Archive of Our Own

The day Kaveh moved in was like some kind of dream – perhaps a nightmare, at first. He was perfectly polite, reasonable and well spoken, not to mention kind too. There was something to be said, Alhaitham supposed, for the looks of him as well. This all created the problem. The original advertisement of a cheap room to rent had been meant to entice, meant to draw in the unsuspecting. It had been a self serving endeavor, a swing into the void to try and find someone desperate enough they’d even live in the dilapidated remnants of this mansion masquerading on the edges of the city as an old townhouse that had simply never been blended into the rest of town. That they’d live with Alhaitham – give in to his requests and demands. He wasn’t too proud, nor ashamed at all, to admit he’d been hoping they’d be a terrible person; it would have allowed him to skip through the niceties of explaining his situation and taking paltry offerings every now and then, he could have jumped straight into the bloodbath his stomach hungered for.

No, instead, he got Kaveh. Sometimes ill-tempered, always doing his best; light of Kshahrewar fallen on hard times, or so Alhaitham had heard. The kind of person who’d go out of his way to make everyone else's life easier, to help even when it hurt. The kind of person people missed – that Alhaitham would miss, it pained him to say. He couldn’t kill him, not now and not ever. It was a horrid realization, mortifying, that he’d been completely domesticated in that moment by pure unfiltered altruism. It confused him too, knowing that it was the antithesis to himself, a mirror of all he didn’t want to be, couldn’t be. Alhaitham wanted comfort, he wanted peace, an uncomplicated way of living even with the current status of his life. Kaveh offered only ructions – he stayed up late, he was noisy at times, he drank too often and felt too much, there really wasn’t a day that went by that they didn’t disagree on something. He was unequivocally human in a way Alhaitham had forgotten people could be. It mesmerized and it pained him all the same.

The first moment he’d set eyes on him, all his long limbs clothed in a dark, burgundy suit, the ends of his white sleeves just subtly too long where they sat daintily around the knuckles of his hands. They were dusted, subtly discolored at the hem with paints and charcoal, and he looked every inch the genius artist that he was. In that split second Alhaitham had known nothing was going to happen. No violence nor torment, no harm at all. Eyes as red as the blood he craved so monstrously settled on his face through the thin crack in the forebodingly large door and the anxiety in them softened at the sight of a person. Alhaitham had been a ruined man from that first faux breath he’d taken.

His home – their home now – was by no means meager or small. It was actually rather difficult to run into each other as often as they seemed to. Alhaitham hated how readily he’d settled into switching his favorite spots so they might coincide with where Kaveh seemed to settle himself. In the large room that served as their shared lounge the artist had set up a tilted table, large and wooden, that served to hold his complex drawings. Alhaitham had stood beside him one evening as he worked well into the somber dark of night, the wick of his candle severely short.

“Alhaitham.” Kaveh had said his name quietly, fingers around the ink-full pen they held stilling as he glanced furtively up through swaths of golden hair that fell loosely across his cheek. It had taken humiliatingly long for Alhaitham to reply with a quiet acknowledging grunt, distracted as he was by the sight.

“It’s hard to draw when you’re staring at me like that.” Alhaitham blinked, once then twice, the words slipping through him like the shiver of a ghost and he did an abrupt about turn as Kaveh called after him, “No, no – Gods, you can stay just –!”

It had taken a week for Alhaitham to venture back into the room, book in hand this time, prepared to be a silent audience. He kept his distance and settled neatly into the velvet of the expansive couch close by. He was still near, but not intruding as Kaveh had already insisted he hadn’t been. From here the steady beating march of Kaveh’s pulse was distant but soothing all the same. His scent, floral but earthy, was softer than it had been when he’d leaned close over his shoulder – teal eyes had been trained on the scratch of a pen across parchment while he breathed in the aroma of life as if he had never had the pleasure before – but still even from afar as it was now, it entranced him.

They danced around each other like this, endlessly. They’d meet in the long winding corridors of the old mansion, Kaveh in his loosely fitting, untucked shirts and paint splattered trousers, and Alhaitham in his neatly tailored tops and pants, every button firmly fastened and every loose end tucked tidily away. Kaveh would turn, as would Alhaitham, the two of them with their backs almost to the walls as they crossed paths. Sometimes, their chests or their arms would brush, and Kaveh would utter an apology Alhaitham never mirrored. Perhaps it seemed rude, ill-mannered, but he was too lost in controlling the temptation of that sweetly iron soaked scent – the distant thrum of his blood in his veins.

Alhaitham returned home those early mornings doused in a scarlet that drew a fondness to his thoughts now.

It had been months, how many he wasn’t entirely certain, time had long since become something he chose to ignore. Kaveh still didn’t know by then. Alhaitham worried on that a few times, wondered how he hadn’t figured it out when he was clearly smart enough to, and drew the conclusion that Kaveh cared so little for him that his whereabouts and wrongdoings didn’t seem to register. That was fine in its own way, Alhaitham didn’t need to be liked to like in return. The hunger was becoming a bothersome task though, to always excuse himself in the evenings as if he had somewhere important to be only to instead bore himself into a second death wandering the poorly lit, far away streets of the city to try and find something – someone – he could feed on. Eventually he had become complacent, at least that was what he thought it was. In truth, maybe, he had been slipping up because he wanted an easy out – a way for Kaveh to find out what he was, an instance that Alhaitham could frame as an accident, removing all the guilt from himself for dropping such a bombshell of a thought on the other. He supposed that was how it had happened. Carelessness and the opposite in perfect sync.

“What are you doing?” Kaveh had breathed the words, shuddering and light, as he stood in the rickety old doorway that led out into the spacious expanse of their lusciously green garden. It was cold, the night dark and the wind soft but chilling. Kaveh clutched at the robes he wore, shivering as bare feet tentatively stepped out onto the flat stone of their pathway. “Alhaitham–”

He was stooped over a lump; a wheezing, distressed sounding lump, and with every second that passed the rattling gasps of encroaching death escaped the prey below him. It hadn’t been human, at least. Still it was shameful in a sense, how ravenous he’d been to the point that he was dripping with the evidence of his hunger. In the blackness of night the red wasn’t clear, but the darkness that smeared across his mouth, the heat he felt dripping down his chin, was damning even in the shadows. Alhaitham didn’t have to breathe, didn’t need to do much beyond exist in stillness, but the habit of pretending all this time had collected in him to the point that now, panicked and suddenly seen, he pants quietly with the horror he expected to see reflected back at him as he looks over his shoulder to the man behind him.

Kaveh’s eyes widen, that much is visible, but he doesn’t scream nor retreat, he barely even stutters in his breathing, Alhaitham notes. There’s a clumsily frightened moment where his legs seem to shake but he steadies himself commendably and then, suddenly, he’s kneeling just behind where Alhaitham is. The smell of iron must have been overwhelming, the man’s nose wrinkling as though to confirm the thought as Alhaitham watches how he swallows a rising lump in his throat. A hand, warm and gentle, slides over the man’s shoulder. He’s careful, understanding in his touch and yet still so acutely aware that he’s counting on the kindness of a predator now. Alhaitham steadies himself to match the calmness Kaveh exudes, hands dropping the viscera coating his fingers in sticky, heated blood. The sloppily loud sound of it meeting the soaked grass beneath was grotesque in the otherwise haunting silence.

There are no words, not at first. Kaveh only watches him, the color of his eyes gone in the darkness of the unlit world; Alhaitham misses them. His gaze dances, up and down, side to side, taking in every aspect of Alhaitham like this. In something of a rush he pats himself down, making a small sound of frustration until he finds what he was looking for. From his pocket he drew a silky looking handkerchief and it was so like him, so unexpectedly reliable, to have something like that now, as the small hours of morning approached. Alhaitham feels like he might flinch when the fabric touches him, when Kaveh strokes it softly against the mess of his face, soaking up all the blood that he could. He can’t tell if he does, numb to the actions of his own self in this odd moment, but he’s certain the drag of the fabric is only making the stains worse, the dry material must be smudging red across his dark skin until there was nothing left to do with it, but still Kaveh persisted. Alhaitham doesn’t blink, doesn’t move, forgets all those habits from before and only recovers a semblance of the distant hint of humanity when Kaveh offers a smile. A smile. Alhaitham wants to laugh, wishes he could find the motivation to do so.

“Do you need help?” Kaveh murmurs and Alhaitham feels all that frustration well up inside of him again – When would he learn? When would the altruism end? When he was dead because of it? His head whips to the side, turning away from the blond and his handkerchief. “Let me.”

“No.” He replies, curt and forceful as his form hunches over the carcass of the deer below him. There was a territorial look to it, something left over from his instincts, but really he only wanted to shield it from the other. He would form a barrier of himself if he had to, to keep the horrors wrought by the blood he’d drawn from seeping into the tanned softness of Kaveh’s skin.

“Yes.” And it’s so familiar, this back and forth. Even as the mismatched roommates they were, seemingly meant to disagree, they still insisted on finding the time to argue incessantly about their differing worldviews as if it were enriching, as if it brought them joy to bother one another so much. Kaveh insisted it was good to help all those that needed it, no matter the cost. Alhaitham insisted he was a fool, kindhearted perhaps, but destined to find himself losing everything to it. Somehow, beneath the fundamental differences, they couldn’t quite find it within themselves to hate one another. On the contrary, at least for Alhaitham, he’d grown irrevocably fond in just these few short months.

Kaveh’s presence fades then, the warmth he emanates disappearing so that Alhaitham is left only with the sickly humidity that radiates from the animal below him. The padding of bare feet dissipates into the distance, then does the opposite when he returns. Alhaitham hadn’t thought he would – return that is, and if his heart still beat it might have thumped audibly in his chest at the idea. The weight of a blanket falling around his shoulders startles him more than anything else. It was so resoundingly human, such a thing to do for someone that had spent who knows how long outside in the night chill. He does laugh slightly then, a sound detached and slight; it stutters to a stop when the tips of Kaveh’s fingers ghost softly against the top of his head, hair subtly moist with the dewy air of the evening.

“Where do you usually get rid of these?” Alhaitham’s silent at the question, petulantly so, but Kaveh persists, crouching with ease beside his similar form and he continues. “I assume this isn’t the first time – I had thought you odd, Alhaitham, but this really exceeds expectation.”

“Is this the time for jokes?” He murmurs, tasting the last remaining remnants of his meal on his tongue and stuck between his sharpened teeth. Kaveh smiles, head tilted sweetly, as though they were speaking over a warm cup of coffee, and not the rapidly stinking body of an unlucky creature.

“I’m not joking.”

“Inappropriate jovial statements fall into the same category.” He deadpans, raising a hand to roughly wipe the back of it against his mouth. They were beyond polite movements now.

They had remained like that for a while that night, locked in a battle of wits neither of them could lose – Kaveh determined to help whom he deemed needy and Alhaitham destined to never accept it. It was only when light began to peek over the horizon, the sun inquisitively staring down, warm and bright, upon the carnage in their garden, that either of them slowed their arguments. The blood stains upon his dark skin and his beige, loose shirt, had become obvious. The red was startling, like paint it covered him thickly, splattered across him in wild streaks. If not for the smell he imagined it might have been possible to convince him that was all it was, that perhaps under Kaveh’s influence he had taken up artistry. Still, Kaveh didn’t falter. There was a queasiness in his voice that gradually worsened but it seemed due to that stench of iron, and the visage of the animal torn asunder below them both, rather than Alhaitham. Small victories, he supposed, ignoring how large it truly was, how world defining this acceptance would be.

He let Kaveh help him wrap the carcass eventually but he wasn’t allowed to accompany him to where he disposed of the creature, somewhere deep in the woods, somewhere bones littered the floor and silence echoed in a way that might make a mortal’s stomach ache, and their head spin, a quiet that was unnatural in the thick shrubs and heavy hanging leaves. Humans had long since learned to never wander here, Alhaitham would not show it to Kaveh, either.

At home that morning he’d let Kaveh sit him on a stool in their backyard beneath the sheltering shade of the ruined structure that had once been a greenhouse. He’d allowed him to dunk buckets of warm water over his head and sat miserably as hands too gentle for the beast he tamed scrubbed the staining suspicion of red from his skin. Long fingers had cupped his chin and Alhaitham had looked up, surprisingly docile, through the dampness of his hair that stuck uncomfortably pin straight to his face. Kaveh had drawn the soap against his cheek as he spoke.

“I won’t ask more than I need to know.” Alhaitham had felt how his stationary chest had clenched at the tender understanding present in Kaveh’s voice, the emptiness inside feeling instead an odd fullness. “But if we’re to continue living together then I don’t want to idly sit by whilst you go out of your way to struggle when you needn’t.”

“What is that supposed to mean?” He inquires against his better judgement, an inkling of something clawing at the back of his mind but the way Kaveh rubs the soft towel against his face distracts him.

“I mean, I was here the whole time.” Alhaitham’s worst fears had been realized so quickly, then. “Must you eat an entire deer to be satisfied?”

“No, but –”

“Then don’t. I can help you –”

“Kaveh. Do you insist on being a fool?” His hand had shot up to catch the other’s hand, perhaps firmer than he had meant or needed to. Kaveh seemed not to be bothered even if it had staggered him to silence for a moment. He stared down with as much force as Alhaitham offered him in return. “This isn’t offering to carry that old woman’s bags miles to the other side of the city, nor is it closing up for a shop you’ve never once worked for. This is dangerous. I’m a monster, if I lose control –”

“You won’t.” Kaveh says with certainty, and Alhaitham had been so wrought with surprise that he’d let the thin wrist in his grasp go easily then. He found he missed the steady calm of Kaveh’s pulse against his fingers after.

