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 his 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, Tagalog, and ASL. 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.

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.

...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.

Man, he kind of doesn't like this.

Not that that matters.

He should probably eat, too.

"How's the sleeping twice thing sitting so far, if it seems bad I can get a bottle of ten-hour and do overnights instead."

"It's fine," he says, automatically, looking for something to eat.

He's got lots of choices in the freezer. "If you say so."

Yeah he'll pick one of those choices in the freezer and cause it to become edible, then.

Typety typety. "Do you need anything, questions comments complaints concerns, or shall I get out of your hair now that you're conscious?"

"No, and you don't need to leave if you don't want to, it's all the same to me."

"If we were doing overnights that'd make sense, I might want to switch to that to save on teleports even if you don't mind spending sixteen hours a day asleep, but not tonight, my cat's expecting me."

"Sure. I'm not allergic to cats if you want to bring it here, either." ...are any espers even allergic to anything. They might not be.

Whatever.

"Nah, he's a huge asshole to people who aren't me, he'd have something mean to say. - he's a talking monster cat."

Blink. "A talking monster cat."

"With wings." He clicks a link, on his computer, and a picture shows up; he gestures toward it. "His name's Cricket."

Jaeha looks. "He's pretty."

"I'll tell him you said so." He closes the laptop. "I'll see if I can finagle an evening dungeon tomorrow and show up with pajamas and whatnot, if that's all right with you."

"Sure, that works."

Fork in dishwasher, empty tray in the trash. "Seeya." Laptop in bag. Teleport. Afterimage and then nothing.

Sigh.

Okay. Well.

...if he tried, he could kill himself right now. Traceless got rid of the sharpest knives but let's get real, here, it would be very easy, actually. There are several OTC meds that can be overdosed, and sufficient overdosing can easily be too fast for medical attention (though he'd need to do research and he's not sure his phone isn't being monitored). Even not very sharp knives can be used to cut himself, he could fashion a sharper one out of stuff in the woods maybe, a creative person with the resources at his disposal wouldn't really have trouble dying and his backlashed self was sufficiently creative and he has no reason to believe that he is less skilled than his backlashed self at anything.

It follows, then, that he doesn't want to die anymore.

Which is a fucking pain because he doesn't exactly want to live, either. So what the fuck does he want? And how would he figure it out?

He's gonna go order some barbells and dumbbells and a yoga mat and exercise clothes with the money his carer gave him and then Google him.

Traceless has a blog, Eventualities, published in English and French with a few recent posts also available in Tagalog, which is about dungeons, espers, monsters, and related topics, with digressions into the translation process, charitable causes, cat pictures, and research methods; he has an official esper profile, listing his public powers (selective imperceptibility, personal psychic defense and flight) and his partners (June Yamanaka, secondary Sparkler); he has a couple of small fansites and fanblogs; he has given out an above-average number of interviews to various journalists, some of which results are crossposted to Eventualities.

Jaeha notices an impulse to try to do deeper research on this guy but he recognises it as contentless and sourced from his constant need for control, which he's let go of, so it's more of a passing fancy than a temptation. He probably doesn't even have access to his network anymore so he couldn't if he tried. 

...but doesn't he...? No he does not and even if he did that's what evil Jaeha does, not him. He doesn't even have a reason to do it. 

Whatever. He supposes he might as well read the blog.

Photography posts! Dungeon case studies! Sex Themed Dungeons: What The Fuck (that's the literal title). Public-information compatibility map of every esper partnership every esper with available data has ever had in their entire careers (this one's a link, Traceless didn't do it all himself). Book review of a history of the early reception of espers and dungeons. Interview with Columba. Interview with Sparkler. Interview with the founder of the Maple agency. Interview with a mundane dungeon squad leader. Interview with an author who's got a book on tour about recovering from being kidnapped by dungeons. "The" "standard" dungeon and how common various deviations from mode are. Cricket's biography. Esper immigration law and practice ft. interviews with three different experts. Dungeon Surveys And Why You Should Fill All Of Yours Out Please. Interview with an esper who survived awakening in 1971 and the zeitgeist of not knowing it was possible to ever guide backlash away in the early days. Interview with Rhombus. Link roundup of all the research available on attempts at propagating plants from cuttings/seeds/spores/monsters that turned into sessile plants/etc. originating in dungeons. (One of them yields a surprisingly tasty gluten free flour.) Profiles of named dungeons, including ones somebody managed to kill after the naming.

