Jaeha's getting guided fast. He's getting guided really, really fast. And he can be most things on Haru's list. Monogamy comes really easily to him, as well as all of the things he's reading between the lines about how much Haru wants the man of his dreams to be wholly devoted to him. He can become ambitious, he can be really intellectually interested, he can be... most things.
He can also be scrupulously ethical. And honest, which is a subheader. He can. It's just that...
That...
The dungeon is timed conveniently for Jaeha and Haru to walk (not fly, Haru's still burning off dungeon backlash) to the QQ meetup with Haru in a chatty mood. "Hi folks! It is I, the scourge of Malaysian bigotry!"
(Scrupulously ethical. Scrupulously ethical. Scrupulously ethical. Scr—)
Haru sits next to him. "Cricket referred to you as a 'useful assistant' the other day," he tells Woo-young. "In among other remarks but still."
"I didn't write it down," but he can relay Cricket's opinions on his useful assistant.
...is that meant to be an insult. Jaeha is being SCRUPULOUSLY ETHICAL and can't tell but it felt like it was maybe meant to be an insult?
"The tall, dark, and handsome vibe can totally swing that way, depending on how you do it."
Pet pet. "I have felt the siren call of motorcycle ownership and I refrain. The price we pay for longevity."
...okay he also doesn't want Haru to die but the thought of him in motorcycle leathers pulling up to Jaeha's house and pulling his helmet off and winking at him and taking him for a ride... the part of him that's still a teenager can absolutely see the appeal.
He will SCRUPULOUSLY ETHICALLY not erase ANYONE'S memories even if he embarrasses himself. "I mean."
Hyun-jae lifts her hand to block Jaeha's sight and looks away like he just turned on a spotlight from where he's smiling. "I should've brought my sunglasses."
You know what, it's fine if people know he's in the palm of Haru's hand. It's true and not embarrassing and people should know it.
"On paper we've been officially partners just since signing with Quasar. Came together pretty fast since we met."
...okay he. Kind of likes that response. It's ambiguous and misleading and yet it still makes him not look like a pathetic worm who's begging for scraps of attention and is inevitably going to be abandoned soon maybe today. Like, that's still true, but at least he gets to save face about it.
What... is... that feeling.
He looks at Haru and—it's not Haru, but then—what—
"Ugh, see what I meant?" Yoo-min tells Haru. "And he means it, too! We've known each other like a year and a half now!"
"Good evening to you, too, hoobaenim. —oh, you're Kang Jaeha-shi? We haven't been acquainted." He bows.
"It's nice to meet you, sunbaenim."
What the fuck what the fuck what the fuck what the fuck what the fuck what the fuck what the—
...is it? He looks kind of constipated.
Well, he'll sit down. "Oh, Min Woo-young. This is your first time here, right?"
"Jaeha, you okay?" Haru murmurs, calibrated for a tableful of espers.
Forced smile pasted on. "Yeah, I'm alright. Ah, I just need to go to the bathroom for a moment—"
He gets up and hurries in a direction that looks plausibly bathroomwards.
"Anyway I assume permission is not the thing stopping you from just calling me Haru but you do have permission," Haru tells Tae-gun.
"Don't bother, he's going to call you by your full name at best," grumbles Yoo-min.
"Of course I have a second secret name, my Canadian passport says 'Traceless'."
"By the way, Tae-gun, Si-yeon is at the other table over with the girls if you wanna say hi," says Juheon, hiking a thumb in that direction.
Ughhhh must he? Fine fine he'll go, Si-yeon will probably be sad and think Tae-gun's doing some social thing if he doesn't say hi the first time they're around each other after they stopped being partners.
The other table has so many more people though.
Ughhhhh.
Jaeha is still being scrupulously ethical, so the way that he knows that Lee Tae-gun is no longer sitting at the table is that he's watching them from a distance, not using his power.
...is that ethical? That may not be ethical. He's not using his powers but—it's okay to just be looking, right? With his eyes? Or is it creepy? Is he creeping people out?
Fuck. Fuck!
But he can't go back. Can he? Not if Lee Tae-gun will be there. That felt, felt—he always thought stories about people who could guide each other from a distance were fake but, but how else do you explain this shit? That was guiding! That was 100% guiding! But Lee Tae-gun himself didn't seem fazed so it was probably very asymmetrical, but also, fuck!
What's he going to do? What's he going to do?
Lee Tae-gun doesn't spend a lot of time at the other Quasar table. He just says hi to Ha Si-yeon and his new partner Kim Chun-hee as well as some other people who are there, blushes terribly at probably being teased by one of them, and then walks back to the table where Haru and the others are.
No! No no no! Why is he coming back! Couldn't he stay away! That way Jaeha wouldn't need to, to—he doesn't even know. People are going to think he's taking a massive shit and he can't even muster the feeling to get embarrassed about it because the alternative is sitting at the same table as Lee Tae-gun. Maybe if Lee Tae-gun were across the table from him but he is right next to Haru.
Fuck!!!!!
He wants to go home. He wants to go home with Haru, wants to be far, far away from Lee Tae-gun and with Masaharu Swan, with his partner, his Haru, not, not, not Lee Tae-gun.
But he doesn't want to rain on Haru's parade. Haru is still backlashed, and is having fun with people, but Jaeha isn't there so he's not even getting guided, but Jaeha can't go back, and, and, fuck.
He can do it. He can do it. Haru needs guiding, and backlashed Haru has fun at these places, and he should not rain on Haru's parade. He will just sit on the sickening feeling in the pit of his stomach until they can LEAVE.
...but he'll also pop a painkiller from his inventory so that when he's explaining what took him so long he can truthfully say that he wasn't feeling so well and took meds for it. He won't be lying at all. Haru doesn't want him to lie.
Okay. He's ready.
He walks back to the table and takes his seat next to Haru.
Jaeha can barely feel Haru guiding him because Lee Tae-gun is right there and that is horrible.
He was prepared for having to do some acting so he doesn't let those feelings show. Instead he just kisses Haru on the cheek.
"Okay now that everyone's here and the mood's right! I have an announcement to make! Actually." He gets up and clinks a fork against his glass to get the attention of the people at the other Quasar table, too. "Everyone! Important announcement!"
He places both hands on Choi Seungjoo's shoulders. "Seungjoo and I are now officially dating!"
Hyun-jae looks at Seungjoo with concern. "Blink twice if you need rescuing."
This doesn't feel any worse than being near Lee Tae-gun but it's still not actually improving his mood at all.
"I heard Yun Minseo-sunbae and Baek Ji-woo-sunbae have also started dating," Lee Tae-gun observes.
"...I just ran a dungeon with Yun Minseo-sunbae the other day and she mentioned it."
"Oh but this needs confirmation, brb," he says, getting up again to walk over to the other table.
Everyone! Everyone around him! Gets to have that! And he doesn't! And he won't!
Argh!!!!!
His Haru is so good he really likes his Haru he wants to be with his Haru and none of these people especially not Lee Tae-gun.
He squeezes Haru's hand right back and—doesn't quite succeed at masking any better than he was a second ago, which was enough to fool everyone other than Haru.
You can also go home without me if you'd rather, I'm not in a particularly bad way right now and I can coast for an hour no problem.
...I definitely don't want to be away from you right now
He gets to be clingy like this, right? It's fine? They're in a stage of their relationship where that's alright?
"Folks, I hate to bail but something's come up," he shakes his phone, its screen carefully blanked, "ping me on chat if you have any horse-sized-duck emergencies or whatever." And he tugs Jaeha out of his chair and away from the table.
...now he's feeling bad about being bitchy at them in his head.
Anyway, he successfully stands up and can bow to his sunbaenim before leaving with Haru.
He has the best Haru.
That's why this is going to suck so fucking much augh.
And home and inside and a quick check to make sure Cricket's not in earshot and - "What's eating you?"
"So many things." He needs to sit down, he's gonna go sit down and bury his face in his hands because it is so many things.
Great. Amazing. He's getting hugs from Haru for what is probably the last time ever and he is not going to get a beautiful Autumn wedding in Canada and, and, and he has to do this.
"I'm a coward, Haru, and because I'm a coward, I'm going to start with the easiest part."
"I'm so compatible with Lee Tae-gun I was getting guided by him from a distance. I think it's asymmetrical. And it—sent my brain down a spiral of—I don't want to be here. I didn't want to be near him, getting—guided—like that, by—someone who isn't you. And it's obviously the stupidest thing to think, obviously I'm not going to have any partners I don't want to have, but it's what I was thinking, that—that I don't want to be Lee Tae-gun's partner, I want to be yours, I don't care if Lee Tae-gun could fuck me for ten minutes and cure me of my backlash—and when you held my hand and I could barely feel you guiding me under the pressure of that guy, I—"
...this is very very obviously the wrong time to make a crack about how he too is acceptably compatible with Tae-gun and they could have a threesome. He sits on it. "Hardcore monogamy feelings, okay. I'm sure he'd sit farther away if it bothers you."
"Maybe. But that wasn't—I mean, that—yes. But I think I'd have been able to feel that from ten meters away. I could feel it halfway from the bathroom to the table. And it's—I knew I liked you. Obviously. And I knew that it wasn't just about guiding, or mostly about guiding, or—or about guiding at all, really. Maybe at first. Not now. So I have to become the guy of your dreams."
"...I really don't want you under this much pressure about that. I'm not about to bolt as soon as I wouldn't want to sue myself for leaving you in a hole, we're doing fine."
"It's not that. I'm not—feeling pressured. It's just that I—lied to you. And the guy of your dreams is honest. So I have to be honest, too."
"And, goddamnit, I want to be honest, too, because I—don't want to lie to you. Or at all."
Well he hadn't actually hugged Haru back so if Haru wants to unhug he is free to. And then he'll never be hugged again and this is fine, actually, it's fine, he's made his bed so he needs to lie in it.
"My backlash isn't anhedonia. Or—it's not just anhedonia. It's... a lot more. Much, much more."
"It's—everything. I lose everything. My emotions. My empathy. I become empty, I don't care about people, I don't care about myself, I don't care about anything. I don't feel remorse or guilt, and the bad, ugly emotions are the last to go. I can feel sad but not happy. I can feel angry but not calm. I can feel jealous but not satisfied.
"And then those are gone, too."
"Did... you just tick over into 'bad emotions only' suddenly while we were out?"
"No. No I—I'm almost done, actually. I honestly think—three days, maybe. If that. I would only need three more days of this before everything was back. Most of it's back.
"I told you I'm a coward, Haru-y—" He can't say that. "Masaharu-shi. I am starting with the easiest things to say."
"I lied to you about what my powers are, too. ...I lied to everyone about what my powers are. No one knows the full picture, except me. I'd—demonstrate, but actually I oughtn't. I'll just describe."
"My illusions are all-encompassing. Everything you can feel, I can fake. I can fake your proprioception. I can fake the feeling of using your powers, the feedback. I can fake the feeling of backlash." He's sure the way his voice sounds hollow to his ears is just a projection of his emotions but it still feels like someone else is talking. He's started so now he can't stop. Whoever's puppeteering him is going to keep going, keep the show running, and he'll just let it happen. "I can make you feel like you just woke up. Like you're out of breath. I can make you think you can't move, because even though you're moving your nerves are telling you otherwise.
"You have no way to tell. There is no mind esper who has any way to tell, because my illusions don't change anything in your mind, they change what your nerves are perceiving in the first place. There's no difference between you seeing something that's actually there and something I made you think is there. The memories of perceiving my illusions are as real as those of perceiving reality. You can't tell, even in retrospect."
"I am not, as far as I am aware, able to penetrate your shields—but I haven't really tried. I don't want to try."
He takes a deep breath, then continues. "I don't need to do my own detailwork, either. I can let your brain do it for me. I can make you believe you're holding a conversation with me when you're not, the contents of which your own brain generates. I can tell your brain to believe that I said or did something with a given character, I can say I was charming or funny or sexy, and you'll come up with it for me.
"I can't fake emotions directly, but I can mute or highlight ones you're already feeling. Mostly but not exclusively by focusing on their physical correlates."
Another deep breath, and onto the scariest part. "My receptive power isn't just empathy. I can't directly read anyone's minds, but I can perceive their feelings, I can know if they're talking to someone they know or a stranger, if they're feeling claustrophobic or comfortable, if they're somewhere familiar, if they're near an animal and what animal it is, if they're alone—the big things that human brains can do, instinctively, deeply.
"And then, if I have hold of a mind, I can also watch your memories being formed. And I can grab hold of them and erase them. Once it's properly recorded in long-term memory I can't, anymore, but memories take much longer than people think to do that. I can do it selectively, only erasing parts of a memory. I could touch another esper, notice that we're not compatible, and replace the part of their memory related to feeling that incompatibility with new feelings of compatibility. I can say something, see that it didn't land well, erase it, and try again. I can repeat interactions, find the perfect ones. Over and over and over."
Keep going because once he stops he's not sure he'll be able to say any more things.
"I can't pick out minds using my power. I need to know where they are, through non-powers means. Reasonably but not completely precisely; knowing you're in a room isn't enough, knowing you're in a room and having access to its CCTV feed is. My range is very extensive, but I lose precision fast with distance; this matters less for me than it would for others due to the aspect of it I mentioned of being able to rely on your mind to figure it out for me."
He's braced. He's soooooo braced. Jaeha did not figure out the limitations of his power by meditating alone in a room somewhere. He didn't keep it secret by asking nicely. Haru is braced.
"It's... a self-perpetuating problem, isn't it. I use my power, I get backlashed, my backlash makes me care less about everything, my empathy is one of the very first things to go, it's so much easier to slip into it.
"When I manifested, my father forbade me from working as an esper, from doing dungeons. He said he was going to disown me, cut me off completely. And now here I am, working as an esper, doing dungeons, and still using money that comes from companies controlled by Kang Jaehyuk.
"I use my power all the time. Constantly, on everyone. I micromanage their reactions, I make sure to come off flawlessly, charmingly, interestingly. I make sure to say the right things, to be seen in the right ways. I make sure to pull on the ways people like me, the ways they think I'm cool or fun or hot or impressive, and I downplay the ways they dislike me, the ways they think I'm arrogant or overconfident or mouthy or irritating. I find the right things to say, every time. The right things to do. No one, before we became partners, had ever had a negative interaction with me, or at least they didn't have the memories of any. No one'd ever seen me commit a faux pas, no one'd ever seen me be rude or obtuse or clueless."
"They'd... seen me be passive. Apathetic. Callous. Since right after dungeons, when my backlash is at its height, I don't even manage to care enough to want to manage their impressions of me. I'm boring. I don't have a personality. My old partners could barely deal with it, if they wanted to have sex with me they'd need to be the ones providing all of the enthusiasm, at least to start off. And it wore on them. It wore on them that whenever they saw me, I'd be this empty husk, and they'd need to fuck me for half an hour for me to have any semblance of humanity. I couldn't give them what they needed, out of a partner. I don't actually know if Wo Do-in—if my old partner—I don't actually know if he found someone else, or if he just decided that he was better off alone than with Kang Jaeha. He might have. He wouldn't have been the first."
There was one last thing.
"I knew about Sparkler before you told me about him. I know his secret identity. I was so jealous I wanted to make sure you wouldn't ever be with him so I wanted to find out—why he was with you. See if I could figure out a way to—give him what he needed. Find him someone else, something else, so that he wouldn't see you anymore. And then I learned that he has groupies. He's just some fuckboy. That—calmed me down. And that was before I asked you about it. Because—because everything good about me—or at least everything that isn't wretched—is gone. It's just the jealousy and the petty pride left. I can't let myself be seen as—weak, vulnerable. I couldn't have asked you about it, because if you knew how desperately jealous and needy I was you'd leave. You'd find it offputting, aggravating, pathetic. I failed, I failed really hard, but I also tried really hard, I tried really hard to be cool. To not be so whiny and needy. To stalk Sparkler until I found his full name and more details about his family than he probably wants me to have, rather than ask you."
Haru is still hugging him. He's not sure why. He's trying not to think about why. He knows it will be for the last time. He knows there's no Autumn wedding waiting for him. And he shouldn't—feel—he shouldn't cling. He should let go. He should, should, should let Haru find someone who isn't so—monstrous. He can't actually be the man of Haru's dreams, because the man of Haru's dreams wouldn't have done everything he did.
"That... that was all."
"Y—hang on." He will actually think this through. Was there anything else...? He'll spend at least thirty seconds thinking about this because he cannot get it wrong.
"Not Cricket. Yes the—people who were at the same dungeon we were at, when we met, but not in any—specific ways? Just generally. And the waitress at the restaurant you took me to, she was feeling homophobic towards us so I made her not direct those feelings at us. And... there might have been other people, just generally... You should assume I was using my powers on everyone all the time until the day you moved in with me. Except you. And Cricket."
Well, Haru guesses he's glad he never got around to introducing Jaeha to Ren.
"Why not Cricket?"
"Because... I wanted to win him over honestly. As part of winning you over honestly. I failed but..."
"It took - this long to - I know the backlash was pulling shit but if you were able weeks ago to want to win Cricket over honestly and that successfully occurred to you as a necessary component, why -"
"Part of the—ethics thing—" He's glad he's been reading so much stuff about altruism online because it gives him a lot of expressive vocabulary for this kind of conversation. "Is generalising. It's—caring about people even if I don't know them, right. Or in the abstract. Or for—themselves, as ends unto themselves. It's expanding my circles of caring. I didn't care about Cricket, I just knew that if I used my powers on him and you found out that'd be bad. It wasn't—because I thought it was wrong. I knew it was, intellectually. But I didn't care."
"Right. And if I did find out it'd be impossible to cover up without getting into some hideous psychic fight with me, I guess, so it minimized - risk."
Can Haru please just go. Can he just leave. This, this, this playing with Jaeha's heart isn't—it's cruel. It's cruel that he's staying. It's cruel that he's asking these things. It's, it's giving him hope, and he shouldn't hope. He shouldn't hope for something that's not going to happen. And he could never, ever say that. Any of that. Haru knows everything, now. There's nothing left. So it's just—Jaeha makes no more choices, from now on. Has no agency. It's all on Haru.
So won't he please go?
"I'm gonna sit here till I zero out. So I can go write. If that's okay by you."
"Yeah. Of course."
Okay, that's... obvious, in hindsight. The obvious reason why he'd stay. Because he's not stupid. He's not gonna just drop a partner like that before he can get fully guided. So they can stay here for... however long. And then he'll go.
He can keep that in mind. And think of nothing else. He's guiding Ha- Masaharu. That's all.
"I'm making up a narrative in my head, it's probably not quite right, I don't know if it'll turn out to matter but it might?"
"...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 Moon-il, founder and original chairman of Kang Moon-il group, the largest conglomerate group 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 Kang Moon-il 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."
"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."
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.
Haru's got a notebook with him. He flips it open to his conclusions page with one hand, reaches out with the other to rest his palm on - what's sticking out of the covers here - the back of Jaeha's neck.
"Not really sure what order to address all this in."
Jaeha's heart had already been doing something funny but with Haru's touch it's going into overdrive BA-DUM BA-DUM BA-DUM BA-DUM BA-DUM BA-DUM so loudly Jaeha thinks he won't be able to hear Haru's voice over it.
"I don't think I can—let myself understand that sentence well enough to have an opinion."
BA-DUM BA-DUM BA-DUM BA-DUM BA-DUM BA-DUM BA-DUM BA-DUM
"How long until you leave?" he says, his voice growing smaller until it's just a whimper by the end of the sentence.
He curls up smaller. "I can't—live in the world where—you're staying—until—unless I know it's real."
...pet pet. "I am probably going to stay. It's - I'm horrified, obviously, but - you stopped. If we can figure out how you can stay stopped, if I can trust you - trust that even if I die or something you will still be safe - then I can stay."
Well if Haru dies or something Jaeha will also die so he will definitionally be safe he sees that today is a day for him to reach heights of mental illness heretofore unseen.
"Then I'll—believe it when we're there. And until then I—don't have any most urgent questions."
"So, I don't think I personally would have reacted to your power and your father the way you did but I think - kind of a lot of people would, it's understandable as - lapses go, and from there I guess it just got gradually pettier and more habitual, but you can break the habit, you've only poked me by mistake a very small number of times, and - you seem able to carry forward your plans from before you're backlashed into the period when you are, so that's not necessarily a huge relapse risk factor, does that sound right?"
"I—suppose?" He did break the habit with Haru, it's true, but also he'd just been not using his powers at all. ...he should say that with his mouth. "I don't know how much our experience so far generalises due to how I just haven't been using my powers at all full stop for long stretches of time. If I go into dungeons it'd be very easy to relapse into the habits."
"...going into dungeons in particular or any power application at all?"
"Dungeons are the biggest thing, since I use powers continuously inside them and then it's just a matter of not stopping. I—am not sure what other situations I'd be using my powers in."
"Oh. It's easier to not relapse then since I'm just using my power in short bursts and just to clear influences and shield people. The biggest relapse risk is using my passive powers at all."
"...maybe? I'd—probably feel sufficiently embarrassed of the possibility of fucking up."
"Short of experimentation, I'm not sure. I—the way I feel right now is that I'd rather cut my hands off than fuck this up. But I just spent eight years continually fucking it up. So I have a lot of—uncertainty—around what the actual triggers could be. I only have the one history of sliding into doing it and then sliding out of doing it, there aren't moving parts."
(Man, it's striking to him how the way he's taking sounds so weirdly nerdy to his ears and it's 100% because of who he wants to be for Haru and it makes him feel a little bit proud even though they're not actually going to figure this out and Haru will leave him forever.)
"You could go - not necessarily public public, but within-industry public, to have more - checks, than just me noticing if something's weird."
"With my powers or just my backlash? I—my powers are the kind of thing that gets people muttering about preemptively restraining and monitoring espers. —I'd still do it," because he'll do whatever Haru asks him to, "I'm just thinking through it."
"They are absolutely that," and if they had had a policy like that eight years ago, well... "This is presumably also a problem with anything along the lines of apologizing to anyone particularly egregiously affected."
"I think that'd be... I suppose it depends on what you mean. I'd naively only include Kang Jaehyuk in that category, just due to not really spending enough time with any other individual people to have done more than make a conversation go better. —not that that's fine, just, not 'particularly egregious', relatively."
"I didn't really use my powers on them. We met up for guiding, when I didn't care, and by the time I was sufficiently guided to care there wasn't anything more to be done to make those interactions have gone better, they were all already in long term memory."
"Do you... know, when you have somebody think that you said 'something cool', or whatever, what you're meant to have said, it didn't sound like you did but if you don't that'd get to be such a pile..."
"I usually don't just go with 'say something cool', I go with 'say something that communicates this but which comes off as cool'. But no, I don't get precise enough feedback to know exactly what it is that I was meant to have said. Occasionally this has involved me having to use my powers a bunch to cover myself while I try to infer what it is I'm saying in real time.
"That's when I care to. I could just let a conversation play out for them while I'm doing something else with my time."
"Right." Sigh. "...I want to figure this out but I don't know if it's realistic to do it tonight. Any chance you'll be able to sleep now?"
"...I don't know. I can try." Not on his own. "I want to flag that I think going within-industry public with at least my backlash is likely a good idea." And most importantly it's a concrete step that might get Haru to stay. He's mostly been running on that, on his words working towards the goal of getting Haru to stay.
He thinks that once he stops saying words he's going to break down again, though. He still hasn't actually looked up at Haru's face even once.
"Okay. Do you... want to sleep here, or were you just trying to give me space?"
"I was trying to hide from myself, the world, and you." Seems like he's just given up on ever not sounding whiny and pathetic to Haru so he's just failing with abandon now.
"Do you still want to do that? You can come to the usual bed with me. If you want."
Okay maybe he hasn't given up because he does sit on the pathetic whine that's threatening to come out. "I'd—like that, yeah."
He can get up but he's still not entirely sold on this "look at Haru's face" idea.
He doesn't have to.
They can go to bed and curl up together. No point stopping three days from the finish line.
That was probably an overestimate.
He wants a good night kiss. He's pathetic. He's just going to snuggle. That's good enough.
Jaeha fails to do much of that, until much much later that night. He needs to make 100% sure that Haru is still there and hasn't left, and every time he starts to fall asleep he has the beginnings of a nightmare that Haru's leaving and he immediately jolts awake.
On the bright side, he discovers that Haru talks in his sleep, which he feels blessed to know, and finds extremely endearing. He might've found it less endearing if it were sentences explaining how much Haru is going to leave him but it's just random (as far as he can tell) nouns so it can just be cute instead.
Even after he finally succeeds at getting to sleep, though, he sleeps lightly, and the minute Haru stirs awake so will he.
