Turn-About

Auryn was sitting at his kitchen table with lots of paper and a few books in front of him, trying to work out the array pattern which caused the effect of directing energy around the body without interfering with it. He knew those arrays existed in his own body, but while it was easy to find the central ones, finding all the applicable sub-arrays was another story. Since his goal was to manipulate those energies without the requirement of a body being there, he first needed the original arrays to know the complete instructions. The books admittedly weren't doing him much good, but they at least kept reminding him of the sheer complexity of the arrays he'd have to find.

As he worked, he heard his balcony door open, and paused long enough to see who it was—Doriss. He went back to work as she sat across from him and said in an amused tone, "You do realize it's three in the morning, right?"

"Couldn't sleep," he replied, sketching another sub-array.

"Any particular reason why?" she asked, still sounding amused.

"I'm just not tired right now."

"Really?" Doriss chuckled. "Well, whatever." She paused to look at the books and the arrays, then shook her head and muttered, "I'm not going to ask."

He gave her a faintly amused look, then blinked as she pulled out a folded square of paper and began trying to work out how to get it open. "Looks like a Wutain trick letter," the blond boy commented, starting on a new sub-array, though he was less sure of its inclusion, so placed it on a different sheet from the one he'd started on as she'd come in.

"I noticed. Did Tseng have Donnel pass it on to me, then?"

"No idea, but I'm pretty sure Vincent and Kariya both know the same folding technique. I never bothered to learn it, just how to get it open again."

The woman paused with a faint frown, then looked up and asked, "So how do you get it open without ripping it?"

"It's not really something I can talk you through," he replied dryly. She offered it to him, but he shook his head. "It's yours, so don't look at me. And Donnel probably gave you a hint to work from, anyway."

Leaning forward, Doriss asked, "Could I bribe you into doing it for me? It'll sure make things faster."

"Bribery? Really?" Auryn asked as his brow quirked.

"Bribery is a valid currency," Doriss smirked.

He looked up at her in faint amusement. "Fine, then offer me something I actually want and maybe I'll agree, depending on how badly I want what you're offering."

"I know you won't go for candy or money..." She sat back with a hum and an absent expression, thinking for a couple of minutes. Auryn blinked in surprise as her eyes lit up and she leaned forward again to say, "I have to go get it from my bank vault during open hours, but on one of my cases in Wutai, I came across—"

"Stole!" the boy interjected in pure amusement.

"Ahem! I came across—" (Her emphasis on the words made Auryn snicker.) "—a very interesting 'weapon' which I think you may like. The basic premise is to have it hidden so someone trying to grab you would get a very nasty surprise—they're a series of very, very small, sharp spikes with poison in them which you can link together, separate, put in different places. For example, if you were to wear a choker, you could push them through from the underside, and anyone who tried to grab your neck would end up grabbing the spikes and getting poisoned. As long as you handle them carefully and know where they are, you could have them all over your body with no one the wiser. And, for the record, this poison kills in about ten seconds."

"Does it work like that on SOLDIERs, too?" the younger blond asked curiously. Had he ever come across a weapon like that before? He didn't think so.

"Um...I don't think they'd die as quickly, but I also believe it would work—I lucked out once when a pair of Dark Dragons came down from the north, and just one of those spikes had enough poison to kill the one which injured me about five minutes after injection. I honestly have no idea how or why, especially since the poison replenishes itself once it's been used. Whether you would be the exception, given the state of your 'blood', I don't know, but I think even you'd end up dead with it." Auryn stiffened in shock and fear approaching panic at the words, so she said, "I'm not sharing that with anyone, Auryn. You have the right to know I've got your medical records, though, so yes, I am aware of the state of your body."

At that point, he'd have had a full-blown panic attack if Minerva hadn't interjected a sense of it being okay for Doriss to know, but with the knowledge from her, he was able to close his eyes and try the calming technique Tseng had taught him. It wasn't so different from someone coaching him to breathe deeply and slowly if he was having an attack, but it also wasn't easy to do alone. He tried, forcing his breath to come more slowly, for some time—he had no idea how long, but Doriss was watching him worriedly by the time he was able to open his eyes and look at her.

"Doing all right?" she asked him when she saw lucidity in his eyes, not blank fear.

"About as well as can be expected," he muttered. "Are you trying to give me a heart attack?"

She rolled her eyes. "Good job. Now, about that weapon...?"

