Prompt Exchange #3: Rubber Ducky, You're the One
Feb 28, 2016 23:06:10 GMT
neonquincy1217, House of Mystery, and 2 more like this
Post by dragonsandmagic on Feb 28, 2016 23:06:10 GMT
So Eli, I ask myself, did you really just write a 3k+ fic about the Tokyo Metropolitan Police Department and a bunch of rubber ducks in a grand total of six hours? The answer, of course, is why yes. Yes I did. Why this ended up being as long as it is I can honestly say I have no idea, but I do believe I have succeeded in writing something sufficiently free of angst (and my angst-free Prompt Exchange fic streak continues!) and hopefully crackish enough for the prompters desires. The moment I got the prompt I knew exactly how I wanted to play everything out, but writing it was a bit of a different story.
This is actually my first time writing many (any) of the characters from the TMPD in a fic dedicated solely to them as opposed to being background characters in something else, so I deeply apologise if my characterization is a bit off. Fun as it was, writing this fic gave me so much trouble because I'm so inexperienced with the characters. Any comments/critiques/suggestions for next time would be gratefully appreciated! Especially if you think anyone is horribly OOC. I want to know!
Regardless, I hope the prompter enjoys and everyone else has a fun ride.
This has been left largely unedited, as I don't have the time to re-read through it right now and fix grammar issues because oops, I'm a procrastinator and running late for work again. Ao3 and ff.net links will appear eventually.
Prompt: Rubber ducks and the Tokyo Metropolitan Police.
Rating: G
Word Count: 3661
Warnings: One instance of Nakamori-keibu's foul mouth.
Summary: Rubber ducks start mysteriously appearing around the Tokyo Metropolitan Police Department's Division One branch, Homicide.
It started, like many things did, on a Tuesday.
Takagi was first. Returning back to the department after a particularly long (and high intense) car chase with Sato-san, he was quite looking forward to finishing up the paperwork for the day so he could head home and finally get a well deserved break. He'd been trying to take his (in any form, be it grabbing something to eat, pausing for at least five minutes to collect himself, or even going to the bathroom) break since ten thirty that morning, and had long since given up on accomplishing any of those things until he'd successfully returned home for the night. At this point, he was more interested in just wrapping everything up and taking a well-deserved nap.
But, he did promise Sato-san before they'd gotten back that he'd have his report in before he left that day, and he was never really able to deny her anything. Leaving the work for a later date wasn't an option.
So, worn-out from sheer panic and far-too much adrenaline because of successive near-death encounters, Takagi trudged his way over to his desk and collapsed into the chair and for two full seconds of complete bliss, he allowed his eyes to close and his entire body to relax. Moment over, he sat up in his chair and opened his eyes, officially ready to set himself to work.
To find a bright yellow and orange beaked rubber duck staring right back at him.
…
Right.
Well, perhaps 'staring' wasn't exactly the right word, since a children's toy could hardly fixate its attention onto anything and much less a person, but Takagi was beginning to feel more and more hesitant under its gaze.
Shifting himself to the left, he tried positioning himself differently so it felt as though the duck's gaze was pointed somewhere near his right side as opposed to directly at him. It had been placed under the rightmost side of his computer monitor next to a stack of papers, diagonally from where Takagi was sitting.
This did not do well for getting him out of the duck's line of sight.
In fact, it almost seemed like the more he moved around, the worse it was actually getting. No matter what he did, the rubber duck was still looking at him.
Takagi was beginning to feel more and more like he was being laughed at. His lips turned down into a frown. Well, he didn't have to stand for that if he didn't want to. Grabbing the empty coffee mug from the other side of his desk, Takagi flipped it upside-down and extended his arm to place it over the duck, cutting its gaze off completely.
Only to be interrupted just moments before he would have set the mug down.
“Takagi-kun, what are you doing?”
Startled, Takagi's arms flew out from his sides and he flailed, nearly tossing the mug into the air at the same time. After a bit of juggling with it as it was airborne, he finally solidified his grip on the object and brought it down from the air. Takagi placed it upright on the desk in a desperate scramble to keep his hands as far away from the nearly-broken object as possible.
He held his hands out in front of him defensively, decidedly flustered at being caught doing what could only really be described as playing with a toy.
“S-s-sato-san, what can I do for you..?” he stammered, embarrassed from being caught and a slight flush colouring his cheeks.