“You’re being ridiculous. Purposefully stubborn. Infuriating.” He stood, swatting away any further attempts to clean him up. It was good enough as it was, and he had no desire to hear more of this argument. The light had been too much by then, anyway, and Alhaitham chose the tranquility of his home rather than the stinging burn of the sun – either of them.

It had been another few months of this. Another painful set of weeks of Kaveh watching him more intently, making note of all he did, offering himself as if a prime rack of meat for the taking – for tasting. Alhaitham clenched his fists each time, felt how his nails dug with consistent stinging into the softness of his own palms before he decided he’d had enough and left the room, angrier each time, without a word to be heard. After the last time, it had taken a while for Kaveh to try again, the slamming of the door behind the vampire had echoed through the halls for what had felt like hours. Alhaitham had long since noticed the quietness that overtook him before he’d broach the topic, had committed to memory the way Kaveh would worry his lower lip until it ached and reddened.

“Are we going to do this again?” Alhaitham didn’t even look up from his book, one practiced finger flipping the page with as little movement as possible.

Kaveh had stiffened where he sat at the nearby desk, positioned neatly under one of the large stained glass windows of their living room (during the day the colored glass helped keep the sunlight dim), hands stilling against the paper he carefully plotted exteriors across.

“Do what?” He mumbles, the guilt in his voice exceedingly obvious and something about it was staggeringly endearing. Alhaitham did well, he thought, not to give into it immediately.

“Ask. Go ahead.” Another slow turn of a page as he listened to Kaveh’s chair screeching backwards across the hardwood floor, pushing himself away from his work so that he might better argue his point now.

“It’s just – It’s so –” Alhaitham doesn’t have to look at him to feel how his hands gesture wildly, likely with a pencil and ruler in tow as often was the case. His voice dripped with unrepentant frustration, built up and furious after all this time. “I already told you, multiple times, that it’s completely alright. Why can’t it be? You’ve bitten other people.”

“Those are other people, strangers, and you should know by now the people of the town aren’t exactly kind to me, nor do they care to change that.” He finally closes the heavy cover of his book, glancing up as he leans back into his soft seat, relaxing his stiff posture as he stares at the other. “Besides that, you’re under no obligation to offer me such an extreme favor, nor am I obligated to accept. You are only my roommate, that’s all.”

That earns him an angered stamping of feet before Kaveh stands suddenly, pointing the wooden ruler right into Alhaitham’s face for a moment before it swings wildly to the side again. “More important than a stranger, yet just a roommate – listen to yourself! You make so little sense, it’s maddening. There’s no good reason to refuse.”

“I don’t need a good reason, I need only to say no.” Alhaitham tilts his head as if to infer the end of the argument. Kaveh’s hands lift as he drops the ruler with a loud metallically uncomfortable clang against the floor. Long fingers rake from his blond hair as he groans his annoyance into the air. Alhaitham stays calmly seated as he was.

Kaveh huffs, then turns suddenly, hands scrambling across the slanted expanse of his drawing desk until he finds just what he had been looking for. Alhaitham recognizes it as soon as Kaveh turns around, triumphant with the object in his grasp. A knife, thin and small, the kind he used to cut out small tests of his designs, or to score folds into his work when necessary. Alhaitham had borrowed it on occasion to open his letters more easily – Kaveh always hated that.

“Don’t.” Alhaitham warned, low and rumbling, no one alive (or otherwise) dense enough not to see what Kaveh’s plan was here.

“You told me,” He points the sharpened tip toward Alhaitham, then towards his own arm. “That your saliva can heal small wounds, thin ones. That’s how you do it – how you don’t kill them.”

“Kaveh –” His voice catches on a hitching of breath he didn’t need to take, a startling rush of something he hadn’t felt in years when that little knife dented perfect skin. He was on his feet before he knew it.

It wasn’t difficult to wrestle the instrument from mortal hands, even less so to fling it across the room with a grunt of only partial exertion. It sticks, almost comically so, into the flimsy plastering of a far wall, tearing through the wallpaper and leaving an ugly gash in its wake when it does finally drop into gravity’s hold, clattering against the floor.

“I am not entertaining your flippancy anymore. This need to diminish yourself for the sake of others, to use up every inch of your own self to help them. I’ve respected your desire to be good, infuriating as it is, but I have had enough.” His voice never raises, but the sternness in it is palpable. One large hand grips firmly at where Kaveh had held the sharp metal and with force, though purposefully careful not to hurt him, Alhaitham pulls him to the side, watching as he tumbles into the softness of the waiting couch. Kaveh makes a sound, something akin to a sharp inhale as though winded as his body thumps heavily into the cushions. Alhaitham sees how it shakes him, how it dazes him for a moment as he leans himself into the plushness that had cushioned his fall. Even just this second of carelessness, this manhandling that went against all his instincts with the architect, made Alhaitham sick.

“You hold no value for your own safety.” He turns now, too. Turns so that he could look at that man forcibly reclined across the seat, how he stares up at the other in confusion and sulking silence. “You are careless, you have no thoughts of securing your own well being before others.” His heavier form seats itself at the edge of the chair, hands delicately grasping at Kaveh’s arm again. With one hand he holds his, balancing the warmth of his palm atop the coldness of his own, noting how even here he can feel the beating of his pulse – the badge of life he wears so well. Alhaitham’s other hand glides up along the smooth expanse of his forearm, fingers diving under the loose billowing cotton of his sleeve to draw it up higher, scandalously far to the eyes of anyone else, until all the fabric bunched up uselessly around Kaveh’s shoulder. He still looked bemused, a stern gaze locked on Alhaitham that grows hazy as he feels the touches – cool as marble, yet careful as a friend.

“If you wish to put your life in my hands, then I no longer have the patience to convince you otherwise.” He turns the man’s arm over, the underside of his wrist on full display now and the stuttering in Kaveh’s chest does not go unnoticed by the trained ear of Alhaitham. He sighs, quietly and to himself, the excitement will not last, he warns Kaveh from his mind, acutely aware and distantly grateful of how he would never hear those thoughts himself. “I daresay I will take better care of you than you ever have.”

His thumb draws firm and searching over the unblemished column of Kaveh’s wrist until he finds the strongest pulsing throb, where heat pools and Alhaitham’s throat clenches with anticipation. He shouldn’t do this, he shouldn’t give in – but Kaveh had made it more than easy to, and he loathed him for it, just for now.

“For a moment, it will hurt.”

“Only a moment? Won’t it–” Kaveh’s voice pitches into a sharp yelp as fangs draw light across his skin, then pierce it without restraint.

Alhaitham feels from within how he shudders, how his body convulses once with the shock of the incision his teeth make, that sting of pain that throbs for a moment or two, then subsides.

That first touch of blood to his tongue is like magic. Like oil to a flame, he ignites. There’s all he would expect, a flooding, sticky warmth and the familiar tang of iron, but there’s more, too. So much more. Kaveh holds within him all the delicate notes of taste that Alhaitham had forgotten could exist. There was something light, airy and sweet, something sharp and like citrus, and beneath it all a deep, velvety richness that made him sigh into the dampness that swelled around his lips. He had been so certain, so set on being gentle, polite, and restrained, he would sip as carefully as was necessary. Yet here, now, with the taste of Kaveh on his tongue and in his throat, he hungered so painfully, so fervently, in ways he could never hope to fulfill. He gasped as he sucked, gulped himself full as if he had never fed before – as if this were his first night turned, dining desperately upon Kaveh as though he were his first and last meal all at once.

“Haitham –” That melodically sweet voice cuts through the frenzy, stirring him somewhere back to calm as he laps soothingly across the bites, retracting his teeth now so he might only suckle at the blood that flows free and messy. “Why –” He sighs breathily into the air, free hand reaching to grasp softly at the back of the other’s neck as he greedily sucks at his wrist. “Why does it feel good?”

Alhaitham groans against his flesh, against the limb he holds so tightly in his grasp he feared that in the morning there might be inelegant bruises littered upon bronzed skin. He was ashamed. There were no specifics, in truth he was embarrassed of it all – his desperation, his brutishness, how sloppily blood dripped around his mouth onto his lap. How he failed to explain in full the effects his fangs could create, how like any good hunter he had a myriad of tricks and tools to lull his prey into sweet, secure dependency. Of course, it wasn’t the intent with Kaveh, but he couldn’t turn off what he was, all the horrible things he could do. So he silently drank himself into a deliciously delirious stupor, letting Kaveh whimper and whine against the loveseat as a cool tongue spread his blood far and wide across his wrist, greedily consuming every drop that fell from him until it was enough – too much. Kaveh was dizzily limp beside him now, though still conscious, head lolling to the side, skin hidden beneath a warmly pink blush that spread without cease across his skin now.

Alhaitham stared at him from over his arm, dumbfounded and foolish, his face smeared with scarlet that matched the eyes that watched him in turn. They were framed by darkened lashes, heavy and fluttering with every weakened gasp he took. High curved cheeks are covered with the tousled, disheveled layers of his hair – golden and shining. It sticks to him, curls over his skin and splays over dark green fabric below. His lips, pink and glossy even now, were parted and soft, and tempting in ways his blood had never been. Alhaitham resists, as he hadn’t done when confronted with the promise of being well fed, and ignores the emptiness in his own chest in favor of saving the distant thrumming in Kaveh’s.

It’s easy to maneuver him like this, easy to handle him when he was so pliantly drained of what fueled him. Kaveh was surprisingly light in his arms despite the dappling of lean muscle across his long limbs. Alhaitham adjusts him, carefully lifting him from the couch that was large but still too small for a comfortable night’s sleep. He’s carefully cocooned in his arms as he wanders up the creaking, twisting staircase. It’s akin to drunkenness, what afflicts him now, a drowsy kind of haze, Kaveh’s head resting against a firm shoulder and Alhaitham can feel – tortuously – how every slow breath leaves the parted pink of his lips, warm and ticklish against his steel skin.

The hallways are dim, hauntingly dark at night with only the sparse lamps to light them. The grandeur had long since been worn away, even long before Alhaitham had staked his claim upon the house. There were remnants of gold and vibrant greens and turquoise that hid beneath layers of peeling wallpaper and dusty, unsaturated patches of damp. The thrill of the decor was gone, it’s luster forgotten – or it had been. There were notes of its return, here and there, small decorative items that had begun to pop up, scattered across the shelves that were stacked with Alhaitham’s books, or otherwise empty. Kaveh’s doing, unless there was an interior inclined fairy living in the thin shuddering spaces of their walls.

Alhaitham has to gently back up against the door to the architect’s room, leaning slightly to nudge the shaky handle down so the door might swing open for him. The creak is jolting, the slow eerie sound loud in the otherwise quiet surroundings. Kaveh’s room is messier than one might expect, given his proclivity for design. There are papers pinned to two of the walls, the parchment covered in impressive displays of design and astounding artistic talent. Alhaitham doesn’t have the time to dawdle, no time to wander the edges of the room full of furniture distressed with time but repaired with love – a state to which he could only half relate.

“Are you full?” Kaveh slurs softly as he’s laid out on his bed, Alhaitham easing the thin blanket up over his still clothed body. He was done taking risks for today.

“Yes.” He lies as easily as a man whose entire existence was a mystery as yet unproven could; there was no sating this hunger they had started within him now. Kaveh smiles to himself as he burrows down into the comfort of his pillows, Alhaitham hardly noticing when his hand reaches to brush the blond back from his forehead, to steal himself a last look at that face – so proud of himself, he was. “Foolish” He murmurs to himself as he lets the silken hair go again, but the whisper is soaked heavily with damning affection.

The next day Kaveh is scratching more thin ink in surreally straight lines, arms braced intensely against the slanted top of his desk. Alhaitham lounges on the loveseat, as he had done before. His eyes close, unwittingly, a byproduct of his strange waking hours due to his situation. When they flutter open again, heavy and tired, he sees a shape – a silhouette – shadowed ahead of him. Kaveh had moved; Alhaitham wondered how long he had dozed. A hand is reached out slightly, shading his eyes from the light that pools from the multicolored panes of the window behind the architect. His slight frame leans, his free hand holding himself up as a sudden flush of color aches across his skin when Alhaitham catches his gaze, there was no mistaking his awakeness now.

Kaveh’s voice is soft when he speaks, a whisper of sweetly tender proportions. “I thought the sunlight hurt your kind.”

“It aches.” Alhaitham says, his voice low in turn. “Like a stretched muscle. It’s dull, at first, but it builds the longer we’re exposed.”

Kaveh hums a sound, inquisitive still but understanding the limits he should hold to his curiosity and Alhaitham only realizes just how terribly soothing the noise is once it’s gone. He gazes up into the dimness offered by Kaveh’s still raised hand and gently, with his own fingers, he presses against the edge of the cuff of Kaveh’s sleeves – above where his lips had ventured against heated skin only the night before. The light shifts, beams of it now directly lighting his sharply carved features.

“I can pull the curtains for you.” Kaveh offers, already turning as if he might stand but Alhaitham is faster, of course he is. His fingers grasp softly around the slim offering of the wrist he knew so well now and he halts the movement.

“No. No, I can feel the warmth. It’s pleasant. Besides that, I –” Kaveh glances over his shoulder, looking down at the relaxed form of Alhaitham patiently, waiting for what he might say with an expectant raise of his brows. The way the refracted light, in all the colors of the stained glass, glitters against the gold that falls from his head, laying across his shoulders in waves as soft as clouds, has the vampire sighing a sound he had no intention of making a mere second ago. “I shouldn’t like to lose the sun so early.”

Kaveh smiles, and time doesn’t feel so long after all. Alhaitham lets the fragile width of his wrist go then, subtly reluctant when the man lifts himself from his perch at the edge of the soft green seat. He stretches as if it had been him who had stolen a wink of a nap that day, long and lithe, lit from behind by that large arched window and the midday sun that poured out of it. The thin fabric of his shirt is illuminated through by the light, and Alhaitham can see how it makes him glow from within, how every inch of Kaveh’s figure is shining at the edges. He wonders, then, who had broken off this perfect crumb of heaven and thrown it to the hungry here on earth; who had sent the willful goodness of an angel to live with the monstrous whims of the devil.

