eats quality and shares with peruses

“That they should’ve picked me,” Sehun laughs. “I mean look at him.” He turns the magazine around and frowns deeply, eyes narrowing. “He’s so…wrong! His arms are too long, his nose looks almost beakish, and his eyes are devoid of any human emotion. It’s a mess.” “Your eyes are kinda dead too,” Chanyeol comments. And there’s a brief moment where he thinks Sehun will take the magazine from his hands and smack it straight across his face with silent indignation. Except he doesn’t, he just sits there, frown still plastered across his lips, and goes back to thumbing through articles to reach what he wants the most: pictures. There’s no point in reading useless commentary when the photographs themselves speak a thousand words the columns can’t. “But yours are nicer.” Sehun’s lips curl upwards in a slow smile. The makeup assistant asks him to stop smirking and hold still as she applies a nice coat of lip-gloss. Chanyeol follows each swipe until he’s being forced forward, gold glitter back for round two.

Lu Han is not in love with Yixing, but how could he be? He is not in love with his legs or his bones or the moment when he spot-checks the water below him, knowing his dive will be perfect. Yixing is in his legs, in his bones, in the surety of perfection. Yixing is in his diving, and diving is all Lu Han has known. So the only thing left for Lu Han is to dive better, work harder, give more. If Yixing is incomplete, then Lu Han, too, must be incomplete. If Yixing is unsure, then Lu Han, too, is wavering at the edge of a platform, an unspeakably long distance stretched out between him and the water. Whatever Yixing is looking for, Lu Han must be. It's not a sacrifice to be willing. Yixing comes to Lu Han now, holding the wet shirt out, like Kris with his towel reaching out towards Lu Han, like Kris with his hand reaching out towards Yixing. Lu Han takes a deep breath. He doesn't look down. Yixing is there, across from him. He sees the surface of the water laid out in front of them, like eternity. 

At some point Jongin decides to stop Lu Han from scoring by running away with the ball. With no referee other than Joonmyun's tenuous sense of sportsmanship, the game dissolves into a soccer-rugby-football hybrid. After K catches up to M's score, Lu Han exchanges a glance with Zitao, who is one of the only people in this band that Lu Han trusts to be just as nastily competitive. Zitao rolls his shoulders back in response. On the next play, he launches into a full-body tackle that sends Sehun flying into Jongin. "I'm your number one anti-fan," Jongin yells as he goes down. Less than a minute later, without any help from Jongin, Lu Han slams straight into Yixing on his way to K's goal. "Man down!" Chanyeol cheers. Before Lu Han can react, Kris is swooping in for the ball. "Wasn't that our esteemed leader?" Yixing says, winded, while the game continues without them. "He turned traitor," Lu Han says. "I'm your duizhang now." "Hello, duizhang," Yixing grins.

Bond paces the length of the room, his arms folded across his chest. He walks back to his desk, leaning his hips against it, and looks directly at Q. With the hint of a smile, Bond slips a hand into his pocket.

It’s so quiet in the room that Q’s first concern is that somebody will hear it. The vibrator is equally as quiet and Q’s grip on his pen tightens. He looks down at the sentence he’d been halfway through writing, his thoughts too jumbled to remember what he was trying to say. He glances up at Bond, who is still leaning against his desk, wearing an expression that could be mistaken for apathy if Q didn’t know better. Bond is watching him, and Q is glad that he’s sitting at the back of the room because this way, he doesn’t need to be paranoid about anyone behind him noticing the way he keeps looking up. Nobody notices the way he shifts in his chair, trying and failing to find a comfortable position to sit in, doing his best to focus his attention on the question he’s trying to answer.

Bond smirks, his lips just barely moving, but Q can read them anyway: good boy.

The stuffed peppers are the tipping point.

“Are you my poison taster now, is that what this is?”

Bond resolutely swallows and says nothing.

“Oh,” says Q. “Oh, God, you can’t be serious.”

By the time he manages to pry his face out of his hands, Bond is gone.

