#49 ねこあつめ
Title: ねこあつめ
Prompt: #49
Rating: PG
Length: ~2330 words
Side pairings: Baekhyun/Lay
Summary: Sehun is more of a cat person.
Warning(s): mild swearing
Notes: I love this game. I still think the Japanese version (original version) is better.
You should play Neko Atsume.
“Sehun, Sehun!” Yixing shouts across the aisle between their desk cubicles. Sehun groans into his keyboard as he tries and fails to hide by ducking lower in his seat, until his chin is nearly level with the edge of his desk, all to no avail, because as he looks up over the staggered mountain range of his keyboard, he’s greeted by the twinkling eyes of a certain Mr. Zhang who always has far too many bright ideas and far too little respect for Sehun’s real, actual, painful deadlines.
He went to visit Yixing in his cubicle once, back before he knew better, before he knew that Yixing was dating Mr. Byun from the finance department, the one with the magic fingers who could sort the books in no time leaving him with too much time for mischief, back before Sehun knew who Yixing really was.
When he saw the framed quote hanging on the wall of his cubicle, he should have known better.
I LOVE DEADLINES. I LIKE THE WHOOSHING SOUND THEY MAKE AS THEY FLY BY.
“Douglas Adams,” Yixing had said, grinning when he notices the direction of Sehun’s attentions. “My personal hero.” Sehun had eyed his somewhat askance, but he’d chalked it up to just a sense of humour, nothing more.
He knows better now. Whenever Yixing ropes him into something new, with just a simple, innocuous-sounding, “Oh hey Sehun! Can you help me test drive this feature?” or “Want to read this blurb?” or “I found this new thing that I think might have a lot of potential,” it’s always Sehun who ends up staying till the crack of ass-o-clock while Yixing goes home, Sehun thinking to himself, he’s never going to make that deadline, only to see him slipping the report or whatever else it is into the slot of Heechul’s box with nary a care for the world, showered and groomed with gel in his hair as he waltzes back to his desk with a Java chip frappuccino while Sehun feels half dead, gritty with yesterday’s clothes on and huge bruised bags under his eyes and he’s stumbling forward with his barely finished whatever it is this time.
So whenever Yixing calls his name across the aisle, Sehun always tries and fails to hide.
“You look stressed,” Yixing says, glancing at Sehun who is literally at eye level with his keyboard. Sehun grunts.
“I’m fine,” he says, before promptly losing his grip and sliding with a pained groan onto the floor, as the edge of the chair scrapes over his back. “I’m fine,” he says, as he slams his head into the underside of his desk as he’s struggling to stand up.
And the most infuriating thing? Yixing just stands there, chin resting on the low cubicle wall, a cryptic grin on his face as he waits for Sehun to settle back into his chair before he says the same fucking thing over again.
“You look stressed,” Yixing says, and Sehun bites back his tongue before he can retort, Because of you! Because everyone knows that Yixing is dating Baekhyun and Baekhyun has far. Too. Much. Time. On. His. Hands.
And an affinity for numbers.
So Sehun just grits his teeth and nods and Yixing takes that as an open invitation to slide around onto his desk, perched next to his keyboard, and show Sehun something on his phone.
“I found this!” Yixing says brightly, as though this is the best fucking thing he’s ever found and Sehun rolls his eyes internally and drags his eyes begrudingly down to the screen before Yixing can spring something even more dangerous on him. This is just looking. Looking shoud be safe, right?
And then he sees the cats.
Something that most people don’t seem to know about Sehun, when they first see him, is that he’s a cat person. For some reason, he still hasn’t figured out why, most people for some unfathomable reason look at him and think dog.
Maybe it has to do with Jongin. Jongin, who has three dogs that still live at home with his parents because though Sehun and Jongin are saving up for a house, the apartment they’re living in right now, having been living in together since university, doesn’t allow pets larger than a fish.
A fish.
