the bellman equationtags: kaveh/alhaitham, kaveh, alhaitham, porn, porn with feelings, porn with arguably too many feelings, unhealthy coping mechanisms, unreliable narrator, exes, past relationships, anal sex, hand jobs, complicated relationships, academic angst, canon compliant, bottom alhaitham, top kaveh, one shot, not beta read
status: 4013w, completed,
ao3 linksummary:It's not hard to have sex — physically. Usually. Maybe not with Alhaitham. Right now the majority of his effort is devoted to not saying anything stupid, which isn't limited to the thoughts that he'd outlined earlier but the new thoughts that've joined him while Kaveh mechanically fucks in and out of Alhaitham, trying to focus on the blistering heat of Alhaitham clenching down on him rather than saying what Kaveh wants to say, which is, does it feel good, am I making you feel good, because he's afraid that he'll say it with the wrong emphasis, the wrong meaning: do I feel good, am I making you feel good, and he has to bite his lip, hard, until he feels it split under his teeth, to stop himself, fingers digging into the edge of Alhaitham's hips, his oil-slick hand working over Alhaitham's dick as it jerks in his hand wetly.
the bellman equation
When he was younger — when he could afford to do it — Kaveh would give up architecture whenever he hit a block. He'd stop drawing entirely, swearing off of blueprints and building plans: I'm done, he'd say loudly to anyone who was listening, I'm done, I'm done for good, and everyone had humored him, mostly: shared knowing looks between themselves and said, sure, Kaveh, shaking their heads, and they'd made bets about how long it'd take him before he gave in and picked up the pen again.
The first few times had been different. He'd get professors and counselors coming at his door, probing him on whether he'd like to change the focus of his studies to what they'd recommend, or what they would do, if they were him, and Kaveh had accepted their pamphlets and textbooks and papers and said thank you the way you were supposed to in the Akademiya to your seniors or superiors, and he'd even read them all.
There had been some papers from an astrologist who published their findings in a Fontainian journal on physical cosmology, which had been recommended to him on account of its relation to topology, which Kaveh had experience in (it was one of the available electives for students in his darshan who wanted to study civil engineering, although the application of what he studied was primarily reserved for materials science and mechanical design), and he'd thought, maybe I'll be an astrophysicist. Someone else had said they read his paper on kinematic determinacy, the one he'd written in his third year, and wanted him to consider optical engineering. Wouldn't it be incredible to work on light-engineering, re-engineering ancient desert technology with a modern perspective? So perhaps he'd go into that instead; he had some rudimentary understanding of the topic, and he'd been the best in his class at photonics, which wasn't really a testament to his own knowledge so much as it was the fact that he had the most experience with it, no matter what his classmates said.
In the end, it didn't matter what he'd choose: "As long as it's not architecture," Kaveh had told Alhaitham, burying his face in his hands: they were outside in the garden, Alhaitham sitting on the bench, Kaveh pacing back and forth in front of him in circles around the perimeter of the garden. The high arches and geometric tiles of the structures around them cast scalloped patterns of light on the top of Alhaitham's head, not his face, because he wasn't looking at Kaveh, but the book he held in his hands. This was the eighth time they'd had this conversation, not the first, not that that'd made a difference, either; Alhaitham had been reading the first time too. "It doesn't matter what it is, so long as it's not architecture. I'll study anything else. What do you think, Haitham? Would I do well in Haravatat?"
"I thought you liked architecture," said Alhaitham plainly.
"It's not about liking architecture," said Kaveh, turning on his heel, and then, pushing a hand back through his hair, "And it isn't — I don't — it's not about that," he settled on, adding as he started to pace again, "You wouldn't understand. No one thinks I'm being serious about this. They're all just waiting for me to come back; my advisor won't even give the Change of Darshan sheet now."
"If it's not about liking architecture," Alhaitham said, that green gaze uncanny on Kaveh, "Then what is it about?"
He had this way of making someone feel pinned underneath his gaze. That was what their debate instructor said — shared between the darshans, because there was no formal debate class, every scholar who walked through the halls of their Akademiya should be capable of presenting their ideas and establishing counterarguments when pressed — when Kshahrewar and Haravatat had been facing off on the topic of whether it was more instrumental to understand a ruin through its physical mechanics or whether understanding the text inscribed upon it, not essential to it, took priority. On the surface it looked like a trivial distinction (merely a matter of what darshan was "better"), but it was necessary: conclusions drawn from debates like these would later shape the construction of standard research practices on the field. Order of operations.
