Work Text:
Mail delivery inside the office was an unremarkable point of the day. One of the clerical androids would make a round through the workstations in the bullpen, distributing whatever few items still came to the DPD via postal service. No one hardly even looked up from their terminals during this routine. Nobody was ever excited to receive mail.
Which was why Connor was confused this particular afternoon when everybody in the office sat up straight at full attention when the clerical android, Julia, came in to hand out the mail.
Wait…was she pushing a cart?
Connor twisted a bit in his seat to verify that…yes, she was pushing a small cart that was absolutely loaded with a mix of official looking, white envelopes and brightly colored pastel envelopes. The majority of the pile in the cart was made up of the colored envelopes. He could see a few bundles where the envelopes had been made into bricks with rubber bands. A quick scan estimated there to be close to two hundred of them. Miscellaneous packages and other letters were buried under them.
“Hank?” Connor asked, not pulling his eyes from the bizarre sight.
Hank only grunted in response, seemingly the only one not actively honed in on the cart.
Tina was practically bouncing in her seat, and Gavin was eying the cart like a hawk.
“Hank, what is going on?” Connor completed his question. “Our precinct receives very little in the way of post mail on a day to day basis. Today there appears to be an…escalation.”
Hank frowned at his terminal, glanced at Connor, found Julia and her cart, and he frowned again, looking back at his screen.
“I guess it’s pen pal season again.” He didn’t sound enthused.
“Pen…what?” Connor looked from Hank to the cart again.
Julia came to her first stop at Ben’s desk, plucking out three colored envelopes and handing them to him with a smile. Ben hastily finished his coffee and set the mug down, taking the envelopes with a quick “thank you” before tearing the first one open.
Hank, it seemed, was not interested in providing any further explanation and had decided to ignore both Connor, Julia, and the way Tina was nearly vibrating behind her desk in anticipation.
Connor blinked and leaned to the side. “Officer Miller?”
Chris had also abandoned his work momentarily, but he was at least putting on a show of organizing the pens on his desk to look busy.
“Yeah, Connor?”
“What is…” He gestured in Ben’s direction, where the older detective was smiling as he read the equally colorful paper that had come out of the pastel blue envelope.
Chris followed him and smiled. “Around this time of the year, a few classes at the city schools do a pen pal program with the Detroit Police, the Fire Department, some of the government offices, local businesses.” He shrugged. “It’s been going on since I started working here. People seem to really get into it.”
Connor pursed his lips in thought, watching Julia give Tina a handful of a dozen of the coveted envelopes. Tina already had a dangerous looking letter opener in her hand, and she yanked up the first letter, tearing it open rather violently.
“What are pen pals?” he asked.
Julia pushed her cart completely around Gavin’s desk, as though steering clear of an invisible, steel barrier, but the detective’s eyes remained locked on the cart, and his head seemed to swivel like an owl as she sidetracked to Officer Wilson’s desk instead.
Chris scratched his chin. “It’s just somebody you write letters to. I guess it used to be more of a big thing back before everything went digital. It’s usually somebody you don’t really know in your daily life.”
“So we’re encouraging children to write letters to strangers,” Connor said flatly.
Officer Wilson looked a little surprised at the four letters that Julia offered him, but his smile said it was a pleasant surprise. He carefully read the front addressing on all of them before selecting the first one to open.
Chris laughed. “Kinda, but it’s all…the teachers at the schools monitor things, and it’s just us, police, firefighters…I guess they want kids engaging with us to kinda…break the ice, y’know? Let them know we aren’t that scary, that we’re just people, man.”
Julia approached Chris and handed him five letters. Chris thanked her with a nod and set them aside, looking back at Connor.
“Plus, it’s kind of a nice distraction from all the shitty mail we get besides this.” Chris rummaged in his drawer for a letter opener. “Stuff that’s all…meetings and paperwork and notices and…where is it?”
While Chris dug around, Connor craned his neck to peer at Chris’s pile. The top envelope was a pale pink color, and there were gold and blue star shaped stickers sealing the back of it. Maybe it was the light, but he thought it looked like there was some glitter on the edge of it too.
“Aha,” Chris lifted up the prodigal letter opener.
“Why are these not being distributed uniformly? Do some officers receive more than others?” Connor asked.
