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“Are you alright?”
Alhaitham stares down at the small sheet of paper in his hands. The penmanship is horrible; it was most likely written in a hurry, and the ink has been smudged where the sender had presumably rubbed their fingers onto the parchment while folding it.
Turning his head over his shoulder, he spots the most likely culprit, a Kshahrewar student one table over. Golden locks and bright ruby eyes, who gives him a polite smile and wave.
Paying him no heed, Alhaitham tosses the already-forgotten note aside with a roll of his eyes, and turns his attention back to the other Haravatat students he was sitting with, only to immediately zone out again once he realizes they are still bickering over the same problem Alhaitham has given his solution to — an hour ago.
Thwack. Another ball hits the back of his head. He’s already got a good guess as to who the perpetrator is, and while he doesn’t want to encourage him further he still picks up the note that bounced off his head and onto the table next to him. Out of boredom or curiosity, he’ll never know.
“You look lonely. Do you want a friend?” The note says, and at the end sits a little smiley face, as if to drive the point home.
No, he does not.If this hadn’t been a group assignment, Alhaitham wouldn’t have been here in the first place to begin with.
With a sigh, Alhaitham set the note aside. Still, he can still feel the blond’s gaze on him, and figuring he won’t go away unless dealt with, Alhaitham writes a note back. He quickly jots down the problem his fellow Haravatat students are dealing with, crumples it up into a ball without waiting for the ink to properly dry, and chucks it back at the Kshahrewar student.
It’s almost comical how the blond blinks down at the paper ball as it lands before him, almost as if he didn’t expect it, and Alhaitham watches him carefully unfold the paper, only to furrow his brows at the problem presented to him.
‘There we go.’ This way it’ll look like he is actually humoring him, and most likely after this, he’ll probably stop bothering him and will find some other poor student to annoy.
Alhaitham flinches at the slightly heavier ball of paper that bounces off of the ball of his neck a few minutes later. He turns his body and bends down over the chair he is sitting on in order to pick up the note, and in doing so, he catches a glimpse of the annoyance grinning a bright smile. Alhaitham has never been one to rejoice in others’ logical fallacies, but now he cannot wait to metaphorically tear whatever solution the other student has quite literally thrown at him.
He blinks down at the note. Somehow, by some miracle, the Kshahrewar student has gotten it right. At least, for the most part. There are a couple mistakes here and there, and a couple proofs that could’ve been done more optimally, but he’d gotten it down.
He takes his quill, and circles parts of the mystery blond’s answers, jotting down corrections and pointers before sending it back over his shoulder.
“I think you’re wrong.” Is his response scratched at the very bottom of the same note he’d written his proof on, mere seconds later. The other Haravatat students Alhaitham had come with have begun to notice the little game he was playing with this mysterious Kshahrewar student, and they give him odd glances. However, Alhaitham has never been one to particularly care, so he writes another note right back. “On what basis?”
“I’ll tell you if you come with me to Puspa Café. My name is Kaveh btw. What’s yours?”
“It’ll take a lot more than that to convince me. It’s Alhaitham.”
Alhaitham observes Kaveh gathering his belongings from the corner of his eye. The Ksharewar student takes a moment toa adjust the hat sitting atop his head, until he notices the other student’s gaze on him, and tilts his head to the side in a silent offer to leave with him
Well, anything this Kaveh might have to say is most likely more interesting than what the Haravatat students he is will ever tell him. Alhaitham drops Kaveh’s written proof onto the desk next to him for his classmates to find later on, and quickly gathers his things.
It turns out, after spending the rest of his day bickering in Puspa Café, Alhaitham had been right all along. Kaveh was just looking to bait him and Alhaitham had in fact not been wrong with his corrections. Despite being miffed at first, he eventually comes to the conclusion that he made the right choice in following Kaveh from Kshahrewar; he is without a doubt far more interesting than the Haravatat students could ever be.
* * * * * *
It becomes a routine.
Alhaitham will show up in the House of Daena, and sometimes — not always — this Kaveh will show up too. Some days they’ll be completely quiet, barely mumbling greetings or goodbyes to one another upon arriving or leaving, but most days they’ll be passing notes.
