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The first constellation to appear on Alhaitham’s otherwise unblemished skin is his grandmother’s.
For most people in Teyvat, the first design that graces their skin belongs to their parents. It’s not uncommon to walk the streets and see someone with a delicate mark on their forehead from all the kisses their mothers would give them when they were still too young to refuse, or spot the mark between shoulder blades of a father who loves to clap their child on the back.
But Alhaitham has no mother to kiss his forehead and no father to offer approving smiles. He has his books and his home and his grandmother, who always rests her hands on the knot of his neck where his spine juts out while he reads at his desk. And even as her hands turn brittle like dried tree branches reaching for the wind, they find their home on his neck.
It’s a gear. Six dots, each a pale shade of cream, and the shimmering gear shape surrounding them. His grandmother, who builds her pride on the foundation of her knowledge and taught Alhaitham to do the same. It is only fitting that her constellation represents who she is and what she loves.
Alhaitham’s constellation finds its home on the bony edge of her shoulder, where he supports her when she sways. Six dots in a shade of turquoise and a hawk mid-flight.
“My little bird,” his grandmother had said to him as they admired the design, heads pressed together in the mirror. “My little hawk, I always knew you would grow to be strong.”
When she weakens, and the ever-falling sands of time become less starlight and more quicksand, Alhaitham finds her with her hand over her heart. He knows from helping her bathe that his grandfather’s own constellation lies there, in the same place it has lived for the last sixty three years.
He knows the mark that belongs to his father, where it rests on the softness of his grandmother’s inner wrist. And he knows his mother’s lives on the back of her left hand.
He traces them with painstaking care so that when his grandmother leaves him too, he will still remember their shape. His grandmother, with shaking hands, helps him add the gear from his neck to the paper. The lines are uneven and crooked, and Alhaitham treasures it as if it were made of gold.
His grandmother’s headstone is simple. No marble or gold inlay, because she made it clear that such frivolous choices would never withstand the test of time.
“When you make a choice like this,” she had said, voice raspy with age and weariness but strong at its core, “you must remember to look beyond mere beauty. When the beauty has faded, what will be left behind?”
On the granite surface, Alhaitham only has a few things added. Her name. Her date of death. And at the bottom, the constellations.
His grandfather’s. His father’s. His mother’s. Hers.
And his.
He kneels there, in newly disturbed dirt, and traces the lines with the pads of his fingers until he feels he could draw them in his sleep, could follow them blindfolded. And when his chest feels full and his eyes burn with tears, he stands from the ground and turns his back.
His home is as empty as his skin. It takes time to adjust to his new life, but knowing that he carries this small piece of his grandmother with him helps. When he is reading, he will reach to his neck and trace the design he knows is there. It isn’t raised, and has no texture, but Alhaitham knows the exact position of each star anyway, and that is enough.
It is enough until the day that it is not.
Kaveh is a mystery, at first. He smiles like sunbeams and carries anger like a summer monsoon, and it doesn’t take long for Alhaitham to find the grief that Kaveh buries.
They sit side by side in the House of Daena, heads bent over their respective books. They eat together in Razan Gardens and watch the sun set beneath the flickering lights until the sky is a tapestry of stars.
Kaveh’s dad was from Rtawahist, and Kaveh bears his mark on his right shoulder blade. It’s faded, pastel blue, and Kaveh traces the lines of a star– a real one, the kind that burns above their heads– the way Alhaitham can imagine his grandmother’s. Sightless, with a delicacy that speaks of the ache the marks hide.
He does not ask about Kaveh's mother's, and Kaveh does not offer.
But Alhaitham is not jealous, because it only takes a few weeks before his own skin bears a new design of sharp crimson and gold. Alhaitham wakes one morning and finds a bird of paradise, its wings extended in flight, has taken shape on his bicep. He follows the lines with his fingers in a mirror, and tries to ignore the strange twist of something like hope in his chest.
Kaveh finds him before his first class, out of breath and beaming.
“Did– did you–?”
Alhaitham lifts his sleeve to show Kaveh the bird, and Kaveh is incandescent in his excitement as he bunches his sleeve to his shoulder. Alhaitham’s hawk is there, exactly as Alhaitham remembers it, claws extended and wings spread wide.
“Yours is so cool, ” Kaveh says, and Alhaitham cannot help but throw his head back and laugh.
And this is how Alhaitham makes his way through the world. When he is not in his Akademiya clothes, he favors sleeveless shirts. It does not matter to him if the world knows that the bird on his arm belongs to Kaveh, because Alhaitham knows, and that is enough.
