Archive of Our Own ^beta

Alhaitham wants it on record that none of this was his idea.

He was only sitting, headphones on and brows scrunched over a book when he came.

And, see, Alhaitham has heard of this elusive figure.

A messy mop of fretfully dyed blonde hair,  scrolls that spill out of satchels and sawdust that catches in the lining of sleeves.

Kaveh of the Kshahrewar… destined to win Pir Kavikavus – outshining the competition by miles!

Ah, yes! The one with the blonde hair. I’ve seen him in classes before, he has quite the charisma.

Precious, isn’t he! Ai, what I wouldn’t give to go out to dinner with him. Or do more, once we get to my hous—

And on, and on, and on.

Alhaitham is not remotely interested in the rumor mill, but the Akademiya is built on it. Scholars, yes. Countless pens that fly over paper and spittle that spews from mouths in passionate discussion.

Yet with the grueling collar that is the Akademiya’s expectations, people need a place to relieve themselves.

That place turns out to be a collective circle that spans Akademiya-wide in talking about everyone.

God! They are worse than the Aunties at the bazaars, an olive in their mouth and their eyes seeking out any sort of oddity.

Within this circle is Kaveh of the Kshahrewar. Despite his avoidance for people as a whole, Alhaitham has heard of him.

You’d be hard-pressed to wander the Akademiya’s gilded halls and not hear his name resounded in tapestries of gold. 

Kaveh the beautiful this, praises to his genius that, all idle chatter – and speculation from romantic minds, Alhaitham is practically certain – that he is not at all interested in, yet is subjected to.

It’s quite the pity, really.

Case in point: Alhaitham has heard of him, but has not gotten to meet the fleeting figure, all bright laughs and red clips stuck into hair.

Until now, that is.

Alhaitham has his head bent to an uncomfortable angle, trying to decipher a particularly strenuous grammatical translation from Mondstadt when scrolls flutter and bump against the bridge of his nose.

The smell of paper and spices – the smell of food spices on paper must be a veritable crime – is overwhelming and he scrunches his lips, sitting straight.

His back pops. Maybe he should have a better sitting posture.

When he lays eyes on the boy, it is already evident that this is The Kaveh.

The rumor mill had exaggerated all too much: he is not a god upon a pedestal. He still has splotches of irritated skin upon his face, chapped lips and fingers stained in ink. He looks like a boy, just as Alhaitham is one with matching stains on his fingers.

Red eyes that catch Alhaitham off guard; brewing anger a forethought to the way the boy’s eyes crinkle when he waves.

In the small alcove Alhaitham had found for himself, bathed in the stained window’s colors, the boy looks ethereal.

Highlighted in a blue thrown over his cheeks, an orange that rests atop already bright hair, and the way that when he shifts – uncomfortably, Alhaitham is not as clueless as most seem to think – the pink cuts a line down the hem of his robes.

It is here, for the first time in a long, long time, that Alhaitham is rendered speechless.

He must stare for a time, as the boy reaches out a hesitant hand to pick up the scroll that had rolled onto Alhaitham’s book.

“Ah… haha. Sorry about that. I didn’t pack them up well, you see, and as I tried desperately to find a place to sit – why is the library so full on a Friday? – it kind of just toppled out and fell onto your stuff. So sorry, again.” Alhaitham blinks once. “Haha.”

There is a beat of silence in which the boy fiddles with the edge of the document, running this thumb across the edge in what could coalesce in blood.

He goes at it again, and Alhaitham is inexplicably drawn to the split of his mouth. His eyes snap back upwards instantly, a curious seed of guilt unfurling in him.

“So-ooo. Can I? Sit here, that is? Please?”

Alhaitham really must be ill, or running on terrible hours of sleep when he says:

“Suit yourself.”

With his heart hanging treacherous from his sleeve, he turns back to his work. Lets his bangs hang in front of his head as he picks the pencil back up, staring at words that seem to make no sense.

(He has a feeling that even if they were in Sumerian, Alhaitham wouldn’t understand anyways.)

There is the sound of an affronted snort, something that sounds like hah! before the boy takes a seat, pulling out scrolls and rulers and all sorts of equipment that Alhaitham has not used in his life.

Sheets upon sheets of numbers appear next to Alhaitham’s small writing, and he cannot quite find it in himself to snap as he usually would.

He only speaks again when Alhaitham has become accustomed to the presence of someone beside him, the rhythmic motions of their breaths and the way his skin seems to itch in the proximity.

“Sorry, but— what’s your name, anyway?” 

A pause.

Alhaitham has picked a few Inazuman light novels up before. 

( A well rounded education in literature is important , his grandmother had said, pressing a stack of light novels into his hands on a night he could not sleep. And, this way, we can discuss how Hime Tanaka slays the dragon. A wink of the eye, and a pat to Alhaitham’s cheek as she’d let him crawl into bed with her.) 

This, in Inazuman light novels, is known as the point where the story begins.

The tapestry of Them begins to unravel at their feet, even if Alhaitham does not know it.

A monumental moment, so to speak. To set the ball rolling until it goes and goes and goes—

“Alhaitham. Though I did not ask for yours.”

The boy blinks for a moment, mouth opening in attempted retort. Yet it soothes back into mirth: his eyebrows relax and he bursts out in laughter that feels too loud for the library’s echoing halls. He sticks a hand out toward Alhaitham, joy crinkling at the corner of his eyes.

“Ha! You are going to get on my nerves. I like it! Lovely, Alhaitham. I’m Kaveh.”

Alhaitham shakes his hand, only once, and feels as his calluses press momentarily to the ones on Alhaitham’s own hand.

Kaveh smiles again, and Alhaitham yanks his hand back in a hurry to get back to his own assignment. Turns the cancellation of his headphones to the highest, and tries fervently to engross himself back into words. 

(It doesn’t quite work – the smell of Kaveh, a curious thing that has him feeling young and sitting on a stool in mamani’s kitchen, watching as she stirs a spoon, tucks hair behind her ear – it is all distracting enough.

Kaveh takes a strand of curls and wraps it around his finger, and Alhaitham tries valiantly to ignore it.)


He gets a surprising amount of work done, even despite the presence of the boy.

Kaveh had bent his head to his own papers, frowned over numbers and brushed eraser spill away from straight-backed lines.

It only becomes a problem again with Kaveh stretches, something like a groan slipping out of his mouth, and fixes Alhaitham with a Look.

Alhaitham prides himself on blending, on staying away from becoming anything extraordinary. He is not a star – and he has never wished to be a star. Alhaitham will put his head to his work, turn it in and have teachers scowling at the mediocrity when he could do so much better, boy – and focus on what interests him on his own time.

He does not need the approval of instructors that look for things that suit only them.

Alhaitham is more than happy working on his own and reaping the benefits as such.

Therefore, this study of him is strange, and Alhaitham does not know how to feel.

The attention – from both of them – is ripped to shreds as the bell rings. 

A momentary lull in which Kaveh stares at him, wide-eyed and too innocent. He feels like the personification of childhood, the seam of his mouth and hands that smell of cardamom, the ink stains that only grow in size dotted upon him like constellations writ in gold. 

Then, he laughs, and Alhaitham’s world falls off its axis. 

“I confess I lost track of the hour— I have a class to attend to. I think Madam Faruzan would have my head if I arrive late once more.” He speaks at the rate of trains, talking as she stuffs books into his bag far too hapzazardly. 

Picks up a pen disguised as flamboyant feather and sticks it in his hair. Alhaitham snorts once, earns himself a roll of the eyes and a you don’t seem like the type to appreciate aesthetics, anyway. 

“I will see you around, Alhaitham!” 

It sounds like a threat. 

The bell tolls again, and Kaveh sqwaks. In his haste, Alhaitham swears he can almost see dust trailing behind the patter of his slippers upon ground. 

See you around becomes a normal thing.

Kaveh seeks him out everywhere. Walks in the gardens, brings Alhaitham to his dorm to let them speak of many things, and sometimes only sit together in companionable silence within the gilded drapery of Akademiya halls.

It is enchanting, the way he moves. 

Light seems to heed his call, the way he shifts and hair rests upon his shoulder like the touch of a lover, the way his fingers snap and his eyes glow incandescent when Alhaitham goes toe to toe with him on a topic. 

(On one such occasion, the librarians escorted them out with a lecture. Alhaitham had almost laughed himself sick at the way Kaveh’s cheeks flushed vermillion.) 

This becomes a thing. Now the rumor mill, despite Alhaitham’s disdain for it, does not only speak of Kaveh. 

It speaks of Kaveh and Alhaitham – the elusive boy in green with the headphones, hair that falls like ash upon shoulders, rucks up into green when he brushes a hand through it. Two polar forces that come together as if magnetized.

Kaveh meets him in the library, most often. 

It is only a shame that he manages to catch Alhaitham as he’s going to leave. A Saturday, where everyone is out partying and doing god knows what in the scattered streets of Sumeru City. 

Alhaitham, for one, intends to get good sleep in without being subjected to drunken classmates.

Kaveh opens his mouth just as Alhaitham finishes packing up.

“Come on,” he says, sudden.

Alhaitham’s hand pauses where it lies upon his hair – practically unmoving when sanguine eyes gleam in his direction – and looks up.

“What?”

“I said come on,” repeats Kaveh, sitting up straighter and letting the tome he had idly picked out fall shut. It sprays dust motes around his face, cut arcs of the dying sun that filters in through the windows.

Strange, how something mundane can feel so blindingly beautiful.

“What makes you think I’d follow you?”

Alhaitham is a hypocrite. Alhaitham is a massive fucking hypocrite because he says that, yet already stands, wincing at the screech of the chair upon marble floors.

Kaveh only glances down at his hands, raises two eyebrows with the tilt of something pretty at the edge of his mouth.

He’s got a mole there, thinks Alhaitham absently, organizing the table with a touch of vengeance. 

“I think your actions speak louder than your words, Alhaitham.”

Alhaitham. What a way his name trips off Kaveh’s tongue, causing an all-together too treacherous reaction in Alhaitham’s head.

It is his name— he has been hearing it for years! There is no reason he should be so affected by the way a boy made of sunshine and smelling of the warm wooden stools of mamani’s kitchen says it.

“Come on,” urges Kaveh again, sending a curious zip up Alhaitham’s arm when he grabs at his fingers.

Alhaitham blinks once, feels something inside him crack with the way Kaveh’s smile is adorned in glimmering colors.

Fuck the Akademiya windows and their propensity for beauty.


Out of all the places Alhaitham expected to appear, this was not on his list. He and Kaveh have wandered the halls together before simply for the sake of doing it – devolving into arguments over theorems that have everyone side-stepping them with wide berths and audible sighs. There they go, Kaveh and Alhaitham.

Call him introverted, but Alhaitham does not quite like being perceived.

Kaveh pulls him out of the library at a leisurely walk, then yanks him over to tighten his fingers upon Alhaitham’s as he breaks out into a run.

They weave through the interspersed pools of light on the floor, jump over staircases that professors would die if they saw them do – Kaveh leaps with a brilliant laugh straight across a mosaic that is hundreds of years old.

Alhaitham is starstruck by the simple beauty of him.

When people spoke of Kaveh, it was praise to his genius, or idle speculation about a life that is not their own.

It is not the Kaveh Alhaitham has come to know.

Not everyone can see him with hair streaming in a messy tangle of curls behind him. Not everyone can see the wild way he gasps for breath, hands on his knees painfully human. The way his clips come unarranged in his hair, prompting Alhaitham to slide one back into place.

The look he gets, too, is also something he thinks is only his.

And with a rare fierceness, he hopes it is.

Kaveh grabs at his hands again and leads them to a part of the Akademiya that Alhaitham does not often visit: the cafeteria.

And Alhaitham eats. Of course he eats – he’s as human as anyone else.

But the cafeteria, or the food court, has a tendency to be very loud, even through the barrier of his headphones. Chatter and speculation and sharp barks of laughter that dig uncomfortably into the soft spots of his head.

Yet before he begins digging his heels into the ground, Kaveh shakes his head. The motion jingles with the rattle of clips that hold a braid up. There’s no one there, at this hour. Trust me.

A dangerous notion; a dangerous though. Yet Alhaitham lets himself be spurred back into motion by the tilt of Kaveh’s head and the warmth of his palm against Alhaitham’s.

The sun has reached its resting point, and everything is bathed in a liminal sort of blue. In the silence, Kaveh walks in a small circle.

A frown mars his face. Alhaitham has the fleeting thought of he shouldn’t look like that. Right on the heels of that is shut the fuck up, Alhaitham.

“Feels weird so empty, right?”

A shrug, and the slant of eyes in the same breath. At Kaveh’s inquisitive turn of the head, Alhaitham shrugs again.

“I do not come here so often.”

“What, so you don’t eat?”

He rolls his eyes, hears an amused huff. Blonde hair shifts, and moonlight scatters playfully within its strands.

“Of course I eat, Kaveh. Don’t be foolish.”

“Foolis—”

“I just don’t come to the cafeteria on a regular basis. That’s all.”

A groan, and Kaveh’s eyes skate over his form with a touch more attention. The slippers on his feet, the drag of the robes upon the floor, the way the sleeves reach nearly half his hand, up to the cap sitting pretty upon his head. Alhaitham can feel it smushing his bangs and resists the itch to fix them.

“No wonder you look like a twig.”

A wholly unexpected bark of laughter that makes Kaveh’s eyes widen in something akin to joy. Even in the dimmed light, they still shine a beautiful sort of red. The color of ripe Henna berries – the scent of summer and a sticky tongue covered fruit juice.

“And your hair looks like weeds.”

“Shut the fuck up! Seniority!”

Alhaitham lets go of Kaveh’s hand – he misses the warmth almost instantly, an ache so unfamiliar it teeters – to cross them over his own chest.

“Apologies, Senior. I did not mean to add insult to injury.”

“You— my hair is fine. Beautiful, in fact!”

Alhaitham is tempted to agree, but he’ll be damned if the thought gets past an open mouth.

“Anyway,” he continues on, brushing away Alhaitham’s comment with the flimsy bat of a hand. “You’re a scrawny little thing, and lack nutrients. Come on, I said.”

Kaveh strides on, and Alhaitham, always a slave to his desires, trots on after.


He ends up sitting atop the counter at Kaveh’s behest (he’d threatened Alhaitham, wooden spoon in hand and hand cocked on his hip if he didn’t comply) and watching as Kaveh begins pulling out vegetables with ruthless efficiency.

He looks at home in the kitchen. A familiar visage that has something in Alhaitham’s chest – bruised, never quite set properly – twisting a spare few degrees to the right. With it comes a wash of nostalgia that he doesn’t even know what to do with. It sits there, useless, gathering up the space in his brain and pushing lethargy into his bones, on particularly bad days.

“Are we even supposed to be here?”

“Oh, hush. The kitchen staff loves me.” He pulls out a chopping board and makes a grab at the small bouquet of mint leaves. A beautiful bouquet all going to be murdered by the meticulous tss tss tss of a knife. 

Kaveh cuts them all up without mercy, gathers mint, coriander, and ginger into small piles before reaching for the potatoes.

Alhaitham, in a curious display of guilt, hops off once and offers to help peel. Kaveh waves him off with the knife, points back at the counter with a smile that feels more like a threat.

And, so: Alhaitham sits, Kaveh peels potatoes, and the kitchen feels entirely foreign in the fringed space of night.

He and Kaveh speak of many things, too many things. It starts off with their respective fields – oh my god, Haravatat. Of course.

You say that as if it was not instantly obvious that you were Kshahrewar.

