Haru's backlash ticks down, and down, and down to nothing.

He squeezes Jaeha's hand and gets up to go to his office.

Jaeha will...

...

There are many, many bedrooms in this stupidly huge house—which could be sold for an insane amount of money, 90% of which could be used to buy bednets, the remaining 10% of which would still be enough to get a really nice apartment—and he's not going to go to the one he and Haru have been sleeping in. He's going to go to another one, one of the bedrooms no one uses. He's going to go into that bedroom, and he's going to shut the door and get in bed and turn the lights off and hide under the covers.

Well, that'll make it harder for Haru to find him a couple of hours later, he has to prowl the whole house.

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."