Chapter Text
Jisung was having one of the worst days of his life. Not only had he been out of work for the last two months, he'd had a flat tire that morning. He'd dropped his favorite coffee mug, shattering it all across his kitchen sink to boot. He'd had to change out of his favorite interview shirt after spilling even more coffee on it. Then just getting to said interview took half an hour in early morning traffic.
He was already exhausted, and it wasn't even nine in the morning yet. His interview with Wolf-Lee was scheduled for nine, which was why he was so pressed about it. He was only going to be answering calls and taking front desk duties, filing and the like. But it was a job, and he desperately needed a job. Any job.
He pulled into the parking lot, staring up at the brilliant gold office building. It was four stories tall, housing multiple businesses, from the looks of it.
Jisung took a few minutes to compose himself, checking his understated makeup and simple hairstyle in the backwards camera on his phone. He looked clearly put together in a charcoal gray suit that didn't quite fit him in the shoulders and his narrow hips. He was as ready for this interview as he was going to get. It still took him a little bit of an internal pep talk to get his anxious ass moving toward the building.
The ride up the elevator was a smooth one. Already a good sign, as Jisung had last worked at a two-story Uptown store where the elevators always seemed to shake on him. They'd never stopped with him inside before, but they had once for a pair of customers. He hadn't wanted to get back on it since.
The third floor dinged, letting him out into a hallway that had two doors at either end. A bay of floor to ceiling windows flooded it with brilliant light. The view out over the city was a pretty one, showing the tops of trees and houses not far from the shopping center down below.
The suite he was headed for was to his right. Large signs posted by the handle said to pull hard on the door, as it was heavy. He did so, surprised by how much he did have to tug at it. He wasn't weak by any standard.
The young man at the large desk glanced up as soon as he entered the room, his hair dyed ginger.
"Good morning," he greeted Jisung politely. "Do you have an appointment?"
"Yes, I'm here for an interview with Mr. Bang," Jisung replied, keeping his tone neutral. He didn't want to come off too warm or too cool, if Mr. Bang discussed with the current front desk staff how he treated him.
"Oh, okay, you must be Mr. Han, then." The young man smiled warmly. "Go ahead and have a seat, and I'll call Chan. My name's Jeongin, by the way. In case you get the job."
Jisung couldn't help but smile warmly. "Nice to meet you, Jeongin."
The ginger-haired man typed on the laptop in front of him for a few minutes, dousing them into silence. "Chan is on his way up. Good luck, Mr. Han."
"Thank you," Jisung replied, smiling. He liked Jeongin already. The young man obviously was happy with his job, or he wouldn't be so kind to an interviewee.
A minute passed, and then the door directly behind Jeongin opened, revealing a broad shouldered man in a tailored three piece suit. He smiled warmly on seeing Jisung. His eyes even crinkled at the corners. "You must be Jisung. I'm Chan. Please follow me."
Jisung climbed to his feet, crossing the small room to the door where Chan held it open for him. The door shut with a heavy bang. Chan winced. "Sorry, all our doors are heavy-duty here." He didn't pause to continue the conversation there, but Jisung got a good look at the large office space while he followed Chan across the space to a small corner office.
The office was set up with a large array of cubicles, arranged in groups of six that spread out across the floor. Men and women sat at laptops connected to two screens each, their eyes tracking Jisung and Chan curiously. The walls were lined with other offices, a mail room with filing cabinets spread everywhere, two large meeting rooms, and a break room. All in all, a far cry from working at Uptown doing freight and customer service.
Chan opened the door to one of the corner offices, closing the door deliberately behind him.
"Go ahead and have a seat, Jisung." Chan sat on the other side of the large U-shaped desk and adjusted his suit jacket while Jisung took one of the two chairs near the door.
"This is a very nice office," Jisung said, as a way to start the conversation.
"I'm glad you think so," Chan said. "My husband and I own the business, though we do work for the state. We are technically a contractor for the state."
"Wow, that's cool, actually," Jisung said. "You and your husband are Wolf-Lee?"
