Chapter Text
It had been something of a struggle to all but smuggle the walking, talking, breathing statue back to his house. Wrapped in his long, singular section of fabric, Kaveh tried to keep him hidden in evening shadows and between flopping greenery and mighty tree stumps. It had taken far longer than usual, but they’d made it, with barely a quizzical glance for the trouble – perhaps everyone was simply used to his oddities by now.
It had been a little over two weeks now, Kaveh certain that time had slowed to match the lazy, ebbing flow of honey from a soon’s curved edge. He trudged through it, not unwillingly, but unbound in some ways from the reality of it. He was hardly to blame, he thought, now that he woke every morning to a not-quite-stranger in his home.
Alhaitham – that was the name that had settled upon him, partially Kaveh’s offering and partially his own for he had been brought to life with all the faculties of a learned scholar which had proven a blessing and a curse – was adapting easily in comparison. Or, perhaps that was the wrong way to describe it. He wasn’t adapting at all, it seemed as though he found nothing he needed to adapt to. Whatever bothered him, he ignored, turning his gaze back to things that pleased him instead. It was an easy confidence, a comfort in himself that Kaveh had never known anyone truly possessed. He certainly had not.
“Alhaitham,” Kaveh began, staring without shame at the man who was nothing but flesh now, chin resting on a knee. He’d lifted one leg, heel pressed with almost uncomfortable pressure into the stool he sat on, simply so he could hunch over it as he did. “Are you certain you’re happy enough to simply sit here and read quite so… Constantly?”
Parchment almost burned by time at its edges scrapes against its ilk as Alhaitham flips a heavy page to the next. He glances up briefly, offering something akin to a quizzically amused stare, though Kaveh noted his expressions lacked a certain intensity so far.
“I am.”
Kaveh could feel the subtle crinkling of his nose, how his head tilted as he pondered the idea. If he was suddenly brought to life, an adult with an entirely full concept of their own self, would he want to be thrown to the outside world so haphazardly?
“What if there’s something out there you’re missing? Everything is so new, surely you can’t know of everything you might enjoy –”
“I wonder if this isn't some kind of projection, if so then nobody is stopping you from visiting the wide, wonderful world, as you seem to see it." Kaveh lets his brows settle in to a frown, though it's hard to argue as he yearns to when the words wound the way truth often did. "Or, if this is about my mind then, new as it is, I know it well enough.” The stack of papers in Alhaitham's hands are brought together with a dull thud and his attention settles firmly now on Kaveh, who found he still had not grown accustomed to the severity, or the new vivid color, of the eyes he had carved out himself. “There are parts of me that even your hands didn’t touch.”
Kaveh almost flushes then, with bashful color. It was shame, or uncomfortable shyness, a gentle ripple of anxious worry that he had exerted some unknown ownership onto what was no longer his. Had never been, truly, in the same way the wind or the leaves could never belong to any one hand. “I didn’t mean to imply… I know that.”
“Do you?” The man asks, a brow raising in a way that feels so intrinsically human – natural – that Kaveh realizes perhaps he wasn’t as certain then. Would he have imagined a man so intent on debating his every thought? Still, it excited him to some extent to be challenged like this, to have an equal who would push him, poke him, and never simply just adore him without reason.
Quiet descends over them, and Kaveh rights his sitting position. Both feet, bare and warm compared to the cooler climate of the flooring, set flat and still against the ground now. His hands fold in his lap and he can’t quite help the subtle slump of his shoulders – he feels as if he’s back in school again somehow, presided over by tutors who knew only how to cut to his core.
He hears how Alhaitham stands, all soft taps and stretches, none of the grinding dust or rock he did admittedly sometimes still expect. He hears his footsteps, then his sigh, and eventually feels the light tap of a scroll, rolled tightly and bound, to his head.
Kaveh looks up without much of a tilting of his head, seeing his own brown lashes as they hover above the scarlet of his eyes – Alhaitham stares back at him, looking down with that contrastingly blue-tinted verdant.
“Am I a disappointment, in personality?” He asks, as if he had suspected Kaveh's train of thought and yet entirely missed the concluding sum of the equation.
“No, never.” Kaveh doesn’t falter, not even for a moment. “You’re as you were meant to be.”
Alhaitham didn’t smile, but with a movement so minute Kaveh could convince himself he had imagined it, his shoulders settled into a softness, relaxed and easy, in a way they hadn’t before.
The next day, after his stroll to the markets, Kaveh finds Alhaitham standing in the garden staring up into the wispy branches of a tree. They droop heavily with the summer flowers that spring from their bursting buds. His hand is lifted, the other curved neatly behind his back, fingers toying absentmindedly with the few tassels that hang there from the fabric wrapped around his middle.
As his fingers brush a petal, Kaveh calls out quietly, catching his attention as the light breeze carries his voice down the meandering garden.
“What are you doing out here?”
“Catching up, as I was instructed to.”
Kaveh’s shoulders shake subtly with the laugh that scatters from his lips. It's easy, free, the kind of sound he’d had such trouble making before now. Alhaitham doesn’t reciprocate the sound, but contrary to the stern set of his expression in the days past, his lips almost turn up into a smile now. It felt, in some way, as if with every minute that passed them by now he learned, changed, became this mortal thing everyone feared to be.
Kaveh tries, just within his own head of course, to imagine what it might look like if a joyful smile stretched the fullness of Alhaitham’s lips. It’s vague and faraway, just an idea, but the thought almost untethered him all the same.
As he’s wondering if it was cruel to carve him so piercing and fierce, rather than soft and pleased, despite how wholly Kaveh enjoyed every sharpened aspect of him, the man in question speaks up.
“Did you need something?”