And that had sent Kaveh into a tangent about his studies, words rapidfire when they have to do with numbers.

They loop from schooling to the Akademiya’s sins – taboo to speak of, but Kaveh seems to have no qualms with that which the Akademiya considers vile – to the wood of the kitchen counters, the best metals to make knives out of.

It is hilarious, to Alhaitham, when Kaveh repeats the fact that he wields a claymore.

A stick of a boy (despite his teasing, Kaveh also lies on the slimmer side, the cadence of a person that has missed more than a few meals prevalent in his step), really!

“I do,” he insists, throwing a piece of onion skin at Alhaitham’s forehead. It hits the wall with a splat. “I should spar with you one day, get it through that thick head of yours.”

Alhaitham picks the onion peel up, stares at the mark it leaves on the wall, and resolves to leave cleaning duty for Kaveh.

It was Kaveh who threw it, anyway.

Alhaitham: 1, Kaveh: 0

“Is that a challenge?”

“To spar?” There’s a skitter of something in Kaveh’s eyes, the rise to bait that Alhaitham throws out on a hook.

Alhaitham throws the onion peel right back, yet Kaveh catches it in a deft hand. Artist’s fingers.

“I don’t see why not.”

“Brilliant,” he says, and leaves it at that.

Exciting, the thought of crossing blades with someone. Not something he does all that often – preferring to train on his own time and without the irritating distraction of people around him. The swing of a sword has a macabre sort of beauty when he is the only one to hear it.

Kaveh continues to cook. Alhaitham only has a vague idea of what he’s doing, yet watches as clever hands make a green sauce, add vegetables to a pot to create a mixture.

Unbidden, Alhaitham slips soundless off the counter and goes over to where Kaveh is stirring.

It is what looks to be a mixture of potatoes, various herbs, powders. Salt, too, as Kaveh reaches over to sprinkle it. Alhaitham watches as he does so, looks forward into the pot with a frown and adds more. It falls from his fingers like stars – jewels that end up in their mouths, silver catching on their teeth.

The outline of him from the back feels vaguely familiar: he cannot quite place it. It is not mamani’s, not when she stood for hours in the kitchen with a bun sitting pretty at her nape.

(And, he thinks, it is not mama, either. He does not remember enough of her other than her eyes – they were like his. He knows that. He knows that.)

Yet it is something he knows all the same. Everything is full of contradictions.

Kaveh turns to him with a full spoon in hand. There is a lack of tension in his expression, and Alhaitham wishes to capture it, immortalize it so that he may never forget.

“Try this, would you?”

Docile as a puppet, Alhaitham parts his mouth. Metal touches his mouth with an amalgamation of flavors—

And it is then that Alhaitham notices what exactly it is that Kaveh’s making.

He chews, and his mouth tastes like home.

(What really is home, anymore?)

“Who taught you to make pani puri?”

The stretch of Kaveh’s smile twists a bit, and he shifts so that Alhaitham only sees the side of him. He picks up the wooden spoon again, stirs with blatant listlessness.

“My father,” he says, voice bowed with something like grief. Alhaitham knows the feeling, lets it sit in his mouth on honey-soaked days until he can breathe past the swell of his throat. “He was an excellent cook. It is how he managed to get my mother to fall in love with him, in the end— the way to a person’s heart is through their stomach.”

“An archaic phrase.”

“I am not debating this with you when I have a knife in my hand.”

Kaveh grins, and Alhaitham finds himself softening as he watches.

It is a give and take. He can tell Kaveh looks mildly uncomfortable with his truths out in the open, hanging in the air until they become as solidified as a third presence.

Alhaitham lets the metaphorical rope in his hands slide and coil in the ground between them, snaking around their ankles in a dainty knot.

“My parents passed early,” he begins, a minute or two after Kaveh has begun cracking and filling the pooris. Where Kaveh got them from, Alhaitham will never know. Perhaps he carries them around in his bag as a talisman for good luck.

He digs his thumbs into the skin of them in a practiced move, begins scooping the potato filling in and adding the flavored sauce he’d made earlier. The faint crackle of the skin resounds loudly in the kitchen, threatens to shatter this moment made of glass.

He does not pause in his movements when Alhaitham speaks, but there is a noticeable stumble before they pick back up.

“An accident. I was too young to remember. My grandmother raised me – and she often made just this.”

He nods his head to where Kaveh adds green sauce to another one.

A pregnant break where he looks down at his hands, bangs fluttering to shield his eyes in a facsimile of privacy.

“It was one of her favorite meals.”

Kaveh remains silent, cracks the last one. It feels like a declaration of sorts when his thumbs spread it, grab the spoon to add filing, pour the sauce right over it all.

He turns to Alhaitham with it in his hands.

Chest to chest as they are, he can feel the rhythm of his breathing. The beauty of him in the glittering colors of the night, the moon cutting perfect crescents across his face.

He smells of the kitchen: he smells of what Alhaitham, in a spare few months, has come to associate with comfort.

Is home not the presence of someone else? Can home not be wherever, if you can still look at the eyes of the ones you love?

He buts the poori at the soft seam of Alhaitham’s lips. Crust flakes onto his mouth, and he swipes a gentle tongue over it. Kaveh watches intently, wine eyes that flick back up to his with a flush growing pretty on his cheeks.

“Then we eat in her honor,” and his voice is naught but a whisper.

Alhaitham opens his mouth, eats the pani puri, and thinks of times long gone.

Kaveh eats them, knocks into him hip-to-hip, and smiles in a way that Alhaitham knows will ruin him.

“I told you I made them well,” he says, watching as Alhaitham reaches for another.

“I never said you didn’t. You reach those conclusions on your own.” A pause, where Kaveh’s brows furrow and his cheeks bulge much as a squirrel’s would.

“What happened to being a stickler for manners? No talking with food in your mouth, senior.”

Kaveh swallows, opens his mouth again in a laugh. It sounds like sugar, and Alhaitham isn’t quite sure what to do with that fact.

“I really hate you, you know.”

Alhaitham knocks into him with his hip, causing Kaveh to yelp as the poori in his hands does a series of acrobatics. Crust drops onto Kaveh’s hands, and Alhaitham kind of wants to lick it off.

Affection does terrible things to the heart.

“I know. I hate you too.”

Kaveh only rolls his eyes, sinks teeth into the food.

I know. I know.

-

Kaveh becomes Kaveh and Alhaitham.

Alhaitham cannot pinpoint when it devolved into a merging of the two, but when people speak of Kaveh, inevitably, there is an Alhaitham attached to it.

Kaveh finds it all fucking hilarious.

Alhaitham only scowls when gaggles of people skitter into the walls when they walk through, follow him with greedy eyes and mouths that spill salt.

On a memorable occasion, a group of girls had approached their study table. Kaveh had had the unfortunate timing of stepping out for a moment – claiming he needed a break from Alhaitham’s incessant apathy.

(It is not apathy. It is only the fact that in this particular debate, Alhaitham has the upperhand. And with that upperhand, he had efficiently countered all points. Kaveh had rolled his eyes and stood grandly with a I need a break from you, Alhaitham. Cutting, yes. But it is belied by the way he ruffles a hand into Alhaitham’s hair, displaces the hat so it falls into his lap with a plop. )

The group of girls – vultures, really – swoop in and settle at the table.

One of them sits upon Kaveh’s chair, and Alhaitham has the urge to snap. It is Kaveh’s chair. Those are Kaveh’s books sitting pretty, his handwriting drying on the paper. 

“Hi,” she says, and Alhaitham wrinkles his nose at the stench of her perfume. “Alhaitham, right?”

He does not reply, crosses arms over her face. Her mouth, painted in an objectively pretty shade of red, bends into a pout.

“Well. You know, I was just wondering… since you are all that popular, and no one’s really gotten a good read on you yet.” She leans forward, and Alhaitham, in the same beat, leans back. She smiles, as if this is all very amusing. “Oh, aren’t you cute! Anyway, see, I was thinking— there’s this new restaurant that has opened in the city, a quaint little cafe. Are you a coffee drinker? Tea? No matter. Friday, at seve—”

“Excuse me,” comes a voice from behind her, and Alhaitham almost sags in relief when a bob of blonde and red clips elbows gently through the crowd, coming at a stop in front of the girl.

Alhaitham likes to think that he’s an expert at seeing Kaveh angry. It is an expression he gets directed at him more often than not; witty comments and an inferno that lights like a match to tinder when they go toe to toe. Bullheaded, Kaveh is. (And Alhaitham is, too.)

This is a particular sort of anger he does not witness often.

“Can you not see he looks uncomfortable?”

The girl’s eyes, wide and brown like that of a doe, flick to his momentarily and back to Kaveh. In the next moment, she’s up and out of the seat, hands demure over her chest.

“So sorry, so sorry! Was only offering to buy coffee.” Her smile feels like it should be sweet, but all Alhaitham can see in it is the taste of burnt baklava.

“I don’t drink coffee,” says Alhaitham, only to make a point. Kaveh turns to him with a disbelieving glare – he’s made Alhaitham coffee too many times to count. Kaveh can make mean pots of both coffee and chai. Alhaitham feeds off of it.

“Sorry.” and the girl walks off, no doubt already beginning to debrief the entire debacle with the group of girls that follow her like clumsy schools of fish.

“God,” seethes Kaveh, sliding right back down into the seat. His seat. Alhaitham derives pleasure from seeing him sit there – delineated in the background of books and his robe settled upon his shoulders, a comfort in his eyes when Alhaitham dares to look.

“Can people really take no social cues? At all? Ever? ”

“You make it seem like she did something far worse than ask me out to coffee, Kaveh. The only one irrationally angry about this is you.”

“Irratio— Alhaitham! Are you serious?”

“Hm?”

“You’re more far gone than I thought, then. This was my table, anyway. What did she achieve by sitting here? And you— you’re mine.”

A brief second where Alhaitham’s heart goes into overdrive, shutting off the oxygen to his brain. Mine?

Kaveh realizes the misstep at the same time – throws hands up hurriedly. They land upon Alhaitham’s own.

“Mine as in friend. Friend, you know?” A laugh that sounds far too forced. “It’s my duty as your senior to look after you. Right!”

Alhaitham only stares at the slant of Kaveh’s mouth, wrought into a smile that he knows is not true. His hands are warm where Kaveh covers them, unbearably cold when he snatches them away to rest solidly upon his own paper.

“Anyway. I have to work, so shut up and let me focus.”

“I literally haven’t said a word.”

“Sorry, what was that you just said?”

Alhaitham, in a rare show, flips him off. Kaveh laughs loud enough to garner a dirty look from the librarian.


It goes on like this: a push and pull that solidifies their relationship into what it becomes.

Alhaitham is with Kaveh, and Kaveh is with Alhaitham.

That’s really all there is to it.

(Except Alhaitham finds himself staring at the dot near Kaveh’s mouth, the column of his neck when he throws it back in a groan, wondering if the flush on his face when he figures a problem out is as warm as it seems. Alhaitham doesn’t think he has the privilege to find out.

This is fine. He is fine. Everything is great.)


Alhaitham, early in his first year at the Akademiya, had come in with a perspective that is now, in his acquired wisdom of being near finished with his second, was entirely mistaken.

It was the naivete of assuming that he would be able to breeze right past all his classes. And even, if he pulled it off right, not going to one of them.

That had worked until Madam Azmi had sent him a penned letter meet me in my office, and had given him a stern talking-to for upwards of thirty minutes.

(He suspects Madam Azmi’s throat is still sore.)

Point is that Alhaitham has become accustomed to having his head bent over work. It is rare that he has the time to read something for his own leisure, sit down and simply rest his head on the soil so he can think.

Today is one such day.

He’d always been prone to headaches from prolonged exposure to loud noises, and with his headphones acting odd as of late, it all coalesces into this:

Spread-eagle upon his bed, curtains haphazardly closed, pillow flung onto his head and towels stuffed into the cracks under the door.

His head pounds. There is work to do lying unfinished on the cramped desk, and the day dashes by him even if he tries to grab at it with slippery fingers. He must study for exams that are coming up, deadlines that seem to have feet of their own, papers that his professors require with an unforgiving urgency.

Alhaitham is tired. Alhaitham is so, so tired.


He sleeps, intermittently. It is difficult to sleep with any sort of headache, drills that dig uncomfortable into his skull until he cannot think with the racket going on.

He wakes, and he shifts to one side, smothers a whine into sheets that stink of sweat, and repeats the process again and again and again.

Alhaitham wakes once in the awkward spill of midday through the curtains to a hand upon his forehead.

“You idiot,” he can hear, voice pitched down low. The curtains have been drawn tighter, too, conscious of the state he finds himself in.

The hand slips from his wet forehead down to his neck, rests gently at his carotid. Feels the beat of his pulse for a spare few seconds before removing itself entirely.

Alhaitham does not whimper. He does not.

When he swallows, his throat is dry enough for tumbleweeds to be happy.

“Cruel to bully a sick man,” he croaks.

Kaveh only makes a funny little tsk sound and buts a glass of water at his lips. Alhaitham opens his mouth and drinks greedily – reprieve of something he had not even realized he wanted.

“You’re not sick, Alhaitham, you just have a terrible sense of self-care.”

“Hilarious, coming from you.”

“Can you ever be quiet?”

“Afraid that’s a skill I lack.”

Kaveh groans, and when Alhaitham dares to open his eyes to look, there’s something a little too fond. He should have kept them closed.

“Come on, you cannot be lying in sick filth. Up you get.”

And with Alhaitham’s begrudging sigh, Kaveh puts two hands under his arms and pulls him into sitting.

Kaveh links his arm with Alhaitham – as if they were a couple. The things this man does to Alhaitham need to be dissected under a fucking microscope – and has them both stepping in lockstep outside. 

Alhaitham doesn’t really quite know where they’re going.

But it has been months that he’s placed his trust in Kaveh’s hands, and Kaveh’s only ever treated it with utmost care. It still feels strange to have let someone in like this. To see the parts of him Alhaitham shies away from showing anyone, letting Kaveh hold them up to light and gaze upon the core of him without flinching.

If he had to describe Kaveh’s care for him, it would be that his palms are warm. Slants of sun that fall upon an undeserving head, the way the big windows in mamani’s kitchen would fog when she turned the stove on during the winter.

Kaveh walks them both to Razan Gardens.

Kaveh claims that the sun lets him focus – settles onto the ground in patches of moss, tilts his head to smell the grass.

And, well, Alhaitham can’t fault him for it. He does seem more productive laying on the ground, hair branding a halo upon the greenery.

(It is the spirit of Sumeru, he thinks. Wisdom upon the fields of their nature – scholars picking at ripening fruits and cracking them open to reveal the secrets of the world on their fingers.)

Kaveh laughs – gentle, he’s always so gentle when Alhaitham is like this – as he settles them onto a bench.

“Do you have an aversion to the world?”

“No,” he grumbles, flinging a hand over his eyes. It helps. The sun is not even particularly bright on this brisk morning, yet it is still present.

Alhaitham doesn’t have the presence of mind to flinch when Kaveh runs consoling hands through his hair.

“Can you wait here for a little while?”

“Going to leave me and meet your mistress?”

That earns him a swat to the knee and a sigh that sounds like he’s so done with Alhaitham.

It’s their love language.

“Just wait. Okay? I won’t have it if I come back and you’ve vanished to god knows where.”

Alhaitham risks the pain and lowers his arm enough so that he can crack an eye open. There’s something a little too delicate in his expression that sobers Alhaitham rather easily. He doesn’t like that expression upon Kaveh’s face. Detests being the reason for it.

“Alright. Go off and do your salacious business.”