Heeeeee is not going to read anything about that last one that's for sure. He's not sure he's gonna read any of it, honestly.

He doesn't want to.

He doesn't have to! The blog will not judge him.

Yeah. He'll just. Sit. And not do anything. For a bit.

When Traceless comes to the cottage next, he'll find Jaeha doing crunches shirtless in the middle of the living room.

Haru's on the phone, of course, reconnecting the dropped call. "- are we back? Hooray! So did you actually meet the unicorn - does the unicorn have a name - there is so little unicorn information that I'm starting to think it's not real at all, or maybe that it doesn't talk or died three years ago -" He waves at Jaeha and goes through the checklist as usual.

Right. Time to go get knocked out by drugs and be hugged by a stranger for eight hours again.

He was kind of having more fun moping in prison.

Whatever. He'll finish this set and then go shower, he supposes.

Valid to shower. Haru's still on the phone when he emerges, and waves again. "I should totally call her but I don't speak a speck of Zulu, can she get along all right in English?... yeah, if it's as good as the English-Korean translation I used that a fair bit on my trip to Korea and it was serviceable, I can make do. No, yeah, I did start learning it but I don't know much, I know basically the alphabet. Yeah, it's a very elegant writing system. I might need you to do my checklist again, if I can trouble you?"

Right then. He supposes the stranger will be... doing his own thing, there, and Jaeha will... sit and wait.

"Hang on a sec." He puts his hand over the mic pickup on his phone. "Something up?" he asks Jaeha.

"Nothing in particular," which is the whole problem.

"Do you need anything, or... anything? I can rain check this person and call them back later if it's complicated, like I said I consider myself responsible for you."

Kang Jaeha is out of practice with managing his reactions in real time, and also has acquired some amount of negative affect about the whole thing, what with how royally those tendencies have fucked him over, so while he doesn't quite scoff out loud he kind of rolls his eyes and looks away and huffs a breath that is almost that. "I'm fine," he says with a shrug.

"Ooookay." Back on the phone. "Sorry about that! Checklist time please? Yeah that's the one. Check -"

Through the whole thing.

Mmhm. Back to waiting.

And presuming Jaeha doesn't materialize any objections he will spend the next ten hours unconscious with Traceless taking phone calls and then sleeping on him.

Nope, no objections materialise, he is a vessel for someone else's will so that something good will come of his existence eventually.

In the morning he wakes up, as usual, with the bracelet on and the handcuffs off. Traceless turns out to have acquired toaster waffles and maple syrup and a few other foods to have around, and he is eating some of the waffles. "Morning."

"...morning."

He wonders if it would be easier to just never interact with Traceless at all. But of course what's easier to him is irrelevant.

"There's more waffles if you want some, I ordered a bunch of breakfast things since we're doing overnights now and I need to make sure the pill wears off like it's supposed to."

"Sure." He supposes Traceless did say he shouldn't starve, so he's gonna go eat, or something, probably.

Traceless puts a couple more waffles in the toaster.

His social instincts, nearly atrophied from disuse, are informing him that he should try to make small talk. Every other part of him is informing him that he should not inflict more of his personality on anyone than is strictly necessary.

The fight is... surprisingly close... but every other part of him is the winner, so he doesn't say anything, and just, well. Waits.

Traceless isn't backlashed. Silence is golden. He plates the waffles, when they pop, and passes them to Jaeha with the syrup.

Cool. He can eat some bland waffles with bland syrup so that there is some stuff in his stomach.

"If you want to do another block today I have some monster captures lined up and will want guiding after, but I can sit with my regular partner if you'd sooner be overnights only."

"Whatever works best for you."

"Okay, if I don't come back I'm with her," he shrugs. Laptopping laptopping.

"Understood."

...but is he going to just stay here or...

Yup after a bit he bags the laptop and teleports away.

