serious and possibly fatal

by priorwalter

Summary:

Kaveh once thought that he would run out of himself. He would give and give and one day there wouldn’t be any left and then he would die. But there is no dying in e-cigarette purgatory and there is no salvation in waiting for eternity, except maybe if Kaveh waits for one more eternity there will be.

Notes:

my last fic was a departure from how i usually write so i wanted to return to my roots. this was pretty experimental but i had to get it out

note non-linear narrative tag. beyond the first scene, every one following will be labelled either “minus [amount of time]” to show how long ago it was set or “plus [amount of time]” to show how long has passed since the first scene. and no one think about why teyvat has the same brands of cars as normal earth

1. ground zero

Kaveh learned to drive in a Ford Model T. The man who taught him was named Adrian and Adrian liked that Kaveh was young, rail-thin, and beautiful in a temporary way; the kind of person you’d see on the news in a few years for dying in an accident tragic for the fact that it could have been prevented if only someone noticed his derailment. Adrian wanted to fuck Kaveh in his Ford Model T but Kaveh didn’t allow it. The windows never fogged up enough for him to relax. Adrian wanted to make his claim known but Kaveh couldn’t do it. Adrian wanted to be seen together as friends or as Adrian and Adrian’s new plaything. It wasn’t that Kaveh minded being owned, only that he was too ashamed to let it be known that he liked it. 

Four years after Adrian taught Kaveh how to drive he died of cancer. He was buried with his late wife and his car went to Kaveh, who didn’t have the courage to face Adrian’s eleven year old daughter left with her distant uncle. Kaveh met her a few times, but she found him off-putting in a way she could not articulate with her childish vocabulary. Though her vocabulary was still oceans vaster than Kaveh’s had been at six, eight, eleven. Adrian had ensured she would have more private tutors than she knew what to do with. Kaveh left Fontaine when Adrian’s daughter was twenty-seven after the birth of her third son. He was still thirty one, as he had been for four hundred years. 

Now more than a century later Kaveh does not like to drive. Cars are dreadful, lonely beasts. Even the quiet ones are too loud. On buses and subways and trains and streetcars, Kaveh thinks about killing everyone around him and revels in the misery of depriving himself of it. The modern era makes it easy to erect walls between himself and humanity. Kaveh conducts work meetings over Zoom and Instacarts his groceries. He visits museums alone and ignores the waiter’s pitying looks when he eats at restaurants by himself. But he allows himself the anonymous intimacy of crowding together with strangers on a speeding, lurching bus, the sweet, rich scent of blood sharp in his nose. 

The woman sitting beside where Kaveh stands now on the fourteen which was three minutes late is heavily pregnant and her young son’s small hand rests on her belly. Once Kaveh read that pregnant women have more blood in their bodies and he is so thirsty. In another world, Kaveh might entertain the idea of asking her to share. Ma’am, surely you don’t need all that? Ma’am, let me take a load off your back. I’ll only take a little. But her son would scream and she would scream and someone might call the police. Kaveh doesn’t need blood. He only wants it very badly. 

The mother and son get off at the next stop and a man looks meaningfully at Kaveh and then the now-empty seat like Kaveh looks like he can’t bear to stand for a minute longer. Kaveh pretends not to have noticed and hopes the man doesn’t say anything to him. He hasn’t truly spoken to anyone beyond work obligations or socially contracted small talk in many years. Since Adrian, perhaps, whose company Kaveh enjoyed mostly for his bruising grip and propensity for violence when drunk. There was a man half a century ago in Liyue Harbour and a woman two decades ago in Chenyu Vale, but Kaveh has never been able to leave Sumeru for long because the blood smells like home and the Palace of Alcazarzaray reminds him of everything he thought he could have. 

When Kaveh disembarks, the fresh air of Sumeru City floods his senses, though it isn’t as fresh as it once was. Now with the stench of blood there are exhaust fumes and cotton candy vape clouds. On some days, it’s thrilling—it’s a suffocating reminder that five hundred years have passed between now and then. But most days it adds to his misery. Maybe he really did die and this is some strange, lonely purgatory filled with artificially flavoured e-cigarettes and buildings so tall that the Divine Tree doesn’t look impressive anymore. 

The street is crowded. A flautist from Mondstadt is  having a concert at the arts centre and Kaveh enjoys the flute, so he pretends that it was the concert he was looking forward to and not the overstuffed bus ride on route fourteen during rush hour. He’s dressed nicely, perhaps too nicely. The Kaveh of today is a wealthy man despite his best efforts and his wardrobe reflects it. A girl with an NG tube taped to her cheek on a bench near the entrance inside the arts centre is wearing a button up dress that is just too big for her, like it was ready-made from a department store and sizing down would have meant the dress was too small but this size is still too loose. After he sees the dress, Kaveh notices her blood. 

The bleeding girl with the NG tube is crying and she is far too old for it. Fifteen, maybe, though Kaveh doesn’t spend enough time with teenagers to be able to tell anymore. One of her knees weeps blood and she holds her right hand to her chest like it hurts. Her blood smells like flying. Like the only reason that anyone ever eats or drinks or smokes or fucks is because they can’t have this. But Kaveh can’t have it either. He sits near the girl, mindful of the cane leaning against her uninjured leg. 

“Are you alright?” he asks, maintaining as much distance as he can between them without making it obvious that he is doing it. “Do you want me to get anything? Water? Or a staff member?” 

She wipes at her eyes furiously and shakes her head. “I just lost my balance on the steps outside. I’m okay. I’m waiting for my—um, I’m waiting for someone.” 

Blood drips down her knee. If Kaveh were not a monster, he would find a bathroom to get some tissue to wipe it up, but that would be too tempting.  “You like Alemann?” he asks in an attempt to distract her from her tears. 

She sniffs. “Huh?”

“The concert,” Kaveh says. “Is that who you’re here to see?”

Her uninjured hand comes down to rest on the rounded handle of her cane. It’s covered in colourful stickers and charms. “I guess,” the girl answers. “I don’t really know who he is. But my friend in Mondstadt likes him so she said I should see him.” 

“It sounds like you’re a good friend,” Kaveh offers, having nothing else to say. 

“I don’t know. Um, I don’t want to make you late or anything. So if you have to go…” 

Kaveh has made her uncomfortable. “I’ll get out of your hair. I just wanted to make sure—”

“Collei?” comes a cold, deep voice. A short man inserts himself between the girl and Kaveh. “What happened? Are you alright?” 

“I tripped on the steps,” she answers balefully. “Um, he was just sitting with me until you came. So it’s okay.” 

The short man glares at Kaveh with eyes hard as flint. “Is that right?” 

Collei would probably be embarrassed if Kaveh admits he was worried because he saw her crying. “I saw her bleeding so I just wanted to make sure she was alright. I’ll leave you be. I hope you both enjoy the concert.” 

He leaves without waiting for a reply. It was as though the man could see Kaveh’s desperation. Like he sensed Kaveh’s need to knock Collei to the ground and tear at her skinned knee until there was nothing left but bone. 

Kaveh floats into the theatre on light feet. He bought three seats by the wall so there would be two in between him and everyone else, but he still smells the blood of the woman sitting in front of him, who is on her period which Kaveh knows because he can smell it.

The flautist is alright. For two hundred years, Kaveh loved to see how music and theatre and art and literature shifted with time, and then for another one hundred years Kaveh had seen so much music and theatre and art and literature that he hated all of it. For one hundred years after that he appreciated what had changed in his century of living as a philistine. For the next one hundred years, a malaise Kaveh could not name sat heavy on his chest every time he watched a movie or read a book or went to a concert and now, when Alemann misses a note, he realizes all at once that this has been done before, every emotion Alemann has felt since he emerged from his mother’s womb red and screaming has been felt before, every note echoing around the theatre has been played before, and Kaveh is still here, and it is beautiful but he has heard this song before. 

Kaveh is thirsty. He shuffles out of the theatre in the thick herd of people, jerking every time someone brushes against him. Al-Haitham hated the flute more than any other instrument and could not explain why. He thought it was dumb. He’d have said it out loud. Kaveh, I’ve heard this song before.  

But he doesn’t know that, Kaveh would say. As far as anyone else in this room knows, no one has written this song except for him. And if Al-Haitham were here for Kaveh to argue with, maybe then Kaveh could have convinced himself the concert was good, but he isn’t so Kaveh sits on the bench across from the one where he found Collei two and a half hours earlier and stares at his leather shoes. His phone has given him an alert that service on the fourteen is disrupted, which means Kaveh will have to take the two-oh-four and then transfer onto the seven to get home, but if the fourteen is disrupted the seven probably will be too, and anyway Kaveh doesn’t like transferring. He can afford to call a car but Kaveh hates cars. He can afford a private jet but why would Kaveh take a private jet to his apartment from the arts centre. 

The world is very beautiful and Kaveh is outside of it. If Kaveh could watch from inside the room, he would like Alemann more. 

“Umm, hello,” says a young girl’s voice, “are you okay?”

First Kaveh sees the red on her knee, and then her green hair, and then the short man beside her. “Yes,” he says, sitting up straight. “I’m just waiting a bit so the bus’ll be less crowded on the way home.” The lie slips out easily. 

“It might be a while,” says the man with the deep voice. His hair is so white it hurts to look at. “There was a big accident uptown. A lot of the bus routes are delayed, apparently.” 

“Ah, I’ll get home eventually,” Kaveh deflects. 

Collei looks up at the man beside her. He looks down at her. They both look back at Kaveh, though neither look into his eyes. “Where are you headed?” the man asks. 

“Uptown,” Kaveh answers vaguely. 

“If it would get you closer to home, we could drop you off at the subway,” he offers. Why does this man who Kaveh thought saw through him want to drive him to the subway? But being driven by this man and Collei wouldn’t be as terrible as driving a car alone. 

“I couldn’t impose, really,” Kaveh insists. “I’ll just get a taxi.” 

“Okay,” says the man flatly. 

“Are you sure?” asks Collei. “It’s on our way.” 

Kaveh prefers the bus to the subway because the stuffy smell makes him gag, and a transfer between a car and the underground is still close enough to a transfer, but Collei looks so shy and the subway will be so crowded with the service disruption. 

“If it really wouldn’t be a bother,” Kaveh gives in. “But I don’t want to keep you.” 

Is this something that people do? Three hundred and fifty years ago people asked if Kaveh had a way home, if he had anyone to watch out for him, if he had a place to go back to. Now everyone ducks their head and stares down at their phones. What if Kaveh was a serial killer? What if the man knew how much Kaveh wanted to kill his daughter/sister/friend/ward? 

But he doesn’t so Collei sits on the bench two feet away from him in full view of the concierge as the short man whose name is Cyno walks two streets up to where his car is parked. She isn’t supposed to walk that far if she doesn’t have to, Collei explains in a small voice. 

