#elementalsight

It was a rare visit; Tseng usually had better things to do these days -- better, Rufus mused, or filthier. Nevertheless, it wasn't an entirely rare occasion to have Administrative Research's Director at his apartment door in Junon around this particular time of the year. Like most things Tseng did, it involved dual-purposes.

'Here to spy on me?' Rufus asked upon letting the Turk in just after Tseng knocked, pointlessly, his door. 'Or to drain information from my network of spies?'

Tseng just cocked his head and shrugged. Rufus, twenty-five years old and going on a hundred now, cocked his head too in blatant imitation, but moved away from the door to let Tseng in more properly. Why did Tseng ever bother to knock, when the electronic door lock would, no doubt, slide obediently open to that most wondrous of keycards in the Turk's pocket?

Then again, why did Rufus ever bother to answer the door? He doubted that either of them knew; it was just part of the elaborate dance they danced. Rufus was technically under house arrest; Tseng was technically his guard. Tseng was technically a loyal Turk; Rufus was technically the Vice-President. All just form; pomp and circumstance.

'Would you like something to drink?' Rufus called over his shoulder, gesturing grandly at the small kitchenette that graced his mostly bare apartment. Years of exile under Turk surveillance, and still nothing on the walls. To put anything there would be to give in; give up. 'I have all the alcohol in the world and quite the supply of sparkling water.'

'No, thank you,' Tseng said from where he stood by the floor-to-ceiling windows that graced the south side of the apartment. Rufus huffed, and reached into his refrigerator for a bottle of water. What a useless piece of show-off excess, Rufus thought as he pulled the cap off the pointlessly well-shaped bottle. You could drink filtered water right from the tap, but here on his nominal place on top of the world, Rufus drank his godforsaken artesinal dihydrogen monoxide from carefully crafted vessels of glass.What a joke.

'You're brooding,' Tseng informed Rufus.

'None of your business what I brood about,' Rufus volleyed back venomlessly. Over the years, Tseng's visits had come to sting less, so long as Rufus thought of them less as his father's invisible hand at work and more as part of his bought-but-payment-pending allegiance with the Turks. They kept each others' secrets, Tseng and Rufus. 'Just as I'm sure it's none of my business asking why you're here.'

'Manpower issues, actually,' Tseng said, almost too-casually. 'I can't always spare field agents for cushy assignments, and every now and then I like to stretch my legs.' He was standing, liquidly comfortable with himself in a way that very few people were when idle. Normal people crossed their arms or twitched or found something in their pockets to play with or meddled with whatever was on hand, but Tseng could stand for hours in many forms of mild attention and never seem discomfited. Rufus had seen him carefully blank out in front of Professor Hojo for entire meetings.

'Field agents, you say, as though Turks are ever desk-bound,' Rufus laughed, conscious of the fact that his own hands were busy with the bottle of water. He wondered how obvious his tells were to Tseng; how much Tseng knew about essentially everything in his life. 'Don't be coy,' Rufus said, leaning against the adjacent wall and well aware of how the action might seem defensive. 'Reno hasn't been on duty for the last two weeks, and I'm sure there are cameras upon cameras in this apartment, even in the bedroom -- are you here about him? Shouldn't you rather be surprised that I held on this long before fucking a Turk?' Perhaps he sounded defensive; Rufus didn't care. Tseng could try living in a box in Junon with no company and then come back to him.

'Ah,' Tseng said, articulately. 'Reno.'

'Will you ever tell me where they are, by the way? The cameras?' Rufus asked, segueing abruptly. 'I found the ones on the bedroom ceiling, but I'm sure you were more thorough than that.'

'You honestly believe we don't replace any of the cameras you take out?' Tseng asked.

'No,' Rufus said, 'but it was worth a shot to avoid having the conversation about what I'm wagering is going to be either safe sex or inter-company relations that I'm sure you're being paid extremely well for by my father to conduct. What's the opposite of helicopter parenting, Tseng? Or did my father confuse that concept with choppering me from Junon to Midgar and Midgar to Junon?'

'I'm not here to replace your father, or to give you reprimands. I am nominally here because of Reno,' Tseng agreed. 'You won't be seeing him on duty here for a while; standard procedure. I have to at least pretend that Administrative Research isn't, in some form or another, in your pockets.'

'Oh?' Rufus said. Something about the way Tseng was speaking seemed off. He waited for the Turk to speak.

'There are really only four cardinal rules Turks have,' Tseng said eventually, still standing unnaturally and comfortably upright. He said, 'You don't talk.'

'Reno talks.'

Tseng said, 'You don't ask questions.'

'He asks plenty.'

Tseng said, 'You don't walk away.'