Haru remembered to cancel his first dungeon for the day (and mark himself tentative on the next three) and turn off his alarm, so they can sleep in a little bit. He does eventually open his eyes.
"Morning."
"Morning H—" He can't say "Haru-ya" but he's going to feel like shit if he calls Haru "Masaharu" once more. "Haru."
Haru repositions a little. "Straight into it or should it be a post-breakfast conversation, d'you think?"
Please stop asking Jaeha to make decisions.
..........
"I—know this may be a lot to ask, but—I'd kind of—prefer—if you didn't ask me to make decisions."
"...no, that's fine, I can handle that. Up you get."
They can have a quick low-effort breakfast - Haru does occasionally import Cheerios with which to take advantage of esper lactose tolerance, but doesn't have any right now, so it's the contents of the rice cooker with kimchi and eggs, and then they can retreat somewhere Cricket's not likely to interrupt them.
"So an order of operations thing I'm confused about is - guilt is a negative emotion, would in theory have been around for kind of a while, and the list with the words 'scrupulously ethical' on it was a while ago too, but the actual trigger here was Tae-gun being guidey at you, nothing particularly related to your history of power use being wrong, and I want your model of... why that might be."
"I've... been... trying not to think about how something like this was going to happen... for several days now. So guilt's been back online. And I think it was just—being guided. I—think I knew it was going to happen yesterday, actually. Even before we went out. Or today at the latest. And I was trying to—escape from my responsibilities. Leave it for future Jaeha, guided Jaeha who would be more able to deal with the fallout. In theory." A theory which has been conclusively disproven. "Lee Tae-gun was just—a trigger for—reinforcing how much I want—need—you in particular."
"Mkay.
"What's your model of why using your power on people is wrong?"
"People... have a basic right to be correct about reality? Or—if you mean the receptive part—people go into interactions with a basic model of what others are able to know or infer about their thoughts and feelings and intentions, and receptive psychic powers—especially undisclosed ones—break that model, and—people might not have consented to interacting with someone if they knew what that someone was getting out of it and thought it was more than they were willing to give."
"...yeah, that's not how I would have put it but it's mostly right. I would have said something like 'have the tools they use to understand reality uninterfered with' or something, obviously people manage to be incorrect about reality under the most supportive conditions all the time but mind-controlling them about it is still fucked up if you manage to make them more correct in so doing."
"I... think there's an argument to be made," and goddamnit why is he making it why can't he just shut up and be meek, "that there's an extent and—kind—of power use—for personal expression—that isn't different from being better at social skills due to explicit practice and grinding, or just inborn talent. But I'm not sure I can trust myself to—limit myself to only the kinds of power use that would match just that and nothing more—especially since I clearly slide down the slippery slope really easily."
"...I guess in the degenerate case, in principle you could use your power to be kind of in effect a functional copy of mine, just erase yourself from a scene so nobody can see you, and I don't think it's morally wrong to be invisible as long as you aren't, like, spying on them in ways it would also be wrong to do with a camera, but the route by which you'd do that is alarming, and, yeah, you might need a bright line."
"It's also less comprehensive, I do need to know that there's someone there to be able to do it. I've used my power for stealh in dungeons in the past, though."
"And with dungeons, who we have as yet no way to communicate with to make peace an option, that's fine, as long as it's not a prompt to - spread it around more, but...
"I can be around you to maybe be able to catch you a lot of the time, but not all of it forever, life's chaotic, shit happens, our occupation is not especially low-risk, and... it's not that I'm not terrifically flattered to have played a pivotal role here, the same part of me that thinks it's romantic you wanted a list also thinks it's romantic that you're having ethical revelations precipitated by being in love with me,"
Jaeha flinches, but it's not like he didn't know... or didn't know that Haru knew. He'd just... not said it. Because it's pathetic.
But it was already pathetic even before he called it 'love', so, it's not like it changes much.
Handsqueeze. "- but if we're being romantic and not just assigning me a watchdog role with a deadman switch that outs you to an intractable number of people if I introduce myself to a monster one day, we need to figure out how you can be much, much more robustly trustworthy than that. It's romantic if I got you started but not if I'm the only thing keeping you safe."
"Yeah. That's why I think going public would help. Get our guild's help. I—think—I know we haven't been in Quasar for even a month yet, but from what I've seen of it, I would trust their ability to help with this kind of thing a lot more than I would have Juno's. So that's a—possible first step.
"The thing is—what I said yesterday. I don't know what the actual triggers are for me to fuck up again, because the only time I went from not backlashed to that—level of callousness—was right after I manifested, which I think is a set of conditions that's really hard to generalise from. It might turn out fine. It might not. From my current perspective it would be horrifying to slide back into it. Maybe the ethical opinions I've acquired in the past eight years—at least the ones that had been there in potentia before they became actual—will be enough.
"I also—what I'm about to say is really suspect for the obvious reasons, but—I worry that we might be trying to come up with the perfect solution to a problem we don't know the parameters of yet and can't know the parameters of until we see the problem happen in the wild, and so we won't guess what the right solutions could even be."
"Would you be able to take note of any time it's - on your mind, so we can look for patterns? While doing a very very gentle schedule of dungeons and hitting zero promptly after every time. On the supposition that it occurring to you is the lesser form of being tempted is the lesser form of actually slipping."
"I think so. I—it occurred to me a lot, with you. I wanted to know what you were feeling a lot. I wanted to know if you liked me, if you thought I was cool, if you thought I was stupid, if I was reading too much into things or if I was right that you were just being kind and would fuck off as soon as I got fully guided because you'd realised how boring I am. I wanted to make myself seem cool to you, I wanted to seem confident and impressive and well-put-together. I cursed your power in my head for not letting me do that.
"I... think... I wouldn't have actually done it. In retrospect. Which is suspect again, but... it feels like if I had had the power, back then, I would have realised that I—didn't want it enough to actually follow through.
"But I'm not sure."
...nod. "Well, I'm certainly the safest person to be tempted about.
"Another reason to not run your entire morality on being attached to me is that - however romantic we're being, you have known me for like a month and I am responsible for just about all the pleasant experiences you've had in the last eight years, if I understand correctly, and that might produce some very intense and potentially temporary psychological results. You still haven't hit zero, even if you had the timeline is objectively very quick..."
"I—guiding always felt good. Even at my lowest. So not all of my pleasant experiences. But all of the pleasant experiences other than those, yes.
"I understand what you mean. But I want to—I mean, I don't want to run my morality on being attached to you. But I want to like you. I want to be a person who—" Fuck. "Who's in love with you. And I want to be a person you'll be in love with. And that—doesn't stop if we break up? Uh. Break it off. I—guess the part where I want to be someone who's in love with you might," lol lmao, "but the part where I want to be that person—won't. Because that person is someone who wants to be themself.
"I really, really didn't want to be myself, even at my worst. I want to be him instead."
"...but that's not to say that you're wrong. And that was not what I was getting at when I said the thing about—wanting to use my power on you. I just meant that I think I can notice wanting to, because I did. Because I have been."
Haru nods. "...is there an element of - substituting feeling other people's emotions for your own missing ones, or is it mostly about being oriented and informed?"
"It's almost exclusively about the latter. About—feeling safe, feeling like the Malaysians aren't a threat, feeling like the waitress isn't going to spit in our drinks, like people aren't going to think I'm terrible and spread rumours about me and leave me alone. Like you're not going to leave me as soon as you ethically can."
"I'll tell Quasar about it, and I'll register every time I feel tempted, and I'll review that when I'm back home to make sure I didn't skip anything, and if I do slip we'll see what went wrong and have a better idea of further solutions. What—parts of the problem—does that fail to address, at least until we know more? —that's a genuine question, I'm not trying to—say that it's definitely enough and we should stop thinking right now."
"Well, I guess it feels like I'm being a dick keeping you in an emotional holding pattern but maybe that's just not solvable today. It also doesn't cover the restitution angle at all, but I could see myself settling for you just disowning your father and no longer taking his money. Who in Quasar are you most comfortable talking to?"
"I... don't know. I wasn't thinking of having any individual person do it, I was more imagining getting—institutional help. Whatever they can offer. As for my father, I—don't know how I would—do restitution, I still—hate him. No longer taking his money is fine, not having anything to do with him is fine—though I think he was bluffing when he said he'd disown me. As far as I know his wife hasn't yet agreed to give him another child to inherit this business and if he doesn't get someone then he'd need to pass it all down to my dongsaeng, whom I've never met and I'm not sure my father has either. It would feel to him like giving his wealth to his wife's family, I think.
"I don't know what he'd do if I tried that anyway."
"...is there any reason to care about the fate of his corporation or whether he likes the number and dispositions of children his choices have left him with, I am not immediately seeing a reason to care about that. I don't have to wish him particularly well to want to not profit off his mind control."
"No. That's why the thing I said I'm not sure how to do is just the restitution, not having anything more to do with him is fine."
Handsqueeze. Haru is squeezing his hand. Haru isn't leaving. He still might, but... not right now.
He feels like crying.
"...I'm trying to think of a better question than 'are you okay', but don't immediately have one -"
He laughs weakly. "I am—better than I was yesterday after we got home."
"...okay.
"...if we discover that being backlashed is a big risk factor, or actually even just until we discover that it isn't, you need a backup guiding plan. I have no intention of dying on you but if I do anyway, or if I run to Japan to bail Yamanaka out of a pickle after she unplannedly rescues thirty orphans from a burning building or something and I'm not on hand, or something. If Tae-gun can guide you from meters away this does not have to involve anything conventionally impinged on by monogamy but you certainly seem to have monogamy feelings about it anyway?"
He shuts his eyes. "It feels—wrong—for someone other than you to guide me. But—I could probably get over it. If I tried. It might be because of how strong my mental associations are between guiding and sex, from how that was the only reasonable option for me with my prior partners. It feels a bit like—having someone else give me an orgasm. Maybe."
"Okay, if Yamanaka rescues thirty orphans from a burning building I can ask Woo-young to haul her here, but - probably work on that in the background and be ready to do it fast if something bad happens."
"This has to have been really hard and I'm glad you told me even though it was hard to digest."
It was so hard.
"In the interest of transparency," because he cannot shut the fuck up, "I am not sure how long it'll take me to get over my—anxiety—so I'll probably feel the need to cling to you a lot and be half-convinced you're about to leave any minute now. And I realise this might come off as incredibly offputting and—make it more likely to happen—but."
"I think this will last several days so you probably shouldn't change your schedule because of it."
"Okay. I cancelled my first one for the day already, though, is this a good time to go to Quasar and have an awkward meeting?"
God. "Does it have to be in-person." Hasn't his pride been hurt enough.
"No, I don't think that's necessary. I wish we had a specific point person to report to instead of nebulous scheduling teams and procurement teams etcetera..." He scrolls through contacts trying to figure out who to text.
Well there's this one esper who's been in Quasar almost since its inception...
You free? Kind of heavy complicated followup on the general topic of Jaeha's backlash hole which I mentioned before.
He'll probably be out soon, but then he'll be with his partner most likely. "We can wait for Yoo-min who might not get back to us till this evening or I can go with a shotgun approach and we can talk to whatever Quasar rando is most promptly available, I guess."
"...let's wait until lunch at least?" He said "institutional help" but that's different than sharing it with a lot of random people...
"Sure, my late-morning dungeon should have me in a meeting-y mood anyway."
Haru is going to LEAVE HIM if he were going to he'd have done it already. Probably.
"Okay.
"What are you... feeling. Or thinking. Right now."
"I'm nervous. Seems easy to fuck things up from here. I'm worried about you, you look to be having a really wretched time, but simultaneously also kind of worried that you'll panic suddenly if I say the wrong thing and anyone we bring in to the situation is going to have a problem. Kinda wrung out in general, left over from last night's revelations. Mostly I'm trying to keep myself composed so I can be competent in my dungeons."
"I don't think the ways in which I'm—fragile—right now include being sensitive to specific things you could say. I—feel—uncertain, like I don't—this is the kind of situation I'd use my passive power for. I'm not tempted, but it's—I'd use it to know where I'm standing, with you, what you're not telling me because of thinking it might set me off, what you're trying to hide from me, so that I'd know what—possible futures—I could end up in, and prepare for them."
Pet pet. "I'm being, like, at all measured in the language I choose relative to what I might use alone with a notebook when referring to how alarming I find mind control, but mostly because, like, I don't want to be an asshole and it doesn't seem like it'd help anything to go on a rant about that, you seem to get it well enough to be going on with. I'm more worried that like - I don't think you're consciously angling to get me to make dramatic emotional declarations but my not doing that and the things I say instead might be upsetting or triggering? Or that I'll misunderstand something about you and say something dumb for that reason, like, I was treading carefully when I said you need a backup guiding method because I'm very used to platonic non-sex guiding and don't have a great model of what was going on with the monogamy feelings there."
"I think I'd—maybe I'm wrong and just not very creative, but I think I'd find it a lot more reassuring if you were filtering less because then I wouldn't fill in the blanks in the things you're not saying. As opposed to just the things you don't mean.
"I also want to do some of the emotional labour and help support you in what you might need here but I'm not sure if there's any amount of that you'd want from me. It just feels like I'm putting all of my emotions on you and if I want to—be in a relationship with you—which I do—then I have responsibilities towards you, too, and demonstrating any ability to fulfill them even in advance of that hypothetical relationship existing would make me a more suitable candidate for it."
Hug. "I'm not going to get started on a mind control rant right now because I need to be under control to be safe in dungeons but if you wanna get me going this evening I certainly have the material. Supporting me in this is going to almost entirely take the form of making sure it never happens again, though, that and to a lesser extent making it right for the people it's already happened to is what I'm focused on. You are very sweet and I appreciate that you want to take care of me but my own emotional state is and has always been the sort of thing I like to manage myself, when I'm in my right mind, so the emotional support work of being in a relationship with me is mostly going to be happening when I'm backlashed and comparatively little when I'm trying to make serious decisions."
Oh he's getting a hug now. Okay. He's feeling like crying again. "I can try to figure out how I'd 'make it right' for my father. I can also try to figure out what it would mean to make it right for everyone else but it would probably need to be something a bit diffuse and generic for humanity as a whole because I have not kept track of everyone I've talked to for the past eight years.
"And I do want to hear the rant, when you feel like giving it."
"If you want it you can have it. When I'm not about to prep for a dungeon."
Jaeha—can probably—properly return the hug, right? He thinks so. He'll do that, he'll wrap his arms around Haru and just settle into it.
He really, really wishes he were the man of Haru's dreams. He wishes it were possible for him to become that man.
When Haru's alarm goes off he gives Jaeha a peck on the temple and takes his teleport to the dungeon to get geared up and do heroics.
By the time he's out Yoo-min will have replied to his text.
Sorry, was in a dungeon.
What's up? How can I help?
yeah I realized that after a minute, should have checked first. how does a conference call with me, Jaeha, and whatever we're having for lunch sound?
give me five to teleport home and make sure he's ready then yeah
No he hasn't, he needs to have any semblance of ability to be a functional human being if he wants Haru to like him and that includes making them lunch.
"Yoo-min can hop on a call now," says Haru, dishing himself some of the lunch.
Not exactly enthusiastic consent but Jaeha didn't want to make decisions! Haru calls.
He picks up quickly. "Hey. How're you guys—" Then he takes one look at Jaeha's face and decides that's a stupid question. "How can I help?" is what he goes with instead.
"So, remember how Jaeha's been in a backlash hole that I was very restrainedly not suing anybody over? - Jaeha I'm gonna need you to, like, explicitly release me from the NDA, possibly in writing."
"Already done," he says, opening a file on his commscreen and mailing Haru it, with his digital signature. He realised he was going to need it earlier today while Haru was in the dungeon and decided to get it out of the way early.
"Yeah, buckle up, it's not fun. His backlash eats his emotions, positive ones first. And he has been continuously backlashed since his awakening, with, like, a brief blip right as he was coming out of hell week for his asshole dad to show up and be an asshole, which was when he was seventeen. And as you might expect in a seventeen year old whose emotions are being eaten and whose dad is an asshole his conscience fell by the wayside somewhere in there and he's only just now coming out of it. His power's a lot more comprehensive than it looks on the record and he's been in the habit of abusing it in civilian situations. We are in progress on a plan to cut that shit out forever but I am among other things not immortal and the plan can't be 'I personally catch him at it every time'."
"It's not taking full complete control of someone's entire mind but if that's the target you're aiming to get just short of you'll land approximately in the correct description of it."
"He bounces off me - he's slipped and accidentally tried to empath me a couple times, passed it off till yesterday as a startle response, it ticks my backlash but doesn't do anything to me otherwise. Based on the description I can't imagine it'd work on recordings, and it doesn't alter long term memories. Range extent is also very scary - Jaeha, how scary exactly, do you know -"
"From the top floor of the Quasar building I can reach street level. —I haven't tried that specific thing, it's just a good order of magnitude ballpark."
"So, yeah. Guild support in managing that as he finishes getting out of the hole - almost there, now - and verrrrry cautiously resumes dungeoneering activity - would be good. Jaeha unless you happen to remember for a fact that you've never poked Yoo-min in the brain this would be a great opportunity to apologize."
"Nothing specific to you. The first time we met in that one QQ meeting I was generically making myself come off funnier and more charming and interesting than I actually am."
"Can't go that far. I can play with my illusions while pulling on your brain's own understanding of what would look good, and then make up the difference by subduing the immediate negative reactions and encouraging the positive ones, but I can't make you feel entire new things wholesale nor actually change what you're thinking directly."
"Oh." That's... less bad than he'd expected. "And you did that just to sound better?"
"It's what I used to do all the time, to everyone, almost as a reflex. I wasn't trying to do anything else."
...he probably shouldn't try getting into Kang Jaeha's fundamental motivational structure here even if it sounds fascinating. "I see. I—forgive you."
"That's very generous of you. I don't know that we can rely on everyone to react the same way, if you have a sense of who would be best to tell for safety coverage without making it a huge public witch hunt."
"To make it less tempting to backslide. I think he'll keep sensitivity to risk of getting caught in more stages of backlash than he will a felt sense of it being fucked up. Am I wrong?" he asks Jaeha.
"...oh. I see. I—can get a list of people for you to vet. —do you want access to counselling?"
"Yeah. We have some people who are used to dealing with esper shit and who can be trusted to keep everything confidential."
"I tried it when I was like eighteen and it wasn't for me but a lot of people seem to get something out of it," says Haru.
"It'd be someone to check in with you regularly and whose entire job is to be nonjudgmental about any times you fuck up and who'll be there to help you come up with effective ways to do better in the future. It might be a lot tougher, emotionally, to admit errors to someone whose opinion you respect or feel like you need to live up to, especially if you don't already have a plan for how to do better."
If such a person actually existed that could potentially be useful, even if absolutely mortifying.
"Maybe."
"We do have very trustworthy people, and you don't even need to start off by telling them everything, maybe just see them a few times to get a feel for them, get their vibes, see if you can make it work."
"Beyond that, we could get a rotation of people checking in, asking you how you're doing, just generally keeping track of you."
"Do you know of anyone else in Quasar you're compatible with, who could tell how backlashed you are?"
"He's... very reserved and private," Park Yoo-min hedges. "It's difficult to get close to him. Although, for something like this..."
"We're compatible enough I could feel him guiding me from a distance, yesterday. —I think it was asymmetrical, he didn't seem to react at all."
"Oh. Wow." Yoo-min and Seungjoo are compatible enough they don't need to be touching to guide each other but Jaeha and Tae-gun were substantially farther apart than just "not touching". "—did you use your powers on him yesterday?"
"I see. Well, that's a possibility, if he can tell how backlashed you are. And maybe we should find other people, but—don't feel forced."
"You're handling this very well, I appreciate it," Haru tells Yoo-min.
"Man this sounds incredibly tough for both of you, I couldn't do anything else."
"Well, you know, it's not thrilling but at least I am so cool that I could redeem him without having even known what I was redeeming him from, or something, so that's validating."
"What was it you said the other day in chat? 'Guiding dick too bomb'?"
"I like to think that my aura of incorruptible integrity was helping at least as much."
"It was also your thoughtfulness, thoroughness, self-awareness, and ability to inspire me to become a better person."
"I would actually love to cause you to blush someday. Stretch goals."
"Good God, you two, I'd tell you to get a room but you are already in a room."
"Anyway, is there anything else you feel like the guild could help you guys with? I just came up with those ideas on the fly but maybe you had something else in mind... Oh, and I assume I have your permission to share stuff to the extent it's necessary with the people you vet, once I've got those?"
"Still substantially in the brainstorming stage over here too. I think we're stable, just not redundant enough for my tastes. Thank you so much for your help."
"Yeah, of course. And thank you for trusting me. I—wish I had someone specific I could point to and be like, hey, that person will definitely be able to get you the resources you need, but this problem is... kind of unique."
"I believe in you guys. You'll get through it. If you think of anything else feel free to come bug me."
And he hangs up.
Jaeha lets out a breath he'd been half-holding throughout the conversation.
Jaeha kisses him back.
(Look, this isn't the behaviour of someone who isn't romantically interested in him. He'd know, because his past partners weren't interested in him, and very much did not kiss him except when needing guiding. They didn't—hug him like this. Take care of him like this. Worry for him like this. He isn't sure what the difference between this and dating is, exactly, except for the—relative security. If they're not dating and Haru leaves, it's not breaking up. It's something less serious. And Jaeha doesn't like it. But Haru kisses him when he doesn't need any guiding at all, and seems to like spending time with him, and—might be settling for him instead of the man of his dreams, because Jaeha isn't the man of his dreams.)
(Jaeha doesn't like himself very much right now. And he definitely doesn't like being inside his skull either.)
(He wishes he could undo... so many things.)
"Kind of wishing I could skip to the part where I've figured out what I need to do" for you to like me "without having to suffer through the intermediate steps but, you know, could be worse," you could've already left.
"Yeah, I don't see a good way to speedrun the process or I'd be all over it."
"Do we have any concrete next steps at the scale of hours? ...more words, Jaeha. I still feel like if I do or say the wrong thing something is going to explode and I would like to feel less like that and I am trying to figure out what it would take for me to feel less like that."
"- yeah that doesn't seem like a constructive posture to be in. Uh scale of hours I'm on for two more dungeons and then if you still want my rant on mind control there's that. You could... backread the guild chat or hop on it to actually say things and see if you like anybody in there enough to want them in the, like, support-slash-monitoring network we're cobbling together? Make appointments with the guild therapist folks so you can see if you're comfortable with any of those?"
"Yeah. I'll do that." But those aren't really the things he's scared of—
...no. No, he needs to reframe it in his head, actually.
"I think I'm starting to understand why you use your notebooks."
"Maybe. I'm not sure. My thoughts are doing something funny in my head."
"I think if I do that I'll do it electronically. Besides, I—might want privacy, actually, so this would have to wait until I guided you enough for you to be alright with not being near me."
"Or do it while I'm dungeoneering, unless you think you won't want to drop it abruptly once I'm home - and even then I can keep with Cricket purring on me for a few minutes while you get to a good stopping place, if that's what you need."
"I don't know that I know the process well enough to spend the whole time you're in a dungeon doing it so I'll probably be done by when you come back. I just—want my thoughts to stop doing funny things when I'm not looking."
He squeezes Haru closer. "I'll figure it out. One way or another. I—I will become the man of your dreams. Just you wait. I'll make you proud."
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.
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."
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.
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.
And then Haru has to bounce off to do his last dungeon of the day before dinnertime.
He doesn't write much more during that time. Instead he messages some people from Quasar's directory of counsellors to set up a first meeting and then does what Haru suggested and starts reading the backscroll of Quasar's group chat, which leads him to notice and accept an invitation to the QQ group chat and read that backscroll.
He starts forming opinions about these people. He's starting to feel kin with Cricket, which can't be a good sign, so he'll need to review those opinions later with a kinder mindset, but it's a place to start.
The last dungeon of the day goes on for a while - it's been around the block a couple times - but it doesn't strain Haru's powers very hard, having a few very tough monsters rather than lots of them. He comes home for dinner. "Tadaima!"
"Okaeri!" He's almost done with dinner, which tonight is spicy tteokbokki with a cheese filling and fish sauce.
"Smells delicious. I will have to take on some cooking duties once I'm not sprinting any more, see how you like what I know how to make." He wants to be touching but he is not so backlashed that he can't allow Jaeha freedom of movement to complete the last steps of the meal.
"I look forward to it. And semi-relatedly, I realised we've been living together for almost a month now and I haven't shown you anything in Seoul, so I am of a mind to take you out on some dates soon."
"I have ideas of places to visit and things to do but not so much an order of operations or a set of dates in mind."
