The request for the extra chicken had been successful, and as ravenous as the guys were, it hadn't  made it to a place on the kitchen table, a place from where they could eat like civilized people. Two thirds of them hadn't even bothered to grab a floor cushion before the group ripped open the boxes and tore into the chicken.

The first sound that wasn't a "nom" or someone the sauce off a bone was from Lay, who thought to ask, “Baekhyun, how’s your arm doing?” when he saw him avoiding fully extending his right arm when reaching for another piece of chicken.

“It’s alright, just a tiny bit sore.” He flexed his elbow out toward the center of the circle in an attempt to show that he was indeed alright, but the involuntary wince that came from him gave him away.

“Sorry again…” Sehun said sheepishly.

“Sehun accidentally caught Baekhyun with an attack,” D.O. explained, seeing the lack of understanding on Chen’s face.

“Sehun’s no joke out there, though!” Baekhyun grinned, reliving the astonishing moment. “Since when have you been able to manipulate individual elements in the air? Soon you’ll be able to split atoms or some like that.

“Well… I’ve kind of already been practicing,” Sehun said quietly. He smiled and his ears flushed a little in embarrassment at the praise.

The silence that followed indicated that there would be no further praise.

“Isn’t that kind of a dangerous thing? I mean, to be practicing?” Chen asked. He was starting to regret not going; it seemed like he’d missed out on a lot.

“It’ll be fine. I’ll read up and make sure I’m doing it safely.”

"Just be careful with it, okay?" Suho asked.

Sehun's mouth took on its characteristic upturned frown. "I am. I just said I am. Jeez, you guys never have trust in me."

Baekhyun cleared his throat loudly and glanced down at his injured elbow, causing Sehun to give him a very disdainful look.

"Really," the taller asked.

"Yes, really."

"I already apologized."

"The point still stands that maybe you should wait until you have a little more mastery over directing your attacks to-"

"You're acting like this hasn't happened to every one of us before at some point, so why single me out?"

"Because no one else is practicing something with such dangerous consequences," Chen asserted.

"It's not. That. Dangerous. For 's sake, the fission of atoms is on an entirely different scale than a nuclear explosion. I shouldn't have told you guys."

"Guys, us younger members are not children. We're grown men, just like you. Have some faith in him," Tao said.

"It's not about faith, it's about making sure everyone stays safe," Suho corrected.

"Hyung, with all due respect," Kai said, finally slowing down after having eaten nearly half a chicken himself, "I'm agreeing with Tao. Sehun's the only wind-type in the room, and the only one who's put in the research. He knows more about it than the rest of us. Let him handle stuff related to his own powers." 

"Alright," Suho sighed. If there was one skill he had as a leader, it was knowing when an argument wasn't going to go anywhere constructive. “Speaking of handling things, Jongdau, are you sure you’re going to be okay tomorrow?”

“Wan handad pacant," he replied around a full mouth of food. Seeing the confused looks from the others, he swallowed sheepishly. "One hundred percent."

“Okay, well,” Suho said, switching over to addressing all of the members, “We’ve all worked incredibly hard for this showcase. This is the biggest one we’ve done since The Lost Planet, so it won’t be easy, but if we expected it to be easy, we wouldn’t all be here right now. You guys are strong, and EXO is as strong as ever, possibly even stronger. We’re going to rock them tomorrow, so get a good night’s sleep, okay?” He put a hand in toward the middle of the group, and nine more hands piled on top of it.

“We are ONE! EXO!”

“You guys remember that time Chanyeol knocked D.O. off the stage?”

The two groaned when Tao brought up the memory from the otherwise perfect concert several months prior.

“Coming from the guy who fell off the stage himself before,” Chanyeol snorted, tossing his bag over his shoulder before examining the sky through the high-up gym window. He squinted through one of the broken panes. “It looks like rain out there.”

“You guys… can go ahead.” Xiumin said, dodging a blast of wind that swirled through the icy haze that hung in the air. He along with Suho was currently locked in a fierce two-on-one battle against Sehun, who was mostly defending against the other two, but was clearly holding his own. The intensity increased as time went on; despite the threat of rain, the other members were so enthralled that they all remained, and were cheering loudly.

“SEHUN, ON YOUR RIGHT!”

“YEAH, THAT’S THE WAY, HYUNG!!!”

Adrenaline and testosterone pumped ferociously through the young bodies, wind clashed harder against ice as the attacks began to get more and more serious, and the only one who seemed even slightly concerned about damage to the gym or the fighters was Lay, but even he was so rapt by the fight that no words came from his open jaw.

