Here's one of the regulars! He's never given his name, but one of Julien's co-workers swears he must be an esper because he's so hot, even though his hair is not neon. "Mocha and a maple eclair please."

"Coming right up!"

Oh god oh god - it's fine.  This is a sign that something bad is going to happen to him, but everything is a sign that something bad is going to happen to him, so he can handle it.  Here's the card reader.

He taps his phone. Beep.

And then goes over to the here's-your-order counter, right?  Away from Julien?

Yup, there he goes.

It would be an exaggeration to say that Julien experiences relief, but he does experience: the lack of an extremely bad thing happening to him.

The next day, a coworker says something seems different about him, like, in the way he looks - and Julien, extremely importantly, has not done something different with his hair (he's been very carefully showering on exactly the same schedule as before), has not started or stopped wearing glasses (his eyesight is as vaguely-slightly-weak as ever), has not stopped or started wearing guyliner again - nothing about him should be different.

So... that's it, then.  That's the thing.

He should still, definitely, keep an eye out for other things; it would be idiotic to let his guard down even a little.  But this is where his primary focus should be.  Because now, now that someone's commented on it, he absolutely cannot look in any mirrors.  Because whatever he sees there is probably not going to be something he likes.  He's 100% going to be some sort of monster, the instant he looks, and then... it'll be all over.

The next day he has a late shift, and this Timmy Ho's has a west-facing window.  So it's totally normal, Julien reasons, to wear sunglasses.  The sun is right there, shining directly at him.  In his eyes.  It's normal.  Everything's normal.

He doesn't take them off even after it gets properly dark.

In comes a regular. "Hi, I need to be conscious and capable of human speech for the next four to six hours or so, can I get a double double please?"

"Of course!"  Oh god.  Also: putting orders into the tablet involves sooo muuuch looking at his own hands, but probably they're not going to change right in front of him, into - crab claws, or praying mantis arms, or whatever monster they're going to make him, so as long as he's careful every time they leave or enter his vision, then, it - might - be okay.

...Fuck, was that too long a blink, after the nights filled with 'mares - safer to keep his eyes closed for a minute, until he regroups; it's not even like anyone can tell that he's doing it.  (Or, the people running things can definitely tell, but none of the characters can, not without giving themselves away.)  He will - feel - around for - there it is, the card reader - here you go, suspiciously hot regular.

"Are you okay?" Reach.

Aaaaaaa.  "Ye -"  Bump.

"- dude, you are not okay, you have more backlash on you than I do and I just did a dungeon, are you awakening?"

What.  What?  Is this - this is how things are going.  Okay.

"What?"

"I'm an esper - and espers can tell when we touch other espers - did you just start awakening recently with some kind of symptom -" He has his hand extended where Julien could clasp it if he wanted to. "Something which is compatible with me but that doesn't tell me exactly what it is..."

"I -"  If he accepts this questline then in a week he's definitely going to be some sort of ravening beast.  But he probably already was going to be, and sooner than that, and also... realistically there's no way he can unobtrusively maneuver out of this.  He already failed that when he touched this guy's hand.

"I... have to wear sunglasses."

"Well, that's three for three on people compatible with me who have to wear sunglasses, I guess. Uh, you should possibly be in the hospital, or else I could take you to my house, backlash is dangerous and I do not think you should be working at Tim's while awakening because that is insane."

It's..... well, first of all he, yeah, takes the esper's hand, finally.  He's cooperating.  It's after dark, in the summer, so it's got to be pretty late.  He doesn't want to look at devices any more than he has to.  "We close at ten?"

"I am almost positive that you can get time off for having an esper awakening and if Tim Horton's sucks about this for some reason you can flip them off because you are going to be an esper, even if your powers suck you can do better than a coffee shop job. - if you have some kind of short term money problem for which you need this week's paycheck in particular I can cover it?"

"Julien oh my god, go the fuck home."

"- Mind your own business, Elise!"  Also home isn't even the place he'd be going.  Can he avoid going with this man.... doesn't seem so.  Aaaaaaaa.

"It is reasonable to not to want to walk off with someone you have barely met to be clear! But like at least go home with a family member who can watch you or to the hospital, it is vanishingly rare for it to be outright impossible for a backlash to kill you - admittedly it is also vanishingly rare for a backlash to allow you to work at Tim Horton's but if I had for some reason been trying to do that with mine I could maybe have done some of the tasks before I, you know, died."