Kaveh’s smile is the last thing he sees, and Alhaitham presses his arm over his eyes again to avoid thinking any imprudent thoughts.

It doesn’t work. With Kaveh, it never has.

“Fuck off,” he hears, and the pitter-patter of sandals leaving.

Alhaitham sticks his tongue out in the air.

It’s really a pity he managed to fall in love with his best friend.


Alhaitham dozes, arm thrown over his eyes in a mimicry of being in bed, with curtains closed, and a pillow over his eyes.

Why did he let Kaveh drag him out, again?

(He’s always been rather weak when it comes down to it. He doesn’t know if Kaveh has noticed, but Alhaitham would heed his beck and call with the curve of one finger. Debating and relentless arguing aside, Alhaitham doesn’t quite know how he managed to form a bond so deep in what nears two years.)

No matter. He will have a nice nap out of it, the gardens carrying the mild scent of Sumeru roses upon the wind.

He does not think of Kaveh choosing this specific location because it is secluded, shaded, and has no strong scents.

He doesn’t think about that at all. Because it doesn’t mean anything at all. The concern of a friend, and that is it. That’s all.

That’s all.


Kaveh startles Alhaitham out of semi-restful sleep for the second time in the day.

He doesn’t quite know what he carries with him, but it smells like savory food. As if a pavlovian response to him, Alhaitham’s mouth waters.

Kaveh taps his arm with the flat of his hand. It runs ridiculously warm, accidentally smears Alhaitham’s skin with something that feels like oil.

A muffled curse, and Kaveh dabs at it with a napkin.

“Are you going to open your eyes?”

“Is there anything to see that makes it worthwhile to do so?” You, Kaveh. But the sight of you makes something in me want to crack.

He can feel the roll of his eyes without needing to lift his arm up at all. They are just that in tune – long hours of poring over books and longer hours still sitting in patches of sun with Kaveh hanging upside down from a tree have to have served some purpose.

“Open your mouth,” says Kaveh in a non-sequitur, and Alhaitham throws in the towel without second thought.

Kaveh deposits something familiar into his tongue, knocks gentle knuckles on his chin to get him to swallow.

When Alhaitham chances a glance, colors pirouette uncomfortably bright until they settle.

Kaveh looks curiously red, fingers still resting delicate at the side of his jaw.

His eyes meet Alhaitham’s, and he removes them hastily.

“Chew, dimwit.”

Alhaitham lowers his arm chews. A curious mix of something fried, relatively spicy fish – tuna? – and various spices in a roll. It tastes like the tavern. Like Lambad’s.

“Fish rolls,” declares Alhaitham, opening his mouth again. Kaveh snorts momentarily before placing the next bite in his mouth.

“Am I force-feeding you, now?”

“I’m ill. Sick. You dragged me out here, take responsibility.” Alhaitham swallows the next bit, continuing on with his tirade. “Consequences, senior.”

Kaveh doesn’t reply, only stares at the fish rolls, runs an appraising finger over the fried dough of them.

He also looks tired. Rings under his eyes that only grow more present with every year they study, responsibilities and crucial decisions inching closer with every breath.

Lean, too, as if he has not been eating. The hollows of his face have caved in in the past few months, ribs a little more noticeable when they spar.

Kaveh had been irritated the last time they sparred, thrown the claymore to the ground to grapple at Alhaitham with fists and nails. Alhaitham had responded in kind, and they had both ended up with dirt in their mouths and collective laundry to do. But Kaveh had seemed pleased – a fierce smile in his expression and the energy that made his bones shake dissipated.

He gives so much of himself to others: cooking for Alhaitham when he himself looks starved.

On a whim, Alhaitham grabs the next fish roll Kaveh had begun to push at his mouth. He uses the resulting part of aggrieved lips to shove it into Kaveh’s, relishing the surprised widening of eyes.

After a second of brief hesitation, Kaveh chews.

There are six rolls. Dutifully, Alhaitham divides the small plate into two unseen spaces: three for Kaveh, three for Alhaitham.

He hates the surprise on Kaveh’s face. Is it really natural to be looking like a beast in a trap whenever someone is moderately nice?

Kaveh’s still staring at the rolls as if they hold the secrets to the universe.

In a reversal of roles, Alhaitham picks one up and pushes it against Kaveh’s lips.

“Eat. Do not be hypocritical on this matter, Kaveh.”

Numb, Kaveh only opens his mouth and eats. His tongue nearly brushes Alhaitham’s fingers, and he can feel a traitorous warmth crawling up the nape of his neck and up to where his ears lie covered.

They share a meal this way.

Sitting in the garden, taking turns feeding each other with the gentle press of a hand. Once, Kaveh’s tongue does lick at Alhaitham’s finger. Kaveh doesn’t say anything, and Alhaitham does not speak at all.

(The feeling of it will haunt his nights for years, he thinks.)

It is a silent affair, bowed by the weight of expectations and work sitting unfinished upon tables they have not touched.

Yet it is still pleasant – for Alhaitham would be hard pressed to analyze any moment with Kaveh and call it un pleasant.

The midday sun falls dappled upon their laps, spilling sunshine onto their food and their hair.

Alhaitham brushes a piece of leek away from Kaveh’s shoulder, and keeps the smile he earns himself under dutiful lock and key.

They eat, and they speak, and they dream of futures yet to come under the shade of the adhigama with leaves that brush against their skin.

Kaveh offers him two pain relievers, and watches as Alhaitham downs them with a quick swallow of water.

There is an expression on his face Alhaitham does not know how to place – concern, in the tilt of his head? Something else, in the way his eyes move over the already memorized planes of Alhaitham’s face?

He does not know.

Yet Kaveh smiles at him, eyes shining and his earrings a gorgeous thing that refract the light around them.

In this moment, fish in his stomach and a curious contentment in the cant of his mouth, Alhaitham feels at peace. 

The peace is short-lived. 

Near the end of the year, as Alhaitham is nearly finished packing his bags to pay mamani a visit, Kaveh bursts in through his dorm door. 

He’s a mess of hair and short of breath, resting hands on his knees to pant. When he catches Alhaitham’s eyes, he grins. 

“I had an idea—a group project! We are the perfect candidates for it, and we will make the world so much better. Listen, it has to do wit—”

That, there, is the beginning of the end.

–

Kaveh and Alhaitham turns quickly into ah, Kaveh and Alhaitham, and a sigh over tea.

The connotation of two geniuses sours far quicker than Alhaitham thought it had the ability to.

In some misguided sense, he feels bad for Kaveh. Kaveh cares about his public appearance more than Alhaitham could ever hope to, and the slandering to his name cannot be comfortable.

(Yet the slandering skews more towards painting Alhaitham in a negative light – and he doesn’t really give a fuck. They can think what they want. Alhaitham knows what he came here to do, and he is going to do it.)

Group projects typically are not Alhaitham’s forte. He works better alone, when he can hear himself think and breathe to the cadence of a pen hitting paper.

Group projects are loud things: the flying hands in discussion, thunks of head upon wood when the members cannot seem to go on, or the heavy breathing in rooms when they are all sat together.

Alhaitham would much, much rather work alone. It is in his nature.

Kaveh brings out the parts of his nature that Alhaitham does not quite know what to do with. He only accepts the proposition at Kaveh’s behest – a smile and pleading eyes that Alhaitham is too weak to ignore.

And, even as they begin, with their ragtag group of scholars that seem overjoyed to be working with The Kaveh and Alhaitham, Alhaitham can tell that this is going to be in vain.

The night after their first meeting, they’re curled up on Kaveh’s bed.

Better said; Kaveh is curled up in Kaveh’s bed, and Alhaitham lays at the foot of it, arms starfished around him.

Kaveh’s room has become home more than anything else has in these few years. Alhaitham swears he has spent more consecutive hours here than in his own room, piled high with books half-finished and plants that wilt in their pots.

“It is exciting, right? The thought of embarking on a quest for knowledge with other scholars?”

Alhaitham snorts, closing his eyes. Exhaustion is a heavy-laden thing that pulls at him, drags him deeper into the press of Kaveh’s mattress.

There is really something to be said about the comfort of a bed that is not your own.

“You think of things too romantically. We are writing a paper together, nothing more, nothing less.”

A resulting groan, and a shift. Alhaitham breathes out a surprised breath when Kaveh makes the executive decision of resting his head on Alhaitham’s stomach.

Blind, Alhaitham angles a hand down to pet at his hair. Kaveh purrs like a cat when he begins pulling hair clips out.

Closeness is easy like this. He does not have to think, only press fingers into Kaveh’s hair – soft, despite the brittleness of years of dye – keep his eyes closed, and breathe with the weight of Kaveh’s head.

When Kaveh speaks again, he can feel the movements of his mouth catch on the seam of Alhaitham’s robes. They scatter like starlight, weave themselves into the tapestry of sewed edges.

“I think it will be prolific,” he claims, all assuredness and confidence that Alhaitham associates with him and academics. “A good learning experience.”

“Hmm.”

“Don’t hmm me, Alhaitham. You ought to learn to work in groups. It will save you a lot of grief in the future.”

He probably does not mean for it to be, but it sounds prophetic. Warning chimes that snake themselves into the intonation of his words.

“Hmm.”

“Ugh.”

Alhaitham laughs, and feels the indent of Kaveh’s teeth on his ribs.

It all begins to go down spectacularly quickly.

Alhaitham has always had problems with Kaveh’s relentless self-sacrifice, and Kaveh has oft pointed fingers at him for what he claims is egoism.

Their philosophies do not quite align, and that is okay. That is how knowledge is born – through differing perspectives that snag onto each other like hooks going in opposite directions. There will be a moot point.

This moot point is where Alhaitham and Kaveh have resided. Kaveh does speak about his ideals, and Alhaitham offers his perspective. It can go differently, depending on the day: there have been times that Kaveh rolls his eyes, slams a tome closed, and says I’m hungry. Be quiet for once and come with me to Lambad’s. And, well. That is that.

Other times it leads to impassioned discussion; as if that is not already something they have too much of. Candlelit nights hidden between bookshelves, Alhaitham’s back aching where it rests upon books.

The feeling of Kaveh’s rapt attention in the space between them is what kept him there though, pain be damned.

This moot point is one that the group project begins to press upon, yank to each side to see how long before it snaps.

Kaveh meets the other members, eyes Alhaitham a little bit wearily, and they work.

They is strong of a word. Kaveh works.

Alhaitham hates this: does not understand why Kaveh shoulders everyone’s work when they are more than fucking capable of doing it themselves. He’s human, inevitably, he has limits. He pushes past those limits and they hang in a strange, elasticized sort of tension.

He does not agree. Why should he, when the work was divided evenly between them all?

“Academia is not charity work,” he says one night, after watching Kaveh toil relentlessly over parts of the project that are not even his. Kaveh’s field of study is architecture— why is he taking the work for the people that deal with history?

“It will not magically make them better if you do their work for them, Kaveh. There is a difference in ability.”

Alhaitham does not think it sounds particularly cruel. He does not think it sounds cruel when it comes out of his mouth.

He is only stating the facts; attempting to nip Kaveh’s nose-first dive into ruin at the bud before it happens. To protect him.

“We are all deserving of the same education, Alhaitham,” says Kaveh, voice on a leash that he has not heard in years. Tightly held for fear of impending destruction.

“I never said—”

“I know how you think, anyway,” is what Kaveh says next, and the papers in his hand crinkle when his grip tightens upon them. “And I know you did say it.”

And with that, he collects his belongings and walks past Alhaitham with his head held too high. Bruises under his eyes and exhaustion written in the cramp of his hand, but he walks with his pride on the edge of his sleeve, wears it a bloody crown upon his head.

Kaveh begins to slip away from him, and Alhaitham does not know what to do.


That initial spark of animosity begins to grow, balloon into something that skids to crack on the ground faster than anyone could have anticipated.

It goes something like this:

Kaveh, being Kaveh, had taken over many of the responsibilities for the people in the group. In the communal house that they own, Kaveh is the one toiling day and night at the window to get everyone else’s work done.

Alhaitham, for one, does not agree with this. He finds it foolish that Kaveh takes on everyone else’s work in a desperate bid to keep the project standing on shoulders of steel – yet the other scholars begin to drop like flies.

Sorry, Master Kaveh. I simply cannot keep up.

Terribly inconvenient, Master Kaveh, but my mother is ill and I must go take care of her.

Frankly, I cannot deal with you and Alhaitham. How is one supposed to sleep with you two arguing long into the night?

It continues as such until it is only Kaveh and Alhaitham in the project. A powder keg that flirts on the daily with total annihilation.

Alhaitham is tired of this. He wants his friend back – he wants the Kaveh that would sit and make pani puri for him, he wants the Kaveh that would sit side-by-side with him in comfortable silence, shoulder brushing the crown of Alhaitham’s head.

He doesn’t like this; but he is also not going to help aid Kaveh on his path of self destruction.

Will not become the whip with which he self-flagellates in misconceived perception of deserving the pain he inflicts upon himself.

It’s a situation Alhaitham does not quite know how to solve. And that frustrates him – a puzzle with no solution, two gears trapped in a repeating cycle until they break.

In the end, it all comes to a head when Kaveh is cooking.

Alhaitham sits upon the low table with papers spread out, fingers digging into the space between his eyes. Kaveh paces in the kitchen throwing words into the air with vitriol.

They land upon Alhaitham’s skin like hot oil, and he must do his best not to flinch.

It smells of chicken and spices in the kitchen, a scent that smells like home – like Kaveh – turned into something burnt that itches.

“It was you that led them off the project,” Kaveh is saying, and Alhaitham can see the silhouette of him tense in his anger. When he mixes whatever he’s making inside the pot, rice flies out and lands in a dreadful patter around his feet.

A muffled curse.

“You who pushed them off with your relentless fucking egoism—”

“It isn’t egoism, Kaveh,” and oh, is that really his voice? Torn to shreds as such, a whine when it comes out of his mouth.

Kaveh still does not turn around, stooped upon the ground to clean with his back turned to Alhaitham. Even if he does not grace Alhaitham with his gaze, Alhaitham can still hazard a guess.

Eyebrows sitting low upon his face, mouth twisted and bared in a snarl, hands shaking where they hold the wood of the spoon.

“It isn’t egoism? Surely, surely, when you’re the one who’s been harassing me day and night when all I want is for everyone to work in harmony, and this project to come to fruition! Do you even care about the project at all, Alhaitham, if all you want is to rail into me until there’s nothing left?”

“Cruel of you to say that I do not care about the project, Kaveh, when I have been working as tirelessly as you to get everything finished.”

A rattle as Kaveh sets the top on the pot, holding onto the wood of the counter so hard Alhaitham can hear it creak. He would not be surprised if the wood itself bore indents of his hands, carved into it with anger that consumes.

“That’s really fucking funny, because the only one who has been doing anything at all here is me ! If you cared about helping people, if you cared about helping me, we wouldn’t be in this discussion at al—”

Alhaitham lets the pencil fall down before he snaps it between two fingers.

The anger that wicks up his throat is something he does not like, but – if Kaveh speaks such statements Alhaitham cannot be held accountable for what spews out of his mouth.

“Sadistic of you to say that, Kaveh, implying that I do not care about you at all.” His voice dips into a hiss, and the tension in Kaveh’s shoulders locks further. He does not know if the smell of food really is burnt or not, but it spins in the room, sending Alhaitham’s senses skidding.

“Because all I am trying to do is get you to respect yourself, and not throw the work solely upon your shoulders. The people left because they were not smart enough. Because they could not reasonably keep up.”

