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You were never much of a maladaptive daydreamer. You never had enough time to spare for it, nor the drive to let yourself indulge in what you know cannot be. You were too focused on the reality quickly unfurling in front of you, of making decisions and seeing practical results to let yourself purely imagine. You couldn’t fathom spending all that time just thinking without pulling out parchment paper and a quill to put those ideas onto paper. Sure, you always plan things before you start sketching, but this usually only goes for physical constructions.
As of late, however, you have been letting your mind wander. Letting it do all the ruminating you never let yourself do in fear of the paths your mind would take you down. You’ve given in—you think it won’t make a difference now that you’re already at rock bottom. You have not been interacting with people whom you can be at least a bit honest with. You have not been drawing buildings you actually like.
You have to create something, though, eventually. You could at least sleep on the construction sites and feel like your hands and brain are still worth something. But you cannot bring yourself to do so right now. In fact, you have not been creating anything for the past two weeks besides a deeper hole of despair for yourself as you concoct a cocktail of distressing memories and past regrets in your mind.
You look down at the cool wine bottle in your hand, and hope it will be your last. Whether that means you’ll get over your compulsion to turn to this detrimental vice or if you’d become unable to even wake up to beg Lambad for one, it doesn’t matter either way to you anymore. Your fingers curl around the neck of it as you take another clumsy swig, far too gone to even care about how it looks to drink straight from the bottle, how the dark liquid trickles down the side of your mouth to ruin one of the last nice shirts you own. Your reputation may be one of the last things you have, but for once, in this very specific night, you couldn’t give less of a shit.
Weariness of the deepest sort has sunk into your very core, an ache you feel replacing your bone marrow and veins. You cannot stop how the past crashes onto you. You cannot fix what happened. You cannot change the outcomes. Nothing at all. You can only relive the memories over and over again. You can only sit here numbly, hand propping up your chin, eyes blankly looking at the colourful guests around you, their chatter muffled by the rushing torrent in your head of your mother’s anguished cries and your father’s favourite song and the last words Alhaitham said to you. You cannot remember exactly what your father’s voice sounds like, you search for it in the farthest corners of your mind and only find yourself telling him you want him to win that godforsaken competition. He did not win, and you and your mother lost him entirely.
Your imagination shifts for a bit. You manage to access the happier ones: stargazing with him, molding clay houses for a school project with your mother, sharing savoury snacks with Alhaitham in Razan Gardens. You almost feel like you’re there—the sparkling gold lights of the tavern’s lanterns become the constellations your father taught you, the decorations the end result of baking and glazing the clay, the scent of Lambad’s fish rolls and chicken-mushroom skewers painfully nostalgic of study breaks. You can almost taste your father’s delicious cooking, see your mother’s crooked smile, hear Alhaitham’s rare but beautiful laugh.
Here, you are content. Here, you can lie to yourself, and be okay with it. You can act as if it doesn’t cleave your chest in two to have to try and deceive yourself in the first place.
In the back of your mind, you know it's wrong. You know that things didn't just stop here. You know that so much more happened afterwards.
But—you can stay here, in this illusory oasis—just for a while—right? You can be what you once were. Unburdened. Soft. Innocent. Clawing onto your youth and old desires, even as foolish as you were. Let the warmth of the booze and memories of a sweeter time flow through your body, as if in search of a soul you haven’t felt inhabiting your body in a long time. You feel as though you lost it a while ago, though you don’t know exactly when.
Was it when you realised you’d willingly lost all of your material possessions for a palace that you will never live in (was it voluntary, when you would have always gone through with that choice?)? Was it when you realised every single commission coming your way was as uninspiring as the previous one, that what you wanted and what society wanted were completely different? Was it when you furiously ripped a thesis paper in half and felt something tear through you too—was it when you sobbed on your knees, piecing the shreds together and blurring the ink of your name and the one you called a best friend? Was it when your mother waved goodbye to you with a gaunt face as heavy as your hearts? Was it when you sent your father off to the desert, did you curse yourself and your mother the second you asked your father to bring home that pretty diadem you’d seen?
Or have you been empty from the start, from the very beginning of your life? The birth of a body but not of a spirit inside of it? Has it all been a mask, a facade? Have you only been pretending to feel something your entire life?
But you felt something with Alhaitham, didn’t you? You remember the rush of butterflies in your stomach, the feverish way you would seek him out, the call to learn him, to understand him and be understood in return so strong it was akin to hunger of the most delirious sort. In your first debate, and in all the high-spirited arguments and conversations that came afterwards, you remember feeling alive, awake for the first time since your mother left you (or did you make her leave you, like you made your father, like you made Alhaitham?).