...Hospitals definitely have a lot of torture equipment in them, whereas options for random dudes are like.... kitchen knives baseball bats rape?  Mayyyybe a chainsaw???  And psychic pain rays, of course; esper.  Back home in the country with Mom is.... no.  Absolutely not.

"No, I can... it seems fine?"

"...okay." He takes a sip of his coffee, finds the temperature just barely swiggable, swigs it. "Uh, anything you need to wrap up here, or - I walked here but my cat's waiting for me out front, stalking pigeons -"

"- That's grossly irresponsible."  Fuck fuck fuck fuck why did he say that.

"He's a person monstercat and doesn't like entering buildings without cat doors."

Oh.  Cool, Julien's going to get turned into a pigeon and then toyed with and eaten alive.  Message received he will stop being bitchy.  "Oh.  I'll... get my bag?"

"I'll go collect Cricket."

So Julien - breaks contact - and walks away from the counter, and mumbles an apology to Elise and gets a hug from her, which is awful until it seems like he really isn't about to suddenly turn spiky and blade-y in her arms, and zips up his backpack, and.... heads out front.

There's the esper! He is on his phone but pockets it and holds out his hand again when Julien approaches.

Purring winged cat on his shoulder.

Yes hand.  Haaaaaand.  Are they trying to make the torture seem worse later by providing him with hand now?  Julien will be on the lookout for this.  "Hello, hello," he says to each of them.

"Hello."

"Cricket, this is - Julien, do I have that right? And I'm Haru, or Traceless if you prefer the codename."

"You have that right.  Nice to meet you."

"House is thisaway. We live with my mom Ren. So uh - what exactly are the sunglasses doing for you if I may ask - I won't go around telling people and Cricket can fly ahead if you'd rather he not hear and you don't even really have to tell me -"

"I think I don't want to tell you quite yet."  He's got to keep his options open where he can.

"Legit. My backlash is loneliness, so I'm very chatty, but I can make phone calls and talk to Cricket and my mom if you get sick of me."

"That's good to know!  It seems fine so far, though."

"That's good. And you're pulling on it pretty hard so it should be gone in a few hours."

Plotline where this guy is nice to him while backlashed and then becomes much meaner later?  "Convenient!"

"For us, yes, I did have to apologize to my partner that I will not be joining her but I think she'll understand, we've all been through awakening, it sucks."

"I've been..." what's the tack, here - "not great, but like, fine - if you want to go visit her?  At some point."

"...if I knew for a fact you had, say, the exact same backlash as my secondary Sparkler, then that would be fine. If I don't know what it is I do not think you should be left by yourself. The most common single way for backlashes to kill people is by driving them to suicide and the fact that you haven't gotten into a corner of it like that yet doesn't mean you won't."

"...Oh."  (Oh.)

"Like mine for example, if I lean on it hard enough and there's little enough of it that I can steer I can keep it firmly in forms that don't make me want to die but it can drive me straight into suicidality-inducing delusions and I would have needed supervision during awakening even if I had wanted to be alone, which, well, conveniently - after a fashion - I did not."

The situation is going to drive him to attempt suicide and he Should Not do that unless he can accept that whichever of "they bring him back and a new form of torture begins" and "he permadies" is more tragic and worse according to him.  "Oh."

"- so kitty, you were saying about How I Met Your Mother?"

"I think some of the personality archetypes have aged poorly, but Neil Patrick Harris does a timeless job of selling the internal struggles of his character Barney -"

(They can go on like that as long as Julien doesn't have anything to say.)

Yeah he does not.  This is preferable.

And here's Haru's house. His phone and fingerprint unlock it; beep. When they get in, he (still asking Cricket questions about How I Met Your Mother) pulls his shirt off.

Oh.  Aaaaaaaaaaaa.  Sure.  Sure, right, that makes sense.  Julien will close his eyes and do the same.

Haru holds up his arm in a shoulder-putting fashion but doesn't close the distance. "- so it didn't say on IMDB?"

"I didn't check IMDB. I really doubt they had even cast the mother at that point, and the fact that she's white was already pretty obvious from looking at Ted's kids."

Julien has no idea Haru does this because his eyes remain closed.  It'll take him a minute to correctly psych himself up to be unsurprisable about looking down at himself and seeing a fly body or whatever.  And if he's unsurprisable then there will be no point in trying to surprise him with it right now.

