Chapter Text
Nothing changes, and this is the problem, Alhaitham reflects.
It isn’t strictly true. Everything changes. After their week in Aaru Village, they come home, the two of them red-eyed and exhausted and starving and when Kaveh comes to his room instead of going to his own and collapses onto the sheets with some mumbled complaint about the thread count, Alhaitham joins him and concedes that it isn’t his room anymore—it’s theirs.
He buys new sheets the next day, ones so expensive he thinks at first the price must be a joke, but Kaveh insists they’re just the thing, and how can you sleep on that burlap, Alhaitham? It’ll give me a rash. So they go from sharing a house to sharing a bed and a set of sheets worth a month’s income, and when Kaveh grouses about the state of Alhaitham’s room, about the mess he left in the living quarters, and can’t you just put the glass in the kitchen when you’re done? Really, who raised you, it always ends in bed. Or against the wall, or on the carpeted floor, in the hall, or memorably on Alhaitham’s desk. Kaveh gets a bruise on his hip from the sharp corners; he whines about it for days after.
Fucking, Alhaitham realizes, is another type of conversation. A conversation that can’t—unless he tries very hard—end in one of them storming out. A conversation where neither of them can misunderstand a turn of phrase.
When he puts his fingers in Kaveh’s mouth, when he nibbles at the skin below his ear to leave a tattoo of red over his soft skin, when he pushes in and Kaveh loosens his limbs and mouth, when Alhaitham slows to draw it out and Kaveh tears lines into the skin of his shoulders and back--this is a conversation, too.
Or, he muses, hissing as the cold water of the shower runs over his tender back, a different kind of argument.
“Knock knock,” Kaveh sing-songs, already in the door of the bathroom as he says it—his usual habit, even before they were sleeping together, because he needs at least thirty minutes with his reflection in the mornings and Alhaitham needs at least ten in the shower.
He turns off the water and steps out, grabbing a cloth to dry himself and ignoring Kaveh’s unsubtle examination of him in the mirror.
“What is that?” Kaveh asks, aghast. “Did I do that?”
He waves his hand at Alhaitham as a whole, and Alhaitham realizes after a moment he’s referring to the scratches on his back. He doesn’t bother replying, because yes, who else? Kaveh doesn’t wait for one. “Where’s that ointment?” he mutters to himself, another rhetorical question, as he fishes around in the box of what Alhaitham had thought was mostly hair products. After a minute, he crows victory and pulls out a little phial of something that smells sweet when he uncorks it and lets it drip over his fingers.
He treats Alhaitham’s body like he treats Alhaitham’s house: like he owns the place and always has.
Alhaitham minds less than he should. Whatever is in the phial, it’s instant relief as Kaveh spreads it over the razed skin, his fingers gentle. He’d hardly noticed the marks when Kaveh made them, but he’ll take any touch Kaveh wants to administer to him. Outside of sex, he almost never does.
When he steps back, he says, “There,” with an imperious air, as if Alhaitham fucked up somehow and he’s put it all to rights. True, more or less—or, more often than Alhaitham would like to admit to himself.
After a moment, Kaveh adds, “Sorry,” in a soft voice. “I didn’t mean to go so far.”
A real apology. Imagine that. “I don’t mind,” Alhaitham tells him.
But Kaveh is still staring at his back as if he’s done something Alhaitham didn’t want him to do, and any other words of assurance fail him. It isn’t due for Kaveh to act meek. Alhaitham could say this, but words have been failing him lately on this single debate stage. Instead, Alhaitham turns to him and takes him by the shoulders as Kaveh’s eyes get wide—until Alhaitham shakes his wet hair with the wildness of a dog, sending drops all over and all over the immaculate composition Kaveh made of his own hair.
Kaveh rears back, spluttering, as if he’s made of sugar and is going to melt at a drop of water. “You animal.”