Sato raised an eyebrow at him, but finally raised a folder into the air as a reminder. The report he had promised to finish immediately came to mind.
“Your report, Takagi-kun?” she prompted, waving the folder.
“Ah. R-right. I'm starting working on it right now. I'll finish it, I promise,” he declared, pressing his palms together and bowing his head to her as a promise. 'Thankfully, Sato just laughed and dropped her hand.
“Just find me when it's finished, alright? I'll still be here.”
She smiled, and then walked off without another word. Relieved, Takagi let out a breath and shot one last look at the rubber duck before turning his complete attention onto the paperwork.
Later, Takagi would find that the rubber duck's presence didn't actually bother him nearly that much when he'd had a full night's rest and a nice and hot cup of coffee in his system. It actually accentuated his desk quite nicely.
(He never did find out where it came from.)
Three days later found a very confused Chiba in the men's restroom, wondering why on earth each of the stalls had a rubber duck placed in them on top of the water tank.
At first, he'd gone off the assumption that someone may have left the toy (perhaps it was evidence?) in there accidentally, and thus he'd left it be in the event that the person realised they'd misplaced the duck and went retracing their steps to look for it.
Two large glasses of soda and a bag of chips later had Chiba back in the restroom, in a decidedly different stall than earlier but looking at an identical rubber duck to the one he'd seen earlier. Closer introspection a few hours later showed no disturbances to the toys despite the people that must have been to the bathroom throughout the day.
Confused and really unsure what to do about the situation, Chiba took that to mean that he'd missed whatever memo had been passed around through the department that said 'don't worry about the ducks'. Or, 'don't touch the ducks'. He wasn't completely sure, but he didn't want to risk messing something up by moving them somewhere different. The last he needed was two mistakes on his record in one week after he'd accidentally switched up two of his case files before submitting them to Megure-keibu the previous Monday. That mistake had proved a bigger mess than it normally would have, as Megure-keibu was starting a month vacation the next day and all of the paperwork up-to date had to be completed and filed correctly before he could finally leave the department to pack and catch his flight.
Chiba at least didn't make the Inspector miss his flight, so that was good. But the entire situation had been stressful enough that he'd rather not have a repeat of it any time soon.
And to stay in the higher-ups good graces. Staying in their good-graces was always good.
So, he let the ducks be and didn't question it.
But they were still there when he got to work the next day.
Takagi had had a rubber duck on his desk for the past week and Sato found herself infinitely curious about it.
Her partner had never really been one for desk decorations before this, which was why it had caught her attention as it had. Normally Takagi's desk was just littered with papers, pencils, and notebooks in an organized-but-disorganized frenzy.
Despite that, he still knew exactly where everything was and how to organize it properly. It was the only reason she had yet to chastise him for being messy. That, and somehow the chaotic wreck that was his desk during working hours always ended up completely clean and picturesque by the end of the day. Even seeing Takagi in action and dealing with the mess of papers himself, Sato still wasn't completely sure how he managed to make it spotless. Especially since earlier in that day it had looked like he was quite literally drowning in papers.
Evidenced by a stack of folders toppling over him when she'd asked if he wanted to grab lunch together the day before.
But either way, the rubber duck hadn't been moved an inch since she'd first seen it show up, and for some reason she felt weird just coming out and asking him about it. What if it had some odd sort of sentimental value? Though if that was the case, Sato was becoming more and more curious as to what it could be. Or what changed his mind and caused him to decide to do the slightest bit of decorating when she'd been teasing him about how business-like he kept his space when it wasn't drowning in notes.
Maybe she should talk to Yumi and see if she thought it would be weird to ask about it. But then again, Yumi would probably just respond by saying that she should just ask Takagi and stop being weird about it, in addition to some other subtle nudge about the two of them or a mention of how she should see if Takagi would put up a picture of the two of them now that he was decorating his workspace.
...Nevermind. She wasn't going to willingly submit herself to teasing. Besides, she'd probably take it upon herself to mortify Takagi soon enough (it had been two weeks since she'd last done so, after all, and Yumi had this strange habit of sticking to a weird schedule when she'd set her mind to something – what that something exactly was Sato had no clue, but she knew it consisted primarily of ways to make her partner blush and stammer) and Sato did not need to help her in her quest.
Regardless of the cute face Takagi made when he was flustered.
Anyway.
