something_incredible | (no subject)

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beverly

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Hopper is sure at least a few kids in Beverly's class are jealous of her right now, given that today is Take Your Kid to Work Day and her parent is a homicide detective. He's willing to bet there are bored kids in offices all across the city, texting their friends with stuff like bev got to go to the cop station! or however they write things out these days, but Hopper knows -- and now Beverly does, too -- something they don't.

Being a detective is pretty damn boring a lot of the time.

It's paperwork, it's sitting around and waiting for calls, it's taking statements and a lot of the time those statements aren't all that exciting either. Right now they're just both at Hopper's desk in precinct three and he's been on the phone for nearly ten minutes with a young woman trying to set a time for her to come in and give a statement for a break and enter, and Hopper is growing more exhausted by the moment.

He looks at Beverly from across the desk and quirks an eyebrow at her, trying to get her to smile before he rolls his eyes at the woman on the phone. They eventually secure a time that works for her and he hangs up, heaving a sigh as he leans back in his chair.

"Is this as exciting as you figure?" he asks, smirking at her.

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Boring or not, Beverly thinks, this is a hell of a lot better than a day spent in school. Lately, she's spaced out a lot of the time she's there anyway. Being here is far less stressful, even if it also isn't exactly exciting. So far, most of what she's done is text her friends, like the other Losers, who didn't have anywhere to go today, and ostensibly do some homework, which has really just amounted to sketching on her notebook paper. A part of her almost wishes something would happen so she'd get to see things in action, but knowing what would have to happen for that to occur, she figures this is probably the better option.

Maybe she'll embellish some kind of story when she goes back, though, just so it doesn't sound like she did nothing all day.

"Oh, yeah, it's thrilling," she says without missing a beat, looking up from her drawing to grin over at Hopper. "Hearing one side of a phone call, you can't beat that."

"One side of a scheduling phone call," Hopper says. "Wasn't even anything exciting like a call with a medical examiner."

Not that he really wants to expose Beverly to the kind of shit he sometimes sees with this job, but at least it'd be a little more exciting for her. Besides, he knows she's been through a lot more shit than he's heard about, so he thinks she's probably pretty capable of handling some details from a medical examiner.

"Sooner or later we'll walk outside and get some lunch," he adds. "The fun never stops around here."

"How do you even deal with this much excitement?" Beverly asks with exaggerated seriousness, though the brightness in her eyes gives her away easily. Really, there are probably worse things than a job that's often boring, especially with what the alternative would be. She imagines it gets frustrating, though, having to coordinate phone calls and deal with heaps of paperwork and not have much to actually do.

Right now, she'd just rather be bored here than bored and stressed out in class.

"I couldn't do it. It would just wear me out."

"Why do you think I'm so damn tired when I get home?" he jokes. "It ain't just because I'm old."

It's due to a lot of things, the reason he's so tired all the time, although he has to think most people feel like this as they get older. Things weigh on them, drag them into the ground. It's one of those depressing things about getting older that no adults ever like talking about when they're around kids. Hopper's not going to be the one to start with Beverly. He figures she'll work it out enough on her own, if she hasn't started to already. He only wants to make her happy.

"We can probably go pick through the evidence lock up if you want," he says. "There's some weird shit in there."

"Ooh, I want to see the weird shit," Beverly says, her delight only partially feigned. As much as she doesn't really mind how boring this has been so far, capable enough of entertaining herself with her phone and sketchbook for a few hours, it would be kind of cool to get to do something a little more interesting. Besides, all joking aside, this is what he does every day. Part of her is curious about it purely on that basis, wanting to see more of what he does here. She's sure some of it is fucking morbid, but she's seen a lot of shit already. She can handle it.

"That sounds cool. Better than hearing one side of a phone call to schedule a phone call, no offense."

"C'mon," he says, locking his computer, then his desk drawers, and adjusting the holster at his waist as he stands. Maybe this isn't exactly standard, but he has to figure whoever is manning the evidence lockup at the moment is just waiting for this to happen with someone. The precinct isn't an exciting place for a kid to be and while Hopper figures most workplace environments aren't exciting for kids, he wants to at least give Beverly something to talk about when she goes back to school.

Even if that something is a pound of coke or a bloody knife.

At the elevator, he jabs the button to head up, then leans against the wall. "I'll jazz up the next phone call for you, too," he says. "Piss someone off. Get them to scream for my superior."

"That's one way to make things exciting," Beverly says with a grin, shifting her weight where she stands as they wait for the elevator. She feels a little weirdly self-conscious being here, knowing that this isn't ordinarily the kind of place teenagers hang out, but it's muted by being with Hopper. Boring so far or not, it is pretty cool to see what he does every day, to get to be a part of that a little bit, anyway. Even if they don't find anything cool in the evidence lockup, it'll all be pretty well worth it. That, and it definitely beats accompanying someone to an office job, or worse, having a parent she wouldn't want to spend this time with. She knows all too well what that's like.

"And, I mean, I know I shouldn't want you to have something to investigate. That it's better that you don't," she adds, not wanting to give the wrong impression on that front. "But maybe this'll, I don't know, split the difference."

