Work Text:
It wasn’t fair of Vanderwood to call the CCTV a distraction. Alright, so he had it open in his peripheral vision, but he was still (kinda-sorta) doing his work while looking at it. Type a line, glance. Type a line, glance. Type two lines, did he just see something move? Maybe not but better cycle through all the cameras just to be sure.
She hasn’t been out of her room recently, and that’s distracting if anything is. Is she snacking enough? Does she have snacks in that apartment? Maybe he could have snacks delivered to her. He starts mentally listing convenience stores near that apartment, almost pulling up a map because he thinks he remembers a 7-11 and then he could get her some Honey Buddha chips - no, probably too risky. She can go get snacks on her own. The chips will have to wait until - sometime. Maybe the party. He’ll bring a whole bowl of them. Yoosung might actually cry with happiness.
She hasn't left her room in almost three hours. It’s a little - not worrisome because he’s not worried, but.
“Could you get me a coffee?” He’s asking Vanderwood, not looking up from his screen full of code that he hasn’t actually contributed anything to in at least ten minutes. Look like you’re working, god Seven. Look busy . He types some random commands, if (longcat.location) GetCurrentPosition(meme(position)} . If he did this for an hour, would his boss be able to tell the difference?
(Maybe not, but when the international trade deal went through he’d definitely know. Could buy him a couple more days, though? Easier not to think about it.)
He counts down to Vanderwood walking out of the door (did they say yes? he wasn’t listening), his fingers absently tapping on his phone before the door has even closed. His brain is a full five seconds behind his body, as always, so at first he doesn't understand why he hears ringing. By the time he catches up she’s already speaking into the phone, a confused sounding “Hello ?” His heart, uncooperative, goes catapulting straight into his throat.
He just kind of says things, for a couple minutes, enjoying the sound of her laughter, tilting back in his chair and spinning around, glancing around the room with new eyes. Looking at the CCTV, even though he knows where she is right now. Imagining going on a walk with her. Imagining buying her a coffee and seeing her laugh like this in person. Telling her about the CCTV and how it feels to see her walk by, like sitting in sunlight.
She says, Want me to put on a special show for you?
Record scratch noise.
A noise comes out of his mouth as his brain plays catch up. He rewinds the last few seconds of conversation back in his head, trying to figure out where that came from.
He imagines it, because he is human and he cannot help it - her, making eye contact with the camera. Maybe dancing. Maybe in a cat costume. Maybe in one of those cat costumes that he saw in an anime -
Oh god. God, no, this is not - keep it pg-13, yeah? He’s protecting her, nothing else. It’s taking some real stubbornness to keep the CCTV thing from being creepy but he’s doing his best, here.
Heartbeat pounding in his throat, he swallows and changes the subject. Deflect, dodge. Do not imagine that anymore, whatever you do.
He hangs up the phone and breathes deep, as he always has to after a phone call with her. His heart is racing. Breaths come unsteady, and he counts a couple, one-two-three one-two-three. God. God, help him. He just needs to work, ok? He needs to work.
But he can check the CCTV camera one more time. He probably should. He needs to keep her safe, after all.
Glancing at the hallway. Still nothing moving. Glancing away again.
He’s thinking about it again.
God . Nevermind. He’s just - not going to look unless he sees something move.
That lasts a heroic thirty seconds, until his phone buzzes and he sees are you watching ? He looks at the CCTV and hey, there she is, when did you get there? He'd been watching for movement, but he hadn't even seen her enter the screen.
Nice going, your peripheral vision is clearly doing great, what if it had been someone else? You wouldn’t have seen it coming. Some job protecting her you’re doing .
707 : ya
She’s sitting in the hallway, across from the camera. When she looks up it’s as though her eyes meet his, and wow, even that makes his heart beat faster. Is he sick or something? This is ridiculous.
hi meow, pops up on his screen.
He looks at her. Looks at the way she’s smiling at her phone, and then up at the camera, and then down at her phone again.