It’s dark and he’s in the garden again. His feet are bare, damp with the rain that splatters ceaselessly against him, and he’s ravenous; his hands are smeared with scarlet and even as he gorges himself on the bitter blood of a wild boar his mind sinfully cries for Kaveh, Kaveh, Kaveh. In Alhaitham’s mind all he can see is gold and bronze, the perfect expanses of tanned skin blushed with rosy pinks as all the life inside him rushes to the surface. He could imagine the taste, the full bodied flavor that made him salivate with maddening desire, but he could never quite grasp it. There was no masking the inadequacy of what slithered stickily between his fingers and teeth now. He lapped at it anyway – greedily, forcefully, desperately he ate, as if doing it with such ferocity might hide the emptying ache that still settled in his gut.

As red spirals down the toned expanse of his forearm, twisting along the column until it begins to seep into the white of his shirt, Alhaitham’s mind follows. Warmth soaks his mouth, coats his tongue with iron, fills his belly with the scarlet he had come to covet so dearly. He imagined Kaveh flooded with it. How the tips of his hair, darkened with brown, might drip instead with crimson. He thought of him, beautiful and clean, stretched long and curving, splayed out atop puddles of sticking, clammy, Cabernet red. Alhaitham could sink his teeth into anything, any part, he could pierce his way along a tender thigh or glide his tongue from the pounding throb at his chest to the thrumming beat in his throat. The Kaveh in Alhaitham’s mind was sweet as a berry, fit to bursting with all the glory of life, and then he was void of it. He was pallid and limp, splayed in all the wrong ways – broken and twisted and empty. Alhaitham gags around the blood that floods his throat, coughs against the sickly metallic syrup as it trickles back out over his lips. He couldn’t wretch as he once might have, but he felt the need nonetheless, the desire to upheave all that settled in his darkness now.

When the sun begins to pinken the sky he wanders to the woods, heavy carcass in tow, and returns an hour later.

He washes his hands methodically in the large copper sink in the kitchen, hearing how the squeaking coil of the tap sounds in the silence when it was only him. It was still barely morning outside as he watched darkness meekly simmer in its last moments before dawn through the thin fabric of gossamer curtains. He stalks his way through the steady stillness of his home afterwards, reliving for a single moment how it felt to be so decidedly alone; he almost startles when he turns the corner into the secluded staircase and finds candlelight held aloft, and the crimson that screamed his crimes back at him.

“Kaveh –”

“You didn’t call on me.” He states, plain and simple, as it had been. There’s a sulking nature to it too, but Alhaitham chooses to ignore that side of him for the moment. He was shamefully weak to it, after all. “I thought we had finally agreed that I would help.”

“That was a mistake, I had thought you might come to your senses after. You needn’t do anything more.” Alhaitham offers, taking one step up, closing the gap between their bodies, hearing how the sound of Kaveh’s heartbeat grows one breath louder with the distance closed.

“I want to.” He fights back, taking a step backwards, up one higher, as if he meant only to maintain this subtle chasm between them. He could look down on Alhaitham like this, after all, further up the staircase as he was.

“Well, I'm finished, so we don’t need to waste another moment speaking on it.” He moves again, two steps this time and it is only by the grace of his dexterous gifts that the swinging movement of Kaveh’s candle in its silver plate doesn’t catch him alight. He’s angry, that much is clear, pretty brows furrowed over the fire that lightens the red of his eyes. Alhaitham found it difficult to take in that scarlet now, hard to stomach whilst iron still flavored his lips.

“Are you full?” He asks, and it isn’t proud like it had been that night last week. It wasn’t joyful nor simmering with a hope of being useful; it was angered and dejected, suffering through the anguish of being left out, ignored.

“Yes.” Alhaitham lies, again, and there is a silence that settles over them, attention that he loathes as much as Kaveh is sure to loathe him in that moment.

“Then,” Kaveh takes another step backwards, turning his body so that it is held flat with his back to the wall. “Next time.”

Alhaitham trudges up the steps, brushing past him and feeling only the slither of warmth that he could without making a show of driving their bodies together at once.

“Next time.” He murmurs, hands flexing by his sides as if it might distract his mind from the images that plagued him; bronzed then pale, clean then bloodied, whole then asunder.

He reaches his door, hand firmly on the rounded handle when Kaveh’s voice echoes from his place still among the ghostly creaking of the steps. His candle flickers by his face, warm and bright, a single pinprick of light in the shadow of the stairwell.

“Promise me.” He doesn’t ask but he demands, his voice strong in the heavy silence.

Alhaitham pauses, ceasing the screeching of the metal in his door that had long been neglected of the oil that might fix it. He wants to speak, he’s sure he does. He wishes that he were another man who might easily make that promise, and he wondered if with enough delusion he might convince himself that one day Kaveh might thank him for his restraint, but it was clear there was no chance of that; the only person he had yet found who could rival the stubbornness he held was standing a few paces behind him now.

“Next time.” is all Alhaitham can offer, another quiet repetition of their earlier exchange. The door closes with an echoing click behind him then, and he hears nothing more.

He doesn’t sleep. He should, but he can’t. There’s a plague in his mind, a buzzing he can’t get rid of that keeps him up. He hears a distant fluttering sound later in the day from his window and he wanders to it. Sitting in the bay that’s scattered with cushions he lifts a hand to brush the curtains aside. That rush of sunlight stings momentarily but he grits his teeth against it. Below he first sees only flashes and flutterings of white, pure as the absence of anything, then gold. Kaveh walks between the fabrics that catch in the wind. He reaches up to brush a hand through them as he stills, head tilting back with his eyes closed to the world. The honeyed tan of his skin was saturated and delightfully warm; his hair like threads of spun gold, glittering in the ceaseless light. He must be basking in it, that warmth and chill combined, how the wind must soothe the burn of day. Like this, like a sunflower tilting towards its heated god, Kaveh looked at home. Beneath the brightness of day he glowed and shined, like a coin, or a jewel, something precious and worth the world itself. He belonged, Alhaitham lamented. He belonged nowhere else but here, caught beneath the gaze of the sun, for all eternity. He was day, where Alhaitham was night, the sun in blue against the moon in black. It was a miracle they had met as they did, it felt as if they were never destined to again, that their paths would always cross so sparingly until there was no more road left to travel.

He drew the curtain back across with a rattling scrape and brought himself back to bed for the rest of the day, sleepless and aching.

The next week is awful, in truth. Kaveh is impossibly sulking and petulant – he knows he’s been lied to, knows he’s been thrown to the side, and he won’t let Alhaitham rest until the slight is fixed. The criminal himself refuses to do so, though, and so they are at an unpalatable stalemate of long silences and stomping footsteps. The worst of it comes when exactly on the seventh day since his last feed Kaveh leans over the back of the couch, arms crossed so his cheek could lean against them as he peers down at Alhaitham’s laid back form; he was lost in his book for a moment before the firm curiosity of the gaze could no longer be ignored. He rests the still open pages against his chest and peers back, just as openly and just as sternly.

“Have you chosen to speak to me yet, or is this merely an excuse to gaze upon me until you tire of it?” The question earns him nothing more than a huffing of irritated air and Alhaitham is within his rights, he thinks, to return to his book without further aggravation. He’s about to do so when Kaveh begins to move.

He saunters around the loveseat, draws long fingers along the curving wooden design at its peak, and follows it all the way to the arm that Alhaitham’s head rests upon. He stalls there for a moment, hands braced on either side of the grey tousled mess of hair and he looks down so that Alhaitham can see him, tilting his own head back so that his teal eyes can follow the trail of skin from Kaveh’s jaw to his throat. He shouldn’t have, it only awakens that gnawing hunger that sits deeper, somewhere unreachable, than his stomach.

“Will you eat tonight?” He asks, and it’s the first real taste of his voice Alhaitham has received in days. “It’s been a week.”

“I’m aware.” He mutters, preoccupied with how Kaveh’s shirt had been left unbuttoned down to his chest – improper, really. Alhaitham wasn't stupid though, not blind to exactly what this was, despite how Kaveh might try to insist on occasion. “I am undecided.”

“Aren’t you hungry?” Kaveh asks again, and his voice is like honey now. It was no harm to indulge in the sound of it, at least.

“Are you so motivated to be killed?”

“At least I’m willing.” Kaveh steps around to the side of him now, sitting with less grace than he usually afforded himself. Alhaitham’s too taken aback by the words to notice the action. The fingers he rests atop the book on his chest tense, pressing roughly into the coarse fabric of the bound novel’s cover. The sights that haunted his mind like unwelcome spirits flooded in again as Kaveh stared at him with poorly concealed frustration. He adds, as if it might help. “It didn’t hurt.”

“There needn’t be physical pain to enact lasting damage.” He lifts the still open book from his chest and snaps it shut with a sound that makes the other startle, the crimson of his gaze following the novel as it’s tossed to the ground beside their shared seat. Alhaitham sits up now, easily, and the both of them are lost for a moment in the sudden intensity of their shared stare – of how the distance had been so cleanly removed from between them. Kaveh’s breath is warm, and his heartbeat loud, and Alhaitham has to fight the hypnotizing, consistent beat of it within his ears. “Willing or not, I do not wish pain upon you.”

“I’d rather it were me, than them.” He inclines his head to the wall, front then back – human or animal, Alhaitham supposed he was gesturing on behalf of both.

“A ridiculous sentiment they likely do not share. Is there nothing you won’t give up for the sake of others?”

There’s a pause, Kaveh opening his mouth just slightly before closing it again. He begins his habit, teeth chewing softly on the curve of his lower lip as he worries away at his thoughts. Alhaitham waits, patient as he ever was, still as stone and stubborn as an ox. If there were an answer, he would hear it.

“I can think of one thing.” Kaveh murmurs, his shoulder slumping subtly as he sighs around the words. Alhaitham tuts, tongue heavy against his teeth.

“One? Alive as you are, there should be hundreds.” He sees how Kaveh’s brows crumple into a frown, as if Alhaitham hadn’t understood him, but he was used to that by now and he paid the frustration evident in the glittering scarlet of his eyes now little mind.

“Drink the blood, Alhaitham.” The outstretching of his arm is sudden, the back of his hand thumping down against a broad shoulder; Alhaitham feels the weight of it, feels how suddenly the side of Kaveh’s hand brushes against his cold throat – how the scent of him wafts so sweetly up into Alhaitham’s hungered senses. “As little or as much as you want. Do it for me, because I asked, because I will not watch you suffer away alone – I will not stand another night of you hating yourself in the dark, over another animal’s body.”

His hand has lifted, when he doesn’t know, but he can feel now how his fingers draw along the softness of Kaveh’s bared arm, starting from where his sleeves had been rolled up to his elbows in obvious preparation.

“So you would have me hating myself over you, instead?” He lets his hand wrap possessively around the other man’s wrist, feeling how the jutting bone of it digs into his palm. Kaveh’s breath hitches in a way so obvious Alhaitham wonders if he had meant for it to be.

“Yes.” He’s so certain when he says it that it’s endearing when it shouldn’t be. His voice doesn’t shake, and neither does his body as Alhaitham’s lips curl back and his fangs elongate, head turning so the sharpened tips of them could draw grating lines across Kaveh’s arm. He doesn’t break the skin, yet, only irritates it. “A burden shared is a burden lessened.”

“Foolish.” Alhaitham mumbles, hand pushing against warm skin until it presses to his mouth.

“So you tell me, so very often.” Kaveh whispers before he bites back the yelping cry that threatened to escape as teeth sink piercing and rough into the waiting flesh of him.

Alhaitham shivers around the sigh that escapes against Kaveh’s wrist, lost in sudden ecstasy to the taste, the rush of flavors he’d only been able to dream of since that first offering, the thick glide of blood against his lips that was still warm, still sweet, still willing. When that first sting passes and Alhaitham’s mouth covers the wounds, the tell tale sigh leaves Kaveh, too. He melts in ways he shouldn’t, goes pliant and sugar coated where he sits. Alhaitham lets him fall into him, lets their bodies twist and settle until Kaveh’s back is heated and squirming against his chest. He can’t sit still, he can’t stop writhing and hiccuping sounds Alhaitham wished he didn’t have to hear; he adored them, of course, but it only made the void that grew in him wider, darker, deeper. He wanted for more with every gulp, with every sound, after each subtle brush of skin. Like the moon longed for the sun, reverent beneath the glow it offered, Alhaitham reached for Kaveh even when he pushed him away.

The width of his tongue draws in steady, practiced movements across Kaveh’s tanned wrist until the gouged holes left by Alhaitham’s fangs heal without a blemish left behind. That odd desire sparks within him again, that need for something to remain. He squashes it down, deeper than he thought might be possible. A droplet of thick crimson that remained uneaten dribbled slowly from the disappeared wound, sliding slow, uninterrupted, down the expanse of Kaveh’s arm. Alhaitham stretches the limb long, lifts it high and watches with intensity how the sphere rolls lower, towards his elbow. It left a trail of smudged red in its wake and eventually Alhaitham pulls his arm close, curving it around his head so that Kaveh might grasp at his hair for comfort, or balance, as he buries his face into the temptation of skin. His lips part, eager and chilled as they were, around the spot the droplet had stilled, and he sucks. He knows that within seconds it’s gone, swallowed with the rest, but he lingers, rolls his tongue across the subtle saltiness that remains, a thin sheen of sweat apparent on Kaveh’s form now.

