![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Entry tags:
Crisis Core: Cream and Bastards (Zack + Tseng)
I need to stop writing now or I am going to kill myself.
Title: Cream and Bastards
Characters: Tseng, Zack
Rating: PG-13 (swearing)
Summary: Tseng and Zack talk; about what they've done, and who they've done.
Warnings: Set in the middle of Crisis Core, when Zack is exiled to spend time on a beach with the Turks. Spoilers for Crisis Core and Before Crisis.
2768 words. Almost, but not quite, slash.
Angeal was gone, now, and suddenly Zack was on holiday. Shinra-sanctioned, and overseen by Turks - life, as the saying went, was beautiful.
One day it'd be Cissnei. She wore her two-piece and rubbed suntan lotion over herself and splashed in the water, and at the end of the day she and Zack would chill out on deckchairs and talk. She about how the Turks taught her how to break fingers and Zack about how in SOLDIER the favourite hobby of the training sergeants was to keep track of how many times you died in the training sim.
On some other day, it'd be Reno. The two of them don't really get along. Conversation wasn't hard, but Reno didn't care enough for it. Which was crazy, because Reno talked as much as Zack, but they never seemed to meet anywhere. Reno looked at Zack like Zack'd seen too little, and the more time passed, the more Zack thought that Reno had seen too much. Reno was a slum kid, born and bred in Midgar, and that had have got to have been some childhood. If Reno had any childhood at all.
There were a bunch of others, but Zack got the feeling they either hadn't been there long or wouldn't be staying around much longer. Zack didn't like to think about stuff like that, but hanging out with the Turks meant that he had to acknowledge that they turned their people over faster than you could flip pancakes. One life gone, just like that, and it was only the remaining cream and bastards who rose to the top.
Tseng was more than a little of both.
Tseng was not a man afraid of doing outrageous things. You had to have more than just guts to come out onto the beach and lay back in a deckchair in a full suit. You had to have the ability to turn off your sensory perception as well.
'You,' Zack said, staring at Tseng, 'have got to be out of your mind.'
'Last I checked,' Tseng replied, crossing his legs at the ankle and looking out into the expanse of ocean before them, 'I hadn't been classified insane yet.'
Zack shrugged. Man has his own tastes. 'You're going to die of heatstroke,' he warned.
There was a tinkle of ice on glass. 'I'll drink more, then,' Tseng answered, stirring a drink that looked neither fruity nor tasty, but was certainly cold. Zack raised a sceptical eyebrow.
'What's in that? Water and vodka?'
'Just about,' Tseng replied, and by now Zack'd got used to the fact that his voice never once changed its register or tone. Tseng was a consistent kind of guy.
Zack sipped his pina colada. Tseng sipped his iced ethanol. The sea crashed onto the shore. The sun beat down on their shared umbrella. Every once in a while, a shadow of a gull would block out parts of the endless stretch of golden white sand. It wasn't paradise, but it was pretty close, in a weird kind of way.
'This place is pretty swank,' Zack commented, throwing a look around. It was a company vacation spot, but not exactly the average resort that you'd let the office guy from the 39th level bring his wife and kids to. He'd been given a sort of villa of his own, complete with huge showers and fluffy pillows and a veranda and big, big glass windows. As far as he could tell, everyone else had their own as well. No sharing, just a lot of room service. Higher up kind of stuff. 'Maybe it isn't so bad, being a first class.'
'I've seen worse,' Tseng replied lazily, the most relaxed that Zack'd ever heard him. 'And better. It doesn't quite matter, after a while.'
'You Turks really have been everywhere, haven't you? Done everything?'
'Not everything,' Tseng shrugged, tilting his head back and closing his eyes. He was surprisingly pale for a guy that got out a lot, Zack reflected. Tseng was a pusher of paper, but he pushed people off cliffs pretty regularly too. He wasn't that kind of guy, but it'd been a while since he last saw Aerith, and Zack'd been in the military long enough to know a bunch of guys who wouldn't say no to the sharp angle of Tseng's jaw and the fact that the Turk looked so put together all the time. 'But close,' Tseng qualified himself. 'We've done close to everything.'
Zack shot him a look. 'What does that mean?'
Tseng turned his face and opened his eyes to meet the SOLDIER's gaze. 'What do you think it means?' he asked, oblique and steady.
