SHINee Fic Mix 2011 - kat_elric
Title: Curious Coincidences
Author: Kat_elric
Pairing: slight Onew/Taemin Onew/Minho Key/Jonghyun
Rating: PG-13
Author’s Notes: It took me forever to figure out something to write for this because the original was just that enjoyable. I hope that this is enjoyable as well.
Original Work: Alternative Advances by black_goose
Curious Coincidences
or: this is why we don’t play games at work
“And you go in ‘S’,” he mused cheerfully sliding the folder into its new home in the drawer ignoring the fact that the neatly printed name neither contained nor started with the letter ‘s’. With that done he ambled out of the filing room and back to his desk for a quick game of solitaire before the time for a coffee break rolled around. Not his coffee break of course, interns didn’t get such a thing even if they were paid a meager sum, but the coffee break for his superiors which he would undoubtedly have to go fetch.
His job wasn’t bad, in fact it was every little boy’s dream assuming, of course, that the little boy liked to poke at and inspect things that had already passed on. His mother had always told him that he should play with this or that as a boy and the dead cat he had carted home had disturbed her, but she hardly protested now when he played with dead things. It seemed like a boring job but one that he rather enjoyed.
He had just been defeated in a round of solitaire and switched his attention to a game of minesweeper when a voice called for him. “Taemin, what did you file Kim Kil-bang under?”
“F,” he answered honestly suppressing a grin, “for Fat Bastard.” He could hear the lecture before it began, tuning most of it out since he knew the script by heart. Some people simply never appreciated his attempts to make the office place a lighter one to be in. Offices were boring enough without all of the dead bodies coming and going.
He exchanged a retort with his boss and was, as he had expected, sent out for coffee. No matter, he enjoyed the different activities of his day, even if they had little to do with what he was actually earning a degree in. Still he turned back to his computer to finish the game of minesweeper, a process that only took seven clicks before he accidentally exploded a mine. Clearly it was not his day for computer games.
The expensive clothing of the detective visiting their office had been noted when he had delivered their coffee and forgotten shortly thereafter; forgotten, of course, until the detective had walked stiffly out of the office and with a rather telling stain on his pants, in a fairly peculiar location. Either there had been something very unprofessional going on in the meeting, which he doubted his boss Onew had the guts for, or something unfortunate had happened. He was willing to bet it was the latter that was the truth.
His suspicions forced him to pause on the papers he was filling out, work for once, and reach to his white board. The small object had been a gift to him upon his arrival by the pretty little secretary by the name of Luna. Taemin was certain she had intended the object to be used to keep track of things of importance. He had put it to good use thus far. In one corner, written in red, was the current number of solitaire games he had won, the ones he had lost had no place on the board. In the other corner in blue was the number of minesweeper games played so far. The middle contained other important information such as the last thing they had for lunch or the time of the last coffee break.
Taemin dug a green marker out of his desk and uncapped it. At the top of his board he carefully printed ‘Onew-condition vs. Expensively Dressed Detective’. Under Onew’s name he printed a one and under the detective’s he printed a careful zero, a number that he wasn’t certain would be changing in the near future.
The end of the work day was possibly one of his favorite times on the job. There was simply something about knowing that the day was coming to a close that always made him brighten, although that could also be caused by the opportunity to annoy his boss and anyone left in his vicinity for too long. The only person he couldn’t seem to annoy was the one person he was currently avoiding, Key.
It wasn’t that he didn’t like the man, or didn’t enjoy his company, there were simply things he would rather not do with his coworkers after work. Clubbing with Key was one of those things.
“Why don’t you want to go clubbing with Key?” Onew asked him, genuinely curious.
“Because I don’t think he will take me to conventional clubs,” Taemin informed him. In fact he was almost certain that Key would not do any such thing simply because he wanted to see Taemin squirm as some form of revenge for the daily irritations. “And my boyishly good looks tend to drive gay guys crazy. Gay guys and older women, actually. You’ve noticed the way Kibum-hyung acts around me, that’s because in Kibum-hyung both categories are mixed up.” He had had more than one night with gay men panting after him and although he didn’t particularly mind the attention. Drunken gay guys tended to be a bit more touchy-feely.
