Chapter Text
The Inazuma City skyline triumphs over any over skyline he’s ever laid eyes on. Or at least, it’s far better than any old view he gets from the stuffy townhouse he shares back in Sumeru.
Outside his hotel window, bright, brilliant lights line the post-sunset horizon as orange fades to a deep sapphire sky. A perfect, seamless meld of modern and historic — where the lower land glows with bustling life and city lights, the Grand Narukami Shrine sits high on the neighboring mountain with its own subtle, aetherial aura. Untouched, clean, spiritual.
Kaveh wishes he had come with the ability to meander around and garner inspiration for his projects. Instead, he’s cooped up in this damn hotel for this damn project manager who desperately needs his hired professionals to do the work in person only. Jokes on that guy, seeing as it gives Kaveh free travel — and a reprieve from his roommate — for a week or so.
“Mm, send me the details in an email if you can, I’m just finishing the floorplan of the office space now.”
Sitting on his bed, half-gazing out the window, Kaveh chews on his thumbnail with his phone to his ear. The project manager on the other end hums in response as well, and Kaveh resists a shiver at the low baritone that comes through the receiver.
He may or may not have a thing for voices. Timbre, tone. Not just voices, though — there has to be a brain attached to it. And this man on the other end has a brain, and a nice deep voice, but the brain seems to leave entirely when they’re discussing the project over the phone.
“The email’s been sent. I will see you in the meeting tomorrow, Mr. Kaveh.” Such a waste of a lovely voice when it has no charisma, no wit or flirt to it.
Quite a handsome man, though. A rather influential person in Inazuma himself, and though his people skills are fantastic when face to face, his conversational skills all but disappear otherwise. A shame, really— the man has lovely hands and such sharp features. And of course, the voice, so full of potential…
The call ends, leaving Kaveh buzzing with disappointment, lost in his own budding fantasies of deep voices and real charisma to bounce off of. Real allure.
And the fact that he hasn’t had sex since he first started staying at his new place adds a real sprinkle on top of that. Ugh.
He blinks in the low lamplight of his room as his phone screen bleeds into another incoming call. The name Roommate scrolls ominously across the screen.
Distaste sours his tongue, Speak of the devil, so they say, but then again an unfortunate incubus of a seed plants alongside it ringing a similar tune: speaking of deep voices…
His thumb initiates the receiving of the call and he curls his knees to his chest on the bed, staring out the window at the city as he lets out a biting, “What?”
“A nice greeting,” is toned back with obvious sarcasm. “Did you look before you answered, or am I to believe you answer all of your calls so impolitely?”
That buzz under his skin from before rears its ugly head as soon as both of Kaveh’s previous boxes become checked off right in his ear: a rich voice, and wit to bounce off of.
The problem existing within his roommate, Alhaitham, is that he happens to check many of Kaveh’s boxes when it comes to desirable traits. Handsome, intelligent, confident, and yet aloof. The issue comes around in the makings of a man that pisses him off rather than turns him on.
“I did in fact see it was you calling— so then I suppose next you’ll say, ‘Oh, so you formulate a greeting specific just for me, how nice,’ or something else to try and once again counter me,” says Kaveh back, and he doesn’t care how the words drip with disdain.
“You know me so well.”
Damn that buzz under his skin. He’d gotten all in his head about a stupid desire of his, and now each time Alhaitham speaks, the tiny sprout of curiosity stretches its roots deeper in his stomach. If he doesn’t nip this soon, it’ll grow into something… undesirable. A pretty, poisonous flower.
He edges his nerves into impatience. “Why did you call, Alhaitham?”
“You left some things out and I was not certain how to handle them.”
Oh. Not too bad, then. A simple enough topic. He sits back against the headboard of the bed, propping a couple of too-fluffy pillows behind him. “I’ve been gone for a few days, you know. If it’s food, you can just throw it out.”
“No, it’s some blueprints on the tea table in the living room. They’re labeled with Inazuma City at the top. Are they relevant to your work?”
A genuinely curious lilt follows Alhaitham’s words and makes Kaveh huff to dispel the delighted flutter in his stomach. “No, those were initial drafts. I uploaded them to my computer already.” He frowns. “Is that all? You could have texted that to me.”
