Chapter Text
The Akademiya was a beautiful silver in late autumn. The beginnings of moonlight spilled through the lattice of stone arches, scattering across dry parchment and cooling the cups of honey-sweetened tea. The air held the scent of brittle leaves crushed under student sandals, mingled with old ink, tired breath, and the clove-laced tang of warming oils brought in from the Aaru merchants. Though it was barely past seven, the courtyard had already quieted, hushed down low from the early darkness and the creeping bite of cold to accompany it.
Under the bare reach of the Divine Tree, two sat shoulder to shoulder, the last of its browned leaves curling against the walls of Haravatat Hall. It's great branches no longer offered shade, but a kind of solemn shelter from the north winds. Their shared table was a sprawl of scrawled notes and teacups gone tepid, textbook pages fluttering like the wings of a stressed Dusk Bird— a tragic attempt at collaborative organization.
Cyno hunched over his notes, jaw set straight and tense, pen scratching furiously in cramped ciphers that had begun to slant like they were trying to escape the confines of each line. The chill had clearly crept into his fingers, but he refused to say anything, even as he pulled his coat up tighter, and even as he knew Alhaitham had vials of said warming oils in his pocket.
Alhaitham didn’t look up from his own notes. “You’re shivering.”
“I’m perfectly fine,” Cyno replied, breath cut short and snappy so he could sink his chin back into the comfort of the collar quickly.
“You always say that, then your handwriting becomes so terribly tragic.”
Cyno hummed without the slightest offense. “I’m writing for efficiency, not beauty.”
“I can assure you, it does neither.” Alhaitham bit back a grin, keeping his expression composed if only to see the quick furrow of Cyno’s brow as his eyes quickly scanned for something to inspire an adequate quip.
“Well, maybe you’re just bad at reading fast,” Cyno huffed, and there it was— the crinkle of his nose and the way his brown skin moved to accommodate his frustrated expression.
“I can read six different languages. I do not think I am the problem,” Alhaitham retorted, a small noise leaving his throat, something between a sigh and a laugh.
Cyno rolled his eyes and went back to writing, subtly shifting closer to his tea and cupping it with his left hand, its warmth bringing color back into his fingertips. Alhaitham didn’t comment on it; let him have this little bit of surrender. Rather, he allowed his gaze to linger on the way Cyno curled one foot under the bench, trying to stay warm without giving the satisfaction of admitting it.
Cyno could very well ask to move their work inside, a perfectly warm and well-lit library prepared to greet them just past the doors of Haravatat Hall. Five hours ago, it had made plenty of sense to sit out here beneath the tree, sun still high and leaves blowing with cooled air. But now, with the moon well above the walls and the cold creeping in fast, the courtyard had lost all its previous charm.
Alhaitham considered suggesting they relocate more than once, but he knew precisely how that would go. Cyno would end up gritting his jaw and insisting on staying— something about endurance, or building tolerance, or not letting the weather dictate his carefully balanced discipline. So Alhaitham remained quiet, pretending not to notice Cyno’s fingers trembling slightly against the page. How terribly stubborn.
Still, it was this same brand of stubbornness Cyno applied to every debate, duel, and day he faced: relentless and proud, with no modicum of moderation. And still, it was why Alhaitham liked him— liked him too much, in ways he couldn’t allow himself to think about.
So instead, he criticized his handwriting.
“Are you trying to invent a new script?” He asked more dryly than he meant it, nudging the corner of Cyno’s notes and moving closer than he intended. “Because that character looks suspiciously like a drowning Shroomboar.”
Cyno shrank lightly at the jest, looking up at Alhaitham with lamplight catching in his lashes like fine threads of gold, their faces now all too close to one another. “It’s um,” he looked back down toward his notes, and Alhaitham followed his eyeline as he found what Alhaitham was criticizing. “It’s an arrow of implication.”
“Toward what, exactly? Your descent into madness?” This time, Alhaitham couldn’t stop the grin from spreading across his lips.
Cyno turned away before he could notice Alhaitham's brief lapse in composure, broadening his shoulders to block the pages and leaving Alhaitham staring at the rugged fabric of his coat. “Toward the end of this assignment, if you would just let me work,” Cyno said with an annoyed sigh.
Alhaitham leaned over him slightly, gaze drifting across the page, and Cyno’s height did little to conceal his papers. “You keep rephrasing the same conclusion. The point’s been made three times.”
