Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

Alhaitham locked the door to his office at 4:45PM. 

He had done this since his very first day as the Akademiya’s Scribe, and he would continue to do this for as long as he held the position, barring any future coups or other such frivolous interruptions. 

His work hours technically ended at five, and he was not interested in anything that held him past his work day. Locking the door early gave him an excuse to avoid scholars trying to slip their way into his office at 4:59 for a “quick chat” that held him past the end of his work day for whatever inconsequential query they deemed important enough to be brought to his attention– usually a question about an application whose instructions were, Alhaitham thought, quite clear. It was not in his job description to teach scholars basic reading comprehension, after all.

However, this routine was rarely respected. So it was no surprise to Alhaitham when, around 4:50, somebody began knocking on the door. Alhaitham eyed the door, making sure he had remembered to engage the lock, and continued shuffling papers into the (very large) pile of rejected forms, with the occasional form being tucked neatly into the folder of approved applications destined for the desks of the respective Darshans’ Sages. 

Still, the knocking continued. It grew more insistent, in fact. Alhaitham frowned. 

It wouldn’t be the first time some scholar missed a submission deadline and deluded themselves into thinking that they could fix their careless mistake by cornering the Scribe and cajoling him into taking the form and filing it. Not that the routine of it made the disruption any less annoying.

The knocking grew to a banging, then, and a familiar voice called through the door.

“Alhaitham? Alhaitham, if you’re in this office, I swear–”

Alhaitham pulled the door open, lithely stepping out of the way of the incoming fist of the General Mahamatra. Cyno blinked in surprise before rearranging his face into its neutral expression he used while carrying out official business. Without the spots of red high on his cheekbones, Alhaitham could almost convince himself that Cyno was visiting him out of a collegiate obligation. 

“What.” 

Cyno rubbed at his face with his hands, seeming to gather his thoughts. If Alhaitham were a more generous man, he might offer Cyno the comfortable seat that sat, rarely used, in front of his desk. He did not. 

“Are you finished for the day?” Cyno asked. 

Alhaitham’s gaze flickered to the clock on the wall. “In approximately… four minutes, yes.” He crossed his arms, observing the shorter man. “Why?”

“Come with me,” Cyno said instead of answering Alhaitham’s perfectly reasonable question. He turned on his heel and started down the hall without even bothering to look back and check if Alhaitham was, in fact, coming with him. Alhaitham considered not following him, but his curiosity eventually won over his desire to go home and relax for the evening, and he caught up quickly with Cyno’s hurried pace, falling into step beside him.

“Explain,” Alhaitham said. Cyno didn’t respond as he led them through the House of Daena and out the front doors of the Akademiya, with scholars scattering before them the whole way. It was only as they began the winding path downwards, towards the roots of the Divine Tree, that Cyno finally gave him a response.

“Some of the Matra that were patrolling the path between Sumeru City and Gandharva Ville reported finding an unconscious civilian on the path,” Cyno began. He made a sharp right, heading toward the city entrance. Alhaitham eyed his home for a moment, torn between his curiosity and sharp regret over his decision to follow Cyno.

“And how is this of consequence to me?”

Cyno huffed. “If you’d let me finish, I’d tell you.” They were nearing the outskirts of the city, the areas where fruit and vegetables grew firm and sweet. 

“Then finish.”

Alhaitham could feel Cyno rolling his eyes, even though he couldn't see the other’s face. “The report from the messenger they sent ahead was that the victim was a younger man with blond hair and a red cloak.”

Alhaitham ignored the uneasy feeling in his gut with an ease born from years and years of practice. “You think it might be Kaveh.”

“I do.”

Alhaitham sighed. “I’m sure it is. Knowing Kaveh, he stuck his nose into something he should have left well enough alone and received his due consequence.” 

Because Kaveh didn’t know how to just leave things be. 

Because Kaveh couldn’t see something he perceived as an injustice without immediately stepping in to help. 

Because Kaveh didn’t have an ounce of self-preservation in his body when weighed against his desire to help others.

It was foolish. Alhaitham couldn’t wait to remind Kaveh of that fact.

Still, the uneasiness didn’t fade. In fact, as Cyno turned to the left to approach Bimarstan, Alhaitham swallowed to fight back the oddly discomforted feeling that had settled in his chest.

Cyno approached the nearest doctor, an older-looking woman with dark brown hair gone silvery at her temples, and began discussing something in low tones. Alhaitham eyed the few beds currently in use, but none of them were occupied by his roommate, and so he gave them no more mind. Instead, he stood at the entrance, facing down the path out of the city. Whoever the Matra had discovered, whether it was Kaveh or not, would be brought along this path. 

The chances of this random person being Kaveh, of all people, were slim. Alhaitham knew this. There were plenty of blond people in Teyvat, and red was not exactly an uncommon clothing color. Frankly, it was ridiculous that Cyno had retrieved Alhaitham from the Akademiya before even verifying who was about to arrive at Bimarstan. There was no proof that this person would be Kaveh other than two vague descriptors that could apply to a quarter of Teyvat. 

And yet, a part of Alhaitham could understand Cyno's concern. 

Because on the other side of the scales lay the truth of experience. It had been less than a month since the near loss of their Archon at the hands of the Fatui and the corrupted Sages. Cyno had stood by and watched, powerless, as Tighnari had been hurt, as Alhaitham had gambled everything on a plan that was never guaranteed to succeed. Cyno, who secured the foundation of his identity on justice and a pledge to protect, had only been able to stand aside as an observer in the end.

They had nearly lost their nation and themselves to complacency and comfort.

It made sense that Cyno would still be on edge when it came to the people he cared about. 

Alhaitham could understand the strange disquiet that rocked those close to the situation– the worry that the things they held close may be snatched away if they took their eyes off of them for long enough. 

Cyno must have finished speaking with the doctor, because the woman quickly hurried away to prepare a bed tucked into the far corner of the space. As Alhaitham watched, the woman began pulling vials and bandages from a nearby cupboard. The sheets were turned down, empty and ready for the body that would soon occupy the space. Alhaitham turned back toward the path rather than watch. 

The sound of footsteps heralded Cyno’s approach, and together they stood sentinel to whatever was about to arrive.

“Why am I here, Cyno?” Alhaitham asked again. Cyno exhaled slowly, not taking his eyes off the horizon. 

“If it is Kaveh,” he finally began, “then he has no family in Sumeru.”

Alhaitham nodded once to indicate he was listening, though he had an uncomfortable idea of where the conversation was heading.

“In cases like this, where a victim doesn’t have any relatives, precedent indicates that a victim’s next of kin should be identified by the Matra.”

“And you’ve chosen me.” Alhaitham pondered that thought for a moment, mulling it over in his mind. “Why? Kaveh and I are barely acquaintances.”

A truth, stated plainly, but also a lie. Like Kaveh, a contradiction tied in pretty ribbon and offered to the world, as if a sacrifice. Because what were they, if not acquaintances? They were not friends, nor colleagues. Family was too bold and enemies too contrite. 

Cyno offered him a strange look, half-exasperation and half-fondness. "Who else would you have me choose, then? Acquaintance is still a stronger connection than any other Kaveh might have here.”

Alhaitham hummed. Unfortunately, Cyno was right. Despite how known Kaveh was within the city, Alhaitham couldn’t think of a single person he could consider Kaveh close to. Tighnari, perhaps, but the Forest Watcher was all the way in Gandharva Ville, and would likely not enjoy having to upend his chosen life in the forest to make medical decisions for Kaveh in Sumeru City anyway. Cyno, as General Mahamatra, simply could not guarantee that he would be in the city for any reasonable length of time.

Which left Alhaitham. 

In the distance, Alhaitham could faintly see the swaying form of a Sumpter Beast approaching the gates. Based on the people in Matra uniforms leading the beast, it was easy enough to conclude what burden it might be carrying. 

Alhaitham pushed off from the fence post he had leaned against and followed behind Cyno as he approached the incoming party. Perhaps Alhaitham would be lucky and the Matra would be escorting another blond-haired man with a red cape and awful luck. Perhaps Alhaitham would be able to head home before the sun fully managed to set.

So of course, it was Kaveh on the beast’s back. 

One of the doctors brought over a stretcher and Alhaitham watched as the Matra lowered his limp body to the ground. When they picked up the stretcher, one of his arms hung off the side of it, bouncing with the motion of the two people carrying him. A third carried Mehrak, deactivated and still, in her arms. They laid him out with as much delicacy as they could on the newly unmade bed before stepping to the side so that the doctor and nurses could surround the bed and begin checking for any immediately pressing wounds. Cyno eyed the waiting Matra.

“Go,” Alhaitham said. “They clearly have something to say to you.”

Cyno nodded and stepped away to join them, voices low. Alhaitham watched them for a moment before taking the waiting seat beside Kaveh’s bed, out of the way of the doctors but still close enough to hear them quietly discussing their findings.

“–What could have caused this,” the doctor said. Her fingers were pressed against Kaveh’s neck as she leaned over the prone figure, an ear over his mouth to listen to his breathing. “His pulse is normal, if a bit fast for a resting state. Breathing is unlabored and regular. No agonal gasping.” She counted beats for a few moments more before gently prying open an eyelid. Alhaitham suppressed a shiver of revulsion at the sight of Kaveh’s normally vibrant carmine eyes as they slowly looked from left to right and back, clearly not seeing anything. It was so wrong , the way Kaveh laid still beneath the doctor’s touch. When the doctor released his eyelid, it shut with no fluttering or shifting. Kaveh didn’t stir.

“Eye movement is bilateral and regular,” the doctor noted. A nearby nurse was jotting down notes on a clipboard as she spoke. “No voluntary eye movements.”

On and on the list went. No external wounds other than a few superficial scratches. No remnants to suggest poison from either plant or animal. No traces of elemental energy– this one Alhaitham double-checked with his own Vision, even though the doctor had used a handheld device to gather the data in the first place. 

Cyno rejoined Alhaitham after dismissing the Matra. He held Mehrak in his arms, cradled against his chest. One hand came to rest delicately on Alhaitham’s shoulder in a gesture of solidarity. Alhaitham wasn’t the kind of person to seek out physical contact from others, but he recognized that Cyno was discomforted by the normally-vivacious figure laying lifeless and too small on the sterile looking bed, so he permitted it. 

Finally, the doctor sent the attending staff off with a wave of her hands and turned to the two waiting men.

“General Mahamata,” she said with a nod toward Cyno, who acknowledged it with a similar gesture. “Is this the next of kin?” She glanced at Alhaitham. Recognition sparked in her eyes, but she said nothing. If there was one thing that could be relied on in this new Sumeru, it was the discretion of the medical professionals of Bimarstan. 

“Yes,” Cyno said. “He has accepted the responsibility.”

He debated arguing for a moment, reminding Cyno that he had done no such thing. And yet, he had stayed, had he not? Here he remained, at the bedside of this strange, vexing man. 

Cyno's words wore patterns into his brain. Who else would you have me choose?

Alhaitham stood from the rough wooden chair. On his feet, he stood a few inches taller than the woman, but she didn’t look intimidated in the least. 

“You are Scribe Alhaitham, correct?” she asked.

“I am.”

“Good, then we’ll be able to find you easily if you’re needed,” she said. She retrieved the clipboard from the small side table next to Kaveh’s bed and began writing in the blank space at the top. “I just have some questions for you about your…”  

“My roommate.” Because really, how could Alhaitham define their relationship in one word for a doctor to write on a medical record? Cyno coughed. Alhaitham leveled him with a glare for a moment before turning back to the doctor, who was very purposefully keeping her eyes on the sheet in front of her. 

“Roommate, then. Can you help fill in some medical history?”

Alhaitham, as it turned out, could. He told her about Kaveh’s allergies, about the three broken ribs and a concussion Kaveh had sustained by falling off of some scaffolding when he was younger, about the way the joints in his wrists would ache when the weather turned too cool. He told her about everything he could think of that might affect Kaveh medically, with the doctor taking notes the whole time. Finally, with her eyes and attention still mostly focused on the wealth of new information presented to her, she dismissed Alhaitham with a promise to send a report to his home or his office if anything changed in Kaveh's condition. 

“Kaveh will be fine,” Cyno said as he and Alhaitham left Birmastan, turning back toward the main part of the city. Alhaitham raised an eyebrow.

“Yes, I’m aware.” 

Cyno sighed and shook his head. “You know, it’s alright to be worried.”

“I know.”

Cyno eyed him as he held Mehrak out for Alhaitham to take. Alhaitham could feel the weight of his gaze as he took Mehrak by its handle, but ignored it. What he said was true– he understood that there was nothing wrong with the uneasiness that he carried. He also understood that the doctors at Bimarstan were exceptionally good at what they did. Knowing his… knowing Kaveh, it was likely that he had simply passed out from exhaustion while on his way back from meeting a client in Vimara Village, or perhaps he had once more picked a fight with somebody he would have been better off leaving alone. 

Alhaitham wouldn’t be surprised if he woke tomorrow morning to Kaveh making too much noise in his kitchen, cooking breakfast for the two of them as he complained about the doctor who now knew that he was stuck living with Alhaitham.

He carried that thought through his evening routine. It wasn’t the first time that Kaveh had gotten himself into problems. How often had Alhaitham himself carried the older man home, or supported him with an arm slung over his shoulder as they fumbled their way back through the city? Alhaitham had lost count months ago.

So he went about his evening with as much normalcy as he could muster. He docked Mehrak on its charging port in Kaveh’s room. He made himself something to eat. He spent some time on the divan reading a recent acquisition of poetry from Inazuma. And when he went to bed that evening, he did with only the faintest wisps of anxiety still twisting, low and aching, in his chest. 

Alhaitham woke suddenly in the darkness of his room. Normally, he woke with relative comfort to the sunlight streaming in through the open window, or the sound of Kaveh finally going to sleep for the night (morning?), or to the hustle and bustle of the city getting ready for another day.

He sat up slowly, vision fuzzy, and rubbed at his eyes as he listened for what might have woken him. For a moment, the room was silent, and then–

A knock at the door. Gentle, but clearly audible. Alhaitham slipped out of his bed and pulled his discarded shirt back over his head before summoning his weapon. He doubted any intruder would be kind enough to knock on his bedroom door, but he also wasn’t going to risk such an assumption proving incorrect.

But as he approached the door, a familiar voice called out through the wood.

“ Habibi, are you awake?”

Alhaitham froze, his hand halfway to the doorknob before slowly withdrawing. Habibi ? Nobody in his life called him that. Especially not–

The door slowly opened, and there, silhouetted against the moonlight filling their foyer area, was Kaveh. 

“I see you are,” he murmured, taking a step forward (into Alhaitham’s room? He never entered Alhaitham’s room, not unless he absolutely had to and he complained every second of it.) and gently nudging the door closed behind him. “I’m sorry, did I wake you?”

Alhaitham nodded. He dismissed his sword, leaving him bare-handed and barefoot. It was discomforting, to be sure, but not the weirdest thing he had ever dreamed. Kaveh seemed to feature in more and more of Alhaitham’s dreams, lately, always with this soft silhouette of light, with gentleness on his tongue and at his fingertips.

Kaveh lit the lantern near the door, casting a warm glow over the room. Alhaitham squinted against the new light as Kaveh came closer to him. He was still fully dressed, Alhaitham noted, down to the white shoes on his feet and the cloak over his shoulders. If Alhaitham didn’t know better, it was as though Kaveh had simply been out at Lambad’s for the evening and was coming home to rest. 

“What time is it?” Alhaitham asked. The discomfort from earlier was back, settling like a weight in his chest. (Which made no sense. Wasn’t Kaveh here in front of him, looking perfectly healthy and unaffected by whatever had felled him only hours earlier?)

“A few hours past midnight,” Kaveh said. He kept coming closer. When he finally stopped, it was with bare inches between the two of them, so much closer than Kaveh had been to him in the years that had passed between them like grains of sand. The golden light of the lamp washed out Kaveh’s eyes. They appeared almost the color of a sunset, with the reds softened to a gentle pink. 

“Why are you in my room, Kaveh?” Alhaitham asked. Kaveh’s hand came up between them, resting delicately on Alhaitham’s warming cheek.

“I just wanted to see you, habibi .” Kaveh replied, and this definitely had to be a dream because since when had Kaveh ever spoken to him with such softness in his voice? When had Kaveh ever used such sweet words to him? Alhaitham brought his hand up, resting his palm against the rough curve of the back of Kaveh’s hand. 

“So badly that you woke me when I have work in–” Alhaitham checked the clock hung on the far wall, “–five hours?”

Kaveh’s soft smile shifted, becoming a little sharper, a little more wicked. 

“Perhaps I just couldn’t wait to have you.”

Kaveh moved closer, his thigh settling between Alhaitham’s legs and pressing against him. His free arm came to settle low on Alhaitham’s hips, nails digging sharp points into the thin sliver of skin below the hem of Alhaitham’s shirt. Alhaitham inhaled sharply, the bite of nails in skin crashing down on him like a stone.

Even in Alhaitham’s dreams, Kaveh never hurts him. Nothing the older man can do in his dreams affects Alhaitham like this, to the point where it feels almost–

Real.

Alhaitham stepped back sharply, putting space between himself and Kaveh, who was frowning at him now.

“What’s wrong, habibi ?” Kaveh asked. 

“You’re not well, Kaveh,” Alhaitham replied. “We should go back to Bimarstan–”

“No!" Kaveh nearly yelled, the voice echoing strangely in the quiet room. The silence that returned after Kaveh’s outburst was deafening.

“No,” he repeated. “I feel fine. I don’t want to go back. I don’t need to go back.” He stepped closer again, those starlight-pink eyes flickering oddly. “I just need you.”

“You’re speaking nonsense,” Alhaitham said, taking another step back. “It’s late. You should be asleep.”

Kaveh’s eyes darted down to Alhaitham’s mouth in a motion that felt obscene, despite absolutely nothing else accompanying it. Alhaitham could feel a flush creeping across his cheeks, one he tried desperately to ignore. Kaveh only smirked and filled the space Alhaitham had just vacated in a sinewy movement that felt almost predatory.

“I’m not speaking nonsense,” Kaveh murmured. His voice was lowered, now, rough with something Alhaitham might almost call need. “I want you.” And that smile was back, dangerous in its promise. “And I think you want me too.” His gaze shifted down again, lower this time, and the blush on Alhaitham’s face darkened.  The tips of his ears burned.

“Stop,” Alhaitham said. His voice shivered in the quiet, but he ignored it. “Kaveh, it's late. I’m tired. I have work in the morning.”

Never mind that a small, quiet part of Alhaitham was begging for him to stop talking, to let Kaveh have whatever it was that he seemed to want so desperately. It would be cruel to take advantage of Kaveh when he was so recently recovered. But was it taking advantage of Kaveh, when he himself had taken the first step? 

Kaveh considered his words for a moment, then sighed. 

“Fine,” he finally conceded, in a tone so normal that Alhaitham might have just forbid him from buying something superfluous with Alhaitham’s mora or reminded him that he needed to sleep and not just work all day and night. Alhaitham couldn’t help but relax, regardless of the little bubble of disappointment in his chest.

Then Kaveh started toeing off his shoes, setting them neatly by Alhaitham’s boots at the door, and Alhaitham felt that anxious energy from earlier come creeping back in.

“What are you doing?” Alhaitham asked. Kaveh smiled as his fingers nimbly undid the clasp at his throat, allowing the cloak over his shoulders to fall and pool at his feet. He didn’t bend to pick it up, something that Alhaitham categorized with a strange sense of worry.

“Getting ready for bed, of course.”

“Is your room not good enough to change in?”

Kaveh huffed a soft laugh as he unclasped his earrings. He set them gently on Alhaitham’s small desk, as though they belonged there, as though he belonged here, in Alhaitham’s room, in Alhaitham’s space.

“Why would I go back to the guest room?” he asked. His hands went to the hem of his shirt and Alhaitham barely managed to avert his eyes. The soft sound of fabric was unmistakable. He wished desperately for the noise-canceling feature of his headphones. “I’m going to stay here, after all.”

Alhaitham sighed, exhaustion warring with anxiety. Something was very wrong if Kaveh was inviting himself into Alhaitham's space and choosing to stay there. He should insist on taking him back to the doctor, perhaps have him checked for a concussion. And yet, the late hour was inescapable as Alhaitham considered the long and exhausting process of forcing Kaveh to redress himself before dragging him down the path to Bimarstan. 

