FFVII: Empery (Tseng, R)

[karanguni]

Title: Empery
Characters: Tseng; Veld cameo
Rating: Hard R (non-explicit sex, swearing)
Warnings: Written for roads_diverged. Massive AU. Massive culture abuse. Massive abuse in general.
Summary: He was taught that Wutai was the centre of the universe; he could not understand the empire stirring in the East until it was upon him, until it destroyed him, until it changed him, until it gave him empery.

6756 words and oh god this is my baby. Personal justification for Wutai versus Midgar in the original game, transplanted so that it makes sense. If there was one fic I'd beg my flist to read, this would be it.



They said: Empire is coming. By the time he understood what they meant, it was already too late.

Not rural. They were not rural. Even though they were far from any other civilisation, even though they were far from the great electric cities that were raising a never-setting sun to the East. Unnatural was what they called it; wrong that the light should not descend in their West. The Empire was a faraway thing, the talk of fantasy. The East could think of expedience and convenience, but the East always forgot honour; the East always sought the ascent to zenith. The East was young.

West in Wutai was old greatness. Tseng grew up far from the centre. Ever since an ancient and nobler time, they had called the capital the centre of the world, and everything was made relative to it.

Great ones, Tseng's parents told him, will walk within a hundred paces of the Emperor's seat, and greater ones will kneel within ten. Like gravity pulling one within. Like the sun drawing closer and closer; burning and inevitable. Honour was to move inwards, to know one's self and to know one's country.

He was not born for greatness, and not destined for ascent. He was born in fields that they had tended for hundreds, perhaps thousands, of years. Rice and water and mud. Stuff of the earth. Not all can be great, his parents told him. But everyone can be honourable.

A great river's tributary ran through their village. It flooded every year before the planting. His father brought him to its banks. 'Think of its source when you think of water,' he said to Tseng, pushing the boy of six down to his knees. The mud was cool and rich against his skin, dark and earthy against his small fingers. 'Think of the river, follow it home. Remember where you came from. Remember who you are in all the things that you do.'

The drums, the drums they played at night when the first thunderous waves came. Music enormous made one invincible. Tseng was allowed to sit at the edges and ride on the notes back across an aeon. 'Careful ears,' his mother said to him, stroking and combing black strands that would one day be allowed to grow out into man's hair, 'careful ears can listen. Do you hear? If you grow up well you will know the meaning of the melody and the harmony.'

The stringed instruments that the girls played with long fingers and sharpened nails; the hollowed wooden bodies of the sonorous woodwinds; the taut animal skin over empty barrels; the thud and the roar and the hymn and the hum. Tseng did not yet know what they meant. Too many sounds.

'Otherwise,' his mother told him, her fingers gentle against his scalp, 'if you grow dumb and you forget, the music will be to your ears as it would be to an ox, an ass. You would not understand it. You would lose it forever.'

The others were not "East" because Wutai was "West". The others were East because they were Middle, the kingdom of the earth around which the sun centred, rose and set. There was no other way, no other orbit, no other gravitation. It took Tseng many years to unlearn this fact.

When the war drums sounded, they were emptier than the musical drums. Tseng was thirteen years of age when his father tied a black cloth over his forehead and took up his old arms.

'Where are you going?' Tseng asked that night, unable to sleep for the unending, rhythmic beat that had the world shuddering beneath his feet.

His father touched his forehead. 'To the capital,' he said, 'to the centre.'

'To achieve greatness?' Tseng asked, remembering.

'Perhaps,' his father said, in the usual, staid way of their men. 'It is my only intention to honour what makes this kingdom stand under heaven.'

Heaven above, the earth beneath the sky. All of it theirs to inherit, or that was how it had been ever since any of them could recall. Tseng's father went to war, and did not come back. His mother took black cloth and ripped it into squares. She sewed them onto her sleeves and his, and did not speak for seven days and seven nights; he, untaught and unspoken for, could only listen numbly to the war drums. They filled the silence that had entered his house, an unwanted guest which did not leave.

