Chapter Text
Maybe if Barbara from HR's kids phoned home more often, their mom wouldn’t try to boa-constrictor Hwanwoong into a conversation every time she caught sight of his bright blonde hair through the sliver of window in her office door.
That’s how he got stuck.
She’d caught him as he tried to do the ‘I’m busy please don’t talk to me’ run on the off-chance he wouldn’t hear the tell-tale ‘HENRY!’ that rang out 99% of the time. Barbara was one of those people who saw how many letters were in his non-English name and skipped straight to asking if she could call him another H-name, to which he can't remember agreeing to. At this point, she’s butchered his actual name so many times that he’d rather her call him that.
In the middle of her rant about how her kids don't call enough, something passes by the window and catches her eye, her chair pushing back so she can wave enthusiastically at whoever it is. Behind him, the door handle clicks, and a rush of cool air blows past him.
“Ravn! Come in, I was just telling Henry about James.”
A figure clad in all black stands beside him, a dark splotch against the office’s bright palette. Eyes trailing down, he can see the top three buttons of a high-quality shirt are undone and if the universe could pause time and let him scream for a while, that would be dandy. The stranger is kind of cute yet hot in that rough, stray dog kind of way, and Hwanwoong is tempted to shoot his shot once they’re out of this, but it’s best to wait until another day because he’s not looking cute, and he needs to make a good impression.
Ravn- Raven? whatever- shines a plastic smile which fades as he looks at Hwanwoong.
“Nice to meet you.” He says, offering a hand to shake, then getting the daylights startled out of him by Ravn kissing the tips of Hwanwoong's knuckles. Hwanwoong barely stops himself from pulling back and swatting at him like a displeased cat.
“The pleasure is all mine.” He grins. His voice is smooth and melodic enough to ignore whatever… that was.
Whatever. He’s probably just old school.
Barbara doesn’t appear to notice what just happened, or maybe she’s seen it enough times to not be phased anymore (which is kind of concerning) and barrels on.
“So I was telling Henry about how over the summer, I met a man, James….” she says, and proceeds to reveal more than he ever needed or wanted to know about her personal life, and Hwanwoong is really not keen on having this conversation. He’s considering the probability of there being a catastrophic failure on one of the rides, like a Ferris-Wheel-of-corpses type deal, when he feels a hand press into his side. Long fingers graze across his thin jacket as though stroking along piano keys in the direction of the door.
He looks down.
He looks up.
Damn, he’s good
Ravn hasn’t missed a beat. While one hand is setting a scene which has Barbara completely distracted, she has no idea what his other is doing. Hwanwoong keeps the devilish grin off his face long enough to mutter a low, serious ‘excuse me’ as he makes his escape into the Administration wing.
Free at last!
The cool air rushes into his lungs to replace the humid 75 degrees of Barbara’s unintentional torture chamber. What a relief…
It takes a while for Ravn’s body to slip out one leg at a time, then the rest of his torso, and finally his lingering head from the chatty woman’s hideaway.
“...would love that. I’ll let Masego know you said hi.”
Now safely outside, he's free to take a breath. He lets out a long exhale like he's just finished running a marathon and honestly he doesn't blame him.
“Woah,” he says, and the pant that follows shouldn’t sound as good as it does, “forgot how much she liked to talk…”
The man turns to him, a head full of perfectly, artfully tousled black curls catching on the sunlight streaming through the giant glass panels in the ceiling.
Shit, he's pretty…
His brain rushes to find something else to say just to keep him there a little longer. “You do that often? The whole ‘putting out verbal housefires', I mean."
“Comes with the territory of being a real-life Disney Prince.” he says, and Ravn has the audacity to wink .
Hwanwoong's eyes nearly go rocketing around his sockets, but he covers it by lowering his head and ruffling his hair. He’s tempted to sock Ravn in the shoulder, but that would hardly be appropriate for someone he’s known for all of about two minutes who got him out of a pinch unprompted.
“I think I’ve seen you before... you’re friends with Lee Keonhee, right?” Parted lips show off perfect pink softness. Ravn wears a smile like it's second nature. He probably kisses well too...
“Yes…?” Hwanwoong quirks his head in half confusion, half suspicion, jumping as Ravn straightens up like his mental actuator has gone off.
“Knew it! We were having a meeting with catering and something broke in the kitchen. Keonhee came over to us to apologize, said his friend ‘Hwanwoong from Ops’ would be there to take care of things and what do you know, you ran in! I know a lot of the Ops guys. You’re good at what you do.”
“Oh gosh, I can't believe you remember that…. Ravn ?”
He waves a hand. “That’s just Barbara’s name for me. You can call me Youngjo.”
Hwanwoong’s blood freezes.
Fuck
Fuckfuckfuck
Oh man he really goofed this time
Just hear him out, ok?
Ok…
So when Hwanwoong was hired, he was sitting and making friends with HR because that’s what new hires do. Want anything done in a timely fashion? Become friendly with HR and they'll keep an eye out. Someone is being a jerk? Let HR know and they'll end it before it's even started. Naturally, being of small stature and apparently blessed in the face, Hwanwoong has no trouble getting all buddy-buddy with them.
