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Haitham’s habits are surprisingly regular—ordinary, even. Cyno didn’t know what he expected from Grand Scribe Al-Haitham (one of the Akademiya’s most gifted graduates, as well as their resident lunatic), but he was rather sure it wasn’t so…
Boring.
Haitham wakes up late, around eleven or so. He spends an hour reading or writing, often feverishly, as though he’s recording insights he’s had while sleeping. He bathes for an hour every alternate day, fifteen minutes on the remaining half. He eats neither breakfast nor lunch, heading out directly after changing his clothes to perform one of many perfectly routine tasks. He files taxes for himself and his roommate. He buys groceries. He goes to one of the three booksellers in the city that he frequents, or one of several antique dealers, or a selection of sweetmeat shops. His purchases are ridiculously domestic. He spends between forty-five minutes to an hour and a half on such activities, before depositing his finds at his apartment and proceeding to the library, where he works on Scribe-related duties until six in the evening. At six, he stops at the cafe near the library for a cup of coffee and one of three sandwiches, though which one is thankfully completely random. Cyno doesn’t know what he’d do with the uninterrupted monotony otherwise. He buys dinner for his roommate, and goes back to the apartment, leaves the dinner on the table, and shuts himself in his room to work until the early hours of the morning. He barely makes it to his bed before passing out.
Cyno doesn’t watch Haitham every day. That would be creepy. And weird.
Besides, he’s still the General Mahamatra. The Akademiya can’t suspect there’s anything off about his behavior, and that means carrying out his duties as usual, engaging in his customary activities.
Lately, though, Cyno can’t shake off the feeling that he’s being watched. Wherever he goes—in the middle of the desert, in some cave within the forests. On the highest boughs of the tree that gilds the city, in the depths of domains, in the middle of a crowd and in the pale light of dawn.
It makes his skin crawl. Eyes on his back, fingers scratching at his heels. Always a little ahead of him, vanishing when he turns. Something is coming.
There is an irony to this. How many scholars have feared him the way he now fears his own old masters?
Panic makes people stupid. Cyno does not panic. He…plans.
He plans, and he hunts.
After all, you can only be one: predator or prey, wolf or deer. As long as he’s the one in pursuit, it doesn’t matter what’s at his back. It can’t outrun him like this. It’s only when he sits still that…
And there it is again, the feeling of being watched.
Some nights are worse than others. He can fill the hours with tracking targets (sometimes it’s so easy that Cyno can almost forget it was once hard—these days it’s like spearing scorpions in a barrel, watching their chittering poisonous scrabble for freedom and feeling the dullness of knowing exactly how it will end for each of them), with meeting Tighnari and Kaveh and Collei for dinner and drinks and games of Genius Invokation when they indulge him, with his own petty chores. But in the long hours of the night when he’s alone, when he can’t rest because he knows there are spies out there, tracking his moves, counting the space between his heartbeats to measure the moment he falls asleep—it doesn’t matter that the spy is his own Terminal, that he leaves it off these days. He can’t outrun their teeth nipping at his heels.
On those nights, he dons his darkest cloak and steals across the boughs and rooftops of Sumeru City, to a window he knows will always be lit.
Haitham’s curtains are never drawn. His desk is in front of the window, and with the rustle of the foliage concealing his breath and its shadows masking his shape, Cyno can watch Haitham work. Writing with one hand, elegant script unfurling under his pen in the lamplight, turning pages with his other hand, never looking up for long. If he ever pauses, it’s only to grip his hair so hard his knuckles whiten, as though his head aches.
Sleep, Cyno thinks at him sometimes, so loud Haitham should be able to hear him. But Haitham never sleeps before dawn, and mostly only after, and Cyno lets the morning light guide him away from that window—just like any other during the day—to the Lambda or a bakery, to eat and begin his day. In the back of his head Haitham is always there, not a thorn as much as a clockwork man, so reliable Cyno can glance at the angle of a shadow and know precisely what Haitham is doing no matter where he is.
