Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

If you had the willpower, you could turn Hanahaki disease from a pitiful tragedy into a mild annoyance that you could live with day to day—like allergies.

The trick was: avoid the stimulus. That, or microdosing intermittently until you built up a stronger tolerance. But Al-Haitham employed the former technique for years, and over time, the hacking coughs turned into just an occasional irritant, and the flower petals trying to sprout from his mouth started to feel more like a stray herb caught at the back of his throat.

But of course, that all went to shit when Kaveh moved in.

After that, Al-Haitham tried to follow the latter technique: take Kaveh in small doses instead of all at once so he didn’t, you know, choke to death. But it was hard to take someone in moderation when you lived with them.

And so here was how Kaveh found Al-Haitham: at midnight. On his elbows. Hunched over the bathroom sink like a shrimp as his lungs tried to heave themselves out of his chest. There were flowers everywhere—the red petals scattered like blood across the sink. Stems and roots and the vibrant, drooping heads of the mourning flowers like a destroyed bouquet. His chest hurt and his throat felt raw, but all he could think about was how much of a pain it would be to clean up.

The door banged open.

“Al-Haitham—”

He heard it faintly at the back of his head. He blinked once, blearily, before he lifted his head to find Kaveh staring at him. He could feel the cut at the corner of his mouth stinging—the salt of his involuntary tears trickling down.

“Oh.” Kaveh’s expression shattered. Shuttered. He glanced at the sink, then back at Al-Haitham’s face. “What—what is this? Are you—?”

Ah, so this was how Kaveh was going to find out. 

Truthfully, Al-Haitham wished the reveal hadn’t been this messy: at midnight, coughing like he was trying to expel his lungs, Kaveh bursting in on him—not on his terms. Ideally, Al-Haitham would have never wanted Kaveh to know at all. But the flowers made their bed and shoved Al-Haitham onto it, so he wiped his mouth, lifted his head, and leveled Kaveh with a look.

“I’m fine. I’m breathing—” He choked and swiveled back to the sink before coughing up a single, whole mourning flower, perfectly intact from flowerhead to root.

He stared at it for a long moment—could feel Kaveh’s gaze burning a hole into the sink where the flower lay. 

Archons, thought Al-Haitham.

“You—” Kaveh cleared his throat. “Is that…?”

“Yes, it’s a mourning flower,” said Al-Haitham. “Very astute observation.”

Kaveh sputtered. “You’ve been coughing up flowers.”

“I have.”

There was a beat of silence. “So you—”

“Yes, yes, I have Hanahaki disease. Or ‘suffering’ from it, would be the more proper verb.” Al-Haitham gripped the edges of the sink, staring at the mess in front of him for a long moment before he straightened. He hesitated only for a second before he started plucking the flowers off the counters, pinching the wet stems between his fingers. “I know how sharp your mind is, Kaveh. Just speak when you figure something out so you can save us both time with your stuttering.”

“Hey!” He could hear the indignation in Kaveh’s voice.

Al-Haitham turned to him and raised an eyebrow.

Kaveh opened and closed his mouth like he was searching for words to say, but after a long moment of silence, Al-Haitham sighed and turned away.

“If you don’t mind,” he said quietly, as to not wreck his throat more. “I’ll be cleaning up this mess now, so if you could get out of my way—”

“Wait.” A hand landed on his wrist.

Al-Haitham flinched and looked up. “What?”

Kaveh jerked away as if he’d been burned. “Sorry. Sorry, sorry, sorry.” He was in his night clothes, none of his earrings or other adornments on. His hair lay loose on his shoulders, all of it maddeningly in his face in a way that made Al-Haitham want to reach out and brush it aside.

Kaveh at night was something so rare and soft it made Al-Haitham’s heart ache, all of his edges dulled with sleep.

Al-Haitham raised an eyebrow. “What?” he repeated.

Kaveh startled like he hadn’t expected Al-Haitham to respond. “I…”

He rolled his eyes, irritated. “Spit it out. I have work tomorrow, Kaveh.”

“I…” Kaveh started, then shook his head. “Are you in pain?”

“As much pain as coughing up a whole flower can cause, yes.”

Kaveh sighed, all the exasperation and anger coming out in startling force. He shouldered his way into the bathroom and glared at Al-Haitham. “You know what I mean, Al-Haitham. I’m not talking about this one specific instance, I meant generally. Obviously.”

“Obviously,” echoed Al-Haitham. There were a lot of things he’d thought were obvious with Kaveh, but not anymore. He’d learned his lesson. “Overall fine. This isn’t the first flower I’ve coughed up.”

Kaveh’s eyebrow twitched. “And that isn’t concerning to you?”

Al-Haitham shrugged.

“Fine, if you insist.” Kaveh chewed his lip. Al-Haitham tried not to follow the movement.“May I ask…who it is?”

Absolutely not. Absolutely the fuck not. He didn’t tell Kaveh back then—and it was probably for the best, considering how they turned out—and he especially wasn’t telling Kaveh now.

“You want me to tell you who I like? Like it’s some Akademiya crush?”

Kaveh groaned. “No. Clearly, it’s more than that.” He gestured pointedly at the sink. “I just…we were friends once, weren’t we? You can tell me. If you need to.”

Al-Haitham very, very much could not.

Kaveh must have seen it on his face because his expression hardened. He crossed his arms. “Actually, no. No manners because this is very serious. I won’t let you leave this room until you tell me.”

“Kaveh, it’s nearly midnight.”

“And?” He narrowed his eyes. “I’m serious, I think you should tell me. Or at least talk about it. I want you to tell me when you’re feeling terrible or ask me for help when you get like… this again.” He took a step closer and Al-Haitham felt alarm bells ringing in his head. “Seriously, what even happened that made you like this—”

Al-Haitham stepped back. “That’s not your concern.”

Kaveh frowned, but paused his movement. “It is because I live with you. And I’m worried about you, because we both know how serious Hanahaki can get and I really think this is something you should have mentioned to your roommate at least—”

“No.” Of all the people in the world, he especially could not talk to Kaveh about this. “I’m fine, Kaveh. It’s late and I’m tired—”

“From coughing up flowers?” interrupted Kaveh.

“From staying up late,” he said flatly. “So I’m going to bed.”

“Hey, I’m not done with you—”

Al-Hatiham pressed against the wall and sidled around Kaveh until his back was to the door. He took a step backward and then he was in the hall.

“Hey!” Kaveh glared, eyebrow twitching at being outmaneuvered. “Al-Haitham.”

“Goodnight,” he said. And then he turned and walked as quickly as he could down the hall without looking like he was fleeing.

-

Al-Haitham had first learned of Hanahaki disease back in the Akademiya. On one random Wednesday morning when he’d decided to skip class again because the lecturer was boring, he’d gone to the House of Daena as he always did. Kaveh was in class, which meant Al-Haitham had no one to bother, so he found himself walking along the shelves in the most forgotten corners of the library where dust had started to gather along the tops.

When he first arrived at the Akademiya however many years ago, he’d started reading the books on the main shelves—of course. But as time went on, he’d started to run out of material, so he had to resort to the edges, to the corners that got picked less so there was more to find.

It was here that he’d discovered the book on old Inazuman folktales. He skimmed through tales of kitsune and oni before he stumbled upon the curse of unrequited love that made flowers grow in your lungs.

Ridiculous, he’d thought. How could someone get so caught up in their feelings like that?

Hanahaki diseases sounded like some old folktale lost to time, but it turned out that it wasn’t entirely uncommon in the modern day. Unlike what the book suggested, Hanahaki could manifest through the whole range of feelings, from small crushes to full blown love affairs; and the Akademiya—fraught with academically stressed youths, had its own fair share of unrequited feelings. So Al-Haitham started to witness it all first hand.

Hanahaki, it seemed, did not happen to everyone, but wasn’t so obscure that it was lost to myth. About a third of those with unrequited feelings actually seemed to suffer from it, while the rest of the lucky ones dealt with it like normal people.

“Poor Effendi,” sighed Kaveh. 

The Effendi in question was standing near the exit of the House of Daena, watching forlornly as the door swung shut. He’d just confessed to Darya—some girl in Spantamad that he’d apparently liked for a long time—and she had politely turned him down before he coughed up a flower petal. Both Al-Haitham, Kaveh, and the rest of the people sitting near the exit watched as an awkward silence descended on them. There was a long moment of silence before Darya awkwardly pat him on the back and said, “I hope you find someone,” before she hurried out the door.

“What about it?” muttered Al-Haitham.

“What do you mean , ‘what about it?’ Effendi mustered up the courage to confess to Darya and he got rejected!”

“She doesn’t owe him anything.”

Kaveh leveled him with a flat look. “And I never said she did. I’m just saying it’s unfortunate that his feelings were not returned. It never feels good having your feelings unreciprocated.”
“Ah yes, you would know, wouldn’t you, Kaveh?” said Al-Haitham wryly.

Kaveh flushed because he, of course, had his fair share of hallway confessions. He turned everyone down just as politely as Darya, but has also witnessed a few coughed up flower petals immediately afterward. Then, he’d come to Al-Haitham and stew in guilt about how he couldn’t return their feelings and Al-Haitham would say it wasn’t his responsibility. 

“Shut up,” muttered Kaveh. “I just think—it’s unfortunate. The mild case of Hanahaki disease as well.”

“He’ll get over it,” said Al-Haitham. “It’s a school crush that has probably gone on for—what, a few months? The flowers will clear out by then long before he starts suffocating from them.”

“You’re so callous, Al-Haitham.”

“Practical, you mean.” 

“‘Practical.’” Kaveh huffed. “Imagine if you faced an unrequited crush. Imagine you started coughing flowers. What then? Would you have more sympathy for Effendi’s situation?”

Al-Haitham traced a finger down the spine of his book before turning to Kaveh. “I wouldn’t let flowers grow in the first place.”

“And how would you go about doing that?” Kaveh was smiling.

He thought for a moment. “I’d rip out the seeds.”

Kaveh laughed—a deep, loud sound echoing from the depths of his stomach. “That’s a bit morbid, don’t you think?” 

“No.” Al-Haitham tilted his head up, toward the direction of light. “I would never let my feelings get so out of control.”

“I’m not sure that’s up to you to decide, Al-Haitham.”

“Is it not?”

The corner of Kaveh’s mouth quirked up, the half smile revealing a flash of white teeth. He blinked: a slow drag of his eyelashes through the air, and raised his eyebrows. “You tell me.”

Something hot flared in his chest. Al-Haitham abruptly jerked his head away and looked back down at his book. His finger marked the place he’d left off, but the entire content of that page suddenly flew out of his head.

“Yes,” he grunted. “It is.”

Kaveh pulled back in his chair, the legs scraping loudly against the wood. He let out another laugh that was objectively soft in the space of the library, but it echoed through Al-Haitham’s bones until he felt dizzy with the sound.

-

“How bad is it?” Kaveh asked the next morning.

He gave him a flat look.

“Oh, don’t look at me like that. As if you didn’t expect me to ask you about it.”

Al-Haitham sighed. He sat at his usual spot at the table, across from Kaveh, letting the coffee mug warm his hands. “Not…terrible,” he lied.

Kaveh raised an eyebrow. “Are you sure?” 

“If you don’t like my answer, then why ask the question?”

“I’m just making sure you’re being truthful.” Kaveh slid into the seat across from him. “You looked like you coughed up an entire bouquet last night.”

Al-Haitham took a drink from the coffee in response.

Kaveh sighed. “How long have you had it?”

Since you left. “Not long.”

“How long, Al-Haitham?”

Al-Haitham thought. What would be a plausible lie? Something sprinkled with truth but not encompassed by it. There were always seeds, there was always something growing, but he didn’t start growing a garden until—

“A few months ago. Maybe a year.” That was when it had gotten worse.

“I see…” Kaveh traced a finger through a groove in the wood on the table. Behind him, the sunrise sprawled through the window, haloing his head in light. “Is there…anything I can do to help?”

What a question.

Al-Haitham gave him a wry smile. “Well, you know of the cure to Hanahaki: to get over your feelings or have them returned. Let me know what you think you can do to help that.”

“You don’t have to be an asshole,” muttered Kaveh. “I only meant: if you need anything from me. Water or medicine or food, or…I don’t know. Anything to make your life easier.” 

“Well, that’s kind of you, but unnecessary.” 

Kaveh chewed on his bottom lip.

The sunbeam crawled further across the table, meaning he was getting close to being late for work if he entertained this conversation any longer. Normally that was a non-issue, but today he wanted to be there—if only to oversee the fallout of Azar’s defeat, and what everyone would do now that over half the Sages had been kicked from their position.

“Do you think you can get over it?” Kaveh asked him from across the table.

It was the funniest question in the world that Kaveh was asking Al-Haitham that, while sitting across the table in the house they designed. 

“I will certainly try.” Though he didn’t know how much he wanted to.

Kaveh frowned at that, eyes cutting to the side. If Al-Haitham didn’t know any better, he’d almost think Kaveh looked upset.

“Can I ask again who it is?’

“You can,” said Al-Haitham. “But I won’t answer.”

Kaveh let out an exasperated sigh. “Why?”

“Why do you need to know, Kaveh?”

“Is curiosity enough of a reason?” Kaveh bit his lip. “I don’t—I don’t mean to make you feel like you have to share. I’m just wondering, and I thought, well…” They’d been friends once. It would have been an easy thing to share then. Not anymore now, though. 

“It’s enough of a reason,” said Al-Haitham, softer. “But I have my own reasons for not sharing. Besides, it isn’t important.”

Kaveh furrowed his eyebrows. “If…you insist.”

“I do.”

The silence settled between them and he wondered if he could take that as his cue to leave. Before he could say anything else, though, Kaveh spoke again.

“What do you do with the flowers?”

Al-Haitham paused. “What do you mean?”

“Like, what do you do with the flowers you cough up? Do you keep them or…?”

He furrowed his eyebrows. “What—why would I keep them? I obviously throw them away. Why are you asking?”

“I was just wondering—I mean if you’re not using them—like, if I could possibly…have them?”

Al-Haitham stared at him incredulously. “You want my unrequited love flowers?”

“Yes?” Kaveh flushed red. “Since…since you’re not using them.”

Since you’re not using them—

“What the hell would I be using them for? What the hell are you using them for?”

“I—I can explain.” Kaveh held up his hands in surrender. “I’ve been training with the Traveler and she said I could, um, use the mourning flowers for training and getting stronger. And as you know, they’re hard to come by, and since a…er, nearby resource, is growing the flowers, I was wondering—”

Al-Haitham couldn’t believe his ears. “Am I just a garden for you to pick flowers from?”

“No! Of course not! You’re obviously a lot more to me than that—” Kaveh froze like he realized what he’d just said.

“Go on…” said Al-Haitham flatly.

“I mean.” Kaveh swallowed. “Well for one, you’re my roommate.”

“Your roommate,” mused Al-Haitham.

“Yeah. And…former, er, classmate.”

“Yes, that’s true.”

“And we were friends once,” Kaveh said in a rush. “But, you know, the architect in me wants to be efficient with resources. And since you—you’re—”

“Growing mourning flowers in my chest,” supplied Al-Haitham.

Kaveh winced. “Yes, thank you—I just thought that if you weren’t using them…why not give them to me?”

Al-Haitham stared at him for a long time.

Today, he could breathe. He’d coughed up so many flowers last night that his airways felt almost a shade clearer. But he felt something shift in his chest, something that wasn’t the roots. 

He’d already given Kaveh so much in this life, what was one more thing? And it was also, perhaps, a little fitting, that Kaveh was asking for flowers that grew from unrequited love. Because in a sense, Al-Haitham was just giving them back to their maker.

“Sure, Kaveh.” Al-Haitham let out a long, suffering sigh. “You can have my flowers.”

“Ah, wonderful.” Kaveh smiled. “Thank you so much.”

“Don’t mention it.” Al-Haitham waved his hand. “Seriously, don’t.”

-

(A few months ago—maybe a year—Kaveh waltzed back into Al-Haitham’s life. Or, rather: stumbled sideways and headfirst into his shoulder.

Al-Haitham didn’t cough when he found Kaveh at Lambad’s. He could breathe just fine when Kaveh threw his arm over Al-Haitham’s shoulders and let himself be dragged out of the tavern. But the flowers came quick and fast the moment Kaveh stepped over the threshold of the house they’d designed years ago and said, “Huh, I never expected to see this completed.”

Al-Haitham’s heart burst anew with sprouts and he nearly dropped Kaveh onto the floor as he tried to swallow the onslaught of flower petals trying to spill out of his mouth like blood.

“Are you alright?” Kaveh frowned, eyes still a bit hazy from however many cups of wine he’d drunk.

Al-Haitham didn’t respond because his lung was trying earnestly to climb out of his mouth.

“Al-Haitham?”

He coughed and shot an irritated glance back. “I’m fine.”

“Clearly, you’re not.” Kaveh moved Al-Haitham’s arm off his shoulders and reached a hand out to turn his head, fingers grazing the edge of his jaw.

Al-Haitham whipped around and narrowed his eyes, daring Kaveh to move another inch.

Kaveh froze.

“Worry about yourself first.” Al-Haitham paused and swallowed a mouthful of flowers before starting to push Kaveh towards the couch. “You can stay here.”

Kaveh watched him, eyes wide. “Are you sure?”

Al-Haitham raised an eyebrow. “Are you in a position to be polite right now? Where else would you go?”

Kaveh bit his lip, eyes falling.

Perhaps it was the new flowers, the delirium—lightheadedness from the new lack of air—but Al-Haitham softened. He sighed and pressed down lightly on Kaveh’s shoulders until he was seated.

“You can stay,” he said simply.

“For how long?” asked Kaveh. “I’m—broke.”

Something stirred in his chest—the flowers? His heart?

“You can stay as long as you need.” Al-Haitham paused. “This was once in your name as well.”

“Ah, but I gave it up.” Kaveh leaned back against the couch, covering his face with his hands. 

“And?” Al-Haitham crossed his arms.

Kaveh peered an eye out from between his fingers, and when he caught sight of Al-Haitham’s face, he dropped his hands. He sighed, relief cracking clear across his features, and simply said, “Thank you.”

Only three candles were lit in the main room at this hour, but the firelight still glinted around Kaveh’s smile. The one he used with teeth. The one Al-Haitham hadn’t seen in years.

Al-Haitham jerked his head to the side and coughed violently into his hand. He was suddenly grateful to Lesser Lord Kusanali—and probably the other Archons—that the house was so dark and Kaveh so drunk that he wouldn’t see the stray flower petals Al-Haitham hadn’t managed to catch. Al-Haitham saw them now—only two or three scattered across the floor like forgotten tears, but he kicked them under the couch and clenched the rest of the petals in his fist before turning around.

“Are you sure you’re alright?” asked Kaveh.

This time, Al-Haitham ignored him. “You can get water for yourself if you need it. My room is down that hall, but don’t bother me until after seven unless you’re courting death.” He knew he sounded entirely too rushed, so he quickly added, “Goodnight,” before hurrying down the hall.

Distantly, he heard Kaveh let out a quiet laugh. “Goodnight, Al-Haitham.”

Al-Haitham shut the door to his room before any more flowers could come up.

Not a terrible first interaction, he remembered thinking. After all the years that had passed, he’d only coughed up some petals! Not even a whole flower! Maybe if he kept doing that—if he kept hurrying away, kept swallowing and turning his head, he could suppress it. He could keep the flowers at bay.

Of course, when you lived with the gardener of your flowers, it was hard to stop them from growing.)

-

Al-Haitham gave Kaveh his first mourning flower a few mornings later before work.

He woke up, started making coffee, and by the time Kaveh emerged with a hand sleepily reaching out for a cup, Al-Haitham shoved a flower in there instead.

Kaveh blinked once. Twice. Then the rest of him woke up as he stared down at the flower in his fist. There was a moment where his head twitched up to look at Al-Haitham—eyes wide—and the rest of his face started to flush.

“For your training,” reminded Al-Haitham.

“Ah, right.” Kaveh looked away as if embarrassed, and Al-Haitham tried not to imagine what for. He’d had his fair share of wishful thinking in the Akademiya, and look where that led him.

“If that’s all…” Al-Haitham turned to leave.

“Did—” Kaveh started. “Did you, um, cough it up this morning?”

Well, he’d actually produced the flower last night when Kaveh tripped over a book Al-Haitham had left near a couch and then yelled at him about leaving his shit everywhere when he looked down at the cover and said, “Oh, you’re still reading this series?” The pain of nostalgia lanced through his chest so sharp that he barely made it to his room before he coughed up a whole flower. Then, he cleaned it up and waited until morning to give it to Kaveh to divert suspicion.

But Al-Haitham wasn’t telling him that, so he lied and said, “Yes.”

“Ah.” Kaveh twirled the stem between his fingers awkwardly. “What, uh, happened?”

Al-Haitham rolled his eyes. “Are you going to ask me that every time I give you flowers?”

Kaveh flushed. “No. I was just—”

“Good, because I don’t think it’s your business.”

He frowned. “I was just trying to make conversation. But if you’re not comfortable sharing, I won’t press you.”

“Hm, that’s kind of you.”

And before Kaveh could respond, Al-Haitham turned and slipped out the door.

The second time he gave Kaveh flowers, he had a few accumulated over the days Kaveh had been gone in the desert to find inspiration. Al-Haitham had missed him, of course. But he wasn’t going to tell Kaveh that, so instead, he handed Kaveh the bundle of flowers the moment he walked through the door.

Kaveh had startled. “What are these?”

“Flowers,” said Al-Haitham. Obviously.

“Right, but—” Kaveh set the flowers down and pulled off his boots. “What happened while I was gone?”

That. Precisely. Kaveh was gone and the house was empty so Al-Haitham’s chest filled with flowers. But again, he’d rather not tell Kaveh that, so he shrugged.

“Nothing in particular.”

“Al-Haitham—”

“If you don’t want them, I can throw them away—”

Kaveh snatched them up. “I’ll take them, I’ll take them.”

He let himself smile, just at the corner. “Thought so.”

The third time he gave Kaveh flowers, he had something close to a bouquet. He didn’t present it as such because that would be too much and too obvious, but he did bundle them together until they filled his whole fist and he held them out to Kaveh while they were both working in the study after dinner.

“You’re giving me so many flowers.” Kaveh gingerly grabbed the bundle of flowers. “What would your unrequited think?”

Al-Haitham gave him a flat look. “They don’t know and don’t care.”

“You could be giving them bouquets instead of me.”

“How romantic. My unrequited love flowers covered in spit,” said Al-Haitham wryly. “At least you’re able to use them.”

Kaveh examined the flowers, even though they were spotless. “You washed these though, right?”

Al-Haitham rolled his eyes. “Yes, of course I did. I always do.”

Kaveh gave the flowers another once-over before he set them down on the desk. He peered up at Al-Haitham. “I was serious, by the way. I think, perhaps, if you put more effort into making your affections known to them, you could make progress on curing your Hanahaki.”

“And cut off your endless supply of training materials?”

Kaveh frowned. “I’m not so selfish that I would rather you keep suffering so I don’t have to go to the desert to get my own. I just think—if you’ve had this for a year, it doesn’t seem like you’ve made any progress on trying to remedy it.”

A bit difficult to do when the object of your affections lived in the same house of you, determinedly not reciprocating. But of course, Al-Haitham didn’t say that.

“Why don’t you worry about getting yourself out of debt first?” Al-Haitham tilted his head. “Then you can worry about my affairs.”

“You can’t just bring up my crippling debt anytime you want to avoid talking about a subject!”

Al-Haitham almost smiled. “I can and I have and I will. I’ll bring you any more flowers I make in the next few days. Now, goodnight, Kaveh.”

“Al-Haitham—”

And so the process of giving Kaveh his mourning flowers went like this: Kaveh would do something ordinary like nag Al-Haitham for leaving his books on the table, or complain that Al-Haitham’s coffee was too sweet, or throw himself onto the couch and unleash a litany of grievances of his day like he expected Al-Haitham to listen (and of course, he would).

Al-Haitham—being the lovesick fool he was—would feel a flower rising in his throat. He’d excuse himself, cough it up in the bathroom, wash off all the saliva and blood and what have you, and then give it to Kaveh a certain amount of time later so he couldn’t connect the timing of the event with the production of the flower.

Kaveh would accept it, maybe make a comment about what had caused the flower this time, but Al-Haitham always dodged it. 

“Have you even told them how you feel?” Kaveh asked once after a delivery of five flowers at once.

“No.” He really hadn’t. That was the thing, though. Back then, back in the Akademiya, neither of them had said a word to each other about it. It was all feeling and implication and the youthful frenzy of infatuation, but they’d never laid it out on paper, never defined it in ink. So the implication leaned the other way and the fuzzy thing they had had scattered to the winds.

Kaveh frowned. “Then how do you know they don’t return your feelings?”

“I know,” said Al-Haitham. “Believe me.”

“You could try telling them. Maybe they do feel the same.”

Al-Haitham rolled his eyes. “Suppose I did confess. And suppose they reciprocated. Then we fall deeply and madly in love and I bring my lover home to this house. Wouldn’t you find that annoying?”

Kaveh scowled. “This isn’t about me.”

“But you’d complain, so I’m saving myself a future headache.”

Kaveh watched him for a long, silent moment, red eyes piercing him in a way that made his nerves squirm.

“I’m surprised I’m even home in this scenario,” Kaveh finally said. “I would have thought you’d kick me out once you found someone else to tolerate you.”

Al-Haitham frowned at that. “I would never kick you out.”

Kaveh’s eyes widened like he hadn’t expected that, and it made Al-Haitham feel uneasy all over. In what world would he ever kick Kaveh out? Why would Kaveh even think that?

Before Al-Haitham could ask, a knock came from the door and Kaveh answered it to find one of his clients there asking about revisions to the project he’d commissioned Kaveh for. Kaveh had thrown Al-Haitham an apologetic look before suggesting to the client that they speak outside of the house (and ask how the hell he found where Kaveh lived) and then Kaveh was gone for the rest of the night. 

A few weeks after Kaveh had first asked for his unrequited love flowers, Al-Haitham returned home from the Akademiya to find the Traveler sitting at his dinner table across from Kaveh while he chatted animatedly. Her floaty companion Paimon hovered nearby.

“What’s this?” Al-Haitham let the door swing shut.

“Oh, Al-Haitham!” The smile dropped as Kaveh jumped to his feet, replaced with a strange amount of nervousness that made his stomach curl. Kaveh shot a glance at the Traveler. “I, uh, hope you don’t mind, but I invited them inside after training today.”

“Training,” repeated Al-Haitham.

“Yep!” Paimon chirped. “Thanks for getting the mourning flowers for us. Super helpful.”

Across the table, Kaveh flushed.

“You’re growing them, right?” Paimon continued. “That’s really cool! Paimon didn’t think they could grow outside of the desert. Though, Paimon didn’t see a garden outside anywhere.”

Kaveh cleared his throat.

The Traveler, ever the perceptive, cut a glance at him. 

Al-Haitham felt the corner of his mouth twitch. “Something like amusement bubbled up in his chest, though that could have also been the flowers.”

“It’s in my room,” said Al-Haitham. “Mourning flowers prefer dimmer lighting because they normally grow in the swamp, so I tried to mimic those conditions.”

“So your room’s all dark?” asked Paimon.

“Sure.”

“Don’t you like reading? How do you read in the dark?”

“Lamps. Or I’ll read out here.”

“Huh…” Paimon tapped her chin. 

Al-Haitham let himself sneak a glance at Kaveh, trying to gauge his reaction. He thought Kaveh would look more grateful, but instead he just looked wary.

“Ooh, can Paimon see? Paimon wants to grow flowers in the teapot—”

The Traveler stood suddenly.

“We should probably head out,” she said. “We’ve probably overstayed our welcome.”

“Oh no, not at all—” Kaveh stood to follow them.

She shot him a glance that said something like, I’m trying to help you.

Kaveh clamped his mouth shut.

“Oh, sorry!” Paimon exclaimed. “Thank you so much Kaveh for the tea!”

“You’re very welcome, Paimon.” He smiled earnestly, voice warm.

The Traveler nodded at Al-Haitham. “Your house is nice.”

“Thank you.” We designed it, he wanted to say, but didn’t, of course.

The Traveler tilted her head towards the door and gestured for Paimon to follow. They both sent one last wave before they left, and when they shut the door, the creak of the hinges echoed through the foyer.

Al-Haitham stared at Kaveh for a long moment.

