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Alhaitham, being no longer in his living room, decides the first thing he should do is sit down. He does so.
He’s in an Akademiya dorm room. It’s early afternoon. A few moments ago it was late at night and he was speaking with Kaveh, who was in the kitchen of Alhaitham’s own house. Alhaitham was leaning against the couch in the living room and flipping through a book that wasn’t worth the paper it’d been printed on. The book is also gone.
Alhaitham only began dreaming again eight months ago, but he’s confident that this isn’t a dream. It looks, with a great deal more specificity than could be possible even for his sleeping mind, like Kaveh’s dorm room. Books of design, materials science, desert exploration, runic translation, and piano theory are piled on the desk. There is, laying on the bedsheets by Alhaitham’s hand, a cheap but fashionable earring he remembers vividly for the way it had caught the light in their single shared lecture, late afternoon in the hall below the Sanctuary. Semiotics and Glassmaking in Deshret’s Kingdom. He skims the earring briefly with a fingertip then moves his hand to his lap.
He considers what this might mean.
The door swings open and Kaveh says, “Haitham, can you take some of these? I borrowed everything I could find on desert Seelies but it’s really almost nothing, like I can’t tell if we’re running into another ridiculous knowledge restriction again or if genuinely no one’s ever tried to track the Seelie courts in Upper Setekh, which would be so typical, wouldn’t it, so I grabbed everything else I saw on the—”
Kaveh’s face is bright, young, flushed, freckled, happy. He’s wearing an Akademiya uniform and is as tall as the last time Alhaitham saw him (fifteen minutes ago) which means he’s an inch or two shorter than the last time Alhaitham saw him, because the uniform boots are heeled. He’s staring at Alhaitham with the aforementioned flush spreading like dye over the silk of his cheeks.
“Kaveh,” Alhaitham says. “Don’t freak out. I believe I’ve been displaced in time.”
“Oh, I,” Kaveh says. His hands start to go slack beneath the stack of books leaning against his chest, so Alhaitham takes the books from him and sets them on the chair beside the desk.
“You—yes,” Kaveh says, the flush climbing down his neck and up to his ears now. “I—oh.”
He couldn’t be more than eighteen. Which would make it, assuming this is in fact the past Alhaitham remembers, which he really has no way to determine without further investigation, the year Alhaitham himself turned sixteen.
“I developed a bodybuilding habit when I was twenty and attempting to do some metabolic experiments that ultimately proved unfruitful,” Alhaitham says. “You can touch my shoulders if that would get this over with.”
Kaveh, whose left hand had begun to drift with little apparent thought towards Alhaitham’s bare deltoid, snaps back so hard his head smacks into the doorframe. “I’m so sorry!” he says. “I’m so sorry, this is so rude of me, I should never have assumed, I’m so sorry, and you’re so much older, and you never said—”
Alhaitham sighs.
Kaveh stands bent over the kitchen sink, working his jaw and watching his cuticles slowly go to ribbons in the soapy water. Not literally. Literally enough. He should have let Alhaitham buy the stupid gentle dish soap that didn’t ruin Kaveh’s cuticles. Kaveh stops himself from thinking further on Alhaitham’s incredibly domineering dish soap opinions.
Alhaitham has gone quiet in the living room, but that doesn’t mean very much. The state of their immortal souls could be at stake and Alhaitham would still bar himself from Celestia before he continued a conversation he continued boring. Or a fight.
Kaveh works his jaw harder, tension dull and radiant above one eye. It’s not impossible for him to wait Alhaitham’s silence out. He’s done it before and he could do it again. It’s a way to end a fight, and wouldn’t it be nice, ever, to end a fight? Without starting another? Could they hope for that much peace, at the least?
Suds climb up Kaveh’s wrists. The number of nights he’s spent in this same position, mirroring himself like silvered glass over the past year and whatever he’s lived in Alhaitham’s house, frustrated and sad and exhausted by this whole situation, feels suddenly like a millstone around his neck. What a joke.
“Look, I get that you don’t think conversation is worth your time!” Kaveh shouts as he slams the cutting board into the sink. “But pretending like this isn’t a problem just because you’re bored is not actually a long-term solution to the problem!”
Silence. “Haitham, I know you’re still out there!”
“Kaveh?” Alhaitham calls back. His voice ends on a high and uncharacteristic quaver.
Kaveh throws himself through the door to the living room.
There’s a different Alhaitham standing in the soft streetlamp glow of the window. There’s an infant Alhaitham. He’s skinny, teetering, his hair too long over his ears, where are his headphones?, god, look at those stretch marks on his shoulders, red as fresh paint—
Alhaitham is looking up at the ceiling, head tipped back, balancing poorly on his heels as he turns. His head follows the lines of the woodwork. “Is this—” His voice cracks, squeaking in a way that Kaveh was viciously self-conscious of when he was young and Alhaitham never gave a shit about. Alhaitham didn’t start the masculinizing meds until he was at least fifteen, supplies a portion of Kaveh’s heart that very rarely forgets. His voice hasn’t cracked since they were—
Alhaitham looks from the vaulted ribs of his home to Kaveh. His eyes are enormous. He appears full of stars. “Is this the research center… you designed?” he asks. “This is our project?”
“Oh, no,” says Kaveh.
He’s wearing the undershirt and trousers of an Akademiya uniform. The permanent frowning divot between his eyebrows has yet to form. The longer he looks at Kaveh, his pale eyes flickering from Kaveh’s face to hands to chest to belt, the more he appears, ludicrously, to blush.
“Oh, no,” says Kaveh, as Alhaitham trips backwards over the footstool and lands flat on his ass.
Kaveh makes himself coffee, and the infant Alhaitham some tea, and then also himself some tea, because he gets flustered and forgets about the coffee by the time he’s brought Alhaitham the tea. Alhaitham of course doesn’t look up, because he’s pulled between ten and fifteen books off Alhaitham’s—his—the house’s shelves.
“I told you not to read anything!” Kaveh says, very stressed. He sets the tea down with a too-strong clatter of cup to coaster.
Alhaitham continues to not look up. His head is bowed and still, his finger trailing down the margins of the text far, Kaveh knows, behind the actual path of his eyes, little more than a measure of his conquest. “Sure,” Alhaitham says, which is an obvious and borderline insulting afterthought.
Kaveh takes the book out of his hand, not gently. It’s a history of inter-Darshan conflict within the Akademiya, one of normal-aged-Alhaitham’s favorite casual reads. “I told you that, given the—circumstances, the situation, you should try not to learn too much about the state of the city right now. Is that so hard to understand?”
“You don’t have an Akasha terminal on your ear,” Alhaitham says, with barely a quirk of his teenage eyebrow. “And my terminal can’t connect to the network. Is that not revelation enough?”
Kaveh frowns. “I—you shouldn’t notice that.”
“Sure,” Alhaitham says. He picks another text off the stack.
Kaveh exhales sharply so as not to steal another book from a teenager. “This is serious, Haitham. We don’t know anything about this situation!”
“Mm-hm,” Alhaitham says. He opens the second book.
“Stop that, if you’re stuck here or something because I didn’t keep you from—”
“Of course it would all be your fault—”
“Listen,” Kaveh says, slapping his palms to the coffee table, “so long as you’re—”
“Displaced in time?” Alhaitham says, and Kaveh snaps, “Let me finish my damn sentence!”
Kaveh realizes he’s made an error because Alhaitham actually drops the book, looking up at Kaveh with big, startled eyes. Like a cat pushed off one’s lap, or a dog kicked away from his toy. This Alhaitham’s only sixteen, Kaveh thinks, rapid and hot. Did Kaveh talk to Alhaitham like that, when Alhaitham was sixteen?
“Y—yes,” Kaveh says, withdrawing his hands from the coffee table. Alhaitham watches them rise with an attention Kaveh has lost all familiarity with. “You’ve been, as best we can determine—displaced in time. And I am—worried. About your ability to return to your own time. If you keep noticing things about the current time in which you are placed.”
“Your present-day Alhaitham doesn’t remember any of this, yes?” Baby Alhaitham says. He’s slow to start, his eyes still following Kaveh’s jittering hands, but fast to continue. “So it’s not a concern. He doesn’t remember it so I must, necessarily, not be his past. And so this is, for me, an alternate future. Anything I learn here has nothing to do with my own future, such as it exists.”
Kaveh’s skull thumps as he once more clenches his jaw. “He may not have…told me.”
“What?”
“If this,” Kaveh says, “had happened to him. My—the present day Haitham. It may not have come up.”
Alhaitham, one long and over-knuckled finger slid between the pages of his book, appears to consider this information. He then discards it. “Regardless,” he says.
“Regardless,” Kaveh says, louder, “we need to get you to someone who actually knows anything about this! Before something terrible happens—which it will, by the way! But I don’t know who! Spantamad is obviously the best choice for the inexplicable, but Cyno is hardly an expert in time and space nonsense—”
“Cyno the possessed professor’s kid?” Althaitham says, frowning.
