Last Morning ( ffvii; tseng/rufus )
Title: Last Morning
Fandom: Final Fantasy VII
Characters: Tseng; suggestion of Tseng/Rufus.
Warnings: Disc one game spoilers.
This is the last morning. Fate creeps heavily at his heels, laps at his ankles like a wave that wishes to lose him to the undertow. This sense of destiny and its chain reaction has always factored heavily into his life: everything happens for a reason and nothing is done without cause and you must always accept the consequences of your actions. Not predestined, not completely, this belief that you can rule the world, but everything you do is just the next in a series of events, from the least mistake to the greatest.
Dawn breaks through Midgar’s smoggy skies, bathes the white carpet golden-grey as it draws the seventieth floor into its embrace. Tseng is awake, dressing in silence weighted only by the sound of his lover’s breath. It is like a dance, this oft-practiced routine, each movement performed with a purpose. Buttons looped efficiently into place, the quiet glide of leather across crisp cotton and the quick snap materia makes as it’s slotted into a dark metal pistol that fits into a holster at his shoulder.
Shoes go on after, loafers that are polished enough that he can see his own reflection in them, worked to their black lacquered perfection by a shoeshine boy in the lobby of the Midgar Imperial Hotel. It was a menial task he could have performed himself if he’d never turned to look into the child’s painfully blue eyes. Tseng dismisses the sentiment and the action itself as momentary weakness, and shakes the memory away. Gloves are fitted snugly over knuckles but leave nimble fingers free, jacket lifted from its draping of navy blue across the back of a chair.
He pauses then; turns around. Rufus Shinra lies curled in the bed, nearly lost beneath the tangled sheets, brow smooth and golden lashes resting against his cheeks. In this unguarded moment the Turk wonders if the young man knows how almost innocent he looks in his sleep, all but for the petulant little frown that is part of his personality even in slumber.
He’s asked Tseng to wake him before he leaves. Tseng never does but this morning finds himself tempted. There is something in the air; hot, humid, cloying on the tongue, some sense of a greater purpose than all this. Then he exhales a breath and shakes his head; all the foolish notions slip away, and he with them. There is no need to linger, not even say goodbye. Rufus will be angry when he wakes up, he always is, tousle-headed and disoriented and undeniably beautiful. It won’t be the first time Tseng has left without a word in the middle of the night. And Rufus will accept it, even if perhaps that feeling will linger of something left undone.
The Turk goes now to fulfill the endless ambition. Discover the key to the Promised Land, paradise of the Cetra. Defeat Sephiroth, maddened general who seeks to destroy the world. In fleeting moments of morality he wonders if they are any better in their ways that slow devour the planet. Doubts he has learned to detach himself from. But fate, destiny, kismet, these are all things that burden his shoulders and provoke inspiration so futile as this, for him to enter the office, massive space still and dim in the half-light of breaking day, the desk the centerpiece that dominates the room.
Here he is now leaving love letters when he should already be well on his way with his morning coffee, black, steaming in a foam cup that will try its damnedest to spill on the leather seats of his sedan and he wonders, absently, if it can be called foreshadowing when one realizes what they are doing will echo into the future. He’s as efficient with a fountain pen as the thin reed of a calligraphy brush and the eight neat and simple lines flow onto paper with ease. The black ink does not run when in a few steady strokes he signs it. Not name nor proclamation of affection or anything but what two innocuous symbols convey.
It’s a silly notion, the Turk is self-deprecating and self-absorbed enough to understand that. Thirty-two years old and nothing better to do than leave silly notes for a lover but he folds it, halves and then quarters and slides it into the desk drawer anyway, and in doing his fingertips brush absently over the scar that still mars the surface, lucky it was metal or all the bloodstains never would have been cleaned away. And in a nauseous, rolling, knowing pang he feels metal of a different sort, hard as diamond and twice as cold, and he tastes the coppery tang of a razor edge dripping lifeblood, warm crimson spilling over hands as birds fly from their vine nests at the disturbance and seem to bear something of him away with them.
Tseng jerks away from the desk, finds his free hand slick where it rests on the back of the leather chair. The other trembles with some imperceptible shock and through sheer force of will he stills it, chilled as if someone’s walked across his grave.
Someone told him, once, that death never comes without premonition. In youth, chasing the legacy of Turks like Valentine and his own dead father, he’d dismissed it as pointless superstition. There had been fireworks in Wutai that night, his last night there: a dragon hunting its prey, whistling and whipping through the sky in colorful streaks of light. He’d been like that dragon, trying to catch up to a destiny that couldn’t be fulfilled quickly enough.
Now it seems to come too soon.
This is the last morning. The next he’ll be so busy glancing over his shoulder that he forgets to look ahead.
FIN -- June 24, 2004
Notes: This is the first Tseng fic I ever wrote, and as such, I'm still a little proud of it. What I was mostly trying to convey was a sense of precognition on his part-- I still think it's one of the better shortfics I've written. For anyone curious, Tseng's note contained the following (which is typically revealed in the companion fic Meridian by skyfalls, but which I will include here for good measure):
"My blood is all meridian; were it not,
I had not left my clime, nor should I be,
In spite of tortures, ne'er to be forgot,
A slave again of love, - at least of thee.
'Tis vain to struggle - let me perish young -
Live as I have lived, and love as I have loved;
To dust if I return, from dust I sprung,
And then, at least, my heart can ne'er be moved."
-- Lord Byron, "Stanzas to the Po"
Also, skyfalls drew art for it here.