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.

"Two days, then. I haven't booked a flight home because if you wind up coming with me we're going to have to teleport, so I can be flexible."

"Sure."

"See you then." And he heads out.

Haah...

God, what's he even meant to do? He had just begun to, to—to get used to being alive, and now there's this. This random guy shows up and wants to pull him back into doing dungeons and is guilt tripping him into it and, and why isn't he dead already. Why hasn't he died. He should've died, he should've succeeded when he tried. Now he's here, getting guilt tripped by some Canadian guy who calls himself Traceless into going back into that fucking hellscape.

He can't. He can't do it. He just can't. He doesn't, doesn't, he doesn't have it in him.

Traceless is back in two days for another visit.

Kang Jaeha is expecting him, but... he also does not seem to be willing to leave his cell? He hasn't really, ah... expressed an opinion one way or the other on Traceless's presence.

"...well, can I meet him at his cell?"

"He doesn't have any visitor restrictions on his file so I see no reason why you wouldn't be able to if you so wish."

"...okay, do I need to be escorted or searched or anything, what's the protocol -"

Some rigmarole later he arrives at Jaeha's cell.

Since he's not some petty criminal, the prison he's in is the fancy kind, and his cell is basically just a small room, and he doesn't deserve even this much comfort but he can't bring himself to ask for anything else. Right now, he's curled up into a ball, his back to the door, staring at the wall.

"Good morning. Uh, it's been two days. I don't know if you meant to tell them to turn me away at the door and this just didn't successfully happen, or if you just needed to lie down for a while, or what? - you can totally tell me to fuck off, if I wasn't clear enough about that."

"I know I can," he tells the wall.

"Do you have... questions, perhaps, about how I see this working or anything...?"

"Sure, why don't you start by telling me about that."

"Okay. I live in Toronto when I'm at home, and I found a cottage on Fox Island - it's an hour's drive and some ferry time, if you're not teleporting, from Toronto. It's a nice house, at least if you ask me, I live below my means; more importantly it's far enough away from other residences on the island, and I leased it as a silo and bribed all six of the neighbors, though of course I'll break the lease if you don't want to go. You'd live there. Whoever we find to partner you, I've got leads on a couple backlashes that sound maybe workable, would come by regularly for guiding, perhaps exclusively while you are asleep. You'd wear an ankle bracelet and you would leave the immediate environs of the house only with me and only wearing a body cam; I have those already, waiting in the silo. I can get a robot to deliver groceries and stuff, there's internet access, if you need anything else of course you can ask for it, this is important and I don't mean to pinch pennies. That having been said, if this works out long term instead of merely as an abortive pilot experiment in which I just eat the loss of the startup cash, it'd ideally be self-funding. My accountant couldn't find an insurer who'd touch you so you'd need to pay most of what you made in dungeons into a self-insurance account for the first while unless you retain enough control over your previous finances to fill 'er up from the get-go. We do agents, in the West, not guilds, and I can see arguments both ways for whether you'd share mine or have your own for conflict of interest reasons, though the conflict of interest is here sort of the point."

"You've really thought this through, huh."

"Yes."

Goddamnit.

God fucking damnit.

"And Korea's fine with this."

"Yep. Also I made some more calls after our last meeting and you can take the bracelet with you to Fox Island if you want it for while you're awake."

"...the version of me without the bracelet will in fact attempt suicide as soon as he possibly can. There is no version of this plan that does not involve that bracelet coming with me."

"Bracelet it is, then."

"What's the plan for actually getting me out of the backlash hole? I think if I had a reliable partner I were having sex with every day it would take me weeks. Being hugged in my sleep—" Assuming he didn't decide to just turn around and kill the person sleeping next to him before offing himself...

"Months, yeah, though we could get lucky on blood typing."

So. The difference between the status quo and that is that he'll spend months being hugged by a stranger in his sleep and then maybe eventually that'll culminate in him not needing the bracelet anymore (the thought burns like a hot poker) and then maybe that version of him will be able to be useful to society again and do some amount of atoning for his crimes. Which... he probably doesn't deserve, but it's probably better, in terms of—justice served, and harms reduced—than him just being stuck in a hole forever.

