—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.

"...I can hear your heartbeat."

Godfuckingdamnit.

"Contrary to evidence, I am a human being." Kang Jaeha you're a fucking idiot is what you are.

"The heartbeat isn't evidence of that! Lots of species have those." Snuggle.

"Then I suppose I must at minimum be one of those, humanity TBD."

Haru is snuggling him and being cute and said that he likes him and he needs to think about something else. Maybe some gruesome image from Nightmare, he has plenty of those to distract himself with.

"The blog queue got to your interview today," Haru mentions. "I don't know if you're a reading the comments person, I only do it because I have to moderate and also for, like, medical reasons. - unrelatedly once it isn't digging you too much deeper into your multi-year backlash hole to do things with your powers I could maybe let the empathy one through sometimes. If that would be fun."

...ba-dum ba-dum ba-dum shut uuuuuuuuuuup ba-dum ba-dum—

"I—might like that. Uh. What brought this up...?"

"You reacting like I said something extremely surprising when I let on that I like you? Maybe it will be more obvious in a directly sensory format."