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The first family that Kaveh made for himself comes cloaked in the pride of a lion, wrapped in wisdom and bearing teeth.
Kshahrewar was not the Darshan people chose for fame, for glory. Kshahrewar was once respected, surely, but that was history, gone from the world like those who spoke of Greater Lord Rukkhadevata with familiarity mixed into awe. Kshahrewar came with baggage, with weight against his brow in the shape of a golden lion. Perhaps it was this very pride that incited others to disdain, to whispers that followed them all.
“If I fail this exam, my mother said I might have to join Kshahrewar,” one green-robed figure said, a little too loud, a little too clear. The sneers were unspoken, but the snickering was not.
“I think I’d drop out of the Akademia first,” another replied. “Better not to graduate at that point.”
Some of Kaveh’s peers rise to the bait in raised voices and arguments, fighting like cornered animals for any drop of the pride that once bled from them like gold, like precious gemstones from the Chasm, easy to find like fruit hanging heavy from low-limbed trees.
But not Kaveh. Where others might bare their fangs, lash out against the purposeful cruelty, Kaveh only bows his head, grits his teeth, and keeps working.
Some assumed that he bows his head in meekness, that he knows the truth in their words and sees no worth in arguing. Intellectual superiority– the idea that some are simply born with wisdom in their veins, blessed and chosen by the Dendro Archon– runs through the halls of the Akadmeiya like wildfire, like poison injected directly into a major vein. Some people are simply blessed, and others will naturally bend to their wisdom.
Only his juniors hear him later, when they have retreated to their space, where the eyes of others do not search for ways to wound.
“When you engage in their argument, you are acknowledging that their argument has worth,” Kaveh would say, his head bent over calculations for force and load-bearing and wind resistance. He does not look up to see if his peers were listening– they would listen or they would not, and Kaveh would not waste his time or breath on trying to convince those who would not learn better. “We know our worth. Is that not enough?”
“Let them say what they wish,” he says, “and then prove them wrong. No word can stand against the weight of evidence.” He pushed back from the drafting table, lifting finished blueprints to the light. Trishiraite eyes read over angles and formulas with a singular intensity. His calculations are sound. His building will stand.
And oh, did Kaveh know his worth. His worth was measured in his mind, in the precision of his calculations, in every splinter and callus on his hands. He measured his worth in the strain of his muscles as he carried bundles of wood and panes of glass and buckets of clay. His worth was the ache of a day hard-worked and the sting of sweat in his eyes as he bent low over a model in the midday sun.
And he measured his worth against his juniors needing him, because what else could possibly be worth more? Kaveh’s worth was measured in the way that his Darshan looked to him. His worth was counted in the weight that he shouldered, in the half-finished projects he dragged back to his dorm because he’d promised to check the calculations of a junior who offered him the blueprint with eyes foggy with sleep and heavy with tears. (Nevermind that his head spun a little as he settled the blueprint across his drafting table, as he secured the edges with weights and pulled scrap paper from the drawer. It’s nothing a little coffee couldn’t fix.)
(Besides, what was a little extra sleep compared to the relieved sob Kaveh was gifted as a reward when he returned the blueprint the next morning along with four cramped pages of notes on the calculations and how to avoid making the same mistakes in the future?)
Through sheer skill and tenacity, Kaveh clawed back the reputation of Kshahrewar from the brink. He will play nicely when he must. He bent his spine and bowed his head until he feared his bones would shatter like mosaic tiles from the pressure of hands pushing him down, of sneers and smirks and half-compliments laced with barbed wire and coated in sticky-sweet honey.
Kshahrewar had built the very nation that now sought to cast them aside. Kaveh, pressed ever tighter between the stone walls of the Akademiya and the expectant eyes of those who watched him, only bit his cheek until he bled and sought, with ruthless intensity, another inch he could shave away from himself.
Nothing lasts forever.
Not even this.
“Why do you do this to yourself, Senior?” Alhaitham asked one late evening, when the lights of the House of Daena were lowered in accordance with the Amurta research on lumens and ocular fatigue, when the moon promised respite through the stained-glass windows if Kaveh would only stand up, walk outside, keep walking and not look back.
Alhaitham, beside Kaveh, was the very picture of relaxed comfort, though his half of the table was sprawled with books. The closest, a heavy leather-bound textbook with faintly shimmering gilt lettering, laid open and half-ignored. Instead, Alhaitham’s eyes were steadily trained on Kaveh’s cheek.
He did not look up.
“Do what, Junior?” Kaveh asked. He was half here– half only if he was generous with his calculations, rounding up and then rounding up again. Most of his attention was fixed on another set of calculations. Scrap paper covered in scratched-out equations, half-completed formulas for curves and supports. His eyes burned. The curve of his spine felt more sharp than grace. His wrists pounded in time with his temples.
Alhaitham huffed, a ruffle of air and flyaway strands. “Don’t play stupid. It’s unbecoming of you.”
“But Junior mine, you know my intelligence. Why should I concern myself with how you see me?” Another equation, crumpled up to join the steadily growing pile. A fresh sheet of paper, pulled close.
Kaveh stared at it for a moment, pen hovering over its pristine surface, before he sighed and let the pen drop. He pressed his fingers into his eyes until the black sparkled with purplish stars.
“Then why, Senior, do you concern yourself with how your peers see you?”
Kaveh didn’t have a good answer to that, so he did what he did best, what he had learned to do through years of practice. Deflect.
“Why do you concern yourself with my state?” he asked. Red eyes flickered over to meet teal-amber. “Surely you have something better to do with your free time. Aren’t you the one always talking about finding a balance between academics and real life?”
Alhaitham met his gaze for a long moment. Steady. Even. Then he looked away, down to his own notes, and began to gather them up.
“Perhaps you’re right, Senior. I’ll take my leave then.”
Kaveh stared down at the blueprints spread out on his table, each marked with the name of a different person, as Alhaitham tucked his notebooks into his satchel, as he gathered his borrowed reference material to be returned to the shelves.
He did not look up. Not even when Alhaitham walked out the door.
Kaveh sat for a long moment, hyper-aware of the empty seat beside him and desperately trying not to be hyper-aware of it, before he exhaled. All the fight sucked out of him, he slowly sank in his chair until his head met the cool, flat surface below his palms.
