That's one of the things Haru knows!

He does kind of want to say the thing, though, so he has to stop kissing. 

...

"I—okay maybe this is not the best time—no I'm just being a coward." He clears his throat. "...what do you..." Gah why did he decide to start this, this was a bad idea, this was a terrible idea, arghhhhhhh.

"When you said—about the incentives in esper partnerships—what exactly did you... mean?"

"...we're all going around exacerbating our bespoke medical problems all the time, and we can't just show up at any hospital asking for a nurse and a bag of IV fluids and get it seen to, we've all got a very short list of compatible people and an even shorter list of ones we know exist. And the mainline treatment options are, you know, intimate, it's not like a nurse would never be getting up close and personal depending on what the problem was but it's a technical task with an interchangeable provider and professional accountability and that softens it some. Human beings mostly have monogamous tendencies and intimacy-specific boundaries which makes it extremely tempting even in completely nonmagical relationships to get aboard the relationship escalator and stay there and this doesn't get less tempting as an approach when securing routine access to, not necessarily sex but realistically it is very often sex, is somewhere between a life support need and a career requirement. It's very elegant when it does happen to work out but counting on it sort of reminds me of that weird Christian denomination that forbids blood transfusions and would just rather die than get one. There aren't a whole lot of things I'd rather die than do. You know, usually."

Yeah. Okay. That's—roughly what he thought Haru meant, maybe not with that many words. He can run with that.

"I'm getting guided really, really fast. You're—correct, you were correct, that this was a good idea... but..."

"But the thing about having my backlash for as long as I have, for—like you said, I haven't had my brain fully functional as an adult—I think I just—I don't know if—" Haru is so much better at coming up with coherent things to say on the fly.

Why did Jaeha decide to say this today, again? There's nothing special about today. 

Gah.

"I don't know if there's a 'me' under all of the backlash."

"I'm... not sure I know what you mean."

"I mean that—everything I've been doing, the way I've been occupying my time—that's not—I didn't discover an interest in Civilization. Or in the intricacies of malaria net distribution logistics. Or in the, the, the reasons why dungeons and espers are what they are an exist. I didn't dig the backlash out and find those buried in there, it's just backlash all the way down. I put those there because I—" Baaaad idea. Bad idea conversation. Very, very bad. "I put those there to try to make up a personality that you'd like. Because there isn't anything else in there."

...snuggle. This seems like a snuggle kind of conversation. "You have - something standing in for a motivational system, you bothered to do anything ever before I met you. I'm not expecting you to necessarily be interested in everything you try, either right away or long-term? It seems very natural that while you're taking a break from dungeons the lowest-friction route to doing anything instead of not doing anything would be copying my interests since I'm around you more than anyone else? I'm - you seem to be equating interests with personality traits more than I tend to?"

He shakes his head. "That's not what I'm saying. What I'm saying is—if—you want to wait until I'm out of this hole to find out who I am—I want you to tell me who you'd like me to be. Won't you? Then I can just—become him." He was right he was totally right this was a mistake this was a mistaaaaaake but he understands now why he's making that mistake is because somewhere in the back of his mind he realised that the only way he'd keep Haru would be if he actually succeeded at being someone Haru wants and if he can't find out who that is the normal way then he has to find out the hard way and the hard way involves doing this even if it's pathetic but if the person Haru wants isn't pathetic then he can make himself not be pathetic he just needs to know. "I can—invent myself." He can make himself care about other people, he can make himself smart, he can make himself bookish, he can make himself kind, or arrogant, or protective, or standoffish, or devoted—he's not sure he could make himself not be devoted actually but he'd try—

"That is an incredibly romantic thing to say but I think I may still have factual disagreements?"

He hides his face in Haru's neck and laughs a bit weakly. "That's such a you thing to say. Let's hear them."

Pet pet. "Like - you contain processes that output behaviors? Whether you want to call those processes jointly 'a personality' or not. And these processes are influenced by your backlash and also influenced by you having been under it for so long that you've developed habits around it, of course they are, they couldn't not be. Maybe they are for this reason relatively - impoverished, relatively impressionable, relatively all kinds of things compared to what it would have looked like if you'd never awakened or been better taken care of once you did. This is still not inherently different in general kind from any other way someone's personal history affects how they think and act. People get completely normal mental illnesses all the time without compensatory superpowers. People experience life-altering trauma that has nothing to do with magic, or maybe is just about being abducted by dungeons and not interestingly about magic. And they still have personalities, because they still have processes that output behaviors, and so do you."

"...well, you said you—edited your desire for the romance with the boy of your dreams out of your brain so—maybe we can say that I feel like my brain right now is—uniquely pliant. And editable. And I want to edit it to be—someone you'll like. Call it personality or something else, I just..."

Thoughtful pet-pet-petting. "Why?"

"Must I say it? I already—all but have—"

"- you don't have to say anything you don't want to but - what I would like to do with this gift you are trying to give me depends on why I have it."

"Because I like you. Because I—when we 'see where we're at', I want you to look at where we're at and decide that it's a good place and that you want to stay there. Because I got—so stupidly jealous of Sparkler—"

"- oh no, oh my god, Jaeha, he's nothing to me."

"I know that now! But the thought that—you know. This is too embarrassing to say."

Pet pet pet.

Jaeha squeezes Haru closer. He's maybe clinging a bit. "And I realised that—I might get out of the hole in a week and a half. I'm getting guided really fast and—and if I'm right that I can—be him, be the guy of your dreams—or something like him—then I want to. At the end. When you're—okay with the idea of maybe looking at me."

"Well, I last updated those dreams when I was seventeen, so you might need to give me a minute."

...okay that was probably not literally the best possible thing Haru could have said here but Jaeha is coming up blank on better ones. Haru does not need esper superhearing to hear the way his heart is hammering in his chest like crazy.

"Take as long as you need, Haru-ya."

Thoughtful snuggles. Then, "Are you going to panic about it if I actually go do this in my office into a notebook? - possibly after my next dungeon?"