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Kaveh has always been somewhat of an empath.
Not in the ridiculous, self-diagnosing, I-have-a-shred-of-sympath-for-your-very-obviously-emotionally-distressing-plight kind of way, but as in he can quite literally feel the emotions of those around him.
He only realizes that the typical person doesn’t have the same affinity to emotion later on when he’s already in his teenage years in the same way that people who grow up in a certain environment don’t realize how their household is run differently until they’re removed from it. It’s not even as if it’s something that runs in the family—or if it is, his mother never tells him about it, and by the time he’s made aware that it sets him apart from other people, his father is already gone with no hope of consulting him about anything, no less emotion-sensing powers, so that’s that.
Kaveh finds out like this: while he’s still attending the Akademiya, fresh out of a three-hour lecture, his classmate—whose name he can’t remember for the life of him—taps him on the shoulder. “I’m going to ask the professor if I can have a week-long extension on the paper due on Thursday real quick. I’ll be right back.”
“Oh, I don’t know,” Kaveh says automatically, gaze flickering to the woman shuffling through papers at her desk as they make their way to the front of the hall. “She’s not in a good mood right now. She’d probably only move up your submission date out of spite or something if you bother her.”
Insignificant Classmate #1 squints at him. “How do you even know that?” he asks disbelievingly. “She was perfectly fine for all three hours of the lecture. Look, she’s smiling right now at that guy talking to her.”
Kaveh stops walking. “Can’t you feel it?” he says, puzzled. He can feel her impatience ramping up in increments the longer she’s held up, the sensation mixed with increasing panic that she’d lose her composure. He can guarantee that if anybody occupied her time for five minutes more, she’d probably snap.
“Feel what?” Insignificant Classmate #1 is looking at Kaveh as if he’s crazy. He’s thinking it too, sort of, and it only confuses Kaveh more that the only emotion he’s getting from the other is genuine dubiousness. “The vibes? That’s not real. I don’t know if I trust your intuition more than I need this extension. I literally haven’t done any of the readings yet.”
“That’s just going to make it worse,” Kaveh hisses, grabbing him by the sleeve and tugging him toward the exit. “I don’t think any professor wants to hear that, regardless of if they’re in a good mood or not.”
“Kaveh, I refuse to fail this class,” Insignificant Classmate #1 says, and Kaveh recatogorizes him as Idiotic Classmate #1 as he watches him march over to the professor, interrupt the conversation she’s already engaged in, and then proceed to be eviscerated with a bone-deep rage that Kaveh feels within his core. A sentiment that he can sympathize with, honestly, because hadn’t Kaveh warned him? Had he not quite literally attempted to drag him away from making an ill-advised decision?
Still, the thing that lingers with Kaveh for long after, even after the term ends and he never sees the professor or his idiotic classmate again, is the feeling that this trait of his that he has long taken for granted isn’t quite as universal as he assumes.
When Kaveh meets Al-Haitham, the first thing he notices is how incredibly underwhelming his emotions are. As if they’re slate-gray, carved and smoothed over, each outstanding dent so carefully filled that Kaveh almost doesn’t notice that his feelings are so unnoticeable.
That’s not to say that Al-Haitham doesn’t feel anything at all—he does, and that feeling is usually a quiet sort of irritation because he seems to be displeased whenever things don’t go his very specific way, and they usually don’t. Like whenever they study together and Al-Haitham comes across a notation in the footnotes that he doesn’t agree with, so he gets that tiny little furrow in his eyebrows that tells a lot more than whatever Kaveh can glean from his emotions.
Kaveh, for the first time in his life, has to rely on reading the people around him by their body language and hidden tells, and it pisses him off. Al-Haitham is the one whose discipline involves studying all sorts of languages, and it’s as if he uses his combined knowledge of every esoteric tongue and nuanced alphabet to make himself the world’s most difficult person to understand.
Kaveh is an incredibly stubborn person who sees Al-Haitham as a challenge, so he gets there, but it takes quite a bit of time. And by then, he’s so used to Al-Haitham’s quiet, folded-together configuration of human emotions that he can tell each one apart as easily as breathing—his mild surprise whenever Kaveh turns up at his dorm with a second coffee in his hand for him, the simmering exasperation that crops up when Kaveh drags him to lunch with his friends and Cyno cracks a particularly terrible joke, and the sharp, keen spike of wild eagerness whenever they get into one of their infamous spats.
