My tag in my last reblog punched me in the face with a reminder that this paragraph exists:
In which Cloud gets Genesis medicinally high and Sephiroth ends up too busily…uh…engaged with saving Genesis from cellular degradation to burn down Nibelheim. Actually a really good fic:
Additional Tags: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Eventual Smut, Medicinal Drug Use, Recreational Drug Use, Nibelheim Incident (Compilation of FFVII), Graphic Depictions of Illness, Degradation (Compilation of FFVII), Averting the Nibelheim Incident With:, Weed, Blowjobs, Threesome - M/M/M, threesome featuring C/G/S, Praise Kink, Bottom Sephiroth (Compilation of FFVII), Top Genesis Rhapsodos, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Timeskip
Summary: In which Cloud is fixated on an open window, Genesis is in excruciating pain with no hope for relief, Sephiroth is unknowingly his first friend’s only hope for salvation, and Claudia Strife deals in the finest herbal remedies.
Oh wow, I just came across this in the #sephesis tag and I gotta thank you for the rec! I have a fully-edited version of this fic I’ll be putting up as a downloadable PDF hopefully sometime this month, so stay tuned! ♥
I wonder how many people are going to get the stupid reference in the upcoming chapter of RTGT, wherein Vincent refers to an insanely powerful Shinra device with a really long name as a “Reployer.”
Working on that fancy PDF-to-print version of Smoke and Mirrors as I edit the chapters (I’m up through chapter five) and this part looks so good with more formatting freedom.
It’s been over a year since I finished Smoke and Mirrors, so I’m finally comfortable going back through it in its totality and cleaning up little errors that clung on through multiple rereads. I’ve already cleaned up and updated chapter one, but I may update it again later—I’m thinking about adding in a couple scenes I wound up never using.
In particular, I have a whole unfinished bit that I wound up cutting from the first chapter, back when I thought the fic was going to be shorter. It’s currently about 800 words long, and it was pretty aimless when I was first writing the fic: Cloud checks the general store for exotic apples, we get a look at him being really cagey with the locals in spite of being in his own hometown, Zack is also there buying an orange, and there’s a short mention of Kunsel. It was originally intended to drive home both Cloud’s behavior and his familiarity with agriculture, as well as touching on the linguistic differences I play with throughout the rest of the fic, but I need to see if it’s possible to get it a little more focused before I plug it in properly. Chapter one is the shortest in the entire fic at a little over 4k words long, so there’s plenty of room to add things there, they just need to actually serve the narrative.
When all is said and done, I’d like to put up the edited version as a PDF (or epub?) with nice formatting and some extra bells and whistles. If I do this, I’ll also be splitting two specific chapters up, because a couple of them are extremely long and I really should have posted them separately, but I was just trying to get the fic finished at the time. I can’t change the chapter count on the version posted to AO3, since comments are tied to specific chapters, but it would be nice to have it put together in a way that is a little more consistent with itself. We’ll see.
Chapters: 7/? Fandom: Compilation of Final Fantasy VII Rating: Mature Warnings: Author Chose Not To Warn Relationships: Vincent Valentine/Cloud Strife Characters: Vincent Valentine, Cloud Strife, background characters not mentioned in tags. Additional Tags: Postcanon, Slice of Life, Hurt/Comfort, Body Horror, Victims of Science, Friends to Lovers, Shinra Manor, Ghosts, Slow Burn, Self-Neglect, Disordered Eating, Pining, Mutual Pining, Not Completely FF7R Compliant.
Sometimes, the only way to expose how badly damaged things really are is by doing even more damage. This applies to both architecture and people.
Posted this elsewhere already but I am working on RTGT chapter 7 and Cloud is going to drag Vincent out of his guilt complex kicking and screaming if he has to.
I can’t describe the feeling of finding what feels like the perfect first line for a story. Knowing exactly how it starts, in this case after literal years of debate and concepts and planning. It’s a huge relief, imparting a sense that this is just might work. Maybe I really am competent enough to do this. I’ve started it again and again and again, but this time—this time—it finally feels right.
It’s the second month of the first summer since the accident, and Alice Ruxbourgh has been missing for thirteen days.
That’s it. That’s it. I’ve got it. I know what I’m doing.
