Tao had to sneeze and found it quite ironic that Canlie of all people would take a step away while looking at him in disgust. If Luhan had been around, Tao would have made him explain to Canlie that he probably couldn't get the flu anyway because viruses usually weren't heat-resistant, and a lack of heat obviously wasn't anything Canlie's needed to be concerned about. He also would have mentioned that him being sick partly was Canlie's fault to begin with. But whether or not Luhan would have translated that part probably was another issue.

Tao judged others by their powers. To him they always said more about a person than any phoney actions or deliberately chosen words and he tried to stay away from people whose powers he considered to be dangerous.
Most people criticized him for it. Some people had aggressive powers but used them in good way, the would say. He was simplifying the world too much, he heard. But really, there was nothing simple about it. It wasn't easy to look at people he loved and who would always make him uncomfortable.
His mother had no powers, so he could never be completely sure whether she really was a good person as words meant nothing to him. His father meanwhile he was scared of. There was nothing good about a power that allowed him to drain all fluids from a body within seconds. Whether it was the power that turned that person bad or whether it was the other way around Tao didn't know. But to him it was clear that there always was a connection between a person and their power.

He joined Kris for two reasons. To escape his father's grasp and him apparently underestimating his cousin. Kris was weak and knew it, so when he used his power, he used it wisely. Tao thought they would work well together. Kris couldn't get into serious confrontations and Tao didn't want to. To control time always was a sign for him that he was the kind of person who would forever be able to create the right moment to run away. His father often called him a coward and he didn't think there was anything wrong about it. Trouble was the last thing he wanted.

But what was supposed to become a business unlike all the others of their family, slowly became a mess.
Lay was a decent guy, obviously. He was such a stupidly good person, he couldn't even heal himself. Luhan by himself also wasn't a problem. Telekinesis was in the wide grey zone of powers that could be either positive or negative, but Luhan himself never really seemed to think much of it, just as if it was guaranteed to be almost as useless as Kris' power to fly. The real issue was Xiumin, the ticking time bomb.

One thing typical for Koreans was that they often had very basic and raw powers. It was probably because the country kept its people with powers in those enclosed areas with few opportunities to mix their blood, so there were many people with very elementary powers. That was also why Korean slaves usually sold well for the Killing Games. Basic powers were incredibly popular because they made more interesting fights than more refined ones.
Not that Tao meant to be racist. He liked simple powers because they were usually easy to read, so he didn't think it was difficult to deal with most Koreans. That's why he also grew to like Canlie eventually. Fire could be extremely destructive, so at first he had his doubts, especially because Canlie was prone to accidents and didn't seem to understand much of what was going on around him. But Canlie ultimately was the perfect example of the advantage of simplicity because he was largely influenced by his feelings. Once he got used to being part of the crew, he also had better control over his power.

Xiumin was different. Ice was dangerous to begin with and he was particularly strong. Tao was pretty sure that both his parents must have had incredible abilities and that they probably never taught him how to use his.
The most bizarre thing was that Xiumin always acted as if he was in control. He never had much of an opinion and never seemed to care much. His powers though were all over the place and at first Tao almost begged Kris to get rid of him. He couldn't understand why the others couldn't see what he saw: that Xiumin probably wasn't completely sane. Because all Tao could feel through his power was hate.
He did get used to him in a way, but he always felt tense. It didn't really help that Xiumin always cooled down every single room he entered, like a constant unpleasantly eerie sensation.

At least the temperature problem Canlie seemed to solve at first. A room that had Canlie inside always was warm and thanks to the fact that it was Xiumin who explained most things to him, did Tao have a short phase of agreeable temperatures. It either was perfect or slightly too warm. To Tao, who had spent years being used to wearing an extra layer of clothes at that point, it felt like heaven. Yes, he probably was a little hard on Canlie sometimes, but secretly he was extremely thankful to him and to Kris. Fire probably was what they had needed all along, fire that could melt the ice.