Alhaitham watches him go, his dancer’s steps pit-patting across the floor, leaving wet prints on the wood. It’s a path Alhaitham wants desperately to follow, to take his hand and pull him back to bed and come up with any reason to keep him there for another hour. He would, if he hadn’t already committed himself to a day of getting something done. Something more than Kaveh, at minimum.
He tries to sate himself on the sounds of Kaveh getting ready in the other room: his ornamented clothes tinking like bells as he tugs them into place, the low murmur he keeps to himself as he considers breakfast and Alhaitham’s innumerable flaws.
“What schemes are you up to today?” he asks in the living room, over peaches and leftover rice. He eats like a bird, picking single pine-nuts and raisins and crunchy bits of rice off his place.
Alhaitham knows he’s going to end up with whatever Kaveh decides isn’t worth his delicate palate. “No. No schemes. And you? Any plans more important than serving Sumeru?”
Kaveh gives him an unimpressed look. “You’re never going to let that go, are you? What a loyal man!” he says, fawning, but doesn’t answer the question.
Alhaitham tries to piece it together as Kaveh slides the plate across to him and sets about gathering scrolls into the satchel he carries, but the workings of the Kshahrewar are a perpetual mystery to him. He could be building a new city—he could be painting vases.
“I’ll see you for dinner,” Kaveh says as he passes the table for the door, making it a threat. He’s peculiar about this. His little rituals, his need for shared time. It’s fascinating. Alhaitham adds it to the list of notes he’s been keeping in the back of his head like he’s going to need to draw up a thesis on the theory of a single man.
“Where else would I be?” Alhaitham replies.
Kaveh stops at the door and then turns back to him and walks all the way back to where he’s seated and leans down—and grabs his key off the table, with a glare at Alhaitham, as if he took it and put it there on purpose. He’s never forgiven him for walking out with his keys, but really, it’s his fault for leaving them on Alhaitham’s desk.
As he tucks the key away, one of his clips comes undone. Alhaitham nabs it off the floor before Kaveh can reach for it and stands to set it back in place. When he’s done he turns Kaveh to inspect his work.
The great joke is the thought he would be able to tell the difference. Hair down, hair up—Kaveh sits at a single level of beauty. The rest is frills, the rest is gilding. Alhaitham couldn’t care less.
An urge overtakes him, then. An embarrassing one. He leans in without thinking about it and Kaveh leans back like their bodies are magnets of equal polarity. He looks at Alhaitham like something he ate for breakfast is stuck in his teeth and he’s been too polite to mention it. Which isn’t true—he’d mention it. He wouldn’t let Alhaitham forget. “Don’t be late,” he says, as if Alhaitham already is.
“Yes,” Alhaitham says brightly, not letting the twinge in his chest, the little flare of embarrassment be anything more than mechanical. “See you later, dear.”
He adds it to see the look on Kaveh’s face morph to nausea. The man slinks out the door, shutting it with more force than necessary.
And that’s day twenty, Alhaitham reflects. Twenty days since they returned from Aaru Village, twenty days since they bonded.
Twenty days, and still Kaveh hasn’t kissed him.
He practices it in his head to the point of madness. Can I kiss you? No; too bizarre. I’m going to kiss you. Worse. Too presumptive.
In bed, sometimes it seems like Kaveh wants it. Their mouths brush by chance, words are spoken against his lips, or Kaveh’s mouth finds his cheek when Alhaitham has managed to fuck his mate to satisfied exhaustion, but it never seems like the right time.
You can kiss me if you want to.
Kaveh would laugh himself blue.
Neither of them are late for dinner that night. Kaveh makes them a meal that involves several vegetables Alhaitham can’t name, two kinds of meat, and curls of citrus peel artfully arranged over the plate. For dessert, they eat sweetened nests of frozen noodles so thin it feels like he’s eating air. After, in the quiet of Alhaitham’s room, Kaveh perches on the edge of their bed and lets Alhaitham pull the clips from his hair, one by one. He preens under the attention, and Alhaitham wonders if he thinks this is a fair exchange for the meal he made—in truth, Alhaitham would take any excuse to touch Kaveh’s hair.