It had come to a total of two weeks since the duck had appeared when Sato had finally had enough. She just had to know where it had come from. Throughout the week, more rubber ducks had started popping up on the desks of other members of the department as well, and she was decidedly beginning to feel as though she was missing something.
Takagi was still at his desk that morning with a cup of coffee when she walked up to him, perching herself on the edge of his desk.
“Morning, Takagi-kun!” she greeted cheerily, and if that startled her partner enough to cause him to jump a foot in the air in front of her, well, she pretended not to notice.
Sato couldn't quite help letting out a laugh anyway.
It took a moment for him to collect his breath before he could respond.
“A-ah, Sato-san. Good morning.” And the smile he shot her in return was so genuine she couldn't help but smile back.
Cute.
But she was getting off track.
“Actually, I had something I wanted to ask you,” she said, eyes straying to where the yellow duck rested on the desk in front of them. Sato glanced around again, able to spot five other exact copies of the toy on the desks of her other coworkers.
They were on most everyone's desks now, actually. Well, everyone except...
Her eyes fell to her own desk directly across from Takagi's.
Where a bright yellow rubber duck now sat innocently right in the center of it.
“Ask me what?” he prompted, but Sato waved her partner off, attention now fixated on her own desk. That hadn't been there when she'd gotten there that morning, she was sure of it.
A few more moments of silence and she'd made up her mind.
“You know what? Nevermind. I'll be waiting by my car in an hour for us to head out, alright?” she hummed, walking away before Takagi had a chance to do much more than nod in confusion.
Returning to her desk, Sato sat down and gave the children's toy a long hard look before picking it up and placing it on right-hand side of her computer monitor.
She could always ask Takagi the whereabouts that the rubber ducks came from some other day. It did make a nice addition to her desk.
Besides, it was sort of cute.
Chiba became infinitely more confused after he was shoved into the passenger seat of a traffic vehicle with Miike, courtesy of Yumi, only to find three rubber ducks resting in front of him on the dashboard.
Aside from police regulations, which he wasn't sure if there were any rules and restrictions against traffic officers having items set up on their dash, what baffled him more than that was despite how fast they drove or how the car turned, they
didn't budge an inch.
Miike was being surprisingly silent besides him, and without an alternate distraction, Chiba found himself wondering how exactly that was the case. They couldn't have been glued in place, could they? Because if their presence alone wasn't a breach of regulation, gluing something to a police-owned vehicle surely was, right? But that was just an assumption, he didn't actually know for sure that they were glued. It could be tape, or velcro which could still be removed with a bit of effort. He didn't know if she and Yumi had actually defaced the interior of the vehicle or not. Surely it didn't count if the decorations could be removed after the same people were no longer using the vehicle, right?
Chiba was going to ask anyway. Just to make sure. After all, it would be no good to have traffic officers themselves breaking the law when they were trying to enforce it, right?
Except when he turned his attention back to his companion to ask, it was to find that her cheeks were flushed red and her hands were gripping the steering wheel tightly, eyes very pointedly fixated on the road in front of him.
He decided against it. He didn't want to distract her if she was that bound and determined to drive them around safely and not cause an incident.
By the time they'd returned to the department that night after a full-day of running around (and once again running into Conan-kun and thus, a murder, and it really wasn't healthy for a six year old to attract death as much as that one did) Chiba had forgotten about the ducks entirely, and lost his chance to ask.
Things had been a bit weird in the department since Megure-keibu had gone on vacation.
Shiratori noticed. He always noticed, but he simply wasn't entirely sure who to report it to. Or, well, if the situation really warranted reporting. So far no one had been hurt, no one had complained, and most importantly, no one had actually said anything about it at all.
Normally if something weird was going on, at the very least you'd hear whispers of it or an occasional mention of the odd occurrences that were going on. This was a police department, after all. And though they were all hard-working adults here, gossiping still did happen, particularly when something as strange as a massive influx of rubber ducks around the department occurred.
But nothing. Not a single person had made a comment to him or any of the higher-ups about the objects.
For a while there, Shiratori was starting to wonder if he was going crazy. He wasn't the only one who was seeing this, right? The desk of every single person who worked in Division One's Homicide department was occupied by a brightly coloured yellow and orange rubber duck. Though most of them just had one duck in any number of places it could rest on their desk, a few officers had two or more, leading to an overall total of way-too-many rubber ducks.
At least compared to three weeks ago when the number of rubber ducks in the department came to a whopping total of 0.
