Chapter Text
His head is pounding.
The room is dark, sleep still renders his eyes and limbs heavy, and the decision to go back to sleep is an easy one to make. He dreams of nebulous shapes and colours, as though peering at a scene through frosted glass. There is one silhouette that catches his attention—a person, by the looks of it, dressed in white, holding something in their hand.
Whatever that something is, it opens like a flower, blooming in a pleasant shade of red.
He doesn’t know how much time passes until the pain finally eases to a dull whisper.
With a slow look around the room as he wakes, he realizes he doesn’t know much of anything at all.
Logically, there are worse ways to start the day than waking up with amnesia. He could wake up with amnesia in a dark and damp place, or wake up with amnesia to find that he is missing a limb. The bedroom he’s in is dim, but only because the blinds are drawn; it is dry and warm in here, and the bed is relatively comfortable. He shoves the blankets away and slips out of the bed, finding that all his limbs are still very much attached to the rest of him.
The first order of business is to figure out where he is.
The door adjacent to this room opens up to another bedroom. The bed is neatly made but the room is lived-in, with signs of life and usage in every corner of the space: paints and writing supplies kept in an array above the desk, a cloak draped over the chair, a half-open closet revealing an assortment of clothes, and a well-stocked bookshelf holding books as well as various colourful trinkets. A stark contrast to the simple, almost pointedly plain room he awoke in.
He wanders into the nearby kitchen and makes a breakfast out of what is in reach: a bowl of yogurt with honey and nuts. Despite not having eaten his fill, he gets the strange yet insistent feeling that he ought to save enough for a second helping, so he follows his instincts. They surely wouldn’t steer him wrong, memory loss or no.
Dominated by shades of grass green and accented with warm wooden trim, the main living area is serene and inviting. Natural light pours through the stained-glass windows in abundance. A pair of wide, swinging doors reveal a rather impressive study, with even more natural light illuminating the space, two writing desks, and bookshelves hugging the walls. A feeling of pride and satisfaction washes over him at the sight of all the books lined up together, their spines making up an abstract mosaic. If this is indeed his own house, he could very easily make peace with that.
Next order of business: his identity.
He searches the living room for any mail or correspondence that might bear his name—any name—and turns up nothing. Frustrated, he comes to a stop in the middle of the room, contemplating his options.
If those desks in the study belong to him, surely there must be some sort of identification or mail kept in their drawers somewhere? Or perhaps he can check the desk in the room he woke up in—
A clicking sound makes him turn around, the front door pushing open moments later.
A man steps inside, hauling a suitcase behind him with a huff of effort. His slender features are framed by artfully tousled blond hair, braided and pinned back. There is a healthy glow to his cheeks, his complexion lightly tanned from the sun, the colour reaching all the way down to the sliver of his chest that shows between the low cut of his white shirt. Sunlight spills behind him as the door opens wider, and for a moment, everything about him is like warm gold.
Despite his lack of memory telling him that he’s never seen this man before in his life, the barrage of feelings that come over him at that moment—among them relief, delight, contentment, and a distinct undercurrent of want—tell him a different story. Everything will make sense now that he is here.
The blond startles and drops his house keys when he looks up. His eyes are a pretty shade of vermilion. “Wha—! Haitham? I didn’t think you’d be home at this hour. Shouldn’t you be at work?”
Haitham. That’s his name. He has a job, which sounds vaguely assuring. And this golden man lives here with him, likely the occupant of the second bedroom. “Work,” Haitham repeats, eyes never leaving the other man as he retrieves his keys from the floor. “Right. That. I… forgot to set my alarm.” Yes, that sounds plausible.
“It’s past noon. Not like you to sleep in. Or play hooky.”
“I had a headache. But it has passed.”
