"It's nothing personal! I don't show anyone, which is like I said part of why therapy didn't work for me."

"Oh. Right. And there aren't—non-personal examples, I suppose?"

"I do sometimes use a similar process for things that aren't especially private but not that often."

"I see. Maybe I'll try it sometime."

"Sure, why not."

He narrows his eyes. "That makes me want to make it work out of spite."

"I don't think that'll help but by all means write your spite into a notebook and see what happens. Or type it, I do longhand a lot of the time but it also works typed."

"...writing longhand, in the year of our Lord 2038?"

"It makes it easier to do, like, arrows between things, novel forms of diagram I invent on the spot, little maps and schematics of locations and things real and metaphorical..."

Blink. "That sounds substantially more complex than writing about feelings!"

"- feelings are complicated and so are some of the things I have them about!"

"I think I've never had feelings that could be improved by diagrams! But then again I never tried so what do I even know."

"It's not literally just emotions per se, it's also everything else that's going on in my head. Like, a pro and con list or a flowchart or something can come up in lots of situations."

"...huh. Hmm."

"Hmm?"

"It just seems... pretty useful, potentially? I don't know, that was the noise of a motivation other than spite rearing its head up."

"Congratulations!"

"Thank you? Anyway, since I seem to be out of my funk about my inherent unworthiness as a human being, wanna get some guiding in?"

"Yes I do."

That's permission enough to start making out, then, he feels.

Yaaaaay guiding makeouts, he hasn't seen Sparkler in a couple years and Jaeha's more compatible and more fun to talk to anyway.

Well, talking isn't going to be happening very much right now if Jaeha has anything to (heh) say about it. Which he does. At least until Haru's at zero.

That's true, it's not a very verbal part of the evening when both their mouths are occupied.

If he goes by how long it took with Lee Tae-gun, controlling for how often he and Haru have sex compared and for how backlashed he started out, it'll probably be another three weeks, maybe four, until Jaeha is at zero. At which point all of the remaining suckage of his life will be the strictly nonmagical kind.

He's not sure what to do about this thought. But he sure is having it.

Haru acquires lube to be put toward this project.