Written by Ryuu

Rated T for violence.

AN: Hullo! Welcome to my slightly odd and extremely difficult to categorize story. This is a self-insert, I suppose, although I'm not so much inserting myself into other people's stories as I am inserting other people into mine. This is a crossover of more than just FFVII and The Avengers, I'm mixing original characters in as well. We'll see how it turns out. This all came from a concept that sprang into my mind ages ago, no doubt a result of insisting "But they do exist! They do!" too often. But I can't tell you exactly what that concept is, exactly, because spoilers...

Anyway, I hope that you enjoy this!

Chapter 1: Fiction in Reality

April 12

I lay on my bed in the fetal position.

I can't believe Arwen's dead, I thought. God help me…please…

It hurt so much all I could really do was pray. It had been eight years since we had lost a dog, and I'd forgotten what it felt like. I'd gotten so comfortable, my life had been so easy and cushy, and now I felt as though the world had dropped from underneath me. I've always felt things too intensely.

Please…

She was kinda old and decrepit, y'know, a rather irritatingly correct voice inside my head interjected.

Shut up, Hóuzi. I'm praying.

You do realize, if people knew how often you held imaginary conversations with your characters, they'd think you were insane.

Shut up.

I'd invented Hóuzi on a whim a week before. His inception was pretty simple. I was reading a manga with a character with ridiculously long black hair tied back in a ponytail. I loved the hair. I know I'm weird, but I just loved the hair, so I invented a character with that hair, decided he was Chinese, thought he looked a bit mischievous, realized the hair reminded me of a tail, and looked up the Mandarin word for "monkey" on Google Translate. Thus, Hóuzi was born.

I was getting really irritated with him at this point, though. He didn't actually have a place in my stories. I just made him up for his hair. So why was my imaginary conversation being held with him? Usually I pretend to talk with characters I know like the back of my hand. And he was trying to talk to me at a really, really bad time.

"Your pixie cut is a bit shaggy, you need a trim." He tugged at my slightly overgrown hair. I could've gutted him.

"I do not want to hear how I need a haircut from you, Mr. Bum-Length-Ponytail."

And then it clicked in my brain that he had actually tugged at my slightly overgrown hair. I sat bolt upright.

"Wha'…th' heck…"

"Yo!"

"Hóuzi?!"

He was sitting in the lotus position on my bed, grinning so huge that his eyes were practically shut.

I looked for a while, waiting for my brain to catch up with my eyes.

"It's not polite to stare," he said, frowning reproachfully at me.

"GET OFF MY BED!" I bellowed, shoving him off. The awkwardness of the situation had taken a while to register, but it had in the end.

"How are you even here?" I said, peeking over the edge of my bedspread. "I made you up!"

"What! No 'I'm so sorry I pushed you off the bed, are you alright?!'" He sounded a little grumpy.

"You're a master martial artist. You're fine." A new tidbit that popped into my head.

"It's still polite to ask!" He snapped waspishly, glaring at me over the edge of my bed, his head positioned so that only his eyes were visible. It looked really funny, I thought mercilessly.

Hóuzi lay propped up on his left elbow, scratching the back of his head and scanning my room. "Anyway, we think Bianca got through Asylum to here. Hal and Loki and Sephy and Genny were worried, and sent me to check on you, but we haven't perfected the technique yet, so I'm about to disappear. I think you'll be fine."

"Say what?" I said blankly.

Hóuzi disappeared.

I chewed the inside of my cheek, trying to think. I'd had tea this morning when I normally had coffee. Did ordinary Twinnings English Breakfast Tea usually cause hallucinations? Maybe it did when combined with emotional stress…?

May 11

I'm in LONDON, I thought gleefully. It was about the only thing I could think. I hadn't slept in 24 hours, I was a little low blood sugar, jetlagged and extremely excited. My brain had nearly gone completely kaput, only able to relay that last dying message over and over again. I'm in LONDON.

There was the Shard that The Doctor had ridden a motorcycle up in The Bells of St. John. The London Eye, Big Ben, the Thames—I was in heaven!

