Title: One Broken Shoelace
Pairing: Catherine/Grissom
Summary: "I'll show you ligature marks."
Description: Catherine meets Grissom. Speculation on a very heavily speculated relationship.
Disclaimer: Not mine.
Rating: R for sex, drugs, and swearing. (All the cool kids are doing it)
Spoilers: I think none.
Feedback: Sure.
Author's notes: I'm quite a G/S shipper but I respect what the show really is more than my own desire and I've always thought one of the most talented parts of the show was the beautiful relationship between Grissom and Catherine. I speculated. This is very relationship heavy so don't read it if you're hoping G/C was always purely friendship.
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February 4th.
The second time you meet Gil Grissom it's at three in the morning and you're getting off the late shift. Grissom is calculating angles in a pool game while you sneak up behind him with your high heels slung over your shoulder.
"Someone like you spends two hours in a strip joint? I'm guessing you have a motive."
"I'm researching a theory for a case."
More than an hour ago someone drunk and beautiful stumbled into him and spilt their gin. You can smell it on him, evaporating slowly. "If you're looking for a guilty party," you say, slowly placing your hand against his chest where you can feel the damp fabric, "then I'm offering to be your man." And a raised eyebrow like a silent dare: "Cuff me."
Years later he'll ask you why you came to him- tired and sallow with drooping clothes and a note pad in his hands in the place of a drink. You'll settle for telling him the half-truth: "You were the most beautiful person I'd ever met.
What you won't say is: "you were the only person more exhausted than I was."
That night he takes you to see 'Dark Side of the Moon' synched to 'The Wizard of OZ'. It's already 3:30 in the morning and nothing else is showing and besides, he is adamant that everyone has to see it once just so they have proof it isn't a rumor. "Not everything needs proving," you argue but you can tell by his uneasy smile that he doesn't believe you.
The theater is underground and ninety-five percent of the occupants are high. As the end credits roll you turn to him in your seat. You want to watch the screen flicker against his eyes. "Why don't you sleep?" you ask him over the music. He tells you it's because momentum is the most powerful force in the universe. He awkwardly places his coat around your shoulders in the aisle and asks you the same. "Entropy is a bully," you say while you both fumble in the dark with snaps and buttons. "And I really hate tyranny."
Later, you stand in your apartment and lean against your front door a moment before sliding to the ground. Sitting with your head pressed against the heavy wood and your bare toes on the carpet you come to two realizations: first: the only difference between his answer and yours was anger.
"And who'll deny it's what the fighting's all about?
Out of the way, it's a busy day"
The second?
He's never even touched you.
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February 29th.
He comes to The French Palace again. It's been three and a half weeks since the theater and when he walks through the door he looks across the room and sees you hanging upside down from a pole. It's 'Comfortably Numb' creeping out of the sound system. You consider it coincidence.
This time when you come off the stage at the end of the night you've got two and a half lines of coke up your nose ("Gotta celebrate the extra day.") and your heels are still on. You take two steps down the side stairs towards him and miss the third. He catches you inches from the ground. His arms are strong and careful but he holds you like a child cracking an egg- as though he isn't certain he's done it right. "Catherine, why are your shoes still on?" his breath against your ear is as affecting as a fingertip.
You pull yourself standing but leave your hand with the fingers spread against his chest. This touch between you is becoming a habit. "I can't feel my feet anyway," you shrug and it's meant to be a joke.
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April. No flowers this year. "But plenty of crickets," chirps Grissom.
Another two months before you dare to dig your fingernails into his shoulders and pull his mouth to yours. So gracefully tugging him backwards down the long hall to your bedroom. You only make it half way there before you've got your hand down his pants and you're swearing into his mouth. "Fuck this. Get on the floor."
With Grissom it feels like your first boyfriend all over again. Experimental ice cream flavors at a parlor you haven't visited since you gave up dairy for cocaine. You tell him as much. You spend three nights sitting across a diner booth from him while he teaches you how to write in Greek. The only time he touches you is to guide your hand over the scratch of letters and after the first night you realize Gil Grissom doesn't desire the way other people desire.
"Desire is a verb," he tells you, "but it should be a noun because it is a thing more than it is an action." The waitress brings you an enormous platter of fries and you ask her for sugar packets as she leaves. "To aspire means 'to seek' as well as 'to want'. Aspire is a very active verb."
You lick your quick pink tongue along the rim of you milkshake glass but receive no response from Grissom. "The men I dance for desire me," you say.
Grissom watches you as though you were a pocket watch. He is not so much concerned with the time as with the way you've been put together- as though one day he will need to take you apart.
"I aspire you," he says. He watches you sprinkle sugar over your fries with fascination and doesn't say a word about it.
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May and June consist of the living and the dead:
Dead bugs covered in chocolate and live bugs in jars on your windowsill, catching sunlight. The feeling of his lips as natural as falling leaves and the violence of cocaine, like chemical bleach making everything brittle. Grissom calls it "The Skeleton Effect." He tells you how to use a microscope and mercury to test what your coke was cut with but he never tells you to quit.
You get three days off in June when one of The Palace's girls turns up in a dumpster. All you can think for a week is: "We wore the same lip color." Grissom works 32 hours straight on this case before he's sent home and it's the next afternoon when Brass phones him to say that their suspect walked.
