Archive of Our Own

The morning had the particular quality of light that Kaveh loved most--that pale, amber-washed hour before Sumeru City fully roused itself, when the air smelled of dew on stone and the distant green of the forest canopy, when the world was still quiet enough that his thoughts didn’t feel like a crowd.

He sat at his drafting table in his room--No, no, he shook his head. It was the room Alhaitham had--with characteristic silence and no fanfare whatsoever--simply made available to him when he moved in. The table was his sanctuary; a controlled chaos of overlapping blueprints, compass rose sketches, half-annotated scrolls, and three mugs  which were, previously, full of coffee just an hour prior. Kaveh barely noticed any of it. His attention was entirely on the draft spread before him.

He pressed two fingertips to his lips, elbow resting on the table’s edge, and studied the lines.

His client--a merchant of some standing in the Bazaar district, a man named Yunus who had made his fortune in Haravatat-adjacent export goods and wore his wealth the way some people wore borrowed clothes, visibly uncomfortable with it--had commissioned a reception hall. A space for hosting visiting scholars and traders. Kaveh had spent three weeks on this specic draft.

He exhaled slowly through his nose, pulling his hair out of its ponytail, and letting the blonde strands cascade to his shoulders.

It was good. He knew it was good. The arched internal colonnade drew from Kshahrewar’s classical tradition while the fenestration pattern--he’d spent an embarrassing four hours on that pattern alone--allowed for cross-ventilation that rendered Sumeru’s humid heat manageable without compromising the visual impact of the space. The flooring plan incorporated geometric inlay motifs derived from older Sumeru manuscripts. It was, if Kaveh was being his own brutally honest critic, perhaps the finest thing he’d produced since the Palace of Alcazarzaray.

Which meant he’d only looked at it seventeen times this morning to make sure it was still fine and not secretly terrible.

He reached for one of the mugs, remembered it was empty, and set it down again.

The meeting was at the third hour past midday. He had time. He had the draft, he had his notes, he had--

He had to stop second-guessing himself. He could do this.

Kaveh rolled his neck until something popped gratifyingly, pushed back from the table, and decided: breakfast. Not because he was particularly hungry--he rarely was in the mornings, a fact that would have horrified his mother (maybe in the past, he doubted she’d care now. But he prefered not to dwell on that. If she was happy, even with her new family in Fontaine, he was too) and did, in fact, occasionally horrify Tighnari--but because Alhaitham would be back from the Akademiya at some point around midday and the man had almost certainly left at dawn without eating, because Alhaitham treated meals with the same energy-conserving pragmatism he applied to everything that wasn’t reading. If it wasn’t immediately necessary to survival, it could wait.

Kaveh had once tried to make this argument back to him, pointing out that food was technically necessary to survival, and Alhaitham had looked at him with that particular expression--the one that somehow communicated I have already considered this and concluded your argument is not as clever as you think it is without a single syllable--and gone back to his book.

The kitchen was cool and quiet. Kaveh moved through it with an ease that still surprised him sometimes, the muscle memory of the shared space having settled into his body before his pride had fully caught up with the fact that he lived here. He started water for tea--his own preferred blend, the jasmine-and-cardamom honey infused one from the vendor near the Akademiya gates that Alhaitham claimed was too fragrant and pointedly tolerated anyway--and began assembling the components for a proper breakfast.

Flatbread topped with za’atar, warmed. Eggs, soft-cooked the way Kaveh always did them, where the yolk was still yielding and the white set just barely enough to hold its shape. A small dish of the spiced oil he’d bought last week on a whim and that had, to his aesthetic satisfaction, turned out to be excellent. Fresh herbs from the bundle by the window, the one he’d started keeping there because the light was good and not at all because Alhaitham had mentioned once, in a strictly informational tone, that cooking herbs kept better near a south-facing window.

Kaveh assembled it all with genuine care and then ate approximately three bites of his own portion before his appetite simply absented itself like a disinterested guest at a party.

He wrapped Alhaitham’s portion carefully in cloth, placed it where the morning light would keep it gently warm without overcooking it--the specific corner of the kitchen counter that did this best had taken Kaveh about a month to identify--and left it. Alhaitham would find it. He always did, with the incurious efficiency of someone who had long since catalogued every meaningful variable in a given space and simply acted on the information without comment.

He never said anything about the food.

And Kaveh never asked.

He went back to his drafting table, rolled the blueprint with practiced efficiency, secured it in its protective casing, gathered his notes, and began getting dressed.

Kaveh slipped into his usual outfit: the crisp white shirt with its subtle red accents, followed by his signature teal vest embroidered with intricate gold patterns and architectural motifs. He fastened the gold accents at the front, then pulled on his tailored red trousers and black boots. He braided back the loose sections of his hair, the beautiful blond strands catching the morning light in a way that would have been painterly if he’d been in the mood to notice it. He wasn’t, particularly. He was reviewing his client notes in his head.

He reached for the blueprint case.

Kaveh’s hand came down on empty air.

No no no no, fuck. 

He looked at the table. Searched at the chair beside the table. He ducked under the couch, perhaps the stubborn piece of paper had fallen under it when he hadn’t noticed. He crossed the room and looked at the secondary drafting stand, the bookshelf, the low cabinet under the window.

His stomach dropped through the floor in a manner that had nothing to do with hunger.

The draft. The good draft, the three-week draft, the one with the fenestration pattern he’d stayed up until the second hour of the morning to finalize --was not where he had left it.

Kaveh stood very still in the center of his room and breathed carefully through his nose.

He had twelve minutes before he needed to leave to make the meeting on time.

He dismantled the room methodically, quickly, with the focused desperation of someone who already knew, somewhere below hope, that he wasn’t going to find what he was looking for. Scrolls moved, stacked papers cascaded, a jar of ink rattled ominously close to the table’s edge. No casing. No draft.

He did find, tucked beneath a secondary set of sketches, the earlier draft.

The other draft. The one from a month ago, before he’d refined the colonnade proportions and reworked the entrance sequence. The one that was--he pressed his fingers to his temples--fine. Competent. Any other architect would have been proud of it.

Kaveh, who was not any other architect and who had spent three weeks making it better than fine, stared at it for five seconds.

It would have to do. He couldn’t afford losing another client. Archons know he has months of unpaid rent piled up on him.

Then he rolled it up, secured it in the case, and left the house.

