The specific thing they are doing right now is scary. It's not too scary to do at all, but Haru's ready to flinch about it, like if he were trying to pick up a snake that might wrap gently around his hand no problem but might strike; he is prepared to discover at any instant that actually he can't handle this and it's too vulnerable he isn't ready and he needs to lock down again.

On the topic of Jaeha in general, though, the way they're curled up together, that's very comfortable and fond and warm, maybe because he can flinch about the mental contact whenever he wants and everything else between them is definitely safe.

A little longer-term anxiety about Project Cut It Out Forever, it's surprisingly complicated - not very surprising but yes very complicated - but not in a way that has called into question whether it's worth undertaking and sticking around to see through.

Haru is maybe a bit lower on the somaticized emotions in general than most people. There's the faintest flickers of the correlates of other thoughts going by but they're happening almost entirely on a level Jaeha can't read, not because Haru's not letting him but because Jaeha's power doesn't extend in that more verbal direction. Tiny flecks of pride and curiosity and satisfaction that register in the nerves for only an instant before being packed away neatly as endorsed attitudes or dismissed passing fancies.

"Haah," he breathes, closing his eyes. "I need—can I have a minute with just this? I'm—" This soothes Jaeha's deep, primal emotional core in a way he didn't know was possible.

Haru likes him. Haru really, actually likes him. It's right there, plain as day, Jaeha can feel it.

Haru - takes a second to focus on the ready-to-flinch feeling, examines it, interrogates it - and puts it aside.

"Yeah."

"This means more than I can say," he murmurs, just basking on the feeling, on the way Haru's warmth mirrors his, the way the easy comfort around Jaeha matches his own comfort around Haru.

The backlash cost of doing this is minimal, and more than made up for by the snuggling, adding only a buzz to the snuggling so soft it's barely even there.

Haru pets him. There is a little self-congratulatory glow when Jaeha says that.

He's so cute, it's unreal. 

"You're—still pretty hard to read, though. Your feelings work in very—you—ways."

"How do you mean?"

"I—don't get emotions directly. It's all, what you're feeling in your body plus some things about what those feelings are pointing to, what you're perceiving and focusing on in broad strokes. I can't tell that you're looking at me, but I can tell that you're near a person, and it's only one person, and it's someone you feel very close to. Stuff like that. 

"And—people get fleeting thoughts and emotions and feelings all the time, right, but you're constantly—organising yours. Feel a feeling, look at it, put it away. I'm not sure you're even doing it consciously most of the time?"

"- the whole point is to do it consciously! I don't want my thoughts putting themselves away without making sure they're doing it right!"

"—of course. My bad." He kisses Haru's cheek. "It's so... tidy. And makes it really hard for me to get anything other than what you want to show, which I suppose is a plus."

"As long as it's not too - intellectualized or whatever - for you to get what you're getting out of it."

"I can't get the intellectual part at all, it's just the feelings. ...we had a goal with this but given that the way you seem to feel is 'comfortable with maybe a bit of anxiety about the empathy' I'm not sure how I'd... learn anything..." He really didn't think it through his brain just went offline when Haru suggested letting him look.

"I think the goal was practicing reading people by looking at them with your eyes, but maybe I'm just a terrible example."

"Yeah, I just mean you look—I would not have been able to guess the part about being nervous about this without knowing you personally, just from looking, and even now I can't see it."

"Huh, I wasn't going to any effort to hide it."

"No, but I get the impression that you don't really... keep your heart on your sleeve, is what I want to say? You may not actively want to hide you're feeling some way or other but you're pretty at peace with what's going on inside you a lot of the time, maybe?" Heeee's feeling kind of nervous about armchair psychoanalysing his boyfriend like this and that is stupid and dumb, Haru likes him, he can feel it.

"I certainly try to be! It took me a while to come to really peaceable terms with my backlash and occasionally I am still very frustrated with it but I don't have any now."

"Yeah. But that means that an emotion like the—I'm just guessing—I feel like something like the nervousness you have around this whole topic is—not exactly—upset? Which makes it harder to surface as something I could see on your face or something?"

"Yeah, I think I'd have said - tense, apprehensive, not upset. It's a lot, for me, you might remember how I was very concerned with whether you'd been able to use your powers on me, during the confession."

"Yeah, I do. Which—is also why this means so much to me." Because even though Haru is tense and apprehensive and doesn't want to do this all the time he is still DOING IT and Jaeha can FEEL IT and know that HARU LIKES HIM. Haru might have noticed that Jaeha's heart has been doing something funny kind of nonstop.

Snuggle. "Well, I'm glad I can provide at least occasionally, then."

Jaeha feels like there was some practical matter they might have been in the middle of discussing but he kind of doesn't want to think about that to try to remember what it was. He just wants to keep hugging Haru and feeling what he's feeling, even if it won't be something they can do all the time.

Does that make him less the guy of Haru's dreams? Would that guy be trying to be more efficient at solving The Problem, whatever the problem was, he doesn't he remember? Should he feel bad about not doing that? He doesn't want to do that. Maybe he wants to want to do that, he doesn't know. There's a really tempting line of thought that the way to become the guy of Haru's dreams isn't by forcing himself through the motions of doing what Jaeha thinks that guy would do, it's by doing more thorough, holistic changes to who he is as a person, and Jaeha even thinks that logic probably mostly holds up, but it's very convenient that it means that he doesn't have to do something other than feeling Haru next to him.

He really likes Haru.

They can hang out like that for another four and a half minutes and then the little flickers of emotion-tagged thought pick up speed and force and Haru says, "I think I'm done now," and then the shields are up.

"Okay," he says, not that Haru needed his permission or assent. There's that moment of backlash for the fraction of a second before Haru gets his shields back up and Jaeha stops trying, and then there's silence.

Jaeha... misses it less than he'd have expected. Misses it, still, it was so nice, but... he can wait. Haru will open up to him again, in the future, and even if he doesn't, the last bits of Jaeha's reluctance to believe the world really is that nice have flaked off, and he's just... happy. Uncomplicatedly. Life is good.

Thoughtful silence. Then: "Okay, so, our conclusions are non-dungeon social exposure therapy, pending fishing for invitations to events at which to do that; probably not running dungeons together so you can be the strong and silent type in yours while I'm a chatterbox in mine, unless there's one where we wouldn't need anyone else with us; if for some reason it does make sense for us and also third parties to run a dungeon in a group we can see if there's a language they don't speak that we do; whoever is running dungeons with you can be informed that you'd be sacrificing a little reaction time to definitively exclude them from your scanning ability and make their decisions on that... am I forgetting anything?"