"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."

"...oh. I mean, you've—indicated before—but it was the part about the, uh—I don't actually know what idiolect means but I'm kind of guessing—" Kang Jaeha you need to shut up and also erase Haru's memories of the past five minutes. You can only do one of those so you'd better do at least that.

"Idiolect is like dialect for one person. My personal way of using language." He has maneuvered his left ear right onto Jaeha's chest.

Stop thaaaaaat that makes him even more self-conscious of his heartbeat which does not help with calming it down at aaaaaaaallllll.

"I guessed right, then." Inane statements are still better than whatever the fuck he's been on recently.

"Greek roots will get you everywhere." Snuggle snuggle. "I think the relationship dynamics and the incentives around esper partnerships are kind of fucky and awkward to navigate and I don't have a great universally applicable algorithm to apply to solve that problem but I like you and I am going to get you out of that hole and then we'll see where we're at."

What does that mean. That sounds like the kind of nonstatement that means Haru is just waiting for him to get fully guided out of altruism so that he discharges his responsibility and can then fuck off to be with someone better.

...that sounds like catastrophic thinking. It's probably not true. Haru said he likes him.

But he can't be sure, and he can't even figure it out firsthand right now, and Haru will only allow him to after he's "out of that hole" which is a very convenient thing to decide if you don't actually mean it—

Chill.

"That makes sense." No it doesn't he has no idea—chill.

Oblivious snuggle.

At least he's got a good poker face for some things. He really should practice. 

...

"Uh, while we're on the topic," that was the worst fucking possible opener, "of esper partnerships and such, uh..."

"Yeah, what about 'em?"

"I think you said you have a partner in Canada?" He doesn't actually remember if Haru ever mentioned it but that also means that Haru probably doesn't remember it either and could figure he must've at some point and in the worst case he can be confused about where he heard this.

"I do, when I visit Charlie I like to be there for longer than I actually want to take off work so I shopped around till I found somebody compatible enough."

"What's he... like?" You're not doing an amazing job at not coming off like a jealous controlling insane person. "I mean, if he caught your attention..." Is Jaeha saying that he's special? Yes he is. He is a lot more special than Johnny could ever dream of being. 

Groupies.

"He caught my attention via fistbump, not by, like, having anything going on upstairs. I don't really think you'd get along. He's like eighty percent canned lines about superheroism, when we meet up he's usually at least tipsy, I can tolerate him when I'm backlashed and would gladly talk to anyone rather than be by myself but we don't otherwise hang out."

Ah.

Okay!

He can hold onto his poker face when he's been concentrating on nothing but that for the past several minutes so he doesn't start grinning like an idiot. Even though that's exactly the facial expression he's having to clamp down on.

"That sounds unpleasant. Ms. Yamanaka didn't want to come with and I assume you didn't want to bother with the teleport costs?"

"Right, it woulda eaten into my charity budget something awful to pop back to Japan to sit with her."

...does that mean he's going to object to Jaeha teleporting to Canada with him. That would suck. That would suck so much.

"Yeah, you're not wrong about that."

Argh!

"...you okay? I assume since you weren't monogamous with your last partner and haven't brought it up with me either that it's not that..."

...how does he say "I liked my partner less" in a way that... doesn't sound clingy...

"Well my relationship with him was different. I... think I mentioned we didn't like each other very much?"

"It didn't sound sunshine and roses, certainly."

"So there was at least part of it that was that we, ah, kind of didn't want to spend much more time together than we needed to and weren't very interested in what the other was doing." Mostly Wo Do-in, Jaeha himself actually had never made use of the "fuck whomever you want" permission until he met Haru.