SHINee drabbles
Lift your Open Hand
Taemin runs head-first into his physics t.a., literally. ontae side story (er, drabble) for Starlight in Your Eyes. college!au
Taemin has his morning routine all figured out by the second day of the semester. He rolls out of bed thirty minutes after his alarm goes off, somehow managing to swim into a hoodie before bolting out of his dorm. He climbs over three fences and steps on an average of two squirrels each morning in his mad sprint to his morning classes. Taemin’s plan goes smoothly until Friday, when he runs head first into someone behind the bicycle rack by the chemistry building.
His victim is busy picking up an entire bag of bagels, probably grabbed as an after thought for breakfast, when Taemin jumps up, nursing his bruised elbow. He gives the other boy a quick apology before running off.
Taemin’s Friday mornings would have been more desirable if not for his physics class. It’s probably his fault for taking a class with a T.A instead of a large lecture, but his contemporary dance workshop dominates a formidable chunk of his schedule this semester. He really should have taken another studio class, but alas, Taemin has no power over his course requirements, just like he has no control over this 9am Intro to Physics class. He silently curses his science requirements as he sprints into the physics building.
Taemin is greeted by a dozen other students when he stumbles into class three minutes late. He takes comfort in the familiar looks of disinterest on his classmates’ faces and pulls out the physics book he borrowed by Kibum-hyung.
The T.A. doesn’t appear until five minutes later. “Eh, sorry about the lateness,” Bagel Boy says as he dumps a stack of syllabuses on the front desk. “I’m Lee Jinki, your T.A. for this semester.”
Serenading and Such
Jonghyun's voice brings the girls (and boys) to the yard. Jongho. college!au
Jonghyun misses one concert for his acapella group after catching mono last semester, and the executive board uses that as leverage to make him work at the fundraiser table. It’s not fair, Jonghyun thinks as he watches Ryeowook arrange boxes of baked goods on their table while hordes of people exit and enter the library. Kyuhyun is probably playing starcraft at home while Jonghyun freezes his ass off outside of a library in the December weather.
Ryeowook suggests that they offer a free song for every batch of brownies sold. They end up selling half of the table for their Brittany remixes, but not before Jinki nearly knocks half of their inventory over. Jonghyun is busy going through the change box for a cute freshmen when someone drops twenty dollars in front of him.
“Can I buy the rest of this?” The stranger asks, pointing to the remaining muffins on the table that Jonghyun laboriously hauled from Ryeowook’s apartment. It’s only thirty minutes into their fundraising and they’ve already sold all of the baked goods.
“My hero.” Jonghyun grins as he beams at his benefactor, a rather tall boy with large eyes. “What song should I sing for you?”
“Do your solo from our last concert,” Jinki suggests from the other end of the table, and Jonghyun spends the next two minutes going through the first verse of a contemporary ballad off the top of his head.
By the time Jonghyun finishes, the boy in front of him is staring, glassy-eyed, as he clutches at his box of muffins.
“You didn’t have to sing for me. I just bought these for my study group- but, you’re really good!” He says, almost shyly, if not for the delight in his eyes. The boy smiles, and Jonghyun can’t help but smile back.
It’s not until the muffin boy is walking away that one of the girls buying cupcakes whispers to her friend, “That’s the winner of last year’s university pageant, Choi Minho!”
Fly Me To The Moon
Taemin is so, so sick of traveling. Ontae
Key throws up in the Narita air port. It’s a very anticlimactic event, what with Onew’s tired but expecting gaze and the way Gyeongshik-hyung gently whisks Key into the nearest bathroom. The clean up crew arrives within two minutes, and that’s that. Taemin watches Key’s vomit pool around the striped pattern on the carpet, stopping only when Minho pulls Taemin away. Then it’s off to terminal two.
