"I think some of the personality archetypes have aged poorly, but Neil Patrick Harris does a timeless job of selling the internal struggles of his character Barney -"

(They can go on like that as long as Julien doesn't have anything to say.)

Yeah he does not.  This is preferable.

And here's Haru's house. His phone and fingerprint unlock it; beep. When they get in, he (still asking Cricket questions about How I Met Your Mother) pulls his shirt off.

Oh.  Aaaaaaaaaaaa.  Sure.  Sure, right, that makes sense.  Julien will close his eyes and do the same.

Haru holds up his arm in a shoulder-putting fashion but doesn't close the distance. "- so it didn't say on IMDB?"

"I didn't check IMDB. I really doubt they had even cast the mother at that point, and the fact that she's white was already pretty obvious from looking at Ted's kids."

Julien has no idea Haru does this because his eyes remain closed.  It'll take him a minute to correctly psych himself up to be unsurprisable about looking down at himself and seeing a fly body or whatever.  And if he's unsurprisable then there will be no point in trying to surprise him with it right now.

"Yeah, that's - Julien? How much can I read into the shirt, here, I don't want to presume."

"Uh, it's -"  If Haru touches him then that's a really easy opportunity for Julien to feel the hand hit something that isn't his regular body map.  So he should touch Haru, but he also needs to psych himself up for that in the right way...  "I need a minute."

"Okay. - so they locked themselves into a white-passing mother so it doesn't super matter whose leg it was, nobody except that weird feet website is going to check."

"Right. Anyway, the umbrella -"

Wow it's really hard to think while other people are talking.  But he can't walk away because his eyes are closed and he doesn't even know the layout of this place well enough to attempt to try bumping around.

He manages to be confident about his brain being in the right shape after - who knows how long.  Seems like ages, though, and then he can look down at himself and watch his hand as it goes onto Haru's shoulder and be really confident the whole time that it would be lame storytelling for it to turn into a pigeon wing with him staring at it expecting that.

Haru slots into arms-around-each-other while continuing to talk about How I Met Your Mother. Someone named Barney is having a flashback episode, apparently. Julien and Haru could sit on the couch like this?

No no no he didn't expect that - let alone correctly - he's going to -

........Okay, it appears that in this instance he has not been turned into a monster.  And probably once's contact's been established, there's no - rugpull element, left to exploit.

(But that information doesn't translate into ability to move, just yet.)

...okay they can stand there then??

Julien certainly doesn't seem likely to cause anything else to happen.

...okay. Haru has no idea what's up with him but whatever it is is Hell Week so he will stand there and talk about Barney's character arc. Cricket ships him with Robin, apparently.

Julien stands all day for a living, so he's pretty good with this.

...Except that he already did nearly a full shift of that.  So after a bunch of minutes he goes slightly limp to get out from under Haru's arm and sits down on the floor.

"- sounds like sedoretu - Julien? We could sit on the couch?"

"Oh, okay."  He gets back up and will trail Haru to the couch.  Even if it will then take him a while to sit down on it.

Haru sits down. Puts an arm over the back of the cushions, though, like, only one arm, so Julien could sit on the other side.

After some staring Julien takes Haru's hand before sitting, then moves down to place it on his shoulder, and - gradually sidles up quite snuggily, over the course of a few minutes.  But any time Haru moves he jumps.

Okay, Haru can hold pretty still while he is talking to Cricket about whether Marshall, Lily, Robin, and Ted work as a sedoretu. He has to explain sedoretus to Cricket.

Sounds interesting.  ...........And also like it might be relevant somehow later???  It has not escaped Julien that Haru is like, hot, and shirtless specifically because of Julien, and - probably something is meant to come of this.  Snuggle.  (Extremely deliberately and carefully.)

Cricket eventually concludes that the weak leg of the sedoretu is Marshall and Ted, he's just not seeing it, and also the format leaves Barney out in the cold, but it does play very nicely with Lily being canonically down bad for Robin, although Robin does not really seem to reciprocate. Now it is time to talk about Barney's brother, who is just like Barney except a) inexplicably black and b) gay.