Fanfic / A Flower's Touch

A Flower's Touch is a Final Fantasy VII Alternate Universe fanfic by WavesBlade.

Years after the Meteor Crisis, Sephiroth finally manages to overcome AVALANCHE and achieve his goal of consuming the Lifestream. In a desperate gambit to stop this, the Planet's avatar Minerva sends the last Cetra, Aerith Gainsborough, back to a time prior to the start of the crises. Now, with all the knowledge and experience of her older self stuck in the body of a teenage girl, Aerith must find a way to prevent the Calamity from occuring...which means finding a way to keep Shinra's top three SOLDIERs from going insane.

Easy, right?

This story contains examples of:

• Alternate Universe: Armed with knowledge of the future, Aerith is sent back to before any of the games begin and immediately starts altering events.
• Attempted Rape: Aerith describes a time when someone lured her into an alley and ripped her clothes off. Reno intervened and shoved his electro-staff through the guy's eye.
• Bad Liar: Sephiroth describes Aerith as speaking with such honesty that it's easy to tell when she's lying, telling a partial truth or hiding something.
• Big Damn Heroes: Aerith and Zack's encounter with the sewer monster could have turned out very bady had Angeal not been following them. As it is, once it turns out they're in over their heads, he strolls in and handily defeats the thing.
• Black Mail: Angeal decides to use the video he took of Zack and Aerith on a mission for future contingencies. Although it's really something to cheer him up if he starts getting depressed about his mother's perceived betrayal and suicide.
• Breather Episode: Chapter 23, which is "Ace Reporter Angeal Hewely" following "the rare and elusive pup (Zack) in its natural habitat". It ends with Zack and Aerith in the sewer facing off against the sewer monster and getting humiliated until Angeal steps in and saves them. And catches the whole thing on video.
• Charge-into-Combat Cut: After Angeal's mother kills herself, he flies into a rage, punches Sephiroth through a wall then comes at him with sword drawn. The scene then cuts to the two of them arriving battered and bloody back at Shinra Tower.
• Curb-Stomp Battle: After it knocks around Zack and Aerith, Angeal beats the sewer monster with hardly a sweat.
• Deconstruction: Chapters 19-22 become one of Aerith as she meets with Dr. Redman to sort out her traumas and other issues, particularly her years as Hojo's specimen.
• Determinator: Aerith is bound and determined to succeed in SOLDIER, no matter what it takes. It gets to the point that she becomes so obsessed with it that Sephiroth has to actually order her to take some time off and go see her mother.
• Did Not Think This Through: Stems a lot from being thrown back in time with just the objective of averting the Planet's destruction, but otherwise having no real notion on how to do that.
• Does Not Know Her Own Strength: Aerith is wholly unprepared for the strength that comes with Mako enhancements. She's tasked with picking up drinking glasses until she can do so without shattering them just from holding them.
• Drill Sergeant Nasty: Sargent Crawford, who becomes Aerith's trainer after joining SOLDIER. He's actually a fairly mild example, but Aerith still regards him as pretty nasty.
• Driven to Suicide: Gillian, after Angeal confronts her about her role in the JENOVA Project, kills herself out of a sense of guilt and shame.
• Eye Scream: How Reno dealt with Aerith's would-be rapist.
• Future Me Scares Me: Sephiroth comes to have a very low opinion of his One-Winged Angel self, especially with regards to Aerith's death, the notion of stabbing an unarmed woman who is no physical threat to him in the back while she's kneeling in prayer being particularly distasteful. He notes this when he and Angeal are discussing whether Aerith's had visions of the future or is actually from the future. Seph hopes it's the former, as that's just a possibility, whereas if she's from the future, it means his actions were so grievous time itself had to be rewritten.
• Get Out!: After a rather cutting remark about Redman's fate in chapter 21, the doctor ends their session and tells Aerith to get out.
• God in Human Form: Minerva merges with Aerith, bestowing on her part of her power. This manifests from time to time when Aerith becomes aware of something that could potentially become a threat to the planet, causing her to adopt a much harder stance than she would usually take, and giving her eyes an unusual golden glow.
• Green Thumb: Aerith finds that she can thread the Lifestream through plants and cause them to grow at an extremely fast rate.
• Healing Hands: On her first mission with SOLDIERs other than Zack or the Trio, Aerith is able to completely restore one SOLDIER's leg that had been shredded by a landmine.
• Heroic BSoD: An absolutely massive one. Dr. Redman's probing into Aerith's past brings up memories so painful she curls up into a ball blubbering apologies. It takes them bringing Elmyra in to finally calm her down enough to bring her out of it.