Kaveh will pass over a sketch to Alhaitham, asking for ideas, and Alhaitham would transcribe a passage for a book, asking for Kaveh’s thoughts on a specific point. Back and forth they go, and one day Alhaitham finds himself excited to visit the House of Daena — not so much for the books, but for the conversation he might have.
And sometimes they’ll end up at Puspa Café, either content with the notes passed throughout the day, or to continue their discussion. And for the first time since losing his grandmother, Alhaitham thinks he’s actually made a friend. It’s a rhythm he could settle in, he thinks. He likes this Kaveh quite a bit, and he’s grateful for the reprieve Kaveh gives him from the aching solitude that has plagued him his entire life.
* * * * * *
Alhaitham has never been one for poetry. Despite being a member of the Haravatat Darshan and spending most of his waking hours as an Akademiya student trying to decipher texts and symbols, the flowery prose and allegories of poetry never appealed to him.
But one day, as if a spell has been cast over him, he finds he’s unable to stop himself from reading whatever poetry he stumbles upon. He reads the author waxing on and on about their beloved, and he watches the author compare their lover to the moon and the stars and to delicate flowers and warm sunshine, and while Alhaitham still preferred other forms of literature, he can’t help but to think of the other man he spent so long passing notes to in the House of Daena.
“You look distracted,” the note says one day.
Alhaitham glances up from the sheet of paper before him to meet Kaveh’s worried eyes, and he looks down again, pulling out a fresh piece of paper from his bag.
He transcribes the poetry he’d just been reading; it is a short and sweet stanza where the poet likens their beloved to the moon with their radiance and beauty, and after a moment’s hesitation, adds a little note to the bottom of the page, before sliding it over to Kaveh.
“This reminds me of you.”
He watches the blond’s eyes move back and forth as he reads each line, and it’s almost comical how quickly Kaveh’s face burns a bright red when he presumably reaches the last line. Kaveh doesn’t respond to that. In fact, Alhaitham curiously watches him refold the note and tuck it into his robe’s pocket.
Kaveh is strangely quiet on their way back to their student housing. It’s late at night and no one is around, but that has never stopped Kaveh from prattling on and on before.
And no, Alhaitham does not like this. He’s gotten so used to Kaveh’s liveliness that he can’t help but to feel as if something is missing and terribly wrong when he’s quiet like this. So he prods him with his elbow in a silent request to speak up.
He almost thinks the nudge is lost on Kaveh before the blond looks up and at him, and Alhaitham is a little surprised to find those vermillion eyes swimming with a myriad of emotions he couldn’t begin to decipher.
“What…” Kaveh’s voice cracks, so he clears his throat and tries again, “what did you mean by that?”
“By what?”
“This!” Kaveh holds up a folded sheet of paper, one that Alhaitham instantly recognizes to be the poem that made the blond blush so deeply. Alhaitham gave an imperceptible shrug. “I said it reminded me of you.”
Kaveh’s cheeks burn bright pink again, visible even in the dim lighting. He breathes out a laugh, and it almost sounds like he’s coughing. “So, you think I’m radiant like the moon?”
“I suppose,” Alhaitham says simply. Because it’s true, and because he thinks of Kaveh whenever he reads something that would be considered ‘sweet’. Kaveh keeps staring at him though, mouth opening and closing again and again like a fish out of water.
Kaveh’s cheeks are practically glowing red in the dim lighting, and something about this visage — his senior standing in front of him, blushing like that, clearly at a total and utter loss for once and yet still beautiful enough to make the moon shining high appear quite dull — etches itself in Alhaitham’s mind for decades to come.
Kaveh laughs again, but it sounds more nervous than mirthful. Still, the smile he gives his junior is warm, and does something to Alhaitham’s chest. “That’s quite probably the worst confession I’ve ever received.”
It hadn’t been a confession, at least not intentionally. But Alhaitham doesn’t correct him. Not even when Kaveh leans in close and tentatively, almost gingerly, to press their lips together.
When he copied that love poem and passed it in over to Kaveh, this isn’t what he had intended. But as he closes his eyes and sinks into the sensation of his senior’s kiss, he can’t say this is the most unfortunate outcome either.