“Well, there are five grades that participate in this program,” Chris plucked up the pink envelope and started opening it. “A lot of the kids’ first go-around they write generic hello letters and those get dished out at random to whoever around here signed up to be a pen pal.” He waved the letter opener around to indicate everyone else in the office. “After a year, most kids stick with whoever got assigned to them or they trade in for a new pen pal. They end up kinda gravitating toward their favorites.”
Julia deposited a brick of pastel envelopes in the box outside Captain Fowler’s office. Her cart was still alarmingly full.
“I’m not sure I understand,” Connor watched Julia come to a stop in front of Gavin’s desk.
Gavin had drawn himself up, sitting straighter than Connor had ever seen him, and he was staring down Julia so rigidly that the android momentarily froze.
“What do you mean, they choose—“
Connor’s voice stalled as Julia picked up three bricks of banded together envelopes and deposited them on Gavin’s desk. Gavin didn’t move. Julia reached deeper into the bag on the cart and pulled out two more bricks, adding them to the first three. Then, with a huff, she reached into the lower compartment of the cart and took out the removable basket. She dumped a dozen loose envelopes onto the pile. Julia glared at Gavin as she replaced the basket and pushed her much lighter cart onward.
Gavin bowed forward immediately, scooping his arms around the pile and shoveling it closer to him with a low, hissing “yessssssss.”
“Oh?” Connor was utterly stumped, and he looked to Chris for help. “They choose favorites, and they choose Detective Reed?”
Chris was already reading his first letter, but he glanced up at the question, over at Gavin, and then snorted.
“Yeah, it’s a mystery to all of us too. My guess is it’s got something to do with his maturity level being closer to theirs.” Chris shrugged. “That or he’s trying to build an army.”
Connor could see that Chris was wanting to get back to his letter, so he nodded and let that conclude the conversation. He straightened back into his seat, glancing at Hank out of the corner of his eye and at Hank’s empty, colorless desk.
“Hank, do you not participate in this program?”
“I do not,” was the exasperated response, again with no eye contact.
Hank was determined to remove himself from this situation, pointedly focusing on his work. Connor didn’t have to muse on his sour mood too long to understand why Hank would not be fond of receiving colorful letters from small children. He didn’t push the issue, but he did find that it was difficult to concentrate on his own work now that most of the officers around him were enthralled in their letters.
Tina was sitting impressively slouched in her seat, holding the paper directly in front of her eyes as if to absorb the chunky, inexperienced writing by osmosis. Officer Person was delicately thumbing through one letter that had multiple neon green pages stapled together. Gavin was hastily sorting and sifting through his piles, clearly searching for one in particular. Chris and Officer Wilson were both poring through their own letters thoughtfully. Ben was snickering at whatever childlike humor had been injected into the letters he received.
Feeling strangely self conscious all of a sudden and unsure of the source of it, Connor tried to interface with his terminal again. He dropped his hand against the base of the monitor and logged in, but his eyes moved across the same email four times before realizing that he hadn’t processed any of it properly. He pulled his hand away, disconnecting, and shuffled some paperwork on his desk.
Case files. Stacks of white paper with redaction markings, medical reports, crime scene reports…He had never been so disappointed at the prospect of working.
The cart edged into view at the corner of his desk.
“And last but not least,” Julia chirped, looking worn out by the whole ordeal.
There was a single, pastel green envelope remaining in the top bin of her empty cart.
Connor’s thoughts stalled. “I…Me?”
Julia smiled, plucking up the envelope and holding it out for him to take. “It’s got your name on it.”
Connor stared at the envelope in wonder for a dumbstruck moment, then carefully reached out and took it from her.
“Th-thanks.”
For a long ten seconds, he simply stared at the envelope. The addressing had clearly been written by an adult’s hand, but the placement of the stickers in a solid string of multicolored smiley faces linked together along the envelope’s seal was just as clearly done by a determined child. His earlier assessment regarding Chris’s letter appeared to apply to this one as well, being that there was in fact some glitter on one corner of it.
Across the bullpen, Gavin snatched up the hard sought after letter from within his small mountain. There was a weird expression on his face between deadly serious and pure joy as he tore it open. Immediately, a wave of purple glitter erupted from the yellow envelope in his hands, sending a veritable mushroom cloud of it all over his desk.
“Seriously? Again?!” Tina barked, seeing the glitter explosion.
Gavin made a pleased noise, flourishing the torn envelope at her to waft some of the glitter in her direction.
“Every. Year!” Chris was trying to sound angry, but he was grinning too much for it to land. “Sammy strikes again.”
