Haru's response to the psych screen is sufficiently outré that they can't even tentatively diagnose him with anything normal, so he's almost certainly awakening.  He has stressed but not dangerous vitals.  He keeps trying to make conversation with the paramedics and it's actually disgusting how bad he is at it.  He only knows how to have a conversation when there is some reason to do that other than to have a conversation.  He can make up reasons - he wants to know how his medical treatment is likely to look, maybe?  He is mining for information on how to find compatible fellow espers? - and they carry him only a very short distance each before he has by any reasonable metric conclusively succeeded or failed and still needs to be having a conversation.

They consider hospitalizing him but they don't insist, and they cannot guarantee that he will have amenable company twenty-four hours a day, whereas Ren, with some trepidation, can.  The paramedics leave.

Haru and Ren sit on the couch, in their pajamas, Haru clinging and Ren petting his hair.  Every time twelve seconds of silence go by Haru thinks of something to say.  It gets inane fast.  He doesn't actually have that much to talk about.  Eventually he realizes that Charlie's probably still awake, since it's seven hours earlier in the day in British Columbia, and he drags Ren upstairs to get his own phone so he can make the call.  Under the circumstances it seems stupid to have her be the one to do it.

Phone acquired, they sit again, and he dials.

He has read the Wikipedia article on esper activation five times and the one on backlash in general a few times too.  Psychological backlash is sometimes a little malleable.  As the newness of it recedes and practice effects take hold he's starting to see it.  It is dangerously easy to believe that people are not real, and that is the worst one.  He mustn't lean in that direction.  It's a good thing he requires Ren's constant physical presence on a more basal level than he requires death in the face of eternal unrelievable loneliness, or a slipup there would probably kill him; they have kitchen knives.  His other options appear to be pushing hard on the touch-starvation angle, which is probably the best place to park for the week, or, alternatively, forming the impression that because talking to people is Not Working Correctly, it must be that he's doing it wrong rather than that his counterparty doesn't exist.  He has the suspicion that the second one would make him really irritating to be around.  Rationally speaking, if he becomes catastrophically annoying for one week because he is having a mental health crisis, his mother will still love him.

Charlie doesn't pick up on the first try, which leaves Haru with the objectively fascinating mental state of believing he has somehow dialed the phone in an off-putting manner.  He redials.  He would really benefit from a couple of hours alone with a notebook, except that if he could have that, he wouldn't benefit from it nearly as much.

Charlie answers, the second time, which is good, because Haru was otherwise planning to sort through Charlie's co-workers numbers that he also has to see which other people he could call in order to get ahold of his dad.  "Haru, what is it?" says Charlie's voice - says Charlie, Charlie who Haru is believing is real as hard as he can, Charlie who is probably ticked off that Haru called him but definitely exists to be ticked off.

"Hi Dad, I'm awakening and it sucks incredibly bad!" Haru says.

"- it does?" says Charlie, because Haru is... oh, right, in some kind of fawn-response dysfunction at the moment, which he - right, hates immensely but hates less than the next most available option.  And this has caused him to say that so cheerily that it sounds like he's sarcastically announcing that he hates that it's his birthday and he only got a pet dragon and the sovereign rule over a small island nation.  It is his metaphorical birthday and he does hate it but it's still misleading to say it like that, since that's exactly how he would have sounded if he'd awakened with a more convenient backlash like being in horrible agony or something.

He's not sure he can fix the tone of voice thing without more practice because usually he just lets his tone of voice do whatever it feels like doing and doesn't make it submit its fucking timesheets.  He needs the practice but he needs to get through this conversation first, it has practical implications.  "I mean that incredibly literally, I am a suicide risk, please fly to Japan to take shifts with Mom sitting with me, I am not kidding, I sound chipper because of how I am this week very insane!" Haru replies.  "I will pay you back when I make esper money assuming I can find someone compatible enough that I can survive the process of trying to do that!  And also if I can't but it will take longer.  Buy a plane ticket immediately right now for as soon as possible, this is not a drill, as soon as I let you off the phone you have to be in the car to the airport, please please please please I can put Ren on the phone if you don't believe me -"

"Okay!  Okay, I'll - book something - what's happening to you, son -"

"It turns out my backlash is that I am lethal amounts of lonely with solipsism for dessert, I cannot at all handle this and cannot be left alone and I think I will probably get worse by the end of the week because of how by then I will not have been left alone for a week.  I don't think we're likely to be able to pick you up at the airport, I'm sorry, should we be asking Mom's friends who speak English if any of them are able to meet you there and get you on the right subway and stuff?" says Haru.  Like he and Ren have contracted food poisoning and regret not being able to greet Charlie right away for some normal planned visit to Tokyo.

