Tao woke up sore all over, and with a head that felt about ten pounds too heavy.

It was the best he’d felt in four days.

Groping around the bed, he finally made contact with his phone, took it out of airplane mode, and upon reading the first text his phone received, he immediately regretted doing so.

“Oh no. Oh nonononono…”

“To all EXO members:

Unfortunately, all flights to the northern area of the country have been cancelled due to the approaching typhoon, meaning your managers have all gotten stuck at the wedding destination. The typhoon also means all SM activities will be suspended until further notice. As you’ve been without managers for a couple of days, we will be sending one of SHINee’s managers to check on you around noon. If you need anything before then, please contact him. The typhoon hits in force this evening, so please stay indoors and take care.”

It wasn’t two seconds before Jongin came bursting through the doorway, causing Tao to jump a mile and a noise to come from him that was much higher-pitched than he’d have ever admitted. “Tao-hyung! Tao-hyung! Does dis mean Taemin can come over and pway?”

Speaking of high-pitched voices, was it just him, or had Jongin’s voice… changed? Sure, he’d sounded like a chipmunk the entire time, but up until then he’d also been speaking relatively clearly. Clearly, other than the fact that he hadn't correctly pronounced a single R since he came back yesterday, but Tao had thought that to be a minor detail. Clearly, he had been wrong.

“You mean ‘play’?” he asked, eyeing him cautiously.

“I said dat! Pway! Oh…” The little one covered his mouth after finally hearing what was coming out of it. “Dat’s not good.”

No, no, no. The only thing worse than caring for nine men in the bodies of children, was caring for nine children in the bodies of children. “This cannot be happening,” he groaned, covering his face with his hands.

“I gots more bad news, too.”

“Oh, gross!!! Uh, I mean…”

Tao tried to think of a way to take back his words as Lay’s tear-stained face threatened to produce more waterworks. The last thing he needed was for Lay to produce any more liquid.

“Why didn’t you wear one of the pull-ups I bought you!?”

“I thought… I didn’t need it… ‘cause I… waked up dry so far…” he explain between loud sniffles.

Tao groaned, half because of Lay's idiosyncratic speech, half because of the wet bed, and one hundred percent out of exasperation. “…Strip your bed and put your sheets and clothes in the wash…”

As Lay did what he was told, Tao went to hunt down a new set of sheets for the bed, fortunately finding them in the usual drawer where Lay kept them. ‘Note to self: When typhoon passes, go to the big store and buy plastic sheet cov-‘

‘What is that noise coming from the wall?’

The tapping was subtle, but the on-and-off ‘rat-a-tat-tat’ from the other side of the wall continued to draw Tao’s attention as he put the new sheets over the bed and a towel he’d laid over the wet spot. The room on the other side of that wall was being shared by Chen, D.O., and now Xiumin as well, if he recalled correctly.

What he didn’t recall, as he entered, was the room looking like a babysitter’s nightmare.

“Oh my God,” Tao’s face went paler with the wall, which wasn't surprising seeing as the wall was now covered in crayon markings done by the two young artists D.O. and Xiumin. Chen, guilty as he had been the day before, was sleeping peacefully as the two young ones babbled back and forth. “Guys, what do you think you’re doing!?”

"Dwah pictures!" D.O. explained gleefully as he continued working on the big, round sun he was exhausting the yellow crayon to make. “Bababababa~” Xiumin offered as well, giving a fleeting glance toward the room’s new occupant before exchanging his blue crayon for a pink one.

“Give me that!” Tao hissed, taking the two strides over to Xiumin and snatching the new crayon from his hand. The surprised and hurt face he gave let Tao know a meltdown was immin-

*Waaahhhh!!!*

“Oh my God… It’s just a crayon!” He also took the rest of the pile and the crayon from D.O.’s hand, resulting in him starting up as well. “Where did you get these, anyway!?” As if to answer his question, he picked up the empty crayon box and his eyes were immediately drawn to the name written on it in permanent marker.