“That’s strange,” Onew began, “You don’t drive me crazy.”
His brain stuttered to a stop at those words. Taemin, for most of his life, had felt that he had a rather well functioning radar that could pinpoint homosexuals with an incredible accuracy. Onew hadn’t even made a blip on his radar. “Hyung, you mean--” he began, but Onew was bidding him good night and sneaking out the door before he could get conformation.
Taemin’s mind was still peacefully blipping in blank confusion when Key walked back into the room. By the time he got his brain wrapped around the idea of Onew actually being of a homosexual persuasion Key was asking him that dreaded question. A minute later Taemin found himself reasonably baffled and of all things, in need of a cat.
Once morning rolled around and he was seated in his chair on the second round of Angry Birds for the morning, he felt he had a significant grasp of the nature of things in the office once more. Not that it was ever a wise idea to harbor less then innocent ideas about one’s boss, but at least for the moment he didn’t feel quite so guilty for it. In fact, he had been toying with the idea of casually beginning to flirt with his boss, subtly of course, in a way that Onew probably wouldn’t see until it was pointed out to him. The question was how.
He was in the midst of forming a mental list while simultaneously decimating the evil pigs when he heard Onew and Key’s voices carrying around the corner to his desk. It seemed that even Key had a dirty little secret, although he couldn’t say that he was ultimately surprised by that. Key just struck him as the type of person to have at least one little dirty secret about a night without limitations and it was rather amusing that it had come back to haunt the man. Unfortunately Taemin was certain that any attempt to tease or otherwise mention said secret, would result in a rather unhappy Key and an unpleasant work environment for him.
Without the option of safely pestering Key he was left with his only other form of newly discovered entertainment, flirting with his boss. “Hyung,” he called sticking his head around the corner using his sweetest voice. “You want some more coffee?”
“I have lunch,” Taemin said brightly, bringing the take out bags to the small desk in the corner of the room. It was far enough away from the lab equipment that no one felt worried about eating something they shouldn’t.
“Thanks,” Key grunted, looking decidedly sour.
“Where is Onew hyung?” Taemin asked seemingly innocently.
“Out to lunch, with Detective Minho,” Key grumbled.
“The one he spilled stuff on?” Taemin asked, pulling out a takeout box.
“The exact one,” Key poured something into a test tube and capped it without any fanfare.
“Oh,” Taemin replied. His boss was allowed to eat lunch with anyone that he liked; it simply wasn’t often that Onew actually did so with someone he was working with outside of their office.
Key paused, finally looking at him in a form of study. “Why?” he asked with more concern then Taemin would have cared to hear.
“No reason,” Taemin replied with a shrug, trying to seem nonchalant.
He must have given away something because a smirk suddenly played across Key’s lips. “Lee Taemin, you have a crush on Onew,” the man declared.
Taemin couldn’t stifle the blush but he could redirect the conversation. “At least someone that I slept with one time in college hasn’t come back to haunt me,” he countered with a wicked smile. Key’s face immediately darkened.
“Shut up!” Key snapped, pulling off his latex gloves and grabbing one of the boxes. Taemin could only grin.
When he wasn’t running errands, playing games on his phone or his computer, or tapping rhythms on his desk, he actually had the opportunity to perform in his chosen field. Even though he was only an assistant at the moment, it was always satisfying to collect the samples as well as take careful notes on everything Onew said. Although a week ago he didn’t think that he would have found near as much joy in the activity as he did now. There was simply something about listening to Onew making the discoveries that all of the bodies held that was newly exciting for him.
Even after the man had left he found himself contently humming as he finished up the last bit of work he needed to do. His crush, as he had come to call it, wasn’t something that he took altogether too seriously but found almost a form of amusement in.
When he finished the last bottle he tugged off the gloves and picked up the small box of supplies. He would have to come back in a minute to place the body in the proper place, but first he needed to deliver the samples they had taken and see if Onew needed anything from him.
