A/N: Oneshot. Very meta. No ships or all ships, depending on who you ask.
Dibs
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In the windowless research lab of the Lightman Group, Eli Loker tapped his pen against the desk in frustration, watching the slow green wave of an animated progress bar swoosh across the screen. It looked like a sine wave.
"Why can't they just make these things simple?" he muttered.
"Are you talking to yourself again?" Torres said, from across the room. Loker reached up, and turned the flatscreen to face her.
"This," he gestured, impatient. "Why can't it just be straight?"
"Why can't you?" Torres said, grinning.
"Ha ha," Loker sad, swivelling the screen back into position. "Cheap, Torres."
"Cheap, yet effective," came the reply.
Loker grimaced, and rolled his chair over to Torres's desk. "What are you up to?"
She flicked her fingers at him. "Shoo. Don't you have work to do?"
"My computer's compiling stuff," he said.
Torres frowned. "Then go get coffee or something."
"I've had too much coffee," he answered, spinning in a half-circle, scanning Torres's screen. "Whoa. What the hell are you looking at?"
He pulled the chair in close. A minimal, old-timey website was displayed in the top browser window, with a blue banner advertising the website name. "Fanfiction .net?"
Torres sighed, looking away. "I'm trying to work on the case," she said, pointedly. "Melanie, the missing girl, apparently had an account on this site. I'm trying to see if it'll turn up any pointers to where she might have disappeared to."
"By reading fanfiction?" Loker said, suppressing a snicker.
"I'm skimming it," Torres said. "For the case. Research. You know, that stuff you're supposed to be doing?"
Loker leaned in. "He took his hand and brushed it along the length of my jaw. I parted my wet lips…"
Torres pushed Loker on the shoulder. "That's enough."
"She wrote this?" he asked, not deterred by Torres's sharp (almost defensive) attitude.
"Teenage girls are a lot more sexual than you think, Loker," Torres said, crossing her arms.
Loker tilted his head, thinking of Emily, a memory now firmly associated with a twinge in his solar plexus where Lightman had socked him. "I wouldn't be so quick to assume what I don't know."
"Oh," Torres said. "Oh, that just came out, so wrong. Loker."
Loker shrugged, leaning in again. "It could've been worse. Let me have a look. I've read this kind of stuff before."
"You read fanfiction?" Torres said, unable to mask her disbelief.
"Yeah. Nancy Grace."
"You're disgusting."
"Whatever. Don't freak out, nobody's writing fanfiction about you," Loker said, scrolling down the page. "Hm. This has nineteen chapters. Hardcore."
"Of course nobody's writing fanfiction about me," Torres said. "I'm a real person."
"Fanfiction gets written about real people all the time. Again, Nancy Grace," Loker said. "I'm just saying, it could happen. To any of us."
"Yeah, but we're not famous, Loker," said Torres. Loker raised an eyebrow at her. "What?"
"What if we were famous," he said, staring her straight in the eye, "and didn't know it?"
Torres laughed and leaned back in her seat, 'skeptical' written all over her face. "You're ridiculous. What do you mean, like, some kind of Truman Show reality, where we're actually on a TV show, and there's fanfiction being written about us while we speak?"
Loker tabbed out of the page, going back to the missing girl's user profile. "Well, when you put it like that, it sounds dumb. But think about it. Even if it was going to happen, we are like, the least shippable group of people ever."
Torres cocked her head to one side. "How so?"
"Well, let's look at the facts. We're all straight, and most of us have massive, irreconcilable age differences. For instance, Lightman, Zoe and Gillian are ancient, so they can only be paired with each other. Emily's freakin' fifteen, and the rest of the cast is so bare-bones that it's really between you, me, Heidi, and that deaf lip-reading chick that isn't around much."
"I dunno, I'd take Zoe on."
"So would I. But that's not the point. In Zoe's case, it's not that she's too 'experienced' for us, we're too young for her. She's a mature, independent, business-minded woman; she wants an equal, not a toyboy."
"Or toy girl."
"Right, or toy girl," Loker said, and paused. "Wow. Give me a second to think about that."
"Moving forward, Loker," Torres said flatly. "Anyway, I thought you and Emily were a –"
"Don't," Loker said firmly. "Even go there. I'm twice her age. Which is more than I can say for you and Lightman…"
"Okay!" Torres threw her hands up. "So, okay, we're pretty age diverse. What's the solution?"
"Well, I guess Lightman and Foster get to hook up, and you get back with Reynolds, and leave the rest of us holding our dicks. Except not, because I'm technically the only other guy who works here." Loker pushed himself back from the desk, folding his arms. There was a bittersweet satisfaction to having well-honed reasoning skills. Sometimes you find out you didn't want to be right.
Torres grinned, after a pause. "I guess you can still try Heidi."
"Oh my god, no. I'm a perpetually single lab rat. She's so out of my league that we're hardly ever in the same room," Loker said matter-of-factly.
"I beliieeve in you," Torres teased. Loker waved a hand over his face.
"Yeah? Well, see this? I don't believe in me," he said. "Heidi's a big-breasted, blonde billionaire bombshell. Whatever she's here to get a piece of, it's not me."
Torres leaned a hand on her chin. "When did you get so stoic?"
A muscle at the corner of Loker's mouth twitched. "When you rejected me, I guess."
Torres bit her lip in a non-sensual manner, a facial gesture of oh, shit followed by the chin-tilt of shame and eyelid flutter of sorry. Loker noted the cluster of signals, and gently touched Torres' elbow to get her attention back. "Hey. Apology accepted. No big deal. We're wasting time – let's get back to Melanie, shall we?"
Torres nodded, with a half-smile, and swivelled back to her desk. Loker rolled back over to his side of the room with a single, practised movement, much like the way he shrugged things off. After a few minutes of quiet, Torres turned back.
"So if you're not into Heidi –"
"Dibs," was the short, and uncompromising reply. Torres flicked her hair in frustration, looking back at her computer.
"Right."
The end. Also, the Sugababes.
[If you're ready for me boy]
[You'd better push the button and let me know]
(The one that says 'review'.)