Sehun still has nightmares of waking up in the middle of the night as a little impressionable five year old and finding his mom dumping his goldfish into the toilet.
“I’m sorry,” she’d said, when she saw his small form standing in the doorway of the bathroom, hair tousled and rubbing his eyes as though he couldn’t believe what he was seeing, his mother, physically dumping his precious Nemo in the toilet, “when I came down for a glass of water he was floating in the tank. . .” She looked sympathetic, looking at him as her hand reached out to pull the lever on the toilet and Nemo was flushed down into the bowels of the sewer system. Sehun knew all about it, because he had watched the Magic School Bus episode on it in class, but what upset him more than Nemo dying, or his tiny golden body being flushed into the sewer, was the fact that his mother had literally been going to dispose of Nemo without even telling him, probably thinking she’d mention it over breakfast, soften the blow. Or see if he even noticed.
Sehun vowed, then and there, never to get a fish ever again, no siree bob.
So they have Jongin’s dogs, that he calls his kids and talks on the phone to and goes home to visit, first his dogs, then his parents and older sisters who both live on the same street with their own families and dogs, and Sehun wonders sometimes, what will happen when he and Jongin finally have enough money to buy their own house, and the kids come to live with them.
He’s considered telling Jongin, “I like cats?” But even in his head it sounds like a question, because he somehow doesn’t think Jongin will believe him.
“But we have the kids,” he can picture Jongin saying, with a confused expression on his face, and Sehun will slink away to play Starcraft. And look up cat cafés on the internet.
But now he’s looking at the game that he somehow, against his better judgement, downloaded after Yixing waved it in his face at the office and grinned and Sehun knew he had to have it even if he would never admit it.
Sehun doesn’t even know Japanese, but you play a few (hundred) games and you kind of know how things work, intuitively, like hopping in a new car and figuring out where the windshield wiper control stick is, not that he’d know that feeling since he and Jongin are saving up for a house which means that they take the bus or subway everywhere, but still, it’s the thought that counts.
Neko Atsume. Cat collecting. Sehun knows, as soon as he opens the game and slides his finger along the scroll bar to look at the spots that will soon be filled with little in-game snapshots of cats, that’s he’s a lost cause. Right away he sets out a plate of food to tempt the kitties, buys a few toys or two, and waits.
Jongin sees him playing on his phone all the time, it’s nothing new. Jongin doesn’t really do games; he prefers messaging his sisters or looking at photos of his kids, or better yet going over to visit them, something he has the ability to do since he works from home. Sehun isn’t jealous, it’s nice to know that when he gets home from a long day of avoiding Yixing at work, Jongin will be there, sitting on the couch, watching anime, and he’ll pat the sofa next to him, come over and sit beside me, and Sehun will sink down onto the sofa beside his boyfriend and watch anime with him.
Sehun usually just basks in the feeling of comfort, of the warmth emanating from Jongin’s skin, the vague sound of the tv buzzing, bright colors flickering over the screen, as he sometimes even drifts to sleep before Jongin wakes him up with a kiss to his nose for supper.
But now Sehun still sits next to Jongin, still watches whatever anime is playing while resting his head on Jongin’s shoulder, but instead of drifting off to sleep, every once in a while his finger will reach down to slide over his screen and he’ll replenish the food bowls, maybe even swap out a toy or two, or take a snapshot of a particularly elusive cat who’s been avoiding him for days, only visiting and leaving his yard while he’s not looking.
The Maromayu-san cat, in particular, has been eluding him for days, even though he’s been setting out plate after plate of expensive sashimi for it, and Sehun can’t help but give a shout, sitting on the sofa next to Jongin, as he finally gets a snapshot of the cat, standing primly next to the muticoloured string ball, clutching a slip of what looks like paper in white paws. Sehun adds the snapshot to his cat book and, on a whim really, not that he hasn’t done it for all the other cats he’s managed to snapshot, changes Maromayu-san’s name to Jongin with a comic book. The name doesn’t fit so he ends up changing it to comic Jongin which sounds funny but it’s okay.