“Senior Kaveh!”
Kaveh stepped to the side of the hallway, searching for the source of the unfamiliar voice. The halls were full with students, some chatting animatedly and others hurrying to their next destination with theses and projects and samples clutched to chests like gold.
“Senior Kaveh!” the voice called again.
A small figure emerged from the crowd. It was a girl Kaveh recognized as a newer admission to Kshahrewar. Her robes hung a little too loose on her frame, sleeves dangling past her fingers. She came to a stumbling stop before him, shivering a bit beneath his gaze, before delicately offering him the blueprint she had been strangling in her arms.
“I was, well…” she stuttered. A flush crept over her cheeks and she seemed unable to meet his eyes. Kaveh made an encouraging noise, reaching for the blueprint in her hands.
“Yes?”
She took a deep breath. “Could you, um, please look over this model blueprint for me? My professor says it has promise but also that it feels uninspired and I don’t know what I’m supposed to do with that kind of feedback because it has to be one or the other and-”
She stopped suddenly, almost gulping back the rest of her words, before nearly thrusting the blueprint at him. “Please, Senior, I don’t know what to do.”
Kaveh offered her a reassuring smile. Gently, he pried the blueprints from her hand and tucked them into the blueprint tube slung over his shoulder along with his own. “Of course I can look over it. When do you need them back?”
A wide, watery smile had found its new home on her face. “Oh, thank you, thank you! Can I pick them up tomorrow morning?”
Kaveh swallowed back the acid in his throat at the thought of another night hunched over the drafting table, another evening of Akademiya coffee.
“Sure, I can do that. I’ll leave them in the communal office when I’m done with them, so just pick them up whenever you can.”
Another round of thanks, more gratitude and promises, and then she was off down the hall with a spring in her step. Kaveh took one deep, centering breath before continuing on the way to his own class.
He determinedly ignored a particular pair of eyes that he could feel prickling against the back of his neck. It was none of Alhaitham’s business what he did or did not do, after all.
And yet, as Kaveh entered the House of Daena that afternoon, juggling projects and measurement materials and a large carafe of coffee and two mugs from the Kshahrewar office, there Alhaitham was, settled at their table with his own books surrounding him.
Kaveh carefully set the carafe and mugs between them before dumping the rest of his materials on the table surface and collapsing into the chair with a loud sigh. Alhaitham rolled his eyes, but Kaveh had learned which eye rolls meant what, and that one was definitely affectionate.
Out came the blueprints, first his own and then the one he’d agreed to review. Alhaitham frowned– or, well, there was a tightening of facial muscles that Kaveh had learned was indicative of Alhaitham’s displeasure, and really, that was the same thing– and pulled the carafe to himself.
“Who said that coffee was for you?” Kaveh teased. Alhaitham only offered him a raised eyebrow.
“Experience. Besides, you wouldn’t deny your junior a cup of coffee, would you?” Alhaitham eyed the blueprint Kaveh was setting up on the desk. The rest of the sentence went unsaid, but Kaveh could feel it burning at his fingertips like a match let too low.
“I would never deny my favorite junior anything.”
Alhaitham pressed a fresh cup of coffee into Kaveh’s hand. He took a grateful sip before setting it far away from the design waiting for his input. “Favorite is a strong word, Senior.”
Kaveh grinned, then– a sharp and pointed thing, jagged from grinding his teeth, aching. “Then let it be strong. We have nothing to fear for our strength.”
Alhaitham eyed him for a moment, then sighed and turned to his waiting books. Kaveh almost imagined the words he kept to himself. Perhaps, they seemed to say, but what weakness do you so fear?
Kaveh graduated with shining colors, cloaked in kindness and goodwill and reputation and idealism and all those beautiful, glittering things that people loved to praise when they don’t have to offer anything of themselves. It was easy to praise kindness when you benefitted from it– Kaveh had learned this lesson a hundred times over, in sleepless nights and expectations and work, work, always more work on his shoulders– but Kaveh had not let that kindness cripple him.
Instead, Kaveh had wrapped that kindness into himself, swallowed it down like moonlight and sweet wine and the bitter pill of friendships shattered in the process.
It leaves him lopsided, off-kilter, a foundation on sinking desert sand.
That table in the House of Daena, the one that Kaveh had allowed himself to call their table for a too-short time, was empty every time he visited. The few times he saw Alhaitham, silver head visible as the moon on a cloudless night, he was always moving away from Kaveh, his nose in a book or a paper or simply uninterested in the world around him.
The only exception to this new rule was the evening of Kaveh’s unofficial graduation from the Akademiya. Thesis successfully defended, graduate in all but the piece of paper, Kaveh’s friends had insisted on taking him out to celebrate. There had been food and drinks and laughter and for once, nobody turned to Kaveh to ask him for his opinion or insight or mora or attention and Kaveh could simply revel in the feeling of it all, of finally being free.
It was warm and sparkling in the way that all good moments that are destined to become good memories were– soft at the edges and shining.
Kaveh let that warmth carry him through the evening, through conversation after conversation, all laughter and joy, until the evening drew to a close as all things must. In pairs and groups, people drifted away from the tavern, already discussing the next day’s lessons and presentations and others who would be defending their thesis through the next few weeks. And for one wavering moment, Kaveh watched life at the Akademiya flow on without him.
He stood from his stool on shaky legs, shivering despite the warmth of the tavern. It was getting late, after all, and it was time for him to return to his dorm. Tomorrow, he would begin the process of packing, of preparing to return to his childhood home draped in ghosts and shadows on the wall, and he would take the first step into the future that had always felt just a little out of reach from within the safety of the Akademiya.
The world spun for a moment, wavering, and Kaveh stumbled. He reached for the stool and missed. But the impact of the floor that he had braced himself for never came.
Slowly, he opened his eyes to come face to face with teal-amber. Kaveh swallowed past the dry-sticky-sweet taste of wine in his mouth.
“Alhaitham,” he said. The arms around his waist shifted, helping him get his feet underneath him. Kaveh wavered, but stayed standing.
“I hear congratulations are in order,” Alhaitham replied. “Your defense was well-executed.”
“I spent half of it worrying I would vomit,” Kaveh confessed, “and the other half hoping I didn’t lose myself and curse at a sage.”