“What?” He shrunk under the attention.

“You look like you want to say something.” 

Kaveh sighed. “I’m just curious: why didn’t you say anything to them?”

“I didn’t realize you wanted me to.” Al-Haitham crossed his arms. “I was under the assumption that you were embarrassed about the source of your mourning flowers.”

“I’m not…embarrassed…” Kaveh chewed on his lower lip. “I’m more just confused as to why you would lie for me. I’m not used to spontaneous acts of kindness from you.”

A little dark spot of irritation bristled inside him. “Aren’t you?” he mused.

“I mean—” Kaveh blanched. “Other than letting me live here. I just meant—overall.”

“Hm.”

Kaveh glanced at him nervously. “I never said you were growing a garden, by the way. Paimon just assumed, but I only said that you had given me the mourning flowers. I’m not—I wasn’t trying to make light of your ailment.”

“I didn’t think you were.” Al-Haitham frowned. “And you don’t have to refer to it as my ‘ailment.’ It’s not a dirty thing.”

“I wasn’t sure how you felt about it, considering how little you’ve done to treat it. I didn’t know if you wanted to keep hiding it or not.”

“There’s no point.” Not now that Kaveh knew. “I don’t particularly care and other people knowing won’t change anything.”

“But you could do something to change it,” he urged. “Maybe it doesn’t matter if other people knew, but of your unrequited did—”

“I’m so curious as to what your reasoning is in trying to rid yourself of your flower supply.”

“Is that what you think I think of you?” Kaveh’s voice rose a few decibels. “I’m asking for your flowers because they’re there, but I don’t want you to produce them forever.”

Al-Haitham paused, unsure if he should answer truthfully.

“I’m worried about you,” he said simply. “That’s all.”

His throat suddenly felt tight. “I’m fine,” said Al-Haitham. The weight of the conversation suddenly started to bore down on him, and he didn’t know if he had the energy to deal with it. “Worry about yourself first before you waste any time on me.”

“Don’t say it like that.” Kaveh’s eyebrows pinched. “I’ve never ‘wasted time’ on you.”

Something squirmed inside him: unease? Flowers?

Instead of examining it, Al-Haitham rolled his eyes. “But you’ve certainly wasted plenty of time and money on clients that don’t value your efforts.”

“Have you ever considered not saying the cruelest possible thing at any given moment?” Kaveh huffed. “You better not be saying that you don’t value my efforts.”

“I do,” he said before he could help himself.

“Then listen to me when I say that I’m worried about you.”

“And listen to me when I tell you I’m fine.”

There was a long pause. Al-Haitham watched Kaveh press his mouth into a thin line.

“Do you remember Effendi from fourth-year?” he asked suddenly.

“...yes? Why?” Al-Haitham couldn’t stop the weariness creeping into his voice, but the curiosity still won out because even after all this time, he could never turn down a conversation with Kaveh.

“Do you remember what we talked about after Darya rejected him?”

Dread rolled through him, slow like acid. “...yes.”

“You said you would never let your feelings get so out of control,” said Kaveh slowly. “What about now? How in control do you feel over them?”

“Are you trying to prove me wrong?”

“I’m just asking you a question, Al-Haitham.”

How do you gauge how much control over something so intangible? Or maybe that wasn’t the right question: how much control did he want to have over it? How much had he let go? He remembered Kaveh sitting across the table from him in the House of Daena, a sunbeam smashing through the window and haloing the back of his head. He remembered watching Kaveh squint at the light and complain and grab at Al-Haitham’s wrist—long, artist fingers, rough artist hands, wrapping around the bone—to pull him further down the table so the glare wouldn’t blind him and felt something slip.

“I guess the flowers inside me answer for themselves,” said Al-Haitham simply.

There was a long silence. Al-Haitham could hear pipes running somewhere through the walls.

An even longer moment passed before Kaveh spoke again. “Do you have sympathy for Effendi now?”

“No,” he said, no hesitation. “In fact, I know now that he was an even greater fool.”

-

(The morning after Al-Haitham had dragged Kaveh home from Lambad’s Tavern and invited him into his home, the flowers came back in full force.

Al-Haitham had woken early with the sun—a habit from the Akademiya that he carried over to this day, though he hardly ever woke early for classes. He’d found that mornings were quieter, less bloated with people, and so he would rise before dawn like a bird and wander to the quieter parts of the Akademiya to read.

But his mornings now were for finding a pocket of quiet before the rest of the city woke up. Al-Haitham went about his morning routine before walking into the living room and the reminder of the previous night smacked him right across the face.

There lay Kaveh sprawled on the couch, one of his long legs flung over the arm and the other dangling towards the floor. A blanket spilled haphazardly across his lip, covering only half of his torso, leaving the other half—with the shirt buttons undone to his navel and collar open and askew—out. His hair, golden and lovely and long, twisted in a dozen different directions like the tentacles of an octopus, and one of his red hair clips had somehow migrated downard and now clung valiantly to the ends. Mouth open. Limbs sprawled. Al-Haitham wouldn’t be surprised if Kaveh had passed out the moment he’d stopped speaking.

He briefly considered pulling a blanket over Kaveh and letting him sleep, but the thought sent a new pain spearing through his chest that ended with a hacking cough that quickly ended that idea. He turned because he did not want Kaveh to see. Because if Kaveh saw, he would ask questions. And then what would Al-Haitham answer?

Al-Haitham tried to retreat but Kaveh was already peeling open his eyes.

“What is with that old man cough?” Kaveh muttered blearily. He lifted a hand and rubbed the sleep out of his eyes.

Al-Haitham swallowed the new flowers and turned around. “May I remind you that I’m younger than you.”

Kaveh sat up and folded his legs underneath himself. “That cough makes you sound otherwise. Have you gotten more frail since I last saw you?” 

There was a hint of teasing in his voice that made Al-Haitham’s stomach curl—too familiar and too close to how they’d been in the Akademiya considering their last conversation with each other.

Al-Haitham raised an eyebrow. “Do I look like I’ve gotten more frail?”

Kaveh’s eyes darted down in the direction of his chest and shoulders before shooting back up, face turning vaguely pink. “...no. I can’t say that.”

Al-Haitham kept his eyebrow aloft.

Kaveh tried to glare at him but tore his gaze away a moment later.

The sun had finally started to press entirely into the house. At first it had flitted along the edges of the window, leaving little trails of light. But their conversation had stretched long enough that morning came in full bloom, spilling through the tinted windows and painting the floor with color. And Kaveh sat in the center of it like the subject of a portrait, still yawning and half awake like a nymph or a god at birth.

Another sharp pang. Al-Haitham stepped back.

Kaveh’s head shot up. “Where are you going?”

“Work.” Al-Haitham nearly choked on a leaf. “Some of us have scheduled hours.”

“Hey. Uncalled for,” said Kaveh, but the corner of his mouth tipped up.

Al-Haitham turned away, if only to hide the grimace when he felt something new sprout. “I was just stating a fact.”

“You and your objective facts.” Kaveh stretched backward onto the couch, curving the line of his spine. “My lack of schedule is not by choice. You know artists have to bend to the demands of clients.”

When Al-Haitham had known him in the Akademiya, Kaveh always spoke with a bit of a smile in his voice. Like despite all of his guilt, all of his fears—or because of it—there was a quiet part of him that was still cultivating something kind, something soft, always on the edge of blooming every time he spoke.

“Hmm,” said Al-Haitham, forcing his voice to stay flat. “So you say, and yet I recall you turning down people whose principles of design you didn’t agree with. So who is bending to whom?”

Kaveh’s voice was warm when he said, “You haven’t changed at all.”

He was smiling tentatively as if he were affectionately remembering the way they used to speak to each other. But there was no way. Al-Haitham had been cruel by all of Kaveh’s definitions and then Kaveh had left. The break was still jagged and he found himself still getting caught on the edges.

“I’m sure,” he said stiffly. “Not much has happened since we last spoke.”

Kaveh leaned forward, resting his elbow on his knee. “Are you saying you were bored without me?” 

“I’m saying I’ve had a peaceful time and haven’t faced any tribulations that would force me to change my character.”

It came out a bit crueler than intended and he regretted it immediately with the way Kaveh’s smile fell.

“I didn’t mean it like that,” said Al-Haitham.

“I’m sure you didn’t.”

Backtrack. Backtrack. He’d misstepped, certainly. But fixing things via words had never been Al-Haitham’s strong suit.

He’d meant to have some kind of clever retort, but Al-Haitham was suddenly overwhelmed with the knowledge that Kaveh was here; finally in this house, in front of him after all these years. He could feel the seeds in his chest waking, close to choking him again.

And he fucked up.

“I meant—” Al-Haitham grit his teeth. Being at a loss for words did not suit him. “I had an uneventful time. Not necessarily boring, but—not challenging, or interesting. The way it used to be.”

Kaveh’s lips thinned. “I’ll accept that.”

Something in his chest loosened in relief, but Al-Haitham did not say that out loud.

“Well,” he said, stilted. “I have work.

A faint smile. “I know, I know, get going.”

Al-Haitham turned abruptly and stumbled on his way to the door when he felt a new sprout take root.

“Did you trip over nothing?” Kaveh laughed.

The sound of it reverberated through his bones, warming the pit of his stomach even against the pain of the flower digging deeper into his flesh.

“No,” Al-Haitham said gruffly.

Kaveh snorted. “Have a good day.” His smile laced so strongly through his voice, Al-Haitham could imagine the shape of his teeth around the words.

He threw the door open and stepped outside. He barely managed to close it without slamming it before he fell to his knees and coughed up a mourning flower, whole and intact.

Archons, Al-Haitham thought.)

-

They didn’t talk about the conversation they had after the Traveler was at the house because honestly, neither of them knew how to approach it. And maybe Kaveh shouldn’t have said that, maybe he was being too harsh on himself and his old classmate, but it got Kaveh to shut up and end the conversation, so he took what he could get.

So they moved on. They continued with their daily lives and every few days, Al-Haitham would give Kaveh some flowers. Sometimes, Kaveh would make a comment about Al-Haitham’s unrequited, asking if he’d made any progress on resolving the Hanahaki, or making yet another quip about how many flowers Al-Haitham was giving away, to which Al-Haitham would say, “I’m not sure they care about flowers from me. They get plenty enough as it is.”

“Perhaps I should meet them,” suggested Kaveh. “I’m a great wingman. I could give you a fighting chance.”

“If they knew I had a roommate like you, you’d more likely scare them away.”

Al-Haitham had grown used to living with Kaveh—long enough that he’d also grown used to coughing up flowers over the most mundane things. What he wasn’t used to was tracking them, holding them, keeping the evidence of his pathetic eight year old feelings.

At least when Kaveh hadn’t known, Al-Haitham had thrown away the flowers or burned them or swept them under furniture on sight, pretending equally that they did not exist. But the act of keeping them and giving away felt like a persistent reminder of how terribly unreciprocated his feelings were and how long they had clung to him.

And when he thought he would drown in all the piles of flowers he was gathering, a blessing disguised as a curse disguised as a blessing came in the form of a promotion he didn’t ask for.

He knew, objectively, what it meant to stage a coup, what the consequences of a coup were, but he never expected people to turn to him for guidance. Yes, he’d planned the whole damn thing. Yes, he had many qualities that people wanted in a leader—objectivity, rationality, level-headedness and ability to see the greater picture—but the ruins of the Akademiya administration forgot to consider one thing: he didn’t want to deal with it.

Well, lay in the bed you’ve made, he supposed, because on an ordinary Tuesday morning, Al-Haitham had gone to work expecting his usual stack of paperwork. Instead, the two remaining sages accosted him. The Mahamata accosted him. Lesser Lord Kusanali herself accosted him. Asked him all these questions. Asked him for his thoughts. Asked him to lead because who else had the mental fortitude to hold the strings of Sumeru together until the glue had a chance to take?

“No,” he said. 

“Al-Haitham,” said Lesser Lord Kusanali. “Please reconsider. The state of Sumeru is very fragile right now and you could be a pillar to help stabilize it until it heals.”

“You can find someone else, I’m sure.”

“I could,” she nodded. “Certainly. But it’s a matter of time. And optimization. Think, Al-Haitham. You were at the heart of the operation that freed me. You saw the roots of corruption and instead of sitting idly by, you acted quietly in the shadows and waited for your chance to strike. You have the mind of a strategist, so you would understand that timing is everything, right? Why would stage a coup if you won’t see it through to the end? What will your efforts be for if they do not last?”

Al-Haitham imagined a world where they did not last: another Azar, another false god. People were quick to call Al-Haitham arrogant, but that wasn’t entirely true, he just had no falsehoods about his capabilities. He did not waste time with false humility. Nor did he have the arrogance to tamper with divinity, to turn his selfish desires outward onto the world. He did not have the arrogance of the sages, and he also did not have the arrogance to believe that the problems of Sumeu would end with his singular action.

He thought of the idealists of the world that believed in the hearts of people. He thought of Nilou and her theater almost reaching its end. He thought of artists in Sumeru, of all the wisdom and knowledge that could have been lost because the sages—with their single-mindedness and flawed human subjectivity—judged it as unworthy. And, inevitably, he thought of Kaveh and what he would say. What he believed. Of the mourning he would do if anything were lost.

“Fine,” he sighed.

Lesser Lord Kusanali—bright-eyed, small-bodied—clapped her hands together in delight while she smiled at him with a gaze older than his grandmother’s grandmother’s grandmother’s grandmother’s grandmother. It was a jarring sight, to say the least. But certainly fascinating, and he decided then and there that he wouldn’t mind the position too much if he could pick the mind of the God of Wisdom.

“Excellent,” said the Dendro Archon.

And so, the following tasks occupied his mind for days, leaving no room for flowers and no time for feelings to fester. He, unfortunately, had to spend much, much more time on his feet, but at least his salary increased.

-

(The first meal they shared together when Kaveh first moved in went like this:

Starting with an argument, of course. Al-Haitham had just come home from work to find Kaveh cleaning the house. He’d insisted that Kaveh did not need to, and all Kaveh had responded with was something about how awful the space was, how there was dust everywhere, how he couldn’t believe Al-Haitham had lived like this for years and, well, Kaveh lived here now so why shouldn’t he try to make the space more comfortable for himself?

“Already acting like you own the place?” Al-Haitham had raised an eyebrow.

“You offered to let me live here!” Kaveh had screeched. “But I can leave, if you so vehemently dislike me cleaning .”

No. Al-Haitham nearly cried, the word rising up in his throat like bile. Kaveh could not leave again. He’d just gotten him back.

But Al-Haitham had never been one to let his desperation show, so all he said was, “And where else would you go?”

Kaveh threw his hands up. “I don’t know! Gods, Al-Haitham, do you have to be so cruel when I’ve just moved in?”

He hadn’t meant to be cruel. He’d meant it genuinely, because if Kaveh left again with Al-Haitham now knowing that Kaveh was back in the city, he knew that the proximity—the so close but so far—would eat him alive.

Kaveh’s face had gone red from irritation. He’d shoved his hands in his hair, on the verge of ripping something out, and he wasn’t looking at Al-Haitham. He was staring at the fallen duster like it had bitten him.

No wonder they hadn’t worked out in the Akademiya. No wonder Kaveh left him.

“I didn’t mean it cruelly,” said Al-Haitham quietly.

Kaveh finally lifted his head. He gave Al-Haitham a curious look. “Well, I was trying to do something nice for you, as thanks for letting me stay with you.”

“I never asked you to do that.”

“Yeah, because I meant to do it out of the kindness of my heart , which doesn’t require you to tell me.” Kaveh sounded less aggravated than before, and more the normal amount of irritated he usually had when speaking to Al-Haitham.

He picked up the duster again, which Al-Haitham considered a victory.

“And you’re thanking me by messing up my books? There was an order in my head to where I put them, even if other people don’t understand it.”

Kaveh shot him an exasperated look with just enough fondness that it almost felt like they were back in the Akademiya. “You’re ridiculous.”

Familiar words from familiar days—he hadn’t been called ridiculous by Kaveh in years. And maybe, just because he wanted to see Kaveh’s reaction, he said, “But this is still my house.”

“You—!”

Al-Haitham turned towards the shelves to hide his smile.

“Thank you for cleaning up,” said Al-Haitham. “But you don’t have to.”

“I live here now, don’t I?” Kaveh mumbled. “I’d like to clean up the space for myself, if not you.”

Yes, he did live here now. Al-Haitham coughed as quietly as he could and swallowed a particularly painful flower stem.

“Well, that’s your choice,” said Al-Haitham. “Remember that I did not put you up to it.”

“Yes, yes, I know.” Kaveh sighed exasperated.

The flowers climbed up his ribcage. He could imagine the vines twining around his bones, slotting through his ribs, until they touched his lungs, then reached his throat, and he pulled back from the bookshelf to retreat to the door.

“Do you have any preferences for dinner?” Al-Haitham barely managed to hold back a cough.

“What?” Kaveh blinked at him.

“Dinner? Do you want anything in particular?”

“Are you going to cook for me?” He sounded incredulous.

Al-Haitham rolled his eyes. “Yes, unless you don’t trust my cooking. In which case we can get something in the city.”

“Why?” Kaveh’s grip on the duster tightened. 

Why? Why are you cooking for me? Why are you doing this? What is this going to cost me? Al-Haitham once knew Kaveh well enough to guess all that went on his head, and even if time had eroded that, he could still see it plain on his face.

He chose to ignore all of them, and instead answered, “Because it’s dinnertime.” Then, he stepped beyond the door before Kaveh could ask him any more questions. “If you have no preferences, I’ll make something myself and you can’t complain to me if you don’t like it.”

Then, he fully retreated into the hall and out of Kaveh’s view. He waited in the kitchen, grasping the countertop until he could finally breathe again.

Kaveh stayed secluded in the study while Al-Haitham worked on making the tajine. When it was finished, he called Kaveh over to the dining room twice before Kaveh reluctantly set the broom down and entered sheepishly like he wasn’t supposed to be there.

The first dinner went by quietly and awkwardly. 

Well, Al-Haitham was sure Kaveh found it awkward, since they didn’t say a single word to each other—but he found it rather peaceful. Kaveh ate the tajine Al-Haitham made him sullenly while occasionally darting a glance up at him, but Al-Haitham kept his eyes glued to his book and his headphones on, though he didn’t turn the noise-canceling on.

Then, when they had finished, Kaveh reached for Al-Haitham’s plate to bring to the sink, but Al-Haitham elbowed him out of the way and grabbed it back.

“Worry about washing your own plate,” said Al-Haitham.

And Kaveh had stared at him for one long moment before he walked back to the sink. When he finished washing, he hovered near the counter and watched Al-Haitham wash his plate.

“Can I help you?” asked Al-Haitham.

“I just—” His voice came out slightly strangled. “Is this supposed to be an apology?”

Al-Haitham pretended like his breath didn’t stutter as something cold splashed through his veins—because the question could mean a million different things. Was the dinner the apology and offending him in the study the reason? The house the apology and the Akademiya the reason? Or the dinner for everything? The house for everything?

“I’m not quite sure what you mean,” Al-Haitham had said.

Kaveh was silent for a long moment before he stepped away. “Nevermind.”

Al-Haitham felt the cold spot in the air where Kaveh’s shoulder had once been. He wasn’t quite sure of the question, but still, he answered, “It is not. I was just making dinner.”

He felt more than heard Kaveh exhale. “It’s that simple?”

“It is.”

“...I see.” 

Al-Haitham was looking down at the sink, which was why he didn’t see Kaveh leave. But as he set the plate onto the drying rack, he heard the door to Kaveh’s new room swing shut.)

-

“You haven’t been home lately,” said Kaveh when Al-Haitham walked in.

Al-Haitham hummed as he dropped his keys into the bowl by the door and started heading deeper into the house.

“Anything you want to tell me?” Kaveh leaned forward on the couch. “Like perhaps if you’ve been seeing a certain someone?”

He turned and gave Kaveh a flat look. “I’ve been busy with work.”

The suggestive smile on Kaveh’s face dropped, replaced with more bafflement. “Since when are you busy with work?”

“Since I got promoted.”

The shock on Kaveh’s face almost made him laugh. “You got promoted?”

“A little against my will, but yes. I did.” 

“‘Against your will,’” scoffed Kaveh. “Only you could get promoted against your will. The only thing you ever try at is laying low, and yet you somehow keep calling attention to yourself.”

“It’s not my business what people choose to notice about me.”

“You staged a coup, Al-Haitham. How did you expect to not get noticed?” Kaveh ran a hand down his face, stretching all of his features comically before he let out a weary sigh. “What, exactly, did you get promoted to?”

Al-Haitham paused at the entrance to the study, wondering what to say. But he’d never been one to mince his words, so he simply said, “Acting Grand Sage.”

“Grand Sage?” screeched Kaveh.

“Acting,” he emphasized. “Until they can find someone else more suitable. And if they don’t find someone soon, well, I might still resign to hurry them along in their decision-making process.”

Kaveh stared at him for a long moment with his mouth open like a caricature. “Only you would be so—so flippant about the position of the Grand Sage.”

“Acting,” corrected Al-Haitham.

“Acting,” Kaveh spat. “Like that matters.”

“It does because I don’t plan on making this a permanent position for myself.”

Kaveh dragged his hands through his hair. “How—are you even qualified for the position? Nevermind, don’t answer that, I don’t want you talking about your employment with me.” He sighed and slumped against the couch. “So you got promoted. And that’s why you haven’t been home lately?”

Al-Haitham turned to face Kaveh. “Yes. Not because I suddenly have a secret lover.”

Kaveh flushed. “I was just making sure…”

Al-Haitham raised an eyebrow.

“Don’t look at me like that,” he scowled. “I just wanted to see if you were making progress on curing your ailment, though of course you would come back with a whole ass job promotion.”

Al-Haitham smiled at that. “Yes, well, don’t feel bad about it for too long.”

“Because you’re rushing to resign, I know. Archons, the nerve of you.” Kaveh drummed his fingers along the arm of the couch before he stilled. When he spoke next, his voice came out softer. “I also…I wondered if you were making progress because I noticed—or I thought you were coughing up less…flowers.”

Al-Haitham gave him a flat look. “I’ve been busy with my job.”

“Yes, I know that now. Excuse me for being a bit optimistic that you might be getting better.”

Optimistic that Al-Haitham might be progressing his relationship with some mysterious third person. He tried not to ignore the little jab of pain in his chest.

“Well, I apologize for not supplying you regularly,” said Al-Haitham wryly. “I’ll be sure—”

“Do not take that as an invitation to cough up more flowers.”

Al-Haitham smiled.

“I’m urging you again, I think you should try to do something about your person.”

“I’m so busy with my new job now,” said Al-Haitham flatly. “And I’m busy with my nuisance of a roommate. When would I find time to romance someone?”

The joke didn’t land the way he wanted to, because instead of laughing, Kaveh frowned so low it looked carved into his face.

“I’m not trying to take time away from you,” said Kaveh quietly.

Al-Haitham didn’t know what to say without revealing too much. And, selfishly, he chose his own self-preservation and pretended not to hear. “What do you want for dinner tonight?”

Kaveh looked at him for a long moment before he exhaled “Fattoush. And make your pita less dry or something because the last time you made it made me feel like I was eating ash.”

Al-Haitham exhaled in relief. “Right, it’s my fault that you made the oven too hot.”

“Hey!”

And despite his best efforts, Kaveh was a weed in his mind as stubborn as mint, and perhaps the time apart was also getting to him because Al-Haitham felt a new flower sprout in his ribs. Before he could cough in front of Kaveh, Al-Haitham quickly excused himself to the bathroom and coughed up a mourning flower—the petals beautiful and lovely and whole. He washed it off, as per routine, and hid it away before returning to the kitchen to help with dinner.

Later, after they’d eaten, Al-Haitham told him, “By the way, I do have another flower for you.”

He gave it to Kaveh because it was part of their routine now. But when Kaveh took it, he stared at the flower with an expression that—for once—was unreadable.

-

When Kaveh first moved in, Al-Haitham hadn’t realized that his cleaning frenzy was…a thing. At least not the first time. But then every time he returned from work, he always found Kaveh sweeping under the couch, cleaning the slats on the window shutters, dusting every horizontal surface he could find—and that was when Al-Haitham realized Kaveh was doing this for a reason.

The cleaning would have been fine and normal if, one: he didn’t suspect Kaveh was doing it from a place of deep, inescapable guilt. And two: Al-Haitham had flowers he wanted to hide. And once he realized Kaveh’s neurotic cleaning existed, he had to redouble his efforts to hide evidence of his flowers.

It took him only a few days to confirm that yes, Kaveh’s urgency to tidy the house came from the trappings of his old guilt. After the first dinner together, Kaveh went into a frenzy, deep cleaning every corner of every room. Al-Haitham kept telling Kaveh to stop cleaning the house, and Kaveh kept not listening. So Al-Haitham had to check under and over every furniture item in the house to make sure he didn’t miss any stray flower petals or other damning evidence that he’d pathetically held onto his feelings all these years.

On day eight of living together, Al-Haitham had pulled Kaveh away from his broom and told him, “You can pay rent instead of cleaning the house if you feel the need to do something. And you can use that time to work on commissions instead.”

Kaveh had scowled at having been seen through so easily and it made Al-Haitham feel a certain amount of satisfaction that the years couldn’t make him completely blind to Kaveh.

So Kaveh started paying him a small rent fee—one that he’d first thought was too low, but quickly swallowed his words when Al-Haitham made a comment asking if he could even afford more than that. The cleaning slowed. Al-Haitham breathed easier. And that was that.

Except now, Al-Haitham started coming home again to Kaveh mopping, sweeping, glaring at him when he moved something out of place. Or waking up to it—which was the worst part. Stepping out of his room before coffee to find Kaveh dusting or tidying or adding new random decorations to the house, but this was too familiar, too close to how he acted when they first moved in.

“What are you doing?” asked Al-Haitham as he stepped into the hall.

“Hey!” Kaveh shooed him backwards. “Not yet, I just mopped that part of the hall.”

Al-Haitham raised an eyebrow but took a step backward into his room and waited patiently for Kaveh to give him the go-ahead. 

“What’s all this?” 

“I thought I’d do some cleaning,” said Kaveh without looking up from the floor. “We’ve both been busy lately—you with your fancy new job, and me with my commissions—but I found a bit of free time, so I thought I’d do something nice and freshen up the house. You can come out now, by the way.”

“You’re sure?” Al-Haitham stepped further into the hall and made his way to the kitchen. “Not because you feel like you need to ease your guilt for staying here?”

Kaveh threw the mop down. “Can you let me have my moment?”

Al-Haitham looked at him flatly. “What’s on your mind?”

Kaveh chewed on his lip. “I think you should tell your person. I promise I won’t be in the way for—whatever happens after.”

“Kaveh, that was a joke.”

“I didn’t know you were capable of making those.” Kaveh huffed. “Regardless, I think it’s worth telling them. I mean, you never know; they could return your feelings and you can stop coughing up flowers.”

“Ah, but what about your training with the Traveler?”

“Shut the fuck up with that for one second.” He shoved a hand through his hair. “It’s fine, I don’t need your flowers because I can just go to the desert and get them.”

“All the way to the Girdle of the Sands,” he mused, starting a new pot of coffee. “Very convenient and nearby. It won’t take away from your time to work on your commissions at all.”

“Shut—”

“Have you considered that I’m trying to help you by taking the material collection burden off of you? Perhaps you’re meddling in that.”

“Do not turn this back on me.” Kaveh whirled on him. “What about this: in exchange for your flowers, I help you win the affections of your person.”

Al-Haitham almost laughed at the irony. “You can’t.”

Kaveh frowned. “Why not?”

“There’s too much to explain.” Why it wouldn’t work out. Why it already didn't work out.

Some of the sorrow must have leaked into his voice, because Kaveh softened. “I have the time.”

His heart twisted. “No, you don’t. And I don’t want to waste any of it. Just go about your day and I’ll go about mine.”

“Just let me worry about you. I am worried about you.”

“So you’ve said.”

“Please, Al-Haitham.” His voice turned pleading. “Just tell me who it is and I’ll help you get your feelings returned.”

Al-Haitham almost laughed. “No.”

“Al-Haitham.”  

“I’m fine.” Al-Haitham stepped away from the counter. He couldn’t be here any longer. “And I have work. So I’ll be going.” 

“Of course,” muttered Kaveh bitterly. “Go do your duties as the Acting Grand Sage and complain about how much you want to leave.”