Tseng's eyes were a little too placid for that question to have been innocent. Zack looked away, hastily. 'Never mind,' he grinned, trying to stave off his own, pretty much morbid, curiosity with an air of flippancy. 'It's too damn hot to talk about serious things like that. Want another drink?' He got to his feet, grabbing their empty glasses. 'I'll go get them.'
'I'd be obliged,' Tseng replied, and as Zack went off he just continued sitting there like he owned the world, and nothing could touch him. Zack wondered if that could actually be true.
It was three days before Zack saw Tseng at the beach again, this time early in the morning. False dawn was rising, dark and splendid against the beachfront as Zack rounded back in onto the main stretch after the last lap of his morning run. Tseng was there, waiting at the chairs, with a litre bottle of water, towels and a couple of drinks.
'What are you doing up so early?' Zack panted, drawing himself up by the table and gratefully accepting the water.
Tseng looked at his watch. 'I wasn't aware that six a.m counted as "early",' he deadpanned.
Zack couldn't tell if he was joking - and couldn't be bothered to try. He just grinned, and sopped up his sweat with the towel Tseng handed over to him. He felt euphoric, high. Running - like fighting - always did that for him. Dropping into a chair, Zack stretched once before going boneless with contentment. Maybe this holiday wasn't so bad after all. 'Do you always act waiter for the ones you're watching?'
'What makes you think you're being watched?' Tseng didn't miss a beat. He smiled, though. 'But I think the answer to that question would be yes. As far as possible, or is reasonable.'
Zack waggled his eyebrows at the Turk. 'Have there been over the top requests?'
'Some people like to think that, just because we're on Shinra's payroll, a Turk'll roll over if you give him or her the command.' Tseng took a seat of his own and cracked open a bottle of juice. He brought it to his lips and met Zack's eye. 'We like proving that the contrary is more true.'
Zack whistled. 'You guys wouldn't take too well to that, huh? The upper executives really that thick?' He tried to imagine, say, Heidegger commanding Tseng to, hmm, polish his boots. It was easier to imagine Heidegger with a bullet hole through his head.
'It's not my place to call them that,' Tseng lifted a shoulder in an elegant shrug. 'Though, personally, I've stopped hesitating before telling Rufus Shinra to go fuck himself.'
It took a long, long moment for Zack to pick his jaw up off the floor. 'Did you just -' Tseng might have smiled for the slightest of seconds, there. 'I didn't just - Rufus as in Vice President Rufus?'
'Rufus has been able to make that title matter, hasn't he?' Tseng mused, unperturbed by the fact that he'd just stunned Zack into incoherency. 'No one would've thought that a child like him could turn the puppet position of vice president into something more substantial.'
Zack put his hands up and waved them about a little. 'Woah, woah, slow down. This stuff is way in over my head.' He slumped back into his chair and laughed, cocking an eyebrow at the Turk. Tseng really was a pretty okay sort of guy. 'If you're on first-name terms with Rufus Shinra, then you really weren't joking when you said you'd done almost everything, were you?'
Tseng chuckled. That sound in itself was kind of disturbing. 'I've... done almost everything, yes.'
Zack closed his eyes and let his inquisitiveness get the better of him. It'd been eating at him since their last conversation, anyway. 'When you said you've... done things.' Zack paused. Tseng didn't fill the silence in for him. 'You meant people as well, didn't you?'
'It's a dirty job,' Tseng said, quietly.
'I know,' Zack ventured, casting Tseng a look, 'that you and Aerith aren't ... like, close the way I am with her now.'
'Like I said,' Tseng's voice was even, blase, 'it's complicated.'
'But you're not with her.'
'No,' Tseng sighed, tapping the container of his drink with his fingers. 'I'm not.'
'So who have you done?'
There was a pause.
'That's a bold question, Zack.'
'You're the one who's been bringing it up, Tseng.'
Silence came after that. It was getting brighter, now, the sun finally coming up from behind the waves, turning the greys and blues into solid golds and oranges. They watched it rise for a while, Tseng contemplating the question, Zack finding himself surprisingly unafraid of having asked it.
There was a crunch of leather soles on sand as Tseng stood. 'Maybe another day,' he said, and picking up their bottles, he left.