Kaveh was mobile, and lucid, and alive. Surely letting him stay the night before returning him to the medical professionals wouldn't cause too much damage. Besides, by allowing Kaveh to stay in his room, Alhaitham would be able to keep an eye on Kaveh, make sure he didn't hurt himself or stay up late working when he should be recovering from whatever happened to him during his travels.

Nevermind that it felt even more like taking advantage of the situation. It was late and exhaustion had settled like a fog, making his thinking slow and difficult. He had never done well with a lack of sleep.

"Fine," Alhaitham finally replied. "But you stay on your half of the bed."

Alhaitham could hear the smile in Kaveh's voice as he turned off the lamp, allowing the room to return to its original darkness. Alhaitham waited while Kaveh shifted, listening to the rustle of bedsheets until the room finally stilled once more. Then–

"Aren't you going to join me, eshgham ?"

Alhaitham bit back a disgruntled huff at the term of endearment. Clearly, whatever was wrong with Kaveh was very, very wrong. So as Alhaitham settled into bed, firmly tucking the blankets between them, he silently resolved to wake up early enough to stop by Bimarstan before he headed to the Akademiya. It would be a little out of his way, sure, but the hassle was worth it when compared to the exhausting possibility that Kaveh would continue to interrupt his sleep schedule with… well, whatever this was. 

When Alhaitham woke the next morning, it was to the discomforting sensation of arms around his chest and warm breath against his neck. Carefully, doing his best to not wake the sleeping architect that had twisted around him like an invasive vine during the night, he peeled the arms off of his skin and slipped out of the bed. Kaveh made a soft whining sound and shifted, nuzzling his face into the pillow beneath him. Alhaitham watched him for a moment, making sure that he was asleep and intended to stay that way, before collecting his clothes from the wardrobe and leaving the room. The door clicked softly shut behind him.

In the bathroom, Alhaitham made eye contact with his reflection in the mirror mounted above the sink– the one Kaveh had bought to replace the small sinktop mirror that had more than sufficed for Alhaitham. Frosted geometric designs outlined the beveled edges. It was a very Kaveh choice of decor, one Alhaitham had made snide comments about even as he paid for it.

Alhaitham did not hurry through his morning routine, despite the uneasiness that had stuck to his skin like viscous tree sap since he had first watched the Matra lower Kaveh’s body onto that medical bed. Kaveh was safe in Alhaitham’s bed, now, and what a thought that was for Alhaitham to be having at seven in the morning. Still, something about the strange way Kaveh’s eyes had glittered last night, the way his calloused hand had cradled Alhaitham’s jaw, convinced Alhaitham to skip his morning coffee in favor of heading to Bimarstan. He’d simply get a cup from the Akademiya kitchens once he got to work.

(Alhaitham purposefully dismissed the memory of Kaveh’s voice, low and wanting, calling out to Alhaitham with soft words and softer smiles. It clashed so roughly against the Kaveh that Alhaitham knew, the one who would rather peel his fingernails back one by one than admit he lived in Alhaitham’s home, that it almost felt like a different person had crawled into Alhaitham’s bed.)

As he clasped his teal cloak over his shoulder, he eyed the closed door behind which Kaveh still slumbered. The feeling of Kaveh’s hands on his skin remained, phantom sensations at best. With a low sigh, Alhaitham took his key from the dish near the door and fit his earpieces snugly over his ears as he headed out the door.

The sun was barely peeking over the horizon, coloring the sky golden as Alhaitham followed the path past the Akademiya and down toward Bimarstan. 

“Scribe Alhaitham,” a doctor called when he approached. This one was different from the older woman who had helped the evening before. He was younger, with sandy brown hair in messy curls. 

“Yes?”

“We were just about to send for you,” the doctor said. He gestured for Alhaitham to follow him before turning away to walk toward the more protected beds in the back. Alhaitham followed.

“You see, we have some theories about what happened to your, ah, roommate,” the doctor continued, but Alhaitham was barely listening to what the man said.

Because there, lying beneath bleached-white sheets, was Kaveh, his chest rising and falling in gentle, even breaths.

Chapter Text

Alhaitham unlocked the door to his office promptly at eight thirty with a mechanical movement based entirely in his years of repetition. His mind was racing as he tried to make sense of what he had learned during his visit to Bimarstan.

Kaveh was unconscious, possibly in a coma. He showed no signs of reaction to any external stimuli. They’d run a couple of tests throughout the night, but as far as the doctors were concerned, there was no immediately discernible reason for why Kaveh was still unconscious. 

Alhaitham had done his best to listen attentively to the information the doctor was providing him– the plan for care, the intravenous diet they intended to put Kaveh on to keep his body sustained. But his attention was scattered, divided between the figure lying unmoving on the bed before him and the body he had peeled off of himself that morning.

He had sent for Cyno immediately upon his arrival to the Akademiya, stressing the emergency nature of the summons. He could only hope that the General Mahamatra would respond swiftly.

Ahaitham sat behind his desk and put his head in his hands.

“What have you gotten yourself into this time?” he sighed to the empty room.

“What has who gotten into?” a soft, high voice asked.

Alhaitham looked up to see Nahida entering his office. What had once been as impossible to Alhaitham as snow in the jungle was now becoming a near-daily occurrence, with Nahida coming down from the Sanctuary of Surasthana regularly to check in on the Akademiya and, more importantly, see some of the people she now considered friends.

Personally, calling Nahida a friend felt dismissive and diminutive, but Alhaitham couldn’t deny that he enjoyed his chances to speak frankly with the archon, and so he did not begrudge her the time he gave her. At least the time he spent discussing things with Nahida never felt wasted, unlike many of the fruitless conversations he partook in with Akademiya scholars. 

“Nothing you need to be concerned with, Lord Kusanali.”

Nahida tilted her head. With her wide, shining eyes, she reminded Alhaitham of the inquisitive children in the Bazaar who would point at his earpieces as he passed or loudly ask their parents embarrassing but insightful questions about the world they inhabited. It was curiosity at its purest, untainted by ideas like politeness. 

“I would disagree,” she said as she stepped into the room. The soft sound of chimes followed her steps as she made her way around the desk to stand beside him. “The concerns of the people of Sumeru should be my main concern, don’t you think?” Her hand came up to rest over her heart in a gesture full of compassion.

It reminded Alhaitham of something, but he swallowed the feeling down. 

“Still, my roommate’s problems are not something you need to deal with, Lord Kusanali,” Alhaitham said. He began gathering the papers waiting for Nahida’s personal review.

“Perhaps I’ll start listening to your advice when you remember to call me Nahida,” she replied with a sparkle in her eye. “Besides, I'm quite interested in meeting this roommate you're always talking about."

"I don't talk about Kaveh," Alhaitham said, but Nahida paid him no mind. 

"Now, please tell me what's going on."

Alhaitham eyed her for a moment, weighing his options. He could restate his desire for Nahida to leave the topic alone. He was relatively sure that Nahida would respect his request. The doctors of Bimarstan were well-educated professionals. To involve a god at this point seemed unnecessary and overreactive. Kaveh's habit of finding himself terrible situations to get involved with was vast, but surely he was still smart enough to not put himself in irreversible danger. 

Right?

Alhaitham sighed, his shoulders slumping in defeat, before standing from his desk. He ignored the victorious shine in his archon's eyes as he picked up his office key and headed toward the door, but the telltale chime of her steps told him all that he needed to know.

Together, the pair headed out of the Akademiya and toward Bimarstan, only stopping once at the building's entrance to inform the Matra standing guard that they should redirect Cyno to Bimarstan if they saw him. As they walked, Alhaitham explained the basics of what had happened over the last day, skipping over the strangeness of Kaveh crawling into his bed. By the time they were approaching the building, Nahida was lost in thought. 

"Scribe Alhaitham," the sandy-haired doctor from the morning greeted them as they approached. Their eyes drifted down and widened as they took in Nahida standing casually by Alhaitham's side. "A-and Lord Kusanali! It's an honor, truly, I–"

"We're here to see Kaveh," Alhaitham said, cutting off the man's stuttering before it became embarrassing for everybody involved. The man nodded, seeming stunned, and stepped aside for the two of them to enter and approach Kaveh's bedside.

Nahida hummed softly to herself as she leaned closer, studying Kaveh's figure. After a moment, she made an odd gesture with her fingers, as though she was creating a square with their shape. Dendro energy pulsed between her fingertips as she held the shape up for a long moment before releasing the elemental energy. Alhaitham watched as it scattered, vanishing into Kaveh's skin as if it had never been.

"Interesting," Nahida said. She held out a hand and gathered more Dendro energy into a sphere in her tiny palm before holding it steady above Kaveh's chest, near his heart.

The sound of rapidly approaching footsteps signaled someone's arrival, and a quick glance behind him informed Alhaitham that it was Cyno. 

"What's the emergency?" He asked without preamble as he stopped alongside Alhaitham. Together, the two men watched as Nahida dismissed the ball of Dendro and nodded to herself.

"Strange, but not unheard of," Nahida concluded. She turned to Alhaitham, offering him a kind smile. "Tell me, Alhaitham. Have you ever broken a porcelain plate before?"

Alhaitham eyed the archon before him for a long moment, unsure where this new strange metaphor might be going and what it had to do with Kaveh lying prone between them. "I have."

"Oh, good. You'll understand then." Using those thin lines of Dendro that Nahida frequently used for her own entertainment, she created the image of a plate before them. "Kaveh is a lot like this plate, you see. He was whole–"

"Wait," Cyno interrupted. " Was ?"

"Well, sort of. You see, something must have happened on his trip back and, just like dropping a plate…" Nahida manipulated the thin strings and, before Alhaitham's eyes, the plate shattered into tiny, reflective pieces. A hard weight felt like it had been lodged in his chest.

"So now what?" Cyno didn't normally get loud, but the edge in his voice was so sharp he might as well be yelling. "We sweep him up and throw him away? That’s it?"

"Of course not!" Nahida looked offended by the very suggestion. "See, if the pieces of the plate are whole enough, and the breaks are clean, you can gather up the pieces and glue them together again."

The tiny plate pieces shivered in midair for a moment before, like time flowing backwards, the plate began to reform itself. Soon, the plate was shimmering and whole once more.

"So you're saying Kaveh… shattered?" Alhaitham said slowly, staring at the plate and the tiny, hairline cracks that ran through the image. 

"Precisely." Nahida seemed proud that they both understood, like the news hadn't settled like acid in Alhaitham's throat. 

"And where are the pieces, then?" Cyno asked. "How do we find pieces of a human soul?"

"Don't worry," Nahida said. She made purposeful eye contact with Alhaitham, like she was waiting for him to make some sort of connection, and– 

Oh.

Of course.

"One of them is in my home," Alhaitham said calmly, as though this was common knowledge and not something he had figured out about five seconds prior. 

Cyno turned on him, then, and Alhaitham was once again reminded that for others, the General Mahamatra was quite the intimidating presence. Not for him, of course, but others.

"I summoned you, did I not?" Alhaitham asked before focusing again on Nahida. "How do we, as you put it, 'glue him back together' then?"

Nahida put a finger to her chin in thought. "I'm not sure," she finally said. "The records of this condition that I can access from here are all varied. They seem to indicate that the solution lies in the parts themselves, rather than any external factor."

Alhaitham crossed his arms. "So the parts will just naturally put themselves together again?"

"There are records of it, yes."

"Excellent. Then this is no longer my problem."

"But," Nahida continued before Alhaitham could walk away, "there are also records of there being no solution."

"Solution to what?" Cyno asked.

"Why, themselves, of course." Nahida smiled up at them and dismissed the illusion of the plate, letting its afterimage fade away. "They are shattered parts of a whole person. Think of all the parts that might create a person you care for. Their hopes and their sorrows." Nahida tilted her head back and stared up at the leaves of the Divine Tree swaying above them. "Each part becomes its own person, just for a time. But they are only a piece of the original person, without any of the restraints and checks that humans rely on to make it through their day." 

When she looked back at them, her eyes were so bright they almost seemed to glow. "Imagine a scholar's curiosity, completely untethered from any other desire. What might they do with nothing to hold them down? No desire for relaxation, no fear of danger? What might a bird do without gravity calling them back to earth once more?"

Alhaitham thought again of the Kaveh of last night, the one whose eyes shimmered with pink starlight, the one who cradled his jaw and called him sweet names. What fragment of Kaveh was that, then, that he so willingly stripped himself bare and sought out Alhaitham's heat in the dark?

"So we need to find the parts of Kaveh and convince them to return to the whole," Cyno said, pulling Alhaitham from his thoughts. "Is that what you're saying?"

"Precisely!" The smile on Nahida’s face was wide and childlike. 

Alhaitham bit back an annoyed huff.

Well, at least he had an idea of where to start. 

"Alhaitham," Nahida called as he turned to leave. He made a sound that Nahida must have taken as acknowledgement. "You should take a few days off."

He turned back. Despite his best efforts, Nahida's eyes remained difficult to read. Finally, he sighed. "Why?"

“Well, if one of the fragments sought you out, it reasons that others might do the same,” Nahida said. Her hand came up and formed a fist over her heart. “It might cause problems for Kaveh in the future if his fragments get into trouble at the Akademiya looking for you, don’t you think?”

Alhaitham crossed his arms. Only Kaveh could destroy his routine without even being conscious to do so. Then again, who was Alhaitham to refuse a vacation offered by his Archon? If he was lucky, he would spend the week at home catching up on his reading and the fragments would come to him– or even better, deal with the problem themselves without involving him. (Though with Kaveh’s own habit of involving Alhaitham in his business even if he didn’t want to be involved, Alhaitham doubted that his fragments would be any more respectful.) 

“Very well,” Alhaitham finally said. “I’ll return home.”

“Good,” Nahida replied. From the way she smiled, it was clear that she knew more than she was willing to share. But Alhaitham was smarter than wasting his time and energy trying to convince Nahida to share whatever piece of information she was withholding from him. 

“I’ll inform the Matra to be alert for any sign of Kaveh,” Cyno said. He turned to Alhaitham, his face set in a thin line. “We’ll deal with this.”

Why did Cyno feel the need to repeatedly reassure Alhaitham that things would work out? 

Alhaitham nodded anyway. It wasn’t worth the discussion that would ensue if he asked Cyno about his new habit, and he needed to return to his home and deal with the fractured fragment of Kaveh currently taking up space in his bedroom.

Still, uneasiness settled itself into Alhaitham’s chest as he left Bimarstan. What could Kaveh have possibly gotten himself involved in to cause this? The discomfort followed him home, biting at his heels like a dog desperate for attention. 

Logically, Alhaitham understood that this problem would work itself out regardless of his interference. Nahida meant well, but all of her knowledge was but a feather on a scale compared to Alhaitham’s knowledge of Kaveh as a person. Kaveh, who had taken blow after blow to his pride, to his reputation, to his heart, would not let something as small and inconsequential as this destroy him. He had too much to do, too many plans that required his calculating eye and deft hands. Kaveh would pull himself together– of this, Alhaitham was sure.

And yet, the more pressing questions remained. What had caused the split in the first place?

More importantly, what parts of Kaveh had been torn from the whole and thrown into the world? If Alhaitham followed the familiar path to Lambad’s tonight, would he encounter a shredded fragment of Kaveh at one of the tables there? Would it be Kaveh’s creativity, set to tearing the building apart only to piece it back together in his image? Or would Alhaitham encounter that grey piece of him, the one that hung around his shoulders like fog, like rain, like seagrass twisted around your ankle when the water’s silty bottom is too far away to see from the surface?

Alhaitham considered the idea, right there in the road beneath the swaying shadows of the Divine Tree, weighing his options. Truly, Nahida had all but offered him a free vacation. Alhaitham had plenty of his own work to catch up on; he had recently received a copy of some runes the Traveler had discovered on a collection of steles half-buried in the desert sand. He could spend his vacation working through those inscriptions and still have some time to spare for gentler pleasures, for sleeping in late and drinking his coffee with leisure before the morning sun shifted from comfortably warm to stifling. 

But the memory of that strange fragment of Kaveh, the one that pressed his bare stomach along the sharp curve of Alhaitham’s spine, the one that cradled his jawline in an artist’s callused hands and called him gentle names in a voice too sweet with wanting to be familiar, would not leave Alhaitham alone. 

Perhaps that was exactly what Nahida had expected. The way she had smiled at him, her eyes shining with something unfamiliar, seemed to suggest that she perhaps carried more knowledge of the situation than she had shared. Alhaitham resisted the urge to sigh as he pulled his key from his belt pouch.

There was nothing he could do about it now. He was involved whether he wanted to be or not. And as much as he might pretend otherwise, there was something about the situation that had captured Alhaitham’s curiosity. 

And that meant he would see things through to the end.

It was with that thought that he pushed the door to his home open, already planning his next steps. Kaveh was nothing if not predictable– at least, he was for Alhaitham, who knew him in every way that mattered, in nearly every way a man could know another. Removing the question of his emotions arguably made the puzzle easier. Kaveh was like an elaborate woven rug. On the surface, the pattern was so intricately interwoven that it seemed almost impossible to pick one thread from the whole. 

But with enough time, enough attention, enough care, the path of a single golden thread was as recognizable as a name, as familiar as home. After knowing each other for as long as they had, Alhaitham could trace a thought to its conclusion before Kaveh had even registered he’d had it– just as Kaveh could do for Alhaitham. Nobody else in Sumeru knew Alhaitham the way Kaveh did– not even their archon.

And yet, the sight of Kaveh on his divan set all of those thoughts tumbling. 

“Kaveh?” Alhaitham asked. Kaveh looked up from his hands, which he had been fidgeting with in his lap. His eyes were wide and watery, the color of the night’s sky on a clear evening. 

Kaveh sniffled. It was a sound Alhaitham was familiar with. How many times had Alhaitham watched as Kaveh pushed his body to the brink of exhaustion and past it like a star streaking across the evening sky? How many nights had Alhaitham quietly helped Kaveh put the pieces of himself back together when the weight of the world threatened to crush him to dust? 

But those moments were meant for the dark of night, when a veil of stars softened their words and shadowed the emotions in their eyes. To see Kaveh showing such vulnerability in the glowing afternoon light set Alhaitham’s teeth on edge. 

Wrong , his brain spat. Wrong, wrong.

“Ah-alhaitham.” The word was half-swallowed by a sob. Kaveh clumsily wiped his tears away, smearing the kohl around his eyes. The white sleeves of his shirt were stained with smudges of dark kohl and tears as he wrapped his arms around his stomach. His eyelashes were clumped with wetness and his cheeks were red and puffy. 

He looked pathetic. Alhaitham had seen Kaveh in all kinds of situations, but he couldn’t remember a time where he had seen the man looking quite this… wrecked.  Not even the night he had found him, three-quarters to gone at the bottom of a bottle of wine.

“I–” Kaveh began before a hiccup cut him off. A hand came up to cover his mouth, like the gesture would hide the way he struggled to breathe. Alhaitham crossed his arms, waiting for the fragment on his couch to gather itself enough to speak.

This piece was different from the one from that morning– this much was obvious. The change in eye color was nothing compared to the drastic change in personality. If each copy was one fragment of Kaveh, then what part was currently taking up space in their home? 

“Yes?” Alhaitham asked. He eyed his closed bedroom door across the room. Was the other Kaveh still asleep behind it, still waiting for him to return?

How many of them were there?

Kaveh stood from the divan, catching Alhaitham’s attention again. He fidgeted with the loose edge of his cloak. With the way his shoulders curved inwards, like the sagging roof of long-abandoned ruins, he looked strangely fragile. 

“I… I missed you,” Kaveh finally breathed, soft as feather down, barely a whisper of air between lips bitten raw. 

What?

Alhaitham had no response to a statement like that, and so he chose to stay silent. Kaveh seemed to take this as an invitation as he rounded the low table between them. Those soft, ocean-blue eyes carried such a strange sense of wrongness. They were too soft, too unfamiliar to be set in such a familiar face. 

“I came looking for you,” Kaveh continued, “the moment I woke up. But you weren’t here.” He sniffled again, rubbing away another tear from the tracks down his cheeks. “You’d already left. You left early. You never leave early.”

Alhaitham frowned. Since when had Kaveh cared about his life’s routine? Besides, he was pretty sure that Kaveh was asleep in the mornings when Alhaitham left for the day. 