Cyno’s pen stopped mid-sentence. “I’m reinforcing it.”
“You’re just circling it like a vulture. Just stab it and move on.” He kept his voice steady and calculated, trying to ignore the warmth Cyno’s body emitted just a few inches below him.
Cyno let out a long, slow breath and dropped the pen onto the table with a dull clack. “This is so pointless.”
Alhaitham blinked, sinking back down into his seat on the bench. “The paper?”
“The whole assignment,” Cyno said, waving his hand around the scattered scrolls on the table. “Tracing linguistic shifts through three extinct dialects to interpret prayer tablets for the late Greater Lord Rukkhadevata,” Cyno recited in exasperated monotone, reading straight off the rubric with a snap of his wrist as though the phrasing physically pained him. “Who is this helping? What does it even do?”
Alhaitham raised an eyebrow. “It’s teaching you how to track layered meaning through time.”
“No, it teaches you that the Akademiya enjoys wasting ten pages on one misused preposition. Maybe the writer was having a bad day and forgot his grammar rules. I don’t know,” there was a bitter twist in Cyno’s tone now, the kind that wasn’t sourced from boredom, rather something deeper Alhaitham had not yet deciphered.
Alhaitham straightened his posture, watching him more carefully now. “I want to study justice,” Cyno muttered. “Not semantics. What am I to gain from deducing whether some priest meant ‘grace’ or ‘order’ four hundred years ago? The people who used this language are gone, their systems of belief are gone. The only thing this does is let scholars argue in circles and feel more clever than their neighbor.”
“You’re confusing application with structure,” Alhaitham spoke coolly, “You can’t interpret law without language, and you can’t prosecute without proof. You must understand the system it was built on first.”
“That’s a lovely lecture,” Cyno replied, tone clipped. “You should give it to someone who still believes in the Akademiya’s priorities.” As quickly as his tone shifted, so did his posture, and he was back to hunching over his work with a new insistence.
Alhaitham paused. He could have dismissed it. He usually would. But something about how Cyno’s voice strung over each of his words— tight, tired, like someone exhausted from biting their own tongue for far too long— made his usual sarcasm feel cheaper than Cyno deserved.
Instead, he said something he did not mean to say aloud. “Then figure out why you’re doing all of this before you decide it’s worthless.”
Cyno blinked. Too late had Alhaitham realized not the words he had spoken, but the softness of them. Not his usual challenge and correction. Just… advice. He busied himself immediately, shifting a few loose pages on the table in front of him into a neater pile, pretending he hadn’t yet noticed the way Cyno was still staring at him, drowning his attention in his ever-shifting thoughts.
That was wildly careless. Why would you let it leave your mouth like that? You can’t give comfort, you give precision. Direction. Detachment. Anything else only leads to misunderstanding, or worse—expectation.
And Cyno was nothing if not quick to expect. Not from naivety or emotive blindness, but because he paid attention.
“I mean,” Alhaitham added, a touch too late, forcing his voice to return to its usual rhythm, “it just feels like you’re wasting more energy complaining than actually doing your work. That is all.”
Cyno didn’t answer. He leaned back in his seat, his collar loosening from where it had bunched up against his chin, revealing the sharp curve of his jaw and the way it loosened. He tapped the page once, then gripped the pen like it might anchor him. Then he opened his mouth, voice low and anything but closed off. “That wasn’t just academic advice.”
Alhaitham didn’t, couldn’t look at him. He didn’t need to anyway. He could feel the weight of his glance. Heavy and measured, pressing against him in the way the cold didn’t. “I give all kinds of advice frequently,” he replied casually.
“Not like that,” Cyno said, and he was smiling, the dry kind, the one that decorated his lips when he knew something Alhaitham couldn’t admit. He shifted forward slightly, and Alhaitham could see from the corner of his eye how the moonlight cast the curve of his cheek in beautiful silver.
“I do have a reason for why I’m doing this,” he said after a moment, quieter now. “It’s just easy to forget sometimes.”
For an instant, the wind softened and the courtyard felt totally still again, like even the trees knew to stay quiet. Cyno watched him, and then, leaning back with an elbow over the spine of the bench, eyes half-lidded with something unreadable, he asked,“So what about you? Why this field? And don’t say it’s for the cushy job. That’s the line you give strangers.”