He would rather die than go through that.

"Okay."

"...yeah? Okay? You don't have any other questions about literally anything?"

"Should I?"

"I mean, I would if I were you, but I guess it's not mandatory. I'll take a bit to pull the trigger on everything that was suspended pending your agreement and whatnot, and I should also get a robot going on the first load of groceries since they'll take a couple hours to show up, what do you want in the cart?"

"No opinions." He stretches out, then, and slowly sits up. "What would your questions have been?" He thinks it's oh-so-easy for people to say they'd do this and that in his shoes but here he is, in his shoes, not doing this or that.

"- you can probably occupy the mental state of no opinions regarding your grocery order but I think I need you to fabricate something anyway, I have no idea what you know how to cook or for that matter what you will be motivated to cook, if you need nothing but microwave meals that implies a very different shopping paradigm than if you're expecting to be so bored that nothing but watching homemade bread rise can fill the hours. Anyway, I might want to see the house? I have pictures. I would probably want a look at the possible partners' profiles, more details on the pharma protocol for ensuring you're asleep when the bracelet's off - do old awakening-zapped allergies come back while you're wearing that thing, I certainly don't know! - you haven't asked how much the self-insurance fund needs..."

He blinks, slowly. "None of that matters. Microwave meals are fine. If I die of an allergy then I die of an allergy. If I run out of money and starve then I ran out of money and starved."

"- I'm not going to let you starve, I am assuming responsibility for you and if it doesn't work out I'll have to send you back but starving's not on the table." He fills up the shopping cart with microwave meals.

"I see."

Glad he doesn't have to make any decisions.

"Personal effects to pack? So I don't have to buy you a new wardrobe."

"I suppose have whatever clothes I've been given to wear, here."

"Yes, perhaps you could gather those while I'm getting everything lined up."

"I can do that."

"Thank you."

Texts are sent. Traceless spends a while on the phone in French. He has to go talk to the prison staff. But scarcely half an hour later, he can order up a teleport.

The cottage is not very large, but it's charming, with lots of cute little bespoke details that would be annoying to replace if they were damaged. They land in the dine-in kitchen. The ankle bracelet's on the dining table and it goes directly onto Jaeha's ankle immediately and some phone-based rigmarole ensues to make sure that's set up properly. The place has seen previous use as an AirBnB, so the appliances all work and there are a smattering of pots and pans in the cupboards; Haru gives him a perfunctory tour thereof, appropriates the only really sharp knife into the backpack he was living out of during his trip, and turns on the heater. There's snow outside.

One prison is much the same as any other he's glad to see his dry drama queen tendencies are still online.

Well, the snow is pretty, at least. And the cottage is cute. Not that it matters.

Alright. What... now.

"I got stuff to knock you out with in the same order as the groceries, it should be here in an hour or so, if it's all the same to you I'll stay put so I'm not buying too many teleports, and then you can crash and we can see - well, I can see, anyway - if you're compatible with me even though you probably aren't just because it'd be so convenient. You're also getting a winter coat in case you need to shovel snow or anything, and, like, a toothbrush and stuff. Wifi password's on the wall, I assume you have one of those implant things that's all over Asia still but if you don't I can get you a phone. Laundry's in the basement. Questions, comments, concerns, blank staring at the wall?"

"I don't have the implant anymore, they got rid of it when I was arrested, but I do have a phone. I can be knocked out whenever, I guess."

Traceless gives him a thumbs-up and takes a seat at the dining table and pulls out his laptop to do some kind of laptop thing and not further hassle Jaeha, till the robot alights on the doorstep and disgorges groceries, a parka, and a pharmaceutical prescription. If Jaeha doesn't get up to help he will put away all the groceries himself - it's mostly microwavable trays of dinners but he's also gotten Jaeha ice cream and pop tarts and a bag each of carrots and apples. And then he fills up a glass of water and decants a little peach-colored gelcap to offer him. "Takes about fifteen minutes to kick in, so that's time to hit the bathroom if you need it and go lie down."

He does in fact help Traceless; it's only polite. Then, yeah, sure, he'll use the bathroom and go lie down.

