Archive of Our Own

It was an ordinary day, which meant Kaveh had already overslept (after having stayed up until the ludicrous sunrise hours trying to alter his latest proposal, which was already a stupendously ridiculous ask of him, he was being incredibly sensible and so what if Naser the bulky engineer had stared solidly at him with his tree trunk arms crossed over his solid chest and said in a clipped voice that staircases don’t float in mid-air, he tried to argue that Payam had given him carte blanche except he had been quite upset and said blanched cart instead) and his coffee had boiled over (and he could already hear Alhaitham’s dry voice of why didn’t he use a quicker method if he knew he was late but it was about the quality and care put into each individual step, which that duncehead wouldn’t understand if it hit him in the face, and sometimes the coffee turned out beautifully and aromatic and full of flavor and beans even if he had to drink it scalding hot [and side-note, he was not being pretentious, he had read at least one peer-reviewed article about coffee and therefore could use those words without Alhaitham staring at him dully across the table]) and he couldn’t find his nice pair of shoes (and yes, there was a difference, which again Alhaitham wouldn’t understand with his fashion sense and see-through shirt which Kaveh did not have enough time to touch upon and he did not want that aspect of his thoughts to be peer-reviewed). 

“You’re late,” Alhaitham said, the proverbial stem on a slime. 

“I’ve noticed.” Kaveh stuffed the rest of his designs into his portfolio case, Mehrak being peaceful and blinking and non-judgmental. He’d run a brush through his hair but the window reflection showed a few strays. Of course he needed to meet the client. But somehow, he felt his hands drawn to pin back those strays into their red ties. 

“You’re not moving like you’ve noticed.”

“I can’t imagine you’d be someone who cared about another’s appointments.” Kaveh waved his brush like the theater in Liyue. “If I had to guess, I’d say you’d make snide little comments like ‘one man’s goat is another man’s butter.’”

“I’ve never said that.”

“You’ve said the essence of that.” 

“The essence.” Alhaitham raised an eyebrow. But he didn’t raise an eyebrow like a normal person would raise an eyebrow. No, he raised an eyebrow with a barely perceptible movement, like a shallow undulation, that was full of distant contempt. In that eyebrow movement, Kaveh could see that he meant ‘you haven’t changed since you were a student, causing trouble for yourself, being so swept up by a few words, wanting to save everyone, you wouldn’t be swept up if you actually did blah blah blah,’ because Kaveh would have liked to have stopped listening at that point. 

That being said, he did listen to Alhaitham. 

Even if Alhaitham might feel differently, he considered Alhaitham a friend. 

This was one of the most sincere and unspoken aspects of his relationship with Alhaitham that he held to be true. He cared more about Alhaitham than Alhaitham did for him and that caused him surprisingly little grief. 

Never would he begrudge anybody for feeling different. He had an architect companion who would confide in him that she felt the difference, keenly, between her affections and her husband. Upon a careful prying, he was relieved to find that her husband did treat her fair. More than fair, she claimed. He contributed to the household, he listened to her, he had left his vital work trip to keep her company through a difficult time. 

But it was a fact, she had said, that she loved him with all her heart. He was just pleased to be with her. 

Valid, true, empathetic. He could view her struggles with sympathy without any true form of envy. That Alhaitham wouldn’t lift a finger to help him felt like a cool drink on a simmering hot day in the desert. He didn’t want to think about what that said about himself. If he ever voiced that, he could only imagine Alhaitham’s cutting remarks about altruism and selfishness and self-destruction. Cutting especially because Kaveh knew that was true, he had been fundamentally changed and never wanted to hurt anyone else, even at the cost of himself.

Kaveh would just conclude that Alhaitham’s apathy was neither a boon or a curse. Just an unchanging element, forever captured in a single moment, a fact of the world. People like Alhaitham just didn’t need people like Kaveh.

“You might as well stay,” Alhaitham said, almost bored. 

“I am off,” Kaveh said piously, sweeping Mehrak off the counter. “Farewell. Please, continue eating the breakfast that I so carefully started to prepare last night.” 

“I didn’t ask you to cook breakfast.” 

“But you have no inhibitions about consuming said breakfast.” 

“Should I?” 

“Yes! And I’d tell you more if I wasn’t so late. Which, by the way, you are not helping at all, even though I know for a fact that your workday starts later today.”

“One man’s goat.” 

“If someone strangled you in your sleep, I could not be a witness,” Kaveh said sincerely. “I am going to spend a wonderful day without seeing your face. Try to clean the common spaces after you come home, even though I know you won’t.” He hesitated at the end of the table. Sometimes he felt like he was forgetting something. The sensation echoed in him with a high frequency. It was like too many rooms in a design. A staircase that floated in mid-air. A tower without any entrances. Something that didn’t make sense. 

What was he forgetting? He had everything. Mehrak, a grocery list for tonight’s dinner, a client meeting. Did he have his key? But he couldn’t shake the eerie sensation that he was forgetting something more important. Like the fact that he knew how many rooms were in this house and yet he was sure if he turned around, one more door would exist in that hallway. 

He broke away from that thought, trying to bring himself back, when he noticed that Alhaitham was looking at him with calm, observant eyes with a strangely sharp glint. 

“Right.” Kaveh shook off the cold chill. “Don’t forget that I’ll be picking up Nahida after work.” He leaned over the couch, sliding his hand over Alhaitham’s sharp cheek, to pull him close enough to kiss. It was brief, an ordinary moment, but he still hesitated when he leaned back. He didn’t know why he looked into Alhaitham’s eyes with almost a question, but Alhaitham’s calm look gave him no answers. If Kaveh was the tumultuous torrent of rain, pelting and howling in the storm, then Alhaitham was the ocean where he could fall and finally ripple into peace. There was a word for that if he could only remember. 

“I’ll see you tonight,” Alhaitham said. 

The cities of Sumeru had existed far before Kaveh and would exist far afterwards. This, too, included the behemoths of pyramids and monuments in the deserts, the small ranger nooks in the forest, the sprawling cities of spruce green, the curved roads that wrapped around arboreal bark. The whole city was entangled in a paradox, the epitome of life in sunny afternoons, the wares exchanging hands with gold coins under the flapping red-and-yellow fabrics, the smell of smoked meats accompanied by the sweet chase of sharbat, the buildings occupied by sheer noise. In the nighttime, a pervasive darkness brought in a heavy silence, only broken by quiet yellow lights that seemed like candles in those big houses, illuminating shadows of furniture. 

Sunset harbored a time in-between, a mild copper-gold accented by the inky river of his shadow. He could feel small in the city, insignificant, but yet he was part of its history nevertheless. His contributions to Port Ormos, his work on the additional wing in Bimarstan, his remodeling of the lower-grade school near the riverbank. 

He could always tell Nahida apart from the other students even from a long distance. In the play area, she sat on the swing without quite swinging. Or rather, being propelled by something other than a teacher’s push. Not that there were any adults in the tumbled play area, abandoned even by the other children being picked up by their adults at the face of the building. He always had a strange sensation when he neared the school, like he was being physically repulsed, but he nevertheless always came to pick up Nahida. She was alone, though she didn’t ever seem to look alone. 

“Nahida.” Kaveh leaned against the low fence. “I’m here.” 

“Thank you for picking me up,” she said as always, proper. 

“You don’t have to say thank you every time. It’s my responsibility.” 

“That is an interesting thought.” 

“It’s an ordinary thought.” 

“That’s what makes it interesting.” Nahida didn’t get off the swing quite yet, her feet too high to even drag in the dirt. “Like a berry, at first glance, would seem like any other berry. But upon closer inspection, you can see the intricacies in the network of seeds. We speak of ordinariness like it is a synonym to mundane. Yet, if we were to examine the mechanizations of ordinary motions, we see moments of truth and thought. What you have said has momentous poignancy. To contemplate what we owe each other. It is something that I do not yet know.” 

“Is it something like how I owe you ice cream because I ate your portion of candied nuts last night.”

“Perhaps. Not quite.” Nahida looked contemplative. “But I would not refuse the call of dessert.” 

He held her hand even when they crossed into the main hub of Sumeru City, though he did pick her up when they’d reached the cafe. The chairs at the table had significant height and Nahida had no protests once he settled into her onto her throne. 

“Do you like it?” 

“It has a fair taste.” Nahida had her spoon in the comically large bowl of ice cream, heaped by the over generous shop owner who had a soft spot for her deep thought in front of the colorful display. Kaveh’s ice cream scoop, not that anybody asked, had a comically small amount. His wallet had been lighter after their trip and the amount was warranted for what he could afford. “Ice cream does have a storied past and its creation is no less novel. This brand does have some interest in the slight saltiness that complements the sweetness of the berries and visually, it provides a strong image. The vibrant yellow has a distinctive trademark and the brightness alludes to a childhood nostalgia. Overall, I would say Berry Delightful deserves its champion place in the shop’s sales, though I understand that Keep It Minty has become a strong competitor.” 

“Right.” Kaveh hastily stopped an errant dollop that melted along his bowl. “I agree as that was, inarguably, my own thoughts as well.”

Nahida smiled with beatific beneficence. “Did you like yours?” 

“Yes.” He couldn’t offer much more details, though he could have pledged to look up a peer-reviewed study about ice cream instead. Though her feet still did not reach the ground, Nahida looked at him with what he could only consider a soft affection. Like how a person might look with indulgent eyes at a puppy. 

“Good,” she said simply. 

“I am sorry that I ate your snack last night.”

“No matter.” 

“I thought it was Alhaitham’s.”

“I know.” She tilted her head and smiled. 

Their walk home cut across the sprawling roads of the city. The day had melted into a mellower sunset, the blue of the sky sitting atop the orange like the clear demarcation of a wall. The familiar house peeked out from the crest as they approached down the road, breaking into the field of vision starting with the tip that melded into the gables that revealed the light from the leaf-shaped windows that stood out against the shadows. 

The strange feeling of forgetfulness was not, apparently, about his house key, which he found secured to his belt. The last time he had actually forgotten his key, he had to wait behind the house with his knees folded to his chin, hoping and hating each footstep beckoned Alhaitham’s approach. He would have thought Alhaitham would feel a slight pity when Kaveh had been rained upon that particular time, but that bone-headed only-good-for-books wine-drinking know-it-all just said, “You could have waited at the tavern.” 

The lights meant that Alhaitham had, as always, checked out at work with alarming promptness. And he wouldn’t have refused to open the door for Nahida, regardless. But when Kaveh unlocked the door, he thought it was strange that the usual lion keychain was accompanied by another small, thin golden key. This one dangled with a strange shape, a strange glint, that became awash in the light of the doorway.

“We’re home,” Kaveh announced. He tossed both the keys onto the table and shut the door behind him. 

“I’ve noticed.”

“A ‘welcome back’ wouldn’t be amiss. Isn’t that normal? And look at you, not even bothering to pick up after yourself.” Kaveh rolled up his sleeves, harrumphing as he circled the low table that had its immaculate finish now tiled with research papers and books. “If you’ve forgotten, this is a shared space. Don’t set a bad example.”

“Interesting.” 

“What’s interesting?” 

“That an untrained eye would consider this a mess.” 

“Is this your organization style?” Kaveh asked, hanging over the edge of the couch. He only caught the words ‘distributed neural networks’ and ‘neuropsychosis’ before Alhaitham flipped the page, nonchalant about his reading speed. “If I looked inside your head, I’d just spot this mess? Sounds about right.”

“I see,” Nahida said, who had sat on the opposite chair. “So it is organized by the immediacy of its contents, your opinion about the veracity of the authors, followed by the relations to each other’s paper. You have an acute eye, but it is not without its areas for improvement. If you switch the Nigel, Commons, et al.’s paper with the omnibus, I believe you will find the flow to be more natural.” 

“Right, what she said,” Kaveh added. He would never pass up the opportunity to tease Alhaitham, even if Nahida’s contribution felt more like a high compliment than any real flaw from Alhaitham’s intellectual monolith. But he joined to perhaps ease the flow of the conversation, where Alhaitham sometimes looked strangely contemplative at Nahida’s words. Not upset, not angry, not even in reaction to her direct words. Alhaitham would look at her as if she had just played a chess move that required deliberate thought. Which was fine, just that he wanted them to get along. 

“I thought you were making dinner tonight,” Alhaitham said. 

“What, I can’t talk in this house? I pay rent.” 

“You’re late in payments.”

“I’m good for it,” Kaveh said defensively. “My newest client is very happy with at least some of my work.” Nevertheless, he already had a plan for a nice warm supper, meandering over to the kitchen unit. Not because Alhaitham told him to cook, he just chose to do it on his own. 

“Who was he again?” 

“You could stand to listen to me sometimes, you know. What if I had something very extremely stupendously important to say, but you had your noise-canceling earbuds and you couldn’t hear me and then you’d regret it?” 

“A specific notion.” Alhaitham flipped back a page in his book, intent on his rereading. 

“I am sure Alhaitham would come to your assistance if you needed it,” Nahida said. 

“Nahida, you are a wonderful child. Alhaitham should learn from you.” Kaveh finished chopping the carrots, checking the boil of the water. “But I’m afraid Alhaitham is the type of bone-headed only-good-for-books wine-drinking know-it-all who would only help save a country, or even just another person, because it’s merely convenient and along his way.” 

“The argument sounds sophistic,” Nahida said. 

“Well, that’s his own fault.” Kaveh wasn’t against arguing with Nahida, but he had the uncanny feeling that even if managed to argue his way through logic and reason to victory, she would only smile and be contemplative in an unbeatable innocence that would make him feel, suddenly, small. “Anyway, Payam. My client is the Payam, which means after this commission, I will be quite robust in funding for at least three months.” 

“You sound overconfident.”

“The project has been quite successful so there’s no need for your doom and gloom. In fact, you must be jealous.”

“Of getting timely rent?” Alhaitham had proceeded further into his book, fingers flying through pages that apparently no longer contained pertinent information. Nahida also had taken up a large book that nearly engulfed her, thin tendrils of Dendro flipping the pages like a blur than Alhaitham. 

“That I am getting along with people. Payam has a daughter, too. Do you know her, Nahida? She teaches at your school apparently.” 

“She is a kind teacher,” Nahida said. 

“Do you get along?”

“That is a difficult question.” Nahida contemplated this, staring at the painting that Kaveh hammered into the common space’s wall. A beautiful artwork of a garden flooded in vivid colors, unblemished even when Kaveh had almost nailed his own thumb. “But I would like to believe that we are not enemies.” 

“Don’t fret. If you do end up friendless, you’ll just be taking after Alhaitham.” 

Alhaitham looked at Nahida, who didn’t quite return the look. Kaveh hovered as long as he could without the stew burning, but by the time he’d taken the pot from the stove, they had resumed their quiet reading. 

Dinner was a quiet affair, or as quiet as their household could take. Alhaitham had a few persnickety comments about the food and Kaveh almost bodied him with a soup ladle. Nahida had a charming laugh and ate like every piece of boiled carrot contained a plethora of experiences. After dinner, Kaveh cleared the dishes and complained next to Alhaitham’s ear that nobody ever helped, except he had to backpedal with Nahida offered and he had to insist that she stay on the comfy couch and read Alhaitham’s lofty books that had been apparently removed from his personal study. Over the suds, Kaveh watched Alhaitham lean down to hear what Nahida murmured about a text, her small finger tracing over a line. 

He didn’t have to worry about them, after all. They got along just fine. 

“I have to insist,” Kaveh said, “between ‘Count the Aranara and ‘The Aranara Fall Asleep.’” He held up the two picture books at the foot of Nahida’s bed. Her room had been decorated by a world-renowned architect in a biophilic style, the curvilinear reminiscent of how vines would grow upwards on the bark of the tree. The window became a prominent feature of the room, letting in the natural light in the daytime and becoming a quiet cooling center in the night. It just so happened, of course, that the world-renowned architect was himself. One side of her room had been filled with bookshelves and the other with toys, including a set of wooden blocks that had been built into an intricate cathedral with a dome. 

“I am quite fine without counting Aranara,” Nahida said solemnly. “It is an ever-changing number.” 

“You don’t want a bedtime story?” 

“I am not opposed.” Nahida contemplated further. “Perhaps ‘Global cognitive decline and decrease in executive function variability studied in prefrontal cortexes in relation to the lack of REM’ by Wong, Hofstadf, and Lankarani would be a lighter read.” 

“Lighter than ‘The Aranara Fall Asleep’?” 

At least Nahida didn’t laugh when he pronounced ‘putative measurements’ as ‘putatatatative.’ After she had drifted off to sleep to the calming lulls of memory capacities, he filed the paper back in Alhaitham’s study and turned off the lights. Sumeru nights would grow quite cold. He could remember studying in the desert, feeling like his bones had frozen within him. Shoes sinking into sand, the moon reflecting on the grains like an ocean of dust and stillness. Someone in front of him, beckoning. His breath pulled out of him, just like now. A thin haze that blocked his view. 

There was an extra door in the house. 

Wood, obviously. Karmaphala, nice and smooth. Handle, iron. The stained glass windows, the brilliant green of the facade, seemed solely focused on the door. It wasn’t Nahida’s room, who had taken his old space. Not Alhaitham’s personal study, the beloved one that smelled like books and paper and coffee. No, this was an unknown room. Too many doors in Alhaitham’s house. 

It felt familiar. 

But it didn’t belong there. The style of the door was too different, modeled with older and simpler lines than this modern house. It felt like a door where he was used to pressing his hand against the stolid wood and listening to the weeping inside. 

It made no sense. This door would only lead to a wall. He knew the design of this house, how it looked from paper to skeletal wiry frame to thick walls. This door only existed in a nonsense childish sort of way, how he used to build with his little wooden blocks and decide, arbitrarily, there should be a door that would lead to nowhere. 

He turned away abruptly, trying not to look, when he made eye contact with Alhaitham. He was leaning on the wall at the other end of the hall with a subtle predatory glare, making him seem even more boorish and disturbing than his usual boorish and disturbing self.

“You scared me,” Kaveh snapped, peevish. “I was just - sprucing up the flowers.” He didn’t remember what he was doing, but he wasn’t going to tell Alhaitham any of that and give him more fuel to the ongoing fire of Kaveh’s life. Even when Kaveh pushed past him, Alhaitham lingered in the hallway, looking at where Kaveh had been. 

Alhaitham’s room resembled himself. Sparse, ordinary, esoteric. Cold and unfriendly at first glance, except Kaveh knew that amongst the knick-knacks on the bookshelf, Alhaitham had a few personal effects. Papers passed down from his parents, his grandmother, an award or two from their days in Akademiya, a mundane recognition of his years of service as the scribe. 

“You could use a painting here, too,” Kaveh said. 

“Unnecessary.” 

“Well,” Kaveh said, resigned. “I always did think you were a brutalist.” 

Kaveh spent some time working on his blueprints with Mehrak at Alhaitham’s desk, sketching designs and discarding them like water. Alhaitham only let him borrow the space at night so when he reached a stopping point, he had to slide his canvas and rulers in between the desk and the bookshelf for morning use. Alhaitham was reading in bed, already tucked in like a presumptuous and snug cocoon. Kaveh finished the last of his hair ties and slipped beneath the covers. 

“Do you think Nahida’s asleep?” 

“I doubt it.” 

“I think she’s asleep.” Kaveh leaned over to kiss him. Alhaitham had sharp cheekbones, hard against Kaveh’s palm. He really was handsome, a stupid sort of handsome that made the other scholars look at him with a haggard envy and want. Maybe some of them would overlook Alhaitham’s stubborn ways, but Kaveh felt strangely possessive, even as he straddled him and pushed both his hands into Alhaitham’s hair. A stupidly kissable mouth, soft and yielding. He could feel one of Alhaitham’s strong hands, broad and firm, holding onto his hip, and tried not to be annoyed that Alhaitham still held onto his book with his other hand. 

He pulled back for a longer breath, elbows resting on Alhaitham’s broad shoulders. Gray, the color of storm. Green, the color of the forest whispers after the rain. He kissed Alhaitham on his bare ear. 

“So what’s wrong?” he murmured. 

“Nothing.” Alhaitham didn’t move, looking at him with a stern casualness. “You can continue.” 