For two years, his mother tried to teach him about the fields, but they were empty lessons given amidst a burning landscape. Grain once harvested used to, in the golden memories of something that felt like a far-gone yesteryear, be celebrated -- men and women and children dancing and tramping the remains of the plants back into the soil, part living plough and part offering. From afternoon's blistering heat into evening's cool, stomping and stamping and laughing aloud before going away covered head to toe with evidence of their livelihood.

That had stopped. Now the army, dressed in the attire of the Emperor, came and stood by their houses and took away their grain-barrels and sent them on carts dragged along by old donkeys. All the roads led inwards, like the rest of the country. To the centre, to the middle, to where the war was slowly creeping.

The war devoured them all.

They put two rough hewn sticks into Tseng's hands one night; the tips of the wood had been weathered down, and he knew immediately what to do with them. The ceaseless war cry continued by his hands, the sound of the thum thum thum deafening and soulless. They continued the beat with hope that their hands' work would one day match the steps of the soldiers returning, but it was vain hope.

On the summer of his sixteenth year, they pulled him from his mother's screaming arms, and set a black band across his head, and gave him a dull blade and taught him how to sharpen it.

'Is this all?' Tseng asked, holding stone in one hand and metal in the other and rubbing them back and forth.

'It is all we have left,' the weary sergeant who had come to their village told him. 'Do not wear that down too much, otherwise you will have nothing left to use, if you ever learn how to use it properly at all.'

The road inwards was long and filled with troubles. Men from the East - the Empire, they said - had trickled down their streams and blown like dead leaves through their forests. Tseng's first encounter with battle was against a small scouting group. They crossed paths accidentally; the Eastern group a mere five-strong while their platoon was made up of twenty-odd youths aged between thirteen and eighteen accompanied by five grown veteran men.

The veterans set upon the scouts and robbed them of their weapons, their clothes and their dignity. They tied up the Eastern scouts and set them on the road, then the sergeant turned to the youths and said, 'This is your enemy.'

They did not look like enemies to Tseng; not very much, at least. They just looked displaced; intruders, not murderers.

'Do you know why your father never came home?' the sergeant asked Tseng, seeing Tseng's eyes alight with hesitance. 'Do you know who will be to blame if one day you return home to find your mother dead with a monster child in her stomach?'

'How do we know that they did that?' Tseng asked, softly, his hand gripping his sword tight, so tight.

The sergeant grabbed Tseng by the short length of his boy's ponytail, yanking him in and making Tseng's head ache. 'Who else do you think?' the man growled. 'I lost my wife to them. You may never get a wife if they continue.'

He shoved Tseng forward and told Tseng to put his knife into their bodies. Tseng closed his eyes and heard his father's voice and his mother's cries and he put his knife in and heard their cries and they were all equal. One for one. Tseng put his knife in again and again until he had to stop from the exhaustion. Shaking, he pulled his black cloth from his head and wiped his hands. He could not see the blood on the fabric, but he knew it was there.

The sergeant let him vomit into a ditch. Then he pulled Tseng out of the stink and put the grindstone in his hand. 'Good,' the man said, quietly. 'Today was your first lesson. There'll be more, so keep your blade sharp. Keep your wits about you. Stay alive. You're the sort who'll pull through.'

The next encounter was less gentle; they ran into the main force that the scouts had belonged to. These men were stronger, more well equipped and angry over the loss of their compatriots. Tseng saw Li, who had lived two doors down from him and who talked with a lisp, go down under the vicious slashing of the bright, strangely tempered blades of the Easterners. Hack, hack, hack; they destroyed his face and then cut his throat. The smell of it made Tseng's eyes water and his heart burn: he went at them and went hack hack hack also.

He sustained a few injuries; nothing serious, just a long gash down his left arm and a small blow to the head. But Tseng felt little of it: he just turned on the bodies of the dead and put his foot to the skull of the one who'd done the deed of murder, and stomped and stamped and made the beat of the drum resound upon bone until his sergeant pulled him away. Screaming, sweat blinding his eyes and adrenaline and fear coursing through him like poison, Tseng spat out every curse he knew and then collapsed on himself, refusing to cry.