"I think me and Google Translate can manage.  Address is the same?"

Haru recites the entire address even though saying yes would do.  He wants Charlie to narrate the process of taking time off work for his family emergency.  He asks how the neighbors are doing.  He opines on the virtues of Japan Airlines versus Air Canada at such inane length that he wants to commit seppuku.  He begins the ritual of pestering Charlie about whether he's eating a reasonable diet even though traditionally that ritual opens with Haru making breakfast in his house and discovering how much bacon and how few vegetables Charlie owns.  He manages to get all the way to the point at which Charlie needs to leave to get his car filled up and drive to the airport without convincing himself that Charlie is not real, though he does wind up convinced that Charlie hates him and resents being obliged to fly to Japan on pain of creating common knowledge that he doesn't want to show up to his son's mental health crisis.  It sucks.  He does not like being convinced that Charlie hates him.  It's just that it doesn't present itself as an unsolvable problem, whereas if Charlie didn't exist, it would be necessary to create him, and Haru lacks the skills to do that.

Well, probably.  Who knows what he'll be able to do in a week.

It had better be really fucking good.

Charlie arrives the next morning, Japan time.

By then Ren and Haru have managed to go back to sleep, both in Ren's bed with Haru as the little spoon.  They have awoken (har har) and gotten up.  The less said about their visits to the bathroom the better.  They make breakfast together even though they usually take turns cooking, and Ren pulls out a recipe for some elaborate tofu thing she's been wanting to try that's complicated enough that she wouldn't normally make time for it.  At least she's getting anything out of being parentally obligated to take care of Haru.  He spends the morning as the most pathetic sous chef, pathologically unable to shut up and barely able to give Ren elbow room to chop scallions.  (She won't let him have the knife.  Objectively this makes sense but it's supporting evidence for the backlash's case that she hates him.  If you like people you trust them to have knives, probably.)

Ren's ability to find things to talk about is not yet exhausted, but it isn't likely to last all week long, so Haru gloms onto Charlie as soon as he arrives, to let Ren disappear into her room and change out of pajamas.  Haru does not help Charlie with his bag.  He won't get his powers till Hell Week is over and done with, so he's still tripping a normal amount - he's not even sure dyspraxia's one of the things that awakening cures, though it seems likely - and on top of that his elbow has swollen up a bit, enough to be stiff when he bends it, but he's had worse.

"I cannot possibly sleep by myself," Haru tells Charlie, "so whether you put your stuff in my room or Mom's room depends I suppose on which of you is going to keep me company in hers, mine doesn't have room for two people, I'm still in a twin size.  That'll be awkward once I have a partner probably.  Though presumably a silo comes with a bed.  I guess if I'm going to be an esper I should find some practical way to sort out all my feelings about not bothering with sex till I meet the boy of my dreams, shouldn't I.  I can't believe I said that out loud to you with my face.  Please tell me something about the inflight meals or whatever, save me."

"I didn't get the airplane food," Charlie says, blinking bemusedly at Haru and graciously pretending that Haru did not say the thing he just said.  "I packed a sandwich and then didn't eat it because I managed to sleep."

"Then you must be starving!  Let's get you some of this tofu thing Mom made for breakfast, I know you're not usually a tofu person but your other options till somebody, realistically it's going to have to be Mom, goes shopping, are week-old tempura and plain rice with furikake on it.  I finished the leftover pizza yesterday and we forgot to put away the curry from Tuesday so we had to chuck it.  Or you could fill up on exotic Kit Kats, but I don't recommend it.  Did you bring me peanut butter?"

"Didn't have a sealed one."