It’s reassuring.
Which means, naturally, that Haitham has to ruin it for Cyno.
It’s been a particularly bad few days, when even keeping his eyes on his prey doesn’t rid him of the clawing tenseness of being watched. The next phase of their plan against the sages draws ever-nearer, and Cyno can’t help but fear that he will once more give them away.
Haitham stumbles into his room earlier than usual, slams the door shut and leans against it. Cyno’s palms tingle; he wants to summon his spear, wants to deal with whatever this is, but some impulse holds him back and makes him patient. Makes him wait and see.
Haitham stays against the door for a long moment, then brushes his hair back. Cyno holds his breath when Haitham crosses to the desk. He raises a hand to the curtains, and Cyno feels a fleeting mix of curious emotion—relief and resentment, half don’t let anyone see you like this and half don’t hide from me. Haitham’s hand is shaking as he grips the edge of the curtain, shaking worse as he lowers it, but then he looks—
Looks right at Cyno, and taps the glass.
It could be a coincidence. Haitham is still looking here, still tapping. Through his shock Cyno translates the age-old knocking code some previous generation of Scribe had crafted.
Three, one-two-two, one-one-one, four. CYNO.
He moves without thinking, abandoning the safety of foliage and high ground to alight on the window’s narrow ledge.
Haitham slides the windows open. “You came,” he says, and ordinarily Cyno would mock one such as him for stooping to the level of the obvious but his eyes are unfocused, his hair a proper mess instead of its customary artful disarray.
Cyno drops onto the desk and into the room, somehow endeavouring not to disturb anything on it. Haitham shuts the window again, leaning his fists on the desk and clearly struggling to balance himself.
“What’s wrong?” Cyno asks, resisting the urge to glance at the Scribe’s paraphernalia.
Haitham shakes his head. Abruptly he reaches for one of the desk drawers, shuffling around feverishly until he comes up with a small bottle of pills. He shakes two into his mouth, swallows dry, and pins Cyno with a dreadfully strange look; Cyno can always tell when someone is scared, but the absence of it makes no sense—Haitham looks angry and ill, but not frightened. Not, at least, of Cyno.
It’s an unfamiliar feeling.
“Stay,” Haitham demands, falls into bed, and passes out.
Well.
Now what?
Despite the clear instruction, Cyno’s first instinct is to leave. Kaveh will be home at some point, or he’s already home—Cyno can’t predict him as easily as he can predict Haitham. He should retrace Haitham’s footsteps, some backwards penance for not having spied on him starting sooner today. Could he have prevented whatever has led his Scribe to be in this state? It’s a pointless train of thought.
Then he considers the room itself. If he is to stay, he must stay here. So he locks the door and draws the curtains, blocking out the light of the moon. No matter—Cyno can see in the dark.
The next consideration is Haitham himself. Cyno checks the bottle and finds it’s a painkiller.
Huh. Cyno turns this over in his head, then returns it to the drawer.
He spends some time trying to get the blood-soaked gloves off Haitham’s arms. He barely stirs, deeply unconscious, but the blood has congealed between his skin and the gashes. He has to use a knife, Electro sparkling at the edges, to fully get them off.
Haitham’s forearms are strangely vulnerable. Despite the angry wounds and the muscle, they’re delicate like fresh shoots in springtime, easily crushed.
He finds bandages in the bathroom’s closet, cleans off the blood and binds the injuries. Dithers over Haitham’s headset, but he only rarely takes it off when he sleeps. In fact, Cyno can count on a hand the number of times he’s seen Haitham without them even for a moment.
He won’t interfere with that, then.
Cyno’s heartbeat settles slowly. In the windless quiet of Haitham’s room, it’s too loud a sound—his heart and Haitham’s, a constant thrum.
Perhaps it’s because he’s watching Haitham: the restless twist of his mouth, dissatisfied even in sleep, the faint frown between his brows. He’s beautiful the way statues in the Akademiya’s museums are beautiful, beyond familiarity. Cyno doesn’t want to think about this.
