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He lives in a sea of glass. It is his first world, and the only world he can really call his. As far as the eye can reach there is nothing but glass, a transparent haven that remains forever locked in its permanence amidst the changing tides of the outside world.
But there is no outside world. There is no outside. There are walls - many walls, for he always feels constrained and immobile, even in this empty place - but he can’t see them. He is suspended in this sea of glass, where the sunlight comes from a sky with no sun, and the ground is jagged surface and milky to the eye. He can’t see the bottom. He resides in this emptiness, but it is solid and it holds him, so he stays. He’s okay with that.
After all, the world he lives in is so clear. It is the image of what should be perfect. He can’t be fooled here, where there is nowhere to hide and there is no enemy. There is only himself. The sea of glass reveals everything that has even the faintest possibility of being hidden, and he likes this total control. He likes knowing everything, because it is only by knowing everything that he can prevent himself from getting hurt.
Alhaitham lives in a glass world, where he knows everything that he needs to know. It is the only way he can be content. It is the only way he can rest. It is the only way he can survive.
The first time they meet in this life, it is the dead of summer and the other looks no older than nineteen, a tall, lanky boy who is at the awkward stage where boys are freshly-turned adults still trying to figure themselves out. He’s wearing clothes a bit too mature for his age - a dark sweater thrown over a collared white shirt, paired with dress pants covered in paint stains, an ensemble of clothing that Alhaitham has never seen on him before yet the other pulls off well. He has bright yellow hair (just as he remembers, just as he is unable to forget), golden threads the colour of the late morning sun right before the break of the afternoon, and his eyes are the clearest red he has yet seen in all of his lifetimes, the circular opening of a deep well reflecting a burning sunset.
He’s sitting at a table by the glass windows, has been sitting there for almost half an hour now, idly flipping through the menu as he scans his choices languidly, a soft smile settling unconsciously on his mouth. A sketchbook sits on the table, flipped open to a half-finished sketch of a lake of swans, but he doesn’t make many additions to it in the time that he waits. Occasionally he’ll pull out his phone to check the clock, check his messages, but it lasts no longer than ten seconds each time before it’s immediately set aside. His long fingers rest on the edge of the table, tapping the hard surface in a rhythm familiar only to him, and it is this soft tapping that accompanies Alhaitham as he stands behind the counter, watching him in silence.
He has almost forgotten how beautiful the other is. He has almost let himself forget.
Is it you? Can it be you?
When the golden-haired stranger finally walks up to the counter, his fingers now drumming the wood, he looks Alhaitham right in the face and eats his soul whole with that sharp, burning red gaze. It surprises Alhaitham how easily the other meets his eyes, tearing his breath from his throat so quickly that Alhaitham forces himself to look away, dropping his eyes to the counter, just so he can breathe. That burning crimson stare hides nothing, as it has never hid anything, and Alhaitham wants to open his mouth and say you are early, you’re a few years early, are you here to torment me?
For he knows it is him - there is no way it isn’t him, there is no way. He knows. He is confident. He has lived almost four hundred years chasing and being chased by that gaze, that haunting red in the faintest of low-light bars and the brightest of open school campuses and holiday festivals. At this point, Alhaitham knows that gaze better than his own, a gaze that haunts him in the late afterhours when he breaks his own rules and has a bit too much to drink, lost in his delusions, a gaze that is there every morning when the sun shines through the slit in his curtains, painting the back of his eyes scarlet. Under his piercing stare, he feels like he’s been stripped down to his very core, all of his secrets exposed and laid out on the table before him. It is always like this.
Why are you here so soon?
The stranger reaches up to play with an earring that dangles from his left lobe, and his hair is pulled back to reveal a dark mole on the side of his neck. Alhaitham’s gaze zeroes in on the dot, at the familiarity of it all, because even his moles are still the exact, exact same, and the air is immediately harder to breathe in the small coffee shop. He digs his nails into the wooden table as his thoughts run, as his brain feeds itself words of insanity and his legs twitch under the intense pressure of his own mind because-
It is him. It is him. There is proof enough, proof everywhere-
His eyes run shamelessly across the other’s body, lingering at his wrists, his collarbone peeping out beneath his sweater, his temple and the junction where his hair meets skin-
And suddenly emotion chokes him and he’s sorry, I’m so sorry, he wants to get in front of the stranger’s feet with his forehead pressed to the ground and he wants to apologise because he’s been here for so long, I’ve been here for centuries, and in all of these lives it has always been me who made it through, and I know so much and so little and I’m still knowing, I’m still trying to know-
The stranger spreads his fingers out on the counter, hands almost touching Alhaitham’s own, and Alhaitham recoils.
The other doesn’t notice. The stranger is still staring at him with eyes unfocused, forehead scrunched up as he ponders something out of Alhaitham’s understanding.
Does he recognise me?
It is too good to be true. He doesn’t test his luck, only says coolly, “Is there something unpleasant on my face?”
Alhaitham feels a side of his mouth quirk up in amusement as the other’s eyes widen almost comically. Hastily, the stranger waves his hands as he leans back out of Alhaitham’s space, face reddening as he realises the awkwardness of his gaze. “Ah! It’s not that, not that at all! I just- it’s just that you… never mind. Sorry about that. P-please excuse me.”
Finally, his features smooth out as he comes to some inner consensus, and his gaze doesn’t waver this time as he looks Alhaitham in the eyes again and asks, “Do you have any recommendations for what’s good here? Drinks, please!”
Panic gone, his voice is lighter than Alhaitham remembers, a lot younger and a lot brighter. His simple smile is much softer around the edges as well, leaving the imprints of round dimples into the dip of his cheek. It’s familiar. It’s been so long.
“Do you like sweet things or…?”
“I think a sweet drink would be better.”
It is strange. He has never liked sweet things in the past. Alhaitham frowns, remembers that this version of him doesn’t know who he is and asks, “Tea or coffee?”
“Tea sounds good.”
“How about the honey apple tea? It’s not too sweet, but has a nice fruity accent that compliments the bitterness of the red tea. I can control the sweetness for you, if you would prefer that.”
The other’s eyes widen in agreement, and the corners of his mouth kick up into a large grin. “Yes! That sounds good. The sweetness is up to you, I don’t really mind.”
“To go?”
“We’ll be staying here. Can you make another one of those teas for me, but take out the sugary stuff? I don’t like sweet things.”
That’s more like him, Alhaitham thinks, and nods as he rings up the order. Kaveh pulls out his wallet and fumbles for his credit card, taking it out the same time he manages to drop a ring of keys that he had been holding. The metal clangs loudly on the wooden counter and the two of them immediately stare at the keys, packed together safely under a silly squishy lion keychain. On impact, the lion lights up and releases a pathetic roar.
The corner of Alhaitham’s mouth twitches.
How did you get your hands on this in this life, too?
“I’m so embarrassed I might die,” the other mutters to himself as he immediately sweeps the keys into his hands.
Ah, this is familiar as well.
Alhaitham ignores the tightening in his chest, squeezing out a warmth that seeps out of his heart and spreads like gentle hands across his lungs, an embrace he has yearned for all these years, and in ignorance of it he pulls out a marker and takes out a slip of paper. He can think about these things later. Now is not the time. “May I have your name?”
Kaveh. “Kaveh, please!”
Kaveh, Alhaitham writes, and ignores, too, the excruciatingly painful and familiar way the letters curve in his hand, a name well-practiced in its loops and lines. Kaveh watches him write, eyes round with intrigue, before he clears his throat and speaks up shyly, “I know this may be a bit late to ask…”
“Go on,” Alhaitham encourages without looking up.
“But what kind of beverage is popular with the university girls here? She didn’t say anything, so I just got what you recommended.” Kaveh slaps a hand on his face and runs it down his jaw, groaning as he stares at the ceiling. It doesn’t fool anyone, especially not anyone who can see him, because Kaveh doesn't bother to hide the smile tucked behind his hand. “But what if she doesn't like it?”
She?
Alhaitham pauses, still holding the note in his hand when the bells to the coffee shop tinkle, and both he and Kaveh turn to look at who just came in.
His blood is ice in his veins, and he’s just about to ask again when Kaveh raises his hand in a wave, and the girl who’d just walked into the coffee shop turns and smiles sweetly at them.
Oh. So this is how it is.
It has never occurred to him that Kaveh may already have someone before they meet again. Call it selfishness, call it ego, because Alhaitham had been able to woo him in every lifetime as if it were second nature (and maybe it is, he has believed that it is), as if it were what they were born to do. Never did it occur to him that someone else would catch Kaveh’s eye so early, especially when he was still in the prime of his youth, with nothing of particular importance to him save for his studies and his work.
He swallows the sour taste in his throat and moves away from the counter to prepare the tea. Their voices drift over the low hum of the coffee machine, over the boiling kettle, and as much as Alhaitham would’ve preferred a comfortable silence he hears their conversation as they wait.
“Were you here for very long?” She asks.
“Not too long,” Kaveh lies like a fool. “I just got here.”
“I’m sorry. I was doing my makeup, and I lost track of time. I didn’t think you would be early.”
“Did I give off the impression that I was not a punctual person?”
“Well. You don’t really make yourself seem like you are.”
Alhaitham frowns. Kaveh laughs loudly, and the tinkle sounds odd.
“I’m a pretty punctual person. Now you know.”
“I guess I do.”
“Do you want to sit down? I saved a spot over the-”
“Did you? Thank you.”
The short conversation leaves a foul taste in Alhaitham’s mouth, an exchange that’s toeing the edge between friendly and irritated. He hears them shuffle away, and so he dares to take a peek at their retreating bodies.
Kaveh has taken her bag from her and is currently slinging it on his shoulder. There’s a safe space between them where Kaveh leads her away, and Kaveh inches closer when he notices for the sake of closing the distance. To Alhaitham’s shock (or, truthfully, maybe not at all), the girl shifts away. Kaveh hesitates for a second, his fingers stilling where they rest on the bag’s straps, before turning and dropping the bag on a chair. Their voices are much softer now.
“How was the commute here?”
“Fine.”
Alhaitham rummages through the cupboards for the apple tea.
“Did you get stuck in the traffic? I heard it was pretty bad on the trains downtown. I was almost late, too.”
“No, there was no traffic.”
He sets the tea bags in their teapots, before pulling out the kettle still steaming with hot water.
“Oh… then, what kept you? If you don’t mind me asking.”
“Nothing. I was meeting someone. I lost track of time.”
“Is that so?”
“Yeah.”
He pours the hot water into the teapot, wincing when the steam heats his fingers.
“I got you the honey apple tea.”
“The what?”
“The honey apple tea.”
He takes a wooden spoon and scans the counter for the jar of honey that he was certain he’d set out just this morning.
“Honey apple? Why?”
“I- I asked for recommendations, and the barista said that one was good. I thought you might like it. You can give it a try later-”
“I hate sweet teas. You would’ve known if you simply asked,” the girl snaps, her shrill voice rising above the jazz playing in the speakers and the muffled sounds of the street outside. The sheer malice in her tone has Alhaitham halting his movements, his hands stiffening where his fingers still hover over the lid of the honey jar. Baffled, with a faint irritation building in his chest, he grabs the jar and moves slightly closer to the side of the counter near their table.
She’s still scolding him, her back towards Alhaitham as she continues, “I can’t spell everything out for you, Kaveh. Your small acts of supposed hospitality are just inconvenient.”
Kaveh’s in direct view, and he looks deeply hurt. Shock is plastered plainly on his features, his eyes wide and eyebrows furrowed as he struggles to comprehend her anger. After all, he has never been one to conceal what he was feeling, and he was left confused when others didn’t do the same. Still, regardless of it all, he has trained Alhaitham in every lifetime to be sensitive to the things that actually mattered. Their stupid banter totals to nothing in the end because neither of them had ever been pointedly, explicitly cruel. Making such crude comments on the better aspects of Kaveh’s behaviour were just a bit too much, though.
“You never respond,” Kaveh protests. “You never tell me anything.”
“Maybe I don’t want to respond,” the girl shoots back. “I have things to do. I don’t sit here everyday waiting for your texts.”
Something flashes in Kaveh’s eyes, but perhaps upon noticing that they’re in a public space he immediately draws up an easy smile and says lightheartedly, “Then, I’ll know not to order that for you again. Is this okay?”
Since when did you learn to hide yourself?
Seemingly just as confused, the girl clears her throat before she nods, and it is then that Alhaitham realises what he’s doing: spying on the two of them so indiscreetly. He immediately turns back to teapots, busying himself with mixing the honey into the tea, and ignores the feeling of something lodged tightly in his throat, something dirty and disgusting and angry.
He has no right to be upset. It’s not his job.
He shoves the thoughts out of his mind, arranging the cups neatly on the tray before heading out to their table.
As he approaches, the uncomfortable line of the girl’s mouth tips up, and she beams at him as he sets their cups down. She’s staring at him, staring at him so intensely that it heats up the back of his neck and makes him uncomfortable. His skin prickles at her sudden change of attitude, red flags enough to send him running in the opposite direction had he been her date.
He wonders what Kaveh’s thinking. He wonders why an almost perverse part of himself wills Kaveh to look at him, just him, and not the horrible person in front of him.
“Thank you!” She chirps, all rosy smiles and crescent moon eyes, as she takes the teapot right from Alhaitham’s hands and pours the tea into her teacup. Baffled, Alhaitham draws his hand back immediately, flinching at her sudden contact, but she doesn’t even notice as she says, “Ooh! This is so good!”
From across her, Alhaitham sees Kaveh’s face fall, and the uneasy feeling in his chest only grows. His heartbeat is choking his throat, a steady rhythm only growing faster when the girl turns and giggles at him. He can smell the perfume she’s wearing - expensive and excessive - and it makes him want to hurl. He takes a glance at her and in that one second he already sees everything he hates about her, from the expensive sunglasses perched on the top of her head, the dark red mark at the base of her neck ( how did Kaveh not notice this? ), all the way down to her perfectly manicured fingers that she’s controlling daintily, as if she’d just gotten them painted earlier today.
(He doesn’t understand why he’s so angry. He doesn’t know why he’s so irritated. All he knows is that he dislikes her, he dislikes her greatly, even if a ten-minute interaction with her is all he has. He doesn’t need to justify it. She’s a person not worth a second more of his time.)
Without a word, he turns and heads back to the counter. He has no desire to deal with her, nor does he have any desire to stare at that pathetic and hurt expression Kaveh wears. It only chews on his own unhappiness further. To him, they are both fools, her for wasting her time pretending she wants to be here and Kaveh for believing it.
“Do you know him?” He hears Kaveh ask from behind him.
“I wish,” she says calmly, as if there’s nothing wrong with that sentence in the situation they were in.
Alhaitham wants to throw the tray at her.
He channels his irritation into cleaning up the counter instead, shutting out the rest of their conversation, then busies himself with new customers as they come. Before he knows it, the bright afternoon is already fading and the sunlight is coming in at low slants, lighting up the rows of empty tables save for the one on the far left, where Kaveh and the girl still sit.
They’re still here? Alhaitham doesn’t say anything as he sets aside the clean mugs, giving the counter another once-over before letting himself rest, picking up a book he set aside earlier. The shop is much quieter now, the streets outside entering the lazy lull before the rush hour, and the three of them are the only ones still remaining in the shop. He pulls out a stool, leans his back against the cabinets, and runs his finger along the top of the pages, searching for his bookmark. He’s just gotten settled down when he hears the faint shutter of a camera and the sudden gasp from Kaveh that immediately follows.
“Why did you do that?” Kaveh hisses.
“Am I not supposed to?” The girl responds coolly.
“Wh- of course not! Delete that! How can you take a picture of someone without their permission?”
Alhaitham freezes, the book barely open and his hands still along the binding. His eyes snap up, an icy chill running through his body as he sees the girl stand up, shoving her phone into her pocket as she steps away from the table.
“Don't tell me what to do,” she snaps. “You’ve been nothing but exhausting today. I won’t go on another date with you.”
“Exhausting? You keep saying these things, but you don’t tell me how I can get better,” Kaveh says as he stands up as well. The both of them are so unhappy that neither of them notices Alhaitham staring them down, what romance that could’ve possibly sprouted between them immediately vanishing into thin air. “If you let me know, I can fix it. We won’t have this problem, but you’re so… you’re so horrible! You were so late, and then you were so cold and uninterested, and then you started flirting with the barista, and now you’re taking a photo of him?! What’s your deal?”
“My deal?! My deal?!” She shoots back, raising her voice. “You weren’t entertaining. You were so lame . For someone I’d liked back when we were in high school, I regret even thinking you stood a chance. Your face- it’s the only thing redeemable about you because you’re so- you’re so insufferable . Why do you keep asking where I am? So what if I was late? So what? Couldn’t you wait? See- this is why I liked you better when I didn’t have the guts to talk to you.”
“I kept asking because I was concerned that you’d gotten hurt-”
“I didn’t ask for your concern! Couldn't you tell that I didn’t even want to come today?”
The words are a slap to the face. Even Alhaitham stills at such a sentence. He clearly didn’t realise it, Alhaitham then observes, because Kaveh’s reddening in equal embarrassment and humiliation and the girl is getting ready to leave and Kaveh’s doing nothing to stop her. “You are so boring. I don’t even want to bother with any other chances. Don’t speak to me again.”
With that, she brushes off her skirt airily before grabbing her bag and flying out of the café. The door jingles mockingly behind her, the bells tinkling almost gleefully as she stomps away, leaving Kaveh behind. The other is staring blankly at something, his eyes wide, his bottom lip pulled between his teeth, and his hand trembling where it rests on the table.
Alhaitham sighs, then sets his book down. The sound shakes Kaveh out of his trance and his eyes snap over to where Alhaitham’s already staring back at him.
“You heard that?”
Alhaitham picks up the tray, then walks out of the counter to clean up their table. “It would’ve been surprising if I hadn’t.”
“How embarrassing. I think I’ll die.”
“You don’t need to feel embarrassed. Things like this are rather common for your age.”
“Why didn’t you say anything?”
Alhaitham stares at him like he’s grown a second head. “Why would you need me to? You don’t need me to fight your battles for you, do you?”
Kaveh’s gaze is clear, a direct gateway to his heart that’s equal parts humiliated yet intrigued, before he tilts his head back and laughs. His arms loosen as he claps, harsh sounds ringing of sheer amazement and disbelief. When he straightens up again, Alhaitham sees his baffled joy clear in every corner of his features. “I suppose not. No, no, I don’t need you to fight my battles.”
“I’m sorry about the date. Perhaps I should’ve recommended a safer option.”
“Why are you blaming yourself? I was the one who ordered the tea,” Kaveh says so simply that Alhaitham’s next words catch in his throat.
He’s right. Why am I apologising? It wasn’t even-
He chooses not to dwell on it any longer.
“Next time, you should get the matcha latte. You can’t really go wrong with matcha,” Alhaitham says instead.
Kaveh grins at him, his previous embarrassment already completely gone and replaced with the amused smile toying at his lips. “How are you so confident that there will be a next time?”
But Alhaitham’s not wrong, because not even a week from then Kaveh is back. His outfit is a little less ridiculous this time, a simple blue sweater over a pair of black jeans, and one side of his hair is pulled back in a tidy braid. This time, the new girl walks in with him, and her hand is wrapped around his arm tightly, almost possessively, as she smiles up at him while he chatters.
In all the lifetimes Alhaitham has known Kaveh, every version of Kaveh has never been one to fool around. Having a romantic partner was never something at the top of Kaveh’s list of priorities, and they’d always just fallen in love because they did, not because of some grand plan from the both of them. Perhaps that explains why Alhaitham feels so irritated seeing the new girl here so soon, the new person , because it is simply so unnatural that it’s surely not Kaveh’s doing, is it?
Some foreign part of his heart thrums with something Alhaitham can’t comprehend. For once, he has no answer.
They approach the counter, where Kaveh waves at him excitedly. Alhaitham simply nods back.
“I’ll take one of the apple teas for myself,” Kaveh says as his eyes scan the menu.
Alhaitham blinks at the monitor, hand still hovering over the screen. “The apple tea? Are you sure?”
“Yeah, yeah, it’s the one I got last time, isn’t it?”
Alhaitham makes the mental note to not add honey as Kaveh turns to the girl and asks, “Do you like matcha?”
“Matcha?” To their surprise, she crinkles her nose. “Not a fan.”
Alhaitham taps the side of the monitor pensively. “My hypothesis is wrong, then.”
“What?”
She ends up ordering an iced Americano, and she even offers to pay for the two of them before Kaveh firmly refuses and all but shoves his wallet in Alhaitham’s face instead. Alhaitham plucks his credit card from its slot and says, “Nice keychain you’ve got there. Does it make noises?”
Kaveh’s face reddens. “H- how do you still-?!”
“What keychain?” The girl pipes up.
Kaveh, with his face burning, sends her to look for a seat.
He hands the card back to Kaveh when he’s done, and watches Kaveh turn and walk casually to where the girl sits, already waiting for him. His chest feels oddly sore. He’ll have to get it checked later tonight.
And yet, just like last time, it happens again. It is the same routine. He’s not sure why he’s surprised.
He finishes the drinks, approaches the table with the tray, and he hears the beginnings of an argument. They don’t look at him, even when the tray makes a loud clacking sound when it comes in contact with the table. Kaveh sports an apologetic expression. The girl is frowning.
The sheer awkwardness of it all sears burning marks into the back of his neck. He mutters a soft “enjoy” that neither of them seem to hear, and all but flees the scene before the inevitable D-Day occurs. He can already sense it. He heads back to the counter, where he’s washing the dirty cups when he hears her raise her voice. Kaveh’s follows not long after, and by the time he shuts the tap off they’re arguing. He looks up just in time to see her pick up her bag and storm out. Still frozen in his chair, Kaveh sits and does nothing. The couple in the table next to him stares at him.