“Shut up, please!” Kaveh says, and then, giving in to all things inevitable and collapsing on the couch in a heap, says, “Ha, and I can’t even ask the Scribe. The Scribe isn’t here!”
He laughs in a deeply unstable fashion. Baby Alhaitham asks, “Why isn’t the Scribe here?”
“Shut up, please!!!!!” Kaveh says, and then the potted rose in the windowsill unfurls like a fern and chimes, in a sweet high voice, “Hello, Kaveh of Paradise Gardens Design Studios!”
Alhaitham says, “Is that what you named your—”
Kaveh says, “So help me god—”
The rose sparkles with green Dendro energy, its petals fluttering as if with excitement. “Lesser Lord Kusanali will see you tomorrow at noon!” it says. “Thank you for meeting with Lesser Lord Kusanali! She looks forward to your conversation and hopes you will arrive at least ten minutes before your appointment in order to facilitate a smooth schedule for all!”
Alhaitham has gone nearly rigid with curiosity. “Lesser Lord Kusanali?” he says.
“Yes, thank you, see you then!” Kaveh shouts at the rose, which chirps happily, dims, and droops. Bracing himself, Kaveh turns back to Alhaitham.
The infant Alhaitham is alight, aglow, aflame with the holy fire of intellectual inquiry. Kaveh resists the instinct to hide. “You can ask her tomorrow,” Kaveh says.
“What happened to the sages?” Alhaitham asks.
“No one said anything about any sages, you’ll notice.”
“Exactly,” Alhaithm says, “so—”
“You can ask her—”
“—Tomorrow, yes, but now—”
Kaveh stands abruptly. He doesn’t swear at Alhaitham again and is proud of himself for doing so. “Haitham, please just go to bed,” he says instead.
“You’re not—” Alhaitham says, and then stops. He looks around the living room. For the second time in at least eight years, the first time being just under an hour ago, Kaveh watches Alhaitham blush.
“We both live here?” he asks.
“I can’t deal with this,” Kaveh says and goes to bed.
He emerges seven minutes later to collect his tea, his coffee, two of his hair pins, and to direct baby Alhaitham on where to find the bathroom, cups for water, and his own bedroom, and then goes back to bed.
In the morning, he takes Alhaitham to the Akademiya.
It’s a hot, smothered day, some storm from the jungle laying humidity like felt over the terraces of Sumeru City. Kaveh re-braids his hair a good two to three dozen times as he leads the way up the root-streets and ramp-streets, Alhaitham trailing silently and still half-asleep behind him, and tries to stay calm
They pass the mid-morning markets and a gaggle of young Akademiya students off to a field study. Kaveh worries someone will recognize Alhaitham. He worries someone will try to talk to Alhaitham. He worries the matra will arrest him for kidnapping a child. He remembers Alhaitham chose to become legally emancipated rather than a ward of the Akademiya when his grandmother died. He worries the matra will arrest him for kidnapping an unusually young legal adult. He worries that all this fiddling will make his hair fall out. He worries that Alhaitham hasn’t said anything to him since he woke up. Sure, maybe it’s because he’s sixteen and Alhaitham age sixteen was so sleepy all the time, getting him out of bed for morning study sessions had been like trying to dredge a very angry harbor who said terrible things about your citation styles every time you tried to pull the harbor off the mattress–
“We’re here,” Alhaitham says, after they have been standing outside the doors of the Sanctuary for several minutes. He appears to have just come to the realization.
“Yes,” Kaveh says, pulling a strip of dry cuticle from his thumbnail as he looks up at the massive green doors. “I’ve never been in here before.”
Alhaitham yawns, “Something we have in—”
“You have, actually,” Kaveh says. “Or you will. You’ll report here every day for work for like three months. I still don’t even know what you were doing.”
Alhaitham blinks, the long sleeve of his borrowed shirt brushing Kaveh’s as the horns call the hour from the timekeepers’ house on the terrace below. Birds launch from the branches of the Tree like clouds of gunpowder rockets.
“Are you having some kind of attack?” Alhaitham asks.
How could Kaveh not know what Haitham was doing with his day for all those months? Did he never ask? Would Haitham have even answered him? Were their lives of so little interest to each other, even after all this? “Probably,” Kaveh says. “Well, let’s get this over with.”
The interior of the Sanctuary is so beautiful it’s like a club to the head. Kaveh stands dazed inside the threshold, staring at the stonework, and the tiling, and the metal worked with such delicacy that each body-thick branch supporting the vaulted dome seems to shiver with life. It’s the most exquisite example of post-Cataclysm architecture he’s ever seen. It’s perhaps the most beautiful structure in Sumeru, period. It’s a miracle.
Haitham never told him about any of this!!!
“Kaveh,” says a very high, polite voice. Kaveh looks down from the tiled ceiling, and then further down.
Lesser Lord Kusanali is the approximate size and shape of a dusk bird chick before it’s fledged—100% down, 0% feathers. Kaveh is possessed of the violent need to fit her carefully into his pocket and feed her some millet seed. Lesser Lord Kusanali smiles at him like she’s trying hard not to laugh.
Haitham did tell him that the Dendro Archon can read minds!!!
“Ah!” Kaveh says, too loud. “Ah ha! Yes! Nice to meet you, your, er–eminence?”
“There’s no way that’s right,” says baby Alhaitham, at Kaveh’s elbow.
“It’s not,” says Hat Guy, in the same tone, at Lesser Lord Kusanali’s elbow. Oh, god, he’s here, too. Oh, god, Kaveh still doesn’t know his real name.
“You can call me Nahida,” says Lesser Lord Nahida. She smiles again. “Just Nahida is fine. And my colleague is indeed named Hat Guy. Legally and all!”
She turns to Alhaitham, who has not exited the protective range of Kaveh’s elbow. “Alhaitham,” she says. “It’s good to meet you. I’m sorry for all this trouble!”
If adult Alhaitham’s aversion to social niceties is well-known, his teenage aversion was legendary–like a brick wall between him and 99% of people in a given room. But he’s looking at Nahida with interest, to Kaveh’s surprise, and he bends slightly to shake her small hand. “We know each other,” he says, not a question but a conclusion. A curious one, even.
“Your older self was a great help to me some time ago,” Nahida says, “and it’s been a pleasure to work with him since. But please, come in, come sit down!”
She turns and gestures them all down the walkway, which is a bit like being led to one’s dinner reservation by a duckling. At the center of the Sanctuary, tucked fastidiously out of sight behind a leaded glass flower the size of Kaveh’s bedroom, are a few couches and chairs set around a low table. Kaveh recognizes the furniture–there’s a merchant down by Lambad’s who’s made her living selling this exact couches-and-table set to every Akademiya student moving into their first apartment in the past twenty-five years. One of the archon’s couches has been accented with a clumsily-knit gold throw. Behind one couch, also out of sight of the front door, is a messy work desk and two shelves of books and file boxes. Kaveh struggles to find a metaphor that accurately captures how surreal this is, and how much he’ll never be able to make anyone else believe this. The Dendro Archon, he imagines trying to tell Lambad—her furniture. Lambad, it’s not that good.
Hat Guy brings the tea, which Kaveh also considers surreal.
“So!” Nahida says, pushing herself up onto the couch. Hat Guy set an especially small cup of tea in front of her and has since taken up an oddly teenaged-looking slouch against the arm of the couch. “Thank you very much for coming to see me. I know this has all been very confusing, so allow me to tell you what you are here to know. Alhaitham, you have been caught in an accident of metaphysical silviculture.”
Alhaitham was silent during the unimaginable torture of small talk while the tea was set out. Now the fire is back in his eyes. “Irminsul,” Alhaitham says.
“And I’m very sorry for the inconvenience,” Nahida says.
She explains, with a long series of hand gestures, glowing diagrams, and metaphors as vivid and dense as jungle flowers, that there was, recently, a tremor. It happened to come just as Nahida and Hat Guy, who is apparently some kind of research assistant to the archon (Kaveh’s previous guess was hired assassin), were at work on the variegated planes on which Irminsul bodily resides.
“What kind of work?” Alhaitham asks.
“Irminsul like the World Tree?” Kaveh says.
Yes! Nahida says. The one that bears all of Teyvat upon its branches and within its heartwood contains all truths of this world! They were at work upon it, though she gives no specifics of their work in answer to Alhaitham’s question, when something of great significance occurred elsewhere upon the continent. The fulfillment of a prophecy, she says. In Fontaine, she says. Her voice is like Alhaitham’s when he’s found something so interesting that he can’t keep up the pretense of sullen detachment anymore–he just has to share. A prophecy that affected the thrones of the Six, she says.
“The Six?” Alhaitham says.
“Buer,” Hat Guy sighs, rubbing a hand over his eyes.