“Alhaith—” There is a warning knell in Kaveh’s tone that Alhaitham bypasses entirely. He has been meaning to say this, and he will say it well.

“You and your relentless fucking altruism— It is not even altruism when it comes from a misplaced sense of guilt! Do you think I do not see it, Kaveh? Do you not think I see how you seek the pain out purposefully so you can lament over it when you have it, claim that yes, this is what I deserve? Why does this always happen to me? ”

Kaveh finally turns, and Alhaitham falters a moment as he watches the first tear slip past his face and pool into the hollow of his throat.

Kohl, sloppily drawn, begins to smudge. An imperfection that stays as such – constellations of pity written into skin that carves them out, begs for them as one begs for a home.

He does not stop. He does not stop.

(In hindsight, he probably should have shut his mouth. But anger is a thing that has been building and building and building, and a pot cannot sustain all the pressure without exploding.)

“You try so hard to be kind to everyone else to soothe the bite of guilt that gnaws at you relentlessly,” snaps Alhaitham, “and I’m tired of trying to stop a train that’s already on a collision course.”

In the silence that follows, there is such heavy breathing. Is that him? It cannot be.

Yet his jaw is still hinged, and tongue resting upon the seam of his teeth.

Kaveh only stares at him for a moment.

Another tear runs down his face – another, another, another until Kaveh is crying, staring at him with eyes made of flint.

He does not turn when he speaks. Only stares at Alhaitham with his nails digging into his palms and an unfamiliar stutter to his breath, and says:

“You have no fucking right to say that to me, Alhaitham. None. None. ” His voice grows with intensity as every syllable is pressed with something like hysteria, and Alhaitham—

Alhaitham—

“None of your fucking business! How funny, one that cannot seem to feel anything at all—” Alhaitham feels a spasm in his chest, “lecture me on the validity of my feelings. Fuck off, Alhaitham! I don’t need you!”

And then: the final, killing blow as Kaveh stares down at him with his mouth splattered with the blood of Alhaitham’s heart. 

“I regret ever becoming friends with you,” he says, voice near a snarl as it tangles into the complicated roots of them, throws everything into chaos and breaks it all off with a single stroke.

Everything happens in a blur.

Alhaitham is sitting upon the floor, resting elbows on the low table.

In the next moment there is a rip! that makes him close his eyes against the grating flinch of the noise, the slam of a plate on the counter, and the hitching of Kaveh’s breath as he moves to the door.

Alhaitham has not opened his eyes— he can hear Kaveh flinging the door open and putting his shoes on.

What has he done? What have they done?

“I regret it all,” says Kaveh, wet. If Alhaitham were to look, he could touch his cheeks and feel the matching salt upon Kaveh’s. “I regret you.”

With that, Kaveh is gone.

Gone, gone, gone.


Alhaitham does not know for how long he sits on that floor, head bowed over their thesis that Kaveh had ripped.

He stares at it, eyes uncomprehending.

How did it come to this? When did it come to this? How did he let it come to this?

His knees creak when he stands. He feels empty. There is a presence missing from beside him, an ache that leaves him hollow with how it guts him.

Alhaitham has not felt such pain in a very, very long time.

When he makes his way to the kitchen – angling for a glass of water, he stops short at the food Kaveh had made. There are still smears of masala where Kaveh was unable to finish cleaning, onion residue that pricks at Alhaitham’s eyes and brings them to water.

There is still a plate half-served. He does not know if it is for Kaveh or not, but Alhaitham takes it ginger in his hands.

It’s still warm.

It’s still warm.

Alhaitham dips his hand in and begins to eat – stands in the silence of the kitchen alone, alone, alone. Stands in the grave of their project, Kaveh’s belongings still strewn upon the couch and the smell of him on Alhaitham’s tongue.

He stands, eats the biryani Kaveh made with bruised palms, and cries. 

–

Time passes a little funny, after that. 

Alhaitham hears of Kaveh through others – just as they began years ago in the Akademiya. 

A rise to stardom so great that it shocks the world around them: a palace hanging from a cliff, a restored lighthouse that single-handedly helps Sumeru’s tourism economy, buildings that optimize the space around them in a way that speaks of Kaveh. 

Alhaitham has learned to read the world around him as signs of people. 

He sees him in the stairways, in the unheard complaints about the structure of the roof in the office, in the way Alhaitham unthinkingly adjusts the potted Pasidarah on the windowsill. 

In the aftermath of their parting, Alhaitham had not known what to do. 

At a loss from companionship he’d held fierce onto for a year – gone, without a moment to grieve. 

Alhaitham had thrown himself into his work. 

He finished his studies, stepped out of the grave of their project, attended his graduation with ghosts sitting in the front aisle when he received his flimsy little paper. 

Hello, mamani, he thought. I hope you are proud. Mama, baba. I hope I made you proud. Hello, Kaveh. I apologize for being a regret in your eyes. 

He attends his graduation, scores a job at the Akademiya that involves minimal contact with people, and settles himself down for a life with a cushy salary. 

Like this, years pass. 

Alhaitham hears of Kaveh, goes to work, lays his pillow on the head at night, and resolutely does not think about him.

At all. Ever.


As many things have been with them, it is coincidence that they meet again after years of static silence.

(Not quite silence, when he and Kaveh have gone at each other’s metaphorical throats in academic journals, getting claims of misdemeanor from various of them. It’s a lifestyle, at this point.)

But Alhaitham has not seen him in a long time, heard of him in people’s words and the lilt of their sighs when they pity themselves for not being as great as him.

Alhaitham finds him in the tavern.

Not a particularly strange sight, not when they frequented it as students, unofficially claiming one of the back tables as theirs. In a fit of irresponsible indulgence, Kaveh had smiled at him, dopey, and said look. I carved our names on the wood. Now we’re stuck here, together! Forever!
(He’d passed right out after more nonsense, leaving it to Alhaitham to walk in staggered side-step back to the dorms. He’d never minded. He never has.)

On nights where he’s feeling particularly pitiful, the sound of a door slamming that ricochets in his mind, he’ll go to that table.

Order a soup even though he hates soup – but Kaveh loves soup, so – sit down, not touch the soup, and rest his fingers above a sloppy A K carved into the wood by an inebriated hand.

Memories of an easier time. Alhaitham nurses them, and they sit, occupying the hollow in his chest with no real purpose.

He finds Kaveh at this table.

It almost takes him aback: the view of him superimposed over the student Alhaitham once knew, back hunched in the same way and the same clips in his hair.

He does not quite mean to go over there. He has an order of tea to pick up, that particular brand of Lambad’s tea leaves to enjoy, and a nice book to curl up on the couch with.

Yet Kaveh lifts his head as Alhaitham looks, and with the eyes that have always made Alhaitham a weak, weak man, he gasps.

The drink in his hand goes slack, half-empty glass sloshing dangerously over the lip of the table.

Alhaitham, mouths Kaveh, too low for Alhaitham to hear.

“Kaveh,” he says, coming to stand right in front of him. The urge to tuck bangs sticky with sweat behind his ear is overwhelming. Such closeness now turned into something dangerous, something Alhaitham does not know if he will ever have the permission to mend.

“Wha— what? You? What are you doing here?”

“A tavern is a public establishment, Kaveh. I can come here if I so desire.”

A pretty twist to his face that Alhaitham knows intimately.

“I know. I’m not stupid.” I never said you were. You’re just drunk. “But— you? At a tavern?”

Alhaitham helps himself to one of the spare peanuts in the bowl, sliding smoothly into the seat in front of Kaveh.

Kaveh only scowls, watches Alhaitham with a weary sort of fear in his eyes.

It’s been so long – it’s been too long.

“Those were my peanuts.”

“It’s a public establishment. And besides, these peanuts are free for all guests.”

Point proven, Alhaitham sticks another one in his mouth. Kaveh tuts, turning back to his glass and taking a sip out of it. He winces when he swallows.

Whiskey, by the look of it. And the scent of it, too, painful the way it snakes up into his nose.

Kaveh stays silent. Picks at his cuticles, clinks his teeth against glass for occasional sips. The liquid is a rich amber in the cup.

Alhaitham simply watches.

Waits.

He and Kaveh may be grown, now – magnum opus under Kaveh’s belt that seems laden with stones upon his spine, but he still knows him. Knows to wait until Kaveh will speak. Look up at him from his lashes, fingers curled around the glass and hesitancy tripping off his tongue.

He looks tired. Sounds tired too, when Alhaitham has had enough of a chance to pick through the folds of his language again. Past the slight slur that comes with intoxication, Kaveh sounds tired.

He’s impeccably put together: of that there is no question. Always a pride in his appearance, earrings radiant where they hang heavy, not a hair out of place and a blush at his cheeks.

To the untrained eye, he looks beautiful.

And to the trained eye, well – he still looks beautiful, but he looks worn.

It does not take all that long for Kaveh to begin to speak.

He glances up at Alhaitham, away and back once, and Alhaitham urges him on with a lazy flick of the wrist. Pops another peanut in his mouth.

Kaveh tells a tale of a man scorned: a palace built upon a cliff, of towering spires and domed roofs, of blackened forest that crawls with greedy hands until it is all torn to rubble. A story of the terror of an empty home, of money that exchanges hands, of the cunning smile on a merchant’s face.

He talks and he rambles and he drinks his whiskey dry until he’s smiling, the white glint of teeth something sad when he turns it upon Alhaitham.

“You were right, years ago,” he says, half-slumped over the table. His fingers twitch where they lie next to Alhaitham’s – a deliberate, careful distance. “You were right. And how much I hate to admit that.”

Alhaitham exhales, and watches as Kaveh’s eyes fall shut as if awaiting execution.

“How has realizing your ideals gone for you?”

A snort, and Kaveh brings his tongue out to wet at his lips. In the light of the tavern they gleam, a pretty thing Alhaitham has found himself looking at for years.

“I yearned for a dream so beautiful that it cracked before my eyes,” he says, voice low as if a confession at a pyre. “I did not care what the price was, and it ended up being me.”

The words hang in the muted silence of the tavern, and Alhaitham only watches. Jaw hinged open with words that do not dare make their appearance, a facsimile of youth that falls down like a pipedream.

He only reaches for Kaveh’s hand, unhooks it from the fist it’s curled itself into.

Holds it flat against the table, fingers pressing delicate at the softest part of his palm.

Alhaitham drops a key into his hand.

Kaveh’s eyes shoot open, hand closing reflexively, running his fingers into the divots where the key’s teeth are.

“Wh—”

“Stay with me,” come back to me, “until you have your feet back under yourself.” Don’t leave.

Kaveh’s mouth gapes like a fish out of water for a brief, hilarious moment.

“I don’t need your pity,” he says, voice a hiss.

“You’ll pay rent,” a high-pitched scoff that makes Alhaitham almost want to smile at the familiarity of, “so don’t consider this pity. Take it or leave it, Kaveh. The door is always open to you.”

A moment’s hesitation where Alhaitham does not breathe. This is why he has always despised matters of the heart, because showing the weak parts of your underbelly to someone is inherently a terrifying experience.

He hangs on Kaveh’s words, hand drumming restless upon his own knee.

“Okay,” Kaveh says, slow. A flicker of something at the corner of his mouth. “Okay.”

“Okay,” says Alhaitham simply, and stands from the chair. Extends a hand out to Kaveh, watches as he blinks blearily, as if he is unsure if what he is seeing is a figment of his own imagination or not.

Yet he smiles, a tentative thing, and grabs at Alhaitham’s hand.


Alhaitham manages to get them both home, stoops to take Kaveh’s shoes off before he slams head-first into the wall, and settles him on the divan.

“Stay,” he says simply, watching as Kaveh nods without thinking. Complacency is unexpected, but Alhaitham is not going to complain.

The better if he does not have to pick a great big lump of a man from the floor, groaning in delirious intoxication.

Alhaitham steps into the kitchen, washes his hands, and grabs a pan from the drawer.

Chai was something Kaveh had often made for him in the Akademiya, adding a spot of cinnamon for flourish. Had made it often for Alhaitham when he was ill, pulled him up with a hand on his arm when he was working too hard. You need rest!

It only feels right, now, to put half a cup of water in the saucepan, add a cup and a half of milk.

Tea leaves, sugar, and firm pats of cinnamon.

It smells of his childhood, and Alhaitham lets himself close his eyes, for a moment. He has the unfortunate love of his life sitting in the living room, drunk out of his mind and with tears still drying upon his cheeks.

None of this feels quite real. He has yearned for it for so long – to have Kaveh back in this house. And now he is, and Alhaitham does not know what to do.

Treats him like glass, like one of those pretty porcelain dolls from Mondstadt.

The tea steeps on the stove, and Alhaitham departs to break his heart anew.

Alhaitham wants to immortalize the shock on Kaveh’s when Alhaitham presses the warm mug into his hands.

He’s been supplied with a blanket and pillow – the divan is not nearly large enough for someone as gangly as him, but Kaveh will have to make do for the night – and will prepare the room for him tomorrow.

The room. For him. Because Alhaitham went and gave him a key after years of not seeing each other, only contact being spitting words at each other in academic journals that hated them both.

God.

“You’ll sleep here for tonight, but the room you owned is still yours,” says Alhaitham, cocking a hip where it leans against the hallway entrance. Kaveh’s sitting with hair sticking up like a lion’s mane, and Alhaitham is hopelessly charmed. “I have crates of books there that will be moved tomorrow. Hope the divan doesn’t screw up your back.”

Kaveh scoffs, still not meeting his eyes. The hesitancy has returned after the tavern, exhausted of words and eyes drooping. When he lifts the chai to his mouth for a sip, his face almost dunks right into it.

He doesn’t change, does he?

“Don’t drown,” murmurs Alhaitham in lieu of good night, I hope you see me in your dreams, and steps into his room.

He will sleep tonight, and ignore the fact that Kaveh is sleeping in their living room with his head resting on one of Alhaitham’s extra pillows.

This is fine. He is fine.


Alhaitham wakes to go to work before Kaveh is up.

A leg dangles from the couch, socked foot sticking out to brush against the floor. He looks deep in sleep – and for that, Alhaitham is grateful. He does not know how he would react if Kaveh awoke before Alhaitham was ready to face it all without coffee. 

He makes himself coffee with minimal noise, sets a glass of water on the low table with a note, steps into his shoes, sighs, and leaves for work.

Kaveh,

I’m off to work. Should be back at five. Help yourself to whatever’s near the mistflowers – I can’t guarantee how much there will be because I have neglected to shop.

Alhaitham settles back into the Akademiya, skyscrapers of books that form his company throughout the day.

They’re better than talking to scholars that stick their noses where they shouldn’t, open their too-big mouths for the lives they lead.

A part of him feels clicked back into place, and it is an odd feeling after living with a hole of grief for so long.


Slow, a week passes.

Alhaitham has minimal contact with Kaveh despite cohabitating in the same house – yet it does feel lighter, in a way.

When he comes back, it is often to see the home brighter than he left it.

The faint scent of lemon cleaner rubbed on windows that are clearer than he’s ever seen them. His tall spires of books brushed free of dust, Kaveh’s obvious footprints on shaken out carpets.

The house had felt dreary in his absence; yet it is only now that Alhaitham realizes it.

Dancing around each other in some tug of war game of avoidance is not ideal, but Alhaitham will give Kaveh the space he needs to settle.

Alhaitham goes to work – there is something beginning to balloon in Azar’s strange orders –, comes back home, and sleeps knowing there is someone in the house with him.

He does not expect to see Kaveh still cooking on a day he arrives particularly late.

Something is beginning to happen with the way Azar’s structured his center of power, but Alhaitham is often too done at the end of the day to have any energy to expend on investigation at all.

