"That's so weird.  ....That's so weird."

"So I'm told! I can't experience it for myself. I think the guiding rate's good enough that I can keep it up all night if you prefer better guiding to more discernible snuggles."

"My arm is on top of you!!  And - you weren't holding it up, and it wasn't falling, and it wasn't floating, it just - wasn't moving."  This is objectively terrifying but also surreal enough to be cool.  "Maybe you've already had this conversation with other people lots of times."

"Not that many! I've tested the power but I usually don't do a lot of frivolous power use."

"Ahuh, sense.  ...I think I will be very distracted if we try to sleep with you doing that."

"Okay. If you have a ton of nightmares in the middle of the night I can hover for a bit but we can try without any backlash on my end?"

"Yeah, that sounds fine."

Haru holds very still, at least until he falls asleep.

"Peahen."

It takes Julien considerably longer to fall asleep, especially with the talking.  But he eventually does.

He dreams about being stuck in a maze that he can't see, or feel, when he runs into it, but there's a behemoth, a creature so large he can only see the legs, slowly trampling it and turning it to shards and rubble that reflect light in a dim, oilslick rainbow, even though he can't see the material directly - and the giant keeps approaching, cutting through the maze, but Julien still has to navigate it, and it seems to go on forever, and then he comes to a point where everything's dead ends, he's not-felt every corner and he can tell, and so the only thing to do is to backtrack through the very long corridor, the one he had thought was his salvation, back towards the monster - he sprints, feeling desperately for some turn-off, a way to get out of this single straight path - and just as he gets within touching distance of one of the elephant-style feet, he not-feels a gap in the wall, and as he lurches through it a hand comes out of nowhere and scoops him up, and lifts him what has to be hundreds of feet in the air, and the creature stares at him, inspects him, almost curiously, its monkey-lizard eyes wide, and then -

drops
Julien.

Julien wakes up with light just barely starting to glow around the edges of his curtains, and frees his arm to bite, and does so, and it doesn't feel right - it doesn't feel like anything - he chomps down harder and harder and it has no effect; he gets up and finds someone and bites them and that feels like it does something, that feels great actually, and he does it harder, and he rips and tears at them with his teeth, and it feels amazing, and when it stops being amazing he drops the person and heads outside to look for more, and - it doesn't feel very nice to be outside but he keeps going, trudging out onto the street as his vision's obscured by some sort of mist, and he falls a little as his feet disappear out from under him, but he keeps going on his shins, his thighs, crawling on his hands, trying to find another person to attack for as long as there's any of him in a solid configuration...

Julien wakes up with no idea what the lighting situation is, because he can't see - he scrambles to try and get the thing off his head, and that doesn't work, so he sits up and makes a more concerted effort.  That works.  The lighting situation is - that it's still dark.  But he's not in his room, he's -

he's....

Right.  Right, he's here, at Haru's, and Haru's here, and nothing's real.  The dreams weren't real but also nothing outside of the dreams is real, either.  Or he's still in one, or whatever.  He is - maybe going to cry about this.  That seems like the thing.

"Peach?"

Julien's not going to try and wake up Haru, because he's not insane, but neither is he capable of being very quiet right now.  It is taking all of his attention to try and stop hyperventilating.

"Hmmmjulien?"

"That's - me -"

"Nightmare?"

"Ye -"  He clears his throat.  "Yeah."

"Do you want me to hover for a li'l bit to help you get back to sleep?"

"I...."  They gave him ice cream.  They gave him ice cream, but also nightmares, which - seems, maybe, like he was on the right track but taking too long about it.  So... there's really only one thing to do about this.  There's only one thing, but it takes him a moment to gather not only his courage but also just physically his voice, with the intensity of crying...

"If you want to be careful with me, you'll - hold still."

"I won't hover if you don't want me to."

Instead of responding verbally, Julien kisses him.

...

.............

Haru holds very still.

On the one hand, this is deeply awkward, and on the other, wow, Julien just near-instantly feels much better.  Wow.  This was maybe the best decision.  This is very definitely what the people running things want out of him.

It doesn't take very long before he stops and flops on Haru, and it doesn't take very long after that for him to realize that this might be conversation-preventing and roll off back next to him.  Snuggle.

"That's - uh - um."

"Was it okay??  I feel a lot better..."

"...getting our backlash levels closer would also have done that."