If Kaveh’s being honest with himself, it’s probably why he chases the thrill of arguing with Al-Haitham so very often—nearly every one of their debates is academic or philosophical, and so he derives no small amount of enjoyment from testing the extent of his own logic while coaxing the emotion that Al-Haitham feels the most strongly all the while. It excites Kaveh to feel that same fire from Al-Haitham that’s reflected within himself, and like a flame that feeds itself on gasoline, the feeling only grows stronger and stronger until Kaveh cannot look at Al-Haitham without feeling short of breath.
That’s another problem entirely. One that Kaveh tucks into the deepest folds of himself, hiding it away so completely that he can almost forget they existed in the first place. It’s humiliating to have feelings for Al-Haitham to begin with, and it’s made even worse by Kaveh’s steadily growing conviction that Al-Haitham doesn’t feel the same.
If he did, Kaveh would be able to tell. In the past, he’s been able to tell the second somebody harbors the first flicker of interest for him, and he’s always held a small amount of guilt over the fact that even the most precious of emotions cannot remain private even though he has no bearing over it.
What Al-Haitham feels for Kaveh is different. He thinks, a sinking feeling in his gut, that the other has always perceived him with careful neutrality and the amiability that one reserves for a friend. And that’s fine. Kaveh can’t have everything he wants, can he? That would be a lot to ask. He should count himself lucky that he’s gotten the chance to get to know Al-Haitham at all, who shrouds himself so particularly when it comes to social affairs because he plain has no interest in getting to know just about anybody. Few others have gotten as far as Kaveh has, and few others will go any further.
Perhaps the worst part of it is that Kaveh knows Al-Haitham views him as one of his best friends, and still his affection for Kaveh is not strong enough for it to be remarkable in any sense of the word. It could be a failing on Kaveh’s part. Maybe he’s just not likable enough.
The thing is, Kaveh doesn’t get the chance to deliberate on the issue for very much longer before their research project blows up in their faces, and Kaveh severs himself from Al-Haitham so thoroughly that they do not even have the tie of distant friendship anymore so that he will not have to feel Al-Haitham’s sickening and inevitable indifference at the fact that they wasted two years of their youth on each other only for it to come up short.
And then Kaveh builds Alcazarzaray, and then he ends up in debt, homeless and hopeless, and then Al-Haitham finds him in Lambad’s tavern, and you know the rest of the story, don’t you?
Which leaves them here.
“Archons, what are you doing here?” Kaveh mutters when he feels a tap on his shoulder and looks up to see the one person he thought he left behind in the Akademiya. Silver hair, striking gaze. “Just my luck that you show up tonight of all days.”
“Luck is one word for it,” Al-Haitham says, and then he deftly moves Kaveh’s glass just out of reach when he grasps for it, groaning and letting his head fall onto the table when his fingers close around nothing. “Is it true?”
“Is what true?” Kaveh rasps, peeling his head up just enough to look at Al-Haitham through a narrowed eye. “Whatever you’ve heard is correct, probably. Or maybe it’s not. I don’t know what they’re saying about me. If you’ve heard that I’ve become incredibly broke after finishing the magnum opus of my career, then whatever rumor you came by is right.”
“Nothing quite as detailed as that,” Al-Haitham says, and the faint flicker of surprise is enough to tell Kaveh that he’s telling the truth. Which makes this worse because that means that Kaveh admitted his own failure in front of the only man in the city who would have it all figured out at twenty-five. “I only heard that you seemingly disappeared off the face of the earth after the palace was unveiled, and I thought it was odd.”
“So you came here.” Kaveh scrubs a hard hand over his face. It’s remarkable how utterly ridiculous Al-Haitham can make him feel when Kaveh is under the weight of Al-Haitham’s damned predictions coming true. It’s even worse that he’d somehow known that Kaveh would end up drinking himself deeper into his misery, and when he digs for Al-Haitham’s feelings, he can’t sense anything but that same, infuriatingly familiar gentle buzz. “Glad to know that I’m so predictable.”
Al-Haitham doesn’t say anything to that—what would he say—but he does end up pulling his coin purse out of his pocket, portioning out mora as Kaveh watches with a slackened jaw. “Do you have anywhere to go?”
Kaveh doesn’t understand. “What?”
“I’d assume that you being back in the city this late at night means that you no longer have a residence up north, correct? I have a house. Two bedrooms.”
Al-Haitham says it so easily as if it’s that simple, and that somehow makes the gnawing sensation in Kaveh’s stomach worse. He’s always been so indifferent when it comes to Kaveh, whose feelings for Al-Haitham are so knotted and complicated that he tries not to even go near them on a typical day. This is not a typical day.
