#idk i was just in a charlie/mattie sorta mood

[lucindarobinsonvevo]

@it-is-bugs TDBM Drabble Challenge: Late Payment Title: Watering Them Geraniums Words: 300 - ish

Being a copper was, in Charlie’s opinion, a bit like being some sort of divine debt collector. Every body that turned up was someone’s down payment on a ticket to Hell. It fell onto the shoulders of the boys in blue to make sure that they were rounded up and made to pay in full. In Ballarat, there were lots of bodies.

If it was still just his life, there’s every chance that he’d still be out there. He liked making arrests and he liked making the streets safer. But these days, it wasn’t just his life that would be affected. No, these days he had a wife. Doctor O’Brien-Davis. If something happened to him, then it by extension, would effect her. He didn’t think she would become a Mrs Spicer, or some such nonsense. She’d lived thirty odd years without him, and he wasn’t so vain as to think that she wouldn’t be able to live in his absence. But just because he knew she’d be okay without him didn’t mean she should have to be.

He’d sworn he’d never come back to Ballarat. After that last fight with Matthew, he’d cut himself off from the house on Mycroft Avenue entirely. For a while, but like Neville woman before him…Here he was. Again. His reasons had less to do with impending death (his or otherwise) and more to do with the fact Mattie had taken a job as the second Pathologist at Ballarat General after Alice asked her to. He didn’t know what it was about Ballarat that drew people back here. It was still just an overgrown country town with no sun and festering war wounds.

And bodies.

“Narrow.” Mattie observed, setting the skull down and not bothering to elaborate on what part of the skull exactly was narrow only that it was.

“Probably a woman, then.” He said, looking at the file in his hands, “Consistent with the file.”

“You’re getting good at this.”

“Lots of bodies.” He said, eyes roving over the six body bags already lined up. So far five were identified as Missing Persons by things on their person. Lots of bodies, and yet never the body he was looking for. One debt still unpaid.