“I get it. Nice cane,” is all that Kaveh says in response. “I like the stickers. I feel like I recognize that purple guy.” 

Her eyes light up. “Do you watch King of Invokations?” 

Kaveh makes a see-saw gesture with his hand. “I read a couple of the novels.” 

“Cyno really likes it,” she says eagerly. “He showed me the TV show and we play the game.” 

Kaveh gets the feeling that Collei doesn’t have many friends and wants badly to rectify that. “That’s pretty cool. I haven’t gotten around to playing it but I like TCGs and I watch a lot of those TikToks of people making the dice.” 

“I like those too. I want to try making my own dice.” 

Is the first person Kaveh that has allowed himself to speak to properly in decades a fifteen year old girl? Is he a creep? Beside the urge to slice open her throat is the unshakeable desire to keep Collei safe from people like him. 

“You should try it. It’s great to make something yourself, you know? And also it has to be so satisfying to pull them out of those little molds.” 

Collei laughs, stilted but genuine. She chatters on until one of the red doors to the theatre opens and Cyno calls out, “Collei?” 

“Oh!” Collei says. “Um. Sorry, Kaveh, I guess I got carried away.”

“Not at all,” Kaveh replies. He climbs into the back of the sleek black car while Collei gets the passenger seat. Cyno rolls down his window and the scent of blood lessens. He and Collei chat about the concert, which neither of them liked very much but apparently Collei is afraid to tell her friend Eula that. 

“What did you think, Kaveh?” Collei asks. 

Kaveh forgot that he was a thing in the car with them and not just a speck of dirt observing. “He was talented, but unoriginal,” Kaveh replies, allowing himself for once a sliver of the truth. “It was alright.” 

“I thought it was a flaut,” Cyno says. When silence answers him, he explains, “Like flop. But it was a flautist. Flaut.” 

Kaveh doesn’t laugh at the joke. It barely counted as a joke and Kaveh hasn’t laughed in many years. But he lets out a sharp breath from his nose at the absurdity of the situation. 

“He liked it,” Cyno intones. “I’ll have to tell Tighnari.” 

“Noooo, you know what he’ll say,” Collei giggles. 

“I do, but I have to tell him.” 

Collei and Cyno have an easy relationship. Kaveh melts into the background. Traffic on the way to the subway is stifling, so it’s nearly forty minutes before they reach the station. It would have been faster to walk. In that forty minutes Kaveh mostly hears about Tighnari, who he guesses is a roommate or brother or partner to someone or other, and he hears about Genius Invokation TCG, and the case Cyno is working on because he is a lawyer, and the butterfly conservatory opening up on the edge of the city, and how Collei did on her math test. It’s all very mundane and for a moment Kaveh doesn’t feel so far away. But soon they arrive at the station.  

“Thank you very much for the drive,” Kaveh says. “I appreciate it. You didn’t have to do this, really.” 

“Thank you for looking out for Collei,” Cyno says seriously. 

“Noooo,” Collei cries. “But yes! Thank you!” 

“If there’s anything I can do to—”

“Don’t worry about it. Have a safe trip home,” Cyno says. As Kaveh leaves, he hears through the open driver’s window, “Collei, if you want to practice driving at night right now we don’t have to tell Tighnari.” 

The stairs to the underground are crowded thick with people. Here there is no avoiding brushing against anyone else. Kaveh lets himself be shuffled down the steps, across the concrete floor, and through the turnstiles, feeling for a moment as though he is just one face in the crowd, a nothing-person, a person at all. It smells like sweat and blood and garbage, a symphony with more truth than anything Alemann could write in his allotted eighty years. 

The doors to the southbound train Kaveh is due for slide open but before he can cross the gap, his eyes snag on something bright—a burst of alluring, gruesome crimson in the sea of browns and greys. It’s an advertisement on the wall, barely visible through the throng of delayed passengers fighting to get home, so Kaveh picks through the crowd to the exposed brick. The ad is massive and encased in a thick plastic frame. It’s for a new exhibit at the National Gallery. Blood, Love, and Lust in Post-Calamity Sumeru, it says in bold black letters, and below it is an old script written in Kaveh’s own spidery handwriting. 

That script went out of use three hundred years ago. No one without a PhD should be able to read it. But it was the script that Kaveh’s father taught him and he recognizes the words after reading over them a hundred thousand times all those years ago, though he has little memory of writing them. By then he had no inkwell left in the room that he locked himself in for weeks, having used it all up writing pages and pages and pages of nonsense, so this section was written in Kaveh’s own blood. That much he can recall. 

I want to eat him, says Kaveh’s handwriting on the wall in bright, damning red. I want him to be inside me forever. Suddenly he feels as though everyone in the bustling terminal can see the blood on his hands.

How did the National Gallery of Sumeru find this journal? Kaveh thought that he got rid of them. It could have been Al-Haitham. Al-Haitham hates him so maybe he did this as some sort of horrible delayed revenge. Maybe he’s gotten tired of living forever. But Kaveh’s heart isn’t in it. Al-Haitham is a very private man and has spent his cursed eternity in relative solitude. More than that, nineteen out of every twenty pages in Kaveh’s journal are about him. Al-Haitham wouldn’t want to expose himself. Most likely it was a very unfortunate accident—some lockbox Kaveh forgot to empty that turned up in the bowels of an old house, or buried underground. 

If they have one page, they have hundreds. Kaveh doesn’t remember writing almost any of it. He was suicidal with self-loathing and insane with thirst, and Al-Haitham stayed with him through it all until Kaveh killed him.

Someone says something to Kaveh in a nasty tone and someone else bumps into his side, but Kaveh keeps staring up at the advertisement, unable to care about the fact that he’s blocking the current of people. There’s an entire exhibit about him? About the worst time in his very long life? With detached horror Kaveh realizes that his unquenchable desire to cannibalize his lover will soon be the subject of someone’s dissertation. 

He catches the next train—only four minutes later! Modern convenience is sickening—and takes a moment to hate himself. His greatest shame being broadcasted on the national stage fills him with a grim sort of satisfaction. Under his rib cage where his heart once beat, there is a great, slobbering beast with needle-sharp teeth and hatred in its eyes and Kaveh spends his eternity throwing paltry offerings into its snapping jaw like its hunger will ever be sated—like Kaveh’s debts will ever be paid. This is definitely going to be added to his Wikipedia page.

 

 

 

 

2. minus one year

The internet was a sexy invention but Kaveh finds modernity boring. It was charming to watch humanity chug along slowly but ever so surely, picking up speed until it dove head-first into bluetooth and 3D printing, but Kaveh misses the scratch of quill against parchment. Typewriters were much cuter than laptops and the ache of nostalgia is only occasionally assuaged by his mechanical keyboard.

If Al-Haitham were around, he’d call Kaveh a materialist but Kaveh cursed him for eternity so Kaveh plays the Sims alone in his very expensive apartment. 

The novelty of owning rather than renting, of having no monetary debts wore off at one hundred and fifty. Today Kaveh could buy the Sanctuary of Surasthana and still have change leftover; five hundred years is a long time. He freelances between very long naps and makes anonymous donations to charity when he starts to feel too guilty about the zeroes in his bank account. He volunteers around the city. He gives stacks of bills to people on the street. He tips one hundred and twenty percent as if almsgiving will stop the spokes of the wheel of time from stabbing him through the chest. 

Kaveh recalls living with Al-Haitham before—Before—and feeling every day like the world would crumble beneath feet and it would be all his fault. If he just had enough money, enough free time, enough space, he could fix it, though he was never sure what it was.

Now Kaveh has more money than he knows what to do with and all the space he could ever ask for. He has all the time in the world—he has forever. But he still hasn’t figured out what it is. Only that it’s still far away. Maybe six hundred will see him satisfied but today he is as hungry as he always has been and always will be. 

While his Sims murmur Kaveh opens his phone. A client has tagged him on Instagram because the house he built her was so beautiful that she hosted her wedding there in her picturesque backyard with that palatial manse as the backdrop. It’s cute. Tacky. Between the tall evergreen trees are twinkling fairy lights. The bride kisses her wife or husband, maybe, Kaveh can’t tell but they both have long hair and they both wear suits, one white and one black, and for reasons he cannot articulate with his childish vocabulary Kaveh throws his phone onto the ground and the screen shatters into a thousand tiny pieces, and when Kaveh tries to sweep up the shards with his hands they embed themselves into his palm so he licks up the blood and it doesn’t taste like his did. 

Earlier that day a car hit a cyclist while Kaveh was walking down the street. He was close enough to hear the sick crunch of the cyclist’s arm and his shout of pain when he hit the ground. The bike was mangled beyond repair and Kaveh didn’t dare go near the injured man for fear of liking it too much but he took a picture of the man in the car and his license plate in case anything went wrong. They argued about insurance as the cyclist cradled his arm against his chest, which was bent at an angle that Kaveh cringed to look at. Kaveh wanted to die. 

How much has really changed in all this time? Maybe Al-Haitham was right about everything. Kaveh builds beautiful buildings and empties his pockets for anyone who asks but he is just one thing. There is a Wikipedia page for Kaveh of Kshahrewar who built the bridge in Port Ormos and the Palace of Alcazarzaray and then died tragically young and a Wikipedia page for the name he’d taken on to restructure Vimara Village one hundred and thirty years later to support its growing population, back when it was still just a village, and there is a Wikipedia page for the name he’d taken on when he’d been angry enough to build an ugly house out of concrete for the Grand Sage of two and a half centuries ago but concrete doesn’t do well in Dharma Forest so Kaveh invented a new kind of concrete that did, and now there’s a Wikipedia page for that too and soon followed the sudden desire for concrete buildings all throughout Sumeru, though no one knows that it’s been him all along and nothing really has changed if the cyclist worried about his insurance before his broken arm and Kaveh still can’t have anything that he wants. He still hasn’t earned it. 

He once thought that he would run out of himself. He would give and give and one day there wouldn’t be any left and then he would die. But there is no dying in e-cigarette purgatory and there is no salvation in waiting for eternity, except maybe if Kaveh waits for one more eternity there will be.

 

 

 

 

3. plus one day

His work email pings. The subject line is, Why didn’t you burn it.

Al-Haitham—because it can only be him—writes without fanfare:

Looking forward to the thinkpieces on who topped. 

It isn’t signed, and the email is a random series of numbers and letters. Kaveh hates him.

 

 

 

 

4. plus eleven days

The butterfly conservatory is far enough from the city centre that it takes Kaveh an hour and forty five minutes of travel to reach it, and one hour and thirty minutes in he begins to consider getting his license again. This bus route is normally empty but the conservatory opened four days ago so it’s crowded with children and mothers and bored teenagers and they’re all wearing brightly coloured shirts hoping that the butterflies will land on them like the website told them to. 

