Home is where the heart is. <3
Hindsight is 20/20
A Final Fantasy VII Fanfiction
Author: Sanjuno Shori Niko
Summary: There are logistical concerns with random gender reassignments that people don't tend to think about.
Timeline: More of this fic here.
=/=
(In which Cid makes a damn fine woman.)
JENOVA Project File No. 36
Attempts to fertilize ovum harvested from CC all failures. Ovum cell barrier wall impenetrable by spermatozoa samples on file.
JENOVA Project File No. 37
Specimen CC now capable of self-locomotion and beginning to display signs of advanced motor control. Awareness of simple self-maintenance concepts i.e. hygiene, feeding, and dressing confirmed by Dr. Crescent. Subject displays some signs of vocal recognition, but as yet has indicated no facility for language.
/…/
Over the course of those first few days, after waking up in a woman’s body and realizing that he had somehow ended up in the past, Cid realized that no, he was not in hell, but he might as well have been there after everything was considered.
The ‘harvesting’ - as Hojo put it - was fucking painful. Lucrecia - and that was a kicker, Vincent’s old flame was even more of a heartless bitch than Cid at his least sympathetic had thought - was riding everyone’s asses to ‘be gentle’ and ‘not damage her’! In bits and pieces over the span of a week, Cid got an idea of the situation he was in as he was poked and prodded and subjected to things that he hoped were the result of Hojo’s sadism and not really something women actually had to put up with during medical exams.
The gist of it was that Lucrecia had miscarried. She had not been strong enough to carry to term after Hojo’s in-vetro experiments. If she had stopped when Vincent tried to get Hojo to suspend the project, maybe she could have successfully finished the pregnancy. As it stood, Hojo had ignored her failing health in favour of continuing his experiments, and it had cost him his ‘specimen’. Cysts had developed, and ulcers had ruptured the walls of her womb. Lucrecia had lost any chance she had of ever having children.
Then of course, Hojo had the brilliant idea of incubating the child in something a bit stronger than a mere human female. Enter exhibit A: the body Cid currently inhabited, which was a clone of the charming Dr. Crescent. Enter a second brilliant idea to fuck with things men ought not to! Hojo went and enhanced the clone with a cocktail mix of mako and Cetra genes harvested from the Jenova specimen.
Most of the more personal details had been told to Cid by Lucrecia herself. She was a chatty woman, and had interesting ideas about what was proper. Apparently it was all fine and dandy to create a clone of your own self and then play mad-scientist-god with the clone’s genetics in order to make a self-regulating baby incubator for the spawn of a homicidal alien intelligence, but spirits forbid any of the guards or techs see said clone naked! That just was not the way civilized people behaved! So Lucrecia Crescent her sainted self was Cid’s primary caretaker. Aside from treating Cid like the world’s most anatomically correct dress-up doll, she was decent enough. Well mannered, genuinely kind - Cid could see how Vincent could have fallen in love her the first time around. Except for the huge gaping hole where common sense and ethics should have been. That kind of sociopathic mental configuration tended to turn Cid off.
Fortunately, aside from his new career as Frankenstein Barbie and his daily adventure in the lab, Cid was mostly left alone and unwatched beyond a monitor bracelet that was more like an anti-theft device than a spy tool. All the time alone gave Cid plenty of opportunity to practice moving around in his new body. Clever man that he was, Cid had not needed Hojo’s gleeful little rant about ‘trace genetic memory’ and ‘high neural pathway generation’ to realize that the reason he had run into trouble moving around in the beginning was because the body he was in right now had never been moved under an internal sense of self-direction before. The brain was sending the message to the muscles, but the muscles had no idea what they were supposed to be doing.
Grudgingly, Cid had to admit to himself - and only to himself - that the mako enhancement helped a whole hell of a lot. Without the mako infused into the cloned body it would have taken Cid a damn sight longer than a week to get strong enough to walk around on his own. Sometimes when he was practicing, Cid could swear he felt the mind-memory being carried down and turned into muscle-memory by the mako. That whole mako equals materia equals memory spiel he had to sit through at multiple points during That Thing With The Meteor might actually have some validity to it after all. His mind knew what he was supposed to be able to do after forty-eight years, but his body was only a week and some days old. It was a complicated little dichotomy - brain transplants were a line of inquiry that Cid was going to do his best to firmly discourage in the medical community should the opportunity ever arise.