His lashes, full and dark, flutter above the teal of his eyes, and that stony gaze flicks to the side, catching how Kaveh’s warmer one follows the movement of his mouth. He draws it up along the smooth expanse of skin, feeling how muscle tenses below him. He’s tender with it, calculated and purposefully torturous, tongue following the line left by that singular drip of blood. What should have taken seconds takes minutes, Alhaitham letting the very tip of his tongue dance against Kaveh until the man is whining, panting softly against his ear as if there were no such thing as shame left between them. It’s too much, it’s not enough; Alhaitham’s overwhelmed by the sound, by the quickened heat of breath against his skin, and when he’s done – blood licked clean from Kaveh’s arm – he turns, and wishes he hadn’t.

Their noses bump, Kaveh’s eyes catching the light as Alhaitham’s find them. They’re too close, yet never close enough. If he could, in some morbid way, he wished they could blend themselves – he wished, distantly, that he could crawl into those veins and dissolve into the blood he adored, that he could become something Kaveh carried with him always. That they could become one terrible thing, together. He hadn’t taken as much today, not as starved as he had been before, and so Kaveh is less lost in the daze that settles thickly over him even so. There’s a hint of sharpness – a knowing – to his stare as it flits between Alhaitham’s eyes and the red stained curves of his mouth.

“I think I’d like to kiss you.” Kaveh murmurs with his eyes settling now, vivid and crimson as the color smeared across Alhaitham’s face, on the fierceness of his stare.

“The feeling will pass.” He replies, muscles coiled tight and painful in the tension of the moment. He thinks, if he had one still, his heart would have expanded desperately in his chest at this moment – and broken into a thousand pieces, lacerating every inch of his insides before it pulled itself together again. His expression never changes as he slowly drops his gaze, letting the coolness of teal tear itself away from the warmth of red. “The dizziness, and the delirium, will fade with rest. Just like before, you need to let your body resupply your system. You’re not yourself.”

His hand moves with a gentle care, tugging Kaveh’s from where it rested behind his head so that he could neatly cross the man’s arms across his own waist. Still he could feel the weight of him, how he leans back carelessly into Alhaitham’s firm hold, the beating of his heart loud and strong through the back of his ribs.

“Is that all this is?” Kaveh inquires quietly, calmly, like he really was just curiously unsure of the truth. Alhaitham nods, and doesn't say a word as he tries to adjust them so that he might remove himself from the warmth he was becoming all too familiar with. Kaveh leans back now against the softness of the seat behind him instead, spread out lazily as if he might just have fallen into an afternoon’s nap, as anyone might.
“That’s easier, isn’t it?” He sighs the words, almost slurring them together, eyes beginning to close as drowsiness overtakes him. Alhaitham watches it happen, how his body lulls him to sleep so it might begin to recover his lost liveliness far quicker.

Kneeling beside the couch like this he could feel how the floor began to dig uncomfortably into his knees, but it was far away, useless information to focus on when instead he could fold his arms on plush seat cushions, and let his head tilt upon them as he watches Kaveh sleep. His breathing is slow, even, soothing in the otherwise silent house. His eyes shift subtly behind his eyelids and Alhaitham wishes he could see inside that brilliant mind. He wonders without cease what exactly he thinks about all day – what he dreams of. He wishes, without a hint of selfishness, that he could make them all come true.

They don’t speak of the words the next day. Kaveh hums to himself and smiles when Alhaitham enters the living room, but he doesn’t flush a pretty red nor does he shy away from speaking as he always did. This was good, better – Alhaitham would rather this forced ignorance than a moment of bliss and a lifetime of regret.

He’s placing a cup of steaming coffee onto the table beside Kaveh’s work, still able to remember how to make a decent one despite the years of only pretending, when he notices the fluttering of fabric in the sweetly floral breeze from outside.

“Are these new?” His fingers extend, feeling how the thin lace brushes against them as the wind wills it.

“Mhm. I saw them last week in the window of a store – aren’t they pretty?” Kaveh’s hand reaches just above Alhaitham’s and there’s a moment, sweet and distant, where they might have touched should they have wished to. “The detail work is something, isn’t it? Birds of paradise embroidered perfectly. I thought they’d help with the sunlight, but also to bring something to the space.”

Alhaitham would admit the extra slim layer of material across the stained glass did further help to mute the sting of the light, so much so he felt he could stand here for hours now unbothered. He does glance at him though, brows subtly furrowed in slight concern when he does.

“Are you displeased with the house?”

Kaveh doesn’t shy away from his emotions then, laughing softly as he lets the curtain within his grasp go, hands placing themselves firmly on his hips now instead and Alhaitham was well acquainted with such a pose. It was confidently entertained by his question, yet stubborn in its posture and the belief he had in his own statement to follow.

“I simply think we can do better. It’s seen far kinder days, wouldn’t you agree?” Alhaitham nods once, silently, agreeing even if he could care less what the building looked like – it did its job well enough, didn’t it? “So I added, well… Just a few things. Here and there, you know.”

He gestures vaguely and Alhaitham follows the general movements. He sees the trinkets that had begun to litter a few shelves, those he had been aware of, but now slowly his recognition grows. There’s paintings, small and large, that sit on the walls – streets he knew frozen in time in oils, ones he hadn’t seen before placed beside them. There were extra cushions on the seats, extra cups on his table, and a vase filled with flowers. Fresh, picked within the past day. Bright, lively sunflowers that seemed to glow within the darkened interiors. He hadn’t noticed how within every room, slowly but surely, a little light had begun to creep along the walls. It was as if colour was being reintroduced to his life, one day at a time.

As Kaveh works Alhaitham spends the rest of his afternoon wandering the halls of his own home; he searches, checks every corner long forgotten and devoid of attention or affection – desperate for a glimpse, a hint of Kaveh in each formerly derelict space.

When he returns to the first floor, sometime in the early evening, Kaveh is shrugging on his outer coat. The wool of it is subtly thick and it should shield him well from the cool winds of spring outside. The trees were subtly bare, still waiting for the gift of their fresh buds, Alhaitham knew it would be cold even if he could not feel it himself. It was a long walk into town from here.

“Where are you going?” He hesitates at the foot of the stairs, a hand grasping the banister as if it might soothe the unease he felt, the sudden onset of a distant loneliness.

“Ah, an old friend from the Akademiya has invited me to join them and our other companions for drinks. I won’t be too late, I imagine.” He flicks the hair trapped under his newly donned coat from under the heavy fabric and leans against the bars of the railing Alhaitham clings to the top of. He smiles slightly, head tilted back as the gold of his hair runs over his shoulders like liquid sunshine. “Why don’t you join us?”

It was all guile and charm, and Alhaitham was thoroughly affected by both, but never enough to accept. He shakes his head, silent in his refusal but stern with it despite the lack of words. His eyes remain fixed on Kaveh, his leaning form, his tilted head – the elongated column of his beautiful neck.

“Suit yourself I suppose – don’t complain later, I tried to invite you.” He sighs melancholically, dramatic and slow as if he might persuade him with the overacted sadness he portrayed now. It doesn’t work and Kaveh is quick to realize the fact so he simply smiles again and pushes away from the rickety old wood.

He realizes, horribly, that he doesn’t want him to go. He can’t tell him, he can hardly reconcile the fact with himself. It didn’t have to mean much, it was merely that he no longer knew what this house felt like without another inside of it – what it meant to hear silence, alone. So he says nothing and only watches, forlorn and solitary, as Kaveh swings the large front door closed behind him. The echo of its closing long rings through the house now solemn without his presence to brighten it.

The night stretches into infinity as so many things did for him, yet this was far worse than most of them. He felt mad with it. He paced the creaking wood floors until it angered him, read books he’d bent the spines and corners of until they began to tear they’d been so often handled over the years. For lack of entertainment he ended up standing in the expanse of the gardens, watching the stars that blinked in and out behind the clouds, the moon almost full yet not quite ready yet to show her full transformation this month. He hears eventually, distant but clear with his enhanced sense, a clumsy knock of the metal form against the door.

When he opens it he’s greeted by the smothering scent of alcohol – wine, spirits, beer, there is nothing here left untried or untouched. Kaveh hangs between two forms Alhaitham recognized only from passing them in the town’s confines a few times. They smile sheepishly, and he sees now how only a few of the offensive fumes emanate from them.

“He drank too much, we couldn’t bear to watch him try and walk all the way here by himself. Sorry to intrude, we can –”

“I’ll take him.” Alhaitham affirms before they can step a foot inside. They share a glance but nod without much further argument, gently transferring the ragdoll-like form of Kaveh to his arms instead. If they were alarmed by just how easily he holds the pliant body alone where they had needed two, it shows only in the raising of their brows or the widening of their eyes. They say nothing else besides learned pleasantries and meek good nights.

As the door closes and Kaveh is brought in from one darkness to another, from the paleness of the moon to the warmth of candlelight, he laughs to himself. Chuckles and giggles about things the scholar had no understanding of continue to leave Kaveh as Alhaitham drags his clumsy feet to the living room. He steadies Kaveh where he stands and bends down, feeling how the other starts to curve over top of him but as long as he does not fall, he will continue. Alhaitham carefully tucks his fingers into the ankle high tightness of Kaveh’s walking boots, loosening the leather and the tight fastenings of the laces until he could slip off the first one, then move on to the next. There’s something unintentionally intimate about it, he thinks, balking at the idea as his hands, broad and strong, glide up along the fitted thin fabric of Kaveh’s tailored trousers. Kaveh hums a soft, appreciative sound as his soles meet the cool expanse of the wooden floor, his hands firm where they grasped onto Alhaitham’s thicker shoulders. He’s lifted, after, carried deeper into the room without even a single word of complaint, only the incessant mumblings of a drunkard accompanying the travel.

One of Kaveh’s obscenely long, lean legs hangs off the side of the couch where Alhaitham lays him, the other propped up slightly, his bare foot steady on the arm of the seat. His head leans back into that cushion Alhaitham had graciously tucked behind his head, drunkenly lolling to the side now as scarlet eyes try to follow the aforementioned man’s large frame across the room. He wanders, stops eventually, and settles into one of the singular armchairs posed by the fireplace. When his legs cross, one ankle settling atop the other knee, Kaveh points to him clumsily, a subtle slurring around the words he tries so confidently to say.

“Why don’t you ever drink with me?” It’s accusatory in nature, but Alhaitham can tell it’s not just a petulance at being rejected – he wants to know the layers Alhaitham doesn’t show, all the reasoning left unclear.

“I drink plenty.” Alhaitham states firmly, leaning his head against his hand, elbow propped up against the velvet covered arm of his chair. “You’ve seen me do it.”

“You know very well what I mean, and it’s not that.” Slim fingers wave to him, trying to dismiss his avoidant nature. “Why don’t you have fun? Be bold, drink wine.” He punctuates the word with an elegant if not over the top flourish of those same fingers.

Alhaitham sighs, fingers rubbing at his temple as he mulls over the question when he really didn’t have to. It was, admittedly, somewhat fun itself making Kaveh wait, whiny and drunk as he was. “It doesn’t work on me anymore.”

“Truly?” Kaveh says with such horror that it’s almost funny and he sits up then, regretting it with a grimace that gradually eases as his body recovers from the nauseating jostling of its equilibrium.

“Yes, truly.” Alhaitham raises his brows slightly then leans back, slow and steady, reclining in his chair – as if he were ever truly that relaxed around the other man. “It only has any semblance of an effect when it’s in blood from someone drunk as yourself. I can taste it, but it’s difficult to feel any kind of joyful high without draining too much, pushing them too far.”

Alhaitham shouldn’t have said anything, he knows that immediately, with how Kaveh’s eyes light up it’s hard not to notice the mistake. He’s moving then, clumsily and on legs like a newborn fawn’s. With some drunken difficulty he staggers his way to Alhaitham and despite the man’s silent protest, sets himself into his lap – at least he tries to. In truth he has simply bent one leg to kneel beside Alhaitham’s, squashed between it and the side of the armchair. He’s still standing on the other, but he’s leaning down, shakily holding up his alcohol infused form with his hands on the sturdy sides of Alhaitham’s seat. They’re close like this, far too much so, and the throb of Kaveh’s intoxicated pulse thrums like a hypnotizing beat inside of Alhaitham’s ears, as if it were emanating from his own mind. When Kaveh smiles in what he must think is a devilishly clever manner but Alhaitham finds only sweetly endearing, drunk and a little lopsided. He feels the gust of his breath against his face and basks in it for a moment – that rush of warm life.

“I want to see that. Alhaitham drunk. You must be quite a sight.” Yes, it had been a bad idea to mention it. Kaveh shifted, his second leg bending so he was all but straddling Alhaitham’s lap. There wasn’t really enough room for them both on this seat but it seemed not to bother him in the slightest. “Let’s try.”

“Kaveh–” Alhaitham tuts loudly, interrupting himself, finally lifting his hands to grab at Kaveh’s when they start unbuttoning the few fastenings at his own collar. “I’m not hungry.”

“Liar.” He huffs out, sulking at the rejection. He was right, too, Alhaitham was lying, he felt like that was all he did these days. There wasn’t a moment that went by where he didn’t hunger in some form – physically, mentally, emotionally. He hadn’t been full a single moment since Kaveh had arrived, even when the warmth of his blood coated his belly it wasn’t the kind of thing he could ever have enough of. He’d felt only a short sense of fulfillment in those seconds his cold lips touched warm skin, when Kaveh – against what Alhaitham thought to be his better judgement – let him pierce soft flesh with sharp teeth.

“Perhaps.” He has no choice but to settle one hand at least against the curved arch of Kaveh’s spine when he leans backwards, frustrated and sighing. If he hadn’t Alhaitham is fairly certain he would have seen him go careening off his lap and onto the hardwood floor instead. As amusing as it might have been he really couldn’t bear to picture the bruises it might leave.

