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i.
“I’m going now,” Kaveh murmurs. He moves closer to his roommate—hair brushing cheek, fingertips grazing shoulder—and his lips pull into the shape of a smile. “Good night.”
Alhaitham watches him collect his keys from the bowl and disappear into the doorway, red cape plumed against the dusk. He frowns. Something about Kaveh has unsettled him today.
A Kaveh with his edges blunted, without a retort at the tip of his tongue? No. He’s seen that before, time and time again. He’s known that version of him for years: Kaveh at midnight in the library, eyelids heavy with sleep. Kaveh in letters, over all the mundane things. Kaveh inside their kitchen, making them breakfast.
But this is different now. Something new curls between the two of them, nudging at their yearslong rhythm. Something has changed.
Alhaitham knows not of when it began. Just that it is, now. Kaveh, for all his professed daring, has always fluttered at arm’s length, rarely drawing closer. But now he lingers. He leaves touch, but only a little. Only in safe places: his shoulder, his arms, his hands. Close enough to platonic to pass it off as such.
Hadn’t it all been platonic, until now? Now that he thinks of it, Kaveh has been carrying himself a little differently. It’s imperceptible to most, but Alhaitham knows him more than anyone else. The way he moves, the way he speaks—the way he is—is off, but only slightly. Something has shifted in the essence of Kaveh.
He knows something that Alhaitham doesn’t.
I think Kaveh loves me. The thought flits through him like an arrow. He turns it over in his mind and it all makes sense. Alhaitham had brushed it off at first—all the stolen touches, all the times he’s felt his gaze on him. But Kaveh had been deliberate; he’d been waiting for Alhaitham to notice.
If he had been a little younger and a little more cold, he would have laughed at the absurdity of it. Love? Back at the Akademiya, they were infamous for their disagreements—for being constantly at each other’s throats. Neither of them, of course, had considered a romantic relationship. Intellectual equals, sure. Friends? Perhaps. They’d been close because they were the only ones who could stand each other.
Time has turned their daggers into thorns and their vicious arguments into everyday bickering. Somewhere along the line, the delineation of their boundaries had blurred into one another, until they were locked in self-perpetuating orbit.
Now, they are here, with this. This thing. This what?
There’s a name for this, somewhere. Somewhere, there must be a response. There must be a sort of pull to this push. A push to this pull. Kaveh, Alhaitham, Kaveh and Alhaitham. That is how it should be. What does Alhaitham feel about Kaveh—what is he meant to feel?
Alhaitham reaches back into his mind, pulls his recollection of them into the forefront. The memory is endless; it runs like a stream through him, image after image of their past. But every moment is the same, in a way: they are always irrevocably them, the bickering and the proximity and the softness. Always how they fit together. Always each other’s complement, for the better and the worse.
No wonder Kaveh would love him. It makes sense.
It makes sense, so he folds himself into the image of them and searches for something. They are opposites, and they are mirrors, so where is his equal and opposite reaction?
He feels for it and his heart offers him the faintest spark. A sense of appreciation. But that’s not enough and he knows it isn’t, so he feels for it again, plumbing deeper into his consciousness.
This time, he brushes up against something. He grasps at it, but uncovering it is like reaching into a sea of fog: incomprehensible, incomplete, unanswerable. Like cotton stuffed up his ears. He doesn’t know. He can’t know.
Love is fickle. Love cannot will itself into existence, or else it would answer if he so much as beckoned it to. It would only be fair.
Kaveh loves him. He cannot say he feels the same.
ii.
There’s a stray cat that frequents their area. It was a scrawny thing at first, all fur and muscle and bone, but now it moves with a sureness, or perhaps an overconfidence. It doesn’t run away anymore; it knows most of the inhabitants around here by now. And it knows the ones that feed it, too.
Alhaitham isn’t one to pick up any stray he sees on the street. But he does have one living in his own house, in a manner of speaking. And the cat reminds him of that person. Something about the yellow fur and his hair, and the way it jumps into things, a little too bold for its own good.