707 : Meow!! Is my precious cat back?
Too much. Back up. Why hadn't he created that un-send feature?
707: but good kitties stay in their rooms where they’re safe.
He gets to watch her get the texts, scroll through them, and smile, like a secret. Like she’s alone. Which she is, kind of.
She knows he’s there but he still feels like a creep, how unfair is that? So unfair.
(Work looms on the other screen, a stream of code that he’s totally lost the thread of and is going to have to spend five minutes catching up on again. Well, already distracted now. Might as well just do it once she’s stopped - this.)
I’m safe if you’re watching me, meow!
She accompanies it with a little cat-batting at the camera, and there isn’t sound but he can see her mouth a meow ! at the camera, and that’s so cute and so dumb that he has to put his phone down, press a hand to his face. He’s so warm that it's almost feverish. Is he getting sick? Maybe that’d explain the distraction.
The way that she’s sitting, with her knees up and her skirt barely covering anything, might also have something to do with it?
Nope! Ctrl-Alt-Del, close that program, don't let it take up brain space anymore. Keep it PG-13, Seven.
707: aaaaaaaaahhh
707: no but seriously
707 : have you eaten lunch yet? you should go eat .
I ate , she sends back, and had she? He's having trouble remembering. She shifts, runs a hand up to sweep her hair aside. It’s an innocent gesture, but it tilts her head in such a cute way. And the way her hair falls means he can see her shoulder now, and the picture is not great quality but it looks so smooth. How is she so relaxed? Some guy she hasn’t met is watching her via CCTV and she’s just leaning against the wall like she doesn’t even care , which is kind of insane? And she’s shifting her legs, so that -
Three things happen, rapidfire, in the kind of slow-motion that he generally associates with the middle of a life or death mission:
First, the barest shift of her legs, so her skirt might, just might accidentally be showing a bit of her upper thigh and -
Vanderwood reenters the room with the beginning of “So I brought - “, slamming the door behind them, and -
He presses two quick shortcuts to switch the main CCTV camera to one facing the opposite wall of the hallway. By the time Vanderwood has ascended the stairs, his screen is free of distracting girl and maybe-scandalous skirts; just an empty hallway and a screen of code that maybe Vanderwood will assume he’s been working on.
Nothing to see here, just Special Agent 707 breathing kind of hard and acting like a complete spaz. Nothing new there, right?
Haha.
“Have you gotten anything done?” Vanderwood asks, setting the coffee down next to his left hand and staring at the screen. “That looks the same as when I left. I was leaving so you could concentrate .”
“I’ve - “ his voice comes out in a squeak. He coughs, tries again. “I’ve been brainstorming! Thinking of brilliant ideas. You were only gone for eight minutes.”
“I’ve seen you clear national firewalls in less time, Seven. Were you watching the CCTV again? She’s just in her room, I told you.”
As though the universe is out to get him, his phone buzzes in that moment. He’s not a complete moron so the RFA message previews don’t pop up on his homescreen, but Vanderwood still sees the logo before he can snatch his phone off the desk.
“Are you messaging her? Now?” Vanderwood sounds like they’re trying for annoyed and landing on the kind of exasperated affection one might direct towards a misbehaving puppy. This, when both their lives are on the line. “How cute. Don’t make me break your phone.”
That sends a jolt of cold through him that makes his voice come out harsher than he intends when he says, “ I need my phone .”
Under the desk, just out of Vanderwood’s line of sight, he opens the message. He can’t read it from this angle, but he types one-handed,
707: 5 mimn
707: or gobback in urroom thatsd fine 2
“Then work .” Vanderwood shoves the coffee at him a little, then grabs it when it wobbles - they both know damn well that coffee on his computer systems right now would be literally fatal for them both. The tension in the room stretches like a rubber band, on the edge of snapping.
The cup steadies. The rubber band relaxes again, infinitesimally.
