[It happens on his birthday, because of course it does.
The old man has always liked to test him in cruel little ways like this, even since before he'd presented as the family disappointment. His father's flagrant biases on the basis of designation have never been a secret, not within the family and not to anyone outside of it; he's been told how alphas rule by birthright, and Shinra alphas most of all, for as long as he can remember. One can't even be considered for executive rank in the Shinra Corporation without sufficient documentation proving alpha status, and with all of the testing required to be performed internally, there's no chance whatsoever of hiding once one reaches that lofty a position.
Maybe that's why he's the vice president with no executive authority whatsoever. They pretend it's because he doesn't want it. His father withholds it because he'll never be worthy of it.
There's very little about Rufus that's truly private, or so his father likes to think. That's what he lets him think, anyway — trading the indignity of having his medical records and health data delivered in sealed envelopes to the old man's desk in exchange for the little things he is able to hide. He knows his heats are tracked and monitored. There's always a convenient excuse ready and waiting, a business trip or a personal getaway, to hide the days he spends shivering and aching in the dark and quiet of his nests. He loathes it, but he plays his part: learns to snarl like an alpha, learns to mask his scent, learns to perform when there are eyes on him in exchange for the luxury of being left alone otherwise.
It's a twisted sort of irony, that his next heat aligns so perfectly with his next birthday.
That should've made it all the easier to make an excuse. Let him run away on some personal vacation, jet-setting off to Shiva-knows-where, spending Daddy's gil with abandon in celebration of another year of life. Then the invitation had shown up, two weeks in advance, and his expression had gone as cold as his blood — that to show his satisfaction with his only son and heir, his proud alpha father would be throwing a gala in his honor, set for the very day of his birth. And of course, featuring him as the man of the hour, the one everyone would want to see — and who no one would leave alone.
It's a test, of course. A warning delivered in implication. Another year older, another year closer to potentially earning his rightful place at the head of the company — but only if he plays by the rules, only if he performs as expected. A Shinra alpha is what everyone will be expecting at that gala, and that's who will show up — or else.
And that's who does show up, for hours upon hours. Rufus Shinra, the perfect Shinra alpha. Rufus Shinra, whose clothes don't abrade like sandpaper on his hidden heated skin because alphas aren't oversensitive, who smirks and bares teeth instead of his throat. Rufus Shinra, who isn't overwhelmed by the commingling scents of all the alphas in the room, the heady musk, the spice and sandalwood and leather and pine so strong that he aches to purr for their attention. Rufus Shinra, having the time of his life on the day of his birth, rather than being enmeshed in his own personal private hell.
It's close to midnight when his eyes start wandering in ways he can't quite help, the combination of social exhaustion and alcohol and heat and sleepiness making his eyes and his thoughts drift to the way the guests stand, fleetingly considering the knots that might be hiding beneath the tailoring. He lingers a little too long in conversations, a little too flushed beneath the skin; he's been drinking all night, so no one thinks much of it, but fuck, it should be illegal for Reeve Tuesti to smell so good, to make him shudder from the clasp of the congratulatory hand on his shoulder. He wants to sit down, but if he sits he'll want to curl up in the plush cushions of the tastefully assembled furniture, will rub his cheek against it and he can't do that while they're watching, everyone's watching, his father is watching —
It occurs to him that he hasn't seen Tseng in what feels like forever, in the same moment that Reno pulls the fire alarm.
Everyone startles, looking for signs of smoke or fire, so no one sees the way leather-clad fingertips touch against his elbow from behind, or the way he shivers all over from the touch. The nightmarish screeching drowns out all but the loudest of astonished cries; no one hears the damning trill that rumbles in the back of his throat as his instincts all come alight with alpha. No one would be surprised that he wobbles as he's all but pulled off his feet in the direction of the VIP emergency exit; who wouldn't be, when being hustled out of such a venue by the Turks?
He just barely manages to keep his cries smothered in his throat until they've escaped to the sanctuary of the narrow stairwell, but once the door slams closed behind them, he can't keep them from spilling out and echoing off the cinderblock walls.]
Tseng.
[Alpha, his body whines, hot and aching and already growing wet from the maddening desperation, the need for scent and satisfaction and bite. It should have been Rude doing this and it would have been so much worse if he had, no scent, no sanctuary, alpha alpha alpha and his eyes all but roll back with it, the wanting, the need.
They're too far from home. He needs to hold on. And yet all he can do, all he can think, is that it's too many steps to go after the night that he's had, too much to bear, when his body is ready to give out and sell out to anything willing to give him a knot.]
[ president shinra has always been cruel to rufus, ever since his son presented as an omega and not as the alpha he was born to be. cruel and demanding, forcing rufus to playact the alpha because status is all that has ever mattered to shinra senior—status, and money, and power, although aren’t those all really the same thing at the end of the day? and tseng has watched. for as long as he’s been in the shinra company’s employ, he’s watched the way rufus has taken that cruelty and used it to make himself stronger, smarter, quicker on his feet, watched him grow into a better alpha than some of the real ones in this ballroom with them tonight.
he has also studiously ignored the way that every one of rufus’ carefully-controlled heats has triggered a corresponding rut in him—partly because it would be inconvenient to think about, and partly because tseng isn’t supposed to be an alpha, just the same way rufus isn’t supposed to be an omega.
the turks are all betas by regulation—more neutral, easier to control, not influenced by pesky things like hormones and scents and territorial instincts. since he was fifteen years old tseng has been hiding his nature, suppressing his pheromones and quashing all of the annoyances of his biological imperative: the desire to defend what he thinks of as his, the desire to mate, the desire to protect. he’s a good little beta, for all that the company is concerned, with falsified health records to match, and he’s been a good little beta for half of his life, toeing the line.
except, as it turns out, where rufus is concerned.
having tripped the alarm, reno rushes off, accompanied by elena, to usher the president to safety. there will be a car with bulletproof glass windows, and a circuitous route back home that will keep them occupied for some time. tseng, for his part, puts his hand at rufus’ elbow, his grip just this side of too tight, and pushes him out into the stairs that lead to the helipad on the roof.
it’s a fucking miracle none of the alphas at this party clocked the reality of the situation. tseng doesn’t know how they couldn’t—rufus’ heat is pouring off him in waves, his body too loose and his eyes glassy and bright, the scent of the wetness between his thighs bursting across tseng’s tongue like fruit, tart and sweet. ]
Sir. [ it was a terrible idea, making rufus come to this party, a risky move even for the president. and look at rufus now, so strung out on his own need that he’s practically panting for it.
tseng takes his face in both hands and imbues his voice with the command of an alpha—enough, he hopes, to break through the haze of rufus’ desire without either startling him or, even more dangerously, making him present himself to tseng. ] Sir, look at me. One flight of stairs, then the helicopter. Do you understand?
[He knows Tseng's secret the same way that Tseng knows his — damning intel traded for the sake of mutually assured destruction, a prisoner's dilemma where collaboration is the only viable option. It's one of those things that Rufus takes a particular malicious joy in when he's not marinating in his own roiling heat; proof positive that an alpha nature doesn't guarantee that you can't be owned, and an omega's doesn't always predicate subservience. Irrefutable proof of his father's erroneous beliefs, because it wasn't his feigned alpha posturing that won him the Turks. It was his willing to gamble, and his daring, and his cunning, to know full well what advantages an omega might have and exercise them all to the fullest.
He'd have more room to be proud of it right now, if he weren't out of his mind with stress and the rising simmer of his heat-induced arousal, the latter made exponentially worse because of the demands of the former. And even Tseng's presence doesn't alleviate the stress, not precisely, but it does focus it; rather than all the competing scents and pressures, now there's only the one, familiar and rich and sharp as amber.
The hands on his face draw him a little way out of his haze; the command makes his heart skip and his pulse jump, pupils dilating as he focuses in on Tseng's face, still a little dreamy but far from drifting as he'd been before.]
Don't call me "sir".
[It's rare that he uses his omega vocalizations — his trills, his purrs, his wails. He's conditioned his throat to accept the gravel of snarling and force in its place. But Tseng isn't just any alpha — and not his alpha, but his, and an alpha — and the nature he's been suppressing all night rears its ruthless head, a little smile curling like paper lit aflame as his focus on Tseng's face solidifies.
And he purrs.
Thick, full, rumbling, damning, with his eyes dark and simmering with heat and locked on Tseng's, the sound fills the stairwell like a reward: you're a good alpha, aren't you, so strong, so good, protecting little old me.]
[ the sound of that purr hooks its claws into tseng before he even fully realizes what he’s hearing, tugging at something hot and dark low in the core of his body. he’s heard rufus vocalize before, of course, once or twice usually when he’s the one responsible for getting rufus to whatever nest he’s going to use to ride out his heat—but he’s never had the full force of it directed at him before, and he’s not ready for the way it slides down his spine like a drip of molten glass.
for a moment, tseng considers fighting it. he’s very good at resisting his alpha nature; he might be able to hold himself back like a good beta would, to take his hands off rufus’ neck and guide him up to the helicopter and take him back to shinra tower to ride out the rest of his heat in peace and quiet. he could probably do it, if he put enough effort into it.
but before he even gathers the motivation to try, there’s already an alpha’s growl reverberating in harmony with the sound of rufus’ purring. it takes tseng a moment to realize it’s coming from him, and a moment longer to realize it means rufus has won.
he swallows down his growl, but it’s still there in his voice when he says, ] Rufus.
[ tseng’s nails curl against the back of rufus’ neck, sharp and possessive. they’ve been dancing around this for what feels like an eon, ever since rufus came to tseng to tell him he knew tseng’s secret; it’s felt dangerous before, but never quite like this. never like tseng is one delicious omega trill away from sinking his teeth into rufus’ nape.
one thing at a time.
tseng keeps his scent suppressed the same way rufus does, with a careful combination of colognes and patches. it works for daily life; it does not, as it turns out, work when faced with an omega going into heat, an omega that tseng’s nature is trying to claim as his territory, his omega. his scent spills from him just as hot and wild as rufus’ does. tseng’s wrists brush against the throbbing pulse in rufus’ throat, and his scent lingers there, clinging to rufus’ overheated skin like the shimmer of oil across the surface of water.
tseng wants to kiss rufus so badly his mouth aches with it, but they only have so much time, and tseng only has so much restraint. ]
Upstairs. [ tseng swallows hard. his mouth waters. ] Now.
[There are no words for how good it feels, all of it; Tseng is always so correct, so perfect and stable and sure when it comes to something that needs to be done, but this time what he's satisfying is everything that was wrong with Rufus's world, all set to rights in an instant. It's what he craves, all of it — the growl, the little pinpricks of nails in his skin that speak of violence and possession. He'd been an omega surrounded on all sides by alphas, solitary and aching but with none of them to fix it, to make it better, but now it's all being set to rights, just the way it always should have been.
Because it wasn't just a power play, the demand for Tseng's scent; of course there'd been some thrill of authority to it, some triumph in provoking the reaction he'd desired, but once it's laid it's like Rufus can finally breathe again amidst the fog of desperation and longing. It quiets the burn, or at the very least creates a firebreak around the blaze; the worst part of his heat isn't the lack of control but how it makes him feel like only half of what he's meant to be, a fractional thing thrashing and begging to be whole again.
But not this time. Alpha. Someone wants him so bad they would kill for it. Someone wants him like his father never has.]
One flight of stairs, then the helicopter.
[There's an almost hypnotic quality to the cadence of it, still lost in the euphoria of the scent clinging to his parched, desperate senses. It feels so good, so soothing to be compliant, just this once — to not have to fight tooth and claw in the other direction with fangs and nails that never came naturally.]
And then...?
[But he's already moving, buoyed on the force behind the word now, the promise of what he might get once they make their escape.]
[ in many ways, tseng the man understands why the president structured his company the way he has. alphas are known for their strength, their leadership, their determination, their ability to take hold of a situation and shake it to snap its neck. it makes sense that a man like the president would look at the vast list of things he wants to grasp and think to himself that it's a goal that can only be achieved by alphas.
but tseng the alpha, the one looking down into the liquid storm of rufus' eyes, the one spreading his own scent all over rufus' throat;that tseng knows the truth, which is that between an alpha and an omega, it's the omega with all the power.
tseng is strong. tseng is a leader, is determined. but all rufus had to do was purr, and tseng wanted to get on his knees and do whatever he asked. all he has to do is get rufus upstairs to the helicopter, and if rufus purred again, if rufus so much as looked at him the right way, tseng would forget his own directive in service to rufus' desires.
an omega raised as an alpha, twice as strong and twice as stubborn as anyone else on the executive board. smart, and clever, and wickedly sharp-tongued, with a mind for detail and analysis and a strategic streak as wide as it is deep… and on top of that, who could bring the entire board to their knees on his whim?
no wonder the president is afraid of him. no wonder tseng would follow him to the ends of the earth. ]
And then I take you home.
[ rufus turns away, and the spell of his gaze is broken. it's a small blessing, though, because as he turns to walk up the stairs in front of tseng, tseng's senses are immediately overwhelmed by the scent of rufus' heat, the salt zing of his sweat and the tart sweetness of his slick.
he swallows hard, his teeth aching with how badly he wants to push rufus against the wall and shove his tongue inside him. ]
Rude is piloting. [ not that it matters; the cockpit is separated from the rest of the helicopter by a bulletproof glass panel that stays up unless rufus says to lower it, and rude would never be able to hear anything over the sound of the rotors anyway.
tseng feels insane. he feels drunk, not quite able to string words together right. he manages, his voice tight with arousal: ] We'll see about… taking that edge off.
[He can feel Tseng's eyes on him as he stumbles up the stairs, gripping the railing just a bit too tight, half-pulling himself up each step as they head for the landing that leads to the roof. Just one flight of stairs and then into the waiting helicopter, and already the prospect of the enclosed interior is making anticipation vibrate in his blood, small and safe and soundproof and most importantly, smelling right.
It's good that it's Rude. All implications of designation aside — he truly is about the most perfect beta Rufus has ever laid eyes on, a model Turk in that particular respect — Rude keeps his eyes forward and his mouth shut, and sees only what he's intended to, nothing more and nothing less. Rude won't detect the heat rolling off of him in waves. Rude won't crash the helicopter from taking his hands off the controls to frantically jerk himself with one and milk his knot with the other.
Tseng might, were he left to it. Fantasies of certain death have no right to be so utterly arousing.]
Only you.
[There's a throaty tremor in the assertion, a faint but telltale wobble as he forces the purr out of his tone and smothers it back like he's done all his life; it would be neater, imperceptible, most of the time, but he's far from his right mind right now and it's close enough for hand grenades, regardless.]
No one touches me but you, Tseng. No one.
[It could be benign. It's supposed to be. But there's a vow of sorts in it, too — a claim staked, a choice made. Tseng's scent is full and bold at the sides of his throat, for all that it won't last long and will need to be refreshed until he can do it more properly at home. He'd sooner bite off the fingers of anyone who reached for him right now, save Tseng; not even his own Turks would be safe from it, bristling and agitated as he is with the need to be properly satiated.
His feet hit the top step; he blindly lifts his foot as if there might be one more and it comes down harder than he means it to, forced to drop an extra six inches or so until it finds level ground again. If he weren't gripping the railing, he might well have stumbled; as it is, he just uses the momentum to throw his weight into the heavy door that leads onto the helipad, making small adjustments to draw his movements back into the realm of tipsy as opposed to over-aroused as he makes for their waiting escape.]
[ it's evident in the pitch of rufus' voice that he's working hard to force the purr from it, and yet another growl rumbles in the back of tseng's throat at the very notion of another alpha laying their hands on rufus right now. he hasn't even touched rufus himself, not really, and he already knows he would kill any other alpha who tried.
incidentally, this is also how tseng realizes that there's no way he's getting rufus back to headquarters without also getting him off. he's already this far gone, and they're not even trapped together in the helicopter yet—what more havoc will that enclosed space wreak on his senses? ]
No. [ forcing the growl from his voice, the same way rufus has forced the purr out of his, tseng manages a steady, even response. if his voice is made tight by the sheer intensity of his arousal, he'll thank rufus not to mention it. ] I would—
[ he inhales sharply. exhales slowly. admits, ] I would tear their throats out if they tried.
[ there used to be other alphas, before. not for a while. tseng hated every second of bringing them up to rufus' nests. partly because of what he knew came after, but mostly because he would inevitably end up locked in his own office, fucking the circle of his hand and thinking furiously about rufus pinned beneath another alpha's weight.
they push out onto the helipad on top of the building and the helicopter is there, waiting. rude is already in the pilot's seat, and he gives tseng a thumbs up through the glass as tseng puts his hand on rufus' back and urges him to duck, to make his way under the circling rotors to climb into the waiting bird.
the door slides shut; the whir of the helicopter changes as rude lifts them up, away from the rooftop.
tseng looks across the enclosed space at rufus. already it feels like every corner of the helicopter is soaked in rufus' scent, and tseng can tell that his is flooding out to meet it, to claim this place as his territory and this omega as his omega. ]
[It burns like a brand, the feeling of Tseng's palm through the specially-woven fabric of his crisp white eveningwear; the combination of the soft cloth on his hypersensitive skin with the heat and pressure of the guiding touch very nearly rips another ill-timed purr out of him as they hurry to the helicopter and into the passenger enclosure. It's all he can do to stay even marginally composed — far from his usual poise, but hopefully still close enough to only seem rushed and inebriated — for Rude's benefit until they're secure and out of sight and the bird is in the air.
Something imperceptible shifts when the struts leave the ground. Suddenly the helicopter isn't so much a vehicle as it is exactly what his instincts are begging for — a small, secure place with reasonably comfortable places to sit and lounge, full of all the right scents and no prying eyes. Rude's will be forward; Tseng's are on him, and he can't seem to stop wetting his lips, chest on the verge of heaving as he sucks in breath after breath of Tseng's scent, knowing full well it's making his own need worse even as it calms his raging instinct to whine and wail.]
Tell me again.
[His gaze drifts up to capture and hold Tseng's, his blue eyes stormy with barely-suppressed desire; but for the way he's gripping the armrests of his seat and has his legs crossed at the thighs instead of at the knee, he's doing a surprisingly good job of restraining himself from what is almost definitely the urge to lunge across the space between them and throw himself into Tseng's lap.]
How you would kill for me.
[A very normal topic of conversation between the VP and his director of the Turks. Definitely.]
What you thought about, the whole time we were at that fucking party.
[ tseng hauls the sliding door of the helicopter shut, thumps his fist twice on the thick glass separating the cockpit from the passengers, and then sits back in his chair and watches rufus watching him. rufus' gaze is sharp, so pointed tseng feels it almost like a physical caress; his tongue comes out to wet his lips, and his chest rises and falls on deep breaths he doesn't need to be taking.
a shivering thread of desire stitches its way up the vertebrae of tseng's spine. he feels his mouth flood wet, and swallows hard against it, his fingers digging in to his own armrests as well. ]
You're wearing my scent. [ and he can say it was practical until the chocobos come home, can say it was a necessity to get rufus out of a perilous situation, but deep inside tseng knows the truth: he scented rufus because he wanted to. because rufus wanted him to. that it was practical was just a happy coincidence.
tseng holds rufus' eyes. he feels cast adrift in the storm of them, only tenuously bound by the tenets of boss – subordinate interactions. the wolf in him wants to bend rufus over one of these chairs and— ]
You know what I would do to anyone who laid a hand on you.
[ to anyone who dared to touch what's his.
it's a losing proposition to think that he can stay in this helicopter, drenched in rufus' scent, and not lay a hand on him—but at the very least, the followup question buys tseng another minute before he gives in to his baser desires. ]
At the party? [ he takes a deep breath, which is a mistake. ] I thought you were incandescent. More alpha than half the alphas in the room.
[ the rich, liquid amber of tseng's gaze says: i still wanted to pull you into a supply closet and fuck you stupid. ]
[There are words for what alphas are supposed to be, ones he's heard so often they're practically a mantra for the expectations on his behavior — powerful, strong, bold, fierce. The fact that Tseng chooses none of them, even when praising him for his conduct, makes him shiver so visibly that he almost loses control of himself altogether. It's the sort of affection, the attention, that he'd dreamed of even long before his designation had ever manifested: to be wanted, to be worthy, to be beautiful and prized for himself and not just what he represented.]
I'm wearing your claim.