The meeting room at the merchant’s offices was everything Kaveh’s spaces never were: expensive, tasteful in an entirely impersonal way, and aggressively beige (Kaveh never got the hype for the extremely basic color. Why would beige surpass red, green, or gold?) He spread the draft on the long table, anchored the corners with the polished stones Yunus’s assistant produced from a drawer with obvious practice, and began his presentation.

He was, if he was being fair, still good at this. Even on an off day. Even with the wrong draft. He knew the building by heart; he’d lived inside this design for three weeks and could describe every choice and its justification from memory, which meant the visual discrepancies between what he’d drawn and what he’d intended to refine barely showed.

Or so he thought.

Yunus leaned forward over the spread plans, a heavy ring catching the light as he rested his hand on the table. He was a broad, deliberate man, the kind who moved slowly because he’d long since discovered that people filled his silences with nervous chatter that benefited him more than words of his own would.

“It’s not quite what I envisioned,” he murmured, seemingly in deep thought.

Kaveh maintained his expression. “How so?”

“This--“ Yunus gestured along the colonnade. “This is classical. Old-looking.”

“It draws from a tradition, yes,” Kaveh said, moderating his tone with the careful patience of someone performing surgery. “The reference to Kshahrewar’s architectural heritage was meant to lend the space authority. For hosting scholars, particularly--“

“I’m hosting traders,” Yunus interrupted. “Not scholars. Modern men. Men who’ve seen Fontaine, who’ve seen the new construction in Liyue Harbor. I don’t want them walking in and thinking they’re in a museum.” He sat back. “I want something current. Something that says we’re looking forward, not back. Clean lines. Simple. No…all of this.” He waved a hand over the geometric inlay sketches, the fenestration detail, the motif work. “Start fresh. Modern. You know what I mean.”

Kaveh did know what he meant. 

He bit the inside of his lip. 

He nodded.

He walked home in the full heat of the afternoon, the blueprint case under his arm, Yunus’s revised brief folded in his inner coat pocket like a stone.

Clean lines. Simple. Nothing too clever.

It wasn’t the first time a client had said something like this. It wouldn’t be the last. This was part of the work, this was the negotiation between vision and commission, between what an architect could see and what a client could imagine wanting, and Kaveh knew all of this with the confident authority of someone who had given this exact speech to younger students during the one semester he’d assisted with a foundational design seminar at the Akademiya.

He knew it. 

But he still felt like something important had been handed back to him slightly broken.

The house was quiet when he got back. He didn’t check the kitchen counter--he’d find out whether Alhaitham had eaten when he saw the man, which would be this evening, probably, or possibly not until tomorrow depending on whatever task the Akademiya had given him sufficient justification to delay.

Kaveh sat down at his drafting table.

He uncapped a fresh pen.

He started over. 

The next seventy-two hours were a particular kind of architecture: constructed of necessity, inhabited under duress, sustained by will and something that Kaveh’s more honest internal voice might have called stubbornness but that he preferred to think of as professional integrity.

He worked through the first night without noticing the hours pass, which was, in his experience, the best way to survive them. The problem with working through a night you were aware of was that you could feel each hour as a distinct weight accumulating on your shoulders. The problem with working through a night you weren’t aware of, was that you woke up--not in any real sleep sense but in the sudden orienting jolt of it is now daylight and you have been at this table for fourteen hours--and the weight was all there waiting for you, deferred rather than avoided.

He ate a little. Enough to sustain the work, not enough to satisfy any broader category of hunger.

He drank coffee until the coffee began to taste like something abstract and then switched to plain old tea Alhaitham insisted was better than the honey-infused one Kaveh loved but made him drowsy.

He did not sleep. He didn’t exactly have time for it. And perhaps he had forgotten through the hours of drawing, erasing and drawing then erasing again. He hadn’t even seen Alhaitham ever since he started on the new draft, and he could thank the archons for that. He didn’t have time for endless bickering. 

The design that emerged under his hands over those seventy-two hours was competent. It was clean, as requested. It achieved what Yunus had described wanting. The entrance sequence was efficient. The interior proportions were sound. The materials palette was contemporary and would read as such to the visitors from Fontaine and Liyue Harbor whom Yunus apparently wished to impress.

It had, as far as Kaveh could bring himself to assess it after thirty-six hours and then forty-eight and then sixty, no personality whatsoever.

He told himself this didn’t matter. He told himself this four or five times every hour, in the comfortable privacy of his own skull, with the conviction of a man repeating a phrase in a language he hadn’t entirely learned.

It mattered enough that his hands kept reaching, during the detailed work, for refinements that Yunus hadn’t asked for and wouldn’t want--a small arabesque in the cornice line here, a secondary rhythm introduced in the column spacing there--and kept pulling back.

It doesn’t matter. He reminded himself. It doesn’t.

The letter arrived on the second day.

He almost didn’t notice it. The house’s small mail alcove near the front entrance was Alhaitham’s territory by default, not by any explicit arrangement but by the simple fact that Alhaitham remembered to check it with the reliability of someone who had systematized the minor tasks of daily life into a schedule that ran without requiring him to think about it. Kaveh’s mail primarily accumulated.

But he happened to be passing the alcove on his way to refill his water glass, and he noticed the envelope with the particular handwriting that his body recognized approximately half a second before his mind did, in the way that bodies store certain memories in the nerve endings rather than the brain. 

His mother’s handwriting.

He picked it up, looked at it for a moment, then set it on the small table beside the alcove.

He refilled his water glass, and came back, tracing his finger over the edges of the letter.

And with a heavy heart and hope he dared not name, he opened it.

The letter was three paragraphs. Affectionate in the diffuse, slightly formal way of someone who had been living in a different country for long enough that the emotional registers had partially recalibrated, whose closeness expressed itself in endearments rather than specifics. “My dear Kaveh. I hope you are well. Fontaine is beautiful in summer, you would love the architecture.”

The request arrived, as it always did, at the opening of the third paragraph, eased in with the practiced smoothness of something that had been phrased and rephrased in private before committing it to paper. A sum. Not an exorbitant one, all things considered--not compared to the amounts Kaveh had already lent, borrowed, arranged, sacrificed. Modest, even. Just until her current situation sorted itself out.

She never specified what the situation was.

She never sent anything back.

Kaveh read the letter twice, refolded it with the care he gave to things he didn’t want to look at too closely, and put it in the specific drawer where he kept all of them. The drawer was getting full. He did not examine this fact for too long.

He went back to his drafting table, and picked up his pencil.