He unlocks the door with no small amount of exhaustion, slips his boots off, and crumples gracelessly onto the divan.

Unsightly, for the Akademiya’s scribe to be curled up on a divan like a puppet with its strings cut. Yet this is his house, and there’s no coworkers here to nitpick his lack of communication. He gets to be exhausted in his own house. He gets to smother a whine into a pillow in his house.

The faint racket in the kitchen grinds to a halt.

Alhaitham has his face stuck into a pillow, but the sound of Kaveh’s feet is unmistakable. He walks the same way he did when they were younger, envious dancer’s grace wrought into sawdust and iron.

A beat, and the sensation of being watched prickles uncomfortably upon the nape of Alhaitham’s neck.

“Alhaitham?”

A non-commital grunt. Kaveh takes it in stride – he always had, in the Akademiya, too perceptive of Alhaitham to do much else – and looses a sigh. One of his hands finds its way to the crown of his head, runs like water to his shoulders. Alhaitham winces as Kaveh digs into one of the knots built there, hitting with the precise precision of a screwdriver.

Alhaitham must make some faint sound of discomfort, because the fingers pause, then run up and down his shirt once before retreating.

What does it say about his state that Alhaitham must bite back a plea for the touch of Kaveh’s skin again?

“Wait here,” he says, voice lower. He’s always been too keen for his own good.

The feeling of being watched leaves with the dulcet patter of socked feet on wood.

Alhaitham dozes for a little bit – coasts the bleary line of awake but not quite lucid. There is the sound of things going on in the kitchen again, the smell of fried dough that hedges a protestant whine from Alhaitham’s stomach.

Shut up, he thinks, drowsy. I ate a magnificent lunch of absolutely nothing. The cafeteria food is ass.

Breathes in the smell of the pillows, blinks slow, listens to Kaveh hum a soft little tune as oil rasps against the bottom of the pan.

He must pass out for a moment, for Kaveh wakes him up with a gentle finger to the shoulder.

Alhaitham smacks his lips, raising his head from the pillow uncomfortably. He does not know how long he slept, but the crick in his neck does him no favors.

“Sit up, sit up,” murmurs Kaveh, pulling him up until he’s sitting, head lolling before he sighs and resigns himself to waking up completely. Scrubs a heavy hand over his eyes, meets Kaveh’s again.

There’s something too unbearably fond in the red before they flit away, nudging the plate on the low table toward him.

“Tulumba,” croaks Alhaitham, a question and a statement.

Kaveh hums, watches as Alhaitham picks one up and bites into the fried skin of it. Alhaitham has missed Kaveh’s cooking.

Alhaitham is not a particularly bad cook, but there is a nuance to the way Kaveh cooks that Alhaitham cannot quite replicate. He has heard of Amurta experiments claiming that the mind perceives something as a gift from others to be inherently better than what one makes for themselves – and he does not know if that postulate holds true or not.

Yet there is something hidden in the sweet elasticity of it, the swipe when Alhaitham brings his tongue to the corner of his mouth to catch the syrup.

“Tulumba,” says Kaveh on a nod. There’s a half-crescent teasing on his mouth, watching intently as Alhaitham chews.

He looks a little like a puppy, leaning a little forward with hands poised upon his knees. The evening sun refracts in his hair, bathing him in gold gold gold.

“It’s passable,” he says, mouth still full. It is excellent. It tastes of your youth – of our youth, of papers broken and evenings when the sun hit the cobblestone.

Kaveh relaxes – shoulders dropping and eyes rolling in something ever familiar. The red of his eyes looks honey-like, and Alhaitham shoves another tulumba in his mouth to avoid the growing pains in his chest.

“Did no one teach you any manners? Don’t talk with your mouth full.”

For emphasis, Alhaitham chews once and speaks while chewing.

“My house, my manners.”

“Ugh,” groans Kaveh, and rubs a finger over the bridge of his nose.

Silence blankets the space between them, broken intermittently by Alhaitham chewing. It is not a particularly uncomfortable silence, not the way others have been.

It does not prickle when it settles between them, not a third presence that bites at their cuticles.

Softer, now. Gentler.

An olive branch that extends from hands at a distance, pressed upon cushions of iron.

Alhaitham has missed this. Companionship, even if it is not what he used to know. But Kaveh is sitting next to him, contemplating the view out the window with a tilted head, and Alhaitham feels the dangerous little thing in him swell.

They might still be a jumbled mess of tangled vines and slammed doors – yet there is a tentative peace, a halting truce.

Kaveh turns to him, blinks in evident surprise when Alhaitham is already looking, and looks down at his lap. It is hopelessly endearing. More than it has any right to be.

“I’ll let you be, then,” he says, making to stand.

Alhaitham cannot have that.

“Wait,” he blurts, surprising even himself.

Kaveh stops where he’d been fixing his bangs, fingers tangled into his hair. He doesn’t breathe, stares at Alhaitham with his eyebrows flying into his hairline.

“You made them, it is only fair you get to eat some of it.”

It is Alhaitham’s turn to push the plate in Kaveh’s direction with a finger, the skrssh of porcelain on wood.

“Wha—”

“Eat with me, Kaveh,” says Alhaitham, blunt. A bite of hesitance, the swooping fear of falling into a never-ending hole.

Yet Kaveh only huffs – a sight that Alhaitham feels unworthy to have directed at him, and sits back down onto the couch.

He takes a tulumba, puts it in his mouth, and licks the syrup off his own fingers.

Good god, Alhaitham will not be able to survive this.

They talk, bit by bit. Steer clear of any minefields that dot their checkered past for fear of disturbing the dubious peace they find themselves in.

In a way, they are still walking on eggshells. Yet Kaveh laughs once, bright and clear with his lips sticky with syrup, and Alhaitham feels himself topple headfirst back into him.

It really, really is a pity he managed to fall for his— best friend?

Hm.

Such an easy word before, convoluted and twisted until it has lost its shape, handed back to him molded by hands of steel.

Alhaitham is in love with the man sitting next to him reaching for the second to last tulumba on the plate. 

Somehow, the prospect does not scare him as much as it reasonably should.

A resigned sort of joy: Kaveh will find someone that loves him in his entirety, is able to cup the whole of him in his hands and bring it to their chests.

There’s a bite of jealousy that Alhaitham resolutely ignores – Kaveh is not his. Never has been his.

Alhaitham will be his crutch for the moment, hold him close for as long as Kaveh can withstand.

Birds cannot stay too long in their nests before they die, anyway.

–

The ice begins to thaw. Three months pass, countless sunrises in which Alhaitham meets Kaveh going to sleep, countless sunsets in which Alhaitham prepares for bed as Kaveh settles down to work.

They fall back into their old ways.

Kaveh comes back into his element: complains terribly about Alhaitham charging too high rent – ha! –, his lack of proper cleaning, and his clients, when work catches steam again.

It is not to say that they do not step on each other’s feet. Because they do .

Alhaitham knows that he’s placed Kaveh in a delicate position. This has them throwing sparks, and inciting arguments over the most trivial of things. (The most recent is Alhaitham’s penchant for setting the curtain entirely behind the divan. Kaveh urges him to fold the lip of it onto the couch for decor. Who is he even trying to impress, anyway?)

Yet they seem to deflate before they reach critical points. Sometimes Kaveh will open his mouth, furrow his brows, and then turn his back to Alhaitham. They won’t speak, but Kaveh will bring back a plate of sliced peaches hours later in a non-vocalized apology.

Sometimes it is Alhaitham’s folly – worn thin by his scribe’s duties until he snaps without meaning to; throws words out that should rightfully be dug into dirt. 

The house feels like a home now. Alhaitham finds himself itching to go back when work days get longer.

Another thing, too: work has been unbearable. Alhaitham is almost certain there is something going on in the Akademiya under Azar’s thumb, because the restructuring and the money transfers going nowhere are irrational.

Work piles onto his desk more than Alhaitham has ever had to handle, and he must grit his teeth to not snap when the workers come with more pamphlets.

Irritating, all of this. He hates it.

Even more unfortunate, it has begun to affect the way he comes home.

Kaveh has taken to working in the living room – and Alhaitham must deal with a consistent swell of nostalgia when he sees Kaveh with his head curved over a paper, charcoal stains on his cheeks and feather in his hair.

Alhaitham will walk in, done with the world and done with himself, and despises the way it makes him want to bite something.

Kaveh looks at him too much. Narrows his eyes just a smidgen more every time Alhaitham trudges through the door with a sigh on his lips and a headache between his eyes.

He’s always been too perceptive. Alhaitham knows this.

Yet they are in a strange limbo where he cannot simply ask Alhaitham if he is alright – he only cleans up after him a little more, has more leniency when Alhaitham is pitiful as a child, leaves cups of tea at his door when Alhaitham cannot manage to make food.

Work was supposed to be little else than a cushy salary and a means to an end for a peaceful life!

When did it come to this?

(In some way, Alhaitham knows, this deliberate distraction, this exhausting deflection is part of whatever Azar’s going to do. A simple magician’s trick – divert the audience’s attention to the smaller things, and they will miss what lies right before their eyes.

But what is he missing?)


Months pass in this way, and Alhaitham gets progressively more exhausted. 

Yet Kaveh seems happier. And in spite of the tumultuous world around them, Alhaitham finds a spot of joy in that.

He looks better. The bruises under his eyes have faded into something manageable, a little added plumpness to the sticks and bones that he was – and even if Alhaitham does not have a right to be, he is proud.

Despite Kaveh’s insistence that Alhaitham should not be proud, that he is leaving as soon as he gets his feet under himself I swear, Alhaitham; Alhaitham is.

Bleary-eyed and staring into lukewarm chai made by a caring hand that Alhaitham does not quite deserve, he is.


“I’ll be going into the desert,” Kaveh says one night, stretched out on the floor with his elbows resting upon the low coffee table.

Alhaitham looks up from the sheets of paper in his hand, chaotic writing and numbers with too many zeros still imprinted into his retinas.

He blinks once, frowns, locks his eyes onto Kaveh’s.

Kaveh’s looking at him with his head tilted, sanguine of his eyes scrutinizing the skin beneath Alhaitham’s eyes, the newfound hollowness of his cheeks.

Alhaitham knows he doesn’t look well. The concerned spasm of Kaveh’s lips only reinforces the notion.

Deflection is a nasty world to dip one’s toes into, but Alhaitham cannot see any way out of this. He is not in the right mind to try and deal with Kaveh’s concern. It is appreciated, in some tangible way, but Alhaitham simply cannot.

He suspects if he put it in his mouth, it would be a jumble of things. An uncomfortable pressure against his tongue that buts up against his palate uncomfortably.

He can’t. He can’t. 

Therefore:

“Oh? The desert?” 

“Mm,” says Kaveh, looking at him for a moment longer before turning back to the diagram. Or what should be a diagram. It is simply a few stray lines, neat script at the top that states Commission.

“Inspiration, and all that.” His face turns sour for a moment, a bite into a lemon. “I cannot seem to think.”

It is vulnerability Alhaitham does not know what to do with. So he runs a hand over it, soothes it, and lets it rest gentle in his palm.

“Enjoy, then. Don’t track the entire desert into the house with your sandals.”

“Do you really think I would be foolish enough to go to the desert in sandals?”

“You’ve always been partial to warmth,” says Alhaitham, looking back down at his papers. There is a groan he must suppress when there feels like there is more than before.

“That doesn’t mean I would track sand into the house with sandals! Who goes to the desert in sandals, anyway! And, besides, you don’t clean at all. I clean. So in that vein of thought, why would I br—”

Everything feels right again as Alhaitham begins to write, hand cramping over the quill.

Kaveh’s presence beside him is common, a foreign feeling molded back into home, a key sliding into its rightful lock.

Kaveh heads off for the desert a week later, and not three days after, hell breaks loose in Sumeru.

A god, a crisis, a traveler, and a group of people Alhaitham never thought he would see come together.

Nahida with her cryptic messages, Cyno with his blatant – deserved – mistrust, Tighnari with his laughter in the Fatui’s face. The eccentric traveler with their incessantly yapping companion, and a goddess whose very steps make flowers grow in her wake.

Alhaitham lets the capsule slide comfortably into his palm, and uses the long awaited opportunity to launch himself at Azar’s face. His knuckles ache with the urge to drive them into his jaw.

(Regrettably, it does nothing more than make the man stagger.)


Sumeru is in metaphorical flames, the sages have been sent to Avidya forest – Tighnari had grumbled, looked at Alhaitham with a fierceness in his eye and a hand brushing the tense string of his bow. I should hunt the bastards for sport. That, or set the Rishboland Tigers upon them.

Alhaitham, for his part, will stay well away from Tighnari in his future. Something about short people carrying the most rage in their bodies, or whatever.

(Then again, Kaveh is far from short and can carry an impressive amount of complaints in that pretty mouth.)

Somehow, Nahida nominates him as Grand Sage.

“I think you are perfect for the job,” she murmurs, patting him once on the hand. There is childlike slyness in the fold of her lips that Alhaitham does not miss. “Sumeru needs a strong leader, and you have been the face of this whole operation. Would you not assist me, Alhaitham? If only for a little while?”

Alhaitham thinks this is utter bullshit.

But if god tells you to do something, you bow your head and obey. Even when she’s pulling an elaborate prank only funny unto herself.

“I suppose,” he hedges, and Nahida smiles. 

“I knew you’d come around!”

And, so: Alhaitham is installed as Grand Sage. Temporary Grand Sage.

Dehya laughs herself sick when Alhaitham corrects her the first time. Squeezes his shoulder once with a smile still splitting her face. Ha! Real funny, Alhaitham. Good luck wrangling the Akademiya in your hands. And then she’d laughed some more, endlessly amused by his progressive frown and the near way he thunks his head onto the meeting table.

With the Grand Sage comes the work of rebuilding a nation.

Yes, Devi Kusanali is there for assistance. Cyno straightens out the Mahamatra, and Tighnari lends the support of the Forest Rangers in clearing debris from the traveler’s cataclysmic fight.

It is still so much.

Alhaitham can feel his eyes drooping despite three coffees, and the cramp in the easy flesh between thumb and pointer is an old friend.

He works by candlelight, by sunlight, is glued to his chair until he fears an imprint of him will dent it.

Nahida sends him off for a mandated break a morning she comes in and finds Alhaitham passed out over his desk, quill still gripped in shaking fingers.

“Go,” she says, deadly serious. It is still beyond him how downright authoritive she can be when she so wishes. It should make a funny picture, a child looking up at him with hands pressed upon her hips, eyes green as leaves. “Sleep, Alhaitham. God knows you need it.”

And then she laughs at her own joke, dispelling whatever thoughts were cycling through his head.


He goes home, slips his shoes off, and almost topples onto the floor.

The divan is right there. There is, however, the pesky issue of not having eaten anything in a solid fourteen hours.

It is so that Alhaitham finds himself in the kitchen, staring at their assortment of mistflowers with dismay.

Kaveh does most of the shopping. Alhaitham contributes – financially, most times – and is a decent enough cook. But with his longer working hours, and Kaveh still gallivanting off in the desert, there is, well—

Nothing.

When one thinks about it, it is hilarious.

Alhaitham resigns himself to his stomach caving in over itself and stumbles toward the divan.

A bed would be more comfortable, but. The divan is within stumbling distance, and Alhaitham cannot be bothered to move a step further.

He rests his head upon the pillow, yanks at one of the blankets that still smells of Kaveh, and falls asleep in a matter of minutes.

The midday sun gleams opposing from the windows, but Alhaitham pays it no mind as his mouth goes slack and his breath slows to a lull.


