Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

For years now, Alhaitham has lived a quiet, solitary life in his home, content with his own company and his library.  The house grows old around him, creaking with age.  The floor is worn smooth from countless feet, rugs half-faded from sun streaming through windows.  Furniture slumps tiredly, body-shaped depressions long-imprinted in the cushions.  The house is old, historical even, and Alhaitham enjoys its understated simplicity.  He enjoys the solitude.

It almost makes up for being dead.

For years now, Alhaitham has lived a quiet, solitary life in his home, watching from the periphery as the world around him changes while he remains static, fixed.  A hundred or so years have passed (he’s lost track of the exact count) since he died, and the house has remained shut up tight.  No one ever moved in after him.  He’s glad to have the place to himself.  If he must be stuck in some ambiguous limbo between life and death, at least he gets to spend the time alone. Doesn’t have to watch some fool come in and throw out his beloved furniture or ruin the old stonework with garish and “modern” paint.

It’s true, sometimes Alhaitham thinks back on being alive and feels a faint stirring of…something.  Nostalgia, maybe?  He’s been dead so long he’s lost touch with most of his emotions.  Alhaitham thinks he remembers, soon after he died, being sad, or angry, or maybe both.  Definitely, he had very strong feelings about no longer being alive.  Those emotions—and the thoughts that accompanied them—have faded with time, and he hardly even remembers what he was upset about anymore.

These days, he doesn’t even notice the time passing.  He walks through his dusty library, studying the spines of books, and realizes that the light has swept across the floor seven times—a week has passed.  Mostly, he feels detached, floaty; he appreciates the dust motes in beams of sun and the accumulation of dirt on the windowsill and waits patiently for the house to finally collapse around him.  Yes, Alhaitham is content to slowly fade, his consciousness deteriorating with the house.

Which is why he feels a sudden, uncomfortable throb of something that he later identifies as annoyance when three people force open the door of the house and start stomping through the place.  They talk loudly, voices too bright.  Even their pens scribbling on their clipboards are too noisy, and Alhaitham wants nothing more than for them to leave—or maybe just snap their clipboards in half so they have no choice but to stop that incessant scratching.  Each intruder wears a lanyard and a hard hat.  Alhaitham sees (after he remembers how to read) that their IDs say Sumeru Historical Society: Volunteer, and suddenly he realizes that the harsh chatter of their voices form words, words like culture and landmark and restore.

Well, this won’t do at all.

Alhaitham stands with arms folded, an unseen additional vertex to their huddle, turning the triangle into a square.

“This place is amazing,” one, a blonde woman, says.  “Gorgeous structure.  Great bones.  I can’t believe they’ve let it fall into such disrepair.”  She runs a reverent hand over a blueprint pinned to her clipboard.

At least they appreciate it, Alhaitham muses.

“We’re going to have to start right away,” another adds.  His face is obscured by an impressively bushy beard.

“We don’t have the funds or the time, not with the proposed schedule,” the third, a petite woman with fidgety hands, protests.

“We’ll make it work,” the blonde woman says, resolute.  “Even if I have to move into this place and work around the clock.”

Please no, Alhaitham thinks vaguely.  He doesn’t want company.

“You might have to,” Beard Guy says.  His eyes scan the main entryway, the cracked wood and scratched windows, the moth-eaten curtains and termite-gnawed rafters.

Fidget Hands cracks each of her knuckles in turn as she follows his gaze.  “I’m not sure how structurally sound it is in here.  Maybe we should continue this conversation outside until we have some engineers evaluate the place.”

“Nonsense!” Blonde Lady snorts.  “It’s perfectly safe.  Watch.”  And she heads across the room purposefully.

“No, you can’t—” Beard Guy calls, uselessly.

Blonde Lady ignores him and strides across creaky floorboards towards Alhaitham’s room, and a flare of displeasure shoots through him.  “No,” he says, following her.  “Stay out of there.”  He doesn’t (didn’t?) let anyone in his room.

“Careful,” Fidget Hands calls.  “We can’t say for sure that there aren’t any wild animals cooped up in here.”

“As if I’d let animals run amok in my house,” Alhaitham grumbles, thinking fondly on the time he knocked books on a snake’s head until it slithered away, disgruntled.

Blonde Lady peers at the knob of Alhaitham’s door.  “This seems to be in much better condition,” she narrates to her companions.  “Likely due to being an interior door.”

“Obviously,” Alhaitham says dryly.  He hovers anxiously over her shoulder.

“It’s probably not locked,” Blonde Lady continues.  She reaches out a hand and grasps the knob.

“I said stop,” Alhaitham snaps, reaching out for her hand without thinking, as though he’d be able to stop her.  His hand passes uselessly through her flesh, which he expects.  What he does not expect, however, is for Blonde Lady to scream.

“Oh my f—what the—what’s on me?  What?  What!?” she yelps, swatting violently at her hand and doing a little hopping dance away from the door.  Alhaitham looks at his own hand in mild interest.  He’s occasionally been able to move inanimate objects, but he doesn’t think he’s ever interacted with something alive before.

“What is it?” Fidget Hands shrills, wringing her hands.  “What is it?”  She’s equally light on her feet, gaze darting across the floor as though she expects a revenge-driven spider to come barreling towards her in the search for blood.

