"I am not sure I'll be able to figure out when you're asleep and was figuring I'd wait for your pulse to slow down as a hint?"

"Oh.

"I think all of the places with pulses are kind of sensitive."

"...I can just go by breathing."

"We can try wrist, I guess."  He offers his hand and when Haru takes it he grips it back in a loose and flopped sort of Roman handshake.

"Sure."

His pulse fluctuates some but in a way where it's hard to compare to itself unless Haru starts counting it out and writing down the results.

He opens up a tap-to-measure-BPM webapp and every few paragraphs he checks again.

It's sort of decreasing, very non-monotonically, for a pretty long while before it drops off comparatively sharply into something resembling normal.

From there Haru gives him fifteen minutes, then closes his laptop, goes unfeelable for the snuggle rearrangement, and attempts to go back to sleep.

Before Haru falls asleep he's being clutched at and whimpered on.

He is there for this approximate purpose. Wakefully?

Not especially.

Backlash nightmares suck. Hopefully this one calms down soon.

It takes a while but yeah.

But they keep happening, at various volumes.

Haru will get shit sleep. Fine. Some lucky bastards spend their whole awakenings asleep, not that Haru would ever call them lucky bastards out loud.

One of them around 5:30 he wakes up from.  He doesn't go to shake Haru right away (which is convenient given that he's already been crying out for the past few minutes), just starts properly sobbing.

"You are having so many nightmares," mumbles Haru, "wish Health Canada'd hurry up and get that dunmat sleeping pill approved, they use it in China already..."

Crying!

Pet pet.

"My mom was torturing me.  Or - something wearing her face -"

"Jesus, are all your backlash nightmares that bad or is that a standout?"

"They're all that bad.  Or - dreams - they have the thing with the way they feel not matching up with what's happening in them, often.  They are all that scary."

"Jesus. I hope you're all done by end of day tomorrow."

Cling.  "I couldn't really feel the pain.  It was a dream."

"I guess that's better than not that."