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Kaveh hated that he looked for Alhaitham first.
It wasn't a decision. That was the problem. Decisions implied awareness, and he hadn't been aware of doing it until it was already done. His eyes moved across the crowd, skipping over colleagues and strangers and people whose names he actually liked, until they landed on a familiar silhouette near their home.
Their shared home.
The relief arrived before the annoyance.
He hated that too.
He found Alhaitham where he expected to find him.
Of course he did.
While the rest of Sumeru seemed determined to speculate itself into a panic, Alhaitham was already working. A scroll rested in one hand. His attention was fixed on something written across the page, as though the possibility of imminent disaster had merely become another problem requiring sufficient research.
Annoying.
Predictable.
Strangely reassuring.
Kaveh frowned. He chose not to examine that too closely and moved forward before he could think too hard about why.
After that, there was work.
An unreasonable amount of work.
The kind that swallowed entire days without asking permission.
Ancient schematics. Deshret notation. Endless revisions. Arguments over feasibility. Arguments over methodology. Arguments that somehow kept ending with both of them leaning over the same table anyway — forced to join as 'the brightest scholars of Akademiya,' albeit their history.
Alhaitham handled the knowledge. The translation, the interpretation, the part where incomprehensible Deshret notation became something resembling a plan.
Kaveh handled the structure. Whether the thing could physically survive what they were asking it to do. Whether the math of it held.
By the second day, Kaveh stopped noticing when Alhaitham handed him a document before he asked for it.
By the third, Alhaitham had apparently remembered exactly how Kaveh organized his calculations.
Neither of them commented on it.
Neither of them commented on the fact that, despite everything, they still worked together as if no time had passed. Like the last few years of careful distance had been a temporary detour rather than a permanent rerouting.
The night before the main operation, the desert was very quiet.
Kaveh found himself in the upper chamber without entirely meaning to. Or, that wasn't quite true. He knew, if he was being honest, exactly why his feet had carried him here instead of anywhere else.
Alhaitham was already there.
Of course he was.
Standing at the edge of the overlook with a book in hand, reading, as though the night before a potentially world-ending operation was a reasonable time to catch up on literature. He didn't look up when Kaveh approached. He didn't have to.
Kaveh stopped beside him and looked out at the desert instead.
The stone beneath his feet was old. He knew this the way he knew most things, not from being told, but from looking. Old things settled. Foundations shifted. Most collapses began long before anyone noticed them.
He was trying very hard not to think about what that particular observation applied to.
The silence stretched. Comfortable in the way their silences had always been, underneath all the arguing. Kaveh had never quite figured out how to explain that to other people. Strange, perhaps, but not unusual.
He folded his arms.
"So, uh."
Alhaitham turned a page.
Kaveh looked out at the horizon. Something about the sky was wrong in a way he couldn't articulate technically, which bothered him more than if he could. He was a man who dealt with shapes, load distribution, and aesthetics. The sky wasn't doing anything he had vocabulary for.
"Do you think this is what impending disaster looks like?"
He hadn't meant it as a real question. He'd meant it the way he meant most things when he was frightened. A noise. Proof that he was still capable of producing words in the correct order. He expected nothing. Or 'obviously' at most.
Alhaitham considered this with the gravity it apparently deserved.
"Probably."
Kaveh laughed. It came out wrong — too short, too sharp, like something that had been trying to be genuine and given up partway through. "That's it? Probably?"
"What answer were you hoping for?"
I don't know. Something that sounds like you're scared, too. "Something with more than one syllable."
Alhaitham made a sound that wasn't quite a scoff. He set the book down and stepped up beside Kaveh, close enough that their arms nearly touched, and looked out at the same view Kaveh had been trying to make sense of. The desert stretched endlessly below. Dark stone. Bruised sky. Sunset light behaving in ways neither of them had words for.
Kaveh had designed structures meant to last a thousand years. He had calculated load-bearing tolerances, stress points, and the exact amount of material needed to survive catastrophic pressure without shattering entirely. He had never once calculated this, whatever this was. The specific gravity of standing next to someone you'd been angry at for years and realizing the anger had just been scaffolding for something that scared you more.
"The structural integrity of the situation is compromised," he said, which was not what he meant at all.
"Obviously."
"I meant —" He stopped. Pressed his tongue against the back of his teeth. The problem was that he wasn't entirely sure what he meant.
"I meant that we should probably have a plan."
"We have a plan."
"We have steps. That's not the same as a plan. A plan implies survivability."
Alhaitham was quiet for a moment.
"Awful things happen all the time," he said. "Sometimes, people can stop them. And sometimes they can't."
Kaveh went very still.
It was such a simple thing to say. Measured. Factual. The kind of sentence that sounded, on the surface, exactly like the bloodless pragmatism that had driven Kaveh to the edge of reason for most of their youthful lives.
Except,
He had known Alhaitham long enough. Had lived with him, had worked beside him for three straight days in a room full of ancient schematics, had learned the precise shape of his silences to know that sometimes they can't was not dismissal.
It was refusal to lie.
Kaveh had been lied to with optimism before. He knew exactly what it felt like: the bright architecture of reassurance built on nothing, the way the whole structure collapsed the moment reality arrived. He had built things on promises like that. He had watched them fall.