“Of course, my apologies,” Nahida says, with a child’s excited, slightly bashful giggle. “You’ll find out what you’re meant to find out when you’re meant to find it out.”
Kaveh condenses all his feelings on this conversation into a small, hard ball with which he will engage later or else never again. He resolves to write his mother sometime this week.
“You wouldn’t have brought it up if you didn’t want us to ask,” Alhaitham says. “Now you don’t want us to ask?”
Hat Guy snorts loudly. “Are you laughing at him?” Kaveh asks, hands closing tightly on his teacup.
“He really hasn’t changed much since age twelve, has he?”
“I’m sixteen,” Alhaitham clarifies, posture rod-straight in the way that means he’s decided to hate someone. Hat Guy laughs at that, too. Kaveh’s grip threatens the structural integrity of his teacup.
Nahida says, ”Unfortunately, the tremor had a number of small effects on Irminsul. Including creating this small knot in your personal timeline, Alhaitham. It’s akin to knitting—” Uh oh. She’s going for another analogy. “—like your life is a long series of many stitched rows, and a shake in the knitter’s hand has caused the needle to catch on a lower stitch, pulling it up into—”
“So what happened to my older self?” Alhaitham says over the Archon, wholly unrepentant. “Did we switch places or is he just gone?”
Kaveh jerks back. Who said anything about gone?
“You have switched places, yes,” Nahida says. “And we are working to get you switched back. A colleague of mine with an expertise in time will be assisting us.”
“That drunk!” says Hat Guy (because apparently being a huge dick to a teenager is fine but having a little drink during work hours is the crime of all crimes!).
“And we hope to have your timeline back to normal shortly,” Nahida says.
“And there won’t be…any problems? Putting him back?” Kaveh asks. “Even knowing what he knows now about the future?”
“No problem at all,” Nahida replied. “This is an experimental field, but my colleague assured us that the very nature of the repair to Irminsul will eliminate any possibility of conflict. I’m not sure what the effect will be on your knowledge, specifically,” she says to Alhaitham, with a smile, “but, for better or worse, it’s not something we have much control over. Higher powers are at work!”
Alhaitham leans forward. “Celestia.”
“I’m sure you wouldn’t remember even if I told you, so—”
“So if you told me—”
“So, I won’t tell you. Apologies!”
Kaveh swallows, a motion that feels suddenly clumsy, and Nahida turns to him. “My Alhaitham,” Kaveh says, “present-day Alhaitham.” He can’t stop thinking about the young Alhaitham saying gone. It hadn’t even occurred to him that that was a possibility. That there was a chance that Alhaitham wouldn’t come home. “Is he okay?”
Nahida smiles, with those eyes like the sun through new growth. He wishes he didn’t know about the mindreading. The things he thinks, no one should have to be subjected to them without several years’ warning. “I mean, he’s an adult,” Kaveh continues, overly fast, “so obviously he can take care of himself, but—”
“He is well,” Nahida says. Steam rises in a skinny wisp from the teacup held carefully on her lap. “I believe, actually, that he’s with you.”
“Huh?” says Kaveh.
“You were with Kaveh when you were pulled to this time, weren’t you?” she asks the young Alhaitham, who nods confidently. Even now, Kaveh must marvel at it–how Alhaitham can be so far outside anyone’s imaginable realm of expertise and still sure of himself and his knowledge.
“So, that’s where our Alhaitham will be now,” Nahida says to Kaveh. Her piping voice sounds kinder. “With you, in the Akademiya, deducing, I’m sure, most of the things I’ve just told you. With your help, of course. And home soon.” She smiles. “For now, I’m sure you’re both perfectly fine.”
“Ha ha,” says Kaveh. “Right.”
“Absolutely not,” says Alhaitham, to Kaveh, in Kaveh’s dorm room, in the past, where he still is.
Kaveh’s smile is enormous, and beautiful, and very troubling, because he’s smiling like he knows something Alhaitham doesn’t. He leans closer to Alhaitham on the floor.
“Look, just think about it!” Kaveh says. “If your Kaveh never mentioned this to you, and obviously he would, because I would, then there’s no way that you telling me about the future could cause any problems! Because my future isn’t your future!”
“Your logic is sound,” Alhaitham says, which makes Kaveh laugh like he’s trying to fill the room with the noise of it, “but I don’t care.”
“No, come on, be fair!” Kaveh says. “Just a little tidbit! Who’s Emperor of Mondstadt right now?”
“You’re trying to bait me,” Alhaitham says.
“And it’s working,” Kaveh says.
“Hmph,” Alhaitham says, and Kaveh laughs again.
Rain pounds the window of Kaveh’s dorm room, sluicing down the glass and making Kaveh’s taped-up layers of pencil sketches flutter like the leaves on the Tree. It’s the monsoon, Alhaitham notes, with little conscious attention. Summer, with at least another month of hot, sodden days to come.
Another thing he notes, with sweat gathering down the tight back of his shirt: a summer night in Kaveh’s dorm room smells exactly the way he remembered it. He hasn’t, but once, been in the bedroom of his time’s Kaveh since Kaveh moved in. Sitting again amongst Kaveh’s clothing, sketches, books, smells, laughter, etc. feels of passing resemblance to the monsoon.
“Okay, well, what about the Archon,” Kaveh says, “if you really have nothing to say about us, our classmates, the Akademiya, the sages, or the God-Emperor of Mondstadt.” He sits beside Alhaitham on the floor, legs tucked beneath him and one elbow propped on the mattress. His hair, long enough at this age to braid in a crown around his head, escapes its captivity in sleek, dangling curls. His shock at Alhaitham’s appearance did not, ultimately, last very long at all.
“Kshahrewar’s lack of world historical education in its upper-level courses is as appalling now as in my own time,” Alhaitham says, removing his gaze from Kaveh’s hair.
“Is she living?” Kaveh asks. “Dead? Transformed into a shroomboar? In secret alliance with the Electro Archon to make everyone’s gardens grow slightly too fast?”
“I have nothing to say about the Dendro Archon.”
“You’ve got to know how insanely suspicious that sounds,” Kaveh says, then, “Wait. Say that again.”
“Say what?”
“The thing you just said!” Kaveh’s hand smacks his shoulder, light and hot. “Come on!”
Alhaitham repeats, wary and dutiful, “I have nothing to say about the Dendro Archon.”
Kaveh’s warm eyes alight, his grin growing as if feeding off the air. “Haitham, you like her!”
“What?”
“So she’s awake! And you know her somehow. And you like her! That’s so cool!”
“On what possible evidence could you imagine—”
“You’re doing that thing you do when you think someone’s funny!” Kaveh says. He taps one long finger to his nose. “It’s very obvious when you know what to look for.”
“That’s ridiculous,” Alhaitham mutters, and the monsoon floods the city with another year’s rain outside.
“Many of your habits are,” Kaveh says, leaning his head against his fist. His knees rest atop one tassel of Alhaitham’s cape. “Is she nice?”
“I’m not going to—”
“I know, I know,” Kaveh says. This young Kaveh talks over Alhaitham like he knows exactly what Alhaitham’s going to say and is simply too excited to let him say it. Quite different from being talked over because your conversation partner is conducting an argument in his head, pre-scripted, already acted, that has very little to do with you at all.
“You can’t say anything that might jeopardize my future,” Kaveh says, “I get it. But you can at least tell me if she’s nice, right? That’s just a little thing. It won’t matter.”
“She’s nice,” Alhaitham admits at length. “She…likes crossword puzzles.”
“That’s unbearably cute.”
“Many of her habits are,” Alhaitham says, which is close enough to true. She stopped trying to mindspeak to him when he asked. “Tell me about your studies.”
“A subtle change of topic, Haitham.”
Alhaitham raises an eyebrow, at which Kaveh laughs and relents. “Fine! We can talk about something besides my inevitable future. But don’t ask me about my studies, sounding like my mother. You’re studying with me right now!”
“Any confusion that results from you referring to me and my younger self interchangeably is going to be entirely your own fault, you know. I haven’t been to a lecture except by my own choice in ten years.”
“Wow,” Kaveh sighs. “That sounds heavenly. Could I come back with you to the future?”
“Tell me about our thesis,” Alhaitham says. It’s a less calculated move than he would care to admit. The words come out of him like they’ve spent years waiting for their chance.
Kaveh laughs again, this time with some embarrassment. “I mean, I can,” he says, “but with all the time we already—surely you’ve heard enough about this nonsense for a lifetime!”
“No,” Alhaitham says.
Kaveh looks away, squirming, showing Alhaitham the flushed skin of his cheek. “You don’t have to indulge me, you know! I promise I’m capable of conversation that isn’t about school, I’m not a child.”
“Fine,” Alhaitham says, “if you prefer. Whatever you like.”
From over Kaveh’s shoulder, one red eye fixes Alhaitham with open suspicion. “You’re being weird.”
“I like talking to you.”