Alhaitham’s eyes still crinkled at the corners in the same way when he thought something was amusing, Kaveh noted absently, as though Alhaitham’s entire personality would have changed within the six months it had taken Kaveh to pivot his thesis, create something new to fill in the empty space left after Kaveh had frantically erased his original submission with no explanation.
“Your consideration for your audience is noted,” Alhaitham said, and oh, it felt like it was supposed to, like those cool evenings in the House of Daena over lukewarm coffee and too many blueprints and Kaveh was abruptly consumed with an ache that made him want to grab onto Alhaitham and not let go.
But Kaveh was used to denying himself things, and there was still a not-insignicant part of himself that still hurt, still pulsed with pain to the cadence of hateful words said with the uncompromising tone of someone who had never been wrong in any way that mattered. So he swallowed it down, like he had swallowed the insults and the condescension and his pride again and again and again. He let it curl, acrid in his chest, like the sharp smell of turpentine. He let it settle into the hollow spaces, let it twist around his ribcage until it was indistinguishable from the rest of himself.
And he offered Ahaitham a smile, all sharp edges and bared teeth, as he raised his goblet of wine in a mocking salute.
“Who was it who once said I possessed far more care than sense?” he asked. The ache in his chest twisted, tightened, in time with the way Alhaitham’s eyes tightened, the way his mouth compressed into a thin line. The arms circling his waist withdrew, and Kaveh bit his cheek, trying not to shiver beneath the intensity of the other’s stare.
“I stand by the assessment,” Alhaitham replied. Kaveh refused to allow himself to shrink, to wither beneath the other’s gaze. He drew himself to his full height, allowed himself to press closer until they were nearly chest to chest, until Kaveh could feel the sharpness of Alhaitham’s breath against his skin, could see something shimmer in those too-close, too-much eyes.
“Your concern is noted,” Kaveh said. He clung to his bravery with both hands, digging nails in until it bled. “I’ll keep that in mind in the future, dear Junior.”
Alhaitham did not move. His eyes flickered, searching for something in Kaveh’s gaze. Would he find it there, Kaveh wondered? Or would it be like most other things, something dismissed when it no longer captivated Alhaitham’s attentions?
Not that Kaveh cared, of course. That ship had sailed, with incompatibility and cruelty and memories of softness gone cold and jagged in the light of day. Alhaitham could rot, for all that it affected Kaveh.
There, standing in the dim light of the tavern, wine gone sweet-sour-sticky on his tongue, staring into a pair of teal-amber eyes, Kaveh swore that he would make it true. He would become the kind of person who could meet those eyes and mean it when he said that he felt nothing. Until then, he would do everything in his power to ignore the strange feeling twisting through his chest like smoke, settling like sawdust on a workshop floor.
Alhaitham kept their gazes locked for only a moment more before exhaling sharply. It ruffled across Kaveh’s face, and he was abruptly reminded of how very, very close they were standing. Before Kaveh could do anything about it, though, Alhaitham was already stepping back, the something in his eyes shuttered behind indifference and cool academic curiosity. For a moment, Kaveh wanted to dig the jagged, chewed-raw edges of his nails into his skin and rip that uncaring facade away like peeling protective film from glass, exposing the shine and beauty beneath it.
Then he remembered his prior oath and shook the desire from his hands.
“I hope you do, Senior,” Alhaitham said, already turning his back to Kaveh. “A little more caution would do you good.” He paused for a moment, seeming to contemplate something, before speaking once more. “I wish you well. May your future contain whatever it is you are searching for.”
And with that, Kaveh watched as Alhaitham strode out of the tavern and into the evening without looking back.
And so Kaveh left the Akademiya behind just the same, taking that first step into a world where he was well and truly on his own, for who did he really have, in the end, but himself? What could he rely on but his knowledge and his skill and his own two hands?
And he, with the confidence of a man who had tasted success and renown and become accustomed to its sweetness, its bite, began to build for himself a life. He filled his days with meetings with clients, with drafting projects and measuring materials and teaching the occasional guest lecture at the Akademiya. His juniors became his students, his professors now his peers, and he wove for himself a space in the tapestry of Sumeru.
He created for himself a reputation– as a skilled architect and a kind man. It wasn’t fame, not in the traditional way people think of when they think of renown, but it was comfortable. Merchants called his name in the Grand Bazaar. He helped Zubayr Theater create set dressings.
Kaveh did not receive an invitation to Alhaitham’s graduation, not that he expected one in the first place. Alhaitham was not the type of man to go out of his way for pleasantries. Kaveh spent a few hours in Lambad’s tavern, alternating between sketching out a half-formed daydream of a stained glass window shining soft rose-colored light into a room tastefully full of soft surfaces and softer blankets and staring out the window as his brain came up with and discarded idea after idea for why he might be at Alhaitham’s graduation.
But every time he imagined having to meet Alhaitham’s eyes, that intense teal-amber gaze methodically pulling him apart and categorizing him like a specimen, cut down the midline and pinned down beneath their intensity, he found himself rooted to the seat beneath him.
There was a chasm between the two of them, wide and growing wider all the time. Kaveh was never more aware of it than in the moments where he found himself craving Alhaitham’s company at his side, when he missed the quiet sound of his breathing and the gentle turning of pages. Perhaps there would come a day where they saw each other across the tavern and turned away, Maybe one day the space beside him would stop feeling like Alhaitham’s space.
Kaveh rested his head in his hands, staring without seeing into the slowly crowding tavern.
There was no use in sitting here moping. Nothing between them would change unless Alhaitham wanted them to change– and clearly, he did not, or Kaveh would have heard from him. They had argued before, often enough that it felt just as much like a part of Kaveh as his smile or the calluses on his hands, but maybe some things couldn’t be fixed. Maybe some chasms were too far gone to have a bridge built between them. Maybe some bridges couldn’t bear the weight.
Maybe they were just too broken.
Kaveh stood with a sigh, dropped some mora on the table next to his empty goblet, and headed out into the cool evening. In the distance, the revelry of the Akademiya was carried through the city as scholars celebrated their successes, as they enjoyed their last days before they too made their way into the world. He stood for just a moment, listening to the faint sounds, before turning on his heel and heading for his empty home.