Alhaitham was not promising him anything.
He was saying: I see the same horizon you see. I am not going to insult you by pretending otherwise.
It hit Kaveh somewhere below the sternum.
"Right," he said, when he trusted his voice again. "Yes. That's… accurate."
Alhaitham glanced at him. Not long enough to constitute a look. More of an acknowledgment. Then, almost as an afterthought,
"What you and I have done is increase our chances of stopping this one."
"That's not the same as a guarantee."
"No."
"You could just say it'll be fine."
"I could," Alhaitham said. "Would that help?"
Kaveh opened his mouth. Closed it. "…No."
"Then I won't."
The wind moved between them. Below, the desert continued to exist. Full of people who didn't know they were being held up by a plan with more variables than certainties, and two people who had spent days working side by side without once saying anything that mattered.
"Are you frightened?" Alhaitham asked. Not the way most people would, with that slight uptick of concern disguised as curiosity. He said it the way he said most things — like a measurement. Like he was calibrating.
Kaveh snorted. "Aren't you?"
"That depends."
"On what?"
"The outcome."
Kaveh turned to look at him. "That's not how fear works."
"Then perhaps I'm using a different definition."
"Oh, wonderful." He exhaled and rubbed at his forehead. "We're redefining emotions now. During the apocalypse."
"I prefer calibrating."
"Of course you do."
"I asked first."
Kaveh finally looked at him. And that was a mistake, because Alhaitham was looking back with that expression he almost never wore outside the house. Not boardroom neutrality. Not studied distance. Just… present. Waiting, with something that might have been patience, for the rest of the world to catch up.
"Yes," Kaveh said. "Obviously. Incredibly."
His laugh sounded hollow, even to his own ears.
"I'm terrified, Alhaitham, because I've walked through a lot of things in my life, and I can usually see the shape of what's on the other side of a problem. Maybe not the details, but enough to know where I'm going. However, I cannot see the shape of this, and that is—" He exhaled. "That is a very uncomfortable feeling for someone who makes his living understanding shapes."
Alhaitham was quiet for a moment.
"The other side of this," he said carefully, "is uncertain. That is true."
"Wonderfully reassuring, thank you."
"I wasn't finished." And there it was — that slight compression at the corners of his mouth that Kaveh had spent years learning to read, the nearest thing that Alhaitham can show that means 'stop being difficult, I'm trying to say something'. "The other side is uncertain. But the path to it is not. We know what we're doing. We know why we're doing it. That's not nothing."
Kaveh looked at him for a long moment. The sky remained silent and still, like it's waiting for something enormous… like tension urging to break through the somber night.
"Is that your version of 'I'm frightened too'?" Kaveh asked.
Alhaitham looked away. Back to the horizon. "Don't push it."
Which was — yes. That was exactly what it was.
Kaveh turned back as well. Stood there in the half-dark with his shoulder almost touching Alhaitham's, looking at something that might be the end of the world or might be, if they were very careful and very lucky, the condition that preceded a different beginning.
Kaveh thought about what it meant to build something. Not the technical version. Not the tolerances and load distribution and the precise angle of stress through an arch, but the actual truth underneath all of that. You chose to believe, before you had any evidence, that the thing you were making would stand. You committed to a shape that didn't exist yet. You handed all of your precision and all of your hope to a future that couldn't promise you anything back.
He had been doing that his whole life.
He had just, for a very long time, been doing it with the wrong materials.
If the world was ending, he thought, I would still be standing exactly here.
The thought scared him more than the disaster.
"After this," he said.
Alhaitham looked at him. "What?"
"If this goes badly—"
"You don't know that."
"No," Alhaitham agreed. "But I know you. And I know myself. And I find that to be a sufficient foundation for reasonable confidence."
Kaveh stared at the side of his face. Alhaitham, to his credit, did not look smug about it. He just looked… present. Certain, in the way he was certain about things that mattered. Like this was a theorem he'd already proven to his own satisfaction and was simply waiting for the rest of the universe to follow him.
"You're insufferable," Kaveh said. His voice came out softer than he'd intended.
"You've mentioned."
"I'm going to mention it again. Probably multiple times. After this."
Something shifted in Alhaitham's expression — subtle, seismic. "After this," he repeated.
"After this," Kaveh said. Firmly. Like a load-bearing wall. Like something he was choosing to believe in before he had any evidence.
Alhaitham looked at him then, full-on, the way he almost never did in public. And he didn't say anything. He didn't have to. Kaveh had been reading his silences long enough to know the difference between the ones that meant I have no response, and those that meant I don't have words for this, and that is itself information.
This was the second kind.
Kaveh looked back at the horizon.
Below them, the desert waited. Above, the sky was doing something wrong. Tomorrow, the plan would either work or it wouldn't, and there was nothing left to do about it tonight except stand here, shoulder almost touching shoulder, in the particular silence of two people who had just said something enormous without technically saying anything at all.
"Okay," Kaveh said finally.
Alhaitham turned.
"Let's go check on the others."
And Alhaitham fell into step beside him, half a step back, to his left, exactly where he'd always been. And they walked back toward the light.