To save Kaveh the embarrassment of having the same person see him get rejected twice, Alhaitham doesn’t come out to tidy up the cups immediately this time. He waits until Kaveh sighs, gets up, and leaves not long after, before finally walking over to their table with the tray. He picks up the teapots, the tea and cookies barely touched, and sighs quietly to himself.
Some things just don’t make sense.
The third time it happens (and this time it’s a bit uglier, because she had been holding her cup with full intent of throwing it at him before she decided against it), Alhaitham decides to approach him.
He doesn’t have to. He didn’t need to. He just wants to, and a part of himself struggles against what rational thing he should and shouldn’t do before he finally decides fuck it , I’ve been alive for far too long to worry about something like this.
“Are you finished with that?”
“Huh? Oh,” Kaveh blinks at his tea, barely touched, and hesitates. Seeing him still, Alhaitham bends down to take it away, but Kaveh immediately reaches out to slap his wrist.
Alhaitham jerks his hand back, appalled, as Kaveh reddens furiously. The other immediately turns his body to where Alhaitham’s hovering by his table, eyes wide, and he stammers, “Ack! I’m sorry, I-I didn’t mean to do that! No, no, I’m not done yet. You made it for me and I didn’t even drink any of it. I’m so sorry.”
“It’s fine if it’s not to your liking,” Alhaitham says, trying desperately to keep his hold on the tray steady and not fling it at Kaveh’s face out of horror. “You can’t force yourself to like it. Just get a different one next time. I’ll make sure not to let you order the apple tea.”
“It’s disrespectful. I don’t want to be rude. I’ll finish it,” is all Kaveh says stubbornly before he picks up the pot, pours teacup after teacup and proceeds to down it all at record speed.
“Don’t choke on yourself,” Alhaitham mutters apprehensively as Kaveh coughs into his elbow, wincing slightly before drinking one more sip and setting the teacup down. He peeks into the teapot, sees it almost empty, and exhales in relief.
“Thank you,” Kaveh says, and he stands up and stretches. “Let me help you clean up.”
“You really don’t need to,” Alhaitham protests, but Kaveh’s already reaching for the cups on the table. He shoots Alhaitham a friendly grin before shifting out of his chair and heading over to the counter where he gently sets the cups down, leaving the dirty porcelain by the sink. Baffled, Alhaitham watches his retreating figure walk away, and the distant thought that I am still getting to know him, I still don’t know him drifts across his mind before he shuts it down.
“I felt that I might as well,” Kaveh admits as Alhaitham turns back to wipe the table. “I’ve been a headache these past few weeks. Sorry that you had to be there to witness all of that. I didn’t mean to use your shop as my testing grounds… or whatever I can call this.”
“Testing grounds, huh,” Alhaitham muses. He bends down, checks that the table is clean, before saying, “She was angrier than the last girl. What irrational thing did you say to her?”
“How can you assume that it was me who was irrational?” Kaveh sputters as Alhaitham heads towards the counter. Kaveh leans his hip against the wood, crossing his arms defiantly as he adds, “Just so you know, what I told her was not irrational. I was just being honest.”
Alhaitham stares at him flatly. “You didn’t go around insulting her or anything, did you?”
“No!” Kaveh almost whines, stamping his foot on the ground like a child. “How can you say that?”
“I don’t know what you said. For all I know, you could’ve even insulted her mother, and you could argue that it wasn’t irrational.”
“For the record, I didn’t insult her mother.”
“As long as you didn’t do anything wrong, then you don’t need to overthink it,” Alhaitham concludes, reaching into the sink and rinsing out the dirty cups. “Better luck next time.”
“I sure hope so,” Kaveh sighs, tilting his head up to stare pointlessly at the ceiling. He’s quiet for a few seconds, the two of them standing beside each other under the sound of running water, before Kaveh looks over at him to get his attention again. “Hey, Mr. Alhaitham… can I call you Alhaitham?”
“It’s what’s on my nametag, isn’t it?”
Kaveh snorts. “You’re so straightforward. Are you like this to everyone?”
“Probably.”
“Do you even have friends to show off that snarky attitude of yours to?”
“If I were someone else, I’d even be offended. Where is this coming from?”
“I’m not asking to be cruel, I’m simply curious,” Kaveh says without bite.
“With the way you talk, there’s no surprise to why all those girls left you.” Alhaitham pauses, then adds, “For the record, I don’t have many friends, but friends are not necessary. Most existing friendships are temporary and far too strictly related to interhuman benefits. It is exhausting to live like that.”
“Friends are not necessary!” Kaveh laughs, and when Alhaitham glances his way he sees the way the other’s eyes shine, unhinged curiosity and some perverse glee at the prospect of insulting and being insulted at. “You’re so cynical!”
“Well.” Alhaitham turns his gaze away. “That’s not the first time I’ve heard that.”
It really isn’t.
“Hey. Alhaitham. I’m gonna tell you something. Don’t call me insane, okay?”
“I’ll have to hear what you say first.”
“I might be crazy but, for some reason, this feels familiar, don’t you think? You’re so easy to talk to. I feel like I already know what you’re going to say before you say it. Maybe you’re just oddly predictable, but do you feel this way as well?”
What?
Alhaitham almost drops the ceramic mug he’d been holding. The initial shock of it is almost too much for him to bear, a sudden fear that Kaveh might remember his past life, too , but he forces it out of his mind because it’s impossible. There is no way. Willing his rapidly beating heart to calm down, he clears his throat and asks, “You must be crazy. Are you projecting your hopeless love unto me?”
Kaveh laughs, loud and bright, and it echoes over the sound of running water, morphs with the muffled stream until he and the water become one. “You’re so strange, Alhaitham.”
“People have told me that before.”
“You’re so strange. You’re really, really so strange. It’s fascinating.”
He doesn’t know what to make of it.
Kaveh comes back again tomorrow, but this time he orders a coffee. He asks for a regular latte, to which Alhaitham arches an eyebrow and says, “Are you sure?”
“Definitely,” Kaveh grins, sliding his credit card over. “I should get accustomed to coffee. It’s still a bit too bitter for my taste, but that’s what university kids drink, no?”
“The idea that university students must drink coffee is nothing but a marketing play instigated by the beer-bellied CEOs of capitalism,” Alhaitham mutters, but takes the card nonetheless.
Kaveh barks out a surprised laugh that echoes with his entire body, and when Alhaitham looks up he’s greeted by a bright, shining red gaze. The other smiles at him amusedly as he says, “But aren’t you feeding directly into this marketing play, oh tall-and-handsome barista?”
Alhaitham can’t help the smirk that makes it onto his own face. He pointedly ignores the ‘tall-and-handsome’ comment as he says, “No matter what, you’re the one paying me.”
Kaveh breaks into a laugh now, hands coming down to grip the sides of the table as he all but shouts, “You’re so ridiculous! I can’t get anywhere with you!”
He has missed this. He has missed being able to banter with someone who could match his own cynicism with fearless, mocking criticism, and it’s what he misses every cycle of these lives, floating meaninglessly in the in-between as he waits for Kaveh to come back.
Alhaitham clicks his tongue and hands Kaveh’s credit card back to him. Their fingers meet as Kaveh takes his card back, and a rush of warmth shoots up Alhaitham’s arm and burns at the junction of his elbow. He pulls his hand back, hoping Kaveh did not suspect anything, and all but laughs cynically at himself.
All these years, and yet you are still the same.
He breaks away from the counter to prepare the coffee, and Kaveh trails after him like a curious child. He leans against the wood, peering over as Alhaitham works the coffee machine and heats up the milk. The entire time he remains silent, only occasionally uttering low hums of fascination. Alhaitham slides the mug over to him when he’s done, only to stop when he notices the sudden dissatisfied frown on Kaveh’s face. Alhaitham’s gaze flicks up to Kaveh’s expression, then down again to the cup of coffee still sitting motionless between them. He clears his throat and says, “Is there something wrong? I am uncomfortable with the critical way you’re glaring at my coffee.”
“Don’t you think it’s missing something?”
“What is it missing?”
“The- the white stuff that coffees usually have! The latte art! The art!”
“The art?” Alhaitham peers down at the plain white foam floating on the top of the liquid. “You wanted latte art?”
“Well, it’s not that I wanted it per se. I just expected it.”
“Making latte art is not one of my skills.”
“You could always learn.”
“I find it rather pointless,” Alhaitham says plainly because he does , and so the horrified look on Kaveh’s face shocks him. “What?”
“Is that what you think about latte art? That it’s pointless?” Kaveh’s eyes are blown wide, as if he can’t believe what he’s hearing. Alhaitham doesn’t get it.
“Isn’t it?” Alhaitham continues, which is definitely the wrong thing to say because Kaveh starts choking on nothing. “I mean- okay. Look. The barista wastes a good minute to make some aesthetically appealing heart on the coffee but then you drink it and the heart is gone. Conclusively, isn’t all the effort behind making the heart all for naught?”
“You can take pictures of it!” Kaveh sputters. “You can keep the pictures! And if it’s nice, you’ll want to go back to the shop to see more!”
“The quality of the artwork is fundamentally unrelated to how the coffee tastes, however,” Alhaitham tries to reason. Hearing himself, he winces because he sounds like a dick, and with the way Kaveh eyes him warily he knows Kaveh thinks the same. “Sorry. I’m just being honest.”
“I know you are,” Kaveh says with an arched eyebrow, “because you look dead serious when you talk. I don’t mind, I guess, but you know, Alhaitham, the way you do things will leave you with a lot of enemies one day.”
Tell me something I don’t know. “Maybe. Frankly, I’d rather not waste time with people who don’t care anymore about me than I do about them, and the amount of people who fit in that category consists of just about everybody.”
The other doesn’t respond, and Alhaitham’s starting to think that he probably said something wrong, prepares to apologise for his crassness (it’s always been that, Kaveh has always scolded him for that) when he looks up and sees the look on Kaveh’s face.
First, he is not angry. Alhaitham exhales in relief, because that’s another headache he doesn’t want to tread. But Kaveh is frowning, and he’s thinking about something because one of his eyes is squinting, revealing a bright red glow smaller than the other, and his finger is tapping on the counter in a steady, quiet rhythm. He’s in the middle of some inner dilemma, and after all of their lifetimes together Alhaitham knows Kaveh is trying to reason with himself, an inner debate on whether or not he should bother to even feel offended by Alhaitham’s mindless statement. Amidst all of this, Alhaitham is hit with the sudden realisation that he never wants to see such a pensive look on Kaveh’s face ever again.
Ah. I still have yet to learn how to watch my words.
And so Alhaitham turns to face him properly now, no more of that casual leaning against the wall in an effort to look like he doesn’t care about anything. He reaches over for the small jar of cinnamon powder and, bending down to the coffee cup, sprinkles on a poor attempt at a smiley face. It looks horrible, the powder sinking into the foam and leaving a horrible, monstrous smile in its wake, but Alhaitham doesn’t have much of an artistic bone in his body and it’s already the best he can do.
“Drink up,” Alhaitham says softly, pushing the cup over. “It’s going to get cold if you don’t.”
Kaveh looks down and all but laughs, the frown immediately dissipating into a shocked smile as he picks up the cup gently. He peers at the sprinkling of cinnamon, at the lopsided, sunken smiley face, and shakes his head. “I don’t get you at all.”
“You don’t have to get me.”
“I’d like to. I’d like to understand you, and,” Kaveh takes a sip, then shuts his eyes and smiles. “I’d like to be someone you care about, because I think I will care about you.”
The words light a flame he didn’t even know he’d been hiding inside him, burning him from the inside with a reassurance and a longing he hasn’t experienced in a long time. Every corner of his body tingles, each bend of his limbs and slope of his neck and back, and he almost wants to reach out and grab Kaveh by the arms, tell him that I’ve missed you, I’ve missed you so much, I want you to care about me because I care about you.
“You don’t even know me that well,” Alhaitham mutters instead, his face starting to heat up. He grips the counter tightly, desperately holding on to what he can still salvage of his composure in a moment that’s getting a bit too intimate for what it’s worth. He reminds himself that Kaveh is still so young, but maybe that’s a good thing, maybe it means they can spend more years together in this life, or maybe he’ll have the time to perfect a cure-
“I’m happy,” Kaveh says, and there’s a thin line of foam on his upper lip when he pulls the cup away from his mouth again. Alhaitham stares at him, can only stare at him now, suddenly breathless with an emotion he can’t explain even after all these cycles, all these lifetimes. “I’m happy. Even this… even this is enough. Yes, I’d like to be someone you will care about. I think that’ll be worth every cinnamon-sprinkled coffee. I think it’ll be worth more than that.”
For once, Alhaitham doesn’t know what to say.
That evening, he goes home and searches up tutorials on latte art. He figures he should start practising tomorrow, after all.
The girls keep coming. He’s not sure why he’s surprised.
Perhaps Kaveh only meant that he’d wanted the two of them to be friends. That’s fine, too, I guess, and because it’s ridiculous and childish and because Alhaitham’s not the type of person to die for what he wants.
Is he?
Am I?
The girl standing in front of the counter - Kaveh’s new date - is wearing makeup so heavy that she looks ghostly, unnatural. She frowns, staring daggers into the menu behind Alhaitham’s head as if glaring at it could make her decision come any easier. She’s been doing that for almost five minutes now.
Usually, Alhaitham doesn’t mind. One can take as long as they want picking an item, he doesn’t care, but it’s twelve in the afternoon on a Tuesday and it’s two weeks before the university downtown starts its first semester. International students have started moving in, started roaming around the city to get used to their new environment, which means that the coffee shop is busier than normal, which means that it’s currently rush hour and the Kaveh’s new girl is holding up the line consisting of increasingly irritated university students.
He counts to thirty in his head. If she doesn’t order anything before he’s done, he’ll say something.
Which means that he has to say something.
“I’m sorry, miss,” Alhaitham says without sounding the least bit apologetic, unflinching when her sharp gaze lands on him, “but we’re busier at this time. If you haven’t decided yet, please wait until you’ve picked something before coming back to the line, just out of respect for the people behind you-”
“Think you can boss me around, don’t you, pretty boy?” The girl snaps, and Alhaitham’s eyes widen in an appalled and perverse amusement. He scoffs under his breath, smiling sardonically as she shoots him another look before turning back to the menu. “I’ll take my time.”
His jaw ticks as he struggles to keep the smile on his face. “Please be considerate of those behind you.”
“You didn’t mind, did you?” The girl whips around as she addresses the poor customer behind her, another university student whose meek reaction is enough to tell Alhaitham that he’ll be walking out of this with a headache. The student jolts when the girl’s eyes land on him, and he stutters as he tries to respond.
He mutters something that sounds awfully like “Actually, I have somewhere to be-“ , but the girl’s already shooting him a sickly sweet smile before turning back to the front. Languidly, she pulls out her wallet from her back pocket, flips through her bills idly, before yanking out her credit card and flinging it in Alhaitham’s direction. It hits the monitor on its way down.
She blinks. “Oops.”
Alhaitham wants to go home.
He rings up her order, considers smashing and stuffing her credit card down the drain, then thinks better of it and hands it (politely, might he add) back to her. She smiles that horrible sweet smile at him before walking away.
Out of the corner of his eye, Alhaitham watches as she sits down in front of Kaveh, immediately reaching out to pull one of his hands into her own. She then presses his palm against her cheek, grins as she leans into it, and Alhaitham’s forced to tear his gaze away just before it gets a little too intimate for his liking.
But he’s just fooling himself. He hasn’t liked a single second of any of Kaveh’s dates in this life so far, and he figures he can only keep up the careless, nonchalant facade around Kaveh for so long before it crumbles. It makes no sense, as if he has earned some sort of right to claim Kaveh as his own, as if Kaveh belongs to him, and he can only hope that Kaveh won’t be around to witness it because he’s already starting to lose his patience.
But it seems that, this time, Kaveh loses his patience first, because he’s the one who storms out on the date before she can. He stands up, his hands balled into fists by his side, and he calls her something Alhaitham doesn’t catch but leaves her immediately teary-eyed, red-faced, and furious. Alhaitham watches in surprise as he goes, slinging his bag over his shoulders roughly as he barges out, the bells on the door protesting as they clang noisily against the glass. Kaveh makes a commotion as he goes, the rest of the cafe quieting down and turning to stare at his retreating figure until it’s out of sight, and then turning to stare at the girl he’d been with.
Her face is aflame, even underneath all the makeup, and she pauses for a second too long in her seat before hurriedly grabbing her things and chasing after him. Some snickers float through the air, while others comment on the poor boy (he makes a mental reminder to tell Kaveh that soon. Kaveh will have a field day hearing it), she’s got such a disagreeable attitude anyways. And because he’s a sadistic bastard Alhaitham smiles, notes that the oxygen in the air feels far easier to breathe, and busies himself with cleaning their empty table.
When Tighnari asks him why he’s been smiling so much today, it’s so unlike you, Alhaitham doesn’t give an answer. There is no need for one.
As expected, he returns the next day. She does not.
“What did she say to you? I’ve never seen you storm out like that,” Alhaitham says as he busies himself behind the counter, preparing a latte for the other.
Kaveh snorts at his seat on one of the stools by the glass windows, crossing his arms as he huffs out an irritated breath. He glares down at the sketchbook open on the table as he says, “She was a horrible person, through and through. I should’ve made it clear what I wanted with her because I was shocked by her proposition. It was as if she thought I was on the same page with her all this time. I wasn’t.”
Alhaitham watches as the espresso drips into the cup. “Enlighten me.”
“She wanted to use me to cheat on her boyfriend. Was going to bring me to him and all without him knowing so she could dump him the easy way.”
Alhaitham almost drops the jug of steamed milk. “You must be joking.”
“I’m not joking at all.” Kaveh huffs again, and this time he looks thoroughly, thoroughly pissed. The bridge of his nose is scrunched up, his eyebrows furrowed together as he shuts his eyes and recalls the memory again. He taps his pencil irritably on the desk, a rhythm that gets steadily faster as he gets angrier. “How can you do that to someone? How can you just use someone for your own selfish intent? It makes you no better than a... what's that word? Oh- a tyrant! It’s just absurd. It’s so cruel that I can’t even imagine it happening again. I don’t even want to imagine it. I hope she’ll never be able to live a good life with good people. Hopefully I never become like-”
He cuts himself off there, staring pensively at nothing again. Waiting for him to finish what he’s been saying, Alhaitham picks up the mug of coffee and busies himself with attempting a piece of latte art, trying to remember the steps he’d learnt yesterday that he’d failed on his own cup earlier.
“Hopefully I never become like that, taking advantage of people for my own personal gain,” Kaveh finishes, and shudders. “It’s so horrible. It’s so cruel.”
Alhaitham, holding the coffee and the saucer in his hands, circles around the counter and heads over to where Kaveh’s still sitting on that awkward stool, his gaze now fixed on the sketchbook that’s empty save for a few lines on the paper. Not wanting to disturb him, he gently places the cup down on the table. “Your lack of confidence is astounding, Kaveh. You’re a good person.”
“Am I?” Kaveh says so quietly Alhaitham almost doesn’t catch it, but the pensiveness is gone and he’s peering at the cup already, gasping before Alhaithan can get a word in. “Did you make this?! I’m shocked!”
“It’s not very good,” Alhaitham says, staring at the coffee, and he tells the truth. The swan he’d attempted on his own coffee earlier ended up looking like a horse, but he was too stubborn to give up so he tried again on Kaveh’s cup. As he’d expected, it still resembles a horse. “There’s no need to fake your compliments. Actually, I'm not sure if you're aware, but people are usually more offended when you lie-”
“I’m not faking them,” Kaveh interrupts, appalled, as he takes out his phone. Positioning his hand above the cup, he grins as he snaps a few photos. “I can’t believe you’d think so little of me.”
Alhaitham stares at the phone. “Kaveh, I-”
“Ah, Mister Alhaitham’s first latte art for me! I’ll treasure this forever.”
“You don’t have-”
“See!” Kaveh suddenly shouts, and he whizzes around in his seat as he all but shoves his phone in Alhaitham’s face. Alhaitham jerks back at the sudden intrusion, tries to focus on the screen, and eventually notices the simple photo of his ugly coffee on the beige table wood. He stares at it for a second longer before looking up at Kaveh in confusion, who’s grinning widely now.
"What?"
“Don’t you get it?” Kaveh demands when Alhaitham doesn’t show any more emotions. “Look at how nicely framed the photo is!”
Indeed, it’s objectively nice to look at, I guess. Alhaitham takes in the cutlery and empty space that surround the cup, a nice frame that compliments the clean colours of the coffee and the table. However, his gaze keeps wandering back to the hideous blob that remains at the centre of the coffee, and he cringes.
“It’s not the nicest coffee. Whatever latte art I’d made, if it could even be called that, can’t even be called art.” It's true. It'd be insulting to the artists he knew, including Kaveh, whose worn-out sketchbook with its torn corners and peeling cover already implies a well-loved craft.
“It doesn’t matter!” Kaveh all but shouts, and his eyes are glittering as he pulls his phone back and marvels at the photo. He doesn’t even notice the exasperated scowl on Alhaitham’s face. His lips are pulled up into a wide, wide smile, soft around the edges and earnest in its joy, and in the planes of his face an odd part of Alhaitham’s heart thinks that Kaveh holds the world, the entire world, as if the concept of manifesting the world into something tangible can only be done by someone like him.
Is this who you are to me?
It leaves him breathless, a tight feeling in his chest that tugs at his heart and the air in his lungs. It is abominable to him that he still finds Kaveh so easy to love, even after all these lifetimes, and he thinks that this must not be normal, there’s no way the universe is cruel enough to throw Kaveh’s heart to him life after life after life for him to hold and then to lose. He finds it hard to focus.
“I still have much to learn,” he mutters, and turns away from Kaveh to hide his face.
“You’ve improved.”
Alhaitham stares at the white (rather fat) swan on the surface of the coffee, and huffs out a sound of agreement. “Huh. Perhaps I have.” At least it doesn't look misshapen anymore. At least they can tell what it’s meant to be.