On the third evening, Alhaitham found him at the table at an hour when the room had gone dark around him and he’d forgotten to light the lamp.

Kaveh heard the front door, heard the particular quality of Alhaitham’s footsteps --unhurried, even, with that characteristic almost-silence that used to unsettle people who met him in the Akademiya corridors and that Kaveh had long since stopped noticing--and then heard them pause outside his door.

A beat. Then the sound of the lamp in the hallway being lit, and the light spilled under the door.

Kaveh did not turn around, too busy trying to perfect a line that his sleep-starved brain insisted was not straight.

The door opened.

“You haven’t lit your lamp,” Alhaitham observed, in his default register, which was somewhere between informational and rhetorical.

“I’m aware,” Kaveh mumbled.

A pause. The kind Alhaitham deployed when he was deciding whether something was worth addressing. Kaveh knew all of his pauses at this point, the way you learned the load-bearing habits of a structure you spent enough time in--not because you’d studied them but because you’d simply absorbed them through proximity.

He heard Alhaitham cross the room and then the lamp on the corner of the drafting table clicked to life, and the light fell across Kaveh’s work, and he became suddenly, uncomfortably aware of how his hands looked against the paper--pale, slightly unsteady, ink-stained to a degree that suggested he’d been at this rather longer than was strictly reasonable.

“When did you last sleep?” Alhaitham asked, leaning down to look at Kaveh properly.

“I’m on a deadline,” Kaveh glared at him pointedly.

“That doesn’t answer my question,”

“No,” Kaveh agreed pleasantly. Please leave please leave please leave. “It doesn’t.”

Another pause. Alhaitham had an uncomfortable quantity of patience for a man who claimed to find most interactions inefficient--he didn’t press, didn’t repeat himself. He simply remained in the room with the particular quality of presence that he had, which was substantial for someone who said so little. Kaveh continued working. His pencil moved in a slightly careful, controlled way that might have told an observer something.

Alhaitham apparently observed it.

“Is that the design for the Bazaar commission?”

“Yes.” 

“How many hours have you put into it?”

“Enough.”

“Kaveh.”

There was something in the way Alhaitham said his name, occasionally, that Kaveh had no adequate framework for. It wasn’t soft--Alhaitham didn’t really do soft, it wasn’t part of the structural vocabulary of his personality--but it wasn’t its usual dry, slightly ironic precision either. It was something that landed without pressure and still managed to land.

“I know,” Kaveh said. He set his pen down, finally, and looked at what was in front of him. Clean lines. Simple. Nothing too clever. “I know, Haitham. I just need to finish this.”

A very long pause.

“There’s food,” Alhaitham said. “I made--“ a tiny, almost imperceptible shift in his tone, the kind that might have been nothing to anyone else and that Kaveh had catalogued as the closest Alhaitham generally came to acknowledging something he hadn’t meant to admit. “--extra.”

Kaveh glanced up at him, the way his vision blurred slightly on the edges did not help.

Alhaitham was standing with his arms at his sides, expression doing nothing at all, which was not the same as having no expression. He was watching Kaveh with an attention that was, in context, notable.

“Thank you,” Kaveh said.

He went back to his draft, and after a short while, heard Alhaitham’s steps echo further and further from his room.

He ate the food later, at the drafting table, with his notes spread around him, and finished the redesign at approximately four AM. Then he sat back in his chair, looked at what he’d made, and felt very tired and not very much else.

He didn’t sleep.

The weekly gathering had evolved, over time, into something that none of them had explicitly decided to make into a tradition but that each of them would, if pressed, admit to scheduling around. It occurred with the comfortable inevitability of things that begin as coincidence and calcify into necessity: every week, barring genuine crisis, at Lambad’s Tavern, with its particular smell of spiced wine and char-grilled fish and wood that had absorbed years of conversation.

Tighnari arrived first, as he almost always did, because he treated punctuality with the same methodical seriousness he brought to botanical classification--a thing with rules that existed for good reasons and that ignoring made you a less reliable person. He’d come in from Gandharva Ville that afternoon, which meant he was already in the particular mood that city visits produced in him: alert, slightly overstimulated by the noise and density, restoring himself through the relative quiet of Lambad’s before the others arrived and made it loud again.

Cyno arrived second, by his own complicated internal calculation, having come directly from whatever case the Matra had him processing this week. He settled across from Tighnari, produced a small stack of TCG cards from his coat with the habitual casualness of someone who brought them everywhere not because he expected to play but because he liked knowing they were there, and said, without preamble:

“What did the ocean say to the beach?” he asked, in his usual deadpan delivery.

Tighnari closed his eyes briefly, his ears flat against his head. “Cyno--“

“Nothing it just waved.” A pause, then, with genuine delight: “Because, you see, even though the ocean makes noise it cannot speak words. However, the movements of the water at the surface are called waves, and the common motion of moving your hand—”

 “I understood the joke,” Tighnari interrupted, sighing.

“Nari, you didn’t even smile.”

“I was deciding how to respond in a way that wouldn’t encourage you.”

“Encouragement is irrelevant,” Cyno said, with the serenity of a man whose commitment to his bit had long since transcended the need for external validation. “These are for the benefit of the group.”

“The group,” Tighnari said with the patience of a man who has been dealing with this since the day he met Cyno, “is not yet all present.”

Alhaitham arrived next, which was unusual. Alhaitham’s relationship with the gatherings was technically consistent and practically frictionless--he came, he sat, he participated in conversation at a rate calibrated to precisely what he found worth saying, which was never nothing and never excessive--but he was, typically, the last of them, timing his arrival with the efficiency of someone who had optimized against unnecessary waiting.

Tonight he was early.

He sat beside Cyno, ordered tea--he rarely drank, finding the effect on his cognition an uninteresting trade--and looked at the empty seat across from him.

Tighnari glanced at him. Alhaitham’s expression was its usual opaque, but Tighnari had known him long enough to read the texture of his silences, and this one had a particular quality to it. 

Kaveh arrived last, and Tighnari noticed immediately.

It wasn’t one specific thing. It was the sum of several things adding up in the way that they did for Tighnari, who had trained his attention on the cataloguing of living systems; the quality of Kaveh’s color, which was off in the indefinable way of someone running warmer than they should. The careful, slightly over-calibrated nature of his movements, the hypercontrol of someone compensating for fatigue’s interference with fine motor function. The way he smiled when he spotted them--it was Kaveh’s real smile, not the social one, it reached the mismatched eyes and crinkled the corners, but it had the quality of something being performed slightly above its actual energy level, the way a plant reaches toward light when the light is a little farther away than it should be.

