the craigslist request; joonhyun; 1/3
title: the craigslist request
rating: pg-13
pairing: baekhyun/joonmyun, chanyeol/sehun
warnings: alcohol (not abuse, though), language
word count: 27,557
notes: drink moderately, party safe and, most importantly, don't swap clothes when drunk, kids!
honestly i had intended to finish revising this by january '15 and then put it up by feb, but i never revised it and right now i'm trying to find things to do to avoid other things to do so i'm putting it up. maybe i'll revise it later. crossposted to dreamwidth and ao3.
Picture this-- a coat with a key ring in a pocket, an identical coat but with an avocado in the pocket instead of a key ring, and some harmless, de-stress nightlife activity.
BEHOLD, THE TALE OF TWO COAT-CROSSED LOVERS-- ONE, FAR TOO ENGROSSED IN ANIME, AND THE OTHER, IN CLUBS
12th OCTOBER, FRIDAY, 04.36 A.M., A MANSION IN THE MIDDLE OF NOWHERE
The day doesn’t start out very well, unfortunately. For one thing, it begins at the asscrack of dawn, because hangovers rouse Joonmyun way earlier than they would any other human being. For another, he has no idea where he is. Trusty sidekick Park Chanyeol is artistically sprawled across the sofa opposite, jaw hanging open, glasses hanging precariously off one large ear. Shady sidekick Do Kyungsoo is nowhere to be found. Joonmyun tries to sit up and bam, the various protesting brain cells in his skull start up their orchestra of don't don't don't and shit shit shit and THIS LIFE IS THE CENTRAL CESSHOLE IN THE TORNADO OF HELL. Which, hey, is pretty poetic for waking up at 5.42 a.m. after ingesting a gigantic amount of concentrated alcoholic beverages. But Joonmyun doesn't get to appreciate himself enough - he keels over and pukes. On the carpet. A stranger's carpet.
This would be acceptable, standard procedure for a weekend. But for a Friday morning? This is terribly unprofessional behavior.
"Remind me," Joonmyun chokes out an hour later, squinting at the windshield through his sunglasses. Fifteen minutes of teeth-brushing, and his breath still reeks of shitfaced. "Never to go clubbing with you on weekdays again."
"Yes, bossman," Chanyeol hums, speeding at a red light. "That is to say, no, bossman."
Trusty sidekick position: strikeout. "I am striking out your trusty sidekick position," Joonmyun informs him.
Chanyeol wrinkles his nose and turns up the radio. Something that sounds suspiciously like My Chemical Romance starts screaming into their ears, and Joonmyun slumps, sad, against his window. "Seatbelt," Chanyeol intones as they near a checkpoint, policemen looming ahead. Joonmyun shrinks further into the door; maybe he should switch occupations and try working on becoming a door handle. Or those whatsits, the things you push to get the window down. Chanyeol sighs and puts his seatbelt on for him. Trusty position achieved. Again.
Then a thought hits him, "Why was there a checkpoint?"
Chanyeol's fingers tap a rhythm against the steering wheel, and he sends Joonmyun a sideways glance. "You really want to know?"
Of course he doesn't. He just likes facing the music, so long as it isn't My Chemical Romance. Speaking of which, thank goodness the radio's gone a bit whack. Readjusting the seatbelt, he passes his order. "Speak, underman."
Chanyeol looks at him again before replying, as if trying to gauge how bad his reaction will be. "City limits. We just entered Seoul."
This successfully gobsmacks Joonmyun into silence for a full three minutes. He resurfaces to conversation with a weak, "Can we stop the car? I need to throw up."
Chanyeol holds his head until he's done, as always. "So," he gasps, retching a little, "We had an extraordinarily wild night, and ended up outside the city."
"I'll say, buddy," Chanyeol's hand gives his shoulder a comforting squeeze, and Joonmyun totters back to the car, thinking, There are so many things that I regret.
12th OCTOBER, FRIDAY, 10.10 a.m., THE KIM OFFICE (ON THE WAY TO CUBICLES KIM AND PARK)
Apparently, Friday's terrors don't just stop at hangover, parking ticket and disgustingly late for work. Oh Sehun has this great timing - comical from an outsider's standpoint and tragic from an insider's, as Shakespeare would say - where he sides with the rest of the universe and does one more thing to go against Joonmyun. Oh Sehun forwards some random chainmail about rainbows after rain and sterling 11.11 wishes, a TGIF ecard (which, first, what and second, why) and a picture of a cute bunny.
(Chanyeol loves all of them, thinks Sehun is precious, and sends Joonmyun a slew of one-lined emails expressing his thoughts on the event. One-lined emails on the work email server, which, as everyone knows is constantly monitored by the monstrously tall IT intern. Yug-something, or whatever. Chanyeol's gameplan seems to be focused on getting the lot of them fired.)
Joonmyun is having none of this. Unlike Kyungsoo, Sehun isn't a sidekick; he's just plain shady. When the hell's he ever sent anyone anything not related to work or French art? Speaking of, why the hell did he even send people French art? French art had nothing to do with work? Did Sehun work for some secret French art division in the company? Why were all his thought processes suddenly ending in question marks?
Right then, though, Sehun actually turns around from across the aisle to face him. Joonmyun watches in amazement as the guy sends him a grin, goofy and slow, accompanied by a slow thumbs-up. Sehun opens his mouth, leaves it hanging at around two inches, and blinks. As if he's thinking about what to say. "Hey, Joonmyun," he breathes, and the smell of soju can be smelled from a foot away. The smell is, for lack of a better adjective, smelly. At least things make more sense, though. Sehun is a solvable problem. Shady, with a touch of cheerfulness when drunk.
Not bad, not bad. Joonmyun returns the greeting with a cough and a wave, before returning to his duties.
He logs in to his email, yada yada yada, skips through scam, toodle tee doo, deletes viagra emails that have still made it to his inbox, the usual, and checks his horoscope for today. A tad superstitious of him, to be sure, but his favorite anime character is Midorima Shintarou. He’s got to emulate him somehow! Besides, it’s not like he hasn’t tried other ways: being tall is out, as are eternal three-pointers on the court (Joonmyun sucks at basketball), and that time he dyed his hair green wasn’t a good era in his life. Chanyeol literally pissed his pants laughing at him.
Anyway, back to the horoscope. The email finally loads.
Your thinking can’t quite keep pace with today’s drama - so hang back and watch. You are sure to pick up some new information that sheds a new light on your people and their weird issues.
Huh. Maybe he’ll realize why Kyungsoo likes Prince of Tennis so much. He blinks and goes back to his inbox. What had his lucky item been this month? He checks Monday’s horoscope. It’s mentioned in small font, as if whoever put the info up was embarrassed and didn’t want too much attention drawn towards it. Avocado.
Oh, yeah. He’d gone through five different 7-Eleven stores before he’d landed a lonely, shiny avocado. Worth the trips, though. It adds a nice, comforting weight in his coat, like a balance in his wild weekday-partying life. He reaches down to pat the pocket where he put it, but the coat sways loosely on the back of his chair. Joonmyun pats it again, absently. The coat sways some more, devoid of heavy stuff. Heavy stuff being, you know. The avocado. He turns around in his chair and bends over, hands batting over the fabric. He starts slapping his coat frantically until it swings from side to side. Chanyeol leans sideways and peeks at him behind the desk, observing him silently. Then he raises an eyebrow when Joonmyun looks up and stares at the far end of the room, unfocused.
“Bossman?” he asks.
Joonmyun shakes his head and refocuses on his friend, conveys panic through his facial expression, but Chanyeol only says, "Is it the constipation again?" Joonmyun gives up on everything harder than he ever has before. Chanyeol passes a glass of water and whispers conspiratorially, "It helps when you take too much fibre."
Sipping at the water calms him down, anyway, and he goes on to finishing up the weekly report and checking on the presentation he’s supposed to be having a meeting on, soon. He checks the schedule, makes notes, forwards emails and replies to requests.
Sitting in the back of his mind all the while is the weight of his missing lucky avocado.
12th OCTOBER, FRIDAY, 12.35 P.M., THE KIM OFFICE (LUNCH ROOM)
Whoever doesn’t want to buy croissants from the bakery next door straggles into the mess for lunch. Whoever buys croissants eats them in their cubicles, and whoever comes with their lunch packed goes to the mess, too. The workplace didn’t actually have any rules for lunch at work like they do at school, but people have fallen into patterns over time; Chanyeol goes to the mess for burgers, Kyungsoo packs his lunch occasionally, Joonmyun either packs his lunch or has three espressos. Sometimes four.
“So,” Chanyeol chomps down, crimped hair falling into his glasses. “I didn’t see you at home last night.”
“Please,” Kyungsoo says, quietly, opening his paper bag. “You weren’t at home last night.”
“You didn’t come with us,” Joonmyun shrugged. “Same thing.”
Kyungsoo raises an eyebrow. “Unlike you two, I have a life outside partying. I’m monogamous and married to my work.”
Chanyeol grins, bread crumbs from the burger stuck between his teeth. “Literally stayed in, slept in your office clothes, and woke up at your desk,” Joonmyun predicts.
“And continued working,” Kyungsoo nods.
“Bed hair,” Chanyeol raises a finger, and Joonmyun realizes he hadn’t thought of that problem before. Did Kyungsoo have a comb hidden beneath his keyboard?
The dude in question shrugs into his peanut butter sandwich. “The advantage of being a bachelor and having a total of zero people to come home to is that I can carry my life in my briefcase. I have hair gel, and the office has a bathroom.”
“You have Chanyeol to come home to. Roommates,” Joonmyun finally takes a sip of his espresso. This is all old talk, though. They know Kyungsoo’s work ethic barely sees Kyungsoo in the room. Or maybe Chanyeol and Kyungsoo rooming together has established Kyungsoo’s work ethic. Which came first, the chicken or the egg? Not a perfect analogy, but close enough.
“Do Kyungsoo, workaholic extraordinaire,” Chanyeol mumbles, and they hear the distinct ripping of lettuce.
“Kim Joonmyun,” Kyungsoo suggests. “It’s about time you join Alcoholics Anonymous.” Chanyeol provides the necessary audience-oohing backtrack. Joonmyun raises a hand in defeat, as Kyungsoo wipes his peanut buttered mouth with a triumphant expression.
It’s when they’re almost finished (except for Chanyeol, who gets two more burgers and shares one with Kyungsoo) that Joonmyun’s green-fruit plight comes back to him and he tells Kyungsoo about their night. Or whatever he can remember about it, at least.
"So let me get this straight," Kyungsoo frowns over his burger. Chanyeol's already wolfed his second down and is stretching in his seat, feet inadvertently kicking the both of them. (Neither of them minds anymore.) "You are wearing your jacket, and you go with Chanyeol and have a drink. It is Thursday, and you know what doing that with Chanyeol means, but you proceed anyway."
Joonmyun groans into his coffee. Coffee is all his stomach will settle with for this coming week, before he throws it all up. "Yes."
Chanyeol beams, unperturbed.
"And then you crash, drunk, through the entire country and come back here, your coat intact but for your... avocado."
The impertinent and shady sidekick is trying to make him sound stupid. He can feel it. He chooses not to react too much. “This is true,” he settles for saying.
Kyungsoo shrugs, “I guess we should check places for lost and found, then.”
“First stop,” Chanyeol says, “The Wide World Web, I assume?”
Joonmyun frowns. “Think you’ve got something off, there.”
11th OCTOBER, THURSDAY, 09.00 P.M., A RENTED APARTMENT (BYUN QUARTERS)
Nine o’ clock, on the dot. Baekhyun rolls over in his bed, hears Jongdae blasting some Muse song in the other room. Here in his own room, the clock ticks. Tick, tock, tick, tock. It’s the kind with a pendulum, so he follows the swinging bob to the right, left, right, until he feels a little dizzy and annoyed with himself. Muse switches to The Arctic Monkeys, and Baekhyun grabs his phone to message Kyungsoo privately.
Their conversation unfolds like clockwork: predictable, regular, timeless. Well, maybe not timeless. Clockwork runs on time. But whatever.
bbh let us go, let us club
bbh the dj shall make us fall in love again
dok first, fool, i’m not coming with you
dok your parties are lousy and i actually have work to do
dok do you know why? because i’m a good EMPLOYEE
dok the boss TRUSTS me
bbh huh
dok you on the other hand
dok if i knew how to type in emojis
dok i would give you the smug one with an eyebrow raise
dok because you suck and i rule
bbh yawn
dok second, that song is bluh
Again, whatever. Baekhyun ignores him, switches to his LINE group. Kyungsoo’s part of that one so he’ll get the messages, but it’s cool. Kyungsoo’ll just reject Baekhyun’s magnanimity again, no problem. Happens all the time.
bbh club y/y
dok breaking news: this is a week night.
dok so no.
lh aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaah
kjd no i need alcohol after 2day
kAi idk i think hyung has a point
bbh we're all hyungs
lh which hyung
kjd yeah kid
dok me ofc
kAi him ofc
bbh come on
bbh bring taem
kAi well..........
dok its fine. im ok w being deserted
lh leave him alone where are we going
kjd shhh i got it
kjd theres a place down from the
kjd balls parkour
kjd ball** park** shit
The Arctic Monkeys are rudely shut off in the middle of the chorus, and Baekhyun hears Jongdae banging his closet doors about. He closes his eyes for a few seconds, allows himself to drift off. The pendulum swings tick, tock, tick, tock, two cycles, and he gets out of bed. Grabs the nearest jeans and goes to raid Jongdae’s clothes for a shirt that isn’t in the laundry.
