Restorations I (Tseng, Rufus, Reeve, Wutai, Midgar) Title: Restorations I Rating: PG Characters: Tseng, Rufus, Reeve, Wutai, Midgar, everyone. Summary: And Shinra said, we are going to save the world, and then said, but let us start with restorations. Warnings: First part of a multiparter - one or two more chapters planned. Canon AU. "What happens after Midgar." Gen, with slash when you squint. You may have to squint less in other chapters.
2410 words, and Rufus would like you to know that he is perfectly harmless, thank you.
They sent him into Wutai because it was the predictable thing to do, and these days it paid to do things predictably.
When Rufus told them what he wanted of Tseng, Reno said, 'Once upon a time we'd just have caught them off their guard,' as he rocked back into an office chair they'd plundered from the remains of the tower. 'Slapped them in the face and got in and got out.'
'When I said restoration, Reno,' Rufus interjected, 'I didn't mean either restoration by force, or restoration of Shinra alone.'
'Really?' Reno asked, spinning to look their President – de facto, but even de facto titles were important – in the eye. His reply was too arch to be simple. Rufus managed a wry smile when Reno followed up saying, 'Sorry, boss. After years of being selfish bastards, it's hard to break out of the habit, yeah?'
So they sent him to Wutai in the oddest of roles: the herald with the olive-branch, the penitentiary, the gruesome apologetic who would walk into a nation he abandoned with the name of the world's most popular enemy written across his chest and, in all audacity, bow in the ways he'd forgotten in front of the elders he did not remember while offering them words they did not want before finally proffering monetary support and plans for infrastructure which they would no doubt throw back into his face.
Tseng told Rufus as much. 'You're sending me there on a suicide mission.'
'Are they going to stone you to death?' came the mild response. 'And even if they are, you're familiar with the procedure, aren't you? Men in glass houses, after all.'
'You haven't changed, sir,' Tseng said, and he meant that in the worst way possible.
Rufus was eager for reform; he thirsted for it now like he'd wanted very few things in his privileged, particular and perversely narrow lifestyle. The end of the world had made him into a reformist and a protector of cultural rights and a saint with a conscience, except that saints, Tseng was fair sure, did not have the methods Rufus Shinra had. What was the use of a conscience when one used it the way one once wielded fear? Tseng had spent too many years as a Turk thinking about apologetics.
Tseng doubted Rufus had ever, with all due respect, contemplated anything other than politics. He said, 'Shinra no longer owns the world.'
'And I wonder, Tseng,' Rufus replied. 'I wonder, did Shinra ever?' – and Tseng had to give pause. Rufus Shinra could frustrate and could irritate with what seemed like short-sighted blindness and inadvertent arrogance, but as Rufus turned to face him, Tseng saw the man he'd chosen to follow a long time ago there – 'No, you're not a philosopher. Go to Wutai. Give them what they don't want. They'll most likely loathe you for it. They'd rather spend a decade as an independent backwater developing at a crawl than spend a year of steady growth relying on blooded money. And if they do, we'll both be here watching them struggle every foot of the way. It's repentance either way, isn't it? The truth of a good game plan. Go to Wutai. Go back home. Make that your apology. It's harsh enough for even your own standards, I believe.'
'Rufus,' Tseng spoke. There'd been too much heat in those words. It was in Rufus' nature to do things past the point; he could do it with self-blame as easily as he could with his games of money and moving mountains.
'Pity is for those who have the time and luxury for it,' Rufus said. 'We gave up that time after the end of the world, remember?'
'You haven't changed, sir,' Tseng said again. 'At least, not in your penchant for dramatics.'
The flint in Rufus' eyes faded, partially, and for a moment he looked like what and who he was – twenty-odd years old and world-weary. If Tseng stayed, they'd keep comparing scars, and then there'd be no end in sight. 'What are you offering them?' Tseng questioned, and it was like pushing a switch – Rufus reached into his drawer and drew out a grid plan and a data module, and then it was work: foundations for an electrical circuitry system, boosters for PHS signals, soft and hard copy blueprints for solar and turbine power generators, invoices for a stock of chemical scrubbers to be used in equipment until the time that oil and carbon based fuels could be discontinued.