Those rare nights at the Akademiya when Kaveh was too tired or full of wine to care for himself, this was the duty Alhaitham was happiest to take on.
“If you ever want something,” he says, the single glass of wine he allowed himself catching up with him, “you know you can ask for it.”
Kaveh glances up at him, red gaze as sharp as broken glass. “New bed,” he says after a considering moment.
“What?”
“Yours is too small.”
Alhaitham rolls his shoulder. “We bring yours in here and push them together—“
Kaveh shoots him a look both scandalized and pitying. “No we cannot.”
“—And that’s not what I meant. I mean, from this.” He gestures between them, though the space is minuscule.
“Oh.” He turns to Alhaitham on the bed, folding his legs beneath him, and takes the clips from Alhaitham’s hand. “Is there something you want?”
A scrolling list unfurls in his head, each entry more embarrassing than the last, but they’ve made a few strides and beggars can’t be choosers. “You,” he says honestly. But once in a day is probably enough.
The smile that flickers across Kaveh’s face is wicked. “Only greedy men want more of what they have,” he says, seeming to think this is wisdom.
“Then I’m greedy.”
What Kaveh doesn’t understand, what no one understands, is that greed makes him.
Only a greedy man could want what he’s wanted. Only a greedy man could bear to keep it, the way he has.
When he joined the Akademiya, Kaveh was years his senior, and already renowned for his art, for his mastery of those talents people described then and still in hushed awe, the way they describe nothing else. Vision, they call it, imbuing more glory in the word than they would ever put to the bauble hanging from Alhaitham’s hip.
Alhaitham had thought him showy, obtuse, and unrealistic. He’d thought Kaveh all frill and no substance, attention seeking, foolish, and idealistic. He’d listed these qualities to himself, pinning entire critiques in the privacy of his own mind whenever the name was mentioned to him—and it was mentioned so often. Everyone knew Kaveh, or of Kaveh, and Kaveh knew everyone.
He’d wondered if they were all conspiring to drive him to madness, or playing some cosmic joke.
The day he met Kaveh at last, it was hot out, and he’d been asked to bring something to the Kshahrewar as one of those menial tasks seniors delight in assigning new students. It was by chance Kaveh was there, and Alhaitham hadn’t known then what he was looking at. The artist had two pens stuck through his hair, holding it back in a loose bun, a pencil behind one ear, and ink on his cheek and hands. He’d thanked Alhaitham, and then introduced himself. Alhaitham had stared for too long as he thought what a terrible irony it was that everyone crowed about the man’s art when it was clear he’d put to shame any masterwork he was set beside. It was something about how his hands moved when he was intent on something, the way his eyes gleamed when he had a thought to share, the way he walked and held himself. It was as if he never doubted for one moment, for one step, where he was going, or that his path was anything but the right one and solely his.
Alhaitham could do nothing but follow.
So Kaveh would be loud—Alhaitham would be quiet. Kaveh would light up a room—Alhaitham would edge in around the shadows. His own path would be as sure as Kaveh’s and twice as clever, because it would have to be. How else to catch up to someone so far ahead?
He’d made a life out of haunted Kaveh’s steps in this way, and if Kaveh was surprised to see him there, he could do nothing but act as if it was Kaveh was the one impeding him and not the other way around. That was the way of them, and it worked. For so long, it worked, but now the scope of it has warped and Kaveh seems to have forgotten that between the two of them, he’s the catch.
After all, what is Alhaitham? Skilled linguist and Scribe lacks something when set beside the greatest architect of a generation, renowned across Teyvat.
