Chapter Text
“I had a dream,” says Alhaitham one morning, which is so unusual that Kaveh nearly drops his broom in the middle of sweeping the kitchen. Kaveh, who had grown up in a nation in which no one dreamed, firstly cannot get over the novelty of having dreams at all, let alone sharing such an intimate thing with someone else—look, he knows that they’re commonplace everywhere outside of Sumeru and they’re nothing to be ashamed of, but it still feels a bit like handing someone else a part of the deepest, messiest, most illogical part of your mind and heart. Honestly, Kaveh would rather show someone one of his dirty drawings.
As if Alhaitham is doing nothing strange, Alhaitham continues, “I woke up in my own bed, but the sitting room was an absolute mess. And your room had no bed, no clothes, no drawings. It was just full of my books.”
Kaveh stares at him. If Alhaitham is going to tell him that he had a dream about a world in which Kaveh didn’t exist and the ensuing peace and quiet was the equivalent a wet dream to Alhaitham, Kaveh would really rather Alhaitham have just showed him his porn stash.
Alhaitham shrugs. “Although I walked around the city looking for you, I couldn’t find you. I kept getting lost, because small things about the city had changed, too.”
“You? Looking for me?”
“Someone has to get you from the tavern when you’ve passed out in your beer,” says Alhaitham coolly. “But it turned out that you had just been away on a business trip.”
Kaveh sighs in relief. What an oddly specific detail for a dream, but then again, Kaveh once had a dream that Alhaitham had somehow popped an intellectual boner for Hat Guy’s essays, switched to Vahumana, and moved to Inazuma to elope with Hat Guy, so he’s aware that most dreams are total nonsense. “A business trip is usually where I am when I haven’t been home,” says Kaveh. “You act like I’m a drunken lush passing out under every table just because I did it once.“
“Once is more than enough to lose your standing as a respectable senior.”
“You—it was only because I’d forgotten to eat anything that day, and I could hardly refuse when a client’s pouring the drinks for you—it’s rude to just turn them down when they’re forking over the paycheck at the end of the day! Business relationships are more important than you think.”
Alhaitham doesn’t respond.
“If you turned on your headphones in the middle of our conversation,” says Kaveh.
“The Palace of Alcazarzaray wasn’t there,” says Alhaitham.
Kaveh pauses. “…It was destroyed?”
“The place where it was supposed to be was just empty. It had the typical signs of Withering that was in the process of recovering, but was otherwise untouched.”
Kaveh stares.
Alhaitham shrugs. “Dreams are either nonsense or divine revelations from Lord Kusanali herself,” Alhaitham pauses to yawn in a truly jaw-cracking way, “according to Sumeru’s rumor mill.”
“Don’t tell me you had a dream where I was…”
“Where you were was inconsequential.” Kaveh bristles, but in truth, he’s not surprised—of course Alhaitham would have a dream where Kaveh had disappeared from his life and find it of no real importance. Kaveh can’t stand him sometimes. “So was the state of my house, and so was the state of the city. They were superficial changes.” Alhaitham walks past him to grab one of his snacks from the pantry. He eats like a kid, Kaveh swears, all bland carbs and snacks a million times a day. “The important thing was that the Palace wasn’t there.”
For a horrible second, Kaveh thinks that his life would be better if the Palace didn’t exist. If he’d never made the choice to build it, if he’d never funded it, if he’d never taken out a loan from his own client to build her project—Kaveh wouldn’t have to live in this damn house with a guy who has a dream about Kaveh disappearing from his life, for one—
Kaveh takes a deep breath and sighs. It’s too early in the day to be upset about things, and he adores his magnum opus for the most part. “I didn’t know you were so attached to my work,” he says without expression. Alhaitham’s eye flicks over to watch him out of the corner of his vision.
“I’m not. It just happened to be the most important causal factor.” And right in the middle of the kitchen floor, Alhaitham rips a piece of naan in two and puts one half in his mouth.
