( 1. )

Rufus doesn't belong down here; he never has. It's hard to disguise glory, but Rufus is trying: the man at Tseng's side is as far from the Rufus Shinra the denizens of the slums will have seen on news reports and in the papers as he could get. Instead of neatly-pressed bespoke white linen suits, he's wearing a pair of jeans (Tseng recognizes them from Rufus's high school rebellion days; they've deteriorated even more since then) that are soft and worn to shreds and missing one knee and half a back pocket, and an equally-soft and equally-worn grey t-shirt that reads "Property of Midgar U Athletic Department" in chipped and peeling letters. (Rufus has never attended classes at Midgar U, much less played for one of their athletic teams; Tseng wonders which of his regular lovers he stole the shirt from, as Tseng can think of several who did.) Over it all is an oversized black leather biker jacket designed to conceal both the bulk and stretch of Rufus's shoulders and the weaponry Rufus no doubt has stashed everywhere. (He wouldn't be the man Tseng trained if he hadn't.) Instead of the weekday-and-public-appearances take-me-seriously severity of hair gelled back until not even a strand can escape, it's the flyaway freedom of weekends when Rufus doesn't bother with product, his hair curling lightly into his eyes and being blinked or tossed away. He's even taken the time to re-open the sporadically-appearing and paternally-disapproved-of piercing in his left lobe, and fitted a battered and tarnished silver hoop into it. (Tseng would eat his sidearm if the ring weren't deliberately cosmetically-aged niobium or platinum, not silver or brass. He of all people knows how sensitive Rufus's skin truly is.)

He looks nothing like any of the people around them on the train.

Oh, he's trying. Tseng did well with him; Rufus stood quietly at Tseng's side as they swiped their ID cards through the turnstile at the station in the basement of North One, his eyes roaming over the crowd of people in the late-evening rush. (Early evening is for executives and other high-powered employees. Late evening is for the young ones, the hungry ones, the ones who dream themselves into a windowed office in ten years, five years, three years.) Tseng could see the moment, as they moved past the crowd and slid onto the platform for the circumplate train, where Rufus picked his mark (babyfaced, innocent, wearing mismatched frayed pants and jacket and a tie that looked at least thirty years old, and if Tseng had to guess he could write the kid's life story in three sentences or less). A pause, a breath, and Rufus's body language had changed, became a mirror of nerves and exhaustion and oh Ramuh Mom is going to kill me if I'm late because I stayed to work out after my day ended. A few stops and they were arriving at University Plaza, and Rufus transfered his template to one of the engineering students who climbed aboard and took a textbook out of his backpack to lose himself in it as the train wended its way downward: a little bit of boredom, a little bit of abstraction, a little bit of this paper's going to take me all weekend so I'm going to have to start it the minute I get home. Nobody looks twice at him: he blends. It's good work. It always has been.

There's still no disguising Rufus. There never has been. No matter that Tseng and the boys have trained him into the skills of the somatic chameleon, no matter that his clothing is perfect for his environment (and it isn't a costume -- costumes sit wrong on bodies unaccustomed to their weight; it's the easiest tell in the world to someone who knows what they're looking for -- but Rufus's own wardrobe, worn smooth on his body over years and outings), no matter that he's perfected the lean in and lean away from Tseng, sitting next to him, that a younger, weaker man would have for his older mentor who's a little dangerous (there's no disguising Tseng's wariness and Tseng never tries) and more than a little bit a lover. There's still something sleeping under Rufus's skin that cries out at subterfuge, that shouts of his power and control and deadly grace, that says you. I own you. I own this. No matter how hard Rufus works to disguise it.

He's lucky that Tseng is one of the only people who can see it. (Or maybe Rufus saves it for him to begin with.)

Off the train at Lower Seven, through the stinking slum streets, and Rufus's eyes never stop moving through the crowds, seeking out threat and danger, his lone tell and one Tseng and the Turks never tried to train out of him. Tseng can tell the minute Rufus notices the quiet mugging in the alley they go past (only about fifteen seconds later than Tseng himself does): his shoulders go taut for half a heartbeat, tight and dangerous, before Rufus breathes out and makes himself relax without so much as twitching his hand towards one of his pieces. Tseng's proud of him. He's explained to Rufus, time and again, that the rules are different in the slums; when Rufus finally wore him down enough to agree to this outing (when the time came right for Tseng to advance his plan), he'd placed anonymity as the only condition. The last thing they need is for Rufus to go swooping in like an avenging angel. There's no doubt he'd win any altercation, but winning draws attention and weapons hold a different meaning down here where Shinra's reach doesn't extend as far as Rufus and his father like to think it does.

(Rufus's father, really. Rufus doesn't hold many illusions about the realities of life in Midgar anymore. The so-very-few his father had left him after childhood had fallen before Tseng's teachings in adolescence. But there's knowing and then there's knowing, and as far as Tseng knows -- and Tseng knows everything, including the things Rufus doesn't want him to -- this is the first time Rufus has ever been down in the slums to see things for his own self.)

"Good work," Tseng says in a low voice, tossing Rufus a look out of the corner of his eye. He can see the quiver of overtrained muscles twitching to fire and being held back by nothing more than strength of will, but he knows he's probably the only one who can.

Rufus gives him a look, one of those you may be my teacher but I still own you looks, the kind that -- when they're Upstairs, when they're alone -- make Tseng roll over and show his fuzzy underbelly. They aren't Upstairs, and they aren't alone. Tseng's on the clock, and his job right now is to make sure that Rufus Shinra gets through this little life lesson undisturbed. He knows Rufus can see the implacability in his face as he stares back at Rufus; Rufus's eyebrows go up and his mouth quirks, once, before he remembers himself and shifts back into his innocent-student seeming.

But that doesn't mean he forgets. "How often does that happen down here?"

It isn't that Rufus is ignorant of what goes on in the slums. He receives the reports from ExSec and SOLDIER (and the ones he doesn't receive, he pilfers from the mainframe later); he listens to Tseng and Reno and Rude while they discuss and debate the best way to handle the anti-Shinra rebels and the slums' drug problem and the Shinra-issue arms that keep hitting the streets from locked and coded army warehouses and that IntSec can't seem to trace. For a man who was raised in the rarefied heights of Upper Central and the high-end boarding schools of Junon built for the sons and daughters of important men, Rufus is shockingly aware of the way life is lived in the strata below him. (Which is to say: not much, but more than any of the rest of them.) But this is the first time he's been here to see it with his own eyes, and Rufus is a man who above all else doesn't trust the perceptions of others.

Now isn't the time for the lesson, though. "Often," Tseng says shortly. "But: later. Just watch, for now." It's a rebuke, for all it's delivered in as gentle a tone as he can conjure, and Rufus's shoulders jerk once before he falls silent. Tseng can feel Rufus's eyes on him for a few more seconds before Rufus goes back to sweeping the streets. He doesn't want to influence Rufus's observations with his own conclusions; he wants to see what Rufus will come up with on his own.

A few more blocks, bathed in bad neon and deep-set grunge, past the people who are living and working and starving and trying to get by the best they can, past the people who are preying on the weak to avoid becoming them, and Tseng is watching for the moment of realization in Rufus's eyes but that doesn't make it any less sweetly vindicating when he sees it. "Wait a second," Rufus says, craning his head behind him, eyes narrowing as he tries to make out the invisible boundary line they've stepped over. "Something's different. We just --"

Tseng smiles at him. No matter how often Rufus does something like this, some feat of observation and knowledge that redeems the decade and more Tseng's been training him, it never gets old to see. "We just crossed over into the territory that belongs to the place we're heading," Tseng tells him, in his very best inscrutable voice. He knows Rufus will hear it as the only answer he'll get. Sure enough, Rufus quiets down, but he doesn't stop watching and he doesn't stop thinking, and it's a delight to watch.

The Seventh Heaven sits at the center of a five-block radius of truce. Everyone down here knows Tifa has claimed these streets, has decreed her customers will be safe and her neighbors will be undisturbed, and if there's something incongruous in a girl barely out of her teens dictating terms to the denizens of the slums, well, that incongruity goes away the first time an observer sees Tifa dislocate the kneecaps of someone who's failed to honor the truce and leaves him for the predators that walk on two legs to find. It makes the streets feel lighter, the air seem sweeter, as though the knowledge of safety writes deeply into the space around them. Tseng isn't surprised Rufus sees it, but he is surprised to watch Rufus's eyes narrow, his head turn, until he points unerringly at the unmarked building they're heading to.

"There," Rufus says. "...A bar?"

"The bar," Tseng says. The front door's closed against the early-spring chill, but there are a few patrons nursing drinks out on the pockmarked porch built of recycled wood that Kyle, the bar's previous owner -- a retired Shinra facilities manager -- had hauled in from Outside at great expense. ("A bar floor's supposed to be made of wood and sawdust," Tseng remembers him saying, the few times he'd been teased about the effort he'd gone through.) "Welcome to the Seventh Heaven."

"Mmm," Rufus says. "Bit far to go for a drink."

Tseng looks over to him and sees Rufus smirking back. It's Rufus's I know you aren't telling me something and I'm waiting to find out what it is smirk -- Tseng knows it well -- and he has to laugh again. "There's someone I want you to meet," he says.

"One of your informants?"

"Mmm," Tseng echoes back, in his best noncommittal tone. "You'll see."

The door opens to heat and noise, the smell of spilled beer and too many bodies in too small a space, and the floor is sticky underneath Tseng's boot-heels, the same way it is no matter how much Tifa scrubs it, as though years of alcohol and grunge have changed the very molecular composition of the wood. The first few times Tseng came down here, the entire room would quiet as heads turned and people shifted, ready to flee at the sight of one of Shinra's Turks. By now, he and the boys visit often enough, have established themselves as willing to obey the Truce of the Watering Hole, that only a few people notice: a few conversations still, a few piles of gil are swept off tables and into waiting pockets, and one or two no-doubt-wanted men turn their faces politely away so Tseng won't be forced to take notice of them. (In exchange for their courtesy, Tseng never takes notice of them, until he has to, until circumstances force his hand. And never here. Elsewhere in the slums, where the truce doesn't apply.)

Beside him, Rufus breathes in, once, and falls silent. Tseng knows he can see all the small tells that label this a gathering spot for both sides of Midgar's eternal class struggle, knows he recognizes the few Shinra middle-managers scattered throughout the crowd by body language if not by personal acquaintance and can guess at the few who make the struggle against Shinra's dictates their vocation or avocation. His discipline holds, though, and he turns his head quickly, letting his hair fall into his eyes and hunching his shoulders uncomfortably in the body language of someone trying to make himself smaller than he truly is in the face of attention, and that's enough unlike Rufus Shinra that the few in the bar who could be expected to recognize him turn back to their drinks in dismissal.

Tseng is powerfully possessed of the urge to ruffle that hair, here and now where Rufus couldn't object or fight back without blowing their cover. He resists. Manfully.

"Come on," he says instead, and starts picking his way through the close-packed tables to the one that's always his or theirs when they visit: in the back corner, a stone's throw from cover behind the bar should it become necessary, the one table with perfect sight-lines on the entire room and all the entrances and exits. (Not to mention only a few steps away from refills on the drinks.) It's occupied, but that doesn't matter much; the occupants take one look at him bearing down on them, grab their drinks, mutter an apology, and move. He leaves the seat with the best sightlines for Rufus -- the point is for Rufus to watch everything, after all -- and takes the second-best for himself. He knows he doesn't have to be on high alert in here, simply the level of alertness he always carries, even in places of sanctuary; Rufus doesn't know enough yet to say that much.

Just as they're sitting, the swinging doors to the kitchen open on the other side of the bar and Tifa comes through, trays piled high with plates perched on each hand, hip-checking the doors out of the way as she maneuvers. Tseng can see Rufus starting at the movement, can see the instant Rufus notices the way her eyes scan the crowd -- flick, flick -- with the swift and practiced evaluation of someone who's used to being on guard even on home ground. Rufus's eyes narrow, and he lets his own gaze rove over Tifa -- up, down, taking in everything from her sensible shoes to the miniskirt she's wearing to the high-cut but midriff-baring top that's somehow even more revealing than a plunging neckline would be. (Tseng knows precisely why she won't wear low-cut tops. He's one of the few men living who does.) Everything about Tifa, Tseng knows, is calculated to make men underestimate her. He's immensely proud to see that Rufus's eyes stay narrowed, his face thoughtful, long after most men would dismiss her as harmless.

Tseng knows Tifa spotted them the minute she re-entered the room, but she delivers the snacks and drinks with the thoughtlessly optimized trajectory of the career waitress, managing to circle the room only once, without doubling back, in order to finish emptying the trays she carries. She drops the empty trays on the bar, then swerves to arrive at their table. She leans down to kiss Tseng lightly as she does, and Tseng can feel Rufus's shock -- quickly controlled -- at that, even as Tseng slides his arm around Tifa's waist and tugs her towards his lap. She resists, as she always does. "Oh, no you don't," she says, laughing. (Tseng loves her laugh.) "If I sit down, I'm never getting up again. And we're shorthanded tonight."

He watches her eyes flick over to Rufus, watches her add things up, watches her make (the correct) conclusions and watches her resolve she will not say a word until either of them do. It's as subtle as a heartbeat, and he's pretty sure Rufus missed it. "I should have brought Reno," Tseng says. "Or is he still barred from bartending after the everclear incident?"

Tifa laughs again, bright and free and glorious. "Reno is barred from bartending for the rest of his natural life. Or until it's a really busy night, whichever comes first. Seriously, though, it's a madhouse tonight and we haven't even hit dinner rush, and it's just me on bar, running, bussing, and bouncing, with Biggs in the kitchen on grill and dishes. It's been pull-your-own-pint for the last half hour and I've penciled in breathing for one AM or so."

