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It’s a familiar scene:
Kaveh’s father, his body being swallowed whole by the gaping maw of the desert, staring at him with blood-red eyes. Eyes that are blown wide, scared, accusative, and he can hear his father’s hoarse voice in his head: why did you have me come, son?
Kaveh can never seem to reach him in time. Whenever he regains control of his shock-frozen limbs, it’s too late: his father is gone. The sands leave nothing behind, nothing to fill a coffin with. They’d buried an empty box, because his father had already been returned to the earth from which he came.
When Kaveh looks up from the iron red soil of the desert, it’s only to meet his mother’s rusty-red eyes, vacant and cold on the day of the burial. She was always sensitive, his father would tell him, even during their days at the Akademiya. She was an artist, first and foremost, always creating.
She has not created, has barely even spoken, since the news came. Her hands spasm at her side, empty, as she drags her dull eyes away from Kaveh’s young face to stare at the coffin, made of karmaphala wood. That coffin is the closest physical manifestation of her agony. It is her heart, to be buried in the earth, alongside her husband.
No matter what Kaveh does, he cannot get through to her. He cannot comfort her in any meaningful way. What comfort would she want from him, anyway? She didn’t want him to go. It was Kaveh who encouraged his father. It was Kaveh who sent him to his death in the desert. It was Kaveh who had his father’s blood on his hands.
Kaveh rises from his seat next to his mother. Mechanically, he approaches the coffin, and places his hand on the cold lacquered wood. Something in him compels him to open the lid, to take a look. Maybe something of his father’s does indeed remain?
But when he opens the coffin, it’s dark. The kind of dark to swallow Kaveh whole, to envelop and devour him, like the sand that suffocated his father. Somewhere in the darkness, Kaveh can see a pair of ruby-red eyes. They rapidly approach him in the darkness, their proximity making Kaveh feel trapped, helpless. It’s his father’s eyes. His father’s eyes, in the hollows of his shriveled up corpse. His expression is one of permanent anguish, stuck in time as the sand takes him. His voice invades Kaveh’s mind, agonized and inescapable, demanding witness. Kaveh cannot free himself from it, even as he thrashes desperately in the darkness. The more he struggles, the louder his father’s pleas—demands—get.
Why did you have me go, son?! Son, why would you kill me? Son, son, son!
—
Kaveh jolts upright from his bed. He’s hyperventilating. The ghost of a scream lingers on his lips, parted with his panicked exhales. A part of his mind, distanced from his body, notes that he sounds like a wild animal.
“You’re awake.”
Kaveh whips his head in the direction of the voice. Fighting to regain control over his limbs, he shakily leans over to brighten the dim lantern next to his bed– the room is far too dark.
Al-Haitham waits as he gathers his scattered wits, watching as he shifts to sit on the edge of his bed, head in his hands. He says nothing, but Kaveh can still feel his eyes on the side of his skull. It feels too familiar. It’s nauseating.
Son, son, son!
“Could you stop staring at me like I’m some– some kind of creature on exhibit?!” Kaveh snaps, nerves shot from his memory-nightmare-dream. He hears Al-Haitham snort a soft exhale through his nose.
“It’s more like watching a crazed fungus,” he notes dryly, before moving further into Kaveh’s room, seating himself across Kaveh’s bed at his desk chair. Kaveh’s leg bounces as he mindlessly strokes a hand over his braid. He still can’t make eye contact with Al-Haitham. Yet, he speaks, throat clicking.
“Did I wake you?”
“With your wild cries, I’d be surprised if you didn't wake up everyone on our block.” At this, Kaveh’s indignation causes him to lock eyes with Al-Haitham, glaring at the other man.
Al-Haitham’s eyes are a slightly desaturated teal blue, almost blue-grey, with a diamond of amber around golden yellow pupils. Kaveh has always found them particularly fascinating, so unnaturally geometrical and yet so natural on his face. Kaveh also finds them reliable; after having known him for so long, Kaveh can track the minute shifts in how Al-Haitham moves his eyes, the different ways in which they glint under different lights, and almost like a Rtawahist scholar studying the movement of the stars, Kaveh can piece together the meaning in those eyes. To anyone else, Al-Haitham’s eyes would be blank and emotionless. To Kaveh, they are the window to Al-Haitham’s soul.
To his relief, Al-Haitham’s eyes do not trigger the same claustrophobic pressure in Kaveh that the eyes in his memory-nightmare-dream had. Al-Haitham is watching him carefully, as though Kaveh is a cryptic riddle he found out in the desert, or some newfound script that he wishes to deconstruct and learn from the inside out. Methodical, like everything else he does in his life. Kaveh can sense no pity in Al-Haitham’s eyes, and perhaps that’s why he opens up.
“I dreamt of him again,” Kaveh confesses.
“Of whom?”