Once they reach the place, Baekhyun makes himself at home, wriggling onto his seat as he orders three shots of whatever Jongdae will be having, thanks. Apparently Jongdae’s ordered something bright blue, followed by something with a lot of fennel that burns his guts inside out, and anticlimactic rum. Lots of sweet, anticlimactic rum. The bartender is obedient and multiplies Jongdae’s order by three before handing anything over to Baekhyun. Baekhyun’s pretty much drinking himself blind.
“Flaming cocktail?” someone laughs in his ear, and Baekhyun tries to look at who it is but he’s very much by himself. Do people imagine things when they’re intoxicated? Baekhyun has a vague idea that he’d thought of this before, perhaps even experimented - but if he’d reached any conclusion, he was probably too inebriated then to keep it in his mind.
The bartender is looking at him strangely as he wipes glasses clean. Perhaps it was the bartender who’d suggested it? Never mind. He doesn’t feel too comfortable about alcohol and fire together. He slides off, trips a bit, salutes the bartender and gathers all his concentration into walking in a straight line towards the crowd on the dance floor.
Whether he makes it there successfully, he doesn’t know. He isn’t too aware of his surroundings from then on; things are just blurry.
At one point, he’s sure someone’s pulling him by the hand outside, which is equal parts great and terrifying -- he’d been getting a bit claustrophobic in there, so getting out was a relief. On the other hand, the outside was so wild and unpredictable. Didn’t… didn’t Mole and Rat have a conversation about that once? Ah, what was the book called. Wild Woods. The Willows Green. Windy Beans. He hits the leather seat and bounces a little.
“Dude,” someone says, somewhere off to his left. “You are so wasted.”
Baekhyun frowns. “Wasted? I’m not wasted. I’ve exercised all my talents and skills to the level--” he hiccups, classically, “--to the--” hiccup, “level best.” He frowns harder, for emphasis.
And more people and things blurring together. Really loud music, kind of hurting his head, but still catchy. Is that Taeyeon’s voice calling out to him from somewhere? Perhaps the speakers. Ah, SNSD. Love personified. A gift from above. He sighs and presses his forehead against the window, stares out at traffic lights and passing cars. Big buildings. So many of them. Man has accomplished so much, he thinks to himself. He cries a little. He’s a part of man. He’s accomplished just as much, if not more.
“Consider Louis Armstrong, the first man to play a trumpet on the moon,” he slurs, with much effort, to the company in the car, and rambles off about society and the wheels of time. He suspects nobody’s listening though, so he raises his voice and plows on. Then everyone is tumbling towards the doors, so he does, too. Jongdae slides an arm around his waist and yells about drinks and girls. Baekhyun perks up and takes the flaming cocktails. He yells and the world whirls around him, gentle and happy and fierce. The dancefloor is bigger than before, and he slips in between all the people, arms in the air, eyes half-closed. Thrum, thrum, thrum. The bass grips onto him and slides under his skin. He moves easily.
Blur.
A fleeting sense of Jongdae leaving somewhere, Lu Han dragging him off some place else.
The rest of everything filters through to his conscious in screenshots, and in the middle, his body floats.
The sky lightening to grays, people moving in groups, girls screeching, high heels in their hands. He nods appreciatively and takes off his own shoes. Walking barefoot across the streets and entering a villa.
Yiyin shouting his name and running over for a hug. He stumbles and falls, gets right back up. Yiyin nowhere in sight.
People dropping in, people dropping out.
Loud music, again. A bit jarring, but it shakes in the walls. Oh, he loves this. Like a harmless, private earthquake. He leans against the trembling walls, blinks and takes everyone in. Swirl swirl, whirl whirl. The world is a giant washing machine, and he shares this insight with the next kind soul who hands him a cup of… well, wine with ice cream, maybe. That’s what it tastes like. And mint. Definitely mint toothpaste. The aftertaste has him rushing to the bathroom for a puke.
When he comes out he feels terrible, but more refreshed. He stumbles towards the living room, or whatever, and finds someone curled up on a sofa, wearing his coat. Well, this wouldn’t do. Pickpockets just don’t do. Pickcoat-ecs. Pick-Kotex. He laughs himself silly. Kotex. He’s a damned genius. He walks over, takes it off the guy, and tugs off whatever he’s wearing right now to put the other one on.
Good. He feels nice wearing his coat. It feels different, too. He’ll congratulate himself later on his new choice in perfume.
Blur.
Bawling on Jongdae’s shoulder. Jongdae dazedly saying, “Forgot the keys,” like an anthem. No, that isn't right. Like a mantra. Was ‘anthem’ even a word? Baekhyun slaps himself ineffectively for his own keys. Nothing happens.
Blur. Discussion.
Crashing Lu Han’s place because the keys got lost. Bed. Nice big bed. He slumps into it happily and the blur blurs off into a blur of blurry dark blur. Ahhhh.
12th OCTOBER, FRIDAY, 07.00 A.M., LU HAN'S PLACE
When Baekhyun wakes up, there is the pain of Ye Olde Hangover, the ache of terribly bruised shins, and definitely the curse of bad breath. Like, really bad. Like someone poured soju onto rotting bananas and threw some day-old egg yolks in for good measure. And when he tries to recall the previous night, he’s greeted by a blackout. He cannot remember a damned thing.
Lu Han’s room wavers in front of him with a liquid quality, and he realizes his eyes are watering. He rubs them with his palms and curls up. He supposes telling this to Kyungsoo would result in an I told you so, and he isn’t really in the mood for that, so he doesn’t tell Kyungsoo. Not like he knows where his phone is, anyway. Baekhyun tries to go back to sleep, and is actually about to drift off again (considering how his head is pounding, that’s just short of a miracle) when Lu Han comes in and shakes his shoulders until his head bobs.
He coughs, and spittle lands all over Lu Han’s face as he rasps an eloquent, “Bye.” He then rolls off the bed unceremoniously and shivers on the cold tiles.
“Baekhyun.” Lu Han experiences the emotional spectrum as well as the next guy, but getting him to feel hopeless and exasperated is something only Baekhyun can accomplish. Lu Han leaves him after a few minutes of yelling and coaxing by turns. “Great!” he calls, banging the door behind him. “We’ll see how glued to the floor you are when your boss calls!”
Baekhyun doesn’t want to admit it, but that’s what jumpstarts him into moving. He lifts his head and grasps the bedframe, hauling himself up. He overhauls and crashes onto the floor, face first. Okay, into trying to move.
12th OCTOBER, FRIDAY, 08.12 A.M., BYUN’S APARTMENT DOORSTEP
The attempt to return home goes smoothly until he stands, as mentioned above, at his doorstep. He can’t find his keys, and has a vague feeling of deja vu. He rattles the handle, takes a few steps back to ram his shoulder into the door, looks under the doormat for his keys, and yells for Jongdae to open up. Jongdae, however, is probably already at work. He checks his watch and glares at the dial, as if everything was its fault. He’s almost half an hour late for work - and his boss had called him in fifteen minutes early today.
He’s cussing the fates and picturing himself strangling his boss for time shifts that make him look bad, when his phone breaks out into a Britney Spears fit. The taste of your lips-- Baekhyun attends in a hurry, making sure nobody else heard his ringtone. He’s about to picture himself strangling Jongdae for messing with his phone and changing his ringtone, instead, but the voice on the other end freezes his gratuitous imagination.
“Mr. Byun,” the voice pronounces, clearly. “The E-unit offices haven’t been unlocked yet.”
Disadvantage of regularly being the earliest guy at your unit, if you’re one of those poor bastards stuck at the manual workplaces: you get the keys to the entire floor and unlock the offices yourself. At least with the automatic panels you got to authorize opening all the doors with the passcode and your thumbprint.
“Yes, sir,” is all Baekhyun can say.
“I’ve dealt with it, of course, but it would be a bit charitable of you to either hand the position over to someone else, or work on fulfilling responsibilities.”
Baekhyun shoves his fist into his pocket, staring fixedly at his doormat. His hand bumps against something. Startled, his fingers uncurl and close around something weird and kind of pear-shaped.
“I mean,” Huang Zitao is adding, pleasantly, “No pressure and all that. We all have our late days, our off days. But this is your fifth day this week. We can't make too many concessions now, can we, Mr. Byun?”
“No,” Baekhyun mumbles, miserable. He works a five-day-week. “We certainly can't.”
"Last warning, then," Zitao says, and hangs up.
Well, shit. Guess who was dangerously close to getting fired.
His fingers close around the thing, and he brings it out of his pocket. Then he blinks. “So,” he remarks, dully. “The gods have blessed me with an avocado.” Then he puts it back in, and rushes down to grab another taxi. No office keys meant no car keys, either. Everything was in the same ring.
It begins to rain as he waves for a cab. No umbrella on him, either. “Some kind of karma?” Baekhyun calls out to the sky as he looks up, water splashing with hard determination on his face.
Once he gets inside and tells the driver the address, he leans back in his seat, head hitting the car window sadly as they lurch from side to side in the the downpour.
He takes out the avocado from his pocket and stares at it. “Karma,” he decides, and stuffs it back with a scowl.
The driver notices. “Hey,” he grins, “You making guacamole today?”
Baekhyun ignores him.
He goes through something similar to a walk of shame, shuffling quietly and trying to attract as little attention as possible while he makes his way to his desk. Lu Han raises an eyebrow as he passes by. Baekhyun flips him the bird and shrugs his coat off as he settles into his chair.
He has some trouble remembering his password at first, but otherwise he gets started on his quota just fine. The regular tap tap of keys and humming computers everywhere around him soothes his hangover-bullied-and-doused-into-a-coffee-rush frayed nerves a bit. His shoulders relax as he reviews the list of clients he has to call up today, before moving onto their stock feedback of the week.
Changsub fumbles over with some files around eleven o’ clock, in typical klutz fashion. His shoe snags on some wires, sleeve catches on someone’s desk corner, and he ends up barely saving the papers in their order as he goes down gracefully, like a swan.
There’s a loud, “Oomf.”
Baekhyun frowns at the disturbance. Changsub gets up breathlessly and shoves the stuff over to him. “Boss says to read these over, so he can sign later.”
Typical Huang. Forcing extra shit on people who seem to be slacking. And Baekhyun wasn’t even slacking! He was just… tipping over, being a little unbalanced! He’s about to protest to Changsub, but the guy’s sniffing his coat. Sniffing his coat. “Dude,” Changsub says. “Your coat smells weird.”
“Dude,” Baekhyun wants to say. “Sniffing my coat? That’s weirder.” But he brushes it off with a shrug. “It’s a new perfume,” he replies. Then he frowns again. Since when did he get new perfume?
“Huh.” Changsub shrugs. “And why did you embroider KJM on your collar?”
“Why would I embroid-- Changsub,” Baekhyun shakes himself. “You gave me your files. Is that all?”
Changsub straightens his back slowly, puzzling out the coat. “I guess? I guess, yeah.”
Baekhyun has wondered, from time to time, why he works this job. What good it does to him. What good he does to it. How the boss, Huang Zitao, can put up with the likes of him, Byun Baekhyun. Not in a negative state of mind, of course, but just with a certain curiosity.
Today he contemplates these weighty questions again, as he fills up line after line with client approval or rejection, as he answers calls, as he scratches his head and frowns at the obnoxious swirly brush Siwon has gelled his hair up into, today.
It’s when he’s closing all his work-related windows and wrapping up his last call, that he realizes the answer: he’s been with this little company since the shaky beginnings (last year), when they’d been hard pressed for more eligible slash dedicated slash vaguely interested candidates. This does spur on the negative side of things. He hangs up, and swivels in his seat, about to descend emotionally into--
He’s hit by a paper airplane. It bumps against his forehead smartly before landing on his lap. He takes it up. The wing tip, Baekhyun knows from experience, says please clean up my messes too! shift’s over but i haven’t finished yet~ help~. On closer inspection this time, though, there are some additional scribbled emojis and lewd promises underneath. Well, Baekhyun thinks to himself. Lu Han's certainly learnt from the best.
And the best, as everybody knows, kneel to no one. Baekhyun scrunches up the plane and chucks it into the trash.
A minute later, another plane swoops over and hits him on the forehead. Next to him, Eunji stifles a giggle. Temporarily distracted, Baekhyun grins at her, like getting hit by paper planes is an illustrious and impressive job. But she frowns and goes back to her monitor, stony faced.
