He smiles bitterly. "I tried being meek, I tried being assertive, I tried being political. He said my actions were disgusting, he called you a foreign homosexual and the reason why Japan should have stricter immigration laws, he said I should be away from the people I'd known so that I wouldn't have such easy ways out and could learn how to be an adult."

"You know, at one point you said to me that one shouldn't be willing to edit someone's mind if they weren't also willing to just kill them. The amount I changed Iwasaki Iemasa's mind was less extreme than that but—right that moment, if you'd given me a button to push—

"It's so silly. Isn't it? I'm a powerful magical boy. He can't do anything to me. He wanted to enroll me in Kaiyo, so what? Why should I care? I can stop time. I can kill eldritch beings from his nightmares. I could turn him into a smear on the floor. He's nothing.

"But he didn't feel like nothing. It didn't feel like I could just ignore him. Like it didn't matter if he wanted to take me away from you, that he didn't have any power to do it. It felt like I was still a little boy who couldn't do anything to escape him.

"So that's why I changed his mind. I'm not proud of it, and I wouldn't do it again, but that's why I did it."

"So after he left I telepathied you. You were in the middle of—a private moment—and so I called you on the phone rather than keep using a less secure means of communication, and you asked if Iemasa was gone and I said something like—I made sure he wouldn't bother me again—and you freaked out when I explained that I'd made him not care as much about my actions—and you said that we could still fix it, I could rewind and we could workshop solutions that weren't that and I was—really angry. With you. Because it felt like—it doesn't matter. You said that him abusing me excused a lot of shit but this crossed a line, I asked why I should care about someone who made my life hell for two decades—other way around probably—and you said that it had seemed like I understood why it was wrong to rewind and steal someone's memories but clearly I hadn't stopped at that either—

"So I stopped time, cried for half an hour, then rewound and never told you about any of this. Because I was insane, because the thought of you breaking up with me over something like—Iwasaki Iemasa—was the worst thing that could possibly happen in the whole world."