* * * * * *
Not much changes between them. They sit in the House of Daena and pass notes about this and that, but they’re now accompanied by stolen glances and soft blushes. No, nothing much changes between them at all.
Silences are filled by the scratch of a quill against parchment, detailing their newest idea, or now which hidden nook or cranny they should meet up to steal kisses, away from prying gazes.
Kaveh finds himself opening his sketchbook to profound poetry hidden between the pages, and more than once Alhaitham finds his bookmarks to be replaced by love poems. They pass notes to say what they wanted to say, but couldn’t quite vocalize — at least not yet. They’re young and shy and giddy with the prospect of finally finding what felt to be their soulmate, and it’s all so grand.
Until it’s not, and it’s over as soon as it begins.
It really starts so simply; a small annotation in the corner of their shared notes. A circle drawn around a paragraph in red ink, a harsh contrast against the pale parchment, and a little scribbled note underneath reading; “is excessively sympathetic towards ancient Deshretian civilizations.”
Beneath that, a little annotation appears a couple days later “It’s only realistic.”
“Hardly what I’d call realism.” Appears beneath that, squeezed within the margins at the bottom of the page.
“Why must you always be so cruel, Alhaitham?” Kaveh says, verbally, the next day. He looks hurt, almost as if he had been the one who was personally insulted. Alhaitham blinks up at him, genuinely surprised and miffed at the comment. “I’m not being cruel. You’re too idealistic.”
It’s amazing how fast it escalates.
One moment, Alhaitham is calmly explaining how he thinks Kaveh would do good to be less optimistic regarding other people, the next he’s digging his nails into the palm of his hand, trying his absolute best to stay cool and collected enough to make logical arguments. It ends with slammed doors and ad hominems, but surely they’re not over, right?
It doesn’t end with that argument, because perhaps the argument itself never ended.
Like a wound left untended, their relationship slowly festers in ways neither could’ve possibly imagined. Comfortable quiets were now tense silences, and it is almost as if everything is a trigger for their shouting matches to start up again.
Frustrated beyond belief at Kaveh’s insistence for not seeing things the way they were, Alhaitham speaks his mind on things he’s never spoken of, and crosses lines he maybe shouldn’t have.
Kaveh physically recoils, curling up in himself as if he’d been stabbed. Those crimson eyes that Alhaitham had grown to love so dearly turn into daggers, glaring at him with the intensity of a thousand suns.
Alhaitham cannot take his words back, and all he can do is watch Kaveh bleed. Not that he wants to take back his words. He’s stuck between a rock and a hard place, and he knows he’d choose his own beliefs over someone’s emotional well-being — even if said someone is Kaveh — every single time.
But it still aches, unbearably so, to hurt Kaveh like this.
It ends with a note placed carefully on top of a finished thesis,
“My apologies for being too cruel for you. -H”
Alhaitham later learns that Kaveh had torn the thesis in two, ripped the note to shreds and had cried until the letters of his lover’s note had bled into one angry black splotch.
* * * * * *
Years later he sees Kaveh again.
It was purely by chance; Alhaitham had been winding down at Lambad’s tavern after a long day at work, and a coworker that he isn’t on bad terms with approached him. After apologizing profusely for disturbing him, she asked if he wanted to join her and her friend for drinks.
Alhaitham was about to say no — after all, he isn’t the most sociable even on the best of days – until he spotted a familiar figure behind his coworker. Gold hair and crimson eyes, even in the dim lighting of the tavern and looking awfully uncomfortable; Kaveh stood out against the other tavern-goers by sheer radiance alone.
Alhaitham said yes.
Which brought him to now; the most awkward evening Alhaitham has the displeasure to experience in recent memory.
“Don’t you value your precious me-time above all else?” Kaveh drawls once they sit down at a table, his first words to him after so long.
“Oh, you two know each other?” Alhaitham’s coworker asks, curiously glancing between the two of them.
“We did, yes,” Alhaitham says briskly, ending the line of questioning there. No, the last thing he needs is for Kaveh to trip and fumble his way through anything he might not want to talk about. For whatever reason, the blond still looks a bit hurt though.