It’s only when he feels the warm breath on the soft skin of his neck that he realizes that Jongin is also looking at his screen. It’s just a game, Sehun thinks, just a game about cats, but his heart is racing just a bit as he presses the off button on his phone and his screen goes black.
“What are you playing?” Jongin asks curiously, and Sehun stutters over the words.
“It’s just a game,” he says, too quickly, as he curses Yixing to high heaven and back for ever poking it at him, or maybe just Heechul’s office during auditing.
Jongin looks at him for a moment before nodding, and Sehun feels himself flushing despite his best attempts at keeping his cool.
It’s really okay, it’s totally okay, Sehun absolutely isn’t hooked onto a game that consists of collecting cats and tempting them to visit with toys and treats. He would never have a tab open on his browser with a neko atsume walkthrough, making sure he’s setting out the right combination of food and treats to tempt the particular cat he still doesn’t have a photograph of.
“So how did you like that game?” Yixing asks, swinging by on his way to the copier. Sehun, leaning over his phone, refilling the food dishes, almost drops his phone on the ground in shock.
“It was okay,” he says, shrugging though it’s more of a twitch, his hand reaching up to card his fingers through suddenly sweaty bangs.
Yixing just looks at him and grins, for a moment, before he heads off the the copier. He looks like he just won the lottery. Sehun grimaces, before remembering that he’d better feed the cats.
It stops being okay when Sehun forgets his phone on the counter when he rushes into the washroom after a disastrous lunch where he stress-inhaled some kind of evil permutation of chili dog under the gleeful gaze of Heechul, who never appeared at the cafeteria unless he somehow knew it would throw someone off.
When he’s walking out, hands still damp from the towel, stomach still gurgling faintly, he finds Jongin peering at his phone, a curious expression on his face.
“It’s not what you think!” Sehun bursts out, before he realizes that he has no idea what Jongin is actually looking at, but now if Jongin was simply just looking at the calendar or something, now he definitely knows something is up.
“There’s a game,” Jongin begins, his eyes glancing up to meet Sehun’s; he wants to look away but he can’t, “with a book full of cats named after me.” He pauses-
“I can explain!” Sehun almost shouts, before he realizes that he really can’t.
There’s an odd silence then, stretching out between them, as Jongin looks back down at the phone and Sehun tries not to run out of the door.
“Comic Jongin is really cute,” Jongin finally says, smiling, and Sehun finally takes a breath.
“I-” he begins, stops, begins again. “I like cats?” It sounds like a question, even though it really isn’t.
“I know,” Jongin says, nodding, as though it’s one of the most fundamental facts about Sehun, twenty-something, graduated from university, likes cats.
“Oh,” Sehun says.
“I like this game,” Jongin says, after a moment of looking through the cat book. “What’s it called?”
“Neko atsume,” Sehun says, and watches as Jongin searches it up and downloads the app on his own phone. It feels like his brain is short-circuiting.
“I thought you liked dogs,” he says, finally, after he can’t hold it in any longer.
Jongin looks up at him, and laughs. “We’re allowed to like more than one thing,” he says, and that’s that.
Sehun reaches for his phone to refill the cat food dishes, and after a moment, pauses to show Jongin how to find the better cat food.
“This one reminds me of you,” Jongin says, pointing at Shirokuro-san who’s his first visitor. Before Sehun can do more than blink, Jongin has changed the cat’s name to Sehunnie.
They end up sitting side by side on the sofa, watching anime and feeding the cats every now and again, and Sehun thinks about thanking Yixing but decides not to. After all, it would probably only encourage him.
“Did you know there’s a live action video of neko atsume?” Jongin says, glancing at an article on his phone. Sehun shakes his head, looks over.
Eleven hours of happiness. He presses loop.
Note: There really is a live action of Neko Atsume and it really is eleven hours long.