Come dawn, he packed his bags and left for a meeting with a new client, one who had promised him a budget beyond anything he had ever worked with before and nearly complete freedom on the project. It was a deal almost too good to believe, and definitely too good to miss. He brought the blueprints he had finished at the tavern, for a building resting on foundations of stone and beauty, and he dreamed of a world where he could point to a palace of glass and marble and say with pride that he brought that piece to life.
And then his world falls apart, and Kaveh falls with it.
The morning after that disastrous night, Kaveh woke up in an unfamiliar room, curled against the cushions of an unfamiliar couch. A blanket was twisted into his legs and tucked around his shoulders. His head felt heavy, muffled in cotton and aching, and his clothes had pressed lines into his skin. The world around him was blurry for a long moment, caught between the sunlight streaming through stained glass windows and the sweet-turned-sour aftertaste of alcohol still on his tongue. He blinked.
There, on the coffee table he hadn’t originally registered, was a glass of water, its sides damp with gathered droplets of condensation, and his jewelry and clips gathered in a neat pile.
He sat up slowly. The blanket around his shoulders fell and he shivered in the cool morning air.
Other than the couch that had been his impromptu bed, the room was mostly devoid of things. A too-large bookshelf dominated the space of the largest wall. The windows were all bare of coverings, allowing the dawn light to trickle through their colored glass. A teal cloak hung in the entryway.
With shaky hands, Kaveh reached for the glass on the table. He downed it before he had a chance to think. Glass now empty, he simply held it for a long moment, letting it warm between his palms.
He should go, before the owner of this house came out and started asking questions or worse, tried to tell Kaveh that he had warned him about where his ideology would land him. Kaveh felt fragile, like glass pulled from an annealer too early, like spiderweb cracks were spreading across his surface and one rough touch would send him to the ground in a cascade of sound and reflecting colors. He wouldn’t survive such an encounter.
Kaveh set the glass back on the wooden table with a decisive thunk before gathering up his clips, his jewelry, his last shimmering fragments of pride. The last thing he wanted was to overstay his welcome and find himself face to face with the house’s owner. No, he would go and pick up his bag of clothes from the Kshahrewar offices and be on his way to Gandharva Ville long before that. Perhaps Tighnari would let him stay for a while in exchange for repairs to the Forest Rangers’ huts, or he would find comfort in the woods like those scholars in Satyavada life.
(Never mind that the idea of living his life deep in the rainforest, sleeping in the outdoors where things like fungi– or worse, mosquitos– could come and harass him made him shudder with misery.)
Kaveh quickly put his earrings back in and pocketed the rest of his accessories to worry about later, when he had slunk away to soothe his wounds in peace. But as he moved toward the front door, the sound of another door shutting with a click caught him by surprise. His shoulders stiffened, feeling like a scholar caught by a professor halfway through copying a classmate’s work. He did not turn around.
“Going somewhere?” a familiar voice asked, so much like his memories of years ago that it made his stomach spiral into something tight and knotted and aching.
“I was just leaving,” Kaveh finally said.
“To go where?” Alhaitham asked. He looked different without his cloak hiding half of his body, Kaveh noticed absently. Someone less well-versed in Alhaitham might call him harsher without it, all of the softness of the flowing fabric lost to the harsh lines of his body, the pointed shapes and sharpness of skin and bone. But Kaveh recognized the vulnerability in the removal of the cloak.
“Somewhere else,” Kaveh said. Alhaitham came to a stop between Kaveh and the door, his arms crossed across his chest, and Archons, when Alhaitham has that smug, disinterested look on his face it made Kaveh want to dig his nails into the skin of his neck and heave until Alhaitham expressed even an ounce of the emotions that bubbled like tar in Kaveh's own chest.
“Oh, my apologies,” Alhaitham said. “I didn’t realize you had somewhere else to go.” He stepped to the side, offering Kaveh a half-shrug in the direction of the door. “In that case, be my guest. But I will remind you– since you seem to have forgotten– that Tighnari and the Forest Watchers are busy cleaning up your mess.” His teal-amber eyes glimmered like ice, like the sharpened edge of a knife. “So if Gandharva Ville was your plan, I would encourage you to reconsider.”
Kaveh bit his tongue, the taste of his anger and shame mixing sharp and metallic. It grated at him to think of the work he had created for others through his hubris. It sat, heavy and thick, in the hollow of his chest, curled around his heart like a poisonous snake. Alhaitham watched with impassive eyes. After a long moment that stretched between them like glass pulled from a furnace, sagging beneath its own weight and heat, Kaveh slumped.
“I don’t.”
“You don’t what, Senior?”
“I don’t have anywhere else to go, okay!” Kaveh balled his hands into fists, swallowing the shattered glass of his ego and feeling it shred his throat. His eyes burned. He would not cry in front of Alhaitham, not after last night’s embarrassment, not while shame still twisted his chest tight.
Alhaitham uncrossed his arms and took one shivering step closer. Then another. One more and he was nearly chest to chest with Kaveh. Without his boots, they were the same height, or close enough that the difference between them wasn’t worth measuring.
“You have no other options?” Alhaitham asked. “No friends who would take you in?”
Kaveh thought for a moment, really considering if he knew anybody who would let him crash on their couch after such a disastrous event. But no matter how he tried, he came up empty. Sure, he had made friends since leaving the Akademiya. He was sure that the Zubayr theater would offer him a few days of shelter. He could probably find a couch here or there, scrape together enough to afford a room at the town’s inn now and again. He could make it work. But one friend that would let him stay? No. He hadn’t had that since… well, he didn’t have that.
Slowly, he shook his head. The fight had gone out of him now, abandoned him to wilt under the intensity of Alhaitham’s eyes. His head bowed, spine curved beneath the weight. Familiar and unfamiliar all at once.
“Then stay here.”
Kaveh’s head whipped up, his eyes finding and holding Alhaitham’s gaze.
“What?”
“Stay,” Alhaitham said again, his voice low. To someone who didn’t know him, he looked unaffected, as though the offer was as inconsequential to him as a comment about the weather or a criticism of a poorly-planned argument. But Kaveh could recognize the look in Alhaitham's eyes from twenty feet. It was the look he bore when a question had caught his interest, when an idea was worth his time. "You say you have nowhere else to go, and half of this house was meant to belong to you before–" he stopped short, looking as though he had something else to say before simply letting the pause become the end. "Just… stay here."