"That is completely fair and I am glad you did not delay with a stop at Save-On before coming to save me.  Or more to the point to save Ren," Haru babbles, dishing up a serving of the tofu thing for Charlie.  "What do you think you'll want for lunch?  Dinner?  We could order something but doing it all week will be expensive and you're both already taking off work so probably at some point Mom should go buy ingredients and we can make whatever.  I really appreciate you coming all the way out here on no notice and want to make it as painless as I can for a value of 'can' that does not mean I can shut up, I can't shut up, oh God, and hey!  If you're not feeling the Japanese food there's places to get Western style groceries.  Even peanut butter, it's just expensive.  They have to import all the peanuts."

"I don't need peanut butter, Haru."

He's leaning on Charlie's left shoulder so Charlie has his right hand free to eat the tofu thing.  "I'm sorry about the tofu.  It was her idea.  Please don't hate me.  I can make you something else if the tofu's awful.  I think we have pancake fixings.  Only I would in fact need you to hover over me in physical contact ninety-five percent of the time and also I think Mom doesn't trust me with knives and maybe you don't either.  Pancakes don't usually require knives but we haven't been able to find the kitchen scissors since July and I might need to open a new bag of chocolate chips.  Or slice up an apple if you want them apple.  With a knife.  I know I said I'm a suicide risk and that isn't technically false but I think it would be more of a problem if I were actually left alone, I don't think I'm going to try to stab myself literally right in front of you.  Just don't leave me alone.  Please."

"We won't leave you alone, Haru."

"I love you.  Please don't hate me."

"Your brain's doing some nonsense."  Charlie scritches Haru's head.  "Does it do anything if I tell you I don't hate you?  I don't hate you."

Haru considers this.  "No, that doesn't work at all, I'm really very insane, I'm sorry."

Scritch scritch.  "The tofu thing's fine but I never turn down some normal broiled fish."

"We do have fish in Japan!" says Haru, and he pulls out his phone and talks out loud through the entire process of making Ren a grocery list for a meal plan that covers the next week, because she likes shopping but kind of sucks at making lists and will forget everything Haru doesn't write down for her.  They have an app for it.  Before Ren makes it back down the stairs showered and dressed Charlie is going to know every one of the app's features.  Charlie probably can't stand it and Haru is completely fed up with himself, too, it would really be great if he did not have to abuse Ren and Charlie's parental responsibility to get through the week, but he'd very much rather get through the week, when he's insane in the right direction and not the wrong one.

After Ren's left to do the shopping Charlie and Haru curl up on the couch, with Haru kind of draped across Charlie's lap while Charlie rubs his shoulders and his neck and pets his hair, leaning as hard as he can toward touch-starvation so that he can shut up for fifteen seconds at a time instead of only twelve.

It hasn't even been one day and it's going to be seven.

"I need to get a cat," Haru says.

"...I'll see if anyone on the esper forum has advice about that," says Ren.  They tried having Haru navigate the website, but it wasn't immediate enough.  He thinks it might be a tolerable distant second to real-time conversation if he were at least twenty percent less backlashed.  For now Ren's doing the browsing, while she keeps up a running commentary and adds his remarks to her posts.  "Do you think a cat would definitely be - satisfactory?"

"It's not always going to be this bad," says Haru.  "If I got like this in a dungeon I'd need to bail out.  Ideally sooner than this level to leave margin for error.  And people have their own things going on.  I don't have many friends, and even if I make more of them very fast while any of the thousands of possible awkward combinations of backlashed and introverted, sometimes they are all going to be unavailable at the same time.  Also, like, literally nothing is actually satisfactory, because nothing we do is making the backlash go away.  I have an emotional problem that is imposed directly by a magical curse and will only be lifted by, like, true compatibility's kiss, and until that happens I have - an almost skeuomorphic - tic, compulsion, itch, thing, and obviously I am having no luck with actually suppressing it but I think I could steer it onto a cat."

"All right, I'll put it on the forum."  She types something up.  The laptop is sitting on Haru's back because he is between Ren and her lap right now.  "The Sapporo Group has mixers for inactive and unpartnered espers, every three months, I'm signing you up for the next one."

"That sounds incredibly unappealing but I'm certainly not going to stop you."

"Because it'll take eight hours to get to Sapporo?"

