Chapter Text
It started in the raining season of that year. Early.
It started with an argument, which was normal enough. Kaveh came home late and trekked dirt into the house with his muddy shoes. Alhaitham, already on the couch with book in hand and dressed in enviable comfortable house clothes, regarded him with deep annoyance. It went something like this: You're late, said Alhaitham. Thanks, oh master of rhetorical and unnecessary statements, replied Kaveh sarcastically.
It ended up like this: Kaveh stripping off his soaked red cloak, and after a blur of other things happening, he was seated on the floor next to the divan with just a nightshirt. The wood was cool against his legs. Alhaitham's fingers carded through his hair, comb in hand, carefully working out the tangles.
Kaveh said, "You're being suspiciously nice." Waiting for the catch. Hoping for the catch. There was something familiar and ugly and cruel caught in his throat. It had ever reared its head in the presence of any kindness offered to him since he killed his father with careless words and robbed his mother of a chance at happiness in life.
Alhaitham was quiet for a moment. Then he answered, "I have no ulterior intentions. At the moment."
It was the wrong thing to say because it was too close to kindness. But Alhaitham was not to blame. Kaveh should have known better. He should know not to want. Not to sit there quivering not from the cold, but from the vice grip of want around his heart. He should have known better than to squeeze his eyes shut and latch onto the memory of those hands caressing his hair with all his might.
Fantasies were dangerous. Especially those rooted too readily in reality. Especially those you did not deserve.
Late that night, there was a tickle in Kaveh's throat. It developed into a cough, which was not entirely unexpected as he had walked through the pouring rain for at least ten minutes. Irritated and dismayed but not surprised, Kaveh stumbled out of his room and towards the kitchen, looking blearily for tea.
He found a still-warm pot of it already brewed and waiting for him on the dining table. Alhaitham's note was tucked beneath it, reminding him to go to bed. And because it was Alhaitham, it also made sure to remind Kaveh that he spent so much money on that bed, he'd better use it lest it be a wasteful purchase.
Kaveh muttered darkly under his breath about assholes who couldn't pass up a chance to needle an empty wallet where it hurt, drank the tea, and then went back to his work. Ten minutes later he was back for another cup, his cough nowhere soothed. Another ten minutes and he'd brought the entire pot back to his room.
The cough persisted. Something felt uncomfortably lodged in his airway, deep in his chest. Kaveh duly noted it down as “alarming, but not immediately life-threatening” and kept at his projects. He really would like these to be done; there were three in total, one being a house for an expecting couple. They had been driven out of the forest due to encroaching Withering, and had now returned to their birthplace after the phenomenon ceased. Kaveh had only six months to ensure they’d have the perfect abode before their child arrived, and he was determined that it would happen.
He had learned, this time. He’d gone down to the site himself to check on any and all pockets of Withering, paranoid from the Alcazarzaray incident. It was just as well that he did; there was a very small area where the mysterious blight lingered. Kaveh had cleared it out himself, thankful for the Traveler’s and Tighnari’s notes on just how to do it. Sure, he might’ve felt a little sick afterwards, and slogging through the rain to get home probably didn’t help, but Kaveh knew illness. He knew his body’s limit. This wasn’t it.
The cough might worsen into a fever, and Kaveh would take some medicines, bully Alhaitham into getting him soup for a few days, and it would slow him down but wouldn’t halt his work. He could make it to the six-months deadline, and when he wasn’t feeling well enough to give his best he’d just switch to working on the other two, less intensive ones. Easy.
…He ended up falling asleep at his desk some time in the night, after the pot of tea had run out. He woke to a pounding headache and another coughing fit that felt like it was ripping through his lungs this time, but whatever.
Kaveh stumbled blindly into the bathroom, eyes watering and nearly retching. He made it to the sink, clutching onto its side like a lifeline as he hacked and gagged. Tears streamed from his eyes, lungs seizing in agony. Panic seized his heart, and for a moment Kaveh stuttered, calling for Alhaitham with a voice that wasn’t there.
Finally, finally, something dislodged itself. Kaveh retched, bringing up a spatter of phlegm, specks of red that he tried not to think was blood, and…
…flower petals?
He leaned over the sink for a long, dazed moment, heart thundering and throat, lungs, his entire body throbbing in time with a pounding headache. He blinked at the terrifying, disgusting glob in front of him, its mix of purple and red and green, and wondered detachedly if he’d coughed up a piece of his lungs.