Kaveh took that idea, twisted it this way and that as he considered it. On one hand, it was humiliating to need Alhaitham’s help. They hadn’t been friends in years. Kaveh wouldn’t even call them acquaintances, really. Their falling out had been legendary, the kind that relationships didn’t recover from, not really. They would always remember the cracks. There was pain in the spaces between them.
But Kaveh had nowhere else to go.
Kaveh took in a deep breath. He let it fill every inch of his chest, until it felt that he might burst from it. Then he exhaled, sharp in the quiet room, and nodded.
“Fine. I’ll stay.”
The second family Kaveh builds, slow and gentle with his own two hands. It shimmers between his fingers like starlight and rests on a foundation stronger than any stone he could import from Liyue, woven tighter than the finest Inazuman silk. For a man prided on timeliness, whose reputation rests on his singular focus on a problem and his never-missed-a-deadline attitude, Kaveh did not allow himself to take his time.
Kaveh had been right, that morning, when he had wondered if they would ever heal from the break. There was no erasing the cracks between them. Sometimes, it still felt like he was standing on the edge of that chasm, yelling threats and hurts into the void and hoping that Alhaitham would hear him from the other side. But sometimes, in the evenings where they gathered for a meal at a table meant for two, Kaveh found himself thinking of the Inazuman tradition of kintsugi– of repairing the cracks in pottery with gold. The resulting veins of shimmering golden color often left the broken piece more beautiful for being broken.
Other times, when Kaveh sat in the living area, sketches spread out across that table that had once held his jewelry while Alhaitham sat nearby with a book open in his lap, Kaveh considered whether mosaic or stained glass would be a better fit for the two of them. Kintsugi implied that the thing was functional before, and that the repair only brought the item back to its original usefulness. But Kaveh wondered if maybe he and Alhaitham had been destined to break. Just like with mosaics, maybe their true potential could only be reached by the breaking. Maybe it was only in their new shapes, set apart and brought back together, that they could learn to work like this.
Of course, there were also days where Alhaitham ground into the very bone of Kaveh’s soul. Some days, it felt like he did it on purpose, always with that little hint of smugness as he wormed his way against Kaveh’s weakest spots and pressed against open wounds. On those days, where Kaveh thought that he wouldn’t survive another day sharing space with Alhaitham without finding himself before the General Mahamatra on charges of murder, he sought companionship in others. He found himself cultivating a growing friendship with Tighnari, the Forest Watcher who had stepped in to fix the mistakes he had made in his pride, and Cyno, the General Mahamatra with an appreciation for justice and an incredible wealth of terrible puns. He took commissions from the Adventurer’s Guild and worked his frustrations out with claymore and power wielded between his fingertips.
Step by aching step, he learned.
He learned that Alhaitham took his coffee with more frills than he had expected, with star anise and cinnamon and sweetened cream.
("You always took your coffee black in school," Kaveh noted.
"I didn't realize the Akademiya had offered any other options," Alhaitham replied.)
He found that Alhaitham enjoyed comfort foods, but not when they were difficult to eat while reading.
("Have you ever tried to eat soup one-handed?" Alhaitham had asked when Kaveh pointed it out one evening over two steaming bowls of Sabz Meat Stew. Kaveh didn't have much else to offer, but he did make an effort to cook more easy-to-consume-while-reading meals. Unless, of course, he wanted Alhaitham's attention over dinner.)
He was messier than someone might expect, but only when it came to his books and his clothes.
("Can't you put things back in their places?" Kaveh complained over breakfast.
"If I leave my book there every evening, then isn't that its place?" Alhaitham replied. Kaveh only scowled and shoved more food in his mouth to avoid having to reply.)
The house always smelled like something– like jasmine or Sumeru roses, fresh and comforting. When Kaveh left the city on a commission, heading into the wilderness to cull the fungi population or deal with a rogue band of hilichurls, he would gather some wild flowers on the way back to display in a vase as a pop of color and life. Alhaitham might claim that he didn’t care one way or another, but Kaveh had caught the gentility in his eyes as they sat on opposite couches and he glanced up to look at their velvety petals in the lamplight.
Time had softened Alhaitham, Kaveh finally concluded, or maturity had hardened Kaveh. They fought just as viciously as they once had, and yet Kaveh found that the barbs hurt less when Alhaitham flung them his way.
Usually.
“What happened to your commission?” Alhaitham called as he hung his cloak beside Kaveh’s in the entryway. Kaveh, who was busy in the kitchen with their dinner for the evening, waited until Alhaitham joined him before replying.
“The client decided to go with a different architect,” Kaveh said. Alhaitham settled in one of the kitchen chairs, twisting it so he could face Kaveh.
“Hmm,” Alhaitham replied.
“I know!” Kaveh nearly shouted, waving a spoon stained with curry in Alhaitham’s general direction. “He said he wanted to go with somebody with a lower commission fee, can you believe it? And I even stayed up late finishing a first draft for today’s meeting– what a waste of my time!”
Alhaitham crossed his arm, eyebrows faintly raised. “And you didn’t offer to work for the reduced fee?”
Kaveh turned, leveling Alhaitham with an intense glare. “My work is worth far more than he was willing to pay already. Besides, if he was going to cut his consultation budget, who knows what other budgets he would cut!” Curry splattered on the ground as he waggled the spoon in his direction. “Aren’t you the one always telling me to charge what I’m worth? I have bills to pay, you know!”
Alhaitham met his glare with a neutral look, but Kaveh could recognize the smugness beneath the neutral surface, and even a hint of what might have been pride. “How interesting.”
Kaveh turned back to the stove, ignoring the way he could feel his ears heating up. “You’re impertinent, has anybody told you that?”
He couldn’t see him, but he could imagine the smile, the subtle upturn of his lips. “Once or twice.”
Kaveh served their dinner in silence– not the anxious kind of silence, the kind that settles like dust after an explosion, like droplets of blood after a wound, but rather a silence that wraps around the shoulders like a warm blanket– and they ate across from each other in the late afternoon light streaming in through the kitchen window with a bouquet of hand-picked flowers between them.
