[who let the dogs out?]

[majorlyugh]

WHO: Major Lilywhite
WHERE: Major/Ravi's cabin, around the village
WHEN: Mid-October
OPEN TO: All, specific starter for Ravi
WARNINGS: PUPPIES.

---

Major had been lured outside by the sound of whimpering. Every ounce of softness and kindness he'd ever held in his body had been tingling like a small fire, spreading over the expanse of his body from head to toe at the sound. When he had opened the door, two boxes were sitting side-by-side on the porch - one about half the size of the other and, to his surprise, moving around like one of those fake ferret toys for cats, the kind that's glued to a mechanical ball that moves around.

Only a little less erratic.

He took the stationary box in first, setting it off to the side of the living room, before returning to get the one that had now seemed to calm down a little bit. As he lifted it, there was a quiet yelp from the inside, and Major knew in an instant what the mystery box's contents were, without having to remove the lid.

He sets the box down in the middle of the living room, carefully lifting up the cover to reveal the small, Basset Hound puppy gazing up at him inside. At the sight of his face, it lets out another yelp, this one happier but still pleading, and tries to stand on its hind legs to see outside the open top of the box. It doesn't quite have the hang of what it means to be coordinated yet, and so it tumbles backwards, causing a very loud "AWW!!" to come rushing out of Major's mouth.

He reaches inside, carefully scooping the puppy up in his arms. Once near enough, it begins to lick his face and squirm around in his grip. As Major's trying to check the box for any other dog-related items, the puppy manages to wiggle its way out of his arms and, before he can manage to do anything to stop it, runs straight out of the door that Major's foolishly left open by mistake.

He opens his mouth to shout a name, but realizes he doesn't have one at the ready, so he shouts the only thing he can think of:

"HEY! ... HEY YOU! COME BACK!" as he scrambles to his feet and out the door, chasing after the bounding, long-eared puppy.

Comments

[3ofswords]

"They do that," Kira agrees, glad that if he must make contact with the villagers in this state, at least it isn't very fraught. He can do meet-cutes with friends of friends over mutually saddled pet-parentage. Earthquakes and possible threat of zombie viruses, not so much.

It's a cute dog, as far as Kira can tell: despite having one for most of the last year, he's not much for them. Aurora is the beautiful and talented exception, who spends most of her time herding Bodhi into some semblance of a routine and chasing bees.

Talented: not intelligent.

He keeps his crouch to hold her around her shoulders, enduring her reoriented affections as they lick and nip at his jaw. "It's a little odd, how safe the place seems for them. But I guess they're engineered by whoever's in charge, why waste them in a fight with a badger." It's a little odd that they get dogs and cats, that they get gifts at all--that they're here. But after nearly a year, he's fixated on--the lack of pet injury.

[majorlyugh]

"I haven't had a puppy in a while," Major reflects, mostly to the open air. It isn't that he doesn't want to engage Kira in conversation but, based on the little he knows about the guy from their limited interactions, he doesn't feel the need to demand a response. So he sort of just lets the words tumble out without much thought, like an open invitation should Kira feel the need to RSVP. He gives the larger dog a considering glance. "Is it yours? Did it arrive as a puppy the way this guy did?" he asks, moving the arm still cradling the puppy a little as if the clarification's needed.

"Huh." He hadn't thought of that, the possibility - or even guarantee, at this point - that the creatures are engineered by the Powers Unseen, whatever or whomever those might be. He'd just assumed everything was .. transplanted from Earth, or something like Earth, at least. He lets his gaze fall onto the unnamed puppy with a different kind of intent, almost a scrutinizing one, a suspicious one. The kind one would use on a stranger while trying to determine friend or foe. It's hard to be so tough on something so small and cute, and it doesn't take long for Major's expression to soften - especially as the puppy stretches up to place a few licks on his chin. "Guess they can't wander too far, with the borders and everything."

