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Can a person hide their best self in the hollows of a person,
(Even if they hate that other person, so half-assedly superior.)
Tuck the parts of themselves they want to be remembered
Into every unused crook of a separate individual?
This thought ricochets in Kaveh’s head as his quill sits poised over paper, full of right angles and tall towers, unable to put ink to page because his hand still shudders.
He remembers the quicksand that swallowed them up and brought them into Thoth’s sphere of consideration. He licks the nib of the quill, sucks the ink from it in his haste not to bite down.
Cyno can take his creativity. He wouldn’t do anything to corrupt it; if anything, it would serve as an ornamental card-back to his deck.
To Tighnari, all his tears. Though Tighnari often rolls his eyes over his head, he suffers the press of Kaveh’s face to his tunic, letting tears soak into the rich fabric without complaint.
And, Alhaitham.
Damn the man.
Kaveh doesn’t get a say in what Alhaitham claims. Every night he skims a little off the top that is the constantly-overboiling pot of Kaveh’s personhood, secreting glares and swears alike into the margins of his latest book.
In exchange, Kaveh isn’t so much a thief as an innocent victim forcefed Alhaitham’s terrible personality. The snide remarks get caught in the jagged edges of his lungs, and the pointless facts Alhaitham blithely delivers him– they stick themselves right into his overtaxed heart. They wallpaper the backs of Kaveh’s eyelids. He comes to bed in the middle of the night and, collapsing next to Alhaitham in a dead heap, tries to shut off his brain… just to have stupid words punch him right in the jaw. “The bee, of course, flies anyway because bees don't care what humans think is impossible.” Yes, yes, of course.
In the morning, Collei extends her hand to him in a brief show of alliance, and Kaveh recognises the tremor in her fingers. The tips, still blackened by Eleazar, are so small in his palm. To her, Kaveh imparts the pathetic whole of his accumulated wisdom.
Dehya can have his experience with make-up, for all the good it does her.
Kandake? Hells, he’ll suck up any ignorance she hasn’t shed under the crescent moon. There’s nothing worthwhile he could ever present to her.
Can a person hide their best self in the hollows of a person, he writes in his field notes,
(Squinting daggers at Alhaitham’s back, and the man doesn’t even turn around.)
Tuck the parts of themselves they want to be remembered
Into every unused crook of a separate individual?
The thought begs for an answer. His hand, it still shudders.
When all of it means to spill over, to become tears that will evaporate before they hit the paper,
Alhaitham is there, touching his shoulder. Taking his cut off the top.
Kaveh looks up at him, overwhelmed, grateful-hateful,
And swears.
Inside that place, that sepulchre of truth and violence, the air was rich with the perfume of white peppercorns. The spice, usually so gentle on the tongue, punched Cyno in the face like a corpse wrapping its arms around him. Like a lost lover. Like a body sucking down air and drowning on a rising deluge of blood.
Sethos, full of quips and quickness, pushed forth like a man desperate to ignore the pulse of Hermanubis under his skin. Each time their eyes met, something white like lightning flashed across Sethos’ face, and he turned from the crags of their unsolved relationship with a smile.
He has asked Tighnari each night, furry tail laid across his leg, what he made of the place. What he thought of Sethos. What the ripped-open future is supposed to look like.
‘You’re overthinking it,’ Tighnari has chided, kissing his eyelids and trying to pull the interrogation out of them. ‘We were all feeling harried. Couldn’t you tell I was annoyed?’
‘You’re usually annoyed,’ Cyno pointed out, refusing to baulk when Tighnari laid a rueful hand over his face.
‘Not like that. I wasn’t sure if we’d be stuck down there our whole lives.’
Cyno doesn’t quite believe that. They knew Layla had surfaced from the ruins, and so their freedom was all but guaranteed. Yet he knows, just as well, that most people see the crumbling majesty of the Scarlet Sands as a prison.
He thought to say, I expected Sethos to welcome me as a brother, not an unpleasant reminder of his lost power.
He thought to venture, I felt the loss of Alhaitham and Kaveh at our sides like a hole torn through me.
He thought to ask, Did you feel the same way? The four of us, who live such separate lives, who are destined to spin back together like four orbiting bodies that kiss on their cosmic journeys– For the first time in a long while, I thought we might never come together again.
Cyno did not put these words to his tongue. Rather, he accepted the weight of Tighnari’s arm across his chest, turning on his side so Tighnari might bury his nose into his shoulder.
Is this how it feels to be Layla? Each side of her, unable to meet the other. Perhaps so many more selves sunk beneath the earth.
Is this what Sethos perceives when he clutches his chest, grins wickedly? His self made unwhole. Knowing he has tasted true power, now lost.
(Or was it all his own overthinking? Maybe Sethos bears no grudge against him and the scornful energy is imagined. Each aspect of Hermanubis may even seek to pit them against the other.
Cyno, who centres himself upon the pinhead of black-and-white justice, hates this unsolvable ambiguity.)
‘You’re overthinking,’ Tighnari reminds him now, squeezing his arm. ‘Try to get some sleep.’
Sighing deeply, Cyno shuts his eyes. He sees it all weighed upon the golden scale.
It overtips and crashes to the floor.
Tighnari anoints his tongue in the juices of a Zaytun Peach, swipes it across the lips of a trembling Kaveh. Slice, to draw blood. That same tongue of his running lengthwise across Kaveh’s neck, pausing to kiss the apple bobbing beneath the skin: this is how he would murder his spouse.