He comes to your apartment door that night with a tulip in a coffee cup. "It was on the sidewalk," he says while you search your cupboards for a pot. "Someone pulled it up by the bulb and left it in the middle of the sidewalk." One of the yellow petals falls off when he sets it down. He stoops to retrieve it and the shed petal looks important in the palm of his hand- valued. You give up your search for a suitable container and cross the kitchen to stand in front of him. "People don't respect the living," he concludes sadly. You put your hand over his with the petal pressed between your palms and you lock his fingers with yours. You straddle him against the couch and with only one hand each it takes you two minutes to remove his pants. You're already moving against him when you whisper an instruction against his neck. "Don't let go."
You come fast, screaming fragments of his name and with your hand viciously gripping his. The petal will be wilted from the heat of your skin but you don't let go. You both finally sleep that way, with the smell of live earth between your palms. When you wake the house is silent accept for the faint sound of wind against the walls. You've left a window open somewhere. You both watch in silence as your hands untangle from themselves and separate like a pale clamshell-
Revealing emptiness in your palm.
In shock, Grissom tentatively pulls your hand against his face and breaths in the smell of your clammy skin- the fragrant plant is barely tangible there. "I think this is what belief is like," he says finally, and despite your disappointment you laugh. You must have dropped it in the very beginning.
The petal is on the living room floor- dry and brittle.
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By the end of June his science experiments are taking up more room in your ancient fridge than food is. He brings a sort of clutter with him and some nights when he's working a 'double' you sit cross-legged in your living room and sort through his papers. You learn about amoeba and bring it up over dinner. He's surprised to hear these scientific quotations tumbling from your lips and he kisses you with sweet and sour sauce still in your mouth. You realize that it's the first time he's ever touched you before you gave him permission to.
The first time you asked him to spend the night he said no. He didn't explain, just said, "No thank you Catherine," and continued pouring plaster into the ice cube trays on his table. It never occurred to you that maybe sometimes he woke up just as terrified as you did.
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July 4th.
A girl is murdered with a firework. Grissom skips watching the fireworks display that evening to attend the autopsy. That night he wakes beside you, petrified and you put your hand over his chest the way you did five months ago in The Palace-a wordless assurance. You hold it there until you can feel his heart beat slowly drop away. "I have an idea," you say next and it makes him smile with pale lips.
It takes you thirty seconds to have your shoes on and another ten minutes are spent in the miscellaneous aisle at the 24-hour ESSO station down the block. Your purchase three packets of Jell-O: red, white, and blue and you eat the cubes with your fingers as the sun comes up. The blue flavor stains your skin like watercolor paint. When Grissom tries to sneak a scoop of ants into the clear Jell-O you let him and that surprised you both. He puts a blue stained finger into your mouth and now you're thinking, "Love is in smaller pieces than I though."
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Starting July 10th: 40 degrees for two weeks straight.
You bring home royal blue satin sheets and strip the bed of its blankets. He makes ice cubes shaped like beetles and you can hear each other crunching them all over the house. It's thirteen days of ice water and ducking into shadows for a momentary escape from sunlight. On the fourteenth day Marlene from work calls and tells you that Diana is pregnant and Suzan is MIA and Cindy is a big whore and you'll be working double shifts starting 'right the hell now'. Marlene also says, "Oh. And I'll buy you new shoes."
From there it's six days a week of coming home at 4 AM with blisters on your feet and your sequined bra still on. He sleeps on the couch and wakes up when he hears your heels scuffing the carpet in the hall. 40 degrees has turned into 38 degrees and oddly humid. Your feet slide around in your heels no matter how tight you cinch the glittering straps. Now, when Grissom brings you a tray of ice cubes it isn't to eat. You both lay on the couch and he holds your blistered feet in his hands- glides the cool blocks over your skin. One night he presses his forehead to the raw bottom of your foot and holds on tight. It is the first time you can recall that he won't look at you. Instead he just stares blankly down at the couch cushions while the ice cubes melt together in their tray.
You mean to say 'don't worry' and for a moment when he looks up at you, you don't even realize… He gently places your foot down on the couch so that you aren't touching.
All you'd said was 'don't'.
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August.
The news stations call it a heat wave. You call it, "Hell's god damn sauna". Grissom collects grasshoppers from the withered grass and pins them to Styrofoam boards. Neither of you sleep. "It's like we've forgotten how," you say and Grissom blinks and ponders this a moment.
"Two like behaviors reinforce each other," he says. For the first time you find this concept frightening.
You wear thick makeup to hide the circles around your eyes and when the purple-black exhaustion begins to show through anyway you turn to dark Versace sunglasses. You're skinnier now and the frames are no longer flattering.
Grissom lays you down on the kitchen counter one evening and you put your burnt feet into the cool metal basin. He runs icy water over your toes while you wiggle them, smiling. He carefully removes your sunglasses to see your eyes. Then, so slowly, he slides his finger down the sweaty bridge of your nose like a tiny apology.
There's thunder almost every night now, and together you lie awake listening to the dry rumbling. In the dark bedroom Grissom draws the star signs on your skin. The sheets whisper more than you do to each other.