#zhijie ff7

[fearowkenya]

what if zhijie met sonon before zhijie met sonon and made it everybody's problem

it's fucking insane to me that there is NOTHING in the way of zhijie/sonon did you SEE the intricate secret handshake?? anyway here is a wip. sonon's not in it, but his presence is implied.

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what the hell is this fic about you might be asking. thats a great question

hi, under read more so i dont make somebodys dash eighty miles long.

uh this fic started as a joke when my friend and i were like 🤨🏳️‍🌈❓about every single moment sonon and zhijie are in proximity to one another, then it spiraled out of control. many such cases.

despite that being the starting point, the actual crux of this fic is more about how avalanche's sector 7 cell coped after the splinter cell cuts ties with the main branch, and how people (nayo specifically) are feeling about it a year after the fact when shit hits the fan vis-a-vis the plate. it's not really relevant in this part but i promise it makes up most of whats currently written.

cool few things about this fic that arent necessarily super obvious from this wip but im too excited about not to share:

nayo is one of jessies roommates. "but isn't jessies place for aspiring actresses" nayo is their weird extra guy who wants to paint the sets and stuff instead of being on stage. i think it could be fun. and also the drama would be off the rails. imagine having a catastrophic friend-group fission and having to live with one of the people on the other side of the split. except in addition of it being a friend group it's a climate extremist cell, and it's vital that your other two roommates DO NOT find out about it. also you are gay (so much of this fic is unresolved not-requited-but-also-not-unrequited jessie/nayo anguish. hows THAT for a rarepair huh. im in hell)

it's already implied in-game that sonon and zhijie spent some time together in wall market, but my friend was like 'wouldnt it be really funny if the two of them met and had this wild night in wall market before sonon like. actually showed up to the avalanche hideout. like what if zhijie didnt KNOW'. and i was like holy fuck youre a genius

my apologies to polk for fort condor being his only personality trait. i intend to go back and comb through all of his lines to try to glean as much from canon as i can, but for now its all fort condor i guess

its not directly stated but i am also using this to push my insane gamer theory that zhijie is corneo's bastard child. it probably wont come up but my main reasoning is this very pepe-sylvia meme type of conjecture linking the assumption that zhijie frequently hangs out in wall market to him inexplicably knowing that the plate is going to fall. who the hell told him. corneo fucking sucks but i think if he had a child who was in danger of being crushed by the plate fall he'd probably warn him to get out, even if the child in question hates his fucking guts and would prefer not to be associated with him

i love thinking about how throughout most of this, cloud is (checks notes) parachuting off the plate after a high-speed motorcycle chase.

i am so in love with stories where we get a look at what a B-team is up to while the A-team is in the spotlight doing something else entirely, ideally creating absolutely disgusting amounts of tonal whiplash. like what do you MEAN everybody is having the worst day of their lives while cloud is being made to pick flowers and rescue children at the behest of a very pretty girl??? horrible!!! me too please!! i want to play in this space as well!!

and thats what this fic is meant to be: my contributions to the insane shit happening in the background of The Sector Five Reactor Incident as well as aerith dragging cloud on errands with her, both during the day in sector 5 and later on in the evening during their stint in wall market. there is SO MUCH interpersonal nonsense that they will just NEVER know about. but i know! (: and maybe you will too!

[priceofreedom]

Zhijie Requested by anon!

[rydiathesummoner]

Zhijie: Describing his trauma of watching thousands of people dying horrifically, trying to keep the dead eyes at bay and move on with his life one day at a time.

The background music: HAPPIEST FIDDLE ON THE PLANET PLAYING BOUNCY HAPPY TUNES 🎵 DOOO, DOO, DOO DOOOOOO DOO 🎵

[cielomist]

finally and blessedly saw my man. he seemed much sadder than he was in the dlc which makes sense bc u know.. the plate.. but king how can i bring your smile back.... show me that shitty little smirk you always used to have....

no but seriously why isnt this sidequest showing up for me. i want to do it. please. all the internet says is that you have to reach chapter 12 and then it will be on the cosmo canyon notice board but im IN chapter 12 (via post game chapter select) and its not there 😭

[fictionkinfessions]

you know what's funny? i think the shinra execs were so preoccupied with cloud's group after the plate fell that no one really seemed to notice i just fucking. left. and never came back.

like. ok, after the plate fell, i hauled my ass down to the remains of the sector 7 slums because i joined SOLDIER in the first place to *fucking help people* so after a minor emotional breakdown/confession after finding zhijie to be alive and ok (... as ok as someone can be after that), i stuck around to help out the survivors from sector 7. and just kinda.. decided to not go back to shinra. because how the fuck would i be able to stomach going back to work there when they just killed thousands of their own citizens in one fell swoop.