Al-Haitham allowed a small smile. “I will.”

Kaveh was silent for a moment, long enough to make Al-Haitham break.

“I… appreciate your concern for me, Kaveh,” he sighed. “But it’s unnecessary. The only reason I’m not telling you who it is is because there is well and truly nothing you or I could do about it.” 

“So you’re saying it’s hopeless?” asked Kaveh darkly.

“I’m saying there’s no point in worrying about something you have no power over.” No matter how time had scabbed over the wound. No matter how many flowers had grown in the garden. “I know your idealism begs you to fix everything wrong with the world, but there are some things you cannot change. And I’d rather not see you hurt over it.” Al-Haitham could not ask Kaveh of this, no matter how much it hurt. This was the closest admission he could allow.

Finally, Kaveh laughed, a little mirthlessly. “Why are you the one reassuring me when you’re the one with Hanahaki?”

“Because I’m not worried and you are. Are you reassured?”

“No.”

Al-Haitham tried to keep the humor out of his voice. “I’ll try again next time.”

Kaveh stared at him for a long moment before turning away. “Go—go do your job.”

This smile Al-Haitham kept for himself. “I will.”

Al-Haitham left the house with his coffee still cooling on the table, which he sorely regretted later, because work that day involved a series of events where the Traveler had to get involved. After dealing with an old classmate named Siraj, Al-Haitham turned to the Traveler.

“You seem to be somewhat of a harbinger of misfortune,” he said wryly. “My days as the Acting Grand Sage were relatively peaceful until you showed up.”

The Traveler winced. “Sorry about that.”

“It’s not your fault,” said Al-Haitham. “I was just making an observation.”

“Paimon agrees,” said Paimon, floating up near his head. “Every time we go to a new place, Paimon hopes that it’ll be more normal but there’s always some kind of new problem going on that we have to fix.”

“Maybe you’re the problem, Paimon,” said the Traveler.

“Hey!”

Al-Haitham almost wanted to watch them a little longer, but his watch told him he was fifteen minutes past five p.m., which meant it was about time he left. He lingered back a step to leave but the Traveler turned to him.

“Are you heading home?” she asked.

“I am.”

“Ooh, tell Kaveh we said hi!” Paimon bobbed excitedly.

Al-Haitham inclined his head. “I will.”

“Oh, oh, and tell Kaveh to meet us in the desert next time. There’s this new domain that Paimon found—”

“You didn’t find it Paimon, I did,” interrupted the Traveler.

“Well, actually Paimon saw it first when Paimon got flung by that—”

“I’ll tell him,” interrupted Al-Haitham. 

Paimon paused like she remembered they had an audience. “Also tell him we need twenty mourning flowers this time. Or Paimon guesses we should tell you. You know, it’s really cool that you’re growing these flowers for him—”

“Paimon,” interrupted the Traveler. “Can you go see what the fruit stand has for sale?”

“What? Are you trying to get rid of Paim—”

“There’s a new fruit dish recipe I want to try out—”

“Got it!” Paimon zipped off, leaving the two of them alone.

Al-Haitham raised an eyebrow.

The Traveler turned to him. “Can I ask you a question?”

“My working hours ended fifteen minutes ago.”

“Not about work.”

He thought for a moment before conceding. “What’s your question?”

“I was just curious: where are you getting all of these mourning flowers?”

Al-Haitham stayed silent.

“Because I don’t think you’re growing them in your room.”

“Why is this relevant?” he asked.

She shrugged. “It’s not, I guess I’m just curious.” 

Al-Haitham didn’t respond.

After a moment, the Traveler continued. “He just seems…unhappy when he trains.”

Al-Haitham frowned. “He’s usually unhappy for some reason or another. The state of the world or his own personal history.”

“Right, but, more than usual. I think.” She turned to look where Paimon was hovering excitedly around the fruit stand. “When we first met him, we got him mourning flowers from the desert and he seemed fine. But now that he’s supplying his own, he seems upset.” She glanced at him. “I was wondering if it had something to do with you.”

Al-Haitham pressed his lips together. 

“I don’t want to assume anything,” she said slowly. “Because I’m not sure what exactly is going on. But I’ve…I’ve just been wondering.”

“What was your goal with this conversation?” he finally asked.

The Traveler shrugged. “I was just curious. Paimon too, but I thought I’d give you a bit more privacy.”

“I see.” 

He couldn’t fault the Traveler for being curious, but he also didn’t care for pity. Neither she nor Paimon needed to know that Al-Haitham was growing mourning flowers in his chest instead of soil, and that was why Kaveh was so upset. 

Behind her, the rest of the city sloped downwards. All he’d need to do to get home was take the first path down until his feet carried him home. And at the end of it all would be Kaveh—gardener of his flowers—continuing in their mundane routine like a dream he never thought he’d get to see the end of.

Which Al-Haitham desperately wanted to return to right now. It’d been such a long work day.

“If that’s all,” he said. “I’ll be heading home.”

“I just—” The Traveler took a step forward and then held herself back. “I worry about him. I mean, you know him better than me, but from what I can tell, he really cares about people. He worries like the pain is his own.”

Al-Haitham almost snorted. “You are correct on that front.”

“Just…take care of yourself, too, Al-Haitham.”

Al-Haitham shook his head and turned around. “I always have.”

-

(The first thing Al-Haitham had noticed when Kaveh moved in was his sleep schedule.

Kaveh still stayed up late it seemed—a habit carried over from their Akademiya days. At first, it’d been out of necessity to complete all the various Kshahrewar design projects for becoming an architect, then it stayed long enough to alter his biological clock. Now, Kaveh was up at midnight in their house, hammering into the night while muttering madly to himself about blueprints and materials and tearing his hair out over little details Al-Haitham had little familiarity with.

The lights were terribly dim in the living room as he passed Kaveh on the way to bed—dark enough that it cast darker shadows on his eyebags, and Al-Haitham could almost imagine Kaveh in the Akademiya greens and still ruining his eyes in the fading lamplight. He had the same expression on his face when Al-Haitham found him in the House of Daena before a particularly cruel project due the next afternoon.

He remembered bringing Kaveh a new cup of coffee as well as a glass of water, then asked if he needed anything else.

“You—” Kaveh had flushed, but the high collar of the uniform had hidden the pink of his neck. “Could you—possibly—stay?”

And since Al-Haitham had had no flowers in his chest then, no thorns growing in him at the time, he pulled out a book and sat across the table from Kaveh until dawn.

Now, though, Al-Haitham had work in the morning, so he said, “Keep it down. It’s nearly midnight.”

Kaveh startled. “Oh! Oh, sorry, Al-Haitham.” He stared down at his materials. “I…sorry. I’ll be quiet.”

He didn’t know why that of all things made a root shift in his chest, but Al-Haitham turned and quickly disappeared into his room.

Come morning, he was surprised to find Kaveh’s door still open. And when he entered the kitchen, he was even more surprised to find Kaveh sitting at the table. He was staring blearily down at his plate of meloui with the jam already melted while his head rested in his hand, the other hand idly running a finger down the handle of his coffee mug.

And across the table from him: another mug of coffee.

When he walked in, Kaveh jerked up.

“Oh.” Kaveh blinked, eyes still unfocused. “Good morning.”

“Good morning…” Al-Haitham eyed the coffee mug. “Were you up all night?”

“Yeah.” Kaveh rubbed his eye. “Yeah, I was. I had—um—you know, big project. First one after Alcazarzaray so I don’t want to mess it up, you know? I can’t afford to displease a client. But, um, sorry for the noise. I know I just moved in and I don’t want to be a bother—”

“What’s this?” Al-Haitham gestured at the second mug. “A poor remedy to your sleepless night?”

“Oh.” Kaveh stared at it like he’d forgotten it was there. “I made that for you. As an apology. You still drink coffee, right?”

A vine twined around his ribcage, close to his heart. Al-Haitham pressed his lips together, then said, “Yes.”

“Oh, good. I’m glad that’s also the same, then.” Kaveh downed the rest of his coffee and shoved the plate towards Al-Haitham’s side. “Well, I’m off to meet the client. I made that for myself, but I don’t really have an appetite right now. So you can have it.”

Al-Haitham stared at the plate. “Kaveh, I can’t eat your breakfast.”

He waved his hand. “It’ll go to waste otherwise.”

“No, I mean.” Al-Haitham stepped in front of him to block his path. “You are not about to go about your day when I’m sure the last time you ate was over twelve hours ago. Kaveh, sit.”

“I’ll be late.” Kaveh stared at the plate, then sighed. “Fuck, fine. I’ll wrap it up. I really have to go though.”

Al-Haitham narrowed his eyes. 

Kaveh stepped back and threw his hands up in surrender. “I’m doing it, I’m doing it. Calm down.”

Al-Haitham watched with a hawk’s eye as Kaveh grabbed a clean cloth and wrapped the flatbread into a neat little package. Then, he peeled back the top so the meloui was exposed—easy access to eat and walk. He shot a glance at Al-Haitham like, Are you happy now? before brushing past him to head to the door.

Al-Haitham almost let him go, but the words slipped out before he could stop them. “All these years and you still don’t know how to take care of yourself. Aren’t you supposed to be my senior?”

Kaveh had paused, then turned back, smiling wryly. “All these years and you still haven’t learned how to talk to people. Don’t concern yourself with me, Al-Haitham. I’ll be fine.”

Then, he’d left. The sound of the door shutting echoed in Al-Haitham’s head, almost persistent enough to hide the feeling of a new flower blooming—painfully—in his chest.)

-

Al-Haitham knew Kaveh must have suffered through another failed commission when the clock ticked past ten p.m. and he still hadn’t come home. He looked up from his book, stared at the time for a long moment, then sighed and set the book down on the couch before standing. Al-Haitham grabbed his keys and his jacket off the back of the couch before leaving the house and striding into the night.

The city was colder after dark, but not in the same way the desert was. In the city, there were still other bodies moving through the hilled streets, different lamps and flames lighting up the paths. The desert was cold and empty at night—just you and the sand and the sky. And the snakes and scorpions waiting to bite your ankles.

He checked the only place he knew Kaveh would be: Lambad’s Tavern, drinking away his sorrows. When he pushed open the door, Lambad gave him a weary smile and jerked his thumb towards a table near the back.

“Thank you,” he said with a nod before stepping further into the tavern.

Kaveh sat in the back with his head down on the table, one arm up supporting his forehead while the other twined around a goblet—still half full of something-strong smelling.

“Kaveh,” said Al-Haitham.

Kaveh jerked up his head. “Huh?”

“Are you finished?”

Kaveh blinked slowly, then sat up straight. “What are you doing here?”

“Taking you home. As I’ve done before multiple times.” 

“Shhh.” Kaveh leapt to his feet, pressing a finger to Al-Haitham’s lips. “Not so loud.”

Al-Haitham pried Kaveh’s finger off. “What are you on about?”

“Don’t—Don’t—Don’t say that so loud.” Kaveh swayed, head falling on Al-Haitham’s shoulder. “I can’t—people can’t know I'm living with you.”

His heart throbbed. “Oh, and why is that?”

“Bad for clients. Bad for my reputation,” Kaveh mumbled into the cloth of Al-Haitham’s shirt. He could feel the movement of Kaveh’s mouth on his skin, the heat of his breath burning through the fabric like there wasn’t a barrier at all. “If—If—Imagine if someone found out I was broke. Who would want to hire me? Then I’ll never move out and you’ll be stuck with me forever.”

That doesn’t sound too bad, he almost said, but perhaps that was a conversation to save for when Kaveh was sober.

“I see,” said Al-Haitham wryly.

“Ahhh.” Kaveh finally lifted his head and Al-Haitham tried not to shiver at the new cold air. “I’m…I drank a lot tonight. I don’t know how much money I have left.” He glanced at his cup for a long moment then downed it in one go.

“Kaveh—”

“I have to get my money’s worth,” said Kaveh. He looped an arm through Al-Haitham’s and tugged. “Come on, I have to go settle my tab.”

Al-Haitham let himself be pulled to the counter and ignored Lambad’s raised eyebrow.

“Closing your tab, Kaveh?” asked Lambad, glancing down at their linked arms.

Al-Haitham pulled his arm out and moved in front of Kaveh. “Yes.”

“What? What are you doing!” Kaveh cried.

Al-Haitham pulled out a pouch of Mora and dropped it on the counter before Kaveh could move. “I believe that’s enough. Whatever extra’s in there can be a tip for dealing with him.”

“Hey!”  

Al-Haitham turned to find Kaveh’s face flushed red like a cherry. Something like fondness curled in his gut, but he stamped it out before it could make him smile.

“Let’s go.” Al-Haitham grabbed Kaveh by the elbow and tugged him towards the door, dropping it only when they were outside.

“Why did you pay for me?” Kaveh screeched.

Al-Haitham winced. “Not so loud, Kaveh. It’s late.”

“You didn’t have to pay for me,” said Kaveh, a bit softer. Then his face twisted. “Why did you do that? Are you going to charge interest? Or are you going to make me pay you back in some other way later?”

“Why do you always believe the worst of me? Perhaps I just wanted to do something nice.”

“Ha, sure. When men can create gods.”

Already attempted, thought Al-Haitham. But he just said, “Tell me about the commission that made you try to drink your water weight in wine.”

“Why are you assuming it’s a commission?”

“Is it not?” He raised an eyebrow.

Kaveh fixed him with a hard stare before he began walking. His steps were a little wobbly when he said, “Well, the client wanted—he wanted the house to mimic this historic building in Liyue, which I could have done, except I felt odd about completely copying the style of another building. And then he also wanted serpentine in the floor—which is a very impractical stone by the way, considering it’s about as hard as your teeth. And he had many other specifications that I tried to explain would not work, but each time he would shut me down until he said I was ‘too picky’ and I finally couldn’t stand it, so I dropped him.” Kaveh huffed, strong enough to blow a strand of hair out of his face. Al-Haitham tried not to smile at that.

“So instead of bearing through it, you dropped him?”

“Of course! To do so otherwise would go against my principles!”

“Ah, right. The Light of Kshahrewar and his beacon of principles.”

“I don’t need this from you right now.” Kaveh glared at him before ripping his gaze away. “I’ve just had the shittiest end to the shittiest week and you coming here to gloat at me isn’t helping.”

“I’m not gloating, Kaveh.”

“Oh, please.” Kaveh scowled into the dark. “You always get on my ass about my debt and being able to afford my drinks and then you swoop in and pay my tab just to show how little burden it is on you.”

Kaveh’s voice had risen somewhere in the middle of the sentence, loud enough that his words were echoing off the buildings. He always spoke a bit louder than most, always excited or emphatic or some other reason—but he was so deliriously drunk right now that he’d seemed to have lost the sense that he was yelling in public. Al-Haitham couldn’t care less, but he knew Kaveh would melt from embarrassment when he sobered up, so he reached for Kaveh’s shoulder.

“Kaveh, you should lower your v—”

“You’d tell me, right?” Kaveh turned, suddenly desperate. He wrenched out of reach of Al-Haitham’s hand and stood in front of him.  “If I was too much? If I was disturbing your life too much? If I was—keeping you. From things you wanted. Because I know we never talked about life after the Akademiya, but I know you would have never wanted a washed out roommate who kept moving your books out of place.”

He felt something in his chest soften. “Kaveh, that’s not—”

“Ah, whatever.” Kaveh pulled away. “Whatever, whatever, whatever. Don’t answer me. Don’t mind me. It’ll be a miracle if I remember any of the bullshit that came out of my mouth tomorrow.”

“You’re not washed out,” he said. “Far from it.”

“Spare me.” Kaveh waved him away.

Perhaps it wasn’t just the commission he’d been drinking about, but this, too.

He reached for Kaveh again, hand hovering near his shoulder.

“Archons, it’s freezing.” He suddenly let out a violent shiver.

Al-Haitham’s hand froze. He hesitated, finger twitching, before he let his hand drop in the air between them.

“Gah, hurry up, hurry up. I feel like a cryo slime is crawling up my ass. It’s so fucking cold!”

Al-Haitham snorted, despite himself. “Really? I feel fine.”

Kaveh turned back just so Al-Haitham could see him scowl. “Of course you do. You’ve got your giant jacket hanging off your shoulder.”

Perhaps the night was affecting him as well, because Al-Haitham found himself saying, “Do you want it, then?”

Kaveh blinked at him. “Are you serious?” 

“Have you ever known me not to be?”

Kaveh groaned suddenly. “Can you not—answer a question with another question?”

“I’m sure I can, it’s less entertaining though.”

Kaveh stepped toward him, looking ready to throttle him when something caught his foot and then suddenly he was tipping forward. Al-Haitham thrust his arms out before his brain could catch up and suddenly he had an armful of Kaveh in front of him.

The top of Kaveh’s head knocked into Al-Haitham’s chest. There was a pause before he looked up. Their eyes connected and then Kaveh was scrambling backwards until he hit a tree.

Al-Haitham raised an eyebrow.

“Um.” Kaveh coughed. “The wine…”

“Yes, of course, blame it on the wine and not your terrible reflexes,” said Al-Haitham wryly, though his entire heart was slamming against his ribcage like a captive. 

“Alcohol impairs your reflexes!” Kaveh burst, turning red. “Fuck you!”

He smiled. “That’s not a very nice thing to say to someone about to give you their jacket.”

“You—!” Kaveh furrowed his eyebrows like he was trying to parse out the charity from the words. “Shut up.”

“If you say please.”

Kaveh huffed and turned around. He walked a few brisk steps before Al-Haitham shook his head and began to follow.

They managed a few steps in silence before Kaveh cleared his throat again. “Um, about your jacket.”

Al-Haitham sighed. “Do you want it?” 

“...yes.” Then, through gritted teeth, “Please.”

Al-Haitham smiled and pulled off his jacket. He held it out and watched as Kaveh tried to put it on, but with his coordination so severely lacking, Kaveh somehow couldn’t find the armholes and ended up fumbling for a bit before Al-Haitham finally took pity on him.

“Let me.”

“What—?”

Al-Haitham took the jacket back from him. He reached around and dragged the coat around his shoulders before holding the collar in place around his neck.

“Now put your arms through.”

Kaveh complied wordlessly, moving his limbs where Al-Haitham nudged, stilling where Al-Haitham held him—all the movements now easier with someone else keeping the jacket in place. Between one moment and the next, they’d somehow gotten Kaveh into the jacket and Kaveh was looking at his arms like he couldn’t quite believe it either. There was something like drunken wonder on his face before Kaveh looked up at Al-Haitham with wide eyes.

Al-Haitham nearly coughed up an entire flower into his face. 

He stepped back, half thankful for the excuse to look away from Kaveh. He turned and coughed violently into his fist, wincing when he felt something wet and prickly land on his skin. In the dark, his blood almost looked black, but at least it didn’t look like blood.

He snuck a glance at Kaveh and was struck with the fear that Kaveh would connect the dots.

But no revelation dawned on his face. Eyes still hazy from wine, Kaveh just frowned and said, “Are you thinking about your person?”

Al-Haitham swallowed the blood in his mouth. “My what?”

“The object of your unrequited affections,” said Kaveh wryly.

“Ah…” Al-Haitham didn’t know how to answer that.

Kaveh sighed and let himself fall against Al-Haitham’s shoulder. “I’m so worried about you, Al-Haitham. Why won’t you tell me who it is? Why won’t you let me help? Why don’t you trust me? I just—I want to know you like we used to.”

Al-Haitham’s heart squeezed. “You do know me.”

Foolishly, stupidly, he tugged Kaveh’s arm over his shoulder to help the walk back.

“Not enough to tell me.” Kaveh sounded angry and petulant in a way that he hadn’t heard since the Akademiya. All this time living together and this was the closest they’d ever been to addressing the way they ended the first time. “You can’t—you can’t leave me, Al-Haitham. I need you to stay.”

The alcohol must’ve been getting to Kaveh, and the skin-to-skin contact wasn’t helping Al-Haitham think any clearer either. So he just shifted Kaveh’s arm on his shoulder and said, vaguely, “I’ll be here.”

“Not if you don’t take care of your Hanahaki.” 

“Ah.” Well, that was a morbid thought: the true, long term effects of Hanahaki untreated. But Al-Haitham hadn’t thought about it because he’d lived with it for so long and it’d been fine. But now that Kaveh lived with him…

“See?” Kaveh jerked his head up before stumbling again and he fell back against Al-Haitham’s shoulder.

“I’m not going to die, Kaveh.”

“You could,” he mumbled into the skin of his neck.

“I won’t.”

“Tell me who it is,” Kaveh murmured.

Al-Haitham hoisted him up and kept walking. “Let’s get you home.”

“Home,” Kaveh mused. And then his eyes were closed, feet shuffling just enough to help Al-Haitham carry him back.

-

(On flowers: Al-Haitham rarely ventured into the desert as far as Kaveh had, but he'd still known the flowers that were growing in his chest. They were simply called mourning flowers—according to the books he’d read on desert flora—because they grew in ancient battlefields with their petals drooping as if mourning long gone heroes. Some tragically romantic lore for some flowers that decided to grow in a swamp.

Funny, honestly, that Al-Haitham the scholar was no soldier, yet they still decided to take root in him. He knew Kaveh had a fondness for them—both in their appearance and the romanticism of flowers mourning things across time.

Back in the Akademiya, Al-Haitham would sometimes catch Kaveh hunting down the rare merchant that was brave enough to bring a bundle of mourning flowers from the Girdle of the Sands into the cradle of the city. Kaveh would hear rumors of one circling through his vast social network. He’d fix Al-Haitham with a look, run off into the city to buy a bundle, and then disappear for the evening to take them somewhere.

Al-Haitham had never asked, but he knew Kaveh well enough to guess it was his father’s grave.

Before he started coughing them up, Al-Haitham had never taken a good look at the flowers. But after he did—after bouts of coughing spells that left him wiping his counters and floors of blood—he’d look at the flower on the ground, seemingly still wet with afterbirth, and think it really is beautiful.

If only he had the eye for it. He spent years wondering what kinds of stories or philosophies Kaveh had about it, what it would be like to hear his voice again. But then Kaveh moved in and he spent more time hiding the flowers than admiring them, so he had to keep wondering.

Al-Haitham wasn’t a creature of desire, usually. But sometimes he wanted—in his bloodiest, dizziest, blurriest moments, he wanted —for the flowers to clear. Not to end, not to lessen, but to ease. To become something beautiful to look at again instead of something to hide in his lungs and hide in the bushes and hide as ashes in the hearth.

But that was beside the point.

Kaveh was worried about him in a way that Al-Haitham entirely expected. Because Kaveh had a bleeding heart. Because Kaveh cared about strangers and friends turned strangers like him. And Al-Haitham wouldn’t admit it even at the threat of death, but sometimes he was afraid, too, that one day he’d choke on the flowers fully, one day he’d drown in his own blood, and then the flowers would lose their place to grow and he’d have nothing to look at at all.

Some days he could feel the roots stretching into the crevices between his bones—into the tendons, into the muscle. And it fucking hurt. But the sensation only followed after Kaveh’s laugh, Kaveh’s grin, Kaveh’s hair clips left in the bathroom and on the counters and between the couch cushions. So he couldn’t renounce it. Not entirely.

He remembered early on Kaveh coming home after one of his rare successful commissions, eyes bright like a star. He’d burst in through the front door of their shared house and planted himself directly in front of the couch where Al-Haitham was reading.

“Do you mind?” He’d asked, eyebrow aloft.

“No!” Kaveh had cried loudly, brightly. “Because I just finished the most wonderful commission with the most wonderful client!”

He launched into a tale with a fire in his eyes like they were both still young and hopeful about the world. Kaveh gestured with his hands, sat down and stood from the couch multiple times just to make sure Al-Haitham was listening, brushed their arms together once before standing and pacing around the living room again. He talked about the commission with the vigor of their Akademiya days like they were both back in the House of Daena, or in the garden, or in one of their dorm rooms—Kaveh spilling every thought in his head onto the floor because he wanted Al-Haitham to see them, to look at them, because they were friends and they’d known each other once. And now there was an imitation— here— as if time had not changed that.

Kaveh turned to look at him and the smile he gave felt like a gut punch. “I’m just so glad I got to meet her. It’s so easy to get disheartened in this profession, and architecture hurts me sometimes in a way I can’t even describe. But there’s something so wonderful about—someone appreciating your art. The things you create. Even if they’re a stranger. And the fact that it will last, too. It makes the pain worth it, I think.”

Al-Haitham could feel a new flower taking root in his chest, blooming, expanding somewhere and choking up more air, but the touch of petals against his bones were soft and familiar. And maybe that was why he allowed himself a small smile.

“You got paid for it, though, right?” asked Al-Haitham, warmer than he’d meant. “You got paid the original price that you asked for in the commission?”

Kaveh flushed red. “I— well, I mean. This project would have a greater lasting impact than the immediate present, and her financial situation was a bit compromised, so I gave her a bit of a discount. But yes, I did get paid. So don’t you worry about me making my rent on time, because I still—”

Al-Haitham laughed then. And when he watched the surprise flit across Kaveh’s face like a bird before settling into a tentative smile, he thought that, yes, Hanahaki disease could be a painful thing, but sometimes the pain could be a little sweet.)

-

They didn’t talk about that night when they got home because it wasn’t the first time Al-Haitham had needed to take Kaveh’s drunken ass home. But that also meant they didn’t talk about what Kaveh had said to him about staying, about leaving, and perhaps that was the more pressing thing they needed to address, but they’d already gone months without talking about the past, so what was one more thing to brush under the rug?

When Kaveh woke the next morning, he behaved normally, which was to say: very hungover. He grumbled at the light and sat blearily at the table while Al-Haitham dropped a mug of coffee and a glass of water under his nose.

“Stop being nice to me,” muttered Kaveh. “It’s out of character for you.”

“Is it?” mused Al-Haitham.

The following day, Kaveh woke before Al-Haitham for once. And he knew because Al-Haitham could hear him banging around the kitchen before dawn before disappearing into the morning and stayed out of the house until well after nightfall.

The day after that, Al-Haitham emerged from his room to get ready for work to find Kaveh sitting at the couch, staring aimlessly into his lap.

“What’s wrong with you?” he asked.

Kaveh startled like he hadn’t expected another person to be in the house. Al-Haitham watched his shoulders rise and fall for a moment before he slowly turned around.

“Good morning to you, too,” mumbled Kaveh.

“You’re up early,” he noted. 

“Hardly,” scowled Kaveh. “I don’t always wake up at noon, you know. Believe it or not, I am working tirelessly on my commissions.”

“I do believe you.” Al-Haitham moved to the kitchen. “I was just noting that it was early for you.”

“What do you know about me?” snapped Kaveh.

“Quite a bit, actually.” Al-Haitham watched Kaveh flinch. “At least, enough to know that something has you in a bad mood. You’re not normally this volatile in the morning.”

“I…” His shoulders slumped, the fight draining out of him. “You’re right. I’ve just been feeling off the past few days. I’m…sorry for snapping at you.”

Al-Haitham couldn’t help himself. He let out a quiet chuckle. “You’re sorry? Something truly must be wrong with you.”

“Shut up!” Kaveh shot up from the couch and stalked into the kitchen. “Shut up, oh my gods. You’re lucky I’m not so combative in the mornings because if I was as abrasive as you, you’d get a taste of your own medicine for once!”

Al-Haitham smiled because he was facing the window. When he turned back to Kaveh, he held out a coffee mug in the closest peace offering he could make.

Kaveh narrowed his eyes at it before snatching it and taking a drink. “Ow! Fuck, it’s hot!”

“Because I just took it off the stove.”

“Oh, shut up.” Kaveh set the mug down on the table and opened his mouth, inhaling and exhaling rapidly to cool his tongue.

Al-Haitham laughed and simultaneously felt a flower curl around a rib. Not nearly painful enough like the other times, but enough to itch at his throat that he had to turn and cough. When he looked back, he saw that Kaveh had stopped to watch him.

The cough had been quiet enough that he could brush it off as a normal one. So, Al-Haitham said, “Well, you seem like yourself again, so I’ll be off.”

“Sure,” said Kaveh, almost cautiously.

“I’ll see you after work.” Al-Haitham grabbed his keys out of the basket near the door and left. He made it halfway down the path to the Akademiya when he realized there was a second key looped around the teeth of the first.

Kaveh, of course, gave him shit about it later when he returned home, leaving their entire morning forgotten.