Key has been fighting a stomach bug for almost a week. Jonghyun’s double eyelids disappear so frequently from stress that the make-up artists give him eyemasks to subdue the swelling. Minho breaks a pair of ear phones every week, yet he refuses to purchase stuff from airport giftshops, so they trade cheap 200yen konbini electronics for Minho’s silence on transatlantic flights. It takes longer and longer to wake Onew up each week, when the in-flight movie has ended and Key has to drop Onew’s backpack from the overhead compartment onto Leader-sshi’s lap with a thud. And Taemin? Taemin is so, so sick of traveling.
Taemin used to miss home and his mother’s kimchi jjigae. Nowadays, he would give anything to just go back to their dorm in Seoul, trading hotel-grade down comforters for their shabby couch and room service for a bottle of his own shampoo. Key has those bases covered, though, ransacking through duty free shops and purchasing bags upon bags of foreign cosmetic products.
They shoot promotional photos for magazines Taemin has never heard of, days blending into night, and Taemin’s eyes adjusting so frequently to the blinding light from the photography equipment that he finds the lamps in their -not dorm, but- hotel room to be too dim.
Taemin wasn’t homesick at fourteen, when he moved into a strange apartment and had to share a room with four other boys. Now he would give anything to be in a country where he can understand more than ten percent of the spoken language. Every city is the same- only the fangirls get louder and security guards gets pushier. Everyone’s faces blend into one after a while, and Taemin can no longer tell if the Tokyo TV PD is the same person he met in the bathroom at the Beijing air port. In London, he accidentally speaks Japanese on stage. On the bright side, Taemin hasn’t eaten air plane food in months, not that they’re ever on a flight long enough to be served anything beyond peanuts and fuzzy orange juice.
In Australia, an attractive flight attendant scribbles her number on the back of Minho’s napkin. According to Key, Minho doesn’t find the napkin until four days later, when they’re back in Japan. Minho is so irrationally angry that Taemin can only assume she was beyond pretty.
They’re stuck in traffic in the middle of metropolitan Tokyo one day when their driver honks loudly at a Honda cutting them off. “Stop,” Taemin says. “Stop it.” Only Onew turns to look at him, eyes wide and weary. Key doesn’t bother taking his headphones off while Minho continues staring out of the window. Jonghyun doesn’t even wake up from sleeping.
“I can’t do this anymore,” Taemin says slowly, unsnapping his seat belt. He doesn’t wait for anyone to speak up before unlocking the door to his right, stepping out of the van. His right foot feels heavy, but Taemin ignores the numbness as he follows the sidewalk, weaving past the line of traffic on the street as he ducks into an alley and breaks into a run.
“Taemin!” Someone calls after him, and Taemin only runs faster, turning into another street and swimming through the stream of people conglomerated in front of a clothing store on a Saturday afternoon. He stops when someone pulls him back, spinning him around by the shoulder.
It’s Onew, cheeks flushed. “Where are you going?” He asks, voice akin to a whine, as if Onew is the one who wants to cry right now. He pauses when Taemin doesn’t answer, following Taemin as he attempts to flag down a cab. “Lee Taemin! Stop- Just, look at me right now. Answer my question.”
Taemin turns to him, eyes glassy. “What, hyung?”
“What?” Onew looks like he wants to laugh. “What? What are you doing? You can’t just step out of a moving vehicle-”
“It wasn’t moving, Hyung,” Taemin says as if stating the velocity of their van is the most biting thing in the world. “We weren’t moving. We’re always moving but we’re also never moving. I’m sick of driving and flying all over the place. I’m sick of this place.” He goes back to looking for a cab, stopping only when Onew gently pushes his outstretched arm down. Taemin opens his mouth to protest, but suddenly Onew is hugging Taemin, rubbing circles on his back.
“Oh, Taemin,” Onew whispers. “I miss Korea too. I want to go home too.” They stay like that for a while until Jonghyun, Key, and Minho join them.
“You bastards, running off by yourselves. Do you know how hard it was to find you two? ” Key says before coughing violently into his hands. Minho goes into the nearest konbini to buy water for Key, and they all end up sitting on the front steps of the store, tearing through 100 yen onigiris and sharing bento boxes. Jonghyun buys cucumber favored pepsi while they share calpis and a whole box of coffee favored kit-kats.
