Chapter Text
Day 14 of solitary confinement
Rufus noticed it sometime during what he estimated to be his second week. When the cell gave him nothing to measure time by except the intervals of the sublevel maintenance cycles.
During those hours, the lights along the ceiling seam dimmed to almost nothing.
The plate supports shifted against their housings in long, patient increments. The ventilation pulled air through the shaft beyond the wall in a low percussive hum.
It rose and fell, rose and fell, until he stopped hearing it as machinery and started hearing it as lungs.
He had not spoken aloud in four days after they had rationed his supply of water. When he tested his voice just to ensure it still functioned, the sound mildly alarmed him.
It was thinner than he remembered. An unfamiliar rasp that belonged to a stranger, not him, the son of the most powerful man in Gaia.
He refused to dwell on why.
The operation had failed in a way he still could not fully reconstruct, largely because the shape of the failure shifted depending on the hour he examined it.
Sometimes it seemed a single miscalculated loyalty. Other times, a rushed timeline.
During the darkest hours—the ones that arrived alongside the maintenance cycle—the truth felt simpler and far more humiliating: he had been a child playing a game whose real rules his father had never let him see.
The disgrace of that thought was so total that he usually retreated to blaming the timeline instead.
Still, he forced himself to run the sequence every night. He had nothing else to occupy the hours. After all, he was a man paying the price for treason.
Funding them had been the beginning. That was the piece he had been most meticulous about, the foundation he still believed was sound.
A company weakened from within was far easier to inherit by force than to wait out. He had quietly fed them intelligence through channels designed to survive this exact tier of collapse, and for a time, the machinery had worked.
Who would have foreseen that Fuhito would have a god complex and pushed the operation past the boundaries Rufus had set?
The moment it ceased to be his instrument, it became his downfall. The men he hired to execute his plan had locked him out of it, and by the time the Turks came for him, control was already gone.
That was the detail that haunted him. Not the betrayal itself—he had expected that, had built the entire strategy around the certainty that everyone involved would eventually turn.
The part that refused to close was that he had correctly anticipated their willingness to turn, yet still failed to predict who would strike first.
He knew his father had ordered him brought here rather than to a standard holding facility. It was a message, even if he had not fully decoded its precise phrasing.
Perhaps it meant: this is your current worth to me. Or perhaps: this is the fate of those who reach for unearned power.
More likely, it was merely the reflexive cruelty of a man who drew no distinction between punishing an enemy and punishing a son. To President Shinra, those categories had never been separate.
Rufus had inherited that same instinct. He recognized it in himself even now, curled against the cold plating with his knees drawn up, cataloguing which of his father's lieutenants had turned and in what sequence, filing each name away the way another man might offer a prayer.
Through the ceiling above, he heard the Turks moving.
It was rare and muffled. The sublevels were engineered to swallow sound as effectively as light, and whatever the intelligence division conducted in its corridors remained quiet.
Occasionally, a door down the hall would open, releasing a fragment of conversation before sealing shut again—two voices, unhurried, carrying the flat cadence of men who had handled worse tasks this week and would do so again the next.
He tracked their shifts by those brief sounds. In honesty, he learned to track a great deal from almost nothing, a subtle skill born of fourteen days spent in a windowless vault.
Something about his sense being heightened after overcoming the initial bout of taphophobia.
His proximity to them allowed him to feel the structure working. That, he assumed, was the intent. His father had not exiled him to a remote facility where his absence could be disguised as an extended overseas assignment.
He had buried his son in the sublevels of corporate headquarters, three floors beneath the men who made problems vanish, leaving him to be felt rather than seen.
A living coffin inside the family house.
The door mechanism woke him. He had no memory of drifting off.
His father's voice arrived before the heavy door finished retracting, mid-sentence.
It is heavy with the specific, furious edge Rufus had spent twenty-four years learning to read like bad weather.
Pushing himself upright against the wall took more effort than it should have, a detail he logged with distant detachment, as if reading a report on someone else's physical condition.
"—look at him." The President did not step fully into the cell. He never crossed the threshold for anything he deemed beneath him, and Rufus understood with sudden, restful clarity that he had been officially categorized.
