The checklist is making sure all the incidentals to arrange for a safe and effective guiding session are observed! Pill, bathroom visit, cuff, bracelet, etcetera.

And eight hours later, as usual a fully guided Traceless sits at the dining table. He's done the dishes.

Uh huh.

Well, he supposes that for dinner he'll just go heat something up maybe.

"...what's bothering you?" Traceless asks after a silence. He sounds... not annoyed, but at least like he considered being annoyed and decided not to.

He stops and then turns to look at Traceless, looking faintly incredulous.

"Or I can just shut up? But you look upset."

He can't be serious. He just cannot be seriously asking what's bothering Jaeha.

"Seriously? You want to know why I'm upset? I don't know, Traceless, why I'd be upset. I mean, maybe it's the fact that I abused the man I loved for a year then stalked him for five then tried to kill his girlfriend while under a truckload of backlash, and when I tried to kill myself to atone I was stopped and forcibly made to feel deep, searing regret for all of it all at once in one concentrated dose, then I had to spend a year in prison marinating in it, and I'm now under the power of some guy whose name I don't even know who feels like he needs to be kind to me so I can be properly managed, but I'm probably just being oversensitive!"

...ah fuck. He did not mean to snap like that. He covers his face and turns around. "Shit, I'm sorry, I don't—"

"No, you don't have to be sorry, I asked. Uh. Okay. So... legit. ...the simplest item there to address is you not knowing my name but I don't know if that would by itself help at all or if it's more a symbolic thing."

He doesn't uncover his face but he manages to get his voice under control. "It's, I don't really—" Fuck. Now he's gone and made it hard to be managed. "It's not really my place to ask anything like that."

"...your place? I - look, to the extent I'm being hyperprofessional and cautious with you it's not because of me trying to get outcomes of any particular kind from you. I can't force that and don't know you well enough to try to manipulate you in that direction even if I wanted to. I'm being careful to make sure I adhere to my own standards of conduct because I have very consciously put myself in a position where it would be outrageously easy to become abusive, especially while planning to myself not always have full control of all my faculties. It will be actively helpful toward this project if you materialize requests about the conditions here or how I act around you or whatever because then I can run on information instead of guesswork."

He lowers his hand, then, and looks at Traceless again. "I—we're not here to make me feel comfortable, we're here to work together towards a goal we share and it seems like a waste of time and energy to focus on me and my feelings." Seems like he went and opened a goddamn Pandora's box and now he's just kind of saying things. This is not making it easy to be managed!

"...that is why we're here but that doesn't mean it isn't worth some marginal time and energy to make it as pleasant as it can be under the circumstances."

"Well, I don't know how to make it any more pleasant, under the circumstances. I'm turning out to find the fact that I'm only conscious for approximately six hours a day to be more objectionable than I had expected but I don't see a good way out of it."

"We can do overnights only, I can schedule my dungeoneering for the evening."

"In the interest of transparency my immediate instinct here was to say that we shouldn't inconvenience you."

"This," Traceless gestures generally at Jaeha and the cottage around them, "is my project for the foreseeable. I want to get it done efficiently, humanely, and constructively. If those things trade off against each other I need to know that. If they trade off against my convenience, my convenience can go hang, I don't run my life to be convenient, I don't choose projects to be convenient, I run my life to get things done and I choose projects because if I want anything done right I need to do it myself. - that's not fair, many things are done right without my involvement. If I want anything unusual done right I have to do it myself."

Oh. 

That's kind of hot. 

Jaeha really, really shouldn't be feeling attracted to Traceless right now. He doesn't even know if Traceless is into men that is literally the least important of the laundry list of reasons why it's a bad idea to feel attracted to Traceless. 

"Fine. If that's how you feel then what would make this easier would be symmetry. Tell me about your constraints, too, and don't—" He stops himself and sighs. He feels like such a petulant child saying this.

"Don't what?"

Another sigh. "I'm very aware of the power differential here but when you say things like that I'm your responsibility or act as if I'm something to be managed then you shouldn't be surprised that I'll start optimising for being easy to manage."

"...I think that does actually surprise me but I can take into account that it is part of how you're navigating here. Okay, so. My constraints. I have an informal but substantial relationship with a monster zoo on Lake Ontario, I've got my cat, I've got a blog, but all of these things are time-insensitive on the scale of hours and even days, I can reshuffle them as necessary. I have specialized more over the years into monster capture, relatedly to the zoo, and can generally get a dungeon when I want one and not get one when I don't, so that can be any time of day though they don't like me to jerk them around too much. I might wind up being asked to go sit with my official partner possibly on a scale-of-hours emergency basis because she has trouble not using her powers by accident in day-to-day situations even when she's not doing dungeons because I've become less available but I am not formally obligated in that direction. I don't hold with torturing myself while I'm backlashed just because the loneliness is artificial and will not put myself in situations where I cannot be having a conversation basically the entire time I am backlashed though at low levels I can substitute text communication and suchlike. Is this more or less what you wanted to know?"

"Yes. But also, what obligations you have towards other people and expectations they have of you with respect to me and this project in particular?"

"There's people I'll have to tell if you die or run away, there's people who'll want the bracelet back when you're done with it, my agent has my estimate for when she can start scheduling us for dungeons that are more like your psychic thing than like my monster capture thing and would want an update if that estimate changed, she is reporting to various dungeon handling and international relations organizations with an interest in the matter. Mostly I have been given a really depressing amount of - depressing because of what it signifies about anyone else having eyes on the entire idea of getting you back in action or looking out for your welfare, specifically, not for other reasons - autonomy here."

He nods. "Alright. Thank you. 

"And... I'm sorry for being hard to manage. And for switching the terms out from under you. I realise the person you met in prison seemed a lot more..." Empty. Useless. Lumpish. Depressed. "Subdued."

"I assume I'm seeing some variable mix of like, situational depression and coping slash defense mechanism and guilt and presumably your actual personality in there somewhere, and I'm sort of curious which things are which but it's not a problem if they change with the circumstances and time. You're not actually hard to manage, particularly, I don't think? I was prepared for much worse."