Suho-centric
Continuity: Chapter 2

#9: I’ll Never Love You Any Less

Suho thinks that children might just be the most awful creatures in existence. He has never encountered another being anywhere that has the capacity to make one want to scream, cry, throw things and at the same time love it so much.

It started out easily enough—he was not the first to come to the Northern Sanctuary, that honor goes to Minseok. Suho, or Joonmyun as he’d been then, showed up almost a year later, along with Chanyeol and Jongdae. Back then they’d been five and four years old, none of them were looking for a leader and certainly not a parent because in their experience, parents hadn’t been anything good.

Then Jongin showed up and everything changed. Three and a half years old and a wild child in every sense of the word. He’d terrified Kyungsoo the first time they met on the train, and then he terrified shy little Jongdae at the Sanctuary almost right away. The three older boys had decided that Jongin needed a guiding force to help him adjust to his new life, but Minseok couldn’t command that kind of authority and Chanyeol just wasn’t old enough. That left Joonmyun the only one who stood a chance, and he accepted the job without complaint, not knowing what he was getting himself into. He assumed his responsibility on the day of his renaming ceremony, figuring is was fitting since his new name meant ‘Guardian’.

It wasn’t easy to be in charge of Kai, it was even harder to be in charge of Kai and Sehun, and once Suho asserted leadership over the two of them it seemed like he asserted leadership over all the other Guardians-to-be. Being catapulted into that position had made Suho realize that there were an infinite number of things that could go wrong on his watch. He used to wake up in cold sweat from nightmares about his kids falling into abandoned wells or getting their fingers crushed in doors. He’d watch Chanyeol jump from steps two feet high up and picture him slipping and crashing to the floor. He’d lose sight of Sehun for two minutes and wonder if he’d run off and gotten lost. Kai would refuse to eat dinner and Suho would be terrified that he’d starve. He could have filled a book with things beyond his control that could harm or even kill his kids—high fevers, falling rocks, poisonous berries, wild animals, it went on and on.

The worst part was that he made himself bear the brunt of that stress alone. It wasn’t like he could tell his kids what they were doing to him, that he was losing sleep over things like rusty nails in someone’s foot and lightning strikes. Even though he didn’t say anything though, sometimes it seemed like his boys went out of their way to give him grey hair.

----

“Chanyeol!” Suho shrieked. “Don’t you even think of it!”

Chanyeol paused with his foot halfway in the river. “But I’m hot,” he whined. “I want to go swimming!”

Suho ran over and flailed his hands in Chanyeol’s direction muttering “Leeches, leeches, leeches,” under his breath until he backed away from the water. Suho turned around and gasped.

“Sehun! Kai! Put those sticks down before you poke your eyes out!!”

Kai stuck his tongue out and when Sehun jabbed at him again, he fell to the ground clutching his arm and screaming in pain.

Suho’s heart leapt to his throat and he dashed over. “I told you! I tried to warn you and you didn’t—why are you laughing you brat?!”

Kai removed his hands and flashed Suho a toothy grin. “I was just playing! You’re so easy to fool, Suho-ah.”

Suho curled up on the forest floor and groaned quietly. “Why me?”

----

Suho took in the sight of the kitchen floor, laden with mousetraps, and the five boys trapped in the center of the room.

“Where did you get all of these?” He asked tiredly.

Chanyeol fidgeted. “We found them in the attic,” he muttered sheepishly. Kyungsoo caught Suho’s murderous glare and hid behind Chanyeol.

Suho pinched the bridge of his nose. Behind him, Minseok elbowed a giggling Baekhyun in the ribs. “And why, why in the name of the Tree, did you think you needed nearly two hundred traps to catch one mouse, who by now has probably fled the Sanctuary?”

Sehun pouted and Jongdae started to cry. “It wasn’t my idea!” He yelled tearfully. “Kai made me!”