Just how much of its words were the truth? Did these pieces of Kaveh hold the same memories as their original? How far back did the memories reach? Where did they end? Could they understand the emotions tied to those memories, or did they feel distant, like looking through glass? 

“I had a personal errand to attend to,” Alhaitham said, rather than asking any of the questions that sat heavy on the tip of his tongue. 

The press of fingers to his wrist was enough to ground Alhaitham to the moment, to the copy now standing uncomfortably close and gripping onto him like he might vanish into smoke if he released him.

“It’s okay,” Kaveh said, all soft words and softer smiles. “You’re back now.”

Alhaitham moved to pull his wrist away, but Kaveh’s grip tightened. There was a shine in his eyes, a wideness that made him look a little frantic. Alhaitham wished he would take a step back. Having him so close was making it difficult to focus on anything but the way his chest rose and fell with his breaths, too fast to pretend at calmness. 

“You’re staying, right?” Kaveh asked. “You’re supposed to be at work now, but you’re here. You’re not leaving again.” 

His tone was final. He tugged, pulling Alhaitham toward the couch, but Alhaitham stood firm. Kaveh turned back to him, the expression on his face shifting to something anxious, something fragile and thin as the first layer of ice in the winter. 

“You’re… not leaving. Right?”

Alhaitham’s plan hadn’t been to leave, of course. He had intended to check on the Kaveh from the night before or, barring that, at least start planning what he would do to deal with the current problem. Tackling this situation without a plan in place was truly asking for disaster, and Alhaitham didn’t particularly want to waste his time on half-formed plans and ineffective attempts. And yet, here Kaveh was, looking at him like he might burst into tears if Alhaitham told him that yes, he did intend to leave. 

Nahida had indicated that the shattered fragments would return on their own. But how? What triggered their reunion with the whole?

Did they even know that they were fragmented in the first place?

Kaveh’s grip heated around his wrist like a brand the longer Alhaitham hesitated on answering the question, his gaze becoming more and more intense. Whatever piece of Kaveh this was, it was clearly not pleased with the idea of Alhaitham going somewhere other than their home. 

“I have one more errand to run,” Alhaitham said. Kaveh frowned. 

“It can’t wait? You just got home…”

“I fail to see how my plans for the day affect you.”

And normally, this is where Kaveh would huff, raise his voice and his hands to make sure that Alhaitham understood just how wrong he was. It’s only polite to tell your roommate when you’ll be back! Kaveh might say, his eyes shimmering with annoyance, his mouth set into a pout that he would deny under threat of death. But I suppose even common courtesy is beneath you, isn’t it?

But he didn’t say anything like that. Instead, he frowned.

“Of course your plans affect me,” Kaveh said, like his words weren’t a shock, like the mere fact of his confession wasn’t enough to set Alhaitham’s entire world off kilter, a little to the left, shining and strange and discomforting. Who was this Kaveh, who would so easily say these things as though Alhaitham hadn’t spent the years of their conjoined lives trying to get Kaveh to understand the exact same idea in reverse?

“Yes, well,” Alhaitham said, hoping the small shiver in his tone was only obvious to him. Judging by the way the Kaveh in front of him sighed, his frown morphing into a gentle smile like the dawn as it first crested the horizon, his hopes were misplaced at best.

“I can come with you,” Kaveh offered. Alhaitham tried to pull his wrist from Kaveh’s grip once more, but Kaveh only stepped closer, until they were breathing each other’s air in a way Alhaitham was acutely aware of, despite how he was trying to ignore it. 

And normally, Alhaitham would refuse, but nothing about right now was normal, and so Alhaitham could only feel relief as he pretended to consider the offer. A plan was falling into place before his eyes, offered to him in an artist’s scarred palm. Of course he would accept. Alhaitham had the feeling that, whatever piece of Kaveh this was, it did not want to be left alone. It wouldn’t be hard to find a reason to walk them toward Bimarstan. From there, Alhaitham could only trust Nahida and hope that whatever thing was going to happen that would return the piece to the fragmented whole would happen without much extra trouble. 

It rankled, the fact that he couldn’t plan for what came after. Maybe it would be simple, like sinking into his soft bed after a long day. They were parts of each other, after all. It wouldn’t be unreasonable to assume that they would fit together naturally.

Somehow, though, Alhaitham suspected that it wouldn’t be so simple. 

“Do what you’d like,” Alhaitham said, suspecting that this Kaveh would take it as the invitation it was meant to be rather than the rejection Kaveh normally would. He decisively ignored the way that thought made his stomach twist.

He was becoming very practiced at dismissing his reactions to this whole situation. Idly, as Kaveh bustled about putting on his shoes and checking his hair and makeup in the tiny mirror hung by the door, Alhaitham wondered if he should be worried about that fact.

A problem for later, he supposed.

Kaveh stayed close beside him as they began the walk toward Bimarstan. Alhaitham eyed the man walking beside him, identical in every way to the Kaveh in his memory.

“Aren’t you curious where we’re going?” he finally asked when his own curiosity could handle the silence no longer. Really, Alhaitham had a list as long as a freshman thesis full of questions he wanted to ask the fragment. What was it like? Was he aware? Did he know?

What had happened?

(Alhaitham should get some kind of award for keeping the questions to himself, honestly. Though he also acknowledged that there was a strange kind of excitement thrumming under his skin at the idea of learning these new things all on his own, using only his powers of observation.)

“Mmm, not really,” Kaveh replied. Alhaitham bit back the response ready on his tongue, once more off-kilter by how different this Kaveh was to the real one. 

“You would just follow me blindly?” The derision in his voice was difficult to mask.

Kaveh frowned, his hands returning to fidget with the edge of his cloak. The fabric would begin fraying if he kept this up— I wonder if the clothes are real? Do they vanish when the fragment returns, or will they crumple into a heap where it once stood? –  but Alhaitham kept his thoughts to himself. 

“Of course I would,” Kaveh answered after a beat of silence. “I don’t want to be…”

Alhaitham stopped walking. They were approaching Bimarstan now, close enough that they could hear the telltale sounds of doctors working, of patients being treated and medicines being mixed. Kaveh froze, eyes wide as he stared directly at the bed where Alhaitham knew the real Kaveh was resting. 

“Why are we here?” Kaveh asked. He fixed Alhaitham with a stare that was suddenly full of distrust. The edge of his cloak fell loose from his fingers to flutter at his sides.

“I need to speak with the doctor on duty about something.”

“Liar,” he hissed. His eyes, suddenly as dark as a storm-tossed sea, were filling with tears, fat and hot as they streaked lines down his skin once more. “You’re trying to get rid of me.”

Alhaitham exhaled, heavy through his nose. That answers that question. “So you know.”

Kaveh laughed through a hiccuped sob. “Of course we know, how could we not? We are him.” He took a step back. 

“But I won’t go back!” he yelled. Tears were spilling freely now, falling from his jaw to leave damp splotches on cream fabric. “He hates me, and I hate it! I won’t go back, I won’t!”

Alhaitham realized what was about to happen only a second too late. He stepped forward, trying to grab its wrist, but he was just too slow.  Kaveh turned his back and sprinted down the path, leaving only the sound of his cries behind, ringing in Alhaitham’s ears like an aftershock, like the bitter aftertaste of burned coffee gone cold.

This was going to be far harder than Alhaitham had hoped.

Chapter Text

In the end, Alhaitham wasn’t surprised by the fact that he was unable to find the vanished fragment of Kaveh. He had always been good at making himself scarce when Alhaitham most wanted to speak to him. It was a skill Kaveh had maintained since they were both students, though it had often been others that Kaveh was hiding from. Even now, with adulthood settled firmly on their shoulders, Kaveh would not be found if he didn’t wish to be. 

So instead of wasting his time chasing after the long-gone fragment, Alhaitham turned his back on the city and made his way back up the path to the Akademiya. Nahida had seemed to indicate that there were records on this phenomenon. Perhaps one of the texts in the House of Daena would provide him some insight. If nothing else, the quiet of the House would provide Alhaitham with a space to be and a chance to breathe and plan. If any other fragments came looking for him, they would either assume he was still at work and make their way to the Akademiya or they would go home to wait for him there. A private corner, tucked away enough to be difficult to spot from the main path but close enough to his office that he would be able to spot the familiar head of silky blond in the crowd, was the best place for him for now. 

The House of Daena was busy, with scholars taking up many of the tables with stacks of textbooks and scraps of parchment. Alhaitham walked the shelves, pulling the occasional text from its place. Most of them, he flipped through for only a few moments to review the abstract before replacing it on its shelf. A select few were tucked under his arm to be carried to the nearest empty table. 

The immediate problem was that nobody seemed to know what had happened . The only person who might possibly know was Kaveh, and he and his pieces didn’t seem like they were willing to share any time soon. 

Alhaitham fought back the desire to grit his teeth as he returned another book to the shelf. 

WIthout a more specific idea of what had happened, his research would likely not bear much fruit. He could hypothesize all he wanted, but it wouldn’t make any difference without more information about what had caused the strange division of personalities. And yet, Alhaitham could not imagine a way to gather more information that did not involve at least a little bit of research.

It was a miserable place to be, one Alhaitham did not miss from his student days when professors would set impossible, confusing translations as though it would teach them a truth about life, rather than simply frustrate a class full of students. 

He carried his too-few stack of books to an empty table near the hallway that led to his office and dropped them on the worn surface. The first text, a dusty volume bound in Spantamad red, seemed the most promising. So Alhaitham settled himself in the chair beside the desk and flipped open Studies on the Effects of Exposure to Ley-Line Energy Overflow in Relation to Elementalist Theories of Development .

Every desk came equipped with a supply of Akademiya-issued paper and a few quills for scholars who were in too much of a hurry to bring their own materials. Kaveh had frequently helped himself to the supplies when they had both been students, often working through the entire stack at a workstation and necessitating a trip to a different desk to pilfer theirs as well. Alhaitham pulled a sheet from the top of the pile and smoothed it flat. He dipped the nib of the quill into the nearby ink pot.

This was just another question, another inquiry he was following. It was not the first time he had tackled a topic that felt insurmountable. 

Still, it was hard to ignore the mounting frustration that crawled under his skin like ants, itching and threatening Alhaitham with– something . He didn’t know quite what that something was, but he couldn’t deny that he was wound tight by the position he found himself in now. 

But Alhaitham, and Alhaitham alone, was master of himself. He breathed, slow and purposeful, focusing on the smell of wet ink and old books, and he began to read. 

As Alhaitham worked his way through the stack of books, it became more and more clear to him that his earlier assessment of the situation was likely accurate. Whatever disaster had befallen Kaveh on his travels, Alhaitham would not find the solution sitting prettily in a book. At least, not without more information.

He closed Analysis of Fungal Spores Exposed to Burgeon Reactions and Their Effects on Human Biology with a dull thud and set it on top of the pile of finished books. His palms pressed into his eyes, sending silvery-purple sparks dancing across the backs of his eyelids, before he stood from the table and collected the stack to reshelve them. His unfortunately short list of theories went into a pocket, neatly folded. 

Nahida knew more than she was letting on. Alhaitham had worked alongside her for long enough now to know the look that found a home in her eyes when she knew something, but wanted the other party to figure it out on their own. There was something more going on than a simple coma. Ley lines seemed like a possibility worth exploring, but Alhaitham could not picture a path forward in such an exploration that didn’t involve either an incredible amount of luck on his part or the assistance of their Archon. Really, it would be far easier for Alhaitham to throw his hands up and declare the problem unfixable, a question beyond his understanding, and simply hope that Kaveh’s stubbornness stepped up to solve the problem itself.

But that would require Alhaitham to let go of the mystery before him.

Alhaitham returned the stack of books to a waiting return cart as he planned his next stop. 

He could make his way up to the Sanctuary of Surathana and see if Nahida would give him further information. It was a longshot, but there was a possibility Nahida might have forgotten to tell him something vital.

He could go home. Mehrak would have been with Kaveh when this had happened, after all. Maybe there was some information inside Mehrak or within its storied memory that could shed some light on the situation. 

Or… he could go visit Kaveh. Maybe there was something on his person that would give Alhaitham a path to walk, a direction to follow. 

Alhaitham considered his options for a long moment, weighing their possibilities of success, before sighing and turning toward the atrium of the building. 

It looked like a visit to Bimarstan was in order.

The sun was settling low in the cradle of the sky when Alhaitham sat in the empty chair beside Kaveh’s bed. The older man lay still and unmoving beneath the bleached white covers. Someone had clearly cleaned and redressed Kaveh since Alhaitham had visited in the morning. His clothes were neatly folded on the low table beside the bed, and Kaveh’s shoulders, where they were visible above the thin blankets, were covered instead by a loose-fitted beige fabric that Alhaitham assumed was a sort of nightgown provided by the Bimarstan for patients. 

Was it only Alhaitham’s imagination that Kaveh’s hair was already beginning to look matted and brittle? Was it a trick of the light that Kaveh’s skin looked that sallow?

What kind of clues did Alhaitham expect to find here, anyway? The nurses had bathed Kaveh as well as they could, so any environmental evidence was likely already gone.

The path toward the truth seemed covered in twisted brambles, twined tightly enough that not even light could peek through the gaps.

Slowly, almost aimlessly, Alhaitham shifted his chair closer to Kaveh’s bedside, until he could rest his elbows on the firm mattress. This close, he could hear the soft sound of Kaveh breathing, see the rise and fall of his chest beneath the fabric of the blankets.

And oh, Alhaitham wished he could reach into the darkness of his ribs and rip out the aching, burning something within him. Because this wasn’t what Kaveh was supposed to look like. Kaveh, all brightness and rough-hewn vitality. Kaveh, who had carved out a place for himself in the world with blood and pulsing anger only to line the edges in velvet and silk. 

Alhaitham had once called it selfish. Kaveh, who tore out pieces of himself to hand to any passersby. Kaveh, who fractured his light only to place it into the palms of people who would discard it the moment it grew too heavy, the instant it burned their hands. 

Alhaitham stood by the assessment. How could he not, when he alone remained as witness and recorder when the shine had faded and Kaveh was left in the shadows of his own making? 

His hand found Kaveh’s through the blanket, curling with gentle hesitation over the sharpness of Kaveh’s knuckles that could be felt even through the thin fabric. 

“Alhaitham.”

Alhaitham withdrew his hand as though the blanket had been electrified. He could feel the telltale heat of embarrassment in his ears, but he kept his face carefully neutral as he turned. 

“Kaveh.”

Kaveh fidgeted under his gaze. Alhaitham stood from his bedside seat. The discomfort of being watched by this approximation of the man lying beneath the blankets beside him slithered ice-cold down his throat.

The Kaveh that stood before him had eyes as orange as the sun just before it vanished beneath the horizon. As with the other two mimicries, he was otherwise identical.

The figure stared past him at the body on the bed. Alhaitham had to fight back the desire to step between them.

“You know,” this Kaveh said, “he would be miserable to see you sitting here like this.”

The figure brought a hand to his lips, teeth a flash of white as he dug into the edges of his fingertips, biting away the skin of his cuticles. It was such a uniquely Kaveh action that it made Alhaitham’s chest ache, just a little, like a bruise he hadn’t realized was there. 

“I’m… we’re always making things worse for you, aren’t we?”

Alhaitham opened his mouth– to argue? To refute his point?– and promptly closed it. What was he supposed to say? What words could he offer to the hollow man before him?

Kaveh smiled a tight, resigned sort of smile. Alhaitham wished, as he had before, that he could peel back the layers of Kaveh and pick him apart, the way he did with a book, with a text awaiting translation or interpretation. Those things had solutions, even when they were buried beneath a coating of dirt and time. But Kaveh, the Kaveh of inscrutable gemstone eyes, the Light of the Kshahrewar, the man setting himself on fire to guide the oblivious and the ungrateful? Kaveh could be as clear as glass or as murky as untreated ore. 

Sometimes, Alhaitham wondered if even Kaveh himself understood the reasons behind his reactions.

“If that’s how you wish to interpret it,” Alhaitham said instead. Kaveh had never once let Alhaitham’s words sway him from his beliefs, and this particular one seemed to run as deep within him as magma beneath the surface of the world. 

Kaveh sighed. He held his hands out, palms up, between them as though the lines and calluses on his hands belonged to him. As though he had any right to the pain and memories that had formed those lines, that had created the scar across the second knuckle of his right finger where Kaveh had sliced it open on a chisel while they had both been younger, wearing hopes and sorrows and robes of forest green. Alhaitham had staunched the bleeding with the hem of his uniform, holding Kaveh’s then-larger palm in his and feeling the heat of his blood even through the fabric. 

Alhaitham eyed them, tamping down the familiar desire to reach across the gap and take them with a finely-honed ease. 

“Please, Alhaitham.”

Alhaitham sighed and took his hands. How could he refuse? What other options did he have, what other leads did he possess?

Kaveh’s hands closed, solid and secure, around Alhaitham’s.

“I want to go back,” Kaveh said. “I am tired, Alhaitham. I am tired of being whatever this is.”

Why did they all speak in riddles? It was exhausting, frankly, and for all Kaveh normally avoided speaking his thoughts, for all he soaked his truths in sickly-sweet platitudes for others who were not Alhaitham, he was not the type of man to speak in circles. 

Alhaitham tightened his grip, feeling the telltale pulse of life between his fingers. Whatever this is indeed. Were they even flesh and blood? 

“Then go back,” Alhaitham said. “Return to him.”

“I don’t know how.”

Alhaitham bit back the desire to curse, because if even they did not know the solution, what hope did Alhaitham himself have? The House of Daena had proven itself worthless in the face of this particular issue, and now even the source of the problem stood before him confirming that they themselves knew no more than he did. 

“What do you know, then?”

Kaveh swallowed, eyes darting away before refocusing on him once more. 

“There are… more of us. Of me. Of him.”

“So I surmised. Do you have any actual useful information?”

“Seven.” Kaveh’s eyes flickered over Alhaitham’s shoulder, to the him with closed eyes and even breaths. “There are seven of us.”

“Hmm.” That was useful information, as much as it annoyed Alhaitham to admit. He had always preferred goals that were measurable. It settled a question, at the very least, and Alhaitham could appreciate the satisfaction of crossing something off of his list, of putting a curiosity to rest. 

Kaveh’s eyes were unfocused, staring without seeing at the gentle rise and fall of his own breaths. It was the same look Kaveh had when he was thinking through a seemingly impossible problem– the real Kaveh, Alhaitham remembered, because what was standing before him was not the Kaveh that had reached across the empty divide all those years ago to pull Alhaitham across, nor the one that sliced through his side of the bridge that spanned the gap.

“Take a walk with me,” he finally said.

Alhaitham weighed his options, but really, what good was any other answer when set opposite the one he would give?

“Very well.”

Kaveh released his hands and turned, not looking to see if Alhaitham would follow as they left Bimarstan, as they followed the path to the city’s gates and out. The only sound between them was the crunch of dirt and stones and the rustle of grass in the wind. They walked for a ways, side by side, until Kaveh abruptly stopped at a place where the road forked into two. To the right, the wandering path that would eventually lead to Port Ormos, to the lighthouse and the bridge that had begun Kaveh’s meteoric rise. To the left, the Palace of Alcazarzaray, too distant to be seen.

Kaveh turned to him, then, and spread his arms wide. His eyes were fixed on the distant horizon, where an unseen lighthouse signaled the safe path home.

“You are supposed to be at work.”

“I am.”

“But you are not.”

“I am not.”

The wind caught in Kaveh’s cloak, billowing its crimson fabric out behind him like wings, like a bird preparing to take flight. 

“Why?” His voice was strained, sharpened on an edge Alhaitham could not see, a whetstone invisible to him. “Why do you let me do these things? Why do you let him ruin your life?”

Alhaitham frowned. 

“Who are you to say that my life is ruined?”

Kaveh sputtered in a devastatingly familiar way, and Alhaitham couldn’t ignore the small curl of fondness that rose like smoke. He tamped it down. This isn’t Kaveh, he reminded himself, not really.

“O-of course it is! Look at me!” He gestured wildly at himself, at the distant boughs of trees that shaded the Palace beyond both of their sights. “How can I be anything to you but a burden?”

Alhaitham shook his head, but Kaveh ignored him.

“I am alone, Alhaitham. I am alone with nothing but misery and the expectations of others lining my pockets, and yet you allow me to take up this space in your home and in your life. Why? Why do you show me your kindness when I have done nothing to deserve it?”

