On the day Scarlett started in Shin-Ra's employment, she was eighteen years old and a very different woman. Wearing a cocktail dress to your day job is something one must work up to, after all; it did not come naturally; and the truth is, for all Scarlett's more modern efforts to hide the fact, that at the time she had been less Whore Of Babylon and more Little Red Riding Hood.
On that day, little Red met her first wolf.
President Shin-Ra's penthouse soiree. His little boy Rufus' birthday- six years old- is the occasion; or to be more accurate, the excuse. For Rufus is nowhere in attendance, as no well-attended child would be, for there is a multitude scattered across the motley of scarlet carpeting, drinking gin and praising folly. A skeletal piano player systematically collapses over his instrument at regular intervals, and the sounds in the air under the hum of conversation indicate he draws pure magic from the ivories, bone on bone.
Scarlett has never had a drink before, and will refuse all offers of alcohol until President Shinra- in passing- tells her pointedly that she is off the clock and ought to enjoy herself, the inference being that he will not be impressed if she doesn't. Heidigger catches this and, with an amused horse laugh, shoves her a tall glass of gin. Unmixed, on the rocks as they say. Scarlett shoots Heidigger a look of disgust- she bought this red dress, with its crushed-crimson velvet and slitted side and smell of luxury, only the day before, and he's wasted no time trying to get it off of her again. She withdraws to sit on the fountain, and carefully takes a sip.
Gin tastes like- pine. Unmixed, and Scarlett is unused to it, and it burns like lava as it slides satin-smooth down her stomach to her hips. There is a forest fire lodged in her throat. It tantalizes. She drinks again, sucking on an ice cube when her tongue can take no more.
Gin makes Scarlett feel powerful. She sits quietly, examining the feeling almost clinically. The crippling shyness that had cultivated a wallflower mere seconds ago suddenly seems a choice, not a shackle. She is sphinxlike, sitting by herself in this corner on the white-marble arm of the blue-neon lit fountain, watching and making judgement on the revelers as the water panders drowning in her ears.
She drinks gin and sits there the whole night, legs crossed in a way she will only later realize is artlessly seductive. She draws conclusions like a heretic and an artist. Palmer is a weak, self-serving fool who will go to fat the second he turns thirty. Hojo has no grasp on either social standards or social conventions and is only tolerated because his expertise is required. She was right about Heidigger, who Panlike chases all legs emerging from skirts, only to have them turn to bushes, flowers, constellations at the last possible second. Scarlett smiles, sips her ignition. Wonders why these things did not seem immediately obvious to her, why all through the day she had tried so hard to please.
The party like a music box begins to wind down to a close, one, two, three in the morning, and one-by-one the attendees follow Cinderella home. Scarlett continues to oraculate silently off the side of the fountain, uninterested in leaving when she feels divine. She stares off at the now mostly-empty room; sad, tattered confetti scattered across the scarlet floor, one of the maids has brought out a vacuum. Broken glass, in places. The reaper-like pianist gathers the sickle of his songbook.
Scarlett sighs and knows it is only a matter of time. She stares into the blue lights wavering beneath the waves of the pool that form the fountain's base, underneath a cascade of false whitewaters. She knows she will have to leave soon, and despises it. Today before the party she had been petrified, hadn't known how to insinuate herself- a little girl lost- into the grand cogs of the machinery that was Shin-Ra and that seemed to run quite well without her and her plans for her "Sister Ray". Very nice, Heidigger had told her condescendingly, as though she was a toddler who had thought up something clever. She was afraid that, when she left and was away from the magic of the music and gin and the arm of the fountain, the memory would cease to be amusing and become merely embarrassing and painful again.
When she looks back up, sighing, there is somebody in front of her.
She nearly upsets her gin in surprise, and feels herself flushing, embarrassed and annoyed. Tseng. Even in her sphinx pose, alcohol-powerful, she had no easy condemnation or dismissal for this snakelike and enigmatic new head of the Turks. He wasn't a day older than she, and yet he astonishes her. His long silences, his black gazes which had pierce her like glass shrapnel, frighten her. She knows this is his job and yet even this morning, she had wondered how she could ever work with the man daily without an eventual and inevitable heart attack from the stress.
And to her astonishment, he speaks first. "Everyone is gone," he intones, which seems to infer that the quiet maids who have begun to clean are not people.
"I didn't want to go," she says, "I was having fun," and realizes how ridiculous it sounds for she has been sitting here watching the entire night. Yet the truth is she has enjoyed herself.
"The most lovely woman should never be the last to leave," Tseng says, black eyes boring into her, and she is shocked. Has she heard this wicked man, this master of interrogation and wetworks, correctly? Is he flirting with her? The waterworks of the fountain hiss a disbelief. "I'm Tseng," he tells her, when she still find she cannot speak, and he regards her over the vodka-haze of his martini after taking a sip. "And may I have your name?"
"I'm Scarlett," she offers meekly, and yet they were introduced that morning. "Surely you-" she begins, then stops. Suddenly she is tired of the little girl voice, the 'surely', the 'having fun'. Such phrases and intonations do not belong here; this is a gathering of adults. "We met this morning," she begins again, and is pleased enough to doubt it's the gin when her voice sounds, to her, throaty and appealing. "Scarlett Woolf. I'm the new intern in Weapons Development."
Tseng regards her blankly for a moment. Then his eyes widen. "Miss Woolf." He begins, and has to stop. "I'm sorry," he says at length. "I didn't recognize you. You look… stunning."
Scarlett, too, doesn't recognize the look in his eyes. And yet she almost wonders. Could it be? Could any man?... She stands, and notices in a mild disbelief that nonetheless confirms her hypothesis that his eyes trail up her legs like a paper chase.
I'll fold him down, she suddenly decides in the gin-fog, this man who tried to scare me this morning. I'll show him who's who. Shoot him down like a soldier.
Previously she had examined her own unknown beauty; now Scarlett exploits it. She positions one leg so it peeks from the slit of the dress. "I wouldn't have known," she pouts, and the gin lends her words power and key. "From the way I sat here all night. Not one offer to dance."
"I'll dance with you," Tseng says, and suddenly Scarlett wants this shared seduction to stop. For the little-girl-lost she is sure to be it has already become too much. But Tseng reached down and grasps her around the waist and forcibly places her in front of him, iron hands moving her into grace, and they slowly rotate to the sound of-
"There's no music," Scarlett said.
Tseng stops as though he has not been aware. "You're quite right," he replies evenly, very seriously. "But there's a stereo in my apartment. If it's of vital importance that we dance- and I assure you that it is- we can use that."
They went to his apartment and stayed there until the morning.
But, somehow, they never would up using that stereo. And most of their activity was horizontal.
From that day on Tseng couldn't look her in the eye. And from that day on she wore that red dress to work. She took great pains as she grew older to keep in fitting perfectly.
Scarlett had found power. And knew how to use it.
She shot him down like a soldier.