Work Text:
Kaveh needed to work.
Except, for him to be able to work, the house needed to be neat enough to not drive him insane as he walked through the living room. And for the house to be neat enough to not drive him insane, his roommate needed to tidy his things.
Really, Alhaitham wasn’t especially messy. But Kaveh’s focus had always been very easily stolen by quite literally anything, and so, if his environment wasn’t perfectly in order, he was unable to fully dedicate his attention to the mind-numbing pile of blueprints and proposals sitting in his drawer.
He could usually ignore a few books strewn across the living room coffee table, but his study needed to be the image of perfection, or else he’d start spring cleaning at three AM. And the issue was that he and Alhaitham shared a study.
And, at the start of the semester, which was the case right now, Alhaitham’s desk was sometimes drowning in petitions and documents and applications and letters of complaint and official communication notes and his fancy pen ink and paper and stamps and notebooks and checklists and spreadsheets and—
Breathe, Kaveh told himself, eyeing the horrendous mess splotched over the gorgeous hardwood desk table he’d personally scavenged. His eyes were twitching, and his fingers were trembling slightly where he gripped the wood.
He would love to shriek “Alhaitham!” as usual, and give his sloppy junior a talking-down about tidying after yourself, but the culprit was at the Akademiya, and the mess was overflowing, and Alhaitham probably wouldn’t be back for hours anyway, and that edge of a page was crumpled, and—
Fine. He would just take ten minutes to organise this, quickly. Just stack it all into neat piles and go back to work.
And so, Kaveh hummed while gently pulling a document here and there, making sure none of the ink was fresh enough to stain. His fingers worked quickly but carefully, pushing to the side the candle wax for envelope sealing, and a stack of fresh envelopes, and Kaveh absentmindedly thought: who does Alhaitham even write letters too?
That was when it happened.
A single page stood out in the dishevelled mess of papers Alhaitham clearly didn’t care about, all of them crumpled and folded. This specific one was written in finer paper with a lovely cream colour, penned in elegant handwriting much neater than Alhaitham’s usual. The letter (it was obvious enough by the size that it was a letter) was unfinished, as if Alhaitham had been called away after only managing three paragraphs. Kaveh had probably beckoned him over for whatever reason while he’d been writing.
His eyes instinctually darted to the first line before his moral values could get in the way.
I always catch myself thinking of our moments together, even after all these years.
He blinked. Just who was Alhaitham writing to?
No, Kaveh. He forced his eyes closed. This was confidential. A personal letter. He shouldn’t be going through Alhaitham’s things at all, much less reading what he had clearly written for someone else’s eyes.
And yet… one of his eyes fluttered open. Who was this for? Alhaitham had no close friends other than the ones he shared with Kaveh, none of which he’d write that kind of thing to. He also had no living relatives.
I’ve never been one to daydream, and yet, with you, my imagination is always whirring, reconstructing the glint of your smile, the fleeting touch of your hand on my skin, the way your voice sounds early in the morning, even. I imagine those drowsy lips pressing kisses to my forehead and curling at the edges because of something I said.
Oh. It was a love letter.
Kaveh turned around, cursing his curiosity for forcing his eyes down the page. He shouldn’t have read any of that. It was never meant for his eyes, and he’d breached Alhaitham’s privacy by intruding upon his vulnerability.
Right, it was never meant for his eyes. Because Alhaitham had someone to write love letters to, and it wasn’t Kaveh.
His eyes prickled with tears, but it wasn’t the time for self-pity. Alhaitham had a lover, evidently, and it wasn’t Kaveh, and that was fine, and Kaveh was not going to be affected by it. He would keep his chin raised because he could cope with heartbreak just fine — I mean, no need to call it heartbreak, it was more like a slight romantic mishap, really — and there was no need to think about this any more than he already had. He would do the mature thing and pluck this out of his mind, then go back to work.
“So that’s what happened,” he choked, wallowing in misery over the tavern’s counter.
“I’m sorry,” Lambad replied, offering him a sympathetic smile. “Maybe it’s not a lover. Maybe it was a confession letter.”
“No,” Kaveh slurred, his voice barely audible against the rim of a bottle. “I read the letter. It was clearly written to someone he has intimacy with already. I’m telling you,” he hiccuped. “Alhaitham has a secret lover.”
“Right.” Lambad pulled the bottle away from him. “You better stop drinking before you spill all of this to him when he comes pick you up.”
“He’s probably with his girlfriend right now!”