“Well, that’s not true!”
“It’s true right now.”
“So weird,” Kaveh says again, but seems to accept the explanation regardless. He turns back to Alhaitham, hands stretching into artful shapes as he picks at his pen calluses. “I could tell you about a really inane article that got published in the Architectural Review last week. You definitely won’t remember anything about that.”
Alhaitham indicates that this would be acceptable. His own pleasure he experiences at a remove, like watching a cat wander into the house that you know will never be convinced to leave again. Kaveh tells him, with a growing vicious passion, of some idiot trying to sell the Review’s readers on imported Liyue pine for residential construction, as if, Kaveh insists, pine won’t rot the instant it enters the jungle. The Review is obviously failing to enforce its financial disclosure policy for article submissions yet again.
Alhaitham remembers the article, of course. He remembers Kaveh’s complaint, too. He remembers quite a lot of the summer, and the monsoon, of the year he turned sixteen—he made a point to, after he and Kaveh stopped talking. They’re going to stop talking very soon. It’ll happen just a few weeks after the rains end. Not long now at all.
Whatever eye Alhaitham had as a young man for Kaveh’s tells, he hasn’t lost it. It’s simplicity itself to watch Kaveh speak and gesture and smile and know he hasn’t slept well recently. He’s barely eaten. He’s had a lot of coffee and little of anything else. He brushes his hair behind his ear with a shaking hand.
Kaveh’s stupid useless hands won’t stop shaking, so he orders a shot to go with his beer and shoves his fingers under his thighs until the server comes by with one big glass and one little one. It’s nice to have a solution to a problem, no matter how temporary that solution might be.
The bar where he’s meeting Tighnari is at the southern edge of the markets, frequented primarily by those regular merchants and Forest Rangers who work in the city but choose to live elsewhere, and is so open-air as to be basically a roof, some decorative hints of walls, and a dozen of tables packed inside the shade. Straw covers the floor and now Kaveh’s flats. Not that a lot of things don’t put an unknowable fear in him these days, but drinking at a bar other than Lambad’s definitely puts an unknowable fear in him. What if they’ve never heard of tabs?
“Hello,” says Cyno, who is not Tighnari.
“A ha,” says Kaveh, “hi.” He looks over his shoulder as Cyno slides onto the bench across from him. “Tighnari’s not with you? Not that I’m not happy to see you!”
“Tighnari has a job,” says Cyno. He takes his headdress off and sets it on the bench beside him, as if the jackal-head might also have a drink order.
“But…you also have a job? Right?”
“I’m on leave right now,” Cyno says. “It’s not for a TCG tournament,” he appears compelled to clarify.
“Is that good?”
“I like to think so. I’m trying new things.”
“Oh,” Kaveh says. He likes Cyno, really, Cyno is nice and unafraid of committing to his awful jokes and once beat Haitham so badly in an arm-wrestling match that Haitham didn’t come back to Lambad’s for a week. He’s not sure he always knows what’s happening in conversations with Cyno.
“Collei’s friends are in town for her birthday and they’ve asked me to lead them through a kind of role-indwelling game played on a table,” Cyno says. He says everything so seriously, even the things he’s very much punking you with. Kaveh tries frantically to stay alert. “It’s on the top of the table. They were oddly particular about that. So I’ve taken the week off to prepare for their game and also show them around the city. Collei’s friends are from Mondstadt and have never visited before, you see. They're very excited about the Tree.”
This is too much. Kaveh should have gotten two shots with his beer. “And so, Tighnari?” Kaveh says, a little squeaky. Collei has friends from Mondstadt?? They’ve never seen trees??
“He did get your message. Unfortunately, he had to leave the city a few hours ago after some poachers were caught outside of Gandharva and he isn’t sure when he’ll be back, so he sent me instead.”
“I mean,” Kaveh says, “I wrote him to ask for help with an—interpersonal problem. Regarding the Alhaitham situation. You know about the situation?”
Cyno hesitates. “Did you want to know anything else about the role-indwelling game?”
“I don’t,” says Kaveh, “think so?” Mentally, he adds a few further question marks after the first.
Cyno exhales, almost like a sigh. “I’m briefed on the most recent situation, yes,” he says.
“Okay, well, great, because Cyno, I don’t know what to do! He just keeps following me around!”
“The teenage Alhaitham does?”
“Yes!”
Cyno takes his time to consider this, accepting his glass of tonic water and a wedge of lime from the server. He takes a sip, carefully setting his lime aside after squeezing a few drops into the glass.
“What would Tighnari say now, if he were here?” Cyno asks.
Kaveh boggles. “That—this is crazy! That it’s not like Alhaitham at all! He wants to be with me all the time! It’s bizarre!”
“Got it,” Cyno says, and then, like he’s reading off a card written by Tighnari’s far-distant hand, “How bizarre.”
“Okay,” Kaveh says, when he enters the living room, braced and prepared. “Okay, I need to review a jobsite down in Port Ormos today, and since you refuse to stay here alone for more than two hours at a goddamn stretch—”
“Solitude is stultifying,” Alhaitham says from the carpet by the bookshelves, where he has spread out the disassembled pieces of his older self’s spare headphones in a grotesque mechanical rainbow. One of Kaveh’s screwdrivers hovers above the twinkling green remains of a speaker.
“Solitude is enriching,” Kaveh says.
“So is fertilizer,” Alhaitham says.
“How am I arguing with you of all people about the virtues of alone time?”
“I like to be alone when I like to be alone,” Alhaitham says, as if there exists no simpler truth in this life.
Kaveh can’t keep doing this. He can’t keep being wrenched off course by a sixteen year old, even if there is no more annoying sixteen year old in all of Teyvat. He has to focus. Kaveh says, “Okay, well, since you refuse to stay here and you can’t go to the House of Daena—”
Alhaitham says, affronted, “I could go to the House of Daena if you would let me—”
Kaveh loses the battle. “Seriously?! Everyone in that building knows you! You—your older self! You’ve worked next door for years! You’re in there three times a week! Someone comes over to say hi who knows you aged twenty-seven, how are you going to explain how you lost two inches and thirty pounds of muscle?”
“Sudden-onset muscle deterioration,” Alhaitham says.
“And that won’t invite more questions??” Kaveh says, and then has to sit down on the footstool and breathe into his hands.
The junior Alhaitham stands from his graveyard of personal electronic goods and comes to sit on the couch across from Kaveh. “I think you’re getting distracted,” he says. “You were going to ask me to come with you to your construction site.”
“You,” Kaveh says, and, shortly after, “—You.”
Alhaitham looks at him with what, even Kaveh must be forced to acknowledge, is Alhaitham’s version of large, pleading, hopeful, beseeching eyes. It’s not dissimilar from his “I have a stomach flu and am about to make it your problem” expression.
Kaveh exhales through his teeth. “Go get your shit,” he says, and Alhaitham scrambles, with all the grace of a three-legged calf, to comply.
By early afternoon, Kaveh and the bantam-weight Alhaitham are packed into the back of a Sumpter cart and thumping their way to Port Ormos. Kaveh sweats unaesthetically in the heat. Alhaitham holds Mehrak in his lap and examines her with the fury and passion of a god beholding the newest piece of his creation. Mehrak chirps happily every time Alhaitham admires her seams and gears, except when he wiggles too forcefully at her seams and gears, at which point she chirps sadly and blinks an admonishing gold.
“Don’t be rough with her,” Kaveh says. He forgot a hat and is limply shading his head with two sketchbooks held in one sweaty fist. “She’s sensitive.”
“Got it,” Alhaitham says, without looking up. He speaks again twenty minutes later. “What are we sitting on?”
“Oh,” Kaveh says, looking down. It’s a bit cramped in the back of the cart; he and Alhaitham, neither of whom are exactly short, are crammed in with bags of fruit, crates of fishing nets, and a few dusk birds who Kaveh initially thought were pets of the driver and now thinks are conniving little fuckers who care for nothing but a free ride and some unattended fruit. Beneath all of that, and them, wrapped in burlap, are thirty long steel rods. They are, Kaveh will be the first admit, a bit uncomfortable to ride on.
He sighs. “They’re the death of my integrity as an architect.”
Alhaitham peels back a layer of burlap. “They look like steel.”
“Exactly, Haitham, exactly.”
“They’re ribbed,” Alhaitham continues. Mehrak beeps as he sets her aside. “Is this to…increase surface area? For what?”
“Alright, well, what’s going to happen is that nine years into your future, an organization of domestic and international steel merchants is going to turn every structural architect in Sumeru into a credulous, gullible, penny-pinching loon.”
“And they weren’t already?”
“You’re right, Haitham, they’re going to capitalize on the fact that every one of my coworkers and clients is a cheap idiot.”
Alhaitham folds his hands under his chin. “Go on,” he says.
Kaveh explains, for the next three miles, about the evils of reinforced concrete.