But when Kaveh finally got enough control of his shaking hand to turn the faucet on so it would wash away the sordid evidence of whatever the hell was wrong with him now , he saw the petals. Feeling out-of-body, he picked one up and held it to the light.
The texture was familiar in Kaveh’s fingers. The soft, powdery feeling of a Sumeru rose. He’d sprinkled a handful of these into the bath Alhaitham ran for him just last week. As Kaveh watched, however, it seemed to rot right in front of his eyes, wilting and turning slimy and disgusting.
He quickly washed his hands. Washed them until his skin was rubbed red. He didn’t know how long he stood there in front of the sink, floating in a feverish limbo between dissociation and nothingness.
But time passed, and Kaveh came back to himself eventually. He turned the faucet off, with a much steadier hand, and went back into his room.
There was a blanket discarded in a heap next to his desk. Kaveh blinked at it. It wasn’t his. The texture was too rough, more like something Alhaitham grabbed without looking from the market because Kaveh complained about the threadbare, ugly-looking one they currently had. No, that definitely did happen. Kaveh remembered, because he’d complained about this one too when Alhaitham brought it home and gone out to buy a nicer one.
Hadn’t he glimpsed this scratchy monstrosity in Alhaitham’s room last, though? Why was it here, on the floor?
The teapot was gone too, as was the dirty cup. There was a new mug there. Kaveh went over to it, squinting blearily.
Alhaitham’s handwriting scrawled at him under the mug of now-cold masala chai. It said, Go to sleep at a reasonable hour.
And just like that, things were normal again. Kaveh scowled and crumbled the piece of paper, then took a petulant sip of the chai. To his chagrin, it tasted very good, but he decided to claw back some of his smugness by realizing that it was good because Alhaitham clearly followed the recipe he drilled into him since moving in.
“You don’t tell me what to do,” Kaveh muttered at the crumpled note, content to be petulant in the privacy of his loneliness. Also because his raw throat and aching lungs couldn’t produce anything even a decibel louder.
A moment of sentimental madness led Kaveh to put the ball of paper down on his desk again instead of tossing it into the waste bin beneath, along with the half-empty mug of chai. He returned to his seat at his drafting table and picked up his quill again. His vision swam with black dots, but that’s fine. Doable. This is doable.
Kaveh closed his eyes. In the dark behind his eyelids, he saw that disgusting taint in the sink again; phlegm, what-he-couldn’t-admit-was-blood, and…flowers.
It was absurd. How bad his luck was. Kaveh snorted to himself. There have got to be some kind of annual award for Most Bad Bullshit Happened. Maybe then Kaveh could win something wholesale for once.
You are only ever content on winning when you’re set to lose something , a voice in Kaveh’s mind that sounded too much like Alhaitham’s said. Complete with that damned undertone of scolding. He could imagine him saying it too, arms crossed and brow furrowed just so.
Kaveh swore at the image of him in his mind. He could offer no rebuke because he was too tired to think of one. His lungs seized again, and Kaveh coughed.
At least his annoyance eclipsed his weariness, for now. Rummaging for a straight-edge to help with his shaking fingers, Kaveh went back to work.
The house. It had to be done in six months.
-
The front door opened an hour earlier than Kaveh expected it to. He jumped slightly in surprise, realized he’d spaced out where he was standing in the kitchen, and put down the knife he’d been chopping vegetables with to scowl at his roommate.
Alhaitham acknowledged him with…nothing. He just met Kaveh’s gaze, expression utterly blank and unflappable. There was already a book in his hand. He probably read it all the way home, letting people move out of his way instead of watching where he was going, like usual. Kaveh envied Alhaitham’s inhuman ability to make his existence everyone else’s problem, sometimes.
“Skipping out on work?” Kaveh snarked.
“There was a,” the slightest pause, “situation at the Akademiya requiring my attention. I resolved it, so it seems a fair trade-off that I get to leave early.”
“And did you actually consult anyone about your idea of the trade-off or did you just run off?” Kaveh replied, though he already knew the answer. He picked up the knife again, looked at the half-chopped vegetables on the cutting board for a moment as his muddled thoughts tried to pick up where they last left off.
A hand closed around his wrist. Kaveh blinked, jerking back in surprise. When had Alhaitham gotten there?