“Of course I can. But you’re distracted.” 

“Do you need my full attention?”

“Never.” Kaveh reflected. “No, always. Never mind. That’s not the point.” He rolled off him to the small sliver of the bed allotted to him, fussing with his hair. “It can’t be work. You never bring that home with you.” 

“Work was normal.” 

“Not that you would tell me if it wasn’t. Can’t be another person, either, you don’t care what any of them think. I haven’t heard of any large happenings in Sumeru, even in the desert. Again, not that you would care unless it meant you would have a mild threat of overtime. Not that you’d listen. Well, what can we do with a lunk like you?” He propped himself up on the pillow. “Is it me? Have I done something? If it is, don’t you dare tell me. Never mind, tell me. Now.”

“Mercurial.” 

“You knew that about me from the start.” Kaveh drew an idle line on Alhaitham’s arm. “If you don’t want to talk about it, then you can say that.” 

“As if you could leave it alone if it bothered you.” Alhaitham finally placed his book by the stand, foregoing a bookmark. “You would feel a pea underneath twenty mattresses and eider-down beds.”

“Another uncaring comment to stab into the pile of knives in my back.” 

“If that’s how you choose to see it.” Alhaitham snuffed out the light, leaving them in darkness. The night settled over them coolly, a light touch of surprising peace. There were no menacing shadows in Alhaitham’s room. 

“I know you think I’m an idiot and that is quite uncharitable of you.” 

“Is that an evidence-based assumption?”

“What, I have to format a citation?” Kaveh made sure to heave a loud sigh beside Alhaitham’s ear, which he knew would bother him. “You’ve told me that you think I’m utterly selfish person who only helps others for my own sense of fulfillment. Isn’t that enough?” 

“That’s not how I said it.” 

“It’s the essence,” Kaveh said impatiently, though the red hot sword that had plunged through his rib cage had dulled into nostalgic scars. “But that’s how you are. I could be absolutely desperate and floundering and drowning and you wouldn’t do anything about it.”

“That’s not how I see it.” 

“You’ve said that many times, but yet I still don’t know how you actually see it.” 

The quiet lasted so long that Kaveh wondered if he spoke at all. Now that he wasn’t working on a piece of carpentry, the green of the headphones rested beside the book, so he knew Alhaitham would have heard him. He thought he heard a gust of wind blowing against a stack of boxes outside, but when he turned, Alhaitham finally spoke like a low thunderstorm in the distance. 

“People will do what they will. If they need assistance, they should ask.” Alhaitham’s voice grew harder, more casual stubbornness. “It’s irrational to blame me if I allow you to do what you want.” 

“Is that why you’re so grumpy? Someone’s blaming you for something?” Kaveh peered at him. “I mean, certainly, you’re incredibly frustrating. You don’t listen to other people. You make me so angry that I should have had a doctor test my heart rate after seeing your face. It would have made excellent academic research. But really, is something so small bothering you?” He had to laugh, which sounded a bit meaner than he intended in the darkness.  

“Irrational guilt is pointless.” 

“Right,” Kaveh said, not unkindly. “I mean, it doesn’t sound like you think you’re wrong. Whether you were actually wrong, well. But if you don’t think you’re wrong, then you’ve always been best at ignoring someone else’s bark.”

“An easy statement.”

“I’m correct, as always.” 

“A difficult statement.”

“Don’t be such a brat. I’m saying you’re right and I know you have no greater desire than to hear that phrase.” Kaveh stroked his arm. “But why do I feel like the more I agree with you, the more upset you get?” 

Alhaitham raised himself on an elbow and looked down at him. His eyes almost glowed in the moonlight. He was close, close enough that Kaveh could smell him. Alhaitham looked like he would smell like papers and wood and fresh cut grass, but he smelled human. Grounding. Soothing. Kaveh reached out to touch the side of his face, overcome by sudden affection.

“You’re shivering,” Alhaitham said. 

“In anticipation.” 

“No.” Alhaitham was studying him. Kaveh hadn’t noticed that he’d been shivering, but now that he noticed, he couldn’t stop. His fingers shook against the sharp line of Alhaitham’s jaw. He didn’t know when he had started shivering. A long while ago. 

“I’m.” Kaveh tried to stop his teeth from clattering. “I’m cold.” 

“How cold?” Of course Alhaitham would want to categorize this. 

“I don’t know. Cold.” Kaveh tried to pull out from underneath him, put on a kettle or wrap another blanket around himself. Instead, he found himself pinned to the bed. Alhaitham had caught his wrist. He could feel the whole of Alhaitham’s palm and a heavy amount of weight against his thin veins. 

“How cold?” Alhaitham repeated. 

“I don’t know,” Kaveh said, even more irritable. “Cold is cold. Is there really a diff-difference in cold?” He couldn’t cut out the last chatter. Even though the night sky hadn’t changed, he felt like he’d been buried in Dragonspine. He tried to breathe through another burst of violent chatter and failed. 

“Can you feel your fingers?” 

“No,” Kaveh said, before he could think of the answer. He didn’t know why he said no. He could feel his fingers just fine, curled against the bed. His bones felt like ice in him. “Why-why have you done that?” 

“Done what.” 

“My hands.” 

“What about your hands.” Alhaitham had big hands. Big stupid hands that slipped down his wrist, curled almost protectively over Kaveh’s fingers now. 

“You’ve tied them down.” Kaveh tried to move, but the golden metal straps looped around the armrests and dug into the bony protrusions of his wrists. Even in the dim light, he could see a ring of thin scarring from where he’d struggled against the biting metal. 

“I didn’t do that.” 

“Oh.” Kaveh closed his eyes. “No. No, you didn’t. You didn’t. Sorry. It’s just - when it’s cold. It’s hard to think. Sorry. I’m sorry, Alhaitham.” 

“Stop.” Alhaitham’s voice snapped close to his ear, harsh and guttural like a growl. It sounded like he hadn’t meant for this to come out so harsh because his next words were controlled with a tighter tension. “Is it like a desert cold?” 

“Desert cold?” He mulled over this. “Yes. Colder than that. Am I bleeding?”

“Why would you be bleeding?” 

“I don’t know.” He couldn’t see out of one eye. A strong flutter of his eyelid told him that the blood had only dried into a thick coat that had sealed his eye shut. With his other eye barely open through the ice, he saw mostly darkness. He had half-anticipated to see his breath as a thin line of vapor, but he was wrong. He wasn’t shaking. He was barely breathing. His mouth tasted like metal and then it did not. Something white was there, shining in the darkness. Small and still, clean even in the bloodied room. 

“Ow,” he said abruptly. Alhaitham had dug his thumb, hard, into the nestle of Kaveh’s wrist, hard enough to send a jolt of pain up his arm. Kaveh finally wrestled his hand away, rolling to his pitiful side of the bed. He clasped his palm over his wrist, but Alhaitham seemed to offer no apologies.

“What do you remember?”

“I remember you digging your finger into my hand. Why did you do that?” Kaveh rubbed his wrist, but then lit up with thought. “Or are you finally overcome with jealousy and envy and have finally resorted to brute strength?”

“Doubtful.” Alhaitham looked at him longer, then seemed disappointed. For Kaveh’s part, he had a strange feeling in the back of his mind. Like he was forgetting something important. He tried to ignore that sensation, pulling for levity instead. 

“Well, I’ll always forgive you.” Kaveh slid his fingers up the back of Alhaitham’s hand, tracing the delicate veins. “For a price.” 

“I won’t discount the rent.” 

“You know what I meant.” Kaveh pulled him close. Alhaitham had apparently decided to indulge him, all the way until Kaveh could feel his breath like a whisper against his ear. “Come on, now. Pay up and kiss me.” 

“If this is what you want.” Alhaitham said this heavily, with more weight than he expected. 

“If you know that much, then deduct your way to the rest.” Kaveh didn’t understand, but he supposed he didn’t need to understand. This wasn’t an academic exam. He just needed to wrap his arms around Alhaitham’s shoulders and kiss him. He liked how Alhaitham felt against his mouth, a sensation that flooded into him as Alhaitham kissed him. Alhaitham didn’t taste like metal and that was nice. 

He didn’t know why he thought about metal. Maybe he’d accidentally drunk out of the wrong metal-lined mug at work. It didn’t matter. Alhaitham was warm and that was all he needed. 

When he finally fell asleep, he had an unsettling dream that was filled with white walls and vases of blooming flowers. 

Work was normal. 

That was to say, absolutely frustrating. If someone offered to grant him an insight into the minds of his clientele, he would greedily accept and then immediately attempt to revoke that acceptance. Tempting as it would to finally understand what ‘more round’ or ‘less house-y’ or ‘bigger with a smaller budget’ or ‘can’t you just flout the laws of physics and safety conditions’ or ‘I haven’t heard of irrigation and believe that Sumeru will never experience rain again in this building’s robust lifetime’ or ‘I would like this to be much more boring and have no sense of creativity at all and am only interested in designs that are boxes on top of more boxes and I only eat one raw cabbage piece a day because I am actually that boring a person,’ he would be certain that he would drive himself out of his mind with actually understanding what the clients were saying. 

Payam was a rare client who would actually have a bountiful amount of money so Kaveh didn’t have to worry about an attempt of robbery, again, in the middle of nowhere, again. The Payam was the benefactor who rivaled even the top names of wealth, a merchant who had connections throughout Teyvat. He had built a reputation of ruthless and cutthroat deals, crushing small businesses under his heel. His enemies disappeared quietly, shadowy rumors barely rising to the top. If he had only one bane, it would be that he wasn’t officially recognized as the heir of the Houshian wealth, the tabloids fascinated by a story of a lost jewel and an eager branch house awaiting to steal away the reputable name and blah blah blah. Kaveh didn’t have much patience with rumors that put others into pedestals and he only felt a faint sense of envy to imagine being surrounded by wealth. His reality was arguing with Alhaitham about whether his tending the house could be considered any part of a rent that he could not make that month. 

Payam worked in the factory business, built upon investing in diversified fields like fabrics and shipping, so Kaveh’s path had rarely crossed his. But clients were still clients. Payam was a brusque man and Kaveh understood why the small businesses didn’t sprint towards the nearest bulletin board to warn others away from suspicious deals with well-known sponsors. Payam carried himself in a heavy way, the faint scar on his neck proof that he would follow through his threats. In terms of pickiness, he didn’t dissuade Kaveh from his extravagant designs. He only had one rule, in fact. 

“It must be detailed,” Payam had said, sitting in the dark while surrounded by artifacts that each cost more than Kaveh’s career. 

Which, given the generous budget, wasn’t a problem. In fact, Kaveh’s level of details could have generated its own economy, thriving in the lushest of carpets and breathable concrete and sturdy woods imported from Mondstadt and bricks shipped from Liyue and hand-woven fabric brought from Inazuma. Payam never pushed back. Kaveh’s biggest problem was that he hadn’t seen Payam for weeks and found himself dealing with Naser, an engineer who had far less patience for Kaveh’s designs. 

He felt already bone tired with a hoarse throat when he dragged himself to pick up Nahida from school, but he felt his energy slip back into him when he took her hand. 

“If you’re tired, we don’t have to go,” Nahida said. 

“I want to go.” 

“I could always go alone instead.”

“Like I said, I’ve meant to watch a performance at the Zubayr Theater for a while. And it’s not safe to go alone, not nowadays.” He didn’t know exactly what he meant, just a vague shapeless fear. An endemic of people not acting like themselves, empty eyes, vacant stares. He frowned in half-thought, but the more he thought about it, the more his head began to ache. 

“You should rest.” Nahida looked up at him. “To see Nilou dance is my selfish request.” She had wanted to see Nilou’s dance, a performance that was happening that night and would stretch past her bedtime. Alhaitham had declined to join them, which meant Kaveh had to fight against the crowd alone. Nahida had looked slightly abashed after her request, but it was rare that she would ask something for herself that Kaveh wouldn’t miss this dance even if it meant giving up all of Payam’s lucrative requests. 

“You should ask for more things. Children should be selfish.” He almost had to elbow another person out of his way through the crowd, which jostled like a living being. “Don’t let go of my hand, you’ll get lost.” 

“I won’t.” Nahida looked down at her feet. “I know Alhaitham did not see the appeal of watching her performance during this time.” 

“Who cares what he thinks?” The stage had been cast through strong stage lights, yellow curves cutting into the polished wood. “Are you two arguing?”

“You are quite attentive.” Nahida did lift her arms helpfully when he lifted her onto a stack of crates, tall enough that she would have a good view of Nilou when she first arrived on stage. “Though I would not certify us as ‘arguing.’”

“No shame if it is. I argue with him all the time. It’s his fault, he should at least think about other people for half a second.” 

“It isn’t to that extent,” Nahida said, reflective in a quiet way. “Maybe it’s more like how the moon might disagree with the sun.”

“Are you the moon or the sun?” 

“I am both.” Nahida seemed to be working through something in her mind and Kaveh didn’t interrupt her. Instead, he leaned against the cold wood and looked at the stage. They held different shows there, which meant they had to be flexible with the design. During theater performances, the stagehands have to change sets with sleights of hand, a big magic show even as the wooden cogs turned above to give the impression of flight or snow or shadows. 

“I won’t pry,” Kaveh said. “Just remember that he’s a person.”

“Do you mean to know that he can be wrong? Or do you mean to treat him kindly?”

“Treat him however you want. He’s always wrong in some way. But he’s right in all the other ways,” Kaveh admitted, begrudging. “I just mean, you don’t have to consider him to be some statue or force or anything like that. He’s petty and stubborn. He’ll sometimes come when he’s invited to places. He has favorite books and friends. He’s just Alhaitham.”

“I see,” Nahida said, “but I do not quite understand.” 

“I think academics around here get too focused on verifying results that they forget that we are always surrounded by people. He knows this and he’s somehow one of them, but he’s more than that, too.” A problem that he’d run into more often than he liked, even in the House of Kshahrewar. He understood both the legacy and the downfall of the House. He’d even heard stories of Alhaitham’s grandmother during its patterned history. But sometimes he felt like chewing through a knitted hat rather than arguing with them one more time about the constraints of what they can do and what they should do. If they had to have boxes on boxes, they could have beautiful boxes on boxes. He once built only wooden blocks, too. Instead, they hid behind their papers and cited costs and totaled efficiency numbers rather than just listening and thinking. But even then, Alhaitham sided too far and looked down upon them like little ants. 

Yet, at the same time, he couldn’t help but also be unable to bear when the other students had insulted Alhaitham too much. They acted like Alhaitham couldn’t hear their little snide statements, even when Alhaitham wasn’t wearing his soundproof headphones. Just like with Kaveh, they treated him like an untouchable object. He wasn’t trying to tell Nahida anything that she didn’t already know, but he felt, as always, a persistent sensation to insist that Alhaitham was someone who was deserving. 

It would be nice if Alhaitham actually bothered to attend more social events. At the same time, internally, he could not begrudge him with too much heat. Half the people in any given room watched him with narrowed pupils, wary of his ascension into a role of power. The other half watched him with a dense stare, lust and want and desire and greed that made even Kaveh shiver, aware of Alhaitham’s contentment of his scribe role, but aware that others considered him a kingmaker. 

“I will keep that in mind when I talk to him,” Nahida said.  

“Don’t worry,” Kaveh said. “I’m sure you’re right and he’s wrong.” 

“I cannot be so assured. It is difficult to understand another person’s emotions, so I am uncertain about the best path forward.”

“That stodgy guy has emotions?”

“Yes. You know that keenly, sometimes moreso than he does.” Nahida looked up suddenly, her large eyes unblinking. “I apologize. Only now do I see that you are joking and by taking that statement seriously, I have ruined a moment of good faith and a kind gesture.”

“You haven’t ruined anything.” He had to smile at that. “I don’t know why you’re so afraid.”

“Fearful?” Nahida tilted her head like this was a novel concept. “No. I wouldn’t say that I was afraid. Apprehensive would be a better descriptor.” 

“Of what?” He did worry about Nahida sometimes. She had a pensive look and did not appear to make friends easily in school. But he didn’t, either, and Alhaitham certainly couldn’t have made a friend to save his life. It was just that he felt that Nahida was somehow beyond those limitations and deserved better than what he had experienced. 

She wasn’t an urchin. She hadn’t broken a family. She deserved all that he could give and he felt, keenly, how shattered he felt that he had nothing more to give than his hollowed self. 

“Have you ever done something where you don’t think you’ll be forgiven?” Nahida’s responses, as always, were cryptic. 

“Yes. Of course.” He tried to meet her gaze, but she did not pull focus from the stage, still sitting on her throne of boxes that towered above the milling crowd.

“It’s the opposite of that.” 

He opened his mouth to ask her, but the eruption of applause from the crowd drew his attention. Nilou had emerged on stage, head bowed as she approached the center and settled into a beginning pose, arms arched with a casual tension. The fettered air in the Grand Bazaar settled into hum, the clamor into side conversations. 

He didn’t know much about dance, but watching Nilou always made him want to learn. In the dry desert of his mind, she evoked waves of water, never threatening to drown, but casting out her fingers like the castaway droplets against the rocks, spinning with the slow lull pull of the currents, a sparkling iridescent of the sea in the moonlight. 

He knew Nahida enjoyed the performance, too, given how she had that quiet look that she usually only displayed when reading an interesting paper. 

“Did you want to talk to her?” He lifted her down from the boxes, the crowd already peeling away in the quiet left behind her dance. 

“No,” Nahida said. “There wouldn’t be much point.” 

He bought her a cob of roasted corn, fresh from a grill with scarlet embers, and pretended he wasn’t hungry when she offered to share. For all his big talk to Alhaitham about making rent, he had given some of his coins to a group of children clustered around a stand who were trying to count the number of heads and number of kebabs. 

Alhaitham must have still been conducting his personal research at Port Ormos since he wasn’t back when they arrived. He lit the lights on the facade and crammed himself into Alhaitham’s precious study to finish up his work. He’d almost stabbed himself with his angle ruler when he dug into the blueprints and scattered them around the desk, basking in the luxury of Alhaitham not being home and being able to spread out as he wanted. He had moved his woodworking to his job site to not disturb Nahida’s sleep. 

He got distracted, however, by old blueprints that he must have drawn up in idle thought. Fanciful little things, looking more like Aranyaka houses with whimsical mushroom cap hats, floating islands, a huge castle created by the softest of clouds. Perhaps work for a domain. He could tell he was nodding off, but he couldn’t muster the power to drag himself into a bed. His eyelids felt heavy and even Mehrak only let out mechanical coos.

The wind blew outside, hard, like a gust that threatened to rampage throughout the city. He hoped Alhaitham would be back soon before the waves swallowed the docks. 

He thought he heard Nahida speaking from the room next door. 

“I know,” she said, voice faint through the walls. The wind rattled an open window, the shutters snapping. 

“I understand.” Silence. “Thank you for your report. I’m sorry it hasn’t been going well.” The wind again, like a howl. “Please continue your search safely. I didn’t have high hopes for results, but sometimes it’s better to lift a rock than to step over it.” A snarl of the sky. “I know,” she said again, even fainter. “We don’t have much time left. I appreciate your help, but I am afraid that if it comes to it, we must do this according to Alhaitham’s plan.”

He had another dream. 

A tale from long ago. A wounded goddess, wandering the desert lands. Where she wept, water flourished. Where she sighed, gardens would grow. Where she stepped, flowers would follow. And yet, this breath of life was not enough. 

A princess from a nearby kingdom became greedy and envious. Her older benevolent sister ruled the throne by birthright alone, though the younger princess was undoubtedly more clever, more shrewd, more ambitious. She waited until the goddess slept during the darkest night and cut above her heart with a golden dagger. The blood dripped into the desert, mingling with the grains of sand and forming an emerald, rimmed with a brilliant verdant green, but the center absorbed sunlight and instead looked like a shale red. The princess fled with the emerald back to her kingdom and claimed that the goddess had given her this jewel freely, honoring her as their true queen. In her first act, she executed her sister and her family. Her acts of terror became renowned throughout the land, a vicious kingdom that eventually fell apart into ruins even as she was surrounded by riches. Rumor had it that the tyrant queen had been plagued by nightmares throughout her life, leaving her screaming in the dark. She did not speak of those dreams, though it was said the goddess would visit her and whisper the same phrase into her ear, a phrase forgotten by time. They said that if a person understood that nightmarish whisper, only then they had been forgiven. But no matter how much they listened, none could decipher her words. 

