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when i said i'd return to you (i meant more like a relapse)

Summary:

The first time Alhaitham coughs up a flower, he is sitting in the House of Daena watching Kaveh. Fondness curls, familiar and warm, in Alhaitham’s chest.

And it stays there.

It’s heavy, and Alhaitham muffles a cough into a closed fist. It comes away with a spit-damp petal stuck to his skin. He stares at it, taking in the lamplight as it shimmers off of deep, royal purple.

A Sumeru rose.

- - -

In which Alhaitham deals with the repercussions of Hanahaki. Twice.

Notes:

(See the end of the work for notes.)

Work Text:

The first time Alhaitham coughs up a flower, he is sitting in the House of Daena watching Kaveh. He does this sometimes, when he needs a moment to allow his eyes to rest from squinting at tiny, faded text in tiny, faded books. Kaveh is working over a schematic, carefully labeling the parts of some mechanical device that is far beyond Alhaitham’s two Kshahrewar electives. Ink smears across his jawline like a creeping shadow from where Kaveh had rested his head against his ink-stained hand. Fondness curls, familiar and warm, in Alhaitham’s chest.

And it stays there.

It’s heavy, and Alhaitham muffles a cough into a closed fist. It comes away with a spit-damp petal stuck to his skin. He stares at it, taking in the lamplight as it shimmers off of deep, royal purple.

A Sumeru rose.

Alhaitham pockets it with a smooth movement, and Kaveh is none the wiser. 

It’s not hard to find an answer. 

It takes a bit of digging, of course, but Alhaitham’s professors are used to him staying after class (if he bothers to show up at all) to ask a question completely unrelated to the lesson. He phrases it as a term he read in a book, and the Amurta professor in charge of his current lecture is more than willing to point him in the direction of a few books on the subject of Hanahaki Disease.

It seems simple enough on paper. Unrequited feelings with nowhere to go, manifested by those with a Vision in search of an outlet for all that repressed ambition and desire. Easily treatable, but at a cost: the loss of the emotion. Not memory, but the feelings associated with it. Those who underwent the surgery reported their memories as being distant, as though they had happened to a character in a novel rather than to them. A fitting metaphor for a disease that people once believed existed only in the realms of fairy tales and trashy romance novels. 

There were two options forward, then. His feelings would be returned, or he would get the surgery. The third option, confessing only to be rejected, was not worth considering. Alhaitham was, at his core, a man of logic. He would not confess if he did not know that Kaveh reciprocated. He could not live with himself if he allowed his affection to become another cage for Kaveh, another weight added to the chain pulling him into the deep, dark waters of his grief. 

The flowers are not that bad, not really. Alhaitham moves a bit slower, breathes slightly shallower, tires a little faster. But it is bearable, and he takes every petal as a sign of his devotion to his beliefs, as proof that he is still the person he was before he fell in love with Kaveh. 

The day Kaveh asks him to take part in a group thesis, Alhaitham barely manages to leave the House of Daena for somewhere quieter and more private before he’s on his knees coughing up an entire bouquet. He is only grateful that he had managed to accept before the flowers wrecked his throat, and he spends the first week of the project with a throat ripped raw. 

And it’s everything . Because when Kaveh is in his element, he shines like a meteor, and Alhaitham is more than content to be the pitch-black night sky that Kaveh lights with his fire. When they are together, pressed nearly temple to temple over runes Alhaitham had transcribed from a sand-coated wall, Alhaitham can feel the stems and roots and petals shift inside of him, and it aches. But then, when the night falls and the desert turns cool and Kaveh sits by the fire pressed shoulder to thigh against Alhaitham’s side, it almost soothes the weight in his chest.

As Alhaitham stares up at the shimmering stars, there in the hollows carved from sand dunes with Kaveh’s warmth shielding him from the desert’s biting cold, Alhaitham comes to a decision. 

“When our project is finished,” Alhaitham thinks to himself, “then I’ll tell him.”  

