Hurting

Tseng jolted awake not that long after he'd gotten into bed, but wasn't sure what had woken him, other than a sensation of pain from both the Lifestream and the Minerva housed in his core. While the former generally put out a sense like it was feeling pain at all times, this was a different sort of pain and wasn't tied to that general sensation. He was told to go back to sleep, but after that jolt and with his own worry about Neirine, he didn't think he would be any time soon.

What had happened to have woken him?

He didn't get up, though—he honestly was so tired he just didn't have the strength. As much as he wasn't able to sleep, he probably drifted in and out of it several times, only coming fully awake when someone touched his forehead.

The touch had been a bad thing and had shoved him into fight-or-flight mode, causing him to attack the one touching him...And he only realized after he'd laid the man flat—and fallen to the floor beside his bed on his face in the process—that he'd just attacked Veld.

As Veld looked up at him in mixed surprise and amusement, Tseng's expression turned sour, and the older man gave a small chuckle. "I should have realized you'd have a bad night and not tried to touch you. I'm sorry for startling you awake like that. Do you need a hand up?"

At the question, Tseng tried to sort out his lethargic limbs until he could sit up leaning against the side of his bed. Rubbing his eyes tiredly, the Wutain muttered, "Shouldn't you already know I don't take well to being touched when I'm asleep?"

"I've been able to before without ill effect," the older man replied in a dry tone, sitting up and pulling one knee up to rest an elbow on. His other hand supported his weight a bit behind and to the side.

The younger man's gaze turned confused. "What?"

"I told you—you're like a son to me, Tseng. Parents check up on their kids at night, and I did with you, many times," Veld answered. Again, he looked amused. "Especially right after I returned from the firebombing..."

"...And I never noticed?" the Wutain asked in shock.

"No, you didn't," the older man agreed.

Rubbing his eyes tiredly again, the younger of the two leaned his head back on the edge of the mattress. "I should have realized I had bonds this deep much sooner."

For a moment, silence followed the words, then the older man said, "Tell me something, Tseng...Prior to now, had you ever been able to acknowledge the bonds for what they were? In those fourteen years you had lived through, was that aspect of your relationships with people something you dealt with and accepted?"

Tseng was silent for a minute before sighing and admitting, "No."

"So it wouldn't have occurred to you that you may not feel threatened by being touched by someone you have such a bond with," Veld said simply. "As to why I'm here so early this morning—if you're up to it, we can eat, then have the discussion we put off from before?"

After a silence, Tseng had to admit he couldn't back out now, even though all his senses were suddenly as much as screaming at him to keep it hidden as he always had. It occurred to him that, like with everything else in his life, he needed to start sharing those things if he wanted to be able to move forward. "...Is Kariya around?" he finally asked quietly.

Veld's brow rose and he asked, "You want to share this with him, too?"

"You, he, and Reno are the only ones who can touch me safely when I'm—not myself. Kariya is more aware of the situation than you are, and older than Reno. After the partial memories Reno seems to have gotten, he has more to deal with than he should have, so I wouldn't want to share this with him yet. That leaves you and Kariya, as people I obviously have much deeper bonds with than I had previously realized. Also, I may not be able to say it all again, other than piece-meal to a few people I trust, and eventually, Kariya would force me to tell him if I don't include him now," the Wutain explained, carefully rising and going to his closet to pull out some of his new cloths.

"Where did you get those?" Veld asked with a raised brow as Tseng quickly changed.

"From our tailor," the younger Turk replied as he was tugging on his shirt. He'd known Veld would find out, regardless, since he'd get the bill, but maybe it was better for him to find out this way.

"On what premise?"

"That I was going to be going undercover to try to make contact with a target. To make it believable for Maya, I went with the option of trying to attract someone who would be more favorable to 'a Wutain supporting Shinra', rather than a Shinra-raised Wutain, which is essentially what I am."

Veld gave an amused snort and informed him, "You could have just asked me for permission to get some clothes without having to go in such a roundabout way. Now, I'm actually going to have to do that to you."