"That's correct." Chan nodded. Then he jumped into the meat of the interview, asking Jisung to tell Chan about himself, why he wanted to work for Wolf-Lee, and about difficult challenges he had solved in his prior roles.
Jisung felt like he nailed each question, until Chan asked: "So you applied for the admin assistant position, but I see you majored in music production and minored in computer science. Can you tell me about that?"
"My passion has always been music," Jisung said, not as confident in this answer as he hadn't expected it. "But I had to have a backup, so I minored in computer science."
Chan hummed softly to himself. "I would like for you to think about applying to our case worker position instead. The computer systems we use from the state are difficult for new users to get used to, but with a computer science background, I feel like you would do well with it. What do you say? It is a slightly more rigorous position, has more training involved, and its pay is higher to start out."
"I could do it," Jisung said confidently. He hoped this meant he had the job. "I pick up new skills quickly."
"Then I'll need to run a background check, call your references, all that. But I think, between you and me..." Chan winked. "I can make no promises. I'm going to send you to the main office for the state and get your fingerprints done, though. It's a requirement for any position here."
Jisung grinned widely, already feeling like his bad day was getting better. "Really? That's fine by me. I'll go right now."
***
The next week crawled by as Jisung waited for his fingerprint results to come back from the state's bureau of investigation and the FBI. The actual FBI had his fucking fingerprints now, and he was terrified he might have done something in his past for it to pop up. But he was a good boy. He'd never done anything that would get him put on any government watch lists, let alone anything crazy like petty theft.
The anxiety wouldn't leave. He applied for and interviewed for two other jobs that didn't pan out, but still he waited and hoped for the position at Wolf-Lee.
It was getting down to the wire with finding work soon. His bills were beginning to exceed what minimal savings he had. Just when he was about to start spiraling about it one random Tuesday, his phone lit up with a call. He answered it immediately, praying it was what he was hoping for.
"Jisung?" It was Chan's voice on the other end. Jisung held his breath so he didn't sigh in relief from the call.
"This is him," he said.
"Your background checks all came back good. I'm sending you an email with the offer this morning. If you accept, you start this Monday."
Jisung's smile grew and grew the longer Chan spoke, and you could hear it in his voice by the time he answered. "I'll respond to it as soon as I receive it. I look forward to working with you, Mr. Bang."
Chan chuckled. "Just Chan is fine, Jisung. We'll see you in the office on Monday at 8am sharp, then."
The line clicked off. Jisung double-checked that the phone had really disconnected before he let out a whoop of pure joy.
He got the job!
Jisung spent the remainder of the week deep-cleaning his apartment. The job was apparently business casual, so he could get away with a flannel shirt and a decent pair of jeans, per Chan's email. It was something of a relief that he wouldn't have to buy any more suits to wear to work. The two he did own didn't quite fit, since he was so narrow in the waist and hips compared to the length of his legs. The weekend arrived, and with it he chose not to go anywhere. He was down to the last $500 in his bank account, and he was absolutely certain that he still hadn't paid his electric bill yet this month.
That meant that he was playing around with his SoundCloud account as J.One, but his raps hadn't found more than a scant handful of new listeners. Not in the last few months, at least. He had something of a cult following that he wasn’t entirely certain he’d earned.
By the time Sunday night rolled around, he was ready for his new job to start.
On Monday morning, he decided to head out an hour early just to make sure he got to that side of town on time. That meant that he was there a full half-hour before the workday would begin. So he swung into a local coffee shop that was in the parking lot of the business complex, a place called Oddinary Coffee. He sipped on the iced cold Americano in the parking lot until it hit a quarter of.
His anxiety spiked seeing Chan walking into the building not far from where he'd parked. He wasn't sure who his new boss was going to be, but knowing one of the two owners had basically made the decision to hire him still made him anxious. He rubbed the seam of his jeans pocket, hoping it was really okay that he was wearing those and a scarlet flannel shirt.
He grabbed his bag from the front seat, filled with things he thought he might need: a packed lunch, a coffee mug, some pens, and a notebook. He took a deep breath and headed inside.
