And did it burn, like he hadn't thought it possible to burn this way; he knew all the technicalities, if you wanted a strong charge on a bolt function you applied to the factors of strength but also of an inherent, implicit ability that has to either be born or bred, and while
Some men are born great, others achieve greatness
And there was the first time they ever put him in solitary. He had not been prepared for it: no one ever was prepared for it, and it was an experiment in glancing that human nerve. Of skittishness, ambivalence, confusion, and fear. They made you into such men that inherited the back doors on filthy streets, and then in a cell just six feet by four they crammed you into a space as large as your own head, and let your own instincts inflate until you had to bite your knuckles to stop your fingers from clawing at the concrete walls. It was tempting, after the third hour or maybe third day; no way to tell the time, and only the dirty smell of piss to keep you company after a while. You started to imagine, sometime between one tick and another tock, that the itching of your scalp wasn't just the vagaries of accumulated dirt, but a physical touch: insects, ghosts, monsters, your own fingers raking through your hair again and again until you thought you could feel sticky blood beneath your nails.
Tenses and futures and presents swapped themselves in and out like a roiling sky boiling, boiling. Hold fast, his blood told him, as he felt the second burn ice its way up his spine while he forced his eyes open to scout silver hair on a white face, a nightmare in the pale, walking, alive and like a thing from the past
Kadaj touched Tseng on the cheek. 'I'll take your name card,' he said, reaching into Tseng's blazer and taking the plastic bit-part of lies and a face that was Tseng's own only as much as the brand of Shinra over the left hand corner, an emblem in blood red, stop. 'He cut you,' he said, crouching over Tseng, whom they'd put in a corner of one part of this miserable forest, trees and soil everywhere, no comforting concrete and no grey ceilings contain the errant noise and scuffle. He leaned over Tseng, and pressed one hand (was it cold or hot, and could you trust your senses) to Tseng's stomach, and let his fingers (were they pressing down or not) trace the scar tissue there. 'At the temple. He didn't think you were important.'
'Which you are not,' Veld says, throwing open the door and the light makes Tseng grind his teeth together and muffle a noise at the back of his throat. A migraine builds itself up from the base of his neck going up his temples (temple temple temple); he has been alone for so long that Veld's voice resembles an earthquake, and the ambient darkness of the lit corridor outside sears his vision to white for a while. 'What is important are the secrets you'll eventually come to hold for this company. We are gatekeepers, and the perfect gatekeeper is lock and key but not content. You should be a passageway, allowing people through or keeping others out. You should never think of yourself as a vessel. When you know nothing, you reveal nothing.'
It seems to Tseng that Veld talks forever, these words words words, but when he manages to get his eyes to focus on the green blinking digital clock that measures the time on the far wall (he has been in the cell for six days three hours forty two minutes and seven, eight, nine seconds; at the end of it at least the details stay with him, cold company in solitary) Tseng realises that the speech takes Veld less than half a real minute, and it's only in the nominal eternity that he manages to give Tseng sufficient time to put himself back together, and stand long enough to receive the lesson.
The importance of being
'Shinra's loyal dogs,' he said, tapping Tseng's name card against his palm. 'Woof, woof. I hear you attend to the President,' he said. 'Or, at least, that's what I remember. At the end of the day you're the only ones that stayed, weren't you? All the SOLDIERS were turned into monsters, and all your scientists disappeared. Only you left to look after your President in his wheelchair. Not a very good job, since the President can't walk and has to send you to look for Mother. You should have given her to us then, Director.'
Kadaj spoke too much about
the importance of a coin. Gil didn't come in that sort of denomination in Shinra: if you had a coin in your pocket, it came from spare change paid out accidentally, and was only for use on the odd vending machine that did not accept bills. The jangle of metal in a wallet could be a liability; that was the official reason for it, within Administrative Research, but the unspoken word was always the higher truth: bills were a status symbol, coins were an embarrassment. You were paid to put money in your pocket, if not for exchange, then for use. In the right circles, men would fear the empty power of legal tender far more than the barrel of a gun. Keep your weapon apropos of the situation.
Stop wavering. You may give yourself time to swerve from one process to another, but only give yourself the requisite time for reorientation. Everything else is excess.
Coin. Coins. Every one has two sides, the old saying goes. But they are essentially the same object: the head of a five-gil fades into the tail, and somewhere across the two millimetres of copper-compound one becomes the other, flips itself without ever having to be flipped. You take a coin, and throw it in the face of anyone who tells you to dictate heads or tails, wrong or right, strong or weak, and spit, if necessary.
When they torture you, he remembers being asked, do they torture your mind or your body? Tseng had said both, and they had told him, that is an evasion of the question.
Solitary the second time. Tseng remapped mission reports, idly, for the first forever, and in the second forever he exercised Wutainese vocabulary and grammar. Closed his eyes and thought, figuratively, of Midgar. The silence rang less. When the pain came, he breathed out and let it climb. Eventually nerve receptors would either fire or give out. There was always an end, even if it was long in coming. When the pain came, he knew that it was in his
'Blood is very messy,' Kadaj informed Tseng. 'You bleed so easily! You all do, and it's ridiculous how fragile you are. We didn't even try to hurt you,' he said, coming around again from where he had been pacing. He swiped a thumb across the gash on Tseng's cheek. Kadaj looked at the redness for a moment, then he wiped his fingers on the pristine white of Tseng's name card. 'This will be all your President gets if you don't co-operate with us and tell us where Mother is!'
Kadaj got angry without any consideration for
'Consequences,' Veld said when he opened the doors a second time and let the light in. 'Of not being able to differentiate between one type of pain and the other.'