"This is my heir. Decades of grooming produced a boy who funds the people trying to kill me, then folds the instant his own instrument turns on him. A loser."
A second voice joined the air—level, measured, carefully controlled. Rufus did not immediately recognize it.
"You asked me how to retain him in usable condition, sir," Nakamura said. "I am telling you that four years in a windowless cell at this pressure is no longer punishment. It is degradation."
"Are you correcting me, Nakamura?"
"I am giving you an assessment. You requested one from Facilities and they handed you a maintenance log, so I am providing the context they omitted."
Rufus kept his gaze fixed on a seam in the metal flooring. He listened the way he had learned to process everything in the dark: as a man gauges a storm he cannot see, feeling its vibration through the hull.
"He attempted my assassination," his father said. "Through proxies, using company capital, alongside an organization that has spent years attempting to burn my reactors to the ground. I have no interest in an assessment of his comfort."
"I am not offering one." A precise, brief pause followed. "I am outlining the narrative consequence if the board learns the Vice President—your sole named successor—was held in a vault beneath headquarters without natural light and emerged non-functional. That is not a question of mercy. It is a matter of liability. At present, you have a disloyal son. In another two weeks, you will have a public relations catastrophe wearing his face, and no version of the succession plan survives that intact."
Silence settled over the room—the particular silence Rufus feared far more than elevated voices, signaling that his father was calculating figures.
"He funded a coup, Nakamura. Part of me believes the appropriate response is to remind him, physically, whose company he attempted to take."
"That remains your prerogative, sir. I merely point out that a visibly damaged heir is far more difficult to manage than a defiant one. Defiance can be reframed when necessary. Physical damage cannot."
Rufus remained motionless. Looking up cost currency he did not possess.
In this house, his father's attention brought only two outcomes, neither of which he was currently equipped to survive. He held still, letting them weigh his value in his absence.
"Move him," his father said at last, already turning away with the sudden boredom he displayed whenever a conflict lost its edge.
"Somewhere with light. It matters little where. Make him presentable enough that this detail does not follow us out of the building."
"Understood, sir."
The door sealed. The footsteps faded—his father's brisk and indifferent, while the second set lingered a moment longer, as if their owner were completing a final line item on an internal checklist.
Rufus did not move for a long time. He processed the dialogue as he did every conversation about his future, sorting the statements into expenses and assets.
His father: a punishment calculated and temporarily deferred due the fact that he still views his son as an investment. A future extension of himself. That was familiar and legible.
The second man's contribution he filed away without deep interest—a name, Nakamura, attached to remarks on corporate liability and narrative management.
It bore the marks of routine execution: an employee managing a problematic subordinate.
Nothing in the tone requested anything in return, which, in Rufus's experience, signaled that no personal capital had been risked.
He set the thought aside.
They came for him the following morning, or the equivalent hour in a space without windows. Two unfamiliar Turks arrived, offering only the minimum communication required to direct his movements.
One held the door while the other waited in the corridor with the practiced patience of someone executing a routine assignment. Neither looked directly at his face.
His father had cycled the personnel again, ensuring no single pair of hands retained a complete picture of what had transpired. The new room was located two floors up. It had a window.
Though smaller than the vault—which had lacked furniture entirely—it offered natural light. The illumination filtered through a reinforced pane facing a central ventilation shaft rather than the open sky.
It was bright enough to track the passing hours by watching the angles shift across the floor.
From this elevation, the building sounded different, positioned farther from the plate supports and closer to a higher-pitched mechanical hum.
Standing at the glass, Rufus looked down. Three floors below, he could see the sealed corridor he had just vacated.
Its entrance was indistinguishable from the dozen other heavy doors lining the hall, each opening into the same dark space.
He had spent fourteen days buried in that stretch of metal while the building above continued its operations, entirely unaware of his presence.
Rufus stood at the pane for several minutes, watching the corridor where he had learned the rhythm of his own breathing.
Then he turned back to the room and began calculating how to ensure his father never had the opportunity to send him down there again.
*****************
Junon Medical University Hospital (JMUH)
Dr. Amsel had the specific brightness of a man about to hand someone else his problem.
