Tao looked down at his feet, biting at his lip in shame as Kris shouted at him.

"I sent you to get champagne, Tao," he hissed, his anger evident. "Not... this." He waved his hand at the crates Luhan was currently picking through, giggling his head off at the lecture Tao was having to endure. "What did he get, Luhan?"

Luhan smirked as he pointed to the Hangul on the side of the crate he'd just popped the top off. "Wine vinegar," he drawled, grinning as Lay looked up in interest from the manifest he was going over. "Definitely not champagne."

"But you know I can't read Korean," Tao whined, subsiding at Kris' glare.

"We could still sell it," Lay commented, getting up from the rickety box he'd been sitting on and going over to where Luhan stood, picking up one of the bottles and dusting it off. "Restaurants will pay top dollar for this stuff if we market it right."

He looked over his shoulder. "Chen!" he shouted back into the darkness of the warehouse. "Where's Xiumin? This is his area of expertise..."

"Where do you think?" Chen shouted back, appearing from the tiny office at the back, his fingers ink-stained, his glasses pushed up onto his head. "Watching a football match on TV." His tone was scornful as he sighed. "What am I even paying him for?"

"You mean what am I paying any of you for?" Kris corrected him wryly as he glared at them all. "What kind of smugglers are you if you can't even read?"

"Hey, I can so read," Tao protested weakly. "Just not anything that isn't Chinese."

"Which is kind of his point," Luhan replied with a sigh. "You've taken the same classes we have and yet you're worse at Hangul than Chen and Xiumin are at Mandarin, and that's saying something."

"Hey, I resent that remark," Xiumin said, coming out of the office and dusting off the front of his shirt, his eyes narrowed. "We try, and Mandarin is bloody hard." He glanced at Kris, who was glaring at him. "And it's not like we have much time for studying, when Kris keeps us busy..."

Kris' eyebrows rose. "Some of us are busier than others," he said, his voice soft with warning. "While others are busy watching things that have no bearing on what they should be doing..."

Xiumin just snorted. "Like I have much to do when you're here," he shrugged. "I just sell the you smuggle in." He glanced at Tao and Lay. "If it's in sellable condition. I have to wait until you guys are done with the inventory before I can do anything."

Lay sighed. "Well come and look at this, moron," he said, gesturing at him. "We need your esteemed expert advice." The sarcasm was hard to miss and Xiumin rolled his eyes as he picked his way through the mess to look at the bottle Lay held in his hand. "How much can we hock this for?"

About to answer, Xiumin (and everyone else) jumped as Luhan gave a shriek of triumph, scaring the daylights out of everyone within earshot.

"I found one!" he screeched as Kris gave him one of his trademarked evil looks that said 'this had better be good or you had better have your will made up and a good undertaker paid for'.

"Champagne, and not just any champagne, either," he said proudly, turning to the others and holding up a bottle as if it was the most precious thing he owned. "Moët-Chandon Brut Impérial 2006."

Kris stared at him in shock. "Are you sure you read that right?" he asked, starting to feel faint. If this was true, just one bottle would make the entire year's sweat, blood, and tears (and there had been a lot), worth every moment. "And dare I ask, how many bottles are there?" He had to sit down.

Luhan knelt down beside the crate and counted carefully. "Only six, but... Duizhang. This..." His voice was hushed. "Six bottles, Kris..."

"Put it down carefully, Luhan," Kris said quietly, his heart pounding in his ears. "If you break it, I'm going to kill you..."

Luhan nodded, his eyes wide as he (very carefully) laid the bottle back down into its straw nest and put the lid back onto the crate.

"Oh my God, Kris. Did I just find what I think I found?" he asked, turning to look at their leader.

"You did find what you thought you found." Kris smirked at the look on Luhan's face when his words were thrown back at him. "Now make sure nothing happens to that champagne, or I'm taking every single bottle that gets broken or damaged out of all of your paycheques."

As he spoke, he moved closer to the crate, almost tempted to take care of it himself rather than leaving it up to Luhan. While he trusted the older man with his life, Kris wasn't sure he trusted him with champagne that could make each of them rich for the next 10 years.

It was just his luck that a stack of crumpled newspapers Lay had pulled from one of the crates of wine vinegar tripped Kris up as he moved, and with a shout of dismay, the Chinese leader fell, twisting in vain in order not to crush the crate of precious Moët-Chandon. The others (apart from Chen and the ever-oblivious Lay), stared at Kris with varying degrees of shock and horror on their faces as the stench of alcohol filled their noses, almost making them drunk on the smell alone.

Then the shrieking began, most of it from Luhan, the colourful vocabulary in several languages Kris hadn't even realised he knew rendering him speechless.

"You!" Luhan shouted, his finger pointed at Kris as he sat up, his eyes carefully averted. "You... you broke it! All that lovely champagne! That amazing, overwhelmingly expensive champagne..."