Blonde Lady shudders, tentatively turning her hand over.  When she sees that there’s nothing there, not a bug or a bite or scratch or otherwise, she lets out a breath and relaxes her stance.  She shakes out her arm, making a displeased face.  “I don’t know,” she says.  “I thought I felt something touch me.  It was cold.”

Beard Guy grunts.  “Don’t like that.  Don’t like that one bit.”

Blonde Lady scrunches her nose playfully at him.  “What, you going to tell me you think the place is haunted?”

“Yes,” Beard Guy says flatly.  “It’s entirely possible.”

Fidget Hands moans in despair, swaying, but Blonde Lady just snorts.  “Please.  Ghosts?”

“They say,” Beard Guy intones ominously, “that the last person who lived here was violently murdered.  His spirit could be trapped here.”

Blonde Lady’s incredulity bursts forth in the form of a laugh.  “Oh Archons, you’re serious!  Ghosts aren’t real.”

Alhaitham snorts at their exchange.  The last person to live here was him.  Murdered?  Please.  He died from…from…well, he—

“Gods and magic can be real but not ghosts?” Beard Guy shoots back, crossing his arms.  “Just last week you were working with a client who opted out of an irrigation system for their garden because they can summon water with their mind.”

“That’s different,” Blonde Lady says, waving a hand.  She’s getting comfortable again, posture loosening.

Fidget Hands still looks ready to bolt though, and Alhaitham looks between his hand and the smaller woman, then back again.  “Hm,” he says, touching her cheek.

Fidget Hands shrieks, jerking so hard away from his touch that she loses her balance and topples to the floor.  “Out!” she yells.  “Out!  We’re getting out!  We’re leaving!”  She scrabbles for purchase on the floor, lurching to her feet and making a beeline for the exit.

Beard Guy moves to follow her, but stops when he sees Blonde Lady looking after them with supreme amusement. “Faranak!” he hisses.  “Come on.”

Blonde Lady rolls her eyes but starts walking.  “Fine, fine,” she says.  “We can come back later.”

The door closes behind them with a slam, and the house finally, blessedly, falls into silence once again.  Alhaitham nods, pleased.  He’s gotten rid of them.

✧   ✧   ✧

He has not gotten rid of them.

Blonde Lady is back the next day, and the day after that.  Occasionally there are other people with her, taking measurements and pulling out wall too termite-eaten to save.  More often than not though, she’s alone as she breezes around the house like a rain shower.  She flits from place to place, stopping a moment here, lingering there, changing direction as suddenly as an indecisive breeze.  Company—particularly the unwanted kind—stretches time back out into unbearably long hours, and Alhaitham finds himself feeling bored for the first time in decades.

Faranak—he can’t keep from learning her name, not when she talks to herself so often—doggedly pursues the renovations, despite Alhaitham’s best efforts.

She finally pries his bedroom door open, and when she steps back to wipe her hands on her pants, Alhaitham slams it shut again with all his might.  Entirely contradictory to his intent, it swings slowly closed and latches with a gentle click.  Faranak’s eyes widen, but all she says is, “Archons, the drafts in here are bad,” and spends the next two days crawling around on the roof.  (Alhaitham does not appreciate the fixed leak in the kitchen, obviously.)

Faranak picks his books off the floor in the library, stacking them neatly on his creaky desk.  While she putters around checking the soundness of the bookshelves, Alhaitham throws all his weight into the stack of books and sends them flying—well, slowly toppling, really—to the floor.  Faranak looks up from her place on the floor, half wedged between a bookcase and the wall, and mutters, “Hm.  Wobblier than I thought,” and spends the rest of the afternoon tinkering with the feet of Alhaitham’s desk until it rests steadily on the floor.  (About which he is not pleased, not at all; he liked that the house was falling into disrepair, thank you very much, and just because his desk, which is the perfect size for laying out a manuscript and several reference materials at once, has been spruced up a bit doesn’t mean he enjoys that she is here.)

No, Faranak is not dissuaded from continuing to meddle with his home.  In fact, she starts to spend more time there than ever.  Sometimes she doesn’t even work on the house, just sits on the floor in the living room and soaks up a beam of sunlight, absently chewing on a takeout pita pocket and even more absently drawing and labeling native Sumeran plants in a thick sketchbook, surrounded by blueprints and diagrams.  She’s very good, actually.  In a technical sense, of course.  Alhaitham does not appreciate sitting next to her and watching her work.  At all.  In fact, he finds her rather annoying, especially when she flicks eraser dust too aggressively from the page and topples her inkwell onto the blueprints, where it splays out into a five-pointed splash and soaks through to the flooring.

She curses softly and blots the ink, then starts to scrub the stain from the floor.  She stops halfway through, pulling her mouth to one side in thoughtfulness.  “Ah, why not,” she finally says, and begins ripping out the floorboard instead.  Alhaitham groans.  Faranak groans too, but only because she sees the state of the foundation beneath the wood.  “Greater Lord Rukkhadevata, give me strength.  This is—oh, damn! ”  She lets the floorboard fall and shoves herself to her feet.  “I nearly forgot—oh he’ll be so—I can make it, I have time,” she rambles nonsensically to herself, shoving materials into her bag.  She makes for the door, turns quickly on her heel, snatches up the remainder of her pita pocket, makes to leave again, turns back a second time, puts the lid back on her ink, and is gone.  A true whirlwind of a woman.

