Chapter Text
13:45, 25 October
Watford Secret Agency Headquarters
Special Agent Baz Pitch
It’s a bad day to be me. Bad fucking week to be me, actually. Waist deep in autopsies and reports and the leftover takeaway that I’ve let accumulate in my flat, and then in the middle of my Friday I get called in to speak with Minotaur. That’s never happened before, so I know I’m justified in every ounce of dread I feel walking to his office. It’s bad news. I know it is. I have no reason to anticipate it, I haven’t done anything but bust my arse all week, but then again, he has no reason to call me in.
Division Chief Minotaur resembles his namesake; he’s a beefy man that I would assume on first glance is a WWE star rather than head of the forensics unit at Watford Secret Agency. As I walk in, his muscular figure is sitting behind a desk, looking at me like he’s about to body-slam all my hopes and dreams of a steady career. Another thing about Minotaur is that he isn’t one for greetings, because the first words out of his mouth are, “Pitch, what do you know about Agent Snow?”
I try to keep my face calm. Agent Snow? Excellent bloody question, I know nothing about him. Well, that’s not true. I’ve seen him around, but we don’t work in the same division, so I’ve never met him personally. But, for an agency where discretion is so highly valued, rumors travel fast. It’s inevitable to hear gossip about my coworkers, but especially about him. Snow’s a laughing stock to put it lightly. If I say all of this to my boss, the worst that will happen is he thinks I’m a gossip, something that’s semi-true. But truth is really the question here, isn’t it? I don’t know for sure that Agent Snow is as loony as everyone says it is, and when someone with a medical degree starts spreading half-truths like it’s the real deal, like they have any basis at all, heads start to turn. And I don’t know why he’s asking.
“Not much,” I play it safe. “I know he works in a highly specialized field.”
“Highly specialized,” he scoffs. “That’s certainly a way to put it. Agent Snow works in our unexplained unit, the so-called X-files. Up until now, he has been the only agent dedicated enough to stay assigned to it.”
“Until now?”
“We have decided it’s in everyone’s best interests for you to be reassigned there with him.”
There it is. The metaphoric body slam. It makes my left eye twitch. “Sir, I’m not sure I understand.”
“Pitch, you’re a scientist. You were top of your class at medical school, you have continuously shown exemplary work here at Watford. To put it bluntly, you would bring something to the unit that it currently lacks: logic and reason.”
“Sir--”
“It’s not a request.”
“But surely Agent Snow doesn’t want--”
He waves a hand to silence me, and says to make up for it I can leave early, which doesn’t appease me as much as he had probably hoped. I stuff the belongings on my desk into a tiny box to bring home, since it’s apparently an immediate transfer, and my first day is Monday. This gives me the whole weekend to dwell on how much I hate myself for joining the agency, for doing the one thing my father told me not to do.
He was fine when I said I wanted to become a doctor, and was more than happy to put me through medical school, but he nearly burst a vein when I told him I’d applied to work at Watford Agency just as my mother had before me. Granted, it led to her death. I knew there would be pushback from father, but I didn’t know it would sever our relationship entirely. I always thought being gay would be the last straw, but no, it was this. If he knew I was being forced to make an example of the workplace lunatic…
I don’t tell him, I tell my Aunt Fiona, who calls me a whiny bitch. “Shouldn’t you be taking this as a compliment? They’re sticking you with him because you’re damn good at what you do.”
“No, they’re doing it because they think I’ll take one look at the division and dismantle it. I guarantee it. They can’t cut it without a reason, so they need me to find one. I’m just their pawn.”
“You signed up to be their pawn, boyo. I remember when you were tearing your hair out over whether or not they’d hire you,” Fiona cackles because she thinks the suffering of her only nephew is hilarious, as all good aunts do. “And anyway, fine, just go in and shut the place down. Then you can go back to your morgue and be happy.”
“But if there isn’t a reason? There wouldn’t be an unexplained unit if there wasn’t a need for one in the first place.”
“Then blow your supervisor and hope someone else gets sacrificed. Christ, kid, are you even supposed to be telling me all this?”
Probably not, but that’s auntie privileges for you, even if she did take the piss out of me often and with pleasure. Who else did I have to complain to? I suppose there is Dev, but with him I really wouldn’t risk saying anything Agency related with, not the way he goes off the deep end with conspiracies. By the sounds of it I’m about to get enough of that without the help of my halfwit cousin.
Phoning Fiona is the only thing of note I do over the entire weekend. I cook lasagna that will last me a handful of days, I watch a pitiful amount of Coronation Street, I lounge. Mostly, though, I think about every single nasty bit of gossip I’ve heard about Snow: he’s only an agent because his foster father was (not that I have room to speak), he’s a total loon who believes in aliens, he thought he saw one of the kids at a care home get abducted one night, he puts six sugars in his tea, on and on and on until suddenly it’s Monday morning.