Is that how that works? Kaveh thought that bright meant danger, like a poison dart frog, do not eat me this is your last warning. But butterflies like high-frequency colours. The girl beside Kaveh wears a lilac blouse: I am not dangerous, I will submit to you, you can land on me. If Kaveh were to bite her it would hurt. He wants blood but he isn’t built to drink it; his teeth aren’t any sharper than any other human’s since he was born as one of them. His canines aren’t meant to tear through flesh. So he would have to bite her all the way down to his molars and it would hurt and it would leave a bruise covering half her neck if she survived. 

Kaveh shuffles off the crowded bus. The conservatory has a playground outside of it filled with screaming children. When Kaveh shows the ticket on his phone, the man at the front desk gives him a wide smile and points him down the hallway to a pair of heavy glass doors. There are blue arrows on the floor too, with little painted butterflies fluttering around them. “There’s a school tour starting in half an hour, just so you know,” the man adds before Kaveh follows the arrows. “They might be a bit loud.” 

The greenhouse is huge, like a section of the Avidya Forest has been cut neatly out and transported here into the conservatory. Colourful butterflies flit around, some bigger than Kaveh’s hand and some barely as long as this thumb. He looks down before every step he takes in case there’s one on the floor. 

The scent of blood is present, but alongside it is the heavy humidity in the air and the sweet smell of flowers. A brown and white butterfly with eye-like circles on its wings suddenly shudders into flight from where it was perched on the branch in front of Kaveh and when it flies, the outer side of its wings are bright, shining blue with black around the edges. Some of the brown and blue butterflies float in pairs, dancing around one another in jerky, uncoordinated circles. 

The air is sticky but Kaveh doesn’t mind. He has worn uncharacteristic black so none of the butterflies land on him. Most insects live for months at most, or even days, but humans don’t live for much longer. 

There’s an artificial creek running through the centre and a turtle lounges on the edge. Kaveh sits on the damp bench nearby to look at it. How many butterflies will this turtle see die? When will Kaveh stop being so morbid?

His contemplation is interrupted by a shutter sound, and then, “Oops! I thought I turned off my volume. Um, Kaveh? There’s a butterfly on your hair.” 

Kaveh turns his head slowly, mindful of the butterfly apparently on him, to see Collei and Cyno dressed in casual clothes this time, Collei in a sundress and Cyno wearing a tank top with obscene armholes almost down to his waist. Beside them is another man with tall furry ears. Kaveh hasn’t seen anyone like him in years, maybe not since he left Inazuma, and it leaves him unable to speak for a moment. 

“Hello,” he finally chokes out. “I would go over there but I guess there is a butterfly on my head.” 

“Do you mind if I sit with you?” Collei asks, and Kaveh doesn’t, so she sits on the bench with two careful feet of space between them and opens her phone to show him the picture she took. There is indeed a rusty red-brown butterfly on his head, and Kaveh’s expression looks blank in a way that upsets him to see captured. “Sorry to take a picture of you without asking, but I was worried it would get scared off before you could see it.” 

“It’s a monarch, right?” Kaveh says, mostly to himself.

“No, you see the black line parallel to its body? It’s a viceroy.” She zooms in on the butterfly’s wing. “There.” 

“I wonder why they look the same.” 

Collei looks up at the man with the ears, who nods at her. She explains all in one breath, “They used to think viceroys were mimicking monarchs to protect themselves because monarchs are toxic, but it turns out viceroys are also toxic, so it’s not one-sided. It’s like… mutual mimicry. There’s a name for it but I forget.” He feels a faint tickle on his head and Collei looks up. “Goodbye,” she says to the viceroy. 

“Mutual,” Kaveh echoes. “I didn’t know that. Do you know about those blue ones with the eyes? The big guys.” 

Collei nods. “Blue morphos! Tighnari told me all about them. He works here, well, he’s helping out here for a while until things settle down because he knows all about the butterflies but he isn’t an entomologist. Um, Tighnari is my, that’s him over there.” The man with the ears doesn’t acknowledge her, in deep conversation with Cyno. 

“It seems like it would be a great place to work,” Kaveh offers after an awkward pause, wondering why this teenager who is not yet old enough to drive has latched onto him. He is not thirty one but he looks thirty one, and surely Collei would rather talk to someone her own age like the boy looking at the praying mantis in the glass enclosure a few feet away. 

“When I can drive I want to work here after school,” she gushes. “But um. The blue morphos. I think that in the wild, the bright blue on only one side looks like flashing when they fly so it confuses predators, and of course the eye spots are meant to scare them off too.” 

Kaveh raises his eyebrows. “You know a lot about butterflies. I’m sure they’d love to have you work here.” 

“I’m sure they would,” cuts in Tighnari with his big ears. “What do you do for work, Kaveh?” 

Just like his first meeting with Cyno at the arts centre, Kaveh feels seen through down to his bones, like Tighnari knows that Kaveh is wondering if his valuka shuna blood would taste different. “I’m an architect. I mostly freelance. What about you?”  

“I work at the national park,” Tighnari says vaguely. “Funny running into you here.” 

Kaveh is a horrible monster but at the very least he doesn’t stalk little girls. Maybe if Collei was older. “I kept seeing ads for this place after Cyno mentioned it, so I wanted to visit. What a coincidence to run into you guys again, though I want to leave before that tour gets here, so I’m going to go soon.” 

Tighnari relaxes minutely. “Little kids always end up killing a few of them. I can’t stand it.” 

Cyno must be in his thirties but Tighnari doesn’t look much older than Collei herself, at least by Kaveh’s standards. Twenty-five or twenty-seven, maybe. She doesn’t look anything like either of them. She must be a stepsister or stepchild or family friend or adopted. 

“What does the blue morpho play instead of I Spy?” Cyno asks.

“No,” Tighnari sighs. 

“I spot,” Collei answers dutifully. 

“Like eye spot,” Cyno explains. 

“Okay,” Tighnari mutters. “I have to go now. See you guys later. Nice to meet you, Kaveh.” He nods at Collei and kisses the corner of Cyno’s mouth like it’s nothing. Kaveh thinks about his broken phone. 

“What does an architect do?” Collei asks. 

“I design buildings,” he answers. “Did you hear about the new wing of the National Gallery they built a few years ago? That was me.” The new wing of the National Gallery where his diary is on display for the world to see. 

“Really?” Cyno asks.

“Cool,” Collei breathes. “That seems hard.” 

“I like it,” Kaveh says, and it doesn’t feel true but if it were a lie he has had five hundred years to give up on it. “But it’s thankless. You’re better off working with butterflies, I promise.” He looks at Cyno and then at Collei, and asks uncertainly, “You’re in… high school?” 

“I’m in grade eleven,” she says. “I don’t know what I want to do at university yet. I am not going to law school.” 

Cyno breathes in a way that might be a laugh. Collei seems to think so because she laughs too. “If you want to go, get an easy degree for an easy job and rest on your laurels for all of your life,” Cyno suggests, patting her head very slowly. At first Collei flinches at the touch but consciously she takes a deep breath and after a moment leans into it. 

Rest on your laurels for all of your life. Kaveh has heard this song before too. A tiny green butterfly lands on Cyno’s hand and he outstretches it ever so slowly toward Collei, whose eyes widen. She takes out her phone and turns off the volume before taking a picture of it. When Cyno raises his arm, the excessively large armholes in his shirt reveal his chest and for a moment Kaveh can’t stop staring, can’t stop thinking about the raised red scar. Cyno frowns so Kaveh rights himself and looks down at the paper guide in his hands. 

“I think it’s a greenstreak,” he whispers like speaking too loudly will scare off the butterfly.

“Probably,” Collei agrees, voice just as low. 

Soon the greenstreak flies away and Collei leaves with Cyno to keep exploring the conservatory, but only after Cyno asks for Kaveh’s phone number, which he rattles off from memory because his phone is still broken. Kaveh makes himself scarce before the children arrive because he doesn’t want to think about eating them.  

 

 

 

 

5. minus ninety seven years

With Kaveh’s cock deep inside of him Al-Haitham gasps out, “I thought you might have died.” 

It is not as unsexy as it should be. Instead of replying Kaveh rocks into him until he comes and then buries his face between Al-Haitham’s legs so nothing spills out yet. It tastes bitter but Al-Haitham is sweet and soon he cries out and clamps his legs around Kaveh’s ears and pulls on Kaveh’s hair so hard Kaveh’s cock twitches again, and Al-Haitham says “Come here,” so Kaveh lets himself be dragged and Al-Haitham bites him where his neck meets his shoulder and drinks and drinks and it hurts so badly but Kaveh feels it everywhere, in his throat and his dick and his tits and his toes, the bottoms of his feet and the backs of his eyes. 

Al-Haitham’s mouth is covered in blood. Kaveh’s mouth is covered in Al-Haitham. When they kiss Kaveh thinks about the day four hundred years ago and shoves his leg between Al-Haitham’s thighs and Al-Haitham grinds against him with pathetic, hiccupy moans for too long until he comes like he’s sixteen and not four hundred. He lets himself fall back onto the wooden floor which is where they ended up instead of a bed or even maybe a rug. 

“Why would I die,” Kaveh mutters roughly, chest heaving. 

“It’s been a few decades since there has been a new architectural movement in Sumeru,” Al-Haitham answers, sounding remarkably calm for someone who had bitten a hole in Kaveh’s throat with his molars.

Kaveh sighs. “My back hurts. Stupid fucking floor.” 

“But your neck is fine?” Al-Haitham asks. 

“Whatever.” His neck is going to hurt soon but now he feels warm and untethered inside. His skin feels tacky and Al-Haitham doesn’t look happy but if they clean up now, the blood will be gone from Al-Haitham’s face. So Kaveh stands and helps Al-Haitham up and leads him to the guest bedroom, not his own, where he collapses onto the bed. Al-Haitham stares for a moment. Come drips down the inside of his leg. Kaveh wants to stuff it back in. 

“On your clean sheets,” Al-Haitham observes, but he doesn’t object. Kaveh licks the blood off his face and then Al-Haitham licks at the wound on Kaveh’s neck which has no dried blood around it because Al-Haitham knows better than to leave any behind. “I’m going to sleep,” Al-Haitham announces suddenly. “Do whatever you like until I wake up.” 

Kaveh knows that Al-Haitham means it. He could kill Al-Haitham or he could fuck him for hours or he could drink Al-Haitham’s blood until there was none left. He could bundle Al-Haitham in his arms and throw him naked into the street. Al-Haitham wouldn’t care. He’s beautiful and he falls asleep instantly like he always has, like Kaveh was always jealous of, so Kaveh bites his earlobe, decides against running a bath, and retrieves a bottle of wine. 