“Hm. Well, you’d better get dressed.” He leans his suitcase against the nearest couch. “Did you finish that yogurt I bought before I left? I hope not. I found myself craving yogurt of all things out in Apam Woods…”
“There’s more in the kitchen,” Haitham answers—somewhat needlessly, for the blond man is already sweeping past him with a flutter of his ornate cape like he owns the place. (Maybe he does?) As he busies himself in the kitchen—first making a pleased noise when he finds the remainder of the yogurt in the ice box—Haitham decides to take the man’s advice and get ready for work. Perhaps there, he will have better luck remembering things.
Half of his closet consists of several identical pieces of the same pants, tops, and accessories, so he does his best to wrangle them into some semblance of a coordinated look. Taking off the unconscionably skin-tight shirt will most definitely be a challenge later, but that’s a problem for Future Haitham to solve.
When he reaches the front door, it occurs to him that he doesn’t know where he works, let alone what he does for a living.
“Aren’t you forgetting something?”
Haitham turns to find the blond man behind him, holding up what appears to be some sort of headset. “Ah… yes,” Haitham says, carefully taking the offering. “Thank you.” As he looks between the headset and his surroundings for whatever sort of gadget the cord is meant to be plugged into, the blond puts his hands on his hips, eyes narrowing.
“You’re acting strange, you know. You’re even wearing your outfit differently,” he remarks, gesturing rather broadly at Haitham as if to encompass all of him, “and you’re never one to veer from that routine.”
Haitham looks down at himself. Is there something wrong with the way he tied his sash? Did he put his cape on backwards? When he doesn’t give any verbal response, the blond steps closer, his expression shifting to one of naked concern.
“Are you sure you’re feeling well? What did you get up to while I was gone?”
“I don’t remember,” Haitham says unthinkingly, truthfully.
“What do you mean you don’t remember?”
“I… I can’t remember.” His throat closes, and his chest feels like it is slowly being hollowed out with a spoon—a peculiar, and rather belated, response to his predicament as it finally sinks in: “I can’t remember anything. I don’t know who I am, or where, and I don’t… I don’t know you. Who are you?”
Vermilion eyes turn wide with shock. “You’re being serious? Haitham, it’s me. Kaveh. I’m your—” his lips visibly close around a sound that never gets voiced. Instead he parts his lips and says, “Roommate.”
“Kaveh,” Haitham echoes. “My roommate.”
“Yes. We’ve known each other for over a decade—ever since we were at the Akademiya together. Remember?”
Haitham stares and stares at the other man, willing himself to remember. The mention of the Akademiya might ring some distant bell, but it’s so faint that he can’t be sure it was ever there at all.
He shakes his head. “I’m sorry. I really can’t remember.”
“Oh… no.” Where most people might start pacing the floor in panic, Kaveh shuffles on the spot, hands gesturing this way and that as if he needs something to do with them. “We need a doctor. No, wait—” The sudden wildness in his eyes suggests that he is thinking of things that haven’t yet occurred to Haitham. “Not a doctor. We can’t—ah!”
With a snap of his fingers, Kaveh steps past Haitham to the front door. “Come on,” he says, looking over his shoulder at Haitham, “I know who can help.”
::::
Kaveh brings Haitham to the forest to see a young man with tall, fluffy ears and an even fluffier tail. From the way the fox-man and his teenaged apprentice address him, he learns that his full name is actually Alhaitham—and given that he’s only been “Haitham” for the last couple of hours, it’s an easy adjustment to make. They’re brought to a hut where he is instructed to sit down on the examining bed for a series of brief tests, Kaveh hovering anxiously like a hummingbird searching for the best angle to approach a flower.
“I’m sorry to barge in like this, Tighnari,” Kaveh says, “but I hope you can understand the need for discretion.”
“Of course,” Tighnari agrees with a prim nod as he activates and shines a Luminescent Spine before Alhaitham’s eyes. Both he and his apprentice, Collei—occupied with some errand elsewhere—are faintly familiar to Alhaitham. Not in the way Kaveh is, but familiar all the same. “News would have travelled fast if you’d brought him to the Bimarstan, and I can only imagine it wouldn’t do the Akademiya bigwigs any good if they found out their scribe has suddenly and inexplicably lost his memory.”
