“Great concert, everyone!” their manager cheers, patting each member one by one on the back absentmindedly as he tries to simultaneously hold a conversation with a stage manager. “Great job! Kris, can you get everyone to round up their things and go to the car?”

Kris nods, dabbing the sweat off his forehead with his shirt sleeve even though he can almost hear the coordinoonas whining about it in his head.

“You heard manager-hyung,” Kris says. “Get your things, time to go!”

“One, two,” he counts, pointing at Chanyeol and Baekhyun, who had found some sort of rodent underneath the stage and had decided that it was cute and they wanted to bring it back to the dorm and raise it as their own child.

“Three, four,” he continues, choosing not to linger too long on Minseok and Luhan, who were in the middle of debating over who had the best aegyo.

“Five, si-”

“Kyaaaa~”

“Shut up, Luhan! Six,” Kris continues, checking off Lay, who had been sitting in front of the fish tank, transfixed by the colors, ever since the concert had ended thirty minutes ago, and Kyungsoo, who, ever well-behaved, was cleaning the food wrappers off the floor.

“Seven, me. Eight,” he continues, checking off Chen, who had found his way over to the corner where the coordi-noonas were packing up their makeup, trying and failing to hone his flirting skills.

“Uh, where are all the maknaes?” Kris says with a furrowed brow, scanning the room. He glances over to the half of the room where Baekhyun and Chanyeol’s rodent had gotten loose, scurrying over to scare the living daylights out of Xiumin and Luhan, who could never reach notes as high as they were screaming right now when they were practicing.

Kyungsoo is the only one to pay attention to him, waving a hand in the general direction of the doorway to the hall. Kris mumbles a thanks before wandering out warily, cell phone clutched in his hand in case one of them has been trying to climb up to the ceiling again, and he was going to walk out to find a bloody corpse.

He realizes all of a sudden that he could be walking into a whole number of painful scenes - Kai could have injured his waist teaching Sehun how to pirouette again, Tao could have pulled his thigh out of its socket again after trying to prove that he was indeed very flexible, Sehun’s body could have finally realized that it was just a giant, boneless noodle that had somehow learned how to dance and just collapsed in on itself all of a sudden. Kris’s hand hesitated on the handle - was he ready for this? Was he as a man ready for this? Had he prepared enough throughout his life to handle this emergency, whatever it may be?

He goes for it, the handle sinking down underneath his hand and the door sliding open to reveal -

“Aww,” he can’t keep himself from saying. The three maknaes are sitting quietly atop one of the wardrobe chests, huddled around a Youtube video playing from Tao’s cell phone. He smiles to himself as he says a quiet “nine, ten, eleven” and slips back into the dressing room. How well behaved those boys were! Surely Suho just wasn’t as much of a man as Kris, because look at how quiet they were when Kris was put in charge, nothing like their rowdy selves when Suho was in charge.

Wait.

“Hey, has anyone seen Suho?” Kris asks. Kyungsoo is too engaged in scrubbing a wad of chewed gum off the coffee table, and Lay is too engaged in his fish tank to respond. He glances hopefully at the other five, only to be disappointed to find Xiumin and Luhan running around the room screaming “rat, rat, rat!” and Baekhyun and Chanyeol running after them screaming “stop, he won’t hurt you!”. Chen is sitting in a corner, sulking and nursing a dark red slapmark in the shape of a woman’s palm on his cheek.

Kris turns back into the hallway to ask the maknaes.

“Have any of you seen-”

Before he can finish, all three of the maknaes look up in sync, eyes glinting with mischievous humour and danger.

It all clicks into place.

Kris sighs.

“Everybody off,” he says with a disappointed huff. The maknaes run off, giggling and tittering. Kris lifts open the lid of the wardrobe chest.

“Hey lil buddy,” he coos, “You doing okay?”

He offers out a hand to Suho, who stares at it wide-eyed and trembling, nestled in with studded leather jackets and camouflage harem pants.

“C’mon, little fella, you’re alright now,” Kris hushes as he lifts Suho out of the box and heaves him over a shoulder. “No, no, no crying.”