Kai rounded on Jongdae. “I did no such thing! You had free will to say no—”

“You said if I didn’t help you were gonna—”

“Will the two of you kindly shut up!” Suho cried. He turned to Minseok and Baekhyun. “Get me a broom, a bucket and a fire poker. And some gauze, there’s no way I’m getting out of here with all my fingers intact.”

Later that night he counted himself lucky that at least it was his own finger that had been snapped by the traps and not little Sehun’s.

----

Seven boys knelt in front of Suho, all of them soaking wet and covered in mud.

“Do you listen when I talk? Huh? Are you all deaf?” Suho fumed at them. “I swear, sometimes you only hear me when I yell. Do you think I like yelling?”

“Well it’s all you ever do,” Kai muttered.

“IF YOU WOULD JUST LISTEN TO ME ONCE IN A WHILE!” Suho thundered. “Just ONCE I would like to feel like I’m not talking to a brick wall! Is it too much to ask for you to listen to me and do as I say? I don’t ask a lot from you, I really don’t!”

They had apparently decided that it was a good night to catch frogs, despite the fact that it was raining and dark and Suho had expressly forbidden them from going out because the doors were going to be locked soon. But that hadn’t stopped them and sure enough, they’d been locked out and Suho had needed to come downstairs and sneak them back in.

“Do you enjoy driving me crazy? Or is it just in your nature to give the people around you a hard time? Do you know what, next time I’m not even going to help you.”  He decided that on the spot, but now that he said it and saw their shocked faces, he decided to go with it. “Next time I’m going to leave you out there all night, and in the morning you can explain to the Head of the Sanctuary yourself why you  were out past your curfew, and when you’re punished don’t even think of crying to me because I am officially done. Do you understand me now?”

He stood in front of them, breathing hard. They were all wide-eyed and pale, and they nodded frantically.

----

It was far too quiet in the Sanctuary, Suho thought to himself. Something was definitely wrong.

He stalked through the library, looking for anything that seemed off, but everything looked normal. He inspected the hallways for string traps, the doors for buckets of spiders rigged to fall on the next person who opened them, all the bathrooms for frogs and came up empty handed. It had already been a week since his tirade, the lot of them should have snapped back to their usual trickster selves.

“Something is not right,” Suho muttered. Someone should have been yelling at Kai, or making sensitive Jongdae cry. Sehun should have been coerced into hiding something important, and someone should have been—

“Of course,” Suho gasped, hitting himself on the head. He took off for the bedrooms.

Suho paused outside of every door and listened for voices, and finally when he got to Baekhyun and Kyungsoo’s room he heard them.

“Hold the light steady, damnit!”

“You wimp, give Kai the light then if you can’t look.”

“It’s really bad,” someone muttered, sounding like they were crying. It was Kyungsoo, Suho realized. “We should tell Suho.”

“Do really want to get scolded again?”

“Shut up all of you! I can’t concentrate if you’re distracting me!”

“Distracting you from what?”

Everyone jumped and turned around. There was a collective gulp as they all saw Suho leaning against the door frame. Chanyeol shuffled in front of Kyungsoo, who was lying on his bed. They all seemed to be trying to hide him.

Suho looked them all over. Jongdae had green stains on his pants, Sehun had leaves in his hair and they were all sweaty and covered in cobwebs.

“Let me guess,” Suho sighed. “You went to go pick berries, didn’t you?”

There was a berry patch up the mountain, and it was notoriously difficult to get to. You had to crawl through an old drain that was filled with spiders, go through a patch of low-hanging tree branches, and crawl across an old log that was precariously balanced over a dry riverbed, now filled with slabs of rocks. The last time they’d gone, Suho had seen that the log was starting to rot and had told them that they couldn’t go that way anymore, but they hadn’t had time to look for an alternative route.

Caught in the act, they all nodded. Suho sighed and walked over the bed. The boys guiltily moved aside so Suho could get a look at Kyungsoo, who had gotten the rotten luck of being the one on the log when it collapsed.

