Sehun backs away from Jongin as if he’d been caught with his hand in the cookie jar. “I - um,” he stutters, but Luhan doesn’t pay any attention, turning to Jongin instead.

“This is really good apple juice,” he says, taking another sip and completely ignoring Sehun. “I didn’t know you had so many different brands stored away in your fridge, Kai-sshi.”

Jongin laughs, winking at Sehun (who’s still frozen in place) before shrugging at Luhan. “You can call me Jongin. I suppose you’re done with snooping around my house and making sure that I have nothing to do with this case?”

“Hm, not quite,” Luhan says thoughtfully. “Would you mind if we borrowed your coding skills though?

“You want me to help you on the case, you mean,” Jongin supplies helpfully, and Luhan nods. Sehun has a momentary, fleeting feeling that geniuses communicate with each other on some strange level he will never understand.

“Your resources and level of expertise are very well suited for this,” Luhan remarks in a respectful tone, and Sehun finds himself feeling irrationally jealous. He could do just as well or maybe even better than Jongin, match Luhan’s intelligence so he could notice him just once.

“I’m sure your abilities are equally well suited,” Jongin courteously replies, and Sehun doesn’t know why they’re up to each other like this. Is this some kind of secret competition that he’s unaware of? Well screw that. He’s not going to stand by and watch as they shower each other with sugared compliments or whatever they consider it.

“But what could he do to help?” Sehun cuts in. “Besides, this is supposed to be ‘confidential’. Considering Kai’s background...”

Jongin shoots him a slightly offended look. “What, you don’t trust me?”

“You were a suspect about fifteen minutes ago. You still probably are, even if Luhan doesn’t mention anything. We’re supposed to keep our friends close and our enemies even closer, aren’t we?”

Friends or not, for some strange reason, Sehun doesn’t quite trust Jongin around Luhan. Maybe it’s the fact that Jongin is smarter and clearly more of an intellectual match for Luhan, and knowing that makes Sehun rather insecure. Regardless, Sehun has decided that having Jongin help out on the case probably won’t lead to anything good and therefore he should do everything possible to convince Luhan otherwise.

Luhan takes a thoughtful sip and seems to reconsider. “That is a fair point.” Sehun does a little mental dance of victory, before Luhan continues, “But unfortunately, we do need Jongin’s help. Unless you want me to ask Suho.”

“What.” Sehun stops in mid-mental dance and stares at Luhan. “No! Of course not! I mean. No. Um.” Damn it. When it comes down to Grandpa Suho and Kai, Kai is definitely the lesser of two evils. Anyways, Jongin is his friend. Just. Not the friend he wants near him when he’s with Luhan. Because Jongin might corrupt Luhan’s innocent mind and - yeah, who is he kidding?

“So,” Luhan says, tilting his head at Jongin, “do you accept?”

“Of course.” Jongin shrugs and grins at Sehun, who tries not to let too much of a mortified expression show on his face. Jongin knows why he’s angry, doesn’t he? “I might as well do something interesting. I’m pretty bored these days, you know.”

“Excellent.” Luhan beams and tugs at Sehun’s arm. Sehun freezes and tries not to freak out, because normal physical contact with Luhan is not anything to get excited over and it is definitely not affecting him. Jongin raises his eyebrows at Sehun and smirks.

Oh, this will be fun.

Luhan paces in front of the whiteboard, twirling a marker, occasionally stopping to write down a line or two before resuming his walk. He turns around to look at Jongin and Sehun, who are currently eating lunch at one of the far lab tables (Jongin having assured them that it was perfectly sanitary and there were no leftover traces of dangerous chemicals).

“Any breakthroughs yet?” Jongin calls through a mouthful of pizza. Luhan shakes his head.

“You should probably take a break. Eat something,” Jongin suggests and Sehun shoots him a subtle look of annoyance because taking care of Luhan is his job. At this rate Jongin could replace him - oh no. Sehun quickly pushes that thought out of his mind.

“Stop glaring at me like I’m going to jump your precious crush,” Jongin says, elbowing Sehun in the ribs as he grabs another slice of pizza. “It’s kind of unnerving.”

All right, so maybe that look isn’t as subtle as he’d like to think. And it seems that Jongin has managed to pinpoint the exact source of Sehun’s iness. Figures, him being a genius and all that.