He swings himself forward again, blond hair raining down against Alhaitham’s face as he leans over him. Crimson is dazed and wild, his cheeks reddened with the effects of the alcohol and the thrill of seating himself so readily in another man’s lap no doubt. Kaveh, to Alhaitham’s horror, only seats himself ever more comfortably. His hands shift from himself to him instead, the warmth of his hands bleeding temptingly through the thin dusty beige of his shirt, seeping so deliciously into the skin that lay below. With how they were positioned now, like this, Kaveh’s forehead was all but resting on his own. His hair was like a curtain around them, hiding the outside world from this shared moment of tensely guarded intimacy. He smiles, and it’s blindingly lovely, and Alhaitham wants to feel the rush a stake through his chest might offer instead of this affection – certain, in the end, that it would hurt less. He’s not certain though of how much longer he can live like this, Kaveh at the tips of his fingers and his tongue both.

“I only drink the finest wines, I’m sure it’ll be delicious.” The blond mumbles, fingers needlessly toying with the front of Alhaitham’s own clothing, twisting in the fabrics as if the tighter he held him the more likely he was to agree.

“I have no doubt it would be.” He’s going to hate himself for playing along, for indulging even this far, but he’s far past weighing the moment against the future for now.

His hand is being guided then, past the wrinkled mess of Kaveh’s shirt and the lopsided way his overcoat hangs from his shoulder. His fingertips, tense and hesitant, are brought up to the heat of Kaveh’s throat. They’re pushed through the silky tousled lengths of his hair and pressed to the pulse that pumps just below his bronzed skin, and Alhaitham shudders shamefully at the sensation. It’s so forceful beneath his own marble-like skin, so quick and sudden, so alive. Alhaitham feels how Kaveh’s fingers release him, how now it’s only his own fault that his hand stays pressed to that steady rhythm. The architect’s fingers clumsily, drunkenly, fiddle with the buttons that imprison the lower half of his neck until the fabric falls open in a way no one should ever be allowed to see. It frames the dignified elegance of his collarbones in a way that makes Alhaitham’s throat feel dry, paralyzed with want. His skin stretches impossibly far beneath the rest of the clothing he wears and he has to blink away the need to draw his gaze any lower than he had already allowed it to wander – lest he be swallowed whole by his own desires. As he raises his gaze Kaveh tugs at the billowing loose fabric of his shirt, pulling until his entire shoulder is revealed, a honeyed, smooth curve that makes every expensive bust and trinket in their home seem worthless in its wake.

It’s childish, Alhaitham thinks, how Kaveh cups his face as if he were a fragile young thing. His expression is tender yet there’s an excitement glistening in the depths of his eyes that does not go unnoticed. Soft padded thumbs stroke against his sharp cheeks then he’s being pulled close, Kaveh tilting his head to the side in an act far too indecent for Alhaitham not to secretly memorize. The column of his throat is stretched, elongated beneath the hand Alhaitham still holds there and as golden locks fall away the breath he didn’t need to take shivers, all emptiness of his dried up veins replaced now with seeping, burning desire. Kaveh’s hands, unrelentingly firm and yet somehow still gentle, coax him closer still, closer and closer until Alhaitham feels how his lips replace the grazing touch of his own fingers. Kaveh trembles, not from fear he notes, but something else. Something that makes him sigh and arch into the cool, stony form of Alhaitham’s torso.

He’s not proud of himself for how he succumbs. How his mouth opens with all the intent he’d sworn he didn’t have. It was one thing to feed from Kaveh’s wrist, already so wantonly obscene and monstrous, yet here he was open mouthed and hungering, hanging from his throat like the leech he had become. Kaveh flinches, jolts where he sits on Alhaitham’s thighs as that first painful piercing happens, but he settles quickly as the vampire’s spittle lathers across his wounds. The first hit is heavenly, as always, but there’s that odd tang to it now – something heady and thick that settles strangely in his stomach and veins. It takes little for the effects to slip through him, one of the many reasons he’d wished to refuse. It wasn’t necessarily that Alhaitham was weak to alcohol, it was more that the blood he drank soaked right into his system, and thus in this case, so did every drop of Kaveh’s drinks.

He feels him then, so acutely, so viscerally, how he grasps at him like a man lost at sea. Thin, long fingers disappear into the swaths of his grey hair, the other clutching instead at the loose fabric that lays across his back. Kaveh whines and Alhaitham is lost to it, that sweet sound. He’s louder than before even, a side effect of his drunken stupor he supposes. A side effect of his own is how he indulges it, where he might usually pull back.

The fullness of Alhaitham’s lips pulls away for a moment as he licks across them, sighing against the still subtly open holes opened on the fragile flesh of Kaveh’s neck. He dives in soon after, suckling desperately at the wound, gasping as the liquid washes over his tongue, how it muddles his thoughts and eases his tensions. It’s embarrassing, mortifying really, how he laps at him like a famished dog to a stranger’s kind hand. He smothers him, licks and sucks and kisses – and in a way that’s all this really is. Alhaitham draws his lips across his stained skin, again and again, drawing his tongue across droplets that begin to escape, lovingly covering the tanned expanse with every kind of kiss he could, all just to taste him.

“Haitham–” Kaveh sighs, head tilting back rather than to the side now, and Alhaitham leans back too, worried he’d gone too far, only to be met with a sight of joyful delirium. Kaveh’s biting softly into his lower lip as his body rocks subtly – he only notices it then, how Kaveh’s been moving this whole time, how he’s been working himself subtly, and sometimes less so, against his lap. “Don’t stop – Keep going.”

When he lifts his head, there’s blood drawing slow from the already closing bite Alhaitham had left behind, the droplets fat and shining as they slide down the definition at his clavicle. He’s flushed, despite the loss, lips parted slightly and his eyes are as glossed as the peach at his mouth. He wants to refuse, he thinks, somewhere distantly the sensible standoffish part of him does. The Alhaitham here, right now, infused with wine and weighed down by the grinding figure of the man above him, thinks nothing at all.

With the first bite healed he carefully, with adoring tenderness, uses his hand to tilt Kaveh’s head the opposite way. This time he sinks his teeth lower, into the bend of neck to shoulder. Kaveh gasps a sound that almost seems to choke him for a moment as the pain brings him terribly back to himself for a short, spiteful second. It passes, of course, and then he’s whimpering again, palm pressing into the back of Alhaitham’s head to encourage him – to offer all he could. They move together now, in this deranged dance they’ve chosen for one another. One of Alhaitham’s hands keeps Kaveh’s head positioned correctly but the other roams – it feels how his thighs fill their clothing, how his hips shift back and forth where he sits, how his waist dips temptingly; he ends with his fingers shifting beneath the untucked mess of his shirt. He feels now that skin as yet untouched by bloodied hands, spreading his palm and fingers wide across the warm curve of Kaveh’s back.

The next sound he hears is unmistakable; a moan. It’s elongated yet stuttered in the middle when Alhaitham feels how their crotches meet, shamefully hard as one another. He knows Kaveh is just drunk, and truthfully now so was he, but there’s a spark of something that ignites within him when he feels that, when he feels their matched investment, how for this fleeting second they felt equal in their adoration. He releases the man’s neck with a shuddering grunt, feeling how blood stickily links them together, how it drips down his chin, messy and smudged and staining them equally. As his head tilts back, Kaveh’s tilts forward and there’s a terrible, beautiful moment where their lips almost meet. Kaveh’s soft, pink, plump, and unsullied, all while Alhaitham’s are ruined, stained and thick with life’s sweetest ambrosia. Hands are grasping at the side of his head again, Kaveh holding him still as their bodies wave in sweetly electrifying tandem. The very tips of their noses touch, then their foreheads, and as they both pant their eyes are fixated, drinking in the sight of the other, all these sounds and expressions they might never get to see again.

Even through the layers of clothes Alhaitham could feel the heat, the hardness, the weight of Kaveh brushing so needily against him. His cock jumps where it’s confined, desperate for the warmth Kaveh’s weight upon him promised but there was no going further than this, no drunken haze that could drag him so far under. Kaveh presses down, sudden and forceful, and they both cry out at the friction that numbs them so wantonly. Alhaitham groans, low and rumbling as he leans back into the iron scented comfort of Kaveh’s throat. He laps at him again, dragging the flat of his tongue along the length of his neck and dragging his teeth against the dampened skin after, grazing deep enough to draw that sweetly spirited blood free. The hand he holds at his back presses into the clammy, warm skin there, as if to encourage him, forcing his movements to continue on and he’s so lovingly obliged it’s enough to make him believe this was all a dream. It can’t be, though, with how the fire in his gut burns his insides to a cinder when Kaveh stops lifting himself at all, instead focusing only on pressing down in slow, steady circles, until Alhaitham feels his body become only stuttering pins and needles – like he was made entirely of nothing, yet everything, all the feelings in the world rustling under his skin.

“Again,” Kaveh whispers, their foreheads sticking together almost with how he began to shimmer with a thin sheen of sweat – a trait Alhaitham didn’t share but he loved to see it, how the exertion showed itself so prettily across Kaveh’s skin. “Again.” He demands softly, tilting his head so that there could be no mistake about what exactly it was he ached for so desperately. Alhaitham, lost in the moment as he had become, was in no position to deny him any longer.

They rock against one another again and again, greedy and dazed both, and the air is warm with Kaveh’s panting and Alhaitham almost feels as if he too was heated, warmed somewhere on the inside simply by the act of proximity. The movements, and that sweet building tension coiling in his core, all begin to crescendo the longer they draw them out. It’s only when Alhaitham’s fangs, devilishly sharpened yet adoringly, tenderly slow to break skin, bury deep into the softness of Kaveh’s throat that the peak is really found. Kaveh’s first to fall to it, as soon as that pointed bone is drawing the blood from him his hips stutter and he chokes around a sound Alhaitham never thought he would be quite so fortunate to hear; he’s melodic even in his drunken state, even as his mind seems to melt into a substance as thin and sticky as the blood in his veins. He comes with a pretty arch of his back, shaking through each wave that hits him, and Alhaitham is stunned by the assault of it, of how the sight – so perfectly surreal, beautiful and strange, is so vivid ahead of him. He forgets to pretend, to breath or blink as he watches the stuttering mess Kaveh becomes in his aftermath. He’s only brought back by the wracking pleasure that overcomes him soon after, how Kaveh never forgets to move, even with the front of his clothing dampened and darkened with his release. Alhaitham leans back, mouth slack as blood pools at the corners of it and he shivers with each distantly familiar shock of ecstasy.

When Kaveh gradually slows, his body probably feeling somewhat like a poorly made putty, Alhaitham clutches at his waist when he feels how he begins to wobble. He’s against him in moments, leaning into him as if he were a creature to trust and not one to fear. His warm breath is muffled as he settles his face into the cold crook of a pulseless neck, Alhaitham’s hands drifting to the expanse of his back so he might soothe the shivers that plague him for a few moments after until he's still, quiet and soft. It was hard to tell, in truth, if he was sleeping from the exertion or if Alhaitham had simply overstepped with his hunger and caused him to drift instead into unwitting unconsciousness. He supposed in a way it was irrelevant as long as those precious hiccups of air continued to sound and that ferociously beating heart continued to thump against him. Like this, chest to chest, there was the strange sensation that the beating could almost be felt from his own chest; a case of mistaken identity of course, but for a little while Alhaitham indulges in the nostalgic feeling of living.

He had planned, in his naive way, to clean Kaveh up before he set him into bed. Now, though, realizing how involved such a process might be, how invasive – unconsenting – it would seem on top of all he had already foolishly let him do, he changes his mind. It turns to another night of Alhaitham carefully, albeit clumsier than usual with the alcohol swimming within the blood in his gut, carrying Kaveh to his room.

It’s easy, really, a route he knows well, and he’s grown used to the deceptively muscled figure of the artist heavy in his arms, so he struggles little in carrying him up the winding staircase. As he lays him atop the blankets, fully clothed, he almost topples down on top of him but the reflexes afforded to his kind, even in the haze of wine, saves him from winding the other with his weight. He at least shimmies off the outer jacket Kaveh wore over his now truly ruined shirt, but he leaves the rest despite the discomfort it might afford the other in the morning. When Alhaitham turns to go there is a force that tugs him back, a delicate, exhausted set of fingers that curl into the back of his shirt and refuse to let him go despite their half slumber.

“Don’t go.” Kaveh slurs, cheek pressed into the softness of his pillow, and the words are weighted with a sadness Alhaitham hasn’t heard him use before, a pain removed from this evening, he’s certain. “Don’t leave me.”

So he doesn’t, how could he? His hand carefully removes the grasp from his shirt, rubbing a thumb affectionately across the tanned knuckles of the other before he lets him go, tucking his hands back into himself. Alhaitham sits slowly, leaning his back against the aged frame of Kaveh’s bed. At least, like this, there was the thin comfort of the mattress to cushion the back of his head. He can hear how Kaveh mumbles to himself – sleep talking most likely, and Alhaitham feels the curve at the corners of his lips as the sounds babble through the silence he had become so miserably accustomed to. It seemed, somehow, like such a Kaveh type of habit. Within the hour he’s snoring, light and quiet but still, it’s there. Alhaitham is too intoxicated to care for moving himself now, and he had in his own way made a commitment not to leave the other, so he stays.

When morning comes Alhaitham is just barely awake, eyelids fluttering over the turquoise brightness of his eyes. He can see the dappling of light that escapes around the edges of thick curtains, decorating the dusty old floorboards as if they were the prettiest of marble tiles. He can hear the steadily maintained beat of Kaveh’s heart in his chest, how his breathing remains carefully soft and measured. It almost startles him, then, when fingers card gently through his hair. He doesn’t move, doesn’t alert the other to his knowledge of the touch just yet. Even if he knows he shouldn’t he indulges in the movement, of how warm Kaveh’s fingers were as they massaged lightly against the back of his head, tumbling down so that his fingertips could brush feathery and light against the exposed nape of Alhaitham’s neck.