Tseng tugs on her braid until she gets the hint and leans down for another kiss. (She's short enough, and he tall enough, that he can almost kiss her while sitting without her having to lean; she gets grumpy when he does, though, and he's smarter than to get her annoyed at him.) This one's a little more passionate, a little less of a peck. He loves kissing Tifa -- he always loves kissing Tifa -- but his true purpose was to get her to lean in close enough for him to speak softly in her ear, which he does just before she starts to pull away. He uses his native language; he always does when he has something to tell her that he doesn't want overheard. "We'll wait until after closing. I brought someone for you to meet."

"I noticed, you idiot," she says, matching language to language -- her accent still execrable and her aspect of speaking still much like a (male) gutter punk, but he's starting to find it cute by now. Her voice is just as low and more than a little bit peeved, pitched to be swallowed up in the general noise of merrymaking before anyone -- before Rufus -- can overhear and wonder why they've switched languges, before she or he has to explain it away as lover's secrets. Then she's pulling back, her smile fixed back into place as though it never left. "Your usual, I'm assuming," she says, then transfers her attention to Rufus. "What can I get for you?"

"Whiskey, two fingers, neat, best bottle you've got," Rufus says. "With a pint of whatever ale you've got on tap as a chaser." He's doing a damn good impression of someone who's just along for the ride, but there's always a note that creeps into his voice when he's giving orders, the one Tseng privately thinks of as his Brat Prince tone. Rufus must hear the command in his own voice, or sense Tseng's sudden disapproal, because he smiles, then, and it's Rufus's heartstoppingly beautiful smile, the one that can disarm any conflict before it even starts. "Please. And I don't mind waiting, or doing it myself if you just point me in the right direction."

That earns him one of Tifa's looks, the penetrating and assessing one that so unnerved Tseng the first time he was on the receiving end, the one that first convinced him Tifa was far more than she appeared or projected. Then Tifa smiles back at Rufus, and Tseng knows it for her let's-be-friends smile. (The one whose subtext is: let's be friends, because I don't want to have to fight you.) "It's okay," she says. "I keep his sake in the back on the special shelf anyway, and I have to warm it. I'll just grab your drinks on the swing-back. You can grab one of those trays and do a bussing run, though, if you really want to help. After you finish your drinks, of course." She runs a hand over Tseng's hair, her touch quick and gentle, then reaches over to remove his hand from her hip and turns away to get back to work. "I'm Tifa, by the way," she says, over her shoulder, before ducking under the pass-through to the bar. She doesn't wait to hear Rufus's response.

Rufus watches her as she goes, observing the swing of her waist and hips and the easy way she moves, the balance of her weight through the hips and thighs and the way she places her feet when she walks, the ball of her foot coming down before the heel does. Then he transfers his attention back to Tseng. "She moves like you do," he says. Tseng knows what he means: the leashed, easy grace of the Wutaian martial artist that he's never been able to shed (and never really tried). Tifa's version of it is a bit less perfect, a bit more improvised -- just as innate, just as powerful, but further away from the classical forms, more personal and syncretic than Tseng's own form, which was trained into him beginning before he could walk. But it's the same framework, underneath.

"Point to you," Tseng says, far more amused than he'd expected to be. He holds his tongue further, waiting to see what else Rufus will say.

Rufus sits back in his chair, drapes one arm over the back and studies the room from under lowered lashes. "So. Girlfriend, not informant." There's amusement, not jealousy, in his tone. Tseng hadn't thought there would be otherwise, but he's still glad to hear it. They've been lovers, or whatever it is that they are to each other, for years: since the summer of Rufus's sixteenth year when Rufus had shown up in the living room of Tseng's on-site apartment, the night before Rufus was scheduled to head back to school for his senior year, and smiled that smile before calmly taking Tseng apart with hands and mouth and obliterating any potential guilt Tseng might have had about the age difference between them, about the fact that Tseng had been near-raising him for years, before it could even take hold. In the time since, Rufus has had more lovers than Tseng could count -- for profit, for information, for affection, for fun -- and even Tseng has taken one or two, here and there, but they always come back to each other sooner or later.

Tseng lifts a hand, palm down, and rocks it back and forth. "Eh. Maybe so, maybe no. Something like, at least." He doesn't volunteer any more information -- what he and Tifa have between them is only Rufus's business if Rufus makes it be, and only if Rufus picks the right choices in this course of this particular evening. He's Rufus's man, through and through, and he always will be. But what he's doing here, in the slums and with Tifa, can serve Rufus just as well even if Rufus doesn't know the details. He's entitled to a personal life, after all.

"Hm." Rufus's eyes narrow, and he falls silent again. Tseng waits, patiently, his eyes held on Rufus's face. Rufus must take that as a subconscious cue that the room is safe, or safe enough; he lets his eyes linger on Tseng for longer than he would, otherwise, when in hostile territory. Then he looks back over to Tifa just as she disappears into the back again, pursing his lips, and this time his look is far more piercing.

He's nearly got it, Tseng thinks. If he gives Rufus a bit more time, if the right things happen in the bar tonight for Rufus to see, he'll have it figured out -- as much as Tseng's willing to let him see, at least -- by the time Tifa closes up for the night.

Whatever Rufus was going to say -- if Rufus was going to say anything -- is forestalled by Tifa returning, tray in hand. She props it against one hip and begins unloading it: the sake bottle and the tiny ceramic cup in front of Tseng, with a pint of Pilsner to go with it; Rufus's whiskey (Tseng is fairly certain Rufus is steeling himself to drink rotgut, and looks forward to the moment when he realizes it's the same vintage that lives on the sideboard in Rufus's office) and ale go in front of him. Rufus is studying Tifa with a care and depth Tseng is glad to see: it means Rufus is thinking. Rufus is always thinking, but Tseng only knows what Rufus is thinking about half the time, and if Rufus has gone this long without saying anything it means there's a good chance Rufus might be thinking in the directions Tseng needs him to be.

"There you go, gentlemen," Tifa says, brightly. "Tseng, is this coming out of your credit, or are you settling up with me at the end of the night?"

"On me," Rufus says, before Tseng can say anything. It's not what Tseng would have liked for him to say; Tifa's happy-go-lucky cover slips for a minute, cracking and falling away to reveal the steel beneath it as she glances at him. Rufus doesn't move to see it, not even to lift an eyebrow, and Tseng can see Tifa's relief as she summons her mask and presses it back into place, thinking Rufus didn't see. Tseng knows better. Rufus is just better at covering up his reactions than she is. He'd been trained in a far harsher school than she.

"Sounds good to me," she says, and her voice is back to being cheerful. "You're new, so you don't know the deal -- you don't have to help, it's totally optional, but if you do decide to help out, it's one free drink for every hour of work you put in, plus one alcoholic drink while you're working and unlimited soft drinks and water. You have to be sober enough to hit the floor with your hat, or rather, sober enough to not hit the floor with my glassware, while you're working, and Ramuh help you if you fuck with my customers or start anything while you're behind the bar. Any tips you get handed are yours to keep; if I catch you skimming the cashbox or shorting the tickets, you're a dead man. And I will catch you."

She smiles, slow and feral, and Tseng sees the instant where Rufus realizes it isn't hyperbole: shock flashes through his eyes, then deepens to a slow, dawning respect. (He knows Rufus hasn't yet figured out that she knows who he is; he knows Tifa's figured it out, and he's struck, once again, by the fact that his girlfriend-lover-whatever has balls of hammered steel to be delivering this speech, to this man. But Tseng brought Rufus here undercover, without warning her, and that means she's treating him like she would treat any other newcomer brought in by a trusted customer -- probably more so, just to get a bit of revenge on Tseng for failing to warn her in the first place that he was bringing Rufus J. Shinra into her bar on a night like this.)

Then she turns to Tseng. "You, I'll order around with impunity. If you two aren't in the middle of something, I need someone on bar for an hour so I can take the grill and Biggs can catch up on dishes, or else everyone will be eating off trays and tabletops and drinking out of their shoes in another twenty minutes or so. I can give you ten minutes or so to finish off the sake before it gets cold, but after that, hop to. I really don't want to put Dai on bar again."

Tseng winces. "Ah, yes. I remember the last time just as well as you do." He pours his own cup of sake -- the drinking habits of home were the first to go, back when he realized no one here knew them -- and toasts the space precisely between her and Rufus. "Kanpai," he says, and adds, still in Wutaian, "Go easy on him. He's delicate." Then he downs the cup.

Tifa snorts, as he meant for her to do. Rufus looks between them, his face calm but curious; he has asked Tseng multiple times to teach him Wutaian, and Tseng has refused each time. (It's always good to have a language that one's employer-and-sworn-lord can't understand one in. For swearing and backtalk, even if nothing more, even if Tseng has long since discarded the laws of his former home that would preclude the teaching.) She doesn't respond, though -- wanting to keep her understanding secret, of course, for she could have been laughing at Tseng's behavior just as easily as what he said -- and only adds, "Cheers, gentlemen," before turning again and heading back behind the bar to deal with the slowly-growing field of customers wanting drinks.

"This is a test, isn't it," Rufus says quietly, leaning in so that his voice won't carry past him to the other tables around them. "There's something here I'm supposed to figure out, or do, or not do, and you've brought me here so you can see if I will. Or won't."

"Everything's a test," Tseng agrees, lightly, refilling his cup and downing it just as fast. (He wouldn't drink whiskey so quickly, but he grew up on sake, like mother's milk, and the fact that Kyle -- and now Tifa -- was willing to import it from Wutai, at great expense, was no small factor in his initial selection of the Seventh Heaven as one of his drinking establishments of choice. That had been before there had been other factors to keep him here, of course.) Across the table from him, Rufus takes his first sip of his own whiskey, makes a face before it even hits his tastebuds, then doubletakes and stares at his glass. Tseng hides the smile. "But: yes. You're right. It is. Final exam, really."

Rufus raises an eyebrow. "For?"

"For the class I've been teaching you for, what, the past thirteen years now," Tseng says. "Don't worry; you're doing fine so far." He sets the ceramic cup atop the sake carafe, where it will help to keep the drink warm, and puts his hands on the table to push his chair back. "And if you'll excuse me, you heard the lady; I'm wanted behind the bar. Enjoy yourself while I'm busy; the pool table in particular is often staffed by excellent opponents, and the permanent poker game in the side room is usually looking for additional players."

He can feel Rufus's eyes on his back as he turns, picking up his drinks to bring with him, and makes his way to the pass-through at the side of the bar, then ducks under it and picks up a bar-towel that he immediately twists up to flick Tifa (who's facing away from him, reaching for something in the depths of the corner chest freezer) on the ass with. She hisses at him and whirls around, hands coming up in the third defense position before falling when she sees it's him. She knew it was him from the moment he ducked the pass, he knows; she always knows when someone enters her field of presence. It's one of the first lessons of the fighting arts. He also knows she'd be perfectly capable of stifling the automatic response to a perceived attack while she's here on her own turf. Which means that her response is a test, or perhaps a show, for Rufus's benefit -- that she wants Rufus to see that she knows the fighting arts, that she wants him to see how good she truly is at them. He wonders what's going on inside that brilliant mind of hers.

Perhaps he should have warned her ahead of time after all. (But it's more fun this way, and Rufus's honest reactions aren't the only ones he's testing here tonight.)

"I'm going to kill you and hide the body," Tifa says, through gritted teeth that pass for a smile if anyone isn't looking too closely. She turns back and grabs the extra bag of ice she'd been seeking, hauling it up and onto the bar like it weighs nothing instead of the thirty pounds he knows it does. Tseng takes a moment to watch the beauty of her muscles rippling beneath her skin; this might be a serious moment, the end stages of a multiplayer game of go he's been working on for months if not years, but the day he can't take a moment in the middle of his scheming to admire Tifa's quite-frankly-excellent body is the day they light his funeral pyre. She switches to Wutaian, mindful of the sea of people waiting (patiently enough; Tifa's customers are fairly understanding of minor delays and willing to cut Tifa a great deal of slack) on the other side of the bar: "Whatever you're up to, you had to pick a Friday night for it?"

Tseng slings the bar towel over his shoulder and turns on the sink to wash his hands. "Necessity, this one fears, due to the schedule of the one this one brought with him. And yet, perhaps, a miscalculation. This one offers his humblest and most sincere abject apology." She isn't really upset -- he knows her moods well enough to know that she's mildly peeved at most -- but a little bit of groveling never hurt anybody.

His ascent into the most formal, most humble register -- used only for those of a station so high above the speaker as to be nearly godly -- makes her roll her eyes, the same way it always does. She learned the language from an outsider, the same man who taught her the fighting arts -- the man who should not have known either, and Tseng is still curious as to how he did -- and not from a native speaker; it still shows in the fact that the only register in which she speaks is the one said outsider learned himself, the coarse and low-class speech of the dock worker. When Tseng slips into the mode of speaking of his birth, it always makes her think he's teasing her, even when he doesn't intend to. "Yeah, yeah," she says, back in Midgar's common language again. "Let me finish pulling the orders I already took, then you can take over here while I go on dish-and-glass patrol. I've been working from the left side of the line, if you want to grab the right." She adds, then, her tone just as brisk and no-nonsense for any listener to hear despite the contents of her words: "You're lucky I still love you, even if you're a pain in my fucking ass."

"My charm and sterling wit," he says, dryly. It earns him a punch in the arm, but he was expecting that, and she generally doesn't punch too hard, unless she's far more peeved with him than she is right now.