“Gyeongshik-hyung will kill us,” Jonghyun says while stuffing individually packaged melon-pans into his pockets, for fear that they’ll be punished with threats of no dinner. “That is, if he ever gets the driver to pull our ride out of that traffic jam.” In the end, they’re the ones who walk back to their ride.
Gyeongshik-hyung is busy nursing a headache when they step back into the van, one by one. He takes a look at the bread that they bring back and says, slowly, “I’ll just pretend that Taemin had to go to the bathroom.”
“He was overcome with constipation,” Onew agrees solemnly.
“He even knocked a girl down on his way to the public bathroom,” Jonghyun adds.
“Let’s go back to Korea,” Onew says that night, when Taemin is going to sleep. He peaks up from the side of Taemin’s hotel bed, setting his laptop by Taemin’s foot. “We’ll book a flight for next month and give management the memo that we’re releasing another single in Korean.” Onew nudges Taemin when he doesn’t reply.
“Mmm,” Taemin says from underneath the covers. “They won’t have a song prepared for us. We’ll have to write it ourselves, and Jonghyun-hyung will just pen another ballad about his suitcase. What will our concept even be?”
“I’m thinking chic tourists.” Onew says with a smile, patting the top of Taemin’s head. “I’ll talk the coordi-noonas into giving Key a fannypack.”
“He will kill you,” Taemin mumbles, eyes already sealed shut. “Or maybe he’ll just vomit on you.”
“Goodnight, Taemin,” Onew says.
“Night, Hyung,” Taemin replies. Every city is the same, with forgettable faces and unimpressionable places. The things that do matter, however, are the people Taemin has by his side.
an: gyeongshik is one of SHINee's managers. Choi Jin is the other one. Yes, I did research. Gotta love tumblr. Konbini = Japanese convenience store. And yes, all these snacks do exist.
Also, these titles are all taken from Olivia Ong songs.
Taemin runs head-first into his physics t.a., literally. ontae side story (er, drabble) for Starlight in Your Eyes. college!au
Taemin has his morning routine all figured out by the second day of the semester. He rolls out of bed thirty minutes after his alarm goes off, somehow managing to swim into a hoodie before bolting out of his dorm. He climbs over three fences and steps on an average of two squirrels each morning in his mad sprint to his morning classes. Taemin’s plan goes smoothly until Friday, when he runs head first into someone behind the bicycle rack by the chemistry building.
His victim is busy picking up an entire bag of bagels, probably grabbed as an after thought for breakfast, when Taemin jumps up, nursing his bruised elbow. He gives the other boy a quick apology before running off.
Taemin’s Friday mornings would have been more desirable if not for his physics class. It’s probably his fault for taking a class with a T.A instead of a large lecture, but his contemporary dance workshop dominates a formidable chunk of his schedule this semester. He really should have taken another studio class, but alas, Taemin has no power over his course requirements, just like he has no control over this 9am Intro to Physics class. He silently curses his science requirements as he sprints into the physics building.
Taemin is greeted by a dozen other students when he stumbles into class three minutes late. He takes comfort in the familiar looks of disinterest on his classmates’ faces and pulls out the physics book he borrowed by Kibum-hyung.
The T.A. doesn’t appear until five minutes later. “Eh, sorry about the lateness,” Bagel Boy says as he dumps a stack of syllabuses on the front desk. “I’m Lee Jinki, your T.A. for this semester.”
Serenading and Such
Jonghyun's voice brings the girls (and boys) to the yard. Jongho. college!au
Jonghyun misses one concert for his acapella group after catching mono last semester, and the executive board uses that as leverage to make him work at the fundraiser table. It’s not fair, Jonghyun thinks as he watches Ryeowook arrange boxes of baked goods on their table while hordes of people exit and enter the library. Kyuhyun is probably playing starcraft at home while Jonghyun freezes his ass off outside of a library in the December weather.