“Exactly,” Kaveh says on an exhale, sounding terribly relieved at not having to explain himself.
Tighnari asks for Alhaitham’s permission to examine his head. After finding nothing of note, he declares, “Pupillary response is typical, no evidence of trauma to the head—I think we can rule out any form of brain injury. I can’t be completely certain without performing more intensive tests, but we can forgo those.”
Good. Alhaitham does not want to know what intensive tests will entail, and judging from the faintly disturbed moue on Kaveh’s face, he isn’t keen either.
Tighnari hands him a pen and paper. “Please write the following sentence down: Sphinx of quartz, judge my vow.” He fetches a book from the shelf as Alhaitham’s hand glides over the paper. “Good, good. Now read this highlighted passage out loud.”
“Doctors and patients move together through time, humble in the face of its dictates. Novelists allow their characters to enter time, revealing in the characters' particular, ongoing lives some universal truths about living. Both the medical chart and the novel capture individual human lives as they change and as they age, finding some meaning in the random events that happen in them. Literary critics who write about the novel provide useful frameworks for doctors who reflect on their practice. In this essay, I examine the medical charts of two of my patients in detail and—”
“That’s enough. So far, so good,” Tighnari says, seemingly just as much for Kaveh’s benefit as Alhaitham’s as he looks between both men. “Tell me, Alhaitham, what is the earliest thing you remember?”
“Waking up this morning with a headache.”
“You can’t remember anything about your identity? Your past?”
“I only know what Kaveh has told me.”
“Hmm. I believe it’s likely that you were exposed to errant ley line energy recently. Kaveh, would you know anything about this?”
“No. I was away on business for the last few days. When I came home, he was already like this. How do you figure that it’s ley line energy to blame?”
“His symptoms match those of a few patients I treated in the past. They came from different areas of the forest, but they all had the same things in common: they couldn’t remember anything of their identities, their lives, or their loved ones, but their cognitive abilities—speaking and listening, reading and writing, mobile functions and so on—were still intact. All of them had been exposed to excess ley line energy in the wild. I can only assume that Alhaitham came across the same ley line disorder at some point.”
“He was fine when I left.” Kaveh looks to Alhaitham. “You must have gone somewhere in the meantime. I, ah, don’t suppose you would remember where?”
“Shockingly, I don’t.”
Kaveh briefly flicks his eyes to the ceiling. “Oh, good, your penchant for sarcasm is also intact.”
“If I had to guess,” Tighnari says, “you must have spent some time outdoors. You've got a noticeable tan. Of course, that hardly narrows things down.”
“Wait,” Kaveh interjects. “Say he did go somewhere and became exposed to this errant ley line energy. Then why is waking up this morning his earliest memory?”
Alhaitham understands Kaveh’s train of thought, as it mirrors his own: “Why do I have no memory of returning home from wherever it is I went?”
“I was just wondering the same thing,” Tighnari admits, lifting a hand to his chin. “I hardly think a disrupted ley line would have appeared somewhere in or around your house and made you lose your memory. Such things don’t tend to form in the middle of populated areas like cities or villages. For whatever reason, this may be a delayed reaction of sorts… Unfortunately, the whys and wherefores might escape us for the time being. I’m more concerned about your recovery going forward.”
“So what do you suggest we do?” Kaveh asks.
“It’s simple, really. Just wait it out. Some patients woke up one day with all their memories back, while others regained them gradually. It can take anywhere from a few days to a couple of weeks, but I’m confident that you’ll see a full recovery eventually—just as long as you don’t go getting caught in the middle of more excess ley line energy.”
“I feel like that goes without saying,” Kaveh remarks, sounding faintly amused.
“Oh, you’d be surprised,” Tighnari says with a shake of his head, sounding for a moment like a man who has lost entirely too much faith in people, yet cares for them regardless. “One more thing, Alhaitham. You said you had a headache? That was also a common thread among those patients with ley line-induced memory loss. You’ll likely have more of them.”
