Chapter Text
There is one thing Kaveh does not allow himself to forget.
No matter how much Tighnari tells him to let old regrets lie, or the traveler tells him to see it as a favor, or Nilou tells him to accept gifts with grace, or even Alhaitham tells him, with every action and motion and quiet routine, that it is not a debt Kaveh must repay. That it is not something that should weigh heavy on his shoulders and solid in his heart.
But Kaveh remembers his debts. And he keeps almost a religious tally of what he still needs to pay back, what he owes.
He owes Dori a ridiculous amount of mora, something he’s not quite sure he’ll ever fully pay back in his lifetime. But Dori is fair, in her own way. She knows that if he can’t support himself, she’ll never collect any mora at all. So she gives him some leeway, the hawk circling above the mouse high enough where it can forget it for a while, but not so far that the mouse escapes.
Kaveh knows debt. He knows struggle. He knows palm to the ground and working, working, working.
His debt to Dori, he can manage. It is a burden on his mind and it is fear in the back of his head, but it is not impossible and it is not all-encompassing.
He owes Alhaitham so much more.
*
Alhaitham is still getting used to the sounds of someone else in his house.
To the sounds of Kaveh.
He knew Kaveh. Kaveh as a student, shifting his cold hands and feet away from Alhaitham, the old dorm bed heaving a creaking sigh of relief as he got up and left Alhaitham in a warmer, but somehow emptier, mattress.
Kaveh as a student, puttering around in his dorm kitchen to brew the fastest and most disgusting cup of coffee he possibly could. The cheaper, the stronger, the better. If it didn’t burn off your taste buds and make you regret the few mora you’d shelled out for it, it wasn’t worth it for Kaveh.
Kaveh was loud with Alhaitham and quiet with everyone else. He would keep his head down and plaster a polite smile when he was at the Akademiya. Alhaitham would pass him in the halls and Kaveh would look right through him as he laughed his bright laugh with his friends.
Kaveh would sit next to Alhaitham in the library and rest his chin on Alhaitham’s shoulder and Alhaitham would let him. He would let him. He would let Kaveh mumble to Alhaitham the things he could not share, could not say, and he would listen.
And when someone approached, Kaveh would become a fish—too slippery to catch, all bright scales flashing back at you—and he would muffle his light, making it softer, warmer. Approachable.
The Light of the Kshahrewar’s light was sharp. It was bright in a way that was vicious and cutting and threw its rays into every darkened corner, burning and seeing and possessing all in one. Kaveh’s was a light that saw and knew and judged .
But when others came, Kaveh put a lampshade over that light. He softened it, muffled it, muted it. He turned it warm and gentle and was careful not to let too much of it shine. He laughed respectfully and turned his eyes towards the floor to hide their flash. He bit his lip and tongue so hard it became bloody, ragged.
Kaveh as a student was a Kaveh filtered and muddied and carefully sealed away for the benefit of everyone else. And he resented Alhaitham for knowing the sharpness of his light and not proving to him that it was something he could be condemned for, something to hide.
Alhaitham would only open up when Kaveh let his red eyes blaze the way they wanted to, let his tongue loose the way it was meant to be, let his light burn just because it could. When Kaveh muffled, Alhaitham became just as cold, just as hollow as a solid stone. Alhaitham became clipped and boring and Kaveh’s friends looked at him as though he was strange and mean and they bundled Kaveh away and teased him, wondering at why their pretty light would want to be with the odd one out.
Alhaitham hid himself from the stranger that muffled Kaveh’s light when he was around others. And that stranger let Kaveh’s eyes slide over and through and past Alhaitham.
Kaveh as a student was quiet. He let eyes flicker over him—bright enough to attract moths but not so bright to draw attention. He moved lightly, as if he was just air, so that you would forget he was even taking up space. Kaveh existed like he didn’t belong, like he didn’t deserve to exist.
Kaveh wanted to take up space so badly. His light was so sharp and fierce. When he was with Alhaitham he was solid and present and a beacon of a person. But even when he stayed in Alhaitham’s dorm, even when he slept next to him, Kaveh would leave early and take everything with him. He brought nothing and left nothing. He was air and light, smoke and mirrors, and he vanished as soon as you looked away.