It ends where it began, because Kaveh and Alhaitham would not be Kaveh and Alhaitham if their lives did not read a little bit like a story. Except Alhaitham is left alone to face the fact that their epic is not a romance, but a tragedy.

The worst part? Even like this, with eyes full of fire and a mouth twisted in fury and betrayal, Kaveh is beautiful.

“I’m done, Alhaitham. I’m finished .” Kaveh stands so abruptly the chair he was sitting on topples over, slamming to the stone floor, but Kaveh does not flinch. He only stares down at Alhaitham, hands shaking, pupils wide.

And then he opens his mouth once more, and Alhaitham has no more attention for anything other than the weight in his chest and the hollow in his heart.

“I regret ever meeting you.”

And what can Alhaitham say to that? He only sits in silence and watches Kaveh walk away from their table with his things haphazardly gathered against his chest and he feels the burning, choking feeling of flowers blooming in his chest. 

There had always been only two options before him, a forked path with two destinations. Either Alhaitham would confess and find his love returned, or he would rip the feelings from his chest. Now, at least, he had received his answer. It was not the answer he had wanted, but what kind of scholar would he be if he did not accept the truth when it revealed itself to him? 

Truth cared not for wants or needs; it simply was. The sun would rise. The moon would set. Kaveh was not, and would never be in love with Alhaitham. And Alhaitham would simply have to learn to live with that.

He stands from the table. He gathers his things. He returns to his quiet, empty house.

And the next morning, he reaches out to Bimarstan and he schedules his surgery. 

The surgery itself is a simple enough affair. The doctors and nurses all wear a familiar look of sympathy. It is the same look they used to give him when his grandmother first passed, the one that meant they were pitying him, that they were quietly thinking about how grateful they were that his plight was not theirs. 

Let them waste their effort pitying him. As long as they do their job, Alhaitham does not care one way or another. 

When he wakes from the anesthesia, his chest bears thin scars and his breathing comes smoothly. The doctor keeps him overnight, but he does not cough up anything more. Nothing stirs in his chest, neither verdure nor feelings. 

The research was mostly correct. Alhaitham could still remember his life’s events. He could remember Kaveh approaching him in the House of Daena that first time. The language they had studied together was still readable. The sight of Kaveh’s eyes flashing as he tore their thesis in two still took up space in his brain.

But it didn’t hurt, not anymore. 

In fact, after Alhaitham had finished categorizing the memories again, he summarily dismissed them and focused on recovery. If anybody had bothered to ask, Alhaitham couldn’t explain what about Kaveh had been worth his attention. He wouldn’t decry his genius; Kaveh as a person was the closest Alhaitham had ever come to being challenged by another. But he was not unique enough to be worth the time or the pain Alhaitham had spent on him.

Alhaitham recovers, and he returns to his comfortable, solitary life with gratitude. He breathes deeply and thinks about how grateful he is that he had gotten the flowers removed. He graduates, and he takes the offered job as Scribe, and he does not think of Kaveh at all. 

But Sumeru? Sumeru thinks of Kaveh. Kaveh’s name is never far from Alhaitham’s ears as people talk about his accomplishments, about the palace he is raising in the cradle of the forest. And then, of the tragedy of fate, and isn’t it such a shame how bad things happen to good people? 

And Alhaitham doesn’t feel a thing, and it is a blessing. 

And then, on a perfectly normal night, as Alhaitham turns from the counter with a fish roll packaged for his walk home, he has his attention caught by a glimmer of gold spread across a tavern table.

Kaveh has a goblet in his hands and he is staring, unseeing, into its dregs. As Alhaitham watches, he swirls the last bits of jewel-tone liquid before tipping his head back and bringing the rim to his lips. Alhaitham can’t help but watch the long line of his throat as he swallows.

He remembers doing this when he was younger, enough times that he could not pick one moment from the tangle of them. He does not remember finding it quite so… entrancing. 

