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He’d never admit it but Kaveh was right, Alhaitham truly didn’t get it.
Despite how ironic it was, Alhaitham, out of the corner of his eyes, would notice people who stopped in the middle of the path to gaze up at the setting sun in awe at the watercolour puddles that ebbed the sky above. He’d secretly eye a child who’d failed to notice the drool about to pool over his parted lips, distracted by the sight of a twinkling display of a toys and trinkets stall. He would sometimes spare a few glances at new puppy love teenagers, giggling amidst their interlocked hands, faces flushed with a brightness close to bursting open into fireworks of pink, silver and red .
And every single time, Alhaitham would let out a disinterested huff alongside a shallow shake of his head, burrowing himself deeper into the much more interesting book before him since…well, he just didn’t get it.
You see, the sky was always there above everyone regardless of the time of day or even the day of the week and the trinkets stall flashed a price tag heavier than gold, with a price so abysmal that by the time the oblivious juvenile had even half the amount in his pocket, it would have gotten old and rusted, the teenagers’ hands clenched together tighter than an Akademiya lock, even though their veins had miles of experience laid out before them for the future.
The scribe let out a not so subtle sigh as he caught sight of another student from his own darshan pausing their journey to lean against the rails of the path, sticking their nose high into the air to get even a nanometre closer to the cottoned sky.
Kaveh was sitting in front of him, smirking into the coffee he’d been nursing for the entirety of the evening. “Something pestering you, I see?”
“Not particularly,” Alhaitham curtly replied as he dragged his eyes away from the starstruck student. “Pestered wouldn’t be the most appropriate word to use in my current state.”
His roommate rolled his eyes at the words as he took a sip of his drink, gently setting it back down while he let out his fifth satisfied breath at the taste. “Please, do enlighten your senior on what best describes your current state.”
The younger of the pair lowered his eyes in thought, catching the way the sun had reached the perfect axis to create fractured kaleidoscopes of colour littering their legs and the ground underneath. It wasn’t anything special — a glance at the Palace of Alcazarzaray was no different to him as the diamond lights beneath.
“...Flummoxed.”
Kaveh let a few beats of silence blanket the both of them before blinking in surprise, maybe confusion.
The sun was gently grazing at the blond’s hair, threading through each frazzled, delicate strand to weave a highlight of gold bordering his silhouette. His eyes were no longer just red like most people described them to be, no, they were effulgent like the finest jewels. Even through the cliché of a comparison, Alhaitham saw the sparkles that mirrored the shape of the star above.
Even then, they were more than that.
They were red as in the way your mother would pack your lunch before you left for the first day of school, leaving a kind note on top of the container to engulf you in a pleasant surprise. Or when you would walk back home after a long day at the beach, sand sticking to your toes as the wind traces the tan line your second-hand sunglasses left on the peak of your nose bridge.
But Alhaitham would argue that he still didn’t get it.
Letting out a slight huff, Kaveh turned to also gaze upon the setting sun. Alhaitham kept his eyes on the blond, trying to figure out why he’d prefer the sight of his roommate sitting so languidly and loose instead of the yawning skies. Why such a sight had left a feeling akin to cotton being stuffed between his ribcage and his heart, his skin tingling with…something, something sweet and gentle to the tongue. The gentle sprinkle of content freckling Kaveh’s cheeks only perplexed his mind further.
Objectively, he had the ability to note beauty where the credit of such as due, such as his roommate’s magnum opus. Outside of the architect’s self-blinded view, he had watched the latter spend restless hours of the night at any available surface, blueprints spanning larger than his own frame with intricate formulas and calculations splattered across the crinkled pagers. Skillful hands weaving stone and mortar into just the right places with little to no space for error, a human finish to where a fault may be noted. The work that had been put into each and every corner of the Palace was what, in the scribe’s awfully modest opinion, made the thing a creation of beauty.
“Kaveh,” he began over the top of his mug, unsure if it was to hide his twitching face or soothe his parched throat. “What is beauty to you?”
The man in question was very blatantly taken aback at the sudden question, actively shuffling backwards into his seat as the question wormed its way to his mind. Alhaitham didn’t question it — despite being the Haravatat scholar he liked to pride himself to be, he rarely actively participated in more complex conversations outside of work, at least not willingly with a purpose other than to rile his senior up.
Clearing his throat as he gathered his thoughts, Kaveh let himself perk up in his seat. “Talk about a loaded question…”
Alhaitham kept his face still while rough and overworked hands began to wave around the afternoon air.
“I can’t say I’m too sure about what beauty truly is, to be frank. Some people would talk about people when asked about it while others would bring up luxury. It’s a very, very subjective topic, I mean, as the saying goes — beauty is in the eye of the beholder. And I think that rings true. A single star in the night sky to one might be equivalent to that of the cosmos to another, all the while standing next to one another. Hence, one person may find…hm, I don’t know, green eyes for example– Hey, don’t give me that look! I’m just hypothesising here!”
