#also hi please tell me if you've ever been personally attacked by nosy coworkers and what your coping strategy is

[mixtapedoh]

How about lonely boy, lee know, and forced proximity?

@eclliipsed — i am thinking of you, specifically while writing this <3

;༊ — lonely boy

pairing: lee minho x gn!reader genre: fluff, office setting word count: ~3.6k warnings: language, situational stress, han is here stirring the pot, a startling amount of homicide jokes

olive’s notes: a unique challenge of writing lino fic that i did not before account for or even conceptualize is that when i think of said silly little stray kids cat boy, i think of him almost 99% of the time as 'lino' and like 0.9999999999% of the time as 'lee know'. lee minho? you mean the actor? it's not clicking up here, asdfghj. all that's to say, if i make a mistake and call him lino instead of minho, i'm so sorry, feel free to stone me in the square on whatever day is most convenient for you <3.

☄. *. ⋆ lee minho x forced proximity...

— society, as a collective, just loves their 9 to 5, right?

i mean, if it were actually a 9 to fucking 5, maybe you wouldn't be screaming, crying, throwing up, gnawing on the iron bars of your enclosure.

— but haha, as a general rule (collectively agreed upon at some point, or perhaps no one agreed so much as they were browbeaten into submission), more than society loves their 9 to 5, they love their workplace grindset culture.

gotta get those financial gains, amirite?

— which is all to say, you were simply enamoured, quite totally besotted with, completely captivated by and hopelessly devoted to your demanding, grueling, parasitic life-force of an office job.

and people had the gall to say you didn't have romance in your life.

clearly, they hadn't seen the zeal and devotion with which you dedicated yourself to your company issued computer, stacks of files, and white-walled cubicle.

after all, regular hours simply weren't enough for all the worship you had within you — you simply had to have both your mandatory overtime and your Implicitly Dictated and Oh-So-Reasonably Expected overtime hours as well <3 you did want to keep your job after all, and job security is such a silly little thing <3 corporate culture really is just soooo romantic in that regard <3 complete and utter devotion <3 commitment almost pious <3

until you managed to break away from the curse of Living in a Society and could live without bills, debt, responsibilities, more bills, more debt, and the desire for silly little (but financially substantial) hobbies to make this existence of yours worthwhile, your love affair with your job would simply have to stick.

— which made for the perfect little soup you were currently mired in. a thick broth of learned helplessness seasoned with intense loathing, a dash of interest in low stakes coworker drama, a sprinkling of compulsory people pleasing, a garnish of yes man energy, and an optional mix-in of untapped, constantly simmering rage.

so, of course you were best friends with han jisung.

— the universe really did do you a solid when they placed han jisung in the cubicle next to you.

perhaps the only employee that hadn't succumbed to the incessant humanity-sucking leech affectionately called a company, jisung was the only one who kept you sane when you were 56 hours deep in your work week and considering moving to a homestead on alaska where you would likely not even last a whole 72 hours — but, hey, you would at least get some sleep at the end of it when succumbing to the effects of hypothermia, so it didn't seem that bad of a gig, really (jisung always offered to cover half of the down payment cost, but at the end of the conversation, he'd just buy you a coffee and the two of you would call it even).

— and being friends with jisung was, all at once, both a blessing and a curse.

(because this is corporate living and existence is a fucking nightmare ~°~♫⭒~꘎ )

— poor excuses for jokes in your company chat box, sticky note battles during days when the mundane tasks you were assigned were mind-numbing enough to fell the strongest of corporate warriors, the constant "i owe you" back and forth when one of you went on a coffee or vending machine run and grabbed something for the other, and, of course, juicy gossip during your lunch break — all of these were the positives of being jisung's partner in captalist crime.

— but on the other hand, should either of your work be wanting in any regard... well... accountability is a word long enough to stretch between two.

— which led you to your current state of affairs.

"the next time you forget to delete your 'tongue-in-cheek' speaker notes on the powerpoint we're submitting for review from higher ups, i'm breaking your fingers so you can't type them in the first place."

but of course jisung just turns it into a joke about a hand kink.