He sighs, a sound that shivers through the air, and his voice is rasping with how unused it had been throughout the night. “Did you sleep well?”
He doesn’t turn his head, focused still on the floor ahead of him where he sits but he can feel how Kaveh’s hand stills, then retreats, how the thumping in his chest quickens. Alhaitham smiles to himself at that, at least.

“Have you been there all night?” Kaveh whispers, the sound of sheets moving beneath his body a telltale sign of how he must be curling up into himself.

“It’s no bother. I rarely sleep at night, after all.” He doesn’t mention how he’d asked him to, he’s sure Kaveh remembers.

There’s no reply after that, only the slowing of a pulse as the bashfulness leaves him, and the gentle tapping of his fingers against his mattress. Alhaitham stands, dusting his hands off against his thighs as he finally turns to look down at what his dreams were so often made of. Kaveh lies, curled up as he predicted, atop the sheets where Alhaitham had left him. His hair is tousled from sleep and his eyes betray his exhaustion, and his flush his embarrassment.

“I can draw you a bath.” He turns, quickly, eyes sheepish now with his affection surely so obvious. “I’ll prepare you breakfast, too, it should help the nausea.”

There’s no more conversation to be had, Kaveh as quiet as Alhaitham often was. He does as he said he would, leaves Kaveh to his steaming water to prepare him food he still remembered how to make. He receives no complaints at least, Kaveh only offering him the slightest hint of a smile when he’s done, all reddened and glistening with the remnants of his heated bath. Alhaitham can’t bear to look at him, an anchor of sorts weighing down his guts. He aches and he’s empty, all at once. Wanting was the most awful of things to experience.

Later, when Kaveh is seated on the steps that lead out into the gardens, head on his hands as he watches two birds dip and swerve around each other in the afternoon sky, Alhaitham joins him. They sit in that same odd silence for a while, the barest hint of space between their legs that neither of them dare remove – Alhaitham didn’t quite know why Kaveh avoided it but he himself was perpetually afraid of what might snap in him if they grew too close beyond the offerings of blood he was already struggling to receive. The birds tumble from the sky, then swoop miraculously back into it, melodic chirps sounding through the air as their wings flap in unison.

“Truthfully, are you ever lonely?” Kaveh asks suddenly. The sounds of the birds is all there is for a moment as Alhaitham wrestles with the question.

“Does it matter?” It’s hard to lose the walls he’d spent so long meticulously creating, brick by cruel brick.

“Of course it does.” Kaveh’s fingers tap silently against his own cheek as his scarlet gaze follows those flying creatures with something Alhaitham could only identify as envy. “Is there any emotion more crippling than loneliness? Is anyone immune? If you had said no I would have called you a liar.”

“Then why ask?” He sits straight, postured and polite as he often seemed when he didn’t bother to open his mouth. Kaveh follows his lead now, sitting straight and letting his hands fall from his face, turning his face towards him. Alhaitham felt how it warmed him, just a little, to see it.

“It’s the reason I first came here, that I chose to live here and not somewhere with a little more going for it.” He glances at him with raised brows to get across his point before he turns away again, softer once more. “And I thought you might be ready to be honest with me, on occasion.”

Alhaitham’s body feels heavy yet light, as if he were floating at the deepest depths of the sea. His mouth is dry when he finally murmurs his hard won reply. “I think… I had forgotten what loneliness felt like for a long while. If you are alone for long enough, it becomes the norm, doesn’t it? You forget how to feel anything else and so it’s not so strange. Besides that, there was no one I cared for, no one I longed to be near. It wasn’t something that bothered me.”

“And now?” Kaveh breathes, eyes fixated on Alhaitham’s profile. He feels it, how it burns, stinging more than the sun ever had.

“Will I be allowed questions, too?” He turns to him then, meeting that steady gaze with his own, recognizing in it that distant longing – willfully ignoring it for now because he couldn’t handle even the weight of his own. He feared he might truly drown beneath the knowledge they shared it.

“Questions certainly.” He smiles, all rose tinted honey cheeks and glittering gold hair. “Answers, perhaps not.”

Alhaitham laughs, too, and tries not to dwell on how unfamiliar the sound feels – or how Kaveh stares so openly, so thoroughly shocked by the noise delivered to him so freely now.

“Why do you always take the hardest route, for everything?”

“What do you mean?” The architect draws his gaze low to his own hands, picking at the charcoal embedded under his nails and dusting his fingers.

“You can choose not to answer but don’t pretend to be obtuse, we both know you’re too smart for that.” Alhaitham watches as those birds return from a short absence in the trees, gliding so close to the floor he feared they might crash but they lift again, swirling in tandem beneath the clouds. “I understand you want to be of help, to everyone no less, but it feels as if you’re desperate for it to hurt. As if you think there has to be some price for your kindness, as if you deserve it.”

Kaveh is silent, now fully enamored it seems with the sight of his own fingers in comparison to this direction of conversation, so Alhaitham continues.

“When you asked, that first time, why it felt good, you sounded disappointed.” It had taken a long time for him to understand that was what it had been, that strangely distant tone in his question, how before he had been bitten he had been confused as to why it would only last a moment. “All those times you assured me of how willing you were, how you never argued that there was a risk – even though you always assured me I wasn’t a monster.”

“You’re not.” Is all he offers, and Alhaitham chooses to ignore the soothing. This wasn’t about him, it had never been.

“You didn’t run when you saw me eating, covered in blood, not because you weren’t scared but because you were hoping, maybe somewhere deep down, that I’d kill you too.”

The quiet that settles then is chilling. It’s cold in the early spring air, heavy like lead around their fragilely vulnerable forms. The wood creaks where they sit upon it and the sounds of the birds have ceased, too, both pairs silent in the garden.

“You don’t know–”

“I understand more than you think. You honestly believe I don’t know what it feels like to not belong somewhere, like everyone is against me? Kaveh, for me that’s real. If I ventured to town with you as you so desperately wish me to, we’d both be stoned back here, or worse. I hate that you let those friends of yours bring you here, I–” He notes Kaveh’s growing frown and shakes his head, sighing as he rights the course of his mind.
“That’s not what’s important. The truth is, I hear things. It’s hard not to in the evenings when I do dare to get close. Everyone drinks, everyone gossips, sometimes about you, and I’m always there in the shadows.” Alhaitham’s hand might’ve trembled if he were as mortal as the man he so adored as he reached it toward him. The bronze of Kaveh jolts when the brown of Alhaitham meets him, softly easing against the top of his hand. His knuckles are sharp beneath his palm, Kaveh’s fingers long and thin where his own were thicker, broader.

“There will be other projects, other clients, more money. There’s more to life too, than work.” He can see how Kaveh’s brows furrowed, how his nose scrunched (a way Alhaitham would have described as sweetly) as he huffed a disbelieving sound. “You’d be missed, more than you realize.”

He softens then, all the wrinkles of his frown smoothing suddenly before he seems to crumple just a little where he sits, shoulders slumping as his hand goes gently pliant beneath Alhaitham’s.

“I’ve long since changed my mind, a while ago, you needn’t try and convince me life is worth living.” He whispers, hesitant in his soft admission. Even if his mind had changed, it still cemented that Alhaitham’s statement had been the truth. The vampire feels how the architect’s hand turns over under his, their fingertips touching with a jolt of a feeling Alhaitham had long forgotten existed – that it still could for him, at all. “In truth I suppose it’s more appropriate to call it a change of heart.”

Alhaitham is glad then for his lack of a pulse so that he nor Kaveh had to feel how it might have humiliatingly jumped at his choice of words. He swallows around the swelling of feelings in throat and nods just the barest, smallest amount necessary to convey his understanding.

“Is it enough, one lifetime?” Kaveh asks him and the words feel so airy they might have dissipated into the wind if Alhaitham hadn’t been there to catch them.

“I wouldn’t know.” He replies weakly, wrecked by the sudden onslaught of thoughts arising in his mind already far too clogged with horrors and nightmares alike. If he had to dwell for too long on the thought of time – time with Kaveh, time lost from Kaveh – he might truly lose what little thread of sanity he still clung to.

“I think it might have been.” Kaveh’s fingers slowly tangle into the gaps between his, their hands melding into something warmer than Alhaitham could ever be alone. He turns, finds that beloved crimson staring into him as if it might uncover all the truths of him simply by gazing distantly at all his shadows and scars. Kaveh smiles, something sad in the red of his eyes now. “Before.”

It’s an awful feeling, pulling ferocious and ravenous at his insides, this idea that Kaveh might’ve been sadder without him, uncertain, but he at least might have been whole, secure in his humanity. There’s a terrible sound to accompany the nausea and both their heads whip around to face the expanse of the garden. There’s a splash of red that stains the grass at the far end, a scattering of colorful feathers falling like dusty snowflakes through the air. A ruckus of distressed chirps and horrible squawking echoes from the creature still circling the carnage below, alone, as a beast – a fox, perhaps – draws the marred corpse of the duo’s other half back into the bushes. The scene weighs on Alhaitham’s mind for weeks, haunts his every waking moment and the slumbers that follow, as if an ill omen demanding to be witnessed until its truth fell upon reality.

They continue in their strange arrangement as if nothing had truly changed between them, as if they hadn’t known something more of one another now that changed everything. They still tiptoed around each other’s forms in too tight corridors and expansive living rooms, still settled into similar spaces in silence as if merely the proximity of their forms was enough to ease the ache of a life long lived alone. They still, to Alhaitham’s slight chagrin, end up subtly, bloodily entangled some weeks, sharpened teeth caught in the soft flesh of a delicate wrist. Kaveh would lay against him as his arm was held high, soft lips sucking red marks to the newly opened wound until he grew faint and Alhaitham would carry him to his bed, tuck him in as if this wasn’t all his fault – as if he wasn’t the beast to the beauty. Still with every encounter they grew closer, bolder, Kaveh brushing their hands together when they passed in the dark of night, Alhaitham letting his lips migrate high, to the thrumming pulse at Kaveh’s throat instead of the meek flow at his wrist. It was intimate, those times, the way their bodies would crush together as Alhaitham’s nose was buried into the underside of Kaveh’s jaw, how the architect would clutch at his back or the tufts of his hair at his nape. Despite his reluctance Alhaitham was enamored with the feeling, the closeness it offered, how they’d lay there for minutes, sometimes hours after, lost in the weight of their forms together.

It was almost the end of summer when Kaveh came bounding into the house that always smelled faintly of blossoms now, with decadent fabrics hanging across the colorful windows, embroidered rugs covering the cleaned hardwood floors. He seems to forget all his reservations and shyness long held and runs straight into Alhaitham’s firm, unwavering form. He has no choice but to wrap the strength of his arms around him to save him from toppling over as he clings to the taller man. He indulges, for a sweet moment, in how the scent of the blond overwhelms him like this, nose tucked into the gentle slope of his shoulder, buried into golden locks.

“It’s mine – The job, they gave it to me.” He leans back, huffing his breaths painfully, wheezing from how he’d ran the distant path all the way back to the leaning mansion. Alhaitham brushes his tangled hair back from his face as Kaveh beams up at him, the sun in his lonely sky.

“I told you.” His voice rumbles warmly, proud of course, but certain of the outcome already. Kaveh laughs and the sound is like every gentle, warm feeling Alhaitham’s ever known in one. He cups his cheeks, tentative and light, as if he were only doing so to keep his hair back from his eyes. It’s sudden, then, how Kaveh leans up and there’s heat against his mouth.

“I’m sorry, I just – I’m just suddenly so very–” He doesn’t get to finish, Alhaitham leaning down to capture his mouth in the same way his own had been moments before. He supposes it isn’t their first kiss, not now after Kaveh’s quicker approach, but he thinks this might be the one they remember, that they truly savor. Hands clasp into the looseness of his sleeves around his biceps, Kaveh clenching his fingers into the fabric as he sighs against Alhaitham’s lips. It’s not neat, nor well practiced, neither of them new to this but simply finding their experiences lacking in comparison to the sudden onslaught of emotion here in the room with them now.

He was so terribly, wonderfully warm. Alhaitham could feel every rush of blood beneath his skin, every hurried beating of his heart, how he laughs softly between their mouths before he’s smothered by adoring lips again. Eventually, they have to part, Kaveh panting between them whilst Alhaitham remains as inscrutable as he ever was.

“Are you full?” Kaveh asks tenderly, outside of their usual ritual, and Alhaitham is startled for a moment before he has to laugh, to give in to the ridiculousness the two of them had created together. His hands still cup heated cheeks and he lets his thumbs brush sweetly against the soft skin of him as he leans their foreheads together.

“No.” He murmurs, honest for once in his answer. Kaveh’s eyes sparkle as he grins, fingers dancing up the front of Alhaitham’s chest so that he might grasp at his face, too, kissing him once more with such unrestrained desire that it felt wrong for him to have denied this.

They’re upstairs before he can really think it through completely, before he has the chance to convince Kaveh this wasn’t what he needed, not the reality he wanted, though he’d made it quite clear that it was. Alhaitham’s held sweetly by warm hands, undressed lovingly by them too, handled as if he were the fragile one here – as if Kaveh knew something he didn’t about himself. Perhaps he did.

As they lay down, Alhaitham relishing how heated skin glides against his own as his weight settles gently down against the blond’s, he presses his lips to the river of Kaveh’s pulse, following the line of it along his throat. Just this earns him a shiver, an anticipation of a bite even when he had no intention of giving one. Kaveh’s fingers cascade along the expanse of his back, stroking against the cold muscle as their bodies settle sweetly together. It’s strange, in a sense, how easy it was to settle into the sudden intimacy of it. Only Kaveh, only his light, could do this. It was only possible with the two of them, there couldn’t be this with any other.

