InsaneJournal

Character Information
Name: Rufus ShinRa
Fandom: Final Fantasy VII
Age: 19
Birthday: April 4
PB: Boyd Holbrook
Job: University student, with an internship at a local law firm. (He’s in his junior year--he skipped a grade when he was younger)
Supplant: Zelda, younger sister

Sexual Orientation: Bisexual. He might have a preference for women, but he’s not opposed to relations with his own sex, and in fact gets a bit of a thrill out of the rebellious aspect. (It’s unclear what reaction his father in-game would have if he knew about such tendencies, but it is well-engrained on a subconscious level that his canon father would not be pleased.)
Appearance: Rufus stands at 5’8” and maintains an appearance that would immediately be identified as clean-cut and formal. His blond hair is neatly kept, and his manner of dress is formal. His build is thin, but not frail. Probably the most prominent of his features are his eyes, which are an icy blue and very intense.
http://i286.photobucket.com/albums/ll118/yueyustudio/holbrook.jpg
Personality: Rufus is intelligent, manipulative, and very used to getting his way. Even though his in-game background is far less likely to inspire automatic respect, some part of him will always simply expect people to listen to him. He’s extremely ambitious, and usually scheming something, if often only ways to attain a long-term goal. He does get temporarily upset when his plans fail, but he’s also resilient and adaptive; when things fall apart, he will pick up the pieces, figure out what he did wrong, and try again. It takes quite a lot to discourage him from anything once he’s decided that it’s something he needs or wants to do. He’s very image-conscious in that he will generally wish to appear professional, and if people are going to have some opinion of him, he’d rather they find him just a little frightening (“It is better to be feared than loved,” a favorite author in this world once said). But as straight-laced as he would choose to appear in general, he does have a bit of a rebellious streak as well.

Between his personality, his aforementioned choices of bedside reading, and canon experience, he can be very good at dealing with people in a business kind of sense. While he’s pathetic at understanding other people’s emotions, he can often figure out at least some of the things that would be likely to motivate them, and pick out ways in which they might be useful. He has an air of power about him (though in this game one might wonder where it comes from) and when faced with the right kind of other personality, he can inspire a good deal of respect without much effort. In any interaction with other people that isn’t purely business, however, he’s more than a little socially awkward. He doesn’t trust easily, and he gets personally attached to people even less. He will be polite and play the part of a gentleman if he thinks it would be of benefit to do so, but by and large he is not a caring person, and he would not put much thought into the effect his words or actions have on people (unless there’s a particular effect he’s trying to produce, but even then he’s fairly likely to misread the other person). At the same time, he will not go out of his way to be unkind unless he sees some benefit in it, either. It’s not that he’s incapable of caring about people, but that that person would have to be a very special case. He is more likely to entrust his life to another person than his thoughts or feelings, and the former almost functions as a requirement for the latter. This all combines to make him fundamentally lonely, but the times when that actively bothers him are relatively few and far between.

It may come from having had a pet both in his canon and in-game, but he’s often thought that animals are easier and more desirable to deal with than humans. They can be trained, are loyal and obedient, and they flat out can’t repeat anything one might say to them. Rufus has had few if any people he might label as friends in his lifetime, but he’s always found his dog (or... whatever that is in canon) a fitting companion.

Now for the list of quirks: He likes heights. In the life he doesn’t remember, he spent a fair amount of time hanging out on top of the Shinra building, which is 70 floors tall. His favorite color is white, followed by black, and deep red (though he has a strong aversion to clothing colored a particular shade of the latter, which he wouldn’t be able to explain--it reminds him of his canon father). He is basically incapable of using chopsticks. He is more or less addicted to coffee. He is no stranger to alcohol, despite not yet being legal to drink it, though he very rarely actually gets drunk. His choice of drink if he wants an effect is whiskey; if not so much, red wine. He also smokes on rare occasion, though very few people know that.

History: Rufus has lived a relatively isolated life, with the expectation from a very young age that he would eventually rule the world. He was born the son of President Shinra, owner of the super-powerful ShinRa Electric Company. He attended school normally (if at what his father considered to be an exceptional school), but even as a young child, he was always set apart from his peers simply by dint of being who he was. If this bothered him, he got over it before he was very old, and learned early on to appreciate being in a position of relative power.

It was always assumed that he would follow in his father’s footsteps, and he became Vice President of the company at the age of fourteen. One might wonder why the President would entrust a position of such power to Rufus at that age, but if you consider that Rufus was his son and that such a position could function as a kind of internship, it makes more sense. However, Rufus hated his father (largely for personal reasons, though he might be likely to tell you that it was more for differences in ideologies and that the man was simply in his way) and by fifteen, he was collaborating with an eco-terrorist organization in the hopes of overthrowing his father as President.

