Title: The Office
Author: tsuki_llama
Rating: Teen–Mature (varies)
Genre: Slice of Life/Drama
Status: WIP-Series, (collectively 185k words as of 2019-08)
Pairings: Hei/Misaki
Summary: from "The Informant": An alternate path in which Hei's team discovers something about the Syndicate's plans sooner, and decide to ask for help.
Link: https://archiveofourown.org/series/483635

"The Office" is a series of Darker than Black AU snippets with the premise that sometime post-anime Season 1 Hei joins up with Section 4. The snippets range from 1k oneshots to 50k+ mini arcs and have been written anachronistically, so you might find that at some point the author has shoved in a snippet that takes place halfway through the series. Fortunately, they generally reorder their series list whilst doing it so the link above has everything in chronological order.

The series is mostly slice of life and borderline WAFFy, with some snippets dealing with Hei trying to navigate office politics or (avoid) asking his new coworkers on how to arrange a date. There are at least three longer stories, however, which are a bit more serious and deal with the setup for the premise (#1: "The Informant"), attempts at normalisation gone wrong (#12: "The Therapist"), or the eventual meet the family (#17: "The Shifu"). There are certain parts which jump into mature territory, but for the most part the snippets are rated Teen.

Good:
I think I've mentioned in previous reviews that I'm a sucker for slice-of-life fics. There, that's out of the way.

Spoiler

The author, I feel, does a good job of meshing together the personalities of Darker than Black's "Black Reaper" and "Li Shengshun" personas to words. Whilst Chinese Electric Batman isn't actively hiding how badass he is to his coworkers, he's obviously still stuck in a mindset of trying not to draw attention to himself and downplaying as much as possible, even when he's vaulting cars, running walls, and tackling baddies through storefront windows. The smaller snippets play up the adorkableness as much as possible as well and Misaki feels like a decent foil as a competent officer who is trying to encourage him to act in ways that justify her trust in a known assassin.

Meh:
At the same time some of the characterisation for the supporting cast is a bit flanderised, though there are moments of brilliance. While there's not a whole lot to their characterisation from the anime and OAVs, we have the 'office archetypes' in the officers of Section 4: the Office Flirt, the Office Professional, the Office Old Wise Man, and the Token Female.

Bad:
No Yin.

The author tends to write somewhat haphazardly. Being a sort of snippet collection the plot and chronology is all over the place, plus the author will pick up and drop plotlines for the larger stories seemingly at whim without completing one first. For example, the series began with several snippets that are now somewhere in the middle of the pile, THEN "The Informant" was written... dropped, more snippets, lighthearted shenanigans with "The Therapist", then more snippets, "Informant" is completed... etc etc etc.

tl;dr—there's not a whole lot of DtB fanfics out there so this author really grabbed my attention. I personally rate it a 4/5 although I know SOL is not everyone's cup of tea.

Fortunately, there's a somewhat more serious series by the same author: "Distractions"
Still elements of SOL and WAFF but it's a bit more serious and plot-heavy (335k in the collection with nearly all of the stories being 10k words or more). Unfortunately it's updated much less frequently than "The Office", but on the other hand it has my single favourite short story by the author "Wine & Sympathy"... mostly cuz Yin features pretty heavily.