"Yeah, that's - Julien? How much can I read into the shirt, here, I don't want to presume."

"Uh, it's -"  If Haru touches him then that's a really easy opportunity for Julien to feel the hand hit something that isn't his regular body map.  So he should touch Haru, but he also needs to psych himself up for that in the right way...  "I need a minute."

"Okay. - so they locked themselves into a white-passing mother so it doesn't super matter whose leg it was, nobody except that weird feet website is going to check."

"Right. Anyway, the umbrella -"

Wow it's really hard to think while other people are talking.  But he can't walk away because his eyes are closed and he doesn't even know the layout of this place well enough to attempt to try bumping around.

He manages to be confident about his brain being in the right shape after - who knows how long.  Seems like ages, though, and then he can look down at himself and watch his hand as it goes onto Haru's shoulder and be really confident the whole time that it would be lame storytelling for it to turn into a pigeon wing with him staring at it expecting that.

Haru slots into arms-around-each-other while continuing to talk about How I Met Your Mother. Someone named Barney is having a flashback episode, apparently. Julien and Haru could sit on the couch like this?

No no no he didn't expect that - let alone correctly - he's going to -

........Okay, it appears that in this instance he has not been turned into a monster.  And probably once's contact's been established, there's no - rugpull element, left to exploit.

(But that information doesn't translate into ability to move, just yet.)

...okay they can stand there then??

Julien certainly doesn't seem likely to cause anything else to happen.

...okay. Haru has no idea what's up with him but whatever it is is Hell Week so he will stand there and talk about Barney's character arc. Cricket ships him with Robin, apparently.

Julien stands all day for a living, so he's pretty good with this.

...Except that he already did nearly a full shift of that.  So after a bunch of minutes he goes slightly limp to get out from under Haru's arm and sits down on the floor.

"- sounds like sedoretu - Julien? We could sit on the couch?"

"Oh, okay."  He gets back up and will trail Haru to the couch.  Even if it will then take him a while to sit down on it.

Haru sits down. Puts an arm over the back of the cushions, though, like, only one arm, so Julien could sit on the other side.

After some staring Julien takes Haru's hand before sitting, then moves down to place it on his shoulder, and - gradually sidles up quite snuggily, over the course of a few minutes.  But any time Haru moves he jumps.

Okay, Haru can hold pretty still while he is talking to Cricket about whether Marshall, Lily, Robin, and Ted work as a sedoretu. He has to explain sedoretus to Cricket.

Sounds interesting.  ...........And also like it might be relevant somehow later???  It has not escaped Julien that Haru is like, hot, and shirtless specifically because of Julien, and - probably something is meant to come of this.  Snuggle.  (Extremely deliberately and carefully.)

Cricket eventually concludes that the weak leg of the sedoretu is Marshall and Ted, he's just not seeing it, and also the format leaves Barney out in the cold, but it does play very nicely with Lily being canonically down bad for Robin, although Robin does not really seem to reciprocate. Now it is time to talk about Barney's brother, who is just like Barney except a) inexplicably black and b) gay.

Isn't Neil Patrick Harris - should Julien be participating in this conversation??  "Isn't Neil Patrick Harris -" actually, no, he shouldn't be, what was he thinking.  Aaaaaa.

"- well in real life yes but he is an actor, simpleton."

- Is this the part where he gets turned into a pigeon -

No. "Anyway Barney's brother settles down and gets married and Barney's horrified about the monogamy..."

Okay!!  Julien is just going to sit here forever, apparently.  This is so much worse than working even accounting for the "guiding".

Eventually, after a couple hours, Haru's contributions to the conversation slow down. He asks Cricket to bring him his e-reader.

Cricket does this, and then goes over to his catbed in the window seat for a Nap.

Haru goes through the comments section on - a blog? His blog, apparently, he bans a spammer.

If he doesn't look at Haru's computer then it can't be used to jumpscare him with something horrible.  It's not even boring to refrain because there's just so much to worry about.

Then they'll have a low-key time of it till Haru's - backlash, that's presumably backlash? - drops away to a baseline level. "It's late," he says, shutting his computer. "We've got a guest room, do you want to try having it to yourself - mind you'll get worse from where you are as soon as I let go of you till you're up to where you were at at Tim's - or have a sleepover? I think you'll fit in my pajama pants all right."