Once finished drying his hands and stowing the bar-towel back over his shoulder, Tseng starts in on taking orders where Tifa had indicated. He always gets a secret, amused kick out of doing this: there's something about the head of the Turks, feared and respected, slaving behind a bar that never fails to appeal to his sense of universal irony. The first few times he'd taken a bartender's station, half the customers had decided it was time to suddenly dry out lest he poison them right before their eyes, but by now it's just as unremarkable as his presence in the bar itself.

Handing the taps to a regular customer for emergency help during rush time, or when the bar is short-handed, was a custom Kyle started, back in the days when he'd worked with half the people who tended to come in and was neighbors with the other half. Tifa had kept it up over the past two years since assuming sole ownership of the bar due to necessity alone; for all her genial and easygoing nature, she is a boss so demanding as to make Heidegger look sweet, and Tseng has listened to the rant about how impossible it is to find good help that will both live up to her standards and not disappear within a month so many times he could probably deliver it himself.

It's odd, truly odd, how often he has listened to Tifa deliver that rant, and others far more intimate and personal, since the time he'd walked into the Heaven with Reno and Rude and Reeve to discover Kyle had finally hired both the bouncer and extra waitress he'd been thinking of adding, and they were both the same unprepossessing scrap of a girl. ("Bouncer?" Reno had scoffed upon hearing. "Ky, the only things she can bounce are her tits." That had been before the night's attempted robbery, where Tifa had broken both the robber's arms, his nose, and his jaw before frog-marching him out of the bar -- without opening the door first, on the first attempt -- with a form and grace so perfect Tseng's teachers would have wept to see, and Reno's jaw had stayed on the floor for the rest of the evening.)

Tseng had known there was something behind the sweet-faced, heavenly-bodied girl from the beginning, especially when she'd given him that look when she thought he wasn't paying attention to her: she'd moved a bit too carefully, looked at Shinra employees with a bit too much control and avoided them far more than could be explained by random chance, and there had been dark circles under her eyes and Tseng had seen the few moments here and there when she'd had to stop and catch her breath after a bit of physical exertion that shouldn't have bothered someone as fit-looking as she was.

None of it had added up, until the night she'd dropped and broken a tray full of glass on the floor in the midst of an epic bad day and sworn in Wutaian before panicking when he'd heard. He'd dragged her out to the front porch (she looking as though she was on her way to execution the whole way) to interrogate her about where, precisely, she'd learned. (He'd put her fears at ease first thing, of course. By then he'd known she knew the Wutaian fighting arts, and he'd also begun to suspect that she knew enough of Wutaian culture to know that they, and the language, were never taught to nanbanjin: to do so without special dispensation was death for the Wutaian who gave up his Empire's secrets and, often, death for the nanbanjin who learned. But Tseng had not been a loyal son of the Sun Empire for years, marked for death himself should he ever return -- defecting to one's Empire's mortal enemy generally sufficed to get one on one's family's bad side, even were one's family not the Imperial Family itself and one were not second in line to succeed one's father upon his ascension to the heavenly, rather than the celestial, throne -- and he couldn't give a shit about where Tifa learned the skills she'd learned. He just wanted to know.)

When he'd pried the place of her birth out of her, though -- the moment the word "Nibelheim" passed her lips and she'd turned her face away, bringing up one palm to press between her breasts in the same habit he'd seen her exhibit whenever she grew short of breath or pained from a long night's work -- Tseng had realized there was more to her story than even he had suspected. And he'd realized that learning that story, the truth behind that terrible night in that tiny town halfway across the globe, had suddenly become urgent.

She wouldn't tell him more than a few bare words, not then, but they were still more than the official story even the most rarefied echelons of Shinra's people had been fed: Sephiroth came. He went to the reactor, and then spent four days holed up in the mansion outside town, and then he came out from the mansion and set the town on fire and went back to the reactor to ... do something. I don't know what. And I followed him to try to stop him from doing it. It was stupid, and I was an idiot, and I shouldn't be alive right now and I'm not sure how I am.

Tseng hadn't pressed. He'd known, looking at her by the lights of Lower Seven at night -- pale, shaking, clearly terrified and expecting to have the rug of her life yanked out from beneath her feet again, but still holding her chin high and staring him straight in the eye, daring him to do his worst -- that the secrets she held were connected to the secrets Rufus had been seeking since the moment Rufus had heard of Sephiroth's death, and he'd known that getting her to trust him enough to reveal those secrets to him would take months, if not years, of patient outreach.

Birdseed, he'd thought of it. Birdseed, and Tifa was the bird he was trying to coax to his hand, and her secrets the song he was trying to coax from her throat.

He certainly hadn't expected to find himself falling in love with her as he waited.

But she is beautiful and she is kind, generous to a fault, having somehow lived through -- whatever went on in that reactor in the mountains -- and survived to plant her roots somewhere she'd clearly never expected to find herself and not just live but thrive. She is tough without being hard, steel without being rigid, able to stare down men twice her size and more and courageous enough to not back down when Tseng of the Turks made it clear he was ready to take an interest in her story. She is a woman of meiyo, makoto, chūgi, and rei, gi and yū and jin, and one half of Tseng is quietly horrified to find such a perfect example of bushido in a woman's body while the other half is horrified to find that example here in the slums of Midgar, but all of him is stunned at the flawlessness with which she reflects the virtues and code he'd thought he'd left long behind him.

(Not completely. But Rufus is a special case, and always will be.)

Tseng enjoys tending bar, when he gets the chance to do so. He hadn't expected to, but there are many things in his life he hadn't expected. It's an easy physicality, requiring all the attention of hands and eyes and little of the attention of mind and thought: more dance than chore, his painstaking footwork necessary to avoid spills and rough spots in the floor rather than avoid an enemy's sword-strike, his reflexes pressed into service to avoid fumbling and dropping a full pint glass or an empty shot glass rather than to guide a blow or dodge an enemy's strike. Mushin no shin is easy to achieve under such circumstances; watching Tifa behind the bar at full rush is like watching a line of poetry in motion, like watching the wing of a bird in flight, and she has been known to grab him by the collar and drag him into the back room for a quick fuck up against the boxes of supplies the minute the rush calms down, whenever he's the one at the taps. ("Couldn't resist," she'd claimed, tugging her skirt back down after the first time and giving him her tiny pleased smile. "Now go pick up the empties.")

Tonight is no different, no matter who may be watching him. He does not often get the chance for simple pleasures.

He clears the wait at the bar within his first ten minutes of work and starts catching the shouted-out drink orders after that; the woman who steps up to assume the task of ersatz waitress and bar-runner is familiar to him by face only, not by name. He's never asked her name. He doesn't want to know; he knows she's another one of Tifa's little malcontents, and that's all it's wise for him to hold. They work together well enough, though; all of Tifa's ersatz assistants learned quickly enough that he needs neither scraps of paper nor mnemonic to retain the orders as they are shouted to him. He wonders what Rufus is thinking, to watch his red right hand pulling off his tie and tossing his suit jacket negligently over the end of the bar, rolling up his sleeves before turning back to build a whiskey sour with his right hand and pull a pint of stout with his left. He doesn't look up to see, though. Rufus will tell him later, if Rufus wants him to know.

The ebb and flow of traffic at the bar eases eventually; Tseng consults his time-sense and finds an hour and a half has passed while he was submerged in his work. Tifa surfaces from the kitchen a few minutes later, her face flushed from the heat and her hair curling into tiny wisps around her face where it has escaped from its protective braid. She grabs him by the ears and kisses him thoroughly. (It earns them two hoots and a wolf-whistle from their audience, but is otherwise unremarked upon.) "Ten minute break now that we've got it under control," she says, firmly. "Porch. I'm dying back there and I need a breath of fresh air."

Her motives, as always, are never only that which she speaks, but he doesn't doubt the chill of the early spring outside will feel good on her overheated skin. She grabs two bottles of water from the chest refrigerator under the bar (they're both for her, he knows, having made that mistake the first time and never again) and sets off for the front door without waiting to see if he'll follow, armed with an easy smile and a few kind words for everyone she passes.

Tseng takes a moment to let his eyes sweep the room for Rufus; he's been reserving one tiny fraction of his full attention for tracking Rufus's trajectory and knows Rufus to have been holding down the pool table against all comers for the last half an hour. He looks closer now and sees Rufus in the midst of chalking his cue, teeth flashing white in amusement as he laughs at something one of his opponents has just said to him. (Rufus will look easy, relaxed, to any who take the time to study him. Tseng is the only one who knows it for a pose, an act so flawless because it is more than half truth. But no matter how deeply Rufus buries himself in a role, the mind behind that beautiful patrician face is always ticking away, calculating numbers and odds and running costs and benefits against an eternal balance sheet only he can read the tally of.)

Tseng catches Rufus's eye, pantomimes going outside, you stay with nothing more than flick of eyes and twist of mouth, the easy communication they've had for nearly as long as they've known each other. Rufus responds with amusement, assent. Tseng can't see what he's thinking beneath, but that's all right; they're on stage and there'll be time for the debrief later.

Tifa is halfway through her second bottle of water when Tseng slips out onto the porch, her head tilted back and her throat working hungrily as she drinks it down. She is sitting on the railing, her legs twined around two rails -- less to keep her balance on the thin strip of wood, since he knows she's capable of balancing on far worse a perch, and more to dig her aching calves into the edges of the posts for relief -- and her skin is luminous in the late-night shine of neon and chrome reflecting off the plate above in Midgar-below's false-faced substitute of moonlight. As he watches, she lowers the water bottle -- empty -- and wipes her mouth with the back of her hand. Her lips are still shiny, and it becomes a moral imperative to slide between her knees and kiss her.

"I'm still going to kill you," she says when he brings the kiss to a close, resting her forehead against his while her fingertips play with the skin at his throat set free by lack of tie and two buttons loosed. "While you're sleeping. Don't think that an hour and a half of bartending is going to get you out of death by pissy girlfriend."

"I'll start sleeping with a pistol under my pillow," he assures her, dryly. (He already does. She knows it as well as he does.) His hand slides around her waist, teases the cream and alabaster skin he finds at the small of her back. They're nearly of a height when posed like this; it's almost disconcerting. He's used to her barely clearing his collarbone while projecting the presence of a woman twice her size. She traps his hips between her knees and squeezes. "I wouldn't have brought him if I didn't have a good reason."

Tifa sighs, following his language shift with the ease of long practice. "You always have a good reason. That doesn't mean I have to like it. Or agree."

Her words are bloodless, lacking any particular heat. She has never objected to his necessities, any more than he objects to hers. Their relationship started as one of manipulator (him) and manipulated (her), and he'd thought his secret safe until she'd tipped her face back up to him, after the first time he'd kissed her, and said, "Don't treat me like I'm as stupid as the people you usually do this with," before kissing him again. That had been the moment he'd realized she knew what he was doing -- some of it, at least -- and had come to him with her eyes wide open and her own agenda behind them. There isn't full truth between them, but it's the closest Tseng has ever come. (Save for Rufus. But Rufus is always and eternally Tseng's exception. In so much.)

"I have a very good reason," Tseng repeats. He stretches out his hand; it nearly spans her back from side to side, and her skin is warm beneath his palm. "One that, for once, you might even approve of."

Tifa turns her face away from him so that her eyes are in shadow; she bites her lip. "Don't," she says, quietly. "I'll listen, and I'll consider. But don't taunt me. We both know who we are."

Tseng rests his cheek against hers. She smells of cooking and sweat, stale beer and spilled liquor, but underneath it all she always smells a little bit of fresh air and sunshine. Tifa has never belonged here in Midgar's prison of steel. If they were different people, they could conquer a world together, but if they were different people, they wouldn't fit together like this, jagged edges worn smooth against each other by ease and familiarity, each with their own honor and necessity to guide the way. "We always have," he says, into her hair. Truth: they have. Neither of them has ever lied to the other, and the number of things they do not say are legion.

She sighs, low and shifting. Unhappiness and resignation and a cold, clear determination to see this through, however it ends. He would question how she knows, what cues of his have told her that tonight is the night where it all changes, except she's never needed a map to read him; it's at least half of her appeal. "Is this how it ends, then?" she asks, and it's her middle-of-the-night voice, the one he thinks he's the only one who might get to hear.

He steps back, pulling away from her carefully enough as to not disturb her equilibrium, like smoke wisping away to the heavens. She meets his eyes, and hers are fearless. He lifts his hand, resting his fingertips against her lips in the closest thing to a kiss he knows she will accept from him right now. "Never," he says. It's as close to a promise as he can give.

When he slips back into the warmth of the bar, leaving Tifa outside for a few moments of solitude to compose herself, it's to return to the taps and pull himself another pint. They're in the lull between rushes -- the way orders always come in waves no matter what had been one of the more fascinating things he'd realized, and Rude used it as an example in one of his white papers on chaos theory a year or so back -- and so he bows to impulse and curiosity and takes both himself and the pint over to the pool table. Rufus is bending over, mid-shot, and he watches as Rufus carefully lines up himself and the cue on the 6-ball before letting fly.

The shot misses, which Tseng knows was on purpose -- he's seen Rufus make far more complicated shots while six times as drunk as he is right now -- and Rufus's opponent, an actual student from Midgar U that Tseng has played himself more than a few times, laughs and claps him on the shoulder as Rufus grumbles out loud. "Bad luck, man," the kid (A-something -- Adam, Aiden) says, then transfers his attention to Tseng. "Hey, man, you met Rupert? He's a business major over in the b-school, hoping to get a job with Shinra when he graduates. Don't suppose you could give him a hand with that?"

