K (karanguni) wrote in nasdack, @ 2008-10-22 14:34:00 |
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Entry tags: | fic, original fic |
Is that a trust fund in your pocket, or are you just happy to see me? (Part 1 of 3)
Is that a trust fund in your pocket, or are you just happy to see me? (Part 1 of 3)
Fandom: FFXII/FFVII (Stockmarket AU)
Characters/Pairings: Balthier/Tseng, Tseng/Rufus, Balthier/Rufus
Rating/Warnings: R
Word Count: 2558
Summary: Tseng's in New York, Balthier's in London, and Rufus is in the sky as the world burns around them. Hedging on futures can be such tricky things.
Functional explanation: The joint fault of karanguni and logistika_nyx. More excuses can be found here!
Early October, 2008
It takes the entire financial system crashing for Tseng to be found out: the circumstances, as people would say, were extenuating. Tseng hadn't so much slept in the last two weeks as he had napped in between one market opening and another closing. There was a list on his desk that served as a body count for the days: AIG, Merrill Lynch, the Lehmann Brothers, Wachovia, Iceland. That day, he went from the floor to his office to the elevators without remembering the ring still sitting warm in his breast pocket. Principles were funny things; he couldn't talk to Balthier with it on, and he'd never visit Rufus without it.
Tseng knows, the moment he walked in through the anteroom and in through to Rufus' office at one in the morning, almost haggard and fresh off the phone from someone somewhere in panicked Asia.
'Lose something?' Rufus asks, which makes Tseng pause, and then there isn’t a point in playing any games. He unbuttons his jacket, takes out the ring and slips it onto his fourth finger.
'If you don't like it, you don't have to,' Rufus points out, flat in the way he was when the world didn't bend to his will; the world hadn't been a very willing partner lately. It made Tseng want to hesitate again, and Tseng rarely hesitated. He had bad timing, yes. But it had been a bad week.
'It has very little to do with liking, Rufus,' Tseng says, very calmly, from four feet away. 'I want to.'
'In my presence,' Rufus says, making no move to close the gap.
'In your presence,' Tseng agrees, tucking his hands into his pockets. 'And out of it.'
'Here comes the qualifier,' Rufus pronounces, ironic. At least he was willing to listen, or maybe he was just tired out from the last twenty days and twenty nights of phone calls and meetings and red figures going redder. Tseng supposes he should be glad he’s even being given room to explain, justify and propose an alternative route other than his immediate retrenchment and the wrath of one of the richest men in the world brought down on his head.
Tseng's lips quirks. Laughter under fire. 'Men need equals, Rufus,' he starts.
Before It'd started the way things normally started, nothing of the starshine that characterised relationships with Shinra, both the one Tseng had professionally and the one... otherwise. No, nothing spectacular: no sponsorships, no courtships, no fine wine. A staid lunch at a staid hotel with a boring speaker and an interesting conversationalist at the table. Afterwards they talked. After that they fucked. After that Balthier rolled Tseng over and said, 'Do you have any idea at all who I am?' To which Tseng responded, stretching slightly, 'Yes.' There was this silence, filled mostly be Balthier's incredulity, and then by a warm kind of palpable amusement. 'And do you care at all?' asked the Bunansa heir, who, if he so wanted to, could affect the lives of a good few thousand people at his whim. 'Not precisely,' Tseng said. He sat up and pushed his hair out of the way; Balthier’s fingers crept forward to assist, caressing. Tseng turned and spared Balthier a look. 'Would you rather I fawned?' asked Tseng before he swung his legs off and padded, unselfconscious and completely bare, towards the bathroom. 'No,' Balthier replied, getting up and following after. 'I just find it -' 'Interesting?' Tseng turned on the shower and tested the water. The heat was instant. Balthier always had the best choice in hotels. 'Unbelievable, refreshing, something more than the boring debutants in dresses and the heirs in suits?' 'Most people are either a little bit apprehensive, or far too enthusiastic,' Balthier explained, crowding Tseng into the glass stall. 'I'll do your back?' Tseng laughed, a short, sharp noise, and reached around Balthier’s pale shoulders for the shampoo. 'I'll do it myself. I prefer the men I fuck to at least know my name before they get any ideas.' 'Ah,' Balthier said, sheepish. 'It's Tseng,' Tseng replied, scrubbing at his hair. 'Just Tseng. Keep your hands to yourself,' he added, when Balthier's fingers found the insides of his hips. 'I've a meeting in half an hour.' 'You don't speak like you're really from Manhattan,' Balthier observed, leaving his hands precisely where they were. It earned him another arch of Tseng's eyebrow. 'What does anyone from Manhattan sound like? No one's really from Manhattan, Bunansa.' 'Call me Balthier.' 'Balthier,' Tseng said, his tonality heavy on the vowels, and then he flipped the water on to cold. 'You're a cruel man,' Balthier informed Tseng as they dressed. Tseng's reply was a non-committal noise. Tseng's shirt was another matter altogether. It caught Balthier's attention far more readily for how it was, for one, something worth less than a hundred dollars. 'You're from Shinra, aren't you?' He handed Tseng his jacket and noted, again, the quality and cut as both competant and particularly generic. 'And they dress you in that?' 'I dress myself,' Tseng said, mildly. He shot Balthier a glance as he flipped up his collar and reached for his tie. 'You'll excuse me if I prefer not to waste the wealth of small nations on my wardrobe.' 'But a man's clothes say so much about him,' Balthier sighed. 'Yes,' Tseng nodded, finishing off his knot. 'They do, don't they?' If there was irony in his voice, he didn't let it show. Not in so many words. Finished, Tseng leaned against the wall and watched Balthier. 'You are a rich man. You should know. Yours is the breed that invented multiple ways of tying a noose.' He threw Balthier's tie at the man. 