When Al Haitham dreams, it's in shades of sandy blonde and red, metallic gold and feather-blue. His nightmares are colored much the same.
Kaveh leisurely strolls ahead of him, shoes leaving deep treads in the soft desert sand. He keeps a careful distance, arms length, and in return Al Haitham keeps an eye on him, the other man's back dead center in his sights.
He curses the sand in his boots and the long line of footprints he steps into, already the exact shape of the soles of his shoes.
They aren't lost. Al Haitham knows where they are. They've been here before. They are still here.
Kaveh doesn't watch their feet. His head is constantly tipped back with his eyes on the stars and their constellations (of which Al Haitham only knows two, Vultur Volans and Paradisaea). He'll walk right into a cactus like that. Al Haitham yells ahead for him to watch where he's going.
Kaveh reaches up to touch the side of his head in a strange motion, but otherwise there's no acknowledgement. They press on into the dark of night.
Something squelches beneath Al Haitham's boot.
It stops him short, pulls his attention like a magnet and as much as he wants to, he can't ignore it. He doesn't want to lose any more ground. But something won't let him move on. Al Haitham watches as red seeps into the golden sand, spills beyond the border of his bootprint until he slides his foot aside.
It's an ear.
It's a human ear, and there's a heavy earring attached, metallic gold, gems red and green, a familiar shape, a familiar shade-
Al Haitham opens his mouth to yell. Chokes. Swallows the lump in his throat as he quickly restarts his pace. Tries again.
"Hey!"
Another squelch under a hurried footstep. He doesn't stop to look. Al Haitham is pretty sure he knows what it is.
"Kaveh, hey!"
The path becomes littered, little slices and small pieces, fingertips and knuckles, Kaveh's arms once held casually behind his back now strewn along the sands. Every time Al Haitham extends his hand to him, reality warps and bends like the twisted image in a broken mirror, lines mismatched and edges jagged. Kaveh flits just beyond his grasp, fleeting fae, no longer able to hear him or to reach out to him. Al Haitham can only grit his teeth and follow.
His right foot marches forward. His left follows. His right again. His left suddenly doesn't follow, and Al Haitham is thrown off balance and pitches forward, swinging his arms outward to land on his palms and keep his face off the ground, because he's been in the desert enough times to know what a foot suddenly being stuck can mean.
Quicksand.
Al Haitham curses and swears in just about every language he knows as he tries to spread his weight as evenly as possible, stay afloat at the top of it because if he sinks, he knows he'll be done for, and shit, Kaveh.
His neck cranes uncomfortably in his search, Kaveh had only been a few feet in front of him, he can't be sunk much further, and he's in the desert much more often than Al Haitham anyway, he'll be familiar with what to do-
Kaveh stands in front of him, empty sleeves fluttering loose. Still just out of his grasp, still watching the stars. The quicksand is already up to his calves.
"Say, Al Haitham..." It's the first he's spoken this whole time. His voice resonates somewhere deeply nostalgic in Al Haitham's chest, produces a ripple that momentarily stuns his heart.
Kaveh is sinking.
Al Haitham stretches out on his belly as far as he's able, it's quickly up to his knees, Kaveh isn't even trying to redistribute his weight or pull himself out, it's at his thighs, Al Haitham sucks in a breath and yells for him, his hips, yells louder, his waist, Al Haitham's trembling fingertips can almost reach, his chest, Kaveh drops level with him, quicksand about his neck like a noose.
Kaveh's head tips back, back, impossibly far back, until it hangs, angle awkward, and he's looking right past Al Haitham with his tired smile and gouged, blinded sockets full of starlight.
"Do you believe in karma?"
The quicksand swallows him entirely and Al Haitham dives, shoves his arms deep and pushes off with the one foot he'd had left on safe ground, because he can't, he can't, it's not the same without Kaveh, not anymore, he needs him, no one else keeps him sharp, no one else challenges him like Kaveh, if he can just grab him, if he can just pull him back up-
Al Haitham thrashes, against the sands, against gravity, against the hardwood of his bedroom floor. Clumsily scrubs the back of his hand across his face to rub the grit of quicksand and sleep out of his eyes.
