Title: Adrift
Author: Traxits
Fandom: Final Fantasy VII
Rating: General audiences
Content Notes: None.
Word Count: 503 words.
Summary: Devout had never been a word that Tseng would have applied to himself. Not before the war, not during, and certainly not after.
Author's Note(s): Original prompt from Fic_Promptly on Dreamwidth: Final Fantasy VII, Tseng + Hojo, The only Wutai in Shinra HQ
[[ … One-Shot … ]]
Devout had never been a word that Tseng would have applied to himself. Not before the war, not during, and certainly not after. But the small, traditional shrine tucked into the employee lounge beside the more ornate shrines for the gods of Midgar's children managed, nonetheless, to send shivers down his back whenever he passed it. Perhaps it was the strictly traditional layout of it, perhaps it was simply the lack of things on the altar. Perhaps it was the fact that Tseng had never expected to see one of these again. Sector Eight, with its higher than average Wutaian population had such things, but here, in the heart of the Shinra tower itself, it seemed out of place.
Still, he couldn't stop himself from pulling a stick of incense and lighting it, spending the half a moment with his eyes closed and his lips moving soundlessly on words that had been engraved too deeply to ever rub out. He blew out the flame on the incense, and when it smoldered properly, smoke rising to the narrow vent in the ceiling specifically designed to keep the smoke away from the alarms, he let himself set the stick lighter back down. His fingers trembled slightly, and he made himself forget about it until the next time he was in the lounge.
Eventually, he learned to simply avoid the lounge, opting to leave his things in the lockers in the gym instead, and he didn't have to have such strange feelings under his skin again until the first company party that he covered as security. He spent half of that party staring at one of the trays on the buffet, at the food that he'd long since resigned himself to giving up. That tremor in his hands stayed, an old shadow of his life before Shinra, until he finally met the Professor. Their eyes met across the room before he was ever introduced, and he could tell from the way the man went still that he felt the same thing Tseng did.
Expats. That was what the SOLDIERs called him, but he could hardly imagine anyone daring to say such a thing to the man in the white lab coat. Behind those glasses, there was something sharp and dangerous, something that made Tseng's skin crawl in ways that the shrine had never managed.
They didn't speak. They didn't have to. Anything they needed to say to one another was communicated quite clearly in the way they both very easily avoided the Wutaian trappings that Shinra had set up for them. Their shrine (it was difficult to think of it as anything else) was left alone past that first day Tseng had lit incense, and it hadn't taken much to discover that the Professor never left his own floor except to retire to the small apartment that Shinra provided him.
Tseng couldn't help but wonder if he had a shrine of his own in there, or if he was as adrift here as Tseng sometimes felt.