"It wasn't an outright threat? Someone just - mentioned, at the wrong time, that the last time the government of Japan heard anything about Cricket, Hasegawa was responsible for him. Reformed monsters should absolutely have legal personhood, but if you have a test case who maybe speaks any Korean and can get through a conversation with the average person without telling them that they could costlessly be replaced with an equivalent volume of Styrofoam, Cricket is probably not the ideal show trial candidate."

That's... true... but Quasar will go to bat for either of them if they want. Option's on the table.

Anyway! If that's all squared away then they are both officially members of Quasar, now! Their comm systems should have access to the internal Quasar apps, including the one where they will be receiving their dungeon assignments according to their declared specialties and preferences, there's procedure for changing that if they want to, they've got a lot of leeway to figure out what works best for them during their first month, etc etc, welcome!

Hurrah!

They can go introduce Cricket to his wing of the house (Cricket requires a cozy catbed and a television with a large-buttoned remote) and Haru can do some unpacking - he's going to sleep in Jaeha's bedroom with him but there's enough space that he can commandeer a room as an office! - and Jaeha is firmly instructed not to read the spiral-bound notebooks that are to be shelved therein but if he wants to borrow the Shakespeare or something that's kosher.

"Am I at least allowed to know what's in the notebooks or is that a secret, too?"

"Lots of different stuff, I usually have one on me and if I need to write down 'pick up a loaf of bread' that'll be where it goes instead of my phone sometimes. But the reason they're private is that I do a lot of processing my thoughts in 'em, I like to have stuff written down where it can't move around and get all vague on me so I can decide how I feel about it."

...man why does he also find that endearing. He is starting to suspect foul play.

"Is that something you use to deal with your backlash feelings?" Does he write about Jaeha in those notebooks? Jaeha's desperately curious to know that, but—he's not going to read them. If the feelings aren't happening directly in front of him for him to know how to act they're less useful anyway.

"No, I can't do it while I'm backlashed, which is really really annoying, I have useful skills accumulated from the practice that I can still use when I'm backlashed but I can't sit down and write things to myself in private for long enough at a stretch when I'm like that. I have to do it all in retrospect. One of the many reasons cooperating with myself is so important."

"—huh. And why the—paper notebooks? I don't think I've written anything longform to any appreciable extent in years."

"I can do it typing, but I want a full keyboard, and that's a little more annoying to whip out in arbitrary locations. Also going electronic makes it a bit higher friction to switch languages, I don't really notebook in Korean unless I'm doing it as deliberate practice - backlash is good for making me do practice conversation but what originally drew me to Korean was the elegance of Hangul - but I mix Japanese and English and weird terms of art I made up symbols for in there all the time. And I draw diagrams and stuff."

"That sounds—fascinating is the word I'm coming up with but it sounds weirdly condescending if I just say it without any disclaimers. Really cool, maybe?"

"Thanks! Sometimes I do a similar process about things that aren't private, I can try to remember to call you over if it happens when you're around."

"I think I'd like that."

"I'll make a note of it." He does this.

Definitely foul play. There's zero reason why this would make him want to kiss Haru and yet.

He's allowed, though, right?

He's allowed!

"So that reminds me because of how you are carrying around an assload of it - is your backlash secret because it's private, like you don't actually want anyone to know and the NDA is a belt and suspenders thing, or -"

"—ah. It's—" He'd been tempted to tell Haru the first time he asked, so now he finally can. 

The abridged version, that is. 

"Yeah. It is that."

"It's anhedonia. Loss of motivation, apathy, an inability to want anything. When I manifested, I—didn't try to kill myself, not very hard, but it wasn't because I didn't want to."

"You do an awful lot of dungeons, considering, how d'you do that?"

"I run on autopilot. It's what I've been doing, it's easier to keep doing it than stop and do something else if it all feels the same. It's not like I have any criteria to make a different decision."

"You are... also a lot hornier than I would have expected based on that description."

"Being guided still feels nice even when nothing else does. And—it's the only thing that makes anything else feel good again. Coupled with none of my previous partners having been as compatible with me as you are, I needed to have sex with them to get as much guiding as I do by holding your hand. 

"It makes me become myself again." Or something like that.

"I think you should take a vacation, tell them not to call you unless it's Nightmare and then only go in with me to hand, get to zero as quickly as possible, and - check in with yourself - it's awkward timing since you just switched guilds but did Juno have people who knew this, were they just running you into the ground because they weren't sure they'd ever get you started again if they let you lose momentum?"

He blinks. 

He's really not sure what to say to that.

"Like, if your previous partners were not adequately down to fuck, that's - tragic, but - ratcheting you up to this point when you don't have the access to your own motivational system that would let you do anything else looks actively malicious? Like, seriously, do you want to fucking sue them? If we stay in bed all week will you want to sue them then? You're not okay and they kept sending you into dungeons! There are going to keep being dungeons for the foreseeable future! It is of course inexcusably tragic if somebody gets eaten by a dungeon while you're on vacation and it is also inexcusably tragic if someone else gets eaten by a dungeon in two decades because all your organs quit on you and you weren't even on vacation such that you could be wheedled out of it with a bonus and a promise that it's an exceptional circumstance! Have you had so much as a pleasant afternoon when I wasn't there in the last eight years?? Or done anything that wasn't suggested to you - don't sue them on my say-so, think about it and decide when you're at zero, I'm fucking pissed at those amateurs though -"

Why is that so incredibly attractive.

"I don't—think they were aware of how much backlog I have," he says, because he thinks that asking Haru to channel that anger into fucking him would be the wrong move.