"Better, thank you," she giggles, leaning on him so much that she'd fall over if he wasn't there. "While we're talking anxiety, is not using the oppa honorific okay? I can if you really want me to, but I have literally only used it with my actual relatives, and it's mapping to fucking onii-san to me, which is just, I, no."

"...yeah. Uh. I suppose that'd be weird. Um.

"...um.

"........would you be okay calling me Tae-gun-ah? And. Can I. Call you. Hye-jin-ah, too?"

That's technically changing things and it's changing things in a dating direction but. But!!!

"Hmm. Yeah, okay. Sounds good, Tae-gun-ah." She leans back and then up to give him an affectionate kiss. "And you may!"

Aaaaaahhhhhhhhhhh.

Heehee. So cute.

In time with her partner overheating, the kettle's ready! Time to prepare (read: "prepare") their instant ramen. And then it's back to hugging him after sealing the little tops to let it sit for a bit.

He starts running his hand through Hye-jin's hair.

"My relationship with Jaeha was good. It was very, very good. And I still don't understand what happened. Don't understand why he did everything he did. It feels like it could've been fine, like he could've talked to me, like we could've figured it out. He didn't need to do everything he did, to keep me. I was already his. There wasn't any meaningful risk of me leaving, it feels like he was seeing knives in shadows. And I knew him before he had been guided enough to be himself, and I knew him right after dungeons when under acute backlash. You can't... take so much from a person and have them still be the same. If the person out there isn't guided, if the man using his name is as backlashed as he was when we met, or more, that's not even a shell of him, that's him without any of the good parts of him. That's all of the bad, concentrated, without anything to make him better. What would I look like if I were bad without good? I'm scared and anxious and self-loathing and guilty and I don't trust anyone and I don't think I have any value besides the work I do and my image is really important to me and if I didn't have any of the good parts of me I'd be—I don't know what I'd be. But it's not me. I might rape people, I might go on destructive rages, I might be unreliable to keep commitments, I don't know."

... Oh, so they're going back to incredibly heavy stuff, then. Uh. Okay.

She'll just hold him, then.

"... I'm sorry," she murmurs, uselessly. "That's really awful."

"And the way I feel when you guys talk about—dealing with him. Is that you're—punishing my Jaeha for something someone else is doing. And I know it's not that simple, but that's what it feels like. And I dunno what my Jaeha would do, now if we could get him back somehow. Unless, unless I'm really wrong about who he was, then—I don't know. But if I'm not, he, he wouldn't—

"But that's the hiccup, isn't it, is that he did. Is that my Jaeha did do what he did. And I have no, no, I don't know. It never ends. It never ends, because there wasn't an ending, the last time I saw him was just before he left for a dungeon and I ran away, and I must've hurt him so much, but I couldn't stay like that. I couldn't stay."

"... Yeah," she agrees, softly. "I'm - sorry for not seeing the nuance, there. Just going 'he's a terrible person,' when it's more complicated than that. Though I do still feel like the - person under the backlash that is depersoning him - made some really critical mistakes."

"Yeah. Or—something. I dunno. I dunno what he was thinking. I'll probably never know. My Jaeha did... do things that were awful and I don't want to, to excuse that. It's just..."

"Yeah. Really sucks that there was a magically enforced slope of evil to trip and slide down from a smaller set of mistakes." Pause. "... Sorry, was that too flippant? I mean it, just, um. It came out more flippant than I intended, and it's about a man's life and all..."

"It's fine," he sighs. It's not like it's false, that's pretty much what happened. ...oh he's not saying everything he thinks anymore, his backlash is probably going down.

They have been snuggling, and she is still petting him.

"Ramen's ready, I think, if we'd like to move away from the kitchen."

"Yeah. Sounds good."

Then they can move to a couch, and have a nice quiet meal with lots of snuggling. They don't need to talk, she can just scroll on her phone between the more important tasks of eating and petting him.

... Then she reads something and makes a face.

"...what happened?" He will not look at her phone because he is a good boyfriend partner who respects his partner's privacy.

"Nightmare's active."

He opens his commscreen to look at the announcement then shuts his eyes and takes a deep breath.

"Yeah." Sigh. Snuggle.

He rests his cheek on the top of her head. "...on the bright side this means that a lot of other S-ranks will start appearing." Pause. "I mean, that's not good, just, we'll be distracted, uh."

Snort.

"Yeah. And we both do like to keep busy." And Nightmare being active means that Kang Jaeha is, you know, mostly accounted for? He is in a place that is not near either of them. Racking up even more backlash that is taking away all of the parts of him that made him good. Yaaaaaay. "Maybe we'll get to kill another one. Not that I'll be trying to do something stupid to get the chance, just."

"...well if we have a lot of sex..."

"Is that a proposition, or a future plan of 'Hey guys, do you mind if we go into the S-rank dungeon and fuck'?" she teases, amused.

"Once I am done having feelings for the day I am going to fuck you into tomorrow but I meant the latter."