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Katarina is three years old when her thoughts get abruptly more crowded. She can't communicate what it is, only knows that there are impressions—hunger, sleepiness, curiosity, sleepiness, distress, sleepiness—filtering into her that aren't hers and she doesn't know what to do with them. They're a constant itch in the back of her head that she doesn't know how to calm down or redirect or deal with.
Later, she can't remember—or never knew—whether her soulmate got better at regulating their own emotions or whether Kat got better at tuning them out. It doesn't matter, really; it got better, whatever the cause.
Whoever she's connected to is a pain in the ass. Kat rarely gets fear from them, but there's always a low and desperate tension humming beneath the surface, a want that its owner doesn't get. Or doesn't know how to get. Or isn't willing to try to get.
It's not sadness most of the time so much as it's just a nameless, aimless drive. Sometimes Kat can figure out how to use that determination to fuel her own; sometimes it helps.
Usually, she just wants to reach past the distance between them and throttle her soulmate until they either do what they want to do or give up on it and find something else.
If they notice the first time Katarina kills someone, they don't show it; at least there's that small mercy.
The first time Kat kills someone she didn't want to, though—
(there was nothing it could do, it wasn't even old enough to talk, this wasn't even its fault it was just to send a godsdamned message)
—then they notice.
Kat feels the ripple of curiosity the second her heart slows down after her flight from the infant's target's bedroom. She quells it, silences it, does all she can to shove it out of her mind; but the longer Katarina tries to drown the presence in numbness, the more it evolves from curiosity into
(she didn't even know its name, just its family; the sound it made when she)
concern, and then to a worry so sharp it almost cracks her expression before she can be left alone.
(and there isn't even a scratch on her, no one even knew she was coming, and she should be happy about that but)
Katarina submerges in the bath, holds herself down with both hands against the lip of the tub as if the water can drown out thought as well as noise. The burning on her eyelids is because she drew the water too hot. This is nothing.
(no one came until it was too late to save it)
The worry gains a frustrated edge, serrated, tell me what's wrong let me help but there's nothing. There's nothing.
Her lungs burn. Her fingers loosen. She breaks the surface, sucks in a breath, and lets it out in a choking sob.
Damn you.