Traceless locates a box of nitrile gloves so he can handle the bracelet without coming into contact with it, once Jaeha's out.

The pill works really well. That one dungeon that was putting people to sleep with a gas and masking its smell psychically, distilled into pill form. It'll give you asparagus-pee-smell but that's all. This is on the fact sheet, which Traceless leaves on the kitchen table for when Jaeha wakes up. Fifteen minutes to digest the coating and get the drug past the blood-brain barrier, and he's out.

Gloves on. Bracelet off.

...whoa, he was not expecting that.

Convenient, anyway.

He sets himself a timer, de-shirts the both of them, snuggles up, and pulls up Cyrano de Bergerac on his computer.

Jaeha wakes up, re-braceleted, shirt still off but with a blanket on, eight hours later. (They can get him a stronger dose if they ever want to do more than that in a row.) Traceless is in the kitchen at his laptop again.

Blink. 

Blink blink.

He goes to the kitchen.

There's no one other than Traceless there.

"...huh."

"I was surprised too, but yeah, turns out we're highly compatible, I should be able to handle this without diverting any of my charity budget toward bribing people to come by and lounge on you. I'm going to guess you have no opinions whatsoever on how to schedule anything, but of course correct me if I'm wrong and you like being nocturnal or something. Additional good news is I'm already really used to sitting with a partner who does not in any way acknowledge my presence while I make phone calls and stuff, so that's useful."

"...you are? Why?" He guesses he has no idea what Traceless's backlash even is, he'd just been going by Traceless's own expectations that they wouldn't be compatible and background expectations from the general population.

"My heretofore partner has a social anxiety kinda backlash. Mine is loneliness. So she wears noise cancelling headphones and hides under a blanket and I call everybody I know on the phone while my cat sits on me. Speaking of, once you're doing dungeons, we are going to be around each other while I am backlashed and cannot just call everyone I know on the phone; my plan is that you teach me Korean, it doesn't require you to have any opinions or for us to have anything in common and language practice is a good sweet spot for me."

...loneliness does not sound like it matches him at all but these things are really weird sometimes.

"Understood. I assume your current partner has better compatibility with you such that it wouldn't be worth it for you to use," my unconscious body, "me instead." Or maybe they like each other, who knows.

"Her compatibility with me is better but by a bewilderingly small margin, so the limited literal surface area she presents is enough to make it a net improvement to sit here when I'm debacklashing instead, especially since someone's gotta anyway and I don't have to go to any further effort to convince myself. I'll probably be able to run twice as many dungeons as I normally do if I just sleep on you most nights, though I think ideally you'd be on a ten-hour dose instead of an eight-hour if I'm doing that so there's turnaround time margin and no risk of you waking up debraceleted. So that's an improvement to the previous time horizon."

He nods.

"...I think—I have a lot of difficulty modelling my backlashed self—if he couldn't find an immediately obvious way to—get what he wants—he might play along. So it's not the worst possible thing if he does wake up without the bracelet."

"I mean, it's still worth avoiding, but good to hear. You don't think I would be at an alarmingly elevated risk of being murdered or anything?"

"He... might try it if he were completely certain he would succeed... My powers don't involve anything physical so handcuffs ought to maybe suffice. —what are your powers?"

"Well, in the interest of him not being completely sure he'd succeed I do in fact have a secret one which would be helpful, but publicly, I'm selectively imperceptible, I already mentioned psychic stuff bounces off me, and I can also fly."

"So he'd... probably not try to use handcuffs against you." The thing is Jaeha has no idea what his backlashed self would even want. To be dead, probably, because his current self also (mostly) wants that, but he—thinks he's—no longer obsessed with don'tthinkthename—or at least he's certain he's never going to ever interact with don'tthinkthename. And he shouldn't. And the fact that Jaeha still misses him like he'd miss a limb, like he'd miss a piece torn out of his chest, is immaterial. They should never, ever meet again. Jaeha should never, ever, ever be allowed to sully him again.

"Yeah, I can get a pair, and a bottle of ten-hour."

He nods.

...and then goes to see if he can find anything to eat. Since he should probably not starve himself.