First, Auryn sighed, not sure how to take her reaction—then decided to go back to the topic because she was just doing what she always did, giving him a sense of normalcy. As far as the weapon went, it was obviously very rare, and likely extremely difficult to produce, so it was probably not one he'd come across again. It had several advantages other weapons didn't have, and people would be hard-pressed to realize it was there or avoid it. While there were also down-sides to it, such as poisoning an ally or friend by accident, he actually thought the good out-weighed the bad.

"Fine," he finally agreed. "I'll expect you to give it to me in the evening. Trick letter."

He held his hand out for the folded square, which she passed to him with a grin, then watched with interest as he began shuffling it around and moving parts. The first thing he'd had to do was open it up into its box form and re-flatten it opposite the way it originally had been, and from there, he could flip open the small folds holding it together. Each adjustment made it larger, until he reached the half-way point and it was returned in one set of four folds to nearly the size it had started at, but then it opened up again from there.

By the time it opened into a single, flat sheet, over twenty minutes had passed and Doriss looked stunned. He passed it to her without looking at it—only for her to read it, then pass it back to him, her expression annoyed. Looking down at it, he noted the hand-written text as one he didn't know, but the writer's identity became obvious as he read it:

I have no idea how you got the data you did, but it isn't data you should leave lying around. Either way, we're trusting you to keep your knowledge close, because if it falls into the wrong hands, the one to suffer for it will be—well, you know the answer to that.

In the meantime, I would like to ask you to let us know if you hear something you know, or think, we need to know. We leave that at your discretion, but every little bit will help. I can't shake the feeling that something is very wrong, more than my husband's usual bid for power.

It wasn't signed, and gave away shockingly little to people who weren't already in the know, but it was easy to deduce that Lady Shinra was the writer. Which likely meant Vincent had been the one to fold it. He could sort of see why it annoyed Doriss, though.

"They're just asking you to do something you're already doing," Auryn pointed out.

"I know. The problem with destroying the evidence is that, without proof, everyone will be in trouble," the older blond sighed. "I don't plan to leave it out where just anyone can find it, though."

"Yeah...How successful do you think that will be?"

"...I guess we'll be finding out."

Auryn gave a faint sigh and went back to his array work, and Doriss sat watching him thoughtfully for a few minutes before finally asking, "Where did Tseng take you to for those couple days you were away?"

"To visit my honorary sisters," he replied blandly.

"...Your what?" the older woman blinked in surprise.

"Well, technically, he was only taking me to visit one of them because I saw the other's dead body, but then she was there, too, so..."

"You 'saw' her body in one of your 'scenarios'?"

"No. She died—as far as I knew—before the scenarios even began."

Again, Doriss was quiet for a few moments, then asked, "And you were okay with that?"

Looking up at her, Auryn replied bluntly, "My brain broke for a bit, and all I could grasp was that she was alive, I was holding her again. Like I said, I spent more of those two days unaware than aware. And, I've never seen Tseng as relaxed as I just saw him first thing in the morning both days—he wasn't even in his uniform."

"Was that a good thing or a bad one?" the Turk asked in faint amusement.

Going back to his work, Auryn thought about the question. Had it been anything at all? He'd only ever seen 'Tseng the Turk', not 'Tseng the man' in every previous dimension, even the first one. Some of the discussions they'd had over the various dimensions had been more personal—and personable—than others, but they had still always been part of the Turk element of the Wutain. It had been impossible to separate the 'Turk' from 'Tseng'. Now, not only had Tseng shown him he could cook, but he'd shown him there was more to 'Tseng' than just 'the Turk'.

Suddenly, he stopped working and looked up in surprise as he realized what it had done. "He's starting to become a different person to me than the ones who had previously hurt me."

Doriss smiled. "Then that's a good thing. And for him to have let his guard down around you also means he trusts you implicitly—otherwise, even in familiar territory, he'd never have let you see him that way."

"How do you—?" he gaped at her.

"The only Turk I know of who sees him as a man is Ansha—even Vincent and Lady Shinra don't get quite so much of his open friendship and trust. I only know because I go sneaking around where and when I shouldn't be. I was curious about seeing Tseng in less than his full uniform, so started following him around in my free time. There was one thing which blatantly stood out—he never, with anyone except Ansha, removed his tie and jacket in their company, or openly relaxed and behaved like a normal person. It was odd to see him sprawled on her couch with his eyes closed. I never saw that trend with anyone else."

