"I mean, platonic partnerships are a thing, if you're not into it - yet or ever - we can just not go there."

"So the thing is, the thing my backlash is, is also just a way I am naturally? Whether through learned experience or what. And- Maybe a lot of the things are no longer true, awakening has made me less of a scrawny little newt, I can be considerate and calm, I can just try something scary and decide 'yeah that was fine' or 'nope that was not fine' after- If something ends up being too weird, too much, I can just go 'actually how about no'. And part of me is like, oh no, Haru deserves a partner that will have sex with him but burn that part with fire nobody deserves sex it's always - consent- When I think about my ethics I usually end up somewhere close to utilitarian and- Sidetrack-"

"This- Everything has been a whirlwind for the last two weeks and it's like, why not just keep going. You went flying with me, you have a blog I glanced at the most recent post of that seems interesting, you're going to be a fucking superhero and so am I, horny-making touch practically right out of stupid esper fic and all. So why not just 'screw it, kiss him, maybe kiss Wendy if she's up for it, roll up and save the day and buy a fancy car and a two thousand dollar graphics card, the world is your oyster'? Why not, Teddy? You can just - do the thing - pick up the hundred dollar bill in front of you. Haru, if you don't really mind that what's doing most of the attractive work for me so far here is the guiding and fantasies of empathy-enhanced sex, more than your looks or personality - which to be clear neither are bad just not hitting that way exactly, you're cheery, you're the body-type face-type of guy I like when I like guys - I don't actually know much of you yet, I mean, with a loneliness backlash we're probably going to talk for hours at a time, so there's time, but there's just so much fucking anxiety flavor in my mood profile. Aaaand I am rambling and shutting up now."

He takes a deep breath.

"Did any of that... Make sense, at all."

"I think it made sense. I actually act way less chipper when I'm not backlashed, it's - I don't get social anxiety backlash directly but it comes in as a side effect sometimes, because it makes me sort of socially desperate and it turns out I react to that by being really smiley and crossing my fingers that it works. It's fine to take it at face value while it's happening, since that is the entire point, but that's not my actual personality, it's a symptom. It really confused my dad when I called him to tell him I was awakening, he thought I was being sarcastic about how much it sucked.

"- anyway, one of the first things I did right after I was done awakening and in, like, recovery from that, is I kind of re-thought my whole attitude toward, like, sex, romance, the relationship between the two, because - I couldn't know in advance who I was going to meet, right? If I want to be a superhero, which I really do, it will be an impediment to get hung up on details. I can't turn myself bisexual - I did take a bit of a run at it but it wasn't happening - but a lot of the rest of the kind of... So, like, I wasn't planning on being an esper, I wanted it but the odds were bad, I responsibly had other plans, I was going to go to med school and locate and be monogamous with the guy of my dreams. And if I get to be a superhero, being arranged that way is a career liability. It only works without slowing me down on the superheroism front if a very specific sequence of events I can't control happens. So I sort of refactored myself about it? And the version of me who is doing premed at U of T next year does not start necking with a guy I just met who is mostly not into me as a person, but I'm not that version of me, I'm the esper version of me who will totally do that. If you don't think it's going to cause any long term repercussions."

"...Okay, with that thought in mind I think it would be a mistake to kiss you today. I want... My first real actual foray into this stuff, I guess, to have more foundation stone than 'guiding is nice and I'm anxious'. I want to if I'm going to kiss you, do it when I am, one, less anxious in the moment, and two, a bit more into you as a person, which seems likely to develop, and three, after having thought about it on my own some more and maybe talking it out a bit more and figuring out how separable sex and romance are to me."

"Eminently reasonable."

Yeah, this is. This is the correct action.

Would he be thinking differently if Haru was a girl and the impression on his hindbrain was 'really really hot' instead of 'kind of cute'? ...Maybe? That hypothetical alter-Haru would probably still be around this hesitant, which would make him stop and think in turn, but he honestly doesn't know. It'd be nice to think that he'd come to the same conclusion then, maybe with more waffling over it, but you never know how you'll react to something until you actually do react to it.

"Heavy thoughts. Sorry. Um... Topic change. Why do you want to be a superhero?"

"I wanna save people. They're not gonna save themselves, and my power set is good for it. And also I intend to make a shit ton of money and donate it toward the control and eradication of malaria."

That knocks him out of his thought loop.

"-Malaria? Because it's the most effective per dollar? I think I heard something like that."

"Yes but also I just find it kind of personally offensive that we still have malaria. It's not everywhere! You used to be able to get malaria on this continent! - still can in some parts of Mexico, but like it used to be you'd get it in the southern States too. It's achievable to simply not have this problem any more, as with smallpox, and - I once saw an estimate, almost certainly an overestimate, that malaria caused half of all human deaths over the course of history. That's - it isn't true, but it didn't instantly fail a back of the envelope check, the way you'd immediately call bullshit if someone claimed this about, say, childbirth or cancer or something."

"...If you've seen this one old meme- A wikipedia page: List of eradicated diseases. This list is incomplete; You can help by expanding it."

"- I think I've seen the actual Wikipedia page, I didn't know it had been processed into a meme."

"It's kind of an old one? I think they stopped putting 'This list is incomplete; You can help by expanding it' at the top of list pages. I originally saw it as- 'List of communist revolutions', and then a picture of Lenin with glowing red eyes under 'expanding it'."

"Maybe I did see it in meme form and just remembered it wrong, I'm not sure."

"I should make this particular meme." He tabs away from the 'overcooked' level select screen and opens MS Paint, then opens a browser (he checked and his phone's wifi hotspot feature works in Canada) and starts looking for the original as a template. "Do you have any good ideas for, uh, famous epidemiologists or something?"

"John Snow?"

And tab and tab and copy and paste and crop and copy and paste and...

"Behold, a meme."

"From the United States? Is there not one for worldwide?"

"Apparently not. There's a disambiguation page, and a general 'disease eradication' page, but not a 'list of diseases eradicated worldwide'."

"Huh. I guess it wouldn't be that long at this point in time."