Kaveh shakes his head quickly – both to answer and to shed some of the heaviness of his own inward musings.
“Not particularly, though I brought the fruit you requested.”
Since they had begun this odd cohabitation, Kaveh had fetched more food than he'd ever had to. It wasn't only because of his extra guest and his specific stubborn cravings, but because he himself had begun to eat more. It had been subconscious at first, he had settled into a sort of comfort that allowed his body to rest - to nurture and repair what he had neglected throughout his myriad of troubled patches. He had seen of late how joy filed his sharpest edges, how it softened his emptiness and eased his aching.
In a way, since seeing life flicker into being within empty stone, he had remembered what it meant to live himself. All the duties that came with it, and all the simple rewards too.
Now, Kaveh watches as Alhaitham moves with an ease that never fails to surprise; despite the heaviness of the materials he had been born from he strode his way across plush grass and firm stone all the same. Like it was clouds beneath his feet. He moved slowly, as if he could still feel the weight of his creation, and yet it was always with grace and a kind of lazy elasticity gifted only by the softness of flesh.
As he moves to pass Kaveh in the open doorway he pauses, and the blond is left staring up at him, body facing out into the warming golden glow of the sun; Alhaitham looked down at him with an expression that could almost pass for a simmering sheepishness, like he wanted to speak but couldn’t find the words, nor the timing. In contrast, he was turned inward toward the cooler toned shadow of their as yet unlit abode.
The moment passes as their forms do, and Kaveh listens without looking for just a moment or two to Alhaitham’s gentle steps and rustling clothes, before joining him in the living room as he often did, though there were no books left to read, nor sketches left to draw.
Kaveh reached for one of the fruits in the newly filled basket. His fingers, low and bronzed, brush the skin of pomegranates, hesitating on the softness of grapes and the crisp peel of an apple. In the end he takes his familiar favorite, curling his grasp around a tangerine as he seats himself on the comfort of the divan.
Alhaitham follows, and as his form causes the plush green below him to dent beneath the broadness of his thighs Kaveh begins to dig his thumbnail into the puckered peel below it.
At first it’s easy, a few seconds of silence beyond the quiet rip of rind from pith. He can’t tell if it’s the warmth of Alhaitham’s thigh so close, just barely the measure of an inch between them, or something far less tangible but Kaveh begins to lose the steadiness in his grip. He squeezes, the tangerine buckling subtly in his grasp, and heavy scented juice drips in a short flood over his offending fingers. He hisses as the citrus slips into every minuscule battle scar of artistry that hides on his deceptively delicate hardworking hands.
Alhaitham’s hands are quick and firm, confident in their sudden movements, as Kaveh had found them to always be now.
The first to make contact catches Kaveh’s wrist within its tender grip, fingers catching around the slim set of the bone as his thumb glides up between the curves at the heel of his palm. Kaveh’s nerves twitch as that subtly roughened pad of a thumb presses into the meat of his hand, between the lines that creased the fragile tanned skin that settled there.
He feels distantly how Alhaitham’s other hand begins to ease the fruit from his own grasp, taking the barely peeled thing for himself. Kaveh is distracted elsewhere, concentrating instead solely upon how his newly sticky fingers are being pulled towards the other man.
It’s hard to tell if the hesitation were Alhaitham’s own thoughts catching up to him, or a pause on Kaveh’s behalf, but the statuesque man halts at least long enough to draw his gaze from slim wrist to mirrored stare. The eye contact makes Kaveh’s guts twist in a way that is both haunting and fulfilling all at once; it sends him to the edges of delirium when Alhaitham maintains it as he brings Kaveh’s fingers to his mouth.
With a tongue Kaveh suddenly remembered he knew the feeling of, Alhaitham licks a travelling droplet of juice from the length of his finger, before engulfing the slim digit within the warm confines of his lips.
He slips away just as quickly with the kind of slick popping sound Kaveh wished he’d never had the pleasure of hearing – and certainly not with Alhaitham’s eyes still transfixed on his own scarlet ones, red staring back far more wild and wide at what had just transpired.
Within moments Alhaitham repeats the action upon his next finger. The pause this time, as he pulls away as if it were the most normal thing in the world, is far longer than the first.
“It stings, doesn’t it?” With each word he could still feel the rush of air and the tender touch of lips to his fingertips. Kaveh is too startled to reply, a silence Alhaitham takes more as confusion than pure petrification. “The cuts on your hands, it hurts them. Let me do it for you.”
Kaveh’s hand is released, though he merely lets it drop to the slim space between their thighs with its new earned freedom, unsure of how to approach owning that which has graced Alhaitham’s mouth so thoroughly.
He watches, with those same stupefied eyes, as Alhaitham uses a deftness most would not assume him to possess to begin to unravel what remained of the peel. It’s hypnotizing to see, to stare as a spiral of unbroken vivid orange is torn by steady, strong thumbs using only tender touches. The action, in motion and in intent, said all it needed to of Alhaitham’s true nature.
The first piece is fed to him while his mind is still in besotted pieces, unmade from the single act of almost elicit affection between them. Still, as the tangy, spongy surface of the tangerine’s segment is pushed between his lips Kaveh remembers to chew, lest he makes more of an embarrassment of himself.
The second comes slower, Alhaitham turning the piece over in his fingers as he stares at it – studies it for a few long moments.
“I remember the taste, like some long known nostalgic thing, but I have only eaten them in the few weeks I’ve been here, of course.” His thumb slides over one wrinkled orange side, before he lifts it towards Kaveh.
Alhaitham moves his hand toward him, then stops, pausing just short so that Kaveh had to make a choice; stay still and let still silence overcome them, or move and ignite something unknown.
