Wednesday

Sehun bites his lower lip and wipes a hand across his forehead, where small droplets of sweat threaten to fall down. His heart thumps loudly in his chest, an irregular staccato that skips a beat whenever Sehun makes a move. He’s close now. Closer than he ever was.

He swallows thickly before carefully sliding over the dark yellow tile. 1024. Almost there.

“Yo, amigo!” A heavy, blue binder is thrown on his desk, knocking Sehun’s phone out of his hands. It slides across his desk and topples over the edge. Sehun reaches out with a yelp, fumbling as his fingers fail to get a grip and he loses his balance, landing face-down on the ugly green carpet of the office floor, right next to his iPhone. He scrambles to turn the device around, only to see the mocking brown letters plastered across a full board. Game Over. Try again? Sehun groans and drops his head back on the carpet in defeat. So close.

Above him, Luhan whistles as he leans over Sehun’s desk, looking down at his younger colleague. “You know, you’ve got some good reflexes for a guy who spends his time playing mind-numbing games during work hours.” The desk creaks dangerously as Luhan sits on top of it, knocking over Sehun’s pencil holder in the process. “Speaking of work, I’ve finally found a neat little job for you so hold on to your breeches, comrade.”

Sehun scrambles upright, grabbing his office chair for support as he hauls himself back up. “For your information, 2048 requires a lot of mental effort, and I won’t have you judge my lifestyle-choices when I know for a fact you keep an old Nokia in your drawer to play Snake while you take your two o’clock dump in the old bathroom on the fourth floor.”

Luhan scowls. “, and here I was, thinking I still had some privacy left in this world.”

“In this office, nothing is sacred,” Sehun smirks. The words have barely left his mouth when Baekhyun peeks around the corner of the office shared by Luhan, Sehun and Chanyeol.

“Sup, losers. Anyone up for drinks tonight? Minseok’s dating a chick from human resources and I’m gonna force all the dirty details out of him with the help of some whisky and some botched internal reports,” Baekhyun grins.

Sehun wonders for the umpteenth time if whoever put Baekhyun in charge of IT has already realised his mistake. It had taken Sehun about one week weeks to figure out why Chanyeol and Luhan preferred to use pen and paper for internal memos, since Baekhyun seemed to spend most of his time messing with files on the shared server (and getting away with it, probably because their department’s supervisor Minseok was about as tech-savvy as a shoelace).

Sehun opens his mouth to answer but Luhan beats him to it. “I’m coming, Sehun’s staying behind,” he says, gently tapping the massive binder on the desk. He turns to Sehun again. “It’s a print-out of every brief regarding the Ddaengbok case. I need you to cross-check these with the references I mailed you, Chanyeol is gonna need them tomorrow when he returns from Busan. Summarize and comment, you know the drill. You can send the rest to the archive.”

A horrified Sehun eyes the large stack under Luhan’s hand. “You’re making me do this now? At 5pm?” he asks incredulously.

Luhan makes a noncommittal shrug and points at his extremely cluttery desk. “Didn’t find it until now. Have fun!”

Baekhyun cackles. “Snap, Luhan, what happened on going easy on the new kid?”

Luhan stands up and walks over to Baekhyun, snagging his jacket from the hook. "He's been here for seven months, I'd say our young grasshopper has had the princess treatment long enough."

"Hey!" Sehun objects.

"Has it been seven months already? Damn, they grow up so fast," Baekhyun sighs.

"I'm only a few years younger than all of you," Sehun says.

Luhan turns around and shushes him. “Baekhyun, do you hear that?”

“...Hear what?” Baekhyun asks.

“It’s the sweet sound of Sehun being the only one who has to work overtime, again.”

Baekhyun guffaws. Sehun does his best kicked puppy impression, but unfortunately Luhan isn’t as easily swayed as Chanyeol.

“You’re not even my boss!”

Sehun officially reports to Chanyeol, but Luhan is in charge whenever the taller man is out in the field (which thankfully doesn’t happen too often).

“Bye, Sehun!” Baekhyun calls over his shoulder as he retreats back into the hallway. Luhan throws him a thumbs up before ducking out of the office as well.

Sehun slouches back into his seat, eyeing the paperwork with apprehension. He had never expected being a paralegal at a medium-sized company like theirs would require him to work overtime. Of course, no one was waiting for him at home and since he got his permanent contract a month ago, he was getting paid for those hours too - but it was starting to cut in on his video game time, and Sehun wasn’t sure if he was ambitious enough to sacrifice that for his job.

With a heavy sigh, he sets to work.