“How long did this one take you to perfect?” Kaveh asks, lifting the cup to his face and bringing the art up to his eye. He inspects it closely, as if staring any longer at it could give him the answer.
Alhaitham taps the side of his leg twice. Eight tries. “This is my third attempt.”
Kaveh takes one glance at him and snorts. “Liar.”
He can’t help the grin that spreads across his face. “Eight times. You win.”
This is the fifteenth time he has made the latte swan. Kaveh takes a picture again, just as he has every other time Alhaitham has made one for him, and smiles softly to himself before he takes a sip.
"It's so precious," Kaveh had told him as he took the photo. The shutter clicked, the sound vibrating in the shop, as he finished, "It means all the more to me because it's temporary."
And so, when he finally makes the best swan he has made so far, Kaveh takes a picture before shutting his eyes and holding the phone up to his mouth. He presses his lips against the screen, smiles gently to himself, and tells Alhaitham, "I admire how much dedication you put into everything. The person you love must be so lucky."
Alhaitham only stares at him quietly, only thinks I wish he is, I wish he is lucky, too, and I wish, above all, that he is happy, in this life and all the ones after.
He has stopped bringing the girls. Kaveh knows that Alhaitham knows, and Alhaitham knows that Kaveh knows that he knows. Neither of them say anything.
Kaveh breaks the news to him on a special day, a few days after summer’s end, a few days before the university starts their first semester. Of course he does. He always has to be the most dramatic about everything.
One of Alhaitham’s regulars had let him know the previous week that he’d planned to propose in the café sometime later, and had asked for Alhaitham’s help to decorate the coffee shop. With not much to do anyway, Alhaitham had agreed, and now he's setting up flowers and lace decor on the tables, Kaveh by his side after volunteering to help. Kaveh had already put up the hanging vines from the ceiling the previous night when Alhaitham was changing the curtains to the fancier blue set, and now that most of the bulky work was done they settled into a slower rhythm, taking their time to find the best placement for the remaining candles and flowers.
Kaveh holds up a flower arrangement in a pink tinted glass vase proudly. He catches Alhaitham’s eye from across the café where Alhaitham’s fiddling with a set of dried petals on a table, and he shakes the vase as he calls out, “Don’t these look pretty?”
They are very nice. “If you keep shaking them, they’re not going to be pretty for long.”
Kaveh snorts. “I can always count on you to never give me the compliment I want.”
Is that so?
He doesn’t know where he gets the confidence from, and Alhaitham thinks he’s really getting too confident and too comfortable for his own good, because he walks over to where Kaveh’s still turned away from him, fingers fiddling with the flower arrangement. He leans down, face close to Kaveh’s neck, and presses his chest to Kaveh’s shoulders as he taps his nose on the baby’s breath in the vase. He catches a strong whiff of Kaveh’s cologne, a citrusy smell that has only changed in variations over the years, and it hits him at the back of the nose and stirs something dark, something like desire, at the bottom of his stomach. He feels Kaveh stiffen in front of him, the other inhaling sharply as Alhaitham inspects the arrangement and hums softly. He’s sure the vibrations carry over to Kaveh’s own body, if the sudden shudder is any indication. He doesn’t address the part of him that wants to choke himself for acting so improper.
He leans away before his conscience can kill him. “They’re hideous.”
“D-don’t lie to me”
“You’re right. They’re very pretty. I think you did a splendid job. Does that satisfy you?”
Kaveh’s face is aflame. He has never been the best at hiding his emotions, and now his embarrassment and excitement are written cleanly all over his features, his cheeks bright red and his eyes wide. He struggles to find his bearings, only barely managing to sputter out, “You- you didn’t have to do what you did just now! You could’ve just looked at them.”
“I could,” Alhaitham agrees, which only riles Kaveh up more.
“Go back to your dead flowers,” Kaveh mutters, holding the vase close to his chest, tucking his face away to hide the burning blush on his cheeks.
Alhaitham feels a corner of his mouth quirk up, but he only nods and walks away. He hears the sound of palms meeting cheeks from behind him, as well as a quick and irritated exhale, and he smiles to himself, smiles to nobody in particular.
He turns back to his dried flowers, and moves through the arrangements on three more tables before deciding to take a break. Stretching his arms above his head, he turns to look for Kaveh, before finding him squatting a few tables away.
He’s crouched in front of a table, tongue sticking out of his mouth as he positions a bouquet of flowers as the centrepiece. His hair is pulled back by a feather barrette on the left side, while the right side comes down and covers the face turned away from him. His red eyes are dark and wide in concentration, his fingers delicate on the flower petals and stems, and-
He is so beautiful it hurts. He is so alive, as if being alive is a competition between him and life itself, as if he has to prove to someone that he is here in this very moment, as if it is all that matters.
Maybe it is, Alhaitham thinks as his hand comes up to rub at his forearm, where he has seen black tarnish the other’s pale skin for far too many lifetimes for it to still hurt like this.
Maybe it is, Alhaitham thinks as the customer leads his girlfriend into the shop a few hours later, as she stops and stares, gaping, at the decorations, and then saying, “All this, just for today?”
Maybe it is, Alhaitham thinks as he prepares their coffee, as Kaveh pulls out a sift with a heart design on it and hands it over for him to use, pointing at the cinnamon powder discreetly.
Maybe it is, Alhaitham thinks as he watches the man hold out a bouquet of flowers that hides his ring to the young lady in front of him. When she finds it, the lady blushes, covering her face with her hands as she cries and the man laughs. She squeals, says ‘yes’, and they meet together in the middle in a tight embrace. Maybe he’s living this life to prove something to me.
But what can it be?
Kaveh follows the newly engaged couple around the café, helping them take pictures. He laughs with them, his bright voice joining in cadence with theirs as he shares in their excitement, a beautiful smile blossoming on his face in genuine joy as he congratulates them, wishing them years and years of happiness. They’re strangers, yet the couple seems to be completely at ease around him, the three of them sharing drinks and stories of their personal life, snippets that Alhaitham barely hears from his spot behind the counter. It is a skill Kaveh has always had, a skill Alhaitham could never learn and has always admired from afar.
He is beautiful this way, Alhaitham thinks, watching as Kaveh tilts his head back and laughs a little too loudly. The feather accessory behind his ear threatens to slip off, to which the young lady notices. Her hand comes up to his hair, where she unclips it and helps him adjust it.
Something tight and stifling coils and squeezes itself in Alhaitham’s stomach and he curses his heart as he holds himself back. Jealousy is inappropriate, it’s not an emotion he has any right to feel as of now, so he only leans against the wall and watches the interaction without a word. He doesn’t yet have any right to say anything, not when Kaveh hasn’t said anything first, not when they are still strangers in this life. It would be improper - cruel, even - to project hundreds of years’ worth of affection unto someone simply because they are who they are. He says nothing.
The three of them exchange phone numbers, promising to keep in contact. He doesn't say anything.
He still hasn’t said anything, even after the couple leaves and he and Kaveh clean up the coffee shop. He still hasn’t said anything when the last of the candles and flowers are put away, when the hanging vines have been pulled off the overhead lights and the curtains changed back to the old white pairs. He still hasn’t said anything when the evening has fallen, illuminating the streets in their neon haze, and he still hasn’t said anything when Kaveh picks up his bag and releases a soft, tired sigh.
Alhaitham grabs his keys and his bag before coming out from behind the counter, stuffing his phone in his pocket and preparing to walk the two of them to the door. Suddenly, out of nowhere, almost as if the universe is playing some sick joke on him today, his hip hits a table and he suddenly bends.
“Agh!” Alhaitham winces, clutching at his leg where he’d bruised it just yesterday adjusting the curtains. He didn’t expect it to still hurt now, and he's only faintly aware of his own surprise at how he didn’t notice this the whole day. Maybe he was too busy fixing the decor, or maybe he just never hit his leg anywhere, or maybe-
He doesn’t get to think much more of it because, immediately, Kaveh is by his side, one hand wrapping around Alhaitham’s hands, the other reaching out to steady his shoulder as he glances down worriedly. “What? What is it?”
“I have a bruise,” Alhaitham mutters as he rubs at his upper thigh. The pain shoots up in firework patterns, and he hisses as he feels one particular nerve thrum a little too painfully. “I hit my leg on one of the cabinets yesterday.”
“Are you okay?”
“I’m alright. It’s not something I can’t handle. I’ll be fine tomorrow.”
“Be careful,” Kaveh says apprehensively, letting go of his shoulder to massage the area with his hand.
Alhaitham freezes. Kaveh’s fingers work into his skin, rubbing soft, soothing circles that leave his face burning. The other seems not to notice this at all as he continues, muttering soft criticism under his breath as he scolds Alhaitham gently. Alhaitham doesn’t hear any of it, only hyper-focuses on the warmth from the hand on his leg, on the other around his wrists, and the strong scent of citrus from Kaveh's expensive shampoo hanging in the air between them. It grabs him by the throat, it urges him to do something, tell him you love him, tell him not to leave you again, and it’s so overwhelming and so heavy that Alhaitham’s breaths feel like a burden tearing their way out of his lungs. From the position they’re in, he can see each of Kaveh’s eyelashes, gentle golden lines that frame a soft, hauntingly surreal red, and it is so achingly familiar and it is so Kaveh, it is so everything that he ever was, that Alhaitham doesn’t know what to say anymore. He simply doesn’t know.
He’s come full stop again. It always happens in every life, when Kaveh does something so similar to the Kaveh of their first life that Alhaitham doesn’t know how to respond. It's a haunting reminder, a permanent image that just will never go away. He doesn’t know if all of these Kavehs have been new Kavehs or simply the same one reincarnated over and over and he’s been too afraid to know, too afraid to tamper with the system in the fear that one day Kaveh will stop showing up and all will be worth nothing.
He could never love someone else. He has tried, but it has never amounted to anything. Every night he sees gold and red, sees bright smiles and ridiculous laughs and hears attention-seeking phrases and they never go away, and he knows that, deep inside, he doesn’t want them to go away, either.
They have all died. All the Kavehs have died, centuries and centuries worth of Kavehs, just because Alhaitham could not find a cure. He has to. He has to find one. He is so close now, he thinks he can do it, they’ve never gotten this far before-
Kaveh’s knee cracks as he adjusts his position on the floor. The sharp sound snaps Alhaitham out of his reverie.
“Don’t hurt yourself again,” Kaveh taps Alhaitham’s leg twice and stands up. If he notices the flustered red on Alhaitham’s cheeks, he doesn’t say anything. “Will you be okay?”
His voice comes out steadier than he thought it could. “I’ll be fine.”
“That’s good,” Kaveh says quietly, and he adjusts the bag on his shoulder. He looks like he wants to say something, his forehead scrunched up slightly and his fingers tapping the strap. He doesn’t move.
“Kaveh?” Alhaitham prompts.
“I…” Kaveh starts, but he looks up at Alhaitham and his voice fades. He clamps his mouth shut again, shifting his weight on his feet, and struggles to speak again.
It must be bothering him, Alhaitham thinks as he reaches for the light switch. He flips it off, and the coffee shop plunges into darkness. The only light comes from the lamplight outside, from the hanging neon signs on the buildings above them and the headlights of passing cars. Alhaitham turns to look at Kaveh, where the other is still standing motionless by the counter. The lights on his body move in a quiet shadow, following the movement of the world outside, and each time a beam hits his face his eyes glow, red and vibrant and alive, and Alhaitham waits for him to speak.
“Alhaitham,” Kaveh tries again.
“Yes, Kaveh?”
Kaveh’s gaze shifts away, and he takes a deep breath. He says it, and it knocks the wind out of his breath.
“I’m moving abroad tomorrow, Alhaitham.”
Alhaitham stills. His hands freeze by his sides.
“Something… came up. My aunt decided to send me abroad. I’ll… I don’t know how long I’ll be gone.”
A silence falls between them, Kaveh not knowing how to continue and Alhaitham not knowing what else to say. Eventually, by some miraculous power, Alhaitham finds his voice. “What about your studies?”
“I-I withdrew. I’ll be taking some online courses. It’s fine.” A ghost of a smile flickers across Kaveh’s features before it disappears. Kaveh thinks that he’s keeping his composure well. Kaveh thinks that he’s keeping everything light, digestible, because he has no idea how else to tell the other.
But as for Alhaitham, who has lived through four hundred years of this very moment, he feels the pit in his stomach that has been chewing on him for weeks now open up, and it opens up far too wide. It rips him apart from the inside with the sheer gravity of this knowledge, sends him into a mental pain that claws at his skull in an agony far worse than a physical wound ever could, and he digs his fingers into the fabric of his trousers just so he can feel something. It takes every ounce of his strength not to keel forward, not to grab at his insides and scream, because how is it already happening? How? So soon? He doesn’t even look sick, he looks fine, he looks-
“I’ll come back to visit, I promise. I won’t be gone permanently. It’s just… for a few years. I’ll be back before you know it,” Kaveh continues, and Alhaitham wants to take his word for it, he wants to so bad but he knows, of course he knows, and yet-
“Please don’t wait for me, okay?” Kaveh’s voice is a whisper now, exhaled into the quietness of the night. A car speeds past them, roars and drowns their breathing out, fades them into silhouettes of the city, fades them into the ghosts of people who are somewhere between friends and lovers, just like everybody else. Soon enough, the sound of the engine fades away, and the evening takes control of the coffee shop again. Alhaitham can see him rimmed in pale white light against the dark, and in the deep evening Kaveh’s eyes are pleading. “Please don’t wait for me. I don’t want to bog you down. It would only be an inconvenience.”
How could you ever bog me down?
“What nonsense,” Alhaitham mutters, but the other doesn’t hear him.
“I won’t be here tomorrow,” Kaveh continues. His body is so still that Alhaitham thinks he’s talking to an illusion. “I’m sorry. I have… I have loved your coffee, with and without the latte art. But the swans were the most special. The swans… were symbols that you cared about me. That you were willing to put in the effort to make me happy. I am very thankful. I will never be able to drink a coffee with a swan on it… or with anything on it ever again unless you make it for me, so promise me you will still be making them in the future. Promise that you’ll ask to make a cup of coffee for me when I return.”
“Kaveh-”
“Promise me!”
The protests die on Alhaitham’s throat because Kaveh’s eyes are wide, they’re wild, and the red depths cut deep into his soul and leave him full of jagged edges. And all too soon he knows that no, he can never be whole again. This life and all the ones before it have cursed him like this, chipping him away slowly and slowly and he lets it, he relents because he knows that he can never be complete without Kaveh beside him to patch it all up again.
It is so cruel. All of it. Everything. Everything is just so, so cruel.
“I promise,” Alhaitham whispers.
The corners of Kaveh’s mouth turn up gently, and his eyes are watery under the evening light. Alhaitham thinks he might cry. He doesn’t. Instead, he shifts his bag higher on his shoulders, steps forward, and envelopes Alhaitham in a hug.
It is warm, for a farewell that is so cold. It is so warm, and it feels like coming home, if only it didn’t mean that he was leaving.
Out of habit, Alhaitham’s arms come up to rest around his waist. Kaveh is strong, pulling Alhaitham tightly against him as he buries his face into Alhaitham’s neck. He smiles, and Alhaitham feels the movement of his mouth against his skin, the upward turn of relief. He exhales softly, feels Kaveh breathe with him, and leans his head against Kaveh’s own.
It is a familiar embrace. Kaveh has always hugged him like this, intrusive and intimate and tight, and it is a sensation he has missed for years and years. He holds Kaveh back just as tightly and they stand in silence for a long time, long enough for the sound of other shops closing to fade into nothing, long enough until the busy cars down the road have slowed to only a few.
Kaveh steps away, and Alhaitham reluctantly lets go. The other heads toward the door, stepping away in slow, slow movements. His hand is already on the handrail when he turns and, with eyes shining like a dying planet, admits, “I never explained to you why I brought all those girls with me.”
“No, you never did.”
But he knows the reason why. He has always known. It has been a part of Kaveh ever since their first lives together, ever since Kaveh was born.
“I want to leave an imprint on as many people as I can,” Kaveh says. His face glows, perhaps in some fond remembrance or some cruel mockery of himself. It can be both. It can be neither. Alhaitham will probably never know. “It is consolation, even if it is not much, that at least one person will remember me, because I’ve tried to make them happy at one point.”
“Even if they all left?”
Kaveh laughs. “Even so. It doesn’t change the fact that they laughed with me once, enjoyed my company once, doesn’t it?”
Alhaitham stares at him, takes in the outline of his body, the glow of his hair, and his permanent iridescence that will follow and haunt him forever. His gaze burns on the mole on the side of Kaveh’s neck, on the ones on his wrists, his temple, on the ones hidden behind the fabric of his sweater and the junction where his hair meets skin. He shakes his head, and smiles because it hurts, it has always hurt, and he knows. He smiles because he can’t change anything as he is now. He knows he can’t change anything, but maybe he will later. Maybe he will. He will hold on to the hope that he will, and maybe then Kaveh will be happy, and they can laugh together for as long as life will have them. “It doesn’t.”
Kaveh stills. There are so many tables between them, so much empty space, and yet Alhaitham finds that he’s struggling to breathe when Kaveh whispers, “Your smile. The real one. It is so beautiful.”
Alhaitham’s expression freezes on his face. “What?”
But Kaveh laughs now, laughs freely and it is freeing and it is sad, it is a terribly, terribly sad sound, and Alhaitham watches as the tears stream like starlight down his face. They are shooting stars, dying comets, and Kaveh is beautiful and he is dying as he says, “I’m so glad I get to see it before I go. I’m so glad. So glad.”
He doesn’t send Kaveh off. Kaveh never told him to.
He doesn’t keep in contact with Kaveh, either. Kaveh never gave him his phone number, and Alhaitham never asked.
He doesn’t tell anyone about Kaveh. Kaveh would probably be a little sad to hear that.
What he does is continue to make latte art swans. He branches out as well, starts perfecting the hearts he’d always found the most difficult, and even manages to make an eagle one day. Kaveh will like that.
The summer is over, and the autumn leaves begin blowing into the coffee shop every early morning. After the morning rush hour dies down, Alhaitham sweeps the stray leaves out of the shop and shuts the door behind him, shuts everything behind him, and thinks of nothing more. No more discussions of art, no more swans on lattes, and no more pictures and banters.
Not now, not now. Not now.
His heart is a little heavy. He doesn’t want to explain it.
Kaveh’s gone, he thinks one day when he finishes a latte swan that’s particularly beautiful. He hesitates, then snaps a photo of it to keep for himself.
Kaveh’s gone, he thinks when he sees one of the customers sitting on the stools by the glass windows, sketching a charcoal still life of a cup of coffee and a slice of blueberry cheesecake.
Kaveh’s gone, he’s still thinking when he locks up the coffee shop for the night.
Maybe it’s better that he is. It’s better for him to return when I’m ready, he thinks when he walks into the research lab that same evening, approaching a table where a dark-haired man is analysing samples in a test tube. “How’s the research coming along, Tighnari?”
“No progress,” the man sighs, before setting the test tubes down and turning around. His blue eyes blaze under the bright white lights as he says, “She just came in this morning, much earlier than we’d predicted. I don’t think we have much time left in this cycle.”
Alhaitham looks over across the lab where a young girl is lying on a bed, her forearms wrapped tightly in bandages. A white-haired man sits next to her, holding her hand tightly between his own up to his forehead, face bent over hers as he mutters something under his breath.
Something catches in Alhaitham’s chest, and he suddenly finds it hard to maintain the impassive look on his face.
“In this life, too?” He asks, and his voice comes out thin.
Tighnari’s Adam’s apple bobs as he swallows harshly before pulling the lab coat off his shoulders, reaching out to hang it on the rack. His hands shake and the coat falls off the hooks, landing in a crumpled heap on the floor. He exhales, and his voice is full of pain. “When have we ever lived a life without it, Alhaitham?”
In his glass world, everything is clean. It is his first world, and the only world he can really call his. As far as the eye can reach there is nothing but glass, a transparent haven that remains forever locked in its permanence amidst the changing tides of the outside world. Everything is clean in this glass world only because he has allowed it to be clean. He has only allowed what he’s comfortable with to come in. He has never let himself leave.
So when he sees a small girl sitting on the jagged glass, her hands spread out behind her as she tilts her head up to the sunless sky, he stops and draws his weapon.
Sensing his presence, she turns around and smiles. It’s enough to warm his heart, enough for him to set his sword down, and enough for him to exhale and say, “What are you doing here, Lesser Lord Kusanali?”
“You still remember me?” She asks.
“How could I forget?” He moves to sit down beside her, winces when the jagged glass presses into his skin. She notices, and suddenly they are hovering in the air. “It’s been so long, but my memory isn’t so bad.”
“So long? Has it been so long?” Nahida muses. Her clear green eyes, two pools revealing a vast emptiness, shines as she asks, “How long has it been?”
“Four hundred years.”
“It has been long to you, hasn’t it?”
There is no outside. There are walls - many walls, for he always feels constrained and immobile, even in this empty place - but he can’t see them. He is suspended in this sea of glass, where the sunlight comes from a sky with no sun, and the ground is jagged surface and milky to the eye. He can’t see the bottom. He resides in this emptiness, but it is solid and it holds him, so he stays. He’s okay with that.
But maybe he isn’t. He looks down, and the jagged glass suddenly looks a bit too sharp for his own liking. He holds his knees a little tighter. “It has.”
She hums, a sound that only one who has lived a lifetime of lifetimes could make, and they fall into a still silence. The glass world shines around them, reflects the light from nowhere and scatters it around the air. They are stars in the light, stars in the pale blue, stars that shouldn’t exist.
“How is Kaveh?” Nahida asks.
Alhaitham stares at the sky, at the pure blue unbroken by clouds. “Which one?”