Sehun, preoccupied with the knife-sharp frozen stalagmites forming at random below him, shot out a sharp gust of wind to take care of the projectiles being shot at him, but Xiumin had hidden a secret tactic in the midst.

Sehun didn’t notice Xiumin unfreeze the ice as their attacks met and Sehun’s wind sent the water droplets flying into the air, but he could feel them as they refroze and began to rain from above. He couldn’t easily redirect all of them from that angle, and as he focused his attention on doing so, he didn’t notice the needle-thin ones coming from the front.

“SEHUN!” Tao yelled, raising his hand to freeze the scene.

Sehun looked front just in time to see the needles coming toward him. The next thing anyone recognized, an enormous blast of energy threw Xiumin and Suho toward the wall 15 feet behind them, and knocked the other seven members on the other side of the gym clean off of their feet. Tao had been too late to stop the needles, but he had been able to stop Xiumin and Suho from what would have been a rather painful collision with the wall. He unfroze the scene in such a way that erased the inertia, and they fell to the ground, entirely dazed.

“Damnit! Are you guys okay?” Sehun asked, running over. The other members followed suit, a few of them nearly slipping on the icy floor in the process.

“Yeah…” Xiumin murmured, being helped up alongside Suho.

“The hell just happened?” Kai asked, entirely confused.

“I-I overreacted…” Sehun stammered vaguely, not making eye contact with any of the others in the room. “I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to-“

“Did you split atoms?” Chen asked, voice going gravely low.

Sehun merely nodded, putting a hand over his face.

“See, I told you it was dangerous to learn!” Chen yelled, "You should have listened!"

“Calm down, it’s not his fault, Xiumin and Suho shouldn’t have done an attack like that.” Tao said, the accusatory look in his eyes not going unnoticed by the leader. “Anyone would get terrified.”

“I wasn’t actually going to hit him,” Suho, who was more or less in charge of the direction of the attacks, defended. “They were going to go near him, but not-“

“He couldn’t have known that.”

“It doesn’t matter, the point is that he reacted by splitting atoms,” Baekhyun said.

“I’m on Chen with this one; we can’t have him responding like that to a surprise attack,” Lay added.

“I’m so sorry…”

Suho wrapped an arm about Sehun, who looked as if he was threatening to cry. “We can talk about this later; you guys go home for now. We’ve worked really hard today. I’ll clean up.”

Sehun paused, as if was about to offer to help, but he realized that after what had just happened, using his powers probably wasn’t what the other members wanted to see. Xiumin took up the task of comforting him as Suho picked up all of the water that was left after the fight with a bit of assistance from Chanyeol, who helped by quickly melting the ice before joining the others.

“So, tonight. Dinner. What do you guys want?” he asked when he caught up shortly outside of the doors as the rest of the group waited underneath the angry-looking sky for one of the managers to show up.

“Ramen?” Chen piped up.

“Wait, you actually want to eat with us? First you actually come to practice and now you’re not scurrying off to your girlfriend’s house?” D.O. teased, slightly amused. "What's going on?"

Chen had indeed been spending an inordinate amount of time at his girlfriend's house as of late, something against which he couldn't argue.  “She’s out of town for the night…” he mumbled, looking down and swiping a toe against a small sprig of weeds trying to thrive in a crack in the asphalt.

“Well good, finally you’ll actually spend some time with us!” Xiumin said with a smile.

“I’m actually pretty tired; I was thinking about hitting the sack when I got back.”

“…And you wonder why we say you’re no fun recently,” Baekhyun pouted. He kicked a stray pebble that had erred from the rest of its brethren in the flower display on the curb.

“Okay, I was thinking about hitting the sack or eating ramen.”

“Booooring,” Baekhyun concluded, kicking another pebble at Chanyeol, who passed it back. Chen intercepted it and kicked it straight across the asphalt, far enough away for the other two to consider their game ruined.

“That’s my ‘ you’ right back to you guys,” he said, winking at Baekhyun, who was about to grumble a reply of some sort, when their ride could finally be heard coming up the gravel road. Suho, channeling the massive amount of water that had been inside, appeared through the doors at the same moment, directing the water back to the small pond from which it had been drawn.

As they all piled in the van, one hopeful voice asked, “So since no one else said anything, does that mean we can have ram-“

A chorus line of nine various forms of “no” was his answer.