Chapter Text
Kaveh bit his lip, teeth tearing at the skin as his fingers tapped a frantic rhythm against the armrest of his chair. His unconscious habits did nothing to ease the anxiety welling in his chest, especially not helped by the late hour at which he was awake.
Al-Haitham hadn’t returned home yet, and while normally this would mean more time to relax, in this case it caused Kaveh’s body to fill with a simmering panic. It was already several hours after the latest time that the scribe was known to return home; three hours and 27 minutes after, to be exact. In all the years Kaveh had known him, he had never seen Al-Haitham deviate from his work day routine, coming home right on time like a clock strikes midnight when the moon is highest in the sky. But tonight, Al-Haitham still wasn’t home. Kaveh was worried sick.
Grunting as he heaved himself from one of their two dining chairs, Kaveh began to pace the length of their kitchen, muttering under his breath as he went. Getting groceries? No, it was too late for that. A work emergency? Possible, but Al-Haitham was usually very efficient in dealing with those. Could- could he have run into trouble?
Kaveh paused in his cycle around the room, feet freezing in place as he struggled to contain the dread simmering in his gut. Al-Haitham was just as capable a fighter as he was at academic argument (Kaveh would know), but there was always the chance that someone would outmatch him, that someone could overpower the man and strike him down. Al-Haitham always managed to get himself into trouble despite working for the Akademiya as a Grand Scribe, which was primarily a desk job, mind you. Made through Al-Haitham’s blunt speech, dry wit, or whatever he was doing with the knowledge capsules he had hidden and thought Kaveh didn’t know about, the scribe had no small number of people that might pay a truckload of mora to see the man killed. Al-Haitham had enemies, and it was entirely possible they had chosen today to act.
A loud thud against the front door startled Kaveh from his fearful musings, and he rushed down the hall, nearly tripping over his haphazardly placed shoes that he had carelessly chucked off many hours ago. He grabbed the doorknob with entirely too much strength and tore open the door, hinges creaking in protest of the violent treatment.
Al-Haitham blinked, eyes widening ever so slightly as he pulled back from the door he had just been about to open, before straightening out and bringing his arm, key in hand, back down to his side. The two stared mutely at each other, one blank and surprised and the other scrutinizing and worried.
Scanning the other man’s body up and down like a school teacher stares down their students, Kaveh searched for visible signs of a struggle; scuff marks, bruises, or anything else amiss. Bruises and scrapes decorated the scribe’s arms in a patchwork of reds, purples, and greens, patches of dirt littering his otherwise pristine clothes. Kaveh let a sound of surprise pass through his lips and glanced up, a snide question forming on the tip of his tongue. Al-Haitham had not said a word yet- no cynical greeting or complaint over Kaveh’s treatment of the door. The blond moved his eyes upward and- oh.
Where were Al-Haitham’s hearing aids?
“Haitham?” Kaveh called, worry furrowing his brow as he dropped all possible pretenses of snark. The silver-haired man had his hearing aids on his person at all times, finding them vital to be able to hear more than a severely muffled hum, and the signs of a fight littering his body did nothing to soothe the growing dread in the architect’s stomach. The bruises Kaveh spotted on his jaw were strange, but stranger still was the blood trickling from the gash in Al-Haitham’s left ear.
The other man still hadn’t responded as Kaveh scrutinized his face, and with a silent groan the blond remembered Al-Haitham could not have heard him talk. Instead, the Grand Scribe stood stock still in the entryway to their shared apartment, face impassive but eyes swimming with indiscernible emotion. Annoyance, maybe. Fury? Definitely. And- Kaveh squinted- fear?
The scribe, while standing firmly in front of the blond, looked as if a mere gust of wind could bowl him over and send him into a nearby tree. His eyes darted around like a mistreated animal, glancing back and forth across the street as if looking for signs of danger. Something serious had happened, and Kaveh found himself at a loss for words.
Al-Haitham shifted, and just like that the paralyzed haze Kaveh had found himself snapped like a tightly coiled string. He moved aside, eyes wide and fixated on the other’s face as the scribe stepped through the doorway, removing his shoes without the same efficiency and movements as he would on any other day, this time acting in jerky, halted motions as he finished with his shoes and hung his cloak on a nearby hook. Upon spotting the blond’s own shoes strewn out in the hallway, Al-Haitham turned around and glared, but it lacked the normal spark that his gaze normally held when he was annoyed with Kaveh. The architect grinned sheepishly in return, but it was small, barely passable as a smile in the face of the situation before him.
It was rare for someone to get the best of Al-Haitham, and rarer still for the scribe to come back visibly shaken.
“Haitham?” Kaveh tried again, watching as the scribe continued through the motions of removing his outdoor shoes and sliding on inside ones, picking up and organizing Kaveh’s own shoes in the process. Not once did he turn to acknowledge the blond’s repeated question- and why would he? Al-Haitham couldn’t hear.