"I had been expecting that when I went to Maya," Tseng replied dryly, finished dressing and heading for his kitchen.

Veld rose and followed him, watching in amusement as the younger man froze at the doorway to his room, where he could see his kitchen table and the food sitting on it. While it was take-out, something Tseng didn't normally eat, it was also from a Wutain restaurant in the city which was run by Wutains who passed the food tradition down to their children, so it was one of the few places he would eat at. He hadn't realized Veld had meant the meal was already waiting for them when he'd said they should eat, then talk. He only moved forward and sat because Veld used his hands on both shoulders to gently guide him in the direction of the table.

While Veld was serving the food, Tseng eyed the man for a long moment, then said, "Maybe—I should tell you one thing now, though. Before Kariya gets here."

"Will it disrupt my ability to hear out the rest of the story?" Veld asked as he finished serving out helpings of the take-out and sat to start eating.

"Probably. It's also not something I think Kariya 'just has' the right to know, it's something you should have the right to tell him or not," the younger man answered. "But what I have to tell you about myself will also disrupt your ability to handle this."

"Hmm..." Veld murmured thoughtfully, and as Tseng ate some of his meal, he had the distinct impression that Veld was delaying his response on purpose. In hindsight, eating at least some of the meal before having that kind of discussion was probably a good idea. Finally, when Tseng had eaten about half of his meal and the older man had eaten most of his, Veld said, "Then, I should probably hear it now."

Again, Tseng paused, then gave a small sigh. "When I mentioned AVALANCHE before, I didn't give all the details. There are—three leaders of the group. Well, the third one may not have joined them yet, but regardless...They had a strategic leader for on the battlefield, named Shears. He's the one I'm not sure has joined them. There was the tactician and the actual leader of AVALANCHE, Fuhito—he was also its founder. The third was a young woman Fuhito found wandering in the Nibel Mountains with no memory, who he named Elfé." He paused there for a moment, then said, "As much as she had taken over the title of 'leader' and most of the members respected her more than Fuhito, there were two fatal flaws with her."

Veld remained silent when Tseng paused, so the Wutain went on carefully, "The first was that she had a Summon Materia stuck in her arm, which was a fragment of a larger shard intended to summon a being which would reduce everything on the world to ash. Trying to remove it was—largely guaranteed to cause her death, but leaving it would cause her death as it drained her life to sustain itself. The second is that—when you saw her for the first time, you recognized her as Felicia."

The older man's eyes went wide from shock before he dropped his fork onto his plate and just stared at the younger man across from him. It was obvious he was trying to process what he'd just heard, but it left Tseng feeling unsettled, so he did what he always did and retreated into himself. Without realizing it, his expression completely closed as he stared down at his own plate and just picked at his food, more just pushing it around rather than even trying to eat any more. The longer there was no response from the man across from him, the more he retreated, bracing himself for a blow. From Veld, even if he was braced against it, the blow would hurt all the more.

Suddenly, there were arms around him, holding him tightly as—he thought Veld was...crying onto his shoulder? Instinct caused him to raise his arms to put them around the older man, just waiting for what would come next.

After several long minutes, the man drew in a deep breath, reached up to rub his eyes with one gloved hand, then sat back to look at Tseng. "I get the distinct impression the situation was not pleasant for more reasons than that, and you've just touched the tip of the iceberg."

"...That was also when I was given orders to kill you because you were going to try to save your daughter," Tseng told him. He blinked in shock. "And that was when Scarlet and the President would have publicly executed you—and all the rest of the Turks. He's fickle at best, and that was when the realization came, almost too late for us to survive it. Thankfully, we ended up with an unexpected ally, and I was able to save most of the Turks, you, and Felicia...But it still came at a great cost, and we were wearing nooses from that point forward. Our lives weren't our own anymore...Would never be again. We had given everything to preserve Shinra, and what we were given in return—was contempt and betrayal."

The older man's hand gently gripped the back of his neck, his arm resting on Tseng's shoulder. "That won't happen this time around. You know where AVALANCHE's base is, yes?"

"Yes," the Wutain agreed.

