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Jun. 29th, 2023 10:27 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
strange_naturesTitle: 5 Things DCI Catton Let Go (and 1 Thing She Couldn't)
Original Universe: Strange Natures
Rating: gen.
Summary:
Warnings/Triggers: None
The Odd Squad are odd, there’s no two ways about it. DCI Catton stands in the foyer of their headquarters, cross-armed and tight-lipped, considering the situation.
Her predecessor had been content to leave them to it: sit in his office, take the occasional briefing, and play golf with the men responsible for putting him there instead of demanding his full resignation from the force.
She may be here because she’s being scape-goated for the Lipman case, but she’s not sure she can abdicate her responsibilities to the job as a protest. Not the way Clairbourne did. No matter how competent DI Thewlis apparently is.
The dog lets itself in through the front doors - pressing its nose in just the right spot and pushing, a grimace on its face. As far as Catton can tell, for it to do so is normal, although this time there’s something more aggressive about the gesture. Almost as though it’s pissed off.
Why the squad even merits its own dog unit is a mystery, and she's getting tired of those.
She tries not to think about the nature documentary she watched last week, because it turns out that the slender, long-limbed canine in question is a dead ringer for an Ethiopian wolf.
DC Owen Novell trails after the beast, shoulders hunched like he’s in trouble. “Aww, come on, Saffy, how was I supposed to know some arsehole emptied the car - you could have checked yourself!” He pauses to offer Catton a “Ma’am,” and she swears the dog dips its head a little, as though doing the same, before they vanish into the recesses of the building.
Catton waits for DC Diyab - she and Novell are thick as thieves, usually work together - but she doesn’t appear.
She spots her inside later. She seems to be as pissed off with Novell as the dog was: something about a change of clothes.
***
That the squad apparently merits their own morgue and pathologist is a greater mystery still.
Thewlis is reluctantly showing Catton around the Odd Squad’s headquarters. It’s separate from the main building, off to one side, and mostly underground. Another oddity, no pun intended.
The morgue is down a long corridor. Thewlis waves at it vaguely and tries to move on.
Catton’s not sure what makes her push the door open. Perhaps some need to establish control, however briefly. She's not prepared for the sight she's confronted with.
A six foot tall redhead straight out of Dolly Parton's worst nightmares turns to look at her, calm at first, then startled as recognition passes across her lovely face. Behind her, a scrawny, dark haired boy of maybe twelve stands on an autopsy table, one foot either side of the occupant. He's dressed in burgundy pathologist scrubs and a splash visor. And he’s holding a toy sword, raised as though he’s about to behead the cadaver.
It has to be a toy, no matter how realistic it looks. There's no way the actual child in front of Catton could be strong enough to heft the real thing with such ease.
“…What…” It takes Catton a moment to realise the word comes from her own constricted throat.
They all stare at each other, a silent tableaux. Then the redhead gestures at the boy with one hand, and deadpans: “He likes to be tall.”
“Damn it, Duvall,” Thewlis mutters from the hallway.
***
Speaking of the Duvall twins, Catton has never once seen DC Toby Duvall and PCSO Tabitha Duvall together. It’s possible that they’ve coordinated their mutual avoidance, but if they dislike each other that much then why both transfer up to the same nick? One of them could have stayed in York. It makes no sense.
She’s tried calling a briefing with the explicit instruction that everybody must attend, but both times one of them had an excuse, and Thewlis backed them up.
Catton knows she’s imagining that the Odd Squad’s cat, ‘Constable Tibbles’, has eyes an identical pale green to the pair, and ears the exact same shade of red as their hair. She’d do a side-by-side, but she hasn’t seen the cat in the same room as the twins either.
***
The morgue is one thing, the ‘workshop’ and its occupants are quite another. The place looks like something out of a fantasy novel, a mash-up of a jeweller’s studio and an apothecary.
Thewlis and DS Blythe have both told Catton that they deal with black market antiquities, among other things - why the squad is spread across so many specialist areas, from murder to arts & antiquities, is something they haven’t been able to explain.
Their master-forger, ‘Kit Please-Don’t-Attempt-My-Surname’, is an oddity all on his own. Polite, but with a hyper-introverted demeanor that’s just plain off-putting. A refugee, apparently, although everyone’s cagey about where he fled from.
Catton’s not happy about his two children spending time in the nick, but Thewlis dug her heels in: the kids are quiet, they’re only there after school and they stay in his workshop. And the family has been through a lot; they feel safer together.