“Wha—get a plate!” Kaveh cries, while Alhaitham switches on his headphones. “You’re getting crumbs all over the floor! Look at this broom in my hands! I literally just finished sweeping—"
*
Alhaitham never mentions this dream again. This is fine, because Kaveh doesn’t forget it: A world where the Palace of Alcazarzaray didn’t exist. A world where Kaveh didn’t have debt.
Monetary debt makes dating difficult, so in lieu of a lover, Kaveh’s debt becomes his most constant companion. When he wakes up in the morning, he turns over on his pillow and pulls the covers up, the overhead fan spinning lazily to the tune of Kaveh’s utility bill. He makes himself get up, makes himself grab his clothes and his jewelry and his sketchbook and Mehrak. He’s careful with them all, so that they don’t need parts replaced; he will make room in his budget for it because he will feel obligated—to maintain an image, to not let down everyone in the city who’s so proud of him for making it big, to keep Mehrak functioning so he has someone he can talk to where he doesn’t have to be afraid they won’t pay him or he won’t pay them.
He yawns past the coffee that’s sitting on the kitchen counter—it’s Alhaitham’s, anyway, and god knows that he’d make Kaveh pay him back the four mora that it cost to make it—but it’s not worth it, Kaveh thinks; it’s a privilege to change the caffeine levels in your blood, and one that Kaveh doesn’t afford anymore. He slides in one minute before the appointed time to shake hands with his latest client, notices the fat gold rings on his client’s hand, smiles at his client in the eyes. The man offers to buy breakfast for them both so they can discuss work over food. Kaveh declines, offers to pay instead, and does.
After Kaveh’s paid the bill he can’t afford, he goes off to the outskirts of Sumeru City and stares up at the horizon. The fields near the outskirts are free to sit at and the sunset is free to view, so Kaveh can look stay here relatively guilt free. Kaveh misses going to the bazaar as his usual haunt; while it’s technically free to enter, there’s too many people who expect him to be a generous spender because he’s done so in the past, and he can’t bear to let them down when so many of the aunties there are so proud of him for having “made it big” as Kshahrewar’s most famed architect. Kaveh misses going to the Akademiya library (another location where he can enter for free); there’s too many people who want to poach him for this-or-that project, this-or-that charity, expecting Kaveh to be able to take up these offers easily, since most architects almost always have money to spare. It’s been so long since Kaveh would go to art galleries for fun. The tickets are cheap, but the act of having to part with mora is already too much guilt; and then there’s the matter of the young aspiring artist who is usually starstruck that Kaveh has come to visit them who would simply die of happiness if Kaveh were to purchase one of their pieces, and then Kaveh will feel too terrible to leave without purchasing—
Kaveh has a headache. He hopes he’s not becoming one of those people who develop migraines in their late twenties. Medication costs money, too, and he doesn’t need another expense to feel terrible about.
And the higher the sun rises in the sky, the more keenly aware Kaveh is that time is money, and he’s wasting it twiddling his thumbs instead of producing sketches.
For all the ideas that Kaveh’s newest, obviously-rich client talked about for his new summer villa, and for all that Kaveh agreed at the time, none of the images are compelling enough to stay in his mind. The sky is blue overhead and without clouds. He stares at the trees that mark the beginning of Sumeru’s forests. The trees planted just outside Sumeru City are remarkably straight up and down with curls and whorls in the bark itself. None of this inspires him, either.
So he goes home. Kaveh cleans the sitting room while he waits for Alhaitham to come back from his own dayjob, picking up Alhaitham’s books and the socks that Alhaitham leaves all over the house. There’s mopping to do, tidying to do; the coffee table keeps acquiring strange stains and a dozen books and letters, hair clips, teacups, an errant bowl, some dried crumbs from one of Alhaitham’s snacks. He mops the floors because it’s not his house because he doesn’t have enough money to have his own house. He uses a nice mop that belongs to Alhaitham, or at least was already in the house when Kaveh arrived.
Kaveh takes a deep breath and makes himself smile. “Well. How was your day?”
