don't visualize don't visualize don't visu—wait, he's not here. "Xe's always xad too much to prove. I guess from being upstaged by Snegurochka all the time or something. I don't know. It's a very different life for them than for me."

"So while he's not here, I should make it clear that you don't have to partner with him or anyone else in particular. We're not going to assign you to people. Partnerships are mutually consensual or they don't exist. The Degenerate West is pretty serious about that, for all that we're mostly east of Russia."

Then what am I good for?

"I guess you probably know of several likely candidates for my xoobae on the company payroll off-xand. I think xe will probably be xappier, that way."

"...oh maybe? I'm talking about you, though."

"I'm sorry. I suppose that was obvious."

Several perceptual millennia of effort to generate a follow-up comment leaves him staring plaintively at Si-yeon, bolt upright like a startled rabbit. It's been a long time since he had had to proffer an opinion to questions other than yeah, you like that, cocksucker? and he had forgotten how.

"Man, see, this? This is why I hate Russia. What did they do to you. Dasol, what do you want?"

"I just... want to be... useful." No, not quite that. Dare he?

"I mean... I want to feel useful. I want... I'm sorry, this is inappropriate of me." Nope! He did not dare! Back down off that cliff, boy.

He considers excusing himself, but Sasha is already monopolizing the bathroom. Why couldn't that idiot come back now? Come back, come back, so that this man could stop pointing his soft eyes and hard biceps and white teeth and violent pity at him for a moment! Dasol's belly churns like he's going to puke.

Dammit, Sasha, always letting me down when I need you.

"I already dropped the honorifics, go ahead and be inappropriate, no one's watching."

"Fine," he says. In Russian, because fuck it.

"I don't know the words for this idea in Korean, so I have to say it like this. I know intellectually that guiding is important. That people die if you don't do it. I know that even if I have a horrible useless power that I can still make a difference in the world. I just—wish I felt that way in my heart. I wish I could guide people without—things happening, uh, natural... responses to relaxing. That make it creepy and make people call me a freak. I wish someone would look at me the way they look at Yulya and Sasha."

"I just want to matter."

He wipes his face with his sleeve, angrily. "I'm sorry! Okay? I'm sorry I'm like this and I can't fix it! I just want to help without being a freak they have to hide in a cellar!"

"You're not a freak. Why would you be a freak?"

No reason.

Please stop looking at me, Ha Si-yeon-nim.

"Oh is this a homophobia thing? Okay let's be super clear here, I'm really queer, so're half the espers in Quasar, hell as far as I can tell so're half the espers in the world, and most places aren't the way Russia is about it. There's really nothing wrong with it."

Fuck! "No, you don't understand—It's not—everybody knows espers get a little—look, I—!"

He jerks to the side suddenly, sagging over the armrest, like a fuse popped in his brain. After a moment he sighs resignedly. "I guess you have to know eventually. My backlash is that almost anything I touch feels painful. Even my clothes. I have to—I have to be totally naked when I'm guiding, and I'm usually—fuck me—I'm usually hard while it happens. Like, massively massively hard. Like no pretending." He sniffles. "They wanted me to guide in dungeons, you know, because I'm so compatible with several real espers, but... too many normal people would see that and... it wouldn't be good. So they hide me away in a cellar where there aren't any windows while I lick Snegurochka's body all over. She can't touch me so much while I'm high on backlash, so I have to touch her with my... the palms of my hands and my tongue. It hurts less that way. She calls me her little dog."

Okay. Did you really have to add that last part?

"Then once I'm a little lower I do Sasha. It's less efficient but he's also a bit more specialized that she is, so I can work with him overnight. But—they wanted me to be able to go out with him. To dungeons. I was going to hold their hands and help them, but I couldn't wear any clothes at all after a minute or two and I'm such a—

"such a—

"useless fucking guide!" 

"Okay none of that makes you useless. If you don't want to be hard, there's meds for that. If you want to dull the sensations, there's meds for that. If you don't want to like it, there's therapy for that.

"But I know an esper, an incredibly powerful esper, whose backlash turns them into a whimpering horny mess who's begging to be fucked until they pass out. I'm obviously not telling you who, and no you're not going to guess, but the lottery roll of backlashes doesn't make them useless and neither does your roll make you useless. And none of it makes you a freak."

"Is he running around naked in dungeons? Because it's one thing to be horny all the time and another to have it in people's faces!"

Wow, that was, uh... more forceful than he'd really intended. He clears his throat delicately and sits up straight again. Please, Sasha, be too busy to come back out here now.

"I never found anything that dealt with the sensations effectively enough to make me useful in high-intensity dungeons, but it also wasn't a priority at the GBE, since we're assigned to the far-eastern sector and most resources go the more-populated west. If... if you all felt that that was worth your time?" He sighs. "Honestly, I was hoping that if I matched with enough powerful espers, maybe you all would think it was worth trying to treat the symptoms. I wasn't thinking Sasha would want to come do all this but since he was here, you know... that's one more argument in my favor. Not enough by himself, but maybe I've got more compatibility around here. And I'm—I'm very good at guiding! It's not really a skill, exactly, other than just being patient with people, but it's something!"