Prompt: #49
Rating: PG
Length: ~2330 words
Side pairings: Baekhyun/Lay
Summary: Sehun is more of a cat person.
Warning(s): mild swearing
Notes: I love this game. I still think the Japanese version (original version) is better.
You should play Neko Atsume.
“Sehun, Sehun!” Yixing shouts across the aisle between their desk cubicles. Sehun groans into his keyboard as he tries and fails to hide by ducking lower in his seat, until his chin is nearly level with the edge of his desk, all to no avail, because as he looks up over the staggered mountain range of his keyboard, he’s greeted by the twinkling eyes of a certain Mr. Zhang who always has far too many bright ideas and far too little respect for Sehun’s real, actual, painful deadlines.
He went to visit Yixing in his cubicle once, back before he knew better, before he knew that Yixing was dating Mr. Byun from the finance department, the one with the magic fingers who could sort the books in no time leaving him with too much time for mischief, back before Sehun knew who Yixing really was.
When he saw the framed quote hanging on the wall of his cubicle, he should have known better.
I LOVE DEADLINES. I LIKE THE WHOOSHING SOUND THEY MAKE AS THEY FLY BY.
“Douglas Adams,” Yixing had said, grinning when he notices the direction of Sehun’s attentions. “My personal hero.” Sehun had eyed his somewhat askance, but he’d chalked it up to just a sense of humour, nothing more.
He knows better now. Whenever Yixing ropes him into something new, with just a simple, innocuous-sounding, “Oh hey Sehun! Can you help me test drive this feature?” or “Want to read this blurb?” or “I found this new thing that I think might have a lot of potential,” it’s always Sehun who ends up staying till the crack of ass-o-clock while Yixing goes home, Sehun thinking to himself, he’s never going to make that deadline, only to see him slipping the report or whatever else it is into the slot of Heechul’s box with nary a care for the world, showered and groomed with gel in his hair as he waltzes back to his desk with a Java chip frappuccino while Sehun feels half dead, gritty with yesterday’s clothes on and huge bruised bags under his eyes and he’s stumbling forward with his barely finished whatever it is this time.
So whenever Yixing calls his name across the aisle, Sehun always tries and fails to hide.
“You look stressed,” Yixing says, glancing at Sehun who is literally at eye level with his keyboard. Sehun grunts.
“I’m fine,” he says, before promptly losing his grip and sliding with a pained groan onto the floor, as the edge of the chair scrapes over his back. “I’m fine,” he says, as he slams his head into the underside of his desk as he’s struggling to stand up.
And the most infuriating thing? Yixing just stands there, chin resting on the low cubicle wall, a cryptic grin on his face as he waits for Sehun to settle back into his chair before he says the same fucking thing over again.
“You look stressed,” Yixing says, and Sehun bites back his tongue before he can retort, Because of you! Because everyone knows that Yixing is dating Baekhyun and Baekhyun has far. Too. Much. Time. On. His. Hands.
And an affinity for numbers.
So Sehun just grits his teeth and nods and Yixing takes that as an open invitation to slide around onto his desk, perched next to his keyboard, and show Sehun something on his phone.
“I found this!” Yixing says brightly, as though this is the best fucking thing he’s ever found and Sehun rolls his eyes internally and drags his eyes begrudingly down to the screen before Yixing can spring something even more dangerous on him. This is just looking. Looking shoud be safe, right?
And then he sees the cats.
Something that most people don’t seem to know about Sehun, when they first see him, is that he’s a cat person. For some reason, he still hasn’t figured out why, most people for some unfathomable reason look at him and think dog.
Maybe it has to do with Jongin. Jongin, who has three dogs that still live at home with his parents because though Sehun and Jongin are saving up for a house, the apartment they’re living in right now, having been living in together since university, doesn’t allow pets larger than a fish.
A fish.