“Any. The first one. The most recent one. The one you loved the most.”
“How can there be the one I loved the most,” Alhaitham breathes, “when I have loved every single one equally?”
“There is no such thing as unconditional, equal love. You of all people should know this.”
“He is the same person,” Alhaitham says firmly. He had questioned it once but now he doesn’t deny it. “In every lifetime, he is the same. It is simply a cycle of getting to know him again and again, and when I do I end up loving him even more. I love him. Yes. I only love him.”
A soft laugh tinkles from beside him, and Alhaitham turns to meet Nahida’s gentle smile. She reaches over and her small fingers wrap around Alhaitham’s arm, the warmth seeping into his skin that had been bleached cold in the empty air.
“Never did I imagine I would hear those words from the feeble scholar himself,” she says, her eyes twinkling. “Are you the person you want to be? Are you the person you’ve chased all these years?”
He stares at her small, small fingers, at her fragile hands, and he sighs. “No. Not yet.”
“What’s stopping you?”
“The cure. I need to find the cure for Eleazar before it takes him from me again.”
Nahida grips him tighter, and when he looks at her he sees nothing but concern in her eyes. She hesitates, turns a thought over in her head, before she finally asks, “What if you cannot find a cure?”
“Then he’ll die, and I’ll keep searching for one until he stops dying.”
“What if-”
“Don’t ask ‘what if’s, dear Archon,” Alhaithan interrupts only with the pride a man too sharp and too reckless for his own good can wield. Above him, the light burns, sears into his knees and the back of his neck. “Ask reasonable questions. Tangible ones, so we don’t have to waste our breath.”
She laughs, because she’s not angry. She laughs because it is like him, because it is how she has expected him to answer. It is the reason why Alhaitham has always respected her.
“Well then, if you want reasonable, tangible questions,” she starts, and Alhaitham soon notices that she’s not as saturated as she’d been the longer she stays in this glass world. As she hesitates, she begins to fade. It is inevitable.
“Where am I, Alhaitham?”
Her voice is clear. She is barely here. Alhaitham has wondered how she had been able to permeate through the boundaries he’d set up for himself. He’s not surprised to see that it has taken a toll on her, and now she’s slowly disappearing as she’s losing strength. Not long now, and she’ll be completely out of the glass world.
After all, the world he lives in is so clear. It is the image of what should be perfect. He can’t be fooled here, where there is nowhere to hide and there is no enemy. There is only himself.
“Where am I, Alhaitham?” She asks again.
She’s almost gone. She’s memory now, and Alhaitham wonders if she’ll visit him again. When she will. Wonders when she’ll ask to sip tea at the Puspa Café like they’d done with Kaveh years ago, wonders when she’ll ask him to drop by Apam Woods to help her pick Rukkashava Mushrooms, wonders if they will ever be able to live the lives they once did.
She’s gone. She is no longer here. Alhaitham reaches out, feels the faintest warmth of her hand, and says, “My pride. My ego. My everything.”
It is the only way he can be content. It is the only way he can rest. It is the only way he can survive.
Tighnari holds the vial up to his line of sight. It bubbles violently before it fizzles out, and hot, angry tears spring up in his eyes. His hands tremble, he looks like he’s about to break down, and so Alhaitham takes the vial from him.
“We have time. We have time. We will succeed this time,” Alhaitham says quietly.
The liquid in the vial swirls, murky and white. Next to him, Tighnari sets his elbows on the lab bench, before reaching up and grasping the roots of his hair tightly with his hands. His knuckles shine white amidst his dark strands as he dips his head and repeats incomprehensible words to himself.
“We have time,” Alhaitham says again. “It is useless to lose your composure so early on.”
Tighnari looks up now, but not at Alhaitham. Instead, he looks past him to where a young girl lies in a bed at the corner of the lab, fenced away by a large blue curtain, and he exhales.
“I don’t know what I’m doing wrong,” Tighnari whispers. “I don’t know anymore. I don’t know.”
At that moment, someone walks out from behind the curtain, and Alhaitham meets the steady gaze of the General Mahamatra (but he’s not the Mahamatra anymore, is he?), now only a young man wearing an exhausted face and an even more exhausted body. He heads over to where the two of them are seated, and he reaches out to massage Tighnari’s shoulders gently.
“Not today?” Cyno asks.
“Not today,” Alhaitham answers.
Tighnari’s shoulders tremble, and Alhaitham pretends that he doesn’t hear the sobs.
He lives in a glass world, where he knows everything he needs to know.
But he lies. He doesn’t know everything. Something sits, uneasy, on his chest, heavy and ready to pounce, and it has weighed him down for lifetimes. There are still things he doesn’t know. These things he wishes to never admit aloud, for it makes him feel so horribly, horribly guilty.
He doesn’t know how many lives Kaveh has lived at this point. He has lost count. He dies and is reborn, dies and is reborn, and he will keep dying and keep being reborn so long as Alhaitham is unable to find a cure.
And it is hopeless. No matter how many books Alhaitham has read, no matter how many tests and experiments he has run, nothing works, nothing is successful and nothing will save him, nothing will pull Kaveh’s worn, exhausted soul out of this horrible, endless cycle.
Knowledge is finite. He understands this now, because he knows so much and yet it is useless. Yet Kaveh keeps dying. The world is dying.
These things - they permeate as many corners of his glass world as they can. Today, the jagged glass floor is a lot sharper than usual, and Alhaitham winces when he steps on a particularly sharp shard. He lifts his foot and peers down at the sole of his feet, where a speck of red dares to peep through pale flesh.
How stupid of him to throw such a fit when he can live comfortably, when death isn’t even an option for him. How stupid.
He sets his foot down firmly. He walks forward with no destination in mind. The jagged floor tears at his skin.
He’s in the middle of writing the new specials into the menu, his fingertips stained with the dust from the chalk, when the door chimes, signalling the entrance of a customer.
“Just one second,” Alhaitham calls over his shoulder before finishing his last word, setting the chalk down and reaching up to hook the blackboard on the wall. He turns around, wipes his hands down on his apron, and freezes.
The girl standing in front of him is the one he recognises as the first girl Kaveh has ever brought. He didn’t think he’d ever see her again, especially not after that fiasco that had occurred the last time she was here, and when he takes in her appearance he figures that she really hasn’t changed much, that she still looks the same, and that she reminds him painfully, painfully of Kaveh.
She sighs when he notices her, rakes a gaze across the signboard, before finally saying, “I’d like one of those honey apple teas. The one I got the last time I was here, but maybe you don’t remember.”
Alhaitham blinks slowly. “I remember.”
“Good. I’d like-”
“But you don’t like sweet things.”
“Huh?”
“You don’t like sweet things,” he repeats, then figures it sounds creepy and intrusive. “It’s what you said last time you were here. I wouldn’t recommend the honey apple-”
“How do you know?” She furrows her brows as she stares at him intently. “I don’t recall telling you.”
“I overheard.”
“Well.” Her mouth falls into a thin line as she scans the menu again. They fall into an awkward silence, him standing with a hand on the monitor and her tapping her fingers on the counter impatiently.
“I can give you a recommendation,” Alhaitham says after he realises she won't be deciding anytime soon. “The lemon roselle tea is good, and it’s not sweet. Would that be to your preference-?”
“Okay, yes, sure,” she interrupts, not even bothering to really consider it as she slides her credit card over. Just like that? Alhaitham thinks, but she’s already looking away. “I’ll take one of those.”
“To go? Or-”
“To go, please.”
“Okay.”
That same horrible silence resumes between them, punctuated only by the tapping of Alhaitham’s fingers on the monitor, before she clears her throat. Alhaitham looks up.
“I’m sorry,” she says, completely unprompted. Her face is flat, expressionless, and Alhaitham briefly considers if this is what a joke is in this modern day before she repeats, “Sorry.”
Alhaitham blinks when she doesn't laugh or say anything otherwise. “What?”
“I’m a bit sorry, I guess,” she shrugs, not looking apologetic at all. “You’re friends with him, right? I was flirting with you when I was on a date with him. I’m sorry. It’s been eating at me.”
“It’s been almost three months since then.” Alhaitham's head reels at the idiocy of this situation. “I’ve almost forgotten about it myself.”
“Well, it was bothering me, so I’m sorry,” she snaps, and she looks increasingly uncomfortable as the moment drags on. “There. Apologise to him for me, too.”
“Why would I waste my time apologising for your mistake? Tell him yourself,” Alhaitham says, moving away to start preparing the tea. “You’re the one with his phone number, right?”
“Well, of course, but he probably doesn’t want to talk to me anym- wait, what? Are you saying you don’t have his number?”
“I don’t.”
“But aren’t the two of you friends?”
Not really. He’s a bit of everything, and nothing at all. He doesn’t even know how to begin describing Kaveh. “I guess so. How do you even know this? You've met me once.”
“I came back one day to apologise to you, and I saw him inside. You two looked like you were having fun, so I figured.”
“You have great observational skills.”
“Was that meant to be sarcastic?”
“I don’t know, was it?”
“You have a horrible personality,” she remarks as she watches Alhaitham prepare the tea. “I don’t know how someone as agreeable as Kaveh could get along with someone like you.”
“Agreeable? I wouldn’t call him agreeable,” Alhaitham says, recalling the many days Kaveh spent venting about his previously failed dates or Alhaitham’s horrible latte art. It'd be a joke to call him agreeable.
“Isn’t he, though? He was so kind. He was so considerate, so thoughtful as well, and he was so easygoing! I could introduce him to all of my friends and not be embarrassed, you know. Really, I would’ve gone out with him if it wasn’t for-” she stops herself in the middle of her passionate rant, and her face falls. A pained look crosses over her features as she clicks her tongue and says, “Never mind.”
“Okay,” Alhaitham busies himself with pouring hot water into the teapot. He didn’t have much of a desire to satiate his curiosity today, and the longer he spends with her the more he realises that he doesn't like her very much.
She looks at him out of the corner of her eye. “You don’t want to know?”
“I'm not going to waste my breath. If you’re not comfortable saying it, I’d rather not know. It’ll save us both the embarrassment.”
“He was dying, Mr. Alhaitham.”
Clink!
Alhaitham’s hand trembles where he’s holding the kettle over the teapot. He accidentally bumps the metal spout on the porcelain, and the sharp noise startles him. A drop of tea spills over the edge of the teapot where he’d overfilled it, sliding into the saucer and ruining the perfect white.
His heart slams against his throat as he watches the steam rise from the teapot. It fades into the air, creating a weak shield between him and the girl, and he thinks that this is not enough, that nothing has prepared him for the fact that this girl knows, and I don't. I don't know anything.
“I just couldn’t stand him after I knew,” she continues, for some miraculous reason having not noticed anything wrong. “He wanted it to just be a friendship thing. He figured it wasn’t worth it to make me wait, and so I forced him to go on that date with me just so he could see what a horrible mistake he was making. But I saw that pathetic face of his put so much effort into something that I'd dragged him out to and I just hated myself. He’s such a fool, honestly, and I hate him.”
“He was dying?” Alhaitham repeats.
She glances at him. “Yes. He’s going to a medical centre so they can offer him treatment, but I honestly think it’s just a scam for them to take advantage of his body under the excuse of science.”
He’s finding it hard to stay focused. His mind is everywhere and nowhere at all and, in the distance, glass is breaking, shattering, and things are murky and they don’t make sense. “He’s been shipped off to a medical ward?”
“He says it’s like a temporary vacation for him to rest.” He feels cool hands on his own, and he startles to see that he’d been holding the kettle unmovingly over the teapot all this time. She takes the kettle from him, sets it down on the counter, and pulls the tray towards her. She doesn't ask him any questions and he's glad, because he doesn't know what he will say. “But I’m sure it’s not as nice as he pretends. He didn’t say how long he’d be gone, and I don’t think he wants to contact me. I mean, I did fuck up, I guess. Anyway, I’m just here to ease the guilt so I can move on.”
“Did he have a choice?” Alhaitham's mouth tastes like it's been washed out with sandpaper.
“Of course he did,” she responds without hesitating. “His Eleazar is not so severe to the point where he can’t move around on his own free will. And you know how stubborn he is. He wouldn’t have gone if he didn’t want to.”
All that she says is true, and it digs at him and it makes him hate himself. He stares at the kettle, still releasing puffs of steam, and he clenches his hands into fists tightly so he can feel something.
“When he comes back, tell him I said sorry,” the girl says before picking up the tray. “Or don't. It's up to you. Thanks, anyway.”
He watches her go, and he doesn’t know what to say. He doesn’t know what to do. For once, the man with a million pieces of knowledge at his fingertips is rendered motionless, and he stands behind the counter and only thinks, he can only think, and he does nothing at all.
He is in his glass world. The rain falls from the glass sky, and the drops hit his skin like a gentle splattering of ignorance personified. He stumbles on the fuzzy glass, trips on his way to nowhere, and the jagged glass under his feet tears at his skin when he lands. A drop of red falls from his knees, then two, and soon there is a splatter of crimson at his feet, the only colour in this vacant world. He looks down and he finds that he cannot see his reflection.
“It’s okay,” he says aloud, as the rain washes away the red.
“It’s okay,” he says again, when the jagged glass becomes milky again.
“It’s okay,” he says a final time, as the rain continues to fall. Somewhere, it has reached the boundaries of his glass world, and the water starts to rise.
Blood beads at his knees where the wound has yet to heal. He sticks his leg out, watches as the rain lands on his skin and mixes with the blood, before the droplet grows too heavy and slips down his leg. He looks down at the ground, where the rain has now risen to his ankles. He exhaled, rests his forehead on his knees, and feels the water rise to his hip.
But what is it that is okay? He asks himself as he gets up and continues to walk, dragging his feet down a roadless world, pushing away water through his every step. What am I saying ‘it’s okay’ for?
The rain pours. It is up to his thighs. Red is gone, and he realises he doesn’t know.
Autumn treads into winter, slips into spring, and before he knows it it’s June again and the university is out for the summer. As quick as it comes, it goes, and faster than he can comprehend a year has already passed, then two, then five.
Kaveh hasn’t returned. Alhaitham guess it’s expected, and so he busies himself with cleaning the coffee shop, reading up on books he didn’t have the time to read in the past, and then spending his evenings with Tighnari at the lab, where he watches Collei steadily get worse with each passing of the seasons.
Cyno is there more often than not, and this afternoon it’s just the two of them sitting with Collei. She sleeps soundly, still and silent save for the few moments when her limbs twitch, little snippets of time when the pain gets the better of her. Cyno has a lock of her hair in his hands, braiding it into small sections, and Alhaitham sits beside him with a newly released medical report on Eleazar. Neither of them speak.
Cyno breaks the silence first. “How are you holding up?”
Alhaitham doesn’t look up from the paper. “Me?”
“Don’t feign ignorance. Tighnari told me about Kaveh.”
“Why should I worry about him? I only knew him in this life for a few months,” Alhaitham says stoically, though the second he speaks he already knows that he has betrayed himself, his voice coming out warbled and throaty and just weak.
It is so unlike me. Everything. Everything about this life is challenging me, pulling me in so many directions. I don’t know what to make of it.
Cyno catches on a bit too quickly for Alhaitham’s liking, and Alhaitham curses the other man for- for what? For being able to read him so easily? For uncovering emotions he couldn’t hide, due to his own weakness?
Cyno’s voice grates his ears. “You can keep deluding yourself, but you’re the one reading those papers.”
“I read them for my personal enjoyment,” Alhaitham lies.
Cyno’s stare is full of disgust. “How proud are you?”
He doesn’t know. He flips to the next page, and the words don’t register in his brain. It’s just ink on paper - everything is just ink on paper - and he’s getting nowhere, he’s not reading anything he doesn’t already know-
A soft cough breaks the horrible tension between them, and Cyno and Alhaitham both turn to the girl still lying on the bed. Her eyes are hazy with sleep, barely coming to her senses, and Cyno immediately drops the foul attitude as he asks, “How are you feeling?”
“I’m okay,” Collei says, and she smiles softly at the two of them. “It’s nice having people to wake up to.”
Cyno winces. “Please don’t sound as if you’re dying tomorrow.”
“I’m not dying tomorrow.”
“I know that.”
“I’m very happy.”
Cyno’s frown fades into something much softer, and he hands her a glass of water. “Is that so? I’m glad to hear that.”
How can you be happy?
Alhaitham watches as she takes small sips, occasionally stretching her palm out for Cyno to hand her her medication. She smiles each time he hands her a pill.
You’re lying. There’s no way you’re happy. Simply looking at you is causing me pain.
She’s still smiling, even after her arm throbs with horrible pulses and she winces. Cyno, still holding the various bottles containing her medication in his hands, looks like he wants to destroy the world and everyone in it.
Stop lying to yourself. Stop it. The sooner you admit defeat the easier it will be to bear with it, to bear with what you can’t change.
Her smile haunts him, it’s too much, and he can’t breathe.
Alhaitham shakes himself out of his reverie not because they are words he will never say aloud, but because they are the very reason for why he can’t say anything at all.
In his glass world, the rain hurts when it hits his skin. It’s a falling world, the sky crying about something, he’s not sure what, and the light is gone and all is living and dying under a murky grey haze.
It’s new. He has never been hurt here before, but now he’s standing on jagged glass and the raindrops that pierce his arms and shoulders sting far too much for it to be normal. He reaches a hand up to protect his shoulders, and watches, transfixed, as the drops pelt his fingers like falling comets.
“Alhaitham,” a voice from behind him says, and he bears the pain under his feet as he turns to meet a bright green gaze.
“Lesser Lord Kusanali,” he greets.
“You know you don’t have to call me that anymore.”
“I know.”
Her eyes are on his skin, at the harsh red marks that threaten to bleed, at the blood tainting the glass beneath his feet. She sighs, walks up to him, and wraps her tiny arms around his torso.
The rain still hurts. The glass still eats at the bottom of his feet.
But he has a bit more strength now, so he leans and reaches over to wrap his arms around her shoulders.
If he thought more about it, he’d consider his actions to be almost derogatory. Here he was, shielding a god, an Archon that wielded a power he could only imagine. In her wake, he is nothing, simply another being living in this world, living under the same sky, with very little to absolutely zero importance. It's his place in this world.
But Alhaitham’s kind, and he doesn’t know that he is, so he winces when the raindrops hit the back of his neck as he shields her from the falling stars. He watches as the heavens break, as the world caves in on itself for a reason he doesn’t know, and he wonders why his universe is falling apart.
“Why did you hug me?” He asks.
For a long time, Nahida doesn’t answer. She merely hides her face away, holds him as the rain tears away at both their skins, and she only hugs him tighter.
“You can’t fix this,” he says quietly. “This is the world I’m used to. I built this world. It’s mine.”
“It’s killing you,” she whispers. “You shouldn’t get used to it.”
“It’s been so good to me,” he says, and looks around at the raining world. The rain is falling heavier now. The water level is rising again. It’s coming up to his ankles. “I have relied on it all these years. It’s a way for me to save myself.”
“Save yourself? From what?”
“From me.”
The rain pelts them with a merciless scream. The water is rising, rising, and his shoulders are threatening to bleed.
“That’s a lie,” Nahida chokes, and Alhaitham realises through the tremors in her voice and the shaking of her shoulders that she’s crying. “You’re lying. You keep lying. You keep letting yourself get hurt.”
The water underneath their feet is a murky red.
“Nothing can satisfy you.”
The ends of Nahida hair are brown where it mixes with the rainwater.
“Nothing… nothing can heal the emptiness in your heart,” Nahida continues.
She’s up to her neck in water, soaked red with blood.
“Nothing can offer you consolation. Nothing can help you. You are refusing to let yourself live because… because you think you are too late in every cycle, that you are too late in this cycle as well.”
The water snakes around his body, around Nahida’s, and wrenches the both of them under.
He blinks. Alhaitham wakes up.
The first thing he hears is chaos. He startles awake, realised distantly that he had fallen asleep in the lab, and he wakes to a world of chaos.
“This way! Over here!” Tighnari is shouting, and soon the faint rumble of a trolley accompanies the cadence of his voice. Someone else is yelling - a lab technician, Alhaitham recognises - and the sound of the trolley’s wheels gets steadily louder.
“Be careful!” Cyno’s voice rises as well. His voice booms above all of the others, a knife cutting through the chaos of the moment as the wheels make it right outside the lab’s door.
“What’s happening?” Collei asks, and Alhaitham looks down to see her shifting to sit up. He pulls the pillow out from its spot and adjusts it behind her back.
“I don’t know,” Alhaitham mutters, glancing away to the door, where someone is fiddling with the lock.
The events of the next ten seconds pass by so quickly Alhaitham doesn’t register them properly until he is a mess, after he’s standing with his knees trembling, after his heart has already found a permanent spot in his throat, after he’s staggering, his hands on the wall behind him as he struggles to keep himself upright.
First, the trolley rolls in and bumps against the corner of the wall. Someone yelps in pain.
Then, the bed comes into view, and on top are bloodied sheets and stained towels. A body is hunched under the covers.
Finally, the bed stops by an empty space underneath the glass windows of the lab. The late afternoon sunlight is streaming in, lighting up the air and casting a soft glow in the open space, golden beams upon starched white and grey. The body in the bed shifts, the blankets and towels falling off as he moves, and the patient struggles upright before releasing a strangled cry.
Immediately doctors and lab assistants are at his side, hooking up machines and IV drips to his body. White and red are everywhere, they’re all that he can see no matter where he looks. The commotion is too much, there’s so much noise, and Alhaitham’s still standing, still trembling from every crevice of his body, feeling only half alive, when their eyes meet across the many bodies surrounding the bed.
The world clouds behind a horrible milky blur as hot tears prickle at his eyes. Alhaitham’s gaze is scanning everywhere, at the bloodied bandages and sheets on his bed, at the giant patches of black on his body, the dark rings under his eyes, on-
Teal meets bright crimson from across the room as the only man that Alhaitham has ever loved whispers, “Alhaitham?”