— your punishment for 'distasteful' jokes left in the margins of official company output wasn't anything too severe — bless whatever cosmic force made it so that the generally easy going mr. ok taecyeon was the one to see jisung's fuck up, and not someone less forgiving — but it meant the next few weeks would be hell in the form of grunt work.

see, your company was expanding in the industry, and it meant that the building you were currently working in wasn't big enough to house all the ✨aspirational goals✨ it was just starting to believe in. thus, the majority of higher ups were going to move into a new office building... and for some ass-backward reason, so, too were all of the archives.

and someone had to go down there and box it all up, making sure it was properly labeled and in order.

sure, the company was just head-empty enough to have the desire to move physical archives to a new office building. but at least they wanted it all in order before they stuck it in a different dusty basement.

— the very first day you went to the basement and saw the sheer level of work the two of you had in store, you locked eyes with jisung and just knew that fucker was going to find some way to get out of it.

— on your lunch break you tried to beat him to the punch and defend your honor against the soul crushing weight of undue punishment. but alas! you had already taken vacation days in the last month (damn that kpop concert - did you really have to be that devoted to your ult group??) and han hadn't had a day off for the last 6 months.

how the hell did you end up doing the punishment work for actions that weren't even (mostly) yours?

han jisung better move to that alaskan homestead after all, nowhere else would ever be safe from your wrath... once you got out of this basement, of course.

— the most you were given was help in the form of lee minho — who would have thought that he of all people would be your saving grace?

maybe he'd help you plan jisung's murder. they were friends, true, but anyone who was around han long enough would not be opposed to plitting his demise. it was part of his elusive charm, after all. everything wonderful about him also lent itself to fodder for plotting his demise.

convenient, really, given the circumstances you were in.

— but back to lee minho. perfect performance lee minho. always last to leave the office lee minho. infuriatingly not suffering from looking chronically fatigued or daunted, overwhelmed, or simply fazed by the overzealous work culture you found yourselves in, lee minho. curt and focused but lacking of an edge that would make him unapproachable lee minho. impossible to pin down, the vitruvian man of corporate dreams, somehow the bosses favorite despite failing to do any of the sucking up some of your other coworkers engaged in almost religiously lee minho.

he didn't frustrate you; he didn't even really baffle you, but he didn't exactly occupy your brainspace in a way that could be described as indifference, y'know?

maybe this was something you could blame of jisung, too. he always talked about minho an ungodly amount, waxed poetic about how it was a shame that minho worked in a different department — how the two of you really would get along famously, but damn, if he couldn't convince either of you to spend any of your (perhaps two (2)) hours of off-duty life in the same place at the same time.

social lives, after all, were laughable, where the both of you were concerned.

— the day you walked down there and saw minho already elbow deep in a filing cabinet seemingly older than your parents (which, lamentably, was the worst organized filing cabinet you'd ever seen, and was regrettably representative of 95% of the work ahead of you), you laughed out loud and took the moment to convince minho to take a picture for you, so you could tell jisung that he was missing the Historic and Long Anticipated Meet Up, and that was the moment you realized that you were so deep in the basement, phone service was a pipe dream.

it wasn't a concern, really — you were both benefiting from the random employee benefit of free spotify premium, so your downloaded content was enough to get you through the long hours of organizing and packing, and hey! being in the basement meant no one really expected any more out of you than your required hours and whatever mandatory overtime you had left to complete.

— so really, jisung had been stupid as hell to avoid this punishment. it was effectively less work than you were used to (though tedious) and you were far enough away from your desk that the thought of the work piling up in the world above wasn't eating at you that much (at least not any more than usual; workplace anxiety and you were well acquainted, at that point <3)

— and minho! — god forbid you say anything complementary about that bastard han jisung while he left you (more than) 6 feet under, doing work that was, by many rights, his punishment — but he had been right when he said you and minho would gel.

he didn't disturb you, for the most part, but working in the same space for full work days with nothing to do but listen to podcasts and check the dates on dusty files meant that Annoying The Only Other Person In Your Vicinity became a welcome distraction from wallowing in the fact you were moving at a pace slower than desired. and he responded quite well to any question you threw his way - no matter how brain-dead, invasive, or embarrassing. in fact, he'd hit something back - put the ball in your court in a question almost more ridiculous, leaving you to question how jisung hadn't forced the two of you together sooner (but fuck jisung; all my homies are blaming this comedy of errors on jisung and are in this basement actively plotting his demise).