It's only the ease of long practice that lets Tseng keep a straight face. He queries Rufus with his eyes -- Rupert? Really? -- and Rufus flips his hair out of his face with a practiced toss of his head that also has the effect of letting him turn his face to hide the smirk that says whatcha gonna do. "We've met," Tseng says, bone-dry, to the kid. (Arthur. That's it.) To Rufus, he says, "I've got a few minutes at least until the next rush starts up. May I claim next game?"

The kid is the one to answer, even as Rufus's raised eyebrow is asking you really want to do this here? "I have to get back to the paper I'm writing as soon as we wind this one up, so you two can have the table." He gestures to a table nearby, where three open books, a notebook, and a laptop computer worth more than a year's wages for most of the people in this neighborhood are sitting unattended. (The Seventh Heaven is the only place in the slums where it's safe to leave one's drink, much less one's belongings, alone for more than the time it takes to turn your head.) "And, man, I'm really sorry, but --"

Three perfect shots later and Rufus is shaking the kid's hand in congratulations and offering to buy him a beer later. ("Sure, thanks. After I finish the conclusion, though, my prof couldn't follow the last one because I was too drunk to summarize my arguments, which is what happens when you're writing your papers in a bar, right?") Tseng accepts the handoff of the cue stick and waits for Rufus to finish his glad-handing while he racks the balls for the next round. "Rupert, hm?" he says, when Rufus turns back, after checking to make sure they won't be overheard.

Rufus only grins. (Tseng has seen Rufus's relaxed-and-happy grin more times tonight than he has in weeks.) "Rupert Soho is very much looking forward to the chance to interview with Shinra once he gets his degree," he says, equally quietly. "Is there anything I could do to convince you that you should give me a good recommendation, sir?"

It's playful, is what it is, the sound of Rufus's eternal mockery turned inward instead of brought to bear on the world around him -- Rufus views the world, himself included, through a lens of detachment and dispassion and a healthy dose of unearthly irony, and Tseng would feel more guilty about it were it not for the fact that the odd little man-child he'd first met, a dozen and more years ago, had already possessed those qualities in spades after a childhood spent observing the vagaries of others out of nothing more or less than self-defense. It strikes him then, standing there in the Seventh Heaven with a pool cue in his hands and the scent of spilled beer and unwashed clientele in his nostrils, staring at Rufus laughing back at him: the fact that somehow, above all else, Rufus has managed to hold on to the ability to play is perhaps the most perfect miracle he's ever been witness to.

"Your break," he says, his voice rough, and turns away to sip from his pint of beer before his face can give too much away. (He's more than a little fey tonight. Endings and beginnings do that to him; he has thoroughly repudiated so much of his Wutaian heritage, the mysticism inherent in every interaction with the world being one of the first things he jettisoned so long ago, but refusing to acknowledge the universe's personality means nothing when the universe continues to acknowledge you.)

Tifa slips back through the front door, her face once more composed and perfect, when they're on their second game. (Rufus won the first without Tseng taking a single shot, some small quiet joy at having room to not have to pretend to be less than he truly is singing through his skin with every move.) Tseng catches her eyes, jerking his head to the bar in a question -- do you want me back there? She shakes her head, gestures I've got it in return, and stops at a hail to converse quietly with a patron on her way back to resume her rightful place as mistress of her domain.

He turns back to find that Rufus has been watching the interaction, a thoughtful look on his face. "More than just a girlfriend, then," he says.

Tseng knows what he means; the ability to have a conversation across a crowded room is something that requires intimate knowledge of the other party, something Rufus knows damn well, since Tseng's the one who taught him. The last thing he wants right now is to have a conversation with Rufus about Tifa -- Rufus sees too much in one direction and not enough in the other -- but it's what he brought Rufus here for, and he's going to have to face it sooner or later. "Something like that," he says, bending over the table for the shot he'd been considering before Tifa walked in and missing it by a hair. "What do you see?"

"The reason you've been spending half your time down here lately, if I don't miss my guess," Rufus says, still light and amused, and Tseng suppresses the urge to slap the backs of his thighs with the pool cue in rebuke. Rufus sobers quickly though, sensing (somehow, but Rufus's instincts have always been impeccable when it comes to Tseng's moods) that now is not the time. Rufus picks up the chalk and dusts the tip of his cue, carelessly, using the move as an excuse to stall, to stay close enough to Tseng for their voices not to carry. When Rufus turns serious, brings the force of his focus to bear on a problem, he is magnificent. Rufus's eyes track over to Tifa, behind the bar, laughing at something that someone said to her and drying her hands off on a towel before turning back to the task of passing out drinks. "She's younger than she looks, and younger than she wants people to believe, but she's been hurt -- hurt badly -- by something in the past, and in its way -- whatever it was -- it made her. I'm going to guess, Shinra."

He flicks a look back at Tseng, as though to check his read. Tseng keeps his face impassive. Rufus gives him the ah, fuck you face, but there isn't much heat to it. "Yeah, yeah, I know, not your secrets to give, you can neither confirm nor deny, yadda. But you wouldn't have brought me here, no matter how much I've been pestering you to bring me down to the slums, if there weren't a very good reason, since this is where you go when you want to stop being who you are for a while, and bringing me in here runs the risk of making the worlds collide and wrecking all the benefit you get from it."

And Tseng does have to control his face at that, and probably didn't succeed in doing it fast enough, but fortunately Rufus has gone back to studying Tifa and doesn't see. It's a good thing. He hates it when Rufus pulls those moments of stunning insight out of nowhere, no matter that it's a credit to his teachings whole and entire. "Interesting theory," he says, when he's sure he can control his voice again. "Go on."

Rufus throws him another look, this one a bit more smug. (Rufus has never had a problem believing in his own talents.) "So, she's got a secret. And whatever it is, and whether you know it or not, you think it's something I need to hear. She moves like you do -- I already said -- which tells me she knows the Wutaian arts, even though she's not Wutaian -- but she didn't learn them from you, because if she had, you wouldn't let her get away with treating you like that. And the fact that she does get away with treating you like that means you're more fond of her than you'd probably want me to think. Or she's got something on you. I don't think it's that, though. You didn't bring me down here to show me a problem you want me to take care of for you."

"No," Tseng murmurs. That's a read on the situation he hadn't expected at all, but it's the way Rufus thinks, and that this has always been the truth has always saddened him. "No, I didn't."

Rufus nods, once. "Didn't think you had. You like her too much for that to be the case; you can't fake real affection like that, not in front of me." The casual assumption of his ability to read Tseng would sting, did Tseng not know it for the truth. Rufus wavers between being stunningly perceptive and stunningly obtuse when it comes to matters of the heart. It's a relic of his peculiar upbringing, Tseng knows; he grew up without a model of true affection to compare against, true, but children of abuse are often left with a self-defensive ability to read the emotional weather around them that borders on the uncanny, and for all that the abuse Rufus suffered at his father's hands in his youth was quasi-benign neglect rather than malignity, it left its marks nonetheless. "Meanwhile, this place itself is full of all kinds of interesting people. I've been playing for about an hour, and in that time I may have faced off against a few Shinra middle managers and Midgar U students, but I'm pretty damn sure that half my opponents have been people who'd rather like to see me dead. Institutionally, rather than personally, I should say."

Tseng nods. He hadn't expected Rufus to miss that, but it's nice to know Rufus hasn't disappointed. "One or two, yes," he agrees. "At least."

"Mmm." Having milked the pause for all it's worth, Rufus rests the chalk back on the edge of the pool table and squints at the arrangements of the balls on the felt. "I'm guessing that's your real motive," he continues. "That test you mentioned. This is one of the meeting spots for the anti-Shinra movement, isn't it?"

Tseng lets one edge of his lips creep upward, the only sign of approval he'll give Rufus at the moment. (At the bar, Tifa glances over at them and her eyes narrow; when she looks away, he can read the disconcertment on her face, and the lines of her shoulders read you'd better know what you're doing. He knows she can't possibly have heard Rufus's conclusion, but he suppresses the shiver nonetheless.) "What makes you say that?" he asks Rufus, instead of answering. He knows Rufus will take it as answer enough.

Rufus pockets the 9-ball and pauses for another set of calculations. "How about the fact that I'm not stupid?" he replies, pleasantly enough. "Or maybe the fact that you've been training me how to look around me, really look, since I was eleven. But no, I overheard a few conversations while I was bussing tables." (Tseng starts at that; he hadn't seen Rufus pick up the tray at all, too deep in concentration at the bar. But of course Rufus would have. For all Rufus's faults -- and they are legion -- he has never turned up his nose at honest work no matter what the type, and one lesson Tseng has drilled into him over and over again is that servants are invisible no matter what type of servitude they're offering.) "It's not all that's going on here, but it's part. And you wanted me to notice that, and you're proud as hell of the fact that I did, which means you've got a plan, and you haven't turned them into ExSec, which means that your plan isn't 'kill them all, the gods will know Their own'. And that could have something to do with the fact your girlfriend owns the place and you don't want to bring ExSec down on her like a ton of wet bricks, but, you know, call me crazy, somehow I've got this feeling it's more complicated than that."

Tseng only graces that remark with a raised eyebrow and a cool half-nod. "Your body language is slipping," he adds. (It is. Apparently contemplating the thought that people want to see him dead is enough to rouse Rufus Shinra, child of privilege and command, from behind the mask of 'Rupert Soho' Rufus has been wearing all night. Rufus isn't usually that sloppy; Tseng wonders what else is going on behind those calculating eyes.)

Rufus makes a face at him and starts in on the hundred minor adjustments, each so small and understated that an observer wouldn't catch notice of the man in the corner changing, each designed to bring his body language back into alignment with his cover story. (There are ways and ways of disguise, and Tseng has taught them all to Rufus over the years; they all have their time and place. But the most effective disguise there is, and one that can't be taken away by another's actions or revealed due to accident or mishap, is that of misdirection. Ninety percent of recognition is in the intangibles -- the way people move, talk, stand, carry their weight -- and changing those is often all it takes to make someone think you look a little bit like someone they think they ought to know.)

"And that was a diversion," Rufus grumbles, but he turns back to the pool table anyway and lines up his shot on the 14-ball. "I'll get it out of you eventually, you know. You can bet on it."

Tseng wouldn't bet even if he weren't planning on laying his cards on the table in another few hours. A smart man never bets against the house, and Rufus Shinra, no matter what else he is, is usually the house. "Closing time is usually around one, one-thirty or so," is all he says. "You'll see then."

That's enough to end the conversation. Or rather, put it on pause, while Rufus studies Tifa (deep in conversation at the bar with someone Tseng knows to be sympathetic to the rebel groups, if not an actual member, her face animated and her hands flying wildly; Tseng tries to read the topic from her reactions, fails) and pieces together Leviathan-knows-what conclusions. Before he can start it back up, though, a pair of older men Tseng vaguely remembers from a raid on Wall Market six months ago come over to the pool table. Tseng shifts his stance subtly, enough to have a good head start if the two have recognized Rufus and are willing to flaunt Tifa's ironclad "no fighting" rule in exchange for a chance at the heir to the Shinra empire, but as it turns out, all they want is ask for a game of two-on-two.

By midnight, the bar is down to nothing but the regulars, from the ones who try to drink themselves into a better place every night to the ones who are here because it's better than being at what passes for home; around one, Tifa puts both her hands on the bar and leans forward, summoning up her best stentorian-publican tone to cut through the crowd, even though the wall-to-wall chaos of earlier has dulled into nothing more than the soft murmurs of individual conversations. "Last call, folks," she says: not yelling but projecting, her voice filling the room and making all heads turn. "I'm locking the doors in twenty minutes, so if you want one for the road, now's the time to put in your orders and settle up your tab."

Half the remaining customers start packing up and leaving at her announcement; the other half (Arthur-the-university-student among them, Tseng notices with amusement) make their way to the bar, some to hand over a pile of gil (which gets tossed carelessly into the strongbox -- about the size of two or three hardcover books stacked atop each other -- that Tifa uses for a cashbox, and Tseng is gratified on her behalf to see that it is overflowing; after the night she's had she more than deserves it) and some to put in a last request. (Tifa keeps disposable cups for the last order of the night, so she can send people on their way with their final drinks; it keeps them from holding down tables for half an hour past the point when she's more than ready to get the night's chores done and get off her feet, she says, and everyone who drinks here knows the to-go option is a privilege that will disappear if Tifa hears one word of drunken patrons causing problems for the neighborhood.)

He and Rufus have moved back to their table, talking of nothing of consequence (it's late enough, and the room is empty enough, that there is no longer enough cover noise to prevent others from overhearing). Tseng takes Tifa's announcement as a cue to stand and grab a tray, start circling the room to pile up empty shot glasses and pint glasses and the dishes that housed the assortment of bar-snacks and light meals Tifa keeps on the menu, to bring in to the sink in the back. Rufus, after a moment, follows suit.

Chasing out the last of the stragglers always takes at least ten minutes more than Tifa expects it to, so in the name of getting to the purpose of this visit sooner rather than later -- and, Tseng will admit, in the name of making sure that Tifa, who is fundamentally and biologically incapable of sleeping past seven or eight AM no matter how late she got to sleep the night before, has a chance of getting at least some rest -- Tseng starts in on the end-of-shift checklist once they've gotten all the empties there are to get. He knows the routine fairly well by now -- he's spent enough nights assisting -- so it's the easiest thing in the world to hand Rufus a damp rag and the bottle of ten percent bleach solution and direct him to start wiping down the tables and the bar while Tseng rolls up his sleeves again and starts packing up the perishables in the bar's garnish station for stowing in the cooler overnight. Rufus accepts his instruction without so much as a raised eyebrow. It's interesting, Tseng thinks; somewhere along the way, in these last few years, Rufus has finally learned patience. The child he'd trained would have tried to throttle answers out of Tseng hours ago.