Chan smiled at him as soon as he caught sight of him. "Good, you're here early. I'm going to have you sit with each stage of the process so you get to know everything about the job. You'll sit with Jeongin this morning and see how he works the front desk."
"Sounds good to me," Jisung said, happy to sit with the kind younger ginger who had wished him luck. He was also glad to see he was going to get a lot of training instead of simply being tossed into the wolves.
Jeongin was all smiles as soon as Chan dragged a chair from the back to sit next to him. The desk was an L-shaped monstrosity with a second level where clients could set down things as well. The laptop and two monitors were hooked together by a docking station, making it easy for others to connect to the stationary monitors and ethernet cable.
"You'll get a laptop like this one once IT starts in on you," Jeongin said. "And all the cubicles have the same thing."
"Do we need so much digital space?" Jisung asked.
Jeongin gave him a look that said he'd asked a stupid question. "Yes. As a matter of fact, you'll sometimes wish there was another monitor. We have to have lots of programs open at once. It's actually a good thing the company spares no expense on our computers."
He opened a program on his laptop that Jisung didn't recognize and pointed to it. "This is our access to the state systems. It's still running on old DOS line-entry style computing. You'll never use function keys half so much as this bloody program does."
"It looks ancient," Jisung said flatly.
"I wasn't even a thought in my mother's mind when it came out. It's older than me by ten years."
Jisung whistled.
"You're not that much younger than me," he said. "Is--"
The door swung open, and all the air in Jisung's lungs evaporated. The man who had ducked through it was gorgeous, busy on his cell phone and not even glancing up at Jeongin before issuing a small greeting.
"Jeongin, hi." His nose was straight, his eyes shaped like a cat's, his upper lip plump. His black hair was carefully styled away from his face, revealing the ethereal beauty. He was gone so fast Jisung had whiplash.
"Who was um... that?" Jisung asked, his voice faint.
"Oh that's Minho. He's one of the six attorneys." Jeongin stared at him. "Are you all right?"
"Oh, yeah, sure, sure, I'm great," Jisung said, too fast, too quick.
"Depending on which alpha you get, you might be working with Minho. His caseworker quit not that long ago. About three weeks."
"Oh. That's. That's cool, I guess." Jisung could tell his voice sounded strangled. Having to work for someone as gorgeous as that would do him in. But he needed this job. Then his brain caught up with what Jeongin had said. "Wait, alpha? Like what are we talking about when you say that?" The only alpha he knew about was fanfiction omegaverse and surely that's not what Jeongin was referring to.
"Work around here is split up by the alphabet by surname,” Jeongin explained. "So Minho's alpha split is A through F."
"Oh. Okay, that makes sense." Jisung nodded. He glanced over his shoulder to the door to the main portion of the office, where Minho had vanished. "Do all the attorneys work in the office?" It was a question he'd thought to ask Chan earlier, because there weren't that many offices.
"No, most of them work from home. Minho and Felix are the only ones who are always in the office."
Great. The hot sexy attorney Jisung thought he couldn't string two words in front of was one of the only attorneys that actually came into the same office where he was to work.
Just then a customer walked in. It was a young woman, no older than twenty, and she leaned against the desk casually.
"Hello, I'm here to speak to Mr. Lee about my case?" She said.
"I'm afraid Mr. Lee is busy," Jeongin said. "What's your name, and I can see if I can help you today."
The woman gave her name, and Jeongin typed it into a NAME function on the old school program. It brought up several people by her name, but Jeongin navigated expertly to one and pulled up another screen. There were extensive notes on the case, dated over the last few days.
"It looks like this case went to court on the third, and we obtained an order from the judge. We're just waiting now on him to sign it and return it to us so we can get it filed. You should get the order in the mail in a few days."
"I wanted to talk to him about the order. It's much too low," she said.
"Did you bring this up in court?"
"Yes, the judge said that it was based off his income. But he's lying about how much he makes."
"I'm afraid without proof of that, the judge made the determination based on the facts in front of him," Jeongin explained calmly.