“You’re late,” Cyno observed as the blonde sat down next to Tighnari, in the mildly reproachful tone he deployed when genuinely pleased someone had arrived. “I had to tell my  joke without you. It would have done you good.”

“I’m sure it was exceptional,” Kaveh said. His voice was steady. Slightly careful.

Tighnari watched him order wine--the semi-sweet Zubayr variety that he favored--and then watched Kaveh not drink it.

He waited until Cyno and Alhaitham had fallen into their usual orbit of low-intensity disagreement about something Spantamad-related, which generated enough ambient noise to give him cover, and then he leaned in.

“Kaveh.”

“Mm.” The response was automatic, attentive-seeming.

“When did you last sleep?”

A very small pause.

“I sleep,” Kaveh said, in the pleasant tone he used when he wanted a statement to do the work of an argument.

“That’s interesting,” Tighnari hummed, in that way Kaveh knew he lost the argument, “because you’re doing the thing where you’re compensating for a decline in coordination by holding your body unusually still, which I’ve seen you do exactly twice before, both times after extremely extended periods without adequate rest, and you haven’t touched your wine, which you always finish within about thirty seconds of it arriving, because you’re probably running a slight temperature and alcohol is going to make it worse and your body knows that even if you’re not consciously registering it.”

Kaveh’s gaze lingered on him, tracing the faint crease between Tighnari’s brows, the anxious way his ears had pulled back flat against his head, and the unmistakable worry pooling in those sharp green eyes.

“I’ve had a complicated week,” Kaveh admitted.

“Kaveh.” Tighnari said it quietly. “What’s going on?”

And Kaveh--Kaveh who could talk for uninterrupted lengths about architecture, beauty, the ethical obligation of art, the emotional failure modes of rationalist thought, the particular tragedy of a badly-proportioned cornice--looked at his wine glass and said nothing.

The silence extended.

Cyno had stopped whatever he was saying. He was looking at Kaveh now, with the particular attentiveness of someone who had spent years reading people for professional necessity and had never quite turned it off even in friendly company. His expression, absent its usual animated commentary, was simply concerned.

Tighnari sat back, unwilling to push. He would find another angle later. That was fine.

He looked across the table at Alhaitham.

Alhaitham was already looking at Kaveh.

He’d been looking at him since he arrived, Tighnari realized--with an expression that Tighnari had to spend a moment parsing because it wasn’t one of Alhaitham’s more legible ones. It was the expression of someone who had already identified the problem, already run through the available responses, and had arrived at the uncomfortable conclusion that the options they preferred were not currently viable.

He looked, Tighnari thought, with a slight internal adjustment to his read of the evening, like someone watching a thing he was choosing not to intervene in, and finding the choosing difficult.

Kaveh never touched the wine. He contributed, eventually, to the conversation--small offerings, the right words in the right places, the practiced ease of someone who had spent years being charming as a professional skill and could sustain it well past the point where the genuine warmth underneath it had run low on fuel.

He didn’t make any of his own jokes. He didn’t hold the floor. He laughed at Cyno’s second attempt at the ocean joke--a different version, revised in real time, because Cyno never gave up--but the laugh was small. 

When they left, Kaveh said his goodbyes warmly and turned in the direction of home, and Tighnari stood on the street for a moment after watching him go and felt the specific discomfort of someone who knew a plant was underwatered and had no water on them at the moment.

Alhaitham had already gone after him.

Tighnari noted this. He filed it alongside everything else from the evening and walked towards Gandharva Ville, thinking as Cyno hummed quietly beside him.

He woke up wrong.

Not with any sense of gentle return to the world, but like he had been violently yanked out of sleep by some cruel hand. His heart was already pounding as if it wanted to claw its way out of his chest. The room was too bright, the light slicing through the window at a sharp, merciless angle that told him everything he needed to know before his mind could even catch up.

Midday. Well past midday.

The client meeting had been at nine o’clock.

Kaveh sat frozen on the edge of the bed, the realization sinking in like a blade between his ribs. Three entire days--three days--of grinding, soul-rotting work. Of swallowing every bold instinct, every creative impulse, and forcing himself to produce something safe, bland, and marketable. Of staying up until his eyes burned and his hands cramped, telling himself it would be worth it, that this time he could deliver something he wouldn’t hate.

All of it… for nothing.

His breath started coming faster. Too fast. He pressed his hands flat against his thighs, trying to ground himself, but they were trembling violently. The shaking only worsened the longer he stared at them.

“I didn’t--” His voice cracked before the sentence could even form. “I didn’t just sleep in. I slept through it.”

The words tasted like ash.

He stood up on unsteady legs, mind racing for solutions, for damage control, for anything. He was an architect. He built things. He fixed things. There had to be a first line, a starting point, a logical sequence that would pull him out of this pit. But his thoughts kept fracturing. Every time he tried to grasp one, it slipped away like sand.

He sat back down heavily. Stood again. Paced two steps and collapsed onto the bed once more.

The wave didn’t build slowly. It simply arrived--massive and without mercy.

It wasn’t sadness. It wasn’t even anger. It was something uglier, something that had no name and no shape. Just overwhelming static flooding every inch of his body. A choking pressure in his throat, in his chest, behind his eyes. Everything he’d been pushing down for months--years--crashed through the fragile wall that seventy-two sleepless hours had weakened.

The redesign he despised. The client’s polite but cutting notes asking him to make it “less eccentric.” The letter from his mother in the drawer, written in her elegant handwriting, asking for another “loan” she would never repay. The mountain of debt that never seemed to shrink no matter how many projects he killed himself over. The haunting knowledge that his father had been brilliant too--and brilliance had never once saved him. That stability was a language Kaveh had never been fluent in, no matter how hard he studied it.

He was so tired. Tired of being the gifted disappointment. Tired of smiling through meetings while quietly dying inside. Tired of pretending he was one big project away from getting it right, when deep down he knew he was nothing of the architect Sumeru praised him for.

Kaveh curled forward, pressing the heels of his palms hard against his eyes until he saw sparks. A broken sound tore out of him--half sob, half gasp. His breathing turned shallow and frantic, each inhale smaller than the last, until his lungs felt like they were collapsing in on themselves.