"Actually," Chen grinned, the only one not horrified by Kris' mishap finally spoke. "I think you'll find that champagne is a cheap knock-off someone's trying to pass off as the real thing. So no harm done at all." He chuckled at their expressions. "Oh come on now. I can't know anything about wine?"

"But you're a preacher," Xiumin pointed out in confusion, his eyebrows knotted in puzzlement. "When you're not smuggling and doing the books for us, that is. How would you even...?"

Chen's knowing smile widened. "I have very rich parishioners," he said softly, tapping the side of his nose. "Ones who know a lot about this stuff, and..." He looked satisfied. "Who keep me not only well-informed, which is how I can do what I do for you prols, but well-stocked."

"Speaking of well-stocked," Lay said absent-mindedly, with his nose still buried in the shipping manifest, poking in a crate at Tao's feet. "I think I've just found the real deal..." From the markings on the side of the crate (which had been suspiciously absent from the first one), Lay was right. "And there's more than one of these things."

He looked up, the dimple evident as he smiled, oblivious to the bombshell he'd just dropped in their laps.

"There's not just 2 crates with six bottles each, but 4 in total," he added, checking the sheet in his hand. "As well as another 2 of the fake stuff..." Lay looked at Tao approvingly and patted the younger man's shoulder. "Seems you're not an idiot after all. You did well, Taozi."

Tao knew better than to preen under the praise from Lay, but it still went a long way to soothing the annoyance he felt after Kris' lecture. And if everything worked out, he knew they'd all benefit; Kris was a hard, but fair, man, and he would share the profits equally. Even considering their Korean counterparts' cut, this would mean they'd probably never have to work again, though he knew they would. They loved the thrill too much.



Even after calling Junmyeon to complain about his supplier's attempted rip-off (during which the Korean group's leader reassured him it would be taken care of), Kris was in an excellent mood, especially when Chen and Xiumin reported on the recent shipment's sales figures. All but 2 bottles of the real champagne had sold at a more than acceptable price, and Chen had immediately demanded one as part of his cut, to which Kris (eventually) agreed. All the wine vinegar had been sold at a tidy profit, thanks to Xiumin's expertise, and the fake stuff had been passed off to one of Lay's acquaintances named Calvin to get rid of, apart from the few bottles Chen had purchased (at a suitable discount) for his own use.

Chen was still surprised to see them all in attendance at his sermon on a cloudy Sunday morning, smirking at Tao's obviously overwhelmed expression as he surveyed their part-time clerk's church in amazement. Xiumin was the only one who attended regularly, with Kris showing up at random times just to make his life miserable, Chen thought with wry amusement as he began his sermon, going through the motions with practiced ease. The others had never been before, and it was plain Kris had somehow roped them into coming, not that Chen minded. They'd all done very well.

Concluding his sermon, Chen gave his friends a sly wink as he began the ending prayer. "Forgive these men, for they know not what they do," he drawled, enjoying the confused looks on the faces of his congregation, and the amused looks from Kris, Luhan, and Xiumin.

Once everyone but his friends had gone, Chen took them into the vestry, pulling a set of fine crystal glasses from a cupboard and a bottle of what Kris recognised as one of the champagne knock-offs. Pouring each of them a glass, he handed them around with his trademark smirk, proposing a toast.

“To the idiots who can’t read Hangul, who spend their time watching football matches when they should be working, who can’t tell the difference between a fake and a real case of champagne, who are so oblivious to anything that doesn’t directly concern them, and to Duizhang, who fell on one of the said cases of fake champagne, like the klutz he is.” Grinning at the glowering expressions on his friends’ faces as he took a sip from his glass, Chen continued, amused. “We’re all very rich idiots now, so where do we go from here?”

Kris drank his champagne, giving them all evaluating looks before he spoke.

“Back to work,” he said firmly, setting the now-empty glass on the table he’d been leaning against. “There’s a shipment of high quality gemstones coming in at midnight. So be ready.” He looked pointedly at Xiumin and Luhan. “No football games tonight, am I clear?”

Luhan smiled, his eyes sparkling. Gems were his area of expertise. “Clear as diamonds,” he said, exchanging a sly glance with Xiumin. “Since the football match will hopefully have finished by then. If not, you’ll just have to wait. You can’t do anything without me, and you know it.”

“I also know that if you’re late, your cut drops by half,” Kris drawled, then disappeared as the others laughed at Luhan’s dismayed expression before following him out. He poked his head back through the door, this time focusing his attention on Chen, who looked back at him in confused amusement. “As does yours if you ever give us that fake again,” he added sourly, then left the startled clerk and Luhan to stare after him, shaking their heads.

“No rest for the wicked,” Chen chuckled ruefully, shooing Luhan out so he could change back into his street clothes. Then the two men left the church, heading back to the warehouse/office for that night’s entertainment that masqueraded as work.



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A/N: The champagne in question is arguably the most expensive champagne ever produced, and sells for around $2 million a bottle. So yeah, not cheap plonk.

Prols = an insult basically meaning (uneducated) peasants. From the word proletariat.