Another day, he stands and peers over her shoulder at a sheaf of official-looking documents on the table.  She sips contemplatively from a “Teyvat’s Best Mom” mug, artfully made but with the inexperience to make it charming, and slowly turns a page of a blueprint.  Alhaitham stares at a page with the familiar heading of a memo, waiting for the squiggles on the page to align themselves into words.  When they do, he folds his arms and allows annoyance to wash through him.

…accept the bid from…survey Auxiliary Employee Housing site no. 6 with intent to preserve existing structures if possible…converted into modern employee housing except in case of…Sumeru Historical Society deems the location historically significant, then the…open to the public…

Alhaitham can’t make himself concentrate on the paper for long, and soon the text swims off into unintelligible patterns again.  He reads enough to know that he doesn’t want for Faranak to finish her work on his house, because they (whoever they are) will either a) turn it into employee housing and probably fill it with noisy, annoying people, or b) open the building to the public as a…what, museum? and definitely fill it with noisy, annoying people.

Abso lute ly not.

In desperation, seeing that his haunting efforts are going very poorly, Alhaitham takes to invading her space in the most literal sense, walking through her and standing in the same place her body occupies until she shivers and goes outside to stand in the sun.  He tries to get the same reaction out of her as the first day she showed up, but if anything she seems to acclimate to Alhaitham the more he tries to unsettle her.  He concentrates on corporeality enough that he starts hiding things that look important; Faranak is easily distracted enough that she spends half an hour looking for the feather pen that Alhaitham had managed to kick under the sofa before finding it.  He spends an entire night carefully ripping a single sheet of paper into tiny shreds that he scatters down various defunct drains.  The last one seems to upset Faranak enough that she doesn’t come back for two days, hopefully lost in a bureaucratic hellhole of delay and frustration.

He thinks, eventually, his increased effort might be working, because her renovation efforts seem to slow to a close: She stops tearing out rotted wood paneling and beating out dusty carpets and starts staring at the walls.  Her long, deft fingers clutch pencils that she stops using.  She stops talking to herself, and Alhaitham successfully begins to forget her name.  She doesn’t get work done, but she starts to spend more and more of her time huddled in Alhaitham’s house like she owns the place.  Or maybe like she’s hiding.

One day, she stumbles in, closes the door behind her, collapses on the floor, and cries.

“I’m sorry,” she weeps.  “I’m sorry, I can’t.  I’m sorry.  I—I can’t .”

Not the best at comforting others even when he was alive, Alhaitham can do nothing but watch.  She sobs in a heap, shoulders shaking, hiccoughing someone’s name.  The words are round and watery, and he doesn’t understand what she says, but he has no problem understanding the grief.  It was the same sound his grandmother (what was her name again?) had made after his own funeral.

Someone that the woman loved has died.

Time passes.  Blonde Lady peels herself off the floor.  She stares blankly at the hardwood, at the sketchbook and feather pen that have fallen out the bag she never took off her shoulder.  Without picking either up, she turns and heads toward the door.  She touches the wood almost reverently, and casts one last look about the place.  Her eyes land on Alhaitham—or it feels like that, even if he knows she’s looking through him.  “I hope,” she says, voice thick, “that someone else will come to love you.”

Alhaitham shudders, spine tingling.  He knows she’s talking to the house, and yet…and yet.  “Thank you,” he says, soft.

Blonde Lady takes a stuttering breath, and then the door is closing softly behind her.

She doesn’t come back.

✧   ✧   ✧

It’s been a few days since last he saw Blonde Lady.  He’s been spending the time looking out the back windows and watching ants crawl through lichen—the activity he chooses when he wants a bit more mental stimulation.  Vaguely, he recalls the memory of a memory of something he read once, describing…pheromones, was it?  Ants and communication…their social structures…the shared knowledge of a colony and the control of a queen…  The thought floats away, and he doesn’t chase it.

“We’ll be quick.  I promise.”

The voice is soft, but Alhaitham still hears it like an icepick to his eardrum.  He winces.  What…?

By the time he gets to the entryway, the door is open.  Beard Guy and Fidget Hands stand uncertainly at the threshold, as though waiting for an invitation.

“Isn’t the historical society going to just close this place back up?  Because of…you know, what happened?” Fidget Hands asks, gesturing vaguely.  “Why do we have to go in?”  She taps each of her fingers on her thumbs in turn.

“You know why,” Beard Guy says.  He finally steps inside, and the floor gives a disgruntled creak under his weight.  “If we think this is something we can complete on our own, then the project will still go forward.  The Akademiya has decided that they’re tired of letting this place rot away on their doorstep.”

The Akademiya .

The name spreads through Alhaitham’s chest like poison, like chain lightning.  He used to work there, he remembers.  He…he…

Near the front door stands a small, round table.  The finish used to gleam over the dark wood, reflecting the keys that rested upon it every evening.  It was something cheap that Alhaitham bought soon after graduating.  Nothing special, but he’d never bothered to replace it, so it’s been in the house for as long as he has.  Now, the table crashes down with a slam that splinters a plank of flooring inches before Beard Guy’s toes.  The top of the table disconnects from the legs and goes rolling off, comically wobbly, before slowly teetering to the floor.

Alhaitham stares at the table in surprise.  Slowly, his mind caught ten seconds behind his body, he remembers gripping the edge of the table so tightly the wood groaned, then knocking it to the floor with all his might.  He hadn’t even realized he’d done it.

Beard Guy looks uneasy.  He looks up, right at where Alhaitham is standing.  “We’re leaving.”