"If we start with a walk along the Han river," he says, nodding in the direction of the window that has a view to it, "I could show you some places and see which ones caught your fancy. There's the Yeuido Hangang Park and the National Museum, the National Cemetery is really pretty if you don't feel creeped out by the nearby graves, the Banpo Bridge Moonlight Rainbow Fountain will start having light shows soon, and there are lots of restaurants I know near all of these places. If we're lucky and the cherry blossoms start flowering soon we could also go watch them, I'd love to do that with you... There are other places in Seoul I could show you but I feel like this would be a nice start."
"That sounds lovely. I am not particularly creeped out by graves, graves had their chance to be creepy when we were assigned our ration of supernatural bullshit and they didn't participate at all."
"Well, they do participate occasionally in dungeons, but that's not really the same thing at all."
"No you. You're going to take all the steam out of my rant. Are you sure you want the rant and not to just be cute at each other."
"...I know you too well to think that the alternative would be you doing anything like 'bottling it up' but I feel like there might be some—catharsis—in it? But maybe I'm wrong about what you... mean by it."
"I think the upside potential is something along the lines of - you really could not have picked a more horrifying thing to be going around doing, for me personally, and maybe it is valuable to have that fully communicated both for squishy mutual understanding reasons and also for Project Cut It Out Forever? And also I thought of a very mildly amusing analogy, but it's really not one of my best. It is totally fine if you don't wanna hear it in any more detail than 'that was horrifying, cut it out forever'."
"On the one hand this could be inviting—stress and emotional harm—that might not accomplish anything, especially given the—distance I want to put between me and those choices. In the sense of—I haven't done it in weeks and there's a chance there's some fragility in my sense of accomplishment which could be disrupted by feeling like, if that clean break wasn't enough, nothing will ever be."
"And on the other, I—want to know you better than anyone else. I want to know you best. So if there's anything you could say that I couldn't predict in—sufficient detail—that means there are things there about you that I don't know. And you don't—owe me, knowing every detail of your life, just because I want to. But I want to.
"Plus, there's a part of me that I haven't entirely, ah, 'notebooked' away, that is still waiting for the other shoe to drop because of how calm and collected you've been about the whole thing so far. That part of me is sure that you're going to be holding something over me, until it can see that something exist and go away. It's the same part of me that wanted you to be completely unfiltered with me earlier, that wants to know—everything, the good and the bad and the ugly, to know what works and what's broken, so that it knows where to step confidently and where to tread carefully."
"Wow, good job Kang Jaeha those were lots of words that communicated things rather than sitting on your feelings, right there, get a cookie." He pats his own head.
"...wow, you're doing amazing, I have never seen my notebook thing work for anybody else." Haru also pats him on the head. "Would it split the difference usefully if I complained about, like, mind control science fiction plots? So that you hear more about my feelings on the topic without it being about you."
"Hmm, it'd—plausibly? I... Give me a moment." He closes his eyes, but it turns out to be just a moment, because this was one of the things that was looming largest on his mind when he decided to start writing down everything he'd been feeling and it's fresh and ready to be put to more words. "The thing about—wanting the other shoe to drop—I know I said I haven't gotten rid of it yet but I don't actually know that I can get rid of it at all, is the thing? Or—probably I'll be able to, eventually, but—given how much it seems like that desire has driven such a big part of why I've used my powers in the past, leaving it to simmer afraid in the background could be—bad—but then again it could be good to just stop feeding it altogether.
"I think if—you did the thing about the plots, but then also told me more about—hmm. I don't know. I don't know what would be sufficient, for that part of me to truly believe that it's safe."
"We can start with that, and see what still feels missing, if anything? I digest most of my science fiction these days in the form of telling Cricket what shows have been recommended to me and having him summarize, but probably if it's going to feel very vulnerable you wouldn't want him in the room, I can dig up a short story or something that I'll have time to read or that you could read to me."
"I would still love to turn Cricket's opinion of me around and get him to like me but it seems like a hopeless prospect at this point, and this might hinder that project rather than help, so plausibly including him would not be ideal, yeah."
Haru leans his head on Jaeha's shoulder. "I take enormous satisfaction in Cricket liking me but not in a way where I think it reflects poorly on anyone for him not to like them." Om nom tteobokki. "Mm, this is good."
"I'm glad you like it." Jaeha kisses Haru's forehead and eats his food, too.
"- you know what would work would be Harry Potter," says Haru, after he has located a literal cookie to present to Jaeha. "It's not short but there's several kinds of mind control in it and I remember it well enough for all that I last read the whole thing through when I was twelve."
He got a LITERAL COOKIE from his Haru it doesn't matter that it's a cookie from his own damn kitchen he is being materially rewarded for being good at communication and he is going to do the most creating positive incentives in his head about this he can.
"Same. Sure, let's hear it."
Haru has OPINIONS about mind control in Harry Potter. The casual references to love potions - the author decided to heavily imply that being conceived under the influence is what made Voldemort so evil but has nothing but amusement in her heart about schoolchildren sneaking doses to other schoolchildren, or the less overtly unpleasant of the Potions teachers possessing Amortentia for some reason and displaying it in the school when the school's security measures for in-universe-taken-very-seriously items of value can and have been bypassed by eleven-year-olds.
The Obliviation, on so thin an excuse for having a masquerade that it would have been better not to bother to try, and where they don't Obliviate it's because they can instead coerce and intimidate, as with Harry's relatives; at no point does any wizard ever try to convince anyone they could instead casually overpower or extort. Particularly egregious in the case of Hermione's parents, who by rights ought to have been convinceable and whose ignorance wasn't even legally mandated, and who instead are replaced with versions of themselves who yearn to move to Australia and don't have a daughter, which, if she'd died, would have completely denied them the opportunity to ever remember and grieve their child - she doesn't even give her allies a way to look them up afterwards for the case where the good guys win their conflict but she herself doesn't happen to survive - and given that she didn't die and one might generously presume she put them right later (it doesn't say), presumably created some dreadful emotional fallout, about the resolution of which absolutely nothing is said.
Comparatively speaking Haru is not that fussed about the Imperius Curse. That is, it's obviously an atrocity, but it's not worse than a memory charm. It commandeers the self, but it doesn't undermine it, though prolonged use obviously has plenty of opportunity to undermine someone's relationships and personal boundaries and life plans. A student learning to throw the curse off who jumps onto the desk when so commanded can still come to terms with this eventuality on their own time without any gaps in their ability to do so. And the exercise seemed to have more of the (ostensibly) intended effect than the Occlumency lessons, which -
Legilimency! Fucking everywhere Legilimency! Good guys doing it, bad guys doing it, everyone acting like it's a neutral skill! If Haru lived in this setting he would fucking LEARN the Occlumency, even if no evil wizards seemed to be specifically after him and even, perhaps especially, if he hated his poorly-thought-out assigned teacher who kept trying to read his mind as an ostensible form of education; it doesn't even sound hard, though, like, obviously whether something that doesn't exist sounds hard to someone reading a book about it is not necessarily indicative.
...okay no that all just sounded 1. correct and 2. incredibly endearing. Kang Jaeha is too much of a 25-year-old Korean man to properly swing his legs back and forth like an American teenage schoolgirl from an 80s movie watching her crush speak but that's very much the emotional tone, here, he's finding it delightful to hear Haru be so opinionated about all of this.
He really, really likes Haru.
In English or in Korean he's not going to ask Haru to confess, that wouldn't be cool.
Time to be serious again, though. "I'm glad you have the power you do. As you say, a lot of people are a lot more chill about this kind of thing at least in fiction than they probably ought to be, but I'm glad that you can block it altogether.
"I'm not particularly surprised or dismayed by any of this and I'm not missing the obvious parallels, either. I do agree with every single thing you said, here."
"- no, I've been very deliberately saying 'horrified' and not 'angry', it's not - positioned in a way where I'd be angry about it? I probably would be if you'd done anything to Cricket or my parents."
"Are you horrified at—by—me, personally? As opposed to—I'm not sure what, really. 'My choices, disembodied and devoid of cause' is where I wish that would be, but..."
"I mean, insofar as I've identified a cause it's at least sixty percent your asshole dad. I'm horrified that doing tons of mind control was appealing, I guess? And that there was nothing in place to - bring you up short, before now, that there wasn't enough anti-mind-control in the water to give you any more pause than it took to write up an NDA, and that you hadn't been sold on the value of authentic human relationships, and that nobody was worried about your backlash levels till me - were you actively concealing those from past partners such that they couldn't have told Juno even if they'd wanted to be responsible about it -"
"Not—with my powers or anything. I wasn't actively bringing it up every time we talked but I wasn't hiding it or talking around it, either." He laughs at himself, a bit. "I feel like a story trope when I say this but I'm not entirely sure I've ever had an authentic human relationship. Before you, I mean. Maybe I had some friends as a child or young teenager, but..."
"I didn't have friends when I was a kid basically at all. People I'd talk to, sit with at lunch, sure, but I wasn't the social butterfly type. Ren is, I bootstrapped myself up to my present level of social life with a lot of help from her once I needed a social life."
"I think—if that's all—then there's nothing missing. I am also horrified that the mind control appealed, and the only real explanation was that I just straightforwardly didn't care. ...I wasn't under the impression that the people around me weren't real but maybe drawing on that comparison with that part of your backlash might be enlightening about the extent to which I didn't care."
"I am certainly very rude to people when I don't think they're real. It's sort of weird to me that this coexisted with caring about whether they like you."
"That was always flavoured as a transactional thing, in my head. If they like me, they'll do me favours, help me with things. Networking and connections. But also I'm very—proud and vain. I cared—care—about my image, about saving face, about my dignity. And—not really wanting things doesn't mean that I wasn't scared of losing them. That might be another useful way to look at it, I almost exclusively felt the pain of loss without ever feeling the corresponding joy when I got anything I sought after, so I was obsessed with never losing."
"Yikes. I'm - not really expecting it to make a lot of further qualitative difference, but - looking forward to getting you out of the hole."
"Probably the only things missing are pure joy and the intensity of every other good thing."
🐚snailmail: who's the bomb, we the bomb
𖣘fan_death: legal beating procurement in the unofficial go tournament is not exactly national news
🇺🇳 glob: it's international news.
🇺🇳 glob: because I told people in 6 other countries so far
𖣘fan_death: because you - yeah that, that doesn't count
🐚snailmail: ur just jelly
🌙moon'n'joon: that's definitely it, uh-huh
🐚snailmail: TRIUMPH happened
𖣘fan_death: SECRETLY there is a seventh dan go player in legal. apparently. I'm not bitter.
🌙moon'n'joon: we agreed no handicaps for the tournament :) :)
🇺🇳 glob: yeah 1 dan is like a black belt and it goes up from there.
🐚snailmail: we ANNIHILATED themmmmm
𖣘fan_death: okay you personally don't deserve the credit for it, I creamed you
yoo-min-max: oooooh
taegun fan no. 1183: no one was thirsting over him with @traceless here
🇺🇳 glob: I remember being impressed at how professionally unthirsty the interview on traceless's blog was
𖣘fan_death: oh hey do you legal department dishonorable cheaters happen to know why the bell. I want a prize
🌙moon'n'joon: a) no b) if we did why would we tell you b2) especially if you're calling us dishonorable cheaters because you didn't check anybody's ELO in advance c) he probably doesn't even have a prize in mind, like what would that even be
...
"Uh. Not that it matters but why the bell?" he asks, failing to mask his intense curiosity.
"That's my middle name. I hate my first name and have no idea what Ren was thinking, but I don't hate it enough to resist the temptation to tweak people's noses about it."
"Oh. ...may I ask what it is...?" Wow he hates the fact that he didn't know this a lot more than he'd have expected.
"I will literally never call you by it but I am inordinately happy that I know things about you that most other people don't."
KangJaeha: I know why the bell
🐠nemo: you don't count
🚫do-not-jin: ........I really feel like there's some kind of moderator warning I should give the two of you here but my handbook of allowable moderator warnings does not cover this kind of stuff at all
🔔traceless: I am too clever for your handbook
No he's already done a lot of backscroll reading and if there's anything Haru wants to do with him he wants to do that more than being in chat.
After all, guiding dick is widely reputed to be bomb.
And they're on the home stretch of a sprint, too.
And there isn't fanfare, there's nothing special announcing that it happens. It's been happening for weeks, and by the time Jaeha finally confessed everything there was very little left, and he doesn't notice going over the edge at all, except that it happens at some point in the middle of sex when he isn't watching so he only notices it when they're snuggling afterwards and he thinks about it and says, "Oh, I'm done."
"Like, off dungeons? If you aren't about to run off now that your responsibilities are discharged that could be an opportunity for those dates I mentioned. Unless you'd rather just stay home and have some introvert time." So long as "home" continues to be Jaeha's house.
Haru is not running away. Jaeha is so fucking happy he might die. —oh, that's also probably the guiding, isn't it, "so happy he might die" is almost certainly, like, the actual first thing to go.
"...I like you a lot, Haru-ya," he says, in Korean so Haru knows what he means (and because saying "I love you", even in English, sounds far too serious). "Really quite a lot."
Oh okay he thought he was so happy he might die but he was wrong, now he's so happy he might die, he's so happy he needs to hug Haru really very tight and bury his face in the crook of Haru's neck and try not to hyperventilate.
"I was going to go somewhere, I was going to say something I'm sure there were words that were coming next," he says into Haru's skin, trying his damnedest to keep his breathing even and his heart still and, and that's the stupidest thing, really, he can't make his heart go still, and is there even a point in trying with the breathing? He thinks very plausibly not. But it's not like he's trying to hide what he's feeling, he's just trying not to breathe so quickly he passes out, because right now he shouldn't pass out he needs to hug Haru, his Haru, no one else's, just his, his Haru!!!!!!
Pet pet. "Oh no, I have done such violence to my Jaeha's train of thought."
Haru called him "my Jaeha"!!!! Out loud!!!!!! With his mouth!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Jaeha's definitely going to need. A minute. Or ten. Maybe a minute of hugging and then ten minutes of kissing, or something, he doesn't know, he lost his train of thought, he lost his ability to form new thoughts, he's running in circles in his brain playing the memory of Haru calling him "my Jaeha" on repeat.
"You called me 'my Jaeha'. You did. With your mouth. You said it. No takebacks. I'm yours. Okay? I'm yours. You said it." He's reminded of that XKCD strip with the inanity of statements being inversely proportional to the distance to a cat except here it's Haru instead of cat. Not even his thoughts are making much sense, which makes sense, really, since he's not forming them anymore, they're just forming themselves, or, or something, he doesn't know, he doesn't care, he just doesn't care.
"I didn't know that was such a high leverage phrase! My Jaeha, all mine."
And now he's kissing again, kissing Haru all over, lips nose cheeks eyes forehead temple ears jaw chin neck—definitely neck, he wonders if he can leverage their hugging position to reach the back—Haru said it!!!! He did!!!!! He really did!!!!!!!!! Haru likes him back!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! He never understood the cliché'd thought of "this must be a dream" before but now he does because it must be, reality was never this nice, never, not even his dreams have ever been his nice, even when Haru told Jaeha he liked him in Jaeha's dreams that didn't feel this nice, maybe that means it's real, only it can't be, only it is, he's Haru's, he really is, Haru likes him back!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
He's so cute! Why did Haru get a guy who was so moved by Haru's presence to renounce his wicked ways and customize himself to Haru's specifications and who is also ridiculously cute dropped in his lap, why is that a thing!
Hey can they go another round Jaeha thinks he doesn't have enough words to express how happy he is right now he knows he's a bit of a one-track mind on this one particular subject he's sorry but also if Haru calls him "my Jaeha" while in the middle of sex Jaeha would actually reach Buddhist enlightenment he thinks he's pretty sure and anyway even if not he still needs to find more ways to express how happy he is he's not the type to go shouting things into the heavens so he can't do that and also that wouldn't be so useful because that'd mean he's not actively touching Haru which seems like a completely absurd thought he needs to be touching Haru right now yes please??
So on the ?bright? side he's still human and he does get sufficiently physically tired to need a break from these proceedings, but it doesn't look like he's particularly inclined to stop touching Haru anytime soon. You'd think he was the one with the loneliness backlash, except for how both of them are at zero right now, and also he doesn't feel lonely just deliriously happy.
"I remembered what I was gonna say," he murmurs, holding Haru in bed. "I found a counsellor I'm willing to try out, and we'll see how that goes. I... was going to say that I was going to do my best to become someone worthy of your affection. I'm not sure what I did good enough to get it already, it feels like I still have such a long way to go... But it's not like I'm going to stop. So I guess I'm going to do my best to continue being worthy."
Smooch. "Good. You're doing very good. I'm maybe not zero nervous about what'll happen when you resume dungeoneering but I think we'll figure it out."
He laughs a bit, also nervously. "Yeah, me too. But if I'm with you, I feel like I can take on the whole world."
"I'm not saying anything I don't mean. Meeting you was the luckiest moment of my life."
"Oh, well, the swelledness of my head is probably a lost cause anyway."
"So do you have preferences for what we ought to do for our first date? ...does that time in Japan count as the first, actually?"
"We could choose to tell the story that way but we could have a cooler first date than that if we don't."
"I don't think it's hard to improve on desserts you were unable to enjoy at a cafe chosen because it was near our dungeon!"
"I bet I can, too. You know, the gay teenage romantic I never was but who still lives in me kind of wants to make a little bit of a production of it. Show up at your door maybe a little bit overdressed and nervous about it, give you a ride in my car, hold your hands in public while showing you beautiful places in Seoul, get a restaurant reservation for us somewhere fancy... Is it a good use of esper money, getting a last-minute reservation somewhere nice?"
"You should know that I'm not actually a foodie, I might not adequately appreciate somewhere really upscale. I eat microwave ramen and Kraft Dinner and I like it. Also my door is your door, but on this indulgence is free."
"From the perspective of someone whose taste buds have been all but dead for nearly the entirety of the past decade, the appeal is in the narrative and aesthetics, not really so much the taste."
"I like that, we can do a picnic. It would've been really romantic if we could do our first date under cherry blossoms but I'm not willing to wait until April and besides in practice all parks in Seoul are going to be too busy to be properly romantic until at least May."
"Cherry blossoms are nice but I don't even spell my name 'spring'. A picnic this not-technically-the-weekend sounds good to me."
...he's feeling insecure about something. It's about... having his ideas shot down even though they sounded SO ROMANTIC to him in his head. Perhaps he should tell Haru about it.
...
He doesn't want to. And he's too tired to figure it out, and it's not really that big a deal anyway, and actually starting a conversation about it this late at night is very unlikely to be a good idea. He can try to think about it more tomorrow. Maybe he'll "notebook" about it. Actually he'll write down that he wants to "notebook" about it, so that he'll remember to do it later.
It's quite late and they should go to bed. Even though Haru gets to sleep in because no dungeons.
And Jaeha gets to sleep with him in full certainty that Haru LIKES HIM because he SAID SO and he doesn't say things he doesn't mean and it seems wild to him that just a few days ago he was confessing being the most wretched of sinners and fully expecting Haru to run away screaming and instead they are sleeping together and they are BOYFRIENDS—
"- I almost said 'if you want' and then I realized that was a stupid answer. Yes."
They are BOYFRIENDS now and he's really quite thoroughly exhausted so he's only going to kiss Haru about it a little bit and hug him a little bit more but the hugging is compatible with falling asleep so it's fine.
Jaeha has the best night's sleep he can remember having ever. Not only is he at zero backlash, but he has a BOYFRIEND and it's HARU. It takes him a little bit to actually fall asleep due to how giddy he is, and he wakes up twice in the middle of the night for no reason at all and is reminded of how CUTE it is that Haru talks in his sleep, which causes him to fall back asleep shortly after, soothed by the random nouns. He gets to wake up feeling well-rested and comfortable to the sight of HIS HARU and he's not sure his life could get any more perfect.
He does still want to write a bit about his thoughts, but he's not sure how he'll get the requisite privacy with Haru RIGHT HERE, he doesn't want to let go. A conundrum.
Haru decides it's his turn to cook and he's zero backlashed so he doesn't want help. Jaeha has till pancakes are up to notebook.
Right. Okay. So what things did he want to think about?
One of them was how he felt last night when they were talking about date ideas, which feels... scary... to think about, for some reason. He jots that down word-for-word, including the ellipses. He's also got to think about what to do about his father, and he had a related thought involving charitable giving. That one is really easy to think about, though, so he writes some things down and then moves on to the date thing.
Why is it scary to think about that? What feels scary about it? If he tries to force himself to think about it despite it being scary, the way his brain keeps sliding off it is "well of course we shouldn't do anything that Haru doesn't want to" and "of course the things Haru likes out of dates aren't going to be just the standard romantic tropes" and so on, which... hmm. Points at something. Especially given that, you know, it's not that picnics aren't a standard romantic trope? So that last sentence in particular is hiding something. What's it hiding?
It's that... Haru is special, and romancing Haru is not like romancing other boys, and part of that is that Haru is the kind of person who knows what he wants and goes to get it even if it's strange or unusual or nonstandard. But why did that feel relevant? What if it weren't the case that Haru was special, what if Haru did want the standard romantic tropes? Well, then he'd have accepted Jaeha's ideas, which means that if he did like them but also didn't accept them that would've meant he didn't want to do those things with Jaeha specifically. So using that particular excuse is a way for Jaeha to protect himself, his own pride. If the reason why Haru doesn't want to do these things is because he's special and needs to be romanced in a customised way, then it doesn't say anything negative about Jaeha and about their relationship. It is true that Haru needs to be romanced in a special way, of course, but the fact that it's true is what was giving that particular thought the necessary oomph to support itself as a face-saving measure.
So, Jaeha's scared that if Haru doesn't want to do those date things with him, this means that Haru doesn't actually like him. That's patently stupid.
But he was still rejected, in a sense, and that felt bad in itself. Why did it? "We shouldn't do anything that Haru doesn't want to" is hiding something, too. Is that true?
Some of it is. Some of it isn't. You obviously shouldn't force your partner to do things that they dislike, that are upsetting, or anything like that. But on the other hand, some amount of give is necessary in a relationship, some amount of doing something you don't want to do if it'll make the other person happy. Jaeha's pretty sure, anyway, it's common wisdom and it feels right to him and thinking some about it he thinks it's probably true. That's, like, the difference between being in a relationship and just kind of existing adjacent to each other doing whatever they want to do, right? It being a relationship means that there are some responsibilities and expectations in addition to the rights and privileges, and some of it is just the mundane "I'll do something I don't really like that much because it'll bring my partner joy" kind of thing.
The fact that that phrasing is where his brain went to is interesting, though. "Bring my partner joy." Would going to a fancy restaurant bring Jaeha joy? He said that his taste buds have been deadened for years and it's not the taste of the fancy food that he wants, and after stopping to think about it for a little while he agrees with that, it really isn't the taste of the food. But it's also not just the narrative, like he told Haru yesterday, not by itself. There's something more.
He actually has some trouble pinning it down, and it's interesting (and unpleasant) that the emotion he feels while he tries that is embarrassment. What's there to be embarrassed by? He wants to go to a fancy restaurant with Haru for an embarrassing reason, what is it?
Actually... Didn't he say he wanted to do a little bit of a production? Why did "a little bit of a production" conjure that image he described to Haru, of picking him up at his door, slightly overdressed? He referred jokingly to "the gay teenage romantic I never was but who still lives in me", but was it actually a joke or did he just put it that way self-deprecatingly in order to protect himself and his feelings in case he didn't get what he wanted? Wow, uh, when he puts it like that the answer is really obvious, isn't it. He cares a lot more about that than he thought he did. He wants it. He actually really, really wants it. He wants to, to...
He wants to pick Haru up at his mum's place, be really polite and charming to Ren and tell her that he'll bring Haru back by midnight and take good care of him. He wants to be driving a car slightly nervously, stealing glances at Haru when he thinks Haru won't notice, except of course Haru will notice and he knows that Haru will notice, but they'll pretend he doesn't while his hand is conveniently located for Jaeha to hold it if he wanted to, and after a little bit of this he'll wipe his hand on his trousers because of how nervous he is and he'll tentatively take Haru's hand and Haru will jump a little bit because he got distracted right that moment which will make Jaeha panic but before Jaeha can properly pull his hand away Haru will grab it firmly and keep hold of it, looking out the window. Jaeha won't be able to hide his goofy grin, even if they're holding hands for only a few seconds because he has to drive, and Haru will think he's really cute, and they'll talk about nothing at all until Jaeha gets them where he got a reservation for. He'll be trying so hard to impress his date, and it's completely unnecessary because Haru already likes him, but Haru will indulge in it because Jaeha looks really cute when he's flustered and trying too hard, and Haru doesn't really care about the restaurant but he does care that Jaeha was so thoughtful and thorough and is trying so so so hard to get it right. They'll talk about all sorts of things, because they just click together, and Jaeha will get distracted from feeling nervous, and on their way back he will be a lot more confident in holding Haru's hand, and he'll walk Haru to his door and look around a bit nervously before stealing a kiss from him on the porch and fleeing into the night.
