They can migrate back to the couch, then.

Oh soft.  Wow he's still kind of tired although probably in a way that no rest will fix.  (Maybe ever.  Maybe he's just going to keep sleeping badly until it escalates from torment to torture even in his waking hours.)

"Would it be okay if I laid on your lap?"  Haru's going to be mad at him for suggesting something sexual-adjacent and also for probably using the wrong sort of lay/lie word for the situation.  "I don't want to be up."

"Yeah, that's fine."

He positions himself more towards the knee end of Haru's femur.  Hm.  There is not really much guiding over here, except what he can get through the pants on his neck.

Haru rests his arms on his back.

Mm.

And he can lie on his side and play phone games for a while.  Minesweeper this time.

Is he going to jump a foot in the air every time he loses?

He doesn't jump for the first half an hour, at least.  But Haru can't see his phone from most of the angles he shifts through here, so maybe he's just not losing.

(Occasionally he does line his finger up with something, scrunch his eyes very tight, make the press, and only reopen his eyes several seconds later.)

Seems like a functional strategy for him. Whatever works. How bad is the logistics support in the Philippines? Who operating in the Philippines has a published backlash? What is down this rabbithole about dungeon appearances correlating with nonmagical disasters, huh, he's not too depressed to get sidetracked by that.

Sometimes Julien puts down his phone for a bit and rests his eyes, though it doesn't seem like he's falling all the way asleep.

At 10:42, his backlash goes just a tick lower.  Even though neither of them moved.

"- I think you're on your way down. You seem exhausted, do you want to relocate to the guest bed so you can crash as soon as you're not artificially terrified any more?"

"If you want me to..."  Yeah, he doesn't sound super awake either.

Haru carries him up and cuddles around him with one hand free to take occasional timestamp notes.

Yay.  Great.  Cuddles.

"- Oh, okay, I definitely feel the difference now.  Um, is there a level you're expecting besides zero where I might suddenly decide I hate you?"

"Not a level so much as some unbacklashed time to process things."

"Oh."  The thought of his psychology drastically changing over the next hour is also quite scary.  Really really quite scary.

Yes, well. That’s how it be sometimes.

Will it be dying, kind of, if his psychology suddenly becomes radically different?  Also it seems really dangerous to stop believing he's in a simulation while he's still in a simulation...

It's hard to get a high granularity feel for exactly how quick he's dropping so mostly Haru wants to make sure he knows when it's all over with.

"I still don't hate you," Julien offers after ten minutes of silence.

"Thank you."

"You think I might not even when I zero out?  But like, later or tomorrow or something?"

"I'm worried about something distinct from you hating me in particular but yeah."

"Which is what?"