Work Text:
It takes five years, two mergers, and one cross-departmental transfer at Nekoma Tech for Kuroo to find his first real nemesis: the new Omega on their design team.
“Before you go on, Kuroo, I need to make sure that the next words out of your mouth won’t trigger an All-Hands meeting or a new required training,” Yaku says, not looking away from the spreadsheet stretched across two of his five monitors. “Or both.”
The last time they were forced into an impromptu company-wide Anti-Harassment Training, it was because Lev — fresh out of orientation — suggested that Yaku was compensating for something with his work setup.
(He’s added another monitor since.)
“Me?” Kuroo scoffs. “I’m an angel, I would never!”
Across the aisle, Sugawara — who does something mysterious and vaguely legal in marketing, and on-boarded the same week as Kuroo — scoffs, hands dancing across the keyboard of his newest model Macbook.
How does he manage to get every upgrade when Kuroo’s still using a laptop from the early 2000s? Who can say.
Yaku has strong opinions on spreadsheet aesthetics, so it’s only once he finishes formatting his cells properly that he turns towards Kuroo.
He looks like he’s one broken formula away from an aneurism.
“Kuroo. How do you have a grudge against someone in design? We don’t even work with their department?”
Kuroo gulps.
“Well, I never said it was a work rival! Just a nemesis! It’s your fault for not asking for clarification earlier!” He’s contemplating how to flee before Yaku becomes the subject of their next HR seminar, when —
“You’re gonna be late!” he grins, as the meeting notification on Yaku’s outlook pings angrily at him. All the phone booths and meeting rooms around them are occupied. “Better hurry.”
“I’ll send you a calendar invite for your murder,” Yaku says, before grabbing his — late 2000s — laptop and bolting.
The origins of his ire are a natural reaction to the laws of supply and demand.
“It’s the tragedy of the commons in action!” Kuroo wails to Yaku over lunch, who stops picking at his questionable konbini bento for long enough to narrow his eyes at him and suggest he brush up on his high school ecology.
Even if it’s not a parable on the downfalls of capitalism, it’s still a tragedy — to Kuroo, at least.
That morning, when he arrived at the office — always one of the first, and a little too chipper for the security guard manning the entrance — after stowing away his coat in the locker area and pulling out a spare tie because he forgot one at home, he’d gone to the office canteen.
The god of office life — Daichi, their office administrator — keeps their kitchen stocked with a Keurig and K-Cups for every employee to use at their leisure.
Kuroo always gets a hazelnut one; it makes the shitty taste of the instant coffee almost palatable, especially when he mixes it with milk.
But that morning — to his horror — he entered the kitchen only to be greeted by the sickly sweet scent of hazelnut coffee, and a pretty blond in glasses yawning while stirring a mug with a dinosaur on it.
Cute, his caffeine-deprived brain said to him, before the blond — an Omega, who smelled faintly like strawberries and freshly cut grass, reminding the Alpha inside him of summertime — swanned past him to leave the kitchen.
“Machine’s all yours,” he murmured, and the smell of hazelnut coffee left with him.
He stood there in a daze for a few moments before realization dawned. Rushing over to the coffee area, he realized the terrible, horrible, no-good, very bad truth: that the blond had taken the last hazelnut coffee.
And so — as he forlornly brewed a French roast, and stirred in three additional sugar packets to disguise the flavor — he decided that it was time to take on another career milestone: having a nemesis.
It only takes him a few minutes of browsing the Nekoma intranet to figure out the omega’s identity.
The name and biography of the worst person he knows is plastered across one of the pages highlighting new hires to their company: Tsukishima Kei. 27 years old. Graphic designer with a specialization in data visualization.
His new nightmare.
It is possible that, over the course of a long day of meetings, an aborted lunch break, and Yaku’s excel formulas breaking because of their intern Lev fucking up a major data export, that Kuroo’s exaggerated his tale of woe, especially by the time he and Yaku meet up with Kai for post-work drinks at their usual izakaya.
Kai, for his part, listens gamely as Kuroo complains about the scoundrel who stole mana right from Kuroo’s hands. He has the benefit of liking his job in their Engineering department, while Kuroo and Yaku languish in Business Operations, so he’s fine listening to their complaints as long as he gets in his one monthly dig about Agile methodology or project managers.
It is also possible that Kuroo is very drunk, and Kai thinks he’s funny when he’s tipsy.
(He’s also the one who keeps flagging their waiter down for more drinks.)