Kaveh does not know Alhaitham still keeps their notes and letters as mementos of their time together. Kaveh also does not know that Alhaitham has completely given up looking for another companion, because how could he ever hope to find someone who matched his senior? What Kaveh does know though is that Alhaitham, being Alhaitham, most likely hasn’t changed (he hasn’t), and that they ought not to talk to one another for too long, lest they fall back into their old habit of bickering over nothing.
It’s all very uncomfortable, but somehow Alhaitham does not want to leave.
On closer inspection, Kaveh does not seem to be doing very well. There’s a faint downturn to his lips; a sharp contrast to the ever-present smile that used to sit on his lips so effortlessly. Kaveh taps a finger against the table and shakes his leg like he does when he’s agitated. His eyes are sunken, and he looks like he hasn’t gotten a wink of sleep in weeks.
Kaveh isn’t the elated seeing Alhaitham for so long, sure, but something else was bothering him too.
Alhaitham waits until Kaveh and his friend are distracted by conversation once more before pulling a piece of paper out of his pack, and angling his arm so neither his friend nor Kaveh could see, he begins to write. It’s a gamble of sorts, but he’s not quite sure how to properly communicate with Kaveh by regular means, at least not with an outsider still there.
“Are you alright?”
Subtly, he reaches forward from beneath the table until his fingers graze the back of Kaveh’s hand. Kaveh turns his wrist to the side and slowly pulls the slip of paper out from between Alhaitham’s fingers, almost as if he was expecting it.
Alhaitham watches Kaveh discreetly look down, presumably at the unfolded note in his hands. A moment later he looks up into Alhaitham’s eyes, and there’s an almost imperceivable shake of his head.
“You could live with me,” Alhaitham says at the end of the night, long after his coworker had left and it was just the two of them. “I have a spare room.”
* * * * * *
At first, things were awkward.
Of course they would be; save for the tavern, the last time they had been in each other’s presence for more than twenty-or-so minutes, they had been screaming at each other with all the stops pulled. They can hardly talk to one another, and it’s quite uncomfortable all-around. At the very least, Kaveh seems to be doing everything in his power to avoid spending too much time with Alhaitham.
“I’ll find a place of my own in a couple weeks,” Kaveh says unprompted, more than once. “Then I’ll be out of your hair.”
Two weeks come and go, and Kaveh is still there. Instead, Alhaitham finds a small pouch filled with Mora placed on the center table on a rare morning that had Kaveh leaving before Alhaitham could even wake up. Atop the pouch sits a little note, written in Kaveh’s sub-par handwriting.
“Rent,” the note says. Alhaitham stared down at it.
‘Alright then.’
“Do the grocery shopping.” He writes down on a small slip of paper, and places it on Kaveh’s desk.
It’s not long until he gets to hear his senior’s thoughts on the matter through a brief confrontation in the living room while Alhaitham was relaxing for the evening.
“What’s this?” Kaveh snaps, holding up Alhaitham’s latest note. Alhaitham doesn’t even look up from the book he’s been reading. “Chores. If you’re going to be my roommate, you’re going to have to pitch in.”
Kaveh is quiet for a moment before walking away, grumbling ‘respect’ and ‘seniority’ under his breath.
The next day, Alhaitham finds the pantries full of food. In one of the cupboards, he finds a note requesting that he finally dusts the shelves in the living room.
They once again leave notes for each other, and it slowly becomes a routine.
“Clean the dishes when you’re back.”
“Make sure to lock the door.”
“Stop taking my keys.”
“Stop forgetting your keys.”
They’re a far cry from the romantic letters Alhaitham still keeps stashed away in his study as makeshift bookmarks, but every note makes him just as happy. And since what must have been a long time, Kaveh seems to be quite content as well.
* * * * * *
One night Alhaitham comes home to a curious, but not uncommon sight. He finds his senior collapsed onto the centermost divan in their living room — a dramatic sight — with one arm draped over his eyes, and another loosely holding onto what was an empty cup, drained of what was most likely the wine it once held.