Sometimes he thinks he preferred it when the Akasha was still harvesting his dreams.
He pops his head out from under his weighted blanket and lays where he'd fallen out of bed for a moment, blinking blearily against the lamplight shining from his desk in the corner. Deep breaths. His consciousness shifts along the blurred line of nightmare and reality, crosses over the slow transition into wakeful awareness.
He's home, Kaveh is home. It's dark out. The house is dead silent.
He's just going to go check, he tells himself as he peels himself out of his sweat-soaked shirt and roots around for a replacement. He's already losing memories of his nightmare, the details spilling away from him like wet ink, but he knows he needs to see Kaveh. It'll feel better to do something, anything, than try to go straight back to sleep.
He's quiet when he slips out of his bedroom door, because they both keep late hours but their bedrooms are right next to each other, and Al Haitham will never hear the end of it if he wakes his roommate up.
Lights off, door shut. Nothing conclusive. He moves out to the main room.
Kaveh sits on one of those ridiculous sofas he'd ordered three of for some reason, back to him as he tucks a lock of hair behind his ear. A mostly-empty wine bottle stands tall on the table, next to the cobbled-together remains of an architectural model that's been picked and fussed over for four days straight now.
"Kaveh? What are you doing?"
This earns him an exaggerated startle, but Kaveh doesn't turn to look at him, preoccupied with whatever new sketch or blueprint he probably has in his hands. "Ohhh, nothing," he slurs cheerfully. "Just working. Just thinking."
Kaveh has always been the world's chattiest drinker. Al Haitham waits for the rest of it.
"Say, I think...I think I asked you this years ago, back then, but you never answered me." Al Haitham feels all the blood drain from his face in ominous familiarity, drip cold down the length of his spine. Kaveh sinks into the couch until he can tip his head over the back of it, looking up at him with a tired smile and exhausted eyes.
"Do you believe in karma?"
174 notes
·
View notes
i care very much about stage mtc lol:
alan-san is very pretty lol like i wish i could say he’s the prettiest samatoki but that’s also a judgement based on the assumption that samatoki has given us anything under an 11 LOL
but he’s still a gorgeous samatoki lol
asanuma-san is a god tier seiyuu so anyone having to embody samatoki i doubt can capture what asanuma-san does with samatoki’s voice but alan-san’s take isn’t bad i don’t think!!!!!
like when he raps aggressively, it’s really cool lol
stage samatoki is like, the most emotional sad boy samatoki we’ve gotten and alan-san’s face sure does give it just that man just looks so sad sometimes lol
this is less to do with his samatoki and more of himself lol, but during a separate event unaffiliated with hypstage but featured a handful of them, he challenged akira-san to a video game on the basis that because both their names start with the letter 🅰️, they gotta throw down because there can only be one Ace in town and that was so funny he’s a goober lmao
asanuma-san made a very similar joke the year prior to that event and that’s how i know he shared the samatoki braincell LOL
throwback to the samatoki cross talk where he and asanuma-san had to guess what’s samatoki’s default pose on the official website. asanuma-san got it right but alan-san didn’t and upon getting it wrong, he attempted to run out from the venue LOL
mi…………….. mizue kenta sir 🥺🥺🥺
he’s slain many a human with that face of his and i’m not strong enough to fight it either lmao
juto used to have a modicum of coolness in the beginning and has been nerfed significantly over the years lmao but mizue-san’s juto is an old relic from those times lol
like it’s so funny to me both komada-san and mizue-san used to voice juto on a higher register but eventually deepened his voice as their perception of the character changed lol
mizue-san is legendary at video games and i’m not saying juto’s gamer status came from him but—
speaking of arb lol y’all know that one horn-knee bait juto card with the handcuffs????? mizue-san’s juto said hold my beer and showed the true hornee juto bait lol
like what do you mean he gets TWO solos where he tramples on and seduces men?????????????
