A/N: So, uh, you might have noticed that progress on this story has slowed. I started graduate school in August, and the work is finally starting to catch up. Don't worry, I'm going to finish the story, but you can definitely expect updates to be pretty irregular. I could update once every other day or every other month. Fortunately, there aren't *too* many chapters left, so it won't be like you're waiting years, haha. This story turns one on February 3rd, so I want to have at least one new chapter up for that,  hopefully at least two. Also, there might end up being some kinks in the later chapters as well, as taking so long between updates means I forget what I've set up for myself to finish. I'll try to straighten those out, if I find any. Anyway, please bear with me! ><

“Let’s talk about what happened yesterday.”

Peaceful night or not, there were issues to be resolved.

Chanyeol looked away as his mouth twisted in annoyance before blowing a curly forelock out of his eyes—most of them were going to need haircuts soon, Tao noted.

“I’ll be honest with you,” Tao said, pressing forward despite the child’s standoffish disposition, “I can’t promise you won’t get in trouble. But I know this isn’t you.”

The little one looked down at his pint-sized body, then quizzically back up at Tao, who rolled his eyes in response before adding, “Despite everything else, I’d be hard-pressed to expect you lashing out like that. So, I want to hear from you what happened, and why.”

Chanyeol wasn’t the only one to be acting ridiculously out of character, but this was the first time Tao had noticed there might be a whole new layer to the situation he hadn’t even realized existed. The one who sat cross-legged (which was just one of three different positions he’d fidgeted in and out of in the thirty seconds since he’d sat him down to talk,) in front of him was only the first in a list of kids he had to question.

“Iunno. Chen made me mad, and I pushed him. I didn’t mean to hurt him,” he muttered matter-of-factly.

“What did he do to make you mad?”

He was silent for a moment, twisting around so he was laying on his stomach, legs still crossed, and hugging his pillow before replying. “I’m the leader in our group, and he’s always saying my ideas are dumb, and I’m a bad leader and stuff.”

“Gotcha… Do you…” he continued on a hunch, “Do you like being leader?”

Chanyeol nodded. “I like it a lot. I always wanted to be a leader, and now I am, and I don’t like him saying I can’t, I guess.”

It wasn’t that it was abnormal behavior for a kid. It was, however, that not only did Chanyeol not have a violent bone in his body (many, many hyperactive ones, but none violent,) he hated leading. Responsibility was not a concept at which Chanyeol excelled, and he was very aware of that fact. Being team captain in games was the extent of leadership roles he had ever shown an interest in taking on, and even that was something he had to be picked to do. If there were such thing as a natural-born follower, it was this guy.

“Okay. You can go now.”

Chanyeol perked up, head rising from the pillow excitedly. “Really? I’m not in trouble?”

Oh, right. ‘Trouble.’

“Uh, no TV or meetings of your little group for a day or two,” Tao mumbled dismissively. Frankly, he had more important issues with which to deal.

Getting the most difficult out of the way first was often the best policy, and it was the policy Tao intended to use. He had Chanyeol send Sehun into the room, who took the former’s place on the bed, sitting with his legs off the bed, and arms folded.

“What am I in for now, officer?”

“You’re not ‘in for’ anything,” Tao said, voice taking on a steely edge despite his best efforts to sound neutral. Talking calmly with the kid who was giving him the most hell was not an easy feat.

“Then why am I in here?”

Tao was telling the truth: Sehun was not in trouble. He was, however, the second of four he’d noticed acting out-of-character.

Sehun was both intelligent and incredibly snarky; there was no denying it. However, his intentions were always benign, and if his snark ever started to bother someone, he knew when to back off. The kid in front of him did not, and Tao had been about to chalk that up to his decision-making skills being… disrupted, but as he was about to write him off as “just being a bigger brat than usual,” something said brat had said re-surfaced in his head.

“I was gonna blackmail hyung.”

From the day he’d met Sehun, he’d realized how terrible the maknae was at withholding information, and the conversation they’d had once the kids had come back to the dormitory was in direct contrast to what Tao knew as basic fact. Sehun had been planning to use the fact that Tao had wanted a break from the kids as blackmail—somewhat weak blackmail that might’ve only been good for extorting a cookie or two, but blackmail all the same. The Sehun Tao knew would never blackmail anyone, because he couldn’t keep a secret long enough to do so, not to mention the fact that such a malicious line of thought just wasn’t characteristic of him.