Breathing steadily - an ability for which Cid was privately grateful, even if everything else was shit - Cid slid out of the bed. He swayed on his feet, still expecting his center of balance to be a few inches higher, but his grip on the bedpost kept him upright. Determined, Cid released his support and carefully took the first step. Everything was off-kilter, and for a spearman who spent more time in the air than on the ground it was a nightmare. As soon as he got settled into his new balance he was going to have to practice his footwork, this was ridiculous. At least he was still the same height, his arms and legs were still the same length. Cid did not think he could have dealt with adjusting to a new strike zone on top of everything else. Still, first things first - Cid needed to be able to walk in a straight line before he started worrying about his spear work. Now if he wobbled once or twice, that was fine, just as long as he did not fall over. It was a big room - more of an apartment, really - on the third floor. Cid had never been on this floor of the mansion before, the basement having been the focus of Neo-Avalanche’s attention during their searches, so it was going to take a bit of planning to figure out the best path down to the labs.
Cid grinned at the end of his third lap, coming to an almost-graceful stop on the far side of the room from the bed. Breathing was still easy, and Cid felt a little thrill every time he managed to fill his lungs. It would be a while until he forgot the pain of slow suffocation, if ever. He could still feel the phantom sensation of drowning on his own blood as his lungs rotted in his chest, feeling air against his face and knowing with a kind of hopeless resignation that it was not going to do him any good when he had no lungs to breathe the air with. Hojo deserved a spear to the gut for creating the pathogen Cid had been infected with alone, and that was not even getting into what he had done to Vincent, and Cloud, and even fucking Sephiroth. As soon as he could find something pointy enough, Cid was going to take great pleasure in gutting the slimy little pissant.
Growling, Cid looked up. Blinked, attention caught. There was a mirror attached to the dresser he was leaning against, a feminine bit of vanity that offered a full-body view in the tri-partite reflective surface. Cid had been installed in Lucrecia’s guestroom. Apparently being married to one of the lead scientists on the Project got you first dibs on the rooms. Lucrecia had her own bed, separate from Hojo’s in order to give her time to rest and recover from her miscarriage. Not that Cid blamed her; if he had been married to Hojo he would want his own room too... but since that would require throwing over Vincent, fuck no never. Also, Hojo, ew.
Knowing what he did about his current body’s origins and having caught impressions in quasi-reflective surfaces in the lab, Cid did not expect to be all that surprised by what he looked like once he finally got a chance to have a good look.
He was wrong.
Where Cid had been expecting a mako-bleached version of Lucrecia was a female version of Cid himself. Blonde hair, pale blue eyes - vertical pupils like a cat, which contracted sharply in surprise, and that was a new and interesting feature - and the angles of the face were all wrong for a clone of Lucrecia. The difference in bone structure was not terribly much, but Cid knew how much even a fractional change in an angle could affect the finished product. They had probably written off the changes as a resulting side-effect of Hojo’s tampering with Lucrecia’s genome while the clone was growing. Cid would probably be in a lot more trouble if Hojo had not spliced in that ‘Cetra’ DNA - the change in colouring notwithstanding, Cid was taller than Lucrecia by a few inches, and his overall structure was far sturdier than the dainty little scientist. Cid snorted in amusement, eying himself in the mirror. Not pretty - not in the way Tifa and Aeris or even Yuffie would be, if the hyperactive little ninja managed to survive puberty without annoying someone into putting her out of their collective misery - but there were some classic good looks here. Drawing back his shoulders Cid pulled his chin to the side, a mimic of his grandmother at her most exquisitely polite moments of distain.
“Fuckin’ statuesque, granddame.” The husky voice was rough with disuse, thread-thin from lack of practice, but damn. Cid was a sexy-sounding bitch. Smirking at himself, Cid flipped his hair, amused to have enough length to be able to pull the move off. Lucrecia had put him in a white lace dress and layered it with a shawl made of royal blue lace. There were blue ribbons in Cid’s hair, keeping it back from his face. Staring at the impressive woman in the mirror - a woman who belonged in some epic saga where people sang a lot and stuck wings on their helmets - Cid was reminded of his mother when he was young, the pride in her posture even when things went bad. Oddly enough, it gave Cid a measure of peace, being able to see his own blood in the woman shown to him by the mirror. “Well now, ain’t that somethin’.”