This was what Kaveh meant when he said that Alhaitham had a way of making someone feel pinned underneath his gaze: there was nowhere he could go, with him looking at him like that, other than through the past.
His head ached. "Why did you go to Haravatat, Alhaitham?"
"I'm not you," said Alhaitham, which cut. Kaveh's mouth twisted. "Any reasoning inherent to myself would be inapplicable."
"That's why I said you wouldn't get it," he said, which wasn't cruel, but felt it, looking at Alhaitham in his green cap and robes, ensconced entirely in a place of learning. "You don't know what it's like. Doing this. You don't … it's unbearable."
"But you're bearing it," said Alhaitham.
Even in moments like these, Kaveh couldn't bring himself to say what was proven true on this singular occasion: that Alhaitham was just like everyone else. "You think I'm just being dramatic."
"No," Alhaitham said. He was sitting up straight: he always did, or he usually was, and when he wasn't he was leaning forward, his attention fixed on what was in front of him. "I think it's unbearable for you. I think that you're bearing it."
"That doesn't make any sense."
"Haravatat is a study of contradictions," said Alhaitham. They'd argued about this before. Alhaitham had told Kaveh that he was addicted to searching for a single, all-encompassing answer that didn't exist, and Kaveh had told him that he was too obsessed with technicalities that relied entirely on connotation. "There is no one 'correct' expression of a truth. Two opposing statements can be true at the same time."
The age-old example from Haravatat, intuited by students even before it's taught: the paradox of nothing, which, by definition, is nothing : but is, once defined, 'something'. Kaveh swallowed, and then, suddenly, felt an unimaginable something welling over him.
"I mean it when I say I'm giving it up," said Kaveh. His voice cracked. At some point he'd stopped walking. "I can't … I just can't, Haitham." He stared at the tiles underneath his feet. They were worn under the tread of countless students walking the very same path that he had. "But I can't keep on doing it, and I can't stop. What do you do with a contradiction like that?"
Alhaitham said nothing.
Kaveh laughed, watery. "I guess even you don't know."
Alhaitham glanced at Kaveh. He'd put what he was reading down. It was sitting on his lap, half of the bench still bare, the sunset cascading over the two of them, painting the color of Alhaitham's skin over with the yellow of a developing bruise, Kaveh with the green-tinged shadow of the overhanging canopy, the dark of the statue that loomed over him. Kaveh's fingers curled into a fist loosely. He didn't have the strength for more.
Alhaitham looked at him. He turned half of his face away, pressing the rounded edge of his knuckles into the corners of his eyes.
"I'll figure it out," said Alhaitham, soft.
Years later, the connection: most people buy things when they have crises, but Kaveh gives them up. He stops drawing until he can't help but want to draw, when the desire is thick enough that it doesn't matter what he's sketching so long as he's doing it — the principle behind the threat that parents made to their children at the dinner-table, which was finish your food or else you won't get dinner, which was to deprive yourself of something until you needed it more than you wanted it.
Does he like architecture; does he love it? Is he meant for it? In the end, it's irrelevant; it's impossibly relevant. It haunts Kaveh on his artless days, when he stares at the ceiling — wondering if there was something that he'd be better at, more suited to, if he had only chosen something else when he was younger: it didn't have to be architecture. He could have learned anything, gone anywhere. Haravatat, studying semiotics, or Spantamad, or Rtawahist. He could have become an archaeoastronomist: he has some field experience, and if he'd started younger, he could have turned the study of ancient technology into the topic of his research, not dams and land surveying. He goes back to architecture, but that doesn't mean he loves it. It could mean anything. It only means, in the end, that it's familiar to Kaveh: something he started young, and grew up around; he had only invested himself in it early, not knowing the gains he would reap or the losses he would incur.
Architecture, structure, the invisible bindings of the world: everything, all Akademiya graduates know, obeys the finite Truth of the world, the laws which they seek to unveil; it doesn't matter what method you take there, no matter how much Haravatat and Vahumana disagree — you're bound to the same things regardless. The concept of substitution: if something is true here, then it should also be true elsewhere, given a context in which the 'definitions' have relation.
It's in Sumeru that Kaveh gives architecture up until he can no longer bear it, and must return. It's also in Sumeru that Kaveh gives Alhaitham up until he can no longer bear it, and must return.
