"Sleep well," says Haru, and he goes into the bathroom himself.

Sure, lol.

Okay, the guest room was - Haru said that door, and it could have any number of things inside of it, such as mirrors or monsters or - anything.  He gets his head in order and goes in.

The guest room has a bed! A nightstand! A window, with curtains! No mirror, as it happens. There is a dresser. There is a wall hanging that might be from India or something.

Okay Julien is going to - first of all, turn on the light and close the door behind him, and then do brains about the window before making sure the curtains are as tight and opaque as he can make them, and then - get in the bed, and with the lights and sunglasses on, try and endure the next however many hours.

He does, despite himself, drift off at a few points.  He dreams of being chased through warehouses, of being caught and torn apart, of being stitched back together in new configurations.  Of being eaten by a tiger or lion or something - he only sees the eyes, while it's stalking him, and then the inside of the mouth, while he's being eaten, and then transforming inside it, as the acid sizzles him away, into something even more large and awful and powerful, with lots of limbs, wings and tentacles and wolf-legs and eyes - and he claws and strains and bursts his way out - it was a leopard, looks like - and then there's the people who failed to save him (were they there, when he was being hunted?  ...it's still their fault, their fault and his right); he reaches for them and grasps them and shovels them into his great mouth -

He wakes up and, right, the light's on and he's in this room, this strange room - aaaa he can see his body and everything is - still the same.  So far.  It stays still the same.  He feels really bad, he - bites his arm, not that hard, until he feels enough better to stop doing that.  He is not going to torture himself for their benefit, they're going to have to put in the work for that, but he - he's allowed to ground himself.  It helped.

The rest of the night continues in much the same way.  He tries to keep the pain to a minimum but everything is so bad and after another few rounds of nightmares he ends up pressing his other arm into the corner of the nightstand until he feels like he can breathe again.  And then he's really really very definitely not allowed to do anything more because the marks might not fade by morning and someone might take that as evidence that he wants to be hurt a lot more.  So instead he just curls up as tight as he can go, clenching all his muscles, and - it's really not as good but he doesn't die of it not being as good, or anything.

In the morning someone knocks on the door.

Hhhhhh.

"Come in!"

Haru pokes his head in. "Hey, you sleep all right?"

"It was okay."  ....Wait - "Do you want me to talk?  Or -"

"- I'm not backlashed right now so I don't need you to talk, if you'd rather do the nodding and shaking your head thing."

What does that meeeeeeean.  Nod.

"Scrambled eggs for breakfast sound good?"

Nod!

"I haven't practiced cooking in contact with another person in a while but I did a fair amount of it when I was awakening if you want to shake off some overnight backlash." Hand?

Stare stare stare stare hand do not turn into a monster - hand.

And they can go downstairs and Haru will make them scrambled eggs. He puts ketchup on his and Julien is free to do that or not do that.

Julien refrains.  (Because he closed his eyes again and toppings including salt seem way too hard to navigate like that.)

There's salt in the eggs. Haru sits on his left so he can eat with his right hand; he manages left-hand eating for himself.

Julien manages the first half of his eggs pretty well but as they get sparser he starts to do worse.

"You want me to nudge all those into the near end of your plate for you so they're easier to stab blind?"

How does he - probably it's pretty obvious.  Even with the sunglasses, even if he's not reading Julien's mind.  Nod.

Nudge nudge the eggs. "There you go."

Well, eggs.

When the eggs are gone - hm. Haru stacks the plates and puts the forks on top of them but does not attempt to clear them with his uncommunicative awakening guy. "Couch?"

This bit would be easier if his brain would - just - get in the right shape, so that he could open his eyes.  He could get walked anywhere with his eyes closed.  (He could also get walked anywhere with his eyes open, but.)

He's so tired...  Also he broke his own rule last night because he didn't eat after work, and he ate some during work but that was before five o'clock and really more of a lunch-sized number of calories, and he didn't notice he was hungry because of all the everything else but now he feels super hungry.  But he's got this prison guard who he can't talk to so there's not really any way for him to get more food.

Nod.