...The last time he talked - was bad.  So he'll just - well first he sits up, but then he shakes his head.

"......I can recast that as a yes-or-no question. Should I do that?"

Nod.

"Do you want to try sleeping alone in the guest bed?"

...Nod.

"Okay. Do you want to borrow some pajamas?"

Nod??

"Are you good to follow me up to my room to get them?"

Hhhh.  ....But - nod.

Haru's room is upstairs. He's got a fantasy-modded Civilization screenshot as desktop wallpaper; it comes up when the dresser drawer makes the desk wobble enough to jiggle the mouse. He produces a pair of pajama pants and a gray T-shirt that look like they'll probably fit Julien. "Guest room is over here," he says, when these have been excavated. "If your backlash gets to you badly enough that you can't sleep you can wake me up and I can join you, okay? I'm not going to be weird about it."

Julien is absolutely not going to be able to sleep alone, but he also isn't going to be able to with this guy there, otherwise he would have while not being bored on the couch.  Nod.

"You want first crack at the bathroom? I can get you an unopened toothbrush."

Nod.

Toothbrush, and Haru disappears into his room, leaving Julien with the pajamas and the toothbrush.

Teethbrushing is easy except that he remembers halfway through that this is more attention than he usually pays to the inside of his mouth and that's a prime opportunity for Suddenly Teeth, so he has to pause and freak out about that and then stop freaking out about that enough to finish up with no opportunity for surprise.  And then of course it takes several minutes to prepare to actually change, especially since there's a mirror.  He can face away from the mirror but he can't make there not be one.

But he does eventually emerge, with clean teeth and pajamas and also still the sunglasses.

"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.

"...if walking is bad I can carry you?"

"- No -"

"Okay. Just offering. Whenever you're ready."

Fuck.  ...But - "Should I talk for logistics reasons, and then shut up the rest of the time?  Or always be silent."

"- I have no idea what your symptoms are or why talking is sometimes bad. I think we can get through the week on nodding and shaking your head if that's what you need and I think we can still do that if you want more guiding than I can do on no backlash."

"...It did not seem like you wanted me to talk."

"I'm not very talkative when I'm not backlashed, and when I am backlashed I need conversation at a clip that seemed like it was going to be hard for you to sustain so I was focusing on Cricket. But I have no underlying wish for you to not talk."

...Okay, so, maybe the monster is the one in charge here.

"I'm still really hungry."

"Oh! More eggs or do you wanna have a look in the pantry? - or have me recite the contents of the pantry if this is an eyes closed time."

"Either is fine.  I have my eyes open."

"Pantry's this way."

They've got various snacks, a range of aggressively pedestrian things and weird hippie stuff.

Potato chips, then.  He'll follow Haru's lead on whether to take them back to the table or to the couch.

Couch is good. Haru's got Les Mis to read.

Julien is going to scarf down quite a lot of potatoes and then do his slow, careful snuggleup-ing, out of the way of the book, and then - doze off.  Food coma style.

Although... not quite enough like a coma that he doesn't have dreams.  Sometimes there are little variously-unhappy noises, too quiet to carry through walls but definitely noticeable now that he's right on Haru.

Poor guy. Once he's asleep Haru risks repositioning a little for more surface area, very gently.

"-Nn?"

Whoops. "Everything's fine, you can nap."

..........Right, everything is awful but this is in line with what he knows about the awful situation.

Back asleep.

Haru does his best not to move for the rest of the nap. Poor Julien.

After not too long the noises get denser and unhappier until Julien wakes up, gasping.

"Whoa, hey. Bad dream, I take it."

What - Right.  "Yeah."

"Hell week is the fucking worst."

"Yeah."  Sure.  Whatever this is certainly sucks.  And he can't even bite himself to calm down because he's right in front of Haru, and then one of them will turn into a beast with big teeth and eat the other one, probably.

Haru Holds Perfectly Still Even Though His Right Hip Is Really Starting To Dislike That.

Well, Julien curls up real tight in on himself, which is definitely a movement.  It's not aimed at doing anything to Haru's hip, though.

"Iiiiis it okay if I move also, you didn't seem to like it when you were asleep."

"I -" he's got to come up with a pretend backlash, hasn't he.  And maybe whoever's running things will think it's funny, he's funny, if - well first he should get off of Haru.  "I can touch you but you can't touch me, is the thing.  Or else I might turn into a monster."