“Why must you earn the kindness of others? Do you expect others to earn the kindness you show to them?”

Kaveh scoffed, waving his hand as if to dismiss Alhaitham’s words from the record. “You are the one always telling me that I should be more selective in my benevolence. Do not pretend that you have suddenly grown a charitable soul.”

And here, beneath the cloudless blue of Sumeru’s endless sky, Kaveh looked every inch the untouchable man he had been at half a decade younger, when the world had not yet dug its claws into the marrow of his bone and shredded muscle and flesh. 

And here, as Alhaitham had not done half a decade younger, when time had not yet taught him the bitter taste of losing something that he still had a chance to keep, he stepped forward and caught Kaveh by the wrist. 

“Kaveh,” he said as he pressed his thumb to the jut of bone beneath his wrist, “I do not, and have never, offered you charity.”

I have offered companionship. 

I have offered a home to you, if you were willing to take the mantle alongside me.

Kaveh stared, lips parted and eyes wide.

“I have never given that which I did not wish to give,” Alhaitham said instead. “You take up space in my life because I wish to have you in it. Is that truly so impossible?”

Kaveh pulled his hand back, but Alhaitham chased it.

“ Why , Alhaitham? I have never been an easy man to bear. And you have always been a man who prided himself on pragmatism. I have nothing to offer you, and I cannot imagine whatever it is that you see in my companionship that is enough to balance the scales against the ugliest parts of me.” Kaveh spoke with a dull finality, the way he might speak of the weather or the goings-on in the Bazaar. 

Alhaitham knew that Kaveh believed these things, that Kaveh could not see the parts of him that shone like fine gemstones through the slag. And that thought stung in the back of his throat like bile. 

“Aren’t you the one always trying to convince me of the value of living life with a little more emotion?”

Kaveh huffed. “As if you would ever listen to me.”

Alhaitham released his wrist. Kaveh met his eyes then, wide and sad but expectant, as though he had known that Alhaitham would let him go, only to inhale sharply in alarm as Alhaitham caught him by the shoulders instead. 

“I do.”

“Ah– Alhaitham–”

“I listen.” Alhaitham tightened his grip. Beneath his hands, the sharp edge of Kaveh’s shoulders was somehow soothing and sickening all at once. Because here Kaveh was, so solid and alive , and yet as unreachable as the distant flickering stars of Celestia. 

“You are ashamed,” Alhaitham said. “You look at the things you have done and you search for the shadows. And in those shadows, you find the things you have failed to accomplish and you let them rot inside of your chest.”

Kaveh flinched, but Alhaitham only held him. He would never say these things to Kaveh– not the Kaveh of the daylight, the one that walked the halls of their home and bewitched half of the nation in his stride. But this Kaveh was a falsehood, a ghost made flesh. And Alhaitham was possessed, suddenly, by the dizzying desire to make this version of Kaveh understand what Alhaitham had known as the truth the entire time.

“You drown yourself in the shame of your own choices. And yet, you assert that you would not change your path if the opportunity was presented. Both of these things cannot be true, Kaveh. Not without tearing yourself in half to make space for the contradiction.” He caught Kaveh’s gaze and kept it. Cadmium orange flickered as Kaveh searched Alhaitham’s eyes, looking for something Alhaitham could not offer. 

“I…”

Kaveh shuddered beneath his hands. 

“What have the opinions of others ever done for you? They call your work your magnum opus, as though you are dead and they are waiting only to bury your flesh. Will you believe them, then? Will you go quietly with your head bowed low?”

A sniffle, and Alhaitham abruptly realized that the Kaveh before him was crying , twin lines shimmering on his skin, and he released his grip with a suddenness that left them both reeling. 

Kaveh wiped his face with the softness of his wrist, leaving dark patches on his gloves. Alhaitham stood stiffly, unsure of what he should do with himself as the adrenaline of the moment began to fade. An apology sat heavy and thick in his throat.

But Kaveh was smiling when he raised his head again, even with watery eyes and flushed cheeks. 

“When did my bratty junior learn such people skills? Surely he hasn’t just had them this entire time.”

“Perhaps I was only saving them for the right moment.”

Kaveh turned toward the Palace once more. Alhaitham waited. This was something this ghost of Kaveh had to finish on its own. The only sound between them was the soft sound of the wind. 

Then, finally, Kaveh spoke.

“He will not stop being a burden to you,” he said. Alhaitham watched him, watched the way the wind twisted strands of gold into the connecting lines of the universe. “You know that.”

“You are not a burden to me.” Alhaitham’s eyes softened just a bit, turning up at the corners. “I thought we had clarified this point already.”

Kaveh waved a hand absently. “Details. What I mean to say is that there will be no freeing yourself of us if you see this through. You will walk this path at my side or not at all.”

“I accept your terms.”

Kaveh nodded and turned his back to the Palace, reaching once more for Alhaitham’s hand and offering him a full, shining grin when Alhaitham took it.

“Very well,” he said, his tone as final as the closing of a book. “Then let us return. I think it’s time I go.”

In the end, returning the fragment to Kaveh was rather simple. 

Nahida met them at Bimarstan, a fond smile on her face that grew wider, like a flower blooming, when she caught sight of their conjoined hands. The urge to drop Kaveh’s hand flickered through him, but Kaveh’s grip tightened and the idea was quickly forgotten. 

“Are you ready?” she asked. Her head tilted to the side like a curious cat as she studied Kaveh. Whatever she saw there must have pleased her, because she nodded and held her tiny hand out in the space between them, palm up. Kaveh stood still for a moment, debating something, before he released Alhaitham’s hand to take Nahida’s instead.

“I’m ready.”

Nahida laughed. 

“Spoken like a true scholar. Alright, Kaveh. Let’s begin.”

The false Kaveh allowed himself to be led to the bedside. He rested his hand over the chest of himself, palm open. There was a quiver in his palms, a nervousness Alhaitham was intimately familiar with. So he looked away and focused on Nahida instead.

But Nahida didn’t move. She just stood at the side of the bed, wide eyed and smiling up at Kaveh. For a long moment, there were just the ambient sounds of a city in motion around them. Then, Kaveh spoke.

“So how do I…?”

Nahida laughed, a quiet and tinkling sound like wind chimes in the cool dark of evening. 

“I think that’s up to you. How do you think it works?”

Kaveh’s eyebrows furrowed. He looked down at himself, at the him resting peacefully beneath his palm. 

“I think…”

He closed his eyes. They stood there, the three of them surrounding a silent fourth, listening to the rustle of the branches overhead. Nothing happened.

Alhaitham looked at Nahida again, but she made no move to intervene, did nothing but smile and wait and watch. And while Alhaitham did not put much stock in gods, he did put some measure of faith in Nahida’s intelligence, so he waited and watched just the same. 

It was a quick thing, like how a novel might describe a snowflake melting in your palm. One moment there were two of him, and the next there was one. Alhaitham was sure there had to be some transitory stage, because nothing happened so abruptly that there was not a moment in the middle. Even lightning did not simply appear. But whatever it had been was too fast for Alhaitham’s eyes, and they were only three once more. 

Nahida clapped. The sound startled Alhaitham out of his reverie. 

“Oh, I knew he would figure it out!”

Alhaitham crossed his arms, turning to face the archon. “So that’s it? They just need to want it?”

Nahida’s smile was beatific. It was easy to glance at her and see the childlike wonder in her, the curiosity spilling from her fingertips. Her eyes, though, contained multitudes. Wisdom and knowledge and the promise of the world’s secrets caught in the eyes of a child. 

“Something like that,” she said. “Though I think only Kaveh could answer that for certain. I believe that’s why I couldn’t find any record of how it worked in Irminsul.” Her hand came to her chin in a thoughtful gesture, one Alhaitham had grown familiar with over his short tenure as Acting Grand Sage and his slightly longer friendship with the Archon. “Maybe when Kaveh wakes up, he’ll have an answer for us both.”

When , not if . It was a subtle choice, but Alhaitham couldn’t help but feel appreciation for it. Kaveh would wake up. He would make sure of it.

“Kaveh said that there were seven of them,” Alhaitham said. Nahida hummed.

“Interesting. So they’re aware of each other?”

“I assume so. I didn’t ask.”

“Hmm,” When Nahida looked at him, Alhaitham could almost understand what it felt like to be a specimen for dissection in an Amurta research facility. Nahida looked at him like she could peel back the layers of skin and muscle and peer directly into the core of what made Alhaitham who he was. It was disconcerting. Alhaitham was not used to being readable by anybody other than the man lying under threadbare blankets. 

“If that’s all, I’ll be taking my leave,” Alhaitham finally said. He forced himself to not glance back at Kaveh as he turned away. “I apparently have six more of him to find.”

Nahida’s laugh followed him the whole way down the path.

Chapter Text

If Alhaitham was being honest, he had assumed that this whole process would go a little quicker. Sure, Kaveh had always possessed a skill when it came to avoiding being found. But surely Sumeru City only contained so many places to hide. 

And yet, no matter how much he looked, it felt like Alhaitham was always just half a step behind the shards of the man, as though he was doing everything he could to avoid him. 

He shouldn’t be surprised. If they were as aware of each other as Nahida seemed to believe that they were, then perhaps they knew that one of them had already returned to the whole. All things, as long as they possessed consciousness, naturally sought their own preservation. It made sense that these fragments would do the same. They understood what awaited them if Alhaitham managed to find them.

And Alhaitham would find them. 

Yet it had been two days since Alhaitham had returned that first piece to Kaveh, the real Kaveh, and he had not seen another since. He had tried all of Kaveh’s usual haunts and came up empty each time. Normally, Kaveh was relatively easy for Alhaitham to find. If he was in a good mood, Alhaitham might find him sketching in Razan Garden or wandering the Grand Bazaar looking for something to waste his meager funds on. If a commission had gone poorly, he was far more likely to be found in Lambad’s tavern, partway to wasted and bemoaning the state of the world, of the arts, and of himself. Which was perhaps why Alhaitham found it so singularly frustrating that he could not find these pieces now.

But what choice did he have but to continue on?

He changed the order, but his stops were always the same. He would wander through the Grand Bazaar, keeping his eyes peeled for any glimpse of crimson and blond in the sea of bright colors and moving bodies. There was a merchant in the Bazaar, tucked in a corner, that sold stationary and inks that Kaveh preferred. While he could receive a perfectly acceptable ration of drafting supplies from the Akademiya under the name of his work as a master of the Kshahrewar and a guest lecturer, Kaveh preferred higher quality materials for his final drafts, and so he frequently came home with rolls of drafting paper and pots of archival ink in a rainbow of colors. 

But every time Alhaitham asked, the merchant could only reply that while yes, she had seen Kaveh earlier in the day, that she had no idea where the architect had gone after, and could Alhaitham kindly suggest that Kaveh keep his thoughts to himself a bit more if he didn’t like a design for sale? 

Lambad’s Tavern was easy enough to check. Alhaitham would have to do little more than step inside before Lambad would give him a shake of his head. The man had seen Alhaitham come to fetch his erstwhile roommate enough that he could assume Alhaitham’s purpose when he entered without Kaveh either at his side or already sprawled across a table with three empty wine-stained goblets on its surface. Alhaitham might purchase a fish roll or a shawarma wrap if he hadn’t eaten yet.

Razan Garden was both the easiest and most difficult to check. Difficult because it was large, with lots of hidden nooks where Kaveh could tuck himself away to hide from Alhaitham. In theory, this made Razan Garden the best choice for Kaveh if he was trying to hide from Alhaitham, and the most difficult space for Alhaitham to search. In practice, however, Alhaitham knew that Kaveh preferred one particular gazebo (though he did not allow himself to consider the reasons why Kaveh might hold fondness for that specific one) and would not likely be found in any other parts of the Garden. Here, Alhaitham might settle on one of the stone benches and eat whatever he had bought himself at either Lambad’s or the Bazaar while he read for a while. 

Finally, Alhaitham would check the House of Daena from corner to corner, starting at the shelves that carried the books Kaveh had annotated while he was a student. From there, he would visit the table that had borne witness to their friendship’s loud birth and far louder heat death. If he did not find Kaveh in either of those places, he would proceed to check the rest of the tables, the hidden corners and quiet shelves. He would walk the Kshahrewar halls, ignoring the looks of confusion or mild distaste that followed him, until he was sure that no trace of Kaveh was to be found in the Akademiya.

If he had checked the tavern early, Alhaitham might detour to check once more before returning to his empty house for the evening. The Kaveh of the first night had not returned since that day. Perhaps it had realized that Alhaitham was aware of it. Perhaps it had found gentler places to lay its head. Kaveh did not want for admirers in Sumeru City, after all. Whatever fragment of Kaveh it had been– and Alhaitham was starting to form theories in the quiet parts of his mind about what these fragments represented– surely it would not have a difficult time finding a bed willing to make space for him.

Alhaitham ignored the way the thought made his chest tighten with something like grief. 

This had been Alhaitham’s routine for the last two days, with little success. So as Alhaitham entered the House of Daena with a book of Fontainian fables that the Traveler had sent him, he did not immediately register the head of blond hair bent low over a blueprint at their table until he was nearly beside him.

Luckily, this piece of Kaveh was fully engrossed in his work, and he did not look up as Alhaitham studied him. 

He looked… harried, was the best word that Alhaitham could find. As though he was running out of time. As Alhaitham watched, Kaveh reached with an almost frantic energy for the quill waiting beside him. It came up dripping red ink. Kaveh set it to paper immediately, scribbling something across its surface. He sat back, staring at the paper before him. Alhaitham could see, even from a distance, the warped mess of lines and colors that spread across the surface. He set the quill down with shaky hands, staring at the design that was nearly eclipsed by red ink, and then there was the sharp sound of paper as Kaveh crumpled the draft and shoved it aside into a pile of balled up paper laying on the floor. Kaveh did not watch as the rejected draft fell; he only pulled another sheaf of paper from the pile in the center of the table and smoothed it flat. He took up his straight edge and charcoal only to freeze mid-motion.

“Alhaitham,” he called. “Here to laugh at me?”

Alhaitham crossed the space between them. The chair made a loud sound as he pulled it back and sat across from Kaveh. Kaveh didn’t even bother to look up.

“That’s quite the accusation. Perhaps next time you should try starting with ‘hello.’”

Kaveh rolled his eyes. The straight edge made a sharp clanging sound as Kaveh dropped it to the table. Kaveh was not normally rough with his tools. He respected their value to his craft. How often had Alhaitham sat through a lecture on the importance of treating the tools of their respective trades with proper respect? (Which Alhaitham would usually counter by pointing out that Kaveh didn’t treat his body particularly well, and were his wrists and his mind not the most irreplaceable tools of his trade, after all? And then Kaveh would huff and bluster before storming off, which Alhaitham knew well enough to take as a victory.)

This Kaveh, though, only bent low and drew his charcoal across the paper with a viciousness unlike him. His fingers were white with the pressure he exerted. Charcoal crumbled beneath his fingers, leaving shards across the surface of the paper.

Kaveh sketched for a moment, working with fervor, before shoving the paper away with a frustrated grunt. The metal straight edge clattered to the floor. 

“Say what you came to say and leave, then. I have work to do.”

Alhaitham took in the refuse littering the table– the scattered drafts, smeared with red ink; the tools dumped unceremoniously out of a canvas bag; the way this Kaveh’s hands shivered like the gentlest boughs of a tree beneath the oncoming storm– and hummed a noncommittal sound.

Kaveh’s grip tightened on the charcoal, sending dust and chunks falling from his fist. He cursed, loud in the quiet of the House, and dropped the remnants of the charcoal to the center of the paper before crumpling the whole thing into a messy ball and shoving it aside. 

“Do you have to do this?” Kaveh spat. He wiped the charcoal from his hands onto his pants, glaring at Alhaitham with eyes the color of a cloudless Sumeru sky. “Every goddamn time I try to get something done, you show up with something to say.”

Was that how Kaveh saw it? Alhaitham bit back the urge to smirk, knowing that it would not help his case at all if he started laughing at the architect’s comments, but even the subtle change in his expression must have been enough for Kaveh, who yanked another blank piece of paper from the Akademiya supply sitting in the center of the table. 

“Oh, wait. Of course we have to do this, because you think it’s funny to watch me struggle. We’re all just ants beneath your magnifying glass, after all.”

“Uncharitable as always, Kaveh.”

Kaveh slammed the quill he had picked up back onto the table, raising one charcoal-stained finger to point at Alhaitham. “Don’t– don’t you dare. Don’t you dare .”

Alhaitham crossed his arms, lounged back in his chair with one eyebrow arched. It was awful, how familiar these paths felt. Almost enough for Alhaitham to forget that the Kaveh bent in two before him was a lie. 

Kaveh glared at him, jaw tense, shoulders tight. Finally, he picked his quill up and returned to the blank paper beneath him. 

“If all you’re here to do is critique me, then go away. I don’t have the time to deal with you.”

Alhaitham leaned across the table, trying to get a closer look at the project Kaveh was marking. Every part of Kaveh was tight and drawn close. He felt a little wild, a little out of control, like a Rishbolad Tiger that had been surprised on the hunt. 

“I mean it!” Kaveh snarled. “Leave me alone , Alhaitham!”

The quill in Kaveh’s hand snapped, splattering ink across the design’s surface like pomegranate seeds knocked loose from their skin. All was silent, save for the quiet drip, drip, drip of ink from Kaveh’s clenched fist. 

Alhaitham grabbed Kaveh by the elbow and pulled him up from the chair. Kaveh was shaking, fingers covered in ink that dripped to the stone floor like blood. Alhaitham pulled the ruined draft from the table and used the inkless edges to wipe the majority of the staining from Kaveh’s fingers.

“Take a walk with me,” Alhaitham said. Kaveh stood, shoulders slumped, eyes glassy, focused only on the ink-sodden paper in Alhaitham’s hands. He breathed in shallow little pants, a frightened bird in Alhaitham’s palms.

“Kaveh.” His tone was firm. He pressed a canvas bag, now freckled with crimson ink, into Kaveh’s empty hands. “We’re leaving.”

Alhaitham didn’t care about the mess as he pressed a palm into Kaveh’s shoulder and urged him forward. Let someone else clean it up. It would not be the first time a table was left in ruins after a scholar crashed and burned, and it would not be the last. 

It was a short, intimately familiar path they followed out of the House of Daena, down the Akademiya’s halls, and out into the cloying humidity of the Sumeru afternoon. They walked until the sounds of people filtered away, until quiet discussions were replaced by birdsong and the rustling of trees. 

“Sit,” Alhaitham said. Kaveh sat obediently on the stone bench. Alhaitham crouched down until he was eye level with Kaveh, ignoring the weirdness of being eye to eye with blue instead of the red he expected.

“Breathe.”

Kaveh closed his eyes. As Alhaitham watched, his frantic, hummingbird breaths began to slow. 

Alhaitham ignored the desire to reach out, to bridge the thin distance between them and brush the hair from Kaveh’s brow, to tuck the fringe behind his ears. 

“That’s it,” he said instead, because he knew that the architect couldn’t bear the silence when he got like this, when the mortal folly of his body became the largest barrier for Kaveh to overcome. “Breathe.”

Finally, Kaveh exhaled, his eyes fluttering open again. Alhaitham nodded once and stood back to his full height. Kaveh, below him, looked like he had something to say– but instead, he looked away and patted the bench beside him with fingers still tinted reddish-pink.

“Sit with me.”

So Alhaitham did. 

It was silent except for the birds in the boughs and the rustle of leaves. Kaveh fidgeted with the strap of his bag. The tools held within made a merry clinking noise as metal met glass. 

“I haven’t slept since I first woke up,” Kaveh finally confessed to the bag in his lap. Alhaitham counted minutes and moments and let out a sharp huff of displeasure.

“It’s been about sixty-five hours since they found him,” Alhaitham said. “No wonder you’re a mess.”

Kaveh made a derisive noise, seeming like he might argue, before cutting himself off with a long exhale like an Anemo slime deflating. 

“Yeah,” he said instead. “I’ve been working nonstop. I don’t get tired. I just keep thinking, you know? I can’t stop.”

He started picking at the cuticle of his thumb. It’s a habit Alhaitham recognized from their school days, when the pressure of assignments and projects and eyes on him would become too much. Back then, Kaveh would pick his skin until he bled. There had been a period of time where Kaveh had scabs on every finger, and every third blueprint or project had blood spilled somewhere on it.