The door opened, and Cid panicked for a moment before calming, yanking his reactions back under control and pasting on his ‘mindless drone’ face.
“Nothing!” Hojo spat as he slammed the door shut behind his wife. “Everything we’ve done has been useless!”
Lucrecia bit her lip as she hovered uncertainly by her husband. “She is strong enough to produce the results we want.”
“Oh yes, no doubt of that. She is a lovely specimen.” A brief flicker of satisfaction crossed Hojo’s sallow face before he scowled again. “But none of the samples from paternal subjects are capable of breaking through the ovum barrier, and technology is incapable of keeping up with the needs of my genius.”
Hah. Cid turned around to watch the scientists, fighting down the grin that wanted to erupt. None of Hojo’s flunkies were man enough to get Cid pregnant. Take that Hojo.
“Oh dear.” Lucrecia sighed, frowning thoughtfully as she drifted away to a window, chewing on her lip. She straightened with a gasp, whirling around to face Hojo. “That’s it! It’s so simple!”
“What?” Hojo’s heavy brow creased in irritation as he looked up from his notes.
“We need an enhanced male donor!” Lucrecia was speaking quickly in her excitement, and Hojo’s dark expression turned calculating as he listened. “We’ve been going about this the wrong way. Yes, the JENOVA Project needs an enhanced growth environment, but that restricts us when it comes to choosing the secondary contributor! We would need something on par with - oh with the CHAOS Project results. Is there anything viable coming out of the SOLDIER Project yet?”
“Hmm... the idea has merit.” Hojo drummed his fingers against the file in his other hand, a nasty sort of glee twisting his face. “Yes, why don’t we do that... Yes, why not? We’ll recycle the materials from the CHAOS Project; it’s the least that can be done to make up for the interruption of the first iteration of the JENOVA Project.”
Cid froze. He barely noticed that the two scientists were leaving the room, jabbering excitedly at one another about inheritance traits and hybrid vigour. CHAOS Project? Were they talking about Vincent? They were going to use Vincent to breed their alien super-baby? Cid’s Vincent? That was beyond crazy... by this time Hojo had already killed Vincent - ‘tested to destruction’ the file had said - and then Lucrecia had done some crazy Lazarus shit with Vincent’s mako-saturated body and primordial-forces-men-were-not-supposed-to-meddle-with.
Cid was going to have that Vincent’s baby?
Holy fuck.
JENOVA Project File No. 39
Suggestion made by Dr. Crescent to utilize an enhanced male donor. Specimen V (see CHAOS Project files) only current option. Approval for the use of recycled Project materials pending.
File amendment 1: Request for use of CHAOS Project materials approved for JENOVA Project Experiment 3.
JENOVA Project File No. 40
Attempts to harvest reproductive sample from Specimen V failed. Subject appears to have mentally regressed to a feral state - perhaps a result of the temporary death experienced prior to the CHAOS experiment? Subject has shown no recognition of individuals such as Dr. Crescent or Dr. Hojo despite emotionally intense personal histories. It may be necessary to consider another male subject and perform the needed enhancements.
Delay of the JENOVA Project continues.
(Word Count: 2,321)
=/=
More adventures of girl!Cid in Wonderland the past. Is it wrong of me to want to giggle like a mad thing at the reactions I'm anticipating to this piece? XD
=/=
Little sister is fine, it was only a 24 hour fever and it broke at around 4am this morning. Baby sister came home from her trip and will be hanging around here at the farm until after Thanksgiving (the Canadian one, natch. XP) Family chatter has let me know that I need to think about what I'm giving people for our non-denominational Mid-winter holiday gifting, otherwise all the good ideas are going to be taken.
=/=
HERE THERE BE DRAGONS!! (Ha! Managed to breed myself a Hell Horse! Also, I am the Abandoned cave Queen. Managed to get five of the eggs I was looking for there, XP)
♥
♠
♥
♠
♥
♠
♥
♠
♥
♠
♥
♠
♥
♠
♥
A Final Fantasy VII Fanfiction
Author: Sanjuno Shori Niko
Summary: There are logistical concerns with random gender reassignments that people don't tend to think about.