Kaveh showed him the plans for the Palace before he started on his project—wondrous, mad, beautiful beyond believing—and then he was gone for months of construction, when the only time Alhaitham saw him was in harried passing at the Akademiya or at the building site if he could contrive some vaguely annoyed excuse to go there himself. Each time he saw the Palace, there was some new wonder appended to it, until it was an embarrassment of genius. Spires layered on terraces, opulent gardens perched above the deep, paths floating on nothing more than root and air. Alhaitham had hid his fascination behind pointed questions about supplies and funding—valid questions, it turned out, every one of them—but the grudging longing he’d been nursing like a sore tooth until then took those months of distance to morph into something else. Something monstrous. After, when Kaveh had run himself destitute in the feeding of his passions, Alhaitham had made every effort to ensure he was the only place to land.
He wonders now if that was wisdom, but the one man who would know is the one man he can’t ask.
Don’t go asking questions you don’t want the answer to. A merchant told him that two weeks back, at the dock market on the tail end of a hot day when he’d tried to buy some ridiculous fish Kaveh had it in his head to cook them for dinner. He hadn’t bought it, for obvious reasons, and Kaveh had nearly had him sleep on the couch over it, but it wasn’t about the fish, he said, it was about caring, and it was clear Alhaitham didn’t and never would care about anything that truly mattered. And when Alhaitham pointed out he could sleep in Kaveh’s room instead, it hadn’t helped. Kaveh had posted up on the couch in silent protest, and they’d spent the night like that: Kaveh sleepless on the couch and Alhaitham enjoying the luxury of having his bed to himself and concocting one excuse every hour to peek in on the living area to make sure Kaveh was still there.
The point stands—does Kaveh need him? He’d rather cut his own tongue from his mouth than give Kaveh a reason to answer that question, because if he did, he might realize he could do better than a Haravatat Scribe with a two-bedroom house. Much better. Better enough to fund any project he set his sights on. The number of wealthy merchants and nobles who would make their money and bed ready for a man like Kaveh are as innumerable as roses in Sumeru.
Even in the quiet of their bed, with Kaveh wrapped around him, mumbling dreams into his chest, he isn’t sure that isn’t what Kaveh deserves.
The thing of it is, he’d rather skewer himself than ask anyone else for advice. Even if the advice was about something reasonable and not How do I ask my mate to kiss me? We’ve been fucking for a month but I’m not sure he means it. Am I the problem?
Probably.
“Are you planning to eat,” his unwilling companion asks, “or are you going to glare at your food instead?”
Alhaitham ignores the man across from him. “I have a date later.” He makes date sound wry because if he lets it sound genuine, the General Mahamatra might have an opinion on it, and he sees too much already. On a regular day, Alhaitham would rather stare directly at a wall in silence than spend his lunch with—well, anyone really, except Kaveh, but his options for this particular event were to stare at a wall and inevitably find himself in pained small talk with the varied merchants and small business owners who have come to offer their wares at the event he’s ostensibly helping host, or declare a temporary truce with the only person there guaranteed to keep all prospective conversations at bay.
“A date,” Cyno repeats. He snorts. “Would he describe it that way?”
Alhaitham grits his teeth and hopes it doesn’t show on his face. But it occurs to him that by some stroke of luck or terrible convenience, he’s sitting across from the only man he knows of in a successful relationship. Perhaps in proximity success will rub off on him. Surely, that’s how it works.
It can’t hurt. “You and that ranger. How’s that going?” he asks in a masterwork of subtlety.
Cyno stares at him across the table as he picks a Harra fruit from the bowl between them. “His name is Tighnari. But you know that.”
“Right.” Of course he did. He could give an abbreviated abstract for every paper Tighnari ever published with the Akademiya and a few he didn’t.
“Is this you asking about my love life?”
Alhaitham hides his wince. “No,” he says pointedly. “I heard he was hurt.”
Cyno snaps the fruit in two whole halves with his bare hands—a feat Alhaitham hadn’t known was physically possible--and picks a bite of flesh between his thumb and forefinger to pop in his mouth. “He’s doing better,” he says around the mouthful, and then without allowing Alhaitham to pretend this is normal small talk between two happy acquaintances, “Why?”
