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The shore just west of Port Ormos is barely wide or long enough to be called a shore at all, but it is one of the only places where Sumeru meets the ocean and, as a consequence, attracts students desperate enough for distraction that they’re willing to throw themselves into the sea to get it. Sumeru doesn’t get very cold but its wind can carry a chill, especially when blowing in from the sea.
Two students walk at a brisk pace down the little beach, too fast for a leisurely stroll along the water’s edge.
“—and how did you come to that conclusion?” One of the two, tall, gray-haired, draped in blacks and greens, and almost startlingly muscular, demands loudly enough for the words to echo across the water. His companion, long-haired and blond, contrastingly adorned in whites and reds, throws up ring-laden hands and laughs disbelievingly.
“I read her thesis, you dolt!” He exclaims and kicks a bit of sand at the other man, who dodges most of the spray nimbly. They are both barefoot; further along down the beach, two pairs of shoes sit abandoned in disarray.
“Oh, right, the posthumous thesis that the Akademiya censored all the way to the abyss and back. Yes, that’s definitely a good source of information. Kaveh, you’ve no idea what you’re talking about.”
“Al-Haitham, you are an arrogant prick.”
“Is that the only rejoinder you have? You’ve said that before. Many times.”
“Perhaps I’m just hoping repetition will result in retention,” Kaveh retorts, watching as Al-Haitham bends to roll the legs of his trousers halfway up his maddeningly shapely calves. He’d heard Al-Haitham use the ‘feeble scholar’ line once and nearly spat up blood in his disbelief and exasperation. Al-Haitham regularly kicks the ass of anyone who dares enter the Akademiya’s training room looking for a spar, although Kaveh can usually give him a run for his money because Kaveh fights dirty—like now, as he waits for the other man to shift his weight to roll up the other pant leg before kicking sand into Al-Haitham’s face. He hops back a few steps and whistles innocently as Al-Haitham sputters and spits the coarse grains from his mouth.
“Start running, Kshahrewar,” he growls before lunging for Kaveh like a Rishboland tiger jumping at its prey.
Al-Haitham has the advantage of speed over Kaveh; he’s an agile bastard, light on his feet like he’s always one jump away from leaving the earth’s solid ground and soaring into the sky, truly living up to his namesake. Kaveh doesn’t get far before a solid wall of muscle crashes into his side and sends him sprawling into the rough sand with a shout. Not one to go down quietly, Kaveh rolls to his knees and throws his weight at Al-Haitham’s knees, locking his arms around them and pulling hard enough to bring him down into the sand as well.
Has it always been like this with them; pushing and pulling and grappling with each other physically, verbally, and intellectually? Probably so, since Kaveh can’t remember it being any different. The catalyst of their acquaintance is nothing but a fuzzy memory now. Perhaps it was a squabble over a book in the library, or maybe a difference of opinion in a rare cross-Darshan lecture. All that remains of that first meeting is the memory of seeing and being seen, of meeting one’s match, of narrow-eyed scrutiny and the mutual circling of two predators with sharp, snapping teeth.
The whole of the Akademiya has been happy enough to leave them to their bickering; both thrown to the other like the wolves they are, to chew and be chewed on like a bone stripped of meat. And once they started, they just didn’t stop; content to argue over the value and wisdom—“Or lack thereof,” so proclaimeth the Haravatat prodigy Al-Haitham—of art, the merits of trusting the mind versus the heart—“Not that you would know anything about having a heart,” saith Kaveh, the artist—and anything else they can get their greedy hands and minds on.
Yes, they’ve always been like this; a matched set, the only ones capable of going head to head with each other and coming out the other side relatively unscathed. Kaveh’s stubborn genius catches on the sharp edges of Al-Haitham’s blunt logic, but does not tear. Colleagues, friends, and strangers alike are all too happy to leave them to each other in the hopes that their mutual, affectionate destruction won’t cause any collateral damage. Kaveh’s newest acquaintance, an Amurta student by the name of Tighnari, once witnessed a relatively tame argument over the precise angle of a line in an ancient Enkanomiyan rune. After Al-Haitham left with a roll of his eyes and curt wave of his hand, Tighnari took a long look at Kaveh’s narrowed eyes, slight breathlessness, and flushed cheeks and said, Get well soon.