Avel, the son, is missing an arm; his sister, Yana, wears an eyepatch. Kit’s glove hides two stumps where his ring and pinky fingers should be. They all share a haunted look, and a habit of jumping at shadows.
Catton relents. What’s one more breach of regulations?
***
It takes a while for Catton to find, and then enter, the ‘store-room’. It’s hidden in the back of the evidence locker, and was not included in Thewlis’s tour of the place.
Another oddity - the shelves are filled with dusty artefacts and books; it might as well be part of a museum set in a movie.
In the back she finds another set of shelves labelled 'Offerings'. It's filled with boxes, each with a name written on it in Sharpie: Orion, Nine, Perdita, Summer, Cosmo, Ethan, Indigo, Nick, Lyra, Vega, Sage, Nemo. The list goes on.
She pauses, remembering the massive, muscle-bound, scarred woman who’d come looking for Thewlis, referring to the DI as the squad's 'Gaffer' rather than Catton. Everyone had been horrified about the encounter, and desperately trying to hide how concerned they were. Blythe especially; she'd come in scraping and wheedling and outright calling the woman 'milady', separating her off and guiding her through the station doors, leaving Catton in the foyer with a thousand more questions. Not to mention a creeping realisation that she'd prefer to not think about: the claustrophobic air-pressure of an oncoming stormfront came and went with the strange individual.
‘Perdita’ is hardly a common name. It can’t be a coincidence, can it?
She opens the box and peers inside, not sure what to expect after how strange its namesake was. And finds three bottles of tequila, six packs of Benson & Hedges cigarettes, and several baggies of benzos.
She stares at the pills for a moment, then opens up the box labelled ‘Orion’, wondering what secrets wait for her in there. Mead, chocolate Hobnobs, a couple of paperbacks. ‘Nine’ reveals glitter and packets of mushroom spores. ‘Summer’: red wine and chocolate. ‘Lyra’: toffee vodka and fountain pen ink. If anything, it’s more mysterious than the class-C drugs.
What the hell?
She decides not to waste her breath demanding an explanation.
***
Thewlis isn’t expecting her to turn up at the crime-scene, but Catton is sick of sitting in her office. It’s not even that she wants answers - there are too many questions now. A Gordian knot.
But this trip might give her back some small sense of control. Even a smidgen would help.
When she pulls up, the SOCOs are still milling about. The Odd Squad has their own, but for some reason they stay back at first, allowing the scene to go through the normal channels until some mysterious switch is flipped.
She asks where Thewlis is and sets off across the muddy field, to where her DI is apparently talking to a local resident she knows.
At a guess, it's the man leaning against the Range Rover. Tall, genuinely pale as milk, unlike most people the comparison is applied to, and silver-haired. An albino, perhaps? He looks younger the closer Catton gets, until finally she realises he’s barely twenty. He doesn’t stand like a twenty-year old though. He's talking to Thewlis with a confidence far beyond his years - real self-assuredness, not the cocky swagger a boy his age usually projects when they try to mimic it.
It puts her in mind of Dr. Charmers. Apparently the diminutive pathologist is not twelve, it's a rare genetic disorder that stops the visible ageing process - an explanation that sounds like bullshit at first, but once he speaks and moves it's credible. There's a gravitas she can't square with childhood. And, once 'a wind up' is discounted, what other explanation is there? When you've eliminated the impossible, what remains, however improbable, must be the truth.
She’s still approaching when the car window opens and someone says, “Beach?” in a husky voice that indicates the word is a struggle.
Catton freezes: too much input, too much going on at once as the figures all turn to look at her. Thewlis’s absolute horror. The whispered "Shit!" from somewhere behind her. The pale young man’s confused frown.
And the frozen expression on the face of the boy in the car. A face she knows. He's too young for the life he'd led; the life Catton tried to get him out of despite every obstacle thrown in her way, including his own stubbornness. The last time she'd seen him he'd been jonesing, sporting a black eye from a john who'd refused to pay.
He looks different now: healthy, well-fed. Somehow the changes in the planes of his face have made his dark blue eyes larger, but she’d know him anywhere. She's spent too long sitting on the opposite side of a table, while he gobbled down the meal she'd bought him, studying his features and wondering what the hell she had to do to get the courts to stop returning him to his damned parents.
Greyson Miller, dead for going on four years now. A fire in a warehouse; all that survived were a couple of teeth. Or so she thought.