“What if you just… brought in your own hazelnut syrup? Wouldn’t that solve the problem?” Kai offers, when Kuroo finishes his rants.
He’s a little heated and he knows his scent is all over the place, the green tea of his scent flaring bitter, the seawater a little saliter. Yaku’s face is all red, which means — his tolerance being much higher than either of them — that they should close out soon, or Kuroo’s angry scent is flustering the Omega in Yaku, not that he’d ever bring it up.
Kai, a Beta, is unbothered.
Typical.
“It would probably taste better than stuff from the Keurig, anyway,” Kai continues, always sensible. “Who knows how much that’s been processed? And there’s definitely better brands of instant coffee, too, so even if you didn’t buy syrup, you’d have something more palatable.”
Kai’s so reasonable. Kuroo would love to be like him. He should nominate him for a corporate award or a Kudos or something; that Engineering department doesn’t know how good they have it.
Unfortunately, Kuroo is not reasonable, at least when it comes to competition.
“It’s the principle of the matter, Kai. You wouldn’t understand it,” Kuroo grits out, banging his fist on the table. This is another sure sign they should be leaving, and Kai is already signaling their waiter for the check. “I have to win.”
They’ve been friends long enough that, instead of arguing with him or further belaboring the point, he just squeezes Kuroo’s shoulder tightly, and pays their bill.
It settles Kuroo’s scent, but it also makes him feel — just a little bit — like a jerk.
Somehow — no matter how early Kuroo gets in — Tsukishima is always there, grabbing the last of the hazelnut K-Cups.
This wouldn’t be a problem — honestly, it shouldn’t be a problem — had their already harangued IT team hadn’t started hoarding all of them because they’re the best flavor.
It nearly started a war between Marketing, IT, and the Data Scientists until Daichi stepped in with his charts and request forms and staked his flag in the ground to end the battle.
Well.
It was really more of a harangued sigh as he surveyed the chaos of the kitchen, crossed his arms over his chest and shook his head slowly. “I’m disappointed in you,” he said, in a voice so deep and firm and plaintive that they couldn’t help but feel scolded. “You’re not children. Do better. Especially before I submit a ticket to HR.”
That got them scurrying to figure out a plan.
(Since Marketing was involved, it took three days, a slide deck, and five separate meetings to figure it out.)
In the end, it was agreed that — each day, when Daichi restocked the K-Cups — the IT team was allowed to take the lion’s share; they’re operating on a shoestring budget, with fewer staff than they need, to support their team 24/7, around the globe.
(Kuroo still thinks all of the K-Cups are for Asahi, who works a shift primarily supporting their American colleagues and always looks like he’s been through the wringer by the end of the day.)
And IT — who needs to protect their assets — leaves a single Hazelnut K-Cup.
To the victor goes the spoils, or so the saying goes.
They all know that it’s bullshit; scavengers are the ones who thrive the most after battle, and Kuroo, who had been trapped in a project during the escalation of the war, only to finally see freedom three days after a truce was laid down, is a vulture.
Until Tsukishima started, Kuroo got into the office the earliest; he loves his job, but more importantly he loves the quiet that comes with arriving at a godawful early hour. It lets him focus, especially because Yaku always insists on discussing Love Island or starting an argument when he arrives nearly two hours later.
But more importantly, he loves securing the Single Remaining Hazelnut K-Cup, watching the Data Scientists and Marketing Analysts frown over the empty basket in their stock area.
He thought, at first, that it was a one-off, but it keeps happening — the theft, that is.
Tsukishima is always just finishing stirring milk and more sugar into his coffee when Kuroo finally enters the kitchen, smirking at him as he takes a sip to check the flavor. He knows what he’s doing, sharp, taunting gaze directed right at Kuroo as he fiddles around in the other K-Cups.
“Lots of French Roast left,” Tsukishima says, when he starts to linger behind, taking more time than strictly necessary to stir in the sugar, “or medium roast, if you’re into that. Or—”
He scrunches his face, looking disgusted, the strawberry in his scent spiking rotten.
“That,” he sneers derisively.
Kuroo follows his gaze, and chokes back a laugh. Apparently Daichi’s either still pissed about their argument, or he’s secretly a nerd: there’s a new brand of K-Cups, lurid orange. A Naruto tie-in, if you can believe it.
“What, you’re not a fan?” Kuroo replies, grabbing one to drink out of spite and ignoring Tsukishima’s annoyed huffs and empty threats to email Daichi.