I was also delighted with the large population of cute Asian guys—a particular weakness of mine. The people here dressed very strangely, though. The guys were generally uber hip, with tight jeans and silly hair. I even spotted a bright ginger-brown head and rather flamboyant red coat out of the corner of my—

My head whipped round, but I couldn't spot even those colours in the crowds of London. I shook my head. My brain sure did play funny tricks on me sometimes. I obviously needed some food to fuel up on before I went completely bonkers.

June 1

The tail-end of the anime conference, the geekiest event of the year. I was incredibly exhausted, but ridiculously happy. I was happy that I'd been able to come, and I was suffering from some pretty incredible Warm Fuzzies—an aftereffect of a hug from Vic Mignogna. Seriously, we should send him to the Middle East to hug Taliban members and Syrians and BOOM! world peace. No one should be allowed to be that good at hugging.

Exhaustion, Warm Fuzzies. One of the best days in my life. And I was with Nira. Does life get any better? Well, maybe if Louise had been there. Then it would have been really perfect, but as it was it was pretty dang near perfect.

I trotted out of the bathroom to rejoin my friends. Naturally, I ran right into a Sephiroth cosplayer. Talk about awkward. Apparently I can't see when I'm tired and happy.

"S-sorry," I stammered, trying to regain my balance. I failed. The cosplayer gripped the collar of my Vote Loki Laufeyson 2012 shirt as I went down and placed me back on my feet. It appeared he had an unusually strong arm for a cosplayer. I usually imagined cosplayers to be weakling basement dwellers who hardly ever moved, like me.

"Thanks, man," I said, glancing at his face. My insides froze. Those weren't contacts. Coloured contacts always bug me because they look really fake, and those weren't coloured contacts.

The not-cosplayer grunted in response, and walked into the colourful, costumed crowd with long, powerful strides. I blinked and he was gone. I gaped, and felt my neck to make sure I hadn't been decapitated while I wasn't looking.

That was the third time something like this had happened, I realized. Was I going completely mad?

But a mere few seconds of Sephiroth's cold stare couldn't fully overcome the aftereffects of a Vic Hug, and in a moment I'd forgotten about him and skipped over to my friends.

June 24

A simple volunteer job that I go to twice a week shouldn't have stressed me out that much, but it did. I've always hated being away from home unless I am at (1): Silver Dollar City, (2): England, (3): anime conferences, or (4) Nira's house. Having a payless job that took me away from home 16 hours a week really rubbed me the wrong way. I liked the people, and for the most part I didn't exactly mind going, but sometimes I'd get really stressed about it. And eventually the stress overflowed, like it always does, and got vented through tears, which is my own personal method of venting stress. My own personal, completely involuntary and really irritatingly miserable method. I went to sleep that night feeling completely drained.

I got up early the next morning to get ready to leave, and when I walked into the kitchen I saw Loki Laufeyson righting a chair. Genesis Rhapsodos was rolling his eyes and protesting that he was innocent, and Sephiroth was treating them both to a truly blood curdling glare.

"Oh, Kaitli," Loki said when they saw me. "Sorry, there was a small altercation over who got the rice." He glanced meaningfully at Genesis and Sephiroth. "Don't worry, Genesis cast a few barriers and nothing was actually destroyed, exactly."

"Don't forget the other small altercation due to something someone put in the rice," Genesis added scathingly, scowling at Loki.

Sephiroth merely made a slight growling noise.

I walked back into my room.

I walked back into the kitchen.

They were still there. My brain, water-logged by the early morning, could only offer one solution: coffee. Get to the K-Cup machine, it said. You need caffeine. I slotted a k-cup into the coffee-maker, put my mug in place, pressed the button, and watched the beautiful rich brown liquid trickle into the mug. The smell was lovely. Once it was done, I took a good swig, and then turned around.

They were still there.

I rubbed my eyes. They were still there.

"Um," I said, glancing at the clock. I was going to be late at this rate, said some bit of my mind that seemed determined to act like life was perfectly normal.

"Ah, don't worry, we're about to get out of your hair," Loki said cheerfully. Genesis glared daggers and Sephiroth simply looked as though he wanted to try and destroy the planet. Again.