Even now, when Kaveh hunts through the temperaments around him, Al-Haitham’s are quieter, more subdued, especially in a place like this where most of the waves of emotion come on in wild, riotous joy and alcohol-induced indifference. In the corner, a man drinks himself to numbness until his melancholy slips away down the drain. The table beside them is filled with students celebrating the acceptance of one of their theses being accepted after years of trial. The man before him, on the other hand, only has the lightened, tinfoil hum surrounding him, the surprise from earlier dialing back into a feeling dyed with acceptance.
“I don’t need your pity,” Kaveh spits out, his eyes narrowing to slits when he looks up at Al-Haitham, but even as he says the words he knows that he can’t root out a single thread of consolation in the other or see it hidden in the crevices of his expression.
Years ago, Kaveh used to find a reprieve in Al-Haitham when he needed a break from the obsessive emotions of everybody around him. The quiet drone was a comfort. Now, it almost makes him feel worse, but he supposes nobody is at fault if Al-Haitham just doesn’t care.
“It’s not pity,” Al-Haitham says, his clear voice telling the truth. He spins a coin in his fingers. “It’s just a statement. It would be convenient. I could do with a little bit of supplementary income if you pay rent.”
“Of course I would pay rent,” Kaveh says. “Who do you take me for, a freeloader?” He stops. “Not that I’ve accepted your offer or anything.”
“Obviously not,” Al-Haitham says with all the grandeur of someone who has already made up his mind. He places one key on the table before him, the gold sheen gleaming under the dim lights. “I’m right by the Akademiya. It’s the building we received for the research project.”
“You’re so awfully, terribly pretentious, Al-Haitham,” Kaveh laughs, hating himself even as he says it.
Al-Haitham shrugs. “I’ll see you later, Kaveh.”
And then he’s gone. Kaveh studies the key before him, the shining edges and the way it's clearly never been given to another before, missing the rubbed-away quality that comes with frequent use, and he wonders if that means Al-Haitham has never shared his home with another person or partner before. Wonders why he would break that rule for the first time in Kaveh’s honor.
Kaveh chews his lip, and then he snatches the key and stores it in his pocket.
Living with Al-Haitham means that Kaveh is no longer surrounded by the all-consuming emotions of people around him that fight to make themselves known, like Dori’s irritation whenever a small detail in the project goes sideways or the exhaustion of the workers around him when the shifts ran long and they were tired of rebuilding the structures that they’d erected only a month before the Withering corroded the palace. And then, later on, Dori’s telling glee when Kaveh made it out on the other side having given everything he had to Alcazarzaray and still owing a lifetime’s worth of debt after it all.
It also means that Kaveh gets bored. Like, extremely quickly. He’s so used to his life being on the fast track all of the time while he was still working on the project that now it feels as if he’s regressed, experiencing the lull in work that every Akademiya student goes through post-graduation. Being able to read his clients’ emotions makes picking up work extremely easy, and so he doesn’t even have to struggle with the challenge of that. (There is, however, the knowledge that no matter how many commissions he picks up, it’ll still take decades to repay his debt.)
But still. While Kaveh was busy with his work, he hardly had the time to see anybody who wasn’t involved in the project, let alone any of his friends, so he takes it upon himself to meet up with as many people as possible that he hasn’t quite fallen out of touch with but those who communications have grown a little distant. He goes out for brunch with Dehya and Candace once when they’re visiting the city and spends his time wandering through the market, getting to know the aunties and uncles just for the hell of it. He sees Nilou once at Al-Haitham’s house for lunch and a few other times at a cafe, but once her theatre troupe gets into the swing of things, she’s so busy with performances and rehearsal that he gives up on that. And, of course, he sees Al-Haitham every morning and night, but that’s nothing extraordinary.
He takes it upon himself to invite Cyno and Tighnari over for dinner whenever the latter is in Sumeru City, which is fairly often, but still not enough for it to become a regular occurrence given that he lives in Avidya Forest.
The first time the four of them get together again ever since Kaveh and Al-Haitham had their infamous falling out, Kaveh cooks. It’s very good because Kaveh’s been taking on more of the household chores around the house to relieve his perpetual guilt for intruding upon Al-Haitham’s space, though whenever Al-Haitham points it out, Kaveh wants to quit helping around out of pure spite.
Well. He still cooks a lot of their dinners because Al-Haitham is the one working a nine-to-five, even though most days he comes home earlier than that—Kaveh has no idea how he gets away with it—and then Al-Haitham ends up doing most of the dishes. So it’s an equivalent exchange, really, even if Kaveh bitches at him from the stove while Al-Haitham lounges at the dining table being a nuisance.
Al-Haitham never feels genuinely peeved about it, so Kaveh doesn’t stop. If anything, there’s a small vein of pleasure that he picks up on, so he figures that he really must be doing a favor by taking over cooking duty.
