"Yeah, I might wind up picking up some hanja incidentally if I get a lot of use out of the Korean, it's less of an oppressive time sink if it happens while I'm just doing whatever as opposed to committing to a program of study."

Well he probably won't get a lot of use out of the Korean, what with how Jaeha can speak English, but sure. "Makes sense."

"This is really tasty, what is it? Lemon and... they're not peas but..."

"Capers," he supplies. "I'm glad you like it."

...huh. He means that, actually. Right, he can feel positive emotions again, he'd kinda forgotten.

"Capers! Fancy, I don't know if I've actually ever had those before."

"They're nice, but easy to add the wrong amount of, some people find the taste too strong so there's a balance to be struck. It's a bit like blue cheeses, which I like having a lot of but they can easily overpower the taste of other stuff so adding just enough of them to a dish to get their kick while still letting the other flavours exist under them takes some work figuring out..."

"—ah, sorry, I don't mean to talk your ear off about boring trivia."

"Please talk my ear off about anything that comes to mind, I'm backlashed."

"I'll... try to keep that in mind." He doesn't think he have any more food trivia to say right now, but that might just be because he squashed his desire to talk about it by convincing himself Traceless wouldn't want to hear about it and undoing that is difficult.

"If it's too much I can haul out my phone again, that just seemed inconsiderate when I realized you'd made me lunch."

"...I don't think you need to worry about being inconsiderate." It seems like Traceless is perhaps under some misapprehensions about what their relationship is like, here.

"I kind of think I do? Like, this setup here is two steps short of solitary confinement and I am singlehandedly being one of those steps."

"It's not like solitary confinement would have been disproportionate, if the Korean government did that."

"My objection to torture does not actually take as an input what the subject did."

Jaeha really thinks that characterising it as "torture" is a bit much. And you know what actually is torture? Five years under untreated backlash is what. Even mostly-untreated backlash, in his case, was hell to live through, he can't even imagine what he must've done to Tae-gun.

...Lee. to Lee Tae-gun. He really should get into the habit of calling Lee Tae-gun by his full name, even in his head. He's been telling himself that for a year and it hasn't worked, but he's sure it will, eventually.

"Mm," he says—vocalises—rather than voice any of those thoughts.

"Anyway, the Geneva Convention predates the Internet but I'm still your only in-person source of human contact for the next couple months at least and I'd like to be decent about it."

"Sure." He doesn't see why being on the phone a lot would be failing to be decent but he's starting to think (lol.) that maybe (lmao.) he has some difficulty (hahahaha.) modelling this guy. Also he doesn't really know how to move on from this point of the conversation, he feels like he made it heavy and weird if it's gone from talking about capers to the Geneva Convention.

"So, uh, anything else you want to wrap up before going to sleep?"

Argh.

"No, not particularly."

"Okay. Uh. Dinner plans?"

Blink. "Not... really." He's about to be unconscious and have his body used for other people's purposes for eight hours so he can't really cook anything interesting afterwards unless he wants to go sleep at, like, midnight or something.

"I guess it'd be kind of a time crunch to fix anything elaborate. I can get pills that are rated for less than eight hours..."

"Whatever works for you."

"...okay. Uh, I think it's probably not wise to have you go over my checklist so I'm going to - uh -" He pulls out his phone. "I'm going to call Maurice -" The phone starts dialing. "- and get him to do it, but do feel free to interrupt me if you think of anything you need."

"...sure." He doesn't even know what this checklist is.