“Good,” Alhaitham says, even though they can’t hear him.

“ Good, ” Fidget Hands says emphatically.  The words come out sideways because she’s chewing aggressively at her thumbnail.  “I never want to see this house again.  I think you were right about it being haunted.  We should just leave it alone and forget it ever existed.”

Beard Guy sighs, but he doesn’t argue with her.  They leave, locking the door behind them.

Time slips back into blessed obscurity.

Chapter Text

Many years ago, in some hidden corner of the House of Daena, Alhaitham had read a book on desert animals.  He was meant to be researching Deshret-era writing systems, but he’d already done his part of the group project and wasn’t about to be saddled with more work because he was foolish enough to admit that he was finished.  So: a corner of the library, and a book on fauna.

Alhaitham hadn’t spent much time in the desert.  He’d been born, raised, and educated in the forest, and since his research interests mostly had to do with language (a subject very conveniently library-bound) he didn’t have much reason to request funding for desert expeditions.  The desert was hot and sandy, and he had always hated the way sand ground on his feet when it inevitably worked its way into his shoes.  No, it wasn’t for him.

So, why this book?  Initially, it was because it had been shelved incorrectly.  This was, after all, the section on ancient languages, not biology.  He’d unshelved it with the intent to place it on a cart so a puttering librarian could wander around and eventually get it back in its place, but then he’d seen that a chunk of pages in the middle had their corners folded over.  Absently, Alhaitham let the book fall open in his hand, reaching up to smooth out the crumple.  Desert Foxes, the subheading read, vulpis desertas.  Alhaitham’s steps slowed as he read while walking.  A sly animal as elusive as a fairy that often appears in folk stories, symbolizing unusual cunning and ancient memories.

Alhaitham had reached the cart, but he only stood and absently fingered the bent pages.  Quickly, he continued to read the entry:

These animals call the vast desert home and are smaller than most of their kin, which is possibly how they evaded the ancient calamities.  Their long ears are an adaptation that helps them better live in their hot and dry desert home: their blood passes through the small veins, cooling off through the thin skin.  Foxes are also fond of sunning themselves, preferring to conserve energy by letting the environment regulate their body temperature.

Most desert foxes range in color from an off-white color to a dark tan, with relatively uniform coat patterns devoid of spots or stripes.  Common eye colors are gold and brown.  However, occasionally a fox will present with abnormal markings and eye color [fig. 7].

The typical diet of a desert fox consists of small rodents, supplemented in times of extreme hunger with henna berries or ajilenakh nuts.  They have also been known to raid wenut hatching grounds, although it is theorized that the foxes only consume sand grease pupae because they like the taste and not for any nutritional value.

Desert foxes tend to stay away from human settlements, although they have been known to befriend lone travelers, trailing them through the desert eating scraps and chasing away small pests.  Historically—

There was more, but Alhaitham stopped reading, distracted by fig. 7.  It was close-up photograph of an atypically-colored fox.  Alhaitham put a finger to the paper.  The fox stared head-on into the kamera, eyes wide and ears swiveled forward in interest.  Its eyes were a bright, intelligent red, and a spattering of dark brown spots dusted its sand-colored forehead like a three-fingered hand waving.  Its gaze was intense; Alhaitham had always considered himself rather practical, but even he found something vaguely approaching human in the fox’s expression.

He shook his head and closed the book.

Alhaitham doesn’t know how many beams of light he’s sat through, ruminating on this memory.  He also doesn’t know why it came back to him in the first place, other than a simple correlation between watching the sun move through the dusty air and recalling that vulpis desertas enjoyed sunbathing.

The front door shudders.

Alhaitham blinks slowly, his version of a startled jerk.  The knob is rattling now, making horrible screechy noises of protest as someone forces it to turn.

Wonderful.

Alhaitham presses his lips together and stands reluctantly.  He rounds the corner just as the door slams open, dislodging a shower of dust that leaves a figure hunched and coughing.  The person steps inside and shakes their hair, long and streaked with dust and shadow and—oh.  Blonde Lady.

Wonderful.

She coughs again, waving a hand, and drops several heavy-looking bags.  Straight-edges and the handles of long paint brushes poke from the tops.  It’s much more than she’s brought in the past, and much less neatly packed too, even towards the end.

“Archons,” she croaks, still half coughing.  “This place is a mess.”

“You left it like this,” Alhaitham says testily.  Every now and then he gets the motivation—he’s not short on time—to slowly inch an object back to its pre–Blonde Lady position, but moving furniture is difficult, so the most obvious change he’s accomplished is setting the notebook and pen she left behind on the mostly empty bottom shelf of the living room bookcase.

She brushes off the front of her clothes and finally looks up, and it’s then that Alhaitham pauses.  This…this is not Blonde Lady.  This is a man.  A man who looks…very much like Blonde Lady.  No, not very much.  Nearly exactly.  Surely Alhaitham’s memory is not so bad that he entirely misremembered her (his?) gender.

Blond…Guy puts his hands on his hips and stretches, letting his head fall back and releasing a tense breath.  “Archons,” he mutters.  Alhaitham isn’t sure if he’s talking about himself or the sorry state of the ceiling he’s now staring at.