Now, he could barely make a turn without seeing bright yellow and orange in his line of sight, or at the very least in Shiratori's peripheral vision. There were ducks in the break room, ducks in the bathroom, ducks in halls and cars and situated comfortably in the soil of a potted plant, and no one was saying anything about it.
Now, the toys weren't hurting anyone, obviously, and Shiratori had long since checked to make sure that what they appeared to be was exactly what they were – plain, ordinary rubber ducks that children use to play with in the bath and that were decidedly not dangerous in the slightest. No bombs, no taps, nothing. Just regular rubber ducks, doing absolutely nothing but staying where they were placed until someone came along and moved them, though it didn't appear that there were many people doing that.
Shiratori just had no idea where they had come from. He felt incredibly out of the loop. The desire to ask around was strong, but who was he even supposed to ask? He didn't know who'd brought all of the ducks into the department. Despite reviewing the security footage in his spare time, all that proved to do was make it look as though the rubber ducks had just started appearing.
Not only was that illogical and unlikely, it was also impossible. But that didn't change the fact that he didn't have a single shred of security footage as evidence to tell him who was carting in all of the rubber ducks.
They had, essentially, just started popping up randomly and it apparently hadn't come across as a bit alarming to anyone but himself.
A few days back he'd convinced himself to take quick visits to some other Divisions to see if he could gain any clues, but that line of thought was brought to an abrupt end after he'd entered Division Two's department to be greeted by Nakamori-keibu's distant shouting about yet another Kid heist note (“It's barely been three weeks since the last one and now he's sending me two?! I want everyone putting their heads together to figure these out. We'll catch that bastard this time, just you wait KID!) and the obvious stress of everyone in the Division trying to keep up with the Inspector's enthusiasm and to decipher the riddles as quickly as possible.
Given the last time he'd even been near a Kid heist Shiratori had been out on a – cough – completely platonic dinner date with Kobayashi-sensei from a block over and at the time he could still hear Nakamori-keibu's cursing from a distance, he got out of there quickly before the Inspector really started to use his lungs.
Sato claimed that he actually could get fairly quiet during the chase, depending upon to what extent Kid riled him up beforehand, but Shiratori still wasn't entirely sure what he thought. Still, she'd been the one to drag Takagi along to the last heist and had actual personal experience in the matter, so he wasn't going to question her on it.
Still, Shiratori made no plans to be anywhere near a Kid heist in the near future.
And from what he'd seen from his quick visit, there were no stray rubber ducks hanging around anywhere in the Division Two office or the other ones he'd visited, so it answered the question that this phenomenon was isolated solely to Division One's homicide department.
Times like these made him briefly wonder why he hadn't decided to go into the arson department instead.
But when he returned to his desk later and watched as all of his coworkers worked and chatted along with each other, Shiratori couldn't help but smile. Sato was standing near the coffee maker with Takagi and laughing along with him, and Chiba was off to his left side scribbling something on a report with his tongue peeking out the corner of his mouth and the utmost look of concentration on his face. Takano was on the opposite side of the room from Takagi and glaring at him as though he thought that maybe, perhaps Takagi would just randomly disappear from Sato's line of sight if he stared hard enough. It looked as though detective Kobayashi and Yokoyama were about to join him in envy if Sato stayed over there too much longer.
Over all, absolutely nothing was different in the department despite the influx of rubber ducks.
And as he opened up a drawer in his desk to grab a pen to complete his report with and found a little yellow duck, placed unassumingly on the inside of the drawer, somehow Shiratori knew he wouldn't have it any other way.
He withdrew his pen and shut the drawer closed, duck and all.
The rubber ducks were still strange, though.
Megure was quite pleased to find that, after he got back from his month-long vacation, his branch of the Tokyo Metropolitan Police Department had yet to completely fall to pieces without his guidance. He hadn't been under the assumption that it would even before he'd left, but it was always nice to have that added confirmation.
In fact, things seemed to be running more smoothly than usual if nothing else. There was an organized pile of papers for him to come back to – and actually organized, despite Takagi's tendencies to shuffle papers into places they didn't belong – and reports from his superiors informed him that all of the required work had been completed on time and submitted from his detective's along the correct channels while he'd been gone. It had been like he'd never left, and his team was capable of doing everything they had needed to get by while he'd been away.
Megure was proud, to say the least. He'd been expecting to have to play at least a bit of catch-up after he'd returned, and now he was glad to say that he wouldn't have to waste the effort.
