#office rivalry

A comment in a meeting that sounded suspiciously like the idea you floated in the group chat three days ago. A nod from your team leader that landed on him instead of you. A “great job, Jungkook,” when you were the one whose eye had twitched compiling a fifty-page report.

One thing led to another, and suddenly:

He’s in your seat in the weekly performance review.

He’s in your place on the email threads, Teams chats and Zoom meetings.

He’s in the front row, presenting your pitch, with your graphs, and your politely homicidal smile forced into a supportive expression in the background.

You do not consider yourself a vengeful person.

Truly. You recycle. You respond to emails within 24 hours. You once let someone take the last chocolate muffin in the break room without cursing their entire bloodline.

You really don’t.

But Jungkook has thirty-seven pens on his desk.

And every single one of them is blue.

Blue ink.

Blue barrels.

Blue caps.

Blue souls.

You know this because you’ve counted them before—during one particularly long conference call when the client said “circling back” ten times and your only comfort was silently calculating how much Jungkook’s stationery obsession could fund a small pen museum.

He arranges them in little clusters: the “today pens,” the “meeting pens,” the “absolutely-not-for-lending pens.” 

He has a system. He polishes them with the sleeve of his shirt. He glares at anyone who dares touch them. They’re his emotional support pens. His emotional support blue pens.

So you steal them all.

You do it quietly, professionally, like a woman with a mission and an Excel sheet.

It begins at 9:41am, when he leaves for his “quick” coffee break—meaning anywhere between 10 and 27 minutes, depending on how flirtatious the barista is and how existential his mood is that morning.

Step one: scan the office.

Your team leader is in a meeting. Hollie from HR is nowhere to be seen, probably busy crafting another “Remember, we’re a family :)” email. The interns are whisper-fighting over the printer. Curtis from IT has his headphones on and looks spiritually divorced from reality.

Perfect.

A handful of pens disappear into your tote, sliding between your planner and your lunch.

Another handful slips up your sleeve with the precision of a magician pulling off a trick no one paid to see.

One is tucked into your hair like a weapon, the clip anchoring perfectly into your bun.

You move like you’re conducting a heist and balancing a looming deadline—fluid, focused, mildly stressed.

By the time Jungkook returns from his suspiciously long coffee break, his desk is empty.

Completely.

Utterly.

Beautifully barren.

It looks almost minimalist now. Clean. Peaceful. Like the desk of someone who doesn’t make your blood pressure spike.

You sit at your own desk, typing calmly—the picture of corporate innocence. The scent of burnt office coffee hangs faintly in the air. Someone’s keyboard clacks too loudly in the distance. The air-con is too cold, as always.

And then the door opens.

Jungkook stops dead in the doorway.

“…No,” he whispers.

You don’t look up.

You can feel him behind you though, like static. His sneakers squeak against the carpet as he takes hesitant, disbelieving steps toward his desk.

He opens his top drawer.

Then the second.

Then the third.

The sound of each drawer rattling open is deeply, deeply satisfying.

“No, no, no—”

The pitch of his voice climbs with each drawer like he’s narrating the stages of grief in real time.

He whirls around. “Did you take them?”

You finally look up, blinking slowly, your expression is the human embodiment of a shrug.

“Take what?”

“My pens,” he says, voice cracking like he’s recounting trauma to a therapist. “My blue ones.”

You let your gaze flick lazily to his desk. Then back to him. His hair is a little messier than before, like he’s run his hands through it on the walk back from the café. There’s a tiny smear of coffee foam on his lip. 

It annoys you that you notice.

“Why would I do that?” you ask, sipping your coffee—with his favourite pen in your bun like a crown.

You make sure the pen’s clip catches the light when you tilt your head. It glints—a royal blue halo above your face.

Jungkook’s eyes track the movement automatically. His stare catches on your hair. On the pen. You watch the exact moment the penny drops.

He looks personally betrayed.

“You know I can’t write with black ink,” he says, devastated. He says it like some people might say, “You know I’m allergic to peanuts,” or “You know I was abandoned at a train station as a child.”

“That sounds like a personal problem,” you reply, letting the words roll off your tongue with the practiced ease of someone who has been rehearsing this moment in front of the bathroom mirror.

You turn back to your monitor, clicking to the next slide, pretending his mild meltdown is not the highlight of your week.

He doesn’t move away.

Instead, you feel him lean closer. His desk chair creaks quietly as he plants a hand on the edge of your desk, bending toward you until his cologne and coffee-breath mix into something familiar and annoyingly distracting.

Too close.

Definitely not HR-approved proximity.

His voice drops, low enough that only you can hear it over the background noise of phones ringing and keyboards rattling.

“I will get you back for this.”

You feel it more than hear it, the soft vibrato of his words skimming over your skin. It shouldn’t do anything to you. 

It does. You hate that.

You smirk.

Tiny. Controlled. Weaponised.

“Checkmate,” you murmur, not bothering to hide the satisfaction in your tone.

For a second, the corner of his mouth twitches—like he’s fighting a smile he has no business having in this conversation.

“Game on,” he says quietly.

Then he straightens, walks back to his tragically empty, penless desk, opens a drawer, sighs miserably at its contents—or lack thereof—and, with the deepest possible reluctance, picks up a lone black biro from the communal stationery pot.

You watch him out of the corner of your eye as he stares at it like it’s personally offended his ancestors.

He uncaps it.

Hovers it over a sticky note.

Winces. 

“Ugh,” he mutters.

You take another sip of your coffee, stealing one more glance at the blue pen in your hair.

He took your promotion. Your project. Your first kiss.

You took his thirty-seven pens.

Seems fair. For now.

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