made from hungry mouths

“go away for a bit,” the words come out of your mouth clumsily, like tripping over your own feet in haste. “this one's t-taken.”

your humour probably didn't land as well as you hoped. the stuttering of the heart in your chest beating like a butterfly's wings in flight, like it had ambitions of flying out of your chest instead of remaining behind your ribcage where it belonged. to your credit, it was hard to think of a joke in the middle of everything that was happening in your body. you would've rated yourself fairly well, all things considered.

alhaitham didn't seem to agree, although he didn't frown at you. he tends to voice out his disagreements vocally rather than through things like body language—you know, like a machine would when you press the wrong button? 

if he knew what i'm thinking right now, he would probably say that it's one of the virtues of studying under haravatat—classic alhaitham!

instead of saying anything immediately though, he sat cross-legged in front of you, his eyes wandering, seemingly…. observing? what was he looking at? you're sure you could've tell if your mind was clearer, but you couldn't at the moment.

“does it not hurt?” he asked, then, from your face dipped over your hunched knees, you heard two raps of a knock on the desk. “this is the desk made with athel wood, isn't it? it's very durable, but it's difficult for the city craftsmen to make full use of them right now because of how hard it is. the edges don't look sanded enough.”

“i-it's fine,” you choke out, and then breathed in and out for a proper response. “i don't mind it so much.”

he raised a brow in return. oh, you think, so now he's going to use body language, is he? 

too bad you couldn't savour it this time too. 

“as long as it's pressing against me, i'm… okay.”

you hear him hum in understanding, like he does when he reads a well written proposal. 

“is that why you chose this desk in particular? the others were too high and wide and you couldn't make contact with the wood?”

before you realised it, it was easier for you to speak now, even though your heart was still pounding, and your skin felt raw. you didn't usually try to talk when you were experiencing… whatever this is. 

“yeah. i just need… to feel safe.”

before you realised it, your face was no longer tucked between your knees, but instead resting on them as you avoided looking him in the eyes. 

“i see,” he said, and he paused before saying: “would you mind if i tried something?”

you hesitated, and your eyes finally meet. “i don't know, what are you going to do?”

“i'm going to hold you in my arms,” he said, and switched from sitting cross legged to having his knees tucked under him, arms open and his hands stretching for yours. “if you don't mind.”

in any other situation, you wouldn't have minded. you'd say: maybe it'll start snowing in the desert today! should we start preparing for the oncoming winter?

but now….

you were a mess—just like you were in the tavern that night, too. red ringed on your puffed-up eyes, sweat drenching your clothes and making your back feel as humid as the rainforests at night, and you could barely eke out a word before seemingly using up every bit of air in your lungs, like a newborn babe that only knew how to cry.

you didn't know how to tell all of this to alhaitham. sorry, can i go change into better clothes first? can i save this hug for another time when i'm completely sane and sober to take full advantage of it? can you wait till i ice my eyes so i can look at you properly?

instead, what came out of your mouth was: “i'm disgusting right now.”

he hummed, and you weren't sure if it was his i'm-considering-how-to-reply-to-this-idiotic-situation hum or i-see-where-you're-coming-from hum.

“i can see why you'd think that, but that's irrelevant.”

ah. so it was both.

“why do you want to hold me?”

“i want to see if i can do a better job than a desk,” he says, and you feel a smile ghost your face, only because you see him wearing one too. a small smile, simple like him. 

“i probably smell really bad. i'm sweating so much right now.”

“that's fine. i'll stop breathing through my nose.”

“my eyes are really red too. it's not that i don't want to look at you, it's that i'm too embarrassed to.”

“i can just close my eyes.”

“my heart is pounding really painfully right now, and it's hard to talk.”

“i'll ask questions that are easy to answer then.”

finally, you relented. “...is it really okay?”

“yes.”

after you confirmed that he couldn't smell you and couldn't see you, you slowly inch from under the desk and into his lap, where he then wrapped his arms around you. not tightly or passionately, but a sort of reassuring grip—like he wouldn't let you fall.

