Canonically? Probably that time he messed up that mission with Veld and almost got them both killed. (The one that leads to one of my favorite lines from Veld, which basically translates to “…They say that subordinates are a lot like their superiors, so maybe I’m still naive, too.”)
Headcanon? When Tseng was about seventeen he once accidentally stole one of Veld’s extremely expensive pens after a group meeting, didn’t realize it until two days later when he found it in his desk drawer, and proceeded to spend the next week trying to sneak it back into Veld’s desk instead of just telling him that he’d accidentally walked away with it.
After a series of failed attempts that landed three colleagues in trouble (all of whom insisted that they would willingly sacrifice themselves to keep Tseng out of trouble because Turks are and have always been ride-or-die, even in exceptionally ridiculous situations), the incident was resolved when Reno finally just took the pen from Tseng, slipped it into his pocket, and walked into the armory.
A few seconds later he walked back out, holding up the pen like a lighter at a concert. “Hey, Chief! Isn’t this like your sixth-favorite ‘I’m a rich bastard’ pen? I don’t think it goes in the materia locker.”
As it turned out, Veld had been so busy over the past week and a half that he hadn’t even noticed it was missing. He thanked Reno, theorizing that he’d accidentally carried it in there himself when getting kitted out for a field assignment, and just accidentally left it in the locker.
(This event may be why Reno was given the vice director position upon Tseng’s promotion within the department, but neither of them will confirm or deny the possibility.)
(Also I know the Ultimania says that Reno is 25 during the Crisis but that makes absolutely no sense with the timeline of the Compilation so I reject this as soundly as I reject Sephiroth being born in 1980.)
24. Most annoying habit?
For simple habits, like tics, Tseng tends to use fountain pens not because of any preference of his own, but because he will fidget with click pens or snap the lid on and off capped pens over and over and over until everyone around him wants to strangle him alive. Veld got him into fountain pens so that he’d stop doing that during mission briefs and meetings.
For more complex issues, as indicated in the story above, Tseng is horribly indirect in social situations. This is doubly true when he thinks someone else has a problem with him, which leads to him asking questions of mutual acquaintances, making observations and constructing timelines to try to figure out whether he or the other party is in the wrong, and overthinking every previous interaction he can think of instead of just asking the other person what’s going on.
This is less annoying for the people who don’t realize it’s happening, but for everyone else there’s a lot of “Just ask him. Oh my god. Just ask him what’s wrong! Tseng you are THIRTY-EIGHT YEARS OLD just ASK HIM if he’s mad at you!”
35. Their idea of a perfect day?
Even with alarms off, Tseng wakes up a little after sunrise, even on the weekend. He rolls over, slings his arm over Reeve in bed and stays there until Reeve wakes up about an hour later. They get up, Reeve checks his phone—Tseng takes it from him, because they’re off work today. He goes through Reeve’s notifications, snoozes all of them for 48 hours, then gives him back his phone.
Reeve makes coffee while Tseng makes sure Cait Sith is set on assignments for the day, and then both and and Reeve see him off for the day. Cait Sith won’t connect directly with Reeve except in an emergency, and Tseng isn’t worried about that; he can take care of himself, and things are quiet these days anyway. The biggest problems they have to deal with these days are ordinary people with legal agreements, not overpowered superhumans with lethal aggression.
Tseng gets dressed before Reeve, because Reeve likes to shower first thing in the morning and Tseng likes to shower before he goes to bed. He makes breakfast while Reeve is washing up, and gets a call from Reno that he’s letting Elena off early today because she has a date. It’ll mean they’re running a little skinny through the weekend, but the mission board is almost empty so he’s not pressed about it. Tseng says that’s all right, he trusts Reno’s judgment, and he’ll talk to him on Monday.
He pages through the worst gossip rag in Junon while Reeve eats breakfast, periodically turning the magazine around to ask if Reeve thinks a particular photo of this or that public figure was taken by Kunsel. Reeve agrees with him every time, except for the one of Vincent, and they both admit that Kunsel is too scared of Vincent to have done that. They spend some time theorizing who would have taken the chance, going well past the point that breakfast is done, but don’t reach a consensus before an alarm goes off and it’s time to head out.
