Something He Chose Not to Tell Me
"I don't understand what you're talking about," Tseng says as he turns around and looks down at me. He completely ignores the gun I'm still aiming at him and he genuinely looks confused for a moment.
Then a light goes off behind his dark eyes and he straightens up, stiffening at the base of the spine as he defensively concludes, "Is that why you insisted we continue last night? So that it would be easier for you to tell me something like this in the morning?"
"What?" I ask, taken off guard by his response while he shakes his head at me and I utter, "No," in astonishment.
"Good, you had me concerned about it for a moment."
Then he sighs, looks into the bag he's carrying, and walks passed me to put the groceries on the counter.
"You don't sound surprised," I conclude, and I lower my head as if I'm disappointed in the fact that he's not upset as he snickers with his back to me.
"Vince…"
"Vincent."
"I'm too hungry to process it right now," is all he tells me. Then he kneels in front of the broken cabinet door to study it and continues as if he really doesn't care about the issue in the least, "Besides, I'm afraid I don't believe you."
"Don't believe me…?" I repeat, still feeling like something is not quite right with the situation, despite that nothing seems out of place as Tseng turns around and looks at me while I lower the gun. Yet I can't help but notice that he takes on a subtle caution as he speaks and makes no attempt to move from the spot.
"I believe that maybe you believe what you're saying, like your other… visions that you think you have," he solemnly clarifies with a slight roll to his eyes as if he genuinely thinks I'm making it all up, "I just don't believe that what happened is what you believe really happened."
"You're serious?" I disbelievingly conclude.
"Yes," he calmly says before he rests back on his heals and lightly runs his forefinger along a black smudge on the cupboard. "Your gun is old and custom. Fifty calibre bullets are rare in handguns. They always have been. They're more commonly used in rifles and due to their size, I'm sure they'd leave a larger mark behind. Unless whoever healed me was a miracle worker, there's simply no way that it could have been you that shot me."
"What are you saying?" I ask, suddenly more dumbfounded than I thought was possible at this point.
"My scar, Vince, it's not from your gun," he says before he struggles with the broken drawer above him and pulls out a butter knife to scrape at something he sees on the cupboard. "If I didn't know any better, I'd say it was a nine millimetre, the same standard issue that we use."
Then he sighs and leans back on his heals again, pauses, and then he curiously asks in a genuine tone, "Why would you think that you shot me?"
"I…" don't know…?
"Leviathan…" he mutters and stands to stretch his legs out. Then he puts his head down in a solemn manner before he shakes it and walks over to the table without regarding me, "I really hope you're not implying that you might have fired at me out of some harebrained reaction that you're becoming renowned for."
"Reno…" I start, and feel like recoiling inward at the admittance.
"For the love of all that is sacred, Vince," Tseng says, irritation high on his voice as he stands so he can look down at me, "How many times do you want me to say that you have nothing to worry about with Reno?"
"If I have nothing to worry about, why are you hiding from him?"
"I'm not hiding from him, Vince, and that retort had absolutely no relevance."
"You said you couldn't trust any of them," I push, not really caring about whether I stick to any particular topic or not. After this morning, dignity is less of a concern than it was before I met Tseng.
"I can't and I can," he admits. "There are some things I simply can't share with them but that doesn't make them untrustworthy… it just makes you, despite your scattered and senseless sense of reality, someone that I feel I can relate to."
"Relate?"
"I mean… 'talk'," he frustratingly corrects and grimaces in a subtle way while his hand twitches as if he wants to grab at whatever pain he feels but doesn't want to let on that he feels it. "Can we not do this right now?"
"Do what?"
"Argue over nothing," he says. "I'd like to think things went well last night, and I would like to sit down and have a pleasant breakfast as a compliment this morning, although I think you're about to ruin it by trying to tell me that you think you might have tried to kill me because of Reno."