He doesn’t have time to wonder, because Blond Guy is suddenly moving, just as much of a whirlwind and he remembers.  He lugs his bags to the other side of the living room, clearly intending to pile them next to a bookcase to keep them out of the way, but halfway there he pauses, going very still.  This, too, Alhaitham remembers.  The way that she—he—they? can switch so suddenly between frenetic movement and preternatural stillness.  Alhaitham ignores whatever it is that has this person standing as though frozen in the middle of his living room in favor of studying their appearance, cataloguing data in an attempt to unscramble his confusion.  The hair is the same, as are the elegant hands with perpetual ink stains at the cuticle.  The way they hold themselves is just as he remembers, as though simultaneously excited to get where they’re going and on the cusp of forgetting what they’re doing.  They’re also about the same age Alhaitham remembers Blonde Lady being.  He just doesn’t understand why they’re now a man.

Blond Guy lets out another puff of air, setting the bags back down and kneeling next to the bookcase.  There’s a flutter of blue between slender fingers, and Alhaitham remembers the pen and notebook at the same instance the intruder speaks, voice the raw twinge of a freshly-picked scab.  “Mother.”

It makes sense, suddenly.  This new person isn’t Blonde Lady at all (which means Alhaitham’s memory is not as shot as he had wondered).  This is her son , likely returned to finish the work his mother started.  Alhaitham sighs, just shy of a groan, and resigns himself to more intrusion, contractors, and paperwork.  Maybe this time his guest will rip out a particularly vital bit of cabinetry that will finally dissolve the remainer of his consciousness.

For now, Blond Guy is small, movements tucked close to his sides, head bowed over his hands.  He gently brushes dust from the vane of the quill and then, after a contemplative moment, places the pen behind his ear.  He packs up the notebook as well, placing a hand on the cover without opening it.  Slowly, with a sudden fatigue that his mother only ever showed near the end of her tenure in Alhaitham’s house, Blond Guy finishes moving his bags.  He slumps against the bookshelf when done, facing Alhaitham’s general direction and staring blankly across the room.  For a moment, Alhaitham almost tricks himself into thinking they’re making eye contact.

“What are you doing?” Blond Guy asks, and Alhaitham stiffens.  He’s sure that if he had a body he’d feel his heart lurch.  Is he…asking him?

Blond Guy spreads his hands, looking down at his palms.  A lock of hair wearily slips from behind his ear to shadow the side of his face.  “What are you doing?” he repeats, a whisper.  Ah.  Of course.  He’s talking to himself.  Alhaitham should have expected this.  This man looks and stands just like his mother, so of course he’d retain some of her mannerisms as well.

Blond Guy presses his open palms to his face, breathing deeply.  There’s a long, quiet moment, full of unspoken history and unvoiced emotion.  He’s so still that Alhaitham watches flecks of dust lazily sway through the air to settle on his shoulders.  It is not until Blond Guy lets out a slow and rather noisy breath that Alhaitham realizes he’d been holding it in.  Alhaitham has not needed to breathe for four times longer than the amount of time he was alive, hadn’t realized the warm slide of air through lung and trachea had been missing.

When Blond Guy looks up, he has reset, face blank and ready for a mask.  Alhaitham watches him reconstruct his emotions one micro expression at a time: the relaxation of a pinched mouth, the softened tilt of furrowed eyebrows, a vapid brightening of watery eyes.

“Kaveh.”

The voice, sudden and soft, startles even Alhaitham, although it’s Blond Guy who lets out an undignified squawk.  Both he and his unwelcome guest—Kaveh, he supposes?—whirl to face the door, where a matra stands leaning casually on his spear.  He’s not wearing a typical matra uniform, instead clad in purple and with an elaborate jackal headdress that allows him to peer out intensely with one bright red eye from underneath its brim.  It’s an effectively commanding look.  “Why are you in this building?” the matra asks.  “It’s off limits.”  His voice is more genuinely curious than accusatory.

“Cyno,” Kaveh croaks, tension draining out of his body.  So he knows this man, then.  “By the Lesser Lord, you scared the shit out of me.”

“This site is closed to the public,” Cyno says.  “Last I checked, you’re the public.”

Alhaitham brightens a bit.  “Are you going to kick him out?” he asks, not caring that the ears to which he speaks can’t hear him.  “He broke in.”

“I’m actually supposed to be here,” Kaveh says, pulling himself up a little.  Alhaitham doesn’t miss the actually or the defensiveness in Kaveh’s response.  Is he often found places he shouldn’t be?

Cyno doesn’t respond, just raises his eyebrows and allows the moment to stretch with expectation.

And of course, Kaveh falls for the trick, awkwardly launching into an over-explanation in order to fill the silence.  “You—you know, like you said, this building isn’t open to the public, but the Akademiya needed someone to look into renovating it.  I’ve been contracted.  I have documents.  Look, here.”  He shoves his hand into one of his bags and flips through folders until he finds whatever stack of papers he’s looking for, then holds them out.  “My previous client was finally happy with their eaves, so I’m working on this now.”

Cyno takes the papers from Kaveh, eyes darting over the forms.  “You have your clothes with you,” he says without looking up.  “Not just your architectural supplies.”

“I—no, those are just—I’ve taken them out to wash,” Kaveh stutters, looking back at the bags huddled in the corner.  Alhaitham looks too, belatedly realizing that yes, there are far too many bags for one architect’s work materials.  He used to be more observant than this.

Cyno shuffles the front page to the back of the stack, drawing both of their attention back with the rustling.  “Instead of washing them at home?”

