"Do we have any concrete next steps at the scale of hours? ...more words, Jaeha. I still feel like if I do or say the wrong thing something is going to explode and I would like to feel less like that and I am trying to figure out what it would take for me to feel less like that."

"- yeah that doesn't seem like a constructive posture to be in. Uh scale of hours I'm on for two more dungeons and then if you still want my rant on mind control there's that. You could... backread the guild chat or hop on it to actually say things and see if you like anybody in there enough to want them in the, like, support-slash-monitoring network we're cobbling together? Make appointments with the guild therapist folks so you can see if you're comfortable with any of those?"

"Yeah. I'll do that." But those aren't really the things he's scared of—

...no. No, he needs to reframe it in his head, actually.

"I think I'm starting to understand why you use your notebooks."

"...you do?"

"Maybe. I'm not sure. My thoughts are doing something funny in my head."

"...well, I have blank ones, if you want to give it a whirl."

"I think if I do that I'll do it electronically. Besides, I—might want privacy, actually, so this would have to wait until I guided you enough for you to be alright with not being near me."

"Or do it while I'm dungeoneering, unless you think you won't want to drop it abruptly once I'm home - and even then I can keep with Cricket purring on me for a few minutes while you get to a good stopping place, if that's what you need."

"I don't know that I know the process well enough to spend the whole time you're in a dungeon doing it so I'll probably be done by when you come back. I just—want my thoughts to stop doing funny things when I'm not looking."

"Mood."

He squeezes Haru closer. "I'll figure it out. One way or another. I—I will become the man of your dreams. Just you wait. I'll make you proud."

Smooch. "You are doing a hard thing and I'm already proud of you."

Kiss.

"A hard thing, you say."

"...sorry, I just had to."

Haru snickers.

Anyway, they should finish eating lunch and... Well, Jaeha is not going to be the one to suggest ideas for how to guide Haru some more, because at this point Haru is the one who's most uncomfortable with being together, so he'll just follow Haru's lead.

Haru wants snuggles, for now. And occasional kisses. Maybe he'll be in the mood after the next dungeon.

Off he goes, when his alarm goes off.

Okay.

Alright.

He opens a text app on his commscreen and starts writing.

Reframing:

The thing he wants is to keep Haru. He keeps saying that he wants to be the man of Haru's dreams, but then he's just whining and feeling sorry for himself. Haru has given him a list. Haru has told him exactly what he needs to feel safe. Jaeha shouldn't be approaching those as a checklist of things to do before Haru will finally get over Jaeha's past so that Jaeha can have a chance; this is what being Haru's dream is. If he conceptualises himself as being the man of Haru's dreams, having woken up from this extremely long period of inebriation, watching the way he set his own life on fire, then figuring all of this out is part of being that man. Getting therapy, talking to the people Park Yoo-min suggests him, cutting his father off, these are all steps to becoming that person. Maybe not sufficient, but definitely necessary. It's not that doing them will get Haru to finally recognise him and tell him he's done good; he needs to want them. He needs to want to be that person. The way he'll get Haru to love him, the way he'll get his chance to feel stable, to have Haru want to "become monogamous again" and be with him, is being trustworthy about being that person.

Many of those steps feel scary. So maybe what he should do is write them down, all of them, and then think about them and write down why they feel scary. What feels scary about them. What failing would look like, and what succeeding would look like. What he should do if he fails, what he expects to fail. And then come up with plans for those. Figure out what he should feel about them, and what he actually does feel about them, and why, and why he's feeling that and not what he should, whether those are compatible, whether he's attached to feeling one way or another and why, how much he can flex that, what he's willing to sacrifice. Which parts of his brain are important, and which are not.

He spends... quite a while writing all of this down, and staring at it, and erasing and rewriting it. Not so long that he's still doing it by the time Haru's back, but mostly because eventually he gets cross-eyed and headachey from all of the staring at his own brain he's been doing and has to take a break to go work out in the personal gym he has in his absurd house so that he can forget he has a brain in the first place. He's still there when Haru's done with his dungeon.

"Tadaima!"

His gym is too far from his living room for him to hear it.

come here you fool

Ah, Cricket, never change. He does the last two reps of his current set then jogs upstairs to the living room, covered in sweat and patting his face dry with a face towel. "Haru-ya," he says, when he sees Haru, and the endearment sort of just escaped without thought but also Haru might notice that Jaeha's mood is substantially improved, visibly, from what it was when Haru left.

Haru flings himself in Jaeha's general direction. "I had no idea that notebooking could leave someone so damp," he remarks. "Must be the electronic medium."