Okay cool. Now...

...he needs to buy ingredients because if he has a choice he will not be eating waffles for breakfast. He does not see what the big deal is about Canadian maple syrup, anyway.

Plus, he is extremely bored, and if he doesn't find something to occupy his time with he might go insane. He's not sure how he survived being in prison that long, but something about being out is making every aspect of his existence unbearable. Which is just deserts, really, but he continues to be a selfish person despite it all, so he will try to make his existence a little bit more bearable.

Traceless is back four hours later! He's got a bandage on one wrist and is, as usual when backlashing, on the phone. "All good? Yeah. - so, is enclosure eighteen still free? Double check the roof net but I think it's roomy enough. Try them in there and start rotating through the set dressing and see what they like." He waves at Jaeha once he's put his bag down. "And my guess would be that they'll be carnivorous but if we've got perytons that eat hay then we've got perytons that eat hay, try stuff and we'll figure it out. No, of course keep the shutters closed till - yeah. I'm going to ask Cricket to swing by, yeah, it's not going to work but if we skipped it and then it turned out it would've I'd feel so stupid. Yeah. Probably this afternoon but he's in the middle of some anime and might not want to interrupt till a season break or something in which case probably tomorrow morning."

Jaeha has made lunch. It is chicken picatta. He thinks he messed up the seasoning but it's probably acceptable.

Traceless sniffs the air and smiles a little. "Yeah, absolutely. No, of course you should call them 'perytons' in the copy. Anyone who knows what that means will be excited about it and anyone who doesn't wouldn't be more excited about the dungeon's ID number, come on. - wow, really, again? Okay, send me aquarium guy's number and I will personally hassle him, it's a disgrace that we don't have a saltwater setup yet."

What the fuck are they talking about.

...it doesn't matter. It's not any of his business, and he shouldn't be nosy. He can serve Traceless some food.

"- oh wow okay apparently there is catering here, I'll talk to you tomorrow but do send me aquarium guy's number. Bye!" He hangs up. "I was assuming that was all for you, you don't have to fix me lunch!"

"...I'll put it away if you've already eaten."

"I haven't, I packed a sandwich and was planning to just eat it in bed once I'd come down enough to be off the phone. This smells amazing, thank you!"

"Ah. Sure." ...be polite. "You're welcome." And he will also eat, yes.

Nomf. "Oh, it's yummy - sorry, I talk with my mouth full when I'm backlashed, I'm working on sign language but it's not fork-friendly and also would only help if you knew it -"

"I don't mind it. And no sign language, here," though maybe he should learn—Kang Jaeha your people pleaser tendencies. Chill.

"Sign's very linguistically interesting but I almost never run into opportunities to use it organically so it's harder to keep up with than the French and the Tagalog, and I'm putting off a deep dive into Korean for now, so we have some material when you're up to dungeons and I can't bother my entire contacts list with my chatterboxness. I probably already told you that, sorry."

...oh no he's cute and Jaeha is gay, that's a problem. 

"It's fine," he says, and that might be the first time he's told Traceless that and meant it. "You did mention wanting to learn Korean, yes, but I'm not sure I know why...?"

"Practicing a language is a sweet spot for my backlash, I'm an introvert underneath and can get pretty sick of myself about it so I turn as much of the socialization firehose on things I can agree with myself later are good uses of time as possible. Interviews for the blog, work calls, bothering the aquarium guy about why he can't keep an appointment, studying languages. It's never going to be Chinese because most of the difficulty in Chinese is learning to read and I really dislike the idea of learning to speak but not read a language, but Korean's got Hangul which is a real standout in terms of alphabet elegance, and once we're tromping around dungeons out of cell service range, if we have nothing else to talk about, I can start asking you for vocabulary and sentence patterns."

"Makes sense." He supposes he is really boring and will probably not have much useful to say. "Why do you think you can't learn to read Chinese?"

"Oh, I could, it'd just take up precious time in which I'm sane which I want to spend on other things."

"—sane as in not backlashed? I think it's possible to make teaching hànzì a social activity..."

