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Al-Haitham used to dream of days like this one.
Seriously — in his youth, he’d stare down the table at the House of Daena and try not to make it completely obvious that he was staring at Kaveh instead of out the window on his other side, daydreaming of a fantasy future with his best friend. He would picture sunlight streaming in through skylights in a slanted roof, green cushions on couches with wooden feet, a book in one hand and Kaveh’s fingers laced together with the other. He didn’t know if it was possible, at the time, but he hoped.
He hoped until it seemed likely, then until it seemed concrete, then all the way through the years in which it felt impossible, too. He hoped when all he had of Kaveh was an old contact photo and a damning message history, along with some doodles in the margins of his notebooks from sophomore year.
Kaveh had walked away, but Al-Haitham had hoped. All these years, he had hoped.
He doesn’t have to hope anymore.
Against all odds, he has the skylight. He has the couch — three of them, in fact. He has the book and another book and another ninety-two, but, of course, there are some things about it all he hadn’t seen in advance.
The cat, for one thing. The fresh flowers, for another. It isn’t Kaveh’s hand that rests in his, either, but a strand of Kaveh’s hair that twists around Al-Haitham’s fingers where Kaveh’s head rests comfortably in Al-Haitham’s lap.
It’s better than he hoped, to be honest, save for one recent development:
“Emi es divertida,” Kaveh’s phone says — loudly — in a polite female voice.
This has been happening all afternoon.
Tap. Tap. Tap. Ding! “Yo tengo un gato.”
“Yo tengo un gato,” Kaveh repeats stiffly, tapping at his screen some more. Ding!
Al-Haitham breathes in, trying to focus on the air filling his lungs. Kaveh had asked if it was okay for him to practice his Spanish while they relaxed this afternoon. Al-Haitham had said yes, of course, because Kaveh taking an interest in foreign language and linguistics is yet another dream come true, but this? This is not what he had expected.
Whatever asinine language-learning app Kaveh seems to have downloaded this morning has, in Al-Haitham’s completely unbiased opinion, one of the most annoying sound effect databases known to man. He’s only been at this lesson for twelve minutes, so far, but that’s enough. Al-Haitham has been re-reading the same sentence for eleven of them.
He has no idea what it says.
“Alejandra necesita ayuda,” Kaveh’s phone continues, now in a deep, masculine voice that makes Al-Haitham’s arm hair bristle.
Kaveh hums. Tap. Tap. Tap. Instead of a ding, this time, there’s a da-dum sound that makes him huff in disappointment. Tap. Tap. Tap. Ding!
“Sorry for misgendering you, Alejandra,” Kaveh mumbles to himself before tapping the screen again.
“Le enseño el libro a Lia.” Tap. “Le.” Tap. “Eseño.” Tap. “El.” Tap. “Libro.” Tap. “A.” Tap. “Lia.” Ding!
Al-Haitham closes his eyes, willing the universe to give his noise-canceling headphones the power to move freely on their own and float into his proximity from where they’re charging in the bedroom right now. It’s a long shot, but he’ll beg if he has to.
Ding!
Yeah, he’s going to commit smartphonocide.
Kaveh shifts in Al-Haitham’s lap, angling his phone in a way that finally allows Al-Haitham to see what’s on the screen over the top of his book, and he has to admit that he’s curious.
‘Speak this sentence:’ is printed at the top of the screen with a cartoon woman standing underneath it and a speaker icon with a short phrase to her right. Kaveh hits the speaker with his thumb, and the phone says the phrase out loud in that same female voice as before: “Mi nombre es Isabel.”
He taps the microphone icon underneath, then holds the phone closer to his face and repeats the sentence back to the device. “Mi nombre es Isabel,” he tries, but there’s a slight pronunciation issue on the ‘O’ in ‘nombre,’ and the app doesn't take it.
“It’s ‘nombre,’” Al-Haitham mutters. “With a longer ‘O.’”
“Nombre,” Kaveh repeats, then tries the recording again. Ding!
“Nina quiere sopa.”
Al-Haitham furrows his eyebrows, squinting at Kaveh’s phone in distaste. “What program is this?” he asks. “This lesson is… chaotic.”
Tap. Tap. Tap. “Duolingo,” Kaveh replies distractedly. Ding!
“You’re kidding.”
“What, you have something against Duolingo?”
Al-Haitham has a lot against Duolingo, actually. “Yes.”
“Mm. That’s unfortunate.” Kaveh makes no move to stop, though, still tapping away at the words on the screen.
“It’s a horrible way to learn a language,” Al-Haitham insists.
“I’m having a good time.”
Al-Haitham huffs, laying his book open-faced on the couch to keep his place. “Have you even learned anything useful?” he asks.
Kaveh shrugs, though the effect is somewhat lost with his neck and shoulders resting on Al-Haitham’s thigh.
“What does that mean?”
“It means I don’t know yet, Al-Haitham, I just started this morning.”
“Well, wouldn’t you rather st–”
Kaveh cuts him off with a sigh, letting his wrist flop to the side and looking up at Al-Haitham through his eyelashes. “I know you learned, like, forty-something languages by age twenty-five, azizam, but you are uniquely deranged in that regard.”
Al-Haitham frowns. “Deranged?”
“I mean it lovingly. We don’t all have standards that break through the ozone layer, though. I’m doing this for fun.”
“My standards don’t break through the ozone layer, they’re reasonable.”
Kaveh purses his lips, his eyes softening as he reaches up with his free hand to thumb at Al-Haitham’s chin.