Kaveh begins to tap his fingers on his thigh nervously, looking anywhere but directly at the matra he is trying to convince he’s not breaking any rules.  “They’re—getting washed at the donation center.  That I’m taking them to.”

Cyno is quiet for a moment, then looks up, eyes sharp but softening.  When he speaks again, his voice is gentler than before.  “Your house was sold yesterday.”

“I—”

“And besides, you’re a terrible liar.  Why are you really here?”

“I have…I have paperwork,” Kaveh says weakly, gesturing to the stack of documents Cyno still holds.

Cyno nods.  “I read them.”  He holds up the stack by the top edge, the gesture clearly meant to display rather than return. “Kaveh, this says you’re permitted to work here, not live here.  If you were to be found residing in this building, not only would it be a severe safety violation—I mean, look at this place—but it would also breach your contract and lead to a termination of your work with the Sumeru Historical Society.”

Alhaitham finds himself liking this Cyno fellow.  Not only had he gleaned an impressive amount of information from his brief scan through the documents, but he’s also trying to get Kaveh to leave.

“Yes, but I—I—” Kaveh’s voice, which has been getting steadily higher, now begins to take on a slightly panicked tone.

“It’s a good thing that I’m going on patrol.  In the desert,” Cyno interrupts.  There’s an almost mischievous glint in his eye.  “Because I’m probably the best person at my job.”

Kaveh looks a little bewildered.  “What?  I mean, yes, but what?”

“Other matra would have no reason to check this place out unless under order from the General Mahamatra—which they won’t get, since he’ll be in the desert—or if someone illicitly living here were especially careless in his secrecy.”  Cyno finally hands back the papers.

Kaveh takes them and carefully lines up the edges, hands a little shaky.  “I understand.”

Alhaitham crosses his arms.  The dregs of an emotion curls in the back of his mind, twisting into an annoyance strong enough to make him frown.  He’s…actually not sure the last time he made a facial expression of any meaningful distinction.

Cyno takes a step, preparing to go.  “Be careful.”

 “Wait,” Kaveh says, and Cyno obliges.  “Why are you going to the desert?”

Cyno’s stillness is different from Kaveh’s earlier breathless moment.  This descends upon him not like a shadow but a responsibility—or a curse.  Alhaitham doesn’t think he’s ever seen something alive be so motionless.  “It’s…a bit of a personal investigation.  One that involves…confidential information from the Akademiya.  That’s all I can tell you.”

Alhaitham narrows his eyes.  “You’re hiding something.”

“Oh,” Kaveh says.  “Well, um, thank you.”

Cyno nods minutely.  “Be careful,” he says again, and then he’s gone, his exit just as quiet as his entrance.

The second the door closes, Kaveh groans and screws his eyes shut.  “Great,” he says, “now Cyno knows you’re here, which means Tighnari knows you’re here, which means Collei knows you’re here—might as well post a notice on the message board!”  He gestures rather emphatically at his luggage, as though it will sympathize with him, then launches into a fake conversation.  “‘Did you hear Kaveh is squatting in a run-down building that could, at any moment, collapse on his head and kill him?’  ‘Kaveh?  Isn’t he the Light of Kshahrewar, the guy that’s supposed to be good at everything and isn’t allowed to have any flaws?  Why is he living in a deathtrap house?’  ‘Oh, you don’t know?  He’s broke as shit because even though he’s a good architect professionally he’s a brilliant fuck-up personally, one who can’t say no to people and is now literally fucking homeless!’”  He throws his arms up to punctuate the statement.

“I understand that you’ve a penchant for the dramatics,” Alhaitham says, wincing, “but do you have to be so loud about it?”

With another screeching stop, Kaveh puts his hands back on his face.  “This isn’t going to work,” he mumbles through his fingers.  “I should just jump from the top of Deshret’s tomb.  Although,” he adds, bitterness creeping back into his voice, “I’d probably hit an endangered bird on the way down, or maybe my corpse would poison a scavenger and the resulting ailment would cascade through the destruction of an ecosystem.  Gah!”

Alhaitham blows a breath out of his nose.  “Or you could just do as the General Mahamatra said and be mindful of the need for secrecy.”

As though he’s heard him, Kaveh sighs.  “Fine.  Are you done being dramatic?  Good, because you’re embarrassing yourself.”  And then he’s moving again, pulling sheets of paper from a portfolio and snapping them open to reveal the blueprints to Alhaitham’s house.  There’s a partially faded five-pointed ink splatter on one corner.  “Okay,” Kaveh says, voice almost believably bright, “so…”  His monologue transitions to internal as he paces off the measurements of the room, humming as he stops in a corner and taps his finger to something on the paper.  He turns and walks the other way, then rounds the corner down the short hall to Alhaitham’s library.

Alhaitham follows, a little apprehensive about what Kaveh’s plans are.  Kaveh turns in a slow circle, casting a critical eye over the bookcases, the desk, the grimy windows.  “I can work with this,” he says.  “Or, I could, if they would just tell me about the person who lived here.  None of the furniture matches.  Is that because of an intentional choice?  Was it due to a horrible sense of style?  Did they just not care?  Urgh.”

“The furniture doesn’t need to match,” Alhaitham quips.  “It needs to function.”

Kaveh tosses his papers onto the dusty surface of Alhaitham’s desk.  He gently wiggles the chair, testing its soundness, then lowers himself cautiously onto the seat.  “Let’s see…” Kaveh mutters.  He pulls at the various drawers, making little grunts of disappointment when he sees they’re empty.  Kaveh pushes the last drawer closed, then sets his elbow on the desk, leaning on his hand and gazing around the room once more.  “Hmm.”