To his surprise, the flavor is slightly more palatable than all the rest — it requires one less sugar to be drinkable — so it becomes his daily brew.
The fact that it irritates Tsukishima is just a bonus.
This whole thing continues for the whole week and into his next, and despite how annoyed he looks during their daily progress checks or twice-weekly izakaya hangs, he doesn’t take up Kai on his incredibly sensible suggestion.
Instead, he suffers.
“You don’t know suffering,” Yaku says darkly, bags under his eyes while trying to fix yet another report sent in from a customer support team, “until you realize that your import failed because the file has a single cell of special formatting.”
Kuroo frowns. “Maybe you need this more than me,” he says, before placing the can of iced coffee he purchased from their vending machine — a midday luxury! — right next to Yaku’s desk.
The whole thing ruins his morning — he’s not suffering, he’s just annoyed, because the blond always seems to get in just as early as him, if not sooner, and the Naruto coffee isn’t good enough to drink until he retires — and it means that, by the time he’s gotten to his biweekly meeting with his manager, he’s distracted enough that he doesn’t notice disaster until it swats him in the face like an annoyed cat.
“Thank you for agreeing to take on this project,” Nekomata says, leaning back in his chair and smiling widely with relief. “That is a huge weight off of my shoulders. You’re the only one I could trust with it.”
Trust, in business, is as useful a currency as counterfeit coins.
“Of course,” Kuroo says, “it’s my deepest pleasure.”
And he thinks that until he gets to his desk, opens the email chain with reports that Nekomata forwarded him during their meeting, and promptly has a meltdown.
“Wow, okay, maybe you need it this time. Please tell me you’re still breathing?” Yaku lobs a can of coffee at Kuroo — when did he buy it? He never leaves his desk — who catches it because he still has instinct even if he lacks sanity.
“Nekomata’s just strung an albatross around my neck,” Kuroo says. “He’s sandbagged me.”
“And you’re being dramatic. I’m going to ping Kai — maybe we need an actual coffee break.”
“There will be no coffee breaks for me in the future, Yaku. I am but a footsoldier in the corporate battlegrounds.”
Across the aisle, Sugawara snorts. “Okay, Mr. Drama Degree,” he mutters, which makes Yaku laugh.
Kuroo’s affronted. “That’s only a rumor! I never studied theater! I couldn’t act my way out of a paper bag! Stop laughing!”
Despite Yaku’s attempts at levity, the situation is pretty dire.
Kuroo has a job that is 90% emails, 10% Powerpoint slides, and 20% personality.
“And 80% math, clearly,” Yaku says.
According to the contract he signed, he’s a Customer Relations analyst on their Business Operations team, which means — practically speaking — that he handles a variety of reports about customer tickets and issues, presenting decks internally in meetings where he yells at Sales for overpromising and gently placates engineering for under-delivering, and he spends at least an hour a day cursing whoever signed the contract for their shitty customer management software that they’ve been locked into for a decade.
But because Nekomata believes in him, now he has to work on a major outward facing presentation about one of their biggest customers; and 90% of the slides are going to be —
“Data visualization,” Kuroo gulps. “My white whale.”
He’s never gotten the hang of color theory or what that scam artist Miya in Employee Learning and Development calls Data Storytelling.
“Aren’t the numbers the whole story?” He’d asked, in the workshop Miya led about it.
“Ah, but they’re only your baseline. The real story is what can we do with the numbers! By the end of the day, you’ll understand everything we can do with Data.”
Kuroo came out of that workshop knowing even less than he did when he walked in, and with the distinct impression that Miya thinks Data is another word for magic.
When he crawls back into the office the next day, scent weak as he practically begs Nekomata to let him off the hook and transfer the project to literally anyone else, Nekomata puts on his carefully practiced ‘I believe in you’ face.
It’s a good face, and it almost makes Kuroo cave. But he’s no longer the spring chicken of an intern who would work till midnight trying to patch through deliverables for a middle manager who would never give him the credit for any of the work, or reimburse his instant ramen.
But Nekomata is a good boss, and he believes in Kuroo. More importantly, he knows the right carrot to dangle in front of him in the emergency meeting Kuroo blocked off on his calendar.
He steeples his fingers together, sending out calming pheromones as he peers at him from over his desk. He has an ancient desktop and one single small monitor, and Kuroo’s not sure how he gets anything done on it.
