Final Fantasy VII: Restorations, Interlude II (Tseng, Rufus, Veld)
Restorations, Interlude II
Rating: PG
Characters: Tseng, Rufus, Veld.
Summary: By the end of the world, there were more scars on Tseng than there was skin.
Warnings: Foruth part in the Restorations Arc. Post-Advent Children, with references to Before Crisis.
Part I Interlude I Part II
2197 words, and more Tseng backstory than I really should ever shake a stick at.
By the end of the world, there were more scars on Tseng than there was skin. The rip across his stomach dominated, stretched skin made eerily smooth by materia and surgery, a shrine to what Shinra could produce. Rufus once mapped it, blunt nails catching on ridges and furrows. 'You healed,' he said, like Tseng's body was a map that he could read to rebuild his own destroyed world.
'It's not the only wound I have,' Tseng replied. 'It's also far from the first or last one I'll ever receive.'
The pauper prince said, 'How many more will you take for me?'
Tseng buttoned his blazer and said, 'How many more can you give, from now until the day you finally, truly die?'
For bright light, they said, you had to burn a candle at both ends.
The first scar that Tseng took and pasted onto himself was more given to him than received. When he was sixteen, he frustrated Veld to the point of action.
'Sometimes,' Tseng's mentor told him, 'you care so much for this job I wonder if it's my fault for somehow brainwashing you, or if it's something to do with your heritage and the way you can't see the difference between the Plate and the sky.'
'Are you,' Tseng asked, with a hesitance that he'd learn to forever forget later in his life, 'angry because I express loyalty to the Turks and to you?'
Veld tucked his hands into the pockets of his pants, looking out over the gleam of the city. Shinra Tower's windows were reinforced glass even this high up; it protected the keepers from the zoo below. 'What do you think? If you're asking me what I think, I think you want too badly to believe in Shinra because you don't have any reason for stepping out of the shadow of Wutai.'
Tseng looked determinedly West. 'My blood doesn't make me. Especially not when this is the city I grew up in.'
'Understandable. You want to bleed for Midgar. Shinra built it, and you're here with us, part of the hammer and the sickle ready to beat down and cut short anything that gets in the way.'
'Yes,' Tseng said.
'We'll do anything, Tseng,' Veld said, voice quiet in the room. 'We'll do everything to anyone.'
'I know,' Tseng said, he who had and would kill and kill again, eighteen years old and unable to blink for mercy's sake at the people he'd put down, because he lived in a city filled with so much smog that Shinra was a name worth worshipping, never mind the Heideggers and Palmers and Scarlets that they stocked their world with.
Veld was silent for a while, and then he took out his gun and tapped Tseng on the shoulder with it. 'Tseng,' he said, levelling the weapon at Tseng's right shoulder. 'Do you think I'll pull the trigger?'
Tseng narrowed his eyes at him. 'No.'
Veld gestured at the younger man. 'Not even going to reach for your own?'
'What for?' Tseng asked. 'At this range, you'd have me through the heart before my hand made it under my lapels.'
'Fair point,' Veld agreed. 'But you don't think I'm going to shoot.'
'No,' Tseng said, 'I don't think you're going to shoot.'
'Why not?' Veld asked.
'Does it count as a shot if it's done for the sake of a lesson?' Tseng said.
'Let's find out,' Veld replied, and shot Tseng through the left arm. The force at that range drove a solid bullet in through flesh and left Wutainese blood over Shinra glass as Tseng stumbled backwards, eyes dilated.
'It's odd that people never think about how much healing hurts,' Veld commented as he holstered his gun and reached for a set of materia. He watched Tseng clutch at his arm, the man's breath shallow and eyes burning with questions and also answers that Veld knew Tseng didn't want to believe. Veld slipped on a bracer. He ripped the shoulder seam of Tseng's jacket open, ignoring the pained grunt from the younger man, and then he placed his fingers on either end of the entry wound. 'How many times have you taken a cure this soon after a hit?'
'Never,' Tseng ground out, his jaw clenched.
Veld nodded. 'Fresh wounds, if healed too fast, scar,' he said. 'It's not right for me to do this to you, but, like the rest of Shinra, how much can a man like me care about right or wrong when it comes to the things he thinks he helped build?'