Between the two of them, they very nearly have the place presentable by the time Tifa finishes up her discussion (a discussion Tseng has carefully avoided overhearing; he's almost positive Rufus can't say the same, but he's dead certain Tifa wouldn't say anything she wouldn't also put on a poster and paper the Shinra building with while Rufus is anywhere in the sector, much less a dozen feet away) with the slum boy she keeps on as dishwasher and relief cook (Tseng can't quite remember if he's Biggs or Wedge; the two look nothing like but are firmly intertwined in his mind) and the two flunkies from Wall Market, shooing them all out the door. She locks the door behind them with a flourish, leaning back against it with the air of the righteously exhausted.

"Free at last," she says, her ritual end-of-shift antiphon. "Remind me that I love my job."

"You love your job," Tseng says, looking up from where he's mopping the floor. "It's only the people you despise sometimes."

Tifa laughs. It isn't the glorious, full-throated laugh of hers he loves so much, not at the end of a long and trying day, but it's beautiful nonetheless. "No, no, it's fine. Biggs and Kenny and Carlos just wanted to make sure I'd be all right if they left me alone." She gives him a sly look from underneath lowered lashes. "They wanted to protect my virtue, is all."

"Charming," Tseng says, as dry as he can make it. "They probably should have been more concerned for mine." (From behind the bar, where Rufus is loading fresh water bottles from a pallet into the refrigerator to chill overnight, Tseng can hear a bitten-off sound that sounds half like a laugh, half like a cough of disbelief.) "Sit. We're down to the last of the cleanup; there's just the rest of the dishes and the cashbox to do, still."

"Oh, Shiva bless." Tifa rubs a hand over her forehead, tries several times to shove the increasingly-flyaway strands of hair back into their braid, and finally gives up. She kicks off her shoes, leaves them by the door, bounces twice in place and then rises onto the balls of her feet, linking her fingers together and pushing them up and over her head until her body is one long straight line rising for the heavens.

Tseng watches her -- he can never not watch her; Tifa stretching is a masterwork of art -- but he spares a glance out of the corner of his eye for Rufus, who is watching her without being obvious about it. His eyes are not on her breasts, nor on the way her top rides even further up her midriff until (Tseng knows) it comes dangerously close to revealing the secrets written in her scars; he's watching the way she rises further on her feet, until she is balanced on nothing but her toes, and does not sway at all. Tseng has trained Rufus in all manner of things. Rufus knows damn well how hard that balance is to keep.

"Leave the dishes," Tifa adds, bending at the waist to rest her palms on the floor and then rising back to true, putting her hands on her hips and twisting from side to side. Tseng can hear the soft pop of her joints re-setting themselves. "We kept ahead of them for most of the night, thanks to that hour and a half you gave me, and I've got Wedge and Jessie coming in for inventory and weekend prep tomorrow afternoon. We can get the last of them then." She crosses the room on silent feet, ducking under the pass-through to the bar, neither avoiding Rufus nor coming too close to him. She takes out three highball glasses and sets them on a tray, starts the water in the sink running, and then ducks her head beneath it for the equivalent of four long breaths.

She comes up spluttering -- she always does -- and shakes the loose droplets off her skin, managing -- somehow -- to avoid splashing Rufus as she does. One brisk scrub with a clean towel over her face, and she unbraids her hair with deft fingers, finger-combs through the waves, and re-braids it into something more decorous than the loose, sloppy plait it always turns into by the end of the night. Thus fortified (Tseng loves watching her end-of-shift ritual, and not just for the fact that it always soaks her plain white top just enough that he can see the palest ghosts of her nipples through it), she transfers the glasses to a tray and must stretch on her tip-toes to fetch down a bottle of the bar's best whiskey from the top shelf. The bar is arranged for Tifa's comfort and Tifa's comfort alone, but that's the shelf of liquor she only breaks into for wakes and life-changing decisions. (Endings and beginnings.)

Smart woman. She knows what Tseng has in mind.

"You can leave that," she adds, speaking to Rufus directly. Rufus startles a little at her tone: brisk, direct, more than a touch chilly, nothing at all like the easy affection with which she'd addressed Tseng or the friendly welcome she'd offered him earlier. "Have a seat. I'm sure he'll tell us what he wants sooner or later."

"Let me settle up my tab before you close out for the night," Rufus says, after a moment's silence. Tseng knows that tone: it's Rufus's I am reserving judgement voice, the one he deploys for his father's craziest ideas and the odd proposal here and there that bright and eager rising execs love to bring to him in the hopes they will make their names from it.

Tifa looks at him, piercing and steady. "Your money's no good in here," she says. It isn't a compliment. Nor is it a gift, nor an offering. "Not yet. I'll tell you if and when it is."

Rufus keeps a lock on his face; his surprise shows only in his eyes, and only because Tseng's looking for it. He fixes those eyes on Tifa's face, staring her down in the way that tends to make grown men shuffle their feet and avert their eyes like little children. She only looks back at him, solid and unyielding: not a challenge, but not giving an inch, either. Her face, too, is utterly motionless.

Tseng almost wishes he could be between them at that very moment. Not because he's crazy enough to want to get between Tifa Lockheart and Rufus Shinra in the middle of a staring contest -- he's actually quite happy to be on the other side of the building from them, in fact -- but because this is the moment he's been waiting for, the moment where they take each other's measure, and he'd really like to know what is passing between them in that look. He can see there is communication there, but he can't read it. Not in the least.

The thought worries him -- more than it should; he's been building to this moment for at least the last six months, and he would have sworn before any of his fathers' gods that he'd steeled himself for however the pageant might play out. But he keeps his presence as small as he can, applying mop to floor with a singleminded intensity, and he waits for one of them to crack.

Rufus does first. Which surprises Tseng. "So," he says -- voice perfectly neutral, like he's reading the weather -- "how many of you figured it out? Should I expect the mob, lying in wait outside, when we leave?"

Tifa shakes her head. "Just me," she says. "And only because I know him, and I know the way his mind works." She indicates Tseng, with a lift of her chin, without taking her eyes from Rufus's. "If anyone else had put it together, they would have told me, to make sure I wasn't surprised by whatever might happen. My people look out for me. And you're not going home until morning, anyway -- the circumplate trains stop running at two AM. I'll make up the guest room for you once we're done."

That earns a double blink from Rufus -- both surprise that she would offer the room so unthinkingly (and that she would assume they would be willing to accept it) and a touch of chagrin that he'd forgotten the train schedule. (It isn't a part of his world, and it never has been; the above-plate trains all run twenty-four hours.) He nods, though, with the tilt of the head and the dip of the chin that comprise his very best aristocratic acknowledgement of someone who has just given him something unexpected. "My thanks for the hospitality," he murmurs.

Rufus is the one to finally break their stare; he picks up the tray Tifa had loaded and balances it as easily on one hand as Tifa does. (Tseng can see Tifa blink at that, one quiet whisper of surprise across her face and then gone. He's never told her of all Rufus's summers spent working his way through one department after another, learning menial job after menial job, his father's attempt to humble him that backfired so spectacularly his father will never know the true extent of how badly. What had been intended to humiliate had instead given Rufus the skill to see how all the pieces of the Shinra empire fit together like clockwork, down to the smallest gears and joinery; that he can see those interconnections makes Rufus deadly.) He bows to Tifa, then, deep and sweeping, gesturing with one arm at the pass-through. "After you," he adds.

Tifa keeps her eyes on him for another few seconds, just long enough that Tseng wonders if this is going to end even more badly than the worst of his fears. Then she inclines her head, as regal as Rufus on the best (or worst) of days, and makes her stately and dignified way out from behind the bar and over to the table Rufus and Tseng had been sitting at, the only table Tseng hadn't stacked the chairs on in order to mop the floor around. Tseng can see the way her shoulders tense as she turns her back on Rufus, as though it makes her shoulderblades itch to present him with a target, but he can only see it because he's looking.

"Put the mop down and come have a drink with us, Tseng," Rufus says, perfectly calm, perfectly pleasant. It isn't an invitation.

Tseng sets the mop back down in the bucket and wipes his hands on the towel he'd tucked into his waistband. He reaches the table before Rufus does; Tifa looks up at him from her seat (the one with the best sightlines, of course; Tseng is sourly amused at the thought that if they wind up doing this somewhere Tifa doesn't have the home-court advantage, they're apparently going to have to play jan-ken-po for who gets the right to watch the whole room) to regard him with sober eyes. He wonders what she's thinking, to see him obeying Rufus's orders so readily. She's never seen the two of them together before, of course, and it's one thing for her to know intellectually that he is Rufus's man, but it's another to see it in action.

Trust me, he tries to say to her, as he settles in the chair across from her and angles it so his back isn't completely to the door. I know what I'm doing.

He hopes like hell that he's right.

Rufus joins them a moment later, having stopped at the refrigerator to take out half a dozen bottles of water and added them to the tray with the whiskey and the glasses. Tifa's jaw clenches to see; Tseng knows why. It's one thing for her regulars to make themselves at home, to help themselves to a drink while they're pitching in; while Rufus was masquerading as just another college student slumming it for the evening, the friend of a man who had already earned Tifa's respect, for Tifa to treat him otherwise would have been cause to elicit comment from anyone who saw. With Rufus's true identity acknowledged, now that they are done pretending, for Rufus to make free of the refrigerator's contents turns from standard behavior and customary hospitality to Rufus Shinra taking what he pleases.

Rufus usually has better manners -- or better sense -- than to be that blatant; for all he was raised to a privilege so profound Tseng knows that Tifa can barely comprehend the extent of it, he is perfectly capable of behaving in any way a situation calls for, and Tseng knows damn well that Rufus noticed the minute the subtext shifted. It's Rufus's form of counter-strike to Tifa's refusal to let him pay his tab: Tifa said there are some things even you can't buy and Rufus countered perhaps, but I already own everything else. With thrust and parry out of the way, Tseng hopes (would pray, were he a praying man) that honor has been properly satisfied.

Divesting himself of the tray, Rufus busies himself for a few minutes, arranging a glass in front of each of them. Tifa starts to reach for the bottle of whiskey to pour, but Rufus beats her to it, filling each glass with a generous splash, and she diverts the movement smoothly to reach for a bottle of water instead, frowning slightly. It takes Tseng a minute to realize why: he'd slipped back into viewing the world like a Wutaian would. (Dammit.) In the culture of his birth, it is taken for granted that the person with the highest social status pours for the table, as an act of humbling the self and to set the rest of the table at ease. He's never sure how much of his birth culture has rubbed off on Rufus, absorbed with the rest of the lessons he's taught over the years, whether that's something along the lines of what Rufus intends or whether it's another subtle power play. Tifa, no doubt, sees only the power play and nothing more.

"Cards on the table before we go any further," Tifa says, as Rufus caps the whiskey bottle again and takes the seat between Tifa and Tseng with the grace and ease of a man who has never felt awkward and out-of-place once in his life. She wraps her hand around the bottle of water but does not open it or drink, only worries at the label with a thumbnail worn down by hard work and absentminded chewing. Her gaze, when she turns it on Rufus, is flat; if she were a cat, her ears would be pressed back against her skull. "I don't like you. You have more power than any man should, you use it in the wrong ways, and your responses to having that power challenged are reprehensible. If whatever you --" She transfers her gaze to Tseng, who meets it unflinchingly. "--have in mind involves anything to do with me ever trusting him, with anything, you boys might as well leave right now before you miss the last train."

Balls of hammered steel, Tseng thinks -- not for the first time, and no doubt not for the last. He opens his mouth to say something (anything; he's not sure what). Rufus holds up a hand for his silence, though, and he obeys as unthinkingly as he always does, only realizing what it must look like after a muscle in Tifa's cheek twitches at the sight.

"My turn," Rufus says. "More power than any man should, I'll grant you that one. Using it in the wrong ways?" He smiles, then, his charming little-boy smile that Tseng once thought had been deliberately cultivated to manipulate others and finally decided was simply Rufus being Rufus. "Matter of perspective. You're dating Tseng, after all. There's more blood on his hands than there ever will be on mine."

Tifa is perhaps the only person Tseng has ever met who can resist Rufus's charm; Tseng can see it actively working against him, like Tifa has checked the box in her head marked 'manipulation attempt' and moved on to defending against the next tactic Rufus is likely to try. "Is there?" she asks, and the way she says it, it isn't a rhetorical question at all. "Who's more reprehensible -- the man who's never lied to me once about who and what he is, or the man who sits in his corner office and pretends he's innocent before giving orders no one should ever give?"

"As interesting as this little philosophical exchange is," Tseng interrupts -- before they can each get firmly entrenched in arguing a position from which honor will not let them back down -- "I do, in fact, have a reason for bringing the two of you together, and it isn't for you to dissect my fundamental shortcomings as a human being." He waits until he has both of their attention, then picks up his glass of whiskey and toasts the air between them. It burns going down. "Both of you have spent the last two and a half years trying to figure out the truth about Nibelheim. I'm here to bring you together so that you can pool your efforts."

Across the table, Tifa has gone pale; Tseng can see, under the table, her hand form into a fist to keep herself from reaching for her scars in the familiar gesture she can't help but use whenever she remembers that night halfway across the globe. "I know what happened in Nibelheim," she says. Her voice holds nothing but the sound of betrayal: betrayal of her secrets, betrayal of her trust in him. He wouldn't have done it for anything less than this. "I was there. That's why I'm here."

Rufus leans in, all notions of their power-play discarded, in that moment utterly and completely present the way Rufus can manage from time to time and that never fails to take Tseng's breath away. "You were there?" he demands. "That's not possible. No one survived Nibelheim. No one could have survived Nibelheim."