Alhaitham dumps his coat on the nearest seat and rolls his neck and tosses his keys in the key bowl. The actions of someone who can expect when his next paycheck can be expected, to be able to afford food and property taxes without blinking an eye and measuring every mora, someone who doesn’t have to watch his mailbox like a hawk for the next unexpected bill that he hadn’t accounted for. “It was fine,” says Alhaitham, and picks up one of the books that Kaveh had just tidied (Dream Interpretation and Other Analyses of the Mind, by some Fontanian author whose only credentials were that he was “more experienced in having dreams than the average Sumeru citizen”) and disappears to his room. Kaveh cleans the rest of the house alone, not wishing that Alhaitham were here to argue with him to at least distract him, wishing that if he weren’t so annoyed about doing house chores because he doesn’t have enough god damn money, wishing that Alhaitham had at least required Kaveh to do house chores as part of their agreement so that Kaveh could be annoyed at him instead of at himself and his own guilty conscience.
Contrary to popular opinion, Kaveh and Alhaitham don’t spend every single moment of their lives arguing with each other. Some nights, Alhaitham will shut himself in his room and read through books until he’s found the exact right piece of information that he can either file away for his own self-satisfaction or include in whatever paper he’s currently writing, which would also be a paper written for his own self-satisfaction. That’s the ideal of a scholar: Someone with leisure time and books enough to follow their own innate curiosity, to strive only for the wisdom and knowledge that they personally seek. Kaveh will never tell Alhaitham this, but Alhaitham’s self-interested, self-serving, single-minded interest in his own collection of knowledge is a finely honed art within itself, unchained from obligation to turning a profit or filling quotas for research grants.
Kaveh sits alone in the spot where Alhaitham usually sits. Then he grabs a bottle of wine and, foregoing a wine glass, drinks straight from the bottle.
Cheap wine that does the trick—the only reliable companion when one is in debt. Bottled 16%-alcoholic happiness on sale is cheaper than the millions of mora required to fix Kaveh’s monetary decisions, and the day his accounts are settled is too far off for Kaveh to really believe that one day he’ll be debt-free. So why bother trying dreaming of some day that won’t come for the next thirty years? Better to focus on just getting through the night and making it to morning without wanting to throw himself off a bridge. He opens his sketchbook to a blank page, thinks about drawing someone else’s summer home, wills himself to pick up his pencil and start sketching, drinks his way slowly through the majority of the wine, and stares at the ceiling until he falls asleep.
*
7:26
Kaveh wakes up in a hotel room.
This is akin to experiencing a heart attack without the cardiovascular failure, as the cheapest hotels in Sumeru’s most competitive, academic metropolis run at minimum for five thousand mora a night, and even then Kaveh would probably sleep on the floor than risk sleeping in the (most certainly unwashed) sheets of any hotel charging only five thousand mora per room. Worse, Kaveh is in a suite in a finely-decorated hotel room with a walk-in closet and giant shower and a view of the Divine Tree—how much is this? Twenty thousand? Thirty thousand? There’s three wine bottles on the nightstand (forty thousand mora?). There’s uneaten food (UNEATEN? As if Kaveh has the money to be wasting food like that!) in the corner of the room on a room service tray (ROOM SERVICE? Who does Kaveh think he is—the Grand Sage?!).
And worst of all: Kaveh doesn’t recognize any of the possessions in the room.
Naturally, he scrambles off the bed and bangs three body parts into the wall immediately.
Kaveh does not need to add “criminal record for crimes he doesn’t remember committing” to his list of life woes, and he’s wearing sleepwear he doesn’t remember putting on, so he squirms out of his shirt and throws it against the wall like it’s a live snake and wishes that the Akasha System were still live so that he could angrily message Alhaitham about whatever cruel prank he’s playing now, except Kaveh knows that Alhaitham doesn’t have this sort of sense of humor, which is worse to think about because it exhausts the only possible explanation that Kaveh had for what was going on. He scrambles around the hotel room for something to wear, but he doesn’t recognize any of his own clothes—everything is too ritzy, of fine quality, of a bland sort of cut that Kaveh wouldn’t be caught dead wearing. Whoever stays here has no artistic sense, although this is thoroughly a problem for a different time. Terrified, he chooses the most inconspicuous white shirt and brown pants that he can find and pokes his head out of the hotel room.