He ran into Al-Haitham at the tavern for the first time in years. When they knew each other it was unusual to find Al-Haitham drunk but he was very drunk, and if they hadn’t done this before Kaveh would have worried about taking advantage of him but instead Kaveh, who was also drunk, sat across from him and told him off for stalking him and Al-Haitham said something else and Kaveh said something too and then Al-Haitham wanted to drink his blood. 

“Freak,” Kaveh says now to Al-Haitham, who is already sleeping peacefully, “whore pervert slut bitch.” He presses his first two fingers against the wound on his neck which has started to ache fiercely now. Al-Haitham isn’t human but he bites like one. He sleeps like one too.

They don’t talk much anymore. They run into each other every so often and Kaveh pretends he isn’t going to let Al-Haitham do what he likes and then he lets Al-Haitham does what he likes because Al-Haitham is also thirsty and he already knows that Kaveh likes it so it isn’t as bad, but it still isn’t good. Kaveh wants it more, he wants it every day, he wants Al-Haitham to bite his dick clean off. He wants someone who knows how long Kaveh has been alive. 

Professionally, Kaveh’s name is not Kaveh, and that’s not what he told Adrian his name was either so Al-Haitham is the first person to call him by his name in a long time. Maybe soon it will be long enough that Kaveh can be Kaveh again, if he doesn’t show his face too much. He likes it when Al-Haitham says it and that makes him feel like a child. 

 

 

 

 

6. plus three weeks

Blood, Love, and Lust in Post-Calamity Sumeru will open in a week and a half and stay at the gallery for five months. He opens the NGS’s website for a moment and closes it almost immediately. It says things like Queer art through the ages, and Many historians believed that the Acting Grand Sage Al-Haitham’s cohabitation with— and Kaveh’s descent into madness and enduring love for— and His presumed death at age thirty-four can be assumed to—

Kaveh instead opens his Wikipedia page, his very first one and looks through the edit history for a version from before his journals were discovered. The Career section is long and effusive but the Life section is short, only three sentences.

Very few records survive detailing his life or death. Kaveh’s mother was also a Kshahrewar alumnus. He lived with former Grand Sage Al-Haitham until his presumed death at age thirty-four. 

Once Kaveh tried to edit out the part about Al-Haitham. It reappeared a few weeks later. How does anyone know he lived with Al-Haitham? Why did that slip through when Kaveh tried to destroy everything? Why does anyone care? Al-Haitham is so irrelevant now that he doesn’t even get his own Wikipedia page. His name just appears on the list of Grand Sages with no blue link. 

What does the Life section say now? That Kaveh wanted to kill Al-Haitham? That Kaveh was mad? That he was sick? That he and Al-Haitham were lovers? He and Al-Haitham searched for a long time for an explanation for what became of them, and then when there was none, someone who was like them, and then when there was none Kaveh ran away because he couldn’t stand the sight of Al-Haitham anymore. 

He downloads Twitter on his brand new phone and makes an account so he can search his name. KAVEH THE ARCHITECT THE RANDOM DUDE I DID A PROJECT ON IN MIDDLE SCHOOL WAS GAY? AND ALSO CRAZY I GUESS? says one user. The first reply reads: Lol obvi alcazarzaray was built by a faggot. The second: real kaveh fans knew when his wikipedia page said he lived alone with a man until he died. also what the fuck is that other guy talking about. The third: why the hell are you stanning some fuckass irrelevant historical figure with that pfp??  

Kaveh does not throw his phone because he just bought a new one but he does drop it when it beeps with a text message from an unknown number. 

It’s Cyno. We’re having a few friends over for dinner next Friday if you’d like to come. 

No, Kaveh doesn’t want to come because food tastes like chalk even though he needs to eat it. Why does Cyno care if Kaveh shows up? Why does he trust him around Collei? Something about Kaveh always puts children on edge but Collei is too stupid to see it. He isn’t a person, he’s a monster puppeting a corpse and he thought that Cyno could see it but he doesn’t apparently. Kaveh shouldn’t go. He’ll get too drunk and watch miserably as everyone else enjoys their meals that won’t taste like chalk and it will be a horrible terrible evening. 

But he wants to find out how Collei ended up with them instead of with real parents. It all seems like a facade and Kaveh wants to see it break. Yes, he imagines Collei will say, he hits me when I don’t scrub the grout with my toothbrush, and the thought fills him with horror and a grim resignation. 

Sure, Kaveh agrees, sounds good.

Cyno replies with the time and address and Kaveh tries not to think about it just like he tries not to think about most things. He wants blood but he needs food but food doesn’t taste very good at all but he still has to eat it or he’ll die, probably, he’s never tried to die in that way. But what if he starves himself of food and becomes so thirsty he kills someone? So thirsty he tears someone open with his molars? What if someone cuts themself at Cyno’s dinner thing and Kaveh asks for them to pass the bloodied napkin please? In five hundred years these worries have never quieted. But maybe after six hundred they will. 

 

 

 

 

7. minus one hundred and twenty six years

Kaveh lives alone in an apartment in a cheap neighbourhood in Natlan’s Stadium. His neighbour is a man that dresses like a woman or a woman that dresses like a man. He wants to speak to them but he might kill them by accident and that would be bad. 

For the first few years blood was everything and then for a century or so it was only one thing instead of all of them. But the longer Kaveh was thirsty the more of himself yielded to the wanting until there was nothing left inside him. Would Kaveh’s neighbour hate him? Kaveh can’t speak to them. He needs to move. There’s no time to think when all that he is is thirsty. How can he build something beautiful like this? How can he build something beautiful when he is not beautiful. That’s why he built that horrible concrete thing for the Grand Sage but it didn’t turn out right because everyone loved it and it spawned a movement that plagued the country for years until Kaveh ran away to Natlan because he couldn’t stand to look at any of it anymore. 

Before he left Sumeru a wealthy man paid him to build a home outside the city and Kaveh needed to leave but he also needed to create something. So Kaveh built a walled-in paradise and now in the twenty years since he left, the country has seen the return of the chaharbagh because that man had so adored how Kaveh adhered to old tradition, how his quadripartite garden away from the chaos of the world brought serenity, how the quiet fountain at the centre of the property was so peaceful; that man wept into the rivers of milk and wine and water and honey and wouldn’t shut up about it. So Kaveh came to Natlan where he will do nothing and then maybe die. 

But his fame in Sumeru, that is the fame he can’t seem to shake despite his best efforts, isn’t as frightening as the need inside him to speak to his neighbour, the need to follow them and maybe see what their blood tastes like so whatever is inside them would be inside Kaveh too, and he doesn’t know why he wants that or if it would change anything and he doesn’t know what he wants to change. But he has always been searching for that mysterious it and maybe it is here in a shitty apartment building in Natlan in Kaveh’s neighbour. But maybe Kaveh needs to go back to Sumeru and drown in the fountain. 

How would he do it? He would ask them politely. Please let me drink some of your blood, I don’t even need to bite you if you just nick yourself I’ll have a lick, or you can pour it in a cup if you don’t want me to touch you, I probably wouldn’t want me to touch you either if I was you, I don’t want to hurt you I want to—I want to—

 

 

 

 

8. plus five weeks

Kaveh finds himself remarkably normal when he looks in the mirror. He has normal human teeth and normal human eyes and no one can tell that something is horribly wrong with him. It would be easier if they could, maybe, or it would be nice if, if, if, but Kaveh can’t think of the rest of the sentence. If something, then Kaveh would something. But he looks presentable enough to show up at Cyno and Tighnari and Collei’s house so he fixes his hair which has gotten too long and refills his fare card with the app on his phone and leaves his penthouse. 

He takes the seven and then the nineteen and thinks about what would happen if he bit the bus driver. It isn’t easy to bite people with blunt human teeth which is not good when you aren’t human but Kaveh has done it before, just once, so he knows that he could manage it and it would derail the bus and then probably some of the other passengers would bleed too and it would be a feast for Kaveh where nothing tasted like chalk, but he doesn’t want to kill the bus driver or any of the passengers so he wears a surgical mask because he can convince himself that with it on the smell isn’t as strong and so it won’t be as bad when he goes to dinner and everything tastes like nothing. 

There’s a couple kissing in the aisle across from Kaveh on the nineteen. The couple is also doing other things. A perfectly normal couple is acting perfectly not-normally because heavy petting isn’t really meant for a bus, and Kaveh shouldn’t watch but he does intently because this is a public bus and he is tired.

Al-Haitham liked to be watched just like this. It went against everything else Kaveh knew about him. Maybe he just liked to stake his claim. But if Kaveh let him, and if the Sumeru City of half a millennia ago had buses, Al-Haitham would have jerked him off on one. Kaveh didn’t hate the idea but he was ashamed. 

Hopefully Al-Haitham is enjoying this new century. There’s all kinds of surgeries and pills and injections for him now, and harnesses and silicon and things that buzz. But he’d still lie down and make Kaveh do all the work anyway. If they met, that is, but it’s been ninety-seven years now which is the longest he’s gone without seeing Al-Haitham, except there is that email sitting in his inbox which Kaveh marked as unread so the little red circle on his email app would remind him of it. It’s been keeping him awake. 

Perhaps the fact that there is no information on Al-Haitham anywhere is a good thing. Yes he was Kaveh’s male roommate which says something about Kaveh that Kaveh doesn’t like but regarding Al-Haitham there is nothing else to know about him and nothing to doubt or wonder. 

When he gets off the nineteen at Cyno’s house there’s three cars in the driveway. It’s a nice, spacious house, and not one of those cookie-cutter cheap ones. He knocks on the door with a bottle of expensive wine in hand. When the door opens for a moment Kaveh thinks no one is there but it’s only Collei, who says, “Come in! Thank you for coming!” 

There’s Cyno, Tighnari, and Collei, and two tall women who introduce themselves as Dehya and Candace, and a short woman who is Faruzan and a very, very short woman who is Nahida and Kaveh stares at her for twenty seconds before remembering where he is. 

“Collei’s friend from school was supposed to come sleep over tonight so she’d have fun with someone her own age, but the friend cancelled,” Tighnari says quietly to Kaveh once Collei ambles off. 

His tone of voice leaves nothing vague. “Kids are mean,” Kaveh mutters. “Does she know everyone here, at least?” It looks like she does. Dehya is showing Collei something on her phone. 

“Yeah. She’s gotten pretty friendly.” Tighnari sighs and looks at the spread on the kitchen island before them. “I don’t know if our house cost as much as that wine, Kaveh.” 

Kaveh’s face turns pink. “Sorry.” 

Tighnari laughs. “I guess it’s no hardship for you, but I’m going to drink so much of it.” 

“By all means.” Against his will Kaveh’s gaze settles on Nahida. “What does Nahida do? I’d ask her but I feel like I know her from somewhere and I don’t want to tell her that in case I don’t.” The sentence comes out all too quickly, awkward and strangely inflected and Kaveh remembers suddenly that he hasn’t really had a real relationship with anyone in years. 

