I wanna know some aeriseph sibling lore please 🙏🙏🙏🙏
HIHIHIHHIHIIHIHHIHIHIIIIIII ANON HEYYYYY YOU WANNA KISS?????????????????
wowie okay. okay. im sorry this took so long i had to organise my thoughts properly
jinxie's crazy aeriseph siblings lore that she made up on a random tuesday
so everything i'm about to say probably would fit into canon..... maybe a few things are out of place idk. i've not played anything but the original games but i have a very vague idea of what goes on during other parts of canon. but none of this shit takes place during ever crisis so you could probably ignore the fact that i know about it at all. in my head seph and aerith are a little less than six years apart? with aerith being born in feb 1985 (as in canon) and seph being born in july 1979 (which i made up based on a general midpoint of sephiroth's possible birth years). so sephy is about five when aerith pulls up to the shinra labs.
i don't see any reason why seph nor aerith would have anything to do with each other for the first few years together but... i headcanon that when she was three and he eight, a prior incarnation of AVALANCHE (not necessarily the one in before crisis, but one that shared similar aggressive views) raided shinra HQ - so like, bombs, breaking experiments' enclosures, shooting people - and in the fuss, aerith and sephiroth both were separated from their caretakers and end up in some random corner of shinra, completely alone but for each other. naturally a toddler is not suited to defend herself but sephiroth has ABSOLUTELY been trained in the sword by this point.
however there is no sword. for three hours he fights off incoming danger with an office chair and a handful of other impromptu weaponry. a team of turks find him shielding her with his body, kept conscious by basically pure willpower, and when the threat is finally eliminated, he passes out on the floor and doesn't wake up for like five days.
the moment he wakes up, sephiroth demonstrates an act of immense deviation from his character and asks about the child he was trying to defend. hojo's like "yeah she's fine. can you inject this overdose of mako now" but sephiroth ends up asking if he can see her. hojo obviously rejects him and he's willing to give up until hojo gets word from aerith's captors that she's asking to see seph, too. and unlike sephiroth, she is NOT backing down.
begrudgingly, the two departments organise a meeting in sephiroth's quarters (reason being that hojo just injected him with some insane pharmaceutical cocktail and he's insanely high on mako right now so. can't really be taken elsewhere). despite seph's delirious state, the two become fast friends. what's more, aerith has already memorised the way to sephiroth's quarters and not a thing in the world will stop her from seeing him now - she is seemingly not pain averse and ignores people when they tell her to stop trying to find him. shinra considers moving either of them to a different floor but realise that will probably cause more problems than solutions.
so, over the next few years, they grow closer. sephiroth, who previously saw no meaning in his own training, learns to appreciate his role as a protector and a warrior, a SOLDIER, for some time, because now he actually has something to protect. he meets ifalna, and ends up (privately) projecting a mother role onto her, to compensate for the lack of affection he received in childhood, while she is none the wiser. aerith is a little more aware of how sephiroth feels towards her and her mother and willingly treats him like a brother. eventually, it gets to the point where they put seph on some work for training purposes and assign him to aerith's security detail.
when aerith and ifalna escape, sephiroth isn't present - once against held up by hojo, because what's new?? he finds their quarters empty, goes back and asks around where aerith is, and is told (lied to) that aerith and ifalna attempted to escape but died on their way out. sephiroth pretends he doesn't give a fuck because he doesn't feel like being punished for showing emotion but this is unfortunately life-shattering for him.
now that aerith is gone, that protective spirit he once nurtured for her dwindles entirely and he develops that mindset of 'i don't want to be a hero i just want to be fucking normal!!!!!' that we know him to have today. he becomes jealous and jaded toward aerith even though he believes her to be dead, simply because her mother thought to bring her on their escape but not him - something that he perceives to be abandonment from both aerith and ifalna. as his connection to her erodes, so does his own humanity, as he inadvertently alienates himself from the people around him.
aerith, meanwhile, is pretty traumatised both by having been held in a lab for the first seven years of her life, but also by the fact that she's just violently broken out of said lab and lost somebody who swore to protect her and essentially acted as a big brother. as with most of her memories regarding shinra, she begins to forget them, to the point where she doesn't remember growing up with sephiroth at all. these memories are likely only returned to her after her death, when she returns to the planet. i think it's likely she feels a fair bit of pity for sephiroth though, once she knows the whole truth. they're two sides of the same coin, after all.
sorry this took so long anon. i love aeriseph siblings. if you have any more questions i will answer them.