Maybe, Kaveh concluded weeks later, time hadn’t softened Alhaitham at all. Perhaps it was just something about their home that sweetened his bitterness, that incited him to softness. Kaveh found himself spending his days waiting for the evenings, waiting for Alhaitham to come home and settle at the kitchen table, for the soft sound of pages turning alongside the sizzle and simmer of cooking food.
Kaveh decidedly did not allow himself to consider the implications of those feelings, however. Something in him could sense that if he acknowledged whatever it was shining between them like gold, it would fundamentally change what they had managed to create.
Besides, what if Alhaitham was unaware of the softness he carried? It reminded Kaveh of a riddle he had heard once, back in his Akademiya days.
What was so fragile that even speaking its name could cause it to shatter?
Like silence, perhaps all it would take to shatter this delicate candy-floss peace was Kaveh speaking it out loud.
And so they continued on like this, arguing and making up, bickering and comforting, fighting and feeling, until the day Kaveh returned from a long, sandy commission in the desert to learn that Alhaitham had taken part in a plot to overthrow the corrupt government of Sumeru and free the Dendro Archon, and had somehow been successful.
Worse, someone had decided that the solution to the sudden power vacuum had been to put Alhaitham in charge of the nation.
Worst, Alhaitham’s new responsibilities meant that he was now spending late nights reading complicated proposals at the Akademiya, and Kaveh found himself eating alone at the kitchen table more often than not.
On the surface, it should have been exactly what Kaveh wanted, right? Some peace and quiet, with nobody to critique his sketches or offer snide comments about the slightly crooked painting in the hallway or complain about him tinkering with this piece of Mehrak or that part of a model. And for the first few nights, Kaveh did find a vindictive sense of freedom in his ability to be loud and take up space without having to worry about the inevitable attitude that would come.
But as the days wore on, the pleasure gave way to quiet, to the discomforting feeling of something important being missing, to loneliness.
Kaveh couldn’t quite explain how he found himself standing in the House of Daena, in the end. It hadn’t necessarily been a conscious decision. But here he was.
The lights in the House were softened, turning the space nearly ethereal. With the Akasha newly deactivated, it was busier than it had been while Kaveh had been a student. But even then, the room was rapidly emptying as students packed their things for the evening, content to take a break from their work and seek gentler pleasures.
Kaveh followed the path of his mind to a specific table, one tucked into the back of the room, sequestered in an alcove nearly out of sight. He had sat at this table more times than he could count, with blueprints and references spread across every inch of the surface, drinking mediocre, burnt coffee into the dawn. It had seen the best and the worst of Kaveh.
As had his table partner.
He rounded the final corner and was unsurprised to find Alhaitham bent low over a document at the very same table, chin in his hands as he scanned whatever was written across its surface. Kaveh pulled the other chair out with a protest of wood on stone.
“Come home, Alhaitham,” he said. Alhaitham ignored him, which was also unsurprising.
“Haitham,” Kaveh said, softer this time. He tapped on the wooden surface between them– one, two, three rapid knocks, close to where Alhaitham’s free hand rested so he would feel the vibrations.
Alhaitham looked up. His free hand fiddled with the dial recessed into the side of his headphones. How long had those bags been taking up space on his face? Kaveh frowned.
“Why are you here, Kaveh?” Alhaitham asked, voice low and rough. Kaveh wasn’t sure if the roughness was from overuse or disuse.
“To bring you home.”
Alhaitham looked at him for a long moment before returning his gaze to the paper spread across the desk’s surface. “I’ll return home once I’ve finished my tasks for the evening. You may leave.”
“Why? So I can spend another night alone while you work yourself sick in the House of Daena?” Kaveh snorted. He leaned back in his chair, allowing himself to really look at Alhaitham’s condition, at the wrinkles stubbornly clinging to his pants, the exhaustion weighing down his face, the ruffled state of his hair. “No. You’re coming home. You could do this work just as effectively in our study while I make you something to eat.” Kaveh didn’t ask why Alhaitham chose to work on these things in the House of Daena rather than the Grand Sage’s office. Alhaitham was many things– stubborn, rude, infuriatingly objective– but he had never craved the power and prestige of a title. An endless pragmaticist.
“If you’re so lonely, then invite some friends over.” Alhaitham said, pulling another reference book closer and flipping through the pages until he reached the appendices. His finger followed the lines of the page as he checked the index. “Surely you know people other than myself.”
Kaveh bit down on the inside of his cheek. He would not rise to the bait, no matter how hard Alhaitham tried. Kaveh hadn’t come for an argument; he came to drag his roommate home.
“You are changing the subject, and it won’t work,” Kaveh declared. “Now, pack your things and stand up. We are leaving.”
Alhaitham looked up, meeting Kaveh’s eyes and holding them. Kaveh fastidiously tried to ignore the exhausted look in those teal-amber eyes, the way they were dulled. Finally, Alhaitham spoke.
“Why do you care, Kaveh?”
And Kaveh found that he had nothing to say in reply, nothing that wouldn’t expose his softer thoughts to the air for Alhaitham to pick through like an index. What answer could he give, when even Kaveh wasn’t sure?
Alhaitham waited for a moment, two moments more before turning back to his documents. Kaveh was sure he imagined the way his shoulders deflated, the way he sunk into the desk beneath him.
“Go home, Kaveh,” Alhaitham said. He did not look up again.
And Kaveh went home.
He went home. He hung his cloak on the empty hook by the door, devoid of its partner. He laid on the divan and stared at the ceiling, turning Alhaitham’s words over and over again in his mind.
“Why do you care, Kaveh?”
“Why do you care?”
Time passed in that ephemeral way where it might have been two minutes or two hours as Kaveh thought. Why did Kaveh care? Why did the idea of Alhaitham sleeping in the House of Daena, spine curved and aching as he stared at document after document, as he fought back sleep with cups of lukewarm coffee and sheer will bother him so badly?
Perhaps it was because Kaveh could relate. After all, how many times had Alhaitham kept him company through an all-nighter? How often had the roles been reversed?