Anyway. Kaveh cooks for the four of them because he’s become pretty practiced at it, and everything is delicious, and it is very, very nice to see his friends again in a capacity that he has not had since he graduated from the Akademiya.
“You’d make the perfect house husband,” Tighnari coos, cupping his hand in his chin and smiling at Kaveh across the table while he sets out a smattering of dishes before them. Kaveh flips him off in response, but he can’t hide the slight grin tearing at the corners of his mouth. “I’m not sure Al-Haitham even appreciates what he has. Al-Haitham, are you properly appreciating Kaveh?”
“He wastes a lot of my produce trying to make his food look pretty, and he keeps hanging up Kshahrewar merchandise around my home despite me expressing my displeasure at it,” Al-Haitham says, frowning. “I do not know how many times I have to tell him that I don’t need to see another lion in my life. I thought that the Haravatat floor mat in the parlor would get the point across, but he tried to throw it out when I wasn’t looking.”
“You never even cared about school pride until I moved in,” Kaveh says, put out. The feeling that Al-Haitham exudes is infuriating smugness. “I swear you only do it to get on my nerves specifically. Anyway, Tighnari, did you know that Al-Haitham hates soup? Isn’t that awful? It’s for the stupidest reason you’ll ever hear, by the way, so that’s why I made soup this evening. Cyno, will you pass it to Al-Haitham?”
Tighnari gives a faux gasp. “Al-Haitham, Kaveh cooked a dish with you in mind? That’s so sweet of you, Kaveh, really. I wish Cyno would do that for me.”
There’s a sharp spike of pleasure that Kaveh can tell is distinctly from Al-Haitham, and he whips his head to the side on instinct, taken aback by the uncharacteristic display of emotion. He doesn’t see anything particularly out of the ordinary, however. Al-Haitham’s expression is as blank as it ever is, perhaps bordering on bored, and Cyno is handing him the large serving bowl of soup, their hands brushing every so slightly, and—
Huh.
The feeling fades away so quickly that Kaveh wonders if he imagined it, but he can’t dismiss it entirely, the imprint of it an unfamiliar dent. The thing is, he’s felt Al-Haitham’s satisfaction before. It’s a quiet sort of thing. It doesn’t make itself known besides the way the creases around his eyes soften so slightly that Kaveh is sure Al-Haitham doesn’t know he does it.
“I would be souper ecstatic to cook for you next time we have dinner,” Cyno says solemnly. “Soup as in the dish that typically comes in a liquid form, made of a broth stewed with vegetables or meat—”
“I know what soup is,” Tighnari says tightly. “Thanks, though. It wouldn’t be a get-together between the four of us without your special humor.”
“Special is a word for it,” Al-Haitham says, not looking up from where he’s doling out a portion of mixed rice. Then, without fanfare, he slides Kaveh’s plate over to his side and heaps a spoonful onto his empty platter. Kaveh startles. He’d forgotten to serve himself food, caught up with attending to Cyno and Tighnari.
“It’s so nice to finally have the time to see you guys again,” Kaveh says, sighing. He reconsiders. “Well, maybe not Al-Haitham, but the thought counts.”
“Why did you move in with Al-Haitham, anyway?” Tighnari asks. “Last I heard from both of you, you two weren’t talking. Then I got that letter from you telling me your project was done and you wanted to meet again. In Al-Haitham’s house.”
“Oh, yeah, haha,” Kaveh says, not really laughing. The genuine curiosity wafting over from the other side of the table is awkward. He can feel Al-Haitham’s gaze on him as well as if wondering what he’ll say in response. “I suppose I just thought that twenty-seven was too old to hold grudges. You know, peace and love and all that?”
“Sounds like a quarter-life crisis,” Al-Haitham says around a sip of water. Kaveh glares at him.
“I’m just a good and kind and forgiving person,” Kaveh says, sweating.
“Humble, too.”
“Shut up, Al-Haitham. This is why I didn’t include you when I said that it was nice to meet up again.”
Al-Haitham gives him a look that suggests he thinks Kaveh’s stupid. “This is my house. If you refer to the group, I’m included by default.”
Oh, he makes Kaveh so mad. “You and your ridiculously specific distinctions. You know, everyone hated you Harvatat folk back in school because you were all so obsessed with semantics.”
“That is indeed an important discipline underneath the Haravatat branch—”
“I’m so glad to see that none of you have changed,” Tighnari says, a peaceful smile on his face. Kaveh and Al-Haitham look back at him simultaneously. “It’s been five years, and somehow you both continue to act like children. They do say that youth never dies.”
“You’re such a smart ass,” Kaveh grits out, but the feeling Tighnari’s sending out in waves is the usual exasperation tinged with relief that things are just as easy as they were when they were students, and it’s really the small, unhidden spark of joy that really gets to Kaveh.
