Fic title thing - heart held close to the moon and Neptune
Neptune ... Neptune was the Roman god of the sea right? ... Just looked it up and yes he was so-
But rather than EVERYONE being mer or whatever, it’s ONLY the three Soldier Firsts of canon. Sephiroth, Genesis, and Angeal who have never met any other mer, because Shinra are immoral and terrible and use propaganda to promote the idea that Mer aren’t REALLY just like humans in intelligence and emotional range and soul, they just happen to look human-ish on the top half. And because Mer are seemingly extinct (read: in hiding), they have nobly “Resurrected” the lost line of the “most exotic creatures of the sea” in Sephiroth, Genesis, and Angeal and claim to be in the process of cloning female Mers to “reintroduce the species”.
Except mer are NOT animals.
Mer are the children of Gaia’s oceans, the pulse of her waves and tides, touched by her moon on high. Mer are MAGIC and they will not be contained.
They escape, by the skin of their teeth and with many bloody scars, helped by the last of descendant of the True Mer (Aerith) who can walk on two legs for a time because of her half-human blood. They flee, out into the wild waters, just the three of them as a pod, rapidly protective of their little Pod Queen Aerith, their little sister in their eyes for all it would doom mer to extinction again. So they swim, up river and through lake and through the sea, and sometimes Aerith stops to visit the human woman who cared for her as a child and to tend the garden on two legs while the other three lounge in the little pond and sing softly together, and it’s ... nice.
Then Aerith meets Zack. Zack who is a cheerful sellsword rather than a Shinra plaything, who still respect the Old Ways as best as an ignorant human can, and Aerith adores him and so despite what they want, Sephiroth, Genesis, and Angeal refrain from dragging him below the waves and eating him for trying to court their sister. But Zack is genuine and not cruel like the other humans they’ve met, he gets along with Elmyra and dotes on Aerith and Angeal ends up taking him under his fin after Zack nearly falls in and downs in the pond because surprise this idiot CAN’T SWIM, and really that is that. They have another human in the pod.
Zack tells them all sorts of stories, of the lands they’ve never seen. Jungles and deserts and icy mountains, and in those stories one name and description comes up a lot, the other, younger sellsword Cloud Strife. A fierce little mountain girl who still swears to the Old Spirits and avoids Fairy Circles and will not set foot on a boat until she’s made a sacrifice to the lost Children of the Sea. He describes his “little buddy” so often during his tales that really, it’s no wonder Sephiroth RECOGNIZES the woman while on a solo hunt, struggling in the water, bubbles escaping her mouth and nose, arms and legs bound from where she’s been THROWN OVERBOARD by pirates stealing the ship she had booked passage on.
Sephiroth screams and the storm screams back. The pirates stand no chance and Sephiroth pays them no more mind as he dives down for Cloud, ripping the ropes apart with his claws, swims her up to the surface and realizes that the storm he just summoned is a PROBLEM. The waves are too high for him to keep the human’s head above the water and she’s already NOT BREATHING and Sephiroth can’t just- UNSUMMON a storm, but this girl is Zack’s friend and Zack is pod which makes THIS ONE pod and Sephiroth-can’t-let-her-die-.
Sephiroth holds her close and sings-sings-sings, struggling against death, screaming to the moon to spare this human, to make her SURVIVE somehow, because Sephiroth has too few people in his life and he cannot afford to lose any of them, even one he has never met before.
Sephiroth was Hojo’s finest creation. He was grown from the blood of the most Ancient mer. The Wild Kin even Aerith’s race of mer feared for their power, their savagery, their ability to wrap up the world in their voice and SHAPE it the way they wanted. Jenova is not an alien virus in this au, oh no, Jenova was The Sea Witch. The most feared and powerful and deadly o the Wild Kin, the last to fall in their war against the much more numerous humans and Cetra mer that had banded together against the Wild Kin and their Sea Witches. Jenova was the one who cursed the Cetra and decimated their numbers, she was the one to freeze the great northern sea mid-motion like a glacier around a great crater.
Jenova is, in a morbid, cloned sense, his mother.
The body in his arms changes.
Cloud breathes in water and does not drown.
