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."

"...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—