And you could never be a stranger.
Alhaitham didn’t respond right away. He let the question hang between them, let it cool in the space like the last of the tea in his cup. He could lie, and it would be so easy. He’d said it all before— stable work, minimal oversight, no forced collaboration with anyone he didn’t feel like working with. A simple life of reading and research. He’d even convinced himself, once.
But Cyno wasn’t just asking to hear his answer, he was watching for how Alhaitham might answer.
Be more careful now. Truth implies closeness, and closeness implies risk. He’s already too close. He’s practically warmed your tea by just sitting by you.
“I like a stable post,” Alhaitham said at last, measured. “Quiet hours, predictable routines.”
Cyno gave him a look. “Oh, please, you’re describing retirement. Is there not something that impassions you while we’re still young and can change all…” he waved toward the buildings around them, holding centuries of knowledge and tradition, and yet still redefined by each new generation that walked its halls, “all this?”
Alhaitham followed the gesture without turning his head. The Akademiya sat sharp and old around them, every corner packed with their doctrine disguised as an honorable legacy. He had no illusions about what this place was. He wasn’t foolish enough to love it. He tolerated it. And if he could move through it untouched, unshaped, unnoticed— it would be for the better.
But Cyno, his dear Cyno, wanted to change it. He wanted to name it, challenge it, crack it open until it finally stopped devouring people like him.
Alhaitham’s gaze returned to him, careful not to linger.
What impassions me? The way you sit out here and pretend your hands aren’t freezing because you’re too stubborn to admit it’s become too dark out here. The way you keep rewriting the same three lines because it has to be right, not just over and done with. The way you think you can change this place, and worse, make me think I could be more than just a witness to it.
“I’m here, aren’t I?” he said in place of the truth. “That’s answer enough.”
Cyno didn’t look satisfied, but he didn’t argue either. He just turned back to his notes, pen tapping twice against the corner of the page before he picked it up again. The silence between them was quiet, but not cold, not anymore.
Cyno’s pen scratched across the page in cramped, decisive bursts, until its point hesitated, then hovered, dropped. A long breath slipped through his nose. He stared down at his notes like they were no longer the problem at hand. Then, without looking up, he spoke again, the warmth in his voice striking Alhaitham still. “You really want to know why I keep doing all of this?”
Alhaitham didn’t answer immediately. He didn’t need to. Cyno knew the answer, just as Alhaitham knew this wasn’t a new question. It was something Cyno had asked himself countless times in various forms across their years together— across study sessions, late-night debates, across the quiet edge of discussions never finished.
Alhaitham could recite Cyno’s reasons with flawless accuracy. But something in his voice tonight was asking for the space to say it again, out loud. To hear it land on the ears of someone who mattered.
Alhaitham gave a short, silent nod.
Cyno exhaled and leaned back slightly, letting his shoulder brush against the stone wall. His eyes drifted upward to where the bare branches of the Divine Tree bent like the ribs of something ancient and ever-enduring.
“My people didn’t build places like this,” Cyno began, “Not because they couldn’t. Because they weren’t allowed to.”
Alhaitham’s fingers tightened around his pen, pausing his writing entirely. He stayed still. Attentive.
Cyno’s voice was sharp as he spoke.“The Akademiya talks about Sumeru like it starts and ends at the edge of this city. But there’s an entire world beyond the Wall of Samiel,” he swung himself by his hips back toward the table, flicking his fingers over the scattered pages, “and it gets treated like a cautionary tale in every textbook. Like it’s only ever been dust and misfortune. Like nothing good survives there.”
He looked down at his own hands, flexing his fingers slowly, as though the cold had settled deeper than he thought. Or maybe it was the quiet rage. “Sandstorms, bandits, poor soil. What could a place like that possibly offer the Akademiya, right?”
Cyno’s voice was defensive, tinged with the helpless anger of someone forced to explain their own existence to a room full of people who had already decided it was inconvenient.
“I’m here to prove that isn’t true,” he continued, “I’ve told you that before. I’m not here to fit in. I want to make something of myself in front of them. To leave no room for doubt that people like me can belong here. Not because we assimilated to their demands, but because we excelled. Because we earned it.”