Timeline: More of this fic here.
=/=
(In which Cid makes a damn fine woman.)
JENOVA Project File No. 36
Attempts to fertilize ovum harvested from CC all failures. Ovum cell barrier wall impenetrable by spermatozoa samples on file.
JENOVA Project File No. 37
Specimen CC now capable of self-locomotion and beginning to display signs of advanced motor control. Awareness of simple self-maintenance concepts i.e. hygiene, feeding, and dressing confirmed by Dr. Crescent. Subject displays some signs of vocal recognition, but as yet has indicated no facility for language.
/…/
Over the course of those first few days, after waking up in a woman’s body and realizing that he had somehow ended up in the past, Cid realized that no, he was not in hell, but he might as well have been there after everything was considered.
The ‘harvesting’ - as Hojo put it - was fucking painful. Lucrecia - and that was a kicker, Vincent’s old flame was even more of a heartless bitch than Cid at his least sympathetic had thought - was riding everyone’s asses to ‘be gentle’ and ‘not damage her’! In bits and pieces over the span of a week, Cid got an idea of the situation he was in as he was poked and prodded and subjected to things that he hoped were the result of Hojo’s sadism and not really something women actually had to put up with during medical exams.
The gist of it was that Lucrecia had miscarried. She had not been strong enough to carry to term after Hojo’s in-vetro experiments. If she had stopped when Vincent tried to get Hojo to suspend the project, maybe she could have successfully finished the pregnancy. As it stood, Hojo had ignored her failing health in favour of continuing his experiments, and it had cost him his ‘specimen’. Cysts had developed, and ulcers had ruptured the walls of her womb. Lucrecia had lost any chance she had of ever having children.
Then of course, Hojo had the brilliant idea of incubating the child in something a bit stronger than a mere human female. Enter exhibit A: the body Cid currently inhabited, which was a clone of the charming Dr. Crescent. Enter a second brilliant idea to fuck with things men ought not to! Hojo went and enhanced the clone with a cocktail mix of mako and Cetra genes harvested from the Jenova specimen.
Most of the more personal details had been told to Cid by Lucrecia herself. She was a chatty woman, and had interesting ideas about what was proper. Apparently it was all fine and dandy to create a clone of your own self and then play mad-scientist-god with the clone’s genetics in order to make a self-regulating baby incubator for the spawn of a homicidal alien intelligence, but spirits forbid any of the guards or techs see said clone naked! That just was not the way civilized people behaved! So Lucrecia Crescent her sainted self was Cid’s primary caretaker. Aside from treating Cid like the world’s most anatomically correct dress-up doll, she was decent enough. Well mannered, genuinely kind - Cid could see how Vincent could have fallen in love her the first time around. Except for the huge gaping hole where common sense and ethics should have been. That kind of sociopathic mental configuration tended to turn Cid off.
Fortunately, aside from his new career as Frankenstein Barbie and his daily adventure in the lab, Cid was mostly left alone and unwatched beyond a monitor bracelet that was more like an anti-theft device than a spy tool. All the time alone gave Cid plenty of opportunity to practice moving around in his new body. Clever man that he was, Cid had not needed Hojo’s gleeful little rant about ‘trace genetic memory’ and ‘high neural pathway generation’ to realize that the reason he had run into trouble moving around in the beginning was because the body he was in right now had never been moved under an internal sense of self-direction before. The brain was sending the message to the muscles, but the muscles had no idea what they were supposed to be doing.
Grudgingly, Cid had to admit to himself - and only to himself - that the mako enhancement helped a whole hell of a lot. Without the mako infused into the cloned body it would have taken Cid a damn sight longer than a week to get strong enough to walk around on his own. Sometimes when he was practicing, Cid could swear he felt the mind-memory being carried down and turned into muscle-memory by the mako. That whole mako equals materia equals memory spiel he had to sit through at multiple points during That Thing With The Meteor might actually have some validity to it after all. His mind knew what he was supposed to be able to do after forty-eight years, but his body was only a week and some days old. It was a complicated little dichotomy - brain transplants were a line of inquiry that Cid was going to do his best to firmly discourage in the medical community should the opportunity ever arise.
