"Ah."

"Yeah. Sorry. - I'd explain in more detail but perhaps I hadn't better."

"I have an imagination.  It might not be correct, but I have one."  He expected this to be in-reality safe, but it's not hard to come up with reasons it wouldn't be; that's why he thought he'd be able to scare himself with it at all.

"I could stalk you through the house."

"...Are you confident I won't be able to hurt you and that you won't need to really hurt me to prevent that?"

"If the point of this exercise is to simultaneously scare you and cause me to rack up backlash, yes, though I might need to call a halt partway through, and will also need to be on a call with Cricket the whole time - and I don't work on electronics so you'll be able to hear me talking to him about television through his computer the whole time, which I suppose might ruin the effect."

"...Headphones," he suggests, almost absentmindedly.  "I - don't want to make you two do this... but maybe this isn't the part of that I thought was bad."

"It doesn't sound particularly unpleasant for me, let alone Cricket for whom this is basically his job anyway, I'm just making sure I have the logistics angles covered. Like I'm imagining from my end I'm just sort of wandering around discussing The Wire, occasionally moving a chair in your peripheral vision or something till I'm backlashed enough that I need to, shall we say 'pounce', and then I do that."

"I think I was imagining something more hide-and-seeky, but fundamentally that doesn't not work."  His body language is already becoming tenser, though he keeps his tone of voice relatively light.

"Shall I go alert Cricket and then not reappear for a concerning amount of time?"

...Are the headphones within reach yes they are.  He can feel his heartbeat.  "Sure."  Does he have any approximate potential last words.... "Thanks for being, really pretty not awful."  Well.  That will have to do.

"You're welcome."

He vanishes, noiselessly and instantly.

He jumps, a split-second later than if it had been a truly uncontrollable reaction.  He's made up of pretending; he should start now, even if it feels a little silly.  And even if before he really starts getting in character he's going to sling on the headphones and try to look up - yes, excellent, thank you ASMR people, 'Spooky Scary Ambience | Spine Chilling Ghost Mansion Mix 4 Hours | Music & SFX' sounds perfect.

And then he'll, what, hyperventilate on purpose?  Yeah, that seems like the thing to do.

"- so do you remember I was telling you about when McNulty was pretending to be British on the phone, I found out that actually his actor is British."

"Oh, that's a fun meta-gag, I bet the writers were very pleased with themselves," says Haru's voice, but only from Cricket's computer.

A light flickers in the kitchen.

Okay, right, he can only sort of hear that through the headphones so he could ignore it, but clearly the narrative here is that Haru is away and just calling in, and a separate entity is stalking him who's like, a ghost or a demon or something.  And Cricket is in the role of the person in the horror movie who won't believe that something's up, except he's also maybe already been replaced with some sort of nefarious being so Bug he can't go to him for help.

Yeah, okay, his character (whose name is maybe, coincidentally, Julien) is not so scared yet, but ~strange things have been happening~ and flickering lights is one of them.  This place is fucking haunted and his character knows it (but in that way where he doesn't actually believe believe it yet).  He stops hyperventilating on purpose but his breath is still kind of heavy.  He darts his eyes around, looking for anything that could have caused the lights.

A drawer in the kitchen sliiiiides open, then closed again.

That happens pretty close to a door creak in his soundtrack, which for a moment is legitimately frightening because it's behind him and he doesn't think that Haru can do two things that far apart at once.  But when he whips around it moves with him, and he realizes what's up.  He'll take his heartrate spikes where he can get them, though.  (This would be such a time to also discover a real haunting, although that won't happen because:  ghosts aren't real.  Robbers and things are, he supposes; that could happen.)

What if he.... his character might grab something to protect himself but he absolutely should not.  He'll - he takes a few (thoughtless for his character, very intentional for him) steps backward.  At an angle away from both the drawer and where he first heard the door.

Something's tugging on the back of his shirt a little bit. No hint of guiding, though.

Aaaaa.  Wow yeah that's scary.  He's going to run (carefully!  It will not at all help either him or his character to take it in the teeth) to the guest bedroom.

Once he's in there the door starts slooooowly closing.

Yep, yep, sure, fine.  He's fine.  He's going to go - he won't fit under the bed he doesn't think - into the closet (har har har har) and close the door before anything else can get in here with him.  (Or at least, so that it will be extremely scary when something does.)  He curls up in the corner and covers the bottom of his face with a hand and tries to be completely silent, which currently means trying not to breathe, and after a moment means trying to breathe very little.

The door slooooowly opens.

He is holding so still.  Back to no breathing.

Tug tug at his pant leg.