Why can’t I ever get this right? Why am I like this? Everyone else manages. Why am I the only one who keeps breaking?

Hot tears slipped through his fingers. He hated them. Hated how weak they made him feel, how pathetic he must look right now--curled up on the edge of his own bed like a child, shaking apart over something as stupid as missing a meeting. But it wasn’t just the meeting. It was everything. It was the proof that no matter how hard he tried, he would always be too much and never enough at the same time.

His chest hurt. A deep, crushing ache that made him wonder, in a distant, hazy part of his mind, if this was what dying felt like. Part of him hoped it was. At least then he wouldn’t have to face the client’s disappointment, Alhaitham’s quiet judgment, or the endless cycle of pretending he had his life together.

He couldn’t breathe. He couldn’t breathe.

Kaveh rocked forward, arms wrapped tightly around his own torso as if he could physically hold himself together. His shoulders shook with silent, ugly sobs that refused to stay quiet. The static in his head grew louder, drowning out everything except the vicious little voice whispering that this was inevitable. That he had always been destined to disappoint everyone--including himself.

He didn’t hear the door open.

He only registered, through the roaring in his ears, the soft click of it closing. Then quiet, measured footsteps. The mattress dipping carefully at the very end of the bed.

And then--warm, steady pressure between his shoulder blades. A hand. Alhaitham’s hand. Not rubbing, not pulling him close, just resting there with calm, unshakable certainty. An anchor in the middle of the storm.

Kaveh’s breath hitched painfully. He kept his face buried in his hands, mortified, but he didn’t pull away.

The hand stayed.

It didn’t move, didn’t pat, didn’t offer empty comfort. It simply remained--warm, heavy, and stubbornly steady against his back, as if Alhaitham refused to let him unravel completely.

Kaveh’s shoulders shook with another suppressed sob. “I ruined it,” he choked out, voice hoarse and muffled. “Three days of work. Three days. And I just… I slept through the only thing that actually mattered.” A bitter, shaky sound escaped him. “Go ahead. Say it. Tell me how predictable this was.”

Alhaitham stayed quiet for a long moment.

“You didn’t ruin anything,” he said eventually, voice low and even.

Kaveh gave a wet, scornful laugh. “Don’t start. I don’t need your logical analysis right now. I know exactly what this looks like.”

The hand between his shoulder blades pressed slightly firmer--not pushing, just anchoring. Alhaitham shifted a little closer on the bed, until his thigh brushed Kaveh’s hip. Then, slowly, his fingers moved up to the nape of Kaveh’s neck, threading carefully into messy blond hair. The touch was so deliberate, so gentle, it made Kaveh’s breath catch.

“You worked yourself into the ground,” Alhaitham murmured. “Your body made the decision you wouldn’t. That’s all.”

Kaveh clenched his jaw, fighting the fresh wave of tears threatening to spill. He didn’t pull away from the hand in his hair, but he didn’t lean into it either.

“I have it handled,” he muttered, voice cracking despite himself. “I don’t need you to…to step in and fix my mess for me.”

“I know you don’t,” Alhaitham replied calmly.

Kaveh closed his eyes tightly, mortified at how raw his voice sounded. “You should be at the Akademiya.”

“I finished early.”

A lie. Kaveh didn’t have the energy to call him on it.

He stayed curled forward for another minute, then slowly shifted, letting his shoulder rest against Alhaitham’s side--the smallest, most grudging concession he could allow himself. Alhaitham didn’t comment. He simply adjusted his posture slightly so Kaveh could lean more comfortably, his hand never leaving the back of his neck.

Kaveh didn’t say anything else. The static in his chest had finally quieted to a dull, exhausted hum. His body felt lead-heavy, drained beyond anything words could reach.

Just before sleep dragged him under again, he muttered, barely audible.

“…You didn’t have to stay.”

Alhaitham’s only response was a faint squeeze of his fingers against Kaveh’s neck--silent, steady, and impossibly patient.

He stayed anyway.

He didn’t wake up properly. That was the strange thing, in retrospect. Consciousness came in shallow, fever-thick surges, as though he were rising through layers of warm honey that clung to every thought and slowed it to a crawl. His skin burned from the inside out, too tight and too alive; the afternoon light slanting through the half-drawn curtains fractured into gold needles that stabbed behind his eyes. The pain there had teeth now--steady, patient, claiming more ground with every heartbeat. The room smelled of parchment and old ink and the faint, bitter edge of a drink someone had left steaming on the bedside table. Everything felt slightly sideways, as if the world had been tilted just enough to make the familiar strange.

At some point he became aware of Alhaitham.

The man was sitting in the chair dragged from the drafting table, the one with the ink-stained armrests and the creak that always announced Kaveh’s own late nights. Alhaitham’s posture was the same as ever--straight-backed, economical--but the book in his lap lay closed, one long finger keeping a place he clearly had no intention of returning to. The light caught the silver in his hair and turned it molten.

“You’re running a fever,” Alhaitham said, voice low and even, as if stating a minor theorem.

“I’m fine,” Kaveh rasped. The words scraped out like dry leaves. His throat felt lined with sand.

“Don’t try to sit up.”

“I need my notes--the south corridor arches, the proportions--if I don’t write them down they’ll shift again, Haitham, they always shift when I’m not looking--”

“There are no arches.” A sigh, soft as a turned page. “You’re in your room. Lie still.”

Kaveh tried. For a moment the arches were still there anyway; delicate, light-latticed, soaring like frozen music above a sunlit hall that no longer existed. Then they dissolved, and he was staring at the real ceiling with its familiar plaster scar in the left corner, the one he’d meant to fix for three years and never had.

“I hate the redesign,” he muttered to the plaster scar. “He wanted clean lines. Do you know what clean lines really mean? They mean surrender. They mean you’ve stripped the soul out of a building and left it a polite box with enough headroom for people to exist inside without offending anyone. Any fool can draw a box.”

“Yes,” Alhaitham said quietly.

Kaveh’s voice frayed at the edges, slipping out of his control like thread from a spindle. “She sent me a letter again. The same request, just--a different situation. I…I don’t know what to do with that. She’s my mother. I’m probably going to end up sending her the money again. Just don’t tell the real Alhaitham, he’ll insist on ignoring the letter.”

A brief, careful silence. Ah. He thinks this is a dream.

“I won’t,” Alhaitham murmured quietly.