Because it is great to be back, even if it’s under unfavorable circumstances and Kaveh has to live with Al-Haitham, a prospect he’d never once entertained or even thought would ever be a possibility. Because Kaveh hasn’t really had a reason to go out drinking to drown out his thoughts. Because he could get used to nights of cooking dinner and watching Al-Haitham’s back while he does the dishes, and this time, when Kaveh roots out a snaking feeling of affection coursing through his chest, he knows that it belongs to no one else but him.
The next week, Tighnari is back to his post in the forest, so Kaveh invites Cyno over to join Al-Haitham and him for dinner. This time, he lures him with the promise of playing Genius Invokation. It’s partly because he knows Cyno loves it and partly because if Kaveh has to play another game alone with Al-Haitham, he’ll tear out his hair from frustration.
“Please don’t deck Al-Haitham, Kaveh,” Cyno says while he shuffles a literal deck of cards, and the self-satisfaction radiating from his joke is almost so endearing that Kaveh can forgive his terrible sense of humor. Almost.
“I would never resort to such brutish acts of violence,” Kaveh says, affronted, even though he’s been pelting Al-Haitham with pistachio shells for the past five minutes.
“Cyno, I have been enduring a barrage of attacks all this time, and you only think to speak up now?” Al-Haitham says. Cyno ignores him in favor of dealing the cards, enraptured by the movements. He brought a few of his special edition cards this time with the very strict instructions for them not to bend, tear, or rip any of them. Kaveh’s a little afraid to even touch them.
“Who’s playing who first?” Kaveh asks, leaning back on his hands. They’re gathered around the table in the living room, the low-set surface just the right size for cards. “I don’t mind sitting out for the first round if you want to play, Cyno.”
“No, it’s alright. I like to observe my opponents first to take notes on their playing style so I can effectively take over the match once my turn begins,” Cyno says, completely serious. Kaveh looks upon his expressionless face and wonders if he’d be better at poker than Genius Invokation.
“Um. Okay,” says Kaveh, and then he scoots up to the table, sitting across from Al-Haitham and Cyno. “Al-Haitham, it’s you and me. Again. You know, Cyno, I invited you so I wouldn’t end up in this situation again, but I guess it’s fine.”
“I’m handing it over to you,” Cyno says, patting Al-Haitham on the shoulder with a heavy grasp, and Kaveh anticipates the same begrudging acceptance that Al-Haitham gets whenever Kaveh gets touchy with him, except it never comes. What he does sense, however, is a rolling wave of giddiness—as giddy as a man like Al-Haitham can be, anyway, but it’s definitely a departure from his usual nonchalance.
Kaveh does a double take. There’s absolutely nothing out of the ordinary to elicit such a reaction, but there’s no mistaking what he senses, especially since it’s coming from Al-Haitham. He’s spent so long attempting to learn each of Al-Haitham’s moods since he’s always found it so difficult from the beginning that he can intrinsically know how his emotions differ from other peoples’. Al-Haitham’s emotions remind Kaveh of nighttime, of stale, stagnant summer air, of the first air of wonder you get as a child when you look upward and notice that the sky is blue. Familiarity. The hint of naivety he still had before he graduated and he thought that the future belonged to him just because it was under his name.
Nostalgia is a funny thing—he’ll be taken back years into the past by a passing smell or a familiar sight, memories triggered by random sensations, but this is the first time that Kaveh has been transported back on a feeling alone. Inexplicably, it makes him think of late nights spent wandering the city with Al-Haitham, ducking into coffee shops as the hours grew long and the windows shuttered around them, high on caffeine and each other’s company as the sun rose again. Al-Haitham never liked it because he was such a stickler to his bedtime, but Kaveh dragged him out anyway, and the surreal knowledge that he was living the memories he’d look back on never let him regret it.
He looks back on them now, and it makes him feel ill with how much he’s missed Al-Haitham’s company. Kaveh spent so long convincing himself that he didn’t need the other to forget that he had anything to regret, and it’s strange now to mourn something he already has.
It’s even more odd that he can’t pinpoint what brought about the unfamiliar emotion in Al-Haitham that likewise triggered so many memories in Kaveh except for that one hand on his shoulder.
A thought strikes Kaveh, and it’s not a pleasant one. Trying to decipher the clues, he narrows his eyes and looks up at Al-Haitham—who’s already looking at him, cards in hand, waiting for him to make the first move.
Kaveh slaps down a card at random, and with his mind as far away as it is, it’s no surprise to him when the entire game whittles away and he ends up losing to Al-Haitham’s cards, those of which still have an insulting amount of HP left. Kaveh should be ashamed.
