"It's okay, you're okay."

"Noo..."

"I've got you."

"'Kay."

Well, it would be sort of gratifying to have the thought "great, Julien knows I won't let anything happen to him" if Haru had been remotely successful in not letting anything happen to him! As it is it's... honestly sort of still gratifying but really complicatedly?

The cooling water does not wake Julien up.

Eventually Haru drains a bit and adds some hot.

In that case he can support a Julien until around eight or so.

"My body is very jetted...  Also cooked."

"I figured pruniness would be the lesser evil. Let's get you some water."

"Oh, I might be really thirsty, yeah."

"Happens in a hot tub." Water for espers.

Gulp gulp gulp gulp gulp.

And they can dry off and wear pants maybe.

Julien would still prefer shorts.  He'll take the fancy jorts if he must.

He can have them.

Snugglecuddle.

"We mostly don't have guiding at a distance but I think I can feel you through one but not two layers of fabric," he notes.

"Huh. That's asymmetrical, I'm not getting that."

"Huhh.  How normal is that?"

"Hard to say because it's very subjective if there's no distance on either side, you wind up comparing Likert scales instead of millimeters. You can get some data off how two backlashes at the same level get dissimilar with guiding through skin contact - if they're at the same level the study participants can tell and then one might get below the other and they can tell that too - but there's always the possibility that one person was sweatier. It seems uncommon and it's usually slight, though."

"Should I have been trying to sweat this whole time?  Or, you?'

"It helps only a tiny bit if at all and it seems to stop helping if both people are sweating, probably because the would-be recipient has a useless fluid barrier preventing the would-be provider from making as good a skin contact connection, so if we did this by warming up the house it would probably accomplish nothing."

"Oh.  ...Is there more food?"

"Let's go see what's around that's vegetarian."

There's various snackfood. There's frozen jalapeno poppers and exactly three falafels. There's canned lentil and minestrone soups in the back of the pantry. "I could also make something but I'm not immediately thinking of vegetarian recipes that don't want groceries and if we're going to order something it might as well be lunch outright."

"Do you think the soup would be okay cold?"