Work Text:
Midoriya Izuku was having a pretty good day. He knew exactly where he was in his project, exactly what needed to be done still, and had a good idea of how to do it.
The website he was working on wasn't difficult. He'd probably be done well ahead of schedule.
Unfortunately, however, his good day was not shared by everyone around him.
From the doorway came a familiar voice. "I hate this job," Todoroki Shouto said.
Izuku looked up from his computer. "You good?"
At the same time, from across the room, came a quiet, "Real," from Shinsou Hitoshi.
Shouto came the rest of the way into the lab and rested his forehead on Izuku's shoulder. He said nothing.
Slowly, awkwardly, Izuku raised a hand and patted his boyfriend's head. "Client meeting go that badly?"
Shouto lifted his head enough to nod before putting his head back down.
"Oh," Ochako said from Izuku's other side. "What'd the client want? Was it just a bad vision for it or a bad product or what?"
Shouto lifted his head again. "It's my brother's 'not-boyfriend.' My oldest brother's."
Izuku didn't know why he bothered clarifying—Shouto only had two brothers and the other one was dating a girl—but he didn't say this.
"I'm sorry," Izuku said. "Was it just awkward, or…"
Shouto sighed, straightening up properly again. "He thinks we're friends."
"Hugged him as soon as we got in the room," Jirou said from by the door. Izuku hadn't seen her come in, but she must have followed Shouto in. She was the lead for that project. Kacchan, standing next to her, had been assigned the project at the same time. Shouto had only been asked to join them that morning, so it made sense he hadn't known the client beforehand. "Tried to, at least."
Tried to?
"I didn't know what he was doing," Shouto said.
"He tried to hide behind me," Kacchan said, arms crossed.
Jirou smirked. "Client ended up hugging Bakugou instead."
Izuku heard Ochako poorly disguise a laugh.
"I'll kill you, Round Face!" Kacchan said, not moving to do anything.
"No threats at work!" Yaomomo called from across the room. "Remember what Aizawa said if you cause another problem?"
There was a silence as they all remembered. A client had been in the building a few weeks prior and had heard Kacchan and Izuku elsewhere in the building arguing over a databasing issue with a project that they had thought was finished. For some reason, she had felt the need to file a report. In-person.
She'd left her actual client meeting with Ochako and Shinsou to hunt down the HR office, where she had complained to Aizawa for half an hour before he had agreed to suspend them for being disruptive.
They had to work remotely for three days.
In theory, Izuku didn't mind working from home. However, his set-up in the office was much better. At home, Izuku only had one monitor. Here, he had three. One for his code editor, another for a live version of the website, and a third to watch things while he worked.
Izuku did his best to keep these videos to only coding related ones or background noise. Ochako, however, enjoyed watching things like, 'Violent Barbie Jeep Racing,' or 'Will Elmo survive a particle accelerator?' It could be very distracting at times. Not just for Izuku, who could always see it at the side of his vision, but also for others in the room—specifically, Kacchan. Kacchan liked to pretend he wasn't interested, but he was somehow always showing up by Izuku and Ochako's workstations. Shinsou would also show up sometimes to critique her video choices. He and Ochako had a shared playlist of videos which Izuku would not touch with a twenty foot pole.
"Whatever!" Kacchan shouted back at Yaomomo, snapping Izuku back to reality. Oh, right.
"What happened after that?" Izuku asked quietly as people began to return to their tasks.
Shouto sighed again and leaned backwards against Izuku's desk, forearms resting against the edge. "It was mostly fine," he said. "But what he's asking for is absurd. He wants a website that looks like a forest where all the buttons are birds hidden on branches and between leaves."
"That would cause problems with aspect ratios," Izuku said, half to himself.
Shouto made a face. "Not if the forest is made up of pieces put together at random every time the page loads. Which is what he wants."
Izuku stared at him. "He wants the button to move every time someone accesses the page?"
Shouto nodded grimly.
"Wow," Izuku said. "That… that's certainly something. How attached is he to the concept?"
Shouto pressed his lips together and did not answer.
"I'm sorry," Izuku said.
"Bakugou called it 'the shittiest idea ever' to his face," Shouto said. "He laughed."
"What's the website even for?"
Shouto shrugged. "His own entertainment. One page is for links to all his social media. Another is a flappy bird game he made with a drag and drop code editor. He wants four different pages for his photography—one for birds, one for himself, one for couple pictures with my brother,"— here he wrinkled his nose—"and another for pictures everything else. He also wants to sell his—self-published—autobiography. And his graphic novel adaptation of it."
"I see," said Izuku, who very much did not.
"Deku," Ochako said. "Can you look at something for me? My site's displaying horizontally."
Izuku turned to see. As she had said, all the elements on the site were next to each other instead of above and below.
"Weird," Izuku said.
Shouto kissed him on the cheek before leaving for his own workstation, at which point Izuku stood and walked the few steps to stand in front of Ochako's set-up.
He scrolled through her stylesheet, but couldn't see any errors. Must be a problem with the html then…
Oh! There!
"Header tag isn't closed," he said.
Ochako rolled her eyes. "God, of course it's the header. Thanks!"
"Of course," Izuku said, returning to his own seat and getting back to what he was doing before.
Written by a human in Ellipsus.