("Oh. Fuck. I can't. Fuck. Shit.")

"How has this not come up before??"

("...I didn't have anything I cared about before?") he guesses. ("I had no nightmares for Nightmare to use...")

"Okay, well, that's very romantic and once was too many times for that to happen but we can postmortem that later, this doesn't seem like the time."

("Yeah... I'm sorry. I, it's my fault, I'm sorry, that was so stupid...")

"We're postmorteming that later! When you're debacklashed! In particular we are not doing it where Nightmare can hear you!"

("—right. Yes. Let's go. ...we're already going. My brain is mush. I thought you were dead...")

"I'm okay. I've got you. We've gotta be almost there."

They are. The exit's right there.

"Hidey face, love."

Hidey face. If this is Nightmare it'll be very funny, he bets. Ha ha.

(Please don't be Nightmare please don't be Nightmare please be real please be real) "I love you" (please please please please)

"I love you too."

He takes a flying leap out the portal and wafts to the ground and heads straight for a guiding tent.

...this is alarming! People are alarmed! They don't, like, do anything about their alarm, when two espers shoot out of a dungeon portal clinging to each other for dear life and zoom straight to a guiding tent you step aside and let them, but, that's Kang Jaeha and his partner.

Nope, he doesn't care, they're out, they're actually out, this means that this is real and Haru is really alive, he's going to cry harder now thanks.

"Hey." He can sit down now, still holding Jaeha. He's more backlashed than Jaeha is right now but he's also at the moment definitely the more mentally stable of the two of them. "Hey. It's okay. We're both okay." He kisses the tears off Jaeha's face, it can pull double-duty as comforting and guiding.

Oh God.

"I'm sorry. I love you. Please don't hate me. I'm sorry, I know I, I really fucked up, I—"

Haru squeezes him. "I don't hate you. I love you. It's never been a problem before, right? You just made a mistake."

A mistake that almost got him killed and then Haru would've been alone because he's fucking stupid—

—that's the backlash speaking. "It hasn't. Or, I, I bet it—I bet it's looked through my eyes to make problems for other people, somehow—but..."

"And it wasn't on anyone's radar, like, I could have made a checklist with 'make sure Jaeha self-shields' and I did not do that."

"I—" There are other espers around. He doesn't want to say this out loud anymore.

("I should've thought about it. With every other psychic dungeon it was so automatic, will I be affected by it, if so I'm not going in, and I never reviewed that after I recovered my sense of ethics and I've been so, so stupid.")

Haru pets him. "We should postmortem later when you are debacklashed."

"Right. Yes. Later. Okay.

"...can we go home? I, we," ("I can write a very quick report and send it.")

"...I was imagining delivering a report out loud myself in person but that's the backlash talking, yes, go ahead and do that."

He opens a commscreen but he'll also talk Haru about it while he types.

"We ran into what looked like the locus of the nightmare of someone who survived a fire. We didn't find any obvious safe ways in, and while you were looking for them the building Nightmare was simulating started expanding rapidly and dangerously, temporarily splitting us up. After we met back up we decided we weren't able to rescue that victim and we left. We're now going back to our silo for guiding and won't be returning for the rest of the night. Morning? Until our next shift in the evening.

"Did I miss anything?"

"...you are going to need to be assigned someone to shield you on your next shift."