“GOD ING DAMNIT!!!”

“Kyungsoo, STOP!” Suho grabbed and held D.O.’s wrists in a bid to prevent him from punching the wall until his hand broke.

“I CAN’T; WHY didn’t I melt it all the way!? My ing impatience… damnit!!!”

“Kyungsoo, look at me. No, stop-“ he let go of D.O.’s wrists and firmly held both sides of his face. “Kyungsoo. You can’t fix it now. What you can do is get everyone else safely into a bed, and I especially need your strength to help us get Chanyeol into his.”

“I shouldn’t have fallen asleep…” murmured Xiumin, staring straight ahead at nothing in particular.

“Hyung, no blame game right now. Please go get in bed and get a good night’s sleep.”

He complied, not wanting to put much thought into the situation anyway. The door clicked quietly shut behind him.

“Come on, Kyungsoo,” Suho said through the solemn mask on his face. He took command of Chanyeol’s cranial end, grabbing him under the arms, while D.O. grabbed him by the ankles. “I think it’d be better to put him in Kai’s bed,” he added in a clearly strained voice. “So we can watch all three of them.” The other didn’t particularly care; he was content enough to follow Suho’s directions, and he did so, following after him clumsily while trying to keep the giant high enough off the ground so that his arms didn’t drag, until Baekhyun finally noticed the issue and put them up across his chest.

The other two Suho had previously referred to were in various states of consciousness; Lay’s eyes were open, and Chen was murmuring something unknown in his deliriousness. While Suho and D.O. worked on getting Chanyeol situated in Kai’s bed, Baekhyun turned his attention to the seemingly more awake of the two.

“How’re you doing? Lay…?”

“Baekhyun… can I be honest with you for a second?”

This caused him to blink in reply, but he just as quickly nodded his head. “Yeah… sure, anything.”

“I feel like .”

Baekhyun stifled a laugh that he let go of once he realized that Lay was already smiling, and the two shared a small chuckle that the former didn’t realized he’d needed so badly until he’d gotten it.

“Yeah, well…” he wiped at a bit of drool that had accidentally found its way out of his exhausted mouth, “You had a seizure. You’ve earned it.”

Lay’s characteristic confused look washed over his face. “A seizure? Me? Why? What happened?”

Baekhyun shook his head. “I don’t know, but Sehun must have done something-”

He blinked, eyes wide. “Sehun came back?”

His blink was reciprocated. “You don’t remember?”

Lay’s forehead crinkled and his eyes closed as he tried to think of the last thing he could remember, and out of the shadows of his mind he could see Chen’s body writhing under the force of a figure trying to smother him with a pillow.

“I think he tried to suffocate Chen…” Lay concluded, eyes going wide again. “That’s all I can remember.”

“Lay.” The attention of both of the guys shifted to where Suho had just finished pulling the covers over Chanyeol. “I hate to ask this of you right now, but after Sehun came through here, he attacked the rest of us. Everyone other than the three of us got hurt, and we really need to make sure none of them are hurt too badly. Take your time and rest up, but as soon as you’re ready, we need you.”

“Give me just a minute…” Lay pulled himself up into a sitting position, faltering slightly when the pain from the blood rushing to his injured head trucked him. Baekhyun helped him the rest of the way up and against the wall, and after thanking him, Lay’s eyes closed once again. The others watched, the only sound in the room being Chen’s occasional murmuring, and the pain in Lay’s face eased away over a course that took less than the minute he’d asked for.

“Okay. I’m fine. Who’s worst off?”

The three others looked between one another; without having seen the entire fight, they had no idea of how the others had been hurt.

“Chan… yeol could have a head injury…” Suho mused, his lips pursed in thought. “Tao hit his back… Other than that, I don’t know.”

“Alright.” Lay nodded, mostly to himself. “Okay. If you guys could, just keep a watch on the others until I can get to them. We don’t need surprises.”

Suho returned to his own room as did D.O., leaving Baekhyun to go keep an eye on Xiumin. Since Chanyeol was relatively high on the triage list, Lay stood with a sigh and got to work on his analysis. 

Fortunately, other than a few bruises, and a mild, easily fixable concussion in the case of Chanyeol, every member would live to see the next day, although they’d be-

“…” the aforementioned head trauma patient moaned, as he woke up, flexing his toes to the tune of pain, “I’m sorer than hell…”

When he squirmed about, trying to turn over in the single bed without his muscled screaming bloody murder, he noticed quickly that this was not his bed. Opening his eyes let him know just as quickly that this was not his room. Flipping back over, much to the complaint of his body, he realized that this was Kai’s room, and Kai’s bed. Chen was beginning to stir comfortably in his own bed, but Lay had fallen asleep propped up against the wall, the covers of his in an unmade pile beneath him. Tears streaked his eyes, the small, battered body of a piglet cradled in his arms.

Chanyeol's eyebrows creased as he himself fought against the heat rising behind his eyes, and he looked away after seeing the piglet take one shallow breath. Instead he took in the strange state of disrepair the room had fallen into. His brows furrowed even deeper in confusion, but his concentration was then broken by the sound of slow footsteps in the main room, accompanied by a voice he recognized as Baekhyun’s.

“Oh man…”

Not wanting to wake the other two, Chanyeol convinced himself to his feet, avoiding stepping on ‘Baekhyun’s pillow…?’ and taking a second to allow the momentary dizziness of the sudden decrease in blood pressure to pass by him. Every inch of his body urged him to return to bed, but he ignored the warm yet almost comfortable pain that spread over his body.