There's always something to investigate and Hopper does have a few things on his plate at the moment, but none of them are overly pressing and his superior had decided they weren't the right things to show a teenage girl. Hopper doesn't agree, but he's also not in charge.

Right now, as they get on the elevator, he's just got his fingers crossed he'll get a chance to take her to interview a robbery witness who has been a little hard to pin down recently.

"Maybe we'll be able to find some drugs," he teases as the elevator doors slide open again, delivering them to the proper floor.

"Please, I can find those at school anytime," Beverly says, though she's careful to make clear from her tone that she's only joking. It probably wouldn't be untrue, if she really tried, but she has no real interest in trying. If nothing else, she'll stick to smaller rebellions — a drink at a party, maybe a little pot, but even more rarely. Nothing harder than that. Living with a cop, she's pretty sure she would get caught out immediately, and there's a small part of her that's still always waiting for him to decide that she's more trouble than she's worth, someone he'd be better off not keeping around.

For the moment, though, she tries to banish all such worries. Even if this hasn't been very exciting so far, they've been having fun, and getting to check out whatever's in evidence does seem pretty cool.

"I wanna see what the weirdest thing there is. The one that seems least like it should be evidence."

"Now that's a challenge I can accept," Hopper answers, grinning as they approach the evidence lockup. Officer Mueller is on duty and although she makes a show of considering and then reconsidering whether or not she lets them in, the door is eventually buzzed open. There's a chance they're being let in because she's got something on a crush on Hopper, a crush he's definitely not bothered by at all and has plans, eventually, to make good on it.

"Alright, what've we got?" he muses, walking down one of the brightly lit aisles. There are boxes lining most of the shelves and Hopper stops at a few, pretending to consider each before he finds what he's looking for.

"How's this?" he asks, pulling a plastic evidence bag out of a box. Inside is a plastic turtle with a shell of about ten inches, the sort of thing someone might put in their garden as a decoration. "What do you think this is here for?"

Beverly immediately tries, and somewhat fails, to stifle a laugh when she sees the plastic turtle inside the bag. That definitely counts as weird, she thinks. Though she has a couple of guesses why it might be down here, she feigns exaggerated thought for a moment, her teeth pressing to her lower lip and head tilting to the side. "Someone buried a body in their yard and used the turtle to mark where?" she asks, the most morbid idea she can come up with. "Or... maybe got splattered with blood during a murder?"

There are definitely reasons it could be in evidence that don't involve someone being killed, but those seem way less interesting.

The first guess makes Hopper laugh, because although it isn't right, it's pretty damn funny. This kid's got an imagination, she's a hell of a lot more creative than Hopper is, and he hopes she doesn't lose that.

Most people do, but he wants better for Beverly.

"Someone used this thing to try and smuggle a whole lot of cocaine through a check stop," he tells her as he turns the bag over and shows Beverly the plug in the bottom of the turtle. "They shoved the baggies inside here and held it tight as could be, which looked pretty damn suspicious, all things considered. If they'd just left it on the backseat, we probably never would've thought twice."

"Oh my god," Beverly says, pressing her hand to her mouth for a moment to stifle a laugh. It probably shouldn't be funny, but at least it's more so for the fact that it did not, in fact, involve any murders. While she's never smuggled drugs or anything and has no intention of doing so, she thinks it's pretty ridiculous to be that obvious about it, anyway. Not prompting any suspicion seems like the most important concern there. It's no wonder they got caught. At least she gets some amusement out of it now, pretty pleased with this little game they've come up with.

She's definitely going to get some good stories out of this, too.

"Not as morbid, but that's amazing."

"Should've seen the guy's face when he realized he'd been caught," Hopper says with a grin. "He just clutched the damn turtle even harder."

He puts the turtle back in its box, then moves down the aisle before he comes to a box he hesitates in front of for a moment. Some of this shit he can't even begin to look at, can't show Beverly, because it would feel like glorifying or making light of the stuff that had brought it there in the first place. He's not going to show her knives or guns men have used on their wives or girlfriends. Won't show her the weapons women have used in return when they ended up cornered. And he sure as hell isn't going to show her any of the evidence from cases of kidnapping, where little kids went missing with the most horrific kind of people.

What he does instead is takes a bag from a box, a birthday card with a pink bunny on the front, and he holds it out toward Beverly. "Okay, what about this one?"

"Oh, shit, that's a good one," Beverly says with a laugh. A birthday card might be even more unexpected than the turtle was, and it requires a moment's more thought on her part. She doesn't actually think she'll be able to guess why any of these are in evidence. What she can do, though, is come up with a good possible explanation, a story both plausible and entertaining. She's sure there's a lot of shit down here where that wouldn't be an option, where it's obvious what it was used for and impossible to joke about, but there's no sense in getting hung up on that when she's probably not going to see any of it.

"Um... Someone used it to send money that was stolen?"

"Hey, not far off," Hopper says with a grin. "We got a whole bunch of these things after we discovered a bunch of criminals were using them as a way to make drug sales. They'd slip things into the cards and whoever was buying would have their own birthday card with money inside of it. Then they'd trade cards and it'd just look like two friends giving each other birthday cards."

It wasn't exactly foolproof, especially when it became pretty clear it was the same people trading cards over and over, but it was at least a little bit creative.

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