office!au

morethantheycansay asked:

Jelsa + office/workplace AU for 3 sentence fic please?

The early morning fog made Elsa's corner office feel oddly reminiscent of just last week when she'd sat atop the Austrian Alps, sipping fresh dark coffee from her balcony, wondering if Anna truly needed her back in the office by Monday... and knowing all the while that she'd be back, according to schedule, no matter what.

You have no choice.

She stamped down the tiny whisperings of resentment and bitterness and curiosity, and you don't want to be here, you've never wanted to be here, as she meticulously arranged her notes for the morning meeting. Elsa cleared her mind as she sat in her cold, crisp office on the 118th floor, sipping homemade decaf coffee from her familiar thermos, unable to keep from wondering what the look on Anna's face might be, if she—in all her leadership, all her efficiency, all her planning and honesty and meticulous preparations—ever actually found the nerve to step down, step back, step away, and let Anna rise up in her stead, to take control of the company that Elsa had always been too efficient not to lead but had never truly wanted.

"Oh," a voice cut through Elsa's useless daydreaming so quickly she actually started—and was therefore all the more annoyed for it when she saw a young man—James? John? Jacob? she should really know Anna's new temp by now, but she was slipping so quickly, so distracted these days—"My bad, I thought you'd probably want one but it looks like you already got yours."

Elsa glanced to his arms—full of three carriers, honestly, who had sent him out for so many coffees at once, and who did she need to have a word with about the way this company treated their temporary staff?—and then her gaze landed on the compostable to-go cup of black iced coffee labeled decaf and, to her mild horror and amusement, scary boss.

"Uh," he—Jason? Jameson?—was blushing, when he, too, saw the label. Good, she thought, ruthlessly. "Um. They weren't supposed to write that down."

Elsa raised a single brow.

"But!" he was grinning, clearly caught out and not anxious about it in the slightest, and suddenly Elsa had many questions about Anna's newest addition to her staff. (Elsa deliberated—cold and stern? gracious and merciful?—and settled for something in between.) He was starting to back away, anyhow, toward the door, "I didn't realize you bring your coffee from home, and you already have one, so, I won't bother you—"

"If not to me, then to whom might you deliver it?" He froze. She held her thermos aloft, looking him carefully in the eye, so that he could see the gentle curve of her smirk—she saw the edge of tension in his shoulders lessen, watched the glow of his face in early morning skyscraper fog slide into something easier, something more playful.

Interesting.

Disrespect? No, she would have smelled that a mile away.

Unprofessional? A little, certainly, but Elsa—look at what you're doing this very moment?

She watched his eyes flip through possible answers like a gameshow contestant, and he tentatively offered, "... Anna?"

Elsa grinned in spite of herself, at the clear lie within; Anna had many worthy leadership qualities, but she'd always been more approachable than Elsa, no matter the day. Intimidating? When Anna wanted to be, sure. Scary? Hardly.

"A worthy answer," she praised, which had the most interesting result of him lighting up—and blushing again. He was clearly harmless.

Oh, what the hell.

Elsa carefully moved a stack of paperwork—crisp, tidy, ready to be ignored for review—to the side, and pulled a second coaster from its stack, then gently laid the coaster on the corner of her desk. And waited.

"Oh. You don't have to—I mean—"

"Jack," she commanded, as his name flooded back to her in a sudden sweep of memory; Anna had mentioned something about being very excited to hire him on for the next month or two, something about helping a friend-of-a-friend-of-a-friend who was down on his luck. "Leave the coffee."

He grinned, clearly pleased with himself. Perhaps a bit too pleased with himself... She stamped down the sudden self-doubt and alarm; it was good for employee morale to keep spirits high and to show some of her humanity whenever she could—snow queen, ice queen, they whispered, when they were too careless to recognize that she had eyes and ears everywhere in this kingdom of hers—but this. Was this too much? What have I done?

He did not immediately provide any relief on that front as he walked up to her desk with a truly shit-eating grin that was already grating along her spine. He carefully balanced all three carriers and delivered her iced coffee to her coaster with an alarmingly apt degree of coordination. Elsa blinked.

"Black, decaf, light ice," he grinned, righting himself and his coffee carriers. "What should I ask them to write on your cup, next time?"

My name? she thought dryly, then paused. For reasons she could not quite pin down, she gave him a level stare and said, "Surprise me."

She'd assumed he couldn't light up any further, but clearly, she was wrong.

With an aye, aye, madam! and an exaggeratedly playful wink—which completely caught her off-guard—he easily and gracefully backed out of the ajar door to her office, which he gently nudged open with his foot—his foot!! like it were a barn door or something!—with 11 more cups of coffee deftly balanced in his capable hands, and was gone.

Elsa suddenly eyed the drink on her desk with a mixture of shock, alarm, and curiosity, knowing deep in her bones that her well-established routine was thoroughly and utterly disrupted. She reminded herself again that he would be gone in only a matter of weeks, anyway; Elsa remembered something now from Anna about how Jack was moving between jobs, between states, floating from place to place, so all of this would be over before it started—before what started, Elsa?! So, really, there was no cause for alarm.