The rush of the power of the materia ran through Tseng like molten lead. He might have let out a short yell; he couldn't tell for cracking his head against the window, his fingers as they scrabbled caught only slippery glass. The wound on his shoulder closed, the first scar lines now beginning to echo Shinra's old urban legends.
'Do you think you'll pull the trigger?' Veld asked Tseng, a lifetime later when they met at opposite ends of a bullet. 'Considering how long Shinra's had that notice out for me, it's in your better interests to do it.'
A notice out because Veld had ran, away from his directorship, away from politics, old monarchy and young megalomania. Ran from the Turks he'd made his own to be with a daughter he hadn't seen for as many years as Tseng'd been alive. Ran to be a father to a girl with no marks and his own blood. Old man Shinra'd sent the Turks after him as easily as he'd sent Rufus to Junon.
'Maybe,' Tseng told his old mentor, keeping his aim straight. 'Are you really doing this for family?'
'For both of them, yes,' Veld told him. 'You can chalk it up to old age catching up with me. I need a breath of fresh air. New material. I want to bring someone up instead of building someone. If you pull the trigger and do your job and get promoted, maybe in a few years you'll figure out if it's natural for old, dead Turks to do stupid, futile things.'
Tseng's lips twitched, maybe with regret, maybe with agreement. 'Do you want me to let you know?'
'Are you going to shoot me?'
Tseng, standing there with pre-signed documents in his pocket from Vice-President Rufus Shinra declaring and confirming Veld's death, said, 'Let's find out.'
When Rufus Shinra inherited the earth, the only question he ever asked was a question he asked Tseng, and the question was, 'Is it better to be loved, or to be feared?'
Tseng, who had not seen Veld for three years because of the man, the boy, the prince who'd bought him to be his sword-arm, told Rufus, voice flat, 'Which one do you think you already are? Loved, or feared?'
There were a number of ways to stay clinically sane on the job. Dissociation was not the best of the limited options; dissociation being another term for denial. There were a number of things you had to accept about yourself. A number of things that you had to come to realise were now - and forever - relative.
He pulled the safety back on his gun, the muted click a sound and a trigger. His hand shook and slipped. But the job was done; a tick of the minute hand on the clock, tick tick click.
The image in his mind of Midgar rearing up above and beyond him, the city that spat him out. But Midgar was a million miles away now; his intestines spilled out like an umbilical cord trying to connect him to her.
There were two ways to send yourself to the padded cell: care too little, or care too much. Dissociation meant not caring what happened to the souls a thousand feet below when you dropped four metric tonnes of concrete on top of them and watched as it all fell down. Association meant visualising the crunch of bone and the slick saltiness of jelly-ooze, brains and hearts and lungs all suffocating and pierced by concrete, metal and glass.
Association was better.
Tseng knew the smell of blood, intimately. The smell of his own, as well, though not so well in recent years. It was all over him now, drying out on his sleeves and keeping his jacket damp. He brushed his fingers over his cuffs. Getting cold.
He let his head rest against the Temple walls, sitting there bleeding like a corpse all over the floor. The gash in his stomach so large he couldn't care to trace it, the world so remote and kaleidoscopic that he didn't bother to focus. His gun the only real, solid thing in his universe, the Planet one huge monument to failure of human arrogance.
If he were to dissociate now, this would be how he'd do it. Thoroughly, removing the compartmentalised parts and reassembling. Rufus Shinra, aged too young, sending them on errand to save the world, and himself, through fear. Sephiroth, driven to this by too many years of use. A bad tool, to break and go insane. The battle of Mako versus blood was an old war. Blood always lost. Hojo had tried, multiple times, to tell Tseng that, eventually, effort would cede to engineering. That was dissociation. Acknowledgement of error, and acceptance of fate, which said that he was going to cleave to haemoglobin loss, almost thirty and therefore a Turk too old. Him a pawn, playing the game for kings. Even amateur players knew what pawns were for. Dissociation said, players send pawns to die.
Association was better.
Noisy thoughts, yes, but a move for recognition was a move to care. When you began to feel the neat barriers of your mind crumble under the pressure screaming need for air, need for meaning, need for resolution, that was when you dropped the pretence that the mind could reign victorious. When the partitions rend, you followed your heart, because you believed it still capable of beating. In spite of the temper of masamune searing an open line of agony in you, shoving cloth and fabric in through delicate organs. Tseng sat there, thinking about the rupturing of vessels, the tangle of organ over organ, muscle he'd worked years to develop ripped, ligaments snapping like string.