“Hey,” and a shake to his shoulder. Alhaitham groans.

“I know you heard me, hey ,” and Alhaitham opens his eyes reluctantly, squints against the sun that still shines terribly bright.

It is Kaveh – for who else would it be? Who else would stand with judging hands on hips as Alhaitham screws up his eyes childishly?

There is sand in Kaveh’s hair, trailing down the slope of his neck and sticking to it in grimy sweat.

He is a mess: hair frizzed out from traveling, pants rucked up to his knees in the heat.

It’s Kaveh, and after the inordinately bizarre events of the past few weeks, Alhaitham cannot help but smile.

Kaveh frowns at him, pushes a finger at Alhaitham’s chest.

“We are going to talk, because the Akademiya is in flames. Both metaphorically and literally. Somehow, I get the feeling you have to do something with it.”

Alhaitham licks his lips, the parchness of his mouth an uncomfortable reminder of the past few weeks.

When he speaks, it sounds like a croak.

“That sounds like a threat.”

“That is because I know you, Alhaitham,” Kaveh lets the sentence hang in the air for a moment, seeming a little astonished at his own candor. It shutters back into annoyance. “And besides, you would not take a nap in the middle of the day unless something cataclysmic had happened.”

With that he steps away, picking at a granule of sand upon his clothing.

They shine like starlight, over his work pants and travel shirt – constellations of stories that Alhaitham is not privy to. He looks bruised by the sun.

(Alhaitham should probably invest in aloe vera.)

Yet he is still beautiful. He never hasn’t been, not to Alhaitham.

Even with tears streaking down his face, kohl on his cheeks and masala powder on his hands, he is gorgeous. It is simplicity, in the end: he is Kaveh, and that is all that matters.

Kaveh departs with a promise to come back and thinly veiled intimidation in the way he states stay there. Move, and I’ll set Mehrak on you.

Alhaitham doesn’t even know where he would be going, weak with hunger and grogginess still a lingering touch at the corners of his eyes.

Kaveh brings Alhaitham a glass of water – almost spills it when Alhaitham takes a sip and says so I’m the Grand Sage.

He strings Kaveh along on the journey, watches as his expression flits from disbelief, to righteous anger, to concern, to something Alhaitham cannot quite parse.

Kaveh brings a nail to his mouth, runs it over the seam of his lips in apparent contemplation.

Alhaitham takes a sip of the water, lets the frigidness of it shake his head back into motion.

“Nahida ordered for the Sages to be placed in confinement – a grown-up timeout, if you will – in Avidya forest. I wish them the best of luck against Tighnari.”

He’d been aiming to get a laugh out of Kaveh, a caustic joke to get that strange expression off his face. He does not succeed.

Kaveh looks at him with such startling intensity that the words climbing up his throat dry out in his mouth.

“And you— you’re alright?”

A wholly unexpected question, a moment where sand slips down the hourglass.

“Yes,” he says, slow. I am, now that you’re here. “Yes.”

“Awfully reckless of you to go forth with your own agenda without telling anyone,” murmurs Kaveh, still staring at him with infestimally wide eyes. 

In the light of the sun, the brown flecks in his eyes glow golden.

“You could have been hurt—”

“I wasn’t, Kaveh. There isn't a purpose to dwell upon the things that could have happened. Things progressed smoothly as I anticipated.”

“No purpose t— do you realize what that could have entailed? If I came back to an empty house because you were senseless enough to almost get yourself killed?”

The gears in Alhaitham’s head are frozen in the face of Kaveh’s rage.

“What if I—” and he pauses there, licking over his teeth. “What if I had come to find you lying dead on a hospital bed, Alhaitham? What if I had come back and you were not there?”

His voice cracks upon the last word, a terrifying ache instilled into two syllables.

“Cruel of you to do that,” he settles on again, and sniffs once. “Cruel of you to do that to me.”

Alhaitham had not— Alhaitham had not thought of it as such. He had done what he needed to, to get everything back to normal and to be able to live his life.

He had not anticipated this anger at his actions.

(In some part of him, there is a smidgen of comfort that Kaveh still cares enough at all. That his bleeding heart somehow still allows Alhaitham any sort of lenience.)

Alhaitham feels like he’s done something wrong when he remains silent, mouth slightly parted in strange incongruence.

Kaveh’s eyes flit away for a moment, look back at him and then resolutely at his feet.

He brushes palms over the flowy material of his pants, stands with the weight of boulders tied to his ankles.

Kaveh steps away, walks to his room and lets the door hang ajar. The familiar sound of the floor scraping against his chair is a symphony Alhaitham cannot appreciate.

It takes a lot to render Alhaitham speechless, but Kaveh has stuck a hand in his throat and squeezed all the words in the crush of his fist.



They do not speak again until the next afternoon of Alhaitham’s mandated break.

Nahida had never specified how long she intended him to stay home for. So Alhaitham will simply stay home until god knocks on his door.

He’s slept more than he thinks he has in months, spread out on his bed until his hair is birds-nest tangled.

He’s staring up at dust-motes in vigorous dance in the air when Kaveh knocks on his door.

There’s a clench of something – not quite discomfort, but something two inches to the left of that. Bothersome. (It really is his own fault.)

“Mm?”

“You’ve been in bed for a solid day and a half,” begins Kaveh, leaning against his door with his hip cocked and arms crossed.

So they’re not going to speak about it, then.

“Up you get. I cannot be the only one cooking.”

The words are biting. They should be biting. But the one thing Alhaitham can focus on is the fact that his eyes sweep over the thinness of his face, cheeks sunken from the work and the exhaustion that chased him for weeks on end.

It’s concern. Concern Alhaitham is entirely unprepared for, entirely unworthy of. 

“Up!” 

“I’ll raise your rent for disturbing my rest,” he says, a grunt when he stands up to pick through new clothing. 

“Even if you do it won’t be enough to pay your hospital bills if you lie comatose like that.”

A sniff, and end of discussion. 

Much as in their youth, Kaveh pulls Alhaitham out for sunlight. 

His claims that fresh air enlivens the spirit, and that sunlight soothes the soul have not changed. (Neither has Alhaitham’s penchant for groaning as if it were punishment whenever Kaveh does this.)

A finger wags in his face as they are stooped to tie their shoes. 

You will help me with the shopping, or so help me god, Alhaitham, I—

A twist to his face as he stands, strap of the sandal falling neatly upon his foot. 

I don’t know what I’ll do. But you are not going to like it. Our lack of ingredients is your fault for hatching a plot to save the entirety of Sumeru, so. This is coming out of your wallet. 

The bazaar does help. Even if Alhaitham is not going to admit it.

Fresh air does wonders for the congestion in his lungs – he had not realized it until Kaveh guided him forcibly, but it does help.

It smells of the last, hazy days of summer. That one last gasp where fruits ripen, farmers toil away at their fields to harvest nature’s beauty. The chatter; faint now, as it is the hour that people find solace in their homes. Calls from every stall, voices raised in symphonious cry to get them to look. 

Kaveh leads him with confident steps and a cloth bag flung over his shoulder. Despite the air being tense, he walks at Alhaitham’s pace without question, letting him set the prerogative for just how far they’re going to be going today.

Alhaitham bites the inside of his lip to stave off a smile, follows quick enough that dirt kicks up from under his boots.

Kaveh is already listing off items when Alhaitham walks beside him again. 

“Tomatoes, carrots, onions— are there any cucumbers left?”

“No.”

“You ate them all.”

“They had gone bad.”

“Well you have to make something with them, Alhaitham. Only a heathen would eat a cucumber like that – not even with salt on it.”

“I fully intend to take heathen as a compliment.”

“You’re impossible, ” groans Kaveh, but Alhaitham can see the hint of tension on his forehead easing into something gentler. The lines around his eyes relax into something familiar, something Alhaitham has run reverent fingers over in their past.

Kaveh only looks at him from a moment, a question in his eyes and words trapped low in his throat.

Yet the moment passes, as all things do, and Kaveh’s gaze flits to the grandpa offering them discounts on two perfumes.


The Bazaar is unexpectedly—

Fun.

A word Alhaitham has not had the chance to use between months, weeks of work, and the strenuous task of learning to cohabitate with Kaveh again.

(It isn’t inherently strenuous. Alhaitham does not think of Kaveh as work. But working out the chinks in their relationship – even if they have not truly spoken about their past, lips clamped tight when it comes to an unspoken agreement – is difficult.

They persevere and they make mistakes, and they reopen gashes that are not quite as healed as they thought. Alhaitham and Kaveh are nothing if not stubborn.)

The Bazaar is fun.

Alhaitham tries to avoid coming when the crowds are here; and has not had the chance to come at all in light of recent events.

The people: vendors, clients, officers, they all look bewildered at times, still touching their heads for the comforting pressure of the Akasha. A sigh and a rueful little laugh when they realize it is gone.

Alhaitham thinks Nahida is right. The reliance has become entirely too much, and people must go back to the library to sit down between piles of books for research, dust that fogs up one’s glasses and an ache in the back that does not dispel.

The breeze carries the scent of cinnamon. Cats yowl and weave between their legs, prompting Kaveh to stumble once. Children dash through the curtains, play a raucous game of hide and seek amidst the peaches, watermelon, the figs that line the wooden stalls.

Funny, how everything gains a nuanced quality when it is graced with Kaveh’s smile.

(Funny, how Alhaitham still vainly wishes that could ever be directed at him.)

Their bags are half-way to full when he and Kaveh get roped into a little contest.

It is a brilliant marketing strategy used by the student, yet Alhaitham does not think she quite realizes with what voracity he and Kaveh will go when faced with competition.

It begins something like this:

A stall filled with wooden toys, puzzles that catch Kaveh’s eye and have his steps slow.

The student – broke out of her mind, probably – grabs onto his attention like a lifeline.

“They’re at a discount! Twenty percent off two if you can figure out one,” and the little condescending lilt to her voice is golden, really.

The chestnut of her eyes glance between them, cataloging something Alhaitham cannot hope to ever understand. There’s a curl to the edge of her mouth.

In the next beat, “how about whoever solves one first gets one free, and one at a discounted price?”

“Deal,” says Kaveh almost instantly, competitiveness setting a match to tinder. He turns to Alhaitham with a cheeky little glimmer in his eye. “Unless you’re too chicken for it?”

Alhaitham takes a moment to savor the cocky look – shoulders lax in assumed victory, eyebrows pulled up and the upwards pull of his lip that Alhaitham has terribly missed.

He is the Kaveh of their youth.

Highlighted in the sun with his hair catching flame, looking at Alhaitham with confidence etched into the fabric of his being.

“Deal.”

(Alhaitham loses. Terribly. Technological puzzles of the sort are not difficult for him, but he is far outmatched in the speed of Kaveh’s mind, agility in his fingers and the clack clack clack of the wood.

The girl looks decidedly impressed when Kaveh hands it to her with a small, flourishing little bow. Righteous confidence, a man who knows what his skills are and how to use them.

They end up taking two of the toys home, despite Kaveh’s insistence to pay her full price for the both of them. It comes from Alhaitham’s mora pouch, but he cannot find it in himself to complain.

Kaveh walks with a skip in his step, brushes his hand once against Alhaitham’s shoulder, and grins – a wide, toothy thing.

Alhaitham put that expression upon his face, and Alhaitham gets to savor it.)


They end up making a lot of stops.

Bookstore, when Alhaitham contemplatively runs a thumb over a title embellished in faded gold. The stalls with sugar, vanilla bean – Kaveh claims he needs to make something sweet to soothe the palate. Alhaitham agrees.

Vegetables, meats, sacks of tea from the Auntie that has a fondness for Alhaitham, all necessities that have been neglected with the pressure of life.

It has been a long time since Alhaitham has gone shopping with anyone else at all. The last person probably was Kaveh, the ghost of him that smiles and hugs Alhaitham at the waist with a chin hooked over his shoulder.

The wind tumbles in their hair with the heat of summer, and Alhaitham can only feel something in his chest expanding. It pushes at the seams of his ribcage until it’s a gentle pain.

Love is an old friend by now.


“Halva?”

It is a proposition under the warm light of the kitchen lamp. The stray curl that hangs out from the back of Kaveh’s bun hangs out in the humidity, and Alhaitham must resist the urge to bat at it like a cat. He isn’t a cat.

Alhaitham slips his headphones off in a fluid motion.

“Do we have the ingredients?”

“I bought them all.”

“ I bought them.”

“Yes, well, I picked them out!” A bat of the hand aimed poorly at Alhaitham’s shoulder.

“Halva, then?”

Kaveh hums, already picking out a pot to boil, setting teeth to the sugar packet to get it to open. They gleam almost dangerous in the yellow light.

Baking together was not something they often did. Alhaitham claimed it ended with handprints made of flour on his books, fingers sticky with honey that would doom pages into being stuck together eternally.

Kaveh had thought it a fun prospect, and often did bake for leisure. Alhaitham just hadn’t known if the habit had carried over from their sun-drenched days.

He becomes a terror in the kitchen, watching intently as Alhaitham sets the pot of water, sugar, and cardamom on low heat. 

Leans over his shoulder, chin barely hooked.

A strange sort of deja vu, as the Fontanians like to call it. 

For a moment, Alhaitham is seventeen again, with Kaveh’s hands wrapped around his stomach and his hair tickling the nape of Alhaitham’s neck. 

He’d laugh, say Alhaitham, you’re distracted! and Alhaitham would think how could I not be with you? 

“You’re distracted,” deadpans Kaveh, leaning over to set the stove higher to bring the mixture to boil.

It is warm where Alhaitham grips the wooden spoon, slack in his musings. 

“Hm.” 

“ Hm, ” throws Kaveh right back, no small amount of snark included. 

The mixture is brought to boil, a momentary screech in his ear when Kaveh deems it hot enough, and it is gently, gently poured into a bowl with tahini and vanilla Kaveh had lovingly prepared. 

(He’d mixed the two together with enough vigor that some of it flew out to land on Alhaitham’s nose.) 

“Do you want almonds?” 

“Hm.”

“That isn’t an answer, so I will say yes. Congrats.”

It’s idiocy, for Kaveh knows Alhaitham’s favorite nuts are almonds. 

A push and pull they have going on, thrown precariously out to sea with no particular end in sight. Alhaitham had tried sending out a buoy, but had ruined it all with silence and neglectful attention to the ocean’s tides. 

Kaveh knocks into Alhaitham with his hips, displaces him to counter duty. 

(He is resigned to watch as Kaveh mixes, dips a finger in to taste, frowns, and leans over to chop up the almonds some more.) 

In the light of their kitchen – their kitchen – Kaveh looks beautiful. A healthy weight to his body, the lean fingers of his that snick snick snick with ruthless efficiency. 

The child who made pani puri, pressing fingers into the crinkling poori. The boy teetering on the cusp of terrifying success with masala powder pungent on his fingers. 

The man, now: standing before Alhaitham with halva paste on his hands and bangs falling into his eyes. 

Somehow, somewhere, things never changed. They always come back to each other – find themselves standing again and again and again in a kitchen surrounded by their belongings and their food.

Curious. For the first time since coming back, Alhaitham thinks he understands the extent of Kaveh’s anger. 

If Alhaitham had been the one to come and find Kaveh lying blue, motionless upon a hospital bed, he— 

He doesn’t know what he would have done. 

“What?”

“Hm?” 

“You’re staring,” murmurs Kaveh, tongue pressed against his lower lip in concentration as the halva slides glossy from the bowl to the prepared pan. It should be Alhaitham’s tongue, instead. 

God. 