“And people believe that story?” 

“It’s just an old family fable.” 

“Which means you’re obligated to  believe that story.” 

“Who knows? But I think parts of it might be true. I don’t think anybody can steal from the Mistress of Dreams and be unchanged. But enough about my family. I want to hear about the House of Daena. Is it true that you can climb for days without reaching the top bookshelf?” 

“I did get stuck up a ladder once, if you must know.”

“I really must.” 

When Kaveh had been a student, he traveled to different places to sketch and study. He still traveled for personal studies and had been particularly fond of a hilly overlook that faced Mawtimiya Forest. In the evenings, the faint bioluminescence of the mushrooms would cast soft blue light onto the forest grounds, a charming garden of lilacs and pewter, the smell of grass and shrubbery intertwined through the cathedral of plants. 

It was a perfectly wonderful sight that was filled with perfectly wonderful things, unbroken save for that Alhaitham was sulking. Or Kaveh assumed Alhaitham was sulking because Kaveh was sulking too, when Alhaitham had just said in a monotone that Kaveh would slip and fall if he tried to climb the mushroom wall and it was nonsense to listen to that guy so Kaveh had indeed tried and slipped and fell with his foot landing on Alhaitham’s face so now Alhaitham was keeping a step behind while Kaveh laid out the blanket and the dishes so at least Nahida could have a nice evening dinner with beautiful sights while he could drag Alhaitham off behind some mushrooms and scold him or be scolded.

“It’s beautiful, isn’t it?” Kaveh piled up a stack of delicate cheese slices on Nahida’s plate and slapped an unbroken wheel on Alhaitham’s plate. 

“Yes. Thank you for taking us here.”

“No need for thanks. I mean, I wouldn’t mind an utterance of at least one thank you from that lunk over there, but that’s neither here nor there.” Kaveh turned to glare at him. “And what were you doing all day? I tried to contact your office, but they said you were out.” 

“I was busy.”

“Busy with what!” 

“With personal business.” 

“That’s not like you. What, things aren’t going well at work? That would be absolutely hilarious. I’d laugh for days. You’d absolutely deserve it.” Kaveh hesitated. “Are things going well? I don’t know that many people in the offices, but I can put in a good word. Reluctantly, of course. You’d have to beg. But I could stop by tomorrow.” 

“Things are well.” Alhaitham finally deigned to sit on the blanket. “A little too well.” 

“And what does that mean?”

“That my days are filled with people with just the right amount of care and compassion for me.” 

“Are you bragging? I don’t want to hear it.”

“You were the one who asked.” 

“That’s the polite thing to do! I don’t hear you asking about my work.”

“How is your work.”

“Don’t even get me started.”

“I didn’t want to get you started.”

“First of all, Payam is still missing. For someone with that much money, isn’t that weird? I’m used to clients ghosting on me, but they were usually those without money.” Kaveh waved his hands in the air, trying to brush away the cobwebs of the day. “It’s not like it’s impeded any of the work significantly, but most people would want to see what I’m doing. He just disappeared.”

“What did you think of him?” Nahida seemed inquisitive. Kaveh hesitated, fork still hovered on his plate. 

“He’s a client.”

“I’m merely curious about your personal thoughts. I won’t tell anybody,” Nahida added. “I don’t have anybody I could tell at school.” She probably had meant that as a winning signal that Kaveh could tell her any secrets, but that just made his heart ache. Not that he could give her any advice about making friends at school. Look, one of his best friends at school was sitting with his sculpted back towards them and staring at a pool of water at the mushroom tops instead of engaging with them at all. 

“It’s not a secret,” Kaveh said. “He’s just - unpleasant.” 

“Like how you say Alhaitham is unpleasant?”

“It’s different.” Kaveh drew his knee to his chin, contemplative. Even if it was just Nahida, he’d rather never have to admit that Alhaitham was just a very unique unpleasant, not in the same way he’d call others who were genuinely cruel as unpleasant. “He’s just - oxymoronic.” 

He’d been through many offices in Sumeru, making a paltry case for mora during his different jobs. Payam’s had been one of luxury, the intricate woodwork on the back of the chairs, the open window behind him that overlooked a beautiful garden with exquisite water features, the outdoor walkway with detailed keystones. A man who, ostensibly, had everything. Glass cases filled with grueling evidence of his hunts, from fur to glistening white teeth, glass paperweights awash with a tint of red. 

‘People are beasts,’ Payam had said, cutting into his steak that dripped onto a stack of papers. His blunt knife scraped against the delicately adorned ceramic. Behind him, in a room of opulence, was a single glass case that was empty save for a velvet cushion with a faint circular imprint, a missing jewel of the collection. ‘If you say you can’t be bought, then you’re lying. Every man would sell his soul for the right price.’ A stab, a cut that stained the flecks of gold with a growing ichor red. 

‘So name your price.’ 

The towers of Mawtimiya had grown through decades, scaling since he was still scribbling on his mother’s blueprints and building block houses. He wasn’t giving them any credit by dwelling in unpleasantries. Nahida was still looking up at him with her great green eyes, so he cleared his throat and set back to work on his plate. 

“Here, Nahida, you could have this tart.”

“Is that not your portion?” 

“It’s fine, it’s more important for you to have it to grow up big and strong.”

“I will grow,” Nahida said, contemplative, “but it might not be in height for many years.”

“Who knows, maybe you’ll probably take after Alhaitham.” He laughed and then stopped. The night air had been cool and fresh, but now took on a strange humidity. There was something that he said that had been wrong. He tried to test the words out again in his tongue, but he just felt cold. His arm felt like it had been stabbed with a very thin knife. The sand had gotten into his mouth. 

“I’m going to,” Kaveh said, standing up and feeling dizzy with a sudden head rush. “I’ve left something so. I’ll be back.” 

Nahida quietly looked at him, just as Alhaitham did not. 

He walked past some distance to a small thicket, though not as far as he had hoped. He had to get it together for Nahida’s sake, but his head hurt and he sat down with a soft collapse of his knees betraying him. In the past, the simple presence of the trees and leaves and the steady presence of the domes above him would have given him comfort. Now, he just felt lost. He folded his elbow over his knee and buried his face into his forearm, breathing against the thin cloth that felt like it clung to his mouth and nose at every inhale. 

He really hadn’t gotten as far as he thought, but apparently had given the impression that he’d dashed off in a fit of typical Kavehness. Behind him, he could hear the young soft voice and the deeper calm one mingling together. 

“We don’t have much time.” 

“I’ve received such reports. This third try will be our last.” 

“It’ll work.” 

“Your plan will come with a cost.” 

“I am aware. Do you still intend to help?” 

“Of course. It has always been my duty and my privilege.”

“Even if you don’t agree with the methods.” 

“It will cause a hurt that will never go away.”

“He’ll live.” 

“Hm.” A short pause, the wind rustling the silver grass that glinted like knives in the bioluminescence. “If you take a walk through a garden, you may find many different flowers. Some are bright and some are dull, short and tall, big and small. I will not begrudge you to have your favorite.” 

He felt like he’d forgotten something. 

A little further off, he saw a mourning flower. This seemed out of place, somehow. He had to plant his hands on the damp grass for purchase, but he did manage to stumble-stand, and trailed towards the flower. A dull red, like he remembered, with petals that resembled the thin ornamentation of a ribbed palace. One had been firmly planted at the robust stem of a large mushroom and another, further down the road, peeked behind a boulder. 

They formed a road that dove down the hill, leading to seeming nowhere, but he followed them. It seemed right as it seemed wrong, until he wasn’t in the forest anymore. The softness of the grass beneath his footsteps became a harder, firmer road, one that became what he had known to be Sumeru City. The tavern had closed already. He didn’t know how he knew that. Maybe because he smelled like wine, the strong taste on the back of his tongue. The city had a musky air, the moon shrouded in the clouds, the buildings holding a quiet breath. 

A shadowy figure stood near the closed cafe. They didn’t turn, even as Kaveh approached from the scattering of red flowers that he had placed on his father’s grave. In the darkness, he half-expected a ghost, but the moon shone bright enough to make out the familiar features of a man. He may have seen him before, this man carrying the faint scent of dry desert, in the background of a meeting or a conference or something. He stood facing the wall, unmoving. 

“Hello,” Kaveh said. “Are you all right?” 

The man didn’t answer. Didn’t turn. Kaveh swallowed, throat somehow dry. Tentatively, he touched the man’s shoulder. The man stared at the wall, side profile covered in shadow in the soft affordance of the gables. 

“I think they’re closed. Why don’t you go home? I’ll treat you to something in the morning,” Kaveh said, aware of the slight tremble at the end of his voice. “They make a brilliant cup of coffee, don’t they?” When he inclined his head, just slightly, he could only make out the whites of the man’s eyes in the shadows of his face, featureless. 

“Kaveh.” 

He started, pulling away from the shadow and jerking against a metal chair. Alhaitham stood on the road. 

“You can’t help him.” Alhaitham jerked his head towards the direction of his house. “Let go.” 

“That’s not true.” But somehow, his legs wouldn’t move any closer to the shadow.

“Your refusal to acknowledge the truth doesn’t constitute a need to willfully impose yourself on others.” Alhaitham seemed unhappier than usual, his temper a steady low boil. 

“What’s wrong with him?” 

“He’s been Hollowed.” 

Kaveh hesitated. “I don’t know what that means. Shouldn’t we take him home? Or to the hospital? I did a little work on the wing expansion, surely a doctor would remember me. They would be willing to take a look.”

“All the medical staff in Sumeru are already working on this issue.”

“We can’t leave him here.” 

“The temperatures have been reasonable at night. He won’t freeze. This would be a safer place for him than taking him somewhere strange.” 

“Maybe I’ll just get him a blanket. Or some food.”

“Kaveh.” 

This one felt more like a snap, the kettle finally whistling on the stove. Kaveh still hesitated, but when he looked at Alhaitham, he could see a hardness to the lines of his face. 

“How many are there? You said the medical staff, they’ve been investigating.”

“The number is classified.”

“Then why do they call them the - Hollowed?” 

“A flight of fancy by an unimaginative scholar.” A familiar ground for Alhaitham’s poaching, scholars who had buried themselves in books and claimed themselves to be experts of reality. “She claimed they had been hollowed out.” 

“Right,” Kaveh said. “Amnesiac. Unable to make decisions. Unresponsive to stimuli. Have we had this conversation before?” He paced towards Alhaitham, who ignored him as always. But somehow, he felt like this had the confused undertones of a memory. “I’d forgotten my key so I’d gone to the tavern like you’d suggested. This was the first time I saw one. Someone who’d been Hollowed. This man. I don’t know if I’ve seen him before or where I’ve seen him. You were passing by. You’d come back after doing your own investigations at Port Ormos. Isn’t that right?” The night had been murky then, too, and he’d been too drunk to think with any real clarity. He wanted to grab Alhaitham’s hand, touch him to make sure this was real, but they didn’t have that kind of relationship, except that didn’t make sense, either. 

“We should go,” Alhaitham said. “It’s late.” 

“You go. I’ll stay.” He shifted his weight to his back foot, ready to return to the man that still caused him an unmired concern.  

This was the wrong thing to say. Alhaitham’s placid temper shifted like the rumble of a storm that threatened to tear open the bellies of the clouds, a masked rage in the sudden grip of his jaw and forced swallow of his throat that only moved a hair’s breadth. Kaveh took a step back despite himself, the cold iron of the gate jabbing against his back. Certainly, Alhaitham sometimes got angry, but this would simmer into annoyance. The unmarred rage made Alhaitham’s eyes almost aglow with menace. 

The thing was, Alhaitham didn’t get mad. He was stuffy Alhaitham. For him to demonstrate any emotion mean an extreme that Kaveh felt keenly to resolve, almost desperate. Kaveh breathed shallowly through his mouth, playing with the strand of hair in front of his face before he shoved that behind his ear with finality. 

“Never mind,” Kaveh said, quick to his feet. “Let’s not keep Nahida waiting any longer. Come on, off we go.” He touched the wide breadth of Alhaitham’s arm, the muscle of his bicep hard beneath his fingers, and leaned to coax a kiss from him. Alhaitham didn’t lean into the kiss, didn’t respond, but this much was common. Kaveh knew that pouring his affections onto him had as much use as pouring water over a stone, but he couldn’t help himself. There was a cool relief in that indifference, somehow, that no matter how he reached for Alhaitham, that Alhaitham would not reach back towards him. 

Kaveh worked his hand on the back of Alhaitham’s hair, smoothing the strands and trailing a finger over the thrum of the skin on the back of his neck. The ornamented street lamps poured light over the Padisarah flowers. He could feel Alhaitham breathe, the slight impress of his chest, and then he broke off from him. Kaveh smoothed down the stray tails of his hair and had to jog after him. 

As expected, Nahida stood at the doorway with the lantern flickering behind her, the green panes of the gilded windows casting an emerald sheen over her small figure. The slope of the pathway made it so that she seemed to tower over them with a kind and sorrowful expression. He had seen that same expression somewhere, a long time ago, in a different place. A vestibule breaking open to the raised temple, light piercing through the glass and falling like a veil over a marble statue of benevolence. 

She had said to Alhaitham about a garden. He still didn’t quite understand, but he had a sensation that all the flowers of a garden would be her favorites. 

“Are you hiding again?”

“I’m not hiding.” 

“So it’ll be fine if I open my curtains, then?”

“No. No, fine, I’m hiding, but it’s not my fault. That professor doesn’t like me at all. He’s incredibly arrogant, won’t listen to anybody but himself. Working with him is like working with a rock, except a rock would actually relent after however many years.” 

“Aren’t you part of a special work-study? Hand-picked by the professor?”

“Well, yes. But that doesn’t mean he likes me. I simply had the best score on the project. It’s the same with my friend, Alhaitham. He’s the type of genius who’s too good to ignore, whether you like him or hate him.” 

“And which one is it to you? Love or hate?”

“I’m not here to talk about him.”

“Yes, you’ve come to hide.”

“I didn’t come for that, either! Why don’t you tell me another story. You said you had thousands of them.” 

“My family has a thousand stories. I don’t know, what would you consider interesting? I have one where my great-grandmother poisoned her husband on their wedding day, waiting to inherit the family fortune. Or perhaps when my grandfather was one of triplets, and that bloody outcome. It’s quite fascinating, really, because they never found out which triplet actually survived.”

“Don’t you have anything more pleasant?” 

“You know the deal. Trade me a story and I’ll tell you a story in return. If my family of murderers don’t titillate you, perhaps I should tell you something more saccharine. A neglected daughter, perhaps? Abandoned in a small hospital room, resentful and always thinking about revenge? A lost family fortune? An heirloom that lets you manipulate memories? But you go first. Tell me about your Alhaitham.” 

“Alhaitham? He’s not mine. I mean, I wouldn’t - Never mind. Alhaitham, what to say about that guy. People just see him wrong. I could describe him as a genius and people still would get the wrong idea, they’d think he’s just a feeble scholar, he’s arrogant, he’s pushy, he’s a prodigy. But he’s just bigger than all that. Everybody would see that, if he just got along with them better.”

“Would you want that?” 

“Want what?”

“People to know what he’s truly like.” 

“Yes. Why wouldn’t I?”

“Because then he might like someone else more. He won’t be yours anymore.”

“Of course he’d like another person more. That’s inevitable. I just hope they treat him kindly. I must sound mad, of course, he’s a practical genius, I know he’s not one to keep his head in the books, he doesn’t need anybody to worry about him. He won’t get swept up like me. It’s just that he’s not so insensitive that he doesn’t feel pain.” 

“I don’t know how you’re so accepting of this. If I had something I wanted, then I would do anything to take it. I’d sneak out in the night and break through any number of locks, lie and cheat and steal, betray even those who think they love me best, so I could take it and hide it forever. If I thought anyone would ever steal it from me, then I would rather give it away than to have it stolen from my grasp.” 

“Would you really?”

“Honest. On my heart. Why is that so hard to believe?”

“I think you’re capable of doing everything you said - and more - but I can’t imagine that for myself.” 

“Because you’re so accepting. You’re a little angel.” 

“No. No, it’s the opposite. It’s just. I can’t say it right.”

“Then just say it.” 

“It’s - I’ve done something bad. I did it a long time ago and nobody really knows about it except for one person, but I don’t think it makes it better or worse if the whole world knew, that’s the kind of bad. And because I did this very bad thing, it - means I don’t get good things. Or I shouldn’t get good things. Or maybe I’m just trying to be very extravagant and grandiose but I’m only hiding that I just - I wouldn’t deserve it. Do you understand? I don’t deserve - anything.” 

“Oh.” 

“Oh.”

“Don’t look so glum. I didn’t mean it like that. I was just surprised.”

“Surprised? Or disappointed that I’m this depressing student that chooses to hide out in a sick patient’s room rather than face his professor?”

“No, I knew that. I was just surprised that we’re more alike than I thought.” 

It was a strange dream. Murky, full of drifted whispers. Like the misted fog of a morning, the tendrils withdrew from his grasp when he tried to remember the contents of his dream. Faintly, he could see a silhouette of a girl sitting on a bed with white sheets, backlit from a white light. The brilliance faded into the darkness of the bedroom. 

Alhaitham didn’t snore, but he had rolled with his sturdy back to him. His soundproof earphones had been cast onto the nearby table. The moon had emerged as a small sliver, giving only enough light to pave a small slit towards the open door. When he finally sat up, gentle to not wake up Alhaitham, he could see the extra door. 

He knew how many doors had been in this house. He knew the floor plans like the back of Alhaitham’s hand. There had never been that door in the plans. 

Each unsteady step towards the door felt like he poured himself into the bottom of his tavern glass. Head woozy, sick in his throat, the world a thin vapor to his surroundings. When he didn’t have enough strength in his legs, he sank to the ground and gripped his head. His breathing labored and strained like a butterfly beating against his chest and bashing against his rib cage. Every inhale tripped over the exhale, the blood long since dried from where the machine had been drilled into his head, he’d been told to hold still but he wasn’t able to, weak, screaming until his throat became a scratchy piece of plywood, until his hands had finally been bolted down. 

“Shh. Shh.” 

He thought he was still dreaming until he managed to peer up. Even in the darkness, he could tell this was Nahida’s figure. She had a hand against his shoulder, looking at him with almost curiosity. 

“Kaveh. This is very important. Do you know where you are?” 

He tried to speak, but his panicked breathing hadn’t lulled. Half-breaths, like hiccups, threatening to overwhelm him. Dizzy, the vault of his ribs collapsing like a controlled destruction, folding with bones outward and piercing his skin. Heart like a thunderstorm, he tried again. “No. No, I don’t. I don’t know.” 

“Where are you?” Nahida spoke not unkindly, but strictly. A parent lecturing their child. Kaveh closed his eyes and opened his other eyes. A cold dark room. A thin string of moonlight that struck through the dust motes that floated through the air. Sand piling on the floor. Something pure in the doorway. Nothing made sense. He did not like his mouth with the taste of blood so he closed his eyes again. 

“I’m where I’ve always been,” Kaveh said. “Alhaitham’s house.” 

She had hunkered beside him, feet flat on the hardwood floor, with her small fingers a faint whisper against his shoulder. This felt like an echo of a distant past, a mingling of those brief afternoons where he had built cities out of wooden blocks on the floor. His parents sat at the table behind him, the sun touching all the flat planes of his row of little houses and a loose gathering of parks and his crown achievement of a ten-block-tall tower with his favorite triangle carving and he could hear his father laugh at something that his mother had murmured. The warmth felt painful, bursting from inside of him and threatening the other memory that he revisited the most. Standing with his back outside a door, fingers loose and touching the grains of wood, while his mother cried quietly inside and he did not know how to reach her. 