He never met Alhaitham’s eyes as he spoke. He didn’t need to. This wasn’t a performance, it was a tired, ritualistic reminder that eventually, all this could matter. He didn’t interrupt. He simply watched the faint flush that crept into Cyno’s cheeks from feeling too much all at once.
The first time Cyno had said something like this, they were barely two weeks into their first semester. Alhaitham still remembered the way he’d corrected a professor mid-lecture, cool and sharp, entirely unforgiving, when an offhand comment dismissed the desert’s contributions to the Matra’s origins as having “no academic merit.” He hadn’t said much afterward, but that evening, he’d stay late in the library, translating three old judiciary scrolls in his native dialect just to make a point, then presenting them with burning pride.
Cyno looked down again, fiddling with the edge of one of the scrolls he’d already annotated and read through twice. “I just want to be someone they remember. Someone the kids I grew up with can point to and say, ‘That’s my kin’. Someone all my people can claim, not as some exception, but as proof.”
He paused. Then laughed, short and flat, barely reaching his eyes. “I know that sounds… dramatic.”
Alhaitham tilted his head slightly, resting his jaw against his knuckles and turning it to look straight at Cyno’s eyes, the warm and bright orange of them, like the glittering sun against the sands he was born in.
“It sounds like a reason,” he offered simply. “A better one than most.”
Cyno groaned. “So you’re still going to make me finish the paper.”
Alhaitham shrugged, “You’re the one who wants to be remembered. Might as well do it legibly—” his sentence cut off by a shove. Half-hearted, mostly warm. Their knees knocked lightly beneath the table. Neither made any effort to change their positions.
Cyno leaned back again, shoulder brushing against Alhaithams as he made his way to slouch on the wall, taking a long pull from his teacup, lips tugging up at the corners in a near-smile. He glanced toward the library entrance. The golden light inside flickered through the windows in long lines of amber. Alhaitham watched too, as a group of students ran inside, rubbing gloved hands together and stomping the beginnings of snowmelt off their boots. The warmth inside seemed awfully exaggerated by comparison, and Alhaitham was beginning to lose his resolve, too.
“Still too stubborn to admit you’re cold?”
Cyno stared into his teacup for a moment, then muttered, “I’m considering it.”
That was enough. Alhaitham rose in one motion, gathering their notes into orderly piles, pausing only before grabbing Cyno’s papers to stack them tenderly. “Good to consider it before frostbite entirely compromises your ability to draw your precious implication arrows,” he smirked softly, slipping the scroll into the top of Cyno’s bag.
Cyno snorted as he stood, stretched out his legs from under the bench with an audible crack of joints, then quickly drew his limbs back into the center of his body. “We don’t exactly get winters in the desert, alright?”
Alhaitham gave him a look over the rim of his papers. “Would you like to borrow my scarf?” he asked without thinking. He caught himself, tone shifting quickly, “or is your pride still conducting experiments in hypothermia?”
Cyno shot him a glare, sharp and jokingly defensive. “I’d rather freeze.”
Alhaitham clicked his tongue, placing the papers in his own bag with surgical precision. “Excellent,” he said sarcastically, “The experiment continues.”
They fell into an easy rhythm, tucking loose stationery into each other’s bags with the kind of practiced familiarity that made it hard to tell whose things were whose. It didn’t take long.
The cold clung to them as they stepped out from under the skeletal branches of the Divine Tree, long limbs creaking softly like it too was already tired of the season. Neither spoke as they crossed the courtyard. There was no need.
Cyno slowed just before the entrance, cupping his hands over the nearest lantern. Its flame flicked behind the glass, warm and steady, just enough to coax the cold from his fingers. Alhaitham didn’t say anything; instead, he stopped beside him, close enough for the tips of their coats to brush. He held his own hands near the flame, palms outstretched, letting the heat seep slowly into the chilled skin.
Their fingers bumped ever so lightly. It would have been easy to shift, maybe pull away, and make a quick joke to cover the accidental contact. Still, they stood like that longer than necessary, the warmth that grew between them owing little to the lantern’s flame. Alhaitham tried to keep his stare ahead, silent and still, but the tips of his fingers stayed where they were, brushing against Cyno’s knuckles, close enough to remember the shape of them.
When Cyno finally pulled his hands back, flexing his fingers with a satisfied hum, Alhaithamn let his own drop to his sides and said nothing. Some warmth lingered anyway.