"No, because that's too far in the future to appeal to the backlash and too much small talk with strangers to appeal to me.  But yeah, I need to shake hands with a bunch of espers, I might as well do it in Sapporo."

"It looks like Hasegawa actually has something similar, closer to home, but it's in six weeks and Sapporo's is a week from Thursday.  I'm still not finding anyone who'll do a house call."

"I mean, I probably wouldn't do house calls either unless somebody sounded really promising, compatibility is a crapshoot.  You'd have to visit the sickbeds of fifty teenagers before you found one you could guide particularly well, and most people are probably either already active, which means they've already got partners, or they're not active, which means they aren't actively in need of them."  Ren doesn't answer right away, so Haru has to talk more.  "So the mixers are probably the best they can do.  Low commitment, high density, it'll be annoying for me but it's not the worst part of this mess by a long shot."

"Somebody's offering you a... cat," says Ren.

"What, theirs had kittens?"

"Not exactly," she says, and she moves the laptop so he can see it.  Fluffy colorpoint with blue eyes and blue... wings.

There's a description to go with the picture, but Haru's eyes bounce off of the first kanji more obscure than "猫", and he hates everything.  He closes his eyes.  "Does the cat make housecalls?"

"It says," says Ren, very kindly not letting any of her presumable resentment leak into her voice, "that he's an orphaned dungeon monster, and he speaks fluent Japanese though he not literate, and he's been living in the guild offices of Hasegawa, helping navigate other four-dimensional dungeons for them in exchange for sashimi, but that he gets along very poorly with everyone there and hasn't accepted any names they've tried calling him so he's presently just 'Neko', and they'd be happy to introduce him.  But it doesn't say if he'll make a housecall.  I can ask."

"Tell them to tell the cat I said I'd teach him to read."

"Will a cat who can talk work for you, given what you want one for?"

"If people are trying to give him away to strangers on the Internet, I think he doesn't have his own competing obligations I'd have to schedule around," says Haru.

Ren talks to Haru about what they're cooking.  He learns the names of every one of her friends and every student in her class.  He tells her about school, every meaningless detail down to the typos in the history textbook and the button he lost when he tripped on the way out of math class and had to hunt for it after-hours to sew back on to avoid having to buy another uniform jacket.  He can't pull into conscious thought anything about any books he's read lately till she asks him, and then they're there, as long as he's answering questions.  He confesses that when she's not listening he refers to her by first name and she tells him she already knew that.  She tells him he talks in his sleep, which comes as a surprise to him but apparently he's done it since he was in kindergarten.  She sings to him, a repertoire consisting of equal parts children's music and catchy anison miscellany, and when it's not interactive enough he tries to sing along even when he doesn't know the tune, but the singing-together format at least mostly lets him read lyrics over her shoulder.  They plan vacation itineraries for trips she might take one day.  He's going to owe her plane tickets to let her travel the world during every part of the year school's not in session, for getting him through this.

Charlie gets Haru started about the premises of speculative fiction; he exhausts the ones he's already heard of promptly and starts looking up new ones to seed conversations, everything from Star Trek plots that Haru can't read and has to have read to him through the conceits of whatever Nintendo's putting forth lately.  It's a good approach; Haru can feel, not like himself, not with the yawning awful pit of loneliness that nothing will assuage, but like a functioning agent of himself, an extremity sent into a terrible environment but capable of criticizing the national priorities of Hyrule and the 24th century's approach to transporter technology.  It turns out Charlie also knew about the first name thing.  And the talking in his sleep.  He catches Haru up on how everyone in Grand Forks is doing.  He talks about fishing. And sports.  And how he needs a new police car, the old one's gas mileage was never great but is now dreadful.  Haru is pretty sure he cannot straightforwardly buy a new police car because they probably have to be government-issued but he'll think of something.  Probably there's expensive fishing gear to be had.

He really doesn't love the discovery that he'd rather commit low-key elder abuse than tank an unaddressable pica alone in his room which doesn't have any knives in it.  Even when he manages - with increasing success over the course of the week - to force himself firmly into touch-starvation, the least psychological of his available woes, he doesn't love this discovery.  Is that a fair description of the thing he's actually doing in real life?  Probably not.  Is it the thing that he often thinks he's doing, and endorses continuing to do even in those moments when he thinks it?  Absolutely.