The structural integrity of the skin changes in the absence of sinew and bone. Kaveh, in the end, had stayed in Kshahrewar: he had never stepped foot in Amurta except to consult them on geographical features so he could take the ecological condition of construction sites into account, but he knows the inner layout of Alhaitham's skin through its supports. It's solid at the neck, although the skin over it slides with his palm when it drags against the surface, and his shoulder blades hold up the skin there that jumps when Kaveh presses his tongue to the underside of Alhaitham's wrist, feeling that twitch shudder and ripple through his body.
"Kaveh," says Alhaitham, voice rough.
Kaveh closes his eyes. I wish you wouldn't talk, he wants to say, but it wouldn't be true. It would be true. He doesn't want to hear Alhaitham's voice like this, all wrong, all right, different from how he imagines it every time that red mouth opens, made new by new perspective, new separation. It was higher in his memories, and deeper in his fantasies — when they'd been apart, Alhaitham's voice had been slower in his head, like Kaveh had unconsciously wanted to savor the sound. He hadn't realized how off it was until he'd heard Alhaitham talk again, and even that had felt like a betrayal: an imperfect reconstruction of the person he remembered. Or was it that Alhaitham had simply changed?At least he tastes the same. Everyone mostly tastes the same, washed clean and then forced to flush red underneath another set of hands. Not even a romantic can change the practicalities of salted skin and slightly sour sweat, that tasteless texture of Alhaitham's coarse hair underneath his tongue, the way it becomes tasteless over his nipple, and then faintly perfumed near his nape from his shampoo.
There's nothing about Alhaitham's that seductive in the traditional sense. The only exception is his clothes, which are ridiculous by any measure: not ridiculous the way that he calls Kaveh clothes ridiculous, as if he has any sense of aesthetic (and if anyone thought he did, they were sorely mistaken — one look at his sense in interior design, and they'd change their mind). The stretching panels of black fabric that cross his chest, and then the faint translucence of the part that covers his stomach, his back; is it translucent, or is it just lighter? He'd found out earlier, tugging it over Alhaitham's head, that it was the latter, and it relieved him for some reason, having it off of Alhaitham, that wasn't just the fundamental relief that came with accepting that sex was going to be easier to have with the other person's clothes off rather than on.
He'd thought it be easier to want Alhaitham less without it. That, miserably, he wouldn't like it so much, the way that Alhaitham looked, if Alhaitham was divested of the parts that should have made him desirable, or at least made him more desirable. There was no going away with some fundamental truths of the world, which included Alhaitham's attractiveness, where he took care of himself and looked like he took care of himself, and the fact that he was very much Kaveh's type, which he had been before Kaveh even knew he had a type, in the sense that what you surrounded yourself with in childhood would later define your senses of the world; he had defined, the way that children defined the color blue with sky, that Alhaitham was synonymous with attraction, and in the process doomed himself a long time ago.
And of course the point of sex was to like it, Kaveh thought, sliding his other hand deeper into Alhaitham, which made him jerk around Kaveh's fingers. It wasn't like he didn't like it. He wasn't masochistic, or anything like that, no matter what Alhaitham said about his self-flagellating tendencies, which he did not possess, or his martyr complex, which he also did not possess. He was having sex with Alhaitham because he liked it, and he liked Alhaitham, and sure it was ill-advised because Alhaitham and him were exes, and living together, and their relationship was strained at best on a normal day and complicated at best on an excellent day, but people made ill-advised decisions all the time, especially if it was for their own pleasure. He was feeling pleasure now, hard as he looked at Alhaitham, listened to Alhaitham, felt Alhaitham moving under him, Alhaitham's breath punched out of him upwards in the direction of Kaveh as Kaveh opened him up. It wasn't a problem that he liked it.
What he felt was just the guilt that came with having sex with your ex that you were living off of and who paid your bills and bought you food and did things that they didn't have to do for you, no matter what they said about it or how annoying they were about it, because even Kaveh knows that there's a separation between annoyance and debt, and he has both, when it comes to Alhaitham, both more than he should. He should like it less, is all. But he does like it, because that's normal, he's normal, it's normal to enjoy sex! He just shouldn't like it as much, even if he should like it: focus more on Alhaitham, or something, his pleasure over Kaveh's, and think — less. He should think less, although he can't, even with his hand damp and inside of the most damnably beautiful man he's ever known, harder than he's ever been and vaguely wrong-feeling and wishing that he would've drank before this, even though he didn't plan this, even though he couldn't have known, looking at Alhaitham, that he was going to stare at him until Alhaitham looked up from his book and said what, and Kaveh, mouth dry, would say the thing that he knew he was going to regret saying, the one definite, blurting out, do you want to have sex?