And now you have mourned him for longer than you even knew him, and it is yet another tragedy in the notches of your pitiful life. How does one come back from that? How can one move on, when one doesn’t know how to? When one may not want to in the first place, because forgetting feels like admitting defeat, means giving up and taking the coward’s way out? When one does not know how to live without the self-inflicted wounds to their heart that they keep willingly adding salt to? When one does not want to let go even if it hurts to keep the memories safely tucked away?
You do not know what to do about this…situation, even with years of both running away from and chasing after solutions you cannot bring yourself to go through with, and therefore you do nothing. You have been through worse, and yet it is the memory of a boy with the prettiest eyes you have ever seen that immobilises you. You’re in mountains of debt, yet it is a man who you no longer know that haunts you more often at night. You have nearly died several times, but it is your first love who you mourn the growth and fantasy of, not yourself.
You sit here in silence, nursing a drink you barely recognise the taste of anymore, after parading around as if your life is as jovial as your fake laughs when someone comes up to you in the tavern and asks what you’re working on these days. You can only fib about being on vacation, trying to explain away why you’re seemingly frequenting this establishment even more than you used to since you became of age. You can force a smile when they say your rest is well-deserved, that they cannot wait to see what wonders you come up with next. You can try to believe that your hands will be steady again anytime soon to even attempt another masterpiece. You can turn your head away from Lambad; who’s watching you across the counter with a concerned gaze, the man who is so graciously letting you sleep in one of his spare rooms and feeding you leftovers in return for you renovating his bar and attracting customers who want to see what the “resplendent Light of Kshahrewar” is up to nowadays.
If only they knew how far you have fallen.
You feel like screaming, like crumbling to your knees with your hands in prayer for anyone to see through the well-crafted guise of prosperity you cannot break yourself. But you won’t let it happen, not when the last time you let yourself be seen, your loved one rightfully called you out for your bad habits, confronted you with a truth you were simply not ready to bear just yet, and it ultimately was the end of your cherished friendship. He was too abrasive, out of line, and seemingly bellicose; you were too sensitive and embarrassed to see the care beneath it in the moment. Those were your natures then, most likely still now, but if you had known better—if you’d known how agonising the years afterwards would have been—you would have heard him out. Worked together on your self-destructive nature, compromised and learnt together. Instead, you have been apart, and you do not even know if you ever cross the current Grand Scribe’s mind. Maybe it’s for the better.
(You secretly hope he does think of you, because if he has changed you, if he has impacted you this much, if you still wonder about him, he should at least be decent enough to remember you.)
Your heart does not care about what is better for you, though. You want him, a longing so great that it causes bile to rise in your throat whenever you think of him too hard. And then you forcefully swallow it down and sigh, because you have no place in his life anymore, and he shouldn't in yours either. Even if you want it. Even if you want him. Even if it feels like you need him sometimes, to be the wretched yet entirely valuable reflection of your ideals.
Even if he came back, you know he will not fix everything that is wrong with you. He will not change everything that the world batters you down with. But you miss the days when he was able to soothe you, offer you a new, fresh perspective, his strangely expressed but unending support. For all that he was blunt and critical, he never alluded that you were any less intelligent than him. He never said he loved you in the words you always wanted to hear, but at least he never pretended to do so. How much worth were you to him? You don’t know. To this day it confuses you on what you were to him, what you were to him after the fight that ended it all. It still feels like things were left unfinished, but that doesn’t matter when Alhaitham has never made an attempt to talk it out with you.
(Not that he ever would, not that you would let him, you think to yourself bitterly. But you know, deep down, if he tried, you would always hear him out.)
Archons, Alhaitham. The name alone brings tears to your eyes. You put the bottle down with a thunk and hide your face in crossed arms. You know where he works—you heard the gossip of him becoming the Grand Scribe of the Akademiya a year or two ago. He finally got that cushy, stable, well-paying job he had always wanted, and you hope he is happy. He has to be. He's better off without you—but you aren't without him, and wanting him back purely for that would be so selfish that it makes something awful crawl underneath your skin.
So he must be okay, and you will learn to be as well.
Is there a word that could adequately summarise all the suffering you've endured? Even the pain you could argue you knowingly brought upon yourself—can you say you deserved it?
Does it even matter? It has happened to you. It is happening to you. It is too late to question whether it should have happened to you in the first place or not. You must live with it. You must not let it chip away at the relationships you already have, the ones you can barely maintain.
You can't afford to push away any generosity anymore anyway, both in a literal and metaphorical sense.
At the end of the day, you just wanted to be happy. And whatever future you'd seen with Alhaitham—it was quickly snatched out of your hands. Even as you watched the downfall happen, even as you took part, even as you thought he knew you well enough to stay even when you told him to go, you never thought he'd actually leave you. From the moment he entered your life, you didn't foresee one without him.