Alhaitham sighs. “Wonderful.” It occurs to him that that might have sounded quite rude, especially towards someone who is ostensibly some kind of medical professional and has been nothing but helpful and courteous. But for some reason, Tighnari only smiles as if meeting with an old friend.
“I can make you a salve that should help. I’ll need to go and fetch some of the herbs I need, but you or Kaveh can come back for it by sundown. For now, you both can go home and rest. If Alhaitham’s memory hasn’t shown any signs of returning after, say, a week or so, you can come and see me again to discuss what we can do from there.”
“Thank you so much, Tighnari,” Kaveh says as the Forest Watcher excuses himself, slipping out of the hut with a swish of his tail. When they’re left alone, Kaveh drops down onto the examining bed next to Alhaitham with a sigh, their shoulders brushing together.
“What a strange mess,” he says, hand pressed to his forehead. “Not what I hoped to come home to.”
Alhaitham, still feeling rather like an unmoored ship and that Kaveh might be the only stable point in the middle of the water, figures it would be best to play along. “What did you hope, then?”
“You having saved me some of the yogurt, but with your memory decidedly not lost.”
“One for two is not a bad outcome.”
“How uncharacteristically glass-half-full of you. Other scholars would clutch their pearls at the very thought.”
“Is that what I am, then? A scholar?”
“Ha! At one point, you were the scholar. You—wait, you know what? Let’s go home first. We can talk some more there. I don’t want to overstay our welcome.”
Kaveh makes a point of stopping by the next hut to say their thanks and see-you-laters to Tighnari and Collei. “You must trust Tighnari very much,” Alhaitham observes as they leave Gandharva Ville, out from under the canopy and onto the main road.
“He’s one of my dearest friends—oh, watch your step,” Kaveh says, touching Alhaitham’s elbow and pointing out what looks like a half-eaten and sun-browned Sunsettia in his path. Alhaitham dutifully steps over it. “And he’s exceptionally knowledgeable. I believe him when he says this will all blow over. You’ll be back to your old self soon.” After a moment, Kaveh snickers softly to himself. “Though I can’t imagine why anyone would want that…”
Despite the joke at his expense, Alhaitham can’t help but give a smile of his own. Kaveh’s constant worry since walking through the door of their shared home, the nickname and banter that speak of a longtime familiarity, the warm and comforting feelings that swell in his chest every time he looks at Kaveh—it all makes sense. In these last few hours, nothing has made more sense.
He reaches for Kaveh’s hand. “Thank you for taking care of me. You’re a very good boyfriend.” He presses a kiss to Kaveh’s cheek. The man stops completely in his tracks, prompting Alhaitham to do the same a few steps ahead of him.
“H-Huh!?” Kaveh goes wide-eyed and turns approximately seven shades of red—how cute—before he gathers himself up and splutters, “I-I’m not your boyfriend. You don’t even like me.”
Alhaitham frowns. “I’m certain that’s not true.”
“But it is.”
“Why would we be living together if I don’t like you?”
“Heh,” Kaveh laughs dryly—if a bit nervously—as he looks to the side. “I ask myself that question all the time.”
Alhaitham gets the feeling that he is missing something very, very important. He looks down at their hands, still clasped together with their arms stretched between them. “So we’re not together?”
Kaveh seems to squirm at the very notion. “No.”
“I see.” Disappointment sits like a stone in Alhaitham’s chest. He quite likes the feeling of holding Kaveh’s hand, but in light of the news, he reluctantly lets go. “How unfortunate.”
“Wh—! Unfortunate? You’re—I don’t—gah, let’s just go home, alright?”
With that, Kaveh storms ahead, uttering something about his long trip and how he would really like a proper bath already. Alhaitham catches a view of the window of exposed skin at Kaveh’s back, the appealing curve of his backside, and the way his blush reaches all the way to his ears.
Unfortunate indeed.