Baekhyun makes a face, then turns to his new message. This one says I detest you, which cheers him up a lot. He rolls up his sleeves, thinking cap wheels whirring; he has some serious stuff to do. Things have clicked inside his head, and he has realized that somewhere along the night, he inherited someone else’s coat and bequeathed them his own. A someone with the initials KJM. At least, he hopes so. He could just as easily have dropped his coat in the middle of the street and snatched someone else’s to make up for it.
He goes about trying to plan how to get his coat back. The internet is probably his best friend, here, but it’s a bit of a challenge because he doesn’t know where to start with the whole ‘swapped my coat with a guy while drunk???? important keys missing help!’ gig online. Sure, there’s always Twitter, which he barely checks, and Facebook, with the one thousand hookups who parade as Friends and wouldn’t actually help. Hmmm…
Clueless, he texts Jongdae. Jongdae, ever the resourceful, answers shortly and to the point.
sure i kno some sites. oodles, adoos, hoobly. dnt 4get craigslist. dats a nobrainer!!!
When Baekhyun asks him where they’d gone last night, he gets something a little less helpful.
holy shit idr half the places. the regular hongdae ones, for sure. the new club we went to first. but then we started hopping thru gangnam… idr most of the names. octagon definitely tho. i kissed this hot australian girl. lost her number :(
Still, Jongdae is a bro. Baekhyun doesn’t mind.
He turns his thoughts to his beloved coat and keys. Given that he’d been drunk and still doesn’t remember crap, he isn’t sure what had gone down that would make him switch--
Baekhyun blinks and massages his temples. Please don’t let him have had really great sex with some attractive human only to suffer from highly selective memory loss. What if he’d snagged a number? A date? Further promises of swelteringly hot banging? His head spins with the hypothetical loss of this.
He spends a good ten minutes mourning about it all, before he realizes that with or without sensual contact having occurred, he can’t exactly mention sex in a lost and found classified ad. At least, not if he doesn’t remember it happening.
Baekhyun, therefore, sets forth on his quest without further ado, improvising a G-rated story line, and within the half hour he has a bunch of identical ads floating across the interwebs.
Ad:Guy, you took my jacket by mistake - BBH
We've got the same Hawk & Co. jacket. It appears you accidentally took mine from the lounge of Octagon last night…
12th OCTOBER, FRIDAY, 07.02 P.M., THE KIM OFFICE (DOH’S CUBICLE)
“And left yours. Mine had my keys, which I clearly need. Yours had an avocado in the pocket, which I'm assuming is equally important,” Kyungsoo reads aloud. All three shift their positions slightly when he finishes. Apart from the security guards downstairs, they’re the only ones left in the building.
"Well," Chanyeol comments at length, "We did hit Octagon. He’s probably our guy.” A pause. “And he's especially polite about you having a blasphemously huge green fruit in your coat. Seems okay."
Joonmyun colors, but does what he does best. He ignores any offensive proceedings. “Let’s reply to his ad with some place to get the coat,” he says. Kyungsoo turns to look at him blankly, then shrugs and types in a response.
13th OCTOBER, SATURDAY, 01.15 P.M., A RENTED APARTMENT (KIM’S QUARTERS)
The weather outside looks nice, but Joonmyun’s far too invested in his warm comfy spot on the bed to get to the window. Maybe he’s also a tad nervous of doing anything without his trusty lucky avocado on hand, and maybe that means he’s maybe too dysfunctionally superstitious to be a normal human. Maybe he’ll concede to this point if someone strolls into his apartment and raises it, but that doesn’t happen, as is to be expected.
So Joonmyun bides his day in bed, venturing out only for matters of ingestion and excretion.
14th OCTOBER, SUNDAY, 10.14 A.M., IN THE VICINITY OF AN OKAY-SEEMING RESTAURANT OFF THE SUBWAY, KIM STANDS
They meet at the restaurant in Gwanghwamun, as promised.
Joonmyun arrives first, exactly fifteen minutes and thirty seconds before time. He hesitates, but goes in and gets a table eventually. It’s easy to get one -- not many people are in yet. Once in his chair with his feet tapping incessantly, he passes time by patting the coat over his arm and smiling nervously at the passersby who glance in.
When he checks his watch, ten minutes have passed, which means five minutes ‘til go-time. Meet-time? Whichever.
Someone coughs as they come in, head bowed and shoulders hunched. Shorts and a button-up, with supremely dirty Converse. The white’s all splotched with mud. His knees are scarred and bruised all over, like he’s still riding scooters and losing his balance every other second. Then the guy looks up, and Joonmyun sees hair and huge sunglasses. That’s literally it. Brown hair, fringe, huge sunglasses. He looks a bit like a dressed-up insect. Joonmyun feels a little disappointed.
Anyhow, he’s looking purposefully around, so this may very well be The Guy. He doesn’t seem to have noticed Joonmyun, but he’s walking in Joonmyun’s vague direction. Potential The Guy is approaching, Joonmyun thinks to himself.
14th OCTOBER, SUNDAY, 10.14 A.M., INSIDE AN OKAY-SEEMING RESTAURANT OFF THE SUBWAY, BYUN STANDS
Hey, Baekhyun thinks to himself. He has a coat over his arm, like me! Neat!
14th OCTOBER, SUNDAY, 10.15 A.M., ON A CHAIR INSIDE AN OKAY-SEEMING RESTAURANT OFF THE SUBWAY, HENCEFORTH REFERRED TO AS ‘THE RESTAURANT’, KIM STARES AT BYUN
There’s a coat on Potential Guy’s arm! He might very well be The Guy! Potentiality: upped by 50%! Come over to my table and reveal yourself. Bring forth to me the avocado that is my right! Joonmyun stares hard at him, trying to telepathically communicate.
14th OCTOBER, SUNDAY, 10.15 A.M., THE RESTAURANT, BYUN STARES BACK AT KIM
Huh, he’s kind of glaring, though. Bad mood, maybe? He should break the ice or something. Baekhyun stops a few feet away and waves. “Yo yo,” he says, borrowing Lu Han’s catchphrase, before wincing a little. It suits Lu Han more. “What’s the time?”
14th OCTOBER, SUNDAY, 10.15 A.M., THE RESTAURANT, KIM ATTEMPTS TO BE USEFUL
Joonmyun clears his throat and looks at his watch. He reads out the time. “Ten, uh, ten fifteen.” He blinks, looks at him furtively, then adds, “In the morning.”
14th OCTOBER, SUNDAY, 10.16 A.M., THE RESTAURANT, BYUN ATTEMPTS TO CONVERSE
Well, duh, it was in the morning. The sun was out, wasn’t it? “That’s nice,” Baekhyun says, courteously. He continues standing aimlessly in the place, before he decides to sit with this dude while waiting for The Dude. Company wouldn’t hurt. “Mind if I sit here?”
This dude looks at him owlishly, with round eyes and a prim little mouth. Would make a cute girl, Baekhyun thinks to himself.
“No, actually,” this dude says. Baekhyun should rename him TD, for this dude. In fact, he renames him TD right away. TD continues, all soft-spoken and probably Gangnam-bred, “Not at all. Have a seat.” Then he kicks the chair in front of him forward, and that right there isn’t very Gangnam-bred at all. Perhaps Baekhyun has judged too soon. Baekhyun sits anyway. Their knees brush and it’s a bit awkward. Neither of them says anything, which makes it a lot awkward.
The waitress approaches, but the silence is creeping up on Baekhyun like a monster and rendering him socially inept, so he smiles at her blankly. TD comes to his rescue. “Water for both of us,” he orders, after clearing his throat, and the waitress writes it down before moving on.
TD doesn’t say anything else. Baekhyun presses his lips firmly and stares at the table, and has a strange feeling that TD is doing the same. After a while, a thought floats through his head: This isn’t getting anywhere. Followed by an observant, What’s he even doing here if he just ordered water?
Baekhyun rouses himself. “Waiting for someone?”
TD clears his throat again. “Yes, actually.”
Baekhyun nods politely, and silence falls upon them once more. Like a goddamned vice. It kind of makes Baekhyun sweaty. He’s about to ask TD to elaborate when TD opens his mouth by himself. Thank goodness for that.
14th OCTOBER, SUNDAY, 10.16 A.M., THE RESTAURANT, KIM RECOUNTS HIS TALE
“Well, you know,” Joonmyun fiddles with his handkerchief. The waitress arrives with their water and leaves, gliding. “It’s a bit of a funny story,” he continues. “Something happened on Thursday night, a bit of a mix up, really. I, uh, swapped my coat with someone else, and now I have this random bunch of keys! They won’t unlock anything I’ve got, you know, so I’m here to get my coat back.”
Potential Guy seems to perk up at that. “Hey, though, the same thing happened to me! My coat had an avocado-- I mean, not my my coat, but like the coat that I ended up with.” He grips his glass and takes a sip, and Joonmyun notices that he has long fingers. Joonmyun’s own are small and stubby. Joonmyun sighs internally.
“Will you look at that,” Potential Guy chortles. Joonmyun isn’t sure where he should be looking, but Potential Guy (Joonmyun abbreviates him to PG) doesn’t seem to know that and continues. “I’ve got it right here, actually,” he pats the coat on his arm, “And I--”
It’s when PG breaks off into a confused pause that Joonmyun does a double take and re-assesses their conversation. PG is no longer PG. He is RG. Real Guy.
“Oh,” they say, at the same time.
Joonmyun takes refuge in calling the waitress again. PG-turned-RG looks momentarily confused, but brightens when the girl turns to him after Joonmyun orders. “So,” RG says after she takes his order, too. He sounds a lot more attentive than before. They look at each other expressively, and fail to convey anything coherent via their eyes. Silence, it seems, has struck again. Joonmyun should take a shot every time it does. Enough times and maybe he wouldn’t have to, anymore.
Neither of them speaks a word until the food arrives, and-- “Hello,” the guy grins, staring pointedly at his plate. Joonmyun is familiar with this attitude. The yeah-you’re-here-but-you’re-a-pushover-and-I’m-not-gonna-take-you-very-seriously attitude. He is weary of it. “Hello,” he replies. RG’s fork clinks a bit on his plate, through the pasta and tomato sauce. Joonmyun tries not to slurp on his extremely hot soup. They eat in a profound Silence.
“You know,” RG mumbles through his last bite, then pauses to swallow. “This,” RG continues, expansively, once he’s done, “Looks like a date.” He’s dabbing his mouth with the napkin, very blasé, and Joonmyun, very unblasé, does his best not to choke. He succeeds in this endeavour, but when he sets his spoon down, he’s frowning through tears. Worse, he can’t come up with anything to say to that.
“I suppose it does,” Joonmyun ends up with, looking pained, and either RG is naive, or he misunderstands Joonmyun’s expression on purpose. RG passes his glass of water, still half full, over to Joonmyun.
“Touch of constipation?” he smiles, and his teeth are shiny. Nowhere near as toothpaste-ad worthy as Chanyeol, but still. Impressive. Wait, what did the guy just say? What is he saying? “Water helps with the fibre. Although I guess that’s why you took the soup.”
Somehow, this doesn’t strike Joonmyun as the easy, professional conversation he’d imagined having with his coat-swapper. Granted, he hadn’t had much time to imagine this conversation, but still. The differences were wild, not to mention a bit tough on the part of his brain that was responsible for comebacks.
“My bowels are doing okay,” Joonmyun manages to make his tone steely, or so he hopes.
RG shrugs goodnaturedly. “Glad to hear that, Mister…”
“Joonmyun,” Joonmyun drinks the water anyway. “Kim Joonmyun.”
“Byun Baekhyun,” RG says, holding out his hand over the remains of their meal, and Joonmyun stands up halfway to lean ahead and shake it. He doesn’t want to sound rude or intrusive, but he really wants to ask for his avocado back, right about now. RG-turned-Byun-Baekhyun doesn’t show any signs of hurry, though, so Joonmyun keeps his queasiness to himself. A new waitress comes over to their table, red haired and bespectacled. “May I have your orders,” she smiles, plastic, no intonation of a question present.
15th OCTOBER, MONDAY, 12.15 P.M., THE KIM OFFICE, LUNCH ROOM
“LET ME GET THIS STRAIGHT,” Kyungsoo slams his hand down on the table, after Joonmyun’s finished. Chanyeol pulls a wry face. Joonmyun watches this role-reversed enthusiasm with amusement.
“Why can't you get things twisted? Bent? Wired up? It's just one shot, Kyungsoo, one hit from my best stash is all I'm asking and you'll see for yourself--” The table rocks a little, and Chanyeol stops talking immediately, chewing his lip. “You didn't have to kick that hard.”
“On the contrary,” Kyungsoo’s expression is satisfied and placid as he leans back in his chair, “I did.”
Joonmyun taps his feet against the floor, slightly impatient, and Kyungsoo turns on him with a raised finger. “Don’t go all I don’t have time for this on me. You referred to us with your problem, we are going to see it through.”
