ffvii: as the red earth rolls - prologue (SI/OC-insert fanfic)
i'm an old fan, as in, old enough to have played the og game, but this is my first time actually writing for the ff7 fandom. this fic was inspired by a plot twist in a gacha game (reverse1999) actually (iykyk) but i'm super thrilled to share this fic with you guys! enjoy!
Summary: The Lifestream contains multitudes; in one of them, a fork in the river of life diverges the flow, and Aerith is a little less alone in it than in others. Meanwhile, Rhea is about to learn that those not born of Gaia will never find salvation in it.
(SI/OC-Insert as Aerith's twin)
An Archive of Our Own, a project of the Organization for Transformative Works
You can also read the fic below: -
Aerith
She burst into tears when Rhea ripped up her drawings.
She heaved huge, gusty sobs, and threw herself on the floor of her room, screaming and kicking. “She tore it, she tore my drawing!” she wailed, when the caretaker, Marielle, and her son Lonny came to visit and found her splayed on the floor, weeping.
Sitting unrepentantly on the bed they all shared, with her back propped against the headboard as she paged through a book, Rhea did not even so much as glance over at the newcomers’ entry.
Rhea continued, placidly, to read.
Aerith hated her sister so much in that moment.
“Oh, honey,” said Marielle, clucking her tongue, her son Lonny hovering behind her, brows creased with worry, “What happened? Did you two get into a fight?”
Was Marielle not listening? Aerith sniffled pitifully. “Rhea tore my drawings!”
“They were ugly,” said Rhea, stoutly.
Aerith lifted her face from the floor to throw her sister a look of deepest dislike. “I hate you!”
“Yeah, yeah.”
“I mean it, I really mean it this time!”
Rhea blew her a raspberry then went back to her book.
Aerith put her face down and sobbed again. “I’m telling Mom when she comes back!”
“That’s well and dandy, but will you get off the floor for me, Aerith?” Marielle asked, walking briskly in, carrying her bucket of cleaning suppliers. “I need to sweep and mop, dearie.”
“Just sweep her away with the rubbish while you’re at it, Marielle,” Rhea said.
That’s it!
Righteous indignation spurred Aerith to spring to her feet and charge at the bed even as Marielle said, “That’s a nasty thing to say to your sister, Rhea,” and Rhea looked up just in time to bring her book up as a defence before her sister pounced on her.
“Girls!” shouted Marielle, aghast, as the twins went rolling off the bed and onto the floor. Tiny fists flailed at one another, and tufts of hair were seized and wrenched. The book Rhea had been reading was smacked into the side of her sister’s head. Aerith winced through the pain and hit her balled up fist into her sister’s brow in retaliation. The girls grappled until Marielle—and Lonny—waded in between them to separate them. “Girls, really, this is atrocious behaviour, what’s gotten into the both of you?”
Lonny, who had always played nicely with Aerith, put his arms around her once his mother had pulled Rhea away, and Aerith hugged him, burying her face in his shoulder and blew her nose.
“Come on,” Marielle grumped, tugging Rhea out into the hallway, “We need to have a chat about manners.”
“Tell that to Aerith—she jumped on me!”
The door closed behind them.
Lonny patted her back uncertainly. “It’s okay, Aerith. It’s only a small fight.”
“It’s not! She’s getting so mean lately,” Aerith sniffled, pulling her face back. A string of snot joined her nose to Lonny’s shirt. Lonny was too nice to scold her about it. Rhea would’ve pulled on Aerith’s hair about it already. “All we do is fight. And she never says she’s sorry.”
It was stupid because they lived together in the same room and had done so all their lives, but she missed Rhea. Lately all they did was argue. Every small thing escalated into a fight; Rhea was irritable and angry all the time, and Mom—Mom was getting sicker and sicker. She wanted to tell Lonny how bad it was every day, being locked in this room except for when they took her out for tests and sample draws, and then in those sessions she had to put up with creepy Dr. Hojo. Rhea wasn’t with her at those tests. Her sister was what Dr. Hojo called, cruelly, a ‘dud’. Aerith had chomped on his fingers for that insult to her sister, for that one—but she’d never told Rhea. A ‘dud’ was something bad, Aerith knew that much from Dr. Hojo’s nasty tone even if it wasn’t something she understood by definition, and she didn’t want to hurt Rhea’s feelings.
The word pushed at the tip of her tongue. She felt mean. She wanted to hurt her sister back for hurting her, but at the last minute, she swallowed the word back.
Lonny went to fetch a box of tissues for Aerith to wipe her face with.
Outside in the hall, they could hear raised voices: Rhea was screaming at Marielle, “Shut up, shut up, shut UP!” Footsteps patter away. Rhea must’ve dashed off in a fit of pique.
Aerith envied her sister that. How easily they allowed Rhea to roam the labs where she could not. The one time she’d asked Marielle if she could go for a walk, too, Marielle had said no. “I’m sorry, but your classifications are different,” was all she’d said, apologetically.
They were twins, twins! They even had the same face. Aerith didn’t understand what they meant by different classifications.