There is no getting well. There is only this: grappling in the sand like little boys, laughing and pretending to not be laughing. Kaveh is the first to get to his feet. Al-Haitham may be faster, but Kaveh is stronger, thanks to the hard labor necessary to bring his imagined creations kicking and screaming into reality. Next to slabs of granite and limestone, Al-Haitham’s weight is not nothing, but neither is it too much to bear.
“Kaveh, you brute!” Al-Haitham yells into his ear as Kaveh unceremoniously throws him over his shoulder and marches towards the water. He squirms in his hold, audibly biting down on laughter as he protests. “Do you do this to everyone you disagree with academically? Blind them, tackle them to the ground, and throw them around like a sack of potatoes?”
“Not everyone,” Kaveh replies cheerfully, huffing in exertion as he wades into the water up to his ankles. He hisses at the biting cold as it laps at his feet. “You’re just special,” he says while raising one foot and then the other out of the water to escape the icy water. Al-Haitham very nearly writhes out of Kaveh’s hold, but curses when Kaveh simply readjusts and digs his shoulder into his abdomen.
“You know I’m right about the thesis, you just won’t admit it,” he wheezes. Kaveh snorts and leans his weight backwards, allowing the tips of Al-Haitham’s hair to touch the ocean’s surface. Al-Haitham twists his upper body to avoid the water. “It’s just like you, resorting to pathetic scare tactics to avoid losing an argument,” he says, reaching up to slap ineffectually at Kaveh’s surprisingly sturdy shoulder. “What, can’t come up with a solid rejoinder? Have I bested you? There’s no shame in admitting it.”
“Big talk for someone a hair’s breadth away from getting dunked in the ocean,” he replies. He hefts Al-Haitham’s weight so that his knees rest on Kaveh’s shoulder and the whole of his upper body cascades down Kaveh’s back. It’s enough to get more of Al-Haitham’s perfect hair soaking wet and plastered to his forehead.
“Alright! Alright. I yield,” Al-Haitham huffs, tapping twice at Kaveh’s thigh. With a self-satisfied chuckle, Kaveh backs out of the water and graciously helps put Al-Haitham’s feet back on the ground. He straightens, dusting off his hands, and grins.
“There now, was that so difficult?” He asks, flopping down to sit on the sun-warmed beach.
“You are insufferable,” the other man replies with an annoyed huff. He shakes his wet head like a dog, sighing in resignation when his wet bangs do nothing but hang limply in his eyes.
“And yet you suffer me,” Kaveh says, perhaps a bit too fondly. Al-Haitham glances back at him from where he stands close to the water, letting the ocean’s cold, gentle waves briefly submerge his feet.
“I do,” he replies, a little wonderingly—and with a hint of accusation. “Why is that?” Al-Haitham asks quietly, more to himself than to Kaveh, which suits him just fine. He has no answer. Why is that, indeed?
Al-Haitham moves away from the water and stands next to him but does not sit down or stand still; instead, he removes his shirt and drops it unceremoniously to the ground. It lands half on the sand and half on Kaveh’s knee. He does the same to his trousers, stands in nothing but his briefs, unselfconscious and heedless of the eyes upon him. And Kaveh’s eyes are on him; two of Al-Haitham’s most redeeming features is his attractiveness and his own disinterest in his appeal. The way that he looks is just a fact of life and not something he wields over others. It is the spoonful of sugar that briefly chases the bitterness of his arrogance, bluntness, and abrasiveness away. That bitterness always wins out, of course—but then, Kaveh has always had a fondness for the taste.
