Faded Dreams, Falling Like Rain is a huge, gargantuan fan fiction for Final Fantasy VII that I did in the summer of 2002. It totals 25 chapters, and is approx. 120 pages in length, so it's a nice read.
To those of you who didn't get the hint that I'm obsessed with Final Fantasy VII by my Xanga, or my website, then this will definitely drive that point home. It's insane. It sheds light on all of thetheories I've had about Final Fantast VII. Those who have talked to me about Final Fantasy VII know my beliefs on the game, and here I put those theories to use.
FD,FLR takes place immediately after Lifestream saved the planet from Sephiroth's Meteor summon. How immediate? Cloud is standing on the Highwind watching Lifestream cure the planet in the opening sentence. Yup.
So, the story is basically like this: Cloud simply doesn't know what to do with himself once everything is over with. He's lost and cannot find himself, and besides, now that his tie to Jenova is supposedly (yes, suppedly . . .*ominousness*) over with, he feels like he shouldn't be feeling such a great sense of loss, but he finds himself yearning for Sephiroth to be alive again . . .so much so that he wills Sephiroth to him. I say he wills it, but Sephiroth came to him of his own volition. He's still under the sway of Jenova, so it's actually not Sephiroth, but Jenova, and she tells him everything he wants to hear, even coming to him as Aerith. That's important.
All righty, so Cloud starts to think about Nibelheim, so it brings him to the thought of Zack and his time spent as an experiment in Hojo's lab in the Shinra Mansion. He remembers the events he couldn't remember before, and then even remembers an event where his tie to Sephiroth was so strog that he experienced one of Sephiroth's memories.
Vincent decides to help Cloud with this process, because he feels that they are very similar in their feeling of loss. The come upon another Sephiroth clone. Her name is Lilith, and she is Vincent's daughter!b Yes, and Sephiroth's half-sister. In the story I had Lucrecia live a year longer to give birth to Lilith, and die in the process of giving birth because Hojo could care less about having done the job properly. It wasn't like when he took Sephiroth from Lucrecia, because he actually cared then. Sephiroth is his primary specimen, remember.
Hojo tested on Lilith simply as a replacement for Sephiroth in case he died during his long experimentation. She was pretty much neglected for her whole life, kept isolated as a "control." (Yes, Hojo is a sick, sick bastard)
I made Lilith the third Jenova clone, because if you remember Aerith's "This guy are sick" Squaresoft folly, it was in a pipe where they found the second Jenova clone, a poor bastard with little to no free will.
My explanation? Hojo didn't number the clones until much later, and made Lilith third because that's how Hojo identified her as the control, as being "tertiary." It also stands for "Holy Trinity" because Lilith is literally Jenova, and it's an implanted irony on my part. None of the characters realize this however. Their memories of "Lilith Valentine" were implanted.
Yes, it's twisted as hell. I love it. Cloud actually has sex with Jenova and Sephiroth at the same time, though he perceives it as only Lilith. In the back of his mind, he imagines it's Sephiroth because it IS actually Sephiroth. Hahahahha, I know. I'm a strange, mentally ill person.
In the end, we find out that the whole events of FFVII were in Sephiroth's mind because of Jenova experimentation. Yup, Cloud never existed. Cloud was a figment of Sephiroth's imagination because he was so alone that he imagined someone to control in order to please Jenova. Essentially, Sephiroth was a controlled experiment, and his accepting Jenova was never fully realized because Jenova made him insane like the Sephiroth clones, and he makes little sense to anyone . . . when he talks to people, he says he's a god, and people laughed and locked him up in an insane asylum.
Hojo never made any Sephiroth clones because after the results with Sephiroth himself, he was disgusted with himself and committed suicide. So there was never any threat to the planet.
This is essentially a story that depends on Hojo and Gast being less monstrous than in the game, so Jenova never gets so far in attempting to destroy the planet.
Why is this important? Because Hojo and Gast, and any other scientists and students that messed with Jenova, in my opinion, were totally responsible for Jenova almost destroying the world. Ergo, humanity will ultimately destroy itself.
Another variation on man being born with original sin, for all of you Christians.
----- Go there to read the revised versions of chapters, with no typos or awkward grammar.