#holy shit im sorry for the wall of text someday i will clean this up i swear

[petitepistol]

headcanon;but it is very messy

oh god strap in because this is going to be 3k words worth of rambling under the cut which you don't actually have to read since i posted it at 5am so it probably does not make much sense!! also I have only just recently accepted that my elena does not follow compilation timeline to the letter because I fucking hate the fact that before crisis placed her age at being a high school student almost immediately preceding the start of the original game and I always saw elena as being at least aerith's age by the time she became a turk so please bear with me as my elena uses a floating timeline to prevent her from being...like a literal teenager for original game fuck that noise they had cissnei be the uwu fifteen-year-old turk and elena gets to be her own character when im writing her so compilation can fuck right off

so first off her dad is a military man, and that entire side of his family? kind of just defaulted into the military for generations. well before shinra at least, the old shit. I'm constantly flabbergasted by the idea that shinra is the dominant military force on the planet when as little as forty years before game them were a fledgling company, and I'm fascinated by what kind of insane shit must have gone down to facilitate shinra going from defense contractor/power company to defacto global superpower, and what they superseded when that happened. so yeah her dad is military, and even after he was put out to pasture he still wound up teaching at a prestigious shinra sponsored academy in junon and both of his daughters attended.

her mom was upper middle class and driven as hell, had a ballet career which got cut short due to injury in her late teens. then she wound up going into nursing by her early twenties and spent some time working in deepground when it was still a run of the mill army hospital where she met elena's father who was...voluntarily a candidate for some biotech stuff that shinra was doing back when shinra was still a defense contractor, go figure he was one of many early examples of mako conditioning. they didn't get along at first but did wind up marrying but never actually settling down because of the nature of his career. she retired from nursing but did medical coding part-time.

elena's sister was born in deepground (canonically from the 'midgar slums' but deepground is pretty fucking close and it makes sense to the era and background worldbuilding), and things went as smoothly as possible at this point in time. elena herself was born in icicle because lol military stationed there (elena being an icicle native was also a very popular piece of fanon in the pre-compilation era and I feel like it may have had some supporting evidence in something like kaitai shinsho but I never really managed to cross-reference that so probably not true and just a gut feeling), and by then things were getting...fishy. details being covered up about the full extent of the side-effects of mako conditioning and rumors that shinra had an egregious amount of influence over the military at large. these things all turned out to be true, but elena's father kept his head down and did his duty because he was a good soldier. he was also in wutai on and off during this, before the situation over there fully hit the fan, so he had more pressing matters to worry about.

anyway, elena was born in icicle but she and her mother and sister weren't there for more than a year or so before it was back at it again in midgar because dad was being put on some kind of assignment that had him closely working with shinra. the general implication of this is he was doing legwork for the implementation of SOLDIER in a few years, but what that means can vary by interaction from being paperwork to mk ultra style endurance testing to teaching an adolescent jenova project specimen how to integrate into military procedure before they drop him in wutai which is slated to become an all-out conflagration very shortly. it all depends but the point is it is sticky and worsened significantly when his wife is killed in a car accident. if this seems familiar it is because I firmly believe elena is the aya brea of ffvii and parasite eve featured similar background story. I'm borrowing deal with it.

by this point, elena is around eight and in school but elena is just barely four and in the vehicle when it happens. mom is killed instantly, elena survives but barely fares better. she's in intensive care for a while and there is a period where they don't even know if she is going to be brain dead or just have permanent brain damage in the first few days. her sister is basically staying at a school friend's house for like...way more than a fortnight while this got sorted out because their dad still actually has orders to carry out, even if he isn't on a battlefield. at one point on of his higher-ups implies that it could be arranged to transfer elena from the civilian hospital to the recently renovated deepground and he turns it down and feels like shit for it because yeah, deepground probably would mean a better chance at his youngest daughters survival because of that cutting edge shinra biotech, but at what cost? he knows well enough now something is wrong and justifies his willingness to let fate take its course with elena by focusing on the fact that her sister is still alive and well and he needs to keep his head down for his older daughter because she needed him too, even though they barely saw each other during the crux of this.

so lo and behold elena does recover and goes through the icky sticky of physical therapy and does just fine. great, right? well yes but the family dynamic is stupidly fucked up. dad has done either really good or really bad on his assignment, and gets put out to pasture in junon to teach at a military academy that is now nearly entirely funded by shinra (yeah so in before crisis it is all but implicit that academy is in midgar but fuck that junon is the seat of military power it would be near there if anything). this is great because it keeps him in work and both of his daughters will benefit. which they do. elena's sister is an ideal student, and the roughness of losing her mother happened at a sensitive period but a period where she was old enough to understand what was going on. she was capable of being a little trooper through all of it, but the cost of it was not being able to emotionally process the loss of her mother and the fact that her little sister was still alive when mom was not. the seeds of discord are sown there and that will be an ongoing thing throughout their childhood and into adulthood. they don't hate each other, but the relationship is fraught with tension and it is far from a healthy dynamic, especially since their father has pulled back almost entirely from fatherhood. he has no idea what he is doing without his late wife, and can't organically interact with his daughters so he defaults to being an instructor. both of them flourish despite this, but it is not a good family dynamic.