It’s a question Alhaitham doesn’t have a ready answer for. Obfuscation is his province—not wholesale fabrication. He loops his mind through possible answers and comes around to the worst of them. “No reason. I’m surprised you weren’t more worried.”
The look Cyno fixes him with isn’t as violent as he expected. “Is there a reason I should be?”
“No. But I would hardly have guessed you two are mated. You’re good at hiding it.”
“If you’re trying to prove a point, it’s not a secret. And you can’t use him as leverage. He can take care of himself—as can Kaveh.” This time, Alhaitham isn’t fast enough to hide his flinch. Cyno cocks his head. “See? When I have something to say, I say it.”
Kaveh taking care of himself. Now there’s a thought. Alhaitham bristles, his irritation the aimless variety that plagues him whenever he’s given to thinking about Kaveh for too long these days—which is all the time. “Yes, your predictability was quite the asset in the end, wasn’t it.”
Cyno merely picks another bite. “I’d rather be reliable than not.”
If it’s an insult, and it is, it’s a fair one. “Apologies,” Alhaitham offers after a moment, and almost means it. “Kaveh would tell you I’m no good at small talk.”
“He has. At length.”
Whatever words he was planning on saying next fumble on the way out of his mouth. “We have different priorities,” he says instead, which is the charitable way to put this. Kaveh makes small talk, makes people like him. Nothing in Alhaitham is built that way. If something needs doing, he’s the man for it, but getting people to enjoy him in the process is a layer of tedium he can’t begin to confront.
Cyno raises a brow.
“He sees the world through the eyes of an artist.” An idealist. In every situation he sees some perfect justice, as if so much of life isn’t, at the end, a zero sum game. “One of us needs to be tied to the ground.”
Cyno takes another bite of his fruit, enough to fill his cheeks.
It’s so—irrational to be frustrated by it all, but he is. Kaveh floats off on his projects; Alhaitham makes sure there’s a home to come back to. Kaveh misses the near-fall of their country; Alhaitham makes sure it stays standing. And the terrible crux of it is that he wouldn’t love Kaveh if he were anything but what he is. He’s castles in the air made manifest and grand virtue put to practice and the abiding belief that every space in their mediocre world can be filled with something beautiful and just so, except—he laughs to himself, the sound bitter, “For a man obsessed with romance, he doesn’t seem interested in showing it.”
Cyno’s other brow ascends. His mouth is still full.
“Don’t,” Alhaitham says, cutting the air with his hand, shocked to find embarrassment running flush on his face, “You don’t know him like I do, and even I have no idea what he wants. He can whine about me all day long, but I don’t know what to fix if he won’t tell me.”
Cyno swallows with visible effort. “Do you want to hear a joke?”
“No.”
“Good, because I can’t tell one better than what you just told me. You don’t know what he wants?” He spits a seed on the ground. “Grow a pair. Ask him.”
Genius. “…I’ve tried that.”
“Then try again.”
Try again, he says. As if he hasn’t, as if he won’t. He’s nothing if not stubborn.
At the gathering of merchants he finds a small clock of beautiful construction from the collection of a Fontaine crafter. It has crystal inlay and enamel flowers asymmetrical on each side, the sort of thing Kaveh would run his fingers down, would make schematics of in his spare time, would draw a still life of at ten times the scale. The merchant offers it to him as a gift when he says who he’s buying it for; he pays anyway. Greed, he reminds himself, makes him. He savors his own resolve sharp on the back of his tongue. He’s not letting Kaveh go. He’s going to keep Kaveh happy, one way or another. If he has to buy out every pretty piece of filigree in Fontaine and run himself bankrupt in the process. He can’t do otherwise.
But when he gets home, the door is locked—and not because he took Kaveh’s key from the bedside table by accident again.
