"Please don't be startled. Lift it up slowly."

Okay...?

It does not go.

...what the fuck! It's very hard not to be startled by that!!! He freezes but what the fuck!!!!!!

"You can control me?"

"No. It's an illusion." He stops it and now Tae-gun's hand is where it should be.

...what.

"My illusions are all-encompassing. Everything you can feel, I can fake. That includes proprioception. You did move, but I made you feel like you didn't, like your hand was still there. You have no way to tell. There is no mind esper who has any way to tell. My illusions don't change anything in your mind; they change what your mind is perceiving in the first place. There is no difference, as far as your nerves are concerned, between an illusion I show you of something being somewhere and that something actually being there. The memories of perceiving my illusions are as real as the memories of perceiving reality, neurologically speaking. You would not be able to tell if anything is real or being faked by me, even in retrospect."

Oooookaaaay that is a lot scarier.

"I don't need to do my detailwork on my illusions. I can let your brain fill in the details. I can make you believe you're holding a conversation with me when you're not, the contents of which your own brain generates. I can tell your brain to believe that I said or did something with a given character, and let it generate that. I can tell it to believe I said something charming, or funny, or sexy, and it'll come up with it for me.

"I can fake feelings like the feeling of being in a dream, or the feeling of having just woken up, or the feeling of being out of breath.

"I can't fake emotions but I can mute or highlight ones you're already feeling. This is mostly but not exclusively done by focusing on their physical correlates.

"If I have a hold of your mind while a memory is being formed, I can erase it. Once it's properly recorded into long-term memory I no longer have access to it, but until that happens, I do. I can do that selectively, only erasing parts of a memory. I could touch someone, find out we're incompatible, then replace that memory with a memory where we're compatible."

What the fuck what the fuck what the fuck does this guy have any weaknesses—

"My range is pretty extensive, but I can't pick out minds directly; for me to find you I need to know where you are, relative to me, through non-powers means. I need to know it reasonably precisely; knowing you're in a specific room isn't precise enough if I don't know where in it you are. Knowing you're in a room, seeing you through CCTV, and knowing where the CCTV is in the room, is precise enough. I can't use my power through dungeon portals. I lose precision quickly with distance, but the fact that I can let your mind decide what it's perceiving covers a lot of that weakness."

...okay, that's...

"I can't read your mind, but I can feel a lot of what you're feeling, especially in response to my illusions. I get emotional feedback and I get feedback of the major things human minds tend to find easy to keep track of, such as whether they're looking at a face and whether they recognise it.

"You're scared of me, and you should be. My powers are terrifying. The fact that I never told you this before is terrifying. The fact that I've used my power on you should be terrifying. From the start, from before we partnered. I've lied to you, and I've messed with your memories, and I've made you see and feel things. I've done that to everyone, I do it constantly, I don't even know how to interact with normal people in normal ways. I'm constantly going through life with cheat mode enabled. I didn't feel guilty, I wasn't capable of feeling guilty, not under all of that backlash that I was never sufficiently compatible with anyone to get rid of. 

"Anyone but you.

"But you can't trust anything you've perceived around me, you can't even trust that I'm telling the truth now, and, and if you were smart you'd leave. If you were smart you'd run away, you'd tell everyone about this NDA be damned because I'm a risk to humanity, because my usefulness doesn't outweigh the risks, doesn't outweigh how much I can, how much damage I can do. 

"I don't know what I want but part of me hopes you'll do that, because then I won't have the chance to lie to you and hurt you again, because I can't live with the fact that I've done this to you already."

And then

he

stops

using his power. He stops watching Tae-gun's emotions. He stops listening to anything but Tae-gun's panicked breathing and heartbeat, he still doesn't look up because he doesn't want to know what horrified, disgusted faces Tae-gun must be making. He doesn't want to know. He can't know.

"—I, I need to think about this. I should, I—"

"Go. Do what you must, get away from me, find somewhere safe. I'm not—safe. I don't deserve you, and I don't—I just keep manipulating you with my words, just go."

...he goes.

fuck.

Jaeha stays up all night. He tries to tell himself he's not waiting for Tae-gun but that would be a rotten lie, every waking moment of his revolves around Tae-gun. He at least manages not to obsessively check his messages and just lies in bed keeping only his own miserable self for company.

He cancels the next day's dungeons. If he goes into a dungeon, he'll get backlashed and he does not trust his backlashed self to be sensible about it, it would be so so easy for him to slide back into a version of himself that would, would try to optimise Tae-gun, to figure out the words to say and the things to do to get Tae-gun back and he, he can't. He can't do that. He can't do that to his Tae-gun, to the man he loves, he needs to make it possible for Tae-gun to decide to never touch him again and never see him again and never think about him again and the only version of him that would ever allow that to happen is the current one. Then if, if Tae-gun decides to end it all, he can, he can make sure that he will end it all, that he'll find ways to prevent his backlashed self from being able to get Tae-gun back like he will inevitably want to.

He needs Tae-gun, but he needs Tae-gun to be safe and happy more, even if that means that was the last time he'll ever see Tae-gun in person in his life.

Tae-gun doesn't contact him all day.

So he's just miserable all day. He doesn't manage to get out of bed until 4PM when it occurs to him that starving himself pitifully because he misses Tae-gun would also be kind of manipulative and pressuring if Tae-gun ever comes back and—something. He doesn't think he can pretend his way into acting like a full normal human being but he can at least not be a useless lump and have some semblance of ability to care for his own biological needs.

He doesn't know what to do. He doesn't know what to do. The answer is "nothing", obviously, but—but how can he do nothing? What comes next? Should he be thinking about what comes next? Surely Tae-gun will let him know that it's over, right? He's not going to be left in limbo forever and just have to guess based on how long it's been since he's been ghosted? That, that would be so cruel, and his Tae-gun isn't cruel, has never been cruel, couldn't be cruel. Tae-gun—even if he's scared of Jaeha, Tae-gun is still, is still himself. He wouldn't just, just not say anything, would he? Just leave? At least a text? Surely he'd send Jaeha at least a text?

When it's been exactly twenty-four hours since Tae-gun teleported away, he sends Jaeha a text.

He set priority to texts and calls from Tae-gun to maximum and he gets an instant popup on his commscreen and he nearly dies with some sort of emotion he doesn't want to know.

What's... the content of the text?

Are you available for a video call?

yes

, he responds immediately.