The trigger was always the hardest part, slick and confusing when you couldn't feel the tips of the pads of your fingers. Tseng looked down at his weapon, one goddamned envelope of firepower and potential energy against the wrath of nature.
Dying, to Tseng, was a job best done neatly.
The way they'd done it in the past was one through the head. Sometimes people did it to themselves, but most of the time it was him, or Veld, going after the one or the other who couldn't take how far back you had to pull to break free of guilt, or how deep in you had to go to make what Turks did feel right. A good way to die.
Tseng put his left hand on his abdomen and let his fingernail dig into the very edge of the wound. The pain flared like a nova, going up his spine, electric through a body ready to die and just enough to push adrenaline right out through his glands, just enough to have him wrench his eyes open and look at the gun, look at it, look at it in his hands, vomit up from the back of his throat a coarse laugh, and throw the motherfucking thing away into the dirt, bang bang bang.
Tseng was told, upon opening his eyes, 'Do not do that again.' There was no time to gather his wits, but how much could anyone gather in a world gone insane?
It was Rufus at the side of the bed, present even though Tseng was more than vaguely sure that his empire was still falling apart about him. Tseng did not bother to try to speak; forcing his eyes open took enough out of him.
Rufus uncrossed his legs and said, 'The Planet is producing an environmental reaction. Unique. Insofar as I know, there has never been a case of geological constructs rising from the ocean bed. One's headed this way. We're attempting to charge the Junon canon.'
That made Tseng crack a smile. His voice was destroyed, but his words were recognisable when he said, 'What are you doing here at the end of the world, Rufus?'
That made Rufus stand. 'I was waiting for my time,' he replied, brushing his sleeves straight. From his pockets he produced a piece of paper, which he tossed onto Tseng's bound chest. When Tseng raised an eyebrow, Rufus said, 'You haven't seen him for half a decade, but I doubt Veld's ever forgotten a face.'
Tseng closed his eyes. 'The same way you've never forgiven a grudge?'
'Things change,' Rufus Shinra said, and walked out of the room to face his destiny.
Tseng was not there the day that Rufus Shinra stared into the bright light of his world burning down, but Tseng was there the day that Rufus Shinra woke to make a new one.
Rating: PG
Characters: Tseng, Rufus, Veld.
Summary: By the end of the world, there were more scars on Tseng than there was skin.
Warnings: Foruth part in the Restorations Arc. Post-Advent Children, with references to Before Crisis.
Part I Interlude I Part II
2197 words, and more Tseng backstory than I really should ever shake a stick at.
By the end of the world, there were more scars on Tseng than there was skin. The rip across his stomach dominated, stretched skin made eerily smooth by materia and surgery, a shrine to what Shinra could produce. Rufus once mapped it, blunt nails catching on ridges and furrows. 'You healed,' he said, like Tseng's body was a map that he could read to rebuild his own destroyed world.
'It's not the only wound I have,' Tseng replied. 'It's also far from the first or last one I'll ever receive.'
The pauper prince said, 'How many more will you take for me?'
Tseng buttoned his blazer and said, 'How many more can you give, from now until the day you finally, truly die?'
For bright light, they said, you had to burn a candle at both ends.
The first scar that Tseng took and pasted onto himself was more given to him than received. When he was sixteen, he frustrated Veld to the point of action.
'Sometimes,' Tseng's mentor told him, 'you care so much for this job I wonder if it's my fault for somehow brainwashing you, or if it's something to do with your heritage and the way you can't see the difference between the Plate and the sky.'
'Are you,' Tseng asked, with a hesitance that he'd learn to forever forget later in his life, 'angry because I express loyalty to the Turks and to you?'
Veld tucked his hands into the pockets of his pants, looking out over the gleam of the city. Shinra Tower's windows were reinforced glass even this high up; it protected the keepers from the zoo below. 'What do you think? If you're asking me what I think, I think you want too badly to believe in Shinra because you don't have any reason for stepping out of the shadow of Wutai.'
Tseng looked determinedly West. 'My blood doesn't make me. Especially not when this is the city I grew up in.'
'Understandable. You want to bleed for Midgar. Shinra built it, and you're here with us, part of the hammer and the sickle ready to beat down and cut short anything that gets in the way.'
'Yes,' Tseng said.