“how does it feel?”

“you're probably better than my desk,” you laughed out, and the sound felt strange to your ears, just moments after you were alone and crying and hyperventilating under a desk in a room by yourself.

“glad to be of service.”

you laughed again. “i don't think even the other sages from the akademiya can ever get you to say those words.”

“because they can't. if any of them leapt into my arms asking for a hug, i'd redirect them to doctor zakariya.”

you laughed again, and you were glad you made him promise to close his eyes. the sight of alhaitham smiling slightly at you, and the sight of your smile looking at him would've convinced anyone that you were starstruck by him. you didn't feel up to being publicly humiliated at the moment. 

the two of you spent the next few minutes—which felt like hours—in each other's embrace (well, yours in his, mostly), and soon your breathing steadied. from the high tides and low crests of your chest rising and falling asynchronously, it returned to the rhythm of the afternoon tides of port ormos.

although it was a difficult question to ask, you asked anyways. “are you not going to ask me what happened?”

“one of the six sins of any scholar under the akademiya is to interfere in human evolution,” he began, and you felt a smile coming before he even finished. “i assume it was your body's way of protecting you against a threat. although—” 

he opened his eyes, and you would've tried to stop your smiling by any means before he could see you, but he was wearing a smile of his own, and you couldn't help but dig your fingers deeper into his arms. 

“—the nature of the threat and it's scale remains unknown to me still. you have a way with handling problems, after all.”

you gave him a big smack on his chest, fists closed for maximum impact. “ouch!”

how did that hurt you instead of him?

“a good rule of self defense is hard parts against soft targets, and soft parts on hard targets. you shouldn't have closed your hand. a slap would work better.”

“how was i going to know your chest was literally rock hard?!”

“i thought you might have some inkling. i've noticed your stare a few times before.”

you wanted to throw yourself into the abyss.

you couldn't, so instead, you took his hand and bit his fingers as the next best thing. 

a small ouch sounded from him, though you couldn't tell if it was genuine or for the sake of making you feel better. you laid your head back against his chest, arms now wrapped around him in return.

“thanks, alhaitham.”

“you're very welcome,” he muttered in response, and you almost didn’t hear him.

“you’re not going to tell me that the solution is simple, or that i was the one that caused this thing in myself?”

he hummed.

“no,” he started, and you wanted to collapse in relief. “i am a scholar of haravatat, not amurta. i don’t understand the subject matter enough to say in any confidence or plausibility that the way your—or anyone’s—body works is simple. if it was that simple, then we wouldn’t have an entire field dedicated to it. and i do wish it were that simple, sometimes. then perhaps so many scholars wouldn’t have written audacious sounding proposals that i’d have to read thoroughly just to reject.”

you snickered. “what does haravatat’s wisdom has to say about me?”

for a moment, you see his eyes soften, straying away from yours.

“that your body failing you is not a moral or intellectual inadequacy on your part. that we do not have full control of ourselves, even if we would like to. that, perhaps…”

“perhaps?”

his gaze returns to you. “...perhaps, we are all more fallible than we see ourselves.”

“only you see yourself as infallible. i know very well how my body betrays me every second of every day. it’s one of the things that comes with being in touch with my own emotions, don’t you know?”

the teasing was meant to be lighthearted, as you knew he didn’t mean anything he said before in a dogged way. his words was not thorny on purpose like a bramble bush, just rough to the touch like a tongue’s cat. there were days where his words striked too much like an arrow through you, and days where the coarseness only brushed your ankles like standing in sand. you loved and cared for him despite that.

suddenly, he pulled you tighter against him, and you squeaked. “alhaitham? Is everything okay?”

no answer. you shifted in your position to make yourself more comfortable, and with whatever left strength you could muster, you rub your hands over his back in calm, soothing circles. “there, there.” 

your voice reverberated through your body, and you continued to hold him reassuringly, hoping that enough exposure to having him be so close to you would cure your racing heart and your voice, almost crumbling at his touch.

it was good how self conscious of yourself you were. then, you wouldn’t be able to tell that his heart was racing, too. 