Even the urge to go through the Scribe’s things has faded. It is his right, of course, as the General Mahamatra. But all of that feels strangely immaterial. He takes off his gauntlets and cloak, kicks off his shoes. Haitham’s bed is big enough for two, and Cyno hasn’t had sleep come this easy in weeks.
It’s odd, he thinks. He no longer feels watched.
He wakes up when Haitham stirs. At some point in the night, Cyno has managed to curl in the space between Haitham’s sprawling limbs, folding his body into the bracket opened by an arm and a leg. He’d be cold were it not for the heat radiating from Haitham’s body.
He’s also never seen Haitham wake up from this close before. Haitham blinks at the ceiling, reaches up to touch the side of the headset. Apparently reassured by its presence, he closes his eyes and tries to return to sleep. Fails, frowns, turns on his side, squeaks out a rough exhale at the pain. Sees Cyno.
“You’re finally awake,” Cyno says, as though he’s been waiting for hours and not, oh. Two minutes.
“What,” Haitham mumbles. “The fuck?”
Some internal process completes, and Haitham drags himself out of bed without waiting for a response. Cyno sits up as well, content to watch.
But—it’s daylight, and he should be going. Things no longer feel as simple as they did in the dark. Cyno has questions: how did Haitham know he was out there? What was Haitham doing before that? What the fuck just happened?
Haitham returns a minute later, shirtless. Cyno is fascinated, entirely against his will, by the subtle, dangerous shift of muscle in Haitham’s shoulders, his chest and back and arms. Few scholars, few scribes, would bother maintaining their body to such an immaculate and frankly unnecessary degree. He finds a t-shirt quickly, though, looser than his usual. Cyno tells himself he’s in no way disappointed.
“You can leave,” Haitham tells him.
Cyno stares at him and does not budge.
Haitham sighs. “It was unseemly of me to ask you to stay and keep you from your duties,” he sounds bored, as though he’s reciting from a script. “I’m sorry. You can leave now.”
Cyno simply grips his ankles and waits.
Haitham picks up a pen from his desk and fiddles with it, a sign of nervousness so uncharacteristic that all of Cyno’s senses sharpen and lean into the new information. “You have questions,” Haitham surmises, clearly reluctant. “Well, let’s not do this here.”
They end up in a private booth in a cafe on the top floor of an expensive establishment, not far from Haitham’s flat. Haitham does not say a word as they walk, and Cyno wonders if it was perhaps a mistake for him to allow Haitham to find a decently sized shirt and pants from somewhere for Cyno to wear. He feels utterly naked without his wolf’s cloak, his hair cinched back into a casual ponytail.
Perhaps it’s rather fitting that they’re both out of sorts.
“Ask away,” Haitham says, the moment they’ve ordered.
“No,” Cyno says, instinctively contrary in the face of a conundrum like this. “One question each, and then we both answer.”
Haitham nearly smiles at that, but it’s more tired and less smug than usual. “Alright. You first.”
“Where were you last night?”
“Why did you learn to read Grand Scribe Nitya’s personal knocking code?”
Cyno blinks. “Is that it? I learnt it because I needed it for a case. A cadre of foolish scholars using it to transmit equations.”
“Nitya’s Code is a painfully inadequate way of convey equations covertly,” Haitham observes. “I can suggest several better ones off the top of my head.”
“And yet, you used it,” Cyno says idly. “Was that your only question for me?”
“Of course not,” Haitham answers. Their food arrives—dosas for Cyno, puri and masala potatoes for Haitham. “But as you know, the questions someone wants answered says as much about them as their answers. I didn’t want to put my cards on the table so early.”
Cyno frowns. “Your turn to answer.”
“The Akademiya’s hidden vaults.”
“And the injuries?”
“I was attacked by a Matra.”
Cyno looks down at his food. Suddenly it looks unappetizing. “And here you are, eating with their General.”
“I’m safer here than I am anywhere else,” Haitham replies. “With the Mahamatra himself watching over me.”