“I think it’s a valuable chance to upskill, Kuroo, and it might put you in the path of a promotion.”
Kuroo perks up.
With promotions come raises, but more importantly they bring more clout.
Although he could use a higher title to win over people in competing departments, he’d rather use it to try and justify convincing Daichi that they should just order more K-Cups instead of fighting over the miniscule quantity he receives and restocks each day.
And so, armed with newfound motivation, Kuroo starts coming into the office earlier and earlier.
“There’s something wrong with you,” Yaku says, when he signs in for the day and is greeted by Kuroo, way too chipper for 9 AM.
“I’m just feeling particularly productive, is that a problem?”
“You’re going to mess up your deliverables. You’ll over-commit this quarter and it’s going to make you look worse in H2 when you under-deliver by comparison. I’m warning you now.”
“I’m fighting a battle for both of us,” Kuroo insists, tugging at Yaku’s shirt.
He narrows his eyes at him. Looks between the empty cup of coffee on his desk and the unopened packet of energy gels. “I hate hazelnut coffee, Kuroo. This is all on you.”
The benefits of his new, extended schedule are twofold. It gives him more time to work through a horrific online course — the narrator speaks so slowly, and there’s only so much that 2X speed can do — about data visualization.
But more importantly, it allows him to actually compete with Tsukishima — who not only is an early rise, but wears his tie to work like a psychopath so he doesn’t have to stop by the lockers — until one day — one glorious Thursday — he arrives to the kitchen and there’s no smell of hazelnut coffee in the air, and the single K-Cup is his!
So what if he does a little dance? Victory is sweet; much sweeter than the coffee he sips triumphantly when Tsukishima enters the office kitchen grumbling about a train delay — funny, Kuroo narrowly missed one, thanking the stars as he slid into his early train right before the doors closed — and frowning at the mug in Kuroo’s hands.
It’s black and round, and looks like a cat, with pointed ears formed from the ceramic and a painted face.
It’s also his prized possession.
“Looking for something?”
When he heard Tsukishima’s footsteps, he made sure to lean against the counter so his body framed the display of K-Cups. He watches eagerly as Tsukishima — much more tired than him —processes his loss.
Maybe Kuroo is still a little tired, because he doesn’t move a muscle, forcing Tsukishima — with his sweet and grassy scent — to navigate around him as he makes a backup coffee, with extra sugar packets, just like Kuroo had been doing.
“Couldn’t you have stuck with Naruto for one day?” Tsukishima groans, frowning as he sips at his drink.
He pulls a face. It’s cute.
“This is the only way you could possibly understand the suffering of the common man, Tsukishima,” Kuroo replies.
“Oh? So you’d say you’re common, then?” Tsukishima looks him up and down, with slow consideration like he’s taking stock of him. “You shouldn’t look down on yourself that much, Kuroo. It’s unbecoming of an Alpha.”
His words curl around the word as his eyes flutter shut, like the caffeine is just suddenly hitting him.
Kuroo suddenly has to tamp down on his own pheromones — the green tea growing summer sweet — and bite back his response before he really ignites an HR crisis.
He still hasn’t taken a sip of his coffee, so he doesn’t have the energy to wonder why they seem to be reacting.
And he doesn’t notice that he never responds, until Tsukishima passes him with a sigh and the scent of strawberries.
“Have the day you deserve, Kuroo,” he says.
It takes him until he reaches his desk to realize that had been an insult.
This starts a competition.
Kozume Kenma [11:27 A.M]: i don’t think this is healthy kuro
Kuroo Tetsurou [11:27 A.M]: I’m fine!! Relax, Kenma!!
Kozume Kenma [11:30 A.M]: you only use that many exclamation marks when you’re sleep deprived. we have nap pods. use them.
Competition is healthy! It makes the world go round!
Kozume Kenma [12:48 P.M]: weren’t you just complaining to yaku about the tragedy of the commons?
And it’s a healthy distraction for Kuroo.
The K-Cup competition hadn’t been any kind of real race until he beat Tsukishima into the office for the first time. Until then, it had been one of the endless minor annoyances that plagued office life, like the overhead like that was too cool-toned for you to focus, or the bathroom that never locked properly, or the person three desks over who insists on using a loud mechanical keyboard.
Had he not taken this assignment — had it not been forced upon him — Tsukishima would have faded into the background symphony of his life, a brief blond speck in his memory.
But now?
Now things are fun.