Kaveh stood from the couch. In his head, he imagined the Alhaitham from the Akademiya, the Alhaitham who hadn’t quite finished growing into the intensity of his eyes or the confidence of his personality. The Alhaitham who sat by his side, even when he disagreed with Kaveh’s choices.
It didn’t take long for Kaveh to gather his materials. His blueprint tube was just inside his room, resting against the wall where Kaveh had abandoned it earlier in the day after a meeting. He dug through the collection of half-completed projects and picked one almost at random, rolling it carefully and tucking it into the tube. Merhak was resting on his desk charging, so Kaveh settled for a traditional satchel with his tools instead. He only paused for a moment to clasp his cloak again.
Sumeru City was quiet in the evenings. Merchants had closed their shops for the evening, and all but the most dedicated and desperate of the scholars had returned to their homes or adjourned to the bars and taverns of the city. So it was a quick, cool walk back to the House of Daena, back to that same table.
“I’m not going home,” Alhaitham said before Kaveh could even set down his bags. “Even I thought you were smart enough to not make the same mistake twice, Senior.”
Kaveh shifted a few books to the side. He ignored Alhaitham’s curious gaze as he pulled his blueprints from the tube, laid them out and settled their edges with weights.
“Don’t worry, Junior,” Kaveh said as he pulled his drafting tools from his satchel, “I’m not here to try to bring you home again.”
“Then what…?” Alhaitham asked.
“If a late evening in the House of Daena is good enough for our illustrious Acting Grand Sage, then it’s good enough for me. Besides, I brought work.” Nevermind that Kaveh didn’t have any commissions due in the next few days. Alhaitham didn’t need to know that.
Alhaitham sighed. “Kaveh. Just go home.”
“You first,” Kaveh replied.
Alhaitham huffed an annoyed breath, but clearly realized that the argument wasn’t worth having. Kaveh was tense at first, waiting for the argument, but as Alhaitham continued working, Kaveh allowed himself to settle.
The blueprint spread before him was the front facade of a house, a modest two-story home with two bedrooms, an office, a kitchen meant for two people to be cooking in. Unlike their current home, it had a few little upgrades. More windows, some frosted for privacy and others crystal clear or stained in a rainbow of colors. A room separate from the office with as many built-in bookshelves as Kaveh could fit. A soft couch right by a window. An alcove just big enough for a drafting desk and a well-loved chair. It was a project Kaveh had worked on here and there for years, always changing, erasing, updating.
He wouldn’t have brought this particular project if he had been in his right mind. In fact, he had never worked on this project where Alhaitham could see.
Kaveh could feel his face warming with his flush, but he determinedly ignored it. Packing up now would be like admitting defeat, and Kaveh wasn’t about to do that. Instead, he worked on adjusting the scale of the curved window he had placed about the entrance. The original measurements had been well calculated to match the double door entrance he had originally designed for the home, but after working on a recent project with a newly popular style of entrance that had included removable sidelights rather than permanently installed ones, Kaveh had changed the design, and that meant changing all of the measurements to match.
Annoying, to be sure, but it wasn’t the first time Kaveh had made a major change to the design, and he was sure it wouldn’t be the last.
And so they worked, Kaveh and Alhaitham, side by side at that table, until Alhaitham scrawled something surely scathing in the margin of whatever document he was working on and stood from the table, joints popping as he stretched.
“Are you finished?” he asked. Kaveh set down his drafting pencil and rubbed his burning eyes before admiring the newly redesigned entrance.
“Yes, I think so.”
Alhaitham leaned over his shoulder to eye the design spread out on the table.
“I thought your next commission was for an older couple? Surely you aren’t expecting them to climb stairs.”
“Do I look like an idiot? Of course not. This isn’t for them.”
“Oh? I wasn’t aware you had any other upcoming commissions,” Alhaitham said. He started stacking the reference books, already sorting them by their subjects so he could reshelve them appropriately rather than leaving them for the actual House of Daena staff.
“I don’t,” Kaveh replied.
“Then what is this design for?” Alhaitham asked. And later, Kaveh would blame his exhaustion for not reacting faster, not thinking of an untruth or reminding Alhaitham that Kaveh didn’t owe him an explanation for his actions, or really anything other than–
“It’s for you.”
Kaveh froze, eyes suddenly wide and a little panicked as Alhaitham gently traced the threshold of the door, following the design Kaveh had sketched for the pattern of leaves and vines he imagined carved into its dark wood.
“You… designed a home? For me?” Alhaitham asked, and really, Kaveh had never once wished for the ability to melt into the floor like he did in this moment.
“It’s just an exercise in design,” he said quickly, pulling the weights from the edges so it would roll back into its tube and disappear from beneath those intense eyes. “Practice in designing for a client with particular tastes, and I really couldn’t think of somebody more inconvenient to design for than you.”
Alhaitham traced the sketch one more time before allowing the paper to roll tight and vanish from his sight. Was Kaveh imagining it, or did he look a little pleased in the softened early morning light? “I see.”
Kaveh swept the rest of his drafting tools back into his satchel and slung it over his shoulder before grabbing a stack of books. “I thought we were going home? Now do you think your feeble body can handle shelving the other half of the books, or shall I do it for you?”
Subtle though it might be, Alhaitham didn’t lose his smile the whole walk home.
In the end, falling in love was nothing like they made it seem in books and plays. In stories, falling in love was always the purpose of the story. The story was told because of love, or the day was won because of love, or the main character suffered because of love. Love was the beginning and the end.
Kaveh always imagined that the day he fell in love would be big and important. The kind of day he would never forget. The kind of day he could tell stories about, a love that hit him like fireworks and music and beauty.
Instead, love came quietly, the way you wake up one morning and learn that summer had come while you weren’t looking and melted all the ice away. (Not that they really got ice in Sumeru.)
Love came like a flower blooming. Watching and waiting, watering and feeding, and then one day you stepped outside and saw that your plant had finally grown velvety blooms while you weren’t looking.
Kaveh realizing that he was in love with Alhaitham was a lot like that.
The morning after the House of Daena, Kaveh slept in. He had nowhere to go, nobody to meet, so he laid in bed until his body reminded him that it would like to have breakfast before he moped around.
And there, at the kitchen table as though it was exactly where he was meant to be on a late morning weekday, was Alhaitham. Two plates of food, one mostly eaten, waited on the surface.
