good lord we're back here again. time is a circle huh.
anyway hi this is lyn, aka ao3 user yugto and twitter user @tadhanastar (for however long that lasts). thanks for visiting, stick around if you'd like!
in which alhaitham switches places with his younger self and everyone handles this extraordinarily badly. we will improve this situationship or die trying. now on ao3! first two scenes below for ur reading pleasure.
Alhaitham, being no longer in his living room, decides the first thing he should do is sit down. He does so.
He’s in an Akademiya dorm room. It’s early afternoon. A few moments ago it was late at night and he was speaking with Kaveh, who was in the kitchen of Alhaitham’s own house. Alhaitham was leaning against the couch in the living room and flipping through a book that wasn’t worth the paper it’d been printed on. The book is also gone.
Alhaitham only began dreaming again eight months ago, but he’s confident that this isn’t a dream. It looks, with a great deal more specificity than could be possible even for his sleeping mind, like Kaveh’s dorm room. Books of design, materials science, desert exploration, runic translation, and piano theory are piled on the desk. There is, laying on the bedsheets by Alhaitham’s hand, a cheap but fashionable earring he remembers vividly for the way it had caught the light in their single shared lecture, late afternoon in the hall below the Sanctuary. Semiotics and Glassmaking in Deshret’s Kingdom. He skims the earring briefly with a fingertip then moves his hand to his lap.
He considers what this might mean.
The door swings open and Kaveh says, “Haitham, can you take some of these? I borrowed everything I could find on desert Seelies but it’s really almost nothing, like I can’t tell if we’re running into another ridiculous knowledge restriction again or if genuinely no one’s ever tried to track the Seelie courts in Upper Setekh, which would be so typical, wouldn’t it, so I grabbed everything else I saw on the–”
Kaveh’s face is bright, young, flushed, freckled, happy. He’s wearing an Akademiya uniform and is as tall as the last time Alhaitham saw him (fifteen minutes ago) which means he’s an inch or two shorter than the last time Alhaitham saw him, because the uniform boots are heeled. He’s staring at Alhaitham with the aforementioned flush spreading like dye over the silk of his cheeks.
“Kaveh,” Alhaitham says. “Don’t freak out. I believe I’ve been displaced in time.”
“Oh, I,” Kaveh says. His hands start to go slack beneath the stack of books leaning against his chest, so Alhaitham takes the books from him and sets them on the chair beside the desk.
“You–yes,” Kaveh says, the flush climbing down his neck and up to his ears now. “I–oh.”
He couldn’t be more than eighteen. Which would make it, assuming this is in fact the past Alhaitham remembers, which he really has no way to determine without further investigation, the year Alhaitham himself turned sixteen.
“I developed a bodybuilding habit when I was twenty and attempting to do some metabolic experiments that ultimately proved unfruitful,” Alhaitham says. “You can touch my shoulders if that would get this over with.”
Kaveh, whose left hand had begun to drift with little apparent thought towards Alhaitham’s bare deltoid, snaps back so hard his head smacks into the doorframe. “I’m so sorry!” he says. “I’m so sorry, this is so rude of me, I should never have assumed, I’m so sorry, and you’re so much older, and you never said–”
Alhaitham sighs.
--
Kaveh stands bent over the kitchen sink, working his jaw and watching his cuticles slowly go to ribbons in the soapy water. Not literally. Literally enough. He should have let Alhaitham buy the stupid gentle dish soap that didn’t ruin Kaveh’s cuticles. Kaveh stops himself from thinking further on Alhaitham’s incredibly domineering dish soap opinions.
Alhaitham has gone quiet in the living room, but that doesn’t mean very much. The state of their immortal souls could be at stake and Alhaitham would still bar himself from Celestia before he continued a conversation he continued boring. Or a fight.