Chanyel mutters under his breath. “He never does that with me.”
Kyungsoo ignores him. “So, let me just get this strai--”
“I went to the restaurant, as promised,” Joonmyun recaps, listless, checking his wristwatch. “We talked for, like, five minutes before we ate food. Realized we had each other’s coats.”
“And then he hit on you,” Kyungsoo raises his eyebrows.
“He said that the given circumstances were remarkably similar to that of a date’s,” Joonmyun clarifies. “I wouldn’t call that hitting on me.”
“Don’t think you used proper grammar right there,” Chanyeol whispers loudly, leaning forward with his elbows on the table. He is ignored.
“Dude, nobody talks like that,” Kyungsoo overrides Joonmyun.
“I do!” Joonmyun protests.
“Well, then! You’re nobody.” Kyungsoo can be pretty ruthless. Joonmyun isn’t sure if he should be feeling hurt or not right now, and Kyungsoo’s already forging ahead. “Afterwards, with great reluctance, he handed over your coat and avocado--”
“See! You’re talking like that, too!”
“This is different,” Kyungsoo snaps. “And then you guys--” he raises his voice defiantly over Joonmyun’s arguing “--exchange numbers, and he puts a heart next to his name on your phone.”
Joonmyun can’t deny that. He blinks. “Really, I mean. I mean. Yeah.”
“How d’you figure on getting this, Kyungsoo?” Chanyeol breaks the silence. “Because that wasn’t straight at all. Pretty homosexual, actually.”
Judging by the resigned expression on his face, Kyungsoo actually agrees.
16th OCTOBER, TUESDAY, 11.37 A.M., THE KIM OFFICE (THE GENERAL AREA OF KIM AND OH'S CUBICLES)
Chanyeol's very busy at the moment.
"Your hair looks really great today," Chanyeol nods, staring at it like he's never seen hair before. He leans against the cubicle nonchalantly. Joonmyun's sure the sharp edge is biting into his elbow. "What color is it?" A furious bout of rustling from the desk that's on Joonmyun's left side indicates that his female co worker Yuri is probably stuffing tissues into her mouth to keep from laughing out loud. As she is wont to, in such situations.
Sehun raises his eyes slowly from his screen to Chanyeol's face, fingers still typing. "My hair's exactly the same as it was yesterday," the guy’s voice is nasal and cutting. Chanyeol blinks a little in nervousness, keeps his smile on. "The only difference is the color, which I take it you've noticed. Yesterday it was blond, today it's pink."
Joonmyun winces, but the trusty sidekick is saved from saving face. The boss had been walking towards Chanyeol since he'd gotten up -- he's reached now and cuts in.
"Problem, Park?" Minseok's voice is very breezy and his stature is very short, not at all the deep-voiced, tall and threatening type of superior. This doesn’t seem to deter people’s impressions of how truly terrifying he can be, though: the entire office freezes guiltily. Joonmyun isn’t surprised by this effect. Kyungsoo fits that mould, too. He wishes he could follow in their footsteps; short, important and universally acknowledged as such.
But back to the scene at hand. Chanyeol's smile has taken on a curiously brittle aspect. "No, sir," he says, and moonwalks abysmally back to his seat.
Joonmyun sends Chanyeol an email as soon as the boss goes back to his own room.
Subject HA.
That wasn't straight at all.
He hears a snort, and the reply is prompt.
Subject RE: HA.
i'm so dope you stealin my lines
Joonmyun types fervently.
Subject RE: RE: HA.
DON'T USE THAT WORD, WHAT ABOUT THE INTERN
The chair scrapes backwards and Chanyeol's shadow looms over Joonmyun's keyboard before Chanyeol himself. Joonmyun looks up in fear, but Chanyeol's back is turned to him. He seems to be observing somebody in the far corner of the room. Then he sits down again.
Subject RE: RE: RE: HA.
which word. why can't i use words. why are you ridding me of my freedom of speech. and idk, he's cute? wait do u dig him bc i think someone called dibs on him the day he got in
Then, a few seconds later.
Subject WAIT RE: RE: RE: HA.
IF you dig INTERN then WHAT about HEART SHAPE COAT GUY?????? are you leading him on. are you the player i initially thought you to be!!!
Right, this is getting slightly out of hand. Joonmyun opts to leave for the bathroom. On cue, Chanyeol joins him exactly four minutes later.
"Yo," he says, making a great show of unzipping busily, and Joonmyun rolls his eyes into the mirror as he washes his hands.
"The intern's sole purpose is to check up that we aren't wasting time, sending emails to each other with wastive text," Joonmyun explains. “And I’m not a ‘player’,” he adds, making air quotes around the word. Chanyeol's turned the other way, so he can't quite make out whatever expression he's got on right now. Joonmyun sticks around, waiting impatiently. Oblivious, Chanyeol takes his time peeing.
"Okay," he replies at length, zipping up again with some effort. (As if he had that much junk!) "You mean little Yugyeom is spying on our emails?"
“He’s not little,” Joonmyun frowns. “He’s probably taller than you. And yes, he is officially spying on our emails.”
“Well,” Chanyeol says. “Then he knows about me and Sehun? I email Kyungsoo about him a lot.”
Their shoes thud a little on the shining tiles, and Joonmyun sighs as he turns the handle. “You and Sehun don’t exist, Chanyeol. You just project your feelings of loneliness onto the nearest tall cute guy.”
Chanyeol gives him a little shove that sends him tumbling ungracefully through the door. “It’s not like you can blame me. I need someone the exact opposite of you to balance things out.”
Joonmyun pats down his sleeves and torso, huffing. “I won’t even bother taking offense.”
“You can’t afford to,” Chanyeol points out, nudging his shoe against Joonmyun’s pants on purpose. “I’m the only one who’ll do your dirty work.”
One day, Joonmyun will come up with good comebacks on the spot. Today is not that day.
17th OCTOBER, WEDNESDAY, 08.03 A.M., KIM OFFICE
“Look who graced us,” Kyungsoo raises his eyebrows, when Joonmyun tumbles into his chair. (Truly, a role model.) “Boss says he emailed you a ton of shit, so go through it ay-es-ay-p. Additionally, I’ve given you enough time to think. What do you propose to do about your new sexual prospects?”
Joonmyun blinks at him dumbly for half a minute, the first fifteen seconds processing what had just been said, the next fifteen seconds processing what to say.
“Absolutely nothing,” he replies, finally, emphasising each syllable.
Both sidekicks stare at him. The way they seem to be agreeing for seemingly the first time in their lives on Joonmyun’s pathetic excuse for a sex life is getting really ominous and… omenous. Joonmyun brightens a little. Now there was a stellar pun. And he, Kim Joonmyun, came up with it!
“Don't tell me you don't think he's cute,” Chanyeol frowns.
Joonmyun decides he will not answer that. In fact, he makes up his mind to be silent on this topic forever. It is, after all, barely seven minutes past eight in the morning. No human can function in this kind of environment. He starts up his PC busily and tries to make it very clear that he’s ignoring them.
It seems to work-- but just as they shake their heads and turn away, his phone vibrates in his pocket. Joonmyun freezes momentarily, before typing in his password. Chanyeol’s phone rings a minute later. Joonmyun darts a glance at Kyungsoo. He’s tapping his pencil against the screen, a graph in reds and blues staring at him.
Furtive, Joonmyun checks his phone. If those two catch him at it, they’ll smell something’s up at once.
let's meet again tmrw y/n
Joonmyun closes his eyes and sighs.
y
“Hey,” Kyungsoo spins a one eighty in his seat a few hours later, gently nudging Joonmyun in the thigh with a folder.
“Hmm,” Joonmyun says, typing in the last line of the calculation before turning to him. “What?”
Chanyeol peeks over the cubicle wall to join in. “Plans? Bowling looks like a good change. Saturday.”
“More importantly,” Kyungsoo speaks up, “It bodes nonalcoholism. And I might actually go home today.”
“Wait!” Chanyeol’s so surprised that he slips, nose smashing down against the wall. “Wait,” Chanyeol repeats, groaning. “You’re coming home? I have a roommate today? We can spoon in bed? Catch up with that murder TV show?”
Kyungsoo chews his lip as he stares at the floor, probably regretting saying anything.
“I can’t,” Joonmyun says, “I’ve got--” and stops. He’d just promised himself today that he wouldn’t talk about the dude to them ever again.
“You’ve got,” Chanyeol prompts, all encouragement.
“...Stuff. To do,” Joonmyun ends, lamely. But they’re curious, and Chanyeol’s hard to deny when he’s got puppy eyes and a bleeding nose.
So much for the silence plan.
Lunch is a comfortable, quiet fifteen minutes during which they barbarically stuff their faces (Chanyeol chokes on a stray ginger piece in his burger).
By two p.m., Sehun has a mini breakdown where he starts yelling random French names at random intervals.
2.03 PM “Gislebertus! Wait no, Giselbertus. Ghiselbertus?”
2.18 PM “Evrard d’Orleans! Ha, New Orleans.”
2.23 PM “Jean Poochie! No no that sounds wrong… Jean Pucelle, the Parisian Gothic-era manuscript illustrator… okay… what was his style...”
2.44 PM “Jacque something. Jacque Prevert? That’s wrong, I know it is. Jacquemart de Hesdin! I got it! And he had different spellings, different spellings, come on, I’ve got it, I’ve got it…”
2.56 PM “God, almost done, almost done. Jean Honorary Dragon-- shit! Jean-Honoré Fragonard! Fragonard!”
Chanyeol fidgets, restless, before finally yelling back, “YOUR ACCENT'S GETTING BETTER!”
To this, Joonmyun sends him an email.
Subject: Seriously?
why are you saying ‘better’ as if you’ve heard him speak french before
Chanyeol doesn’t reply within the minute, so Joonmyun fills in a few more cells in his spreadsheet. He’s about to send a new one:
i mean, is it like you’ve got something to compare it with? has he talked french to you before? [jason derulo inference] lipstick stamps on my passport...
But Chanyeol replies right as Joonmyun’s all set to hit Send.
Subject: RE: Seriously?
well i was going to say IT’S GREAT but that would make me sound desperate.
Joonmyun grins and backspaces to type a new reply.
Subject: RE: RE: Seriously?
you shouldn’t worry about that. everybody knows you are.
Surprisingly, Joonmyun finds himself feeling some guilt over poking Chanyeol like this all the time, wondering if Chanyeol will ever blow up. Perhaps Joonmyun is actually more than a little curious, part of the reason why he’s always needling him. Just to see the office’s Friendly Guy™ limits. (Joonmyun himself isn’t the office’s Friendly™ as much as he is the Nice™. There is a difference, folks. There is a difference.)
With his car in repairs-- all his tyres need replacement, plus his battery’s pretty dead-- Joonmyun ends up taking the bus back with Kyungsoo after work, and Chanyeol goes straight to some underground event.
“What’s the thing?” Joonmyun yawns, standing shoulder to shoulder with Kyungsoo. They hang on to the rails as the bus fills, briefcases bumping into each other. Kyungsoo shrugs. “Some rap party. But they don’t call it a party… is it a convention? ComicCon, RapCon? God, I don’t know. It’s an underground rap scene, whatever it is. Chanyeol likes staying there ‘til eleven, sometimes. It starts around nine and goes on until four in the morning.”
Joonmyun lets out a whistle. “He ever take part in them?”
Kyungsoo shrugs again. “A few times. But they all come up with their own songs, and he doesn’t have time to write all focused like he used to. So he doesn’t, really, not anymore.”
Joonmyun lets his head loll to the side, looking out. The boulevards pass them leisurely by in the slow traffic, cars honking, pedestrians ambling. “Pretty sure I have it in to bully him or something,” he confesses, eventually. “Like, nothing horrible, just poking a lot. I think I want to see him angry, secretly.”
Kyungsoo considers this, tilting his own head. “I guess you’ve got enough heartless asshole in you for that to be a plausible theory.”
Alright, Joonmyun isn’t sure if he deserves the title of heartless asshole, per se--
“You should listen to some Beenzino, though.”
Joonmyun blinks. “Uh, sure. Why?”
“Because Chanyeol likes his stuff! And it would be nice if you did friendly things,” Kyungsoo rolls his shoulders, one at a time. It’s a thing he does when he’s exasperated, Joonmyun’s noted. “Like listening to music your friends like, now and again!” A pause, then a quiet, “You’re basically his only real friend apart from me.”
Joonmyun stares at his shoes. “Don’t see how that works into being friends,” he says, defensively. He kind of does, but he needs a last say anyhow.