His feet carry him to the table before he has time to think, and then he is standing at the tableside, looking down at Kaveh, taking in the dullness of his hair and the bags beneath his eyes. Part of him hesitates. He can remember, with sickening clarity, the taste of bile and blood and rotten flowers as his throat convulsed around Sumeru roses and Padisarahs. This man was the root of that suffering, the foundation of a grief Alhaitham had carried within his chest, within his lungs. 

The rest of him wonders, with cool indifference, what this mess of a man could have possibly offered him to make him willing to bear that burden for him. 

So he pulls an empty chair closer and sits across from Kaveh, who looks up at him through eyes half-lidded by exhaustion and fogged by wine.

“Al… haitham?” Kaveh breathes. He rubs at his eyes, as though he cannot believe the man is standing in front of him. Truthfully, Alhaitham cannot really believe it either. For all that Alhaitham knew the truth of his life, thinking back on his time with Kaveh in the Akademiya felt a lot like viewing a story through stained glass– distant, foggy, lacking any sense of familiarity. Like something that had happened to someone else. Yet here he was.

Kaveh reaches across the table. His palm curls over Alhaitham’s closed fist, blisteringly warm even in the humid tavern. Alhaitham allows it.

All is quiet for a moment as Kaveh stares at their conjoined hands. Then he begins talking.

Kaveh talks and talks, regaling Alhaitham with everything that had happened to him since the day he graduated from the Akademiya. Alhaitham listens with little more than academic curiosity. This man had once been someone Alhaitham considered an equal. He was intelligent and driven– all the things that should have guaranteed him success in a place like Sumeru. Yet here he sat, in debt and alone at the bottom of Lambad’s cheapest bottle of wine. 

How curious.

“How has realizing your ideals gone for you?”

Kaveh blinks up at him, and then it’s like the last of the fire dies out in him. He exhales, long and slow, and allows himself to slump over the table.

“I don’t regret it,” he says to the empty goblet in his hand. He removes his hand from Alhaitham’s and reaches for the bottle of wine. Upon finding it empty, Kaveh stands from the table on shaky legs. When he is relatively steady, he looks down at Alhaitham and offers him that smile that Alhaitham remembers once thinking of as devastating. 

“Thank you, Alhaitham.” His eyes are sad, and Alhaitham is gripped, suddenly, with a need to know why . If Kaveh holds no regret for his decisions, then why does he look so sad? Which of his choices haunts his daydreams if not the one that led him here, looking for hope at the bottom of a bottle? 

If Kaveh walks out of this tavern, then Alhaitham will let him go. He does not care enough to chase him. But his curiosity still rears its head like a snake in the grass, looking for something new to sink its teeth into, and here Kaveh is, baring his neck and waiting for Alhaitham to bite. 

So he does.

“Stay with me.”

“Huh?”

“I have a spare room. Stay with me.”

Let me study you. I want to tear you apart until I understand. 

Kaveh wavers on his feet. Something shimmers behind his eyes, twists his mouth, as he stares at Alhaitham. Like he’s waiting for something. Finally, he nods.

“Alright. I’ll stay.”

So Kaveh moves in. 

And then the flowers start growing again.

The flowers are slow at first. The first few months, there's nothing at all. Kaveh cleans, he cooks, he pays rent, he might as well be hired help for all the attention Alhaitham pays to him most days. The closest they get to companionship is in the rare evenings they sit together over dinner and discuss academic pursuits– theories gaining traction in Sumeru, the latest ridiculous proposal by the Grand Sage, the preparations for the Sabzeruz festival. 

Alhaitham ignores the heaviness in his chest, chalks it up to exhaustion or annoyance or a litany of little things. And then, while he's out in the desert hunting mad scholars with a strange band of traveling companions, he idly finds himself hoping that Kaveh is safe, wherever he is in this vast desert. 

