Chapter Text
Kaveh hummed quietly under his breath as he strolled through the empty streets of Sumeru. At four in the morning, the city was completely deserted, which suited him fine. He was used to being awake at this hour — late nights fixing drafts were practically a habit at this point — but tonight he had traded his drafting table for a walk outside. He needed to clear his head.
The commission was the problem. His client, Ziryab, a scholar from Haravatat, had hired him to convert an ancient ruin into a fully functioning laboratory, with one condition: not a single original structure at the site could be touched. On top of that, Ziryab had given him complete creative freedom over the interior design. For Kaveh, who had spent the last several months producing bland, beige, painfully modern buildings for clients with no imagination, this was the most exciting project he had seen in years. He had accepted before Ziryab even finished explaining.
The problem was that he had absolutely no idea where to start.
He had spent the evening staring at a blank draft while Mehrak projected the ruin's scanned layout onto his ceiling. Nothing came to him. He needed to see the place with his own eyes, walk through it, feel the space. A projection was useful, but it was not the same.
Which was how he ended up here, at four in the morning, wandering toward the ruins on foot.
He was mid-thought, absently kicking a pebble along the path, when he realized he hadn't heard Mehrak's familiar whirring in a while. He whipped his head up, his eyes flitting around until they landed on a familiar green ray of light. She was several meters ahead, bobbing happily through the air and scanning the area with periodic flashes of green light, completely unbothered by the fact that she had wandered off without him.
"Ah—Mehrak! Don't rush ahead, please!" he called, waving her back.
She zipped back to him and, before he could say another word, projected a glowing three-dimensional map of what appeared to be an underground ruin directly in front of his face.
"So it is here," he said, studying it. "But where's the entrance?"
Mehrak chirped.
He looked around until his eyes caught a patch of ground that seemed too neat, too deliberate to be natural. He crouched down and brushed the dirt aside. Beneath it was an opening mechanism. A brief pulse of Dendro was enough to activate it, and the entrance ground open with a low, heavy rumble.
Kaveh peered over the edge. Below was nothing but darkness. He coughed at the cloud of dust the opening kicked up and glanced back at Mehrak, who was already projecting a very clear NO in the air beside his head.
"Don't give me that," he said. "It'll be fine. I've got you with me, haven't I?"
Mehrak's light flickered in a way that communicated strong disagreement. She had been like this lately, flagging every slightly risky decision he made. He suspected Alhaitham had something to do with it. He really needed to adjust her adaptation settings. He couldn't deal with one Alhaitham, nevermind two.
"Can you check how far down it goes? I might be able to jump," he told her.
She gave him one last disapproving pulse, then dove into the opening. A few seconds later she flew back up and beeped.
Kaveh took that as a yes.
He sat down at the edge of the opening, legs dangling over the drop, and took a moment to assess. The darkness below wasn't total — as his eyes adjusted he could make out the floor, maybe three meters down. Manageable. He'd jumped from worse on site surveys.
He pushed off.
The landing was harder than he expected, the stone floor uneven beneath the dirt, and he stumbled forward a step before catching himself. Dust bloomed around his boots. He straightened up, brushed his hands off on his clothes, and looked around.
Mehrak floated down beside him and brightened her light, casting the chamber in a steady green glow.
Kaveh went very still.
The ruin was not what he had expected. He had prepared himself for the usual — crumbling walls, collapsed ceilings, the kind of general structural disaster that made converting old buildings such a headache. Instead, the chamber around him was almost entirely intact. The walls were fitted stone, each block seated so precisely against the next that he could not have slid a fingernail between them. The ceiling vaulted upward in a long, clean arc. The floor, beneath the centuries of dust, was patterned in a geometric arrangement that he recognized immediately as load distribution design, practical but deliberate, the kind of thing that only appeared when an architect cared about the floor as much as the walls.
He turned slowly, reading the room. The proportions were unusual, slightly taller than wide in a ratio he didn't see often, which created a sense of height that the actual dimensions didn't quite justify. A trick he had used himself, once, in a private gallery commission. Seeing it here, in a ruin that predated anything he could reliably date, gave him a strange feeling he couldn't immediately name.
