"Huh. Why'd you do it? Just scientific curiosity or...?"

"...you could put it that way but it's not how I'd put it. I'm scientifically curious about how bicycles stay up. I'm desperate for answers about why the fuck aliens landed in the seventies and started abducting people and what they want! They just keep doing it and we keep killing them in self-defense! They at least sometimes contain people in potentia, like Cricket, and yet they won't talk to us and we can't talk to them and so we just keep killing each other and it's -" He gestures in frustration. "Cricket's very special but not unique, there have been a couple other talking monsters, and Cricket doesn't remember anything but maybe one day one will, or there'll be a pattern in the monster biology, or something."

Jaeha is really quite conscious of the power differential here. Really quite conscious. There is no ethical way for literally anything to ever happen ever between him and Traceless Haru. He also probably has a whole minefield of triggers around the whole thing! He's not over Tae-gun! ...Lee Tae-gun! And he's probably going to have feelings related to Insoo, too! ...Kim Insoo, too! It really is a very very bad no good terrible idea to be attracted to Haru Traceless!

Ain't none o' that seem to be stoppin' him tho lol

He looks down at his food and decides that he should in fact start practising controlling his facial expressions again. "Aliens, huh?"

"Well, it's a bit flip, but they're - phenomena that generate organisms even if they are not themselves organisms and they weren't around before, whatever that crackpot who thinks Gilgamesh was an esper says."

"No, I understand what you mean. 

"...Nightmare talked to me. All the time, actually."

"- what'd it say?"

"It tormented me, of course. I—assume you've read up on everything about me so you know I can't shield myself. And I lied to everyone about that, so I always went in, unshielded, and it tormented me. 

"It never used to, prior to T- to Lee Tae-gun. When I didn't care about anything. And then I had something I cared about, and it—it's not true that it only shows you your worst past nightmares, and repeats them. It's a lot more creative than that. It showed me all of my fears. It showed me Ta- Lee Tae-gun dying, breaking up with me, leaving me, mocking me. 

"But sometimes it didn't do any of that. It didn't even pretend. It was wearing T- his face, it talked like he did, but it was talking to me. It taunted me about how I was going to have to keep coming back, again and again, and I would keep seeing the worst things I could possibly see, again and again. It talked like him but it didn't say anything he ever would."

"And then there were other people. He was the most frequent torment vector, but it would occasionally co-opt other victims' nightmares, too, make them talk to me. Not—directly. Always plausibly deniably. But to me. And I was constantly editing their perceptions so that they wouldn't realise it, wouldn't see how Nightmare talked to me."

Deep breath. "Then—a year and a half ago, last confluence, it started wearing Kim Hye-jin's face. And it barely pretended, with her. It just mocked me, every day."

Another deep breath. "And on that last day it called me its friend."

"At the risk of being callous may I take notes -"

That startles a bark of a laugh out of him. "Go ahead. Want me to recite to you the last things it said to me? I remember them perfectly, word for word. I didn't even try to, it's just been seared into my brain."

"Please. Ready now."

"It wore her face, and it mocked me for the hare-brained plot I'd cooked, and then it said,"

"What's going to happen, dearest Jaeha-oppa, if all of the backlash falls away and you tell your beloved everything?"

"I'm going to die. Obviously."

"Really? That's your brilliant, master plan?"

"It's not a plan, it's a prediction."

"Oh, come on, it can't end like that! That's - that's - that's so stupid."

"Do you have a fucking alternative? Yeah it's fucking stupid, I, I, I made a mistake somewhere and I don't. I just. I don't have a plan anymore."

"Fine! Then let's - let's workshop alternatives, okay, I'll help you, I bet there's a way I can pull someone's strings to fix this -"

 

 

"What the fuck?"

"You can't just fucking die! Especially not like that! We've - look I know we haven't always gotten along but we've been together for years - !"

"Dropping kayfabe? That's a first."

"You're - you're the closest fucking thing I have to a friend, you prick! You're the only human that's anything like me and if you go off to die in a corner like a pathetic little worm where I can't even see -!"

"...and that's what drove me over the edge. It called me a friend. It stopped acting like Kim Hye-jin at all, stopped pretending to pretend to be her, and told me I'm the only human like it, and the closest thing it had to a friend, and obviously if that's true then the best thing I can do for humanity is die."