“So the concrete bonds to the steel skeleton,” Alhaitham says, “using the ribbing, gaining an incredible amount of tensile strength and significantly reducing the amount of concrete that needs to be used on any single project. Thus saving the investor or taxpayer potentially millions of mora, without even mentioning the savings in time. And you hate it.”
“Of course I do! It introduces rust into concrete! Is no one thinking this through?” Kaveh says. The dusk birds ruffle their wings reproachfully from the sides of the cart.
“But look at what’s possible with it. The aqueducts of Fontaine would be inconceivable with the weak, subpar concrete you’d prefer to use.”
Kaveh cocks his head, sweat marching like a river down his spine. Haitham, he thinks, is having fun. Kaveh had nearly forgotten what it looked like.
“Joining the war on good engineering on the side of bad engineering, are you?” Kaveh asks.
Alhaitham shrugs, an obvious yes. He doesn’t even agree with his own position, equally obvious. He just likes the argument, and wants to poke some holes, and wants to see Kaveh fight. It’s shockingly palatable, coming from a kid still months away from learning how to shave without bloodshed.
“Fine,” Kaveh says. “Let’s go. How do you deal with the moisture problem?”
“Moisture problem?” says Alhaitham.
“The bond to the steel can’t be made perfect. Moisture gets in, rust forms on the steel, that rust puts pressure on the concrete and starts creating cracks.”
“Seal it.”
Kaveh laughs. “No seal can stand up to Sumeru humidity forever, as you well know.”
“What do the Fontanians do? They’re not exactly desiccated.”
“Another eighty thousand tons of their aquabus line collapsed into the Great Lake last week, so—”
“Dahri then. Their concrete is famous, their surface ruins have lasted thousands of years.”
Alhaitham’s mouth is hitching. He’s smiling.
“Haitham, you’re never going to believe it. Dahri didn’t put metal in their concrete.”
“And yet here you perch on bushels of it. What’s your client’s solution to the moisture problem?”
“An additive in the concrete mixture and a healthy dose of prayer.”
“And your client is?”
“The Portmaster of Ormos. She’s renovating the seawall.”
“The seawall,” Alhaitham says.
“Oh, yes,” Kaveh says.
“So, moisture. And salt.”
“And intense temperature changes from sun exposure. Oh, yes, indeed. She just wants to try it.”
“I think your client is a cheap idiot.”
Kaveh laughs until he nearly cries. It seems so silly that he forgot he could have fun with Alhaitham when, for many years, all the best parts of his day were spent having fun with Alhaitham. Sitting and filling out his housing paperworks could be fun so long as he was doing it with Alhaitham. It could also be stressful and aggravating beyond all human measure, but that hadn’t seemed to matter nearly so much, before.
“Did you bring water?”
Flowers trail like lovers’ hands along the sides of the cart as they rumble south. “Oh, no, sorry!” Kaveh says. “I completely forgot, but we can get you some in the market as soon as we stop.”
Alhaitham scoffs. “Not for me, obviously. You’re overheating and probably dehydrated. And I’m sure you only had coffee to eat this morning.”
Kaveh frowns. “Haitham—” he says.
Alhaitham leans forward in the cart. “How much for one of the melons?” he asks the driver.
“Alhaitham,” Kaveh snaps, mortified. The driver regards them over his shoulder, hands loose on his beast’s reins, and Kaveh is as furious as he is humiliated.
“Hundred mora for one of the bruised ones is fine,” the driver says.
“Deal,” Alhaitham says. He drops a pile of coins on the driver’s bench and breaks a soft melon open on the side of the cart.
“I don’t want this,” Kaveh says, when Alhaitham tries to hand him a dripping half of a fruit. “I don’t appreciate you inserting yourself into my business, either.”
If Alhaitham realizes how angry Kaveh is, he certainly doesn’t care. “Your business of passing out from heat sickness?” he says. He’s scoffing again, not even bothering to look at Kaveh as he angles his half of the melon away from any fabric that will stain. If he were a dog Kaveh would grab him by the back of his neck and shake him until he stopped. Enough of the ankle-biting. Enough of nip, nip, nip, nip, nip.
Alhaitham’s still holding the melon. Kaveh would throw it if he took it, so he doesn’t take it. “Of course,” Alhaitham sighs, rolling his eyes, setting the melon down on the humped burlap between them. Kaveh considers throwing the melon anyways.
Alhaitham leans back against the cart, waving off beseeching dusk birds, then twists and leans even further back.
“You built that?” he says, and with great reluctance Kaveh follows his gaze as the bridge across the Ormos river comes into view.
Kaveh says he did. Alhaitham has no follow-up questions, just turning to track the great arch of the bridge as they move with the curve of the riverbank, head fixed to its span like a hawk to its hunt.
He turns back to Kaveh as the bridge moves out of sight and they approach the trunk-tunnel into the market. He’s full of stars again, huge and bewitched.
“They’re wrong about you,” Alhaitham says.
“What?”
“Everyone at school. They just think you’re smart. They have no idea what you’re capable of.”
The unshakeable confidence he has. That total and eclipsing belief. Kaveh’s anger mingles with windedness, the feeling of having been punched, or else a sickening kind of vulnerability he has no name or reason for, as the cool shadows of the Ormos-tree beckon them into the port.
In a break in the rains, Alhaitham and the young Kaveh clamber out of a corridor window and onto the Tree so that they might, Kaveh insists, get a look at the stars.
Kaveh leads them on a well-trodden path through the lichen and moss across the Branch of Kshahrewar (on which the Kshahrewar dormitories and auditoriums sit) and around the Trunk to the Branch of Amurta (on which the houses of both Amurta and Rtawahist reside due to a property dispute that predates the Cyro Archon). He talks the entire way, with little required of Alhaitham but his presence. Alhaitham did, at last, get Kaveh to tell him about their thesis.
Alhaitham never pitied the other members of their thesis group who abandoned him and Kaveh over the course of their final project. He was not, of course, naturally inclined to pity—each of those students were perfectly capable of making their own choices. They all went on to complete their own projects and to graduate basically on time, despite Kaveh’s persistent fears. At this distance, he can acknowledge that there’s even a modicum of respect in his memories of them. What he and Kaveh were doing at the end of their academic careers wasn’t something that anyone else could ever have kept up with. The breadth, the sprawling insanity of it—it was only ever just for them.
Their former group partners knew when to give up. It’s a valuable skill. He knows Kaveh’s thoughts on the matter.
Some storeys above the roof of Kaveh’s dorm room, Kaveh says, “Here! Perfect,” and flaps a hand at Alhaitham until Alhaitham hands over the blanket carried from Kaveh’s bed, some storeys below.
Kaveh spreads the blanket over the branch. The blanket immediately begins to slide over the branch’s carpet of moss towards open air. Kaveh pulls the blanket back. The blanket excuses itself once more. “Oh, come on,” Kaveh says.
With both knees pinning the blanket down, he waves a hand again at Alhaitham. “Can you fix this?”
“Probably not,” Althaitham says.
Kaveh laughs, the sound like the last of rainwater falling through the leaves. “Come on, jerk! You must have some talent with that vision by now.”
It took Alhaitham a few years to really understand and control the power of his vision, mostly because he didn’t give a shit about it. The esteem of the heavens had never won him more than inappropriate questions from strangers and, while it provided some security when traveling alone, so did sword training, a consistent upper body workout, and minding his own business. When this Kaveh knew him, the primary function of Alhaitham’s vision was to collect lint in his pocket.
“Do you think every Dendro vision-holder is a plant whisperer?” Alhaitham asks. He tsks. “How reductive.”
“Don’t tell me you’re still using it as a paperweight,” Kaveh says.
“What I get up to with my vision is between my vision and myself. You’ll learn information relevant to you when it becomes relevant to you.”
Kaveh laughs again. “Oh, don’t say this is some terrible future secret, too! You just hate to perform! While I’m about to slide away to my death!”
Alhaitham looks down at the branch on which they stand, which is as wide as a stone bridge between market-terraces. “You may be in less danger than you suspect.”
“Well, sure,” Kaveh says, and this time his laugh is a little rougher, a little more at himself, “but, you know, I’m just asking you to show off. I want to, to see what you can do.” When he looks at Alhaitham he blushes tremendously but he keeps on looking. “Would you show off?”
“Let’s move the blanket somewhere dry,” Alhaitham says.
They do, pulling it to a less mossy patch of bark upon which they can sit and see clear to the humpback mountains of the Liyue Chasm. The stars spend themselves with abandon. Kaveh asks where that bottle of wine from his room went. Alhaitham says he doesn’t know, having dumped it in the first bin they passed on the way to the Tree. Alhaitham, the greatest of all idiots, spreads his hands above their heads and creates a lens that accepts with pleasure the entire image of the sky.
