Chapter Text
Kaveh lays crumpled on the sands, bleeding out into the glittering vastness. Above him, a sky full of stars glistens like ice chips, flat, cold, and uncaring. Uncaring, for he lies here, unable to move, unwilling to move since the slightest cough makes him tremble with the sheer pain.
Silken threads of gold weave their way through his hair, spilling into the red rivulets of his blood. Despite the heat rising from the sands, still warm from daylight hours, the finality of it all chills him to the bone, sending little glass blades of crystalline pain in between every fracture of his broken ribs. From his spine downwards, he feels numb. This, at least, is some weak blessing. This far west, it marks the last traces of the Dendro archon’s gentle benevolence. Further out, the flat empty sands stretch level to the sky marked only with redcrest and tumbleweed.
Even the weak light of the stars hurts his eyes, the pain traveling down his spine to his ribs and growing molten in its fury. A dark smudge against the sky, a figure approaches, Kaveh feels sand-worn hands tangled roughly in his hair, dragging him up. He coughs and chokes, blood spilling from his cracked lips, shirt slipping past his shoulders and exposing him to the cold night.
The man says something Kaveh no longer has the mental capacity to understand. They smashed him across his head earlier. It could have been hours ago, or days, but he blacked out and now everything hurts even more. He closed his eyes, choking at the heat rising through his veins, longing for coolness. The man spits, or something warm lands on his cheek. He no longer has the willpower to wipe it away. Or if he could, he wouldn’t be able to.
The silk shirt falls away and the tearing fabric wakes Kaveh slightly. He tries to choke out a protest, feels hot tears trace their twin paths down his face. More blood drips onto the reddish sand. All that comes out of his mouth is a guttural sob, a pleading fucking failure. A mess.
He feels the man flip him over, vision whiting out as his cracked ribs give way. He senses the coolness across his back and legs, feels the cold night on his skin at last. Oh fucking archons. He tries to brace himself for the man, but fails to catch his breath. The man fucks into him raw and Kaveh’s visceral scream sends the golden hawks stirring in their nests, sets the sand itself on edge.
His face is smashed into the sand, a bloody mix of blood and sweat and tears caking his body. Kaveh’s reality hits with sickening finality. No one is coming to save him. Not Cyno, who has a land to be bound to and never cared about Kaveh’s drunk ramblings anyway. Not Tighnari, whose gentle, sweet nature and innocent hopes he dismissed as the weak dreams of an insignificant failure. After all that time, the real failure was himself. What an insignificant fucking loser he was. Nothing he had created was worthy. Nothing was truly original or beautiful, only a distorted fragment of a once pure, sublime beauty. He could die here and no one would know, no one would shed a tear. Not Dori, long grown sick of Kaveh’s pleading debt. Least of all Alhaitham, someone deserving some higher world than this. Some better place, unspoiled by insignificance. Alhaitham didn’t deserve Kaveh's idiotic rage, his drunkenness, his lack of appeal.
Shit, Alhaitham was a beautiful man. As the soldier fucks into Kaveh from behind, he sobbed into the sandy grit, crying Alhaitham’s name on his lips. Flashes of white-hot pain send him keening, unable to form conscious thought, but between these he glimpses visions of silver hair or turquoise eyes. Kaveh can’t feel his legs anymore. This new numbness is heaven to his broken mind, his fragmented body. He slips willingly into the darkness engulfing him, only clinging to the regret of a realization known too late. Kaveh’s mind fades into white space, taking with him the brief images of the time he’d been blessed enough to spend with Alhaitham. Kaveh will never fucking deserve him. He is worthless, and Alhaitham hates him. The white space takes over, while Kaveh continues to cry into the darkness.