“Who else, Haitham?” Kaveh can’t help but sound exasperated as he’s forced to elaborate. “I dreamt of my father, o glorious Acting Grand Sage.”
Al-Haitham cringes almost imperceptibly at the usage of his current title. Again, a mannerism only Kaveh is calibrated to pick up and decipher. No one else would have been able to catch it.
“And what did he say to you this time?”
“Oh, just the same things he always does. Asked me why I sent him to his death. How I could have killed him.”
“Kaveh…” Al-Haitham begins, uncharacteristically careful with his choice of words for his roommate, “you do realize that you were not responsible for his accident, right?”
Kaveh looks away from Al-Haitham. He stares at the quiet flame of his lantern, instead. “I was the one who encouraged him to go. My mother didn’t think it was a good idea, but I told him, ‘father, when else might you have a chance like this? Win for us! You can do it!’ And he listened to me, and he left, and I never saw him again. Did you know, Haitham, that all they could find of him was a single shoe? The only reason why mother was able to identify it was because she helped design those shoes for him, custom-made. They had her signature inside. We buried that shoe, Haitham. Nothing else.”
Belatedly, he registers that Al-Haitham’s moved from his desk to the edge of the bed, next to him. Kaveh only realizes that he’s crying when he feels Al-Haitham’s pen-calloused fingers under his eyes, gingerly wiping his tears away. His warm hands cup Kaveh's face delicately, as though he is a particularly precious and fragile artifact that Al-Haitham is loath to break.
“No, I did not know that. In the past, you’ve shared that you and your mother buried an empty coffin. Additionally, the Akademiya records regarding the accident contain nothing about a shoe,” Al-Haitham says, voice unbearably gentle.
His tenderness, his soft touch, his logic, it all incenses Kaveh.
He shoves Al-Haitham’s hands off his face, rubbing his own eyes harshly as he does his best to respond without breaking out into angry sobs.
“Well, I’m sorry that my memory cannot compare to one of your fancy Akademiya books on the death of my father. We can’t all be perfect like you, Acting Grand Sage.” Kaveh spits venomously. He knows he’s being petty. The ugliest parts of him revel in the familiarity of this bitter pettiness on his tongue. Al-Haitham simply sighs, lowering his hands back to his lap.
“You’re drawing illogical conclusions from what I said. You know that’s not what I meant.”
“Then what else could you have meant?” Kaveh glares at the other man incredulously. “Was that supposed to be reassuring?!”
Al-Haitham’s face closes off, his displeasure evident in the cold glint of his eyes. On his lap, his bare hands curl into fists. Some part of Kaveh—some deep, base part—wishes for him to lash out at him, to show something. To give Kaveh the punishment he deserves, for all that he’s done.
But nothing happens. Al-Haitham releases his fists. As he stands from the bed, he smooths down his sleeping pants, soft and sheer, made of silk from Liyue. Kaveh watches him like a hawk, desperately tracking his every move, eyes wide and undoubtably bloodshot.
“It seems that I am only upsetting you by trying to reason with you. If you wish to wallow in your own misery, I won’t stop you. But don’t expect me to join you.” Al-Haitham turns his back on Kaveh, approaching the door of his room.
Please don’t leave me, a small voice in Kaveh’s head immediately pleads. Al-Haitham stands still at the doorway for a moment, hand on the doorknob, as if waiting for Kaveh to express his true desires.
(He just wants to be held, is all. He just wants someone to touch him, to confirm he’s alive, that he’s not a ghost of himself. He wants to feel a warmth that isn’t scalding like the desert sun. He doesn’t want to be alone. Please don’t leave me alone.)
Seconds pass in silence, agonizing in their slow pace, and Al-Haitham’s shoulders drop, nearly imperceptible. Kaveh is, and has always been, a stubborn and prideful fool, and Al-Haitham has never spared him from his thoughts on the uselessness of Kaveh’s stubborn pride in the past.
But tonight, he just lets the sound of the door closing as he leaves speak for him. Somehow, it hurts even more than anything he could have said as he left.
Kaveh stares at his door for who-knows-however many more moments, frozen in place. He can’t tell whether or not he’s crying again. Numbly, he lowers himself onto his bed, grabs one of his pillows, and wraps himself around it: the crescent moon, made man. He leaves his lantern on as he closes his eyes, miserably hoping to get perhaps just a few more moments of sleep.
In the morning, he will create something beautiful out of his pain, something with lots of light. He’ll make something with many windows, a glass cage of his own design. He won’t think about how such a space wouldn’t allow him a place in which to hide. He won't think about how it would leave all of his weaknesses out on display for all to see, for all to stare.
He won’t think about how no one else has Al-Haitham’s eyes. He won’t recall how Al-Haitham waited for him silently at the doorway.
In the morning, all will be washed away by the rising sun. Kaveh simply needs to keep his eyes closed and wait long enough for the dawn to reach him.