"It's fine," he says, immediately. "Didn't—I guess there wasn't really any way for me to avoid getting dark about this given the givens regardless of whether I meant to. What I wanted to say was just—from a purely strategic perspective and knowing how I work—I will as a matter of fact be paying a lot of attention to your safety while fighting Walpurgisnacht even if that reduces my ability to kill it. So... I mean, it's probably still worth it, I don't think it reduces my effectiveness by more than a whole extra magical person on the ground. Just. Something to keep in mind. I guess."

"My magical situation's going to lend itself to ranged attacks and support healing anyway, I don't expect to wade into the thick of it for kicks insofar as I can avoid that."

"Hopefully this time we'll be given the luxury of that choice."

"...how did it happen, last time -"

"Well most of the magicals didn't really believe me until the last week. Or, like, they wanted to keep their options open, was what the guy in Minato said. And they were very—standoffish even then, and started hoarding their seeds and—it was just a mess. Disorganised. There was any attempt at trying to converge and attack but people were bad at communication and I spent so much magic having to stop time and rescue people and rewind time to save their lives and then—when I wasn't looking—I barely had any more magic left, I had used up all of our seeds and my gem was almost black and you were—"

"Okay. So. Coordination this time. You'll have to - brief us all on how the witch fights."

He takes a deep breath,

and chills out.

"Yeah. I have much better notes on what the fuck is up with it this time than I did the last time. It's too fast, is the problem, even faster than the origami witch or the doll witch, and I can deal with how fast it is but most other people can't so we need to figure something out that'll be—robust."

"We can't just all hold a string?"

"Yeah, but—if we're all together we're easy targets, the witch can well behead all of us in one go—and if we're separate it's harder for the string not to be a hindrance—which means that whatever setup we do in time stop—I mean, whenever we resume time we need to be ready to react immediately."

"Makes sense. We could have - several teams, with you going between them to allow each one to do time stop things in separate places? Puts a lot on you, but..."

"There's gonna be a lot on me anyway," he shrugs. "Especially if..."

Handkiss.

He sighs, then shakes his head and forces himself to smile. "That's defeatist. We don't win unless we plan to. And I'm getting my hands on some large-scale explosives."

"Yeah. Maybe all this thing needs is a good carpet bombing."

"That sounds fun."

"Does it?"

"Yeah! Make it go boom like fireworks for—"

"—having the audacity to think it could hurt you twice."

"I love you."

"I love you too."

Dinner is delicious. Haru goes back to Yutaka's place after, to make out and maybe have a small amount of - okay a medium amount of sex, it's just really good okay, he wants to try topping and it turns out it puts him in a very kissy mood, he just starts kissing Yutaka somewhere in there and doesn't stop doing it till a while after they've finished - and then when they're decent again, he summons Kyubey, who comes out from under Yutaka's refrigerator like that's a remotely normal way to behave. Thank goodness they didn't decide to fuck in the kitchen.

And - malaria. He's been worried that he's gotten so emotionally convinced that this loop won't stick, that he's going to lose all his progress and all his memories, that he won't have the oomph for it "anymore". But Kyubey says he can do it, though he might be a more powerful magical boy afterwards if he's worked up about it, so he notebooks about it for a bit.

Because, man, fuck malaria. Nobody in Tokyo has it? Good for Tokyo, but Tokyo's not special besides that they live here. The Indian curry they just had, the guy who brought that cuisine to Japan might have relatives dying of malaria. Africa's riddled with it. South America and Indonesia have it. In putting it off this long he's probably gotten, like, several dozen babies killed, or something, which he will stand behind as an expected value calculation because Tokyo also contains several dozen babies but would sure stammer about if he had to do this to any of the African parents' faces. He can be emotional about that just fine, when he tries, when he reaches for the vision of the sobbing parents and the relieved invalids and the astonished doctors.

"I wish for the eradication of malaria," he tells Kyubey firmly, as soon as he's written himself up into a peaky froth, before one more mosquito bite can turn into anything more than an itch.

Kyubey reaches out with its ear-tendrils to complete the contract, passing through him like he's insubstantial -

And he is suffused with a golden glow and he's holding his - self - in his hands and he can feel the way his muscles work like his perfect telekinetically obedient servants instead of spastic insurrectionists, and he beams and lets his gem assume its place on his costume, and picks Yutaka up - because he can do that now, he won't drop him and collapse in a heap - and spins him around, cackling.

Yutaka laughs as he's spun. "Congratulations!"