The unexplained division is in the basement of one of the older Agency buildings. I’ve never had a reason to visit, so I get lost four separate times trying to figure out how the hell one even gets to the basement level, and by the time I’m where I’m supposed to be I feel a cold dread in my chest. Maybe that’s just because it’s cold on the level, full stop. I’m sure I’ve been in warmer morgues than this.
I wander the halls, my oxfords the only sound as they hit the tile, until I come across the only room that isn’t designated for cleaning supplies. The little plaque on the door that says Special Agent Simon Snow is crooked, hanging by a nail. I knock just beneath it.
“Yeah, come in!”
It was true that I had seen him around, and during those few times, I never thought he looked crazy. In the light of day he was only slightly disheveled, but then again, so were plenty of people. It was a highly stressful career path we all chose; not everyone is an angel all the time. But this isn’t the light of day I’m dealing with down here in his lair, it’s flickering fluorescents, and my heart drops to my stomach at the sight of him. The sight of everything. The posters on the walls, the documents on the floor and all over his desk, the empty coffee cups, the maps, the projector screen that’s pulled down and displaying nothing but a glowing white page, the utter, utter madness of it all. Him, sitting in the middle of it, scribbling into a notebook.
No wonder they want me here. Talking some sense into Agent Snow and saving Watford some money looks like the right choice, but how the hell do they expect me to do that on my own when it’s this I’m up against? Has anyone other than myself walked into this room in years? Division Chief Bunce definitely hasn’t. If she had, she would have sent a hazmat team, not me, a doctor in over his head.
The man himself stands back from a swivel chair abruptly, holding out a hand, a confused expression on his freckled face. “Agent Snow. Um, Simon. Simon Snow. Nice to meet you.”
“Agent Pitch. Likewise.” I neglect to shake his hand back. It's slathered in ink; he must be lefthanded. And, anyway, if he touched me, he might see how frozen I was, might comment on it, and I’m not one for small talk. Cold down here, eh? That’s October for you. Absolutely horrendous, those kinds of conversation.
Snow draws back and wipes his palm of the white of his button-up. “Right. Well, this is it! Home sweet home. This is the only desk, but I’m sure we can find you something. Anyway, you don’t need to spend time getting anything situated today, we’ve got a full schedule.”
“What do you mean?”
Snow smiles, sinks back down in the swivel chair, then slams his fingers into the keyboard of a computer until the projector is finally showing something. A neck. More precisely, a human neck covered in blood, with two identical wounds on the side. “This is what I mean. Three people have been found like this in the woods near a village in Cornwall within the last three months.”
“Unfortunate. What does that have to do with us?”
“We need to investigate it. Obviously.”
“Why today?”
He swivels. Again. Snow seems rather unkeen on keeping anything out of an arms reach, including a…lunar calendar? “It’s the full moon tonight.”
I feel myself raise an eyebrow, more judgmental than I mean to be. “Are you suggesting there is a--what, a werewolf, loose in Cornwall?”
“I’m not suggesting anything. I’m theorizing that something has been attacking teens in this village for the last three full moons, and if we want to get there in time to figure out what it is, we need to shake a leg.”
Somewhere between being appalled by his choice of idiom and an encore of total despair at my career path, I found myself driving down the motorway with Special Agent Simon Snow, conspiracy theorist extraordinaire and confirmed nutjob. The agency never lets us take our own cars, so we’re stuck in one of the black, nondescript ones they set aside for missions. I say they’re nondescript, but when you put two men in black trench coats in the front and suddenly you look anything but inconspicuous so it’s lost on me why they even bother. If we were in my car, we would look less like we were cosplaying the Men in Black. That, and I would have a real excuse to yell at Snow for fiddling with the radio.
“Can you find it in your heart to listen to one song all the way through?” I sigh, watching him twist the dial for the seventy billionth time since I hit the accelerator.
“I thought that one had ended,” he shrugged. “Anyway, this doesn’t seem like the right mood music, does it? Like, classical doesn’t shout secret mission.”
“I happen to like Shostakovich, so I don’t give a damn what the mood is. The mood is irrelevant.”
Snow has the audacity to groan. He has a bloody lot of audacity, actually. For the thirty minutes that we’ve been driving, he’s been smacking his gum and fidgeting, as if he wasn’t the one dragging me out to the sticks to chase make-believe creatures.
I turn the volume up and try to tune him out.
09:43, 28 October
Unnamed Country Road
Special Agent Simon Snow
It figures the agency would spring some snobby prick like Baz on me. If it’s between dealing with him and losing the division, then I figure he’s worth putting up with, right? From the moment I was sat down and told if I couldn’t make this work it was over, that I could forget reassignment and had the unemployment office to look forward to, I knew I had to try. But he isn’t making it easy. The bastard didn’t even want to shake my hand!