Ryeowook suggests that they offer a free song for every batch of brownies sold. They end up selling half of the table for their Brittany remixes, but not before Jinki nearly knocks half of their inventory over. Jonghyun is busy going through the change box for a cute freshmen when someone drops twenty dollars in front of him.
“Can I buy the rest of this?” The stranger asks, pointing to the remaining muffins on the table that Jonghyun laboriously hauled from Ryeowook’s apartment. It’s only thirty minutes into their fundraising and they’ve already sold all of the baked goods.
“My hero.” Jonghyun grins as he beams at his benefactor, a rather tall boy with large eyes. “What song should I sing for you?”
“Do your solo from our last concert,” Jinki suggests from the other end of the table, and Jonghyun spends the next two minutes going through the first verse of a contemporary ballad off the top of his head.
By the time Jonghyun finishes, the boy in front of him is staring, glassy-eyed, as he clutches at his box of muffins.
“You didn’t have to sing for me. I just bought these for my study group- but, you’re really good!” He says, almost shyly, if not for the delight in his eyes. The boy smiles, and Jonghyun can’t help but smile back.
It’s not until the muffin boy is walking away that one of the girls buying cupcakes whispers to her friend, “That’s the winner of last year’s university pageant, Choi Minho!”
Fly Me To The Moon
Taemin is so, so sick of traveling. Ontae
Key throws up in the Narita air port. It’s a very anticlimactic event, what with Onew’s tired but expecting gaze and the way Gyeongshik-hyung gently whisks Key into the nearest bathroom. The clean up crew arrives within two minutes, and that’s that. Taemin watches Key’s vomit pool around the striped pattern on the carpet, stopping only when Minho pulls Taemin away. Then it’s off to terminal two.
Key has been fighting a stomach bug for almost a week. Jonghyun’s double eyelids disappear so frequently from stress that the make-up artists give him eyemasks to subdue the swelling. Minho breaks a pair of ear phones every week, yet he refuses to purchase stuff from airport giftshops, so they trade cheap 200yen konbini electronics for Minho’s silence on transatlantic flights. It takes longer and longer to wake Onew up each week, when the in-flight movie has ended and Key has to drop Onew’s backpack from the overhead compartment onto Leader-sshi’s lap with a thud. And Taemin? Taemin is so, so sick of traveling.
Taemin used to miss home and his mother’s kimchi jjigae. Nowadays, he would give anything to just go back to their dorm in Seoul, trading hotel-grade down comforters for their shabby couch and room service for a bottle of his own shampoo. Key has those bases covered, though, ransacking through duty free shops and purchasing bags upon bags of foreign cosmetic products.
They shoot promotional photos for magazines Taemin has never heard of, days blending into night, and Taemin’s eyes adjusting so frequently to the blinding light from the photography equipment that he finds the lamps in their -not dorm, but- hotel room to be too dim.
Taemin wasn’t homesick at fourteen, when he moved into a strange apartment and had to share a room with four other boys. Now he would give anything to be in a country where he can understand more than ten percent of the spoken language. Every city is the same- only the fangirls get louder and security guards gets pushier. Everyone’s faces blend into one after a while, and Taemin can no longer tell if the Tokyo TV PD is the same person he met in the bathroom at the Beijing air port. In London, he accidentally speaks Japanese on stage. On the bright side, Taemin hasn’t eaten air plane food in months, not that they’re ever on a flight long enough to be served anything beyond peanuts and fuzzy orange juice.
In Australia, an attractive flight attendant scribbles her number on the back of Minho’s napkin. According to Key, Minho doesn’t find the napkin until four days later, when they’re back in Japan. Minho is so irrationally angry that Taemin can only assume she was beyond pretty.
They’re stuck in traffic in the middle of metropolitan Tokyo one day when their driver honks loudly at a Honda cutting them off. “Stop,” Taemin says. “Stop it.” Only Onew turns to look at him, eyes wide and weary. Key doesn’t bother taking his headphones off while Minho continues staring out of the window. Jonghyun doesn’t even wake up from sleeping.