• I Need a Freaking Drink:
  • Dr. Redman (Jessie's mom), upon hearing how her daughter met her fate in the original timeline, shuts down their session and goes to hit a bar.
  • Sephiroth, after listening to his recordings of Aerith's therapy and hearing how the One-Winged Angel kept returning and wearing down AVALANCHE until he beat them, finds the hardest liquor he has, lamenting that his Mako enhancements don't allow him feel more than a slight burn down his throat.
• Irony: Sephiroth of all people trying to get Aerith to not throw her life away and trying to keep her from getting herself killed by running off and trying to take care of JENOVA all on her own.
• Mad Scientist: Chapter 19 covers Aerith's life in the labs under Hojo's care in all its horrific, gory detail.
• Mama Bear:
  • Aerith may have willingly gone back to Shira, but Elmyra will still stand up to anyone there see to her daughter's well-being.
  • Ifalna in Aerith's description of her time in the labs, though she didn't have much power there. She still protects Aerith as much as she can, outright threatening Hojo when he gets up to some of his more egregious experiments. And when Hojo attempts to impregnate Aerith, she goes full-on berserker mode, killing her way out of the labs until they reach the train station where eventually Elmyra finds them.
• Mercy Kill: Ifalna threatened this if Hojo ever attempted to inject Aerith with Jenova cells again.
• Named by the Adaptation: Jessie's mother was not so much as mentioned in the original game, and as of Remake, she is an actual character now, but still doesn't have a name except a last name, Rasberry).
• Playing with Syringes: The above mentioned Jenova injections, but Aerith describes being injected with things that run the full spectrum of reactions from her.
  Aerith: One time, it felt like my insides were liquefying. You have no idea how painful that was. Even after I was healed, even with my birth mother's magic, the pain stayed for days....I've been in all kinds of states from what he put into me. Feeling detached from my own body. Delirious out of my mind. Sicker than a dog. Hyperactive to the point of bouncing off a wall, literally. I think being hypersensitive to everything was the worst. My state of mind changed day to day, he put enough chemicals in me to make teenage moodswings seem pleasant in comparison.
• Precision F-Strike: When Dr. Redman asks if Elmyra is aware of what Aerith went through in the labs, Elmyra recounts how Aerith used to act like it was normal, expecting it to continue, and describing in detail what happened, capping it off with, "YES, I'M FUCKING AWARE!"
• Pyrrhic Victory: Aerith realizes the war the Ancients fought against Jenova wasn't really won, they just managed to contain her while their civilization was all but destroyed.
• Rape as Drama: After Hojo decided he needed more specimens, he attempted to force Ifalna to bear more. And when she wouldn't give him one, he began a hormone treatment on Aerith to jump-start her child bearing. That's when they ran.
• Sensing You Are Outmatched: Aerith comes to this realization when she insists on finding and taking on the sewer monster, and is surprised when it turns out to be a lot stronger than she remembers, then realizes that the first time, Cloud was with her and at the time had 1st class Mako enhancements. She and Zack are only 3rd class.
• The Shrink: Dr. Redman is assigned as Aerith's therapist. She starts off as leaning toward the well-meaning but ineffectual side to gradually becoming more effective as time goes on, seemingly learning from Aerith's breakdown, as she learns just what kind of case she has on her hand with not just one, but two lives worth of trauma.
• Supernatural Gold Eyes: Vincent gets these when Chaos is speaking through him, and Aerith herself also gets them when she is apparently channeling Minerva.
• That's an Order!: Aerith gets this when told to go see Dr. Redman. Earlier, Sephiroth tells her to go see her mother, who she hadn't seen since the time switch, and says he will make it an order if need be.
• This Is Gonna Suck: Aerith when she's called to meet the Trio after they've had their true natures revealed to them and are clearly not in the best of moods. She has to keep reminding herself that things are different now and she's not going to be run through with the Masamune this time...right? *gulp*
  • A more minor one comes when she realizes she has to go through puberty...again!
• What the Hell, Hero?: Aerith gets this quite a bit throughout the story.
  • The biggest comes when she invites herself into SOLDIER, despite not having any of the prerequisite training or going through the proper channels and, as Sephiroth angrily points out, circumventing his authority.
  • He himself gets one later from SOLDIER Cody, a far more polite one, but it still fits for not utilizing Aerith's healing abilities earlier.