[The cadence of his remark is a perfect match for Tseng's, right up until that last word. It carries something of that hypnotic quality to it, the same as when he'd spoken earlier in the stairwell — the call-and-response of following his chosen alpha's lead, dancing on the outskirts of obedience without ever quite submitting to it. But Tseng says scent and Rufus says claim, and in practice they might as well be one and the same, but for the affirmation that the latter offers up like a reward.
Claimed. His. Unambiguously so.
Rufus's legs are already uncrossing as the weight of it hangs in the air between them, as his pupils blow wide and dark and his hands on the armrests are suddenly more about giving him the leverage to move out of his seat than to keep him secured in it.]
And I know what you want to do to me.
[He lets out a slow, shuddering breath. The next one he sucks in is rich with all the scent markers of Tseng's imminent rut — the rut he caused, he must have, the one triggered especially for him — and it finally proves too much even for Rufus's iron control; he lunges from his seat and into Tseng's lap, straddling his hips with a knee on either side as he drapes his arms about Tseng's shoulders and shoves his nose against his neck to pant hot and heavy against his skin.]
— it hurts, Tseng, it hurts — make it stop — make it better —
[And maybe it is, in its way, as manipulative as when he'd purred to bend his alpha to his will — but there's a note of honesty in it, too, glimmering behind the fractures in his control; it's giving out, he's going mad, and all the alpha conditioning in the world can't extinguish the force of his need as it rages like a wildfire in his blood.]
[ it takes less than the span of a breath for rufus to cross the small space and straddle tseng's lap, and even less time than that for tseng's arms to come up and around him, pulling him so close tseng can feel the heat of his body and the beat of his heart even through the fabric of their clothes. he feels rufus' words as much as he hears them, feels the thread of real need that underwrites them—they may sound manipulative, but tseng knows that what rufus says is also true.
he pulls rufus' dress shirt free of his belt in the back and slides his hands up underneath coat and shirt alike, palms pressed to the sway of his lower back, skin against skin. tseng's nose finds the curve of rufus' throat right where his scent is strongest, and he breathes in, lets it wash over him—spice and wet and sweet, summer humid, a burst of flavor on tseng's tongue and a taste in the back of his throat.
how did he ever think he stood a chance?
tseng gives up entirely on keeping his voice neutral. he brings a hand up to rufus' neck, coaxing him back from tseng's throat, and when he says, ] Come here. [ his voice is rich and reverberating with command, with protection, with the certainty that as long as rufus is in tseng's arms, no harm will come to him.
he will make it stop. he'll make it better. all tseng has to do is get rufus home.
as rufus moves back, tseng shifts forward and catches rufus' mouth in a thorough, needy kiss. he finds that rufus tastes just as sweet as he smells, and tseng makes a noise against his mouth, deep alpha satisfaction as his tongue slides against rufus' in a kiss meant to claim and conquer.
one hand drops between them, into the barely-there space between their bodies, to work one-handed at the buckle of rufus' belt, then at the button and zipper—every one of tseng's instincts wants him to just tear the fabric apart, but the very last of his control tells him not to. rufus still needs to leave this helicopter looking presentable, needs to stay that way at least until they have some privacy. ]
[Safe. Safe, safe, safe; the sheer relief of it makes him tremble in the circle of Tseng's arms, the warm security of his hold. For the first time in what feels like hours, the tension melts from Rufus's limbs, washed away by the tidal flow of Tseng's command. His eyes fall half-lidded, his lips wet and hanging open; he couldn't have arranged himself to be more kissable if he'd done it by design, and then suddenly he is being kissed and there's a soft sound pressed into it, offered to him to swallow and smother in his own throat.
It feels so good to be — not weak, he can't bear to think of it as weak even when it's only Tseng to bear witness. But to be something other than fierce and domineering, something that aligns with the compulsions of his designation rather than subjugating them...to be precious, cherished, cradled, claimed...
There's a shyness, almost, to the way his fingers run over Tseng's shoulders and back, how they find their way into the thick silken strands of his hair and weave it through the spaces between the knuckles. That, too, is a luxury he's rarely afforded — the chance to be hesitant at all, to ask questions with his touches instead of making demands with his words. His fingertips go higher yet, running lightly along the back of Tseng's neck above the pristine tailored collar of his shirt, feeling out the nape just below the hairline as if to ask, is this all right? Do you like this? Do you like my touch, like I like yours?
He pants against Tseng's mouth, still burning but distracted pleasantly by the feeling of hands on him, pacified by the glide of skin on skin. And for a second, just a second, there's nothing in the whole of the world except his own desperate desire to make Tseng happy, not just to hear another of those rich full sounds but to earn it.]
Yes, alpha.
[He lifts his hips slightly, back arching as he makes a little more room for the slide of Tseng's hand, his eyes stormy and dark as he brushes their noses together, presses their foreheads flush. With so little space between them, he can feel the heat radiating off his own skin and washing over Tseng's; a sudden sensation of slippery-damp makes him shudder, abruptly acutely aware of his slick beginning to accumulate to the point that he won't be able to ignore it much longer. The horrible emptiness will come next, he knows; the full-body hollowness in desperate need of being filled, the high-burn agitation that only submission and a knot will soothe.
He wants it. He wants it so bad that he tilts his chin down and licks over Tseng's mouth, a faintly inquisitive trill winding out from the back of his throat.]
You can have me. You can have all of me, just give me your knot.
[ the trill on its own would be enough to make tseng stumble, were he standing upright, but the words—ramuh, rufus is going to be the death of him. tseng's hands fumble slightly as he tugs the zip of rufus' pants down and opens the fly, grateful suddenly that rufus' penchant for flowy fabrics and loose-fitting trousers makes it easy for tseng to work his hand inside. ]
Rufus. [ the hand at the back of rufus' neck tightens, instinctive in response to the powerful wash of desire that rufus' words send through him. tseng wants to knot him, wants it with the depth of a biological imperative. he wants it so bad he can taste it, but the last shred of his human consciousness knows that it'll be minutes, only, before they land, and if he knots rufus it won't be mere minutes before they're through.
so he swallows hard, despite the low growl building in the back of his throat, the one that gives away exactly how affected he is. takes a slow breath and pushes his hand into rufus' underwear, past his cock between his thighs. ]
You'll have my knot. [ there's so much promise in the words that rufus doesn't need his alpha intonation to believe it, but the intonation is there, regardless. ] Once I get you home, you'll have everything you want.
[ once i get you home being the operative, here. and for now, tseng can give him something else: the slide of a gentle touch along the thin sensitive skin behind his balls, up to his hole, where his slick is making a mess of him for tseng to run his fingertips through.
despite tseng's best efforts to be careful, there's some barely-restrained urgency to his movements as he slips his middle finger into the slick, wet heat of rufus' body. he feels the muscle clench around it and his entire body throbs in answer, a flash of white heat through every single one of his nerve endings. ]
Fuck. [ tseng begins to move his finger. the sound of the helicopter is just barely too loud for tseng to hear the noises his finger makes, but he can imagine.
he presses his mouth to rufus' throat and murmurs something quietly enough that rufus will be able to feel the words vibrate, but not hear them spoken aloud, then curls his finger against the smooth shape of rufus' prostate and rubs against it purposefully. ]
[Tseng's promise takes him from euphoria to devastation in a span of moments, a soaring high cut short by a plummeting crash. Once I get you home means not now, means he has to wait even longer when he's already waited so long already as it is. Without meaning to, a note of his icy despair works its way into his scent, a sour acidic undercurrent to the sweet-spice warmth it's been; for just an instant, an irrational fear swells in his throat and leaves him to beat it back with annoyance and frustration.]
I want it now —
[Petty, spoiled thing that he is, his fingers scrabble against the reassurance of Tseng's steady shoulders, like grasping at him will somehow make him change his mind. It's a petulance that lasts only until Tseng's fingers find their way into his pants and glide to his entrance, giving him the gift of girth and stretch that still isn't what he wants, but that still satisfies the craving simmering in his blood.
Tseng's middle finger presses inside and Rufus drives his hips back almost instantly to meet it, instincts singing, eyes glassy with heat and need; on instinct, his body tightens and recedes around it again and again, as if to taunt Tseng with the feeling of precisely how it'd milk him if he would only compromise his resolve and comply.]
Ngh — I need it, I need it —
[His head falls back, baring the whole of his throat to Tseng's attentions — a damning impulse for a so-called alpha and a Shinra both — as he tries to take Tseng's finger deeper, choking back a whine when it finds his prostate and stimulates it in a way that leaves him shaking. There's no teasing, not like this; it is, he recognizes through the cloudy haze of heat-intoxication, what he needs, because Tseng knows better what he needs than he does, right now.
It's a reassuring thought; his scent sweetens commensurate with it, even more heady and rich than it'd been even before his moment of fear had taken him earlier. His alpha. His Tseng. Safe and here and safe, feeding his pleasure, showing him how he'll survive this.]
Tseng. Tseng, m'gonna — I'll, I'll come —
[Maybe that's what Tseng wants, or maybe he wants him to wait for that, too. But either way, he knows he wants to be told. Told to endure it, told to come — that belongs to his alpha, too, for all that his penchant for being a brat might want to pretend otherwise.]
[ even if every cell in his body weren't totally attuned to rufus, tseng would still notice the note of cold fear that works its way into the scent emanating from him—it's a sharp contrast to the warmth of his scent otherwise, and it forces a low rumbling noise out the back of tseng's throat as he presses his lips to rufus' neck and holds him just a little tighter. ]
I know you do, baby. [ it's an endearment he would never use, not ever, except for the intensity of rufus' need and the alpha instincts roaring in the back of his mind. he wants to reassure, wants rufus to know that it's only a delay, not a refusal—the way tseng feels right now, how could rufus possibly doubt that tseng would give him any thing he could possibly want as soon as they're within the safety of his room?
with a note of raw honesty and real possessiveness in his voice, tseng says, ] I'm not letting anyone else see you like that.
[ rufus is beautiful, a creature of need and instinct as he fucks himself back on tseng's finger, his body tightening and relaxing in rhythmic waves around the intrusion. and if he's this gorgeous when it's only tseng's finger inside him, what is he going to look like when tseng's knot is buried inside him? there's no way in hell tseng will ever be able to let anyone else see it—not even a beta like rude, who would absolutely be the one to see it if tseng were to knot rufus right here.
as a distraction, tseng slips another finger inside rufus and resumes stroking his prostate, not hard enough to ache but certainly enough for rufus to feel it. he senses the way rufus' scent sweetens in response and feels relieved for it, to know that rufus can read his intentions—that he knows, however instinctively, that tseng knows what he needs.
and what he needs is this: to be touched, to be treasured, to be made to come with two of his alpha's (his alpha's) fingers buried inside him. ]
Come for me. [ tseng's voice is a growl of command, rumbling against rufus' throat. ] Let me feel you.
[Even in his heats before, even when he'd had alphas vetted and selected to see him through it, he'd never come for them on command. Even when they'd used their vocalizations, even when they'd growled it and snarled it and crooned it, something in him had still resisted, had still stubbornly held out long enough that it ultimately still took raw sensation to topple him over the edge. That he manages it with Tseng — that all it takes is the vibration of his growl against his neck and the insistence that he wants it —
He yowls, thick and filthy and low, and shudders all over like his climax has been torn from him, cum flooding his trousers as his slick coats Tseng's fingers and streams down the length of his hand. The world goes as white as his clothes; for the duration, scent becomes the dominant stimulus, and all he can breathe, all he can taste, is Tseng.
Baby. Shiva, even the echoes of it sound filthy in his memory of Tseng's voice, almost out of place, almost unprecedented — but it rolls over his fleeting afterglow like a long lick of a tongue and all he can think is, for me, for me. He's no one's baby, no one's darling, no one's omega, but Tseng's.
The reprieve, he knows, will be a brief one at best; even through the languid lethargy of orgasm, his heat-driven arousal still burns like a distant threat. But there's space, at least, to shift and put his head down onto Tseng's shoulder, melting against him like his climax turned his very bones liquid, a reflexive purr already vibrating in the back of his throat.]
Taste it.
[His purr intensifies, dreamy-maddening; he's hot and filthy and wrecked, his scalp beaded with sweat and his hair falling down out of its careful style from the damp and the exertions both, and beneath him he can just feel how hard Tseng is, how much he wants him, the knot that's for him soon enough.]
S'for you. The others...I never let them taste me. Only you.
[His breath hitches; for a moment, his purr goes softer, more of a trill.]
[ a problem: tseng will never be able to let another alpha knot rufus.
another problem: tseng will also never be able to let another alpha see rufus when he comes.
he's a vision, pleasure knitted into every line and cord of muscle standing out against his skin, in the line of his throat and the wet of his mouth and the quiver of his thighs as he spills into his own trousers. his cum lands hot and sticky on the inside of tseng's wrist, and his slick gushes down over the back of his hand, soaking his trousers beyond salvaging. (they'll have to be dry cleaned. tseng can't think that far in advance.) he fingers rufus through it, until the tension in his muscles melts away and is replaced by sweet lethargy, his frame going languid and soft where he leans against tseng. ]
Just like that. [ good boy, tseng doesn't say.
he lets his fingers slip from between rufus' thighs, but he doesn't wipe them immediately, and it's a good thing he doesn't, because rufus is purring around words that are almost shocking in how filthy and arousing they are. not telling tseng to taste it—although yes, that too—but the fact that he wants tseng to taste him, when he's never let anyone else do the same... that he wanted tseng, that he wants tseng, that his voice is made sweet by those gentle vocalizations but the words are, tseng thinks, no less true for it...
he lifts his hand, right where rufus can see, and licks along his own wrist and up the backs of his fingers in one long swipe. his cum tastes sharp and tangy and a little bitter, like lemon zest and sun; his slick is sweet and tart and makes tseng's teeth ache with how badly he wants to turn rufus on his belly and shove his tongue inside him.
he brings his cleaner hand up to nudge rufus' chin, tilting him up to look at tseng. like this, they're only inches apart. ]
Would you like to taste yourself? [ on tseng's tongue, he means, where their mouths are so close they might touch. ]
[His breath catches in his throat, watching Tseng with enthralled intent as his tongue flicks out to drag through the wetness clinging to his hand and wrist; it's so hot, and he's still so stimulated and riddled with heat, that he trembles in Tseng's hold again as an aftershock quakes through him and coaxes another, smaller gush from his body that dampens him further.
A knuckle slips beneath his chin; his eyes go glassy in an instant, loving — craving — the submission implicit in it. It's the smallest things that drive him so desperately out of his mind, the ones Tseng is normally far too restrained to indulge. Touching him like he owns him, like it's his right to make him look here or there — it's something Rufus could never tolerate asking for, yet aches for nevertheless.
A little overwhelmed, he resorts to nodding slightly, unable to collect enough presence of mind to find words that won't just dissolve into begging. Tseng — Tseng wouldn't make him beg, likely, wouldn't lord the opportunity to hear it over him and demand it as a condition of his care. Some alphas would. Tseng would kill any who so much as thought of trying.
It's not that he wants to taste himself, not exactly. But he wants to be kissed, and he wants Tseng's mouth, and he wants to give Tseng what he wants — and thinks that maybe this is the only way he'll let himself ask for it, is by offering it to him instead. Letting him choose, because of who they are, and not just what they are.]
And when...when you get me home.
[They're so close, so close that he knows Tseng can't help but breathe in his panting, that the very air between them is shared just as much as everything else.]
Want to taste you. Want you to let me suck your cock.
[ it's less, for tseng, that he wants rufus to taste himself as it is that he wants to kiss rufus and knows that an inevitable consequence of that will be that rufus tastes himself. so the nod, when it comes, is a welcome sign, and tseng immediately leans in to press their mouths together and coax rufus' lips to part.
the kiss is deep from the get-go, a needy, desperate thing. tseng licks into rufus' mouth like he wants to taste every inch of it, like every moan rufus has ever bitten back might be there under his tongue, sweet as candy. he doesn't need rufus to beg, would never think to make him—if rufus begs it will always be of his own accord, because he feels safe in asking tseng for what he needs. if anything, really, it feels like tseng who should be begging, as wrapped around rufus' little finger as he feels right now.
when they pull apart, the wet of tseng's mouth betrays his otherwise collected appearance, as does the flush of color high in his cheekbones. ]
Anything you want, baby. Anything.
[ it's a promise tseng fully intends to keep, too. no empty words, no false vows just to tell rufus what he wants to hear. tseng is, he realizes, absolutely and irrevocably fucked—but he can't really find it in himself to care.
the sound of the rotors outside changes slightly as they begin to descend toward shinra tower, and tseng presses another brief, firm kiss to rufus' mouth. ]
Let me clean you up. [ he wants to call rufus sir, to get himself back into the mindspace where tseng is bodyguard and rufus is vice president, but with rufus looking so languid and warm in his lap like this, he can't quite manage it. tseng tugs rufus' pants up again and re-fastens the button, does up the zip, straightens out a few of the wrinkles caused by their grinding. ] I'll take you straight to your bedroom. Rude will stay with the helicopter. This late, there shouldn't be more than the skeleton crew of security, but we'll need to be mindful until we're behind closed doors.
[ his tone makes it obvious: tseng is saying this as much for his own benefit as for rufus'. ]
Is that clear? [ a pause, and then the faintest smile, and tseng lifts his hands again so he can rub his scent against rufus' throat. ] Sir.
[Tseng doesn't say it in so many words, but even in his heat-addled state, Rufus knows what he means: that once they land, and for the duration until he can stumble his way to the safety of his nest, he can't be an omega anymore. Even amidst the raging of his body and its needs, he has to find a way to tamp down on all of the impulses he's been so guiltily indulging and call up his armor of power and dominance once more. It aches, and he hates it, but it doesn't render him cold and despairing the way that the thought of Tseng withholding his knot had before. It's just — enduring, and he knows how to endure. He's been enduring for every day of his life, waiting for the chance to finally usurp his father, bearing up under the disappointment and the petty humiliations until that hour inevitably comes.
Letting Tseng put him back together is, in its way, its own kind of submission. His hands are careful and soft, for all that they're precise in never straying too far into temptation. He would like, he thinks, to lie boneless in thick blankets or a bath and bid Tseng to run his hands all over him, tending to his need for touch as though he were doing maintenance on his favorite gun.
And then, as if having read his mind, Tseng's wrists brush against his neck once, twice — his senses flood with it, that claim renewed, and all of a sudden acting the part of a perfect Shinra doesn't seem so insurmountable when he's doing it at the direction of the alpha who loves him, instead of the one who loathes him.
(He needs so badly to come, for all that the inside of his trousers are still soaked from the last one. He needs to be shoved down into a mattress and held there by the hair while he screams and howls and takes a dick up his ass until every last bit of his own rebellious body has been beaten into euphoric submission with it.)
What he does do is close his eyes, and breathe Tseng's heady scent, and remember the feeling of pulling back his lip as if to show the fangs he's never had.]
Pity for you.
[It's more coherent than he's been for most of the ride, slurred and distracted but still painfully clear how he's forcing the whimper back, how he's dropping his register lower to force it smooth and confident when he isn't.]
Having to — to walk two steps behind the whole w-way in.
[He laughs, and the first time it breaks into a noise that treads close to a sob; the second time, it holds steady without cracking, rumbling with dry and biting amusement. When he finally manages to open his eyes, the blues are glazed and glassy, but he's — put together enough to make it, at least, and Tseng's smile is the slightest ray of sunlight through the tempestuous storm.]
Try to — keep the salivating to a minimum. Director.
[ it's a blessing to know that the trip is short between the helipad to rufus' apartments in the shinra headquarters. it means fewer people to see them, and more importantly, less time they have to spend doing something other than tearing at each other's clothes and trying to climb inside each other's skin. tseng traces the route in his mind, well-worn from thousands of trips to and from—in through the security doors and across the foyer, down an escalator, left into a hallway, through the door into the apartment and then into the bedroom. easy.
...probably easy.
tseng watches as his scent does what he hoped it would, shoring up the walls of rufus' self-control and allowing him to slip back into the skin of rufus shinra, the alpha heir apparent to the company empire. after so many years working together, tseng has seen rufus act the alpha more times than he could ever hope to count—now, for the first time, it looks... odd. not wrong—rufus wears alpha status like a second skin, perfect—but like a double exposure. rufus as an alpha, and then the ghost of rufus the omega, needy and beautiful. ]
I'm prepared to rise to the challenge, sir. [ although there's a ticking muscle in tseng's jaw as it clenches that suggests he's actually not, not quite. walking two steps behind rufus all the way into the building, being forced to look at his ass, to smell his heat and not touch—and besides that, the way rufus's laugh sounds so much like a sob of desire that it makes tseng want to shove him down and fuck him until he screams—
it's a good thing his jacket is cut so long, but even so, tseng shifts surreptitiously to readjust the way the hard length of his cock sits in his trousers. ]
I can make no promises, however, about the state of my saliva.
