"If I were greener, yes, but I'm nearly five years in."

"That's so long.  You're barely older than me.  ...Unless you're being cheeky with definitions of 'me', in which case you're twenty-two years older.  But that's obviously wrong, it's clearly like one."

"My eighteenth birthday happened in the middle of my awakening! You're later than median."

Everything vaguely witty he can think of saying sounds too much like a come-on.  "Yeah."

Wow it's a good thing Haru is a fucking professional or he would be having some kind of problem right now about that nothing of a response. He snuggles very slightly more aggressively. "Any guesses what your mom's bringing for dinner?"

"Well, she said casserole, and she probably feels bad enough for me to go with my favorite - or at least Julien's?  We do seem to have somewhat different tastes; he's never put hot sauce on eggs - which is, it's like, fundamentally not very different from broccoli cheese soup except it's a casserole and there are tater tots."

"Broccoli cheese and tater tots, sounds pretty good. Does he not like spicy food in general or just not specifically hotsauce on eggs?"

"The latter!  Or, he never bothered trying it.  I assume he'd like it fine if he tried it; there has to be some sense in which taste buds are real.  - Meaning, and like the nerves and the brain or whatever.  Bodies are real, is what I'm saying.  And probably have effects on things."

"That's probably the most important factor if you're talking about whether cilantro tastes like soap but I wouldn't know which way to bet for more matters-of-taste stuff."

"One could imagine it being true that it differs!  But so far it doesn't seem so, for me."

"I'm imagining some division of labor thing where it's your job to taste potentially dubious food to see if he'll like it."

"What?  No.  I'm the indulgent one.  It's plain sufficient things versus nice bonus things, not stability versus novelty."

"Ah, I see, he never bothered not out of downside concern but upside disregard?"

"Pretty much, yeah.  Probably some of the 'but why would I bother' is worrying about experiencing a bad thing, but not most of it.  ....Although in fairness to him I think it's genuinely harder for him to enjoy experiences on a sensory level this week."

"Yeah, that makes sense."

"Whereas IIIIIIIIII am afraid of not getting to."  Snuggle.

"Even with your demonstrated ability to access nice things such as Thai food and hotsauce on eggs?"

"Well, I mean the thing I'm spending all my paranoia on is that I won't be able to come back, after this.  Which was also mostly true of the previous times, so you might think that it would stop working, since I keep in fact coming back, but - I do think you were right that I might be specifically awakening backlash, so I've remained pretty scared about that since the first time.  Which I guess is convenient, as long as I'm wrong.  If I'm not awakening backlash then I guess I won't need something to be afraid of all the time in order to be able to function."

"Huh. You do seem able to exist at lower, guided levels..."

"Yeah, but what if I still have to start at ones way higher than it's ever safe and sane to go, is my thinking.  Or it's something about the experience as a whole.  ...Suffice to say, I am running a lot of my functioning on feeling dead certain that this is my last time alive and I've got to make the most of it, so maybe we don't poke at that too hard lest my brain start coming up with other reasons I should be terrified and I turn back into Julien.  Which would be really - meta, or ironic, or self-fulfilling or something.  But."  Cling.

Hug hug. "Gotcha. I do think that would count as irony."

"On a scale of Alanis Morrisette to ten I am validated.  ...Also.  You - to me it already counts, but.  You told Julien you would apologize to me, and perhaps you would feel bad later if you forgot this.  Or not."

"- right, thanks, I'm sorry about wedging you into guiding the first time, I don't think I had the resources to make a better call but it presumably sucked and I wish it hadn't."

"Thank you."  He nestles down a bit, with intention, into a less clingy position.  "That does seems true."

"You're welcome."