“She’s like, an eternal PhD student,” Tighnari explains, which is annoyingly vague. “I’m not really sure, to be honest. Maybe you went to school together? But you can just ask her. She’s great to talk to.” 

Kaveh has not actually gone to school in several hundred years. He fakes his credentials every so often, which has gotten markedly more difficult with the modern age. He nods. “Maybe. I’ll catch her eventually.” 

The night goes not horribly. Kaveh feels itchy and weird. Tighnari gets tipsy and Cyno holds him up. Collei disappears when it’s time to eat and returns straight after and no one mentions it. Faruzan complains about her endocrinologist. Dehya laughs too loudly and everyone laughs with her. Kaveh gets drunk and sad. 

“Bored?” Dehya asks him later in the night, the first time she’s spoken to him all night. 

“Huh?” 

“You keep looking at your phone,” she says, and then laughs when Kaveh blanches. “Nah, don’t worry about it. I’m just messing with you.” 

“I was just…” Kaveh trails off. Itchy. Weird. “Checking.” 

“Waiting for something?” Dehya asks. 

“No,” Kaveh answers. “Maybe?” 

“Is it no or maybe?” 

Kaveh huffs. “My. Um. Ex. Contacted me for the first time in a while recently so I’ve been… ahhh. I didn’t want to drink tonight because of him but I wanted to so bad.” He always forgets his tendency to talk when he drinks until it’s time to talk when he’s drunk. Is Al-Haitham an ex? Al-Haitham is a limb that Kaveh cut off. That Al-Haitham stole away from him. 

“Sounds fun,” Dehya says. 

“Super not fun,” Kaveh sighs. “He sucks.” It feels wrong to speak so openly. Like someone might descend from the heavens and strike Kaveh down. Kaveh thinks about cutting open Dehya’s arm from elbow to wrist and drinking it. 

“Sounds complicated,” Dehya amends.

“Super complicated,” Kaveh agrees. Yes, Dehya, all the worst things that I did to him are actually on display at the museum right now and you can go see for yourself, but everything he did to me isn’t there so you can’t make a fair judgment, but it probably doesn’t matter because what I did was kill him. Kaveh is thirsty. 

“You want water?” Dehya asks, and then Kaveh realizes that he said it out loud.

“I have to go,” Kaveh hisses and heads toward the bathroom, but he gets distracted by the painting on the wall in the hallway and that is where Nahida finds him. 

“I recognized your name,” she says in lieu of a greeting. “You built the museum, right?” 

“The new wing, yeah,” Kaveh says, though he did also build the rest of it a hundred and seventy years ago or so. It was under a different name. He didn’t want to do it, but the woman they called in was going to make it out of fucking concrete so Kaveh gave in to save the nation. How does Nahida know him? No one cares about architects unless they build the Palace of Alcazarzaray and even then, barely at all these days. “What do you do? Tighnari said you’re, uh, studying?” 

She nods. She is incredibly tiny. “I research theoretical astrophysics.” 

“That’s amazing,” Kaveh breathes. “So you’re in research?” 

“Yes. Academia takes a certain kind of person, but I enjoy it.”

Kaveh wants to ask how old she is. Twenty? Fifty? One thousand? Not one of these answers would surprise him. Her hair is white but so is Cyno’s and her hands are tiny like the child of the woman on the bus’. “How long have you been doing that?” he asks instead, gathering every ounce of politeness within him. 

“A while,” she says with a very warm smile. “Feels like forever!”

“Right,” Kaveh says with a stilted laugh, “I get that!” 

He meant to leave early but finds himself crammed in between Faruzan and Candace on the sofa and Faruzan cannot stop talking. Kaveh doesn’t mind. She is also in research, she says, but every time Kaveh asks her what about the conversation gets derailed to something or other. He likes her, he really really likes her, but what does that mean? Does he want to bite her? Sleep with her? She says she’s older than him but no one is. What is forty two to five hundred.

Nahida stands up to leave first and Kaveh won’t be the last to go so after Nahida leaves he makes his excuses, a dance he hasn’t practiced in many years. Collei seems unhappy to see him go. 

“I want to show you the dice I made,” she says. Should she be asleep? Do teenagers still have bedtimes? Her fathers/brothers/guardians don’t seem like the type to inflict that, though still Kaveh still has not figured out what’s going on there. 

“Next time,” he promises, not really meaning it. 

“Yes, you can next time,” Cyno agrees with a sharp look at Kaveh that means Kaveh will be following through whether he likes it or not or he will die. 

Cyno follows him outside to say goodbye. If Kaveh still smoked, now would be a good time for it, a convenient excuse to stand and say nothing, but Kaveh kicked the habit after the last time he saw Al-Haitham and now it feels weird. 

“She wants to impress you,” Cyno says quietly. “If you don’t want to hang around a kid then make yourself scarce now instead of later.” 

“Why does she want to impress an old man,” Kaveh mutters. Maybe she likes him in the way he remembers that he used to when he was a child, an adult that you look up to so very much your puerile heart tumbles into admiration. 

“I wish she’d make friends her own age but obviously that’s not easy for her. If she wants to follow around a sad, rich socialite what am I going to say? No? It’s not like anyone plans on letting you alone with her.” 

That makes Kaveh feel better. The meaning behind Cyno’s words is clear. If Kaveh will not be a consistent presence in Collei’s life which she clearly desires for reasons unfathomable, he should make that clear now. But Collei probably has more friends than Kaveh does and Kaveh hasn’t spent time like this with anyone for decades. 

“I won’t disappoint her,” he says, not believing it. 

 

 

 

 

9. plus three weeks and one day

Kaveh writes back: 

Re: Why didn’t you burn it.

I saw someone on twitter say I was gay. Am I?

Kaveh Norouzi 
Apadana Design Studio
3-110 Fortuna St N
09XX XXX XXXX

 

 

 

 

10. minus one hundred and forty nine years

Al-Haitham doesn’t look thirsty. He never does. He looks perfectly content in his perfect solitude. But he likes to drink from Kaveh anyway. 

Kaveh thinks as he watches Al-Haitham sleep in his ornate four poster bed that there must be others. Al-Haitham isn’t mad like he is, or he is but not in the same way. Al-Haitham doesn’t care that he’s a bloodsucking leech, a mosquito meant to be squashed, a pox to be eradicated. How often does he do it? Does he kill people? Does he ask politely? Does he dig up graves? Would dead people taste good? 

Al-Haitham engineered their meeting. Kaveh knows it. There was an earthquake and part of the Palace of Alcazarzary was destroyed and then Kaveh went to the bazaar for groceries and there Al-Haitham was, looking at a bolt of fabric like he cared enough about anything to do something with it. 

“What the fuck are you doing here,” Kaveh demanded, loudly enough that it drew the attention of everyone in earshot.

“Shopping,” Al-Haitham answers. “What are you doing here?” 

“Shut up. God. Did you hear?” 

Of course Al-Haitham heard. It’s the only reason he’d find Kaveh. Somehow Al-Haitham keeps track of Kaveh’s constantly changing address. He shows up at Kaveh’s door or at the tavern or on the street every thirty or forty years, maybe, because they reached a truce a while ago, or as close to a truce as Kaveh will allow. The truce says that Al-Haitham won’t show his face too often and Kaveh is allowed to do whatever he wants while Al-Haitham is sleeping. But never once has Kaveh looked into where Al-Haitham lives, if he moves as much as Kaveh does, if he is running too. If Kaveh knew Al-Haitham’s address he isn’t sure what he would do. He drags Al-Haitham back to his very nice house, a house that he built a long time ago under another name for another person, and deposits Al-Haitham on his bed and sits on the floor. When Kaveh makes no move to speak Al-Haitham goes to sleep. 

The palace was supposed to live forever and Kaveh was supposed to die. Kaveh is alive and the palace is dying and Al-Haitham is here even though Al-Haitham betrayed him, he made Kaveh into more of a monster than he already was that day, he drove Kaveh mad. Kaveh is mad. 

While Al-Haitham sleeps, Kaveh cuts his hair short so it falls by his ears. He rucks Al-Haitham’s shirt up to his chest and pours a bottle of red wine all over his bare torso and then licks it up. Al-Haitham sleeps on. The earthquake that collapsed the west wing of the palace was so far away that Kaveh’s bookshelves only quivered for half a minute. 

When Al-Haitham finally wakes up, he groans, and then he looks down at his exposed, sticky abdomen and says, “What the fuck.” 

I was thirsty. “How many others?” Kaveh, who has at last settled at the desk, asks. 

Al-Haitham doesn’t answer. He touches his stomach and then licks his fingers. “Did you cut your hair while I was sleeping?” 

“No, I fell on a large and conveniently placed axe.” 

“My senior is jealous.” 

“My junior is annoying.” For many years Kaveh couldn’t bear to look at him. Al-Haitham pushed Kaveh off the ledge and thought he would take flight but he only splattered on the ground. “Why are you here?” 

“The palace,” Al-Haitham says. “Sleep for a while.” 

Kaveh shakes his head and his hair falls strangely around his face. “I’ll never sleep again.” 

“Sleep,” Al-Haitham says. 

“You don’t want to talk?” 

“Do you?” 

Why did you do that to me. When am I going to stop being mad at you. When am I going to stop being mad at me. Why am I like this. Why are you so awful. Why are you so nice.

So Kaveh goes to the bed and pulls Al-Haitham’s shirt down because he doesn’t want to get sticky and lies beside him even though the sheets are wet from the wine. Al-Haitham runs his fingers through Kaveh’s greasy hair. 

“Aren’t you thirsty?” Kaveh whispers.

“No,” Al-Haitham whispers back. “You aren’t the only one.” 

 

 

 

 

11. plus seven weeks

Kaveh has been invited to a private showing of Blood, Love, and Lust in Post-Calamity Sumeru because he built the fucking museum. There’s going to be a talk by the anthropologist who ruined Kaveh’s life. He has two extra tickets. It’s in three weeks. Why are they only inviting him now? Shouldn’t he have gotten to see it before it opened? Before anyone else got to see it? It’s his exhibit, after all. It’s his diary. How long can he put off seeing it? The people of Sumeru City know more about Kaveh than he does. How awful.

I have two extra tickets to a private thing at the museum on the 15th, he says to Tighnari. I am not sure who to bring with me? Do you want to come?

Tighnari replies: Is it the blood thing? Collei wants to see that. Would you take her? And I think Cyno is free?

The blood thing. Yes it is. That sounds good to me. Thank you, because I didn’t want to go alone, but how am I going to be able to hear what an innocent little girl thinks of my bloodlust, of my cannibalism, of everything that is inside me. 