Is this you?
“Kaveh?” Alhaitham chokes out, and the world crashes and burns.
When he comes back, Kaveh is a changed man. At first, Alhaitham could not place it. Later, he learns.
“Alhaitham!” Kaveh says before he laughs, a soft tinkle that reminds Alhaitham of better times, of sunlit coffee shops and flower arrangements and latte art. “What are you doing here?”
“I’m a researcher,” Alhaitham speaks through the lump in his throat. He doesn’t even know how he finds his voice, doesn’t even know how he manages to get words into the air when everything feels so impossible to manifest and touch. His head is ringing, pictures of red and white and blood and bandages flashing through his mind, and
It has never been this bad this early on.
“Oh? I didn’t know that my favourite barista was a smartass, but I guess it makes sense,” Kaveh jokes, even as he winces when a lab assistant peels off his bloodied bandages. The pained expression immediately disappears as he leans in Alhaitham’s direction, eyes shining as he takes him in. “I haven’t seen you in so long. You’re still as handsome as ever. I’ve missed you.”
He’s only twenty-four.
“You’re awfully confident for someone in your state,” Alhaitham’s voice is flat.
Kaveh’s smile hides nothing and everything all at once. “‘Someone in my state’? What do you mean?”
Alhaitham’s gaze flicks down to the horrible black scales on his forearms and shins, patches of skin that definitely hurt, no matter how wide Kaveh’s smile is, before looking back up. The assistants have finished dressing his wounds, and the bedside is empty now. Kaveh meets his gaze steadily. He doesn’t flinch.
“You have Eleazar,” Alhaitham says, as if he’s talking about the weather, the colour of the wallpaper, the date on the calendar.
“Yes, I suppose I do,” Kaveh replies, as if he’s talking about how he likes the rain, how he likes pale grey walls, it’s November and it’ll be winter soon.
“Why didn’t you tell me?”
“There wasn’t a need to,” Kaveh shrugs as he glances down at his forearms, where his bandages have been replaced. “I wasn’t going to work after the summer was over, anyway.”
“You made me worried,” Alhaitham says stiffly. “I didn’t know where you had gone.”
“Somewhere. Elsewhere. A little bit far, sort of off the map,” Kaveh hums, before snapping his gaze away and turning to Tighnari and Cyno, who were still standing in the room and have watched the whole exchange between them with thinly-veiled amusement. “Thank you, Tighnari. I owe my whole life to you.”
“Don’t need to be dramatic,” Tighnari mutters, before sighing softly. He gestures to Cyno, who has placed Collei in a wheelchair, and the three of them head for the door. “Watch the bandages, Kaveh. Be careful not to have the wounds reopen.”
“Of course!” Kaveh beams, and waits until Tightnari, Cyno, Collei, and the rest of the assistants leave. The room plunges into silence, the two of them waiting for the other to speak first because they don’t know what to say.
Alhaitham keeps his eyes fixed on Kaveh, at the way he looks now, and he wants to reach over and wash him clean with rainwater. Words are hard, he decides, words are hard to say, especially with the way the other looks, as if the world has thrown itself at Kaveh completely and mercilessly with no intention of caring for him.
Kaveh meets his gaze confidently. “What is it?”
“...how are your arms?” Alhaitham gestures to the freshly wrapped bandages.
“Oh, these things?” Kaveh turns and holds an arm over his head. He winces, but doesn’t put it down. “They’ll heal.”
“Are you sure?” The scales were almost up to your elbows.
“Of course.” They’re not going to heal.
“Didn’t you get treatment these past few years? Did it help you in any way?”
Kaveh hums, running a finger up and down the bandages on his arms. His lips quirk up slightly as he shakes his head.
“They helped somewhat,” he says calmly, still rubbing at his bandages absentmindedly. “At least I suppressed it for a while. It’s gotten a bit worse now, so that’s why I decided to come back. I figured it was pointless for someone like me to keep receiving treatment.”
It’s enough. It’s really enough , Alhaitham thinks, enough for me to know that he’s here, even if he's dying.
“Don’t look so grave,” Kaveh’s voice cuts through his thoughts, and when Alhaitham looks at him again he’s smiling brightly. He is still under the sun, the sunlight turning his beautiful hair golden, and he is aglow, like an angel, like something precious that he cannot touch. Kaveh beckons him over with his hand, and Alhaitham listens.
He sits down on the bed next to him, feeling it sag under his weight, then feels gentle hands on his shoulders. Kaveh pulls him back until the side of Alhaitham’s hip bumps against Kaveh’s thigh, and the subtle contact of their bodies leaves the entire side of Alhaitham’s body burning. They’re sitting close, a little too close for what they are now after they’ve lost touch for five years, but Kaveh doesn’t seem to mind.
Alhaitham stays still.
“Has the shop been okay?” Kaveh asks. His fingers start massaging circles and shapes into Alhaitham’s shoulders, and Alhaitham tips his head back as he caves into the motions.
“It has been alright,” he answers. “It’s still as it was. Are you allowed to go outside? You should visit me again.”
“That’ll be nice,” Kaveh muses, then leans forward and taps his forehead on the back of Alhaitham’s neck. Alhaitham freezes, feels the warm and short puffs of Kaveh’s breath on his skin, feels the patch of skin where they meet flare up, and feels every cell in his body tremble as he aches for Kaveh’s touch, as his body lights itself up with the flames of long-suppressed desire.
“Kaveh,” Alhaitham warns, but he doesn’t move away, and neither does Kaveh.
“Let me have this,” Kaveh says softly. His fingers press into Alhaitham’s shoulders, moving down to his collarbones before they move back up. Alhaitham’s body feels blessed, every move Kaveh makes on him feeling like worship and devotion, and he swallows the emotion in his throat and buries it deep, deep down. “You’ve worked hard. You always do. Let me have this.”
Alhaitham exhales.
“Did you wait for me? Or did you find someone new,” Kaveh mutters, voice muffled by the back of Alhaitham’s sweater, “find someone who you could be happy with? Forever? Who won’t let you down by bringing in girls all the time, bringing in people to please?”
“Are you still caught up on that?” Alhaitham faces forward, choosing not to turn around in fear of what he will feel if he sees the expression on Kaveh’s face. He’s scared. Perhaps he is. He can admit it. He lets the sunlight shine into his eyes, lets it blind him as he hums and sears this moment into memory. “You know I never held that against you.”
“You’ve never?” Kaveh's breath comes out shaky as he laughs. “That’s good to hear.”
“And…” Alhaitham pauses, before reaching up with one hand to grasp Kaveh’s forearm over the bandages. The heat of his body seeps into Alhaitham’s palm, and Alhaitham loosens his grip on him in fear that he may be hurting him. “I don’t have anyone else.”
Kaveh’s voice is low in his stomach. “How can that be? Did you wait for me?”
“What, would you hate me if I told you that I did?”
Kaveh’s quiet for a while, and Alhaitham is about to apologise, thinking that maybe he’s said something wrong, maybe he shouldn’t have said all that, when Kaveh finally whispers breathlessly, “You don’t know how foolish I am. You don’t know how infuriatingly foolish I feel. If you did, you wouldn’t want to be here with me.”
“Try me.”
“I wanted to tell you that I loved you that evening in the coffee shop before I left,” Kaveh admits. He laughs at himself after the words are out, as if even he couldn’t believe the type of person he is. “It was on the tip of my tongue. I think I would’ve said it, if I’d let my demons win. Before I knew it, I’d already loved you for so long.”
He laughs again and clutches Alhaitham’s shoulders tighter. Alhaitham tips his head back further before it rests on Kaveh’s own, and they stay unmoving like this. They hold each other, and they don’t say anything.
There is so much he doesn’t know, Alhaitham thinks. He doesn’t know how much I love him. He doesn’t know that he leaves me breathless, that he leaves me with flashbacks and flashbacks of every life we’ve had in the past and how I have loved him and will love him through all of them, through all of the ends of our worlds.
Kaveh is kept in recovery for a few days. During these days, Alhaitham doesn’t pay him any visits.
It’s not under anyone’s request. It’s not that Kaveh, nor Tighnari, nor anyone didn’t want it. For a cruel reason that only he can understand, the intimacy they displayed during their first meeting after so many years apart scared Alhaitham, and he decides that the best way to distance himself from that is to simply not see Kaveh at all.
He’s not scared of Kaveh. The person he’s scared of is himself.
He spends a week away, busying himself in the café and shoving away the urge to visit the lab. He keeps himself on a tight schedule, filling his day with tasks and endless chores, cleaning and re-cleaning, bombarding himself with ambitious projects just so he won’t have to think about the bed in the lab. He reads and reads, spends hours typing away at drafts and proposals to send to Tighnari, and he doesn’t rest. A part of him doesn’t feel alive at all.
He is shaken out of this delusion one day when, in the middle of wiping down the sides of the coffee machine, he sees someone sitting a few seats away.
His hand freezes because she’s never visited me like this , and he picks himself up and clears his throat to get her attention.
Bright green eyes meet his own from across the coffee shop. Nahida smiles and says, “You’ve been working hard, Alhaitham.”
“Lesser Lord Kusanali. Why are you here?”
“Straight to the point as always. No time for idle chit-chat?”
“Pointless.” He frowns, then says, “Sorry. I didn’t mean for that to sound cruel.”
“I’m already used to it,” she laughs, then hops down from her chair. She walks over to the counter, where she peers at the coffee machine Alhaitham’s polishing. “You did a good job with these.”
“I’d assume so. I spent far too long-”
“Not going to visit Kaveh?”
He stills, eyes staring pointlessly at the black machine, then clicks his tongue. “So you know.”
“Of course. I visited him when you were away.”
“How was he?”
“Much better. He can move around now, but his arms will take a bit of time to heal properly. I’d nullified the pain before I left, but it’s not permanent.”
“What even happened to them?”
“Why don’t you ask him yourself?”
He doesn’t say anything.
“Why do you feel guilty, Alhaitham?”
“What do you mean, Lesser Lord Kusanali?”
“Your heart,” she says, then reaches out to place a gentle hand on his chest. It’s warm, it burns, and he almost caves into it before he catches himself. He clicks his tongue again.
“Alhaitham.”
“Yes, Lesser Lord Kusanali?”
“Why do you let yourself suffer?”
His heart hurts. “I don’t let myself suffer. I’ve never-”
“If it hurts to watch him live, why don’t you stop?”
“I can’t.” His hands are shaking where he’s still holding the towel. “I can’t stop. I can’t stop until I find a cure. You must not understand. I can’t.”
“The cure’s not for you to find.”
“That’s easy for you to say. You’ve never been through what I have.”
It’s out before he can control it, and he freezes in shock at the sheer audacity of his own words. How could you be so rude? Immediately he jerks away from her touch and gets on his knees, dropping his head to the ground as he trembles. The cold floor burns through his skin and he blabbers, he doesn’t know what he’s saying, and he’s repeating I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to, I’m sorry-
“Alhaitham, get up.”
He scrambles up immediately, braces himself for harsh words and some divine punishment, something he deserves after being so cold to his Archon all these years-
And, yet, it doesn’t come. He looks at her, and her eyes are sad.
She reaches out, and she holds his hand between hers. “I know, I know,” she says softly. “You can trust me that I’ll know. Stop holding on and hurting yourself. Let yourself live.”
“I can’t. You know… that it is impossible for me to live that way.”
“Live in what way?”
“So carelessly. Selfishly. Especially when he’s suffering in all these lives, and I have been unable and unable to bring him any semblance of safety and relief. How can I-?”
“Isn’t that the point of living?”
“What?”
“To live is to be selfish. How can someone live while not being selfish?” Her words are cold, and yet she’s smiling, she looks at him with the warmest gaze he has ever seen, and he wants to crumple and fall apart because she’ll be here to pick him up, because he won’t have to bear everything on his own if only he lets himself listen to her properly. “You can be selfish, you know. You can do what you want. He won’t hate you.”
“He will hate me. He already hates me. It will be foolish to believe otherwise. In all his lives, I couldn’t save him.”
“Has it ever occurred to you that that may not be what he wants?”
“What?”
“Alhaitham,” she whispers. “In all of your lives together, have you ever asked him what he wanted before you scampered off to look for cures and medicine? To look for magic and spells and potions that never worked? Have you ever sat down in front of Kaveh, held his hands, and asked him what he wanted before he died?”
Something burns at the back of Alhaitham’s throat, threatens to choke him and kill him. His hand goes slack in her hold.
“Have you ever asked?”
“...no. No, I haven’t.”
“Then what should you do now?”
He doesn’t reply. He grabs his bag, locks the door behind him, and runs.
When he arrives, Kaveh’s not in the lab. It’s empty, save for Collei and a few assistants, and she looks up in surprise as she takes in his dishevelled appearance.
“Alhaitham!” She greets him, smiling. You’re smiling again. “What brings you here?”
“Kaveh. Where did he go?”
“Mister Kaveh? He was on the roof last time I-”
“Thank you,” Alhaitham interrupts before turning on his feet and running to the staircase.
He shoves the door to the roof open, heaving gasps of both exhilaration, fear, and anxiety, and drags his wild, wild gaze across the wide space, searching and searching and-
Kaveh’s standing in the middle of the rooftop next to laundry, hauling his heavy blanket onto one of the many drying lines. The blankets and coats and hospital gowns flutter around him like clouds, covering and concealing him in passing images as he frowns, adjusting the blanket with the clamps. White is everywhere, on his clothing, on the laundry, the floor, the clouds in the sky, the highlight of the sun in his hair, the bandages on his arms, and he is set against the blue sky, so blue that Kaveh burns, a beautiful, beautiful mirage of someone who seems to be only barely there. And maybe, in one sense or another, that’s truly all he is, a tiny brushstroke against the wide backdrop of the painting of reality, and if Alhaitham had come just a minute too late, maybe he wouldn’t even be here anymore. Alhaitham sees him like he sees a modernist work of art, capturing the flicker of a moment, and an overwhelming amount of desire overtakes him like a horrible, carnal tidal wave.
He’s running towards him before Kaveh even comprehends he’s there. Each footstep leaves his body in an aching echo and Kaveh seems to be so far away, he seems to be an illusion, he seems-
The other notices him when he’s only a few steps away, face breaking into a surprised smile as he starts, “Alhaitham-?”
Alhaitham grabs him with a force he didn’t even know he had and all but squeezes him to his chest, dropping his forehead heavily on Kaveh’s shoulder. He presses them together, feels every single inch of Kaveh’s body underneath his, feels the straggly fabric of the cloth of his bandages against his legs. He inhales deeply, smells clean laundry and antiseptic and medicine and the iron smell of the lab, and he locks his arms tightly around Kaveh’s waist. Kaveh’s heartbeat drums loudly under his cheek as the other, breath hitching in surprise, hesitantly wraps his arms around the back of Alhaitham’s shoulders. He shuts his eyes, and doesn’t move.
Eventually, he feels Kaveh’s hand move as Kaveh strokes his shoulder gently. The other’s voice is close to his ear as he asks, “What happened, Alhaitham?”
Alhaitham doesn’t respond.
“What happened?”
“Give me… give me this moment. Please.”
“...alright.”
And so Kaveh doesn’t say anymore. He holds Alhaitham just as tightly, moving to bury his face in Alhaitham’s hair, and his breath tickles Alhaitham’s ear and the back of his neck but he doesn’t care, he doesn't’ care about any of this anymore, and he holds Kaveh against the beautiful blue sky, hands holding purity, hands holding someone he should’ve held all this time.
“I thought you were dead, Alhaitham. You didn't come visit me at all.”
“No, I’m not quite dead.”
“You look worse for wear.”
“I’ve been… on the junction between life and death. I didn’t know which was worse, to be dead or to be barely alive. I know now.”
“And what’s your answer?”
“Barely alive. Hope still comes out of the strangest of places, so long as you’re still breathing.”
“That doesn’t sound like you.”
“It doesn’t, does it?”
Kaveh laughs, and he holds the side of Alhaitham’s cheek against his own. The sunlight burns against their faces, warms them as they hold each other against waving bedsheets and changing air. “I’m just glad you’re here.”
The sun is setting, letting in long sunbeams that light up the dust in the air, suspended in their descent. The world is quiet the hour before the evening folds upon them, and the lab is empty now. Collei’s at another ward with Cyno and Tighnari, and the rest of the lab attendants have gone home. It’s just the two of them, side by side on Kaveh’s bed in the quiet lab, Alhaitham reading a thick medical report as Kaveh slumbers by his side, his head leaning against his lap, his arm draped across his thighs. Alhaitham peeks down from the report, notices the blanket sliding off Kaveh’s body, and brings it back up around his shoulders.
It wakes him, and Kaveh rubs his eyes sleepily as he mutters, “What time is it?”
Alhaitham glances at the clock on the wall. “A little past five.”
“I slept for so long,” Kaveh muses, but he makes no effort to get up. He turns his head up and smiles lazily, before reaching out and tapping the papers Alhaitham holds. “What’s this?”
Alhaitham folds the papers in half, hesitates, then hands it to him. “A report on possible cures of Eleazar that have been discovered just this year.”
Something flashes through Kaveh’s eyes but it’s gone in a split second, so fast that Alhaitham’s not even sure if he saw it correctly, and the other merely opens the papers up and scans its contents himself. “Is that so? What did they find?”
“Nothing. The experiments were unsuccessful.”
“How’s Tighnari doing with his own experiment?”
Alhaitham looks away. “Unsuccessful.”
“If that’s how it is…” Kaveh muses to himself before turning on his back to toss the papers onto the table beside the bed. He turns back around, smiles at Alhaitham again, and says, “Then let’s not worry about it.”
Alhaitham stares at him. “What?”
“Let’s not worry about it,” Kaveh repeats. “If it’s something we can’t change, then why should we waste the precious time we have left in our lives to worry about it? It’s not our job to fix it. Let’s not worry about it.”
Alhaitham wants to believe him. Alhaitham wants to be happy.
His eyes are so bright, so unusually red, lit up to life under the low sunlight as he continues, stretching his arms up in a big yawn, “I’m so tired. Can you read to me?”
Alhaitham hesitates, but Kaveh’s already pawing at one of the books on the table. He picks up a thin volume and presses it into Alhaitham’s hand gently. “This one, please.”
“I never said yes,” Alhaitham mutters as he glances at the cover. Poetry of the Twentieth Century Western World.
“But you’ll do it anyway,” Kaveh’s grin seeps into his voice as he gets comfortable again. “Thank you.”
His arm rests draped over Alhaitham’s thigh, and his face finds its place by Alhaitham’s hip. Kaveh inhales deeply, exhales into the fabric of Alhaitham’s pants, and smiles into the warmth between them.
And just like all those years ago, just like all those lifetimes ago, Alhaitham obediently opens up a book of Kaveh’s preference and begins to read.
“Let us go then, you and I,
When the evening is spread out against the sky
Like a patient etherized upon a table;
Let us go, through certain half-deserted streets,
The muttering retreats
Of restless nights in one-night cheap hotels
And sawdust restaurants with oyster-shells:
Streets that follow like a tedious argument
Of insidious intent
To lead you to an overwhelming question ...
Oh, do not ask, “What is it?”
Let us go and make our visit.”
It’s a Sunday afternoon and they’re at the park a few blocks away, walking around aimlessly as Kaveh holds his camera between his hands. Alhaitham’s carrying a bag on his shoulder, packed with sandwiches and fruit teas and bottles and bottles of medicine and bandages, and he walks a few steps behind Kaveh as the other stops by the fountain, bending down on his knees to aim his camera at a shot of a bird behind the curtain of water. He holds his breath as Kaveh’s finger hovers over the shutter, pretends not to notice when his hands tremble furiously, nor when he takes a couple seconds longer than he usually does to grab the picture. He gets it anyway before the bird flies away, and Kaveh makes it back to him, tilting the screen of the camera towards him in badly concealed pride.
“It’s adorable, isn’t it?” Kaveh all but preens, grinning at the photo. “Isn’t this shot nice?”
“Are you asking to be praised?” Alhaitham says flatly, leaning closer to get a better look at the photo. It is a nice shot.
“Well, if you could spare me some, I wouldn’t mind,” Kaveh mutters, but he doesn’t pull the camera away. He stands there, waiting, before Alhaitham finally sighs and caves in.
“It’s a nice shot. I like how you framed the bird in the center with the waterfall by the sides,” Alhaitham drawls monotonously.
And yet Kaveh breaks into a smile anyway. “It is, isn’t it?”
He skips away, and Alhaitham follows. They find a patch of grass on a low hill, situated between a plethora of other families enjoying a Sunday picnic, and Kaveh falls on his back as he says, “I love this weather.”
He’s spread out on the ground, pale arms sinking into the deep greens and whites of the grass. It tangled with the locks of his hair, a mess barely constrained by red hair clips that shine starkingly, like flowers, through the cool tufts beneath them. Kaveh shuts his eyes, pulls himself into a world of his own, and Alhaitham stares at him in this way, thin arms and an entanglement of white bandages and sun-doused blonde hair.
He sees the frizz in those locks and sighs. “Even if it messes with your pristine appearance?”
Kaveh blinks up at him. “Why would that matter?”
And all of a sudden, Alhaitham doesn’t know what to say. It is pathetic how easily he is rendered wordless. The words fail in his mouth, all of his nagging caving in on itself as he remembers right, his appearance is not what he cares about in this life.
Instead, the Kaveh in front of him is pulling out an umbrella from his bag. Confused, Alhaitham glances upwards at the sky for signs of heavy clouds, but before he can poise the question Kaveh explains, “It’s so the other people don’t need to see.”
See what?
Kaveh shuffles so that he’s underneath the umbrella now, face and upper body concealed by the shade, before, to Alhaitham’s shock, unwrapping the bandages on his forearms, peeling the stained white fabric back as he checks the conditions of his skin. The white rope falls back in spirals, each pale unwinding revealing gnarly black skin, scabbed and uneven where the scales have been ripped off, all uneven edges and still-healing wounds.