[ the helicopter touches down on the landing pad. the rotors begin to wind down, their roar dulling to a whine. tseng looks up to meet rufus' gaze, unhesitating, his own eyes full of promise. ]
[For you, I am, Rufus almost says, startled after the fact by how much he means it, by how much it feels like something compelled out of his chest but it's not the heat that prompted it. Of course he's not ready for this, not in the truest sense of the word; most authorities on the subject would agree that to force an omega like him through half the things he's required to do would be abhorrent at best and torture at worst, but he's ready to survive it anyway. He's ready to do what has to be done.
(It's just easier, like this, to do it for someone who can be proud of him. Who wants him. Who might even...who might spoil him, maybe, once they're safe and alone. Again, he imagines the decadence of that particular fantasy. Again, he shivers from want of it.)
He leans forward one last time, bumping their foreheads together before rubbing his cheek against Tseng's, like he's returning the courtesy of being scented with a subtle, pacifying gesture of his own.]
I'm tired, Director. That fire alarm was a blessing in disguise; the best birthday gift I can imagine right now is to make for my quarters and sleep.
[He closes his eyes. Breathes in slowly. Alpha. Confident. Strong. Ruthless.
He can do it. He can do it, but he's not going to be able to hold it for long, and so he moves as rapidly as he can, dragging himself out of Tseng's arms with a last mournful whine before making for the door of the helicopter and signaling Rude through the window to get it open for him in perfect cadence, so he doesn't have to pause even an instant in the smooth trajectory of his departure.
His legs feel like jelly the moment he lands on them. He's so sure he's going to wobble or stumble. But the night air is cold and devoid of the thick and drowsy aroma of his scent commingling with Tseng's, and it drives him to get one foot in front of the other, drawing up the ache of his heat into his chest and alchemizing it into powerful annoyance in its place.
Security, however light it may be at this time of night, is expecting him; evidently, reports of the fire alarm and evacuation made it back to the building in advance. It helps, because it means they all keep a wide berth from the clearly annoyed (clearly, clearly he's annoyed) Shinra heir as he storms back to his rooms after a festive night cut short. It means he has every reason to sweep past, to not bother to wait for doors to be opened for him. Let him be moody and frustrated and prickly; there are plenty of other excuses for it, none of which let on anything about the truth.
Just a little farther, he reminds himself as he crosses the foyer, hyperaware of Tseng's eyes on him, the hair on the back of his neck standing up with the weight of it. Just a little farther and Shiva he's not even going to make it to his bed, not even going to make it to his room, if he makes it three steps in the door before howling to be fucked against the wall it's going to be a damned miracle.
[ the night air is practically freezing in contrast to the sweet, muggy heat of the helicopter. it shocks some sense into tseng's system, blessedly, allows him to land on his feet when he hops down from the cabin and gestures to rude through the window that final shutdown procedures can begin. it will take a few minutes for rude to run through the checklist, but even so, he knows better than to follow them into rufus' quarters. like all the turks, he keeps track of rufus' heat schedule, so he knows that for the next several days, this wing of the building will be entirely off-limits.
it is, tseng thinks, a minor miracle that they make it into the building. two steps behind rufus and to his left, tseng follows him through the lobby doors and past the flustered-looking security guards, who he dismisses with a curt nod; down the stairs towards rufus' private residence, past an administrative assistant with a neat bob and sensible heels who looks at tseng, opens her mouth, and then wisely thinks better of it and closes it again. ]
Clear the vice president's schedule through Tuesday.
[ tseng's voice comes out blessedly steady, devoid of the alpha growl that's been simmering there all evening. the assistant manages a clipped yes, sir! and then turns on her heel to go back the way she came, and tseng continues on, lengthening his stride to keep up with the pace rufus sets.
he has never been so aware of every inch of his body. a bead of sweat forms between his shoulderblades and runs slowly down his spine; his cock throbs with every step, trapped as it is along the crease of his thigh in an effort to stop it being patently obvious to everyone they pass. he feels feverish, not like his skin is overwarm but like his core hass heated up, a furnace inside him driving his steps.
just a little farther.
down the hallway toward rufus' rooms. tseng's gaze drops unbidden to his ass, perfect, hidden beneath the layers of fabric that comprise his formalwear. at this distance his scent is nearly overwhelming, and it's only the long-worn habit of putting one foot in front of the other regardless of circumstance that keeps tseng walking, instead of pinning rufus to the wall to fuck him front of everyone.
in the end, he manages to hold back until the door swings shut behind him. the latch clicks into place, tseng reaches back to turn the deadbolt, and then before he's even really conscious of his actions he has rufus by the hips, turning him, pinning his back up against the wall so tseng can seal their mouths together in a thorough, punishing kiss. ]
[It all happens so fast. Through the haze of heat and need he can mark the footsteps behind him, the faint whisper of door hinges, the way his clothes feel like a barrier that's trying to hold his radiant body heat in and there's sweat beginning to bead about his joints, in the junctures of his limbs. The sound of the latch clicking has barely faded from the air when all of a sudden he's not where he thought he was anymore, moved too fast for his desire-addled senses to track; one moment he's thinking of how many more steps it will take to reach his bedroom and the next his shoulderblades are digging into the entry wall, pinned up so snug and tight that he yowls into Tseng's mouth from it.
And he gives way — it feels so good to give way, here in the safety of his own quarters, where he can be as loud and as needy as he wants. They'd soundproofed the walls long ago on the excuse of company security, in case the vice president should need to conduct business within the comforts of his own rooms. Really it's so that he can howl as loud as he wants when he's got an alpha seeing to him — one of the few rare courtesies his father has ever shown him, not that he did it for his son's sake to begin with.]
Tseng!
[His legs leave the ground almost on instinct — one at first, testing, as he hooks it around Tseng's waist to help keep him close, then the other once he figures out that Tseng will hold him if he does it, will hold him up with nothing but the press of his body alone. His arms drape over Tseng's shoulders like it's a lover's embrace; the rest of their conduct is anything but saccharine, as his scent starts to flood the air unrestrained.
His nails, blunt though they are, shove down the back of Tseng's collar, beneath his coat and his shirt, looking for skin to dig into and mark. When he finally manages to drag himself away from the kiss far enough to talk, his eyes are dark and wild, unfocused with desire and desperation.]
Are you excited...?
[His lips are slick and wet from the force of the kiss; he licks at them, his mouth still open like he's expecting another to claim it at any moment.]
[ oh, hells, if it doesn't make tseng's knees weak to hear his name in that tone from rufus' mouth. they're pressed so closely together that tseng thinks he can feel every inch of rufus' body, down to the beat of his heart and the vibration of his voice in his chest; it's intoxicating, devastating, just like the press of rufus' thighs as he lifts his legs to circle tseng's waist. rufus' estimation is right, and tseng does hold him up against the wall with nothing but his hands on rufus' ass and the firm press of his own body. their mouths meet, and meet again, and rufus' scent floods the air around them with a sweet tang so perfect it makes tseng's molars ache.
when rufus pulls back from the kiss, tseng drops his mouth to rufus' throat instead. his tongue drags over a bare stripe of skin at the base of his throat, just above his collarbone, and then tseng bites a bruise into the curve of his shoulder that will necessitate higher collars until it's gone. he wants to take rufus apart. he wants to strip him piece by piece until he learns exactly what makes him tick.
with some force of effort, tseng drags his face away from the intoxicating scent in the hollow of rufus' throat and manages a response. ]
Can't you tell? [ surely rufus can feel the heat and pressure of tseng's cock where it's right up against his ass. he shifts just right and the hot length of it rubs insistently along the curve of one cheek. ] I haven't stopped thinking about it since I smelled you.
[ by some miracle, tseng doesn't stumble when he pulls rufus away from the wall to carry him to the bedroom instead. whether they'll make it remains to be seen, truly, but at least tseng knows the way and at least for now it seems like his legs will hold them. ]
[There are no words for how good it feels to be wrapped up in Tseng in that moment, with his heat raging and their mingling scents thick in the air and the freedom to be as loud as he wants — to not have to think about how he looks or acts or snarls, free to bare his throat to Tseng's attention and whine audibly as his teeth sink home into a mark that isn't going away anytime soon. It's dizzy and feverish and soon it feels like he's lost control of his limbs a bit, too insensible to move them with any sort of intent because he's so busy clinging and trilling and trying to get more of everything Tseng offers and then some.
Fuck, but his cock feels big when he grinds it against him, full and thick and just what he wants. He's had alpha studs before but he's never wanted like he wants this, panting and whimpering and convinced that there's nothing in the world that could possibly feel as good as Tseng will feel when he takes him — hells, he hasn't even come close to it yet and already he's certain of it beyond a shadow of every doubt.]
Don't stop. Don't stop thinking about me — !
[Tseng pulls them away from the wall, just takes hold of him and moves him because fuck, he's so strong — he hides it beneath those trim-tailored suits but pressed up against him, there's no hiding how it's all muscle underneath and fuck, he wants to trace each one with his tongue, taste his sweat, bite little omega claims of his own into his flesh — and he wraps around Tseng like it's the most natural thing in the world, purring audibly from the unparalleled pleasure of being held.]
My alpha. My Tseng. You're mine, too — mine, mine —
[ as if there's a snowflake's chance in ifrit's fires. as far as tseng is concerned, the entire universe is the size of the two of them, rufus in his arms, their joined mouths, their bodies pressed so close together it's hard to know where one ends and the other begins. at least until tuesday, there's nothing that could draw tseng's focus away from rufus, not a single thing that could interrupt the strength of his attention.
he manages not to stumble as they make their way down the hall, but it's a close thing, especially when rufus presses his face to tseng's neck and lets him feel the vibration of one of those sweet little trills he keeps making in the back of his throat. he wants to dig his teeth into rufus. desire closes its fist around the base of his spine and pulls hard, makes it a minor miracle that tseng kicks the door of rufus' bedroom halfway closed before he deposits rufus onto the irresponsibly soft, large mattress of his bed.
tseng is on him again in an instant. his hands are steady as they work at the buttons and fastenings of rufus' clothes, his coat, the belts that hold it closed. he's wearing too much. tseng wants to dig his nails into the fabric and tear it to shreds, and it's only the barest recollection of expense reporting that stays his hand. ]
Tell me what you want. What you like.
[ tseng could figure it out, but he wants to hear it from the source—and besides that, he likes the tone of rufus' voice when he's trying to talk through his own desperation, how pitched and needy it gets, especially now that he has no reason to keep it modulated. ]
[That first instant of landing on the thick deep comfort of his mattress — it's unparalleled bliss, so much so that even his raging need briefly takes a backseat to bask in the way it feels. He hadn't even realized how much it'd abraded, all the pretensions he's forced to wear like armor when he's pretending to be alpha. He'd drawn them in so close he'd forgotten how desperately he'd been craving this, the pillowy sweetness of a place that reads as soft and safe and nest.
For a second, he's lost in it; even the heady musk of Tseng's scent isn't enough to overpower the flood of relief that saturates him, rubbing his cheek against the cashmere comforter, the thousand-count sheets. This room, this bed, this nest smells like him, accentuated in the best possible way by his alpha's presence — and that's all there is, no competing influences, no unpleasant distractions.
It's why he doesn't help at all when Tseng reaches for his clothes, half because he's too far gone in the release of relief to even think of it, and half because it is what he wants. His alpha should get his hands on him, should pamper him so. At long, long last, the pieces are falling into place; finally there's rightness in his world, the long struggles set aside to make room for his reward.]
You, you, you.
[That's not helpful, and doesn't come close to addressing the question he's been pressed with, but this isn't offered up as an answer to Tseng's demand; quite the contrary, it's a reward for good behavior, praise for the lovely perfect alpha who delivered him into this bliss, who's seeing to his needs just like he's supposed to.
His eyes open a bit, dark as a stormy ocean beneath long lashes and half-lids, and another course of purring spills from his throat as Tseng's clever hands free him from the awful confines of his clothes, as the scent of his slick and his need fills the air more and more as the linen peels away.]
You said — your cock, I want your cock —
[His mouth falls open, soft and wet, tongue rolled out like a red carpet against his lower lip. Obscene. Inviting.]
Scent me — ah, mmmn — while you give it, give it to me —
[ tseng makes it all the way back to hq before his number is up. in fact, what happens is this: he leans on reno, keeps his feet under him and a hand pressed to his abdomen, and feels himself bleeding out. they all know it. he can tell by the pinched look on his turks' faces that they all know, and yet none of them will say it aloud. you're gonna be okay, boss, elena says, and reno opens his mouth like he wants to say something but then closes it instead.
his own blood is hot and sticky under his palm. tseng looks down at his feet on the marble floor of the foyer and sees his own red bootprints; he's bled down the entire front of his slacks. ]
I'm afraid one of you is going to have to clean up after me, [ he says, and then the world goes dark.
from there it's a lot of nothing. black. silence. sometimes less silence, interrupted by the steady beeping of machinery or the hushed and unintelligible sound of voices. often there's pain; even more often there's a kind of hazy numbness that overtakes him, leaves him floating in oblivion. more than once, there's a burst of white light in the corner of his vision that tseng knows, instinctively, to be the lifestream; just as many times, there's the instinct to turn away from it.
don't walk into the light, reno had joked once, about something entirely unrelated. tseng hadn't thought that he would ever need to take such advice so literally.
it isn't that he's afraid to die. tseng hasn't been afraid to die since he was thirteen, since he signed his life away in service to the general affairs division. but he knows, vaguely, in some indefinable way, that he still has something left to do. something left to say. he can't quite grasp it; it has no fixed form, no definable edge. it's an impression more than it is a fact, even. but it's enough to keep tseng holding on for as long as he can, no matter how many times the blankness threatens to overwhelm him.
once or twice, he floats closer to the surface of consciousness. the first time, perhaps, when he comes out of surgery; he thinks something like closed me up, then, and then sinks back down into nothingness. the second time, perhaps, when he's moved to hq to recover, where the beeping is less obnoxious and the bed is much softer, but he still can't bring himself to open his eyes. he can hear the hushed voices of those around him, like listening to someone speak from underwater, but his eyes stay closed, and soon the voices cease.
little by little, he feels his body start to put itself back together. it hurts. it's okay. the hurt means he's still alive. ]
[He's lost track of time, ever since. The sun rises and sets. Hours bleed into days. None of it seems to mean anything, next to the constant that is Tseng lying still and pallid against sterile white bedsheets, refusing to wake up.
They'd tried to insist on keeping Tseng in the medical wing, once he'd gotten out of surgery. It was the better place for him, they'd said — round-the-clock care, Mr. President, they'd assured him. He's in good hands with our staff, they'd told him. But the medical staff hadn't been there in the helicopter while the world fell down and his blood turned to ice, listening to the senseless afflicted in their black hooded cloaks as they'd moaned and writhed, strapped in like cargo in the back. The medical staff hadn't heard Professor Hojo offer his services in assistance to Tseng's condition, already openly covetous of the prospect of another high-quality specimen.
He'd kept his voice even. Matter-of-fact. And the instant they'd landed, he'd ordered Tseng moved to secure quarters on the 69th floor — to the one place he could guarantee would stay within his own complete and utter control.
Tseng doesn't look any better in his old four-poster king than he'd looked in the hospital room. He'd thought that a little color would help, somehow — would make him seem more alive, somehow, more robust, less frail. Tseng isn't supposed to look frail, isn't authorized to lie there in bed like the man he is instead of the force of nature he's supposed to be. He's supposed to be on his feet, unconcerned no matter how much blood there is pouring down his suit. He's supposed to smile, sharp and secretive, and remark how it's mostly someone else's.
It was his. All the blood they'd bleached off the lobby marble, it'd all been his.
He — Rufus Shinra, president of the Shinra Electric Power Company, the singular most powerful man on the whole of the planet — has long since lost track of what day it is. He goes up to the 70th floor and works until he can't stand to stay away any longer, and when it gets to be too much he comes back down and sits in his old bedroom and listens to Tseng's monitors beep their soft and persistent cadence. Darkstar keeps vigil while he's gone, welcomes him when he returns; she waits only long enough for him to find his seat before pushing her head under his hand, resting her muzzle on his thigh, at a loss for how she is supposed to protect him from a deep-seated anguish she's wholly unable to sink her teeth into.
It's not that he regrets his orders. There's no burden of guilt or self-reproach for being the one who sent Tseng and his Turks into that temple. Given the choice, he'd do it again. He's not in the business of doubting his decisions, and neither is Tseng. Tseng isn't his father; he's never doubted him even once.
Maybe. Probably.
What it is, really, is that Rufus knows that Tseng would be content to die like this. All Tseng would ever regret were the loose ends — an unclear succession to the directorship, maybe, with Reno the next in line but Elena possessing more of the raw potential for it. Tseng would say he accomplished his mission, gave his life in service to the cause. Nothing else should have to matter, in light of that.
He knows the words he should've said to that: You do. You matter.
It's that Tseng could die right now in perfect service to Shinra, and that's what Rufus Shinra is supposed to want — Turks who will die for his cause, for his company. The problem is that Tseng will die for the company when Rufus needs him to live for him, and right now he doesn't know which one Tseng will choose.]
Have you been watching him for me, D?
[It comes out a little more hoarse than he means it to, as he sinks into his usual chair and strokes her sleek head with open affection, unable to help a weary, unguarded smile as she rumbles her pleasure right back. There's an indentation in the blankets on the far side of the king mattress, roughly hound-shaped, marring the expanse that Tseng's body isn't occupying; had she been curled up next to him, while he was gone?
Gods, if only. If only he could —]
Let's see if he wakes up today. He will if he knows what's good for him, won't he.
[ tseng continues to float, awareness sliding in and out of focus. it's warmer here than it had been before, this much he knows; sometimes there's a weight against his side, solid and reassuring, and sometimes he's left in a sea of cool sheets, bereft and alone. he senses, strangely, the presence of others, sometimes one, sometimes many. sometimes they linger. in a cycle, they come and go, but tseng can't track the timing of it, his mind is too fuzzy and his consciousness too thin.
when he finally rises to the surface of the sea of his own unconsciousness, for the first time in gods know how many days, it's to the low murmur of a familiar voice. he can't make out the words, but he knows the cadence of it, knows its tone: rufus, talking to darkstar.
the first thing tseng thinks is, absurdly, they wouldn't let darkstar into the hospital. so he isn't in a hospital. back at headquarters, then, maybe in the residential wing, in a room converted for medical use—but no. the second thing he thinks is, even more absurdly, general affairs doesn't have the budget for this thread count, and it's that thought which prompts tseng to finally crack open his eyes.
he knows this room, this four-poster bed. he knows it intimately, from the long evenings he spent in rufus' personal quarters during his house arrest. no wonder it was so comfortable. no wonder it felt so good, to be here, floating in a haze of nothingness and letting himself be tossed about in the currents of his own mind. he's not intubated—that's for the best, tseng could self-extubate but he doesn't want to—but he has an iv in his wrist and a pulse ox clipped to his finger, and there are monitoring leads snaking in through the front of his shirt, tracking his vital signs.
and to his left, sitting in a drawn-up chair and looking for all the world like he belongs there, is rufus shinra himself. he looks terrible. (that's the third thing tseng thinks.) he looks exhausted, in the way only someone like tseng would ever be able to recognize, someone who knows every inch of rufus and would know what to look for. the faint shadows under his eyes, the angle of his head as he props it on his fist. even the slow movement of his fingers as he strokes back over darkstar's head. the president of the shinra electric power company, the singular most powerful man on the whole of the planet, does not need to come sit vigil at tseng's bedside. not unless he wants to be there.
it doesn't feel real. tseng, for once in his life, isn't sure it is real. it feels so very much like a dream, whether that's because of the pain medication or however long he's been under. for now, he's content not to interrogate it too much. he swallows, which takes some effort, and then parts his lips. ]
Did they... [ his voice is rough with disuse, and it takes effort to get the words out. he has to pause mid-sentence to draw in a breath. ] ...get the... blood out?
