Final Fantasy VII (Tseng) - Restorations Interlude I; theme 3: canon what-if Title: Restorations, Interlude I Author:karanguni Fandom: Final Fantasy VII - Tseng Characters: Tseng, Rufus, Reeve, Wutai, Midgar, everyone. Tseng/Rufus focus for this part. Rating: PG Warnings: Second part of the multiparter push-along for my claim; first part here. Canon AU. "What happens after Midgar". Gen, with slash when you squint. Theme: 3: canon what-if Summary: And Shinra said, we are going to save the world, and then said, but let us start with restorations. Even in the aftermath of everything, few men would tell Rufus Shinra what to do with his life.
2657 words and Tseng playing a side role, for a change, as Rufus takes the stage.
Even in the aftermath of everything, few men would tell Rufus Shinra what to do with his life.
Everything was a subset of the world Rufus had grown up to inherit: everything included in its definition the sun-baked streets of Midgar and its familiar financial lines, its old political furrows, its comforting inclusion of everything grey in a world that attempted black and white. Everything was the end of the world: bright, bright light and the searing ring of frequencies in his ears as WEAPON held him hostage in his own tower and forced him to step onto the scales of justice. Rufus remembered dying. Living was not the same, after that.
'There are better ways to commit suicide, Rufus,' Reeve told him the day that Rufus woke up, again, and decided that the world was more useful to him functional than apocalyptic. 'You have men that trust you for no good reason and enough remaining from your old company to get up and leave this town.'
Rufus would leave no town, and do no fleeing. Life, he discovered, could compress itself into a series of images: events could be cruelly minimised to the bare bones of fact. That flipbook of history was what he saw when he refused to blink for death: his birth, a dead woman who must have been his mother, an empty youth, Midgar, Junon, Midgar, Sephiroth, then nothing. Life had used him like a cheap mannequin for one of its greater plays: a cheap inheritance and dealings in the dark that no one would remember. Rufus snarled into the face of an ending that came for him too early.
'The Turks stay with me because of old transactions made a long time ago in old Midgar,' Rufus told Reeve. If it took effort to sit so casually upright in his wheelchair, Shinra did not let it show. 'Wouldn't you want me to earn that right the way men like yourself do?'
He had not expected to wake, but since he did, Rufus did what he expected of himself. The first sounds were faint, but every beep from the monitor by his bedside seemed like one klaxon scream following another and another. By the time Rufus counted sixty for his heart, he let his eyes come open, and though they were crusted over with recuperative sleep and sealant, their first glimpse of the new world order was taken with a vengeful, brilliant blue.
'Tseng?' was his first word, because that Turk had been the one best bought, and therefore least likely to have him dead for quid pro quo. Rufus had never enjoyed the shadow of Veld's memory that lingered in their interactions; now equalised, it did not seem so important.
'Sir,' was the reply from his side. Rufus turned to see Tseng seated in a chair, his dress shirt buttoned loosely enough that Rufus could trace the thick path of bandages that wrapped itself around his abdomen and stomach.
'You're alive,' Rufus said.
'So are you,' Tseng replied, blasé and as unaffected by any of Rufus' pronouncements as he had ever been. Rufus decided, then, that he might have loved this man, if Tseng could have laughed and if Rufus himself could ever have felt that way about anyone.
He settled instead with saying, without pause, 'We will salvage everything that we can. I will require access to Junon, and then structural plans for Midgar and a final fiscal breakdown of this year.'
There was no immediate reply. With one hand, Tseng hooked a button of his blazer in place so that his injury could not be seen, and then looked up and replied, 'Midgar is in ruins. You have been in that bed for two and a half weeks.'
'How much longer do you think I intend to stay in it?' Rufus asked, reaching gingerly for the bed frame and sitting up. Everything screamed: muscles that had lost mass, the phantom burns that materia could not magic away, his pride. Tseng watched passively. 'We are going to change the world,' Rufus said, breathing hard through his nose. Tseng did not offer him water, painkillers, a hand.
'I have heard this before,' Tseng said with the voice of a man who now had an option to either stay or leave.
'Have you ever wondered,' Rufus posited, 'what you are capable of without materia, without a gun in your hands, without Shinra at your back?'
'Shinra, at this moment, is the sum total of a weak man on a bed.' No more salaries to bind this Turk to the Company; no history of blackmail nor the lure of a privileged lifestyle. Tseng had one foot through the door.
And Rufus smiled, his lips curving into a scimitar's edge. 'What do you think, Tseng, of restorations?'