The fourth day after the drinking incident, Al-Haitham returned from work to find Kaveh pacing restlessly around the living room. He didn’t even startle when Al-Haitham entered. So, just for fun, Al-Haitham let the door slam shut.

Kaveh jumped and slammed his knee into a side table. 

“What the fuck is wrong with you?” Kaveh hissed. “Why would you do that?”

“Close the door?” Al-Haitham asked neutrally, dropping his keys in the basket.

Kaveh whipped his head up and glared. “You know what I mean.”

Al-Haitham raised an eyebrow, then said, “What are you running a hole into the carpet for?”

“I—” Kaveh turned away. “I don’t know what you mean.”

“Don’t you?” He snorted and headed toward the kitchen. Kaveh could tell him if he wanted, but he decided to give Kaveh some peace for now. “I’m going to start dinner.”

“Wait!”

He paused. “What?”

There was an awkward moment of silence where the only sound was Kaveh limping to the kitchen, still rubbing his knee from slamming it into a table. When he finally stopped in front of Al-Haitham, he looked a thousand times more nervous than when he’d initially walked in.

“Do you—” Kaveh flushed. “Would you like to come with me to dinner at Tighnari’s tonight?”

Al-Haitham narrowed his eyes. “Why?”

“Because—” A red splotch was crawling its way up over the edge of Kaveh’s collar. “Because Tighnari invited us.”

“He invited me,” Al-Haitham said flatly.

“Yes?”

He sighed. “What’s your ulterior motive?”

Kaveh scowled. “What the hell do you mean? Why would I have an ulterior motive?” He crossed his arms. “Maybe I just—maybe I’d like to have dinner with my friends, that’s all.”

“Am I your friend?” he asked, surprised.

It’d been the wrong thing to ask because the pink flush turned to an angry red. “Are you serious, Al-Haitham? Is that a serious question? Are you well and truly asking me that?”

“I—”

“I guess not,” muttered Kaveh. “If you don’t want to be. I guess our time at the Akademiya meant nothing to you—”

Anger flared hot in his chest. “I never said that, Kaveh.” He stepped closer. “You always have these assumptions about me, about what I’m thinking and what I’m feeling. But you never truly ask or let me explain.” He was burning. Al-Haitham rarely felt truly agitated by things, but when he did, it ate at him, clawed at him until he felt tilled like soil, scraped until there was enough ruin to grow something. “I was well and truly asking you that because I don’t know. I don’t know what you think of me anymore, and unlike you, I didn’t want to make assumptions.”

His chest heaved. He felt like a tidal wave had moved through him, and now his ears were ringing in the aftermath. 

After a long moment, Kaveh spoke. “I’m sorry.”

Al-Haitham rolled his eyes. “It’s fine.”

“Is it fine?” Kaveh looked at him. No fire in there, just something inquisitive. 

Al-Haitham shrugged.

Kaveh sighed. “I…I didn’t know you felt that way. And for that, I’m truly sorry. I really…I didn’t—” He clenched his fists. “Yes, I consider you a friend. You are my friend, if you still want to be.”

He uncrossed his arms. “Alright.”

“Alright?”

“Alright,” repeated Al-Haitham. “I’ll go to dinner with you.”

Kaveh sighed, relief stark on his face like an open wound. “Great, I’ll—well, I was planning on leaving in a bit to get there before dark. Cyno and Collei usually join, but today it’ll be just us.”

“Sure.”

“I’m gonna put my shoes on,” said Kaveh suddenly.

“Okay.” Al-Haitham raised an eyebrow. “Thank you for sharing.”

“Shut up.” Kaveh was still red, but his voice was softer now. He turned and marched back to the foyer.

Al-Haitham took mercy and gave Kaveh a few minutes to recollect himself before he went to the front door. Then, they slipped into the evening.

The city was alive and awake with its usual bustling, which made the air between them feel quieter than normal. The air felt stiff, sterile, like it was wrapped in the sounds of Sumeru, and it was the bubble that gave Al-Haitham enough courage to speak again.

“Of course they meant something to me,” he murmured finally. “You were my best friend.”

Kaveh sucked in a breath like he’d been punched. “And now?”

His spine prickled in warning. “What do you mean?”

“What am I to you now?”

Dangerous, dangerous question. “My roommate. And friend. As you said.”

Kaveh let out a laugh that almost sounded on the wrong side of bitter. “I see. Well that’s better than nothing.”

They misstepped again, a stutter and they were out of sync. Like all those years ago at the Akademiya, like the project that tore them apart. Al-Haitham, delusionally, imagined Kaveh saying, Nothing more? But only Al-Haitham would say that. Of this, he was sure of.

Something sharp shifted in his chest. Him? Or the flowers?

“We’re friends,” said Al-Haitham. As close of an admission he could get.

“Okay.” Kaveh’s voice was a whisper, and that felt wrong. So Al-Haitham steeled himself again and pushed onward.

“To Tighnari’s?” he said tentatively.

Kaveh inclined his head in a nod.

Al-Haitham, for once, couldn’t bear the silence, so he walked on ahead. Behind him, Kaveh let out a sigh so rough it almost sounded like a cough.

-

When they reached Gandharva Ville, Tighnari greeted them with a sigh.

“You’re late.”

“Hardly!” Kaveh protested. “It’s still bright out! You just can’t tell as well because of all the trees.”

“I have eyes, Kaveh. And I can clearly see through that that you made it dangerously close to sunset.” He jerked a finger to the clearing behind them.

“...we got caught up.”

Tighnari raised an eyebrow. “With what?”

“We had a minor argument,” Al-Haitham supplied. Out of the corner of his eye, he saw Kaveh shoot him a glance.

“Of course, you did.” Tighnari turned to look at him like he finally realized Al-Haitham was there. “I’m surprised you came.”

“Was I not invited?”

“You were. But I know you’re not one to socialize if you can help it.” Tighnari crossed his arms. “I’m more surprised Kaveh actually got you to come.”

“It took some convincing,” said Kaveh. 

“I’m curious about your methods.”

“It’s a secret.” Kaveh smiled like nothing was wrong. “Well, I don’t know about you, but I’m starving. I’m excited to see what you made this time, Tighnari.”

“I see you’re a freeloader even with your other friends,” mused Al-Haitham.

“What? I am not!”

Tighnari looked back and forth between them. Then, he turned and started walking towards his hut. “Come on you two, before the pita pockets get cold.”

As they headed up the path, Al-Haitham finally grasped just how often Kaveh visited Tighnari.

Kaveh waved to almost all the Forest Rangers they passed, asking them about family members or new recipes or how friends were doing with various injuries. They all brightened as Kaveh passed, somehow engaging in full conversations in the brief four seconds it took to walk past them. By the time they reached Tighnari’s hut, Al-Haitham was sure they’d spoken to at least half of Gandharva Ville.

“I don’t think I ever comprehended how much you come here,” said Al-Haitham as they entered.

“He knows the other Forest Rangers as well as I do.” Tighnari closed the door behind them. “And yet, he never picked up on any of the forest knowledge, because he still tried to build a house on top of a Withering Zone.”

“Why are the both of you ganging up on me?” Kaveh whined.

“Because we care for you greatly,” said Tighnari. “Or at least, I would assume so.”

He cut a glance in Al-Haitham’s direction, and he suddenly had the feeling he was being interrogated.

But Al-Haitham didn’t rise to the bait and instead took a seat at the table where all the plates and utensils were set up.

Three different dishes sat on the round table in front of him: pita pockets, tachin, and some kind of mushroom hodgepodge. Tighnari took a seat across from him while Kaveh sat next to him. There was one more empty chair, usually reserved for Cyno or Collei, he presumed.

“Did you make all this yourself, Tighnari?” Kaveh asked. “This is so much, I feel bad. I could have helped you!”

“Collei helped,” said Tighnari. “She just can’t join us tonight because of her studies.”

“I see.” Kaveh picked up the napkin and laid it across his lap. “Well, send her my regards.”

The dinner passed by as normally as he expected it to. Al-Haitham ate quietly while Kaveh and Tighnari chatted about their lives, and they spoke with an ease that was lacking in their own dinners at home. Perhaps it was the lack of baggage that made Kaveh able to talk about his mishaps without his eyes darting shiftily like he was waiting for judgment, and something about that made Al-Haitham ache.

He bit into his pita pocket.

Once, he could say he and Kaveh talked like that. He wanted to say that meals in their home were like that, too, but he’d be lying. Back in the Akademiya, they ate most meals together. Whenever their class schedules aligned and both of them were free, they’d meet at the front doors to venture out into the city to find something. Kaveh would loop his arm through Al-Haitham’s and then they would set off.

Now, of course, their dinners were a bit more stilted. A bit more hushed. They’d been on their way to talking like they used to, but Al-Haitham had gone and ruined it with his flowers.

“What do you think of dinner?”

Al-Haitham didn’t startle, but blinked like he’d stepped out of a dream. “Pardon?”

Tighnari nodded at his plate. “What do you think? You’re rather quiet.”

“I have nothing to contribute, so I’m not going to waste energy where it’s unnecessary.” Al-Haitham took a bite. “And it’s good. You and Collei have done well.”

The corner of Tighnari’s mouth tipped up. “High praise from you.”

“It is,” said Kaveh. “Al-Haitham never compliments my cooking.”

“Because I’m busy eating it,” he said simply.

Tighnari’s mouth tilted higher. “You know, every time Kaveh comes here, he always has some large complaint or another about living with you, but I’m glad to see you’re able to coexist overall.”

Kaveh scowled. “That was confidential information, Tighnari.”

“I’m sure Al-Haitham already knew that.”

Al-Haitham pressed his mouth together wryly. “I did.”

“Gah.” Kaveh threw his hands up and slumped back into his chair.

“It’s no secret that you have problems with my living habits.”

“Because you always buy such ugly, ugly fucking furniture and you leave your books everywhere!”

“There’s an order—”

“Blah blah, there’s an order to your books, I know. But that doesn’t change the fact that you have to take me furniture shopping with you every time you go.”

“Well, I don’t have to.”

“Oh, if only Collei were here,” murmured Tighnari.

Kaveh cut him a glance. “Excuse me?”

“Nothing.” Tighnari leaned forward. “Are you almost done, Al-Haitham? Can I get you anything else?”

Out of the corner of his eye, he thought he saw Kaveh sit up.

“No, I’m fine. Thank you for inviting me.” 

He made to stand and move the dirty plates when Kaveh suddenly shot out of his chair and zipped out the door.

“Kaveh—?”

“Sit down, Al-Haitham,” said Tighnari.

He glanced at the door. “What?”

The door slammed shut and then suddenly, there was the distinct sound of something heavy thumping against the frame.

“Kaveh—” He sighed. “What are you doing?”

“Your Hanahaki is getting worse and you still won’t tell me who it is.” Kaveh’s voice was slightly muffled from beyond the door. “And you refuse to treat it or take care of it, so I took matters into my own hands and asked Tighnari for his medical advice and I’m trapping you in there until you tell him.”

What—“Is that where you disappeared off to a few days ago?” he asked, incredulous.

“Shut up!”  And that was all the confirmation he needed.

Al-Haitham turned to Tighnari. “You agreed to this?”

“Kaveh is cashing in on one of his favors. And he’s very persuasive.”

He sighed and looked back at the door. “Kaveh, I have work tomorrow.”

“Then you better start talking quickly.”

Al-Haitham looked at the door for one long moment, hoping that it would melt away and this bizarre dream would end. But the door stayed solid. Kaveh’s heavy breathing could still be heard from beyond the wood. And Tighnari was watching him like a hunter, head tilted curiously while his ears twitched in the direction of new sounds.

“What, exactly, do you expect to happen here?” He kept a hand on the chair. “Do you think my confessing will cure it? Or do you just want to know?”

“I’m fucking worried about you, asshole. And you won’t do anything about it! Don’t think I have noticed you discreetly wiping up blood.” 

Out of the corner of his eye, he saw both of Tighnari’s eyebrows climb up his forehead.

“I’ll leave if you want your privacy,” Kaveh said, quieter. “Just talk to Tighnari about it. Please.”

And Al-Haitham, lovesick fool, jester in the tragedy, had always had a certain amount of weakness to the pleading in Kaveh’s voice. Not that he would ever tell him. He couldn’t allow Kaveh that weapon.

He sat down.

Surprisingly, Tighnari also seemed to be relieved.

“Give us some space, Kaveh,” called Al-Haitham.

There was a beat of silence, like Kaveh processing what had just happened. Then, there was some shuffling and then a long stretch of silence after Kaveh’s footsteps crunched away.

“Blood?” Tighnari prompted.

“Ah.” Al-Haitham turned around. “Yes.”

Tighnari sighed. “Archons.”

Al-Haitham drummed his fingers on his thigh. “So, what exactly am I supposed to tell you?”

“Well, Kaveh told me about some of your symptoms and coughing fits and so on, but I wanted to hear them from you yourself.”

Al-Haitham sighed. “There’s not much more detail beyond that. There are flowers growing in my chest. I cough. And sometimes there’s blood.”

“That’s concerning.”

“Really? I wasn’t aware of that.”

Tighnari sighed. “You’re truly not concerned with the fact that you’re coughing up blood?”

“It only happens sometimes. And otherwise, it hasn’t affected my health.”

“Kaveh told me that he found out you had Hanahaki because he woke up to the sound of a major coughing fit of yours at midnight.”

“That’s not a regular occurrence.”

“But something occurred to cause it, right?”

Al-Haitham pressed his lips together.

“And this is why Kaveh is concerned.” Tighnari leaned back in his chair. “You’re so nonchalant about something that could potentially kill you, and you’ve made no moves to remedy it.”

“It won’t kill me.” Al-Haitham idly tapped the rim of the plate. “It hasn’t worsened to that kind of state.”

“And how long, exactly, have you been coughing up flowers?”

Al-Haitham stopped tapping and switched to running his thumb along the side. The plate was slightly rough and grainy, and he wondered which villager in Gandharva Ville shaped these clay plates. Kaveh would know. Probably.

“I have work tomorrow, and as you said, so do you. And we both know Kaveh would truly leave us both trapped here until I told him I’d done my best in trying to wheedle answers out of you.”

Al-Haitham let his hand fall to the table. “Then tell him and release us both.”

Tighnari sighed. “Believe it or not, I have a vested interest in your wellbeing as well.”

He raised an eyebrow. “Why?”

“Because I care greatly for Kaveh. And Kaveh cares greatly for you. Which is why we are both here and will be until you bring this standstill to an end.”

The cicadas outside the hut started singing. It must have gone truly dark.

Al-Haitham sighed. “A few years.”

“A few… years?” Tighnari’s eyes widened.

“What? Is that surprising?”

“A bit, yes.” Tighnari looked at him like he was seeing him for the first time. “Kaveh said—well, he made it sound like it only happened recently. Like only for a year.”

“Yes, well, there’s a reason for that.”

“You were hiding it.”

“Of course.”

Tighnari raised an eyebrow. “Why?”

The corner of his mouth twitched. Instead of smiling, Al-Haitham leaned back and pulled a leg up, ankle resting against knee. “We both graduated from the Akademiya. Surely you can figure it out.”

Tighnari scowled. “I’m not Kaveh, Al-Haitham. I’m not here to dance around your words until you annoy me enough to leave. I will see this through”

“Then ask the right questions and I’ll answer them truthfully.”

Tighnari pressed the heel of his palm to his forehead. “Archons, you are a headache to deal with.”

Al-Haitham finally smiled.

“Who is it?”

“I’m not answering that.”

“How many years, then?” Tighnari leaned forward onto the table.

Al-Haitham thought for a moment. “Eight.”

“Eight.” Tighnari choked. “What is wrong with you?”

“I wasn’t coughing up blood for eight years,” he clarified. “Half the time I forgot about it. Again, it only recently got worse.”

“And why would that be, Al-Haitham?”

He snorted. “Try again.”

Tighnari narrowed his eyes. “Kaveh only found out a few months ago, which means it must have gotten worse around then for him to notice. Am I correct in saying that?”

Al-Haitham thought for a moment. “Partially.”

“Partially,” he repeated. “How long ago exactly would you say it got worse?”

“A year ago.”

“Hmm.” Tighnari hummed. “I see. There’s a lag between when Kaveh found out and when you started coughing more. You were hiding it, of course, but you often hide things.”

“Not often.” Al-Haitham had little to hide, he just felt a very, very small need to share. But this, of course, he did hide intentionally. Not that Tighnari needed his verbal confirmation to know that.

Tighnari gave him a wry smile. “Then, I wonder what happened a few months back that led Kaveh to find out.” He lifted his fingers and began to count. “The Sages incident. The decommissioning of the Akasha. And Kaveh returning from the desert in the midst of it all.”

Al-Haitham stayed silent.

Tighnari sighed. “Out of curiosity, what do you do with your flowers?”

Al-Haitham almost laughed. “Kaveh didn’t tell you?”

“...no?” 

Al-Haitham laughed then, one long exhale through his nose and entirely voiceless. “He asked for them.”

“Asked…for them?”

“To use for his training with the Traveler,” he clarified. “I cough up mourning flowers—which you can only find deep in the desert. Thus, when I suddenly became a nearby resource, he asked for the intact ones.”

Tighnari laughed humorlessly. “Of course, he did. Well, that seems awfully convenient. You should cough up some Nilopalata Lotuses for me so the Traveler stops pestering me about them.”

“It doesn’t work like that. You should ask someone else with unrequited feelings for you.”

“A ha!” Tighnari jumped out of his seat. “I knew it! I knew it was Kaveh!”

“As if it wasn’t obvious.” He felt something shifting in his chest. “Well, I suppose it was obvious to everyone but him. Or maybe he did know, and that was why he left all those years go. Ah well, I gues I’ll never know.”

Tighnari glared at him. “Are you serious? You live with him! You could literally ask.”

Al-Haitham snorted. “Sure.”

“Al-Haitham—” Tighnari brought his hands together, curling his fingers like he was strangling the air in front of him. “You— dumb head of lettuce. I know what a rational creature you are, so surely you’ve followed this chain of logic to fixing your issue.”

Al-Haitham laughed again, feeling a little hysterical. Of course he’d thought of it. Of course he’d thought of the fucking outcome.

“Suppose I tried to fix my issue.” His teeth felt sharp in his mouth, the bite of a razor in his throat. “Suppose I went to Kaveh and ask: ‘did you love me back?’ And he says no. What then? We continue to live with each other, but Kaveh becomes so consumed with guilt—and you know he would be—that he leaves out of the charity of his own heart. He has no home again and I have thoroughly broken my own heart. What then?”

Tighnari looked at him with something like pity in his eyes. “I think you need to be more optimistic.”

“I leave that to Kaveh. As you said, I’m the rationalist.”

“Then look at the evidence around you to come up with a more realistic scenario.”

“Tighnari,” he said, a bit more sharply than intended. “I appreciate what you’re trying to do. But you weren’t there eight years ago when he left.”

For the first time that night, Tighnari looked helpless. “That may be true, but I know him now. I have been friends with Kaveh for years and I think you should at least try to tell him.” 

“I won’t,” he said a bit too fast.

“Why not? Tell me why, Al-Haitham.”

At first glance, many people would call Al-Haitham selfish. But the more correct term would be self-interested. There were things he wished to have in the world, things he wished to see stay: the integrity of knowledge, the life he’d built, the vantage point he’d made to watch falling stars from afar, like a mortal bearing witness to something unstoppable. 

There were papers in his study that even he’d been able to hide from Kaveh’s manic cleaning: newspaper clippings throughout the years, transcripts from the Akasha, photographs, all tracking Kshahrewar’s new sunrise. All the news articles— Kaveh from the Akademiya taking Sumeru by storm and leaving everyone behind in his wake.

And Al-Haitham—self-interested, self-motivated—wanted to keep him. He wanted Kaveh to bloom. So he kept him the only way he knew how: in his home where he could see him, the door open so he could leave when he healed his wings. He could never ask Kaveh to care for a garden that was not his. He would never ask Kaveh of this.

“I can’t.” His voice came out in a whisper, more desperate than he’d ever heard it sound. Something soft in his chest ached like a bruise and he felt more pathetic than he ever cared to admit, more raw like a wound. “And you—you cannot tell him either. I can’t risk it.”

Tighnari looked at him like he was watching a tragedy. He stared at Al-Haitham for a long moment before his face fell, contorting into something less pained, more neutral. “Alright. I guess I can’t help someone who doesn’t want to be helped.” He sucked in a breath like he was bracing for something. “Now do you want to tell Kaveh or shall I?”

And still, Al-Haitham—the weak fool that he was—felt his stomach curdle at the thought of disappointment on Kaveh’s face. So, he asked, rather pointlessly, “Is there nothing else I can do?”

“You know what I think,” Tighnari said darkly. “I’ll say it again.”

Al-Haitham sighed. “No need.”

There was a pause. “Just—take care of yourself, Al-Haitham.”

“I am.”

“Somehow, I don’t believe that,” Tighnari said wryly.

Al-Haitham ignored him. “Where’s Kaveh? Should we call him back?”

“I got it.” 

Tighnari turned to the window behind him and climbed out, and it suddenly occurred to Al-Haitham that he could have escaped through that the whole time, but perhaps it was a relief to have confessed it. 

A few minutes ticked by, enough that Al-Haitham grew restless enough to stand on his own and walk around the perimeter of Tighnari’s hut before he heard the scraping of whatever heavy object had been left outside the door being pushed. A moment later, Kaveh ducked into the hut followed by a very, weary looking Tighnari.

Al-Haitham raised an eyebrow. “Where did you go?”

“I found Collei and tried to help her with her studies.” Kaveh turned to Tighnari. “She’s making great progress, by the way.”

“Hm, well, I told her she shouldn’t be studying this late anyway.” Tighnari sighed.

Kaveh shot a glance at Al-Haitham before his shoulders rolled forward and he turned fully. “Well, shall we go?”

“You’re not going to ask about what we talked about?”

“No need. I can already tell your stubbornness won out,” he said gloomily. 

Al-Haitham glanced at Tighnari.

“Get out of my house,” he grumbled.

“Thank you for your help, Tighnari.” Kaveh gave a tentative smile. “And thank you for dinner.”

Tighnari sighed. He said, softer, “You should go before it gets too late.”

“Right. Come on, Al-Haitham.”

Kaveh stepped out. Al-Haitham lingered for a moment longer before Tighnari raised an eyebrow at him and he felt annoyed enough to leave.

Outside, the sun had truly gone. Unlike Sumeru City, Gandharva Ville did sleep, all the lamps burning low and a hush under the layer of cicadas screaming violently into the night. Al-Haitham could barely see the ground in front of him. When he tried to take a step forward, he stumbled.

“Careful—” Kaveh held out a hand.

Al-Haitham righted himself and stepped out of the way, and only partially regretted it when he left Kaveh there, hand lingering.

Well, maybe he fully regretted it. Something about the conversation with Tighnari, of finally laying it bare felt like picking a scab open that made him say, gruffly, “Thanks.”

In the dark, he imagined Kaveh’s eyes widening. As it was, Al-Haitham couldn’t bear to look at him.

They began the walk back to the city.

“It can be hard to navigate the forest in the dark,” said Kaveh softly. “In the desert, at least, everything’s mostly sand. You just have to be careful not to step on any snakes or rocks. But here, it’s all branches and vines layering on top of each other.”

Al-Haitham hummed.

“Which you know, of course. Because you’ve been to both, obviously.”

“Not as often as you.”

Kaveh went silent again.

Around them, the cicadas were still singing. Beyond the cluster of huts in Gandharva Ville, he could hear the night birds coming alive and Rishboland Tigers yowling in the distance. That was the nice thing about the forest, Al-Haitham supposed, that it was always awake. It would always fill the silence, too.

“The forest has a different kind of darkness than the desert,” Kaveh finally said. “The desert feels so quiet and the only thing you can hear is the wind. Like a pit of dead things. The forest at least is alive, but that means more things to hunt you down. I’m not sure which I prefer.”

“It’s a shame you can’t see the stars so easily here,” said Al-Haitham. “I’m sure they’re more brilliant in the desert. They would be here as well if you could find a patch of sky between the trees.”

“What did you talk to Tighnari about?” Kaveh finally asked.

He felt the blood in his fingers frost over, but Al-Haitham pressed forward. “What do you mean? I talked to him about the things you wanted me to talk about.”

Kaveh pressed his lips together. “I gathered, but now you seem…”

“Seem what?”

“Softer.”

Al-Haitham paused. Softer was a good word. Tender was better though, like a fresh bruise, like the skin around a scab re-opened.

“I don’t know what you mean.”

Kaveh sighed. “You can’t feign ignorance with me, Al-Haitham. Your intellect would not allow you to do so.”

Al-Haitham grimaced in the dark. 

“Did you tell him who it was?” asked Kaveh.

“Of course not.” Tighnari had figured it out on his own.

Kaveh sighed. “I’m not sure what I expected. Well, did he tell you what to do to at least…let you breathe a little easier?”

“He told me to tell them.” Which he wouldn’t do. He would never do.

“And will you?”

“Why would I listen to his advice when you told me the same thing?”

Kaveh threw up his hands. “I don’t know, Al-Haitham! Maybe I thought getting a second opinion would convince you. That it’s not just me that’s worried about you, and how you’re not doing anything about it, how you’re just letting the damn thing grow inside you like a parasite.”

“I never thought a romantic like you would call feelings parasitic.”

“They are if they’re killing you!” Kaveh’s voice echoed off the trees, startling a few birds into flight. He cast a glance upward, slightly embarrassed, before turning back to Al-Haitham. If there was enough light, he was sure he’d see red brimming Kaveh’s eyes. As it was, he let himself stew in ignorance.

“It’s not killing me.”

“It could.”

“It won’t.”

Kaveh exhaled like he was pissed off. “What I don’t understand is why someone like you would just—let yourself be miserable like this. Coughing up flowers aside, why would you let yourself love someone for so long without return? Does it not—hurt? I would have thought you’d have tried to get over them by now.” A pause. “Why can’t you get over them?”

Maybe it was the dark, maybe it was the sounds of the forest wrapped around them like a bubble, like in the city, that Al-Haitham finally, finally confessed, “Of course it hurts. I just—I could never get over them.”

And there came the silence and the forest filling it in with sound. He could almost pretend Kaveh hadn’t gone dead quiet with the sound of his own heartbeat thumping through his ears, louder than the tigers yowling into the night.

“I’ll be fine, Kaveh,” he tried.

“You always say that.”

“Because I will be.”

They walked the rest of the way home in silence.

Chapter Text

Al-Haitham learned to live with the flowers.

They had appeared two years before graduation when he bid Kaveh farewell at his graduation. They’d stood in the hall outside after the main ceremony ended, the both of them staring at each other like they were standing at opposite sides of a bridge with a valley between them.

The question was: shouldn’t he have known sooner? Shouldn’t he have figured out earlier that his feelings for Kaveh weren’t returned?

But the thing was: they had never actually been anything at the Akademiya—contrary to popular belief. Sure, they did nearly everything together, could be seen at the library or the cafe or one of their dorm rooms together; but for all the time Kaveh spent in his bed—or Al-Haitham in his—they’d never done anything, because it was always them studying, always them debating, always just Kaveh passing out after a long night of talking and being too tired to return to his room, so Al-Haitham would pull the blankets up over his senior’s shoulders and then find a comfortable spot on the carpet to sleep because even laying next to each other was a boundary neither of them dared to cross. They never talked about their feelings like that, never brushed shoulders longer than a second, never kissed.

Al-Haitham had always kept to himself in hopes that’d go unnoticed. But that in and of itself garnered him the reputation of never speaking to anyone. But people talk, so of course they noticed when he started clinging to Kaveh like a pest. Sure, half the time they’d be arguing, but Al-Haitham would still be talking, and the was the most significant part.

“They’re cute together,” he’d sometimes hear in the halls. “But I’m surprised that it’s them. Kaveh’s so social and that one…he’s so surly. Half the time he doesn’t even show up to class.”

“Who’s that one with the headphones?” He’d also hear. “I swear I’ve never seen him before except with Kaveh from Kshahrewar.”

“The kid’s stuck to him like glue, but he always looks vaguely pissed off.”

“Kaveh seems fond of him, but I don’t really get it. Not that I’m about to pry into a relationship that’s not mine.”