The contents of his impromptu how-to-be-a-better-friend-to-Chanyeol therapy session with Kyungsoo keep him up until really, really late, when he turns over in bed and reaches for his phone.
jm about being friends
dok ur bright ideas are disasters
jm let’s get him with sehun
dok k… maybe i judged a bit earlier than usual
jm do we have a deal
dok maybe…? i’ll think abt it
Joonmyun goes to sleep a bit excited, despite the laundry piling up everywhere, tinting the air with an old musty smell.
part ii
rating: pg-13
pairing: baekhyun/joonmyun, chanyeol/sehun
warnings: alcohol (not abuse, though), language
word count: 27,557
notes: drink moderately, party safe and, most importantly, don't swap clothes when drunk, kids!
honestly i had intended to finish revising this by january '15 and then put it up by feb, but i never revised it and right now i'm trying to find things to do to avoid other things to do so i'm putting it up. maybe i'll revise it later. crossposted to dreamwidth and ao3.
Picture this-- a coat with a key ring in a pocket, an identical coat but with an avocado in the pocket instead of a key ring, and some harmless, de-stress nightlife activity.
BEHOLD, THE TALE OF TWO COAT-CROSSED LOVERS-- ONE, FAR TOO ENGROSSED IN ANIME, AND THE OTHER, IN CLUBS
12th OCTOBER, FRIDAY, 04.36 A.M., A MANSION IN THE MIDDLE OF NOWHERE
The day doesn’t start out very well, unfortunately. For one thing, it begins at the asscrack of dawn, because hangovers rouse Joonmyun way earlier than they would any other human being. For another, he has no idea where he is. Trusty sidekick Park Chanyeol is artistically sprawled across the sofa opposite, jaw hanging open, glasses hanging precariously off one large ear. Shady sidekick Do Kyungsoo is nowhere to be found. Joonmyun tries to sit up and bam, the various protesting brain cells in his skull start up their orchestra of don't don't don't and shit shit shit and THIS LIFE IS THE CENTRAL CESSHOLE IN THE TORNADO OF HELL. Which, hey, is pretty poetic for waking up at 5.42 a.m. after ingesting a gigantic amount of concentrated alcoholic beverages. But Joonmyun doesn't get to appreciate himself enough - he keels over and pukes. On the carpet. A stranger's carpet.
This would be acceptable, standard procedure for a weekend. But for a Friday morning? This is terribly unprofessional behavior.
"Remind me," Joonmyun chokes out an hour later, squinting at the windshield through his sunglasses. Fifteen minutes of teeth-brushing, and his breath still reeks of shitfaced. "Never to go clubbing with you on weekdays again."
"Yes, bossman," Chanyeol hums, speeding at a red light. "That is to say, no, bossman."
Trusty sidekick position: strikeout. "I am striking out your trusty sidekick position," Joonmyun informs him.
Chanyeol wrinkles his nose and turns up the radio. Something that sounds suspiciously like My Chemical Romance starts screaming into their ears, and Joonmyun slumps, sad, against his window. "Seatbelt," Chanyeol intones as they near a checkpoint, policemen looming ahead. Joonmyun shrinks further into the door; maybe he should switch occupations and try working on becoming a door handle. Or those whatsits, the things you push to get the window down. Chanyeol sighs and puts his seatbelt on for him. Trusty position achieved. Again.
Then a thought hits him, "Why was there a checkpoint?"
Chanyeol's fingers tap a rhythm against the steering wheel, and he sends Joonmyun a sideways glance. "You really want to know?"
Of course he doesn't. He just likes facing the music, so long as it isn't My Chemical Romance. Speaking of which, thank goodness the radio's gone a bit whack. Readjusting the seatbelt, he passes his order. "Speak, underman."
Chanyeol looks at him again before replying, as if trying to gauge how bad his reaction will be. "City limits. We just entered Seoul."
This successfully gobsmacks Joonmyun into silence for a full three minutes. He resurfaces to conversation with a weak, "Can we stop the car? I need to throw up."
Chanyeol holds his head until he's done, as always. "So," he gasps, retching a little, "We had an extraordinarily wild night, and ended up outside the city."
"I'll say, buddy," Chanyeol's hand gives his shoulder a comforting squeeze, and Joonmyun totters back to the car, thinking, There are so many things that I regret.
12th OCTOBER, FRIDAY, 10.10 a.m., THE KIM OFFICE (ON THE WAY TO CUBICLES KIM AND PARK)
Apparently, Friday's terrors don't just stop at hangover, parking ticket and disgustingly late for work. Oh Sehun has this great timing - comical from an outsider's standpoint and tragic from an insider's, as Shakespeare would say - where he sides with the rest of the universe and does one more thing to go against Joonmyun. Oh Sehun forwards some random chainmail about rainbows after rain and sterling 11.11 wishes, a TGIF ecard (which, first, what and second, why) and a picture of a cute bunny.
(Chanyeol loves all of them, thinks Sehun is precious, and sends Joonmyun a slew of one-lined emails expressing his thoughts on the event. One-lined emails on the work email server, which, as everyone knows is constantly monitored by the monstrously tall IT intern. Yug-something, or whatever. Chanyeol's gameplan seems to be focused on getting the lot of them fired.)
Joonmyun is having none of this. Unlike Kyungsoo, Sehun isn't a sidekick; he's just plain shady. When the hell's he ever sent anyone anything not related to work or French art? Speaking of, why the hell did he even send people French art? French art had nothing to do with work? Did Sehun work for some secret French art division in the company? Why were all his thought processes suddenly ending in question marks?
Right then, though, Sehun actually turns around from across the aisle to face him. Joonmyun watches in amazement as the guy sends him a grin, goofy and slow, accompanied by a slow thumbs-up. Sehun opens his mouth, leaves it hanging at around two inches, and blinks. As if he's thinking about what to say. "Hey, Joonmyun," he breathes, and the smell of soju can be smelled from a foot away. The smell is, for lack of a better adjective, smelly. At least things make more sense, though. Sehun is a solvable problem. Shady, with a touch of cheerfulness when drunk.
Not bad, not bad. Joonmyun returns the greeting with a cough and a wave, before returning to his duties.
He logs in to his email, yada yada yada, skips through scam, toodle tee doo, deletes viagra emails that have still made it to his inbox, the usual, and checks his horoscope for today. A tad superstitious of him, to be sure, but his favorite anime character is Midorima Shintarou. He’s got to emulate him somehow! Besides, it’s not like he hasn’t tried other ways: being tall is out, as are eternal three-pointers on the court (Joonmyun sucks at basketball), and that time he dyed his hair green wasn’t a good era in his life. Chanyeol literally pissed his pants laughing at him.
Anyway, back to the horoscope. The email finally loads.
Your thinking can’t quite keep pace with today’s drama - so hang back and watch. You are sure to pick up some new information that sheds a new light on your people and their weird issues.
Huh. Maybe he’ll realize why Kyungsoo likes Prince of Tennis so much. He blinks and goes back to his inbox. What had his lucky item been this month? He checks Monday’s horoscope. It’s mentioned in small font, as if whoever put the info up was embarrassed and didn’t want too much attention drawn towards it. Avocado.
Oh, yeah. He’d gone through five different 7-Eleven stores before he’d landed a lonely, shiny avocado. Worth the trips, though. It adds a nice, comforting weight in his coat, like a balance in his wild weekday-partying life. He reaches down to pat the pocket where he put it, but the coat sways loosely on the back of his chair. Joonmyun pats it again, absently. The coat sways some more, devoid of heavy stuff. Heavy stuff being, you know. The avocado. He turns around in his chair and bends over, hands batting over the fabric. He starts slapping his coat frantically until it swings from side to side. Chanyeol leans sideways and peeks at him behind the desk, observing him silently. Then he raises an eyebrow when Joonmyun looks up and stares at the far end of the room, unfocused.
“Bossman?” he asks.
Joonmyun shakes his head and refocuses on his friend, conveys panic through his facial expression, but Chanyeol only says, "Is it the constipation again?" Joonmyun gives up on everything harder than he ever has before. Chanyeol passes a glass of water and whispers conspiratorially, "It helps when you take too much fibre."
Sipping at the water calms him down, anyway, and he goes on to finishing up the weekly report and checking on the presentation he’s supposed to be having a meeting on, soon. He checks the schedule, makes notes, forwards emails and replies to requests.
Sitting in the back of his mind all the while is the weight of his missing lucky avocado.
12th OCTOBER, FRIDAY, 12.35 P.M., THE KIM OFFICE (LUNCH ROOM)
Whoever doesn’t want to buy croissants from the bakery next door straggles into the mess for lunch. Whoever buys croissants eats them in their cubicles, and whoever comes with their lunch packed goes to the mess, too. The workplace didn’t actually have any rules for lunch at work like they do at school, but people have fallen into patterns over time; Chanyeol goes to the mess for burgers, Kyungsoo packs his lunch occasionally, Joonmyun either packs his lunch or has three espressos. Sometimes four.
“So,” Chanyeol chomps down, crimped hair falling into his glasses. “I didn’t see you at home last night.”
“Please,” Kyungsoo says, quietly, opening his paper bag. “You weren’t at home last night.”
“You didn’t come with us,” Joonmyun shrugged. “Same thing.”
Kyungsoo raises an eyebrow. “Unlike you two, I have a life outside partying. I’m monogamous and married to my work.”
Chanyeol grins, bread crumbs from the burger stuck between his teeth. “Literally stayed in, slept in your office clothes, and woke up at your desk,” Joonmyun predicts.
“And continued working,” Kyungsoo nods.
“Bed hair,” Chanyeol raises a finger, and Joonmyun realizes he hadn’t thought of that problem before. Did Kyungsoo have a comb hidden beneath his keyboard?
The dude in question shrugs into his peanut butter sandwich. “The advantage of being a bachelor and having a total of zero people to come home to is that I can carry my life in my briefcase. I have hair gel, and the office has a bathroom.”
“You have Chanyeol to come home to. Roommates,” Joonmyun finally takes a sip of his espresso. This is all old talk, though. They know Kyungsoo’s work ethic barely sees Kyungsoo in the room. Or maybe Chanyeol and Kyungsoo rooming together has established Kyungsoo’s work ethic. Which came first, the chicken or the egg? Not a perfect analogy, but close enough.
“Do Kyungsoo, workaholic extraordinaire,” Chanyeol mumbles, and they hear the distinct ripping of lettuce.
“Kim Joonmyun,” Kyungsoo suggests. “It’s about time you join Alcoholics Anonymous.” Chanyeol provides the necessary audience-oohing backtrack. Joonmyun raises a hand in defeat, as Kyungsoo wipes his peanut buttered mouth with a triumphant expression.
It’s when they’re almost finished (except for Chanyeol, who gets two more burgers and shares one with Kyungsoo) that Joonmyun’s green-fruit plight comes back to him and he tells Kyungsoo about their night. Or whatever he can remember about it, at least.
"So let me get this straight," Kyungsoo frowns over his burger. Chanyeol's already wolfed his second down and is stretching in his seat, feet inadvertently kicking the both of them. (Neither of them minds anymore.) "You are wearing your jacket, and you go with Chanyeol and have a drink. It is Thursday, and you know what doing that with Chanyeol means, but you proceed anyway."
Joonmyun groans into his coffee. Coffee is all his stomach will settle with for this coming week, before he throws it all up. "Yes."
Chanyeol beams, unperturbed.
"And then you crash, drunk, through the entire country and come back here, your coat intact but for your... avocado."
The impertinent and shady sidekick is trying to make him sound stupid. He can feel it. He chooses not to react too much. “This is true,” he settles for saying.
Kyungsoo shrugs, “I guess we should check places for lost and found, then.”
“First stop,” Chanyeol says, “The Wide World Web, I assume?”
Joonmyun frowns. “Think you’ve got something off, there.”
11th OCTOBER, THURSDAY, 09.00 P.M., A RENTED APARTMENT (BYUN QUARTERS)
Nine o’ clock, on the dot. Baekhyun rolls over in his bed, hears Jongdae blasting some Muse song in the other room. Here in his own room, the clock ticks. Tick, tock, tick, tock. It’s the kind with a pendulum, so he follows the swinging bob to the right, left, right, until he feels a little dizzy and annoyed with himself. Muse switches to The Arctic Monkeys, and Baekhyun grabs his phone to message Kyungsoo privately.
Their conversation unfolds like clockwork: predictable, regular, timeless. Well, maybe not timeless. Clockwork runs on time. But whatever.
bbh let us go, let us club
bbh the dj shall make us fall in love again
dok first, fool, i’m not coming with you
dok your parties are lousy and i actually have work to do
dok do you know why? because i’m a good EMPLOYEE
dok the boss TRUSTS me
bbh huh
dok you on the other hand
dok if i knew how to type in emojis
dok i would give you the smug one with an eyebrow raise
dok because you suck and i rule
bbh yawn
dok second, that song is bluh
Again, whatever. Baekhyun ignores him, switches to his LINE group. Kyungsoo’s part of that one so he’ll get the messages, but it’s cool. Kyungsoo’ll just reject Baekhyun’s magnanimity again, no problem. Happens all the time.
bbh club y/y
dok breaking news: this is a week night.
dok so no.
lh aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaah
kjd no i need alcohol after 2day
kAi idk i think hyung has a point
bbh we're all hyungs
lh which hyung
kjd yeah kid
dok me ofc
kAi him ofc
bbh come on
bbh bring taem
kAi well..........
dok its fine. im ok w being deserted
lh leave him alone where are we going
kjd shhh i got it
kjd theres a place down from the
kjd balls parkour
kjd ball** park** shit
The Arctic Monkeys are rudely shut off in the middle of the chorus, and Baekhyun hears Jongdae banging his closet doors about. He closes his eyes for a few seconds, allows himself to drift off. The pendulum swings tick, tock, tick, tock, two cycles, and he gets out of bed. Grabs the nearest jeans and goes to raid Jongdae’s clothes for a shirt that isn’t in the laundry.