But, after exiting his office to go share his greetings with his Division, he found that there was still soone thing that he needed to address.
And so, a good hour after the customary 'Hello's and 'Welcome back, keibu!'s and anyone still had yet to breach the subject, Megure found himself forced to break the ice.
After an entire month, he was the first one to actually question it out loud.
“So... is anyone going to explain the ducks?”
This is actually my first time writing many (any) of the characters from the TMPD in a fic dedicated solely to them as opposed to being background characters in something else, so I deeply apologise if my characterization is a bit off. Fun as it was, writing this fic gave me so much trouble because I'm so inexperienced with the characters. Any comments/critiques/suggestions for next time would be gratefully appreciated! Especially if you think anyone is horribly OOC. I want to know!
Regardless, I hope the prompter enjoys and everyone else has a fun ride.
This has been left largely unedited, as I don't have the time to re-read through it right now and fix grammar issues because oops, I'm a procrastinator and running late for work again. Ao3 and ff.net links will appear eventually.
Prompt: Rubber ducks and the Tokyo Metropolitan Police.
Rating: G
Word Count: 3661
Warnings: One instance of Nakamori-keibu's foul mouth.
Summary: Rubber ducks start mysteriously appearing around the Tokyo Metropolitan Police Department's Division One branch, Homicide.
It started, like many things did, on a Tuesday.
Takagi was first. Returning back to the department after a particularly long (and high intense) car chase with Sato-san, he was quite looking forward to finishing up the paperwork for the day so he could head home and finally get a well deserved break. He'd been trying to take his (in any form, be it grabbing something to eat, pausing for at least five minutes to collect himself, or even going to the bathroom) break since ten thirty that morning, and had long since given up on accomplishing any of those things until he'd successfully returned home for the night. At this point, he was more interested in just wrapping everything up and taking a well-deserved nap.
But, he did promise Sato-san before they'd gotten back that he'd have his report in before he left that day, and he was never really able to deny her anything. Leaving the work for a later date wasn't an option.
So, worn-out from sheer panic and far-too much adrenaline because of successive near-death encounters, Takagi trudged his way over to his desk and collapsed into the chair and for two full seconds of complete bliss, he allowed his eyes to close and his entire body to relax. Moment over, he sat up in his chair and opened his eyes, officially ready to set himself to work.
To find a bright yellow and orange beaked rubber duck staring right back at him.
…
Right.
Well, perhaps 'staring' wasn't exactly the right word, since a children's toy could hardly fixate its attention onto anything and much less a person, but Takagi was beginning to feel more and more hesitant under its gaze.
Shifting himself to the left, he tried positioning himself differently so it felt as though the duck's gaze was pointed somewhere near his right side as opposed to directly at him. It had been placed under the rightmost side of his computer monitor next to a stack of papers, diagonally from where Takagi was sitting.
This did not do well for getting him out of the duck's line of sight.
In fact, it almost seemed like the more he moved around, the worse it was actually getting. No matter what he did, the rubber duck was still looking at him.
Takagi was beginning to feel more and more like he was being laughed at. His lips turned down into a frown. Well, he didn't have to stand for that if he didn't want to. Grabbing the empty coffee mug from the other side of his desk, Takagi flipped it upside-down and extended his arm to place it over the duck, cutting its gaze off completely.
Only to be interrupted just moments before he would have set the mug down.
“Takagi-kun, what are you doing?”
Startled, Takagi's arms flew out from his sides and he flailed, nearly tossing the mug into the air at the same time. After a bit of juggling with it as it was airborne, he finally solidified his grip on the object and brought it down from the air. Takagi placed it upright on the desk in a desperate scramble to keep his hands as far away from the nearly-broken object as possible.
He held his hands out in front of him defensively, decidedly flustered at being caught doing what could only really be described as playing with a toy.
“S-s-sato-san, what can I do for you..?” he stammered, embarrassed from being caught and a slight flush colouring his cheeks.
Sato raised an eyebrow at him, but finally raised a folder into the air as a reminder. The report he had promised to finish immediately came to mind.
“Your report, Takagi-kun?” she prompted, waving the folder.
“Ah. R-right. I'm starting working on it right now. I'll finish it, I promise,” he declared, pressing his palms together and bowing his head to her as a promise. 'Thankfully, Sato just laughed and dropped her hand.
“Just find me when it's finished, alright? I'll still be here.”