I glanced at the clock again, then back at them. They were gone.

My shoulders slumped slightly and I began fixing my breakfast. Memories of the past three encounters flooded my brain—though I wasn't sure if glimpsing Genesis in London really counted as an encounter, exactly—and I began to seriously question my sanity. Especially because I'd actually forgotten about the incidents. How in heaven's name could I—could anyone?—possibly forget things like that?

"I'm not completely insane, am I?" I asked desperately.

Nira shook her head slowly, looking a little bewildered. "Actually, now that you mention it…"

"What?"

"I think I may have seen Sephiroth at the anime conference too—yes, I definitely did. How did I forget? I remember seeing him walking in the same direction you'd gone, and my brain just couldn't process it fully. And then I got distracted and forgot." She frowned. "How did I forget?" she repeated.

"There are no words to express the abyss between isolation and having one ally. It may be conceded to the mathematician that four is twice two. But two is not twice one; two is two thousand times one," I recited mentally. Not only was I not a nutter, but she had seen Sephiroth too. Which meant she believed me. Maybe she could help me figure this out; her brain functioned more reliably than mine. "From what you've told me," she mused thoughtfully, "it seems as though all four incidents happened while you were feeling extreme emotion." I nodded. "Yeah, I did actually figure that, surprisingly." "It seems like more extreme things happened when you were feeling negative emotions. When Hou…what's his name again?" "Hóuzi. And don't worry about pronouncing it right, I say it wrong, too. Chinese is fiendishly difficult." "Hóuzi showed up when you were upset over poor Arwen, and all three supervillains after you'd been really stressed, as opposed to a glimpse of Genesis in London." "When I was in ecstasies over being in London, yeah. But what about running into Sephiroth at the anime conference? I was pretty happy there and that was pretty…extreme." Extreme wasn't a strong enough word, I still got goosebumps thinking about his stare. At least when he was in my kitchen his attention had been mostly on Loki. We stared at Nira's poster of Roy Mustang (a souvenir from the anime conference), thinking. It's hard to be in her room and not stare at that poster, Mustang's just too dang good looking. "Nira," I said dully, "what's going on?"

We paused a moment to contemplate how weird this was. It was hard to accept the weirdness as real, sitting in Nira's room, staring at Roy Mustang.

"Are we absolutely certain we're not nutters?" I asked.

Nira shrugged. "I sure hope not."

"It's kinda difficult to believe at the moment."

"Just a bit, yeah."

Someone rapped at the window. Nira and I looked at each other.

"I'm not feeling very emotional right now, just kinda blank," I pointed out.

"So it shouldn't be a weirdo," Nira agreed.

We still hesitated. Whoever it was rapped again, slightly more urgently.

"Who the heck is that?" I said nervously.

"We could pull the curtain back and see," Nira said. She sounded a little apprehensive.

"I think I could handle an ordinary creepster. We can just stab him with your broadsword, right?"

"It's not sharp, remember."

"Yeah, but it's big and metal and heavy."

"I'll go get it."

She trotted to the corner next to her closet and grabbed her broadsword, hesitated, and grabbed her "fantasy sword", too. It was another souvenir from the anime conference, and it also was big and metal and heavy, with some bonus sharp pointy bits.

Armed with our makeshift weapons of mass destruction, Nira pulled the curtain back.

"Hal?!" I yelped.

"Don't tell me—" Nira began.

"I made him uuuup," I wailed. "He's fine, he's not a creepster." I had a vague idea of him being an unbelievably nice person.

Hal, one of the few characters I had made up on a whim and who didn't actually have a place in any of my stories, like Hóuzi. Why? Why not characters I connected with more strongly?

Nira and I dashed out of her room, down the hall, through her front door and into her front yard.

"Wh-what are you doing h-here?" I panted, hunched over with my hands on my knees. To say I was woefully out of shape was an understatement.

"Can we move to the backyard first? I feel exposed here."

"What, seriously?" I said grumpily, but we all walked round the house, through the garage and into the backyard.