***

the third time he finds you, it was not so much being found as it was being chased.

it was just one of those days that went wrong in every way it could’ve gone wrong. you stubbed your toe after getting out of the shower, your research project was going nowhere despite your multiple reminders to your groupmates, and even the way the sticky-sweet baklava clung to your teeth annoyed you.

worst of all, you had a fight with alhaitham.

now that you think of it, it could hardly be called a fight. you’ve seen full-grown adults in akademiya gowns act pettier in a structured debate, and you were sure that if you had asked alhaitham—truly asked, with no contempt or malice—he would’ve presented to you a perfectly reasonable explanation why he didn’t act like an asshole and moreso sounded like one.

right. the only person that was taking things too seriously was you. it had always been you.

it wasn’t that you wanted to be less emotional. you had spent too much time in your formative younger years denying the fact that you simply felt things more deeply, more quickly, than others. it was difficult to accept that you simply had thinner skin than most people—that, on a bad day, the veil of privacy that stood between your emotions and the outside world was nothing but sheer silk that fluttered all too easily with an evening breeze. 

the ‘fight’ was nothing spectacular, either. It wasn’t as if you two were having an intellectual discussion as two scholars, rigorously going through peer review on a research paper. it wasn’t as if neither of you would come out of it having respected each other a little less.

but, like the person that you are, so tethered to the heart that it kept your feet frozen sometimes, it had hurt you deeply.

it truly was nothing spectacular. you simply wanted to vent about your terrible groupmates, and you thought that it would be nothing more than a venting session over drinks, getting sober, and then buckling down to do the job once you were ready again in the morning.

but it escalated. he, also seemingly irritable that night, kept bringing up questions, solutions, to your dismay. at any other time, you would’ve let it slide and shelved it as simply alhaitham being alhaitham—a man who wanted life to be simple and easy, fixing problems before they sprung. however, what you needed that night was not a fixer or a tinkerer with all his haravatat wisdom. you needed alhaitham the drinking buddy, the one that would foot the bill, the one that held you in his arms and wanted to be of more comfort than the desk you hid under.

“i just wish you would just—listen!”

“i am listening. it’s just that it’s difficult to keep my words to myself, seeing as this problem can be easily fixed, if you weren’t so fixated on unnecessary things.”

“unnecessary? i don’t like them, but it doesn’t mean that i want to snitch on them!”

“what’s stopping you? they clearly don’t respect you. who else can they blame but themselves as the logical consequence of their actions if you do tell on them? they are adults in their own capacity, and the akademiya is not a place for people to loiter around, seeking for forgiveness for one’s own incompetence. their lesson is theirs to learn.”

“i have my own way of fixing things, alhaitham. you may not care about other people’s feelings, but i do! and i’d rather work it out clearly with them rather than resort to underhanded tactics just to have my life go a little smoother.”

“then tell me, why hasn’t your way of fixing problems worked? only an idiot would employ the same methods over and over again, hoping it’ll work the next time.”

he didn’t call you an idiot directly, but he didn’t have to. the insult found its way to you just the same. 

even if you did, you couldn’t fully deny it either. in the perspective of alhaitham, perhaps everyone else other than him was a dimwit full of hot air. the thought that the same applied to you, who you thought had a pretty close relationship with him, stung the most. 

he had tried to talk to you and reach out multiple times (although, by your estimates, his attempts were somewhat weak and clumsy), and you kept him out of your house with a badly made sign that said ‘TRESPASSERS BEWARE’ above an aranara carving that looked—in your opinion—pretty scary.

on these days, it was difficult. you couldn’t touch yourself, feeling so raw that you feared that wherever your hand brushed, you would come away bleeding. 

there were at least some good news though: your groupmates finally decided to cooperate with you for the project, and you were extremely thankful for it. it turns out that they all had personal issues that made it difficult to speak out on, and now that they realised that you wouldn’t judge them for whatever excuse they may have, they confided in you, and everything went as smoothly as you could hope for.

the four of you celebrated at the tavern, drinks in hand at 3 p.m. in the afternoon. the boss, seeing this particular group of inebriated students, simply shook his head and smiled defeatedly. by the time the sky changed colours, only you were left sitting alone at your table after having escorted the other three to their homes to get some well-earned rest. you would have left soon after, if not only for the fact that you had ‘bumped’ into alhaitham and he ordered a drink to have at your table.