“Don’t think that I will take this unfortunate defeat lying down,” Kaveh hisses with one hand in Al-Haitham’s indifferent face, and then he scrambles to his feet, veering to the kitchen. “I’m going to get water. Does anyone want a glass?”
Both Al-Haitham and Cyno shake their heads no, already gathering the cards to reshuffle them and begin the next game, so Kaveh skitters away to the kitchen and peers through the open wall as he takes his time picking a cup from the cupboard and slowly wiping it down.
Across the room, he sees Cyno lean over to Al-Haitham and whisper something into his ear, his hand cupped around his mouth as if telling a secret, and then the same spark of delicate affection comes from Al-Haitham, meeting Kaveh all the way in the kitchen.
“Oh god,” Kaveh gasps, his hand flying to his mouth. “Al-Haitham has a crush on Cyno.”
Kaveh’s revelation is thankfully quiet enough that Al-Haitham and Cyno don’t hear it, but that doesn’t mean that Kaveh can forget it, the knowledge stewing in the back of his mind for the next week and a half. He just doesn’t know what to do about it.
For one, Cyno is dating Tighnari, so this can go one of two ways: Al-Haitham never speaks a word about his unfortunate feelings and the world moves on, or—there’s no other alternative, actually. Al-Haitham will have to die with this secret, and now, Kaveh will have to as well.
For another, it really is so very unfortunate that Al-Haitham has feelings for Cyno when Kaveh is the one who’s stuck here on his seventh embarrassing year of being in love with Al-Haitham. It sucked knowing that Al-Haitham was so cavalier about their friendship from the beginning, and now it only rubs salt in the wound to know that of all the people that he developed a crush on in the friend group, it wasn’t him.
Kaveh has a lot of great qualities! He’s a good friend, and he considers himself to be a kind person, and Al-Haitham’s the one who calls him too generous for his own well-being (well, he calls him a gullible idiot, but it’s basically the same thing). He has the project of a lifetime under his belt, the title of a celebrity architect, and he can even cook. What does Cyno have? Cyno has Tighnari.
Maybe Al-Haitham likes Genius Invokation TCG more than Kaveh previously thought. He despairs.
Kaveh cancels all of his plans to invite Cyno over because he can’t stomach the thought of seeing the two of them together and also he doesn’t want to aid in anybody’s role in being a homewrecker, and the best way to get over somebody is to keep them out of sight and therefore out of mind. It didn’t work for Kaveh, but hopefully, it’ll work for Al-Haitham.
Tighnari, who’s being visited by Cyno in his abode out in the forest, says that Collei finally has a free night and that Kaveh and Al-Haitham should make the journey out to have a meal with them. It ruins Kaveh’s scheme. He’s also the last person who would say no to an invitation like that, so of course he says yes.
When they arrive, the place is cozy, glowing with small lights strung up all over the walls. There are five place sets instead of the usual three, and they all bump knees under the table when they sit down to eat, but it’s nice. Cyno cooks some dish with mushrooms. It’s good, but Kaveh thinks to himself that he can do better, and then he mentally reprimands himself because he has no business thinking such uncharitable things about a friend. Even a friend who has unknowingly stolen the affections of the one person Kaveh has had his mind stuck on for the last seven years, which is—god. It really is so depressing when he puts it that way.
“How are your studies going?” Kaveh asks Collei to forget about it, and she squeaks in surprise before she hesitantly begins telling him about an assignment she’d just spent three hours completing before she derails completely and goes on about a recent expedition she’d taken by Tighnari’s side.
From the corner of his eye, he sees Cyno pick up a plate of pani puri and hand it Al-Haitham’s way. He braces himself from the inevitable fluttering feeling—but there’s nothing. No surge of affection or panic. Al-Haitham’s expression doesn’t change either, his face remaining perfectly placid, and Kaveh only realizes that he’s staring when Al-Haitham raises one cocked eyebrow at him. He flushes and turns back.
“I can’t wait for you to enroll as an Amurta student in the future,” Tighnari says, smiling peacefully with one hand on Collei’s back, and she gives him a hesitant look back. She’s apprehensive about the idea, judging from the feeling radiating at Kaveh’s side, but the challenge exuding from Tighnari seems to mostly be aimed at Cyno, who crosses his arms and meets it with his own indignation.
“Spantamad would be a respectable choice as well,” Cyno says. He stares at Tighnari.
“Think of the job market,” Tighnari says with a light wave of his hand. “Everyone wants doctors and nurses these days, and if you do stay as a forest ranger, then you’re going to be perfectly set up for the job. What can Spantamad graduates do? Become a historian? How much does that pay?”
