Tseng never fails to find it interesting how well he sleeps in Tifa's bed. By all rights, he shouldn't; Tifa is lover and enemy all at once, even if they have silently and wordlessly agreed that they will not formally declare themselves as enemies until the day when it becomes absolutely necessary. And unless the world changes beyond all recognition, that day is coming, even as he wishes it didn't have to; Tifa is too compassionate, too egalitarian, to ever let the yoke of Shinra's actions lie lightly upon her shoulders even if she didn't have a personal reason to despise Shinra and all it stands for. Tseng knows it's only due to the fact that every anti-Shinra rebel group in the slums is far too violent, far too lacking in long-term thinking, that Tifa hasn't joined up with one of them already. The day when she sees or experiences something to cross her personal line drawn in the sand is coming, and old man Shinra seems to be doing all he can do to hasten that day along, and when that day arrives there will be nothing Tseng can do to stop her from claiming her rightful place at the head of the rebellion.
(She will be a magnificent leader, when it happens. He'd almost like to live in a world that follows her rule. But he's given his allegiance already, and he knows the saying about a man once forsworn never again being trustworthy, but he's never allowed it to apply to him.)
Still. In the meantime, until that (hopefully) distant day, Tseng sleeps like a baby in Tifa's attic apartment, and only wakes when the tiny piece of his mind that never stops being on watch tells him that the noise he has been hearing, steadily, for the past ten minutes is the sound of combat in the yard outside. Punctuated by laughter, the sound of approval and approbation, encouragement shouted and returned. Not a danger -- he would have woken earlier, had it been.
When his conscious mind wakes enough to realize it must be Tifa and Rufus sparring, he is out of bed before he realizes he is moving.
It isn't that he's worried. (Much.) Even if the sounds of battle drifting in through the cracks around the windows weren't lighthearted enough to clearly be a practice match, he knows both their capabilities, perhaps as well as he knows his own. Tifa's skill level is barely one step below his own, her natural grace and the benefit of good, though mysterious, teaching having been combined with a dedication and work ethic his own teachers back home would have burned offerings daily to Leviathan to see. (He hopes he'll be able to see what she grows into when she has another decade or two to refine her style.) Rufus isn't as good as she is -- may never be; he doesn't have enough time to devote to the study and he can't afford to be locked into a single school of combat in a world where he may be called upon to defend himself against anything and everything with no notice at all -- but he's more than capable of holding his own, especially if they aren't fighting with formal rules.
They won't hurt each other. (Much.) Even if Tifa had woken to dawning anger and decided today was the day she would begin her fight against Shinra in earnest, in the person of Rufus Shinra himself, Rufus would have been able to fend her off for long enough to get away, and he would have been smart enough to holler for Tseng. He hasn't; his hollering is the sound of a man who is enjoying himself more than he has in months. (Years.)
The curiosity is enough to draw Tseng to the window, move aside the curtain (habit, nothing more, keeping him standing to the side and just barely twitching the curtain's edge enough to see out of). What he sees is ... unexpected.
Tifa and Rufus are playing.
Tseng knows the signs: both of them have hit the stage of mushin no shin where the world seems bright and sharp and flowing, where the body moves through the air around it like a sword cleaving through yielding flesh, where the enemy is not enemy but honored partner. He knows a moment of jealousy: he has never seen Rufus achieve that state when sparring with him, always too worried about pleasing Tseng or impressing him or just not letting him down too much. But as Tseng watches, he sees the moment where Rufus lets go, surrenders himself to the glory of movement and the joy of no-self, and in that moment he and Tifa are not opponents but working together to hold themselves in that state for as long as possible.
It's beautiful. No, Tseng thinks, watching a moment where Tifa bypasses an opening to end the match quickly and decisively and instead leaps sideways and -- nearly horizontal in midair -- snaps a kick that is as perfect as a line of poetry calligraphed against the blankness of a fresh scroll with her body arching through the air as beautifully as the song of a bird on the first day of spring, only for Rufus to ignore the opening she has left him and instead catch her, throwing them both backwards like a tumbler setting his partner up for her next gravity-defying feat. What Tseng is watching is beautiful, yes, but beauty is the wrong word to encapsulate it; beauty does not come close to describing what is being created beneath him. What he is seeing is art, plain and simple and most profound.
They are both physical perfection: Rufus's body, lean and muscled, always surprisingly solid whenever he lets himself out of the suits he's had tailored to draw the eye away from his power and grace; Tifa's body, compact and efficient, her glorious musculature always on plain display and always disregarded by those who do not have the eye to see. Their contrast could not be more sharp: one dark, one fair; one tall, one short; one curved, one angular. But in that moment, watching the two of them push their bodies to their limits and reveling in the sheer joy of it all, Tseng stands in the window looking down upon them and cannot decide which one he finds more beautiful.
There's no doubt Tifa is the stronger fighter of the two. Rufus is good -- when Tseng had been given the task of his teaching, he'd pushed Rufus as hard as he'd dared and as firmly as he could, and the man-child Rufus had been had soaked up the learning like it was the first time he'd ever found something he'd truly enjoyed -- but Rufus had been nearly twelve years old when he'd started learning, and they hadn't had as much time as Tseng would have liked, and he'd been constrained by the constant knowledge that he was teaching Rufus, not the pure classical forms he himself had learned, but the skills that might someday save his life. Their training had been hinged around the elephant in the room: Tseng had never explicitly told Rufus he was equipping Rufus with the skills to survive an assassination attempt, but he hadn't had to, because Rufus had known from the very beginning. And Rufus had bent his neck to the learning, bowed his head and thrown himself into everything Tseng had to offer, and Tseng knows that even now Rufus doesn't consider a day complete unless he spends half an hour in the gym testing himself against Tseng or the training dummy.
Rufus is good -- damn good. But Tifa is better.
The first time he'd seen Tifa fight had been an attempted mugging in the Heaven, back when she'd been nothing more than the waitress and the bouncer Kyle had just hired, and he knows now that she'd been six months out from an injury that should have killed her. He'd still seen, watching her disarm and remove the threat, that she was that rarest of creatures, the natural talent. His teachers back home would weep to see the skill and grace she commands. (Would no doubt weep to see such skill and grace in the form of a woman, too; his brother's daughter might be the only child left to the family after Tseng's defection, might have been accepted into the temple and taught the arts because custom dictates that the one who will rule Wutai must know all her secrets, but Tseng knows his former masters well enough to say that collective apoplexy must have been had when they'd all realized young Yuffie would be the one to one day sit what is left of the throne.)
Tseng is better than she is -- something he says not out of pride or vanity; she agrees -- but there's no doubt in his mind that he, who was once the pride of an entire generation of Wutaian adepts, will not be better than she is for long. He has the advantage of experience and practice, of having started his training earlier and having received his training from the hands of masters, but since coming to Midgar, he has let his form slip and his practice fall by the wayside far too often. Give Tifa another decade of working as hard as she works herself now, and she will be able to walk into the temple of Leviathan and put any of the adepts she finds there on the floor without breaking a sweat.
In his darker moments, Tseng occasionally ponders financing a trip back to Wutai for her, just so he can see it.
There are bits of dead grass on Rufus's face and in his hair, wordless testimony that this is not their first match, that Tifa has bested him at least once, but Tseng can see no bruised ego in Rufus's movements. That's one thing Rufus lacks completely, and Tseng had been surprised to discover: once Rufus acknowledges that you are better than he is, in whatever field he has chosen to measure himself against you upon, he holds it against neither you nor himself. He simply challenges himself to rise to your skill, always looking for what he can learn from you. Tseng can see, watching the way Rufus and Tifa parry and thrust across the reach of the backyard, that despite the clear and crystal no-mind of the perfect match, there is a deeply-buried part of Rufus watching each of Tifa's movements, hungrily soaking up her example. Rufus respects competence, in all its forms. He always has. (He sees so little of it.) When the match is over, Tseng would not be surprised to see Rufus asking her for lessons.
