#this is 3k words of brain spaghetti please enjoy

[charbunnies]

HAPPY BIRTHDAY GRIMMY MY GOOD FRIEND GRIMMY you should talk about your unhinged ff7 au

OUHH MIMI MY FRIEND MIMI YOU FOOL. you have opened pandora's box and unleashed the eldritch beast that is my ff7 au. god where do i even start

this is going to end up so long i'm ACTUALLY going to put it under a read more. it's also (mostly) stream of consciousness so sorry if it's a bit disorganized :)

lllllet's see. i'll establish like, baseline weird character relationships because the valentine family is a mess.

here's a family tree to make this more readable LMAO

vincent is the (world's first absent transmasc) father of reno, sephiroth, and aerith. sephiroth is half siblings with reno and aerith but reno and aerith are full siblings. the way that this happens is kind of convoluted because of course it is, nothing with me can ever be easy, but basically: reno eldest brother, sephiroth middle sibling, aerith little sister.

reno is the only one who escaped the vincent experimentation era fucking-up but, yknow, still half ancient. vincent takes lucrecia's place with the mid-pregnancy experimentation thing but like entirely against his will, and also lucrecia is still sephiroth's mother (she and ifalna are both transfem because I SAID SO), so sephiroth's completely unrelated to hojo. but yeah, vincent ended up with jenova cells and monster fuckery and more trauma and it's all fine and good (it's not. sorry vincent)

AERITH ended up especially fucked up, though. not only is she half ancient, she was also born like, YEARS after vincent got fucked up so she's got some of his monster fuckery too (she has a little bunny tail and glowy cat eyes and fangs among other things) and a little bit of jenova cells for good measure. she hears jenova whispers AND the voice of the planet and has learned to deal with that a loooot better than sephiroth did but yknow, still not fun! she hates jenova like crazy <3

reno basically ended up in an orphanage through mysterious circumstances when he was like 2. vincent entrusted him to a friend to look after him for a few weeks while he was out on a mission and came back to find his friend missing and reno with them. oops! so reno grew up in an orphanage in midgar hearing voices and being accidentally gaslit into thinking that the voices of the planet were just his internal monologue. he and rude grew up together in the orphanage and fell in love as they got older :) also when reno meets aerith and talks to her about her ancient stuff (she trusts him a lot) he's like "huh. weird. that sounds like what i have all the time" and she looks at him like he grew another head. he treats her like a little sister long before he knows she's his little sister. they're really close and it makes me wail

as for sephiroth... he's mostly the same, except for having known aerith and ifalna when they were being kept in the shinra labs and having a sibling relationship with aerith when they were both little. he broke ifalna and aerith out of the shinra building when aerith was 7 and she was tormented by having left him behind for the rest of her life until, yknow, *gesturing* they met again. they love each other so much though, even though it's kind of a messy relationship. a really messy relationship

when vincent and aerith meet in shinra manor, he almost immediately recognizes her as his kid (she looks just like ifalna, with vincent's fucked-up-ness) and babies her like crazy in the most vincent-y way. by which i mean lets her hide in his cape and hovers near her and lets her cuddle him despite him not letting hardly anyone else near him. vincent, sephiroth and reno all baby her and she likes it so much (autistic who loves physical affection)

i'm still workshopping whether or not i want ifalna to still be alive, because seb and i have talked about it extensively and i have Feelings about it but also it throws off the timeline a lot so Who Knows! but i'll talk a little about it laaaater :)

i promise this is all important information. it's not really but it's important TO ME. anyway.

this is very close to an everyone lives/no one dies au. zack, aerith and sephiroth all live. as to the circumstances of that, WELL!

zack narrowly survives getting shot a bajillion times because cissnei finds him as he's dying and brings him back to shinra hq just in time for *drum roll* hojo to steal his dying body and stuff him in the drum and keep him in a coma for another two years! cissnei and tifa go on a years-long search for him and come up empty! vincent finds records of him being kept there while sorting through turk documents after advent children (they hired him) and aerith and cloud go break zack out. zack started turning into a mako monster over those last two years from more severe experiments and now he has a big ass tail that he has Mental Trouble about. i will get into him later because ouuhhhhghhghghghg grabs him. chews on him

anyway. aerith lives because she limit breaks when sephiroth stabs her and keeps herself alive. she then proceeds to drag his ass out of the lifestream kicking and screaming by reminding him of their childhood in the shinra labs together and offering to help him. after slapping the shit out of him, of course <3 this was not how i initially intended it to happen HOWEVER mimi and i wrote it so well i felt like i was going to die and therefore i changed it <3

suffice to say, that's why sephiroth lives. aerith rehabilitates him LOL he's extremely fucked up and overprotective of her to the point of practically hissing and spitting when anyone so much as comes within 5 feet of her. he gets over it (somewhat) over time but she has her work cut out for her for real. he's also extremely overprotective of zack but that's later.

