Smooch. "You are doing a hard thing and I'm already proud of you."

Kiss.

"A hard thing, you say."

"...sorry, I just had to."

Haru snickers.

Anyway, they should finish eating lunch and... Well, Jaeha is not going to be the one to suggest ideas for how to guide Haru some more, because at this point Haru is the one who's most uncomfortable with being together, so he'll just follow Haru's lead.

Haru wants snuggles, for now. And occasional kisses. Maybe he'll be in the mood after the next dungeon.

Off he goes, when his alarm goes off.

Okay.

Alright.

He opens a text app on his commscreen and starts writing.

Reframing:

The thing he wants is to keep Haru. He keeps saying that he wants to be the man of Haru's dreams, but then he's just whining and feeling sorry for himself. Haru has given him a list. Haru has told him exactly what he needs to feel safe. Jaeha shouldn't be approaching those as a checklist of things to do before Haru will finally get over Jaeha's past so that Jaeha can have a chance; this is what being Haru's dream is. If he conceptualises himself as being the man of Haru's dreams, having woken up from this extremely long period of inebriation, watching the way he set his own life on fire, then figuring all of this out is part of being that man. Getting therapy, talking to the people Park Yoo-min suggests him, cutting his father off, these are all steps to becoming that person. Maybe not sufficient, but definitely necessary. It's not that doing them will get Haru to finally recognise him and tell him he's done good; he needs to want them. He needs to want to be that person. The way he'll get Haru to love him, the way he'll get his chance to feel stable, to have Haru want to "become monogamous again" and be with him, is being trustworthy about being that person.

Many of those steps feel scary. So maybe what he should do is write them down, all of them, and then think about them and write down why they feel scary. What feels scary about them. What failing would look like, and what succeeding would look like. What he should do if he fails, what he expects to fail. And then come up with plans for those. Figure out what he should feel about them, and what he actually does feel about them, and why, and why he's feeling that and not what he should, whether those are compatible, whether he's attached to feeling one way or another and why, how much he can flex that, what he's willing to sacrifice. Which parts of his brain are important, and which are not.

He spends... quite a while writing all of this down, and staring at it, and erasing and rewriting it. Not so long that he's still doing it by the time Haru's back, but mostly because eventually he gets cross-eyed and headachey from all of the staring at his own brain he's been doing and has to take a break to go work out in the personal gym he has in his absurd house so that he can forget he has a brain in the first place. He's still there when Haru's done with his dungeon.

"Tadaima!"

His gym is too far from his living room for him to hear it.

come here you fool

Ah, Cricket, never change. He does the last two reps of his current set then jogs upstairs to the living room, covered in sweat and patting his face dry with a face towel. "Haru-ya," he says, when he sees Haru, and the endearment sort of just escaped without thought but also Haru might notice that Jaeha's mood is substantially improved, visibly, from what it was when Haru left.

Haru flings himself in Jaeha's general direction. "I had no idea that notebooking could leave someone so damp," he remarks. "Must be the electronic medium."

He gives Haru a moment to rethink his decision to get wet but who's he kidding, here, he's pretty sure Haru's far too backlashed to give a fuck. "I wrote until I couldn't write anymore and then I decided to work out to get some of the stress out of my system and allow myself some time during which I could have no thoughts whatsoever."

"Well, you look substantially chilled out so at least something in that series of events must have worked."

"I think all of it did. I don't know if the thing I did is the same thing you do when you write in your notebooks but it was an interesting experience that I will continue to try doing once I no longer feel in danger of having my brain melt and leak out of my ears."

"Oh no, your poor brain." Performative ear-checking. "Maybe we should go take a shower."

"I was thinking that perhaps we should instead take a bath. I feel like taking my time getting clean and, most importantly, getting you clean."

"Can't scare me." Mwah.

"May I carry you?"

"Please!"

Swoop. He was in the middle of a back and shoulders workout so this twinges a bit but not in a bad way, and then up to the bathtub they can go, where Jaeha can do some unspeakable things to this boy while the water fills up and then some more things afterwards.

Oh yes that's a good plan.

And once they're done with that Jaeha will sit behind Haru on their bed while he blowdries Haru's hair and occasionally kisses his neck and shoulders and cheeks and lips. Maybe Haru mostly doesn't need emotional support outside dealing with his backlash but Jaeha still wants to pamper him and take care of him in other ways.

It's really sweet.