Chapter Text
2024
Sorting the post was not in Jo Yeong's job description. Any of his jobs. Ever. Any of the ones he'd applied for, anyway. It had, however, become a part of being friends with a man who had no other friends and that friendship was more valuable to him than nearly anything else in any world.
It had started with a sporadic series of text messages on that friend's wife's phone, all very short and to the point. It later progressed to written notes because of character limits and more complicated requests for information or coordination. Eventually, there were care packages, too--snacks that couldn't be acquired on one side sent to the other, and the like. Before too long he was writing real, honest-to-god letters to his counterpart, asking for advice on topics like pregnancy and parenting, or simply using him as a sounding board for problem-solving at work because it was like talking to himself but a version of himself that knew things he didn't and it was always easier to talk to someone who wasn't involved in the problem, themselves. He got similar letters in return. Before he knew it, there were other letters from and to other people he barely knew and he was collecting them all for a small packet that was traded for a different packet in a dead drop location he'd set up with the help of persons with espionage experience but he wouldn't get to see in action for several more months. That new set was then sorted into piles (though piles was the wrong word since there really weren't that many) to be delivered to his wife, his friend, his friend's wife, or a certain coworker he never actually interacted with because he just tossed those into one of the ubiquitous reusable manilla envelopes of the internal delivery network. If that contact had a package, a blank sticky note was sent that was later exchanged for whatever item had been left on a certain shelf in his office.
For all the seeming complexity, if he had to sit down and explain it all to someone (and he had, once), at least it all blended in nicely with the paperwork that already covered his desk in neat little stacks, so no one noticed that he'd added Inter-Universal Postmaster General to his recently-created list of Utterly Ridiculous Job Titles I Never Signed Up For, right next to Best Friends With An Emperor. Because when you've killed people (a lot of people) to save someone's life and he then makes sure your bullet-riddled carcass makes it back home before you have the chance to die for king and country, you're willing to put up with all kinds of stupidity for his sake.