After he was satisfied with the state of the entry room, the silver-haired man straightened up, sighing as his eyes flashed once again with indiscernible emotion. He gestured behind Kaveh, motioning at the open door which the blond hastily moved to shut and for good measure, lock. So caught up in peering through the entryway window, scanning for movement on the dark street their apartment resided upon, that Kaveh did not notice Al-Haitham move closer until the other tapped him on the shoulder.
The architect startled, turning his full attention onto the scribe as the other raised his arms, rotating his wrists a couple times before starting to motion. Kaveh watched wide eyed as he moved his hands, arching his fingers and moving his hands to form different shapes, symbols, and-
Sign language. Al-Haitham was communicating in sign language.
Kaveh stared blankly at the other’s hands as he signed a few more words before he stopped and stared expectantly at the blond. Al-Haitham was waiting- waiting for Kaveh to respond with his own hand gestures as if he thought Kaveh knew sign language. For a moment, Kaveh was confused, befuddlement downturning his lips as he wondered why the other expected him to be able to translate. It wasn’t until a few seconds later that the architect remembered, eyes widening in almost comical horror.
Thinking back to years ago, long before they had moved in together and the two only knew each other as fellow Akademiya students and rivals, he recalled Al-Haitham had slammed a book down on the table where the older student had been studying (i.e. slacking off), and glared at him with so much fire that Kaveh truly wondered if he had crossed a line.
In the center of the dusty, tome-filled library sat Kaveh, seated at a table covered in blueprints and architecture books. Painstakingly he had collected them all, slaved away over a blueprint of his own, before promptly giving up on work after only an hour of toil. Under the pretense of resting his eyes, the architecture student was napping soundly in his chair, head pillowed comfortably by his arms before a loud thud startled him out of his sleep.
Kaveh jumped, staring mutely at the thick textbook that now lay haphazardly over his architecture papers, having caused many of them to flutter to the ground at the force of the impact. He looked up to glare at the student who had decided it was a good idea to slam a textbook upon his workspace but was promptly startled into silence. It was Al-Haitham, whose lips were turned into a scowl that made Kaveh wonder what horrible thing he had done to cause it. His robes were in disarray as if he had been storming around, possibly looking for Kaveh, and with a gulp the blond surrendered to the inevitable lecture he was about to receive.
But instead of giving Kaveh the verbal lashing of a lifetime, the silver-haired student raised a pale hand and gestured to the offending textbook, ignoring the glares from the library’s other occupants at the disrupting thump that echoed through the spacious room. Quietly yet firmly he spoke to Kaveh in a tone that barred no room for argument.
“Read it.”
Kaveh blinked. “Excuse me?”
“Read it. Learn it.”
“Um… why?”
“Just-” Al-Haitham’s hand curled into a fist as he brought it back to his side, fierce green eyes breaking contact with Kaveh’s own as he glared at the table. A light pink blush dusted his cheeks as he scowled, confusing Kaveh’s poor, fluttering heart for what felt like the millionth time since he had first laid eyes on the other boy. “Just… in case. Please.”
Kaveh’s mouth gaped open like a fish out of water- this was the first time Al-Haitham had ever nicely asked him to do anything. Al-Haitham commanded, he never said wasted time on polite, flowery language. So what was this all about?
Glancing down at the textbook, Kaveh was startled to note the title ‘Sumerian Sign Language’ decorating the cover in bold, embossed print. Before the blond could open his mouth to- to what? Agree? Complain? Consider the implications of his rival wanting him to learn how to communicate with him even if his hearing aids were off?- Al-Haitham spun around and left in a swirl of turquoise robes and flustered air.
“Read it.” He called over his shoulder as the blond stared mutely after him, glancing back once before disappearing behind a bookshelf. He lingered just long enough for Kaveh to once again glimpse his reddened cheeks, contrasting with his piercing green eyes in a way that the architecture student was pretty sure people could write poetry about. A twin blush lit over Kaveh’s own face, and after forcing down a giddy smile, he grabbed the textbook and opened it to the first page.
Shit.
Kaveh had meant to read it, he really had. But at the time he had been working on a massive blueprint that then got overshadowed by an even larger assignment, and before he knew it the library had summoned him to return the textbook that was now largely overdue. Kaveh had done so without a second thought, meaning to check it out again and learn another time, but he had, of course, forgotten.
It had never come up again, not for years, until right now where Al-Haitham was staring at him expectantly from the entryway to their apartment. Guilt welled up in Kaveh’s chest, flooding his lungs until he could barely eke out the words to form an excuse. But what good would that do anyways? Al-Haitham couldn’t understand him right now, and Kaveh… Kaveh couldn’t understand him either.
Shrugging helplessly, Kaveh apologetically bowed his head, feeling more helpless than he had when he had run out of money and had to resort to begging the other for a place to stay. With his gaze fixated on the floor he could just barely see Al-Haitham’s feet shift after a momentary pause, before turning and moving down the hall, past the kitchen and into the living room. Kaveh guiltily followed him, dragging his own feet as he sullenly watched the other shuffle around their cluttered sofa table for a blank sheet of paper.