'We'll do anything, Tseng,' Veld said, voice quiet in the room. 'We'll do everything to anyone.'
'I know,' Tseng said, he who had and would kill and kill again, eighteen years old and unable to blink for mercy's sake at the people he'd put down, because he lived in a city filled with so much smog that Shinra was a name worth worshipping, never mind the Heideggers and Palmers and Scarlets that they stocked their world with.
Veld was silent for a while, and then he took out his gun and tapped Tseng on the shoulder with it. 'Tseng,' he said, levelling the weapon at Tseng's right shoulder. 'Do you think I'll pull the trigger?'
Tseng narrowed his eyes at him. 'No.'
Veld gestured at the younger man. 'Not even going to reach for your own?'
'What for?' Tseng asked. 'At this range, you'd have me through the heart before my hand made it under my lapels.'
'Fair point,' Veld agreed. 'But you don't think I'm going to shoot.'
'No,' Tseng said, 'I don't think you're going to shoot.'
'Why not?' Veld asked.
'Does it count as a shot if it's done for the sake of a lesson?' Tseng said.
'Let's find out,' Veld replied, and shot Tseng through the left arm. The force at that range drove a solid bullet in through flesh and left Wutainese blood over Shinra glass as Tseng stumbled backwards, eyes dilated.
'It's odd that people never think about how much healing hurts,' Veld commented as he holstered his gun and reached for a set of materia. He watched Tseng clutch at his arm, the man's breath shallow and eyes burning with questions and also answers that Veld knew Tseng didn't want to believe. Veld slipped on a bracer. He ripped the shoulder seam of Tseng's jacket open, ignoring the pained grunt from the younger man, and then he placed his fingers on either end of the entry wound. 'How many times have you taken a cure this soon after a hit?'
'Never,' Tseng ground out, his jaw clenched.
Veld nodded. 'Fresh wounds, if healed too fast, scar,' he said. 'It's not right for me to do this to you, but, like the rest of Shinra, how much can a man like me care about right or wrong when it comes to the things he thinks he helped build?'
The rush of the power of the materia ran through Tseng like molten lead. He might have let out a short yell; he couldn't tell for cracking his head against the window, his fingers as they scrabbled caught only slippery glass. The wound on his shoulder closed, the first scar lines now beginning to echo Shinra's old urban legends.
'Do you think you'll pull the trigger?' Veld asked Tseng, a lifetime later when they met at opposite ends of a bullet. 'Considering how long Shinra's had that notice out for me, it's in your better interests to do it.'
A notice out because Veld had ran, away from his directorship, away from politics, old monarchy and young megalomania. Ran from the Turks he'd made his own to be with a daughter he hadn't seen for as many years as Tseng'd been alive. Ran to be a father to a girl with no marks and his own blood. Old man Shinra'd sent the Turks after him as easily as he'd sent Rufus to Junon.
'Maybe,' Tseng told his old mentor, keeping his aim straight. 'Are you really doing this for family?'
'For both of them, yes,' Veld told him. 'You can chalk it up to old age catching up with me. I need a breath of fresh air. New material. I want to bring someone up instead of building someone. If you pull the trigger and do your job and get promoted, maybe in a few years you'll figure out if it's natural for old, dead Turks to do stupid, futile things.'
Tseng's lips twitched, maybe with regret, maybe with agreement. 'Do you want me to let you know?'
'Are you going to shoot me?'
Tseng, standing there with pre-signed documents in his pocket from Vice-President Rufus Shinra declaring and confirming Veld's death, said, 'Let's find out.'
When Rufus Shinra inherited the earth, the only question he ever asked was a question he asked Tseng, and the question was, 'Is it better to be loved, or to be feared?'
Tseng, who had not seen Veld for three years because of the man, the boy, the prince who'd bought him to be his sword-arm, told Rufus, voice flat, 'Which one do you think you already are? Loved, or feared?'
There were a number of ways to stay clinically sane on the job. Dissociation was not the best of the limited options; dissociation being another term for denial. There were a number of things you had to accept about yourself. A number of things that you had to come to realise were now - and forever - relative.
He pulled the safety back on his gun, the muted click a sound and a trigger. His hand shook and slipped. But the job was done; a tick of the minute hand on the clock, tick tick click.
The image in his mind of Midgar rearing up above and beyond him, the city that spat him out. But Midgar was a million miles away now; his intestines spilled out like an umbilical cord trying to connect him to her.