Zack figured, the next time they talked, that he'd have to be as generous to Tseng as he wanted Tseng to be generous to him. Already kind of half-sick of the beach, he decided to change into something a bit more dressed up than a pair of board shorts, grabbed a bottle of wine and two glasses from the resort's restaurant, and went off to find Tseng. No honour in being the one chased down all the time, after all.
He found the Turk - surprise, surprise - in his decidedly larger villa. There was one more room than the place Zack'd been given, and a living area for guests - as if Tseng'd have any. Zack hammered away at the bell until the door swung open to reveal Tseng in - another surprise - a suit, albeit with his blazer unzipped this time.
'I brought refreshments to make your life slightly more worth living,' Zack smiled, dangling the glasses in front of Tseng's face. 'And if you refuse, I'm going to tell the entire 49th level that the Turks are made up of stuffy desk-sitters.'
'I don't think I was going to turn you down, but now you have me convinced,' Tseng said drolly as he pulled the door fully open. 'Come in,' he said, doing up his blazer. Zack saw him move across the room and shut his laptop screen. Not a very trusting guy, Tseng. Not that Zack blamed him, all things considered.
'You don't have to dress up like that all the time, you know,' Zack grunted, struggling with the cork remover he'd brought alone. 'It's just you and me, really. What's the point of the tie and stuff?'
'Call it habit,' Tseng said, washing out the glasses and wiping them dry. He set them out, and let Zack pour. 'What's the occasion?'
'Friends do this thing where they talk every once in a while,' Zack sighed, rolling his eyes. 'So I'm here. To talk. Brought wine so that maybe you'll talk too.'
'I thought friends didn't manipulate their friends for information,' Tseng said jokingly, taking his glass.
'I thought Turks never took their minds off their jobs, and whoopee, looks like I'm right,' Zack retorted. 'Shut up and take a sip. I'm just a country boy, but this stuff doesn't taste too bad.'
Tseng sampled it. 'It's not unpleasant.'
'Y'know, the first time I tried wine, it was with Angeal?' Zack said, leaning back into the sofa where he'd reclined. 'I was a freshly minted 2nd class. I'd spent most of my time in Midgar as a 3rd running around the grubbier parts of the Plates. The only thing I knew how to do was to drink cheap beer and sneak into the movies during intermission. I think he got tired of me being an uneducated bumpkin, so Angeal took me out one night and taught me how to drink. I nearly spat the stuff out, first time.'
It surprised Zack. That it could hurt, still, talking about Angeal. But then he felt relieved. If it could hurt - then Angeal was still worth mourning. Still human, still good, still honourable.
He didn't realise how quiet he'd been until Tseng's voice broke through. 'Angeal was a good man. A good mentor. I know what it's like to have one of those.'
'Meaning you weren't always the head of your happy troop?' Zack asked, turning to Tseng. The man looked strangely distant.
'I had the same dilemma as you, once,' Tseng said quietly. 'Having to fight someone I respected and trusted.'
Zack looked down into his wine glass. 'Did it work out?'
Tseng's lips twisted into a wry smile. 'In a way befitting Shinra, yes. It did.'
'More blackmail and intrigue and monsters and stuff?' Zack joked, sniggering.
'Actually,' Tseng snorted softly, 'that could be a summary of events, yes.'
They spent the rest of the night exchanging stories - of Veld, of Angeal - and getting sloshed. Tseng held his liquor like a sponge, but Zack wasn't intending to be drunk under the table by a suit wearing pansy (he didn't actually say the last part aloud). They finished the bottle and called for another one and shared a third. Tseng wasn't pissed by the time they finished, but he wasn't exactly in his head, either. Zack could've been better off himself. They'd almost run out of anecdotes. The clock read two, maybe three in the morning.
'It's been a damned long while,' Zack giggled, 'since I felt this high.'
'It's been as long,' Tseng said, not bothering to fix his voice with sobriety, 'since I've been off duty long enough to drink.'
They were each sprawled in a chair, staring up at the ceiling. Zack realised he was learning to let go. Tseng, silently, wondered at finding his voice again. Neither said anything to that extent. No point shattering the illusion they were both comfortable with.
'So,' Zack said, when they finally were through with their stories and their senses. 'Have you done... Rufus?'
