Nod. "I don't have a lot of practice with them, visits to my family were usually never formal? But. Yeah I'll just go with a dress, then, that's easiest." And she doesn't have to go shopping and potentially venture into the public eye in doing so, which sounds great to her actually! Win-win.

"You look really good in a dress so I'll be looking forward to it."

That's a good way to cheer her up; she smiles and then leans over to kiss him. "Thank you." Kiss!

Hana's attempting to put together a reliable staff to help with managing her, uh, everything. Objectively speaking trying to do all of the management of where she should be leveraged, and then also squishing feelings and tanking the resulting backlash, would be, well. A stupid fucking idea, as Woo-young would put it. She has the self awareness to know it. And, comparatively, the anxiety around picking the right people to manage her scheduling, the updating and dissemination of her procedures, backlash management, priority lists etc is not as bad as actually doing all of that herself. It's only mostly her fault, not entirely her fault.

Unlike some other things that are arguably entirely her fault. Which she's thinking about right now, properly, instead of spiraling into perfect anxious stillness as is her custom. She's nestled against her partner, and - fidgets in a way that he would probably find telling. It is the 'I am no longer backlashed and I'm piecing together my actual thoughts and they're tricky,' fidget.

(Yes, it is that specific. Hana is very predictable about these things.)

And Woo-young has years of practice with that kind of thing, now. "Let me know when you want my input," he says with a small grin.

She is, if anything, both more self aware and more emotionally proactive than Tae-gun.

"Mhm," she agrees, with a tiny almost-smile.

"My complicated feelings are about Kang Jaeha. I'm - I don't regret anything, exactly," because she followed the procedures and everyone agrees she was very good at doing that, "but I'm also not sure I would have tried to save him if I'd known why he wanted to kill himself? So figuring out how I feel about it is. Hard."

"...ah. Yeah." That one is hard, yes. He feels... complicated about that, too.

"Mhm. So on one hand I - don't think we should let Nightmare torture anyone into suicide if we can at all help it, especially counters to it. From a, a - purely tactical level, it's a permanent loss of resources with which to counter it, which is to be avoided as much as possible. So on that front I regret nothing."

There's a pause as she lets this hang in the air; she checks to see that Woo-young doesn't have any questions, but he kind of likes hearing everything systematically laid out instead of picking through things piece by piece, so she continues.

"But I'm also not sure of - so, because of what he did, he might never be allowed, or able, to ever use his powers again. So keeping him alive is neither useful, nor kind, and I don't like being a party to keeping a man in a box because no one can decide what to do with him if it won't serve a purpose. It's just - torturing a guy."

"Except I then also think about - I am mad about everything he did to Lee Tae-gun and Kim Hye-jin and you and everyone else, but actually the thing that makes me furious enough to want him to suffer in a cold dark cell for the rest of his life is how he - he's not shielded against Nightmare. He was never shielded. And he never told anyone. He just kept going back in and being - the, the perfect anti-Nightmare, when that was a lie. How could he just, I don't understand, it's - I - I have worked so hard to manage my everything, I am still working so hard to get help to better manage my everything. I was and am painfully honest about my abilities and weaknesses, even though it's - not standard for psychic espers, makes me weird and scary to everyone, even my own peers. I spend hours every week looking for potential improvements to my intake and empathy procedures, I carefully catalog my backlash levels and mental state, I'm - attempting to figure out how to hire people that will tell me what to do when I can't think straight, even though I am the one that has to live with the consequences of what I do, and I don't even know how I can give someone that level of power over my life and choices and it's scary, but - I need to. I want to. Because it will help. Because I can't do this by myself. It would be," and her mouth twitches a little and she parrots, "'a stupid fucking idea.' To try to do it all by myself. To pretend I'm perfect to the detriment of all else."

"But then he did just that, and it ruined his whole life, and hurt a lot of other people, who didn't do anything wrong, and it was so stupidly predictable and I'm. Furious. Horrified. Disgusted. I can't - I don't - it's -" Snuggle the partner as she tries to words. Words are so hard.

Yeah he'll hug her and kiss the top of her head. He... does have thoughts and feelings about those things... but he'll wait until she's let it all out before he chimes in. Especially since he also doesn't really have everything neatly resolved in his mind, either...

Hug. Hugs help. For more than just guiding reasons, because she's zeroed out on backlash and this is just ambient 'person that she's compatible with' niceness, now.

"... I used to idolize him," she murmurs. "I - he was - the psychic esper that made me realize that we could kill people's nightmares for them, with these powers of ours. That made me want to try and make it work, with my - my weird and scary power that lets me look into and then meddle with peoples' minds, even though probably no one should have that power. Because the monsters out there are scarier than anything I can do, and they win if we do nothing, and I can learn how to be brave. Even if it sucks a whole lot, and takes so much work, and sometimes I just want to hide under the bed and pretend I don't exist. So I'm angry at him for lying to me, for risking so many people for his stupid pride, for being an active risk to combating and mitigating Nightmare, for - just. He unknowingly gave me a big job to live up to, and then he wasn't even doing it himself. So I think that's what I am selfishly most mad at him about. On my own account."

Pet pet pet.

"He... got to a lot more people than he was even trying to," Woo-young agrees, quietly.

"Yeah." Lean. "... I don't think I actually want him to rot in prison forever, or be executed, it seems like too much of a waste, practically speaking. Anyway it's harder to go on instead of not. So it's probably actually meaner, and it was neither a mercy nor a kindness that I didn't let him kill himself."

Pause. "... Okay now I feel bad...." she grumbles, nearly immediately.

Pet pet pet.

"When I first found out, found—everything out, six years ago, I wanted to kill him," he says, matter-of-factly. "I'm not sure I wouldn't have, if Tae-gun hadn't stopped me."

Nod!

"Using psychic powers to tamper with an S-rank is in fact the sort of thing dungeons and their monsters get killed for. I don't see why it shouldn't also apply to espers if they go rogue enough. ... You didn't have a plan for getting away with it, did you. You were just mad."

"What do you take me for, of course I had a plan for getting away with it! It'd take some doing because I'd need to hide the fact that I got suddenly backlashed but I'm sure prez would have aided and abetted me. And if Tae-hwan—" He stops short as the breath hitches in his throat, then clears it. "Anyway."

"Oh, okay. Good. No further complaints, then." Only petting, because. Her poor partner.

"But Tae-gun... loved him. I'm not sure he doesn't still. He... I had to stay mad. For years. Because if I didn't then Tae-gun would keep, keep, keep trying to make it so much smaller than it was, trying to make it his fault, trying to make it make sense by wishing it away. 

"But now that everything happened, I'm just... tired. I'm just so tired of it all, and, and I'm sad, because, because hyung loved him, and he loved hyung back, and it was all so fucking stupid."

Nod, hair kiss.

"Yeah. It's hard to - be someone else's defense mechanisms, emotionally. Which is what it sounds like it was? So."

"お疲れ様でした*."

*Roughly translates to, Thank you for your hard work.