He makes his way down the hallway and the stairs to the hotel lobby with success; he walks fast and looks like he knows where he’s going and gives a strained smile and a nod to everyone he passes. Easy: Bad habits he picked up from Alhaitham when they skipped class together. He gives the front desk receptionist a half-smile and a wave and makes a beeline for the front door.
“Kaveh!” says a loud voice.
Kaveh freezes and contemplates if Cyno would kill him quickly as a favor between friends when Kaveh is inevitably taken to jail and charged with whatever crime it is to wake up in someone else’s hotel room.
“Sleep well?” says a very large Snezhnayan man, approaching at a leisurely pace. “No need rush anywhere. I adore your enthusiasm, but breakfast, first.”
“Uh,” says Kaveh.
“Like hotel, is paid for by company card. Eat as much as you like.”
This man, who Kaveh has honest-to-god never met in his entire life, treats Kaveh like they’ve been colleagues for years, pats Kaveh on the back, sits Kaveh down at the hotel’s dine-in restaurant, orders Kaveh a cup of morning tea on Kaveh’s behalf and actually orders the kind Kaveh likes. “Should take advantage of free money when have it,” the man tells him with a wink. “Company is so generous. You will like travel benefits.”
“No, no, I couldn’t,” says Kaveh automatically.
“I insist. What else Fatui money good for?”
Kaveh tries very hard not to choke.
“Ah,” says the man sympathetically. “Yes. Sorry. Perhaps you did not know. We are normal Snezhnayan company, I promise. We hire whoever we can, we build whoever will pay us. But is subsidized by Fatui,” he says, a bit apologetically. “Everyone is. That is Snezhnaya right now. Walk out your door, the police are ex-Fatui. Go to the bank, the shareholders are Fatui. At work, your boss is paid by Fatui, so your boss is Fatui. Your office building loaned from Fatui. You go home, your child has joined the Fatui. No escape!” He laughs hugely. “May as well ‘go with the flow.’ May as well ‘put eggs in one basket.’ There’s no other baskets to put them in. I am fifty-five. I might make it to seventy before the ‘basket’—“ The man makes a hand expression miming an explosion. “Seventy will be enough for me. Then I will say I at least live long and well. Time for breakfast, yes?”
Kaveh struggles to keep up with the conversation from context clues alone. “If the situation is that way, I’m surprised that you stay in Snezhnaya,” says Kaveh cautiously.
The man does not seem bothered by this statement, so presumably Kaveh’s improv acting skills have pass undetected. “No, is same everywhere. Even in Liyue, oldest regime in Teyvat, power change hands, change hands again. From old gods to Rex Lapis to Miss Tianquan. Soon it will be Miss Yuheng.” He makes another hand gesture. “We will see. Maybe I will reach seventy and will want to cheat death. Maybe I come here to hide in Sumeru as refugee!”
He laughs at this too as the waiter of the hotel’s dine-in restaurant brings them bread, cheese, and jam—an extremely humble breakfast offering that is out of place with the luxurious décor in the hotel, as well as the gravitas that the waiter brings it to them with.
“Not things for you to worry about,” the man says. Kaveh starts thinking about a clever, subtle way to ask this man for his name, so that he can stop thinking of him as just ‘the man.’ “For now, is easy money. Hedonist money. Dirty money is only good for being enjoyed. Welcome to the project.”
The man tucks in with gusto, eating the bread and cheese together in huge bites, folded in half with the cheese in the middle like a sandwich. Kaveh could not possibly be less hungry, but he makes himself pick up a piece of flatbread and a bit of jam. “Could you tell me a bit more about the project?” Kaveh asks slowly.