[If it were anyone else, anyone else but them, then perhaps it would've taken until the first croaking words had spilled from Tseng's throat for Rufus to react — but it doesn't, because time seems to freeze from the moment he sees Tseng's throat shift as he instinctively swallows to wet it. All of a sudden, the dim ambient lights seem to halo far too bright; all of a sudden, there's a buzzing in his ears that seems to increase like the pressure behind his widening eyes. He forgets how to breathe, all of a sudden, when it slams into his lungs in the form of a quiet gasp and holds there, burning, like a hope or a prayer or an incantation against the possibility that what he'd seen was absolutely nothing at all.
Only it wasn't nothing, and through the blurry haze of his vision he knows Tseng's lips separate when they'd been pressed together before, and it isn't until the first consonant breaks the silence in the air that the weight in his chest dislodges, and all the breath he'd been holding leaves him in a rapid rush.
Tseng.
Darkstar whuffles, shoving her head up into the hand that had gone still mid-pet between her eyes; he realizes a little too late that the other one is gripping the armrest of his chair so tight that his knuckles have gone white beneath the trim of his black gloves.]
Two seconds back from the dead and that's what's on your mind?
[His own voice sounds strange to his ears, and not just because it seems like it's filtered down through water, distant and faraway and obscured by the cadence of his pulse beating in them. It's thinner than it should be, almost as frail as Tseng looks. His father would be ashamed of him.
His father has no place in this room. This room is only for the people he can't live without.]
Expense the damn suit, Tseng, I couldn't care less about it.
[ tseng hears the rush of breath that leaves rufus and it makes something ache in his chest, something entirely unrelated to the still-healing scars beneath his clothes. were anyone else in the room, rufus would never let himself react this way, with an audible and obvious emotional response—and somehow, the fact that he does so now makes it no easier for tseng to decide whether or not he's dreaming.
on the one hand, he would know rufus' voice anywhere, but even he doesn't think his subconscious could recreate rufus shinra in such beautiful, devastating clarity. on the other hand, it seems like a thing of dreams to think that rufus' rare, precious show of emotion could be because of him.
rufus was right about one thing: tseng would have been happy to die in the line of duty. he would have regretted the mess he left in the lobby and the disorganized state of his succession planning, yes, but he would never have regretted giving his life on rufus' orders. what rufus was wrong about, though, is that tseng would have been dying for the company. that's not it at all. he would have been dying for rufus—and rufus is now the company, so it's sort of one and the same, but at the end of the day rufus shinra is where tseng's loyalty lies. and if that means putting it all on the line for the mission, where the mission is to get rufus what he wants—what he deserves—then how could tseng ever regret it? ]
I'll remember... you said that.
[ he must be dreaming. either that or he's too high to tell the difference. surely this will matter to him at some point, but it certainly doesn't matter now. tseng closes his eyes again, then opens them, his head turning slightly to look at rufus and darkstar. moving more than that feels like too big a task, but he wants to look at rufus, really look at him. ]
Are you all right? [ he should ask about the others, too, and about the mission, the temple. he doesn't ask about them. it takes him a long moment to lick his dry lips and then add, ] Sir.
[It would be so easy to scoff at him for a question like that — to roll his eyes and huff his disbelief and insist that asking whether he's all right is the last thing Tseng should be inquiring after in a moment like this. Maybe it would be for anyone else. But even as injured and weary as he is (he can't say frail, he can't say weak, he refuses to think either of those things about a man who's fought his way back from the dead for him), Tseng moves to try to look at him anyway, like he's the only thing in the world that matters —
And that's why he's asking, Rufus knows. Because he is the only thing in the world that matters. Because there's no amount of reassurance in the world that will convince Tseng to have any sort of concern for himself if he doesn't let him first establish that he's all right.]
I am now.
[It's an admission. He doesn't try to hide it; he wouldn't succeed even if he did. He averts his eyes briefly instead, up and away, unthinkingly casting his face into profile in the soft lamplight when in fact he's just trying to make sure the heat rising in his eyes never escapes his lashes.]
They worked on you for nine hours. I'm going to buy your surgeon a house in Costa del Sol.
[After a long moment, he finally looks back, his gaze lingering on Tseng's face for what feels like an eternity before it occurs to him that he might've let it rest there a little too long, and it flicks away again, this time to the bedside table.]
Oh. Ah, there's — water, or chips of ice. If you — I can —
[ whatever reassurance tseng derives from the confirmation that rufus is okay is immediately destabilized by the magnitude of that admission. it takes a second for him to put it together, his mind moving at what feels like a snail's pace; at first, tseng thinks rufus must mean that something happened to him from which he's only just now recovered, but then his brain catches up to the rest of him and understands what rufus really means: that until tseng was awake, he wasn't okay. he's okay now, because tseng is awake.
the thought of it shakes tseng to the core. the thought that any part of rufus might be less than fine because tseng himself is less than fine—he can hardly breathe around the implication.
fortunately, there's water to think about. under any other circumstance, the idea of letting rufus feed him ice ships would be intolerable, but tseng has discovered that his limbs are not especially cooperative right now, and he's genuinely not sure he'd be able to manage it himself. so it's with some small amount of chagrin that he says, ] ...Please.
[ he tries to push himself up a little, to scoot up onto the pillows so that he's at least at a better angle for it, but the mere act of engaging the muscles of his core sends a lance of pain through him that makes him grunt quietly and drop back down to the mattress. which, to be fair, is not a far distance to drop, since he really only lifted himself by about an inch. ]
Do you...
[ ...no. he'd thought to ask rufus if he needed to call someone, the medical staff, a nurse of some kind to assist. and if rufus decides to do so, tseng won't stop him. but at least for right now, selfishly, he would like a few more moments to keep rufus to himself, just in case he is dreaming and he'll never experience this again. ]
[Not that it surprises him, that Tseng tries; he wouldn't be Tseng if he didn't. But something inside him still wrenches even at that soft noise of pain, because it's still more than Tseng would ever usually allow himself to begin with. They told him, his Turks told him, that even after being run through Tseng had still gotten to his feet and walked to them, prior to collapsing into their waiting grasp. That he'd mumbled something about needing to make his report. He pushes himself too much; even on the brink of death, that much is never going to change.
But there's one thing Tseng will listen to, Rufus knows, and he isn't above using that against him for the sake of the greater good. If he makes it an order, if he can bear to render it a command, Tseng won't defy him. Not when there's no competing priority to speak of, otherwise.
The real question is, can he make himself do it? To even consider it asks a...candor that they both usually avoid.
But if it means never hearing Tseng make that sound again, then it's really no question at all.]
...Don't move. Let me do it.
[And what a reversal that is, isn't it? But strangely, it isn't one he minds; after day after day of useless waiting, there's finally something at his fingertips that he can do about the situation. And so he eases Darkstar's head out of his lap and rises from his chair, moving the scant few steps to the small refrigerator concealed in the base of the nightstand and retrieving a cupful of ice chips from it.
There isn't much room on the edge of the mattress, but he doesn't need much to suffice. He settles down onto a sliver of it, about even with Tseng's elbow, and clutches onto the cup in his hands like a lifeline before digging in after one of the larger chips and catching it carefully between two of his fingers.
It feels — forbidden, somehow, the prospect of what he knows he's about to do. But he's Rufus Shinra, and he bends the world to his will, even when it's something so seemingly insurmountable as this: moving the already-melting bit of ice close to Tseng's mouth and letting the edge of it skim along his lower lip, wetting and cooling it until the frozen chip has warmed enough to melt and trickle past his lips into his mouth as mere cold droplets of water.]
[ it's only because rufus couches it in an order that tseng is able to allow himself stillness. don't move, rufus says. let me do it, rufus says, and still tseng can't imagine what "it" he might do—reach for the button to summon the staff? press the button that controls tseng's pain medication, such that he might be able to push himself up after all?
no. no, what rufus means to do is to sit at tseng's elbow on the mattress and press an ice chip to his lower lip, to let it melt until cool water trickles into his mouth and down his throat. he does it like it's nothing, like he isn't rewriting everything tseng has ever known about the delicate balance between them. there are things that tseng has never allowed himself to imagine, thoughts he has never allowed himself to entertain, because he knows that to do so would be ruinous—and here rufus is, enacting like fifteen of them all at once, completely unaware of the havoc he's wreaking in the process.
tseng parts his lips slightly and swallows. he focuses on the water, how it soothes his dry mouth, his parched throat. the fluids pumping into him through one of his ivs are certainly no replacement for the base pleasure of drinking after a long time without water. and so tseng is content to let his eyes close again, feeling the ice melt, feeling the water drip, trying desperately not to feel the brush of rufus shinra's fingertips against his mouth.
when he speaks again, his voice is steadier. still slow and a little hazy at the edges, and it still takes a little time for him to catch his breath, but it's much easier to form words. ]
Thank you.
[ sir. he should say sir. somehow he can't bring himself to shape his lips around the word. tseng blinks his eyes open again, focuses them on rufus, so much closer than before and so much more beautiful. brilliant. rufus has always been so brilliant; it's a privilege to see him this close. he can feel his forearm pressing against rufus' hip where he's settled on the bed. tseng doesn't remember the last time he touched rufus, if it wasn't to rush him out of some crisis or another.
something, perhaps the drugs in his veins, prompts him to say, ] I thought I was going to die. ...I didn't want to.
[He realizes then, as he sits there quietly coaxing that chip of ice to melt against the ambient heat of Tseng's lips and his own fingers, that one of the things that has always terrified him is inevitability.
There's a quiet horror in stagnation. In all his setbacks, in all his failures, in all his defeats, there was always the lifeline that his own ambition still burned hot, and that there were still paths to walk and hands to play so long as he still breathed. To surrender to the inevitable is to stagnate, to petrify. Accepting that something cannot and will not ever change, no matter how irresistible the force applied, is a sort of submission that would break him long before he were ever able to fully stomach it.
Looking at Tseng like this, with his usually-glossy hair a little dulled from days without washing, with a prickling shadow appearing on his unshaven chin, with his eyes closed and his breath even and his pallor fading with his newfound return to consciousness, Rufus comes to a second realization: that this is all he will ever have.
This moment, this tenderness, is equivocal. That he can move so close, that he can offer what little comfort his hands might bear, is all conditional on the precariousness of Tseng's present health. If he wants Tseng to never come so close to death again, then he must accept that he will never have this again, either — that he only even has it now solely because Tseng is in no condition to brush off or disallow it.
As the ice melts, and his fingers linger, Rufus arrives at a final recognition: that their respective feelings are — that they can only be — unequal. That Tseng is the impenetrable object that even his strongest ambitions can't move. It's fitting, really, that he so often relies on that old metaphor of lever and fulcrum; for the lever to have any efficacy, the fulcrum must stay constant. They must always be what they are to each other, nothing more and nothing less. To work, they cannot change; to change would eliminate their ability to work.
He will never have this again. This is the most of Tseng he will ever get.]
I thought about ordering you not to.
[The ice rattles in its plastic glass as he makes himself reach for another piece, because if he doesn't occupy his fingers with a fresh chip of it, they're going to stay resting feather-light on Tseng's mouth and on his chin, touching him with no excuse and no purpose.]
Then I thought it would be insult to injury. Not just to die, but to disobey a direct order while doing it.
[I thought I was going to die. I didn't want to. It was the unfinished business, then, that spurred Tseng to fight his way back. And when he was a child, he might've been petty about that — insisting that the reason for his miraculous recovery meant just as much as the practice of it. That having him back was somehow cheapened if he weren't doing it for him, specifically.
He's not a child. Tseng could have chosen to live for the damned mailroom clerks if that's what it took. It's all irrelevant, save for the part that he managed to live at all.]
I told myself you wouldn't. Then I realized...I couldn't name a single reason for you to stay, that wasn't outweighed by just as valid of one to go. I thought you might — [He swallows, fighting the rise of a lump in his throat.] — that you might do it. For Shinra.
[ rufus' fingers move away and tseng misses them instantly. gods, how is he ever going to recover from this? not from the injury, nor the surgery, but from the devastating realization of how warm rufus' touch is? it's rare that anyone touches tseng without intent to harm him. rarer still for that touch to come from rufus, who tseng has loved desperately and without reservation for half his life, and who has always been as distant and untouchable as lightning on the horizon.
he licks his lips unconsciously to taste the salt of rufus' skin, then swallows, because his mind is mostly soft cotton and if this is all he's ever going to have of rufus inside him then he may as well enjoy it. ]
No. [ he feels like he's moving through molasses, through a dream he can't quite control. this must be a dream, or at the very least it must be purgatory, to be tormented with the sweetness of something he'll never be able to grasp. he can practically feel the drip, drip, drip of morphine in his veins. ] I would have... obeyed, if you ordered me. But not for Shinra.
[ it's all but a whisper, hushed in the silence of the room broken only by the whir and beep of machinery. even in a dream, tseng still remembers that it's close to treason to admit that anything he does isn't solely in the best interest of the company he serves.
many, many years ago verdot had attempted to teach tseng this lesson: that the mission comes before the man, always. (very "do as i say, not as i do" of him, that.) he had taught tseng, time and time again, that his life—or indeed any turk's life—has meaning insofar as it's contributing to their mission overall. viewed from that angle, the noblest thing tseng could have done in that temple would be to die, and to go out knowing that he had given his life in service of a higher cause.
as it turns out, the lesson didn't take as well as verdot thought it did. ]
For you. I didn't... want to leave you. [ even dreaming, it feels like treason to admit as much. he should be afraid. but what fear can there be in him, when he's looked the lifestream in the face and turned away from it, all for this man sitting next to him? ] I'll go when you let me... not before.
[ tseng closes his eyes again, then blinks them open, looking up at rufus. blue like a summer storm. warmer than most people will ever know. tseng has always considered himself among the blessed few, to know what rufus' eyes look like when he smiles and means it. if he's dreaming—if all of this will vanish, when he opens his eyes for real—then tseng should grasp what he can while it's still here for him to wrap his hands around.
the fear, then: not fear of saying it, but fear of holding it back. maybe this was the thing he couldn't die without saying. ]
He almost wishes he could convince himself that Tseng is delirious, mumbling something like that. He almost wishes he could maintain it's the morphine clouding his thoughts, sending him off on idle flights of nonsense fancy that he won't remember long enough to regret later. The problem, though, is that he knows Tseng isn't — not least of which because he's monitored everything they've given him in every precise degree, that he knows exactly what the drugs they're administering can and can't do to the person who receives them. He almost wishes that he wasn't saying this with that guarantee of lucidity, with that modicum of clarity. It would be so much easier, however agonizing, to hear it and keep it and never speak of it again.
What that means, instead, is that he has to sit there and hear Tseng say you're the reason I fought to live and live with what that makes him. To press his lips together and choke on his own breath and still not know if that means anything other than that Tseng's loyalty rests with him and not just the chair he sits in. To bask in the bold, brash courage of the admission and be forced to ask himself if Tseng is braver than he is, or if he too is willing to risk his own secrets coming to light without the benefits of the painkillers to blame them on later.]
What if I never let you?
[He sets the cup of ice aside, placing it in the middle of the nightstand's surface because his coordination is abruptly poor and clumsy. Because his hands are shaking. He'd never hit a target with his limbs like this, with such an unexpected anxiety rising like a tide inside him.]
What if I say I have to be the one to go first?
[There's a different way he could've phrased that. It goes something like I'd rather die than live without you. But that's not precisely true, is it? If Tseng had died in that jungle, on the table, in this bed, Rufus still wouldn't have chosen death.
Wished for it, maybe. But he loathes leaving unfinished business just as much as Tseng does.]
[ tseng exhales something that might have once been related to a laugh, but now just comes out a quiet breath of amusement. it's not funny, to think about rufus dying—it's not in the slightest. but gods, it's so very like him to ask something like that. tseng almost wants to say, is that an order? but for once, for once in the entire breadth of his life, he wants nothing more than to leave aside orders and duty and talk to rufus. not rufus shinra, president of the shinra electric power company, but rufus, who he had been young with once, and next to whom he had grown into the man he is now.
with some effort, tseng lifts his hand from the bedsheets. there's a needle in one wrist and a pulse ox on one finger and he can do little more than lean it so his knuckles rest against rufus' back, right between his shoulderblades where the seam of his suit jacket sits straight and pressed. rufus looks so sharp, right now, like he could cut tseng open if tseng touches him wrong. ]
If you don't let me, then I won't go. [ what else is he supposed to say? tseng pauses, takes a long moment to consider the words. he isn't entirely sure how to give voice to the tangle of feelings inside his chest. ] Would I let you... Who lets a hurricane make landfall? I couldn't stop you, if you were determined. But I can promise I won't make it easy.
[ no, no, that's not quite right. it's all true, of course, but it's not quite right, it's not the crux of what tseng means to say. what he means to say is this: ]
And you should know that if you go, I'm going with you.
[ the company will endure, or it won't. the turks will endure, or they won't. but for tseng, whose very existence is wrapped up inexorably in the beautiful, inexorable man at his side, what else could tseng hope to do? he presses his knuckles into rufus' back and then lets his hand drop again, too tired to keep holding it up. healing from surgery sure takes it out of you. ]
So don't go getting any bright ideas until you're ready for me to follow you into the dark.
[Even like this, exhausted as he is — even when he'd been told not to move — Tseng still finds the strength to reach for him, to touch him like no one has ever dared to or cared to or both. It's more exertion than he should be putting himself through, and for a wild moment Rufus considers what might happen if he were to catch Tseng's hand in both of his own, bring it up to his mouth and press it against his own lips in an echo of how he'd fed Tseng the ice, like against like. It'd be more trouble than it's worth, maybe, with the risk of the IV pulling or the pulse ox getting jostled and alarming the machines. But in a way, he's almost grateful for the tubes and machinery, too — for how they force him to be deliberate, and careful, and methodical in every choice that he makes right now.]
Is that what I am? A natural disaster?
[Has Tseng always been one for poetry? Or is metaphor just the only vehicle he finds appropriate for trying to put his feelings into something that can properly be conveyed? Either way, the comparison sinks into his soul and becomes a part of him; how funny, he reflects, that of the two of them he would've identified Tseng as the force of nature, not himself. Yet Tseng seems to see things the precise opposite way.
Though, if he is a hurricane, then Tseng is a man who chases them, and that much feels fitting indeed. Maybe this room, this place, this moment, is the eye of the figurative storm — ephemeral at best, but eerily peaceful while it lasts.]
I don't deserve you, Tseng. I never have.
[His hand comes up slowly, spurred on by a moment of courage of his own, and within a passing moment his fingers are sliding along Tseng's cheek, resting gentle against his face as the pad of his thumb strokes the prickling stubble on his chin.]
You could ask me for the world and I would give it to you. [He pauses. Smiles, a little rueful.] — Well. I'd share it, at least.
Mm. [ tseng shakes his head very slightly, more a shift back and forth than a proper denial. ] Not a disaster. A phenomenon. A force to be reckoned with.
[ astonishing and terrible and unstoppable. beautiful, too, especially to someone like tseng, who very much likes to watch rufus wrap his hands around the throat of the world. this boy-king of the entire world, no one could stop him if he wanted to wrap his hands around its throat. tseng would never try. he only wants to be there to support rufus in the trying.
of course, being told that rufus doesn't deserve him makes tseng's brow furrow and his eyes blink open again. his fixes rufus with a gaze that's half incredulity, half real confusion, all of it too apparent and unfiltered through the lens of the painkillers. (how many more times will he use the morphine as an excuse? just you wait and see.) ]
Deserve me? [ that there might be anything rufus wants that he doesn't deserve has never crossed tseng's mind. ] Of course you do.
[ rufus' fingers lift, touch gently to tseng's cheek. brush down along the line of his jaw and press there, unbearably tender. surely he can't know what it does to tseng for rufus to touch him like this. he's long since contented himself with the role he is allowed to play in rufus' life, and even the tiny spark of foolish hope in his breast is enough to make those boundaries ache painfully. ]
Don't... you'll get my hopes up.
[ all he needs is to be allowed to stay at rufus' side, as long as rufus will have him. be realistic, tseng; don't let yourself dream too big. you're too old for this. and yet, that traitorous little beat in his heart telling him that he's never seen rufus touch anyone the way he's touching tseng right now. ]
I don't need the world. [ that first part is true; the second, he'll blame again on the morphine. ] All I need is you.
[Even just one of the things Tseng murmurs into the tranquil quiet of the darkness would've been enough to stop his heart. He could've been content with the praise, the validation — the confirmation that someone who matters believes in him. It would've been enough to keep him preoccupied for days after this, seeking to unravel all the possible implications that might've been tangled up in of course you deserve me. Just one would have been more than enough, but Tseng doesn't stop at just one. Tseng goes on, and goes on, and each new layer leaves him a little more stunned, a little more breathless in his realization.