And over it is, soon enough; Tseng can see the balance between them falter and flag, can see Tifa's lips moving and Rufus's answering nod, and in the flash between one heartbeat and the next their dance alters from cooperative back to competitive again. They're both exhausted, that much is clear, but Tifa reaches for her reserves of strength and Rufus matches her, and the battle lasts longer than Tseng would have expected before Tifa has him on the grass again.
Rufus taps out, Tifa rolls over, and they both sprawl, exhausted, in the grass. (Tseng doesn't blame them; he's been watching their dance for at least fifteen minutes, and he knows they must have been at it for at least that long before he woke. He's not sure he could keep up a match that long anymore; battles like those are the province of the young.) After a few minutes of panting and gasping, Tseng sees Rufus turn his head, sees his lips moving. Tseng steps closer, without thinking, hoping that either Rufus's voice will carry or a better view will give him a better vantage to read Rufus's lips. He's deathly curious as to what they might say to each other; after a match like the match Tseng just witnessed, he knows the two of them will have learned each other more thoroughly than a month's worth of talking could produce.
But he's too far away, and he can't make out Rufus's words. Whatever they are, Tifa's face is a study in contradiction, the need to pull away warring with the sense that she knows him now, and whatever she says back to him makes Rufus laugh loudly enough that Tseng can hear the faintest stirring of it through the window. It's Rufus's real laugh, the one he saves for intimates. He wonders if Tifa knows how rare it is to hear.
Whatever they're saying to each other down there, it's clear they've reached some sort of accord. Rufus is speaking, and Tifa is listening, and even though both of them are lying limp and drained in the dead grass of Tifa's backyard, Rufus looks like he is standing at the head of the boardroom table and laying out the way the world will be, and Tifa bites her lip and closes her eyes before pushing herself up to stand.
Tseng's heart leaps into his throat when he sees her reach her hand down to Rufus. It isn't the hand you offer an honored enemy after having defeated him. It's the hand up you offer someone you are almost, perhaps, starting to respect.
Rufus pushes himself up to sitting, his hands bracing himself against the ground, and looks up at her. (Rufus is the only person Tseng knows who can look like the conqueror of worlds while he is at another person's feet.) Tifa speaks again. Rufus's posture and carriage changes to hear it, and suddenly his entire body is one long line of desperate hope. He reaches up and wraps his hand around her wrist, and she mirrors the gesture and pulls him up to standing, and once Rufus is towering over her again (Tseng always forgets how small Tifa truly is until he is confronted with empirical evidence yet again) it takes a long moment for them to release their grip on each other. They stand there, staring each other down, and it isn't the assessing gaze of last night as they tried to take each other's measure and see whether or not they would have to fight each other. It's the cautious, tentative look of two people who have decided that they will try to find a way to work together, even if they aren't exactly sure how.
Then they both turn for the door back into the building, and Tseng lets the curtain fall back against the window and heads for the bathroom before he can be caught spying on such an intimate moment.
He's in the shower when he feels the draft of the bathroom door opening and then closing again. "Me," Tifa says -- unnecessarily; Rufus would have used the guest bathroom and besides, Tifa's shower curtain is lacy enough to see the door through, which Tseng knows damn well is by design. He rinses the last of the shampoo out of his hair and turns just in time to see her dropping the last of her clothing on the floor. "Shove over," she says. "I'm all over filthy."
He moves away from the spray of the showerhead to give her room to submerge herself. "Did you have a pleasant run?" he asks.
"Mm," Tifa says. She's facing Tseng, away from the streaming water; as he watches, she tilts her head and lets the water cascade down her hair, her back. Most men of Midgar would fantasize about Tifa's breasts, he knows, and they are indeed lovely, but Tseng's hands always itch to bury themselves in her hair instead. It's a cultural thing, he supposes. "Good enough. But don't play stupid; it doesn't suit you. You were watching us from the window."
"Busted," Tseng agrees, lightly. He decides to indulge himself, if she will let him; he reaches for the bottle of shampoo and gestures for her to turn. She does, with alacrity -- he's not sure why her being willing to turn her back on him always feels like more of an expression of trust than even allowing herself to sleep at his side does, but she loves it when he washes her hair for her. Tifa uses plain shampoo, nearly scentless. It's a good thing, or else just catching a whiff of it throughout the day would probably leave him hard. He rubs his hands together to work up a lather. "The dance was lovely," he adds. "Which you well know."
"Mm," Tifa says again, as he begins to work his hands -- and, incidentally, the shampoo -- through the thickness of her hair. This time, the sound is less assent than appreciation. They're the same sounds she makes when they're fucking; Tifa has never been shy of letting her pleasure be known. He can feel, more than hear, her exhale, and she leans back against him as far as she can without impeding his reach. He digs his fingertips into her scalp and works his thumbs into the knots of tension at the base of her skull. The sound she makes this time is more of a whimper than a moan. "Oh, God, you've got about six years to stop doing that. I've had this headache since Wednesday or so." In precisely the same tone, she adds, "He's very good. You taught him, didn't you."
It isn't a question. "I taught him a lot of things," Tseng says. It's the truth. Or it's what he hopes is the truth, at least; he's trained Rufus in a thousand different skills over the years, from self-defense to disguise to manipulation to how to fold an origami crane, but he's never been sure how much of his worldview and ethics he's managed to teach Rufus alongside the skills themselves. (His detractors would say he has no ethics. He has never allowed the accusations to bother him; he knows himself, and he is a far harsher judge of his actions than any ignorant observer would be.)
Tifa's voice is quiet when she asks, "How many of them took?"
She isn't asking about the self-defense. (Or the origami.) Tseng knows, suddenly and without needing to be told, that Tifa has made her decision, and Tifa has decided she will tell them what it is they want to know -- what he's been hoping to hear from her lips for two years now -- and Tifa is asking him now for reassurance that she is not about to make the most crucial mistake of her life.
He hopes like hell she isn't.
"It's impossible to say," Tseng says, after a moment to consider how honest he wants to be. (He is always honest with Tifa, but he is almost never entirely truthful, with anyone. But Rufus had set aside all his lies of commission and omission last night and given Tifa more truth than he'd ever handed anyone, all at once or in pieces, and Tseng can do no less.) "And the question's been bothering me for thirteen years now. When I first met him he was eleven years old and more mature and self-possessed than some men four times his age. Sometimes I think I understand him completely, and sometimes I think he's an impenetrable mystery."
She sighs at the non-answer. Or perhaps at the way his thumbs are stroking down the lines of her neck, easing away the tension he finds there. He knows what she's asking. She's asking him if he trusts Rufus, if she can trust Rufus, and he's not sure when she became willing to take his assessment of another's character as enough of a base upon which to build her own, but she is perhaps the only person, in this world or any other, who would. "For what it's worth," he adds, "I have never seen him act in a manner inconsistent with any of the things he said to you last night. It isn't much. But it's all I have to offer."
"It's all any of you ever get, isn't it." That isn't a question either, and in it Tseng hears the same division he'd heard last night, you as in you people, other, set apart. Shinra. There's much less bitterness behind it this morning, though. That, at least, is a start.
Tseng transfers his hands from Tifa's neck back to her hair, going back to the task of getting it clean, feeling perhaps she'd feel more comfortable without his hands so close to her spine. She makes a tiny unhappy noise at the loss of his massage, though, and he is once more struck by the amount of trust she places in him. (She shouldn't. But she knows she shouldn't, and she does it anyway, because she knows she can, and not have it misplaced.) "It is," he agrees. "Shinra is not a place where trust is easily won. Nor often a good idea."
"I don't know how you live like that," Tifa says. "I don't know how you could live like that." It isn't a statement needing an answer, though, so Tseng doesn't provide one. After another moment of silence, in which he wonders what is going through her mind, she adds, "I told him I would tell him what you want to know. After breakfast."