The sergeant made him drink hot liquor and sit on his own. 'You're going to get tired of it,' the older man said, pouring the bitter clear liquid into a small tin cup and forcing it down Tseng's throat. 'But only if you don't go mad first.' He slapped Tseng about the face a few times, until Tseng could breathe properly again. 'You're not bad with that sword. Just crazy. Don't be crazy. The other kids look to you. Don't let them down.'

Tseng didn't know what he was supposed to be.

It didn't take long for the others to succumb to the war-rage. One of the fourteen year old ones, a twin who had lost his other half, went over the edge during their next skirmish. He dipped his hands in the blood and dirt of the road and painted the characters for revenge on his arms and laughed to the moon. Tseng pulled him aside and shook him by the shoulders.

'Stop it,' he said.

'What for?' the twin said. 'I am one part of a broken whole.'

Tseng wrestled him to the ground when he tried to kill himself, shook him out of it and said, live for the ones who still have something to live for, then; live for Wutai, live so that she may heal -- he said those words and believed in them himself. They calmed down, heavy with sweat and weighted with exhaustion, clinging onto Tseng's maxims because they were children who needed to cling onto something, anything at all.

'For Wutai,' the twin whispered.

'For her murdered,' Tseng affirmed.

It wouldn't be long before those words were all they had. Tseng found that a lot of his world evaporated to crystals of old memorised stories: remember the source and learn the music and keep Wutai alive; each time three words in his mother tongue, each time three oaths, each time thrice repeated. It kept him sane through the nights; because he could remember he could sleep in the dirt that made him, because he could listen he could open his ears to the night cries of the sleeping country; because he could fight for something, he fought.

They did not so much blaze a trail to the capital as they carved one. Tseng was eighteen when they reached it, his hair was long and his eyes were old and he had left nine boy-men who believed in him and one sergeant with no left arm who had made him believe. He didn't want their respect any more than he wanted his sergeant's pity, but he had both all the same.

'Tseng,' his sergeant said to him as they kept together in the tent that had been given to them.

The outskirts of the centre of the world were dotted with the shit of the army; soldiers like them sitting and waiting for war. At night the fields burned with the light of a thousand fires and groaned with the voices of ten thousand men.

'Tseng,' his sergeant said, 'Your orders.' And he handed Tseng a roll with the Emperor's seal on it, and Tseng - filled with dread - opened it.

It was with flat eyes that he quietly read the instructions to split the command; to take six men with him and to become a specialist force. What could he say? That he did not want the responsibility of those who believed in him when he cried Wutai lives?

'I told you,' his sergeant said, quietly polishing his sword. The blade seemed thin with overuse. 'Told you that you'd get tired of it s'long as you did not go insane first. And you proved me right. Eyes like yours are hard to come by. You won't roll over, you know how to adapt.' The one-armed man looked up. 'You're going to hate yourself for it at some point.'

'Sometimes I want to give up,' Tseng confessed, young enough to admit to being a traitor but old enough to keep it quiet.

'But you won't,' his sergeant laughed, his voice a growl from where a knife had once almost had his throat. 'Because you can't, a man like you.'

Tseng felt an ache in his entire body, a desire to scream. He held it down because that was what men like them did. He shrugged and pulled his hair loose. Laying on his cot that night, listening to the breathing in the shared tent, Tseng wondered many things: how his mother was, how his father had died, whether he would ever lay with a woman, when the hell would end, if the hell had any end at all.

As winter descended upon them, Tseng took his men and went East to help stave the oncoming attacks. There had been many rumours about what they'd meet going out; conspiracies of fast, directed, flying fire and voices in the air. Tseng told his team to put it out of their minds and told them to concentrate on surviving against the snow. Superstition could kill a man.

'They told me I'd be dead by my second year,' Chen said, his boots crunching on new frost. 'I'm still here.'