“CHANYEOL!”

He left the two smallest in search of the oldest, entering Chanyeol’s room to find the boy nowhere in sight, but Baekhyun and Chen sat together on the balled up pile of sheets on Baekhyun's bed, staring at the intruder.

“Where is he.”

They shrugged. Tao pursed his lips in annoyance and went to work searching for the culprit. Pulling back Chanyeol’s sheets and inspecting all the drawers and other little hidey-holes didn’t reveal his location, and, now sweating, Tao faced the two seated on the bed to question them again.

Wait a minute, why was he sweating?

The room had gotten hotter since he entered, and he noticed that the heat was definitely emanating from the spot where Baekhyun and Chen were seated- Oh.

“Move, you two. Now.”

“Why?” Baekhyun questioned.

“Because you’re 40 and 50 pounds soaking wet and I will move you to wherever I darn well please, including to over my knee. Get up.”

Muttering, the two hesitantly moved off the bed, and Tao was finally able to toss the covers aside and find the (very sweaty) ball of heat that Chanyeol had become.

“Care to tell me why Xiumin and D.O. were making a mural on the wall with your crayons?”

Chanyeol didn’t move from his fetal position. “D.O. asked me for crayons! I didn’t know what they were gonna do with them, honest!”

As pissed as Tao was, and despite the amount of mayhem Chanyeol had caused over the past 24 hours, he wasn’t about to punish the kid for the one thing bad thing he'd done that probably wasn’t intentional. He simply sighed out the anger he was holding toward Chanyeol, walked out of the room, and went to go find some cleaning supplies. Internally, he prayed that Magic Erasers worked on crayon.

The one thing he’d come to realize he could be thankful for was the fact that the boys’ abilities to use their powers had regressed right along with their bodies. Powers were something that developed gradually throughout one’s early life, and only Chanyeol was mature enough to have access to his in any capacity. Even that, however, seemed to be limited to his stress response to nerve-wracking, panic-inducing situations.

‘His stress response…’ Tao thought back to their discussion the other day, about how all of this had happened, and how Chanyeol had begun to emit heat when Suho brought up the time Kai, whose powers went awry in response to heartbreak rather than panic, had caused the island Chanyeol was filming on to disappear. Chanyeol had experienced the business end of Kai’s heartbreak response and come out of it alright. Maybe he had an idea of what had caused the situation to reverse itself.

“Let’s think this out,” Tao said as he and Chanyeol worked on scrubbing the crayon off the walls. When Kai teleported the island-“

“I don’t wanna think about it!” Chanyeol yelled, dropping his Magic Eraser and slamming his hands over his ears. “Lalalala!”

“Bear with me for like, five seconds!”

The boy looked up at him with a curious eyebrow cocked. "What's in it for me?"

"Turning back into an adult," Tao said, in a very dry deadpan. The boy relented, bringing his hands back down and continuing his cleaning ‘punishment’, and Tao continued the brainstorming session. “What made the island come back? How did everything turn back to normal?”

Chanyeol shrugged, trying not to put too much into thinking about the incident, lest he freak out again. “Iunno. We didn’t do nothing special. We just came back a few days later.”

Tao’s face lit up as Chanyeol's vague account jogged his memory of exactly what had happened. Kai and his then girlfriend were only split for about five days before they agreed to start dating again. The same day they reconciled, the group got word that the island had mysteriously reappeared. Chanyeol hadn’t seemed to have any idea why they were teleported into space or why they were teleported back, and Kai hadn’t done anything consciously, so the only two things that could have caused Chanyeol to come back was closure on the issue that had caused Kai to teleport the island in the first place, or time, and Tao wasn’t about to wait this one out, if he could be doing something to fix it.