There were other chambers. He could see two doorways from where he stood, both intact, both leading deeper into the structure. Mehrak was already drifting toward the left one, her scanner sweeping the space in slow arcs.
"Hold on," he said, still looking at the walls. "Give me a minute."
She stopped, floating behind him, her whirring a fixed comfort.
He walked the perimeter of the first chamber slowly, running his hand along the stone. Whoever built this had understood more than construction. They had understood experience, the way a person moved through a space, what they saw first and what drew them forward. The chamber directed you toward the left doorway without doing anything so obvious as pointing. It just made the left doorway feel like the natural continuation of being in the room, the way a well-composed sentence made the next sentence feel inevitable.
Kaveh followed it without meaning to.
The second chamber was smaller, and darker, and in the center of the far wall, held flat against the stone by a smooth rock that had kept it sheltered from the dust, was a piece of drafting parchment.
He crossed the room, lifted the stone carefully and held Mehrak's light closer.
The parchment was covered in linework so dense and precise it took him a moment to understand what he was looking at. Elevations. Section cuts. Detailed structural notations in a script he didn't fully recognize but could partially read, an older form of the same architectural shorthand still taught at Kshahrewar today. It was a building, a significant one, complex and considered, every element in conversation with every other.
And it stopped. Two thirds of the way through, mid-notation, as if the architect had simply put down the pen for a moment and never picked it up again.
Kaveh stood there for a long time.
The building in the plans was extraordinary. He could see where it was going, could feel the shape of what it was meant to become the way he sometimes felt the resolution of a piece of music before it arrived. Whatever had stopped this person from finishing it, it was not a lack of vision. The vision was all there, complete, just waiting.
He should put it back. He had his own commission, his own client, his own blank draft waiting for him at home. He was here to study the space, not to get distracted by someone else's two-century-old plans.
He sat down cross-legged on the floor, took out his drafting tools, and got to work.
Mehrak made a sound.
"I know," he said, without looking up. "I won't be long."
He was there for four hours.
The building resolved under his hand slowly, then all at once, the way solutions sometimes did, the individual pieces suddenly snapping into a shape that felt obvious in retrospect. He worked without stopping, barely noticing when the quality of light shifted as the early morning sun found the chamber's upper apertures and replaced Mehrak's green glow with something warmer. He forgot about Ziryab. He forgot about the beige buildings and the debt and the blank draft on his table at home.
When he set the pen down and looked at what he had made, his chest felt the way it always felt at the end of something good. Quiet, and full.
He pressed his palm flat against the finished parchment to examine the lower detail.
Beneath his hand, for just a moment, the original linework glowed. Not brightly, not obviously, just a faint warmth that could have been the morning light, could have been the dust, could have been anything at all.
Kaveh did not notice. He was already thinking about the left doorway and whether the second chamber's dimensions would accommodate Ziryab's equipment requirements.
He replaced the parchment carefully under the stone. He stood up, stretched his back, and took one last look at the chamber.
"Right," he said. "Now let's actually look at the rest of it."
Mehrak's light pulsed, steady and close, and followed him through the doorway.
More than a few hours had past when Kaveh finally finished wrapping up the correct dimensions of the ruins. It was an extraordinary site, Kaveh was surprised the Akademiya hadn't used it already for some kind of grand library or an extra branch for one of the darshans. He was brimming with ideas for Ziryab's lab and it was probably the first time in a while he felt relaxed. Happy, even.
He climbed back up with a huff, and shut the entrance once again. Mehrak beeped loudly and projected a green display of the time.
5:37 PM.
Shit. He spent nearly half the day in the ruins. He was planning to meet up with Ziryab but tommorow would do he supposed.
The walk back home had taken him an hour or so, but that was because of how many people crowded the streets. It was only expected since this was the time of the day students from the Akademiya rushed back home with heaps of papers and books in their arms but he couldn't help but feel an ounce of irritation when he bumped into a passing student for the third time today.
"I'm so sorry, I didn't see you there." the student whom he crashed into mumbled from the ground, piles of books around her.
"Don't worry about it," Kaveh said, reaching out a hand to help her. "Ah—wait, is that you, Goli?" Kaveh remembered her now. He had helped her with her report for an extension for the House of Daena.
