You May as Well Break My Heart [Haikaveh]

Chapter six

The walk back home gnawed at Alhaitham's nerves.

For someone so adept at remaining unshaken, the unease that curled inside him was an unfamiliar, uncomfortable sensation. After talking to the guards, and understand the severity of his absence, his mind worked swiftly, imagining a thousand ways the blonde would react to seeing him after so long.

... He didn't really have an escape route, but he had to get home. Now.

—.—

"Two months?" Alhaitham had asked, the words hanging heavy in the air like the lingering fog of confusion. How could two months have passed while he experienced mere minutes?

The guards continued to update him, telling him about everything that had happened at the Akademiya, and in the city in general. Alhaitham took advantage of this to obtain as much information as possible, clearing up his doubts quickly.

A leyline disorder of exceptional properties—he had figured it out quickly enough. Its effects are baffling even for someone as knowledgeable as he was. A rupture in space-time was certainly a near-impossible possibility. It had been a rather unfortunate turn of events.

For him, mere minutes had gone by, but the world had kept spinning, and time blinked by without him.

Two months in which Kaveh was left waiting for weeks without an answer.

The scribe swallowed thickly, his throat suddenly dry. He had been gone without a word for that long

It was really problematic, not just because of the time lost but because of the circumstances surrounding his disappearance. No doubt there had been chaos at the Akademiya, with his absence unexplained and stirring trouble, but then there was the most personal worry: Kaveh.

He had left him waiting. He had promised to take him to dinner that night.

.... He was gonna kill him.

"Before you keep asking." Alhaitham's voice had come out rough, his usual calm faltering slightly, "Tell me how Kaveh has been. What's his state?"

The guard's expression shifted, regret flashing in his eyes.

"Mr. Kaveh didn't take it well. He cut almost all contact with the Akademiya, except for General Mahamatra Cyno. The city barely saw him, and when he did go out... well, it was usually the tavern. Last I saw, Cyno had to carry him out."

The other guard next to him sighed, "He... he took your disappearance pretty hard. They went on an expedition to search for you, but they didn't find anything."

—.—

Alhaitham's brow furrowed, his pace instinctively quickening.

Rationally, he knew it wasn't his fault—the leyline disorder had been out of his control—an unpredictable anomaly in an already volatile environment, yet logic did little to quell the tightening knot in his chest. He didn't want to imagine what it must have been like for Kaveh, despair slowly gnawing at him as the days stretched on without a sign of his return. The thought alone made his jaw clench.

His lover never did well with uncertainty, he always seemed to fill the silence with anxiety. Like an open wound, Alhaitham could already see the exhaustion in his lover's slumped shoulders, the spiraling thoughts of anger and self-blame. A crack left untended, splitting wider with every passing day. While he wasn't there.

It was mostly a matter of terrible luck, but luck was a poor excuse when the person you loved had suffered because of it.

He could already imagine Kaveh's voice, sharp and laced with hurt, throwing accusations that Alhaitham wouldn't even try to deflect. Not this time.