He doesn’t stir, even with the ruckus Alhaitham makes when entering the room; his breathing is slow and even. Alhaitham spots a most-likely empty bottle of wine sitting next to his cup-wielding hand, and he’s left wondering what had made Kaveh want to finish the whole damn thing. He thinks hard, and after not being able to come up with any probable causes for whatever his senior’s source of emotional turmoil might be, he gives up, figuring Kaveh will tell him tomorrow morning if he wanted to.
The younger man walks over to Kaveh’s sleeping figure and takes a moment to admire him. Even when drunk to the point of passing out, he’s still beautiful enough for Alhaitham to think of paintings of deities and sculptures of angels. Exhaling, he crouches down next to the blond, and gently pries the cup out of his hand, and sets the bottle a safe distance away so neither of them might accidentally knock if over.
He places a hand on Kaveh’s shoulder, and gently shakes him until he hears a soft, unhappy groan come from his senior. Alhaitham can’t help but to notice how warm Kaveh’s hand is as he grabs it to wrap the blond’s arm around his neck. “Let’s get you to bed.”
Kaveh seems to mumble something as Alhaitham slowly pulls him to his feet, and together they shuffle in the direction of the older man’s bedroom. Alhaitham gently puts him down, chuckling softly at how Kaveh seems to sigh as his head reaches the pillow. He makes no move of protest when Alhaitham lifts his legs up by the ankles, placing them up on the mattress.
Alhaitham places a glass of water onto Kaveh’s bedside table, and a bucket next to his bed right by where his head might be if he suddenly needs to use it. The rest, Kaveh can do himself in the morning.
With one last glance, Alhaitham leaves Kaveh’s bedroom. Time to clean up his senior’s mess.
Alhaitham vows to make sure he lets Kaveh know that he had to clean up after him — especially with how much the older man insists on how Alhaitham only seems to worsen the state of the house — but Alhaitham figures they’d both be happier in the morning if there were no traces of Kaveh’s drunken mess.
He bends down to pick up the discarded bottle and accompanying chalice when his eyes fall onto the mess on the coffee table next to him, sheets of parchments scattered across it. He wouldn’t have cared normally, and he’d have organized them into a neat pile for Kaveh to deal with the following morning, but it’s his own familiar handwriting that catches his eye. It makes him put down the cup and bottle again and pause.
Alhaitham feels his heart begin to race as he recognizes the aged letters that had begun to yellow near their edges. Ah, Kaveh has found his letters that Alhaitham had stashed away. Admittedly, he hadn’t hidden them very well; it was only a matter of time before Kaveh would have found them, so he isn’t surprised. But that doesn’t keep his hands from shaking when he picks up a random letter tossed onto the table.
The younger man has never been one for sentimentality, but at the same time, he could never quite bring himself to discard the mementos. He doesn’t need reminders of simpler times and happier days, having Kaveh around is more than enough for that, and yet, there’s still a sort of bitter nostalgia of knowing that there was once a time where he was allowed to openly express his affection.
He wonders how Kaveh feels about this; how he feels about Alhaitham still keeping relics of their time together, and a moment later he gets his answer. There’s a small square of parchment he notices sitting next to the scattered pile of letters, and before he even reads the words, Alhaitham recognizes the familiar shape of Kaveh’s scratchy, cramped handwriting. It’s new; the ink is still somewhat fresh; the letters glisten ever-so-slightly in the dim lighting of their house.
He reads Kaveh’s new note once, twice, thrice — before he finally sets the letter where he’d found it. With a quiet sigh, Alhaitham sits down onto the divan where Kaveh had been lying moments prior. Something new, yet awfully familiar flutters in his chest, and he cannot tear his eyes away from Kaveh’s latest note.
Tomorrow, they’ll discuss this further. They’re not the children they once were, and maybe — just maybe — things might work out this time around.
Alhaitham takes some of the empty parchment and the forgotten quill, dipping it in just enough ink to write what he needs, before shuffling back to Kaveh’s bedside.
Beside him, just shy from the glass of water Alhaitham prays Kaveh won’t spill in his drunken stupor, he begins to scribble down a new note, a line he hopes to write again many times more from here on out.
“I love you too.”