Jaeha wants to die. Jaeha wants to die every day. He wants to die today, and the day after, and the day after, too. Every day he wishes he were dead. Every day he is not dead.

He realises this is cowardly and selfish of him, but he's made peace with the fact that he's a cowardly and selfish man. Being alive hurts, and it keeps hurting, and he deserves to hurt and he knows he does but he still doesn't want to. He doesn't want his deserved justice, he wants escape. He wants to die, so that he isn't hurting so much, all the time.

Every day, he wants to day, and every day, he is not dead, and the days keep coming and coming and coming.

And then it turns out that he can't want to die every day, forever. The human heart is a marvel, and will get used to anything you throw at it. Anything it can survive. And though it hurts, it still hurts, and it continues to hurt, it comes a time when he no longer hurts quite that much anymore.

He doesn't notice it, though, because it hurts to look. It hurts to look at his feelings, it hurts to notice that it doesn't hurt so much anymore. For him to notice he would need to acknowledge that there is anything to be noticed, and that hurts. So he doesn't want to die, anymore, but he still thinks he does, and sometimes he still does.

Time passes. They offer him a therapist. He says that there are a million worthier people the Korean government could be spending this money on. There are other people in prison with him, and they keep their distance, and so does he. Time passes in a haze, and things happen in that time, and some of those things are good, while others are bad. He hurts, but he hurts less, and existence is not unbearable. His life is not yet worth living, but he is unworthy, and so he lives.

He lives, and time passes, and he notices that it's been a year. He notices, because it's winter again, and then it's Christmas again, and then it's the new year.

Happy New Year, Kang Jaeha. He hopes your miserable existence ends soon, except when he doesn't.

He's got a visitor. Knock knock.

...why does he have a visitor.

Sure. He may as well have a visitor. He can go have a conversation with the visitor.

???????

His visitor is a complete stranger!

"Hello. I'm Traceless. I hear you're fluent in English, which I hope is true because I've just barely gotten past the alphabet in Korean."

"...yes. I can also speak Japanese, if that would be better," though that's not a Japanese accent at all, he's no good at placing anglophone accents but he thinks this one is some form of North American. Also the codename thing, that's a North American thing.

"My grandparents presumably spoke Japanese but I've got less of that than I have Korean and most of it's food vocabulary. Just English, French, and Tagalog. Anyway, if you're wondering what brings me here today -

"- I want you back to work."

"Excuse me?"

"Mr. Kang - or may I call you Jaeha or do I have to pull out my honorific cheat sheet? - I hate mind control more than absolutely anything else in the world. Fortunately, I am proof against it, I self-shield in psychic dungeons and against psychic monsters and espers.

"But I can't do anything to help other people against them besides physically carry victims through the portal, when the dungeon even allows that. You can.

"My proposal is that, if you are amenable and inclined to cooperate with this plan, we relocate you to Canada somewhere far away from everyone, I sift through people I know who are willing to be around you till we find you someone adequately compatible - obviously we'd check me too but it doesn't sound likely based on the information I have - and I act as your supervisor in psychic dungeons and any other errands that require you to be outside the silo. I can go into more detail on this if you're potentially interested."

"Mr. Traceless," what a profoundly silly tradition, "you would need first of all the cooperation of the Korean government. But second of all, all of my backlash is still right here, just," he taps the nondescript ivory bracelet around his left wrist, "contained. For me to even begin being useful I would need some way to discharge all of that, while I would be in a mental state where—you are certainly aware of all that I did when I was under that backlash."

"It's just Traceless, if I wanted 'Mr.' I'd have used my civvie name. Anyway, you can be guided in your sleep. If pharma doesn't cut it, I've got a tentative volunteer in the Toronto hospital esper, who can approximately sedate people with her power. Well, volunteer. I'd be trading favors. But if she's necessary she's in. Can you check for compat with that on?"

He extends a hand palm up.

(He hasn't had the opportunity to check. It's not like they've been sending him esper visitors, and when—well. Never mind. He hasn't had the opportunity to check.)

Haru brushes his fingertips against Jaeha's.

He feels like a non-esper.

"Nothing on my end."

"Yeah, figures. Anyway, I did make a lot of phone calls before I got on an airplane. I don't expect to have you back in dungeoneering condition in the next four to six months, but I believe I've got the ducks in a row, except for you. If you're not interested, all bets are off, and that was for a while my primary guess as to why the Korean government hadn't already made some kind of under the table deal with a guild in Thailand or something, but I think in fact no one else has eyes on this and if I want it done I will have to do it myself, so that is what I've arranged."

"...you know what my backlash is, yes?"

"I know what's in the confession transcript et cetera, but I did have to read it machine translated."

"If you knew that taking a bracelet off would remove every single positive emotion you were capable of feeling, as well as the capacity to even want things in themselves as opposed to being scared of losing them, and that it would take at minimum weeks for you to return to yourself, how would that make you feel about the prospect of doing it?"

"If the answer's no, feel free to tell me no, and I'll go home and leave you alone. If you only want to do it if you can be wearing the bracelet any time you're conscious till you zero, tell me that and I'll call people till I know who can authorize it to leave the country. But you sat through hell week like the rest of us, and then you got up again and you started running dungeons. Whatever motivated you to do that, I'm hoping it's still there, because Nightmare is not dead and it is going to keep taking and torturing people by the fistful whenever it damn well pleases for the foreseeable future, and so are any number of its horrible little friends."

He's suddenly so, so incredibly tired. He leans forward, resting his head on his hands and letting out a slow shivering breath. "I need time to think. I, can't, decide, to just, just—" Just go back into Nightmare. Nightmare, which was the whole reason all of this happened. Nightmare, which played the long game with him for years. Nightmare, which showed up five times in five years, which tormented him with his worst nightmares, which took the only good thing about him and twisted it into something horrible and evil.

Jaeha can't decide to just go back into it on a five minutes conversation.

Traceless sits back. "Of course. I don't expect an on the spot response. I can give you some time to mull it over. When does it work for you to have me come by again?"

"I don't know," he says, without lifting his head.

Whatever motivated him to do that, Traceless said. Ha. That's funny. He wonders how Kang Jaehyuk is feeling, that old bastard.

"...okay, I'll go do tourist shit and come back in, say, two days if I don't hear from you? I don't know if you have email access here."

"I don't." Probably he could if he wanted but he does not want.