"...I don't think I follow you."

"If I know - exactly - where I am, and what I am, then I can't turn into a monster.  But if there are surprises then I could."

"...okay. Uh, I don't really expect telling you this to help but just in case, espers do not physically transform into nonhuman organisms, ever, it's just some pigment stuff and getting fitter and more symmetrical."

Hahahahaha yeah, sure, espers in the real world don't.  "I know."

"And psychological backlash is often a little malleable though I guess it's completely plausible that this is the best you can do at the moment. But if the idea is just - that you need to be the one to close the distance - that's simple, I can remember that." He crosses his knees to quiet the angry hip, stretches out his spine a bit, holds out his arm again.

Julien - should be thinking about this as a negotiation, as, he did a thing that was maybe causing more entertainment for the showrunners, but also kind of making things easier on himself.  He really and truly has no idea what they want, no way of guessing it.  So to play it safe, he should... give them crumbs.  Something to entice them.  Make it look like he's working his way up to something juicy.

Arm.  Snuggle.  "Does... do you think that would work for more - traditional - forms of guiding?"

"Uh, I can't say I've ever specifically tried to hold perfectly still while someone kissed me before."

"....Maybe before that we could try - you letting me know where... places you might move are.  Like if I know you're going to be moving your hand around my arm, then I can - take a minute, to pay attention to my whole arm in the right way, and then say go."

"...sure, I can try to do that. Does this only apply to parts of me that are in contact, you've mostly seemed okay about me turning pages...?"

"Yeah it's about contact."

"Gotcha. Uh, I'm comfortable at present but as a dry run how about - I'd like to pick up my arm and switch to having my wrist on your right shoulder, give my elbow a break from being extended?"

"Okay."

Haru stretches out his arm and repositions as described.

Julien doesn't jump.

"Success."

"Success."

If that seems to be all Haru returns his attention to Les Mis.

Okay????  Confusing.

(If this carries on long enough he might get dozy again.)

It doesn't go on that long. Eventually Haru says, "Thoughts on lunch?"

Okay, okay, so, the thing is, the last time he made the very slightest foray into anything resembling 'fun' conversation, everything got very scary very fast, and like, was really bad not even from a simulation perspective.  He would have been pretty upset even if it had happened in the real world.  The monster said something that - customers at Tim's sometimes treat him like a simpleton but they don't usually call him one, or even equivalent terms except once.  And Haru didn't say anything about it, he said literally nothing.  And the scary part is that Julien doesn't know what it means.  The most concrete idea he has is that Cricket's in charge and so Haru doesn't feel like speaking up against him for whatever reason, out of fear or resignation or what, but he's really not confident in that at all; he just doesn't have any other frames.

But if he's supposed to be kissing Haru then he should attempt, even a little, to be - charming, or something like it; casual, friendly.  If he's too stressed for charming to be on the table.  So he wants to point out self-depreciatingly that he just ate like half a bag of chips, but then something awful will happen.  Like maybe Haru will point out that it wasn't 'just', because some large amount of time passed while he was napping, or he'll say something judgey and disparaging about the idea of anyone eating half a bag of chips in one go, or -

"My secondary sometimes doesn't like to eat when backlashed but if he were going to eat something in spite of that it would absolutely never be potato chips so I assume you don't have exactly his thing."

"...I'm kind of full."

"Okay. I'll make a box of KD and it'll warm over fine if you want some of it in an hour or two?"

"Sure.  Thank you."

"No problem. Do you want to do the cooking-while-guiding dance or nah?"

That involves sooo much moving and also there are knives in there.  "Whatever you want is fine."

"Okay. Faster if we don't, I guess, but this is an extremely weak preference and if you change your mind please don't hesitate to chase me into the kitchen, okay?"

Like if he turns into a BEAST?  "Okay."

"I'm gonna stand up when you're ready, say when."

Well Julien can take a beat and then disconnect himself from Haru and - "When."  (Wait was that being the kind of friendly that'll get him at minimum a really mean reply??  He didn't even think about that; it's just the standard response, to him...)

Hup. Operation KD is go.

Not-relief-but-a-lack-of-a-bad-thing-happening-to-him!

It doesn't take very long to make. Haru returns to the couch with his bowl of pasta. "I'm gonna sit back down when you're ready?"