Traceless has already helped himself to a frozen dinner, as evidenced by the fork he gets up to stick in the dishwasher - he was flopped on Jaeha for hours. Once the fork's away: "Those drugs get mixed reviews on how restful the sleep is, do you feel like you slept or just like eight hours mysteriously passed?"

He considers this. "More like the second thing, I think." He's not going to mention that that's how sleep always feels to him, lately. It doesn't seem useful.

"Then you should probably also get real sleep, after you've eaten, and I guess I should plan on the guiding mostly happening during the daytime to account for that. I'm going to go tie up all the loose ends I left dangling since I didn't know if you were coming to Canada or not, and I will be back tomorrow, midmorning, maybe after a dungeon if they can find me a suitable one in that timeslot on short notice. Try to move around and stuff so you don't atrophy, maybe shovel snow or something. You can get all the way out to the fence around the house without the bracelet alerting, I tested that."

"—are there any, ah... exercise materials? Weights, dumbbells...?" It somehow didn't occur to him that the cottage wouldn't have anything resembling a gym. Not that prison had much of one, people would've had too much opportunity to hurt each other with exercise weights, but they had, like, bars you could hang off of and reasonably breakable jump ropes and stuff.

"No, but if you want to pick some out, you can order them." He slaps down a debit card on top of the drug fact sheet. "That's got a limit and it sends me receipts but if you want weights or a pizza or - I actually don't recommend ordering a pizza in winter on Fox Island, it'll arrive half frozen, but in principle - if you want to order stuff you can."

He looks at the credit card with the faint airs of someone who was just presented with a live snake, except they're someone who has worked with snakes all their life so they're not scared exactly, they're just trying to determine what kind of snake it is and whether it's likely to bite them or strangle them or what.

"...I can get my agent to find somebody who'll take shopping requests in another format if this is horrible somehow."

"This is fine." He's not going to work on his facial expression but he does mean it. "Don't worry about it."

"...'kay. I wrote this silo's address, my number, my agent's number, etcetera, on the back of your meds fact sheet, anything else I might be forgetting?"

How should he know.

"Not off the top of my head."

"Alrighty. I'm gonna bounce, then, see you tomorrow." He starts ordering up a teleport on his phone.

"See you."

And he is gone. Not tracelessly. Whoever's powering the teleport system here has a reversed-color afterimage situation. But it's gone in half a second.

Okay.

Jaeha will... eat something. Then shower. Then lie in bed and stare at the stump where his missing limb used to be until he falls asleep.

Traceless appears at 11:05 the next morning. It is pretty obvious from his demeanor and also the fact that he's dialing the phone as soon as he resolves into place in the silo that he managed to find a morning dungeon to do. "Can you hear me now? Great, sorry about that, phones absolutely hate teleportation. Yeah, no, I am doing teleportation now, I think it's worth the money especially since I'm expecting to - oh, no you didn't tell me about that! Tell me all about that," he says into the phone, while he disgorges from his messenger bag a pair of handcuffs. "I might need to cut you off for a minute or two for some meatspace logistics, but then yes absolutely, let me make sure I'm recording so I can turn it into a post later." He waves at Jaeha.

...ah. Okay, he can maybe see how that could be compatible with his backlash.

He waves back.

"Hey do me a quick favor and read off that checklist I just sent you for me? - yes, I know, it's like that for infosec reasons, I think it still serves the purpose of a checklist as long as I remember what all the things on it mean - well I could have him do it but you know he'd editorialize. Mm-hm, check -" He taps the handcuffs, and hands Jaeha a pill to the tune of another "check", and, "yep, I told Paula to call me in seven and a half hours," and "check", and so on throughout the process of getting Jaeha ready to be knocked the fuck unconscious for guiding.

...right. Alright, then. He can go... be handcuffed, and knocked out, and hugged by someone he is apparently really compatible with it turns out... And he won't think about how much this makes his stump ache.

When he wakes up eight hours later the handcuffs are off, the bracelet is on, and Traceless is no longer on the phone; he's at the table with a microwave curry steaming between him and his laptop, working on a blog post.