And now you're being forced to. You wish it never came to this point in the first place. But it is too late, isn’t it? Things will never be the same again, because you are no longer the same. Your new but close friend Tighnari—the only person who you have let in since Alhaitham—would say that that’s a good thing. He would use his love for the jungle and spin it into a lovely extended metaphor about growth and fresh air. But you feel as rotten as the Withering that ravages vibrant fields of tall grass without Alhaitham.
Once upon a time, you revelled in how amazing it was for him to cause all your walls to come crumbling down so easily. And then he reminded you of exactly why you had them up in the first place.
Everything he did brought you to ruin.
He is not your father, who loved you till the very end, loved you even though you were inevitably his end. The one who stayed home with you when your mother was out onsite and made you your favourite coconut shrimp curry whenever you asked for it. The one who had such love and ambition in him, a grace you hope you carry as well.
He is not your mother, whose face you see in your own when you look into the mirror. The one who lost herself in her grief yet tried to not let you see it, tried not to let it consume her when you were around. The one who you let go to Fontaine willingly, because she deserved a fresh start after she did her best for you all your life.
Alhaitham is not inextricably linked to you by blood, even though he was the only family you had left at some point. There are no physical traces of him left behind except for the pieced-together final draft of a thesis that hastened the end, the poorly taped together and tear-stricken papers that are wrinkled in your tattered backpack. But there is nothing you can touch, smell, or taste of him anymore. Your longing has no end. Your yearning has no direction. Your grief has nothing to eat away at besides yourself.
You hurt him, though. What right do you have to miss him when you spat in his face that you wished you had never become friends with him?
(You didn’t truly mean it though, didn’t he know you well enough to figure that out?)
Alhaitham is no one to you anymore. Perhaps it should stay that way. You cannot wait around for a ghost forever, can you?
You're not in the habit of lying to yourself. Your claim that picking up your crate of drinks on this particular day has nothing to do with the fact that you've heard rumours about your only love frequenting the bar at this time is a weak one. Deep down, you know you were as curious as the rest to know how Kaveh is holding up. And now that you’re seeing him, wrecked and folded over himself, you almost wish you hadn’t. The golden hair he always took such good care of in the past falls limply over his shoulders, unkempt and even lacklustre in colour. You are drawn to him like a magnet, much like you were a few years ago, where you didn’t need to look for him because he would just show up by your side anyway. Even now as you walk towards him, each step of yours is a loud thump in your heart, warning signals you have heard before. You feel all the energy of a cat ready to pounce as you approach him. Still, you march on. Still, it is better to talk to him than regret never having said anything.
When you sit down next to him, you take off your headphones, inhale a sharp breath, and await his judgement.
He looks up and your gazes meet immediately. His eyes are bloodshot and glistening, yet there is no shine in them, they are duller than the rubies they normally remind you of. He looks completely disconcerted, as if he cannot figure out if you are real, if you are genuinely sitting next to him. You feel the same way, even if you do not show it outwardly—you can't really believe it's him when you look over. You have never seen him so haggard, not even during finals season, when he would be entirely dependent on coffee and self-hatred to function.
“Alhaitham?” He nearly whispers, his voice cracking over the syllables of your name. It surprises you, the rush of emotion that swells over you, the way him simply saying your name for the first time in half a decade causes you to need to breathe in deeply once again. It seems as though his ability to rob you of your air is still present.
“Kaveh.” You mirror back, fighting for neutrality, fighting for a passiveness you have never really felt around him. What can you say that won't cause him to leave you again? “It’s been a long time.”
“It has.” He is still staring in astonishment, but at least he looks a bit more lively now. “How…how have you been?”
A loaded question, yet one that can be answered simply. You have been as you always are. As you have strived to be.
(But that’s not the full truth of it, is it? If it were, the searing pain of seeing your parents’ portraits, your grandmother’s pretty penmanship, and Kaveh’s blueprints shared in meetings at the Akademiya would not cut through you like a knife. It would not affect the way you do everything in your life.)
You settle on, “I have been alright, though it seems the same cannot be said about you.”
He doesn’t roll his eyes like he once did when you said this exact same thing in the canteen after midterms. Instead, he looks at you with a sadness that speaks to your very soul and says, “It really can’t.”
“What happened to you, Kaveh?” You ask softly. You haven’t heard much to do with him besides the recent rumours and his heated responses to your arguments in billboards that can be found all over Sumeru. You wonder if he tried to avoid hearing about you at first, like you tried to do with him. You wonder if he has also figured out who’s at the other end. You wonder if he purposefully kept going for no reason other than to hear anything from you at all, the same way you have done for him.
Something in him seems to crumble within him as you ask that question. He succumbs to the exhaustion, to the charade, to you. He has not changed in that regard, you can see that clear as day. He launches into a play-by-play of the last few years of his life, and you listen, and listen, and listen.
