Archive of Our Own ^beta

“You’re doing that wrong.”

It is not an unusual accusation to hear in their kitchen on the nights Alhaitham cooks dinner. Kaveh takes spice in quantities great enough to kill a small animal, after all, while Alhaitham prefers being able to eat his meal in peace with an unblistered mouth.

In both Sumer and Liyuean traditional practice, excessive spiciness does afflict the personality with fieriness and unpredictability. Alhaitham has read of Liyuean individuals with such powerful yang energy that they must eat special ice daily to control their temperaments. Perhaps Kaveh is the same way, only Sumeru has no such understanding of balance and instead worships this imbalance. The Light of Kshahrewar, indeed.

However, Alhaitham is not spicing anything just now. He is zesting a lime.

“Perhaps I am,” he agrees. Asking how he can possibly be zesting wrong would be one, acknowledging even a mythical gap in his understanding; and two, result in a lecture. His hands are occupied and messy; he cannot turn up his headphones’ noise cancellation and drown Kaveh out.

Besides, it’s more entertaining to disrupt him.

“You—!” Kaveh huffs. “You’re doing it on purpose, then? Seriously? Just to annoy me, I suppose.”

“Do I ever do anything otherwise?”

This is, truth be told, more effort than he used to put into cooking. Nutrition and convenience are the highest aspirations of food. ‘Convenience’ means that it can be eaten without putting aside one’s book, or other hypothetical priority. ‘Nutrition’ means that it will sustain the body for as long as possible, barring variables such as physical altercations or unexpected illness draining his reserves faster than usual. 

(Hmm. Perhaps that's why the Traveller and their companion are so gluttonous? They certainly do more than an ordinary person's share of exercise.) 

But Kaveh has left an impression here, as he does wherever he passes. Alhaitham considers the cookbooks he has picked up since picking up a roommate an act of self-defense. 

He angles his hand, lets the small knife of Dendro work a long curl of rind loose from the fruit. The scent wafts from the wound, a pleasant tang in the air. 

"You aren't using your Vision for that," Kaveh gasps. "Alhaitham." 

"And why shouldn't I? It's mine to do with as I choose, surely." 

"We own a proper zester, for one thing—"

"You mean I own it?" 

"Oh, for the Lesser Lord—give me that." Kaveh strides over (deceptively fast: it is in the nature of light to move so quickly, isn't it?) and snatches both lime and knife from his hands. Though it is his own Dendro energy that forms the blade, it wouldn't be much of a weapon if it couldn't affect or be affected by others' flesh. It simply dulls separated from Alhaitham, its energy no longer shimmering over the surface. "This is laziness," Kaveh declares. He shakes the little knife. It chimes against nothing. "Honestly, it's a nice change you're paying attention to your meals now, and I will allow you aren't completely hopeless in the kitchen, but shortcuts like this are—" He fumbles momentarily, obviously already aware of how Alhaitham will respond to this, "—are disrespectful to your ingredients." 

Alhaitham arches an eyebrow. "I suspect the lime, having been plucked from its branch, is unbothered by whatever use it is put towards. Particularly once it's quartered and juiced to a pulp afterward." 

Kaveh's sigh reverberates. 

"Bloody-minded literality, Haravatat," he says, and tosses the Dendro knife into the air. Alhaitham blinks. The loss of his focus lets the blade dissipate in a tiny green firework. "You need not maul my metaphors the way you were mauling this fruit." 

"But they're so easily broken," Alhaitham says. As Kaveh searches in the drawers, he seats himself at the kitchen island. He considers returning to his reading while they talk, just to annoy Kaveh. 

"In Inazuma," Kaveh says, and his voice is so alight with fascination that of course Alhaitham does not, "they believe an object used for one hundred years attains a spirit." He finds what he's looking for and waves the microplane in Alhaitham's face. "Tsukumogami, they call it. Part of the youkai tradition. They come alive, and gain the power to change their shape. And their attitude depends on how they were treated." 

"Do you expect to use that microplane for a hundred years?" Alhaitham asks, and pushes the tool away from his nose.

Kaveh snorts and sets about zesting the lime to his own particular standards. "Don't be deliberately obtuse. It hardly suits you. Just—oh, I know it's difficult for you, but imagine it, Alhaitham. This house, in a hundred years, alive with eyes and strangling spirits, because you didn't respect your things." Kaveh shudders in an exaggerated tremor of fear. But his hands remain steady at their work. 

"I am familiar with the mokumokuren," Alhaitham says. "We don't have any shogi, let alone damaged shogi, Kaveh. Besides, you'd fix it within hours of the injury, I have no doubt. There'd be no time for it to turn into a demon." 