Cyno sucks in a breath. “How did you know I was—”
“Out there? You’re forgetting, Cyno,” and on anyone else that smile would be friendly, but on Haitham it looks like a tiger’s “I’ve read the Akademiya’s report on you half a dozen times over from end to end. And I know things about you even they don’t.”
Cyno’s a fool. Who feels watched when they’re staring right at the spy, sitting across from him, sharing a meal—
“You never tried to stop me,” Cyno says numbly.
Haitham glances away. “My turn for a question,” he carries on, silky and deceptively casual. “Why did you answer when I called for you?”
There’s only one answer to that. Cyno should be a little more upset about having his own scheme turned against him, but he can’t seem to work up the rage. “You looked like shit,” he says, blunt and flat. “You looked like you were going to fall over and hit your head.” And then who would I watch over?
“That would’ve been no business of yours.”
“What were you doing in the vaults?”
“Looking for information for the next stage of our plan,” Haitham says promptly. Despite the readiness of his answer Cyno believes him. “Why were you watching me?”
Cyno leans back in his chair. “Shouldn’t you be able to guess that?”
“I want to hear it from you.”
“No,” Cyno says coldly. “You first.”
He doesn’t know if it’s just a particularly rough day or if Haitham is always this suggestible to being pushed. Actually, scratch that, Cyno knows full well that this malleability is a rare occurrence. “You’re paranoid,” Haitham says slowly. “You know the Akademiya can predict you, and you’re trying to prove to yourself that you’re beyond their knowledge.” He inclines his head. “Did I get that right?”
“Close enough.”
“I must say,” Haitham adds, tone musing. “It’ll be easier to go about my day now that I don’t have to put on a show for your sake.”
Cyno exhales. “I knew it. No one could be so regular without—”
“Faking it somehow? Believe it or not, that’s not too far off from how my days actually go. A few more minor variations and surprises, but never far from that general theme.”
“Aren’t you predictable to the Akademiya too, then?”
Haitham smiles enigmatically. “They think I am.”
Cyno tilts his head, considering this. “Let’s eat.”
The food, at least, is distractingly good. And Cyno’s hungry. The bandages on Haitham’s forearms have been redone, though not much neater than Cyno’s own doing and noticeably worse on one side. Cyno can imagine, though, that it’s just as futile to try to force Haitham to see a healer as it would be to cajole Cyno himself under similar circumstances. That comparison no longer rankles as much as it should—Cyno’s made his peace with their likeness, if only in his own head.
And the tremble in Haitham’s fingers eases as their meal progresses. Cyno thinks about how often Haitham usually eats breakfast, and feels unusually proud.
Ridiculous.
Haitham pays for both of them without asking. They walk out into the thick midday sunshine. Cyno is curiously, blessedly relaxed. When he slants his eyes at the infuriating specimen next to him, Haitham is shading his own eyes and trying to look at the sky at the same time. The squint softens his features, makes him human.
What had Cyno thought about him—a clockwork man? It still feels true. Perhaps one day Cyno will figure out what makes him tick.
“One last question,” Cyno says. “Why did you call for me in the first place?”
“Call it testing a theory.”
“And the theory?”
Haitham does not call him out for having another question on the heels of the last. “I was never quite sure,” he says, with a softness that would be vulnerable in another voice. “Whether you were really out there. I could’ve been imagining it, the feeling of being watched.”
The feeling of being watched, Cyno thinks, electrified. “So what gave it away?”
“Well, you came,” Haitham says. The sidewalk of a busy sunlit street is an odd place to be hearing these confessions. Cyno can’t imagine that they’d sound any easier in the middle of the night. Perhaps it’s the way Haitham’s eyes are crinkling at the corners that’s making Cyno so sentimental. “Call the logic circular if you want, but it still proves my point.”
“What point,” Cyno says carefully, “That you’re safer with me than you are anywhere else?”
Haitham lowers his hand, curls it into a fist. He does not answer.