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He keeps forgetting to speak English.
It’s hard to make the switch. Even with the voice box he made Brother Quack, birds don’t like words. With the ducks, English was rare and powerful, used to explain only their most dastardly plans. There are very few things that squawks cannot convey.
Now, everything’s words.
Otis catches himself honking at Olympia, once, in the very early days of their partnership. She doesn’t notice, because they happen to be walking through a park, just beside a massive flock of ducks. It’s a very helpful coincidence. Otis is not going to get that lucky again, and it's a painful reminder that he doesn’t have the luxury of absent words, not when he doesn’t know how to control them. He needs to be intentional, because he knows what the others would do if they found out.
Olympia turns to him and asks him if he’s alright, and he nods sternly. It’s much safer that way.
In everyday life, Otis marvels at how easily people exchange conversation. He knows he can’t read, but he thought he understood talking - use noises to communicate ideas. The people he’s surrounded himself with seem to do so much more than that. They treat it like a pastime, or a game, throwing the speaking role back and forth like it’s a tennis ball and they’re playing catch. Even in the most meaningless, unimportant, useless moments of the day, they’re chatting - as they walk down the halls, complete their cases, file their paperwork, and eat their lunches, it's talk, talk, talk. He has no clue how they find so much to discuss. After a while, it all sounds the same to him, just sets of sounds.
Olympia’s sounds are nicer, though. He thinks he likes his new partner.
He meets with Ms. O on the weekends. He can ask questions he doesn’t think are safe for the others, like how to pronounce alias, or quinoa, and what a projector is. She gives him standard squad training, too, so he can get better at the agent stuff and the human stuff. It’s almost too generous of her, and at night, when he’s lying in bed in his empty, organization-provided safe house, he has nightmares about the day when everyone discovers how many rules she’s broken for him. He’s already decided he’ll take the fall for it if he gets found out.
He knows it was evil to stand by as his brethren grew more aggressive, more violent. He knows he’s evil. He’s accepted it. He’s not going to let anyone but himself be punished for that.
But somehow, Otis doesn’t need to take any falls. He keeps working at the precinct, and he keeps getting away with it. As he adapts to his new life, he starts to improve his speaking skills. Olympia is always willing to talk for both of them, but she seems so happy when he has something to say; he tries his best to speak without excessive consideration at least once a week. One day, when they land in the tube room after solving a satisfying case, she laughs at something he says. And he didn’t even know he was going to say it! It just came out!
Otis thinks that, maybe, he’s closer to Olympia than he could have ever been to his family.
It’s a fleeting impression, but the feeling it leaves is lingering. That night, he takes leftovers out of the fridge and places the Tupperware in the microwave. As his eyes track the spinning plastic, he feels his heart stuttering in his chest. For the rest of the evening, Otis' mind jumps restlessly between attempts to ignore and forget his feelings and frantic rationalizations.
I mean, he’s spending more time with Olympia now, right? Surely it’s just a side effect of the proximity. His brothers are his brothers.
But as he closes his eyes that night, Otis has to admit that his brothers were ducks. Maybe… maybe he needed a human.
The next morning, he lets himself pretend he doesn’t remember the thought.
Seasons pass at the squad. Otis and Olympia celebrate their one-monthiversary, and their halfiversary, and Olympia’s birthday, which he mistakenly assumes is another Odd Squad tradition and not just a regular human thing. He asks where to find birthdays in the manual, mainly to give the (untrue) impression that he’s reading it, and she laughs in disbelief and calls him “cray-cray”. Before he can start to panic, the moment passes, and she moves on to her next tangent. It becomes clear, over time, that Otis has been blessed with a partner who accepts his extensive list of quirks without second thought.
Of course, he makes mistakes, and of course, there are moments where he feels like everything is lost, but for the most part, he’s happy. He’s friends with Ocean and Oona, and he knows Ms. O likes him. When he asks her one day whether his slip-ups are going to get him found out, she replies bluntly, “Otis, they think you’re weird. They don’t think you were raised by ducks and almost destroyed the world. That would be stupid. Get back to work!”
It helps a lot.
He’s picking up the patterns of language, slowly but surely. What he really struggles with are the nouns. He can reason his way through structure, but if you don’t know a word for a thing, you don’t know the word for that thing. Otis finds it immensely frustrating. Ducks make it easier - every object he ever needed to talk about was the same honk. You could always just figure it out from context.
He guesses there are fewer things to talk about when you're a duck.
For the moment, he’s made his way around nouns by letting Olympia finish his sentences a lot, which she is more than happy to do, but it’s not a permanent solution. What he really needs to do is teach himself to read, so he works on letters, which he mostly already knows, then words, and then the nouns for all the little, different, annoying things in his life that have different names for no reason. Every night, he comes home from work, loosens his tie, jumps into the pile of pillows on the couch, and picks up where he left off in a library book or set of Ms. O-provided flashcards.
The words come to him.
Otis eventually lets go of most of his residual fear. He reasons that the longer he’s here, the less likely people are to look into him or his old case. Now, it would probably just seem like another quickly thwarted attempt at world domination.