In a moment of new bravery he leans forward, lips parting and mouth falling open just enough that he could bite into what was offered. Gently, slowly, he sinks them into the soft fruit, and as his lips close around the small feast he feels how they catch subtly on the ends of Alhaitham’s offering fingers, now drenched with juice like his own had been.
“You fed it to me once.” Kaveh hears him say it, but as soon as the words find him he’s in that place again; his workshop, dusty and dark, with only a statue of his own creation to keep him company, sticky juice on his fingertips as he drew fruit down over sculpted, hard lips. “Like this –”
Alhaitham let his own words cut off as he fetched the third segment. It’s lifted again, but instead of stopping short it is brought forward and when Kaveh thinks he may finally stop like before, it moves forward again, shifting until it meets the subtle dip of Kaveh’s cupid's bow, slipping lower still to find his mouth.
Alhaitham’s fingers, strong and thick, drag the fruit across Kaveh’s lip, forcing it to droop then spring back to position – plump as it was, too.
The squeeze is sudden, a pop of sorts that seems felt more than heard as citrus leaks across Kaveh’s subtly open mouth. A gasp is caught between him and Alhaitham’s hand at the sudden act of it, and the opportunity is taken by the latter to feed him what he had crushed between his fingertips.
They’re drawn back out slowly, left to travel through the sticky mess across his lips, to press and drag and pull at the shape of his hungry mouth until he grew heated with it, desperate to eat and yet full at once.
The kiss that follows then is a surprise, but a welcome one.
Kaveh could still taste the tang of the fruit in his mouth, yet the taste of Alhaitham all but flooded it out. He could feel the press of a thick tongue, and the hold of sticky, tender fingers around his chin, tilting his head to deepen the press of the other man’s lips to his own.
Despite this repetition of old acts, it felt new again. Unknown and designated as undeserved, Kaveh struggles not to let doubt creep into the shadowed corners of his mind. Instead, he attempts to focus on how Alhaitham sighs into him, pressing forwards with unbridled hunger, fingers slipping from a curved chin to instead cup the nape of Kaveh’s neck. He felt how he was pulled close and held there, suddenly beloved, suddenly devoured.
Kaveh’s hands stay limp and unmoving in his lap, his shoulders sagging under the weight of all this pent up affection – and stiff even in their slumping under the taut stretch of new anxiety.
Alhaitham is the one to part them. He’s the one to let his fingers slide from the warm skin they rested on, to the safety of his own clothed thigh. He’s the one to stare unwavering and unashamed into Kaveh’s eyes and ask him, without fear, “Why are you so afraid to touch me of late?”
At first Kaveh wonders if the shock is from the bluntness of it, of how sudden it was to be faced with such an odd question; when the feeling settles he realizes instead it's because he hadn’t known Alhaitham could see it in him, that fear. Perhaps he should have known.
“I’m not afraid –” He starts, stuttering to a pause when Alhaitham’s brows furrow in disbelief, but he perseveres. “I’m not. I’m merely – I’m worried, if anything.”
As if he might prove his point, he reaches out one hand to lay it atop Alhaitham’s, feeling that searing warmth under his own palm and relishing how it burns him so sweetly. He might never grow used to it, and it was in that moment he almost doubted his own words. There had been a true fear here, he knows, but it ebbed away quickly with that rush of wishes fulfilled.
“I didn’t want you to think I held some kind of entitlement, any kind of ownership, towards you.” His thumb draws small little circles across dark skin, feeling the bumps of Alhaitham’s knuckles below it. Kaveh hopes, distantly, he can’t feel the remaining anxiety in these slow shapes too. “Whatever hand I may have had in your world before, I have no right to hold it over you. I know so much of you, perhaps not your mind but your body, the very nature of your making, it feels… Unfair.”
Alhaitham listens, though it's clear to Kaveh he disagrees with every word uttered so gently to him.
“Then we must even the field, so to speak, in your eyes.”
There’s no time to ask of what he means, nor to voice his concern as he’s pulled to his unsteady feet. Kaveh’s led, hand in Alhaitham’s, through the modest house they shared until he’s positioned in the center of what had become his bedroom again in recent weeks, his workshop left unattended now what he toiled over walked among him day to day.
He stands, hands by his sides, unsure of how to simmer calmly without cowardice boiling over in the stew of his own thoughts.
Kaveh sets his shoulders back as Alhaitham pulls gently upon them to place them as such. Suddenly now, he’s being circled, with eyes as intent and fierce as a hawk’s surveying him. Alhaitham paces in slow, steady steps around the awkward stance he partakes in, a circle no doubt wearing into the home’s old floors he takes so many lazy rounds.
If he had been a statue as Alhaitham had been it might be less mortifying to be looked upon so unrelentingly.
“Just as you watched me, I have watched you, too. What would you have me learn that I don’t already know?” The man stills just behind him, and Kaveh shivers with the sudden brush of fingers through his hair, twisting the golden locks from the back of his neck to reveal his nape to cooler air. “The freckle at your nape? Or perhaps the one beyond your ear?” Breath at his lobe makes his muscles twitch and Alhaitham lets Kaveh’s hair go so it might sway back, ticklish and light, between his shoulders.
There’s a catching in Kaveh’s breath he struggles to control before he speaks, glancing to the side to watch as Alhaitham circles him once more, stopping finally ahead of him. There’s no time to fret over how quickly and thoroughly he had determined where these things were, nor what it meant, he could only muster enough thought to push through the conversation already laid at his feet. “There are things you cannot see.”
“It is an agony to be reminded.” Alhaitham asserts, without a hint of foolishness about him. Kaveh’s stomach flips with sudden desire, the rush of it obvious in the way his cheek’s honeyed tan turns suddenly rosy.