The woman sighed. "I guess that's all that you can do?"
"Yes, ma'am, I'm afraid so."
She sighed again. "Thank you for your time. I'm going to see if he'll give me his paystubs so the judge can see what I mean." She turned and left via the front door.
Jeongin turned to Jisung. "That happens a lot. The child support is calculated based off both parents' income, and if that's wrong, well... We can fix it, but it takes proof that he's earning ten percent more or less than what the order was based on."
"That seems pretty fair to me," Jisung said. "Which one is Mr. Lee?"
"Oh, that's Minho."
Great, Jisung thought yet again. Not only is the hot attorney the one he's likely to work with, he's also Chan's husband. It looked like he'd have to hide his absolutely massive crush on Minho Lee from the start.
The morning passed by quickly, with Jeongin showing Jisung all the things he'd do on any normal day. Alphabetizing files for the file room, answering the random phone calls that came from other attorneys, taking walk-ins like the woman that morning. There were two small conference rooms in the same room as the little lobby. One of which was where a representative from the office that did DNA testing for paternity cases came in and set up. She sat in the small room off to one side, taking appointments as they arrived. Jeongin had to fill out the forms for her from the information on his laptop.
By the time lunch approached, Jisung's head was spinning from all the new information. The office he now worked for did all kinds of legal legwork for child support and paternity. Now he would be expected soon to manage a caseload of such things.
He was, in a word, overwhelmed.
Jeongin was replaced by one of the intake staff, a man named Seungmin. He greeted Jisung with a polite smile. Jeongin led the way to the break room, where Jisung had stored his packed lunch in the staff refrigerator.
They weren't the only ones in the break room for Iunch. Chan and a man with long blond hair were seated at one of the tables. Two other men were seated at another, one with short cropped bleached blond hair, and the other with black hair like Minho's. They greeted Jeongin on entry to the room, and then Jisung was introduced to Felix (lead attorney), and Hyunjin and Changbin, both caseworkers. Felix was quick to welcome Jisung to the office.
"I heard your birthday is the day before mine," he said excitedly. "That makes us practically twins!"
"No way, really?" Jisung said, his smile bursting out for the first time since Minho had practically ignored him that morning. "That's so cool."
He noticed immediately that Felix wore a white-gold wedding band and feminine engagement ring on his left finger. Just how many of his coworkers were married men? They all seemed to be around his age, though Chan seemed to be the oldest of those working in the office. There were a few older folks among the women. Surely the other attorneys weren't all as young as Felix and Minho were.
He slid into the chair across from Felix and Chan, taking out his small lunch box. "My brain is swimming from everything Jeongin has told me so far."
"That's to be expected," Chan said, sympathetic. "It's a lot of new information coming at you at once. You'll have to sit through some training with Tori this afternoon, and then tomorrow morning I'll have you sit with intake. Probably Seungmin, he knows the best of what he's doing."
"Okay, that sounds like a good plan to me. Intake gets the paperwork from the customers, right?"
Chan nodded. "Yes, that's their role." He glanced at his phone, seeming startled by the time. "I need to get on a meeting with enforcement soon. Have a good rest of your lunch, Jisung. Lixie. Jeongin." He clambered to his feet and left for his office.
"So Felix, have you been here long? You seem to know your way around, too," Jisung asked, taking a bite of his ramen.
"Oh, yes." Felix chuckled. "I've been with the project since the beginning. I'm one of the owners."
Jisung choked on his bite of food, not expecting that at all. Jeongin pounded gently on his back while he reached for his glass of water.
"I'm sorry, I didn't know."
"It's fine. Chan and I don't exactly advertise that we're married in the office much."
Jeongin choked on air, drawing a glare from the older man. "What? It's well known you're together, Felix."
So Minho wasn't married to Chan after all. That didn't change much for him, though. Dating within the organization didn't seem to be frowned upon if the two owners were married, but that still meant Minho was out of Jisung's reach.