I just want to hurry up and get there, but he insisted he drive, and I agreed because I didn’t know he drove like my gran. So I told him he could do two hours, then I could drive the rest of the way, which he shot down. Then, since I packed two muffins--lemon poppyseed, baked by Gran coincidentally--because I didn’t want to have to stop for breakfast, but I can’t do fieldwork on an empty stomach and it’s the most important meal of the day and all that shite, he looked offended when I tried to give him one.
To be fair, I don’t know anything about him. Maybe he’s sensitive to food. Maybe he’s been told bad news (aka being partnered with me) and he doesn’t know how to cope. Maybe he just doesn’t want to be here.
Only one way to find out. Can’t make him any more grumpy than he already is.
“So, um, did you apply to work with me, or…?”
“I was reassigned.”
“Oh.”
It’s the first time we’ve said anything since he yelled at me about the radio, but I suppose I’ve got my answer. Maybe he senses the need for the tension break. We’re off the motorway now, going down a mostly dirt road, so he must think it’s safe enough to dare a glance at me. “I’m sorry, that sounded rude. It’s just that it was very sudden. I was comfortable where I was before, and I didn’t have much intention of being moved.”
“Ah, well. That’s Watford for you,” I say. “What were you doing before?”
“Autopsies for forensics.”
“Oh, that’s grand actually. You don’t know how much help you’re going to be, really. I always hate working with the morticians and whatnot because they treat me like a crazy person,” I laugh. “But now I’ve got my own personal one!”
This is apparently not the right thing to say to Mr. Sunshine and Rainbows, because he fully turns his face to sneer at me. “Right, first of all, I’m not your personal anything. You can take that Sherlock Holmes and Watson fantasy out of your head right now, because we’re equals in this situation. Just because I got transferred--”
“Whoa, man, I didn’t mean it like that. I didn’t mean you belong to me or anything--”
“--does not mean I’m any less qualified to be here than you. And don’t interrupt me! And they probably wouldn’t treat you like a crazy person if you didn’t lead with let’s go to Cornwall and fight lycanthropes.”
“Fuck off. I didn’t say anything about lycanthropes,” though the sound of it coming out of his mouth gets me going a bit. I totally think there’s some lycanthropy going on. The evidence is all there! The full moon, the bite marks, the moors. If the testimonials from my connections are anything to go off of, which they are, then it’s a copycat at the very least. Someone or something wants us to think it’s a werewolf. We just need to figure out which option it is and why, and preferably, how to stop it.
To me, that doesn’t sound crazy at all. Hypothesis, action, solution. Something is terrorizing this community and we can do something about it. That’s our whole job! So what if we need to think outside the box a little bit?
The box is where Pitch seems content to be. “You certainly implied we’d be dealing with them.”
“Ok, fine. I’m taking us werewolf hunting. Does that make you happy? Is that what you want to hear?”
“Obviously it isn’t.”
“Obviously it is. You already have it in your head that I’m sending us on a wild goose chase. I know my own reputation, you know.”
He scoffs at that, but doesn’t say anything. Prick. I don’t bother trying to switch off driving; I let him take us all the way to the pub we’re going to be staying at. Arthur's Paw.
Baz audibly sighs as he looks at the sign with a little Excalibur and paw print. If I didn’t witness the fit he just threw over our actually serious business trip, I would think it’s just from all the stretching he does once he gets out of the car. The bloke should have just pulled out the fucking yoga mat, the way he started bending and shit. Again, I offered to do some of the driving. He missed his opportunity to stretch, that’s on him!
“We’re staying at a pub?”
I grab the bag I packed--there’s clothes in there for him I put in before I knew he was an asshole--and close the boot, trying my best not to slam it. “Unofficially. I don’t know if the Agency would be too pleased with it but I know the owners.”
He mutters something about a conflict of interest as we knock at the locked entrance. Penny opens it, and throws her arms around me in a hug when she sees us, making me drop the bag. “Simon! Thank Merlin you’re here. Come on, you’ll get wet out there. It’s been pissing all morning.”
“Did she just say thank Merlin?" Baz whispers to me. I ignore him.
Call me a bad friend if you want, but it’s been ages since I’ve been out here to visit. That’s what happens when you’re manning a division all on your own. Still, Arthur’s Paw is still as cozy as I remember it being when they first opened the place. Dark interior, vintage beer ads on the wall, photographs of the regulars. It’s empty right now of course, but it was pretty full last time I visited.
“How’ve you been? Is Shep in?”
“Here!” He says, coming down the stairs that lead to their flat above the pub. He’s still in his pajamas. Classic Shepard. I pull him in for a hug too once he gets close enough.