(And Alhaitham refused to think about Kaveh’s hands the night he tore their thesis in two, with blood staining the undersides of his nails. He refused then, and he refused now.)

“But nothing works,” Kaveh whispered. It’s a curse, the way Kaveh’s lips shaped themselves around the word nothing. As though there was no worse punishment. “Nothing I make is good enough anymore.”

It was familiar territory. Not a week went by where Kaveh didn't pronounce himself finished, proclaim the complete loss of his abilities. It usually meant that Kaveh was short on sleep and shorter in temper. There had yet to be a day where Kaveh's burnout could not be solved by a little food and a long sleep, but Alhaitham had a feeling that such methods wouldn't work this time.

Kaveh pulled his sketchbook from his bag and flipped it open. Designs flashed by rapidly, each annotated in more red ink than black. A few of the pages were torn, scratched open by a quill nib pressed too roughly to paper. One was simply red, as though a bottle of ink had shattered on its surface. A few pages were decorated around the outer edges with symmetrical water spots. 

“They're all awful,” Kaveh said. “Bland. Empty. Worthless.” Each statement came with another drawing, the lines blurring between each other like a flipbook.

Finally, Kaveh stopped. On the page, the final draft of the Palace of Alcazarzaray, drawn in such detail Alhaitham could almost imagine the reflection of the vibrant Sumeru sun off the glass.

Kaveh’s smile was soft but radiant and full of pride.

“We gave that palace everything, Alhaitham,” he said. “Every ounce of knowledge and expertise, distilled into a piece of functional art. It’s unlike anything in Sumeru– perhaps anything in Teyvat.” His fingers brushed along the edge of a line. There was such care in the gesture– he avoided touching the ink, wary of the oils on his fingertips. Alhaitham was struck by the irrational urge to pull the sketchbook from Kaveh’s hands.

That doesn't belong to you.

Not that it belonged to Alhaitham either, but he could not bear the idea of the drawing coming to harm. It did not matter that a copy of the blueprint of the Palace was filed in the House of Daena. He did not care that students of Kshahrewar tore the project apart as a case study. This, the original drawing, absent of the mathematical calculations and indicators that created a blueprint but so full of Kaveh's soul that it radiated from the page like light, was more precious by far. 

Kaveh hesitated over his next words, letting them linger on his tongue like the first sip of wine after a long day.

“We gave everything to Alcazarzaray “ he finally said. “It is a reflection of everything we believe in. As an artist, as an architect. As Kaveh.”

Kaveh met Alhaitham's eyes. Even without their signature vermillion, the intensity remained. 

“I would not change a thing about it,” he declared. “My vision was executed exactly as it was. I did not compromise myself in its creation. And now it stands as a reminder to Sumeru that beauty and art are not potential wasted, but realized.”

Kaveh turned the page again, slowly. The next page is blank. So is the page after it, and the one after that, and on and on…

“They call it my magnum opus. A visionary's work. Tell me Alhaitham, what does a visionary become once they no longer see the future? When the dreams of a dreamer become reality, can they even be called dreams any longer?”

Kaveh closed the sketchbook delicately, pressing the cover beneath his palms.

“I have nothing left to give to Sumeru,” he said softly. 

The breeze blowing through the gardens picks up fallen leaves. They swirl through the empty paths, pirouetting around each other in the eddies created by the design of the buildings, the slope of the paths.

“Every person that commissions me expects another palace. Another Alcazarzaray sprung from my mind, fully formed. They wish to hold beauty but scoff at the mess of birth.”

Kaveh stood from the bench, all anxious energy and shaking hands, and began pacing.

“I was willing to tear myself apart for Alcazarzaray,” he said, “and I would do it again if I could. I would rip the muscles from my bones if I thought it would make a difference.”

When he stopped and turned to Alhaitham, it was with the look of a man burning from the inside out. This was not a man walking to the gallows. This was the moment the floor dropped, aware of what was coming but too far gone to stop it.

“But it doesn't.” His voice cracked on the last word. 

“It doesn’t, Alhaitham, and now I am only the husk. I am what is left when fire has burned clean through. The tree after the lightning strike. The empty house when it is no longer a home.”

Unlike the last Kaveh, this one didn’t cry. He only held the sketchbook tighter, tendons visible beneath flesh. 

Alhaitham sat quietly in the aftermath. He had never been good at offering comforting words. For all of his mastery of languages, he could not imagine what words would fix this. He wasn’t entirely sure he believed they existed. This problem had lurked in Kaveh’s shadow for years, since he had been a student. Kaveh worked like he was running out of time, like the sand in the hourglass fell only for him. He created as though destruction was close behind. And how did you combat that? How could Alhaitham fight something like that, when Kaveh discarded his words as soon as they left his lips? What could reach Kaveh as he dug himself ever deeper into the ground?

But who would Alhaitham be if he did not try anyway? 

Who would Alhaitham be without the rope he secured around his own throat before lowering it into reach of Kaveh’s art-scarred hands?

“You are not a machine, Kaveh,” he began, quiet into the maw of the chasm between them. “You are a person. No human being can only create all day, not without allowing themselves time to rest.”

Kaveh shook his head. His hands were shaking again. Alhaitham reached out across the divide and covered one hand with his own palm, allowing the heat of his skin to sink into Kaveh’s icy fingers. 

“I have to be better, Alhaitham. If I am not better than Alcazarzaray, then they may as well bury me. I will not live in a world where I have already reached the stars. I cannot live in a world where my best is already behind me.”

There was a tightness in Alhaitham’s throat. Even if he had words to respond, he doubted they would be able to find their way to his lips. He shook his head, but Kaveh continued, pulling away to gesture emphatically.

“Do not shake your head, Alhaitham. I hear what people say of me. But I don’t care, or I would not care if I could produce something, anything that proved them wrong. It is easy to shrug their words away when I have evidence that proves them wrong. But Alhaitham, what do I do if they are right?”

“They aren’t.”

Alhaitham forced himself past the block in his throat, ripping the words from his chest. He could sense that if he didn’t say them now, then he would not get a second chance. He took Kaveh by the hands and held them between his palms like something fragile and precious. He pulled until Kaveh had no choice but to sit on the bench beside him once more.

“They aren’t, Kaveh. Any person who claims that you are anything less than a genius is wrong.”

Kaveh tried to pull his hands away, but Alhaitham held fast. Their knees knocked together as Alhaitham turned himself fully, until they were pressed together on the bench the way they would sit when they were younger, reading one book spread open between them. Kaveh’s eyes were wide and searching. 

“Even if you never create something again, you have brought forth a masterpiece. Until your detractors can say the same, they have no right to criticize you.”

Kaveh swallowed, and Alhaitham was suddenly aware of just how close the two of them had become, of the long lines of Kaveh’s eyelashes and the dusting of freckles across the bared skin of his chest. Alhaitham maintained eye contact and purposefully filed away the sharp edge of nerves digging jaggedly into his chest to think about later, under the safety of his covers and the veil of night. 

“You are tearing yourself into pieces for people who could never accomplish what you have, not in a hundred lifetimes. What will be enough for you, Kaveh? What will fill the empty space in your chest that you are so very afraid of?”

“I don’t know!” Kaveh yelled. He tried to pull away again, but Alhaitham refused to let him go.

Not again. 

“I don’t know,” Kaveh repeated, softer. 

“I… miss creating things just to create them. When we were in school, the buildings I dreamed of had no limits. I was free to imagine designs that would push me to the very edge of my abilities…” He smiled, thin and wan, eyes full of exhaustion. 

“Now though? Now I just regurgitate the same bland designs. They are structurally sound, but they are graveyards. There is no joy in them, no creativity. Nothing. I have sold my soul for Alcazarzaray, and all I have to show for it is a sketchbook of blank pages.”

“As long as your heart still beats, you still have time. Your present is not your future.”

“I am tired, Alhaitham. Tired of pouring my soul out for people who do not appreciate it. Tired of clawing at a cliff’s edge for nothing.”

“Then rest. Give yourself the kindness you give to others.”

And that was the crux of the issue, wasn’t it? Kaveh would give and give and give to others, but he would not take even the smallest fragment of that kindness for himself. Kaveh, who believed that he did not deserve his own kindness, who would work his body to dust and sand if he could.

Kaveh shook his head. His hands curled hesitantly, protectively around the sketchbook’s roughened edges. 

“When was the last time you created something for yourself?” Alhaitham asked. Kaveh flipped the cover open and closed a few times.

“I… don’t remember.”

“Try it, then.”

Alhaitham pulled a book from his pouch– a study on the cultural significance of Mondstadt’s Windblume Festival, which was mildly interesting at best but easy enough to pick up and put down around interruptions– and settled his back against one of the larger pillars. He kept his eyes focused on the book as he waited.

The sound of a sketchbook being slowly opened once more. The shuffling as Kaveh dug through his tool bag for something. Graphite on paper.

Alhaitham smiled. Just a bit, just the gentlest curl at the corner of his mouth. It was hidden behind the pages of his book, but it was there nonetheless. Finally, he allowed himself to focus fully on the words in front of him, letting the cool breeze of the afternoon and the familiar sound of his temporary companion ease the tension of his shoulders. 

(Nevermind the small part of Alhaitham that reminded him constantly that the figure at his side was a shadow, a reflection, a specter in the fog. As though Alhaitham could ever forget. As though Alhaitham could dismiss the image of Kaveh’s lifeless body being lowered to that Bimarstan bed. Had it only been a few days ago that he had found out?)

Despite the strange wrongness settled in his stomach, reading was a familiar activity. It didn’t take long before Alhaitham was absorbed into the rhythm of words. Academic writing carried a cadence to it, albeit a wildly different one from a more artistic writing like poetry. 

With the addition of Kaveh at his side, scritching unseen lines on the blank page, it was like Alhaitham was half a decade younger. He could not count the number of lazy, sun-soaked days he had spent sitting in this very spot as they worked, Kaveh on his designs and Alhaitham on his translations.

The shadow had been right about one thing. Kaveh had once been as untethered as a sparrow, though never quite as free. Perhaps some things stayed the same despite the march of time. 

Kaveh’s cages had always been wrought from his own hands. 

And Alhaitham had always stood on the outside, bending the bars with nothing but stubbornness and the strength of his own two hands. 

Once, Alhaitham had snapped the bars right off. But he knew better now. 

They sat together until the afternoon breeze turned cool and the lights began to sputter to life along the cobblestone path. Finally, Kaveh made a soft sound of pleasure and dropped the graphite in his hand. Fingers flexed as he worked the stiffness from the joints after hours spent curled.

“I’m finished,” he said. There was something shy in his voice, hesitating around the words. And yet, the light was returning to his eyes. His shoulders no longer carried the aching tension from earlier. 

“Do you… want to see?”

“Do you ever give me a choice?” 

Kaveh frowned. He moved to pull the sketchbook against his chest, but Alhaitham held his hand out before he could do much more. 

“Let me see the sketchbook, Kaveh.”

Kaveh hesitated, but eventually held it out in the space between them. Alhaitham flipped it over, only to come eye to eye with– well, himself.

Because it was obviously him, even in black and white. The line of his brow. The way his earphones cast a shadow across his jaw. The relaxed way he leaned into the pillar behind him, his book held open in a palm.

The subtle curve of a smile on his lips. 

Was this how Kaveh saw him?

Alhaitham looked up from the page to Kaveh fidgeting. When he realized Alhaitham’s eyes were on him, he held his hands out expectantly, and Alhaitham released the sketchbook back into his grip.

“Thank you,” Kaveh said quietly. He kept his eyes on the page, and Alhaitham wished he wouldn’t. Or maybe he wished he would. Maybe he wished Kaveh would look up and Alhaitham would be met with carmine instead of aquamarine. 

Alhaitham took a slow, deep breath. This whole thing was getting to him.

“How do you feel now?”

“Much better.”

Alhaitham nodded. Kaveh hesitated for a moment, then spoke again. 

“I… I think I’m ready to go now.”

Kaveh had never been a small man, not in the entire time Alhaitham had known him. But he looked small now as the last dregs of sunlight were swallowed by the shadows.

“Very well. Let’s go.”

Alhaitham explained, as they walked, what Kaveh would need to do. It was vague and nonsensical, the kind of thing Alhaitham would judge if he heard it from a tavern storyteller. No amount of power could wish things into being. Wanting did not change the truth of the world. 

But he had no other explanation. 

So here they sat, Kaveh with a hand over his own heart and Alhaitham standing quietly at the bedside. The sketchbook lay open on the nightstand.

“I just have to… want it?” The false Kaveh asked again. Alhaitham exhaled, heavy through his nose.

“Apparently. Like I said, the last you just… vanished.”

Kaveh looked down at him, the real him, on the bed. His chest rose and fell in even breaths beneath the shadow’s palm. It was as though he had simply fallen asleep for a nap, if Alhaitham ignored the tubes connecting him to the viscous liquid that counted as sustenance. How many times had Alhaitham come home to find him sleeping just like this, spread across the divan like a creeping vine?

Without thinking, Alhaitham brushed a stray strand of hair into place. When he looked back at the shadow, there was a sharpness to his gaze.

“Ah… I think I get it now…” he said. Cerulean eyes closed.

“Goodbye, Alhaitham.”

Alhaitham hummed softly in reply, and then he was gone, and it was Alhaitham and Kaveh alone once more. The Kaveh in the bed inhaled deeply, the way he might sound right before waking up. Alhaitham watched, ignoring the sick twist of hope that flared out suddenly when he only settled again.

Alhaitham clenched his fists and swallowed down the grief that rose like a wave. When it had mostly settled back into the sea in his chest, he bent low over Kaveh to speak into his ear.

“Five more to go. I’ll get you back, Kaveh. I promise.”

Chapter Text

Normally, Alhaitham refused to attend tavern evenings without being dragged there. That usually meant that if Kaveh was out of the city, Alhaitham stayed home. Tighnari and Cyno were nice enough– Alhaitham might even call them friends if he was under duress– but Alhaitham was also not the type of person to seek companionship in a loud, densely packed space. 

But that was normally. And nothing about the last week of Alhaitham’s life had been normal. 

(Plus, he wasn’t particularly in the mood for the nagging he would have to endure at Kaveh’s hand when the older man awoke and learned that Alhaitham had kept their other friends in the dark about his condition.)

So Alhaitham made his way to the tavern in the early hours of the evening, as scheduled, and took his seat opposite Cyno and Tighnari with decent grace.

“How is he?” Tighnari asked without preamble. His ears twitched. It didn’t take an expert to recognize the agitation in Tighnari’s movements. Which was good, since Alhaitham didn’t claim to be one.

“Stable,” Alhaitham replied. “They’ve been feeding him intravenously. It’s… going fine.”

“Going fine” was an overstatement, but Alhaitham didn’t particularly want to linger on the image of Kaveh hooked up to a bag of fluid, on the way the nurses worked his limbs to keep him as mobile as they could. They were already discussing muscular atrophy with Alhaitham when they caught him visiting, and he had read over their rotation schedule that mostly helped to avoid bed sores. It reminded Alhaitham of the papers scholars would fill out when they wished to analyze an artifact. A chain of custody. As though Kaveh was an object to be passed from hand to hand.

“And the hunt?” Cyno asked. His eyes flashed with interest. Alhaitham regaled them with the sanitized tale of his dealings with the prior two fragments to cross his path, avoiding the parts he knew Kaveh would riot over if he shared. When he had finished, Tighnari leaned back with a thoughtful look on his face.

“Hmm. So the fragments seem to appear in places of special personal interest to Kaveh, then.”

Alhaitham nodded before taking a sip of his wine. It was as good of a theory as any other, and the one Alhaitham had been operating under for the past week.

“But you seem to have been keeping your search limited to Sumeru City,” Tighnari observed. His arms crossed against his chest and he leaned back against his chair. “Why is that?”

“If he was seeking the familiar, his entire life has been spent in this city. The Akademiya is here, after all.” And his home , Alhaitham didn’t add. Tighnari’s gaze was sharp as he studied Alhaitham.

“Well, I haven’t seen him in Gandharva Ville yet, of course. But have you considered checking Port Ormos? Or Aaru Village? Kaveh has completed a number of commissions in those locations, and spent a large quantity of time in both.”

No, Alhaitham hadn’t checked those locations because he’d assumed that Cyno’s matra would alert Cyno, and Cyno would alert him. It was a reasonable expectation.

But hadn’t he just been considering how skilled Kaveh was at avoiding people when he did not want to be caught? If the architect didn’t want to be found, he would not be. How foolish, to trust the matra to do a job that belonged in Alhaitham’s hands alone.

He scowled. The fact that Tighnari had identified the issue that Alhaitham had missed was… frustrating. Reluctant though he might have been to take up the mantle, this was still his task to complete. He did not like that Tighnari had seen something he did not. But Alhaitham set those feelings aside to dwell on later, in the privacy of his home. 

“I understand,” he said. His tone was terse, but Tighnari seemed to take no offense. His tail lashed behind him. 

“If he does arrive in Gandharva Ville, I’ll send a messenger to alert you immediately.”

Alhaitham nodded.

“And I will obviously do the same with Aaru Village. I’ve been stationed out there lately to work alongside Candace on addressing the Akademiya’s damage to the surrounding area, so I will assumedly be the first to know if he does appear. I’ve also informed Dehya to keep an eye out for him on her travels.”

Alhaitham frowned, but said nothing. Having Tighnari and Cyno involved was bad enough, but at least they were friends of Kaveh. It felt wrong to not involve them in Kaveh’s problems, just as it felt right that the pressure of solving this problem fell to Alhaitham in the first place. But Candace knew very little of Kaveh outside of the persona the architect presented while working, and Dehya even less. To let them take part in this with no knowledge of who Kaveh really was… it unsettled him. 

(It felt a little like what Alhaitham imagined it would feel like to swallow lava and feel it shred him open from the inside out, honestly, but that was dramatic enough that it sounded like something Kaveh might say, so he dismissed it.)

Alhaitham swirled the remaining wine in his goblet, watching the way it curled around the edges. Drops clung to the sides and made little rivulets as they returned to the whole, like the tails of shooting stars. 

Normally, their tavern evenings were loud, bordering on raucous. Sometimes they devolved to TCG matches and other times to passionate debates about this theory or that research. Sometimes it was Tighnari bemoaning another adventurer led astray into Avidya Forest. Usually it was Kaveh, lounged across the table, half a bottle deep as he complained about his week, about Alhaitham and his miserable commissions and Alhaitham and the loss of common sense in Sumeru and Alhaitham. 

Now, though? Now a strange silence settled over their table. It was as though a ghost had occupied the empty fourth chair at their table. 

“Tell me again about the other Kavehs,” Tighnari asked, abruptly breaking the silence. He leaned in close, dropping his voice. “You said there were–”

The sound of wood on stone rang out, and then the fourth chair was occupied by flesh and blood. 

“Surely you have better things to gossip about than me .”

Kaveh crossed his arms. His brows were turned down and a scowl marred his face. It was a familiar look for Alhaitham, who was used to Kaveh turning the full brunt of his anger on him.

Well, at least this one was easy enough to figure out.

Cyno and Tighnari shared a look between them, which did not go unnoticed by Kaveh. He huffed.

“If you’re going to talk about me behind my back, at least make it good. I’m doing just fine, by the way. Absolutely perfect. Thanks for asking.”

Alhaitham sighed, and Kaveh turned on him then. His eyes were red, and this was perhaps the worst so far because it was so close and yet wrong, somehow. The red was too monotone. There was no depth in them, just bright crimson ringing black. It was the wrong red. The fire was back to scald his stomach and throat.

“I don’t want to hear from you, Alhaitham. I don’t need you and I don’t need your pity .”

“Hmm. Last I checked, you needed me for a number of reasons. Paying your tab, for example, or perhaps putting a roof over your head.”

Kaveh slammed a fist down onto the table, and Alhaitham met his eyes with a cool gaze that only seemed to stoke the fire in Kaveh higher. Tighnari stood, his chair protesting loudly as it dragged back, and tried to lay a comforting hand on Kaveh’s shoulder.

“Kaveh, it’s alright. We need you to calm down–”

Kaveh laughed. It was caustic and so unlike the normal sound of his joy that even Cyno flinched a bit.

“Oh, don’t you start. Everybody always needs me to calm down or stop overreacting and I’m sick of it. Where do you get off on telling me to calm down? You, who snaps at anybody who steps on so much as a leaf in that mosquito-infested forest you call home?”