He sighs then and grabs at the edge of the bag to look at what's inside again while I study him. He still looks tired and worn, but much better than he did when he first arrived as he drags a chair to position it under the damage in the ceiling and climbs onto it to study the hole that he did or didn't cause.
He also looks unsure, and I can't help but wonder what he's thinking due to the regretful sounding tone in his last sentence, although I feel better about finally telling him the truth. Or at the very least, I think I'm telling him what I thought was the truth even if I'm not sure what the truth is anymore.
"Actually…" I hesitantly start, not really wanting to say it but needing to. "It was Reno I was trying to—"
I would have finished, but he holds his hand up to silence me after he pulls the bullet from where it was lodged and studies it. Then he heavily sighs and closes his eyes as if he's attempting to stop himself from rolling them back in distaste, and I'm more than sure that he has an accurate guess how the sentence would have ended anyway.
"I adore you, Vince," he reluctantly says, opening his eyes and looking down at me, "And I know that you must feel something for me to go to the lengths that you went to last night, despite how frightened you were over the mere thought of it, but sometimes…" he pauses, and lets out another heavy sigh before hiding another wince at another ache as he climbs from the chair, tosses the bullet in his hand so he can catch it, looks at it in study, and says under his breath, "I'm not so sure that being together is healthy for either of us."
"Last night…" I repeat, reflecting on whatever kind of episode it was that I had before he walked through the door and returned a glimpse of hope that maybe I'm just fine, and I look up at him, still on the floor, and I ask, "What happened last night?"
Somehow, the question darkens his mood, and for a moment, I wonder why. That is until he clarifies his reason for suddenly being on guard, "You don't remember?"
Then he lightly brushes his ring-finger over the healing cut on his lip where I kicked him when I panicked and he quickly shakes his head as if he suddenly doesn't want to deal with me as a darkening melancholy slips in and he appears to grow slightly smaller and disappointed.
But I do remember.
At least, I remember what I think might have been what really happened, and I clarify it as the words spill from my mouth in as quick and consoling a manner as I can come up with. Thankfully, it lifts his mood somewhat and quietly confirms that I haven't gone completely insane yet, and he nods to confirm it even more before he pushes the chair back to the table and sits so he can look down at me for a moment.
Then he looks at the bed again, and the ceiling, and back at the cupboard where he stares at the black smudge as if it's familiar to him. After that, he sighs and sits forward and concludes that, "I'm going to assume that you have more to tell me than a confession."
He says it as he quickly waves his hand from the bed to the ceiling and adds, "There are signs of a struggle here… But there's no sign of anyone else actually being here."
He pauses and takes a deep breath while holding my gaze as if it's hypnotic and comments that, "Those marks on the cupboard are from Chaos, and the bullet in the ceiling is yours," and he tosses it at me so I can see it for myself. "And I'm willing to bet that if I look under the bed, I'll find another one that belongs to you."
"About that…" I mutter, almost too low for him to hear as I hold the shell in my hand and stare at it. The way I recall, it came from Tseng's gun, but his gun uses clips. It's unable to handle the larger bullets that fit easily into my revolver, and I suddenly wonder why I would have imagined someone else firing it.
The bed… the ceiling… and the marks on the cupboard… He says they're from Chaos—not him. It would suggest that I was thrown into them as Chaos, somehow… if Tseng's conclusions are accurate.
"Kjata…"
I almost wish I could cry at this point. I've never in my entire life felt so confused.
"I think I'm losing my mind…" I confess, and I slump down as if I have no energy left to fight whatever I feel I should be fighting against.
"No… Vince…" Tseng empathetically says as he sits forward and I cringe at the fact that I fear he's going to say it. He's going to say that I'm not crazy—I'm only losing the battle. "You're not crazy."
He lets out a heavy sigh then and quickly comes to me to help me from the floor to the bed where he sits beside me.
"Confused, maybe," he admits. "But you're far from crazy."
He frowns a little and then leans on me to show a rare affection and holds onto my hand. "In fact, I can't help but feel that I'm partially responsible… Perhaps you weren't ready for the sensory overload I fear I may have presented you with."