"Oh, I don't think it's impossible but I think the return wouldn't be amazing. I'll revisit it if I'm ever looking at spending a lot of time in China, but most people have at least a little English and machine translation's usable. Next on my list after Korean is actually Hindi, it's phonetic."

He nods. "I don't actually speak any Chinese family language, just Japanese, and we do use hanja occasionally."

"Yeah, I might wind up picking up some hanja incidentally if I get a lot of use out of the Korean, it's less of an oppressive time sink if it happens while I'm just doing whatever as opposed to committing to a program of study."

Well he probably won't get a lot of use out of the Korean, what with how Jaeha can speak English, but sure. "Makes sense."

"This is really tasty, what is it? Lemon and... they're not peas but..."

"Capers," he supplies. "I'm glad you like it."

...huh. He means that, actually. Right, he can feel positive emotions again, he'd kinda forgotten.

"Capers! Fancy, I don't know if I've actually ever had those before."

"They're nice, but easy to add the wrong amount of, some people find the taste too strong so there's a balance to be struck. It's a bit like blue cheeses, which I like having a lot of but they can easily overpower the taste of other stuff so adding just enough of them to a dish to get their kick while still letting the other flavours exist under them takes some work figuring out..."

"—ah, sorry, I don't mean to talk your ear off about boring trivia."

"Please talk my ear off about anything that comes to mind, I'm backlashed."

"I'll... try to keep that in mind." He doesn't think he have any more food trivia to say right now, but that might just be because he squashed his desire to talk about it by convincing himself Traceless wouldn't want to hear about it and undoing that is difficult.

"If it's too much I can haul out my phone again, that just seemed inconsiderate when I realized you'd made me lunch."

"...I don't think you need to worry about being inconsiderate." It seems like Traceless is perhaps under some misapprehensions about what their relationship is like, here.

"I kind of think I do? Like, this setup here is two steps short of solitary confinement and I am singlehandedly being one of those steps."

"It's not like solitary confinement would have been disproportionate, if the Korean government did that."

"My objection to torture does not actually take as an input what the subject did."

Jaeha really thinks that characterising it as "torture" is a bit much. And you know what actually is torture? Five years under untreated backlash is what. Even mostly-untreated backlash, in his case, was hell to live through, he can't even imagine what he must've done to Tae-gun.

...Lee. to Lee Tae-gun. He really should get into the habit of calling Lee Tae-gun by his full name, even in his head. He's been telling himself that for a year and it hasn't worked, but he's sure it will, eventually.

"Mm," he says—vocalises—rather than voice any of those thoughts.

"Anyway, the Geneva Convention predates the Internet but I'm still your only in-person source of human contact for the next couple months at least and I'd like to be decent about it."

"Sure." He doesn't see why being on the phone a lot would be failing to be decent but he's starting to think (lol.) that maybe (lmao.) he has some difficulty (hahahaha.) modelling this guy. Also he doesn't really know how to move on from this point of the conversation, he feels like he made it heavy and weird if it's gone from talking about capers to the Geneva Convention.

"So, uh, anything else you want to wrap up before going to sleep?"

Argh.

"No, not particularly."

"Okay. Uh. Dinner plans?"

Blink. "Not... really." He's about to be unconscious and have his body used for other people's purposes for eight hours so he can't really cook anything interesting afterwards unless he wants to go sleep at, like, midnight or something.

"I guess it'd be kind of a time crunch to fix anything elaborate. I can get pills that are rated for less than eight hours..."

"Whatever works for you."

"...okay. Uh, I think it's probably not wise to have you go over my checklist so I'm going to - uh -" He pulls out his phone. "I'm going to call Maurice -" The phone starts dialing. "- and get him to do it, but do feel free to interrupt me if you think of anything you need."

"...sure." He doesn't even know what this checklist is.

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."

His actual personality. Right. Sure. 

"Like?" ...also he'd been in the middle of getting himself food so he might as well resume that.

"Like, you haven't been - doing boundary-testing lashing out type stuff, so that's nice, for example."

...why would he do that. What. 

"I suppose I haven't." This was all so embarrassing and he wishes he'd managed to hold out for more than a few days before popping due to the pressure. Way to go on that emotional stability thing, Kang Jaeha.