— and it didn't take you long to realize charming minho is almost exactly like getting a neighborhood cat to endear itself to you.

pspspsps at random (bat a stupid ass joke his way);

give him space but respond to his random bids for attention;

have a snack drawer (one of the first emptied out file cabinets furthest to the back of the archival area) and occasionally offer something sweet as a reminder that the snack drawer exists and is for joint indulging;

entertain him with logic puzzles and psychological warfare;

and, of course, shit talk your coworkers and company.

indulge the cats desire for destruction and mayhem; tell minho that whenever he was ready to put in his two-weeks, you'd be right there beside him and would run the paper shredder all night while he corrupted the files.

exist calmly and comfortable in the cat's space; work so well in tandem that you began anticipating the movements of the other.

spend quality time with the cat; both of you begining to wordlessly take your lunches at the table in the archival basement, instead of going all the way back up to the cafeteria, choosing instead to chat with each other and indulge in the other's niche interests and stupidly staunch opinions on poor pieces of media.

slow blink at the cat; catch yourself staring for a bit too long when he doesn't notice you looking, your thoughts getting all muffled and sappy as you become wholly fascinated by the slope of his nose and the softness of his big, dark eyes that look perpetually half-bored at work but sparkle with intelligence and mischief when you call out his name — lighting up with interest and disguised delight as that lazy, gummy smile makes it's way onto his features, eyebrows quirking upward, already expecting a challenge and...

— wait... what was that?

— is there absestos in the company walls, and that's why they decided to randomly move buildings? is there lead lining these filing cabinets? black mold in the ceiling? were you perhaps inhaling narcotics in this dusty ass air and hallucinating something vivid?

you were not developing a crush on someone just because you were stuck in the basement with this fool for going on two weeks now and hadn't seen another good looking coworker in quite some time. this wasn't some kind of drama where the ceo has a strange delight in forcing company employees into situations laced with ✨sexual tension✨. you weren't a main lead suffering from romantic withdrawals. remember your leech of a company. you have no time for shit like that.

— but, i mean, if you're never out of the office, perhaps finding romance in office is a solution...

shut the fuck up, you and minho weren't even in the same department. that point was moot.

— because damn, maybe asbestosis really was getting to you, and that's what was knocking the wind out of you any time minho smiled. yes, certainly the absestos in the walls was what was informing the way your heart constricted whenever the two of you brushed hands passing a file between you. maybe you should sue your company and have some hospital use you as a case study. maybe all the distracted daydreams was a new symptom of your newly contracted deadly disease.

see, that would make sense. you weren't catching a mean case of crushing on your forced proximity coworker, you were simply dying. because of the absestos.

— but even still, the day both of you piled all the boxes of (appropriately lableled) filing into a work car, and minho drove you over to the new building, the fresh air didn't seem to be a cure all. you were still a little more than distracted by his messy hair and black sunglasses... his concentration on the road... his pushed up sleeves... not to mention his hands wrapped around the steering wheel.

(but of course you'd snap out of your thoughts when you remember that joke jisung made about your supposed hand kink at the beginning of all this nonsense. shut the fuck up, memory ghost jisung. you don't know shit. you and minho had already talked about it and were coming for his broke ass the day he had the courage to step foot in the office again.)

— yeah, haha, you weren't crushing on lee minho because of a comedy of errors you had never dreamed would befall you in the first place. working alongside him hadn't woken anything in you. certainly not.

— and yeah, haha, you'd definitely be able to hide this from jisung when he came back. not a problem at all when he asks you about how sorting archives went (he had the gall to bring it up every five minutes — taunting you with the fact that he got to have 4 days off and was then reassigned to do answer all the emails that had piled up during his time out of office. yes, he had picked up some of the work originally meant to go to you, but still. a veritable traitor who deserved your absence from your usual lunch dates. and yes, it was hard to be slick when he'd bring up your casual absence from lunch — were you finding minho's company to be more than enough? — but you'd manage. like hell were you going to give the smug bastard satisfaction after he made you atone for his and also your crimes.).

