Disclaimer: I don't own any of the characters from FFVII. As usual, Square-Enix has hogged them all.
By the way… THIS STORY CONTAINS SHOUNEN-AI AND YAOI.
What Little Boys Are Made OfChapter 2: Unexpected News
Mornings on the Plate tended to be green. Not because of lawns or vegetation of any sort, nor because of the walls of tinted glass. It was green in the morning because the sun was not yet strong enough to burn through the noxious haze of gaseous mako residue that had stagnated in the breezeless night. It was a wonder that anyone over the age of sixty could stand to live in the city without having their lungs burned and scarred by the constant bombardment of pollution, and it was equally a wonder that the children still played outside despite the risk to their tiny bodies.
The unclean light filtered its way up to even the highest floors of the ShinRa tower, oozing its way through the windows to shine the sickly emerald upon the pristine, white form of Rufus ShinRa. The Vice President of ShinRa Corp., it was said that Rufus was even more feared than his father, and that the blue-eyed blonde-haired devil would one day strike his father down and claim the throne of power. Then the world would end, they said, in fire and ruin because Rufus ShinRa would rule through terror and an iron fist.
Rufus had never liked gossipers.
He was of the opinion that most of the fear people felt toward him was mainly due to the respect he commanded from the Turks, the special division of the company that, in addition to acting as temporary bodyguards in especially dangerous situations, were responsible for assassinations, kidnappings, espionage, and various types of "accidents." Although many people had never seen the faces of the Turks, they had heard stories from a friend of a friend who had once caught a glimpse of what he thought may have been one on a rooftop of some forgotten building.
It was Tseng's idea, really. Control the people by making them fear what they did not know. Rufus thought it was brilliant, and it reminded him of something he had read in a book. Bentham's Panopticon, it was called, and it had modified the way people could be manipulated. Bentham had stated that, since people changed their behaviour dramatically when they thought they were being observed, the uncertainty of whether or not one was being watched could be used to constantly control the behaviour of people. In a prison structure based upon this idea, for example, a single tower in the middle of a circle of cells could be used to observe all the inmates at one time. If the glass at the top of the tower was made so that the inmates could not see into it, but the guards could see out, the prisoners would have to automatically assume that they were being watched, whether they were or not, and thus modify their behaviour.
Absolutely brilliant.
In practice, this meant that people, therefore, automatically assumed that wherever Rufus went, the Turks went with him, even if they could not be seen. Thus, the fear of the Turks had translated into a fear of Rufus himself, and was only amplified by the stony countenance and frigid personality that he possessed. But it couldn't be said that Rufus was not a man to be feared. His calculating intelligence and low tolerance for ineptitude in the boardroom had stunned a good many people who had not met him previously. It was probably because he was still a few months yet from his eighteenth birthday.
Despite the fact that, since he wasn't even legally considered an adult, any documents he signed would not be binding, his father had him constantly at his desk on the sixty-eighth floor doing just that. Rufus assumed that it was to keep him from having enough time to plot the destruction of the world, or his father's death, or some other equally superficial thing.
Even though he was only fourteen when he'd been promoted to vice presidency, he had quickly realized that whether or not he'd actually read and signed the papers was unimportant. Through experimentation, he'd discovered that if he signed the top three documents and put the stack in his outbox, no one noticed that he hadn't signed the rest.
Rufus had made sure to employ that particular tactic today, as he had more important matters to attend to other than sifting through employee files for people that might cause him trouble when he inherited his father's company. In place of where the stack of documents should have been sat a pile of CDs instead, each labelled with a date and a section within the ShinRa building. They were copies of the security tapes, and the blonde Vice President was scanning each one studiously.
Ah, there he was. Cloud Strife, the new recruit who had joined ShinRa only a week ago. Normally, Rufus would have no interest in an underdeveloped child, but his interest had been piqued by the interest of someone else. Namely, Hojo.