'That's because we've got a damned good commander,' Feng said, saluting Tseng with a grin. They'd grown up together as boy soldiers; if you could call what they had "growing up".

'Enough chatter,' Tseng said, focused. 'More marching.'

He cursed command, but he was good at it. Where others would have failed, they made it over the hilly ranges and out into open plain, where terrain was less cruel but more treacherous.

'I don't like it,' Tseng mentioned quietly to Chen. 'It's too open.'

'If they can see us, we can see them,' Chen shrugged; but Tseng had a feeling of ill omen hanging over their heads.

A messenger from another one of the forward platoons found them not long after. He looked ragged and starved, bone all over where muscle had gone. Tseng poured the same burning liquor his sergeant had once forced into him down the man's throat, and - stuttering - he began to talk. 'Demons come from the East,' he stammered, as if uttering portent and prophecy. 'They bring heresy and metal imbued with magic.'

Tseng did not believe in magic by then, but he did believe in what he'd seen of their improved blades and stronger, better shafted arrows. He kept his suspicions to himself, though, and hoped for the best instead of praying.

'The entire thirty-third is dead,' the messenger told them later, after rest and some of their already-sparse rations. 'I ran like a defector upon the sound of their coming and managed to escape. The East is strong enough, I think, to lay siege to the capital.'

That was preposterous, because nothing could lay siege to the capital, nothing could broach its walls, nothing could penetrate its sanctuary, because - because it was all that they knew, all that they held as true.

Tseng had become a man of very little faith. 'We shall see,' he said, taking first watch, sitting with his blade sheathed and held between his knees. 'Get some rest. Don't think about it too much.'

It turned out that the messenger was not the only member of the thirty-third to get out alive. Tseng saw a figure on the horizon stumble and lurch towards them; heard also the first crack of gunfire he'd ever heard in his life. Saw the man fall struck down by something faster than an arrow and far deadlier. The 4th Midgar Company descended upon his corpse; Tseng did not continue watching long enough to see what happened to it. He went to his sleeping men and shook them by the shoulders.

'Wake up,' he hissed, shoving them with one hand and holding his blade with the other. The hilt felt feeble instead of reassuring. 'Wake up!'

Sleeping soldiers drowse light. They came awake and doused their fire with all speed. Tseng sat them in a close circle and said, 'We must run, or we will die.'

They stared at him, because had he not said, for Wutai, and had he not fought harder and faster and better than any of them?

'Are you out of your mind?' Feng hissed, looking around as if the Emperor were there to hear Tseng speak. 'We still have chance of catching up with the thirty-fourths -- why are you talking of, of defection?'

In Tseng's eyes was the light of one who knows only how to survive. 'They have weapons,' he told them, 'which we cannot win against.'

'That's --' Chen said, torn between loyalty and understanding.

Tseng threw his blade to the ground. 'If they find me with that they will kill me,' he said, voice rough. 'A pointless death, for Wutai or not. Leave the blade and we have time to perhaps warn the others before they bring whatever new weaponry they have any further.'

'Are we being cowards?' Feng asked quietly, his bones stained with cold and his arms drained from years of endless endless endless war.

'We're being practical,' Tseng said curtly, strapping on a smaller hunting blade and motioning for them to do the same. 'We're doing all that we can do.'

They left their thin, almost broken blades buried in a snowdrift and fled back west, but not fast enough.

At the end of a relentless pursuit, the Midgar Contingent descended upon their ragged bunch with the efficiency of a machine. Empire. Imperium. Military strength as the old Wutai kingdom had never seen before; numbers such as a solitary nation had never envisioned. They had weapons that Tseng would later learn were called guns. They had built behind them great railways that could move faster and more loads than any horse. They were new blood, full of the fiery propelling push of advanced technology and a matching desire for the ensanguined sword. Their banners proclaimed it in the red of House Shinra.

They took Tseng and his men, killed the messenger.

'Come with us in peace,' their commander said in broken Wutainese. 'Or die.'

