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Sleep enveloped Kaveh like a nice, warm and fluffy blanket.
He couldn’t remember the last time he’d slept so soundly. It was so blissfull; a couple of times, he even thought he could feel fingers running through his hair, gently caressing him with love that was so hard to put into words, but so easy to feel. Kaveh was simply at peace, and even as he woke up and stirred from that softness, at first he couldn’t even figure out where he was, rubbing the corners of his eyes sleepily and looking around.
His bed in the dorm wasn’t nearly as comfortable, or as soft, or as... upright?
Wait. He wasn't lying down; he was sitting. And the light from the stained-glass windows, falling on the bookshelves all around, very quickly made him realize that, of all places, he had fallen asleep in the House of Daena, and...
And right next to him was the very reason he hadn’t collapsed on the floor after trying to sleep while sitting on those small sofas, which barely had enough room to simply sit on. His junior, calmly reading a book that looked twice if not trice his age — and oh, Kaveh could have sunk into the ground with embarrassment, once he realized why the part of Alhaitham’s uniform closest to him looked so crumpled. And there even seemed to be a small spot on it that looked like a drop of saliva.
And Kaveh, much to his embarrassment, knew that sometimes he, uh. Drooled in his sleep.
Oh, Rukkhadevata, have mercy.
“You… oh, why didn’t you…?”
His head was a complete mess. After all, they’d just had an argument that morning about how to properly prepare the paperwork for submission at the end of the week, and Kaveh had even blurted out that Alhaitham had neither taste nor any sense, absolutely none, because it was obviously way too much work and the teacher had set them up for failure, because they would either not turn it in at all, or turn it in full but with terrible formatting — and Alhaitham stubbornly refused to agree with him!..
When Alhaitham finally looked up from his damned book and glanced at him, those shameless green eyes with such a beautiful brown rim around the pupil seemed not to be looking at Kaveh, but into his very damn soul. Kaveh had heard many people whispering that Alhaitham had a terrifying stare; that "being around him always felt unsettling and kind of uncomfortable", like some primal fear of a predator... even if that predator was only five feet tall, provided he wore boots with heels.
Kaveh didn't feel pinned down by that gaze; he knew that Alhaitham was just... like that, sometimes. But that didn't make him any less flustered!
And yet, Hayi finally just shamelessly shrugged:
“You fell asleep on my shoulder,” he stated the fact, as he always did, and which rubbed so many people the wrong way, but instead of irritation, Kaveh now felt only bewilderment, “I didn’t mind.”
Alhaitham. The little king of “I hate it when people breathe wrongly (or at all) next to me,” the archon of “if you touch me, you’ll lose your fingers.”
He, of all people, didn’t mind that Kaveh slept on his shoulder. And even the faint hope that Alhaitham simply hadn’t noticed the wet spot vanished in an instant when Alhaitham calmly pulled out a napkin and wiped the spot off his uniform, as if it were the most natural thing in the world.
“I... thank you?” Kaveh muttered awkwardly, looking down at his feet and then up at Alhaitham, who had stood up and merely snorted indifferently:
“You’re welcome,” and before Kaveh could even wonder if some secret agents from Snezhnaya had kidnapped his Alhaitham and replaced him with a much politer double, Hayi noted with a little smirk: "I finished the formatting and all you need to do is take it there and turn it in. I also expect you to get the notes from that class I missed while I was serving as your pillow... Hm. Lunch sounds good, too."
Ah! There he was, his little, lousy junior. A little scoundrel, honestly convinced he can do everything on his own—
And then he shamelessly plopped a stack of papers right onto Kaveh's lap. A big one, which, to Kaveh's astonishment, was actually finished and formatted just as it should be — and... and they still had a whole week to turn it in.
Oh.
Oh, Kaveh didn't even really get annoyed by his insolent junior, who squinted at him with an obvious look of “Come on, try to find something to nitpick, if you can,” even though he clearly knew there was nothing left to nitpick. What else was there to say? Hayi was right, and it turned out that Kaveh had been worrying over nothing. Again.
Therefore, with a resigned sigh, Kaveh simply slumped his shoulders and quietly asked that brazen, shameless rascal:
“So... lunch at Lambad's? I’ll pay.”
And for a moment, the smile on Alhaitham’s lips and the dimples that appeared on his cheeks almost made him look his age, not like an old man trapped in a young man’s body.
“Sounds delightful.”
And all that was left for Kaveh to do was to stop his heart from pounding so loudly at how handsome his damn junior was.