Kaveh never acted like he heard the talk, so neither did Al-Haitham. But he thought that they both must have heard, and they both must’ve known the other one heard. But knowing didn’t change anything, nor did it seem to matter. Not with the way Kaveh smiled at him—warm and bright and a little exasperated. Not with the way their elbows brushed in the halls without an apology. How Kaveh—in the depths of his delirium, held up on strings by coffee—would find Al-Haitham to take care of him, to keep him company while he blazed through the Akademiya like a comet, eager to break Sumeru, eager to rupture the skies. And through it all, still leaving a place for Al-Haitham to follow.

Then they decided to do a project together, which was the worst mistake both of them had ever made. At first it made sense—of course, two minds as bright as theirs should work wonderfully together, should produce something amazing.

But the talkers were right—their personalities were too different, their ideals clashed too much. Al-Haitham struck his name from their thesis. Kaveh ripped up his copy. They stopped speaking. Time passed, and then graduation came.

Al-Haitham almost hadn’t come because the last time they’d spoken, they’d blown up at each other, and weeks later he still found himself choking on the debris. But then he was laying in his dorm room, listening to the hallways fill with the procession of seniors heading down to the main hall for graduation, footsteps ringing against the ground like a knell.

And perhaps there was a certain amount of regret eating at his stomach like a parasite; the last words he’d say to Kaveh would always be something too cruel, something thrown out in a fit of irrationality unless he got up right then and there and said something.

Al-Haitham had always said he was going to see Kaveh off—even at the start of their friendship when he knew Kaveh was going to leave first because he was older. Al-Haitham was always going to watch him walk out into the world and Al-Haitham would be here, waiting for him.

Al-Haitham would keep waiting, but he didn’t know if Kaveh would come back now. So, he peeled himself off his bed and made his way to the main hall to say his final goodbye.

He snuck in partway through the ceremony and lingered near the back like a shadow. He was sure he’d been quiet enough, sure that he went unnoticed like how he always wanted. But Kaveh found him, of course, because he always did. Even when Al-Haitham was struggling to find a clear view, peering through the shoulders of different parents and friends and loved ones, Kaveh’s eyes snapped to him like an arrow. When their gazes caught, Al-Haitham stumbled back like he’d been shot.

Kaveh watched him through the rest of the ceremony, breaking away only once to collect his degree before moving back to his spot. The ceremony ended. The hall emptied, leaving the both of them alone in the grave of their memories.

Al-Haitham, for once, approached first. He peeled himself off the wall and made his way over.

“Congratulations,” he said, voice gruffer than he expected.

“You came.” Kaveh’s voice had a deadness to it he wasn’t used to. The Light of Kshahrewar spoke like a storyteller, like a child adding to what they knew of the world, like a mentor imparting a lesson. To find him hollow felt wrong. To know that Al-Haitham had caused this felt worse.

“I said I would.” Back when Kaveh’s impending graduation started to feel like a sentencing, pressing like a hand to your back.

“We both said a lot of things.”

Al-Haitham grimaced.

Kaveh’s eyes flickered to him. His voice, invariably, softened. “I apologize, that was uncalled for. I—thank you for coming. I really…I didn’t expect you to be here.”

“Well, I am.”

This was the last time they had an excuse to be in the same vicinity. Then, Kaveh—the Light of Kshahrewar, flower in bloom—would be off to change the world and follow his ideals while Al-Haitham would be here. Still here. Always here.

The stories said now was the time to apologize, but both he and Kaveh were too proud to say they were wrong when neither of them believed it.

What did Al-Haitham believe? 

He’d spoken the truth as he always did, and Kaveh took it the wrong way again. But it seemed he’d reached his limit, that it was finally too far even though Al-Haitham spoke the same words he always did in the same manner he always did. Kaveh knew that about him, had always known that about him—but maybe he, for once, didn’t want to give Al-Haitham the benefit of the doubt. Kaveh, who was supposed to know him, who was one of the few people in the world he could actually tolerate, chose to sneer at him like others. With anyone else, it didn’t matter. With Kaveh, it cut.

Old anger prickled at the back of his throat, but he swallowed it. He was supposed to say goodbye, and even he wasn’t foolish enough to taint it.

“Your cap is crooked,” was all he could manage.

The corner of Kaveh’s mouth quirked up in the ghost of a smile. “Can’t even give me a break on my graduation day?”

Al-Haitham wanted to shove his fist in his mouth. “I meant that—it was just an observation. In case other people noticed.”

Kaveh let out a humorless laugh. “What does it matter now? I won’t be wearing the Akademiya greens any longer.”

Right. Of course. Kaveh would be leaving soon—so soon, and none of this would matter to him anymore.

Al-Haitham tried not to stagger back like he’d been cut, but he was thankful for the wall behind him to hold him up. Kaveh turned to look at the empty stage, now littered with the remains of the ceremony; rectangles cut from dried leaves covering the stage from the bit of confetti, a few caps still abandoned on the ground after being tossed in the air, and pamphlets—programs from the ceremony—left on chairs and under seats, now left behind after people were done referencing them for the main event. Some poor custodian would have to come in later to pick it all up, but at least the trash didn’t have to pick up themselves.

“Where will you go now?” asked Al-Haitham. It wasn’t in him to be tentative, but asking still felt like poking at something raw.

“Like you care.”

Al-Haitham frowned. “I do.”

Kaveh snorted. “I’m sure.” 

“Kaveh.” His throat felt tight. It was almost hard to breathe. “Of course, I do.”

“You have a very peculiar way of showing it.”

Al-Haitham didn’t know what to say for a long moment, but when he spoke again, he tried not to sound like his lungs had been punched out. “Kaveh, I didn’t come here to fight. I just wanted to say goodbye.”

“So eager to get rid of me?”

He frowned. “I didn’t say that.”

“Really?” Kaveh’s eyes flashed, landing fully on Al-Haitham’s face. “You don’t speak to me for weeks and you finally come here to just say goodbye? Nothing else?”

Al-Haitham pressed his mouth shut for a long moment because if he didn’t, he was sure he would bite. “If you’re looking for an apology, I don’t have one. Not right now.”

“Ohhh, of course you don’t—”

“Do you?” he snapped. “You so desperately want me to apologize, but what about the things you said to me?”

Kaveh frowned, looking like he’d missed a step.

“Are you willing to admit you’re wrong? Because I’m not not and I know you’re not. I know we both believe we were right, so neither of us will speak falsehoods. And that’s not something we can fix in the time we have left, so why can’t you just be civil and let me give you a proper send off?”

Kaveh let out a short, bitter laugh. “You call this proper? Insulting me and saying neither of us are willing to work things out? You’re quite the strategist, Al-Haitham, telling me this at the last possible moment when I have to leave the next day so we can never talk about this again.”

He couldn’t help it—he felt irritation rising like a riptide, and there was more bite when he spat, “I never said that—”

“Then say what you mean, Al-Haitham.” Kaveh’s eyes were cold and flat in a way that made him look like a stranger. “Rephrase it for me. Tell me again in another way that you won’t apologize and neither will I, that we’re both too proud to fix things.”

Al-Haitham, for once, didn’t know what to say. Because it was true, objectively, but he couldn’t find the words to describe how that it didn’t mean they should stop, that they should never speak again. He wanted to say: don’t go, not yet. But it’d be selfish to keep Kaveh here—right at the cusp of his grand future without Al-Haitham.

Kaveh watched him for a long moment before the corner of his mouth tipped down. If Al-Haitham didn’t know any better, he would have thought he looked disappointed.

“I thought so.” Kaveh pushed himself off the wall. “Maybe everyone was right. Maybe we never were a good pair after all.”

Something in Al-Haitham shattered. This was wrong. This wasn’t how this conversation was supposed to go.

“Kaveh—”

“Thank you for the send off, I suppose. If not for the outcome, at least for the intent.”

“Wait—”

“Maybe we’ll see each other again. Maybe we won’t. Either way, thank you for these years, even if it didn’t turn out how either of us wanted.”

Then Kaveh turned away and left before he could squeeze the last of his protests out. He felt like he was tripping, chasing after the coattails of a dream he hadn’t meant to wake up from, but Al-Haitham’s feet were rooted to the ground, every limb frozen like a tree. 

He was losing Kaveh. Kaveh was walking away. Al-Haitham’s goodbye left more finality than he wanted. Nothing had cleared. Nothing had been fixed or reopened. Instead, Kaveh had broken them off so cleanly that there was no ambiguity here, not like when they’d been friends.

Al-Haitham felt a lump rising in his throat. At first he thought it was the kind that came with the hot press of tears, but then it turned more physical—more sharp. Then he was truly choking. Al-Haitham turned and coughed into his fist and spat out the bright red petals of a mourning flower.

Huh. Fitting.

-

(So, when Kaveh first moved in, it felt like a goddamn dream. Sure, their last words to each other were terrible, but Al-Haitham suddenly had access to him all the time and he had the chance to clean up old wounds.

When Kaveh moved in, it was a strange dance of floating around their last conversation. The tentative way Kaveh asked if Al-Haitham still drank coffee, if he still liked his eggs a certain way, if these memories they had of each other from the Akademiya still persisted while avoiding the reason why that gap was there.

Al-Haitham had missed him so bad that the years wore down on his pride. He could have apologized then, but that meant ripping open a wound that was starting to heal. So he let Kaveh fill the house, decorate it, complain about Al-Haitham’s terrible taste in aesthetics because at least it was familiar. 

As time went on and their cohabitation persisted, bits and pieces of Kaveh started to take root in the house. While he had complained in the beginning about the sparse decoration of the house, he didn’t do much to change it and cleaned up all of his architecture materials when he returned for the night (or the morning). But one day, Al-Haitham had started to come home from work to discover a new tapestry, a new rug, a new lamp, anything in some kind of style that he didn’t normally care for but he knew Kaveh did. He didn’t usually catch Kaveh in the act of putting it up, but the after images came when Kaveh would glance at the new furniture item with the ghost of a smile on his face before catching Al-Haitham’s eye and raising an eyebrow as if daring him to speak.

But today, he finally caught Kaveh in the act. Earlier that morning, he’d accidentally taken Kaveh’s keys again, which meant that Kaveh broke into his office around lunch time to swear at him up and down before snatching his own key back and storming out, muttering something about revenge.

Al-Haitham didn’t know what Kaveh had meant by ‘revenge,’ but when he opened the door to their house, he found Kaveh facing a wall that was in direct view of the open door, a new tapestry hung up.

Kaveh tilted his head, peering over his shoulder to say, “You’re back,” before turning back to look at the tapestry.

Al-Haitham closed the door. “What’s this?”

“Revenge,” said Kaveh. “I got rid of the old ugly thing you had and put up a new tapestry that actually matches the furniture. What do you think?”

Al-Haitham did actually like this new tapestry better, but Kaveh didn’t need to know that.

“So you’re wasting your hard earned money for pointless decorations?” Al-Haitham said instead, sidling up next to him.

Kaveh didn’t look at him, but he thought he felt him shift. They stood close enough that he could imagine the heat of Kaveh’s shoulder so acutely against his own—or maybe he was being a bit delusional.

“Of course you would call it pointless,” scoffed Kaveh. “You have no appreciation for these kinds of things, but I’m an architect and an artist and I felt like I was going blind looking at these awful decorations. How are you supposed to turn a house into a home when it looks the way it does when you decorate it?”

Is this your home now, Kaveh? Al-Haitham had wanted to ask.

Al-Haitham stared at him, unamused, instead to hide the choking new growth in his throat. Air was sparse nowadays, but he found he didn’t mind so much when he walked in on moments like these.

And perhaps it was the ghost of something he would have once wanted with Kaveh, what he once believed Kaveh would have wanted with him. There was grief in knowing this, but sometimes an imitation was enough of a reprieve. 

“What if I took it down the next day?” Al-Haitham mused.

Kaveh squawked. “Then I will end you.”

You don’t know how close you are already.

Al-Haitham smiled. “I’d like to see you try.”

Kaveh let out a groan of frustration and tore away from the wall. “Shut up. Just help me with this painting.”

“Oh? Another one?”

“Shut up, shut up, shut up. You will not make fun of me for this.” Kaveh went stomping over to the couch where he hefted a frame up and walked to another blank wall. “Is it so bad that I just want to make this nice for the both of us?”

You already are, he wanted to say. The fact that Kaveh was here at all was enough, but Al-Haitham was going to eat both of his boots before saying that. It was enough for him that Kaveh was here building the house, making the home they wanted.

It was a shame he’d ruined it then. A shame he wasn't strong enough to keep his flowers down. Now they were back to square one as if he’d ripped off the scab over all the healing they’d done and it was wholly, entirely, his fault.)

-

Kaveh spent less time around the house after the dinner with Tighnari.

Al-Haitham knew it was because of the conversation, because of his insistence on “not taking care of himself” even though he was perfectly fine. But Kaveh worried because he always did, and perhaps the worrying had become too much so he couldn’t bear to look at Al-Haitham anymore. And for that, at least, Al-Haitham regretted.

Well, Al-Haitham knew nothing else if not to lie in the bed he’d made; he’d already lived alone for years so it was just a matter of going about his old routine again.

And this was better, perhaps, because it gave him the space to cough up his flowers without fear and tuck them away for later. It didn’t feel like it was getting worse, but maybe it was because he’d lived with them for so long that he didn’t remember what it felt like to breathe easy.

He could still hear Kaveh sneaking in, though, at odd hours like a ghost. After crawling into bed and shutting off the lamp, he’d hear the door creak open and Kaveh’s heavy footsteps echo throughout the house. Sometimes he’d hear Kaveh go into his own room, but come morning, Al-Haitham would open his door and find the house empty again. 

After a few days of Kaveh successfully dodging him, Al-Haitham finally managed to catch him on his way home from work. He saw Kaveh about to leave their house when Kaveh caught sight of him and blanched.

Al-Haitham didn’t run, but he did narrow his eyes as he picked up his pace.

“Try running, Kaveh. I dare you.”

Irritation replaced the shock on Kaveh’s face at a comical speed. “I’m not—I wasn’t going to run,” he scoffed.

Al-Haitham stopped in front of the house, standing an arm’s reach away from Kaveh. “Oh? Then where have you been the last few days?”

“I—why do you care?”

Al-Haitham raised an eyebrow.

“I…was training with the Traveler.”

“You’ve been doing that a lot lately.”

“So?” There was a bite to his voice that made him sound like a dog with his hackles raised.

“So nothing,” he said neutrally before moving to unlock the door behind him. “Just stating an observation. What are you training so hard for? Do you plan on becoming a mercenary for your next commission?”

“It just gives me something to do,” said Kaveh irritably. “It’s always good—advantageous—to get stronger, you know? And it gets my mind off things.”

“Such as?”

The conversation stuttered, but Kaveh quickly picked up again. “Just. Stressors. Commissions, my financial situation, you and…your affliction.”

“I told you that you don’t have to worry about me.”

“And I told you that you’re an idiot with no self-preservation skills.”

Al-Haitham snorted. “Well, if you’re just training, then you don’t have to avoid the house.”

“I’m not avoiding anything.”

“Come in, then.” He pushed the door open. “I have some flowers for you and the Traveler, by the way.”

Al-Haitham stepped inside and only realized a moment later that no footsteps had followed him. He turned around to find Kaveh standing frozen and looking absolutely stricken.

“Kaveh, what’s wrong?”

Kaveh didn’t even startle. He stared blankly at a patch of cobblestone in front of him.

“Kaveh?”

He finally lifted his head—slowly. A whole storm of grief washed through his eyes when he looked at Al-Haitham, but it passed so quickly that he almost thought he imagined it.

“Nothing’s wrong,” he said flatly.

“Come now, you can come up with something more convincing than that.”

Maybe it was the taunt, but something sparked in Kaveh’s eyes. “I’m not trying to convince you of anything.” A bit more life to his voice now, but still mostly, entirely blank.

“Then just come in so I can close the door and stop letting bugs into the house.”

Kaveh glared but dutifully stepped inside. Al-Haitham tried to ignore the embarrassing rush of relief he felt now that Kaveh was in the house again.

“Are you planning on stomping around the house in your shoes like they do in Mondstat? Or are you going to take them off?”

Kaveh scowled. “Have you ever considered that I’ve been out of the house because I tire, so greatly, of your inability to talk to people?”

“Are you?”

He sighed. “No. But give me a second, Archons. I’m—still trying to catch my breath from training.”

“Alright.” Al-Haitham stepped away from the door. “Let me get you the mourning flowers, then.”

“Don’t—” Kaveh held out a hand, sounding pained. “You don’t have to get them.”

Al-Haitham raised an eyebrow. “After all the trouble I went through saving them for you?” he asked flatly.

“Don’t.” Kaveh shoved a hand through his hair and now he sounded well and truly upset. “I don’t want you to feel like you have to save them, if they’re causing you pain. And they are, so—I don’t want to make you feel like you have to make more.”

“I wasn’t feeling that way,” said Al-Haitham. “I mean, the flowers will grow themselves naturally with or without my bearing.”

“Al-Haitham, that’s worse.” Kaveh looked so miserable it made something twist in his chest—not a flower, for once. Finally, just his own heart. “I didn’t realize you felt so strongly about your person. I thought—well, I suppose it doesn’t matter what I thought. I shouldn’t have asked you for the flowers in the first place.” He looked down. “Just, please don’t give them to me anymore. I’m done training with the Traveler anyway, so I don’t need the flowers anymore.”

“Okay.” Al-Haitham’s voice came out more hollow than he intended. He cleared his throat. “If you insist. I’ll just toss the ones I’ve saved into the yard for composting.”

Kaveh closed his eyes. “Sure.”

He hovered in the living room for a moment longer before the silence became too suffocating for even him, then he turned and escaped down the hall.

Al-Haitham did what he said: he took the mourning flowers he’d collected over the past few days—dried and cleaned of blood, petals drooping like heads bowed in prayer—and opened his window and tossed them outside. They landed with a faint crinkle.

He shut the window and stayed in his room for a moment longer before he gathered enough courage to go back into the living room. When he got there, he found Kaveh still staring blankly at the floor.

Al-Haitham frowned. “Really, are you alright?”

“Fine. Fine. Just—maybe I’m a bit more out of breath from training than usual.”

He pressed his lips together. “Alright…if you’re sure.” Al-Haitham turned toward the kitchen. “I’m going to start dinner. Anything in particular you want since you haven’t been home the past few days?”

“No preferences.” Kaveh’s voice sounded distant, tired. 

Al-Haitham looked through the icebox. “Hm, I’m not sure what to make.” He wouldn’t normally narrate this, but only Kaveh could pull this kind of thing out of him: talking to fill the silence because Kaveh wouldn’t. “I haven’t bought any ingredients since I didn’t expect you to be home today.”

“You mean you didn’t expect to trap me today?” There was a hint more amusement in his voice, which made Al-Haitham feel better.

“So you admit you were running?”

“I never admitted that.” 

Al-Haitham smiled when he heard those footsteps shuffling toward the kitchen. 

“Have you been alright the past few days?” Kaveh murmured, sounding closer than he’d thought.

“What do you mean?” Al-Haitham sighed and shut the icebox. 

“Nevermind.” Kaveh’s voice pulled away. “Nevermind. You don’t have any ingredients? None at all?”

“I haven’t bought any. It didn’t make sense to cook any meals while you were gone.”

Al-Haitham expected Kaveh to fill in the normal rhythm of their conversation, but when he turned around, there was a split second where Kaveh’s eyes widened before he let out a loud, hacking cough.

“Kaveh?” he said, alarmed.

Kaveh looked at him like he wanted to respond, but then another cough rose up and he doubled down trying to catch his breath.

Al-Haitham rushed over, hand at Kaveh’s back immediately. “Kaveh, what’s wrong?”

It did not sound like a normal cough—or at least, it sounded like a cough Al-Haitham had become well-acquainted with over the past few years. But it could’ve been recency bias, searching for something that had happened to him and what he knew to be true. But there was no way the coughs could be anything significant, because if that were true, that meant Kaveh had—

“Al-Haitham—” Kaveh choked out before spitting a Sumeru rose on the ground, the purple head fully intact and covered in saliva.

They both froze.

“Oh.” Al-Haitham let his hand fall away.

“I—” Kaveh hastily straightened. “I didn’t—I don’t—”

Al-Haitham couldn’t find any words, not even a snark. He just stared at the flower so perfectly lain on the ground like a tragic figure in a painting. Kaveh had coughed it up. It had fallen out of his lungs. Kaveh had been coughing because there was a flower fighting so valiantly to grow in his chest, and it had finally bloomed because it crawled its way out of Kaveh’s throat, which was why Kaveh was coughing, because Kaveh—

“Excuse me.” Al-Haitham stepped back. “Let me go find something to clean this up.”

“Al-Haitham, it’s fine, I can—”

But he hurried away from the kitchen before Kaveh could lay a hand on him. Al-Haitham didn’t go to the bathroom—because that would have been too obvious. Instead, he hurried to his own room where Kaveh wouldn’t follow, where he wouldn’t suspect anything, where he had enough time to shove a towel under the crack in the door before he retreated to the farthest corner of his room and lay out scrap paper on the ground before he coughed up a mourning flower, then another. Then another. Flower after flower after flower until the leaves scraped his throat raw and there was more blood than spit, until he was crying from the pain.

When the coughing subsided, five new flowers lay on the ground still wet with afterbirth. Al-Haitham, instinctually, thought about how he had to clean and hide them for a few days. Then he remembered that Kaveh didn’t need his flowers anymore.

“Fuck,” he muttered into the air, into the quiet. Hopefully Kaveh hadn’t heard. Hopefully he was still preoccupied with the aftermath of his own coughing.

He took a moment to gather himself before he stood and threw the new flowers out the window. 

Then, he grabbed a rag and returned to the kitchen to help Kaveh clean up his rose.

-

(Once, before Kaveh found out about the flowers, before he disappeared into the desert and Al-Haitham overthrew a false god, Kaveh had been up late working on a commission.

Which wasn’t entirely unusual. It definitely wasn’t the first time Al-Haitham would return from work to find Kaveh working under the light of the fading dawn and his flickering lamp. But when he returned today, Kaveh didn’t even make a snide comment about how late Al-Haitham had returned—which was to say: three hours past five, an absolute anomaly—he just kept working, staring at the blueprint in front of him while ink smeared the corner of his mouth.

Al-Haitham thought about speaking, going so far as to inhale and open his mouth, but then he decided against it and let him continue. He retreated to the kitchen and started cooking because there was absolutely an eighty-five percent chance that Kaveh had eaten at most one meal that day.

He cooked quietly, the fire barely louder than Kaveh’s pen scratching against the parchment. And when Al-Haitham was finished, he moved back to the study and set the plate right under Kaveh’s nose.

Finally, Kaveh startled. “You’re back,” he said.

“I have been for an hour, but yes I am.”

“Oh, I—” Kaveh blinked rapidly like he suddenly remembered he could. “Sorry. I’ve been distracted.”

“I can see.” Al-Haitham cast a glance at the sketch on the desk.

“Is this for me?” Kaveh nodded at the plate.

“I put it in front of you, so yes.”

He sighed. “You didn’t have to cook me dinner.”

“I happened to make extra,” said Al-Haitham, though that wasn’t entirely true.

And Kaveh knew that, too, because he knew Al-Haitham. Finally, for the first time that night, a faint smile cracked across his mouth. “Thank you.”

A flower scratched at his throat. Al-Haitham swallowed it. “No need.”

Kaveh suddenly lifted his head and frowned. “Archons, when did it get so dark? What time is it?”

“About half past nine.”

“Ah.” Kaveh tilted his head and Al-Haitham could almost see the mental calculations he was doing. “You came home…much later than usual today.”

“So you did notice.”

Kaveh raised an eyebrow. “Al-Haitham, in all the time that I’ve lived here, I’ve not known you once to come home past five because you have your head so far up your ass about when your work hours end.”

Al-Haitham snorted. “Well, I’ve been a bit busy lately.” And staging a coup did not, in fact, count towards his work hours. So.

Kaveh rolled his eyes. “Busy? With what?”

“Nothing important.” Al-Haitham wanted to linger, but knew better than to hope, so he pulled away. “I’ll leave you to your work.”

“Wait—”

Al-Haitham’s breath stuttered. “What?”

Kaveh flushed, the red of his skin making the ink splotch near his mouth stark. “You haven’t eaten yet, have you?”

“No?” He tilted his head, confused. “I was about to though.”

“Do you want to bring your plate in here?” The ink smudge on Kaveh’s face felt like a void he could fall into. “You could eat here with me while I keep working. I could…use the company?”

His heart kicked up, but Al-Haitham knew better than to let his emotions cloud his perception. “Is that a statement or a question, Kaveh?”

“Will you eat with me or not?” Kaveh spat irritably.

Al-Haitham hid his smile in the dark. “Sure.”

Kaveh’s eyes widened. “Really?”

Al-Haitham rolled his eyes. “Did you want a different answer?” 

Before Kaveh could respond, he went back to the kitchen and grabbed the plate he’d left on the table before going back to the study. When he returned, Kaveh had already gone back to work, but the plate still sat near his elbow. Al-Haitham took a seat and began to eat.

The night passed quietly like that: Al-Haitham finishing his meal twice as fast as Kaveh because Kaveh was busy working. He sat idly, reading his book and listened closely for the clatter of a fork in between Kaveh’s pen scratching, just to make sure he was, in fact, eating.

When they both finished, Al-Haitham stacked their plates on top of each other and brought them to the kitchen. He washed them, then returned to the study where Kaveh was still working, the slope of his spine entirely unchanged.

It must have been close to midnight now, but Al-Haitham still wandered over to the bookshelves to find something he hadn’t read yet and settled on a book about the history of some of the ruins in the desert. He pulled and the book came out with a quiet scrape.

“Are you going to bed?” Kaveh asked quietly.

Al-Haitham paused. “I was planning on it.”

“Ah…” There was a silence like a stuttered breath. “I see.”

Kaveh had always had a certain way of talking when he wanted something but didn’t want to ask for it, like the simple request was an unforgivable crime. 

“How much longer will you be working?” asked Al-Haitham.

“Oh, I don’t know.” Kaveh chewed his lower lip, right by the smear of ink. “Until I finish. Which might mean an hour. Or dawn. I don’t know.” He let out a shaky breath. “But it’s fine. I—I think the client will really like my proposal.”

“Hm.” Al-Haitham pivoted away from the bookshelf and took a seat at the other desk. 

Kaveh’s eyes widened as he tracked the movement. “I thought you were going to bed?”

“And I thought you wanted company.”

Kaveh startled like he hadn’t expected Al-Haitham to stay, which was ridiculous since Kaveh was the one that had left him in the first place. But the shock settled on his face into something more wary and tentative.

“I’ll be up for a while,” warned Kaveh.

“This is a long book,” said Al-Haitham.

Kaveh watched him for a moment longer before sighing. “Thank you, Al-Haitham.”

His heart twinged. Al-Haitham knew of the tragedy of nostalgia, reaching for a retelling of a story that only existed in his head. But he pretended for a moment that they’d never fought, that the two young, dumb things they had grown into now—sitting with each other like they had in the halls of the Akademiya—were simply enjoying their own company. No history and no pain. Imagine that, Kaveh. Imagine that.

Al-Haitham looked at Kaveh and felt something splinter in his chest. 

Kaveh paused and lifted his head. “What?”

“You have ink on your face,” he said, unable to help himself.

“Wipe it off for me?” Kaveh would have said in the Akademiya, head tilted and mischief sparking in the corner of his eye. Playful. Not flirting, not something meant to extend beyond the moment, just meant to tease him. And Al-Haitham would have said something equally scathing in response like, “You need your junior to wipe your face like a child?” if only to hide the red flush crawling up his neck.

Now, though, Kaveh sputtered. “What?” He reached a hand up and scrubbed the corner of his mouth with his thumb. When his finger came away black, he furrowed his eyebrows. “Has that been there the whole time?”

Al-Haitham smiled. “Yes.”

“What the fuck? Why didn’t you tell me?”

“I just did.”

“Oh my gods.” Kaveh stood. “Fuck you. To the Abyss and back. Oh my gods, I’ll be right back.”

He felt something dangerous like laughter bubbling in his chest as Kaveh stomped away furiously to wipe at his face. Kaveh licked his thumb and tried to wipe away the smudge before giving up to go to the kitchen to get a proper washcloth, muttering to himself all the way about how he would look to the client. It felt so familiar—dangerously so. In a way that made the tension in his shoulders drain. Like this was who they could have been with no burdens, no fights, no history.