“Can I not stare?”

“Deflection,” he sing-songs, prompting Alhaitham to sigh and take the pan from him, keep it ensconced between the mist flowers for a full day. 

“If anyone should be guilty for deflection here, the charges would be pressed against you.” 

Alhaitham toes a fine line here as he closes the cabinet, but Kaveh seems willing to interact. 

Slaps Alhaitham’s shoulder with a rag once, and heads back off to the living room. 

The halva is delightful – Alhaitham has always known Kaveh makes it with excellence. 

He’s still on his mandated break (by his own volition!), and Kaveh knocks upon his door with a plate of neatly sliced squares in the opposite hand. 

He’s about to leave again – again – until Alhaitham grabs at his wrist, slender bones locking into the circle of Alhaitham’s fingers. 

Kaveh would be so easy to bruise. Yet Alhaitham already has experience with that, doesn’t he? Some bruises are not meant to be seen with the naked eye; some lie purple upon the gentle, beating flesh of one’s chest. 

“Eat with me.” 

It’s not quite a question, does not reach the ambivalence of a suggestion, and it is not the candor of an order. 

A hope, a request – a dying man’s plea for mercy. 

“I’ll humor you,” says Kaveh, rolls his eyes as he extricates his wrist out from the circle of Alhaitham’s. “Just this once.”  

They eat; plate divided comfortably into equal slices. 

Kaveh licks remains off his thumb, and Alhaitham tries not to lose his mind. 

(It doesn’t work. It really never has.) 

They’re down to the last piece when Alhaitham begins to walk through fire. 

In futile distraction, he snatches the last piece up, witnesses the brief confusion that sputters upon Kaveh’s face. 

It doesn’t last long— it capitulates into something grander.

Alhaitham pushes the last square of halva at the seam of his lips. Kaveh stares, eyes wider than Alhaitham thinks he has ever seen them. 

A moment, a pregnant pause where Alhaitham thinks he has done the wrong thing, again—

Gentle, gentle, he opens his mouth. 

Alhaitham’s fingers brush against his teeth, retreat quick enough before the pucker of Kaveh’s mouth can taste his skin. 

With his hand still in the air between them, a stray fleck of halva upon his pointer, Alhaitham speaks.

“I’m sorry.” 

Kaveh almost chokes, thumps a desperate hand at his chest. 

Halva still in his mouth and manners thrown to high hell he stammers in a manner most uncharacteristic.

“You’re what ?” 

“Sorry,” says Alhaitham simply, ignoring the way his skin feels too small, stretching out uncomfortably over his bones. It prickles. 

Kaveh still goggles at him as if the very words tilted the Earth off its axis. 

It isn’t that uncommon for Alhaitham to apologize. 

(They never really did apologize for the fight. Not when it was Alhaitham’s fault. Both of their faults, tempers shot and the fragile, gauzy innocence of youth ripped off their faces by an uncalibrated hand.) 

“For everything,” he tacks on, almost winces at how clunky it sounds, falling in broken marble from his tongue. 

Kaveh’s mouth clicks shut. It sounds like a death sentence. 

There’s a tight modulation to his voice when he speaks next that Alhaitham doesn’t know what to make of. 

Has he shaken the shell enough that the turtle will snap? Prodded at it too much until it tears skin off his finger? 

“Alhaitham,” he begins. Stops. Opens his mouth, lets his tongue swipe past his canines. 

“I don’t— you can’t do that. You can’t do that, Alhaitham. You can’t do that to me. ”

Why? He almost wants to ask, digs crescents into the meat of his palm to abstain.

What have I done to still have you here, in front of me with something we made together still ripe on your mouth?

“I don’t know what I would have done if you had been injured while I wasn’t here, Alhaitham— or couldn’t help . Why didn’t you call for me to help? Why when I could offer my abilities to aid did you not call upon me?”

“Selfishness.” 

Kaveh’s arms fall limp upon his lap, gesturing gone like a leaf in the wind. 

“Selfishness?” He repeats, almost incredulous.

“You speak of not being able to bear the burden of you being gone and me being hurt, Kaveh. What if it was the other way around? What if the weight of you being injured before situations I had an ability to change weighed on me?” 

Alhaitham’s skin itches like fire. Needles that poke beneath the fabric of him, poke out of his pores. 

Kaveh only swallows, looks down at his knees as if the pressure of Alhaitham’s eyes on his is unbearable. 

Alhaitham might just be fracturing the most important relationship in his life, but if he is going to say something, he is going to say it. 

“Do you not think I wanted to see you alive too, Kaveh?” 

It sounds almost like a croon, the tut of a pigeon upon clouds made of silver. 

“I’m sorry,” murmurs Kaveh, and it is so wholly unexpected that Alhaitham rears back a little in his seat. 

“For everything,” he says, looking up for the briefest of moments. 

His eyes are watering faintly, and Alhaitham is stricken. 

Yet there is a curl to his mouth, a magnetic pull upwards that smiles to one side. Alhaitham lets himself sag back into his chair. 

They don’t speak; not for a little bit. 

A wondrous sort of silence, the silence they used to find themselves in in their youth, tomes of books and saccharine flowers in crowns upon their heads. 

It breaks languidly — the spill of sun and the sticky sweet of halva upon their tongues. 

“Thank you for eating with me, Alhaitham.” 

It still sounds a little stilted, words clunky in their novelty. 

But it is an effort. 

Alhaitham lets himself smile, tilts his head at the open-eyed comfort upon Kaveh’s face. 

“Thank you for baking.” 

And, well.

That is that. 

–

It all feels more like the Alhaitham and Kaveh of their pasts, a friendly sort of rivalry that stretches over the canvas of them. Blankets them in something unexpected, something that the Alhaitham of naught six months ago could not even have imagined.

It is still strange, sometimes, to wake and find Kaveh puttering over coffee. Hair embellished into a flaming gold on mornings when he’s up at a reasonable enough time to see Alhaitham leave.

They’ll stand hip to hip, watch the steam come out from under the top and color beautifully upon the rising face of the sun. They’ll speak.

Faint words to make the peace, idle chatter with low voices and lower heads.

I have some extra work to get done today, don’t wait for me at dinner.

I’m meeting with Eren today, and he’s probably going to ask me for the diagram. I wasn’t able to complete it— do you know how many times he asked me to remake the columns because they were not to his liking? And objectively, see, I have no issue with that. I understand wanting aesthetics, and being able to implement it related to practicality, bu—

Closeness Alhaitham has not had with anyone else save Kaveh himself years ago.

It’s really not to say everything is going smoothly.

Because, well, they are Kaveh and Alhaitham.

And Alhaitham will certainly buy pieces of furniture that look like they belong in an art museum, if only to get those eyes pointed at him, scalding in their urgency to smite him.

Masochism, Cyno had called it once, too into his cups and leaning over to take a sip of Alhaitham’s. Our dear scholar is a masochist.

(Alhaitham would like to make it clear that he is not.)

It happens often, because Alhaitham passes by the bazaar at the end of work and finds little trinkets he knows would knock Kaveh’s socks off. 

A standee that looks like a canoe, a door hanger with a wreath shaped into a bull – Kaveh had fumed, claimed it a crime against Kshahrewar –, a bright, bright pink shower drain so that Kaveh has to stare at it every single time he plugs it for a bath.

So that he has to think of Alhaitham every time he goes in for a bath.

The most recent one, though, is:

“What the fuck is that, ” says Kaveh on a shriek, staring aghast at the new table decor Alhaitham has bought.

“A dolphin.”

“Why—”

“What do you have against dolphins, Kaveh?”

“I don’t! Have anything against dolphins, Alhaitham! Just why— did you have to buy the one playing a violin?”

“It just wants to be part of a symphony,” says Alhaitham, and the earnestness of his phrasing looks like it almost causes Kaveh to gag.

He smiles, watches as Kaveh eyes the dolphin with nothing short of trepidation to circle around the table. He drops onto the divan with a sigh, tucks his feet under him and lets his head loll.

It’s a picture of comfort. One overlaid by nostalgia in Alhaitham’s mind, Kaveh highlighted in the bronze, gold— in the gilded colors of the sky.

“How was work today?” murmurs Alhaitham, looking down at the book on his lap – 357 – and letting it fall shut.

“Oh my god you will not believe—”

A routine that he settles into. Sinks into it as if a warm bath and the scent of jasmine cradled in his lungs.


Alhaitham catches Kaveh pacing the hallway one night.

It is entirely out of coincidence – a momentary need to use the bathroom, perhaps brew a pot of tea.

He’s in nightclothes, bare feet pressing against panels of wood and hair brushing his angel bones. Regal, even in the lines of tension strung up upon his back. Kaveh has always had an envious sort of elegance. 

“Kaveh?”

Kaveh whips around as if struck, all wide-eyes and a curious flush to his cheeks. Looks strangely guilty – never a good look for someone at the ripe hour of two in the morning.

“Did I wake you? Sorry if I did, I—”

And a pause, where Alhaitham can hear the faint stirrings of the city that never sleeps. Kaveh dips his head, and Alhaitham watches the moonlight run soft fingers across his cheeks.

In the interspersed light of the open door, the shadows look like tears.

“You?” ends up prompting Alhaitham, when no answer is forthcoming.

“The Interdarshan Championship,” starts Kaveh in a non-sequitur. He closes his eyes briefly. Swallows. (It looks like it hurts.) “Have you heard of it?”

“I have.”

“I’m going to take part in it. During the next Parade of Providence.”

An event two weeks out, something that skimmed Alhaitham’s newly restored Scribe’s desk in passing. Something he does not often think about, something he holes himself up for and lets the rave pass.

“I— I need to. I’ll win, and take the pot home with me.” Alhaitham can feel that particular ache in his heart again. A bruise that never healed, and Kaveh keeps pushing and pressing and pricking and prodding until—

Until Alhaitham swears he will bleed red.

“I’ll be out of your hair. I’m moving out.” Stay in my hair, Kaveh. I like your shampoo.

“Ah.”

It hangs for a moment, and Alhaitham lets it steep. Kaveh only furrows his brows again, stumbles just an inch closer into Alhaitham’s space.

He smells of his soap – the soap Alhaitham has been robbing ever so often because it smells of home. Of white sheets and the spill of sun through the window, the tinkling chime of Kaveh’s laughter with the column of his neck thrown back.

Their soap. Relegated back to Kaveh’s soap.

“That’s all? Ah?”

“What else do you want me to say?”

Kaveh opens his mouth, rapid-fire in the way Alhaitham knows whatever will come out is going to sting.

Yet it deflates – and the clack of his teeth in the bleak span of night is audible.

“Nothing, then. Say nothing at all, Alhaitham.” He brushes past him, knocks their shoulders together in something not quite kind.

“I don’t need your words.”

I regret you.


Alhaitham ends up signing up to oversee the tournament itself, led by a hunch and a desire to keep tabs upon Kaveh.

It is not that he doubts that Kaveh cannot take care of himself – he is a smart, smart man. A bleeding heart does not hamper the speed at which his mind works.

It’s for Alhaitham’s own comfort, really. Led by a fleeting thought of Kaveh’s past, and the ever-buoyant Nilou at his side, the contest unfolds.

Nilou tries in vain to get him to speak, but Alhaitham is too busy scanning the desert for a familiar figure adorned in laurels of red.


There is a crown, a speech, the ghost of a man that seems altogether too familiar, and a pot of money that slips right out of Kaveh’s hands.

Butter-fingers.

Yet it is for a worthy cause – Kaveh is notorious for that. Alhaitham cannot truly say he is surprised.

It is also selfish, selfish desire.

Kaveh is forlorn at losing the money, that much Alhaitham can tell. Steps back into the room that is his and stares at the boxes with a slump to his shoulder, throws one of the books from a half-packed box onto the bed. It ricochets from the pillow to the floor in a miserable plop.

“I thought,” he says, despondent. The sentence trails off uncomfortably, lilt of his words something not quite unfamiliar.

Alhaitham cannot see his face, but he stands, highlighted in the light of the moon. The wind picks up his hair and runs gentle fingers through it in consolation.

He sighs, a shuddering thing.

“Thank you, Alhaitham.” A pause, where Alhaitham tastes blood in his mouth. “I fear I must trouble you for a while longer.”

“So it seems.”

Kaveh turns, then tilts his head toward Alhaitham. He looks exhausted, aftermath of a run and revelations he had not ever expected on a silver platter.

There’s something uncomfortably vulnerable on his lips that Alhaitham wants to get rid of, yet—

“Trouble me all you want, Kaveh.” Kaveh parts his mouth. Alhaitham holds a hand up.

His lips press into each other for a moment again, before cracking into a hesitant smile that Alhaitham feels tuck into the easy spot under his ribcage. 

“Alright, then.”

Alhaitham leaves Kaveh to his unpacking, tastes the sticky sweetness of love covering his palate.

He’s in for it terribly, isn’t he?

–

Things do get a little easier after that.

The Championship – and the consequential information Alhaitham gives Kaveh – have led to conversations Alhaitham could not have imagined six months ago.

They become kinder. Something more mellow that Alhaitham treasures on nights where he cannot sleep.

Kaveh smiles more often. It is not the customer-service smile, as Alhaitham likes to call it. But the smile from Before: one side of his mouth pulled up more, a peek of tongue over his front teeth.

It is not as often as Alhaitham would like, but progress is being made.

(And, in a way, he is grateful for that. Because if Kaveh snorted and threw his head back in laughter more often, Alhaitham thinks he would lose it.)


“Hey,” a patter of feet and a rap at his door.

Alhaitham looks up from the desk, eyes refocusing on the world around him. Lets Guuji Yae’s novel slide shut, fingers poised over the cover.

Kaveh’s eyes flick to it, and the corner of his mouth pulls up. 

Mercifully, Kaveh does not comment on his choice reading. Alhaitham is allowed to have hobbies. 

“We are going furniture shopping.”

It is not an option, and certainly not idle speculation. An order, written plain and clear in the slant of Kaveh’s hip pressed against the door.

“Are we now?”

Alhaitham’s already standing, hearing the unfortunate pop of his back after sitting curled like a shrimp.

Kaveh puffs out a laugh, watching as Alhaitham shrugs his cape over his shoulder, slings headphones over his ears.

“Oh, absolutely we are. I will not tolerate a replica of your dolphin statue.”

“You just don’t want to admit that it’s grown on you, is that it?”

The silence and rosy flush that covers Kaveh’s cheeks is damning in its own right.


Kaveh grabs at Alhaitham’s elbow and pulls him out.

They spend a truly prosperous two hours gazing at stools – the rickety chair you have at the kitchen counter squeaks. How can you live like this? Didn’t even put paper under the limp leg!

I do not concern myself with such trivial matters, Kaveh.

Trivi—

They garner looks from the vendors, the people that pass and cover smiles under poorly placed coughs. Hands over mouths that do nothing to hide the mirth in their eyes.

It is novel to be recognized as Alhaitham and Kaveh again.

After a period of it being Kaveh, period, and Alhaitham, period, being seen as a cohesive whole again is strange.

Alhaitham does not give a damn about what people think of him. Cultivates the image of a feeble scholar for his own use, a backup to fall upon when Nahida’s subordinates wish to make connections.

It serves him well, this title of Lunatic.

He will take it, wear it as an emblem and put it on a hat on his head if it will make everyone stay at a distance.

Kaveh is the other way around; fidgety and nervous whenever someone mentions him and Alhaitham together at all.

The only ones who Know – despite half of Sumeru knowing because the rumor mill is a bitch – are Tighnari, Cyno, and Collei.