The unfortunate thing was that nothing like this had ever happened to Tao before, so unlike in Kai’s situation, he had no idea what the original trigger had been. If it was his cold, why hadn’t it ever happened when he was sick before? The loneliness of being ostracized by his fellow members was the same loneliness he’d felt when Kris had left the group, so why hadn’t anything happened then? How could he do anything to fix the situation that had triggered the response if he had no idea what the situation was?

There was also that dreadful second option, that this might actually be something they would have to wait out. Their managers were the only people they’d trusted with the knowledge of their powers (and only because so much weird stuff kept happening that they had had to,) so how on Earth was he going to explain to ShinEE’s manager how nine somewhat-functioning adults had become nine kids? The typhoon had been a lucky break, but after it passed, what would they do if this persisted? There were too many possibilities and bad outcomes for him to want to begin to envision.

Whether this was going to last another day or another year, as they erased the last bit of crayon from the wall, Tao recognized the most immediately important thing for keeping everyone—most importantly himself—from going insane if all of the boys were mentally regressing.

“We’re gonna get some ground rules set.”

Tao had a towel wrapped around his wet hair and a new outfit, as his had been soaked through when he went to the convenience store down the street to pick up whatever food they had left from the relatively bare shelves. Everyone else had already done their pre-typhoon shopping, but Tao, preoccupied with their own disaster, had completely forgotten about the approaching storm until that morning. The children sat around the kitchen table, digging into the bowls of cereal that were about an hour overdue as a result of Tao and Chanyeol’s wall-cleaning. Tao himself sat at the head of the table, yet to eat, feeding Xiumin and keeping a careful eye on D.O., who he’d given oatmeal instead of cold cereal due to the choking hazard.

“Number one, we’re doing things by age order from now on, which means I’m your hyung now. Chanyeol and Sehun are everyone else’s hyungs, et cetera. Number two: That means Sehun is my second-in-command.”

Chanyeol and Suho dropped their spoons into their bowls, sat up in their seats (consisting of stacks of books on their chairs,) and immediately spoke up in protest, but Tao shut them down quickly. “Chanyeol, you’re a troublemaking little snot, and Suho, you think like a three-year-old. Sehun’s the oldest who won’t abuse his power and can keep an eye on the two littlest ones when I'm busy." Tao knew this was incredibly presumptuous and risky; Sehun was merely the only one who was currently able to think on some adult level and was more-or-less neutral along the Tao-Chanyeol scale. He would have killed to be able to put Suho or Lay in charge, but that wasn't happening, and the last person he wanted in charge was one of the Beagles. "Isn’t that right, Sehun?”

“Can my first order of business be to give myself extra cookies at snack time?”

“No.”

“Then make someone else do it. I don’t wanna.”

“Sehun…” What he wanted to do was demand that Sehun follow his command, but he settled for something a little less authoritarian. “What kind of maknae doesn’t want to be the leader?”

He folded his little arms across his chest. Tao's logic was sound, and as much as he didn't want the extra responsibility of watching Xiumin and D.O., being in charge was a pretty sweet position of power. “Fine.”

Tao continued to list off rules, mandating that pull-ups be worn at night by Kai, Lay, and Suho (who was indignant at this but didn’t try to argue once Tao told him to shut up,) and by D.O. at all times. Doodling on the wall was prohibited, as was leaving the dorm without permission. “If you guys aren’t sure about whether or not something is okay, ask before you do it. And, as for me,” he concluded, “I know I’ve done a pretty crappy job of caring for you guys. We’re all the youngest in our families, and most of us have never cared for little kids before, but that doesn’t excuse the way I’ve been treating you all. I’m going to do my best to provide for you, and not yell at you or hit you anymore, but you guys have to help me out by behaving. You try your best to do right by me, and I’ll try to do right by all of you. Got it?”

Only eight heads nodded, but when his stomach then growled, Xiumin looked up at him with a curious, “Hun-gy?” and handed Tao a fistful of Cheerios from the untouched cereal bowl that sat before him, Tao couldn’t help but smile and take that as acceptance.

What else could he do but hope he was right?