You missed his voice so much, so you do not contribute much to the speech. You thought you would reach the end of your lifetime before you would ever hear it directly again. It is a relief, that while his previously boyish tone smoothed out into a husky cadence, his voice retained that lilt that always made you so weak to him.
You sip at the drink he orders for you—he remembered your favourite red wine, a concoction that isn’t overly bitter but not too sweet either. You clench your fists in your lap as you hear about everything he has been through, everything you knew would eventually happen to him but hoped wouldn’t. Your blood boils at points. Your chest feels tight in others. You pat him on the shoulder as he begins to cry, gingerly, carefully. His look of anguish a few minutes later convinces you to finally pull him in fully.
You have never been hugged like this before. You have barely felt another’s touch in years. You have not held him, and something in you feels as if it has righted itself now. His touch is everything you wished to have forgotten the sensation of. Everything you have run away from. It is your downfall, to hold him again, but you think you will gladly fall.
When he is done, your glasses are empty, and the tavern nearly too. Is this one night of peace over soon? Can you be satisfied with just seeing him again?
(You know you can’t be. You will never have your fill of Kaveh. He is the worst addiction you have.)
It is quiet. You have no idea what to say at first. Then, after a few more beats of almost silence interrupted by Kaveh’s sniffles, you ask the question that has been gnawing at you, “How has realising your ideals gone for you?”
You prepare for the worst, for him to walk out of your life once more (yet again, again, again—leaving you behind, like everyone else in your life has). He laughs instead, a sickly, raw, human chuckle that sounds as heavy as the many years in between. When he speaks, he carries that weight along with the sentence. “I dreamed of something so grandiose it only ended up crushing me, and yet I do not regret dreaming. I do not regret trying, Alhaitham.”
You nod. This is very like him. You are almost glad his idealism has stayed—he would not be himself without his convictions.
You wish to spare him of more trouble though, so you produce the extra gold key that you commissioned recently out of a sudden urge to do so. If you were the more spiritual sort, you could call it Celestia preparing you in advance—a sign from the universe you couldn't ignore. You slide it over, and he looks at it, then at you. “You should accept this now that you no longer have a place to stay.” You offer it with logic, with the truth. You do not know how to express the want underlying it. The desire to care for him. The wish to see him rise again.
“I forfeited the rights to the research center a long time ago.” Kaveh says with a defeated breath. His words are still slurring a little, even though you made sure to switch out the alcohol with water when Lambad did his final call. This is typical of him too, he doles out generosity like he always has tons of it to spare, but can barely accept anything in return.
“Only legally. And it is a home now, Kaveh. Mine, and yours, if you can accept that.”
He stares down at the key. “You don’t like people in your personal space.”
“I don’t. But as you may recall, you were always the exception.”
Kaveh still has that awful, guilt-stricken expression on his face. “That doesn’t mean you always wanted it back then. It doesn’t mean you want me now.”
You sigh, and immediately feel bad for the way it makes him flinch and shrink into himself. He looks afraid of you. You don’t know how to not scare him away further. How do you explain to this man that the want you have for him could surpass the depths of all the waters in Teyvat without sending him to drown in those same waters?
“I did. I do now.” You say simply. Unfortunately you know that he will overthink these words as well, so you add, “You know I would not ask you to move in with me if I wasn’t entirely sure about it.”
He looks as though he wants to say something else, and he almost does, opening his mouth. But then he closes it, and sighs. “Okay.” He replies, and you feel yourself relax, your subconscious retort dissolving. For once, he does not rebuke you further. Whether that’s because he’s too drunk to realise that he’s agreed to live with you, or because he knows he genuinely has no way out, or because this is what he hoped for as well, is up in the air. You will take what you can get.
You do argue with him over covering the tab of the night, though he concedes soon after a glare and a grunted, “Save it for your rent.” You wave goodbye to Lambad, and step out into the cool, dark night. He shivers violently as soon as you start walking, and you take your cape off of your own bare shoulders in reflex. He accepts your cloak without much fanfare, he is presumably still very much out of sorts. You understand the why and the how now, even though there’s definitely a lot he’s left out. You didn’t miss the way he stumbled over your name every time he said it, nor the obvious signs of negligence to his body, nor the ways his glassy eyes shifted all over the place.
But you are content with the update you have received for now, and now that he will be under your wing, so to speak, you hope things can only go up from here. It was love that caused you to be apart, after all. It was pride, ego, immaturity, frustration too, but at the crux of it all, it was care. It was want. It was need. Love, different from your family, different from your desire for knowledge, but synonymous to the cherishment and tender rumination.
Perhaps it can be your love that will bring him fully back to you. Perhaps his, if he has any of it left. There’s no guarantee of anything, but as you watch Kaveh smile a little as he stares up at the night sky, with the glow of the moon permeating the outlines of the sparse clouds, and the stars that twinkle brightly above you two as you walk together, you think everything will be alright. Your wait is over.