Work Text:
PODFIC
Duration: 9 minutes, 45 seconds
Size: 22.3 MB
Streaming and .mp3 download available at Dropbox: link
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FIC
It all started with the highlighters.
Namjoon had been complaining to Hoseok about the office supplies over lunch, Taehyung and Jungkook having abandoned them mid-rant for some reason. “I don’t understand why you have to beg for a legal pad,” he said, punctuating his sentence with an angry jab of his chopsticks. “I know we’re supposed to be as paperless as possible, but sometimes a guy just wants to take notes by hand in meetings, am I right?”
“And sometimes a guy just wants to write poetry while he ignores the meetings and then ask his friends for their notes later,” Hoseok said.
Namjoon shot Hoseok a betrayed look. Hoseok smiled brightly back at him.
“I’m just saying.” Namjoon stabbed his chopsticks into his bowl again. “It wouldn’t destroy our corporate finances if a couple of highlighters appeared out of nowhere, okay?”
“Yes, fine, agreed,” Hoseok said, and smoothly redirected the conversation to Jimin in payroll, which was what he’d been trying to talk about all break anyway, and Namjoon let him.
When he got back to his desk after his 2:00 team meeting, brain buzzing with both the new report submission guidelines and a stanza he’d been fiddling with, there were three highlighters just sitting in the middle of his desk.
Namjoon looked around. Nobody was walking by, or searching around for a dropped highlighter or three.
He looked back. They were still there: two yellow and one almost unheard of green.
He turned to the desk across from him to ask his new coworker if he’d seen anything, but Min Yoongi looked busy doing, one assumed, actual work, so Namjoon just dropped into his seat and stowed the highlighters carefully out of sight.
***
“It happened again!” Namjoon told Hoseok the next week. He kept his voice down; the new guy was at the coffeemaker behind him, and Namjoon did not want Min Yoongi to hear him being slightly unhinged over office supplies. Min Yoongi seemed cool, and said funny things under his breath in meetings, and was picking up the fixed asset tracking system faster than anyone Namjoon had ever seen. Namjoon wanted to look like a normal interesting person, not someone obsessed with--
“More legal pads?” Hoseok asked, not quietly.
“Shh! No, the legal pads were just Friday,” Namjoon said. “Today was pens, really nice blue pens, the kind that…” He wiggled his fingers. “They’re like, they have like, you know how food has a good mouthfeel? But for your fingers.”
Hoseok patted Namjoon on the elbow. “You’re such a writer.” While Namjoon was trying to figure out if that was a compliment or not, Hoseok continued, “And you still have no idea where they’re from?”
“I can’t exactly ask around and see who’s breaking into the executive supply closet, can I?”
“I think it’s cute,” Hoseok said, his gaze drifting over Namjoon’s shoulder. “Office supplies as a love language.”
“What?”
Hoseok suddenly perked up, which meant Jimin had walked into the break room, and waved himself off without answering. Namjoon went back to his desk, muttering “Love language?” to himself under his breath.
***
Wednesday brought an actual functioning stapler, and Namjoon could have cried. He looked around, then stepped across the aisle.
“Min Yoongi-ssi?” he asked.
Yoongi looked up from his spreadsheet, met Namjoon’s eyes, then looked away again. “Ah, hello,” he said.
“Have you--” Namjoon swallowed. He couldn’t ask. He just couldn’t. “Have you seen the new memo on month-end procedures?”
“You mean the one that takes twenty-seven buzzwords to say absolutely nothing?” Yoongi asked, looking back up at Namjoon. A small smile crossed his face. “It might have landed in my metaphorical inbox.”
Namjoon grinned and privately decided the whole thing would just have to remain a mystery.
***
Namjoon wasn’t walking past the executive supply closet on purpose. He wasn’t! It was on the way back from his budget rundown with Seokjin in Marketing. Not the fastest way back, maybe, but still.
At first there was nothing out of the ordinary, just like the last couple…few…several times he’d walked past it. Then he saw it - the normally locked door was cracked just a bit.
Namjoon looked around, saw nobody, and eased the door open. His jaw dropped.
“Min Yoongi-ssi?” he asked.
Yoongi looked up from a box, eyes wide, and jerked Namjoon inside. Namjoon let himself be pulled in, and then stood blankly as Yoongi reached past him and pulled the door shut behind him.
“I have so many questions,” Namjoon said.
“I. Yes.” Yoongi ran a hand through his hair, then looked down at his other hand, which was holding--”Here,” he said, thrusting a calculator at Namjoon.
“Thank you?” Namjoon said. He looked at it. Oh, this was a quality calculator, not one of the cheap ones in the shape of the company logo that could only do the most basic of functions. “Thank you,” he said again.
“You’re welcome,” Yoongi said. His shoulders were hunched up around his ears a little.
“Thank you for all the stuff,” Namjoon said. “Um. Why?”
Yoongi’s shoulders hunched further. “I saw the poem you were writing in the department meeting the week after I got here. It looked good. Then I heard you telling Jung Hoseok you needed things, and…I don’t know.”
Namjoon’s chest was doing something funny. “This is locked, though.”
Yoongi held up a paper clip. “Is it, though?” he asked with a bit of a smirk.
Namjoon stopped himself, barely, from saying, “Marry me, Min Yoongi.” But something must have crossed his face, because Yoongi studied him for a second, then leaned up and kissed him. Namjoon kissed him back enthusiastically.
They separated a few minutes later. Yoongi had color high on his cheeks, and he licked his lips. Namjoon took a deep breath. “Okay,” he said. “I have to--we have to--someone is going to come looking for a pen, eventually. If you’ve left them with any.”
“Have some faith in me,” Yoongi said.
“Have dinner with me,” Namjoon said.
Yoongi’s eyes went wide. “Yes. Okay. Yes.”
“And--” Namjoon reached into the box and grabbed a second calculator. He handed it to Yoongi. “Here.”
“Thank you, Kim Namjoon-ssi.” That smile again. “I’ll treasure it.”
“So will I,” Namjoon said, and kissed Yoongi quickly one more time.