He looks gorgeous like this, pliant and at ease. His hair fans out across Al-Haitham’s legs and his skin glows in the late afternoon light, giving him the appearance of a deity, albeit a tired one. He’s ethereal.
“Your definition of ‘reasonable’ might need reevaluation.”
Nevermind. “My standards for myself may be high–”
“Your standards are high across the board. You’re not fooling anyone.”
“Duolingo is still a terrible app.”
Kaveh hums, glancing over at his phone where that stupid green owl is now waving at him next to a circle with a star inside. “I think you’re just a hater.”
“A hater?” Al-Haitham repeats incredulously.
“Un hombre malo.”
A-Haitham rolls his eyes. “‘A bad man’?”
“Like I said,” Kaveh says somewhat sheepishly, “I haven’t gotten very far.”
“If I’m a hater, I hate with reason.”
“You hate because of your infectious pride.”
Al-Haitham reaches down to card his fingers through Kaveh’s hair, working out the tangled near the ends. “If it’s so infectious,” he counters, “you should have more self respect than to waste your time with Duolingo.”
Kaveh narrows his eyes. “Fine, then, what’s so bad about it? Enlighten me, Haravatat.”
“The lessons are poorly organized,” Al-Haitham begins with ease. “They force you into learning one tiny piece of the language at a time instead of immersing you in the context so you can get a better feel for how words are properly used.”
“I’m not aiming for fluency,” Kaveh mutters, leaning into Al-Haitham’s touch.
“It doesn’t matter. You’re working against yourself.”
Kaveh sighs, somewhere between content and high-strung. “They have an option to design your own course,” he counters.
“Yeah, behind a paywall. It’s ridiculous.”
“Alright, so the lessons aren’t perfect. I’ll still know how to ask where the bathrooms are the next time we’re in Natlan.”
“Will you, though?” Al-Haitham asks. “Natlan has at least ten modern dialects, some of which have some crossover with Sumerian languages, sure, but others have more in common with French due to influence from Fontaine. What do you do when you try to tell our host we’re going out, but you end up saying we’re dirtying ourselves instead?”
Kaveh winces. “Can that happen?”
“One of many words that sound the same and mean very different things.”
“Okay, so you take the lead when we visit Natlan. Fine. Why can’t I just learn enough to understand most of what you’re saying when we do?”
“You can, but Duolingo has more against it than just bad teaching methods,” Al-Haitham says, starting to twist a piece of Kaveh’s hair into a loose braid. “Their marketing techniques are suspicious at best, and they’ve been firing employees left and right because of some new artificial intelligence–”
Kaveh suddenly sits up straight, knocking Al-Haitham’s hands out of his hair and dropping his phone on the floor in the process. “What did you just say?”
Al-Haitham nods towards the TV. “You’ve seen their commercials, they’re all way too high in production value for a quote-unquote free app–”
“Not that, Al-Haitham. They use generative AI?”
“I figured you knew this, Kaveh. It’s been all over the internet lately.”
“‘All over the internet’ is an absurd way to phrase that,” Kaveh sighs. “You sound eighty when you speak, sometimes.”
Al-Haitham feels his nostrils flare of their own accord, but he tries not to look too disgruntled. “I’m younger than you are,” he points out.
“Truly a scientific marvel. Doctors hate him. What am I supposed to do now?”
It’s desperate, Al-Haitham realizes. Kaveh’s really upset about this. “You really want to learn?” he asks, laying his hand open-palmed on his knee.
Kaveh takes it willingly, thumbing over Al-Haitham’s wrist as he nods. “I thought it would be fun. I just– It’s so cool when we travel and you can just talk to whoever we come across without worrying about it.”
Al-Haitham blinks. “You want to learn for me?” he asks, but Kaveh shakes his head.
“I want to learn for me,” he says, then smirks. “You may have inspired me a little, though. I guess. Only because you’re very handsome when you’re speaking languages I’ve never heard before.”
“You’re always very handsome,” Al-Haitham assures him, tugging Kaveh towards him and back down into his lap. “Even though your grammar is still bad in your native tongue.”
Kaveh narrows his eyes, but makes himself comfortable again, anyway. “Malparido,” he grumbles.
Al-Haitham snorts. “Did Duolingo teach you that?”
“No, I googled it earlier after you used all the hot water.”
“Cute,” Al-Haitham mutters, then — because it’s thematic, or something — says it in Spanish: “Lindo.”
Kaveh rolls his eyes fondly. “You can’t call me cute when I call you a bastard.”
“You called me a stillborn, actually, but sure.”
The laugh Kaveh lets out is a classic — it’s the one he gets when he knows he’s not supposed to laugh but can’t be bothered to keep it in, so he sort of stumbles over the air in his throat and snorts a couple times at the beginning. It’s one of Al-Haitham’s favorites.
“I could teach you,” he says hopefully. “If you want.”
Kaveh gasps through his laughter, choking on it for a second before he regains his composure. “Would you really?”
“I don’t know why you didn’t ask me in the first place.”
“Honestly, I wanted to see if I could do it myself,” Kaveh admits, reaching up to brush his knuckles against Al-Haitham’s jaw, “but I know I probably could. Why deny myself a hot teacher when he’s offering himself so willingly?”
“That sounded dangerously close to an innuendo.”
Kaveh grins maniacally, extending his fingers to cup Al-Haitham’s face in his hand. “Hey, what do you say we start with some unconventional vocabulary?”
Al-Haitham feels his face burst into flames. “I’m not sure this is ethical,” he teases, his voice already rough around the edges. “What would Duo think?”
Kaveh hums, guiding Al-Haitham down until they’re face-to-face. “The owl never has to know.”