i think i need to make a powerpoint about this au actually. that's beside the point. ANYWAY

how long until i start talking about zack, cloud and aerith. not long i think

i will mention genesis first though. they find him around the same time they find zack, stuck in stasis in the basement of the destroyed shinra building, and sephiroth (alongside vincent) goes to get him out. they have some Unfinished Business (by which i mean a bad breakup that destroyed both of them that they REALLY need to resolve) to work through but admittedly they both still love each other and try to work it out. even though. they are both deeply traumatized and socially inept individuals. aerith has to play couples therapist. it's kind of a nightmare and i'm still working out how the hell they end up married but they do! and the remnants are their kids (eventually) :)

oh let me also explain how, like, the ending of ff7 goes because meteor still happens. basically despite the fact that sephiroth gets ripped out of the lifestream and everything, it's after sephiroth gets his hands on the black materia. which means jenova got her hands on the black materia. and essentially in this au jenova just casts meteor her damn self. the final boss then ends up being jenova herself, and midgar ends up destroyed the same way as in the original, but without the plot of advent children afterward because. aerith and sephiroth put together manage to eradicate jenova and therefore. no need for remnants, no geostigma, etc. aerith still summons holy/the lifestream and it eradicates the last of jenova and meteor and everything's (mostly) fine after that.

the two years after that are dedicated to building edge and tying up shinra's thousands of loose ends and trying to restore the area around midgar and just mostly. rebuilding. everyone trying to find or make lives for themselves after everything. i care the most about this part because i enjoy reading about and writing about interpersonal stuff and the struggle of finding a new life in the ashes of an old one and stuff like that. what happens After the hero's journey, yknow.

OKAY. NOW i will allow myself to talk about zack/cloud/aerith because ehhehehhehhe... bisexuals who make me feel insane.

(seb's art refs for them which i stare at lovingly too often <3)

so obviously zack and aerith don't die. which makes everything initially very complicated wrt their relationships with each other and cloud. because zack and aerith were dating prior to zack's disappearance and zack and cloud were like... in the couple of years of pretending like they're just friends and zack openly flirting with cloud and going on dates and stuff and just acting like it's normal bro stuff and it was quickly turning into like, Actual Dating right before nibelheim. (aerith was aware of the fact that zack is poly and is fine with it, no cheating, i hate that and zack would never do that). so both cloud and aerith were in love with zack and didn't know each other at all and cloud forgot all about zack so when they first met they didn't really. have any fucking idea.

and cloud and aerith fell in love because of course they did (wails and wails and wails) and tried to move on for real while zack was "dead". and then cloud remembered. and they had to talk about that LMFAO but it was fine, if anything it just made them closer because it was like "oh. same trauma *handshake*" (despite cloud still having a LOT of mental health issues and only getting worse when he remembered zack and everything that happened with that. he still has a lot of the same problems he has in advent children, just no geostigma and no weird estranged marriage with tifa)

AND THEN. two years after, when aerith and cloud have started building a life together, they find out that zack's NOT dead. that he's actually alive in stasis and he had been right under their noses all this time. and they rush to get him back of course, dropping everything to go break his ass out of the drum, and then... have to figure out the logistics of their relationships all of a sudden. because they were both in love with him. zack was in love with both of them. they have a life set up and zack just woke up after seven years of being in a fucking coma pretty much. so it's. complicated. they settle on just bringing zack into their relationship in general because like. they all still love each other. they intend to work it out.

zack moves in with aerith and cloud in their apartment they set up in edge. he has to take a long period of rehabilitation because 1. mako fucked up, 2. years of muscular atrophy, 3. severe ptsd. he gets like, visibly depressed and has to go to doctors all the time to make sure he's stable and not, yknow, going crazy from mako exposure because, you know, He Has A Tail and they want to monitor him. he has a lot of insecurity issues because he worries he's intruding on aerith and cloud now because they've lived their lives and suddenly he waltzes back in on it (despite the fact that they're both just extremely happy and grateful to have him back at all). he gets better through aerith coaxing him into talking to her and his friendships with tifa and cissnei, but he still has a lot of problems with feeling like a monster and dealing with the trauma of being a child soldier and also being experimented on and losing his formative young adult years (he wakes up and he's twenty fucking five! he was 18!).

he works for tifa at seventh heaven fixing tables and learning bartending from her sometimes. he picks up various skills working with his hands (repairing things, woodworking, metalworking, stuff like that. he makes weird stuff just to have something to do) and also sometimes helps cloud with his delivery service. he helps out at a vehicle repair shop and works on the sds fenrir for cloud when it needs stuff. he has his own motorcycle and he and cissnei go out on rides sometimes and sing bad mid 2000s pop music as loud as they can over the wind. they're best friends btw and mean everything to each other and also to me <3

cloud has his delivery service but isn't so gone-all-the-time about it. he also picks up painting/photography as an outlet and aerith will sit still and let him paint her all the time :) he needs therapy and also to talk about his feelings more so bad but aerith and zack are both like, trying to pry him into talking about it. he's a bit better now that zack's around, but still like, that doesn't solve years of trauma lmfao.