"And you're not, like, spending money ridiculously, or trying to intimidate me or manipulate me, or - this has gone incredibly smoothly all considered, seriously."

"...you really don't need to reassure me. I was just curious."

"Okay. - now I'm trying to figure out if there's a way to give you my name that doesn't result in you being super Korean about it because I normally go by a shortening of my middle name and I'm kind of allergic to formality. For the reverse reason you might want to consider going by a codename once you're out and about because Westerners will very certainly mangle whatever transforms you want them to perform on your name and you didn't even tell me what to call you clearly enough that I have since that time in fact called you anything."

"...I'm perfectly used to foreigners calling me 'Mr. Kang,' but I'm not sure I'd be able to keep a straight face if people started calling me by a codename. You can call me whatever you want, I'm not going to kick up a fuss because you don't know the arcane honorifics my native language uses especially when we're not even speaking it."

"Okay. Though, like, your codename can literally be Mr. Kang, if you want.

"I'm Haru."

"And that's... not a codename," he clarifies. It doesn't exactly sound like one but it barely sounds like a name! "Right, you did just say you don't like formality," which apparently means not even actually telling Jaeha what the actual name that he's not going to be using is!

"It's what my parents and my cat and my non-work friends call me!"

"I see."

"Then it's a pleasure to meet you, Haru. I'm Kang Jaeha."

"Nice to meet you too. Sorry we got off on the wrong foot."

That's a hilariously insane thing to say. He is not going to engage with it because it would involve a lot more lying than he's quite comfortable with right now.

"So you mentioned your partner uses her power accidentally and then her backlash was... social anxiety?"

"Something like that. I don't know a lot of the details because I have never had a conversation with her. Because of her backlash being something like social anxiety."

"I don't really know anything about this due to, you know, having been in prison, but..." He taps his bracelet. "Surely this isn't one-of-a-kind?" And if it is, is he really the best use of this tech? They could just kill him and find someone else better.

"I did not encounter anyone offering to sell her one so she can retire, but it's worth looking into, I'll suggest it to her brother next time I talk to him."

"Do you know... where it came from? If it had existed seven years ago, I—" He needs to stop himself from considering what-ifs like that. They'll drive him insane. "Never mind."

"Dungeon material. But the dungeon's dead, so."

"It's always the case, with these things."

"Yeah. If they'd known it would do that it might have made the cut for dungeons to let go, but that's a very very short list and controversial to have at all, I don't know Korean policy on it."

"We never let any of them actually go, but any that look mineable or useful get the core placed next to the door and at least one sensor who can keep an eye on new kidnaps at all times plus a teleporter who can do last-minute rescues if the dungeon kidnaps someone and tries to flee before we can get them out. So we're generally very conservative about it and it's almost never done."

"Yeah. Zoo won't take any critters from live dungeons in case the Vadodara incident marks a consistent pattern, too, sometimes I've got to hold a beastie in a warehouse for a few days till they're done harvesting shit."

Alright his reheated frozen food is now reheated, he'll go to the table to eat it. "And this zoo..."

"Ontario Monster Park! Pays for itself these days but I think capturing and studying monsters is probably part of any story that concludes with us knowing what the fuck is up with dungeons so I pushed it into existence as soon as I found people who were willing to run it, and I still supply a lot of the exhibits, I have a good powerset for live capture."

"Huh. Why'd you do it? Just scientific curiosity or...?"

"...you could put it that way but it's not how I'd put it. I'm scientifically curious about how bicycles stay up. I'm desperate for answers about why the fuck aliens landed in the seventies and started abducting people and what they want! They just keep doing it and we keep killing them in self-defense! They at least sometimes contain people in potentia, like Cricket, and yet they won't talk to us and we can't talk to them and so we just keep killing each other and it's -" He gestures in frustration. "Cricket's very special but not unique, there have been a couple other talking monsters, and Cricket doesn't remember anything but maybe one day one will, or there'll be a pattern in the monster biology, or something."