He had to inhale through his half-parted mouth, bringing the sharp bite of breath into his lungs and pushing back the sunlight. The city slept in quiet outside the window, the familiar stone steps and the streetlights looking down over the emptied stalls and storefronts, the water at Port Ormos lapping at the barnacled docks, the nurseries with hidden buds at Pardis Dhyai. 

“I’m fine,” he told Nahida. “I’m sorry for worrying you.” 

“Can you stand?” 

“Yes. You should go back to bed. Did I wake you?” 

“I wasn’t asleep.” Nahida looked thoughtful. “Perhaps it’d be more accurate to say that I was awake and only just recently fell back asleep. I was soaring in the sky.” 

“That sounds like a nice dream. Nowadays, I just have nightmares.” 

“You have nightmares?” Nahida suddenly turned. They had been heading back to her bedroom, the vines draping over her bed like a canopy. The single lantern had been turned on her desk, emitting a pale glow over the stray throned leaves and sticks. This backlit her and the faint green glow at the end strands of her hair. 

“Don’t worry about it.” A sudden pang echoed in him, the familiar cold chokehold of his hand against the door and trying to remember how to reach out to his mother. He never did figure it out. The last thing he ever wanted was anybody to worry about him in the same way, not for his pathetic problems that, admittedly, were his own doing. 

“You can’t be dreaming.” Nahida hadn’t moved, her eyebrows drawn together. “What were they about?” 

“I don’t remember. What, is it really that unusual?” He tried to coax a more humorous tone, but Nahida still stood like a statue by the door. 

“No,” she said slowly. “More like finding a shiny beetle in the forest. It’s mesmerizing to see, but unless you have more information, then you can’t tell its significance. To the entomologist, the beetle may be a benchmark to changing weather patterns and eroding soil. To a passerby, the beetle may just be a pleasant sight and a reminder of the next festival in Inazuma.”

“You take after Alhaitham.” 

“Do I?” Nahida considered this. Kaveh ignored the pulse of pain that stabbed through his brain. 

“It’s a compliment. Now let’s get you to bed, all right?” 

“Very well. But I must insist.” She rustled around her low bookshelf, which had been carved into a charming and impractical leaf shape that templed the books together. When she turned, the bright covers of mushroom creatures glowed up at him. “Which one would you like read to you?”

“What?” His mind, still sluggish, took a moment to understand. “I’m the one who reads to you.”

“Today we have ‘The Aranara Find a Seed’ or ‘Metaphysical supplementation to the cognitive dissonance.’”

“Well.” Kaveh settled into the small chair, which creaked ominously under his weight. “I suppose I’ll have to choose the first.” 

Nahida read softly into the night, fingers gentle over the drawings of soft-bodied creatures. She spoke in a low murmur, despite her high pitch, that he found his eyelids heavy. The wind rattled the window once, twice, then soothed into a gentle breeze. One day, in a faraway forest, a Smart Aranara and a Kind Aranara were very good friends. They went on a walk and discovered a magic seed. It was a very beautiful seed, so beautiful that any Aranara who would have seen it would have wanted it. It was black and red and brilliant and they argued who found it first. It was a very bad argument, the kind when good friends hurt each other in all the soft places in their hearts and say the words that they couldn’t take back, ones they didn’t mean in such cruel ways. The Kind Aranara got very mad and stole the seed and ran away. 

The Smart Aranara thought and thought and thought and realized the seed was actually a bad seed, a very bad seed, an evil seed that would grow into a poisonous lotus. Then the Smart Aranara thought and thought and thought even more and realized that just because the Kind Aranara was kind, that didn’t mean the Kind Aranara wasn’t also smart. The Kind Aranara must have known the seed was evil and took it so no other Aranara would get hurt. But what the Kind Aranara didn’t know was that just because the Smart Aranara was Smart, that didn’t mean the Smart Aranara wasn’t kind, too. The Smart Aranara was very sad. The Smart Aranara was very, very sad, and very, very hurt. The Smart Aranara cried for three days and three nights, cried so much that the water flowed out of the Aranara house and flooded Mahavanaranapna. The other Aranara tried to give the Smart Aranara the best flowers and most beautiful lyres, but the Smart Aranara was sad inside in all the places that the Kind Aranara had once taught them to be happy. 

“And?” Kaveh prompted, though he drifted half-in and half-out of sleep with his neck at an uncomfortable stoop at Nahida’s desk. She had lapsed into a long silence. “What happens at the end?” 

“What do you think happens?” 

“They live happily ever after.” He fought back another yawn. Sleepless without sleep, tired without rest. Vigorously, he rubbed his eyes with the palms of his hands. He hadn’t been the same since he had seen that faceless man on the street. Somebody must know something. He would find out that something and then everything would finally go back to normal, back to lazy mornings and arguments with Alhaitham and reminding him to pick up Nahida after school and walking to the park and having dinners together, not this incessant fear that if he stopped thinking, for even a second, then everything would fall apart. 

“I see,” Nahida was murmuring. “I would like that, too.” 

“It’s rare to see you here.” An old classmate, dressed the way of a professor, had stopped him near the bookshelves. “I heard the Light of Kshahrewar was working on a personal project for the richest man in the city. You’ve certainly set up a nice nest egg for yourself, haven’t you?” Wink wink, nudge nudge, and any other day, Kaveh would have time for pleasantries and lies about his state of near poverty. 

“Dropping off something for the scribe,” Kaveh said, a laugh and a shrug, trying not to show the crinkled heaviness of his tired eyes, “You know how it is - ” Another false statement that he hoped he wouldn’t receive any feedback, since he didn’t how it was. “- But I should get going. You know the old saying, sleeping Sumpter Beasts.” 

“Oh, don’t let me keep you.” The classmate withdrew with a shiver at Alhaitham’s title. Kaveh really was in a hurry to carry out his intricate plan while the House of Daena had emptied out for Tighnari’s day-long event at Gandharva Ville. The fewer witnesses to see him break into a government office, the better. Nevertheless, he still hesitated as he turned on his heel. 

“Has Alhaitham been getting along with everybody here? Nobody’s causing any problems for him?”

“Trust me, he’s the one who would cause problems for us.” The classmate laughed, and then stalled. “Please don’t tell him I said that.” 

The hurried packed lunch that might barely constitute an excuse if Alhaitham really was in his office. But that man could not stand overtime and this was his usual day off. He likely had already set himself up in his glorious study, hidden behind a stack of books and flipping through the pages with the lightest skim of his fingers. Kaveh had no problem slipping into Alhaitham’s office with the box of salad and a small packet of sauce. He closed the door behind him with a soft click, putting the lunch on Alhaitham’s desk and looking quickly around the empty dark office. 

If Alhaitham really was paranoid about his materials, which would be justified, he might carefully place a single strand of hair at the handle of his drawer or memorize the exact placement of his papers to even the slightest degree. Kaveh would have to replicate everything as close as possible, using the salad as a shield for the rest of his interruptions. 

Most of Alhaitham’s scribe work rested in the bookshelves behind his main desk, but Kaveh had no significant interest in the high-class meetings. He knew Alhaitham’s work with startling familiarity. His theses and published articles had the same clinical sentiments, a clarity in the meeting replayed in the bullet points. Some would be published, some would never see the light of day, enshrouded in secrecy. No, Kaveh was looking for a true treasure, as much as he hated to admit it.

He would be looking for Alhaitham’s notes, the raw information before he filtered this all down into a sharp rendition. Alhaitham enjoyed the challenge of textual debate, deriving this down to the truth, but even he indulged to lay down his thoughts before this distillation. 

“Now where are you?” Kaveh had long since dreamed of being an architect, which meant he had a good sense of rooms. The office had been built with a smart outlook on the work of the scribe, allowing easy access to previous works. If Alhaitham had any good sense, he would be practical about maintaining the rectilinear look and the openness provided by the circulation of the egress and the windows, keeping his draft work in a locked drawer or cabinet. 

But he knew Alhaitham had no good sense, so he started his work by shoving his hands behind the bookshelves to feel for any hidden spaces. The ventilation, while surprisingly clean, had no evidence of a journal tucked away. Kaveh next tackled the floors, lifting the heavy rug’s corner to feel for anything he could pry away. If Alhaitham entered the room, the paltry salad would do nothing to salvage the situation. 

“I’m Alhaitham,” Kaveh said out loud, sitting back against the cream-colored walls. “‘Kaveh, you’re an idiot.’ No. ‘Kaveh, you always make things harder on yourself than necessary.’ That’s not it either. ‘I have no particular enjoyment in watching you flounder, but I also fail to see where your failures necessitate my involvement. You are proof that seniority holds a far too rigorous hold on the current academic world.’ Yes, that’s it, now I have truly become him.” 

Kaveh rose to his feet, rubbing the bridge of his nose to fend off against his constant headache. “I’m Alhaitham and I’m stupidly clever. I’d rather not anybody read my notes, but a regular plebeian couldn’t possibly decipher my esoteric nonsense. Besides, I won’t be personal. Me, having feelings? Ha-ha-ha. All right, I’ve come back from a long day of doing nothing and I’m ready to clock out like normal. I will lock away any confidential materials.” He mimicked the locking at the cabinet. “Grab my coat if it’s the weather.” He clasped the air. “Tuck away my journal.” 

He turned three times on the same spot until he spotted the potted plant in the corner of the room. Big fronds, leafy, like a present from somebody. Like a desert fox, he scurried towards the pot. The hefty plant had more girth than he anticipated, making him pant in small gasps when he shoved it to the side. For his efforts, the plywood pried up with his fingers alone. He felt down to the treasury of notes. 

Early journals were easier to detect, the edges of their covers worn down from being carried in Alhaitham’s pockets. Kaveh doubted any true secrets would be written there, those journals more likely to be found in Alhaitham’s personal study instead. These probably pertained to academic puzzles, mild interest in the topic matter as he journeyed for the truth. Nevertheless, Kaveh had nothing but a vague disgust that he might be looking through Alhaitham’s personal belongings, and squinted when he did flip through the journals to find any keywords and blur the rest. 

In the newest journal, he frantically flipped back a few pages. 

The Hollowed.

Kaveh swallowed, glancing at the door. He couldn’t be absolutely certain that Alhaitham wouldn’t barge into his office if he had an inkling of Kaveh’s duplicity. Kaveh himself had to beg off work with a vague excuse, though the team hadn’t seemed to care and likely wouldn’t follow up for the rest of the day. 

Patient Alpha. Found on Treasure Street. Formerly a primary stockholder in the shipping and receiving business. Initially unresponsive to external stimulus. Doctors theorize microsleep. Does not exhibit REM. Does not exhibit day-night behavior. 

Patient Beta. Found on outskirts of Sumeru City. Recognized as principal of a cluster of cram schools. Preparation for Akademiya entrance exams. Worked primarily with students. Similar behavior. No changes. 

Patient Gamma. Found near Apam Woods with luggage. Recognized as an entrepreneur for mechanical parts. New business. Were parts missing? Worked on a shipping route between Fontaine and Sumeru. Similar affliction. No changes. 

Update. 

Patient Alpha’s autopsy has no significant information. Presumed cause of death related to stress. Sleep deprivation? No changes in other patients.

Patient Delta. Found near river leading to Port Ormos. Worked at a fabric shop. Friend said Patient Delta had been working a proposal for a new business. Threat to market? Culprit’s interests? Similar affliction. 

Update. Patient Delta was said to have exhibited brief response after new treatment of sleep inducement. ‘I can’t think.’ Repeated at several questions. Regained ability to speak responsively over course of days. Responds in short statements. No recollection of prior days before incident.

The Hollowed. Term created by psychologist on the team. Term received warmly by other members of task force. Unfortunate. 

Update. Patient Beta’s autopsy reveals no significant information. 

Patient Delta moved to different facility. Brief breakdown over having to choose between fork and spoon. Inability to make decisions. Still able to form new memories. Obeys instructions even to self-detriment. Was told to make sure to eat everything on their tray. Doctors called when Patient Delta found during attempt to eat silverware. Confirmed amnesia. No major intestinal injuries discovered, treatment proceeds. 

Update. Patient Gamma’s autopsy has no significant information. Effects reveal a trace amount of sand on a bloodied shirt in possession. Cause of death attributed to stress of heart. 

Patient Epsilon. Sumeru City. 

Kaveh

At this, Kaveh jerked back. He had sat in Alhaitham’s chair, which faced the door, to read the journal. He stared at the doorway, but he could only hear the faint chatter of the sparse government officials on some distant floor. Probably the Matra, those who hadn’t joined Cyno in attending the lectures. He swallowed, careful not to move Alhaitham’s things, and turned his attention back to the page. 

Patient Epsilon. Sumeru City.

Kaveh made the discovery. He’d been drinking. However, he has a relatively good memory even while inebriated. Might cause trouble if he pursues inquiry. A fundamental and annoying flaw. Phobia of hurting another, extreme in his pursuits to save everyone. Hopefully he forgets.

Patient Epsilon. Former architect. Not known for any significant work. Has no known contact with Kaveh. Not surprising at level of talent. New treatment was applied. Induced longer sleep cycles and rest periods. Unable to induce REM. Doctors report hopeful results. Inflating results for more research funding? Meeting finally called about ‘Hollowing.’ 

Kaveh persistent about asking about Epsilon’s status. Constantly offers to help contact Epsilon's family members and inquires about any potential for his involvement. Refuses to be rebuffed by confidentiality. Annoying. Late on rent after last client broke off agreement. Suggested for him to collect contract break fee. Long circuitous argument about how the disagreement came from both parties and it wouldn’t be honorable to collect the fee. Pointed out that Kaveh has lost money in his investment in the old contract. Kaveh refuses to concede the point. Spent the rest of the night hammering. Annoying. 

Medical staff in argument. Sages suggesting to push for more aggressive treatments. Medical staff protesting over risk. Secrecy statements and security measures applied. Note: sages  refuse to label these incidents, meaning no other protocols have been applied. Unfortunate. Should be treated as a criminal case. Matra have leads, but pretend they don’t. Promising. Tighnari said to host dinner following week. Cyno likely to be in attendance. 

Kaveh asking again about Epsilon. Another long argument. Kaveh promises to make rent next month. Same excuses. Always a new prospective client on horizon. Kaveh seems aggressive in his promises. Unusually sensitive to arguments. Stormed out. Made sure to loudly announce he was storming out. Came back two hours later. Sober. Seemed troubled. Said good night and closed the door to his room. Did not hear hammering. 

Update. Kaveh coming home later at nights. Incrementally: 8, 9, 10. Midnight. One in the morning. Secretive. Smug, has already paid for last month’s rent with late fee. Had not asked for either, but accepted. 

Update. Patient Delta’s autopsy has no new leads. Medical staff has been forced into position where they must accept the sages’ suggestion of aggressive new treatment for Epsilon. May prove effective. Medical staff could have leveraged newest discovery and manipulated results to force their desired result. Most seem to lack this foresight. Nevertheless, Epsilon scheduled for surgery later tonight. 

Patient Zeta. Found in the Chasm. Former gemologist. Aggressive application of new treatment. Patient Zeta pronounced deceased within three hours of treatment. Effects located in a lockbox near their habituation. Trace amount of sand. Nahida?

Took a trip to Aaru Village. Candace accommodating with older records. Disappointed that the sages had not considered Patient Zeta’s discovery a lead. Patient Zeta had chronologically preceded Patient Alpha, indicating others may have also preceded Patient Zeta. Likely biases and an overinvolvement with the current academic climate has clouded the officials’ judgments. 

From Aaru Village’s old records. Three potential subjects, dated several years earlier, from old hospital records. Retroactively referred as Patients Eta, Theta, Iota. Eta: earliest (if correct in hypothesis) who had undergone ‘Hollowing.’ Still investigating, most potential for leads. Theta: potentially second. Iota, third. Theta and Iota displayed most commonalities of the current known stages of ‘Hollowing.’ Both adventurers. Not reported missing by their families. 

Patient Eta most dubious. Commonalities: amnesiac qualities, indecisive, unresponsive to most immediate questions, insomnia. Differences: Patient Eta able to create coherent statements. Older records indicate Patient Eta had also been able to sleep until closer to the end. Hypothesis. Patient Eta was one of the earliest. Hypothesis. ‘Hollowing’ as a deliberate act. Hypothesis. Records of Patient Eta’s statements will prove valuable to the initial insight of the culprit. 

Kaveh didn’t make dinner tonight. 

Said he forgot and went to get takeout from the tavern. Had not asked for Kaveh to either make dinner or amend these niceties, but accepted. Saffron chicken. Kaveh ate three bites and refused the rest. Declined to discuss his client, even though he usually rants about their obstinance. Looked confused when inquired about attending Tighnari’s dinner. Said he hadn’t been invited. Did not seem certain. Said good night and closed the door to his room. 

Trip to Aaru Village. 

Patient Eta. Former scientist, Amurta. In Aaru Village, would take walks to the oasis. Brief interactions, pulled from other records. Notable quotes. ‘I don’t remember. I used to remember, but now I’m not.’ ‘Of course I’m tired. Everybody’s tired. But can’t you see, he’s taken that away?’ ‘I don’t remember. I don’t remember. He said the world has a million possibilities. He meant for him. Not me. But, [redacted], you know what? I think there is a person out there who can do it. They can shape the world with their own hands. It gives me great happiness to know it can’t be him.’ ‘Everybody wants money at first. But he’ll find out soon. What he wants is more than that. He wants what’s taken from him.’

No autopsies had been conducted on Patients Eta, Theta, or Iota. Unnecessary to exhume. 

Dreams: reconstructions of memories. Memories: reconstructions. Difference?

Went home. Found Kaveh waiting behind house. Asked him if he had lost his key. Kaveh looked confused and said he had his key. Took it out of his pocket. Asked him why he did not let himself in the house. Excuses, no real answer. Visible weight loss. Slower movements. Significant loss of appetite. Disoriented. Fell asleep at work desk, had not closed the door. Blueprints show an ordinary building. Office addition. Too ordinary? Hypothesis. Patron pays extra for an ego project, wants Kaveh’s reputation attached. Money?

Tighnari welcoming. Cyno in attendance. Kaveh did not attend. Tighnari disappointed. Said had invited Kaveh and wanted to see him out of concern, but had not received a reply. Asked about Kaveh’s health. Answer seemed to worry him further. Did not know about Kaveh’s current client. 

After Cyno’s final win at party’s TCG tournament, pulled him aside. After initial distrust, Cyno agreed to share most public information of the Matra investigations. Though phrased carefully, likely was personally asked to oversee the investigation. Different leads. Current hypothesis: culprit is wealthy with underground connections. Likely Akademiya-adjacent, but not alumni. Main stopping point. The ‘Hollowing’ takes place in a facility that must use noticeable amount of energy. If not located in Sumeru City, then desert. Too much ground to cover for reasonable search. May share information about Patients Theta and Iota if Cyno asks. 

collapsed 

Doctor 

Unlikely, but 

Nahida? 

Visiting hours: 9 to 8. 

Annoying.

Patient Epsilon’s autopsy indicated cause of death. Stress. Now officially attributed to sleep deprivation. 

Where is he? 

If he shook his head, then the whole world would tremble. Instead, he planted the tips of his fingers against his forehead and tried to hold himself together. It felt like two visions overlapped. He somehow did remember some statements. Certainly, he had been working hard on his newest proposal and had been feeling a bit under the weather. 

But something about a part of Alhaitham’s entries seemed false. It wasn’t the illogical timeline, where Kaveh should have remembered this so much earlier, but the hypothesis about the client. He hadn’t been forced to overwork himself, he felt assured about that. Nor was it only about the money, which Alhaitham seemed all too content to receive at whatever date. 

There had been something important about the job. He knew that it was an ordinary building. In fact, he had been instructed to draft a building with the most bland of exteriors, which he hadn’t found insulting. As much as he’d liked to have flourished and show off gorgeous swooping lines and garden windows that let in the light and a trail of flowers that spun towards the open mezzanine, he could appreciate clean and efficient lines as well. It was just something else, not the building, that was important. 

He’d forgotten it.

It seemed like he’d forgotten more than he thought. 