“You’re up late,” Alhaitham said. Kaveh huffed.
“Can you please hold your rude comments until I’ve at least had a cup of coffee?” Kaveh asked. Alhaitham nudged a mug of gently steaming coffee toward Kaveh, who debated whether or not to be petty before sinking into his seat and taking a sip of the drink.
They sat quietly for a few minutes, Alhaitham occasionally scratching away on the paper he was reading and Kaveh enjoying his breakfast. After days of enjoying his meals alone, Kaveh was grateful to have company at the table again.
Finally, though, curiosity got to him.
“Why are you still home?” Kaveh asked after he had finished the last of his food. Alhaitham met his eyes over the fresh bouquet– mourning flowers he had picked up on a desert commission– and smirked.
“Sage privilege. I informed everybody that I was taking today to work at home.”
Kaveh rolled his eyes. “You’re telling me that this entire time, you could have been working at home, and you haven’t?”
Alhaitham shook his head. “I thought you’d enjoy the peace. Are you implying that you missed me, Kaveh?”
“Would I have hunted you down last night otherwise?” Kaveh asked. Only once it was out of his mouth did he really pause to think about the words.
“No,” Alhaitham said, a strange glimmer in his eyes. “No, I suppose not.”
“Then there you go,” Kaveh said. He stood from the table and gathered the dishes from its surface. “I’ll take care of the dishes, since you cooked.”
And there, bent over the kitchen sink and scrubbing wet food off of pans, Kaveh thought about the blueprint from the night before. He thought of a comfortable house, big enough for two, with spaces for them to be apart and spaces for them to flow back together, and he realized that he wanted it. He wanted that house built with his own two hands, with touches of them both in every plank of wood, every piece of stained glass Kaveh would crack only to put back together again.
Kaveh wanted to know where Alhaitham was in the evenings. He wanted to know that when he stumbled home after a long day of arguing with clients or supervising construction that Alhaitham would be waiting in their living room or curled up in the reading nook Kaveh would build just for him in the space next to Kaveh’s own drafting table. And when the moon drew shadows long and soft out of the sprawling branches of the Divine Tree, Kaveh wanted to stand and stretch and convince Alhaitham to set aside his book for the evening so that they could spend those last precious minutes before sleep talking, or arguing, or just enjoying each other’s company in a bedroom with two closets but only one bed.
Kaveh wanted Alhaitham.
“Oh.”
“Did you somehow manage to hurt yourself on the dishes?” Alhaitham asked, and couldn’t the man sense that Kaveh was currently experiencing a world-altering realization?
“No, shut up, this is more important than the dishes.”
Alhaitham snorted. “If this is your way of getting out of doing them, might I remind you that you offered first and–”
Kaveh didn’t even bother drying his hands before he kissed him. Alhaitham’s eyes were wide, swirling with shock and panic, when Kaveh pulled away after only a moment.
“I lied to you last night,” Kaveh confessed into the suddenly very quiet kitchen. “The house I’m designing– it’s not just for you. It’s for us.”
Alhaitham’s free hand touched against his bottom lip, so gently Kaveh wondered if he could even feel it. Kaveh continued before he lost his nerve.
“It’s got a library on the bottom floor separate from your upstairs office so you can keep important books near our room without having to get rid of the ones you just like to have close. You have a reading nook with a window so you can read by natural light instead of lamplight and my drafting table sits right beside it so I can ask for your advice. There are two closets in our room so you don’t have to worry about my clothes taking up too much space and our bathroom has two sinks and a frankly ridiculous shower.” Kaveh is on a roll now, his eyes focused on the model that only he can see, the one he’d had Mehrak create before even the Palace of Alcazarzaray. “The kitchen is big enough for two and our table expands so we can have our friends visit us for once. And I designed it for us.”
Kaveh swallowed past the feeling constricting his throat and forced himself to meet Alhaitham’s eyes, which were still wide and swirling with an emotion Kaveh can’t name. He was grateful that the panic, at least, seemed to have subsided.
“I know that’s weird, and I swear I didn’t do it on purpose. Well, I guess that I did technically do it on purpose, but I just–”
And then Kaveh can’t do much talking, because Alhaitham has grabbed him by the shirtfront, fists balled into the fabric, and pulled him into a blistering kiss.
Kaveh almost hadn’t meant to kiss him the first time. It had been an impulse, something born of a desire to check his work more than a desire to kiss, because how could Kaveh trust his conclusion if he hadn’t bothered to test it first? But this kiss, the one that had Kaveh making soft keening sounds that he hadn’t even known he could make until approximately fifteen seconds ago, was a purposeful kiss. It was bruising, almost, rough and tinged with desperation as Alhaitham clung to his shirt like Kaveh would vanish in smoke and sand if he let go.
Kaveh wrapped his arms slowly around Alhaitham’s neck, bringing his fingers up to card gently through the hairs at the nape of his neck, and Alhaitham’s grip lessened, the kiss softening into something so full of feeling that it made Kaveh’s chest ache.
Alhaitham finally pulled away, finally allowing his hands to release the fabric of Kaveh’s shirt to settle around his waist instead. Kaveh was grateful for the support; he didn’t think he could stand without it.
“What…” Kaveh managed to ask after a few moments of breathing, of standing chest to chest and nose to nose and heart to heart, “was that?”
Alhaitham smiled the small, shy sort of smile Kaveh remembered from when they were younger and the world was both crueler and kinder to them both.
“That was a kiss, Kaveh.”
Kaveh sputtered, removing a hand from around his shoulders to smack at his chest. “You know what I meant, you brute!”
“Sorry,” Alhaitham said. His eyes glimmered with mischief. “I can never be sure with you.”
Kaveh hit him again for good measure, gently but enough to get his point across. “Why did you kiss me then?”
Alhaitham raised an eyebrow and tightened his grip on Kaveh’s hips, sending a small shudder through him. “Oh, so you can kiss me and then tell me out of nowhere that you’ve designed us a home with two closets and one bed and that’s fine, but I’m the bad guy for kissing you?”
And really, Kaveh didn’t have a response to that. So instead, he just leaned in and kissed him again. (Which did a really exceptional job of shutting Alhaitham up, Kaveh noted. He’d have to keep that in mind for future arguments.)