His fingers still, when Tseng says don't — not enough to make him pull his hand away altogether, where a lesser man might've jolted back like he'd been burned. The fact that he stops is testament enough to how seriously he takes Tseng's feelings on the matter, when most people wouldn't even warrant the blink of an eye before he'd gone on right as he'd pleased.
But it doesn't end with don't, and suddenly he's left to wonder just what hopes Tseng might be referring to, and the twisting dawning recognition that for all the morphine might be loosing his tongue, the things he's saying might be deep-seated truths, and not idle ramblings of nonsense fantasy.
It would've been enough, just to hear don't, you'll get my hopes up.
But then — then, then, then something slips out and the world snaps into focus and all of a sudden, all of a sudden a new possibility begins to blossom, a fragile little notion that he barely dares to look at for fear it might shatter between the weight of a single glance. Because there aren't a lot of ways to interpret a rejection of the world in favor of a man, and all of them leave his heart pounding in the cage of his chest.]
Then get them up.
[He draws in a slow breath, then lets it out again even slower still. Tseng looks almost beatific in the low lamplight, his features awash in the golden glow; Rufus finds himself unable to look away, even when Darkstar nudges against his leg as if in recognition that her master has found someone equally important to pet, and leaves his side in favor of padding around to the far side of the mattress, climbing up to resume her vigil right in the comfortable indentation she'd made before.
The humor of it doesn't break the spell of the moment; it just adds a note of clarity to it, like a dash of much-needed acid to cut through the cloying haze of his affection. Without taking his eyes off Tseng, he reaches over in search of the morphine drip and finds the button, patient enough that Tseng has ample time to see what he's doing before deliberately pressing it.]
You're surprisingly candid like this. I like it.
[Emboldened again, he runs his fingers through Tseng's long hair, around and back until he's cradling the back of his head, his hand nestled between Tseng's hair and the pillow.]
My Tseng. The world is so empty when you're laid up in bed instead of at my side.
[ it's an unexpected response, that. "then get them up." where to? how high? for a moment tseng can't conceptualize it, the idea of what rufus might be suggesting. that tseng might be allowed to hope, might be allowed to... to...
he swallows hard, watching darkstar pad near-silently around the bed to climb onto the mattress next to him. her body is a comfortable weight, warm against his thigh. how many days had rufus left her here to guard him in rufus' absence? how many days had rufus spent here in quiet observation, waiting to see how long tseng would take to wake up, if he ever woke again?
it's when rufus moves that tseng's gaze jumps back to him. there's something so purposeful in the movement as he leans over to press the button on his morphine drip, sending a little more flooding into his veins. plausible deniability. rufus has seen through him, tseng thinks—knows that tseng isn't saying what he's saying only because of the painkillers, and yet giving him that out anyway. an allowance, for tseng to be more forthright where otherwise he would hold his tongue. ]
It's the drugs, [ tseng says, but he knows rufus doesn't believe him, and it isn't true anyway. what else is he going to say? "you can ignore me if you like." of course rufus won't. he never has.
the way rufus' hand moves to cradle tseng's head puts them in close proximity, so that when tseng looks up it's directly into the storm of rufus' eyes. his hand lifts again, knuckles resting against rufus' side. the pain of it fades—that part is the drugs—and tseng draws a slow breath, then exhales, quiet like he's afraid to be louder in case he shatters this moment. ]
[In all the times he'd imagined what it might be like to have Tseng want him, he'd never envisioned a moment like this. All his fantasies of Tseng are powerful ones, bloodwhetted ones — Tseng moving like a coeurl through a room full of men, dropping each one dead with shots timed to every second; Tseng in his ink-black gloves putting him facedown into his father's desk, back when it was still his father's desk and ten times more scandalous for it. They're two of a kind, Tseng and Darkstar, both unfailingly loyal, both breathtakingly vicious, both with the barriers they throw up for the sake of keeping his coat spotless white.
He never entertained notions of Tseng like this, razor edges blunted by feather pillows and thousand-count sheets, reaching for him with his eyes hazy and the alibi of drugs in his veins. He can imagine himself vulnerable all too well; sometimes he loathes it, sometimes he resents it, sometimes he finds a terrifying eroticism to it. He's never imagined Tseng vulnerable, not like this. Part of him hadn't really thought it was even possible.
And he likes it.
He's looked at Tseng before and thought, mine. How he'd bought him amid that business with Verdot. How he's owned him ever since behind his father's back. But this particular brand of possession, he finds, runs so much deeper — a jealous dragonish thing appeased by the sight of Tseng in his bed, in his room, under his protection, whispering his name.
All I need is you, Tseng had said.
He knows the feeling.]
Making us say all sorts of things.
[He lets his gaze drift slowly across Tseng's expression, taking in every detail before finally searching out his eyes and holding steady on them. Any of the residual droplets from the ice chips have long since evaporated or been licked away from his lips, and he's barely had that thought in his mind for half a moment before he's leaning in to press his mouth against Tseng's, dampening them again with a careless swipe of his tongue.
It's the drugs, he'll maintain. Because that's just how painkillers work, clearly.]
Very, [ tseng says, and thinks i don't believe this deniability is plausible, and then stops thinking at all.
perhaps paradoxically, it's the press of rufus' mouth against his own that convinces him this is real. he had dreamed of kissing rufus once before, many years ago, and in that dream he had never quite managed to render rufus correctly—had woken up unable to remember the warmth of his body or the taste of his lips. for all the sharp-edged workings of tseng's mind he has never been able to fully capture the beauty and complexity of rufus shinra.
and yet in the here and now, he feels it. feels the warmth of rufus' palm against his jaw, the warmth of his body where he's leaning against tseng's elbow. the warmth of his mouth where it's pressed against tseng's, insistent and unhesitating. he can feel rufus' breath against his face and knows beyond a doubt that there's no way his drug-addled mind could come up with something like this.
which is, in a way, even more terrifying than the alternative. it makes it real, means that rufus is kissing him, means that rufus meant to kiss him—wanted to kiss him. the shock of it rearranges the tectonic plates inside tseng, a seismic shift of what he understood to be true between them. despite himself, his knuckles press to rufus' ribs, and then his fingers curl as best they can into the pristine white fabric of rufus' coat.
fuck it.
he can't press up into the kiss, but he does return it as best he can. his lips part, coaxing, his tongue meeting rufus' and then withdrawing. instinctively tseng knows he's too weak for anything more, but it's important that rufus understand that tseng wants this, even if this is all he will ever have. ]
[He wants more than this, of course, because he's Rufus Shinra and wanting more is encoded into his very genes. He claims one kiss and there's a part of him already thinking about the next one, and the next one after that; he can't help it, carried away on ambition and desire and the rush of finally, finally getting something he's coveted for so fucking long.
But there's a part of him, too, that recognizes this isn't something to be chased and claimed; it's the part of him that goes still and silent when Tseng's fingers twitch into a gesture that could almost be called clinging, and the way his lips part could quite easily be termed an invitation. And even now that part of him wouldn't have thought — wouldn't have hoped, wouldn't have dreamed —
He wants more, and yet in a rare moment of clarity he also realizes that it's all right if he doesn't get it, because what he wants even more than his own satisfaction is to focus on Tseng. Tseng, who seems to want this too; Tseng, too weak to act much but still determined to signal just how receptive he is to the outcome anyway.]
I need you to get well.
[He keeps his lips against Tseng's as he says it, not because he thinks they'll be overheard and not because he's telling secrets but because there's something exquisite about shaping words against the press of Tseng's mouth, about making his saliva-slick lips glide over his and wet them, too.]
You see, there are better reasons to keep you in my bed than all this.
[He wonders, idly, if the doctors will see an uptick in Tseng's heart rate when they check the readings later. Will they see that it leapt up and began to pound, just now? Fuck, does he ever hope so.]
I meant it when I told you to get your hopes up. Get well, and you can have them. Reclaim the strength to put your hands on me and I'll let you touch me however you want.
![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
→ sin city's cold and empty, no one's around to judge me;
The old man has always liked to test him in cruel little ways like this, even since before he'd presented as the family disappointment. His father's flagrant biases on the basis of designation have never been a secret, not within the family and not to anyone outside of it; he's been told how alphas rule by birthright, and Shinra alphas most of all, for as long as he can remember. One can't even be considered for executive rank in the Shinra Corporation without sufficient documentation proving alpha status, and with all of the testing required to be performed internally, there's no chance whatsoever of hiding once one reaches that lofty a position.
Maybe that's why he's the vice president with no executive authority whatsoever. They pretend it's because he doesn't want it. His father withholds it because he'll never be worthy of it.
There's very little about Rufus that's truly private, or so his father likes to think. That's what he lets him think, anyway — trading the indignity of having his medical records and health data delivered in sealed envelopes to the old man's desk in exchange for the little things he is able to hide. He knows his heats are tracked and monitored. There's always a convenient excuse ready and waiting, a business trip or a personal getaway, to hide the days he spends shivering and aching in the dark and quiet of his nests. He loathes it, but he plays his part: learns to snarl like an alpha, learns to mask his scent, learns to perform when there are eyes on him in exchange for the luxury of being left alone otherwise.
It's a twisted sort of irony, that his next heat aligns so perfectly with his next birthday.
That should've made it all the easier to make an excuse. Let him run away on some personal vacation, jet-setting off to Shiva-knows-where, spending Daddy's gil with abandon in celebration of another year of life. Then the invitation had shown up, two weeks in advance, and his expression had gone as cold as his blood — that to show his satisfaction with his only son and heir, his proud alpha father would be throwing a gala in his honor, set for the very day of his birth. And of course, featuring him as the man of the hour, the one everyone would want to see — and who no one would leave alone.
It's a test, of course. A warning delivered in implication. Another year older, another year closer to potentially earning his rightful place at the head of the company — but only if he plays by the rules, only if he performs as expected. A Shinra alpha is what everyone will be expecting at that gala, and that's who will show up — or else.
And that's who does show up, for hours upon hours. Rufus Shinra, the perfect Shinra alpha. Rufus Shinra, whose clothes don't abrade like sandpaper on his hidden heated skin because alphas aren't oversensitive, who smirks and bares teeth instead of his throat. Rufus Shinra, who isn't overwhelmed by the commingling scents of all the alphas in the room, the heady musk, the spice and sandalwood and leather and pine so strong that he aches to purr for their attention. Rufus Shinra, having the time of his life on the day of his birth, rather than being enmeshed in his own personal private hell.
It's close to midnight when his eyes start wandering in ways he can't quite help, the combination of social exhaustion and alcohol and heat and sleepiness making his eyes and his thoughts drift to the way the guests stand, fleetingly considering the knots that might be hiding beneath the tailoring. He lingers a little too long in conversations, a little too flushed beneath the skin; he's been drinking all night, so no one thinks much of it, but fuck, it should be illegal for Reeve Tuesti to smell so good, to make him shudder from the clasp of the congratulatory hand on his shoulder. He wants to sit down, but if he sits he'll want to curl up in the plush cushions of the tastefully assembled furniture, will rub his cheek against it and he can't do that while they're watching, everyone's watching, his father is watching —
It occurs to him that he hasn't seen Tseng in what feels like forever, in the same moment that Reno pulls the fire alarm.
Everyone startles, looking for signs of smoke or fire, so no one sees the way leather-clad fingertips touch against his elbow from behind, or the way he shivers all over from the touch. The nightmarish screeching drowns out all but the loudest of astonished cries; no one hears the damning trill that rumbles in the back of his throat as his instincts all come alight with alpha. No one would be surprised that he wobbles as he's all but pulled off his feet in the direction of the VIP emergency exit; who wouldn't be, when being hustled out of such a venue by the Turks?
He just barely manages to keep his cries smothered in his throat until they've escaped to the sanctuary of the narrow stairwell, but once the door slams closed behind them, he can't keep them from spilling out and echoing off the cinderblock walls.]
Tseng.
[Alpha, his body whines, hot and aching and already growing wet from the maddening desperation, the need for scent and satisfaction and bite. It should have been Rude doing this and it would have been so much worse if he had, no scent, no sanctuary, alpha alpha alpha and his eyes all but roll back with it, the wanting, the need.
They're too far from home. He needs to hold on. And yet all he can do, all he can think, is that it's too many steps to go after the night that he's had, too much to bear, when his body is ready to give out and sell out to anything willing to give him a knot.]
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he has also studiously ignored the way that every one of rufus’ carefully-controlled heats has triggered a corresponding rut in him—partly because it would be inconvenient to think about, and partly because tseng isn’t supposed to be an alpha, just the same way rufus isn’t supposed to be an omega.
the turks are all betas by regulation—more neutral, easier to control, not influenced by pesky things like hormones and scents and territorial instincts. since he was fifteen years old tseng has been hiding his nature, suppressing his pheromones and quashing all of the annoyances of his biological imperative: the desire to defend what he thinks of as his, the desire to mate, the desire to protect. he’s a good little beta, for all that the company is concerned, with falsified health records to match, and he’s been a good little beta for half of his life, toeing the line.
except, as it turns out, where rufus is concerned.
having tripped the alarm, reno rushes off, accompanied by elena, to usher the president to safety. there will be a car with bulletproof glass windows, and a circuitous route back home that will keep them occupied for some time. tseng, for his part, puts his hand at rufus’ elbow, his grip just this side of too tight, and pushes him out into the stairs that lead to the helipad on the roof.
it’s a fucking miracle none of the alphas at this party clocked the reality of the situation. tseng doesn’t know how they couldn’t—rufus’ heat is pouring off him in waves, his body too loose and his eyes glassy and bright, the scent of the wetness between his thighs bursting across tseng’s tongue like fruit, tart and sweet. ]
Sir. [ it was a terrible idea, making rufus come to this party, a risky move even for the president. and look at rufus now, so strung out on his own need that he’s practically panting for it.
tseng takes his face in both hands and imbues his voice with the command of an alpha—enough, he hopes, to break through the haze of rufus’ desire without either startling him or, even more dangerously, making him present himself to tseng. ] Sir, look at me. One flight of stairs, then the helicopter. Do you understand?
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He'd have more room to be proud of it right now, if he weren't out of his mind with stress and the rising simmer of his heat-induced arousal, the latter made exponentially worse because of the demands of the former. And even Tseng's presence doesn't alleviate the stress, not precisely, but it does focus it; rather than all the competing scents and pressures, now there's only the one, familiar and rich and sharp as amber.
The hands on his face draw him a little way out of his haze; the command makes his heart skip and his pulse jump, pupils dilating as he focuses in on Tseng's face, still a little dreamy but far from drifting as he'd been before.]
Don't call me "sir".
[It's rare that he uses his omega vocalizations — his trills, his purrs, his wails. He's conditioned his throat to accept the gravel of snarling and force in its place. But Tseng isn't just any alpha — and not his alpha, but his, and an alpha — and the nature he's been suppressing all night rears its ruthless head, a little smile curling like paper lit aflame as his focus on Tseng's face solidifies.
And he purrs.
Thick, full, rumbling, damning, with his eyes dark and simmering with heat and locked on Tseng's, the sound fills the stairwell like a reward: you're a good alpha, aren't you, so strong, so good, protecting little old me.]
And scent me first.
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for a moment, tseng considers fighting it. he’s very good at resisting his alpha nature; he might be able to hold himself back like a good beta would, to take his hands off rufus’ neck and guide him up to the helicopter and take him back to shinra tower to ride out the rest of his heat in peace and quiet. he could probably do it, if he put enough effort into it.
but before he even gathers the motivation to try, there’s already an alpha’s growl reverberating in harmony with the sound of rufus’ purring. it takes tseng a moment to realize it’s coming from him, and a moment longer to realize it means rufus has won.
he swallows down his growl, but it’s still there in his voice when he says, ] Rufus.
[ tseng’s nails curl against the back of rufus’ neck, sharp and possessive. they’ve been dancing around this for what feels like an eon, ever since rufus came to tseng to tell him he knew tseng’s secret; it’s felt dangerous before, but never quite like this. never like tseng is one delicious omega trill away from sinking his teeth into rufus’ nape.
one thing at a time.
tseng keeps his scent suppressed the same way rufus does, with a careful combination of colognes and patches. it works for daily life; it does not, as it turns out, work when faced with an omega going into heat, an omega that tseng’s nature is trying to claim as his territory, his omega. his scent spills from him just as hot and wild as rufus’ does. tseng’s wrists brush against the throbbing pulse in rufus’ throat, and his scent lingers there, clinging to rufus’ overheated skin like the shimmer of oil across the surface of water.
tseng wants to kiss rufus so badly his mouth aches with it, but they only have so much time, and tseng only has so much restraint. ]
Upstairs. [ tseng swallows hard. his mouth waters. ] Now.
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Because it wasn't just a power play, the demand for Tseng's scent; of course there'd been some thrill of authority to it, some triumph in provoking the reaction he'd desired, but once it's laid it's like Rufus can finally breathe again amidst the fog of desperation and longing. It quiets the burn, or at the very least creates a firebreak around the blaze; the worst part of his heat isn't the lack of control but how it makes him feel like only half of what he's meant to be, a fractional thing thrashing and begging to be whole again.
But not this time. Alpha. Someone wants him so bad they would kill for it. Someone wants him like his father never has.]
One flight of stairs, then the helicopter.
[There's an almost hypnotic quality to the cadence of it, still lost in the euphoria of the scent clinging to his parched, desperate senses. It feels so good, so soothing to be compliant, just this once — to not have to fight tooth and claw in the other direction with fangs and nails that never came naturally.]
And then...?
[But he's already moving, buoyed on the force behind the word now, the promise of what he might get once they make their escape.]
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but tseng the alpha, the one looking down into the liquid storm of rufus' eyes, the one spreading his own scent all over rufus' throat;that tseng knows the truth, which is that between an alpha and an omega, it's the omega with all the power.
tseng is strong. tseng is a leader, is determined. but all rufus had to do was purr, and tseng wanted to get on his knees and do whatever he asked. all he has to do is get rufus upstairs to the helicopter, and if rufus purred again, if rufus so much as looked at him the right way, tseng would forget his own directive in service to rufus' desires.
an omega raised as an alpha, twice as strong and twice as stubborn as anyone else on the executive board. smart, and clever, and wickedly sharp-tongued, with a mind for detail and analysis and a strategic streak as wide as it is deep… and on top of that, who could bring the entire board to their knees on his whim?
no wonder the president is afraid of him. no wonder tseng would follow him to the ends of the earth. ]
And then I take you home.
[ rufus turns away, and the spell of his gaze is broken. it's a small blessing, though, because as he turns to walk up the stairs in front of tseng, tseng's senses are immediately overwhelmed by the scent of rufus' heat, the salt zing of his sweat and the tart sweetness of his slick.
he swallows hard, his teeth aching with how badly he wants to push rufus against the wall and shove his tongue inside him. ]
Rude is piloting. [ not that it matters; the cockpit is separated from the rest of the helicopter by a bulletproof glass panel that stays up unless rufus says to lower it, and rude would never be able to hear anything over the sound of the rotors anyway.
tseng feels insane. he feels drunk, not quite able to string words together right. he manages, his voice tight with arousal: ] We'll see about… taking that edge off.
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It's good that it's Rude. All implications of designation aside — he truly is about the most perfect beta Rufus has ever laid eyes on, a model Turk in that particular respect — Rude keeps his eyes forward and his mouth shut, and sees only what he's intended to, nothing more and nothing less. Rude won't detect the heat rolling off of him in waves. Rude won't crash the helicopter from taking his hands off the controls to frantically jerk himself with one and milk his knot with the other.
Tseng might, were he left to it. Fantasies of certain death have no right to be so utterly arousing.]
Only you.
[There's a throaty tremor in the assertion, a faint but telltale wobble as he forces the purr out of his tone and smothers it back like he's done all his life; it would be neater, imperceptible, most of the time, but he's far from his right mind right now and it's close enough for hand grenades, regardless.]
No one touches me but you, Tseng. No one.
[It could be benign. It's supposed to be. But there's a vow of sorts in it, too — a claim staked, a choice made. Tseng's scent is full and bold at the sides of his throat, for all that it won't last long and will need to be refreshed until he can do it more properly at home. He'd sooner bite off the fingers of anyone who reached for him right now, save Tseng; not even his own Turks would be safe from it, bristling and agitated as he is with the need to be properly satiated.