The sudden rush of relief washing through him leaves Tseng dizzy. "Thank you," he says. It isn't -- quite -- the acknowledgement her bravery deserves, but he isn't sure she would know the words in Wutaian he wants to use.
"Don't thank me yet." Tifa turns around -- giving him just enough warning of her motion for him to untangle his hands from her hair and avoid pulling it -- and regards him with sober eyes. "It might not be enough. It might not be anything."
"Anything you can tell us will be something more than what we have." Tseng brushes the back of his hand over her forehead, chasing away a rivulet of shampoo-laden water before it can reach her eyes. "Anything might be the piece that unlocks the puzzle. Rufus has been trying to crack it for years."
Tifa closes her eyes and takes half a step backwards. For a second Tseng thinks she might have seen something in his face or heard something underneath his words to frighten her, to make her want to pull away, but all she does is tip her head back under the shower's spray to begin rinsing the shampoo from her hair. "I spent a lot of that day dying," Tifa says, quietly enough for the sound of the water running, the pipes banging, to be nearly enough to drown her words. "I'm not sure how much of what I remember is real."
Tseng's eyes are drawn to the scar standing out from the cream and roses of her skin. He'd known it was there by inference before he'd known it was there by her own words; he'd known it was there by her own words long before he had been permitted to see. The first time they'd fucked, Tifa had stripped out of her skirt but left her shirt on, and when he'd reached for the hem to pull it off her, she'd slapped his hands away. (You touch that again and you won't be touching me anymore she'd said, all angry pride and prickly self-defense, and Tseng had let it go, because it wasn't worth the energy the battle would take to fight it. Patience. Patience is all.)
Afterwards, she had sprawled out in the bed beside him, her back to him, and he had debated the matter for a few minutes before rolling over to fit himself against her, stroking her skin, careful to keep his hand to the swell of her belly, the curve of her hip, the plane of her thigh. She'd sighed. Thank you for not pushing it, she'd said, and scars are a way of life in my profession, he'd said -- he certainly has more than a few of his own, though none of them quite as emphatic -- and she'd sighed again and taken his hand in hers and drawn it up underneath the shirt she was still wearing to let it rest against her breastbone.
He remembers, now, the way her hair smelled as he tucked his face against her neck and shoulder to keep himself from trying to look, the way his fingers had trailed along her skin, learning the spread and reach and depth of the hard and angry rope of flesh beneath them. He remembers tracing the edges, feeling the familiar spongy give at the edges of the scar, mute testimony to the fact it was treated with materia -- a mastered Restore, if he didn't miss his professional guess -- instead of being allowed to heal naturally. He remembers adding up the cues and realizing if it had been anything less than a mastered Restore, she would have died; he remembers thinking that even with the materia, it was likely a close call. (He remembers weighing the evidence against what scant few scraps she'd told him, trying to decide whether those scraps had been the truth.)
They hadn't spoken of Nibelheim or Sephiroth again, and the next time they'd fucked, she'd stripped naked without an instant of hesitation, her eyes daring him to make an issue of it, and he'd kissed the line between her breasts and let it go.
He reaches up now to rest his hand between her breasts, his touch far more gentle than the way she always presses her hand against her scars (for surcease, for a reminder). "I'm listening," he says, with as much comfort as he can. He knows she will hear what he is truly offering: he knows she will find stripping herself verbally bare for Rufus excruciating, and he is offering her the chance to work out what she will say before she is forced to throw herself into painful confessions in front of someone she doesn't trust. (The fact she trusts him will never fail to bewilder him. She can trust him -- up to a point, and she knows where that point lies as well as he does -- but so few people ever realize.)
But all Tifa does is pause a moment, her eyes still closed as though praying for strength, before squaring her shoulders and lifting her hands to squeeze the excess water out of her hair, stripping one hand down its length with practiced competence. "I know," she says. "And you have no idea how tempting it is to tell everything to you and let you figure out what it is he needs to hear. But that would be running away, and there's always the chance that he would know to ask a question you wouldn't, and I only want to do this once. Well. I don't want to do it at all, but you know what I mean."
"I do," Tseng says. He leans forward and kisses the scar, right between her breasts. Her hand comes up to cradle the back of his head briefly, then falls away. "And I honor your courage." The word he uses is one that will not translate fully to an outsider, he knows, but he thinks Tifa may understand it anyway.
When he looks up again, she is smiling at him, the barest quirk of her lips, aimed at herself and not at him. "It's less 'courage' and more complete fucking insanity." The smile falls off her face as she adds, "Promise me something."
His ears sharpen. She has never asked him to promise her anything; the only thing they have promised each other is that they will make no promises. He doesn't know if she knows how much his word is worth to him, once he gives it. He would venture that she does, but he isn't sure. "If I can," he says.
Her lips quirk again, less from amusement this time than from acknowledgement of his words, and he knows, seeing her face, that yes, she does know what his word means to him, and she is relying upon it. "Swear to me that whatever happens, whatever you discover and whatever actions the two of you take, no matter what you might -- might have to do, however the story ends, you will tell me the ending before -- before whatever happens, happens."
Tseng blinks, twice. It's the only reaction he allows himself; he's fairly certain he's just heard Tifa absolve him, freely and in advance, for whatever actions he might need to perform, whether upon Rufus's orders or the old man's or simply out of his own personal necessity. He thinks back to his words of last night, to her reactions to learning that Jonathan Shinra truly is mad enough (rabid enough) to have his own son killed if Rufus became too inconvenient -- to how she has never once flinched away from the blood that is on his hands, sometimes literally -- and finds himself having to turn to fetch her the soap, lest his face give too much away. She is preparing herself for the necessity of her death, for being eliminated because she knows too many of Shinra's secrets, and there's a part of him that knows she had been prepared for him to kill her on that night when she first confessed to being the survivor of Nibelheim (to knowing what Shinra was capable of) but he hadn't realized she still held the thought.
Weighed against the courage of that absolution, his response is unquestionable. "This I swear, upon my family's name and honor." (No one in Midgar knows his family's name, and his family would hold he has long since violated their honor. But it's what you swear by, when you are making a vow you must not break, and he is an exile by choice as well as by fiat, but he is still Wutai's child in all the ways in which it matters.)
When he turns back around, she is watching him, with the penetrating, assessing gaze that always makes him wonder what she sees. "Then let's go do this," she says. "Get out of the shower and let me finish getting clean."
He gets.
Tseng keeps a few spare changes of clothes down here in Tifa's drawers, everything from casual enough to blend into the neighborhood (as well as he can; the clothes themselves come from the secondhand shop in Lower Four but he refuses to wear anything other than his own shoes, which are clearly well-made enough to cost half a year's slum labor) to a full suit hanging in the corner of Tifa's closet for days (nights) in which he stays over and goes straight in to work. Today he picks out a pair of SOLDIER BDU pants and a plain black long-sleeved t-shirt. He bypasses the .45 and the .22 on the nightstand and secures the 9mm into the holster built into the pants at the small of his back, then slides one of his throwing knives into the outer pocket on each thigh. (For him, it's practically going naked.) He can hear the creak of footsteps in the hallway, entering the guest bathroom, which tells him Rufus is taking the chance to shower as well. He wonders, again, what passed between them out there, other than the obvious.
The shower clicks off in the bathroom behind him by the time he has finished toweling out his hair, dressing, and stowing the rest of his weaponry and the suit he was wearing last night in the backpack he keeps down here for carrying things home in. (Their dry-cleaner will, no doubt, lecture him yet again about not wadding up his suit jackets in the bottom of a bag. He can practically recite the lecture along with the man by now.) Tifa emerges a moment later, her hair bundled up in a towel but otherwise naked. Despite her nudity, the bits of vulnerability he'd seen in the shower have burned completely away; her mouth is set in a firm line, and she looks determined.
"Come here," Tseng says, after she's picked out her clothing and gotten dressed. When she hesitates, he brandishes the comb he'd taken from the top of her dresser.