He watches the other man walk unhesitatingly towards the water once more. Something holds his tongue; perhaps it is the sight of Al-Haitham striding with purpose toward the vastness of the ocean, like he’s planning to walk into the water and keep going until he reaches the deep sea floor. Maybe the anticipation of witnessing Al-Haitham’s method for braving the icy sea freezes the breath in his lungs. In any case, the quiet crashing of little waves remains the only sound and movement for a long moment as the other man pauses in his march. The sea laps at his knees, no doubt leaving small deposits of salt in the soft creases behind the kneecaps. Kaveh has a brief but vivid fantasy of putting his tongue to that softness and tasting that brine, wondering if Al-Haitham would let him get that close. Then he remembers that one time Al-Haitham nearly broke his nose with one of those kneecaps during a spar and thinks better of the whole thing.
Kaveh’s idle musings are interrupted by Al-Haitham—evidently having completed his internal calculations—walking out of the water. He stands on the beach for just a moment, barely within the waves’ reach as they rush onto the shore. Then, he sucks in a deep breath that expands his chest cavity to its limit and breaks into a sprint, crashing into the water and, with one swift and graceful movement, dives headfirst into the ocean. Kaveh shudders in sympathy, his warm animal body remembering just how cold the unforgiving water felt just a few minutes ago on his ankles.
“Have you gone mad?” Kaveh calls when Al-Haitham’s head pops out of the water. “You’re lucky I waterproofed those earpieces of yours ages ago. What in Teyvat are you doing—are you trying to catch your death?”
Al-Haitham shakes his hair out, then pushes it back entirely. The sight of his bare forehead and unobstructed view of both unsettling eyes is almost enough to send Kaveh into a fit. “Don’t be dramatic, it’s not that bad,” he calls back. “It’s refreshing."
“Refreshing!” Kaveh says disbelievingly. “Refreshing, he says!” He stands, brushing off some sand from his trousers, and gingerly makes his way to the water’s edge, hissing when the sea rushes around his feet. “Al-Haitham, it’s freezing! Don’t expect me to carry your body back to the Akademiya if you die of hypothermia.”
“I’m not going to die of hypothermia. But if I did, you’d have to carry me back.”
“Says who?” Kaveh demands, bending down to touch his fingertips to the small, swelling waves breaking around his ankles.
“Says I,” says Al-Haitham as he floats placidly on his back, limbs splayed like some great starfish. “You’re to be the executor of my will, after all. Dealing with my body will be your responsibility.”
“Since when? Don’t you have to sign papers for that? I don’t remember signing any papers.”
Al-Haitham submerges himself again briefly and rises from the water like a beautiful, terrible sea monster. “You did,” he says.
“When?”
“Unimportant. A while ago. I told you what you were signing but I thought perhaps you weren’t listening. Now I know you weren’t listening.” He splashes some of the icy saltwater on his pale, perfectly symmetrical face like he hasn’t just informed Kaveh of this looming, awful responsibility he’s apparently had for some amount of time now.
He sputters for a while, flinging a handful of water in Al-Haitham’s direction, though none of the droplets actually hit him. “Well,” He says with an aggrieved huff, “You won’t be my executor. I don’t want you anywhere near my postmortem proceedings! If I die before I’m eighty, there’s a good chance that you killed me yourself in a fit of pique, and I will not have my own murderer arranging my funeral.”
Al-Haitham’s mouth does the infuriating not-smile that means he actually is smiling. “If not me, then who?” He asks, mirth bubbling just below his usual monotone.
Kaveh thinks for a moment. Then a few moments more. He looks down at his pale feet, now numb from the cold. He snaps his fingers and lets out a triumphant laugh. “Tighnari!”
“Tighnari.” The name is said with a hint of incredulity. The mirth has disappeared from his voice. “You’ve only known him for three months.”
“What’s wrong with Tighnari?” Kaveh asks, an unexpectedly fierce protectiveness rumbling through his body like an earthquake tremor. “He’s practical, no-nonsense, he’d do exactly what I would stipulate in a will, if I had one—”
“He doesn’t like me.” Al-Haitham runs his hands through the water, just below the surface, making the ocean swell gently around the path his hand traces. Then, he asks, “You don’t have a will?”