“I’d always thought he was gay.”
“Why?”
Lambad shrugged.
“If Haitham was gay…” Kaveh continued, lying his head against the tabletop. A certain clarity overtook his eyes. “Maybe I’d have a chance.”
“Did you ever make a move?”
“Of course not!” Kaveh took another swig. “I couldn’t risk ruining that kind of friendship. Lambad, you don’t get it, we were— We were… more than best friends. When people saw me without him, they’d ask, Where’s Alhaitham? We were a package deal, you know. Alhaitham and Kaveh. Kaveh and Alhaitham.” He sighed. “How do you ruin a friendship of a decade with the one person who understands you, the one person who you can let your guard down with, who you don’t need to worry about pleasing? I couldn’t fuck it all up by confessing. And now that he’s back in my life, all I want is for us to go back to everything we had before. It was like we could read each other’s minds and predict each other’s behaviour.”
Lambad blinked. “That sounds… awfully homoerotic.”
“I thought so too.” Kaveh’s eyes darkened to a shade of burgundy. “But I guess he has a girlfriend. Or boyfriend, or partner, or whatever. And I’m so fucking stupid, because I really thought, all those years ago, that our bond was just bound to turn romantic at some point. I mean, we were so close. Surely he could fall in love with me eventually. And now that I’m with him again, well, I thought, we’re just meant to keep coming back to each other! He might develop feelings for me! I really, really believed it.”
“Maybe you should—”
“And you know what’s confusing?” he continued. slamming the empty bottle on the countertop. “I mean, why didn’t he tell me? He should tell me. Is this person a new thing? Surely he would have told me. I mean, sure, our friendship isn’t what it was before our fight, but still! We live together. And, I mean, no one is closer to him than me, so I’m still technically his best friend! Why is he keeping this a secret?”
Lambad opened his mouth, but Kaveh kept rambling before he could reply.
“Oh! Maybe it’s some kind of forbidden love. Maybe his partner is… it’s…”
“Maybe you should drink some water. Also, your technically-best-friend is here.”
Kaveh whipped his head towards the door, but his vision went too blurry for him to make out the silhouette approaching them until Alhaitham’s eyes were too close. They always took him in so intensely, as if looking through him. As if he could see the secret stamped on Kaveh’s face: I know you’re in love.
“Alhaitham…”
“Kaveh,” he greeted, dropping a few coins on the counter and nodding to Lambad. “Come.”
“I’m staying,” he sighed. “Got lots to discuss. Don’t worry, I’ll pay.”
He winked. It was sloppy. Alhaitham didn’t move.
“I’m serious!” he continued, dragging out the final syllable. “You have… other things to spend your money on, I found out.”
Lambad pushed a glass of water into his hands. Alhaitham raised an eyebrow.
“Yes, my other financially irresponsible roommate. Come, or I’ll have to drag you.”
“Just leave me alone, I’m going through something difficult!”
Kaveh simply watched the world warp as his vision became higher, now looking at Lambad face-to-face rather than from below.
Oh, Alhaitham had pulled him to his feet.
“Gods… So strong, Haitham…”
“Astute observation. Walk.”
Kaveh did, except he tripped on some kind of invisible object clearly placed there by some trickster god, and tripped halfway into a stranger.
“Sorry,” he muttered, and then, his vision magically transformed again. He was looking up at the ceiling now.
It was a nice ceiling. He’d designed the whole tavern himself, and so obviously the ceiling and the lighting were in good taste.
“Nice lamp,” he commented.
“I should document such observations in a book and publish it. I think it’d make much money,” Alhaitham cut in, his words dripping with irony. “I could call it: Ramblings of a Drunken Architect.”
Right, Alhaitham was carrying him. He often did this. Kaveh quite liked it, so he never complained. Sometimes, he even indulged in wrapping his arms around Alhaitham’s neck, to pretend that their intimacy was of the kind he’d been craving for over a decade.
But that dream had been shattered today. Alhaitham had a lover, and it wasn’t him.
“What’s wrong with you?” Alhaitham, delightful as ever, asked a week later.
“You’ll have to be more specific. I have a list.”
Alhaitham didn’t look up from whatever he was reading. They were having coffee together on a Saturday morning, both still in pyjamas and yawning over the kitchen table.
“The most recent development. You’ve been sulking this week, and eyeing me weirdly.”
Kaveh scoffed. “I do not— I’m not sulking. Or eyeing you weirdly. How dare you.”