"What are you talking about?"
"I thought that you were lonely," he quietly says. "Perhaps as lonely as me, and when you wouldn't go away, I thought that you needed something and I tried to deliver, but what you needed kept growing more out of control. I wasn't prepared for it, and I'm afraid that perhaps you weren't prepared for it either. I presented you with too much that you don't know what to do with it.
"You've been alone and deprived for more years than I can fathom—decades—and sometimes, I ask myself if I did something wrong by thinking I was helping you. Something that I take for granted, like a cake or even a comfortable bed, might actually be too overwhelming to you," he says, and then he grimaces hard enough that he almost hurts my hand.
"What's wrong?"
"Nothing," he indifferently says and decides that the other topic is more interesting.
"Perhaps you're simply not done processing the information, and perhaps I shouldn't have pushed you into a situation you weren't emotionally ready for last night. But by the Ancients," he breathes out and turns his head so his breath is warm on my neck and tickling it, and he wryly grins before barely whispering into my ear that, "I just can't resist wanting to do unspeakable things with you."
And like a coin, he straightens up and acts like he never said anything so wantonly, pats my hand, and goes to his grocery bag so he can start putting his food away while I find I still need clarification. But I find a better and less insulting way to ask it this time.
"What is the last thing you remember before falling asleep last night?"
The question almost makes him smile as he half turns his head toward me and looks down.
"The last thing?"
"Yes."
"I fear I may have given you the cold shoulder by not answering your question."
Then he stiffens as if he wants to avoid the topic like he avoided it the night before, and although I feel relieved over the fact that what he recalls is what I think really happened, I find myself wondering again. I wonder even more when it appears that he didn't only avoid the question last night, but he appears to be avoiding it again.
But there's one more question that will solidify what I think is real and it may be to simply add salt to a possible wound.
"I only wanted to know if it hurt."
"I don't like discussing sexual encounters I've had with other people, especially with present mates," Tseng says, almost sounding slightly cold over the notion. "It generally leads to no good. But if all you want is an answer without details," he says, and he takes a moment to curse in Wutian as he drops the carton of eggs on the floor when he grimaces again, "I can safely tell you, 'Yes'."
He forces a smile at me, quickly, and grabs the cloth from the sink to clean up his mess.
"It was the single-most painful experience in my young life."
Then he pauses after he kneels on the floor and stares at the foot of the bed and slowly adds, "Of course… it might have been… because… he didn't know what he was doing…"
"What are you looking at?"
"Nothing," he assures and starts to clean the eggs after quickly glancing at the surface of the bed and the ceiling and commenting that, "you still haven't told me what happened here."
"You don't want to hear it," I quietly mumble, almost sounding bitter over the fact that he'll resort to his typical name-calling the moment I mention Sephiroth's name.
Sometimes I wonder if it's not because he thinks I'm making it up, but more because he might fear that I'm not making it up.
On the other hand, it's not exactly healthy for me to keep bottling everything up and it could possibly have something to do with the fact that I'm losing myself, and if he really wants to know exactly how far beyond the reaches of reality I've managed to go…
Well, he probably has a right to know that being around me could possibly endanger his life…
Like he always does, he listens intently and I keep preparing myself for his onslaught of how delusional he thinks I am, and inventive. All the while, he becomes clumsier with his attempt to make himself a breakfast and he unexpectedly pauses at certain parts of the story. Stopping everything he's doing entirely as if he's contemplating something that's made him grow slightly paler, and when I'm done telling him, he claims that he's no longer hungry and tosses his food into the trash under the sink.
Then he turns around, stares at the window where the bright light from the sun has been replaced by the approaching grey skies and the sound of threatening wind, and he stares at it like I might have been staring at it during my moment of psychosis.
"What's the matter?" I ask, growing uneasy over the fact that he's not moving, attacking, verbally abusing, or doing anything at all.