His feet hit the top step; he blindly lifts his foot as if there might be one more and it comes down harder than he means it to, forced to drop an extra six inches or so until it finds level ground again. If he weren't gripping the railing, he might well have stumbled; as it is, he just uses the momentum to throw his weight into the heavy door that leads onto the helipad, making small adjustments to draw his movements back into the realm of tipsy as opposed to over-aroused as he makes for their waiting escape.]
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incidentally, this is also how tseng realizes that there's no way he's getting rufus back to headquarters without also getting him off. he's already this far gone, and they're not even trapped together in the helicopter yet—what more havoc will that enclosed space wreak on his senses? ]
No. [ forcing the growl from his voice, the same way rufus has forced the purr out of his, tseng manages a steady, even response. if his voice is made tight by the sheer intensity of his arousal, he'll thank rufus not to mention it. ] I would—
[ he inhales sharply. exhales slowly. admits, ] I would tear their throats out if they tried.
[ there used to be other alphas, before. not for a while. tseng hated every second of bringing them up to rufus' nests. partly because of what he knew came after, but mostly because he would inevitably end up locked in his own office, fucking the circle of his hand and thinking furiously about rufus pinned beneath another alpha's weight.
they push out onto the helipad on top of the building and the helicopter is there, waiting. rude is already in the pilot's seat, and he gives tseng a thumbs up through the glass as tseng puts his hand on rufus' back and urges him to duck, to make his way under the circling rotors to climb into the waiting bird.
the door slides shut; the whir of the helicopter changes as rude lifts them up, away from the rooftop.
tseng looks across the enclosed space at rufus. already it feels like every corner of the helicopter is soaked in rufus' scent, and tseng can tell that his is flooding out to meet it, to claim this place as his territory and this omega as his omega. ]
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Something imperceptible shifts when the struts leave the ground. Suddenly the helicopter isn't so much a vehicle as it is exactly what his instincts are begging for — a small, secure place with reasonably comfortable places to sit and lounge, full of all the right scents and no prying eyes. Rude's will be forward; Tseng's are on him, and he can't seem to stop wetting his lips, chest on the verge of heaving as he sucks in breath after breath of Tseng's scent, knowing full well it's making his own need worse even as it calms his raging instinct to whine and wail.]
Tell me again.
[His gaze drifts up to capture and hold Tseng's, his blue eyes stormy with barely-suppressed desire; but for the way he's gripping the armrests of his seat and has his legs crossed at the thighs instead of at the knee, he's doing a surprisingly good job of restraining himself from what is almost definitely the urge to lunge across the space between them and throw himself into Tseng's lap.]
How you would kill for me.
[A very normal topic of conversation between the VP and his director of the Turks. Definitely.]
What you thought about, the whole time we were at that fucking party.
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a shivering thread of desire stitches its way up the vertebrae of tseng's spine. he feels his mouth flood wet, and swallows hard against it, his fingers digging in to his own armrests as well. ]
You're wearing my scent. [ and he can say it was practical until the chocobos come home, can say it was a necessity to get rufus out of a perilous situation, but deep inside tseng knows the truth: he scented rufus because he wanted to. because rufus wanted him to. that it was practical was just a happy coincidence.
tseng holds rufus' eyes. he feels cast adrift in the storm of them, only tenuously bound by the tenets of boss – subordinate interactions. the wolf in him wants to bend rufus over one of these chairs and— ]
You know what I would do to anyone who laid a hand on you.
[ to anyone who dared to touch what's his.
it's a losing proposition to think that he can stay in this helicopter, drenched in rufus' scent, and not lay a hand on him—but at the very least, the followup question buys tseng another minute before he gives in to his baser desires. ]
At the party? [ he takes a deep breath, which is a mistake. ] I thought you were incandescent. More alpha than half the alphas in the room.
[ the rich, liquid amber of tseng's gaze says: i still wanted to pull you into a supply closet and fuck you stupid. ]
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I'm wearing your claim.
[The cadence of his remark is a perfect match for Tseng's, right up until that last word. It carries something of that hypnotic quality to it, the same as when he'd spoken earlier in the stairwell — the call-and-response of following his chosen alpha's lead, dancing on the outskirts of obedience without ever quite submitting to it. But Tseng says scent and Rufus says claim, and in practice they might as well be one and the same, but for the affirmation that the latter offers up like a reward.
Claimed. His. Unambiguously so.
Rufus's legs are already uncrossing as the weight of it hangs in the air between them, as his pupils blow wide and dark and his hands on the armrests are suddenly more about giving him the leverage to move out of his seat than to keep him secured in it.]
And I know what you want to do to me.
[He lets out a slow, shuddering breath. The next one he sucks in is rich with all the scent markers of Tseng's imminent rut — the rut he caused, he must have, the one triggered especially for him — and it finally proves too much even for Rufus's iron control; he lunges from his seat and into Tseng's lap, straddling his hips with a knee on either side as he drapes his arms about Tseng's shoulders and shoves his nose against his neck to pant hot and heavy against his skin.]
— it hurts, Tseng, it hurts — make it stop — make it better —
[And maybe it is, in its way, as manipulative as when he'd purred to bend his alpha to his will — but there's a note of honesty in it, too, glimmering behind the fractures in his control; it's giving out, he's going mad, and all the alpha conditioning in the world can't extinguish the force of his need as it rages like a wildfire in his blood.]
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he pulls rufus' dress shirt free of his belt in the back and slides his hands up underneath coat and shirt alike, palms pressed to the sway of his lower back, skin against skin. tseng's nose finds the curve of rufus' throat right where his scent is strongest, and he breathes in, lets it wash over him—spice and wet and sweet, summer humid, a burst of flavor on tseng's tongue and a taste in the back of his throat.
how did he ever think he stood a chance?
tseng gives up entirely on keeping his voice neutral. he brings a hand up to rufus' neck, coaxing him back from tseng's throat, and when he says, ] Come here. [ his voice is rich and reverberating with command, with protection, with the certainty that as long as rufus is in tseng's arms, no harm will come to him.
he will make it stop. he'll make it better. all tseng has to do is get rufus home.
as rufus moves back, tseng shifts forward and catches rufus' mouth in a thorough, needy kiss. he finds that rufus tastes just as sweet as he smells, and tseng makes a noise against his mouth, deep alpha satisfaction as his tongue slides against rufus' in a kiss meant to claim and conquer.
one hand drops between them, into the barely-there space between their bodies, to work one-handed at the buckle of rufus' belt, then at the button and zipper—every one of tseng's instincts wants him to just tear the fabric apart, but the very last of his control tells him not to. rufus still needs to leave this helicopter looking presentable, needs to stay that way at least until they have some privacy. ]
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It feels so good to be — not weak, he can't bear to think of it as weak even when it's only Tseng to bear witness. But to be something other than fierce and domineering, something that aligns with the compulsions of his designation rather than subjugating them...to be precious, cherished, cradled, claimed...
There's a shyness, almost, to the way his fingers run over Tseng's shoulders and back, how they find their way into the thick silken strands of his hair and weave it through the spaces between the knuckles. That, too, is a luxury he's rarely afforded — the chance to be hesitant at all, to ask questions with his touches instead of making demands with his words. His fingertips go higher yet, running lightly along the back of Tseng's neck above the pristine tailored collar of his shirt, feeling out the nape just below the hairline as if to ask, is this all right? Do you like this? Do you like my touch, like I like yours?
He pants against Tseng's mouth, still burning but distracted pleasantly by the feeling of hands on him, pacified by the glide of skin on skin. And for a second, just a second, there's nothing in the whole of the world except his own desperate desire to make Tseng happy, not just to hear another of those rich full sounds but to earn it.]
Yes, alpha.
[He lifts his hips slightly, back arching as he makes a little more room for the slide of Tseng's hand, his eyes stormy and dark as he brushes their noses together, presses their foreheads flush. With so little space between them, he can feel the heat radiating off his own skin and washing over Tseng's; a sudden sensation of slippery-damp makes him shudder, abruptly acutely aware of his slick beginning to accumulate to the point that he won't be able to ignore it much longer. The horrible emptiness will come next, he knows; the full-body hollowness in desperate need of being filled, the high-burn agitation that only submission and a knot will soothe.
He wants it. He wants it so bad that he tilts his chin down and licks over Tseng's mouth, a faintly inquisitive trill winding out from the back of his throat.]
You can have me. You can have all of me, just give me your knot.
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Rufus. [ the hand at the back of rufus' neck tightens, instinctive in response to the powerful wash of desire that rufus' words send through him. tseng wants to knot him, wants it with the depth of a biological imperative. he wants it so bad he can taste it, but the last shred of his human consciousness knows that it'll be minutes, only, before they land, and if he knots rufus it won't be mere minutes before they're through.
so he swallows hard, despite the low growl building in the back of his throat, the one that gives away exactly how affected he is. takes a slow breath and pushes his hand into rufus' underwear, past his cock between his thighs. ]
You'll have my knot. [ there's so much promise in the words that rufus doesn't need his alpha intonation to believe it, but the intonation is there, regardless. ] Once I get you home, you'll have everything you want.
[ once i get you home being the operative, here. and for now, tseng can give him something else: the slide of a gentle touch along the thin sensitive skin behind his balls, up to his hole, where his slick is making a mess of him for tseng to run his fingertips through.
despite tseng's best efforts to be careful, there's some barely-restrained urgency to his movements as he slips his middle finger into the slick, wet heat of rufus' body. he feels the muscle clench around it and his entire body throbs in answer, a flash of white heat through every single one of his nerve endings. ]
Fuck. [ tseng begins to move his finger. the sound of the helicopter is just barely too loud for tseng to hear the noises his finger makes, but he can imagine.
he presses his mouth to rufus' throat and murmurs something quietly enough that rufus will be able to feel the words vibrate, but not hear them spoken aloud, then curls his finger against the smooth shape of rufus' prostate and rubs against it purposefully. ]
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I want it now —
[Petty, spoiled thing that he is, his fingers scrabble against the reassurance of Tseng's steady shoulders, like grasping at him will somehow make him change his mind. It's a petulance that lasts only until Tseng's fingers find their way into his pants and glide to his entrance, giving him the gift of girth and stretch that still isn't what he wants, but that still satisfies the craving simmering in his blood.
Tseng's middle finger presses inside and Rufus drives his hips back almost instantly to meet it, instincts singing, eyes glassy with heat and need; on instinct, his body tightens and recedes around it again and again, as if to taunt Tseng with the feeling of precisely how it'd milk him if he would only compromise his resolve and comply.]
Ngh — I need it, I need it —
[His head falls back, baring the whole of his throat to Tseng's attentions — a damning impulse for a so-called alpha and a Shinra both — as he tries to take Tseng's finger deeper, choking back a whine when it finds his prostate and stimulates it in a way that leaves him shaking. There's no teasing, not like this; it is, he recognizes through the cloudy haze of heat-intoxication, what he needs, because Tseng knows better what he needs than he does, right now.
It's a reassuring thought; his scent sweetens commensurate with it, even more heady and rich than it'd been even before his moment of fear had taken him earlier. His alpha. His Tseng. Safe and here and safe, feeding his pleasure, showing him how he'll survive this.]
Tseng. Tseng, m'gonna — I'll, I'll come —
[Maybe that's what Tseng wants, or maybe he wants him to wait for that, too. But either way, he knows he wants to be told. Told to endure it, told to come — that belongs to his alpha, too, for all that his penchant for being a brat might want to pretend otherwise.]
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I know you do, baby. [ it's an endearment he would never use, not ever, except for the intensity of rufus' need and the alpha instincts roaring in the back of his mind. he wants to reassure, wants rufus to know that it's only a delay, not a refusal—the way tseng feels right now, how could rufus possibly doubt that tseng would give him any thing he could possibly want as soon as they're within the safety of his room?
with a note of raw honesty and real possessiveness in his voice, tseng says, ] I'm not letting anyone else see you like that.
[ rufus is beautiful, a creature of need and instinct as he fucks himself back on tseng's finger, his body tightening and relaxing in rhythmic waves around the intrusion. and if he's this gorgeous when it's only tseng's finger inside him, what is he going to look like when tseng's knot is buried inside him? there's no way in hell tseng will ever be able to let anyone else see it—not even a beta like rude, who would absolutely be the one to see it if tseng were to knot rufus right here.
as a distraction, tseng slips another finger inside rufus and resumes stroking his prostate, not hard enough to ache but certainly enough for rufus to feel it. he senses the way rufus' scent sweetens in response and feels relieved for it, to know that rufus can read his intentions—that he knows, however instinctively, that tseng knows what he needs.
and what he needs is this: to be touched, to be treasured, to be made to come with two of his alpha's (his alpha's) fingers buried inside him. ]
Come for me. [ tseng's voice is a growl of command, rumbling against rufus' throat. ] Let me feel you.
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He yowls, thick and filthy and low, and shudders all over like his climax has been torn from him, cum flooding his trousers as his slick coats Tseng's fingers and streams down the length of his hand. The world goes as white as his clothes; for the duration, scent becomes the dominant stimulus, and all he can breathe, all he can taste, is Tseng.
Baby. Shiva, even the echoes of it sound filthy in his memory of Tseng's voice, almost out of place, almost unprecedented — but it rolls over his fleeting afterglow like a long lick of a tongue and all he can think is, for me, for me. He's no one's baby, no one's darling, no one's omega, but Tseng's.
He's Tseng's. He's Tseng's, he's Tseng's, he's Tseng's.
The reprieve, he knows, will be a brief one at best; even through the languid lethargy of orgasm, his heat-driven arousal still burns like a distant threat. But there's space, at least, to shift and put his head down onto Tseng's shoulder, melting against him like his climax turned his very bones liquid, a reflexive purr already vibrating in the back of his throat.]
Taste it.
[His purr intensifies, dreamy-maddening; he's hot and filthy and wrecked, his scalp beaded with sweat and his hair falling down out of its careful style from the damp and the exertions both, and beneath him he can just feel how hard Tseng is, how much he wants him, the knot that's for him soon enough.]
S'for you. The others...I never let them taste me. Only you.
[His breath hitches; for a moment, his purr goes softer, more of a trill.]
I wanted you. I want you.
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another problem: tseng will also never be able to let another alpha see rufus when he comes.
he's a vision, pleasure knitted into every line and cord of muscle standing out against his skin, in the line of his throat and the wet of his mouth and the quiver of his thighs as he spills into his own trousers. his cum lands hot and sticky on the inside of tseng's wrist, and his slick gushes down over the back of his hand, soaking his trousers beyond salvaging. (they'll have to be dry cleaned. tseng can't think that far in advance.) he fingers rufus through it, until the tension in his muscles melts away and is replaced by sweet lethargy, his frame going languid and soft where he leans against tseng. ]
Just like that. [ good boy, tseng doesn't say.
he lets his fingers slip from between rufus' thighs, but he doesn't wipe them immediately, and it's a good thing he doesn't, because rufus is purring around words that are almost shocking in how filthy and arousing they are. not telling tseng to taste it—although yes, that too—but the fact that he wants tseng to taste him, when he's never let anyone else do the same... that he wanted tseng, that he wants tseng, that his voice is made sweet by those gentle vocalizations but the words are, tseng thinks, no less true for it...
he lifts his hand, right where rufus can see, and licks along his own wrist and up the backs of his fingers in one long swipe. his cum tastes sharp and tangy and a little bitter, like lemon zest and sun; his slick is sweet and tart and makes tseng's teeth ache with how badly he wants to turn rufus on his belly and shove his tongue inside him.
he brings his cleaner hand up to nudge rufus' chin, tilting him up to look at tseng. like this, they're only inches apart. ]
Would you like to taste yourself? [ on tseng's tongue, he means, where their mouths are so close they might touch. ]
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A knuckle slips beneath his chin; his eyes go glassy in an instant, loving — craving — the submission implicit in it. It's the smallest things that drive him so desperately out of his mind, the ones Tseng is normally far too restrained to indulge. Touching him like he owns him, like it's his right to make him look here or there — it's something Rufus could never tolerate asking for, yet aches for nevertheless.
A little overwhelmed, he resorts to nodding slightly, unable to collect enough presence of mind to find words that won't just dissolve into begging. Tseng — Tseng wouldn't make him beg, likely, wouldn't lord the opportunity to hear it over him and demand it as a condition of his care. Some alphas would. Tseng would kill any who so much as thought of trying.
It's not that he wants to taste himself, not exactly. But he wants to be kissed, and he wants Tseng's mouth, and he wants to give Tseng what he wants — and thinks that maybe this is the only way he'll let himself ask for it, is by offering it to him instead. Letting him choose, because of who they are, and not just what they are.]
And when...when you get me home.
[They're so close, so close that he knows Tseng can't help but breathe in his panting, that the very air between them is shared just as much as everything else.]
Want to taste you. Want you to let me suck your cock.
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the kiss is deep from the get-go, a needy, desperate thing. tseng licks into rufus' mouth like he wants to taste every inch of it, like every moan rufus has ever bitten back might be there under his tongue, sweet as candy. he doesn't need rufus to beg, would never think to make him—if rufus begs it will always be of his own accord, because he feels safe in asking tseng for what he needs. if anything, really, it feels like tseng who should be begging, as wrapped around rufus' little finger as he feels right now.
when they pull apart, the wet of tseng's mouth betrays his otherwise collected appearance, as does the flush of color high in his cheekbones. ]
Anything you want, baby. Anything.
[ it's a promise tseng fully intends to keep, too. no empty words, no false vows just to tell rufus what he wants to hear. tseng is, he realizes, absolutely and irrevocably fucked—but he can't really find it in himself to care.
the sound of the rotors outside changes slightly as they begin to descend toward shinra tower, and tseng presses another brief, firm kiss to rufus' mouth. ]
Let me clean you up. [ he wants to call rufus sir, to get himself back into the mindspace where tseng is bodyguard and rufus is vice president, but with rufus looking so languid and warm in his lap like this, he can't quite manage it. tseng tugs rufus' pants up again and re-fastens the button, does up the zip, straightens out a few of the wrinkles caused by their grinding. ] I'll take you straight to your bedroom. Rude will stay with the helicopter. This late, there shouldn't be more than the skeleton crew of security, but we'll need to be mindful until we're behind closed doors.
[ his tone makes it obvious: tseng is saying this as much for his own benefit as for rufus'. ]
Is that clear? [ a pause, and then the faintest smile, and tseng lifts his hands again so he can rub his scent against rufus' throat. ] Sir.
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Letting Tseng put him back together is, in its way, its own kind of submission. His hands are careful and soft, for all that they're precise in never straying too far into temptation. He would like, he thinks, to lie boneless in thick blankets or a bath and bid Tseng to run his hands all over him, tending to his need for touch as though he were doing maintenance on his favorite gun.
And then, as if having read his mind, Tseng's wrists brush against his neck once, twice — his senses flood with it, that claim renewed, and all of a sudden acting the part of a perfect Shinra doesn't seem so insurmountable when he's doing it at the direction of the alpha who loves him, instead of the one who loathes him.
(He needs so badly to come, for all that the inside of his trousers are still soaked from the last one. He needs to be shoved down into a mattress and held there by the hair while he screams and howls and takes a dick up his ass until every last bit of his own rebellious body has been beaten into euphoric submission with it.)
What he does do is close his eyes, and breathe Tseng's heady scent, and remember the feeling of pulling back his lip as if to show the fangs he's never had.]
Pity for you.
[It's more coherent than he's been for most of the ride, slurred and distracted but still painfully clear how he's forcing the whimper back, how he's dropping his register lower to force it smooth and confident when he isn't.]
Having to — to walk two steps behind the whole w-way in.
[He laughs, and the first time it breaks into a noise that treads close to a sob; the second time, it holds steady without cracking, rumbling with dry and biting amusement. When he finally manages to open his eyes, the blues are glazed and glassy, but he's — put together enough to make it, at least, and Tseng's smile is the slightest ray of sunlight through the tempestuous storm.]
Try to — keep the salivating to a minimum. Director.
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...probably easy.
tseng watches as his scent does what he hoped it would, shoring up the walls of rufus' self-control and allowing him to slip back into the skin of rufus shinra, the alpha heir apparent to the company empire. after so many years working together, tseng has seen rufus act the alpha more times than he could ever hope to count—now, for the first time, it looks... odd. not wrong—rufus wears alpha status like a second skin, perfect—but like a double exposure. rufus as an alpha, and then the ghost of rufus the omega, needy and beautiful. ]
I'm prepared to rise to the challenge, sir. [ although there's a ticking muscle in tseng's jaw as it clenches that suggests he's actually not, not quite. walking two steps behind rufus all the way into the building, being forced to look at his ass, to smell his heat and not touch—and besides that, the way rufus's laugh sounds so much like a sob of desire that it makes tseng want to shove him down and fuck him until he screams—
it's a good thing his jacket is cut so long, but even so, tseng shifts surreptitiously to readjust the way the hard length of his cock sits in his trousers. ]
I can make no promises, however, about the state of my saliva.