The trial comes out of nowhere.
The Xs suspect him, and they’re right to do so. He is evil, after all. He should have known better than to forget. But in any case, whether they’re in the right or not, the Big O trusts them and is more than willing to kick Otis off the squad immediately. To be honest, he doesn’t really know why Ms. O calls for a trial.
He doesn’t want to see Olympia’s face.
But they go to court, and, of course, she’s his representation, so he has to see it all the same. She looks, most of all, betrayed. There are other things in there, hints of loss and a mask of disbelief and confusion, but it’s mostly a gut-deep reaction that her partner had betrayed her. He knows he’s supposed to be coming up with a defense, but, honestly, he’s much too busy realizing that he can read his partner more than he could ever read in English.
He is able to find words during the trial, although they escape him at the very beginning, but the words are plain, and simple. They walk the listener through his life, a story Otis has repeated to himself so many times that it has lost any shock value. Deep down, he thinks he wants to plead his case, but the words sweep past the momentary desire. They do not fight for his freedom, reason that he has changed, or show remorse.
Sure, he knows that he wasn’t the one letting villains break into headquarters, but the Xs are still right about the evil part. Who cares about the details?
When Otis loses the case, he isn’t sure if it’s his words that lost it or just him.
He just really didn’t want to bring Ms. O down with him. That hurts.
The two of them make their way to Todd’s Home for Villains™ because it was the most lenient punishment the Big O would settle for. Ms. O tells Todd, “This is a mistake!” but Otis can’t bring himself to agree. When his mouth doesn’t even attempt to move, it occurs to him that he might have just lost all desire to participate in language.
When they meet the other villains, he’s fascinated by the fact that he can still make mindless quips. He supposes his time on the squad really did help develop that ‘human language instinct’, or whatever they call it.
Having lost his job, his friends, and Olympia, Otis is more than willing to give up, call himself a reformed villain, and lose himself to the nothingness of “recovery." Except Ms. O doesn’t deserve this, and he knows he didn’t help villains break into headquarters. Maybe, just maybe, he can argue his innocence, if only to restore her to the role she worked so hard for. In his numb state, this thought is the only one that keeps him conscious.
Staying sane does pay off. Oona and Olympia appear from the tubes in Todd’s meeting room with data, logic, and many, many words. They make a big ruckus among the ex-villains in the process of pulling Ms. O and Otis away, then sit him down and tell him he’s not guilty. He knows that already, but it’s nice of them to show they understand, and it’s probably good for Ms. O’s benefit. He chooses not to speak as they explain. He isn’t sure it would help.
He’s really happy Olympia came. She doesn’t look so betrayed now. Mostly, she seems excited, rebuilding this thin, new hope after he’s shattered it.
He doesn’t know if he can handle it with enough tenderness to keep it whole.
When the pair finishes, they look at him, waiting for confirmation. He thanks them, but his heart isn’t in it.
He needs to talk to Olympia.
He pulls her to the side, and, to his surprise, the words start to pour out of both of them. He’s trying to assemble an explanation, just something to make her understand that he never meant to hurt her and that he hadn’t done a single evil thing since he joined Odd Squad, that he’s sorry he didn’t tell her sooner - and he realizes as he says it that he really is. But as Otis speaks, Olympia is apologizing too. She says she’s sorry she didn’t believe him sooner, and they’re both talking and apologizing, and they both desperately need to say the exact same thing, so they speak together and both admit, “The best part about this is, every day, I get to work with my best friend.”
Otis thinks this is the first time his words have ever said everything he meant. That might mean they’re just him, then.
Together, their ragtag group cracks the case. They make their way back to headquarters by hiding Otis and Ms. O in a giant cake, and, using agent attendance records, they uncover that Ohlm was carrying out a villainous plot all along. It’s pretty unbelievable - Otis really didn’t think he had it in him. They argue with Ohlm, he traps them, they free themselves, and, using the power of subtraction, they manage to destroy his cursed, black-hole-creating gadget tornado. In the end, they return Ohlm to his parents, Ms. O is promoted, and the precinct reunites after the chaos, ready to emerge from the ashes. It’s a whirlwind, but as Otis is embraced by a crowd of happy agents, all knowing who he is and what he’s done, he can’t imagine any better way for things to have gone.
A few days after witnessing a real, evil plot be revealed, Otis considers how long it’s been since he did anything even adjacent to causing harm. Otis considers the fact that he never really did much evil to begin with.
Otis thinks he might not be evil.
It’s a nice thought. He thinks Olympia feels the same.
Actually, he knows she does, because she tells him, over, and over, and over again that she doesn’t think he counts as a villain, technically, and that really he was just doing what he was raised to do, and that it was incredible he acclimated to normal life so easily (although life as an Odd Squad agent can hardly be called normal). Each time, she speaks quickly and just a little frantically, as if she needs Otis to hear and internalize her words immediately.
Each time, Otis smiles, and maybe grabs her hands if she’s waving them all over the place, and tells her, “Olympia. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.”
He keeps going until he has said it enough.
And she understands him, and he understands her, and maybe that’s the most beautiful thing of all.