Chapter Text
Tseng
I spent the night before I was shot at a brothel.
Not the Honeybee, of course. I visit that place only when it's professionally necessary, because I find it tawdry to the point of being offensive. Even before you open the door, there is no doubt of what's being sold there. There is no finesse, only carnality. The difference between a visit to the Honeybee Inn and a quick tryst with a street-corner whore is one of degree, not of kind.
The place I had frequented since I joined the Turks is at the edge of Little Wutai in the Sector Two Slums, and it follows the model of upper-class establishments in Wutai proper, selling the illusion of grace as much as it does sex. The courtesans wear well-cut traditional garments, not tacky revealing costumes, and they are educated in arts ranging from dance and music to flower arranging and calligraphy. They are also fine conversationalists, able to hold their own in exchanges on any topic from current politics to the history of textiles, while at the same time never outright contradicting the guest to whom they're speaking.
Since I was a returning customer in good standing, the older woman who acted as greeter waved me through the door without stopping me to explain the rules of the house or ask who I wanted to see. Instead, I went straight through to the lounge area while behind me, I heard her speak softly into a PHS.
The lounge was furnished in a semi-traditional style, with low padded platforms suitable for sitting or kneeling, a tumble of silken pillows, and painted paper screens that half-hid the walls. On the table at the center of the room stood a single vase full of carefully-chosen flowers. Some of them were Aerith's; others had been brought in from outside the city at not-inconsiderable expense. I chose a corner with a good view of the doors and folded myself up, sitting seiza.
I was alone in the room for only a few minutes before Nohara arrived. That wasn't her real name, of course—all the women who worked here used pseudonyms—but I knew her by no other. Had chosen to know her by no other, since as a Turk, I could easily have traced her and found out. I didn't even know why she had chosen a Wutainese word for "field" as her alias.
When she greeted me, however, it was not in Wutainese, but in the lost tongue of Xien: "Tseng! It has been some time."
Her pronunciation was imperfect, and she had difficulty distinguishing certain consonants, but she was one of the few people in Midgar who could speak the language of my childhood at all. The others were all either scholars at the university, or elderly children of people who had left the island right after Wutai had conquered Xien.
Like me, Nohara had been raised by her grandparents, who had sometimes spoken the language at home or with friends. Despite our years of association, I still didn't know what had happened to her parents. She had never volunteered the information, and I felt it was tactless to ask.
I greeted her now with a smile, and accepted her hand when she offered it to me. She led me up the stairs, and to a familiar door, but once there, I hesitated.
"I had hoped we could talk for a bit." I needed to talk about this to someone who wasn't a Turk—ideally someone who wasn't from Shinra at all.
I saw her brow furrow slightly as she worked through the grammar, and she responded in Midgar Common, not Xiennese. "You know I don't mind being paid just to talk. Would you like me to make some tea?"
"Please."
Nohara's room was a mixture of several different styles. The bed was Eastern, with a brocaded red coverlet, but the sitting area was furnished with low cushions rather than chairs. She set water to boil over a decoratively concealed hotplate and measured out tea leaves. Only when the beverage was steeping did she come to sit across from me.
"It's unusual for you to look so troubled," she said. "And if it were work, you would be there sorting things out, rather than here, so I assume it's personal."
"It is," I admitted. "I am finding myself rather . . . torn. There is a young woman, my subordinate, who is being rather open in her pursuit of me."
Nohara smiled—genuinely, not the false smile she sometimes wore for customers. "That seems rather unprofessional of her, but it doesn't seem like enough to send you seeking a sympathetic ear."
"There is also a young man, my superior, who is . . ." I spread my hands. "I don't know precisely what he wants, but he has been watching both me and the girl."
Nohara's smile faded. "Oh, dear. I can think of several things that might mean, but most of them aren't good."
"I don't think it's anything so simple as jealousy. I suspect he has feelings for both me and the girl."
"And do you have feelings for both of them?"
"The young man has been as a brother to me since he was a lonely child of eleven and I was assigned as his bodyguard. I've been asking myself what I think of the girl for quite some time now, and I have no better answer now than I did when I started."
"A quagmire indeed," Nohara said, as she set out two cups and began to pour tea. "Perhaps the more important question, then, is that of what you want. If you come to understand that, then you may be able to decide what to do. If you imagine touching them—either of them—in a less than brotherly manner, does it fill you with revulsion?"
"The girl is so young," I said. "Barely of age."
"And you aren't thirty yet. Such an old man," Nohara teased, placing a teacup in front of me. I picked it up and took a slow sip. The tea leaves were imported and of good quality, similar to what I stocked my own kitchen with. "Saying that she's young, though . . . that doesn't actually answer my question."
