Jaeha fails to do much of that, until much much later that night. He needs to make 100% sure that Haru is still there and hasn't left, and every time he starts to fall asleep he has the beginnings of a nightmare that Haru's leaving and he immediately jolts awake. 

On the bright side, he discovers that Haru talks in his sleep, which he feels blessed to know, and finds extremely endearing. He might've found it less endearing if it were sentences explaining how much Haru is going to leave him but it's just random (as far as he can tell) nouns so it can just be cute instead.

Even after he finally succeeds at getting to sleep, though, he sleeps lightly, and the minute Haru stirs awake so will he.

Haru remembered to cancel his first dungeon for the day (and mark himself tentative on the next three) and turn off his alarm, so they can sleep in a little bit. He does eventually open his eyes.

"Morning."

"Morning H—" He can't say "Haru-ya" but he's going to feel like shit if he calls Haru "Masaharu" once more. "Haru."

Haru repositions a little. "Straight into it or should it be a post-breakfast conversation, d'you think?"

Please stop asking Jaeha to make decisions.

..........

"I—know this may be a lot to ask, but—I'd kind of—prefer—if you didn't ask me to make decisions."

"...no, that's fine, I can handle that. Up you get."

They can have a quick low-effort breakfast - Haru does occasionally import Cheerios with which to take advantage of esper lactose tolerance, but doesn't have any right now, so it's the contents of the rice cooker with kimchi and eggs, and then they can retreat somewhere Cricket's not likely to interrupt them.

"So an order of operations thing I'm confused about is - guilt is a negative emotion, would in theory have been around for kind of a while, and the list with the words 'scrupulously ethical' on it was a while ago too, but the actual trigger here was Tae-gun being guidey at you, nothing particularly related to your history of power use being wrong, and I want your model of... why that might be."

"I've... been... trying not to think about how something like this was going to happen... for several days now. So guilt's been back online. And I think it was just—being guided. I—think I knew it was going to happen yesterday, actually. Even before we went out. Or today at the latest. And I was trying to—escape from my responsibilities. Leave it for future Jaeha, guided Jaeha who would be more able to deal with the fallout. In theory." A theory which has been conclusively disproven. "Tae-gun was just—a trigger for—reinforcing how much I want—need—you in particular."

"Mkay.

"What's your model of why using your power on people is wrong?"

"People... have a basic right to be correct about reality? Or—if you mean the receptive part—people go into interactions with a basic model of what others are able to know or infer about their thoughts and feelings and intentions, and receptive psychic powers—especially undisclosed ones—break that model, and—people might not have consented to interacting with someone if they knew what that someone was getting out of it and thought it was more than they were willing to give."

"...yeah, that's not how I would have put it but it's mostly right. I would have said something like 'have the tools they use to understand reality uninterfered with' or something, obviously people manage to be incorrect about reality under the most supportive conditions all the time but mind-controlling them about it is still fucked up if you manage to make them more correct in so doing."

"I... think there's an argument to be made," and goddamnit why is he making it why can't he just shut up and be meek, "that there's an extent and—kind—of power use—for personal expression—that isn't different from being better at social skills due to explicit practice and grinding, or just inborn talent. But I'm not sure I can trust myself to—limit myself to only the kinds of power use that would match just that and nothing more—especially since I clearly slide down the slippery slope really easily."

"...I guess in the degenerate case, in principle you could use your power to be kind of in effect a functional copy of mine, just erase yourself from a scene so nobody can see you, and I don't think it's morally wrong to be invisible as long as you aren't, like, spying on them in ways it would also be wrong to do with a camera, but the route by which you'd do that is alarming, and, yeah, you might need a bright line."

"It's also less comprehensive, I do need to know that there's someone there to be able to do it. I've used my power for stealh in dungeons in the past, though."

"And with dungeons, who we have as yet no way to communicate with to make peace an option, that's fine, as long as it's not a prompt to - spread it around more, but...