Tighnari withdrew, hands shaking. Cyno was on his feet immediately, teeth bared in a snarl.

“Enough.”

Kaveh rolled his eyes. 

“Oh, don’t you start too.”

The situation was spiraling out of control. Alhaitham stood, and Kaveh’s eyes snapped to him. His whole body tensed– a lion ready to pounce, ready to dig its claws in and rip and tear until there were nothing but shreds remaining. 

“Kaveh.”

Kaveh offered him a sardonic grin, sharp and twisted. He did not relax. 

“Alhaitham.”

“We’re leaving.”

“I don’t have to listen to you.”

“I am not asking.”

“And I’m. Not. Leaving.”

“Suit yourself.”

Alhaitham bent until he was eye to eye with the mimicry sitting before him. It gritted its teeth. Anger was not abnormal between them; the simmering promise of Kaveh’s acidic words and Alhaitham’s equally caustic response was a familiar dance for them both. But this pure fury twisted Kaveh’s face into something unfamiliar and cruel. 

Hands curled into fists at his side. 

“Stay if you wish. I’m going home.” Alhaitham said, voice low. It was barely audible over the normal sounds of the tavern, but Kaveh heard. Kaveh always heard him.

Alhaitham straightened, nodded to Tighnari and Cyno who were both staring at them with barely concealed concern, and headed for the door. The loud scrape of wooden legs on the floor indicated that the fragment was close behind.

“Don’t you walk away from me, Alhaitham!” It called, but Alhaitham was out the door and walking before it could catch him. Not toward the house, though— Alhaitham didn’t want this piece, this angry shadow in their shared home. 

The last two fragments had not been difficult for Alhaitham, not really. Addressing Kaveh’s shame at his perceived failures was nearly second nature by this point, though Alhaitham was rarely quite as bold in his assurances. As for Kaveh feeling burnt out, well, that was a weekly occurrence. 

This anger, though? This was unfamiliar to Alhaitham, and it left him feeling wrongfooted, as though he had taken the first step into the desert only to have the slippery grains shift beneath his weight. A crate of wine and a distraction was not going to be enough to cool the argument that threatened. 

Alhaitham followed the sloped path down, listening to the sound of hauntingly familiar footsteps behind him. It didn’t take long for Alhaitham to reach the docks, the port entry of Sumeru City. Other than a few businessmen and their porters loading and unloading small boats with cargo, it was thankfully empty. 

Kaveh grabbed him by the shoulder, and Alhaitham allowed himself to be turned until he was facing the man once more.

“What the hell,” Kaveh spat at him, “was that?”

A few of the bystanders glanced at them. Alhaitham made eye contact with the nearest. They seemed to get the message and scurried away, eyes down. Hopefully the word would travel quickly and they’d be left mostly alone.

“What was what?”

Kaveh’s hand on his shoulder tightened, fingers digging into skin. Kaveh did not have the strength to overpower Alhaitham, but he had enough that the grip stung a bit. 

“You know damn well what , Alhaitham. Don’t play the fool, nobody here believes it.”

“Hmm.”

Kaveh released his shoulder, hand curled into a fist, but Alhaitham caught him by the wrist before he could do anything with it. Quickly, before they could cause more of a scene, Alhaitham tugged him forward, leading him to a secluded corner out of sight of the loading docks with Kaveh struggling against his grip the whole way. 

“Let me go. ”

“No.”

“Ugh, why are you always like this!”

“I’m not going to let you hurt yourself, Kaveh.”

Kaveh wrenched his wrist away.

“Why not? You hurt me plenty. What does it matter to you if I hurt myself?”

Alhaitham ignored the sharp little spike of something that twinged in his chest. Sadness, maybe? It should not be surprising to hear that Kaveh truly believed Alhaitham cared so little, but it stung nonetheless. 

“I don’t want to hurt you, Kaveh.”

Kaveh snorted and crossed his arms across his chest. 

“Oh, that’s rich . Now you’re threatening me? Go ahead, then. I’m sure it would make you feel incredible.”

Did Kaveh really think that Alhaitham would—

“I’m not going to hit you.”

Kaveh stared at him for a moment. Emotions flickered across his face too quickly for Alhaitham to process. 

“Why not?”

“Now who’s acting the fool?”

“Answer the question, Alhaitham.”

“I have.”

They made eye contact, teal to sickening, just-wrong crimson. Like a paint gone dry, or a fruit just before it truly begins to rot. Too dark, too deep. 

“I have never wanted to hurt you,” he repeated anyway. Kaveh scoffed, but there was a tone beneath the disbelief, a fragility there.

“You’d be the first.”

Bitterness. Words as black as coffee steeped too long, burnt and bitter poured out between them. 

Alhaitham felt something in him soften. The same piece of himself that had held out a hand in memory of the past they once shared and the future they might share again. 

“Haven't I always?”

Kaveh stared at him for a moment, incredulity and frustrating warring on his face. 

“Why are you being nice to me ?” Kaveh asked. The word nice fell from his lips like a curse, like a dirty word mired in something Alhaitham could not see, like the idea of Alhaitham showing him kindness was foreign, unimaginable. 

“Why do you think that you do not deserve my kindness?” Alhaitham asked in response. The Kaveh before him was strangely innocent, for all the fury that had claimed his face minutes earlier. Then his expression twisted again, and that softness was lost to hard lines.

“Don’t pretend. You show me kindness to get rid of me. Like you did to the others.” 

“I show you kindness because I wish to.”

“I can’t believe I almost believed you.” 

Kaveh turned away. His hair caught the sunlight and kept it, hoarding shimmering gold, and Alhaitham grabbed him by the wrist before he could take his first step away. He would not allow Kaveh to walk away from him.

Kaveh made an undignified sound and yanked, but Alhaitham held firm. 

“Let me go, ” Kaveh hissed. It was the adrenaline, the stress, it must be, but all Alhaitham could think about was half a decade earlier, hurt words hurled into the once-soft space between them. Kaveh, turning his back on Alhaitham and walking away. Kaveh, who walked out of his life. 

“No.” Not again.

Kaveh made a sound that was almost a snarl. A lion enraged, a tiger awoken from its slumber. He tried to pull away, but Alhaitham only let Kaveh pull him in closer, until they were chest to chest and he could feel the fevered rhythm of Kaveh’s breaths on his lips. 

“I won’t go back, you bastard! I don’t know what you said to the others, but I won’t, I won’t!”

Kaveh pulled with enough strength that Alhaitham could feel bones pop and shift beneath his grip. It changed nothing. He did not care how wild Kaveh became, as long as Kaveh didn’t leave, didn’t vanish until he was ready to return to the whole once more. 

Alhaitham normally admired Kaveh’s drive. His tenacity, his single minded devotion to his values. Never before had he been in the position of needing to stop Kaveh so completely. Redirect, perhaps. Encourage a little self-reflection before jumping in with both feet, almost certainly. But to stop him from following through on a choice ran counterpoint to Alhaitham’s own beliefs— that everybody has the right to make decisions for themselves. Even if those decisions were a mistake. Even if those decisions might result in their ruin.

“You will go back,” Alhaitham said. Kaveh went very still beneath his grip. 

“You will go back, because you must. Because you are part of him.”

A beat of calm, and then—

“I won’t , can’t you hear me?! He would do anything to be rid of me, he would rip his heart from his chest to excise me from his soul, and you want me to go back?! To live inside of him, always burning, always aching?!”

Fury, sharp and stinging and with bared teeth. This Kaveh was anger and the crackle of kindling. The creak of a tree trunk right before it fell to the forest floor. The edge of a sword, the tip of an arrow. 

“You can. He would not be Kaveh without you.”

The shadow laughed and turned to face Alhaitham fully. Its chest rose and fell in rapid, jerking movements. Feral. Cornered.

“You’re right, you’re always right, aren’t you . He would not be Kaveh, he would be better! He would be a better man without me, without my bite, without my acid to swallow down every time the world disappoints him. Without me, he could be content , he could find solace in the hand life has dealt him.”

“So let me go,” it said. Crimson eyes full, sickening, pupils blown wide. “What have I ever done for you? You cannot pretend you enjoy my presence in your life. His, perhaps, but not mine. Never mine.”

Alhaitham thought, again, of the sharpness of Kaveh’s tongue. Of the cruel, indifferent nothingness of his eyes when they’d meet after their fallout, after that disastrous ending. The sharpness in his gaze. The thin line of his lips. The way his eyes would pass over Alhaitham as though he were faceless, as though they had never shared anything at all.

But he also thought of the Kaveh that now belonged in his home just as surely as Alhaitham’s books, or his bed, or the other comforts that made life worth living. The same curve to his brow, the same displeasure in his mouth, the same venom dripping from curved lips as he bared his scarred heart in the tiniest measures. 

Scratching a quill across a draft with such unbridled emotion that it tears clean through because a client demanded something that would ruin the entire project. Fraying a pillow to its threadbare seams, until the floor was covered in downy feathers, over being spoken to with condescension by the Grand Sage just after Alcazarzaray had been raised for the second time. 

Kaveh’s anger awoke something feral within him. Something that, once removed, would be like declawing a lion, like clipping the wings of a vulture. Who would Kaveh be without the edge of him, without the fangs he bared?

Would he even be the Kaveh that Alhaitham remembered?

“I cannot claim to enjoy his anger, no.” 

Kaveh tilted his chin up, ever defiant, ever full of fire. 

“See? I won’t—”

“But I would never strip you from him.”

The fragment didn’t like that response. It had been pliant enough beneath Alhaitham’s grip as it spoke, but now it fought like an animal in a cage. Like its survival depended on this moment.

Perhaps it did.

“You’re lying!” It yelled. Alhaitham tightened his grip. Kaveh would not overpower him. Not without Mehrak at his side, and even then it would only perhaps make it a fair fight.

“I’m not lying,” he replied. “You are a part of him. I want Kaveh to return to me whole. I would not rip a piece of him away. I would never take that choice from him.”

Kaveh scoffed. “Return to you, huh? As though we belonged to you?”

Alhaitham leaned in until they were nearly pressed nose to nose.

“He belongs to nobody but himself,” Alhaitham said. “And I will not let you run from yourself any longer.”

He blinked, stunned. Whether it was by the proximity or the words, Alhaitham couldn’t guess. 

“Why?” It asked. Of all the things Alhaitham had expected it to say, it was this simple question that gave him the most pause.

Silence stretched between them.

“What does it matter to you, Alhaitham? What does it matter to you if the Kaveh that returns is different, as long as that Kaveh is easier to deal with? Why would you ever choose to burden yourself for him?”

Alhaitham had no answer for the shadow. He had no answer even for himself. 

I don’t know , he thought about saying. Instead, he stopped. He let himself look, really look at this piece of Kaveh that stared at him with eyes so close he could almost pretend it was real. How could he put it into words? He didn’t know why , only knew that the idea of Kaveh returning to him changed, softened not by choice but by force, was a sickening in his chest.

The Kaveh in his memories who spat poison like a dragon breathed fire was not a kind one. But he was real, and tangible, and there. He was someone Alhaitham could reach out and touch.

If Kaveh were to be soft toward Alhaitham, he wanted it to be because Kaveh chose it. Because Kaveh wanted to treat him gently. 

He wanted Kaveh to share his anger just as much as his joy, as long as Kaveh shared it with him.

Alhaitham was not looking forward to thinking about what that might mean.

“Kaveh is important to me,” he said instead. “I will not let him go without a fight.”

The Kaveh in front of him grit its teeth, nails dug into palms.

“Even the worst of him? Even the parts that have hurt you?”

Even me? It did not ask, and Alhaitham did not offer.

“I think,” Alhaitham said, “that we have both hurt each other enough for our lifetimes.”

He had tried, once, to change a piece of Kaveh, and had faced the brunt of this fragment as a result. Alhaitham knew intimately how Kaveh’s anger tasted. 

“You are part of him,” Alhaitham repeated. “And you will return to him.”

Kaveh swallowed. His eyes flickered. Searching for something on Alhaitham’s face, something in his eyes. And then he sighed.

“Very well,” he said. “It’s never been worth arguing with you, has it.”

Alhaitham shrugged.

“I don’t know about that. I think the arguments are worth more than enough.”

They walked up the paved path in silence. Kaveh had no more to say to Alhaitham, and that was perfectly fine by him. The quiet gave him the space he needed to think.

Beside him, Kaveh was docile. It was as though all the fight had gone out of him. This was familiar, too. When they fought, there would come a point after the fury had subsided where Kaveh would slink home from wherever he’d vanished to. Apologies were never said, but they were given nonetheless. A bottle of wine, a quiet evening, warm drinks on the divan. A lion turned housecat. Licking each other’s wounds.

It was only as they approached Kaveh’s bedside that the fragment acknowledged him again.

“It’s not too late to change your mind, you know.”

Alhaitham looked past the shadow, to the man lying still in the infirmary bed. His skin was pale, cheekbones jutting out through the thinness of his face. 

“It is too late,” Alhaitham said. “It has been for a long time.”

The shadow rounded the bed to stand on the opposite side. It took a moment for Alhaitham to raise his eyes to meet the crimson watching him.

It watched him for a long moment, then nodded resolutely.

“Very well,” it said, its lips curling into something sharp and mocking. “I hope you succeed, Alhaitham. For all our sakes.”

Without any further words, it rested its hand over Kaveh’s chest, and a moment later was gone completely.

Alhaitham sighed and slowly lowered his head to rest in his hands, palms blotting out the artificial light of the room.

“Don’t worry, Kaveh,” he said to the empty room, to the figure before him, to the three fragments now returned. “I will.” 

Chapter Text

It was still early enough in the evening that Alhaitham could return to the tavern if he so wished, but, well– he didn’t want to. Something about Tighnari and Cyno seeing the fragment of Kaveh made Alhaitham unsettled. It was private. The truth of this belonged only to him and the shadows that followed him. So instead of returning to that table and the noise and the people he had begun to consider friends, Alhaitham walked the short path back to his home in quiet thought.

Tonight’s run-in made three. How had this all gotten away from him so quickly? How had it only been a few short days since he learned of Kaveh’s condition at all? 

It was becoming clearer with every shadow he confronted that this all had something to do with Kaveh– with the real Kaveh, the one that shared a place in Alhaitham’s once-quiet life. Kaveh had never shared Alhaitham’s contentment with the way that things were. Privately, he thought that Kaveh didn’t remember what it felt like to be content. It had been the fatal flaw that shattered them both, in the end. 

Kaveh, who didn’t know how to release himself from the weights he voluntarily tied himself to.

Alhaitham, who couldn’t stand aside and watch Kaveh drown himself in an ocean he had created. 

And yet, they had found their way together again, hadn’t they? The universe craved order and destruction in equal measure. Whether he and Kaveh were an example of one or the other remained to be seen. Not that Alhaitham particularly cared what the answer was. Kaveh’s presence in his life was more pleasure than pain, and that was enough for him. 

Still, he was not obtuse enough to pretend that nothing about his feelings for Kaveh had changed. Even before this whole catastrophe, Alhaitham had been aware of the way his pulse would stutter when Kaveh smiled at him, the quiet need he felt to ensure that Kaveh could always find new things worth smiling about.

The hope that perhaps, one day, Kaveh’s reason to smile could be him.

But hope would never be enough on its own, and that was where Alhaitham’s softest daydreams always ended. Kaveh was his now in ways he had discarded as possibilities long ago. To risk this new, delicate balance was to come to terms with the possibility that he could lose it all in the aftermath. Alhaitham was content with the way things were now. The risk of loss was far greater than the possible reward.

“What does it matter to you, Alhaitham?” the fragment of Kaveh had asked, eyes alight and hands shaking in fists. Alhaitham had not had an answer for it then, too caught up in the need to keep it close, to make it understand that returning was its only option now that Alhaitham had found it.

Even here, alone in the quiet twilight of Sumeru City, he had no answer. He had no name for the emotion that had taken up roost in his chest once more. And yet, there was no denying the feeling that buzzed, that burned and ached and wanted with a force so strong it scared him a bit to confront.

With a sigh, he slid the golden key into the lock and turned it with a quiet click. No matter. He would stay the course he had set himself on, regardless of any of the distracting feelings that had made a home in his chest. Perhaps, once Kaveh had returned to him whole and sound, Alhaitham could spend some time working through these feelings and considering their implications. Not now, though. Not while Kaveh’s safety and happiness hung in the balance of Alhaitham’s choices. 

With that thought, he opened the door to their home.

“Welcome home, Alhaitham.”

Lounged across the center divan with his fingers curled delicately around a goblet of wine, Kaveh offered Alhaitham a devastating smile.

He looked comfortable, spread across the divan like the subject of a painting, like the very purpose of a piece of art.

(Even as Alhaitham thought the word, a small part of him cringed. Comfortable wasn’t right, not exactly, but what other word could Alhaitham use for the lack of tension in Kaveh’s shoulders and the soft curve of his smile? There was no word in Sumerian that Alhaitham could think of to describe the way this Kaveh looked, other than perhaps home .)

“Hmm,” Alhaitham replied. He busied himself with removing his cloak just to buy himself another few moments. Which Kaveh was this, then? Perhaps his joy, or his naivety? “I see you’ve found my wine.”

Kaveh laughed. It was a lovely sound, bright and free, and the newly unearthed corner of Alhaitham’s heart clenched at the sound. It had been years since Kaveh had made that sound for Alhaitham. A lifetime since Kaveh had let Alhaitham’s presence bring him unfettered pleasure.

“I suppose I have.” Kaveh swirled the liquid in his glass, watching the surface with eyes Alhaitham couldn’t quite see through the veil of hair and soft light. He took a leisurely sip and patted the empty space beside him on the divan with the flat of his palm. “Come sit with me, Alhaitham.”

So Alhaitham did. Kaveh pulled the long line of his legs down and off the divan, and Alhaitham sat beside him. A strange silence settled, heavy and thick as a winter’s blanket but wthout any of the comfort. Quiet never bothered Alhaitham, and yet this discomforting silence felt like the moment before someone drew their sword. As though he and Kaveh were both waiting for the other to make the first move.

Very well. 

Alhitham could be patient. He had learned, over the years, how to bite his tongue and wait for his opponent to slip first. Kaveh— the real Kaveh, the one that should be sitting at Alhaitham’s side– had never been good at this part of their games. The silent treatment was never particularly effective.

But this Kaveh only watched him with eyes the color of a summer sunset, pink shot through with gold. The electricity in his gaze set Alhaitham’s skin alight. 

Alhaitham had faced five of the seven fragments by now, and returned three. As with any research project, the more data Alhaitham collected, the clearer the picture. It seemed as though the fragments he was encountering were the pieces of Kaveh that he wanted to discard– his shame, his anger. 

A perfectly reasonable conclusion. 

Or, it would be a perfectly reasonable conclusion if Alhaitham excluded this strange starlight fragment from his data set as an outlier. Every study has them, of course, because it is impossible to remove the element of humanity from research without removing the entire purpose of a study. Why learn a language if there was nobody with which to use it? Whether that somebody was in the past or the present was irrelevant; languages live and die by the humanity they encapsulate.

So it goes. Which left Alhaitham with three options. 

One, this Kaveh truly was an outlier. Alhaitham could disregard his presence and make a decision based on the information still available to him. An option worth retaining, but not solid enough that Alhaitham would risk placing his hypothesis on its foundation. 

Two, this Kaveh fit within the stated parameters. This seemed about as likely as option one, but brought a new question to light as a result: what piece of Kaveh was this then, that seemed determined to twine itself with Alhaitham? And why was Kaveh so desperate to be rid of it?

Three, Alhaitham was incorrect entirely, and the fragments followed a completely unrelated logic. Unlikely, but Alhaitham was not so egotistical as to dismiss the possibility entirely.

“I can hear you thinking,” Kaveh said from beside him. His voice was low and smooth, like honey and melted sugar. “Care to share?”

The opening gambit. Alhaitham turned and pulled one leg underneath him so he could face it head on. Kaveh mirrored him.

“I’m trying to figure out what piece of Kaveh you are.”

Kaveh smiled, innocence tinted with something darker, hungrier. It didn’t seem to fit on Kaveh’s face, and yet Alhaitham couldn’t look away. 

“I think that depends, eshgham ,” it said. Alhaitham’s face must have given away his feelings about the nickname, because Kaveh’s smile sharpened and his eyes dipped to Alhaitham’s mouth. “What do you think I am? Good researchers don’t ask for answers, after all. They provide them.” Kaveh leaned closer in one slow, elegant movement.