“I just wanted to ask you a few questions. You’re not in trouble for saying you were planning on blackmailing me.” Tao had found that it was beneficial to preface such worrisome statements with ‘you’re not in trouble for…’ but regardless, Sehun’s eyes rolled so far back in his heads that his dark-brown irises almost disappeared. “I just want-“

“Yeah right, like I’m really not in trouble.”

“You’re not. Hear me out, please. I just wanted to ask why you wanted to blackmail me.”

“I plead the fifth.”

Tao groaned. “This isn’t a court of law, this isn’t the United States, and you’re not in trouble. Trust me. I might be dealing with bigger issues than how to separate you from your cookies.”

“Oh? Bigger issues, you say?”

“Like that. That right there," he said, pointing at Sehun. "And you pleading the sixth or whatever, and…” He stopped himself, filled with a sudden awareness that Sehun might either blab his concerns to the rest of the children, or try to figure out how to make gains of his own through them. “It’s not important.”

“Sounds like it is.”

“Work with me, here.”

“I’m not working with you on anything until you tell me what we’re working on.”

“There is no ‘we’.”

“Then I’m gonna go play my video game,” he said, hopping down from the bed.

“You’re extorting me again.”

This caused Sehun to pause in his tracks and turn around. “You’re not as slow as I thought.”

Tao dug his nails into his fingers and bit his lip to curb his building anger. That quickly, Sehun had built up the status quo in his favor, but what he didn’t know was that Tao had confirmed all the information he needed for the time being. Sehun was indeed actively trying to manipulate him for his own benefit, and he was far too sharp for his current state. His manner of speaking, word choice, and intelligence weren’t matching with that of the others, and—as he remembered how Sehun had flubbed the word ‘compensation’ the day before—where his own should be.

“That’s fine,” Tao said, only a slight hint of annoyance on the words he spoke. “You can go.”

He didn’t fail to notice Sehun look slightly disappointed as he muttered, “Whatever, your loss,” and continued out of the room.

He found Lay cleaning the calcium buildup off the showerhead. As part of his personal reform efforts, Tao had pledged to himself to stop using Lay’s obedience as a convenient way to get things done, but Lay was, today, cleaning without having been told.

Tao’s eyes quickly fell from the showerhead to the reddened hands holding it.

“What happened!?” he said, reaching out and grabbing them, flinching slightly when the showerhead hit the plastic wall of the shower. “Did you burn yourself with hot water?”

Lay hesitantly shook his head, as if deciding whether or not correcting Tao or just going with his presumption was the right thing to do.

“Then what was it?”

“He found some dangerous cleaning stuff yesterday,” answered Suho, who was coming in to use the toilet. “We took it from him, but he hurt himself already.”

Helping others to his best ability was a core part of who Zhang Yixing was as a person, but not to the extent Tao had witnessed recently. Not to the extent where he got chemical burns, and the skin of his knees was red and beginning to develop calluses because Tao had given him the job of “tidying up” before the situation with Chen occurred, and once everything was put away, finding his way into the caustic cleaning supplies and scrubbing for at least half an hour at stains on the floor until the others realized he was working too hard and made him stop. If Tao had looked closer at the sleeping figure of Lay last night, he would have seen eyes puffy from crying at having the cleaning supplies taken by the older kids. At least, that’s what Lay was telling him as he sat on the bed, eyes just as red and puffy as Tao imagined they were the previous night.

“You know you don’t have to- No, don’t apologize again.”

“Sowwy,” he croaked out, before slapping a hand over the mouth he’d opened to apologize for working so hard. More tears fell from his eyes and rolled down his face until they met the tightly-gripping hand.

“It’s okay,” Tao sighed softly. He’d already tried the ‘you’re not in trouble’ tactic with the kid at least seven times, but he was inconsolable. All Tao could do was try to work with him through the tears. “You know you don’t have to work so hard, so why do you?”

“I… I don’t want to get punishment…” he sobbed.

“Punishment?”

“I-If I don’t work hard, I’ll get punishment.”

Tao’s face was completely scrunched up for lack of understanding. “Who said anything about punishment??” he said, his voice rising in shock.