The breath is snatched out of Alhaitham’s body as his eyes zero in on Kaveh’s arms, a cruel matted carpet of wounds, a mosaic of pain, a patchwork art piece of inflicted violence from god-knows-what, and he cannot stop his fingers from trembling when he reaches out to touch the falling bandages and whisper, “What happened to you?”
Kaveh doesn’t look up, doesn’t say anything as he continues to peel back the bandages.
“Who did this?” Alhaitham demands. His head is pulsing with a cruel, cruel headache, a horrible drumbeat that ricochets through his skull and burns the backs of his eyes. He is breathing with a horrible, horrible anger, a seething rage so violent he didn’t even know he could wage it to begin with. Every inch of his skin burns with a hatred so immense it threatens to consume him completely, and underneath all of that rage and thirst for violence is a quiet and cold river of guilt, a cleansing away that chants you, you, Alhaitham, it is you who let it get to this point, you for letting it ends up like this.
And all this time Kaveh remains silent, only unraveling his bandages slowly as he keeps his eyes on his skin. Soon the fabric falls to a heap on the grass next to him, exposing black and red scabbed arms to the beautiful warm light of the sky. Kaveh brings his arms away from his body, takes a good look at himself under the sun, and exhales.
Alhaitham pulls the antiseptic and medical kit from Kaveh’s bag, sanitising the burning skin and pretending not to hear when Kaveh’s breaths hitch in pain. He cleans him thoroughly and patiently, even when his body threatens to throw everything around them to ruin in a horrid attempt at atonement, as a cruel way of telling Kaveh that I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I don’t know what happened but I am angry, I am so angry for you and I am so sad.
“Myself,” Kaveh’s voice cuts through the delusion.
“What?”
“Myself,” Kaveh repeats, and the smile on his face seizes Alhaitham’s chest in fear and brings horrible, horrible tears to his eyes. “The one who did this to me was myself.”
“The glass is cracking.”
Alhaitham looks at the young girl standing in the middle of the glass world. Her arms stretch out before her and she’s touching something, but there is nothing where her hands are. Alhaitham doesn’t know what she is doing.
“There are cracks everywhere,” Nahida continues. Her eyes are shut as her arms start moving, touching things in the air that aren’t really there. She looks like a ghost, a creature that’s grabbing at air and leaving the floating world in a horrible suspense. “They are not new cracks. They’ve been here for tens and hundreds of years, enough for the rain to erode them into round edges. There are so many of them.”
“Show me the cracks,” Alhaitham demands.
She opens her eyes and tilts her head upwards. Alhaitham follows her gaze, and feels doom enshroud his heart in a horrible, horrible black blanket as he sees the sunless sky.
It’s crumbling. Jagged black lines run through the pristine blue atmosphere, spider webs interrupting the beautiful solace that had once upheld this place. The sky is cracking, splintering, and all he can do is stand at the murky bottom, looking up at something he can’t fix.
“You need to let go,” Nahida says quietly. Another long crack appears, and splintering glass falls on them and cuts her in the arm. Red interrupts the blackened blue, and suddenly everything is too much, all of these colours are too much. “It’s hurting you, Alhaitham, and it’s hurting me, too. It’s going to hurt everyone.”
The glass is splintering. Everything is splintering. When Alhaitham turns to Nahida, he’s met with empty air where she’s gone, and the sky falls on him like a hundred, beautiful little stars.
“Why?”
“I was so sick of it. I wasn’t getting better.”
“And so you decided that… that ripping the scales off of yourself was the best way to go about it?”
“What else could I have done? I wasn’t getting better, no matter how much medicine was being shoved down my throat. It hurt so bad , and I really didn’t want to see them anymkre. They were a horrible reminder- ah, but you won’t understand. You’re healthy.”
“…of course I wouldn’t understand. My knowledge is only finite. I’m not a god.”
“You’re right,” Kaveh agrees, tying the last bandage around his ankles before brushing his hands off. He smiles, then says, “So just pretend I’m healthy, alright? Let’s enjoy these last few months together.”
“…months?”
“I’m dying, Alhaitham.” Kaveh’s eyes are clear, pools of emotion wholly uncovered, and in their depths Alhaitham sees years and years worth of fatigue, anger, and hopelessness.
And Alhaitham thinks that Kaveh is so ugly like this, so hideous as he stands before him, so pathetic because he’s just giving up-
But what else can he do?
What else can he do?
And here comes the guilt, the overwhelming tide, the unforgiving pressure. Here it comes, where it clouds his heart and brings him under, where the sky is lying euthanised against the spilling afternoon and the world is suspended in a horrible illness, and the glass is splintering.
“Why?” Alhaitham whispers, choking around the broken edges of his throat. “Why? How? We just… we just met again.”
“You talk as if you get to decide,” Kaveh says, and his eyes are so, so sad. “You don’t get to. Don’t be so proud.”
“Isn’t this all futile?” Alhaitham interrupts, and his hands clench on the grass underneath him. His fingertips pull up tufts of grass, blades that break easily from their short lives on the ground and end up a scattered mess by his feet. “All this, whatever the hell we are doing. Isn’t this all for naught, if it all means that you’ll die and forget it all?”
He doesn’t even know what he’s saying. The person speaking is a perverse part of himself that has questioned the repetition of lifetimes, the curse of dying and being brought back and the curse of being eternally alive, and he has hated it and hated it for so long. His hands continue to tear at the ground, scattering green everywhere before he feels cool and light fingers on his wrists, halting his movement.
“Stop that,” Kaveh whispers. “The poor grass doesn’t deserve to bear your wrath.”
Alhaitham’s mouth feels horribly dry.
“And…” Kaveh continues. He looks at the grass by their feet and slowly starts sweeping the uprooted tufts into a pile. “It’s not futile. Not at all.”
“How is it not? How-”
“Do you know what it means to live, Alhaitham?”
Alhaitham clicks his tongue. “You’re asking me? Of course. Of course I know. That’s why-”
“That’s why this isn’t futile,” Kaveh interrupts, and he looks up from where he’s still holding on to the blades of grass. “This conversation we are having. No one except the two of us will know that we have had it. When we die, it dies with us. But right now I am angry and hurt, and yet I don’t let that consume me because I I love you despite it all. I’m angry that you can think so little of the weak, frail lives that we all embody, but they’re the only chances we’ve been given, and I’m not going to start something because I know you’re frustrated. If I can still love you this much, even when I know that it may be worth nothing to the generations after us ten, twenty years from now, how can you still say it is futile?”
You love me? In this life, too?
Alhaitham shuts his mouth. He looks at the wild passion on Kaveh’s face, at the way he’s gripping the blades of grass tightly, and he sighs.
“You’re right,” he says. He doesn’t fight, because he knows he’s been cruel. “Our lives are so meaningless. Simply existing… is exhausting.”
“Isn’t it?” Kaveh agrees, and he sets the grass down. “I’m so tired of it.”
Alhaitham sighs again, before leaning back to lie horizontally on the grass. Above them, the sun burns into his eyes, sears beams of white behind his irises and here he remembers the glass world, remembers the splinters, and he reaches out across the grass.
His fingers enclose around Kaveh’s arm, feeling cloth under his touch, and he hears the other’s breath hitch as his fingers move down to join Kaveh’s own. Alhaitham slots their hands together, waits quietly for any signs of rejection. He doesn’t get any.
Instead, Kaveh locks their grips together, and he laughs shakily.
“I didn’t know how you felt about me,” Kaveh mutters. “You always looked as if I were a nuisance to you.”
“You are,” Alhaitham says bluntly.
He feels Kaveh’s scowl along the side of his face. “You get what I mean.”
Alhaitham doesn’t respond, only continues to look up, up, up at where the sky is endless before his eyes and where the sun shines brightly, where it will shine forever until the end of the world.
And now he wonders what his world is. He’s been alive for so long, the earth only an endless prison for him, as he lives his life trapped in a self-imposed cycle. Yes, he can break free anytime, consider throwing himself off a building if it means he’ll be saved from it.
But that is purely selfish. He thinks of Kaveh, reincarnating back and back into the world, only to meet the end every single time with black scales like pasted plaster on his entire body, a body that will not obey the commands he gives it.
Hundreds of lifetimes ago he had told himself that Kaveh’s life is entirely separate from his own. Why should he stay? Why should he be concerned about a disease with no cure?
But then he sees Kaveh from their first life, flashbacks of a genius architect lying on the couch of their living room, hands landlocked to his sides as he laughs shakily and says, “The world feels like glass and I feel like I’m drowning, I feel like I’m barely alive.”
And then he can’t move on. And then he drowns as well, and then the world around him falls apart and so what, then? So what can I still do? And he remains stuck, reified in Kaveh’s sickness and his guilt, ghosts of the past that he can’t forget.
“What are you thinking about?”
Alhaitham tilts his head to look at the other, where Kaveh’s already waiting for him.
And he is so beautiful this way. He has always been so beautiful, the way the light catches his hair and the corners of the smile and makes him greater than the sky underneath his hands, until Alhaitham feels light, weightless, as if he can get lost in the beauty of that gaze that has warmed the darkest corners of his heart in all of their lives. He is so beautiful, and I am so sorry.
Alhaitham sighs, a heavy exhale that has held all the air in his lungs, before saying, “Nothing.”
Kaveh’s skeptical. Alhaitham knows he is, because Kaveh’s eyes are squinting just slightly. “Tell me.”
“You always want to know everything. You don’t need to.”
“I do want to know everything. What about it?” Kaveh shoots back, expression ablaze with sudden interest. “What are you hiding?”
Alhaitham shuts his eyes. “You don’t need to know. Just keep talking. Talk about nothing.”
“That’s so like you,” Kaveh mutters, and he reaches out a hand to prod Alhaitham’s cheek.
“You have a particular voice that’s not irritating,” Alhaitham explains. “I would rather listen to it. It helps me zone out faster.”
“Is the purpose of my presence only for you to zone out?” Kaveh whines, but Alhaitham hears him shuffle to lie down next to him more comfortably anyway. They lie shoulder-to-shoulder underneath the shade of the umbrella, and Kaveh says, “Alright, then. I’ll talk, if that’s what you want. What would you like to hear?”
“Anything,” Alhaitham breathes in deeply, smells grass and antiseptic and ointment and the smell of the sunlit sky. “I don’t particularly mind.”
“...alright,” Kaveh responds, and he hums. “Have you ever thought about what it means to live?”
“Live?”
“Yes, live. The aspect of life, I believe, revolves in three relations. The first is how your life affects yourself. The second is how your life affects those around you on the immediate scale. These are your friends, family, peers. Finally, the third is how your life affects the world on the global scale.”
“The world?”
“We make up the world. Our lives make up the world. The world is not the world without us. It is through our existence that the world becomes a world, becomes a place one can even fathom as being alive. Perhaps that’s why I think all of our lives are equally important, one just as important as the other. Together, we form the world as it is. We bring life to an otherwise lifeless object. Isn’t that beautiful?”
“The world is beautiful… just because we are alive?”
“Precisely. It is through the short, finite years of my life and the short, finite years of your life, the same short, finite years of Tighnari’s and Collei’s and Cyno’s lives that we make the world a place of purpose, a place of importance. It’s because you and I are here that this world is important. We are here. We are not anywhere else.”
He thinks about the glass world, thinks about splintering skies and murky bottoms and monsoon rains and a world where only he exists.
“And this is how we ‘world’ the world,” Kaveh says, and if a voice could glow with the sheer passion and happiness of its speaker then Kaveh’s does just that. It is alive, it is full, and it’s beautiful. “The world is nothing but a rock, floating in this empty vacuum of a universe filled with millions and millions of other rocks. To the eyes of the outsider we are a speck of dust that will be consumed by the sun when the world comes to its end, and even if this is so we still slowly anticipate our final destruction. Maybe this is just the untouchable truth of divine law.
“And, yet, despite it all, we go on living. We anthropocene this world. We want those after us to know that we have lived. We decide that, hey, I don’t want my life to be meaningless , and so we build sculptures of famous men and infrastructures of ambition that strive to defy the laws of physics, paint pictures of our ordinary, domestic lives, and we write novels about ourselves that we hope will outlast our lifetimes. We tell the world, this is you, this is them, this is myself. I have lived here before, and I will live here forever in spirit . And now, this world is the world, because we have ‘world’ed it, and will continue to ‘world’ it for as long as we live.”
“And this world that you speak of… can it truly be as beautiful as you believe?”
“What do you mean, Alhaitham?”
Alhaitham opens his eyes, where Kaveh’s already looking at him. The other grins, a wide smile pulling his face into a beautiful expression, as he finishes, “This world already exists. It exists between you and me, and everyone else that wishes that it can exist. This is our reality.”
Nahida stands in the glass world, feet bleeding on top of the jagged ground, and she reaches out to touch the air. The wall - has there been a wall here this whole time? He didn’t even know there had been an invisible boundary this close to him in his seemingly endless world, or maybe it was simply that-
“You never checked,” Nahida explains.
“You can read my thoughts,” Alhaitham notes.
“Your thoughts are very loud,” Nahida replies. She doesn’t look at him. “They vibrate across every single glass pane that exists in this space. Even if I didn’t want to, I would still be able to hear them through the violent cries of the breaking glass.”
He looks at the place where her hand meets glass and watches as the glass suddenly splinters. He immediately recoils, throwing an arm over his face as he flinches, bracing himself for impact.
But the glass only falls directly downwards. It lands on the jagged floor, mixes into the already uneven glass, and new walls sprout up. The process is unending. The glass world is breaking and unbreaking itself, over and over.
“It never ends,” Alhaitham muses as the wall beside him shatters.
“It will end,” Nahida says firmly. “It will end the day you decide to stop fooling yourself.”
A huge chunk of the sky falls, and Alhaitham wakes before it can hit the two of them.
Tighnari’s frowning that morning when Alhaitham slides the door of the lab open, the loud bang! ricocheting as the door hits the wall. Collei’s head jerks up from where she’s reading a magazine, and she stares wide-eyed in surprise at the ridiculous outfit Alhaitham’s wearing.
“What’s with the fit?” She asks.
Alhaitham pointedly ignores his blazingly eye-catching teal button up and khaki shorts. He fiddles with the sunglasses around his neck as he asks, “Is Kaveh here?”
Collei snorts. “I see.”
“You have to… be sensitive to his condition,” Tighnari mutters as Alhaitham walks in. He glances over at Kaveh’s empty bed with a big frown, clearly disapproving of their itinerary for today. “He’s been getting worse.”
“There’s no need to worry,” Alhaitham lies. “I know. I’ll be careful.”
“I thought… we would have more time,” Tighnari admits. He reaches over and smooths out the sheets again, even though they were already perfectly pristine to begin with. He must’ve been worried, then, Alhaitham notes, to slave over these useless chores this way. “But I guess we don’t. Not in this cycle.”
“It’s never particularly been something we could control,” Alhaitham answers. His voice comes out a lot brighter, a lot stupider than he intends. “You shouldn't worry about it like this. It’s useless. It’s fundamentally unimportant to how the Eleazar gets treated in the end.”
“Can we even treat him? Can he even be cured?” Tighnari whispers. An unreadable expression settles on his face, digs into the grooves and lines around his mouth, but it’s gone before Alhaitham can properly respond. Tighnari reaches over to the bedside table and hands Alhaitham a small bag. “His medicine. Some painkillers. Make sure he takes it every four hours. Change the bandages every mealtime. The ointment is at the bottom.”
“I know,” Alhaitham takes the bag from him and places it into his own. “Make sure not to get the bandages wet, don’t ride on anything particularly exhausting and stress-inducing, don’t let him ride roller coasters with loops under any circumstance-”
“Trying to find rules to control me?”
Alhaitham turns around, meeting a bright red gaze from the doorway. Kaveh walks in, hitching his bag higher on his shoulder, and shoots Alhaitham a wave. “You’re early.”
“You would chew my ear off if I were even a second late,” Alhaitham frowns. “I’m just trying to save myself.”
“Don’t speak so nastily of me in front of Miss Collei,” Kaveh coughs. “She thinks that I’m an angel -”
“Actually, I don’t-” Collei starts.
“You’re not fooling anyone, not with that ugly fit,” Alhaitham says, gesturing to the red and white striped shirt Kaveh’s put on. “You resemble a walking circus.”
“Well, you’re not any better,” Kaveh huffs. “Who wears khakis in this weather? It’ll be winter soon.”
Alhaitham places a hand on his leg irritatingly. “You’ll be complaining about the stuffiness later after we’ve walked around, and I’ll be the one laughing because it was your decision to-”
“Don’t you have somewhere to go?” Tighnari interrupts.
Alhaitham stands up abruptly. “Goodbye.”
He walks out behind Kaveh, and has just shut the lab door behind him when Kaveh bursts out into a crazed laugh. Stunned, Alhaitham stands by the door, staring as the other heaves out cackles, reaching out to hold the wall for support. He bends over at his waist, leans the side of his body on the wall, and squats there in a daze.
“He looked so fed up with us!” Kaveh explains once he catches his breath, still clutching his stomach. The last of the laughter trickles out of him and he wipes at his eyes. “He always looks at us like that.”
“I think we singlehandedly contribute to how fast he’s ageing,” Alhaitham muses, reaching out to rub Kaveh’s back when the other starts coughing. “I feel sort of sorry for him sometimes.”
“Do you?” Kaveh stares at him accusingly. “I don’t think you do.”
Alhaitham pauses, considers it, then snorts. “No.”
“Thought so.”
The two of them are still sporting traces of their stupid smiles when they reach the carnival by the pier. It’s still the late morning, the sun high in the sky but not hot enough to burn, and the two of them take their time making their way through the attractions. Kaveh pulls on Alhaitham’s shirt, then points to a ride a few steps away.
“The pirate ship?” Alhaitham frowns.
Kaveh grins. “Are you scared of rides? Don’t tell me you’re a wuss.”
Alhaitham clicks his tongue. “You’re just out to get me.”
Much to Kaveh’s protests, Alhaitham forces them to sit at the centre of the ride. He will never admit it, even gives the excuse that he doesn’t want Kaveh to overexert himself, but in truth he’s afraid of being flung out if he sits at the ends and so he squishes himself between Kaveh and the side of the ship and pretends that there’s nothing wrong with the ride. He ignores the fact that the kids next to Kaveh look more than half their age.
Kaveh flings his arms up as the ride begins to move, and joins in the enthusiastic cheers of the kids around him as the ride tilts. The ship moves upwards dangerously, and Alhaitham’s hit with the sudden realisation that there are no seatbelts on the ride. He grips the railing tightly, so tightly his knuckles turn white, and he doesn’t make a single sound.
“You were scared, weren't you?” Kaveh asks when they’re leaving, stopping by the cabinets to grab their bags.
“Of course not,” Alhaitham says breezily.
“You didn’t say anything. You didn’t even scream.”
“Funny. With the way you were screaming, I wouldn’t even be able to hear myself if I tried.”
Kaveh guffaws, almost offended, and reaches out and slaps Alhaitham menacingly. He speeds up, putting a few steps between them, and says haughtily, “You don’t need to protect your ego this much!”
But Alhaitham doesn’t respond to the taunt. He doesn’t even think about it. Instead, his body zeroes in on the whack that Kaveh had left on the shoulder, on how the slap didn’t hurt the slightest bit even if it made a sound, already much weaker than anything Kaveh had ever done in the past.
He thinks about the sickness, and he thinks that he’s running out of time.
They ride a loopless roller coaster next, Kaveh gripping Alhaitham’s arm tightly when the cars tilt to the side on a particularly steep turn. He yelps aloud each time the ride turns sharply, while Alhaitham shuts his mouth and pretends that the ride is not bothering him. His legs are wobbly when they walk out of the cars, and he has to feign an impassive expression as he struggles to find his balance.
“If you don’t like roller coasters,” Kaveh asks when they walk out the exit for this attraction, “then why did you agree to come to the carnival today?”
“Great question,” Alhaitham muses. Even I don’t know.
Ah, but he does. Of course he does, when he’s calculating how much time the two of them really have left. Of course he does. He does it all to make Kaveh happy. That’s why he has ever done anything.
In a much quieter voice, Kaveh asks, “Are you having fun?”
Alhaitham stops, drinks in the worry in the creases of Kaveh’s expression, and memorises it all for himself. He snorts, reaching out to flick Kaveh on the forehead. “I wouldn't be here if I wasn’t.”
Kaveh whines as he reaches up to rub at the spot Alhaitham’s finger attacked, and he all but stamps his foot as he says, “You didn’t have to do that!”
Alhaitham looks at how ridiculous Kaveh looks, at how strange a twenty-five year old man looks throwing a tantrum outside a children’s ride, and he laughs before he can control it. He shakes his head, ignores just how full his heart feels, and places a hand on Kaveh’s elbow as he says, “Should we get something to eat? I’m getting hungry.”
Kaveh peers up at him through his fingers, still rubbing absentmindedly at the spot on his forehead. “Not going to apologise for that?”
Alhaitham leads them away, gripping Kaveh’s elbow firmly and pulling the other closer to himself. “Why should I?”
But, deep inside, he knows that something’s wrong. He has always known, and it is a foolish mistake on his end to ignore that feeling, because they’re just walking out of the line, takeout bags in hand, when Kaveh suddenly gasps loudly from behind him.
Alhaitham’s still putting everything into his bag when he whizzes around immediately the second he hears it, only to be greeted with the sight of Kaveh’s eyes shut tightly, his hand gripping the other’s forearm, a horrible expression of pain quickly blossoming across his face.
And his world is glass, he sees a glass world, a splintering sky-
“Agh!” Kaveh winces, dropping his bag. The button pops open at his feet, all his belongings exploding everywhere - medicines, bandages, painkillers - and hitting everyone around them, causing all the other strangers in the vicinity all turn to stare at him, hawklike expressions burning on the man behind him. Kaveh’s shoulders come up to his ear as he grips his forearm so tightly his knuckles scream with white, his cracked skin threatening to tear itself into shreds.