Quiet, long and heavy, settles between them, velvet smooth to begin but growing rough in the way it seems to agitate against Kaveh’s form now. He wonders if Alhaitham could sense it on him, or if it bothered him too. He speaks, sudden and yet easy, without stress nor frustration.
“I remember, in that same distant way as the fruit, what it felt like when you were there.” His hand, broad at the palm with sturdy, long fingers, draws over his own stomach. As it catches in the folds of his clothing Kaveh finds himself swallowing thickly around an intangible yet painful lump in his throat. His eyes remained trained upon that one hand even as Alhaitham continues, “A gentle hand. An inquisitive hand.”
Alhaitham’s finger reaches the swath of skin at his chest that remains uncovered by flowing robe-like garments. It's his own skin on familiar skin, yet Kaveh reacts as if it had been his, jolting where he stands like lightning had struck him clean off his feet.
“A wanting hand.” Alhaitham ends with his hand dropping to his side again, voice barely a whisper as he closes the space between them now.
Kaveh takes a singular step back only to find himself stopped from taking himself further from Alhaitham’s proximity. That hand he had watched, settles now sturdy and warm into the small of his back, covering him so thoroughly it felt as if he might never be able to fall again.
Their noses almost touch, even as Kaveh leans subtly back into Alhaitham’s hold and the man echoes the movement as if to follow him.
“Let me show you what it feels like to be seen, and known, as I have been.”
It’s a promise Kaveh hadn’t known he longed for. Since when had he been truly seen? Not glimpsed nor stared at, but seen.
By extension, then, he allows himself momentarily to think on how long it had been since he had been more than appraised, more than admired or desired – how long it had been since he had been known. Loved.
He swallows thickly now, quieting the noise of his mind that threatened to painfully resew every lonely thread of thought he’d embroidered into the tapestry of his life til now.
The first touch is surreal; fingertips softer than Kaveh expected gliding over the sharp set of his collarbone, pushing until the cloth laid over his shoulder gives in the path of them.
Once that fabric has gone, slipped over the curve of a tanned, freckled shoulder, Kaveh is left to stare with stunned eyes into the pools of teal that surround starling red. Alhaitham’s hand drops, and Kaveh is made aware of just how simple it was to undo what he so tediously wrapped around himself every day – clothing and heart both.
A flick, a tug, a second heartier pull, and he's unraveled, gasping quietly as fabric slides soft and silky against his skin until it begins to pool in messy piles around his feet.
It’s one thing to imagine the nakedness of standing within one's undergarments, another too to be alone with it. Kaveh hadn’t a clue what to do with it now, as he stood under Alhaitham’s gaze made from his own hands. His hands remain by his sides, slowly lifting as if he might hide the form of his chest, the dips and curves of his ribs as he breathes in deep and the bone seems as though it expands beneath his skin.
There’s no point trying to uselessly position the slim lengths of his arms around himself now, though, as he’s circled again. They couldn’t begin to hide all of him if he tried – not his awkwardly thin ankles to his knees that knocks together on occasion. He couldn’t cover both his calloused fingers and the purple that stained under his eyes, but he couldn't choose between covering them or the odd set of freckles that littered his lower stomach, too.
It mattered terribly for a moment – for close to three decades before this in truth – and then his eyes were caught beneath the strength of Alhaitham’s, the weight of teal that glittered with desire, with something he dared imagine to be love. Then nothing much mattered anymore.
Alhaitham’s touch starts just beside his navel, as Kaveh’s had once on his then engraved torso, drifting with a feather-light touch around to his waist. As he walks with tender footsteps to stand behind Kaveh, his hand follows, feeling along the softness of his skin, dragging his fingertips over the bronzed flesh as if raking them through slow, thick honey.
Kaveh feels it when he stops, standing still as he, again, had once done too. Alhaitham’s hand is warm as fire where it rests against his back, fingers splayed out within the curve that starts gradual and slow at the center of his spine. Gradually the stillness turns to movement, Alhaitham’s fingers almost kneading into the toughness of him, as a sculptor might mold their clay; an artist tending his muse.
His fingers search and survey, dipping briefly into the twinned dimples that sit near to that center line of Kaveh’s back. Upwards they drift after, tracing the jutting shapes of his shoulder blades until he shivers under the repeated, ticklish touch.
He hadn’t moved an inch and yet Kaveh found himself breathless, air stuttering through the confines of his chest as his heart battered at the shield of his ribs. When Alhaitham leans low and close to brush the supple softness of his lips to the newly bared curve of a shoulder, Kaveh feels with excruciating detail exactly how the adoring muscle beats inside him.
As he settles into this newness, this odd exhilaration, he hears a rustling behind him, too. He hears how fingers he knew well now unclip a brooch-like ring of silvered metal from a shoulder – where Kaveh had pinned it that first day. He hears how material heavier than ones he wore himself drag against skin and each other in ways that would not register to him usually, but here, in this suddenly silent room full of only them, it’s as much a cacophony of the chiseling of stone.
He shudders, feeling that rush of air as clothing drifts away in the grips of gravity, hitting the floor with a thud that makes his heels jump a little from the ground in sympathetic reaction. They resettle, though his pulse never does.
A finger stops against his lower back, to the left, tracing a line Kaveh couldn’t see but knew well. There's a question, unasked but heard all the same.
“I was twelve, I slipped when trying to find my way back down from a tree.” He hears a quiet scoff of sorts, almost a laugh in this quiet air, though he still felt unsure if Alhaitham had ever made such a sound.
