"I don't get why I can’t shake this..." Suho murmured just loudly enough to be heard by Lay alone, over the hum of the van's engine. "From an... objective standpoint, I know leaving makes perfect sense, but I... I just can't..."

Lay nodded, not failing to notice how deliberately thought out Suho's speech was and how forced the "big" words seemed, and he tightened his already white-knuckle-tight grip on his backpack. It was the only thing he had to comfort himself against the emotions of the conversation. "It hurts," he said, offering Suho words to finish his sentence.

"Yeah... It hurts, and I don’t know why."

Lay was silent for a moment, not having much of an answer for Suho’s question, but instead he was judging the tone of his voice. "Y'know," he whispered, unraveling one arm from his backpack and linking it around Suho's, "it's okay to say you're mad."

"Mad? I'm not..." He trailed off when Lay gave him a smile set below kind, but knowing eyes

"What gave it away?"

"The way you paused when agreeing with me when I said how I thought you might be feeling. You always do that when you’re hiding your anger. You can talk to me, you know."

Suho sighed, and Lay could feel him relax a bit, sinking a few more millimeters into the seat. He knew Suho, like most of the other members, felt safe confiding in him. "I was kind of hoping, I guess, that getting a taste of his own medicine would teach him something. But he was more than ready to get rid of us and go right back to being his old, self-centered self."

"Hm." He didn't want Suho to think he was invalidating his feelings, but the disheartened leader was jumping to a pretty specific conclusion without anything to back it up. Lay hadn’t interpreted Tao’s actions as being self-centered at all. "Just because he was ready for a break doesn't mean he didn't learn anything. Anyone would be really tired after watching all of us, and-"

"Sorry, but I really just want to vent right now. Without counterargam- counterarguments."

Suho could make himself use his expanded vocabulary, but that didn't mean he had the mature, rational mindset to go with it. He knew that, and had made that clear from the beginning. "Sorry," Lay murmured, shrinking down into his seat. He should have known better

"You don’t have to apologize. You’ve been even more overly-nice than usual since this happened, especially to Tao. Why do you stand by him so much, anyway?"

"Huh?" Lay could understand where Suho was coming from until the question.

"You do whatever he tells you, to a tee."

"So do you."

"I don't have any sort of choice; Sehun's second-in-command, but I'm still the leader of this group. Tao's the most level-headed of us, and those three cause enough resistance as it is," he said, nodding toward the Beagles, who were snoring in the seats in front of them. "And even I have my limits. Today, before the storm, he asked you to clean the whole bathroom by yourself, and you did it. That bathroom was gross, and you know the reason he asked you alone was because you're the only one who wouldn't argue with him. I didn't say anything because you were okay with it, but don't you think that was unfair?”

"...Lay?" Suho asked, looking over again. Lay's gaze had become distant, the fleeting light from the lamp posts revealing glossed over eyes. "Lay." He nudged him in the side and life came back to the boy's face. "Are you okay?"

"Y-yeah, sorry," he murmured. "Just some old memories, is all."

Suho wasn't as good at reading indirect cues as Lay, but he could tell that the conversation would best be ended there.

Tao was standing in D.O. and Chen’s room with a diaper in one hand and a sippy cup in the other before he was fully aware that he wasn't asleep anymore. He'd been jarred back to the waking world when he realized the littlest wasn't in the room he was sharing with the guardian and the problem child, and neither were said guardian or problem child.

'That's right,' he remembered, 'They're not here.

'...They're not here~!'

The silence, the still-present-but-rapidly-fading scent of old milk, the feeling of waking up after sleeping for twelve hours straight (the well-rested version, not the why-did-I-sleep-so-long-my-everything-hurts version.) His illness was even limited to a slight case of the sniffles and something in his throat that would need to be coughed up soon.

‘This is a freaking perfect day to be alive!’

He barely had time to enjoy the feeling, however, before an irksome sense of duty began to inch its way into his consciousness. ‘I should call Youngjun. Do I have to, though…?’ A begrudging pout settled onto his face as his mental debate continued to slide in favor of doing the right thing ‘I guess I have to check in. Find out how they are, how his wife took the news, and how the heck he explained it to her.’