Kaveh gasps, hands clapped to his mouth. The lens hovers above them like the canopy of a tent, magnifying the night a hundred-fold in clean green light. The stars bloom. A leaf of the Tree far above them is suddenly visible as if in cross-section, each of its veins and folds outlined clearly by the moon. Passing clouds appear like desultory trails of cotton. Little tufts and sparks of power drip from the edges of the lens, sparking merrily when they meet the Tree.
“This is amazing,” Kaveh says, “Haitham, this is incredible! You can do this?”
“I’m currently doing it, yes.” Not without some effort, but some tricks you learn to test your ability, not confirm it.
“It’s amazing,” Kaveh says again, softer. His hand trails over his mouth. “The precision this must require...when will you start studying light? I know you’re not doing it now!”
“In a few years,” Althaitham says. When he finds himself with a job he doesn’t like and an excess of time alone.
Kaveh extends a tentative hand, fingertips brushing the curved not-glass of the lens. The not-glass hums lightly and tilts forward, shifting the edges of the magnified image. “Imagine what you could build with this,” he murmurs, “or for this…a whole room, or a courtyard, where you could summon it just for an hour, for something special, and the whole space would be transformed by green light…”
He trails off. “You’re—” he says, “I don’t even know how to describe it, Haitham, I’m just so astounded by you. Like you’re already amazing, you always have been, but you’re just—you’re going to be so much more. I can hardly understand it.”
“You’ll be much more, too,” Alhaitham says, though he shouldn’t.
“I mean, sure, I’ll get more practiced as I get older, and I hope I get to do good work, but something like this—”
“There will be no one in Sumeru whose work I respect more than yours,” Alhaitham says.
He knew what would happen. It didn’t, regretfully, make him act otherwise. Kaveh persists in thinking he’s the only one to ever make an emotional mistake. The young Kaveh kisses him.
Hot weakness overcomes him, and the sensation of Kaveh against him, and the tentative motions of his mouth. Then Alhaitham pushes him away. When he opens his eyes, Kaveh’s expression is already beginning to churn.
“I’m sorry, I’m so, so sorry,” Kaveh stammers, his eyes huge on Alhaitham and then suddenly unable to look at him. He stumbles to his feet, one boot slipping crazily on the blanket, hair tumbling from behind his ears. “I can’t believe I would even—I’m so sorry, that was so inappropriate of me—”
“Kaveh,” Alhaitham says. He feels unnaturally winded, overwarmed by the late summer air. Kaveh doesn’t hear him.
“You must think I’m so stupid,” he says, both laughing and crying. “Of course you’re not—I’m being so silly.”
He’s tugging on the corner of the blanket, trying to roll it up, no longer aware that Alhaitham is still on it, barely aware that Alhaitham is still here, except as an object of humiliation. Alhaitham says his name again.
“I’m so sorry,” Kaveh says, “I’m so sorry. This is all my fault.”
“I’m trying not to hurt you,” Alhaitham says, but Kaveh doesn’t hear.
Look, Kaveh doesn’t have to be proud of it. This is an exceedingly stressful time in his life. And he’s had a lot of stressful times in his life so—he would know! You do what you have to to get by!
So, if, as it happens, he goes to Lambad’s for his weekly drink with Tighnari and sees that in fact it’s still not Tighnari, it’s still Cyno, sitting with his jackal head and his tonic water, and Kaveh simply turns around at the door and walks right back out, that’s no one’s business but his own! No one’s business except his and also Lambad’s, who definitely saw Kaveh do all that! They made eye contact and everything! But Lambad would never tell, Kaveh pays his tab basically on time, so it’s fine! Bye!
Kaveh doesn’t hear from the Archon. He supposes he wasn’t expecting to, or at least was not told to expect to—the problem would be resolved when it was resolved. It’s no less than Alhaitham himself would say. He’ll be home when he’s home. Kaveh’s fretting changes nothing.
Still, Kaveh wakes up and meets clients and hands young Alhaitham books and old Alhaitham doesn’t come home and he doesn’t hear from the Archon.
She owes him nothing. She’s got bigger problems than him. But he finds that, quite desperately, he wishes she would tell him when Alhaitham will be home, and knows it’s all going badly because he allows the thought of Alhaitham home to form fully in his mind, over and over again.
The other way it’s going badly is the twiggy Alhaitham, who won’t give him a single second of peace.
“It’s past noon,” Alhaitham says when he walks into Kaveh’s room, wholly uncaring of the fact that Kaveh perhaps entered and then closed the door to his room to keep himself from clubbing Alhaitham with a t-square, “have you still not eaten breakfast?”
“I thought you were doing a survey of international goods in the Bazaar,” Kaveh says through his teeth. His bedroom/studio/hiding place is fragrant with the smell of his unwashed shirts and the box of empty wine bottles under his desk. An open window brings in no wind but lots of compost-reek from their neighbor’s kitchen garden. Prior to Alhaitham’s arrival, Kaveh had been thinking lustfully of throwing himself into a lake and staying there until the dry season was over. Maybe he could throw Alhaitham into the lake instead?
“Yes, and now I’m done,” Alhaitham says. Alhaitham is not, frankly, adding much to the olfactory experience of Kaveh’s room right now. “How long ago did Inazuma re-open borders?”
“Yesterday!” Kaveh says, with overwhelming cheer.
“Their selections were so limited, I can’t imagine it’s more than a year,” Alhaitham muses. “They’re obviously unsure of consumer preferences in the city. How much coffee have you had?”
“Do you know what it means when a door is closed? It means, generally, you knock. The door being closed is an invitation to knock.”
“Hm,” Alhaitham says, having never recognized the symbolism of another man’s closed door in his young life. He steps past Kaveh’s hunched back and makes a face at the mugs collected on his desk. “Did you drink all of this?”
“It’s tea! Do you have a problem with tea, too, now?”
Alhaitham jabs a finger at one of the mugs. The mug, admittedly, has three tea bags in it. “I do now,” Alhaitham says.
“Okay,” Kaveh says, standing abruptly. Alhaitham catches his chair. It didn’t need catching. “Well, I’m going to Lambad’s. There’s food in the cupboards for lunch. Have a good afternoon!”
“What, to get work done? How likely is that in a tavern?”
“More likely than you might think!” Kaveh says as he begins shoving drafting tools essentially at random into his shoulder bag. He’s got about twenty words of manic politeness left in him and no hope at all for what comes after. “Have a good afternoon!”
“You said that already,” Alhaitham says, and then, peering under Kaveh’s desk. “Ah. That explains it.”
Kaveh, so easily baited, says, “What?”
Alhaitham rights himself, one condescending eyebrow raised. “You’ve depleted your wine stash.”
Kaveh can’t dig his fists into his drafting papers. They’re for the seawall and he has no other copies. The three curling papers on his drafting table are together worth a conservative quarter-million mora. He tries to think about his designs, their budgets, their materials costs, the contractors lying to him about their transport fees, their equally unreliable competitors—and only those things as he says to Alhaitham, “I need you to get out of my room, please.”
“Why?” Alhaitham says.
“Because I’m asking you politely,” Kaveh says. How disorienting to long for his own Alhaitham’s forbearance. Who knew his Alhaitham had forbearance? “Can you go, please?”
“What, so you can dispose of the evidence? Or just get started on another caffeine overdose in peace?”
“Alhaitham, I am asking you.”
“Have you even brushed your teeth this morning? Or showered? Taken the most basic care of yourself?”
“None of that is your business!”
“Then whose is it? Since you appear to have abdicated all responsibility!”
Kaveh snarls, “Not yours.”
“I don’t understand you,” Alhaitham says, which comes very close to making Kaveh laugh. He crosses his arms tight over his chest, expressions mulish and that ridiculous shaggy hair nearly covering his eyes.
“Please, tell me more about your poor comprehension of the situation,” Kaveh says.
Alhaitham jerks his chin up, undeterred. “I don’t understand how I get to the future and you’re worse than you’ve ever been! You still can’t take care of yourself, you still think you’re responsible for all of the world’s sins—what have you been doing? What have I been doing? You’re a mess!”
Now, Kaveh does laugh, with no humor whatsoever, as the afternoon heat cooks the whole of the house like an oven.
He has been trying, so diligently, to not put the pieces together this past week. This Alhaitham is sixteen. He’s growing facial hair but doesn’t know how to get rid of it. His shins are still recovering from his most recent growth spurt. Kaveh can pin his progress on their thesis, which Alhaitham has told him about extensively, down to the week. The day, even. In what world would he have forgotten? Two months, at most, before they didn’t speak again for eight years.
“You have some nerve,” Kaveh says. He shoves his chair out of the way, facing Alhaitham from the other edge of the carpet. “I haven’t changed? You haven’t changed! You’re exactly as superior and condescending and insulting as I remember you. You’re just as bad as you always are!”
“Because I think you should eat?”
“Because you can’t imagine a world in which you don’t know best! You’ve been in this timeline for a week and you think you know anything about me?”
“Yes,” Alhaitham says.