Reeve loathed working with Rufus. Partly because of force of popular opinion – every time Rufus Shinra walked in through his doors, Reeve was sure that five of his investors walked the other way. But part of it was the product of old experience: Reeve had been a Director long before Rufus Shinra first took his baby steps in politics, and he'd seen every one of Rufus' mistakes from then till now. Reeve didn't think it prejudiced of him to take anything out of the mouth of a man who once used terrorist tactics against his father and blackmailed his men into obedience with more than just a pinch of salt.
When Rufus came through into his office, walking slowly because according to hearsay WEAPON had left him physically more dead than alive, Reeve's first instinct was to pre-empt. 'You're not getting a place on the WRO board, Rufus,' he said.
'I'm afraid I don't recall asking for one, Mr Tuesti.' Rufus had the audacity to look amused, but Reeve believed that the expression was false. The boy – Rufus was barely a quarter of a century old, for god's sake – may not have been the most prudent of planners, but he'd learnt the value of contingencies, and had come into the habit of having more of them than Reeve dared speculate. Perhaps Rufus had walked in hoping to position himself in the Restoration's good books. Reeve supposed he'd never know, now – but better to have Rufus work independently than put him in any position of expansion. The best place to keep a Shinra was somewhere backed into a corner.
Reeve tossed his pen onto his desk and resigned himself to not getting work done for a while. 'Then what are you here for?'
'Is this how you treat all your potential investors, Mr Tuesti?' Rufus asked, settling himself into a chair without invitation. Tseng, with an air almost similar to Shinra's, chose to remain standing: visible, silent, potent. Reeve wondered if he should feel privileged, threatened, or both.
'Only the ones who spell trouble,' Reeve said, keeping his eyes on the Turk. He flicked his gaze back to Rufus after a moment. 'You'll excuse me if I tell you that I've never seen you act altruistically in my life, and that my dealings with my investors at this current moment are more philanthropic than profitable.'
He'd said it – and in Reeve's sweetest dreams, Rufus Shinra nodded, got up, and left the room.
Rufus Shinra nodded, crossed his legs, and put a proposal on his desk.
Reeve swore that the Turk was smiling.
He took the papers and read them, because it was safer to know what Rufus Shinra wanted you to know than to speculate on what you thought he wanted you to know. The plan was cogent, cohesive, free from most collateral. A good plan, which was everything to be expected of the man. Reeve tried to read between the lines, tried to understand permutations done with Rufus Shinra's own unique calculus. Eventually, he put the proposal down and said, 'This reads like you're treating restoration like a vendetta. Your investment plans sound like cogs in a war machine.'
Rufus smiled. Disturbing how well the expression fit on his pale face, with hair once tinted red and now gone pale with slowly fading sickliness. 'Isn't efficiency a key word, Mr Tuesti?'
'You make this all sound personal,' Reeve said.
'It is personal,' Rufus replied, unperturbed.
'Is nothing you do ever anything less than self-motivated?' Reeve asked.
'Would you trust me if I said my aims weren't?' Rufus returned, and damn the man for hitting the nail on the head. He pushed the advantage, and Reeve felt himself being shoved backwards onto dangerous ground. 'You sorely need what Shinra is offering, Mr Tuesti.' Reeve wasn't sure when he'd so hated the sound of his own name. 'There is very little room for the company to do ill with what we've proposed to you. Consider it an act of good faith. Money is money – you need it either way. Perhaps,' Rufus said, standing as he spoke, 'consider the analogy that a flower grown in a refuse pile is no less beautiful than one grown in good soil. Little difference between rotting garbage and compost, after all.'
As Shinra walked off as though he still owned the world, Reeve came to the subtle – and somewhat unsettling – conclusion that Rufus had, just maybe, said those last words as a plea instead of a threat.
When Geostigma pushed Rufus back into the wheelchair with less than a tenth of the effort that it'd taken him to get out of it, everyone was afraid for a moment that fury would overtake the erstwhile President. Death was the least of their worries: Rufus Shinra was still, in many ways, a man not yet fully grown. He held grudges like a child, and the ones he couldn't pay back he fought against until he lost. How many years had the Turks watched him play at the game of kings and lose against his own father?
Maybe it was Rufus' reaction to the sickness that convinced Tseng, eventually. Their trust could've been described as tenuous prior to the day that Tseng walked into the newly-constructed lodge at Haelin to find Rufus reading, quiet and composed and turning the pages of the print copy with a hand spotted with dark sickness.
When he heard Tseng enter, Rufus looked up. 'Res dura, et regni novitas me talia cogunt Moliri, et late fines custode tue.'
