"Well, we'll see if any of them live, they want a projected three more days to harvest the joint. It's certainly scientifically interesting though, or it will be if the eggs function as eggs at all."

"Have they ever? I think I've heard of people looking into hybridisation of dungeon plants, but..."

"Not yet, that's why it'll be so interesting!" He divests himself of his bag and pulls up a chair next to Jaeha and flops on him. "Whatcha looking a-"

"- oh."

"Just some blog posts," he says, mildly.

"Didn't anyone ever tell you 'don't read the comments'."

"I would say right back at you but I suppose it is your blog and someone's gotta moderate it, plus it could reasonably be said to be a medical necessity." He unlocks his bracelet and takes it off, as he's been taking to do recently whenever he's around Haru. He's been able to deal with his backlash well enough that he hasn't felt like waiting until night to start getting the guiding in.

Snuggle. "They're not always bad but this was a pretty bad one."

"Was it? It all seemed pretty reasonable and civil."

"Well, I saw all the deleted shit before I deleted it, too, but it's - heavy, and I don't think anybody was at their best."

"Perhaps the deleted stuff spoke the quiet part out loud, then."

"Or it was just sweary and nonsubstantive, a lot of it was that." He's curling into Jaeha's side a bit anxiously.

Why is he anxious? They're having a conversation, aren't they? There hasn't been a substantive break in it.

"I think those commenters that thought that psychic espers should have minders making sure we don't abuse our powers were onto something. As were the ones saying that I probably shouldn't ever be around another human, or the ones heavily implying that the Korean government was wasting its money keeping me alive."

"I don't know what the Korean stance on the presumption of innocence but we're pretty big on it over here and also, like, incentives to not explain one's spooky powers are already enough that you had yours under wraps on top of keeping your backlash under a ruinous NDA for years, there's probably somebody out there who would've done the same thing if they'd have had to have a babysitter and instead didn't. Also see my earlier remarks about my opposition to torture. And you've - is any of this helping or -"

"Well, that depends, helping with what?"

"Helping this be less... depressing? To have encountered? At all?"

"Having encountered it just brings it up, the depressing thing is that it's true not that I ran into it."

"I don't think it is. Like, yeah, you did some heinous shit. Here you are on the other side of the planet never going to encounter any of those same people ever again and hanging out with a human being who's immune to you and decompressing from the horrors - or at least you ought to be - and if that's not enough to prevent further heinous shit, by all means tell me, I'm all for preventing heinous shit, but treating other psychic espers who didn't do anything wrong like incipient criminals would be uncalled for and torturing you or executing you would be uncalled for."

"This still seems like wasting far, far too many resources on me. I'm just—after all of that, I don't matter. I'm not a moral patient, anymore, not compared to—anyone else, people who didn't do what I did."

Haru opens his mouth at "too many resources" but he actually startles at "not a moral patient".

"There are not," he says, "things you can do to stop being a moral patient."

"There are things I can do to go to the bottom of the list of whom you should care about, morally. And I did them!"

"Okay, sure, if you find yourself somehow ever again in direct competition for a scarce resource with one of your victims, you are directionally correct, but you're - juking that way far too hard. And you're not in that situation and should avoid it like the plague! I think you're going to more than pay for yourself in the long run and if you tot up all the dungeon victims you've already saved with your years of genuine superhero work you may already be outperforming a lot of people."

"Very fir- that was going to be a dickish thing to say, I will not say it. There's something to be said here about how—I mean—you can't just add these things up and get the result at the end. You can't, can't, can't have people do horrible things but then it's okay and they're in the green if they've done enough other good things to balance or something, that's not how anything works."

"It's how it works about spending resources instead of executing you, even if you start from being pro death penalty which I'm generally not."

He opens his mouth.

He closes his mouth.

He opens it again.

He closes it again.

"Goddamnit."