[ the helicopter touches down on the landing pad. the rotors begin to wind down, their roar dulling to a whine. tseng looks up to meet rufus' gaze, unhesitating, his own eyes full of promise. ]
Are you ready?
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(It's just easier, like this, to do it for someone who can be proud of him. Who wants him. Who might even...who might spoil him, maybe, once they're safe and alone. Again, he imagines the decadence of that particular fantasy. Again, he shivers from want of it.)
He leans forward one last time, bumping their foreheads together before rubbing his cheek against Tseng's, like he's returning the courtesy of being scented with a subtle, pacifying gesture of his own.]
I'm tired, Director. That fire alarm was a blessing in disguise; the best birthday gift I can imagine right now is to make for my quarters and sleep.
[He closes his eyes. Breathes in slowly. Alpha. Confident. Strong. Ruthless.
He can do it. He can do it, but he's not going to be able to hold it for long, and so he moves as rapidly as he can, dragging himself out of Tseng's arms with a last mournful whine before making for the door of the helicopter and signaling Rude through the window to get it open for him in perfect cadence, so he doesn't have to pause even an instant in the smooth trajectory of his departure.
His legs feel like jelly the moment he lands on them. He's so sure he's going to wobble or stumble. But the night air is cold and devoid of the thick and drowsy aroma of his scent commingling with Tseng's, and it drives him to get one foot in front of the other, drawing up the ache of his heat into his chest and alchemizing it into powerful annoyance in its place.
Security, however light it may be at this time of night, is expecting him; evidently, reports of the fire alarm and evacuation made it back to the building in advance. It helps, because it means they all keep a wide berth from the clearly annoyed (clearly, clearly he's annoyed) Shinra heir as he storms back to his rooms after a festive night cut short. It means he has every reason to sweep past, to not bother to wait for doors to be opened for him. Let him be moody and frustrated and prickly; there are plenty of other excuses for it, none of which let on anything about the truth.
Just a little farther, he reminds himself as he crosses the foyer, hyperaware of Tseng's eyes on him, the hair on the back of his neck standing up with the weight of it. Just a little farther and Shiva he's not even going to make it to his bed, not even going to make it to his room, if he makes it three steps in the door before howling to be fucked against the wall it's going to be a damned miracle.
But he'll make it. He'll make it.
Just a little farther.]
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it is, tseng thinks, a minor miracle that they make it into the building. two steps behind rufus and to his left, tseng follows him through the lobby doors and past the flustered-looking security guards, who he dismisses with a curt nod; down the stairs towards rufus' private residence, past an administrative assistant with a neat bob and sensible heels who looks at tseng, opens her mouth, and then wisely thinks better of it and closes it again. ]
Clear the vice president's schedule through Tuesday.
[ tseng's voice comes out blessedly steady, devoid of the alpha growl that's been simmering there all evening. the assistant manages a clipped yes, sir! and then turns on her heel to go back the way she came, and tseng continues on, lengthening his stride to keep up with the pace rufus sets.
he has never been so aware of every inch of his body. a bead of sweat forms between his shoulderblades and runs slowly down his spine; his cock throbs with every step, trapped as it is along the crease of his thigh in an effort to stop it being patently obvious to everyone they pass. he feels feverish, not like his skin is overwarm but like his core hass heated up, a furnace inside him driving his steps.
just a little farther.
down the hallway toward rufus' rooms. tseng's gaze drops unbidden to his ass, perfect, hidden beneath the layers of fabric that comprise his formalwear. at this distance his scent is nearly overwhelming, and it's only the long-worn habit of putting one foot in front of the other regardless of circumstance that keeps tseng walking, instead of pinning rufus to the wall to fuck him front of everyone.
in the end, he manages to hold back until the door swings shut behind him. the latch clicks into place, tseng reaches back to turn the deadbolt, and then before he's even really conscious of his actions he has rufus by the hips, turning him, pinning his back up against the wall so tseng can seal their mouths together in a thorough, punishing kiss. ]
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And he gives way — it feels so good to give way, here in the safety of his own quarters, where he can be as loud and as needy as he wants. They'd soundproofed the walls long ago on the excuse of company security, in case the vice president should need to conduct business within the comforts of his own rooms. Really it's so that he can howl as loud as he wants when he's got an alpha seeing to him — one of the few rare courtesies his father has ever shown him, not that he did it for his son's sake to begin with.]
Tseng!
[His legs leave the ground almost on instinct — one at first, testing, as he hooks it around Tseng's waist to help keep him close, then the other once he figures out that Tseng will hold him if he does it, will hold him up with nothing but the press of his body alone. His arms drape over Tseng's shoulders like it's a lover's embrace; the rest of their conduct is anything but saccharine, as his scent starts to flood the air unrestrained.
His nails, blunt though they are, shove down the back of Tseng's collar, beneath his coat and his shirt, looking for skin to dig into and mark. When he finally manages to drag himself away from the kiss far enough to talk, his eyes are dark and wild, unfocused with desire and desperation.]
Are you excited...?
[His lips are slick and wet from the force of the kiss; he licks at them, his mouth still open like he's expecting another to claim it at any moment.]
— To see how I look, hhh, when I take your knot?
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when rufus pulls back from the kiss, tseng drops his mouth to rufus' throat instead. his tongue drags over a bare stripe of skin at the base of his throat, just above his collarbone, and then tseng bites a bruise into the curve of his shoulder that will necessitate higher collars until it's gone. he wants to take rufus apart. he wants to strip him piece by piece until he learns exactly what makes him tick.
with some force of effort, tseng drags his face away from the intoxicating scent in the hollow of rufus' throat and manages a response. ]
Can't you tell? [ surely rufus can feel the heat and pressure of tseng's cock where it's right up against his ass. he shifts just right and the hot length of it rubs insistently along the curve of one cheek. ] I haven't stopped thinking about it since I smelled you.
[ by some miracle, tseng doesn't stumble when he pulls rufus away from the wall to carry him to the bedroom instead. whether they'll make it remains to be seen, truly, but at least tseng knows the way and at least for now it seems like his legs will hold them. ]
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[There are no words for how good it feels to be wrapped up in Tseng in that moment, with his heat raging and their mingling scents thick in the air and the freedom to be as loud as he wants — to not have to think about how he looks or acts or snarls, free to bare his throat to Tseng's attention and whine audibly as his teeth sink home into a mark that isn't going away anytime soon. It's dizzy and feverish and soon it feels like he's lost control of his limbs a bit, too insensible to move them with any sort of intent because he's so busy clinging and trilling and trying to get more of everything Tseng offers and then some.
Fuck, but his cock feels big when he grinds it against him, full and thick and just what he wants. He's had alpha studs before but he's never wanted like he wants this, panting and whimpering and convinced that there's nothing in the world that could possibly feel as good as Tseng will feel when he takes him — hells, he hasn't even come close to it yet and already he's certain of it beyond a shadow of every doubt.]
Don't stop. Don't stop thinking about me — !
[Tseng pulls them away from the wall, just takes hold of him and moves him because fuck, he's so strong — he hides it beneath those trim-tailored suits but pressed up against him, there's no hiding how it's all muscle underneath and fuck, he wants to trace each one with his tongue, taste his sweat, bite little omega claims of his own into his flesh — and he wraps around Tseng like it's the most natural thing in the world, purring audibly from the unparalleled pleasure of being held.]
My alpha. My Tseng. You're mine, too — mine, mine —
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he manages not to stumble as they make their way down the hall, but it's a close thing, especially when rufus presses his face to tseng's neck and lets him feel the vibration of one of those sweet little trills he keeps making in the back of his throat. he wants to dig his teeth into rufus. desire closes its fist around the base of his spine and pulls hard, makes it a minor miracle that tseng kicks the door of rufus' bedroom halfway closed before he deposits rufus onto the irresponsibly soft, large mattress of his bed.
tseng is on him again in an instant. his hands are steady as they work at the buttons and fastenings of rufus' clothes, his coat, the belts that hold it closed. he's wearing too much. tseng wants to dig his nails into the fabric and tear it to shreds, and it's only the barest recollection of expense reporting that stays his hand. ]
Tell me what you want. What you like.
[ tseng could figure it out, but he wants to hear it from the source—and besides that, he likes the tone of rufus' voice when he's trying to talk through his own desperation, how pitched and needy it gets, especially now that he has no reason to keep it modulated. ]
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For a second, he's lost in it; even the heady musk of Tseng's scent isn't enough to overpower the flood of relief that saturates him, rubbing his cheek against the cashmere comforter, the thousand-count sheets. This room, this bed, this nest smells like him, accentuated in the best possible way by his alpha's presence — and that's all there is, no competing influences, no unpleasant distractions.
It's why he doesn't help at all when Tseng reaches for his clothes, half because he's too far gone in the release of relief to even think of it, and half because it is what he wants. His alpha should get his hands on him, should pamper him so. At long, long last, the pieces are falling into place; finally there's rightness in his world, the long struggles set aside to make room for his reward.]
You, you, you.
[That's not helpful, and doesn't come close to addressing the question he's been pressed with, but this isn't offered up as an answer to Tseng's demand; quite the contrary, it's a reward for good behavior, praise for the lovely perfect alpha who delivered him into this bliss, who's seeing to his needs just like he's supposed to.
His eyes open a bit, dark as a stormy ocean beneath long lashes and half-lids, and another course of purring spills from his throat as Tseng's clever hands free him from the awful confines of his clothes, as the scent of his slick and his need fills the air more and more as the linen peels away.]
You said — your cock, I want your cock —
[His mouth falls open, soft and wet, tongue rolled out like a red carpet against his lower lip. Obscene. Inviting.]
Scent me — ah, mmmn — while you give it, give it to me —
→ and the pain comes in the long run;
his own blood is hot and sticky under his palm. tseng looks down at his feet on the marble floor of the foyer and sees his own red bootprints; he's bled down the entire front of his slacks. ]
I'm afraid one of you is going to have to clean up after me, [ he says, and then the world goes dark.
from there it's a lot of nothing. black. silence. sometimes less silence, interrupted by the steady beeping of machinery or the hushed and unintelligible sound of voices. often there's pain; even more often there's a kind of hazy numbness that overtakes him, leaves him floating in oblivion. more than once, there's a burst of white light in the corner of his vision that tseng knows, instinctively, to be the lifestream; just as many times, there's the instinct to turn away from it.
don't walk into the light, reno had joked once, about something entirely unrelated. tseng hadn't thought that he would ever need to take such advice so literally.
it isn't that he's afraid to die. tseng hasn't been afraid to die since he was thirteen, since he signed his life away in service to the general affairs division. but he knows, vaguely, in some indefinable way, that he still has something left to do. something left to say. he can't quite grasp it; it has no fixed form, no definable edge. it's an impression more than it is a fact, even. but it's enough to keep tseng holding on for as long as he can, no matter how many times the blankness threatens to overwhelm him.
once or twice, he floats closer to the surface of consciousness. the first time, perhaps, when he comes out of surgery; he thinks something like closed me up, then, and then sinks back down into nothingness. the second time, perhaps, when he's moved to hq to recover, where the beeping is less obnoxious and the bed is much softer, but he still can't bring himself to open his eyes. he can hear the hushed voices of those around him, like listening to someone speak from underwater, but his eyes stay closed, and soon the voices cease.
little by little, he feels his body start to put itself back together. it hurts. it's okay. the hurt means he's still alive. ]
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They'd tried to insist on keeping Tseng in the medical wing, once he'd gotten out of surgery. It was the better place for him, they'd said — round-the-clock care, Mr. President, they'd assured him. He's in good hands with our staff, they'd told him. But the medical staff hadn't been there in the helicopter while the world fell down and his blood turned to ice, listening to the senseless afflicted in their black hooded cloaks as they'd moaned and writhed, strapped in like cargo in the back. The medical staff hadn't heard Professor Hojo offer his services in assistance to Tseng's condition, already openly covetous of the prospect of another high-quality specimen.
He'd kept his voice even. Matter-of-fact. And the instant they'd landed, he'd ordered Tseng moved to secure quarters on the 69th floor — to the one place he could guarantee would stay within his own complete and utter control.
Tseng doesn't look any better in his old four-poster king than he'd looked in the hospital room. He'd thought that a little color would help, somehow — would make him seem more alive, somehow, more robust, less frail. Tseng isn't supposed to look frail, isn't authorized to lie there in bed like the man he is instead of the force of nature he's supposed to be. He's supposed to be on his feet, unconcerned no matter how much blood there is pouring down his suit. He's supposed to smile, sharp and secretive, and remark how it's mostly someone else's.
It was his. All the blood they'd bleached off the lobby marble, it'd all been his.
He — Rufus Shinra, president of the Shinra Electric Power Company, the singular most powerful man on the whole of the planet — has long since lost track of what day it is. He goes up to the 70th floor and works until he can't stand to stay away any longer, and when it gets to be too much he comes back down and sits in his old bedroom and listens to Tseng's monitors beep their soft and persistent cadence. Darkstar keeps vigil while he's gone, welcomes him when he returns; she waits only long enough for him to find his seat before pushing her head under his hand, resting her muzzle on his thigh, at a loss for how she is supposed to protect him from a deep-seated anguish she's wholly unable to sink her teeth into.
It's not that he regrets his orders. There's no burden of guilt or self-reproach for being the one who sent Tseng and his Turks into that temple. Given the choice, he'd do it again. He's not in the business of doubting his decisions, and neither is Tseng. Tseng isn't his father; he's never doubted him even once.
Maybe. Probably.
What it is, really, is that Rufus knows that Tseng would be content to die like this. All Tseng would ever regret were the loose ends — an unclear succession to the directorship, maybe, with Reno the next in line but Elena possessing more of the raw potential for it. Tseng would say he accomplished his mission, gave his life in service to the cause. Nothing else should have to matter, in light of that.
He knows the words he should've said to that: You do. You matter.
It's that Tseng could die right now in perfect service to Shinra, and that's what Rufus Shinra is supposed to want — Turks who will die for his cause, for his company. The problem is that Tseng will die for the company when Rufus needs him to live for him, and right now he doesn't know which one Tseng will choose.]
Have you been watching him for me, D?
[It comes out a little more hoarse than he means it to, as he sinks into his usual chair and strokes her sleek head with open affection, unable to help a weary, unguarded smile as she rumbles her pleasure right back. There's an indentation in the blankets on the far side of the king mattress, roughly hound-shaped, marring the expanse that Tseng's body isn't occupying; had she been curled up next to him, while he was gone?
Gods, if only. If only he could —]
Let's see if he wakes up today. He will if he knows what's good for him, won't he.
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when he finally rises to the surface of the sea of his own unconsciousness, for the first time in gods know how many days, it's to the low murmur of a familiar voice. he can't make out the words, but he knows the cadence of it, knows its tone: rufus, talking to darkstar.
the first thing tseng thinks is, absurdly, they wouldn't let darkstar into the hospital. so he isn't in a hospital. back at headquarters, then, maybe in the residential wing, in a room converted for medical use—but no. the second thing he thinks is, even more absurdly, general affairs doesn't have the budget for this thread count, and it's that thought which prompts tseng to finally crack open his eyes.
he knows this room, this four-poster bed. he knows it intimately, from the long evenings he spent in rufus' personal quarters during his house arrest. no wonder it was so comfortable. no wonder it felt so good, to be here, floating in a haze of nothingness and letting himself be tossed about in the currents of his own mind. he's not intubated—that's for the best, tseng could self-extubate but he doesn't want to—but he has an iv in his wrist and a pulse ox clipped to his finger, and there are monitoring leads snaking in through the front of his shirt, tracking his vital signs.
and to his left, sitting in a drawn-up chair and looking for all the world like he belongs there, is rufus shinra himself. he looks terrible. (that's the third thing tseng thinks.) he looks exhausted, in the way only someone like tseng would ever be able to recognize, someone who knows every inch of rufus and would know what to look for. the faint shadows under his eyes, the angle of his head as he props it on his fist. even the slow movement of his fingers as he strokes back over darkstar's head. the president of the shinra electric power company, the singular most powerful man on the whole of the planet, does not need to come sit vigil at tseng's bedside. not unless he wants to be there.
it doesn't feel real. tseng, for once in his life, isn't sure it is real. it feels so very much like a dream, whether that's because of the pain medication or however long he's been under. for now, he's content not to interrogate it too much. he swallows, which takes some effort, and then parts his lips. ]
Did they... [ his voice is rough with disuse, and it takes effort to get the words out. he has to pause mid-sentence to draw in a breath. ] ...get the... blood out?
[ of the marble, he means. ]
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Only it wasn't nothing, and through the blurry haze of his vision he knows Tseng's lips separate when they'd been pressed together before, and it isn't until the first consonant breaks the silence in the air that the weight in his chest dislodges, and all the breath he'd been holding leaves him in a rapid rush.
Tseng.
Darkstar whuffles, shoving her head up into the hand that had gone still mid-pet between her eyes; he realizes a little too late that the other one is gripping the armrest of his chair so tight that his knuckles have gone white beneath the trim of his black gloves.]
Two seconds back from the dead and that's what's on your mind?
[His own voice sounds strange to his ears, and not just because it seems like it's filtered down through water, distant and faraway and obscured by the cadence of his pulse beating in them. It's thinner than it should be, almost as frail as Tseng looks. His father would be ashamed of him.
His father has no place in this room. This room is only for the people he can't live without.]
Expense the damn suit, Tseng, I couldn't care less about it.
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on the one hand, he would know rufus' voice anywhere, but even he doesn't think his subconscious could recreate rufus shinra in such beautiful, devastating clarity. on the other hand, it seems like a thing of dreams to think that rufus' rare, precious show of emotion could be because of him.
rufus was right about one thing: tseng would have been happy to die in the line of duty. he would have regretted the mess he left in the lobby and the disorganized state of his succession planning, yes, but he would never have regretted giving his life on rufus' orders. what rufus was wrong about, though, is that tseng would have been dying for the company. that's not it at all. he would have been dying for rufus—and rufus is now the company, so it's sort of one and the same, but at the end of the day rufus shinra is where tseng's loyalty lies. and if that means putting it all on the line for the mission, where the mission is to get rufus what he wants—what he deserves—then how could tseng ever regret it? ]
I'll remember... you said that.
[ he must be dreaming. either that or he's too high to tell the difference. surely this will matter to him at some point, but it certainly doesn't matter now. tseng closes his eyes again, then opens them, his head turning slightly to look at rufus and darkstar. moving more than that feels like too big a task, but he wants to look at rufus, really look at him. ]
Are you all right? [ he should ask about the others, too, and about the mission, the temple. he doesn't ask about them. it takes him a long moment to lick his dry lips and then add, ] Sir.
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And that's why he's asking, Rufus knows. Because he is the only thing in the world that matters. Because there's no amount of reassurance in the world that will convince Tseng to have any sort of concern for himself if he doesn't let him first establish that he's all right.]
I am now.
[It's an admission. He doesn't try to hide it; he wouldn't succeed even if he did. He averts his eyes briefly instead, up and away, unthinkingly casting his face into profile in the soft lamplight when in fact he's just trying to make sure the heat rising in his eyes never escapes his lashes.]
They worked on you for nine hours. I'm going to buy your surgeon a house in Costa del Sol.
[After a long moment, he finally looks back, his gaze lingering on Tseng's face for what feels like an eternity before it occurs to him that he might've let it rest there a little too long, and it flicks away again, this time to the bedside table.]
Oh. Ah, there's — water, or chips of ice. If you — I can —
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the thought of it shakes tseng to the core. the thought that any part of rufus might be less than fine because tseng himself is less than fine—he can hardly breathe around the implication.
fortunately, there's water to think about. under any other circumstance, the idea of letting rufus feed him ice ships would be intolerable, but tseng has discovered that his limbs are not especially cooperative right now, and he's genuinely not sure he'd be able to manage it himself. so it's with some small amount of chagrin that he says, ] ...Please.