Once they reach the place, Baekhyun makes himself at home, wriggling onto his seat as he orders three shots of whatever Jongdae will be having, thanks. Apparently Jongdae’s ordered something bright blue, followed by something with a lot of fennel that burns his guts inside out, and anticlimactic rum. Lots of sweet, anticlimactic rum. The bartender is obedient and multiplies Jongdae’s order by three before handing anything over to Baekhyun. Baekhyun’s pretty much drinking himself blind.
“Flaming cocktail?” someone laughs in his ear, and Baekhyun tries to look at who it is but he’s very much by himself. Do people imagine things when they’re intoxicated? Baekhyun has a vague idea that he’d thought of this before, perhaps even experimented - but if he’d reached any conclusion, he was probably too inebriated then to keep it in his mind.
The bartender is looking at him strangely as he wipes glasses clean. Perhaps it was the bartender who’d suggested it? Never mind. He doesn’t feel too comfortable about alcohol and fire together. He slides off, trips a bit, salutes the bartender and gathers all his concentration into walking in a straight line towards the crowd on the dance floor.
Whether he makes it there successfully, he doesn’t know. He isn’t too aware of his surroundings from then on; things are just blurry.
At one point, he’s sure someone’s pulling him by the hand outside, which is equal parts great and terrifying -- he’d been getting a bit claustrophobic in there, so getting out was a relief. On the other hand, the outside was so wild and unpredictable. Didn’t… didn’t Mole and Rat have a conversation about that once? Ah, what was the book called. Wild Woods. The Willows Green. Windy Beans. He hits the leather seat and bounces a little.
“Dude,” someone says, somewhere off to his left. “You are so wasted.”
Baekhyun frowns. “Wasted? I’m not wasted. I’ve exercised all my talents and skills to the level--” he hiccups, classically, “--to the--” hiccup, “level best.” He frowns harder, for emphasis.
And more people and things blurring together. Really loud music, kind of hurting his head, but still catchy. Is that Taeyeon’s voice calling out to him from somewhere? Perhaps the speakers. Ah, SNSD. Love personified. A gift from above. He sighs and presses his forehead against the window, stares out at traffic lights and passing cars. Big buildings. So many of them. Man has accomplished so much, he thinks to himself. He cries a little. He’s a part of man. He’s accomplished just as much, if not more.
“Consider Louis Armstrong, the first man to play a trumpet on the moon,” he slurs, with much effort, to the company in the car, and rambles off about society and the wheels of time. He suspects nobody’s listening though, so he raises his voice and plows on. Then everyone is tumbling towards the doors, so he does, too. Jongdae slides an arm around his waist and yells about drinks and girls. Baekhyun perks up and takes the flaming cocktails. He yells and the world whirls around him, gentle and happy and fierce. The dancefloor is bigger than before, and he slips in between all the people, arms in the air, eyes half-closed. Thrum, thrum, thrum. The bass grips onto him and slides under his skin. He moves easily.
Blur.
A fleeting sense of Jongdae leaving somewhere, Lu Han dragging him off some place else.
The rest of everything filters through to his conscious in screenshots, and in the middle, his body floats.
The sky lightening to grays, people moving in groups, girls screeching, high heels in their hands. He nods appreciatively and takes off his own shoes. Walking barefoot across the streets and entering a villa.
Yiyin shouting his name and running over for a hug. He stumbles and falls, gets right back up. Yiyin nowhere in sight.
People dropping in, people dropping out.
Loud music, again. A bit jarring, but it shakes in the walls. Oh, he loves this. Like a harmless, private earthquake. He leans against the trembling walls, blinks and takes everyone in. Swirl swirl, whirl whirl. The world is a giant washing machine, and he shares this insight with the next kind soul who hands him a cup of… well, wine with ice cream, maybe. That’s what it tastes like. And mint. Definitely mint toothpaste. The aftertaste has him rushing to the bathroom for a puke.
When he comes out he feels terrible, but more refreshed. He stumbles towards the living room, or whatever, and finds someone curled up on a sofa, wearing his coat. Well, this wouldn’t do. Pickpockets just don’t do. Pickcoat-ecs. Pick-Kotex. He laughs himself silly. Kotex. He’s a damned genius. He walks over, takes it off the guy, and tugs off whatever he’s wearing right now to put the other one on.
Good. He feels nice wearing his coat. It feels different, too. He’ll congratulate himself later on his new choice in perfume.
Blur.
Bawling on Jongdae’s shoulder. Jongdae dazedly saying, “Forgot the keys,” like an anthem. No, that isn't right. Like a mantra. Was ‘anthem’ even a word? Baekhyun slaps himself ineffectively for his own keys. Nothing happens.
Blur. Discussion.
Crashing Lu Han’s place because the keys got lost. Bed. Nice big bed. He slumps into it happily and the blur blurs off into a blur of blurry dark blur. Ahhhh.
12th OCTOBER, FRIDAY, 07.00 A.M., LU HAN'S PLACE
When Baekhyun wakes up, there is the pain of Ye Olde Hangover, the ache of terribly bruised shins, and definitely the curse of bad breath. Like, really bad. Like someone poured soju onto rotting bananas and threw some day-old egg yolks in for good measure. And when he tries to recall the previous night, he’s greeted by a blackout. He cannot remember a damned thing.
Lu Han’s room wavers in front of him with a liquid quality, and he realizes his eyes are watering. He rubs them with his palms and curls up. He supposes telling this to Kyungsoo would result in an I told you so, and he isn’t really in the mood for that, so he doesn’t tell Kyungsoo. Not like he knows where his phone is, anyway. Baekhyun tries to go back to sleep, and is actually about to drift off again (considering how his head is pounding, that’s just short of a miracle) when Lu Han comes in and shakes his shoulders until his head bobs.
He coughs, and spittle lands all over Lu Han’s face as he rasps an eloquent, “Bye.” He then rolls off the bed unceremoniously and shivers on the cold tiles.
“Baekhyun.” Lu Han experiences the emotional spectrum as well as the next guy, but getting him to feel hopeless and exasperated is something only Baekhyun can accomplish. Lu Han leaves him after a few minutes of yelling and coaxing by turns. “Great!” he calls, banging the door behind him. “We’ll see how glued to the floor you are when your boss calls!”
Baekhyun doesn’t want to admit it, but that’s what jumpstarts him into moving. He lifts his head and grasps the bedframe, hauling himself up. He overhauls and crashes onto the floor, face first. Okay, into trying to move.
12th OCTOBER, FRIDAY, 08.12 A.M., BYUN’S APARTMENT DOORSTEP
The attempt to return home goes smoothly until he stands, as mentioned above, at his doorstep. He can’t find his keys, and has a vague feeling of deja vu. He rattles the handle, takes a few steps back to ram his shoulder into the door, looks under the doormat for his keys, and yells for Jongdae to open up. Jongdae, however, is probably already at work. He checks his watch and glares at the dial, as if everything was its fault. He’s almost half an hour late for work - and his boss had called him in fifteen minutes early today.
He’s cussing the fates and picturing himself strangling his boss for time shifts that make him look bad, when his phone breaks out into a Britney Spears fit. The taste of your lips-- Baekhyun attends in a hurry, making sure nobody else heard his ringtone. He’s about to picture himself strangling Jongdae for messing with his phone and changing his ringtone, instead, but the voice on the other end freezes his gratuitous imagination.
“Mr. Byun,” the voice pronounces, clearly. “The E-unit offices haven’t been unlocked yet.”
Disadvantage of regularly being the earliest guy at your unit, if you’re one of those poor bastards stuck at the manual workplaces: you get the keys to the entire floor and unlock the offices yourself. At least with the automatic panels you got to authorize opening all the doors with the passcode and your thumbprint.
“Yes, sir,” is all Baekhyun can say.
“I’ve dealt with it, of course, but it would be a bit charitable of you to either hand the position over to someone else, or work on fulfilling responsibilities.”
Baekhyun shoves his fist into his pocket, staring fixedly at his doormat. His hand bumps against something. Startled, his fingers uncurl and close around something weird and kind of pear-shaped.
“I mean,” Huang Zitao is adding, pleasantly, “No pressure and all that. We all have our late days, our off days. But this is your fifth day this week. We can't make too many concessions now, can we, Mr. Byun?”
“No,” Baekhyun mumbles, miserable. He works a five-day-week. “We certainly can't.”
"Last warning, then," Zitao says, and hangs up.
Well, shit. Guess who was dangerously close to getting fired.
His fingers close around the thing, and he brings it out of his pocket. Then he blinks. “So,” he remarks, dully. “The gods have blessed me with an avocado.” Then he puts it back in, and rushes down to grab another taxi. No office keys meant no car keys, either. Everything was in the same ring.
It begins to rain as he waves for a cab. No umbrella on him, either. “Some kind of karma?” Baekhyun calls out to the sky as he looks up, water splashing with hard determination on his face.
Once he gets inside and tells the driver the address, he leans back in his seat, head hitting the car window sadly as they lurch from side to side in the the downpour.
He takes out the avocado from his pocket and stares at it. “Karma,” he decides, and stuffs it back with a scowl.
The driver notices. “Hey,” he grins, “You making guacamole today?”
Baekhyun ignores him.
He goes through something similar to a walk of shame, shuffling quietly and trying to attract as little attention as possible while he makes his way to his desk. Lu Han raises an eyebrow as he passes by. Baekhyun flips him the bird and shrugs his coat off as he settles into his chair.
He has some trouble remembering his password at first, but otherwise he gets started on his quota just fine. The regular tap tap of keys and humming computers everywhere around him soothes his hangover-bullied-and-doused-into-a-coffee-rush frayed nerves a bit. His shoulders relax as he reviews the list of clients he has to call up today, before moving onto their stock feedback of the week.
Changsub fumbles over with some files around eleven o’ clock, in typical klutz fashion. His shoe snags on some wires, sleeve catches on someone’s desk corner, and he ends up barely saving the papers in their order as he goes down gracefully, like a swan.
There’s a loud, “Oomf.”
Baekhyun frowns at the disturbance. Changsub gets up breathlessly and shoves the stuff over to him. “Boss says to read these over, so he can sign later.”
Typical Huang. Forcing extra shit on people who seem to be slacking. And Baekhyun wasn’t even slacking! He was just… tipping over, being a little unbalanced! He’s about to protest to Changsub, but the guy’s sniffing his coat. Sniffing his coat. “Dude,” Changsub says. “Your coat smells weird.”
“Dude,” Baekhyun wants to say. “Sniffing my coat? That’s weirder.” But he brushes it off with a shrug. “It’s a new perfume,” he replies. Then he frowns again. Since when did he get new perfume?
“Huh.” Changsub shrugs. “And why did you embroider KJM on your collar?”
“Why would I embroid-- Changsub,” Baekhyun shakes himself. “You gave me your files. Is that all?”
Changsub straightens his back slowly, puzzling out the coat. “I guess? I guess, yeah.”
Baekhyun has wondered, from time to time, why he works this job. What good it does to him. What good he does to it. How the boss, Huang Zitao, can put up with the likes of him, Byun Baekhyun. Not in a negative state of mind, of course, but just with a certain curiosity.
Today he contemplates these weighty questions again, as he fills up line after line with client approval or rejection, as he answers calls, as he scratches his head and frowns at the obnoxious swirly brush Siwon has gelled his hair up into, today.
It’s when he’s closing all his work-related windows and wrapping up his last call, that he realizes the answer: he’s been with this little company since the shaky beginnings (last year), when they’d been hard pressed for more eligible slash dedicated slash vaguely interested candidates. This does spur on the negative side of things. He hangs up, and swivels in his seat, about to descend emotionally into--
He’s hit by a paper airplane. It bumps against his forehead smartly before landing on his lap. He takes it up. The wing tip, Baekhyun knows from experience, says please clean up my messes too! shift’s over but i haven’t finished yet~ help~. On closer inspection this time, though, there are some additional scribbled emojis and lewd promises underneath. Well, Baekhyun thinks to himself. Lu Han's certainly learnt from the best.
And the best, as everybody knows, kneel to no one. Baekhyun scrunches up the plane and chucks it into the trash.
A minute later, another plane swoops over and hits him on the forehead. Next to him, Eunji stifles a giggle. Temporarily distracted, Baekhyun grins at her, like getting hit by paper planes is an illustrious and impressive job. But she frowns and goes back to her monitor, stony faced.
