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.

Keep going, you've already started, you can't stop now. You gotta keep going.

"My illusions are all-encompassing," he says, and he's sure the way his voice sounds hollow is just a projection of his emotions but it still feels like a robot speaking with his voice.

He presses on. "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." Just keep going, don't stop until you're done. "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."

Now for the scariest part, if he can even call any part of his power scarier than any other. "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—

Almost there, now, the end is in sight. "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...

And finally, "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."

Okay. There. He did it. He told Tae-gun everything. And Tae-gun is...

"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." God, why is he saying this. He doesn't know what he'll do if Tae-gun takes him up on it. He doesn't, he, he, he loves Tae-gun is why. He can't keep doing this because he's in love with Lee Tae-gun.

"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 had a dungeon scheduled for 8:30AM, and hasn't contacted Jaeha by then.

This is fine. This is expected. Tae-gun probably went to sleep, and woke up, and went to work. There was very little time, really, for anything to have happened. For him to have come up with a decision. It doesn't mean anything. Tae-gun shouldn't change his schedule because of Jaeha. It's fine.

Jaeha stays in bed.

Tae-gun's next dungeon is at 1PM, and he continues to not contact Jaeha.

This is, again, fine. Expected, really. Of course Tae-gun wouldn't have had a lot of time, and even if he had, he can't just come back in that time. His schedule is tight. 

But Jaeha's worried about his backlash. Given the way he usually comes home after a single dungeon, will be really be okay, on his own? Or is he getting guided by someone else, maybe he's meeting up with Ha Si-yeon or Lee Juheon and they're, they're—

It's fine if they are. Really. What's important is that Tae-gun is safe and healthy and guided. Everything else is secondary. Jaeha's petty feelings of jealousy are secondary. And if Tae-gun realises that he doesn't need Jaeha after all, that Jaeha is superfluous and unnecessary, then, then, then good. Tae-gun should do what's right for him. This will mean Jaeha will have no more opportunity to hurt him.

His third dungeon is at 4. Still no contact.