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It wasn’t love at first sight, definitely not, each figure silently sizing the other up in presumed opposition. It didn’t happen the first time they fucked either, nor the first time they spent a whole night together (although Rufus will never forget the first time his name escaped Tseng’s lips, not Sir or President but his real name, gasped into the darkness like a confession). Rufus had said it aloud to him once, a few drinks in but not enough to be unaware of what he was saying, and he was sure to make it out to be a joke.
“I think I love you, you know,” he had said, and Tseng had smiled and shaken it off.
“I’m sure you do,” he had replied dismissively, and that had been the end of that.
*
They move forward together, side by side, through a near-literal apocalypse. Tseng is nearly killed by masamune, Rufus nearly crushed by a direct hit from Weapon, the Planet nearly destroyed by a god damn meteor, but every time it is a nearly. They remain untouchable.
And then there is the Geostigma.
Rufus tries to hide it but eventually has to confess that he is sick, and Tseng frankly shrugs it off. It doesn’t matter to him. Normal people get sick, and sometimes it’s bad, but Rufus Shinra isn’t normal people, and so it is irrelevant. When a week has passed and he is still unwell, it’s nothing more than faintly annoying, a frustration in the back of his head. A month passes though, and things are beginning to change - razor-sharp witticisms dulling, snappy comebacks slowing - and he doesn’t want to attribute them to the sickness, but it’s getting harder to deny.
Two weeks later he’s bed bound, the darkness spreading across his skin like some kind of twisted captor, and Tseng can’t deny it anymore; Rufus Shinra is ... sick.
And so he fights. Intel gathering is what they do and so he takes himself out to the wreckage of Shinra Tower, scavenging through what’s left of Hojo’s lab. He travels to Nibelheim and breaks into that cursed basement, reads and reads and reads until he has to literally talk himself out of the nonsense he tries to piece together. He snaps a man’s neck for trying to sell him false information, personally tracks down the bandits waiting in hiding who had planned to ambush him should he have fallen for it.
He visits the church, still standing against all odds, and he wants to ask for help but he doesn’t know how; he has never believed in god, and the smell of the flowers still in bloom only makes him feel sick.
On his fruitless quest for answers he makes one mistake too many, and a stern talk from his fellow Turks finds him sent to Healen to be with their ailing boss. He doesn’t protest, doesn’t have it in him. When he gets there however he doesn’t feel like he’s failed, even though he has no solution to hand, no fix, no cure, and maybe that’s when he realizes.
Rufus isn’t a mission to be failed. He was never a damn mission at all.
“Since when did I matter so much to you anyway?” Rufus rasps when Tseng is finished telling him of his misadventures, his hopeless searching, and Geostigma be damned there is the ghost of a smile on his pale, pale lips. His eyes are sunken, half-lidded, but he still fixes Tseng with that translucent blue gaze.
“I … don’t know,” Tseng answers honestly. Rufus entwines their fingers together and squeezes gently, and Tseng looks down at their joined hands. He is surprised to find himself smiling too, and he doesn’t understand why, but at this point he doesn’t question it either.
The sun is coming up and it doesn’t matter, it could be rising or falling or god damn imploding for all he cares. After a lifetime of scanning surroundings, of checking the shadows, of thinking five steps ahead, all he knows has narrowed down to this one moment in this one room with this one man. All he knows is all that matters, and for one sweet moment, he feels peace.
“I …” he begins, turning their hands together. He gives up with a sigh and raises them both to his lips instead, kissing Rufus’s knuckles gently.
“I know you do,” Rufus says quietly, and Tseng nods. “I know.”