Alhaitham’s smirk must have been poorly disguised behind his suspiciously unmoving cup of tea if the tense rise of Kaveh’s shoulders as he’d glanced over at him was anything to go by.
He let a light chuckle fly past his lips, “I said not a word, senior.”
Kaveh rolled his eyes but continued on regardless, “Right, as I was saying, green eyes. Again, hypothetically. One might find green eyes as nothing special, just some pigment dotted onto an eyeball and that’s it. But another person might look into those same green eyes and instead, see fields of mint and leaves that flutter on a sunsettia tree. Perhaps it’s not even the fact that they’re green that makes them beautiful, hell, they might not even like the colour green! But a gem is bound to look beautiful if the frame is able to accentuate the best parts of said jewel. An apple won't make people pause on the street because they find it beautiful, but it might make them stutter in their steps if it was placed in a lovely velvet box with inscriptions of poetry etched on each side.”
Alhaitham stared at the architect in a daze as he continued to explain his thoughts, half-mindedly listening as he digested the information. Even if he tumbled over himself, Kaveh had a fluidity with his words that many Akademiya applicants barely rivalled against.
He let himself picture moments where he may have cherished something more so than another, for more personal reasons. Like the book his grandmother had left him many years back. It was a darkened emerald hardback with peeling corners and more creases on its spine than a trampled weed. It held a scent reminiscent of pencil shavings glazed with a hint of moisture. Alhaitham never cared for vintage books if they held writings of no interest to him, but that book was his second heart, his second pair of lungs, eyes, ears. It was a copy of himself materialised into a…thing barely larger than his hand. He had held it closer to himself than his skin would let him, leaving dents from where the uneven papers would stick out and poke at his heaving chest on many late nights.
Quickly prying his eyes off of the café table, Alhaitham glanced at Kaveh and let himself think. Was he, too, something Alhaitham cherished? Surely the answer would be no, that would be…ridiculous. The blond hair was nothing special given the many people he’d met on his ventures, people he’d barely bothered to glance a second time at.
Yet when the sun would filter through the windows of their shared home, it would find exactly where his senior would be lounging and beam with an excitement at the mop of white and yellow. Maybe it was that Kaveh’s hair was just a touch brighter than most, healthier despite the hundreds of times calloused hands would wreck the neatly pinned hairs with a rigour that would stun anyone afraid.
To describe his voice, Alhaitham would automatically answer with it being scratchy and weak, too loud for sensitive ears and far too foul for the more innocent. But on nights when the lamps in his room would burn for a few hours too long and the moon being his only other companion, the quiet mumblings of his roommate would blanket his eyes heavy and ease any rumbling in his aching heart.
He let himself glance at the restless hands that continued to swim around while the blond continued talking about…something, maybe even a whole different topic by now, and let himself think once more. Alhaitham would glare at anyone who dared to open that green book tucked away into the corner of his bookcase and read out loud even the first syllable, but froze still at Kaveh’s first read of the first entry on the darkened pages. Not with fear or anger, no. With…with youth? With the feeling like he was merely scraping double digits, his head on his grandmother’s lap as she told tales of foe and legend with each soft caress of his hair.
Blinking, Alhaitham shifted in his seat uncomfortably — maybe it was people he held closer than most?
But Cyno’s hair was platinum, competing with diagrams of Shneznayan mountains covered in piles and piles of snow. He had no issue admitting that the pigment, or lack thereof, was impressive. But not in the same way a warm, home cooked recipe gone right was.
Kaveh’s was.
Tighnari’s ability to procure detailed rants about local flora was always an impressive feat and even Alhaitham had found himself visiting his cabin once in a while out of pure interest, only to note it down onto a notebook that would stay closed until deemed appropriate enough to resurface.
Kaveh would rant, in much less detail and with much more fractured timelines, about the history of all the local buildings with half the grace and thrice the enthusiasm of a coked up addict and yet…Alhaitham spent countless nights listening in, noting things of interest or quotes that his senior had memorised perfectly from ancient texts carved into sandstone walls, his fingers flicking back to those pages and tracing the ink with a finger as he let his eyes turn to the words etched into the stone. Finding a sense of pride swell up in his lungs at his roommate’s dumbfounded expressions whenever he’d get the chance to refute a point with the senior’s own quotes recited to a T.
“—but hey, despite being an architect, I don’t know much about beauty myself. At least what other people think of beauty.”
Then it all shifted into place.
The gasping realisation had spurred his mouth into action before he could even do so much as gulp down a mouthful of tea to silence himself. “You.”
Kaveh, understandably, threw him a blank stare. “What?”
Ah. Well, he couldn’t really back out now. That’d be very…un-scholarly of him if he did so.
“Beauty, I mean. I think beauty is you,” he repeated in what he hoped was an even tone, even if his own eyes were twitching in surprise.
The blond stared at him with his eyes open so wide that the scribe swore he could see some bone peeking out. “M–Me? Alhaitham, Archon above, what’s gotten into you to say such a thing? Is this a prank? This is a prank, isn’t it?”