“You know what, ridiculous of me to have even asked. Get out of the way, Haitham, I’m not doing this with you again.”
“Oh, so my older self does still recognize the basic symptoms of calorie deficiency. What a shame he’s never done anything about it!”
“No—not with my Alhaitham, with you!” Kaveh snaps. “I’m not having this argument with you!”
They could do it again, word for word, right now. It's so suddenly obvious to Kaveh it’s like holding his hand over an open flame. Everything his own Alhaitham wants from him—how could Alhaitham ever believe that they’re capable of more than this same stupid hurt? Like dogs with their jaws locked to each other’s tails. Just standing and growling in a ditch beside the road until they drop dead of their own futility.
“What are you talking about?” Alhaitham says. “What argument?”
“This one, you ass! You, trying to live my life for me. You, thinking I don’t know a damn thing about my own decisions!”
“Why are you talking about it like that,” Alhaitham says, eyes widening, his chest beginning to flutter. “What happens to us?”
Kaveh never wanted to bring it up. Genuinely, with all sincerity. But now that they’re here: there is an undeniable pleasure in it. “We have this fight,” Kaveh says, “the fight that starts with this fight, a few weeks into your future, and we don’t speak to each other again for eight years.”
Alhaitham’s head jerks stiffly back. His nostrils flare. “What do we say to each other?” he asks.
“Does it matter?” Kaveh laughs. “You accuse me of bleeding myself out for a world that won’t even mop up my corpse. I call you the most self-centered asshole that’s ever lived.”
“I’d say it again,” Alhaitham says, fast enough to nearly stumble over the words. “I’d say it now. You would do exactly that. I won’t apologize.”
“What an incredible shock!”
“You’re tearing yourself to pieces over a project no one loves but us,” Alhaitham says. “In my time. The same for your mother’s attention and respect, as if that will ever undo the fact that her husband’s dead.”
Kaveh stares. “Haitham—”
“And you think I should apologize for telling you to stop?” Alhaitham barges on. “Even, even if it doesn’t work—what else am I supposed to do?”
Kaveh wrenches himself away. His bag is packed enough. Leave the seawall drafts, he’ll work on another goddamn commission. He throws his bag onto his shoulder and shoves past Alhaitham to the door.
Alhaitham doesn’t let him. He pushes himself in front of Kaveh, ungainly and still unused to his own bulk. His face is red, as are his eyes, his breathing unsteady and his fists clenching and unclenching at his sides.
“Move,” Kaveh snarls.
Alhaitham’s voice cracks like a branch breaking when he pleads, “Kaveh. What should I do?”
The break in his voice is so loud. He’s a teenager. He’s just a kid. Tears stream down his face.
Kaveh’s bag slides from his shoulder, his heart already sinking into the earth. “Oh, god,” he says.
Cyno comes by not long after sunset, when the fireflies have risen to bumble through the nightflowers and the dusk birds chatter like old friends.
”We’re in the back,” Kaveh calls, not very loudly, when he hears footsteps in the house. He’s on the weathered bench that sits next to the back door, looking out over the small, untidy garden attached to Alhaitham’s house. Kaveh has been meaning to fix it up for months, maybe get some nice landscaped plants from his usual bushes guy. Alhaitham has never cared—when last questioned, he said he enjoyed seeing what might grow there next.
Cyno pads onto the long back step. “Ah,” he says, smiling, “here you two are.”
The young Alhaitham sleeps soundly against Kaveh’s side, hair sticking to the corner of his mouth and faintly snoring. He fell asleep just as the streetlamps came on and though Kaveh’s lower back has a number of serious protests about the situation, Kaveh hasn’t yet moved. “Here we are,” Kaveh agrees. “How are you? How’s the uh, the role-symbolizing game?”
”Role-indwelling,” Cyno says, leaning his back against the mango tree that shades much of the yard. A neighbor’s child gave Alhaitham the sapling mango about a year ago, shortly before Kaveh moved in, at which point it was already fifteen feet tall due to a series of Dendro experiments that Tighnari later referred to as “mortally ill-advised.” “The game was excellent. The girls told me they had a lot of fun and that they very much like my puzzles. And my jokes.”
Kaveh smiles. “Women of taste. So it was a good visit?”
“I believe so. You should join us, next time they come to stay. I think your tours of the city would be much more exciting for them than mine.”
“Ha, I don’t know about that. Do they really like technical discussions of urban planning?”
“I think they would enjoy that more than my repeated explanations of neighborhood crime rates,” Cyno says, to Kaveh’s laughter. “They were very kind, but I’m not the most accomplished tour guide.”
“I’m sure it was fine,” Kaveh says, and then Cyno shifts against the tree, meeting briefly the warm orange light of the kitchen window, and Kaveh says, “Cyno, oh my god.”
“Oh! Do you like it?” Cyno asks, and spreads his arms to reveal his meticulously hand-painted t-shirt. “Collei’s friend Sucrose brought it for me from Mondstadt.” He adds, with brimming pleasure, “It’s my new most prized possession.”
The meticulous hand-painting upon Cyno’s shirt is of a silver dragon. Each carefully-rendered scale shines with power. Its eyes are luminous sapphires. Its teeth, its claws, its massive furled wings—it goes without saying that this is the most impressive t-shirt painting of a dragon Kaveh has ever seen. Or ever will see, seems to imply Cyno’s small yet confident grin.
“That is,” Kaveh says, with a helpless giggle, “an exceedingly cool shirt.”
“It was done for me by the greatest artist in Mondstadt,” Cyno informs him, with no small touch of smugness. “I’ll wear it again during the day, so that you can see the details. They’re truly incredible.”
“I cannot wait.”
“So,” Cyno asks, “are you two alright?”
“Ha,” Kaveh says. “What tipped you off?”
Cyno shrugs, his smile diplomatic. There’s little of the sky to see this close to the Trunk but the night is bright, like the moon is full and the stars abounding, and warm snippets of summer-evening conversation drift from the street through the branches of the mango tree. “I’ve had ample opportunity to speak with you after you’ve had a fight with Alhaitham.”
Kaveh laughs lowly, free hand scrubbing over one eye. His other stays settled on Alhaitham’s arm, thumb rubbing a slow circle into the fabric of his sleeve. “Well, we definitely had a fight. An incredibly mean and stupid one. I made him cry, Cyno.”
Cyno blinks. “Wow.”
“I think I was just—it’s so idiotic, but he kept nagging me, and I hadn’t had much sleep—”
Cyno nods. “Of course.” As if Kaveh ever gets much sleep.
“And, I don’t know, I was—” Kaveh swallows, “I was going insane because Alhaitham—our Alhaitham—isn’t home yet. And I have no idea when he will be. And I want to know.”
Cyno says, “Did you ask the Traveller about it? They’re in town this week.”
Kaveh pauses, thrown soundly off his mental track. “Who?”
“You know, the Traveller. The blonde human with the—well, I’m not wholly sure what species Paimon is, but she’s small and white and floating.”
“Who?” Kaveh says again, more strongly.
Cyno frowns. “The Traveller. Lesser Lord Kusanali’s First Sage. They know quite a lot about Irminsul and—” He squints at Kaveh. “They saved Sumeru?”
Kaveh experiences an intense bout of Conversations With Cyno Disease. “I thought—you and Alhaitham saved Sumeru?” Kaveh says. “With help, of course. Like—Tighnari helped? And Nilou?” he hazards desperately.
“Hm,” Cyno says. “You should maybe read the news more.”
Alhaitham has told Kaveh this more than never. “That may be the case,” Kaveh says, and then, so wrung out after the events of his day, laughs at himself for several long seconds. Cyno kindly allows him the time.
“So,” Cyno says, as he watches Alhaitham settle further into Kaveh’s side. “You had a fight.”
“Yes. I apologized, and he forgave me immediately—not that he said as much, of course.”
“Of course not.”
“But, well, you see his current positioning. And now we’re here and my back is just killing me.”
“You know he loves you, right?” Cyno says. Air pushes through the garden, warm and wet. The end of the dry season approaches, the monsoon beckoning with her long hand.
“I know,” Kaveh says.
“Not just this one,” Cyno says with a nod to the teenage Alhaitham. “Our big one, too.”
“I know,” Kaveh says again. “How could I not know? He gave me a—he’s been trying to give me a house. For almost a year now, if I would just let him.”
“Why don’t you?”
Kaveh’s chest thumps terribly, as if he still has a single hope of escape. As if there remains any path but through. “The thought of owing him that. I can’t even imagine—if we ever left each other again—”
He pauses, still stroking the soft weave of the young Alhaitham’s sleeve. “We slept together a few months ago. Just after the tournament. Did you know about that?”
“I didn’t,” Cyno says, an eyebrow gently raised, “though, Tighnari probably did.”