They keep getting in earlier and earlier, trading off who’s able to get the prize. He’s not sure what brings Tsukishima to the office this early — “I’m a misanthrope,” Tsukishima says one day, unprompted, and he’s not sure if it’s a joke or not — but it still helps Kuroo.
He’s also been able to shave off three whole minutes from his usually six minute walk from the station.
(He might have to carry an extra shirt to avoid being drenched with sweat all day from running through the streets of Tokyo, but it’s the little things.)
The first time he’d done that, his coffee brewing by the time Tsukishima walked into the kitchen, looking sleepy and rumpled and like he'd rather be anywhere but here and awake, it felt uniquely victorious.
Especially when Tsukishima’s scent spiked sweeter than usual, like he was delighted that Kuroo beat him.
That just makes him more compelled to keep winning.
And it’s helpful to have something silly, because he’s realized — with a scream, when he finally got the calendar invitation for the meeting added to his Outlook, right in the middle of his purple Out-Of-Office block — that he’s going to need to reschedule his upcoming rut leave, and take extra suppressants to make it happen. He can’t have it earlier, either, because he needs all of that time to work on this project.
Till now, his rut has been like clockwork. He only had to go on suppressants during puberty, when everyone’s cycles were nightmarish and poorly-timed and painful. But he’s grateful that he can schedule them out a year in advance, block out the time in his calendar and plan around it, until of course the needs of a business — and that dangly carrot of a promotion — come knocking on the door of his den.
So now, each morning while he makes his coffee — hazelnut if he wins or One Piece if he loses, because Daichi’s changed the order — he pops a bitter suppressant pill and swallows it down with a sweet drink.
Tsukishima, to his credit, doesn’t question him about it.
(He even has the sugar packets waiting for him if he wins.)
One day, Kuroo realizes that he and Tsukishima ride the same train.
“Oho?” It slips out of his mouth before he can stop himself as he steps onto the mostly- empty train car. It’s a few doors down from his usual, because there’s a very suspicious looking puddle on the platform right where he normally stands and he just got new shoes.
Tsukishima looks up, despite the big headphones around his head.
“You,” he sneers.
“Kuroo,” he corrects, before sitting in the seat right next to Tsukishima. “Didn’t think you’d recognize me, what with me being a common man and all.”
“You called yourself that,” Tsukishima hisses in a low whisper, even though they are the only two people on the train at an ungodly early hour of the morning. “And I could recognize you at a hundred yards, because you’re the only one with such atrocious hair.”
He frowns and touches his head. Despite multiple trips to different salons and even weighed down with pounds of pomade, his hair insists on looking like he’s freshly rolled out of bed. One reason he works so hard is to counter the fact that his hair insists on being unprofessional.
“Is that with or without your glasses?” Kuroo asks.
Tsukishima looks apoplectic, and he purposefully turns the volume up on his headphones until Kuroo can hear the music, ambient in the train car.
He decides to keep riding this train, thinking that — if they’re on the same car — he can get a headstart on Tsukishima once they reach their stop, but he quickly finds out that Tsukishima has no interest in racing him down the streets to their office.
“Sweat,” he explains, monosyllabic due to the lack of caffeine. “Ick.”
It’s cute, Kuroo thinks, unbidden, and he gives him the hazelnut K-Cup without thinking.
Their morning routine suddenly goes from competition to cooperation, once they start walking side by side to the office and trading the first K-Cup between them each morning.
The enemy — Tsukishima — of his enemy — the IT department — is his friend, as the old adage says.
“Why did you book a room and invite me to a meeting to discuss this, Kuroo?” Tsukishima says, aghast as he looks at the chart of Nemeses and Friends that Kuroo has drawn, in lime green marker, on the whiteboard. “This is an email — no, this isn’t even something you say to people.”
“Aww, Tsukki,” Kuroo says, parroting the cute nickname that Tsukishima’s colleague — misanthrope his ass, Tsukishima always gets lunch with the same freckled guy working in Sales, and Yamaguchi speaks very highly of him — calls him, watching as the anger pounds at Tsukishima’s forehead. “I just wanted to make sure we were aligned on this business segment! I think there’s a great opportunity to synergize between our departments!”
He draws big circles around their names in the same lurid green marker.
“I had to explain to my boss why I was suddenly collaborating with your department, and your meeting invitation was so bare that I couldn’t spin anything!”
Kuroo nods. “So you’re saying you want me to be your business mentor, Tsukki? I thought you’d never ask.”