The jagged ground, the dying rain-
Alhaitham runs up to him immediately, shoving the remainder of their things into his bag as he reaches for Kaveh’s body. His hands close around Kaveh’s elbows as he peers into Kaveh’s eyes, stilling when he sees how tightly Kaveh’s biting at his bottom lip. You’re going to draw blood . “Kaveh, Kaveh, are you with me?”
“Al…haitham,” Kaveh exhales thinly, and his face pales. “I… it hurts so much.”
His right hand is still squeezing his forearm, the patch of skin further down from his left elbow, and Alhaitham moves his hand down to rub soft circles next to it. He grips Kaveh tightly as he smooths patterns into Kaveh’s skin, asking again and again if “Kaveh, you’re here with me, right? You’re here, you’re here, you’re here with me, aren’t you?”
He hears the whispers from the crowd around them. It is impossible not to. He hears the shocked exclamation from the man nearest to him, hears a child’s high voice as he asks, “What’s wrong with the young man over there?”, hears a mother’s frantic hushing as she scolds the child for even asking the question to begin with.
He’s not a fragile person, Alhaitham wants to shout at all of them. He’s not so fragile that he can break so easily under your cruel, pitiful words .
But Kaveh gasps as another tremor of pain shoots up his arm, and Alhaitham only bites down on his tongue as he sweeps everything into Kaveh’s bag, tugs gently at him, and leads him away.
They stop by a picnic table far away from the food court, and Kaveh all but collapses on the bench, folding his arm into himself as he dips his head down. He gasps and heaves out painful breaths, nails digging into the bandages so harshly Alhaitham fears he’ll draw blood, and he pulls Kaveh’s hand from his forearm and locks it onto his own.
“Grab me instead,” Alhaitham mutters. “I need to change your bandages.”
“I… I can’t…”
“Just do it!”
Kaveh’s hand latches onto his arm and his nails dig sharply into Alhaitham’s flesh. Alhaitham’s breath stutters with the sudden shocks of pain, and he grits his teeth as he slowly unravels the bandages on Kaveh’s arm.
He looks at the tarnished skin, and realises with heavy pangs of dread why it all hurts so much.
Scales are sprouting back where Kaveh had torn them away, patches of black that are shiny and smooth under the sunlight. There’s blood around their edges where they’ve irritated the still-healing skin on Kaveh’s arm, and the sight leaves a horrible pit in Alhaitham’s stomach as he fumbles for the antiseptic.
“Al…haitham,” Kaveh gasps, and Alhaitham knows that Kaveh sees the newly sprouted scales on his arms, knows that Kaveh knows what this means.
“Don’t stare,” Alhaitham mutters. He dresses Kaveh’s wounds, dabs the blood away, and ignores the tiny cries of pain Kaveh releases as he digs his fingers deeper into Alhaitham’s arm. The places where his nails meet skin burn with a fiery fury, the pain white-hot as it shoots up Alhaitham’s arm and shoulders. “Don’t. Don’t do anything. You’ll be okay.”
“Maybe… I shouldn’t have come out today.”
“Be quiet, Kaveh, before I shut you up myself.”
Kaveh’s head knocks against Alhaitham’s arm, the other leaning his weight against him, as he chants through heaving breaths, “I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry that it’s you who has to deal with me, I’m sorry.”
“Kaveh, look at me.”
“I’m sorry, I’m sorry.”
“Look at me!”
Kaveh obeys and looks up, face red and tears brimming in his eyes, and Alhaitham swallows the horrible pain in his chest and the searing anger in his throat as he leans down to shut away Kaveh’s horrible expression.
“I’m… I’m going to kiss you. Push me away if you don’t like it,” Alhaitham mutters. “Don’t think about… anything else.”
Kaveh’s eyes are wide, and their faces are so close that Alhaitham can see the flecks of beige and gold in their depths, colours he has never seen in this life until now. He breathes in the familiarity, accepts it when Kaveh nods slowly, and he shuts his eyes slowly. He presses his mouth gently to Kaveh’s own, tastes the iron tang of blood, and feels the sharp intake of breath Kaveh takes in surprise. Kaveh’s fingers dig so tightly into his forearm that Alhaitham knows there will be marks tomorrow, there will be dark purple crescents where his hands have been, and he doesn’t think anymore about it because it’s okay, that’s okay, it’s fine, it’s fine if it’s him-
Alhaitham pulls away, bumps their foreheads together, and whispers, “Don’t apologise anymore, okay?”
Music from the carnival’s speakers ring in the air around them. The atmosphere is alive with the screams of children, the chatter of families, and the bell sounds of different rides. Amidst the chaos, Kaveh’s eyes are still closed. He exhales softly, and nods.
Alhaitham finishes dressing the rest of the wounds, wraps a new line of bandages around his arms, and pulls away as Kaveh’s grip lightens on him. The other pulls his hands back, twisting his fingers together, as he mutters a soft “thank you”. He looks over at where Kaveh’s face is turned away, enshrouded behind his curtain of blond hair, and he reaches over to tuck the strands behind his ear.
“What are you thinking about?” Alhaitham asks.
Kaveh’s face is burning. He doesn’t say anything.
“Did I do something wrong?”
“No,” Kaveh says immediately, eyebrows bunching together. “No, Archons no , it’s not you.”
“Tell me. I can’t know what you don’t say.”
“Indeed, huh,” Kaveh mutters. He remains quiet for another minute or so before finally saying, “The world is so cruel.”
Alhaitham reaches across the picnic table and intertwines their fingers together. Kaveh’s hands close around him almost instantly. “The world is cruel?”
“It is,” Kaveh squeezes his palm tightly. “Our lives are finite. I’ve just realised how sad that is.”
“Wouldn’t that make our lives all the more important? That’s what you taught me.”
“Our lives can be important and tragic all the same. We are multidimensional. We can be the collage of many things, just like how we can know so many irrational things and understand what shouldn’t be understood.”
“And what do you think shouldn’t be understood?”
“The fact that I love you. It is a fact. It is a fact that I cannot understand.”
Alhaitham’s heart is racing just as wildly as his own thoughts.
In this lifetime too, huh?
“What don’t you understand about it?”
“How can I love you? You treat me like I’m stupid sometimes. You’re full of dry comebacks and insults. You’re stupidly honest, and you only sometimes show that you have a conscience and self awareness that your emotions aren’t the centre of the world. And me! I’m- I’m probably not going to be here a year from now, and I’m toeing the fine line between life and death every fucking day and I’m making you suffer for it, and yet, and yet, despite all this-”
Kaveh cuts himself off, gritting his teeth as he stares daggers into his bandages, and his eyes start to water again for an entirely different reason. “And yet… I love you anyway. And yet I’m here, being so horrible selfish, demanding and accepting something I shouldn’t accept because it’ll only hurt you, it’ll only-”
“Kaveh.”
“-hurt you over and over, and can I be selfish, I wonder? Can I-?”
“Kaveh.”
“-ask you to stay with me? Can I be selfish? Can I? With you?”
“I love you.”
“Can I- what?”
“I love you. I love you so much. I’ve loved you for as long as I can remember.”
And it’s true. He sits at a wooden picnic table with Kaven in the middle of a loud carnival full of saturated colours and noise and amidst all this sound, all these things, Alhaitham knows he loves him just as much as he has in their first life, maybe even more, because it is just so easy to love him.
And Kaveh’s eyes are wide, they’re so wide, and Alhaitham can see the crimson and the scarlet and the beige and the gold mixing together to create a beautiful blasphemy, a beautiful masterpiece of what it means to be human, what it means to live a finite life, what it means to have ‘world’ed the world-
“Can I be selfish?” Kaveh whispers.
Alhaitham swallows the tension in his throat. “Yes. I’ll do what I can to fulfill your every request.”
“Then… can I ask you to stay with me? Until the very end? Can I do that, even if it’s not fair to you?”
How can I say no? How can I not? When have you been fair, Kaveh, when it comes to the matters of my heart?
I have loved you in every lifetime, in all the years that I have been alive.
“Of course. You didn’t even need to ask.”
And, this time, Kaveh leans in first, and his hand comes up shakily behind Alhaitham’s ear, his palm resting against the side of Alhaitham’s neck. They breathe in together, they fall in together, and Alhaitham lets himself be consumed by this, burnt by the fire of their love for each other before it inevitably burns and destroys them whole.
He wants to say that their day at the carnival was everything he’d wanted. He wants to say it was all that he’d planned for. He wants to say that he’s been blessed with watching Kaveh flutter through the snack stands, buying hotdogs and cotton candy and feeding popcorn to Alhaitham as if they were still teenagers in love. He wants to say that he was happy holding Kaveh’s hand while they went on as many rides as they could, wants to say that the photos Kaveh took on his phone were prettier than he could admit, that he didn’t see the way Kaveh’s arms trembled everything he held the camera away from them. He wishes to say that watching the sunset together on the ferris wheel was all that it is, was all that was enough for them, wishes to say that the evening by the dockside and the playful dancing beside a band playing an old sixties’ tune was enough.
But the world doesn’t always work this way. He knows this already, and Kaveh knows it too. Perhaps that is why a thin veil of fear permeated their every activity, Kaveh throwing himself into everything because it might be his last, it might really be the last thing he does in this world as he is.
And he’s right. Gods, how he wishes he wasn’t, how he wishes all his fears were only fears and nothing more.
But the world doesn’t always work this way.
One second, Kaveh’s leaning against him, head on his shoulder as he talks about the world, talks about what it means to belong and what it means to transcend the material and the physical, and the next he’s gone.
It happens so quickly that Alhaitham barely processes it before it’s already over. The weight on his shoulder disappears, and just as he turns to ask Kaveh, are you alright? he hears the shocked screams of those around him, the sudden wailing of a child, and he knows, he knows, the horrible guilt in his body is enough to tell him that he knows .
Kaveh’s on the floor, his entire body shaking. His eyes are wild, beautiful scarlet and gold trembling with a panic Alhaitham simply cannot comprehend, a fear that clutches at the darkest depths of his soul because he doesn’t get it , I don’t get it, as Kaveh screams, he cries, “Alhaitham, I can’t feel my legs. My arms. I-I can’t feel anything at all.”
Children are crying - they’re scared.
In his glass world, the rain pours.
People are backing away, forming a horrible ring around the man writhing on the ground.
He’s drowning. He is already drowning. He wakes to water over his head, the world murky blue and lifeless, an endless apocalypse amidst a drowning emptiness.
Someone calls the ambulance.
He swims, pushes the water in a frenzy to try to get to the top. But there is no top. There is only water, and his feet are not touching the ground and he’s drowning, he can’t breathe-
Someone has the decency to wrap Kaveh in a coat even though it won’t help.
“Haven’t you learnt your lesson by now?”
Someone says “Eleazar” and the entire crowd looks at the man on the ground with a suffocating pity that makes him hate them all, he hates everyone so much .
He doesn’t know who’s talking. He can’t tell. The water surrounds everything, drowns everything, and he can only hear that voice as it chants, “Haven’t you learnt your lesson by now?”
Someone asks him, “Is it terminal?”, and he threatens to punch that person in the face.
Haven’t you learnt your lesson by now?
Someone’s shouting something desperate and incomprehensible. It’s only after he feels the aching pain in his own throat that Alhaitham realises the person screaming is himself.
Haven’t you learnt your lesson by now?
Haven’t you learnt your lesson by now?
Haven’t you learnt your lesson by now?
“Lesser Lord Kusanali.”
“Tighnari. It’s good to see you.”
“With all due respect, why have you come? You must know that, right now, the two of them-”
“How is he?”
“...Kaveh’s unconscious. It’s been almost forty hours. Alhaitham’s in the waiting room. I haven’t been able to talk to him.”
“He’s trapped in his own world. When he’s like this, I can’t reach him at all.”
“Maybe you can try talking to him now. I’m sure he won’t ignore you.”
“It feels almost criminal. I’ll wait.”
The glass world is not made of glass. The glass world is made of ideals, his ego, his pride. The glass world is not made to last.
He knows that, and so he drowns. He drowns, and the rain overwhelms him and breaks him and he falls apart, bit by bit, until there is nothing left.
“Alhaitham.”
“...Lesser Lord Kusanali.”
“Looking at the state you are in… makes me so very sad. Have you been hurting?”
“...I can’t. I need to be here when Kaveh wakes up. I can’t afford to break down.”
“Why can’t you?”
“It’s improper. It’s a display of unnecessary weakness. My tears will change nothing.”
“Alhaitham.”
“Yes?”
“Must I give you a command as your Archon to be honest to yourself?”
“I am honest.”
“No, you’re not. Tell me, Alhaitham. Are you alive?”
“...truthfully, sometimes, I don’t feel like I am at all.”
“Then can you live? Can you live for the people you love?”
“...what an ambitious task. You know just… how impossible that is.”
“Why is it impossible?”
“To the end, I still couldn’t do anything. I could do nothing but stand there and watch him fall. I still can’t do anything at all.”
He sits in the waiting room, elbows on his knees, hands interlaced tightly, and he thinks about everything and nothing at all.
Their lives are so short. Kaveh is twenty-four, and yet the end is not far for him anymore. By this time next year, Alhaitham will be alone again, and the cycle will continue.
This cruel, cruel cycle. It plays with him, plays with his heart, and offers him no relief no matter how much he has tried. He loves and he loses and he loves and loses, again and again, and he searches for a cure, tries to create one himself, and he fails every time.
There is no happy ending. Or maybe the happy ending isn’t for him to find. For him, both choices sound equally as horrible.
As a lover, he is impassive. The Kaveh of the past told him this, and in every lifetime he tries to patch it up, tries to fix it.
But it seems that it is never successful. It seems that he’s still missing something somewhere, and it eats at his pride and renders him unable to truly see himself objectively.
I have so many flaws, Alhaitham thinks, and I can never fix any of them .
Then he thinks about the man still lying unconscious in the ICU, strapped up to tubes and tubes of unknown medication and things that won’t save him, and he thinks about the finality of lives, about what it means to have lived somewhere and belonged. He thinks about what it means to belong somewhere, to belong to somebody, to have somebody to belong to.
When Kaveh finally awakens, Alhaitham tells him everything. The past, the lifetimes and lifetimes ago, the living and the dying and the waiting and that horrible, horrible cycle - it spills from his mouth like a long-kept secret that can no longer be contained, and Alhaitham briefly wonders if this is too much to say, too much to give to someone who had just woken up from a fifty-four hour coma.
But perhaps it is the medication and the painkillers. Perhaps it is the pain. Perhaps it is the body and the mind, the Eleazar separating him into fragments. Or perhaps it is Kaveh himself, Kaveh in his entirety, Kaveh as someone who has always been gullible and stupid and someone who has loved him so very, very much.
Kaveh smiles weakly up at him from his bed in the ICU. His arms and legs twitch but they won’t move to his will. All he can do is talk, listen, comprehend and nothing more, and still Kaveh smiles up at him.
“I’m sorry for cutting our date short.”
Alhaitham wants to hit him, shake some sense into him. “Don’t apologise for that. It doesn’t make sense that you will apologise for something like this.”
“I don’t know what else to say,” Kaveh admits. “I don’t have any words now. I’d like it if you could talk instead of me, for once.”
“What do you want me to say? I don’t know what to say.”
“Tell me about our lives, then.”
Alhaitham stares at him, unblinking in his confusion, and whispers, “Which ones?”
“Tell me about the ones in which I loved you, and you loved me as well. Just those. It’s embarrassing to know whether or not I’d fooled around before. That’s embarrassing. Don’t tell me about that.”
“How can you still be joking around, even now?”
The smile never drops from Kaveh’s face and Alhaitham flounders, struggles, and drowns in it. “There’s nothing else I can do, is there?”
“I loved you in all of them. You loved me in all of them. Are you perhaps delusional enough to expect me to recount every single one?”
“We have time, don’t we?” Kaveh says wryly. “I’m not going anywhere. Tell me them all. Start from the beginning. Tell me what you can remember.”
As if I could forget.
“Must I?”
“Just talk to me. It is nice to hear your voice. I think… I will feel awfully lonely now.”
The machine beeps softly at the foot of his bed. Alhaitham stares at the green numbers, red lines, blue text, black background, and curses the world and everyone in it. It is not fair. It has never been fair, not for him.
He takes a deep breath, then reaches out to hold Kaveh’s hand. Kaveh doesn’t flinch because he can’t feel it.
“This was… before the world was the world. We were scholars first, and you were my senior at the Akademiya, and then you were an architect and I was a scribe. You were a hotheaded, stupid, reckless mess. You designed the most beautiful piece of architecture I have ever seen in all my years - your magnum opus, a well-deserved masterpiece worthy of its fame back then. I will not deny that. Do you know what it was called?”
“What?”
“The Palace of Alcazarzaray. It sounds just as expensive as you. But you were a stupid man and you never listened to me, and that’s how your impulsivity hurled you into debt. That’s how you ended up moving in with me. That’s how I ended up loving you first.”
“...you could’ve left out the part about the stupid man.”
“It’s essential to your character. You are still the same.”
Kaveh looks like he wants to argue, but even raising his gaze to where Alhaitham lies beside him is exhausting. He laughs gently, then clicks his tongue. “Maybe you’re right.”
He doesn't put up much of a fight anymore, Alhaitham realises, and it’s this horrible realisation that eats at him from the inside out and chews away at what words he could still come up with. Silently he threads their fingers together, smoothing the pad of his thumb over the junction where Kaveh’s wrist meets his palm, and pretends that Kaveh can feel it, prays that Kaveh will, somehow, be able to know just how much he loves him.
“What’s next?”
“You and I…”
Kaveh moves back to the lab, back to his bed underneath the sunlit windows, and this is where he stays.
He can still talk. It is, truthfully, the only thing he can do, the only control he still has left over his body where the rest of his limbs would not obey him. Perhaps this is why he talks so much, why he opens his mouth to speak at any given chance, all so that he can still hold some semblance of power over himself.
It’s the evening, and Alhaitham has come after locking up the doors to the shop. In his hands, he holds a paper cup of coffee, and he props Kaveh up properly before showing it to him. He pulls back the lid, and reveals the coffee swan at the top.
Kaveh’s eyes widen, and he laughs as he says, “You’ve improved so much. I can’t believe this is done by the same person who wouldn’t even bother with latte art, calling it a waste of time.”
“It still is,” Alhaitham mutters, “but I guess I can make one if I have the time.”
“You surprise me with so many things,” Kaveh marvels, and the expression on his face is soft. “I’m always… just getting to know you. I regret not having been able to get to know you better. I wonder… what kind of life we could have, if I was healthy.”
“Don’t talk about things like that,” Alhaitham scolds. “Don’t regret what you can’t change.”
“But,” Kaveh continues, as if Alhaitham hasn’t spoken, “but, if my life is constituted completely in cycles and endless circles… then maybe I will have a chance at redemption. Maybe I will have a chance of getting somewhere with you in a life god-knows how many years into the future from now. Maybe, in all these cycles, we’ll finally make it to one where we can be happy. Will you wait for me until then?”
Alhaitham’s voice dies at the back of his throat. Kaveh’s eyes are locked on him but he’s not really seeing him, he’s not really here at all-
“Will you wait? Four hundred years have equated ‘til now… so can you wait four hundred more? Do I dare ask for something like this? Is it something I believe I am worthy of asking, something out of the boundaries of my worthless pride?”
“Yes,” Alhaitham interrupts, and he grips Kaveh’s hand so tightly he fears he’ll break him. “Yes. You can ask for this. Of course you can. I have always only ever lived for you.”
“What a hefty thing to say, a phrase that carries so much weight,” Kaveh snorts. “It doesn’t sound like you. Is it because I’m dying and you’re desperate?”
“It’s a lot of things. It’s because I feel guilty, having known you for so, so long, and yet being unable to cure you of this disease that you keep dying from. How can I call myself a scholar, a man worthy of the Akademiya, if I can’t even save you from this? How else can I repay my life?”
“You are so beautiful, Alhaitham.”
“How can- what?”
“Your ideals, your stupid, stubborn conscience,” Kavai starts, and he shuts his eyes and he laughs. “You are so beautiful, the way that you are. You are everything that I have ever imagined for the person I love to be. I hate it. I don't really mind it. You’re so shit at sweet talking, so horrible at giving me consolation yet, despite it all, I cannot help but love you. Where you end is where I begin. This is how I understand the world. This is how I understand the beautiful entropy that lies between you and me.”
“...and how do you understand that?”
“I am me because you are you. Imagine a tree deep in a forest where no man has ever tread. If the tree gets struck by lightning and falls, no one will hear it fall. If this is the case, will the tree have made a sound?”
“Of course. The sound it makes is independent from whether or not anyone hears it. The tree breaks from its trunk and lands. The vibrations it leaves in the air are still vibrations, regardless if they are heard or not.”
“But if no one hears it, will the dead tree still matter? Independent of any ecosystem, will the fallen tree be of any importance to the implied listener?”
“Of c-” he stops, and stares at his hands, where their fingers are still interlocked.
“No,” Kaveh whispers. “It won’t matter, will it?”
Alhaitham’s gaze burns into his fingertips. He trembles as Kaveh leans back and rests his head against the wall. The other sighs, and Alhaitham heard him say, “It really won’t matter, will it?”
“...perhaps it won’t.”
“But if I were to fall, you will be there. You have already proved that to me.” Scarlet and crimson, beige and gold . “Because you are here, I am of importance. I am someone whose fall will not mean nothing.”
But there’s something lost in Kaveh’s expression. There has been something lost there for days now. His gaze is always far away, always looking at him as if he’s invisible, and so Alhaitham asks, “So what is weighing on your heart?”
Kaveh’s eyes widen. “What do you mean?”