All a fool’s dream of course. You could not remove the history from a person and still have the same being. But in the quiet, in the dark, Al-Haitham let himself pretend, for a moment, that Kaveh had missed him, too.)

-

Al-Haitham sat across the table from Kaveh, dinner still unmade, Sumeru rose laying on the table, wrapped in a rag like a corpse. The silence flitted between them, twitching, pulling at someone to speak first.

“I’m fine,” Kaveh finally said.

“Are you?” Al-Haitham’s heart twisted. He tried, and failed, not to make his voice sound so gruff.

“Why do you ask?” He raised an eyebrow, voice almost taunting. “Are you worried?”

Irritation flared hot in his chest. “Of course, I’m worried!” How could he not be? What did Kaveh think all the housing and worrying and fussing was about if Al-Haitham didn’t care? “You said you’ve been having trouble breathing. You coughed up a flower. Is that why you’ve been so tired in training? Did you even tell the Traveler? Did you even think about yourself?” 

All he ever did was worry about Kaveh. Even when they were fighting, even when they’d stopped talking to each other, but especially now that Kaveh was back in front of him, flesh and bone again, something so real and tangible that it could actually break.

“What do you mean, ‘are you worried?’” Al-Haitham scoffed. “Of course, I’m worried!”

“Well, now you know how I feel, asshole.” Kaveh huffed. 

Ah. Of course.

The fight drained out of him all at once, replaced by something weary. “Are you okay?” repeated Al-Haitham.

Kaveh sighed and fell back against the chair. “As well as I can be, I suppose. Nothing physically hurts too bad, just—you know. The pain of unrequited love and all that.”

“I do,” he said wryly.

Kaveh winced. “Right. Sorry, I didn’t mean that, I just meant—” He sighed. “More that I feel a bit pathetic. A bit blindsided. Like I thought I was just imagining these feelings, but to develop Hanahaki makes it feel more tangible that I had been wrong about…”

“Your person.”

Kaveh grimaced. “Yes.”

Al-Haitham pressed his lips together, a question rolling around in his stomach. “Do you find me pathetic?”

“No!” Kaveh’s eyes widened. “No, no. Sorry, I didn’t mean it that way. I meant I felt pathetic. Not that I think you are for having Hanahaki, or anyone else. I just—I thought…I don’t know what I thought. I wonder now if I’d imagined a lot of things.”

There was a beat of silence, loud enough that Al-Haitham could hear his heart picking up speed. A steady ba-dump, ba-dump, ba-dump whispering to him: ask him. Ask him. Ask him.

So he asked, “Who is it?” Even though the answer might break him. Because Al-Haitham, for all his strengths, for all his flaws, his greatest vice was his pursuit of knowledge.

The smile Kaveh gave him was lovely and sad, like the flowers he needed to gather. “I can’t tell you that.”

“Why not?”

“Same reason you can’t tell me who your person is.” His eyes flickered to the window. “Unfathomable reasons to anyone but ourselves.”

It felt almost ridiculous: asking each other who their crushes were like they were two children in the Akademiya. Except they’d never done that while they were young because Al-Haitham was sure Kaveh knew, and he thought he knew Kaveh, so neither of them had voiced it. Neither of them had clarified. Perhaps that was the first mistake. Perhaps that was the first ripple that never ended.

Al-Haitham didn’t grimace necessarily, but he lowered his eyes and hoped Kaveh wasn’t watching. “Then, how long have you…have you had these feelings?”

Kaveh barked out a laugh uncharacteristically cheerful for the fog in the room. “What is this? An interrogation?”

“Did you not do this to me when you found out?”

He snorted. “I suppose.”

“You suppose,” said Al-Haitham dully, though it would sound like his normal voice to anyone else other than Kaveh. “Well, I eagerly await your answer.”

“I’m sure you are.” Kaveh frowned and leaned back in his chair, tracing his finger along the wood grain in the table. Al-Haitham had bought that table, and he’d been surprised that Kaveh let him keep it. When he expressed so, Kaveh only said that it was practical as a table and nothing needed to be changed about it. 

Al-Haitham couldn’t help it. He pressed, “Well?”

Kaveh’s hand curled into a fist, then dropped below the table. “I…this happened relatively recently—well, compared to you.”

Al-Haitham watched him.

“I haven’t been coughing up flowers for years, is what I mean. Because I thought—I thought w—” He sighed. “Well, it doesn’t matter what I thought. I’ve just been finding it a little harder to breathe these past few months and I thought it was the training, but it was actually the flowers in my lungs. And I’ve been coughing up petals for a while but I thought they were going to go away, which was a foolish assumption. But this was the first time—this was the first whole flower I’ve coughed up.”

Al-Haitham let the sentence linger for a long moment before he mustered up the strength to say, “I see.”

“You see?” Kaveh murmured quietly. “Is that all you have to say?”

“What do you mean? What more do you want me to say?” The back of his throat itched with something like anger, like indignance. Kaveh kept saying these things that would’ve given him hope if Al-Haitham didn’t know any better. But because he did, all he felt was anger because it wasn’t fair of Kaveh to ask him of this. As if this was all Al-Haitham had to say. As if he wasn’t constantly biting back his tongue. “Do you want my condolences? My pity? I know you would only hate me more if I gave you my pity.”

“I never said that.” Kaveh’s voice was quiet, tired. “Can we please not fight?”

Al-Haitham sighed, feeling both weary and ridiculous all at once. He’d never felt so volatile in his life, though it only made sense Kaveh was the one to bring it out of him. Was this a fight? What were the fighting about and where the hell had it even come from? He had the strangest feeling that their wires had crossed somewhere, and the fact that he couldn’t untangle them without unraveling everything made him want to scream.

“I just don’t know what you want from me, Kaveh.”

“I don’t know either.” Kaveh shoved a hand through his hair. “I don’t know why I said that. I don’t know what I meant.”

There was a certain amount of masochism to pressing a bruise, just to see how much it could hurt. Al-Haitham pressed, “...do you love them?”

Kaveh’s eyes flicked to him and then he laughed bitterly. “Of course, I do. This wouldn’t have happened otherwise.”

A sharp pain lanced through his heart, which was ridiculous because it was the most likely thing Kaveh could have said. But to have it confirmed still hurt. The definition of insanity: to do something over and over again and expect the result to be different.

“Hanahaki can emerge from a range of unrequited feelings,” said Al-Haitham. “So I just wanted to make sure.”

“Yes, well, I don’t think you cough up flowers from a small crush.” Kaveh stared at the table intensely while he pressed a finger into the wood, hard enough that the pad of his finger turned white from the pressure.

Chest tight. Heart bruised. Al-Haitham finally let up on himself. “I just wanted to make sure.”

“You said that already.” Kaveh sighed. “It doesn’t matter. I never meant to tell you this anyway.”

And that almost hurt more than the rose lying between them. “Why?”

“‘Why?’” Kaveh lifted his head. “Why do you think, Al-Haitham? Because I didn’t want you to worry! The same reason you didn’t tell me, even though you’ve had it so much longer.”

Al-Haitham thought he heard Kaveh’s voice break at the end, though he must be imagining it. Maybe he was lightheaded from the lack of air.

“I…”

“‘You…’” Kaveh mimicked. “You what? You can’t deny that when you’ve said so yourself.” Then, surprisingly, Kaveh reached across the table and wrapped his hand around Al-Haitham’s fist—one he didn’t know he’d made. “I just didn’t want you to worry. Don’t feel sorry for me. As you always say, worry about yourself first.”

A tick of irritation. He couldn’t tell if the heat in his chest was anger or the warmth from Kaveh’s skin. “I tell that to you because you always worry about others first, almost to a fault.” You and your bleeding heart, Kaveh. You and your ideals for a world that doesn’t care about dreamers because not every god will be as kind as ours. “You neglect yourself and you forget yourself, but I do not, so do not turn this advice back on me.”

Kaveh smiled faintly at that, but still pained, still quiet. “Am I an exception to your rules, then?” The teasing lilt to his voice felt like a folk song, like they were almost back in the Akademiya.

Al-Haitham pulled his hand away. “I mean that I do not worry about things outside of my control."

“You overthrew a government, Al-Haitham.”

“I mean that there are things I cannot change: the fundamental nature of people, the prejudice ground into us, our own pride. So I do not try to change every individual I come across, but I can see where the root of our system planted these things in us. You, on the other hand, believe all the world is a punishment you have to atone for. But you cannot help everyone, and you do so at the expense of yourself.” 

He was sure he sounded desperate, but for once he didn’t care.

“Which I meant to say: you are not out of my control yet because it’s still early for you. You can still be helped, so please—” Pleading. He’d never pleaded like that before. “Do not tell me not to worry about you when you—when I—I have seen you tear yourself apart before.”

Kaveh was silent for a long, long moment. 

Fear struck him then on the fourth heartbeat of silence that he’d finally revealed too much, that he’d finally lost control of his mouth. The depth of his longing and his fear laid bare in a split-second moment when his head got too hot, but the aftershocks would not last a split-second. They would linger and linger and linger.

It was the rose of course, the one that Kaveh had coughed up for someone else. And still, Al-Haitham could not let him go, could not let him martyr himself like this. It made him feel selfish, wretched.

“You’re such a hypocrite,” Kaveh finally said around a quiet, bitter laugh.

Al-Haitham’s stomach dropped because those were not the words of a person who was conceding.

“If I must be.” His voice sounded strange to his own ears—high and hollow and wholly unreal. “If I must beg you to take care of yourself, then so be it.” 

It was the wrong thing to say.

“You say all this to me about taking care of myself, but you won’t do the same for yourself?” Kaveh’s voice rose like the edges of the tide. “How do you think I felt when I found out about your Hanahaki? You didn’t think I felt the same? That it didn’t eat at me? That I wanted nothing more than for you to get better? Why do you think I kept bothering you about telling your unrequited? Oh, but of course it only matters when your feelings are involved. Nevermind mine when it comes to me worrying about you.”

“I didn’t—”

Kaveh yanked his hand away from Al-Haitham’s fist, leaving the skin cold. He stood and slammed his down, leaning over the table until he was two breaths away. “You want something from me, Al-Haitham? You want to know who my flowers are for, who I’m suffocating for?” He was flushed red, like someone had taken the petals of his mourning flowers and dragged them across his cheeks. “Then give me something in exchange: tell me who your person is. And if you cannot, at least tell me why.”

It’s you, thought Al-Haitham. It’s you and I cannot tell you because of it.  

And wasn’t that so pathetic? Doubly so, now. It hurt knowing his feelings weren’t returned, worse now because there was someone else. He wondered, pitifully, where Kaveh found this new person. Did he find them in the absence of Al-Haitham? On one of his long trips away from home? What happened to make Kaveh find out his affections were unrequited? He knew Kaveh gave his love freely and easily and that was one of the most wonderful parts about him. But a little jealous part of Al-Haitham still twisted, and that was so, so pathetic.

“Tell me,” said Kaveh again, softer. “I will tell you who it is if you just—if you just tell me. You can trust me.” Like you used to. "Please, Al-Haitham."

Pathetic. Wretched. He whispered, “I can’t.”

There was a long pause. Then, Kaveh scoffed, more resigned than cruel. “Of course, you can’t.”

“It won’t change anything for you to know,” tried Al-Haitham. “It would be more worth your time to try and win your person over.”

“But you won’t do the same.”

Al-Haitham exhaled. “No.”

Kaveh leaned back, expression shuttering. “You really are a hypocrite.”

“Kaveh, I just want you to be well.”

“And I don’t want the same for you?”

“That’s not what I said.” His heart twisted, throat thick with something that had equal chances of being flowers and fear.

Kaveh's voice was soft, deceivingly so, when he said, “Then tell me what you meant to say.”

I want you to be okay, he wanted to say. I care about you. I’d rather choke on my flowers than see you choke on yours.

But that would be selfish, wouldn’t it? To try and keep him here when Al-Haitham hadn’t been enough the first time.

“I just think—” He swallowed thickly. “If you—if there’s a chance for you—”

Kaveh stepped back from the table abruptly, knocking into his chair as he went. “I cannot believe you,” he spat.

Then, he turned away from the table—from Al-Haitham. He strode out of the kitchen, each footstep echoed loud against the wood until Al-Haitham could hear the front door open, hinges creaking like a cry. One breath, the space of a heartbeat, and he imagined Kaveh looking back, lingering on the state of the house, before he turned and slammed the door shut.

-

Al-Haitham knew grief.

He’d lost his parents young enough that he didn’t remember them. What a tragedy, people had said, that he’d lost them so young, that he couldn’t remember their faces or their voices or who they were. That he didn’t know, exactly, what he had lost. But perhaps, that in and of itself was a mercy—he certainly thought so, though others around him did not.

Of course, he loved them in a vague and abstract way like how you love the law of nature that made lotuses bloom on cliffsides; and given the chance, he would have loved to meet them for who they were. But Al-Haitham found no point in looking at hypotheticals, so he took the small mercies granted and was thankful that he had one less thing to grieve in his youth, one less ghost to haunt him.

But then there was the matter of his grandmother.

Al-Haitham didn’t know many people his age, but was acutely aware of how much less time he had left with his caretaker than others. The idea always hovered over his head: the idea of time scarcity, a resource he’d simply been given less of. If he were a different kind of child, he would have dwelled on all the hypotheticals and all the things he couldn’t do. But because he was not, he moved through the world the only way he could: forward.

He read his books, ate his grandmother’s meat stew, read more books, and lived his life in their small house with their little library that seemed much vaster when he was young.

Nostalgia colored his memories of the house warmer than he was actually sure of, but he remembered the way the sound of his grandmother’s voice lit the room like a hearth and the soft creak of the chair she sat in to read to him.

“Are you happy, Al-Haitham?” she’d often ask.

“Yes, Bibi.” He’d say, and he’d mean it.

When she died, Al-Haitham got his first practical knowledge of grief. 

He’d read about it in stories before, had read the scientific categorizations of it, read poetry that described the hollow it carved in your heart, but no amount of bracing for impact could stop the wind from being knocked out of him. 

So when the shadow became flesh, it cut a hole in his stomach wider than the one they’d dug to put her casket in. His knees did not buckle the way the poems said they would. He did not collapse onto the floor. But he’d felt something erode in him like the banks of a river.

Al-Haitham had arranged the funeral himself, of course. He’d said it was because he liked the planning, but it was more to get his hands on something and his mind off the reason why he was doing it in the first place.

He knew, objectively, that he was a good grandson. He’d done all the things to make life good for her, had made her proud with his accomplishments in their little house even though her pride in him was already unconditional, had grown to be handsome and strong and still kind to her even though other people found his brand of kindness strange.

But there were always regrets. To be human meant it was an inevitability. While making arrangements, he thought about how he’d made the chai wrong that morning and that was the last drink he’d ever make her. While writing to the funeral parlor, he thought about all the books he’d never gotten around to that she said he would like, so he could never talk about them with her. While he was organizing her will (where everything went to him), he thought about how she’d asked him to sweep, and for once he was more engrossed in a book than listening to her so he finished the chapter only to find that she’d swept the study instead. He thought of so many things he could have done, and kept thinking and thinking until it dug a pit in his own stomach, until he felt enough pain that it felt like he could atone for the things he didn’t do.

But then he looked up from all the papers, looked around at the empty, empty house and realized how his progress had slowed. Thinking like that wasn’t productive, and there was nothing he could do now, so he did what he’d always done: kept moving forward.

The funeral passed by smoothly. He paid his respects, laid roses by her grave, and left. I’ll apply to the Akademiya, Bibi, he’d thought as he walked away, and told himself that was the closest goodbye he would allow.

The real grief came when he made it home. It only took a few days to realize the gaps she’d left behind, the snatches of her that he could never reclaim.

When he had a craving for her meat stew, he realized he’d never gotten the recipe for it, so he had to learn by trial and error. It never tasted the same, though, and then came the bone-crushing realization that he could never ask her for it. 

It wasn’t just his grandmother lost to time, but her books if he did not preserve them, her recipes that he’d never thought to ask for, the place she kept a secret stash of candy for him, though he’d never been one for sweets. Al-Haitham had never been an artist, and as sharp as his mind was, it was not photographic, so then the exact shape of her eyes started slipping away, which direction her cowlick swirled, which teeth of hers was crooked because she’d fallen on her face as a kid—was it the left side or the right side? Her left or Al-Haitham’s?—and he could ask no one else because he’d been the sole bookkeeper to the remaining history of her life.

What a burden to place on an eighteen-year old. What a great and terrible responsibility—knowing that your only record was your memory, vulnerable to warping, to retellings without ever having the original story to reference.

Knowing Kaveh felt a little like that. Not grief—but the shape of it.

When he’d left after graduation, Al-Haitham felt it carve a hole in his chest in the shape of Kaveh’s laugh, now fleeting. A presence in his life, once so certain, suddenly gone. Story over. Book closed. Now, Al-Haitham only had his own retellings that he wasn’t certain were truthful.

When Kaveh returned, Al-Haitham felt a lot of things: a dream remembered, a story rewritten, a life resurrected. A second chance, even though there was still a lingering pain between them like a burr on your sleeve.

Neither of them acknowledged it, neither of them spoke of it, they just danced around the raw wound they’d never fully let heal because if they did—if they ripped off the scab—they would start bleeding again.

Go back. Closer to the start. Closer.  

Kaveh cared about him then because they were best friends. Kaveh cared about him now because it was in his nature, because he had the capacity to care for strangers and friends.

Al-Haitham cared because he couldn’t let go. He couldn’t talk about it without feeling the bitter fire of forgotten anger crawling up his throat, without a fight. Kaveh had finally come home after all these years and he still didn’t know what to do with himself.

But they were on their way, said hope, said delusion. They could be friends again. They could be that nebulous thing they once were. They could be young and dumb and unburdened by history and maybe they could go through the rest of their lives without talking about how they broke the first time, how they shattered like glasswork stretched too far. He would prefer it. If they could go back—inch by inch—to an imitation of who’d they been in the Akademiya: laughing, bickering, touching elbows, leaning into each other shoulder to shoulder. It was fine if it wasn’t entirely the same. You couldn’t get picky with second chances.

Then Al-Haitham had coughed up a mourning flower—had let his carefully suppressed feelings rise up like a weed. He’d destroyed the fragile piece they’d built and it was all his fault.

Kaveh being tentative, Kaveh worrying, because he had a heart that bled and bled and bled for strangers and friends and friends turned strangers. Once they’d been friends, now they were roommates, and Al-Haitham couldn’t fathom the two of them without constantly being haunted by what they’d lost. The shape of their ghosts so stark on the walls in the house they built together, the evidence of their breaking, the legacy of their destruction. And Al-Haitham’s flowers: something so lovely and beautiful it could only be born from heartbreak, penance for being too naive, gifts for their gardener.

But do not tell him how he was the muse for the garden because Kaveh saw all the world as atonement for the crime of dreaming, for making a mistake in his youth that would eat him raw. He blamed himself for his father. This was one of the first things he realized about Kaveh only weeks after they’d first met. His grief was different from Al-Haitham’s: grief and guilt so intertwined you couldn’t pull it apart, so it lingered like a weed. The grief. The guilt. All of it for everything.

So Al-Haitham didn’t tell him, resolved to never tell him, because the only thing worse than losing Kaveh was Kaveh losing himself. And Al-Haitham never wanted to be a cage, so he kept the maker of his flowers a secret.

Then Kaveh coughed up a rose. Kaveh had feelings for someone else.

And that was the worst part, the infinitely worse part: Al-Haitham could handle not being loved back—he’d always known Kaveh was a star too bright for him. But it hurt more, selfishly, to know that there was someone else. That it wasn’t just that Al-Haitham wasn’t enough, but there was someone better.

He could take his deficiencies in stride, could handle Kaveh not loving him back in the Akademiya, but he lived now in the present: flesh and tangible and forcibly crawling down your throat no matter how much you tried to look away.

It made him think: I was too late.

It made him think: I was a fool all along.

-

Kaveh ended up returning home after that conversation much, much later in the night, long after it had gone dark. Al-Haitham only knew because he was up reading in the study—because he couldn’t sleep, because he couldn’t breathe.

He’d coughed up another three flowers after Kaveh left. After that, it was just shrapnel; he’d swept up all the flower petals on the ground and swallowed the rest and then tried to go about the rest of the evening like he hadn’t just had the worst conversation of his life. 

Then he heard the sound of Kaveh’s keys jingling in the doorway. He sucked in a breath as he listened to Kaveh stumble inside—was he drunk? He heard Kaveh trip over a chair leg with a loud BANG. There was a series of muttered curses, a little thump-slide sound as if he were limping, and it felt so familiar that he instantly coughed five petals into the air, fluttering like birds before they drifted to the ground.

Al-Haitham froze, afraid that Kaveh had heard. But Kaveh must have been too inebriated to pay much attention to anything because a moment later, all he heard was the sound of Kaveh’s door slamming shut, and then it was silent again.

“Archons,” he muttered. 

He waited for a long moment. He let the sound of his own, fluttering heartbeat fill his head before he mustered up the courage to stand and crawl back to his own room.

Al-Haitham went to work the next day and officially approached Lesser Lord Kusanali about resigning from his position as Acting Grand Sage. 

“You’re certain?” she asked, peering up at him like a puzzle. “Did you not enjoy the higher pay? The directive power it gave you? The investment of such a position that lets you move pieces as you wish?”

Sometimes if you weren’t looking close enough, if you let yourself go for a moment, it was easy to forget that Lesser Lord Kusanali was not a child. But if you focused back on her eyes for just one moment, you would remember—with startling clarity—that a god stood before you.

“I’m certain.” Al-Haitham inclined his head. “Such an investment is not…conducive to my long term goals.”

“Ah, what a shame,” sighed Lesser Lord Kusanali. “You were such a wonderful leader, too. Very efficient. Very decisive.”

“I’m sure.”

If Kaveh were here, he’d probably smack Al-Haitham on the arm for his impropriety. But since he was not, Al-Haitham just watched Lesser Lord Kusanali smile.

“I see I still have more to learn about humans.”

He blinked. “Pardon?”

“I’ll find someone else. Enjoy your demotion, Al-Haitham. And your new free time to think.”

She waved him off with a mysterious smile as he left the room.

He continued about his day, now back to just the Scribe of the Akademiya. He went back to dodging meetings and reading applications, rejecting applications, and sometimes—sometimes, walking through the halls and indulging in the memory of what it’d been like to be a student there.

Al-Haitham didn’t linger in the feeling. Didn’t let himself unless he wanted to dip into something more dangerous.

But then he passed by one of their old study spots; he saw the old desk, the scratch on the edge where Kaveh had forgotten to put a buffer between the paper and the table and had sliced a perfectly curved groove into the wood—and felt the grief ring distantly before slamming into him like the reverberations of a bell. He ran outside to get air, to deal with the weed in his head that would not relent.

I cannot keep going like this, he thought.

So when he returned home, exhausted and weary, he unlocked the door to the sound of Kaveh coughing in the bathroom.

He froze immediately, letting the heartache wash over him like he was trying to burn a fever out. And when Kaveh emerged, they stared at each other, unsure who was going to make a move first.

“You—you look tired.” It seemed Kaveh would. “I apologize, I went out drinking last night and you must have heard me come home,” he said gruffly, like he couldn’t hide the evidence of flowers scraping his throat raw.

“I was asleep,” lied Al-Haitham, and he couldn’t tell if Kaveh knew or not. “I heard nothing.”

“Ah, that’s good.”

So it seemed they were both going to pretend they hadn’t heard anything.

Al-Haitham dropped his keys in the basket. “Where did you go drinking last night?”

Kaveh raised an eyebrow. “Lambad’s. Where else?”

“Of course,” he said wryly. “I’m surprised he isn’t sick of you by now.”

“I would say the same for you.”

Al-Haitham paused. “Kaveh, what do you mean by that?”

He’d meant it lightly, like something he’d have said to Kaveh in the Akademiya, or in the house before the whole mess of their flowers came out. But it didn’t land like how it should have.

Kaveh snorted, high and strange and false. “What do you mean? Obviously, I meant that—”

“I’m not sick of you.”

Kaveh’s expression shuttered, which was the exact opposite reaction he wanted.

“Where is this coming from?” He stepped closer.

Kaveh stepped back and Al-Haitham pretended he didn’t notice.

“Um…” Kaveh fidgeted. “Should we…talk about yesterday?”

Well. He hadn’t expected this to happen quite so fast.

“Do you want to?” he asked.

“Do you want to?” Kaveh pressed. “You seem pretty avoidant when it comes to talking about these things.”

A tick of irritation. “Should I remind you that you also hid your flowers from me?”

Kaveh pressed his lips together. “You’re right,” he sighed. “I’m sorry.”

Al-Haitham blinked. “That was a quick apology. I’ll admit, I wasn’t expecting that.”

“Must you be the most obnoxious person on Teyvat, even while we’re having a heartfelt argument?”

Kaveh sounded annoyed on the surface, but Al-Haitham thought he could hear the slightest undercurrent of amusement. Just the thought of it knocked something loose in his chest, like the hope that maybe he could survive this conversation.

Al-Haitham sucked in a breath, then said as neutral as he could, “What do you want to talk about, Kaveh?”

Kaveh tensed again, the laughter gone. “I wanted to apologize for blowing up at you last night.”

Oh. That was not what he was expecting. “It’s alright,” he said, and meant it. 

Kaveh shook his head. “No. I’m just—very worried about you. I still cannot fathom why you won't do anything about your flowers but…” He balled his beautiful, rough artist hands into fists until the knuckles turned white. “You did not deserve my anger. No matter the framing. I took my frustrations out on you, rather than the circumstance, and for that, I’m sorry.”

“It’s alright,” repeated Al-Haitham. “I understand.”

Kaveh exhaled. “Thank you.”

The urge to reach for him slapped Al-Haitham upside the head, which of course meant tucking his fists behind his back.

He could leave it there, let the moment hang as it was. But he knew both of them were unsatisfied because neither of them could talk about what they wanted to.

Before he could think about it any longer, Kaveh asked, tentatively, “Do you have anything to say?”

Al-Haitham sighed because it seemed Kaveh would keep deciding for them. 

“If you want an apology,” he said as gently as his voice could go, “I can’t give you one.”

Kaveh’s sigh was resigned. “I figured.”

“Well, I can apologize for one thing,” amended Al-Haitham. “I’m sorry our conversation ended like that, but I can’t apologize for wanting you to take care of yourself.”

The Light of Kshahrewar screwed his eyes shut, expression twisting suddenly. “Al-Haitham, we can’t keep doing this.”

His heart stumbled. “What?”

“We can’t keep hiding from each other like this: coughing into our fists, sweeping petals under the couch. I thought we were on our way to—” Kaveh balled his hands into fists. “To something. But Archons, even when we’re on the verge of choking—I knew you would say that. I fucking knew. It’s never easy with you. I don’t understand what makes you so special that you must withstand your flowers, but I shouldn’t.”

Kaveh turned to him, eyes blazing.

“Why don’t you trust me to help you?” Why don’t you trust me like you used to? “I feel like you’re always hiding from me, like I’m trying to know you again but you keep—holding back—”

“I’m hiding?” Al-Haitham couldn’t help it. “What about you? You’ve been so shifty and strange, and these past few months, I had no idea you even—”

“Do not talk to me about hiding my Hanahaki for months, when you’ve apparently been hiding it for a year.” His eyes flashed. “Al-Haitham, I really, really can’t keep doing this. I can’t—please, you have to tell me, or I’ll—”

Kaveh cut himself off, like he couldn’t fathom what he was saying.

“Or what?” Al-Haitham said dangerously. “You’ll leave?”

Kaveh didn’t confirm or deny it exactly, but he said, softly, “We can’t keep hiding from each other like this.”

Maybe it was the leftover adrenaline from yesterday kicking up, or maybe it was still the lightheadedness, the lack of air, but Al-Haitham was feeling reckless. He said, like some kind of swansong for something fracturing beyond repair, “Fine, here’s a secret: I missed you last night.” And in all the years that had gone by, too. “I’m glad you’re home. Is that enough to make you stay?”

The words did not have the intended effect. Kaveh did not look comforted or placated, he just looked devastated.

Al-Haitham felt the sudden thunderstruck of fear that he’d really revealed too much. And suddenly, he couldn’t handle what Kaveh would say to him next.

So he stepped back and retreated into the hall before Kaveh had the chance to open his mouth. He escaped to his room and collapsed onto his bed, exhausted. 