“I’m working!” He turns to the code and scrolls up, miraculously catches onto a train of thought he’d lost nearly half an hour ago and starts adding things. It’s haphazard, but might actually work. He’s good that way.
When Vanderwood turns away to skulk over in the corner of the room, as is their habit, he uses the chance to glance at his phone.
He has two new messages:
Still watching? ;3
(Is that a winky cat face? Be still, his heart.)
and then, after his typo-filled disaster, I can wait .
Seven draws in a deep breath, stares at the screen with his actual, life-dependant work on it, and considers.
Ladies and gentleman, let’s make a deal. (The theme plays in his head.) He has two options here:
Behind door number one: he could brush his charge, his friend, his maybe-someone off, and keep working on this job that he hates, that he doesn’t want to do, that he has to do on threat of his life and also Vanderwood’s. (An aside, for those members of the audience just tuning in: he hates Vanderwood too, but not to the point of actively wanting to get them killed.) Everybody lives, nobody gets exploited except the people who are supposed to, job well done. Looks like the winning option all the way! And his hand is drifting towards it but theeeen.
Behind door number 2, the underdog, the dark horse charging in: he could find a way to get Vanderwood out of the room again, and switch the CCTV back, and see what I can wait means, exactly.
Sometimes Luciel truly hates himself, because he knows which option he’s going to choose before he’s even thought it through. Sorry, audience members, nobody’s winning another car today.
He starts the plan with concentrating on his work, for about 20 seconds. It’s a good 20 seconds. He gets a couple lines of actual code written. He picks up a thread of an idea he’d has earlier, ties it off, loops it back in.
If anybody were to try to run this code, that should tie them up for at least a few minutes. If they’re an idiot and try to close it by shutting down the system, it could turn into a few days. It also might locate longcat in real time, he’s not sure.
The next step (a spy theme starts playing in his head, not one he recognizes immediately. It’s not 007 or Mission Impossible. Dum-dum-dum-dumdum-dum-dum-dum-dumdidum) is to take a drink of coffee.
And then spit it out dramatically, avoiding his keyboard but hitting a nice bit of his screen. As expected, Vanderwood springs out of their chair and yells, “ What are you doing ?”
“What am I doing?” He aims for scandalized, misses, lands in ‘kind of hysterical.’ Close enough. “What are you doing? What is this?”
“It’s coffee!”
“It’s disgusting!” That’s actually kind of true. It’s too dark, the kind of overbrewed stuff that every convenience store sells no matter what chain.
“What do you care?” Vanderwood isn’t angry, which is good, and isn’t suspicious, either, which is better. They really are easily appeased by work. “Are any of your tastebuds even still alive after all those chips and soda?”
“I have a very refined taste!” Seven shoves the cup of coffee back into Vanderwood’s hand. “Get me Tully’s, or I’ll never be able to work on this. At least two shots. Sweet but not too sweet.”
From this angle, Vanderwood towers over him, examining. He thinks, for a second, that he might get a cup of hot coffee dumped on his head. He wouldn’t not have that coming, honestly.
“If I come back and you haven’t been working the entire time,” Vanderwood says, low, “I will. Taser. You . You understand that, right?”
It brings him up a little short. Being tased, for the record, sucks. It’s somewhere on his list of “Things that suck” between getting hit by a car , which at least only hurts specific parts of his body, but below nearly drowning , which - yeah.
He’ll deal with that in at least another 20 minutes, though, because he knows for a fact that the closest Tully’s is at least three kilometers away and there’s no good way to get there via public transit. Better yet, it’s obvious that Vanderwood does not know this, yet, because they only look slightly murderous instead of already on the brink of it.
He starts pointedly ignoring Vanderwood for staring at the screen in front of him. He quickly realizes he's already forgotten what he was doing, but they don't need to know that. As they sigh and take his black-tar coffee for their own (his nerves don’t need it anyways so maybe that’s for the best) he adds in another few lines of code: this one will play the nyan-cat song nonstop for 10 hours if they try to trace back where he did this from.