Kaveh isn’t inside. A note is waiting for him on the table that says simply, At the Palace. Don’t starve! written in Kaveh’s looping script. He rolls his eyes, only to himself. If he had his way, Kaveh would feed them nothing but dates wrapped in salted meat and candied figs and tiny nibbles of seasoned delights at a thousand mora a bite.
Instead, he cooks himself a utilitarian mix of meat and vegetables and drowns the dull emptiness behind his breastbone in a sheaf of papers he took from the meeting, allowing himself to look at the little clock sitting across the table form him no more than once an hour.
It’ll be nice to have the bed to himself for a night. More room to stretch out. Kaveh clings too much—and he’s always putting something or other in his hair, which is why the sheets smell like him, and why at three in the morning Alhaitham gives up the attempt to sleep and finds himself wandering the house instead. It isn’t a big place. Kaveh’s room doubles as his ersatz office, because his own office at the Akademiya isn’t enough. For the most part he keeps his space well organized, each thing in its place, until one looks at the side of the room with his desk. It’s as if an art studio suffered a contained explosion in that corner. Papers are pinned to the wall, to each other, trailing up toward the ceiling and around the window. Some are covered in schematic lines, others in sketches of buildings—one he can’t make out until he draws closer and realizes it’s a half-done portrait. His own features look back at him dispassionately. He imagines Kaveh standing precarious on a chair to pin it to its place on the wall.
Alhaitham’s chest pains him. Some indigestion.
He considers, for a single moment, sitting on the bed and waiting for him there, but it’s too pathetic an act to bear contemplating. Instead, he waits on the couch facing the door, the note and the clock sitting across from him while he pretends to absorb any information from the paper he’s reading.
At the Palace, the note says still, in a green flourish. No indication why he’s gone, or when he’ll be back. The clock looks sorry in proximity. It’s endless ticking drones through the empty space.
How did he live here before Kaveh? He can’t recall.
“Alhaitham?”
It isn’t his name that wakes him but the scent wafting through the room with it, and then Kaveh is there, at the door, letting in the first light as he shoulders off his scarves. It isn’t bright enough to be romantic, but he still seems to catch a bit of the glow. His hair is that way. Alhaitham rises so it at least won’t seem like he was sleeping, but then he finds he’s nowhere to go.
Kaveh frowns. “Why aren’t you in bed? Has something happened? Country falling apart again?”
Alhaitham wipes the sleep from his eyes. It was nearly dawn when he came out; he can’t have been out for more than an hour, or far less. “No. Where were you?”
Kaveh snorts. “Lord Sangemah Bay needed my advice on a few specifics of the lower levels—parts are still incomplete, you know. I may work on it until I die and not see the end of it,” he says with some grandiosity. Normally it would irritate, but a grudging affection fills him instead. Again that specific pain in his chest returns; he sets his hand to it and Kaveh’s eyes jump to the motion. “What’s wrong with you? Have you been sleeping in here all night?”
“I wasn’t sleeping.”
“Resting your eyes, I’m sure.” He rolls his, and then seizes on the truth like a dog with a bone. “Alhaitham were you waiting for me?”
Alhaitham finds he’s too tired to deny it. And why not say it? Why not be honest, in this of all places, with this of all people? With the man he’s trying his hardest to spend the rest of his life with?
“Yes,” he says honestly. “I wanted to make sure you made it home safe. Is that so terrible?”
Kaveh cocks his head, a kind smile tugging at his mouth. “What if I hadn’t come back tonight?”
If Kaveh hadn’t come home by daylight, he’d have made it maybe till dinner before taking off after him and dragging him back from Alcazarzaray himself. Or, in the likely scenario Kaveh had something to say about that, joining him there in perpetuity.
“Well I’m home.” Kaveh pats his shoulder on his way by. “And what a perilous journey it was. I’m shocked I made it—did you know I saw three boars! Three. I nearly fainted with fright.”