The finger moves, drawing something like a constellation between freckles before finding its way to just below Kaveh’s right elbow; another silent question, another soft spoken answer as memories flooded in like warmed tea down his gullet.
“The first day my father let me help him I tripped, I scraped the entirety of my arm then – only that part stayed.”
Quiet then, an understanding perhaps? Maybe it was an inherent thing for every mortal – new or old – to understand the longing for a scar of times now lost, no matter how painful the injury had been to start.
With painful steadiness – truly tortuously languid – Alhaitham paces his way around Kaveh’s still but restless form, dragging his fingers along every inch of skin he could see until seemingly satisfied to some minuscule degree.
When they look upon each other again, to see all those opposing features and newly shared nakedness laid out in dull candlelight, Kaveh has to let the fear of this unknown thing slip away, if only so he no longer had to miss out on the way the affection burned him just as warmly but twice as sweetly.
Alhaitham sets a hand against his nape, pressing into the swaths of golden hair that lay there and pulling Kaveh tenderly towards him. Lips brush his forehead and he shudders under the touch, as another startles him to a kind of alertness he had been avoiding these past weeks.
Toying with the last remaining bastion of fabric at Kaveh’s waist was Alhaitham’s free hand. It was white fabric, thin but soft, that twists through a loop of thin brass. He tugs once, and seems to revel in how Kaveh sways with a rushing inhale. Again he does it, just to witness that same jolt with a shuddering exhale now. Then again, for a third time, to truly do what he had set out to.
Kaveh felt that now familiar slip of fabric, a short moment of chilling cold when that ring of metal briefly touched him, too. Then it’s nothing but the warm air of the room between them and the heaviness of Alhaitham’s eyes on what was truly his entirety now.
Alhaitham takes his hand within his, the starkness of the difference between their shape staggering now. Alhaitham’s palm was broad and his fingers long, and whilst they were heavy and sturdy too, they didn’t lack for grace nor delicacy. Kaveh’s in contrast were delicate to look at, held with a false fragility that hid from the world all the tiny, fragmented cuts and scars that littered this artist's strong, fervent hands.
He allows his hand to be led, to be laid against Alhaitham’s cheek as the one that had been at his nape is settled in a mirrored position. They hold each other’s face like that for a moment, before they both begin to move.
Kaveh can feel the heated brush of Alhaitham’s breath this close, and assumes the same must be for his companion. As his hand drifts from a sharply carved cheek, he lets his slim fingers draw down over the musculature of a chest that was wider than his own, yet softer, full with flesh where his own was firmer, close to aching bone. He sees, and traces after a moment, a mark like a scar though he knows it as the chip he had accidentally carved into his creation’s body in a moment of exhaustion. He hadn’t thought to fix the thing before he’d wished the man to life. Perhaps he had simply assumed he’d have the time to, now it stared at him as proof of their shared, entwined existence.
Kaveh lets his palm linger a moment so that he could commit the beating beneath it to his memory – real and living, and no longer just a dream.
Alhaitham’s hand in contrast had lingered at Kaveh’s cheek, drifting down the column of his throat, to his shoulder and then back up again to settle under his chin. His thumb catches on Kaveh’s lip, and he finds himself drawn out of his wanton stares to lift his gaze upwards, to be swept away by a gentle touch and a tender look. To have his head tilted just so, until lips found lips and the rest melted away.
Lost in the silken glide of Alhaitham’s mouth, Kaveh couldn’t recount the steps between his standing, and how he found himself laid out atop the sheets of his bed.
Alhaitham’s mouth still worked against him, though its locations differed; sometimes he mouthed at the dip of his clavicle, other times he ventured lower, drawing his tongue slow around and into the dip of Kaveh’s navel, glancing up through the thick darkness of his lashes when the blond’s stomach caved in subtly, arousal causing his muscles to stiffen and tense in ticklish anticipation.
“How do you know how to talk as you do,” Kaveh whimpers, the arch that shapes his back now almost painful as he bends away from the bed below, pushing as much of himself into the heat of Alhaitham’s wandering mouth. “To touch me like this?”
“Strange as the process may have been, I was born a man like any other – I dream and I hunger, like any other.” Silver hair is feather-light as it drags against Kaveh’s ribs, Alhaitham pressing his open mouth to the planes of his chest now. “I have dreamed of you, and hungered for all these things in the aftermath.”
Eventually he kissed his way back up to him properly, so that he could nuzzle into his cheek or his jaw, to kiss along each surface he found until Kaveh could no longer feel beyond the touch of Alhaitham’s lips.
Their bodies entwined like that, Alhaitham set between the softness of Kaveh’s thighs, their bodies writhing subtly in ways that caught their lengths between the shifting of their stomachs. It made his nerves prickle and his breath quicken, blood rushing to his skin and flushing him with color that burned.
In a way he wished it would stay like this, unchanging and easy, never too much, never too little. In what could have been minutes or years, though, Alhaitham lifts himself away and there’s more than the all encompassing press of heat to think of once more.
Kaveh sees only the mottled color of the ceiling above him for a while when the other man leaves him, hearing distantly the soft pad of Alhaitham’s feet beyond the noise of his own breath coming so heavily it was as if something chased him through his stillness. He wondered what he might do if it caught him, this mysterious beast that hunted through his veins now.
The firmness of the layered blankets shifts as Alhaitham once more kneels upon the bed, the light that filtered across Kaveh’s vision from the few sets of candles and lanterns within his room suddenly darkened as his vision is consumed only by Alhaitham.
There’s a distant kind of clinking of sturdy glass within careful fingers; the turning of a stopper and the gentle pop that follows. Kaveh recognizes the subtle scent of an oil he kept within his room, and a lump once again rises in the tightness of his lower throat. Alhaitham, as if sensing the tension of the moment, eases a hand across the plump shape of his thigh, soothing the skin as the cool oil is poured in slow dribbles down upon what lay between his spread legs.