Tseng barked out a laugh. 'He'd like me to.' The Turk reached for the wine, as if he wasn't quite drunk enough for the conversation. 'And you? Have you even looked past a skirt and at a man?'
'Sephiroth,' Zack declared, drunk enough that the flush of his skin hid his blush. 'When I was still training. You?'
'There were a number of occasions, for the job. Other times, fellow Turks. Occupational hazard.'
'But anyone you wanted?'
Tseng looked over at Zack. 'No,' he shook his head. 'I've given up on wanting for quite a while now. We're Shinra. Monsters of our own sort.'
They fell silent again. Tseng's breathing sounded unnaturally loud in the room, or perhaps it was just Zack's training that made it seem that way. Inhale, exhale.
Zack turned, and leaned over to look at Tseng. 'Do you -' he asked, looking at eyes that, without their steely set, looked oddly estranged, lonely. 'I mean, I'm not - but -'
Tseng looked at him for a very long time. Scrutinising, almost, except this drunk Zack couldn't say what it was he was seeing when Tseng narrowed his eyes and seemed to consider, seemed to lean in, seemed to want to-- Then there was a sound of a blazer being zipped up, and glasses being cleared, and Tseng standing. 'You're drunk,' the Turk said, his voice back to flat, 'and I'm not that desperate. You can sleep here for the night, if you'd like. Goodnight, Zack.'
The door to Tseng's room closed behind the man with a quiet click.
And what a strange and crazy and put together creature Tseng was. Zack knew he wouldn't get it - not now, not ever. People like Tseng, people like Sephiroth. Too much the cream of the crop, too much of a bastard in all of them to ever really be human enough. But not monsters. None of them were monsters. Not really. And certainly, not truly.
'Goodnight, Tseng,' he said to the air. 'Goodnight.'
Title: Cream and Bastards
Characters: Tseng, Zack
Rating: PG-13 (swearing)
Summary: Tseng and Zack talk; about what they've done, and who they've done.
Warnings: Set in the middle of Crisis Core, when Zack is exiled to spend time on a beach with the Turks. Spoilers for Crisis Core and Before Crisis.
2768 words. Almost, but not quite, slash.
Angeal was gone, now, and suddenly Zack was on holiday. Shinra-sanctioned, and overseen by Turks - life, as the saying went, was beautiful.
One day it'd be Cissnei. She wore her two-piece and rubbed suntan lotion over herself and splashed in the water, and at the end of the day she and Zack would chill out on deckchairs and talk. She about how the Turks taught her how to break fingers and Zack about how in SOLDIER the favourite hobby of the training sergeants was to keep track of how many times you died in the training sim.
On some other day, it'd be Reno. The two of them don't really get along. Conversation wasn't hard, but Reno didn't care enough for it. Which was crazy, because Reno talked as much as Zack, but they never seemed to meet anywhere. Reno looked at Zack like Zack'd seen too little, and the more time passed, the more Zack thought that Reno had seen too much. Reno was a slum kid, born and bred in Midgar, and that had have got to have been some childhood. If Reno had any childhood at all.
There were a bunch of others, but Zack got the feeling they either hadn't been there long or wouldn't be staying around much longer. Zack didn't like to think about stuff like that, but hanging out with the Turks meant that he had to acknowledge that they turned their people over faster than you could flip pancakes. One life gone, just like that, and it was only the remaining cream and bastards who rose to the top.
Tseng was more than a little of both.
Tseng was not a man afraid of doing outrageous things. You had to have more than just guts to come out onto the beach and lay back in a deckchair in a full suit. You had to have the ability to turn off your sensory perception as well.
'You,' Zack said, staring at Tseng, 'have got to be out of your mind.'
'Last I checked,' Tseng replied, crossing his legs at the ankle and looking out into the expanse of ocean before them, 'I hadn't been classified insane yet.'
Zack shrugged. Man has his own tastes. 'You're going to die of heatstroke,' he warned.
There was a tinkle of ice on glass. 'I'll drink more, then,' Tseng answered, stirring a drink that looked neither fruity nor tasty, but was certainly cold. Zack raised a sceptical eyebrow.
'What's in that? Water and vodka?'
'Just about,' Tseng replied, and by now Zack'd got used to the fact that his voice never once changed its register or tone. Tseng was a consistent kind of guy.