...hahaha wow uh that fantasy really got away from him what was up with that.
Jaeha wants A Romance™. He wants to feel giddy and happy, he wants to do the things he never did as a teenager because he was too much of a shitty person to do them and then got his brain overwritten by his backlash. He wants to do the normal things, the things that teenage romance movies show, except he seems to have some really specific images in mind because it's not like picnics don't happen in those movies.
Except... that...
Except that, no, now that he wrote out the whole embarrassing fantasy he's no longer particularly feeling the need for it? And he's not feeling sad or rejected that Haru didn't want to do it, anymore. Why would that fix it? Nothing changed—or did it? He supposes, logically, it must have, but...
He reads back over what he's written so far (God, Jaeha from five minutes ago was so cringe) and the part of it that makes his heart make a funny noise is the bit he wrote about not liking it when Haru rejects something that he cared about. And it's that whole sentence that's making his head go weird, but it's not broken down into anything simple...
"Pancakes! Do you know if you like ma- never mind. Today you are going to try maple syrup!"
—and he's out of time! He thinks he made good progress, though, that was pretty productive.
"As my prince wishes."
"Oooh, I'm a prince now. Should I have a crown?" Pancakes with butter and genuine imported Canadian syrup!
"If you want one, you should have one. You'd look fetching, I think." Pancakes with butter and genuine imported Canadian syrup! Also coffee, he should get himself coffee, that is a thing he ?likes?.
"Benkan look kind of dorky, I'd probably go more European. To complete your mental image." Haru doesn't drink coffee on lazy mornings, so as to not develop more of a tolerance than he needs; he's having orange juice.
Jaeha's pretty much fully tolerant, he thinks, it's more a habit than a need for the stimulation. He sets the coffee machine to grind some beans and opens Google. "Do you like the kind that has the red velvet thing or not? Open or closed top?"
"No velvet, open top. It should make a statement with, but not be completely incongruous with, jeans and a T-shirt, like, it should say 'the emperor likes wearing jeans and a T-shirt', not 'an eight year old has stolen the emperor's crown'."
"'The emperor', hmm? I like the taste of that. Masaharu tennō. Or should I call you tennō heika, would you be emperor of Japan?"
"Eh, there's already an emperor of Japan. I think ideally I would be the emperor of, like, Mars, or a tame dungeon pocket dimension, or something."
"Mars might be more tractable but if I ever find a tame dungeon I'm gifting you it."
"Well now I'm going to spend all day thinking up names for my hypothetical tame dungeon empire."
"What kinds of things does Your Imperial Majesty look for in an empire name?"
"Oh, it has to be clever and aesthetic and ideally it'd also have anything do with the nature of the dungeon, which is what makes it so difficult to do it hypothetically."
"Are there specific types or aesthetics you'd most like for the dungeon your empire's in?"
"It should have some open areas for the plants to grow in, like a nice imperial park sort of place, but people usually like to live indoors so if it had a lot of cave system in it too that would be fine!"
"Oh, I was imagining we could maybe get a castle built—although I suppose just a castle wouldn't house that many people... There's the problem that most novel dungeons are kind of small."
"Yeah. I'd want a 4D one but then I'd need Cricket just to get around the place."
Speaking of, Cricket has appeared to collect his breakfast. He rubs past Haru's leg with a purr and ignores Jaeha like he isn't even there.
He's not going to bother Cricket any more than this, and instead turns back to Haru to say, "That teleporter, Min Woo-young, was able to teleport in 4D, right? And his power can be stored. So it ought to in theory be possible to have ways to move along the fourth dimension in some automated way so people wouldn't have to be constantly asking Cricket for rides and bugging him all the time."
"I don't think Cricket works enough like an esper, but maybe there are monster batteries, that would be cool."
"I don't see in principle why there wouldn't be. ...I mean, it's not like I understand anything about any of this so for all I know there might be some reason, but it is not ruled out by anything I do know."
"A battery might be the wrong concept, Cricket just is advantaged at 4D when it's there and it doesn't take anything out of him to navigate it. Hmm."
"Ah, yeah, good point. ...hmm, I wonder if there'd be a way to just build something in 4D? Like a conveyor belt... Except, hmm, that might risk rotating people along the fourth dimension and I'm not sure that's... survivable..."
"Isn't it? I have no substantial 4D advantages so I don't usually go in them and certainly haven't got much background in the math."
"I guess I don't know for sure but if I think about, rather than someone's whole body being in a single 3D space, they're rotated around the fourth dimension so that a part of their body is here and another part is in another 3D space, that could be a problem? Their internal organs would no longer all be in one place... But then again, they would be, within their individual spaces... I don't know. I don't know any of the maths either and every time I've tried to think about them over the years I ended up getting myself more rather than less confused."
Jaeha is perhaps blessed by his inability to properly imagine 4D space and his unwillingness to force it to render something in 3D anyway. And now that his coffee's done he can go back to the table to eat the pancakes Haru made him and make sappy faces at him because HARU who is HIS BOYFRIEND made him PANCAKES and if anything's ever deserved sappy faces this has.
"Yes. It's nice." But the NICEST THING is that HIS HARU made them FOR HIM.
"It's probably a side effect of you telling me you like me. Those might last a while, I fear."
"Well, I hope you are prepared to live with this chronic condition. It sounds like such a burden."
"I haven't found it so! Maybe in ten years I'll change my mind." Jaeha's known Haru for less than two months. He is being ridiculous. But it's fine to be ridiculous because Haru is his BOYFRIEND.
He sure hopes Cricket is not going to hold this amount of being sappy against him because he will not actually budge on it.
Good enough.
"Since we're doing a picnic, would you rather have a late lunch or something closer to the early evening?" It's still only just getting into spring so the evenings are a bit chilly but nothing being warmly dressed won't fix.
"Hmmm, what time is sunset today..." Phone, answer him this question. "Sunset dinner?"
"Hmm, what to bring. I think sandwiches are standard, and maybe some kind of, like, pasta salad kind of thing..."
"I know we had tteokbokki just the other day but that's traditional, too. Maybe I could just make a different kind."
They can go grocery shopping TOGETHER because they are BOYFRIENDS.
"Yeah, let's do that."
Haru normally has groceries delivered every day but they are mostly small amounts of raw fish because Cricket doesn't want it day-old and eats a fairly narrow range. They can go in person for human food. Sandwich bread and little cake things and pasta salad fixings.
And while they're doing their perfectly mundane things together, "So I wanted to pick your brains about something."
"As I am new to this idea of, you know, ethics, I'm trying to think about what to do about everything I have due to my father. Case in point, that house at least half of which I never spend any time in, which could be sold for a ludicrous amount of money and then that money could do something better than 'be a house I only use a small fraction of', but I'm not sure if I'm not overcorrecting and if this is even the right kind of thing to think about."
"Hm. I've mostly focused on not developing extravagant tastes in the first place, since I didn't come into money with any of them already installed. The sprawl is serving a function in keeping Cricket out of your hair, though probably a smaller place could do that too if it were laid out supportively..."
"Mmhm. But that's just a—particularly emblematic example. I am a partial owner of a number of companies under the Kang Moon-il Group umbrella, and my father wants me to inherit the majority shares for most of them, if I'll be able to have an heir of my own. Those are sources of income, not just wealth, that I wouldn't have if it weren't for my father. I have quite an absurd amount of both income and wealth that I wouldn't have if it weren't for my father."
"Yeah. Uh, what happens if you indicate that you're never going to have an heir of your own - do you even want kids in the abstract -"
"Not particularly," but in the specifics if Haru wanted kids Jaeha would be up for that.
...
Bruh.
"And I've—told him that in so many words already. I think he's really hoping against hope that something about me will change as I get older. Either that or he's trying to convince my mother to go through one more pregnancy for him, which I'm not sure she will, she's got the heir she wanted already and I would not be surprised if she thought I was my father's problem."
"I have never had a conversation with her in my life. I'm... not actually even sure how I'd go about contacting her, without asking my father. Maybe if I tried contacting her office the fact that I'm legally her son could get me somewhere?"
"...wow. It might accomplish nothing, but if it did accomplish something it would plausibly be worth it? If it doesn't sound too awful."
"It doesn't sound particularly awful in principle, I actually just do not have any idea who my mother is as a person. For all I know she's actually lovely and has correctly concluded Kang Jaehyuk is not and if I try to reach out to her everything will work out fine."
"And even if she's not lovely it sounds like she's... mastered keeping him out of the way with, uh, the methods available to her."
"Yeah. But also, what kinds of things could she tell me that would change what I ought to do? I suppose if she says she's pregnant that means my father is imminently not going to care about me," though, fuck, could he actually condemn a dongsaeng to the shit he's been through? He might need to raise the kid himself.
"Yeah, I don't know; if I knew what she could say I'd just say it, save the trouble."
"Mm, but I mean more—what kinds of things could I learn that would affect whether I should get rid of all of my stocks or not? Whether I should sell the house and get a new one with esper money? Would anything change if my father did versus did not have another heir planned?"
"I'm getting the impression that having a sibling you've never met doesn't weigh particularly heavily on you, so maybe another sibling wouldn't either? I think... unless he won't take 'I'm cutting you off going forward' for an answer without a really big financial exclamation point, I think you don't need to return the money, so whether you want to liquidate anything is kind of a separate question from how you terminate what little exists of the relationship, and it's not time-sensitive, I don't think the house or the stocks are depreciating particularly fast. I think if I were talking to her I'd mostly want to know how she arranged never to speak to him that thoroughly, whether there's anything she'd be interested in contributing to a project to flip him off..."
Ah, fuck. He hangs his head. "It's—starting to weigh on me, actually, never having met my sibling, and it's—I would not want to condemn someone else to the fate of being raised by my father."
"...well, then you might need to coordinate with your mother about her custody plans."
He runs a hand through his hair. "Seems like I ought to talk to her regardless of anything, if those are the feelings I'm starting to have now that I care again."
"Sounds like it, yeah. Uh, if you're going to start doing dungeons again soon I want to flag that you have to schedule emotional processing accordingly, that's probably obvious but you won't have any habits about it."
"Mm. Yeah, probably.
"...I should get back to dungeoning, right...?" He's not really sure what to do with himself otherwise.
"...well, I thought that was the plan but if you find yourself reluctant by all means spend more time with your entire brain reporting for duty thinking about it first?"
"You could like, walk me through your usual dungeon procedure and we can see if there's looming pain points - do you even ever do normal dungeons that have normal toothy things and pit traps and stuff or are you forever being sent abroad to the spooky ones?"
"Only the spooky ones, there are enough of those in need of psychic espers at all times that it's pretty much never worth it to send me to toothy ones. As for dungeon procedure... I'm not sure what you mean?"
"Like, you show up, you get your briefing, probably you shield some people, in how many of cases do you need to go in yourself, are you ever doing the mobility-oriented rescue stuff or do you hang out near the entrance, who are you going to encounter, what might occur to you to do during those events that you should not, will I be able to be right there at your elbow the entire time to keep the backlash on the ebb or will that sometimes be infeasible. - ooh, they have cheese curds."
...Jaeha really, really likes Haru. Quite an unreasonable amount.
"It varies a lot. For some dungeons I shield people outside and go on my merry way, but those are rare since most things don't need my caliber of shielding and those that do tend to require more field operations. Those will often have continuous effects on civilians that we need to wipe before rescuing them, sometimes literally physically like with Nightmare but sometimes just because the alternative would be knocking them unconscious or physically restraining them to move them despite their resistance. So my usual M.O. is going in with an esper with a mobility power and an esper with a defensive or offensive power, as the case may be, and getting people out of the effects they might be under.
"Some dungeons have more complicated effects, like being fully illusory such that if you don't perceive the illusions at all you fall into an endless void, or having monsters that can enter your brain if you see them and leave with you without being detected, or with more conceptual effects. Those are dealt with on a case-by-case basis.
"I can also often use my powers for stealth and for confusing monsters, which I tend to do as needed, and to reflect monsters' psychic attacks back on them, which is useful on occasion. And sometimes, the dungeon core itself is not physical, and I occasionally have needed to psychically destroy it. It's rare that that's something my particular powers can do, though.
"What I'd be tempted to do is just... keep my passive powers up, forget to stop using them once I'm out of a dungeon, forget to not target other humans with them..."
"Would you forget enough to - do you want to be having this conversation in the grocery store, actually -"
"—no, probably not." Argh probably no one heard him but he has no way of checking and he got so used to just him and Haru at home he forgot other people existed ugh.
"I don't think there's anybody in earshot, just, abundance of caution." Cheese curds go in basket, and cherry tomatoes. For pasta salad.
Okay, he is once again reminded of how much he likes Haru and how great it is that they're BOYFRIENDS. Possibly it's because this feeling is literally a day old. Possibly it's that. It might be.
Anyway yes groceries like normal people who weren't just discussing whether one of them might accidentally become a psychopath!
And then they can go back home. "So - what was I going to say, something about - oh, right. You'd gotten out of the habit of targeting me, do you think you'd retain the - presence of mind for that, or that you'd bump into my shields so I could catch you?"
"I think that—if you were around, it would feel... very embarrassing to fail at this. So there's nonzero effect from just your presence. The amount of backlashed I'd need to be to actually slip up and try to ping you would be—I'm not sure. The flip side of not being in the habit of targeting you is that that was just because I was seeing no one other than you on the regular and so I was just not using my powers at all. If I am, it's—not like I can't target, I can, but I tend to use them in almost a radar fashion, indiscriminately in all directions, so it's possible that I'd bump into you, too." Wow that was a lot of words and not very organised ones at that, huh.
"Hm. You'd suggested a check-in app for me, after my close call, would something like that work or would you ignore it?"
"—I think it'd plausibly straightforwardly work, yeah. At least unless I were so backlashed not to care at all but that would take some doing, I think."
"Cool, is that a native functionality the implanty things have or do we need someone to code it up?"
"Should be built in," he says, summoning his screen and looking into setting up alarms and notifications.
Haru peeks over his shoulder to get a sense of the range of functionality and then gets started on making pasta salad.
It's nothing really fancy, just various time-based alarms plus some bio stuff like for heart rate plus there's options using AI to try to infer things but they look complicated.
Jaeha sets a timer thing for every thirty minutes he'll enable when going into a dungeon and, "Maybe I could lock the alarm and only someone else," Haru, "can disable it so I don't feel tempted?" he suggests, going to work on the tteokbokki he planned.
(Haru was right that it's usually eaten hot, and if he wanted that the solution would be to buy it from a street vendor, but he thinks his tteokbokki is tastier than what you can get off the street and he can get it to taste nice cold, too. The trick is to balance the spice in the seasoning differently and make larger individual pieces and give them an appropriate filling.)
"If I'm not on hand for whatever reason, like if a monster that doesn't know I'm there nonetheless manages to step on me, then I worry that'd backfire. Maybe someone else can turn it off but it will also work to just go be home alone? How much are you comfortable with Cricket knowing? I don't actually know how good he is at confidentiality."
"Being home alone is... probably sufficient, yes. I would not be that against Cricket knowing if he could keep confidentiality."
"Unfortunately if he can't that could fail catastrophically. I can maybe just tell him you're a bummer to be around backlashed and he should be out hunting pigeons."
"I don't expect I'd use my powers on him if I got home. I empirically was perfectly able to refrain from doing so under quite a lot of backlash, if I got reminded that I shouldn't I don't think I'd start."
"And he's not overwhelmingly likely to hang out with you anyway, just - he's my best friend."
...that's making him have some kinds of feelings. He thinks he's—feeling more genuine affection for Cricket than he'd been? Or, like, any? He hadn't really put it like that, in his head, even though it's obvious.
"I guess telling him that I'm a bummer to hang out with while backlashed works well enough. Though if—you got stepped on by a monster—I imagine that he'd, uh... have some kind of reaction to that." Amazing words you're using right there, Kang Jaeha.
"I'm not actually sure how hard a time he might have with talking his way into a hospital where I was getting a broken leg set or whatever. He'd probably try."
...that was. Not. The image he'd had in mind when Haru said "being stepped on by a monster".
"I—am I meant to not go see you in the hospital myself if the only problem you had was something like that?"
"Plausibly? I don't have an entire example scenario because the point is to come up with plans that are robust against unforeseen events, 'stepped on by a monster' is here standing in for lots of possible things not all of which we'll think of today."
"No, I mean—the only reason I see to go home and, uh, isolate myself would be if you were—substantially more incapacitated—otherwise I'd want to be by your side."
"Okay, I guess in any situation where they let Cricket see me they let you too, fair point."
"And in most of those you can get my alarm to stop beeping regardless." It's so good that he can now stop thinking about Haru dying which he had been—not thinking! Because thinking about it would be bad! But now he's definitely extra not thinking about it.
"Speaking of covering for unforeseeable events has anyone talked to Tae-gun for you yet - or were you going to do that yourself - if there is a situation where I can't see you -"
"—ah. I ought to, oughtn't I. I—forgot to think about that." He opens his commscreen to write "figure out what to do about Lee Tae-gun" down.
"I'll leave that for the next time I schedule myself to think about things though because I think I have some feelings to untangle about it."
"Totally legit, you've got like a day and a half till I start doing dungeons again and I don't think you're even thusly committed - actually it might make sense to schedule me along with you all the time. Because you're a specialist and I am mostly capable of operating in those specialist dungeons but am not in my own right worth calling across international borders for most of them, and you are, so I think I'm going to wind up functionally your sidekick."
Okay the idea of doing dungeons with his BOYFRIEND sounds incredibly appealing.
Except...
"I would love to have you with me but I'm not sure you're best positioned to go to the majority of the dungeons I'm usually sent to?"
"No? I mean, maybe not in the ones where the floors are illusions, that'd be a lot of flying for me, but I think even if you need to shield me from something because it goes around my own defenses the marginal cost of one shield'd be offset by the backlash efficiency of working with a partner..."
"I'm more thinking about the more unique cases. I suppose if you came with me to literally just hang out with me while I dealt with, say, a monster waging war inside someone's brain and guide me? But that feels very—wasteful, your powers are useful."
"They're fine, they're just kind of generic, for dungeon purposes. Well, I guess we can present these cases to the guild and leave the scheduling to the professionals, just means we can't plan on me being your external conscience."
"We should see how I do without you at least a couple of times for stress testing anyway, but given how long it's been since my last dungeon it might be a good idea to start small, do a couple of dungeons with you next week, see how that goes, then try one without..."
"Are they generic, though?" he wonders. "It seems like you should be useful for scouting many kinds of dungeons that sensors have trouble with, and the combination of stealth and mobility ought to be pretty good for rescues, too..." Have people considered that Haru is perfect and good at everything. Just a thought.
"I do scouting missions, yes, but sometimes it turns out that in addition to giving sensors trouble the dungeon is also trying to melt off my skin, or it's louder than a heavy metal concert in there for some reason, and I have to turn right around. Admittedly that's not the typical case. And I'm good for rescues but since every dungeon involves rescues everyone has a way to do it or has allies who know how locally and doesn't need me in particular there."
"I suppose that makes sense." But have they considered that they should instead use Haru so he gets to be a big damn hero like he deserves to be. Have they. He thinks they should.
Once the pasta salad is mixed up and chilling in the fridge he writes up these considerations for the guild, though since it will be seen by a relatively large number of people he doesn't identify Jaeha's backlash, just that he was stuck in a hole full of it for years and needs to ease back into balancing it more appropriately.
Quasar can accommodate that! But it might be a good idea to just offer them the dungeons they'd offer them and let them just pick which and how many of them to do? It'll be slightly more work than if they use the opt out system they usually do but only slightly, they'd just need a bit of advance warning.
"Whatcha doin'?" he asks, exaggeratedly stretching his neck over to look over Haru's shoulder.
"Opting in to opting in to dungeons," Haru says, moving it so Jaeha can see easier. "So we can see what comes up in practice while working out how to approach it."
"Oh, I see. That makes sense." He kisses Haru's cheek and gets back to his own cooking. "So that's the plan?"
Is he? Is he really? Jaeha has no reason to doubt his words but the thought that Haru also feels excited to do things with him feels so fake. It makes no sense whatsoever. He does not deserve this luck, and he does not deserve his Haru, but hopefully he will be able to retroactively balance this karma by becoming someone who does in the future.
Haru snacks while he's prepping, so as to have anything for lunch at all instead of losing the concept of lunch in a flurry of picnic dinner arrangements, and then disappears for Introvert Time In The Introvert Hole.
Right. Introvert time. Time away from Jaeha. This is... useful, probably, so that Jaeha can keep writing.
Where was he?
Not Lee Tae-gun. That's for Later, he decides firmly. He could keep thinking about what he'd been thinking earlier, or about... his mother.
Why are there so many difficult topics to think about. Unfair.
...he wants to impress Haru. That's the thought that occurs to him, as he reads over the stuff he wrote earlier. Which, like, duh, obviously.
But that's the thing, when Haru "rejected" him, that felt like he was failing to be impressive. Failing to produce something good enough. It's not that he was married to that particular idea of what to do, that particular date, it's that he failed to be impressive and effortlessly produce something Haru liked. He's meant to be sweeping Haru off his feet, so his date ideas should be perfect and his gifts should be perfect and he should do everything completely right at all times.
Man, you really can fit so much anxiety in one person, huh.
And he's... sure Haru would like it if Jaeha could effortlessly guess the best way to woo him in a way that somehow didn't violate his privacy. Who wouldn't? But there isn't, actually, a way to do that. And the next best thing is asking, it's learning the hard way, with words, what things Haru likes. And it's also, partially, learning what Jaeha likes, and then... telling Haru that. So that they can figure it out together.
That sounds absolutely terrifying and mortifying and horrible and he has no idea how he'll possibly ever do it so instead he's gonna go work out again which is a much better stress response than smoking, in his opinion.
Haru pops out of the introvert hole in plenty of time to pack a... they don't obviously possess a dedicated picnic basket so he is going to put the dinner in Cricket's cat carrier, which he has for when airline staff are fretful.
Jaeha is in the middle of taking a post-workout shower when Haru does this and while esper hearing isn't good enough that he heard Haru while the water was on it's good enough that Jaeha can hear him once he's drying himself off. He can finish that quickly and put some clothes on so that they can go on their FIRST DATE as BOYFRIENDS.
"Hey! If you have a real basket somewhere speak now." He hefts the cat carrier.
...speaking of failing to be effortlessly perfect...
"I'm afraid I don't. Terrible lack of foresight, truly." Over to Haru to kiss him and then help pack.
"I can't imagine it's come up before, no worries." In go sandwiches and little lunchbox-cakes and bottled water.
It hasn't, because Jaeha is twenty-five and Haru is still his first boyfriend so he has zero experience and is winging it. That's fine, though. It's okay. So long as Haru likes him.
Off they can stroll with their picnic "basket". Holding hands, even though neither of them needs any guiding at the moment.
Jaeha has lived in Seoul all his life and has learned a thing or two about it. As an illusion specialist, he has also learned a thing or two about what things are or are not pretty, and why, so he can point those out on their nice afternoon walk holding hands going to a park to have a picnic together because they are BOYFRIENDS.
Haru's narration is not sure what Jaeha's particular brand of illusions has to contribute to a study of what things are and are not pretty, but Haru will admire things accordingly!
Sometimes he likes crafting illusions that are in fact pretty rather than just insert the emotion of perceiving something pretty directly into people's brains, is what!
Anyway, the Han river is pretty and since it's getting to be sunset they might see some pretty water and light shows from the Rainbow Fountain, which the park Jaeha picked has a view to. He's not totally sure if those are already on, he forgot to check, but now would be the time of year for them.
"I know what a light show is but what's a water show in this context?"
"Different coloured lights are pointed at different fountain jets, and they move in sync with each other and the lights to catch them and refract them."
"Mmhmmm." It would be SO ROMANTIC even if Haru doesn't think so. It can be romantic if one of them thinks it's romantic and the other thinks it's nifty, right? Right. That's how this works.
Anyway, they can find somewhere to sit and eat and be really quite gay in public in Seoul which he hadn't really ever quite done before and now he will do it a lot.
Hopefully nobody will decide to intrude on their gay picnic. Not even if Haru decides impulsively to feed Jaeha a piece of cake.
If someone does decide to intrude on their gay picnic Jaeha is going to unfortunately have to throw them into the river because anyone who will interrupt HIS HARU FEEDING HIM CAKE should be eaten by fish.
Then it's a good thing that doesn't happen because someone falling in the river would be very distracting indeed.
