Chapter Text
Kaveh moved his goggles onto his head, looking at his work. The ship’s wing was finally repaired, and it only took…fifteen consecutive hours! He chuckled at the realization.
He would’ve told him to go to sleep by now.
The thought snuck into his head, taking away the sleepy smile he had. Nobody knew or asked him how long he spent on repairing and adjusting his beloved creations. A simple nod or a clap was the most he got, though it was only when he revealed the finished product.
But he was different. That researcher, his colleague. Sometimes he’d check up on him in the ungodly hours of the morning. Watch him working away on some machine past the end of both of their shifts. He’d call out to Kaveh from the handrails, ask if he knew what time it was.
“You can work on it tomorrow,” he’d always say. “You need rest to do a decent job.”
Kaveh always found his snarky comments unnecessary, but he listened nonetheless. It was the only thing that kept him from working through those nights, from staying at the facility. From getting a good night’s rest.
Since he last saw him, good night’s rests became a rarity.
It wasn’t like he couldn’t go to sleep. He knew of his…tendency to neglect his needs in favor of his work. But ever since he arrived in Neo Inazuma, he felt like those needs could be neglected a little bit more. He didn’t feel like sleeping and eating as much as he did when he was human. Fully human.
Maybe he’d love the technology implemented into Kaveh. He did love gathering new data on things. It was his job after all. A job he didn’t leave behind. Probably for the better. He might’ve lost his limbs as well.
A bitter chuckle quietly escaped the blonde’s lips, thinking about how he would probably, no, definitely find Kaveh’s need for a respirator amusing. He’d consider it karma too, karma for running away.
…He wished that researcher ran away with him. Alhaitham.
Great. He was thinking about his name now.
His thumb mindlessly brushed his other palm, gloved with leather. He barely took off his gloves. Barely even thought this much about the researcher in months. It hurt to think about it, the memories of their abrupt goodbye, the damage done to his body.
And yet he still slipped the glove off, the mechanical hand trembling so inconspicuously that not even he realized its gentle movements.
His eyes stared at his unearthed hand, his memories dragging him back to that moment. When he felt nothing and absolutely everything in his body. When he desperately wished, almost foolishly, that Alhaitham would run back to him.
“Do you ever take breaks?”
Yae’s voice pulled him out of his melancholy. She stood there at the hangar’s doors, leaning on the wall with her arms crossed. A leg crossed around the other, looking at the engineer with a relaxed smile.
He slipped the glove back on, the painful days pushed aside by her appearance. “Sometimes.” He looked back at the wing. He didn’t like how familiar this interaction felt.
She tilted her head down, peering over her glasses. The lack of his normally charismatic responses did not go unnoticed by her. But seeing how his gaze was on the glove he just put back on, she knew there was a reason why.
“Wanna take one?”
He did just finish up a section of the ship. A break was an adequate reward. But if he took one, it’d leave more opportunities for him to show up in his thoughts. More opportunities to think of what happened. But right now, he felt rather fatigued.
“...I’ll take one in a couple of minutes.”
He tried to. After she left, it didn’t take long for him to get up. But right when he got to the doors, about to shut off the overhanging lights, his grip on the switch grew weak.
A break didn’t sit well with him. Not with him in his mind.
Maybe working would. Maybe he’d slip out of his thoughts as he thought about the measurements he’d have to make to cut pieces on metal.
And maybe, just maybe he’d forget about him forever.
He went back to the ship, readjusting his gloves. He couldn’t go to sleep. Sleeping wouldn’t be efficient, anyways.
He worked through the night before. He’d do it again.