Some piece of him belongs to Kaveh, just as this piece of Kaveh belongs to Alhaitham. Just as his grandmother took a small piece of him with her when she left. Just as she left a small piece of herself here, in her grandson, in Alhaitham.
So Alhaitham should not be surprised when Kaveh takes that piece with him when he goes.
When Kaveh rips that paper to shreds, Alhaitham knows that the mark on his arm does not ache. They don’t do that. The constellations are meant to be a sign of affection. A gift from Celestia, not a curse.
Logic doesn’t stop it from hurting anyway.
Kaveh leaves the paper on the floor when he leaves.
Alhaitham begins wearing sleeves to cover the smear of color on his arm. He was right, he had been right that night, but it hadn’t stopped Kaveh from walking out the door anyway. And Alhaitham thought, with a viciousness unlike him, that perhaps the constellations were more curse than blessing after all, because why else would Alhaitham be left as a patchwork of people who had loved and left him?
And then, one ordinary morning, Alhaitham wakes up to get ready for work and realizes that the mark on his arm is gone completely. Erased. As though it had never existed in the first place.
This is somehow worse. Alhaitham brushes his fingertips across unblemished skin. There should be a constellation. A star here, a line there, a delicate curve of a bird’s wing across the curve of his bicep.
But whatever was there is gone now.
Alhaitham meets the gaze of his reflection in his mirror and pulls the band of his arm sleeve up until it hides the empty space.
The night he brings Kaveh home from Lambad’s tavern, Kaveh is half-gone from wine and exhaustion and weakness. His touch feels like a fire brand on the bare strips of Alhaitham’s skin, and he swears the blank space on his bicep itches when Kaveh brushes his fingers down the line of Alhaitham’s jaw with a wine-darkened smile. But when he rips the gloves from his arm with shaking hands, his skin is still empty.
The next mark to appear on his skin, strangely enough, belongs to Dehya. It is months after that night Alhaitham brought Kaveh home, long enough that Alhaitham has accepted that maybe the magic is just broken for him. Maybe losing Kaveh’s constellation all those years ago was enough to break the curse and Alhaitham is free from yet another meaningless ritual.
Dehya is every inch the fire that she gets her nickname from. She is loud, and bright, and strong, with skin marked head to toe with constellations in desert tans and sunset oranges. Over the top of her bodice, the curve of something ocean blue peeks out at him, but he does not care enough to ask and Dehya does not offer.
Alhaitham finds that he does not mind sparring with her even when it means that he has to end his evenings dumping sand from his boots and bathing in sun-warmed oasis water to scrub the sweat from his skin. And one evening, as Alhaitham is bandaging a minor cut on his bicep, he twists before his mirror to make sure the binding is secure and spots six stars on the sharpness of his shoulder blade.
He moves closer, until he can make out more than a blend of red and black. It’s a manticore, its head held proud and strong. His fingers touch the edge of its sharp tail, and something stirs in his chest.
Dehya greets him in the morning over breakfast and proudly displays the hawk that now lives on the back of her thigh.
“Maybe if you’d stop kicking me when we spar,” she says with a grin, “you could have ended up somewhere a little more dignified. Your loss, I guess.”
Cyno scowls at them both. Like Alhaitham, his skin is mostly bare. Unlike Alhaitham, his clothing does not hide the marks he does carry. Over his heart, in verdant green, lies a fennec fox that stares out into the world with sharp eyes. A second constellation, a serval in mid jump, lives In the hollow of his shoulder. His third and final mark sits on his shoulder where Alhaitham imagines his father holding him with pride.
Alhaitham thinks of his grandmother, of his grandfather’s constellation against the sharpness of her breastbone. Of the empty space beneath his shirt. Of the blankness of his skin, like a canvas waiting to be filled.
The night before they carry out their plans, Alhaitham returns to his small quarters and finds a wolf on his shoulder where Kaveh’s constellation had once lived. He and Cyno have picked up the habit of bumping shoulders when they walk past each other– first as aggression, and now as something that approximates camaraderie. The stars are a deep violet, and the lines a soft lilac. Alhaitham twists before the mirror, watching the way the colors shift as he moves, and he chokes down the memory of once doing the same thing as he admired a vibrant bird of paradise that occupied the same space.
Cyno bears Alhaitham’s constellation on his shoulder. They make eye contact across the wooden table. A question and an answer pass between them. Alhaitham nods and dips the top of his sleeve low enough for Cyno to see the constellation that shines in the low light. Cyno says nothing, but the soft edge of his smile says all that Alhaitham needed to hear.
