"Yeah, sorry, that was a stupid question." What if his face was on Julien's shoulder. "Okay. Bedtime. You want to walk or should I carry you."

"Either is fine."

"Okay, scoop time, stairs sound awkward while trying to hug and walk around on four total legs." Scoop. Stairs. "Sorry about the emergency dungeon alert, that has to have scared you out of your skin, even I nearly have a heart attack whenever I get one of those."

"- Aa the stairs the stairs!  Stop!  - You should fly up them instead of.  Balancing."

Haru stops at the foot of the stairs. "Uh, the object of this exercise is for me to decrease in backlash load. I can always fly rather than hit the ground if I do lose my balance but I don't do that very often post-awakening, it cured my dyspraxia which I had before."

".........I prefer we walk up the stairs, then."  With holding hands and maybe some arm bumping as the amount of contact.  Once they're clear of the top he gets in position to get picked back up, though.

"Okay." He scoops Julien once they're at the top and carries him into the guest room and flops the both of them into bed. "Maybe I should get some kind of harness thing. Not for right now obviously, it just keeps coming up. I'm imagining, like, what skydiving instructors use or something, they must have some kind of attaching-a-person-to-them rig which probably doesn't strictly require a parachute to work at the attaching process."

"That sounds great.  I would really like that."  Maybe he can be the one to buy it, though.  "...The dungeon alert wasn't really that scary.  Itself."  Now that he's under a blanket again his body decides it's time to resume shivering.

Haru snuggles him very much. "Itself?"

"I was really afraid that I would go crazy in a way that caused me to be untrustworthy when the thing you were trusting me with was your life."  Snuggle.  "But I also didn't want you to go be with your partner instead."

"It would have been an inferior solution in several ways. She's technically more compatible but the guiding winds up a lot slower anyway - even when she's not backlashed and only I am, she does this thing where she avoids interacting with me qua person. And you'd have been alone, so that'd - well, I'm projecting, but I assume it would be worse."

"It would be so bad."

Snuggle snuggle. "I'm supposed to go get my arm looked at after I wake up in the morning, or, just as plausibly, when I wake up in the afternoon, but I can probably bring you along if you prefer that to being here by yourself for like an hour?"

"Yes.  ....I think I can't sleep unless you Good Night Carbon Monoxide Detec -"  Alarm.  Ughhh digging his phone out of his pocket while lying down - dismiss.  He's going to have to delete the rest of the pending ones soon.  "Unless you Good Night Carbon Monoxide Detector me."

"Yeah - shit, did you also not get any sleep before the dungeon alert -"

"No.  It did make it less scary.  Probably."

"I am so sorry please don't be mad at me. - that is a thing I sometimes say excessively when backlashed, we don't necessarily have to do an entire thing about it."

- Okay, he laughs at that, after a beat.

"Eheh. - anyway, uh, good night carbon monoxide detector, sure, where do you want to start on that."

"Umm, I should, I have alarms set every two minutes for the next while, I should get rid of those."  Phone phone phone.

"Wow that's a lot of alarms."

"I was worried the notification wouldn't work and I would miss one of the important texts.  Since they were time-sensitive."  Delete deleeeete.

"Well, it worked, and whether it was overkill who can say, I suppose."

"Yeah.  I tried a test to see whether they were working and some of them didn't.  I think I figured out that it was for a reason that wouldn't apply but I had already set them.  And it wasn't really that bad to check that often.  It's not like I was going to be able to get anything else meaningful done."  Okay he's done, back to proper snuggling.

The snuggling is so proper and Haru is not weird about it at all. "- so like I said I didn't take any guns out, all the stuff I dumped on the garage floor for Tomorrow Haru to deal with is like, first aid and the rescue tool stuff and the paracord and admittedly there is a knife but it's in its sheath and not going anywhere. Any other carbon monoxide detectors you wanna cover?"