Her face softens. "You don't have to," she says, but she comes over to sit on the edge of the bed anyway, undoing the wrap of the towel around her head and using it to rub more water out of her hair before tossing it aside to hang on the bedpost.
Tseng moves it to the side and kisses the nape of her neck again, planting one knee on the bed behind her and beginning, as he always does, to untangle the knots of her hair at the ends. "I know," he says. "I keep telling you: I enjoy it. And you find it relaxing, as do I, and with the day we are likely to be having, a moment of relaxation would not go amiss."
"True," Tifa says, on a sigh. She falls silent, save for the tiny noises of pleasure whenever he strokes his hand over her hair to smooth out a section after he has finished detangling it with the comb. Eventually -- just when he's beginning to think that they will spend the entire task in silence -- she adds, "Tell me something that nobody else knows about him."
There's only one 'him' she could mean, of course. (Rufus exerts his own gravitational pull; he becomes the center of any conversation that so much as touches upon his edges before you know what has happened.) She must sense his reticence, because she adds, "Nothing that he would consider a secret. Just -- something that will help me see the Rufus Shinra you see, instead of the one he's been trying like hell to show me."
Tseng lets the silence build between them again, working through the knots of an entire section of her hair, picking through the entirety of his and Rufus's history before deciding what to offer. "He attended a boarding school in Junon -- that part is in his official bio. It was a school for the children of old money, the ones who view Shinra as vulgar, new-money upstarts." He can feel her surprise at that; that not everyone Above worships at the altar of Shinra is a view that doesn't much make it to the slums. "He skipped two grades, and still wound up at the top of his class. That was his father's influence; his father told him when he was sent away that he expected his son to excel in everything, and for all that his father is a monster, it took years for Rufus to realize trying to please him was a lost cause. None of those things won him any friends; the people who were inclined to ignore the fact his family wasn't old-Plains aristocracy hated him because of his success, and the ones who didn't hate him because of his success found him --"
He considers his words carefully. It's been years since he's been forced to struggle for a concept in Midgar's common language; he sounds now like a native, having long since trained himself out of the Wutaian accent he'd had upon his arrival and worked to mostly lose the stilted, formal phrasings of one who first learned to speak the language from books and non-fluent tutors. But for this, it is important to be precise. "Unnerving," he finally decides. It's as close as he can get to the concept he is trying to convey, the odd and slightly fey intensity Rufus has always held. "Rufus was never a child; he was never allowed to be a child. He attended his first board meeting when he was eight. All of us found him a little disconcerting when he was younger, but those who were supposed to be his peers felt it the worst."
Coming to the end of his self-appointed task, he draws the comb through her hair one more time, then picks the towel back up to blot out the excess water freed by the combing before sectioning her hair into parts for braiding. (Impulse and whim has him choosing many parts, rather than three; it isn't often he gets a chance to indulge in some of the gentler arts here in Midgar, but he had learned the complex braids of a Wutaian imperial wife's hairstyle when he had been a child, to provide his mother assistance when she couldn't bear the touch of a maid, and Tifa will look stunning in them.)
"The summer before he returned for his final year," Tseng continues -- and oh, he will not tell her the whole of what happened that summer; he's certain she already knows that he and Rufus are, or have been, intimate, but it would be simply tacky to speak the details aloud -- "he decided he was sixteen, and well past the point where he should be considered an adult and allowed to make his own decisions. His father didn't agree, of course, but Rufus resolved that since his father wasn't likely to allow him to attend university -- his father hadn't; he put far more stock in on-the-job training -- and since it was likely to be the last year of relative freedom he would have before assuming his position in the company, he would take advantage of it." In so many ways, but those details are one of Rufus's secrets, and one that no one living will hear from Tseng's lips without Rufus's leave. "He kept up the academics. But he decided he'd give himself room to play, as well. He joined the drama club. And was promptly cast as the lead of everything they produced that year."
Tifa stifles a laugh. Tseng can see it running through her shoulders. "That sounds -- unexpected," she says. (Tactful as ever.)
Tseng finishes the first lace braid, arching up and over her hairline and flowing down the side, then ties it off with one of the elastics she keeps to hand and uses the comb to clip it out of the way while he begins on the next. (Once he has done three, he will braid the rest into a crown braid and pin it up, then weave the ends of the lace braids through and around it. The work is thoughtful, meditative. Her hair is lovely. Tifa's slightly-battered bedroom is nothing like his mother's perfumed bower, but when he does this, it reminds him of home.) "The battle, once his father heard of it, most likely could have been heard back in Wutai," he says, dryly. "He won it by pointing out drama training could be useful in business negotiations -- learning how to present the face he wanted to show. We all gave him credit for coming up with good bullshit, at least."
"'We'?" Tifa asks. "And what are you doing to my hair?" She twists her neck, trying (fultilely, of course) to be able to get a view of the work he's doing.
Tseng puts his other hand on top of her head and holds. She subsides, grumbling. (If any of the other Turks could see them now, they would laugh themselves stupid.) "Braiding it. Hold still, or I'll have to start over. And yes, 'we'. At that point, the Turks were serving as his bodyguards whenever he left the school premises. Or Sephiroth, or a few other members of SOLDIER, if we were -- otherwise occupied. We were ... the closest thing he had to a continuity of personal interactions, at the time." The closest thing he had to friends, he thinks, but does not say; those too would be secrets Rufus would object to the telling of. He still remembers the look on Rufus's face, when he'd seen Tseng and Sephiroth standing in the hallway outside the dressing rooms to congratulate him on his success after his first production, and not his father: disappointment at his father's absence warring with the resignation of not having expected his presence in the first place, all overlaid with a fierce pride that Tseng and Sephiroth at least had been there to see.
Tifa's shoulders stiffen at the mention of Sephiroth's name, though, and he wordlessly curses himself. He hadn't quite put two and two together. Even now, he finds it difficult to reconcile the Sephiroth he knew -- the Sephiroth they all knew -- with what happened to Nibelheim. Easy, too easy, to fit that Sephiroth into the category of ikiryō, living ghost, Sephiroth's spirit turned vengeful after his departure, and remember Sephiroth-the-man as the friend he had been. But Tifa would have only seen the ikiryō, and not the man he had been, once upon a time.
"He said that -- Sephiroth was his friend. Last night. I ..." Tseng only hears the fractional hesitation in Tifa's voice before she speaks the name because he's listening for it. "I don't want to hear about that," she adds, suddenly, viciously. "I don't want S-Sephiroth to become real to me. I don't want him to become human."
"I don't blame you," Tseng murmurs. He doesn't. He does not doubt Tifa has spent the past two and a half years hating Sephiroth with every inch of her being, the same hatred she bears for Shinra writ even larger. He also knows Tifa's heart: she is someone who is only capable of hating that which she does not understand, cannot sympathize with.
She stirs, beneath his hands. He debates letting go of her hair, letting her get up and pace the way she so clearly itches to be doing, but before he can make a decision she subsides again. "But it's what you knew, isn't it?" she says, her voice little more than a bare breath. "You knew the man, not the monster. That's why Rufus is trying so hard to figure out what happened -- because you all want to know what happened to your friend."
There are many, many reasons why he admires Tifa. Her ability to view the world as it is, not the way she would like it to be, is one of them; her ability to place herself in the shoes of another and view the world the way they would see it may top it. "Yes," Tseng agrees. He could add more, could explain the ties Rufus considers to bind him and Sephiroth -- both children of Shinra, of Shinra's neglect and Shinra's control, in a way no outsider could ever know -- but he holds his tongue. If she asks, he will answer, but he does not want to offer the information, lest she not want to hear.
Tifa's sigh is unhappy. "Which means I'm going to have to know who that man was, if I'm going to be at all useful in telling you how the man who -- the man I saw differs from the man you knew."