He tossed the diaper and sippy cup into one of Xiumin’s nightstand drawers and returned to his own room. Picking up his phone, he noticed he’d already missed four calls from the manager, and wasted no time in returning them.

“Hello, Tao?”

“Yeah, what’s up? How is everything?”

“Uh, bad.”

Tao felt very, very tempted to hang up the phone and not ask Youngjun to elaborate, especially after the very angry, high-pitched scream he heard in the background.

“Bad… how?”

“I mean it, leave him alone, now!” he heard the manager yell at someone in the background. “Oh God, Tao, I can’t even begin to describe it. They’re a nightmare; Junmyeon hasn’t stopped crying since this morning, and Chanyeol led Sehun, Jongin, Jongdae, and Baekhyun in a revolt-by-tantrum until my wife stormed out of the house to go buy cookies. They started jumping on the couch where Kyungsoo was watching TV and now he’s started screaming and throwing punches!” Suddenly, there was a horrific retching sound in the background followed by a loud “EEEWWW!” and a groan from Youngjun. “And of course, Minseok has just projectile vomited his breakfast all over Yixing. Fantastic.”

Tao swallowed down the mix of terror, disappointment, and that thing that was already in his throat. “Put Lay on the line.”

“Not while his hands are covered in puke, no!”

“Fine, then put Suho on the line!”

There were a few seconds of nothing but cataclysmic background noise before a choppy, “H-hello?”

“Suho, what in the name of Guccio Gucci is going on over there!?”

“I… I wanna go home…”

He rolled his eyes before hissing through gritted teeth, “That’s all good and whatever, but why is everyone acting up!? Don’t you guys have better sense than that!?”

“No yelling at meee!” he whined before dissolving into more sobbing.

“Okay, okay, I’m sorry, calm down, okay? Could you please just tell me why everyone is misbehaving?”

“’Cause you lefted us. We wanna go home.”

When Suho didn't redact the word 'lefted', realization hit Tao, hard.

His heart dropped, punched straight through his diaphragm, and bounced across his abdomen before coming to rest painfully on top of his appendix. If he was understanding correctly (which he really, *really* hoped he wasn't,) not only were they still children and acting worse than ever, they were even closer to being full-fledged rugrats. What had happened to the previous day’s progress? He'd been disappointed to hear that the boys hadn’t become adults as he'd hoped, but this, this was terrible.

“Do you miss us?” Suho sniffled into the phone.

"W-what?"

"Do you miss us?" he repeated, but before Tao had time to gather his thoughts, he heard a quickly fading, “Nooo-!” which signified that the phone had been taken back by Youngjun.

“Were they this bad with you?” he asked, desperation in his voice. “How do you get them to stop? Oh man, our own kids were never this bad.”

“I… I d-don’t know…” he stammered. He hadn’t been expecting this at all. Whatever had caused it wasn’t getting better. They weren’t getting better. They…

“Well…” Youngjun sighed into the receiver. “Christ. Okay, the other managers are back in town. I’ll send one to you for the interview and I’ll get the others over here to help.”

“O-okay. Keep me updated,” he said.

“Yeah.”

Tao tossed the phone onto his bed and fell down right beside it, sighing heavily and fighting back the frustration heating his face. Everything was going so smoothly the day—well, the evening—before. They’d woken up regressed again, but it hadn’t been this bad, and by the time they’d woken up from their naps, they were the most mature they’d been. Was it a random flux? Did they have to get worse to get better? Tao pushed his now aching mind to think of why else they could have regressed so badly.

With a grunt, he rocked back and did a kip-up to get to his feet, and reached for the first notebook and pencil he saw on his desk.

“This all started the day before yesterday” he murmured to himself as he jotted down the day of the week in one column. “They changed into kids, but their minds were a little more mature.” Thinking of how their mental ages had changed over the past few days, Tao decided to rank the way the kids were acting that day as a ‘four.’

“Then yesterday…” he said, realizing that he’d need categories and scrawling ‘Morning’  and ‘Evening’ at the top of the page, and re-thinking the day before that. “By that night, they were at a three. Yesterday morning they were at a two, and when they woke up after their naps, it was more like a five. Then, this morning…” He sighed as he slowly drew the ‘one,’ and paused to look at the disheartening number before shaking his head. 'No, gotta work this out,' he thought. 'If there’s something going on here, I have to figure out what it is, ASAP. What happened before all of this?' He started a new column on the paper.