as for aerith, she runs a little flower shop on the ground floor of their apartment building and no one knows how she keeps it so well stocked (cheating with magic <3). she's terrible at cooking, keeps plants everywhere, and loves jokingly ordering her boys around (they'd do it even if she didn't ask). she still wears her ribbon, but she tore it at one point and cloud bought her another ribbon to mend it with, so it's half pink, half green :) cloud and zack keep buying her more ribbons as presents but they sit there collecting dust because she loves her original one so much. wails about them forever and ever

i mentioned earlier that i would talk more about the potential ifalna lives part of this. we talked about her having mostly lost her memory and ending up in cosmo canyon, where she then meets aerith again when the party comes through and regains a lot of her memory over time. she and vincent were married (see: sort of courthouse marriage except it's hardly a legal marriage) prior to her and aerith getting yoinked by shinra so she's like :( "my husband". she joins the party—we discussed her being a dancer/white mage combo type class, so a support party member—and then shortly after, they find vincent in the basement and ifalna's like "MY HUSBAND!!! :)" and aerith is gagging. gentle friendly flower woman ifalna like "this is my husband!" and vincent, scraggly ass ran-over-by-a-car vampire freaklet who sounds like he smokes 10 packs a day standing next to her like "this is my wife" with the smallest smile because he doesn't know how to smile properly. they're cute i like my funny little rarepair

SPEAKING OF RAREPAIR. cissnei/tifa my friends :) the other canon ship in this au. they fall in love while they're spending two years hunting zack down together. lesbian road trip where cissnei tries to get tifa to talk about her problems and accidentally presses the wrong buttons sometimes but then tifa gets scared of ghosts and hides behind cissnei who is smaller and vastly less built than her and cissnei's like "oh. you are so cute". i feel like this is a separate post in and of itself but I Like Them So Much and have been intending to write them for a while

lastly, and on a completely separate note, i wanna talk about cloud and tifa because ouhhh they make me insane.

in my au, they were not even close to friends as kids. they in fact didn't really like each other at all. like, neighbor who kind of annoys you but who you've spoken to a total of like 10 times and not for very long. there wasn't the weird crush thing, cloud just kept to himself and tifa had her little friend group and they were both fine with that.

fast forward to the beginning of ff7 when tifa finds him fucked up at the train station. she looks at him and sees an opportunity: someone else from nibelheim, who can vouch for its prior existence, who can relate to her suffering with trying to cope with shinra covering up what happened to nibelheim. she wants someone who will give her a shoulder to lean on, someone who she can talk to, someone who experienced the same thing as her. but then cloud starts saying things that aren't true, things he shouldn't know, starts casting doubt on her memories of the story of what happened. and so they start fighting. constantly. they fight like cats and dogs and barret has to break them up and scold them like children. tifa gets mad at cloud for telling the wrong story (accuses him of lying A Lot), cloud gets mad at tifa for getting mad at him and because he doesn't understand, and it's just a downward spiral. it gets to the point where they can hardly be in the same room as each other.

it isn't until they go to gongaga that tifa realizes that there's just something Really Wrong with cloud. it's not that he's lying, it's that he genuinely has a memory problem. when he says he doesn't remember zack when the story he's telling is exactly what happened with zack, tifa gets pissed, but then when cloud comes up to talk to her and there is GENUINE confusion in his eyes, she stops being mad at him and instead just pities him. she feels bad for him. and she starts acting like a big sister, protecting him when he gets in hot water. she lets him do whatever, knows he can mostly handle himself, but if he gets into a fight with a guy way bigger than him, she'll step in the way and kick the guy's ass.

by the end of the og ff7 story, they're inseparably close best friends, going from nearly tearing each other to shreds to sleeping on each other's shoulders and saying that as long as they have each other, they'll be okay. it makes me sob for real. it's worse in the "zack and aerith actually die" version of this because it turns into them thinking that the next logical thing is for them to get married because they're the most important people to each other that they have left, but then they grow to hate each other from trying to love each other in a way that isn't right for them. and just end up divorced and miserable. and it makes me extremely sad. i think about it so much. i think about cloud and tifa in my au for too long and i explode

OKAY I THINK THAT'S EVERYTHING... or maybe not everything but a lot of it. most of it. i love this au so much it makes me sooooooooooo insane <3 the weirdest part about it is definitely the valentine family dynamic but you'll just have to accept this about me that i like mashing characters together that shouldn't ever really be in that kind of dynamic and making it fun. my crossover ship days will never truly leave me

if anyone actually reads all of that i hope you like my meowmeows <3 i put all of them in my mouth and chew on them like bubblegum

#this is 3k words of brain spaghetti please enjoy #someday i'll take all this and make it at all organized but not today #grim ff7 au #<- tag so i can find this later #grim.txt