Jaeha doesn't succeed at broaching the terrifying horrible mortifying subject—mostly because it doesn't even occur to him to try, it being terrifying and horrible and mortifying to think about—and it is still too early in the year for the Rainbow Fountain shows to happen, but it is nevertheless a really nice date with his extremely cute boyfriend and he even manages to get over himself and not obsess over the fact that there absolutely totally are people thinking homophobic thoughts in their direction for a good fraction of the time! A success, in his opinion.
And then they can go home for the evening. And probably have sex. Because of the narrative powers of picnics.
Jaeha was not aware of the narrative powers of picnics pertaining to sex but is he ever going to refuse Haru anything? That's right, he is not.
Jaeha doesn't figure out a way to do the terrifying, mortifying, horrible thing over the next day. He also doesn't think about his mother, because that sounds like a can of worms. He also doesn't want to think about Lee Tae-gun, not for now, not until he does his first dungeon.
...
He's just been doing a lot of introspection and thinking about hard things lately and it's made his brain kind of fried and he has no idea how Haru does it every day except that it's obviously because Haru is perfect in every way. Jaeha, however, is not, and needs breaks from trying to get his brain to do difficult and unpleasant things. Which means he isn't the man of Haru's dreams, either, because the man of Haru's dreams wouldn't just run away from his problems like Jaeha does, but he thinks he's probably on a good trajectory? He might eventually become the man of Haru's dreams, someday? But not if he burns himself out completely on the concept of having thoughts, which he was risking, there, for a bit.
Gahh. It's fine. They have a dungeon to do together.
App working? Gear all checks out? Is Haru scouting or do they know what this one looks like?
Yes, yes, and it's already been mapped; they get briefed when they arrive.
The terrain is really annoying, interconnected vines and enormous trees with linked roots, tripping hazards everywhere. The plants move around a bit, too, usually not so much that paths become impassable but the "usually" is an important caveat.
There isn't a passive psychic effect, though; instead, there are bark-skinned dryad monsters that attempt to wrap you in tentacle-like vines, who then proceed to make you fall asleep and feast on your dreams, turning them into nightmares. Just physically removing the victim from the dryad isn't enough, though, as the dryad also has psychic vines wrapped around the victim's mind which need to be individually released, lest they damage a victim's mind.
Or, well, that's the case at least if you aren't Kang Jaeha.
He is Kang Jaeha, thankfully, so hopefully it'll be easier with him there.
"Ready?" Jaeha asks... himself, really. Of course Haru's ready. But he still needs to ask.
The dungeon is open air, and it's permanently night, the moonless sky carpeted with stars hidden by the occasional wispy cloud. They can't see the ground at all, all covered in bark and vines pulsating and rubbing wetly against each other. Fireflies as big as a fist and dragonflies as long as a person is tall circle the treetops, and the air is filled with the buzzing of unseen cicadas. The internal support team's set up around the portal and an esper with defensive powers is posted with them in case any of the monsters decide to come harass them, though it hasn't happened yet.
The monsters can't see Haru. He's sticking quite close to Jaeha in case he needs to grab him in flight, and when he brushes close enough, Jaeha can feel the little licks of backlash come into existence as firefly vision passes through Haru like he's not there.
Haru has a headlamp and another light he mounts on his shoulder, the one he doesn't brace weapons against. "How aggressive are the bugs?" he asks their defense escort. "Are there harvest priorities in here yet or are we still on some-of-anything-as-convenient?"
"The bugs seem to be strictly cosmetic. They haven't done anything yet, anyway. And we're on some-of-anything-as-convenient but mostly because nothing has seemed to be particularly useful yet."
"Alrighty." Glow in the dark spraypaint to mark paths, every ten steps or as needed whichever is more frequent. In they go.
The spray paint... doesn't stick. Something about the wet surfaces, or the way the vines keep rubbing against each other, the paint doesn't last more than minutes.
Jaeha... doesn't have much to do, yet. He's keeping his attention out but he's stopped keeping the attention of the apparently strictly cosmetic bugs off them so as not to accumulate more backlash than necessary.
Once the paracord is secured they can get underway. Thataway looks like a fine first direction to go looking for people to rescue.
They have a 3D map with the approximate locations of kidnap victims, fed by sensors earlier. The monsters don't move very much once they've trapped someone, but they do move any, and most importantly the vines are doing their best to make the paths change. There are also reportedly dryads hidden in the dark crevices blending into the surroundings that move surprisingly quickly.
Like this one.
Hmm. Jaeha doesn't think so, actually. He thinks that dryad is really mistaken about where they are, and is most importantly very mistaken about what actions it can take and how it can move.
His reaction time and precision are both sufficient to catch it off-guard, and these dryads seem to have independent wills from the dungeon, which means that once this one is finding its body moving in ways it doesn't expect to it doesn't get overridden by the dungeon itself puppeteering its body, and starts thrashing in confusion.
That dryad doesn't have a victim with it so it's fine to shoot it, right? Right. Die, evil dryad. Haru will mourn the inoffensive de-dungeoned dryad you could have been in his downtime.
That all happens so fast their defense escort barely has time to raise a shield to protect them. She supposes it was silly of her to expect she was going to be of any use when Kang Jaeha is on the team.
Jaeha isn't listening—is quite explicitly excluding her from his sonar-like pinging of everything he sees for whether it contains a mind. He can have this much self-control, at least.
Onwards.
Haru swings his whole head around to cast the headlamp into all the corners and crevices and is relying on Jaeha to "watch" their backs.
Jaeha can't directly detect minds as they come "within range"; rather, he has to pick something in his awareness and then check whether it has a mind, constantly. Usually, that's "a person" or "a monster", so it's reasonably simple to lock and go. In this case, where the monsters camouflage and blend into the background, he has to be constantly pointing his powers at things and going, "is that a mind? is that a mind? is that a mind? is that a mind?", in all directions. He's used enough to it that it's almost automatic, and it's how he catches every single dryad that tries to ambush them before their defense escort can, but it's a constant passive backlash generator. Then, whenever he locks on, he psychically shreds the monster, locking it in its own illusory cages for long enough for it to be disposed of elsewise (though he actually suspects that if he used his illusions to make the dryad believe it had been killed it would in fact also die, that sounds like the kind of psychic these monsters are).
Compared to that, freeing victims feels like almost nothing. He can release them from the dryads just like that, leaving absolutely no trace of them behind, and no way for them to do any damage on their way out. It's an almost careless flick of his metaphorical wrist, while simultaneously faking the feedback to the dryads' minds themselves to make them not realise they've lost their targets.
So his backlash steadily grows, tick by tick, and he slowly starts to forget why he's doing any of this in the first place, at least in his heart of hearts.
The victims of this one are not very talkative; by the time they start ferrying people back, Haru's talking to Jaeha. "It's weird for the bugs to be cosmetic, I kind of expect them to swoop down and try to murder us at some provocation, maybe bringing people out."
...okay, he still remembers a little bit of the reason why he's doing this, and it's because of his adorable gorgeous perfect BOYFRIEND.
He can't mention his receptive powers, though. Not in front of the other esper. "I suppose we'll have to keep an eye out. I'm ready to distract them if need be."
"I'd kind of like to catch one of the fireflies. Though maybe if it shrank like Cricket it'd just be a normal firefly and then it would be less interesting."
"Hmm. If it has enough of a mind to illusion it might be possible for me to lead it after us..."
"We'd need something to keep it in, like a net or a jar or whatever, even if you coaxed it there that way."
"Yeah, maybe, I guess they don't know the bugs aren't valuable so they'd have stuff just in case. My money'd be on the kind of mossy stuff on the branches, though, wouldn't surprise me if that wants to be the next industrial lubricant or something the way it slips."
"Hmmm..."
Ping. Lock on. An alluring scent, whatever that means for that bug. Something it wants to follow...
It follows, slowly drawn towards the place Jaeha's leading it to. Their defense escort puts up a barrier—
"Haven't got a net yet, but if you're good to hold it I can take this guy out of the dungeon and go grab one?"
Haru pecks him on the cheek, adjusts his hold on the kidnapee, and pops out.
—wait. That wasn't his power. That was reading body language. He is still doing so well.
Okay. Good. That would have been mortifying.
He comes back with a net that can screw onto a jar like a lid, nabs the firefly, screws it on, and rolls it out of the exit. "Let's go get another person."
It is COMPLETELY EXCUSABLE to kiss in a dungeon. For guiding. They'll be able to keep going longer if he kisses him. Then: onward.
Oh he must never forget. He must never, ever forget. This is what he's doing it all for. To be a person who deserves Haru. Jaeha will go to the ends of the Earth for this man.
The bugs continue to behave merely-cosmetically, and the dryads continue being as aggressive and as unable to pose a threat to them as they've been. The other psychic espers have more trouble with the necessary delicate touch to avoid hurting the victims, but to them this is, relatively, a walk in the park.
Jaeha doesn't forget or slip up even once. He starts feeling cold inside, feeling less, and Haru's talkativeness is difficult to engage with, without being able to use his powers at all so that he can say the things he wants to say the way he wants to say them. This is most keenly felt around the other esper, who is not very close to Jaeha and therefore whom Jaeha feels less comfortable being—broken—in front of. But he would feel even worse if he slipped up, especially in front of Haru. So he doesn't.
And eventually they've got the last victim. They're not especially specialized for finding the core and maybe should hang out and make out guide, responsibly, outside the dungeon, waiting around in case they need Jaeha to destroy the core, but they probably won't and as soon as somebody's killed the dungeon they can go home.
Make out? Outside the dungeon? In public? ...is Quasar okay with that????
Not that Jaeha cares. Not when ✨Haru✨ wants it. Fuck Quasar if they object and fuck the media taking pictures of them.
Are they even in Malaysia this time? Where in the world have they gone.
Austria but their image doesn't stop mattering just because they're out of the country! Or it didn't in Juno.
But can Quasar???????
No, he's not gonna freak out about this, if Quasar sends them a stern email they can deal with it later he's got his BOYFRIEND to make out with.
Quasar can get them a privacy tent if they want. They didn't complain about Malaysia at all!
Haru does feel private about some things enough to want to put them off till they get home.
The obvious, but also - "How was that, temptation-wise?"
"—can we talk about that once I'm at zero? I feel the temptation to—not think about it—and I want to be my whole self." He doesn't, actually, but he knows that's who he should be so he's gonna be him.
He really, really likes the obvious. He particularly likes that the obvious, with Haru, takes him to zero. He wants his motivational system fully online.
It's really nice to be sane! One should set aside time to be sane every day!
Yeah. And since he's sane now, he can work on the answer to Haru's question.
"So one of the problems I had was, when we were having conversations I felt tempted to use my illusion powers. The flavour of the temptation was that I didn't want to be my true self—or, perhaps, my unfiltered, backlashed self—in front of a stranger, and that I wanted to come off as a real unbroken human. I also had the explicit thought that I... was... failing to say the things I wanted to say how I wanted to say them because I didn't know how."
"Hm. Would it work to text me instead, when we need an escort or have a victim in earshot?"
"At low levels always yes, and at middling ones sometimes, it helps if you're right there and I can tell myself the third party's the only reason not to talk out loud - it's less about the medium and more about the immediacy and the, social validation?"
"I see. That might work, but the way I predict it could fail would be related to, hmm, me being tempted to make people not realise that we're texting. Because it's—strange, noteworthy, unconventional."
"We could... ask what languages they speak and hope one of our three isn't among theirs?"
"That... could work," he says, thoughtfully. "I feel like there's something I ought to take some time thinking about..." Jaeha wants to call it "notebooking" but he feels embarrassed doing so in front of Haru, since Jaeha probably isn't doing it right. "If we—hadn't talked about anything—it would've been fine, I think. Or if I hadn't had to respond. Thinking about it. So it seems like I really care about the expressive use of my powers while backlashed."
"...so it might have been easier if I wasn't there at all being talky."
"Yeah..." Which is not a conclusion he loves. "...I don't think I was close to slipping up?" he offers. "The closest I got was this one time I thought I had done it to gauge our escort's emotions but it turned out I was just reading her body language. I felt tempted to use but not actually in danger of using my powers, I think."
"Okay. Is this something where you'd benefit from more practice with it or where one data point is clear and we just shouldn't do dungeons where we'd need an escort unless there's a particular reason to want both of us there?"
"I think this might benefit from practice outside dungeons? I—even without backlash, I seem to care a lot about how I come off... And I'm hacking this with you by thinking that you'd prefer me to be... raw... and also by thinking that if anyone gets access to my whole brain it's you. But—I haven't really been around people very much, over the past several weeks, and exposure to them could be good for me."
"Okay. We can go places. There are even probably more guild events than just specifically the queer bar night, apparently they're having go tournaments when I'm not paying attention - not that I'm any good at go -"
"It's a well-designed game, it's just hard to get good at it without spending a lot of time on it and it's never struck me as important. Anyway, I'm sure there's stuff." O Quasar internal website what stuff is there.
There isn't much official. It seems like you can just create an event, if you want, and it'll show up on the official company calendar, and they're just relying on people being too Korean and/or too scared of having their name out there to prevent vandalism. You can tag your event and then filter events by tag: video games, in-person games, tournaments, bars, restaurants, karaoke, sports, so on so forth.
It's a company with over five thousand people so the calendar is... a lot. It's a lot.
Absolutely nothing.
"...I feel like just showing up to one of these without knowing anyone would be..." Horrible. "...hard mode. Maybe we should see if the people we've already met have things they might want to invite us to."
"Sure." He can text Yoo-min, he's the most read in on the situation.
"Let's see, what else... I didn't feel tempted to read our escort's emotions, which I think I would have, had I used my illusions on her, to see how they were landing, but—I don't remember how much I explained this, my receptive power isn't really passive? I need to look at something—for some values of "look"—and then point my power at it to see whether there's a mind in there—so in that dungeon I was doing that constantly in all directions at all things, and it would've been easy to target her accidentally. It was taking some attention not to."
"It's directional? - I guess you could just explain this to people, potentially, a lot of people would probably be fine with being - emotionally scanned -"
"Not exactly directional, it's—targeted. I can't passively know that a mind is there, not without explicitly pointing my power at a thing I roughly know must be somewhere specific. —it wouldn't be as much as a scan, either, maybe a very short snapshot but if I'm just pinging I don't get enough time to really form an impression. So that... is probably workable... but I'll have a bit of a time explaining why I'd never mentioned this to the people I've worked with regularly in the past. The world of psychic espers is kind of small, I know every other active psychic esper in Korea and they know me."
"There's probably some adequately deflecting phrasing. Like... uh... 'it's faster to distinguish whether things around me are monsters or people with my power first and my eyes second', like you might have only recently discovered this?"
"—this is not rising to the level of temptation, I don't think, but I ought to note that I just had the thought that it would be straightforward to do this if I could use my power for it. To speak for me, that is."
"...you could do that with a volunteer and have them tell you what 'you' said? It wouldn't be personalized but..."
"I could, but I think the personalisation is pulling some weight. Your phrasing is good, in any event, and it's making me more confident that such phrasings in general are possible. ...noting aloud, I seem to default to very pessimistic that it's possible to communicate difficult things with just words." Which is the dumbest possible hangup and the definition of a skill issue. He'll actually go ahead and write that one down because it feels like he ought to remember it in the future.
"Good to note. You seem fine at talking to me but that's probably a special case."
"Yes, though also telling you about all of this was really desperately unpleasant and even while I knew I shouldn't and wouldn't I spent a lot of the time I was confessing everything to you wishing I could get my power to figure out how to do it for me."
"I have also noted to myself that I had some unearned confidence in my ability to understand people and communicate without my powers. This is something I can work on, as a skill."
"I have some ability to do it! Just not... nearly to the extent I thought I did."
"Yes. Very." Half the crises he had over the past weeks were due to being unable to tell whether Haru liked him.
"Would it be... skillbuilding... if I let you read me via power while you were also, like, looking at me conventionally."
"Okay. Wait till I say when or you'll just backlash us both to no effect, but - when."
The specific thing they are doing right now is scary. It's not too scary to do at all, but Haru's ready to flinch about it, like if he were trying to pick up a snake that might wrap gently around his hand no problem but might strike; he is prepared to discover at any instant that actually he can't handle this and it's too vulnerable he isn't ready and he needs to lock down again.
On the topic of Jaeha in general, though, the way they're curled up together, that's very comfortable and fond and warm, maybe because he can flinch about the mental contact whenever he wants and everything else between them is definitely safe.
A little longer-term anxiety about Project Cut It Out Forever, it's surprisingly complicated - not very surprising but yes very complicated - but not in a way that has called into question whether it's worth undertaking and sticking around to see through.
Haru is maybe a bit lower on the somaticized emotions in general than most people. There's the faintest flickers of the correlates of other thoughts going by but they're happening almost entirely on a level Jaeha can't read, not because Haru's not letting him but because Jaeha's power doesn't extend in that more verbal direction. Tiny flecks of pride and curiosity and satisfaction that register in the nerves for only an instant before being packed away neatly as endorsed attitudes or dismissed passing fancies.
"Haah," he breathes, closing his eyes. "I need—can I have a minute with just this? I'm—" This soothes Jaeha's deep, primal emotional core in a way he didn't know was possible.
Haru likes him. Haru really, actually likes him. It's right there, plain as day, Jaeha can feel it.
Haru - takes a second to focus on the ready-to-flinch feeling, examines it, interrogates it - and puts it aside.
"Yeah."
"This means more than I can say," he murmurs, just basking on the feeling, on the way Haru's warmth mirrors his, the way the easy comfort around Jaeha matches his own comfort around Haru.
The backlash cost of doing this is minimal, and more than made up for by the snuggling, adding only a buzz to the snuggling so soft it's barely even there.
Haru pets him. There is a little self-congratulatory glow when Jaeha says that.
He's so cute, it's unreal.
"You're—still pretty hard to read, though. Your feelings work in very—you—ways."
"I—don't get emotions directly. It's all, what you're feeling in your body plus some things about what those feelings are pointing to, what you're perceiving and focusing on in broad strokes. I can't tell that you're looking at me, but I can tell that you're near a person, and it's only one person, and it's someone you feel very close to. Stuff like that.
"And—people get fleeting thoughts and emotions and feelings all the time, right, but you're constantly—organising yours. Feel a feeling, look at it, put it away. I'm not sure you're even doing it consciously most of the time?"
"- the whole point is to do it consciously! I don't want my thoughts putting themselves away without making sure they're doing it right!"
"—of course. My bad." He kisses Haru's cheek. "It's so... tidy. And makes it really hard for me to get anything other than what you want to show, which I suppose is a plus."
"As long as it's not too - intellectualized or whatever - for you to get what you're getting out of it."
"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."
"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."
"...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.
If he doesn't ask he will not find out. "I'mma go notebook some, okay?"
He kisses back and then immediately covers his face with both hands. "You get to me so much."
Jaeha should maybe also do some notebooking.
Instead he is not going to. Because he feels mentally wrung out and he just explicitly admitted to having daddy issues in front of Haru and he feels like stuff kind of sucks in some vaguely nebulously-defined way when it comes to his brain and oh right he has a response to this and it is to go work out, he is going to be SO FIT.
...EVEN FITTER than he already is, that is.
The guild is informed of their updated scheduling protocol. Haru does an easy dungeon the next day, which looked a lot harder than it was; he probably could have soloed it, though it would have taken longer. He comes home while Jaeha's still out, having used more bullets than magic, and not all that backlashed. In fact, he can read, as long as the thing he's reading is directed at him in a loosely conversational way. Cricket apurr on his back, he flops facedown on the couch and does some Reading The Comments and Checking His Email.
Youre a pathetic washout. How dare you think you're good enough for Kang Jaeha? You haven't known him as long as Wo Do-in, you don't understand him like Wo Do-in does, and you'll never be a tenth the partner Wo Do-in is. You're not even pretty and your powers are so pathetic and useless, Jaeha is just having pity on you. I can't wait for him to dump you like the garbage you are, but if you were worth anything you would have gone back to Japan rather than take advantage of his kindness like this. I hope you kill yourself in a fire.
Haru picks his way through a translation and then when Cricket's laughing about it he moves on to the next message.
Your jealousy of Wo Do-in-oppa is literally psychopathic... just because you see someone else dare to have something good in their life, you decide you've got to tear it apart? Why can't you realize that it'll never be you he cares about, you'll never have what Wo Do-in-oppa did, and stop forcing Jaeha-oppa to pretend with you?
"It probably means something that this person is using pretend-he's-their-brother honorifics, but I guess I'll have to ask Jaeha what."
I hope you die. Nobody loves you. Nobody even likes you, even your friends can't stand you. You should just kill yourself and do the world a favor.
I know you don't know me and I feel really weird sending this email and I bet you're not even going to read it but I wanted to get it out somewhere.
Thank you. It's silly and stupid that seeing you and your partner being in love in public like that, not caring about who was watching or even which country you're in, meant so much to me, but it did. It meant a lot. It made me feel like maybe things aren't going to be awful forever. You're Japanese and he's Korean so you probably know what it's like, the way we all pretend we're so modern and developed while still holding onto stupid traditions that don't help anyone and just make us feel small and weak and scared. So thank you for being big and strong and and brave instead.
Yours truly,
a Malaysian boy who has a bit more hope for the future now.
"Awww, this one's a sweet one," he tells Cricket. "Maybe I'll reply to it, only I'm not sure what to say."
Cricket can read this one over his shoulder because it's in Japanese but he needs help with most of the kanji. "Well, you could tell him that Googling you would tell him you are Canadian."
This brightened my day to read. I wish you the best of luck out there.
omg ur soooooo hot you're even hotter than Wo Do-in-hyung I drew you I hope you like it
Attached to the email is a set of drawings of Haru giving Jaeha head from various different angles. They're actually really good drawings, coal on paper and lovingly detailed, capturing their faces perfectly and taking a really good shot at a guess of what they look like naked.
Hey, sorry to email you out of the blue like that, but I was reading this post of yours about the statistics of esper compatibility and it doesn't take exactly the same tack as my research does but it's pretty similar so you might be interested? Here's the paper on arXiv, it's currently undergoing peer review and if it passes it'll be published here.
This email gets a star and the paper opened in a tab for later but he can't read it right now. Next!
Someone saying Cricket is gorgeous. Someone nitpicking one of his blog posts. Another thirsty fangirl, this one linking Haru/Jaeha RPF they wrote on AO3. Someone who's happy Haru stole Jaeha from Wo Do-in because they think Wo Do-in is a jerk. Someone who wants to know if Haru and Jaeha and Sparkler have ever had a threesome. Someone who thinks Haru's research is bad and sloppy and who links their own blog, which is itself bad and sloppy and kind of crackpot-y. Someone thanking Haru for all the effort he puts into his posts. Someone thanking Haru for how nice he always is to people he runs into, themself included. Someone who's really mad that Jaeha stole Haru from them because they want to have Haru for themself. Someone who claims they're interviewing espers with dual-citizenships for unclear statistical purposes.
Haru is potentially willing to be interviewed for unclear statistical purposes if they could become clearer statistical purposes. It is always nice to hear that his affect when he's in dungeons is landing well. ...the RPF can go in a tab in case Jaeha gets a kick out of it. Cricket dictates a reply to the compliment in which he says that presumably everyone with eyes knows he's gorgeous but few people take the time out of their day to remark on this obvious fact.
Jaeha arrives home a little bit after that, and he looks...
...well, he isn't trying to mask at all.
Oh no his poor Jaeha. Haru rolls over, prompting Cricket to hop off him and race away into elsewhere in the house, and he gets up and hugs him.
He hugs back, automatically, and, ah. Yeah. This, this makes it all worth it. His Haru.
"Tadaima," he says, softly, with a smile that doesn't at all reach his eyes.
"Okaeri. - it is very admirable that you're willing to do dungeons when they get you like this but it's a touch confusing."
"...the acute symptoms melt into more manageable ones eventually even without guiding, and I committed to not making any decisions like that until they're gone."
"...makes sense." They should stop wearing shirts, Haru has made an executive decision.
Yeah, he's amenable. That'll make the acute symptoms go away much faster. "When this gets bad enough I get suicidal. After one too many close calls, I..."
Shrug. "I no longer pay attention to what I'm feeling or thinking. Not until I'm—better. I just keep doing whatever I was doing, trusting that that decision was probably good enough. It's not like any other decision feels any better, anyway."
Pet pet. "Well, that's probably at least - convenient for the project, I guess."
"I can do the thing where I fuck you through the blah till it goes away but I have to admit it's less appealing than when you're discernibly horny about it, d'you have a preference either which way?"
"I'd prefer being 'fucked through the blah', yes. I can... look hornier?" He never felt motivated to try, with his prior partners, but he knows he can do it.