He was betrayed by the group, which had become independent from the funding he was providing, and his plan was ultimately a failure. His father learned about the scheme, and he spent a while under a kind of house arrest as punishment (though as far as the public was concerned, he was on a “business trip”), but he eventually returned to his position as Vice President, anxiously awaiting the day he would succeed in taking power from his father’s hands.

(And the events of the original game come after where I’m taking him from, but in case anyone was curious, he was named President at 21, when Sephiroth, the game’s main villain, killed his father. This is the one and only thing he might see fit to thank Sephiroth for.)

In-Game History: Rufus was the first child of parents with a somewhat strained relationship. They loved their son, and the daughter that came after him, but even early on the tension between them was perceptible. He didn’t pay much attention to that, and just assumed that it was normal. When he started going to school, it became apparent that he was an exceptionally bright child, and he skipped a grade early in elementary school. When he was in fourth grade and Zelda was in kindergarten, his parents got a divorce. They both stayed in the city, but lived in separate locations. He lived with their father, and Zelda lived with their mother. His relationship with both parents deteriorated from that point. His father had always been busy with work, and while he had been somewhat closer to his mother, the divorce changed that. He came to resent her for what he perceived as abandoning him (she just left him with his dad and never even tried to see him very much, so she must not have liked him that much, after all). She and Zelda also struggled financially, and Rufus eventually decided that she must have been stupid to choose that over staying with her former husband, who at least had money.

Despite having wanted to keep Rufus, his father found himself unsure of his ability to raise a child on his own. Not really knowing what else to do, he threw himself into his work even more, thinking that at the very least, he would provide the boy a good life. As such, he was rarely around and when he did manage to interact with his son, it was always a little bit awkward. The boy was always somewhat of a handful, and it seemed impossible for them to keep any babysitter for very long. Thankfully, Rufus proved himself to be a relatively responsible child if a very headstrong one, and it wasn’t terribly long before his father became comfortable with leaving Rufus at home by himself. As such, Rufus got used to being on his own most of the time.

But where his father rarely had time, he did have money. He made sure Rufus had the best of everything that he could reasonably provide, from schools to toys, and also made some attempt to make up for his absence through gifts here and there. The best of these was one he got when he was thirteen--a doberman puppy that Rufus named Dark Nation. (He can’t recall where he came up with that name; it simply seemed to make sense at the time) He discovered he had a natural talent for training and interacting with the dog, and it became a close companion.

As he grew older, he began to develop a bit of a rebellious streak. Never really in an obvious way--he remained a model student in school--but in private, he did quite a number of things he knew he shouldn’t. He raided his father’s supply of alcohol (his father wasn’t a heavy drinker by any means, though he did have a liquor cabinet, and kept a bottle of wine or two around on some off chance of a special occasion) on a fairly regular basis (though after once or twice overdoing it, he decided that he really didn’t like actually being drunk), started smoking every once in a while, and snuck out of the house when he could. If asked about it, he would probably say either that it was some attempt to assert his independence or that he just felt like it, but really some part of him had been hoping that at some point his father would notice. But aside from the couple of times that he’d been caught obviously sneaking out, he never really seemed to.

His relationship with his sister was a better one. Though they were separated at home, they were in the same elementary school for the next three years, and while it would be hard to say they were very close, Rufus made a point of looking out for her. They often spent what time they could together in the morning before school started and in the afternoon before they went home. He was also aware of her financial condition, and would occasionally give her some of the toys and things that his father had given him that he didn’t really want, or sometimes he would give her money out of his allowance--but in that case, he would always specify that it was for her to use, and not for their mother. That kind of interaction remained even when Rufus moved on to middle school. The middle school let out a little earlier, and was within walking distance of both the elementary school and his house, so he would walk to her school and wait for her at the end of the day. His father never really noticed that Rufus took longer than he normally should in getting home--he was typically still at work when Rufus got home and let himself in. It became a little more difficult when Rufus went to high school, because he went to a private school that was a little farther away. At that point, though, they were both older and finding ways to see each other was somewhat easier to arrange. Zelda loved her brother and made a conscious effort to be closer to him. From an outside viewpoint, it might seem that he’s still pretty detached around her, but that’s just his personality, and he really cares about her quite a lot.

As he went through school, he found that he had an inclination toward politics and law, and is presently working on completing a pre-law degree at the local university, expecting to continue into their law program after that. He could have stayed at home while attending college, but he chose to take the opportunity to get out of his house. He had been living more or less on his own up until then, so why not make it official? The apartment he’s currently living in is a bit farther away from school than he would like, but it allowed him to keep a dog, and he had been adamant about Dark Nation coming with him.

Recently his time has been mostly spent in classes or at an internship he recently got at a local law firm. His interaction with his father is limited primarily to when Rufus needs money for something or other, but he makes a point of keeping track of Zelda as much as possible.