Upon digging an empty page out of a stack of scrolls and documents, Al-Haitham pulled a pencil from… somewhere on his person and crouched near the table, scribbling on the paper in a manner entirely unlike his normally careful and neat scrawl. It took him only a moment to finish his writing, setting the pencil down with a quiet huff. The scribe held the paper out to Kaveh, who took it despite his continued refusal to meet the other’s eyes.
You don’t know sign language?
Kaveh winced, slowly tilting his chin upwards to guiltily meet Al-Haitham’s steely gaze. He shook his head, cringing as the scribe’s eyes widened for the second time that night. But instead of Kaveh having to squint to make out the emotion in his eyes, this time he could see it plain as day.
Hurt.
“I’m sorry!” Kaveh panicked, hoping that Al-Haitham could read the words his lips were forming. “I’m sorry, I just- I don’t know! I forgot!” He flailed around, eyes flitting from the paper to the walls to the scribe’s shoes, anywhere but Al-Haitham’s face. He didn’t want to see the hurt in his eyes. He didn’t want to look at the evidence that he had caused pain to his long-time crush and closest companion.
Kaveh lept into motion and scurried around the room, rummaging through piles of paper and blueprints in search of a decently blank notebook, stuttering apologies as he foraged. It took a minute or two, during which Al-Haitham hadn’t moved from his spot in the middle of the room except to pivot towards wherever Kaveh flitted to, but eventually the blond found one; frayed on the corners with the first few pages filled with doodles, but a mostly-empty notebook nonetheless. He shoved it into Al-Haitham’s hands, this time sneaking a peak at the other’s face as he did so.
The silver-haired man had schooled his features into an impassive mask, eyes shuttered and dark with his lips pressed into a line. Like an impassable wall, Kaveh mused, shoulders flinching almost imperceptibly as the guilt weighing on his body forced him to bodily move.
“Here,” Kaveh stuttered, sucking in a shaky breath as he forced himself to fill the silence descending upon the room in the wake of his frantic notebook search. “You can use this journal to communicate. I know it’s not ideal but I… I’m s-”
Cutting himself off as Al-Haitham held up a hand, Kaveh watched as the other smiled thinly, tucking the notebook under one dirtied and bruised arm. He met the architect’s gaze for a few moments, shaking his head as if to say ‘what’s done is done,’ before gesturing to the bathroom and then to his face. A second more passed in which Kaveh didn’t respond, prompting the scribe to turn around and disappear behind the bathroom door, no doubt to clean up the blood and grime that littered his body like a spotted dog.
It took a few moments of Kaveh staring at the bathroom door before he moved, expelling the breath he had been holding for his lungs. Almost as if in a daze, he plodded through the living room and past Al-Haitham’s room into his own, collapsing onto his bed with a heavy sigh. He had yet to light his desk lamp, but Kaveh preferred the silence of the moonlight filtering through his drawn window curtains. The near-darkness helped him to think, or in this case, wallow in his guilt.
After that whirlwind of events and emotions, Kaveh couldn’t help but wish he had forced his roommate to sit down before he left to dress his wounds, to chide him and worry over him and also to ask him to write down what exactly had happened. He had no idea how Al-Haitham had gotten so roughed up, and not a clue what had happened to his hearing aids. No doubt both situations were connected, but how?
Kaveh flopped over onto his stomach, burying his face into a pillow with a drawn-out sigh. Tomorrow, he would get his answers. And tomorrow, he would truly apologize.
--
The next day Kaveh did not, in fact, get answers surrounding last night’s situation. When he arose the following morning, Al-Haitham, who normally woke up hours before the blond despite going to bed later than him, was nowhere to be seen. His door was tightly shut, and upon closer inspection, locked, which meant either one of two things: he had not emerged from his room, or he had left their apartment.
Kaveh trudged into the kitchen and pulled a mug from an overhead cabinet, mindlessly going through the motions of making a cup of coffee. Al-Haitham wouldn’t leave the apartment without his hearing aids, would he? They were one of a kind, after all, able to link to the Akasha Terminal and to surrounding noise at the same time. Secretly, Kaveh conspired that the scribe’s hearing aids gave him inhuman hearing, better than a normal person’s could ever be. How else could he know every time Kaveh tried to sip his coveted sunsettia juice with a ‘Kaveh, do not touch’ label?
But that was neither here nor there. Al-Haitham did not have a backup set of hearing aids, and surely he wasn't stupid and stubborn enough to leave the apartment without them. Anyone could catch him off guard, from admirers to pickpockets to- Kaveh froze. To the people who had attacked him last night, wanting to finish the job.
Abandoning his mug of coffee, Kaveh sprinted to the door and dashed outside onto the bustling street, startling several passersby at his sudden appearance. Rounding the corner of their apartment to the side of the building where Al-Haitham’s room lay, Kaveh all but slammed into the window, doing his best to peer inside. The curtains covering the scribe’s window were blessedly open, and with a sinking stomach the architect noted the room was entirely empty. The bed was made perfectly, the desk chair pushed in, and no Al-Haitham.
Kaveh spun around, and aimlessly bolted for the street.