Zack sipped his pina colada. Tseng sipped his iced ethanol. The sea crashed onto the shore. The sun beat down on their shared umbrella. Every once in a while, a shadow of a gull would block out parts of the endless stretch of golden white sand. It wasn't paradise, but it was pretty close, in a weird kind of way.
'This place is pretty swank,' Zack commented, throwing a look around. It was a company vacation spot, but not exactly the average resort that you'd let the office guy from the 39th level bring his wife and kids to. He'd been given a sort of villa of his own, complete with huge showers and fluffy pillows and a veranda and big, big glass windows. As far as he could tell, everyone else had their own as well. No sharing, just a lot of room service. Higher up kind of stuff. 'Maybe it isn't so bad, being a first class.'
'I've seen worse,' Tseng replied lazily, the most relaxed that Zack'd ever heard him. 'And better. It doesn't quite matter, after a while.'
'You Turks really have been everywhere, haven't you? Done everything?'
'Not everything,' Tseng shrugged, tilting his head back and closing his eyes. He was surprisingly pale for a guy that got out a lot, Zack reflected. Tseng was a pusher of paper, but he pushed people off cliffs pretty regularly too. He wasn't that kind of guy, but it'd been a while since he last saw Aerith, and Zack'd been in the military long enough to know a bunch of guys who wouldn't say no to the sharp angle of Tseng's jaw and the fact that the Turk looked so put together all the time. 'But close,' Tseng qualified himself. 'We've done close to everything.'
Zack shot him a look. 'What does that mean?'
Tseng turned his face and opened his eyes to meet the SOLDIER's gaze. 'What do you think it means?' he asked, oblique and steady.
Tseng's eyes were a little too placid for that question to have been innocent. Zack looked away, hastily. 'Never mind,' he grinned, trying to stave off his own, pretty much morbid, curiosity with an air of flippancy. 'It's too damn hot to talk about serious things like that. Want another drink?' He got to his feet, grabbing their empty glasses. 'I'll go get them.'
'I'd be obliged,' Tseng replied, and as Zack went off he just continued sitting there like he owned the world, and nothing could touch him. Zack wondered if that could actually be true.
It was three days before Zack saw Tseng at the beach again, this time early in the morning. False dawn was rising, dark and splendid against the beachfront as Zack rounded back in onto the main stretch after the last lap of his morning run. Tseng was there, waiting at the chairs, with a litre bottle of water, towels and a couple of drinks.
'What are you doing up so early?' Zack panted, drawing himself up by the table and gratefully accepting the water.
Tseng looked at his watch. 'I wasn't aware that six a.m counted as "early",' he deadpanned.
Zack couldn't tell if he was joking - and couldn't be bothered to try. He just grinned, and sopped up his sweat with the towel Tseng handed over to him. He felt euphoric, high. Running - like fighting - always did that for him. Dropping into a chair, Zack stretched once before going boneless with contentment. Maybe this holiday wasn't so bad after all. 'Do you always act waiter for the ones you're watching?'
'What makes you think you're being watched?' Tseng didn't miss a beat. He smiled, though. 'But I think the answer to that question would be yes. As far as possible, or is reasonable.'
Zack waggled his eyebrows at the Turk. 'Have there been over the top requests?'
'Some people like to think that, just because we're on Shinra's payroll, a Turk'll roll over if you give him or her the command.' Tseng took a seat of his own and cracked open a bottle of juice. He brought it to his lips and met Zack's eye. 'We like proving that the contrary is more true.'
Zack whistled. 'You guys wouldn't take too well to that, huh? The upper executives really that thick?' He tried to imagine, say, Heidegger commanding Tseng to, hmm, polish his boots. It was easier to imagine Heidegger with a bullet hole through his head.
'It's not my place to call them that,' Tseng lifted a shoulder in an elegant shrug. 'Though, personally, I've stopped hesitating before telling Rufus Shinra to go fuck himself.'
It took a long, long moment for Zack to pick his jaw up off the floor. 'Did you just -' Tseng might have smiled for the slightest of seconds, there. 'I didn't just - Rufus as in Vice President Rufus?'
'Rufus has been able to make that title matter, hasn't he?' Tseng mused, unperturbed by the fact that he'd just stunned Zack into incoherency. 'No one would've thought that a child like him could turn the puppet position of vice president into something more substantial.'