She falls silent again. Tseng finishes the second lace braid, ties it off, and leans to the side, reaching out to take her chin in his hand. She submits to the motion as he turns her face towards his, but her eyes stay fixed on a spot across the room for a long moment before she sighs again and lifts them to his.
"Asking you to re-live the destruction of everything you knew is cruel enough of me," Tseng says, putting sincerity into his every word. ('Us' would be more the right word, but he doesn't want to bring Rufus back into the equation, not when Tifa is unsettled already, not when she still isn't sure what to think of him. Not when he doesn't want her thinking of how much sway Rufus holds over him.) "I will not ask you to sympathize with the man who was that destruction's hands."
Her lips twist. It isn't amusement. "You might not have any choice."
Too much to hope, that she wouldn't see. Rufus has owned him, whole and entire, since the moment he stepped into the room at Verdot's heels and met the man-child whose fate would be so tightly intertwined with his. (He still remembers the moment Rufus had looked up from his economics textbook and those ice-blue eyes had met his own: the shock of knowing, the click of recognition, and the slow sinking realization that every action he'd taken up until that point, every action he'd viewed as stemming from his own decisions and not from the notion of destiny his people preached and he hadn't believed in, had all been geared to bring him to that moment and beyond. He really fucking hates mysticism.)
"That may be so," he allows. Tifa gives him a look that he can only interpret as no fucking shit. "But I will do all that I can."
"Finish braiding my hair, if you're going to," Tifa says, instead of responding. "I need to go start breakfast." He recognizes it as her way of telling him the conversation is over, or at least that point of discussion put on hold, and so he does; he has finished the third lace braid and is halfway through the crown before she adds, "Does he know?"
Try as he might, Tseng can't figure out what she means by the question. 'He' could only be Rufus, but what Rufus might or might not be expected to know, he cannot guess. "Know what?" he finally resorts to asking.
The tiny hand gesture Tifa makes is frustration -- at making her put it into words? perhaps -- and her voice is more vicious than he's ever heard it be, outside the discussion of the night before. "What he has. In you."
The implications of the question are stunning; Tseng's hands still. He cannot remember anyone ever defending his honor in such sharp tones before. In her words, he can hear how highly she values him, how much she regrets the vagaries of fate and fortune that have dictated they be on opposite sides of a divide he knows it would take miracles to cross, how much she wishes either he or she could be one inch less committed, less dedicated to honor, as they are. (But then they would not be who they are; for both of them, that honor has made them.)
In the hallway, in the guest bathroom, the shower clicks off, and Tseng can hear the creaking of floorboards as Rufus moves.
"He knows," Tseng says. In truth, he isn't sure. He knows what Tifa means, knows she sees the full weight and measure of the coin of his honor, willing to be spent. That Rufus appreciates him, he is certain; that Rufus relies upon him, likewise; that Rufus trusts him, he is less certain, but nearly so. (Rufus trusts him as much as Rufus is capable of trusting anybody.) But he's never actually been certain how much of his honor Rufus can see. Rufus has an incredibly strong sense of ethics of his own, one Tseng has been mapping the edges and valleys of for years, and by now Tseng is fairly confident he could predict Rufus's necessities of honor about as well as he could predict his own. But he's never been able to tell how much of that honor comes from his own teachings, and he's never been able to tell how far deeply into his own honor Rufus can see in return.
Still. It's what he likes to believe. Needs to believe. No blade wishes to think its master does not appreciate its keen edge, and he and his Turks are Rufus's blades, even as they follow his father's orders and await the day Rufus will stretch out his hand and gather them up.
"He'd better," Tifa says, low and fierce. Tseng finishes the last of his work and turns to her dresser for the pins to hold his artistry in place, and when Tifa looks up at him from under the crown of her hair, giving him the fierce look of a mother lioness defending her cubs, it takes his breath away.
Then she stands, and the moment is over, and she cracks her knuckles and links her fingers and stretches to the sky. "Come on. I'm hungry."
She does not look at herself in the mirror to see his work as she strides out into the hall. He would be offended, did he not know that Tifa never looks in a mirror if she can help it.
The first time he was invited up to Tifa's apartment he'd been vaguely surprised to find it had a kitchen, small and cramped and a fraction of the size of the one below, appliances creaky and old. She'd set him to rights soon enough: the bar's kitchen requires careful cleaning after each use, and to fire it up for a single meal would be inefficient. (No matter how much nicer it is to cook down there, she'd added, a minute later, when she'd had to bang on the top of the stove to get the burner to light properly.) He follows Tifa down the hallway in the direction of the kitchen, stopping when he sees Rufus stepping out of the guest bedroom, freshly-showered and dressed once again in last night's clothes, albeit without the body-language overlay to turn them into someone else's.
"Morning," Rufus says. He looks disgustingly alert, like he's been awake for hours. (He likely has, if he slept at all. Tseng hadn't consciously remembered Rufus's problems with falling asleep somewhere he doesn't know well enough to trust, well enough to have internalized all the noises and motions likely to manifest around him properly enough for his subconscious sentries to discard what is normal activity, well enough for him to feel confident he will wake for anything out of the ordinary. But it would not be the first time Rufus has spent a sleepless night, and it likely won't be the last; Rufus is young enough, resilient enough, that a single night's missed sleep won't leave him scrambling to keep up.)
Tseng nods in return. "Morning, kiddo," he says, the same greeting he's given Rufus every morning for as long as he has known the man.
The greeting makes Rufus roll his eyes, the way it has ever since Rufus grew into his own self-confidence. (Tracing Rufus's reactions to the nickname over the years has been a useful exercise in comparison; at first Rufus had bristled at the mode of address, thinking it mockery; once satisfied it was not, as the years went by, he had begun to object to the nomenclature, feeling he'd outgrown it; by now, he has grown to believe it affectionate, a reminder of their shared history. Tseng has never confessed he uses it solely because no one else has ever dared to address Rufus Shinra by a love-name, and there is something in Rufus that cries out for tangible expressions of affection.) "Sure thing, old man," Rufus replies, the same response he's been giving for years, cementing Tseng's position as one of the few people in the world Rufus Shinra is willing to tease. "You saw the sparring match, I take it."
There's a hungry undercurrent in Rufus's words, the way there always is when he's looking for Tseng's approval -- well-hidden, the way Rufus's weaknesses always are (Tseng has trained him far too well for the situation to be otherwise), but painfully present for those who have eyes to see. So he nods. "I did," he says. "Holding your own against Tifa for as long as you did is pretty damn impressive."
Honor thus satisfied (and Rufus knows Tseng meant it, can see the sincerity lurking beneath Tseng's flippant tone), Rufus is free to demur. "She had me on my ass in a minute or less in the first two falls. The last one was more for a workout than any real attempt at sparring." Which is truth, but still downplays Rufus's achievements; Tseng has never met anyone with a more curious blend of humility and arrogance. "The lady is quite impressive."
"The lady will outdo me in a year or two, most likely," Tseng says, dryly. (He knows Tifa is probably in the kitchen with ears cocked, despite the banging of pots and pans as she assembles her workspace for breakfast. He doesn't mind speaking the truth out loud, though; she should know how highly he esteems her skills. Rufus is not the only one who needs a healthy dose of approval from time to time.) "Especially if you keep me on my ass behind a desk as much as you have lately."
Rufus flashes him a quick grin. "Blame my father and Heidegger," he says, and oh, butter wouldn't melt in his mouth. "I think you should at least get out every now and then. They want the reports done by yesterday. Not that either of them reads them."
"That would require them to know how to read," Tseng says. "I trust you've had a sufficient workout to let me off the hook for our run this morning?" Not that he would allow Rufus out in the slums to do that run -- even after years of habit and history without incident, even though he has long since had demonstrated to him that Rufus is capable of defending himself without mercy and without hesitation, his shoulderblades still itch every time he and Rufus take to the streets each morning. A sniper's bullet is hard to defend against. He dislikes Tifa taking her morning run through the slums each day, and enough of the slum denizens know her position and place as the queen of Sector 7 for her to have been placed on the list of untouchables. To allow Rufus into that environment would be unthinkable.