“Well, if he did maybe, uh, have some non-professional interest in you... not that it would happen of course,” Sehun replies, stumbling over his words and acutely aware of how petty he sounds. He gives up on explaining, instead just sighs and picks at his pasta woefully. “I feel like I can’t match up to you. You were always smarter and more confident -”

“And ier,” Jongin adds with a playful grin and Sehun rolls his eyes.

“But honestly, you really think I’d do that to you?” Jongin asks, expression going serious for the first time since they’ve met today. Suddenly his eyes narrow as if he’s just thought of another possibility. “Wait, this isn’t because of that Varskoff thing, is it? All right, I know sleeping with Suho wasn’t the best way of covering it up but that bastard was threatening to leak it to Interpol and I couldn’t risk it. And Kris and Tao were still fighting over the stuffed alpaca attack.”

“What?” Sehun is very confused as he struggles to comprehend this new rush of information. Did Jongin just say he slept with Suho? Well, that might explain some of the mutual hatred between them.

“Never mind,” Jongin says dismissively, waving off his previous morally dubious liaisons. “What I mean is, I promise I’m not gonna touch Luhan.” At that point, Luhan drops his marker and bends over to pick it up, a move that ends up highlighting his backside in a very flattering manner. Sehun nearly chokes on his pasta.

“... without permission,” Jongin finishes, and Sehun shoots him as harsh a glare he can manage, which is not very when he’s hacking up bits of alfredo and gasping for air. Smooth, very smooth.

“I don’t need to know every single detail of every single person you’ve had questionable relations with,” he finally coughs out, eyes streaming with tears. “Go focus on your pizza. Actually. Wait. How many slices of pizza have you eaten already? Ten? How the heck do you stay so thin?”

“I’m a coding genius,” Jongin says airily, inhaling his current slice of pizza and reaching for yet another one. “I don’t gain weight. I burn thousands of calories from just thinking with my brilliant brain. And you’re just slow. How are you still on your fifth piece of pasta? You must like Luhan a lot more than I thought. You stop eating every other minute just to stare at him.”

“Shut up!” Too late. Sehun can already feel his face burning, and what’s worse is that Luhan chooses that moment to turn around and look at the two of them.

“What’s wrong?” he asks, and Sehun has the sudden urge to crawl under a rock and hide for the rest of his life. “I think I’ve almost got it figured out.”

“Really?” Jongin pushes the pizza away and jumps up lightly from the table, a look of interest on his face. He walks towards Luhan, and Sehun nearly trips over his feet (and knocks his knee into the table leg) in his attempt to follow before Jongin really does something to Luhan.

“Okay, so the first thing is trying to figure out why someone would want to hack into the Pentagon,” Luhan begins, pointing a scrawl of illegible diagrams on the whiteboard. Jongin nods like he can actually understand Luhan’s drawings, and Sehun huffs angrily, crossing his arms because it’s not fair how everyone except for him seems to know what Luhan does. “Since people don’t usually attempt that unless they want confidential security information, I think we can all reasonably infer that someone, or a group, wants to breach the defense system of the United States. Which could be rather problematic, because usually when people want to do that, it means they’re either trying to take over the world, or kill a lot of people. Or both.”

“So this case is actually really serious,” Sehun comments, giving up on trying to figure out what Luhan has written.

Luhan raises an eyebrow in disbelief. “Sehun-ah, I’m sorry to burst your bubble, but any case that comes from the United States’ Department of Defense is rather serious.”

Sehun shrinks back, the abrupt comment stinging more than it should. He’s forgotten how Luhan can be blunt when he’s on a case, and suddenly, Sehun just wants to go home, back to their apartment, and curl up under the covers and hope this is all just a bad dream. He doesn’t want to be standing next to Jongin again, working on a case, wishing for someone who will never be his.

“What’s the next step?” Jongin asks quickly, shooting a side glance at Sehun, and Sehun realizes he’s glad Jongin’s his friend.

“We need to find out what and who took the files,” Luhan says solemnly, still peering at his unreadable handwriting. “And once we do that, we need to figure out what the culprit is going to do with the information. This case isn’t about just recovering the hacked files anymore. It’s about stopping something that’s about to happen. Something really, really bad.

“And that is why,” Luhan continue after a pause, in which the three of them look at each other and Sehun feels slightly ridiculous because Luhan has just used the cheesiest detective line ever, “we need you, Jongin, to help us trace the hacker.”

istg we spend more time formulating pwp side stories than actually writing the chapters for this ANGELA STAWP BEING SO Y T__T

also!! in case you didn't see the notice!! the side story for all pwp plots relating to this can be found here (;