Tifa's lips twist. It's nothing like a smile. She picks up the glass of whiskey Rufus poured, knocks it back with one sharp flick of the wrist -- liquid courage -- and stands. Tseng has seen the scars before, has touched and tasted and kissed each inch, which is why he is able to keep his face expressionless as she crosses her arms in front of her and takes the hem of her shirt in each hand. She pulls the shirt over her head without a word and holds out her arms, standing barefoot and bare-breasted in front of Rufus's astonished eyes, unconcerned that she is standing half-naked before the second most powerful man in the world.

No matter how many times Tseng sees this sight, it never gets easier to bear. The scar Sephiroth left her starts at the upper corner of her left breast, angry and red and far too wide and deep, and it crosses diagonally along her breastbone like a strap slung over her shoulder to end just above the last of her lower right ribs, widening as it goes, hooked upwards at the end like the weapon that had delivered it had stuck in her bone and been yanked free once the wielder had satisfied himself of her demise.

Tseng is almost certain that's because it had.

Beside her, Rufus is as pale as though he's just seen a ghost. Perhaps he has. He knows as well as Tseng had known when he first looked upon this view: there is only one person in the history of the world who could have given her those wounds, and she should have died of them. "Sephiroth," Rufus whispers, his eyes wide, more shocked than Tseng ever thought he could be. Then, stronger: "How are you even alive?"

"A hell of a lot of luck, a fuck of a lot of good timing, and the fact that your great general was too damn rabid to notice he hadn't properly finished me off." Tifa waits an extra heartbeat until she's certain she's made her point, then pulls the shirt back over her head. Once she's taken her seat again, Tseng reaches over and claims the bottle of whiskey, re-filling her glass far past the point he knows she would stop on her own, and presses it into her hand. She looks at it for a long minute, like it's something foreign risen to haunt her, and then drinks it down again. Under the table, her other hand is shaking. Tseng places his over it, and is grateful when she doesn't pull away.

"How can -- it's not -- That isn't possible," Rufus bursts out. "It's never made any sense. This is Sephiroth we're talking about. The man wouldn't hurt a fly if it weren't on the battlefield -- he was a damn vegetarian, for Ramuh and Ifrit's sake. Tseng, tell her."

Tseng is not going to get into the middle of this debate; he's had that conversation with Rufus too many times. "Rufus was the last person we can find on our side who talked to Sephiroth before Nibelheim burned," he says, to Tifa, instead. "He's spent the last two and a half years trying to reconcile the Sephiroth we knew with the devastation we found there. We didn't even know for sure it was Sephiroth who caused it until you told me what really happened." He takes a deep breath. Now or never. "I brought the two of you together because I'm hoping like hell you can look past ideology so we can try to get at the truth."

Tifa's voice is far too level and controlled. "And why the hell should I help you?"

For you Tseng hears you people, the invisible line drawn between them in a way it hasn't been until that very moment; threaded throughout, inaudible rebuke, Tseng hears the spectre of the ending he'd promised Tifa they wouldn't come to. He keeps his eyes on hers and puts sincerity in his every syllable. "Because there's one man in Shinra who freaked the fuck out when he heard that Sephiroth had been assigned a mission to Nibelheim -- before we got word of what happened there -- and he still has President Shinra's ear. And if he knows what happened, and he had something to do with it, it could happen again."

Rufus's face twists, turns ugly. "Hojo," he spits. "It has to be him. Has to be."

Tifa is staring at Tseng. "No," she says. The calm has leeched out of her voice now; it rises, spikes. "You don't do that. You don't get to do that. You don't get to dump the responsibility for this on my shoulders and tell me it's my problem to make sure it doesn't happen to anybody else. You don't get to make it my problem to help you clean up your fucking messes. That's not how this works." She shakes her head, slowly at first and then with growing hysteria. "You don't get to do that. You people have done enough."

"I'm sorry," Tseng says softly. The bitch of it is, he really is. What he feels for Tifa is friendship and affection and, on a good day, in the right light, he might even be willing to cop to love. But this is bigger than any of that. It always has been.

"You bastard," she hisses. Then, before he can say anything, she stands, so forcefully that her chair skids back behind her, catches a rough spot in the wood, and topples. She turns, her glass still in her hand, and hurls it across the room, as hard as she can. It misses Tseng's head by an inch; Tifa has impeccable aim. Tseng makes himself remain still.

Rufus, at least, has the good sense to stay silent; Tseng simply doesn't know what he can possibly say, what apology he can offer up that would be taken as even in the slightest bit sincere. When the echoes of shattering glass fade, Tifa's shoulders heave, and her rough breathing is the only sound in the room. Other than her chest, rising and falling, she doesn't move.

A minute goes by. Two.

Then she closes her eyes and breathes out, and this time, her hand does come up to press against her chest: the meat of her thumb and the edge of her palm dig into the ridges of her scars, the tips of her fingers resting against her heartbeat. Tseng can see the muscles flex in her forearm as she drives her fingertips into her own skin. She breathes in again, once, twice. Tseng wonders what worlds are burning behind her eyelids.

When she finally speaks, her voice is flat again, but it isn't the flatness of control. Just exhaustion. "Excuse me, gentlemen," she says. "I need to get the dustpan."

She moves like a sleepwalker, and Tseng makes himself watch, to bear witness to her pain. As soon as she disappears into the back room, Rufus leans over the table; Tseng's eyes are drawn back to him, which tells him his subconscious has identified something in the way Rufus moves as a threat. Rufus is glaring at him, and Rufus is not pleased.

"You didn't tell me," Rufus says. "You should have told me."

Tseng closes his eyes and lifts a hand to pinch the bridge of his nose, trying to stem off the inevitable stress headache. "I didn't want to prejudice your reaction. She's the best person I've ever met at spotting inauthenticity, and if she knew I'd told you ahead of time, this would have gone even more badly."

Rufus puts his hands flat against the table and pushes himself up to standing. It means he's looming over Tseng for a minute, and that, too, makes Tseng twitch. "Not good enough," Rufus says, and oh, that sound creeping into Rufus's voice is the sound of Rufus getting ready to throw a temper fit of epic proportions. "You put me in a situation where I was guaranteed to mis-step and make things worse, and where I was bound to make things worse for her no matter what. I'm not all that happy with you at the moment."

"Yeah, well," Tseng snaps. "Join the fucking club. Line forms to the left."

That makes Rufus give him the look, and Tseng bites back further protest as Rufus crosses the floor on light feet to kneel next to where Tifa hurled her glass against the wall, pulling a handkerchief out of his pocket -- Rufus is the only person Tseng knows who always has a handkerchief on him, no matter what he is wearing -- to pick up the largest pieces and set them into the cloth. Tifa comes back a minute later, dustpan and hand broom dangling from one hand, stopping a good five feet away from Rufus. "I said I would get that," she says, brusque and short, unwilling to let Rufus claim one more bit of her space as his own to tend.

Rufus spares a glance over his shoulder for her, his eyes flicking up and down her frame, before holding out a hand. "You're barefoot. You'll cut yourself. Hand me the dustpan; I'll take care of this."

Tifa grits her teeth. "I walk barefoot over broken glass all the time; my calluses have calluses. I'll be fine."

"That may be so," Rufus agrees, and it makes Tseng blink, because for the first time all night there is no hint of mockery in Rufus's tone. It's gentle, almost. "But I will be fucked if I allow you to be injured further, no matter how minor it might be, by the further action or inaction of me or the people who look to me. So give me the goddamn dustpan." He straightens up but stays kneeling, spine straight, one hand held out to her. Even on his knees, even though Tseng can barely see his face, his presence fills the room.

Tifa holds herself perfectly still for a full minute, the stillness of someone who's just had a great surprise. Tseng is again struck by the look that passes between them: Tifa, blank-faced with a core of polished steel, Rufus, his shoulders squared, stubbornness written in every line. Another minute goes by, and then Tifa drops the broom and dustpan on the floor, far enough that Rufus will have to either get up or crawl to retrieve them. An insult, perhaps, or another test. She doesn't watch to see what Rufus does, only turns and returns to the table they're sitting at, picking up one water bottle and drinking from it before sitting back down. She doesn't meet Tseng's eyes, and her body language is telling him he's going to have to do a great bit of groveling before she's willing to forgive.

Rufus ignores the insult, though, and makes quick work of sweeping up the glass shards, going so far as to bend down and press his cheek against the floor to look for any pieces he might have missed before sweeping his hand over the floorboards for a final check. Satisfied the glass is no longer a danger, he tips the fragments from the dustpan into his kerchief and knots it into a bundle for safekeeping, leaving it atop a nearby table. Tifa watches him the whole time, her face still set in that expression of blank contemplation; he's done something to surprise her, and Tifa reacts to surprises by either blowing up or getting very, very quiet and calm. (Come to think of it, Tseng realizes, she's much like Rufus in that respect.)

When Rufus is finished, he returns to the table, but he doesn't sit down. He only picks up his glass of whiskey, then paces away to stand about ten feet away from the table, well within Tifa's line of sight, facing the chalkboard that takes up one entire wall of the room. (Tifa uses one section of it to write the day's specials when she's decided to be creative in the kitchen, but for the most part, it's covered with the scrawls of hundreds of different hands, message board and advertisements and lost and found and gossip and debate all fighting for space on top of each other. Tseng's favorite part is the long-running Hangman tournament in the far corner.) He stands there for a long time, his eyes so unfocused that Tseng knows he isn't reading any of it, just using it as a focus while he sorts through what's going on inside his head.

Then he starts speaking.

"There's a sort of ebb and flow to information in a company the size of Shinra," Rufus begins. His voice is absent, detached, like he's narrating a series of unconnected statements, and yet Tseng knows he's building to a particular conclusion. Tseng just doesn't have any idea what that conclusion might be. "Especially in a company the size of Shinra. Everything gets written down; everything gets put into reports. Those reports get summarized into other reports, and those reports get summarized further, and eventually, given enough time, it all winds up pooled together in one giant melange of summaries-of-summaries. On my desk. Or on my father's. I've been reading those reports for as far back as I can remember, and when you've read enough of them, when you've gotten enough practice, you learn to spot the rhythms. There are patterns. There's a feel to it. It's nothing I can put my finger on; it's like a symphony where half the instruments are playing the same melody line, and if one of them drops out, you can't hear the absence of that melody but you can sense something isn't right. It's hard to explain past that."

He lifts his tumbler of whiskey, sips from it again, all the while staring at the evidence of a hundred tiny private lives: lost, one dog, answers to Junior; in search of model 1058 cell phone, blue, will pay any price; for a good time call. There's a crudely defaced copy of the Shinra corporate logo chalked above one table. "Everything gets written down," he repeats. "Classified things are still written, they're just hidden and locked away and shared only with people who need to know. Officially, I have access to about ninety percent of the information that flows through the company. Unofficially, I've had full access to the mainframe and the data warehouse since the point I learned how to program and how to defeat network security when I was in my early teens. I don't read all of it; no man could. But I skim most of it. Enough to have the sense of what the normal flow of information sounds like, and enough to be able to spot when something's off."

None of this is a revelation to Tseng. He's known for years that Rufus has broken the mainframe security; he's relied on it at least five times he can remember, and probably others that he can't. He can't see how this relates to anything, but next to him, Tifa is watching Rufus's face, shadowed in profile and staring at her chalkboard, and her own face is thoughtful.

"Sephiroth came to see me, before he left for Nibelheim," Rufus continues. "We were friends -- as much as I can call anyone a friend, and maybe more. We'd talked before, about the information ecology of the company, about things that have gaps or elisions or just plain wrong data. His personal record is -- was -- one of the ones with the problem. Nothing I could put my finger on; nothing he could put his finger on. It was just ... off. Things missing that I know should have been there. Things there that I'd never heard of before. Stuff that doesn't make sense, stuff that didn't add up. It never did. He didn't know anything about his childhood, you see. He was a ward of the company, apprenticed under Hojo's supervision in the science department until he decided that he'd rather join SOLDIER, raised by nannies and babysitters the same way I was. He'd been looking for answers his whole life. All Hojo would tell him was that his mother had been a woman named Jenova, and she died giving birth to him."

At that name, Tseng can feel Tifa go rigid next to him; a small shudder runs through her whole body. Rufus isn't paying any attention to her, lost in his own thoughts, picking through the patterns of potential words to find the ones he should say. Whatever he has just said, something has resonated with Tifa.

Or -- no. Not resonated. Frightened. If he didn't know better, Tseng would say, terrified.

For Rufus to be this honest, this candid, is unprecedented. For Rufus to hand this much information to someone who has said, to his face, that she opposes him and Shinra and everything they stand for is simply unheard of. If it weren't for the fact Rufus seemed ready to punch him in the face -- or shoot him in the foot -- not ten minutes ago, Tseng would almost speak up to protest. But Rufus has decided this approach is the best to take, and in a dozen years and more, one thing Tseng has learned is when Rufus Shinra makes up his mind, mountains will move sooner than he will budge one inch.

"I looked," Rufus continues. "I couldn't find anything. Neither of us could. The one thing we figured out -- eventually -- was where Seph had been born. It had been expurgated from his official record, shunted into whatever mysterious black-hole gap the rest of the information that wasn't there had gone -- but we found a reference, after far too much digging in old microfiche archives that had never been scanned and digitized."

He pauses -- for dramatic effect, perhaps, or perhaps because he doesn't want to say what he's about to say -- and sips his whiskey. Just when Tseng is about to prompt him -- this is a part of the story Tseng hasn't heard either -- he adds, "Sephiroth was born in Nibelheim."

