IV: Shinra
“Just entered airspace over Midgar, boss. We’ll be there in a few minutes. Keep the helipad clear, yo?”
“The helipad,” Tseng replied icily, “Is always clear. Besides—“
“Besides nothing. You’ll meet me on the flight deck, won’t you?”
“Why should I?” he ran ink stained fingers through his hair, sighing at the unfinished pile of reports in front of him. Bad enough that it was peak season and he was behind time already, without the fact that he had taken himself down to the firing range after that disastrous phone call and spent the entire evening emptying magazines into paper targets.
Maybe it was some long lost echo of Wutai, that when one owed a duty to someone, not something. A Company meant all of nothing to him, except that it was the empire of the man he owed his loyalty to. Who had once been worth owing a loyalty to, some bitter voice said in the back of his head. Who had once been a charismatic, charming leader who had gradually swept the world up in his vision, bringing prosperity and life everywhere he went, and the promise of a new world…
Wutai had been old, recalcitrant, unable to embrace the future and all that it entailed. Or so he had thought, a long time ago, when the fire of youth and rebellion had run high in his veins and he had turned his back on a country he thought stupid and backward. Never knowing what was it he had lost, until he had lost it utterly beyond recall.
And now his Emperor was a smirking money-grubbing businessman in a red suit, driving the world into poverty in his mad quest for money, stamping all over the dreams he had once promised he would deliver. And his Empire was a corrupted cesspit, seething with more political intrigue than the Wutai court itself, and with less care for those under them.
No surprise then, that he had looked to the young heir as the answer, perhaps, to this nightmare he had entangled himself in the rashness of youth. The prince, the promise of undoing past wrongs, if only the right people would stand at his side and whisper the right words into his young ears. Just a hope, at the very first, but he had been there to watch him grow up – too soon and too fast, but that was inevitable in this world – and had seen the quiet strength under that fragile exterior, that sharp intellect that learnt too soon how to play the power games that surrounded him. And had seen those blue eyes both potential nightmare and potential redemption.
There is a leader we would be proud to serve.
Veld was a man he admired a lot, whose professionalism he sought to emulate and whose shoes, it seemed, he was destined to fill one fateful day. A day he hoped would be long in coming. But Veld was a man to whom ‘Shinra’ meant the Company and not the family name, to whom the young heir was merely another name on the orders that came down from the President. Important, perhaps, but only in that the President wanted him kept alive, and Turks always executed their orders without question or hesitation.
Until one night the orders had come in with ‘top secret’ and ‘classified’ and ‘attend to this personally’ stamped all over them, and the morning had left Veld slumped in his chair, a gun still cradled in his hands, and somewhere out in the building, an eight year old princeling blankly holding his mother’s body, blue eyes dry and more lifeless than the body in his arms.
And that was when Tseng had seen the doubts that had long festered in his heart and mind, first take seed and start to bloom in Veld as well.
It was paltry consolation, being there for a boy whose mother they had murdered.
It was guilt, the way the child pushed him away, the day he donned that white suit and never wore a different color again.
It was painful relief, even for one who thought himself hardened to all forms of human emotion, when the boy finally broke the silence with one line:
I know it wasn’t your fault.
Every Wutainese knows where his loyalty lies; it is deep rooted, instinctive, not penciled away in a signature on a line, nor bought with money. It is the subtle harmony of the soul, the tandem of footsteps down a long corridor, the silhouette of the back you stand behind.
And when he had looked into icy blue that day, he knew he had been caught, utterly and completely.
“Because I brought you a Christmas
present!”
He was moving even before he realized it, chair falling behind him and all his papers tumbling to the ground, and he didn’t care. He was through the door of his office and into the elevator, fingers shaking inexplicably as they swiped the keycard through. Biting back shaky breath, forcing tremors away—
Ding, all too fast, the echo of his footsteps as he clattered up the stairs from 69th floor to 70th, shouldering his way past the guards, and—
--cold blast of wind from blades that were already slowing to a stop. The roar against his ears bringing him the sound of a raised voice, and his eyes snapped across the distance to see the President, livid, gesticulating as he yelled: “I never ordered you back, how dare you come back without authorization?”
He saw
And to an achingly familiar blue gaze which slid past the President, and came to rest on him.
The smallest of smiles, the fractional dip of that golden head as he excused himself, and Rufus Shinra was striding past his father, waving aside the ranting with a flick of a gloved hand, dismissing everything else in the world for…
…for him, Tseng realized, as the boy came to a halt just two steps away.