“I can’t do this anymore,” Taemin says slowly, unsnapping his seat belt. He doesn’t wait for anyone to speak up before unlocking the door to his right, stepping out of the van. His right foot feels heavy, but Taemin ignores the numbness as he follows the sidewalk, weaving past the line of traffic on the street as he ducks into an alley and breaks into a run.
“Taemin!” Someone calls after him, and Taemin only runs faster, turning into another street and swimming through the stream of people conglomerated in front of a clothing store on a Saturday afternoon. He stops when someone pulls him back, spinning him around by the shoulder.
It’s Onew, cheeks flushed. “Where are you going?” He asks, voice akin to a whine, as if Onew is the one who wants to cry right now. He pauses when Taemin doesn’t answer, following Taemin as he attempts to flag down a cab. “Lee Taemin! Stop- Just, look at me right now. Answer my question.”
Taemin turns to him, eyes glassy. “What, hyung?”
“What?” Onew looks like he wants to laugh. “What? What are you doing? You can’t just step out of a moving vehicle-”
“It wasn’t moving, Hyung,” Taemin says as if stating the velocity of their van is the most biting thing in the world. “We weren’t moving. We’re always moving but we’re also never moving. I’m sick of driving and flying all over the place. I’m sick of this place.” He goes back to looking for a cab, stopping only when Onew gently pushes his outstretched arm down. Taemin opens his mouth to protest, but suddenly Onew is hugging Taemin, rubbing circles on his back.
“Oh, Taemin,” Onew whispers. “I miss Korea too. I want to go home too.” They stay like that for a while until Jonghyun, Key, and Minho join them.
“You bastards, running off by yourselves. Do you know how hard it was to find you two? ” Key says before coughing violently into his hands. Minho goes into the nearest konbini to buy water for Key, and they all end up sitting on the front steps of the store, tearing through 100 yen onigiris and sharing bento boxes. Jonghyun buys cucumber favored pepsi while they share calpis and a whole box of coffee favored kit-kats.
“Gyeongshik-hyung will kill us,” Jonghyun says while stuffing individually packaged melon-pans into his pockets, for fear that they’ll be punished with threats of no dinner. “That is, if he ever gets the driver to pull our ride out of that traffic jam.” In the end, they’re the ones who walk back to their ride.
Gyeongshik-hyung is busy nursing a headache when they step back into the van, one by one. He takes a look at the bread that they bring back and says, slowly, “I’ll just pretend that Taemin had to go to the bathroom.”
“He was overcome with constipation,” Onew agrees solemnly.
“He even knocked a girl down on his way to the public bathroom,” Jonghyun adds.
“Let’s go back to Korea,” Onew says that night, when Taemin is going to sleep. He peaks up from the side of Taemin’s hotel bed, setting his laptop by Taemin’s foot. “We’ll book a flight for next month and give management the memo that we’re releasing another single in Korean.” Onew nudges Taemin when he doesn’t reply.
“Mmm,” Taemin says from underneath the covers. “They won’t have a song prepared for us. We’ll have to write it ourselves, and Jonghyun-hyung will just pen another ballad about his suitcase. What will our concept even be?”
“I’m thinking chic tourists.” Onew says with a smile, patting the top of Taemin’s head. “I’ll talk the coordi-noonas into giving Key a fannypack.”
“He will kill you,” Taemin mumbles, eyes already sealed shut. “Or maybe he’ll just vomit on you.”
“Goodnight, Taemin,” Onew says.
“Night, Hyung,” Taemin replies. Every city is the same, with forgettable faces and unimpressionable places. The things that do matter, however, are the people Taemin has by his side.
an: gyeongshik is one of SHINee's managers. Choi Jin is the other one. Yes, I did research. Gotta love tumblr. Konbini = Japanese convenience store. And yes, all these snacks do exist.
Also, these titles are all taken from Olivia Ong songs.