To bed!
"I understand that. And I—am not saying this to insist, but just to add a model of—it's sometimes useful, to me, to think of the person I'm presenting as more real than the person I'm feeling like, since... I'm choosing to be him. And I'm not choosing to be—this."
"Hm. I think that makes a lot of sense on the level of longer term policies and preferences and such and less on the level of moment to moment moods. Anyway. On your knees."
...he doesn't actually have to pretend to find that enticing. Even at this level of backlash he can appreciate being told what to do by his Haru. "Yes, sir."
See, it's efficient, because at this level of Jaeha-backlash Haru doesn't even have to feel awkward about his favorite thing being asymmetrical, and also the guiding fluids get into the person who more acutely needs them.
"You know," he says, after they've gotten him to zero, "you could just use me. All the time, really, but especially when I'm like that. Do whatever you want with me. I'd go along with everything."
"...it's not really my kink but I could rotate it in the brain microwave for a while and see if it gets anywhere, if it's yours."
"—it might be? I'd suggested it more out of convenience but it's telling that that's what I came up with so naturally when I was fishing for convenience."
"I suppose it is. I will put it in the brain microwave." He pokes an imaginary button. "Beep."
"The problem I was trying to solve with it was—I still feel like I want to consider the—person I'd be without backlash the real me, that's, that's a big part of why I used to use my power for communication. If I'm just the person I look like I am under backlash that makes me feel... small and helpless. But if I could—set policy, like you said—what the real me would've wanted was for you to fuck my brains in regardless of what it looked like I was feeling at the time.
"...though even then having you tell me to get on my knees and suck your cock was extremely hot, I'd like it if that happened more often."
"You're very cute when you smile like that." Hair ruffle. "I checked my email today. Apparently people have managed to be invested in your previous partnership. Somehow."
"I got among other mostly nicer things hate mail from people who think I stole you and should give you back to what's-his-face. There were linguistic pretenses that the letter writer was his little sister in one of them."
"Yeah, I don't actually know exactly how weird that is but it seemed weird."
"It's a—parasocial fan thing. Picture teenage girls going to K-pop concerts and hoping that the cute boy from the boy band she likes will fall in love with her as soon as he signs an autograph, as if he isn't fucking the bandmate right next to him. ...or, in this case, I suppose they must be fujoshi."
"I'm not—in this to be a celebrity. Nor am I in love with people I'll never have anything to do with having opinions about me and Wo Do-in. And the fact that they think he could ever possibly hold a candle to you is just adding insult to injury."
"Well, some people also registered their approval. With in one case surprisingly comprehensive background in drawing from life."
Snicker. "Yes. There was also fanfiction but I couldn't read it at the time so I don't know if it's any good."
"You know, now that my brain is no longer splattered on the wall of that idea, it's..."
"I'll forward it to you." He collects his pants and the phone therein to do this. "Also we did successfully inspire a Malaysian gay to optimism."
He's not actually tearing up because he's not the type to but if he were the type to he would be. "Oh."
"I usually don't reply to stuff but I answered that one. And the one that was really for Cricket but he dictated."
He pulls Haru into a hug again. "I am having some unexpected feelings about the idea of having had a positive impact on someone's life like that."
So long as he's with Haru everything is good.
"—I meant to tell you and forgot. The thing you suggested, about asking if people were comfortable being pinged by my powers, that went over well. And I didn't really feel tempted to do anything more."
"Mmhm. I'm still not entirely sure what to tell people that I've worked with a lot before, though; your suggestion was a good fallback but it does leave the impression that I'm kind of incompetent for not having noticed it in all these years..." The ways in which Jaeha is incompetent are unrelated to that.
"I don't think it's necessarily going to be hugely alarm-raising for most people if they realize that you were doing it all along and just decided to start being more conscientious about asking. It is a risk, I'll grant."
"Yeah. Mm. There's maybe a line to be walked about how having you as a partner might've changed things. In a mechanistic way, I mean, not in a 'it turns out I was evil but I'm not evil anymore' way."
🔔traceless: guess who got the sweetest fanmail from Malaysia
🍸nomu?: was it you
🍸nomu?: I bet it was you
🐠nemo: coulda been @KangJaeha instead
🍸nomu?: when are you going to change your screenname
🐠nemo: I was here first! get your own
🔔traceless: it was me, though I did also forward it to him.
🍉melonmelon: traceless you're relevantly multilingual, should one of them change their name
🔔traceless: it's only confusing in Latin characters, nomu could spell it in Japanese and it wouldn't be at all. I think "nemo" is literally Latin so nomu is the one who has to change though if either does
nomu? has changed their nickname to 飲むか
🚫do-not-jin: I am so glad this platform has nickname histories, if I had to track down the choices you all make I'd go insane
🍸飲むか: unlike your normal self, who is very sane
🚫do-not-jin: yes.
🔔traceless: just that it meant a lot to see me & Jaeha not caring about what country we are in when we kiss in public, I don't want to paste the whole thing because I don't think it was intended for public consumption
🔔traceless: it was heartwarming! I also got a less heartwarming taste of Korean celebrity culture but really all those people were doing me a favor, giving me reading material for when I'm backlashed
🔔traceless: I got some fanmail and also some hatemail! I'm not that famous but Jaeha is.
"No, I don't mind it. And I hear whining about your problems in public is a time-honoured human bonding tradition and if I want to pretend I'm human I ought to try some of those sometimes."
🔔traceless: the emails don't bother me, there's a decent section of my backlash where I can read stuff directed at me and can't read a book and I catch up on blog comments and mail then, but I do think a lot of them reveal questionable character on the part of the senders and they will probably feel awkward about it when they grow up
🚫do-not-jin: I cannot comprehend the appeal
🍸飲むか: you're ace, of course you can't
🐠nemo: I'm not ace and I also can't
🍸飲むか: you're seafood, of course you also can't
🐠nemo: ╭∩╮
MODERATOR ANNOUNCEMENT: Please do not use vulgar kaomoji in chat.
🔔traceless: I also got a fic link but don't know when if ever I will get around to it, it'd interfere with reading novels by dead people which are my staple fare when I can read whatever I want
🚫do-not-jin: I find the ethics of writing real-person fiction thorny and the ethics of writing real-person erotic fiction even thornier
🔔traceless: I certainly wouldn't personally choose to write it myself.
🚫do-not-jin: you're still giving them views on the website, and that incentivises them
🚫do-not-jin: yes I feel a lot fewer qualms about people writing slash fic of you
🚫do-not-jin: ...don't know about Seungjoo
SenSoJoo: :)
🚫do-not-jin: ...you know, there was a time of my life when I thought @yoo-min-max was being really weird about you
🚫do-not-jin: but the two of you deserve each other
The backlash ebbs away and the chat loses its appeal; he turns off his phone.
"People who are extroverted in real life are a lot, huh?" Jaeha says, pushing an out-of-place hair off Haru's forehead.
"- oh, just - people. Can't live without 'em and yet. I'm gonna go hit my notebooks." Kiss.
The next day Jaeha doesn't have any dungeons scheduled, since they're taking it slow at the beginning, but what he does have is his first therapy session. Remote, naturally, because he doesn't want to run the risk of feeling tempted to mind control his therapist, that'd be wholly counterproductive.
His therapist has a minor technical issue with her microphone and then comes in on audio fine. "- me now? Okay, good. Good morning, I'm Dr. Park Areum, it's good to meet you."
"So, Kang Jaeha-nim, do you have any questions for me or should we start with what your goals are here?"
"Hmm I have one main question, I guess: what are the limits of your confidentiality? Under what conditions will you break it?"
"With esper clients, very few. A court order could compel me to speak but they're reluctant to issue those; and I am also allowed to call an ambulance or your partner for you if I think you're having a medical emergency even if I can't explain to them why I think so. If I suspect child abuse I am allowed to report that."
Hm. The legal mandate thing is... troubling... but realistically, if the government asked him to disclose his powers, would he... refuse?
"Are there any circumstances under which you'd need to disclose information related to past actions without ongoing effects, if they don't involve child abuse? Would you need to report it if your patient was the one abused in the past?"
"I not only don't need to but must not report if a client was abused in the past, if they don't want me to. If a client came under suspicion for... a reopened cold case, I guess I'd have to comply with a court order about that, but it's never happened to anyone that I've heard about; I can't think of anything else where it might come up if it's all in the past."
...yeah, alright. Leap of faith, here.
It's what the man of Haru's dreams would do.
"I think those were all my questions."
Man he has no idea how to answer this question. Or rather, he's scared of answering it completely honestly, especially when he barely knows this person.
"Is it alright if I don't give you a full answer? I'd rather..." How should he put this. "...build a rapport before I'm fully comfortable?"
No, not really.
Uhhhhh.
Should he maybe have prepared himself better. Maybe he should've. That would've been smart. He had been kinda treating therapy as this black box into which you insert broken Jaeha and out of which you pluck fixed Jaeha, maybe with a training montage in the middle but uh. That was. Perhaps. The wrong move.
"Probably, but I'm kind of drawing a blank now that it's time to actually do it."
"Hm, would it help to imagine what other people in your life would say to explain it if they were the ones I was asking?"
"Huh. Probably." What would Haru say? Well, obviously that they should figure out a sustainable way for Jaeha to not slide back into casual mind control, but he's not getting into that today. He doesn't think. What would Haru say under that constraint, then?
"...I have control issues. In the sense that I always want to be in perfect control of—stuff. My image, mostly. How people perceive me, how I come off. But also my actions, I don't want other people to—ever be able to tell me what I can't do."
"...right now, I'm having a lot of trouble coming up with things to say in large part because lots of them feel embarrassing or vulnerable and will make me look weak and pathetic to you." Including this sentence but he will be a big boy and not freak out about it.
"And I suppose you already know that this is my job and I'm specifically supposed to be able to hear vulnerable embarrassing things without judging you for it, but that's not helping?"
"It helps some, but—I'm routing most of my ability to work past it through it being something my partner would be proud of me for being able to do at all."
"Do you do that in a lot of situations, filter your behavior through wanting -" she checks the file - "Suwan Masaharu-nim to be proud of you?"
"Recently, yeah. Though—I've been trying with reasonable success to instead try to become a person he'd be proud of, rather than just taking actions he'd be proud of, and—that person, if I become him, will not want to become someone else, so he should be—stable." Wow does he want to erase her memory of what he just said, except he really actually doesn't, it's just that he's feeling embarrassed and his habitual flinch response to feeling embarrassed is wanting to make it not have happened.
"Yeah." Thinks it's very romantic, even, which makes Jaeha feel fuzzy and warm on the inside.
"...to some extent. He doesn't want it to be the case that we need to be together for me to be alright—and I don't, either." Even if the prospect of not being with Haru makes him want to throw himself out the window. "But if I can get there some way that relies on him that's not objectionable in principle." Lol. Lmao.
"That's good, then. But you've been with him for - less than two months, unless my file's wrong?"
"Yeah." He KNOWS it's ridiculous, okay, you don't need to point that out.
"My previous approach did not involve me actually being okay with not being in control."
He'd still rather not talk about what he did instead right now.
"And instead I obsessed—obsess—with figuring out the best way to be charming or funny or interesting or likeable, I'm constantly conscious of what people are feeling and thinking and how they could be interpreting me, I'm constantly tracking the way people seem to feel about me and trying to adjust everything I do or say to try to get the impression I want."
"Yes." Or something like satisfying.
...
...................
"No. Not exactly. It's something like satisfying. But it's probably better to say that it's... correct."
"It's correct for people to see me the way I want them to. It's the way things should be. It's... less vulnerable."
"Both 'yes' and 'no' sound incorrect about all of those. ...forming an impression, I suppose, and so being—causing problems. Making it harder to—do things. I can do more things if people like me?" That's not... all of it... but it certainly is a part of it.
"I don't. Really. But I know that if a guy who knows a guy owes me a favour then I have a guy who knows a guy."
"Get me a last-minute reservation at a fancy hotel or restaurant. Find details about an esper I'm looking into to maybe hire." Lol. "Get me an in with a research department studying a promising dungeon material. Just say my name in positive tones around people who might be feeling generously disposed. It's like having hands, what do you do with your hands, well, everything hands can do."
She nods thoughtfully. "And when you can't have the control over your reputation that you want, it feels - crippling, to extend the analogy?"
"Are you looking more towards seeking control less in the first place, or coping more gracefully with situations where you fail to get it?"
"I think... more the former, but both, really. I want to—want it less. I want it to not be terrifying that I might ever say something wrong and cause someone to hate me forever. ...someone I don't want to hate me forever, that is."
"Is that about people in general or is there anyone specific in your life who you're worried about hating you?"
"Well if Haru hated me that would be the worst thing in the world but he actually likes me quite a lot for some reason so I'm not really worried about that. And other than him... not really."
"Because I really like him." Because he wants a gorgeous Autumn wedding.
"Can you tell me more about him? It sounds like in the time you've been together he's become a key figure in your life."
"He's—" Pause. "Is it going to be a problem that we're in a homosexual relationship."
"No. I see espers, this sort of thing has come up before. It doesn't affect his ability to be a stabilizing and strengthening force in your life."
He's going to not read into that answer because he knows he has a tendency to read into these things and it does not reflect reality.
"He's very—smart and—I'm actually not sure what kind of answer you're looking for."
"We met in Japan, he was rescuing people from a psychic dungeon whose effects turned out stickier than expected and I was requested personally—he has this really charming habit of fist-bumping other espers so as to gauge compatibility in a way where flinching from incompatible touches isn't socially marked, and we fist-bumped and turned out to be really compatible. His backlash is loneliness and he asked if we could hang out after the dungeon and we did. We chatted and spent a while together and eventually—got together.
"I didn't have the best relationship with my old partner and I knew he was on the verge of deciding to leave; Haru's old partner's backlash is needing to be left alone, which is super compatible on paper but meant that she wanted to forget he existed so they did only the bare minimum of physical contact necessary for guiding and it was unpleasant for both of them.
"My old guild made Haru a mediocre offer to join, Haru's old guild made me a mediocre offer to join, Quasar made really extremely attractive offers to both of us, so now we're in Quasar, and partnered, and we live together."
"Hm. And it didn't - bother you that your old partner was ready to leave, his partnership wasn't something you were trying to control?"
That's a good point.
"I think I'd been—resigned—to being unable to do that with someone whom I got as close to as a partner. That wasn't my first time. And I had in fact, at first, been conceiving of my potential partnership with Haru as inevitably doomed and temporary.
"It's probably relevant that my backlash is apathetic depression and it's hard to care about those control desires when I don't care about anything else."
"My acute backlash is very, very strong. The way it works for me is that I get to the nearly-unbearable levels of the psychological symptoms very quickly, and then if it gets sublimated into the delayed form they get more manageable. But that means that right after dungeons I would always be—always am—very passive and apathetic and uninterested in anything, and since that's when I'm getting guided and seeing them most closely..."
Which isn't the whole story but, again, he is not comfortable telling a stranger the whole story yet. Even if that may make it... harder... to help him. But if this therapist can't handle that then they're not gonna have a great time together, are they.
(He notes to himself that this kind of defeatist attitude is not doing him any favours. He'll think about it later. Maybe with Haru.)
"I'm more compatible with him than I've been with any prior partner, which helps. And—his backlash is also psychological, right, and he has a—reasonably healthy relationship with it, which extends to mine. He doesn't hold my backlashed self against me."
"—I don't want to control other people." For some reason the thought is almost offensive, to him.
Hmm.
"I did. At first. But not anymore. He got to see a lot of, uh, me, and he wasn't put off by it and didn't want to leave, so I don't really... have to?"
"Not at the time, it was more—surprising, I wanna say. Unexpected? Novel? And it made me want to—invest more. Plus the guiding was so much better than my previous partners that I didn't want to lose him. Which made me more worried at first and less worried later."
"Because if he likes me without me having to manage it directly then there's less possibility for my fuckups to ruin it."
"It doesn't always get as bad as ruination but the theme that I might make a mistake that will do irreparable or at least very-hard-to-repair damage to a relationship is consistent."
(What even happened to his vocabulary use and speech patterns! He didn't use to talk like this before!!!)
"Broadly construed. In the sense that covers image and perception and intuition."
"I'm pretty sure my relationships with all of my past partners are impossible to repair. Not to be a cliché but so is my relationship with my father, though that one I will claim very little credit for ruining, the man did most of the work himself."
"My father is Kang Jaehyuk from Kang Moon-il group. I'm his only heir, and he had very specific expectations of me, including the assumption that he would be the one to decide whom and when I'd marry like his father did for him, as well as that I would be always mindful of how my actions reflect upon the family name. If you've ever read those light novels or manhwas with rich magnate parents fucking up their kids, they're almost a textbook description of our relationship."
"I'm afraid I haven't. It sounds like you've managed to avoid at least most of those constraints affecting your adult life."
"Except for the obvious ways in which they've caused me to have control issues and lack affection in my life and all of those chewy things, yes."
"Can you think of a relatively recent example of a time when you felt badly out of control and drill into that in a lot of detail on your emotions during that time?"
He hasn't really felt very out of control at all with Haru, recently—or, like he said, he hasn't felt the need to control how Haru sees him. There have been—some things—hmm. Actually.
"So this one might not be the best example because I've kind of already worked ninety percent of it out but I think it's kind of—emblematic. And it wasn't really that bad, either, because it was with Haru, and—I feel safe with him.
"We didn't start dating until very recently, and for one reason or another we hadn't really gone on any proper dates until then. And when we did I had—some suggestions for what we could do, involving me showing him around Seoul some since he hadn't had the opportunity, and doing some nice things, and he—shot down some of my ideas. ...that sounds harsher than I mean. Concretely, one of the things I suggested was taking him to a nice fancy romantic restaurant, and he said that he wasn't really much of a foodie and that some of the effect of that would be lost on him. I did have other suggestions, and we went with some of them, but it felt really bad for him to refuse a couple of the ones that I felt were most—centrally romantic, like the kinds of things you see in movies.
"And it's not like a picnic by the Han river isn't also the kind of romantic thing you see in movies. And it took me a bit to understand where I was coming from, why I had felt bad, and—had it been someone else I probably just wouldn't have suggested something that had the possibility of being rejected. I've lived a lot of my life like that, only suggesting things I know will be accepted, only making requests I know I'll get. With him I didn't—don't, anymore—and so it got rejected, and I felt like I wanted to roll back and try again, wanted to have a redo of that conversation in which I effortlessly suggested only and exactly the things that he'd like the most out of a first date, be the perfectly discerning boyfriend.
"Because if I'm not the perfect boyfriend then he might leave, and that'd be awful. Because if he rejects something I wanted then that means he is fundamentally rejecting a part of who I am—I don't actually think that, to be clear, but that's what it felt like and I think it would've wormed its way into my subconscious if I hadn't explicitly tried to figure out why I felt the way I felt afterwards. Because of course his taste is perfect and flawless and it's me who should change and adapt and I should guarantee he never ever has a bad time in our relationship and it's all sun and roses forever and we have a beautiful Autumn wedding in Canada. If he ever has a bad time he might leave, and that'd be awful.
"And one thing that I thought, later, when I was putting my feelings under the microscope, was that that was all very stupid and also Haru wants to be in a relationship with me and relationships aren't things where everything is perfect forever, they're things where you're prioritising the other person highly and you want them to be happy and that will sometimes mean doing things you don't want to do or make sacrifices for them and that this is symmetrical and it shouldn't always be me who makes sacrifices because if it is then it's not a relationship it's just slavery. And obviously this is so small, small enough that after I had distilled all of these thoughts into their component parts I actually no longer cared about the restaurant. I figured out that I ought to ask things of him, when they mattered to me, and we could talk about what would make both of us happiest."
"And yet I completely failed to bring the topic up over the past several days because the thought that I might inconvenience him," especially after all the everything about how he's a horrible villain, "feels terrifying and it is furthermore really embarrassing to have to admit that I felt bad that he didn't want to go to a fancy restaurant with me when I turned out to not even want it that much either, and if I act embarrassing or immature or needy or clingy he will surely get tired of me and leave."
Dr. Park is writing a lot of notes here. A lot of them. She looks fascinated. "Are there sacrifices you do ask of him?"
He's happy to be an interesting case study.
"It is in full recognition that this is insane and not true that I say that my immediate, intuitive emotional response is 'being with me is sacrifice enough'. Other than that..." He didn't exactly ask Haru to spend a month on an insane schedule so that he could accumulate enough backlash to help guide him to zero most efficiently but that wasn't not a sacrifice he made for Jaeha's sake. But he doesn't want to go into details. "There was something he did for me that was... kind of exhausting and difficult and time-consuming, which I didn't ask him to do, but which benefitted me greatly, and which I still feel a bit like I—sort of owe him for."
"Probably not?" Jaeha doesn't think so? Not in so many words, at least? He did say he thought it was important to make sure you're sane regularly and... he said he likes Jaeha... and also he let Jaeha feel it which was a feeling better than guided sex honestly. ...oh, he should suggest that Haru let him feel it when he's coming, he gets so much enjoyment out of feeling his partners come. He'd also offer the reverse but something tells him Haru would Really Rather Not.
Then again, maybe he wouldn't? His personal dispreference seemed very strongly on the mental privacy side? Food for thought.
"Hm. Can you think of a concession from him - even a very small one - that you'd be able to ask for? Like going to that fancy restaurant, even."
"Would it be easier to ask him over text than out loud? Would it help to tell him it's homework from me?"
"Well, then, that's homework. Pay attention to how it feels throughout, while you're working up to it and while you ask and while you're waiting for an answer and once you've got one. I'm going to want to hear about that, but you can also tell him how you're feeling, too - again over text if that helps."
"Okay. I, uh. Can do that." Homework. From therapy. That sounds so fucking bizarre.
"And we're coming up on the end of the time slot. Is there anything else you want to mention before we wrap?"
"I guess not?" He feels like he's already dumped so much on this poor therapist. He's not sure he... likes... therapy... but it's probably too early to tell, and he has next steps of things to do so he probably should do them and see what that does.
Write write. "Then I'll see you then, Kang Jaeha-nim. I'm going to email you a couple of screening questionnaires, too, they shouldn't take more than fifteen to twenty minutes all told."
More therapy homework. Absolutely bizarre.
"It's been..." A pleasure? "Interesting, doctor-nim. I'm looking forward to our future sessions."
Okay! That was hard and scary and stressful and, what was it that his ✨boyfriend✨ called it, ego-syntonic? It was ego-syntonic, for an ego that he's not quite fully inhabiting yet but is doing so enough to feel the edges of it.
Speaking of his ✨boyfriend✨, is he home, did he go to a dungeon?
He timed one with this in mind and his estimate was pretty good - mere moments later: "Tadaima!"
"—this is not a request to change your idiolect in any way but it is kind of funny that when you said 'Park-sensei' I immediately thought of three separate high school teachers I had.
"She was—it was interesting. She said something that made me think she might be homophobic in most contexts but maybe not when it comes to espers and I am not sure how well she can comparmentalise it but the parts of our conversation that were about you and our relationship did not seem to be very marked so maybe she can? And given my tendencies to overthink everything people say I'm not sure how much I should trust that impression.
"Other than that I think it was maybe useful. Most of the session she was asking me questions about various things and I—did not give her full answers because I didn't want to get into the weeds of the issues that have been historically confidential to me, but I told her that I was doing that, and eventually she asked me some useful questions and gave me homework. I didn't know therapy could give you homework. I think it was probably useful homework."
"Well, 'shinrigakusha' is kind of a mouthful and not a normal suffix. I could have told you about the homework, it got on my nerves. What's your homework?"
"I'd just have used her full name," he says, because he doesn't want to answer the question.
He's going to anyway. "My homework is... difficult. Or, well, part of it is. Another part is just filling out some questionnaires."
"...okay, you don't have to tell me if you don't wanna. Uhhhh I rescued an American today and she tried to tip me, so that was funny."
He snorts and covers his eyes. "I do wanna, I kinda gotta because it's about you, it's just embarrassing and I'm putting it off."
"Oh no. I don't suppose it helps if I promise not to tease you about it or anything."
"I think we have conclusively determined by now that my feelings about my image are only very tenuously connected to reality."
"I do sometimes tease and I can in fact not do it about whatever this is, if it helps! But yeah I didn't expect it to make a huge difference."
"She gave me a pretty good suggestion which is that I should text you about it rather than say it out loud, but you being right next to me ruins it. Unfortunately you just came back from a dungeon so I'm not about to let you go, at least not without pounding whatever sense you've got missing back into you."
Jaeha kisses him. "I hope I can distract you from the suspense. Permission to carry you to the bedroom?"
Oh he really hopes Haru means that.
Hyup goes the Haru to go be distracted.
