Work Text:
Everyone likes being good at things. Being told you’re doing a good job is like a person’s first exposure to drugs. And some people get hooked on it right away. Todd was one of those people.
Truthfully, he never understood why everyone else struggled so much. It’s just basic math and basic reading comprehension, it’s not like their teachers were giving them anything difficult. It was actually too easy, in Todd’s opinion. Practicing a couple times is helpful and everything, but it gets repetitive after the third time. Can’t they just move on and learn something new?
He asks his teachers to move onto something else. “We have to wait for the rest of the class to catch up to you,” they say, and give him more of the same practice sheets to keep him busy. He rereads the same books over and over again and could probably recite ‘The Chocolate Touch’ from memory.
They tell him he’s special. He doesn’t understand. He’s not special. He’s not different. He’s just faster than his classmates. But he’s not different. His mom tells him that, too. She says the school just wants her to pay more for extra help. He doesn’t need help. His mom knows that.
When they got to fractions, it was fun again for a little while. Ratios? Child’s play. Pre-algebra? Todd could do it in his sleep. And he was close to falling asleep in all of his classes that lasted far too long and taught him nothing new.
It got so boring that Todd could no longer distract himself. He even tried out extra curriculars, but he wasn’t good enough, was never great at sports so he dropped out very quickly.
And then he saw an ad on TV. And his life was changed forever.
He breezed through the Academy. It was the most fun he’d had in a long time, and his mom was glad she didn’t have to drive him to school anymore. Staying up late studying, learning all the rules and being exposed to oddness up close, acing all of his quizzes, everything was back to normal.
School had just been a fluke. It was just the wrong environment for him, and now he’s in the right one. It’s fixed. There wasn’t anything wrong with him, he just wasn’t meant to be in a classroom all day.
Or at least, that’s what he tells himself.
He’s not special , he’s like everyone else in the Academy. So what if they’re all the same? They’re just like him. They’re all people who just don’t belong in classrooms.
Or at least, that’s what he tells himself.
But he can’t pretend that he doesn’t notice all of the others looking at him, or waiting for him to get an answer wrong (he never does, he can’t), or waiting to watch him fall (he won’t, he can’t). It doesn’t get to him. It’s not his fault that they’re not putting in as much effort as he is.
Not that he is but… potato, french toast with jam. It’s all the same. It’s not his fault they’re failing.
It’s not his fault that he can’t be a team player, the others just can’t keep up with him, and it’s not his fault. It’s not. Maybe he could try a little harder to be friendly with them.
He sits with Ophelia and Oakley at lunch. “Hey.” He smiles at them, like a friendly person would. “How about that test, huh?”
“You mean the test you got all the answers right on?” Ophelia squints at him.
He shrugs. “I mean, I won’t know until it’s graded.” Which is true, but in all honesty, he’d be surprised if he hadn’t gotten it all right. It was all the basics. Anyone should’ve aced it.
“Yeah, sure,” Oakley scoffs.
Todd finishes his lunch on his own.
Even without making much of an improvement in his teamwork skills, Todd makes it through the academy with flying colors, faster than any agent before him and the best grades Instructor O has ever seen.
He gets paired up with Olive. She’s a smart girl, but she’s too nervous to let go of her notebook. He figures that she’ll be great at taking down witness reports or writing things down in the interrogation room. And if she ever gets over whatever’s holding her back, she could do some really good work on the squad.
Olive doesn’t talk very much, which means they don’t really converse about anything other than cases. And most of their conversations about cases are just Todd explaining how he’s already solved it. He’s pretty sure she sees him as competitive. He doesn’t know how to fix that.
So he hopes it’ll go away on its own.
Surprise, surprise, it doesn’t. Once Todd gets the hang of solving cases, filling out paperwork, and blasting gadgets, it practically becomes routine. Get the case, go observe, catch the villain, do the paperwork, and repeat. Easy. But still fun, for a while. The spontaneity of oddness keeps him interested for longer than most things do.
He travels around the world for this job. He wooshes through the tubes and solves cases, catching villains at every turn, and it’s fun . Sure, none of the other agents talk to him, but that’s okay because he’s always busy with paperwork or out on a case. And by the end of his first three weeks at Odd Squad, he’s already won the Agent of the Month award.
He puts it on his shelf, right next to his Math Honor Award from sixth grade.
After his first award, he makes his way to the trophy room and studies the rest of the awards. They can’t be that hard to get, right? It might be a fun challenge. It should keep him busy. And that alone is incentive enough to get him to make a list of what he’ll need to do to get them all. Like a scavenger hunt. Sort of.
The next morning, he presents an idea to Olive. “What do you think about trying this next case on your own?” She gives him a deer in headlights expression. “You know you’re smart enough for it. It’s really not hard, you should just give it a shot.” She doesn’t say anything. She really never does. But maybe solving a case on her own is the confidence boost she needs.
It goes just about as bad as he expected it to go. Obviously he watched her handle it from afar, he’s not an idiot. He knows that she understands the case. He knows it. But she gets nervous and starts stuttering over her words when trying to talk to the witness and she starts to panic. He can’t just step in and save the day, then she’d know he was spying on her. (And is it really spying if your intentions were good?)
So he gives her a phone call. “Hey, how’s the case going?”