Tseng's skin was wrinkled all about his bare calves, shrunken with prolonged exposure to water that had first been salted and then subject to cold. He had been sitting in a mildly damp, freezing room for two and a half days, and had not been able to tell when the mental attrition had segued into physical sensation. This time, his limbs took longer to settle.
'Frostbite,' Veld told him when Tseng tried to stand, and toppled. He came over, materia in hand. The surge of energy through Tseng felt odd, the sensation half-cognitive and half-actual. It felt like someone walking over his grave. Veld threw him a towel and said, 'There's a fine balance between the two, and your tolerance for both should be high, but not total. The moment you tell yourself that the ability to not feel is an asset, you lose the opportunity to realise when too much is too much. It doesn't matter whether you are on one end of torture or the other. There is always a breaking point, for the receiver and for the giver. If you chose to ignore your limits, do it consciously. If you infuriate, do it spectacularly. If you die, die with purpose.'
Veld held out a hand for Tseng, and Tseng, accepting, saw the edges in Veld's eyes, the hardness in his eyes that spoke of having to do what he did not want to. Two and a half days he watched Tseng count numbers in two languages and ignore his body screaming against both dehydration and hypothermia. Tseng hadn't been the one to plead for the doors to be thrown open, this time. Two sides of the same coin, flipped once and then flipped
The name card around his fingers, before Tseng saw it slid into Kadaj's pocket. The motion was quick, unnaturally fast, alien. Tseng lifted his head just as the glow of materia around Kadaj's bracer dimmed. 'Manipulate?' he said, softly. His voice was raw, but steady. He counted Elena as dead, and did not think of her thereafter.
'Very quick, Director,' Kadaj laughed, coming around. 'Just as we expected from you. Will you tell us where Mother is?'
Tseng smiled, because they would not expect him to say
'Tseng,' Rufus' voice was staticky over an unsecured PHS line going from Junon to Midgar. By all means, they shouldn't have been talking over it. There was always someone listening, one way or another but let them listen. 'When are you next in Junon?'
Sixteen years old and he was already keen on getting what he wanted: sex, security, status. A simple order imposed upon formidable talent; Rufus Shinra would probably grow up doing unpredictable things to achieve his very predictable wants. Tseng shifted his phone to his other ear. 'I don't dictate my schedule, sir,' he said, keeping his voice disinterested.
'I could have you reassigned here,' Rufus said, half-demand, half-plea, half-request, none of it adding up. He was still in the habit of asking for too much. The heir hadn't decided what he wanted to be, yet: Tseng had seen him cycle through phases of revenge, penitence, filial piety, patricide, regicide. Rufus Shinra wanted a myriad number of things, and all of them seemed mutually exclusive. 'If I asked my father.'
'Your father would not reassign a Turk to anything less than a viable threat,' Tseng informed the Vice-President as he wondered how well Rufus could engineer true mayhem. 'We are thin on the ground as is.'
'A viable threat?' Rufus echoed, quietly, thinking.
'Yes, sir,' Tseng said, coming to the conclusion that it would take a few months, half a year at most, before he saw the harbour and the blond again. The harder Rufus tried to buy him, the more Tseng had to
'Abuse you,' Kadaj said, walking behind Tseng. This was one of the few things that truly rankled: being unable to maintain a line of sight. So Tseng closed his eyes, and let Kadaj speak: 'We're trying to be polite, but since you're refusing to oblige, and your friend is -'
Elena was dead, and Tseng would not think of her thereafter in any other way.
' - not in any condition to talk, we're going to get you to tell us about Mother by force.'
Force? Tseng looked up into Kadaj's green, dilating eyes, watched the world burn in them as the materia hummed and the effect hit. 'Where is Mother?' Kadaj asked.
Body and mind. Tseng let himself be pulled along. 'In Midgar,' he said.
'Where,' Kadaj asked, 'is Mother?'
Materia. Only the function of so many factors, applied to a human being that is composed of both body and mind, and the pain thereof may channel itself back and forth, take one form or another. Nerves fire and synapses spasm. Let them.
'Jenova is not in your possession,' Tseng said.
Kadaj leaned in. 'You want to tell us,' he growled. 'You want to tell us what you have been instructed not to. What do you know?'
Invade the mind, put the back to the wall, deprive one sense, overload all the others, solitary confinement and never ending forevers that last one second, one second.
'I fuck Rufus Shinra,' Tseng said, smiling the stupid smile of a man under the influence. He had never said that to anyone in his life. Manipulation was harder, he catalogued, to shake off than he had expected. (Stock answers: I occasionally use stimulants. I smoke. I have killed.)
Pick the lock if you don't have the key, but what's the point if the gate opens up and there's nothing on the other side? Flip a coin and douse the pain.
Tseng forced himself to feel his blood going sticky and thick down his ribs and over his old scars. Kadaj made a noise, animalistic, and the next glow of materia was not gentle or inviting. It was the acrid smell of ozone, and then Tseng felt every part of his body seize as electricity charged through him.
Closed his eyes, then, and thought of Midgar, with her concrete walls and Edge's rising girders as Kadaj beat his body. The opportunity flickered past. Tseng let the remnant do what he wished, and let the pain slide from one scale to the other, and waited.
'Mother, Mother, give me Mother,' Kadaj raged, 'give us Mother, let us see her, we want to see her, we need to see her.' Kadaj's want and Tseng's: who desired freedom from this exercise more? Two sides, same substance. 'Tell us where she is!'
'Look for her in hell,' Tseng murmured, forcing open bruised eyes to watch the whip fall, the bones break, the edge cut, the blade drive home. 'Your mother is dead.'