He almost wanted Alhaitham to burst into the room with an angry glare, temper already warmed from his heated walk to his office, knowing an intruder had come to rustle through his personal belongings. Instead, the building was almost empty when Kaveh finally slipped out. He made it three steps before the headache pierced through his head, a drill to his skull. He threw up in the corner, a dry heave at the end, fingers gripped against the wall. 

When he looked up, the other scholars continued with their roles. One picked up a book, set it down, and picked the same book up again. Two sat and chatted together on the table, laughing in the same cadence every ten seconds. Even the same old colleague still stood by the door, smiling blandly.

He shivered and gripped himself hard enough on his arms that he would leave bruises.

He sat on the bench near the docks and ate the lukewarm salad. When he checked his pockets, he was pleased to find his house key and less pleased to find the extra golden key. Perhaps something he had accidentally taken from Alhaitham, an inadvertent revenge for all the times Alhaitham had supposedly accidentally taken his key. 

It glittered sickly. 

A bird hovered over the water, distant over the thriving thrush of the verdant forest. Its white wings remained still, a swell over the receding tides, fighting not the current or the breeze that should have brought the scent of new summer. Kaveh sat with his hands limp over his knees and let the sun weigh down upon him, watching this unmoving bird. The familiar people of the streets, the passing adventurers with their bright green and the port workers passing hand over hand of salt-twisted rope, all seemed less real. Backdrop. Stage actors. 

He didn’t remember finding the strength to finally leave his bench, just feeling the visible weight of the door handle when he returned to the house.

When he passed the foyer to the living quarters, Nahida and Alhaitham were reading on the sofas. A charming sight, light spindling into the room, the last of the flatbread for breakfast still being eaten beside heavy bound tomes. Kaveh sat beside Alhaitham, fabric creased under his weight. 

“Did you find what you wanted?” Alhaitham turned the page. 

“I didn’t mean to pry.” 

“I doubt you resisted the urge for very long.” 

“What, like you’re the center of the universe? So what, I looked at your things. You have a poor sense of taste and you need somebody to correct that.” He shoved his head onto Alhaitham’s shoulder. It was uncomfortable, of course. Too muscular and bony and like sleeping on a rock. Even when the strands of his hair fell in front of his eyes, he didn’t move. 

“You’re heavy.” 

“You’re so unromantic. I’m glad Nahida doesn’t take after you.” He shuttered close his eyes, even though he could feel the sun still brimming on the back of his eyelids. His head hurt. It ached like a distant storm. “She’s our - child? Are we married? My - ward?” 

“Does it hurt?” 

“What?” Kaveh shoved a hand over his eyes, trying to block the sun’s rays. “Yes. Of course. Don’t relish in my pain.” 

“I don’t.” 

“Are you real?” His head felt like the Chasm’s Maw. The great beams of wooden structures, the ore that had been mined, the foundation of the great buildings, the visualization of the plans manifesting in his mind, the great sprawling city, the mausoleum, the desert sand eroding over ruins, building pillar fist over fist. With a sense of guttural panic, he thought if he couldn’t keep thinking, then this would all disappear. 

“Breathe.” A small hand on his knee. “In. Out.” Nahida, as always, helpful, but his breath caught on the ins and flew too low on the outs. 

A heavy musk filled the room, an unpleasant rotting like the sick sweetness of fruit that had descended to the flies, decapitated heads of tulips with their skirt of white petals flayed out into a dry brown burn. The Withering, and when he opened his eyes, he was back at his old burnt house. His former home, where he had stayed outside and heard his mother cry. Most still remained intact in this room, but the scorch marks of burns had collapsed the exterior rooms and left only withered lumps of furniture. 

“Am I real?” 

“You’re as real as you ever could be.” Alhaitham snapped his book shut. The sudden relocation did not perturb him, nor did this seem to startle Nahida. Her gaze remained a steady presence. He had seemed to move a little closer to Kaveh, but as Kaveh leveled out his breathing, he moved away again. His lean spoke of something more pensive. 

“My head hurts.” He shoved his hands against his head, holding the seams together, and stared at the carpet that had been stained blue by the sudden nighttime. 

“Where are you?” Alhaitham’s tone had less kindness. 

“At my old house.” 

“No. You’re not.” 

“Then what’s this? Why am I seeing this? What’s going on?” Kaveh’s inhale brought upon more lightning in his head, even as he frantically tried to hold together his reality. 

“You already know.” Alhaitham turned away, a move familiar, until he stood by the broken window where the moon hung low across the hills. “This is a dream.” 

“My dream?” Kaveh shoved the palms of his hands against his eyes. “No. Of course. That’s a stupid question, of course it’s my dream. It just feels so real.” 

He had talked to different people who all seemed to be so vivid, the strangers at the tavern, new potential clients, the shopkeepers with their wares, but he could see them as simulations of the fragmented conversations that he had with them before. Dream logic had a way of smoothing out the obvious flaws of reasoning. So many things, he should have known, but now that he knew, he only had a cold feeling in his gut that he shouldn’t have known. This whole city, the whole world, were toys to him. He had never stopped playing with his little wooden blocks. 

“Dreams are complicated. Most in Sumeru are still unfamiliar with their newfound powers.” Nahida tilted her head. “Perhaps Alhaitham can explain this better.” 

“I doubt I could relay this better than an Archon.” 

Kaveh finally looked up. Alhaitham seemed like a distant figure, draped in the moonlight. “Are you real?” 

“Yes. Both Nahida and I are real.” 

Kaveh had a shivering thought that he wouldn’t be able to tell, but the fear washed away like the slow flow of a tide. Even a dream fragment of Alhaitham wouldn’t lie to him. Maybe it was pride, but more likely a reluctant admittance that even in his most vivid of dreams, he wouldn’t be able to mimic Alhaitham. 

“I assume you’ve visited my memory of my notes. Do you remember much about those incidents?” 

“I remember that Hollowed man. After I was going back to your house from the tavern, where I bumped into you. I knew I’d seen him somewhere, I didn’t realize he was my peer. I’ve seen his designs.” 

“What did you think of them?” 

“They were fine,” Kaveh said, blinking. Knowing what he did now, he had no great urge to talk badly about a deceased victim. 

“Really?” Alhaitham arched an eyebrow, the know-it-all eyebrow. 

“What do you want me to say? That they lacked imagination? They were fine pieces and he had made quite a portfolio with them. As a fellow architect, I can only commend that.” 

“Interesting.” Alhaitham did not elaborate, seeming pensive instead. “What do you remember after that incident?” 

“Nothing significant. I remember arguing with you, but that’s not uncommon.” He frowned, trying to pull the memories like fish from the water. “I met with Payam, my newest client. The unpleasant man.” Most of those memories had been riddled with holes, just faint impressions of trophy rooms and glass displays. 

It didn’t seem relevant, so he didn’t say as much to Alhaitham, but his own voice came back to him. This felt like the end of a conversation that he had with Payam, one after the contracts had been signed. 

‘What you are asking for is priceless. I must do that part for free.’ 

He didn’t remember why he said that. 

“Payam was on the short list of suspects for the Hollowing case. It’s suspected that he had hired one of the earlier patients to build a machine. The researcher called it the Lotus Machine. It lets you into another person’s dreams, so to speak.” 

“Is that how you two are here?” Kaveh swiveled to look at Nahida, too, but she shook her head. 

“No. This is my speciality,” she said kindly. “Alhaitham and I entered your dream with my powers. I wouldn’t recommend using the Lotus Machine. It’s like using a machete instead of sewing scissors. Perhaps one day it could be refined, but it’s not very good in that state.” 

“Cyno’s current hunch is that Payam used the machine to gain an advantage in his business, but he later turned his attention to his daughter.”

“Sara?” For some reason, that surprised him. 

“She’s currently in a very long and special sleep,” Nahida said softly. 

“A coma.” Alhaitham frowned. “There are enough differences between that and a regular sleep that makes things tricky.” 

“I wouldn’t have taken a homicidal-loving brutal businessman like Payam as the sentimental type.” Kaveh tried to gather the scraps of his memories, but his screaming head forced him to drop them back down again. 

“I suspect that he has an ulterior motive for wanting access to his daughter’s memories. Dreams aren’t exact memories, but they’re a safer way of coaxing out information than accessing direct memories. Either way, the Lotus Machine proved to be too rudimentary a device to handle delicate operations. He needed someone with a deft enough hand that would allow him to maintain the operation.” 

“Me?” Kaveh jolted in his seat. “Why me?” 

“You’ve had many nicknames over the years,” Nahida said. “The Urchin. The Light of Kshahrewar. The Architect of Dreams.” 

“Payam couldn’t have taken that seriously,” Kaveh said, laughing. He had to stop, uneasily, when he found to be the only one. 

“You said it yourself.” Alhaitham had a dry, crisp voice. “The other architect lacked imagination. You don’t.” The shadows stretched over the familiar little desk, the one with the trick drawer, from his childhood. 

“You’re telling me that I’m not only dreaming, but I’m dreaming for someone else right now?” He swallowed, throat dry. “This is Sara’s dream? I haven’t even met her.”

“You are the host, yes. It would actually be quite bad if you did meet her directly, like when lightning strikes water. You are simply creating an environment for her.” Nahida took a seat beside him, a comforting force with the faint scent of fresh grass. “Perhaps it will be more elucidating if Alhaitham explains what happened to you.” 

“We don’t know what happened to him,” Alhaitham said. Nahida looked at him, long enough that the silence seemed to drift upon them, and then nodded quietly. 

“That is true,” she said, kindly. “Then, if I may guess? You must have been employed by Payam under another guise while he deceptively used the Lotus Machine on you. I believe Alhaitham found you collapsed in the foyer. It is - a brutal machine. I imagine it takes a toll on the dreamer.” She inclined her head, but when Alhaitham didn’t move, continued. “You were taken to Bimarstan. Then you disappeared.” 

“Sorry, what?” Kaveh laughed again, and again found himself to be the only echo in the room. “You must be joking. People don’t just disappear from hospitals.”

“Bimarstan is a far cry from a penitentiary. The doctors operate their facility as partially a training hospital.” Alhaitham had a slight flicker of a frown. “Patients have escaped in the past.”

“Why would I escape?”

“There is a possibility that you were kidnapped,” Nahida said. “But we are uncertain about what happened after that. Alhaitham contacted me a little bit later, which is how we found you on the dream plane. But I’m sorry, Kaveh.” She looked sadder now. “We can’t find you in the physical world.” 

“All right.” He rose from his seat, starting to pace over his childhood carpet. He tried to run his hand through his hair, stopped halfway with his braid and leaving him wildly trying to extract his fingers from the strands. “Well, there must be a way. I don’t want to stay kidnapped. What if I woke up? If I wake up, with great aplomb, then I can see where I am. And before you say anything, Alhaitham, I know it’s illogical-”

“Why would I say that?” Alhaitham looked stolid, but an inner force existed to hold his mouth into a thin line. “That had been the plan.”

“Great. Right?” Kaveh held out his hands expectantly. 

“All we can tell is that you’re in the desert,” Nahida said softly. “Which is vast. But we are searching. My friend is looking, even as we speak, and he covers ground very quickly.” 

“Right,” Kaveh echoed himself, hands sinking slightly. “Well, what about my kidnapper? You said you think Payam took me, didn’t you?” 

“He is no longer in either worlds,” Nahida said, eyes drawn down. “He had been on a business trip, traveling out of Sumeru, when he - was no longer. Cyno is also investigating that, too, but we have found that he was a man of many enemies.” 

“Oh.” Kaveh hesitated. Finally, gently, he rested his hand on Nahida’s head in a half-pat. When her eyes flickered upward, he pulled his hand back like he’d been burned. “Sorry. I’m sorry, I don’t know what overcame me. You’re an Archon, of course.” His heart sank with a sudden weight, a coldness and a heat settling into his face. “Right, you’re an Archon. Why didn’t I remember that? I’ve been treating you like a child. I’m an idiot, I’m a certifiable idiot, of course you’re not - please, forgive me.” 

Nahida pulled herself from the vague sadness, finally smiling with a tinge of nostalgia. “No, I don’t mind. I am, after all, still learning about people. It was very enlightening.”

“I coddled you.” Kaveh buried his face into his hands, knowing that the red simmer on his ears now blared his mortification to the world. “Why did I do that. I truly, deeply apologize.”

“There is no need. This time, I integrated our presence more deeply into your dreamscape. Your unconscious mind simply reconstructed our presence into a heuristics match.” 

“I know it sounds very stupid when we’re standing in basically my mind, but I really assure you, I’m not, I wouldn’t do this normally.” Kaveh muffled this into his hands, desperate. He had thought the Dendro Archon needed help crossing the road. This, somehow, wasn’t the lowest point of his day, but this realization came close to upsetting that delicate balance that always careened downward. 

“Will you take this seriously.” 

The jab from Alhaitham cut through the frosty air. Kaveh lowered his hands enough to peer at where Alhaitham still leaned against the cracked window, the green light of his wiring a faint pulse against his neck. 

“I am taking this seriously,” Kaveh said crabbily. “If you’re waiting for your thrice apology, then wait your turn.” 

“Is this a coping mechanism?” Alhaitham scoffed. “This abnormal focus on the minutiae.” 

“These things matter! If you’re going to be that way, then I’ll just say it outright, that I’m sorry, about, everything, too.” Kaveh thought swallowing his pride would taste more bitter, but the apology came more smoothly than he thought. Not that it mattered. Alhaitham’s dark glare shattered the brief relief. 

“You fail to comprehend the gravity of your situation,” Alhaitham said, slowed as if talking to a struggling official. “You are being held in an unknown location. Your captor is no longer there to take care of you, which means you are running out of whatever he’d been injecting into you to keep you alive. We have no leads and are running out of time. However, upon learning all of this, you choose to obsess over the details of how you are somehow responsible for things beyond your control.” 

“It is precisely because of those reasons that it is vital that I apologize. You wouldn’t understand,” Kaveh said, heated, “because you refuse to get along with anybody that you don’t care about, but people care about the small things because all the small things make their big things.” 

“I see that your cognitive decline has already begun.” 

“There you go, always being so sarcastic and Alhaitham-y.” 

“I know you believe you’re making sense, but as a third-party witness, I will assure you that you are creating adjectives with an absence of anything signified. If you are done with your tantrum, I hope you pull focus and finally take things seriously.” 

“Oh, is that what the great Alhaitham says? If that’s what the great Alhaitham says, then we have to do what the great Alhaitham says - ” Kaveh stopped himself, catching sight of Nahida. He knew she wasn’t actually a child, but his gut still clenched. It only took two steps to cross the threshold and catch Alhaitham by the warm wrist. “Never mind. Let’s take this outside.” 

“I’m fine,” Nahida said. “I understand arguments stem from heated emotions.” 

“I know, I just want some privacy. Come on, don’t be stubborn,” he told Alhaitham, dragging him through the hallway of his abandoned house. He had somehow captured both the best and worst of the looks, the charred framework expressing the sprawling expanse of the house even as he marched through the withered ashes. ‘Outside’ took them to where the burning melded with the natural environment. Heavy clouds rolled above them, obscuring the halo of the full moon. 

“I am sorry,” Kaveh said haltingly. His words seemed even less firm in the thin mountainous air, as frail as the lantern lights that flung itself on the scattered leaves of the trees. “You must have been disquieted by my actions. I know I wasn’t really in control, but I am responsible. I don’t know why I imagined us as lovers when we’re not. I know we’re the opposite. What was it? Sorry, sorry, sorry? I’ll treat you to something if you find it to forgive me. Your favorite and cheapest wine.” 

He knew he was somewhat lying. He knew why he imagined that he had a deeper relationship with Alhaitham, a manifestation of his fruitless pining. Even as Alhaitham faced away from him, he could only find his heart melting faster and wilder. In the midst of his earnest apology, he still wanted to wind his fingers through that gray hair and feel that softness beneath his touch. His guilt should have been visible, a throbbing mass of withered pulp, so he could at least show Alhaitham that at least some part of himself was sincere. 

“Three weeks,” Alhaitham said. 

“What?” 

“You’ve been missing for three weeks.” Alhaitham glanced over his shoulder, disinterest obvious in his stilled features. “The calculations have been run. Assuming your body is being periodically induced with a slushy mixture of nutrients and paralytics and kept in a cold preservative temperature, that leaves us with only days to find you before inevitable asphyxiation. Your presence is the only proof that you haven’t already succumbed to convulsions and respiratory arrest.”

“Oh.” Kaveh rubbed at his upper arms, trying to warm himself. Even though he knew this was a dream, he couldn’t stop the world from feeling real, tracing where he had bruised himself. 

“‘Oh.’” Alhaitham scoffed, a deep sound that resonated from his chest. “You’re dying and you still waste your breath on petty apologies.” 

“It’s not petty. It’s important to me. Is that really so strange?” Kaveh snapped. 

“I don’t care about your apologies. I wouldn’t do something if I truly abhorrently disagreed with it, but you already knew that. You distract yourself with pleasantries.” 

“I am taking this seriously. I don’t want to perish under the hands of some evil mogul, either,” Kaveh argued, gripping himself on his upper arm and wincing. 

“Are you certain?” Alhaitham glanced back. Maybe the moonlight played tricks on appearances, but Kaveh recognized that look. He’d seen that same furrow of Alhaitham’s brow, the tilted line of his mouth, the straight tension of his neck when he was listening to the worst drivel at those meetings. Disgust. Kaveh fought back a wave of revulsion. 

“Oh, who are you to stand there and act like you’re so much better than me. I’m the victim here! I didn’t ask to get kidnapped! What am I supposed to do, wake up and somehow stage a breakout from my little torture chamber? According to you, I’m little more than a desiccated corpse, but somehow. Somehow! I’m supposed to do more!” 

“You could tell us where you are.” Alhaitham finally turned around, facing him for what felt like the first time that night. He clenched his jaw once, arms folded in front of him like a stolid oak. “Everything we’ve gotten from you was through deception. You haven’t cooperated with us at all.” 

“I don’t know where I am! It’s a cold room that has sand, that really narrows it down. You always do this,” Kaveh added, a familiar angry heat surging through him that made his hands shake as he jabbed at Alhaitham’s chest. “You look down on people. They’re just trying their best. Just because you’re successful and great and handsome, that doesn’t mean everybody else can be that way, and you don’t get that. Sometimes people need some droplet of sympathy, not that you’d get it at all.” 

“Is this another one of your pseudo-altruistic statements?” Alhaitham caught Kaveh’s hand, gripping the fingers tight in an awkward bunching. “Is that why you take it upon yourself to give them more than just your sympathy? You meddle in the dealings of others, but you won’t be happy unless you’re sacrificing yourself to help. You are the cause of your own misery.” 

“Oh, you don’t think I know that!” Kaveh tried to yank his hand out, flushing when he failed. The old words needled into his skin like an old thorn. “Stop acting like I’m doing this on purpose. It wouldn’t hurt if you actually acted nice every once in a while.” 

“Acting nice won’t save you.” Alhaitham’s dark gaze burned into him. 

With a motion quicker than the eye, Alhaitham shoved him against the building. Kaveh winced, the thud of his shoulder blades knocking off a crumbling layer of ash. Alhaitham brought his hand to rest against Kaveh’s throat, wrist almost resting against the golden clasp that bit into his clavicle, fingers curled to press a light weight on his pulse. While Kaveh could still breathe in outraged gasps, the pressure felt like a collar against his bare throat. 

“Right,” Kaveh said, feeling the lump in his throat moving against Alhaitham’s hand when he talked. “And this will?” 

“Were you kidnapped?” 

“What?” Startled, he finally flickered his attention back to Alhaitham’s stern eyes. “That’s what you told me. How am I supposed to know?” 

“That’s the null hypothesis.” Alhaitham bent his head until Kaveh could smell him, that ambrosial heavy scent, redolent of heavy fronds after a storm. “You were kidnapped. It couldn’t be helped. You were brought to a secondary location and all traces were lost.” 

“Right,” Kaveh repeated. He swallowed again, against the dry fabric of the sleeved palm. 