“Al-Haitham, you are one of the most self-centered people I’ve ever met. I have news for you: he doesn’t care enough to feel any particular way towards you. Why do you care? And no, I don’t—I hadn’t even thought about it. Don’t make me sound like a freak for not making arrangements for my death while I’m still in my twenties. You’re the madman here, not me.”
“I don’t care. It was merely an observation.” Al-Haitham fixes his eyes on Kaveh, an unblinking, beholding stare that he is very familiar with by now yet never fails to unnerve him. “You should write a will. It’s never too early to plan—”
“Enough!” Kaveh interrupts, just barely resisting the urge to pull his own hair out. “Enough. Just leave it and get on with your swimming.” Al-Haitham treads water placidly in the ensuing silence, eyes still locked on Kaveh. His already quite pale skin has turned almost translucent in the cold, but he doesn’t shiver. Kaveh watches Al-Haitham watching him from deeper waters until the weight of that gaze makes him crack.
“Are we sure that you’re not a mechanical life form?” He asks, squinting suspiciously at his companion. He imagines that the ribs expand and deflate as a result of sophisticated programming pretending at being human; that the faint blue veins standing out from the pale skin are not veins at all, but a complex system of wiring; that the body’s intricate biomechanical network of neuroreceptors is instead a mechanical network of inputs and outputs. Kaveh imagines opening the chest cavity and finding lungs made of metal surrounded by a writhing mass of cables. He imagines plunging a hand into that mass and wrapping his fingers around a glowing core of energy, holding the artificial life in his hands. He imagines Al-Haitham, fully conscious and pliant, looking at him with those unsettling eyes and goading him on as he has always done.
Kaveh is an architect and a serial tinkerer; he loves to get his hands on things and tweak them, modify them, leave his metaphorical and literal fingerprints all over them. His fingers twitch at the thought of fine-tuning a mechanical nervous system—Al-Haitham’s nervous system—to be as sensitive as a human’s. He envisions testing the nerves' responsiveness, tracing fingertips down different patches of skin and observing the resulting shiver of reaction. Kaveh shudders now at the thought; how sublime—how grotesque—that act of piety, of devotion would be.
Of course, because Al-Haitham lives to vex Kaveh, he opens his mouth and shatters the lovely, monstrous winding path his thoughts have wandered down. “I am a man, Kaveh, not a mechanical marvel,” he says, like he knows exactly what Kaveh had been thinking. “My heart beats just like yours; feel it yourself. Prick my finger and watch me bleed. Come, see for yourself the proof of my humanity.”
Sometimes, Al-Haitham extends an offer of himself to Kaveh like it's a challenge. It’s not a hand outstretched, but it is a meeting of the eye, a minuscule nod of the head, an acknowledgement: there is something here and we both know it, but I will not make its discovery and exploration easy on you. These offers, these challenges, are usually proffered when there is something between them that will stop him from accepting. It is a form of cowardice and protection; nothing but uncertainty and possible (probable) catastrophe awaits them if they do step over that final, invisible line. Right now, the icy expanse of sea stretching between them is the thing that keeps him from bridging that gap. Al-Haitham is not afraid of the dark, cold water but knows that Kaveh is not brave enough to dive in headfirst.
Kaveh loves him for his protectiveness over what they do have. Kaveh hates him for his cowardice, waiting to dangle the prospect of something more, something different in front of him until he knows Kaveh won’t take that last step. The offer has been retracted. The gauntlet has been picked back up. The moment has passed, just as Al-Haitham knew it would when he said it.
Incensed, Kaveh throws his hands up and trudges out of the water, seeking the sand’s meager warmth. “No, thank you,” he says. “I don’t fancy freezing my extremities off.” He sits himself back down close to Al-Haitham’s discarded clothing and very seriously considers burying it in the beach. But no—Kaveh is the better man, and he will resist the childish urge to hide his vexation’s belongings. Although it probably would make him feel better to see Al-Haitham mildly inconvenienced and trying to hide his annoyance because if he shows any emotion he’s lost to Kaveh, or so he’d once said while quite drunk.