But absent knife or fangs, this is how he comforts her. When Cyno’s earnest over-questioning and Alhaitham’s stoicism will not do, Tighnari is there to dress the wound. Let it not be said that he has left Collei wanting for experience in the art of healing others, whether by lips or surgeon’s scalpel.
Kaveh clings to him, shoulders tight as a bowstring with want. Kaveh clings to him and Tighnari is the executor of her needs, the lord of the estate that is her body, freeing her rivers and marshes from the colonialism of society’s expectations. With his tongue anointed in the sweet juice of the Peach, Tighnari cuts the throat of the Kaveh that is merely a man, merely good friends with three other boys. He takes that Kaveh and wrings him of his blood, tossing him aside like so much offal.
He does the same for Cyno. Cyno, waiting in the wings, moves to bring Kaveh to him as Tighnari kisses the corners of his eyes. Those are eyes whose pupils finally dilate in want, destroying the walls that rose up to keep the king of the Scarlet Sands trapped behind. Kaveh whimpers, and Tighnari skates a hand down her chest. Cyno looks at Tighnari as if he is his everything–one-third of his everything–and Tighnari obliges him, kissing the ghost of ritual from his lungs.
The process of serving is, itself, a kind of freedom. Tighnari lives on the knife’s edge of freedom, the blade always pointed toward the bonds that keep him secured to the earth. There isn’t a day that goes by where he does not think of severing each one, diving deep into the valley and never returning. He would, of course, have to pull his spouses behind him, and they might not adore the company of Spinocrocodiles very much.
Only for the prayer of faith that he whispers against Kaveh’s lips does Tighnari make himself stay. Right now, he is the lattice through which Cyno’s fingers are caught, squeezing him close. He is the wall that Kaveh climbs and climbs, finally making good on her desire to reach the sun.
Slice. He’d kill all the men that read Kaveh wrong, if he were asked. This sort of devout will is something they’d never expect of him. From Cyno, maybe.
(Cyno, lacing their fingers together, pulling Tighnari’s mouth to his;
Kaveh leaning her head on Tighnari’s shoulder, breath spooling heavy from her throat.)
He’d even put an arrow through Sethos’ neck, if Cyno wanted the full power of Hermanubis for himself.
And,
Tighnari would petition Greater Lord Kusanali to grant Alhaitham access to Her memories, the perfect book.
He’d do anything for these idiots.
Beneath the rich sun, swept over and through by the thin shadows of Aaru Village,
Alhaitham carries supplies to the field team’s rest.
Kaveh sneers at the brocade of muscle that ripples beneath his arms, twists like a rope down his back, and they say, ‘I still don’t know how you keep in shape.’
Fixing him with a mild stare–Kaveh squirming under the attention–Alhaitham replies, ‘A regular training regiment. Maybe you ought to try it, Senior Kaveh.’
Kaveh rolls their eyes and tmp-tmp-tmps away. Their bangles twinkle with every throw of their wrists.
Receiving him at the front desk, Collei does everything in her power not to stare at Alhaitham’s naked chest. ‘T-thank you, Profe– Teache– I mean… th-thank you!’
Alhaitham, placing the boxes next to the table she mans, runs his hand through his sweat-slicked hair. From not-so-far away, Kaveh chokes. Alhaitham glances at them again; Kaveh, face a furious red from desire, turns their back entirely.
At his right shoulder, Tighnari remarks, ‘Cyno never gets that kind of attention.’
‘He had his breasts removed,’ Alhaitham points out. Tighnari hands him a flask of water, which he takes.
‘And you’re not going to?’
Alhaitham shrugs. The only one treating his unbound, naked chest as though it were out of the ordinary is Kaveh. Lust spurs her outrage today.
‘Good work,’ says Cyno, as though summoned. He waits for Alhaitham to have his drink before he asks, ‘Is that the last of the caravan?’
‘No. There’s still thirteen boxes left.’
Cyno nods. ‘I’ll go help.’ His eyes flick down, once, and then back up. He walks away without interest or comment.
‘Huh.’ Tighnari stares after him. ‘I thought he’d have a bigger reaction.’
Again, Alhaitham says nothing. His chest does not define him, whether it were to make someone read him as a woman or to cause Kaveh great sexual consternation. He does not always feel so free, so unlabelled, but today calls for heavy work. Gender doesn’t enter the equation.
Heavy work as it may be, Alhaitham doesn’t miss the chance to seat himself on a barrel and pull out his latest book. The shade of a palm tree gives him the briefest reprieve.
Tighnari leans on that same barrel, and therefore, on him. He skims over Alhaitham’s arm, saying nothing. It would be quite impressive if he could read this ancient language.
He can’t. He steps off after another moment, stretching his arms above his head. Without his gloves, his three rings glimmer like precious gold beneath the God’s white eye. His ears twitch and careen as he catches the crackshot of Dehya’s voice, shouting his name.
‘It never ends,’ he complains, without real heat. Thus Alhaitham is left by his lonesome, naked from the waist up and temporarily without task.
He, once described by Kaveh as “the laziest creature known to Man”, has come to the desert for back-breaking work.
Because his spouses care for it, and so he, ever-so-slightly, cares as well.
It’s a fine feeling.