Alhaitham sits back down, whole body heavy. “You were the one who lost a fight with a scorpion.”
“It was three scorpions and—it wasn’t scorpions,” he argues, heading to his room to set away his bags and whatever wonders he brought back with him from the Palace. He has to yell to stay in earshot. “I hate to be the one to tell you this, but with your complexion, you really can’t get away without sleeping. I remember when you were a student, always walking around with eyes like you’d gotten into someone’s costume makeup kit. Always forgetting to eat. And I’d bring you an apple and you’d look at me like I was trying to poison you.”
In his memory, it plays different. He was grateful for the food and if he bit at Kaveh, it was only to keep him there longer.
Kaveh returns to him. “Are you sick?” he asks bluntly. A thin wrist presses to his forehead. He has a smear of paint there, over his veins and tendons, bright ochre like one would use to paint a sunset or some rare flower—both likely, for a man of his tastes.
Alhaitham catches his hand. “What were you painting?”
It comes out accusatory, when he only meant it in curiosity. He was right when he told the General Mahamatra that he had no skill with small talk. It fails him even here, with this man.
Kaveh jerks back and rubs the spot on his wrist clean. “I told you. I was working on the interior. Lord Sangemah is contracting me for a mural on the lower level. You should see it sometime.”
“Lord Sangemah,” he repeats.
Kaveh rolls his eyes. “Lord Sangemah,” he mimics, voice lowered and accented with drama. “Jealous? I could always paint you something here.” He looks around the house with an appraising eye as if he finds the space dull and wanting. His smile grows teeth. “But I know you don’t hold merit to that sort of thing.”
Alhaitham ignores the dig. “How long is it going to take?” The anticipation of his absence is all his mind can focus on, like a paper cut in an inconvenient spot.
“Does it matter?” Kaveh leaves him there, moving to the kitchen. “I’m making you something. You turn into such a bastard when you haven’t eaten— Oh, Alhaitham, tell me you didn’t make one of those meat-and-vegetable monstrosities again. I told you that’s not food.”
“It is food,” he mumbles.
“No, it isn’t.”
He can hear plates and cups rattling, moving around, as he stares across the table at the clock he bought. A pathetic gesture, really. Kaveh’s scent mingles with the aroma of spices being heated over a flame. His firm belief that Alhaitham turns into an ass when hungry is probably accurate, but the cure was always less the food Kaveh brought him than the fact it was Kaveh bringing it. Kaveh hums to himself as he goes about whatever he’s doing, some light tune—maybe his own composition.
“Why are you so happy?” Alhaitham asks.
“I’m always happy when I get to spend time doing what I love.”
He imagines the two of them, Kaveh and this Lord delighting together over some great masterwork of art, two minds as one. Something Alhaitham will never be capable of giving him. When Kaveh returns to the room, it’s with one plate in hand. A simple dish of cut flatbreads heated and spiced, cut and arranged around a half dozen little cups of oil, olives, cut fruit, and enigmatic mashes of bright colored foods for dipping and spreading. Variety, Kaveh would tell him, is the spice of life. Alhaitham would question who between them is going to wash ten pieces of plateware when they only needed one. But it’s good. He picks bits of the bread and a single olive and Kaveh’s right. It is better than whatever he cooked for himself the night before by miles.
“What’s with the clock?” Kaveh asks. It sits like a third diner at their table.
Alhaitham swallows. “A merchant from Fontaine requested I pass it on to you.”
“It’s gorgeous. Was that from the meet and greet you and Cyno were commandeered for? I wish I could have gone.”
“It was tedious. You wouldn’t have enjoyed it.”
“I love tedious things. Sometimes tedium is necessary. And Sumeru needs this.”
“What, clocks? I thought art could fill all the voids in the lives of men,” he quotes, from one of their more memorable arguments.
Kaveh rolls his eyes. “Not clocks. Variety. People have been so reliant on the Akasha for so long. Something has to fill that void. I’d rather people have more options than less.”