Jaeha is really quite conscious of the power differential here. Really quite conscious. There is no ethical way for literally anything to ever happen ever between him and Traceless Haru. He also probably has a whole minefield of triggers around the whole thing! He's not over Tae-gun! ...Lee Tae-gun! And he's probably going to have feelings related to Insoo, too! ...Kim Insoo, too! It really is a very very bad no good terrible idea to be attracted to Haru Traceless!

Ain't none o' that seem to be stoppin' him tho lol

He looks down at his food and decides that he should in fact start practising controlling his facial expressions again. "Aliens, huh?"

"Well, it's a bit flip, but they're - phenomena that generate organisms even if they are not themselves organisms and they weren't around before, whatever that crackpot who thinks Gilgamesh was an esper says."

"No, I understand what you mean. 

"...Nightmare talked to me. All the time, actually."

"- what'd it say?"

"It tormented me, of course. I—assume you've read up on everything about me so you know I can't shield myself. And I lied to everyone about that, so I always went in, unshielded, and it tormented me. 

"It never used to, prior to T- to Lee Tae-gun. When I didn't care about anything. And then I had something I cared about, and it—it's not true that it only shows you your worst past nightmares, and repeats them. It's a lot more creative than that. It showed me all of my fears. It showed me Ta- Lee Tae-gun dying, breaking up with me, leaving me, mocking me. 

"But sometimes it didn't do any of that. It didn't even pretend. It was wearing T- his face, it talked like he did, but it was talking to me. It taunted me about how I was going to have to keep coming back, again and again, and I would keep seeing the worst things I could possibly see, again and again. It talked like him but it didn't say anything he ever would."

"And then there were other people. He was the most frequent torment vector, but it would occasionally co-opt other victims' nightmares, too, make them talk to me. Not—directly. Always plausibly deniably. But to me. And I was constantly editing their perceptions so that they wouldn't realise it, wouldn't see how Nightmare talked to me."

Deep breath. "Then—a year and a half ago, last confluence, it started wearing Kim Hye-jin's face. And it barely pretended, with her. It just mocked me, every day."

Another deep breath. "And on that last day it called me its friend."

"At the risk of being callous may I take notes -"

That startles a bark of a laugh out of him. "Go ahead. Want me to recite to you the last things it said to me? I remember them perfectly, word for word. I didn't even try to, it's just been seared into my brain."

"Please. Ready now."

"It wore her face, and it mocked me for the hare-brained plot I'd cooked, and then it said,"

"What's going to happen, dearest Jaeha-oppa, if all of the backlash falls away and you tell your beloved everything?"

"I'm going to die. Obviously."

"Really? That's your brilliant, master plan?"

"It's not a plan, it's a prediction."

"Oh, come on, it can't end like that! That's - that's - that's so stupid."

"Do you have a fucking alternative? Yeah it's fucking stupid, I, I, I made a mistake somewhere and I don't. I just. I don't have a plan anymore."

"Fine! Then let's - let's workshop alternatives, okay, I'll help you, I bet there's a way I can pull someone's strings to fix this -"

 

 

"What the fuck?"

"You can't just fucking die! Especially not like that! We've - look I know we haven't always gotten along but we've been together for years - !"

"Dropping kayfabe? That's a first."

"You're - you're the closest fucking thing I have to a friend, you prick! You're the only human that's anything like me and if you go off to die in a corner like a pathetic little worm where I can't even see -!"

"...and that's what drove me over the edge. It called me a friend. It stopped acting like Kim Hye-jin at all, stopped pretending to pretend to be her, and told me I'm the only human like it, and the closest thing it had to a friend, and obviously if that's true then the best thing I can do for humanity is die."

Haru types this all up furiously. "I mean, I don't think I actually agree with that assessment, a human capable of being meaningfully friends with Nightmare while being, uh, generally on the side of humanity, would be big news on the negotiating with dungeons front, but clearly it - struck a suicidal nerve and was probably intended to?"

"Yes, it occurred to me once I turned out to have failed to kill myself that that might've been its intended result. But it knew me better than anyone and it certainly knew what I'd believe, if it said that."