She smiled, and then walked off without another word. Relieved, Takagi let out a breath and shot one last look at the rubber duck before turning his complete attention onto the paperwork.
Later, Takagi would find that the rubber duck's presence didn't actually bother him nearly that much when he'd had a full night's rest and a nice and hot cup of coffee in his system. It actually accentuated his desk quite nicely.
(He never did find out where it came from.)
~
Three days later found a very confused Chiba in the men's restroom, wondering why on earth each of the stalls had a rubber duck placed in them on top of the water tank.
At first, he'd gone off the assumption that someone may have left the toy (perhaps it was evidence?) in there accidentally, and thus he'd left it be in the event that the person realised they'd misplaced the duck and went retracing their steps to look for it.
Two large glasses of soda and a bag of chips later had Chiba back in the restroom, in a decidedly different stall than earlier but looking at an identical rubber duck to the one he'd seen earlier. Closer introspection a few hours later showed no disturbances to the toys despite the people that must have been to the bathroom throughout the day.
Confused and really unsure what to do about the situation, Chiba took that to mean that he'd missed whatever memo had been passed around through the department that said 'don't worry about the ducks'. Or, 'don't touch the ducks'. He wasn't completely sure, but he didn't want to risk messing something up by moving them somewhere different. The last he needed was two mistakes on his record in one week after he'd accidentally switched up two of his case files before submitting them to Megure-keibu the previous Monday. That mistake had proved a bigger mess than it normally would have, as Megure-keibu was starting a month vacation the next day and all of the paperwork up-to date had to be completed and filed correctly before he could finally leave the department to pack and catch his flight.
Chiba at least didn't make the Inspector miss his flight, so that was good. But the entire situation had been stressful enough that he'd rather not have a repeat of it any time soon.
And to stay in the higher-ups good graces. Staying in their good-graces was always good.
So, he let the ducks be and didn't question it.
But they were still there when he got to work the next day.
~
Takagi had had a rubber duck on his desk for the past week and Sato found herself infinitely curious about it.
Her partner had never really been one for desk decorations before this, which was why it had caught her attention as it had. Normally Takagi's desk was just littered with papers, pencils, and notebooks in an organized-but-disorganized frenzy.
Despite that, he still knew exactly where everything was and how to organize it properly. It was the only reason she had yet to chastise him for being messy. That, and somehow the chaotic wreck that was his desk during working hours always ended up completely clean and picturesque by the end of the day. Even seeing Takagi in action and dealing with the mess of papers himself, Sato still wasn't completely sure how he managed to make it spotless. Especially since earlier in that day it had looked like he was quite literally drowning in papers.
Evidenced by a stack of folders toppling over him when she'd asked if he wanted to grab lunch together the day before.
But either way, the rubber duck hadn't been moved an inch since she'd first seen it show up, and for some reason she felt weird just coming out and asking him about it. What if it had some odd sort of sentimental value? Though if that was the case, Sato was becoming more and more curious as to what it could be. Or what changed his mind and caused him to decide to do the slightest bit of decorating when she'd been teasing him about how business-like he kept his space when it wasn't drowning in notes.
Maybe she should talk to Yumi and see if she thought it would be weird to ask about it. But then again, Yumi would probably just respond by saying that she should just ask Takagi and stop being weird about it, in addition to some other subtle nudge about the two of them or a mention of how she should see if Takagi would put up a picture of the two of them now that he was decorating his workspace.
...Nevermind. She wasn't going to willingly submit herself to teasing. Besides, she'd probably take it upon herself to mortify Takagi soon enough (it had been two weeks since she'd last done so, after all, and Yumi had this strange habit of sticking to a weird schedule when she'd set her mind to something – what that something exactly was Sato had no clue, but she knew it consisted primarily of ways to make her partner blush and stammer) and Sato did not need to help her in her quest.
Regardless of the cute face Takagi made when he was flustered.
Anyway.
It had come to a total of two weeks since the duck had appeared when Sato had finally had enough. She just had to know where it had come from. Throughout the week, more rubber ducks had started popping up on the desks of other members of the department as well, and she was decidedly beginning to feel as though she was missing something.
Takagi was still at his desk that morning with a cup of coffee when she walked up to him, perching herself on the edge of his desk.
“Morning, Takagi-kun!” she greeted cheerily, and if that startled her partner enough to cause him to jump a foot in the air in front of her, well, she pretended not to notice.