Baekhyun makes a face, then turns to his new message. This one says I detest you, which cheers him up a lot. He rolls up his sleeves, thinking cap wheels whirring; he has some serious stuff to do. Things have clicked inside his head, and he has realized that somewhere along the night, he inherited someone else’s coat and bequeathed them his own. A someone with the initials KJM. At least, he hopes so. He could just as easily have dropped his coat in the middle of the street and snatched someone else’s to make up for it.
He goes about trying to plan how to get his coat back. The internet is probably his best friend, here, but it’s a bit of a challenge because he doesn’t know where to start with the whole ‘swapped my coat with a guy while drunk???? important keys missing help!’ gig online. Sure, there’s always Twitter, which he barely checks, and Facebook, with the one thousand hookups who parade as Friends and wouldn’t actually help. Hmmm…
Clueless, he texts Jongdae. Jongdae, ever the resourceful, answers shortly and to the point.
sure i kno some sites. oodles, adoos, hoobly. dnt 4get craigslist. dats a nobrainer!!!
When Baekhyun asks him where they’d gone last night, he gets something a little less helpful.
holy shit idr half the places. the regular hongdae ones, for sure. the new club we went to first. but then we started hopping thru gangnam… idr most of the names. octagon definitely tho. i kissed this hot australian girl. lost her number :(
Still, Jongdae is a bro. Baekhyun doesn’t mind.
He turns his thoughts to his beloved coat and keys. Given that he’d been drunk and still doesn’t remember crap, he isn’t sure what had gone down that would make him switch--
Baekhyun blinks and massages his temples. Please don’t let him have had really great sex with some attractive human only to suffer from highly selective memory loss. What if he’d snagged a number? A date? Further promises of swelteringly hot banging? His head spins with the hypothetical loss of this.
He spends a good ten minutes mourning about it all, before he realizes that with or without sensual contact having occurred, he can’t exactly mention sex in a lost and found classified ad. At least, not if he doesn’t remember it happening.
Baekhyun, therefore, sets forth on his quest without further ado, improvising a G-rated story line, and within the half hour he has a bunch of identical ads floating across the interwebs.
Ad:Guy, you took my jacket by mistake - BBH
We've got the same Hawk & Co. jacket. It appears you accidentally took mine from the lounge of Octagon last night…
12th OCTOBER, FRIDAY, 07.02 P.M., THE KIM OFFICE (DOH’S CUBICLE)
“And left yours. Mine had my keys, which I clearly need. Yours had an avocado in the pocket, which I'm assuming is equally important,” Kyungsoo reads aloud. All three shift their positions slightly when he finishes. Apart from the security guards downstairs, they’re the only ones left in the building.
"Well," Chanyeol comments at length, "We did hit Octagon. He’s probably our guy.” A pause. “And he's especially polite about you having a blasphemously huge green fruit in your coat. Seems okay."
Joonmyun colors, but does what he does best. He ignores any offensive proceedings. “Let’s reply to his ad with some place to get the coat,” he says. Kyungsoo turns to look at him blankly, then shrugs and types in a response.
13th OCTOBER, SATURDAY, 01.15 P.M., A RENTED APARTMENT (KIM’S QUARTERS)
The weather outside looks nice, but Joonmyun’s far too invested in his warm comfy spot on the bed to get to the window. Maybe he’s also a tad nervous of doing anything without his trusty lucky avocado on hand, and maybe that means he’s maybe too dysfunctionally superstitious to be a normal human. Maybe he’ll concede to this point if someone strolls into his apartment and raises it, but that doesn’t happen, as is to be expected.
So Joonmyun bides his day in bed, venturing out only for matters of ingestion and excretion.
14th OCTOBER, SUNDAY, 10.14 A.M., IN THE VICINITY OF AN OKAY-SEEMING RESTAURANT OFF THE SUBWAY, KIM STANDS
They meet at the restaurant in Gwanghwamun, as promised.
Joonmyun arrives first, exactly fifteen minutes and thirty seconds before time. He hesitates, but goes in and gets a table eventually. It’s easy to get one -- not many people are in yet. Once in his chair with his feet tapping incessantly, he passes time by patting the coat over his arm and smiling nervously at the passersby who glance in.
When he checks his watch, ten minutes have passed, which means five minutes ‘til go-time. Meet-time? Whichever.
Someone coughs as they come in, head bowed and shoulders hunched. Shorts and a button-up, with supremely dirty Converse. The white’s all splotched with mud. His knees are scarred and bruised all over, like he’s still riding scooters and losing his balance every other second. Then the guy looks up, and Joonmyun sees hair and huge sunglasses. That’s literally it. Brown hair, fringe, huge sunglasses. He looks a bit like a dressed-up insect. Joonmyun feels a little disappointed.
Anyhow, he’s looking purposefully around, so this may very well be The Guy. He doesn’t seem to have noticed Joonmyun, but he’s walking in Joonmyun’s vague direction. Potential The Guy is approaching, Joonmyun thinks to himself.
14th OCTOBER, SUNDAY, 10.14 A.M., INSIDE AN OKAY-SEEMING RESTAURANT OFF THE SUBWAY, BYUN STANDS
Hey, Baekhyun thinks to himself. He has a coat over his arm, like me! Neat!
14th OCTOBER, SUNDAY, 10.15 A.M., ON A CHAIR INSIDE AN OKAY-SEEMING RESTAURANT OFF THE SUBWAY, HENCEFORTH REFERRED TO AS ‘THE RESTAURANT’, KIM STARES AT BYUN
There’s a coat on Potential Guy’s arm! He might very well be The Guy! Potentiality: upped by 50%! Come over to my table and reveal yourself. Bring forth to me the avocado that is my right! Joonmyun stares hard at him, trying to telepathically communicate.
14th OCTOBER, SUNDAY, 10.15 A.M., THE RESTAURANT, BYUN STARES BACK AT KIM
Huh, he’s kind of glaring, though. Bad mood, maybe? He should break the ice or something. Baekhyun stops a few feet away and waves. “Yo yo,” he says, borrowing Lu Han’s catchphrase, before wincing a little. It suits Lu Han more. “What’s the time?”
14th OCTOBER, SUNDAY, 10.15 A.M., THE RESTAURANT, KIM ATTEMPTS TO BE USEFUL
Joonmyun clears his throat and looks at his watch. He reads out the time. “Ten, uh, ten fifteen.” He blinks, looks at him furtively, then adds, “In the morning.”
14th OCTOBER, SUNDAY, 10.16 A.M., THE RESTAURANT, BYUN ATTEMPTS TO CONVERSE
Well, duh, it was in the morning. The sun was out, wasn’t it? “That’s nice,” Baekhyun says, courteously. He continues standing aimlessly in the place, before he decides to sit with this dude while waiting for The Dude. Company wouldn’t hurt. “Mind if I sit here?”
This dude looks at him owlishly, with round eyes and a prim little mouth. Would make a cute girl, Baekhyun thinks to himself.
“No, actually,” this dude says. Baekhyun should rename him TD, for this dude. In fact, he renames him TD right away. TD continues, all soft-spoken and probably Gangnam-bred, “Not at all. Have a seat.” Then he kicks the chair in front of him forward, and that right there isn’t very Gangnam-bred at all. Perhaps Baekhyun has judged too soon. Baekhyun sits anyway. Their knees brush and it’s a bit awkward. Neither of them says anything, which makes it a lot awkward.
The waitress approaches, but the silence is creeping up on Baekhyun like a monster and rendering him socially inept, so he smiles at her blankly. TD comes to his rescue. “Water for both of us,” he orders, after clearing his throat, and the waitress writes it down before moving on.
TD doesn’t say anything else. Baekhyun presses his lips firmly and stares at the table, and has a strange feeling that TD is doing the same. After a while, a thought floats through his head: This isn’t getting anywhere. Followed by an observant, What’s he even doing here if he just ordered water?
Baekhyun rouses himself. “Waiting for someone?”
TD clears his throat again. “Yes, actually.”
Baekhyun nods politely, and silence falls upon them once more. Like a goddamned vice. It kind of makes Baekhyun sweaty. He’s about to ask TD to elaborate when TD opens his mouth by himself. Thank goodness for that.
14th OCTOBER, SUNDAY, 10.16 A.M., THE RESTAURANT, KIM RECOUNTS HIS TALE
“Well, you know,” Joonmyun fiddles with his handkerchief. The waitress arrives with their water and leaves, gliding. “It’s a bit of a funny story,” he continues. “Something happened on Thursday night, a bit of a mix up, really. I, uh, swapped my coat with someone else, and now I have this random bunch of keys! They won’t unlock anything I’ve got, you know, so I’m here to get my coat back.”
Potential Guy seems to perk up at that. “Hey, though, the same thing happened to me! My coat had an avocado-- I mean, not my my coat, but like the coat that I ended up with.” He grips his glass and takes a sip, and Joonmyun notices that he has long fingers. Joonmyun’s own are small and stubby. Joonmyun sighs internally.
“Will you look at that,” Potential Guy chortles. Joonmyun isn’t sure where he should be looking, but Potential Guy (Joonmyun abbreviates him to PG) doesn’t seem to know that and continues. “I’ve got it right here, actually,” he pats the coat on his arm, “And I--”
It’s when PG breaks off into a confused pause that Joonmyun does a double take and re-assesses their conversation. PG is no longer PG. He is RG. Real Guy.
“Oh,” they say, at the same time.
Joonmyun takes refuge in calling the waitress again. PG-turned-RG looks momentarily confused, but brightens when the girl turns to him after Joonmyun orders. “So,” RG says after she takes his order, too. He sounds a lot more attentive than before. They look at each other expressively, and fail to convey anything coherent via their eyes. Silence, it seems, has struck again. Joonmyun should take a shot every time it does. Enough times and maybe he wouldn’t have to, anymore.
Neither of them speaks a word until the food arrives, and-- “Hello,” the guy grins, staring pointedly at his plate. Joonmyun is familiar with this attitude. The yeah-you’re-here-but-you’re-a-pushover-and-I’m-not-gonna-take-you-very-seriously attitude. He is weary of it. “Hello,” he replies. RG’s fork clinks a bit on his plate, through the pasta and tomato sauce. Joonmyun tries not to slurp on his extremely hot soup. They eat in a profound Silence.
“You know,” RG mumbles through his last bite, then pauses to swallow. “This,” RG continues, expansively, once he’s done, “Looks like a date.” He’s dabbing his mouth with the napkin, very blasé, and Joonmyun, very unblasé, does his best not to choke. He succeeds in this endeavour, but when he sets his spoon down, he’s frowning through tears. Worse, he can’t come up with anything to say to that.
“I suppose it does,” Joonmyun ends up with, looking pained, and either RG is naive, or he misunderstands Joonmyun’s expression on purpose. RG passes his glass of water, still half full, over to Joonmyun.
“Touch of constipation?” he smiles, and his teeth are shiny. Nowhere near as toothpaste-ad worthy as Chanyeol, but still. Impressive. Wait, what did the guy just say? What is he saying? “Water helps with the fibre. Although I guess that’s why you took the soup.”
Somehow, this doesn’t strike Joonmyun as the easy, professional conversation he’d imagined having with his coat-swapper. Granted, he hadn’t had much time to imagine this conversation, but still. The differences were wild, not to mention a bit tough on the part of his brain that was responsible for comebacks.
“My bowels are doing okay,” Joonmyun manages to make his tone steely, or so he hopes.
RG shrugs goodnaturedly. “Glad to hear that, Mister…”
“Joonmyun,” Joonmyun drinks the water anyway. “Kim Joonmyun.”
“Byun Baekhyun,” RG says, holding out his hand over the remains of their meal, and Joonmyun stands up halfway to lean ahead and shake it. He doesn’t want to sound rude or intrusive, but he really wants to ask for his avocado back, right about now. RG-turned-Byun-Baekhyun doesn’t show any signs of hurry, though, so Joonmyun keeps his queasiness to himself. A new waitress comes over to their table, red haired and bespectacled. “May I have your orders,” she smiles, plastic, no intonation of a question present.
15th OCTOBER, MONDAY, 12.15 P.M., THE KIM OFFICE, LUNCH ROOM
“LET ME GET THIS STRAIGHT,” Kyungsoo slams his hand down on the table, after Joonmyun’s finished. Chanyeol pulls a wry face. Joonmyun watches this role-reversed enthusiasm with amusement.
“Why can't you get things twisted? Bent? Wired up? It's just one shot, Kyungsoo, one hit from my best stash is all I'm asking and you'll see for yourself--” The table rocks a little, and Chanyeol stops talking immediately, chewing his lip. “You didn't have to kick that hard.”
“On the contrary,” Kyungsoo’s expression is satisfied and placid as he leans back in his chair, “I did.”
Joonmyun taps his feet against the floor, slightly impatient, and Kyungsoo turns on him with a raised finger. “Don’t go all I don’t have time for this on me. You referred to us with your problem, we are going to see it through.”
Chanyel mutters under his breath. “He never does that with me.”