It's not that hard to get his mind off the mystery of the therapy homework.
It's somewhat harder but still not objectively hard to get Jaeha to at least not be constantly thinking about it. Spending time with his ✨boyfriend✨ has the tendency to occupy all of his thoughts.
And once the sense is all duly injected into his poor senseless self Haru will kiss Jaeha and go off to do some work on his blog.
Oh there are kind of a lot of questions huh. They're all multiple choice though and kind of... Well, they sound like therapy questions, which, no, duh.
Is he going to successfully put it off long enough that Haru will be back, oh no, there'll be nothing he can do then—
He just needs to ask to go to a restaurant. That's all. Nothing more. Does he even need to text Haru that? Except he should also be paying attention to his feelings. And maybe tell Haru about those feelings, which honestly sounds terrible.
...he'll start writing this down, shall he.
He just needs to ask Haru to go to a restaurant with him. ...a fancy restaurant. One of the nice restaurants he knows, the kind that needs a reservation. The kind where you usually can't go in in jeans and T-shirt but Jaeha fortunately has more money than sense so he can bribe them to allow Haru in anyway.
(He could be using that money for charitable donations.)
(He might actually go completely insane if he starts thinking like that.)
(Note to future Jaeha: figure out how to deal with the fact that unless he donates everything he owns but the bare minimum necessary to survive he is not a good person.)
(He's not a good person yet, anyway, so it doesn't matter, he's going to spend money on a restaurant reservation.)
And he needs to pay attention to his feelings, before and during and while waiting and after Haru's reply. "Before" is "right now", so, what is he feeling?
Scared, obviously, and embarrassed. Extra embarrassed by how much of a big deal he's making it. It's just not that big a deal, and yet here he is, making it be one. And it's gonna make it even more embarrassing when he finally does message Haru and Haru'll be like "wow, that's what you were embarrassed about? kinda cringe ngl".
Except the Haru in real life is not as mean as the Haru in his head. If he were, Jaeha would probably not be dating him. In fact, it is very central to why he likes Haru, the fact that Haru's not mean.
But, well, the thing about all of the being embarrassed that he keeps doing is that it's...
...it's ego-dystonic to be cringe. It's ego-dystonic to be broken. It's ego-dystonic to be, to, to not have his shit together. If ego-syntonicity is better than fun, ego-dystonicity is worse than, than—not boredom, that doesn't fit. It's worse than just—something. It's bad, is the point. It's like being dysphoric about his personality, there is a kind of person he wants to be and whenever he fails at being that person it hurts.
And when he used his power, he could just be that person. That's...
Okay that's definitely the kind of thing that'll make it harder to let go of using his power frivolously and it definitely explains a whole lot of the way he feels about all of it, wow, okay, huh.
Right.
There is a kind of person he wants to be, not just come off as. And when he's failing to be that person, that hurts his ego, in a—not in the way that phrase is used, or at least not directly, but in a—there is a body part of him in his mind—a mind part of him—that part of him gets hurt whenever he fails to be the person he wants to be. And the person he wants to be doesn't dither, or overthink, or get nervous and anxious, or misjudge social situations, or be tentative and uncertain and scared, or lack confidence. The person he wants to be is confident, and secure, and knows what he wants, and is good at getting it, and is sexy and suave and cool and composed and put together.
...hm. On the other hand. That does kind of mean that a lot of the using his power he does—used to do—was actually just putting up a front. Some of it wasn't! To the extent he wants to be able to communicate things correctly, there isn't a difference (or much of one) between using his mouth and using his powers for it. But guessing the correct thing to say isn't that. Guessing the thing that the other person wants by asking and then erasing the memory of it isn't being good at social skills, it's cheating. It is, in fact, being bad at social skills. It's a crutch.
Oh that's a delightful hack, now he's starting to properly feel embarrassed by needing to use his power. He is awarding himself one (01) cookie for this brain hack.
Okay, he'll get back to that later.
Back on the object-level topic he's meant to be thinking about, he's scared and embarrassed. He's embarrassed because the person he wants to be wouldn't be having so much trouble asking his boyfriend to just go to a fancy restaurant with him, would be able to properly communicate about it like a grownup. And a little bit because the person he wants to be doesn't care that much about it in the first place.
...
No, that's not true at all. The person he wants to be wouldn't be embarrassed about wanting the teenage romance movie dream date. The person he wants to be would be cool and confident about it. The thing is that he doesn't know how to be that person, how to be cool and confident about wanting something cringe, and so he'd rather not want it at all than fail at wanting it in the right way, because if he fails at wanting it the right way then he wants something cringe and he's being cringe while doing it.
But there isn't a way to become that person without practice. No, not even using his power; using his power would make him know how to look like that person, but he wouldn't be that person, and it'd be even more cringe to pretend to be that person using mind control rather than put the work in.
Now the reason he's scared. The reason he's scared is that... Well, he has only one fear in his life, really. It's losing Haru. Everything else is downstream from that. So whenever he does something that seems like it has a risk of causing Haru to leave—like being less sexy and cool, like being a less "objectively desirable" boyfriend, like wanting things that Haru doesn't want, like needing to ask the best way to please Haru rather than magically guessing it through ineffable intuition and thus making the experience of dating him something that is completely effortless on Haru's part—that scares him.
But he can't be just an extension of Haru's will. He can't be perfectly effortless. If nothing else, he—if being around him is perfectly effortless, that's like not existing. Or something. There's probably a better way to phrase that but whatever, this is his notebook, he gets to write shit that maybe doesn't make sense or come off well if it makes sense in his head. The point is that he wants to be a person, he wants to be Haru's person but still a person, and—Haru gave him a goddamn list. Like, what's the point of having a list if he can't even make himself feel secure in being Haru's dream boy by following it? Maybe he could allow himself some insecurity if anyone other than Haru had written that list but, like, Haru is Haru. If anyone would have an accurate list and in fact be happy about the person described by that list it would be Haru.
So he shouldn't feel insecure. He shouldn't feel scared. He's not going to lose Haru, not as long as he's working on being Haru's dream boyfriend.
Easier said than done, obviously, he's sure he's had this exact thought before and he might even have notebooked about it and it hasn't stuck, but whatever, he'll have this epiphany as many times as it takes, so long as he's actually making progress between epiphanies.
And he thinks he is? He thinks he is making progress. Going to therapy is progress. Writing all of this down is progress. Figuring out how to not be a pathetic mess is progress. The person he was a month ago would definitely not have agonised about how he maybe isn't a good person unless he is donating all of his possessions to the needy. Nor would he be notebooking. Nor, really, would he be talking the way he's been talking.
He is making progress. He's really sure of that! He's going to become Haru's dream! (Note to future Jaeha: make a list of all the ways in which he currently falls short of being Haru's dream to do some better-directed self-improvement.) So there's no reason for him to be scared.
There is especially no reason for him to be scared of asking Haru out on a date to a nice restaurant. Even if Haru doesn't like fancy food, Jaeha thinks he can at least make it a nice date, and pamper Haru appropriately.
This is all very silly.
Hey
I have just scrubbed some grime off my brain
My homework is that I should ask you out on a date to a fancy restaurant
that homework is adorable? why is your homework adorable
do you have a place in mind
My homework is adorable because my brain is very strange, the therapist was making some fascinated faces
And I have several!
If you have styles of food you'd rather try tell me them and I've probably got one but otherwise I'll pick one
I don't know what's good in Seoul, I trust your judgment
fancy enough I need to break out the kimono? or buy a suit but I already have the kimono, Ren insisted on it for my 成人の日
I was going to say I could probably bribe them to let you in in jeans and a T-shirt but
The thought of seeing you in a kimono got me hard
Oh, well then.
jeans it is, can't have you distracted from your homework right in the middle of a fancy restaurant ;)
will it ruin the effect if I need help to put it on, those things are complicated
Nope I will totally help
He might need to stop halfway into it to give Haru a blowjob though.
is that the entirety of your adorable homework or do you also need to convince me to take tango lessons or something
Well I also had to write down my thoughts and feelings prior to, during, and after asking
Most of that work was in the "prior to" part though
Well the writing down part wasn't her exactly, she asked me to pay attention to those feelings then tell her about them next session
But there is absolutely no way I'd remember them without writing them down
Not to mention that they'd have wiggled out if I'd given them any space to
they do that.
what was this homework meant to help with, I've got a mental image of Dr. Park going to her friend in the fancy restaurant industry later for a kickback but presumably that is not it
No but it's
A bit complicated
I have like twenty or thirty pages of notebooking about it
He is NOT embarrassed. He's NOT. He isn't. He is fixing his brain and the way he's doing that is by asking his Haru to go to a fancy restaurant with him in a kimono and that's an amazing way to fix one's brain honestly he's glad there's such low-hanging fruit.
wow!!
I don't usually achieve those pagecounts unless I recently almost died or something!
Not just today to be clear
Just on that topic over, uh, the last two weeks?
oh okay that's less alarming and/or indicative about your wordiness
you have been thinking for two weeks about fancy restaurant dates??
The fancy restaurant date was sort of downstream of other stuff
Though it was being used metonymously a lot
About the issues I have with wanting things and asking for them
I assume if you had homework to tell me about any of this you'd go into more detail and I should mind my own business?
She actually suggested I tell you about my feelings too
If I thought it would help
It's just that they're a bit embarrassing to summarise and the less embarrassing less summarised version is thirty pages long
But if you're in the mood for reading through your boyfriend's unedited stream of consciousness I can send you it
You just have to promise you won't hold it against me, especially the parts where the evil Haru that lives inside my head tries to pretend to speak for you
as long as he is also less witty and maybe has a goatee. to go with being evil
He is nondescript so you may headcanon him that way
Heeeeee'll scan through his notes quickly. "Restaurant" does find most of it, and "teenage" "date" "fantasy" manage to catch the rest. Alright send go.
Well they are lots of pages!
...but he's, like. Actually fine? Probably in large part because he thinks he comes off as cool and smart and self-improving. Also in part because laying his soul bare for Haru to see actually feels really nice? He's glad he's at least not a hypocrite re. mental privacy.
Anyway it's alright, he'll occupy himself with catching up on some of the studying statistics he kind of let fall by the wayside.
is it kosher to come hug you about it or are you still using the text format as a buffer
I would greatly welcome hugs
Honestly the texting wasn't even really necessary
That last bout of notebooking prior to messaging you made me kind of not need it anymore
Haru pops into the room and deposits himself in Jaeha's lap. "The me with a goatee is a jerk and you shouldn't rewrite your brain for him at all. Only me, I'm very responsible with this power."
"Yes he is. He keeps popping up. It's—honestly part of why it was so reassuring, that time you let me feel your feelings. He doesn't feel like that."
"—no, that was sloppy phrasing. I mean that he—doesn't like me the way you do. On account of being mean. And ready to leave me at the drop of a hat. And super judgmental of everything I do."
"I don't! I want him gone! He just keeps coming back. I keep—remembering that you like me, and then he goes away, and then I spend long enough not thinking about that or not having—sufficiently available evidence or thoughts or context—and then he's back."
"If you wanna make a regular thing of Direct Psychic Evidence I Like you then - well, maybe not too regular, I might need to have it be totally unremarkable if I wiggle the scheduling around capriciously so as to have room to hide in if ever I am feeling hidey, but a frequent thing, I'm up for that."
"If it wouldn't—" No. Bad Jaeha. Ask for things. "I would like that, yes."
Eheheheheheheheh Jaeha has the best Haru, take no substitutes.
"...you know, I had kind of assumed that you wouldn't want it due to, well, all of the you, but being able to feel what you're feeling while having sex, especially when you climax, is really nice. And—I never really did that with any of my other partners, but it would definitely be straightforward to reciprocate."
"Oh that sounds really fun actually, I don't feel nearly as private about my senses - I mean, if you weren't literally the person I was having sex with, then spying on me having sex would be a problem, but you are, so."
"...also, your senses are pretty much all that I get, passively. Your senses and sort of—shadow puppets of what you're perceiving and focusing on. I don't actually get direct emotions or thoughts in any way. I don't know if I made it sound like it was a lot more than that but maybe I did?"
"...I don't usually think of my emotions as the same thing as like, my hearing or my proprioception?"
"Yeah, hearing and proprioception are more what I get than emotions. I get—the feelings on your skin, heat, the feeling of your breathing and heart rate, the tension in your muscles and your face—and what they point to, the way your muscles are relaxed right now is related to being near the person that you're near, who is a person you are familiar with and feel positively towards—and a lot of that is inference, too. You know the thing people say about how human brains can only count up to four? That's as far as I can tell almost universally true, I can tell when people are perceiving up to four things of a kind but any more than that and it becomes 'many'."
"It's not always true, people can recognise lots of numerical patterns—like the dice patterns, people can glance at them and tell five and six apart and so on, but—people have a lot of trouble getting an immediate impression of five things if they're not neat or not in a row, and more trouble for six, and a lot of trouble for seven unless they're organised very neatly into a group of three and a group of four. I'm sure someone who practised this a lot might be able to do it better and I haven't actually, you know, focused a lot on figuring out the nuances, but—that's the gestalt impression I got, over the years, is that the snap judgment counting ability of people is very limited."
"And you just learned to derive emotional content from all this? - do I owe the therapist I had for two weeks when I was eighteen an apology, she kept being like, where do you feel that in your body, and I was like, no, it is in my brain, where it belongs."
"I did. Uh—you do, for what it's worth, feel things more in your brain than your body as far as I can tell? In the sense that you don't feel very much in your body so I have to assume that's where you must be feeling them. This is a thing people vary in.
"Do you want me to tell you in more detail what I am picking up on from you?"
"You're relaxed—your muscles aren't tense—they got a little bit tenser over this conversation, correlated with, I think, when you were thinking about how much I could get? Could just be noise. But overall you're relaxed, your breathing is slow and comfortable, your heart is beating at a nice sedate pace. You're warm, and a lot of the warmth is coming from the person you're touching, and you're touching a lot of them. You're relaxing into them, you're sort of automatically moving your body in ways that make you closer to them. You're not aware of any other people in your environment, and the person you're with is familiar to you. Someone you're close to. Your attention is mostly on that person, but it's also—somewhere else, or rather nowhere, from which I infer it's inwards. Your mouth isn't dry. Your clothes are comfortable. Your facial muscles are—doing things that I've got a lot of intuition about but difficulty explaining, the immediate way I'd try to translate would be that you 'look thoughtful' even without actually looking at you."
"But yeah, I—infer that you really like me. From the way you feel around me. You're not—guarded, primed for something to go wrong, paying close attention to your surroundings. Also your heart was doing a thing that made me really happy when you got here which I also have trouble describing but my gestalt impression was that you were feeling something like proud and—happy to be here. Which I am also using to infer that you like me. I may be biased, though, unclear"
"Oh, I'm proud of you, the notebooking you did was really admirable."
He is going to hide his face somewhere in Haru. "I want to be a weeb and say 'senpai noticed me' to convey the feeling I'm feeling."
"I guess I am your senpai in specifically the domain of notebooking but I noticed you before that."
The kimono, when it is taken out and hung up to air out, is blue-black, almost exactly like Haru's eyes, and covered in shining gold swans embroidered in mid-takeoff.
Oh... God.
"It would be a bad idea to have sex while you were in this, right?"
"Yeah. Bad idea. Definitely bad." Haru is going to look so hot in that though.
"Should I go back to questioning whether I should wear this out? What if I send a waitress into cardiac arrest?"
"I didn't realize you were so callous about the fates of the waitstaff. Do you already by some miracle know how to get this thing onto me or should I find you a tutorial?"
Haru can find a video of how to put on a kimono and delegate awkward subtasks of this to his lovely assistant. If Jaeha really really wants to sneak in a blowjob he can do it once the robe is on but still completely open, that's a pretty safe compromise.
Oh can he? Can he pretty please? He will be SO careful not to get anything on the kimono, he'll make sure not to miss a single drop—
He has the best Haru, and he even gets to give the best Haru a blowjob while Haru is wearing a kimono. Jaeha thinks he might've died and gone to heaven.
Jaeha's mouth is a little bit too full for him to respond but he feels like that is itself its own kind of response. God he's in love, it's unreal.
The kimono is unscathed physically, but it may never recover from witnessing these events.
Anyway now they can get Haru dressed to go out.
They caaaaaan and since Jaeha is being extra he has a nice car waiting for them outside. It's not a proper limo but there's quite a lot of space in the back.
"You read my deepest, darkest fantasy. I'm holding back, here." By opening the door to let Haru in first.
"I should send my mom a selfie of us, she'll explode." Once Jaeha's scooted in he produces his phone to do this.
Selfie! "Presumably a good kind of exploding?" Also, uh, wow, now he wants to meet Haru's parents, that's novel.
"She - loves everything. She flips between hobbies and religions and genres and lifestyles like some kind of hummingbird trying to cram it all in. Kind of a scatterbrain. I've been in charge of the grocery list since I was pretty little. She's a kindergarten teacher, she got an offer from a fancy English immersion school in Tokyo when I was eight and we moved away from Toronto that summer. We lived in Toronto to begin with because she didn't fully realize until after she'd had me that she couldn't stand the idea of spending the rest of her life in Grand Forks, British Columbia, she needs cities. Though she's only been kidnapped by a dungeon once, it was when we were just starting to unpack into the new apartment in Shinjuku and I had to call the hotline with my still very amateur Japanese. I think I accidentally claimed that my mother was a dungeon. I theorize it was then because she would have been kind of tickled about it at practically any other time."
"Oh, she sounds really cute. ...and very unlike you." Also the thought of tiny Haru who couldn't speak Japanese saying that his mother was a dungeon is making him feel like he might die of adorableness.
"I look like her! And I do think I got some things from her - we both like to be busy, she's smart if less goal-oriented about it."
"I think I'd like to meet her someday." They've only been dating for a short while and yet Jaeha is being so presumptuous aaaaahh.
"Sure, it wouldn't be hard to coax her over here if we can't concoct an excuse to be in Japan."
"The excuse could in fact literally just be 'your boyfriend wants to meet your mum'." Aaaaahhh they're boyfriendsssssssssssssssssssss~
"It could be! Not that long a flight. Canada, now, that's a longer haul."
"What's the point of being filthy rich if I can't even teleport to Japan with my boyfriend to meet his family?"
"I hope Woo-young enjoys the fruits of being the backbone of the transportation infrastructure of the Korean elite."
"I'm sure he's not the backbone of it, we had teleportation before Min Woo-young showed up. ...it did become a lot cheaper, though."
"Teleportation's less available in Japan and even more dramatically in North America for casual use, though maybe what I'm seeing here is actually just a difference in what price tag causes you to act less than casually and, across the ocean, what distances tend to be involved."
"North America is really, really big, and really a lot less dense... But I don't really go there unless there's a dungeon to clear, so I don't really know what it's like. If there's a dungeon that needs me specifically in North America Juno always used to cover the cost."
"Yeah, you're much more prone to being needed specifically than I am. Nobody ever needs to pay to haul me to Vancouver, so they don't."
"Seems like the world is under some misapprehensions about how amazing you are."
"My all-around personal amazingness doesn't make my powers more essential for any dungeons! Anyway, where are we going for dinner?"
"...Mingles? Is that in English? That would be a hokey name for a singles bar and it's just kind of weird for a restaurant."
"They are supposedly 'mingling contrasting elements into harmony' but I can't tell you whether that's the origin of the name or whether they just liked the sound of the word and came up with that later."
"I guess mingling contrasting elements is a sound cooking philosophy. Mingle or Mingling would probably have been a better conjugation if they had to, though. I guess it has no bearing on their culinary skill."
"I've been, a couple of times, before I was an esper, when Father wanted to impress someone with both his taste and how much of a family man he was. One time the person we met with had brought their daughter, too, and I have a suspicion or two about that particular encounter, but I was thirteen at the time."
"Did you have lines to recite or was showing up at a restaurant on command sufficient to demonstrate the concept?"
"Those times were before my, ah, rebellious phase, and I was actively trying to be Father's perfect heir, so he didn't really have to give me lines."
"I don't really remember the food itself, so much as I remember thinking at the time that it was very good, so I'll be rediscovering the flavours with you." Also it has three Michelin stars.
"Is it one where I need to know which fork to use and stuff - if so I'm going to need to copy you, the fanciest restaurant I've been to is the sushi spot Ren likes on her birthday."
"It's Korean food, it'll be either chopsticks or our hands." Which obviously means that Jaeha will at some point have to handfeed Haru. It's the rules.
"I had the worst time learning to use chopsticks when I was eight. I had dyspraxia, did I ever tell you that? Klutziest kid you ever saw, constantly falling down the stairs, chopsticks were very intimidating."
"You didn't! That sounds adorable. I'm sure it wasn't great, but it sounds adorable."
"Eh, maybe when I just dropped my books or something, less so when I wound up in the hospital."
"—yes, that does in fact sound substantially less adorable. The hospital, really?"
"Yeah, one concussion, no shortage of broken arms and sprained ankles. In Canada I actually was looking into getting a wheelchair for winter when it was icy, we were starting to realize I wasn't going to grow out of it. All better now though."
"I'm very, very glad you're not regularly breaking your arms anymore!" Tiny Haru in the hospital does NOT spark joy. What does spark joy is nuzzling real present-day Haru to reassure his lizard brain that Haru is okay and unbroken. This is objectively very silly when Haru is an esper and even if he broke anything that would not be a huge deal but you know what's also objectively very silly, that's right, it's liking his Haru this much in the first place, and also it's taking his Haru to the best restaurant in Korea so that he can feel like a good boyfriend.
"After I'd had a little while to decompress from awakening and was starting to suspect that I could balance like a normal person Ren wanted to take me to the park and get video of me trying to run for effectively the first time, and wasn't shy about telling me that she wanted that right when I most felt like I owed her the world; she probably still has that if you ask her nicely."
"You're cute. As is a video of you trying to run effectively for the first time right after awakening." He is going to back that video up on several different servers so that he never loses it. And also he is now starting to consider the possibility of acquiring tiny Haru pictures from Haru's mum and he is not sure his heart can handle that.
"I don't think I ever watched it for myself! Not my standard brand of narcissism."
"No? But having a boyfriend who obsesses about that kind of thing is, I assume?" he wonders, wryly.
He grabs one of Haru's hands and lifts it to his lips to kiss Haru's knuckles. "I'm glad to be of service, Haru-ya."
It is so, so gratifying to be able to make his Haru happy just by liking him a lot. He can do that, he can do that so so much and so so well, he will like Haru more than Haru knew it was possible to be liked.
He will also kiss Haru right now, driverly audience be damned.
If the driver knows what's good for them they will be looking at the road anyway!
The street is an unassuming cramped one-way, and the building is a pretty basic commercial tower, but inside the restaurant is all big flat swathes of window and big flat expanses of floor and big flat rectangles of wall panel, all shiny and bouncing back the lights, as though to show off the diligence of their cleaning staff in keeping it polished.
Haru steps into it, looking around curiously, hand in hand with Jaeha.
Eheheheheheh LAST TIME he came here he was a nice little well-behaved boy trying to win the affections of a father who would never give him them, NOW he is incredibly, visibly gay holding hands with his BOYFRIEND and still being well-behaved he supposes but in a way that is spitting in the face of traditional Korean values so THERE.
The maître d' does not seem to find Jaeha's homosexuality a noteworthy fact about Jaeha. "Kang Jaeha-nim, Suwan Masaharu-nim?"
Yeah he'd BETTER not find it noteworthy, the amount of money Jaeha had to pay to get them this reservation this quickly better make them real happy to have him here. "That's us."
In he goes, glancing at what other people are eating as he passes tables.
Rice and fish and vegetables, sweet-looking sauces, hanwoo, all things that look recognisably like typical Korean food but really fancy with gorgeous presentation in absolutely minuscule portions.
And here's their table.
Since this is all for Jaeha's indulgence, he will also indulge in pulling Haru's chair for him.
"Thank you," Haru says, executing the necessary steps to sit down without rumpling his kimono. "So what do you recommend, I'm not going to recognize half of what's on the menu."
"Their menu changes every month, so any recommendations will be guesses. Since everything they make is delicious, though, it won't matter much what I guess." The dinner menu is just the one page. "I think for you I'd suggest the seasonal seafood and perhaps the prawn and vegetable tart?"
"Surely fish exist at all times of year. I guess there's... salmon spawning season, that probably affects things, perhaps all sorts of fish have similar scheduling conflicts."
"I do believe so! There's also a Jeju fish dish, I'm not entirely sure what fish from Jeju Island would have that makes them different from other kinds of fish but we could find out."
"Are the fish from the island or from its environs? They could be a weird endemic species if they're from some specific lake on Jeju Island."