“Well? What happened?”
Kaveh bit his lip. They had to breach the subject at some point. He had hoped that Alhaitham would bring his partner up first, since maybe it was a new development in his life which he was planning to announce (although his letter did say years. But then, why didn’t his lover live with him after all that time?). Even better, he secretly hoped that Alhaitham had already broken up with this lover over the past few days, and that was why he hadn’t commented on the matter.
Neither had happened.
“Haitham, you…” He started, drumming his nails on the table. “I know we’ve had stuff happen between us, but you can still trust me, right? Like. You can tell me things if you want.”
Alhaitham closed his book. “Where is this coming from?”
“Well, it’s just…” Kaveh closed his eyes. “I know you’re keeping a secret from me.”
“Namely?”
“Do you have something to tell me about… your personal life?”
“No, nothing comes to mind.”
“Are you dating someone?”
It had come out quietly, in a tone much less confident than Kaveh had been going for. He had always been terrible at hiding his emotions, which he considered a quality a lot of the time. He cursed it at this moment, looking up at Alhaitham through fluttering eyelashes.
“No,” Alhaitham replied, but it was after a pause. “Why?”
“I’ll tell you, but don’t get mad.”
“Getting mad requires too much energy.”
“Right.” Kaveh looked away. “I found a love letter on your desk.”
Silence.
“I’m sorry, I was organising your things because they were giving me a headache, and I just… saw it. And I read it. I’m really sorry. I didn’t read the full thing, though, because I felt bad, I mean, I shouldn’t have read any of it at all.”
“And so, you concluded that I had a lover.”
“Well, yeah. I don’t know, it just didn’t come off like a confession. It didn’t feel like it was the first letter.”
“It wasn’t.”
The confirmation threw Kaveh’s gut wrenching into a knot. Don’t cry, not in front of him.
“Why did this affect you so much?
“Because—!” Kaveh sputtered. “I mean! It’s normal.”
“Is it?”
“Very!” He crossed his arms. “Like, why didn’t you tell me that you’re dating someone?”
“I’m not dating anyone.”
Kaveh blinked, arms dropping to the side. His shoulders relaxed a little, and the tears stopped prickling his eyes. “I don’t understand.”
“Come with me.”
Alhaitham strolled into his room, where he approached a small dresser he’d inherited from his grandmother. He took a key out of a drawer and opened the door, revealing…
Hundreds of identical sealed envelopes.
“As I said, that wasn’t the first,” he commented, as if that clarified anything. “I’ve been writing for years, but I never send them.”
“Oh,” Kaveh choked out. So, while he’d thought Alhaitham wasn’t one for romance, he had been collecting crushes for years. There was so much Kaveh didn’t know about him.
“What day was it, when you found the letter?”
“Uh.” Kaveh’s mind was reeling with thousands of thoughts, and focusing on the question was difficult. “Um. Friday.”
Alhaitham hummed, pulling one of the letters out. Kaveh could see, now, that they all had a small date sprawled on the edge, and this one read the date for Friday.
Alhaitham tore the delicate wax seal open, handing the envelope to Kaveh.
“I— what?”
“Read it.”
“Why?”
“Aren’t you curious?”
He was. And so, gulping, and with trembling fingers, he unfolded the paper.
I always catch myself thinking of our moments together, even after all these years. I’ve never been one to daydream, and yet, with you, my imagination is always whirring, reconstructing the glint of your smile, the fleeting touch of your hand on my skin, the way your voice sounds early in the morning, even. I imagine those drowsy lips pressing kisses to my forehead and curling at the edges because of something I said.
I know it’s not real, and yet, in dreams, it feels too vivid to be purely a fabrication of my mind.
Your smile when I bring you a cup of coffee is too genuine. The grip of your arms around my neck when I carry you home from the tavern is too firm. The ease with which your head melts onto my shoulder when we sit too close is too perfect. The hitch in your breath when our fingers brush is too evident.
I’ve long resigned myself to unrequited love. It’s a fitting fate, really, for someone who doesn’t care what others think. I’ve never minded being unloved, and yet being unloved by you brings a knot to my throat. The one person I’ve dedicated myself to. The one person I give up my time for, freely. The one person I want to take care of. The one person who makes my heart melt like sugar in my chest with a simple smile.
You have always been the exception. And I studied statistics: I know that the probability of being loved by the one person I’ve ever wanted, who I hurt to the point of watching him walk out of my life in tears, is low.