It’s past midnight and most of the houses on their street have shut out their lights. One light remains, pressed up against the window of his house. The diffusion outlines the feline-shaped silhouette by his door.
The cat meows as he fiddles for his keys, rubbing up against his leg. He sighs, more fondly than anything, and begins to unwrap the the remnants of his shawarma.
The door clicks open.
“Alhaitham,” says Kaveh, hovering somewhere above him. “It’s late. You’re late.”
“So I am,” Alhaitham hums. They hadn’t had anything planned today, but Kaveh still likes to expect him a little earlier than now, usually to nudge in some time to bicker over trivial things. For now, he’s busy offering his food to the cat, who leans forward and sticks its nose inside the wrap. “And you’re still awake. Not waiting for me, I hope.”
“Of course not. I was trying to draft that greenhouse,” Kaveh pauses, as if contemplating something, and Alhaitham looks up. Kaveh is closer than he expected, and the lamplight from the window frames his hair in an odd shade of gold—a color the daylight, in all its hues, has never managed to strike. Alhaitham finds he can’t quite place it and can’t quite look away. “The one the Amurta commissioned me for. Turnaround time is fast with them, you know.”
Kaveh smiles again, but an emotion less congruent to that flickers in his eyes. There’s not enough light to pinpoint it. “Hm. But perhaps I was waiting, a little.“
Alhaitham has known Kaveh for years upon years, and so this new Kaveh still unsettles him. What happened to the Kaveh who ran his mouth about everything but the topic of them? How Kaveh he still is, to know something and immediately need to share it.
Forget that. Archons save him, there’s nothing he won’t talk about now.
“So you were, then,” Alhaitham says, suppressing the beginnings of a smirk. He extends a hand to scratch the cat under the chin. It meows, self-satisfied, so he does it again.
Kaveh is watching him with a certain intensity. The same emotion from before now licks at his irises, as if hungry for this higher mode of feeling. Again, the light of the moon and the lamp tell him this much. Again, it is too dark to tell any more.
Alhaitham has seen it before, though, in broader daylight. So he can guess, at least a little, as to what it means to him.
Something about the cat, and the food, and the way he treats it with care. Then, something about the way he treats Kaveh. The unconscious way he pulls himself to arm’s length, even as Kaveh lingers close, and runs a touch too cold. The way he still doesn’t hesitate to care for something he’s only known for a tenth of the time.
But that, of course, is a false equivalency. Cats, compared to humans, are such simple-minded creatures. They need food, shelter, maybe a little dash of love.
Humans are different. Humans want something, and then they want everything, and then maybe nothing at all. They seek. They yearn. For all of his knowledge, Alhaitham is still unpuzzling the puzzle of people, and still detangling the mystery that is Kaveh.
And again, here is the mystery that is the self. Alhaitham. He always knows what he wants, so what does he want from this? From them?
In his mind’s eye, he is looking into the fog again. There’s something like a shape inside, for a moment, and its outline blurs when he moves to it. He is not meant to know it yet, and that has never stopped him, but it shudders. Disappears. He stares still, pale-eyed and unseeing, into the mist.
What does he want?
Something. Everything. Nothing at all.
iii.
Alhaitham awakens to the soft clink of something in the kitchen.
He’s not the lightest sleeper, so he must have been falling out of sleep. Barely unmoored from consciousness, or maybe returning to it. The outside is not quite bright yet, but the palest bit of light clings to the curtains—it’s not dawn, but it will be soon.
He has to wake up in an hour or so to go to work, so it’s fine to get up now, he rationalizes. He wouldn’t get much sleep anyway.
Predictably, the dimly illuminated figure of Kaveh is perched on a stool in their kitchen, brewing a cup of tea with practiced ease and nothing but the moonlight as a guide. Alhaitham watches from the hallway as he pours the drink into his mug. He sighs, half-exasperated, as Kaveh extinguishes the fire but leaves the kettle sitting on the stove.