Rufus laughs, though, as Tseng intended for both halves of his statement to make him do. "If I so much as tried to do a quarter mile right now, I'd keel over dead. The shower's the only thing that's keeping me from falling over and declaring myself out of commission for the day. Come on. I heard rumor of waffles."
"And one of you had better get your ass in here and help me slice and sugar these strawberries," Tifa hollers -- letting them know she's listening, before either of them can say something they shouldn't, even though they both know full well that she is. "Kenji had just enough for one meal, not enough for me to use on the menu for tonight's dessert."
"Coming," Tseng calls, before he can think twice. The look Rufus passes him is highly amused, and Tseng has no doubts that if they were alone, he would be hearing choice comments on his willingness to follow orders when those orders are given by a pretty girl.
The expression on Rufus's face when he sees Tifa's hairstyle is priceless. Tseng hadn't been thinking of Rufus's reaction when he'd decided to braid Tifa's hair in the styles of home, but now he's seen, he realizes it can only help. If Rufus is off balance, even a little, it may help to mitigate some of the uncanny self-possession so many people find disturbing. (Less so than when Rufus was a child, but even as a man of twenty-four, Rufus can unnerve; his manner will sit oddly on his shoulders at least until his hair begins to grey -- although with Rufus's coloring it will be difficult to tell when that point truly is -- and his face can acquire more of the outer proofs of his inner landscape.)
When Tifa sees Rufus's expression, tracks his gaze to realize what his eyes must be fixed on, she lifts one hand to her head to pat at her hair, fingers questing to determine the truth of what Tseng's ministrations produced. (It's a curious reaction, and one Tseng hadn't expected: artless, unthinking, the instinctive motion of a woman trying to determine why a man is looking at her so oddly. He's never seen Tifa exhibit those behaviors before.) She catches herself only a second later, letting her hand fall again and reaching for the door of the tiny refrigerator, taking out a small plastic basket of the aforementioned strawberries and handing them to Tseng. They are small, and more than a little bruised; Tseng wonders, not for the first time, why she uses a slum grocer instead of paying to have better produce brought down from Above, decides (as he decides every time) she wants her money, and the Heaven's, to stay Below where it will do the most good.
"Slices," she says, then points at two of the cabinets behind him in quick succession. "Bowl. Sugar." She opens the drawer next to the sink and pulls out a chef's knife (taking care, but not exaggerated care, to make sure they both see her holding it; she remembers as well as he does the time he hadn't realized she had a knife in her hand and reacted ... poorly ... when she'd gestured at him with it). "Knife."
"What's my job?" Rufus asks. Tseng lets his eyes flick over to see what Rufus's expression might give away; his tone sounds nothing like Tseng might have expected. It's very nearly affectionate, is what it is, and given the way Tifa had been reacting to him last night, something epic must have happened between them before Tseng woke up, for Rufus to be so open with her.
And given Tifa's reactions last night to Rufus's attempts to step up and take control over even the smallest piece of her surroundings, her response is just as astonishing. She brandishes the knife at him, pointing it at the center of his chest to emphasize her point, and part of Tseng is quietly cheering her audacity and part of him is stunned at how Rufus's body language, loose and relaxed, changes not one inch. (He can get away with waving a knife at Rufus without Rufus so much as tensing up nearly all the time; Reno and Rude, about half the time; if anyone else tries it, the knife would very shortly thereafter be removed from that person's grip, with no particular care for whether or not fingers were broken in said removal, before Rufus had even consciously begun moving. That there is six feet and a counter between them makes little difference to Rufus's instincts; Rufus knows damn well how quickly a trained fighter can close that distance.) Then she hands the knife to Tseng. "Your job is to get the hell out of the kitchen," she says. "There isn't enough room in here for three."
The edge of Rufus's mouth quirks up; Tseng wonders if Tifa knows it for one of the signs of Rufus's true amusement. "Is the hallway far enough?" he asks. "Or shall I go downstairs and attempt to puzzle out the coffee maker?"
Tseng barely dares to breathe. Watching the two of them dance around each other in combat wasn't half as potentially deadly as this moment here is. But Tifa doesn't seem to realize that if she says the wrong thing, if she gives the wrong words, Rufus's good mood will evaporate as though it never had been. "I leave it set up overnight for the first run in the morning," Tifa says. "Push the button in the center, you can't miss it, it's the one I painted bright red with nailpolish because people kept asking me how the fuck to turn on the coffee maker. Mugs are under the counter, creamer's in the deli fridge under the mugs, trays are stacked under the bar on the rightmost side. Mine's one milk, two sugars, his is --"
"Enough sugar to make the spoon stand up with a little bit of coffee poured over it," Rufus says. Tifa laughs. Rufus sketches a salute, loose and sloppy, and Tseng can't quite decide if he's ready to start breathing again. (The look Rufus gives him tells him Rufus is doing at least part of it on purpose, to fuck with his head.) Rufus slides by Tseng with an exaggerated hip-swing -- the kitchen really is too small for three; Tifa was right on that much -- and disappears down the hallway, whistling. A minute later, Tseng can hear the stairs creaking under his weight.
Tifa is watching him from under lowered lashes when he turns away from watching the door Rufus disappeared through, even as she measures flour and pours milk and begins to whisk the batter for the waffles. "You look disconcerted," she says.
"Thinking," Tseng says. The strawberries, beneath the tips of his fingers, are beginning to stain his skin red. (He hopes it isn't an omen.)
"About?" From anyone else it would be a trap. From Tifa it is merely a desire to know.
Habit, nothing more, has him deciding to be honest. "Whether or not the two of you are capable of being in a room together without a constant, low-grade struggle for dominance."
Her smile, when it comes, is a quick flash, there and gone. It isn't quite the reaction he expected. "For now? No. He's letting me win, because this is my territory and he needs me too much to challenge me for rights to it. I'm using the opportunity to score as many points as I can to save them up. Wait until we're on neutral ground, and we'll see how it plays out then."
He hadn't -- quite -- expected her to be able to see with that much clarity. But then again, Tifa is exceptional at clarity. "I find myself possessed of equally conflicting desires to engage ringside seats, or to book transport to a different continent."
Tifa sets the spoon down, sticking her pinky finger into the batter and lifting it to her lips to lick it away. "Should have thought of that before you started all this, then," she says, and her tone is playful, but her eyes speak nothing but the truth.
Tseng has nearly finished slicing the strawberries -- and Tifa has finished the first two waffles, transfered them onto a baking sheet, and put them into the oven to keep warm while she continues to work -- when Tifa's head comes up. Tseng hears the sound of voices drifting in from downstairs half a second later. (He has often suspected her hearing is sharper than his is.) She points at him, then at the waffle maker. "Three minutes, crack it, check if it's brown," and she strides out of the kitchen, grabbing a towel to wipe her hands clean as she goes.
Only the fact she'd mentioned several of her part-timers were coming in this morning keeps him from following. (The urge to defend Rufus, even when Rufus is more than capable of defending himself, is one he will never lose.) But he's met all of Tifa's staff, here and there, and though he would not be surprised to find them forming the core of Tifa's rebellion -- when Tifa reaches the point where it becomes necessary for her to form her rebellion -- he knows they will not do anything without Tifa's leave and Tifa's grace. Which Tifa would not give. The truce of the watering-hole binds her as well, and she has given both him and Rufus implicit sanctuary in her domain. She would not allow harm to come to either of them, not without explicitly withdrawing her pledge of sanctuary first.
So he watches the wafflemaker.
He can't hear what's going on downstairs, but just as he's checking the waffle for doneness (and, finding it nicely browned, he takes it out and adds it to the growing stack inside the oven) he hears the creak of footsteps up the stairs. He's spent enough of his life listening for it, so he knows the tread to be Rufus's. A minute later, Rufus pokes his head in. "Coffee delivery," he says.