Zack put his hands up and waved them about a little. 'Woah, woah, slow down. This stuff is way in over my head.' He slumped back into his chair and laughed, cocking an eyebrow at the Turk. Tseng really was a pretty okay sort of guy. 'If you're on first-name terms with Rufus Shinra, then you really weren't joking when you said you'd done almost everything, were you?'
Tseng chuckled. That sound in itself was kind of disturbing. 'I've... done almost everything, yes.'
Zack closed his eyes and let his inquisitiveness get the better of him. It'd been eating at him since their last conversation, anyway. 'When you said you've... done things.' Zack paused. Tseng didn't fill the silence in for him. 'You meant people as well, didn't you?'
'It's a dirty job,' Tseng said, quietly.
'I know,' Zack ventured, casting Tseng a look, 'that you and Aerith aren't ... like, close the way I am with her now.'
'Like I said,' Tseng's voice was even, blase, 'it's complicated.'
'But you're not with her.'
'No,' Tseng sighed, tapping the container of his drink with his fingers. 'I'm not.'
'So who have you done?'
There was a pause.
'That's a bold question, Zack.'
'You're the one who's been bringing it up, Tseng.'
Silence came after that. It was getting brighter, now, the sun finally coming up from behind the waves, turning the greys and blues into solid golds and oranges. They watched it rise for a while, Tseng contemplating the question, Zack finding himself surprisingly unafraid of having asked it.
There was a crunch of leather soles on sand as Tseng stood. 'Maybe another day,' he said, and picking up their bottles, he left.
Zack figured, the next time they talked, that he'd have to be as generous to Tseng as he wanted Tseng to be generous to him. Already kind of half-sick of the beach, he decided to change into something a bit more dressed up than a pair of board shorts, grabbed a bottle of wine and two glasses from the resort's restaurant, and went off to find Tseng. No honour in being the one chased down all the time, after all.
He found the Turk - surprise, surprise - in his decidedly larger villa. There was one more room than the place Zack'd been given, and a living area for guests - as if Tseng'd have any. Zack hammered away at the bell until the door swung open to reveal Tseng in - another surprise - a suit, albeit with his blazer unzipped this time.
'I brought refreshments to make your life slightly more worth living,' Zack smiled, dangling the glasses in front of Tseng's face. 'And if you refuse, I'm going to tell the entire 49th level that the Turks are made up of stuffy desk-sitters.'
'I don't think I was going to turn you down, but now you have me convinced,' Tseng said drolly as he pulled the door fully open. 'Come in,' he said, doing up his blazer. Zack saw him move across the room and shut his laptop screen. Not a very trusting guy, Tseng. Not that Zack blamed him, all things considered.
'You don't have to dress up like that all the time, you know,' Zack grunted, struggling with the cork remover he'd brought alone. 'It's just you and me, really. What's the point of the tie and stuff?'
'Call it habit,' Tseng said, washing out the glasses and wiping them dry. He set them out, and let Zack pour. 'What's the occasion?'
'Friends do this thing where they talk every once in a while,' Zack sighed, rolling his eyes. 'So I'm here. To talk. Brought wine so that maybe you'll talk too.'
'I thought friends didn't manipulate their friends for information,' Tseng said jokingly, taking his glass.
'I thought Turks never took their minds off their jobs, and whoopee, looks like I'm right,' Zack retorted. 'Shut up and take a sip. I'm just a country boy, but this stuff doesn't taste too bad.'
Tseng sampled it. 'It's not unpleasant.'
'Y'know, the first time I tried wine, it was with Angeal?' Zack said, leaning back into the sofa where he'd reclined. 'I was a freshly minted 2nd class. I'd spent most of my time in Midgar as a 3rd running around the grubbier parts of the Plates. The only thing I knew how to do was to drink cheap beer and sneak into the movies during intermission. I think he got tired of me being an uneducated bumpkin, so Angeal took me out one night and taught me how to drink. I nearly spat the stuff out, first time.'
It surprised Zack. That it could hurt, still, talking about Angeal. But then he felt relieved. If it could hurt - then Angeal was still worth mourning. Still human, still good, still honourable.