The sand tickles his throat, scratches and makes him feel cracked and dry. He coughs. And a single petal falls delicately into the palm of his hand. 

The sight fills him with horror. He's been down this road before, and he cannot believe he'd be crazy enough to make the same mistake twice. One is fine– he's a scholar and mistakes are as much a part of learning as reading or listening or thinking– but to repeat the same pattern makes him a fool, and Alhaitham has never been a fool.

But he has no time for surgery. The Sages are corrupt and the fate of the nation of wisdom hangs in the balance of his choices, so Alhaitham will simply have to endure it. 

It's a minor annoyance at best. If he doesn't think about Kaveh, it doesn't bother him. He'll deal with it when things are calmer. 

Except then they're making a god and suddenly the nation has no head and Lord Kusanali wants him of all people to be that head and as much as he hates it, he can and does listen to logic when she points out that there is nobody else qualified to take the position who isn't already under suspicion and investigation.

But finally the surgery is scheduled. He's stepped down from Acting Grand Sage, and Kaveh is home safe, and the nation will live without him for a week or so while he recovers from having the flowers ripped from his lungs– for a second time, he notes with no small amount of distaste.

All he has to do is tell his roommate.

Because the last time he did this, he was alone. It was nothing to take a week off of his studies when nobody cared but his professors, and even them only barely. Now Kaveh is here, and watching, and living in his space. Kaveh will wonder.

Kaveh will know.

And for a while Alhaitham considers just... not telling him. Not everything. His medical history is his business, after all. There is no reason Kaveh has to know why he's undergoing surgery.

But somehow it feels like lying. Maybe it's the small part of Alhaitham that has held out hope all this time. 

He cannot remember what the love he once held for Kaveh had felt like- the memories of his senior's head bent over a book alongside his, of his smile and the shine in his eyes as he raced through Razan Gardens to look for Alhaitham are there still, but faded and distant, like looking at them through fogged glass. But if those feelings are anything like the ones he feels now, then surely the Alhaitham of the past had once hoped just as the Alhaitham of the present hopes now. 

"I have a surgery scheduled for Friday afternoon," Alhaitham tells Kaveh over dinner. Kaveh promptly chokes on the sip of wine he was drinking.

He sputters and coughs, and Alhaitham takes a deep breath and holds it to avoid rattling the twisted branches and stems he feels in his chest.

"What for?!" Kaveh finally demands.  His hand curls into a fist by his plate. Alhaitham can see his nails digging into his palms. "Unless they're going to surgically give you a better personality, then–"

"I have Hanahaki Disease," Alhaitham says. The room falls silent. Kaveh's fist loosens, then tightens again, as though gripping at nothing.

"You- I- huh?"

"I have Hanahaki Disease. It's a relatively uncommon-"

"I know what Hanahaki is!" Kaveh is wide-eyed and searching, as though he might find answers in the shadows below Alhaitham's eyes. "How long?"

"A few months."

"A few– Alhaitham!"  Kaveh, normally a flurry of movement, is still. Only his fingers and eyes show any sign of the man being anything but a statue. 

For a long moment stretched like spider silk, there is silence. Then, hesitantly, Kaveh asks.

"Who...?"

Alhaitham shakes his head.

"It doesn't matter. I'm getting them removed."

"But- but your memories will–"

"I will maintain the memories. I will only forget the feelings."

Kaveh's eyes are softened with sadness and grief. It is a familiar sight, the same as the one Alhaitham remembers from that night in the tavern almost a year prior. "Isn't that worse? It would be like living with a ghost."

Alhaitham presses his lips together to swallow the petals and words both. I live with a ghost already, Kaveh. What difference does it make?

Kaveh looks as though he might argue, so Alhaitham stands and leaves the table and the half-finished tajine and Kaveh and instead, locks himself in his study.

He sits at his desk with his head in his hands and breathes. He can’t let this upset him, not when his lungs are already so full with flowers that even the walk home from work could leave him lightheaded if the humidity was high enough. 