It’s fun to rile him up, Tsukishima’s grassy scent like a lawn, freshly mowed out of frustration, rests upon his nose so sweetly.
He ignores Kuroo in favor of drawing his ire towards the markers. “And whose bright idea was this? The color is illegible. Don’t they know anything about contrast? I’m going to write an email.”
As he leaves, Tsukishima is typing away purposefully at his laptop, shirtsleeves rolled up to reveal a pale length of forearm and the scent glands on his wrist, letting Kuroo bask — for a second – in his scent again; his own has grown muted from the suppressants, and he resolves to never need to be on them again, come hell or high water.
He’s not sure who Tsukishima emails, but within three days, the lime green markers are nowhere to be seen.
“I don’t understand,” Kenma says, the next time he’s in the office. “Can’t you just go to another floor for it?”
“What are you talking about? We only have one kitchen.”
Kenma looks aghast. He never quite understands the need for overexertion or effort, which is why he’s automated his entire department, but he does know how to keep it a secret, which is why he still has a job. He’s even gotten it written into his contract that he only needs to visit the office once a week, but most of that time is taken up for meetings that his boss insists on having in-person.
“ Just go to the 17th floor? They have hazelnut coffee. I’ve seen it. It tastes better than ours.”
“You don’t even like hazelnut, though. When did you try ours? Have you been bothering the IT guys again?” Kuroo pauses, thinks a little bit more. “Wait, how do you even get in? That’s not even our floor!
“Well, they don’t know that, clearly.”
They’re having lunch together — it’s the only time that Kuroo can steal from his friend’s schedule when he actually comes in — and they’ve decided to take it outside and three blocks away so Taketora doesn’t crash their meal like he always does.
Kenma — with his analytical brain — stares off, squinting at one of the buildings as he thinks.
“Kuro?” he says, suddenly, when they’re nearly done with lunch. “Why don’t you just brew a larger size and split it between the two of you?”
“Kenma, you need to focus on other thi- oh,” Kuroo talks over him before his words process. “You know? That’s an idea. A good one, even.”
“I know,” Kenma replies, leaning back against the konbini wall. “That’s what they pay me for. I charge a consulting fee, you know.”
“I didn’t realize you were freelance, now.”
Even so, Kuroo brings a slice of Kenma’s favorite apple pie to the office, just to pay his fee.
Of course, all good things go to shit eventually. It’s the bell curve or something.
(“Kuroo, are you fucking with me or do you not know what the bell curve is?” Yaku hisses.)
His project keeps getting more and more complex, with added reports, additional queries from the customers, and three or four separate analysts in his deck watching every single change.
Nekomata keeps checking in with him and although it’s kind and well-meaning and his advice is helpful, it’s still a little overbearing. His inner Alpha is rubbed raw; his tea and seawater scent acting up enough to make Sugawara choke and Kai worry and Taketora start thinking about vacationing in Bali.
The suppressants certainly don’t help; he thought they were supposed to keep his scent and pheromones tamed, which is why a lot of Alphas and Omegas in professional environments take them, but somehow it’s strong enough to annoy Yaku.
Neither do his morning meetings — informal as they are — with Tsukishima, whose scent warps sweetly around him in the early morning hours, naturally like he doesn’t even realize he’s doing it. There’s something about their layered scents that makes Kuroo feel warm, like a summer night, cold tea and vine ripened strawberries.
But his actual nights are getting later and his mornings earlier. He’s burning the candle at both ends —
“You know what? For once you’ve got the right idiom,” Yaku says.
“Don’t you mean a metaphor?”
“I’ll shove my inevitable HR Violation up your a—”
— and it’s exhausting.
He’s so tired that he doesn’t notice autosave had been disabled, and he hasn’t manually saved the file either when he realizes — towards the end of the day — that the data for his first attempt at visualization has been corrupted and he needs to do it all over again even though he was planning to run the draft by Nekomata the day after next.
There’s no faster way he knows of to fix it; he just needs time that he doesn’t have, unless he stays late.
So, just like the horrible, early days of his first internship, before he got the position at Nekoma after networking with Nekomata at an industry mixer and learned what a good manager was like — he kindly did the needful, and stayed late.
Throughout the evening, he alternates between typing and drinking shitty konbini coffee with a few salty snacks to line his stomach.
Late turns into an all-nighter and when he finally enters the kitchen sometime between 4 and 5 AM, eyes swimming with lines of data and code and the colors of his lines, he realizes he’s forgotten his suppressants at home, and he missed yesterday’s dose, too.