Kaveh’s silhouette moves to the doorway, and Alhaitham moves along with his movement. As if they were mirrors, because they are. Before he can step outside—without his keys, again—Alhaitham taps him on the shoulder.
“Kaveh,” Alhaitham says, and Kaveh turns to meet him without as much of a startle. As if he had expected him to be there, even now at who-knows-when in the morning when the both of them should still be asleep. “You forgot your keys.”
“I did not,” Kaveh searches his pockets with his free hand to find that he did, indeed, forget his keys. “Oh. Never mind that. Listen, I’m tired. But I can’t sleep, so I’m trying the next best thing and getting some fresh air. I won’t be out for long.”
“And the tea,” Alhaitham deadpans, following him outside, and Kaveh allows it. After all, this is always an invitation. The keys—both of them—clack against each other in his hand as the door swings shut behind them, as gently as he could make it.
“Herbal.”
“Fair enough.”
They make it out to the street before Kaveh pauses, squinting up at something. Alhaitham follows his line of sight to the dark expanse above them, fading just slightly at the emerging dawn. Still, the stars are as lustrous and numerous as they always are, freckling the sky like little moons.
“Look at those stars,” Kaveh says, gesturing at a sliver of sky over their house. To Alhaitham, the stars there seem to be just as they were before, but he follows along anyway. “I didn’t realize it—but that’s a constellation.”
“A constellation? The gods must’ve given someone a vision then, hm?” Now that Kaveh mentions it, Alhaitham sees it too—the way a few of them glimmer, brighter than the rest. His gaze flits to Kaveh’s own vision, which pulses faintly in time with his own. “The Rtawahist postulates that it is a trick of the mind. Have you read of it? We notice them only when someone’s fate is realized.”
“Yes. I’ve read that column,” Kaveh says, holding out a hand as if to frame it. The cape of his coat flares out behind him, and Alhaitham likens the color to that of a particularly showy pheasant. “I think of it too, at times. From a layman’s perspective, a star can go from nigh-insignificance to dictating the destinies of vision-holders themselves overnight. And yet it has always been there, spelling out their fates, and will always be. Sometimes I find it ominous—the way our fates are predetermined.”
“But those patterns have existed for eons, no matter when we notice it,” Alhaitham looks up at the sky again, making sense of the shape. There are six stars, as always, this time in a lopsided zigzag. “Most say that destiny is fixed. That every person, vision-bearer or not, has their fate written in the stars.”
Kaveh notices the phrasing. He quirks an eyebrow, then takes a sip from his mug. “But you don’t believe that.”
“Not fully,” Alhaitham shrugs. “It is a broad rule, but does not tell the full story. And I have not formed a full opinion on the subject matter. There is a dearth of research on the interactions of fate and little conclusive evidence. Much of what I know comes from that Steambird column.”
“I know, I read it too,” Kaveh sighs, a touch dramatically, and takes another sip. “That column—it keeps referencing the astrologer’s fate entangling with the subject’s, and then it doesn’t elaborate. Astrologists’ secrets, I suppose.”
Their conversation descends into a light debate, or some form of collaboration, over fate and stars and constellations. To some it may seem as frivolous, but the Rtawahist has measured it into angles and formulas and triangulation. There is a method to its madness—one that Alhaitham has not learned enough of as an Akademiya student, preferring more tangible, applicable things.
Kaveh, the ever-fleeting dreamer, might even know more than he does.
The stars are retreating, folding their gleaming bodies under the brighter, nascent dawn. Kaveh’s body, too, is starting to sag. His responses are the slightest bit delayed, and the grip on his mug is slackening.
“Let’s go home,” Alhaitham says, and Kaveh gives him a faint nod.
Alhaitham leads him down the street by the hand, and somewhere along the way, Kaveh’s weight droops just enough so that it presses into his. This time, instead of recoiling, he allows it. He lets the foreign warmth trickle into his side, cling onto parts of him that he keeps tucked away from plain sight.