The man looks at him. “We discuss already the details.”
Kaveh feels his spine break out in cold sweat. “Could we go over them… again…?”
Kaveh, luckily, is a master at pretending to be himself. Or rather, a master of pretending to be ‘the light of Kshahrewar,’ who is some fictitious man who lives a life of wealth and ease, of divine enlightenment and rapturous fits of artistic passion. The man thinks about this, nods, wipes his fingers on the tablecloth and says “You are conscientious. Good businessman,” which makes Kaveh smile wryly, because he wishes he were a good businessman. “Prisons are not that complicated to design. We not care about if prisoners are happy inside. No need to overthink.”
Kaveh almost stands up right that moment. Schools, shopping districts, office buildings—these are all things that Kaveh could, if he worked hard enough, design with the intention of benefiting the people who lived and worked there. But prisons—the only sort of prison that Kaveh would ever design would have doors instead of bars and spacious bedrooms and large windows for natural light and well-stocked communal kitchens so that everyone, no matter what laws they’d broken, could have another chance to live a good life. Any prison Kaveh would put his name on would be no prison at all, but a rehabilitation center.
“Hm?” says the man, looking at Kaveh’s face.
“I’m sorry,” says Kaveh, and puts down his bread. “I think you have the wrong man.”
The man’s jovial smile doesn’t change, but grows darker. “Feet are cold?”
“No, no! Or—” Kaveh struggles to reign in his temper and makes himself breathe. “I would never have signed myself up to design a prison.”
“But you did.”
“I really never would have. Not in any universe, not for any reason, not for any sum of money. You must have mistaken me for someone else.”
“Kaveh of Kshahrewar,” says the man. “No, no. I have right man.” He wipes his mouth with the back of his hand and reaches into his briefcase to pull out a stack of papers. The legal contract is long and lengthy, but has been drafted by Liyuen lawyers and signed off by two people: Mr. Petrov and Kaveh himself, in a signature that is undeniably Kaveh’s own. Kaveh stares as the man points to the two names: “Me,” he says, “and you.” He points to Kaveh’s signature next to Aleksandr Petrov. “Eggs in one basket.”
Kaveh stares at this paper that he’s never seen before in his life. “That’s—that’s a forgery! Someone else forged my name!”
“You signed it,” says Mr. Petrov. “In front of me. I saw it with my two eyes. We had witness. Three witness, actually. I call Sergei if you like. He gets up early. The other two witness I can call too.”
Kaveh starts to feel like he can’t breathe.
“Now,” says Mr. Petrov. “You and I had understanding. Dirty money is money, and happiness must be bought. Who ever lived happy life on a single mora?” Mr. Petrov sighs deeply and laces his fingers together and sits back in his chair. “I told you of my son last night. He is your age. I told him, we need to eat; justice and ideals do not fill your stomach. Happiness cannot be acquired through suffering, even if it is good suffering for good cause. And now you have cold feet?”
“You’re lying to me,” says Kaveh. “Where are those witnesses? I won’t just take the word of anyone. I’ll contest the contract with the matra.”
“Two of witnesses are from Akademiya. You ask them.” Mr. Petrov is no longer smiling, although he does not seem angry, either. He does not seem to care much one way or another, as if this is completely outside of his concern now that he has acquired Kaveh’s signature and the trap’s snare has already sprung. “They will not lie for you against your matra, I think. Even if did, Sergei will not.”
Kaveh doesn’t understand. He couldn’t have gotten so drunk that he blacked out for three days, somehow acquired a large Snezhnayan man who wanted him to build a prison, and had a whole conversation about this man’s son after signing a legally binding contract with three witnesses in that time. Has he gone insane? “I—I refuse,” he stammers. “I won’t build a prison. I can’t. I don’t even think I physically could.”
Mr. Petrov nods deeply. He motions over to the waiter and hands the waiter a considerable amount of mora. “I am going now. I will see you tomorrow for our departure for Snezhnaya. In six months time, you will be back here. You will be much richer man soon.”