Alhaitham shrugged, looking past the long abandoned railing of the path and towards where the sun began to snuggle into the horizon’s edge. “It’s not a joke. You said that you did not know what others truly thought of beauty despite your work and career orbiting around client’s perceptions of it. I think that beauty is you. I wouldn’t particularly agree on a favourite colour of mine, yet, as of late, I have noticed the gold embellishments I seem to have gravitated towards in my spare time at the Grand Bazaar. Even useless things such as ink bottles — they are practically all the same, yet I had decided to use the ones sold with gold-dipped rims.”
Kaveh stumbled into the midst of his explanation with a wild look on his face, filtered with a cherry tint that bled down to his neck. “I thought you said the ink dried faster! Have we been paying all that extra mora for nothing?”
The taller scoffed, “I was bluffing, obviously. They’re from the same manufacturer so their quality is guaranteed to be the same. Had I told you so you would refuse to use said ink as a form of protest.”
“Of course I would have! But…” Kaveh let his sentence trail off before picking it back up with half the certainty. “...Why?”
It was a timid question, heavy, but timid. Alhaitham shrugged once more. “That is what I was trying to figure out all this time. Why, out of all things, did I find myself looming over silly trinkets coated in oranges and reds and whites? Why did I begin to care for the colour of the peaches I purchased? Why bother for such useless things if, subjectively, beauty was in my mind just a shallow idea?”
At such a blunt answer, Kaveh shifted in his seat, his eyes glazed over with an emotion Alhaitham had yet to understand, as he held his breath. Had not trained himself to strain his ears for the senior’s mindless retorts thrown at him from behind a closed study door, Alhaitham would have missed the quiet whisper that swam out of parted lips, “What changed?”
Maybe it was mean of him to let a long pause draw out before he answered, but he felt it necessary. Instead of rushing with an answer like he usually did, he let himself map out his thoughts for a moment.
“I didn’t find beauty in the world because beauty is you. There was no reason for me to waste time admiring something as mundane as a plant since that plant wasn’t you, Kaveh. But…bit by bit, it is. I see the beauty in a peach more rogue than another simply because you prefer them that way. Trinkets with colours that hold the same colours as you catch my eye since it’s you I see in them, even if minute. Hence, bit by bit, I’ll eventually find beauty in the world since…the world is you. Even the air I breathe makes me think of you — the scent of morning dew will never compare to the fragrance of your cologne and your many, many hair oils.”
Kaveh snapped out of his stupor at the comment, forcing his tense limbs to ease as he crossed his arms. “Funny hearing you say that, you know? You’re always the one shitting on me for my excessive buying habits when it comes to self care!”
If it hadn’t been for the glint of amber dusting his cheeks, Alhaitham would have felt a tad hurt at how quickly his senior had pushed aside the rest of his sentences. But his shoulders were still high and up to his ears, his hands gleaming a tad brighter from sweat built out of the anticipation welling up inside of him.
Alhaitham let his façade drop for a bit, tilting his head as his eyes swayed between the two that continued to gawk back at him. He felt his cheekbones twitch with an itch to rise to his eyes, his lips barely containing themselves. “For I thought they’d mask your original beauty. The smell of peonies was always far too potent for my tastes and I had rather be preoccupied with the way you’d smell like the breeze from Port Ormos or the leaves from Gandharva Ville. With time, I came to the…humbling conclusion that the peonies never grew on me because I came to like them with how often I smelled them, but because peonies became a marking of you and, as I had mentioned, made it a beauty.”
Stunned silence followed suit, even the distant conversations of other customers falling muffled by the bubble of awe that surrounded the pair. Their teas had long gone cold though the gaze shared between the architect and the scribe kept it warm enough.
Clearing his throat, Kaveh sat up before he hesitantly slid his hand across the table towards where Alhaitham’s lay stagnant. He raised his eyes towards the younger’s before placing his warm palm atop the cold. Like a web, the warmth radiated towards Alhaitham’s bones and tendons, reigniting rather than lighting fresh aflame.
“I…really appreciate your words, Haitham. I…”
Alhaitham only turned his hand over to hold onto the blond’s, squeezing gently before standing up while he held the delicate fingers of his senior. “You need not express any gratitude, senior. A shock, I know. It must be me thank you thrice for you taught me something that I had never been able to figure out for decades now.”
Kaveh stood up alongside him, his eyes refusing to leave the taller’s gaze. Nodding breathlessly, he let himself breathe out. “As a feeble scholar once said to me, ‘earnest thanks should be given thrice’, right?”
Only a chuckle followed suit, then fingers snaking between worn out ones, then a nudge to the shoulder. “That was my first, and the many more to follow will be earned.”
“Hey! Alhaitham, that’s not fair!”
Not much in life was fair, Alhaitham thought. Nothing was ever peaceful even on days uneventful and mundane, not with Kaveh scuttling from corner to corner with curses trailing behind him. But for now, he let himself get dragged towards their home as he glanced at the sky one last time, letting a smile grace his lips as he whispered the words to the passing wind:
“May you rest in a peaceful sleep, Nana.”