He does. He needs it so much. He spends a while there, he's not keeping track of the time and the blackout blinds don't let any sun in so he can't even use the light to help, and he cries harder than he's cried in a long, long time, possibly ever. 

Eventually he does calm down, though, enough to stop crying, and a while after that he calms down though to be able to pull away again. "Sorry, Tae-gun-ah. I'm sorry. I just—"

"Was it Nightmare?" Tae-gun asks in a soft voice.

"...yeah."

Tae-gun nods. He doesn't ask what, exactly, he saw in Nightmare. He doesn't want to dig up whatever was painful enough to cause this, and it doesn't really matter. He also doesn't ask if this has happened before, because he's pretty sure it hasn't, and that this is the first time Jaeha's gone into Nightmare with so little backlash, possibly the first time Jaeha's gone into Nightmare while he cared about anything enough to have nightmares over it. It wouldn't have been able to show Jaeha anything personal, Jaeha can completely nullify it, but seeing other people's nightmares over and over and over again, seeing other people lose those whom they love, and Jaeha spent how many hours in the dungeon? Jaeha, his Jaeha, his poor Jaeha...

God, being pitied by Tae-gun is almost worse. He turns his empathy off again—he doesn't want to know, and really he shouldn't have turned it on in the first place, except he needed it, he needed more than just Tae-gun's words to be reassured, however immature and pathetic that makes him—and cups Tae-gun's cheek with a hand. "I need a shower." Not just because of the crying, he also spent several hours running around the nightmares of so many other people, he's feeling grubby and grimy and disgusting.

"Yeah." Jaeha is a teensy bit taller and definitely broader than Tae-gun but Tae-gun is strong and can definitely bridal carry him to the bathroom.

!!!!!

He wraps his arms around Tae-gun's neck—not that he really needs it, he's sure Tae-gun would be able to hold onto him regardless—and hides in Tae-gun's neck. "You're ridiculous," he sob-laughs.

"Yeah," he agrees. "Let me take care of you."

He doesn't deserve this. He'll accept it, but he definitely doesn't deserve it.

"Deserving" is a fake concept anyway. No matter how much Jaeha does or does not deserve this in any kind of cosmic sense it'll still be the case that Tae-gun loves him and will take care of him. He'll do the things Jaeha does for him, getting him under the warm water and wash his hair and hug him and tell him that he likes him a lot and will never leave him.

Yeah. Okay. Good. That's—that's good. 

"...sorry I'm a mess," he says eventually, once they're out of the shower and Tae-gun is fixing Jaeha something to eat.

Tae-gun eyes Jaeha dubiously. "I don't think you're a mess, but if you are, you're my mess."

(He's so coooornyyyyyyy aaaah.)

He snorts. "Got that going for me, I suppose."

Man, that was just day one of Nightmare. 

"Should I come with you from now on, then?" There's no way Jaeha can doubt that Tae-gun will stick with him, then, if he can see Tae-gun in the flesh right there.

"No. Absolutely not. I can't, can't—I won't be able to handle that."

"...handle that...?"

"Please, just—this is bad enough as it is. If—if it—please, Tae-gun-ah. Please don't ask that of me."

"...okay. I'm sorry."

"No, don't, don't feel bad, that's just—it's just me. I'm the fucked up one."

He really doesn't know how to interface with any of that. 

"...should we have sex? Maybe get rid of the last of your backlash..."

Is it the backlash that's making him feel like such shit? That's the obvious candidate, isn't it, and just spending the "night" in bed together would not have been enough to deal with all of his backlash, now that he thinks about it, especially if Tae-gun woke up before he did—

(a flash of annoyance)

—yeah, if he's annoyed with Tae-gun for that he's definitely still really backlashed.

"Yeah. Probably. Let's eat first, though?" He's starving.

"Of course."

Oh... Tae-gun's smile is so pretty... He's glad at least that he's not so backlashed that he can't see that.

Tae-gun himself isn't backlashed at all—he cancelled today's dungeons, after all, since he'll be shifting his schedule to match Jaeha's and therefore he'll be taking dungeons at night—so he's not as desperate and mindlessly horny as he usually is. And his Jaeha looks fragile, is fragile, right now, so Tae-gun is careful, so very careful. He kisses Jaeha and he tells Jaeha how much he likes him while making love to him and they don't talk about anything.