Up on the roof of the WRO’s executive housing facility, Tseng and Reeve load up one of the organization’s aircars—like an airship, but stripped down to the smallest versions of the barest essentials until it’s not quite the length of a travel trailer—and spend the next few hours in the sky. The autopilot gives Tseng some time to read, although it always makes Reeve anxious. This is funny, singe Reeve helped develop the aircar in the first place, so he knows there’s no risk of them going down just because Tseng took his eyes off the instruments for a few minutes, and Tseng teases him about it until Reeve begrudgingly concedes.
They touch down in Costa, but not on the landing pad—not even properly in town, instead settling just past the cliffs that divide the commercial, public beaches with the less-accessible stretch of shoreline to the north. Reeve unloads the aircar and Tseng sets up, propping up an umbrella, unfolding chairs and draping them in towels, situating the cooler and pulling out one of those cheap premade smoothies-in-a-pouch for lunch. He gets changed while Reeve has his own lunch, and they spend the rest of the day at the beach; around sunset they get back in the car (leaving all those things they brought on the sand, no one can get here except from the air and everything is replaceable anyway) to head into town, where they get dinner from a food truck on the side of the road as they walk from the landing pad to the hotel where they’ll spend the night.
Tomorrow afternoon, they’ll head home. But for a little over 24 hours, there’s nothing but sunshine and sand and water, ice melting in a plastic cooler, slightly-uncomfortable folding chairs and sand-crusted towels. No work, no responsibilities, no crises to avert.
And when Tseng goes back to work on Monday, he’ll remember exactly why that work is worth doing, which feels pretty perfect to him.
44. Their happiest memory?
I would say that Tseng doesn’t have a lot of happy memories, but that’s not really it. The thing is that for Tseng, happiness is a fleeting, finite thing; contentment is possible eventually, but happiness is different, happiness is deeper, and it isn’t until after the world has come to and end multiple times that he finds it in a more permanent sense. Before that, his happiest memories are…not what most people would consider pleasant? But they’re happy nonetheless.
Pinned under rubble when he was too young and too naive to know when to give up, sure that he was going to die, and then having Veld show up to save him after insisting over and over that he wouldn’t.
Security footage taken from Kalm, seeing Aerith under a blue sky for the first time and knowing that it was where she was meant to be, that she was finally getting to see the world that belonged to her.
Sitting in the forest outside the Forgotten Capital, bruised and bleeding after days of torture at the hands of the Remnants, watching Vincent work on treating Elena’s injuries—first, before Tseng, because she was unconscious and he wasn't—and eventually turn to Tseng and declare without a hint of uncertainty that she would pull through.
If asked, Tseng would say that he has a lot of happy memories. Nobody else would think they’re happy at all.
R - Which friendship/platonic relationship is your favorite in fandom?
This is actually hard to say! Firstly, I see all ships as being friendships—if they’re not friends, I don’t think that’s a good relationship. My favorite ship is still VinVeld, I think, but it’s basically a pool noodle so it’s hard to call it my favorite in fandom. I am the source of like 75% of the fanart ever drawn for those two, so like. The fandom is me. 😭
I think my favorite relationship altogether (romantic or platonic) within fandom right now, as in the ones where I interact with other people, is Strifentine. There are a lot of really fun people into their interactions all across the world, and I’ve honestly never had a bad experience on that side of the fandom. Pretty much everyone over there is very much “I’m in my lane and that’s all there is to it,” and that’s basically how I feel about fandom in general so it’s pretty great. Also I just love the character dynamic between the two of them in-canon (particularly the OG and AC), so it’s always really nice to play with regardless of context!
S - Show us an example of your personal headcanon (prompts optional but encouraged)
I have a lot of random Tseng headcanons, but I think I’ve shared most of the fun ones at some point in the past. I can talk about one of my stupid Tseeve headcanons that works in conjunction with a Tseng headcanon?
My Tseng has had an on-again-off-again relationship with Reeve since he was about 20, often with long “off” stretches between the “on” periods—he’s had plenty of flings and even the occasional repeat hookup, but his only actual dedicated relationship has been with Reeve. Given that he knows Tseng has slept with other people, Reeve does not know this until they’re planning their wedding around 2012; he makes a joke about a jilted ex-boyfriend showing up to cause trouble, and Tseng says that won’t be an issue since he doesn’t have any ex-boyfriends. He didn’t think this was a big deal, considering that he was more dedicated to his job than to anything else up until Meteorfall—which is one of the reasons he and Reeve broke things off so often—but upon discovering this, Reeve proceeds to have a minor internal crisis over whether or not that means all his boyfriends during their long “off” periods count as cheating. (They don’t. Oh my god. They don’t. Reeve. Please.)