And yet.
Sharing a house with you is the perfect image of my greatest dreams and my most pathetic failures side by side. A single home, but separate rooms. Proximity, but not intimacy. Understanding, but not to the point we used to have.
When you mumble a smiley “thank you” as I carry you to bed when you fall asleep at your desk, or when you bring home a trinket for me, or when you notice my headphones are malfunctioning and fix them before I even ask, I catch my imagination thinking: my fantasies could be real. Perhaps. Potentially.
I counted. This is my 142nd letter. And I’ve never said any of it aloud.
Sometimes, I wonder if you’d like to read them.
Kaveh turned the page, but there was nothing else to it. He stared at the letter with widened eyes, gripping the paper too strongly. His head was blank.
“I read that this was a good coping mechanism,” Alhaitham murmured. “Somewhat like journaling. I read it in a book not long after we met, when I was researching love and how to deal with it.”
Kaveh lowered the paper wordlessly.
“Here’s the first one I wrote,” Alhaitham continued, opening another envelope. “Dear Kaveh. I stopped writing that at some point, since it could only be for you. I stopped signing my name for the same reason. Anyway,” he cleared his throat, “I’ll skip some of this. Here. I’ve never felt anything like this before. I listed the symptoms: sweaty palms, elevated heart rate, mind blanking, nervousness. I realised, that this must be love.
“This must be love, because I usually hate talking, but I’m desperate to debate anything with you. This must be love, because I can never spend too much time in your company. This must be love, because when you ruffle my hair or touch me in any way, I don’t mind. I like it, even.
“I’m not going to tell you. I don’t see any of the symptoms in you, unless you’re very good at hiding. A psychology book suggested this letter-writing method, so I’m giving it a chance. It should be a way to externalise my feelings without confessing directly to you.
“I hope I get to confess, one day. Maybe one day, you won’t see me as your cute junior, but rather as an equal who you could fall in love with. Maybe one day, I could tell you how brilliant I think you are, really, and have you believe me. Maybe one day, you’ll let me braid your hair. I fantasise about that sometimes.
“Maybe one day. But until then, I’ll write it all in here, and keep all these disconcerting feelings safe. To show you one day, or not. Maybe this will be the last letter. Maybe I’ll burn it. Maybe I’ll fall out of love. I don’t think I could. For now, I’ll just write about how gorgeous you look, even after studying the whole night, even when it’s laundry day and you’re dressed ridiculously, and even when you’re flirting with someone else who isn’t me.
“I love you. I love you. I love you. I don’t know what else to say. I hope to one day see you feel the same for me as I do for you.”
He looked up. “Yours, Alhaitham.”
Kaveh had tears streaming down his face as he placed a tentative step forward, crimson eyes looking directly into teal.
“I’m not an expert in romance,” Alhaitham continued, and, for once, his voice was faltering. “Although I would say I know quite a bit about being in love. And, if you were sulking and moody because you thought I had a lover, then, well.” He inhaled. “I assumed— you were jealous. Was I correct?”
“Yes,” Kaveh breathed, cupping Alhaitham’s jaw. “Yes, yes. I— For so long. You and I… Haitham—”
“I know,” he murmured, wiping the tears off. “I know, I know.”
“I love you too. I love you.”
Alhaitham’s lips grew into a soft smile, his gaze all adoration and reverence and relief. “I’ve been writing for so long.”
“I wish you’d sent the letters instead of hogging them. So selfish. I’ve been deprived of love letters for years?”
“I wrote even when we weren’t talking.” Alhaitham pressed a tender kiss to his temple. “My feelings have always been here.”
“And I—” Kaveh made a sound between a sniffle and a laugh. “And I thought you had a secret lover.”
“The whole time, you were jealous of yourself.” Alhaitham brushed his hair back. “Always the overthinker, senior.”
“Hey,” Kaveh protested, sheepishly. He touched their noses together. “I like the Alhaitham from the letters better. Go on, tell me I’m brilliant, and gorgeous, and perfect, and your exception.”
“If I do, will you let me kiss you?”
Kaveh hummed, caressing his cheek. “If you let me read all one hundred and forty-two letters, I’ll give you a kiss.”
“Can that wait until after the kiss?” Alhaitham breathed. His heart was pulsing wildly, and his eyes were focused on Kaveh’s lips. “I’ve waited— such a long time for this.”
Kaveh grinned before he leaned in, eyes crinkling at the edges. “Alright. If you insist.”