"That's not possible," Tifa says. Her voice is low and scratched, like a record needle skipping over dusty grooves. "Nibelheim is -- was -- a tiny town. Everyone knew everyone. If there had been ..."

She stops herself. Her face goes slack, distant; Tseng can see her eyes flicking back and forth, even as she stares off into the distance, like she's reading invisible print off the very air. Rufus has turned his head and is looking at her, finally, his eyebrows furrowed, his face showing far more of his emotions than Tseng would have expected. "Been what?" he prompts, when it's clear Tifa is done speaking.

Tifa shakes her head. "It's nothing. Just remembering something. Go on. I'll tell you later."

Or I won't, her tone says, as plainly as though she added it aloud, and Rufus's face contorts, clearly debating the wisdom of pressing her further. He lets it go, though. "I looked into it. We both did. Apparently there was some sort of Shinra outpost, just outside of town, used for engineers who were visiting the reactor for maintenance and upgrades and the like."

"The mansion," Tifa murmurs, as though to herself. "We used to sneak into it to play, when we were children."

Rufus nods. "At one point, there are references to some sort of research project using the place, because there wasn't enough space for them here in Midgar. No word on what it was, or what it was researching. And from there, the paper trail just ... ends. It's as though the project never existed. I can't even find out what department it was attached to. And that's unheard of. Anything that takes company money needs to justify itself seven times over and send in sixteen reference forms before breakfast. In triplicate. And those forms get filed and referenced and summarized and tied into the information ecology, and any project that looks to Shinra in any way, shape, or form stays on record from inception until judgement day, and there is no sign anywhere that this ever existed."

His voice is starting to heat up now, grow more and more passionate. "And that shouldn't be possible. If I hadn't seen it with my own eyes, I'd swear it couldn't be possible. But it is. And it's connected to all of this, somehow, and I've never been able to figure out why. And when Sephiroth was assigned to a mission in Nibelheim, a SOLDIER general assigned to some pissant little project to clear out some Mako-spawn in the mountains that a wet-nosed private could have handled, I asked him to keep his eyes open for me in case he noticed anything that would explain it. And he never came back."

In Rufus's voice is the sound of a child's eternal betrayal -- why did you leave me? what did I do? Tseng has known for nearly three years now that Rufus still feels guilty about Sephiroth's death, but he hasn't known until this very minute, hearing the anguish in that one brief cry, just how much it still weighs on Rufus's shoulders. Rufus would never have told him. And yet he is telling Tifa, and Tifa is sitting and listening, and Tifa folds her hands together (to keep herself from moving otherwise?) and rests her chin on her knuckles, studying Rufus like she's trying to decide how much of his story to believe.

"And that would be bad enough," Rufus adds, after a minute to compose himself. His voice has gone back to being flat, calm, the simple recitation of fact: the sound of Rufus mutating strong emotion into bland nothingness, the defense he's learned a thousand different ways over the years after too many people using his emotions against him. "Except when my father called a full board meeting to announce that Sephiroth was dead -- Sephiroth, who survived three years of war with Wutai without a single injury that wasn't due to someone else's stupidity -- Hojo showed up. And when Heidegger announced that he had assigned Sephiroth on a mission to Nibelheim, Hojo freaked out, for half a second, before he got control of himself. Before my father said that Sephiroth was dead. And I never got a satisfactory answer as to why."

He takes a deep breath. "Sephiroth radioed me. Four days before he died, judging from the best timeline our investigators could fit together after the fact. The reception was shit -- you can't get a clear signal from the mountains over here to Midgar, and that was before we put in the repeaters at Corel, the Gold Saucer, and Costa del Sol -- and I only caught one word in ten. He said he was looking into something, and something about Hojo, and I couldn't piece together the rest of it. One word in ten. If that. I caught 'reactor', and 'SOLDIER', and 'Hojo'. He was asking me to check something. And then the signal was lost. As far as any of us can tell, I was the last person to talk to Sephiroth before he died. From our side, at least. From what Tseng just told me, from what you've told me, you were the last person to see him alive, period."

He looks down at the glass that's still in his hand as though it belongs to someone else. Then he swallows the rest of the whiskey and turns, fully, to face Tifa. His face is perfectly composed, but his eyes are burning. "So I'm asking you. You don't have any reason to do me a favor, and many reasons -- many good reasons -- to tell me to piss up a rope and then hang myself with it. But you may have the key to a mystery that's been haunting my company for anywhere up to thirty years, and I'd really like to know why the gentlest man I've ever known went insane and set a town on fire, and I'd really like to know what the fuck is going on with my VP of Science, and I'd really like to know how someone could make information disappear like that, and who, and more than that, why, and above all else I'd really like to know what I have to do to make sure this never happens again."

His words echo against the stained and scuffed timbers of the bar. His eyes are locked on Tifa's, and hers on his; Tseng can tell, looking at Tifa's face, that she has started to succumb to the hypnotic pull of Rufus's voice, lured in by the rise and fall of Rufus's rhythms. Rufus has been speaking in public for nearly his entire life, and there is nothing he doesn't know about how to hold a crowd. There's always been something about Rufus, some shining force sleeping behind his eyes, that can turn the heads of everyone in a room and compel the attention of everyone in a hundred-foot radius even when he's doing nothing more than breathing. Rufus is fascinating, in the truest and most original sense of the word: he has the ability to fascinate, to mesmerize, to entrance. In his toolbox are a thousand techniques to captivate an audience.

He isn't using those techniques right now -- not deliberately, at least; Tseng knows the difference, but so many of them are so integral to his mode and manner he can never be truly without them -- which is, perhaps, the most fascinating thing. Tseng has seen Rufus attempt to gain his own way with a hundred different methods of persuasion, from seduction to bribery to threats to simple, rational argument. This is none of them. He's taken off a mask with Tifa that he almost never lets anyone see him without. The pure, naked force of Rufus's honest truth is more compelling than any of the attempts at manipulation, however practiced, however genuine-sounding, could ever be.

Rufus doesn't do that. Period. The only reason he could have to offer up such stunning honesty -- to say nothing of the amount of classified information he has just handed Tifa (gift-wrapped and neatly packaged for maximum use to cause Shinra grief) -- could possibly be because he is attempting to make reparations for a debt that is owed to her. And Tseng knows the way Rufus's mind works -- if Rufus were Wutaian, Tseng would say that he views himself as the daimyō of Shinra and all who look to her, responsible for their actions, honor-bound to redeem their faults and failures as though they were his own, and it's what Tseng had been counting on when he brought Rufus here in the first place -- but even that alone would not be cause for such --

Oh.

Tseng is possessed of a sudden and hysterical urge to burst out laughing. He wonders if Tifa could possibly have any clue that -- somewhere in the depths of Rufus's brain, in the part that neatly divides the world into mine and not-mine and endlessly calculates the precise weight and measure of that which is owed to the mine and owed from the not-mine -- Rufus has claimed her as his own, upon the strength of her relationship with Tseng. Rufus has decided -- whether he knows it consciously or not -- that because she is Tseng's lover, and because Tseng is his most trusted lieutenant and the closest thing he has to a true friend, Tifa falls under the umbrella of his protection as well. Whether she likes it or not.

Tseng will have to break it to her very gently. At some point in the unspecified future. (And then probably run, very very quickly.)

Before he can decide what to do with this new realization, Tifa stirs, shaking off Rufus's spell and turning back to her bottle of water. (It has the feel more of her looking for something to do with her hands, something to look at that isn't Rufus, than any real thirst.) "Why are you telling me this?" she asks, her voice still rough and low. "Surely you can't think I'll be so moved by your story that I'll rush to give up secrets I've kept for years to my worst enemy."

If her phrasing bothers Rufus, he doesn't let on. "I'm not your enemy," he says. When Tifa snorts, clearly preparing to argue, he just shakes her head and keeps talking over her: "You won't believe it right now, and honestly, I wouldn't expect you to. You went through something no one should have to, and it was one of my people who did it to you, and that alone would be cause for you to hate me and mine for the rest of your days -- and then you found yourself here, surrounded by people who have cause to hate Shinra, and you have no doubt been absorbing that hatred, day in and day out, ever since. In your eyes, I'm the face of that enemy. And there's nothing I could say that could convince you otherwise, whether it's true or not. I obviously don't think it is, but then again, no man looks at himself in the mirror and sees a monster. But I bear you no ill will, and I will do my utmost to make reparations for the harm you have suffered at the hands of my own."

Tifa's chin comes up at that. "I'm not the only person Shinra's fucked over. I'm not the only person Shinra's fucking over right now. Are you going to personally make amends to all of them, too? If you acknowledge they have cause to hate Shinra, why haven't you done something about it?"

"Because his father would have him killed if he tried," Tseng says, quietly. Rufus throws him an irritated look -- he wouldn't have told her that much, then, despite his honesty in all else; Rufus's standards for which information he will share and which he will jealously guard are impenetrable. Still, it's the truth, and Tifa deserves to know it; if she is considering forming an alliance with Rufus (and the fact she hasn't thrown them out of the bar yet means the possibility is still on the table) it's something she'll need to know. In Tseng's opinion, the possession of that one fact makes nearly everything else about Rufus's life fall into place.

Tifa startles at his words, which tells him she'd forgotten his presence; he's a little bemused by how much trust that displays in him. She turns, transfering her pinpoint stare to him. "That -- you can't be serious," she says, doubt laced through every word. "Can you?"

Rufus barks a laugh, his voice rough and raw the way it always is when the topic comes up. "Oh, he's serious. And he's the person who'd probably be tapped for the job, too. My old man would be on the bottom of the list of contenders for the Father of the Year award. He didn't want a son, he wanted a carbon copy who'd uphold his 'legacy' after he was gone, and when he got me instead, he made it damn clear my continued existence was entirely on his sufferance. The stories I could tell you ... And I will, actually, because at least a few examples of the old man's complete and utter insanity touch on the whole matter of what happened after we found out about Sephiroth's death, and why I haven't been able to get anywhere further in investigating it, but I don't want to overwhelm you completely. Or make you think I'm looking for your pity, or trying to play on your emotions."

He crosses back over to the table, refills his glass. "But I'll give you an example," he says, bringing the glass to his lips but lowering it slightly before he can take another sip, speaking over the rim. Despite the casual and offhanded tone, his eyes are deadly serious, trained on Tifa's face, and Tseng's heart turns over in his chest as he realizes what Rufus is about to say. "Because you deserve to know. When the old man found out Nibelheim had burned, and Sephiroth was likely responsible, do you know what the first thing he ordered was? Not that we find all the people in the company who came from Nibelheim and let them know the news as gently as possible. Not that we send a team of engineers out to the reactor to safety-test it and make sure that whatever had happened hadn't damaged it. Not that we send a team of forensic specialists out to dissect the scene and reconstruct the sequence of events of what really happened."

He does drink, then, and the momentary pause is clearly for him to compose himself, because his tone has started to turn vicious again, and this isn't the sort of news that deserves to be spit out with venom. (It's the sort of news that doesn't deserve to be spoken at all, because it shouldn't have happened. But the world goes as it will, Tseng thinks, and should and shouldn't bear no resemblance to reality.) Next to Tseng, Tifa has gone pale and still again; she senses the depths of what Rufus is about to say. Tseng slides one hand across the table to settle it over hers, and it's a sign of how unnerved she is by the gravity with which they're both treating the situation, sensing the weight of the news about to be delivered, that she doesn't pull hers away.

"No," Rufus says, once he's composed himself, and his tone is as gentle as he can make it. "No, his first orders were that we send a team of the finest minds in Shinra to clear away the bodies, clear away the houses, raze what remained of the town to the ground, and then spend millions of gil to reconstruct the scene as note-perfect as possible. 'I want a native of that town to be able to walk into the reconstruction and never tell the difference,' he said. And I asked him why, and he said, 'Because we can't afford to let anyone think we can't control our people.'"

Tifa blinks. Then blinks again. Underneath Tseng's hand, her hand flexes, her fingernails digging into the wooden boards of the table until Tseng thinks she must be driving splinters under her nails. "He what?" she breathes. It isn't even anger, the way it otherwise could have been. It's simply disbelief, like the words Rufus is speaking refuse to fit together into sentences, into meaning, inside her ears.

Rufus's jaw clenches; it's the only sign of his anger Tseng can see. Tseng remembers that anger, remembers the vicious, pointed battle Rufus and his father had fought in the boardroom over that order. Rufus had fought back with a vigor he didn't usually allow himself to use in challenging his father's orders, but he'd lost. He always did. And his father had sent him out to Junon as punishment for questioning the plan, ordering him to the contingency site -- to provide 'much-needed executive supervision', the president had said -- and no one with the eyes to see what really went on in the upper echelons of Shinra's board of directors had doubted it was anything other than punishment.

(Not just punishment, Rufus maintains. Junon is Shinra's failover site, staffed by a skeleton crew ready to pick up the reins of the company's functions in an instant in the event of Midgar-based disaster, but Junon is isolated from the ebb and flow of the main thrust of day to day operations, completely outside the information ecology Rufus had so vividly described earlier; it isn't even connected to the main company network regularly, since the old man had never approved the cost of laying trans-mountainous cables. Data transfer to Junon is only twice a week via radio link, to synchronize the most mission-critical databases and to send and receive the backed-up email; cell phone reception out there is next to nil, prone to cutting out entirely at the slightest hint of weather or even when too many devices are powered on nearby. Rufus's exile to Junon wasn't just a sign that he had displeased his father; it had been an act of isolation, cutting Rufus so neatly out of the web of power and information Shinra runs upon that Rufus insists it had been the old man's true purpose all along. Tseng isn't entirely convinced, but Rufus does at least have a point; when his father had finally relented four months ago and allowed Rufus to return home, Rufus had holed himself up in his office for a full two weeks, leaving to neither eat nor -- as far as Tseng could tell -- sleep, until he had satisfied himself he'd caught up on everything he'd missed, and Tseng knows he is still finding gaps in his understanding even now.)