“Ha, probably. Well, we did. And as soon as we were done I told him we could never do that again.” He stalls, Cyno nodding him on. “I told him we—it was too dangerous. What if we hurt each other again? How could we ever recover from that?”
“What did he say?”
“He said that of course we’d hurt each other again,” Kaveh says, and adds with a small smile, “called me an idiot, too. He was entirely naked when he said it, so I didn’t immediately try to kill him but—well. He said that of course we’d hurt each other. We’d just have to forgive each other, as well.”
Cyno nods slowly, as if in judgment. “I must reluctantly acknowledge that Alhaitham is correct.”
“Maybe,” Kaveh says. “Probably. Probably! I told him to fuck off, of course. Worse, really. I said worse than that. And I still don’t—I’ve spent so long being so mad at him for our fight at school. I can’t even imagine how to forgive him. And if I can’t forgive him for that, how could he assume that we could forgive each other for anything?”
Cyno looks at the gawky teenager curled into Kaveh’s armpit. “Is that still what you think?” he asks.
“He’s a stupid kid,” Kaveh admits softly. “I was a stupid kid. How could I not forgive him?”
The wind blows again, and the streets sound, and water plonks steadily into their neighbor’s little backyard fountain. “So, will you forgive him?” Cyno asks.
“If I do, do I get to pick and choose? If I forgive him this, doesn’t that mean I could forgive him anything?”
“You could,” Cyno says. “You wouldn’t have to, but you could.”
Kaveh nods, swallowing clumsily. “And then what?”
“Well, I think you decide if you want to spend the rest of your life with him.”
“I don't have the faintest idea how to do that.”
“Maybe that's the case,” Cyno allows. “But I think he’s waited for you for a long, long time. And I think he’ll wait for you for the rest of your lives, really. But I don’t think you should make him. Not even Alhaitham could bear that forever. Though he would surely try.”
Kaveh produces a deep, stuttering laugh. “You know, I don't think Tighnari would have said a single word of this to me.”
“Probably not. That's why I offered to come check on you. Don't tell Tighnari.”
“Only if you forgive me for abandoning you in Lambad’s yesterday. Which I am almost certain you saw.”
“I did. You're forgiven. And you have a deal.”
“Thank god,” Kaveh smiles, wiping the tears from one cheek. Beneath his other arm, the young Alhaitham stirs.
“Cyno?” Alhaitham asks, in a sleepy, slurred voice.
“Hello, Haitham,” Cyno says, eyes creasing as he grins.
“The p’ssesed professor's kid?”
Cyno and Kaveh both laugh. “Yes, still me,” Cyno says.
“...What’re you wearing?”
“A very, very cool shirt,” Cyno says, and Kaveh can't help his smile as he strokes Alhaitham’s shaggy head.
“Go back to sleep,” Cyno says to Alhaitham. “I was just leaving. We’ll meet again soon.”
“Fine,” Alhaitham mumbles, an unbelievable concession to his own lack of consciousness, and sinks back to Kaveh’s side before he can remember himself and start an argument.
“Tighnari finally made it back from his hunting trip, then?” Kaveh asks softly, as Cyno removes himself from the trunk of the mango tree and Alhaitham’s breathing deepens against Kaveh’s side.
“Yes, happily. He’s been gone too long,” Cyno says, though his eyes pause on whatever tangled shape Kaveh and Alhaitham make upon the bench. “You know, I used to see you two like this all the time.”
“Really?”
“Yes, in the House of Daena. One of you reading, the other curled up next to them. Reading or sleeping or similar. Nearly every week, it seemed.”
“I suppose so,” Kaveh murmurs, his hand passing up and down Alhaitham’s side.
He looks down at Alhaitham, at his slumped head and the slow, loose motions of his shoulder. “I think I used to scare him a lot,” Kaveh says. “Back when we were kids.”
Alhaitham returns to Kaveh’s dorm room just before sundown, the absolute last time at which an unattended adult might be wandering unremarked-upon through Kshahrewar’s halls. He’s hours too late, of course. He should have recognized the letter, and he didn't, and so when he returns to Kaveh’s room Kaveh is fiercely drunk and sobbing into his folded arms.
The letter is open on Kaveh’s desk. Alhaitham didn't recognize it when it appeared on Kaveh’s desk this morning but he remembers its contents vividly: an otherwise innocuous letter from Rtawahist’s desk of grant awards that assumed, erroneously, that Kaveh’s father was still alive.
…In light of your past achievements we would be pleased to consider a renewal of your previous award if you would please submit a summary no more than five pages in length of significant advancements in your work in the period since etc. etc. “Kaveh,” Alhaitham says, kneeling at Kaveh’s side, putting a hand to his heaving back. “Inhale. Kaveh, breathe.”
The letter isn't the only cause of tonight’s agony, of course, though it is the tipping point. Alhaitham remembers that there was a project deadline, and a final stubborn group member who fell off their thesis work, and a teacher who made a pass at Kaveh in an uncrowded hallway. This time, obviously, there's the additional stress of Alhaitham himself. His essential mishandling of this entire situation. It's almost enough to make him leave and trust in someone more capable than himself to help Kaveh through the evening, but there is no one else. He’s it. “Kaveh,” he says. “Match my breathing.”
Kaveh tries, forcing his lungs into a few lurching exhales, but it quickly falls apart. He sobs wretchedly, bent over his desk, the letter just a few inches from his head.
As vivid as Alhaitham’s memories are of Kaveh on this evening so many years ago, so are his memories of himself. He'd made it through the night by the skin of their shared teeth. His panic had been like a pit trap the entire time, a spike-lined grave awaiting his approach at every turn. Their last fight didn't begin until weeks later, but he’d conducted it with much of this night in mind. How his hand had hovered over Kaveh’s quaking shoulder.
He gets one arm around Kaveh's shoulders and another under his knees. “Kaveh, I'm going to take you to the bathroom,” he says, voice held steady with an iron grip. “You've had too much to drink. You need to vomit or else you're going to do it on your bed.”
Kaveh is insensate. Alhaitham lifts him into his arms and conducts them out of the room, kicking the door closed behind them. When they return he lowers Kaveh as gently as he can onto his bed. As Kaveh continues to cry, weakly and hitching, Alhaitham removes his shoes, his jacket, and his hairpins, moving Kaveh’s head with as much gentleness as he can. He sets the hairpins on Kaveh’s desk, along with the empty bottles clustered together by the side of his bed.
Kaveh mumbles to himself. “What?” Alhaitham asks, leaning closer, pushing Kaveh’s hair back from his red, swollen face.
“‘M sorry. ‘M sorry.”
“You don't need to apologize.”
“‘M sorry,” Kaveh says again. Stubborn. “You d’nt have to.”
“I don’t mind.”
“You should. You should. It's all my fault.”
“It's not.”
“He's dead b’cause of me.”
“He's not.”
“He is. He is.”
All of Alhaitham’s ridiculous self-imposed rules about not influencing the past—what purpose do they serve? What is his knowledge for, if not for this? “He’s not,” Alhaitham says again. “It wasn’t you. We find the man who hurt him. Your father was trying to come home to you. You make sure no one can ever be hurt like that again.”
Kaveh cries and cries. There’s no guarantee he can even hear what Alhaitham’s saying. For a moment Alhaitham is possessed of the profound need to know Kaveh as he was before his father died. If he can see this far back in time, then why not then? Kaveh before he was hurt, before a single bad thing had ever happened to him. Let him see it. Let him have all of the facts.
“It’s not your fault,” Alhaitham says. “None of it is your fault. Everything will be okay. You’ll build such beautiful things. You’ll see so much beauty in the world, things I can’t even imagine. You’ll be the smartest person I’ve ever met. Kaveh—”
He’s beneath Alhaitham’s hands, crying himself sick, sobbing into a pillow sodden with his tears and then—he’s gone. Alhaitham is elsewhere. Alhaitham is as he was a week and four hours ago, sitting on the couch in his living room, beside a book not worth the paper it was printed on.
Alhaitham stares around the empty room, seeing his own furniture, his own books, the thousand small pieces of clutter Kaveh has purchased and displayed where Alhaitham might see and complain. He tries to regulate his breathing and when that doesn’t work he forces it into obedience, putting his hands to his mouth and counting back from one hundred in threes.
“Alhaitham?” Kaveh calls. Not the young Kaveh, the drunk and sobbing one. Alhaitham continues to breathe into his hands.
“Haitham, is that you?”
Kaveh comes through the door from the kitchen and stops, hands falling from the dish towel slung over his shoulder. But as soon as he stops he’s moving again, coming forward, kneeling in front of Alhaitham on the living room carpet.
“Hey,” he says gently, peeling Alhaitham’s hands from his mouth, folding them into his own so that Alhaitham can squeeze the warmth of their palms together. “Hey, it’s okay.”
He leans his forehead to Alhaitham’s, his steady breath against Alhaitham’s mouth. “It’s okay. I’m okay. Thank you. I’m sorry.”