The Waste wasn’t a place for the weak, a lesson Catarina had to learn at a young age. Her mom left when Cat was still a baby, her dad in and out of prison most her life. She had to learn to take care of herself from a young age. The Lobos and Vixens looked after her, anything for Joey’s kid they said. Always assigning her worth to whatever man she was tethered to. First her dad, later Basil. 

 

Catarina resented being defined by the men in her life, striving since she was a child to make a name for herself. She was fiercely independent from the start, always challenging and questioning. Even then she was too smart for her own good. Her dad would bring her along, but she quickly became overexposed to the underbelly of their world. She had a knack for getting into trouble, always managing to slip from his gaze and find it. He started leaving her behind in the Wolves den, often unsupervised for hours - sometimes days at a time. 

 

She had to learn how to take care of herself quickly, Catarina learned at a young age the only person you could depend on is yourself. There weren’t many other children living in the Wolves Den, most of them either older or younger than Catarina. She always wanted to play with the big kids, always having something to prove to others.

 

People treated her like she was some fragile glass doll, something that was meant to be kept on a shelf out of reach. Catarina wanted to run on the hot pavement barefoot, climb a fence, skin a knee. She wanted to be feral. Her father wanted to chain her to the apartment, sometimes locking her in her room at night when he went out. She would hang out the window waiting to catch a glimpse of one of her friends, hollering for them to find a ladder and bust her out. 

 

Her dad was barely around, and when he was he was more interested in being her jailer than her parent. Catarina knew what he wanted from her, to be the doll to sit on the shelf. She learned to play along, let him think she was the angel he wished she was. He didn’t take well to her defiance, it was just easier to lie. Besides, it wasn’t like he was ever around for long. 

 

Even then Catarina was arrogant, thinking she was the smartest one in the room. She could only fool her dad for so long. He’d catch her in a lie, or sneaking out - confront her about it. She was a devious thing, knowing which buttons to push to provoke a disproportionate response from him. It was a level of deflection and deception that shouldn’t fit in something so small and precious. 

 

“Catarina…. She’s difficult. You can’t let her get a reaction out of you.” Her father told Queenie  when he left for prison, leaving Catarina in Queenie’s custody while he did his time. 

 

She was pleasant while things went her way. When you have been taking care of yourself for the most part since ten years old, you learned that adults didn’t have as much power as they pretended to. Fortunate for Queenie, Catarina was just happy to be rid of her dad. She did as Queenie asked, hoping she might be able to stay whenever her dad came back. When he did, she threw a fit begging to stay. The only one who was able to get her to calm down was Queenie, promising that Catarina could visit any time. 

 

It was easier to subdue her with promises or gifts than to try to talk her down. Catarina didn’t do anything she didn’t want to, unless there was something in it for her. Her father would bribe obedience out of her with cash or shopping trips, it was the only way to make her compliant. Often she would just create an opportunity for her dad to bribe her because she needed some extra cash. Even knowing her ways, her dad still would fall prey to her manipulation every time. At the end of the day she was still his baby girl.

 

Over the years they only grew further apart, after his last stretch in the slammer she just moved in with Queenie full time. If you asked Catarina her real life didn’t start until she officially became a Vixen. Up until that moment she’d just been floating around in her father’s world. The Vixens gave her a sense of purpose, a place in their universe that her father hadn’t sullied yet. 

 

When she became a Vixen her life became her own, finally out from her father’s tyranny. The other girls became her sisters, Queenie who had always been like a parent to Cat all but adopted Cat. He set her up in her own apartment in the Wolves Den, only putting a few floors between this life and her old one but it was felt like lightyears away. 

 

Still, even with her new life she’d always felt a tinge of displacement. That is until the night she met Basil. It was the first night of her new life, one she had chosen. He was the first piece of that life, however dysfunctional they were. Basil could handle her, unlike so many before him. Catarina had grown to accept that she was too difficult for anyone to stick around long, but no matter how many times she pushed him away Basil he kept coming back.