“There are plenty of opportunities available in the Haravatat Darshan as well,” Al-Haitham cuts in.
“Don’t go there,” Kaveh tells Collei on instinct, their age-old fight kicking in. “Haravatat scholars are all pretentious pricks who think they’re better than anyone else around them. Take Al-Haitham, for example. You wouldn’t want to end up like him, old and jaded.”
“You’re older than I am, Kaveh.”
Kaveh kicks Al-Haitham in the shin underneath the table, and though his expression doesn’t flicker at all, the soft hint of fondness that appears takes Kaveh so off-guard that he forgets to fight back. He looks to Cyno, instead, who doesn’t appear to have done anything to cause such a reaction in Al-Haitham. If anything, he’s stuck in some extended staring contest with Tighnari, and they’ve leaned so close to each other that his hair threatens to dip into his food.
Kaveh’s gaze cuts back to Al-Haitham, who gives him an inquisitory glance. He flushes instead, turning abruptly back to Collei so he doesn’t have to look him in the eye anymore. He’s forgotten everything he wants to say.
“You should choose for yourself what you want to end up studying,” he says, though from the feeling of amusement coming from her side of the table, she’s more entertained by all of their inner fighting than anything. “You’ll absolutely hate your life if you choose something you’re not passionate about, and schooling at the Akademiya is already difficult enough.”
“I guess I just don’t really know what I am passionate about enough to pursue it,” Collei says, indecision entering her tone again. She looks tired, too, as if the threat of the future is something that’s haunted most of her dreams. Kaveh gets the feeling.
He smiles, anyway. He’s gone through enough periods of uncertainty to know that somehow, you’re bound to end up on the right track again, even if you spend years skipping lanes.
“You have time,” Kaveh says, and then, despite himself, he glances at Al-Haitham, whose eyes have gone from hard to quietly understanding. This time, Kaveh can’t tell if the fluttery feeling is from Al-Haitham or himself. “It takes years, maybe, but you’ll end up right where you’re meant to be.”
The quiet, gentle feeling stays with them for the rest of the evening, even when they say their goodbyes and return back to the city, trudging into the house long after they typically go to bed. It reminds Kaveh, again, of how cherished his memories of school were when they didn’t have to make calls and long distances just to catch dinner as a group. Even though the night did nothing to clear up his confusion about what was happening between Al-Haitham and Cyno.
Speaking of Al-Haitham—
“What’s the issue, Kaveh?” Al-Haitham says right behind Kaveh where he’s facing the wall, hanging up his jacket, and he jumps so much that he almost smacks his head on the wood paneling behind him.
“Fucking hell,” Kaveh hisses, one hand over his heart to coax it back to a normal pace. “What’s your problem, Al-Haitham?”
“I believe I asked you that first,” Al-Haitham says calmly, and Kaveh curses him for the nth time in his life. Sometimes he can’t believe that he fell for somebody who gets on his nerves so frequently. “You’ve been acting strange for a couple of weeks.”
“I have not been acting anything,” Kaveh says defiantly, and then he attempts to step out of the hall so he can get ready for bed, but Al-Haitham places himself in front of him so that he has no choice but to stop short and glare up at him. When he searches for it, the only emotion he can feel is the same low hum and a wisping thread of genuine curiosity. “Al-Haitham, I’m tired.”
“You keep staring,” Al-Haitham says ominously, and then he advances, leaving Kaveh no choice but to step backward so that they don’t run into each other. Kaveh throws him a questioning glance, and then his back hits the wall, his eyes going a little wide. Al-Haitham leans close, so close that he can count his eyelashes, and Kaveh’s heart rabbits so much he thinks distantly that it puts him in danger of cardiac arrest. He’s not used to Al-Haitham being so near. He’s got unfairly pretty eyes when Kaveh stops to think about it.
Not that he can really think. “I see,” Al-Haitham says, leaning back and feeling infuriatingly smug for some reason, self-satisfaction emitting from him in one of the strongest displays of emotion Kaveh has felt since he’d seen him with Cyno.
“What are you even talking about?” Kaveh says impatiently. “What do you see?” And then, just to mock Al-Haitham, he dives in close to the other’s face just to prove to him how ridiculous he’s being, but the sudden surge of panic that he picks up from Al-Haitham makes him rear back as if he’d been slapped.
“What the fuck,” Kaveh says faintly, and then the alarm twists into embarrassment. A hint of nerves. The kind you only get when you’re around somebody you like. But Cyno isn’t even here.
“Bed sounds good,” Al-Haitham says, ducking away.
