Chapter Text
“I’m home.”
No reply.
“Kaveh?” Alhaitham tried again. He was sure that his roommate would be home by now, judging from the lights despite no one currently occupying the living room. And of course, there were thefreshly dirty dishes that sat at the counter, mocking Alhaitham.
After a few moments of silence, a ruffle and a thud was heard, before a very sleepy looking Kaveh emerged from his room, rubbing his eyes, “Haitham.. You’re back..”
“And the dishes are undone.”
“Mm? Oh, hahhha- sorry, I was gonna do them..” Kaveh scratched the back of his head sheepishly, “but I had a project to finish, and uh.. I might have forgotten..”
“Not too surprising there..” Alhaitham mumbled, setting down the documents in his hands. Asking his roommate to do them now would be fighting a losing battle, he’d might as well get started. “..Though, you didn’t have to use ‘i need to complete a project’ as an excuse for falling asleep and forgetting.”
“Hey! Who are you calling a liar? I really had something planned, alright? .. And maybe I fell asleep doing it..”
“By ‘something’, are you referring to the same blueprint that you’ve been working on for the past 2 months? Kaveh, I can translate books faster than that.”
“It takes a lot of effort to design a building okay?!” Kaveh stomps his foot childishly, padding over to stand next to Alhaitham, grabbing one of the dirty dishes. “And I really did just forget, I was going to do them, I swear!”
“You said that last week.”
“Yeah, well.. Ugh- I’m doing them now, okay?? Can’t you be happy for once?”
“I would be if you would actually do something that’s productive.”
The plate that Kaveh was frantically scrubbing at drops into the sink, and soapy hands find their way to his waist. “Are you calling me useless?”
“Correction: I’m calling your work useless.”
“Well, this useless job has helped build many of the buildings you see in Sumeru today!”
“And it has also landed you in bankruptcy.”
Kaveh remains silent after that, choosing rather to tend to the dishes than communicate further with his infuriatingly stubborn roommate.
Taking Kaveh’s silence as another battle won, Alhaitham retrieves his documents, seating himself on the couch nearby. At least work from the Akademiya made more sense than arguing with his infuriatingly stubborn roommate.
After a few long minutes, the tap finally stops running, with Kaveh wringing his wet hands all over the floor in exaggerated actions, as if to purposely piss Alhaitham off even more.
“Haitham.. Haitham, Haitham-!!”
“WHAT?”
“Do you think the Sages would approve of this?” Kaveh prances into the living room, flipping the huge blueprint over Alhaitham’s lap, above the book he was reading. The sheet had many random lines and symbols that Alhaitham had never seemed to understand, along with Kaveh’s messy handwriting in the margins.
“I doubt they’d even be able to read that.”
“Haitham! Be serious..”
“You want my honest opinions? Well then, I think spending 2 months on this,” he proceeds to wave over the paper on his lap, “is a waste of potential time that could have been spent on something else. That being said, nearly everything you do is a waste of time anyway.”
And when Alhaitham finally turns to face Kaveh again, he’s already long gone.
It was one thing that Alhaitham didn’t like his work, but it was another thing to call him useless. Sure, Kaveh did sometimes overspend his Alhaitham’s money on things that are more aesthetic than actually practical, but it still hurt when it was pointed out so obviously from the last person he wanted to hear that from.
If Alhaitham doesn’t want to support his work, Kaveh would just bring it elsewhere.
“Well, at least it’s much more quiet here..” Talking to himself was another thing that Kaveh did that Alhaitham found quite annoying. At least in here, he could do it freely.
But where was ‘here’?
To answer that, Kaveh had found a little space within the nearby garden in Sumeru city that he could easily go to to escape his naggy roommate. Since not many people in Sumeru even cared for the well-being of plants, Kaveh found his much needed peace and quiet by camping there.
Not many people understood how beautifully intricate his work was, if he could even call it work. Alhaitham wasn’t wrong when he said Kaveh had been driven to bankruptcy after completing a major project. Although he has successfully graduated top of his class in Sumeru, the Akademiya still refuses to give Kaveh the funding he needs to pursue his interest in architecture, hence his current arrangement, living with his infuriatingly hot and sexy junior.
All he needed to do was to get the Sages to approve of this project that he had been working on for months. Just a little funding would really help to get him back on his feet, just a little to show Alhaitham that he wasn’t as useless as he believes.
Back in their apartment, Alhaitham brings it upon himself to tidy up Kaveh’s room. It was by far no easy task, but it was something that he was willing to sacrifice his sanity for. As complicated as Kaveh was to understand, there was a certain beauty behind everything that he did.
The moment Alhaitham stepped into the room, he was greeted by a large assortment of construction paper being strewn all over the floor. Each of them were labeled with a number, going all the way from 1 to 23. Every single piece was decorated with the same building, each with a slight difference in design.
Had Kaveh really put this much effort into this project? Well no wonder it took him months. And yet, it seemed as though the clients who were truly satisfied with Kaveh's work were few and far inbetween.
Alhaitham remembers the times where Kaveh would emerge from his room after hours, dark circles under his eyes, clutching a blueprint with a proud smile on his face. “Haitham! Haitham look what I did!” he would say, brandishing his hours of work to his roommate, who (most of the time) just waved him off.
He picks one up. Along the margins are formulas, scribbled in Kaveh’s messy script. Alhaitham could almost imagine Kaveh scrunched over his desk, tired fingers curled around a thoroughly sharpened pencil, muttering to himself as he drew and drew and drew, deep into the night when Alhaitham himself was already asleep.
Of course Kaveh would wake up the next day complaining of backaches, and Alhaitham would ignore him.
Sighing, he stacked the blueprints by number into a pile and placed it on Kaveh’s paint-stained table. They would have to get a new one eventually, but Kaveh had always been emotionally attached to this particular one despite its sorry state. That was just one of the other things Kaveh did that Alhaitham did not understand, his unwillingness to let go of things so trivial.
It just made no sense at all, why Kaveh would hold on to items that have long outlived their use.
And with that, Alhaitham decided a quick trip to the Akademiya was required to pick things up to do for the weekend.
He wonders where Kaveh had run off to this time.