Here's one of the regulars! He's never given his name, but one of Julien's co-workers swears he must be an esper because he's so hot, even though his hair is not neon. "Mocha and a maple eclair please."

"Coming right up!"

Oh god oh god - it's fine.  This is a sign that something bad is going to happen to him, but everything is a sign that something bad is going to happen to him, so he can handle it.  Here's the card reader.

He taps his phone. Beep.

And then goes over to the here's-your-order counter, right?  Away from Julien?

Yup, there he goes.

It would be an exaggeration to say that Julien experiences relief, but he does experience: the lack of an extremely bad thing happening to him.

The next day, a coworker says something seems different about him, like, in the way he looks - and Julien, extremely importantly, has not done something different with his hair (he's been very carefully showering on exactly the same schedule as before), has not started or stopped wearing glasses (his eyesight is as vaguely-slightly-weak as ever), has not stopped or started wearing guyliner again - nothing about him should be different.

So... that's it, then.  That's the thing.

He should still, definitely, keep an eye out for other things; it would be idiotic to let his guard down even a little.  But this is where his primary focus should be.  Because now, now that someone's commented on it, he absolutely cannot look in any mirrors.  Because whatever he sees there is probably not going to be something he likes.  He's 100% going to be some sort of monster, the instant he looks, and then... it'll be all over.

The next day he has a late shift, and this Timmy Ho's has a west-facing window.  So it's totally normal, Julien reasons, to wear sunglasses.  The sun is right there, shining directly at him.  In his eyes.  It's normal.  Everything's normal.

He doesn't take them off even after it gets properly dark.

In comes a regular. "Hi, I need to be conscious and capable of human speech for the next four to six hours or so, can I get a double double please?"

"Of course!"  Oh god.  Also: putting orders into the tablet involves sooo muuuch looking at his own hands, but probably they're not going to change right in front of him, into - crab claws, or praying mantis arms, or whatever monster they're going to make him, so as long as he's careful every time they leave or enter his vision, then, it - might - be okay.

...Fuck, was that too long a blink, after the nights filled with 'mares - safer to keep his eyes closed for a minute, until he regroups; it's not even like anyone can tell that he's doing it.  (Or, the people running things can definitely tell, but none of the characters can, not without giving themselves away.)  He will - feel - around for - there it is, the card reader - here you go, suspiciously hot regular.

"Are you okay?" Reach.

Aaaaaaa.  "Ye -"  Bump.

"- dude, you are not okay, you have more backlash on you than I do and I just did a dungeon, are you awakening?"

What.  What?  Is this - this is how things are going.  Okay.

"What?"

"I'm an esper - and espers can tell when we touch other espers - did you just start awakening recently with some kind of symptom -" He has his hand extended where Julien could clasp it if he wanted to. "Something which is compatible with me but that doesn't tell me exactly what it is..."

"I -"  If he accepts this questline then in a week he's definitely going to be some sort of ravening beast.  But he probably already was going to be, and sooner than that, and also... realistically there's no way he can unobtrusively maneuver out of this.  He already failed that when he touched this guy's hand.

"I... have to wear sunglasses."

"Well, that's three for three on people compatible with me who have to wear sunglasses, I guess. Uh, you should possibly be in the hospital, or else I could take you to my house, backlash is dangerous and I do not think you should be working at Tim's while awakening because that is insane."

It's..... well, first of all he, yeah, takes the esper's hand, finally.  He's cooperating.  It's after dark, in the summer, so it's got to be pretty late.  He doesn't want to look at devices any more than he has to.  "We close at ten?"

"I am almost positive that you can get time off for having an esper awakening and if Tim Horton's sucks about this for some reason you can flip them off because you are going to be an esper, even if your powers suck you can do better than a coffee shop job. - if you have some kind of short term money problem for which you need this week's paycheck in particular I can cover it?"

"Julien oh my god, go the fuck home."

"- Mind your own business, Elise!"  Also home isn't even the place he'd be going.  Can he avoid going with this man.... doesn't seem so.  Aaaaaaaa.

"It is reasonable to not to want to walk off with someone you have barely met to be clear! But like at least go home with a family member who can watch you or to the hospital, it is vanishingly rare for it to be outright impossible for a backlash to kill you - admittedly it is also vanishingly rare for a backlash to allow you to work at Tim Horton's but if I had for some reason been trying to do that with mine I could maybe have done some of the tasks before I, you know, died."