Kaveh stands up. “Did you hear me? You can take me to court if you like. There’s a clause for breaking the contract—I’ll pay the sum. But you can’t make me design the prison.”
“Take day to think,” says Mr. Petrov. “Go to bazaar. Spend money on something nice. Reward yourself for your choices. Guilt will go away.” Mr. Petrov waves both hands, like a magician does after he’s made something disappear. “Then you will remember why you make decision you did.”
Then Mr. Petrov hands him a briefcase, pats it, tells him that it’s the down payment, and walks off. Almost so furious that Kaveh can’t speak, Kaveh opens the damn thing right there in the hotel lobby and nearly screams at the sight of nine million mora.
*
8:31
He can't just leave the money there. The hotel staff won't take it; Mr. Petrov cannot be found. So, if only because he doesn't know what else to do with it, Kaveh emerges from the hotel carrying a briefcase that feels like the equivalent of nine million mora worth of explosives.
Kaveh lives in the undesirable position of being well-known by essentially everyone, has no shortage of people to make small talk with, has a vast collection of clients and ex-clients and colleagues and ex-collagues, but were he to collapse in the middle of the night from illness, he doesn’t actually know who he could be close enough with to ask to help him get to the hospital.
It’s Bimarstan’s job to be on call for medical emergencies, but just because Bimarstan gets paid to take care of people, that doesn’t mean that Kaveh should take advantage of Bimarstan, right? Kaveh’s mother, even if she was not currently living in Fontaine, is out of the question because her long-standing depression is only somewhat alleviated by the thought that her son is a successful architect, and Kaveh is not willing to destroy what little peace of mind his mother has; Lambad has already seen enough of Kaveh’s woes and Lambad is frankly not paid enough to be both a tavern-keeper and a therapist; Tighnari is already busy from spending sixteen hours a day working and writing papers and lecturing and preventing the forest from exploding. So really, if required to ask someone to assist him in a medical emergency, Kaveh thinks he’d rather just bleed out on Alhaitham’s kitchen floor.
In this case, Bimarstan probably will not be able to help him with having nine million unaccounted-for mora on his person, his mother is in Fontaine, and Lambad’s tavern is currently closed because it’s too early in the day and also Kaveh doesn’t know if he would trust Lambad to know that Kaveh has nine million unaccounted-for mora on his person in the first place.
So.
“Haitham, I know you’re in there!” Kaveh calls through the door, then peers through the windows as if he could see through the curtains. “C’mon. I forgot my keys again! I don’t know where they went!”
Then a woman walks past on her way to the Akademiya library carrying a huge stack of books, so Kaveh has to twiddle his thumbs and act calm and chill and like he isn’t attempting to break down the door of a house where he definitely doesn’t live, because he definitely has a house of his own and has no monetary debt and doesn’t have to mooch off his ex-best friend’s pity. When he turns around, he sees the curtain sway. “I know you’re in there,” Kaveh hisses, and bangs on Alhaitham’s door. “I know you roll out of bed twenty minutes before your scheduled hours and clock in thirty seconds before your shift! You don’t even have work until 9:30!”
No response.
Now Kaveh wonders if he imagined the entire thing and Alhaitham isn’t home after all. Not that Kaveh is a stranger to being homeless, but Kaveh hasn’t ever had to wander around Sumeru’s streets pretending not to be loitering while holding nine million mora that he’s not supposed to have. Is he supposed to ask Tighnari for a favor? Can he make it all the way to Gandharva in a single day on foot? He doesn’t have the money to go around paying someone to take him there on cart. Could he ask Cyno? Cyno is more Alhaitham’s friend than Kaveh’s friend. Would Tighnari really not turn him in for something like this? Isn’t Tighnari a bit of a square anyway?
The door unlocks. Alhaitham’s face appears in the doorway.
“What do you mean, ‘again’?” Alhaitham asks.
Kaveh makes a truly embarrassing noise of relief and makes to step inside. Alhaitham closes the door just a bit, blocking the entry with his body. Kaveh asks, “What do you mean, ‘What do I mean, again’?”
