Maybe they should switch to a slightly more proprietous configuration about this.  Side by side.  He wouldn't want to be doing this level of PDA in front of his mom even with a girl.  - Girls can't be shirtless in a normal way.  Even.... in a homonormative world.  It's been a long time since he texted his mom; he should do that.  Type type hello yes he is alive and relatively minimally traumatized, how are you, etc.

"My mom wants to know if she should bring a casserole over tomorrow night?"

"If she wants. It's unnecessary but if it'll make her feel less indebted or something. I assume she already knows you're a vegetarian."

"Knowing my mom I think it's less about debt and more about thanks."

"Well, I think if she'd like to that would be fine and we'd appreciate it. Right, Mom?"

"Sure! Tell her to surprise us!"

"I will do this."  Type type.  "Same time and everything?"

"Sure."

He worries until dinner that it will be bad in some way to have Bug interact with his - with their mom, but he thinks.... not enough to want to not try and bring him back.  He thinks this is the way to make his other self hate him the least (in a hypothetical where Bug exists to have opinions later no matter what), when he compares the level of intellectual dread he feels about each of his options.  (The emotional dread feels the same no matter what, obviously.  It's magic.)  And he doesn't actually expect Bug to mess anything up, in any sense more substantial than one based in panic, which he can't trust.  So.  Forward as planned, he thinks.

Spaghetti hits the table after about fifteen minutes of kitchen work. "Chow down, boys!"

Yum.  He can make it through this.  He's only a little terrified that he's going to have made it this far and then mess it up catastrophically somehow.  He only has a little over a day left.  ...If he hands things over to Bug and that goes approximately as planned, he only has a few hours left, probably.  That would be nice.

So the question is whether there's anything he's missing, that could cause things to go catastrophically.  There - probably isn't, given all of the everything else, and he'd make it worse by looking too hard.  But... maybe he should write Bug a letter.  It seems - polite - even though Bug seems to have a much better understanding of how Julien ticks than the reverse.

If this activity requires more privacy from Haru than snuggling on the couch while Haru reads Candide he will have to say so.

Yyyyyyeah.  "Can we sit back-to-back, for a while?"

"Sure." Scootch scootch.

He opens a new note document and types 'Dear Bug,' and -

The thing is that he does know exactly why Bug named himself that, and it's... it hurts.  In the way that realizing your own flaws often does.  He knows how he feels about bugs, lowercase; heck, he even summarized it out loud, not that long ago and directly to the same person who's most involved in his current situation.  And he certainly tries to treat more complex classes of beings with more dignity and kindness than that.  He - didn't.  He got called out on it; his mind split itself into pieces just to call him out on it.  You don't get to torture people just because they're you.

His brain keeps providing him, gratis, with ways this is going to cause something to go horribly.  (Thinking that thought again is going to cause Bug to come back and he'll be angry at Julien because it's right before bedtime and they'll both suffer a lot and the harnesses haven't come in yet so they don't even have a workable strategy for switching back -)  It's curious:  it's the most - jarring - the paranoia's felt.  He's had his ways of intellectually working around it, and Bug certainly had whatever Bug's way of dealing with it was, but - the thing he feels is guilty.  He can tell that the thing he should be feeling is guilt.  But paranoia is inherently about the future, or at the very least about new information, even if he often panics about something he's done in the past being revealed to have been somehow bad the whole time.  And here he knows exactly what he's done and exactly what the problem is.  So it just - doesn't - jive -

He's honestly getting really sick of crying as much as he has been, recently.  Nothing to be done for it, though.  He closes his laptop and, okay, what if he were cuddling Haru substantially more than currently.  Once he relocates the box of tissues.  He'll finish his message in a minute or fifteen.