Work Text:
Aerith is seven years old again when she accidentally jams her hand in a lab door and breaks her finger.
Considering that she remembers enduring much, much worse than just a mere broken finger, she does not react with nearly as much screaming and crying as she might have, had she been seven years old the first time around. Unfortunately, her higher pain tolerance seems to intrigue Hojo far more than if she’d just wailed like the child she’s meant to be, which means that instead of a quick splint and a hi-potion, she’s whisked away to his lab for further testing.
Only once they get there, there is an unmistakeable silver-haired youth waiting at the door.
“Who is this?” Sephiroth asks.
Hojo scowls and shoulders past him to swipe his keycard and open the lab door. “Just a damaged specimen,” he says. “I have a few tests to do before I send it back to containment.”
Thinking back on it, Aerith isn’t sure how she never managed to run into Sephiroth in her first life, considering their overlapping time in the ShinRa Building. However, given the annoyed look on Hojo’s face, she wonders if the separation may have been intentional on his part.
He’s so young, she thinks to herself, then laughs internally at the irony that she herself is technically so much younger. But she sees the way he holds himself awkwardly, the way he has to fight to keep his expression neutral, so different from the man she remembers. This man—this boy—in front of her now has a long way to go before he becomes the Nightmare who would summon a Meteor and put a sword through her back.
And Aerith wonders: perhaps this, right here, could be her opportunity to fix so much before it even begins.