Alhaitham can’t see it, but Kaveh is probably smiling to himself.
He draws in a breath, then pulls it back out of his lungs. Normal, clear, even breaths. It’s harder than it should be—enough that he tries not to dwell on it.
When they arrive at the door of their home, Alhaitham fishes the keys out of his pocket with his free hand. Once again, the tooth of his key catches on the ring of Kaveh’s key and they come out as one tangled mass.
They enter quietly, Alhaitham waiting for him to remove his shoes at the doorway, and step into his room. Kaveh sets his mug on the nightstand and collapses into the bed, gesturing at his roommate to…what? Join him?
Alhaitham swallows a breath and sits down on the side of the bed. Kaveh doesn’t protest; he only buries his face in his pillow, then shifts a little under his blankets to allow him closer. Within moments, his breathing slows and he is asleep.
Alhaitham sits there on the bed, watching the light swell through the curtains. It bathes the side of Kaveh’s face in brightness, illuminating the straw-blond hair draped over his chin. He reaches forward, tucks a strand behind his ear.
Kaveh, he thinks, when the Rtawahist draws their star charts and makes their calculations, what would they find of our own constellations? Would they find what they already know, or something new, unexpected? What does fate have to say for us?
Because I think I—
Oh.
Here in Kaveh’s room, hand threading through the dim gold sea of his hair, the wisp of a smile curls into Alhaitham’s mouth.
He knows, now, that the incomprehensible fog in his mind is taking shape. There is a word to this, a meaning to this, after all. The answer is simple, has always been simple, but he for once is not disappointed in the winding path that he had to take to reach it.
He is rarely so sentimental, but he doesn’t mind this. It is clouding him, and yet he prefers it.
Kaveh has always been an exception. This is no revelation to him. It feels like coming home.
iv.
Water clings to the glass of their windows. The storm is temperamental, quiet and loud and back again, but it’s evened out for now. Still, the rain is falling so fast and so sideways that each drop seems to elongate until it vanishes, lance-like, against a surface—a wall, a roof, a sidewalk.
Alhaitham arrives home early, half-drenched. He retracts his malfunctioning umbrella and tosses in the bin, then starts to peel his cloak off his shirt.
Kaveh is curled up in the middle of their couch in the living room, reading one of Alhaitham’s books. Something about the cellular respiration of fungi. He is dry, unlike Alhaitham. And any lesser man would call him infuriatingly dry, but because Alhaitham is no lesser man, he will only call him irritatingly dry. See—less sway on his emotions.
Considering that, he’s likely stayed at home all day being unproductive. But Alhaitham hadn’t done much he considers productive today, either. He’d wasted half of the day transcribing a pointless argument between two Sages, silently adding his own interjections to the script, before the storm had picked up and they’d all gone home.
Alhaitham shrugs to himself, his gaze flickering to Kaveh’s inert form on the couch. With a final yank, he hangs his cloak on the hanger and makes a beeline for the bathroom, hoping to get there before Kaveh can notice him and snark about him getting soaked.
“You’re home early.” No such luck.
“Yes. Thank you for stating the obvious,” Alhaitham sighs. Momentarily, he debates the merits of ignoring any further conversation to take his much-needed shower, but his thoughts are interrupted by the sound of footsteps. The sensation of Kaveh’s hand on his shoulder, then on his hair. Ah. So touchy, and for what?
“And you’re soaked,” Kaveh continues, as if he hadn’t heard him at all. He pats at the damp edges of Alhaitham’s hair with a frown, and Alhaitham suppresses a shiver. “Did that umbrella of yours finally break? I told you its structural integrity was under question, and you brought it with you today anyway. Serves you right.”
“It’s not broken,” Alhaitham mutters, feeling the warmth seep into his ears. It drips into the back of his neck, threatens to creep into his ribcage. “It turned inside out and I couldn’t turn it back. It just needs some fixing.”
