Haru scrolls labriously through his contacts till the one he wants is readily available. "Could start the Korean lessons if it winds up being that you're not - well, the word 'considerate' feels weirdly loaded now."

"Just don't add the qualifier to it and it's a perfectly fine word."

"If you wind up not being considerate, then, but are still willing to go through vocabulary."

"I hope I don't disappoint."

"If you don't wind up talky I'll call Tess and if she doesn't pick up I'll call Cricket and he'll tide me over while connecting me to people like an old-timey telephone operator but I apologize in advance if that happens, I keep my phone volume low but not so low you would be guaranteed not to catch anything."

"Understood. —I suppose you'll still want to call someone else to read you 'the checklist'?"

"It's shorter without the handcuff step by enough that I'd expect to notice if you missed something, which is most of what I was guarding against by calling third parties for it. Actually, if it's now acceptable for you to be conscious when backlashed we could also dispense with the pills step and me making sure that I'm definitely up before you."

"Were those the contents?" He doesn't know how to feel about the prospect of actually being awake while unbraceleted again and then spending the night with Haru. It sounds... kind of dreadful, actually, now that he thinks about it, so he will instead stop thinking about it before he works himself up and makes it worse. "Yes I had been thinking no more pills." Although if he starts having nightmares he might want them back, unsure. He hasn't had nightmares in a while but that was while not having any backlash and the first few months in prison he had them nearly every night without fail.

"I think so but if I could remember the list reliably while backlashed I would not have been having people read it to me in the first place. I'll just pull up my checklists," attention, phone!, "and you can have a look -"

Yeah it's pretty much just the bedtime routine they've been following.

"Yeah, that seems to be it. So what are the... codes for?"

"Oh, that was so whatever random person I had reading it for me wouldn't know what it was about, negligibly-selected third parties shouldn't know where you are or what's going on with you just because I can't read a checklist."

"Oh." For some reason Jaeha thought it was to hide its contents from him.

"It's not a very secure code but I don't think it has to be and a really sturdy one would also not work at any time when I can't read."

"Yeah, that makes sense."

He should be trying to come up with something interesting to distract Traceless but he can't come up with those on command. Or at all.

"- so uh what time do you want to go to bed?"

"No particularly strong opinion. I don't have competing obligations."

Maybe as a result of this conversation Haru will act a little bit less like a bank teller and Jaeha will be able to forget what their actual relationship is, for a bit. It didn't really escape Jaeha's notice that despite everything they still ended up not talking about the thing Haru claimed he didn't care whether they talked about, or their apparent disconnected framings for it, by the time Haru decided they ought to stop having a contentful conversation, so it seems like the end result in terms of how Jaeha should act is the same.

Hopefully that'll be easier to do, now that he's managed to find and exterminate the little bug in his brain that was apparently aiming for friendship. Pathetic.

"Okay, 'cause I'm done eating and I'm pretty backlashed and I don't necessarily need to sleep right away but it seems like we're running out of topics and I could stand to be guiding and learning how to say stuff in Korean instead of panicking about that."

They're running out of topics, is that what Traceless is going with? Rather than apparently just choosing not to talk about the one thing this particular session of Jaeha dumping his damage on him was about in the first place? Sure.

"I've never taught anyone any languages, fair warning. Do you have a format that works best for you? I could try to follow it."

"My favorite Tagalog tutor used to just try to have a normal conversation and then stop whenever I mispronounced something or used the wrong word or didn't know what to say and catch me up on how I should have gone about it, which worked pretty well."

"How did that work before you had any words?"

"He started with numbers! He'd hold up something - we were on a video call - and say 'isa', and then 'dalawa' for two of it, and so on."

"Doesn't sound like a very normal conversation but I can try."

"He told me it would be a normal conversation with a one year old and I was playing the role of a one year old. We got to be more normal about it later. He's my cleaning lady's son, we'd catch up about her sometimes, that kind of thing."

"I'll do my best."

"I appreciate that. Okay, bedtime procedures, can you monologue about something while I'm brushing my teeth or is that not so much happening."