"Then, we'll go get your friends from Nibelheim, see if we can find the last one, and do something about AVALANCHE. Those are immediate things we have to do something about—we can't wait for long or they'll go sour. If I can get Felicia back without the President knowing she was anything other than an experimental subject to AVALANCHE, that whole situation can be waylaid. I would rather that to a repeat of what happened in your previous experiences," Veld told him, giving the back of the younger man's neck a comforting squeeze.

Rather than allowing himself to keep retreating, Tseng looked up at the man's even gaze, drew in a deep breath, and nodded. "Okay." He felt Minerva smile into his mind.

"Did you want to finish eating while I call Kariya, or are you done for now, until the rest of this discussion has been dealt with?" Veld asked then, releasing the younger man's neck and standing.

Tseng glanced at his plate, then made a face as his stomach rebelled. "I'll have to wait on the food." At Veld's nod, the Wutain rose and made his way to one of the chairs in the living room to sit in it—and instinctively curled into a ball there, with his arms wrapped around his bent knees.

He listened absently as Veld said into his PHS, "Tseng has something he wants to tell us both, as he feels you'll get it out of him eventually and he really only wants to have to tell it once. Head over to his apartment." In the meantime, the younger man gazed around the room.

It hit him all of a sudden, as he gazed at the clinical, gray furniture, that he'd been so absorbed in his work throughout his whole life that he'd never bothered to decide on what he liked in his living space. There was nothing personal about anything he owned other than his bed sheets and blankets—everything else had been left as it had come, and back then, he had never cared. If he were to switch out furniture or put pictures up on the walls, what would he want to see every day? Even as they'd moved from location to location in the future, he had never personalized his space, it had all been work, work, work.

His attention was drawn by a hand on his head, making him look up at Kariya. When the man had his attention, he moved over to sit in the other chair as Veld sat on the nearer end of the couch. "So, you wanted us both here to tell us something?" the orange haired man asked from his seat, pulling his sunglasses off to tuck them in one pocket, gaze intent on the younger, Wutain man.

Rubbing his eyes tiredly for a moment, he agreed, "I did."

"So, why me?" Kariya asked curiously.

"Because you're one of a very small number who can touch me—not intimately—without me reacting poorly. I know Vincent can, but he had previously tended my injuries after I had been tortured once." Both of the other men's eyes widened, but he held up a hand in the 'wait' motion. "Apparently, Genesis also can, at least with something small like a hand on my shoulder—but both of you and Vincent can actually hug me without getting attacked, whether I was aware of you or your motion to do so or not. Normally, I wasn't close enough to anyone to allow that, but when Neirine was injured yesterday—" He paused for a moment as Kariya's eyes widened. "—I realized you were right, Kariya...I have to start facing things, and this is one of them."

After a long moment of silence, Veld asked, "And what is 'this'?"

Closing his eyes, Tseng said, "I'm not—strictly human, and the bonds I form aren't normal bonds. They affect what I'm able to do, how well I can do it, and even my health." His eyes opened to see their shocked expressions. While Veld looked confused, Kariya only momentarily looked confused before it morphed into an expression of recognition and shock.

"You mean that—what I had always assumed was a rumor—about your mother being a Summon is true?" Kariya asked. Veld turned his head sharply to stare at the other man for a moment before looking back at Tseng.

"It is," Tseng agreed quietly.

"So what does that Summon blood actually do to you, how does it affect you, and which Summon is it?" Kariya asked shrewdly. When Tseng's gaze became questioning, the older man made something like a dismissing motion, then pulled out a cigarette and lit it as he answered the look with, "The more we know about the effect it has on you, the more we can do to help keep you out of the situations which will do you the most harm."

"What harm?" Veld asked with a small frown.

Kariya took a puff on his smoke before releasing a serpentine string of it into the air above their heads, then said, "Veld, Wutains are so damned resilient and resistant to defeat in battle because most of them have ancestral Summon blood in them—the Emperor's line has Leviathan's blood, for example. But there's a few families known to frequently have fresh input of Summon blood, and Tseng's line—the Kaoin line, cousins to the Emperor—is one of them. In his generation, the only one of those lines who had an immediate Summon who produced children with a Wutain was the Kaoin line, as the others were already great-grandparents, not an immediate parent. Of course, Tseng is the only survivor of his line, and that probably only because the people who tortured and killed the rest of his household also assumed he had died, too."