Sehun still has nightmares of waking up in the middle of the night as a little impressionable five year old and finding his mom dumping his goldfish into the toilet.
“I’m sorry,” she’d said, when she saw his small form standing in the doorway of the bathroom, hair tousled and rubbing his eyes as though he couldn’t believe what he was seeing, his mother, physically dumping his precious Nemo in the toilet, “when I came down for a glass of water he was floating in the tank. . .” She looked sympathetic, looking at him as her hand reached out to pull the lever on the toilet and Nemo was flushed down into the bowels of the sewer system. Sehun knew all about it, because he had watched the Magic School Bus episode on it in class, but what upset him more than Nemo dying, or his tiny golden body being flushed into the sewer, was the fact that his mother had literally been going to dispose of Nemo without even telling him, probably thinking she’d mention it over breakfast, soften the blow. Or see if he even noticed.
Sehun vowed, then and there, never to get a fish ever again, no siree bob.
So they have Jongin’s dogs, that he calls his kids and talks on the phone to and goes home to visit, first his dogs, then his parents and older sisters who both live on the same street with their own families and dogs, and Sehun wonders sometimes, what will happen when he and Jongin finally have enough money to buy their own house, and the kids come to live with them.
He’s considered telling Jongin, “I like cats?” But even in his head it sounds like a question, because he somehow doesn’t think Jongin will believe him.
“But we have the kids,” he can picture Jongin saying, with a confused expression on his face, and Sehun will slink away to play Starcraft. And look up cat cafés on the internet.
But now he’s looking at the game that he somehow, against his better judgement, downloaded after Yixing waved it in his face at the office and grinned and Sehun knew he had to have it even if he would never admit it.
Sehun doesn’t even know Japanese, but you play a few (hundred) games and you kind of know how things work, intuitively, like hopping in a new car and figuring out where the windshield wiper control stick is, not that he’d know that feeling since he and Jongin are saving up for a house which means that they take the bus or subway everywhere, but still, it’s the thought that counts.
Neko Atsume. Cat collecting. Sehun knows, as soon as he opens the game and slides his finger along the scroll bar to look at the spots that will soon be filled with little in-game snapshots of cats, that’s he’s a lost cause. Right away he sets out a plate of food to tempt the kitties, buys a few toys or two, and waits.
Jongin sees him playing on his phone all the time, it’s nothing new. Jongin doesn’t really do games; he prefers messaging his sisters or looking at photos of his kids, or better yet going over to visit them, something he has the ability to do since he works from home. Sehun isn’t jealous, it’s nice to know that when he gets home from a long day of avoiding Yixing at work, Jongin will be there, sitting on the couch, watching anime, and he’ll pat the sofa next to him, come over and sit beside me, and Sehun will sink down onto the sofa beside his boyfriend and watch anime with him.
Sehun usually just basks in the feeling of comfort, of the warmth emanating from Jongin’s skin, the vague sound of the tv buzzing, bright colors flickering over the screen, as he sometimes even drifts to sleep before Jongin wakes him up with a kiss to his nose for supper.
But now Sehun still sits next to Jongin, still watches whatever anime is playing while resting his head on Jongin’s shoulder, but instead of drifting off to sleep, every once in a while his finger will reach down to slide over his screen and he’ll replenish the food bowls, maybe even swap out a toy or two, or take a snapshot of a particularly elusive cat who’s been avoiding him for days, only visiting and leaving his yard while he’s not looking.
The Maromayu-san cat, in particular, has been eluding him for days, even though he’s been setting out plate after plate of expensive sashimi for it, and Sehun can’t help but give a shout, sitting on the sofa next to Jongin, as he finally gets a snapshot of the cat, standing primly next to the muticoloured string ball, clutching a slip of what looks like paper in white paws. Sehun adds the snapshot to his cat book and, on a whim really, not that he hasn’t done it for all the other cats he’s managed to snapshot, changes Maromayu-san’s name to Jongin with a comic book. The name doesn’t fit so he ends up changing it to comic Jongin which sounds funny but it’s okay.