paint over this family drama with the fact that wutai is now well and truly happening. the military is effectively controlled by shinra and very very soon the propaganda blitz surrounding SOLDIER is going to push that over the edge and shinra will be accepted on a public and official level as being the army. the slogans are changing and going from an old fashioned sense of unity to focusing on becoming top class and singularly extraordinary. there is an emphasis on joining to be great rather than joining for the greater good. the recruitment plays into the deeply seated neurosis of adolescence for a reason because the younger some kid joins up the more malleable they are to both the shinra rhetoric and the by now very refined mako enhancement process that costs so much but nets such spectacular gains. in fact, it costs far too much to ever justify wasting that kind of money on doing it to women. so yeah it is blog canon that women in the shinra army is not a thing that is encouraged and like hell would they ever be in SOLDIER. the company culture is an old boys club steeped in misogyny and the only reason scarlet succeeded is because she took that and marinated in it and played the game very well. dirge era deepground operatives are little more than a consequence of years of unethical human experimentation left to rot in a basement. we don't really see women in actual military positions in the original game. sexism is alive and well and it serves my characterization of elena and her development.

so yeah it is a time of paradigms shifting and reforming very rapidly. elena's sister takes to this with aplomb, she is a perfect cadet and in elena's eyes a perfect daughter. someone easier to idolize than the SOLDIERs on the glossy recruitment posters and more available than their emotionally distant father. she is pristine and by extension beloved, things elena wants to be as well. elena is too young to realize her sister doesn't have any better of a relationship with their father than she does, but who knows if that would change anything. she emulates her ideal sister but remains a half step behind, which makes perfect sense because elena is four years younger. from a critical perspective that half step is a very close gap because even if elena doesn't realize it, she is just as prodigious as her sister is. the difference is while her sister can follow orders to the letter, elena has the makings of a maverick. not a positive thing in the strict environment of a military academy, no matter how high her scores are. idealization goes hand and hand with a quiet resentment, the latter of which her sister has also harbored towards her ever since their later mother died and elena did not.

that simmering toxicity stays at a low boil until her sister graduates. at the top of the class, even she could not become anything. or at least, to elena it looks that way, as she watches her sister back her things for midgar where she will start as a trainee for an administrative/auditing position for the shinra electric power company. elena does not know what a turk is at this point, even if her father does. he seems as impassive as ever, even if that is not the case and in actuality he is struggling to accept the reality that his oldest daughter is far too smart for his own good and is entering a profession no one would ever want for their child. despite his distance and his lack of connection and all of his failings as a father he does love his children and that will eat away at him until he dies no doubt. but all elena sees is her shining example of an older sister being doomed to desk work. when gun leaves (because she becomes gun the moment she is added to the payroll) the real constant of elena's childhood also leaves. and during adolescence, that is hard for anyone. more so when you realize no matter how sharp your skills are your future is off the chopping block and there is no path for you to take with them.

elena goes from being a prodigy prone to pesky critical thinking to a prodigy with a chip on her shoulder. her technical marks don't plummet, in fact, quite the opposite. she picks up a secondary battle specialty, close-quarters combat, which will set her apart from her sister. she flourishes with equal parts precision and aggression, despite her small size. the academic commendations feel entirely hollow to her though, and in the way teenagers tend to do she convinces herself she is not much more than nothing. the memory of her sister becomes tarnished with the bitterness of her negative self-image. her instructors must hate her for her failures, she tells herself with false objectivity. her instructors include her actual father, who is nearly clueless aside from a vague feeling in the pit of his stomach and he doesn't know if that is due to his oldest daughter going into wetworks or the fact his younger daughter is shattering academic record after record with the sheer force of what he assumes to be ennui driven spite.

at least he is clueless until in the spring just after she turns fifteen she files for early certification to leave academy, just like every other boy in her year as well as every other boy on the continent and beyond. they do it to catch the recruitment push and join the army soon enough to have a shot at making SOLDIER before they age out. but elena can't do that and he knows it and braces himself to have that conversation with her, calling her into his office where she keeps her stance formal until he tells her to be as ease and even in the chair across from his desk her posture is tense. spine straight, eyes ahead. he begins what he thinks is going to be the "you know you can't join SOLDIER" conversation but she cuts him off in what he thinks is a somewhat uncharacteristic display, but to her is just another example of how disgraceful her conduct is and how she needs to get out of academy before brings the value of the whole institution down. she tells him this, she tells him she is aware of her shortcomings and the fact she has no future in a military career and her intention is to go to midgar and learn how to be a civilian on her own terms. he signs off on it because none of her bullet points are actually wrong.