Kaveh laughed once, a cracked sound, and the fever dragged him sideways again. The room blurred. The person beside him blurred. And suddenly the words that had been locked behind years of pride and sharp retorts and careful, caustic distance spilled out as if the fever had kicked the door off its hinges.

“You know what’s funny?” His voice was small now, almost wondering. “I keep thinking about that fight we had in the Akademiya library. The one where you told me my designs were ‘emotionally inefficient.’ I was so angry I wanted to throw my portfolio at your head. But later--later I realized you were the only one who ever told me the truth and still stayed. Everyone else left when the commissions dried up or the arguments got loud. You just… stayed. Even when I was impossible. Even when I called you heartless. I think…I think I’ve been in love with you for longer than I’ve been angry with you, and that’s saying something, because I’ve been angry with you since we were nineteen.”

He reached out blindly. His fingers found the edge of Alhaitham’s sleeve and closed around it with the clumsy urgency of someone drowning. The fabric was cool against his burning skin.

“I never told you because I knew you’d give me that look. That infuriatingly neutral look that means you’ve already calculated the emotional cost and decided it’s not worth the disruption. But right now I don’t care. Right now I can say it; I’m tired of pretending this house isn’t home because you’re in it. I’m tired of pretending I don’t look for you every time I walk through the door. I’m tired of pretending I don’t need you to stay.”

Alhaitham didn’t move. He simply let Kaveh hold his sleeve like a lifeline.

“You’re delirious, Kav,” he said after a long moment, gentle in the way only he could be--precise, never soft, yet somehow both at once. 

Kaveh blinked up at him through the haze. Alhaitham’s face was very close now, the green of his eyes sharp even in the dim light, the line of his mouth unreadable except for the faintest tension at the corner that Kaveh had learned, over years, meant something like worry.

“...Am I?”

“Most likely.” Alhaitham lifted the cup from the bedside table--cool ceramic, the herbal infusion still faintly steaming--and guided it to Kaveh’s lips with the same steady care he used for everything; books, arguments, stray architects who forgot how to stand upright. “Drink.”

The liquid tasted of willow bark and honey and something that eased the fire in his throat. Kaveh swallowed, eyes fluttering shut for a moment, then forced them open again.

“You don’t have to stay,” he whispered. “You never take leave. The Akademiya--”

“Is managed.” Alhaitham set the cup down. His fingers brushed Kaveh’s temple once, checking the fever the way one might check a flawed measurement--methodical, almost reverent. “I’ve taken the time I need.”

Kaveh stared at him, the room swimming gently around the single fixed point that was Alhaitham’s face. The man looked exactly as he always did, composed and distant. 

“You’re doing that thing,” Kaveh said, voice thick with sleep and something dangerously close to wonder.

“Which?”

“That look on your face when you’re trying not to smile. You can smile, atleast around me. I like your smile. It’s…pretty.”

Alhaitham’s mouth curved... just barely, the smallest concession to fondness.

“Go back to sleep, Kaveh.”

“I’m not--” But the protest dissolved before it could finish. The fever pulled him under again, gentler this time, wrapped in the quiet certainty of being watched over by someone who had decided to stay a long time ago.

The afternoon curdled into evening slowly, the way bad things do--without announcing themselves, without the courtesy of a clear beginning.

Alhaitham had, with characteristic efficiency, established a quiet perimeter around Kaveh's room: a fresh basin of cool water on the low table, a second set of cloths folded beside it, the herbal infusion remade twice already because it cooled before Kaveh remembered to drink it. He'd moved Kaveh's notes and half-rolled blueprints to the secondary stand, not discarding them, simply relocating them with the care of someone who knew better than to touch them permanently but also knew they were a hazard in their current positions. He'd done all of this without narrating any of it, without asking permission, without making it into anything that required Kaveh to respond to or feel about.

This was, Kaveh would have recognized if his brain had been operating at standard capacity, the specific language Alhaitham used for things that mattered to him.

It was not operating at standard capacity.

By the time the lamps needed lighting, the fever had made itself comfortable and clearly intended to stay.

Alhaitham noticed it the way he noticed most things: not through any single dramatic indicator, but through the accumulation of small, precise data. The cloth he'd placed on Kaveh's forehead two hours ago had dried within twenty minutes the first time, fifteen the second, ten the third. Kaveh's responses had narrowed--not slipped into unconsciousness, but narrowed, like a window being gradually shut against the light. He answered questions but the lag between question and answer had stretched. He'd stopped trying to sit up, which was, under other circumstances, concerning for entirely different reasons.

And then Kaveh made a small sound--half breath, half something that hadn't quite decided what it was--and turned his face into the pillow, and said, in the careful, controlled tone of someone trying to be precise about something that resisted precision, "My head."

Alhaitham set down the cloth. "Where?"

"Behind my eyes." A pause that cost him something. "Both of them. And the back. The--" His breath came out unsteady. "The light. Can you--"

Alhaitham had already crossed to the lamp and turned it low before Kaveh finished the sentence.

The room dimmed to a faint amber. Alhaitham returned, resettled the cool cloth--freshened in the basin--over Kaveh's eyes and forehead, and took the fever measurement he'd been tracking by the simple method of pressing the back of his fingers to Kaveh's cheek, his throat. The heat radiating off his skin was substantially worse than it had been two hours ago.

"How bad is the pain?" Alhaitham asked, his voice low and quiet

"Bad enough that I would very much like to not have a head." Kaveh's voice was muffled by the pillow. "Which I recognize is not an ideal solution. Architecturally speaking."

"No," Alhaitham agreed.

A long silence, during which Kaveh breathed carefully and Alhaitham watched the careful breathing and calculated, with the part of his mind that never entirely stopped calculating, how long they had before this required a different category of intervention.

"Haitham."

"Yes."

"I'm going to--" The sentence broke off. Then, "I need--"

He moved too fast, or tried to. Alhaitham had already anticipated it--had seen the particular tightening around Kaveh's jaw that preceded it--and was already reaching for the basin. He got it there in time. He held Kaveh by the shoulder as he threw out little of what was in his stomach, a steady pressure that was neither clinical nor performative but simply present, and when it was over he set the basin aside and pressed a clean cloth into Kaveh's shaking hands without comment.

Kaveh sat hunched at the edge of the bed, hair falling loose across his face, and said nothing for a long moment.

"I hate this," he said, finally. Very quietly.

"I know," Alhaitham said.

"This is--" His voice fractured on the edges, stripped of its usual careful modulation by exhaustion and fever and the particular humiliation of being witnessed falling apart. "I was fine this morning. I'm always--I was fine."