And there was pain in his visage, both new and old, but also something else.
“Welcome back, sir.”
Joy. Joy and happiness and gladness, carefully shaded in the slightest upturn of the corner of his mouth, in the way the light caught and held shining eyes.
“Thank you, Tseng.”
Older, taller, broader of shoulder. But that smile upon that face was the same hesitant one it had been two years ago, the same uncertainty of how just far propriety led and how far it should. The same awkwardness, recalling always watchful eyes and image and—
“Screw it,” Rufus muttered. “Two years should have taught me that holding back simply means depriving yourself.” And suddenly his arms were around Tseng’s neck, his head buried in his shoulder, as Tseng froze in shock.
“I missed you,” were the soft words in his ear, and he dimly
registered
Screw it, he thought, and his arms came up as well. There comes a time when propriety and rank are not important enough to stand in the way of what you hold dear…
“I missed you too, Rufus-sama.”
“Then all is well,” Rufus said, while Tseng’s brain summarily registered gibberish like how the boy’s head fit into the curve of his shoulder blade just so, how newfound strength in once too-skinny arms turned his grip into something sure, confident, possessive. How the world suddenly fell away and nothing else mattered, just his liege-lord back and safe…
…and he almost didn’t recognize the wave of happiness breaking over his heart, so caught up in the relief and the sheer rightness of it all.
“Boy’s got a right, sir. You didn’t say he wasn’t
to come back either,”
“Give that Turk a Christmas bonus,” Rufus chuckled, letting go of him at last. “If the old man doesn’t approve it, it can come out of the Vice President’s budget.”
“As good as done, sir,” Tseng said.
“And now…” Rufus turned, as the President stormed across the helipad towards them. “Will you stand by my side, Tseng?”
“Always, sir.”
“Then nothing can stand in my way.”
And at last, the heir comes into his own, Tseng thought.
“Less noble in the mind to suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune,” Rufus murmured, “Than to take arms against a sea of troubles.” And he smiled. “And thus to end the heart-ache and the thousand natural shocks; through neither death nor sleep, nor dreams of death, but by courage under the waking day.”
And behind them, the morning sun broke through the clouds, to cast the in gold the silhouette of the white clad back he stood behind.
-End-
Author’s notes:
Rufus is quoting extensively from Hamlet in the first chapter and at the end. The full soliloquy is as follows:
HAMLET
To be, or not to be: that is the question:
Whether 'tis nobler in the mind to suffer
The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune,
Or to take arms against a sea of troubles,
And by opposing end them? To die: to sleep;
No more; and by a sleep to say we end
The heart-ache and the thousand natural shocks
That flesh is heir to, 'tis a consummation
Devoutly to be wish'd. To die, to sleep;
To sleep: perchance to dream: ay, there's the rub;
For in that sleep of death what dreams may come
When we have shuffled off this mortal coil,
Must give us pause: there's the respect
That makes calamity of so long life;
For who would bear the whips and scorns of time,
The oppressor's wrong, the proud man's contumely,
The pangs of despised love, the law's delay,
The insolence of office and the spurns
That patient merit of the unworthy takes,
When he himself might his quietus make
With a bare bodkin? who would fardels
bear,
To grunt and sweat under a weary life,
But that the dread of something after death,
The undiscover'd country from whose bourn
No traveller returns, puzzles the will
And makes us rather bear those ills we have
Than fly to others that we know not of?
Thus conscience does make cowards of us all;
And thus the native hue of resolution
Is sicklied o'er with the pale cast of thought,
And enterprises of great pith and moment
With this regard their currents turn awry,
And lose the name of action.--Soft you now!
The fair Ophelia! Nymph, in thy orisons
Be all my sins remember'd.
In short, I suppose this could be called a ‘To be or not to be’ piece, whereby Rufus gets kicked out of his ‘not-to-be’-ness in Chapter 1, to ‘taking arms against a sea of troubles’ in Chapter 4 and taking his destiny into his own hands. To which end he no longer quotes blindly, but wrests the soliloquy into something of his own creation, stepping outside the bounds of propriety to get what he wants.
…Or I could be talking a whole lot of rubbish. *grin*
Elvaron / sf, December 20, 2005
Final word count: 5, 562
Archived: split-infinity.org/advent05
All characters and places copyright Square-soft Enix. Hamlet, of course, is credited to one William Shakespeare.