Regret was one thing — he had been prepared for that, even saying it, and even before saying it — but he couldn't have anticipated Alhaitham saying, alright, and setting his book away properly as Kaveh had watched open-mouthed and dumbfounded, palms beginning to get clammy, and then. And then.
"Kaveh," Alhaitham says again. Now, in the present, blisteringly warm under his hands. He's pulled his body slightly so his forearm covers his forehead, shadowing his eyes. It doesn't do anything to hide the way that he's looking at Kaveh, which is expectant and honestly almost kind of unsexy, impatient and clinical and not quite bored but demanding in the way that Kaveh associates with Alhaitham telling him to hurry up and get out of the bathroom rather than anything more suited to the room adjacent to the bathroom, which was the bedroom. "Stop thinking."
And so before Kaveh can say anything like I'd really like to but you're the one who's making it difficult or, worse, why did you let me live with you or, even more terrible, I think I'm still in love with you, maybe, he gets on with it, fumbling for the oil and slicking himself up and touching Alhaitham with one hand all-over as he does it, kind of clumsy in the way that people are when they're doing different things with different limbs at the same time. Alhaitham looks like he's permitting it, or tolerating it, which does not-great things to Kaveh's self-esteem, but at least they're still both hard; he would have to hunt for some other bridge in Port Ormos to fling himself over the edge of if Alhaitham's erection started to wilt while he was feeling him up.
"Okay," says Kaveh. Incredibly, he manages to sound normal. "I'm going to — get in you now."
"I assumed," says Alhaitham.
For all that he sounds entirely unmoved, if out of breath, and bent over instead of perfectly still like Kaveh had feared that he would be when they first had sex, (because Alhaitham's calm was one thing even if it was only faux-calm, he had a temper that no one else believed in and he could get emotional over the weirdest things when they were in the Akademiya when they were kissing, or something, Kaveh really did not want to have sex with an Alhaitham that looked like he could be doing sums in his head), Alhaitham locks around Kaveh as he pushes in, which is not really helpful, and then pushes back, fucking himself down on Kaveh's cock, which is helpful, and his voice breaks on a bitten-off moan when Kaveh pulls himself out and does the whole thing again.
It's not hard to have sex — physically. Usually. Maybe not with Alhaitham. Right now the majority of his effort is devoted to not saying anything stupid, which isn't limited to the thoughts that he'd outlined earlier but the new thoughts that've joined him while Kaveh mechanically fucks in and out of Alhaitham, trying to focus on the blistering heat of Alhaitham clenching down on him rather than saying what Kaveh wants to say, which is, does it feel good, am I making you feel good, because he's afraid that he'll say it with the wrong emphasis, the wrong meaning: do I feel good, am I making you feel good, and he has to bite his lip, hard, until he feels it split under his teeth, to stop himself, fingers digging into the edge of Alhaitham's hips, his oil-slick hand working over Alhaitham's dick as it jerks in his hand wetly.
"Harder," says Alhaitham, breathless and trying to hide it, sucking in a breath before like it'll give him the air he needs to say it evenly, but he can't hide the way that he curls back and then into Kaveh, off-rhythm, as Kaveh pushes into him, like too-late, delayed desire, and Kaveh fucks into him harder, and his body just shifts, there's no other word for it, half a shake and half a tremble and half a something, nearly liquid in a way that it can't be, it's not made of the right material, isn't made right for it, but it is, it is. "Again."
Kaveh does it again. And again, his mouth full of the taste of iron and something faintly sour underneath, hand clenching erratically over Alhaitham's body, swiping his thumb over the slit here, running over a dark, dusky nipple there, searching for that place where his ribs vanish into the abdomen, Alhaitham's stomach flinching as he runs his palm over the hair there, and he thinks, gratefully, that he's about to come, that he could come like this.
Alhaitham turns his head suddenly into the pillow, not quite able to hide the way that his body seizes as he comes, relaxing, and then starts to furl into oversensitivity, so Kaveh pulls out and jacks himself off, trying to not focus and focusing regardless on the way that Alhaitham looks when he comes, and the way that he looks when he's about to come, and just the way that he looks when he's having sex, in general, with Kaveh, which, to be fair, is the only way that Kaveh has seen Alhaitham having sex, because of the obvious.