“Uh…” comes out as her poetic response. “Y’know what? You should probably just talk to her,” and she moves to hand her phone to the lady she’s trying to talk to.
“Scribbles!” He shouts, to get her to hear him through the phone. “You know what you’re doing. You wouldn’t have graduated if you didn’t know what you were doing. You’ve seen me do this a million times. Just ask what I ask.”
“I’ll try.” Olive says, and then hangs up. He can’t exactly hear what she’s saying from far away, but it looks like she’s talking, and the witness is talking back to her. He chuckles when she pulls out her pocket notebook and starts writing, but knows it’ll be helpful when he inevitably gets roped into doing the paperwork later on.
Once he’s finished making sure she’s alright, he gets started on his own case. A fairly simple but still intriguing code he gets to break. It only takes him ten minutes before he’s wooshing through the tubes to stop another villain’s evil plan. If they really wanted to get away with it, they shouldn’t have given them clues in the first place.
Maybe they just do it for the thrill of getting caught. He’s happy to provide.
The sixth time today, he sends a villain back to headquarters to be properly dealt with by security. Quite frankly, he’s not sure any of the security department is any good at their jobs. But that’s really not his problem.
And so he coasts by, tackling cases upon cases every day. He leaves the smaller, easy cases to Olive, hopefully building up her confidence with each one of them, and takes the more challenging cases on his own. He’s learning more and more by the day, and it’s keeping him ridiculously energized. He has so much energy he doesn’t know what to do with it. In the downtime between cases, he’s bouncing around departments, offering his help and observing how it all works.
It doesn’t make sense, not really, but he remembers the rules more than well enough to get by. Olive’s confidence is slowly but steadily growing ( very slowly), and he’s winning more awards than he has shelf room for. He’s breaking records at a pace that the Odd Squad Press can’t keep up with.
He wins every single award. That’s never been accomplished before. It took eight months for Todd to run out of things to do.
Ms. O gives them a terrible case on Olive’s day off. It’s a month-long undercover mission and it’s incredibly dangerous. They might never be able to work again when they come back from the mission. Todd signs up. Olive isn’t going. She’s got time to improve. If he can’t ever work again… well, he’ll cross that bridge if he gets to it.
Being sent off for a month-long mission isn’t as thrilling as you might think. It’s filled with signing paperwork, waivers that inform you that you could die (which his mother signs without question), and training that barely delves deeper than his Academy training. Ms. O sends him off with the words, “Good luck.”
Olive doesn’t even show up to say goodbye.
He lives. Maybe it would’ve been better if he didn’t.
Truthfully, the real case wasn’t hard at all. He’s good at those kinds of cases. Great, even. He’s the best, that’s why he was asked on this case.
But it sucks. He likes challenges, he does. They keep him busy and entertained. This case, however, he almost loses himself. He’s not a method actor, or whatever, but he plays this person so often that he’s having a hard time remembering who he was before.
It sounds stupid to say he lost himself only over a month, but he’d be lying if he said it wasn’t the case.
Todd tries to forget that mission. He can’t forget. His jaw is scarred, his hands are screwed up and shaky, and he knows neither of those things are going away. And neither will the memories.
His first day back is arguably worse than the mission itself. “Welcome back!” The squad cheers, at a volume that is far too loud for 8 o’clock in the morning. The only person who he even remotely wants to see is Olive, and she’s nowhere to be found. It’s not her day off. She could be sick. Maybe she’s out on a case. No, no, it’s only eight. She might be coming in late, but Olive’s never late. She’s freakishly punctual.
Olive doesn’t want to see him.
He sits down at his desk, denies the squad’s request for a speech, and tries to return to work like normal.
His first case back, he uses the wrong gadget. The woman insists it’s okay. It’s not okay.
Todd leaves early.
Olive taps him on the shoulder the next morning. “Todd? We have a case.” She says loudly, like he’s zoned out.
“Right.” He hears himself say.
“Are you… okay?” She asks, meekly.
“Just fine, Olive.” Not that she cares.
He’s not fine. He’s not fine. He has to be fine. This squad needs him to be fine. He needs a break. He needs to stop thinking so much. He needs gadgets to stop firing loudly and for Oscar to stop dropping things.
“Welcome back, Agent Todd.” Ms. O greets him. “You look different.” She comments, absentmindedly. He thinks she’s waiting for him to come back with a snappy remark like he used to. He doesn’t.
“Where to?” He says, monotonously. He hasn’t been home in a while, he realizes. He wonders if his mom missed him. He knows she didn’t notice he was gone.
“Oak Street. You can’t miss it.” Ms. O says, and they’re off.
Not much has changed. Olive still writes in her notebook, which looks new, so she must’ve run out of pages. Maybe he’s still got it.
But he goes on autopilot for the whole case. They’re not done by lunch, so they take their breaks late and sit down in the park and eat sandwiches in silence. He can’t stand the quiet. He can’t.
So he tries to make some friendly conversation with Olive, his partner who doesn’t talk to him, who he barely knows anything about. “So, uh, when I was on that mission —,” he starts, cut off very soon after.
“Would you just stop bragging for once?” Olive snaps in a tone he’s never heard her use before. He wasn’t bragging. He just… What else would he talk about? What else does he do but work?
Does he really brag that much?
He doesn’t think so. But he stops anyway.
He doesn’t try to talk to Olive anymore.