When Veld looked back at Tseng with a puzzled expression, the younger man said, "Yes, Kariya has all that right. He's also spent a lot more time in Wutai than most people from Shinra lands have, so he's aware of more of the things we take for granted. My mother was an Alexander who had been free-roaming, not bound to a Materia shard."

Kariya whistled at that and commented, "Your survival in a place like Midgar is nothing short of a miracle, then."

The younger man's gaze became sardonically amused, but when he noted Veld's expression become even more perplexed, he gave a small sigh and explained for the other man's benefit, "Given that Alexanders are holy elemental Summons and Midgar is a cesspit of its polar opposite, yes. I suspect that has a lot to do with the torture I suffered as a ten-year-old, as my Summon genetics—and abilities—have been shut down since then." He reached up to touch the dark stone on his forehead. "This would be red—Summon Materia red—if those genetics were active, but they couldn't be directly housed in my human—and physical—body, given how those genetics belong to a mainly spirit-form being. They were housed in this shard, instead, and intermingled with my physical genetics as I needed or wanted them to when I was young. I suppose by our scientific terms, they would be 'recessive genetics' when not in active use."

"How were they shut down, then?" Veld asked in confusion, only having marginally more of an understanding of what Tseng was trying to say.

"Summons bond with people on a deeper level than all humans except maybe twins bond with one another," the Wutain explained in a quiet, now halting tone. It was time to directly face his own bonds and how much he was left wounded every time another Turk, another member of his family, died. "First, let me clear something up before I start. Those bonds run so deeply that I get some sort of backlash from the death of someone I have a bond to, but normally, one death or a few won't cause overly much harm. What causes the harm is when dozens of people I have a bond with die all at once or in short succession, and torture has a similar effect."

Both men's eyes widened again—even Kariya hadn't realized the effect of such a bond—but Tseng pressed on. "When I was ten and my household was attacked, the attackers knew my mother was a Summon and knew they'd never win if they tried to go directly just to my family members. They also knew the Kaoins are non-traditional nobles and befriended their servants and the villagers on their land—we were friends with nearly everyone in the village and with our household servants, and just those household servants were about two dozen people. Two dozen people my mother, my four siblings, and I all had Summon-level bonds with, and who they slaughtered all at once." Veld looked stunned and Kariya looked ill at the words.

"By the time they reached our family, the six of us were paralyzed and three quarters dead already, and our father was vastly outnumbered," Tseng sighed. "I guess my mother isn't really 'dead' by that definition, but she's locked into a recovery state for a very, very long time—I'll probably have lived out my life before she'll be able to return to the human world again, so for my purposes—she's dead, too. Add to that the number of Turks—my new family—who have died, and I've never managed a full recovery." Kariya's expression became pained, so the Wutain held his hand up in the wait motion again. "No, I'm not blaming you, and never really did. It's the nature of a Turk's job, the Death God of the Battlefield aside—anyone could have killed any of the same Turks you ended up killing before you joined us."

"But the pain I—" Kariya began.

"Stop it, Kariya," Tseng sighed, and the older man silenced in surprise. "You're forgetting what happened the first night I woke up with Leviathan's Blessing, how close I let you get to me without being afraid of being hurt. Whatever you used to be, my senses have accepted you as part of my family, as someone I can trust, and forged one of the deepest bonds a Summon can form with another human. You and Veld are undeniably the two deaths which would hurt me the most out of all those whose deaths would hurt me. I had lived those fourteen years trying not to form any bonds after how much it had hurt me as a ten-year-old, but then—without even realizing it, I had formed dozens of those very same bonds...Including with you. Actually, maybe I should say it was twenty-two years, from age ten. There's only one other person whose death would—and did—hurt me as much as yours would."