There were two ways to send yourself to the padded cell: care too little, or care too much. Dissociation meant not caring what happened to the souls a thousand feet below when you dropped four metric tonnes of concrete on top of them and watched as it all fell down. Association meant visualising the crunch of bone and the slick saltiness of jelly-ooze, brains and hearts and lungs all suffocating and pierced by concrete, metal and glass.
Association was better.
Tseng knew the smell of blood, intimately. The smell of his own, as well, though not so well in recent years. It was all over him now, drying out on his sleeves and keeping his jacket damp. He brushed his fingers over his cuffs. Getting cold.
He let his head rest against the Temple walls, sitting there bleeding like a corpse all over the floor. The gash in his stomach so large he couldn't care to trace it, the world so remote and kaleidoscopic that he didn't bother to focus. His gun the only real, solid thing in his universe, the Planet one huge monument to failure of human arrogance.
If he were to dissociate now, this would be how he'd do it. Thoroughly, removing the compartmentalised parts and reassembling. Rufus Shinra, aged too young, sending them on errand to save the world, and himself, through fear. Sephiroth, driven to this by too many years of use. A bad tool, to break and go insane. The battle of Mako versus blood was an old war. Blood always lost. Hojo had tried, multiple times, to tell Tseng that, eventually, effort would cede to engineering. That was dissociation. Acknowledgement of error, and acceptance of fate, which said that he was going to cleave to haemoglobin loss, almost thirty and therefore a Turk too old. Him a pawn, playing the game for kings. Even amateur players knew what pawns were for. Dissociation said, players send pawns to die.
Association was better.
Noisy thoughts, yes, but a move for recognition was a move to care. When you began to feel the neat barriers of your mind crumble under the pressure screaming need for air, need for meaning, need for resolution, that was when you dropped the pretence that the mind could reign victorious. When the partitions rend, you followed your heart, because you believed it still capable of beating. In spite of the temper of masamune searing an open line of agony in you, shoving cloth and fabric in through delicate organs. Tseng sat there, thinking about the rupturing of vessels, the tangle of organ over organ, muscle he'd worked years to develop ripped, ligaments snapping like string.
The trigger was always the hardest part, slick and confusing when you couldn't feel the tips of the pads of your fingers. Tseng looked down at his weapon, one goddamned envelope of firepower and potential energy against the wrath of nature.
Dying, to Tseng, was a job best done neatly.
The way they'd done it in the past was one through the head. Sometimes people did it to themselves, but most of the time it was him, or Veld, going after the one or the other who couldn't take how far back you had to pull to break free of guilt, or how deep in you had to go to make what Turks did feel right. A good way to die.
Tseng put his left hand on his abdomen and let his fingernail dig into the very edge of the wound. The pain flared like a nova, going up his spine, electric through a body ready to die and just enough to push adrenaline right out through his glands, just enough to have him wrench his eyes open and look at the gun, look at it, look at it in his hands, vomit up from the back of his throat a coarse laugh, and throw the motherfucking thing away into the dirt, bang bang bang.
Tseng was told, upon opening his eyes, 'Do not do that again.' There was no time to gather his wits, but how much could anyone gather in a world gone insane?
It was Rufus at the side of the bed, present even though Tseng was more than vaguely sure that his empire was still falling apart about him. Tseng did not bother to try to speak; forcing his eyes open took enough out of him.
Rufus uncrossed his legs and said, 'The Planet is producing an environmental reaction. Unique. Insofar as I know, there has never been a case of geological constructs rising from the ocean bed. One's headed this way. We're attempting to charge the Junon canon.'
That made Tseng crack a smile. His voice was destroyed, but his words were recognisable when he said, 'What are you doing here at the end of the world, Rufus?'
That made Rufus stand. 'I was waiting for my time,' he replied, brushing his sleeves straight. From his pockets he produced a piece of paper, which he tossed onto Tseng's bound chest. When Tseng raised an eyebrow, Rufus said, 'You haven't seen him for half a decade, but I doubt Veld's ever forgotten a face.'
Tseng closed his eyes. 'The same way you've never forgiven a grudge?'
'Things change,' Rufus Shinra said, and walked out of the room to face his destiny.
Tseng was not there the day that Rufus Shinra stared into the bright light of his world burning down, but Tseng was there the day that Rufus Shinra woke to make a new one.