"I can't get the intellectual part at all, it's just the feelings. ...we had a goal with this but given that the way you seem to feel is 'comfortable with maybe a bit of anxiety about the empathy' I'm not sure how I'd... learn anything..." He really didn't think it through his brain just went offline when Haru suggested letting him look.

"I think the goal was practicing reading people by looking at them with your eyes, but maybe I'm just a terrible example."

"Yeah, I just mean you look—I would not have been able to guess the part about being nervous about this without knowing you personally, just from looking, and even now I can't see it."

"Huh, I wasn't going to any effort to hide it."

"No, but I get the impression that you don't really... keep your heart on your sleeve, is what I want to say? You may not actively want to hide you're feeling some way or other but you're pretty at peace with what's going on inside you a lot of the time, maybe?" Heeee's feeling kind of nervous about armchair psychoanalysing his boyfriend like this and that is stupid and dumb, Haru likes him, he can feel it.

"I certainly try to be! It took me a while to come to really peaceable terms with my backlash and occasionally I am still very frustrated with it but I don't have any now."

"Yeah. But that means that an emotion like the—I'm just guessing—I feel like something like the nervousness you have around this whole topic is—not exactly—upset? Which makes it harder to surface as something I could see on your face or something?"

"Yeah, I think I'd have said - tense, apprehensive, not upset. It's a lot, for me, you might remember how I was very concerned with whether you'd been able to use your powers on me, during the confession."

"Yeah, I do. Which—is also why this means so much to me." Because even though Haru is tense and apprehensive and doesn't want to do this all the time he is still DOING IT and Jaeha can FEEL IT and know that HARU LIKES HIM. Haru might have noticed that Jaeha's heart has been doing something funny kind of nonstop.

Snuggle. "Well, I'm glad I can provide at least occasionally, then."

Jaeha feels like there was some practical matter they might have been in the middle of discussing but he kind of doesn't want to think about that to try to remember what it was. He just wants to keep hugging Haru and feeling what he's feeling, even if it won't be something they can do all the time.

Does that make him less the guy of Haru's dreams? Would that guy be trying to be more efficient at solving The Problem, whatever the problem was, he doesn't he remember? Should he feel bad about not doing that? He doesn't want to do that. Maybe he wants to want to do that, he doesn't know. There's a really tempting line of thought that the way to become the guy of Haru's dreams isn't by forcing himself through the motions of doing what Jaeha thinks that guy would do, it's by doing more thorough, holistic changes to who he is as a person, and Jaeha even thinks that logic probably mostly holds up, but it's very convenient that it means that he doesn't have to do something other than feeling Haru next to him.

He really likes Haru.

They can hang out like that for another four and a half minutes and then the little flickers of emotion-tagged thought pick up speed and force and Haru says, "I think I'm done now," and then the shields are up.

"Okay," he says, not that Haru needed his permission or assent. There's that moment of backlash for the fraction of a second before Haru gets his shields back up and Jaeha stops trying, and then there's silence.

Jaeha... misses it less than he'd have expected. Misses it, still, it was so nice, but... he can wait. Haru will open up to him again, in the future, and even if he doesn't, the last bits of Jaeha's reluctance to believe the world really is that nice have flaked off, and he's just... happy. Uncomplicatedly. Life is good.

Thoughtful silence. Then: "Okay, so, our conclusions are non-dungeon social exposure therapy, pending fishing for invitations to events at which to do that; probably not running dungeons together so you can be the strong and silent type in yours while I'm a chatterbox in mine, unless there's one where we wouldn't need anyone else with us; if for some reason it does make sense for us and also third parties to run a dungeon in a group we can see if there's a language they don't speak that we do; whoever is running dungeons with you can be informed that you'd be sacrificing a little reaction time to definitively exclude them from your scanning ability and make their decisions on that... am I forgetting anything?"

Ah. Those were The Problems—or, rather, the solutions to The Problem. Yes. He remembers them now. And the guy of Haru's dreams would stop and think about it and try to remember their conversation and figure out if there's anything they missed, so...

"I also need to figure out—this might need therapy—why it bothers me so much to not come off the way I want to. There was—something that changed—when I was a teenager I was really intensely trying to rile people up and get them to dislike me," mostly his father, "so clearly I've got the, the, the ability to do it, so to speak..." When did he become so normie?

"Huh, I'm not a psychologist but that's - certainly interesting - I mean, trying to rile people up is itself also a form of coming off a way that you choose to?"

"...I suppose that's true." It does have a certain resonance to it, something about... "Something about, if people are going to be disgusted by how much of a homo I am, I'm going to make sure they're as disgusted as I want them to be..."

Oh good job Kang Jaeha you have just shown your whole ass to Haru. This is the kind of thing you should've notebooked.

"Something like that, yeah, if you ruled out staying in the closet."

"If I'd stayed in the closet Kang Jaehyuk would've found me a nice wife to marry and have one point five children and zero point three dogs with and I was not about that life."

"Yeah. Which honestly sounds also not unrelated to having control issues."

He closes his eyes. "It's not that I didn't know I had them but I don't love coming face to face with my daddy issues."

Pet pet.

"...I am taken by the insane desire to apologise for having issues rather than letting you find a nice mentally healthy boy to date but rather than actually apologise I'll just make this apophatic comment."

"Too late to get rid of me now, you let me move into your house and stuff." Haru kisses the nearest Jaeha location, which is an arm. "Try therapy and see if it works for you. I didn't like it but my issues are not your issues."

"Yeah, I've got a first appointment scheduled for... Huh. Two days from now, I guess?"

Also he is desperately curious about what it is that Haru would consider "his issues" but he isn't going to ask.