In the end, neither of them revealed anything because they were both tired, both weary, leaving them worse than where they started.

-

Once, when they were younger, Al-Haitham asked Kaveh to teach him more about Kshahrewar because his grandmother had shared his darshan.

He’d read books, of course. He’d enrolled in various electives (and then promptly skipped them just to do the homework and come away with high marks anyway), but there was an element to the human mind he was missing—something he could easily remedy by going to class, but the people there didn’t interest him. Not like his grandmother.

So he turned to Kaveh. In the light of Kaveh’s dorm room, Al-Haitham asked if he would give insight to the minds of people in the darshan of technology.

“Well, if I teach you something, it’s only fair that you teach me something, too.”

Kaveh had been up for at least twenty hours at that point, and you could see it in the way dark circles were bruising under his eyes. But he’d looked at Al-Haitham with a small smile tilting the corner of his mouth; and young, foolish Al-Haitham, suddenly felt entirely too warm reading on top of Kaveh’s bed.

So another sixteen hours later, Kaveh finished his project and passed with flying colors. He’d shouted at Al-Haitham from across the corridor that his professor loved his design and the three days of no sleep had been worth it before barreling down the hall and wrapping Al-Haitham in a hug so encompassing, he almost coughed up a lung from how hard his heart was thumping against his chest.

Then, Kaveh pulled away. And before Al-Haitham could feel the slightest inkling of disappointment at the loss of contact, Kaveh wrapped his fingers around Al-Haitham’s wrist and tugged him back to their favorite corner in the House of Daena.

“What are you going to teach me, Professor?” Al-Haitham said wryly after Kaveh had shoved him down into the seat by the shoulders.

Kaveh flushed, looking entirely too pleased with the title. He was smiling as he pulled out his blueprints.Well, I just got a very high grade on a project in one of Kshahrewar’s upper division classes, so I’m going to instruct you on a little bit of that. We’ll also touch a bit on technology, and on King Deshret’s as well for my own curiosities.”

Al-Haitham watched as Kaveh pulled out more textbooks, writing utensils, and parchment out of his seemingly endless bag and laid them out on the table in front of them.

“Of course, my discipline is more design and structural stability in architecture,” said Kaveh. “But I’ve taken all the foundational classes on puzzles and mechanisms that people in Kshahrewar must take, so I can tell you a little bit about that as well. Your grandmother must have been a technologist, right? From the way you speak about her.”

“Yes.” Al-Haitham had never confirmed for sure, but there had always been little trinkets around the house. Even when her fingers had started to curl from arthritis, she’d ask Al-Haitham to come over with his steady youthful fingers to put something in place while she watched him near the window light.

“Wonderful. Well, good for you, your knowledge of runes will help when we touch on King Deshret’s technology. Not that words alone can tell you everything—” Kaveh stared at him pointedly, “but it will help some concepts stick to your mind better when you know what the root of the word means.”

“Rare compliment from you for my darshan.”

“Oh, shut it, Haravatat.” Kaveh bumped their shoulders together. “In exchange for my services, I’d like you to teach me a bit of the old languages you know. For my own curiosities about Deshret’s technology. Sound like a fair trade?”

His eyes were molten in the low lamplight. What else could Al-Haitham do but swallow and nod?

So Kaveh taught him the principles of construction, how those principles applied to form, and Al-Haitham taught him how to identify patterns in language, and how those applied to old runes. This was how they started to become proficient in each other’s languages: in the House of Daena, late enough that they were ruining their eyes in the dark, shushed for speaking too loudly but huffing laughter into each other’s shoulders afterward. 

Here, he started to find threads of his grandmother in the sketching, in the tinkering, in the way her mind worked and the principles of design and thought and puzzling taught in Kshahrewar. Kaveh brought a circuit board one day and Al-Haitham took it with both hands.

“Are you happy?” He imagined his grandmother saying while Kaveh guided his hands along the board, while he fiddled with the wires, while they sparked against his fingertips, biting and biting and biting.

“Yes, Bibi,” he wanted to say. But she was not here, so he turned to Kaveh and asked what was next. The next thing to learn. The next step forward.

It was moments like these in the liminal dark where he wondered—where the little yearning animal inside him wanted more than what he was content with. There was settling against Kaveh’s shoulder, and then his face in Kaveh’s book, in Kaveh’s voice swallowing him whole. Moments like these where he wanted more than just to know the presence of fire, but to feel.

He wanted to ask: do you want to eat me the way I want to eat you? He wanted to reach into the burning thing between them and feel the flesh curdle, to feel the pain so sharp and clear that nothing was muddled. A demarcation so stark he knew which side to stand on, so that he’d know for sure.

But the problem was that he’d never asked. Neither him nor Kaveh. Because the comfort was so sweet and warm that you couldn’t bear to step out of it, out of fear that it might change for the worse.

And what a shame it was: that in the end, they’d never had a chance at all.

-

It was getting harder to breathe nowadays. The house felt like a ghost, like the empty, empty rows between graves—the both of them walking through the shell of a thing they’d built together, now trapped in the hollow.

So, Al-Haitham went to work and Kaveh went to who knew where. Now that he’d resigned from his position as the Acting Grand Sage, he had his old workload again, which left him with too much time on his hands—to think, to feel. He couldn’t even read his books without his mind drifting.

Finally, on his fifth attempt at starting The Folio of Foliage, Al-Haitham gave up and wrote to Tighnari: It’s getting harder to breathe. How do I make it easier?

Then he let the letter sit for a long time, unsure if he was going to send it at all, when he caught a glimpse of Cyno through the crack in his office door. He stood to seize the opportunity, and strode over, throwing open the door before grabbing the General Mahamatra by the tails of his headdress.

“Who—” Cyno whirled around, using that terrifying matra voice of his.

Al-Haitham pressed the letter into his hands. “Can you pass this onto Tighnari?”

Cyno paused and looked at him curiously, before nodding once. Then, he disappeared down the hall.

Later that day, Cyno reappeared and dropped a note on his desk that just said: You know what I think you should do.

Al-Haitham crumpled up the note and threw it away.

He tried other things to distract himself. He trained with the Traveler, who wanted sand grease pupas from him, of all fucking things. And when she sent him to the desert to collect them, he gained a newfound appreciation for the fact that he was growing mourning flowers in his chest, which were even farther in the desert than the pupas. Convenient for Kaveh, truly.

Al-Haitham went back to work. He took notes at the meetings he was supposed to and rejected applications that were missing requirements and tried, increasingly, to get through his books, but couldn’t. So he turned the noise-canceling in his headphones all the way up and listened to music to drown everything out like he was eighteen again and dripping with fresh grief.

Then, Cyno reappeared with a new note and a mix of herbs. He tossed the whole bundle unceremoniously onto Al-Haitham’s desk and stood there with his arms crossed while he waited for Al-Haitham to read the note.

You stubborn oaf, at least try this. Followed by the herbs listed out and the portions in which he had to mix them for some medicinal paste for a torn up throat.

“What’s this?” Al-Haitham raised an eyebrow.

“Tighnari’s attempt at trying to make you take care of yourself.”

“Hm.” Al-Haitham lifted the pouch and inspected it.

“He wanted me to tell you: ‘this doesn’t mean you can just perpetually push it off.’”

Al-Haitham was suddenly curious. “How much do you know?”

Cyno narrowed his eyes. “Enough.”

Al-Haitham leaned back. “Alright. Go tell Tighnari I’ll think about it. You can get back to work.”

Cyno frowned at him one more time before disappearing.

Of course, he wasn’t going to tell Kaveh. He did not lie when he said he would think about it, but no amount of thinking would ever change the conclusion: that he would never tell Kaveh who his flowers were for, what all the blood and salt amounted to. And the magnitude of it frightened him—holding onto these feelings for so long when Kaveh must have thought nothing of him, when Kaveh must have found someone else anyway.

Al-Haitham did end up making that paste, but all it did was numb his throat. When he gouged up another flower, the pain wasn’t as sharp, but he was still coughing blood; and, well, he supposed he should have expected that.

Dinners at home were the worst change since the Sumeru rose incident. Before, they would discuss ingredients beforehand, argue about what to make, bump into each other in the kitchen and then continue arguing at the table when the food was done—but at least they would talk.

Now, dinners were sterile, even more than Kaveh had first moved in and they were both unsure how to behave. For all their tentativeness, there were olive branches then. Now, there was a valley between them.

They didn’t eat at the table as often. Kaveh or Al-Haitham would make something per routine, then leave it in the pot and wander off to their own spaces before the other even thought to stand and take a serving. 

And here again, Al-Haitham sat at the table without Kaveh sitting across again, coughing quietly into his fist as he attempted to eat his biryani and read at the same time.

Out of the corner of his eye, he finally saw Kaveh slink out of the study. Kaveh cast a wary glance at him before quietly padding into the kitchen.

Al-Haitham coughed again, sending a scatter of flower petals fluttering out from between his teeth. He stared at them for a moment before sighing and brushing them to the center of the table to throw away later. 

“I really think you should tell them,” a voice said softly behind him.

Al-Haitham didn’t quite jump, but he tensed up so fast he was surprised he didn’t pull a muscle. Slowly, he turned to find Kaveh watching him with something unreadable swimming in his eyes.

“Why?” he asked, though of course he knew the answer.

Kaveh looked down at his plate, piled with the other serving of dinner Al-Haitham had made. “I feel like you’ve been coughing more lately.”

Ah, consequences. It was true: Al-Haitham had been coughing more lately, but he also hadn’t bothered hiding from Kaveh anymore. The coughing or the flowers. What was the point? Now that he knew Kaveh had feelings for someone else, he let himself cough with wild abandon without worrying about Kaveh figuring out the flowers were growing for him.

He said none of this, of course. Al-Haitham set his book down. “I’ll tell them if you tell yours.”

“This isn’t a competition, Al-Haitham.”

“I never said it was.” He ran a finger along the edge of his plate idly. “Are we not both suffering from the same affliction? Maybe I’m just motivating the both of us to take better care of ourselves.”

Kaveh let out a groan of frustration. “Mine isn’t as far along as yours. Al-Haitham, you are literally coughing up blood.”

“Then you should tell your person before it’s too late for me.”

Kaveh dropped his plate on the table, a few grains of rice knocking off the plate.

“You’re paying for a new plate if you break—”

“Don’t joke about that.” Kaveh glared. “Stop—stop being so flippant about all this.”

This was the most they’d spoken in days, and all of a sudden Al-Haitham couldn’t keep hold of his tongue.

“Sorry,” he said genuinely.

“‘Sorry,’” scoffed Kaveh. “If you’re sorry, why don’t you take this more seriously and tell them?”

Al-Haitham took a deep breath. “I don’t see a point in…causing unnecessary stress for them.”

“You—” Kaveh wrung his hands together, eyes suddenly turning wild.  “You always say people should be more selfish, that they should be more concerned about themselves. Where’s that mindset now?”

Al-Haitham was selfish, so selfish. It’s you, it’s you, it’s you. And if he hurt Kaveh more, he couldn’t forgive himself.

“You wouldn’t understand.”

“Then fucking tell me. Let me help you!”

“I can’t,” Al-Haitham said flatly. “Call me a hypocrite again if you must, but this is something I have to keep secret.”

Kaveh threw his hands up. “Fine. Don’t tell me. But at least tell them because I care about you and I want you to be well.”

A flower rose into his throat, heart wrenching. He coughed as quietly into his fist as he could before he demanded, “Why are you so certain confessing will fix it?”

“Why are you so certain it will not? Do you really think they don’t return your feelings?”

“Why would they? You’ve said so yourself, I’m unbearable and a hypocrite and my personality is terrible.”

Kaveh let out a frustrated cry. When he spoke again, Al-Haitham almost thought he sounded pained. “I didn’t mean it like that. ” He shoved a hand through his hair. “You are condescending and rude and lack any sense of respect for your seniors, but you are smart and selfless and kind in aways you don’t even acknowledge. You were—” He swallowed. Al-Haitham’s heart stuttered. “My dearest friend, and I regret having lost you all those years ago, but please let me keep you now.”

Foolish heart, delusional heart, but Al-Haitham couldn’t help the hope sprouting in his chest, up his throat.

“Kaveh—” His voice trembled, right at the breaking point.

“So you should tell them,” Kaveh finished. “Because you are good. And you are—wonderful. And they must be too, if you’ve held onto them for this long.”

The hope shattered. Al-Haitham didn’t realize he’d thrown up another flower until he felt pain splintering through his knees. He was on the ground. The wood under his fingertips. He must have fallen. Must have slammed into the floor. When?

A sharp, throbbing ache pressed at his temple. He blinked to find Kaveh next to him, holding a hand to the side of the table where Al-Haitham must have bumped his head.

There was another hand on his back—also Kaveh’s. Al-Haitham tried to look at him, but just the sight of the furrow between his brows was enough to send him spiraling down another coughing fit, back to the floor and coughing and coughing and coughing.

Black spotted his vision—at the corners, in the center—melting into his field of view until the world was a soup he was trying to wade through. There was a pressure in his chest and he couldn’t tell if it was from his lungs or from the flowers. Typical, typical, typical. The flowers ruining everything, distorting his logic, his reality, shaking the fragile equilibrium of a life he tried to rebuild.

They must feed on his misery because the ones sprawled in front of him were so red, so full. He thought, deliriously, that Kaveh would love these. He thought, deliriously, about making a bouquet—like Kaveh had suggested—before remembering, deliriously, that Kaveh didn’t want his flowers anymore.

“Al-Haitham, what happened? What’s wrong? Why are you coughing more? Oh, Archons—” Kaveh’s voice sounded so strained, so pained, which didn’t seem exactly right because why would he care about Al-Haitham? Ah, but how could he forget, the bleeding heart. Maybe the mistake was thinking Kaveh’s worry for him was special.

“Can you speak? Can you say something? Oh my gods, do you—”

Al-Haitham felt something clawing at his throat. A moment later, he realized it was his own hands: the blunt drag of his nails against skin—the ridged muscle of his esophagus so hard and sturdy when the insides of his throat were already scraped raw. 

He was drowning in himself. If this were an ocean, at least there was a way up, a way out. But there was no escape here. Not with this thing growing in his chest.

“Al-Haitham, what can I do?” Kaveh was pleading and he hated the sound of it. “Please, let me help you.”

Tell me more about how you missed me, he wanted to say. Tell me how you want to keep me and end it there.

But he couldn’t speak. Couldn’t breathe. So he turned over and coughed onto the floor of the kitchen they designed together, in the house they built together. And coughed and coughed and coughed until his mouth tasted more like iron than salt and the black flooded in until he couldn’t see even the red of his flowers.

-

When Al-Haitham woke again, he was lying on one of the beds in the Bimarstan.

He could tell because of how rough the sheets were from frequent changes and washes, and the pillow just thick enough to support a neck without causing spinal issues. He lay there for a long moment trying to repopulate his head with thoughts before he gave up and rolled over to find an empty glass and a water pitcher sitting on the crate next to him.

He sat up and reached for the pitcher.

“Don’t do that,” came a voice from behind him. “Let me get it.”

Tighnari’s hand appeared at the corner of his vision and poured a glass of water before handing it to him.

Al-Haitham took it.

“Thank you,” he said, and then realized how raw his throat felt. He tried to clear it to make way for his voice, but even that hurt, so he drained the glass and tried to pretend the cold water was more soothing than it actually was.

He glanced at Tighnari. 

“You look like you want to say something,” noted Al-Haitham.

“I’ll refrain until you feel a little better and you can properly fight back.”

He felt a smile tug at the corner of his mouth. “How merciful of you.”

Tighnari narrowed his eyes. “You are so lucky I make it a personal rule of mine not to be too mean to my patients.”

A patient. The memories started trickling in—the coughing, the drowning, Kaveh and Kaveh and Kaveh.

“How long have I been here?” he asked, because he had a vague idea of how he must have gotten here. He wouldn’t put it past Kaveh to drag Al-Haitham’s body all the way to the Bimarstan, if his arms allowed it.

“About a day,” said Tighnari. “Now ask your other question.”

Al-Haitham stuck the empty glass between his lips, licking at the last of the condensation before he spoke. “Where’s Kaveh?”

“Playing a TCG game with Cyno to get his mind off of things,” said Tighnari. “I can go grab them.” If you’re ready, he did not say.

Al-Haitham ran his tongue behind his front teeth before he said, “Okay.”

Tighnari stood there for a moment longer, as if giving him the chance to reconsider before heading down the path and disappearing beyond the buildings.

Al-Haitham took stock: his mouth was clean—someone must have wiped all the blood off—though there were little cuts all over the inside of his mouth, presumably from the entire bouquet he’d coughed up. His throat was entirely raw, so scraped and destroyed that it hurt to swallow his own saliva. And his chest—he pressed two fingers to the pulsepoint under his chin, just to make sure his heart was beating—ached like he’d been punched by a sumpter beast. It must have been from the flowers, growing and growing and climbing and ripping out of his mouth. He sucked in a breath and his lungs rattled.

There were no other patients outside, which was incredibly lucky. Only a few doctors milling about, in transit to go back into the building where the rest of the patients must be.

Tighnari returned with Kaveh and Cyno in tow. He walked a bit in front while Kaveh lingered a few feet behind, murmuring something to Cyno about what he should have done to beat that one move Cyno did. 

Instinctually, Al-Haitham cleared his throat—and immediately regretted it.

He let out the quietest grunt of pain, but Kaveh was at his side in an instant: grabbing the glass and pouring water and muttering to Tighnari about numbing herbs or something else to help the pain.

“He’s fine,” said Tighnari. “Just an idiot.”

Kaveh furrowed his eyebrows. “What—”

“I thought you said you weren’t mean to your patients until they felt better,” said Al-Haitham wryly.

“If you can make snarky remarks like that, you’re fine.” Tighnari rolled his eyes. “Besides, I checked the rest of you over and nothing seems irreparably damaged.”

Al-Haitham snorted. “Reassuring.

“Al-Haitham, you passed out,” interrupted Kaveh.

He finally turned to the side. “...I know.”

“Are you not concerned?” Kaveh whipped around to Tighnari. “Are you not concerned?”

Tighnari crossed his arms. “I am concerned that you let it advance this far, Al-Haitham, when there is such a clear and obvious solution right in front of you—”

“Tighnari…” he said warningly.

Tighnari pressed his lips together, then started again. “You insist on not telling them even though you’re choking on the magnitude of your feelings—which is so fucking stupid by the way. It would literally benefit everyone if you just talked about it, if you didn’t insist on holding this all to yourself. You say you’ve loved them for years but you don’t even trust them to listen to you.”

The Forest Watcher that had come to the city flicked his eyes to the side, the direction clear to everyone but the target himself. Lucky that Kaveh was only looking at Al-Haitham, because Al-Haitham saw the way Tighnari’s mouth curved lower looking between the both of them.

“Tighnari,” he said, voice raw and on the verge of panic. “Don’t.”

Tighnari stopped cold. Out of the corner of his eye, he saw Kaveh glance at him before suddenly whipping his head to the side and coughing forcefully into his fist. 

At first, Cyno and Tighnari didn’t pay it mind. But Al-Haitham knew better, and he couldn’t help himself when he let his eyes follow the purple rose petal fall out of Kaveh’s hand.

“Shit,” muttered Kaveh.

Silence dropped on them, thick and heavy.

“...what is that?” Tighnari asked, voice deceptively flat.

“Um…” Kaveh stayed kneeling. “A rose petal?”

“Yes, I can see that.” Al-Haitham could see the whites of Tighnari’s teeth, even as he spoke. “But why?”

“Uh, I may…I may have Hanahaki disease as well.”

“You— what?”

Al-Haitham warily looked at Tighnari. He didn’t look shocked—which was the expected reaction. Instead he looked—very, very mad.

“Tighnari…” Cyno reached for him.

“I cannot believe the both of you!” Tighnari brushed him off and thrust his hands in front of them, fingers curling like he wanted to strangle something. He let out one frustrated noise throwing his hands back down and starting to pace back and forth, tail thrashing irritably. He went a full circle before he suddenly stopped right in front of Kaveh. “You. How long?”

Kaveh shrunk back. “Um, a few months?”

“Oh my gods.” Tighnari buried his face in his hands. “Kaveh, I care for you so much, but you shorten my lifespan by three years every time we speak. You are so—the both of you are so goddamn annoying.”

Kaveh frowned. “Hey—”

“Colossal fucking morons. I cannot believe both of you decided to become martyrs.”

“Tighnari, don’t—” There was a warning rising in Kaveh’s voice, but Al-Haitham wasn’t sure for what.

Tighnari glared. “Kaveh—you come with me.”

“What? Why?”

“Now.”

Kaveh stood abruptly.

“Cyno, I’m trusting you to take care of Al-Haitham now that he’s more stable. Kaveh, I need to give you the same lecture I gave Al-Haitham.”

Cyno nodded dutifully before Tighnari turned to Kaveh with another forest-leveling glare. If Kaveh weren’t taller, Al-Haitham was sure Tighnari would’ve grabbed Kaveh by the ear and dragged him away. Instead, he bat at Kaveh’s back with his bow to push him to start walking.

It didn’t take long for them to disappear into the street. From the direction they’d started walking, Al-Haitham assumed Tighnari was leading him away from the city—probably to give them more privacy for when Tighnari started yelling at him.

He watched them until he couldn’t see them anymore, then he looked back to where Cyno was looking at the Sumeru rose petals on the ground.

The thing about leaving Al-Haitham and Cyno alone in a room together was that you never knew who would speak first, or if the silence would break at all. Now that there was less animosity between them post-staging-a-coup-together, it left them with no conversation starters.

Al-Haitham didn’t care to speak unnecessarily, and neither did Cyno. So it left them at this standstill: the sounds of the edges of the city, the shuffled footsteps of the Bimarstan, and them.

It wasn’t strange to see Cyno so far from the Akademiya—after all, it was his job to hunt down scholars scattered across Sumeru. But it was odd seeing him here so idly, playing doctor to Al-Haitham of all people. 

“Do you need anything?” Cyno asked after a long moment.

“No.” Al-Haitham swung his legs off the bed.

“Sit,” urged Cyno. “Tighnari would kill me if I let you stand too early.”

Al-Haitham gave him a wry smile. “Afraid of him, are you?”

“No.” The General Mahamatra looked at him flatly. “Believe it or not, I’m also trying to make sure you’re alright.”

Al-Haitham snorted, then regretted it when he felt the wounds in his throat slide together. He turned and coughed, but that made the pain so much worse.

He didn’t realize he was laying down again until Cyno removed his hand from his shoulder. He turned and watched as Cyno mixed a familiar concoction of herbs with a suspiciously well-practiced hand. 

“How long have you and Tighnari been together?” asked Al-Haitham.

Cyno paused. “So you have noticed.”

There was a touch of amusement in his voice, the kind that came when he thought someone had cracked open the meaning of his joke.

“Of course, I have.” Al-Haitham propped his pillow up against the headboard against the shallow headboard and sat up. “I was wondering what business you had here at the Bimarstan, if you weren’t already here to see Tighnari. Besides, you seem to trust each other, which I know is something neither you nor the Forest Watcher give away lightly. It’s fairly obvious.”

“To you, perhaps.” Cyno set the pestle down and held the mortar of mixed herbs out to him. “Because you’re the Scribe. It’s your job to take note of such details.”

Al-Haitham huffed a laugh through his nose and grabbed it. “What purpose do you have in saying complimentary things about me?”

“I meant to say it’s a bit ironic how observant you are, Al-Haitham, but even you are not immune to the human pitfalls of ignoring something right in front of you. Or perhaps you’re just being wilfully ignorant out of fear.”

Al-Haitham gave him a flat look. “Did you and Tighnari plan this?”

Cyno chuckled. “How could we have planned you coming here completely unconscious?”

He sighed. “A long time then—to answer my own question. Only the years together could have made the both of ou as insufferable as you are.”

“You would know, right Al-Haitham?”

He pressed his lips together and stared down at the little stone bowl. The cool minty smell of it was so strong, it was burning his nose in its position all the way from his lap.

“Kaveh and I were never together,” he said quietly.

Cyno raised an eyebrow. “Now that is surprising.” 

“I’m not talking about this with you.”

Al-Haitham swiped a finger through the paste and settled it on his tongue. The taste wasn’t entirely bitter—not like how it’d been when he’d made it himself a few days ago—but certainly medicinal, and certainly unpleasant, but he needed something to focus on so his mind didn’t wander too far.

After a long stretch of silence, he heard Cyno shift. 

“...never?”

What an absolute joke, he thought. Talking about his feelings with Cyno of all people.

Al-Haitham sighed. “Correct. Never.”

Not in all technicalities, never in name. But Al-Haitham had no desire to rehash that, so he shoved another finger of medicinal paste into his mouth.

“You know,” said Cyno suddenly. “I helped Kaveh bring you here.”

That surprised him. “You did?” he asked, shuddering around a bitter swallow.

Cyno nodded. “I was on my way to visit the Bimarstan because I knew Tighnari was visiting, but then Kaveh came stumbling down the road begging every single person if they could help him. Of course, I heard him first so I came.”

Al-Haitham pressed his mouth together. It sounded like something Kaveh would do, but it still made his heart twist inexplicably.

“We eventually got some nice merchant to let us borrow his sumpter beast to drag your body over. It was such a pain getting you onto the thing, but when we did, I thought Kaveh would finally calm down. But he didn’t. He kept fussing about how fast or slow the sumpter beast was going, wondering how quickly we could get you there without making the beast walk too fast and jostle you around.”

“There’s that attention to detail,” murmured Al-Haitham softly. “And the architect in him, trying to optimize.”

Either Cyno didn’t hear him, or chose to give him the privacy of his own mutterings, because all he said was, “You should have seen the look on his face when he found me. I’d never seen him so pale.”

“Well, of course. It’d be alarming to have anyone pass out in front of you.”

Cyno narrowed his eyes. “I’ve had plenty of dinners with Kaveh to hear all of his ramblings and grievances, but I’d never seen a fear so naked on his face like that. And it was for you.”

Al-Haitham didn’t know what to say to that.

“I don’t care to what degree, what kind of worry he has, but it is so clear to anyone with eyes that he cares about you. If it’s not in the same way, like you fear, you have to at least trust that he would not leave you. No matter his own feelings. Unless you wanted him to.”

Al-Haitham sighed, long and weary. “That’s the problem. If I told him and he didn’t feel the same, he would stay for guilt. I could not trap him like that.”

“You’re hopeless,” said Cyno darkly. “You can’t say I didn’t try.”

“Of course,” said Al-Haitham lightly. “But there’s no point. Your efforts, regardless, are appreciated.”

Cyno didn’t speak after that. He just turned and paced restlessly at the foot of Al-Haitham’s bed before he gave up and sat on the ground against a crate. He shut his eyes, tilted his head up to the yawning sky, and went still.

Al-Haitham didn’t know how to shake the unease in his bones, so he pulled a book out of his jacket and began to read.

He didn’t know how much time had passed, only that at some point he needed to flip the lamp near his bed on. Occasionally, Cyno would rise and refill his water pitcher or grab more herbs for him, but wouldn’t speak to him. He’d just stare at Al-Haitham with his mysterious red eye through his curtain of white hair and then sit down again

After their longest stretch of silence, Cyno finally said: “Did you just start that?”

Another stretch of silence, then: “Did you just start that?”

Al-Haitham sighed as he turned another page. “Yes, this morning.”

“It looks like you’re trying to… book it to the end.”

Al-Haitham didn’t bother with a response.

“Get it? Because you’ve already made quick progress through that book and ‘book it’ is synonymous with—”

“I know, Cyno. I don’t need your explanation.”

“You didn’t laugh so I wasn’t sure you understood. I just wanted to make sure you understood the joke because—”

“I understood it, Cyno.”

The cicadas started to sing, humming louder than his own heartbeat.

“For the record, I still think you should tell him.”

“I know.” Al-Haitham flipped a page. “You and Tighnari both.”

When Kaveh and Tighnari finally returned, a silence had settled over the Bimarstan so thick Al-Haitham felt sluggish when he moved again.

Tighnari looked significantly less pissed off, having blown off all his steam, while Kaveh looked a bit more resigned. They were muttering quietly to each other all the way back to Al-Haitham’s bed and stopped only when Al-Haitham tried to stand.

“Are you well enough to do that?” Tighnari asked sharply.

“Stand?” Al-Haitham stretched his legs. “Yes. The flowers grow in my chest, not my limbs.”