[3ofswords]

"She wasn't always," he answers honestly. It's strange, to think in the last half of a year of disasters and losses, one of those was the flop-eared puppy replaced with a dog that seems capable of grace until she actually sees or smells another sentient life form. Now she's all worked up, the puppy back to the surface, rolling in the damp grass in the hopes that someone will rub her stupid belly.

Kira obliges. "A friend who disappeared," he explains. "But she was very small when she arrived, all this happened in a matter of months. All this being the length of dog huffing under his hands, snapping her teeth at a welt of grass when it falls in her face. "She's the first dog I've ever had, period. I wouldn't know how to keep her in line if it were a bigger space." Half the time, he told her to find Ravi, or Bodhi, and hoped for the best.

[majorlyugh]

"Sorry. About your friend," Major inserts softly as he watches Kira rub the dog's belly while scritching the puppy behind the ears and under the chin absentmindedly. He glances down at the pup with a different kind of considering glance, one that's painted with less suspicion but still drenched in curiosity and a little bit of a confusion.

"Wonder if you're gonna sprout up - or, uh, out - like that the way this dog did," he wonders aloud, the puppy almost acting like it understands with a sideways tilt of its head and a whine with an upward inflection. "I don't think Basset Hounds get super big, though. Your legs are gonna be short and stubby no matter what, bud." He glances over at Kira again, this time with a different kind of question.

"Uh, I don't know if anyone else has female dogs in the village, but - is there someone here who can .. fix them? So that there aren't litters of puppies running around? Though that kinda does sound amazing, if I'm being honest."

[3ofswords]

"It's not a big deal," Kira dismisses, even as it's clearly a big enough deal that he's kept a dog for most of a year after, with no signs of giving her up. She's proven her uses, and as his bed repeatedly empties--it's nice to have something to lay at his back as the nights get longer and colder.

Tim has been harder and easier. He'd gotten closer this time, than he had before. A kind of closeness he'd maybe only had with Jyn, right before the end, and cultivated over a longer time. But he could set it aside in a different way than he set aside Casey, or Jyn, or--Credence.

Tim, if he'd gone home, had simply gone home. Not to a dead end, not to a rotting world of ash or a version of New York that hated and haunted him. Casey isn't a big deal because Kira simply can't let it be, and continue to get up every day. And he didn't let it be for so long, it's second nature, even looking down at Aurora's lopsided, panting face. "None of the animals have ever gotten pregnant," Kira says, notes from even before his paying attention confirming it. "None of the people either. Far as we can tell, they're already fixed."

[majorlyugh]

Major gets the insinuation that it's a topic Kira'd rather not talk about, so he doesn't push it. There's no need to, not if it's something that might dredge up painful memories. He doesn't know exactly how long Kira's been here, but based on how he approaches and feels about things, it isn't hard to guess that he's been here long enough to have lost people. Probably a lot of people, if what Major's heard from the others is any kind of indication. The way Ravi's explained it, it sounds like it comes in waves - with a number of people disappearing in a short period of time, followed by a burst of arrivals. He wonders if there's some sort of quota that the village needs to maintain, which is why it expels before it accepts.

He honestly hasn't allowed himself to dwell too much on the topic. It's significantly easier to go down the path of Denial and pretend like everything's as hunky dory as it can be. Otherwise, he'll spiral - and though it's only happened on a handful of occasions before, it isn't really something Major particularly enjoys. Blissful ignorance is a little more tolerable, even if it's only temporary.

"Huh." He looks down at the puppy. "I should've figured. It's like the village - or whoever's running it - has thought of everything ahead of time. Which is both really unnerving and surprising at the same time."

[3ofswords]

"Are the two mutually exclusive," Kira asks, gaze aimed with Major's down at the dogs. "They only let us do so much for ourselves. It might be a matter of space, too. If we wound up with too many grazing animals, we only have so much space left for them to feed."

In a way, Kira was thankful: it was an exception being made for Aurora, he couldn't deal with a litter of puppies and no reliable way to fix her.

