#also the clouds/knives rivalry that i deeply desire exists here bc it's also funny

[millionsnife]

verse drop;; ff7/trigun fusion; building this verse with @lockhartred

important notes. readmore for length:

gunsmoke doesn't happen; instead the SEEDS ships land on the planet gaia. knives and vash are born roughly a year before the coordinates are chosen and input into the pilot program. they're roughly 2 years old when the ships land on gaia.

humanity begins colonizing the planet.

monsters are discovered, and in an effort to combat them and survive on their new home, experiments splicing plant dna into human dna begin using adult volunteers. success rates are high and the experiments are considered a success. there's now a mix of pure humans and cetra; cetra is the name they give the human-plant hybrids.

rem, wanting to be closer to her sons and understand them and their needs as plants better, also volunteers for the experiments. (unknown to anyone, a virus in space managed to infect one of the plants on board. at this time, the virus only affects plants. the plant rem's spliced dna comes from is an infected plant. this becomes the first strain of the newly named geostigma when it's discovered, but it is assumed they caught and eradicated the disease before it was a problem, not knowing.)

at some point within the next couple years, vash and knives get older and start exploring this new world at rem's side. they wander north, and something or other happens. rem, in an effort to protect the twins, loses control of the new powers she's gained as a plant hybrid and there's some sort of explosion or such. it's never clear even when they tell people what happened; regardless, the north crater results from the accident, and rem is sealed within an icy cavern below ground.

knives and vash are the ones to create the cetra of the watch; the intention for this is that when rem finally reawakens again, someone will always be there and ready to help her rejoin the world. the twins themselves resume traveling and living among humans, both to occupy their time and bc they think rem would prefer them to live their lives instead of sitting around waiting for her. most plants somehow end up in the crater via unknown (to everyone else) means.

time passes. cetra dwindle and only pure humans remain, somewhere along the way the history gets warped. rem's existence in the cavern gets forgotten by all but the remaining watch and even their stories somehow warp and shift so that they believe they're guarding against a calamity from the sky, instead of being there as guardians meant to protect and eventually reintroduce rem.

shinra finds rem eventually; gast renames her jenova, unknowing of what he's truly found and experiments begin. by this point, the infection of the original virus in combination of time and weather have degraded rem horribly; what's left is not the mother the twins knew, and at this point the twins begin to come in conflict on what to do about the situation. shinra also finds the plants and begins using them in ways they should not lmao

"Reunion" is not what hojo believes it to be, whatever the hell that is; "reunion" is just the plant dna trying to bring their new hosts into the higher plane/add them to the network of the collective plant consciousness. hojo's meddling has also fucked around and found out a lot of problematic ways, and rem/jenova's a little bit mad.

vash wants to cooperate with humans the way they always have, convinced they can work together to fix the rem problem and bring her back to the mother they remember. knives, after centuries of wandering, has grown a bit jaded by humanity and is all for letting rem/jenova just kill off humanity and leave him, vash and plants as the remaining survivors.

he's not actively killing anyone but knives is totally down for letting jenova just do the thing. vash is the one who firmly believes (and is right!) that what's left of rem's mind would be horrified of everything she's doing. he eventually convinces knives to work with avalanche to remove shinra as the problem they are and save the other plants, without killing everyone else off.

and the last point is where the threads take place; during the ff7 game timeline, as well as post