"...Does that mean he doesn't trust anyone else?" Auryn blinked.

She shook her head. "He trusts them the way any Turk trusts another, and the way the Guards trust one another. That says a lot. But it says infinitely more when he lets his guard down completely with certain people."

Auryn had no response to that, so opted to go back to his work until he got tired enough to sleep, which wasn't until after Doriss had left and returned with some snack foods for them.

FoWD

"Verdot," Vincent said tiredly as the named man turned the corner at about eleven at night the day after Verdot had sent Doriss and Lakis to meet their new informant. Verdot froze, glancing between Lady Shinra's office door and the man waiting outside it in wary puzzlement, only for Vincent to sigh. "Stop doing this. Just...stop."

Verdot eyed him for a long moment, then slowly shook his head and answered, "I can't do that." The two of them had known one another for the bulk of both their lives; they were even only two years apart in age. Back then, Verdot had always thought those two years were a huge gap, but the reality had always been that no one had ever known him as well as Vincent, and he'd never been closer to anyone else, not even his wife and daughter.

A wife who had just informed him that they were getting divorced now that Felicia had joined the Turks.

Keeping busy was currently his best bet until his reaction to the news had settled. Another attempt to carry out Lady Shinra's assassination was one of those, but he was sure Vincent knew it was half-hearted at best, especially right now.

It wasn't that he wouldn't carry it out if the opportunity presented itself (which should have been right then, as Vincent had supposedly been called away to deal with something), it was that he wasn't putting the effort into accomplishing the task he should have been. Then again, with a man who knew him as well as Vincent, that was a pointless endeavor, as he'd never actually succeed while the other man was guarding her. For all his own trained, honed skills and decades now of experience, his fellow founding Turk had always been just that little bit more skilled, just that one step ahead.

"Verdot, right now, you can't even lift your gun, let alone pull the trigger," Vincent replied in a rather brittle, annoyed tone. Then his gaze became worried and he asked quietly, "What happened?"

With a faint sigh, Verdot shook his head. "We're on opposite sides now, Vincent. You shouldn't care so much about an enemy—that's a weakness."

"If you actually were one," the black haired man replied dryly.

"You know I'd kill her if you weren't guarding her," the brown haired Turk replied flatly.

"And that's why you never 'try to kill her' when I've left other Guards here and gone somewhere else?" Vincent asked sweetly, that time with amused eyes.

Reaching up to pinch the bridge of his nose, Verdot replied, "Don't call attention to that, you idiot."

"Who do you think is watching us here, right now?" the older of the two asked. "Because I've made sure no one is. I—noticed something has been bothering you for a few days, and I want to be able to help you. You're not an enemy to me, just a misplaced friend. I don't want to see you suffering."

The words reminded Verdot of a time long, long before, back when he and Vincent had still been kids, eking out a living in the slums of Junon, way back before Midgar was even being built. Admittedly, Vincent had sort of come out of nowhere, all of twelve years old, saying his mother had died and no one could find his father, so he'd been out on the street on his own. But for ten-year-old Verdot, who had ended up there not long before because his family had been killed by monsters while they had been traveling, they were both in the same boat.

Those years, before Janelle Shinra had found them as a fourteen and a sixteen-year-old, while they had been hard, they had also been happy and simple.

It had hurt to realize they were becoming divided.

Neither had been able to step away from their chosen paths, though.

Verdot looked away from Vincent as he asked, "After everything I've done, do I really have the right to your friendship—or your help?"

"If you know it's wrong, then stop following that path, Verdot," the older man replied shrewdly, crossing his arms over his chest and giving him an annoyed look. "I'd really like my best friend back sometime before I die."

How quaint, Verdot couldn't help but think as he gave a short chuckle. "I never knew Turks could be such saps," he commented, but the tone—much to his horror—came out more longing and bitter than he'd expected.

"Feelings don't just go away," Vincent's soft voice reached him, the tone pleading. "Even just once, please show me there's still a chance we can—have back what we lost. If I thought there was another way, a way which wouldn't just destroy everything we all worked so hard to build, I would be standing beside you, not opposite you."

The appeal nearly brought Verdot to tears as he remembered their vows to one another and to Lady Shinra all those years ago. If only she had never turned her back on him when all he was asking for was to have returned to him the last surviving memento of his dead family! Everything else—she would have been his preference of leader, but his loyalty ultimately went to the President, the man who had helped him when she hadn't. This tug-of-war was painful, even after he had chosen his...Well, he supposed the President was more of a 'master' than a 'leader'.