“You said, ‘I forgot my keys again.’”
Kaveh stares at him. Alhaitham never passes up an opportunity to rub salt in the wound whenever Kaveh’s forgotten his keys, even if Alhaitham took his keys. “I mean I forgot my keys again. What kind of trick question is this? Let me in.” Kaveh glances over his shoulder nervously.
“Did you lock yourself out of your house?”
That infuriating, smug, condescending son of a bitch—! What does he want?! For Kaveh to grovel for Alhaitham to let him into their house?!
But there’s a few scholars walking past, so Kaveh holds his tongue and lowers his voice: “You really have a sick sense of humor.”
I’m waiting to hear the magic words, is the sort of response that Kaveh expected, or maybe, No humor involved, Kaveh; I just think clear communication is important. Tell me more about how you locked yourself out of the house for the third time this month and how a genius of your caliber cannot make use of a simple key bowl to keep track of his keys. But instead, Alhaitham’s voice remains expressionless, frozen in a cold, aloof stare, as if he were studying at a great distance a bug that had crawled into his food. Suddenly self-conscious, Kaveh coughs to clear his throat. “Well. That is.” He adjusts his collar and shifts his bag of dirty money to the other hand. “I…”
Humiliating, Kaveh thinks miserably. Every day Kaveh brings misfortune on himself and he has nobody to blame but himself. He doesn’t know yet how he managed to get himself nine million mora that he isn’t supposed to have, but he’s sure in advance that that’s something he brought upon himself. He doesn’t have the right to beg Alhaitham for help after Alhaitham has already done him the favor of allowing Kaveh to live in his home.
When he’d confessed that he’d lost his home to Alhaitham in Lambad’s all those months ago, Alhaitham had looked at him with the even-handed neutrality of someone reading a physics textbook: Neither good nor bad, neither impressive nor unimpressive. Simple laws of nature coming to their natural conclusion. Alhaitham had told Kaveh that he would ruin himself if he carried on allowing his guilt to drive his life; in the same way, objects that go up must come down, objects at rest stay at rest, and objects in motion stay in motion. Objects driven by guilt reach their inevitable conclusions.
And then, after having seen the entirety of Kaveh’s mistakes, having heard the full extent of shame and stupidity that would have driven everyone else away in revulsion, Alhaitham had only reached out his hand and asked Kaveh to go home with him.
“Fine,” says Kaveh, trying not to sound bitter. He’s only bitter at himself, anyway, not Alhaitham. “Laugh at me all you want. I think…” He glances over his shoulder, then leans in to whisper: “I think I’m in some kind of trouble, okay?”
Alhaitham’s face doesn’t move. “Not my problem.”
“Haitham, maybe you think you can get away with ignoring everything mildly uninteresting to you, but—”
Alhaitham’s face, usually as unblemished and impassive as the moon, splits in a curl of disgust. “Don’t come to my house again or I’ll call the matra,” says Alhaitham.
Kaveh jerks back. He doesn’t know what he expected. He doesn’t know why he thought that Alhaitham would help him. Why had he thought that? Why had he assumed that Alhaitham might snidely comment with critique and drag his feet and never let Kaveh live it down, but if push came to shove, Alhaitham still would not abandon him?
But to call the matra on him...?
When Kaveh does not respond, Alhaitham nods once, curtly. The hatred on his face is not loud or brash or angry, but instead tapered and tightened to a coiled point, refined to a pure sharp edge. It’s not an expression that Kaveh has ever seen him make—not to anyone, not even to the worst sort of idiot, most certainly not to Kaveh. “You have thirty seconds to vacate my property," he says, and then shuts the door hard.
This is Kaveh’s first divine revelation: That for all they’d bickered before, for all that Alhaitham would needle him about not eating enough or about Kaveh's spending habits, Alhaitham had never hated him, and he knows this because clearly, undeniably, for unknown reasons, Alhaitham hates him now.