This one. This one she needs an explanation for.
Original Universe: Strange Natures
Rating: gen.
Summary:
Warnings/Triggers: None
The Odd Squad are odd, there’s no two ways about it. DCI Catton stands in the foyer of their headquarters, cross-armed and tight-lipped, considering the situation.
Her predecessor had been content to leave them to it: sit in his office, take the occasional briefing, and play golf with the men responsible for putting him there instead of demanding his full resignation from the force.
She may be here because she’s being scape-goated for the Lipman case, but she’s not sure she can abdicate her responsibilities to the job as a protest. Not the way Clairbourne did. No matter how competent DI Thewlis apparently is.
The dog lets itself in through the front doors - pressing its nose in just the right spot and pushing, a grimace on its face. As far as Catton can tell, for it to do so is normal, although this time there’s something more aggressive about the gesture. Almost as though it’s pissed off.
Why the squad even merits its own dog unit is a mystery, and she's getting tired of those.
She tries not to think about the nature documentary she watched last week, because it turns out that the slender, long-limbed canine in question is a dead ringer for an Ethiopian wolf.
DC Owen Novell trails after the beast, shoulders hunched like he’s in trouble. “Aww, come on, Saffy, how was I supposed to know some arsehole emptied the car - you could have checked yourself!” He pauses to offer Catton a “Ma’am,” and she swears the dog dips its head a little, as though doing the same, before they vanish into the recesses of the building.
Catton waits for DC Diyab - she and Novell are thick as thieves, usually work together - but she doesn’t appear.
She spots her inside later. She seems to be as pissed off with Novell as the dog was: something about a change of clothes.
***
That the squad apparently merits their own morgue and pathologist is a greater mystery still.
Thewlis is reluctantly showing Catton around the Odd Squad’s headquarters. It’s separate from the main building, off to one side, and mostly underground. Another oddity, no pun intended.
The morgue is down a long corridor. Thewlis waves at it vaguely and tries to move on.
Catton’s not sure what makes her push the door open. Perhaps some need to establish control, however briefly. She's not prepared for the sight she's confronted with.
A six foot tall redhead straight out of Dolly Parton's worst nightmares turns to look at her, calm at first, then startled as recognition passes across her lovely face. Behind her, a scrawny, dark haired boy of maybe twelve stands on an autopsy table, one foot either side of the occupant. He's dressed in burgundy pathologist scrubs and a splash visor. And he’s holding a toy sword, raised as though he’s about to behead the cadaver.
It has to be a toy, no matter how realistic it looks. There's no way the actual child in front of Catton could be strong enough to heft the real thing with such ease.
“…What…” It takes Catton a moment to realise the word comes from her own constricted throat.
They all stare at each other, a silent tableaux. Then the redhead gestures at the boy with one hand, and deadpans: “He likes to be tall.”
“Damn it, Duvall,” Thewlis mutters from the hallway.
***
Speaking of the Duvall twins, Catton has never once seen DC Toby Duvall and PCSO Tabitha Duvall together. It’s possible that they’ve coordinated their mutual avoidance, but if they dislike each other that much then why both transfer up to the same nick? One of them could have stayed in York. It makes no sense.
She’s tried calling a briefing with the explicit instruction that everybody must attend, but both times one of them had an excuse, and Thewlis backed them up.
Catton knows she’s imagining that the Odd Squad’s cat, ‘Constable Tibbles’, has eyes an identical pale green to the pair, and ears the exact same shade of red as their hair. She’d do a side-by-side, but she hasn’t seen the cat in the same room as the twins either.
***
The morgue is one thing, the ‘workshop’ and its occupants are quite another. The place looks like something out of a fantasy novel, a mash-up of a jeweller’s studio and an apothecary.
Thewlis and DS Blythe have both told Catton that they deal with black market antiquities, among other things - why the squad is spread across so many specialist areas, from murder to arts & antiquities, is something they haven’t been able to explain.
Their master-forger, ‘Kit Please-Don’t-Attempt-My-Surname’, is an oddity all on his own. Polite, but with a hyper-introverted demeanor that’s just plain off-putting. A refugee, apparently, although everyone’s cagey about where he fled from.
Catton’s not happy about his two children spending time in the nick, but Thewlis dug her heels in: the kids are quiet, they’re only there after school and they stay in his workshop. And the family has been through a lot; they feel safer together.