*

It’s past nine pm when Sehun finally leaves, shuffling past the maintenance crew on his way out. His apartment is just a 5 minute subway ride away from the office but his legs feel stiff from sitting down for too long so he decides to walk the distance instead and pick up some dinner at the new Big Hit Chicken that recently opened close to his home, to treat himself for a job well done.

*

Twenty-five minutes and eleven thousand won later, Sehun clutches the large bag of fried chicken against his chest as he unlocks the front door of his 1 bedroom-apartment. It’s a little larger than he should’ve been able to afford but the noise of the karaoke bar on the top floor and the smell of the seafood restaurant below his apartment have driven down the rent - low enough for Sehun to live by himself in the spacious home.

He’s just about to take off his shoes when he feels his phone vibrate in the back pocket of his slacks. He glances at his phone and sees Joonmyun’s bright smile flash across the screen before he accepts the call.

“So you’re still alive, huh?” Sehun grunts into the receiver as he pulls at his shoelaces with one hand, leaning awkwardly against the wall to keep his balance.

“Hey, that’s no way to greet your favorite cousin,” Joonmyun replies in a mock-offended tone.

“Hyung, it’s been two months.”

“I know, I’m sorry. I’ve been a little… busy.”

Sehun and Joonmyun had been close since their childhood, and had followed very similar paths in life - mostly because Sehun had taken to following his older cousin’s example from a very early age, sticking to Joonmyun like his shadow, even professionally (although Joonmyun, the brains of the family, had come out on top of his law class at Seoul University while Sehun had given up in his second year, settling for the far-less promising career of being a legal assistant instead). It wasn’t until a year ago, when Sehun learned about his cousin’s after work activities, he started seeing less of him (mostly at Joonmyun’s insistence, claiming “plausible deniability will protect you”).

Sehun didn’t know what the biggest shock was: finding out about his well-groomed, straight-as-a-board, disciplined cousin moonlighting as an extremist animal rights activist, or realizing his cousin had been so passionate about something for years and had kept it a secret from Sehun. Sure, Joonmyun had always had a soft spot for animals, even badgering Sehun into doing volunteer work with him at a local shelter a few years ago (Sehun got scratched by a cat on the very first day and insisted his finger would need amputating - the owners politely told him they would “no longer be needing his services”). After moving off campus, Joonmyun’s apartment would usually be home to at least two or three strays - birds, cats, rats, even an adult Mastiff once (“Admittedly, not my brightest idea ever” - Joonmyun).

So perhaps Joonmyun’s complete inability to refuse help to an animal in need and his master’s dissertation title ("Animal hybrid rights in the 21st century: analysis of South-Korea’s anti-discrimination laws and their furry loopholes") should’ve been red flags - but finding out Joonmyun had spent a large chunk of his time in college founding an underground group of animal rights activists to execute guerilla actions that, more often than not, strayed into illegal territory, had completely come out of left field for Sehun. Joonmyun claimed he hadn’t told Sehun because he didn’t want to get his cousin into trouble.

After Joonmyun’s fourth arrest, Sehun was starting to agree with him.

He’d picked up his rebellious hyung at the police station in the early hours when he was released on bail after he got caught releasing a bunch of ferrets from a farm just outside the city. Joonmyun smiled mischieviously as he greeted him dressed in a longsleeved turtleneck sweater, black skinny jeans and moss green beanie, a far cry from the dresspants/starched white shirt/black tie combo Sehun was used to seeing him in. There was a scratch on his cheek and his messy hair peeked out from under the beanie.

“You look way too happy for a man who just got arrested,” Sehun had remarked.

“Three hundred ferrets have been freed tonight, I am a happy man. Besides, I’ve got the legal system on my side,” Joonmyun had said as he buckled up in the passenger’s seat.

“Let me guess, they had to let you go because of some technicality?”

“Well, I’m not out of the woods yet, but I’ll find a way to get off the hook somehow,” Joonmyun had replied confidently (he did, which only proved to Sehun what a brilliant lawyer Joonmyun could’ve been if he hadn’t been so insistent on settling for a mid-level job at a small firm and getting arrested all the time).

Now, whenever Joonmyun disappeared off Sehun’s radar for a while, he knew Joonmyun was working on a big ‘project’, and that it definitely wasn’t legal.

“Are you okay? Do you need me to pick you up somewhere?” Sehun can’t keep the worry out of his voice. He pads into the kitchen, carefully placing the bag of take-out on the counter.

“Yes, I’m okay and no, but I do need a favor.”

Sehun groans inwardly and contemplates putting the food away in the fridge instead. Last time Joonmyun asked him for ‘a small favor’, Sehun had ended up buying 25 kilograms of frozen fish, trying his hardest to ignore the news report of a young polar bear getting kidnapped from Seoul Zoo showing on the old tv-set behind the counter at the supermarke