"Oh? - you realize you don't have to tell me what you're notebooking about, that would kind of undermine the thing where it doesn't have to be embarrassing because you're the only witness."

"One, I'm a lot more embarrassed by myself, and two, you get free access to my brain. Those things actually kinda complement each other because even if it's embarrassing to show you stuff it's an ego syntonic kind of embarrassing, like, I should embarrass myself in front of the boy I love, he makes me lose all sense of face or propriety because of how crazy I am for him."

"O-oh is that how that works..."

"Mmhmmmm. What, you think I wasn't cringing when I wrote that sonnet, I was cringing so much, it was so embarrassing, and I was embarrassing myself in front of the boy I love because it'd make him happy and because who cares if it's embarrassing, when I'm with my Haru my brain and my heart are too full of Haru for me to want to stop myself because of embarrassment..."

"The sonnet was good though!"

Well now he's blushing. "Well, th-thank you. But I'm not, like, Shakespeare and it felt so—presumptuous—to replace Shakespeare's words with mine..."

"Nah, people riff on Shakespeare all the time, it's a really normal thing to do."

"If you say so. I'm glad you liked it."

"It was lovely." He kisses his hand again.

He wiggles in place a bit. "Um, anyway, right, so, the thing. About you becoming magical."

"Yeah, what about it?"

"So, um... I'm... scared of seeing you get hurt. Or, um. Worse."

"Even though you can undo it? I mean, in the short term, and I'm not going to get any doomeder in the long term, that's all Walpurgisnacht..."

"Yeah. I, I mean, not scared enough that I don't think you should do it, just. I've. Seen more parts of your body separate from the rest of your body than I wish I ever would."

"That does seem like it'd be... disturbing. Though Kyubey says I can turn pain down and I'm going to have souped-up healing powers, for anything that doesn't actually kill me..."

"Yeah. It's," he licks his lips and clears his throat, "just a me thing. Really. It's not about—whether you're under actual risk. Objectively speaking."

"Is there anything that'd make you feel better about it?"

"You being esconced away at Bondi Beach safe and sound and far from any danger."

"Well, short of that, particularly since that'd be a hell of a commute for you to drop by and feed me grief seeds for maintenance recharge."

"The only real—practical consideration is—I am constitutionally unable to not make you the top priority of my life which means that necessarily when we're fighting Walpurgisnacht I'll be spending a lot of my attention on you and making sure you're alive and stopping time to rescue you and—and—" He swallows. "If we kill Walpurgisnacht but you die and I can't rewind to save you I—"

"If we are in some kind of incredibly stupid situation where I can kamikaze Walpurgisnacht and we can't figure out another way to do it -"

"There's no reason why it'd have to be you. And I, I'm." He's gripping the steering wheel kind of hard, staring intently at the road. "I don't know that I'm that good a person."

"I am."

"I know. I. Haru, I—this feels like—looking at weird edge cases just to—hurt. It, there's, there's no reason to expect it to be necessary for you to—sacrifice yourself to kill the witch, and there's no reason why if we killed the witch but you incidentally died it wouldn't be possible to kill it again, so it probably won't be a problem, but—in these weird edge cases that would constitute definitive proof that God is real and hates me personally, I—"

"You're right. It's unlikely and it'd take way more loops than this to even need to seriously entertain the possibility. Sorry."