Alhaitham's breath beginning to even out again, and feeling normal about it until Alhaitham rolls himself slightly over again and watches him, in which case he slows, somewhat awkward, and awkward about feeling awkward.
"Aren't you going to get yourself off," says Alhaitham, voice slightly too thick in his post-orgasm haze.
"Um," says Kaveh, who is actively getting himself off, just slower now, and also rapidly retreating from the edge of climax with every moment Alhaitham stares unrepentantly at him jacking himself off, but also not really retreating at the sight of Alhaitham covered in his own come. "Yes?"
"Come here."
Kaveh hesitates. Alhaitham opens his mouth. Cornered, Kaveh hastily says, "Alright," and shuffles that awkward step over on the bed where he has to crawl because Alhaitham isn't that far off but far off enough that he can't just be leaned towards.
Alhaitham takes him in his hand, which is soft but mostly dry, but Kaveh's dick is definitely not dry, so it's fine, everything's fine, as Alhaitham starts to jerk him off lazily, his wrist working around Kaveh's erection as Kaveh desperately tries to determine whether it would be okay to fuck up into his hand and ends up fucking up into his hand anyway, his hips jolting forward, Alhaitham's gaze fixed upon his face, his breathing still loud, his eyes still softer than they usually are, looking at Kaveh. He averts his gaze.
When Alhaitham reaches upward, he touches the side of Kaveh's face. Kaveh tries to dodge it and then, a little too late, tries to look like he wasn't dodging it, unable to get away when Alhaitham literally has his grip around Kaveh's dick, isn't sure how well he managed either, doesn't want to look at Alhaitham, still, and looks at Alhaitham anyway.
"You're bleeding," Alhaitham says. His thumb swipes over his bottom lip. It comes away smudged red.
In his hand, Kaveh shudders and comes.
He doesn't think about it for some time. He spends most of his time not thinking about it, and avoiding Alhaitham, and then avoiding avoiding Alhaitham, and some convoluted course of action that he doesn't consciously plan out more than he just does, creeping around the corners of Sumeru City and then burying his face in his hands, just. Really, they should create a guidebook for this sort of thing: he can't be the only one, can he? If he was it would be some sort of achievement, and it doesn't feel like an achievement, and the worst thing of all is that he still wants to do it again, and doesn't want to do it again, and wants to go back, and doesn't want to go back.
"I thought you were avoiding me," says Alhaitham when he comes through the front door. It's late. Later than Alhaitham usually stays up, and he's sitting on the daybed, the light on, his neck still faintly bruised from where Kaveh had bitten him, which was something he'd covered with his high collar when he was out but was exposed when he was home. His earpiece is in. He's not looking at Kaveh.
"I wasn't sure if," says Kaveh, and then, pathetically, abandoning that, vaguely says, "Well, you know."
Alhaitham's quiet. "I don't," he says, and then, inexplicably, contradictorily, he sets his book down, and says: "Come here.author's notes
i do not enjoy writing summaries. is that too obvious. really tempted to label it as "kaveh and alhaitham have sex" but i was like well ... maybe not ... let's leave that in 2024 and aim for higher horizons ... and the higher horizons were just stealing a paragraph and slapping that in the summary field instead.
it was meant to be pwp but ended up character study, which is kaveh-typical (or at least typical of my kaveh pov). some conversation to be had on this one, not a lot, but generally was fairly easy to write this one out; i enjoy writing kaveh pov because it comes out very stream-of-consciousness, which is very convenient for me, someone who hates outlining and drafting, and also someone who loves to write scenes beginning->end instead of chronologically, or whatever.
the sex was hard to write, but the hardest part to write was the ending. i hate writing endings. the fic was actually supposed to end with kaveh coming in alhaitham's hand, but then i was like, well, maybe it's too porny of an ending considering the way the fic opens, and then i came up with a little scene and threw it in at the end. is it random and rushed and could it be more fleshed out and benefit from that. well yes. but also this fic was literally just practice for smut i have to write in the future so sorry kaveh and alhaitham but you will have to suffer from rushed ending-itis for now. i might chop it off entirely, depending on how i feel about it tomorrow, so.
generally, fairly satisfied with this. besides the ending, if i had to rewrite something in the future, i'd probably add to the handjob. that being said, let's walk through it:
There had been some papers from an astrologist who published their findings in a Fontainian journal on physical cosmology, which had been recommended to him on account of its relation to topology, which Kaveh had experience in (it was one of the available electives for students in his darshan who wanted to study civil engineering, although the application of what he studied was primarily reserved for materials science and mechanical design), and he'd thought, maybe I'll be an astrophysicist.