“What if that didn’t happen?” Alhaitham waited, but when Kaveh only scrabbled against the building wall, he scoffed. “Here’s a hypothesis. A client contracts you with a sob story. His daughter is in a coma. He wants to see her, using this fantastic device, and visit her dreams. He’s tried with others, but his daughter catches on too fast. But he’s certain your architectural design could trick any dreamer. This is the part where you should ask why it matters whether she knows it’s a dream. What information he wants to steal from his daughter.” Alhaitham’s grip tightened, a heavy enough weight that Kaveh flinched. “But you don’t ask. You offer yourself on a platter, eager for any bleeding heart cause. Things are going well, but you’re collapsing. So this same client walks into your hospital room and makes you an offer. One last try, he comes up with a nonsense theory that the dream just isn’t long enough, he’ll put you under and then it’ll work. Maybe you’re thinking that you’ll witness a tearful reunion between family. Maybe you’re thinking that your client has bad intentions, but you’ll find a way to stop him. It doesn’t matter.” 

“Alhaitham-”

“Because,” Alhaitham said softly, more threat than whisper, a visible heft against his ear. “You walked out of that room. You know where you are.” 

Kaveh shoved his hand against Alhaitham’s chest, trying to push him away. With a tight, wired anger, he recognized how Alhaitham had shoved two fingers against the groove of his neck. 

Alhaitham wasn’t choking him. He was a human lie detector. 

“How dare you,” he growled. When Alhaitham didn’t move, he changed tactics and grabbed onto Alhaitham’s wrist with both hands, trying to yank him. Even when he planted his feet against the ground, Alhaitham didn’t struggle. 

“Why don’t you answer?” Alhaitham asked. 

“I’m not a liar.” Kaveh bit the end of his words, waves of fury crashing over him. Treated like a liar when his head already had been cracked open. Alhaitham had nerve, a horrible audacity to always shove him while he was down. His fingers scrambled over the lean muscles of Alhaitham’s arm, but he had no give. It was a fight in the way he’d seen small beasts scrabbling for purchase on a tree trunk, the tree never losing the battle. Finally, exhausted, he had to stop. His hold on Alhaitham loosened until his fingers barely clutched onto the dark sleeve. The anger didn’t abate, but the heat mingled with a colder resignation. 

It was still night. The landscape around them carried a stillness, a painting of a landscape, as the moon remained unmoored. 

“Am I hurting you?” Alhaitham always had the same cadence, serious and logical. 

“No,” Kaveh said. Then, reluctantly, out of curiosity. “Why?” 

Alhaitham gave no indication that he heard the last question. He studied Kaveh’s throat for a moment too long. When he dropped his hand, his knuckles had a lingering brush against the bare skin of Kaveh’s chest where his shirt opened. Kaveh tried not to react, but he shook. With anger, he told himself. 

“I’m not that self-sabotaging,” Kaveh said, quiet and bitter. “No matter what you say.” He had to endure upset after upset, but somehow Alhaitham grabbed his attention the most. An impulse shot through him to yell about how his memories lived in a hazy smoke and he didn’t have to stand here and be accused of being a perfect idiot when he had done nothing wrong. He wrapped a hand around his own throat, though he was uncertain whether he wanted to massage away the pressure or hold the warmth tight against himself. 

“I have work to do,” Alhaitham said, clipped. He turned to leave and Kaveh had to lunge for his wrist, grabbing him by the golden thread. 

“What, you’re going to leave? I’m not done with you!” 

“Then say what you need to say.”

“If I knew where I was, why wouldn’t I tell you? Even if I abhorred the idea of you saving me so much, Nahida is here. I could just tell her. You’re not making any sense,” Kaveh said, heated like he was boiling under the heavy fleeced clouds. 

“If that’s what you believe.” Alhaitham hadn’t quite turned around. He had a distilled look on his face, a tranquil placidity that didn’t betray what Kaveh knew must be his temper. Alhaitham was angry, which only made Kaveh irrationally more angry. 

He didn’t know why Alhaitham accused him of lying. He also didn’t know why he felt uneasy about it. 

“You’re being stubborn,” Kaveh said, voice too loud even for his own ears. “More than usual. Why does it turn into this? How are you so infuriating? I just came here to apologize.” And he hated that his voice now became almost softer, more vulnerable, near begging, dripping in vitriol and patheticness. “To say I’m sorry. I’m sorry that I cast you, in my mind, as someone who cared about me. That I made you play a role. I get it. But I won’t let you go until you tell me that we’ll be fine.”

“It depends on your definition of ‘fine.’” Alhaitham tilted his chin. In a certain light, he would have looked hurt, but Kaveh knew better. 

The clouds had finally split. It was just a flicker of rain, a scattering of light that caught in the lantern lights. Instead of the usual silver puddles, they landed on the ash and darkened. ‘Fine’ meant the same as normal. Where he would go back to the house and cook dinner and clean a room a day and Alhaitham would return and make awful comments and they would sit together in silence and Alhaitham would read with his bright eyes. He didn’t know whether he meant ‘fine’ to preserve that slice of normalcy or ‘fine’ to shut down the delicate temptation to even now brush his fingers through Alhaitham’s damp hair and push the strands out of his face because he didn’t have that. He never did. 

“That you won’t hate me,” Kaveh said finally. “Promise me that.” 

“Promises like that are acts of emotional manipulation.”

Kaveh tried not to let the surge of anger overwhelm him, even as his heart thundered against his ears and flushed his face a violent red. No matter how many peace offerings he placed on the table, this was Alhaitham. Rejecting all of them, relishing in his vulnerability, probably laughing to himself that Kaveh was stupid and naive and foolish. Probably disgusted that Kaveh even had the notion of being affectionate towards him. 

“Never mind. Hate me if you want. I don’t care. Just go.” He released his hold on Alhaitham. The vague tug of his heart told him only physically. 

“I’ll be back tomorrow,” Alhaitham said. “Are you done now?” 

“No,” Kaveh said defensively, though he was done. “Why would you be back? Just leave. Don’t come back. Can’t I just mentally push you out?” 

“I’ll return to finish what you can’t.” Alhaitham looked at him. The rain had begun to slick his hair against his forehead, enough that a few strands swept downward and giving him an overcast look. “You had your chance.” 

“Stop being so cryptic and acting like I’m a liar! You haven’t told me anything significant at all and now you’re acting like I wronged you!” 

“What haven’t I told you?” 

“Anything! Everything! This - the person, the daughter, I don’t even know her. You haven’t told me anything about her,” Kaveh said, grasping desperately. The thought had occurred to him like a thin trickle of a river, silver and darting through his mind, about the reason why he had become a prisoner of his own mind. What he didn’t expect was Alhaitham’s stony stare, looking like Kaveh had hit him in the face. Alhaitham’s mouth twisted in a brief burst of unhappiness, smoothing back into a mask of indifference in the time it took Kaveh to take a watery breath. 

“Why?” Alhaitham said. 

“Because I. I just want to know.” Kaveh felt like he had missed a step on the staircase and was spiraling out of control. He had wanted to hurt Alhaitham in his various other insults, but he hadn’t anticipated that brief look of hurt at an innocent question. 

“Why don’t you ask about your friends instead?” Alhaitham had a casual tilt of his head, a barely imperceptible twist of a tense neck. “This daughter. You care more about her than your friends who had to deal with your absence?” 

“Of course not,” Kaveh said defensively. But if the question about the daughter had come to him like a river, then he had to admit, coldly to himself, that the thought of his friends was like the background. He had assumed they would just go along with their lives without him. 

“Cyno has been working tirelessly to track you down,” Alhaitham said. The rain began to strike down in earnest, pebbles of water hitting the leaves and trickling to the ground. Rivulets darted down his neck, dampening the darkness of his clothes. “Nilou has been asking. Your students pester their parents. And Tighnari.” Alhaitham’s mouth twisted, again a heartbeat of rage, before it smoothed again. “Tighnari has been in his study, day and night, trying to gather more information about you. He’s neglected his work. He’s personally gone on expeditions with Cyno to try and find any trace of you. He even contacted your mother in Fontaine for any information. He’s been worried, beyond comprehension and knowledge, of anything that he’s ever seen before. There hasn’t been a day that passes that he hasn’t thought about wanting you to return, beyond all reasonable hope and any logical fact. I would not doubt that he would have given his entire heart in exchange for your safety. But I can see that his worry was misplaced. I’ll be sure to inform him that he’s not even a concern in your mind.”

“That’s not fair,” Kaveh protested weakly. “I can’t control my dreams.” 

“You can control what you’re saying.” Alhaitham flickered his gaze off into the distance. Against all reason, the dampness on his face looked like traces of old tears. “I don’t hate you. The reconstruction of dreams can make little sense. No matter what happened, I wouldn’t have given your actions any emotional weight. But I must admit, you are a better architect than I had given you credit.” His gaze flickered back to Kaveh, a cold slice. “You have an astounding capacity for building walls.”  

One moment he was there, the next he was gone. He disappeared between the slashes of the rain. 

“I’m not done,” Kaveh told the empty air. Then, louder, “Come back here, you coward! I’m not done with you! You don’t get the last word!” He stepped forward into the soggy ground, almost tripping over himself in the wet darkness. “I know you can hear me! You’re a jerk! You’re a jerk and it’s unimaginable that anybody even gets along with you! Do you hear me!” 

He knew Alhaitham couldn’t. It was why he yelled into the sky and let out an aggravated yell into the thicket of trees. He didn’t want to stop being angry for even a second, heat emanating even with the rain cold against his shirt. If he stopped being angry, then he would start feeling the way he always felt. All he could do was shove his forearm against his eyes and try to breathe amidst the heavy downpour. 

————————————

To his surprise, Nahida still sat on the half-withered sofa when he finally returned to the living space. She had created an intricate umbrella from immaterial vines, little flowers dancing on its rib cage. 

“Alhaitham left,” he said. 

“I know.” Nahida extended her umbrella over the full sofa. “Please, sit. You should rest.” 

“How am I supposed to rest? I’m already sleeping.” But he did sit, the rain immediately cutting off from pouring on him to pounding of the stretched vines of the umbrella. 

“Correct. But this is a misuse of a dream. I consider myself somewhat experienced,” she added shyly, as if being an Archon didn’t warrant her expertise. “Dreams are meant to be an active respite, not a method for espionage. For you to host a detailed world on your own must be causing great stress.” 

“I haven’t felt it. I’m used to all-nighters.” Kaveh touched his hair that had gotten mussed in the rain. He must have looked like a mess in front of Alhaitham. 

“What did Alhaitham say?” 

“Nothing much.” Kaveh clamped his mouth shut after that curt utterance. Alhaitham was an absolute buffoon to think Kaveh wouldn’t want to be unkidnapped. But he had to admit that if someone came to him, asking to be reconnected with their comatose child, he couldn’t imagine himself refusing. “I know you said I couldn’t meet her, but what is she like? The daughter, Sara? Has she been - happy here?” 

Nahida considered this solemnly, as if handling a piece of delicate parchment. “While I cannot call myself an expert with emotions, I do believe she has been. You have given her a beautiful dream of an ordinary life.” 

“That’s good.” Kaveh unclamped his braid, running his hand through his damp hair. “It’s not strange for me to inquire about her, right?” 

“I believe it is very kind.” 

“I’m also worried about my friends, too,” he told the carpet, where he had spent long evenings with his mother’s blueprints spread out like a storybook around him. 

“They are worried about you as well.” 

“Just because I don’t ask about them first doesn’t mean I don’t care.”

“Is that why you argued with Alhaitham?” Nahida tilted her head.

“One of the many reasons.” Kaveh shoved his hair from his face. “He’s got such a temper. I don’t understand why he’s been so angry, it’s not my fault.”

“He has been worried,” Nahida said kindly. “Though it is not your fault, perhaps it is some of mine.”

“No,” Kaveh said immediately. “It’s nothing to do with you. We argue, that’s the way it is.”

“Though I have professed myself an expert, I had some errors in how I accessed the Lotus Machine’s dreamscape. The first time we came into your dream, we could not talk to you.” 

“I don’t remember this.” 

“Dreams are a beautiful ephemeral bubble,” Nahida said. “Once they pop, then they pop. Just as you have a hard time recollecting events after your collapse, you would equally have no memory of what transpired in your dreams before your present moment. Dreams are, of course, different from aspirations, but they may certainly have a strong influence.” 

“I trust the expert.” Kaveh smiled at her. She returned the smile, then looked a little sadder after a moment. 

“You had already drowned,” she said. 

“What?” Even as she said it, though, he could feel his lungs feel a little too full. He slid his hand over his heart, trying to keep the rhythm.

“Quicksand. You were unresponsive. Alhaitham suggested leaving immediately so I could try again, more integrated into your dream so you would recognize us as people. A wise assessment.” Nahida dropped her gaze. “It was a mistake, perhaps, for me to disagree. I wanted to provide you with a little comfort, enough that you would welcome us into your dream on my second try.” 

“Why was that a mistake? It was kind of you,” Kaveh said, “even if I don’t remember it.” 

“Alhaitham agreed with the practicality and stayed to watch. I was worried about you, but I should have also worried about him, too.” 

“Why? He’s fine,” Kaveh said, puzzled. “He must have predicted the possibility of a failure. There are lots of dreams where people fall or drown or things like that.” 

“I do not believe he predicted that for you. It startled him. I should have insisted that he leave first.”

“That doesn’t sound like Alhaitham.” Not the Alhaitham he knew with the trademark deadpan look and clinical logic. 

“He surprises me still. With his ingenuity, wisdom, and much else. Even now, I did not anticipate that he would be so reluctant to leave your dream. He even made his trip to Fontaine in record time to return to you.” 

“He went with Tighnari?” Kaveh had only heard from his mother in brief letters, so he couldn’t imagine they would find much else in that land other than beautiful sea and architecture designed in an attempt to endure the constant waterfalls. 

“Tighnari? No, Tighnari has stayed in Sumeru. He has been a great help in studying the lotuses that may have been used in the Lotus Machine.” 

“He didn’t need to do that,” Kaveh said, vaguely distracted by whether he should argue with Nahida that she was mistaken. 

“Why would you say that?” 

“It’s a lot of trouble and I’m sure he’s busy.” Tighnari was a good friend. He likely had his own business with the rangers and the forest. The last time they had talked, he remembered Tighnari sighing about poachers. That seemed like something worth his efforts, not busying himself in encyclopedias about plants. 

Nahida tilted her head in a way reminiscent of how she had thought deeply about her ice cream flavor. “May I ask you a personal question?” 

“You’re inside my mind, what else would I hide from you?”

“We are inside an unconscious part of your mind that is deconstructing, constructing, and reconstructing. These aren't your raw memories,” she said. “You are the conscious part of your mind, capable of all higher function brain abilities. If it is to your liking, you may handle complicated tasks and even lie. You speak both more truth and falsehood than anything this environment could tell us.” 

“I wouldn’t lie to you,” he assured her, even as she smiled and shook her head.

“You are free to do as you wish,” she said. “I am simply curious. If I truly was a child in the most human sense, and I accidentally set forward a motion of events that has created this current argument between you and Alhaitham, would you forgive me?” 

“I don’t want you to think you did anything wrong,” Kaveh said. “There’s nothing to forgive. I promise.” 

“If I was a human child,” Nahida persisted, “and I accidentally caused something to go very wrong, due to my wishes. Would you forgive me?”

“Like I said, there’s nothing to forgive.” Kaveh smiled at her in what he hoped was a gentle manner. “Children should have wishes and dreams. That’s all.” 

“In the first time that we entered your dream, when I was trying to revive a part of your mind to show that we were friendly. After you drowned. You said that you deserved this. Do you still believe that?” 

“I don’t remember that,” Kaveh said, after a moment that he felt was too long. “So it doesn’t matter.” Even though they had been walking around in his head for weeks, this felt like he’d somehow tripped and fell into a bottomless lake. He kept the tremble from his voice and stared at his hands, somehow dry even so close to the torrent crashing on the umbrella. He hoped Alhaitham hadn’t heard that, but the coldness clamped down on his throat to even ask Nahida. 

“I see,” Nahida said, gentleness in her voice like the ripple of grass on a sunny day. “I apologize for the intrusion. I am a little bit nosy because, in some ways, you are all children to me.” 

“Even Alhaitham?” 

“Of course.” Nahida nodded, almost to herself. “And you as well.” 

“Right.” Kaveh had to crack a small smile. “Alhaitham must have been an adorable child. Precocious, being a menace to his professors. I would have liked to see that.” 

“Yes, an inquisitive sort.” 

“He said he’d be coming back tomorrow to finish things. What did he mean?”

“Alhaitham has a theory,” Nahida said vaguely, looking now at the broken wall. “We disagree about the methodology, but he believes a more thorough investigation of your dream may provide us with a more detailed memory. Even if you were unconscious during your kidnapping, any sensations may provide us with the necessary lead to finally discover your location. Like a sparrow that spots a seed that leads to another seed that leads to a squirrel treasure.”

“Sounds complicated.” Kaveh was sympathetic, which was apparently a strange answer. Nahida looked at him almost curiously. 

“I would just like to be sure that you understand,” Nahida said hesitantly. “But Alhaitham is resorting to a drastic method because we have passed the point where we have any predictions about when your heart might give out. It is almost certain that you have already suffered massive internal trauma.” 

“Right. It’s not that I don’t care,” he said hurriedly. “It’s just that the dream feels so real that reality feels like a dream.” 

“Yes,” Nahida said. “Dreams do feel real. To the dreamer, certainly.”

“You must know for a fact that it’s a dream,” Kaveh said, relieved that she wouldn’t press on the sore subject. He didn’t want to have to protest to her that he actually did care like he had to shout at Alhaitham. 

“Not necessarily. I understand why Payam chose you as the dream host. It is not only you have a detailed eye, but an artistic grasp about the essence of structures. It is quite exquisite. But it is time for you to rest now, Kaveh. I’ll stay for a while longer,” she said, “so please don’t worry about that.” 

“Oh.” Kaveh frowned in thought. “No wonder you looked surprised. When I sleep, how am I dreaming in a dream?” 

“There are many things I am still learning. But I do not believe your inner dreams are causing you harm. And I would very much like for you to rest before tomorrow.” 

“Sounds like a good idea as any. But you don’t have to stay,” he added. “I’m sure you’re busy. Others probably would like to talk to you and hear your wisdom or something like that.” 

Nahida regarded the rain with distant eyes. She raised a small hand and swiped the downpour away, forming a roof over their heads that Kaveh recognized as Alhaitham’s roof. They were sitting in Alhaitham’s house again, this time in a bedroom that Kaveh knew that he had unconsciously repurposed as Nahida’s room. The charming little details melted into the messiness of his bedroom, the abandoned coffee cup that left spirals over crude design sketches and Mehrak sleeping in the corner of his desk, sketches pinned to the cork board and the messy tabs of the books in his shelves. 

“Before you go,” he said, trying to hide his disappointment at the drabness of his own room, “if I really don’t make it without, you know. Could you apologize to Alhaitham for me?” 

“Is this part of your thrice apology?” Nahida frowned as she considered this request gravely. 

“Oh, that.” He flushed at being caught in his own sarcastic joke. “No, that’s just a spin on something he said to me once. That thanks should come in threes. I was being cruel.” 

“He’ll understand,” Nahida said. “I don’t want to meddle, but I do think that he probably is regretting some things he said, too.”

“I doubt it. But maybe it works out.” Kaveh swallowed down the abrupt melancholy. “The first sorry is when you’re mad. The second sorry, you actually mean it.” 

“And the third?” 

“Because it’s not about the argument anymore.” Kaveh gripped his elbows. “Never mind. He’ll get it.” 

He felt Nahida’s gentle pat on his shoulder before her presence vanished from the room, too. 

When he turned to shut the door in his bedroom, a habit left over from when he tried to muffle his carpentry from Alhaitham’s sleep, he saw the strange door again. He recognized the extra door this time, the helpless feeling when he was a child and he knew his mother cried alone because he had been selfish and asked for something too much, that he was the one responsible for his father’s death, his mother’s never ending sorrow. He’d struggled then, like he was drowning, an impossible iciness of how he never would be able to provide any comfort with the blood on his hands. He was better now. He was used to drowning. 

“I know,” he told it. 