Tseng pours the batter for the next waffle and takes the mug Rufus holds out. "Any trouble down there?"
Rufus shakes his head. As Tseng watches, he wanders over to the tiny window set into the equally-tiny free bit of wall and looks out; it faces over the street. At this time of morning, the slums are quieter than they will be later, but there are still enough people out and about for Rufus to get a chance to see what life is like down here. Tseng wonders what he's thinking. "The lady had a cover story all ready," Rufus says, absently. "I'm a friend of yours from Costa del Sol, just starting the U. We overstayed the train last night." He pauses. "What time does the circumplate start running in the mornings, anyway?"
"Nine on weekends, eight on weekdays," Tseng says. (He finds it so fascinating that Rufus has apparently decided Tifa is to be 'the lady' in reference, rather than her name. He isn't sure what that means; were Rufus Wutaian, Tseng would call it a sign of high respect, but Rufus has never shown any sign of having adopted that behavior in Tseng's hearing before.)
It takes a second for his answer to sink in, and then Rufus turns from the window and frowns. "And the train takes -- oh, from here it would be what, an hour fifteen to get to the CBD?"
"At least," Tseng says. "They often run late." He knows where Rufus is going with this. It's fascinating to watch his mind work, see the way he immediately leaps to the systemic conclusions but never loses sight of the individual connections.
The line between Rufus's eyebrows grows sharper. "That's why we can't keep employees who live in the slums, isn't it. They keep getting written up for being late." When Tseng makes a small noise of assent, Rufus shakes his head. "Why doesn't the old man just push the trains' start time back another two hours?" He holds up a hand. "No, don't answer that. Money."
"Money," Tseng agrees. (And yet another way people in the slums are kept in artificial poverty, but he knows better than to say so outright. Rufus will make the connection eventually, anyway.)
Rufus shakes his head. His attention is drawn back to the window, and Tseng wonders what he's seeing out there. "Did you know about the groceries thing?" he asks.
Tseng frowns. "What groceries thing?"
"Someone's gotta be diverting the supply trains that are supposed to get down here. Those strawberries?" Rufus nods his chin to where the sliced strawberries are sitting in sugar to make syrup while the waffles cook. "She paid sixty gil for them. I saw the invoice. And she says they're the best quality she can get down here, period."
Tseng blinks. Then blinks again. "No," he says, truthfully. He'd known the difficulty Tifa has in obtaining fresh produce, but thought it her insistence on using the grocers nearby rather than seeking out the best suppliers the slums had to offer. He hadn't known what she pays for her supplies, nor that they are all she can get. He has been scrupulously careful to avoid looking into the finances of her business. "I had known she had difficulty. I didn't know it was ... endemic."
Rufus rests his forehead against the window and sighs. "So now, on top of the rest of this shit, I have to go back Upstairs and knock heads until I figure out where in the line the rot starts. It's not Reeve, which is all I know. And that's going to be so much fun when we're also busy trying to figure out the rest of this mess." He turns his head, and his ice-blue eyes pin Tseng in place. "How in the name of Bahamut's left wing did it get this bad down here, Tseng?"
"Your father," Tseng says. (Rufus already knows the answer.)
But the look Rufus is giving him is hard and uncompromising. "Why didn't you tell me how bad it was down here?" he asks.
And yeah, that's probably the question he meant in the first place. Tseng sighs. (Checks the waffle.) "Part of it I've told you, and you didn't have enough experience to hear what I was truly saying. Part of it I kept from you, because if you knew the full extent of the problem, you would have confronted your father about it, the wrong way, and he would have exiled you to Junon again, from whence it is not possible to fix anything. Part of it I'm certain I simply don't know. We spend more time down here than many, but I won't pretend we know the entirety."
He waits to see if that answer will be acceptable to Rufus, or if he will be in further hot water than he no doubt already will be, when Rufus is ready to deal with his displeasure from the night before. But all Rufus does is breathe out, heavily, and turn back to look out the window again. "I have to fix this," he says. "I have to fix this somehow."
"Yes," Tseng says. "But you can do nothing from Junon or the grave." He lets the warning stand there. It will suffice for Rufus, where it might not suffice for another. But Rufus, even when he throws himself into a project, does so in the most planned and calculated fashion possible.
Tseng occupies himself in transfering waffle to oven, pouring another, while Rufus thinks. It doesn't take him long; it never does. "I want to bring her back Upstairs with us when we go back up tonight," Rufus says, finally. "If you think she'll come. It doesn't have to be the complex, assuming we can use your place or one of your safehouses, as long as it's on the network. I want her to read through all the information we have on Nibelheim, and tell me where they're lying through their teeth."
It's not entirely unexpected. Tseng turns the thought over in his head for a few moments, examining it from each facet. "It's possible," he finally says. "If you allow me to do the asking, I believe I could make the case. However, it is Saturday, which is her busiest night, and while her employees are capable, she is ... possessive of what is hers."
Rufus makes a face. "Right. Right, I'd forgotten. Well, I would be too." He falls quiet again, turning things over. "Think she'd go for it if I call in a few favors? I could call down one of my department's project managers. If you give me twenty minutes I could probably get Beatrice to find one who has some bar experience. And if absolutely necessary, I could probably get Reeve down here to watch things, if I told him what it was for, and probably Reno and Rude, too."
"Reno is banned from tending bar for the rest of his natural life, or until he apologizes and I believe he really means it," comes the voice from the door. Tseng doesn't jump, but only because he's trained himself out of showing too much surprise; he only stops himself from drawing one of his knives by the fact he knows Tifa's voice well enough for his subconscious to stand down before his conscious mind gets the memo. Rufus isn't as lucky; he's pulled his P-225 from the holster at the small of his back before he can stop himself, and his expression as he re-holsters it is half anger, half chagrin. Tseng hadn't thought to tell him that, like any child of Wutai's arts, Tifa is capable of moving silently enough to startle even him when she wants to. She usually makes it a point of walking more heavily when he is present, but if she had wanted to listen in on their conversation, of course she would have slid into stealth. (She's barefoot, he notices. He tries to remember if she had put shoes back on when she dressed after her shower, or if she'd taken them off downstairs to walk more quietly.)
Tseng turns, slowly, first making sure that his body language is controlled and his face will not show anything. Tifa is leaning her shoulder against the doorframe, her arms folded across her chest, every line of her body the perfect, calculated picture of relaxation and not-a-threat. She is looking, not at him, but at Rufus. He can't read anything from her face.
He wonders how much she heard.
Rufus lets his hands fall from his handgun, although from the way his fingertips twitch, Tseng is vitally certain the mock-casual pose is to bring him within reach of one of his other holdouts. (Tseng doesn't know the location of all of them; what he doesn't know, he can't be forced to divulge. He knows most of what Rufus regularly carries, but Rufus varies the specifics from day to day, and Tseng has never let Rufus tell him all the details.) It isn't that he thinks Rufus thinks Tifa is a threat; it's more that when Rufus is startled, when Rufus feels he has lost face, Rufus feels better if he can have a weapon in hand in less than a second. "The question as a whole stands, even if the individual details must still be negotiated," Rufus says. (Never apologize; never back down. Rufus learned those lessons early.)
Tifa's eyes are locked on Rufus's. "I could have afforded an entry permit for Upstairs a long time ago if I'd wanted one. I was never willing to let them put me in their database." (Them, not you. Tseng wonders at the significance of her choice of pronoun. Tifa is a woman who chooses her words carefully.)
From his face, Rufus is wondering too. But his chin comes up the slight fraction that is Rufus, preparing to argue down all objections. "If you're with us, you won't need a permit."
Tseng realizes the slightly scorched smell wafting past him is the waffle, starting to singe. He lets it burn. The last thing he wants to do right now is remind either of them he is here.