Which means they talk to him.
HR love talking to him, and they also love talking about Kim Youngjo, one of their department's favorite subjects. Hwanwoong has been employed for all of about three weeks and could probably ace a trivia game about him.
Here’s where it gets interesting.
Even though he's just a seasonal employee, Youngjo has a reputation . He’s got a story, and that story varies based on which of the seemingly innumerable coworkers with a heart boner Hwanwoong's talking to.
Some say he’s a classic heartthrob.
Others say he’s a real-life Disney prince (pun not at all appreciated).
And still others say he’s like the cute boy-next-door.
But one thing is clear- Youngjo is the kind of person who has all of Hwanwoong’s red flags going up.
Because Youngjo is so perfect that there has to be something wrong with him. Like ‘psycho killer qu'est ce que c'est’-type wrong. There's no way a person can be this friendly without planning to eat some poor guy's liver with some fava beans and a nice Chianti.
He's no 'real-life Disney prince'. He's no 'cute boy next door'. He's a man pretending like he isn’t aware of how powerful he is, and like he doesn’t know how everyone feels about him.
Hwanwoong knows better than to venture so close to such a social chameleon.
“Yeo Hwanwoong, but you already knew that.”
"Just that and not much else. But it sounds like you've got a lot of stories."
He shrugs, "I've been around the block a time or three."
Youngjo leans against the wall, arms crossed and smile lopsided. “I've got some too. Maybe we could exchange some over coffee sometime. Are you free this weekend?”
Hwanwoong blinks.
Oh no.
Nope.
This can’t be happening.
Why?
Because Hwanwoong is Hwanwoong and these things like heart attacks and freak accidents and pretty men who are probably serial killers asking what he thinks he’s asking are things that happen to normal people like Mingi and Wooyoung, not to him. This is decidedly horrible.
He needs to eject himself from the situation.
Stat.
"I... Uh..." He says like an intelligent caveman.
He spots a door about 2 feet away, one that he knows will open (God, how embarrassing would that be if it didn’t?) and subtly guides them over to it as quickly and as inconspicuous as he can. The pushbar opens, to his immense relief.
“Well it was great meeting you thanks for saving me from Barbara I’ll see you sometime OK BYE!” he half-shouts, startling a couple of interns who definitely know the woman and might go back and tell her about this weird charade, and fine, fantastic, he'll deal with the fallout later, it’s time for him to go . He throws himself out the door without checking how badly he’s confused and probably offended Youngjo, rocketing down the flights of metallic stairs, through a hedge, almost into a stream, and off straight ahead to get as far away from the building as possible. It's a narrow getaway, but he's getting away and that's better than whatever was about to happen.
About five minutes later, he sees the edge of the lake and realizes that the Ops headquarters is in the opposite direction.
++
Hwanwoong decides that he can never talk to Youngjo again, accidental or otherwise, for the sake of his weak heart and his dignity.
He decides this while in bed because of course people like Keonhee could food poison themselves with a pufferfish and be perfectly fine in two hours and Yeosang could take a tumble down a hill after failing a skateboarding trick and get up like nothing happened, but noooooo , the second Hwanwoong walks through a drizzle with his thin jacket while on no sleep, his body immediately cancels itself and he becomes a teary-eyed pneumonia-ridden mess.
He ponders the reason why the higher powers have decided to play with him and tries not to hack his lungs out.
What a fucking horrible day...
++
Hwanwoong is part of the Facilities and Operations team, which basically means he’s a mechanical engineering court wizard who gets called in whenever something breaks, which is startlingly often. The department is full of men who are taller than him but not by much, most of them older Americans with bushy white beardstaches and potbellies minus Dmitri, the one stray Russian who looks like he’s simultaneously living in 1983 and 2101 and responds to everything with a series of grunts. They get along well enough. His co-workers treat Hwanwoong like the son they never had or the son who preferred fixing cars instead of sterile white labs (which was to say they gave him many life lectures and were overly invested in his nonexistent love life). Hwanwoong is one of those hard-working types- like 'wiping away sweat and leaving a grease stain', knee-deep in the nitty-gritty'- so they trust him to tackle issues on his own.
Today’s issue has to do with Under the Sea, namely how it’s turned into an eternal smoke machine. His manager isn’t pleased, but he’s the only one they could spare since the rest of them have to deal with getting the Polynesian Village Resort functional by mid-July. Moonbyul tells him to give her a call if anything goes horribly wrong so she can hunt down Admin.
Hwanwoong doesn't like how that sounds, but thanks her regardless.
He walks down the main concourse into the center, heading around the path to the right instead of through the castle. There are a good number of families getting their vacations in early. Each department held a meeting at the end of the public school year specifically to prepare them for this, though it still comes as a surprise to see the sheer number of humans crammed into a few square miles.
Maybe he’ll get used to it after a few years.
Hwanwoong swings past the gate to Storybook Circus and-
He stops in his tracks.
“Oh, you’ve got to be kidding me.”