"Again with the low standards," he sighs. "Even if you only partnered with a C-rank who works in construction we'd still think it was worth our time and effort to treat you the symptoms. You don't need to justify your existence and presence, here. We're not going to be like, oh, he's not guiding enough high-ranking espers, he's not worth helping."

They called me a hero worth their time before I’d signed anything in Russia, too, Si-yeon. And it was bullshit then, too. “I appreciate the sentiment,” he says the way tourists appreciate being offered tripe or beef tongue. “I still am committed to assisting anyone who can tolerate me.” Well, at least you avoided ‘use me’ this time. Is pathetic a step up from whore? Maybe not. Whores get paid.

He brushes his own thoughts away, determined to wrest this conversation back to professionalism before Ha Si-yeon could show him anymore pity. “You said it is worked out between individuals. Xow would they choose me, then? Do they get a… a dossier? Xow do they test compatibility?”

"...Yun Dasol-shi," he says, switching to a more formal register. "Let me try to put it this way: you will be wronging Quasar's interests if you go into this expecting to just be useful to and used by 'anyone who can tolerate you'. It would be a PR nightmare if it ever became known that a professional partner in our employ was doing anything that might even remotely look like it was under duress or under the impression that... I don't know, that they'd be left in a bad situation they can't leave otherwise. Professional partner contracts have the most generous exit clauses out of all contracts we have because of how much of a disaster it would be to make a professional partner stay in a partnership that wasn't good for them. And the best way for it to not look like that's the case is for it to in fact not be the case. I'm not saying this out of pity for you or a desire to rescue you; it is literally a legal liability for it to be otherwise.

"And to answer your question," he continues, not letting Dasol respond to that, "initially we will present you with people that might be compatible based on our understanding of their and your backlashes and who they and you are compatible with, and further guesses will be refined from the compatibility map we build. You will shake their hand to gauge basic backlash compatibility, and then you will talk to each other and get to know each other, and see if your expected work conditions are acceptable to each other, and see if you have some basic level of personal compatibility such that it won't explode in a messy legally complicated breakup in three months."

He’s too deep in his feelings to censor himself. “So, what, I just shake their xand and say, ‘by the way, I’m a walking sexual xarassment lawsuit?’ At least when it isn’t my choice it’s also not my fault that I’m assaulting their eyes when I guide them.”

Dasol, manners! Apparently there are things more powerful than embarrassment and shame. Like the prospect of further embarrassment and shame!

"You inform them in advance—or we can, if you'd rather we filter it—that you cannot suffer backlash and wear clothes, and that they must be fine with that. That's really not as big a deal as you seem to think it is, I'd say at least half of esper partnerships involve sex, there's a reason sex is sometimes called the 'standard guiding procedure'. That includes gay sex. 

"You could also just not accumulate any backlash for your guiding. It makes guiding less efficient but that's all it does, is make it less efficient."

By habit, he glances around the room the moment the word gay is said, and then closes his eyes and scolds himself. “Sorry, I am not used to being so matter-of-fact about… everything. I will practice being more open.” What does that even mean? He doesn’t know. He’s just saying words to keep from getting kicked out at this point. As mortifying as it is to be talking about this, there’s also that horrible niggling feeling of hope and trust in his chest. That urge to let his shoulders down and smile tiredly. Or maybe cry. Or maybe kiss him. The kind of feeling that gets you beat up when you least expect it.

Thank God Sasha is taking the world’s longest piss.

”I do think it would be nice to warn people ahead of meeting me. If that can be done.” Suddenly an overwhelming pressure bubbles up in his chest. “I can make it nice for them! Snegurochka likes scented candles and… I always made sure we had some for her bad days. And she relaxed better if I made little barking sounds.” He can feel his skin turning drunkard-pink but if that were enough to stop himself he wouldn’t be here at all, would he? “It’s not all about me, is the point! I am happy to accommodate my partner. They should put that in the file… too.”

"...I think that's probably better discussed in person personally but that's just a suggestion, other than vetoing classified information and similar stuff and giving you advice Quasar lets you put whatever you want in your file.

"Does it help with the 'being open' thing if I tell you that all of Lee Tae-gun's partners prior to his current one were male, including myself, and that it's not a secret that Tae-gun had sex for guiding with all of us?"

“I assumed that was Russian propaganda.” He starts laughing at himself, partially from embarrassment, partially from relief. Mostly to preclude picturing this man naked, lying on his back, beckoning with a simpering expression before closing his eyes and relaxing while Dasol takes his left forearm and starts to rub all the tension out—

Ahem. “How did you—how did you negotiate that? If it isn’t too much to ask! I’m sort of used to it being… something you don’t say. Ever.”

"I don't remember the exact meeting, that was almost a decade ago, but it went roughly like..."

"So, Ha Si-yeon-shi, what, uh, forms of guiding are you comfortable with?"