"You weren't fine this morning," Alhaitham said. Not unkindly.

Kaveh laughed once, short and without humor, and pressed the cloth against his mouth. His shoulders were shaking--not from the nausea now, but from something underneath it, the thing that nausea had unlocked the door to. His eyes were wet. He wasn't looking at Alhaitham.

"I missed the meeting," he said. The words had a different quality than they'd had this morning--quieter, more excavated. Like he'd been carrying them in his chest since he woke and the weight had finally done something to them. "I missed the meeting and I'm going to lose the commission and I'm going to have to tell Yunus that I slept through it like a--like some kind of--"

"Kaveh."

"--like I don't take my work seriously. When the work is the only thing I--" He stopped himself. His jaw worked. "The only thing I'm actually good at. And I can't even--I couldn't even deliver it right. The draft I had was the good one, the right one, and I lost it somewhere and had to take the lesser one and then he asked me to start over and I spent three days making something I'd be embarrassed to have my name on and then I couldn't even--I couldn't even show up to give it to him--"

The tears were quiet, but they were there--spilling over with the undramatic steadiness of something that had simply run out of room to stay contained.

Alhaitham sat beside him on the bed. Not close enough to crowd, close enough to be unambiguous. He reached up and tucked the loose hair back from Kaveh's face with two fingers, a gesture so matter-of-fact that it managed to bypass the part of Kaveh's defenses that would have flinched at anything resembling pity.

"The draft you lost," Alhaitham said, in the quiet tone he reserved for things worth saying precisely. "The one with the fenestration work. The one you stayed up to finish."

Kaveh looked at him, sniffling quietly. 

"It's on the kitchen table," Alhaitham said. "You left it there three days ago. I moved it so you wouldn't crease it."

Kaveh stared at him.

The expression on his face went through several stages that were interesting to observe, in the way that structural materials under stress were interesting to observe; disbelief first, then something fragile and complicated, then something that was either relief or grief or some architectural hybrid of both.

"You--" His voice came out wrecked. "You absolute--why didn't you tell me--"

"You didn't ask," Alhaitham interrupted quietly. "And you'd already begun the redesign."

Kaveh closed his eyes. Fresh tears, which he seemed furious about even as they fell. "I spent three days--"

"I know."

"Three days making something I hated because I thought I'd--and you just--it was there--"

"Yes."

"Alhaitham, I will absolutely commit an act of violence against you when I'm well enough to stand."

"Noted," Alhaitham said, with the mildest possible inflection, and pressed the cool cloth back against Kaveh's forehead with steady hands.

Kaveh let him. He sat there, trembling and fever-bright and furious and something more complicated than furious, and let Alhaitham smooth the cloth across his skin, and eventually the shaking eased to something that was merely exhaustion rather than the ragged edge of collapse.

"Lie down," Alhaitham whispered. 

Kaveh laid down.

The fever peaked somewhere between the ninth and tenth hour of the evening, in the imprecise way that worst things tend to--gradually and then all at once.

Alhaitham had been tracking it. He had also been tracking the quality of Kaveh's breathing, the coherence of the few things he said in the semilucid intervals between the deeper pulls of fever-sleep, the second episode of nausea that had him lurching upright with almost no warning. He'd gotten the basin there again. He'd held Kaveh through it again, and afterward Kaveh had pressed his face against Alhaitham's shoulder with the unself-conscious desperation of someone whose pride had simply run out of fuel and said nothing. Alhaitham had put a hand on the back of his head, careful with the pressure, and said nothing either.

The fever cloth burned through in eight minutes this time.

Alhaitham made the calculation that he should have made an hour ago.

He went to the writing desk, produced a sheet of paper, and wrote three lines to Tighnari. Then he dispatched it with the efficient bluntness of a man who had never in his life wasted time on social niceties in a message that needed to convey urgency, because social niceties were slow and Kaveh's temperature was not declining.

Tighnari arrived in forty minutes.

This was, on its own, informative: Gandharva Ville to Sumeru City was not forty minutes. It was forty minutes if you moved through the forest the way Tighnari moved through it when something was wrong--at a pace that his students had once described as terrifying and that he himself thought of simply as efficient.

He came through the door with his satchel already open and his ears flat and an expression on his face that Alhaitham recognized as the specific intersection of professional focus and personal frustration that Tighnari produced when he had been right about something he hadn't wanted to be right about.

He took one look at Kaveh--pale and too-still against the pillow, hair damp, the quality of wrongness that even non-medically-trained observers could sense once it passed a certain threshold--and set his jaw.

"How long?" he said to Alhaitham. Not a greeting.

"The fever has been present since this morning. It accelerated this afternoon. He's been sick twice. The head pain started around the five o’clock."

Tighnari was already at the bedside, checking pulse, checking temperature with the practiced efficiency of someone who did not need instruments to know that the number was too high, checking the responsiveness of Kaveh's eyes in the low lamplight. His hands were capable and quick and betrayed nothing except the thing that careful professional manner was sitting slightly on top of, which was worry.

"Kaveh," he said, voice leveling into the particular register he used with patients. Calm, clear, direct.

Kaveh's eyes found him. It took a moment. "Nari." he mumbled, his voice was even worse than before. 

"I'm here." Tighnari's hands moved--pressing the glands at his throat, checking the set of his shoulders, asking the small diagnostic questions that his body answered before his words did. "I need you to drink something for me. Can you do that?"

"Mmm." A pause. "I told you I’m fine," Kaveh said, and the words were slow, imprecise, but there was something in them--something habitual, attempting to be wry.

"Yes," Tighnari said, with a flatness that was doing a great deal of work. "You did tell me that. At Lambad's. Just yesterday, in fact." He unstopped a vial from his satchel and held it to the lamplight, checking its clarity. "I am, for the record, extremely aware that you did tell me that."

"You're annoyed," Kaveh observed, with the candid observation of the delirious.

"I'm a healer seeing a patient who had every symptom I identified twenty-four hours ago and chose to ignore them because he had a deadline." Tighnari turned to Alhaitham. "Get me clean water, hot. And change that cloth, it's warm again." He glanced back at Kaveh. "How's the migraine?"

Kaveh made a sound of profound disagreement with the entire concept of the migraine.

"That's a seven or eight, then," Tighnari said.

"Nine," Kaveh corrected, quietly.

"Right." Tighnari's expression adjusted almost imperceptibly. "Then we're going to deal with that first."