"I—yes, I'm Goli." the short haired girl took his hand, standing up with her books. "I'm sorry, I don't exactly recall us meeting." she said, confused.
That was strange. But Kaveh chalked it up to academic stress. When he was in his last year—shuffling between drafts, meeting thousands of faces everyday, and struggling with getting his thesis accepted—he forgot to eat for nearly two weeks and was bedridden in Birmarstan for a week (much to Alhaitham's complaining, but Kaveh will not think of his infuriating roommate right now.)
"I'm Kaveh," he smiled, and Goli reciprocated, but she didn't seem to have recognized him yet.
"It's nice meeting you." she said, nodding her head politely. She waved Kaveh off and rushed to wherever she was heading.
Kaveh did not think about that encounter after that, but he'd be lying if he didn't feel a slight twinge in his chest.
"I'm back!" he yelled out when he opened the door to their—no—Alhaitham's home. He was sure Alhaitham was back from the Akademiya, he usually was before 5 o'clock on Thursdays.
When no reply was heard, Kaveh rolled his eyes, pulling off his shoes and putting them in their designated spot. Sure enough, Alhaitham's shoes were there too, as well as his keys on the the entryway table. He must be ignoring Kaveh, or had his headphones on.
"Go recharge, Mehrak." he told her, as she went to his room, floating lower than usual.
As he walked to the kitchen to make coffee so he could start his drafts, he was greeted with the unpleasant sight of his roommate sitting on the divan, reading a book Kaveh was sure he read a million times before.
"Oh, there you are." Kaveh squinted at him from the doorway. "What, too engrossed in a book you've already read three times to bother with a reply?"
"You announced yourself to a house," the bastard replied, without looking up. "I wasn't aware that required a response."
"Common courtesy requires a response." Kaveh moved to the kitchen and started looking for the coffee. "Some of us were raised with it."
"Some of us were also apparently raised without a concept of time." Alhaitham turned a page. "It's past six."
"I'm aware of what time it is."
"You left before dawn."
"I'm also aware of when I left." Kaveh found the coffee and set the pot on. "I was working. Some of us have commissions to fulfill."
"Some of us also have a meeting with Ziryab that was scheduled for two o'clock," Alhaitham said, with the particular flatness of someone delivering information they had no emotional investment in, which somehow made it worse.
Kaveh turned around. "How do you know about my meeting with Ziryab?"
"He sent a message." Alhaitham finally looked up, just long enough to meet Kaveh's eyes. "Three times."
Kaveh's expression did something complicated. He turned back to the coffee.
"I'll reschedule," he said.
"You've rescheduled with him twice already."
"I am aware of my own schedule, Alhaitham, thank you."
"Clearly not, given that you missed it."
Kaveh grabbed two cups from the cabinet, more for something to do with his hands than out of any real desire for coffee right now. He poured one and slid it across the counter toward the divan without looking, because Alhaitham would drink it and complain about neither the temperature nor the fact that Kaveh had made it without asking.
"The ruin was more extensive than the scan suggested," he said, leaning against the counter with his own cup. "Four additional chambers. The spatial sequencing alone was worth the entire morning. I wasn't going to leave in the middle of documenting it."
"No one suggested you should have," Alhaitham said. "I'm pointing out that you had a meeting."
"And I'm pointing out that some things are more important than meetings."
"Tell that to Ziryab."
"I will, when I reschedule." Kaveh took a long sip. "Which I will do tonight. It will be fine. He hired me because I'm good at what I do, and what I do requires occasionally losing track of time in extraordinary ruins."
Alhaitham finally picked up the coffee Kaveh had left within his reach, which meant the conversation had moved out of the territory he considered worth actively engaging with. Kaveh knew this the same way he knew most things about his roommate, through years of involuntary study.
He looked at the dust still on his clothes. Thought about the second chamber, the parchment, the way the building had resolved under his hands.
"I found a blueprint," he began.
Alhaitham said nothing, which was not the same as not listening.
"Someone else's. Pre-Akademiya, from the notation style." Kaveh turned his cup in his hands. "They never finished it."
A pause.
"And?" Alhaitham said.
