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."

"Good morning, doctor-nim, good to meet you too."

"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."

"All right, then. What can you tell me about what brings you to therapy?"

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?"

"Of course. Is there something you would like to talk about first, then?"

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."

"Hm, can you give an example?"

"...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.

"Does he know you do this?"

"Yeah." Thinks it's very romantic, even, which makes Jaeha feel fuzzy and warm on the inside.

"Do you know how he feels about it?"

"Yeah."

"And he's all right with it?"

"...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.

"So this strategy is new to you."

"Yeah."

"What makes it better than your previous approach?"

"My previous approach did not involve me actually being okay with not being in control."

"And instead...?"

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."

"Hm. Is it satisfying, when you succeed?"

"Yes." Or something like satisfying.

...

...................

"No. Not exactly. It's something like satisfying. But it's probably better to say that it's... correct."

"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."

"Vulnerable to what?"

Shrug.

"Them saying something? Doing something? Just thinking something?"

"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.

"What kinds of things do you most worry about being able to do?"

"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."

"A guy who can do... what?"

"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?"

"...yeah, something like that, I suppose."

"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."

"That's your partner's nickname? Why would it be the worst thing in the world?"

"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."

"How did your relationship start, what things do you do together..."

"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."

"Were you spending a lot of time backlashed, then?"

"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.)

"Hm, that does sound difficult - it's not a problem with your current partner so far?"

"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."

"Do you feel like you want to control him, or is he an exception?"

"—I don't want to control other people." For some reason the thought is almost offensive, to him.

"Control his reaction to you?" she amends.

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?"

"Was that a relief, that he wasn't put off?"

"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."

"Less worried later, how so?"

"Because if he likes me without me having to manage it directly then there's less possibility for my fuckups to ruin it."

"Would you feel you worry about ruining things a lot?"

He huffs a bit self-deprecatingly. "Yeah."

"Is that the main thing that tends to worry you or are there more patterns?"

"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!!!)

"Relationships in particular?"

"Broadly construed. In the sense that covers image and perception and intuition."

"Has that happened before, a relationship being hard or impossible to repair?"

"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."

"Oh?"

"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?"

"...hmm. Let me think."

She nods and waits attentively.

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."

"Hm, would he say you owe him for it?"

"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."

"...uh..."

Patient smile.

"I guess I could?" That is still making him feel awful though.

"It sounds hard?"

"Yeah." He's so pathetic.

"Would it be easier to ask him over text than out loud? Would it help to tell him it's homework from me?"

Oh. "Yes. To both." His brain is so stupid.

"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.

"Shall I put you down for the same time next week?"

"Yeah. I think that works."

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."

"Likewise." She waves and the video freezes on her mid-smile.

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!"

"Okaeri!" Jaeha calls back, walking up to Haru to hug him.

Snuggle! "How was Park-sensei?"

"—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."

"What'd she give you that was difficult?"

"It's. You know. Brain stuff."

"...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."

"Oh, okay, I'll just have to live in agonizing suspense then."

Jaeha kisses him. "I hope I can distract you from the suspense. Permission to carry you to the bedroom?"

"Always."

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.

Okay! Cool! So Jaeha can work on his homework!

...he'll take a look at those questionnaires first.

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 buries his face in a pillow and screams quietly into it.

whyyyyyyy is he liiiiiiike thiiiiiiiiiiiissssssssssss

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 a 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 ;)

Nooooooooooo

Pleasepleaseplease kimono please

( •̯́ ^ •̯̀)

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.

OK. I need notice to let it air out before the date then :)

Understood 

I'll lyk

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

a therapist after my own heart

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.

aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa he's fine

A delay ensues.

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."

Eeeeee he has a lap Haru~

"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."

"He has an entire emotional sensorium? What's in it?"

"—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."

"Well, why would you even want him to stick around?"

"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."

"Now is good if you want."

Eeeeeeeeeee "Yeah."

Haru is happy and proud and smug and cozy about his Jaeha.

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."

"We should do that then."

"...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'."

"Are you sure you're not confusing us with rabbits?"

"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?"

"Sure."

"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."

"- huh, it's like the emotional equivalent of subvocalizing maybe?"

"Oh, yeah, that's a pretty good description of it."

"You are very snuggly."

Ehehehehehehe

"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."

He thinks he wants to kiss his Haru, that's what he thinks.

Oh what a capital idea.

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?"

"It'd be pretty easy to wrinkle and hard to clean."

"Yeah. Bad idea. Definitely bad." Haru is going to look so hot in that though.

"I will model for a photoshoot if you want."

"I don't know if my heart can take it."

"Should I go back to questioning whether I should wear this out? What if I send a waitress into cardiac arrest?"

"That is a risk that I am willing to take," he says solemnly.

"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?"

"I'd probably need a tutorial, yeah."

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—

Since he asked so nicely of course he may.

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.

Haru is a lucky lucky man. "Jaeha, my Jaeha -"

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.

"Rolling out the red carpet, are we. Metaphorically. So far."

"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.

"No, you caught me planning matricide, muahahaha."

He kisses Haru's temple. "What's she like?"

"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."

"Haru-ya. Haru-ya. Come on. Haru-ya."

"You're going to insist on teleporting over, aren't you."

"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?"

"It's a nice little restaurant called 'Mingles'."

"...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."

"It really, really doesn't."

"Have you been here before or is it just of sterling reputation?"

"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."

"Well, I hope the food's as good as you remember."

"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."

!!!!!!!

"Oh. Oh I will."

"You're cute."

"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.

"You caught me."

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."

"Eeeeee~"

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."

"Will you come with me? I'll show you to your table."

Jaeha gestures for Haru to go before him.

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 out 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."

"Absolutely no idea."

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 -

"...damn," he remarks, startled into English.

"Hmm? Is it good?" Jaeha asks, also in English, all innocent.

"Yeah, it's really good!"

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.

—oh damn wow yeah. This is good.

"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.

"Oh, absolutely." Aaaaaah.

It is, naturally, also delicious.

"Oh, yum. Here, try the prawn thing -" A bite is proffered.

Omnom.

(Eeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee boyfrienddddddddddddddddddddddddddddddddd~)

And he can try Haru's seasonal fish too.

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."

"That's all right." He looks at Jaeha.

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.

It's a giggly kiss. "Congratulations?"

"Cricket thinks I'm okay!!!!!"

"For now!"

"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.