“Why do I have to play the princess?” 

“Because I have to play the Mistress of Dreams, the Goddess of Flowers. You’re rubbish at it, you get the lines all wrong.” 

“How do I get the lines wrong?”

“You make her sound so nice. Remember, you’re supposed to be vindictive. How are you going to curse an entire bloodline with nightmares if you don’t actually act a little bit menacing?” 

“And what if I said I wasn’t going to play this make-believe.” 

“Then I will point out, again, that this is my last day here and it will be awful that you refused the whims of a sick girl.”

“Fine. But don’t tell my professor.” 

“I won’t, I promise. Now hold on, I’m looking for something. I shouldn’t have packed this so early, that was stupid of me. I didn’t want anybody to find it so I hid it too deep.” 

“Aren’t you leaving tonight? You’re supposed to be packed.” 

“I don’t know when I’m actually getting picked up. My father doesn’t always remember these things.”

“I’m sure he’ll remember.”

“I’m not! I don’t like him, not one bit. One time he found out that I made a friend at school. She was using me, of course, but I knew that and I think she would have come around over time, but he had to be all smug and undercut her father’s company and now she doesn’t come to school anymore. Besides, now he’s all distracted because he’s missing the heritage jewel and without that, he can’t get recognized as the official heir.”

“What does that do?”

“Being the official heir? Nothing, you just don’t get some special acknowledgements. But it drives him batty. And he has this weird idea that he can’t get rid of those nightmares without it. I can tell he’s been getting them worse now, too, he wakes up screaming.”

“Do you have the nightmares too?” 

“No. But it might be different with me. I’m sick, remember? There’s going to be a time that I’m going to come back to this hospital and not go out again. Oh, don’t make that face. I hate that face. Aren’t you a year older than me? Be brave, won’t you? It’ll just be a long sleep. A very long sleep. I hate people feeling sorry for me, so don’t.” 

“When you get out, why don’t I take you somewhere? You said you’ve always wanted to see the Akademiya grounds.” 

“I’m interested in the learning and teaching, not the actual Akademiya. And no, we can’t talk to each other outside of here. Didn’t you hear what he did to my friend? I won’t let him to do that to you.”

“I think I can defend myself well enough, thank you.”

“I’m going to make sure that you don’t remember this, either. To the best of my ability. That’s the other thing the jewel could do, give you some special abilities.” 

“You can just come find me. I know the best places in the harbor.” 

“Yes, here we go! I found it, I knew I put it in this bag. Now kneel down.”

“Why?” 

“Are you asking a sick girl to get up?” 

“Fine, but I still don’t get it.” 

“What’s there to get? I’ll play a better Mistress of Dreams than you, by far. I just have to figure out what nasty little things I want to whisper to the descendants of those who stole my blood. Give it back? That sounds drab. I curse you? So direct. Come on, tell me what you would say.” 

“I don’t know, aren’t those good enough?”

“Nope. I won’t let you get up until you have a good answer. Let’s say someone took something from you. Alhaitham, your friend, he’s gone and taken your a bit of your blood. What would you say to him?”

“Why would he do that?”

“Does it matter? Come on, you have a chance to get back at him, what would you say?” 

“I don’t know. If he wanted them so much, he could have just asked.”

“But he took them to sell! Your precious lifeblood, he sold it off without another thought.” 

“It doesn’t make sense. But if he really needed it, then it’s fine. I guess I would just tell him that he should have taken more.”

“Oh.”

“What?”

“No. Nothing. I’m just laughing because it’s something he would never have gotten. But I wouldn’t have, either. Never mind. Here, your reward. It’s just a toy, but you can keep it. It’ll be quite fitting, even after we play my game. Remember, you’re the hero and I’m the villain.” 

The crown felt heavy on his head, surprisingly so even with all the gaudy fake emeralds twinkling on the plastic rim. He had to remove his green school beret, leaving it on his knee. When he looked up, she was smirking at him with her brilliant gold-flecked eyes, a mysterious bewitching look that only looked more enchanting in the light of the sunrise. A little breeze blew into the room and rustled the flowers, but even in her hospital gown, she didn’t shiver. She nodded to herself once, smug as she gazed at him. 

“Remember to forget,” she said. 

Things had gotten progressively worse. 

The Palace of Alcazarzaray, once described by a heady news article as a magnum opus, had sunken into the withered ground. The structure he had built for Port Ormos, a magnificent beckoning of welcome to new visitors sailing down the river, had split into a wild maddening of branches that spiraled over the lower bazaar. The Mausoleum of King Deshret had been buried in sand, which would have been the most normal of the trio, except the sand had also become mixed with the boulders that he recognized as the same enshrouded boulders from when he had once ushered his peers to safety from a collapse. 

Sections of Sumeru City persevered, the citizens chattering as they circled the same twenty steps. Other parts had become little more than the simulacrums run by Mehrak, basic protrusions of levels and measurements, a glitchy green that threatened to vanish at any strong breeze. To find safety, he had returned to where the river lapped at the docks, staring at the deep blue of the water and ignoring where the water had run a terrifying red at the mouth. 

His head had the same dry hurt, but now even his stomach betrayed him. Or something deep inside him, an unknowable depth that only resonated out quick arrow shafts of pain. He shoved a hand against his side to hold himself together. 

“Kaveh.” 

“You were probably right,” Kaveh said. He liked that the water didn’t have his reflection. “Just about one thing, so don’t get a big head. It’s just, well. I have a suspicion that things aren’t going well for me.” 

“You could say that.” Alhaitham stayed behind him. Kaveh finally turned, the world shifting in a strange mirage of lights until the blurry blemishes became an elaborate room, one with rows of marble statues in front of star-shaped windows, each statue with a chiseled blindfold and pristine hands that grasped nothing. 

“Any luck?” Kaveh asked, though he knew the answer by how Alhaitham shifted his weight from foot to foot. 

“No.” Alhaitham withdrew his swords. The white tiles of the room reflected the green glow, the ornate design melding into his hands. A staircase wrapped upward, smaller rooms tucked against the sides, an infinite spiral in a finite space. The ceiling had been pointed in a large arch above them, a mural faintly painted of a beautiful figure leaving red flowers in her footsteps. 

“Where’s Nahida?” 

“I told her that I would fetch you and bring you back to the house.” 

“But you’re not going to do that.”

“No.” 

“Right.” Kaveh wanted to sit down on the bench, but it didn’t seem like the occasion. Instead, he leaned against the meticulously designed pew, where the upright knob fit perfect in his hand. “I did try to wake up. I thought maybe I could find another hint or send a signal or escape or something.”

“And?”

“I couldn’t wake up.” The stained glass windows would have taken years to build, held together by a thin gold metal. “I can’t say that’s a good sign.”

“It isn’t.”

“Are you going to hurt me?” 

“Yes.” Alhaitham hadn’t moved, swords still in his hand. He at least had the graciousness to look solemn. 

“I just don’t understand why you’re so certain that I’m lying.” Another sharp arrow of pain thrust its way through his ribs. “I recognize that look in your eye. You think it’s an established fact. But you wouldn’t believe something like that without proof and you don’t have proof.”

“It’s proof,” Alhaitham said, “if you were the one who told me.” 

“When?” 

“The second time we came.” Alhaitham approached, each step a clean sound against the untouched tiles. “Nahida had done it just right. Not too much that you would think we were part of your dream and incorporate us into the fold. Not too little that you wouldn’t recognize us at all. Enough that you were conscious and talking to us.”

“You must know by now,” Kaveh said weakly, “but I don’t remember.”

“It had been going well. You made squawks of outrage about your situation and pledged your help. You said you may have some notion of where you might have been taken. We were about to ask how you would know that when you stopped and asked about Sara.” Alhaitham had closed the distance between them with only a few strides. Kaveh tried not to buckle over from the pain and looked up at him. He didn’t realize that Alhaitham was quite tall until he had to try and look at him in the pained eyes. “You asked what would happen to her if you woke up.”

“And what would happen?” 

“Nahida theorized that the shock would kill her. She said she would stabilize the reaction as much as possible, but a full recovery would be impossible.” 

“So I refused.” Kaveh tried to smile, which became a warbled mess. “Or, if I know myself, I would have pretended that I misspoke. Or did I give you a false lead? Those all sound like me.” 

“This dreamscape is a reconstruction of a representation of reality,” Alhaitham said. “But we may find the answer if we find the original reconstruction. If we go through your memories.” 

“Is that why Nahida isn’t here?” 

“We theorize that is why the others were Hollowed, but you underwent several sessions of the Lotus Machine without that affliction. Your memories were of no interest. You were just a host. This is why Payam was careful not to do the same to his daughter, when there was delicate information he wanted to recover. If we go beyond the dreamscape and into your memories, we risk destroying you.” 

“That’s why Nahida isn’t here.” 

“Will you tell me your location?” 

“I don’t remember.”

“Would you tell me even if you did?” 

“No.” Kaveh smiled weakly, though he faltered when Alhaitham returned a stony stare. “I wouldn’t want to give you the satisfaction.”

“Kaveh.”

“There must be something we can do for her. I’m not self-destructive, I don’t mean to say that I’ll sacrifice myself for her, but there must be another way. Even if Nahida can’t do that much, maybe she’ll get better on her own.” His words lacked any real belief, even to his own ears. He grasped at the clumps of hope, but they slipped through his fingers with the waxy sheen of leaves collapsing into piles at his feet. “She’s innocent. She didn’t ask for any of this. She deserves more.” 

He could not hurt another. Even if one last gasp of an idea remained in the world, then even crawling, he would try to preserve that glimmer. 

“I will practice caution,” Alhaitham said, “when I go through your memories. You won’t be Hollowed.” 

“I know. But it’ll probably still hurt.”

“Yes.” 

“Well. I’ll try not to scream too much.” Kaveh drew himself up, ignoring the dull aches. Alhaitham wasn’t looking at him. He had an unfocused look in his eyes, the same when he was comparing two books. Alhaitham raised his sword until it rested too well in the hollow of Kaveh’s throat. Kaveh couldn’t resist a wince when the blade began to dig through his skin, leaving a thin trail of red that seemed too frail, like he did not yet know that he was bleeding. The pain followed behind like a forgotten unknown, a slight sting that turned into a sharper pain as the sword began to dig deeper. 

“That’s incorrect,” Nahida said. “Unless you wish to vivisect your friend.” 

Alhaitham stopped. His blade had hit the sternum, a hard and hollow sound. Kaveh’s hand instinctively flew to the shallow line above, as if holding himself together. Nahida sat in the rafters, feet dangling, as she hunched over as if observing a row of ants. 

“Did you want to stop me?” Alhaitham asked. He didn’t seem disturbed at her appearance, nor did Nahida appear disturbed at the transparent trickery.

“Yes and no?” Nahida tilted her head. “No, we made an agreement. Like I said, it is my duty and privilege to help you. But yes, I do want to stop this line of thinking. That’s not where he keeps his memories.” 

“And you know where?” 

“Hasn’t he accidentally shown you, too?” Nahida smiled in a way that didn’t reach her eyes. “I think it’s time to tell him, Kaveh. For real.” 

“How’d you know?” He didn’t know why, somehow, he was still surprised. Nahida was the Archon and the self-proclaimed expert on dreams. He should have known better than to hide something from her. Alhaitham had returned his gaze to him, stoic except for the occasional flicker of attention to the blood that seeped between Kaveh’s fingers. 

Kaveh lifted his hand, a gesture of goodwill, and motioned to where the door had appeared. It was the same haunting door, enshrouded in the pale blue of the moonlit night where he had to listen to his mother cry, that stood out in contrast to the gentler pasture green and sunlit yellow of the windows. He still had a clean hand, which he used to fumble out the golden key. Alhaitham joined his swords together in one hand, holding out a palm and accepting the key without rejoinder. 

“I’m sorry,” Kaveh said. “If I can keep her safe, for even a moment longer.”

“She’s not safe. Not like this.”

“As long as there’s a chance. Maybe these few minutes are what she’ll need to recover.”

“If you’re not going to get your hands dirty, then I will.” The key disappeared in Alhaitham’s fist. 

“As I have said before, you cannot touch his memories without causing harm.” Nahida floated down, spinning until she sat on her swing of ethereal vines. “He will be changed in some way. Irrevocably. Like how a plucked apple will always remain plucked.”

“It might be better,” Kaveh argued. “He might be able to fix me while he’s in there.” 

“Stop.” Alhaitham said it too quickly, eyebrows drawn together, for this to be anything but his temper, gritted teeth drawing sleek muscled lines from his neck. “There’s nothing to fix. You’ve made your decision and I’ve made mine.” 

When Alhaitham’s back looked so stolid, no arguments could be made. Kaveh watched as Alhaitham unlocked the door. The metal meeting metal made an old, rusted sound, the hinges of the door creaking open. Though the framework of the door stood alone on the floor, the insides depicted a different scenery than the white walls. A gentle golden light shone through, layered like delicate veils that draped over them, and now that Kaveh wasn’t on the receiving end of the sword, he could see the faint trace of raw pain on Alhaitham’s steeled mouth. 

When Alhaitham didn’t move, swords returned to his hand, Kaveh angled his head to glance inside. He wasn’t certain if he was allowed to do so, but Nahida sat on her swing and did not stop him. She had a different air now, a quality not present in the comfort of last night. 

He remembered the scene behind the door. At first, he thought it would be an idyllic scene of a childhood self playing with blocks, or making the tragic mistake of happily talking to his father about the diadem, or his forced smile when his mother announced her remarriage. But the golden light only gently embraced a rapturous scene, a gentleness that he was certain wasn’t present in reality. But in his memory, everything had been beautiful. The most beautiful thesis, the loveliest of designs, an untouchable blueprint. 

He’d been studying with Alhaitham, before they started their thesis. He remembered how he had approached Alhaitham with a worry that the other students were ostracizing him and the sheer relief to know that Alhaitham was simply independent and then an admiration that a person could be so above both the pedestal and the whispers. They sat together in the study hall, close enough that their knees would touch if Kaveh jammed his leg further inward, but he didn’t. It had been another comical moment when he was trying to teach Alhaitham something as his senior, only to realize that Alhaitham had not only understood the concept, but had somehow refined the ages-old theory. The subject didn’t matter. The studying didn’t even matter. 

Alhaitham had reached over to touch where Kaveh had braided a strand of his hair to keep it out of his face. His hair had been getting long, long enough to always be snapped in the boards where he carried around his portfolio designs, and he hadn’t bothered to cut it. Alhaitham said something. In the golden memory, even that was blurred, but he knew that Alhaitham had some version of that it was different. Kaveh still remembered the flustered defense he had built in the bluster of his chest, ready to defend himself like always against the accusations of being strange. 

But Alhaitham said it was pretty, and then dropped his attention back to his book. 

It was painful to see how he had looked as a student, which couldn’t have been reality, just a representation of how he had felt in that moment. Even now, he knew it. The flush of his face, down to his fingertips, and the look of adoration that glittered in his eyes. One of many moments where he had fallen in love, again and again. 

Except this time he was also an outsider to this memory, standing beside Nahida while leaving messy smudges of his blood that smelled heavy and metallic, and he could see Alhaitham watching the memory too, still frozen at the door. 

Alhaitham had his mouth parted slightly, features stilled, knuckles paling where he gripped his swords. Genuine pain, a vulnerable and raw wound, like he had been stabbed. Kaveh had never seen him like that and the sight caught at his heart. Alhaitham seemed unable to move, watching the same moment with a thready breath, a growing hurt. 

Kaveh stepped closer to comfort him, or at least tried. Nahida tugged at the ends of his red capelet to stop him. 

“He made his choice,” Nahida said. “If he wants to save you, he should start slicing through your memories.”

“He’s suffering.” Kaveh tried to pull out of her grasp, but her fist did not move and he didn’t want to hurt her. “Are you mad at him?”

“No. We may have had our disagreement, but this was our agreement. He knew what he was risking.” 

“He doesn’t have to do it alone.” 

“Yes, he does. He is well enough to make his own decisions.” 

“Just the beginning,” Kaveh said, and he didn’t know why he was asking her instead of running off. “I’ll just help him through the beginning part.”

“No.” 

“Why not?”

“Because you have made your choice, too.” Nahida considered this, a glimpse of her more inquisitive nature apparent through the tilt of her head. “But since it is arguable that you are not well enough to do so, I am here to help you think this through. Just as the trees must consider when it is time to flower, you must consider the same.” 

“I just don’t want to see him like this.” He felt drawn to stare at Alhaitham’s back, which he knew was strong. “He should just cut it. He should just fix me and be done with it.” 

“Also incorrect. It has to be the right order,” Nahida said. “You make your decision. He makes his decision.” 

“I don’t know why he’s waiting.” 

“Do you really not?”

“My feelings are nothing.” He gripped harder at his chest, the cut still open and throbbing. “Especially to him.” 

“Is that what you believe?” 

“It’s not what I believe, it’s the truth. I like him. I love him,” he said, helplessly. “But Alhaitham doesn’t feel the same. And that’s fine! I don’t mind! I don’t mind that he doesn’t care about me. As long as he stays by my side, he can make fun of me. He can dangle rent above my head just to watch me jump. Fine, he can see how far I’ve fallen, how disgraceful I am, how stupid, but I just want him by my side. He’s shown me that much kindness, I can’t ask for more. You don’t ask anything more from a flower, that it might occasionally bloom, right? He’s indifferent and that’s okay. I might lose these feelings, but maybe I’ll be less of a burden on him. One less parasite.”

“I see.” Nahida kicked out her feet, swing arching higher in the air. “I think that is beautiful in its own way, if that were true. Just as some flowers only bloom at night or once in a full moon, we ask nothing but to admire. If we cannot even have that, we are grateful, all the same.” 

“What do you mean, if that were true?”

Nahida kept her gaze upward, towards the bewildering array of impossible rooms. “As I said, you have an artist’s eye. That is why you were chosen to be the architect of dreams. It is easy enough to trick someone when you depict something not as it is, but as the way it feels. It can also be the opposite for you, though. You see things by how you feel and refuse the sensations that tell you differently.” 

“I don’t know what you mean.” 

“I think you do,” Nahida said. 

Alhaitham still hadn’t moved. 

“It’ll be fine,” Kaveh repeated, and then gained courage that coursed recklessly through his bleeding veins. “Of course it’ll be fine. It’s all win-win. Everything worked out. Everything will work out. Once Alhaitham starts, it’ll be smooth for him. It always works out for Alhaitham. It always has to work out for him. He’s not like me.” 

“In what sense?”

“He’s better. I hate to admit it, but he is. Better than me.” Kaveh thrust out a hand at Alhaitham’s form. “People won’t take advantage of him. He’ll be safe even if I’m not there. He’ll be happy, especially because I’m not there.”

“I do not know enough to ascertain whether that is true. However, historically, that has not been true.” 

“Alhaitham doesn’t care about me!” He was shouting, now, but not at her. He yelled at the whole building, the too big room with its domed ceiling and statues all frozen with their palms upwards. 

“Why not?” 

“Because he can’t. He’s not allowed to care.” He grabbed his head, trying to stop the split from dividing himself into two. 

“Why isn’t he allowed to care?”

“Because. Because! He’s Alhaitham, he’s not that type of person. I know he’s not. I know better than anything.” 

“If that is your decision, then I will allow you to stand by it. Alhaitham is free to wreak havoc on your memories. Even with his most delicate touch, he will destroy them.” She watched Alhaitham, her swing stilling until her feet barely touched the floor. Her fingers hooked through the vines, the flowers resting like rings over her hands. “But it bears repeating that it will cause a hurt that will never go away.” 

“If he really does accidentally destroy my memories, I won’t even know,” Kaveh argued, weakly. 

“Oh.” For the first time since Nahida appeared on the rafters, she seemed surprised. Her eyes flew open, tilting her head enough that her long hair draped against her side. “I apologize. I should have made myself more clear. I was not referring to you.” 

A faint pressure began to push on his chest. His lungs withered in the sudden cold that descended upon him, a freeze that shot through to his fingertips and a sudden weakness in his legs. He tried to breathe, then breathed too much, until he shoved his hand over his mouth to stop himself. 