Hell, Jisung didn't even know if Minho was gay or bi. He'd literally just watched the man come in for work that morning, looking fine as fuck, so focused on his phone that he barely greeted Jeongin. He hadn't even acknowledged Jisung's presence at all. Jisung really needed to stop spiraling about the gorgeous man.
Jisung's lunch ended without him further embarrassing himself in front of his other new boss. As Chan said, he sat all afternoon with Tori, who was very kind, but all business.
"You've got a lot to learn, but we won't throw you into the deep end. Jeongin showed you the mainframe this morning, so we'll learn about the process beginning to end from here."
Tori showed him a completed application packet, which included a bunch of legal documents that she went over one by one. Each had its function in a court case and missing one would mean that case couldn't proceed.
Then she showed him a completed petition, which was ready to be filed with the court. It was full of legal jargon that made his head swim again, but he asked questions about each new thing he came across. Tori was patient with him, answering each question with a smile.
Jisung would be the one drafting these petitions and sending them out for service. He learned that service often took the longest. Because people would just simply not be home, or they'd dodge the sheriff, or the address they did have turned out to be no good. Once the petition was in the person's hands, then it would go to court where the attorneys would get the orders. He'd have to draft the order based on what the attorneys brought back.
That would be his whole job. He was nervous about drafting legal documents, something he had never done before. Tori assured him it was a lot easier than he was thinking.
"You have a background in computers, which makes this so much easier." She glanced down at the computer and nodded. "It's almost closing time. Feeling pretty good about it so far?"
"I think so." He nodded. "You said I'll get all the training before I'm even going to start getting my logins. How long does that take?"
"The state takes the longest to issue that stuff for the mainframe, so at least four weeks of training before you even start trying to draft your own petitions. You'll probably start doing locates, or something equally simple before you have to draft anything."
"That's good, locates didn't look too difficult." Jisung glanced at the laptop that Tori was using now to note her time for the day. "I think I can do this with as much training as you say I'm going to get."
"You'll get used to all the terms and stuff too. Before long you'll be calling them NCPs and CPs and alleged fathers too."
Jisung shook Tori's hand, and together they headed out to the parking lot. He waved goodbye to his trainer and climbed into his car. It was going to be a long four weeks getting to know this job.
Jisung arrived home, where he lived alone in a small one-bedroom apartment in a less than glamorous portion of town. His prior employment hadn't let him live anywhere near where he was working. His new job paid better than his previous ones did though, and he felt like he could breathe again now that he'd secured it. The benefits were also a nice perk, one he hadn't had before. Maybe he should take advantage of it and make an appointment to see a doctor.
Jisung put his bag on the coffee table, already ready for the weekend. Now that he had weekends off, at least. It was going to take some getting used to, that.
That thought led him to Minho. He paused, his hand on a bottle of wine he had kept for his first day on his new job. It wasn't anything fancy, no cork or anything, but it was enough for him to celebrate with.
But Minho... Jesus, all he'd seen was the guy's face, and all he could do was inwardly drool. He wanted so badly to get to know the hot attorney, but...
What if he was wrong and dating the attorney you reported to was against policy? Surely it was at least frowned upon.
Jisung opened the bottle and poured himself a glass. He had no one he felt he could go to about this. His older brother would just laugh at him. His friends would be sympathetic, but they'd likely have no more idea how to deal with this than he did. He gulped down the first glass of wine, barely tasting it before pouring another.
He firmly put the bottle back in the fridge, with the screw-top in place. Getting wine drunk on a work night surely wouldn't help matters.
How the fuck was he supposed to function day in and day out, working alongside someone as beautiful as Minho? He couldn't decide which was worse: that he had to work under Minho or that he obviously had a crush on him that he couldn't act on.
Jisung put the wine glass in the sink and pulled out a pot to fix his evening ramen in. He would be eating it for the foreseeable future until he got back on his feet, after all. Thankfully he genuinely liked it.
Now all he had to do was figure out how not to make a fool of himself at work.
***
The second day of training, Jisung sat with Seungmin in the morning like Chan had informed him the day before. Intake's whole job was to send out paperwork to customers, follow up on paperwork that hadn't been returned, process paperwork that had been received, and closing cases that people chose not to return paperwork on.