Kaveh can only shudder, gasping a short and sweetly tender sound when Alhaitham’s newly free fingers draw through the slick mess he’d created. They rub slowly back and forth before growing more intentional, more pressured, with every glancing touch. It’s slow, gradual and gentle, and yet Kaveh still arches with the sensation of a breaching finger.
His breath comes quickly, even more so than it had before, as Alhaitham’s knuckles slip within him, finger curving if only to drag the tip of itself against his walls on the lazy pull out.
“Easy now.” The man soothes, an instruction as Kaveh’s thighs tense and his heels dig roughly into the bed when the second digit eases into the oil-slicked hole the other occupies already.
A pitched cry breaks through Kaveh’s tightened jaw when the two pads of thick fingers press inside of him, hooked and searching, leaving no piece of him undiscovered. They drag and poke, scissoring in subtle motions until the stretch feels less foreign, less stinging and more a simple thrum of an ache that fans the flames of the fire already burning in his gut.
Alhaitham’s free hand lays upon Kaveh’s stomach, palm firm where it slides up and down along the fluttering muscles below, feeling every jolt of nerves or sudden caving in when the pleasure spikes.
Just below, Kaveh’s cock lays against himself, weeping sticky droplets on to his own skin as he twitches with each heated rush of new sensation. Alhaitham’s fingers are warm, smooth and long, gliding into him with easy, steady movements that fill him in ways his own attempts could never measure up to.
As the pressure mounts, localized shivers turning to full body trembles and the arch at his back growing painful as he pushes himself on to the languid thrusts of Alhaitham’s hand, Kaveh finds himself turning, curling up into himself as hushes little sounds escape in quick succession, almost gently punched from him by the quickened fingers.
Alhaitham begins to lay his body over him then, mouthing at his jaw, then his cheek, and finally his temple. He seems not to mind how Kaveh writhes under him, nor how his golden hair gets caught against his lips as he kisses the side of his head. Instead he only perseveres, silent and measured, aware of every little twitch and shiver Kaveh makes against any part of him.
Eventually, he uses the strength of his one free hand to ease Kaveh’s body further over, until his chest is heavy against the bed and one of the soft forms of his cheeks is malformed by the pressure of the bed against it. Kaveh thinks on the embarrassment of his position for barely a moment, easing into the pleasure like an overworked man to his warm bath waters – the gentle way Alhaitham enveloped him, how his hands worked him so tenderly to thrilling seconds of ecstasy, made him believe he deserved this.
If Kaveh’s knees ached, he couldn't feel it, unbothered by the awkward folds of blankets beneath them that dig into his skin in odd ways. It was all faraway, inconsequential and small now that he could feel instead how Alhaitham’s length rubbed through the overtly slick moisture of oil dripping between the bronzed skin of his ass.
His fingers had been removed, the hand they belonged to instead settling at one shaking hip, steadying Kaveh’s form as it set itself up on knees and chest. His hands were useless to him truthfully, his arms curled up under his ribs as his open mouth exhaled hazy, stuttering breaths across his sheets.
Kaveh couldn’t see Alhaitham, not like this, but he could feel him and that was on equal footing to him now. He had done nothing but feel him since his first conceptualization. He had loved him through touch, through ideas and imagination, since that very first tender thought of stone carved companionship. It didn’t bother him then, it didn’t bother him now, not when one hand steadied his hip, and the other pushed at one rounded cheek until he was bared enough for the tip of Alhaitham’s cock to catch on his stretched rim.
He had known his own want, had been intimately aware of the thing that superseded simple affection, this hunger that lived just beneath his skin and at the corner of his mind. Now, as the first push against him buries that first inch of aching length inside of him, he can hear it in Alhaitham too. He sags, leaning over Kaveh’s bent form so that his nose, curved and handsome, presses into the mess of golden hair that blanketed Kaveh’s head. Between them there’s nothing but shivering and gasping, melting bodies turning into one molten lot of flesh and desire.
At first there was discomfort, an oddness to the fullness that settled like a heavy weight in his gut. The pressure of Alhaitham’s form folded above his own made Kaveh’s back arch and his knees slip wider, the muscles of his already spread thighs starting to burn with sudden stretching.
When it eased, that dull ache of first filling, Alhaitham suddenly sunk the entirety of himself in with one steady swing of his hips. The action drew the breath from Kaveh’s lungs, and stole the last ounce of strength from his posture. His hips drop under the weight of Alhaitham’s, his fingers twisting desperately in the sheets caught beneath his chest already flat to the bed below, and he finds himself fully prone against that softened surface now, full and dazed.
They lay like that for a moment, Kaveh full and Alhaitham fitting as if this had all been on purpose. It hadn’t been, though Kaveh’s mind offers the remembrance of all those nights alone with nothing but the idea of him, of his creation – of his Alhaitham.
Lips brush light across his nape where the hair parts in messy, sweat dampened layers, and Kaveh knows Alhaitham’s kissing at the exact spot marked by the freckle he mentioned earlier. His mouth migrates slowly around to the side of his neck, moist and warm and making Kaveh’s skin ticklish and buzzing with sensation.
When Alhaitham moves Kaveh can feel the world shift, though he can’t move with it. He’s trapped between the heaviness of his lover’s body, and the soft spread of his bed below. It burns the blood in his veins and makes his head spin, feeling how deeply the other grinds himself into him, salaciously slow and firm. He gasps, the sound stuttering with both the loss of breath and the pressing of his cheek to the sheets.