“What are we doing here, Al-Haitham?” Kaveh calls as he digs his toes into the shore. Just below the surface where the sun cannot reach, the sand is cool and moist. “When you insisted I accompany you to Port Ormos, I was expecting—well, actually, I don’t know what I was expecting. Certainly not this, ” he says, gesturing to the seashore around them. Al-Haitham finally emerges from the ocean, water sloughing off his body as he makes his way back to the shore. Now he shivers, breathing a little heavier than usual as he settles down on the ground next to Kaveh.
“We’re distracting you,” he says through lightly chattering teeth.
“Distracting me?” Kaveh demands, looking sharply at his companion. “Distracting me from what?”
Al-Haitham doesn’t answer immediately. He lays down and rolls back and forth in the sand briefly, in order to dry off and warm up a little. He sits back up and haphazardly brushes the grains of sand from his body. “Your cohort came to me,” he says.
“What, all of them?” The only person that scares his classmates more than Kaveh himself is Al-Haitham. They must have been desperate to dare approach the Haravatat scholar, even in what Kaveh imagines was a huddled group moving as one; a school of fish daring to ask a favor of the sharp-toothed, and notoriously unhelpful, shark.
“A good number of them. They said you haven’t been sleeping, that you’ve been doing nothing but work, and that they were worried you were—” Here, he rolls his eyes and makes air quotes, “—‘going to suffer some kind of psychotic break’. They wanted me to provide you an outlet. A distraction.”
“And they came to you? ” Kaveh asks incredulously. “Wait. We’re here now, which means… you agreed to help them?”
Al-Haitham shrugs, staring at the horizon line. “Who knows you better than me?” He retorts. Kaveh opens his mouth to speak, but Al-Haitham interrupts him. “Don’t say Tighnari. That would be a lie, and you don’t lie.”
Kaveh huffs. “Alright, fine, yes. You know me best. Yet the question remains: why did you choose to bring me here?”
He hums. “I’ve been told that the sea air is a popular treatment for those suffering from hysteria.”
“You know as well as I do that hysteria has not been classified as a legitimate medical diagnosis in hundreds of years,” Kaveh hisses. Al-Haitham’s mouth quirks up in his maddening almost-smile and his eyes sparkle with suppressed mirth. Kaveh aims a weak punch at his bare shoulder. “Don’t be an ass.” He leans back on his hands and gazes out across the water. His body suddenly feels very heavy. His classmates were correct in their assessment; he hasn’t been sleeping or eating consistently enough. He is on the cusp of graduating from the Akademiya—not an insignificant feat and one that comes with a huge workload—and has been drafting something that could, with enough dedication, become his life’s greatest work. He is tired.
When he admits as much aloud, Al-Haitham clicks his tongue softly and reaches towards Kaveh’s face. Cool, sandy fingertips brush briefly along his cheek and travel to his ear, where they deftly remove the jewelry hanging heavy on his earlobe. Kaveh sighs and closes his eyes, allowing Al-Haitham to take the other earring as well when a hand alights on his chin and gently turns his head. A push on his shoulder sends Kaveh sprawling onto his back, and he doesn’t bother to get angry or get back up. Now that he’s acknowledged the exhaustion, it crashes over him like a great tidal wave, leaving him dizzy and weak.
“We still have a few hours of daylight left,” Al-Haitham’s voice says, just barely audible over the sound of the sea. “Sleep.” The command is issued with a tenderness that Kaveh isn’t coherent enough to appreciate, nor will he remember it later. “When you wake, I’ll get you to admit you were wrong about Madam Faruzan’s theory on the purpose of King Deshret’s puzzle mechanisms.”
Kaveh has just enough wherewithal to fling a hand out blindly and smack at Al-Haitham’s thigh. “Brat,” he mumbles as he succumbs to his exhaustion. He hears a quiet huff of laughter and feels a hand pass through his hair, gently removing the ever-present feather tucked behind his ear. He’s not worried. Al-Haitham has taken it, and Al-Haitham will keep it, like he has taken and kept everything Kaveh has given him.