“Just making sure that you hadn’t accidentally ruined your entire career in one fell swoop,” he says with that stupid half-teasing voice. The kind he knows is reserved for him, considering he’s the only one Alhaitham talks to like he’s simultaneously the largest thorn in his side and the greatest source of his amusement.
Kaveh lets his disdain morph into a bitter mutter as he picks at the quilting of the hotel duvet. “As far as I recall, you were surprised when I told you I even got a career.”
The pause that sits between them exists as an unspoken rebuttal. They both know the means and matter by which Kaveh came to become Alhaitham’s roommate in the first place. The economy is not kind, even to once-prodigies — and he’d certainly once been so far fallen from grace that he thought himself Icarus, already plunged into the cold, cruel sea.
His next sigh falls to the receiver. “If you have nothing else to say, I’m going to go—”
“Tell me about your work.”
A blink. “What?”
“Your project. The draft designs are attributed to the Kamisato Clan,” Alhaitham states with clear interest instead of menial curiosity.
“They are.” Kaveh clears his throat, glancing around his room as the last of the sapphire sky dims into pitch-black night. It’s late, but a strange adrenaline coats his bones, making his frame shiver. “I was just speaking with the project lead, who is also the commissioner and head of the clan. A nice fellow.”
“Kamisato Ayato.”
“... Sometimes it frightens me about some of the things you know.”
“The Kamisato clan are quite famous,” Alhaitham reasons, and a faded noise comes through the phone; faded but sharp, definitely a turning of the page in a book in Alhaitham’s lap. Typical. “Their family history is long, but exists now as a family of politicians. Interesting that this one has his nose so far in the architectural proceedings that he speaks directly to you.”
A light jab. Kaveh brushes it aside with a scoff. “Only you would set aside the sheer opportunity that comes with his involvement in this project. This is huge for networking since he does have his nose in it!”
“Oh, so you’re making friends, are you?”
Every fucking time. Every time that half-teasing lilt comes out, Kaveh’s stomach dips. “He’s not my friend.” He sniffs, turning his head away even though Alhaitham won’t see such a movement. “Though I wouldn’t object to it. There’s certainly something about him…”
They let that trail off in the airspace between them. A twinge of embarrassment settles pink over Kaveh’s cheeks at such a needless admission before his roommate actually speaks again. “If you truly had a thing for him, you would have already gushed about him at length.” A hum on the other side suggests Alhaitham’s brain working too hard over something entirely menial. “A huge networking opportunity, with caveats?”
Kaveh pinches between his brows, letting out a long, relenting sigh. It’s no use arguing anything when Alhaitham is objectively correct this time. "He can't keep a flow in casual conversation," Kaveh complains openly. "He's kind of charming in person, but over the phone he has no… wit. It’s like he’s an entirely different and entirely more boring man."
"What is it exactly in wit that’s lacking?"
"Mm?"
"Your calls. Wouldn’t acknowledging that he has charm in person allow you to overlook a stale conversation over the phone?"
He should think the logic sound. But admitting that just a nice voice and a sometimes-charismatic person isn’t enough might give off too many hints that he gets off on such things.
Still, he tries to round out the conversation. "If he has no means of keeping up stimulating conversation over the phone, it lowers my interest, is all."
"So should he have a nice voice but no wit, it wouldn't be enough for you?"
This question is valid too. It makes him all the angrier, feeling the unavoidable cornering about to occur that always, always makes him weak to the whim of that he’s loath to admit: Alhaitham sets the bar for a good voice. Tone, timbre, vocabulary, wit and turn of phrase, to be able to fool him into facing his own problems head on such as he does. In a further, darker corner of his psyche, he revels in the fact that such a man exists so close in proximity to him, to secretly fantasize about after arguments.
And the problem with someone setting the bar so high is that it creates a long line of incomparable disappointments. Other people who simply don't shape up.
"No. It wouldn't," he breathes back, willingly subjecting himself to more of this farcical dance.
Alhaitham's smooth, disbelieving retort of, "Of course it wouldn't," makes him fold his legs into his stomach so he doesn’t have to face the cyclone slowly turning in it.
The line goes quiet. But despite Alhaitham's insistence for more quiet in his daily diet, Alhaitham himself decides to fill the silence anyway. "What I've gathered is that your project manager is charming when it's a networking opportunity and stale when it's not."