[ he tries to push himself up a little, to scoot up onto the pillows so that he's at least at a better angle for it, but the mere act of engaging the muscles of his core sends a lance of pain through him that makes him grunt quietly and drop back down to the mattress. which, to be fair, is not a far distance to drop, since he really only lifted himself by about an inch. ]
Do you...
[ ...no. he'd thought to ask rufus if he needed to call someone, the medical staff, a nurse of some kind to assist. and if rufus decides to do so, tseng won't stop him. but at least for right now, selfishly, he would like a few more moments to keep rufus to himself, just in case he is dreaming and he'll never experience this again. ]
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[Not that it surprises him, that Tseng tries; he wouldn't be Tseng if he didn't. But something inside him still wrenches even at that soft noise of pain, because it's still more than Tseng would ever usually allow himself to begin with. They told him, his Turks told him, that even after being run through Tseng had still gotten to his feet and walked to them, prior to collapsing into their waiting grasp. That he'd mumbled something about needing to make his report. He pushes himself too much; even on the brink of death, that much is never going to change.
But there's one thing Tseng will listen to, Rufus knows, and he isn't above using that against him for the sake of the greater good. If he makes it an order, if he can bear to render it a command, Tseng won't defy him. Not when there's no competing priority to speak of, otherwise.
The real question is, can he make himself do it? To even consider it asks a...candor that they both usually avoid.
But if it means never hearing Tseng make that sound again, then it's really no question at all.]
...Don't move. Let me do it.
[And what a reversal that is, isn't it? But strangely, it isn't one he minds; after day after day of useless waiting, there's finally something at his fingertips that he can do about the situation. And so he eases Darkstar's head out of his lap and rises from his chair, moving the scant few steps to the small refrigerator concealed in the base of the nightstand and retrieving a cupful of ice chips from it.
There isn't much room on the edge of the mattress, but he doesn't need much to suffice. He settles down onto a sliver of it, about even with Tseng's elbow, and clutches onto the cup in his hands like a lifeline before digging in after one of the larger chips and catching it carefully between two of his fingers.
It feels — forbidden, somehow, the prospect of what he knows he's about to do. But he's Rufus Shinra, and he bends the world to his will, even when it's something so seemingly insurmountable as this: moving the already-melting bit of ice close to Tseng's mouth and letting the edge of it skim along his lower lip, wetting and cooling it until the frozen chip has warmed enough to melt and trickle past his lips into his mouth as mere cold droplets of water.]
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no. no, what rufus means to do is to sit at tseng's elbow on the mattress and press an ice chip to his lower lip, to let it melt until cool water trickles into his mouth and down his throat. he does it like it's nothing, like he isn't rewriting everything tseng has ever known about the delicate balance between them. there are things that tseng has never allowed himself to imagine, thoughts he has never allowed himself to entertain, because he knows that to do so would be ruinous—and here rufus is, enacting like fifteen of them all at once, completely unaware of the havoc he's wreaking in the process.
tseng parts his lips slightly and swallows. he focuses on the water, how it soothes his dry mouth, his parched throat. the fluids pumping into him through one of his ivs are certainly no replacement for the base pleasure of drinking after a long time without water. and so tseng is content to let his eyes close again, feeling the ice melt, feeling the water drip, trying desperately not to feel the brush of rufus shinra's fingertips against his mouth.
when he speaks again, his voice is steadier. still slow and a little hazy at the edges, and it still takes a little time for him to catch his breath, but it's much easier to form words. ]
Thank you.
[ sir. he should say sir. somehow he can't bring himself to shape his lips around the word. tseng blinks his eyes open again, focuses them on rufus, so much closer than before and so much more beautiful. brilliant. rufus has always been so brilliant; it's a privilege to see him this close. he can feel his forearm pressing against rufus' hip where he's settled on the bed. tseng doesn't remember the last time he touched rufus, if it wasn't to rush him out of some crisis or another.
something, perhaps the drugs in his veins, prompts him to say, ] I thought I was going to die. ...I didn't want to.
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There's a quiet horror in stagnation. In all his setbacks, in all his failures, in all his defeats, there was always the lifeline that his own ambition still burned hot, and that there were still paths to walk and hands to play so long as he still breathed. To surrender to the inevitable is to stagnate, to petrify. Accepting that something cannot and will not ever change, no matter how irresistible the force applied, is a sort of submission that would break him long before he were ever able to fully stomach it.
Looking at Tseng like this, with his usually-glossy hair a little dulled from days without washing, with a prickling shadow appearing on his unshaven chin, with his eyes closed and his breath even and his pallor fading with his newfound return to consciousness, Rufus comes to a second realization: that this is all he will ever have.
This moment, this tenderness, is equivocal. That he can move so close, that he can offer what little comfort his hands might bear, is all conditional on the precariousness of Tseng's present health. If he wants Tseng to never come so close to death again, then he must accept that he will never have this again, either — that he only even has it now solely because Tseng is in no condition to brush off or disallow it.
As the ice melts, and his fingers linger, Rufus arrives at a final recognition: that their respective feelings are — that they can only be — unequal. That Tseng is the impenetrable object that even his strongest ambitions can't move. It's fitting, really, that he so often relies on that old metaphor of lever and fulcrum; for the lever to have any efficacy, the fulcrum must stay constant. They must always be what they are to each other, nothing more and nothing less. To work, they cannot change; to change would eliminate their ability to work.
He will never have this again. This is the most of Tseng he will ever get.]
I thought about ordering you not to.
[The ice rattles in its plastic glass as he makes himself reach for another piece, because if he doesn't occupy his fingers with a fresh chip of it, they're going to stay resting feather-light on Tseng's mouth and on his chin, touching him with no excuse and no purpose.]
Then I thought it would be insult to injury. Not just to die, but to disobey a direct order while doing it.
[I thought I was going to die. I didn't want to. It was the unfinished business, then, that spurred Tseng to fight his way back. And when he was a child, he might've been petty about that — insisting that the reason for his miraculous recovery meant just as much as the practice of it. That having him back was somehow cheapened if he weren't doing it for him, specifically.
He's not a child. Tseng could have chosen to live for the damned mailroom clerks if that's what it took. It's all irrelevant, save for the part that he managed to live at all.]
I told myself you wouldn't. Then I realized...I couldn't name a single reason for you to stay, that wasn't outweighed by just as valid of one to go. I thought you might — [He swallows, fighting the rise of a lump in his throat.] — that you might do it. For Shinra.
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he licks his lips unconsciously to taste the salt of rufus' skin, then swallows, because his mind is mostly soft cotton and if this is all he's ever going to have of rufus inside him then he may as well enjoy it. ]
No. [ he feels like he's moving through molasses, through a dream he can't quite control. this must be a dream, or at the very least it must be purgatory, to be tormented with the sweetness of something he'll never be able to grasp. he can practically feel the drip, drip, drip of morphine in his veins. ] I would have... obeyed, if you ordered me. But not for Shinra.
[ it's all but a whisper, hushed in the silence of the room broken only by the whir and beep of machinery. even in a dream, tseng still remembers that it's close to treason to admit that anything he does isn't solely in the best interest of the company he serves.
many, many years ago verdot had attempted to teach tseng this lesson: that the mission comes before the man, always. (very "do as i say, not as i do" of him, that.) he had taught tseng, time and time again, that his life—or indeed any turk's life—has meaning insofar as it's contributing to their mission overall. viewed from that angle, the noblest thing tseng could have done in that temple would be to die, and to go out knowing that he had given his life in service of a higher cause.
as it turns out, the lesson didn't take as well as verdot thought it did. ]
For you. I didn't... want to leave you. [ even dreaming, it feels like treason to admit as much. he should be afraid. but what fear can there be in him, when he's looked the lifestream in the face and turned away from it, all for this man sitting next to him? ] I'll go when you let me... not before.
[ tseng closes his eyes again, then blinks them open, looking up at rufus. blue like a summer storm. warmer than most people will ever know. tseng has always considered himself among the blessed few, to know what rufus' eyes look like when he smiles and means it. if he's dreaming—if all of this will vanish, when he opens his eyes for real—then tseng should grasp what he can while it's still here for him to wrap his hands around.
the fear, then: not fear of saying it, but fear of holding it back. maybe this was the thing he couldn't die without saying. ]
You're the reason.
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He almost wishes he could convince himself that Tseng is delirious, mumbling something like that. He almost wishes he could maintain it's the morphine clouding his thoughts, sending him off on idle flights of nonsense fancy that he won't remember long enough to regret later. The problem, though, is that he knows Tseng isn't — not least of which because he's monitored everything they've given him in every precise degree, that he knows exactly what the drugs they're administering can and can't do to the person who receives them. He almost wishes that he wasn't saying this with that guarantee of lucidity, with that modicum of clarity. It would be so much easier, however agonizing, to hear it and keep it and never speak of it again.
What that means, instead, is that he has to sit there and hear Tseng say you're the reason I fought to live and live with what that makes him. To press his lips together and choke on his own breath and still not know if that means anything other than that Tseng's loyalty rests with him and not just the chair he sits in. To bask in the bold, brash courage of the admission and be forced to ask himself if Tseng is braver than he is, or if he too is willing to risk his own secrets coming to light without the benefits of the painkillers to blame them on later.]
What if I never let you?
[He sets the cup of ice aside, placing it in the middle of the nightstand's surface because his coordination is abruptly poor and clumsy. Because his hands are shaking. He'd never hit a target with his limbs like this, with such an unexpected anxiety rising like a tide inside him.]
What if I say I have to be the one to go first?
[There's a different way he could've phrased that. It goes something like I'd rather die than live without you. But that's not precisely true, is it? If Tseng had died in that jungle, on the table, in this bed, Rufus still wouldn't have chosen death.
Wished for it, maybe. But he loathes leaving unfinished business just as much as Tseng does.]
Will you let me?
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with some effort, tseng lifts his hand from the bedsheets. there's a needle in one wrist and a pulse ox on one finger and he can do little more than lean it so his knuckles rest against rufus' back, right between his shoulderblades where the seam of his suit jacket sits straight and pressed. rufus looks so sharp, right now, like he could cut tseng open if tseng touches him wrong. ]
If you don't let me, then I won't go. [ what else is he supposed to say? tseng pauses, takes a long moment to consider the words. he isn't entirely sure how to give voice to the tangle of feelings inside his chest. ] Would I let you... Who lets a hurricane make landfall? I couldn't stop you, if you were determined. But I can promise I won't make it easy.
[ no, no, that's not quite right. it's all true, of course, but it's not quite right, it's not the crux of what tseng means to say. what he means to say is this: ]
And you should know that if you go, I'm going with you.
[ the company will endure, or it won't. the turks will endure, or they won't. but for tseng, whose very existence is wrapped up inexorably in the beautiful, inexorable man at his side, what else could tseng hope to do? he presses his knuckles into rufus' back and then lets his hand drop again, too tired to keep holding it up. healing from surgery sure takes it out of you. ]
So don't go getting any bright ideas until you're ready for me to follow you into the dark.
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Is that what I am? A natural disaster?
[Has Tseng always been one for poetry? Or is metaphor just the only vehicle he finds appropriate for trying to put his feelings into something that can properly be conveyed? Either way, the comparison sinks into his soul and becomes a part of him; how funny, he reflects, that of the two of them he would've identified Tseng as the force of nature, not himself. Yet Tseng seems to see things the precise opposite way.
Though, if he is a hurricane, then Tseng is a man who chases them, and that much feels fitting indeed. Maybe this room, this place, this moment, is the eye of the figurative storm — ephemeral at best, but eerily peaceful while it lasts.]
I don't deserve you, Tseng. I never have.
[His hand comes up slowly, spurred on by a moment of courage of his own, and within a passing moment his fingers are sliding along Tseng's cheek, resting gentle against his face as the pad of his thumb strokes the prickling stubble on his chin.]
You could ask me for the world and I would give it to you. [He pauses. Smiles, a little rueful.] — Well. I'd share it, at least.
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[ astonishing and terrible and unstoppable. beautiful, too, especially to someone like tseng, who very much likes to watch rufus wrap his hands around the throat of the world. this boy-king of the entire world, no one could stop him if he wanted to wrap his hands around its throat. tseng would never try. he only wants to be there to support rufus in the trying.
of course, being told that rufus doesn't deserve him makes tseng's brow furrow and his eyes blink open again. his fixes rufus with a gaze that's half incredulity, half real confusion, all of it too apparent and unfiltered through the lens of the painkillers. (how many more times will he use the morphine as an excuse? just you wait and see.) ]
Deserve me? [ that there might be anything rufus wants that he doesn't deserve has never crossed tseng's mind. ] Of course you do.
[ rufus' fingers lift, touch gently to tseng's cheek. brush down along the line of his jaw and press there, unbearably tender. surely he can't know what it does to tseng for rufus to touch him like this. he's long since contented himself with the role he is allowed to play in rufus' life, and even the tiny spark of foolish hope in his breast is enough to make those boundaries ache painfully. ]
Don't... you'll get my hopes up.
[ all he needs is to be allowed to stay at rufus' side, as long as rufus will have him. be realistic, tseng; don't let yourself dream too big. you're too old for this. and yet, that traitorous little beat in his heart telling him that he's never seen rufus touch anyone the way he's touching tseng right now. ]
I don't need the world. [ that first part is true; the second, he'll blame again on the morphine. ] All I need is you.
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His fingers still, when Tseng says don't — not enough to make him pull his hand away altogether, where a lesser man might've jolted back like he'd been burned. The fact that he stops is testament enough to how seriously he takes Tseng's feelings on the matter, when most people wouldn't even warrant the blink of an eye before he'd gone on right as he'd pleased.
But it doesn't end with don't, and suddenly he's left to wonder just what hopes Tseng might be referring to, and the twisting dawning recognition that for all the morphine might be loosing his tongue, the things he's saying might be deep-seated truths, and not idle ramblings of nonsense fantasy.
It would've been enough, just to hear don't, you'll get my hopes up.
But then — then, then, then something slips out and the world snaps into focus and all of a sudden, all of a sudden a new possibility begins to blossom, a fragile little notion that he barely dares to look at for fear it might shatter between the weight of a single glance. Because there aren't a lot of ways to interpret a rejection of the world in favor of a man, and all of them leave his heart pounding in the cage of his chest.]
Then get them up.
[He draws in a slow breath, then lets it out again even slower still. Tseng looks almost beatific in the low lamplight, his features awash in the golden glow; Rufus finds himself unable to look away, even when Darkstar nudges against his leg as if in recognition that her master has found someone equally important to pet, and leaves his side in favor of padding around to the far side of the mattress, climbing up to resume her vigil right in the comfortable indentation she'd made before.
The humor of it doesn't break the spell of the moment; it just adds a note of clarity to it, like a dash of much-needed acid to cut through the cloying haze of his affection. Without taking his eyes off Tseng, he reaches over in search of the morphine drip and finds the button, patient enough that Tseng has ample time to see what he's doing before deliberately pressing it.]
You're surprisingly candid like this. I like it.
[Emboldened again, he runs his fingers through Tseng's long hair, around and back until he's cradling the back of his head, his hand nestled between Tseng's hair and the pillow.]
My Tseng. The world is so empty when you're laid up in bed instead of at my side.
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he swallows hard, watching darkstar pad near-silently around the bed to climb onto the mattress next to him. her body is a comfortable weight, warm against his thigh. how many days had rufus left her here to guard him in rufus' absence? how many days had rufus spent here in quiet observation, waiting to see how long tseng would take to wake up, if he ever woke again?
it's when rufus moves that tseng's gaze jumps back to him. there's something so purposeful in the movement as he leans over to press the button on his morphine drip, sending a little more flooding into his veins. plausible deniability. rufus has seen through him, tseng thinks—knows that tseng isn't saying what he's saying only because of the painkillers, and yet giving him that out anyway. an allowance, for tseng to be more forthright where otherwise he would hold his tongue. ]
It's the drugs, [ tseng says, but he knows rufus doesn't believe him, and it isn't true anyway. what else is he going to say? "you can ignore me if you like." of course rufus won't. he never has.
the way rufus' hand moves to cradle tseng's head puts them in close proximity, so that when tseng looks up it's directly into the storm of rufus' eyes. his hand lifts again, knuckles resting against rufus' side. the pain of it fades—that part is the drugs—and tseng draws a slow breath, then exhales, quiet like he's afraid to be louder in case he shatters this moment. ]
Rufus...
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[In all the times he'd imagined what it might be like to have Tseng want him, he'd never envisioned a moment like this. All his fantasies of Tseng are powerful ones, bloodwhetted ones — Tseng moving like a coeurl through a room full of men, dropping each one dead with shots timed to every second; Tseng in his ink-black gloves putting him facedown into his father's desk, back when it was still his father's desk and ten times more scandalous for it. They're two of a kind, Tseng and Darkstar, both unfailingly loyal, both breathtakingly vicious, both with the barriers they throw up for the sake of keeping his coat spotless white.
He never entertained notions of Tseng like this, razor edges blunted by feather pillows and thousand-count sheets, reaching for him with his eyes hazy and the alibi of drugs in his veins. He can imagine himself vulnerable all too well; sometimes he loathes it, sometimes he resents it, sometimes he finds a terrifying eroticism to it. He's never imagined Tseng vulnerable, not like this. Part of him hadn't really thought it was even possible.
And he likes it.
He's looked at Tseng before and thought, mine. How he'd bought him amid that business with Verdot. How he's owned him ever since behind his father's back. But this particular brand of possession, he finds, runs so much deeper — a jealous dragonish thing appeased by the sight of Tseng in his bed, in his room, under his protection, whispering his name.
All I need is you, Tseng had said.
He knows the feeling.]
Making us say all sorts of things.
[He lets his gaze drift slowly across Tseng's expression, taking in every detail before finally searching out his eyes and holding steady on them. Any of the residual droplets from the ice chips have long since evaporated or been licked away from his lips, and he's barely had that thought in his mind for half a moment before he's leaning in to press his mouth against Tseng's, dampening them again with a careless swipe of his tongue.
It's the drugs, he'll maintain. Because that's just how painkillers work, clearly.]
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perhaps paradoxically, it's the press of rufus' mouth against his own that convinces him this is real. he had dreamed of kissing rufus once before, many years ago, and in that dream he had never quite managed to render rufus correctly—had woken up unable to remember the warmth of his body or the taste of his lips. for all the sharp-edged workings of tseng's mind he has never been able to fully capture the beauty and complexity of rufus shinra.
and yet in the here and now, he feels it. feels the warmth of rufus' palm against his jaw, the warmth of his body where he's leaning against tseng's elbow. the warmth of his mouth where it's pressed against tseng's, insistent and unhesitating. he can feel rufus' breath against his face and knows beyond a doubt that there's no way his drug-addled mind could come up with something like this.
which is, in a way, even more terrifying than the alternative. it makes it real, means that rufus is kissing him, means that rufus meant to kiss him—wanted to kiss him. the shock of it rearranges the tectonic plates inside tseng, a seismic shift of what he understood to be true between them. despite himself, his knuckles press to rufus' ribs, and then his fingers curl as best they can into the pristine white fabric of rufus' coat.
fuck it.
he can't press up into the kiss, but he does return it as best he can. his lips part, coaxing, his tongue meeting rufus' and then withdrawing. instinctively tseng knows he's too weak for anything more, but it's important that rufus understand that tseng wants this, even if this is all he will ever have. ]
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But there's a part of him, too, that recognizes this isn't something to be chased and claimed; it's the part of him that goes still and silent when Tseng's fingers twitch into a gesture that could almost be called clinging, and the way his lips part could quite easily be termed an invitation. And even now that part of him wouldn't have thought — wouldn't have hoped, wouldn't have dreamed —
He wants more, and yet in a rare moment of clarity he also realizes that it's all right if he doesn't get it, because what he wants even more than his own satisfaction is to focus on Tseng. Tseng, who seems to want this too; Tseng, too weak to act much but still determined to signal just how receptive he is to the outcome anyway.]
I need you to get well.
[He keeps his lips against Tseng's as he says it, not because he thinks they'll be overheard and not because he's telling secrets but because there's something exquisite about shaping words against the press of Tseng's mouth, about making his saliva-slick lips glide over his and wet them, too.]
You see, there are better reasons to keep you in my bed than all this.
[He wonders, idly, if the doctors will see an uptick in Tseng's heart rate when they check the readings later. Will they see that it leapt up and began to pound, just now? Fuck, does he ever hope so.]
I meant it when I told you to get your hopes up. Get well, and you can have them. Reclaim the strength to put your hands on me and I'll let you touch me however you want.