"Just how many times did you replay this conversation until you got all of that out of me?"

"Not telling! But if that did happen, I assure you I got your consent to do it."

"...did you."

"Yeah. Now come here, you're touch starved and need a hug, I'm going to tell you all about how cool our mother and younger sister are."

Meanwhile the Harus are (from a safe distance) plotting. Mostly this is taking the form of the older one passing on lots of future information, his smugness about his various accomplishments tempered by how graciously the younger one is failing to bring up his superior romantic situation.

And eventually Jaeha the younger re-emerges and homes in on his Haru via some combination of ineffable body language perception, being able to tell ages apart, and remembering where his Haru had been seated earlier. He will plop himself onto a seat next to his Haru and await a moment of less active conversation to say things.

His Haru smiles at him in a confirmatory sort of way but is not as demonstratively affectionate as he normally would be. Maybe to avoid exacerbating the other Haru's wistfulness.

"I think I may have gotten my alt to become substantially less of an idiot and then I taught him how to do notebooking so he's doing that now. Presumably when he's done he'll show up here to offer you," older Haru, "an apology and an explanation. Also I'm making facial expressions and tone of voice manually right now so if I look or sound bizarre it's the backlash." Speaking of backlash, he does kind of want some physical proximity even if he is going to follow his Haru's lead and not be as sickeningly sweet as he normally would be.

They can hold hands and put leg to leg, they just have to be polite about it.

"He doesn't really owe me an apology," says Older Haru.

"Hmm, maybe not, but it'll be healthy for him to do it anyway. If nothing else he was certainly adding a lot more words in your mouth than you actually said, and there are quite a lot of things you think you communicated to him that he misconstrued into something quite insane in order to appease his sense of self-loathing and need for flagellation."

"I did notice that some of the conversations he experienced us as having were not taking place out loud."

"He is almost constitutionally incapable of considering himself a moral patient at this moment and so he is interpreting everything you do through the lens that you agree with that assessment, except whenever he puts it in so many words in his head he realises that's insane and immediately covers it up with rationalisations that eventually melt back down into the first thing when he's not looking. That's part of why the notebooking will help, is it'll make him have to actually put those thoughts where they can't change while he's looking away and he'll have to confront the fact that they're nonsensical. I'm not sure if that'll solve the entire problem but I got him to feel embarrassed of everything he's done so far and avoiding embarrassment turns out to be such a good motivator for Jaehas all over the multiverse."

"...well, I'm glad notebooking'll work, I've never run into anybody else who picked it up and found it useful before."

"It's so useful. There was so much cruft in the corners of my brain I had to scrub off—still is, honestly, it would be very surprising if I were entirely done. And then there's maintenance, of course, I'm looking forward to when that's the main thing I'm doing with the notebooking."

"Sounds like it'll be good for him... obviously the material facts of the situation persist, but they can do so in an environment of better mental health."

"The material facts?"

"The incredibly cool alternate dimension situation notwithstanding I'm still his parole supervisor."

"...that's fair as far as it goes, but—he's not going to reincide, in practice he doesn't actually need a parole officer for the purposes parole officers exist, and while I'm of course not saying you should shirk your obligations I am saying that I think both of you would benefit from growing closer, even if it doesn't quite look like it from where he is. So... so I think there's more I want to communicate but the backlash is getting in the way of me finding the right words to say it so I'll get back to you in a couple of minutes once I figure that out."

"You guys can kiss, I'll survive the experience."

Younger Haru waits a beat, assessing the sincerity of that remark, then kisses his Jaeha.

!!!!!!

Oh okay cool he's all over his Haru then eeeeeeeeeeeeee~

"He said we could kiss, not -" whispers his Haru.

He stops and pulls away a bit sheepishly. "Sorry, got carried away."

"Later," his Haru whispers, and resumes kissing more decorously.