It’s only when he feels the warm breath on the soft skin of his neck that he realizes that Jongin is also looking at his screen. It’s just a game, Sehun thinks, just a game about cats, but his heart is racing just a bit as he presses the off button on his phone and his screen goes black.
“What are you playing?” Jongin asks curiously, and Sehun stutters over the words.
“It’s just a game,” he says, too quickly, as he curses Yixing to high heaven and back for ever poking it at him, or maybe just Heechul’s office during auditing.
Jongin looks at him for a moment before nodding, and Sehun feels himself flushing despite his best attempts at keeping his cool.
It’s really okay, it’s totally okay, Sehun absolutely isn’t hooked onto a game that consists of collecting cats and tempting them to visit with toys and treats. He would never have a tab open on his browser with a neko atsume walkthrough, making sure he’s setting out the right combination of food and treats to tempt the particular cat he still doesn’t have a photograph of.
“So how did you like that game?” Yixing asks, swinging by on his way to the copier. Sehun, leaning over his phone, refilling the food dishes, almost drops his phone on the ground in shock.
“It was okay,” he says, shrugging though it’s more of a twitch, his hand reaching up to card his fingers through suddenly sweaty bangs.
Yixing just looks at him and grins, for a moment, before he heads off the the copier. He looks like he just won the lottery. Sehun grimaces, before remembering that he’d better feed the cats.
It stops being okay when Sehun forgets his phone on the counter when he rushes into the washroom after a disastrous lunch where he stress-inhaled some kind of evil permutation of chili dog under the gleeful gaze of Heechul, who never appeared at the cafeteria unless he somehow knew it would throw someone off.
When he’s walking out, hands still damp from the towel, stomach still gurgling faintly, he finds Jongin peering at his phone, a curious expression on his face.
“It’s not what you think!” Sehun bursts out, before he realizes that he has no idea what Jongin is actually looking at, but now if Jongin was simply just looking at the calendar or something, now he definitely knows something is up.
“There’s a game,” Jongin begins, his eyes glancing up to meet Sehun’s; he wants to look away but he can’t, “with a book full of cats named after me.” He pauses-
“I can explain!” Sehun almost shouts, before he realizes that he really can’t.
There’s an odd silence then, stretching out between them, as Jongin looks back down at the phone and Sehun tries not to run out of the door.
“Comic Jongin is really cute,” Jongin finally says, smiling, and Sehun finally takes a breath.
“I-” he begins, stops, begins again. “I like cats?” It sounds like a question, even though it really isn’t.
“I know,” Jongin says, nodding, as though it’s one of the most fundamental facts about Sehun, twenty-something, graduated from university, likes cats.
“Oh,” Sehun says.
“I like this game,” Jongin says, after a moment of looking through the cat book. “What’s it called?”
“Neko atsume,” Sehun says, and watches as Jongin searches it up and downloads the app on his own phone. It feels like his brain is short-circuiting.
“I thought you liked dogs,” he says, finally, after he can’t hold it in any longer.
Jongin looks up at him, and laughs. “We’re allowed to like more than one thing,” he says, and that’s that.
Sehun reaches for his phone to refill the cat food dishes, and after a moment, pauses to show Jongin how to find the better cat food.
“This one reminds me of you,” Jongin says, pointing at Shirokuro-san who’s his first visitor. Before Sehun can do more than blink, Jongin has changed the cat’s name to Sehunnie.
They end up sitting side by side on the sofa, watching anime and feeding the cats every now and again, and Sehun thinks about thanking Yixing but decides not to. After all, it would probably only encourage him.
“Did you know there’s a live action video of neko atsume?” Jongin says, glancing at an article on his phone. Sehun shakes his head, looks over.
Eleven hours of happiness. He presses loop.
Note: There really is a live action of Neko Atsume and it really is eleven hours long.