After a while Kaveh, short of breath and feeling deliciously full and hollowed out at once, can feel the gradual slip of a hand along the slender shape of his waist. It eases below him, trapped as he had been between a body and a bed, though Alhaitham does not let it pause. He drags the broad shape of his palm up, following the dip at the soft center of Kaveh’s torso, between his ribs and through the sharp, sturdy middle of his collarbones.
Kaveh, for a brief moment, thinks this is the moment he’ll be lifted, yet the freedom from the heat and proximity never comes.
Alhaitham leans lower somehow, finding space that did not exist between them to melt himself into. Kaveh’s voice comes as something akin to a whimper now, quiet and sweet as he disappears into the mess of the limbs it felt as if they shared now.
Lips at his jaw, his head tilting, face bared to the dull light of the room, brows furrowed and mouth fallen open with pleasure. He’d be ashamed to see himself, but he hasn’t any time left for such a thought when the one who sees him now is Alhaitham. There’s no shame left, no bashfulness strong enough to distract from the thumping thrill of his heart to his ribs, mirrored by the twinned beat he could feel pressed to the cut of his shoulder blades.
With each thrust that resembles more a fluid, singular wave, Kaveh can feel the rippling effect it creates through the softened musculature of Alhaitham’s form above him. Their skin sticks to one another's, sweat shining between them as Alhaitham’s hips roll into him, never pulling out far enough for it to truly feel as if they ever part.
In honesty Kaveh feels a kind of delirium; he’s warm – feverish even – skin pink with the heat, vision blurred with it too, his head spinning with all that comes from such continued intensity. It all feels too vivid, too real, desire raging like a starved animal in his gut.
Distantly he feels Alhaitham’s fingers drawing up along his throat, caressing the shape of his jaw and slipping without purpose over his parted lips. It’s a slow, shivering reminder of reality; a grounding touch among the maddening high of the rest.
The next thrust is rougher, firmer, deliberate in how it pinpoints the waiting pleasure inside of him; Kaveh jolts and moans his approval with the next, too. Again and again now he feels himself made anew, body shifting against the fully tousled sheets with each strong movement of the other’s hips.
Alhaitham’s free hand, that had been stalwart in its grip upon his hip, slips itself beneath Kaveh instead. It follows the defined line that leads low, finding the heated base of him to then draw soft, tender fingers up along his length until precum drips across his fingertips.
Kaveh lies to himself in his mind, then. He thinks without that touch, without the enticing curl of a broad palm around his cock, that he could have withstood this – for minutes or hours more, all night perhaps. Instead he shivers and lets his hips shudder separately, bucking down into the minimal space the shape of Alhaitham’s fist offers.
“Oh –” Kaveh sighs, cheek to cheek with Alhaitham now as the other buries himself deep, a low grunt rumbling between his ribs as he twists his fingers just so, feeling once more how pearls of thin pre dribble between the gaps left between the digits.
“Let go,” Alhaitham breathes against the fragile, flushed shell of his ear now. His lips catch on the gold that adorns them, teeth nibbling at soft skin before – after a sweetened yet rough gasp – Alhaitham implores, “Cum with me.”
It’s not the instruction itself, Kaveh is certain, but the way in which it’s delivered to him. It’s the breathy whisper, the air caught between the words. It’s how he can feel the tremble at Alhaitham’s lips, the desperation potent between the two of them, neither of them left alone with it. It’s how their hearts seem to skip the same beat as the syllables cease and all that’s left is the understanding and the steady rhythmic slap of skin.
Kaveh can’t stretch out, still caught as he was beneath and between, so he simply trembles. He jolts and shakes and lets Alhaitham drag his open mouth along his shoulder, leaving shimmering trails of spit and welting, suckled bruises in his wake.
They don’t cum together, but it’s as close as Kaveh imagines possible.
Alhaitham is first, tumbling with a short moment of almost painfully contained silence before the thrill seems to explode beneath his skin. His hand grasps at Kaveh’s chest, holding him firmly to his own, as if he would ever try to leave. His hips stutter then, thrusts erratic for a moment or two as he grunts and groans and sighs into the crook of Kaveh’s neck.
The feeling of the filling leaves Kaveh boneless; it’s not his end but it is, in part, his undoing. He moans Alhaitham’s name like a prayer, repeating it perfectly as if it’s the only word his tongue remembers in the haze of his pleasure. He arches as best he can now that Alhaitham’s movements have slowed, his broader hips steady and gradually coming to a stop. It’s all his hand, then, and the pressure of his moistened lips to Kaveh’s pulse point that brings him over that precipice, too.
His sounds stop with a choked inhale, air catching his throat and his heart fluttering like it would follow. Time stops, or so it seems, when the elated burn of ecstasy floods his veins. He doesn’t think, doesn’t feel, he just is. For that short moment it’s like he’s floating, the ends of his nerves abyss with a fire he has no understanding of.
And then it’s over, and he’s left with the sticky heat of skin and the tangled ache of limbs overused.
They lay in that heap for shorter than he’d like, but certain longer than they should. Kaveh can feel how the sweat pools in the curve of his shoulder, then slips in a ticklish, wet line down his arm. It ends on the bed, he assumes, unable to witness its demise with how Alhaitham’s arm crosses his at the junction where it would drip.
Gently, a finger swipes the hair stuck to his cheek away and behind his ear, replacing the uncomfortable swirl of hair across his skin with a tender, feather-light kiss instead.
It must have been minutes again after this, but it feels far too soon when Alhaitham peels himself away from the melded set of their forms. Kaveh whines his disapproval, the air colder without his lover, but Alhaitham doesn’t give in to his sounds this time and Kaveh waits with impatience for his companion to return.