He’s still again, but Alhaitham can see the quick flick of his gaze on the bookshelves, the calculations running behind his eyes.  “Well, maybe,” Kaveh says, shrugging.  “Might be worth it.”

Alhaitham is going to lose his mind if Kaveh keeps having half-out-loud conversations with himself like this.  What might be worth it?

(And yes, while it’s true that Alhaitham has spent the better part of the last century looking forward to losing his mind, devolving into madness because of an annoying roommate is not how he had imagined it happening.  If only he had his earpieces so he could tune out the intrusion entirely.)

The thing that might be worth it, it turns out, is Kaveh walking to the bookshelves by the window and pulling out dusty volumes at random.  He creaks open the covers, looking for a name, or inscription, or anything to tell him even the smallest bit of information on their owner.  His face shifts through an impressive range of expressions while he flips through the books—mostly different flavors of incredulity and disappointment, but Alhaitham finds it interesting how the tiniest twitch of a facial muscle can change Kaveh’s expression so drastically. 

Kaveh sighs with increasing flair the longer he goes without finding anything of substance.  Perhaps he’s lost certainty that he’ll find anything useful, or perhaps he finds the contents of Alhaitham’s library disagreeable on a personal level.  It might be both, based on his cranky muttering after snapping the latest book closed.  “Did this person ever read for fun?  I swear, it’s just dry philosophical texts on—” he stops to refer to the title page “—Compensatory Lengthening: Phonetics, Phonology, Diachrony.”  He tilts another book free to find its title.  “ The Ethics of Reading?  What do you mean ethics of reading?  How can reading have ethics?  You just do it.”

“You’d know if you bothered to read it,” Alhaitham snipes.

Kaveh sets the books back, sneezing as the action kicks up dust.  “This whole library is incredibly pretentious.  I’d bet my life’s savings half of these books never even got read.”

“No wonder you’re suffering financial struggles.” Alhaitham pushes on one of the books Kaveh placed back on the shelf, properly realigning it with its neighbors.  “You’d lose the bet.”  It grates on him more than he’d like to admit that Kaveh seems unwilling to believe that he would be the type of person who has all these books because he wanted to learn, instead building a sketch in his mind of an uptight, self-important, and ultimately useless academic.  Exactly the type of people Alhaitham prefers to avoid.

Giving up on the current bookshelf, Kaveh swipes the toe of his shoe on the floor, scraping out an arc in the layers of dust and silt.  He does a little hop on one foot, turning so that he can continue the line until it meets back at the beginning and he stands in the middle of a circle.  Kaveh sighs again , the most despondent yet, and droops, back curled and fingers just brushing the floor.  Tiny pops run up his spine as he releases the tension in his back.  “Archons,” he mutters.  He pulls on his ankles, deepening the stretch, then gets distracted again with drawing shapes in the dust.

Alhaitham might find Kaveh’s scattered approach to everything amusing if he weren’t so annoyed by it.  Instead, he rolls his eyes and flexes his own neck, unconsciously copying Kaveh’s actions and trying to crack bones that aren’t there.

“Ugh,” Kaveh says, and slowly straightens, one vertebra at a time.  He releases a breath.  “Okay.  Oh, huh.”  He perks up suddenly, standing a little taller.  “Hey.”

Alhaitham follows his gaze, frowning when he realizes that Kaveh has zeroed in on the bookcases behind his desk.  These are different from the others, in that they have glass doors encasing the shelves.  They are different, too, in that they contain the myriad little personal effects that Alhaitham tucked away for safekeeping and never let anyone touch.

Kaveh, because of course he does, heads right for them.

Alhaitham is quick on his heels.  “Don’t you dare.”

Kaveh, because of course he does, dares.  “Do you open?” he wonders aloud, pulling ever-so-gently at the knob of one of the doors.

Alhaitham slaps a hand on the glass, straining to keep it closed.  Just because Kaveh is here to stay doesn’t mean he has to make it easy for him.  “No,” he grits.  “This is mine and I want you to stay out of it.”

Kaveh hums and pulls a little harder.  Despite Alhaitham’s best efforts, he can’t overpower the strength of corporeal muscle, and he stumbles a little as his strength gives out and his arm suddenly sinks through the glass.

The door opens faster than Kaveh was anticipating, judging by his little yelp of surprise.  The yelp gets louder when the door falls off its hinges, determined to shatter itself at their feet.

In an impressive display of quick reflexes and quicker thinking, Kaveh jerks forward, scooting his foot under the door before it manages to hit the floor.  This, plus the firm hold he keeps on the handle, saves the glass from breaking.  It does not, however, save Kaveh’s foot.

“Ow, fuck!”  Kaveh pulls in a breath through his nose, screwing his eyes shut as he lets what Alhaitham is sure is incredibly unpleasant pain throb through his toes.  “Fuck, fuck, fuck.  Owwww.”

Alhaitham cannot find it in himself to feel bad.  “Stay out of my things,” he mumbles.  He lets himself slump far enough into the bookcase that he’s halfway overlapped with the shelves, only just catching himself before he topples through the wall entirely.  Something odd seems to be tugging his limbs down.

Kaveh gingerly eases the cabinet door off his foot and leans it against the wall.  “Sorry,” he says.