When Cloud groggily wakes up three days later, it’s to one very frantic Zack hovering over her face, the sky above her head, and the weird sensation of being submerged from the waist down. She remembers being knocked off the ship and sits up in confusion-
Looks down and doesn’t see legs.
The glittering tail of ink black and spiraling ice blue twitches spasmodically under her stare, responding to her desperate attempts to move legs that AREN’T THERE ANYMORE.
Cloud starts screaming and all the glass and quite a bit of nearby stone shatters.
While Zack and Aerith help deal with ... THAT whole mess, Sephiroth lurks guiltily in the nearby river, not daring to enter the pond while Genesis whimsically notes that aside from the ice blue swirls, her tail exact same shade of black as his, so does that mean she’s a full blooded Wild Kin now? Genesis and Angeal aren’t, because they have bright red and bright blue scales with black highlights respectively, sign of Wild Kin blood but not nearly as pure as Sephiroth’s jet black and trademark silver hair and slitted eyes. Angeal slaps Genesis over the head and says there are bigger things to worry about, because SINCE WHEN was any kind of magic strong enough to transform a human into an ACTUAL MER and what do they do now? Sephiroth already tried turning her back, but it didn’t work, because that kind of Song that remakes the world itself can only be used on a person on that large a scale ONCE, so now they’re stuck and how will they explain any of that to Zack’s formerly-human friend.
Sephiroth continues to lurk at the bottom of the river, feeling very guilty. He didn’t mean to do that. He meant to save her, not transform her, and the entire thing tastes too much of Hojo’s lab and his unwanted experiments and talk of using Sephiroth’s blood to create clones or hybrids.
Maybe once Zack and Aerith calm her down she won’t entirely hate him?
Who is he kidding, she’ll probably try to gut him with her bare claws.
(Anyway a sort of Modern-Fantasy AU where Mako is a thing but the SOLDIER program isn’t, Mer are a thing, and Fem!Cloud and Sephiroth end up doing an enemies to lovers slowburn but more in a you-transformed-me-against-my-will-so-I-HATE-YOU to friends to lovers way.)
(Also Hojo tries to do more evil shenanigans and Shinra hopes to conquer the world, but that all gets shut down by the Pod because fun fact you can’t run a wold spanning empire if all your ships keep mysteriously getting sunk. It’s not like you can helicopter EVERYTHING over the water, especially since all air traffic gets rapidly shut down by the mysterious super storms that blow in when they try. Reeve eventually gets accidentally kidnapped by the Pod and converted to their side so he starts looking into non-Lifestream power alternatives and Rufus is on board because honestly there’s nothing like a couple of mer arguing, IN YOUR LANGUAGE on whether they should eat you for your sins to make you rethink your life choices and by extension all your evil father’s life choices.)
(Also also Vincent and Felicia are both experiments by Hojo to see if he could create human-mer hybrids. Felicia is a sea serpent and Vincent sometimes forgets that Legs Are A Thing and so just sighs tiredly on Elmyra’s floor in all his red and black octopi glory. Veld is pulled on board the “lets kill Hojo and reform Shinra” boat after he nearly gets his throat torn out by his long lost daughter only for his long lost Turk partner to tackle her and talk her down from accidental patricide.)
(For reference, Sephiroth is a black beta fish with some silver edging on his fins, Genesis is a red with black stripes lionfish, and Angeal is a long-suffering blue and black lions fish. Aerith turns into a long-finned koi, and discovers quite by accident that if you kiss your human boyfriend enough times he gains the ability to breathe underwater and transform into a mer for a few hours before changing back into a human again.)
(And because I’m on a roll, Nanaki is still a cat-lion-thing, Cait Sith has underwater capabilities, Jesse, Wedge, and Biggs are all incredibly baffled humans who aren’t sure how this is their life now, Tifa would like to know when and how her best friend became a Mer (Cloud: It’s all catfish’s fault. Sephiroth: hey.) Barret is a monstrously overprotective dad and Marlene is the world’s cutest baby mer and Sephiroth would literally destroy the world for her if she asked him too. Genesis would help him. Angeal would just sigh and hold Marlene out of the danger zone.)
