Lucien eventually drifts off during an increasingly incoherent conversation he thinks might be about how much Lucien paid for various things at the supermarket.

In the morning he's had a nice long consecutive stretch of guiding and is hopefully much less insane!

"You are very nice to sleep with," Lucien says before his brain has properly woken up. 

"Thanks."

Lucien is going to take another spoonful of cereal up to his mouth and then spill it back into his bowl when what he said reaches his ears.

"...I lose a fair amount of verbal filter backlashed too, I get it."

"Huh, I haven't noticed."

"I have practice. Mostly for me it helps to have a lot of conversational topics and scripts pre-decided so I'm never at a loss and desperate enough to say something I shouldn't."

"I get the feeling a lot of the things you have been talking about have to do with me and this means you've been thinking of me related conversational topics - but I'm not entirely sure I trust this feeling since it seems related to my backlash?"

"Yes, that seems related to your backlash, which appears to cause you to overestimate the degree to which things are about you."

"Yeah I'm starting to get that. I really wish it wasn't so convincing about this."

"Psychological backlash is usually a little malleable, but in - direction, not in fundamental nature or in severity. I have to stay on top of mine to keep it in one of the survivable forms."

"One of the survivable forms?"

"I've got one that makes me suicidal, if I really push it, though obviously I have so far survived this."

"That sounds really difficult."

"I'm pretty good at it but it's work. Anyway, you've probably got some flex, you will probably always be inclined while backlashed to think everything's about you but you might be able to steer away from specifically the guilt spirals or whatever that nightmare was about."

"My parents, I think."

"- well, whatever attitude made a dream about them nightmarish."

"They.... were sick of me, in the dream. Or something. It's not very clear which is probably a good thing."

"Yeah."

Ren comes through for cereal and wishes Haru and Lucien a good day and then skips off.

Lucien does not literally have a heart attack about this! 

He gets squeezed. "That's just Ren."

"And she saw me...Saw us."

"...yes. She knows you're here. If she didn't know before you started screaming in the middle of the night she would have figured it out then. She is apprised of the situation."

"That makes complete sense but also. ... We're not wearing shirts. And um. Homosexual."