Kaveh gapes. "Don't make rude assumptions about the people I work with!"
"Is it rude? Or is it simply an unbiased observation?"
"All of your 'unbiased observations' are rude."
"Thus settles the point."
"I hate you," he snarls.
"Something tells me you're quite enjoying this phone conversation, actually."
"And what would that be?"
"You haven't hung up yet."
"That’s the line you’ve drawn? You’re grasping at straws here, Alhaitham."
"I’d wager our time speaking has been at least leagues better than the dreary conversation you’ve had with your project manager, hmm?"
Why on Earth would he say that?! "Emphasis on hating you."
"Still haven't hung up."
Kaveh grits his teeth in the intermission of their rapid-fire speaking as his heart races through it. "You don't know what his voice even sounds like!"
"So it is the quality of voice that keeps you interested?"
No— no, it’s most definitely not only that. His hand digs nails into the bed until his knuckles strain white. "Maybe it is,” he says, contradicting his earlier statements fully— but with the intent of not allowing Alhaitham to deduce any more than that. “Maybe he has a deep voice, and he talks me through his plans for our project step by step in a hypnotizingly gorgeous tone and doesn’t pester me with annoying jabs."
"This hypothetical sounds more like a sexual fantasy," Alhaitham muses around a clear, unseen smile.
Kaveh chokes and trips and falls over his torrential thoughts, of anything he could possibly say to that to make it sound convincingly untrue. "Maybe it is," he says again, weaker.
Hang up. Hang up. He inhales, sharp, a piercing to the air between them right as Alhaitham makes an interested noise. "Then I'm fully convinced this manager of yours has no worthy skill in any sexual capacity, considering the prior way you described his casual nature. A smooth voice and pretty words would never be enough to satisfy that sort of thing."
The thread offered to him is thin and confusing. Kaveh grabs at it with blazing hot fingertips. "Don't pretend you know better," he shoots back, feeble to how precisely Alhaitham cuts through his inner workings.
"I do know better."
"Liar." It can’t be true. He can’t be the entire package, the entire list of checked boxes.
God, where has his breath gone?
"What makes you say so?" Alhaitham pushes.
He needs evidence for such an accusation. But Kaveh's brow turns down and a reasonable response occurs to him: one cannot prove something does not exist. It’s not him who needs to provide evidence. Rather—
"You haven't proven it to me yet."
A challenge. An actual, veritable challenge. He tries to push aside the feeling of slowly digging himself a hole he cannot escape from as a dangerous heat blossoms between his thighs.
"You would like an example," Alhaitham presumes, tone even. Kaveh shivers openly at it, emboldened by this sightless connection forming that gets further and further out of hand.
"As is implied," he says back, mouthy. Playing it off, yet pushing it just that bit further. "And should you not provide one, I'll have to assume you did, in fact, lie."
"How would you like me to prove it, then?"
A generous offer. His entire body shocks with a tremor of excitement. Thrill, he recognizes and turns his nose from in pride. Before he can answer, Alhaitham adds a sarcastic, "I suppose if anything, I should merely try and be the exact opposite of your manager."
"Which is?" he questions tersely.
"Witty, of course, and not dry."
"You know, Alhaitham, you're doing a great job so far."
Crackling through the air between them, Alhaitham offers, "Shall I demonstrate what it is you wish to hear?"
Kaveh pauses. A startled pause — a naked pause.
"Yes," he answers, because he must.
How else will he learn if not to punish himself with the evidence fed directly in his ear?
Alhaitham obliges his self-destruction with a simple lit match. "He'll compliment you."
Kaveh huffs in amusement. Is that all? He hums to humor Alhaitham's thought, picking at a string hanging from the hem of his black trousers. He doesn't need to express any thoughts yet, though. Alhaitham barrels on, voice drawling and inquisitive in the silence of his hotel room.
The match drops.
"You have a charmed smile as he tells you how pretty you were at the project meeting this morning." Kaveh's heart jumps in his throat. A painting laid out between them, a scene. Pretty? he latches onto deliriously. "He'll tell you that your hair falling in your face as you drafted projects over the table made him want to brush some behind your ear, just to have an excuse touch you. He's romantic, but it's all fantasy."
"It could be real," Kaveh retorts without thinking.