He tilted his head up, an irritated comment at the top of his tongue – and nearly kissed Alhaitham with how close their faces were.
Green-and-fire eyes pinned him down. At this proximity, they were even more disconcerting – mesmerizing – than Kaveh already knew they were. The kohl Alhaitham lined his eyes with made them seem all the brighter in contrast. There were precious gems and geodes worth several mansions that weren’t as beautiful.
Kaveh swallowed. His heart squeezed, painful with want–
–and then he immediately had to turn away as a vicious fit of coughing overtook him.
An arm wound around his waist, keeping Kaveh steady and in place as he hacked into his elbow. Kaveh tried to shove Alhaitham off, but the hand had his wrist hadn’t left. It tightened instead, forcing him to drop the knife he was only vaguely aware he was still holding. “Easy,” Alhaitham murmured, still too close, and the hand finally moved, resting on Kaveh’s shoulder. “Easy. Breathe.”
His voice was right in Kaveh’s ear, but barely enough to be heard over his pounding pulse. Kaveh tried the advice because he didn’t know what else he could do, tried to inhale in between coughs – and immediately choked on something.
He still had enough presence of mind to be alarmed, to remember what had come up that morning. Kaveh wrenched himself free from Alhaitham, lost his balance and slammed his hip painfully into the opposite counter. But he shoved him away when Alhaitham tried to reach for him again and stumbled to the kitchen sink, hand clasped firmly over his mouth.
There was an unnamed but all-consuming terror in Kaveh’s heart. Whatever happened, Alhaitham could not be allowed to see the petals.
The coughs did not subside. They only re-summoned that horrible tightness in his chest, the feeling of something lodged in his throat once more. Kaveh glanced around the kitchen, his vision irritatingly obscured by Alhaitham’s bulk as he insisted on moving closer still, and finally alighted on a box of napkins.
He pointed at it with a shaking hand. Alhaitham at least got the hint and grabbed it, passing it to him. Kaveh yanked it out of his grip, pulled out a few, then spat something that tasted and smelled horrendous in his mouth into one.
The stench of it – a combination of sickening copper (yes, it was definitely blood), phlegm, and rotting flowers – nearly made Kaveh empty whatever was left of his stomach. He didn’t, he couldn’t. Alhaitham was watching, standing stiffly only steps away, his eyes wide in concern but Kaveh knew better than to think he wasn’t seeing and dissecting every single movement Kaveh made.
Instead he viciously yanked out a few more napkins, wadded up the one that held the evidence to his newest misfortune, and staggered over to the trash to throw it in there.
Then he turned on the kitchen sink’s faucet and stuck his whole head and hands under it.
The water drowned out the horrible rasping noises Kaveh knew he was making. It sounded bad to his own ears, so he could imagine what kind of ribbing Alhaitham would give him for it. He’d take a little humiliation for this display of madness over Alhaitham’s concern . That, Kaveh could not stomach right now. (He never could; he could not gracefully accept things he knew deep down he didn’t deserve. But especially not now , with how ill and ragged he felt.)
A small eternity passed.
Kaveh straightened, ran his hand through his soaked hair, turned off the faucet, and looked at the pot on the fire. He’d forgotten to turn the stove on. “Get out,” he said with as much authority as he could muster. It wasn’t much. “I’ll make dinner.”
“You will do no such thing,” Alhaitham replied. His voice was stone cold, twice as solid. Kaveh closed his eyes. He hated him, just a little – not really – for being the one without the mystery new illness and the black spots dancing in his vision. “Go lay down. And I mean actually lay down, not ‘sit down at your drawing table’.”
“I’m fine,” Kaveh said sharply. “It was just– a cold. Colds won’t kill me.”
Fingers closed around his arm, pulling. Kaveh tried to dig his heels in, but he didn’t manage it. He tried to shake Alhaitham off; didn’t manage it either. Fuck. Fuck . But he could still refuse to look at him, and he did.
“Kaveh,” Alhaitham said.
He sounded imploring more than commanding, and damn it, damn it–
Kaveh lifted his head. They looked at each other.
Alhaitham was, thankfully, not as close as he was before. But his mouth was tense, his jaw too, the way he often was when he was deeply worried. Guilt sank its fangs into Kaveh’s heart. He hadn’t seen him like this since he dragged him out of Lambad’s that night what felt like a lifetime ago, given him a key to his house. A debt Kaveh still hadn’t managed to resolve, even now.