This Kaveh is different.
This Kaveh is loud.
Alhaitham will wake up to him moving around the house, making food, leaving for early meetings, writing on the board next to the door. Alhaitham will hear him late in the night, mumbling to himself as he works with his models, his tools.
He can tell Kaveh is trying to be quiet. But this Kaveh takes up space in a way that is natural, in a way that fills the air.
He doesn’t muffle his light anymore. His light is just as sharp and fierce as it was before, tempered only by the ease and satisfaction of no longer being restricted.
This Kaveh is not as tightly penned in. This Kaveh knows his worth and walks like he knows where he’s going.
Alhaitham watches this Kaveh, who is not quite the stranger who muffled the younger Kaveh’s light all those years ago, but is not that unfiltered and sharp Kaveh either. This is a new Kaveh, one that Alhaitham can see pieces of the old in, but is mostly foreign to him.
When Alhaitham looks at this Kaveh, he does not look into Alhaitham, nor does he look through him. This Kaveh drops his eyes and moves past, leaving the air thick with tension and giving Alhaitham pause. It is as if Kaveh is guilty or ashamed of something. Of who he was? Of the vulnerability he showed Alhaitham?
Alhaitham had never thought Kaveh would come back to him. Not after he watched Kaveh graduate and leave all those years ago. Not after they became two names and a random scribble on message boards across Sumeru.
And in some ways, he never did quite get his Kaveh back.
And for a while, they are just the scribe and the architect. Two planets orbiting around each other. Watching, waiting, but never touching.
*
Kaveh graduated and never wanted to look back.
The Akademiya was a jagged prison, a social maze of scrambling for just enough money, of trying too hard and then not enough, of wanting to be good, to be liked, and falling just short or shooting too high. For every success, there were five failures. For every hill Kaveh got over, there was a mountain range waiting.
Alhaitham was a plateau in a world that, for Kaveh, was nothing but ups and downs. Alhaitham was a flat stretch that Kaveh hated and loved and was unbearably addicted to.
Kaveh would cry on Alhaitham’s shoulder and curse out the man—the boy, then—in the same breath. And Alhaitham would do nothing, say nothing, be no one. Alhaitham was a statue of a boy who Kaveh talked over and around but could never talk to.
When Alhaitham did not want to be reached, he was not reached. And when Kaveh did something, said something Alhaitham did not approve of, the boy would shut down.
Alhaitham was most alight, most alive when Kaveh was talking about something that interested him, and Alhaitham would watch his mouth move with a rapt attention he provided nothing else. And when they argued, it was flint cracking on stone, air to a flame. They disagreed on every possible topic. Kaveh half suspects, now, that Alhaitham played the devil’s advocate every time just out of spite, just to get Kaveh riled up, just to give him a differing opinion on something that everyone sided with him on.
Alhaitham was a challenge. Alhaitham was a hill that every time Kaveh thought he crested, he found himself back at the bottom again. But Alhaitham’s wasn’t a mountain Kaveh had to climb. He could choose to step back, to go around, and Alhaitham would let him. Would watch him. Would wait for him to be ready.
Alhaitham was always ready.
Kaveh threw the worst of himself at Alhaitham. Kaveh showed Alhaitham his most ugly, bruised and battered pieces. Kaveh lashed out and sneered at Alhaitham, burned into any soft parts the other boy showed him, tore him to pieces. Kaveh attacked every weakness with the ferocity of the lion his darshan sported.
Alhaitham was a blade for Kaveh to sharpen his own upon and then stab the grindstone with. And still the other never wavered.
And for all that Alhaitham was prideful, for all that he tolerated nothing from anyone else, he gave it all to Kaveh. He gave himself. He would push back when he thought Kaveh needed it, and he would engage when he wanted to. But he never stopped. He never pulled away. He never left Kaveh.
And Kaveh hated him for it.
And yet, for all that Kaveh pushed and Alhaitham pulled, there were parts that they did not touch. Pieces of the other that they mentioned in snide comments and harsh judgements but never quite faced directly. Every time, they sidestepped the softest parts of the other and let their hurts lie.