Rufus was smiling, at the end of the session. Tseng raised an eyebrow in askance. 'I wanted to change the world when I was a child, didn't I?' Rufus asked.
'Don't confuse yourself,' Tseng shook his head, standing and tucking the documents under his arm. 'When you were a child, you wanted to rule the world. The two are different.'
'Go to Wutai,' Rufus sighed, dropping his head to his chest. 'Just go to Wutai.'
That said, they couldn't just call up and helicopter and fly themselves wherever they wanted; it wasn't so easy anymore. More than that - Rufus was used to seeing the big picture, used to operating within it, and all his instructions still sounded the same and had the same competency, but they'd relied on buildings worth of people that were no longer theirs now. If it had been Midgar and not Edge, there would have been hundreds of engineers, human resource people, technicians and publicists who could have, once upon a time, come up with a plan in twenty-four hours and have each individual, blindly developed piece delivered to Tseng with an eyes-only command attached.
Things were more transparent in the new age, or whatever it was the people chose to call it. Reeve didn't look pleased to see him when Tseng arrived at the World Restoration Organisation headquarters, but Reeve rarely look pleased at all these days, and Tseng could hardly blame him.
'And Shinra's mess comes knocking on my door again,' Reeve sighed when Tseng walked into his office. 'What absurd miracle does Rufus want now?'
Absurd was a good description of their situation. The WRO and Shinra were opposites in the eyes of the public, and yet internally they ran parallel: Rufus wanted to "do good", and Reeve wanted to rebuild. Their aims were similar; their operating procedures vastly different. 'You have the money,' Reeve had told Rufus in their initial meetings conducted at Haelin with only Elena and Tseng as witnesses. 'But I know men who would rather starve and die than work under the Shinra banner, and I wouldn't call them foolish for it.'
And Reeve was right - there had been an enormous fallout after Midgar was abandoned. Shinra held all the assets and facilities and wages and jobs, but men were beginning to remember inconveniences such as integrity and honour. Without the behemoth city looming up and above and everywhere, and without the anonymous crowd, and without the noise of an eternal night-time padded by a green Mako glow, out in Edge city men turned into neighbours, co-workers and friends. The cranes and the buildings were coming up again, but now everything reached upwards from equal ground, and there were spaces in between plazas and alleys winding through corridors of shops and parks and a road that led back to the abandoned church. Edge was a different place. It had different people in it. These citizens wanted no part in the conspiracy that had bled their planet dry and wrung them almost to extinction. Shinra was spat on. Salaried men and wage-earners alike left their jobs and took to the street.
Reeve had inherited the headaches of a teething city. Tseng didn't envy him any more than he envied Rufus. 'Every time you come into my office, Tseng, I get a headache,' the director of the WRO said, beckoning the Turk into one of the many chairs littered in front of his desk. 'If Rufus wants a vehicle, he sends Elena. If he wants blueprints and maps, he sends Rude. If he wants me to overrule a plan, he sends Reno. But every time he sends you, I end up having to give you an arm and a leg and half of my already much-shortened lifetime.'
'All hail Reeve Tuesti,' was Tseng's bemused reply. 'Saviour of the world not once, but twice.'
'I didn't save the world with Cloud,' Reeve held up a hand. 'Don't get me wrong. It was a good job, but that was the beginning, not the end. And now Strife runs a delivery service sending packages back and forth from Kalm to old Midgar while Lockhart tends a bar in the crumbling remains of a slum that has an entire dysfunctional city hanging above it just waiting for structural damage and rust to eat through its supports. You understand if I'm vexed.'
'I understand,' Tseng said, slipping into a chair. 'And you're still facing recruitment problems?'
'Some people don't trust in large organisations anymore,' Reeve said, wryly. 'They seem to forget that the only thing that kept them fed and clothed was Shinra, and that if they don't want to go to Rufus, they'll have to come to me. Instead, we have a third of the population requesting licenses to set up their own shops and rent their own spaces. It's good spirit,' Reeve said, patting a large folder. 'But I can't help them like that.'