Through the walls, he can hear Kaveh in the kitchen. Food being stored, plates being washed. It is familiar and comforting and Alhaitham cannot swallow the petals that threaten. All he can do is close his eyes and feel every inch of burning, aching, tearing as the flowers rip their way out of his lungs. All he can do is bear it. 

When the coughing subsides, the kitchen is silent. There is no light coming through the gap beneath his study door. Kaveh must have heard him and retreated to his room.

Good. Alhaitham doesn’t want him to hear how pitiful he has become.

He wipes the blood from the corner of his mouth and swipes the bloody mess into a bin. He’ll throw it out before going to sleep for the night. For now, he has one more task to complete. 

Quills and ink are stored in the drawer to the right, where he can easily access them. Paper is in the basket on the corner of the desk. Alhaitham dips the quill into a pot of ink and pauses there, staring at the blank paper. He has never been good at putting his feelings about Kaveh into words. But perhaps, since this is only meant for his own eyes, he will find it easier.

He sets the nib of the quill to the paper and begins to write.

When you find this tomorrow, you will not remember the feelings that brought on this disease, but you will remember that it is his fault. You will consider this experiment a failure and demand that he leave, because that is who we are.

So here I am, pleading with the me that I cannot imagine but know will come.

Please let him stay. 

He is my home. This house will only be a building if he no longer lives within it. 

Alhaitham has to stop, has to hack and cough another handful of roses and Padisarahs into the already full bin. Tears gather and fall from the corners of his eyes, and blood speckles the backs of his hands where he held the bin to his mouth. But he cannot stop until his task is finished. 

When the onslaught finally stops, he sets the bin back on the floor and wipes his mouth. It leaves a streak of crimson across his skin and brown across his glove, but he pays it no mind. He only picks up his quill and begins again. 

I know what I am asking. I know that him staying will invite the flowers back, will ask them to take root in our lungs. You will sit here without the emotions but with the memory and find me weak, the way I thought of the me who fell for him first. 

But to love like this, knowing that it brings pain, is its own kind of strength. And I am only strong enough to face losing him because I know it will keep him by my side.

Please.

Keep him by our side. 

He does not sign the letter before he folds it and tucks it neatly into an envelope. He knows that it is foolish even as he seals the flap shut– he will remember writing this letter, just as he will remember his decision to let Kaveh stay. Truly, it is little more than a waste of paper. But it feels like the closing of a book. 

It feels momentous. 

It feels like saying goodbye. 

In the end, Kaveh does not try to talk him out of the surgery. Instead, he walks Alhaitham to Bimarstan, because of course he does. Kaveh is a good man, the kind of man who would burn themselves to ashes to give someone else a little light.

The doctor comes in. She goes over the surgery. She mercifully does not mention that this is a relapse, though Alhaitham can see the way her eyes linger on Kaveh, who is sitting at his bedside pretending not to listen. 

She hands him glass filled with a tincture meant to knock him out. 

"When you wake up again, we'll be all done." Her smile is reassuring. Alhaitham wonders how often she has gone through this.

He wonders if she ever finds it as Sisyphean as the weight in his chest is to him.

He hums, nods, and downs the viscous liquid in one swallow.

She turns to talk to Kaveh for a moment, but the medicine works fast and Alhaitham is too exhausted to focus. He lays back and lets the medicine do its job.

Soon his fingers are numb and tingling. Then his wrists. His eyes are heavy and his breathing is slowed.

"Alhaitham," a familiar voice calls. He tries to turn toward it, but finds he has no control over his head, his neck. He tries to hum, to make some sound of acknowledgement. 

"Haitham."

A pressure against his side. Is the voice holding his hand?

"You'll be okay." It is soft, as though it's meant more for the speaker than the listener. Darkness is encroaching on the edge of his consciousness, promising dreamless sleep.

"I'll be here when you wake up, Alhaitham. I promise."