Avel, the son, is missing an arm; his sister, Yana, wears an eyepatch. Kit’s glove hides two stumps where his ring and pinky fingers should be. They all share a haunted look, and a habit of jumping at shadows.
Catton relents. What’s one more breach of regulations?
***
It takes a while for Catton to find, and then enter, the ‘store-room’. It’s hidden in the back of the evidence locker, and was not included in Thewlis’s tour of the place.
Another oddity - the shelves are filled with dusty artefacts and books; it might as well be part of a museum set in a movie.
In the back she finds another set of shelves labelled 'Offerings'. It's filled with boxes, each with a name written on it in Sharpie: Orion, Nine, Perdita, Summer, Cosmo, Ethan, Indigo, Nick, Lyra, Vega, Sage, Nemo. The list goes on.
She pauses, remembering the massive, muscle-bound, scarred woman who’d come looking for Thewlis, referring to the DI as the squad's 'Gaffer' rather than Catton. Everyone had been horrified about the encounter, and desperately trying to hide how concerned they were. Blythe especially; she'd come in scraping and wheedling and outright calling the woman 'milady', separating her off and guiding her through the station doors, leaving Catton in the foyer with a thousand more questions. Not to mention a creeping realisation that she'd prefer to not think about: the claustrophobic air-pressure of an oncoming stormfront came and went with the strange individual.
‘Perdita’ is hardly a common name. It can’t be a coincidence, can it?
She opens the box and peers inside, not sure what to expect after how strange its namesake was. And finds three bottles of tequila, six packs of Benson & Hedges cigarettes, and several baggies of benzos.
She stares at the pills for a moment, then opens up the box labelled ‘Orion’, wondering what secrets wait for her in there. Mead, chocolate Hobnobs, a couple of paperbacks. ‘Nine’ reveals glitter and packets of mushroom spores. ‘Summer’: red wine and chocolate. ‘Lyra’: toffee vodka and fountain pen ink. If anything, it’s more mysterious than the class-C drugs.
What the hell?
She decides not to waste her breath demanding an explanation.
***
Thewlis isn’t expecting her to turn up at the crime-scene, but Catton is sick of sitting in her office. It’s not even that she wants answers - there are too many questions now. A Gordian knot.
But this trip might give her back some small sense of control. Even a smidgen would help.
When she pulls up, the SOCOs are still milling about. The Odd Squad has their own, but for some reason they stay back at first, allowing the scene to go through the normal channels until some mysterious switch is flipped.
She asks where Thewlis is and sets off across the muddy field, to where her DI is apparently talking to a local resident she knows.
At a guess, it's the man leaning against the Range Rover. Tall, genuinely pale as milk, unlike most people the comparison is applied to, and silver-haired. An albino, perhaps? He looks younger the closer Catton gets, until finally she realises he’s barely twenty. He doesn’t stand like a twenty-year old though. He's talking to Thewlis with a confidence far beyond his years - real self-assuredness, not the cocky swagger a boy his age usually projects when they try to mimic it.
It puts her in mind of Dr. Charmers. Apparently the diminutive pathologist is not twelve, it's a rare genetic disorder that stops the visible ageing process - an explanation that sounds like bullshit at first, but once he speaks and moves it's credible. There's a gravitas she can't square with childhood. And, once 'a wind up' is discounted, what other explanation is there? When you've eliminated the impossible, what remains, however improbable, must be the truth.
She’s still approaching when the car window opens and someone says, “Beach?” in a husky voice that indicates the word is a struggle.
Catton freezes: too much input, too much going on at once as the figures all turn to look at her. Thewlis’s absolute horror. The whispered "Shit!" from somewhere behind her. The pale young man’s confused frown.
And the frozen expression on the face of the boy in the car. A face she knows. He's too young for the life he'd led; the life Catton tried to get him out of despite every obstacle thrown in her way, including his own stubbornness. The last time she'd seen him he'd been jonesing, sporting a black eye from a john who'd refused to pay.
He looks different now: healthy, well-fed. Somehow the changes in the planes of his face have made his dark blue eyes larger, but she’d know him anywhere. She's spent too long sitting on the opposite side of a table, while he gobbled down the meal she'd bought him, studying his features and wondering what the hell she had to do to get the courts to stop returning him to his damned parents.
Greyson Miller, dead for going on four years now. A fire in a warehouse; all that survived were a couple of teeth. Or so she thought.
This one. This one she needs an explanation for.