Rae recognized the demeanor before he uttered a word—the overly quick smile and the way he cleared his throat twice before she even settled into the chair across from him.
On the table lies a folder he kept squaring against the desk edge like a salesman practicing a pitch.
This better not be a VVIP client
She had attended enough placement meetings, both legitimate and the staged variations professors used to project authority, to recognize the mechanics of management.
"I have an opportunity for you," he said. "A significant one. I want you to grasp that before we proceed."
"All right."
"You are aware of the individual currently under evaluation at the Midgar facility."
She was. Everyone on the psychiatric services rotation was aware, operating within that specific environment where no one spoke his name directly in the break room.
Yet everyone understood who was implied by the case upstairs. She kept her expression neutral.
"The Vice President."
"The Vice President." Amsel delivered the title with reverence, as though the phrasing itself were a reward.
"He has proven exceptionally difficult to assign. We have rotated three residents through that post in five months. Two requested reassignments. One was dismissed by the family office—which, to be clear, Rae, is an outcome that permanently alters a career trajectory here."
"And you want me."
"I want you because your logged hours, standing, and overall temperament suit the role. You do not rattle. I have observed your performance in triage."
He opened the folder, performing the gesture more for effect than out of a need to review its contents.
"This is a field placement most in your cohort would surrender a limb to secure. Direct clinical exposure to a case of this profile and visibility is the precise credential that guarantees admission to any advanced program. I expected you to appear somewhat more pleased."
She understood, in a detached sense, that he intended it as a gesture of goodwill. From his perspective, he was offering a senior student a rare and lucrative assignment.
As for her, a model student, she learnt that the exchange was to respond accordingly.
Act flattered, slightly awed, and suitably grateful to reinforce his self-image as a benefactor.
She had performed that quiet appreciation for minor favors in the past. At this moment, however, she could not conjure it.
The Vice President. Rufus Shinra. Twenty-four, heir presumptive to an empire built on the calculated, funded violence her father had spent her entire childhood being compensated to overlook.
She knew, through the flat reality of corporate machinery—not from official documentation, but from the deliberate silences at her family's dinner table—that his attempt to seize control had not been an impulse. It required funding, reach, and patient execution built over years.
There was a version of the eco-terrorism of recent years, the version her father never confirmed, yet never denied when asked where those disruptions were not organic expressions of outrage.
When Rae did her own investigating much later, she learnt that the acts of terror were apparently financed by a wealthy, impatient heir. One who calculated that a corporation weakened from within was easier to seize by force than to wait.
Her mother, a doctor who had been on duty as a travelling doctor, had been standing in the wrong reactor sector on the wrong afternoon during the first of those blazes.
Rae shared none of this with Dr. Amsel. No phrasing of that truth allowed her to retain the placement, her clinical hours, or her academic standing, and she had calculated those trade-offs long before finishing the thought.
"I am pleased," she said while hiding her burning resentment. "When do I begin?"
Shinra Electric Power Company
They escorted her for their initial session, descending through an armed private elevator that popped faintly in her ears as the seal equalized.
She had to move past two security checkpoints where guards inspected her student identification as if assessing its validity.
Her escort, a young guard whose uniform still bore crisp factory folds, maintained steady conversation during the descent.
They spoke about how they are glad that they have found a willing resident who did not mind signing a NDA prior to visiting their patient, and how the Vice President had become much easier to handle since being moved upstairs, relatively speaking. Rae logged the qualifier without commenting.
The quarters assigned to him were an improvement over a cell in the way a clinical waiting room surpassed a transit station: sanitized, brightly lit, deliberately stripped of character, featuring a thick window that looked out onto dark water rather than bare stone.
Rufus Shinra sat beside the pane when she entered, his chair angled slightly away from the doorway. He did not turn to acknowledge her entrance—a choice, she recognized instantly, rather than a lack of awareness.
"Another one," he said to the glass.
"My name is Rae."
"I did not ask."
She placed her folder on the small table between them with deliberate, unhurried care, taking the opposing chair without waiting for an invitation.
At close range, he differed from her expectations, though she had not constructed a clear image beforehand.