"I'm sorry," Rufus says, when the silence extends too long between them. "There is nothing I can offer right now to make this any less of a violation. But you needed to know, because until people know the truth -- and sometimes after -- they persist in thinking of my father as sane and rational. And he isn't. Not in the least. He hasn't been for a very long time."

"My father --" Tifa says. Her eyes mist over, and she blinks several times in rapid succession; her voice wavers, the tremor subtle enough to be missed if Tseng weren't looking for it but still there. Tseng can tell that she hadn't thought about the realities of what post-disaster Nibelheim must have been like until that very moment, wouldn't have thought of the details of the recovery of bodies and the razing of fire-husked buildings while she was struggling so hard to cling to life. "His -- his body. What was --"

She can't make herself finish the question. Rufus winces, ever so faintly. "I --"

"The bodies were given a decent burial, with all respect possible in the situation," Tseng says, as quietly as he can. He doesn't think Tifa needs to know, not while suffering from such a shock to the system, that he and the Turks were the ones to lead the reconstruction team, under Hojo's supervision. (He lived there for years, the president had said, and at the time Tseng hadn't thought to question -- too many other urgent disaster grenades to throw oneself atop of -- and once he'd calmed down enough to think, it had been yet another suspicious thing about Hojo on a list that was already longer than his arm.) He isn't sure if Tifa will ever be ready to hear that news.

But he can offer her this much, no matter that it is cold comfort. As far as Rufus knows, the bodies recovered from the wreckage had been simply destroyed; Tseng had never found the right time to tell him, fearing to set off another explosion of Rufus's temper at the raising of the topic. Hojo had protested the time "wasted" on such "unnecessary sentimentality", but Rude and Reno had backed up Tseng's order, and despite the fact those graves can never be marked or honored, Tseng had made sure flowers would always bloom there.

Tifa frees her hand from under Tseng's, drags it over her face and scrubs, hard, at her eyes with the heel. "All right," she says, abruptly, and her resolve is adamantine. "All right. I can't have the rest of this conversation right now. I can't make any decisions about what to do with the information you've just handed me -- all of it --" Her voice quivers again, but she catches herself before it can break. "Not without having slept and thought about it some more. I --"

She seems to run out of words, hitting a verbal wall composed of her mind's sheer inability to process the depths of what this evening has turned into. Tseng can tell she's reached her capacity to absorb any new information; if she were to try, she would simply shut down. That's the last thing he wants, and so he slides back his chair and stands. "I'll show Rufus where the spare bedroom and the towels are," he says. Then, daring, he rests a hand on her shoulder, squeezes lightly. "If you'd like me to sleep in there instead of --"

"No," Tifa says, quickly, and her voice is more than a little desperate. She turns her head to rest her cheek against his hand and breathes out, roughly. "Shiva, no. Please."

Tseng is more grateful than he would have suspected to hear those words. He'd gone into this night knowing he might be doing irreparable damage to his relationship with Tifa, had been willing to sacrifice it in the name of the greater good and for a higher purpose. But even if she only wants a warm body to cling to in the night, to keep her from being alone while she grieves anew -- even if she decides in the cold light of day she cannot countenance his further presence, knowing what she knows now -- he is grateful for the chance to be the body thus clung to. "Of course," he says, and beckons Rufus with nothing more than a jerk of his chin to follow him as he leads Rufus up to the apartment over the bar.

"That poor woman," Rufus says in an undertone as they climb the stairs. "Sweet suffering Shiva. Every time I think I've come to terms with all my father's shit ..."

He trails off, sighing. Tseng wonders if Rufus can even hear himself, wonders if Rufus recognizes how his concern for Tifa's well-being is indicative of a commitment Rufus would otherwise never make. It isn't as though Rufus is incapable of empathy; Tseng has seen him produce acts of stunning sensitivity to others' emotions over the years. It's just that Rufus's form of empathy is saved only for the people who become real to him, and gaining the status of 'real' in Rufus Shinra's eyes generally takes years and miracles. Tseng hadn't consciously thought of how much help it would be in the game he's been setting up for months, to have Rufus look at Tifa and see Tseng's lover, someone Tseng owed loyalty to, and thus accept responsibility for her through Rufus's commutative property of connection. But he won't deny how much it helps.

He doesn't say any of what he's thinking, though. Instead, he ushers Rufus into the spare bedroom Tifa keeps made up for regulars who wind up spending the night, for reasons ranging from drunkenness to exhaustion to heartbreak to simply an early volunteer shift in the winter when the sun wouldn't have reached past the Wall yet at the times they'd need to leave an apartment that was located outside of Tifa's safe zone in order to be present on time. He shows Rufus the bathroom, and the stack of towels that are always kept on hand, and the stash of secondhand clothing stacked and folded neatly in the drawers so unexpected guests can have a chance of finding something they can wear to sleep in, and throughout the whole process, Rufus doesn't say a word, lost in thought.

Tseng has turned to go back to Tifa, the door already half-open, when Rufus breaks that silence. "You really care about her, don't you." It isn't a question.

Tseng stills, his hand on the doorframe, and turns slowly. "What makes you say that?" he asks, careful to keep his voice neat and even. He can't read what's behind Rufus's voice, can't see any clues on Rufus's face, and while he doesn't want to believe Rufus's statement stems from jealousy, he can't be positive. Rufus has never placed a high level of importance on sexual fidelity even as he builds his life around the bedrock of emotional fidelity from the few people around him he can count on to provide it. If Rufus thinks Tseng is no longer his man through and through, Tseng doesn't know what it will do to him.

Rufus only smiles, sitting on the edge of the bed, bathed in the light of the single weak lamp on the bedside table, looking utterly unearthly. "You spent that entire conversation sitting next to her, looking like you were ready to leap up and throw yourself in between her and the world in order to shield her. I've never seen you look like that with someone else before." Other than me, are the words lurking beneath the surface of Rufus's words, but Tseng can sense no bitterness or recrimination lurking there with them. "It's all right, you know," Rufus adds, apparently sensing Tseng's apprehension. "I've always thought you needed somebody who wasn't a part of the rat race. She seems like what I would have picked for you, if you'd asked me to try."

Sometimes, Tseng despairs of ever understanding this man.

But now isn't the time to get into any of the complicated questions of what he is to Rufus, or Rufus to him. So he only inclines his head. "Goodnight, kiddo," he says, the years-old nickname leaping to his lips the way it always does.

Rufus's answering smile is even more incandescent than the last. "Goodnight, old man. Sleep well."

Back in the hallway, the stairs and the bar downstairs have been plunged into shadows, lit only by the small night-light Tifa keeps on all night behind the bar in the event something she hears down there wakes her enough to feel the need to investigate. As Tseng moves through the hallway with the ease of long familiarity, towards the light spilling out from under the door of Tifa's bedroom, he hears the water of the sink running; it clicks off just as he enters Tifa's room without bothering to knock. A minute later, she comes out from the en-suite bathroom, clad in only a black tank top and a pair of heather-grey panties. She is rubbing her wet face vigorously with a towel, moving with the thoughtless grace of someone who both knows the layout of the room and has enough sense of the world around her to sense any obstacle before running into it, even without the benefit of sight.

When she lowers the towel and tosses it into her laundry hamper, Tseng almost expects to see eyes reddened from a quick bout of weeping, but he can see no sign of it if she did indulge. He opens his mouth to say something -- an apology; an explanation -- but before he can, her head whips around fast enough that her braid slides over her shoulder and encircles her throat. "Don't," she says. "Just -- don't. You're trying to work out the best way to make me believe you're sorry for bringing him here, for putting me through that. But don't. You've been working up to tonight from the first moment I told you where I was born. I told you from the very beginning: don't assume I'm as stupid as the people you usually do this with."

There's no heat in her voice, no anger. Just a calm, clear acceptance with a touch of sadness layered atop it, and not for the first time Tseng wonders at her reasons for beginning this relationship. Tonight is not the night to get into those questions, though, and so all he says, shrugging out of his pistols' holsters before unbuttoning his shirt and tossing it carelessly on the floor, is, "I never assumed you were stupid." He pops the clip of his .45 and checks the chamber before setting it on the nightstand, then slides his 9mm under the pillow and begins to divest himself of his combat knives. "And I don't actually do 'this' with anywhere near the frequency you've always seemed to think I do -- and never with stupid people."

Her lips curve up a little -- self-deprecating amusement, even as the sadness grows -- as she moves over to the side of the bed she sleeps on, when Tseng sleeps here with her, and begins folding the covers down. (The first time he saw this room, he'd noted that of course Tifa makes her bed every morning.) Tseng unbuttons his pants and slides them off as well, pausing to unsnap his ankle holster and add his .22 and his brace of throwing knives to the ever-growing pile of weaponry on the nightstand. (Aside from Rufus, Tifa is the only person he lets see him disarm himself like this, piece by piece, step by step.) "You'd be foolish not to," she says. "Seduction is a time-honored technique for acquiring information. After all, it worked on me, didn't it?"

Tseng turns at that, knowing that shock and budding anger is written on every line of his face and his body. She has climbed into the bed, sitting with her knees pulled up to her chest and her arms wrapped around them, watching him carefully while the same sad smile lingers on her lips. "You don't -- I didn't --" Hearing himself, inarticulate and fumbling in a way he never is, he stops and makes himself take a deep breath, closing his eyes and wishing for patience. When he opens his eyes again, Tifa is still watching him, but the sadness on her face has mutated into confusion.

He would be upset she would think so little of him, upset she would believe him capable of seducing her strictly to gain her trust and for access to the information that she could give him, except he knows: no. It's what he intended at the very beginning, after all, and -- all protests aside -- he certainly has used seduction as a tool in his arsenal before, talking his way into the beds of men and women and slipping back out again with the information he needed. The fact he's never turned any of those one-night seductions into a relationship, not like the relationship he has with Tifa, doesn't redeem him. He can't protest the accusation on grounds it could never be true, not without being a liar, and he has promised himself he will never lie to Tifa through anything other than omission.

And it's late enough that he's starting to feel the need for sleep himself, and the glass and a half of whiskey he'd drunk, atop the sake and beer from earlier, has started to swim through the edges of his brain, and they've all had a very trying evening. (Rufus has always appreciated his gift for tactful understatement.) So instead he just says, "This hasn't been about 'information' for a very long time. And it's never been only about me trying to use you. There's a limit to how far I'll whore myself out for the job. And this --" His tiny hand gesture encompasses the room, her, the whole situation. "This is so far over that line it's like the line is back in Sector Three."

Her face doesn't change at his words, but he gets the impression he's managed to shock her nonetheless. She keeps her eyes on him for a long minute, trying to read his sincerity from the scraps and pieces his face and his body will show, and all he can do is try to keep that body from lying to her (he lies for a living; his body knows the moves of the dance and adopts them even when his mind isn't involved) and know that she knows he's capable of reflecting any truth he might want her to see. After long enough that he's starting to get chilly standing there in nothing more than his boxers (Tifa keeps the building as a whole at temperatures that would make Shiva Herself feel at home in the winter and early spring; she says it's because the mass of bodies in the bar generates enough heat on its own, but Tseng privately thinks it's to minimize the amount of Shinra's electricity she uses), Tifa finally says, "Turn out the light and come to bed, Tseng."

Tseng does. The heavy blackout curtains filter the neon from outside when the room is plunged into darkness; he slides between the cool sheets, contrasting (as he always does) their rough cotton with Rufus's expensive silk. In the darkness, he can sense the motions of Tifa unbraiding her hair and starting to comb it out with her fingers; she dislikes sleeping with it bound, even though it inevitably tangles in the night. "Here," Tseng says, his voice a bare breath in the room, the cathedral of darkness summoning the need to speak softly. He props himself up on one elbow. "Let me."

Tifa sighs and moves so he can reach. He sits up and fits himself behind her, works his fingers through the glorious mane of her hair, patiently undoing the few knots he finds. He loves Tifa's hair. She holds herself stiff for a moment, then sighs again and leans back against him. This close, he can feel the exhaustion thrumming through her body like a live wire.

"I wasn't going to apologize for what I've done," Tseng finally says, when he judges the moment is ripe for him to speak. "Because I'm not sorry. It was necessary. You said it yourself: we both know precisely who and what we are." Finished with his ministrations, he sweeps the weight of her hair aside and presses a kiss against the nape of her neck. It makes her shiver, the same way it always does. "But you should know this: I am pleased that who I am includes your lover, and this will be true until such time as you tell me it is no longer."

It would sound better in Wutaian, but such a sentiment would require the mode of the highest formality, and he doesn't want her to think she is being mocked.

Tifa is quiet for another long minute, so long he thinks she might have decided not to respond at all. (Part of the reason he finds spending time with Tifa so soothing is she, alone of all the people he has met in Midgar in the years of his exile save Rufus, understands the value of stillness and silence.) "I'm pretty sure I'll start to find that reassuring come morning," she finally says, and Tseng thinks he might be able hear the sound of her faint smile in her voice.

Then she pulls away, and Tseng starts to fear the worst. But it's only so she can stretch out in the bed, and when he does so as well, she rolls over to drape her body over his the same way she always does, burying her face against his chest and tucking her head under his chin. He thinks, then, he might lie awake for a long time, staring into the blackness of the room around him; but he lets his hand rove over her hair, stroking its silky lengths and breathing in the sunshine smell of her, and the next thing he knows, he is asleep.

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