He’s kind of fond of that bit of code. If it weren’t suicidally stupid to have trademarks as an international hacker, maybe he’d make that his.
The door closes and he listens to the lock click and then counts in his head, onetwothreefourfive just for good measure before switching the CCTV back.
And then another quick count, onetwothreefourfiveohfuck, before he can bring himself to look at it.
It’s - an image straight out of one of those dating games that he’s always been too embarrassed to play. She’s still leaned against the wall, her knees still up, but spread now, so he can see - she looks casual , still, arms rested on her knees and holding up her phone as she scrolls through something out of sight.
He tries to imagine a girl being comfortable enough with him to pose like that when he was around, and then he realizes that she is, she is real and waiting for him and that’s - gnahhh? Aaaaahhhh.
After he’s able to kind-of look away from the screen long enough to grab his phone, he re-opens the messages and types
707: wow
707: wow!!! ok
707 : is this what ceiling cat feelings liek
and then stops typing when he sees, half-second delayed, her phone buzz in her hand and her face light up as she looks at the messages.
It feels like butterflies have taken up permanent residence in his chest, knowing that this is the face she wears, reading his messages. Does he smile that much, looking at her? He touches his face.
Yes, he does. Thank god it’s a one-way camera, he’s sure she looks way cuter wearing such a dumb, simple smile.
And hey, speaking of wearing. She tilts her head again as she looks back up at the camera, shrugs. Her sweater falls, maybe-intentionally, off of her shoulder. He thinks isn’t she cold? before his thoughts catch up with all that skin.
Is she trying to kill him? She’s going to kill him. He draws his knees up, then drops them again because that’s - uncomfortable, right now. He’s having a little trouble breathing. She’s just sitting in her hallway, relaxing, he shouldn’t be -
As she goes back to her phone, her left hand reaches down and tugs at the hem of her skirt, adjusts it, traces the edge of it. If she’s trying to cover up any more, it isn’t working, just drawing his eye to her thigh and - and her underwear, which look like they might be pink, or light blue, it’s hard to tell without color, and hey-o he should not know this!
His phone buzzes. It takes him nearly a full ten seconds to look away from her, from her fingers brushing her own skin, to read the message.
hey hey!
And he can still hear her voice in his ear, hear the upswing on the second word. Him walking into the hallway and her saying it in just that way, relaxed because it's him. It's an intoxicating image.
707 : grejnaklgnr
707 : ohhhhh myyy goddddd
He should tell her to stop. She must be cold. She should not be doing this, and he shouldn’t be watching. She’s a mission and maybe his friend but she’s not - this. Not anything like this.
But he can’t stop his imagination from running away from him, as she looks up into the camera and, seemingly accidentally, her legs fall a little more open.
Fantasies form and get rejected in his brain, unstoppable, like autorun programs, like a virus in his code. Rapid fire: her taking that skirt off, him taking that skirt off, him sliding between her legs (isn’t she so much smaller than him? It’s hard to get a sense of scale from these cameras) and her thighs on either side of him, putting his hands on -
He slams his eyes closed as his heart starts slamming against his chest. It’s almost painful. This isn’t allowed. He can’t have this. What’s - it’s exploitative! It’s creepy, watching a girl he doesn’t know, or only kind of knows, a few 3 am conversations do not make a relationship, ok. And she definitely doesn’t know him.
She knows nothing about him.
It’s like a bucket of ice water over his head.
She knows nothing about him.
He takes another look at the screen, like a last gasp of air before the feeling is gone. It almost pulls him back under, seeing her trace hands along the tops of her thighs, tilt her head against her knees and look up at the camera. Her mouth is a little open, and he wonder if she’s making any sound.
Wow, no! Get your shit together, Luciel .
He picks up the phone, fumbles it twice, dials her number like his fingers have already learned the muscle memory. In her hand, it rings twice before she picks it up.