The rocks had done quite a number on the right side of Kyungsoo’s body. His pants were ripped, showing still-bleeding cuts all over his leg, and his arm wasn’t much better. He was holding his side and Suho guessed he had a nasty bruise, and he sported a shallow scrape on his cheek.

“Did you hit your head?” Suho demanded, running his fingers through Kyungsoo’s hair to check for bumps.

“No,” Kyungsoo muttered, avoiding Suho’s eyes.

Piled at the foot of the bed was a scissor, some gloves, a bunch of gauze and various disinfecting creams, and a flashlight. Suho scanned the cuts with the light, humming in relief when he saw that none of them had cut to the bone.

“You were lucky,” He told Kyungsoo as he used the scissor to cut away the leg of his pants. “And as for the rest of you,” they all flinched, but Suho went on calmly, “You forgot the hot water.”

Chanyeol whacked himself in the head. “Of course,” he muttered.

Suho made a shooing motion with his hands. “Go get it!” he demanded.

It took almost an hour for Suho clean the dirt from the scrapes and cuts, cover them in the creams and dress them in gauze. It wasn’t a pleasant experience, for him or the other boys, but especially not for poor Kyungsoo.

“Does it hurt that badly?” Suho asked when he finished and Kyungsoo’s shoulders were still shaking with silent sobs. He shook his head and clamped his lips together.

“What’s wrong then?” Suho demanded.

Kyungsoo took a shaky breath. “Just say it already,” he muttered.

Suho folded his arms. “Say what?”

“Aren’t you furious at us?” Kyungsoo whimpered.

Suho sighed and rubbed his hands over his face. “Did anyone else get hurt at all?” He asked, looking over the other six boys crowded on Baekhyun’s bed.

Sehun had scraped his hands and Chanyeol and Minseok had sore arms from carrying Kyungsoo back to the Sanctuary, but otherwise they were unharmed.

“Then right now I’m just really, really glad that you’re all okay,” Suho told them.

They all gaped at him. “But you said next time we got in trouble you weren’t going to help us!” Baekhyun cried. “We thought—”

“I know what I said,” Suho interrupted. “And yes I am miffed that you ignored me. Again,” he threw in pointedly, “But I’d say that it could have been a lot worse, wouldn’t you agree?”

He moved to sit next to Kyungsoo and gave him a gentle hug. “You didn’t break anything, right?” Kyungsoo shook his head. “And by tomorrow morning you’ll be up and walking around just fine. Nobody but us needs to know that this happened.”

Kyungsoo clung to Suho and cried into his shirt. “I’m sorry,” he hiccupped. “We all are.”

Suho patted his back. “It’s okay,” he assured. “I know you’re sorry.”

He felt a tug on his sleeve. Sehun was standing next to him looking rather tearful himself.

“Do you wish you didn’t have us anymore?” He asked. Behind him the other boys waited on baited breath for an answer.

Suho sighed and freed one arm from Kyungsoo so he could hug Sehun.

“Listen to me very carefully, all of you,” he said firmly, looking each one of them in the eye in turn.

“Sometimes all I can think about is all the different ways you can get into trouble. You’ve given me heart palpitations, grey hair and more stress than I’ll ever admit to and you drive me crazy. But even though you act like little terrors, you’re my little terrors. I love you all so much, and at the end of the day nothing you do will ever make me love you any less. I wouldn’t trade you for anything.”

Kai stomped his foot. “You’re such a sap,” he yelled before dissolving into tears.

Suho laughed and called them all over for a group hug, which lasted only a very brief second before he pushed them all away because they were going to break the bed if they weren’t careful.

/flails and screams/ I'M SO SORRY IT WASN'T SUPPOSED TO TAKE ME THIS LONG TO UPDATE BUT LIFE GOT IN THE WAY D:

I'm also working on some other stories at the moment and this one kind of took a back seat for a while ^^;;;; but my muse came back and I have another drabble in mind so hopefully that'll be out soon :)