[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.