T - Do you have any hard and fast headcanons that you will die defending?
Vincent is half-Wutaian! To be clear, all characters in Japanese media are generally meant to be viewed as partially Japanese unless broadcast very specifically as something else (IE: the Shinra family are explicitly intended to be white), but Vincent is so obviously part-Asian just visually that I’m sure it’s intended in-universe. Grimoire has a different hair texture and base skin tone than Vincent, though, and his build and facial features are quite different, leading me to the conclusion that Vincent gets those visibly-Asian features from his mother. (Also seeing people go out of their way to portray Vincent as white gives me hives.)
I forgot to share the Tseeve crumbs from Rebirth, a handful of seconds that had my jaw on the floor.
Tseng’s casual body language? His playful little comment? The smirk? The way the secretary immediately vacates the premises when she realizes it’s Tseng? HELLO?
I’m answering all of these as postcanon; that’s when they’re permanently together.
1. Which one is the better cook:
This is pretty evenly matched, actually. They cook very different dishes, and neither of them are top of the line chef material, but they’re both fully capable. Reeve is an engineer and thus has a pretty strong understanding of things like math, so he may be better at following or formulating a recipe than Tseng, but Tseng is more intuitive in his cooking and can tell what a dish needs to make it better. They also tend to cook very different things, so they’re basically even on this one!
6. How they decorated their bedroom:
Tseng prefers a more functional, minimalistic look than Reeve, but neither of them are fans of clutter (not that you’d believe that based on the state of Reeve’s workshop) and so their room has a fairly clean, modern style. Reeve uses a lot of bakery box white and dark purple, while Tseng leans more into black and neutrals, so their preferences end up working together well.
Both of them agree that the bedroom has a handful of very specific purposes, so there isn’t a lot in there that isn’t meant to facilitate sleep, getting dressed, or fooling around. A big bed with too many pillows, a dark duvet (purple in the summer, black in the winter) and a headboard sturdy enough to tie someone’s hands to but simple enough not to seem out of place; matching nightstands and dressers just too neutral to be the color of coffee; a single bookcase (on Reeve’s side, Tseng takes his books from the study and leaves them on his nightstand until he’s done reading them then he puts them back in the study); a lot of different types of lighting. The window has blinds on it, not curtains.
10. What TV shows they watch together, and which ones they hide from the other:
Reeve wishes he had time for TV, but he really doesn’t. He also didn’t really grow up with TV as a standard form of entertainment, so he mostly gets into radio dramas and the like. Tseng likes those competitive baking shows because they’re interesting but undeniably low-stakes, and while Reeve won’t seek that kind of thing out, he enjoys watching it with Tseng. Neither of them have any “guilty pleasures” when it comes to media entertainment because, frankly, what they’ve done in their actual lives is often much worse (Tseng) or looks much more ridiculous (Reeve) than anything a television studio could come up with.
14. What nicknames they call each other:
They really…don’t? They’ll refer to each other as “commissioner” and “director” on occasion in a tongue-in-cheek sort of way, but it’s not so much a term of endearment as it is general snark. (The only arguable exception to this would be when they’re doing something D/s related but those aren’t nicknames, they’re titles and temporary name replacements, and that’s completely different.)
I actually have an illustration of this exact moment:
Okay so this actually isn’t exactly how it went down, this is obviously exaggerated for comedic effect.
Tseng was about sixteen here, almost seventeen, and Reeve was just recently twenty! Reeve was an assistant to the director of Urban Development at the time, and Tseng had not yet made vice director of the Turks, although he’d been in the department for almost two years.
Tseng didn’t trust how casual Reeve was with Veld—although he was never disrespectful, nobody was this casual with Veld who wasn’t also a jackass, which led Tseng to be very leery of him at first.
Reeve, for his part, looked at Tseng and reminded himself that the legal age in Midgar is 18. They’re only like 2-3 years apart, and regardless of how pragmatic he may be in departmental operations, Reeve tends to fall for people very hard and very fast—Tseng was no exception. (Look, it’s not his fault that his type is “pretty, elegant, and could definitely kick my ass.”)