'I'd rather die,' Chen snarled, and Tseng closed his eyes in time to avoid the sight of his friend of four years being shot in the head. He had to open them afterwards; he did not see a head where a head should have been. It was disfiguration more humiliating than any beheading.

'Come with us,' the Eastern commander said again, putting one of those guns in Feng's hands. 'Show us that you can be trusted.'

Feng turned shallow, sunken eyes on Tseng and uttered a silent apology. Tseng knew that courage could not stay with a man so broken. He managed to roll aside as Feng's shaking fingers pulled back. The noise of the gun and the acrid smell of gunpowder stung him, but Tseng was too used to death to be afraid then. He snatched the weapon away and shot Feng in the heart; a merciful death, Tseng hoped that the man would join his long-dead twin in whatever heaven or hell awaited them. He wanted to shoot himself, but the commander wrestled the gun away from him and nodded and Tseng - gone three days without proper rations and sick on unboiled snow melt - passed out after being kicked and tied and gagged.

For Wutai? Wutai was its people, and he'd saved himself, tried to save his men, tried to save the thirty-fourths. The justification sounded hollow even to his own ears.

The Midgar contingent had electricity. It was their name for the substance stored in what they called "batteries"; the vocabulary was almost beyond Tseng. He did not know their language. On their radio-machines they received news from places so far abroad that Tseng could not imagine how many of them were littered around his home kingdom.

He could guess, though, from the jubilation and relief that poured off soldiers as young as himself, that the message that came through four weeks after his capture was a message of victory. Their course took an abrupt turn: a hundred an eighty degree movement to one side of the world - a journey to the East, like some sick parallel of the stories Tseng heard in his past of journeys to the West.

Midgar was thousand miles away, and the march was long. They took pride in their prisoner of war, the 4th Contingent. Tseng didn't know what their jeers meant, but he supposed they thought him delicate because of his hair -- they kept theirs short, cropped down like the hair of adolescent boys. They shamed him by putting him on a rickety stool and tying his feet to the legs and his arms behind his back; they left him there for an hour struggling and wrangling until he fell over. Tseng went still after that, and they gave up that sport for a new one: they forced his mouth open and made good their frustrations pent up over a long campaign.

They painted his face white with semen and rubbed the leftovers of their mess into his hair, making it wet and sticky and gnarled. Tseng coughed and spat and sometimes even swallowed; it made him sick, but it made him sicker when they set upon him with his own hunting knife and cut his hair off at the root. He would've screamed if he had the energy, but he nothing left at all: not dignity, not pride, not honour, not country, not even his own name, which they could not pronounce.

He could not hate them, because Tseng knew that he would have done the same, in some other world where old Wutai ever had a chance of winning.

A month into their sojourn and Tseng picked up enough words to know what shit and bastard and cunt were in Midgar's odd and angular Standard. He knew other basic things like water and food and piss and fuck; soldier's vocabulary, really. But the thing he learned best and most profoundly was that East was east and West was west and that the Centre was imaginary ground, non-existent. The world revolved around no nation's axes. The sun seemed to start from one end and end in another no matter how far from Wutai they walked.

The thought punished Tseng as much as the fucking they gave him did. At night they had their sport with him - sometimes it was beatings, other times they tied his legs to ends of a pole to spread him open and went at him; five, six, eight, ten men. Another word Tseng learned: savage. Then he learned whore, then he learned bitch. He accepted the titles easily and remembered them forever. Twenty years old as summer hit the earth, Tseng felt eighty instead.

When they finally, finally reached the capital - no, not capital, city - Tseng saw electric lights immortalise wretched Midgar against a dark night sky. He could not really even call it wretched: they were an empire at war, and war had its casualties, and men like Tseng cannot hate hypocritically.

The 4th Contingent bade him farewell and left him in an urban prison. Wutai was not rural - Tseng discovered that it was only because they never knew what urban meant. The prisons were windowless things; they needed no windows. They had plumbing that made waste and water disappear, and lighting that made it possible to watch the guards who watched him at any hour of the day or night.