“Die mad about it!” Gavin exclaimed, fluffing open the letter that had been buried in all the glitter inside the envelope. His entire front was coated in the stuff already, but the letter from this child “Sammy” had grabbed his full attention span immediately.
Connor redirected his focus back to the green envelope in his hands. Slowly, gently, he slid his own letter opener under the seal and cut the top open. His peripheral sensors picked up on Hank occasionally glancing in his direction, but his partner didn’t say anything and Connor was too distracted to say anything either.
The letter inside was written on simple, white, lined notebook paper. The handwriting was crude, and he placed the age of the writer at around seven or eight years old. Each row words took up three lines instead of one, and even with the lines, the writing tended to curve downwards as it had been scribbled across the page.
Everything else in the bullpen fell away, and his focus honed in solely on the letter before him.
Hi Mr. Connor,
How are you? I am fine. My name is Bonny Stevens. I hope you remember me. We made bubbles when I got lost. It was fun. You were bad at it. Have you gotten better? Have you practiced any? What is it like being a robot? Mom said you feel things like people. Do you have a favorite color? My favorite color is green. Duh! I am running out of room, so I think I will stop now. Please write back soon.
Love,
Bonny
PS Sorry about the glitter. It would not come off.
The ambient noise from the office filtered back into his audio processors as he finished reading, and Connor straightened, paused, and then quickly dove back in, re-reading the letter three more times.
As he finished reading it for the fourth time, he reverently set the letter down on his desk and noted that some of the glitter had transferred onto his fingertips. He tried to shake it off and even rubbed his hands on his pant legs, but only served to spread the glitter to the denim fabric.
“You’re gonna be wearing that the rest of the day at least,” Hank broke the silence, reluctantly moving his eyes from the monitor to Connor’s side of the work station.
Connor was too giddy from receiving the letter to care much, and he smiled over at Hank.
“It was Bonny. She wrote me a letter.” He picked up the paper again, cherishing it in his hands. “I was not even aware of this pen pal program, so I’m certain that my name was not on the participation list to choose from…but she wrote to me anyway.”
“Bonny who? You know her?” Hank lifted an eyebrow.
“Bubble Girl wrote you a letter?” Tina boomed across the bullpen. “Nice!”
Connor beamed, holding up the letter for her to see. “She did!”
“Bubble girl?” Hank looked even more confused.
Tina stood up and leaned against her desk, her own letters already consumed. “Yeah, some lost kid we picked up a few weeks ago. I had Connor keep her company while I contacted her parents. Apparently he made an impression. I think you made a friend, Connor.” She folded her arms with a proud look.
“What?” Gavin tore his eyes from his seventeenth letter. “You fucker, you edging in on my turf?”
“God, Gavin, you cannot hoard all the pen pals in the city,” Tina said, rolling her eyes.
“I can try!”
“Why, so you can create some weird, ankle biting gang?” Tina snorted.
“Fuck you, kids love me.”
“Why?” Chris asked him loudly, spreading his hands. “No one understands!”
“Okay, okay.” Hank lifted a hand to calm things down. “Why is this Bonny kid called Bubble Girl?”
“Oh. Oh? OH!” Tina’s eyes widened as realization dawned. “You never saw the video?!”
“What vid—“
“Tina, please…” Connor sighed, already resigned to what was about to happen.
He had been having such a nice afternoon…
A soft whoosh sound on Hank’s monitor announced the arrival of a video file to his email as soon as Tina sent it. Connor distracted himself with re-reading the letter once more while Hank opened the file and viewed it.
It didn’t take long before his reading was interrupted by Hank’s loud, uncontrollable laughter.
Even if it was at his expense, Connor was relieved to hear his friend finally laugh for the first time that day, hopefully signaling the end of his sour mood.
That relief turned bitter as identical whooshing sounds echoed across all the monitors in the bullpen, as Tina re-sent the video in a Reply-All message across the server for everyone to enjoy all over again.
Connor ignored the subsequent giggles that broke out, opting instead to open a new word document on his terminal and begin cybernetically formulating a reply letter. He only got one full sentence in when he paused, withdrawing from the terminal. Thinking better of it, he pulled out a legal pad from one of his desk drawers and pulled out the first page, setting it on the desk in front of him.
He picked up a pen and situated it in his hand. It was an unfamiliar feeling to physically write rather than type or construct a document via cybernetic connection. It felt more…personal. Keeping Bonny’s letter smoothed out beside him, he began to write a response in perfect Cyberlife Sans.
Dear Bonny…