“i was right,” was the first thing you said to him, and you enjoyed the look on his face when the words left your mouth. “i was right. everything turned out like i hoped it would.”

he tilted his head. “surely you can’t expect for luck and fortunate circumstances to befall you every time?”

“i don’t. i don’t, but… i’ll keep doing what i’m doing. i like it when everyone is happy. things won’t always go the way i want them to, but i’ll keep doing it, because it’s important to me that i try to give everyone the benefit of the doubt, that i don’t walk the easy road if it means i’ve passed by something meaningful just to suffer a little less in my own life.”

“you sound like kaveh.”

you chuckled. “that sounds like a compliment to me. thank you.”

when his drink arrived, alhaitham nudged it your way across the table. you raised a brow. “what’s this for?”

“to say i’m sorry.”

“words aren’t enough for you?”

“words are only enough for people who trust others to tell the truth,” he paused, then added: “and i don’t.”

you hummed, then leaned back in your chair. “pretend, then, that we are two people who trust each other to tell the truth, and that we would believe in each other no matter what. what would you say?”

his green-red eyes flickered, and you didn’t know from what. if it was with other people, you could hazard a guess, sure—but alhaitham was different from the people you’ve met, and you did not want to presume what his heart feels.

(even if he claims that it’s only there to keep him alive.)

“when i couldn’t see you, i still thought of you, and i didn’t know what to do. i want to apologise for insulting you with my words, even if i didn’t mean to. i failed to calculate the exact way they had sounded until it reached my own ears and i saw how hurt you were.”

you said nothing, but nodded slightly as a go-on.

“i like it when things are simple, but that didn’t mean i wanted you to be simple. i just wanted things to be simple for you, and i unreasonably tried to force my perspective onto yours and ended up hurting you in the process. and for that…” he seemed to have trouble wrangling the words out of his throat, and you would’ve laughed if he didn’t look so pained. you reached out for his hand on the table, resting yours atop his. “...and for that, i am deeply sorry.”

you hummed. another moment to savour. 

there  was still one more thing you needed to clear up, though.

“...do you think i’m an idiot?”

unlike mere moments ago, the words shot out of his mouth before he even tried to rein them in. “no. not at all. i’ve never once thought you were.”

you smiled at him, somewhat self-deprecatingly. “but you don’t like how emotional i am.”

“it’s not a matter of liking or disliking. your emotions serve a purpose in your decision-making. it’s simply that… i do not like the experience of having to see you go through things that hurt you, even if you’re willing to do so.”

ah, so that’s what it is.

“alhaitham, do you care about me?”

his eyes, previously unfocused, darted back to meet your unflinching gaze. “have my actions indicated otherwise?”

you couldn’t help it. you snorted. “alhaitham, the line between caring for a person’s wellbeing out of courtesy rather than concern is a very thin line. at least, for the rest of us who you might call ‘drama queens’ and ‘fake socialites’.”

maybe he didn’t realise it, but his brows scrunched under your scrutiny, and you couldn’t help but feel joy at the fact that you made alhaitham, someone so aloof and disenchanted, truly perplexed.

“do you not know the answer already?”

“i do,” you say, and you were sure that your smile was infuriating him now. “i just wanted to hear you say it.”

a silence between both of you, even though the tavern was filled with the sound of chatter and the tinkling of dishes and cutlery. 

“i do care for you. deeply. does this answer satisfy you?”

“yep!” you smiled, and alhaitham wasn’t one to offer prayers of gratitude to the sevens above, but he was glad that you were so self-conscious of yourself to be blind to the way he leaned forward in his seat, his one hand tightly clutched under the table, and the way he wished he could bottle your smile and indulge in it on a rainy day, if he could.