At first, Rufus hadn't been aware that it was Hojo, and so three days ago, when Reno had reported that President ShinRa had asked him to deliver a particular message to one of the First Class Soldiers regarding rooming arrangements, Rufus hadn't paid particular attention. However, when Hojo--the greasy-haired, hunched-over, exceedingly-angular scientist himself--had waltzed into his office while the President was on a business trip in Junon and asked for a favour, Rufus decided to take more of an interest in things.
Pretending to be bored with the entire transaction, Rufus had blandly acquiesced and written another note for Reno to deliver, then sent the scientist back to his lab with assurances that it would be sent off immediately. Reno had not been happy with having to be a messenger boy again, but a simple glare had cleared his reluctance right up.
Since that event, which had been a good twelve hours ago, Rufus had been sitting at his desk, going through the security tapes in an attempt to determine what was so special about Cloud Strife. The boy was not exceptional in any way, it seemed. He was short for his age, and certainly wasn't the strongest or fastest in his class. He learned at a pretty good pace, though, but that was hardly any reason for special treatment.
What was unusual, however, was the figure that tended to appear in the background whenever Strife was outside doing his training with the other recruits. Rufus hadn't even noticed the man for the first nine hours that he had been watching the tapes. It had taken a random glance up to the corner of the screen combined with a small flash of sun reflecting off metal for him to even notice the well-concealed man. Even then, the blonde had had to rewind it three times before he was even able to determine that it was a person, and not some random piece of garbage stuck in the hedges.
The glimpse of the man hadn't been enough to identify him, so Rufus had come to the unfortunate conclusion that he needed to rewatch the tapes in the hopes of getting a look at the man's face somewhere along the way. That had been three hours ago, and it had taken him until just two minutes prior to find what he was looking for: a minor misstep that had caused the man to show his face for a split second longer than he had intended.
Rewinding, Rufus waited for the exact moment, then paused the tape and zoomed in. Long, black hair framed a pale face and green eyes, but the face wasn't one that Rufus recognized, and doing a search of the company's database didn't turn up any information, either. This man was obviously not affiliated with ShinRa, so what connection he had with Strife was beyond Rufus' ability to speculate.
Pulling out his light grey cell phone, Rufus held it up to his laptop's monitor and snapped a picture of the face. As his dextrous fingers punched buttons in the familiar pattern of Reno's phone number, he glanced at the clock and suspected that the redhead would hate him. It was 5:23 a.m. on a Tuesday morning.
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Despite sleep's miraculous ability to make one forget one's troubles, Zack hadn't forgotten about the letter sitting on his nightstand. He hadn't minded having Cloud moving in with him, since the kid seemed like he needed a friend anyway, and for the past couple days at least, he'd been doing an admirable job of keeping the place clean and his superior fed.
Forcing rooming arrangements upon a First Class Soldier like Zack was one thing, but when Reno had given him another message last night, the redhead had had to forcefully stop him from going up to the Vice President's office and ripping the blonde's head off.
It wasn't having Cloud assigned to his squadron that had made him angry, despite the fact that the boy wasn't even close to being ready for such a thing, it was the fact that his particular squadron was heading off to war in four days and probably wouldn't be coming back for more than a month or two.
Was the Vice President out of his mind? Was this some sort of sick game he was playing with people's lives? Cloud wouldn't be ready to fight on the battlefield for another few months yet, and Zack sure as hell wasn't going to sit around and let the kid become food for the worms.
"Zack?" asked the questioning voice from not five feet away where Cloud's bed was located. The youth had probably just woken up, as he was still rubbing sleep from those large, blue eyes and had a hairstyle that would rival a chocobo's. "What's going on? You look angry."
"It's nothing, kiddo," the black-haired man reassured him, his usual grin appearing on his face. "Don't worry about it. I've just got to go report to the General, that's all. I swear that guy has no respect for people who like their mornings in the afternoon." Standing up from his perch on the bed, having already gotten dressed and tamed his hair as best he could, Zack gave Cloud a wink and a mock salute. "Work hard in your training today, Soldier!" Then he was gone, the door closing behind him with an unexpected sense of finality, leaving the blonde-haired youth staring confusedly after him.