“We’ve been as good as you can expect, given everything,” says Penny. She’s sat on one of the barstools in her usual skirt and sweater combo, and she’s dyed her hair blue--last time I was here it was purple. “And yourself?”
If Baz weren’t here, I’d tell her the truth. That I’ve been fucking awful. My job was threatened, Agatha broke up with me, then I had a fling for a few weeks with a guy named Jeremey who ended up being more trouble than he was worth, one of my goldfish died, and now I’m stuck with Dr. Prick at my side. Fucking. Awful. But I can’t say all that, not with him here, so I smile and say everything’s been fine, which she knows is code for we’ll talk later.
“You’re his new partner, right?” Shepherd asks.
Baz is still by the entrance, looking like he’s standing on frozen ice and doesn’t know how to proceed. Maybe he’s taking in the decor? He seems like the kind of person to judge a place harshly by the decor. Probably thinks it's kitschy. Still, he clears his throat and says, “Yes, that’s right. Agent Pitch.”
“Pleased to meet you! I’m Shepherd, I’m from Omaha, Nebraska. And this,” he throws an arm around Penny’s shoulders, “Is my lovely wife Penelope.”
“From London,” she chimes in.
“Yeah, we’re both transplants. It was a big deal with the locals when we first opened the place, you know, the gentrification of country living and all, but that’s really not what we’re all about. We won ‘em over in the end.”
Baz purses his lips and nods. “I see. Well, it’s…lovely to meet you both. Snow, may I have a word?”
“Oh, yeah, you can go up to your room. Simon, you remember the way, right?”
I do. It’s the same room I stayed in last time, and the only other one in the flat other than Penny and Shepherds. As we go up the squeaky stairs, Penny tells me she’ll have tea ready for us when we come down for a proper chat, which Baz scowls at. I want to slap the look off his stupid angular face, honestly.
When we’re in the guest bedroom, the door shut, I don’t have time to brace for impact. “Snow, what the fuck is this?”
“This?” I point to the bed. “It’s a bed, mate, don’t tell me you’ve never seen one.”
“No, I mean this whole situation. You barely gave me ten minutes notice on my first day that we’re going to be staying on an overnight trip, hours from headquarters, to investigate some murders that you so elegantly imply were carried out by werewolves! I’m given no evidence of this other than one bloody photograph, I don’t have time to even read the case file, and then I’m marched to some wolf themed pub in the middle of nowhere, conveniently run by your buddies!” He’s been pacing during his second temper tantrum of the morning, punctuating it by throwing up his hands. “Excuse me for asking, is this a joke? Am I being hazed?”
I knew the pub being wolf themed would be a hit to the credibility of the whole thing but, honestly, it’s just a wacky coincidence. The whole reason Shepherd wanted to start up the place was because, back when I was in the agency academy and still living with Penelope, we watched the (phenomenal!) film An American Werewolf in London and he thought it was the best thing he’d ever seen. Then we got to talking about how funny it would be if he, an American, started up a wolf themed country pub, and one thing led to another…
Penelope kind of vetoed the whole wolf themed thing, so it’s not exactly as on the nose as it could be. I mean, it’s not like there are wolf heads hung up on the walls or anything. Just some posters. And the coasters. And the pub sign, and the name, and the menu item names, and the little wolf that’s engraved on the pint glasses. But that’s it! It’s subtle! Tasteful, even! Baz just has it out for me, that’s why he’s bringing it up.
“Look,” I start. “I know it’s a lot to spring on you. Stressful first day and all that. But I want to remind you that I’m not certain there’s a werewolf, I’m only saying that someone or something is going through an awful lot of trouble to make us think there is one. Either way, three people have been killed, and it’s our job to find out why. It's our duty. That’s what’s important, that’s what we need to keep in mind.”
Baz is pinching the bridge of his nose and nodding by the end of my speech. It’s a crooked nose, must have been broken at some point. I wonder if it was a sports injury. Baz has an athletic look about him so I bet he used to play football or something. Used to, because I reckon he’s one of those people who’d rather not play at all than play in a Sunday league. Or, maybe, he has some sort of secret ruffian past. Former bare knuckle boxer. Nah, probably not that. It’s more likely that someone had enough of his attitude one day. Can’t say I’d blame them for slapping him one.
“Yes, yes, you’re right. I hope you’ve made arrangements to talk to the families.”
“And the local coroner. Already sorted, we’ve got a busy afternoon.”
He sighs. Then, “Simon, one more thing.”
“Yeah?”
“Is this actually the only bed, or am I missing something?”
“Shit, you’re right,” It hadn’t crossed my mind that there’s one. Not even a big one. It’s a pretty small room, and doubles as Shep’s game room, so there’s not much space between the bed, the wall, and the PC set up he’s got. “We’ll sort it out later, yeah? Let’s go get some tea. We’re going to need it.”