Except.
The rest of the semester after their argument was dark and blurry for Kaveh. He was furious and harsh and he fought everyone. He bowed his neck and felt his spine crack at the weight of the tension. He lowered his eyes and felt them blaze in their sockets at the indignity. He kept his hands tightly fisted at his sides and waited the way he had waited for all those years.
It was harder the closer he got.
It was harder without Alhaitham.
Alhaitham didn’t come to Kaveh’s graduating ceremony to see a Kaveh that smiled blandly and shook hands and thanked people who never mattered, never should have mattered. Alhaitham didn’t come to see the day Kaveh was finally free and Kaveh burned at that.
And that flame of anger and hurt and buried sorrow burned its way out of Kaveh’s hands and into every message he wrote on those boards. That coal-hot ember found its way into every building, every project he painstakingly worked through just to get a foot in the door. And he clenched his fists and held his tongue and bent his back for years after he graduated, just to get somewhere, just to do something, just to be someone.
Kaveh closed his ears and eyes to the Akademiya and left it behind, and with it, Alhaitham. Kaveh burned his own way through the world with his own hands and his own heart and maybe there was a shadow of a boy in that heart, in those hands, in that flame.
And with every step forward, Kaveh watched the mountains grow farther behind. And with every step, his back straightened and his eyes opened and his light burst free. And with every project under his name, his iron grip on his tongue loosened.
Light. Sound. Color.
But the boy all those years ago who had wanted this for Kaveh never got to see it.
And Kaveh burned.
*
Alhaitham heard of Kaveh’s blaze tearing across Sumeru. And he did not pursue it.
That Kaveh was not his Kaveh of lampshades and light too fierce for their fragile peers. The Kaveh of fire was not the Kaveh he watched shine and bury that shine, his eyes burning of promise. Kaveh, the architect was not Alhaitham’s Kaveh, of potential that burned so bright and wanted so badly it tore him apart. Kaveh of success was not Kaveh of the Akademiya, palm to the ground and back bowed with the weight of it.
Alhaitham held Kaveh, the boy in his palms and examined his shadow and opened his hands to let him go. Alhaitham turned his back and walked away.
Kaveh was fulfilling his promise, his destiny, his fate. And Alhaitham had no hand in it.
So it came as some surprise when Alhaitham found Kaveh with his head in his hands at the back of a tavern. And Alhaitham had not, perhaps, succeeded in letting his Kaveh go, and so he sat down next to the man who was half-boy, half-man in his mind and took in this new face of Kaveh.
This was a Kaveh of color. Cheeks flushed from the wine, eyes redder than blood, hair shorter and browning at the ends from sun exposure. Gone were the bland uniform and secondhand clothes of his student days, and instead this Kaveh sported bright clothing in bold colors and low-cut tops.
Alhaitham got a goblet of wine and listened to this Kaveh tell him about a decision he made that was for someone else’s benefit at his cost, which was so classically Kaveh Alhaitham distinctly felt himself transported several years.
His Kaveh was rarely quite so vulnerable with him. Not when they were students. But there were times when they sat close together as they did then, and Kaveh talking with Alhaitham listening was nothing if not customary, and of course Kaveh would throw away his childhood home and every scrap of mora he’d ever saved for one random client who gave him the freedom to build his dream.
How very Kaveh, to jump the gun for the first opportunity he saw with no care for the consequences. How terribly Kaveh, who would turn his own flame on himself before he ever let it burn anyone else. Beautiful, bleeding heart Kaveh.
It is habit for Alhaitham to offer Kaveh a place to stay, slipping back into their old routine. Alhaitham and Kaveh. Kaveh and Alhaitham.
Alhaitham offers like it means nothing because it means everything. And Kaveh accepts because it is him.
Always him.
*
Kaveh has always been Alhaitham’s greatest adversary and fiercest defender. Alhaitham used to tease him in that dry way of his back when they were students, saying that Kaveh defended Alhaitham so viciously because he could not stand a half-assed and unfounded challenge to Alhaitham.