"Do you have a good sense of what things it must have known about you - I don't know if you're familiar with existing basic research about how dungeons seem to choose targets but it seems like all of them have some sort of psychic or precognitive ability to sift through people, Nightmare's just unusually focused on that -"

"Everything. I can't imagine there was a single thing it didn't know about me. It certainly could see all of my thoughts and feelings and memories, it reacted to that I was thinking even if I never said anything, it probably knows more about me than I do."

"Have you been to every Nightmare appearance since you started running dungeons or have you skipped any, or not made it to any..?"

"Every one of them. And I only took breaks about one out of every eight to ten days."

"Do you know if it ever, like, mentioned you to other people, when you weren't there to. Prevent them from remembering it? I'm trying to distinguish between you being one of many targets who happened to be reachable with a strategy that made it sound like you were special, versus you being more definitively special to it with evidence that wasn't obviously tailored for you."

"I've never been told of any—well, actually there was someone once whose nightmare was being captured by Nightmare and then seeing me specifically refuse or fail to rescue them, but I wasn't the one who did rescue them and I only heard about them later. Not otherwise, though."

"...do you know who that was by any chance?"

"A man called Jean-Pierre Fontaine, from Switzerland."

"Probably speaks French, cool..." Typety type. "And it never addressed you, at all, or seemed to target you in any way, before you had your partner as an emotional handle for it?"

"Yeah. It acted like I wasn't there."

"I've... been in Nightmare one time when it hit NYC three years ago, but it wasn't there long - I'm not sure we even laid eyes on each other though presumably you were there - and I wasn't letting it see me, so I don't know firsthand, is that a normal way for it to behave with rescue espers or does it usually interact with them?"

"That's how it normally goes, yes. The dungeon interacting with rescuers signals that they need to renew their shields."

"...they don't usually have a timer on that?"

"No, they do, but other espers' shields can sometimes run out prior to the expected time."

"...is that known to have any particular factors involved, like, does it possibly vary with how hard Nightmare's pushing or is it mostly down to how hard the esper tries in the first place or...?"

"I... do need to mention here that Nightmare is evil, and that its whole entire fucking thing is messing with us in the worst possible ways and you can never trust you know what you're getting into. So, it's inconsistent, it'll occasionally happen when no one expected it to for no reason anyone can discern, and we have confirmed cases where shields had expired and Nightmare did not—as far as anyone noticed—press the advantage at all.

"But that said, it seems related to esper strength, time spent inside the dungeon, and how much the rescuer was being perceived by people who were not shielded. Nightmare can't see you if I shield you, at all, but it can see everything its victims see.

"And—not just that. That last day, I snuck into a queue to get myself shielded, posing as someone else, and—the shield hadn't entirely run out, I think it wasn't very strong but it was still there, and it still talked to me. So it probably has other senses than just that—which stands to reason, most dungeons do, just, I don't know that it had ever demonstrated it before—and if it knows you well enough it can give you nightmares even without being able to see what you're thinking right then and there."

"Oh, I know it's evil. If it's a person it's plausibly the worst person in the world. But it's - information - I have a whole blog post series called Yelling About Basic Research, I'll not rehash it all right now - hm. Any reason to believe it doesn't just straightforwardly see out of its constructs' eyes and so on?"

"Just the same reason we had before, it hadn't done anything to indicate it could do that prior to using Kim Hye-jin's face to talk to me."

"Had it, uh, met her, or did it have to pull her solely out of other people's minds?"

"The latter. Though... I don't think it was really trying to pull her. Just the boogeyman I had created in my mind that wore her face. ...boogeywoman?"

"Bugbear," suggests Haru. "Right. Did it get anything wrong - I mean, besides presumably the personality -"

"...what else would there be? It got her appearance and voice right..."

"Well, I mean, did it? Did it have her dialect, did it misplace a freckle, I assume you couldn't draw her perfectly from memory."

"Oh. I guess I don't know. She wasn't so different that I noticed, at least."

"Which I guess would be the relevant threshold from multiple angles. Did it ever - I guess it never spoke to you through avatars that were originally patterned for someone else but do you know if it does that in general, commandeers a construct from a victim's tableau to hassle rescuers?"

