FicWad

'Walk with me.' Veld tapped Tseng on the shoulder, and when the younger Turk turned he saw the Director with coat already in hand, Tseng's own extended forward in invitation.

It was raining on the upper plates, a heavy downpour. Rare for Midgar, in spite of its eternal penchant for cloud cover and cold. Down in the slums, you were lucky to get dripping gutter water, but up on the Sector 8 plate the rain came down in droves.

'Hey chief,' Reno drawled from his spot on the couch as he and Tseng passed by. 'No work today?' Green eyes slid from Tseng, pulling on his coat, to Veld, reaching for his keys. It was barely seven at night. The two of them didn't usually know the meaning of the word "retire".

Veld settled his keys warm against his palm, the sound of them a satisfyingly officious noise. 'There's always work,' he corrected Reno easily, a small smile on his face. 'We're clocking out early.'

Reno, one arm flung out across the back of the couch, allowed an eyebrow to raise itself, suggestive, and a slow, languorously amused smile curved the length of his lips. Veld was far from affected, but he cocked his head to the side none the less in a brief, tolerant gesture: /wipe that look off your face, and get out of here/. 'Take the rest of the day.'

It was what Reno had been waiting to hear, his smile morphing into something truly shit-eating. 'Someone's in a good mood.' A split second later and he was standing by the two of them, reaching forward to press the other call button for the second elevator. Tseng's dark gaze caught Reno's lighter one as he walked past the redhead and into the waiting lift with Veld alone, but Reno only waved, fingers curling in a teasing farewell as the double doors slipped shut, and they began to drop sixty stories down.


The windscreen wipers scraped loud across the window shield, but neither said anything as Veld pulled his car out, smooth as if the roads were brittle dry instead of slick with wet. Silence was easy between the both of them. Tseng, laconic by nature, did little to broach conversation, but as the Shinra building pulled back into the hazy eternal background, he had the feeling that Veld's anger had faded.

It was hard to say that it had /cooled/. Tseng was years removed from when his training had first started, and the time had given him ample opportunity to watch Veld - not just his mannerisms, but also his moods. Kalm born and bred and raised, and yet a country boy had come to the city and done more than just assimilate: Veld had become director of men whom even the most cutthroat of slum gangs in this kill-or-be-killed city considered dangerous. Veld's temper did not flare, passionate and uncontrollable. It burned ice-cold, a vicious and efficient tool channelled so as to make emotional weakness a strength.

Veld pulled into a dark and barely sheltered lot, and Tseng withdrew from contemplation long enough to throw a gaze out the window. A neon red sign, swinging creakily but determined against the buffeting winds, hawked a Wutainese noodle bar out to whichever souls still dared brave the streets. A smile found Tseng's face. Not exactly Veld's apartment as Reno might have imagined. 'It's been a while, sir,' he mentioned quietly, slipping out of the doors and looking at Veld over the roof of the car.

'A bit too long,' Veld returned wryly, raising his voice to be heard over the crash of raindrops. Tseng shrugged, a surprisingly open motion for a man who smiled little but who was smiling now. He missed casual interaction, sometimes, a vague part of him that still remained human instead of married to his work. They stomped their shoes out on a thick fibre-woven doormat, Tseng pulling the tail of his hair out before they stepped into the small eatery.

Veld's breath was still puffing condensation when they entered to the sound of a ringing bell and a cheerful greeting in a different tongue. The proprieters gave them a single look and before long they found themselves secreted in a corner alcove, a table between them small enough that it could do little more than bear a tray of utensils and condiments, two bowls and drinks. A far cry from Sector 8 dining halls, but Tseng with his hair down seemed fit into the setting as though it were home.

A tiny waitress with jet black hair skirted up to them, menu and a pad of paper in hand. Already babbling suggestions long before two steaming cups of tea were whipped out of nowhere and settled on their table, she shot Tseng a bright look and finished her stream of Wutai's native tongue, more because she was out of breath than out of any real inclination to stop. Veld watched, tucking himself against a wall, humour in his eyes as he ceased to be a present member at the table, Tseng preoccupied with returning her advances and we-just-got-stock-of-this-today-it's-a-special-won't-you-try-it-sir? It seemed almost a privilege to hear the language spill from Tseng's lips, so easy that Veld could almost forget the reasons - very political, very dry, very unromantic - for Tseng relearning his old tongue in the first place.

Waitress successfully dispelled, Tseng swept his hair back over a shoulder and exhaled, gazing across at Veld as he leaned back in the booth. 'It's amazing the city can still nurture so much life.'

'The Wutainese are a plucky lot,' Veld agreed, eyes sparkling. 'As I'm sure you know.' He paused to take a mouthful of tea, fielding the bitter taste far more easily than a typical Midgar citizen. 'How long has it been since we were last here?'