His gaze lifts to Major, and fixes on him. "You know, plenty of people come from something so bad, they fall pretty easily into thinking this is an improvement." He'd done it himself for moments at a time, given a bath and food that wasn't from an old can; taken to a place where fires could be lit and no one was shooting at them. "Nothing's free, though. They don't do anything good for us without there being some bad. Even if he's just another mouth to feed, you should remember that, and be careful."

[majorlyugh]

"That's .. a good point." And it's true; with everything else that goes on in the village at any given point, Major's found himself consistently feeling unnerved and surprised, at the same time. Sometimes in positive ways, like with the puppy, and other times in negative ways, or a combination of the two. Like Ravi being turned into a ferret, which was both alarming as hell but also kind of funny.

"I guess they could just send some mysterious illness to take care of overpopulation," Major blurts without really thinking of how utterly disastrous and terrifying the concept is. He regrets it the second the words leave his mouth, and he winces before sighing at himself.

"Yeah. I mean, I've heard some of the stories from the other villagers. Things weren't great by any means where I come from back in Portland, but they weren't as .. catastrophic as what some folks have been through. I get why this place could be an improvement." He gives the area a glance around, subconsciously looking for any indication that one of Them might be listening. "I will," he says, bringing his attention back to Kira. ".. Thanks. For the advice."

[3ofswords]

He shrugs: advice has always been part of the job. It had been a bit hard to live with in his teens, his mother's work never really done, her warnings and suggestions constant and unwanted. And here's gone and grown into her, thanks to the constant existential pressure of a canyon prison that's probably hung on the frame of a movie plot from the nineties.

"I've been here awhile," he explains, though he's sure Major had some idea of that. As he might have some idea, if only from Ravi, that Kira knows more than a bit about diseases unleashed to control populations.

"Yeah, we're lucky they stick to the disasters and disappearances," he says, purposefully mild. With winter coming, the last thing he really wants to think about is bodies in the drifts of snow and mass graves behind the trees.

god i meant seattle, not portland idk

[majorlyugh]

"Yeah, that .. was kinda easy to tell. If it wasn't your extensive knowledge about the workings of the place, it's the general .. jaded, sarcastic, fuck-all-o-y'all attitude that gives it away," Major replies with a faint tug at the corners of his lips. Major appreciates Kira's bluntness, his honesty. He likes when people are straight forward, even if it comes across as brutal to some. He'd rather be in-the-know than be wasting all of his energy speculating.

It's probably a part - one of many, many parts - of why he got so angry at Liv for failing to tell him she'd gone zombie and instead let him think he was batshit crazy for almost a year. That and the whole .. betrayal thing. They both sucked.

"I imagine things get kinda .. rough, once winter settles in? Is food scarce or anything?"

[3ofswords]

"Oh no, I showed up with that," he promises him, any insult in the description subsumed into-well, the inability to give a shit. He's not sure how literal it's meant to be--fuck you wasn't really the vibe he tried to give off when he was rescuing people from the fountain or guiding them back to the inn when they wandered to the outskirts in shock.

But maybe, this many meetings in, he was giving that vibe to Major.

Fucking oops.

"No, it starts falling form the sky to compensate for it being winter in the woods," he says, eyes searching the heavens. "We're lucky to have a harvest this year."

[majorlyugh]

"Damn, you got a running head start on all of us overly optimistic idiots," Major replies, gesturing to himself. "I mean, having Ravi here helps, there's no denying that. And it was vaguely neat to try and like, Bear Grylls the situation for a little while, but I'm starting to get to that fuck-all-o-y'all place, and it feels weird." He's absently scratching at Minor's chin and belly and chest. He pauses for a second before flicking his eyes up at Kira. "I didn't mean any of that as being a bad thing. If anything, I'm kinda envious that you have that approach to stuff. Being optimistic is fun to a point, but it eventually gets deflated and crappy. Like those lawn decorations once you've turned the air off, and they just .. lay there on the grass, empty and pointless."

Huh. That was darker than Major intended.

"... Hang on, you said it starts falling from the sky? Literally? Is getting knocked out by a Christmas Goose something I should be weary of?"