The plan proceeds smoothly. Nilou is more than willing to help once Alhaitham explains the plan. As Alhaitham turns to go, she reaches out to grip him by the curve of his elbow. She does not have the strength to stop him, and yet he turns anyway.
“You’re a kind person, Alhaitham,” she says. Her mouth is soft with a smile, her eyes alight with pride. Nearly every inch of her skin is decorated in colored lines. Alhaitham wonders what kind of person she is, to have so many people in the world who hold her as someone dear to them. How many lives has she touched, that her skin is a canvas rioting with colors?
“Thank you for letting me help save our archon.”
Alhaitham nods, and looks into her eyes, and somehow he knows that when he removes his gloves later, he will find another constellation on his skin.
And when the dust has settled, and Nahida is free, Alhaitham is left standing in the ashes of the Akademiya he once knew with a patchwork of color across his skin and an archon sitting across a too-large desk from him with a curious look and a hesitant smile as she holds her hand out.
Like he had once been, the skin of her arms and legs is bare. She watches him for a moment, and the spark of hope in her eyes is too much to bear.
“I have nobody else I could ask,” she says. Her voice is soft and bell-like, but there is still power behind her words. Alhaitham can sense it in her. If she wanted to, it would be easy to insist that he obey, but instead she opens her arms and asks.
“Alhaitham, I have already taken more from you than is fair, but there is nobody else but you. Please. Accept the position as my Grand Sage.”
“No.” There is no hesitation in his voice. Before his eyes, he watches the words register and sees the small goddess wilt like abandoned flowers.
“Very well,” she says, forcing a smile through her disappointment. “I will begin the selection process, and–”
“I would, however,” he continues, “be willing to take the position temporarily.”
Nahida’s smile widens into genuine joy.
“You would?” She asks, as though she is used to hope being snatched from her hands. Perhaps she is. Perhaps that has been her life for the last five hundred years. But no longer.
Alhaitham takes her hand. Her palm is so small in his. Delicate. But she grips him with strength nonetheless, and when she releases him, there is a constellation in his hand. A girl beneath a filigree arch, made of shimmering silver and green.
Across from him, Nahida stares at her hand in wonder. And there is Alhaitham’s hawk in miniature, wings extended from corner to corner of her palm. The smile on her face grows until it threatens to overtake her, and Alhaitham cannot find it in himself to regret his decision. After all, he remembers with aching clarity what it is like to live as a blank canvas, to have your skin display to the world that there is nobody out here who belongs to you. To live for five hundred years and have not a single person to call yours…
No matter, though. Nahida was free to see the world as she wished, now. Soon, her skin would reflect the same brightly colored patchwork of Sumeru itself. A permanent reminder that Nahida belonged to her people once more.
The tapestry of Alhaitham’s skin does not change again for a few months. He might not regret the joy he brought Nahida, but by the time he is able to convince her to take his resignation, he does regret the position. Truly, being Grand Sage was far more trouble than it was worth, and it only cemented to Alhaitham that he had no inclination toward such visible positions of power. He returns to his Scribe’s office with a tangible sense of relief.
Tighnari’s constellation finds a home on his skin on the evening of this resignation. They gather in the tavern, the four of them, to celebrate Alhaitham finally being free from the position he never wanted.
Kaveh stands, cheeks already flushed with wine, and holds his goblet out over the table.
“Here’s to Alhaitham,” he says, grin wide on his face, “the only man in all of Teyvat who would be this happy over a demotion.”
With an elegant motion, he brings the goblet to his lips, and Alhaitham cannot tear his eyes away from the line of his throat as he swallows.
Tighnari taps the inside of Alhaitham’s arm to bring him back to himself. He nods and takes a too-large sip of his own wine.
When he makes it home that night, his head is foggy with his own three cups and Kaveh is slung over his shoulder. Alhaitham settles him in his own bed, and his eyes are wide and dark and endless, and Alhaitham remembers sitting across from him in a dorm room that feels closer than ever and entire nations apart.
“I miss you,” Kaveh breathes. His breath smells of wine and sweetness, and Alhaitham wants. He wants and he wants and it doesn’t matter, it’s never once changed a thing.
Kaveh’s hands are twisted up in the fabric of Alhaitham’s cloak. Alhaitham peels his fingers away and lets them drop to the bedspread.
“You’re drunk, that's what you are.”
“I know,” Kaveh says. He is always easy when he is deep in a bottle, as though the heavy press of alcohol on his mind tears away the layer of acid he coats himself with and leaves only the delicate truth of him behind.