Alhaitham was never warm or soft. He was cold and sharp angles and jagged rock and sometimes it was Kaveh’s greatest frustration. Because Alhaitham never reacted or moved or said anything nice or showed he cared. Kaveh poked and prodded and stabbed at every soft spot he could reach and Alhaitham never budged.
But there were small ways that showed he cared. Small ways in how he let Kaveh in, how he kept letting Kaveh come back. Alhaitham never reached out because he never had to. It was enough for Kaveh to come and Alhaitham to let him.
Kaveh was a storm on his doorstep and Alhaitham left the door open for him. Kaveh was a cat who wandered and Alhaitham kept a bowl of water by the window. Kaveh was the wild wind and Alhaitham was the tree that stood sentinel, waiting for Kaveh to rush through his leaves and leave him behind.
But it was a kindness that Alhaitham quietly afforded Kaveh, no matter how much Kaveh hurt him, no matter how many times Kaveh chose someone else, something else, over him. It was one of many kindnesses that Kaveh chose not to look at too closely.
Alhaitham does not move aside for others. But he does not purposefully stand in their way either. He is a one-man machine who works at having his own life, his own peace, and ignores everyone who does not have a place in the world he has made for himself.
So Kaveh is taken aback when Alhaitham gives him a key that night at the tavern and tells him in his same bland and blunt way of phrasing things that Kaveh has a place with Alhaitham whenever he needs it.
The door that Kaveh had spit on and Alhaitham had closed. The water bowl Kaveh had turned over and Alhaitham had taken away. The wind that refused to play and the tree that dropped its leaves so there was nothing left for the wind to brush against—
That door, Alhaitham opened. That bowl, Alhaitham set out again, refilled with fresh water like nothing had happened. Those leaves, Alhaitham grew back as if there had never been all those years in between them.
How very Alhaitham, to upend the peaceful life he’d built for himself, the home he had made, his one-person ever-forward existence stretching to accommodate two people, all for Kaveh. How very Alhaitham, who would forsake the world for himself but open up that private existence for a shadow of a memory of a boy who had never chosen Alhaitham. Alhaitham and his stubborn, bleeding heart.
Kaveh did not want to accept. He almost turned it down, almost gave the key back. But his mind was fogged by alcohol and his tears weren’t even dry and he was stuck gaping at Alhaitham who looked back at him with a little smirk tipping the corner of his lips that he hid behind his cup. And there was that old challenge, in the glint of Alhaitham’s impossible eyes.
Come on, Kaveh. Who wins, the past or the future? Who claims dominion, a memory or you?
Alhaitham, ever waiting with his nose in a book and his body sealed off with his door wide open, waiting for Kaveh to step through. Waiting for Kaveh to come back because he always did.
Kaveh took the key and let Alhaitham take him to the fruits of that project they had worked on all those years ago. And how ironic that what had torn them apart so long ago is what brought them together. And how ironic that they quite literally lived under that shadow.
The first few weeks are incredibly awkward. Kaveh is out of the house as much as possible—out of necessity is what he told himself at the time, but it was more than that. It was true that Kaveh did need to take on quite a few commissions to put some distance between himself in his debt, but he did not need to swamp himself in as much work as he did.
But he could not bear to be in that house. Where every shadow was a ghost and every sound was a memory and every stolen glance was a lump that settled in the stomach and refused to be disgorged.
Kaveh has lived with all manner of people. He has roomed with the most absurd and mundane, has rented all sorts of tiny rooms in the backs of people’s homes or yards, has even slept outside in a tent. Kaveh has been alone with his own messy thoughts and cramping hands and has dealt with it.
But living with Alhaitham is an entirely different beast.
Living with Alhaitham is precarious. Kaveh is on edge constantly, a bird poised to take flight those first few weeks. He watches Alhaitham cautiously for any tells of his annoyance, of his anger, and waits with baited breath for the single slip that will give Kaveh reason to flee.
Because Alhaitham gives him so much space. Alhaitham opened up his entire home to Kaveh for nothing at all with no expectations, no drawbacks, no questions asked. Kaveh had spent so long carefully monitoring his leash that he found himself lost when the leash was gone. Waiting for him to go too far and feel it tighten around his neck.
So Kaveh did what he did best, and he left again.