If/when he opens the right door, Jaeha will not be asleep, but that will not be at all obvious. The flinch will be kind of unmistakeable, though.

"...I can let you sleep and we can talk in the morning?" Haru murmurs.

Another flinch.

"I don't think I'll really be able to sleep at all tonight," he responds in a soft voice Haru wouldn't have been able to hear without esper senses.

"Well, that's not good for you." Haru goes in and sits on the edge of the bed.

Perhaps "flinch" is not the right verb to describe it. He's tense and taut like a violin string, and every movement, every word of Haru's pulls on that string and makes it twang.

Haru's got a notebook with him. He flips it open to his conclusions page with one hand, reaches out with the other to rest his palm on - what's sticking out of the covers here - the back of Jaeha's neck.

"Not really sure what order to address all this in."

Jaeha's heart had already been doing something funny but with Haru's touch it's going into overdrive BA-DUM BA-DUM BA-DUM BA-DUM BA-DUM BA-DUM so loudly Jaeha thinks he won't be able to hear Haru's voice over it.

"I don't think I can—let myself understand that sentence well enough to have an opinion."

BA-DUM BA-DUM BA-DUM BA-DUM BA-DUM BA-DUM BA-DUM BA-DUM

"...no? You don't have a - most urgent question or anything?"

"How long until you leave?" he says, his voice growing smaller until it's just a whimper by the end of the sentence.

"...Jaeha, I'm not necessarily going to."

He curls up smaller. "I can't—live in the world where—you're staying—until—unless I know it's real."

...pet pet. "I am probably going to stay. It's - I'm horrified, obviously, but - you stopped. If we can figure out how you can stay stopped, if I can trust you - trust that even if I die or something you will still be safe - then I can stay."

Well if Haru dies or something Jaeha will also die so he will definitionally be safe he sees that today is a day for him to reach heights of mental illness heretofore unseen.

"Then I'll—believe it when we're there. And until then I—don't have any most urgent questions."

"So, I don't think I personally would have reacted to your power and your father the way you did but I think - kind of a lot of people would, it's understandable as - lapses go, and from there I guess it just got gradually pettier and more habitual, but you can break the habit, you've only poked me by mistake a very small number of times, and - you seem able to carry forward your plans from before you're backlashed into the period when you are, so that's not necessarily a huge relapse risk factor, does that sound right?"

"I—suppose?" He did break the habit with Haru, it's true, but also he'd just been not using his powers at all. ...he should say that with his mouth. "I don't know how much our experience so far generalises due to how I just haven't been using my powers at all full stop for long stretches of time. If I go into dungeons it'd be very easy to relapse into the habits."

"...going into dungeons in particular or any power application at all?"

"Dungeons are the biggest thing, since I use powers continuously inside them and then it's just a matter of not stopping. I—am not sure what other situations I'd be using my powers in."

"- well, outside them, like when we met."

"Oh. It's easier to not relapse then since I'm just using my power in short bursts and just to clear influences and shield people. The biggest relapse risk is using my passive powers at all."

"Does this change at all if I'm in the dungeon with you?"

"...maybe? I'd—probably feel sufficiently embarrassed of the possibility of fucking up."

"Is there a good way to become more confident of that?"

"Short of experimentation, I'm not sure. I—the way I feel right now is that I'd rather cut my hands off than fuck this up. But I just spent eight years continually fucking it up. So I have a lot of—uncertainty—around what the actual triggers could be. I only have the one history of sliding into doing it and then sliding out of doing it, there aren't moving parts."

(Man, it's striking to him how the way he's taking sounds so weirdly nerdy to his ears and it's 100% because of who he wants to be for Haru and it makes him feel a little bit proud even though they're not actually going to figure this out and Haru will leave him forever.)

"You could go - not necessarily public public, but within-industry public, to have more - checks, than just me noticing if something's weird."

"With my powers or just my backlash? I—my powers are the kind of thing that gets people muttering about preemptively restraining and monitoring espers. —I'd still do it," because he'll do whatever Haru asks him to, "I'm just thinking through it."