there’s a scene at the end of track 4 where once that conflict had been resolved, juto quietly walked up beside samatoki, who was brooding to himself, and expressed an ice cold rage towards samatoki for leaving his team behind in that conflict that has stayed with me lol it’s probably the mtc moment i think about most
besides the rep live skit where samatoki gets falsely arrested but wants to stay arrested because rio wants to feed him so juto’s running back and forth confusedly trying to extend samatoki’s sentence LOL
RIO MY MAN IS SUCH A CHARACTER IN THE STAGE LOL
canon rio’s stoicism is surface level actually like stage rio is more along the lines of stern with a very heavy side helping of silly and i like to that it’s the version of rio canon rio thinks he is lol
that doesn’t mean stage rio isn’t cool tho like his rap game is no joke 😭👌
that part in bop2023 where they do a solos relay and as rio’s solo transitions to juto’s he goes, ‘juto, rock that shit’ and i lose my shit tbh LOL especially when you see that pleased smile on juto’s face pls!!!!!
byrnes-san is the brand of wasian that’s good at english and i enjoyed reading reports of rio’s english lessons during mtc’s rep live
and then to come back later in bop2023 hyping the crowd up with english their japanese audience didn’t understand so he scolded them for not studying it came full circle i want to cry—
10 notes
·
View notes
I know we don't talk and there's stuff we may not agree with. But I am truly sorry you've dealt with a lot of drama over fictional crap. And I'm sorry if my posts in the past ever contributed to that. Hope you have a better day.
Hey... That's all fine, don't worry! After all, it takes a lot of time and Insight to realise that Gehrman is a very gentle and respectful man and Godrick is an absolute gigachad kdkdkshdffhhgfds /lh /lh
But yeah, on a serious note. It was quite frustrating to find out the real motivation under all that... mess was something so pathetic, but at the same time this is what happens when people make engagement with media and fandoms a moral, political act. Not necessarily a problem, after all, I was the one who concluded that the way a fan judges fictional characters and other fans will very well reveal how cruel they are to real people who do something bad, or how much they will forgive based on personal sympathies. And my mad ravings about caring about female characters! I think the problem comes when a fan is so insecure that they have nothing else besides this defence of ideals through fandomry. If your only way to assert yourself is to be a good guy punishing the bad guys, and that mad raving loredigger discovers there is NO bad guy, what is left of you?
This is why it is crucial to have passion for nurturing rather than for undermining! I think if you speak like this, you've found this truth too? This is true that I don't know you very much (mutual-in-law thing), but to be honest.. you didn't poison my fandom experience at all? I tend to never be aware about discourse until someone basically calls me for help fhdhgsdgdfs Can't scout the fandom tag regularly!
But not only it actually was a quite long ago I saw a "negative" post from you, but also I've seen through the posts that my friends liked or reblogged from you that you've actually became very eager person to defend people's passion and interests! I think the post that particularly got stuck with me was when you resented seeing someone's light die after some Redditor asshole "well aktualy"'d a thing they were excited about creating (not exact wording but maybe you remember too)? Like... you are fine, man. At that point I realised that you were a good fan and in the end valued people's creativity and passion over personal preferences. That you never wanted to be THAT guy, even if your interpretation could not be further from someone else's. Coming to terms with what actually matters in fandomry is very mature and I am happy to see this attitude!
I am still glad that you messaged me about this though; I did not expect this, but thank you! I think I will continue getting involved in fictional discourse because my autistic senses cannot ignore factually incorrect takes with a clear insidious motive, and.. eh, sooner or later, I'll piss off the wrong guy again. Don't feel bad for me when it inevitably happens :p I've accepted the shortcomings when I decided to be the debate guy. Simply laughing at some gremlin starting a discourse with the girls in DMs and not stressing over it is only funny until I realise that newer fans could get misinformed right off the bat.
10 notes
·
View notes