and i would still get all the shinra update emails, whether that be about the movements of "the avalanche fugitives" (aka cloud's group) and the plans/orders to apprehend them or the president's death and rufus's subsequent promotion. and i would keep getting all these emails pretty until shinra crumbled.

like, granted, it wasn't like i announced that i was leaving or anything, i did literally just leave and not go back, but. after everything that happened with the 1sts, shinra kept a pretty tight leash on members of SOLDIER, so under normal circumstances i would have been, at best, dragged kicking and screaming back to the company.

so hey cloud (and company), thanks for being such a pain in shinra's ass that they didn't even notice me straight up deserting. -kunsel, ff7

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[ffvii-series-incorrect-quotes]

[leeus-writing]

Nerves

Hello! I hope you are having a good day, I saw that you still have one slot left for the FF7 one shots and if it's not too late, I would love to request something fluffy about Sonon and Y/N having feelings for each other but they're both too oblivious about it except for Yuffie and the gang (zhijie, nayo, etc.) So she (Yuffie) kinda starts being a wingwoman to Y/N and teasing Sonon about his crush on Y/N and it ends with them finally having their first kiss and Yuffie and the rest of the gang is just hiding and going YES,

Nerves

You sighed watching Sonon walk out of the hide out. A dreamy look on your face as your eyes tracked the ass of the soft-spoken man. You wanted to know him better… You wanted to know that ASS better.

Feeling eyes on you, you turned and almost screamed as Yuffie was sat there biting her lip trying not to scream at you about your crush. You wished you hadn’t revealed that to her on a night out. However, you’d gotten very drunk with Zhijie and Yuffie was still sober having been banned from alcohol being only 16. Though she kept shouting about not being a child.

You’d sat there and poured your heart out about how you were falling for Sonon bad. Yuffie listened intently eating her stupid teeth shattering beans. It had been a big mistake.

“Hey Y/N just tell him!” she yammered at you.

“No, I can’t! I’d make a mistake, or he’d think I’m crazy!” you whimpered.

“You’re not crazy Y/N, he’s a catch alright,” Zhijie said with a smile.

You just kind of sighed and nodded. And now the group was practically acting like wingmen for you. Had you known how Sonon felt, well maybe you’d have reached out to him. The others however knew this. They had been planning for a while.

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Sonon left the room and gave a soft small sigh. He’d caught your eyes and his heart had skipped a beat, but he cursed himself for not asking you out. He clutched his fist and pressed it in a weak punch against the wall, gritting his teeth. Stupid, such a coward. Why was he always a coward in every point in his life.

He had a feeling the others knew how he felt about you, but he didn’t know if you knew. That scared him. Maybe you did know, and you just didn’t feel the same so you never said anything? Maybe you found him creepy?

He sighed and shook his head walking away, well today he wouldn’t find out. Maybe tomorrow? If he felt brave enough.

Later that day he sat at a bar looking down at a beer feeling a little sorry for himself.

“You like her don’t you.”

“Yuffie, leave me alone,” Sonon muttered.

“I’m your boss, I can’t leave you alone. I certainly can’t have someone moping around feeling sorry for himself. Your just going to have to tell her. Or I will,” Yuffie made a mock shrug and shook her head.

Sonon rolled his eyes, he’d be cross if Yuffie wasn’t adorably silly sometimes. He slurped his beer and sighed heavily, teeth grit again. No Yuffie was right! He would say something to you. He took a deep breath and sent to stand up when the door opened, and you walked in.

He wilted at the sight of you and went back to brooding over his beer. Yuffie rolled her eyes and stood up. Sonon however grabbed her hand and looked directly into her eyes, he shook his head a little. It was now or never.

You frowned as he stood and walked towards you, so tall and rouged. Your cheeks burnt with a blush which was creeping down your neck.

“Sonon?” You questioned.

“Hi Y/N… I wondered if… if you’d like to go out sometime. Just the two of us?” he asked, his eyes wondering away from your face a little as he scratched the back of his head.

Your heart was beating so fast, you were sure everyone in the pub could probably hear it.

“YES! I mean, yes, yes, I’d love to,” you replied a smile spreading across your face.

Sonon smiled back at you before bending down and kissing your cheek. You grabbed his face and planted a kiss so hard on his lips his eyes widened before he pulled you in close.

“GUYS… IT’S A GO!” Yuffie hissed down her phone, legs shaking with happiness.

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@renohasbigtits

@kittyplier95

@electric-turks

[getvalentined]

I'm gonna chime in first to say that Yuffie definitely looks Asian, so I'm not sure where that note came from, but the thing a lot of people forget is that basically everyone in a JRPG is at least moderately Asian-coded unless explicitly indicated otherwise. (Example: The Shinras are aggressively white-coded, but in spite of being blond and blue-eyed Cloud is not! He has an East Asian nose, jawline, mouth shape, etc. Rufus and Lazard and the President have explicitly white-coded facial features.)