“I don’t want hyung to be mad!” he said as he started wailing once again, having misinterpreted the rise in the other’s voice as anger. “Please don’t be mad!!!”

“Oh, Lay…” he said, reaching out and pulling him into a tight hug, “I’m not mad. This whole time, if there’s one person who hasn’t done a single thing to make me mad, it’s you.”

After half a minute or so of being hugged and reassured, Lay was finally calm enough to say, “If I clean good, hyung won’t be mad.”

“Even if you don’t clean good, hyung won’t be mad.”

“But… Sehun didn’t clean good, and, and hyung got mad.”

Tao chuckled. “That’s because Sehun never cleans good and has a bad attitude. But everyone else who cleans normally, I don’t get mad at. I need help with the cleaning, so I have less to worry about. But when you clean so much that you hurt yourself, I worry a lot.”

“I’m sor- sorry,” he whispered, before pulling his lips in between his teeth to seal his mouth from further apologizing, or apologizing for apologizing.

“It’s okay. But for my sake, please go play now, okay?”

Lay nodded, and left the room.

Not wanting to put Lay to one more task of work, Tao went to find D.O. on his own. He didn’t even have to leave the room, as there he was in the hallway, leaving a trail of toys behind for Xiumin to follow, pick up, then discard as he saw the next one and crawled to it.

“D.O., can I talk to you for a second?”

“Yup,” he nodded, tossing down the armful of toys he held against the wall, and walking over to Xiumin, who he grabbed by the under-arms. “Come on, we gotsa talk to hyung.”

“Actually, I just wanted to talk to you,” Tao said, concern growing in his voice, for this was just the thing he wanted to talk about.

Despite his small size and limited capabilities, D.O. had immediately taken to watching over Xiumin from the second he’d awoken. As an adult, he would cook and clean up behind members occasionally, but he had never taken such an extreme interest in taking care of a member in all respects possible, a fact that Tao brought up with him once he convinced him to (begrudgingly) leave Xiumin to be “babysat” by Kai.

“I wanna show hyung a picture,” D.O. said immediately, jumping back off the bed as quickly as he’d half-jumped, half-climbed onto it. “Come here,” he said, beckoning Tao to follow him with the wave of a hand.

Tao followed him into his room, where he opened his nightstand and pulled out a silver object that Tao would have mistaken for a locket if it hadn’t been at least twice as large as one. The metal was intricately detailed, and a red gem sat embedded in the middle. When D.O. opened it, and handed it to Tao, the latter realized that it was a small picture frame. The right side held a slightly faded color picture of D.O. looking nearly, if not exactly, the same age as his body currently resembled. He was sitting on a blanket, and propped up in his lap was an infant who looked to be several months younger than Xiumin’s current form. He had D.O.’s same round eyes, but a bit sharper, and a certain pout to his lips that together with the short hair made him not look entirely unlike baby Xiumin.

On the left, there was an inscription.

“Our time together was short,
But I will always love you as only an older brother can.”

“This is your brother…?” Tao whispered meekly. It was thought that all the Korean members of EXO were the youngest child in their family. “I didn’t know you…”

“He died. He sleeped one night and didn’t wake up.”

This…

Of course.

Of course D.O. was reluctant to leave Xiumin’s side. Of course he’d been so involved in watching over him.

“I wanna make sure Xiumin stays okay,” he said, round little eyes calm.

Tao’s insides were suddenly abuzz with so many emotions: Sadness, understanding, and so many others he couldn’t identify. He shakily knelt down to one knee and wrapped his arms around the child, who was just trying not to lose another brother. Frankly, he needed the hug far more than D.O. did.

“Of course you do.”

Remaining on one knee, he gingerly closed the beautiful, cold metal frame and handed it back to D.O., who placed it back in the drawer and closed it rapidly. “Can I go to Xiumin now? I dunno if Kai knows what story he wants.”

“Yes, you can.”

D.O. dashed out of the room, and Tao was left with nothing but his thoughts. In clearing up his reasons for being so attached to Xiumin, D.O. had enable Tao to make a solid hypothesis about why some of the kids were acting more eccentric than the rest:

Issues they’d gone through in their real childhoods were resurfacing.

And he knew what he needed to do next.