“Go on then,” he said. “Provide. Unless you want to admit that you don’t know.” 

A pawn at best, but Alhaitham could not ignore it. Still, forming thoughts was difficult beneath that sunset gaze. Alhaitham wanted to ask him to look away, but he would not be the first to show weakness in this battle. 

“I have some theories,” Alhaitham replied. Kaveh hummed and took another sip of his wine. Their eyes met and held until Alhaitham broke the contact.

“You’re… all of you are the pieces of Kaveh that he is ashamed of.”

Kaveh’s eyes crinkled at the corners when his smile widened. Alhaitham ignored the little pang of something like homesickness. 

“How interesting,” Kaveh said. In one smooth motion, he swallowed the rest of his goblet of wine. The last dregs shimmered in the empty cup as Kaveh twisted it in his fingers. 

“Well?” Alhaitham pressed after a long moment of silence. “Am I correct?”

Kaveh set the cup on the wooden table with a dull thunk. 

“Does it matter if you are right or wrong? I am here regardless.”

Alhaitham had nothing to say in response. Kaveh shifted on the divan, brought himself up to sit on his knees with his legs folded beneath him. 

“So,” he said, lips curved, eyes razor sharp, “let us assume that your hypothesis is true. If we are, as you say, pieces of his shame, then what do you think I am?” He leaned, then, and Alhaitham’s eyes caught on the way the wine had colored the soft inner part of his lips. 

Would the wine taste sweet on his tongue?

He banished the thought with efficiency.

“Take your time,” Kaveh offered. All sharpness, all predator. “I’m willing to be patient.”

Alhaitham forced himself to look away as he considered the shade’s question. It wasn’t as though he didn’t have ideas. His behavior that first night had already been suspect, and now tonight only served to solidify Alhaitham’s theory. The problem wasn’t in his idea. 

The problem was in saying it.

Something about the idea of speaking his theory out loud, here in the quiet of their shared home, felt like opening a door that he wouldn’t be able to close again. If he admitted the truth, even to himself, it would be something he could not take back. 

And besides, what if he was wrong? For all of Alhaitham’s confidence, he was not enough of an egoist to assume he was always correct. Accepting incorrect hypotheses was an important part of being a scholar. It was the piece many of the so-called scholars of the Akademiya lacked– the idea that their life’s work could be completely invalidated by a word, a piece of evidence, a small detail they’d overlooked. 

And yet, the idea of calling this Kaveh on what he was and being wrong was not something Alhaitham could swallow.

But what choice did he have?

“Hmm,” Kaveh hummed, and Alhaitham realized that he was closer. The sharp jut of Kaveh’s knees bumped against Alhaitham’s thigh. Had his pulse always been this fast, this obvious?

“Perhaps you haven’t gotten that far?” This close, the pink of Kaveh’s eyes swirled into a kaleidoscope of fuschia and rose, of pastel and neon and all focused entirely on him. The attention settled heavy in his mind. Chapped lips curled into a familiar smile, the one Kaveh had used when they were younger, when he would tease Alhaitham over his prickly attitude. The one from before they had mutually dropped the thing between them and let it shatter on the floor of the House of Daena.

Alhaitham shifted back, putting space between them. A scant few inches, but enough that he felt as though he could breathe again. Kaveh eyed the thin expanse of green, but said nothing, even as Alhaitham caught the disappointment in his eyes. 

Alhaitham pressed his lips into a thin line.

“I’m still deciding,” he said. Kaveh sighed.

“It can’t be helped, then.” Kaveh rested his chin on the softness of his palm, elbow on his back of the divan. Alhaitham was no artist, had never claimed to be one, and even he could recognize the elegant shape of Kaveh’s body. Kaveh had always been beautiful.

“What do you want from me, Kaveh?” Alhaitham asked. 

“So demanding.” Kaveh leaned back– finally– and stretched, releasing the tension in his body and freeing Alhaitham from the strange, sparking energy that had been captured in the space between them. Alhaitham couldn’t help but exhale a sigh at the relief.

“Then again,” Kaveh continued, “I suppose I like that, don’t I?”

He shifted closer again, closing the small space Alhaitham had managed to create, until they pressed knee to knee once more. Kaveh’s free hand, the one not holding his empty goblet, rested on the tight muscle of Alhaitham’s thigh. 

“Come now, Alhaitham,” he said, low and leaned close. His voice settled, warm like fresh coffee, in Alhaitham’s chest. He fought back the urge to dig his own nails into the bare skin of his palm. Kaveh’s eyes sparked with mischief.

“I’ll ask again. What do you think I am?”

Alhaitham swallowed. There was no possibility. And yet, the way Kaveh was asking, there was no other explanation, other than–

“Lust,” Alhaitham said quietly.

Kaveh smirked. Sharp. Predatory. 

Then, he stood from the couch in one sinuous movement. Alhaitham only had a moment to realize what was about to happen before Kaveh settled himself in his lap, knees pressed to the divan on either side of Alhaitham’s thighs. Alhaitham’s hands raised, almost without thought, to settle at Kaveh’s hips before he stopped himself and dropped them back to the fabric beneath them. 

“How interesting,” Kaveh purred. He was so close now, and Alhaitham was sickeningly aware of the long lines of his body, of the places where Kaveh’s heat and warmth pressed into his own. 

“Then, oh genius of Haravatat, what do you think you’ll have to do to be rid of me?”

Kaveh’s hand left tingling lines where his fingertips dragged over Alhaitham’s jaw. A shudder ripped through Alhaitham. Kaveh’s smirk turned hungry. 

“Go on,” he whispered. He was close enough that his breath ghosted across Alhaitham’s lips. He could almost taste the sweetness of the wine Kaveh had been drinking on the back of his tongue. 

“It’s what you want, isn’t it?”

Even through the fog, Kaveh’s words were enough to give him pause. Just for a moment, barely a heartbeat, but it was enough to break the spell. Alhaitham turned his head, focusing instead on the distant wall where Kaveh had carefully hung a painting weeks earlier. Alhaitham always tilted it when he walked by because it meant that Kaveh would come home and demand Alhaitham’s help in straightening it again. 

It was still crooked. 

This wasn’t right. No matter how desperately Alhaitham’s body tried to convince him otherwise. 

He brought his hands to Kaveh’s hips and lifted him up before depositing him back on the divan.

“No.”

Surprise raised Kaveh’s brows and twisted his mouth before his face smoothed over into its earlier mask of confidence. Unlike before, though, Alhaitham could follow the cracks that splintered their surface.

“I think your body and your mind have two differing opinions on the matter.”

Alhaitham ignored the hot flush of his neck and ears.

“We’re not doing this.”

“Why not? Here I am, telling you that I want you, that he wants you, and yet you refuse?”

“I do.”

Kaveh huffed, arms crossed in a position so undeniably Kaveh that it ached in Alhaitham’s chest. He caught Kaveh’s defiant gaze and held it. Conviction made him calm. He would not be swayed from his decision once it had been made. Not for a mere fragment of the only man who might have a chance of changing his mind. . 

“Why?” Kaveh asked. He shifted until he was sitting on his knees, hands on his thighs. There was a shine of desperation in his eyes, a particular lilt to his voice that reminded Alhaitham of disasters and cruel words dropped like explosions between them, of shrapnel they were both still picking from the wounds. 

“Why, Alhaitham?”

Alhaitham turned the question over in his mind. Normally, Alhaitham wouldn’t bother entertaining questions of his reasoning– he’d long since learned that people usually ask that question not because they want his answer, but because they want a different response.

But not Kaveh.

“Because you are not him.”

Kaveh opened his mouth to refute his point. Alhaitham held a hand up between them, silently asking for the time and space to finish his thought. Kaveh glared at his palm for a moment before waving him onward with an irritable twist to his mouth.

“You are a part of him,” Alhaitham continued, “but you are not all of him. I will take him whole or I will not have him at all.” 

The painting on the wall was still crooked from Alhaitham tilting it on his way out the door three days ago. This Kaveh had not straightened it. Until the real Kaveh, the right Kaveh came home, the painting would likely remain this way.

“You’ve spent enough time making yourself small enough to be swallowed whole,” Alhaitham finally said. “I would rather choke.”

Kaveh offered him a filthy grin. 

“That could be arranged, if you want.”

“Don’t push your luck.”

Kaveh acquiesced with only the smallest of sighs. “Oh well. Can’t blame me for trying.”

He stood from the divan. Too smooth, too fluid for Alhaitham, who thought of the Kaveh that would complain about the ache in his back even as he hunched closer to his drafting table, the man who shuffled on cooler mornings until his muscles remembered what it was like to flex and release again. The difference helped to soothe the strange tinge of sadness in Alhaitham’s chest.

(Surely Kaveh wouldn’t begrudge Alhaitham a bit of disappointment, right? Surely Kaveh would understand that there was a part of Alhaitham– however small, however silenced– that wanted to say yes. It was the newly unearthed part of Alhaitham that he had once believed to be long buried. The ghosts of childhood affection come to haunt him once more.)

“Come to bed?”

When Alhaitham returned to himself, it was to a hand, an achingly familiar hand bearing scars Alhaitham could trace blindfolded, held out before him.

“Kaveh,” Alhaitham began, but Kaveh cut him off before he could continue.

“Not for that.” Kaveh wiggled his fingers in invitation, palm up between them. “Unless, of course, you’ve changed your mind.”

“Unlikely.”

“I know.”

The shade smiled. To an unfamiliar onlooker, Kaveh might look unburdened, perhaps even happy. And yet, Alhaitham could see the soft stain of sadness behind it.

“Just to sleep. I promise.”

This was a bad idea. This was such a bad idea that the refusal was already on Alhaitham’s tongue, its taste comfortable in its familiarity. 

And yet.

“You’ll go back to him in the morning?”

“I’ll be out of the house before you even wake up.”

Alhaitham weighed the promise against the delicate part of his heart he kept hidden. It was a risk. Just another chess move, the same as sending a pawn to its doom to open up a path to the king. But could Alhaitham survive the sacrifice?

(The real question: was there any sacrifice Alhaitham was not willing to make in the name of the man that stood before him? Sometimes the answer scared him.)

Alhaitham hesitated for just a moment longer.  Kaveh’s palm was warm and dry when Alhaitham took it.

Kaveh was smiling again. It was faint but genuine, the kind of smile that only showed itself when he was trying to hide it. The hand holding his tightened and pulled, and this time, Alhaitham allowed himself to be guided off of the divan and to his feet once more, until he was face to face and chest to chest with the shadow of his roommate once more.

Alhaitham followed the familiar shape as it led the way down the hall and into Alhaitham’s room. Once again, Alhaitham was struck by how strange it was to see Kaveh in his room, to have Kaveh sitting at the foot of his bed as though they were the kind of people that sought comfort in the presence of the other. As though Kaveh being in Alhaitham’s space was a foregone conclusion and not something Alhaitham had long since made his peace with losing. 

They undressed in silence. What else could Alhaitham do? This was not Kaveh. Not in the ways that mattered. He’d been through four of these now, and yet this one hurt more than any of the others. Like a puzzle piece that almost fit into its place. No matter how much Alhaitham wanted. 

He extinguished the lights, and then it was just the cool moon left. 

Kaveh looked good like this. Softened by the evening, his hair spread across Alhaitham’s pillows. Gold turned silver by the light. 

Alhaitham slid beneath the thin quilt facing the wall. Somehow he could sense that if he turned, if he looked Kaveh in the eyes like this, then he would be lost to the nameless thing that had crackled between them earlier, when Kaveh had leaned close enough for Alhaitham to steal his breath.

“Alhaitham,” Kaveh murmured into the darkness. Alhaitham shook his head, but Kaveh was unperturbed.

“If I–” 

A pause, and then a sigh. Alhaitham did not turn around.

“If he were here, would you treat him this way?”

Outside the window, the cicadas sang their evening song. The bedding rustled as Kaveh shifted behind him. 

“...Nevermind. Goodnight, Alhaitham.”

Alhaitham hummed. He doubted he would get much sleep, anyway. He closed his eyes and counted Kaveh’s breaths as they evened out into a peaceful rhythm. 

(Alhaitham could imagine a life like this. A life where Kaveh did not close a door between them, but rather behind them. A life where Alhaitham could reach across the thin line between them both and pull Kaveh to his chest, bury his nose in padisarah-scented silk and trace the line of Kaveh’s spine. A life where Alhaitham knew the shape of the man beside him by touch.)

When Alhaitham woke up, he was alone again. The left side of his bed was cool and empty. 

A flash of color caught his eye. One of Kaveh’s hair clips remained on the nightstand. 

Alhaitham stretched across the bed and picked it up before he could think the motion through. The clip was thin, made of metal and painted with shimmering enamel. It was cool to the touch as he rolled it between his fingers. The sunlight caught off the sharp edges of the decoration. A matching bar of light reflected itself on the wall as he twisted it.

A sigh, long and low, as Alhaitham let the strange feeling he’d been carrying finally escape the confines of his chest.

It was easier, somehow, to admit what he wanted to the quiet morning light. 

Kaveh, eyes dark and heady over the rim of a goblet of wine. Kaveh, complaining about Alhaitham’s attitude even as he set a carefully arranged plate on the table between them. Kaveh, bent low over a draft in their shared study, or proudly showing off the keychain attached to his new golden key, or rolling his eyes when he disagreed with Alhaitham’s assertions. 

Kaveh, golden hair loose and shining as he laid on Alhaitham’s pillow and smiled as though the two of them shared the secrets of the universe between them. 

And suddenly, that emotion had a name so simple Alhaitham would be ashamed of how long it took him to get there if he wasn’t busy confronting how right it felt.

“What does it matter to you?” the shade had asked. Alhaitham had not had an answer then, but perhaps he had an answer now.

It mattered because Kaveh mattered. Somewhere along the line, between carrying his drunken senior home in his arms and volunteering for a commentator job he never wanted, between tearing apart and coming together once more, Alhaitham had fallen in love with Kaveh. 

He was in love with Kaveh. With his aggravating, obstinate, loud, stubborn, beautiful roommate. 

Mirrors were only meant to reflect. To fall in love with the reflection blinking back was foolish. And yet, here Alhaitham was, in a bed big enough for two, thinking about how nice it would be to have this bed be meant for two from the start. 

At what point had the mirror become flesh and blood? When had the reflection become something Alhaitham could not live without?

Alhaitham had no answer. His life with Kaveh had been intertwined long ago. Maybe it all started the day Kaveh approached him in the House of Daena. Or maybe it truly began that night, when Alhaitham held a key out over a tavern table and gave Kaveh a home once more.

Maybe it was a collection of tiny moments that led Alhaitham here. A mosaic of dinners and Kaveh’s arm slung over Alhaitham’s shoulder as they walked back to their shared home, of hidden kindnesses and open cruelties. 

Alhaitham watched as the clip in his hand shimmered. Then, with a sigh, Alhaitham set it aside on his nightstand and sat up. 

He couldn’t spend the morning lounging in his bed, no matter how badly he wanted to. He had a task to finish, after all.

And then, once Kaveh had woken up, he had a very important conversation to plan.

Chapter Text

For another person, the morning’s realizations might have resulted in a long period of contemplation. It wasn’t often that one confronted feelings long-buried and allowed them a chance to resurface. 

But Alhaitham had never been normal, and he had far more important things to focus on. He couldn’t simply waste his day in bed daydreaming. 

Instead, he wrapped these new feelings into his morning routine the same way he might have worked around an open book. He considered the way Kaveh’s hair curled against his jawline while he shaved his own in the mirror. Pulling breakfast from the cryo box reminded him of the smell of fresh ground coffee beans and a voice gone rough with sleep. The curl of steam from his mug was a pale mimicry of the waves that fell into Kaveh’s eyes as he bent over a design in the candlelight.

It had been foolish of Alhaitham to ever pretend that he could run from the emotions that flickered in his chest. He understood that now, in the way that conclusions are often clearer with the kindness of time. 

He had once imagined himself past the softer emotions of his childhood self. There had been a time where he had thought of Kaveh as an immutable part of his peace, but Alhaitham had done his best to close the cover on such thoughts the day Kaveh had walked out of his life. If Kaveh could wish he had never met Alhaitham, then Alhaitham could wish away the tiny parts of him that missed Kaveh.

It had not mattered how many Kaveh-sized holes Alhaitham found as he navigated life without him. He filled each hole, tamped the uneven surface down with books and music and quiet comforts, until his life was a tapestry of threadbare patches. And he thought himself content until the night he entered the tavern to pick up a few bottles of wine for himself only to find Kaveh spread out across a wooden table stained with circles of other’s memories, with an emptied bottle in his grip. 

He’d let Kaveh in, that night. Out of curiosity, perhaps, or a bit of misplaced pity for what had once bound them. He and Kaveh had once been each other’s only family, and Alhaitham had lost far more than a research partner on the night Kaveh had walked out the door. 

It was only now, in the emptiness of a kitchen that had somehow begun to belong to two people, that he could see exactly how much he had given up. 

He’d never moved on from Kaveh. He’d only shelved those feelings in the dusty corner of his mind, somewhere where he wouldn’t have to cut his fingers on the sharp edges of loneliness and loss. But here he sat, at a table that had always been meant for two people to share, and he opened the book again.

He wanted Kaveh back. The fact seemed clear, in a way it had not been when Cyno walked into his office and asked for his help. He missed Kaveh’s voice, and the quiet promise of another person’s presence in his life and his home. His peaceful morning felt bleak without another pair of eyes across the kitchen table, without another person competing with him for counter space as they went about their morning routines. 

Kaveh should be sitting across the table from Alhaitham, eyes clouded with sleep and hair mussed. Alhaitham would smirk and complain about Kaveh keeping him up the night before, and Kaveh would retort, and all would be right in Alhaitham’s life once more. The strange, off-putting silence would be lifted. 

Strange how Alhaitham could only truly realize what he had when it was temporarily lost to him.

This was what it was, after all. A temporary loss. Kaveh would not escape Alhaitham. That had been true before this realization, and it was all the more correct now. He had been called many things in his life, but nobody would deny that once he was fixated on a problem, he would not be letting go. 

After all, what had once been his would always remain in his possession.

Alhaitham cleared the breakfast dishes in silence. At the door, he clipped his cloak neatly, pocketed the singular silver key that had been sitting in its bowl, and strode out into the morning sunlight. The door closed behind him on a silent house whose days were strictly numbered. He’d had enough of the quiet. 

He only made one stop on his way out of Sumeru City.

The Bimarstan was quiet in the morning light. It was too early for their halls to be bustling with injured scholars yet. A few aides moved from bed to bed, carrying trays of warm food and small bundles of medicine. Alhaitham passed them without a glance.

Kaveh's room was empty when he nudged the door open. Alhaitham lowered himself into the empty chair at Kaveh's bedside.

He hadn't done much visiting. Truth be told, he only ever stepped into this room to return a fragment before turning his back once more. It had been a task that needed completing, a document in his “To-Do” pile that he read over only perfunctorily before assigning its due and moving on to the next thing demanding his attention.

Now, he took a moment to truly look.

On the bed, swathed in impersonal hospital linens, Kaveh looked old. Older than his age, with sunken eyes and cheeks growing gaunt. His hair, Kaveh's small pride, was matted in places and growing brittle at the edges. His skin was dry in some places and oily in others, and his lips were chapped and bloodstained in places where the skin had torn.

Kaveh, for all of his blustering about his status as Alhaitham's elder, had never truly looked it. He was meticulous in his routines and it showed. Only Alhaitham had ever been granted the honor of seeing Kaveh in a state of dishevelment, and even those were quick glimpses between the washroom and Kaveh's personal room. 

His senior would throw a fit if he were to see himself in a mirror now.

Alhaitham cast his eyes around the room, trying to ignore the discomfort in his chest. There was a small bag sitting on the nightstand. A hairbrush peeked out the open top.

Before he consciously thought about it, he reached for the bag and withdrew the hairbrush.

Kaveh's hair was not soft as he worked the bristles through the tangled strands. He'd been imagining it just this morning, soft as silk and warm from where it rested against Kaveh's neck. This felt more like cheap paper– rough and strangely fibrous. He hoped he was being gentle enough. 

When he had worked all of the knots free that he could, he returned the brush to the nightstand and rifled through the rest of the bag. There wasn't much else inside; it was clearly meant to provide patients with the bare minimum until a family member or loved one brought their own things from home.