"I can be around you to maybe be able to catch you a lot of the time, but not all of it forever, life's chaotic, shit happens, our occupation is not especially low-risk, and... it's not that I'm not terrifically flattered to have played a pivotal role here, the same part of me that thinks it's romantic you wanted a list also thinks it's romantic that you're having ethical revelations precipitated by being in love with me,"

Jaeha flinches, but it's not like he didn't know... or didn't know that Haru knew. He'd just... not said it. Because it's pathetic.

But it was already pathetic even before he called it 'love', so, it's not like it changes much.

Handsqueeze. "- but if we're being romantic and not just assigning me a watchdog role with a deadman switch that outs you to an intractable number of people if I introduce myself to a monster one day, we need to figure out how you can be much, much more robustly trustworthy than that. It's romantic if I got you started but not if I'm the only thing keeping you safe."

"Yeah. That's why I think going public would help. Get our guild's help. I—think—I know we haven't been in Quasar for even a month yet, but from what I've seen of it, I would trust their ability to help with this kind of thing a lot more than I would have Juno's. So that's a—possible first step.

"The thing is—what I said yesterday. I don't know what the actual triggers are for me to fuck up again, because the only time I went from not backlashed to that—level of callousness—was right after I manifested, which I think is a set of conditions that's really hard to generalise from. It might turn out fine. It might not. From my current perspective it would be horrifying to slide back into it. Maybe the ethical opinions I've acquired in the past eight years—at least the ones that had been there in potentia before they became actual—will be enough.

"I also—what I'm about to say is really suspect for the obvious reasons, but—I worry that we might be trying to come up with the perfect solution to a problem we don't know the parameters of yet and can't know the parameters of until we see the problem happen in the wild, and so we won't guess what the right solutions could even be."

"Would you be able to take note of any time it's - on your mind, so we can look for patterns? While doing a very very gentle schedule of dungeons and hitting zero promptly after every time. On the supposition that it occurring to you is the lesser form of being tempted is the lesser form of actually slipping."

"I think so. I—it occurred to me a lot, with you. I wanted to know what you were feeling a lot. I wanted to know if you liked me, if you thought I was cool, if you thought I was stupid, if I was reading too much into things or if I was right that you were just being kind and would fuck off as soon as I got fully guided because you'd realised how boring I am. I wanted to make myself seem cool to you, I wanted to seem confident and impressive and well-put-together. I cursed your power in my head for not letting me do that.

"I... think... I wouldn't have actually done it. In retrospect. Which is suspect again, but... it feels like if I had had the power, back then, I would have realised that I—didn't want it enough to actually follow through.

"But I'm not sure."

...nod. "Well, I'm certainly the safest person to be tempted about.

"Another reason to not run your entire morality on being attached to me is that - however romantic we're being, you have known me for like a month and I am responsible for just about all the pleasant experiences you've had in the last eight years, if I understand correctly, and that might produce some very intense and potentially temporary psychological results. You still haven't hit zero, even if you had the timeline is objectively very quick..."

"I—guiding always felt good. Even at my lowest. So not all of my pleasant experiences. But all of the pleasant experiences other than those, yes.

"I understand what you mean. But I want to—I mean, I don't want to run my morality on being attached to you. But I want to like you. I want to be a person who—" Fuck. "Who's in love with you. And I want to be a person you'll be in love with. And that—doesn't stop if we break up? Uh. Break it off. I—guess the part where I want to be someone who's in love with you might," lol lmao, "but the part where I want to be that person—won't. Because that person is someone who wants to be themself.

"I really, really didn't want to be myself, even at my worst. I want to be him instead."

"...but that's not to say that you're wrong. And that was not what I was getting at when I said the thing about—wanting to use my power on you. I just meant that I think I can notice wanting to, because I did. Because I have been."

Haru nods. "...is there an element of - substituting feeling other people's emotions for your own missing ones, or is it mostly about being oriented and informed?"

"It's almost exclusively about the latter. About—feeling safe, feeling like the Malaysians aren't a threat, feeling like the waitress isn't going to spit in our drinks, like people aren't going to think I'm terrible and spread rumours about me and leave me alone. Like you're not going to leave me as soon as you ethically can."

Handsqueeze. "I'm probably going to stay. We just need - a plan."