Haru scrolls labriously through his contacts till the one he wants is readily available. "Could start the Korean lessons if it winds up being that you're not - well, the word 'considerate' feels weirdly loaded now."

"Just don't add the qualifier to it and it's a perfectly fine word."

"If you wind up not being considerate, then, but are still willing to go through vocabulary."

"I hope I don't disappoint."

"If you don't wind up talky I'll call Tess and if she doesn't pick up I'll call Cricket and he'll tide me over while connecting me to people like an old-timey telephone operator but I apologize in advance if that happens, I keep my phone volume low but not so low you would be guaranteed not to catch anything."

"Understood. —I suppose you'll still want to call someone else to read you 'the checklist'?"

"It's shorter without the handcuff step by enough that I'd expect to notice if you missed something, which is most of what I was guarding against by calling third parties for it. Actually, if it's now acceptable for you to be conscious when backlashed we could also dispense with the pills step and me making sure that I'm definitely up before you."

"Were those the contents?" He doesn't know how to feel about the prospect of actually being awake while unbraceleted again and then spending the night with Haru. It sounds... kind of dreadful, actually, now that he thinks about it, so he will instead stop thinking about it before he works himself up and makes it worse. "Yes I had been thinking no more pills." Although if he starts having nightmares he might want them back, unsure. He hasn't had nightmares in a while but that was while not having any backlash and the first few months in prison he had them nearly every night without fail.

"I think so but if I could remember the list reliably while backlashed I would not have been having people read it to me in the first place. I'll just pull up my checklists," attention, phone!, "and you can have a look -"

Yeah it's pretty much just the bedtime routine they've been following.