Once there, Hal Plantagenet smiled his large, somewhat goofy but very handsome smile. "The others sent me because I'm the most ordinary person they could get a hold of to talk to you. It seems you're easily freaked out." I thought he sounded a tad bit bitter when he said "ordinary".

I scowled. "You'd be freaked out too if you suddenly found three freakishly powerful supervillains who aren't supposed to exist in your kitchen early in the morning. I'm surprised I made it not driven insane with my head still on my shoulders!"

Hal frowned slightly. "They're not supervillains, and they wouldn't just murder a girl without a reason." Note the without a reason bit.

I felt very confused. "What? They're totally supervillains! I mean, just think of all they've—"

"Oooh," Nira said.

"What?" I said, looking at her, feeling a little lost.

"Kaitli, don't you remember that project you embarked on a while back? The 'Redesigned Supervillains' one?"

"Eh?" I chewed the inside of my cheek. "Um, yeah…I tried to modify Sephiroth and Genesis so that they didn't rely completely on video-game-logic. I just made them a little more practical."

"Aaaand then you started getting all possessive, and you decided that they were alternate universe not-evil versions of the originals. Remember? And you did Loki just for kicks."

"Oh." I'd completely forgotten about that. Now that I'd thought about it, Sephiroth had had his hair tied back, had been wearing a shirt, and had had a scabbard for a considerably shortened Masamune. Genesis's outfit had been more like the one he'd had at the end of Dirge of Cerberus, tweaked a little to give him a slight cavalier vibe. He'd had a sheath for his Rapier, too. And Loki had been dressed like an ordinary person.

"You may have been in a bit of shock," Hal said helpfully, his slightly husky British accent soothing. "It's no wonder you didn't realize. Those guys are pretty overwhelming."

"So they sent you?" Nira repeated. "Because you aren't freaky?"

"And I'm capable of proper communication, unlike Hóuzi," he added.

"So communicate!" I said. "What's going on?"

Hal scratched the back of his dirty blond head. "We-ell, how do I put it…it's very complicated. Basically, it appears that people you've made up are popping into reality, and we've just about figured out how to do it at will. And I know you didn't make up Sephiroth and the others," he said as I opened my mouth, "but you modified them, and apparently that's enough."

"You said that you've figured out how to come into reality at will," Nira said.

"Just about, yeah; we haven't quite perfected it yet."

"So why were y'all popping up in the first place?"

Hal shrugged. "We think it might have to do with Kaitli being waaaay overly emotional."

I bristled. "Oi!"

Nira did a fist pump. "I knew it!"

"Thanks for your support, Nira," I grumbled.

"Sorry."

"Apparently when you're experiencing extreme emotion, especially negative emotion, your mind latches onto your characters out of, perhaps, a desperation to escape, or for company, and…well, pulls them out of your head or something, we're still not quite sure what exactly actually happens."

Nira fist pumped again. "Yes! I told you."

I sighed. "That still doesn't explain Sephiroth at the anime conference. I was very happy at anime conference."

"Vic Hugs are magic," Nira said matter-of-factly.

Well, I certainly couldn't deny that.

"Wait," I said suddenly. "Hóuzi, when he turned up, said something about thinking I 'would be fine'. Why wouldn't I be fine? And why are y'all so desperate to explain things to me?"

"We-ell," Hal said slowly, increasing the frequency of his scratching, "like I said, people you've made up and/or modified are popping into reality."

"So wh—" I began, then stopped, horrified.

Hal nodded. "I see it's struck you finally."

"What?" Nira said, concerned.

"I tend to keep my stories pretty close to my chest, I don't think that I've told you much about them," I said weakly. "Well…no story's complete without a villain, right?"

"Oh. Oh dear."

Hal smiled a little dryly. "For such an apparently innocent young woman, Kaitli here has invented some remarkably nasty people."

I tried to ignore the jab. Despite the extreme summer heat I was beginning to feel chilled.

"Kaitli," Nira said, trying to sound calm, "I know you've got a slightly twisted imagination—I do too, after all—but you haven't made up anyone that unpleasant, have you?"

"Yes," I said faintly. My mind had instantly pulled up images of some of the worst characters I'd made up. I wanted to hide behind the nearest sofa. We were so dead.