He appeared younger than his official dossier photographs. Then again, those images are most likely crafted for corporate boards to project authority, maturity, and stability.
Something that she knows all too well, with an upbringing like hers.
A quiet stillness surrounded him, coming across less like composure and more like deliberate restraint. When he finally shifted his gaze to her, his eyes performed an immediate appraisal.
His eyes were sharp and dismissive as if he is measuring her against an outcome he had already assumed.
"You are new," he said. It was a statement of fact.
"Fourth-year medical and law student."
"How remarkable for you."
He returned his focus to the water, though the quiet statement registered.
She watched him process it—the dual track, the joint JD/MD path that took six years and broke most of the people who attempted it.
After all, only a masochist would put themselves in a situation like this, as if being in the medical field is not punishing enough. But she does not need to justify to him as he was already doing enough without saying anything.
That particular read in the faces of everyone who heard the combination combined with the brief pause while they sorted through the possible applications.
Medical malpractice defense. Healthcare compliance. Insulating massive entities from liability.
And then, for those who knew the landscape well enough, the other track. Bioethics. Institutional architecture. The legal frameworks governing human subjects, scientific boundaries, research ethics.
The people who decided where the line between acceptable and monstrous was drawn, and who had the authority to move it.
Given that Shinra ran the SOLDIER program and weaponized genetic modification with near-total immunity, a bioethics track was not a random specialization.
It was a door. And someone in this building had selected her for this particular assignment and decided that she was the right shape to walk through it.
Rufus kept his face blank, but she recognized the moment the calculation completed. He had already assigned her a category and a probable purpose.
Predictable.
Let him. The version of her file he could access would tell him nothing useful. She was informed that he still retain access to the company's private server. He would most likely look her up later.
"Allow me to simplify this session," he said to the glass, his voice smooth and detached. "I do not require management. Your predecessors believed otherwise, and you are aware of their results."
"I am aware. Dr. Amsel provided the background." She maintained a neutral tone as she draw on her practical training. "I am not here to manage you.
My instructions are to document your attendance twice weekly, log observations, and submit reports. That covers the scope of my presence."
"And if I decline to participate?"
"I document the refusal. The contents of the report do not impact me personally." She allowed a brief pause before continuing.
"Though the record of being labeled non-compliant carries implications for your standing."
A subtle shift passed across his jaw—not a full reaction, but the containment of one, like an individual checking a physical response a fraction of a second before it registered.
He offered no direct reply. Instead, he studied her again, his gaze lingering with a cold, calculated interest.
"You will remain two weeks," he said smoothly, as though delivering a neutral prediction. "The previous candidate who attempted transparency lasted nine days."
"Noted." Rae opened her folder and unclipped her pen. "Shall we proceed, or would you prefer to exhaust a few more dismissals first? My schedule is clear for the hour."
He did not respond, turning back toward the glass to present his profile.
She permitted the quiet to remain for the standard duration dictated by her training, then began recording entries: date, timestamp, subject demeanor, subject declined engagement.
In her mind, she made peace with the fact that twice a week, she would sit across from the individual who financed the fire that took her mother. It's only four weeks of suffering. In exchange, she would be receiving academic credit for verifying his stability.
In the margin of the sheet, she wrote subject declined engagement a second time, applying slightly more pressure to the paper, leaving the impulse unanalyzed.
I should be angrier and yet, I don't feel anything.
The clock on the wall ticked past the forty-minute mark in sharp clicks. She remained seated, writing nothing further, letting the remaining time elapse without forcing conversation.
When the hour concluded, Rae capped her pen, gathered her documents into the folder, and stood. The chair scraped faintly against the floor plating.
Rufus did not turn around, but just as her hand touched the door mechanism, his voice cut across the quiet room. A low, controlled rasp carrying a slight edge of calculated interest.
"What was the rest of your name?"
She paused at the threshold, her fingers resting against the metal frame. She did not look back at him.
"Rae Shirogawa."
"Shirogawa," he repeated quietly to the glass, testing the cadence, filing the name away alongside every other variable in the building.
The door retracted into the wall and sealed shut behind her.