That sounded nice. To have somebody there for him. To not have to wake up alone.

A soft brush on his forehead, warm air across his face. A... kiss?

"I love you, Alhaitham. May Kusanali protect you."

What?

Alhaitham feels like this should mean more to him than it does, but the darkness is too thick and the blankets are warm and somebody out there loves him. And into the darkness he goes.

When Alhaitham wakes up, his chest aches. 

Kaveh is asleep on the couch tucked beneath a window, with afternoon light casting shadows across his face. And as Alhaitham looks, he is hit by a familiar rush of affection– which makes no sense. He's lived through this before, why does he still feel anything at all for the man laying too-long and too-large across a tiny threadbare couch?

"Kaveh?"

His throat is raw from disuse and dryness, but it doesn't matter because Kaveh is sitting up immediately, hair mussed and eyes bleary.

"Hnng?"

Alhaitham tries to speak, but his voice cracks and Kaveh is scrambling to get off the couch. He stumbles as he retrieves a paper cup and holds it to Alhaitham's lips. The water is cool and sweet and Alhaitham has never been quite so grateful for it. 

Kaveh's hands are shaking.

"How do you feel?" He asks. Alhaitham pauses and takes stock. Breathes deep. It hurts, of course, and it will take some time for the skin around the eventual scars to limber and stretch comfortably again. But he is breathing.

"Okay."

Kaveh is nervous, Alhaitham realizes. He won't make eye contact. 

"The, uh, the doctor wants to speak to you. She asked me to get her when you woke up."

Alhaitham nods. But Kaveh doesn't move.

"Are- will you be okay? While I'm gone?"

"I'm recovering from surgery, not bleeding out. Go get the doctor."

Kaveh huffs. A blush settles high on his cheekbones and he turns to go.

It only takes a few minutes before he's returning with the doctor from earlier. She seems much more cheerful, and maybe a little– amused?

"I thought you'd like the rundown on your surgery as soon as you woke up," she says. Kaveh settles on the couch again, pulling a sketchbook out to try to pretend as though he's not eavesdropping. It's cute. Alhaitham forces himself to focus on the woman before him instead.

"The surgery was a success. So successful, in fact, that there was almost nothing for us to operate on."

His brain is still a little foggy from the medicine, but Alhaitham is pretty sure that the medicine isn't at fault for this one.

"What?"

She nods, the smile on her face solidifying a bit further. "Yes. It made no sense to us either. When we had your final consult yesterday, your oxygen levels were dangerously low. Yet today, all that remained were some withered debris– which we removed, by the way. It seems as though something–" her eyes darted meaningfully over to Kaveh, whose flushed face and lifted-too-high sketchbook indicated that he was listening intently, "–had already addressed the problem."

"And for what my medical expertise is worth, I feel comfortable saying with almost certainty that I do not expect to see a second relapse."

Kaveh chokes behind his blockade, and Alhaitham resists the urge to sigh. (He can do that now that the weight in his chest is gone. It feels very nice.)

The doctor leaves after checking his incisions and reminding him to take it easy, and she leaves the two of them in silence once more.

Kaveh clears his throat. Alhaitham raises an eyebrow at him. He flushes down the front of his chest, too, Alhaitham notes, and the thought makes him giddy. He is so full of feelings he had made peace with losing that he feels as though he might burst.  

He is allowed to know these things. 

He is allowed to learn more.

"So, uh..." Kaveh begins, a shy smile on his face. "Hanahaki, huh?"

And even though it makes his chest ache, Alhaitham laughs.

Notes:

Help me, I wrote half of this fic on my phone sitting by a hotel pool and then the other half while hiding during the holiday today. Also, if I had a nickel for every fic I've worked on this month that used Bimarstan as a plot point, I'd have two nickels. Which isn't much, but it's weird that it happened twice.

Anyway, shoutout to the Haikaveh Discord as usual for feeding my brain rot until I popped out another fic.

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Thanks for reading!