The only thing special that had happened was the argument, which he noted as ‘Chicken?’, adding the question mark as a note of uncertainty about its relevance. They’d woken up at a ‘four’, then ended up at a ‘three’ by evening. By the time that’d happened, five of them had run away after Tao became fed up and angrily sent them to their rooms for arguing. Another fight, albeit a somewhat unfair one; it was clear Sehun and Kai had just been acting up because they were cranky. He noted this as well.

Between the evening and the next morning, the only big things that had happened were him spanking Chanyeol and his fight with Sehun and Suho over the quality of their dinner. He cringed at the last one; Sehun’s point about it being a choking hazard, although crassly made, had been completely valid, and Tao’s response wasn’t the most mature. He’d lost his cool again, and things had come to a head twice.

By the next morning, he was pretty cool, despite the fact that everything had gone downhill and he refrained from going off on Chanyeol for providing D.O. and Xiumin with the toddler equivalent of weapons of mass destruction. Instead—and he was proud of his parenting skills on this one—he’d laid down ground rules and promised to keep his anger in check, and when the children woke up they were better than ever.

“That’s exactly it!” he said, a wide, beaming grin coming to his face for the second time that day. “It’s all about arguing!" That must have been part of the stress response that caused the situation, and it had been getting worse because they had kept arguing. It was obvious that their severe regression this morning had been triggered yesterday evening, when they had fought over…

Over…?

Tao’s smile faded into a confused frown. There hadn’t been a fight last night. Tao’s convincing them to go with the manager couldn’t have even been classified as an argument. Sure, it'd been ill-received, but he'd broken it down for them calmly. Sure, he’d have loved to shout, “I’m tired of taking care of you little terrors; it’s time for someone else to do this for a change!” but he hadn’t.

‘No, no, there has to have been something,’ he thought, placing a hand over his pounding forehead, but as much as he wracked his brain, forcing himself to go over every detail from the moment he woke from his nap to the moment he went to sleep, there simply wasn’t anything to remember.

It wasn’t the arguments that was causing it.

He gave a groan that intensified into a roar and roughly grabbed at the corner of the page, but just as he was about to rip it from the notebook, a word that had popped up only a moment before in his fleeting thoughts resurfaced.

‘Parenting skills.’

He’d been unfair in sending Sehun and Kai to their rooms with the Beagles. He'd done some thinking since then. Kids acting up around nap time didn’t deserve to be yelled at and punished, they deserved a nap and a second chance. He’d gone off on Sehun and Suho when they tried to call him off for his bad caretaking. Sure, they were being brats about it, but Tao could have kept a level head and listened. Instead, he ignored the point that was being made and instead immaturely focused only on how it was being made, and thrown a tantrum of his own. And even though last night he’d used the excuse that sending the boys off with Youngjun was the best thing to do, he, in fact, hadn’t given one iota of a crap about that; he only cared about getting them out of his hair.

Those weren’t the only examples of his less-than-ideal parenting skills, and when he turned over a new page and charted out all of the things he’d done well and the things he could have done better, it correlated perfectly to how mature the kids were.

Tao gave a heavy sigh, leaning back in his chair until the front legs lifted from the ground, and balancing there. Basically, what it boiled down to if he was right, was the fact that he was going to have to do an unrealistically, storybook-perfect, Mary-Mother-Of-Freaking-Jesus job of taking care of The Nine until they were back to normal.

He really, really hoped he was not right, but regardless, he tilted the chair further back until he could grab his phone, and text Youngjun to let him know to bring the kids back around as soon as he could after the filming. He had no idea if time spent in someone else’s care counted against him, but he wasn’t about to lollygag and find out.

Leaning forward, he let the front legs of his chair slam back to the floor, and picked up his pencil once more to scrawl a note underneath the rest of his writing.

“Note to self: Never, ever think something like, ‘This is a freaking perfect day to be alive’ while something like this is going on ever again, you freaking jinx, I hate you.”