Cyno called him a sad, rich socialite. Doesn’t Kaveh have to socialize to be a socialite? He doesn’t have any friends, he only has people who pay him and a girl who is possibly fifteen and her un-parents. Then there is Al-Haitham who Kaveh hasn’t seen in almost one hundred years. 

 

 

 

 

12. plus seven weeks and three days

Re: Re: Why didn’t you burn it. 

Does it matter? I called your work number but you didn’t pick up.

 

 

 

 

13. minus three hundred and one years

“I’m mad at you,” Kaveh shouts, covering his ears.

Al-Haitham says something back but he doesn’t shout it so Kaveh can’t hear him. Kaveh threw a bottle at the wall and it shattered and Al-Haitham cut his hand trying to clean it up, which is the exact thing that happened before Al-Haitham died. With his unmarred hand Al-Haitham wrenches Kaveh’s arms away from his head. 

“You’re always mad at me,” he says coolly. “I thought we talked about this last time.” 

Kaveh grabs at Al-Haitham’s bloody palm and Al-Haitham steps back to avoid him. “Before you drank my blood or after? Or maybe during? You fucking freak?” They dance until Al-Haitham is backed up against the wall with his palm pressed flat to it and Kaveh has him pinned. 

“You don’t want this,” Al-Haitham says, turning his head to the side. “You’re drunk and you’ll regret it.”

“I’m so thirsty.” He leans forward and sucks on Al-Haitham’s throat so it’ll mark but not in the way that Kaveh really wants. It probably doesn’t feel very nice for Al-Haitham who bears it with a scowl. “Al-Haitham, I’m really thirsty,” he murmurs into Al-Haitham’s exterior jugular vein.

For a moment Al-Haitham’s hand, the not-bloody one, comes to rest at the nape of Kaveh’s neck, but then he shoves Kaveh backwards so hard that Kaveh falls to the floor and cuts his hand on the glass too. “I don’t want you to do this anymore,” he announces. “You have problems.” 

Kaveh licks his own blood off of his fingers. “Do what?” he asks. 

Al-Haitham watches his mouth. “I know you don’t want it, so don’t act like it.” 

“I do, though,” Kaveh says, and then he sticks his fingers down his throat and throws up on the floor. Al-Haitham cleans up and Kaveh can’t figure out why. He cleans the floor and helps Kaveh wash up and gives him water and changes the sheets on the bed. 

“I don’t want you to do this anymore,” he says again. 

“But,” Kaveh says, “I.” If something, then Kaveh would something. “Fine. But I don’t want to see your face anymore.” Doesn’t he? Al-Haitham is the only person who is dead like him.

“Whatever,” Al-Haitham sighs. “I’m going to sleep if you’d like plausible deniability.” 

Why does he sleep so much? He’s dead, but he’s always sleeping. Kaveh has forever and he’s still running out of time. 

 

 

 

 

14. plus eight weeks

Why has Al-Haitham disappeared for ninety seven years? Did Kaveh do something? Their last meeting went similarly to all their other ones, that is to say catastrophically, but Kaveh didn’t think it was particularly worse than any other. It isn’t that Kaveh misses him but Kaveh does miss him a little, he wants to speak to someone who remembers Lambad the person and not the chain fast food restaurant. 

He doesn’t want to reply to Al-Haitham’s email. The number he didn’t recognize on his work phone didn’t leave a voicemail so Kaveh didn’t bother to follow up, except it was Al-Haitham who can only reach him through his work phone now, and his work email. 

He replies to Al-Haitham with his personal phone number. All things considered, Kaveh thinks he has taken everything remarkably well. Right now, there are people reading about how much Kaveh wanted to kill Al-Haitham and fuck him and eat him and maybe all three of those things at once and Kaveh only cares a little bit. It is not as though he doesn’t think about that every second of the day anyway, so nothing is very different. Everything is as normal on the inside as Kaveh looks on the outside. 

After five hundred years it has grown tiring. If Kaveh was going to escape this world he would have by now. He did die but he is still here all these years later and nothing is very different from before Kaveh died. The bad inside him is worse; he became the parasite on humanity that he always knew that he was. But he did not find it. How much longer until he finds it? When is long enough? Where is far enough? 

He sends another email to Al-Haitham. 

Re: Re: Re: Why didn’t you burn it.

Are you going to see it?

Kaveh Norouzi 
Apadana Design Studio
3-110 Fortuna St N
09XX XXX XXXX

Kaveh stares at his email app for three minutes before his phone rings. The number is unknown. 

“Hello?” Kaveh asks. 

“I already saw it,” Al-Haitham replies. 

“Why don’t you come see me anymore?” 

“I’ll tell you if you explain why you want to talk all of a sudden.” 

“I don’t want to do that. I don’t know why.” 

“Some of Dunyarzad’s paintings were there,” Al-Haitham says out of nowhere. “Though they still aren’t under her name.” 

“Dunyarzad’s?” Kaveh echoes. Is he allowed to bring Collei to an exhibit showcasing Dunyarzad’s paintings? 

“They wrote about Nilou, too. And there’s a painting of her.” 

Nilou who Kaveh hasn’t thought about in years. Kaveh hasn’t thought about any of it in years. At first he couldn’t stand Nilou though he never said it, just like he couldn’t stand Al-Haitham or himself, but for a few years things were alright after he and Al-Haitham reconciled. Yes, Kaveh lived with Al-Haitham but it was for convenience, I mean what else is he going to do with that Grand Sage salary hahaha, and Dunyarzad’s paintings were sold under a man’s name or they wouldn’t sell at all and Nilou lived in that house with all those girls. Once Nilou saw Kaveh and Al-Haitham going at it because they forgot to lock the door to, Kaveh doesn’t remember, it was somewhere too public because Al-Haitham liked that, and Kaveh’s heart fell through the floor but Nilou laughed and said I’ll see you later, you should come to this bar, I’ll tell you the code to get in. It was okay for a few years and for those years Kaveh thought he could be okay even if he didn’t find it.   

“Nilou,” Kaveh echoes. “I didn’t know that. I didn’t want to look it up.” But why Nilou? And why Dunyarzad? 

“It’s mostly us though,” Al-Haitham goes on. “If you’re going to see it.” 

“I don’t know how you can be so calm about this. Is it because you hate me?” 

“I don’t hate you. I’m sorry they found it.”

“You don’t sound sorry at all.” 

“I forgot Nilou’s face.” 

“I forget too.” Kaveh bites his bottom lip. “Did you go with one of the others?” 

“The other what?”

“The others.” 

“No. I found someone like us. I went with her.” 

Kaveh is very mature so he hangs up and blocks Al-Haitham’s number.

 

 

 

 

15. minus four hundred and sixteen years

It has been eighty-one years, give or take a few weeks, since Kaveh saw Al-Haitham which is the longest they’ve gone without seeing each other by about seventy five years. Kaveh looks the same as he ever did. He is very thirsty. He still hasn’t forgiven him.

Kaveh didn’t want to eat Al-Haitham. No. He did want to eat Al-Haitham more than anything, but it was too hard to control himself, he wasn’t himself, it wasn’t the truth and if Kaveh held back and did not eat Al-Haitham then it would continue to not be the truth. Kaveh wouldn’t be a killer and all the mess would be inside. But Al-Haitham let himself be ruined and it became the truth and that was Al-Haitham’s fault, not Kaveh’s. 

He has spent the last forty-five years in Mondstadt and no one is very kind to him here, he doesn’t have very much money but it’s more than he used to. There was an accident eighty-one years ago when Kaveh left Al-Haitham and it made everyone think that he died so Kaveh ran off to Mondstadt. Mondstadt sucks. He lives in a tiny apartment and the walls are so thin that he can smell it when the woman who lives beside him is on her period. 

For a few weeks Kaveh stalked her. He followed her when she went to work and when she went shopping and snuck into her apartment when she wasn’t home. He thought about stealing her bloody rags and then left in a haste and got so drunk he woke up outside of the city. 

 

 

 

 

17. plus eight weeks and three days

Kaveh wakes up at three in the afternoon and finds three text messages waiting for him. The normal amount is zero. He squints at his phone after picking it up from where he threw it on the floor. The first is from Cyno: Tighnari mentioned the blood thing, Collei is excited. We can meet you there or I can pick you up? The blood thing. Why did he call it that? Cyno shouldn’t let Kaveh back in his car. Kaveh will tear the seats up like a dog.

The final two messages are from an unknown number:

Kaveh let’s grab coffee together! It’s always nice to meet friends from the same hometown. Are you free this week ? :]

It’s Nahida~~

Nahida? Had they talked about her hometown? Kaveh’s hometown is Sumeru City and he doesn’t have any friends from outside of it. 

Friday morning, Kaveh replies, and then, ??.

On Friday morning Kaveh stares at his personal phone which has three contacts now and a fourth number that is blocked. His work phone buzzes constantly and Kaveh works all the time but it’s grown so familiar that sometime in the last few hundred years it fell into the background. Yes, I will build you something beautiful and yes it will influence every new home in the city for the next fifteen years and that is just how it is, I don’t know why that happens, no I don’t think I should charge you more, I promise don’t worry about it. That is familiar. This is not. 

Kaveh takes the bus to the coffee shop. It smells like blood. It’s not as crowded this morning and Kaveh thinks about killing the old man in the wide seat at the front. He probably wouldn’t be able to fight back very well and so Kaveh wouldn’t feel good about eating him. Does Al-Haitham feel good about it when he kills people? Does he kill people? Or does he just drink? 

The cafe that Nahida sent him the address for is tiny, which maybe Kaveh should have expected from Nahida who is tiny. She has already ordered for him and it’s exactly what he wanted.

“Thank you,” he says, inhaling the rich smell of coffee. “I’ll pay you back.” 

Nahida laughs. “It’s alright! I had our mutual friend tell me what you liked.” 

“Our what?” Kaveh asks. 

She nods. “You know. Al-Haitham.” 

Kaveh blinks. Looks down at the mug. Up at Nahida. Thinks about the blocked number on his phone. Until today Kaveh had no one so no one knew Al-Haitham. This horrible thing between them didn’t exist because Kaveh didn’t let it. But if Nahida knows then it must exist, if all of Sumeru knows then it must exist. 

“You’re,” Kaveh says, “you,” then, “he went with you. To see it.” 

“Yes. He didn’t say anything to me, and running into you was a coincidence. But it’s nice, isn’t it?” She slurps her coffee too loudly. “I was happy to meet you.” 

“You’re old,” he whispers so no one hears. “Like me. Do you know? Anything? We tried to find out what happened but—” 

“I’m a lot older than you,” Nahida interrupts. “I don’t remember anymore.” 

What happened was that Kaveh and Al-Haitham didn’t yell at each other for almost three weeks which had never happened before and then they fought so badly that the matra showed up at their door and Kaveh left the house and got drunk and woke up in a park and when he woke up he was very, very thirsty, and there was no marks on him or any proof of anything except that Al-Haitham smelled very good in a way he never had before. 