"That's not the point," Kaveh sighs. "The point is that the way you neglect your things is a spiritual crime. Don't think I don't know you know that from a light novel, either." 

Alhaitham smiles. He slips from his seat and pads up behind Kaveh, looping one arm around the other man's waist and pressing his nose into the soft curve of his neck. Today's fragrance oil is Sumeru Rose, as usual: a pale flower, damp with life-giving rain in some undefinable olfactory way, made salty and just this side of bitter-gold with Kaveh's skin, his sweat.

"Senior Kaveh should know better to rule out knowledge just because he doesn't like the source it flows from," he murmurs into that peaceful spot just below Kaveh's ear. "The Yae Publishing House is delighted to provide supplementals on Inazuman tradition for foreigners curious about the context of tales. They're quite enthusiastic about rejoining the world."

Kaveh leans into him. He's deceptively heavy: his lithe frame and loose clothes fool the eye, but he's strong, heavy enough to counterbalance dreams on the fulcrum of his imagination and lever them into the world. It's one lost argument in Alhaitham's tally: he once fell for the optics of things too easily, laughed at Kaveh's assertions he could lift Alhaitham with ease. Long before he'd learned his senior wielded a greatsword. 

After all—in the infamous words of a younger student who'd witnessed that fight—just look at them. 

He likes their matching trick of it now. Kaveh: soft, delicate, a world-builder. Alhaitham: imposing, broad, a feeble scholar. 

He reaches up with his free hand, twirls escaping golden locks around his fingers and deftly maneuvers them back into the confines of Kaveh's braid. 

"The Sakoku Decree was only a year old, it's not like we forgot what Inazuma was while it was closed," Kaveh grouses. 

Alhaitham shrugs. "But they did not publish their culture in the same way prior to the Decree, either. This Yae Publishing House is new. There's a strong contrast between their own tales and Akademiya theses. Vahumana disregards the supernatural wherever they can get away with it." 

Kaveh tilts his head. His balm-soft lips brush Alhaitham's temple. "I think my adorable junior just likes ghost stories."

Alhaitham snorts, then considers it properly. "There is an element of interest," he allows. "An idea so strong that it jumps the barrier between material reality and the conceptual realm. That it becomes immortal." 

Kaveh's exasperated laugh echoes through their frames. "You're supposed to say you like being scared, so your senior can offer to protect you. Always words with you, isn't it, Haravatat?"

He can always trust Kaveh to catch his meaning. 

If there were not an edict against investigating the origin of words, Alhaitham could stretch this to apply to the language that organizes their every thought. All words, the ghosts of some ancient material reality, haunting them still. The shift from Enkanomiyan to Watatsumi-shaded Inazuman, for example, and the way it's littered their textual corpus with corpses. 

Could. 

But it is forbidden. And more powerfully, it does not interest him much after all. 

He skims his lips over Kaveh's smooth skin to his ear, nosing away the dangling earring that hangs in his way. The lime in Kaveh's hand stills on the microplane. 

"I don't think I'll be repainting the bedroom after all," he purrs.

Kaveh yelps and elbows him. Not hard, just enough to wind him a little and make him step back. If he were in the habit of laughing aloud he would be. Albeit breathlessly. 

"You brute, you promised," Kaveh wails. "It's not repainting if they're unfinished wood to begin with!" 

"Hardly unfinished. I distinctly recall you roping me into sealing them." 

Kaveh colors red, as he always does at the memory of the shared research project that built this house. "That was years ago. They need a new coat. Unless you want your precious house going porous and admitting silverfish!" 

That's a disgusting enough idea Alhaitham can't keep his nose from wrinkling. 

"I was thinking blue," Kaveh goes on. "The Amurta Darshan has just published some research about blue spaces. Water views. They say that green views are good for the mind and its well-being, but that water promotes serenity even more effectively. Since all the forest of Sumeru isn’t soothing your terrible attitude towards our poor petitioners…”

“If water is so serene, do explain Port Ormos,” Alhaitham says. “Or whatever’s going on with Fontaine’s technicians upon receiving public funding.”

Kaveh rolls his eyes. “You can only ask a landscape to do so much, Alhaitham.”

“Well, if it’s landscapes you want, I really will leave it up to you, as the artist between us,” Alhaitham says. He gathers his discarded book from the table. “Let me know when dinner’s ready.”

He leaves for the living room as Kaveh looks down at the lime in his hand, the ingredients arrayed around him, and starts squawking in outrage at their swapped places.

If, as he starts to read before he’s even fully seated on the couch, the book serves to hide a smile quivering at the corners of his lips—

Well. Who’s to know, or speak of it?