Tseng is really Chinese-coded, so it makes sense to assume that he's ethnically Wutaian considering it's the most overtly Chinese-coded region in the game—however, Wutai is also Japanese-coded (with names like Kisaragi and Kusakabe right alongside Zhijie) and is the home of characters with Russian names, so it's clearly a fairly classic East Asian conglomerate fantasy nation with a couple referential twists for fun. China doesn't exist in FF7, so regardless of his coding, until we have more details you can basically headcanon Tseng as coming from anywhere!

Honestly, the only racism issue I've personally run into (and this is in pockets of the fandom I no longer dip into for this exact reason) is people claiming that it's racist to assume Tseng is Wutaian because that lumps all Asian-coded characters together and implies that Wutai is the only place that an Asian-coded character could come from. Considering the majority of the cast is Asian-coded to some degree, along with a huge portion of the world itself (I'm still sure that Midgar's slums were inspired by Kowloon Walled City), this obviously isn't the case.

If I'm being real though my call is that Tseng is a vampire or some kind of otherwise ageless demon. It makes as much sense as anything else.

Tseng is an alien? I thought he was Chinese?

There’s a pretty wide consensus in the fandom that Tseng is from Wutai (Wutaian), but that’s not actually confirmed in the FFVII canon. He could just as easily be from Midgar or any other part of Gaea. He’s not Chinese because China doesn’t exist in the FFVII world. Wutai has a distinctly East Asian flavor visually, along with the area music and spiritual aspects of Wutai culture being reminiscent of East Asian religions/philosophies. Not everyone from Wutai looks Asian though (see: Yuffie), so again, it’s really anyone’s guess where Tseng is from originally.

Personally, I kinda like the idea of him being born and raised in Midgar! :3

[fearowkenya]

Copper Alloy

Nayo stares at Zhijie in disbelief. “Unbelievable. You’re seriously telling me you ditched work to engage in—in homoerotic parkour, and not only did you succeed, you got a raise for it?” “Kinda, yeah.” He’s smiling shyly now, kicking idly at the ground like a bashful kid on the playground with his very first crush.  The situation has no right to be as cute as it is, but Nayo can’t bring herself to feel anything but endeared. Running an Avalanche cell was never easy, but it’s been an absolute nightmare as of late, especially in the wake of what the splinter cell did the other night—HQ was not happy about it, and has had Zhijie running himself into the ground doing damage control and recon ever since. 

Friend group break-ups are bad. Eco-terrorist cell break-ups are worse.

Both at once? Absolutely miserable, especially when the venn diagram of those two things is a perfect circle.

Nayo's doing the best she can, but it's looking bleak for Avalanche's Sector 7 cell, especially in the wake of the Reactor 1 bombing. Juggling orders from HQ while keeping tabs on the splinter cell is no easy feat, but it's the little things that keep her going through it all.

And Zhijie's retelling of his latest Wall Market escapade certainly is something.

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(arrives unannounced to the @ffviirarepairweek and drops this like roadkill at your doorstep) enjoy! (:

link in source (because tumblr is a big big baby about linking out to other sites) and extended authors notes under the read more!

So this fic started out, like I've said, as a joke my friend made about how funny it would be if zhijie and sonon had a wild night in wall market before realizing who the other actually was, only to find out the following day that Uh Oh! The Guy You Made Out With After The Gayest Game Of Tag That Anyone Has Ever Played, Who You'd Never Thought You'd See Ever Again, Is Actually Your New Coworker!

but unfortunately everything i touch turns to lesbian angst so here we are.

im actually pretty happy with where i ended up taking this though! like i have to imagine that the two avalanche cells in sector 7 probably did know each other or at least overlapped a little, but what if i took it a little further. what if they were one cell originally that split in a messy, horrible break-up made even WORSE by jessie and nayo having to live together.

there was like not a ton for me to work off so i spent a lot of time just gleaning what i could from cutscenes and ambient NPC dialogue in intermission. most interesting things i noticed/played with were

wedge introduces himself to polk during the flashback in rebirth, which lines up with polk being the newest to the team. i think he narrowly missed the agonizing friend-group/eco-terrorist cell break-up and feels pretty weird whenever the splinter cell is brought up

jessie was definitely the person in charge of avalanche's fake IDs , and the main sector 7 cell lost access to her skills when the splinter cell formed. she's never namedropped specifically but it's pretty heavily implied in intermission.

i cannot believe zhijie/sonon isnt like. wildly popular. did you guys SEE the weirdly intricate secret handshake?? what was THAT about huh?????????? ok well if no one is going to work with that, I WILL.