On the seventh day Haru naps, as much as he can, tucked into one or the other embrace in Ren's bed depending on which one has an errand or needs a break more in any given hour.  He's exhausted, but with the accumulated effort of being "on", with stress and shame and purely emotional anguish - not in a way that makes it particularly easy to sleep.  Still, he gets about an hour in the morning and two in the afternoon with concerted effort.  And then after dinner he starts mainlining coffee.  He started awakening in the middle of the night and he'll finish it in the middle of the night, and he wants to catch it.  He wants to be conscious for the transition, to note benchmarks over the course of the comedown, and to have the wakefulness to pour the last week into a notebook until his hand falls off, because he can't do it any sooner than that.

"And then I probably won't want to talk to either of you for another week.  Maybe not that long.  At least a day," he says.  "I'm sorry, please don't hate me, it's not that I don't love you, I really do, just -"

"I understand, sweetheart," says Ren.  "We're both very much looking forward to you being yourself again."

He sits up late.  Charlie sits with him, pulling himself back toward his own time zone in the process to prepare for his flight back the next day.  They are out of things to talk about.  Charlie reads him infosheets online, the twins of the brochures in Japanese that Ren already read to him, about the classes he will need to take and the process for getting a secret identity in Canada.  When he runs out of those he starts checking possible esper names for him against the database.  All the good generic ones, starting with "Pinnacle", are already taken, and he doesn't know his powers yet.  What's thematic with loneliness?  Some power-backlash combinations are obvious but many of them really aren't.  He'll know soon.  He wants to know, but in a faraway fashion, where it doesn't seem to matter very much compared to the weight of Charlie's hand on his shoulder and the yawning sorrow of it failing to work.

The loneliness backs off starting at two fifteen in the morning.  Haru dictates, at first, interrupting himself as he realizes over and over that the thoughts he wants to get down on paper are for him and the paper alone, aren't for Charlie, and they will just have to be lost forever if he can't remember them when he can hold his own pencil.  It recedes like the water level in a water cooler, always falling down and never swelling back up again, but punctuated with metaphorical bubbles of turbulence that make it ever more obvious how ridiculously fucked up he's been all week, how bad it still is, how far he has to go.

He's able to let Charlie leave his room at two thirty, and it hurts like a splinter in the eye, but if you have one splinter in one eye you can still see with the other one.  He writes, frantic, through tears and the confused cramping of his hand which hasn't written a thing in a week, through the pounding of his heartbeat in his ears and the desperate stupid temptation to go explain all his notation to his parents, who cannot possibly at this point have the slightest desire to hear it even if he really wanted to.  He doesn't really want to.  It's lying, his magical brain damage is lying, and he can work with it to an extent rather than force his delusional self into a corner with no least-bad option left as a pressure valve; but he will not do this stupid thing that no one needs because he can't wait five more minutes, ten more minutes, for it to back off.

Writing doesn't help, but it happens at the same time as relief, which is very similar.  The relief is absolutely incredible.  There's a derogatory passage, in, if Haru recalls correctly, More's Utopia, about the low physical pleasures - he makes a note to look it up once he's slowed down enough on the urgent notebooking -

He slows down eventually.  He finds his digital copy; he doesn't have that one in paper.  It's foundational to the literary conversation but it's not in itself a tremendously fun read that he often returns to, it's just that the one passage is sticking in his head, now.

If any man imagines that there is a real happiness in these enjoyments, he must then confess that he would be the happiest of all men if he were to lead his life in perpetual hunger, thirst, and itching, and, by consequence, in perpetual eating, drinking, and scratching himself; which any one may easily see would be not only a base, but a miserable, state of a life.

Well.

Sir Thomas More lived before espers existed.

If this is what it feels like when backlash merely goes away then probably being guided is phenomenal.  And the perpetual hunger, thirst, itching, and delusional solitude, well.  That's in service of some of those higher pleasures More preferred, that Haru likes to think of himself as preferring.  The rescuing people.  Assuming his power is any good.