Alhaitham will give him the space he needs; time to lick his own wounds and curl protectively under his own wings until he feels ready to come back to the world. 

A safe space, if you will. They’ve always been that for each other, after they have learned how to work past hurting each other. Breaking their bones, a mediocre attempt at healing wrapped in gauze.

People speak and people look, incline their heads in greeting and murmured hello, brother! And sometimes, a screeched twenty-five percent off a bouquet of flowers!

That is that one that stops Kaveh.

(They end up going home with a bouquet that Alhaitham does not see the use of, but Kaveh grins like a child. He forgives the swaths of color upon their coffee table for that simple fact.)


“This one?”

Kaveh points, tan hand stretching toward a chair colored deep mahogany wood.

“Hmm.”

It’s really only for show. Alhaitham likes the chair, is weak to the curl of Kaveh’s hands into a fist in the face of Alhaitham’s ignorance.

“If you so wish.”

A smile, and Alhaitham almost wants to shield his eyes. The day is cloudy, but the hair sticking up at the nape of Kaveh’s head and the way his tongue dips out in concentration as he doles mora out is sun enough.

It becomes Alhaitham’s job to lug the chair around. He rotates it through a number of places – set on his shoulders as a parent would carry a giggling child, across the stomach as if an uncomfortable bag, swings it under one arm to match the rhythm of his walking.

Kaveh laughs, finding amusement in the way Alhaitham scowls, relegating himself to pulling at it from one leg.

Kaevh, for his part, walks dainty with one of their bags hanging from his forearm, the other cradling a bouquet of pasidarahs and roses in the seam of his elbow.

The petals brush against his skin in the way Alhaitham’s fingers once did, and it is entirely irrational of him to be jealous of a flower.


Inspiration to bake only comes when they are back home. Alhaitham closes the cabinet with the mistflowers with a considering tilt of the head, hands itching to do something. He suspects this is the fate of many artists – a perpetual urge to create, to do something, to contribute to the world in some way.

(Yet this is simply baking. For Kaveh. Perhaps Kaveh will be more lenient to love if Alhaitham makes a really good fucking pudding.)

Getting back, Kaveh had slipped his shoes off and headed straight for the coffee table.

“I am so delayed on this. I’ll finish dinner later just—” a volatile fuck! when he’d slammed his foot into the divan in his hurry, “let me finish this.”

He’d sat down, stuck a pencil behind his ear, set teeth to his lip, and Alhaitham hasn’t heard a word in an hour.

It is a strangely specific sort of pain as Alhaitham watches Kaveh work, twirling a lock of hair between his fingers. He spins the pen in the other hand with unmatched dexterity. Teeth that dig into the plush of his mouth, and Alhaitham is forced to look away from the pretty sight of it.

Instead he must look at their assortment of dirty dishes, sigh, and set himself to scrubbing.

A methodical throwing of the remains into the compost bin, a squirt of soap that smells of lavender – Kaveh’s taste, ridiculously expensive imported from Fontaine –, and setting them onto the drying rack until Alhaitham has the chance to dry them.

Comforting, this: the spray of the water and the sound of the sponge hitting porcelain, all to the muted cadence of Kaveh’s quill against paper. 


Alhaitham has not made Pasidarah Pudding in a long, long time.

Had it last at one of his co-workers' weddings; interesting, the fact that he was invited. He’s only had spare few interactions with Esha, but had been invited to watch her and her husband join in matrimony.

(He’d left early, offered Esha his congratulations, withstood a very drunken hug and a pat to his shoulder. Go confess to your roommate, Alhaitham! You’re not as subtle as you think. And Esha had laughed, pulled away into the circle for countless more hours of dancing until her feet were bruised.)

Mamani had made it often for birthdays – or for the fun of it, too. She’d gather flower petals from the well-cultivated garden, bouquets of bright, colorful things that lended their fragrance to the house. Dandelions, or glaze lilies sold at the Liyuean stall.

In the end, she’d always reverted back to pasidarahs and roses. Something to be said for the most basic way of doing something, comfort in that which one knows.

Alhaitham feels the phantom weight of her hand on his as he pours the petals into the boiling water, stands to the side to grab at the milk and the sugar.

Never a tedious process to make, even if it has been a long time.

Besides – Kaveh’s cooked for him for years on end. It’s only fair if Alhaitham gives some in return.

Alhaitham pours the gelatin in with a careful hand, watches as it begins to come together. 

With the wooden spoon Kaveh is so fond of, Alhaitham begins to mix.

A recipe taught by one who is now passed in preparation to be given to one that has returned.

Alhaitham would not consider himself particularly lucky – yet if he had to put a finger to what he would consider luck, it is the fact that Kaveh is sitting huffing over diagrams in the living room. A sort of thing he did not think he would ever get back.

He wakes, and Kaveh is there. It is not the frigidness of an empty house, anymore.

In theory, Kaveh is the one terrified of homes without light in their hallways. Can Alhaitham not feel the same? After Mamani passed, Alhaitham was not so keen to continue living alone. Yet he was not going to drag some stranger through his doors to meet an unchecked need.

That was reserved for Kaveh, and Kaveh alone. Alhaitham does not think he’d handle living with anyone that has not seen him at his worst, thrown rags at his shoulder and left biryani cooling on the counter.

When Alhaitham dares to leave the pot alone to go check, he’s still hard at work. This time with the addition of charcoal, fingers stained in black and a tint to his hair where it is still wrapped around a finger.

He’s ethereal – in any circumstance.

Tears upon his cheeks or going cross-eyed at a moth that lands on his nose, or looking up at him with eyes made of honey on a tavern table.

It’s still Kaveh.

Kaveh and Alhaitham.

Alhaitham lets him be and returns to mixing the jelly before it burns and sticks to the bottom of the pot.

He’s fairly sure Kaveh wouldn’t let him live that down.


When all is said and done, Alhaitham scoops it into bowls, turns the stove off, and ambles out into the living room.

In the two hours they’ve been home, Kaveh has not moved. His mouth is the only thing that has: silent words that match the rolling of his wrist, quill flying over paper at record speed.

His eyes flutter, a groan, and fingers reach up to squeeze between his eyebrows.

Then he opens them again and gets back to work.

Alhaitham stands like a fool with two plates of jelly watching the scenario loop. 

By the third time, he walks forward and sets the two plates upon the table. Kaveh pays them no mind, counts something by pressing his thumb to the pads of his fingers.

“Kaveh.”

Silence.

“ Kaveh. ”

The sound of scribbled writing, numbers Alhaitham cannot quite make sense of upside down.

Alhaitham pulls at the feather stuck behind his ear, sinks gentle fingers into the hair on the crown of Kaveh’s head.

He starts, a hitching thing that has him looking up at Alhaitham with thinly veiled surprise. In the next breath his shoulders drop, and his eyes roll when he leans back to stretch his neck.

Alhaitham lets his fingers slide out, misses the softness of his hair almost instantly.

“What is so important you deemed it urgent to distract me?”

“Pudding,” says Alhaitham, and nods his head in the direction of the bowls.

Kaveh looks at them, and Alhaitham watches as his mouth drops open, the widening of eyes smeared in ink.

“ You made pudding?”

“No. It’s the ghost that lives in the kitchen.”

Those eyes come back to fix on him, narrow in their lack of amusement. Kaveh tuts, shakes his head in a way that makes his earring refract light all over Alhaitham’s chest.

“Someday, there will be a ghost in the kitchen, and you won’t be able to do anything about it.”

“Exorcism is a skill that can be learned.”

With a surprising bark of laughter and a crack of knees as Kaveh stands – Alhaitham can and will tease him relentlessly for being practically a grandfather – Alhaitham hands him one of the bowls.

Feels like a dog waiting anxious for Kaveh’s response as he stirs it one way, then the next. Brings it to his nose for a sniff, lets the metal of the spoon clack against his mouth.

Tortuous.

And with the ghost of a smile, he sticks it into his mouth.

The most excruciating ten seconds of Alhaitham’s life follow.

“It’s—” a swallow, the clink of the spoon against the bowl, “excellent, actually.”

Kaveh looks more surprised at his honesty than Alhaitham does. Yet he smiles, pushes Alhaitham’s bowl closer to him, and helps himself to more.

It’s sweet. Alhaitham overdid it with the sugar. Kaveh seems perfectly content with it, going through half the bowl in record time.

“Who taught you?”

“Mamani,” murmurs Alhaitham, settles back onto the divan and crosses his legs at the knee.

“Ah,” says Kaveh, with the cadence of someone who has tasted loss with their own tongue.

The two of them are orphans, in some respect. Alhaitham sees it in the tilt of Kaveh’s eyebrow, the understanding part of his mouth.

“You’ve made it well. She’d be proud, Alhaitham.”

The sun slants dangerously over the break of Kaveh’s smile, and Alhaitham must look away in cowardice.

Kaveh chatters idly about any sort of topics – the best flowers to make the pudding with, the status of Alhaitham’s fingers if he does not moisturize them, the way the panels of wood of their floors need to be cleaned with this very specific material lest they begin to rot.

Alhaitham only listens. Finishes his bowl of pudding and lets his head sag as Kaveh speaks, watches his hands fly from the corner of his eye.

He loves him.

A truth Alhaitham had negated before. In the four years of Kaveh’s absence – physical only, for Alhaitham had thought of him on days when it rained – he’d refused it.

Love was something left for Guuji Yae’s romance novels. For teenagers sitting together on a bench, hesitant glances at each other’s mouths. For old couples, hair white and spirits alive in the way that they jab at each other’s ribcages.

The very notion of it was absurd. A man prided on his rationality should not have toppled pathetically into love. With his best friend , of all people.

Sharp words and lanky arms, a brushed out head of hair that Alhaitham had once helped him dye. Entrusted with such vulnerability, his hands had shaken.

Yet Kaveh had smiled – much as he does more often, now – and guided the paintbrush once, twice, until Alhaitham learned how to do it.

Kaveh’s staring at him, something soft on his face.

Alhaitham can feel the way words claw up his throat. (This time, the urge to smite them is not particularly present. They’ve come a long way; a hand pressing metal into the other to sitting in the divan in familiar comfort.)

Kaveh, I love you.

In the end, it is Kaveh that speaks.

Is it not always Kaveh? Coming and going and returning and dancing and living and sobbing into his own arms and—

“Alhaitham,” he starts, the syllables a comfortable press on his tongue.

Alhaitham has always loved the way Kaveh says his name.

“Kaveh.”

A smile that flits into something grander, the edge of teeth that flash from under his lip.

Kaveh sets the bowl down on the table, rises to his knees so he can kneel face-to-face to Alhaitham. He looks as if supplicating in prayer, palms upward on his thighs and something unbearable in the creases around his eyes.

He parts his mouth, and Alhaitham lets his eyes fall shut. If this is to be his undoing, he does not think he could handle looking at it with eyes wide open.

“Alhaitham—” a hitching little breath, “I do not know if this is the right time. I do not think there has ever been a right time with us.”

Alhaitham feels his lips twitch. 

“But you— you have helped me, even when I do not deserve it. I pus—”

“Stop,” he says, eyes snapping open. Kaveh’s looking down at his lap, fingers picking at one of his cuticles. 

Alhaitham presses a soft hand on his, watches as Kaveh’s fingers flex. Gentle, they wrap around his own fingers. He’s warm. 

Alhaitham swallows, unreasonably nervous against the magnitude of his emotions. 

“Stop saying that, Kaveh. You know you do not—” a uncoordinated wave at the house, at them, at the empty bowls on the table, “you do not need to earn kindness.” 

Kaveh’s staring at his mouth as if it holds the secrets to the world. 

“I do this because I want to.” Alhaitham lets his eyes slide back shut. His voice is wet. “I do things because I care for you, Kaveh.”

“Why?”

The eternal question. Fortunately, Alhaitham has had more than enough time to parse the answer out for himself.

It feels like putting his heart in Kaveh’s hands when he says—

“Because you are you.” 

Kaveh’s fingers, still interlaced with his, pull a little bit. There’s an elasticized moment of tension where Alhaitham cannot bring himself to obey. 

“Open your eyes for me, Alhaitham.” 

Reluctantly, he does. Kaveh’s smiling, and the sight feels like a kick in the stomach. 

He’s leaned closer. Close enough that Alhaitham can see the flecks of brown in his eyes, incandescent in joy. 

He is made of gold, his Kaveh. 

“I do not know what I did to be on the receiving side of your mercy,” he murmurs, and Alhaitham feels the words imprint onto his skin. “But Alhaitham, I—”

There are moments when words are irrelevant.

This, perhaps, counts as one of them. 

The rest of Kaveh’s sentence is cut short as his nose brushes against Alhaitham, the wet part of his mouth an almost hungry thing. 

He smiles, murmurs something that sounds like a whined rendition of Alhaitham’s name, and presses his lips to his. 

It is not the fireworks that people describe, it is not the lurch of one’s stomach that feels ill. 

It simply feels like coming home. 

The taste of flowers shared between mouths, the huff of a laugh when Kaveh sinks delicate teeth into the plush of Alhaitham’s lips. 

Alhaitham grabs at his forearms, holds him at a distance. 

“Kaveh,” he says, earnest. Kaveh blinks, lips slightly swollen. “This isn’t a game. You have never been a game to me.” 

Alhaitham brings a hand up to card through his hair, dislodges a few clips that fall soundlessly onto the pillow. 

“You are everything,” he says, low. Kaveh closes his eyes, and Alhaitham traces the shape of them, presses thumbs to his eyelids. “You have never not been anything, to me.” 

His hands slip to the hollow of Kaveh’s cheeks, dip into the mole at the side of his mouth when he speaks. 

“I have always been yours, Alhaitham.” His mouth contorts into a smile. “It may have taken me long, too long, but— you’re the only person I would ever bare myself to.” 

Alhaitham thinks the sting high up in his nose is not normal. Kaveh continues speaking, cradles Alhaitham’s being in his hands with infinitesimal kindness. 

“I could never regret you.” 

And, well, Alhaitham is then hardpressed to pull Kaveh closer, closer, closer by the loops in his pants and lick at his mouth again. 

“I love you,” says Kaveh once they part again, staring at Alhaitham in rapturous wonder from where he lies above him. 

Alhaitham thinks he could hear that for the rest of his life and still ache for more. 

“I lov—”

Kaveh cuts him off, pressing himself down onto Alhaitham like a cat, limbs splayed out above him like a blanket. 

Alhaitham only tilts his nose into Kaveh’s hair, breathes in the smell of their kitchen, of their soap. 

The sight of a boy with pooris in his hands, with leek on his shoulder, with masala on his clothing and kohl on his face. Halva that sticks to the roof of his mouth, pudding that tastes like home in the hollow of his collarbone. 

“I love you.” 

Kaveh grins against his neck, and Alhaitham lets himself hug Kaveh just that much harder. 

This is real. They’re both real, and the pan, still sticky with pudding, lies unwashed in the sink. 

They lie together on the divan, hopelessly in love and pathetic as two teenagers.

Alhaitham does not expect things to be easy.

Being known as Alhaitham and Kaveh never invited anything simple. That is the beauty of them, Alhaitham thinks. Conflict is something integral to life, and they are made of it. Friendship built and reinforced by parting words, forged in steel by a key that Alhaitham dropped into his hand.

He does not think he would have it any other way—

For if it changed, Alhaitham would not get to have this. 

God , the rumor mill is going to have a field day. 

Yet Alhaitham thinks he doesn’t quite mind. Not when he has Kaveh tracing shapes on his forearm and talking incessantly into the soft skin of his neck. 

This feels right. 

Kaveh feels right— Kaveh feels like home.