“Hi?” Her voice sounds so normal for what she is doing. Does she realize? She must realize. Her hand is - that can’t be, just, distracted. He feels like an asshole for not looking her in the eye, even though she can’t see him, but he also physically can’t help it . It’s magnetic, gravitational, watching her hand trace her inner thigh, slide a little further in to press against -
“Wait!” He says, and his voice comes out loud and strangled and so so so dumb. Oh god. Oh god. “Wait! Time out! Pause?”
Her hand hesitates, then draws away. It’s a start. Although her legs don’t move which means he is still really, really distracted and also can’t quite breathe properly. She says, in his ear, “Mmhmm?”
“Gnaaaaghg,” he says, as a shiver makes its way down his spine and he gets the sudden, vivid image of kissing her neck and pulling that exact noise out of her. Maybe he’d surprised her with it, maybe she’d tilt her head more and let him do it again - “Are you trying to kill me? You are, aren’t you? Were you sent by my boss? Because if you were please continue, this is the best way to die.”
“I don’t want you to die,” she says, laughing a little. She’s still looking at the camera.
“Well!” He says. It’s still too loud. He tries again. “Well, then, I should - I really need to work. Like, I really - I probably shouldn’t even be having this phone call, but I wanted to…! I mean, I need you - I need to tell you. I need you to stop. I mean.”
“Aww.” He gets to see the moment of real disappointment on her face as her legs drop back down, skirt falling scandalously high but no longer openly provocative. He wants to apologize to her, and maybe to himself. She reaches over and tugs the sweater back on. It should be better, but knowing that she’d done it for him in the first place is still burning under his skin like three cups of espresso at midnight.
He only realizes that he said some of that out loud when she laughs at him, and he doesn’t know how to recover from this. He wants her to do it again. He wants to tell her who he is and see if she still wants to, and that’s the most dangerous thought of the day. He wants to leave his house while Vanderwood is out getting coffee and do something very stupid.
What comes out of his mouth is, “Later,” and it sounds like a promise before he can realize what he’s promising. He scrambles, “I mean! I have to get back to work so I’ll call you later! Okay. Bye,” and then hanging up before he can hear her voice again.
He watches as she frowns at her phone, and then gets up and heads in the direction of the kitchen. The moment she's out of sight he wants to call her back. The phone’s still in his hand.
Don’t do anything stupid, seven oh seven , the Vanderwood-voice in his head says. Too late , he thinks back, a little vindictively.
He’s good, so good, for - full seconds after he looks back at his code. He almost thinks about adding another loop into it, or maybe how to split-screen it with the cctv so he can keep checking -
His blood is still pounding, face still burning red. This isn’t going to work. This is going to drive him insane.
He’s alone in the apartment but he still goes and locks himself in the bathroom and turns the light off, because he does not want to look at himself as he yanks down his pants and leans against the glass-metal counter.
Images flit behind his eyes and he lets them, taking life in the darkness for just a second:
Her eyes as she’d looked him, but much closer, warmer, knowing , as if she could be -
The specific weight and texture of her skirt and the color of the skin on the inside of her thigh, the warmth of it, the way she’d be so smooth -
Her voice in his ear, mmhmm? , playing over and over again on his head on repeat as he joins it in a soft aaahhn , and jolts in his hand.
Self-loathing catches him in the afterglow like a blow across the abdomen, knocking the breath out of him. He’s the worst. He’s the worst kind of creep, and also, is definitely going to get tased in - he looks at his watch - six minutes, because he is fantasizing about a girl he’s supposed to be protecting instead of doing the work to protect her.
Also, he left the CCTV camera alone.
As he yanks his pants up with one hand and tries to turn on the sink to wash his other hand, he thinks that he probably deserves the tasing, at this point.
No fun allowed , he thinks, random image macro of a cartoon robot with a sign popping up in his head along with the phrase. Back to work, slave 707 .