The next hour was unglamorous, in the way that illness always was unglamorous--a sequence of necessary, precise, ungraceful things, managed with as much dignity as the circumstances permitted. Tighnari worked through it with a quiet competence that had no need to announce itself. He knew when to speak and when not to, which commands required Alhaitham's assistance, and the precise difference between the sounds Kaveh made when he needed intervention and the sounds he made when he simply needed to be allowed to suffer through.

He also said, at one point, while refreshing the compress and adjusting the dosing of the willow-bark preparation: "He was running a temperature last night."

"I know," Alhaitham said.

"I thought you’d handle it before it got to this severity. If I hadn’t got here in time, archons know—”

"I know," Alhaitham interrupted, in the same tone.

Tighnari looked at him for a moment. "I'm not angry at you," he said, correctly, because he wasn't. "I'm angry at the general situation." A beat. "And at Kaveh, specifically. Who is, due to his current condition, temporarily exempted from hearing about it."

"He'll be very relieved to learn that."

"He's going to hear about it when he's well," Tighnari said, with calm certainty. "Extensively."

From the bed, barely audible, "I can hear you." 

"I know you can," Tighnari said. "Rest anyway."

At some point--Alhaitham registered it without marking the exact moment--Kaveh stopped fighting the fever in the scrappy, exhausting way he'd been fighting it and simply gave in to the weight of it, and his breathing evened out into something that was actual sleep rather than its heated, restless imitation.

Tighnari checked him once more. The fever was still high, but it had stopped climbing. That was the thing he'd needed it to do.

He stood, straightened, and repacked his satchel with efficient movements, then laid out a careful line of preparations on the bedside table: small labelled vials, folded cloth packets, a written note in his precise hand specifying dosages and intervals. He went over all of it with Alhaitham in a low, methodical voice--the timing, the signs that would mean the fever was breaking versus the signs that would require him to return, the specific order in which to administer the preparations and the one combination that must be avoided.

Alhaitham listened without interrupting and asked two questions, both of them precise and both of them answered.

"There's a possibility," Tighnari said, as he shouldered his bag, "that he won't remember much of today. The fever was high enough."

Alhaitham's expression did not change.

"And there's also a possibility," Tighnari continued, with the careful neutrality of someone making a clinical observation, "that he'll remember some of it." He looked at Alhaitham steadily. "I don't know which. I thought that was worth noting."

A pause.

"Noted," Alhaitham said.

Tighnari looked at him for another moment--the particular look he had, occasionally, that meant he was making a decision about how much to say and had decided the answer was not quite yet--and then moved toward the door.

"Collei is unwell again," he said. "I need to get back before morning."

"I know. Thank you for coming."

Tighnari paused at the door, hand on the frame, and looked back at the room. At Kaveh, small and too-still against the pillow, and at Alhaitham standing beside the bed with his arms at his sides and the lamp-shadow making the lines of his face unreadable.

"Take care of him," Tighnari said. Not an instruction. An observation about what was already happening.

Then he left, and the house settled into quiet.

The fever broke in the small hours, when the night was at its quietest and the city had stopped dreaming.

Alhaitham was aware of it--the particular shift in the quality of Kaveh's fever, from the dry, relentless kind to something looser, damp at the edges. He changed the cloth, then changed it again an hour later. He administered the second preparation from Tighnari's careful row at the correct interval, with the practiced steadiness of someone who had committed the schedule to memory the moment it had been given to him. 

He'd done everything Tighnari had outlined. He would continue to do everything Tighnari had outlined until it was finished.

He sat in the ink-stained chair, the one he'd dragged from the drafting table. The book in his lap was the same one from the afternoon. He had not advanced past the same page.

This was not, technically, reading. He was aware of this.

He was also aware of the quality of Kaveh's breathing--how it changed in the deep sections of sleep, how it caught slightly when the fever pulled him toward the surface, how it evened again when Alhaitham changed the cloth and the brief coolness allowed him to settle deeper. He tracked it with the same methodical attention he gave to everything that warranted it, which was not the same thing as admitting that it was the reason the book had not advanced.

Around the third hour, Kaveh turned over in sleep. He did it with the particular unconscious determination of someone who had decided, somewhere below waking, exactly what they wanted and simply acquired it--reaching across the narrow distance between sleep and the edge of the chair, fingers closing around Alhaitham's wrist.

Alhaitham looked at the hand on his wrist.

Kaveh slept on, unbothered, with the uncomplicated confidence of the deeply unconscious.

After a moment, Alhaitham closed the book.

He shifted his position, carefully, lowering the chair's angle, moving by degrees until sitting became something closer to stillness. Kaveh's grip on his wrist did not loosen. It adjusted, slightly, as Alhaitham's position changed--fingers shifting, resettling--with the instinctive accommodation of deep sleep, the body making room for a presence it had already decided was supposed to be there.

Alhaitham looked at the ceiling. At the plaster scar in the left corner, the one Kaveh had been meaning to fix for three years. He had, at some point, also catalogued this particular feature of the room.

The lamp was very low. The night was very quiet.

He had intended to stay in the chair.

He looked at Kaveh's hand on his wrist. Then at the narrow distance between the chair and the edge of the bed. Then, with the unhurried logic of someone who had run the calculation and arrived at a conclusion he was not going to examine too closely, he stood.

He moved with care. The mattress dipped only slightly as he settled on top of the covers, close enough that the distance Kaveh had already decided on in sleep required no adjustment. Kaveh's hand released his wrist and then found him again--higher now, fingers curling into the fabric at his side with the same uncomplicated certainty as before.

Then, by degrees, with the slow and wordless instinct of someone finally warm enough to stop bracing against the cold, Kaveh turned toward him. Pressed his face against Alhaitham's shoulder. Settled.

Alhaitham looked at the plaster scar for a moment longer.

Then he brought his arm around Kaveh, carefully, the way he did everything--without announcement, without excess. Just the weight of it. Just the fact of it.

The fever had broken. The breathing was steady. The night had the particular quality it had in the last hours before dawn--that amber-washed quiet Kaveh had described once, in the long roundabout way he described things, as the hour the world was still enough that your thoughts didn't feel like a crowd.

Alhaitham's thoughts, for once, did not feel like a crowd.

Sleep reached him without much fanfare--quietly, steadily, the way things arrived when you had finally stopped the effort of holding them at a distance.

He was still holding Kaveh when it did.