midgar is a city of industry and a city of vice and she hasn't been there since she was a child. it is good to her and it is bad to her, as she unlearns years of quasi-military discipline and figures out how to be her own person. she still sometimes wears the academy uniform because old habits die hard and it is a durable thing. she has a one-room apartment in the slums and a job tending bar in wall market. the hours are early evening to after the last train ends and her circadian rhythm adjusts from 4am wakeups and beds made with hospital corners to the distorted clock that comes from living under a plate with no natural sunlight. there are just as many fights and skirmishes to be had in midgar but none of them are like the training exercises at academy. each one is a beautiful short-lived shrine, sometimes they are fun and on her terms, and other times they are fraught and meant for survival. elena relishes them all as a skillset she once thought was a dead-end turns out to be valuable once more. the major negative point is her sister.

gun is in midgar and wears a sleek black suit along with many other people in sleek black suits. elena hears the term 'turk' for the first time. whether they are urban legends or hired killers or pencil pushers who do double duty waterboarding enemies of a power company turned judge and jury doesn't matter. what matters is the deadness she can see in gun's green eyes when she drops by the bar before closing, oftentimes with equally dead-eyed coworkers. those confrontations are never pleasant, they are a powderkeg. elena would like to reach out to her sister, chase away the exhausted look in her face the way she can with other patrons, but the sentiment gets stuck in her throat and they just snipe at each other. gun is a terrible adult and so are all of her colleagues and they are trying their best to neutralize a growing terrorist threat and they are failing. when they come around in the low light of the bar illuminates the stark futility of everything after midnight.

elena does not know exactly what is going on at the highest level of intrigue but she has a good guess. shinra is shitting the bed, and that includes the turks and SOLDIER, which seems to her to be in the middle of a massive coverup as their public-facing 1sts disappear one after another. she wants no part of it and her agenda switches from mastering the nuances of being a civilian to finding sustainability and meaning outside of shinra as the cracks in the facade split ever wider. when the sector six plate is effectively destroyed, it takes the bar she worked at with it and elena decides it is time to get the hell out of midgar.

her years in wall market set her up with some interesting connections and the owner of a small weapons shop (who she might have married for tax purposes but that isn't fleshed out) sets her up with a distinguished older gentleman who is a complete asshole and happens to run guns all across the continent. despite his immaculate coiffure he is not a people person and requires someone who is both qualified to demonstrate his product and more pleasant to deal with than him, because the market is hot right now. shinra has never had much interest in dealing with flyover country. sure they build reactors in some of the backwaters, but not all of them. and no reactor meant no need for shinra to spend the money on protecting hick villages from increased monster presence. the planet is dying and the monsters are restless in the same way wildlife gets in the real world. the people in those tiny towns do their best to defend their homes and livelihood and that means purchasing weaponry, mostly old stock from competitors that shinra has long since crushed or acquired. shinra lets this happen because it is not a threat to them.

so, for a few years, elena is a pretty face with a bang and it is almost scarlettian. she never comes close to the sex appeal of the actual weapons development director of shinra, but it is enough to help move merchandise. most of the buyers are just people trying to survive in the middle of nowhere, but not always. sometimes they are rougher than that, but the money is good enough that she doesn't care about that, or the fact the man who employed her hates her guts and doesn't care much whether she lives or dies. it is a thrilling rush and it is outside of shinra and more than ever does she want to put as much distance as possible between shinra and herself. because her sister is dead according to a notification that tseng of the turks had been cordial enough to send to her father, news that he passed on in a voicemail to elena with a hollow tone. maybe he was trying to reconnect with her because she was now all he had left in the way of family. maybe he just had the same sense of duty as always. she never calls back to ask.

midgar calls her back though. one day her employer informs her with a vindictive grin that he has sold the business part and parcel and that includes her as an employee. acquired by shinra. the reason, ironically, is scarlet, whom she has been doing a two-bit impersonation of. scarlet is a forward thinker but that doesn't mean she can't be swayed by a stockpile of vintage firearms, and with the viciousness required of her position she can throw weight around and get her hands on anything. the weapons are what she wanted and elena knows this and rejects the notion that she will become apart of the shinra payroll because of this little merger. this is proven wrong in short order as her assets are frozen systematically because the turks are hard up for people. they know her. they knew her sister and they know her, even if they haven't kept tabs on her. as soon as the papers cross his desk tseng seizes the opportunity.

the interview with hr to place elena is a mere formality. there is no other place for her there but in the turks. elena, for all her audacity, accepts this and plasters on a professional veneer. the game begins and the world ends.