'I'm no longer sure that this is even nominally about Reno,' Rufus said, miming a gunshot to his head with one hand. 'He's certainly never tried to run, because your retirement policy is either a sympathetic bullet to the head or years of hopeless pursuit after old Directors who are, frankly, better off unfound.' Tseng's eye narrowed at the mention of Veld, and Rufus chose to leave off the subject. 'What's the fourth rule?' he asked instead.

In lieu of answering immediately, Tseng leaned into the wall behind him such that he now mirrored Rufus. It was a startlingly good look on him, and not something Rufus had ever seen him do before. Rufus was immediately on edge. Something was wrong.

'I get the feeling,' he said to Tseng, 'that you don't normally go around telling upstart heirs to the Shinra empire exactly how its internal affairs work.' Rufus eyes flicked around the room. 'I also have a funny sense that the cameras here are going to be looping unremarkable footage of me puttering around.'

Tseng shrugged. In the quiet of the apartment, Rufus could hear the expensive material of his blazer -- not his field blazer, Rufus realised, but Tseng's shit-kicking blazer, the one with buttons instead of that fucking zipper that Turks wore to executive events -- rustle against the wall of the room. Rufus was also well aware of the fact that no one would ever know if anything were to happen in this room.

'Rufus,' Tseng spoke at last. 'It's been three? four? years since I rescued you, as it were, from getting drowned by a methuselah bottle worth of champagne at your father's erstwhile send-off party.'

'Magnums, Tseng,' Rufus shot back, wit his defense. 'They were magnum bottles. And don't pretend you don't remember exactly how long it's been since you made yourself my keeper.'

Tseng smiled; there was an edge to it.

'No cameras,' Rufus said, hackles raised, 'and you're still speaking in code or not at all. Very well, I'll play along -- happy anniversary. Let's speak a little more plainly: you're not here to remonstrate me about being desperate and hormone-stupid. You're here because you want to teach me a lesson -- be careful you don't really become my father, that would be,' Rufus said, giving Tseng a long once-over, 'distasteful. Say what you came here to say: tell me that fourth rule of being a Turk.'

'If you want to keep secret allies, you'd best be able to keep them a secret,' Tseng said, pushing himself away from the wall. Rufus ached to watch him move. Tseng was a mere foot away from him. The Turk reached over and gently pried the bottle of water out of Rufus' hands; it took him some effort, and Rufus only then realised that he had had a death grip on the bottle's neck.

Tseng said, as he walked away to set the bottle down on a table, 'Reno's one failure, amongst the many qualities that redeem him as a Turk, is that he doesn't understand the one good rule we have.' The bottle was set onto the table with a quiet clink. 'Don't get caught.'

When Tseng turned around, the buttons on his blazer were undone. Rufus could see bloodstains on the shirt beneath it. Whose blood? Rufus wondered as his own ran hot, or cold, or both. 'Did you fly all this way here after breaking someone's neck because you were --' Rufus barked out an incredulous laugh '-- jealous? Parental? Neither? God forbid, both?'

'Rufus,' Tseng said, coming closer. 'One day your father is going to find himself crucified on the sword of his own incompetence. Whether it will be because of the Army, because of SOLDIER, because of the Science Department's very existence or just plain colonial arrogance, I don't know. But one day, you're going to stand at the top of the world. What are you going to do then?'

Rufus didn't have to think before he answered. 'Rule.'

Tseng stepped in, closing the distance between them. Rufus allowed himself to reach out and touch the tips of fingers against the fabric of Tseng's lapel, against the pin over Tseng's heart that had his own name emblazoned across it. 'That's why you're here? To give me my yearly reminder that one day this,' he nodded at his little chamber of exile, 'will be over, and then I'll be the President and you the man right behind me?'

'With a gun,' Tseng murmured, putting a hand on the crook of Rufus' elbow; the first time he'd touched Rufus since Rufus was still practically a child. 'Against your back. Being parental.'

'Whose blood,' Rufus asked evenly, pressing his fingers against the stain on Tseng's shirt, 'is this?'

'SOLDIER blood from a cleanup mission,' Tseng said. 'You wouldn't know the name even if I told you: Zack Fair, a good man.'

'SOLDIER's aren't usually men,' Rufus said. It was the wrong thing to say; Tseng's grip tightened into something painful. 'Tseng,' Rufus said evenly. 'Whatever's going on with your conscience or your feelings, stop.'

'How many good men does Shinra have left?' Tseng asked him, almost wholly rhetorical.

'I have some word on Veld's location,' Rufus said quietly, because he did, and had been thinking of bargaining with Tseng using it. Perhaps he still would. Perhaps he wouldn't. 'I'll help you find him eventually. But let me give you a piece of advice about Shinra: it doesn't do to be a good man. Or at least,' Rufus qualified, digging his fingers against the bloodstain on Tseng's shirt, 'it doesn't do to get caught.'

Tseng put his head down against Rufus' shoulder. He shook. It took Rufus a long while to realise that it was not with sadness, but rage.