Kaveh works his jaw harder, tension dull and radiant above one eye. It’s not impossible for him to wait Alhaitham’s silence out. He’s done it before and he could do it again. It’s a way to end a fight, and wouldn’t it be nice, ever, to end a fight? Without starting another? Could they hope for that much peace, at the least?
Suds climb up Kaveh’s wrists. The number of nights he’s spent in this same position, mirroring himself like silvered glass over the past year and whatever he’s lived in Alhaitham’s house, frustrated and sad and exhausted by this whole situation, feels suddenly like a millstone around his neck. What a joke.
“Look, I get that you don’t think conversation is worth your time!” Kaveh shouts as he slams the cutting board into the sink. “But pretending like this isn’t a problem just because you’re bored is not actually a long-term solution to the problem!”
Silence. “Haitham, I know you’re still out there!”
“Kaveh?” Alhaitham calls back. His voice ends on a high and uncharacteristic quaver.
Kaveh throws himself through the door to the living room.
There’s a different Alhaitham standing in the soft streetlamp glow of the window. There’s an infant Alhaitham. He’s skinny, teetering, his hair too long over his ears, where are his headphones?, god, look at those stretch marks on his shoulders, red as fresh paint—
Alhaitham is looking up at the ceiling, head tipped back, balancing poorly on his heels as he turns. His head follows the lines of the woodwork. “Is this—” His voice cracks, squeaking in a way that Kaveh was viciously self-conscious of when he was young and Alhaitham never gave a shit about. Alhaitham didn’t start the masculinizing meds until he was at least fifteen, supplies a portion of Kaveh’s heart that very rarely forgets. His voice hasn’t cracked since they were—
Alhaitham looks from the vaulted ribs of his home to Kaveh. His eyes are enormous. He appears full of stars. “Is this the research center… you designed?” he asks. “This is our project?”
“Oh, no,” says Kaveh.
He’s wearing the undershirt and trousers of an Akademiya uniform. The permanent frowning divot between his eyebrows has yet to form. The longer he looks at Kaveh, his pale eyes flickering from Kaveh’s face to hands to chest to belt, the more he appears, ludicrously, to blush.
“Oh, no,” says Kaveh, as Alhaitham trips backwards over the footstool and lands flat on his ass.
Tag game reblog this and put Baby’s First Blorbo in the tags like who was the first Character to move into your head and live there back when you were still figuring out how to tie your shoes
Not only will there be a new volume of CHECK, PLEASE! in the works...
But CHECK, PLEASE!: YEAR FIVE will be...
…THE YEAR OF THE FROG. 🐸 🏒 ✨
Below, find a summary of what the newest volume of CHECK, PLEASE! will have to offer… highs, lows, and a whole new SMH!!
Samwell mens hockey’s favorite baker—and championship-winning senior captain—has graduated! How will the team survive?
Problems abound as their new captain, Dex, learns that the effortless balance Bitty maintained on the team isn’t as easy as it looks. Then, ultra-aloof Nursey must finally drop his “chill” and get vulnerable in a senior poetry seminar. And to make matters worse, Chowder faces the dreaded ‘SSGS’ and is having the worst season of his college career.
But when change arrives at Samwell hockey, it not only threatens to rip the team apart, but could destroy Dex, Nursey, and Chowder’s friendship forever. Before they graduate, to save their team and themselves, the three seniors must come together and ask the question:
‘What does Samwell hockey mean to you?’
I can’t reveal any more spoilers, but I’ll leave you with that question—what does Samwell hockey mean to you? Look out for more Check, Please! news in the months to come!
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One of my favourite things when reading fanfiction is when you click with an author's style so much that you adore the fanfiction you're reading, and once it's over you need more. So you go to their page and hope that there's more for any fandom you might know- only there isn't any. They've written for other fandoms you aren't familiar with and never would've thought about before.
But you're down so bad for their style and talent that they got you wading in like:
jbbartram-illu
yousharknotpass
areudirty
pixelskylines
vaporwave