He almost looks like he's dead and not even breathing as his monochrome appearance continues to quietly stand there like an animal caught in someone's headlights. He's simply staring at the window, unwavering with unmoving eyes—so black that they blend with the growing darkness by the waning light from outside.
"You…" he hypnotically starts as the first rumble of thunder disrupts the air, low, still, and distant, "Why did you open the window?"
"What?" I ask, concerned that it's the only thing he seems concerned about.
"The window," he says again. "When I came home it was wide open and you… were having your... episode, from the sounds of things."
"Episode?" I repeat, wondering why it doesn't sound insulting this time and he slowly nods while looking like he's gone even paler than he was, a trick of the low light, I believe. But effective just the same.
"Yes. You were fighting with something, but there's no trace of it," he quietly says, still sounding like he's under some kind of spell as his hand lightly taps on the broken cupboard. "Something threw you… Chaos couldn't have thrown itself—not that hard, and something summoned… Leviathan…" he breathes out and snaps out of whatever daze he was in.
After that, he sets his focus on the dream powder spilled all over the floor and mutters, "Dreams," under his breath. "Why didn't I see it before…?"
He almost falls to the floor as the first flash of lightning strikes. He's in such a hurry to do whatever it is he's decided to do and he starts running his hands over the cracks in the floorboards in a blinded fashion.
"I never told you anything about Genesis," he says, sounding like he's accusing me of something.
"What's that?"
"Genesis," he repeats. "Not what, but who… That's the man in your dreams, and it was probably always him—we thought he was dead. Zack was supposed to have killed him but it was later believed that he only thought he did… Didn't Cloud mention any of this during all the time you spent together?"
"Cloud?"
"He was there," Tseng says. "I felt sorry for them and pretended that I didn't know that Cissnei was lying to me, and I decided against my orders to let them go. A part of me wanted to see Zack and Aerith get together, and Cloud was just a kid—silly notion, I know. What was done to them shouldn't have been done, Vince. Only…" he starts, sounding almost sad and desperate at the same time as he runs from topic to topic in a way I'd never expected from him. "One good deed doesn't go unpunished, and the amount of dirt I have attached to my pay stubs wasn't going to wash away any time soon."
"Sephiroth…" he breaks off and starts pulling the drawers out of the dresser, frantically digging through them. "Leviathan, I loved him, Vince—I did. But I could never let myself tell him—I could never admit to such a weakness. It was partially my fault, if not all, that he left me."
"Left you?" I ask, unable to hide the surprise in my voice as Tseng remains on his knees in the mess of clothes he just made while he continues to look around at whatever else he can take apart while I offer to help him find what he's looking for if only he'll tell me.
He shakes his head though, not willing to say it, and I conclude that it might have something to do with the fact that he might not want to tell me something without knowing for sure. It's just a feeling I'm getting from him right now as he heads over to the drawers in the kitchen and pulls them out, dumping them while the remnants of thunder and lightening linger in the air.
"I thought it was what I wanted," he says. "So he obliged… he left me and decided to sow his wild oats."
For a short pause of a sarcastic snicker, Tseng reflects on it with a hint of disgust before he starts to pull everything out of the cupboards and inspects everything that might hold something. "He did it with about as many people as he could, more than he needed to, and I admit it affected me.
"When we got back together, he confessed that he did it on purpose," he laughs out. "He said that he did it to hurt me—to show me what it felt like."
"You said he was the first one to cheat," I conclude, assuming that's where he's going with the story while he subtly nods and pauses to look around.
"I may have told a white lie."
"Kjata."
"I hid the truth because I didn't want to admit it. It was easier to let him believe it was something else," he casually says and continues to scan the room as if he's tired himself out. "But technically, Genesis… well, it wasn't an affair."
"How can you live with yourself?"
"About as easily as you can live with yourself," he bitterly answers as he crawls over to the bed and tells me to get up, and when I don't move as fast as he'd like me to, he pushes me off the bed in such an urgent manner that I can't help but feel like he seemed a little stronger than I was expecting.