His body, unused to the suppressants but uneasy at the lack of them, doesn’t react well. It doesn’t help that he’s been working so hard and been unable to tamp down some of the more grating behaviors that the Alpha in him had been reacting to, so his mind starts to feel warm.
Too warm, in fact; so hot with swirling thoughts and panic over the deck that he still hasn’t fixed and that he’s missing Tsukishima on the train this morning and his rut could come at any time because he’s fucked up the strict schedule of suppressant dosage the pharmacist recommended, which could ruin his chances at the promotion and disappoint Nekomata.
It’s all he can do to grip the table as his thoughts — altered into a frenzy by his own hormones and stressors — spiral; he could stand there for hours, freaking out, unable to move from the spot in the kitchen no matter how much he knows he needs to get back to his desk and work.
“Hey, hey, hey, easy,” is the first thing he hears when his thoughts swirl back from his little meltdown, thanks to a cool hand on his shoulders and the scent of ripe summer strawberries filling his nose. “Oh good, you’re all right. I was worried I would have to call an EMT. Or Taketora.”
Before he can protest that Taketora should not be called in a medical emergency, the hand and the scent disappear. He mourns it for a second before it’s replaced by the smell of the hazelnut coffee that Tsukishima — because it could only be Tsukishima — places in his hands, before dragging him out to his desk.
He didn’t even know Tsukishima knew where his desk was.
“Okay,” Tsukishima says, stealing Yaku’s chair to sit next to him and look over Kuroo’s monitor. “Tell me what the problem is.”
“Well aren’t you a fixer,” Kuroo snips, but he gestures at his half-broken deck, populated with ugly validations and visualizations but analysis that’s astute, because Kuroo gets the numbers, he just doesn’t understand why they need a pretty pie chart.
“Honestly, pie charts are actually pretty useless,” Tsukishima mutters, cracking his knuckles and pushing up his glasses as he grabs Kuroo’s keyboard and — he squints dubiously at this — ergonomic mouse. “No good data has ever been presented in a circle.”
“Unless it’s the amount of pie you have left.”
A pause, and then — a miracle — a sweet little laugh, straight from Tsukishima’s throat.
“Drink your shitty coffee and let me do my job,” Tsukishima says, working his magic on Kuroo’s spreadsheets and data dumps.
This is Tsukishima’s job, he realizes, once he remembers the little introductory bio he’d found the first time Tsukishima beat him to the K-Cup. It had felt lifeless and drab, accompanied by the standard CV picture everyone at this company had, but Tsukishima — the one right next to him — is alive and sweet, even hunched over his desk.
Of course in the disarray of the morning, Kuroo never takes his suppressant, which means his rut creeps into him by 9 AM when Yaku — just stepping into the office — notices him getting irritable, shoves a candy bar at him, and asks him to “check your hormone levels, please, before you make them add another rule to the employee handbook.”
“You just want your chair back,” Kuroo grumbles.
“He’s so tall he’s probably messed up my settings!”
He lets Yaku and Tsukishima argue about the chairs, but he tests them anyway, and realizes — horrified — that the hazy, burning sensation in his gut is migrating lower.
When he turns back, Tsukishima and Yaku have switched chairs. “Guys?” he says, pointing at the test. “What do I do?”
Lucky, Sugawara from Marketing is there to save the day — “Just call me a hero and buy me coffee when you’re back,” he says, “and get rid of Yaku’s horrible keyboard. — by telling him exactly who to email and how to request emergency rut leave. “This happens all the time in my department,” he explains.
Yaku squints at him. “What does your team even do?” he asks.
And Sugawara looks him right in the eyes as he answers, deadpan. “I have no idea.”
Kuroo sends a note of apology to Nekomata before he leaves, and the last sight he can remember from the office, as his rut starts to swirl around his head again and he begins to lose clarity, is Tsukishima waving goodbye at him, still sitting at his desk, Kuroo’s spare jacket wrapped around his shoulders because their part of the office was always too cold.
It takes him two days for his rut to clear — two long days where he pretends to not think about Tsukishima and his sweet scent, before giving in and dreaming of the tall blond — and when he emerges, his first thought is to panic about his incomplete slides that were due yesterday.
When he finally gets to his phone — chanting “Come on, come on, come on,” as it slowly makes it through Two Factor Authentication — he feels fear then confused relief when he sees an email from Nekomata sitting in his inbox, complimenting his deck.