Breathing steadily - an ability for which Cid was privately grateful, even if everything else was shit - Cid slid out of the bed. He swayed on his feet, still expecting his center of balance to be a few inches higher, but his grip on the bedpost kept him upright. Determined, Cid released his support and carefully took the first step. Everything was off-kilter, and for a spearman who spent more time in the air than on the ground it was a nightmare. As soon as he got settled into his new balance he was going to have to practice his footwork, this was ridiculous. At least he was still the same height, his arms and legs were still the same length. Cid did not think he could have dealt with adjusting to a new strike zone on top of everything else. Still, first things first - Cid needed to be able to walk in a straight line before he started worrying about his spear work. Now if he wobbled once or twice, that was fine, just as long as he did not fall over. It was a big room - more of an apartment, really - on the third floor. Cid had never been on this floor of the mansion before, the basement having been the focus of Neo-Avalanche’s attention during their searches, so it was going to take a bit of planning to figure out the best path down to the labs.
Cid grinned at the end of his third lap, coming to an almost-graceful stop on the far side of the room from the bed. Breathing was still easy, and Cid felt a little thrill every time he managed to fill his lungs. It would be a while until he forgot the pain of slow suffocation, if ever. He could still feel the phantom sensation of drowning on his own blood as his lungs rotted in his chest, feeling air against his face and knowing with a kind of hopeless resignation that it was not going to do him any good when he had no lungs to breathe the air with. Hojo deserved a spear to the gut for creating the pathogen Cid had been infected with alone, and that was not even getting into what he had done to Vincent, and Cloud, and even fucking Sephiroth. As soon as he could find something pointy enough, Cid was going to take great pleasure in gutting the slimy little pissant.
Growling, Cid looked up. Blinked, attention caught. There was a mirror attached to the dresser he was leaning against, a feminine bit of vanity that offered a full-body view in the tri-partite reflective surface. Cid had been installed in Lucrecia’s guestroom. Apparently being married to one of the lead scientists on the Project got you first dibs on the rooms. Lucrecia had her own bed, separate from Hojo’s in order to give her time to rest and recover from her miscarriage. Not that Cid blamed her; if he had been married to Hojo he would want his own room too... but since that would require throwing over Vincent, fuck no never. Also, Hojo, ew.
Knowing what he did about his current body’s origins and having caught impressions in quasi-reflective surfaces in the lab, Cid did not expect to be all that surprised by what he looked like once he finally got a chance to have a good look.
He was wrong.
Where Cid had been expecting a mako-bleached version of Lucrecia was a female version of Cid himself. Blonde hair, pale blue eyes - vertical pupils like a cat, which contracted sharply in surprise, and that was a new and interesting feature - and the angles of the face were all wrong for a clone of Lucrecia. The difference in bone structure was not terribly much, but Cid knew how much even a fractional change in an angle could affect the finished product. They had probably written off the changes as a resulting side-effect of Hojo’s tampering with Lucrecia’s genome while the clone was growing. Cid would probably be in a lot more trouble if Hojo had not spliced in that ‘Cetra’ DNA - the change in colouring notwithstanding, Cid was taller than Lucrecia by a few inches, and his overall structure was far sturdier than the dainty little scientist. Cid snorted in amusement, eying himself in the mirror. Not pretty - not in the way Tifa and Aeris or even Yuffie would be, if the hyperactive little ninja managed to survive puberty without annoying someone into putting her out of their collective misery - but there were some classic good looks here. Drawing back his shoulders Cid pulled his chin to the side, a mimic of his grandmother at her most exquisitely polite moments of distain.
“Fuckin’ statuesque, granddame.” The husky voice was rough with disuse, thread-thin from lack of practice, but damn. Cid was a sexy-sounding bitch. Smirking at himself, Cid flipped his hair, amused to have enough length to be able to pull the move off. Lucrecia had put him in a white lace dress and layered it with a shawl made of royal blue lace. There were blue ribbons in Cid’s hair, keeping it back from his face. Staring at the impressive woman in the mirror - a woman who belonged in some epic saga where people sang a lot and stuck wings on their helmets - Cid was reminded of his mother when he was young, the pride in her posture even when things went bad. Oddly enough, it gave Cid a measure of peace, being able to see his own blood in the woman shown to him by the mirror. “Well now, ain’t that somethin’.”