"Besides," he breathes out as he heaves the heavy old mattress from the spring supports and smugly mutters as he stares at a small red orb that's glowing as if it's what he was looking for.
"It's the lies that attract you to me, Vince," he eerily says, almost like he's in a trance again as the red reflects onto his eyes as another low rumble upsets the skies and he reaches down to pick up the orb to stare at it like it's the most beautiful thing he's ever beheld. It's a summon materia.
"Without them, there'd be nothing to stimulate your inquisitive mind, and I'd be no closer to finding the truth as I might be now."
"Tseng?" I ask, somewhat wary over how calm he suddenly is that I almost want to grab the orb away from him to protect him from something unknown. But he only stands there, staring at it with that eerie lifelessness he exhibited earlier as if he's nothing more than a hollow shell, eyes growing redder and almost silvery as he continues to stare at the orb's diminishing energy before I grab it from him at the next flash of lightening.
"You mentioned that I was pushing you to go to the Northern Continent," he says. "In your dreams… You also mentioned that it was near the ice fields."
"Yes," I hesitantly answer as he looks at me and seems normal all the sudden.
"The ice fields are vast. Do you recall anything else?"
"No," I say, suddenly feeling like I was played into taking him to a place I'd rather avoid, and he tightens his lips before looking at the orb again, but without any kind of attraction to it.
"It would be a lot of ground to cover," he comments, appearing to be completely unaware of my growing hesitance when I think about how many times I've dreamt of killing him there and how I easily did it this morning when I was pushed to the brink. It doesn't matter that it wasn't the real him. What does matter is that I did it, easily, and he nods again while contemplating something and stares at the dream powder on the floor.
"The dream powder is something Koerin would use. It seems like his style to go after you and drive you mad. He'd do it if he would expect it to link you to me," he muses. "But he's not strong enough to take on Chaos in a physical one-to-one. Whatever was here threw Chaos into the cupboards."
He nods at the cupboard to contemplate the level of damage, stares at them a moment more, and then returns his attention to the orb.
"You mentioned a man in red, similar to Sephiroth."
"Yes."
"That was Genesis," he tells me. "Genesis was a master of the arts, summoning was his specialty and he would go out of his way to collect rare specimens. It was rumoured that he was able to steal the essence from some of Hojo's experiments after the reported sightings following his alleged death with nothing more than empty Materia," he informs.
Then he nods at the uncharged materia I'm holding. It's empty.
"We've never been able to prove that he's still alive though, and all we've had to go by were sparsely spread-out rumours.
"Well, needless to say that due to what happened to you this morning, and due to the gifts lying around, I believe that it would be wise if we left as soon as possible," he concludes, and he takes the materia from me to break the trance that I've fallen into while staring at it and he puts it in his pocket. "We'll take this with us. It may be safer if we keep it concealed."
As he carefully covers it with his handkerchief and places it in his pocket, heavy steps hit the floor boards of the hall outside our room. It whimsically beats in time with the storm outside.
Thump… thump…
The thunder, the lightening, and the steady sound of heavily armoured boots growing nearer from the outside hall, slow as if not in a hurry, mingle as if in unison like a heartbeat.
Thump… thump…
And the lightning flashes, along with a bellowing wail of thunder that rattles the windows, and I think, the storm's overheadas the thumping stops like there was never anyone there, but I can still hear it in my head as if it's taunting me.
Thump… thump…
"Vince…" Tseng quietly says as the static in the air is felt on every hair on my body, traveling along the cortex and finding its way inside, alive, yet still.
"We need to go," he says, still as quiet as he was a moment ago and he reaches to grab me in a manner of urgent coaxing as another flash of lightening fills the room, almost blinding, and another threatening rumble broods overhead, so heavy, and the door to the hallway flies off its hinges with a force no human is capable of, revealing nothing on the other side that I can see.
And Chaos…
Thump… thump…
Chaos lunges not at the enemy, but at Tseng.
