Ah. Those were The Problems—or, rather, the solutions to The Problem. Yes. He remembers them now. And the guy of Haru's dreams would stop and think about it and try to remember their conversation and figure out if there's anything they missed, so...

"I also need to figure out—this might need therapy—why it bothers me so much to not come off the way I want to. There was—something that changed—when I was a teenager I was really intensely trying to rile people up and get them to dislike me," mostly his father, "so clearly I've got the, the, the ability to do it, so to speak..." When did he become so normie?

"Huh, I'm not a psychologist but that's - certainly interesting - I mean, trying to rile people up is itself also a form of coming off a way that you choose to?"

"...I suppose that's true." It does have a certain resonance to it, something about... "Something about, if people are going to be disgusted by how much of a homo I am, I'm going to make sure they're as disgusted as I want them to be..."

Oh good job Kang Jaeha you have just shown your whole ass to Haru. This is the kind of thing you should've notebooked.

"Something like that, yeah, if you ruled out staying in the closet."

"If I'd stayed in the closet Kang Jaehyuk would've found me a nice wife to marry and have one point five children and zero point three dogs with and I was not about that life."

"Yeah. Which honestly sounds also not unrelated to having control issues."

He closes his eyes. "It's not that I didn't know I had them but I don't love coming face to face with my daddy issues."

Pet pet.

"...I am taken by the insane desire to apologise for having issues rather than letting you find a nice mentally healthy boy to date but rather than actually apologise I'll just make this apophatic comment."

"Too late to get rid of me now, you let me move into your house and stuff." Haru kisses the nearest Jaeha location, which is an arm. "Try therapy and see if it works for you. I didn't like it but my issues are not your issues."

"Yeah, I've got a first appointment scheduled for... Huh. Two days from now, I guess?"

Also he is desperately curious about what it is that Haru would consider "his issues" but he isn't going to ask.

If he doesn't ask he will not find out. "I'mma go notebook some, okay?"

"Okay. And—thank you for this."

Mwah. "You're welcome, my Jaeha."

He kisses back and then immediately covers his face with both hands. "You get to me so much."

"This time it was on purpose."

"And it works just the same!"

Haru giggles and heads to his office.

Jaeha should maybe also do some notebooking.

Instead he is not going to. Because he feels mentally wrung out and he just explicitly admitted to having daddy issues in front of Haru and he feels like stuff kind of sucks in some vaguely nebulously-defined way when it comes to his brain and oh right he has a response to this and it is to go work out, he is going to be SO FIT. ...EVEN FITTER than he already is, that is.

The guild is informed of their updated scheduling protocol. Haru does an easy dungeon the next day, which looked a lot harder than it was; he probably could have soloed it, though it would have taken longer. He comes home while Jaeha's still out, having used more bullets than magic, and not all that backlashed. In fact, he can read, as long as the thing he's reading is directed at him in a loosely conversational way. Cricket apurr on his back, he flops facedown on the couch and does some Reading The Comments and Checking His Email.

One of the emails he gets today is... interesting. In a sense.

Youre a pathetic washout. How dare you think you're good enough for Kang Jaeha? You haven't known him as long as Wo Do-in, you don't understand him like Wo Do-in does, and you'll never be a tenth the partner Wo Do-in is. You're not even pretty and your powers are so pathetic and useless, Jaeha is just having pity on you. I can't wait for him to dump you like the garbage you are, but if you were worth anything you would have gone back to Japan rather than take advantage of his kindness like this. I hope you kill yourself in a fire.

"Wow. Kitty, you want me to translate you some incredible shit?"

"Will it bring me joy?"

"It might bring you self-congratulatory contempt?"