...Hospitals definitely have a lot of torture equipment in them, whereas options for random dudes are like.... kitchen knives baseball bats rape?  Mayyyybe a chainsaw???  And psychic pain rays, of course; esper.  Back home in the country with Mom is.... no.  Absolutely not.

"No, I can... it seems fine?"

"...okay." He takes a sip of his coffee, finds the temperature just barely swiggable, swigs it. "Uh, anything you need to wrap up here, or - I walked here but my cat's waiting for me out front, stalking pigeons -"

"- That's grossly irresponsible."  Fuck fuck fuck fuck why did he say that.

"He's a person monstercat and doesn't like entering buildings without cat doors."

Oh.  Cool, Julien's going to get turned into a pigeon and then toyed with and eaten alive.  Message received he will stop being bitchy.  "Oh.  I'll... get my bag?"

"I'll go collect Cricket."

So Julien - breaks contact - and walks away from the counter, and mumbles an apology to Elise and gets a hug from her, which is awful until it seems like he really isn't about to suddenly turn spiky and blade-y in her arms, and zips up his backpack, and.... heads out front.

There's the esper! He is on his phone but pockets it and holds out his hand again when Julien approaches.

Purring winged cat on his shoulder.

Yes hand.  Haaaaaand.  Are they trying to make the torture seem worse later by providing him with hand now?  Julien will be on the lookout for this.  "Hello, hello," he says to each of them.

"Hello."

"Cricket, this is - Julien, do I have that right? And I'm Haru, or Traceless if you prefer the codename."

"You have that right.  Nice to meet you."

"House is thisaway. We live with my mom Ren. So uh - what exactly are the sunglasses doing for you if I may ask - I won't go around telling people and Cricket can fly ahead if you'd rather he not hear and you don't even really have to tell me -"

"I think I don't want to tell you quite yet."  He's got to keep his options open where he can.

"Legit. My backlash is loneliness, so I'm very chatty, but I can make phone calls and talk to Cricket and my mom if you get sick of me."

"That's good to know!  It seems fine so far, though."

"That's good. And you're pulling on it pretty hard so it should be gone in a few hours."

Plotline where this guy is nice to him while backlashed and then becomes much meaner later?  "Convenient!"

"For us, yes, I did have to apologize to my partner that I will not be joining her but I think she'll understand, we've all been through awakening, it sucks."

"I've been..." what's the tack, here - "not great, but like, fine - if you want to go visit her?  At some point."

"...if I knew for a fact you had, say, the exact same backlash as my secondary Sparkler, then that would be fine. If I don't know what it is I do not think you should be left by yourself. The most common single way for backlashes to kill people is by driving them to suicide and the fact that you haven't gotten into a corner of it like that yet doesn't mean you won't."

"...Oh."  (Oh.)

"Like mine for example, if I lean on it hard enough and there's little enough of it that I can steer I can keep it firmly in forms that don't make me want to die but it can drive me straight into suicidality-inducing delusions and I would have needed supervision during awakening even if I had wanted to be alone, which, well, conveniently - after a fashion - I did not."

The situation is going to drive him to attempt suicide and he Should Not do that unless he can accept that whichever of "they bring him back and a new form of torture begins" and "he permadies" is more tragic and worse according to him.  "Oh."

"- so kitty, you were saying about How I Met Your Mother?"

"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.

Isn't Neil Patrick Harris - should Julien be participating in this conversation??  "Isn't Neil Patrick Harris -" actually, no, he shouldn't be, what was he thinking.  Aaaaaa.

"- well in real life yes but he is an actor, simpleton."

- Is this the part where he gets turned into a pigeon -

No. "Anyway Barney's brother settles down and gets married and Barney's horrified about the monogamy..."

Okay!!  Julien is just going to sit here forever, apparently.  This is so much worse than working even accounting for the "guiding".

Eventually, after a couple hours, Haru's contributions to the conversation slow down. He asks Cricket to bring him his e-reader.

Cricket does this, and then goes over to his catbed in the window seat for a Nap.

Haru goes through the comments section on - a blog? His blog, apparently, he bans a spammer.

If he doesn't look at Haru's computer then it can't be used to jumpscare him with something horrible.  It's not even boring to refrain because there's just so much to worry about.