Nod. "- I'm gonna try to get off-timeline less, sorry."

He nods. "Anyway, uh... So one thing I had said the first loop around, on our failed date, was that I—hadn't really considered what my type was, what kind of person I wanted to marry, and I didn't know of a way to find out without trying it empirically. As a way to justify being a slut. It wasn't a very good justification but it wasn't—false, exactly. And this time I said to you that at the time I didn't know what my type was, but now I had—a top theory, and I wanted to figure out if I was right about it. And you said 'okay' and I said '...okay?' and you asked if hunting witches was my idea of a date 'cause you wanted to hunt witches and I reacted like—well, you know. A simp.

"We hunted our first witch together that night, we were mostly in time stop and shot it with a bunch of bullets and arrows and we—killed it just like that, we were expecting it to be a lot harder, but it was just overkill. And after we did I kissed you and we made out on the sidewalk for kind of a long time and then we went back to my place and made out some more and that's when you learned you enjoyed having the back of your neck kissed a bit too much. Then I took you to the same restaurant we went to on our date the first time around, and this time I wasn't an ass."

Nod nod write write.

"Um—I'm not sure what level of detail to keep going at—also, uh, it's kind of getting to dinnertime—normally I'd have—I mean—do you want to go have dinner and we meet up again afterwards, or just tomorrow, or—this would be a good excuse for you to do some notebooking about this rollercoaster if you wanted one—"

"...I'll telepathy you when I'm done eating and notebooking, if I get done appreciably before bedtime?"

"Yeah. Sounds good." He stands up, turns around to look at Haru, opens his mouth, thinks better of what he was going to say, and instead says, "I'll see you later."

WHAT WAS HE GOING TO SAY THOUGH AUGH.

"See you."

He transforms and roof hops away.

AAAAAAAAAAAUGH if you had asked Haru in advance he would have said "why yes of course I would absolutely hate it if someone else were in a Groundhog Day loop and I couldn't remember anything that had passed between us" so perhaps this is not the most informative augh-ing he should be doing right now but he really really does not like this.

...he is going to go scoop rice out of the cooker, rinse out the bowl and put in another batch to be ready in the morning, and dump leftover stirfry on the rice. He forgot to microwave the stirfry so he has hot rice with cold stirfry on it. He microwaves the entire thing for thirty seconds and then lets it languish in the microwave for a few minutes while he assigns numbers and indexes everything Yutaka told him so far and gets it into a clean summary. Ren has a printer that doubles as a flatbed copier; he runs off copies of his original notes to staple to the summary to go in Yutaka's bag of holding.

For in case he dies. Again.

God.

He doesn't want to die. He doesn't want to forget. He doesn't want to be quite so viscerally aware down to the hairs standing up on his arms that this could all be a very convincing very heartwrenching scam.

He eats his lukewarm rice and stirfry without tasting it and then he goes back into his room and re-reads the sex notes and jerks off and writes some more once he's got a head clearer of at least one of his numerous problems.

About an hour later: Done for now.

There's a knock on his door.

Come in.

He does. He's wearing a T-shirt and slacks instead of his uniform, this time. "Should I be mindful of Ren coming home?"

"She's out seeing a play. She'll be home but probably not till after ten."

"Understood."

He hands over his latest stapled paper. (It's got a cover page that just has the date and Loop 2.)

...alright. He transforms, puts it away, then detransforms.

"It'll make it - go faster, next time, if."

He seems like he's having to manually keep himself from hyperventilating, the way his breath—hitches a few times, while he nods.

He doesn't say anything about it, though. Doesn't meet Haru's eyes either.

"Look, I also hope this can be the last time, but..."

"I know, but I don't have to like it—"

"—sorry."

"No. Of course you don't have to like it."

He's still not meeting Haru's eyes and stretching his fingers and squeezing them like he's—trying to stop himself from doing something else with his hands.