Then he'd realized what would become of the Turks if he didn't split the ranks.

In the President's mind, Janelle had too much power, and he wanted it—he was a control freak, probably the worst one Verdot would ever meet. It was also obvious the President feared the Turks for their abilities as much as their initial loyalty to Lady Shinra. Unless the President felt secure in his power over half of them—the power Verdot gave him—the Turks would become worse than dogs, just tools to be used up and tossed in the trash. Everything they were would be broken, they would be mere shadows of themselves without even a fraction of either the honor or the integrity of their current group.

And yet, every time he thought about turning on the President and just eliminating him before he could destroy them, Verdot remembered that he owed the man the last little bit of his family and closure for his past. Some of the other early Turks had also had a similar experience, though he and Vincent were the last ones left of what they called 'the founding Turks'. The number the President had helped had been small, but big enough for them to have found one another and realized there was, in fact, some sort of favoritism going on there. He was the only one who could claim to have been given more than one 'gift' by the President, and who the President actively asked for advice, much like one would a friend.

He was no fool—the President didn't see him as a friend. He was, however, valuable to the President, and had been able to use his value more than once to spare his Turks pain, or even their lives. That he had the President's ear enough to do such things said a great deal about the position he held to the man, even without friendship. At the very least, respect was a fair portion of it. He allowed the President his control, and in return was given more freedom than most, allowing him to make a difference when it most mattered. Vincent held out for what Verdot himself viewed as an impossible fantasy.

But he missed the easy friendship he'd once had with Vincent, he couldn't deny that.

Finally, he looked back at Vincent and offered, "You never really knew Mira, beyond her not actually liking my job."

"Unfortunately, no. Why?" the other man blinked in mild surprise.

"A few days ago, I got a letter from her telling me she's filing for a divorce now that I've 'taken her daughter away from her.' She blames me for Felicia wanting to follow in my footsteps, and seems to have decided she no longer has a reason to stay around in Kalm, waiting for us to show up one day," he explained, suddenly feeling tired. He leaned his shoulder on the hall wall and crossed his arms.

Vincent's eyes widened and he commented, "Well, that's definitely not something I expected would happen after twenty years..." Verdot had to snort at the comment, but Vincent then went on, "How are you holding up? How is Felicia holding up?"

Shaking his head with a small sigh, Verdot replied, "I haven't told her yet. To be honest, I'm still processing the entirety of the letter. Right now, I just feel...empty."

After a momentary pause, Vincent sighed and admitted, "That would be hard on anyone. Maybe you should actually take a couple days off? It'll give Tseng a chance to get his feet wet with actual command responsibility, and show him the other side of the fence."

Verdot's brow rose as he asked in faint amusement, "And you think a Guard through-and-through will be able to objectively handle the Hounds, even just for a few days?"

There was amusement in Vincent's voice as he commented, "He hasn't forgotten we both saved him, and I know Doriss and Donnel will help him out while he figures out how things work. I know we've been operating under the assumption that I'll be the first one to go and Tseng would have to try to fill my role, but the reality is, we have no idea who will out-live whom. He could, theoretically, be taking over for either or both of us. And you haven't chosen a second of your own, either, leaving him as the only one, regardless of which of us dies first. He needs the experience and the exposure to the Hounds."

As much as he didn't want to admit it (on principle), he knew Vincent had made a lot of good points. He needed a bit of time away to sort himself out, and Tseng needed experience in command—of both sides of the divide, because there really was no telling which one he would have to lead. The only problem was the divide. While Donnel could openly cross that line, trying to drop Tseng amongst the Hounds as-is and suddenly would be like dropping a rabbit in a pit full of hungry dogs. He had been hoping Tseng would join the Hounds, because he had a legitimate, fatherly fondness for the young Wutain—he didn't want to see him suffer the way he would from that.

Meeting Vincent's gaze again, he said, "I can't have him dropped amongst the Hounds just like that. It honestly won't help, especially not for him to have any sort of command. We'll need to arrange something to make his place there valid."

"Let's go find a place to discuss it, then. Your room? Or somewhere out? I could do with a bit of a drink right now," Vincent readily offered.

Lips quirking with a small, relieved smile, the younger man agreed, "A drink sounds good right about now."

With a nod, the two headed out of the building to visit a bar in the city and work out what they could do to integrate Tseng into the Hounds.