Disclaimer: any recognizable CSI characters do not belong to me.
A/N: this fic was in part inspired by an episode of the television show Boston Legal. One of the females said something to the effect being use to treated like an object. That line stuck with me and reminded me of Catherine.
OBJECTIFY
Catherine is used to being treated as an object.
Catherine has always been treated as an object.
Catherine will always be treated as an object.
As a baby and later as a child she was constantly told she was beautiful. She was treated like a china doll, precious and breakable. Her looks were exalted above all her other virtues. She wore pretty dresses and was paraded in front of extended family and her parent's friends. She was never the smart one. Nancy her sister occupied that spot in the family. It didn't matter how many A's she received on her report cards, she was pigeon-holed into a role she never asked for.
As a teen when boys started to notice her, they took one look at her red/blonde hair and clear blue eyes and automatically judged her. She was an air-head. She was easy. She was a pretty bauble to hang on the end of your arm and an easy notch on the bedpost. She might as well have been one of those latex blow-dolls. She didn't date much in high school, contrary to what her colleagues may think. She was not the a cheerleader or class president or home-coming queen like everyone would think. By tenth grade her reputation that had evolved from rumors and assumptions had been sealed.
So she dated older men, late teens to early twenties, unaware or uncaring of statutory rape or that she was nothing more then a pretty doll to screw and dump.
She even ran away with one.
At sixteen she quit school and ran away to Seattle where her boyfriend was going to be a big rock star. Almost a year later she would walk in on him with another woman - an older woman. (Unknowingly this would be a common thread in her life.) He told - yelled at her when she confronted him that she was lucky that she tolerated her skinny ass and then he kicked her to the streets. She was seventeen homeless and so very alone.
Later when she started at the French Palace as a stripper she was seen as an object of both lust and loathing. She was looked up to in adoration and at the same time she looked down to in disgust. She existed as something akin to both goddess and whore - Aphrodite in stilettoes and a g-string.
When she started at the lab new names followed her. She graduated with top honors from school and was offered jobs in many top labs. She opted to stay in Vegas because of Eddie and because this is her home.
It didn't matter what her grades where or how hard she worked to prove herself, the names
followed her. In the lab, the layout room, the break room, the streets and even the restroom, the stares and snickers as people judged her, objectify her, shadowed her. The few police who had seen her in her former profession snickered and whispered lewd comments that weren't meant to be heard - but where. Other police referred to her as a geek with a gun or science nerd. The perps on the other hand referred to her as a bimbo with a badge or CSI Barbie. The men whether perp or cop starred at her chest and ass and the women looked at her like she was still some over-sexed coked up stripper occupying the lowest rung of humanity.
Through the years she managed to make a few friends. These few men that she allowed close to her heart, she protected and cared for with every fiber of her being. They were her boys - a privileged few allowed to see some of her true self.
But to everyone else she became sun-baked hard. She refused to let anyone see how much those words hurt. She built strong thick walls iron walls and wrapped her tongue in barbed wire.
New names sprung forth - bitch, miss high and mighty and glorified hooker. They never knew how many times she went home in anger to Eddie vowing to never to return to that place. Saying she hated that place, hated all of them both good and bad guys, because sometimes she couldn't tell them apart.
Eddie - a part of her will always love him for seeing past the her tough-girl facade. For loving her for her and showing her all the possibilities love could bring and of course for giving her Lindsey. Part her will always hate him for taking it away. Taking his love and support and giving it freely to some one else.
Now that he is dead she is afraid that the walls have grown impossibly high, impossibly thick. The barbs have become too sharp and too long. But mostly she is afraid that there is not one person strong enough or brave enough to even try to knock her walls down or risk cuts from the barbed wire.
THE END