mona reference. physical cosmology is a generally interesting field and draws heavily on physics; the original plan here was to lean more heavily in the physics field of kaveh metaphors in terms of the overall narrative and relationship to alhaitham, who was the more abstract — less scientific — realm of the branching academic fields that he considered. i personally enjoy leaning into kaveh's more STEM background and alhaitham's social science/humanities focus, which is usually focused on the inverse in their relationship from my personal observation of fanon (kaveh emotional and intuitive, alhaitham logical and rational).
Someone else had said they read his paper on kinematic determinacy, the one he'd written in his third year, and wanted him to consider optical engineering. Wouldn't it be incredible to work on light-engineering, re-engineering ancient desert technology with a modern perspective? So perhaps he'd go into that instead; he had some rudimentary understanding of the topic, and he'd been the best in his class at photonics, which wasn't really a testament to his own knowledge so much as it was the fact that he had the most experience with it, no matter what his classmates said.
greater nod to general ancient sumeru technology. you notice a lot of "light" structures in the puzzles etcetera and general engineering, and wanted to lean into that sort of technical parallel here to fit in-game lore with kaveh's background; more "advanced" mechanical/technological development versus kaveh's more practical, less high-concept architectural innovation; of course, his designs are beautiful, but they have a different purpose and function than the desert ruins, for example, or even mehrak.
On the surface it looked like a trivial distinction (merely a matter of what darshan was "better"), but it was necessary: conclusions drawn from debates like these would later shape the construction of standard research practices on the field. Order of operations.
one of the things that i have mixed feelings about is the portrayal of alhaitham and kaveh's disagreements as trivial. i do think they argue about trivial things, but i don't think they only argue because of trivial things; i think they're people with very different ideologies and outlooks on the world, and that fundamentally affects how they approach things and people. i also think, too, that they're both very detail-oriented people, although in different ways.
"I'll figure it out," said Alhaitham, soft.
the original scene that i wrote with this started with kaveh saying "you wouldn't understand", which i think would be a fundamentally cruel thing to say to alhaitham in sumeru specifically, considering their background: the nation of learning, as scholars, who by definition want to understand what they're ignorant to. it denies him the possibility that he might understand in kaveh's mind, and [various other things that i can't quite articulate right now]. anyway, it would go something like this:
kaveh: you wouldn't understand.
alhaitham: i will.
kaveh: that's why you wouldn't.
alhaitham's face grows pinched.
which i think i still may recycle in future fic. anyway, it still ties back to what alhaitham and kaveh say in the last scene: kaveh, you know, and alhaitham, i don't, which is purposefully set in the present tense, rather than anything more definite.
It only means, in the end, that it's familiar to Kaveh: something he started young, and grew up around; he had only invested himself in it early, not knowing the gains he would reap or the losses he would incur.
metaphor for kaveh's relationship with alhaitham.
Alhaitham's quiet. "I don't," he says, and then, inexplicably, contradictorily, he sets his book down, and says: "Come here."
really the one line keeping me from deleting this whole section.
miscellaneous
> title
the title is taken from the mathematical optimization concept of the same name — the bellman equation "valuates the value of a decision in a given state based on the potential future states and their associated rewards", but more specifically "which writes the value of the optimization problem at an earlier time (or earlier step) in terms of its value at a later time (or later step)" — which is of course the opposite of what is happening in the fic; it's the "fantasy" of the premise.
> on the sex
well i will elaborate on anything if anyone has questions but i don't think anyone would have any ... crylaughmoji ... kind of felt like i was soooo heavyhanded and clumsy with my so-called implicit messaging
> actual note on the sex
the sex takes place on on kaveh's bed. kaveh, in general, does not kiss alhaitham in this scene, and is not close enough to do so; you notice that alhaitham tips his head into the pillow where kaveh's head would rest: this is a shadow of a kiss.
> self-flagellation
i only know one kind of ending to haikaveh fic
> self-flagellation 2.0
how many stem titles can i get away with before people start throwing rocks at me. i've voiced this like 8 times across the past week but genuinely feeling complex emotion about using mathematical and logical and physics-based titles as a crutch. when my professors taught me the bellman equation did they think i would use it for gay video game sexfic
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