There are worse things in the world than being the star author of EXO Entertainment. For the most part, Yixing would even go so far as to say his life is blessed. At 23, Zhang Yixing, art name Zhang Lay, is already the author of ten books: three short story collections, five novels, one collection of half-poetry half-lyrics, and an assortment of essays that, Kris usually says with an exasperated sigh, sounds exactly like a parody of a self-help book written by a twelve-year-old, and is probably just as useful. In the most recent Rich List of Chinese Writers, Zhang Lay came in at five. Not a bad position, considering Yixing's almost a decade younger than the second-youngest writer on the list and wrote the bulk of his work while still in college. Yixing has a nice apartment in the Puxi part of Shanghai, a car he never drives (but Kris does, when they go out of town together), enough money saved up to move his parents closer to him once they get old, and his picture smiling down from the shelves of Xinhua Bookstore and magazine stands alike. His life is good. There isn't much more he wants. There's just one little thing. 

“Oh my god,” Seungri says about five minutes later when his higher brain is functioning again. Jiyong has pulled off of him without Seungri noticing and is sprawled on top of him, somehow taking up the entire bed with the spread of his limbs. His fingers are lazily carding through Seungri’s hair as he nuzzles Seungri’s neck.  “That was hot,” Jiyong murmurs.  “That is completely not how I meant for that to go.” “Sure it wasn’t,” Jiyong teases, lightly running a fingertip over Seungri’s collarbone.  “It wasn’t!” Seungri says, petulant. He’d been thinking more along the lines of mutual handjobs until Jiyong tearfully admitted that yes, Seungri did deserve to be treated like an adult; giving Jiyong a good, thorough fucking but still somehow not being in control was not the plan. 

kris doesn’t think much of zitao the first time he sees him. kris has been training for three years and has seen trainees come and go, with varying degrees of talent and drive. only the strong survive and zitao seems weak in all the wrong ways. “you can fall in love with me if you want” kris tells him “but i’ll never love you” he doesn’t know why he says it. it’s not something one guy should say to another at their first meeting. but there’s a glint of something in zitao’s eyes as he stares up at kris, as though kris is made of something beautiful and he wants to touch. “okay” zitao replies and it’s not a denial. he doesn’t even sound surprised or upset at the insinuation that he is destined to fall into unrequited love with kris. and then he smiles and it’s not a nice smile, more of a knowing smirk. and kris thinks that maybe he’s underestimated zitao after all.

The escape part of their great escape goes off without a hitch. Seungri makes a huge commotion at the other end of the venue and Jiyong steals their passports, replaces it with the note. (Gone fishing, it says. Be back soon.) They all make it out to the exit point at the back of the building. Daesung laughs and Youngbae shakes his head when Seunghyun shows up with a rubber nose and mustache pasted on his face as a disguise. It's a fifteen-minute walk to the airport, the straps of their backpacks digging in through the layers of clothing. The man who checks them in doesn't seem to realize who they are. There's a close call when they go through security and Seungri has to remove his facemask, but it's nearly one in the morning and most of the terminal is deserted. The lady who pats him down looks startled and Seungri grins, raises a finger to his lips. Jiyong's heart pounds in his throat as they wait at the gate. Youngbae's cell phone starts ringing, and he turns it off without a word. The minutes tick by. It becomes, suddenly, difficult to swallow. Daesung's eyes keep darting around and even Seunghyun looks like he's on edge. Jiyong doesn't ease into his seat until the plane finally takes off, Hong Kong's bright lights winking a goodbye through the window. "It worked," Seunghyun breathes, grabbing Jiyong's wrist. "Yeah," Jiyong says. He can't wipe the grin off his face. "It did."

If Wu Fan would suddenly be asked why he’s in love with Yixing, the first thing he’d probably blurt out (because the mere mention of Yixing’s name would send his mind reeling and stop functioning properly) is that being around Yixing is similar to that feeling he gets right when his back first hits his soft, downy bed after a long hard day’s work, the most comfortable, relieving and warmest feeling in the world.  Then he’d probably say that Yixing is also like lazy, rainy Saturday afternoons where he’s wrapped in a blanket, hot chocolate at hand, no test or assignment to worry about and the world stops for a moment while he rests and takes in the beautiful pitter patter of the rain against his window. Then he’ll probably add a longer string of sappy metaphors that generally refer to Yixing’s smile, Yixing’s beauty, Yixing’s dimples and just generally Yixing that would earn him a lot of snarky remarks and endless teasing from his friends. And at the end of it all, he’ll forget everything he said because there’s really nothing he could say to explain just what it is that causes the excited surge of butterflies in his stomach and the unnatural, nervous sweating of his palms whenever Yixing is around (or even when he’s not).

