Meet the press 

A string of invectives left Kim Jongdae’s mouth as the young woman in front of him smirked and took a seat in the front row. The cacophony in the press room was much louder than usual and more than three dozen media outlets had sent their reporters to get coverage of Wu Yifan’s first press meeting as president. Chanyeol, the photographer that was dispatched along with Jongdae, looked extremely uncomfortable in the cramped back row. His long legs had no room to breathe and the AC didn’t seem to work as well where he and Jongdae were seated compared to the front, so his long trench coat found itself discarded on the floor beneath its owner’s feet.

Beads of sweat fell from Chanyeol’s forehead as he glared at the back of his best friend’s head. There was Do Kyungsoo, the photographer for the New Seoul Times, sitting comfortably in the front row next to Byun Insu, the woman Jongdae was so put off by. The pair were the subject of all of Kim Jongdae and Park Chanyeol’s sentiments at the moment, and Byun Baekhyun, the back row veteran of the Green House press room could only laugh at that fact.

Wu Yifan, the newly inaugurated president of United Nations of Asia (UNA), stood at the podium looking like he was about to lose his lunch. And if that was one of the thoughts running through the head of at least one of the fifty or so reporters sitting in the press room at the moment, Yifan ought to praise them for being correct. After embarking on a week-long inauguration parade that began in the most remote parts of the Himalayas and ended in a village hospital in the city of Comilla in East Bengal Province, Yifan was down with a bad case of stomach flu and could literally vomit at any given time.

As his stomach flip-flopped and his fever raged, three reporters sitting in the very back row of the press room engaged in a very amusing conversation.

“Why in the name of Buddha did you have to agree to that ridiculous bet,” Chanyeol growled out.

Jongdae snickered. “Okay, first of all, you're Catholic and you have a portrait of Pope Francis in your cubicle at work in celebration of his supporting LGBTQ+ rights. And second of all, I was drunk out of my mind and even though Real Madrid was clearly winning I decided to support Barcelona all the way.”

Baekhyun decided to but into the conversation. “To be honest, I don’t see why you're more of a Barca fan. Have you seen Ronaldo?”

“And you have seen Messi?”

Chanyeol giggled. “Aka Lionel the roar-less.”

“Roar-less isn’t a word and where the did you even get that from?”

Chanyeol rolled his eyes. “Lionel. Lion’s in his name and he has no roar. Oh, my gosh Jongdae get a brain.”

“I have a brain. I’m just not completely sure you have a single funny bone in that breadstick body of yours.”

“I do not look like a breadstick!”

“Think again wannabe Deadpool,” Baekhyun broke in.

“Baekie,” Chanyeol exclaimed, reaching over Jongdae to put a hand on his boyfriend’s shoulder.

It was then that Oh Sehun from the Tokyo Sun came over, taking a swig from his metal flask. “I thought that you two had a no-pet-names-at-work thing going on?”

Baekhyun removed Chanyeol’s hand from his shoulder and gave the latter a look of disapproval before looking up at Sehun. “Yeah, we do. He’s just violating the agreement.”

It wasn’t long before Sunil Sengupta from the Kolkata Inquirer chose to jump into the conversation. “Jongdae’s right. Chanyeol does sort of look like a breadstick.”

“Breadsticks don’t have hair!”

“You mean breadsticks don’t have receding hairlines?”

“That’s it I’m going to go sit on Kyungsoo’s lap and just take photos from there!”

It was then that Sehun turned to Baekhyun with a half-drunk, half-dumbfounded expression on his face. “Hey, Baekhyun. The last time Chanyeol sat on Kyungsoo’s lap they almost had .”

And with that Baekhyun was off in a sprint after his idiotic boyfriend and Jongdae was left feeling miserable by himself.

Yifan, on the other hand, had retreated to his office for a short while to be treated by his best friend and personal doctor, Zhang Yixing. Yixing was known to be a brilliant doctor despite his extreme absent-mindedness and Yifan would go as far as to trust the former with his life.

“You need to stop eating street food. Street food can give you cancer--or was it typhoid. I can’t seem to remember,” Yixing said.

“I don’t think it’s either of tho--”

Yixing’s face lit up. “Oh! I remember now. I was in Colombo treating a patient who had contracted typhoid after eating some really bad street food.”

“Oh,” Yifan blankly stated, not making a point that Yixing had cut him off. “But I don’t think I have typhoid Xing.”

Yixing nodded. “Yeah, you don’t. It’s just the stomach flu that you're down with.”

“Just give me something to suppress it.” And so Yixing had the sick president take some over-the-counter stomach flu medicine, but what Yixing didn’t realize until Yifan was gone and in the press room was that what the latter had taken was not stomach flu medicine. It was a laxative.

So right when Yifan was about to call on Kim Jongdae from the Seoul Chronicle in the back row to ask the first question of the night, he shat his pants

thanks for reading!

--mahi