Yes. Yes he does. Makeouts are plenty salutary, really, there's less concentrated fluid than the amount of cum someone produces in an orgasm but it can last a lot longer so the overall effect can be stronger. Now, of course, the most effective possible kind of guiding would be doing penetrative intercourse while making out and switching out who's on top periodically, but, you know.

Also Jaeha didn't get off and Haru has half a mind to fix that if Jaeha doesn't object.

...he recognises that his surprise is probably backlash badbrains but that doesn't stop him from being surprised for a moment. But, uh, no, he definitely doesn't object.

Oh good!

He does take a bit, though, due to the, you know, deadening of his senses and all that, but he is not hurting for enthusiasm, this entire situation is really really hot.

It's okay if he takes a while, they're not in a hurry. Though Haru does use this time to among other things figure out why Jaeha might want some of his sex to take place with the bracelet on.

Yeah. He's getting some evidence alright.

Still, it doesn't take that long, objectively speaking, especially if they're still making out throughout. The feeling of guiding can carry a lot of what everything else is missing.

Guiding is very good.

And in the end Haru is zeroed and Jaeha is... not, but they will probably get through this in less than the projected number of months.

If they do this every day it might even just be a singular number! And then the only remaining depression will be the one related to the fact that he has objectively completely ruined his own life.

And they can go to bed and sleep off some more of that backlash.

And this time they don't actually need to sleep wearing clothes so they can get more surface area coverage, and Jaeha doesn't even need to hide that he finds Haru painfully attractive! Overall a very productive day, in his opinion.

Over the next few days Jaeha gets ringside seats to Haru committing bureaucratic murders. Some of it isn't that interesting - he texts Tess a lot, he writes emails, he calls a bunch of other espers and tells them all basically identical spiels about how they should demand the graduation dates of everyone on the SWAT teams in their dungeons and refuse to go in with anyone who graduated in fall till they've all been re-tested, summarizing facts Jaeha already knows to a lawyer - but there are a few more spicy phone calls, which he obligingly takes in the silo, getting the fired teacher onside, and asking pointed questions about what the American contractor thought might happen once their services were no longer employed and why they didn't warn anybody, talking to a couple people in the provincial government about the virtues of audits over blind budget cuts, and even getting the would-be axe-murderer on the phone and dressing him down. In the end at least five people resign in disgrace, the re-test is scheduled, and it is again relatively safe to wander into hostile pocket dimensions and retrieve victims from them.

And Haru absolutely gets more blowjobs as a reward for looking competent and dominant and dangerous. The fact that Jaeha feels like he's the one being rewarded helps, too.

That is definitely why he is taking the spicy phone calls in the silo.

They settle into something of a holding pattern over those days. Having sex every day, and more specifically going down on Haru every day, starts making a noticeable dent in his backlash.

Plus, Jaeha thinks he has found the key to pleasing Haru. He doesn't need to be meek and docile or get out of the way, he can even occasionally be spiky, so long as he pays Haru obeisance well enough. Haru likes being complimented, but he wants to be complimented about the things he's proud of, which, well, doesn't everybody? But buttering him up is easy. He doesn't particularly care about being pretty or hot or sexy, he cares about being intelligent and competent and ethical and hardworking and agentic. Jaeha can admire that. Jaeha can figure out how much to admire it for Haru to be happy.

He's not doing it for a reason, though, understand. Or rather, he is, but the reason he's trying to make Haru happy is because he actually wants Haru to be happy. Because his power may be cool and useful, sure, but if he makes Haru happy that's him. He's having a solid, concrete, tangible effect in the world. He's making someone else happier. Not his power, him. Maybe he isn't a good person, maybe there isn't anything he can do that will tip the balance in his favour, but this is something he can live with. This is a person he can be.

Haru is, if you are the sort of person to embark on a campaign of laser-targeted admiration and appreciation, not hard to please at all. He is having a great time.

Haru is also a very prolific blogger, which means that Jaeha gets a ton of ammunition. Or, well, you know, there's also the fact that he's a compelling writer and his posts are interesting, that helps, both as a thing to admire in itself and as a means of getting very thorough insight into what he likes about himself. Jaeha's been venturing into some of the research rabbit holes Haru mentioned in passing here and there, and while it does kind of hurt a little bit to see the parallels in Haru's and Lee Tae-gun's interests, he's hurting all the time so it doesn't matter that much.