Sato couldn't quite help letting out a laugh anyway.
It took a moment for him to collect his breath before he could respond.
“A-ah, Sato-san. Good morning.” And the smile he shot her in return was so genuine she couldn't help but smile back.
Cute.
But she was getting off track.
“Actually, I had something I wanted to ask you,” she said, eyes straying to where the yellow duck rested on the desk in front of them. Sato glanced around again, able to spot five other exact copies of the toy on the desks of her other coworkers.
They were on most everyone's desks now, actually. Well, everyone except...
Her eyes fell to her own desk directly across from Takagi's.
Where a bright yellow rubber duck now sat innocently right in the center of it.
“Ask me what?” he prompted, but Sato waved her partner off, attention now fixated on her own desk. That hadn't been there when she'd gotten there that morning, she was sure of it.
A few more moments of silence and she'd made up her mind.
“You know what? Nevermind. I'll be waiting by my car in an hour for us to head out, alright?” she hummed, walking away before Takagi had a chance to do much more than nod in confusion.
Returning to her desk, Sato sat down and gave the children's toy a long hard look before picking it up and placing it on right-hand side of her computer monitor.
She could always ask Takagi the whereabouts that the rubber ducks came from some other day. It did make a nice addition to her desk.
Besides, it was sort of cute.
~
Chiba became infinitely more confused after he was shoved into the passenger seat of a traffic vehicle with Miike, courtesy of Yumi, only to find three rubber ducks resting in front of him on the dashboard.
Aside from police regulations, which he wasn't sure if there were any rules and restrictions against traffic officers having items set up on their dash, what baffled him more than that was despite how fast they drove or how the car turned, they
didn't budge an inch.
Miike was being surprisingly silent besides him, and without an alternate distraction, Chiba found himself wondering how exactly that was the case. They couldn't have been glued in place, could they? Because if their presence alone wasn't a breach of regulation, gluing something to a police-owned vehicle surely was, right? But that was just an assumption, he didn't actually know for sure that they were glued. It could be tape, or velcro which could still be removed with a bit of effort. He didn't know if she and Yumi had actually defaced the interior of the vehicle or not. Surely it didn't count if the decorations could be removed after the same people were no longer using the vehicle, right?
Chiba was going to ask anyway. Just to make sure. After all, it would be no good to have traffic officers themselves breaking the law when they were trying to enforce it, right?
Except when he turned his attention back to his companion to ask, it was to find that her cheeks were flushed red and her hands were gripping the steering wheel tightly, eyes very pointedly fixated on the road in front of him.
He decided against it. He didn't want to distract her if she was that bound and determined to drive them around safely and not cause an incident.
By the time they'd returned to the department that night after a full-day of running around (and once again running into Conan-kun and thus, a murder, and it really wasn't healthy for a six year old to attract death as much as that one did) Chiba had forgotten about the ducks entirely, and lost his chance to ask.
~
Things had been a bit weird in the department since Megure-keibu had gone on vacation.
Shiratori noticed. He always noticed, but he simply wasn't entirely sure who to report it to. Or, well, if the situation really warranted reporting. So far no one had been hurt, no one had complained, and most importantly, no one had actually said anything about it at all.
Normally if something weird was going on, at the very least you'd hear whispers of it or an occasional mention of the odd occurrences that were going on. This was a police department, after all. And though they were all hard-working adults here, gossiping still did happen, particularly when something as strange as a massive influx of rubber ducks around the department occurred.
But nothing. Not a single person had made a comment to him or any of the higher-ups about the objects.
For a while there, Shiratori was starting to wonder if he was going crazy. He wasn't the only one who was seeing this, right? The desk of every single person who worked in Division One's Homicide department was occupied by a brightly coloured yellow and orange rubber duck. Though most of them just had one duck in any number of places it could rest on their desk, a few officers had two or more, leading to an overall total of way-too-many rubber ducks.
At least compared to three weeks ago when the number of rubber ducks in the department came to a whopping total of 0.
Now, he could barely make a turn without seeing bright yellow and orange in his line of sight, or at the very least in Shiratori's peripheral vision. There were ducks in the break room, ducks in the bathroom, ducks in halls and cars and situated comfortably in the soil of a potted plant, and no one was saying anything about it.