"I will to return." Tifa's version of the preparing-to-argue look is her chin tilting downward, not upward. She's doing it now. "Assuming you intend to allow me to return."
Rufus closes his eyes for a fraction of a second longer than a blink, and Tseng thinks he might be praying for patience. When he opens them again, his face is resolute. "I will swear to you upon anything you feel will hold my oath that the minute we are Above or before, I will have Tseng or one of his lieutenants bring you an identity card authorized for unlimited travel, with your picture upon it and a name that is upon none of our watchlists. I will swear to you it will be yours to keep, free and clear, with no monitoring and no tripwires placed upon it, then or for the duration of its life."
Tseng has to stop himself from choking. Half of Shinra's employees don't have unlimiteds, and all it would take would be for one unlimited card to make its way into the slums, where Rufus knows damn well the technology exists to clone the RFID chips used for scans and identification, in the hands of someone more sympathetic to the rebellion than to Shinra. It would be a disaster. It would destroy every single one of their security provisions; they would have to invalidate and re-issue every single card in existence, and possibly re-engineer the system from scratch. If Tifa leaves this uneasy alliance with the conviction it is time for her to act against Shinra, Rufus will have handed her a materia bomb and taught her precisely how to arm it.
Tifa tilts her head to one side, studying Rufus's face. "You do realize how foolish that would be."
"You do realize how desperate I am," Rufus says, mimicking her tone and delivery precisely.
Tifa's look turns thoughtful. "I'm beginning to," she says. The silence between them spins out, and Tifa and Rufus stare at each other, and Tseng tries to remember to breathe. "Swear, then," she finally says.
Rufus exhales, sharp and heavy. "What shall I swear by?" he asks. His words have the light hitch and skip indicating he's quoting something; it takes a second for Tseng to place it, and then his memory supplies the woman's reply: do not swear at all, or if thou wilt, swear by thy gracious self, which is the god of my idolatry, and I'll believe thee.
He somehow doesn't expect that to be Tifa's response, even if she recognizes the play.
He's expecting her to ask Rufus to swear by his name or by his honor, the two things he thinks Tifa would (rightly) identify as capable of holding Rufus's word. But Tifa's eyes, still locked on Rufus's, narrow slightly. "Swear by your city," she says, her voice sounding hollow and full of weight, the words feeling more like a ritual than anything else. Tseng can feel it when Rufus breaks their gaze to look over to Tseng, quickly, fury embedded deeply: did you tell her? He shakes his head; he hadn't. But Tifa sees more than most people give her credit for. "Because if you break your word, you will have handed me the power to destroy it, and I will not hesitate to use that power."
For a minute, Tseng thinks Tifa may have asked too much. But as he watches, Rufus swallows down his nascent fury, closes his eyes and fights down his anger until it is transmuted into nothing more than calm. "Thus shall she stand the hostage for your safety," he says, and that's a quote too, but Tseng doesn't know it. Rufus's voice is dark and cold, but he holds up his hand, palm facing Tifa. "It shall be as I have said. I do swear this, by my name and by my word, and by my city's blood and breath."
When Tifa nods, accepting his oath, Rufus's hand slowly closes into a fist before he lets it drop. Tseng can feel the currents of the world's energies moving around them, that strange othersense he learned to listen for in childhood, telling him this is a moment no less significant for his fate and for the fate of the world than the first time he looked into Rufus's eyes and knew he'd found his life's work.
Then Tifa looks over at Tseng, and the heavy, edged grace of the moment breaks and drains away. "The waffle's burning," she says. It takes a second for Tseng, caught up once more in destiny's tides, to realize what she means, and then he swears and reaches for the wafflemaker to dump the charred remains into the sink.
"If not Reno, then whom?" he can hear Rufus saying behind him as he scrapes out blackened bits of batter from the appliance's surface. There's still a hint of fury running through Rufus's voice -- fury at having been forced to give so much up in exchange for the assistance he knows he needs, fury for a world where Tifa so mistrusts Shinra as to have required such a vow, fury at having had to endanger Midgar herself in order to save her -- but Rufus is long experienced in muting that fury for others' ears, and Tseng thinks Tifa might not hear it. (He wouldn't swear to it. Tifa has reminded him how much she is capable of hearing.)
The noise he hears behind him is Tifa sighing, then padding across the floor -- no longer trying to silence her steps -- to run water over the burned mass of dough in the sink and then dump it into the garbage. Their negotiations over, her voice is back to being the same calm, sweet tone it always is. "Reeve knows what he's doing. Or Rude, if you can't spare Reeve. Or you mentioned some of your people have experience in a bar; I'll take one of them, if you can't spare Reeve or Rude. Assuming they're trustworthy enough to be allowed to work unsupervised, and assuming they wouldn't mind if I put one of my people in charge overall."
"They're loyal enough to me that they will be trustworthy," Rufus says, quietly. "They know that if they aren't, there will be consequences. And I will make good any losses you might experience."
"Then we have a deal," Tifa says. "I won't go into the Shinra complex, and I won't sleep anywhere that anyone other than Tseng has the key for. With those limits understood, it probably makes sense for you to plan for at least a week." Tseng looks up at that, startled. Rufus is giving her a similar look. She shrugs. "You mentioned the company runs on information. If there's half as much on the -- on what happened as you say there is on everything else, it won't be the work of a single day. Especially if you're going to listen to my version of the story as well."
"Yes," Rufus says, quietly. In that single syllable, Tseng hears a dawning understanding, and he thinks Rufus is beginning to realize the courage it will take for Tifa to put herself in Shinra's hands; that she is willing to do it at all, even with such a guarantee, is an act roughly the equivalent of the courage it took for Rufus to offer his city's safety as hostage. (He would not have expected it of either of them.) A moment, while Rufus thinks, and then Rufus nods again. "I'll go make the calls. Give me two hours to see what I can set up, and how quickly."
"Yes," Tifa agrees. Rufus bows to her -- from the waist, not from the shoulders, a mannerism he adopted from Tseng -- and strides out of the kitchen, heading for the guest room where he must have left his cell phone. Tifa waits until she hears the door closing behind him to put her hands down on the edge of the counter and lean over them, her body bent in two, breathing out sharply as though she's been punched in the gut. As though she's just run a marathon. (In a way, she has.)
Tseng waits a minute for her to catch her breath, then rests his hand on the small of her back, making sure she can see him moving well enough out of the corner of her eye that his touch isn't a surprise. She doesn't lean into his hand, but she doesn't pull away, either. She just stands there, looking small and exhausted, as though she doesn't know what comes next. "I hope you know what you're doing," he says, softly, making sure to keep any possible note of censure out of his voice. (He doesn't disapprove of her actions. He just thinks they're fucking mad.)
"I do, too," she says, to her hands. A moment, another breath, and then she's pulling herself together, straightening up and breathing deeply. (Tseng is honored she was willing to show him that moment of weakness, of uncertainty.) "I'll go break the news to Wedge and Jessie. And try to convince them I'm not being taken off to a dark basement somewhere to be shot in the head." Pause. "If I can convince myself first."
"He swore by his city," Tseng says. (And he would like to know how Tifa knew enough to demand that oath. Does it have its roots in whatever they said to each other, in the backyard, lying in the grass, exhausted from having tested each other nearly to breaking? It must.) "It is an oath he will keep."
The corners of Tifa's lips turn up. It's not quite a smile. It may be the most heartbreaking expression he's ever seen on her face. "It's not him I'm worried about," she says. She lifts her fingertips to brush them across his lips, then turns and leaves the kitchen as well.
A minute later, he can hear her footsteps on the stairs, and then voices drift upwards: calm at first, then growing more vehement. They mix with the sound of Rufus's distant cadences barking out orders into his cell phone. Tseng stands in Tifa's kitchen, listening for voices holding conversations he can hear but not well enough to understand, with Tifa's fingerprints burning against his lips, and prays to Leviathan this will not end as badly as he fears it might.