No, it didn't. It had been a clumsy attempt at evading it—unusually so, for me. "I am . . . not disturbed . . . by the thought of touching either one of them, no. But the job I do doesn't allow for close attachments."
"You are a man, not a stone. And you aren't being entirely truthful. I know you're attached to your other coworkers. Why not these two?"
"I can't choose one over the other. If I do, it would cause problems." The Turks were held together by a delicate fabric of loyalty. I didn't want to refuse Elena, because a worst-case scenario following on from that might result in mutiny among the junior Turks (and force Veld to clean up my mess). I couldn't refuse Rufus because he was the one I served.
"Then you must refuse them both . . . or, if the three of you are agreeable, accept them both. The one thing you can not do is keep walking this tightrope, not if you wish to keep your sanity."
I might have laughed, or cried, but either was more expression than I normally permitted myself. Nohara was right, oh-so-right, but I couldn't imagine Rufus Shinra either accepting my refusal with grace or agreeing to share me. If I agreed to be shared.
That was why I felt so trapped. I couldn't accept just one. I couldn't accept both. I couldn't refuse both. And so I had been wearing myself out trying to juggle them both, but sooner or later, I was going to end up dropping a ball. And if I had to drop one . . . it was going to have to be Elena. Veld should be able to patch that up well enough for the department to survive. I would likely be displaced as second-in-command and field commander of the Turks, but that was minor compared to what might happen if I offended Rufus.
It was the rational thing to do, but abandoning a comrade in order to save my own hide never sat well with me. Even though I had done it before, and would likely need to do it again. Why did I bother to pretend that I had any honour left?
"I seem to have made things worse," Nohara said. "I am sorry, Tseng."
I shook my head. "I was the one who chose to bring this up."
She was too tactful to agree. Instead, she gently changed the subject, telling me a silly tale of something that had happened to one of her younger co-workers. I responded with a story about Reno—scarcely a week ever seemed to pass without that man doing something story-worthy, and some of it was even fit for the consumption of outsiders. The atmosphere slowly relaxed as we exchanged more trivial tales.
Eventually, Nohara led me over to the silk-covered bed, where together we did what men and women have been doing together since time immemorial. Afterwards, I lay with my head pillowed on her breasts as she stroked my hair.
"I'll be retiring soon, you know," she said.
"Mmm." Few of the courtesans kept working in that role past their mid-thirties, I knew, and Nohara was starting to develop laugh lines at the corners of her eyes that were hard to conceal with makeup. "Where will you go?"
"The house has asked me to stay and teach flower arranging and the tea ceremony to the younger women. It doesn't pay as well, of course, but the income is . . . more constant. This may be the last time we meet this way."
That made me feel unexpectedly saddened. "So I'll never see you again?"
"Not as my client. But I would be glad to receive you if you come as a friend."
Ah. That was something, at least.
I returned to Shinra Tower by the green-tinged grey light of morning—we had established that it would take decades for the last ten percent of the mako particulates in the air to finally disappear, although Midgar was much healthier now than it had been in the old President's day. There were even shafts of genuine sunlight below the Plate now, falling through the clear plastic bricks that had replaced the pavement in some side streets up above, and on down through holes cut in the Plate's interior floors. The Slums would never be a brightly-lit paradise, but they were improving. It didn't hurt that Rufus was allowing Reeve to direct a lot of money into social services that Shinra had only pretended to fund before.
Inside the Tower, the elevator took me up to my private apartment, where I exchanged the nondescript clothes I'd worn to the Slums for a Turk-blue suit, and then back down to the floor where we had our offices. Cissnei was in the lounge, and gave me a little wave as I passed. I nodded back.
There was a stack of papers on the desk in my private office, neatly stacked and centered except for three sheets at the very top that were at a sixty-degree angle to the rest and slopping off the edge of the pile. I checked those three for wires or other odd additions before flipping them over, but it turned out to just be Reno's normal sloppiness.
I was more interested in the rest of the stack than I was in the redhead's interim report on unrest in Corel, in any case. They were the briefing on conditions in Junon, which I had about two hours to absorb before I needed to pilot Rufus there.
There were thirty-eight people in Junon that we were tracking as potential hostiles, and I needed to be able to recognize every one of them. Some were Wutainese who had lost too much during the war to be willing to give up on their vengeance. Others were disgruntled ex-employees or people who thought Shinra hadn't done enough to safeguard their interests, and there were still a few fringe ecoterrorist types floating around, although the Avalanche of old had collapsed when their leadership left.
I read and re-read the papers, then took myself to the small VR room hidden away near our gym to practice picking the people whose faces and biographies I had just memorized out of a crowd of similar-looking others. It didn't feel like enough, but then it never did.