"Unfortunately, I can't necessarily prevent the deaths of the Turks," Veld answered with a sigh.

"But that's what Leviathan's Blessing is letting me do," Tseng replied.

The other two men were silent for a minute before Veld asked, "And where did your self-depreciation come from? I know that isn't just the result of that extra fourteen years you lived, so I need to know what started it." Kariya blinked in surprise.

"What started it? Besides my own people torturing my family and I to death—or nearly, in my case, you mean?" Tseng asked tiredly.

"You've dealt with that. Mostly. It was enough to keep you from trying to get yourself killed, but it didn't keep you from overworking yourself to the point of collapse," Veld replied. "That part isn't hard to grasp. What is hard to grasp is how you could ever have thought Neirine's deliberate dismissal of your warnings about the VR rooms was your fault."

Tseng almost cringed and looked away. "...At first, the reaction was more minor, a sort-of...subconscious reaction to hearing too often how the only use for Wutains is 'to be a good little slave.' Even one of Reno's so-called jokes made use of that and would have resulted in my being gang-raped if I hadn't started killing them. I could only get away with it because they were just SOLDIER and Infantry Cadets, and I was a registered Turk."

Both men's eyes widened at the words, then Veld leaned forward with sudden realization as he said, "That was what caused your reaction to Reno that first day." When Tseng just gave a small nod and refused to look at them, he asked, "Why didn't you tell me?"

"...I didn't think you'd care at that point," the younger man answered softly. "At least, not about that part."

For a moment, the Director of the Turks paused—then asked, "What else happened to have actually made you start to believe that?"

Again, Tseng gave a small flinch, hesitating to speak. At a prompt from Minerva, he forcibly un-gritted his teeth as he said quietly, "Any time Heidegger would catch me alone, he would beat me badly. He's taken to keeping a dog collar on him which he puts on me at those times..."

"Oh, fuck," Kariya swore as Veld closed his eyes. "That's why you knew the reference to the 'collar' my younger self was using in the scenario."

"And I foolishly didn't listen to you when you begged me not to send you to him," Veld sighed sadly. "You didn't think I cared...because you had reason not to. That would also have reinforced the thought that even I didn't think you were worth any more than to be a slave."

"But despite that, I still formed the kind of bond with you that a son has with his father," the Wutain answered softly, looking at the older man with a wry, pained expression. "And Heidegger never stopped doing that until the day he died—I suffered such treatment in his company for eleven years. Your presence never mattered to how he treated me—if anything, without you there, it got worse." Both men looked at him with pain in their eyes. "Add to that the people my work as a Turk forced me to betray, or the people I tried to save and couldn't...and I...really began to think I didn't deserve anything, any better than I had gotten. Leviathan's Blessing was for better people who actually deserved second chances, not for worthless monsters like me. That's what I thought...what I think."

After a short pause, Kariya rose and moved over to kneel in front of him, reaching one hand up to rest it on his cheek. "Tseng, you're worth a lot more than you know, you're worth the second chance you've been given just as much as the other four are. You've proven that already, just in a few days. And I told you—I aim to be here while you're healing, to see you through that healing. My opinion on that hasn't changed." He then drew the younger man's head to his shoulder, holding him as he silently wept.

"Kariya, would you be opposed to staying around here so I can send you to Heidegger in place of Tseng or the other, younger Turks who are most often in the office these days?" Veld asked suddenly.

"I don't mind," Kariya agreed. "Though, if he badmouths me—or Tseng—too much in my presence, I'll tear him a new one in a very unfortunate place."

Veld sighed, but sounded amused as he replied, "That's part of why I want to send you—so he won't get any ideas about trying to do to you what he'd usually do to Tseng."

"Good point," Kariya agreed. Then he paused and blinked, then asked the Wutain leaning on him, "So if Veld's your Dad, what am I?"

"I still haven't figured that out," Tseng muttered into his shoulder.

Kariya blinked again before his gaze softened. "We'll see how things go as you figure yourself out, then. In the meantime, thank you for clearing that up for me."

His only response that time was a nod into his shoulder.