He opened the door slowly, yet still managed to startle Baekhyun, who as Chanyeol opened it further, could be seen standing amidst the wreckage that was their common room.

“What in the mother-“ his voice trailed off as he recognized the poker face look on Baekhyun’s face that Chanyeol knew was in indication that he was not happy.

“I thought you might die, stupid…”

The lack of clarity of the situation was beginning to make his head hurt more than his body. “What are you on about?”

Baekhyun came up wordlessly and poked him lightly in the rib. The soreness bit at him, but he was too surprised to pay full attention to the pain, which he simply jumped back from.

“You’re confusing me.”

“It’s not my fault you got knocked the out,” came the reply from upturned lips.

“…Not helping.”

Another door down the hall opened, followed by footsteps that were revealed to belong to Suho, who had opened his mouth to greet the two before taking in the scene before him.

The ‘Good’ got stuck in his throat. “…’Morning.”

“’Morning.”

He flexed his own slightly sore arms, testing them slowly to see if any areas of his muscles had reached a limit he hadn’t realized. “Can you help me wake everyone up?” he asked gently. “I want to let everyone sleep, but we need to talk now, before the managers come back.” The other two nodded and the three went about collecting the other six drowsy, still hurting members of their band onto the sofa.

The scene looked a lot like it had the night before when they were about to search for a note from Sehun, only this time there was a lot less more morale and adrenaline floating about.

Suho stood before the others in silence, waiting for the right words to come to him. But being expected to lead the others in such an unprecedented, unexpected situation was quite possibly beyond the scope of this leadership abilities.

He wasn’t a natural leader to begin with; the skills he did have only came with his years of knowing how his band members operated. His way of getting people to do his bidding involved bribing, not commanding, but over time, Suho had come to learn how to effectively gain the respect of the others in the group while simultaneously suppressing his urge to fix every sour situation or ensure that the other members didn’t hate his guts via “gifts”. Sehun had been the one to realized that those “gifts” were Suho’s way of maintaining a control he didn’t think he had but did, and he was also the one to talk some sense into him, telling him that he should have more faith in his own abilities, and that when he felt that he couldn’t, to have faith that the members did.

“I’ll be frank. I don’t know what to do, or what is going to happen from here.” Suho bit his tongue at starting with such a disparaging comment, but looking into the eyes of s, focused entirely on him in their weariness, he carried on. “But I do know that before we decide how to handle Sehun, we need to come to a consensus on what we want to do.”

There was silence at the implication of the statement, but they knew he was right.

“L-look…” Tao spoke up, “All I want is to know why. Nothing else matters to me.”

“What if we can’t get to ‘why’s?” posed D.O. from his spot on Tao’s right, ignoring the untrue half of his opinion.

“I heard you captured him once, so can’t you do it again?”

“Until Lay was able to examine everyone, we weren’t sure all nine of us would be sitting here this morning. I want to know why too, but we have to make sure it’s a risk we’re all willing to take.”

No one else spoke up. Tao’s eyes darted around as he turned to look at the group on the sofa above him. Someone else should be speaking up in favor of capturing him by now. Why wasn't anyone else speaking up?

Suho could see that no one was going to pitch in on their own volition anytime soon. “Kai? Xiumin?”

The two’s eyes met as they both shifted uncomfortably in their places next to each other on the floor. To the right of Kai, Tao’s heart dropped.

“He’s kind of dangerous, isn’t he?”

“Yeah…”

“He’s our maknae, guys…” Chanyeol finally said from his spot in the middle-left of the sofa, and Tao’s morbid gaze into nowhere broke, shifting focus to the one speaking. “We’re supposed to take care of his as best as we can. If we can catch him… If we don’t have to… hurt him, we should, right?”

“He can split atoms…” Baekhyun murmured just above his breath from Chanyeol’s right.

“Imagine this,” Chen added, from the far left of the sofa, on the other side of Chanyeol. “We can’t fight him one-on-one. If a big group of us go in, he causes an explosion, and it’s the same end. There’s no way to win against him if we aren't willing to go all-out.”

“We shouldn’t say that before we know that it’s true…” Lay said, speaking up from the far right of the sofa. “Take a while to think about it, and I’m sure we can come up with some sort of diversion, or-“

“No, I think Chen’s right…” Chanyeol muttered. Lay’s eyes widened, but it wasn’t at Chanyeol’s sudden change of position; all of the members were used to that by now. It was what had accompanied it- rather, what had come just before it that surprised him.

Tao’s eyes darted around even more desperately in the face of his losing battle. “We can’t just… kill him outright! We’ll never be able to figure this out. What if it happens again?”

“Same problem, same outcome,” Chen shrugged.

“Suho…” Tao’s eyes pleaded.

“Did you detect any power buildup in him?,” Suho asked, a question that could only have been aimed at Lay, and his gaze followed accordingly. Lay felt a small sense of dread wash over him. Suho was setting him up again.

“I… wasn’t paying attention, but I didn’t sense power buildup…”

Suho’s eyes narrowed without breaking the connection. “Uh-huh… Well, we can talk it over after we’ve rested and thought over it some more, but just for now, I want to get an idea of what everyone is thinking. Everyone in favor of taking Sehun alive?”

His, Tao’s, and Lay’s hands were the sad minority.

Suho didn’t bother with the other vote, letting his hand drop listlessly yet slowly to his side.

“...Okay.”