Kaveh looked at him. "I finished it."
Alhaitham looked up from his book for the third time. He studied Kaveh with the expression that meant he was deciding whether this was worth the energy of a full response.
"It wasn't mine to finish," Kaveh said quickly, because Alhaitham was going to say it and he preferred to get there first. "I know that. But it was extraordinary and incomplete and I could see exactly where it was going, so I did." He set his cup down. "Some things are too good to leave unfinished."
"That's not a justification."
"It's the only one I have and I stand by it."
Alhaitham held his gaze for a moment longer, then returned to his page. The matter, apparently, was filed and closed.
Kaveh pushed off the counter and headed for the hallway. He needed to wash the dust off and write to Ziryab and start the first proper draft before the details of the light in that final chamber faded from his memory.
"Don't go into uncharted ruins alone again," Alhaitham said, behind him, to his book.
Kaveh stopped in the hallway. He didn't turn around.
"I had Mehrak," he said. "And I have a vision, I'm perfectly capable of protecting myself."
"That's not what I said."
Kaveh stood there for a second. The house was quiet around them, warm and settled, the kind of quiet that only existed between people who had gotten used to each other's silences.
"Noted," he said, and went to wash his hands.
He washed the dust off in the basin, changed into something that hadn't spent the day in a ruin, and felt approximately human again.
The drafting table was where he always ended up eventually. It was the one corner of the room that was entirely his, organized in a way that looked chaotic to everyone else and made complete sense to him, reference sketches pinned in overlapping layers, pencils sorted by weight, the good ink kept separate from the working ink. He pulled out a fresh sheet and started sketching the ruins from memory while the details were still sharp. The first chamber, the vaulted ceiling, the proportions. The sequence of doorways. The final chamber and the three apertures and the way the light had converged on the floor.
He worked for two hours without noticing the time, which was normal, and without thinking about the debt or the missed meeting or anything outside the pool of lamplight on the paper in front of him, which was also normal, and which was the reason he kept coming back to this table no matter how late it was or how tired he was, because here the noise in his head went quiet and there was only the work.
Mehrak recharged in the corner, her light dim and steady.
At some point he wrote to Ziryab. The message was warm and apologetic and professionally confident in the way Kaveh had perfected over years of being late to things, and he was fairly sure Ziryab would forgive him once he saw the preliminary sketches Kaveh attached. The ruin was extraordinary. The laboratory was going to be extraordinary. Some things were worth the wait.
He sent it and went back to sketching.
It was nearly midnight when he finally set the pencil down and looked at what he had produced. Six sheets covered in observations and proportions and preliminary ideas, more than enough to start a proper first draft tomorrow. He rolled his neck, stretched his hands, and sat back in his chair.
The house was quiet. Through the wall he could hear nothing from Alhaitham's room, which meant he was either asleep or reading in the particular focused silence he generated when he didn't want to be interrupted. Either way the house had settled into its nighttime version of itself, familiar and still.
Kaveh looked at the sketch of the second chamber. The far wall, the flat stone, the parchment beneath it.
He thought about Goli.
It surfaced without warning, the way small things did when the distractions cleared. Her face, politely confused. I don't exactly recall us meeting. He had dismissed it at the time, filed it under academic exhaustion and the general difficulty of remembering every face you encountered in a city this size. It was a reasonable explanation. He had believed it completely for the entire walk home and the argument with Alhaitham and the two hours of drafting.
He believed it slightly less completely now, in the quiet.
He turned his pencil over in his fingers. Thought about how he had helped her specifically, not just a passing interaction but an afternoon in the House of Daena working through her report section by section. He remembered her name. He had known her name immediately, before she confirmed it.
She had not known his at all.
He set the pencil down. Looked at the ceiling. Thought about it for another thirty seconds with the focused attention of someone who was deciding whether something was worth worrying about.
It wasn't, he decided. She was busy. People forgot things. He forgot things. The world was full of tired scholars who couldn't keep track of every face and he was not so important that his was guaranteed to stick.
He closed his notebook, turned off the lamp and went to bed.
He was asleep within minutes, which was something that rarely happened nowadays.
Mehrak's light pulsed once in the dark, very softly, and then went still.