Elsa sipped her unnecessary, uninvited, decaf, black, light-ice, iced coffee, and gazed into the morning New York City fog, and wondered.

♡ image

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original date: June 19, 2024 @ 1:59pm

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check the pipes for frost — “epilogue” ;

Anonymous asked:

Hey I just wanna ask you about the epilogue of [check the pipes for frost]. Do you still plan to write one? cuz I really couldn’t forget about it, thinking about what will happen all time. Does Jack give those lovely letters to Elsa? Does Elsa invite Jack to her apartment? Do they kiss and kiss and kiss? OMG I’m so into this fanfic.

There’s a moment when Elsa isn’t sure what she’s really looking at. There’s the bagel shop: there’s the giant wall of glass, so clean it’s more a mirror than a window; the trees dotted along the sidewalk and the space between them; she’s there, in the window, holding her phone with both hands, and a half-formed sentence in an unsent text: Where are

He’s behind her.

She can see his reflection in the glass, and he’s behind her.

How many hours, days, weeks; how much agony; how much, exactly, has been leading her to this moment? A crucial, pivotal, surreal and exciting moment, longed for and yearned for and so truly beyond comprehension that she still cannot believe it’s happening, and yet the very first thing that strikes her is that he’s wearing sunglasses.

Everything about her life seems suddenly ridiculous.

He’s taller than she realized. His shoulders sweep broad and long and for some reason she’s unprepared for that fact, this figure, one that she’d actually known the measurements to (180 centimeters he’d said, just short of 6 foot) and had imagined a thousand times (even that one night in the privacy of her kitchen in which she’d held a ruler above her head while examining the hallway mirror) but had never, not once, had she actually envisioned him properly.

In less than a second she’s realized that he’s wearing jeans—the very same dirty pair that he’d complained to Sandy about not more than a few hours ago. There’s a belt with them—a black one, and in the eternity of her tiny, private moment of processing she sees that his belt is so well-worn that there’s fraying around the buckle, clear cracks in the fake leather. His shoes are basic tennis shoes, black and sensible and laceless. It suits him, that he wouldn’t want the nuisance of tying his own shoes.

The navy blue thermal shirt that he’s wearing is fitted across a broad chest, and though he’s not particularly muscular, it holds snugly against his arms. He’s holding his phone. In the direct sunlight, his hair is ever more a shocking shade of almost silver-blond.

His hair is a mess.

There’s a noise—they’re in the middle of the street, in the broad daylight, in full view of the public—and the noise is coming from him. A shout of delight, halfway towards an actual yell—he rips off his sunglasses and moves toward her so quickly she drops her phone, and in the moment before she’s swept up into a pair of arms and her feet leave the ground, she sees that her phone is still awake, her messaging app still wide open as it lies abandoned in the grass. She can’t breathe.

She’s laughing. She’s laughing into his ear and it’s—it’s absurd, that he’s here right now, and that she’s here, and that they’re here, together, in the same place at the same time after all of these months and these messages and these phone calls and these Skype sessions and is it really possible? Really? Is she dreaming?

He’s laughing into her ear. His arms are not bulky but they are long and sturdy and they lift her without any struggle, and just as she begins to worry that perhaps they are making a scene—how long has she been held aloft? how long has he been holding her?—his breathless laugh turns trembling, all soft and fragile hope and, “I can’t believe it.”

Elsa realizes her arms are around his shoulders. Her feet have left the ground completely and her legs have bent at the knee; her heels have crossed behind her, like an actress from an old film. She squeezes.

They’re spinning. Is he twirling her or has the ground begun to sway? Is the earth revolving faster? Her phone is still on the ground. She has the irrational fear that he will step on it in the same instant that she realizes that Jackson Overland smells utterly and truly delicious.

Jack stops so abruptly that the force of it all still has her swinging even as he plants his heels into the concrete. He steadies her, unbalanced and uneven and this sturdy grip upon her shoulders feels so familiar in a way that she can’t describe, that couldn’t have been learned from six mere months of written and online communication, and yet—?

I love you, she wants to say, staring at the blue sky as Jack holds her tight and she presses her right cheek into his ear. He’s letting her down gently, but his arms are trembling, and his laughter sounds breathless and wild and—

“Oh my god, you’re bleeding,” she says, looking down at the trail of blood from Jack’s index finger, dripping from the space between his first and second knuckle, which is, indeed—bleeding.

Jack looks down so quickly that he drops her the final inch towards the ground and Elsa’s heels jar horribly onto the pavement.

“Oh, shit,” Jack says, in front of the bagel shop, from inside which Elsa can now see a rather curious crowd of customers observing them as they eat their perfectly normal morning bagel sandwiches, which is absolutely mortifying.

And that, ladies and gentlemen, is how Elsa and Jack finally meet.