"It has done that to me, actually. —or, uh, it's—said things that made more sense to me than they did to their ostensible targets, at least? But—I don't know of it having done to other rescuers, probably at least in part due to them always being shielded so it'd need to be taking shots in the dark and it doesn't really do those. It only takes a shot it knows will hit home."

"What's happened when it's done it to you?"

"...it was always riffing on the same themes. I was obsessed with Lee Tae-gun, monomaniacally so, so it was always about that. The first time I went into it right after Min Woo-young rescued Lee Tae-gun from me was... rough."

"...should I not pry?"

"...at this point, you might as well. Maybe it will be cathartic to talk about it with anyone." In addition to causing him emotional anguish.

"What did it say, then?"

"I don't remember it word for word, but... it was all my fault. I had everything. Everything, he, he loved me. He loved me, I loved him, I had—no reason—to do what I did. To be, be, be terrified the way I was, of ghosts and shadows and, and, and mirages it itself had planted in my brain. It was taunting me, it mocked me, saying that I must not have really loved Tae- Lee Tae-gun all that much, if I'd let some, some, some dungeon cause me to, to—and then it went on to say that even that was me being cowardly, because, because most of what I did was long after the confluence was over. It wasn't—it wasn't Nightmare that made me do it. I did it. Me. Me, without backlash—at first, at least. Just, just me. It, it was," he swallows dryly and looks at his plate, half-finished now, and he can feel his appetite vanishing into nothing. "It was me who decided that, that, that I couldn't stand the thought of, of—that—he could have anyone in his life. Other than me. I didn't. I didn't have anyone, just him, so why, why did he need anyone else? It was just me. It could've been just me.

"It was wearing his face, that time, and it laughed at me and said that that was pathetic, that being that, that—that if anything was going to drive Lee Tae-gun away it would be how insecure and scared I was, it would be, it wouldn't be his hyungs. It wouldn't be his friends. It would always just be me." He swallows again. "It was just me."

"- what is a 'hyung'."

"—ah. It's. A term of endearment for an older male friend, used by men. Or—it can also have romantic connotations. T- he called me that, and it was—it was definitely romantic there, but h-he also called his older partners, ex-partners I mean, he called them that."

"It never talked to you before you and he had met, at all, is that right?"

"Yeah. And by the time it showed up, we were already in a relationship." Still not looking up. Still staring at his food that suddenly looks disgusting, almost as disgusting as he is. Still, still, still...

...still not okay.

"Are you aware of any other espers it doesn't try to talk to even when there's shield slippage, as a consistent pattern?"

"No."

"So you were plausibly already special to it at your first encounter... how did you start going in unshielded, did everyone just assume that you wouldn't need it and you... forgot?"

"Yeah. I—the first time I went into it I—well, I was going to say that I was already," a monster, "deep in backlash, but the first time I reached zero after the day I manifested was with Lee Tae-gun, so—I was backlashed, as I always had been, the first time I went into it, and I felt—embarrassed—to admit that I couldn't shield myself, and then it didn't matter because it didn't target me."

"Wow. This is how many total Nightmare appearances you've attended over the years?"

"Fifteen? I think? I didn't keep track."

"Would your guilds of record have this if I call them?"

"Yes."

Typety type. "Any characteristics you can recall of the constructs it spoke to you with when it wasn't ones purpose-made for you with familiar faces?"

"It never built new ones for me that weren't familiar, when it spoke to me from other constructs it was by co-opting rescuees' nightmares."

"Right, but like. Consistently the ones that are shaped like humans? Any trends in the victims whose constructs it repurposed or the constructs themselves?"

"It didn't co-opt anything that wasn't human, and I didn't notice any trends beyond that."

Typety type. "If you went out and back in did it pick up new mouthpieces or reuse old ones?"

"It didn't reuse rescuees' mouthpieces—those almost always go away as soon as I shield them—but my personal ones were persistent."

"Did you have to avoid going out while there were any around so people wouldn't notice them?"

"Occasionally, but they mostly melt away as soon as you're out. The area surrounding the portal is deserted most of the time," except for whatever post-apocalyptic hellscape Nightmare is having fun depicting on any given day.

"...how could you tell without stepping out if it was going to melt or not?"