‘No notes,’ the message reads. ‘Great work!’
And Kuroo beams, before his heart-rate spikes.
How did he do great work? He wonders, before flipping through the deck and seeing that Tsukishima really has worked magic, setting up visualizations that support Kuroo’s analysis, and incorporating more jumping off points for him to relay into additional slides. They’re all aligned with Nekoma Tech’s brand and style guidelines, too, which is always the worst part of finalizing a deck. And there’s an appendix with extra visualizations and the source data linked, so that — in the event of an almost unexpected question — Kuroo has more resources to fall back on.
Huh, he thinks, and he lets the Alpha inside of him feel warm and happy, content and charmed.
Well, every good turn deserves another.
If Tsukishima knows numbers and aesthetics, then Kuroo knows people and how to play them like a fiddle.
“Me,” Kenma mutters. “You know me. And this is embarrassing, Kuro, do I really have to do this?”
“Yes, because you’re my friend and you support —”
“-Even your worst impulses, I know. It’s still embarrassing. Shouyou’s going to hold this over me forever.”
It turns out that one of Kenma’s friends in IT — Hinata, who also loves hazelnut coffee — knows Tsukishima from college — even though Tsukishima pretends to avoid him.
“They get lunch once a week,” Kenma explains. “He’s up to date on his knowledge, trust me. And, wait, didn’t you befriend Tsukishima’s actual friend? I thought you mentioned that.”
“Yeah, but Yamaguchi can’t tell a lie without blushing! He’ll give up the game before I’m ready to win!”
Kenma blinks. “And you think Shouyou’s any better?”
But because h’s a good friend, he asks, and Hinata delivers.
That’s how he finds out what Tsukishima likes the most, besides free coffee and the pleasure of Kuroo’s company, that is.
Tsukishima blinks down at the box that Kuroo sets on his desk the next day like it’s a bomb or a letter from the government.
“Come on, Tsukki, no one’s ever looked so bothered by a gift before!”
He looks up at Kuroo, the faintest hint of a blush on his cheeks and the strawberry in his scent stronger than ever. “How did you find out I— no, of course it was the shrimp. I’m going to kill him.”
Kuroo laughs, before pushing the box of strawberry shortcake — from Tsukishima’s favorite bakery, which is two train stops past the office, so he left even earlier to get a slice — into his hands, which he accepts begrudgingly. “ No you’re not. Murder is against our HR regulations. And the law,” he adds, because that’s probably more important.
“Hmm,” Tsukishima huffs.
“But do you know what isn’t? Against the law, or our employee handbook, that is.”
“No, but I’m sure you’ll tell me,” Tsukishima says, looking up at him, a pleasure swirling around him in his scent like he knows what Kuroo’s going to say.
Kuroo holds out two forks. “Split this cake with me?”
An indirect kiss is still a kiss, Kuroo contends, as he picks up a bite of cake that Tsukishima’s fork has already passed through.
But nothing is sweeter than the shy, honest kiss that Tsukishima places on his lips the next morning in their empty train car, after Kuroo hands him another gift — a courting one, this time, not a thank you — of a bottle of hazelnut syrup, so they can have as many coffees together as they want.
His breath tastes like mint, but his lips are so soft, and Kuroo mourns them as he pulls away.
“I’ll have to invite you over for coffee sometime,” Tsukishima says, when they get to the next stop and a few more people board. Both of them stare straight ahead, but their hands linger between them, just barely touching; a little tease of something, before Kuroo takes the leap to twine them together, much to Tsukishima’s shock. “I’ve got an espresso machine. It’s much better than what Daichi orders for the office.”
It takes him a moment to process that, and Kuroo blames his lack of caffeine for being slow on the uptake.
“Wait, you could’ve brought coffee from home this whole time?” He leans in, peering at Tsukishima, the way he’s clearly trying to stifle a laugh. “Don’t tell me — are you a coffee snob, Tsukki? Why did you keep fighting me for shitty office coffee, then?”
“It was fun,” Tsukishima shrugs. “What can I say, I like a challenge?” He whispers that into Kuroo’s ear and it makes him shiver, before pulling on his headphones.
He’s not ignoring Kuroo, though. He’s still holding his hand.
It takes five years, a K-Cup cold war, and one project from hell at Nekoma Tech for Kuroo to find his first real office romance: Tsukishima Kei.