Jisung had never thought about how much paperwork a case for child support might need, having never been party to a case. His parents were both still married to each other and had been since long before he was born.
About halfway through the morning, Minho appeared at Seungmin's desk. He scarcely gave Jisung an inquisitive glance.
"Seungmin, did you manage to get that DRA from Mr. Thomas that I asked for?"
"I did, it's on your Y drive now." Seungmin glanced between Minho and Jisung, a sly smile spreading across his face. "Have you met Jisung yet? He's probably going to take over Sam's old alpha."
"No, I hadn't yet," said the attorney. His smile was small, but still dazzling to Jisung's poor mind. "I'm Minho Lee. Nice to meet you, Jisung."
Jisung managed to crack open his jaw enough to answer the polite smile with one of his own. His face and ears felt hot. "Nice to meet you, I'm Jisung Han."
Minho nodded and stepped back. "Thanks, Minnie."
With that, he was gone as quickly as he came.
"Your face is the color of that old bottle of ketchup in the back of the fridge," Seungmin said, grinning broadly.
Jisung swatted at the air around Seungmin instead of actually hitting him, figuring it would be best not to overreact. He hissed. "Stop, it's not like that!"
"Uh huh. Sure." Seungmin returned his gaze to his laptop. "Anyway, you'll have to ask for the updated DRAs yourself usually, but I was helping Minho out since he doesn't have a caseworker right now assigned to him."
"Is it really okay that I take a whole month of training before he does?"
Seungmin waved Jisung's concern away. "Better you're well trained and halfway decent know what the hell you're doing than you try to figure out how to do half this on your own. Legal docs are finicky things."
Jisung nodded dumbly. He had seen what Seungmin was rejecting when customers filled out the legal documents incorrectly. Things like writing the child's entire name instead of just initials or full dates of birth instead of just the year. He could imagine what the petitions and orders needed to look like if they were so picky about that kind of stuff on the legal documents customers completed.
But Jisung's mind wasn't all on the legal processes he was supposed to be learning about. His mind kept going back to the smile on Minho's face when he'd introduced himself. To the way he carried himself, confident and sure of what he was after. To the way his ears turned brilliant scarlet as he walked away…
At lunch, Jisung sat at the table with Felix and Chan again. Chan was pleased with his progress in training, after the reports from Jeongin, Tori, and Seungmin came in.
"I think you'll fit in really well here," Felix added, taking a bite of his sandwich. He glanced down at Jisung's bowl of ramen, but didn't comment on it.
"Thank you, that means a lot to me," Jisung said. He smiled brightly.
"Is Minho eating in his office again?" Changbin asked from across the room. "He's almost always in here at this time."
Jisung tried not to wilt.
Minho had eaten in his office both days he had worked so far?
Did he just not like new people?
Or was this specific to him?
Jisung can't get Minho's absence from the break room out of his head. Obviously, he's avoiding him, the new weirdo in the office. Minho had built a fortress between them already. He had barely met the man. Jisung stared down at the remains of his cooling ramen, unable to come up with any scenario where Minho wasn't actively avoiding interacting with him. How had he offended his attorney so quickly? Or, barring that, did Minho just not want an incompetent person like Jisung creating his legal documents?
Felix's hand grasped Jisung's, stilling the spiral in his mind with the touch.
"Hey, are you okay? Chan just told you that you were doing fine. It's only your second day."
Jisung was grateful Felix had no idea what was really going on in his head. "Yeah, I'll be okay. Thank you."
Felix looked at him like he wasn't quite sure if he believed him.
"You're winding yourself up over nothing," Felix said gently. Whether he knew the real reason for Jisung's near-panic attack or not, the gentle tone reached Jisung's internal alarm bells and managed to shut them down.
"I'll be okay," Jisung repeated, stronger and closer to meaning it this time.
He really did. Minho hiding in his office shouldn't be his issue. It shouldn't.
It couldn't be him.
Right?