Kyungsoo ignores him. “So, let me just get this strai--”
“I went to the restaurant, as promised,” Joonmyun recaps, listless, checking his wristwatch. “We talked for, like, five minutes before we ate food. Realized we had each other’s coats.”
“And then he hit on you,” Kyungsoo raises his eyebrows.
“He said that the given circumstances were remarkably similar to that of a date’s,” Joonmyun clarifies. “I wouldn’t call that hitting on me.”
“Don’t think you used proper grammar right there,” Chanyeol whispers loudly, leaning forward with his elbows on the table. He is ignored.
“Dude, nobody talks like that,” Kyungsoo overrides Joonmyun.
“I do!” Joonmyun protests.
“Well, then! You’re nobody.” Kyungsoo can be pretty ruthless. Joonmyun isn’t sure if he should be feeling hurt or not right now, and Kyungsoo’s already forging ahead. “Afterwards, with great reluctance, he handed over your coat and avocado--”
“See! You’re talking like that, too!”
“This is different,” Kyungsoo snaps. “And then you guys--” he raises his voice defiantly over Joonmyun’s arguing “--exchange numbers, and he puts a heart next to his name on your phone.”
Joonmyun can’t deny that. He blinks. “Really, I mean. I mean. Yeah.”
“How d’you figure on getting this, Kyungsoo?” Chanyeol breaks the silence. “Because that wasn’t straight at all. Pretty homosexual, actually.”
Judging by the resigned expression on his face, Kyungsoo actually agrees.
16th OCTOBER, TUESDAY, 11.37 A.M., THE KIM OFFICE (THE GENERAL AREA OF KIM AND OH'S CUBICLES)
Chanyeol's very busy at the moment.
"Your hair looks really great today," Chanyeol nods, staring at it like he's never seen hair before. He leans against the cubicle nonchalantly. Joonmyun's sure the sharp edge is biting into his elbow. "What color is it?" A furious bout of rustling from the desk that's on Joonmyun's left side indicates that his female co worker Yuri is probably stuffing tissues into her mouth to keep from laughing out loud. As she is wont to, in such situations.
Sehun raises his eyes slowly from his screen to Chanyeol's face, fingers still typing. "My hair's exactly the same as it was yesterday," the guy’s voice is nasal and cutting. Chanyeol blinks a little in nervousness, keeps his smile on. "The only difference is the color, which I take it you've noticed. Yesterday it was blond, today it's pink."
Joonmyun winces, but the trusty sidekick is saved from saving face. The boss had been walking towards Chanyeol since he'd gotten up -- he's reached now and cuts in.
"Problem, Park?" Minseok's voice is very breezy and his stature is very short, not at all the deep-voiced, tall and threatening type of superior. This doesn’t seem to deter people’s impressions of how truly terrifying he can be, though: the entire office freezes guiltily. Joonmyun isn’t surprised by this effect. Kyungsoo fits that mould, too. He wishes he could follow in their footsteps; short, important and universally acknowledged as such.
But back to the scene at hand. Chanyeol's smile has taken on a curiously brittle aspect. "No, sir," he says, and moonwalks abysmally back to his seat.
Joonmyun sends Chanyeol an email as soon as the boss goes back to his own room.
Subject HA.
That wasn't straight at all.
He hears a snort, and the reply is prompt.
Subject RE: HA.
i'm so dope you stealin my lines
Joonmyun types fervently.
Subject RE: RE: HA.
DON'T USE THAT WORD, WHAT ABOUT THE INTERN
The chair scrapes backwards and Chanyeol's shadow looms over Joonmyun's keyboard before Chanyeol himself. Joonmyun looks up in fear, but Chanyeol's back is turned to him. He seems to be observing somebody in the far corner of the room. Then he sits down again.
Subject RE: RE: RE: HA.
which word. why can't i use words. why are you ridding me of my freedom of speech. and idk, he's cute? wait do u dig him bc i think someone called dibs on him the day he got in
Then, a few seconds later.
Subject WAIT RE: RE: RE: HA.
IF you dig INTERN then WHAT about HEART SHAPE COAT GUY?????? are you leading him on. are you the player i initially thought you to be!!!
Right, this is getting slightly out of hand. Joonmyun opts to leave for the bathroom. On cue, Chanyeol joins him exactly four minutes later.
"Yo," he says, making a great show of unzipping busily, and Joonmyun rolls his eyes into the mirror as he washes his hands.
"The intern's sole purpose is to check up that we aren't wasting time, sending emails to each other with wastive text," Joonmyun explains. “And I’m not a ‘player’,” he adds, making air quotes around the word. Chanyeol's turned the other way, so he can't quite make out whatever expression he's got on right now. Joonmyun sticks around, waiting impatiently. Oblivious, Chanyeol takes his time peeing.
"Okay," he replies at length, zipping up again with some effort. (As if he had that much junk!) "You mean little Yugyeom is spying on our emails?"
“He’s not little,” Joonmyun frowns. “He’s probably taller than you. And yes, he is officially spying on our emails.”
“Well,” Chanyeol says. “Then he knows about me and Sehun? I email Kyungsoo about him a lot.”
Their shoes thud a little on the shining tiles, and Joonmyun sighs as he turns the handle. “You and Sehun don’t exist, Chanyeol. You just project your feelings of loneliness onto the nearest tall cute guy.”
Chanyeol gives him a little shove that sends him tumbling ungracefully through the door. “It’s not like you can blame me. I need someone the exact opposite of you to balance things out.”
Joonmyun pats down his sleeves and torso, huffing. “I won’t even bother taking offense.”
“You can’t afford to,” Chanyeol points out, nudging his shoe against Joonmyun’s pants on purpose. “I’m the only one who’ll do your dirty work.”
One day, Joonmyun will come up with good comebacks on the spot. Today is not that day.
17th OCTOBER, WEDNESDAY, 08.03 A.M., KIM OFFICE
“Look who graced us,” Kyungsoo raises his eyebrows, when Joonmyun tumbles into his chair. (Truly, a role model.) “Boss says he emailed you a ton of shit, so go through it ay-es-ay-p. Additionally, I’ve given you enough time to think. What do you propose to do about your new sexual prospects?”
Joonmyun blinks at him dumbly for half a minute, the first fifteen seconds processing what had just been said, the next fifteen seconds processing what to say.
“Absolutely nothing,” he replies, finally, emphasising each syllable.
Both sidekicks stare at him. The way they seem to be agreeing for seemingly the first time in their lives on Joonmyun’s pathetic excuse for a sex life is getting really ominous and… omenous. Joonmyun brightens a little. Now there was a stellar pun. And he, Kim Joonmyun, came up with it!
“Don't tell me you don't think he's cute,” Chanyeol frowns.
Joonmyun decides he will not answer that. In fact, he makes up his mind to be silent on this topic forever. It is, after all, barely seven minutes past eight in the morning. No human can function in this kind of environment. He starts up his PC busily and tries to make it very clear that he’s ignoring them.
It seems to work-- but just as they shake their heads and turn away, his phone vibrates in his pocket. Joonmyun freezes momentarily, before typing in his password. Chanyeol’s phone rings a minute later. Joonmyun darts a glance at Kyungsoo. He’s tapping his pencil against the screen, a graph in reds and blues staring at him.
Furtive, Joonmyun checks his phone. If those two catch him at it, they’ll smell something’s up at once.
let's meet again tmrw y/n
Joonmyun closes his eyes and sighs.
y
“Hey,” Kyungsoo spins a one eighty in his seat a few hours later, gently nudging Joonmyun in the thigh with a folder.
“Hmm,” Joonmyun says, typing in the last line of the calculation before turning to him. “What?”
Chanyeol peeks over the cubicle wall to join in. “Plans? Bowling looks like a good change. Saturday.”
“More importantly,” Kyungsoo speaks up, “It bodes nonalcoholism. And I might actually go home today.”
“Wait!” Chanyeol’s so surprised that he slips, nose smashing down against the wall. “Wait,” Chanyeol repeats, groaning. “You’re coming home? I have a roommate today? We can spoon in bed? Catch up with that murder TV show?”
Kyungsoo chews his lip as he stares at the floor, probably regretting saying anything.
“I can’t,” Joonmyun says, “I’ve got--” and stops. He’d just promised himself today that he wouldn’t talk about the dude to them ever again.
“You’ve got,” Chanyeol prompts, all encouragement.
“...Stuff. To do,” Joonmyun ends, lamely. But they’re curious, and Chanyeol’s hard to deny when he’s got puppy eyes and a bleeding nose.
So much for the silence plan.
Lunch is a comfortable, quiet fifteen minutes during which they barbarically stuff their faces (Chanyeol chokes on a stray ginger piece in his burger).
By two p.m., Sehun has a mini breakdown where he starts yelling random French names at random intervals.
2.03 PM “Gislebertus! Wait no, Giselbertus. Ghiselbertus?”
2.18 PM “Evrard d’Orleans! Ha, New Orleans.”
2.23 PM “Jean Poochie! No no that sounds wrong… Jean Pucelle, the Parisian Gothic-era manuscript illustrator… okay… what was his style...”
2.44 PM “Jacque something. Jacque Prevert? That’s wrong, I know it is. Jacquemart de Hesdin! I got it! And he had different spellings, different spellings, come on, I’ve got it, I’ve got it…”
2.56 PM “God, almost done, almost done. Jean Honorary Dragon-- shit! Jean-Honoré Fragonard! Fragonard!”
Chanyeol fidgets, restless, before finally yelling back, “YOUR ACCENT'S GETTING BETTER!”
To this, Joonmyun sends him an email.
Subject: Seriously?
why are you saying ‘better’ as if you’ve heard him speak french before
Chanyeol doesn’t reply within the minute, so Joonmyun fills in a few more cells in his spreadsheet. He’s about to send a new one:
i mean, is it like you’ve got something to compare it with? has he talked french to you before? [jason derulo inference] lipstick stamps on my passport...
But Chanyeol replies right as Joonmyun’s all set to hit Send.
Subject: RE: Seriously?
well i was going to say IT’S GREAT but that would make me sound desperate.
Joonmyun grins and backspaces to type a new reply.
Subject: RE: RE: Seriously?
you shouldn’t worry about that. everybody knows you are.
Surprisingly, Joonmyun finds himself feeling some guilt over poking Chanyeol like this all the time, wondering if Chanyeol will ever blow up. Perhaps Joonmyun is actually more than a little curious, part of the reason why he’s always needling him. Just to see the office’s Friendly Guy™ limits. (Joonmyun himself isn’t the office’s Friendly™ as much as he is the Nice™. There is a difference, folks. There is a difference.)
With his car in repairs-- all his tyres need replacement, plus his battery’s pretty dead-- Joonmyun ends up taking the bus back with Kyungsoo after work, and Chanyeol goes straight to some underground event.
“What’s the thing?” Joonmyun yawns, standing shoulder to shoulder with Kyungsoo. They hang on to the rails as the bus fills, briefcases bumping into each other. Kyungsoo shrugs. “Some rap party. But they don’t call it a party… is it a convention? ComicCon, RapCon? God, I don’t know. It’s an underground rap scene, whatever it is. Chanyeol likes staying there ‘til eleven, sometimes. It starts around nine and goes on until four in the morning.”
Joonmyun lets out a whistle. “He ever take part in them?”
Kyungsoo shrugs again. “A few times. But they all come up with their own songs, and he doesn’t have time to write all focused like he used to. So he doesn’t, really, not anymore.”
Joonmyun lets his head loll to the side, looking out. The boulevards pass them leisurely by in the slow traffic, cars honking, pedestrians ambling. “Pretty sure I have it in to bully him or something,” he confesses, eventually. “Like, nothing horrible, just poking a lot. I think I want to see him angry, secretly.”
Kyungsoo considers this, tilting his own head. “I guess you’ve got enough heartless asshole in you for that to be a plausible theory.”
Alright, Joonmyun isn’t sure if he deserves the title of heartless asshole, per se--
“You should listen to some Beenzino, though.”
Joonmyun blinks. “Uh, sure. Why?”
“Because Chanyeol likes his stuff! And it would be nice if you did friendly things,” Kyungsoo rolls his shoulders, one at a time. It’s a thing he does when he’s exasperated, Joonmyun’s noted. “Like listening to music your friends like, now and again!” A pause, then a quiet, “You’re basically his only real friend apart from me.”
Joonmyun stares at his shoes. “Don’t see how that works into being friends,” he says, defensively. He kind of does, but he needs a last say anyhow.
The contents of his impromptu how-to-be-a-better-friend-to-Chanyeol therapy session with Kyungsoo keep him up until really, really late, when he turns over in bed and reaches for his phone.
jm about being friends
dok ur bright ideas are disasters
jm let’s get him with sehun
dok k… maybe i judged a bit earlier than usual
jm do we have a deal
dok maybe…? i’ll think abt it
Joonmyun goes to sleep a bit excited, despite the laundry piling up everywhere, tinting the air with an old musty smell.
part ii