When he does it’s with a damp, warm cloth, and a fresh blanket for their bed.
When Kaveh’s body is clean he rolls himself on to his back, one arm laying across his stomach while the other is splayed lazily above his head on the sheets still dampened with their sweat. Alhaitham watches him, as he does in turn to him. They’re as planets are to stars like this, orbiting from a distance so perfect it could never be altered, lest the world spin dangerously on its axis, swept into burning bitterness or malign melancholy.
Alhaitham reaches for him first, and it feels as if a mirror to that first contact, flesh to stone, had been lifted.
A finger draws against Kaveh’s face; from his temples to his chin, from his jaw to his cheek, it traces from the subtle bump at the bridge down the following straight length of his nose, and when he closes his eyes, it traces them too.
“I struggle to imagine a thing out there that could compare to you.” Alhaitham murmurs, sincerity dripping like honey from the steady words he speaks with irritating, charming ease.
Kaveh wishes he didn’t blush under the weight of them, but he does, he feels every inch of him that heats to a pinkish glow with it. With a smile on his lips, content with his fate of ardent affection, he catches Alhaitham’s hand with his own to cease his exploring fingers. Speaking gently, whilst bringing the palm to his lips to kiss it before releasing him, he scolds him.
“To say such a thing is to earn the ire of the gods.”
“I have met my god,” Alhaitham says, as if it were the easiest thing in the world, with none of the nervous humility that stung in Kaveh’s veins to hear it; the sensation passes quickly and is replaced by a tender burning in his chest, and a deliciously heavy weight in his gut. “And he is benevolent, forgiving even, on occasion.”
Kaveh balks even as affection swells unbidden in his chest, aching and wanting and so truly untenable now. Yet he would argue, because he feared he was built to, and because he could feel the anxiety that nipped at his heels like angry pests.
“They would wage wars on you for saying such a thing.”
“Let them.” Alhaitham leans over Kaveh’s form now, head full of silver locks blotting out the light of the high shelved candle’s light. It glowed behind the shape of him, and though the visage of him grew dark now, Kaveh could see him wholly, every feature burned into the eye of his soul.
“Alhaitham –” He tried to protest, chest tight with his worry even while his voice was decadently thick with his adoration.
“Should they try to lay siege, I would remind them of what weapons they have brought against me already. I would argue they needn’t wage a war they have already won.” Kaveh’s eyes search his shadowed expression now, scarlet roaming in search of something – his hand is taken before he’s satisfied, and he feels that still surprising warmth of Alhaitham beneath his fingers.
Kaveh’s palm is fitted to the shape of Alhaitham’s chest, held there by the other’s gentle strength. Below their entwined fingers Kaveh can feel the still hurried beat of Alhaitham’s heart; exertion still showed itself unashamedly upon him, through this thudding and the subtle sheen across his skin, or in the flush of his cheeks or unruly mess of his hair.
“Was I not carved with Eros’ arrow pierced between these ribs? Was my body not built of longing?” A pressure and a drag. Kaveh feels the firm bump of bone beneath Alhaitham’s toned flesh as his fingers are led lower, then higher again. So high eventually he feels his own knuckles brush against the plushness of Alhaitham’s lips, and his breath when he speaks tickles the digits he holds so closely. “Buried so deeply even Aphrodite took mercy upon my very nature, to deliver me to you.”
Alhaitham’s tongue, Kaveh had learned, could be sharp and sour, strong willed and stubborn with argument. Yet he knew now, too, that it was soft and sweet and capable of a kind of eloquence Kaveh had had no real ideation of when he’d carved that mouth with such dedicated fervor.
Kaveh’s voice comes in a whisper, though the sound still surprises him. It feels as if it comes from somewhere else. “Has it not been removed, and healed?”
“It has.” Alhaitham eases the words free, attentive tenderness oozing from the very syllables of them. “But everyday I am struck anew.”
“But you endure?”
“Of course.”
Kaveh’s fingertips brush across the curved shape of Alhaitham’s lips; he feels the heaviness of the lower, then the slimmer top, tracing the shallow set of his philtrum before his hand extends, escaping the grasp of the other man’s to cup the curve of his cheek instead.
“Why? If it hurts, you needn’t –”
“ – Because,” Alhaitham interrupts calmly, not letting Kaveh linger a second more on the prospect he had yet to even truly voice. “In my short time, I’ve deduced love to be the only fight worth weathering. I would not bother wasting my time with any other.”
There’s a tremble to Kaveh’s touch as his fingers slip from their settled stance. Now instead they fall to lay above his own bare chest, as if he could still the fevered beating within it.
“I hope I have to break the arrow’s shaft from my chest every morning, just to lose to it once more the next, that I can feel the sting of it lodged between my ribs until I die.”
A kiss, then, to the warmth of his forehead where Alhaitham has pushed the thin, silky hair away from its sweat slicked surface. They stare into one another after, breaths mingling under where the tips of their noses brush in a way so slight and bashful it was almost childishly shy.
“I’ve dreamed of you.” Kaveh admits, heart fluttering with a hummingbird’s fervor and fragility.
Alhaitham, looking down upon him with a softness the stone had never allowed for, smiles and the world changes in a way Kaveh would never be able to name.
“And am I all you imagined me to be?”
A hand to his cheek, Alhaitham leaning into his warmth in a silent offering of tender adoration. Kaveh smiles, too, his cheeks aching with how the joy makes him anew.
“You’ve always been more.”
And the world may never know of how stone became flesh, of how the chisel, when given purpose, could carve a man; but until newly equally mortal hearts stopped their dutiful beating, the echo of a lonely wish and the endurance of love would still ring soundly true.