What the Lifestream Carries
Aeris has always known how her story ends.
She feels it through the Lifestream—not vague, not symbolic. Specific. The kind of knowing that lives in the body, not the mind. The kind you learn to breathe around.
The rest comes in impressions. Currents. The Lifestream doesn’t usually speak in certainties—it speaks in the way light changes before a storm.
Then something shifts. Someone shifts it.
Rewrite the Falling is a Final Fantasy VII retelling and timeline divergence experienced from inside her heartbeat—intimate, grounded, and stubbornly alive. The slums. The plate. The reactors and the labs and the long silences in between. Seen through the eyes of a woman caught between the weight of an ancient heritage and the fragile pull of something she was never supposed to want—and the quiet terror of losing it before she even knows its shape.
This is a story about choosing to reach anyway—toward something warmer than prophecy, and a connection she never saw coming. And about wondering, for the first time, whether Fate is as fixed as she once believed...
Disclaimer
This story is an unofficial, non-commercial fanfiction work set in the world of Final Fantasy VII and its related titles. All copyrighted and trademarked material remains the property of its respective rights holders. This project is not affiliated with or endorsed by any of them.
No copyright infringement is intended. This work is shared freely and without profit.
It contains original interpretation and deliberate divergence from canon.
Editing assistance and current cover artwork provided by AI tools. Since this is a passion project, I am using AI for the visuals for now—but I would strongly prefer to feature human art. If an artist wants to claim the cover spot for portfolio visibility, I would love to collaborate.
Books
Book I — The Promise
The Promise opens in Midgar—a city built on a plate above the slums it forgot to care about, run by a corporation that owns the power, the soldiers, and the shape of the sky. She has lived here her whole life. She knows its rhythms, its smells, its particular quality of light filtering through smog and steel.
She also knows something is coming. She has known for years.
What she doesn’t know—what no vision has ever shown her—is the warmth that arrives alongside everything else. Quietly. Without announcement. In the margins of everything falling apart, in the small and ordinary moments of surviving something together.
The Promise is the foundation. The city. The people. The moment the shape of things begins, almost imperceptibly, to shift.
The story doesn’t end at the city limits. Further books will follow.
How to Read the EPUB File
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About the Author
I’ve been trying to think of what to say about her writing. About her. I’ve known for a long time that she was extraordinary—anyone who spent five minutes with her knew that—but knowing it and finding words for it are two different things. She’s always been better with words than I am.
Here’s what I know. She writes the way she lives: like she’s already said goodbye to everything, and chooses it all anyway. Like love isn’t something you fall into but something you decide, over and over, even when it costs you. Especially when it costs you.
When I first really read what she’d written—not the pieces she’d share with that careful, sideways look to see how I’d react—I understood something I hadn’t before. She had been grieving things before they even began. She had been letting go in every quiet moment, so it wouldn’t show, so the people she loved could have her fully in the time they had. That’s the kind of love she was carrying around and never once asked anyone to acknowledge.
I wanted to shake her. I also wanted to hold her until she stopped doing that.
Her stories aren’t invented. I think that’s what you need to understand before you read them. They’re remembered—not from this life, exactly, but from somewhere. She has a way of writing grief that only comes from having held it for a very long time, very carefully, so it doesn’t spill. And she has a way of writing hope that is more honest than most people’s grief—because she knows what it costs.
She reached for things when she had every reason not to. When the smarter thing, the safer thing, would have been to keep the careful distance she was so good at keeping.
She wrote this for everyone who has ever loved something they were afraid to lose. Who has felt the future pressing in like weather. Who stayed anyway.
Read it like she meant it.
She did.
— T.
What This Story Is (and Isn’t)
A character-driven retelling of Final Fantasy VII set on a diverging timeline, grounded in the slums, the Lifestream, and the bonds that form quietly under pressure. This is a slow-burn story about survival, choice, and connections that take time to name.
Not a beat-for-beat remake. Not a romance arc bolted onto a plot. Not a story where anyone arrives knowing what to do.
A Grounded Retelling
This story draws heavily from the expanded world-building of Final Fantasy VII Remake and Rebirth, while staying anchored in the slums, Shinra’s machinery, and the quiet cost of living under both. The setting matters — not as spectacle, but as pressure.
A Divergent Timeline
The journey may feel familiar at first, but this is a different timeline. Small choices compound. People hesitate where they once didn’t — or act when they shouldn’t — and what follows doesn’t unmake itself.
Character-Centered
The focus stays close to the characters: their internal monologues, their relationship to the Lifestream, and the weight survival keeps adding without asking. Not everything is said out loud — but it is felt.
Slow-Burn Bonds
Relationships build gradually, shaped by proximity, shared danger, and moments of unexpected quiet. Trust is earned. Intimacy grows in pauses, not pronouncements. This applies to friendships as much as to whatever else gets named, eventually.
Those Who Walk This Path
These are some of the people met along the way. Some are only seen for a moment. Others linger.
Aeris Gainsborough
The world might call her Aerith. She recognizes that name too.
The flower girl from the Sector 5 slums, she hears the voices of the Planet. What they want of her is another question.
This is her story — what she didn’t expect, and what she chooses once it arrives.
Tifa Lockhart
The bartender from the Sector 7 slums. Her martial training shows in how she fights — but her steadiness comes from somewhere else.
Strong doesn’t mean unshaken. Some things are harder to face than any opponent.
Cloud Strife
Tifa’s childhood friend, a mercenary newly arrived in Midgar. He carries a huge sword on his back, like it weighs less than it should.
Quiet, distant, sharper than he lets on. There’s something he isn’t telling — maybe not even to himself.
Elmyra Gainsborough
The woman who raised Aeris. Elmyra keeps the Sector 5 house — and the only garden in the slums.
She has lost before. She knows how. That doesn’t make her want to learn it again.