“Something’s been bothering you. Spit it out. Tell me.”
“Nothing has-”
“Don’t lie. I know.”
Kaveh’s mouth snaps shut, and he harks out a sarcastic laugh. “So there’s really nothing I can hide, right?”
“What’s been on your mind?”
“...I’m scared, Alhaitham.”
“What are you scared of?”
“I’m scared of dying. What happens then?” Kaveh whispers. His voice trembles around the edges, wispy and barely there, and suddenly Alhaitham fears that if he were to blink Kaveh would be gone. He tightens his fingers around Kaveh’s own. “What really happens then? I don’t want to die. I haven’t lived enough. There are still countries I want to visit, towns I want to explore, books I want to read and drawings I want to make- oh, oh my, I don’t… I don’t have a lot of time at all, do I? It’s… it’s like I’m existing on borrowed time. Always.”
“Thinking of this situation so pessimistically is a waste of your energy,” Alhaitham mumbles, leaning in to press his face into Kaveh’s hair. He shuts his eyes, breathes in the scent of sweat and hospital soap and sterilised rooms, and he pretends not to hear Kaveh as words spiral out of him like some uncontrollable lament, like it is the last speech he will ever give. In one way or another, it is.
“I want to sing songs and learn about our ever-changing universe, see for myself the oceans at every beach in the world, go skiing in the winter…”
It is so cruel. Everything. Everything is so cruel.
“I want to eat a meal from every country in the world, learn how to make coffee swans the way you do, and teach myself how to bake an apple pie…”
Is this what I deserve, after centuries of this endless life and death? I am so tired. I am so tired, sitting here watching him die, lifetime after lifetime after lifetime.
“I want to grow old with somebody, watch the sunset a hundred times a year, sit on the front porch of a house in a seaside town and listen to the seagulls in the afternoon…”
His voice dies off as his consciousness wavers, his head starting to droop, grazing the top of Alhaitham’s shoulders as he tilts. Bringing one hand gently to Kaveh’s face, Alhaitham presses Kaveh’s head down to his shoulders. His cheek is awfully cold, his skin barely alive, and Alhaitham reaches down to bring one of Kaveh’s arms into his lap. His fingers graze the black scales protruding out of his hand and he swallows the ache in his throat he didn’t realise was even there.
“There will be a cure,” Alhaitham lies to nobody, just as he has done every lifetime. He stares at the machine next to Kaveh’s bed, Kaveh’s heartbeat flashing across the top in its stupid, endless waves, and once again he feels useless, feels that there is no more purpose in his being alive if it means that nothing will change.
“Tighnari.”
“Alhaitham. If you’re here for-”
“It has failed again, hasn't it?”
“...yes, it has failed again. And, frankly speaking, I don’t think it will work. I don’t think we can find a cure.”
“But we’ve already spent decades on this. Certainly, certainly, there will be-”
“The cure is not for us to decide, Alhaitham. Some things are part of divine law, and I believe this is it.”
“So what? We’re just going to sit here and watch them die life after life after life?”
“Maybe that’s the only thing we can do. Maybe that’s why the time we spend with them is precious, why we don’t go off disappearing for weeks just because we can’t face them.”
“Tighnari.”
“What is it?”
“Am I… keeping him locked in this time loop? Is it my fault?”
“...how can we know? We don’t know. Don’t blame yourself for it.”
But it is his fault. He knows. The second he wakes in his glass world he knows it is his fault. A lapse in his judgement, something he has overlooked - whatever it is, it is his fault. He knows he has always done something wrong.
The sky is not a sky. The sky is a vast, black emptiness where stars are falling from their place in the heavens, a place without beauty and a place full of sin. The ground is rough with broken glass, each jagged shard enough to pierce through his feet and leave him to bleed.
And yet Alhaitham walks anyway, walks towards where a young girl is standing underneath the dying sky, and she turns to meet his gaze as he walks towards her.
“Alhaitham.”
“Lesser Lord Kusanali.”
“Alhaitham… have you been okay?”
He stops in front of her, the bottom of his feet bleeding from deep red gashes and leaving trails of red on the broken ground. He is exhausted, he is so tired, and he doesn’t know what to say.
“You haven’t, have you?” She whispers.
“...no, no, I haven’t.”
“Do you know why this world is the way it is?” She gestures to the sky, the ground, the glass, the stars. “Do you know why?”
“I don’t.”
“It is your world.”
“I am aware.”
“Have you ever wondered why Kaveh keeps coming back?”
“I have.”
“And why do you think he does?”
“...it is my fault. I don’t know what it is, but it is my fault.”
“Indeed,” Nahida says so simply that Alhaitham jerks back. He stumbles on the glass, winces as he feels his body topple, and prepares for the instant onslaught of pain that will shoot up his body when he lands.
But he doesn’t. Nahida holds him by the hand, and she stares at him through the darkness. “It is your fault. It is the fault of your pride.”
“My pride?”
“Did you really think that you could cure him on your own? That this medicine is something you can come up with?”
“I did.”
“That’s your biggest flaw, Alhaitham. It is your pride, and it is truly nothing else. You think you can save him, and so you trap him in years and years of torment until he is barely there, until he is barely alive. Is this fair to him?”
No, Alhaitham thinks, and the sky burns out of existence. No, it’s not fair at all.
“Alhaitham.”
Alhaitham looks down from the medical documents he’s scanning, where Kaveh’s lying with his head against Alhaitham’s lap. His eyes are staring straight at the ceiling, unfocused and distant, and his voice is quiet as he calls for Alhaitham again.
“What is it?”
“Do you know the story of Duniya and Gifts?”
“...I’m afraid I don’t.”
“It’s set in Somalia, a place wrecked by war and disease. And in this place full of decay and horror, people learn to find hope. There is a constant giving and receiving. The family matriarch, Duniya, takes in an orphaned child. A community is built around this child, and even after the child dies he leaves behind a community that survives. Perhaps what makes us human is our ability to convey so much in so short of a lifetime. Do you know what ‘Duniya’ means?”
“I don’t.”
“It’s Arabic… for ‘world’. The child receives love and gives a community. The world, then, receives a community and gives a community. We ‘world’ the world. We are… what makes the world the world, down to even the individual, down to even you and me. That is our purpose. You have made my world a world that can be called a world. It has meaning. It's become something of worth, and for that, I am endlessly grateful.”
When the last of Kaveh’s energy fades, most of his voice goes with it.
For someone who once had so much to say, so much energy in every crevice of his body, Alhaitham sees only a ghost of who he is now, sitting upright on the bed. The scales cover the majority of his skin now, shiny dark patches that intrude upon the beauty of what Kaveh once was, and simply staying alive becomes difficult.
His hair has lost its lustre. Even underneath the sunlit window, the gold has dampened to a sandy brown, a dullness that can’t be bought back even with the expensive shampoo Alhaitham brings from his own place. Kaveh’s skin sags on his body, most of the muscle in his arms gone as his strength leaves him. He looks years older, the shell of the person he used to be, and it stabs a knife through Alhaitham’s chest that twists itself horribly whenever Alhaitham sees him, whenever Alhaitham reminds himself that this sight is nothing new, I have seen this so many times, even if it hurts me just as much, if not more, than the last.
Only Kaveh’s eyes remain as they were, the bright crimson still flecked with gold, and they are the only source of solace and comfort Alhaitham can still find.
Alhaitham is a mess now. He is broken around the edges, torn from his mental torment and his exhaustion upon seeing Kaveh this way, and everything hurts just a little too much for it to be bearable.
And so one night, when they’re sitting side by side on Kaveh’s bed, the lights above them dimmed for the evening, Alhaitham feels a heavy dread in the depths of his body, a familiar sense that has developed after having been here for so many lifetimes, watching the same thing happen again and again.
He digs his fingers into his palms, shuts his eyes and winces because no, please, not now, not now, I am not ready , but the world has never waited for him, and the world will never wait.
And so, when Kaveh clears his throat softly to get his attention, Alhaitham knows. He knows.
“Al…haitham.”
“Don’t talk, Kaveh.”
But he doesn’t listen. He has never listened.
“I… love you, but you already… know this,” Kaveh laughs lightly, and it hurts him. His body is tense, cold and fragile underneath Alhaitham’s hands, and when Alhaitham looks down he can only see the shiny black scales that now cover every inch of Kaveh’s skin. “I love… you, so listen now… and listen… closely.”
Alhaitham reaches over and slips his hand into Kaveh’s own.
“I… don’t have much left, but I… am happy that you found me… even… in this life.”
No, no, you don’t get it.
“I would’ve… been very lonely… had you… not found me. I would’ve… been very sad.”
Don’t talk like this. Fight me. Argue with me. Tell me useless things. Tell me about the world.
“I know… that we live… in glass worlds. I… know that you… have your own… glass world, and… that living has been… hard for you. I am sorry.”
It’s not that, it’s not that at all.
“But… you know my glass world. We… share so much… in common… that when you see… my glass world in the… future… it will be special… to you… only you, and you … will laugh. You will laugh… because no one else… will.”
My glass world is meaningless. It is all meaningless. Please stop.
He is rational. He has always been rational. It’s the one and only thing he has prided himself with, the only thing he could always rely on when reason failed him, and it’s what has kept him alive for so long.
But he hears sniffles from beside him, sees the droplets that leave dark circles on clothing, and the tears that run down the planes of Kaveh’s face look like stars, dying comets running into the world.
And he thinks it’s so stupid, because mankind will always be limited by what they don’t know in this world. There will always be the unknown. There will always be what can’t be discovered, and it’ll be what kills them and that’s fine, he knows that, so why the hell am I losing my fucking mind?
“Alhaitham…” Kaveh’s voice reels him back to the present, and Alhaitham digs his nails into his palms so tightly they break his skin. “Alhaitham… I don’t… want to die.”
And he loses it. He fucking loses it. He gives his body and his mind and his soul up to the world, to a world that doesn’t love him and doesn't love Kaveh and doesn’t love Collei and Tighnari and Cyno and anyone, a world that didn’t want to be ‘world’ed by the two of them and he reaches up and pulls Kaveh’s face to himself, grabbing the other’s cheeks in his hands as their tears mix in their falling paths.
I am so sick. I am so sick of all of this.
“I know,” Alhaitham grits out, and the tears that dot his eyes distort the room until Kaveh is gouache dunked in water, darkness seeping into the quiet lab, a mixture of colours that have no start and end. “I know, and I’m so sorry.”
“Alhaitham…” Kaveh’s tears are rockets and they are going to the moon and beyond and he’s the reason Alhaitham is alive, the reason why he does what he does so that, together, they can one day ‘world’ the world, leave their mark on a floating rock with no humanity, let it be known they were once here. “Alhaitham, what… have I done to… deserve this?”
I am so sick of all of this. I am just so, so sick.
“You didn’t do anything,” Alhaitham whispers. “You didn't do anything. You have never done anything to- to deserve-”
“Alhaitham,” Kaveh cries, and his every sob breaks Alhaitham’s heart, chisels it away until there is nothing left to hold. “It hurts… it hurts so… so much.”
You are so useless. You are so useless. You have never done anything. All these years, and you have done nothing.
“And yet…” Kaveh whispers, chest heaving as he struggles to breathe. “I think… to be with you… I think that… is the only… reason why I am… alive. Yes… it is to be… with you. Yes, it is… to… make… if even the… slightest corner of… your life worthwhile, so… that my… life… can have a purpose.”
“Shut up,” Alhaitham whispers, and his words come out garbled and choked, as if they carry the weight of all of their past lives. “Shut up, Kaveh, and rest. Shut up.”
In one way or another, they do. Lifetimes and lifetimes of failure, of studying and of knowledge and of wasting his years away in academia, all for this to happen again, all for them to be at this place again, where nothing has changed. What was all his work for? He had so many questions that were never answered, a life dedicated to finding a cure that was just not possible, and maybe it was never for him to find, maybe he was simply a fool with too much self confidence in his foolish world of glass-
“Shut up,” Alhaitham says again as his tears fall like dying stars, empty tears and empty words suspended in empty air. “I am just… a feeble scholar. I can’t… and I have never been able… to do anything.”
“No…” Kaveh whispers, and he tries to smile and his face is a garbled, messy arrangement of beauty and yet Alhaitham loves him, loves him for everything that he is. He leans in and kisses him, kisses the tears off his cheeks even when his own tears mix with Kaveh’s own, and his hands tremble as he holds Kaveh’s body close to him, holds him against the entropy of their dying world. “No… Alhaitham… you… you have always… been enough. I have… always… loved you… just the way… you were.”
“Don’t… say that,” Alhaitham hisses. “Don’t waste your breath.”
“Alhaitham… in my… next life… please make me… a cup of coffee… with cinnamon powder.”
Kaveh shuts his eyes, shuts those universes of crimson and gold, and he does not speak again.
That evening, Kaveh does not move. Alhaitham holds him tightly, doesn’t let him go, and whispers words of love into his ear.
When morning comes, Alhaitham is the only one who wakes. Kaveh lies with his eyes closed, his breathing only a ghost, and Alhaitham knows he will never wake in this life again.
He stands in his glass world. The sky is dying. The glass is already shattered. All is black, and he can’t see anything. He is filled with so much grief, a sadness that comes in waves and waves, a raging tide that bashes him again and again without end. His knees hit the ground, jagged edges piercing into pale skin, scarlet and maroon seeping into a perfect translucent moon glow, and he cries.
“Alhaitham.”
He stands by the bed.
“Alhaitham.”
He stands by the bed. He does not move.
“Alhaitham, please.”
He stands by the bed. He does not move, because he is just so tired.
They have already taken Kaveh away. The bed is now empty, the sheets changed and replaced, Kaveh’s belongings stored in a box to be shipped away, and now there remains no trace that he has ever lived.
Alhaithan stands by the bed, and he does not move.
He feels Tighnari’s presence beside him. The researcher holds a test tube in his hands, and he turns it hesitantly as he says, “Should we try this one?”
“No,” Alhaitham coughs out, his voice rough from disuse. “There will be no more trying. I will… not tamper with his life again. I give up.”
Tighnari clutches the vial. “Are you certain?”
“Of course.”
“And what will you do if this works?”
“It’s pointless. It won’t bring him back.”
“What about Collei? It can save her.”
“Then test it yourself.”
“I need you to help me. I need your research in case it goes wrong, and I-”
Alhaitham suddenly rounds on him, and all of his suppressed anger spills out like a cruel tidal wave.
“Tighnari! I can’t take it anymore!!” Alhaitham yells, and his voice tears like shattered glass. The lab rings with his agony, his pain vibrating in every corner of this white and cold world, and everything is breaking and nothing remains. “I can’t do it! I can’t do this for any longer! I can’t do it! I can’t!”
Tighnari merely stares at him, unflinching, before he nods slowly. “I understand. I’m sorry. I should’ve been more sensitive.”
He walks away, leaving Alhaitham by the bedside, alone once again.
The winter passes, and the bed stays empty.
When spring comes, Kaveh is no longer there.
His world is no longer a world. It is a decaying land filled with fragments and illusions, lost ideals and abandoned dreams. It rains and it rains but it never floods, so he can never die. The stars fall off their places in the sky. Everywhere is littered with broken glass. It hurts to walk.
Nahida stands at the edge of the breaking world. Of course she is here. Of course she is here again.
“How many years has it been since I last saw you, Alhaitham?”
“Almost four hundred.”
“How’s Kaveh?”
“I haven’t been able to find him.”
“In all these years?”
“In all these years.”
She hums softly to herself. “Do you know what this means?”
“The cycle is ending,” he responds. “It’ll be his last life, won’t it?”
“Indeed. The cure, too, is here,” she says without looking at him. “You and Tighnari have worked so hard. What will you do with it?”
For so long he has yearned to hear those words. For so long he has worked to find the cure, to find that one remedy that can cure them of this curse. And now that it is here, now that he has found it, he figures he should be overjoyed. He should celebrate.
But this joy doesn’t come so easy to him.
He tilts his face up, lets the falling rain and dying comets hit his body in their painful departure, and he figures that he has always just been too much. He has always been too much, too proud, too stubborn and too cold. He has never taken the time to slow down and let himself enjoy what he should.
His world is no longer a world. He exhales, and he overcomes it.
“I’ll take it,” he says to the sky, and the world stops falling. “Let him live. That’s all I ask. Let him live. Let me be happy. Let me have what I deserve, because I have worked for it.”
Nahida smiles. The glass world shatters, and he falls, falls, falls past the murky ground to the deep unknown, where crimson gold waits for him.
He and Tighnari sit on an empty bed in their lab, watching as Collei organises the chemicals on the cabinet. She struggles to slide a bottle onto the top shelf, and as she reaches up the sleeve of her jacket falls to her elbows, revealing clean skin without a trace of the black blemished scales.
“Can you believe it?” Tighnari whispers. “We did it.”
“It took too long,” Alhaitham mutters. “Far too long.”
“We did it anyway,” Tighnari says. He pauses, fingers interlaced hesitantly, before he asks, “Will you go look for Kaveh now?”
“What else will I do?”
“Where will he even be? You’ll have to scrounge the world for him.”
“Maybe so.”
“How are you so certain he’s out there?”
“Of course he is. He'll return to me,” Alhaitham says plainly, like he’s discussing the weather, like he’s discussing what he’ll eat for dinner. “Of course he will.”
Tighnari sighs. “You are so confident. Your ego is so bloated.”
“It’s not a matter of ego. It’s just the way this world is,” Alhaitham doesn’t bother explaining, because it is. The moon will disappear behind the cityscape tonight, and the sun will rise. Tomorrow, the sky will be pale blue again. The days after, Kaveh will come back to him, just as he has always done.
When Alhaitham walks into the bar downtown where the coffee shop had once been, he’s not surprised to see the figure already sitting there, a good number of drinks in his system as he slides into the evening.
There's a soft tune playing in the background. Warm, hushed chatter seeps into his senses. The air smells sweet, tinged with notes of smoke and expensive cologne, and somewhere deeper he smells flowers, smells familiarity, smells the scent of parisarahs. The inside of the bar is washed in dark maroons and browns and golds from the lights, and as the figure sags against the table, the gold chain around his wrist flashing each time he moves his arms, Alhaitham wonders if the ache in his chest is due to the stuffy atmosphere or the sheer weight of the emotion that overcomes him now.
The relief that floods his body is unlike anything he has ever felt before. Perhaps it is simply the smoothing of a centuries-long heartache, the answer that comes after so, so many years of waiting and waiting. His body pulses as he recognises the other, recognises all the beautiful parts of him that have continued to remain beautiful, even in this life, and he thinks that maybe he can finally forgive himself now, let himself be completely, wholly content.
He’s clearly waiting for somebody. He’s wearing a thin, black button up that does little to hide the curve of his waist, a shiny heart-shaped belt that flashes each time he moves, and his blond hair is drawn into a braid along the back, set together with bright red hairpins. His foot is tapping impatiently on his stool, and with the way he’s glancing around every so often it’s evident that he’s been stood up.
Dating troubles again?
Kaveh sighs loudly before sliding forward in his seat, eventually ending up crumpled on the table.
Alhaitham holds back a huff.
The other is drunk, his face tinted pink as his arms find a spot outstretched on the bar table, head pillowed on his elbow. Alhaitham looks at his forearms, scans them for the horrible dark scales he’d been used to, and smiles when he sees them bare and clean.
When you get sick, I’ll be waiting for you.
Kaveh notices Alhaitham sitting down beside him, ordering a drink before leaning on his arm and locking his gaze onto Kaveh’s face. His eyes widen comically as he pulls himself upright, fumbling with his words as he says, “A-are you person- ah, the person- that I’m… waiting for?”
“Maybe,” Alhaitham says calmly. “Do you think I am?”
Kaveh squints, narrowing his eyes suspiciously before pulling back. “Nope! You are… much too tall…”
“What time was your date supposed to get here?”
“Eight… thirty.”
“Do you know what time it is?”
“...no.”
“It’s almost eleven.”
“Wha-?!” Kaveh pulls his arm towards him and checks his watch. “Oh, oh Archons, how dare he?!”
Alhaitham can’t help the smile that makes it onto his face. His heart is so warm. “Have you been stood up?”
“N-no!” Kaveh snaps, and his face flushes with the lie. “I’m too… cool to be stood up. You should be honoured to even get to talk… to me.”
“Should I?” Alhaitham only teases. “I don’t know who you are.”
“You don’t-?!” Kaveh gawks at him before immediately turning to his bag, digging around and searching for something. “I’m offended!”
“Enlighten me, then. Who are you?”
Kaveh is suddenly smiling widely. “I’m an architect. I graduated just last year, and- look, look at this!”
He pulls out the tablet, where he unlocks the screen to reveal the blueprints of a building in progress. Judging from the scale of it and the details alone, it’s a project that puts the Palace of Alcazazaray to shame. “I have an ambitious project up my sleeves.”
Alhaitham scoffs. “You really think you can pull something like this off?”
Kaveh immediately whips the tablet away, hugging it closely to his chest. He sticks his chin up in the air, all the dainty pride of an artist who loves his work, a pride he has always deserved. “You- you are so rude! You don’t even know me, and you’re… saying things like this!”
But there’s that wild, flaming fire in his eyes, that crazy competitiveness that Alhaitham has recognised in all of his lives, and suddenly, suddenly he knows.
He knows, with absolute certainty, that this will be Kaveh’s last life.
He is relieved. He is so, so relieved, because he knows that it will be his as well.
It's over. All of it. It's all over.
How great that is, he decides. How great it truly is, that the world as they know it is ending and yet they have each other.
Yet they have each other.
And so he takes a sip of the drink in front of him, a drink that's not his and has already been watered down from the lonely hours of waiting, watches as Kaveh’s eyes follow the line of his throat, and smiles a genuine smile, one filled with centuries of relief, in the other’s direction.
“My name is Alhaitham. Do you, by any chance, like coffee and latte art?”