"Could it?" Alhaitham grunts a skeptical noise that makes Kaveh's stomach swoop alongside its cadence. "But it's not what you want, is it. If he were better, he'd tell you how enticing your blouse looked when you shifted a certain way, showing just enough extra skin to make him want more." Fuck. "He'd tell you how much he wanted to touch you, with more than simple, meaningless gestures."
It's criminally easy to envision. A hand slipping into the deep V of his blouse, his back to someone's chest — not the manager, as if it ever was — and his stomach tensing with unanticipated touch. A golden ring on a middle finger teasing his skin with cool metal, and the sleek fabric of his shirt bending away from his chest as intruding touch dishevels his composure.
"He'd beg for a taste. How even a hand wouldn't be enough to feel how your body shifts under another." Kaveh's legs spread on the bed unevenly, his loose slacks suddenly not loose enough for Alhaitham's smooth words and descriptive vision. Too descriptive. Too alluring not to latch onto. "How he'd beg to kiss your neck." His pulse kicks. "How his hand would go lower."
He feels it, then — phantom touch to his skin, delving in the dips of his pecs to the plane of his abdomen, teasing the trail of blond hair that sinks below his slacks. How low? he wants to ask. To the slight dip between his stomach and pelvis? Or lower, where heat has built enough to make his pussy pulse with the beginnings of arousal?
Shame makes him suck in a breath of stale hotel air. The AC kicks on, and he shivers until his teeth chatter, at war with the fire Alhaitham's set within him.
Nerves force him to flinch when Alhaitham’s voice returns to his ear. “You’re quiet,” he says, and it’s not mercy, but at least it lets Kaveh float back down into his head.
“I’m—” Is he really about to say this? “I’m imagining it,” he mumbles, shy to his slowly piquing interest that flows straight into exasperation. “What else am I supposed to do?”
A soft noise hits the line. A huff. “Hang up.”
The hand toying with the hem of his pants dares to inch fingertips down in, until he feels the first croppings of blond curly hairs. This is not sane. It’s not.
“I can’t,” he says, lost to the fantasy once again.
“Very interesting,” Alhaitham says back; Kaveh feels the hairs on the back of his neck rise, as if there are eyes on him that he cannot see, undressing him in a way that goes beyond mere accessory.
Another easy thing to imagine: deep green eyes on him, watching his every move, guiding him when words cannot. And that siren’s call of Alhaitham’s voice makes him sigh and tense up all at once. “I wonder where your imagination has taken you.” Such a hypnotizing lull, which Kaveh’s brain sinks more and more into. “You’re imagining it,” he considers, “but how far has your mind wandered?”
It trails into an implicit request for a response. He doesn’t want to answer. The beat of silence that follows, insists.
“You said—” How does he broach this without direct self-incrimination? His hand would go lower, he’d said, and Kaveh grasps onto it for dear life. “You said it…” — your hand — “...it goes lower. How low?” he breathes out quickly, his own traitorous hand poised midway in another brush through the curly, coarse hairs covering his mons pubis — where his fingertips dare to slip just that much further. “How low?” he asks again, falling apart to his own daring.
“Kaveh.”
He says his name like a reprimand. A rebuking, a prayer to some god who’s clearly not listening. How can it possibly be that this is what gives Alhaitham true pause? Didn't he ask?
Be he sinner or sinless, they’ve dug this hole together. May as well fucking die in it.
“Tell me,” he insists, voice curling into uneasy provocation. Sinner in body and mind as he breathes, “I want to know where I should be touching myself, Alhaitham.”
The slow inhale on the other side sounds exactly like their shared coffin lid sliding into place.
“You’re getting bold,” Alhaitham offers in lieu of silence.
“You’re losing your touch,” Kaveh snarks back, finally getting his footing.
And Alhaitham always, always knows how to pull the rug right back out from under him.
“I’m hanging up," he says, gentle and provoking, "but... do let me know just how far you go after this, Kaveh.”
Floundering, Kaveh sits up in his bed and rips his hand from his underwear, mouth hung open, stupefied. He barely gets a strangled, confused noise out before the line goes completely dead.
That bastard.
That fucking bastard!
God, what does he even do with this now? A heat lies wound tight between his legs, heat curated from Alhaitham’s voice, his stupidly hot, detailed imagination. The residual of it feeds off his arousal that refuses to fade.
