"Are you still backlashed?" he asks, hooking his hand behind Tae-gun's head to pull him closer.

"Just a bit." He just woke up and his boyfriend had morning wood and he wanted to do something about that.

He licks Tae-gun's lips and the line going down to his chin then kisses him. "Well it's a great way to wake up." Even if he feels like he needs a shower, but they've had this conversation before and Tae-gun has stated that he feels like "free-use" should not have exceptions.

"Mmhmm."

"Come shower with me?"

"Mmhm."

"Come on, then." Hyup they go.

Hyup!

"So what's your schedule going to be like?" he asks once they're showering.

It's been two days since the confluence started and they've barely had time to catch up. It picked up steam a lot faster than they typically do and Tae-gun and Jaeha were immediately swamped with emergency calls. No emergencies have come up this morning yet, though, so they have some time before their first scheduled non-emergency.

"Small dungeons I can solo, B-ranks or A-ranks, with time between them for when S-ranks show up or I have to be called in for emergencies. You?"

"Similar, except I'm waiting for Nightmare to show, and I'm less able to solo dungeons."

"Oh. Right. How does that usually... go?"

"Nightmare? We go in small groups, a tracker finds a victim, someone with good mobility powers gets us to them, I remove Nightmare's mark, and we get them out."

"That sounds..." Straightforward? Almost peaceful.

He smiles a bit, bitterly. "Nightmare isn't directly dangerous to espers, at least not with competent shielding, until we find the victim and get caught up in their nightmares. What's difficult is that it keeps taunting us, trying to make us get lost, showing us other victims we could be helping so that we can stray from our known path and be trapped. It's psychological warfare." And it goes without saying that when he's backlashed he just doesn't care.

"How come you can handle Nightmare when you can't handle horror movies?"

"Horror movies are two hours of nonstop dread, a Nightmare run is twenty to forty minutes most of which is making our way to and from the victim's nightmares. It's especially easy with a mobility esper that can get us there and back without having to experience the interim."

"I'm very mobile," he observes.

"You're also most useful in dungeons where you can do things no one else can. Lots of espers are very mobile, very few espers can do everything else you can."

He nods. "It's not my comparative advantage."

"...your what?"

"Like, it's not the thing I'm best at, so even if I'm also really good at mobility and a lot better than other people I should do the thing I'm best at instead because very few people are as good as I am at that and so someone has to—I'm explaining this wrong. It's an economics concept, like, okay imagine two countries that export—"

Jaeha kisses him. "I think I get it."

Whyyyyy does he still get flustered when Jaeha kisses himmmmm it's been moooonths since they've been togeeetheeeeeeerrrrrrr!!!!

It's because he's a cutie.