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Tseng didn’t look into Veld’s eyes.
He knew he wasn’t seeing him.
He didn’t look into his own reflection overmuch. His face wasn’t static.
Something was living in his skin.
Someone.
Someone he never knew.
Sometimes he saw red where there was brown like he knew Veld was seeing. Or maybe that was a projection he was living. A thing he assumed once and now it was a life he was traveling through, but not living.
Someone could make you feel wrong in your skin with just a haunted look, and Veld was being haunted by his regrets.
Now he was gone, but his haunting was still making him feel haunted too.
Veld was a language Tseng picked up via osmosis.
Tseng felt like he didn’t understand how to communicate what he knew, but he felt fluent in regret.
You could feel what Veld felt. Viscerally. He tried to hide it, but he was bad at hiding anything. Poker wasn’t his strong suit. And try as Tseng might, he felt what others felt. He just didn’t really know what he himself felt in all that rawness beside regret.
Regret was Tseng’s first language, before Standard in Midgar.
Before the very specific subset in the sweltering wetness of the village he lived in briefly in Wutai where he only remembered his mother’s rage and deep regret.
She didn’t have to tell him he wasn’t wanted.
His earliest memory was of her trying to drown him and his father suffering the consequence of saving him.
His father never stood up for him after that. He was the reason Tseng was born.
He wished he could forget his childhood.
It would be simpler.
Rufus said something similar once.
“I remember too much, and that is the problem. I envy people who can erase things. I feel like a tape recorder.” It was a joke, but it wasn’t. He laughed, but there was pain behind his eyes.
“I am exactly like you, except I am completely different,” Tseng told him another day. It was a joke. But it wasn’t. There was pain behind his eyes.
Sometimes it’s enough, he mused, to know that someone travels with a similar but different pain.
It certainly made the pain less sharp.
It made him feel more present too.
Like he was less a shell, and more a man.
Because when Veld looked at him, there was regret, but when Rufus looked at him, there was something like understanding, and sometimes Tseng caught Rufus staring off into space, standing, completely gone from his body, and Tseng knew exactly what that felt like and he just waited, wondering if someone lived inside Rufus too.
Or if that was something Tseng would take to his grave.