"Um. You went to the first class of the day without me, we chatted a bit about magic in telepathy but I think you asked—him—more stuff without including me in it. Uh... I don't remember much specific from then. Then I had lunch with you and the translation club, and flirted openly with you, and Anju was like did you guys already know each other, and you went 'a little bit'. Uh... oh right I joined the translation club then, too, and tried to chat to you but you were too busy with Pride and Prejudice, and I told you that was very cool and you were smug about it. I started translating a really depressing song from Japanese to English. Uhh... Yeah I think that was it."

Nod nod.

"Oh! Also earlier I sent you a bunch of research about TB when you'd been thinking about maybe wishing for it to be gone. You decided against it but I don't remember why exactly. And then we went to your place after school and did more research together into diseases and tractability and stuff, and you tried to make yourself care more about other diseases—uhhh, specific things you said, you were like—oh right the reason you didn't want to do TB was because it was too treatable, you were aiming for cancer or something if possible, I said GiveWell has a list of things but of course they're optimising for tractable in the first place, but malaria was on their list anyway, and you said that Kyūbey kept telling you that you still cared about malaria more and so you might have to settle for it, and I said, 'Settle for, he says, just malaria, it'll be such a shame if that's all you can do, tut tut.', and you said, 'It'll be very cool, which is half my problem here!'"

"Honestly I'm a little less excited about it if there's a substantial chance that it just gets rolled back in a month, but it will still be fairly cool and apparently I'm not too less excited about it."

He nods. "Oh there was another thing earlier I just remembered, when we were deciding where to go you asked me if my folks weren't home, I said I lived alone and I had come to school by roof hopping but I could go grab my car or we could use yours and you were confused and asked if you'd had a car last time and I didn't know but guessed that it was actually Ren's car and clarified that to pretend I already knew from before. So that's how we ended up going to your place rather than mine. I opened the door for you and you looked flattered. —my memory's definitely biased towards stuff that made you happy or sad."

"Some memories are better than none. ...my mental image of abusive parents doesn't involve letting their kids live on their own unsupervised..."

"...Iwasaki Iemasa cares very much about his image and his name. Like father, like son, I suppose. And when my cohort mates started to have their own places, it wouldn't do for his son not to, and it would especially not do for his son not to have the best, fanciest, most ostentatious penthouse any teenager could have in Tokyo, to show everyone else up and make sure they knew he is—and I am, by extension—richer and better than them.

"Although, well, I'm not unsupervised. He certainly spies on me, and keeps track of my spending. He did hear about me getting a boyfriend very quickly, last time."

"...how, do you know who's talking to him?"

"When I used to use his drivers, them, certainly. The people who clean my apartament, to the extent they know anything about what I do. The building caretakers, porters. I wouldn't be surprised if he just had someone tailing me sometimes, but I haven't caught any mysterious figures following me."

"Creepy."

He shrugs. "He's not a good person. ...like father, like son."

"Anyway, you got Kyūbey to start giving you numbers for how much you cared about stuff, and you notebooked for half an hour and managed to get the numbers for dementia and the flu higher by one but that was still not enough. You were pretty frustrated and I said it was maybe insane for me to offer a hug but I was offering anyway and you accepted it. That was the first time we actually hugged. Or, well, actually the first time I had hugged another human being in—I don't even know. Months at least, maybe years. So my heart was hammering inside my ribcage and I'm certain you noticed because you looked—a certain way.

"After that you decided you were too frustrated by your lack of progress and that we should test my powers and figure out what I could do."

"...being a, what did you call yourself, a 'slut', doesn't feature any hugs?"

"Snuggling, occasionally, when it's someone that particularly cared about me. But not a real hug, the kind that makes you breathe easier and makes you feel—liked."

Okay Haru's going to hug him again.

He leans into it, breathes deeply, rests his chin on Haru's shoulder, and lets his eyes close.

Pat pat.

"Sorry. I told myself I wasn't going to dump all of my damage on you this time, but..."

"I keep asking."

"And I can never, ever refuse you."

...blush.

Yutaka is still hugging Haru so he probably can't see that. Haru might in fact learn that Yutaka is just never going to be the first one to pull away.

That's just as well because Haru still has no good way to say "good news, I seem to have the complement to your dysfunctional relationship style at least once you're implementing it without the mind control part".

He sits back.

"Go on?"

"Right. So we moved on to testing my powers. I pretended I didn't know anything about them and started playing with my buckler to hook into 'learning about' the rewinding, but you took the buckler from me to poke at it and found the aperture into the bag of holding."

"Which you actually hadn't known about?"