Tseng didn't bother to ask for a translation. 'Your physiotherapy session starts in five minutes,' he said. Rufus nodded, almost absently, and tucked a bookmark into place. He seemed muted, thoughtful. A more imaginative man would have called Rufus Shinra penitent, then. Tseng aided him across into the next room over, and exited quietly afterwards. He returned to turn the book open to Rufus' marked page:
Harsh necessity, and the newness of my kingdom, force me to do such things and to guard my frontiers everywhere.
The foreign sound in the room was Tseng's quiet laughter.
As though Rufus Shinra could ever be truly penitent.
The stigma would have been harsher on Rufus if the Planet had not chosen that precise time to present him with a plethora of situations that could've ended the world a second time over. Nothing quite delighted Rufus so much as a challenge. When Kadaj and his brothers emerged – as it were – from the Lifestream, Rufus' response was to laugh and comment that this was the break that they had all been waiting for.
Dying, to Rufus, was a concept seen in relative terms: if the stigma could not cripple him to the point where he could not cripple Kadaj, then Rufus held that he had the better end of the deal. He suffered the indignity, incontinence, vertigo and nausea the same way Tseng suffered torture, interrogation and a few new scars.
Reno and Elena called them both out for it.
'You're crazy,' the redhead informed Rufus as he wrapped knuckles that were freshly bled out from a brutal scuffle in Edge's central plaza. 'Kadaj could break you like a damned twig between his fingers.'
'I don't think he's used to twigs fighting back,' was Rufus' reply, and underneath the drape of his shift his fingers curled, gentle and privately smug, over the edge of a sealed black box.
After the rains came, the world stopped inverting for a while. Old, friendly forces came back into contention: economics. Unemployment. Infrastructure. Finance. Rufus eased back into his favoured mode of operation like a man thirsting for convalescence. Twelve hour days which he would wrap up with the last of old brandy, calm and rested instead of frenetic and tired as Edge returned to worrying about the real world instead of old nightmares.
They scheduled almost every moment of his life for him: Rufus couldn't go anywhere without becoming an instant target – people hated him as much as they needed him. There was always a Turk at his shoulder, whether as shadow or threat. They followed him into meetings, rallies, his office, and sometimes into his bedroom. Privacy became an alien concept.
But, as it were, even in the aftermath of everything, few men would tell Rufus Shinra what to do with his life.
'Elena,' Tseng said into his PHS, 'call Reno and Rude off. I've found him.' Snapping the phone shut, he slipped the device into his pocket and leaned against a broad wall-to-ceiling mirror and watched as Rufus Shinra stood and had himself tailored.
The blond was looking at his own reflection when he said, 'I suppose the game is up.'
'You only had Elena in histrionics,' Tseng nodded, tracing the tailor's movements and evaluating whether there was any risk at hand.
'What do you think?' Rufus asked as he shrugged into the blazer that was offered to him. Tseng walked over as Rufus straightened the fall of his shirt, and the President allowed him to adjust the edge of his cuffs and thread the links through.
'It doesn't fit you,' Tseng said mildly, brushing off Rufus' back and smoothing down the vent of the new suit. There were differences in Rufus' cut and his own, even if the black was the same, and the effect equally crisp. Rufus' suit curved inwards and traced skin and muscle where a Turk would've kept some free looseness to give leanness room to stretch.
'Go,' Rufus said to the tailor, and the man left discreetly. Once they had the room to themselves, he turned and faced Tseng. 'I don't feel any discomfort.'
'You wear it as though you'd walk into a boardroom with it,' Tseng says, a curve to his mouth. He taps Rufus' shoulders. 'The suit tapers to fit you. Impresses rather than flatters.'
Rufus let his hands fall to his pockets. He'd never worn clothing so close to his skin before: during the stigma even linen and cotton had chafed at dermis and caused rashes and pustules to form. The visceral memory demanded reparation; so Rufus'd come and asked his man to give him something fitting, and when he'd caught sight of a suit amongst the display cases he'd felt tempted and quietly thrilled. 'They're not my colours,' Rufus agreed.
'It's not your uniform,' Tseng corrected. Turks wore the suit to blend in. Rufus always needed to obtrude, expand, fill in the spaces with his charisma if not his presence. 'Turn,' Tseng said.
Rufus turned. Tseng's fingers were adroit as he tugged Rufus' tie out of his blazer, and faster still as he undid the knot, pulling and running the silk off of Rufus' neck. Tseng draped it over a nearby rack and moved to unbutton Rufus' collar. 'You do better this way,' he said.
Rufus chuckled, the sound warm in the pits of his stomach. He rang the bell to call for the tailor, and when the man re-entered, Rufus said, 'I'll take this, in light grey.'
The tailor nodded. 'And the tie, sir?' he inquired.
'That too,' Rufus said, shooting a private look at Tseng. 'But leave it in the black.'