When the waiter comes by Haru will take Jaeha's recommendation, seasonal fish and the prawn vegetable tart. Usually when they put prawns in food the prawns are outright dead and not merely comatose but perhaps at really fancy restaurants,
Jaeha will get the Jeju fish because now he's curious about what's special about it.
"Do you want a picture? Of me being in a kimono before I have a chance to drop any fish on it."
"Yes. Yes, I do." He may in fact take a few too many pictures. He'll sort through them later to find the best ones, which means that he'll spend a lot of time looking at pictures of Haru, which is a great pastime if you ask him.
Haru will make various facial expressions at various angles for him. He's an amateur photographer and knows one wants a lot of shots.
He is so hot. Jaeha knows that espers are supposedly all meant to be hot but he's pretty sure he bagged the hottest one.
And when their food arrives, Haru picks up his chopsticks with perfect esper dexterity -
Jaeha is getting a PERFECT SCORE at BOYFRIEND. He will be grinning like the cat that got the canary at minimum for the rest of the evening, probably.
But he should also try the food, himself.
"Your doctor's friend in the fancy restaurant industry has earned their kickback." Mmmmmm foods.
He laughs.
Also, "D'you wanna try some of mine?" he asks, because, again, he is going to indulge in ALL of his boyfriendly fantasies including the one where he feeds his boyfriend delicious food. Chopsticks are good for that.
Omnom.
(Eeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee boyfrienddddddddddddddddddddddddddddddddd~)
The restaurant also offers delicious dessert, naturally, and Jaeha continues to feel extremely satisfied by how this date is going. He's especially satisfied by having positively surprised Haru with the nice food, when Haru had mentioned that he wasn't too much into food.
And Jaeha himself is not really that into it, actually; it's delicious, don't get him wrong, but it's not about the food. It's about how it's so romantic and nice and the atmosphere is great and he's only a little bit embarrassed by how much he's enjoying himself and feeling like a successful boyfriend.
The Jaeha of six months ago would be very incredulous about all of this. The Jaeha of now is very smug about that.
Mmmm dessert. They should also swap bites of dessert, naturally. For completeness.
When they get home, a small face is peeping out at them from the window. Judging.
When they open the door, Cricket is there, on the back of the nearest couch.
It's just as well, the kimono inhibits getting carried away and tearing off each other's clothes anyway. "Hi, kitty! The portions were tiny so I didn't save you any, sorry."
Jaeha is heroically refraining from tearing the kimono off Haru anyway. It's too beautiful to be torn off, even if the fact that it's beautiful and also on his Haru makes him want to ravage Haru right there and then.
"Good evening, Cricket."
Cricket looks at Jaeha, and at Haru, and at Jaeha again.
"I GUESS you're okay," he pronounces eventually, with great reluctance. "...FOR NOW."
And then he flaps away to his wing of the house with noisy wingbeats.
He has WON. At LIFE. He has SUCCEEDED. He has the HIGH SCORE. He is UNBEATABLE. Everyone else can go home, Jaeha WINS FOREVER.
Jaeha must kiss his Haru, right this second.
"Haru-ya I would like to get you out of this gorgeous kimono and make my extreme good mood your problem. That's what I would like to do." He has blanket permission to carry Haru places but the kimono makes that harder to do safely, which is really unfortunate because he really really really wants Haru right now.
"Problem? Is it a problem?" They can head for the vicinity of the closet where he stores the kimono.
Yes they can. Although Jaeha might need to stop him on the way there again for another kiss, this one a dipping Hollywood kiss. "That is up to you, I suppose."
But once it's gone there's more Haru for Jaeha to put his hands on. If this makes continued undressing take more care and be more difficult, well, Jaeha has been known to enjoy a challenge.
...Haru takes Jaeha's hands, affixes them like they're clips to the collar of the robe, and steps straight through it. "There, that'll save some bother, though of course now I've got a wee bit of backlash, how shortsighted of me -"
Okay Jaeha is going to need to exercise sufficient care to make sure the kimono does not suffer unduly and then his hands and mouth are about to be rather busy. Sufficiently so that if Haru wants them to make it to a bedroom he is going to need to be intentional about it.
It's a good thing Haru isn't that backlashed, too, because it means Jaeha can do Haru's favourite sex position without worrying too much about fluid exchange efficiency.
"I managed to schedule an appointment to meet my mother," Jaeha tells Haru the next morning.
"Not really, actually. But... probably at least partly because of the way she's treating this. If it's just a business meeting, clearly she in fact has no desire for familial feelings. So there's not really a way in which she'd care if I'm one way or another."
"She clearly has no meaningful expectations so you don't need to worry about falling short of them?"
"I assume it's not the kind of meeting I should be offering to attend for moral support but correct me if I'm wrong."
"Yeah I think not really. And I should... remember that the main goal is figuring out if she has any insight about what to do about Kang Jaehyuk."
Pet pet. "You could I suppose literally go in with an agenda in hand."
"It does some... tone-setting, even if you wouldn't actually forget your priorities for the meeting. But perhaps tone-setting in a useful way."
"I feel like the fact that she scheduled a timed meeting for 2:45PM on a Wednesday sets the tone all on its own."
He agonised over how to greet his mother for a while.
He doesn't know her, so calling her "mum" is out of the question. "Mother", using a formal register, is what he called her in public when he was younger and his whole family had to be present in the same place as the same time, but he didn't call her anything in private because they didn't talk, and right now if he called her that and she called him "Kang Jaeha-shi" (or worse, "Kang Jaeha-nim") he'd probably die.
So when he's taken to her office by a secretary, what he says while he's bowing to her is, "Good afternoon, Nam Hee-seo-nim."
Nam Hee-seo's office is elegant and modern, all angles and chrome and saturated colours, gorgeous abstract paintings and two potted plants—not succulents, proper plants that need care to survive. One wall entirely made of glass so they can see the river from the absurd height this building goes up to, and behind her glass desk there's a bookcase showcasing an array of books on business, economics, and engineering.
And the woman herself is exactly who you'd expect would work here. Her makeup is understated but perfect, the kind of makeup a Hollywood actor would wear for a scene in which her character was meant to "not be wearing any makeup"; her suit accentuates her figure in a way that could be considered sexy but not sexual; her high heels are sharp enough you could stab a man with them; and she wears an easy, confident, even affable smile as she stands up and says, "Jaeha! It's been too long. Please, sit," gesturing at the little sofas and walking over to them herself.
The family resemblance is unmistakeable. Jaeha looks a lot more like his mother than like his father, it seems. He has her eyes, and her nose, and her lips, and her eyebrows, and most of all that exact same smile.
Ah.
Jaeha can't actually wear that smile, here. There's something very disarming about it and he can't match it. He can't read it, either; having been on the other side of it, he knows it doesn't mean anything, even though he can feel his body wanting to relax in its presence, wanting to think that everything is okay and she is on his side and maybe she knows something he doesn't but if he plays his cards right she might just be willing to share after a glass of wine or two. He knows she's doing it on purpose. The smile Jaeha has to use esper powers to sport, she wears with the familiarity of an old friend.
He follows the instructions and sits on the sofa that's a little bit less than perpendicular to the one she chose, so that they're not directly facing each other but are closer. "I know you must be very busy, and I'm very sorry to intrude upon your time."
Ahh. They have an audience. He looks over his shoulder, too, at the secretary who still hasn't shut the door, then back at his mother. "No, thank you, Nam Hee-seo-nim, I'm not staying very long anyway."
"Well, I'll have myself some tea. You know how I like it, yes?" she asks her secretary, unnecessarily.
"So, how have you been? It's been so long! I heard you've made quite a name for yourself as a psychic esper. The anti-Nightmare, isn't it?"
"Well, powers are always a lottery. I can't claim responsibility for what I've been given, but since I have been given it, the least I can do is use it for good."
The tiniest of pauses followed by a somewhat warmer, "Well, I'm still very proud of you. Not everyone would do what you do, with what you have."
Proud of him? She had no hand in raising him, where does she get off on being proud—
He should not be angry. It's an act. She's trying to put him at ease and pull on some heartstrings she thinks might be there. They were there, actually, until approximately thirty seconds ago. Actually meeting her has been a dose of cold, hard reality in a way no amount of thinking about it and preparing beforehand could give him.
"I like to think that most people would," he says, quietly, almost to himself. "Maybe it's idealism, but... I work with espers every day. They're normal people, people who were plucked out of their lives, who had other things going on, and they chose to go out and help others and put themselves in harm's way for the greater good. I think lots of people can do a lot of good, if you let them." Then he turns a little bit rueful. "Although I suppose that given the way I used to act when I was younger I can't fault you for not having the greatest impression of me. I sure didn't make it easy to be liked."
Two can play this game. He doesn't need his powers to act.
"Oh, I've been young, too. We all make mistakes, but so long as we grow out of them and learn from them they can make us stronger."
That was completely contentless. Jaeha supposes she wants him to get on with whatever he came here for and get out of her hair.
"One thing that was not a mistake, though, was my decision to—"
There is a very quick knock on the door followed by it being immediately opened, without waiting for Hee-seo's leave. The person who walks in with the tea isn't the secretary that was there a minute ago, though. It's a younger person, someone Jaeha hasn't seen in a long time, either.
"Mother, I—oh," says Kang Dal-seo, Jaeha's younger sister. "My apologies, president-nim. I didn't realise you were busy."
She stands up, all smiles again. "I assume you must've completely ignored Kim Yoon-seul when she tried to inform you of this. But it's no matter. Here, Dal-seo, when was the last time you saw Jaeha?"
He's standing up, too, but he's frozen in place, a bit taken aback. She can call Nam Hee-seo "mother", of course. She doesn't even use the honorific. She gets to have a mum.
He shakes his head and smiles. "Dal-seo, it's been too long. How have you been?"
"Oh, great, great, yeah, I've been pretty good. I started working here last year and I'm, you know, climbing the ranks." She's a lot less good than either Hee-seo or Jaeha at hiding her feelings, though, and she clearly wants to flee immediately.
"That's good. We should meet up someday for coffee, catch up." An act, all of it an act. She'll say yes, and then it'll never happen, and that'll be that.
"Ah, no, it can wait." She walks over to her mother to give her the tea, then bows. "Once again my sincere apologies for the interruption, president-nim. I'll see myself out."
"She's a good girl," says Hee-seo once she's gone and they're sitting down again. Her tea's still seeping, and she's blowing on it gently. "A hard worker. She'll go far."
She sounds exactly the same—of course she would, if her acting were distinguishable from when she's genuine it wouldn't be very good acting, now, would it—but it stings, a bit, to know that this time she means it.
"Nam Hee-seo-nim, I'll try to be brief. Do you know what Kang Jaehyuk plans to do in case I never accept being his heir?"
This seems to take her by surprise. She doesn't have an immediate response, at any rate, and she spends a second scanning Jaeha's face for clues as to what he's expecting of her. "Your father is, ah..."
"I mean the question genuinely. He and I aren't on the closest of terms, as I'm sure you must be aware, and of course whenever the topic comes up he refuses to give me anything. Of course he expects that if I think he has no option other than me I'll eventually cave, or that in any case it's not to his advantage to tell me that he has a replacement in mind until it's a surer thing. But if he plans to get a new heir the old fashioned way, he would need your consent and participation, which I can't imagine you'd be glad to give him."
Something does change in her demeanour, as Jaeha speaks. She seems to have decided that warmth isn't what this conversation needs.
"You speak with a lot of candor about such a delicate topic and it does not inspire me with confidence that it's in my interests to answer your question," she eventually says. Despite the harshness of her words, though, her tone is open, as if she's willing to be convinced otherwise.
It really, truly does not matter. She is going to come off the way she wants to come off, and nothing she does is very strong evidence about how she feels as much as it is about what she wants Jaeha to think she's feeling.
"I speak with candor because I don't think it's in my interests to participate in the game you and Kang Jaehyuk play. I would lose. I do not have your experience or skill, the time I could have spent acquiring them was spent foolishly as a teenager and less foolishly but no less irrelevantly as an adult, if I try to do business and trade secrets I'll always end up losing. So instead I want to just tell you what I want and why, directly, and you can decide what you want to do with that, if anything."
"I want to not be Kang Jaehyuk's heir. Rather, I will not be Kang Jaehyuk's heir. You may think this is immature, and that I will grow out of it, or that I am being irresponsible and shirking my duty to my family. But I personally don't believe in unearned loyalty, and Kang Jaehyuk has not earned mine. He had years to do it, and he failed. Now, as an adult, I can see how he could've succeeded. It wouldn't even have been difficult. There is a path he could've taken that would've made me want to stick with him, not bring shame to his name with all of the indiscretions I got up to as a teenager. But Kang Jaehyuk is not a good manager, and he has not instilled loyalty in me, and there are better things I can do with my life, worthier things, than inheriting my grandfather's legacy.
"I don't want to screw him over. I've done enough of that in my life. I just want to cut my ties with him, I want to not own any shares in his companies, I want to be an esper and nothing more."
"The fact that I do not want to condemn another child to be raised by that man and if you were planning to give me a new dongsaeng I would need to do something about that." Oh that came off more snappish than he'd intended it. Well, whatever, he means it.
"I think that is quite beside the point. The relationship Dal-seo has with you, where she can walk into your office unannounced and call you 'mother'? Kang Jaehyuk would never have this relationship with me. Someone who has managed to foster that in her child must know what that means. You must know that it doesn't come for free. And you must know that it matters. I can't believe that you don't care for Dal-seo, but Kang Jaehyuk does not care for me, and I don't think he'd care for another child of his, either."
And grudgingly, he thinks.
"So. I want to cut ties with him. And I want him to not raise another child, at least not without me there to actually make sure that child will have anyone in their corner, anyone at all. These are in tension. It has also occurred to me that a man as rich and powerful as Kang Jaehyuk might not take all of this sitting down, and famous esper or not this is something I should probably be concerned about. But I don't know how to play the game, I don't know what he could do, and I am hoping you'd have any insight into it."
"Nam Hee-seo-nim, one of the few things I am very good at, that are mine, is having contacts, and knowing people. I had... three separate people contact me, last week, about how they'd heard someone had been asking questions about me. I told them to answer any questions posed honestly, so you don't need to worry about your file on me being wrong, although I expect you have enough redundancy in your own checks that you'd have noticed something odd was happening.
"I think mine is better than yours, though, and it is also different. That network is coin I can pay with."
Bingo.
"Nam Hee-seo-nim, how you choose to spend that coin is of course something I cannot advise you about. As for the guarantees—you knew, already, didn't you?"
At that she cracks a bit of a smile again. "There are only so many times someone I know could know someone who knows you before I noticed a pattern. Your delivery could use work, though."
She brings her cup of tea up to her lips, purses her lips delicately when she notices that it got too cold in her distraction, then puts it down and starts drumming her fingers against the armrest of the sofa.
"What did you think of Kang Dal-seo?"
"You exchanged ten words, total, for less than thirty seconds. Give me your brutally honest opinion of her, what she seemed like to you. Whatever comes to mind, but try to focus on her shortcomings, if you can."
"Jaeha, there are times when you politely demur and there are times when you obey. This is one of the latter kind."
"...understood. She seemed—earnest. She craves your approval, and feels like she doesn't truly have it. She's impatient, and—green. Inexperienced. She's—clinging to ideals of winning through her own merits, rather than nepotism."
Drum drum drum. "Correct. You know, Jaeha, when you were going through your phase as a teenager I thought you had no self-control and were selfishly lashing out. That's not quite true, though, is it? You chose to come off the way you did, specifically to get under your father's skin. It was deliberate and intentional. It was not, as you said, a mistake—or, at least, it was not accidental."
There are times when he speaks and there are times when he is silent. This is one of the latter kind.
She sighs. "I sent Dal-seo to study abroad, in the West. I think it was good for her, but I think there are some skills she's lacking which you have. I want you to teach her."
"Well, first I'll need to understand what exactly it is that you object to. You say you absolutely will not be Kang Jaehyuk's heir—why? Is there some compromise? Is it the business management side of things? Or—"
"I'm gay, Nam Hee-seo-nim," he interrupts. "I'm gay and I'm not planning to stop being gay and I'm not going to bury that and pretend I'm not for the sake of being Kang Jaehyuk's model heir with a perfect wife and perfect children. I'm gay and I will have a lovely autumn wedding with my male partner in British Columbia and it will be very public and after that I will wear a wedding ring which will match my male partner's."
"Suppose you didn't have to give that up. You could be as, ah, you could show your homosexual affections in public and have your public wedding and all of that. Is there anything more that is objectionable about the deal? Would you be willing to father an heir? Would you be willing to run your grandfather's group?"
"I don't know if it's possible. But I need to know what you actually want, what you can't give up, and what you can. And then I'll see if Kang Jaehyuk can be convinced to ever bend on anything if it means he will have the heir he wants. Then, if that's not possible, I will ensure that you can cut him off cleanly, and that this will cause no repercussions to you and yours. Does that seem acceptable to you?"
"All of that... for teaching Kang Dal-seo those 'skills' I supposedly have that she lacks?"
"Nam Hee-seo-nim, I am going to need something a lot more concrete than 'a couple of times, if I have need of it'."
She grins a grin sharp enough to cut steel. "Why don't we schedule another meeting for later this week?"
"Wow, what a person." Snuggle snuggle guiding yaaaaay. "Have I been underestimating your network, should I be getting in on this, can you get me an interview with the guy at Tsinghua University who does backlash biomarker research? - that's a tangent, table that. Should I expect to meet either of these people?"
"...I can probably get you that interview, yes, and, uh, if you want? Clearly Nam Hee-seo is not looking to have a mother-son relationship with me and I don't know what kind of relationship I'll have with Dal-seo but the idea of introducing you to either of them does not feel meaningfully like I'm introducing you to family."
"I don't feel the need if you don't, just, if you're going to do some kind of weird mentorship thing with Dal-seo she might ever be around, and I too am around."
"Yeah it'll probably happen, I suppose. I'm really not sure what to think about all of that, I want to say it was a success but it was a very weird one."
"No kidding. ...if you wind up deciding on giving 'em a grandkid what ballpark timetable would that be on?"
"I don't know. Kang Jaehyuk was nineteen, maybe twenty when I was born, but clearly that's not what's expected of Dal-seo. ...though I could believe that Kang Jaehyuk would've wanted that of me.
"I—would still be uncomfortable with letting him raise a child? Which means that I want a say in it?"
"- well, yeah, don't give him your kid, why would you do that, I mean do I need to be ready to be a dad in the next year or do I have longer to get used to the idea."
"Backlashing here, if you would rather talk about the guy who got dungeon-napped while bench pressing a hundred twenty pounds and did not want to leave the weights behind we can do that instead."
"Sorry, sorry, just—I—was a bit. Overwhelmed. By the idea of—with you—"
"You told your mother you were planning to have a lovely autumn wedding in British Columbia and then she said 'what if you did that and also had a kid', so it seemed the logical extrapolation, to me..."
"I said that for—effect, mostly—I of course wouldn't have wanted to commit you to anything before talking to you and we should date for a respectable amount of time before I propose to you in a suitably romantic fashion and then we'll have our beautiful wedding and then we can think about children and, and to think I was making fun of the normal standard family life when all it would take to make me want it is turn it gay."
"It's amazing how much more appealing gay things are to gay people. I didn't take you to be committing to anything and agree with all of that except apparently there may be some sort of reason to think about children on a more accelerated timetable. Unless there isn't and it can wait another five years, which I don't know, hence the original question."
"I don't know either, I'd need to consult Kang Jaehyuk or more to the point Nam Hee-seo, but my guess is that five years would be at the high end of acceptable to him."
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Snugglesnugglenuzzle. "Well then. ...vague recollection that surrogacy is hideously illegal in Korea. Is it also scandalous, or merely illegal such that if you can operate overseas there's no problem?"
"It's not any more scandalous than the homosexuality, but I'm not sure if surrogacy is what's going to be happening, here, because Kang Jaehyuk would not want his daughter-in-not-exactly-law to be someone who doesn't know how the game works."
"Huh. Why? It's not obvious to me why he'd want to - add a participant."
"If a surrogate decides to come after us for the infinite money my family has that would be a huge headache and, most importantly, terribly embarrassing. It's a tidy system when everyone knows how it works and what to expect and introducing outsiders to it upsets the tidiness. It might also be inherently embarrassing, to him, for all of the other rich old men's sons to be married to heiresses that secured alliances while his son got a surrogate to have his child overseas and is living in sin with a man."
"Hm. I think I don't like the one parent gets one kid, other parent gets other kid, system that your folks did, so while there might exist lesbian heiresses in the right class and age group it might be dicey to find one suitable for co-parenting with, that's a lot of filters."
"That is to be fair not necessary or the standard. I think Grandfather was just really paranoid. But yeah, that's why I never gave the possibility much thought, it just doesn't seem possible to satisfy Kang Jaehyuk's constraints."
"Do they have to be Korean, do they have to be themselves married, or could we be casting the net far enough for, like, Singaporean asexuals."
"I don't know. I think not being Korean could be a plus or a minus depending on where exactly they're from? Strengthening international relations is a plus and he might be willing to take a hit to the objective profitability of the arrangement if it helps secure alliances in, say, the US. But I'm just speculating, I haven't sat and had a conversation with Kang Jaehyuk in years."
"Well, I don't cultivate a network as a hobby but I have interviewed as many as several people, if that helps, albeit I don't know which large corporations have lesbian or ace heiresses."
"I imagine it'll be easier to find such in the West, so that's a solid suggestion. Perhaps Nam Hee-seo was thinking along those lines, too."
"Those people - or person, if the first candidate happens to be so great we stop looking - I need to meet."
"Actually even though I have met you I don't have a ton of insight into your parenting philosophy besides presumably 'don't be a distant homophobic asshole'?"
"I haven't... developed one," he admits. "On account of not really thinking it was in the cards for me at all."
"Me either, I'm not so enamored of the idea of having kids that I had any intention of going out of my way to arrange it. So that's something to think about, I suppose."
"Yeah. I suppose. ...do you have any, uh, early thoughts about that?"
"I'd probably ask my parents for advice, they didn't stay together and I wouldn't go to them for relationship advice but they were both great with me. - we will need next of kin arrangements that do not ever boil down to giving your asshole dad the kid even though presumably I will not be genetically involved."
"God let's never get that man involved. I might want to look into how my mother did it, since it did seem, from those ten seconds of interacting with Dal-seo, that they actually liked each other, but... I don't expect rich traditional Korean families to be the model I most want to emulate."
"Worth knowing what they did even if only as background information and to check that your mother would be an acceptable fallback should we be eaten by dungeons, yeah."
"Regarding you not being genetically involved, though, I... might have heard..." Time to open his commscreen and see if he can find the thing he might have heard. —right, Haru's backlashed. "I might've heard of people being able to get children that are genetically related to two same-sex parents."
"Oh, I've heard of that too, but I was imagining the presence of a Singaporean asexual or something was load-bearing and I don't see one being interested in the proposition if she's functionally a surrogate."
"Maybe there's one with a horrifying genetic condition who'd be glad not to pass it on but that's so many filters to apply at that point."
"The spiteful part of me wants to say screw him and marry you and have a kid with you and if Kang Jaehyuk wants an heir he has the option to have one by just stopping being a raging asshole."
Haru pets him. "Well, you can present this option to your consultant who is also your mother, if you want. If the main obstacle to flipping him off is that he might have another kid have you looked into whether you can report him for child abuse in a useful fashion?"
"There's that and whatever other things one of the most powerful men in Korea could do to make our lives a nightmare, which I don't know what it is due to not being him but I can't imagine he'd just let it happen if he disliked it. And for a similar reason it would be really really difficult to get him convicted of anything like that."
"Is this like, a corrupt justice system situation, or is there something else going on?"
"Mostly that, yeah. I'd be surprised to learn it's substantially different elsewhere but I'm nowhere near as used to the bullshit of other countries' old money."
"I mean, maybe it's the same everywhere. I'd be fairly surprised to hear about it happening in Canada but that could be an artifact of what reaches the news or something. Ugh."
"I don't know. It's just—I don't know. Maybe I'm just still a scared kid who's made his demanding and cold father out to be a bogeyman."
"Well, even if he isn't one yet he might get that way if pushed harder, it's wise to have an eye on what he could do even if you've got nothing but a gut feeling about whether he might."
Usually, when his Haru is not around, Cricket just watches videos, or goes for a flight, or terrorizes the wildlife, or naps, or goes through his kanji anki deck, or has a snack. He's a cat. Cats are not very socially needy creatures.
However, on this particular day, Cricket goes for a flight that happens to end at Park Yoo-Min's place. He knows where it is because he crashed there in the fleeing-from-Hasegawa-just-in-case incident. Ding-dong a cat is here to bother you.