And today in his archive trawl he's run into a blog post called "Espers Are Random People".

Espers are not selected for being particularly heroic, courageous, intelligent, responsible, or ethical. If you're impressed with the spread of those traits on display in the esper population, remember: this is information about how a representative sample of the world population behaves. Under, admittedly, some particularly supportive circumstances. Espers have good health (backlash aside), good looks, good financial situations, easy immigration to virtually any country of their choice for themselves and their families, the best and most customized disability accommodation system that can be brought to bear, and in most cases also optional fame and renown. Maybe lots of people would step up and be heroes, if they won half a dozen lotteries at once. "Maybe", like we don't know - we do know. Lots of people do exactly that.

But conversely:

If you hear about an actor, a musician, a politician, a corporate tycoon, or even a less famous authority figure like a professor or a firefighter, committing crimes, abusing people, setting fires or taking bribes or flashing teenagers or falsifying data, you should know that this is a) only the ones you hear about, not any who get away with it, and - b) this is after the very fact that they are an celebrity/academic/whatever has filtered out anyone who'd already ruined their life. The ones you hear about, who have jobs attached and aren't just Florida Man, are not random people. They're a cut above random - not a big cut, but a cut. And still sometimes the stress or the illness or the temptation or any of a hundred other things gets to them and they go out of bounds.

Espers step up and save lives at heartening rates. Even the ones who awaken already in juvie or already coping with PTSD or already with their heart set on another career or already pregnant and spending their awakening miscarrying their baby on top of everything else - we're a pretty solid crop of folks, if I do say so myself. I think it's cause for optimism about how much human progress we can hope to see one day with the decline of poverty and the march of medicine and the development of social liberalism, that if normal, random people just win six lotteries at once you can get statistics like ours.

But there's no filter. Espers are random people. We have our share - our six-lotteries-adjusted share, but that share is not zero - of people who find that stress, illness*, temptation, or any of a hundred other things get to them and they go out of bounds. It's just more dramatic when it happens with superpowers involved, the same way it's more dramatic when a case of corruption involves the wealth of nations or nuclear secrets instead of taking ten bucks to overlook a fake ID at the liquor store.

And even if some of us would have chosen this, none of us actually did.

We're random people.

* Yes, espers are resistant to infection. Backlash in a working esper can act a lot like a chronic illness, and espers aren't immune to mental health problems present beforehand or acquired afterwards at any particularly protective rate.

Addendum: This post was inspired by but is not, if you read the literal words that I wrote on the page, about any current events. Keep it civil in the comments, I'm in there with the banhammer.

He looks at the date of the post.

January 2, 2037.

Ah.

He scrolls down to the comments.

[deleted]

[deleted]

[deleted]

okay somebody help me out. what current events.

big names in korea having meltdowns

(This comment has been machine-translated automatically from French; click here to view the post and comments in French instead) What is the point of this post? So the fact that he is a monster and an esper at the same time is random. So what?

Most random people don't sabotage confluence combatants. Like, you have to wait, like you can't break up with someone on Christmas.

[deleted comment]

Was anyone going to tell me that Tae-gun Lee is an absolute snack or was I just supposed to find out about that by deciphering a vagueblog by myself

honey they are all snacks. they are random snacks. it's like bridge mix.

I read this as advocating for... compassion for esper criminals, perhaps? But of course even people who profess (about normal criminals who can be kept out of law-abiding society with normal jail) prison abolition, will, if you press them, acknowledge that you have to do something about crime that goes beyond shoplifting and graffiti. You don't leave an alcoholic in charge of a liquor store, you don't give a pedo custody of the kids, and you don't let this guy around... anyone? Ever.

...yeah. You don't let this guy around anyone ever. That's the correct thing to do.

He scrolls down.

Here's Haru! "Hi! I caught a couple of glow in the dark platypuses! They had already laid four eggs in their cage by the time I left and I'm not sure if that's more exciting or worrying, what do you think?"

Jaeha's been deep in the comment mines for the past hour. Even with Haru's banhammer it's been... enlightening.

"Worrying, almost certainly."