“You don’t look like it,” Kaveh blurts out. Nahida is so small. How could she kill anyone? How could she turn anyone into a monster like she says that she is? Someone so kind and welcoming couldn’t be rotting inside like Kaveh. 

“I don’t look like what?” Nahida asks. 

“Old,” Kaveh lies. 

“Neither do you.” 

“Well, I am.” 

“To me, you’re a baby.” 

“Aren’t you thirsty?” 

“Sometimes,” she answers vaguely. “If you let yourself have it, it won’t be so bad, Kaveh.” 

“You don’t know anything about me.” 

“I’ve heard a lot about you.”

“From Al-Haitham?” 

“Yes.”

“He hates me.” 

“He loves you.”

“I hate him.” 

“Do you?” 

“I blocked his number.”

“That’s your choice.”

“Why did you invite me here? What the fuck is this?” 

Nahida shrugs. “I told you, it’s nice to talk to friends from the same hometown.” 

 

 

 

 

18. plus nine weeks and six days

Kaveh unblocks Al-Haitham’s phone number and texts him a photograph of his dick. Al-Haitham says, 8/10.

 

 

 

 

19. minus four hundred and ninety seven years

“You did this to me,” Kaveh says, straddling Al-Haitham’s waist. He is covered in Al-Haitham’s blood, as he has been for three years, straddling the line between normalcy and whatever this is by going to work and buying groceries and visiting Nilou like everything is normal and then coming home and letting Al-Haitham devour him, letting himself devour Al-Haitham, and it isn’t right. 

“You wanted it and I wanted you to have it,” Al-Haitham pants. His hair is everywhere. 

“But I didn’t want to have it.” 

“Yes you did.”

“Fuck you, that wasn’t your decision to make, I didn’t want to be a cannibal but you made me one,” Kaveh shouts, furious all at once. He beats his hands on Al-Haitham’s chest. When Kaveh realized what he was thirsty for he locked himself up in a room for weeks because he knew that if he let Al-Haitham near him he would do something terrible, he would bite him or cut him up or scratch him with his fingernails until there was no skin left because Kaveh was so thirsty, he was so thirsty and it never ended it only got worse and he kept waiting for it to die down but it didn’t die down, it was all he could think about, there was nothing outside of his room and he stopped screaming after a few days but it didn’t go away, it was a black hole inside his chest, the person that he was supposed to be wasn’t there in the mirror it was only this wrong thing but Kaveh had always been wrong, it was just that suddenly he couldn’t ignore it anymore. 

“I don’t think we’re getting older,” Kaveh goes on before Al-Haitham can say anything terrible. His words come out fast and disorganized, panicked and unwell. “I have had the same patch of grey for three years. One time I counted the grey hairs. It took forever. And yesterday the amount was the same as then. Why am I not going grey? My dad did so early. Al-Haitham, I can’t bear it anymore. It’ll be like this forever. I’ll be like this forever.”

But he has always been like this and he was always going to be like this, except now always is a lot longer. Kaveh could have taken it for a few decades, maybe. But not forever. 

“We can deal with it,” Al-Haitham promises. His shoulder is bitten through to the muscle. 

“I have to go,” Kaveh says. “I need to go.” 

And then he did not see Al-Haitham for almost a century.

 

 

 

 

20. plus ten weeks

Just as he opens his closet to get ready for the museum’s private showing of Kaveh’s worst nightmare, his phone rings and Cyno’s name flashes on the screen. 

“Hello?” Kaveh asks. 

It is not Cyno who speaks but Tighnari. “Kaveh. Cyno and I are at the hospital. Can you take Collei.” There is no inflection. Kaveh blinks. 

“Are you guys okay? What happened?” 

“Cyno got clipped by a car, he’s fine but needs surgery, Collei hates hospitals. She wants to go home but I can’t let her go home alone right now and I think she would prefer to be miserable with her rich old man friend at a museum than here.” It comes out all in one breath. A car accident? Surgery? 

“Cyno said he didn’t want me to be alone with Collei,” is all that Kaveh manages to say. 

“If he cares that much he shouldn’t have gotten hit by a fucking car. Christ. It’s fine, he’s just overprotective and I trust you with Collei and Nahida thinks you’re fine so. Please.” 

Is it okay? Kaveh liked Collei and her non-parents because they seemed to understand that Kaveh was a threat. But now he’s allowed to do whatever he likes with her. Except Kaveh can’t leave Collei alone. What if some other wolf comes to find her? Why is Kaveh someone Tighnari can rely on in a crisis when they’ve barely met? 

“I’ll call a car and be there soon,” he agrees. “I hope Cyno’s okay.” 

“They said it’s not too bad, he’ll be okay if they stick a couple pins in. But. Ugh. Thank you for this, really.”

“It’s no big deal,” Kaveh assures him and finds that it is true. 

“Call a car. I hate rich people. Just get an Uber. Except you better not stick Collei in a car with some random Uber driver. Okay. Bye, we’re at the general and they took him in already so I’ll wait by the front for you with her.” 

And then Tighnari hangs up. He sounded out of breath. Kaveh calls a car and gets dressed mechanically. Maybe Tighnari will have some of Cyno’s blood on him. Undershirt and shirt and pants and then no undershirt, he used to like open shirts, so Kaveh puts on an open shirt and braids his hair back and puts on his earrings that look like the ones Al-Haitham bought him once but aren’t exactly that pair because no amount of care would make them withstand five hundred years of wear. 

It isn’t seeing Al-Haitham again but it kind of is, so Kaveh dresses nicely and finds Collei in jeans and a baggy t-shirt when he arrives at the hospital. When she sees Kaveh’s probably too-expensive clothes she sniffles.  

“Text me everything,” Collei demands, looking up at Tighnari. She doesn’t touch him, holding herself tightly like an elastic about to snap. “He’ll be fine, right?” 

“He’s fine,” Tighnari says soothingly. “He tried to walk it off because he said it didn’t even hurt.” 

“He’s stupid,” Collei says wetly. 

“The worst,” Tighnari agrees. “Have fun, okay? Or don’t. Try not to worry too much. Kaveh, all her medication is in her bag but she can’t be out too late because she has to—”

“Okayokayokay,” Collei interrupts. She looks down at the ground. “Um, sorry I didn’t want to stay.” 

“Oh, Collei. We don’t want you to be stuck in a miserable hospital either. Take pictures so you can show Cyno when he’s on a lot of drugs.” 

And so Kaveh leaves with Collei for the museum. 

 

 

 

 

21. minus five hundred years

“I don’t feel well,” Kaveh says suddenly. He’s been thirsty all day but water does nothing and he keeps pulling Al-Haitham close, breathing in his skin, and Al-Haitham doesn’t mind but—

“If you’re admitting you’re sick it’s probably fatal.” 

“No,” Kaveh cautions, “you don’t understand. I want.” What does he want? He wants to press his nose into Al-Haitham’s throat. He wants to bite down until he bleeds and drink him dry. It smells so good. Will it hurt him? Will it feel as good for Al-Haitham as it must for Kaveh? Why does he want to kill Al-Haitham? Why does he want to drink his blood? 

“You want what?” Al-Haitham asks. 

“Nothing. I just need to go lie down.”

So Kaveh lies down for days and it gets worse, he cuts himself with a fountain pen and drinks the blood and it tastes better than food but nothing like the smell of Al-Haitham, of the smell of his neighbours and the people outside. He locks Al-Haitham out and shouts his name at all hours of the night. He fills up three notebooks in three days and writes in blood when his nice pens break. It’s a want like he has never wanted. A desire for it.  

“What do you need?” Al-Haitham asks one day. He must be sitting right outside the door, so Kaveh sits on the other side.

“Blood,” Kaveh admits in a hoarse voice. “I think I’ll die without it. I don’t understand it.” 

“Then you’ll have it,” Al-Haitham answers. 

“No. I’d rather die.” 

“I don’t care.” 

“It’s not your problem.” 

“I don’t want you to suffer.”

“I deserve it.” 

“I’ll let you have me.” 

“I don’t want your blood on my hands.” I only want it in me.

“I don’t want you to suffer,” Al-Haitham repeats.

They spent five weeks in purgatory. Kaveh would crack open the door for Al-Haitham to slide food through and slam it on his fingers. After nearly a month and a half, Kaveh hears the crisp sound of glass shattering, and then a crash, and then there is blood. 

 He must be bleeding a lot because it smells like milk and wine and water and honey. It smells like Kaveh needs it or he’ll die. It smells like Al-Haitham needs stitches. Kaveh unlocks the door and finds Al-Haitham in the kitchen nursing his palm that has been torn to shreds because he fell, somehow, or he slipped on the liquid from the glass he dropped. Maybe. Kaveh doesn’t care. 

“Don’t let me do this,” Kaveh says. Milk. Wine. Water. Honey. 

“I don’t want you to suffer,” Al-Haitham replies, backing away with every step forward Kaveh takes. “I want you to have it.”

“But you’re still running away.”

“You’ll hate yourself.”

“So what? Why do you care?” 

Pressed against the wall, Al-Haitham tries to push Kaveh off but it only smears his blood on Kaveh’s shoulder, and that’s it, really. It was over before it began. 

 

 

 

 

22. plus ten weeks

Collei tugs on the loose fabric of her pants as they sit in the back of the car. There’s a privacy screen between the driver and the back seat. “I meant to get dressed up nicely but Tighnari picked me straight up from school,” she says sadly. “Sorry. I know it’s a private thing.” 

Kaveh looks at the time on his phone. “It’s fine. No one will mind, I swear. Look, you have your ears pierced, right?”

Collei nods. 

“Why don’t we do this,” Kaveh says, and he unclasps the necklace from around his throat and holds it out to her. “So you can look nice too, and the earrings match.” 

She frowns. “But it will look weird. I’m just wearing my school clothes. And I don’t want you to have no jewelry.” 

“It doesn’t really matter. It’s a private showing so it’ll be full of old people and who gives a shit about them.” 

Collei laughs. “I guess. Okay. But I can’t do it up myself, and I don’t want to take your earrings.” 

Kaveh scoots over. He shouldn’t do this. Collei is exposing her throat to him; she’s baring her skin to a monster who wants to eat her, who wants to kill her, who thinks her blood smells like sex. He pushes Collei’s hair out of the way and she takes one end of the necklace to weave it around her NG tube before passing the chain back to Kaveh, who manages to fasten it together without anyone dying. 

“I’ll give you one earring,” Kaveh says. 

“Then we can match,” Collei says. “Okay.” 

She puts the earring in herself and shows photos on her phone of the dice that she made, which are red and white, and she tells Kaveh about the TCG club at school that she wants to join but she is a little scared of because she’d be the oldest one there. 