“I can be both, Alhaitham.” His eyelids flutter and he collapses back to the bed. His shoes are kicked off and end up somewhere on the bedroom floor with twin thuds. Staring up at the ceiling, he continues speaking. He will not remember them come morning, and if he does remember he will not speak them sober. It is how he has been since Alhaitham let him back into his life.
“I can be drunk and I can miss you.”
And Alhaitham, weak as he is, can say nothing except–
“I miss you too, Kaveh.”
Kaveh hums. Even drunk, his fingers are deft as he undoes the clasp of his cloak, and that is always Alhaitham’s cue to leave.
In the privacy of his room, Alhaitham strips his arms bare and searches his skin. He finds a fennec fox curled in the empty space of his inner arm, a perfect match for the one Cyno wears so proudly over his own heart.
He does not find a bird of paradise.
And perhaps the definition of madness is doing the same thing again and again.
And perhaps Alhaitham is half-mad.
When he is offered the commentator position for the Interdarshan Championship, he refuses. He has no interest in spending his work days talking about what is essentially a drawn-out game of riddles.
Except Kshahrewar announces Kaveh as their representative.
Alhaitham remembers, with aching clarity, laying beside Kaveh on a too-small dorm bed. A bottle of wine in Kaveh’s hand that they took turns drinking from. Kaveh’s voice, shaky and hollow, as he confessed his greatest sin to the silence and Alhaitham’s waiting ears.
Alhaitham shows up to work the next morning and accepts the commentator position.
When the dust of the competition has settled, and Alhaitham stands before Kaveh and tells him what he has learned, he expects many things. An argument, perhaps. Tears, a fight.
Instead, he gets–
“Thank you.”
Alhaitham stops.
“What?”
“I said, thank you.” Kaveh’s eyes are hard, resolute. His shoulders are set. He looks so serious, and Alhaitham wants to lift that burden from his shoulders.
“They say earnest thanks should be given thrice. So, one more time, please.”
Kaveh crosses his arms and retorts, but the hardness from before is lost to the annoyance, and Alhaitham thinks that this could be enough. He can live without seeing that constellation on his skin again, he thinks, as long as Kaveh always stands before him with eyes unburdened by misery.
A sacrifice to Celestia. This fragment of Kaveh in exchange for his peace.
They walk home together, arguing all the while, but when Alhaitham stands bare before his mirror in the dimly lit space of his room, there is no bird of paradise to be found.
He brushes his fingers along the lines he has memorized. Nilou’s lotus. Dehya’s manticore.
His grandmother’s gear, still solid on the back of his neck.
Constellations that tell the story of who he is and where he has been.
Alhaitham had once imagined that he would spend the rest of his life as blank as a piece of paper. Unmarked, unused. He had no interest in relationships, no concern with how others saw him. And yet, here he stands, covered with the proof that people cared for him.
The warmth in his chest is unfamiliar, but not unwelcome.
Time passes, as time does– not smoothly, but steadily. Sand in the hourglass, leaves from the branch.
They meet at Lambad’s. This tavern has seen their hopes and their sorrows, and it has become a refuge for them all.
“I kept the second floor clear for ya,” Lambad calls when Alhaitham enters. Alhaitham nods and heads up the stairs.
His companions trickle in throughout the afternoon. Dehya, with a grin and a punch to his shoulder that tingles down to Alhaitham’s fingertips. Cyno and Tighnari, with a nervous but shyly-smiling Collei close behind. Nilou, with an elegant smile and a small wrapped package even though Alhaitham distinctly remembers telling her not to bring a gift. Nahida, with a young man in a hat whose name Alhaitham can never quite remember trailing close behind her.
And Kaveh, Mehrak tight in his grip, with a laugh and an excuse, cheeks flushed from exertion.
Lambad sends up food and bottles of wine, and even Alhaitham, who is decidedly not a fan of gatherings like this, finds himself enjoying the evening. (Though how much of that enjoyment could be attributed to the fact that nobody here complained when he pulled out a book about twenty minutes in, he couldn’t say.)
“– And after all that, they still had the nerve to try to argue their way out of paying for our work!” Dehya says with a fist slammed to the table. Nilou is sitting beside her, her goblet still three-quarters full, hanging on her every word.
“Sounds like the situation wasn’t all that grain-t,” Cyno says. There is a beat of silence, which Cyno must take as confusion, because he continues. “See, the tiny particles of sand are usually called grains, and therefore–”
“We understood the joke, Cyno,” Tighnari says with a sigh. Collei has her face in her hands to muffle her giggles. The young man in a hat looks at the balcony to the first floor. Perhaps he is calculating if the fall would be enough to kill him.