“Can I have it?” asks Scott, his face doing that hopeful rising sun thing that took Stiles nearly four years to develop immunity to.

“No!” says Stiles. “I bought it for Derek!”

“Yeah,” says Scott. “Why did you do that again?”

“For reasons,” Stiles retorts sullenly.

“You’ve never gotten me a random present,” accuses Scott. “How is Derek even going to charge it? I don’t think he has a computer.”

The bathroom door opens and James has his gun out. A boy. Young man, dark hair, glasses, in a cardigan and Oxfords. Everything in James is coiled and grated exactly the wrong way. He’s a lone predator, and here’s a pup dropping meat in front of him.

“Quite necessary. I understand the precautions you need to take.” The fledgling closes his phone and places it in a pocket, it’s all he does with his hands before folding them in front of him. He stands up to inspection admirably. “I’ve been waiting to find a rendezvous point. I thought, sooner rather than later.”

“You thought wrong. Now I’ll just have two bodies to clean up."

“Hey, do you know if Scott wolfed out the night before last? Maybe ran around, scared some deer, surprised a crow into flying into a tree…” Stiles says.

Derek stares. And stares some more.

Then, “What is wrong with you?”

“That’s debatable, but I found a dead crow on my windowsill and…holy god, why are you giving me that look, please don’t eat me.”

Derek normally looks like he wants to rip out Stiles’ throat, but now he really looks like he wants to. Also, he’s growling like a deranged dog.

“Sorry I asked! And please shut up before someone hears you!” Stiles says.

“Scott couldn’t even hunt a turtle, let alone a crow. He wasn’t the one who put it on your sill,” Derek says. He still looks pissed, and Stiles is still terrified, but at least he isn’t growling anymore.

“Not Scott. Noted,” Stiles says.

"If you've got a problem, Coulson, I want to hear it," Fury says.

"She's just a kid, sir," Phil says finally.

"Yes, she is," Fury agrees. "Doesn't mean her powers might not be useful to the Initiative, when she's old enough."

Phil sighs. This is a snap decision, this decision to take care of this kid, but it's not like he's unused to quick changes in this line of work. He's more than used to rolling with the punches, he just needs an opening, and this is probably the best one he'll get, so he takes it.

"If we're going to make her a part of the Initiative, sir," he says, slipping his hand into his pocket, "she'll need a handler. Somebody with experience."

Christ. Possibly he could've been more emotionally prepared for this. He hadn't realized that a werewolf baby was basically a cross between a puppy and a baby and therefore doubled the cuteness factor, but, damn. This isn't just a baby, it's a weapon of mass destruction. No one, not even Peter Hale, could survive this level of cuteness. It's making pink clouds of… of pinkness explode inside his brain.

“We need to have this out.”

“Yeah,” Stiles says. “We really do. Then—hi, Miss Penrose!—you can stop scandalising the locals, okay?”

Although he feels a frisson of fear once he says that, because he doesn’t know what Derek is doing here, hands all over him, mouth everywhere but on his mouth, and he doesn’t know what this is, doesn’t know if there’s going to be anything other than surprise attacks of presence and touch as Stiles is going about his day, and he doesn’t want it to stop.

He wets his lips, says nervously, “And we can—“

“No,” Derek says. “Not you and me. Me and Tiny Dominator.”

“Are you—“ Stiles starts, breaks off to laugh hollowly. “You’re joking, right?”

Derek doesn’t look like he’s joking.

“You want to have it out with my puppy.”

"Ah," Mr. Argent says, and looks like he's at a loss of what to say. He looks up, over Stiles' head at the other hunters, his expression a polite what the hell is this that Stiles has seen on his dad's face. "So the — so he makes you feel safe. How so?" Oh God, if Stiles doesn't puke or shit his pants, or get disemboweled by Derek or the alpha later, this might be pretty funny to tell his grandkids. Or Scott's, since Derek basically laid claim to him from now until — okay, think about that later.

"I don't — what do you mean?" How so? How so what? How does Derek make him feel safe? Well, Stiles usually imagines Ocean's 11 bank heists where Derek saves him from getting the shit beaten out of him, after he steals a trillion dollars. Or he's having a nightmare about the alpha and Derek and Scott show up and save the day like bosses.