The War was over, Tseng knew, and Wutai had lost. Apparently, Midgar was celebrating with rallying cries of peace; good propaganda and even better policy. Tseng learned enough from his equally jaded cellmates to know that the motto was "enlightenment" - House Shinra said that it would bring both power and knowledge to all corners of the earth, and had done remarkably well in not just Wutai but also in Kalm, Gongaga, Nibelheim and Corel. They would have peace by assimilation, integration. Welcome to the new world order.

Tseng didn't bother even trying to believe. He drank water and thought of rice fields. He listened to prisoners of war beat their tin spoons against bars and pretended that their melodies had meaning. He fought for his own sake, his pride as an Wutai man, his pride as Wutai.

Three months later and their jailors threw their cell doors open. Out they tumbled, Wutai prisoners of war mixed with the scum of Midgar's society. Each had taught the other how to swear and curse.

'Do you want freedom?' the man who came down to inspect them asked. He was one of House Shinra, his hair as bright as the lights this empire produced. 'Do you want a chance at a new life?'

Every bone in Tseng's body demanded for him to say no, but the word that came out of his mouth was not Wutainese, and it meant "yes".

They split the Wutainese up across the different sectors of the new City of Midgar. Everywhere there was construction; this new eight-part behemoth of a capital was being built with the labour of ten different ex-nations and all of their old resources. In on new-paved roads came timbre and refined metals.

Tseng ended up in Sector 6, equipped with a hammer and a blowtorch and instructions on how to weld and beat and build. He wanted to hate the demeaning menial labour as much as he wanted to hate the 4th Contingent, but again: the bricks bled no blood and left no families behind, and the feeling of creating instead of destroying felt like liberation instead of incarceration.

He hated the feeling of ownership that came about - like a sudden ambush - when he finally saw the Sector completed a year later. Yet Tseng had the persistent thought gnawing at the back of his mind: he had never built Wutai, only fought for it. Somehow, Midgar was different; it had imprisoned him, and then given him a key to freedom of an entirely different sort.

Tseng disappeared into the Sector's streets with the rest of the immigrant population the moment they let him. They opened up mail roads, because House Shinra had the power to do things like that. Tseng wrote a letter or two home to his mother, until one night he could not take the smell of ink and the look of characters that were morphing into foreign blocks of stroke-stroke-slash. He stopped sending anything back; did not wait for any replies.

Post-War euphoria went by him; being Wutainese meant being castigated, and the suffering of disloyalty and abandonment came with a loneliness that slowly began to drive Tseng mad. Old words resounded in his head at night: remember remember, listen listen, fight fight. It seemed so senseless after a while: what was there to remember? The sounds of the city were white noise in his ears. Fighting for himself seemed like an entirely selfish and pointless cause. Fighting for Wutai felt at once right and at once wrong. Tseng wanted something to be true to. There was a beautiful Midgar girl who stopped to pity him one night, and she made him forget, if only for a little while. She was gone by morning; her gawking finished, her own little war story ready to be retold to fortunate city children.

Tseng read the newspapers and listened to the new transistor radios that slowly began to permeate the city. He learned better words from them; words like economy, money and industry; as well as things like racial tension and poverty.

There were a lot of children in his neighbourhood; it was a poor one and full of strange skin colours. Tseng realised that empire had begun a lot earlier than at the end of the War - Midgar had taken women from their village-nations and brought them back and humanised them, civilised them. It was some sick sort of integration of the savage; accommodation instead of elimination.

Wutai really wasn't the centre of anything. If Tseng had doubted it before he knew it then. It was just something old, a kingdom gone outdated.

There were a lot of half-Wutai kids around, kids who shared Tseng's eyes but not his hair colour. He befriended one. The kid taught Tseng Midgar's language; it came pristine from textbooks and schools, untarnished by fighting or crime or propaganda.