He didn't realise how quiet he'd been until Tseng's voice broke through. 'Angeal was a good man. A good mentor. I know what it's like to have one of those.'
'Meaning you weren't always the head of your happy troop?' Zack asked, turning to Tseng. The man looked strangely distant.
'I had the same dilemma as you, once,' Tseng said quietly. 'Having to fight someone I respected and trusted.'
Zack looked down into his wine glass. 'Did it work out?'
Tseng's lips twisted into a wry smile. 'In a way befitting Shinra, yes. It did.'
'More blackmail and intrigue and monsters and stuff?' Zack joked, sniggering.
'Actually,' Tseng snorted softly, 'that could be a summary of events, yes.'
They spent the rest of the night exchanging stories - of Veld, of Angeal - and getting sloshed. Tseng held his liquor like a sponge, but Zack wasn't intending to be drunk under the table by a suit wearing pansy (he didn't actually say the last part aloud). They finished the bottle and called for another one and shared a third. Tseng wasn't pissed by the time they finished, but he wasn't exactly in his head, either. Zack could've been better off himself. They'd almost run out of anecdotes. The clock read two, maybe three in the morning.
'It's been a damned long while,' Zack giggled, 'since I felt this high.'
'It's been as long,' Tseng said, not bothering to fix his voice with sobriety, 'since I've been off duty long enough to drink.'
They were each sprawled in a chair, staring up at the ceiling. Zack realised he was learning to let go. Tseng, silently, wondered at finding his voice again. Neither said anything to that extent. No point shattering the illusion they were both comfortable with.
'So,' Zack said, when they finally were through with their stories and their senses. 'Have you done... Rufus?'
Tseng barked out a laugh. 'He'd like me to.' The Turk reached for the wine, as if he wasn't quite drunk enough for the conversation. 'And you? Have you even looked past a skirt and at a man?'
'Sephiroth,' Zack declared, drunk enough that the flush of his skin hid his blush. 'When I was still training. You?'
'There were a number of occasions, for the job. Other times, fellow Turks. Occupational hazard.'
'But anyone you wanted?'
Tseng looked over at Zack. 'No,' he shook his head. 'I've given up on wanting for quite a while now. We're Shinra. Monsters of our own sort.'
They fell silent again. Tseng's breathing sounded unnaturally loud in the room, or perhaps it was just Zack's training that made it seem that way. Inhale, exhale.
Zack turned, and leaned over to look at Tseng. 'Do you -' he asked, looking at eyes that, without their steely set, looked oddly estranged, lonely. 'I mean, I'm not - but -'
Tseng looked at him for a very long time. Scrutinising, almost, except this drunk Zack couldn't say what it was he was seeing when Tseng narrowed his eyes and seemed to consider, seemed to lean in, seemed to want to-- Then there was a sound of a blazer being zipped up, and glasses being cleared, and Tseng standing. 'You're drunk,' the Turk said, his voice back to flat, 'and I'm not that desperate. You can sleep here for the night, if you'd like. Goodnight, Zack.'
The door to Tseng's room closed behind the man with a quiet click.
And what a strange and crazy and put together creature Tseng was. Zack knew he wouldn't get it - not now, not ever. People like Tseng, people like Sephiroth. Too much the cream of the crop, too much of a bastard in all of them to ever really be human enough. But not monsters. None of them were monsters. Not really. And certainly, not truly.
'Goodnight, Tseng,' he said to the air. 'Goodnight.'
no subject
no subject
:D Thank you!
no subject
Oh, and let me know if you want fanart for any of your fics, while I'm inspired.
no subject
F-f-fanart? *HAS NEVER HAD THIS HAPPEN TO HER BEFORE* UM. Um. Do you do Tseng?
no subject
no subject
Oh god um uh UH. *brain kind of breaks* I have no idea! I am the least visual writer you will ever find; imagining things is not my forte. Um. Um. Tseng with all his clothes on is something that I find really hot (... yes) - uh. Mid-interrogation of someone? Maybe with his blazer off and his sleeves rolled?
Oh god am I being really stupid hereLife and I equate automatic fail, I'm sorry!
no subject
no subject
OR RUFUS OR ORasjflksajfYou are the master, I just scrape and bow and drool a lot. 8D
no subject
no subject
no subject
no subject
no subject