“Ah, but who will fix it?” Kaveh’s hand leaves his hair to press against his own forehead dramatically. There is something so light about him—something Alhaitham cannot dwell on right now. “I will. And you will watch me and dissect my every move and question any step I take that you don’t understand.”
“Yes. I will,” Alhaitham says, patting his hair back down. The warmth is curling into his chest. “I would like to understand, Kaveh, so that I can help you. Now if you’d excuse me, I need to take my shower.”
He turns on his heel and makes his exit. His scalp tingles in the places Kaveh touched.
Alhaitham takes his shower. He arrives at the living room in his new and much drier set of clothes, book in hand. Kaveh, sitting cross-legged on the couch again, hears him enter and quirks a smile, patting the empty space next to him.
He sits down next to Kaveh and doesn’t comment or move when his roommate leans into his personal space. Slowly, surely, he has let this last barrier slip between them, leaned into the touch instead of away from it. Now this closeness is something familiar. It feels…pleasant. It does.
But this—Kaveh with his head in Alhaitham’s lap, golden hair splayed out beneath him, holding up his book—has been a boundary not yet crossed, until now.
Kaveh is silent, even as Alhaitham knows it was a conscious decision, and he continues to read his book. He has simply made this movement, as if reaching out a hand. He waits for Alhaitham to respond: to gather it, to bring it to his chest. Or to push it all away, form new, much-needed walls around himself.
Alhaitham, too, says nothing. But the proximity is tugging at him, insistent. It is warming at the places they connect: not just his lap, but his chest, right where his heart thuds against his chest. They’re too close. Too close. Too—
Ah. I should say it, Alhaitham thinks. It’s been a while since I found it out. And I want to. Whatever this is—I want to preserve it.
Reel in a breath. Inhale. Unspool the thread. Exhale.
“Kaveh,” he says, quiet as if a revelation. It is a revelation, no matter how he phrases it. Kaveh is staring up at him, and he knows what he is about to say because there is a wonder tucked into the scarlet of his eyes. Alhaitham longs to pluck it out, study it. To have it all to himself. “I think I love you. I think I do.”
Kaveh gapes, wide-eyed, for all of two seconds, and Alhaitham revels in it. For this one moment, they are suspended in time. Kaveh. Alhaitham. Kaveh, Alhaitham, Kaveh and Alhaitham. It has always been the two of them, names intertwined on the tongue. It always will be. That promise lies, still-unspoken, between them.
Then the moment slips away and the corner of Kaveh’s mouth twitches into a half-smirk. “Do you now.”
“Yes. Should I say ‘unfortunately’?” Alhaitham rolls his eyes. “It did not feel that way to me at first, but I can append it now.”
“No, no. Listen. Alhaitham. I love you too,” Kaveh is laughing, but there is a lightness there that Alhaitham never knew he’d lost. His heart lifts again at the thought of it, threatens to flutter out of his chest. “But you know that already, don’t you.”
“I’ve known,” Alhaitham admits. “But now I truly know it. Now I can feel it. You’re the one well-versed in feelings, I’m sure you understand.”
“Yes, yes,” Kaveh laughs again, light and free and so, so sweet. Alhaitham wants to taste it, to press it up against his lip, until it sinks into him and coats his tongue. Until he’s drunk on it. “Feel it, you say. Alright, then. Show me, wouldn’t you?”
Alhaitham does. He leans down, presses a kiss to the corner of Kaveh’s mouth. Then another, and another, until he pulls back and Kaveh is laughing again, giddy, and sweeps Alhaitham into it too. With a tug, he’s pulled down onto the couch with him. They fall as one. Kaveh, Alhaitham, Kaveh and Alhaitham. Equals. Mirrors at last.
This sliver of time is theirs now, and theirs only. Alhaitham takes it into him, all their tumbling emotions and fluttering glances, and commits it to memory.