At ten o'clock, I put the VR helmet aside, slung the bag I'd packed the previous day over my shoulder, and headed for the helipad on the roof. Cissnei and Elena were already there, checking the underside of the parked helicopter for unauthorized additions that might explode while we were in flight.
Rufus joined us a few minutes later, with Dark Nation and a minion toting three suitcases following at his heels. It was a lot of baggage for what we intended to be no more than a two-day stay, but I didn't begrudge him. Unlike the rest of us, Rufus couldn't wear the same suit to every function . . . although I had no doubt that if I dug deep enough into those bags, I would find a jacket and trousers in a specific shade of blue. Along with hair dye and a certain pair of eyeglasses. While Mirror the Turk was seldom seen these days, he was too useful for Rufus to abandon him entirely.
Sliding into the pilot's seat was an action so familiar I barely noticed I was doing it. What I did notice was Elena taking the copilot's seat beside me. I would have been happier if Cissnei had taken on the chore instead, but she didn't need the practice, and Elena did. My hands remained poised to take over as I turned the controls over to the young blonde, but the takeoff was unexceptionable, and she placed the helicopter on the right course for Junon without my needing to prompt her. I let her fly and pretended not to watch her profile, or notice the little glances she was sneaking at me.
Three hours from Junon to Midgar. Elena landed the helicopter competently on the flight deck, and we all waited patiently while Rufus said a few Appropriate Words to Admiral Arcanol, who wasn't any more impressed by our presence than we were impressed by having to be here. This visit was just for publicity purposes: they'd finally repaired the last of the WEAPON damage, and Rufus had a couple of ribbons to cut and tours to make, that was all.
At half-past-one, we sat down for a late lunch. The old President would never have allowed his bodyguards to eat with him, but to Rufus, we were family. We were served fresh fish, of course. With the reactor decomissioned and a better sewage treatment system set up, the water around the town had become clean enough again to support most of the species that had lived there before the upper city had been built . . . except for the ones that liked lots of light, but you couldn't have everything. Whatever the locals had caught, it was excellent when pan-fried and spritzed with lemon. Even Dark Nation was allowed to get in on the act, although I doubted the fish that had been gingerly placed in front of her by a very junior corporal had any lemon on it.
We left the guard hound in Rufus' temporary quarters when we departed for the first ribbon-cutting ceremony. Dark Nation would keep anyone from interfering with Rufus' belongings. Just in case.
The tramway had been utterly destroyed by one of the WEAPONs, although no one knew for certain whether Emerald or Sapphire or Jade had been responsible for the stray shot that had done the deed. They'd rebuilt it entirely from scratch, and today was the grand re-opening. I stood behind Rufus and to his left as he began his speech. And then . . .
It was one of those moments where time seems to stutter, too fast and then too slow, like a bad special effect. Glint of metal out of the corner of my eye. Throwing myself forward before I'd consciously registered gun. Tearing pain in my chest as the bullet threaded its way between tie and lapel, and down at an angle between my ribs. My shoulder striking Rufus and knocking him prone. Covering him with my body, red smearing his clothes as I pulled my pistol out and raked my gaze over the crowd, searching for a target.
Then Elena was knocking the podium over, blocking my line of sight but also providing the protection of two layers of solid oak between us and the bullets, while Cissnei ran into the crowd. And Rufus was snarling something at the ground.
"Damnit, Tseng, get off of me!"
He had his shotgun in his hand, I realized. Slowly, I raised myself on hands and knees, trying to get my weight off him without allowing him to move away from the shelter of the podium.
"Report," I said into my mic—of course, we were all wearing standard communications gear.
"One shooter," Cissnei said tersely. "At least four lookouts. One of them tripped me to give the shooter a chance to escape."
"ID?"
"Landslide. They weren't even supposed to be here!"
Landslide was an offshoot ecoterrorist group formed by a handful of Avalanche's most militant, which had split off even before Fuhito had died and Elfe and Shears had . . . left their positions. They were the sort of people who not only were willing to accept large numbers of civilian casualties, but deliberately sought to kill anyone who could be thought of as having to do with Shinra, no matter how distant the tie or how minor the job. Janitorial staff, student interns, locals who sold supplies to our smaller establishments . . . all fair game as far as Landslide was concerned.
They held their own lives cheap as well. If we had caught their gunman, he would have shot himself in the head rather than let himself be questioned or used as a hostage.
At least they weren't likely to come back today.
I sidled off Rufus, pulled my blood-soaked shirt away from my skin, and tried to cast FullCure from the materia I always carried, but my vision slipped and slid and I couldn't focus enough to complete the spell. Blood loss. The hole was too big, or the shot had opened an artery, and I'd waited too long . . . Damn it all . . .
I vaguely felt myself hit the ground. Then nothing.