Tseng began to understand that he needed language to ever advance anywhere. Right then he didn't know enough to become anything. There was no real king in Midgar to get a hundred paces close to; House Shinra was everywhere and anywhere, moving all the time. Businesses and industry became the new emperors. Tseng had not enough technical knowledge outside of war and no ability to communicate; so he sold his body as a novelty on the streets, his pride biting at him but his instincts driving him to it.

His "business" became more profitable to him than he imagined it could be. Sometimes he slept with his customer and took his or her money; a normal transaction and a type of atonement for what he'd done in the past (whatever that was). Other times he killed the person he fell in bed with as justification and vindication. Either act felt right.

Tseng had never chosen to be a soldier, and never chose to be a traitor either - but he'd turned out both, and juggled the consequences. He remembered Wutai by putting blood on his hands, and honoured Midgar's rising economy when he put his hands on others.

His business with the killing got him into trouble eventually.

Tseng knew he should have expected it.

One night a high-up from the House came to him. It was a general, recognisable from the air around him as much as from how his face had appeared in the newspapers once.

'I hear you sell for five hundred gil an hour,' Veld said, eyes flinty and grey with the same sort of blandness that Tseng's had as well. Only difference was that Veld was far older - a better soldier, then.

Tseng nodded. 'Yes. Eight hundred for all night.' He swallowed down the gnashing embarrassment at having no skill with words. He wished - again - to be able to hate. But all that was left was a passivity fitting for the whore/bitch/savage that the men brought back from the West.

Veld followed Tseng up into the scruffy room that Tseng kept; it was neat but helplessly small, dingy and dirty in a way that no cleaning could save. Tseng set about to business: he stripped off his threadbare shirt and dropped his pants and got to his knees and hoped to god or money or electricity or Shinra or Feng or his father or his sergeant that this general would just snap his neck or choke him to death with his cock; just kill him and make this torture end, take these choices out of Tseng's hands.

The general did none of that. 'I hear things about you,' Veld said, putting a hand on Tseng's cropped hair, running calloused fingers through the horrible stubble. 'I know who you were in the War.'

Tseng did not bother to stop to ask how - House Shinra had its way, and was certainly capable of digging up such dredges of overwritten history. He sucked harder, felt the man swell, but Veld didn't stop talking.

'Why don't you come with me - the House could use a man like you. You're already, by definition, a traitor anyway.'

The word opened old wounds and poured acid over them; burning, burning, scarring.

Tseng - hair shorn short and on his knees servicing another man - pulled back and snarled, 'What is a traitor?' The only real sentence he could compose; one he'd turned over in his head many times before.

'That is a good question,' Veld said, calm. He tucked himself back into his pants, grabbed Tseng by the arm and hauled the ex-Wutainese, ex-soldier, ex-whore up onto his feet. 'I was from Kalm myself, once. Traitor is a harsh word in any language. Come with me. Let me show you what it means to be true to yourself.'

Veld did not take Tseng to a firing range or a deserted alleyway or any of the other places Tseng was expecting to be led to. He took Tseng into a library.

'Sit down,' the general said, pushing Tseng into a chair. 'I am going to teach you, then you can make your own decisions.'

He started with grammar. Tseng - lost, confused but grateful for something other than forced revenge - picked it up quickly, and tried to ignore the odd sensation that he was living in limbo. Training told him that Veld was doing this to win potentially dangerous ex-enemies to House Shinra's side; Tseng knew that he had gained a fair reputation during the fighting. House Shinra had already proved itself sly in its plans. This was all a ploy. A true soldier would kill himself or kill the general or something.

But Tseng was hungry for a power that he hadn't had in years: a power over himself, his own thoughts, his own actions, his own choices. He stayed, and within a month Veld moved him on to vocabulary. Tseng filled his mind with a fervour that only one from a lost generation could have; his teenage years had been wasted, and now his mind was thirsting. A month later and Veld was talking about the finer points of syntax, starting him on easy novels. He loaned Tseng books and gave Tseng food - it passed unsaid between them that exchanges of money were out of the question. Men still had pride, if nothing else.