“I don’t–” Kaveh began. Then he switched his tune. “I’m hungry. And sick people need soup .”
Alhaitham closed his eyes with a sigh. “Fine. Soup,” he said. “I’ll even make it bland for my senior’s delicate palate.”
Kaveh aimed a light kick at his leg, which Alhaitham dodged deftly. The hand Alhaitham had on his arm still had not retreated, though its strength had laxened. Kaveh tried to gently shake him off – enough was enough; he wouldn’t tolerate coddling – and Alhaitham at least took the hint, letting go.
But because he was insufferable and couldn’t let Kaveh have anything the whole way, he switched to wrapping an arm around his waist instead and marched Kaveh to the living room, ignoring his squawking protests. There, Alhaitham unceremoniously pushed him onto the divan, only blinked blithely as Kaveh called him an unflattering word, and went back into the kitchen. He made sure to have Kaveh see him switch on his earphones’ noise-canceling function.
“You–” Kaveh cut himself off with a cough, then several more. By the end of it, he was quite spent. His head spun unpleasantly, and he had to submit to the allure of the divan’s soft, worn comfort. Sighing, Kaveh let himself drop onto it, curling into himself.
As soon as his eyes closed, his body decided it wanted to forget gravity. All but his chest, it seemed, which felt impossibly heavy. Kaveh breathed in, then out, wincing when he felt the labored drag of air.
What was this, now? Some new and exciting iteration to pneumonia? Had Kaveh eaten three Sumeru roses whole and forgotten about it? He hadn’t gone drinking in the last few days. The last time he’d seen Sumeru roses, it had been down near the building site for his client’s house, near the Withering pocket he cleared out.
But Kaveh was sure he’d have remembered if he inhaled or ingested that many petals. And there was something deeply wrong with the ones he’d coughed up. Hadn’t one rotted right in front of his eyes?
It was possible that it was a fevered hallucination, however. Kaveh frowned, touching his forehead with a hand. He didn’t feel fevered. If anything, he just felt heavy. Exhausted. That was normal with his most recent excursions. Everything was normal aside from the moments of lightheadedness followed by those coughing fits. Which was normal too, considering Kaveh needed air he couldn’t get when he was trying not to hack his lungs out.
Damn it. That house for the expecting couple had barely moved past its first draft.
Kaveh fell asleep thinking about a cottage at the edge of the woods and its lovely little yard, with a great tree and flowers dotting the windowsills. He imagined a blond man and his wife laughing in a spacious, beautiful living room as their golden-haired little boy played with blocks. He heard his father say, “Well done! You’re definitely going to raise up palaces someday.”
He woke cold and aching, from the heart to the soul. His world was shadowed and blurry, the sound of rain muted behind glass. The shape of a man towered over him. Fingers disentangled themselves from Kaveh’s hair. Lightning illuminated gray strands, just barely. It could’ve been a figment of Kaveh’s bleary imagination.
“Are you hungry?” the silhouette asked, in a voice very like Alhaitham’s but that wasn’t right. Alhaitham would never sound so kind. Alhaitham would’ve scolded Kaveh for sleeping somewhere he could find him, either on the couch or at the kitchen table or at the tavern’s counter.
Thus determining this was not his roommate, Kaveh’s unreasonable, stupid heart ached a different way. It had seemed so like Alhaitham, or what he wanted Alhaitham could be to him, perhaps. And that was unkind. That was cruel. He had no right to want Alhaitham in any ways. He had already, was already, demanding more than he deserved.
He coughed, wheezed air past the sick feeling of fluttery mass in his chest, and managed, “Stop.”
The silhouette was quiet for a time. Kaveh closed his eyes again, exhausted to the bones. “Don’t– haunt me any…more.”
I can’t have you anyway, Kaveh wanted to add, but he couldn’t choke it out past his closing throat.
Then there was only the sound of rain, the sound of Kaveh’s audible, rasping breath, and the distant thunder. For a very, very long time.
Then there were fingers in Kaveh’s hair, a warm hand cradling his cheek. He couldn’t help himself. He turned his face to lean into it, trembling.
“Haunting is for ghosts,” said the silhouette in Alhaitham’s voice. “ I am right here, Kaveh. I will not be banished.”
“Stubborn,” Kaveh replied. It was all he managed before darkness claimed him.