— and yeah, haha, you'd would definitely be able to explain to a suspicious and put out jisung why you were canceling anime re-run night with him to instead go with minho to this hybrid cat-and-comic-book-cafe he had mentioned never being able to get a reservation for, despite living two blocks away from it. silly little things like that would be easy to wave away, right.

it's like, totally platonic for you and minho to meet up on your only day off to spend hours lounging at a cafe retreat together where you cooed at semi-sociable cats and joked about adopting and co-parenting the one who enjoyed wearing cute hats, and read comic books for hours and order food to share and have low-stakes debates about the best tropes and characters of shared beloved media.

it's not like that whole set up is incredibly date coded.

and it's not like it would become a recurring habit for minho to invite you to do things with him that would have jisung waggling his eyebrows even as you pleaded innocence and smacked him with whatever quasi-weapon you just so happened to have on your desk (mostly file folders and your favorite cat themed mini calendar).

— haha... it wasn't like you were down bad and incredibly bad at hiding your crush.

...right?

— you fool. you absolute buffoon. han jisung could smell your lies and poorly contained crush from thousands of leagues away. even if you weren't shit at hiding it, he would have known. he could have actually been on that remote homestead in alaska and still picked up on just how brain dead you were over your crush. you thought you were slick? when han jisung has a doctorate in anxious suspicion and twelve master's degrees in the art of bullshitting?

hell, he knew you were going to fall in love with minho before the two of you even met. why do you think he'd wanted to connect the two of you in the first place? because he thought you two needed a social life? please — he knew going in that putting the two of you in the same room was horrible for his self preservation; he knew it was practically undermining company goals because your joint productivity would fall 2000% and the amount of cat memes you two would send on company time would increase so exponentially, you'd both resort to making your own memes using your company paid subscription to adobe creative cloud; he knew that the two of you were almost scarily well matched and equally devoted to drinking your refusal-to-believe-i-can-be-loved-romantically juice.

he knew that you and minho would develop glaring crushes on each other and wouldn't do a damn thing about it beyond smoothly flirting for an afternoon, inviting the other out on dates-that-aren't-dates and promptly fake-gagging and denying in a manner almost theatric that you might *gasp* enjoy the other's company in a way not-so-platonic, only to do it all over again. a vicious cycle of 'stop feeding the rest of us lies and just kiss with tongue already, damnit.' and he knew all of your coworkers would be caught in the middle of it.

— which they were. for, like, a solid five months.

— now, it wasn't too bad, considering the fact that you and minho worked in different departments, but anytime there was cause for collaboration, suddenly you were clambering to be considered, no matter the intense workload or the way the task was slightly out of your wheelhouse. suddenly, it seemed you were incredibly eager to learn and prove yourself.

at first, your team leader was overjoyed. initiative? drive? a seeming zest and fire for more commitment? say less and do more! marry yourself to the dumbass collaboration with the other department! perhaps this could mean freedom for their long suffering servitude under the corporate thumb!

but then they saw you flirting with minho and making plans to spend an afternoon together at a book signing while still on the clock. and while they're not opposed to a bit of misuse of company time (vive la révolution contre les régimes capitalistes, and all that), it was a bitter and sobering pill to watch that shit happen daily while not getting any yourself, and then stomaching the fact that these clearlly love-struck fuckers won't admit their own transparency-set-to-0% feelings and put their chronically-single corporately-suffering coworkers to rest. either say you're in love and just be done with it or take the rest of us out with a shot gun. goddamn.

it's like a sitcom's mind-numbingly over-the-top valentine's day special. someone make it stop.

— and it didn't take a genius to connect the dots and realize that the employee responsible for all of this was han jisung.

after all, he's the mutual friend between them. no doubt he talked about the other constantly in glowing terms. no doubt he planted the seed they'd be a match made in heaven. no doubt he was the one to blame.

and! wasn't it his fuck up that forced you and minho to work together in the archives to begin with?

maybe killing han jisung wasn't going to make you and minho confess to each other, but it would be some kind of catharsis for the people who were stuck in this hell of Watching You Two Take Your Sweet Time With It.

— so jisung had to understandably think of some kind of plot. after all, the two of you were his best friends, but to hope that you would admit your feelings for someone to save his livelihood? don't be ridiculous. the both of you were quite happy with the flirting stage, as it currently stood.

— how to get your stubborn friends to admit their (very real and very reciprocated) feelings for each other... when there's no external or even internal pressure (on them, at least) to do so... jisung would have to think outside of the box.

or perhaps inside of it.

— which i'm sure is reason enough to explain how the both of you managed to get stuck in a closet during your company's holiday party.

and, through it all, is minho's mischievous eyes and your flair for the dramatic.

"do you think we should tell our coworkers we've been dating?"

☄. *. ⋆

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