Decorous kissing it is. Even though his Haru is right here. He has self-control.

"Anyway," says Elder Haru when this is concluded.

He clears his throat. "Right, where was I, where are my cue cards...

"Okay, right, yes. I'm going to tell you some things that aren't true yet but they will be and that he'll have a lot of trouble telling you when they become true but he will desperately wish you could read his mind so that you'd find them out without him having to say anything."

"I wouldn't go around reading people's minds even if I could!"

"I know. But I would certainly love it if—you guys need disambiguating nicknames—my Haru could read mine. But in this specific case, well, you were saying you're still his parole officer, and I—forgive me if I'm misreading it but I think part of what you mean here is that you can't or won't be the one, say, offering to become his friend, or doing anything that might cause in some potential hypothetical scenarios a consent issue, right?"

"I did offer to become his friend, actually."

"I'll be Persimmon," says younger Haru after a bit of thought.

"I guess that makes me Maple?"

"...okay, now I'm curious, why?"

"Well, I could've gone with Sakura but that's a girls' name. He's a lifelong Canadian and I moved to Tokyo as a kid, that seems to be basically the single point of divergence."

"—oh, that's really cute." He is not going to kiss his Haru—Persimmon—on the cheek, but he is psychically beaming that desire.

"Anyway, uh," back to Maple, "so that was after he kind of asked, right, except he—didn't really perceive himself as asking, he perceived himself as self-flagellating about what an absolutely stupid idea that was and proceeding to decide to not do that at all because it would be such a stupid idea.

"But not for him. He wants it. He thinks it's a stupid idea for you, because he, like, insert self-flagellating bullshit here, but more to the point he is on board with the painfully ethical thing you've got going on and in fact a big part of the issues he's been having around the, how did he put it, the ankle bracelet situation, and the power differential between you two, was trying to not make this any harder than it has to be for you. He thinks you shouldn't be his friend because he doesn't want to burden you with navigating the ethical issues around having a friendship with someone you're a parole officer for. He doesn't want to cause you trouble."

"...I manage with Cricket!"

"I know. He doesn't. You might get some mileage out of telling him that, but—the problem is a bit broader here, see, because he—just in general he doesn't want to act in such a way that he... might cause someone who is less you than you to deal with uncomfortable internal conflict about their obligations. He wants to be, well, he'd love to be nice, but he's aiming for at minimum good, for a definition of 'good' that involves a lot of self-abnegation because he perceives himself as unable to make any choices that make his life better because when he had unlimited access to those choices he stalked a guy and tried to have his girlfriend killed.

"He is under a ton of learned helplessness about his own desires, right now, and having a lot of trouble even admitting to himself what he wants and needs, let alone telling you about any of it."

"...is this one of those things that is not true now but that you expect to be later?"

"No. That's true right now. What's not true right now but will be later, and which is related to all of this, is that once he's no longer waging a solo imaginary war against you in his head he is going to board the Jaeha bullet train to falling head over heels for you, and since he thinks it would be a terrible idea from your perspective to touch that with a ten foot pole he's going to spend a while lying to himself about it, then another while pretending it's not true, then an indefinite amount of time trying to not let on so that you don't have to deal with his issues, while still thinking you hung the moon."

"You realize it's possible you're overgeneralizing. Like, for one example of a disanalogy between the two of you, how do you know Jaehas have multiple train boarding opportunities, he did have this one relationship, it was a big thing."

"...well, I was in fact using my powers on him just now—I did get his explicit consent, to be clear—and he already does kind of have a bit of a crush. He thinks you're really cool and a great guy all around already.

"I... want to say 'but you're right, maybe I am being overconfident in my predictions', and—I'm saying it, I suppose, maybe I am being overconfident, but I get him a lot more than vice-versa. You'd think the seven extra years would make it work the other way around but it doesn't, he's very recognisably me but I don't think he thought I was very recognisably him. He didn't really get me. Looking at him feels a lot like looking at myself several months ago."

"Are we chalking that up to notebooking too?"

"There's... something you could gloss that way that I think is true but it's—I have a more mechanistic model than that."

"Well, it's plausible that you have that much insight, I think me and Persimmon are on at least three levels of meta at times and haven't dropped any packets, but. Grain of salt."

"Yeah. Uh—there was another thing, which is that—he keeps trying to read you and failing, you're really hard to read, you don't really do much somatisation of your thoughts and feelings, but rather than conclude that that means you're hard to read he instead concludes that the things he's trying to read aren't there. I think I managed to shake that off him at least to some extent, too, but that'll be another reason he will not want to ever tell you that he likes you, is that all of his tools for figuring out how doomed a prospect it is are returning nulls and so he'll just think it's entirely completely doomed and so he'll mope.

"—and I don't want to, like, say anything about whether it's doomed or should be doomed, to be clear, I get that from your perspective he looks like kind of a mess. I'm just saying, I think that's going to be happening, and he'll be—trying to clean up his act and be less of a mess, but he's going to have a lot of trouble ever communicating any of this, ever."

"I haven't actually been told before that I'm hard to read."

"He's got a deficit, he had a serious crutch for a long time."

"Hmm, that's true, but—you don't, really, show much of what you don't endorse, or the feelings you've looked at and decided to put away at least for the moment. Assuming you're like Persimmon in that way but I'd be surprised if you weren't? And now that I know Persimmon I can read him a lot better but I'm certain he's convinced you haven't just decided not to be but actually inherently aren't capable of being attracted to him, because you don't—steal glances at him when you think he's not looking, you don't exhibit body language that suggests you think of him in anything but the most platonic of ways. He might change his mind now that he's seen Persimmon and me but I wouldn't bet on it."