"Because... I wanted to win him over honestly. As part of winning you over honestly. I failed but..."

"It took - this long to - I know the backlash was pulling shit but if you were able weeks ago to want to win Cricket over honestly and that successfully occurred to you as a necessary component, why -"

"Part of the—ethics thing—" He's glad he's been reading so much stuff about altruism online because it gives him a lot of expressive vocabulary for this kind of conversation. "Is generalising. It's—caring about people even if I don't know them, right. Or in the abstract. Or for—themselves, as ends unto themselves. It's expanding my circles of caring. I didn't care about Cricket, I just knew that if I used my powers on him and you found out that'd be bad. It wasn't—because I thought it was wrong. I knew it was, intellectually. But I didn't care."

"Right. And if I did find out it'd be impossible to cover up without getting into some hideous psychic fight with me, I guess, so it minimized - risk."

"Yeah."

Can Haru please just go. Can he just leave. This, this, this playing with Jaeha's heart isn't—it's cruel. It's cruel that he's staying. It's cruel that he's asking these things. It's, it's giving him hope, and he shouldn't hope. He shouldn't hope for something that's not going to happen. And he could never, ever say that. Any of that. Haru knows everything, now. There's nothing left. So it's just—Jaeha makes no more choices, from now on. Has no agency. It's all on Haru.

So won't he please go?

"I'm gonna sit here till I zero out. So I can go write. If that's okay by you."

"Yeah. Of course."

Okay, that's... obvious, in hindsight. The obvious reason why he'd stay. Because he's not stupid. He's not gonna just drop a partner like that before he can get fully guided. So they can stay here for... however long. And then he'll go.

He can keep that in mind. And think of nothing else. He's guiding Ha- Masaharu. That's all.

"It all started with - your father?"

"...the power use? Yeah."

"I'm making up a narrative in my head, it's probably not quite right, I don't know if it'll turn out to matter but it might?"

"...okay...?"

"...which means could you please tell me more about what happened exactly with your father."

"Oh. Sure.

"I don't know how much you know about—I guess probably nothing at all—my grandfather was Kang Moon-il, founder and original chairman of Kang Moon-il group, the largest conglomerate group in Korea. My father Kang Jaehyuk is its current chairman. I was meant to be his heir. I didn't want to. When I was a teenager, I was—rebellious doesn't quite describe it. Really fucking gay, really loudly, caused multiple scandals he had to spend quite a lot of money to keep off tabloids. He wanted to find me a woman to marry, some heiress of some other group, to strengthen Kang Moon-il Group's hegemony.

"Then I manifested. My manifestation week was—I didn't really omit anything important last time I talked about it, I didn't kill myself because I didn't have the ability to want things enough. I was in a private hospital, and when I got out the other side it felt almost like I'd been in a weeklong nightmare in a coma and the very first thing I saw was my father, telling me I shouldn't become an esper, I already had a future planned for me, he found me a good girl to settle down with, it was time for me to grow up and get these sillinesses out of my head.

"And I could feel what he was feeling. I—knew, already, that he was never really going to approve of me, or love me, I had already known, but feeling it was... something else.

"But then I knew what I had to do. I had to get out. So I did. I optimised him, I dictionary attacked him until I had a way out. I've done that more over the years, turned him into someone who—still doesn't love me, still doesn't like what I'm doing, but isn't in my way anymore."

Haru nods, once.

"Is there—more you want to know...?"

"Did you start using it - all the time on everyone and not just him - right away, or did that take longer."

"...I don't really remember. It didn't take a month. It might've taken a couple of weeks. It might not have."

He's guiding H- Masaharu. Masaharu's backlash means that he occasionally has to say things. It doesn't mean that Masaharu is actually interested, or going to change anything. It's just a way to pass the time. Jaeha should not make any inferences based on what Masaharu is saying.

"Do you think you are... stably safe to exist around now. Regardless of what happens with us."

"...I... want to say yes... but the truth is I don't know. There are—probably—almost certainly—procedures I could implement that would make me not relapse like that. I am—having some trouble thinking about them right now—" What with how he is in medium-grade emotional anguish all the time. "The version of me that I am right now does intrinsically value not violating people's privacy and mental integrity, and values valuing that."

"Mm." He rubs his eye.

Here he is, not making any inferences about anything. He can keep doing that.