"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."

"They are absolutely that," and if they had had a policy like that eight years ago, well... "This is presumably also a problem with anything along the lines of apologizing to anyone particularly egregiously affected."

"I think that'd be... I suppose it depends on what you mean. I'd naively only include Kang Jaehyuk in that category, just due to not really spending enough time with any other individual people to have done more than make a conversation go better. —not that that's fine, just, not 'particularly egregious', relatively."

"Not even your previous partners?"

"I didn't really use my powers on them. We met up for guiding, when I didn't care, and by the time I was sufficiently guided to care there wasn't anything more to be done to make those interactions have gone better, they were all already in long term memory."

"Do you... know, when you have somebody think that you said 'something cool', or whatever, what you're meant to have said, it didn't sound like you did but if you don't that'd get to be such a pile..."

"I usually don't just go with 'say something cool', I go with 'say something that communicates this but which comes off as cool'. But no, I don't get precise enough feedback to know exactly what it is that I was meant to have said. Occasionally this has involved me having to use my powers a bunch to cover myself while I try to infer what it is I'm saying in real time. 

"That's when I care to. I could just let a conversation play out for them while I'm doing something else with my time."

"Right." Sigh. "...I want to figure this out but I don't know if it's realistic to do it tonight. Any chance you'll be able to sleep now?"

"...I don't know. I can try." Not on his own. "I want to flag that I think going within-industry public with at least my backlash is likely a good idea." And most importantly it's a concrete step that might get Haru to stay. He's mostly been running on that, on his words working towards the goal of getting Haru to stay. 

He thinks that once he stops saying words he's going to break down again, though. He still hasn't actually looked up at Haru's face even once.

"Okay. Do you... want to sleep here, or were you just trying to give me space?"

"I was trying to hide from myself, the world, and you." Seems like he's just given up on ever not sounding whiny and pathetic to Haru so he's just failing with abandon now.

"Do you still want to do that? You can come to the usual bed with me. If you want."

Okay maybe he hasn't given up because he does sit on the pathetic whine that's threatening to come out. "I'd—like that, yeah."

Haru untucks him from this bed to take his hand.

He can get up but he's still not entirely sold on this "look at Haru's face" idea.

He doesn't have to.

They can go to bed and curl up together. No point stopping three days from the finish line.

That was probably an overestimate.

He wants a good night kiss. He's pathetic. He's just going to snuggle. That's good enough.

If he doesn't ask for a kiss he's not going to get one tonight.

Yeah. He's not gonna ask. He'll just... try to sleep.