'Meanwhile, Rufus sells them tractors and large vehicles and cranes at prices which have him complaining ceaselessly,' Tseng nodded. 'And then they get the equipment and they savage off the red logo and work them until they break down, and look in askance when Rufus can't provide them enough. They think we're planning something. Conspiring again.'
'Did you come here to talk about Edge alone?' Reeve asked, narrowing his eyes at Tseng. 'Because if you want a list of complaints the city has, Tseng, I can give you one a mile long, and that's not a metaphor. Rufus knows what's wrong with Edge. Rufus thinks Edge is Midgar; he keeps better tabs on things than I do, sometimes. So that's not why you're here.'
'No,' Tseng admitted, pulling out his data module. 'It's Wutai.'
There was a pause.
'Hell just take Rufus now,' Reeve said simply. 'It'll save me the effort of throttling him myself.'
'We know the worst of the damage is here in Edge -'
'Which is precisely why Rufus wants something from me to deal with an entire culture and country that's halfway across the planet? Tseng,' Reeve said, an element of threat in his voice. He welcomed Turks in past his doors, but reserved the right to ask them to leave.
'- but Wutai is a danger of a different sort,' Tseng finished his sentence. 'You're an engineer, Tuesti, not an environmentalist.'
'And Rufus Shinra is?'
'He wasn't,' Tseng agreed. 'But he's had two years worth of calling in every tertiary-educated professional in the field, and he sits in his office reading through old lecture notes skimmed off of the university's servers, then old maps and the updated ones after. You have to remember who he is, Reeve. By the time Rufus was sixteen, his father had ensured he knew enough about materia and Mako to keep up with the developments in Hojo's laboratories. I'm rather sure Rufus would have ensured it himself even without his father's insistence. Do you really think that he'd sit idly just because he no longer has a Science department to find his answers for him?'
'So now he's a, what were the words that Shinra used to describe AVALANCHE in the past? A "hippy tree hugger"?'
'I've not seen Rufus hug a tree,' Tseng said. 'And he continues to dress sensibly.'
'God,' Reeve swore, very softly, before he cleared some space on his desk. 'Fine. Talk to me. What does he see?'
Tseng put down a map, and brought out a transparent overlay. He laid his data module beside it, and tapped on it. 'Wutai,' he said, keeping his voice flat and his eyes blank, 'sits in the Western continent, and spreads from this latitude,' he pointed with his stylus, 'through to here, and this longitude here. Within the boundary just outside of its capital,' Tseng highlighted a substantial area on the screen, 'sits some of the richest oil deposits on their continent. They investigated and drilled extraction points in three separate locations over fifty years ago, but within two decades Mako technology had been developed, and the consequent wars did not stop the spread of ported reserves into the towns even if it prevented a generator from being built over the Mako-rich mines in the north-westerly regions.'
Tseng overlaid the transparency on the map. 'There has been news that Wutai is choosing to drill again,' he said, quietly. 'Seven points excluding the re-opening of the initial three, which would give them enough crude oil to fuel the West for at least a hundred years, but produce enough run-off considering their outdated state of technology to poison the inner-land sea to the east and throw us back to Corel-type pollution. Wallace and Strife, with your permission, run an extraction near Kalm, but they accepted Shinra-based technology and limit their emissions and run-off. Wutai is -' Tseng paused, tapping his stylus on the map's edge, 'stubborn. Its people are,' he paused again, 'stubborn.'
'Stubborn,' Reeve said, unimpressed. Tseng was calling a Cretan a liar. He looked up at him, and wondered which half of the Turk he was looking at - the part that belonged, or the part that'd forgotten.
Tseng ignored him. 'There have been requests made,' he said, voice calm, 'for them to cease their expansionary activities, or to - at the very least - accept newer technology from us. In both cases, their answer has been a rather resounding no.'
'Have you given them these damage reports?' Reeve asked, motioning at the documents.
'Insofar as we could over the limited networking and communications we have with them, yes,' Tseng said. 'They haven't been amenable.'