Frustration mixes with his desire. The jackass wants to know how far he’ll go? Fine.
Kaveh unzips his pants fully, sleek fabric of his fly parted to expose the edge of stained underwear. No need for preamble. He can feel the way his folds sit sticky against the cotton bridge, a tempting sensation. Warm. His fingers delve in again, this time with the goal of finishing this damn mess.
Warm slick gathers on his middle and index finger. He parts them around the jut of his clit— to where his imagination has remained poisoned enough to think so clearly of Alhaitham’s hand full of lightly-calloused fingers. He’s felt them before, at the small of his back when working through crowds in Lambad’s bar, or at the simplest brushes against his shoulder to catch his attention.
And catch his attention he has.
He hisses at the slow drag he imposes on himself. Around his leaking hole instead of inside it, a tease, bringing an easier glide up and around the engorged, sensitive jut of his clit. So sensitive. He avoids it at first for a reason— to let his own tolerance build until he needs the stimulation, right when it’ll drive him off the edge instead of riding it to Hell and back.
The slightest sound of his fingers schlicking against his folds grows stronger, loud enough to be heard even through two layers of fabric. His hips lift just barely enough to meet his own rhythm. When squinting eyes at the ceiling becomes too embarrassing even for himself, he covers them with his forearm and lets his heavy breathing fill the room instead. Not the noise he wants. Not the voice he wants.
He’d beg for a taste.
Kaveh bucks against his two fingers. Alhaitham’s words haunt him even more now that his eyes can’t remind him he’s alone.
A taste. Would Alhaitham taste him? Run his tongue flat between his lips and under his hood until he needs more? Begs for it?
Part of him thinks Alhaitham to be cruel enough to make him beg. Another smaller part latches onto the literal — he did say he’d be the one begging for a taste, after all — or perhaps that was his sick attempt at painting his project manager in a negative light back when the fantasy lived as a mockery instead.
He lets out a low whine at his own straggling thoughts. Too distracted. He refocuses on the mounting pleasure, finally allowing the smooth pads of his fingers to rub over his clit in tiny, hypnotizing circles. Maybe Alhaitham thinks he wouldn’t beg, but then maybe Kaveh should make him anyway. Deny him the satisfaction of indulgence until he knows how to practice humility.
Please. Please. Let me touch you. Kaveh whimpers again, feeling wet spill and stain his underwear worse and worser. Let me taste you. Why can he hear it so clearly?
See it?
Alhaitham between his thighs, eyes glinting with curiosity and danger as his mouth covers his slit. Licking messy spit to mix with his own wet, swirling a tongue in praise around his clit until he sees nothing but a sky full of stars. He seems the type to devour, not merely taste. To cover him whole and suck him dry until neither of them can breathe, two fingers slipped in knuckle-deep until they've both drowned—
Just as his body buzzes with the beginnings of a harshly built orgasm, he finally lets a moan spill out openly from his lips, his hips bucking up as a single, damning, “Alhaitham,” paints the walls of the hotel room sacrilegious.
It washes over him as does a high tide flooding an open shore. Raucous and choppy, then all-encompassing, sunken in until every nerve and synapse reconnects to communicate sheer pleasure.
His breath returns at the surface. Bleary-eyed, he uses his untainted hand to unlock his phone, and he’s on autopilot as he mindlessly opens the camera. Front-facing. Aimed at the dirtied patch of blond hair above the hem of his underwear where his fingers splay open, webbed with stringy cum.
Snap.
Decent. Poor lighting, but it gets the message across.
Swipe. Submit. Send. Whoosh.
Fuck. Fuck. Panic. Shit. Wait. No. Commit. Commit. He asked for it. Demanded it. What’s one measly little picture of his stained underwear and glistening fingers?
Adrenaline high, he almost drops his phone as it vibrates with a single text in unhurried response.
‘Good to know you’re obedient underneath all that fuss.’
Kaveh’s face contorts into embarrassed anger as he shoots back a rushed ‘fuck you’ and tosses his phone to the side. It bounces off the bed entirely.
He should clean up.
But staring at the ceiling lamenting the faded pulse of his arousal and the disdain crowded around it certainly sounds more appealing.
Checks off all the boxes, indeed. Damn it.