“Cyno isn’t even here,” Kaveh says to himself, freezing once he realizes that he’s said it aloud. Al-Haitham stops in his tracks too, turning slightly to look back at him. “Um.”
“What about Cyno?” Kaveh expects to feel the same butterflies at the mention of his name, but he feels nothing, and the entire situation frustrates him so much that he gives up on putting up a facade entirely.
“Don’t you have a crush on Cyno?” Kaveh says impatiently, throwing his hands up in the air, and then he watches with quiet fascination as the surprised look on Al-Haitham’s face turns into amusement at his expense and the emotion, quite decidedly, flips right into hilarity. “Don’t look at me like that.”
“Kaveh, what could possibly make you think that I have a crush on Cyno?” Al-Haitham says, and then, oh, he’s turning back again, advancing on Kaveh the same way he had before. Kaveh swallows.
Kaveh doesn’t know how to explain it, so he squeezes his eyes shut and shakes his head mindlessly. “Forget it. I—”
When he opens his eyes again, Al-Haitham is too close. Entirely so. Especially when he has that look on his face, the smug sort, and the slight smirk makes Kaveh either want to slap him or kiss him. Or slap him. It would be the better of the two.
“Senior, I thought you graduated with honors,” Al-Haitham says patronizingly, and the condescending nature of it automatically has a flood of protests rising in Kaveh’s throat that he doesn’t get to voice before Al-Haitham silences him completely by sliding his lips over Kaveh’s mouth.
All of Kaveh’s thoughts come to a halt. Everything that he feels, too, goes blank, radio silence buzzing in the back of his ears so distractingly that he can’t even enjoy it before Al-Haitham pulls away.
“Oh, okay,” Kaveh says, his voice faint. He stumbles backward. “I…”
“Do you still think that I have feelings for Cyno?” Al-Haitham says wryly, and when Kaveh silently shakes his head, he scoffs a little bit, giving him a little bit more room to breathe.
“What the fuck,” Kaveh whispers, and then he shakes his head again, this time to clear all the distorted sound. “What the fuck?” he says again, louder this time, and then he points a shaking finger in Al-Haitham’s face. “Why did you do that? I thought you liked Cyno!”
Al-Haitham gives him a strange look. “I don’t understand what gave you that impression.”
“Well,” Kaveh says, attempting to straighten out his thoughts and compile all the instances that he remembers. “You—” He doesn’t even want to begin to explain that he can sense other people’s emotions. “Cyno’s hand brushed yours when we had him and Tighnari over for dinner and he was handing you soup, and then you let him put his hand on your shoulder when we were playing cards, and then I saw him lean over to whisper in your ear when I was in the kitchen!” His voice falters at the end. When he puts it like that, it doesn’t sound like anything at all.
Al-Haitham’s eyebrow rises incrementally with each example that Kaveh provides until it’s so high that it almost disappears into his hair. “I see.” He sounds very disbelieving. In any other circumstance, it would piss Kaveh off greatly. “And why were you paying so close attention in the first place?”
“Because—” Kaveh cuts himself off, and then he frowns. “Well, why did you kiss me?”
“Because you’ve been staring at me an abnormal amount ever since I let you move into my house, and I figured that was as much of a sign as any that perhaps you returned my feelings,” Al-Haitham says, his arms crossed. “And then I performed a test, and it was telling.”
“Your feelings?” Kaveh echoes, feeling himself color. “You have feelings?”
“I am not the emotionless robot you seem to insist I am, Kaveh.”
Well, he didn’t mean it like that. Kaveh scoffs. “It’s not very easy to read you, Al-Haitham, if you haven’t noticed. Sorry if I don’t believe you because you’ve acted the same as you always have, even when we first met. How was I supposed to pick up on anything if you’re that good of an actor.”
“Kaveh,” Al-Haitham says, his voice patient, “if I haven’t acted any other way since we first met, how do you think I’ve felt about you since the very beginning?”
And Kaveh. Just. Stops. He opens his mouth, and then finding that he has no words to fill the silence, lets it shut with a click of his teeth.
His mind is whirling. Is he serious? Kaveh can’t think of a time that Al-Haitham has ever lied to him. He’s always been horrifically blunt, even when the situation could call for more delicacy. But if he were to be telling the truth—that familiar background hum that Kaveh has come to associate with Al-Haitham, all this time, has been affection? He’s grown accustomed to it for so long that he wasn’t able to differentiate it from any other emotion.
Oh god. Maybe Al-Haitham was right; Kaveh really is an idiot.
“Al-Haitham, you’re embarrassing me,” he says, and then he cups Al-Haitham’s face between his two hands, kisses the surprised look right off his face, and feels his shock twist right back into that hushed buzz of joy.