Alhaitham hadn't done that. Instead, he had left Kaveh alone in an empty room while he chased ghosts throughout Sumeru. It had been the logical thing to do. The sooner Alhaitham dealt with this roadblock, the sooner he could return to his peaceful life. 

But he has forgotten to consider something important in his equation: Kaveh.

No more, though. Now, Alhaitham gently scooped a bit of moisturizer from the pot in the bag and smeared it across Kaveh's lips. It smelled faintly of medicine and honey. Not like the normal cosmetics Kaveh preferred, the ones that smelled warm and musky or like nothing at all. 

“I'll bring your things tomorrow,” Alhaitham promised as he replaced the pot lid. Kaveh wouldn't hear him, of course, but it felt important to say anyway. Then, quietly, “I won't leave you alone again.”

Kaveh did not move, but Alhaitham had not expected him to. If there were any kindness in the world, Kaveh would wake soon and be none the wiser to the weeks that had passed as he laid alone in this quiet hospital bed. 

(Nevermind that if the world was kind, perhaps people like Kaveh would have far less to worry about.)

Alhaitham allowed himself a few minutes more to take in the way Kaveh’s chest rose and fell. Mentally, he compiled a list of things he would bring to Kaveh’s room that evening. Kaveh’s quilt, for one. Threadbare though it might be, Kaveh always sought it out when he felt poorly. 

Hesitantly, he rested his palm over the lump where Kaveh’s own hand rested, loosely curled beneath the scratchy blanket.

“It won’t be much longer,” Alhaitham said. “I’ll end this soon.”

The twitch he felt against his hand was surely his imagination, but Alhaitham carried the spark of warmth with him as he left nonetheless.

The Sumeru sun cut directly into him as he stepped out of the cool hospital and into its glare. Alhaitham squinted until his eyes adjusted, then set his shoulders and set off down the path. As he walked, he set facts out before him like stepping stones.

He was hunting fragments of Kaveh. While he could not prove it, each of them seemed to represent a part of Kaveh that he did not wish to keep. While there was a possibility that Kaveh’s generosity or kindness was gallivanting about Sumeru, statistics simply did not support that hypothesis. Five had returned, leaving Alhaitham with only two more to find. 

Only one question was left unanswered now: where were they hiding?

Alhaitham had turned every corner of Sumeru City upside down over the last weeks. Now, he had to consider Tighnari’s comment. 

“The fragments seem to appear in places of special personal interest to Kaveh,” he had said. Alhaitham mentally tallied the fragments he’d found. Their home, the tavern, the House of Daena, and at Kaveh’s own side. Now, it was down to Alhaitham to predict the movements of the last three.

Places in Sumeru that held special importance to Kaveh…

Alhaitham sighed and turned toward the distant horizon. To the Palace, then.

Kaveh was not at the Palace of Alcazarzaray. Well, at least, he wasn’t at the Palace right now.

A woman standing beneath the cover of a gazebo was only too happy to tell Alhaitham about her run in with her senior.

“He was so knowledgeable!” she gushed, oblivious to the way Alhaitham was unimpressed with her excitement. “Oh, I’ve always hoped to meet Senior Kaveh. I come out here every day hoping for a chance to speak with him!”

“Why not simply approach him at the Akademiya?” Alhaitham asked, curiosity temporarily overwriting his need for efficiency.

“Well,” the girl said, her cheeks reddening, “it’s… kind of embarrassing, isn’t it?”

“Embarrassing?” Alhaitham repeated. What was embarrassing about seeking out a professor for the purpose of learning? Wasn’t that the whole purpose of the Akademiya? He opened his mouth to say so before something about the girl’s body language stopped him.

She shifted anxiously from foot to foot, her eyes locked on a loose thread she tugged at within her sleeves. She wasn’t acting like a shy student. On the contrary, she reminded Alhaitham of the admirers that had followed Kaveh like a flock of twittering birds during their time in the Akademiya. Students just outside of Alhaitham’s range of hearing, all whispering quietly to each other or eyeing Kaveh from nearby desks while he, oblivious to them all, leaned against Alhaitham’s shoulder to point out a particularly egregious flaw in the thesis they’d been pouring over. The kind of people that treated Alhaitham as an annoyance and Kaveh as a prize waiting to be won. 

“Ah,” Alhaitham said. He felt off-balance, like the earth beneath him had shifted while leaving him where he was. Her blush darkened. 

“A-anyway!” she said, too loudly for their close proximity. Alhaitham hid his wince. 

“He left after he’d finished answering all of my questions. Said something about Port Ormos? Maybe he was meeting with a client there.”

There was no client in Port Ormos, and if there was, Alhaitham doubted this piece of Kaveh was on his way to meet them. 

“We’re done here,” Alhaitham said as he turned his back. He was already walking away from the girl when she called after her.

“I’m not– in trouble, am I?”

Alhaitham kept his back turned to hide his rueful smile.

“No. You aren’t the first person, after all.”

With that, he left, ignoring her voice as she asked for clarification. He didn’t owe her an explanation of his feelings, after all.

Finding Kaveh in Port Ormos was a lot like that old Mondstadt tale of the children abandoned in the woods. They left breadcrumbs to follow, only to find them eaten by birds before they could find their way home.

He leaned his back against the solid lighthouse wall and took a moment to appreciate the view. The sun was just beginning its final descent into the watery horizon of the port. The cool breeze carried the smell of food carts and laughing merchants as they tallied their day’s profits. Further into the city, the night market was just beginning. Alhaitham could faintly see the lights of the market from the port.

Kaveh was somewhere in this city, but not a single person seemed capable of pointing Alhaitham in the right direction. 

The first person Alhaitham had spoken to said he’d seen the architect by the elevator. Alhaitham had hurried through the city, his boots rapping sharply against the cobblestone with each step, only to come up empty at both the base and the top of the contraption. A laborer near the top saw Alhaitham’s expression and asked if he’d lost something. When he heard Alhaitham was looking for the architect responsible for the port’s revival, he was only too happy to point Alhaitham to the street where the night market would be in full swing. Only after walking the whole street twice, eyes scanning every merchant and shadowy corner, had an auntie approached him to demand he explain himself. She’d brightened up considerably after hearing about Alhaitham’s goals, and sent him on his way to the lighthouse with a rough pat on the shoulder and a knowing smile. 

And yet here Alhaitham stood, in the shadow of the lighthouse, with no Kaveh in sight. 

Alhaitham pinched the bridge of his nose and fought back the oncoming headache. He’d covered a lot of distance today. Sumeru City to the Palace of Alcazarzaray was a long journey on its own, and he’d still have to walk back to the City tonight. Getting a room wasn’t an option; he had a promise to keep, after all. 

If he didn’t find this fragment soon, he’d have to declare his hunt a waste of a day. While Alhaitham was well-aware of the sunk-cost fallacy, something in him seemed to insist that he was on the right track. But what if those witnesses were wrong? They might have simply seen another blonde man and made assumptions. He couldn’t hinge his hopes on rumors and second-hand testimony.

He had to return to Sumeru City. It wasn’t negotiable. 

But he was so close–

Alhaitham pushed away from the wall with a low groan. He’d just have to return tomorrow and hope the trail hadn’t gone too cold. In the meantime, he’d head into the night market long enough to purchase a meal and then start the long return trip to the city.

As he walked toward the center of the port, he glanced up toward the bridge.

There was a solitary figure standing against the side of the bridge that faced the open water. The reddish-orange light of the setting sun turned the figure’s blonde hair flame bright, and the edges of his crimson cape fluttered in the sea breeze. It was a familiar silhouette, one Alhaitham would recognize anywhere.

Kaveh. 

Alhaitham turned his back on the bridge and broke into a run. The path upward was close by the port’s entrance, but every second felt precious as Alhaitham hurried up the inclined path and into the protective boughs of the trees until he was standing on the Port Ormos bridge and watching a familiar silhouette stare out at the horizon.

“I knew you’d find me eventually,” Kaveh said, “but I think I hid pretty well. Don’t you?”

“Come home, Kaveh.”

Kaveh ignored him. His fingers dragged along the edge of one of the wooden pedestals that made up the guard railing of the bridge.. 

“Do you know how many people recognized me?” He asked. 

“Does that matter?”

“Of course it does,” Kaveh said. Alhaitham allowed the topic to drop. He had more important things to discuss. 

“It’s time to go home."

Kaveh snorted and turned his back on the horizon. His eyes shone a vibrant purple in the fading light.

“I don’t listen to you.”

“I’m well aware.”

Kaveh’s lower lip curled. “Gods, how did I ever put up with you.”

Alhaitham crossed his arms. “Beats me.”

Antagonizing Kaveh was the wrong thing to do, and Alhaitham knew it. But he felt fragile in a way he was wholly unfamiliar with. It was as though realizing his feelings for Kaveh had ripped away some defense he hadn’t known about, leaving him unbalanced and with his underbelly exposed to Kaveh’s blade-sharp words. A part of him recoiled from the feeling, determined to strike first before this fragment could realize the change and call him out for it. 

Kaveh, oblivious to Alhaitham’s roiling internal sea, only rested a hand on his hip in defiance.

“You don’t get to order me around, Alhaitham.”

“And you don’t have a choice in this matter.”

Kaveh’s lip curled and he turned his back on Alhaitham.

“You wouldn’t get it,” Kaveh said. The wind carried the bitterness in his words along with the salt of the ocean. 

The sun was half swallowed by the watery horizon. In the distance, the night market was just beginning. The faint sound of laughing children and merchants hawking their wares could be heard over the rustle of the tree leaves overhead. 

One step. Then another. Kaveh did not look back, even as Alhaitham came to stand beside him. His hands itched to reach out, to take Kaveh by the wrists. What he would do after that was a secret even to Alhaitham.

“I think,” Alhaitham began, voice low enough to only be heard by the two of them, “that I could surprise you with just how much I understand.”

Kaveh glared at him, but his gaze softened minutely when he caught sight of Alhaitham’s face. Alhaitham hoped his sincerity was clear.  Finally, Kaveh groaned and rested his head on the side of the bridge. 

“I really can’t stand you,” he muttered. He pushed away from the truss and began walking without gesturing Alhaitham to follow. Alhaitham did anyway. 

Kaveh walked quickly, eyes flicking around every time they turned a corner. The energy was enough to put Alhaitham’s teeth on edge, and he found himself glancing around them more than he usually would. What had Kaveh so anxious? What danger had the other man sensed that Alhaitham could not detect? 

Kaveh led him to the harbor, past the lighthouse that Alhaitham had stood beneath not half an hour earlier, and finally into a shadowy alley whose entrance was half-concealed by boxes. Only then did Kaveh turn to face him fully. 

“Prove it, then,” Kaveh said. He crossed his arms, purple eyes flashing with a familiar stubbornness. 

Alhaitham matched his posture. “Be clear, Kaveh. What do I have to prove?”

“You say that you ‘get it.’ That you understand. Well? What do you think you understand?”

“You,” Alhaitham said softly. “I understand you.”

Kaveh’s chin tilted up, defiance flashing in his eyes.

“Do you?”

“I believe I do.”

Kaveh stepped closer, his arms uncrossing only to grab Alhaitham by the shoulders.

“Do you know how terrible it feels? To feel eyes on you everywhere you do?” Kaveh eyed him for a moment, then decisively shook his head and released him. “Of course you don’t. But I do. It’s all I feel when I open the door, when I step outside.”

“You’ve always been sensitive to the opinions of others,” Alhaitham said. 

That was the wrong thing to say. Kaveh took a step back from him, his breath already coming shallow with frustration.

“Of course I am. Everything I’ve worked for hinges on the opinions of others.” He was gesturing now, violet eyes fever bright. “I want to make things that live forever , that people will look to and know that I was here, that I lived. ” His hands buried themselves in his hair, tugging at the roots. 

“If others don’t remember me when I’m gone,” he said, “did I ever really exist?”

They’d debated this idea long ago, when they had been able to disagree without it aiming at their souls. If a tree falls in the depths of the forest and nobody hears it, does it make a sound? 

Alhaitham had argued that since the word sound was most frequently used in the context of a listener hearing it, that no. The tree would cause vibrations, of course, and the aftermath would be there for passersby to observe, but there would not be a sound because there would be nobody to hear it. 

He could still picture the way Kaveh’s face had fallen. Just for a moment, a glimpse before it vanished behind the smile he always seemed to wear back then. 

“What a waste,” he had murmured, more to himself than to others. Then, he’d laughed. Not the happy sound Alhaitham had come to associate with his senior. Something harsher, more bitter. 

“What is?”

“To die like that. Alone and unremarked.”

“It’s a tree,” Alhaitham had pointed out. “It cannot grieve its own demise.”

Alhaitham pulled himself from the memory. Kaveh stared at him, eyes searching his face.

“I understand,” Alhaitham repeated at last. He stepped forward, more hesitantly than before, and cupped his palm around the sharpness of Kaveh’s shoulder. Kaveh flinched.

“Do you?” he asked. His voice shivered. 

“I do.”

It wasn’t the lack of applause or the anonymity of death that Kaveh feared. It was meaninglessness. It was dedicating himself to a life of good that meant nothing in the end. Kaveh believed in beauty for beauty’s sake, in the kind of community that only ever truly existed in the utopias of fiction books. For a man who had given of himself until his palms bled, his greatest fear was that others might look at him and decide that his path wasn’t worth following. 

How like Kaveh, in the end. To cut himself to the bone and try to hide the wound so that others around him might be more comfortable.

Before Alhaitham could reconsider, he pulled Kaveh closer, until they were nearly chest to chest. Kaveh yelped, but Alhaitham paid him no attention.

“You’re afraid to be weak,” Alhaitham said, “because you worry others will conflate kindness with weakness by extension. You don’t want to be forgotten. You want people to point to your work and speak of your skill, but also of your life. Of the kind of man that you were.”

Kaveh went completely still. His eyes flickered, searching Alhaitham’s. For what, Alhaitham didn’t know. 

“But you won’t be forgotten,” Alhaitham continued. He hesitated for a moment, wondering if it was too much, too far. Then, he spoke once more. “I won’t allow it.”

Kaveh’s eyes widened. 

“What do you mean by that?”

“I mean what I say. Is record-keeping not part of my job as the Scribe?” 

Truth, yes, but not the whole truth. Alhaitham tried to imagine a world where Kaveh was forgotten. A Sumeru where, no matter how he looked, he would never find a flicker of Kaveh’s life again. 

“Besides,” he continued, “you’ve touched far too many lives to be forgotten so easily.”

He wished Kaveh could see that truth as clearly as Alhaitham could. Kaveh had changed the landscape of Sumeru forever. The House of Daena held books marked by his neat, elegant hand. The children of Aaru Village enjoyed access to a library of literature through little more than Kaveh’s hands and will. Port Ormos’s iconic entrance was the child of Kaveh’s spark, born of his fire and forged by careful skill.  Alcazarzaray only stood because Kaveh’s fire refused to die without one hell of a fight.

And then there was Alhaitham. Port Ormos could pull the bridge from its foundation and knock the lighthouse into the very sea it guarded. Dori could demolish the Palace and declare the entire experience nothing but a waste of mora.  Sumeru could move on tomorrow and discard everything Kaveh had given them, but Alhaitham would still be here. 

“Let me take you home,” Alhaitham said. “Let me prove it to you.”

Kaveh shifted uncomfortably. Then, sullenly, he relented.

“Very well,” he said. “If you must.”

“I must.”

He brought Kaveh home, as he promised. It felt strange, sliding his key into the lock and opening the door to this new piece of Kaveh. Alhaitham watched as it walked through their living area, fingers skimming over pieces of furniture or knick knacks as he passed. He stopped at last in front of the painting the real Kaveh had hung months ago. It was slightly askew, and he adjusted it until it hung evenly once more.

“You said you had something to prove,” he finally said, still facing the painting. Tension kept his back rigid, his neck tight. “So prove it.”

Alhaitham stepped closer, until his chest was nearly pressed to Kaveh’s back. He reached around him and pressed against one corner of the frame until it hung crooked again. 

“This is proof.”

“The painting?”

“The house.”

Kaveh turned, and they were chest to chest once more. Kaveh’s eyes shone, dark purple in the dim light of the room. The sun had long set during their trip back, leaving the house lit only by lamps and the moonlight from outside. 

“Your proof is a building I had no hand in creating?” His voice was incredulous. “That’s quite the logical fallacy from you.”

“It’s no fallacy.” Alhaitham had thought about this argument their entire walk back to Sumeru City. “You’ve spent weeks wandering Sumeru, visiting all of the places you have had a hand in creating. You know more than I do about your buildings.”

Kaveh smiled. It was a thin mockery of Kaveh’s joyful grin, but it was jarring nonetheless.

“At least you understand that much, I suppose.”

“Do you remember what this building looked like when you first moved in?”

Kaveh’s face twisted immediately. 

“Ugh, how could I forget? It was a disaster , honestly. Every surface covered with books, and not a single place to rest! I still cannot fathom how you came to the conclusion that a seating area with no seats was the right decision, for a home. And the blank walls! It might as well have been a box, with all the artistic effort you’d put into making it a home.” Kaveh’s eyes narrowed. “Why are you smirking?”

Alhaitham schooled his expression into something more neutral. “Do you see my point yet, Kaveh?”

“Everything has to be a riddle with you, huh, Alhaitham?”

Alhaitham only crossed his arms and watched as Kaveh thought through the question. Would Kaveh come to the right conclusion and dismiss it? Or would it not even be an option at all?

Alhaitham decided to help him out. Just a bit.

“Why do you think I let you do whatever you want to our home, Kaveh?”

“Because it’s easier than arguing with me.” His answer was immediate.

“And why do I let you use my mora?”

“Because I don’t have any.” 

“And what do I gain out of this?”

Kaveh’s mouth opened, then slowly closed. 

“I… don’t know.” His voice was softer now, as though the question had never actually occurred to him. Alhaitham waited, watching as Kaveh turned the question over and over in his mind. 

“Why?” Kaveh asked at last.

“Because it’s our home,” Alhaitham answered. He reached out into the scant space between them until he was gently holding Kaveh by the shoulder.

“You have touched lives, Kaveh. I let you in because I want you here. Just as Tighnari makes space in his home when you need somewhere quiet. Just as Cyno makes time to join us whenever he can. Collei seeks your advice. Faruzan desires your thoughts and respects your input. Your lectures are full within hours of opening seats.”

Kaveh bent his head. It hid his eyes behind blond hair, but that was perfectly fine with Alhaitham. They were the wrong eyes. 

“Do you see?” Alhaitham asked. Kaveh rubbed at his eyes, then lifted his head and nodded.

“I do.”

“Will you return to him now?”

“I will.”

“Good. Help me pack a bag for him, first.”

“I– what?”

Twenty minutes later, Alhaitham strode into the Bimarstan ward and dropped an overfull bag of cosmetics and creams onto the bedside table. It dwarfed the tiny care kit by orders of magnitude. 

Behind him, the shade of Kaveh stood with his arms crossed, annoyance clear in his features.

“I look terrible. Have you really left me in the care of nurses this entire time?”

“I was busy hunting you down.”

Kaveh sniffed. “That’s no excuse.”

Alhaitham ignored him and instead began pulling vials and bottles from the depths of the bag. Oils and creams for Kaveh’s hair, lotion for his skin, balm for his lips. When he turned back to the shade, it was watching him with surprising depth in its eyes.

“Take good care of me,” it said. “Okay, Alhaitham?”

“I promise,” Alhaitham replied. “And you can tell him I said that.”

He wondered if it worked like that. When the fragments returned to Kaveh, did Kaveh gain their memories? Did Kaveh know that Alhaitham was looking for him? Or was Kaveh completely unconscious, unaware of all that time took from him as days turned to weeks.

The fragment of Kaveh smirked. It was a prideful thing, the smile of a job well done. It strode across the room and pressed its hand to Kaveh’s chest.

“Don’t worry,” it said, “I’ll make sure he knows.”

In between one blink and the next, Kaveh vanished, and Alhaitham was left alone again. He sighed and pulled the cork from the first vial of hair oil. He poured a small amount into his palm and rubbed them together until the oil warmed and the room was full of the familiar scent of herbs and something softly floral. 

“The things I do for you,” he said, but his smile was fond as he slipped his fingers into Kaveh’s hair and began to work the oil through the strands.