Good. He doesn't want to come off as needy or clingy. Haru shouldn't know about that until he needs Jaeha right back.

Postcoital snuggles time!

And now Haru will probably be sufficiently guided that he won't try to make more conversation which means that Jaeha does not need to worry about his insane tendency to make himself needlessly vulnerable, right? They can just start to settle in for the night?

Yup.

Cool cool.

So now that he's decided that Johnny boy isn't a threat he has a lot more time to keep working on developing hobbies. Haru may like Civ but after a few games Jaeha's finding it a little dull (lol. lmao.) so he's fishing for more things to do. Currently he's trying to disentangle this paper about the statistical distributions of dungeon appearances by broad category while shopping for groceries and he's having to speedlearn stats to make sense of it and he's starting to think the paper might be full of shit, unclear. Anyway thankfully he has a shopping list and doesn't have to pay much attention to the real world except to dodge people who insist on existing around him and having opinions about the interestingness of a guy with a holographic computer screen. It's easy enough to discourage them, anyway. 

And then back home.

Haru gets home before he does; he comes back to find Haru sprawled on the couch.

Cricket is loafing on his chest and purring up a storm about being petted while somehow simultaneously saying, "And then it turned out that Sinclair was Valen, completely undermining anything the show might have been trying to say about Minbari culture before or since. They didn't even have several other foundational philosophers who might have been real Minbari, it was just the one guy!"

—that's an incredibly adorable scene, what the hell. 

"Tadaima—sorry I thought you were going to take longer in your dungeon—"

"You're right, that does undermine everything about the Minbari - okaeri, this dungeon killed people unusually quickly, I pulled out a couple bodies and then somebody killed it off."

"...oh, I'm sorry, Haru-ya—" Oh whoops that slipped let's hope he didn't hear it anyway Jaeha can put the groceries down and—hmm Cricket is currently in the way but presumably he will move because he likes Haru and knows Jaeha can guide Haru right...?

Cricket gets out of the way once Jaeha's close enough for Haru to grab his hand.

Which he does. "I forget, which one is 'ya'?"

Fuck. "Uh. Endearment. Like a close friend." Or, you know.

Aaanyway on safer topics would be prefer a hug over handholding maybe?

Yes, that's better. "Is it one of the ones where we're pretending I'm your family member or not one of those."

"—I think that's backwards but no it is not one of those."

"Those are the weird ones. It's not even Korean-specific, English doesn't do honorifics basically at all and you get people calling their boyfriends 'daddy'."

"I really don't think that's the same thing."

"Isn't it? I have no siblings so perhaps I wouldn't know."

"It's that—it's not that—" He switches to English because it's easier to explain that way. "It's not that 'hyung' means 'older brother', it's that it means—someone who's older and more experienced and whom you look up to and who's meant to look after you?" It's strange to have to think about it explicitly, it feels so intuitive to him. It also doesn't help that generically "brother" is "hyungje"; maybe he should've gone with "sister" as his example, since it's "unnie" or "noona" for the personal and "jamae" for the generic. "And that's—your older brother is meant to always be that but he's not the only one who's that."

"So it's more that one's older brother, where such a person exists, is a central example of the 'hyung' concept? At least as it is used today regardless of its presumable etymology?"

"Yeah, exactly."

"I guess that's less weird than it looks on paper." Nuzzle. "Are you hinting or are we just having a chat about linguistics?"

"—ah, no, it's fine." He'd like to be called hyung but probably they're not at that stage in their relationship and even if they were it'd be fine, Haru doesn't do that anyway, it's nothing special.

Smooch. "If my personal idiolect in any of my languages had a thing I called people besides their names if I liked them I would call you that."

...oh.

Ba-dum.

That—actually means a lot more than Haru just calling him hyung.

Ba-dum.

They're still speaking English so he really shouldn't read into that "like", but. 

Ba-dum. Ba-dum. Ba-dum.