In the immediate wake of his awakening, though, in the final stillness of the departed backlash at last leaving him both alone and willing to be alone, Haru doesn't - doesn't really want to check, if his powers are any good.  He can sense their edges, but he doesn't want to try them.  If he accumulates new backlash it won't go away unprompted.  He doesn't want to pick up any of it that he cannot put down again.

Not till he knows where the relief is going to come from.

The Hasegawa mixer is at one of those sushi places with the little boats in the lazy river.  There's about thirty espers there, mostly inactive ones who are inactive because they, like Haru, don't have any way to safely come back up again if they plunge into the depths of backlash using their powers.  He shakes hands with one and - doesn't fall over recoiling, because he is no longer dyspraxic.  Small mercies.  But the new sensory modality being flooded with "NOPE" is really alarming.

He tries fistbumping the next guy, and the next, and the crowd skews young enough that the gesture catches on rather than running aground on the scandalous informality.  Bump, flinch.  Bump, flinch.  Bump, hm - not a flinch reaction, but it doesn't feel amazing.  Bump, flinch, bump, meh, bump, flinch, bump -

Haru doesn't want to let go but it's not a handshake so "not letting go" isn't an action he can take.  He opens his hand and reaches, parts his lips to say something, but the person he's just touched - she's got a surgical mask and big sunglasses on - takes a step back and dips into her pocket for a business card.  He takes it, bemused.

Yamanaka Junko
Speedster | Aggro Draw
Communications care of Yamanaka Katsuo

and a phone number and email.

There are a few non-espers at the party.  Haru considered bringing Cricket, even, just in case it was necessary to backlash a little to assess compatibility at all and he wanted company on the train home, but the likely drawbacks outweighed the possible benefits.  Maybe Yamanaka Katsuo is here and he can just talk to him now instead of waiting for email turnaround.  He wants to use his powers.  He wants to know what his powers are.  And Yamanaka Junko can help.

The party organizer is some Hasegawa suit.  Haru makes his way to that end of the sushi river.  They didn't overpack the restaurant, which makes sense since ninety percent of the esper-pairs combinatorially possible at this gathering really don't want to touch each other for longer than it takes to find out that they don't want to touch each other.  He asks the organizer if Katsuo-san is present, and he gets directed to a guy with a glass of sake and an order of chirashi.

"She's not too backlashed right now," Katsuo says, "but it's enough that this is hard for her -" and he explains.  Haru doesn't follow idols and news related to them in nearly enough detail to have heard of the incident, now eight months gone, in which Junko mistook her oncoming awakening for stage fright, went on anyway, and panicked in front of a crowd of thousands, but Katsuo gives a rough sketch of the circumstances.  He is so touchingly committed to getting his sister a partner.  Apparently the speedsterness is very hard to avoid using even in a completely civilian context.

Haru goes around fistbumping everyone else at the gathering too, and there's a couple of other almost-good compatibilities, but they're asymmetrical; they'd be good for him in a pinch but they'd be doing him a favor.  Junko is something like four times as compatible as the next best option at the mixer, and that fistbump felt as right to her as it did to him, notwithstanding that it involved human contact and was therefore simultaneously aversive.

Katsuo acquaints Haru with the emoji lookup table, adds a few things to it.  He orders his sister a privacy screen and an extra long couch, so either one of them can get up and go to the bathroom without being obvious to the other and so they have room to touch in the least intrusive fashion.  "When she's almost at baseline, there is - more flexibility, in potential, but of course as her brother, I -"

"I'm gay," Haru tells him.

"That's good to know.  I will make sure she is aware in case there is ever such urgency that it would be reassuring to have that information," says Katsuo, which probably means something like "if she winds up courting organ failure, you might have to take off your shirt and hug her so she doesn't die, but she isn't going to like it".

There's paperwork.  Haru actully winds up with a Canadian agency before he formally signs with Hasegawa, though he has to do the hiring remotely and take out a loan.  At the end of it he has a guild, he has an agent, he has a partner.

He tests out his powers, and then he goes over to Junko's apartment, where she's a lump of blanket with bare feet sticking out.  He takes off his shoes at the door, and he sits on the other end of her long sectional sofa, and he presses his feet to her feet, and the world comes around right again.