'Do you think you're adept enough to start on history?' Veld asked one day, sitting in a chair with his House coat draped behind him.

Tseng raised an eyebrow, a rather refined action he was more than happy to have reclaimed. 'Is that not,' he said with his still-stilted formal grammar, 'very subjective?'

'Subjective's the right word,' Veld grunted with a smile, standing up and going to a shelf. 'That's why I want you to do it.' He pulled down a thick volume, The Rise and Fall of House Shinra, and put it in front of Tseng. 'This will help you see that even great conquering empires like this one aren't invulnerable.'

Tseng did not know what "invulnerable" meant, but he could put "fall of" and "House Shinra" together easily enough. 'Why are you doing this thing?' he asked, forcing eloquence into a child's sentence. He touched the spine of the history and stared at Veld.

'Wouldn't you like to save something instead of destroying everything you have for a change?' Veld asked, looking Tseng over pointedly. 'You were drafted in to help build Sector 6, I saw that on your records. You seem to have been the one who enjoyed it most. Some of your compatriots just drowned themselves in cement or beat themselves to death with their tools. You were the only one who took to task without objection. Seems to me that you've got more to you than just killing.'

Tseng had the odd feeling that Veld might be a kindred spirit, separated by a gulf of fifteen years, a different homeland and a vast status divide. He wanted more than ever to speak, speak well, speak his mind. 'Not traitor to Shinra are you?' he questioned.

Veld shook his head at the language and sighed. 'Expansion doesn't have to come at the expense of total extermination. You can be half and half a thing and still loyal.'

Tseng had to check the dictionary for "expansion" and "extermination", but he thought he understood what Veld meant. 'I will learn,' he said, firmly. 'Decide later.'

'Smart man,' Veld nodded, folding back up into his chair. 'Rufus'll like you, once you stop talking without contractions and adding a thousand layers of etiquette.'

'What?' Tseng said.

'Keep reading.'

Five years later

Electricity brought many things. By the time the Second Wutainese Rebellion had been quelled - peacefully - the City of Midgar was practically sleepless. Radios blared music. Trains brought in supplies from colonies abroad. Cemeteries were laid out for the dead. Empire expanded.

Tseng could not really remember the fields or the drums or the murdered; too many old things from too far away. He had no dominion over his history, same as how Wutai was now little more than a subservient potentate.

But empery can be over many things -- including the individual heart. No centre anywhere but the centre within yourself.

Good or evil, right or wrong - those were not the questions.

Electric music came out of the new machines; Tseng imagined that they must be like how drums sounded to him ten years ago. He understood the beats and melodies and instruments. They did not play to deaf and languageless ears.

Tseng looked into the past and remembered pain and the music of war; he remembered fighting for something; he remembered being in the centre of the universe. But Wutai was not the centre; neither was Midgar, not even now. The centre was wherever he was, the world expanded outwards from there, not inwards from without.

Memory and loyalty were just two things; Tseng could put on armour and fight again for different purposes, different people, different things. Fuelled by history, but fighting for a future.

There was a knock on the door.

'Enter,' Tseng said from his desk.

Veld came in from the hall, a newspaper in his hands. 'Congratulations,' the old Turk - now ambassador to Kalm - said. 'No casualties and a new treaty with the Western kingdom. Rufus didn't think it was possible; he said "all you Wutainese bastards are stubborn fuckers", pardon me.'

'Rufus always thinks that Wutainese are bastards,' Tseng said mildly, reaching over to briefly look through what the Times was saying. 'And it's been a long fight, Veld. That success was deserved.'

'Yes,' Veld nodded, seating himself across Tseng's desk. 'And now you're back to your endless sedentary pursuit in between your headhunting?'

'It is a long history,' Tseng - successor to Veld's position as leader of House Shinra's paramilitary faction - shrugged. 'The Rise and Fall of the Western Front.'

'History's subjective,' Veld pointed out.

Tseng smiled; Veld wondered how and when he'd remembered how to do that. 'Subjective, yes,' Tseng agreed. 'That's the point.'