But then it literally backfired. When warm and cold were in an ideal lukewarm harmony in the beginning, they slowly began to become uneven. It was either too hot or too cold and sometimes the temperature changed within seconds. Xiumin entered a room and brought a chill before Canlie turned it back to normal. Canlie entered a room and brought a wall of stuffy air before Xiumin cooled it down.
At first Tao thought they were doing it on purpose. No matter how friendly they acted around each other, to him that was not more than a facade and the fact that they used their powers to show their dominance, prove it.
But then he realized that they didn't even seem to notice what they were doing.

Canlie was averse to ice and a great number of his accidents had to do with that. He melted an ice ramp before and once told Tao that he found it a hassle to eat things like ice-cream because it took quite some willpower to not turn it into sticky soup. Him heating up rooms that Xiumin cooled down also seemed to do with the fact that he couldn't really feel cold. His body just seemed to act naturally, just like when he felt upset or nervous.
Xiumin also seemed to be that way. It probably was unrealistic to begin with for Tao to think that Xiumin might have been able to willingly change the temperature around him. He sometimes couldn't even stop the food he was eating from freezing, so it was more likely that he didn't notice the heat coming from Canlie, just as if there was a wall of ice around him.

Tao really didn't understand it. He had no idea why it worked fine at first and then turned into a temperature mess thanks to which he couldn't ever decide what to wear. He would either sweat or freeze. Maybe fire and ice just were too antithetic to live in harmony after all. Maybe they automatically created tension.
He was about to suggest to Kris that the whole issue could turn into a serious problem if they just kept the two of them together, when he realized that the answer maybe was much more simple than he had thought.

The moment that had changed his view had happened during one of their free weekends. Kris and Lay were both off to meet their families, Kris out of courtesy, Lay because he actually seemed to care. Tao always felt guilty around his parents, so he went out to meet friends instead. The other three didn't seem to have plans, so he figured they would just stay home as usual. Whatever reason Luhan had to cut all ties with his former relations, he really saw the whole thing through. Xiumin meanwhile didn't seem to like going out and Canlie was helpless by himself. Tao had no idea what exactly those three did on their days off but a great portion probably consisted of teaching Canlie some Chinese.
Tao usually enjoyed those small moment he could just be by himself, without duties and the constant danger of getting sick, but that very weekend he got into a fight. Just like his friends he grew up as a spoilt brat, so he couldn't even blame them, but living with his crazy, financially independant cousin had probably rubbed off on him too much. "Just earn your own money, if your father won't give you an allowance," he had said and before it could turn into a scene, he had headed back home earlier than expected.

He had met Luhan on his way, so he frankly hadn't thought that there would be anything he could have intruded into. The ones with the secret were Luhan and Xiumin after all and whatever Xiumin and Canlie could have talked about, he wouldn't have understood anyway.
At first he thought it was because Canlie was asleep. The two of them sat at the table in the living room and Canlie looked as if he had nodded off, so Tao figured that it was only so cold because Xiumin was awake by himself.
But something just felt off. It was maybe the fact that Xiumin didn't notice him entering or that he just sat there motionlessly. Maybe it was the way Xiumin mumbled something or the way he reluctantly touched Canlie's hair. Or maybe it was the way he accidentally froze the complete table and part of the floor, startling Canlie who almost fell off his chair as he woke up, just because Tao cleared his throat.

Tao began to wonder whether he had maybe misunderstood something right from the start. Xiumin maybe was just as simple to understand as Canlie, just in a slightly twisted way.
To Tao it was natural that a person and their power were one single entity. The power was just part of the person, like their soul and their mind, and to him powerless people felt somewhat incomplete. He never wondered what it would be like to think of one's own power as unwanted but that was maybe exactly what Xiumin was feeling. His power maybe only was out of control because he tried to suppress it, just like he seemed to suppress every other feeling.
So what if some of his most ridiculous mishaps were just feelings that burst out? Whenever something happened to Luhan, he became extremely counterproductive, sometimes even hindering anyone from helping. Some of his aggressive methods around slaves maybe had similar causes, too. Anger, surprise, a simple overload. And the cold around Canlie was perhaps just like that, something he had no direct influence on.

And the more he thought about it, the more he felt as if that mayhem of temperature variations they were all caught in which seemed to be so obvious to everyone but those two, wasn't about dominance at all, but about something as simple as feelings, about Xiumin trying to hide them and about Canlie naturally effusing them.