Kaveh snorts and leans forward to grab one of the half-full bottles on the table. His face is still red, though Alhaitham is relatively sure that this is from the wine rather than the run. His shirt gaps open at the front, exposing the soft skin of his chest.
And a flash of black and turquoise.
Alhaitham freezes midway through bringing his goblet to his mouth, eyes locked on the pointed tip of a constellation he knows with sharp familiarity. Before he can reconsider, he is leaning forward across the table and reaching for the clasp holding the front of Kaveh’s shirt closed.
Collei squeaks in surprise.
“Hey, now!” Tighnari calls, annoyance thick in his voice. Dehya wolf-whistles loud enough that half the downstairs of the tavern goes quiet. But Alhaitham does not care, he cannot care, because there on the bared skin of Kaveh’s chest is a hawk made of teal and black, claws extended, wings outstretched. Alhaitham’s constellation.
Kaveh is silent. Alhaitham does not know what to say. The room goes so still, it is almost as though nobody else is breathing.
“That’s mine.”
Kaveh tries to cover the mark, but Alhaitham grips his wrists and holds them aside.
“Great observational skills,” Kaveh replies. He tries to pull his wrists away, but Alhaitham holds firm.
“It’s in a new spot.”
“Yeah, well, it was gone for a while. Just like yours.” Kaveh eyes Alhaitham’s covered arm, where Cyno’s wolf occupies the space that had once belonged to Kaveh’s constellation.
Wait.
If Alhaitham’s was back on Kaveh’s skin, then Kaveh’s–
Alhaitham has the mental capacity to stand from the table rather than remove his shirt right there in the center of Lambad’s tavern, but it’s a close thing.
“We’re leaving,” he announces to the room. “See ya.”
Kaveh’s protests are ignored by the group, and soon he and Alhaitham are on the path back to their home.
"Alhaitham, hold on–” Kaveh says, but Alhaitham does not care. His grip on Kaveh’s wrist is the only thing keeping him grounded as they follow the familiar path home. How many nights has Alhaitham walked this very path with a drunken Kaveh leaning into his side? How many days has he spent wishing he would wake up and find that constellation back where it belonged?
He has spent too long mourning the days when he belonged to Kaveh.
The door barely closes behind them before Alhaitham drops his cloak to the ground and pulls his shirt over his head.
And there, wings spread wide over the center of his chest, is a crimson map of stars. Gold lines create the pattern Alhaitham memorized all those years ago.
A bird of paradise rests neatly over Alhaitham’s heart.
Fingers touch the delicate filigree lines. Even after all of the hopes, all of the nights spent checking every inch of his skin, to see it back feels a bit like a dream.
When he looks up again, Kaveh is closer than before. His shirt is still open, still hanging wide enough that Alhaitham can see the lines of his own constellation over the place where Kaveh’s heart beats. He presses his palm to warm skin, covering teal and ebony with his hand.
Kaveh’s pulse is as fast as Alhaitham’s own.
Beneath his fingers, Kaveh shudders. His shoulders are tense, as though he is waiting for Alhaitham to say something, anything at all.
But Alhaitham has never been good with words when it comes to Kaveh. So instead, he only drops his hands to Kaveh’s hips and kisses him.
Kaveh makes a sound of panic, and for a delirious moment, Alhaitham thinks Kaveh will step away. Maybe Alhaitham has misjudged, misunderstood.
Kaveh’s hands come up to twist into Alhaitham’s hair, and relief courses through Alhaitham so strongly he worries his legs will give out. Instead, he pulls Kaveh closer and breaks the kiss to hold him, to breathe in the smell of sawdust from the build site Kaveh spent his morning on and the sweet tinge of wine.
They stand that way for a while, just wrapped together and breathing each other in. When Kaveh pulls back, it takes all of Alhaitham’s self control not to crush him to his chest again. To keep him there, where he has always belonged.
“It looks good on you,” Kaveh says. When his fingers brush Alhaitham’s skin, they are electric. Alhaitham is a live wire, exposed and sparking beneath his touch.
“Always has.”
Kaveh looks up at him, then. Alhaitham hopes Kaveh can read the truth in his eyes, the words he cannot speak just yet.
It’s always been you, Kaveh.
Alhaitham cups his palm over Kaveh’s, until they are together cradling the heat of Alhaitham’s heart. And he thinks that maybe, just maybe, Kaveh receives the message.
Kaveh smiles. It’s a real smile, the ones that reach his eyes and soften his face. The ones Alhaitham had once called his. The ones Alhaitham might get to call his once more.
“Happy birthday, Alhaitham,” Kaveh says quietly, and when he captures Alhaitham’s mouth with his own, it’s as though starlight gathers in the space between them.