He isn’t wrong. “I’m sure you have ideas.”
“Of course I do. But do you?”
Ideas. He feels a pressure behind his eyes at the thought, at the concept. His ideas are reactionary now. They come one after the other on a rolling basis, whatever is needed moment to moment to put out fires before they start. The Incident left him too high profile for his tastes; fame is anathema to getting any real work done. Juggling a public persona and private will isn’t something he’s skilled at, and he’d have to be stupid to try. He rubs his eyes absently. Adapting a whole society to a new set of behaviors, seamlessly… Who could do such a thing? Even working from the shadows, it won’t be possible. And that’s the least of their problems. When the institution you work for trying to create god in the basement is the start of your problems, he isn’t sure he wants to see what the last of them are.
Kaveh’s cool touch finds Alhaitham’s hand and pulls it from his face. “You can talk to me, you know.”
He draws a breath. “When are you leaving again?”
“Tonight.” Kaveh draws back. “…But maybe I can put it off a day. Lord Sangemah will understand.”
He can’t help it. A low growl vibrates at the back of his throat, more of a whine, really, like he’s an animal.
“Are you so jealous, really?”
“No. You can do what you want.” And again, it comes out all hard and wrong and defiant, like he wants to start a fight. Maybe a small part of him does.
“Alhaitham, I’m an adult. I can be around someone without having sex with them.”
Alhaitham levels him with a look, because even a month into his memory, the way Kaveh begged for him in the desert still echoes in his ears. If he’d been too late, if he’d not listened to his irrational instinct to chase Kaveh out there-- “Do you know when your next heat is this time?” If they could plan around that, it would make things easier. And he wouldn’t have to worry about having to chase Kaveh to the middle of nowhere again.
Kaveh jerks back from the table and stands. “You bastard. You’re not the first man I’ve been with, but if you want to be the last, you’d better figure yourself out.”
Alhaitham stands, too. “I didn’t mean it that way.” He digs his fingers into the ache splitting his forehead. “I really, really didn’t mean it that way. Lord Sangemah—“
“Lord Sangemah is a girl from Port Ormos with too much money. I’m not spending nights in some den of iniquity with another alpha. Alhaitham, really, and even if I was—“
Even if he was, Alhaitham has no claim on Kaveh. Not formally. He closes his eyes.
“—I love you. We’re bonded, and it’s not something I take lightly, no matter what you think of me.”
When he opens his eyes, Kaveh is looking at him with rare ferocity. The sun has risen and the room is a hazy gold through the stained glass windows, a color that doesn’t match the mood. “Love,” he repeats, in disbelief.
Kaveh’s eyes go shock-wide and then shutter, a book closed, a door slammed. “Yes. Love. I know you find the thought repugnant—“
“I don’t. And I don’t think that of you.”
Kaveh opens his mouth, and closes it. Still his gaze is that guarded thing; his mouth twisted as if against a wound.
Alhaitham steps around the table. It’s a very simple thing to take Kaveh’s face in both his hands and satisfying to do so. To cup his cheeks and spread his thumbs against his cheeks, dislodging another speck of paint as he does so, leaving a smear of gold behind. Alhaitham kisses him, and that’s a simple thing, too. When he pulls away, he says, “I am jealous, and I’m greedy, and I’m terrible at this, but I love you. You should know that.” He kisses Kaveh again, once, less chaste than the first because Kaveh’s mouth is open now.
When he pulls away, Kaveh’s breaths shudders through him. His cheeks are bright red, and from just one kiss. Alhaitham nods to himself and then to the table. “I lied,” he adds, “I got you the clock. And I’m going to bed.”
Kaveh scrambles after him. “Wait—Alhaitham, you can’t just—“
He pauses at the stairs. “You can join me, if you want.” But that isn’t quite right. “I’d like it if you’d join me.”
And Kaveh does. It’s that simple.