'A bit too long,' Tseng echoed Veld's previous words, a laugh in his voice. 'You needn't worry. The girl says the old obaa-san still makes the noodles by hand, and if her enthusiasm is any indication I doubt this place need fear dying out.'

'Quiet places are hard to find, when you don't want to be overheard.' Veld nodded as Tseng freed two small sauce plates and poured out an even ratio of two different soy extracts, placing Veld's before him - two parts to one, slightly saltier than his own tastes could allow - before setting about his own. Tseng looked up momentarily, his curtain of black hair not hiding the inquiry of raised brows. Veld waved a hand at him. 'I'm sorry I seem to want to talk business when this should really be leisure alone,' the older man apologised, crossing a hand over Tseng's still-poised ones as he reached for the disposable chopsticks and snapped them with evenhanded pressure. 'Consider this my apology.' Quick fingers set the utensils down on Tseng's side of the table, mentor serving student instead of the other way around.

Tseng finished quickly, his actions clean, and placed his hand on Veld's to stop the older man before he could continue. 'This is a privilege I consider selfishly my own, sir,' he said, evenly. 'If I could beg pardon.'

Veld sighed, but gave in. Rufus Shinra had, perhaps, not been the only one to grow up too quickly. 'Yesterday was not so much an order as a warning.'

Tseng lifted his cup to his lips without looking up. 'You needn't explain yourself to me, sir.' The food arrived and the bowls, steaming, provided some sort of barrier between them both. Veld picked up his chopsticks in turn and let a beat pass. Tseng had learnt more than well enough how to evade topics he did not want brought up for discussion, and Veld's own choice of a casual setting gave him the full liberty to do so.

'Do you remember,' he decided to remark as he dipped his food into sauce and paused, 'when you trained under me?'

Tseng's look was very arch when he lifted his head. 'Of course I do.' A bit difficult, the sarcastic part of him commented, to forget after close to a decade of mentorship. It provided good cover for the part of him that remembered late nights writing in Veld's rooms, ink staining his fingers until he'd learnt how to hold the brush, translation upon translation of classical works before he was set to recoding entire systems and line after line of binary and command prompts. Later, hours and days and months spent in the training salles, mastering weapon after weapon so as to master the ultimate one: himself.

'Who is deserving of power?' Veld asked quietly, the soft rhetoric that Tseng knew better than to dismiss. 'A Vice President's post is empty. It's honorary, inherited. You, too, would have been empty without the trails that made you stronger' Veld pointed out with frightening accuracy, injecting a heat and fire through Tseng who, for so many years and still now, hung on his every word. Through the trials /I gave you to make you stronger./

The younger Turk found himself forced to take a sip of tea. 'Vice President Shinra is...' he ventured, 'more than capable.'

'You were more than capable when I first set my eyes on you,' Veld interjected. 'That does not mean that you were ready.'

Tseng's gaze flashed up to Veld's scarred face, and he remembered what he had sworn. Veld's gaze was never soft, least of all to Tseng for whom it had to be purposefully hard, but at that moment Tseng believed he had seen overt concern.

'He will bring down walls if he wants to reach his father, and he will not hesitate to bring you down with him. Who guards the guards?' Veld asked humourlessly, but Tseng had seen and underneath decades of trained killer Veld was still a human.

He'd reared Tseng almost as his own. Rufus Shinra threatened to take away something that a presumptuous child-heir to the world could only begin to understand. Rufus Shinra was the sixteen year old Vice President who, in front of a boardroom worth of executives, had bored his gaze via satellite link into Veld's, and brazenly asked what are the Turks doing about this outflow of information? Why is it that everywhere the Turks go, AVALANCHE attacks? What are you doing about this, Veld?

No. Loyalties ran deeper than that, and Veld knew that the most crucial, if least noble, loyalty was first to one's own interests. Whether as convenient scapegoat or convenient ally, Rufus Shinra would not be using his men for his purposes and underaged powerplay.'He will not hesitate to say: no one. Secrets are being leaked, Tseng. And who does that leave but us?'

Tseng said nothing, setting his chopsticks down to reach for a paper serviette and wiping his lips. A moment later he drew his hair back, and bound it out of his face. Veld's eyes shuttered themselves. 'Sometimes,' he divulged, 'I wonder if I made the right choice, sending you to Junon.'

Tseng's gaze was sympathetic with concealed self-reproach. 'There was nothing else you could have done with an Wutainese Turk barely free from the War.'

Veld was the one to look up this time. 'Who says that I refer simply to an Wutainese Turk?'

Tseng fell silent again at that, silent with a snap of his jaw shut so that he could not be taken for surprised, and they completed their meal in silence.

The next day, Veld was dismissed as the Head of Department, Administrative Research (TURKS).