“Touch me.” Kaveh whispers soft and slow against Alhaitham’s cheek, kissing where his words had burned him so wonderfully. “Please.”

His hands waste no time following the adoring demand, the roughened palms of his hand drawing steadily along the hauntingly tempting lines of Kaveh’s body, feeling and memorizing every lovely dip or sharp line. He feels how he arches, how he writhes and chases the coolness of his fingers and Alhaitham adores him, loves him so openly, touching every inch of skin he’s offered. When one hand eagerly dips between the softness of thighs and that first shivering sigh sounds, it’s like the world has ended and restarted at once. Everything is new, exciting and colorful, every sound Kaveh exhales like music unheard. Alhaitham chases the thrill of it, the joy of watching how his brows furrow or his lips part, how his skin erupts with dazzling color as that first finger eases against the tightness of him, helped only with a generous slathering of spit.

“Gods–” He arches again, legs quaking slightly as he spreads them, Alhaitham between the heavenly lengths as his second finger soothes along the heated tension of his walls beside the first.

“Too much?” Alhaitham whispers, nose nudging softly against a warmly tinted cheek and he feels how Kaveh’s head shakes. His eyes are closed, lips reddened with how he bites at them to muffle every sound that threatens to escape him as thick fingers work his insides into warm softness.

He’s distracted from the painting of his face then by movements, dancing his gaze down along the stretched out glory of Kaveh’s body to find where his hand now gently ghosts against his own cock, tanned fingers stroking himself as Alhaitham scissors him gently open. The sight goes straight to his core, like a lance of searing heat it burns him from the inside out and his mouth wets with all the desires as yet unfulfilled. He finds himself nuzzling into that familiar shaded crook of Kaveh’s neck, groaning as his own cock eases against the smooth expanse of a spread thigh. It wasn’t enough, not really, yet it was more than he’d had in longer than he’d care to remember. He thinks, though, that this was all he might need; after this he wasn’t sure there was any kind of going back, no amount of space between them could undo the unraveling of greed that was happening here now.

It’s a few long drawn out minutes more before Kaveh’s whimpering, sighing Alhaitham’s name into the air that grew heated between them, the sound of his hand around his aching cock growing slicker with every moment that passed.

“It’s good, it – It’s enough.” He murmurs, legs trying to close as he lets himself go, every inch of him shivering with the need he’d stoked inside himself now, so sweetly edged to a precipice he didn’t yet want to scale fully, and Alhaitham was beside himself with affection at how he reached for him through it all. “It’s enough, come here.”

He needs little encouragement to obey, though he doesn’t do so quite as Kaveh might have expected. He turns them both onto their sides, one of his arms trapped willingly under Kaveh’s waist so he might wrap it tightly around the slim curve. Like this, perhaps selfishly, he could press his face so easily into the tilting, stretched expanse of Kaveh’s throat, nose buried into the roots of sweetly scented hair.

“Alhaitham–” Kaveh gasps quietly as his leg is lifted slightly, fingers stroking along the underside of his thigh in soothing, long lines as his hole is teased open by the thick head of Alhaitham’s length. He hears how the air is inhaled sharply through his lips as he’s stretched around him, a hand lifting suddenly to reach back, grasping desperately at the back of Alhaitham’s head when just the hint of teeth are brought sharply against his nape. “Oh.” He breathes, “Yes, yes.”

This time he doesn’t give in, at least not with the same immediacy as he had before. He wants for this moment to be between them, something real and not intruded upon by outside forces. He wants to feel how Kaveh clenches and moans, just because of him, how he leans back into Alhaitham’s chest as hips slap lightly into the pert curves of his backside. His hand clutches at the underside of Kaveh’s knee, holding his leg high as he thrusts slowly into the heated tightness of him from behind. His other fingers, loving and curious, draw across the stretched curve of his torso, exploring every soft inch he’d so quietly adored from afar for so terribly long.

“You’re so beautiful.” He murmurs, sweet and sincere, into the subtly sweaty curve of Kaveh’s shoulder.

“No.” The man whines, head tilted so his voice was caught quietly in the softness of his cushions – so he didn’t have to catch even a glimpse of Alhaitham’s ceaselessly fond stare.

“Yes.” Alhaitham confirms, stern even as the pleasure threatens to overwhelm every heightened sense that belonged to him. With his nerves alight, like the burning wicks of all the candles in this run down mansion, he quickened his pace just subtly and reveled in how Kaveh mewled so breathlessly, so lost to the feeling he didn’t bother to argue any longer. “The most beautiful creature I’ve ever seen.”

The sound of their bodies meeting grows ever louder, each movement of hips more desperate than the last, the slick of Alhaitham’s precome helping the fluidity of the glide inside. He can feel it too, how it slips down the gorgeous unblemished softness of Kaveh’s thighs – wishes without cease that he could see the mess he was becoming more clearly.

“So clever, so lovely, so good.” He murmurs, like a prayer on the lips of the devil, as if he were bewitching Kaveh to believe it as much as he did. With each word his fangs, growing longer the less restraint he held onto, grazed against pliant flesh and Kaveh’s breath caught audibly around a whimpering moan of Alhaitham’s name. He knows he wants it, knows he craves that sting because he needs it just as much, the two of them both tensely, horribly addicted to the sins they’d become increasingly familiar with.

It’s something heavenly again when the teeth sink in. He can feel the tension release between them, how Kaveh doesn’t even notice the pain, falling straight into the heightening of his pleasure as blood rushes over the waiting muscle of Alhaitham’s tongue. He’s so hungry, so obscenely empty all of a sudden. He wants so awfully, painfully – desperate in how he sucks monstrously eager at the wounds opened at Kaveh’s throat. His thrusts grow stronger, harsher, something animalistic in how they both take so wantonly from each other, so certain they’ll never truly be denied. Kaveh cries out with every harsh slap of skin to skin, one set of fingers still grasping into the mess of Alhaitham’s hair whilst the second set slips around his cock as they had done before, stroking himself in tandem with the salacious beating of Alhaitham’s hips.

Alhaitham grunts with every movement, groaning into the rush of slick crimson that floods his senses. All of him is Kaveh now, his outsides gliding against him, his insides coated with him, this was all he’d ever wanted – to be less himself and more the other. He pulls away eventually, not yet so mad that he would succumb to taking everything from his lover, he meant too much to lose. His lips are sullied thoroughly, covered in sticky red as he pants, the human habit only adding to the arousal he felt in the moment. With the shared heat, the shared noisy breaths, he might convince himself he was still so much a human, too. Lost in his thoughts as he was, yearning so thoroughly for the other, he takes the hand he’d let wander lovingly across Kaveh’s front and slowly lifts it. As much as it can it pushes softly against his cheek, fingers slipping under his chin to turn his head. Kaveh obliges and Alhaitham melts when he sees the dazed, doe eyes of crimson looking back at him. It’s thoughtless how he leans in, ignoring the clumsy bumping of their noses or the awkward positioning of their heads, intent only on how their mouths slot so perfectly together, so meant to be despite all the meddling of fate, or perhaps because of it.

Kaveh whimpers, Alhaitham suddenly aware of the iron tang between their lips but it’s Kaveh who pulls him closer, who gasps around the taste of his own blood. Their tongues tangle, the substance lathered between them as they gasp and moan into each other, a monstrous desperation building between the minimal gaps left between their writhing bodies. It’s sudden, startling in a way, when Kaveh comes. Alhaitham can feel the full bodied shiver it draws from him, how his mouth slips from his with a sound wet and obscene. His thigh trembles in Alhaitham’s grasp as he holds it lifted even whilst it tries so desperately to fall, to clasp together with the other that lay against the bed as he releases warm, thick stripes of white over his working fingers and across the tousled sheets. He’s sweetly soft after, his body pliant in the other’s strong grasp and their mouths just barely touch as they breathe together, tender and slow, and it’s all Alhaitham needs to finish.

He’s quieter, but no less intense. His head dips and he’s lapping greedily at the almost closed holes at Kaveh’s throat, tasting the last scarlet remnants that drip from him as the pace of his thrusts tumble into clumsy, hungering movements. With rough hands he grasps at the other, wishing for something to ground him as the wave of pleasure crashes through him seemingly without end. His mind feels empty, for the first time in years, a saccharinely sweet static ebbing and flowing through his empty veins as he shudders. He’s buried deep when the tensing ceases and his body begins to shiver less and less, feeling how his release slips stickily around his still throbbing cock.

Kaveh winces when his leg is finally lowered, grunting his displeasure at the strange ache in his hip and Alhaitham can only rub a gentle hand across the jutting bone, murmuring a kind of apology against a sweat soaked shoulder. He kisses the skin, once then twice, and only stops in truth when Kaveh lets out a trembling, exhausted laugh, accepting all the apologies at once. They slot together so wonderfully like this, the subtly shorter man’s slimmer build held easily to Alhaitham’s just slightly broader one. His legs tuck up and Kaveh’s fit around them as if made for one another.

“Congratulations on the job, truly.” Another laugh, and he savors how it reverberates through their joined bodies, how like this he can feel every subtle shift or movement Kaveh makes. The sound of his heartbeat is second now, only to the reality of his pressing presence. Kaveh swallows around the breaths he was trying to regulate and Alhaitham feels how he pats softly at the arm he kept wrapped around his middle.

“Thank you.” He wriggles then, separating them for a moment so that he could turn over, bright eyed and grinning as they look at one another properly. Alhaitham, for the first time in a long time, wished he could at least flush as the other did, that the evidence of all they’d done could be quite so obviously displayed on him, too. His enjoyment, his love. “I start tomorrow.”

“So soon?” He wonders aloud, fingers tracing the shape of Kaveh’s curving cheek as he smiles. They were almost touching, just a hair's width between their noses as they rested their heads on the pillows of Kaveh’s bed – ignoring for now the nakedness they both basked in.

“I’m not certain they’ll take you missing me as an appropriate reason to not assume my duties as quickly as possible.” Alhaitham knows, even without the rush of blood to his skin, that his embarrassment was clear then with how Kaveh looks so devilishly pleased with himself. “I’ll be home in the early evening, I won’t stay late.”

“You won’t tell them where you stay, you won’t let anyone bring you home.” He asserts quietly with genuine concern. There’s no questions, only the certainty of his statement.

“If they’d get to know you, they wouldn’t be so frightened, Alhaitham, they–”
“Kaveh.” He rumbles the name, lets it simmer between them with all the seriousness he meant it with. Kaveh lets himself be interrupted, lets the quiet overtake them for a moment before he sighs and nods slowly once.

“I’ll be careful, I promise.”

Alhaitham nods, slowly and with certainty now. He could cope with that much, he was an adult, and a mature one at that. Kaveh looked tired, drained in more ways than he might’ve expected, and Alhaitham twirls a few strands of soft, blond hair around his finger until he sees heavy lashes start to flutter, lowering over the distinct crimson of Kaveh’s rounded eyes. He doesn’t try to wake him but he also hadn’t meant to follow him down, rather he had wanted to watch him sweetly slumber for a moment, perhaps two, then busy himself with all the tasks he’d ignored in favor of spending every waking moment following Kaveh like the lost puppy he’d become of late. It’s easy, though, sated and full as he was, and with Kaveh’s rhythmic breathing to lull him to it, he falls asleep.

When he wakes it’s with a start – he hadn’t slept so deeply, so well, in years. He hums a sound as if acknowledging his own awakening and stretches out his limbs. The bed is empty and it startles him to full alertness for a moment before he remembers that today was the first day of so many like it, the first day of work for the other, the first day of momentary loneliness. He’d have to grow used to this. Alhaitham stretches again even if the knots and aches in his muscles were merely superficial, never long lasting due to his supernatural constitution. As he stood, naked as he had been when he first fell into the bed the evening before, he finally had that free moment, that expanse of time, to stare around at all the paintings and sketches pinned to the otherwise bland walls.

He wanders closer as he shrugs on the loose cotton of his formerly discarded shirt, leaving it hanging open around his large frame. Outstretched fingers run softly over carefully drawn plans. It was something he couldn’t comprehend, this talent, how Kaveh crafted things from nothing all within those pretty walls of his mind. To do that was one thing, it was another entirely how he laid them so perfectly across paper, how he understood every angle and line before it was ever made solid. A genius, truly. Alhaitham walked from wall to wall, soaking up every piece of art left in Kaveh’s creative wake. Some were buildings, attempts at projects most likely, and others were simply sketches he must have done to pass the time. Something catches his eye from under the corner of an intricately drawn building, his finger settles under the paper and lifts it slowly, so as not to tear or crease its perfection. He stills once all is revealed, all his habits falling away as they often did when he was overcome.

His teal eyes settled on himself. There he was, in soft charcoal and sharp ink. He was reading, lost in the pages of his book so intently – Kaveh had captured it so well, with such startling clarity. He looked real. He didn’t feel real. Yet, there he was, all sternly furrowed brows and sharp cheekbones, accompanied by the slight slouching lean of his frame across the green loveseat. It was dated and signed too, so there was no mistake. It had been weeks, months, since this had been completed. Alhaitham thought back to all those times he’d been mid sentence on a page and felt the shifting of the air, the slight creak of the back of a wooden chair; he remembered with all the adoring fondness he’d been too weak to ignore, how scarlet eyes had glanced at him sheepishly across the room, peering over a shoulder as if holding a secret. How eventually they’d notice him looking too and they’d curve, all joy and embarrassment, as Kaveh smiled, the light of the day behind him, haloing the golden fall of his hair.

