Katha Virk (Kat)

Basic Information
Current year: 2023

Age: 23

Music

 * Runaway - AURORA
 * Hurts Like Hell - Fleurie

Appearance
Much to her own dismay Kat has never made it past five foot two inches, even though her back is straighter than she could ever be. She has a mop of unmanageable curly hair around a delicately set face, with dark eyes and a small pointed nose, all usually in her signature expression of dissatisfaction. She's also never seen without her red scarf or her enormous machete (made more enormous-looking by the fact that such a tiny girl is handling it)

She has a regular pattern of criss-crossed scars on her back, and on her lower back are burn scars. Her left front tooth is missing, though this might be hard to notice at first glance as she tries to hide it.

Childhood
[TW for parental abuse, suicide] Kat was born in Rennes to a loving happy family. She was an energetic child, if a little overenthusiastic sometimes, and spent most of her time playing with her sister and her friends from down the road, Robin and Adélie. At age seven, her family moved to a village outside of London for her mother's work, but in a cruel twist, her mother was killed in an accident just months after the move.

The death of her mother shattered Kat's family, in particular her father, who became more and more hostile to his daughters as the years passed. Unable to cope with this, her sister ran away with her boyfriend of the time, leaving Kat alone in the house. This was immediately followed by the death of her best friend, Andrew. By this point even the ever optimistic Kat was beginning to feel hopeless about the state of her life, and tried her absolute hardest to repair her relationship with her father, only to find that he was unwilling to. When she was fifteen, he went too far, and she ended up in hospital. During this time, her father, believing he'd killed her, committed suicide, and she was remanded to the care of an aunt she didn't know very well for the rest of her childhood.

Adult life
Kat's qualifications were very much affected by her extensive time in hospital and her jaded attitude, but once she turned eighteen she managed to get into an apprenticeship through her mother's stellar reputation. Once she had a job, she moved out and consigned herself to a lonely existence, only occasionally broken by her best friend Ben. Until one day, having been dragged by Ben to meet his new girlfriend, she met a lonely university student who was also not too happy to be there. Kat proceeded to immediately forget about this meaningful interaction, but in the next few months, ended up spending more time with her, until one day they kissed. The girl, named Mina, became her girlfriend for the next year and half, until mysteriously disappearing on a trip to see her family. This was really the last straw on a string of deaths and abandonments for Kat, and she burned all of Mina's things before leaving the country, to the only region of America she was familiar with. Unfortunately for her this coincided almost exactly with the beginning of the zombie apocalypse in America, and Kat was forced to start fighting to survive.

Damn, all this bad luck...you'd think she was cursed or something.

Personality
Kat is definitely a bitch, though maybe in the more endearing sense of the word. She's overwhelmingly hostile to strangers, tells outrageous lies, and it's easy to set her off by mentioning pretty much anything relating to her dead girlfriend. The only exception is children—in this case we see the rare phenomenon that is Kat trying to be nice. Even at maximum effort level, she tends to be blunt and brutally honest, or just plain dense when it comes to emotional cues. Once you get to know her, she gets attached easily and will defend you from anything, even if she's insulting you at the same time. Still not the best person to talk through emotional stuff with, unless it's something very specific that she can relate to. Kat tries her best, and once she's close enough with someone that they can see where she's coming from, it sometimes pays off. But for the most part, she's negative and sarcastic with everyone.

Mina
[TW suicide] The most important person in Kat's life for a long time. When they first met, Kat didn't pay that much attention to her, and it was Mina who was seeking her out. This was interesting to her, because most people got one snarky comment and decided there were better ways to spend their time. Wanting to know what kind of person would try to get to know her like that, she began to actually engage with Mina and couldn't figure her out. Kat had always been a liar, but a bad one. While Mina didn't outright lie to her, it was obvious she wasn't being completely honest either. One night after having a seven hour conversation in a fast food joint, the two properly opened up to each other. For Kat, it was the most honest she'd been in a long time.

And that scared her. Afterwards she ignored Mina for a few days, not wanting to face the truths she'd shared, until eventually Ben forced her to restart some communication, and from there, their relationship strengthened. Up until this point, Kat had believed herself to be a complete hetero, but getting closer to Mina made her realise that wasn't true, and that she was falling fast. This too, scared her. So she did with it what she did with every other feeling she didn't want to feel, and buried it.