“You will be fine,” Nahida continued, toeing the floor. “That is what I believe. You have shown very great resilience and deep strength.” 

“But,” and he was almost heaving into his palm, sliding against the side of the bench until he had dropped to his knees, “I’ll hurt him.” 

“Yes.”

“I’ll hurt him in the same way I hurt.”

“Yes.” Nahida finally stood from her swing, the vines shimmering into the air. He didn’t know when, but the wetness of his blood had disappeared. The cut on his chest spilled out small rubies, scattered against the white wisps of the tiles, cut into facets of a thousand glittering lights. He shoved through the shallow clog of his throat, how his breath hitched and caught and snapped. 

“But I can’t just stop.” His voice came out low and strained, fumbling to fit words around the frantic heaves of his lungs. “I can’t let her die.” 

“I also would like to see her live.” Nahida clasped her hands together. “Unfortunately, she has been dreaming for a very long time. I cannot make any promises. Whatever you choose, I will support. No matter what. It is my duty, my honor, my privilege.” 

“Why?” He held his hands over his eyes, bent over until his forehead touched his knees. “Why do I have to hurt - another -”

He had wanted to help. His mother, this stranger, even Alhaitham. It was important to him to save everyone. It was important that he would never hurt anybody, ever again, with his selfishness. 

This sadistic choice that he wanted to protest, he could scream until his voice scraped over the gemstones of his blood and not change a single thing. He knew Nahida was right. In some way, he had always known. He had always been building a staircase around Alhaitham, choosing to place each step in a spiral against a lovely railing, and trying not to look at him. If he looked, then he would know. The ivory staircase would crash down, leaving rubble at his feet. It would be painful. Ignore him. Ignore the almost tender looks Alhaitham would steal in the study. Ignore the strange look of yearning in his dreamscape when he kissed him, the look that a dream Alhaitham would never show. Ignore how Alhaitham stood in a room, covering the egress, protective against intruders. Ignore, ignore, ignore, because if he ignored it enough, then he could accept that offer, following the trail of footsteps in the desert, away from his warm hospital room, cold enough that his teeth would not stop chattering, and he wouldn’t have to look behind him and see the candlelights of Sumeru City and know Alhaitham was one of them, ignore his looks, ignore his presence, ignore his being. It would have been so easy to love a statue. 

The light had been painful on the back of his eyelids, but this lessened until he could open his eyes a slight crack at a sudden shadow. His eyes watered still from the shards of sunlight, enough that his tear became a tiny sapphire spilled to the ground. His muscles felt sore, ligaments supplanted by tendrils, an old burn. His heart erupted in explosions for every beat, even his fingertips, buried in the cold rubies, stumbled in the aftermath. Every inhale on his lips met with an exhale, every frantic exhale tumbling into a tripped inhale. The shadow cast upon him emerged from the boots that stood before him, enough careful distance that he could not reach out and touch him. He could see the swords abandoned in the opening of the doorframe, dropped at a careless angle, but the clatter of the blades must have been sharp and cold. 

He must have looked pathetic. Vain, even when he withered on the ground, but he had especially tended to his hair. Alhaitham looked down at him, distant, his hands empty by his side. Kaveh bent his head, another sapphire smashing against the scattering of rubies, but Alhaitham deserved this much. He forced his weak neck to incline upward, panting in painful gulps to force his lungs to move. 

“I’m sorry,” he breathed, soft enough that he couldn’t be certain that Alhaitham heard him. “I don’t know how to help you.” 

Alhaitham’s mouth twisted, a short spasm. He lowered himself slowly to the floor, as if his knees had become delicate glass. He regarded Kaveh, and then stretched out a tentative hand. 

Kaveh flinched, but did not move. The hand slid across his cheek, feather against silk, and Alhaitham thumbed away another sapphire into the rubble of jewels. Kaveh watched him, then closed his eyes and allowed himself to lean against the strong hand. 

He instinctively held out his palm when he felt his shoulders pulled forward, finding his fingers shoved against an enveloping warmth. Alhaitham had folded him towards him, his hand now tangled in Kaveh’s hair. He didn’t move. Kaveh inhaled his smell, the slight sensation of hair against his forehead, the heartbeat beneath his. Eventually, against his scent and his heat, Kaveh’s breathing leveled out, the jagged mountains smoothing into gentler hills. He buried himself into the crook of Alhaitham’s neck and allowed himself this weakness, grasping the cape on his back with his full fist, trying to hold him. At that, Alhaitham’s grip on him tightened. 

He had always wanted to build a beautiful structure that he would leave behind, one that inspired a swell of awe, a divine design of art, a veneration for history. A tower that would weather the storms, a monument that inspired sensations beyond the body. A garden, full of red roses and white jasmine, the layers of orchid petals, saffron crocuses and tulips, lilies with open petals and bell curves and tall edges, poppies, splashes of colors and traces of light floral notes, skirts of lilac and bursts of whites and dashes of oranges, interrupted only by arches and a moving waterway with a small water mill scooping the water to bring to the garden, his masterpiece, except he would see Alhaitham sitting on his bench, knuckles perched against his cheek while he read his book, long eyelashes a contrast to the strength of his features, ankle crossed to his knee, the tree casting dappled shadows over his hair and eyes and mouth, and he wouldn’t be able to look away. 

He was beginning to be afraid that Alhaitham would be the most beautiful design that he would ever touch.

Alhaitham stroked his hair, awkwardly, in short motions that trailed at the nape of his neck. He held him like he would hold something important, delicate, afraid to make sudden motions. Kaveh tried to hold onto his sensation, but his head had begun to droop and his body felt too heavy. When he couldn’t keep his grip, he dropped his hands. The tension seeped from his body until he couldn’t feel the pain anymore. His limbs felt too heavy. He knew he wouldn’t be able to move much anymore. Alhaitham paused. His arms gathered him closer, tight enough to almost hurt. 

“Nahida,” Alhaitham said, a rumble in his chest. “Thank you for what you have done. You should go back to the search.”

“Shall we go together?” 

“No. I’ll stay.” 

“Is that your final decision?” 

“Yes.”  

Nahida didn’t say anything for a long while. Finally, “It is one of the finest decisions that a person can make.”

Alhaitham breathed, shallow and smooth. He had dropped his head a while ago and hadn’t bothered to look up at Nahida, either. There was a simple resignation, like he was letting go of something, too. A quiet resolution decided without noise. 

“Wait.” Kaveh was tired. He didn’t know when he became so tired. He hadn’t felt this sensation, not when he stayed awake all night to pull together enough materials for meetings, not when he traveled into a strange house only to be attacked by his clientele, not when he scribbled his angry annotations in those books because he was right and he didn’t need them to know he was right but he needed them to know what was right. Resting was dangerous because this made the fatigue crush him, weak and only able to whisper into Alhaitham’s ear. “The white flower.” 

He did like Alhaitham’s house. Ugly furniture and all. It was located in a lovely nestle in the turning roads of Sumeru City, which wound around the arboreal heartpiece. Follow the road down. At night, insomniac scholars lingered around the pillars, arms full of research and arguing with each other until the moon reached its peak. The tavern would be bustling, still, those inside laughing until their faces turned red and their mugs left only the edges of froth. The outskirts of the City had shorter houses, a quieter air, wooden crates packed with the wares and dogs running with wagging tails. At the arch, a Sumpter Beast would be packed to carry travelers across the sprawling greenery. The hills of wimpled grass, the mountain leviathans, the thickets of trees, would all pass by shortly. The occasional ranger station would appear, wooden structures that guarded over the forest on gangly stilts. Occasionally pass by the rivers where the lotuses bloomed in the night, shy petals unfurled to the sky as the fish darted in the silver winks. Hollows of fallen trees would resemble houses for little creatures, acorn caps of cups and curtains of vines. The moisture would turn into a dryness, a cold that settled into bones, as sand began to appear. The dunes had gentle curves, flats cutting into them, ocean waves frozen in the night. The ground would sink beneath footsteps, leaving behind a faint trail swept clean away by the tumbleweeds. Berries stained a shallow red and the scarab beetles scuttled with their golden shells. The oasis would be beautiful even at night, the palm trees leaning over the silver water in a thin congregation. The desert foxes cock their ears at intruders before their booted paws dance on the wet mud. Cup the cold water to drink, the thin layer of water capturing the shimmering moon in hands, the lunar water tasting like silt and earth and purity down the throat. Another cliff face, looking like all other cliff faces, except a white flower bloomed in secret. Impractical, without soil or sunlight, but beauty did not answer to reason. Palm the protruding stones and follow the trail of white flowers, the fragile petals swaying in the new wind, until modern machines appear. Puddles of dried blood would have attracted gnats if the room had not been sealed so tight. In the dark cavern, the machine sounds echo against the stone walls. Repetitive, an artificial heart, pumping empty now. Further into the cavern, follow the white flowers, find him. 

He is sleeping, but he will soon wake. 

It was noisy and it hurt. 

The room looked different. Researchers in green bent over the machine on the wall. A small group bent over his right side, where they shielded the high pressure of the hydro applicator’s water stream cutting through the golden strap around his wrist. The door had been left open. Sunrise or sunset, one that drenched the piles of sand in a dusty yellow color, even as the white flowers remained untouched and only bent their petals occasionally to the faint breeze. He recognized that trail to the dais and his throne. 

His other hand had been cut free already, a clear tubing still tethered to his veins. He raised his hand to his head. A strange metal contraption circled around him, the back a strong strap that led to raised pieces. In the front, three metal tubes had been drilled to his forehead and anchored the crown around his head. The old blood flaked off in between his fingertips. He dug his blunt nails against where the metal met skin, trying to pry off the tube from his bone. A hand descended to stop him, easy enough to do when he was already tired from the effort. 

“Stay,” Alhaitham said. He looked, almost imperceptibly, tired. A faint line edged the bottom of his eyes. When the medics startled at his presence, Alhaitham’s cool glare at them was enough for them to duck their heads in recognition of the silent admonishment. After finally freeing the strap, they gathered together off to the side where they discussed in hushed tones as they picked through their tools. Alhaitham watched them passively, then returned to study Kaveh. He dropped to his knee after a moment, kneeling to his side, and began to wrap Kaveh’s wrist in a tight bandage. He moved with quiet deliberation, each wrap layered over the other.

In the corner, as if nobody could see her, Nahida sat on her swing. When Kaveh looked at her, she smiled. It was the first time he had seen her smile with so much joy, how plants might extend their leaves to the sun. She giggled to herself, put a finger over her mouth, and disappeared in a vanished light. 

Alhaitham tucked the last edge of the bandage away. His actions were always neat, precise acts of care. Kaveh lifted his fingers. He touched Alhaitham’s face, tracing over his mouth. Alhaitham looked at him, but did not move, even as Kaveh brushed over his nose, the lobe of his ears, his neck, his unblemished clavicle. Finally, tired, he closed his eyes. 

They had stationed a Matra outside his door, which was ridiculous. He wasn’t going to get kidnapped twice in a row. He knew Alhaitham agreed it was a waste of manpower, but Cyno had insisted. Tighnari would have been the only one to convince him otherwise, but he was also in fervid agreement. Kaveh’s room looked less like a hospital bed and more like a study, buried in flowers and books that Tighnari had dropped off in unrepentant waves. But he knew Alhaitham would still take full advantage of the Matra bodyguard to be a snitch, so he wasn’t surprised to hear, “So this is where you are.” 

“What, I can’t move around?” 

“Correct.” Alhaitham pulled out a chair, book in hand. He did not deign to sit closer to the bed, but instead by the window where the most moonlight seeped across the busied charts. “You were under orders of strict bedrest. Your bodyguard was supposed to take care of that.” 

“You’d be surprised how far a little pudding would go.” 

“This transgression has been reported to Cyno.”

“Don’t do that, he didn’t do anything wrong.” 

“He did a lot wrong. You certainly inspire that in people.” Alhaitham flipped open to the middle of the book, eyes parsing through the words. “Eat your food. Stay in bed. Rest.” 

“It’s been a month! I’m plenty well. I should get back to work.” 

“A baby could knock you over.”

“Sumeru raises very strong babies,” Kaveh said petulantly. At least Alhaitham wasn’t forcibly removing him from the room, even if he had already reported the bodyguard. If Alhaitham did decide to grab the handles of his wheelchair and push him back to his room, Kaveh could do little to stop him. Not that he thought Alhaitham would do that, as he had never pushed him without Kaveh’s tired request, but he was still a threat. Alhaitham was the strongest Sumeru baby. 

“And you haven’t been busying as much as I asked,” Kaveh added. 

“Why should I? You’re sleeping most of the time.” Alhaitham had a quick motion to his fingers, tucking the next page under his pinky. 

“I would know that you’re there for me! I’d feel your presence.” 

“I have better things to do than hear you snore.” 

“I don’t snore.” Kaveh hesitated. “Do I? No, don’t tell me, I don’t want to know. But it’ll bother me if I don’t. Do I snore? Are they at least delicate snores?” 

“Are you here because you can’t sleep?” 

“No. Maybe. I’ve been sleeping well enough lately,” Kaveh said defensively. “I even had a nice dream last night.”

“Anything important?”

“Is it symbolic to ride a whale through the sky until my professor shakes my hand and tells me I’m the next whale riding champion and then I have to be in a race except my whale has turned into a fox?” 

“Yes.” Another page. “It means you need to rest.” 

“A little trip doesn’t hurt anybody.” Kaveh finally turned his attention back to the person on the hospital bed. She had a somewhat familiar face, but she also looked like a stranger. He studied her, but her eyes remained closed. He felt that if he could only see her eyes, he would remember something, but the thought was distant and he wasn’t about to try and shove her eyes open on his own. 

“How is she?” 

“Nahida did the best she could.” Another page. “Half a year, maybe.” They had found her in the next chamber of that secret little room, condition relatively unchanged since her last check-in at the hospital. She hadn’t needed to undergo any severe treatment, which felt like a poor reprieve. His heart had a deep ache when he looked at her, beyond only his betrayal. It felt nostalgic. 

“I see.” Kaveh rested his hands in his lap. “You must have tried to find out in your own investigations. What was it that Payam wanted to discover in her mind? Was it truly not to say goodbye to his daughter?” 

“It has been theorized that his nightmares occurred with increasing frequency and he attributed this to a missing heirloom.” Alhaitham gave a half-shrug. “He became attached to the idea that his daughter had stolen this from him.” 

“She wouldn’t do something like that.” 

“How would you know? You’ve never met her.” 

“No,” Kaveh said slowly. “I don’t think so, anyway.” 

“Even if she did steal it, there has been no real evidence. She was said to have made many escapes from her hospital room, but the emerald was never found in her possessions.” 

“Do you think she took it?” 

“If she did, she hid it well. An emerald of that size would constitute an entire fortune. It would have made considerable waves if she had sold it.” 

“I have a big emerald, too.” Kaveh leaned back. “It’s part of a little toy tiara. Someone gave it to me, but I don’t remember who.” 

“Are you going to sell it? You could earn enough to buy yourself a drink.”

“I don’t think it’d even buy me half a drink. But I’ll show it to you. You can have it if you like it.” 

“You can do that later.” Alhaitham closed his book, tucking this away in his pocket. “It’s time to go back to your room.” The hallway was still dark, the nurses’ dim light a small twinkle at the end. Kaveh navigated through the tunnel of books and flowers and well wishes, allowing Alhaitham to help him back to his bed. 

“Are they going to release me soon?” 

“Not if you keep doing this.” 

“Fine, I’ll be on my best behavior.” 

“If you’re on your best behavior, then perhaps they’d be willing to release you to me.” Alhaitham cleared the bed of the small sketches that Kaveh had idly done, piling them together and placing them on the allotted desk. “I’ll come and take you back to our home.” 

“Soon, then,” Kaveh said, triumphantly. Alhaitham drew the curtains closed, darkening the room. He made no misstep through the maze of gifts. Kaveh glanced at the door, ready to see the crack of light and the retreating silhouette, but instead felt a presence on his bed. The bed springs bowed to the new weight and he would have moved to make a room if a hand hadn’t stopped him. It was like Alhaitham could see in the dark by the unerring way his hand was careful against the side of his ribs, careful to avoid the angry surgery scars and instead slotting his fingers against bone through the thin fabric. He’d braced his knees on either side of Kaveh’s hips, not putting his weight on him. When his hand finally reached Kaveh’s face, he had a delicate touch, like he was touching the crisp pages of an old manuscript. 

Kaveh couldn’t see as well in the dark and he stood a too strong chance of accidentally shoving him, so he tentatively felt up the bulk of Alhaitham’s arm. He could feel the slight strain of where Alhaitham held himself up, even to the strong joint of his broad shoulder. 

Alhaitham stroked a strand of hair away from Kaveh’s bandaged forehead. He leaned down and kissed him on the mouth. Kaveh drew him closer, just wanting him near. It was warmth and peace and comfort and he found himself leaning up, slipping his hand to Alhaitham’s shoulder to hold still. In the darkness, everything became more intimate, every motion, hot breath, slight inhale. 

Alhaitham eventually leaned back, though he didn’t leave. He looked at Kaveh in the dark, and then leaned his weight to the side until he was lying on the bed, no weight on him but close enough for the heat to be felt. 

Kaveh turned his head, trying to squint through the thin light. He had to laugh, a soft exhale, at the futility. He thought he could see Alhaitham’s mouth shift into a slow smile. 

“Don’t be so scared,” Kaveh said. “I’ll keep you safe.” 

The sound that Alhaitham made could almost be construed as a laugh. He didn’t say anything, though, and leaned over until his forehead rested on Kaveh’s shoulder. One arm loosely grasped Kaveh’s waist, which Kaveh ran his fingers up his biceps in a loose reassurance. Against the side of his neck, he could hear Alhaitham’s breathing level out. He would have been delighted if Alhaitham snored, but he only made charming soft sounds. 

Alhaitham had been strangely tender. Despite his busy schedule, he had still stayed through Kaveh’s second surgery and brought him various pencils and notebooks and Mehrak from his room. When he did stop by to visit, sometimes in groups with Tighnari and Cyno, he would scan the charts with a critical eye. Once the visitors had left, he’d somehow make a clean chair appear and sit by Kaveh’s side to read, occasionally stopping to massage Kaveh’s wrist and arms with his strong thumbs. He touched him more, eyes always flickering in askance before he gently took his hands. Once, on a particularly bad day that left Kaveh burning in pain, Alhaitham had even read a book out loud to him. A soft murmur, like a wave. 

Kaveh could call it guilt. 

Or he could call it what it actually was. 

“Are you asleep?” He stroked Alhaitham’s hair. 

“Guess.” 

“Did I wake you?”

“No.”

“It’s rare for you to come so late at night. Are you having trouble sleeping?” 

“Not quite.” 

“Tighnari could make a good concoction for you.” 

“I could make an equally potent one for myself.” 

“Are you having any bad dreams?”

“No.” 

“Any good ones?”

“Depends on what you would call good.”

“You’re being incredibly semantic.”

“You’re vague.” 

“Fine, then. Tell me about your dream and I’ll decide for myself.” 

“It might be long.”

“I want to hear it.” 

“I’m in a forest. I’ve come to study something, but the vines are getting in the way. After deliberation, I decide the fastest way out would be through. When I cut into the vine, a sticky sap pours out. They seal together behind me. I am careful, but it nevertheless creates a maze. I think I see a light and I cut towards it, but the light vanishes every time I come close. At some point, I am lost. My compass is not working. The moon’s position is illogical. The humidity has moss growing on all sides of the trees. It might be safer if I stood still, but the light urges something inside me. It’s not something I have felt before. I must have it at any cost. I know if I have it, then it will bring me peace. But it is still night and I am alone. The light vanishes more frequently until I can see it no longer. It is no use. I consider climbing the trees, but the tangle of vines could choke me. Still, I begin when I hear something behind me. You’re laughing because I’m lost. You’re smug, but you’re torn and bloodied and look like you’ve been in the forest for a long time. You say you know the way out and you’ll take me. I doubt if you know, but for some reason, I am relieved. The vines are letting me go. I take your hand. I see your light. I reach you.”