#kaveh.togo

[bl-inkstone]

"when the fire takes and leave me nothing but ash, cup me in your loving palms and make me human again."

a short kaveh thoughtspost about you loving him, burnt edges and all.

i think loving kaveh, for all his brilliance and fancy, is exactly what loving an artist is like.

it's not uncommon for him to come home with tired eyes and aching, reaching limbs honed onto you. most nights, you like to tease him and compare your love to a particularly needy limpet, where not even the crashing waves of alhaitham's annoyance at his "shameless displays of affection" (punctuated by sharp, pointed remarks and long side-eyed glances) are enough to draw him from your side. he says he clings to you because he missed your warmth, and that not even the most potent of electro slimes could ever compare to the amount of energy you give with one embrace. you only laugh in return to his poetic musings with one hand raised to hide your flushed cheeks from sparkling red-wine eyes.

but what is uncommon, however, is the first night kaveh came to you, tired and aching and physically reaching as he always does, but hiding behind halfhearted eyes.

at first, you feared what you believed to be the worst: has he fallen out love? have i been lacking in some way? am i not good enough anymore?

he reached for you and held you, yes, but you could feel just from his touch alone just how distant his mind is from you. were you any weaker, you would've stayed quiet, unsure and hurting, and internalized all of these little unspoken things until the day you could not take anymore and leave behind your heart (your love, and only love) alone in the four walls of his shared home.

but you aren't.

so here you are now, with kaveh near-catatonic on the floor and your anxious, worried hands doing all you can to bring him back to you.

it's been a rough few days, weeks, months for kshahrewar's golden boy, chasing deadline after deadline and just barely maintaining his own self-imposed standard of quality, and kaveh is barely holding himself together. and try as he did to keep such unsightly matters away from you, you've noticed. you always do. and it's the sight of your worried, asking eyes and the sound of your voice flowing through him, "what's wrong, my heart? what is it? how can i help?" that finally breaks him.

he has never denied you anything (not his joy, his company, or his pleasure), and as loathe as he is for his weakness, he won't start now.

so kaveh falls to his knees, strangely disconnected from his body with frustration and fatigue raging in whatever hollow he left behind. he tilts forward when his strength leaves him (when he finally allows it to, after months of pushing more, just one more deadline—) and feels himself physically melt when you catch him in ready arms and hears the steady beat of your heart. his genius is a passionate, fiery thing, lighting the way to grander ventures and innovations that could lead sumeru's tomorrow, but just as all fires do, it burns.

but here, he thinks, in the scorched ground of your embrace that no fire could ever touch, he can rest.

kaveh hates to disturb or inconvenience you in any way — being his lover, he'd often joke with quick, unsure eyes and a crooked smile, is enough work already. but you recognize his doubts as well as you recognize your own. he can't fool you. not about this.

so, you reach down and curl yourself around him, guardian and shelter and lover all at once, and allow him refuge from the burning embers still glowing in the dredges of his beautiful, beautiful mind.

"it's alright," you kiss the reassurance into the crown of his tired head, heavy with the weight of all that he carries with his name as the light of kshahrewar. "take all the time you need, my love. the world can wait for you. rest."

dampness invades the cloth of your robes and you feel them, his gilded tears (always gilded, because everything about kaveh, even his grief, is golden) soak through the skin of your lap.

"i have so much work to do." his voice is a fragile, ruined thing.

"the world will wait, and i will help you. there is nothing you can't ask of me, kaveh."

"you already do so much," he gasps through a stuttering sob. "i will - i will not begrudge you, my heart, if you choose to..."

no. he can't say it. he doesn't want to say it. there's something to be said about the old warnings his elders had about not speaking ill fates into existence, and the fear that he almost did so makes him shake like a battered leaf, barely holding onto his branch, in the raging wind. he shakes and muffles sobs that tear at your heart, hoping you wouldn't hear and think any less of him (because you must, you must, oh, how could he ever show something so ugly to you), and you understand.

"i'm not going anywhere." the words leave you like dew falling off leaves after a storm, and they sting and soothe in the same breath the burns he's hidden for so long.

(am i good enough for you? is all i am enough for you? when my hands no longer hold my pens the same and my words escape me, and the clay has become too hard for me to shape, will you still love me then?)

"i'm here, kaveh. yours, for as long you'll have me, and you're mine, for as long as you'll allow."

forever, then. through the blur of his tears, he raises his head and presses himself, cheek and nose and crown, to your waiting hands like a devout believer laying worship to the first temple that has given him solace in years. forever, forever and ever until the sands of time erode whatever is left of us that loves away.

he drinks in the comfort of your shared silence, basks in the security that even now, at his worst and most unbecoming, you still love him enough to allow him this. his heart settles, slowly, and his mind calms into something less frenzied, less a forest fire, and into something he can recognize as himself again.

kaveh has always loved your hands, endlessly gentle and comforting as they are. he could recognize you blind, deaf, and mute, from the sheer comfort your touch brings him alone. he grasps them in his own calloused fingers and lays soft, grateful kisses to each segment, knuckle, and stretch of skin wound around it. it's these hands that have soothed his physical aches with skin-warmed salves and massages. it's these hands that have calmed his mind in the worst of his passionate genius, running careful fingers through golden strands and reminding him "that the mind can churn and charge all it wants, love, but the body has needs too." it's these hands that have cupped him, left as nothing but ash and bitter tears and dead dirt by his own fiery resolutions, and sculpted him into something human again.

i love you, he does not say because the weight of all the love he feels, both in him and from you, chokes him to silence. instead, he closes his watery eyes and presses himself closer, closer to you, and breathes.

he shakes again in your embrace, but more softly, this time. calloused fingers curl around yours in a desperate bid to keep you close, so much like the stubborn limpet you'd liken kaveh to during nights when the fires hadn't burned him yet, and you understand.

i love you too.

[i may not know much about kaveh, but he is very precious 2 me. i hope i did him some justice with this, and that you enjoyed reading it!]

[bl-inkstone]

no thoughts head empty short thoughtspost abt kaveh + nonsexual intimacy where you two help each other unwind by assisting with your nighttime routines only