The amount of time she spent with Mina made that harder than burying her feelings of grief or abandonment. It was also becoming obvious to the people around her (except Mina herself, of course) and their mutual friends began to nudge them together. One night while out at a club that neither of them wanted to be in, Kat took the plunge and asked to kiss her. And that was the start.

Mina was not in a good place, and Kat struggled to help her sometimes. She understood, but with personalities so different she found it hard to know what would make her feel better. Their other issue was that with Mina seemed to trust Kat far more that vice versa. Kat had struggled to trust people for years now, and while she promised Mina she wouldn't lie to her, that didn't mean she could be honest either. Despite these challenges, the two of them managed to maintain a steady relationship.

A few months in, Mina stopped answering her texts. This was unusual to say the least, but Kat tried to not to freak out, and gave it a few days, after which she got a call from Mina's best friend and found out her girlfriend was in hospital and she'd had no idea. Then she freaked out. As Mina came out of hospital without a place to live, Kat hesitantly offered her a 'room' in her own flat. It took some organising, and some lying to Mina's parents, but in the end they worked it out and Mina moved in.

It wasn't a perfect arrangement. The two of them had some opposing ideas on how to manage a household, and habits that annoyed the other, but overall, they adjusted very well. Better than either of them expected. Kat had lived alone for three years, and before that had lived with people she didn't particularly get on with. The idea that she could come home to her girlfriend whom she loved every day was a novel one, and one that she grew to appreciate more and more.

Having lived with her for several months, Kat now trusted Mina more than anyone else, and was more honest than she ever thought she could be. At some point, the tables turned, and she found that she was the one who was pushing the relationship. In the spring, the two of them went on a trip together, and though she didn't vocalise it, Kat began to wonder about marriage.

Two weeks later Mina went up north for an engagement party. Kat had voiced her concerns about Mina revisiting her family, but knew that it was only for the weekend. So after two days when Mina hadn't answered any of her texts, Kat told herself she didn't need to freak out. She trusted Mina, and she trusted that she'd come back.

Days after Mina said she'd be back with no word, Kat was forced to accept that something was utterly wrong. She got into contact with everyone she could, but none of them had seen her, and she had no way to contact Mina's family. It was like her girlfriend had just vanished. And while Kat told herself she should be used to people leaving her by now, it caught her off guard. She had let her guard down with Mina more than she cared to admit, and the fact that it had now started to go so wrong made her angry. So she jumped to the conclusion that allowed her to express that anger—that Mina had left her, abandoned her for someone or somewhere else.

Somewhere, deep down, Kat believes something different. She knows how suicidal Mina was, and believes that Mina killed herself. And she blames herself intensely for this. Safe to say that when she expresses any anger towards Mina, the true target is herself. Kat's unaware that Mina has become a ghost, as while the evidence is all there, she dismisses it as hallucinations and delusions on her part, wishing for Mina to be alive again. It's best to just avoid mentioning Mina in her presence, because there's really no telling what she'll do.

Damien
Having known him for months now, Kat still doesn't know what to make of Damien. She'll admit, to herself at least, that when they met she misjudged him. Dismissing his kindness and determination, she saw him as a weak link, too emotional and moral to make it through the apocalyptic wasteland, though she started to realise that he was a danger to her in another way, when his incessant questioning brought up memories and feelings she was hiding from herself. Despite these issues she became a little attached to this poetry-reciting philosophical boy.

It was Damien who pulled her out of the most dangerous stage of her grief spiral too—when his questioning became too much she lashed out, and it was his reaction that made her realise how much she'd changed. When Mina was with her she'd been so careful not to hurt her feelings, but now she'd made someone who was less sensitive burst into tears. This was the motivation she needed to change, and she hasn't forgotten that moment of awful realisation since.

In the time since then, Kat and Damien have developed an understanding of each other that tends to go unnoticed by most others. While Leigh completes the trio, she's more immature and easily upset than them, while the other two can usually agree on a course of action without even talking about it. When they disagree though, it's explosive and lasting. It usually takes a day or two for one of them to suck it up and apologise, and Kat's well aware it's usually Damien.