The trip to the lab proved fruitless as Key wasn’t there and he had been told more than once not to simply leave samples lying around. A quick investigation with Luna who seemed to know the location of every person in the office at any given time told him that Key wasn’t anywhere near his lab at the moment and he couldn’t very well deliver the samples without the man being there. Finding Onew would possibly be the best bet for him and he set out to find the man. As always, his boss only frequented a few places and it took little trouble for him to find the man in his office with the Expensively Dressed Detective.
The pair appeared to be speaking about business and as far as he could see there was nothing spilled on the man. Either Onew had suddenly figured out how not to knock over everything, or he had simply missed the event. He knocked politely on the door and waited a moment before opening it. “Uh, hyung, sorry to interrupt,” not that he truly was sorry, “but Key-hyung wasn’t in the lab.”
“He wasn’t? Where is he?” Onew asked.
“The girls said that some guy came to see him saying that they had to talk. They said he was quite short, good looking, and wearing a suit. Key-hyung seemed to know him in any case.” Taemin replied with the information that the girls had provided him with. The looks that Minho and Onew gave each other told him exactly who Key was talking with. Dirty little secret, indeed.
His plan of flirtation, although only half formed in the first place, turned out to very shortly be a large flop. It didn’t take a genius to figure out that Onew’s attention was elsewhere or where exactly it was that it was focused on. Key, on the other hand, seemed to be providing an endless supply of amusement. Taemin knew that he really shouldn’t find this much entertainment out of his coworker’s misery but he felt it was a worthy revenge for the one time that Key had taken him out and let him get hit on by a guy twice his age. Besides, how often was it that a person’s dirty little secret walked back into their lives, let alone became a sequel to the original secret.
Over the months he had spend in the office he had learned the valuable skill of eaves dropping and put it to good use more times than not. ‘I have some dirt on Key,’ he typed and sent on its way to Amber.
‘Shouldn’t you be working or something?’ she sent back almost immediately.
‘I am. :)’
‘I don’t want to know, but at least someone around here is getting some…’
Taemin chuckled and opened his angry bird application on his phone, just before Onew’s voice summoned him for duty.
There was a rule somewhere about office relationships. There had to be even if no one had bothered to dig it up. Therefore it had to be reasonably against that rule when Onew walked in with a huge bouquet of flowers, flowers that were for Key from, presumably, the Dirty Little Secret. It took the man they were designated for far longer to recover and gave Taemin a moment to enjoy his reaction. Clearly the dirty little secret didn’t want to be so any longer.
Key, of course, couldn’t let Onew get away with all of the teasing and had to point out something Taemin had noticed immediately. “It’s a hickey,” he informed his seniors as if they never heard of such a thing before. If he didn’t know any better he would think that he was the one with experience and not them.
Onew’s blush was cute, which he observed in a passing manner and Key’s smirk was amusing. Clearly, Taemin thought, launching a bird towards the collection of blocks and pigs, he hadn’t been all that interested in his boss since the evidence of Onew’s hook up with someone did more to amuse him then irritate him.
“Detective Choi!” he overheard Onew yelp.
Well, well, well, Taemin thought. Who would have thought that spilling things on someone would have encouraged them to pursue a person? Perhaps Onew had made a new discovery on the human condition, or perhaps it was just another fracture of the Onew condition.
He waited until he had finished the level before he reached forward and erased the neat zero on his whiteboard. A mark like that had to be worth five points at least. When he had corrected the score accordingly he observed the 14 to 5 with a satisfied nod. The detective, he thought, might catch up rather quickly if it progressed in this way.
“Taemin,” Onew’s voice called interrupting his musings, “where is Choi Jonghee’s file?”
“S,” he replied with a grin, “for Stupid Dickhead.” He could hear Onew’s groan from the other room and decided not to inform him about the file of ‘Stupid Slut’ he had placed just behind it this morning. The man would find out soon enough, he told himself as he set his phone aside and woke up his sleeping computer for a healthy round of minesweeper.