“Why don’t you draw a new one?” suggested Lonny, distracting her. He had picked up the discarded sketchbook from the scattered pieces of her previous drawings. His smile was kind.
Sucking back the last of her sniffles, Aerith picked up her crayon again and started to draw anew.
In her mind’s eye, a glade was blooming into life.
That evening, Mom came back with Rhea in tow, hand-in-hand. There was a sulky look on her sister’s face that meant she’d gotten a stern talking to from Mom. This mollified Aerith, who felt sure Rhea had been properly scolded for being mean to her.
“Mom!” yelled Aerith, skipping over to hug her mother.
“Hello, Aerith. Were you good, today?”
“I was!” Unlike Rhea was unsaid, but Aerith made sure to lift her face to throw Rhea a pointed look.
Rhea stuck her tongue out at her. Mom smiled wearily down at them. Then she turned to thank Marielle and Lonny for their help today, too, and once they were gone, it was the three of them again—as it always was.
“Rhea, something to say?” Mom prompted.
Aerith looked expectantly at her twin. Rhea’s face was as familiar as her own, because it was the reflection she saw in the mirror, except for the brush of her hair—Rhea never had the patience to sit still long enough for Mom to braid her hair, too—and the murky grey of her eyes, a sharp contrast to Aerith and Mom’s bright green eyes.
Once, Mom had said, Rhea has Daddy’s eyes.
Aerith had never met their father, so she took Mom’s words at face value.
“I’m sorry for tearing up your drawings, Aerith,” said Rhea, haltingly. She bit her lower lip. “And for hitting you.”
The stone walls around Aerith’s heart crumbled like a wet biscuit. She released her mother to fly at her sister, flinging her arms around her, too. “I’m sorry, too, Riri,” she said, crushing her cheek to her sister’s, “I didn’t mean to hit you, or pull your hair.”
“You so did,” whispered Rhea into her ear, but she hugged Aerith back. Then she tried to squeeze Aerith like she was a teddy bear and Aerith squealed at her to stop, digging her fingers into Rhea’s sides in retaliation. This quickly devolved into a tickling war as they rolled on the floor laughing until Mom told them, exasperatedly, to knock it off.
For Aerith, all was well again, equilibrium in their little enclosure restored.
Except: that night, Mom coughed so hard she vomited a little bit of blood onto the handkerchief.
“Mom!” the sisters cried, astonished, and worried.
“It’s all right, girls, I’ll be fine—please—let’s turn in for the night.”
“But—”
“Tomorrow, I will tell Dr. Hojo to give me more medicine.” Mom’s tone was final. Nevertheless, unease made it difficult for Aerith to fall asleep. She could tell it was the same for Rhea.
When their mother was asleep, Rhea rolled over to face her. In the dark, her sister’s expression was indiscernible but—
“Dr. Hojo is being meaner to Mom.” Even in a low whisper, Rhea’s anxiousness shone through.
Aerith peeked over her shoulder where Mom was sleeping. The sisters slept side-by-side; as mad as she was with Rhea in the day, by night she craved her sister’s closeness, a connection ingrained in the womb, where they had slept nestled against one another.
“I know,” Aerith muttered back. But what could they do except be quieter and be nice to one another so that Mom didn’t have to stress? Mom always looked so sad when she saw them fighting. You only have one another in this world, Mom had said once, bitterly angry—and disappointed too, and it crushed Aerith’s heart into little pieces when she disappointed Mom—you need to always be there for one another.
“It’s because of you, you know,” Rhea’s voice was not mean, just matter-of-fact, and it hurt Aerith more than if Rhea had pinched her. “Hojo thinks he has a spare Cetra now and he doesn’t have to be as careful with Mom anymore.”
“I can’t—it’s not my fault—”
“I told you to stop drawing,” Rhea muttered. She had moved closer, like she was trying to stare hard at Aerith. Her breath fanned over Aerith’s face. “You need to stop having those visions.”
“I told you, I can’t control them!” Aerith retorted, “And if I don’t draw them, my head is just—full of those things.” Images so vivid they overlapped the reality. She’d walked into the wall trying to shake those images off. Hadn’t been able to come back to herself until she had picked up a crayon and ran it into a stub by drawing all she saw onto the walls. When she’d come to, Dr. Hojo, Lonny, Marielle and a horrified Rhea had been watching her, off to the side, like Aerith had done something horrible.
Dr. Hojo said, “Excellent,” though.
“Dr. Hojo said those visions make you special, like Mom,” Rhea said, after a silence that went on for so long between them that Aerith thought her sister had fallen asleep.
Aerith fell quiet. She wasn’t sure she liked being special, if it caused so much trouble. When she’d voiced her worry to Mom, she’d only told them that they were special by virtue of being themselves. Even as a seven-year-old, she knew a non-answer when she heard one.
“Rhea?”
“What?”
“Do you really not have those visions? None at all?”
A long, drawn-out silence.
Then, softly, “No, Aerith. Never.” Rhea rolled over onto her back, away from Aerith, and she missed her sister’s warmth already.
“I’m not like you and Mom.”
----
Three weeks later, Mom said the three of them were going to go on an adventure.
