"...okay...?"

"...which means could you please tell me more about what happened exactly with your father."

"Oh. Sure.

"I don't know how much you know about—I guess probably nothing at all—my grandfather was Kang Jaeseok, founder and original chairman of the largest chaebol in Korea. My father Kang Jaehyuk is its current chairman. I was meant to be his heir. I didn't want to. When I was a teenager, I was—rebellious doesn't quite describe it. Really fucking gay, really loudly, caused multiple scandals he had to spend quite a lot of money to keep off tabloids. He wanted to find me a woman to marry, some heiress of some other group, to strengthen his group's hegemony.

"Then I manifested. My manifestation week was—I didn't really omit anything important last time I talked about it, I didn't kill myself because I didn't have the ability to want things enough. I was in a private hospital, and when I got out the other side it felt almost like I'd been in a weeklong nightmare in a coma and the very first thing I saw was my father, telling me I shouldn't become an esper, I already had a future planned for me, he found me a good girl to settle down with, it was time for me to grow up and get these sillinesses out of my head.

"And I could feel what he was feeling. I—knew, already, that he was never really going to approve of me, or love me, I had already known, but feeling it was... something else.

"But then I knew what I had to do. I had to get out. So I did. I optimised him, I dictionary attacked him until I had a way out. I've done that more over the years, turned him into someone who—still doesn't love me, still doesn't like what I'm doing, but isn't in my way anymore."

Haru nods, once.

"Is there—more you want to know...?"

"Did you start using it - all the time on everyone and not just him - right away, or did that take longer."

"...I don't really remember. It didn't take a month. It might've taken a couple of weeks. It might not have."

He's guiding H- Masaharu. Masaharu's backlash means that he occasionally has to say things. It doesn't mean that Masaharu is actually interested, or going to change anything. It's just a way to pass the time. Jaeha should not make any inferences based on what Masaharu is saying.

"Do you think you are... stably safe to exist around now. Regardless of what happens with us."

"...I... want to say yes... but the truth is I don't know. There are—probably—almost certainly—procedures I could implement that would make me not relapse like that. I am—having some trouble thinking about them right now—" What with how he is in medium-grade emotional anguish all the time. "The version of me that I am right now does intrinsically value not violating people's privacy and mental integrity, and values valuing that."

"Mm." He rubs his eye.

Here he is, not making any inferences about anything. He can keep doing that.

Haru's backlash ticks down, and down, and down to nothing.

He squeezes Jaeha's hand and gets up to go to his office.

Jaeha will...

...

There are many, many bedrooms in this stupidly huge house—which could be sold for an insane amount of money, 90% of which could be used to buy bednets, the remaining 10% of which would still be enough to get a really nice apartment—and he's not going to go to the one he and Haru have been sleeping in. He's going to go to another one, one of the bedrooms no one uses. He's going to go into that bedroom, and he's going to shut the door and get in bed and turn the lights off and hide under the covers.

Well, that'll make it harder for Haru to find him a couple of hours later, he has to prowl the whole house.

If/when he opens the right door, Jaeha will not be asleep, but that will not be at all obvious. The flinch will be kind of unmistakeable, though.

"...I can let you sleep and we can talk in the morning?" Haru murmurs.

Another flinch.

"I don't think I'll really be able to sleep at all tonight," he responds in a soft voice Haru wouldn't have been able to hear without esper senses.

"Well, that's not good for you." Haru goes in and sits on the edge of the bed.

Perhaps "flinch" is not the right verb to describe it. He's tense and taut like a violin string, and every movement, every word of Haru's pulls on that string and makes it twang.