'Poor men like myself would rather it just over and done with. I'll be going.' 'Hey,' Balthier called out. He was still halfway through his cuffs by the time Tseng was at his hotel door. 'Leave me your number, at least.' That was a smile on Tseng's face, he supposed, but Tseng threw it so swiftly over his shoulder Balthier wasn’t sure. 'It's in your phone already. Under my name, which you should hopefully remember. I took the liberty of taking yours at the same time.' Balthier lets his hands drop. 'Do you do anything straightforward?' 'I was taught to be suspicious of expensive men,' was all Tseng said before he closed the door behind him. It was an on-again, off-again, as-and-when kind of thing. Tseng never said a word about where it was going, and for a very long time he didn't think Balthier the sort who cared. Tseng was in New York, Balthier in London: they met, at best, three times every quarter, and were mostly too tired to care much for conversation any of the times they did meet. Their conversation they saved for long-distance phone calls, usually filled with mockery. There were not many people alive that Tseng could talk to the way he talked to Balthier. Tseng would be over in the NYSE, standing in his office or somewhere overlooking the floor, while down in the bullpit his men climbed over people and frothed at the mouth every time the market was shorted or some people ran on the banks. Thousands of miles away, Balthier would take one good look at the FTSE, and pick up the phone. Tseng’s phone would sound. The ring went into his pocket. 'Are you an optimist?' Balthier would say into the receiver when Tseng picked up. 'No,' Tseng would reply. He wasn’t. 'Or a betting man?' Balthier would ask. 'Maybe,' Tseng would reply. He was, in some senses, betting his livelihood on a President who couldn't find his arse with a torchlight and candidates who were too busy ripping out each other's throats to approve bailouts which might just have saved the rest of the world from the next Great Depression. He might just have been a betting man, yes. 'Ah,' Balthier would nod. 'Want to make a wager? Say, for every 100 drop on your end, mine'll follow.' 'What are the stakes?' 'What are you wearing?' --- Tseng would send Balthier Hawaiian print t-shirts for Christmas. (Even if he'd never give Rufus a gift in his life.) Balthier would respond more subtly: for some reason whenever Tseng stayed the night in Balthier's (and it truly was one) castle, he could never find his suit the morning after. The house staff moved around his queries, spouting gleeful Spanish; laid out, ever and always, was a fresh Hawaiian shirt. If there were pants, Tseng learned to consider himself lucky. When Balthier’s contrary grain had him disdain all that his money could buy, he stayed in Tseng's apartment. He usually ended up on the couch regardless of the extent of his efforts prior to his exhaustion. Tseng was not known for his sympathy. Whenever Balthier complained of backaches and cramps, Tseng’s response was invariably, 'Does my poverty offend you?' (Rufus never stayed the night, nor did Tseng ever ask him to.) --- There was getting used to the time difference, which Balthier shook off with couple of draughts from the obnoxiously abudant fountain of New York youth. There was also getting used to Tseng, which was another thing altogether. It did not matter at all how long Balthier knew him (long), or how well Balthier knew him (well), there were some things that Balthier simply didn't adapt to naturally. Tseng's washing machine, for example, and the fact that it didn't come with anyone to press the buttons for you. The fact that the man ate like a bird, if he ever ate at all, and slept like a vampire, if he even slept. It put Balthier off, made him want to run his fingers over everything to find the places where his nails'd catch in the cracks. Balthier remembers, with some clarity and chagrin, after the first time he experimented Tseng made him wash the sheets. Tseng never cracked, not easily. Not even when it was Sunday in New York but Monday in the east, and not even when he was on the phone at two in the morning with his voice drowsy but sharp, and not even when Balthier rolled over and onto him. The most reaction he ever got was a raised eyebrow. A little sign: I know what you're doing. He couldn't make Tseng's breath catch, though it wasn't for lack of trying. --- There were certain things about Balthier that set Tseng on edge. Or closer to the edge. Tseng was all edges; he suspected a word didn't exist for what Balthier made of him except Tseng. Balthier would have a limo waiting at the airport every time he arrived; the limo'd be quite awkward in the very narrow streets fourteen floors below Tseng's apartment where it delivered Balthier to Tseng's lobby door. Balthier would bring supplies: food that shouldn't have been called food with the processing it'd gone through, bread that shouldn't have been edible with the lack of processing it'd gone through, coffee of a quality that probably crippled a country to produce, and for that coffee - endless and startling bottles of mineral water. After the first time (and Tseng remembered how easily, blithely and amazingly Balthier had placated the prostitute downstairs after the washing machine'd flooded her apartment), Balthier brought sheets. Lots of them. Brand new ones. Tseng was sure the threadcount was a manufactured impossibility, but if Balthier knew anything it was of manufacturing, money or impossibilities. Tseng knew what it was about him that made him an object of fascination for those rich men's sons. In a skyscraper high enough that Tseng could see the true edge of the city, veiled in a velvet night and the starlight of a true impossibility, Rufus once told him what it was. Tseng was careful. He never let Balthier see the ring. Rich boys, Tseng was wont to think to himself: they never grow past their fathers. Tseng kept the ringtone on his second mobile phone very quiet. When it rang, it never woke Balthier from his stretched sleep, awkward, naked, and entirely too long-legged for Tseng's couch. Tseng was very careful. He never let Rufus see Balthier. |