“I kind of hate it,” she admits in a small voice. “I’m eighteen but I’m only in grade eleven. It makes me feel weird.”

“You’re eighteen? I thought you were like, a baby,” Kaveh admits. “Oh my god that sounded so creepy. I just don’t know any kids. I’m bad at guessing ages.” 

“I kind of am. Everyone was like you’re an adult now on my birthday but I still feel like a kid,” she sighs. 

“You’ll feel like a kid until you’re dead,” Kaveh promises her. “In the least morbid way I could have possibly meant that.” 

“Sure,” Collei laughs, and Kaveh doesn’t laugh but he does smile and they sit in silence until they arrive at the museum, and then Kaveh thanks the driver and does not feel like laughing anymore. He has to help Collei out of the car. She fiddles with Kaveh’s necklace anxiously. 

“Are you okay?” she asks. “You’re shaking.”

Collei this exhibit is about me. Collei you’re a little girl and you’re about to see that I’m the bad man Cyno wants you to run from. Collei it isn’t me, I didn’t mean to do that, Al-Haitham made me, but Al-Haitham wanted it and Kaveh wanted it too so who is Kaveh blaming for any of it. 

“I’m just a little cold. Let’s go.” He leads her into the museum and after they check in with their passes, Collei stops to look around. 

“It’s beautiful in here. You did that?”

Technically this is an old section that Kaveh built under a name that wasn’t his, but he still built it. “Yes. Did you know they were originally going to build this place out of concrete? Plans changed last minute, thank god, but ugh. Can you imagine? It would be so ugly.”

“Ew. Why concrete?”

“I wish I knew.” 

They walk slowly through the gilded halls and red velvet rope barriers. It is  beautiful in here. Kaveh had forgotten.

“There’s supposed to be a presentation but I am not going to watch it,” Kaveh says in a low voice as they finally step inside. Everything is cast in heart-wrenching red.

“I don’t really want to listen to old guys talking either,” Collei whispers back. “Wow. It’s so red. What’s all that?”

All that is a full wall, thirty feet high and twice as wide, covered in Kaveh’s writing. The pages were presumably arranged in order and there is so, so many, with maybe only a centimetre between each one. The ink starts out black and then turns red. There’s photos of a few of them enlarged and translated, and some of Kaveh’s drawings too, and then Kaveh’s eyes fall on a painting he remembers vividly: he and Al-Haitham were in the room while Shirin sat for Dunyarzad and they were all a little drunk. Photographs from the years after Kaveh disappeared and a poem written about Nilou’s red hair. 

Kaveh walks as if in a trance over to the wall. Collei approaches one of the translated pages while Kaveh stands right up at the wall, picking a page written in black at random.

I am starting to think there has never been a time that I was not like this. I’m so thirsty and I don’t remember what it’s like to not be thirsty. There is only this inside me and nothing else, I thought it would stop but it didn’t stop. I want it. Is cannibalism contagious? Will I get the laughing disease? I want to drink him so badly, it hurts like nothing else, it hurts so badly and I don’t think it will ever stop, it’s been days and if I don’t write I will scream again and the neighbours will come back and I hate when the neighbours knock because I think they know. Al-Haitham says they don’t know but I think they know. He doesn’t care. I have a job, I have a career, no one can know but none of that seems to matter anymore when this is all that’s left of me, I’m so thirsty and I want to eat him and I don’t know why I want to eat him, have I become a monster? I don’t think I ever wasn’t one, it’s just that he can see it now but he won’t leave me alone even though I want to kill him. I’m going to kill him. 

Then a few feet down: 

Someone walked by the house and I could tell she was on her cycle and Al-Haitham could always tell anyway but I thought he was a freak but I get it now but it just means I’m also a freak. I thought about killing her and eating her and drinking her blood. I know it would taste good, I know it’s what I want but I don’t know why, I know it would feel so good I can’t stop thinking about it I’ve soiled all my sheets it’s so gross in here but I can’t leave but I can’t tell him that I can’t tell him but I think he knows. I wish he didn’t know.

When Collei wanders off, he stands where she just stood in front of the thick, framed translation of one of the red pages. 

—hate it here can’t do it anymore I’m all alone in here I want to see him my Al-Haitham. He smells so good it hurts. When I leave this room I’ll fuck him until I drip down his leg every time he stands for the rest of his life. I am so thirsty and I want it and I know he wants it and he would taste so sweet like he always does. I want his blood I want to eat him and bite him until he dies and when he’s dead I can have him so I won’t be able to hurt him anymore. I’ve never been so thirsty, I think if he opened the door I would really attack him I would do whatever I wanted to him. I don’t think it matters that he’s stronger than me I have nothing left anymore I just want him, I want to not be thirsty anymore I want to eat him I want to eat someone mine doesn’t taste good even though I tried to drink it. If I killed Al-Haitham than I would have his corpse and I could—

A few others mill around the room and Kaveh can’t look at them even though no one knows that it was him, they can’t even read most of the pages on the wall. It doesn’t make him as sick as he thought it would. Most of the horrible things he said he wanted to do to Al-Haitham, he has already done to Al-Haitham. Should Collei really be reading this? What would she think if she knew? 

Kaveh combs through a few more of the red pages. I miss him. I want it. I’m thirsty. Where is it? I’ll kill him. I want it. I want it. I want it. I want it. 

Eventually he remembers that he came here with Collei. Kaveh looks around and finds her sitting on a bench near a triptych painting of the Zubayr theatre.

“Pretty creepy,” he says sadly when he sits beside her. 

Collei shakes her head vigorously. “I think it was sad. The architect, at least. I mean, obviously there was, um, something going on but he just.” She frowns. “I don’t know. He thought he was a monster.” 

Kaveh shrugs. “He wanted to kill people. What else makes a monster?” 

“Well, he didn’t kill anyone.” Collei bounces the end of her cane on the ground, up and down, up and down. “I think he should have just done it.” 

“What?”

“You know. Killed his boyfriend or whatever. It seems like both of them would have been happier.” She nods decisively. “I’m glad Cyno isn’t here.” 

Killing people is bad. Eating people is bad. Kaveh did kill Al-Haitham and that made him a cannibal. He dreamed every night for weeks about fucking Al-Haitham’s corpse because he is a thing and not a person. 

“Look,” Collei goes on, “let’s go look at the drawings.” 

Kaveh remembers these because he had been lucid for most of them and he doesn’t think he should be looking at his nude portraits of Al-Haitham with Collei but she doesn’t seem to care. The museum has made prints of them and bound them in a spiral book for patrons to flip through. Collei pauses on one of Al-Haitham on the floor, head thrown back, Kaveh’s thighs on either side of his waist. 

“I guess those are his legs, but I wonder what he looked like,” she muses. “I thought they invented cameras back then?”

“Yeah, but they were really expensive.”

“Oh.” 

Kaveh made them sit like that for hours. It was hellish. Al-Haitham’s face was difficult to draw at that angle and he wouldn’t stop moving, you’re sitting on my cunt and you’re drawing me? How am I supposed to take that? But Kaveh did not reply because he was too busy drawing to care about sitting on Al-Haitham’s cunt. If Al-Haitham was willing to sit for that long, he must have cared about Kaveh very much. 

Suddenly Kaveh wants Collei to understand. “Ah, I learned that script in school, actually. They didn’t translate it but he did end up doing it.” These journals don’t go that far; when Kaveh bit Al-Haitham he didn’t need to write them anymore, but Collei won’t know that and hopefully trusts Kaveh’s word more than google. 

“What? You can read it?” Collei demands. “What happened?” 

“The lover cut himself by accident and the architect tried to kill him because he couldn’t control himself.” He explains it like it happened to someone else, which is almost true. 

“Well he didn’t succeed because that guy was the Scribe for a few more years apparently, but Kaveh died. That’s sad.” She looks up at Kaveh. “Can you read some of the other pages to me, then?” 

Kaveh shrugs. “I don’t know. It’s all much of the same. I will kill you and eat you and fuck your corpse, et cetera. Why don’t we go look at those paintings of the theatre? I didn’t get a good look.” 

The Zubayr Theatre was an oasis in Sumeru City; a haven that decried tradition. Sheikh Zubayr was— 

Kaveh forgot what it looked like. Some of the paintings are beautiful and some are grotesque; there’s one Kaveh recognizes as Dunyarzad’s of a body sliced in half, lost in the throes of pleasure. He can’t stand to look at it. 

It’s nice, he supposes. It’s a tribute to things that Kaveh is supposed to care about but mostly it’s a monument to people he knew that are dead now and Kaveh is supposed to be dead but he isn’t dead. He sits on one of the benches while Collei meanders around and opens his text chain with Al-Haitham, which is actually only a blurred out photo on Kaveh’s end and Al-Haitham’s horrible message. He sends a photo of the gallery. Al-Haitham replies: ?  

Idiot, Kaveh says. There’s an old, cracked photograph of Nilou; she must have been in her seventies. How much longer? How many eternities until he finds it? 

 

 

 

 

23. end

Kaveh sits with Collei on a bench in the dark outside of the museum. She smells like blood. 

“Cyno’s okay. They’ll keep him overnight and then he comes home tomorrow. Thanks for still taking me. I hate hospitals.” She runs her hand over the tube taped to her face. “I’m supposed to get switched from an NG tube to an abdominal one soon. I was scared if I stayed in the hospital I might get sick and they’d have to reschedule it.” 

Kaveh has no idea what to say. “That’s smart of you. Congratulations on the abdominal… thing? …Or sorry about that?” 

“I hate it but it’s supposed to be better,” she sighs. “Easier, I mean, and things will go wrong less, but it’s long-term. Like, if I get this one, there’s no going back.” 

“Was there ever going back before this?” Kaveh wonders. 

“I guess not.” 

The drive to Collei’s house is silent. 

Where do you live now, he asks Al-Haitham.

Do you remember that house you built with the garden, Al-Haitham replies.

Do you know how many I, Kaveh says, and then, wait you don’t mean

Yes, Al-Haitham replies. The chaharbagh. I wish you had built more than just the one because this one isn’t very nice.

Fuck you, go live in a concrete hellhole. Kaveh bites on his thumb. Sorry for being a terror for five hundred years. 

Al-Haitham replies with his address and: Whatever. Sorry the entire country knows what a bitch you are and for turning you into a cannibal.

Was there ever any going back before this? Will Kaveh die like this? When will he be allowed to?

Fuck you. I’ll be there in a few hours. Fuck you fuck you fuck you. I give up. Fine. Yes.

Notes:

info on persian gardens from here. sorry alhaitham didn't even show up. the title comes from the sheet of warnings they gave when i asked for an HRT prescription. and the HRT is what this fic is about. among other things. so. thanks for reading. i would love to know what you thought

 

 

twt