we dont know where polk, nayo, billy bob, and zhijie actually live but i imagine its not in the clinic basement. i thought it would be interesting and absolutely MISERABLE for poor nayo being one of jessies roommates. i think they mostly manage to keep it civil , especially when their other not-avalanche-affiliated roommates are around, but i imagine the vibes can be really weird sometimes

ive talked about it before but intermission was SO much fun for me because i LOVE seeing simultaneous events happening in different places with different characters, especially when theres DISGUSTING amounts of tonal whiplash. that is my goal with this fic. somewhere out there, cloud is going skydiving at the exact same time that nayo is listening to zhijie talk about homoerotic parkour.

i mentioned on ao3 that this fic is technically unfinished but can stand alone as-is if i never get around to it. idk if there'll be much interest for it but IM certainly having a nice time. here's a couple lines from later chapters. as a treat.

this is from what is currently chapter 2:

and this is from what is currently chapter 3:

oh now that we're here I guess i can talk about my formatting choices a bit. i know they're a little unconventional, at least in my own experience, and this is the first time im posting something for ff7, i can try to explain a bit for anybody who might be interested!

fonts and colours! i really like playing with fonts and colours to imply spacial and temporal distance. for example, i love using serif fonts + grey text for memories that are being recalled. even without doing flashbacks or anything, i find that text size/position does a LOT of the legwork for implying tone or importance, like things that are not necessarily fully relevant but still of note. (could be the adhd brain talking. every single thought in my head has footnotes hahah)

indentation! you may have noticed that i indent weirdly. i mostly do this with dialogue and place these things entirely based on vibes. idk i just think it helps with pacing somehow in a way that is hard to explain. normally an indent will imply IMMEDIATE follow-up or response to whatever came just before it. i just think it's neat!

tables! i love using tables!!!!!!!!!!!! i mostly use it for the juxtaposition of two things, whether they're concurrent events, or, in the case of the chapter i posted today, past events being brought to mind at very specific moments by very specific actions. it's a lot fun, though it's difficult to gauge how well these things work . at any rate, i hope it's at least interesting if not enjoyable. i try not to make my formatting look like a geronimo stilton book but i also can't deny that the weird mouse (rat??? idk i never actually read any of them LMAO) was doing something cool with formatting.

okay thats about all i have to say for now! i really do appreciate comments so if you're reading this id love to know your thoughts (:

[fictionkinfessions]

for minor/background characters we think about a lot - zhijie from the intergrade dlc

legit i think i might be the only person that cares about him and it blows 😭 i've mentioned before that we were fwbs and also i was his squad's main inside informant on internal shinra business, but he was also genuinely one of the only people i felt close to, especially after zack disappeared. like, as far as people i went so far as to actually consider friends... it was pretty much just zack, cissnei, and zhijie. and of those three zhijie is the only one that didn't just up and vanish one day.

i... hope he knew how much he meant to me. i really don't know what i would've done without him. i remember him saying he'd like to take me back to wutai with him, once i cut ties with shinra and deserted. i remember thinking it'd be really nice to have a life with him there... we did really bad at the "no romantic feelings" part of the friends with benefits arrangement. i really love him. -kunsel, ff7

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[fictionkinfessions]

(FINAL FANTASY VII REBIRTH SPOILERS - nothing too plot-heavy, but just a forewarning; i am sending this just after finishing a sidequest in chapter 12)

i have so many feelings right now, good lord. i... was not expecting to see zhijie and nayo and billy bob and polk in the game, and i am *so relieved* they're all okay. like, i knew they were all okay in my specific canon (mostly; polk was hit with debris from the plate falling and was left with a limp, but they were all *alive*), but it occurred to me before i picked the game up that in the actual game square enix might've killed them off, so. it was a bit of a weight off to see them alive and well.

and god i hope they *stay* safe. it seems like nayo and billy bob and polk are staying put at where they're at in rebirth, so i think they should all be fine. but i know zhijie's heading home to wutai, and i'm so worried he's gonna join the fight and he's gonna get killed and i don't know that i can handle that, even though i know *my* version of him was fine. i... really.... do not want to watch someone i love die again. i played crisis core (multiple times), i already had to watch zack die, please do not kill off another man i was in love with.

anyway. in my canon, after we got together, he once mentioned wanting to bring me back to wutai with him, and i wound up taking him up on that. we got hitched there about 2 years after meteorfall. so if you'll excuse me, i'm gonna cling to those memories to try to keep myself from stressing about a theoretical for a game that probably won't even come out for at least another 3 years. -kunsel, ff7

x

[fictionkinfessions]

love seeing zhijie in the intergrade dlc. im always just like Haha i leaked sensitive company information to that guy -kunsel (ff7)

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