He looks to the window then, thinking of how the sun that sat heavy in the sky would remind him of the smaller one that wasn’t here with him right now. He finds only darkness around the rim of the curtains. Had he overslept so terribly? It had been a long time since he’d been so comfortable, so able to sleep through the entire day as he was meant to. It didn’t soothe him though, so acutely aware now of how empty the house was – he couldn’t hear, even distantly down the stairs, Kaveh’s melodic heartbeat. He’s dressed within moments then, uncaring of how his shirt falls or how the buttons aren’t matched quite right. The clock tells him it’s past ten, late. Kaveh had promised he wouldn’t be late. He paces, bare feet loud against the bare floor of the hallway. His hands reached more than once for his shoes, or his coat, yet he couldn’t bring himself to go, certain that if he only waited then the other would be home soon.

There’s a thump at the door. It wasn’t a knock, not quite, not sharp nor purposeful, but simply a heavy sound that fades into a slow distant sounding slide. Alhaitham stares at the door, something rising heavy and weighty in his throat. It’s as if with every step he takes towards the frame, the corridor extends further from him, as if nausea seeped from the walls into his very being, filling the deflated, dehydrated veins in his body with dread instead. His cold hand grasps the metal handle and with only a single, suffering ounce of confidence he pulls. The meager offering of strength leaves him as under the light of the moon there’s only red muddying the glimmer of gold.

It’s strange to feel the life leaving something. He had felt it so often and yet now, suddenly, there was something about it that felt so heavy, so strange and distant yet painful, as if it were him losing every ounce of himself all over again. Kaveh was heavy in his arms where he had once been light – the weight of the moment held him down, made him like stone, limp and unwilling. Alhaitham stumbles up the stairs with him in his arms; it’s that familiar route that had always been so oddly comforting, so familiar and easy. Now, he struggles, he wants to be sick but he can’t. His skin itches with panic and his chest is tight with breath he didn’t need, yet clamored for anyway. When he places Kaveh on the softness of the bed they’d been in together only hours before he can see how, when he lets him go, the darkness of his own skin is covered with the shining sticky dressing of the other’s blood. It’s everywhere, spreading as if it itself were alive, as if it were crawling into every fiber of the sheets, across Alhaitham’s skin until he was mad with it.

There were wounds all over him, sharp cuts that sat deep in his gut, some in his arms – held up in defense, Alhaitham thinks. He fumes with it, feels how his body grows hot and uncomfortable with his fury. He can feel the anger swelling unfettered and monstrous in his limbs the more he thinks on how this must have happened, how such an atrocity could never be an accident. He’s brought back from the edge of anguished insanity by the wet bubbling choke of Kaveh coughing up blood – always more blood.

Immediately he’s grasping his face, gentle and tender, ignoring how blood settles awfully across the soft curves of his cheeks and into the blond lengths of his hair. It shouldn’t be there, he shouldn’t be like this. He smiles, and Alhaitham wants to fight the world.

“I made it.” His voice is distant, something graveled and rasping and Alhaitham has to shush him softly, thumbs brushing lightly across the swell of his lips.

“You made it.” He affirms, climbing carefully onto the bed beside him as he pets his hair back, brushing every tousled strand away from the face he couldn’t bear not to see again. “Who were they? Kaveh, who–” He tries to get him to focus his eyes upwards, to look at him properly but he starts to shake his head against the pull of Alhaitham’s hands.

“It’s –” A cough, a gasping for breaths as all that kept him the sun in Alhaitham’s bland sky leaked incessantly from the wounds scattered terribly across his form. “It’s not important.”

“This isn’t the time to be good.” Alhaitham tries to grasp at his face again, frustrated and seething with all the hurt Kaveh refused to feel, desperate for him to acknowledge the wrong that had been done to him. “Tell me, you damned fool, I’m begging you to–”

“It’s not enough.” He says, quiet and light, as if he hadn’t heard a word Alhaitham was spilling to him. His hand weakly rises, perhaps with all the meager strength he could muster, and it settles bloody and warm against Alhaitham’s at his cheek. “One lifetime. It’s not enough.”

Alhaitham feels the way the sob wracks his body, shocked by the assault of it, not knowing he could even do such a thing anymore. It aches in ways it didn’t when he was human, something empty in his being that doesn’t like how the emotion wrings him dry. Kaveh’s hand lifts again and it’s soft against his cheek. He leans into it desperately, feeling less warmth than he had even just a moment ago and the thought makes him shake, from his head to his feet he trembles with all the thoughts he’d tried to ignore, to pretend they were far away, unnecessary for so long. The slow wet rolling droplet across his cheek is swiped away by a thumb and he can feel how it burns his skin, red and sticky.

“Are you full?” Kaveh asks him, and it’s so gentle, so soft, that Alhaitham doesn’t know what to do with it at first, only able to shake his head against the current of horror threatening to sweep him away into the darkness of the night outside these walls.

“No.” He finally whispers, devoid of all the joy that the first honest answer had been. This one echoes in the room, resoundingly hurt in how it pains him to say it.

“Then,” Kaveh’s hand drops, nothing left in the muscle of him to hold the limb high much longer, but still he smiles. “Don’t leave me. Let’s keep going.”

There’s nothing then, no choices nor conversation left to him and Alhaitham leans low. Softly he places a kiss to the still warm expanse of Kaveh’s forehead, relishing that last splash of familiar heat to his mouth before he loses it forever.

Alhaitham only ever longed for that thick trickle of warmth down his throat, yet now it made him sick. Every slow draw along his tongue felt like a sin, a genuine act of horror as Kaveh sighs into the air – nothing like the sounds Alhaitham had grown so fond of, so familiar with. This one was empty, rattling in its finality. He can hear how that heartbeat he had memorized the gentle rhythm of slowed until it could hardly be recognized. The silence that fell when his head lifted felt choking, claustrophobic in how it weighed him down from all sides. Kaveh lay so still, just the barest hint of movement around his lips as the last few real breaths entered and left in slow succession. Alhaitham’s quick to draw a cruel gash along the expanse of his own wrist, reluctant even with the clamor of desperate need around him in how he then presses the bleeding mess to Kaveh’s mouth. It’s slow, the effect, and even if it had been quick nothing could ever have prepared him for the real, true echo of nothing that fell around them when the last beating in a coveted chest sounded.

The sound of twigs cracking under his feet is more than he’s heard in an hour and it’s so terribly loud in his ears he wishes he could make it stop. Kaveh’s light in his arms again, somehow all that weight from before lost now he was so thoroughly empty. Alhaitham wanders through the woods, lit now only by the fullness of the moon, careful not to let any part of Kaveh’s night clothes snag on the trees around them. He’d changed him in that deafening silence, alone. He couldn’t stand to see him bathed so thoroughly in blood, as he had been in Alhaitham’s morbidly ominous nightmares all those times. He’d watched as he slipped slim arms into soft cotton, how his wounds closed slowly. It looked as painful as it might have been to receive them, only now there was nothing. The skin, bronzed and soft, stitched itself back together over drying up blood that turned dusty and crisp, flying away into nothing if Alhaitham blew gently across it.

He stops walking when he reaches a clearing, somewhere far from the edges of the city, this the secluded spot so hated by the mortals that resided there. The crunch under his feet changed from the wood of trees to the sharp snap of bone. They were scattered all around, the grassland between the sheltering trees a graveyard for all kinds; there was nothing here that had not been drained first. Alhaitham remembered, with aching clarity, the moment he’d awoken here himself. There hadn’t been anyone kind enough to wait for him, then. He’d scrambled through the smooth ivory into the shade of the trees and shivered in the knowledge of his loneliness until he deemed it overdone, until he hated the weakness in himself more than the cruelty of others. He’d made himself anew that night, given no choice otherwise. Kaveh wouldn’t have that. There would be no panic, no terror, only gentle, careful acceptance.

It’s strange when he wakes – there’s no warning. There’s no subtle rise in his heart rate, no sweetly snuffling breath to alert Alhaitham to his rising. He only is now. Still, there is no greater joy than to see that crimson sparkle again, how he blinks once, then twice, then smiles, as he always did. He’s holding him without question then, lifting him to sitting within his arms, clutching at the softness of him that had remained unchanged, the scent of fruit and florals he still carried after Alhaitham had wiped away all the clinging horror of blood. When Alhaitham leans back he’s brushing all the hair from Kaveh’s cheeks, picking leaves from his hair that had drifted down from the canopy above and pressing kiss after soft kiss to his face until he’s being gently eased away. They stare in that way they both had, that longing they never lost, but then Kaveh’s hunching over subtly, hand clasping at his chest as though he were in pain and Alhaitham knows, aches for him too.

“It will hurt, but just for a moment, I promise.” He murmurs, his hand stroking over the golden silk of Kaveh’s hair, tucking it gently behind an ear as the man curls over himself and wretches. The sound is awful, loud and scathing in the otherwise quiet of the forest.

It takes a moment, as Alhaitham had promised him, but then the pain is gone, whatever had been lodged so terribly in his chest is freed, deposited onto the ground ahead of his kneeling, trembling form. Kaveh scrambles backwards just slightly, not in fear but merely to find the waiting form of the other. The scholar presses a soft kiss to the top of his head, soothing the shivers that plague him still – might for days until he’s settled. With weary hands he reaches out and, with a handkerchief he’d rescued from one of Kaveh’s pockets earlier, he gently picks up the lump. It’s shaped as it might have been when it was living, though it’s smaller, hard and stone-like in appearance. It’s been quickly atrophied, paralyzed in time then shrunken with the abrupt dehydration of his body. Alhaitham had done much the same that first night he’d awoken his new self. Kaveh stares at the thing held so delicately within the white fabric.

“Is that –”

“It’ll crumble soon. Turn to dust.” He explains softly, a finger touching at one corner, his ears ringing with the gasp Kaveh makes when the gently caressed section breaks off and dissipates into the soft breeze that brushes, almost in comfort, across their skin. “I buried mine.”

“Where?” He’s quick to ask, kneeling as Alhaitham was, their hands sharing the light burden of cupping the weight of the organ in the handkerchief.

Showing him was easy. It wasn’t far, and to Alhaitham’s soft surprise there was still the strangely shaped rock he’d carved a symbol into. He had believed he deserved as much back then, he hadn’t been so sure of late. They both dig with their hands, finding the remnants of wrapped fabric around dust that mingled with dirt now. Alhaitham felt strange, a longing for something he didn’t really desire. He’s distracted from the imagining of his long lost mortality by Kaveh taking the bundle of his heart, careful not to jostle the cargo inside the fabric, acutely aware of how it might simply turn to nothing in the confines of his hands. It seemed it hardly mattered as he carefully unfurled the material and with tenderness, as if the dried item could feel his intent, he crumbled it between his fingers into the hole dug by those same hands. He watches as pretty, long fingers grow covered in dirt and dust as they stir the remnants of their humanity together before placing his handkerchief atop it, letting heavy soil fall back over the shortly disturbed grave to their once shared humanity.

They sit, then, both of them kneeling in front of that strange little rock, and their blended hearts. Kaveh’s hand nudges softly against his, both of them caked in mud and leaves, but the feeling is still the same as their fingers entwine – devoid of warmth but never of love.

“I know you feel guilty.”

“How can I not? You were never meant for this.” Alhaitham whispers, teeth gritting against the aching anger that gnawed at him from the inside. Kaveh’s quick to squeeze his hand within his.

“I would have chosen it, if it hadn’t been forced upon us now.” His form leans, shoulder heavy against Alhaitham’s. It will take a while to get used to the absence of heat, but it still felt so distinctly like him. A relief washes through him and there’s a slumping to his body, an obvious softness that overcomes him.

“You’ll miss the sun.” Kaveh laughs, at him or simply because of him he’s not sure, but it’s a strange sound given their situation and surroundings. It, he finds, is never unwelcome though.

“Alhaitham,” His empty hand lifts, touching lightly at his cheek since it was still dirtied with the offerings of the ground. Their eyes meet, as they had always done, and nothing feels changed about them for that moment. “I’d rather forever in the dark, with you, than a lifetime in the light without.”

They lean close, their foreheads touching as Alhaitham tries to reconcile the guilt that wrecks his innards with the forgiveness Kaveh smothered upon him, that he insisted wasn’t needed in the first place.

“Besides,” He starts again, voice melodic and sweet in the aftermath of the carnage Alhaitham longed to forget. “I’ve always thought you were loveliest in the moonlight.”

He supposed, in truth, they were always meant to be like this, a dichotomy of unending affection; mirrors angled to see only each other.

The sun is brighter than Alhaitham has ever known it, summer encroaching on Sumeru as if it had a vengeance to enact. He wanders through the mansion renewed, barely a creak left to hear or a wall left to repaint, the colors were alive and the decorations shone, even under the dim light of their newly acquired lamps. Now, though, in the heat of the day, he was looking for something in particular, something that far outweighed the value of anything sitting prim and pretty inside his home. Bare feet sounded soft as they padded across repaired hardwood. The doors that had once sat wobbly and disjointed on their hinges were spread open wide, made almost entirely of stained glass now rather than damp, rotting wood. The green of the gardens was luscious, bright and holding its own even among all the colors of the potted flowers and flourishing bushes. There’s a flicker of gold, the kind of shimmering flash that Alhaitham never tired of. He stands in the shade of the house, not covered enough to brave the warmth of the light, but he leans heavily on the frame of the open door.

“Are you going to be out there forever?” He calls softly, smiling as a surprised pair of crimson eyes glance at him from under a wide brimmed hat and over broad sunglasses. Kaveh dusts off the dirt on his gloves, looking proudly down at his patch of happily budding sunflowers. He pats at his pockets after, always losing something within them, pulling out the shiny little rectangle Alhaitham had paid for – Kaveh loved to take pictures of every little thing, after all. He checks it, the time most likely, then slots it back where it had come from.

“I might be.” He replies, turning to aim the brightness of his grin at his lover, instead.

Alhaitham wasn’t certain how long it had been, how many years they’d stumbled through this together, but he knew at least one thing, always; even when it burned, he’d never once stopped loving the sun.