Now, the toys weren't hurting anyone, obviously, and Shiratori had long since checked to make sure that what they appeared to be was exactly what they were – plain, ordinary rubber ducks that children use to play with in the bath and that were decidedly not dangerous in the slightest. No bombs, no taps, nothing. Just regular rubber ducks, doing absolutely nothing but staying where they were placed until someone came along and moved them, though it didn't appear that there were many people doing that.
Shiratori just had no idea where they had come from. He felt incredibly out of the loop. The desire to ask around was strong, but who was he even supposed to ask? He didn't know who'd brought all of the ducks into the department. Despite reviewing the security footage in his spare time, all that proved to do was make it look as though the rubber ducks had just started appearing.
Not only was that illogical and unlikely, it was also impossible. But that didn't change the fact that he didn't have a single shred of security footage as evidence to tell him who was carting in all of the rubber ducks.
They had, essentially, just started popping up randomly and it apparently hadn't come across as a bit alarming to anyone but himself.
A few days back he'd convinced himself to take quick visits to some other Divisions to see if he could gain any clues, but that line of thought was brought to an abrupt end after he'd entered Division Two's department to be greeted by Nakamori-keibu's distant shouting about yet another Kid heist note (“It's barely been three weeks since the last one and now he's sending me two?! I want everyone putting their heads together to figure these out. We'll catch that bastard this time, just you wait KID!) and the obvious stress of everyone in the Division trying to keep up with the Inspector's enthusiasm and to decipher the riddles as quickly as possible.
Given the last time he'd even been near a Kid heist Shiratori had been out on a – cough – completely platonic dinner date with Kobayashi-sensei from a block over and at the time he could still hear Nakamori-keibu's cursing from a distance, he got out of there quickly before the Inspector really started to use his lungs.
Sato claimed that he actually could get fairly quiet during the chase, depending upon to what extent Kid riled him up beforehand, but Shiratori still wasn't entirely sure what he thought. Still, she'd been the one to drag Takagi along to the last heist and had actual personal experience in the matter, so he wasn't going to question her on it.
Still, Shiratori made no plans to be anywhere near a Kid heist in the near future.
And from what he'd seen from his quick visit, there were no stray rubber ducks hanging around anywhere in the Division Two office or the other ones he'd visited, so it answered the question that this phenomenon was isolated solely to Division One's homicide department.
Times like these made him briefly wonder why he hadn't decided to go into the arson department instead.
But when he returned to his desk later and watched as all of his coworkers worked and chatted along with each other, Shiratori couldn't help but smile. Sato was standing near the coffee maker with Takagi and laughing along with him, and Chiba was off to his left side scribbling something on a report with his tongue peeking out the corner of his mouth and the utmost look of concentration on his face. Takano was on the opposite side of the room from Takagi and glaring at him as though he thought that maybe, perhaps Takagi would just randomly disappear from Sato's line of sight if he stared hard enough. It looked as though detective Kobayashi and Yokoyama were about to join him in envy if Sato stayed over there too much longer.
Over all, absolutely nothing was different in the department despite the influx of rubber ducks.
And as he opened up a drawer in his desk to grab a pen to complete his report with and found a little yellow duck, placed unassumingly on the inside of the drawer, somehow Shiratori knew he wouldn't have it any other way.
He withdrew his pen and shut the drawer closed, duck and all.
The rubber ducks were still strange, though.
~
Megure was quite pleased to find that, after he got back from his month-long vacation, his branch of the Tokyo Metropolitan Police Department had yet to completely fall to pieces without his guidance. He hadn't been under the assumption that it would even before he'd left, but it was always nice to have that added confirmation.
In fact, things seemed to be running more smoothly than usual if nothing else. There was an organized pile of papers for him to come back to – and actually organized, despite Takagi's tendencies to shuffle papers into places they didn't belong – and reports from his superiors informed him that all of the required work had been completed on time and submitted from his detective's along the correct channels while he'd been gone. It had been like he'd never left, and his team was capable of doing everything they had needed to get by while he'd been away.
Megure was proud, to say the least. He'd been expecting to have to play at least a bit of catch-up after he'd returned, and now he was glad to say that he wouldn't have to waste the effort.
But, after exiting his office to go share his greetings with his Division, he found that there was still soone thing that he needed to address.
And so, a good hour after the customary 'Hello's and 'Welcome back, keibu!'s and anyone still had yet to breach the subject, Megure found himself forced to break the ice.
After an entire month, he was the first one to actually question it out loud.
“So... is anyone going to explain the ducks?”