The door opened, and Cid panicked for a moment before calming, yanking his reactions back under control and pasting on his ‘mindless drone’ face.
“Nothing!” Hojo spat as he slammed the door shut behind his wife. “Everything we’ve done has been useless!”
Lucrecia bit her lip as she hovered uncertainly by her husband. “She is strong enough to produce the results we want.”
“Oh yes, no doubt of that. She is a lovely specimen.” A brief flicker of satisfaction crossed Hojo’s sallow face before he scowled again. “But none of the samples from paternal subjects are capable of breaking through the ovum barrier, and technology is incapable of keeping up with the needs of my genius.”
Hah. Cid turned around to watch the scientists, fighting down the grin that wanted to erupt. None of Hojo’s flunkies were man enough to get Cid pregnant. Take that Hojo.
“Oh dear.” Lucrecia sighed, frowning thoughtfully as she drifted away to a window, chewing on her lip. She straightened with a gasp, whirling around to face Hojo. “That’s it! It’s so simple!”
“What?” Hojo’s heavy brow creased in irritation as he looked up from his notes.
“We need an enhanced male donor!” Lucrecia was speaking quickly in her excitement, and Hojo’s dark expression turned calculating as he listened. “We’ve been going about this the wrong way. Yes, the JENOVA Project needs an enhanced growth environment, but that restricts us when it comes to choosing the secondary contributor! We would need something on par with - oh with the CHAOS Project results. Is there anything viable coming out of the SOLDIER Project yet?”
“Hmm... the idea has merit.” Hojo drummed his fingers against the file in his other hand, a nasty sort of glee twisting his face. “Yes, why don’t we do that... Yes, why not? We’ll recycle the materials from the CHAOS Project; it’s the least that can be done to make up for the interruption of the first iteration of the JENOVA Project.”
Cid froze. He barely noticed that the two scientists were leaving the room, jabbering excitedly at one another about inheritance traits and hybrid vigour. CHAOS Project? Were they talking about Vincent? They were going to use Vincent to breed their alien super-baby? Cid’s Vincent? That was beyond crazy... by this time Hojo had already killed Vincent - ‘tested to destruction’ the file had said - and then Lucrecia had done some crazy Lazarus shit with Vincent’s mako-saturated body and primordial-forces-men-were-not-supposed-to-meddle-with.
Cid was going to have that Vincent’s baby?
Holy fuck.
JENOVA Project File No. 39
Suggestion made by Dr. Crescent to utilize an enhanced male donor. Specimen V (see CHAOS Project files) only current option. Approval for the use of recycled Project materials pending.
File amendment 1: Request for use of CHAOS Project materials approved for JENOVA Project Experiment 3.
JENOVA Project File No. 40
Attempts to harvest reproductive sample from Specimen V failed. Subject appears to have mentally regressed to a feral state - perhaps a result of the temporary death experienced prior to the CHAOS experiment? Subject has shown no recognition of individuals such as Dr. Crescent or Dr. Hojo despite emotionally intense personal histories. It may be necessary to consider another male subject and perform the needed enhancements.
Delay of the JENOVA Project continues.
(Word Count: 2,321)
=/=
More adventures of girl!Cid in Wonderland the past. Is it wrong of me to want to giggle like a mad thing at the reactions I'm anticipating to this piece? XD
=/=
Little sister is fine, it was only a 24 hour fever and it broke at around 4am this morning. Baby sister came home from her trip and will be hanging around here at the farm until after Thanksgiving (the Canadian one, natch. XP) Family chatter has let me know that I need to think about what I'm giving people for our non-denominational Mid-winter holiday gifting, otherwise all the good ideas are going to be taken.
=/=
HERE THERE BE DRAGONS!! (Ha! Managed to breed myself a Hell Horse! Also, I am the Abandoned cave Queen. Managed to get five of the eggs I was looking for there, XP)
♥
♠
♥
♠
♥
♠
♥
♠
♥
♠
♥
♠
♥
♠
♥