“Stop joking about that,” snapped Kaveh.

He turned to Kaveh, feeling immediately guilty. “Sorry.”

Out of the corner of his eye, he saw Tighnari glancing back and forth between them. “Can I trust you both to go home without ripping each other apart?”

Kaveh turned to him, startled. “Yes, yes, of course.”

“Good. And remember what I told you, Kaveh. I’m telling this to you two, Al-Haitham.” Tighnari sucked in a breath and his eyes turned intense again. “You are both responsible for your happiness. Each other’s and yourselves. The both of you need to do something, or so help me not even Lesser Lord Kusanali herself could save you.”

A beat of silence like a stuttered breath.

“Now get the fuck out of here before I give you another reason to stay in the Bimarstan longer.”

And so, Al-Haitham and Kaveh left the Bimarstan quietly without fanfare, the walk back even more silent than the house they returned to.

-

(When Al-Haitham started taking steps to overthrow the government, he wasn’t thinking about power. Of course not. He was wildly too unambitious for that. All he thought about was how his job would be affected by the corruption, how wildly altering and defying the principles of wisdom would change how he read his books, would change the people he spoke to.

Honestly, if he were to be entirely utilitarian about the whole thing, he had welcomed the distraction. At the time, he was still hiding his flowers, still sweeping away petals and keeping his door shut when he wasn’t home so Kaveh couldn’t find evidence of his feelings.

So when it became a bit too hard to breathe, Kaveh disappeared to the desert for a project. And at the same time, the corruption festering in the Akademiya had finally started to collapse from the rot. Al-Haitham met the famed Traveler and her squishy floaty companion Paimon, and then his mind quickly became preoccupied with uncovering the sages and stopping the god-creation plot.

When Kaveh returned, more relief cracked through him than he cared to admit. After Kaveh ambushed him in the House of Daena, Kaveh scolded him all the way home.

“Gods, I don’t understand you,” muttered Kaveh. “Do you have any idea how dangerous that was?” He scoffed to himself. “Stupid question. Of course you did. You just did it anyway.”

“You sound almost concerned about me, Kaveh.”

“Of course I am!” Kaveh huffed, cheeks coloring. “Why would you do that?”

“Would you not have done the same?”

“I would have.” Kaveh crossed his arms. “But that’s me. Why did you endanger yourself unnecessarily?”

“Oh, so you’re allowed to act foolhardy, but I’m not?”

But Al-Haitham had hardly been acting foolhardy. He was a thinker and a planner, and of course he had thought endlessly about the state of Sumeru for years. The Scribe saw all the documents passed under desks, the information they tried to subtly hide, the way protocols could be avoided just because they’d been signed by an official hand. Again, how could he not do what he did?

He’d been watching the principles of the Akademiya crumble for years and it threatened every aspect of his life that he wanted to keep: his job, his house, avoiding annoying people who sought scholarship as a means to something terrible and probably unethical. How could he just watch a city fall like that to human greed? If he could not live in that house with Kaveh day after day, what then?

That would not have been a Sumeru Kaveh loved. It would not have been a Sumeru he would have wanted to be in. How could he let a home fall like that?

“I’m not saying that.” Kaveh gritted his teeth. “Just—what if something had happened? ”

“Nothing did.”

“Are you sure? I know you believe in your mind and I occasionally believe in it too, but no amount of rational thinking can outwit fate or accidents or just—sheer danger. Al-Haitham, what if something had happened and I had to come back to—” Kaveh swallowed and jerked his head away. 

Something cracked in him. “Kaveh…”

Suddenly, there were arms around him, and hair in his face, and the overwhelming smell of leftover sand and sweat and woodshavings, all of it buried under the faint smell of flowers from the cologne Kaveh liked to use. Al-Haitham froze as Kaveh’s shoulder pressed against his chin. He could feel the bone, even through Kaveh’s sweat-soaked shirt. 

“You’re supposed to be the selfish bastard,” Kaveh whispered, breath hot in his ear. “Don’t do that again.”

Then, Kaveh pulled away and disappeared into the house, leaving Al-Haitham cold and alone under the waning moon. He stood there for a long moment, trying to calm the roaring in his ears, the angry, slamming beat of his heart against his chest. And when he finally went inside to the dark house, sleep did not come easy, but it came.

Until he woke a few hours, flowers rattling in his ribs, rattling his throat. He knew they were coming—even before he threw off the covers. But he stumbled out into the hall, onto the cold floor, into the bathroom until he had the space to cough up the mourning flowers that were crying, that were demanding: to be seen, to be acknowledged, to be known. 

The red on the porcelain, lovely like blood. And when Kaveh burst into the bathroom only minutes later, Al-Haitham knew that he couldn’t hide anymore.)

-

Tighnari sent them home with another slap on the wrist and a bundle of herbs to help with all the cuts in Al-Haitham’s throat. Kaveh asked if there was anything he could do to help Al-Haitham breathe better, and the Forest Watcher just said, “You stupid fucks both know what I think would help.”

So they crawled back home in silence from the Bimarstan. When they both left, it was long after the sky had gone dark, so they had to navigate through the city by lamplight. Not nearly as bad as trying to wander through the Avidya Forest after dark, but Al-Haitham was still lightheaded enough that he needed Kaveh to grab his elbow when he missed an uneven step.

(Kaveh would grab him, hold him steady until Al-Haitham could stand upright again, and when he pulled away, there was a burning patch on Al-Haitham’s skin where he’d been touched. Pathetic.)

When they arrived home, Kaveh unlocked the door and waited for Al-Haitham to get in before he followed.

“I’m not fragile, Kaveh,” said Al-Haitham finally. “You don’t have to watch me like that.”

“Can you just—let me take care of you?” 

There was an edge of pleading to his voice that made Al-Haitham concede, “Okay.”

Silence. Kaveh walked around turning on various lights so they could tidy up the house. Al-Haitham wandered into the kitchen to find that his flowers had been cleaned up, but there was still dried blood dotting the ground.

“I didn’t have time to get that.” Kaveh’s voice came from behind him. “I was…in a bit of a rush to get you to the Bimarstan.”

“That’s fine.” Al-Haitham swallowed, feeling like knives were settling down his throat. “I’ll get it.”

“No, you don’t. I’m getting it.”

Al-Haitham frowned but stood back as Kaveh grabbed a rag and wetted it under the sink before kneeling and starting to wipe the floor.

“I’m surprised Tighnari was so mad,” muttered Kaveh conversationally.

Al-Haitham snorted. “I’m not.” He paused. “It’s funny that he called both of us martyrs. We’re alike in that way.”

Kaveh didn’t respond to that, but Al-Haitham thought he saw his frown pull slightly lower.

“I don’t mean to keep making light of both of our…situations,” he said, a bit awkwardly. 

“Then do something about it.” Kaveh’s voice was gruff, flat. “Tell them.”

“Would it make you feel better if I said I would?”

“Only if you were telling the truth. Which I know you’re not.” Kaveh stood and threw down the rag. “Why are you trying to make me feel better?”

“Because you’re clearly more irritated about this than I am.”

“And that’s why I’m upset!” Kaveh cried. Al-Haitham felt himself becoming acutely aware of the shrinking fuse between them having a normal conversation and blowing up. “Because you’re not!”

“Kaveh, please, not now—”

“Not now?” His face twisted. “If not now, when? Because if I don’t talk to you now, I suspect you’ll never talk about it.” Kaveh was on his knees because he was trying to clean up the blood splatters, but in another light, it truly looked like he was pleading. “What will it take, Al-Haitham? What do I have to do to make you take care of yourself? Who have you become that you’re so content with stagnantly accepting your fate?”

Al-Haitham wanted to reach for him. This time, he gave into the urge.

An inch before he reached Kaveh’s shoulder, Kaveh smacked him away.

“I have never known you to be like this, and it worries me. Tell me: are they—” Kaveh swallowed. “Are they even worth it?”

“Yes,” he responded before he could think. All of it, absolutely. You are worth it.

Kaveh’s face didn’t crumple necessarily, but he whipped away to the side. He saw the muscle in Kaveh’s jaw clench. Silently, he stood and rinsed the rag out in the kitchen sink before hanging it to try.

“If they’re worth it,” he said slowly, “then you should do something about it. Give them your flowers, tell them how you feel, anything. Bring them home. Bring them here. I’ll help you, just—just please do something.”

It broke his heart. He didn’t want Kaveh to help him get a mysterious third person. He didn’t want any of this.

Al-Haitham couldn’t help the bitter lump rising in his throat when he said, “Why would I want to bring someone home when this house was made for two?”

Indignation didn’t flash across Kaveh’s face like he would have expected. Instead, Kaveh just looked pained. No response, no retort, he just turned down the hall and disappeared into his room before slamming the door shut.

-

Kaveh left him alone for three days.

In the meantime, Al-Haitham went to work and kept making his disgusting medicinal paste with the herbs Tighnari had given him. He tried to let his throat heal, though eating still hurt, and so did drinking coffee—which made his workday even more unbearable than normal.

On the fourth day, Al-Haitham emerged from his room to find Kaveh sitting at the table. The previous three days, he woken to solitude, but now Kaveh was there with his coffee and breakfast like nothing was different.

It unnerved him.

Al-Haitham took a tentative step toward the coffee pot and poured himself a mug.

“Sure, help yourself,” said Kaveh flatly, like they hadn’t been fighting nonstep for the past few weeks.

“Unless you plan on drinking three cups of coffee buy yourself…” Al-Haitham said tentatively. “I will.”

It was strange. So strange. He couldn’t bear a silence with Kaveh, but this sudden switch back to normalcy worried him more. What happened? Why did he suddenly decide to stop avoiding Al-Haitham? 

He moved back to the table and hesitated for only a second before he took a seat.

“I might be home late today,” said Al-Haitham. “You don’t—have to worry about dinner for me.”

Kaveh watched him. “Are you staying late for work? That’s surprising.”

“No, I’m just meeting with the Traveler. She asked me for a favor.”

Kaveh pressed his lips together. “Alright.”

And it seemed that would be the end of their conversation. Coming up with topics had never been Al-Haitham’s strong suit, and since Kaveh didn’t seem to be willing, he let the exchange die there.

Al-Haitham finished his coffee quietly, trying not to wince too hard while it went down. Kaveh didn’t touch his mug at all. In fact, he didn’t touch his breakfast at all. He sat at the table picking absentmindedly at his foot while he stared intently at a particular swirl of wood on the table like it was supposed to tell him something.

He couldn’t stand it anymore.

“I’m off to work,” said Al-Haitham, standing.

“Right,” muttered Kaveh.

And that was all the farewell he got.

He went to work again, doing the various tasks he needed to. It felt like a routine at this point: argue with Kaveh,  do his pointless tasks, go home and argue with Kaveh, but with none of the fun like it used to be. Before it was all academic, intellectual debate, or something so inconsequential like whether or not to use one or two onions in the soup; now, of course, it was something terrible and binding they couldn’t free themselves from.

Al-Haitham did meet with the Traveler after work, only to find that all she wanted was a few more sand grease pupas.

“I heard Kaveh finished his training with you,” he said as he dumped upwards of ten pupas into her hands.

“Yep, he sure did!” Paimon said cheerily. “Paimon’s so proud of him.”

“Thank you for the mourning flowers, by the way,” said the Traveler, more solemnly. “It helped a lot.”

He inclined his head. “Of course.” 

“Oh, Paimon hopes the training helps when he’s living on his own,” said Paimon worriedly. “He’s still having problems with his wrist and that claymore, even when he saw us the other day. He said he was fine, but Paimon doesn’t believe him.”

Al-Haitham paused, replaying the last few seconds in his head. “What?”

The Traveler blinked up at him, something dawning on her face. “You—you know that Kaveh’s moving out, right?”

He said again, “What?”

Both the Traveler and Paimon blanched. 

“Al-Haitham…” Paimon said worriedly.

He took a step back. “I have to go.”

The Traveler shooed at him. “Go, go!”

He ran down the steps of the Akademiya and through the slopes of the city like he was back in the Mausoleum of King Deshret with all the urgency of a sky crashing down on him. His lungs weren’t as strong anymore, not now after all the damage his flowers had done to them, but he kept running and running and running.

The front door was open when he made it to the house, still trying to haul air back into his chest. There was a pile of various crates and supplies scattered near the entrance, but no Kaveh in sight. 

His heart skipped a beat, fear a lump in his throat. Al-Haitham raced inside.

At first, the living room was as devoid of Kaveh as the front door had been. Various boxes were also stacked on top of each other, clear evidence of someone trying to move. But no Kaveh still. And just the thought of it made Al-Haitham feel like he was choking all over again.

Before he could step further into the house, Kaveh suddenly stepped out of the hall. A bag was slung over his shoulder while he tried to drag another crate into the living room.

“What are you doing?” Al-Haitham demanded.

Kaveh jumped, shoulders hitching up. He paused, then slowly turned around, something like panic in his eyes. “Ah, you’re home early.”

Al-Haitham crossed his arms. “Answer my question.”

“I’m—ah.” Kaveh glanced at the crate, then back at Al-Haitham, casting his eyes downward. “I’m in the process of moving out.”

“Moving out?” Something in his chest tipped over and shattered at the confirmation. “What?”

“Yeah, sorry this is such short notice. I just—you know. Had an opportunity come up.”

“You’re leaving? Again?” You’re leaving again? You’re leaving me again?

Kaveh grimaced like he was in pain. “Yeah, I have money…to move out…”

“Bullshit, no you don’t.” Al-Haitham stepped forward. “You were just talking about how much debt you were in a few days ago.”

Kaveh glared. “Okay, you don’t need to remind me how much money I don’t have, because I am very, very well aware—”

“Why are you trying to leave again?” The fragile thing in his chest was making his tongue loose. Maybe this was entirely too desperate, and he was revealing entirely too much, but he couldn’t bring himself to care because Kaveh was trying to leave again. “What did I do wrong this time?”

There was a long silence. Nothing but the birds and the pipes and the thundering in his own chest, the rest of the city unaware of Al-Haitham’s entire world crashing down on him.

“...you didn’t do anything wrong,” said Kaveh. “I’m serious! I just found lodgings elsewhere, so you don’t have to worry about your washed up roommate taking up space in your house anymore—”

Alarm bells blared in his head.

Kaveh’s smile was so artificially bright, it made Al-Haitham nauseous. This was the smile he used to reassure people, a smile for liars. Kaveh never smiled at Al-Haitham like that because he’d never had to hide something from him before.

“Was it what I said that other day?” Al-Haitham tried, desperately. “About—about this house being made for two?”

Kaveh pressed his lips together, which was enough of an answer. “I just…I don’t want you to feel like you can’t—because I’m here—”

“Kaveh.” His voice broke. His throat itched. “You know I wouldn’t—I would never kick you out over something like that. You—you always joke about leaving, but I would never force you to go—”

“It’s not just that.” Kaveh crumpled, finally releasing his hold on the crate. “You want to be with your person. But you’re stuck with me in this house because you feel this sense of obligation to take care of me, I’m sure. Because of our friendship in the Akademiya. But Tighnari got me thinking, and because you won’t take care of it yourself, I’m going to move out so you have a chance to be with them and you can fix your lungs, so your flowers stop growing.”

“Kaveh—” His voice broke. “That’s not what I meant.”

“I know.” Kaveh winced, like he was in pain too. “But I want to help you.”

“So you are leaving because of me.” His voice fell flat. He was so fucking tired, so weary, and he still had to get through this, the ache of tears pressing at his throat. But he didn’t cry. “So this is my fault—”

“It’s my fault you got Hanahaki!” Kaveh broke. And Al-Haitham felt a twinge of fear, because he thought Kaveh knew . But then he said, “You’re stuck with me, and I think you think you lost your chance to be with the person your flowers are for because you’re stuck with me. And if I leave, I’ll give you a chance to resolve this.” 

“That is the most moronic thing I’ve ever heard—”

“I care about you!”

“So you’re leaving again?”

Guilt flashed across Kaveh’s face. He winced as if in pain and closed his eyes, twisting to the side. “I didn’t mean to hurt you the first time.”

“You tell me constantly of intentions versus consequences, Kaveh. You may not have meant it, but it hurt. It made me think—” Definitely too vulnerable, but at this point he had nothing to lose. Al-Hatiham choked. “That our years together meant nothing to you. That you never cared for me at all.”

“Are you serious?” Kaveh burst. “No, no you are so fucking wrong. I cared about you so much.” Kaveh coughed suddenly, coughing rapidly. Purple rose petals fluttering out of his mouth like blood. He turned, coughing wildly, and then he spat a rose onto the ground. 

Al-Haitham stared at it. Stared at Kaveh. Darting back and forth between the thing on the ground and Kaveh’s face, but for once he didn’t seem afraid. Just determined.

“Al-Haitham,” he started. “I loved you. I shouldn’t have left you like that, and I’m so sorry for it. I loved you and I still left, and I could have loved you back; I could have given you the love you wanted back then, but I didn’t so you found someone else who doesn’t love you back.”

Kaveh’s voice was deadly calm. Al-Haitham suddenly saw his own feelings mirrored: the both of them, giving their last hurrah before something broke irreparably.

“It was my fault you got Hanahaki.” Kaveh looked so beautiful and broken, standing in their house, surrounded by the mess of items he was trying to move out with. “Because I knew how you felt and I knew how I felt, and I still left. And I don’t know how to fix this for either of us, so I’m leaving so you have a chance now.”

Kaveh had loved him. Back then, all those years ago. He was right, and he’d known this, but they’d never said—

Something just shy of a revelation crashed down on him because suddenly everything was clear. He was so, so tired of coughing, of tears, of drowning. Every loose puzzle piece he’d been missing clicked into place and he suddenly understood. “Kaveh, I got Hanahaki in the first place because you left! I coughed up my first flower after your graduation!”

Kaveh paused. “What?” He scrunched his face, realization dawning, window shutters flinging open. Then he looked annoyed— angry even, and it felt so familiar that Al-Haitham almost wanted to laugh in relief. “It was me?”

Al-Haitham did laugh then, almost hysterically, and it hurt. It scraped the raw wounds of his throat. But he couldn’t stop.

“Are you fucking serious? I never stopped caring about you!” Kaveh looked like he wanted to tear his hair out. “How could you think your feelings were unrequited? Stop laughing, you maniac.”

Al-Haitham sucked in a breath. The whole situation felt terribly funny and terribly surreal. Surely he must have suffocated again, and this was some kind of wishful fever dream his mind created to spare him the trauma.

“You left me, Kaveh. What was I supposed to think?” 

“Not—what?” Kaveh blinked rapidly. “What the fuck is wrong with you? I had to leave because I was graduating, but when did I ever say that I didn’t love you?”

“You said we were never a good pair.”

“Like, as academic partners!” He threw his hands up. “Because I was angry! And young and stupid. Not that I didn’t love you back!”

His heart thudded in his ears so loud he thought the entire ground was shaking. Finally, eight years of misunderstanding came slamming into them all at once—all the drowning and the confusion and turmoil, and he finally felt like he’d broken the surface.

There was a long silence. Al-Haitham’s chest was heaving. He couldn’t breathe or think and he felt so dizzy that he couldn’t help but think this all must be a dream; but it couldn’t be, because the wounds in his throat were aching and his fingers were shaking and Kaveh smelled like sweat and wood dust and he heard—his heart thundering so loud in his ears, his heartbeat racing across the world—he’d heard Kaveh say that—

“So you—” Kaveh blinked, voice slow like he was still processing everything. The bag slid off his shoulder and Al-Haitham thought, good. Good, don’t leave. “You got Hanahaki the day I left because…because you thought your feelings were unrequited.”

“Yes.” His voice sounded breathy and unreal to his own ears.

“So you’ve been growing these flowers for years. Not just when I moved back in.”

“Yes.”

Kaveh almost sounded pained. “Those were all for me?”

“Yes!” Al-Haitham burst. “Yes, you absolute moron. How the hell did you graduate with honors and not realize that?”

“You didn’t realize either!” Angry, Kaveh sounded so angry. But in a way that felt familiar, like coming home. “My flowers are for you!”

Al-Hiatham blinked. “What?”

“I developed Hanahaki because I thought you had feelings for someone else!” 

“I never—”

“I obviously know that now. ”

Al-Haitham was still replaying the last five seconds in his head. “You developed Hanahaki because of me?”

“Yes, you absolute fucking buffoon! Because you had flowers for someone else.” Kaveh shoved his hands in his hair. “At first, I thought it was a normal unrequited crush, but then the coughing didn’t stop and you kept giving me flowers and I realized it was bigger. And then you told me you could never get over them and I realized how strong your feelings were and I thought—well, all these years had passed so it only made sense that you’d moved on from me.”

“No,” said Al-Haitham urgently.

“Wait—” Kaveh blinked. “Wait, you could never get over me. You were talking about me.”

“Yes.” Never, never, never. And Al-Haitham would never say that out loud, so he let flowers grow in his chest. All for Kaveh. Everything he could give him.

“Oh my gods.” Kaveh started pacing. “I’m an idiot.”

“You are.”

He whirled around and stalked up to him. Kaveh jabbed a finger at his chest, hard enough to hurt. “And so are you!”

Al-Haitham grabbed it. “All my flowers were for you!”

“And all my flowers were for you!”

Of course, Kaveh got Hanahaki. He got hurt anyway.

“This is why I didn’t want to tell you who it was,” said Al-Haitham, curling his fingers over Kaveh’s. “Because it was you and I didn’t want you to feel guilty that you didn’t return my feelings.”

“And I didn’t tell you because I didn’t want you to find me pathetic!”

“You’re an idiot.”

“No, you’re the idiot!”

He recognized distantly the way they were both yelling, but there was more relief than anger. He felt the high of fear starting to wind down until he was dizzy, until he felt like he could fall forward onto the ground without fear because Kaveh would stay.

“You got Hanahaki because of me,” said Al-Haitham, mind catching up.

“Yes.”

“Because you thought I didn’t return your feelings.”

“Yes.” Kaveh’s voice was soft.

“So that means—” Hope swelled in him, and this time he didn’t try to squish it down. “You still—”

“Yes.” Amusement tinged Kaveh’s voice. “I do.”

Al-Haitham huffed a laugh, air puffing warm between them. “No wonder Tighnari was so mad at us.”

“Don’t talk about Tighnari right now. I’m afraid of what he’s going to say when we tell him that we’ve both been miraculously cured.”

Al-Haitham laughed, truly, genuinely. He tugged Kaveh forward by the hand that was still holding him until they were a sigh apart. Kaveh tilted his head, raising an eyebrow. 

“Hey,” said Kaveh.

“Hello.” Al-Haitham lifted his other hand and settled it along the curve of Kaveh’s jaw. He’d always wanted to do this when they were younger, but could never quite find the courage.

Kaveh leaned into it, smiling.

“I still think you’re a fool,” said Al-Haitham.

“Oh, just shut up and kiss me. Please, before I forget this isn’t a dream and start coughing up roses again.”

Al-Haitham happily obliged.

-

They were right: Tighnari was extremely, extremely mad at them when they told him they’d cured their Hanahaki disease. It happened when Al-Haitham wrote to Tighnari about how he appreciated the steady supply of herbs but would no longer need them. He’d passed the letter to Cyno, who gave it to Tighnari, and came back at the end of the day with Tighnari in tow, demanding, “What the fucking hell did you mean by this?”

To placate him, Al-Haitham took both of them home for dinner, using the excuse of, “Kaveh would like to have dinner at our place. Because he goes over to your hut so often.”

Tighnari’s manners took over as the anger melted away and he said, “Oh, it’s no trouble at all. I like treating my friends—”

Then he saw the mess of the house, all of Kaveh’s things still strewn everywhere from when he’d attempted to move out. Kaveh had meant to clean it, but then he’d gotten a large commission and spent the next few days busy with it. Al-Haitham had said something about Kaveh constantly nagging him about books, but at least they were just books and not entire trunks of things. But then Kaveh kissed him again and promised that it’d be done by the end of the week, and Al-Haitham had let it go.

Well, it was the end of the week now, but Al-Haitham was in a good enough mood that he didn’t particularly care. Besides, maybe if he bothered Kaveh about it again, he’d get another placating kiss-bribe to push it off another week.

“What…happened here?” Tighnari asked.

“It looks like a moving-nado blew through here,” said Cyno. “Get it? Because—”

“Oh,” said Al-Haitham. “This was from a few days ago. Kaveh tried to move out and then stopped because we figured some things out. So now he has to move back in but he’s been a bit preoccupied.”

Tighnari’s voice was dangerous when he asked, “What…exactly did you figure out?”

Kaveh chose that moment to walk out of the study, and when he saw the look at Tighnari’s face, he immediately tried to backpedal, but Al-Haitham grabbed him by the elbow and held him in place.

“You are not leaving me alone in this,” murmured Al-Haitham.

Kaveh swallowed. “Ah, hello, Tighnari. Cyno. How are you two doing?”

“One of you explain yourselves right now or so help me—”

So, they shoved through the mess of the house and got dinner ready. They used a buildup of leftover ingredients to make a mushroom type dish that would hopefully placate Tighnari, and then sat at the table to tell the story.

Al-Haitham started with his point of view from the way he’d left in the morning. Then Kaveh cut in about All-Haitham “wasn’t giving enough context” so he told them about the comment Al-Haitham had made about the house being made for two people, not three. Then Al-Haitham cut in, saying it wasn’t his fault that Kaveh took it the wrong way, and of course he’d meant it about Kaveh, not the mysterious third person he’d imagined up, to which Kaveh responded that he’d been so shifty and mysterious that—

“Get on with it,” interrupted Tighnari.

So they continued, with the Traveler clueing in that Kaveh had been making preparations to leave over the three days Al-Haitham hadn’t seen him, how Al-Haitham had rushed home to find Kaveh trying to drag a crate out. They omitted the more embarrassing parts of their argument, but when they finished, Tighnari shot them a glare so withering, it felt like stepping into one of the zones in the Avidya Forest.

“Archons. Hide me, Cyno,” pleaded Kaveh, angling his chair behind the General Mahamatra.

“I will not obstruct justice,” said Cyno, shifting away.

“You know, both of you asked me to promise not to tell the other! While you were both coughing up your fucking lungs! And because I am such a good friend, I respected your wishes even though it would have been so much easier on everyone if you just told each other in the first place.” He stabbed his fork into a mushroom with a vigor that made both of them flinch. “Never put me through that again or I will bury you.”

Much later, after Cyno and Tighnari had left and the sky went dark, Al-Haitham and Kaveh finally went to work putting the pieces of Kaveh back into the house. They worked quietly because they were out of words, but that was fine. They didn’t need them now.

When they finished, they went to bed. Kaveh crawled in next to him, and it was a marvel when they brushed shoulders and the touch didn’t make him feel like he was burning.

“Well,” said Kaveh, into the quiet, into the dark. “That went well.”

“Sure, if that’s how you want to view it.” Al-Haitham snorted—it still hurt, but the wounds in his throat were finally free to heal over. 

“Shut up.” Kaveh smacked his shoulder. 

Al-Haitham grabbed the hand. “Careful, I’m still recovering.”

“Your chest and your throat are, you annoying brat. Your shoulder’s fine.” 

“I’m not sure. I may need you to kiss it better.”

Kaveh smacked a hand over Al-Haitham’s mouth. He laughed, sure that if it were light enough, he’d see Kaveh’s face a delightful shade of red.

Al-Haitham peeled the hand off. “What? Embarrassed?”

“Shut up, shut up, shut up.” Kaveh rolled on top of him until their chests were pressed together, until they were breathing the same air. Their eyes hadn’t yet adjusted to the dark, but Al-Haitham was sure Kaveh could feel him smiling. 

“That didn’t answer my question, Kaveh.”

“I liked you more when you were telling me how you missed me and wanted me to stay.”

Al-Haitham raised an eyebrow, though Kaveh couldn’t see. “Do you like me less now?”

“No, you insecure baby.” A hand curled in his hair, gripping near the roots. “I cannot believe you thought my flowers were for anyone other than you.”

“I believe you now,” said Al-Haitham, softer. “Though, I wouldn’t mind more convincing.”

He could feel Kaveh’s laugh when it puffed against his face. Then, Kaveh kissed him. Into the pillow, into the mattress, like he’d imagined doing all the way back in the Akademiya.

The dark wrapped around them until he couldn’t tell when his dreams started and ended. And when Al-Haitham woke up in the morning, he took a breath and marveled at how clear it was for the first time in years.