“You’d better fix it,” Alhaitham says.

“I’ll fix you first,” Kaveh promises the door, then turns his attention back to the shelves he has just uncovered.

The items they contain are much less dusty and much more varied.  Along with the books that are stuffed in the rest of the shelves, several open spaces have been left for trinkets and knick-knacks, things he was either gifted from those who knew him well enough to give something he’d actually appreciate or that were leftover from his childhood.

Kaveh looms close to Alhaitham’s face, and he leans back before realizing that Kaveh is not peering into his eyes but looking instead at the little carved desert hawk he’d been given by his grandmother when he first had his stars read and marked his constellation as vultur volans .  It’s currently occupying the same space as Alhaitham’s orbital bone.

“Cute,” Kaveh says.  His eyes slide down a shelf.  “Ooh, is this a yearbook?”  He reaches out, hand passing through the left side of Alhaitham’s chest, and pulls out the book in question.  “It is!” he says, giddy, and plops back down at the desk.  “Finally—surely this has a name in it.”

Unfortunately, as Kaveh soon finds out, it does not.  The inside cover is once again blank, as are the following pages. Kaveh leans his head on a hand, flipping absently through photos.  “It’s so different now,” he murmurs, pausing over wide shots of Akademiya buildings and candids of harried students.  “Ha!  Look at that hair.”

Alhaitham watches wearily from his place inside the shelves.  As much as he’d rather Kaveh didn’t go nosing through his things, he can’t find the motivation to try to stop him.  That strange feeling still tugs at him, sapping his energy and—he realizes, suddenly, that he’s tired.  Apparently dealing with loud blonds is enough to wear out even a ghost.

When Kaveh turns the next page, he inhales a breath just shy of a gasp.  “Finally,” he says, and puts a gentle finger to the paper.  “Alhaitham.”

The sound of his name coming from Kaveh’s mouth is enough to jerk Alhaitham back into movement.  How—what?  He leans around Kaveh, putting a hand on the back of the chair, and scans the page for whatever he’s found.  “Oh,” Alhaitham says.  “I had…forgotten about that?”  He’s not quite sure if he’s asking a question or not.

Kaveh has opened to the staff directory, where tiny thumbnail photos accompany list of names and positions.  About a third of the way down, there’s a message in spiky handwriting next to a woman with a perceptive smile.

Alhaitham—

I know you’d never get one of these on your own, which means I must insist you accept this gift so that you may always have a photo of me to look at whenever you start to miss me too much.  Don’t be a stranger…not all the time, at least!

—Faruzan

“Alhaitham,” Kaveh says again.  He touches Faruzan’s name, tracing the characteristic overlapping flair of the letters and the unavoidable smudge of left-handedness.  He moves to running his finger down lists of names.  “Alhaitham…aha!”  He stops at Alhaitham’s staff portrait, then snorts out a laugh.  “Wow, you look just as stuffy as your books suggested.  You must have been a lot of fun at parties.”  He taps the photo.

Annoyance struggles up through Alhaitham’s fatigue.  It’s not his fault that the whole ordeal of sitting for his photograph was a colossal waste of time he could have been spent doing something more productive, or that the photographer wouldn’t stop insisting on the most inane small talk.  “I wouldn’t know,” he responds to Kaveh’s sarcasm, “no one ever invited me.”

“At least I finally know your name,” Kaveh says.  “No one would tell me shit about this place.  How am I supposed to restore a personal residence without knowing anything about who resided in it?”  His eyes pull away from Alhaitham’s portrait and he closes the yearbook.  “I wonder if I can find out more in the Akademiya archives.  They might—gah!”

His musings are interrupted by the inconvenient collapse of the chair.  Kaveh, now crumpled on the floor, groans and allows himself to lay pathetically for a few moments before rolling to his side.  “What’s your problem?” he demands.

Despite knowing Kaveh can’t see him, it takes a moment for Alhaitham to realize that he’s addressing the now-collapsed chair.

“I tested you for structural soundness,” Kaveh continues.  He picks up a dismembered chair leg.  “I trusted you to seat me.  And this is how you repay me?  Deplorable.”

Alhaitham flexes an ache (when was the last time he ached?) out of his hand—the chair was sturdier than it looked.  He’s better at picking out furniture than Kaveh gives him credit, if he’d had to—

Alhaitham starts and takes a step back.  The past thirty seconds snap into place with the sting of a rubber band.  Kaveh’s musings.  The archives.  A surge of force, a pressure borne of fury.  Wood creaking.  Alhaitham’s hand on the back of the chair, the sudden way he had pressed down hard enough to make the legs snap.

Kaveh clambers to his feet, dusting himself off.  “Clearly, this is a sign.”

“Yes,” Alhaitham says, jaw tight enough to crack teeth.  “To get out of my house.”

“I’m going to get a drink,” Kaveh declares, glowering at the closed yearbook.  “And then I’ll come home and go to bed.  I’ve dealt with enough.  I’ll make a go of this dusty ruin—and Alhaitham—in the morning.”  And then he’s gone, steps purposeful down the hall back to his bags, from where he will surely poke around until he finds a way to snoop through not just all of Alhaitham’s physical belongings, but his personal life as well.

Alhaitham hopes (admittedly, without much confidence) to the Greater Lord that if Kaveh is going to ruin his until-now perfectly reasonable and sequestered death, that he’ll at least be quick about it.