sixthiterationlogs | [you know you feel too much like home, dear, and i've got to teach myself goodbye]

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[you know you feel too much like home, dear, and i've got to teach myself goodbye]

WHO: Major Lilywhite
WHERE: Near the fountain
WHEN: Mid-March
OPEN TO: OTA
WARNINGS: N/A

It happens without any sort of warning, suddenly and all at once. Major sees the fountain, makes the right to head towards the Inn, blinks, and --

She's there. In her apartment, the one she shares with Peyton. He can only see her profile, her eyes intently focused on finding something in the fridge - leftover brains, probably, he thinks to himself - and he feels like his heart may just burst out of his chest. He doesn't say anything, not wanting to ruin the chance to get to watch her like this, after going so many months without even a glimpse of her face.

But .. wait. Something's not right here. What happened to the village? Had it all been a weird hallucination? A waking dream? An overactive and out of control imagination? It had all felt so real, and even Ravi had been there.

As he takes another step forward, this time intent on breaking the silence, he blinks and the world around him has changed again, this one familiar in a much more disheartening way.

The fountain at his back, the wooden inn door in front of him. He sucks in a breath to try and steady himself, feeling as though the ground beneath his feet has been pulled out from under him like some cheap rug. He can't make sense of any of it, and it reminds him of how he felt when he first started to suspect the existence of zombies. He'd checked himself into a mental hospital back then, a residential facility. There's nothing like that here, he knows.

What's the next best thing? Shout about it.

"LIV?" he screams, whirling on his heel and glancing at everything around him. "LIV? WHERE ARE YOU?"

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He's in the middle of wandering through town with Minor, out for a daily walk. What he absolutely doesn't expect in the middle of everything, though, is for Major to start having what appears to be a massive nervous breakdown in plain sight. It's heartbreaking because honestly, Ravi knows the feeling.

Some days, he misses Liv more than is normal, but he's learned to bury that grief down deep and ignore it. Glancing towards the dog, he figures that maybe they should be checking on Major. "Let's just make sure your other Dad's okay and not going off the deep end, yeah?" As if Minor will actually say anything in return.

Wandering closer to Major, a touch wary, he keeps a bit of distance between them in case he's having some kind of episode. "Major?" he starts tentatively. "How are you doing, there, buddy?"

Major whirls around and around, finally stopping when it seems to hit him that he's back in the village, wholly and completely, and sees Ravi and Minor, both of whom appear to be ... concerned. With good reason. He's out of breath, his face is flushed, there's sweat beading on his forehead and at his temples. He can't get his fingers to stop trembling, no matter how many times he clenches and unclenches his hands. He wonders if this is what it feels like to have a panic attack.

"Liv. I saw her. She was here - well, no, she wasn't here, she was back at home, in her apartment but - I saw her, Ravi. I saw her. It was her. It was Liv."

Given that Major has previously lost his memory and started to think that this place is home before, Ravi's starting to get the weary suspicion that maybe this is going to be a recurring issue. If so, he's not sure he has the energy to do it over and over again, but honestly, he's not sure he has any other choice.

"Are you sure she's not actually here?" he asks, letting Minor go in order to head to the fountain to look for signs of disturbance, but there's nothing. It looks calm, not like anyone's been thrashing around trying to get out. "Major, are you sure you're feeling all right?"

"I don't know if she's here, I don't know. I don't know what's going on." There's a rising panic in his voice, partially due to the fact that he really doesn't know up from down right now, but also because he knows there's absolutely no way to prove to Ravi that he saw what he's claiming to have seen. It'll just appear to be another Major Delusion.

"I swear, man, I swear. I was walking to the Inn, and I blinked, and I was just .. standing in her apartment, watching her from the side as she rummaged in the fridge for something. It was only - only a couple of seconds, but I started moving towards her, and it all faded out and then .. I was .. here. Again. Liv-less." He snaps his fingers, his eyes going wide, as he makes a connection. "You said this place always does weird crap like that, right? Like, it messes around with people just because or to get reactions? I bet this is one of those ... weird ... things."

She's not, that's what Ravi can infer given the lack of evidence of anyone coming from the fountain, so that means that Major's panic is a very real thing that they need to deal with. He's sure that the look on his face can't be helping, but he also can't really help it, because he's scared again, that he's somehow going to lose Major again.

"Was there sound?" Maybe it's short-sighted to dismiss this out of hand as something that didn't happen, so he might as well get as many details as he can. "And I should at least do some tests on you, general ones," he admits, gesturing for the nearest place for Major to sit.

"Sound. Sound. Sound, was there sound?" Major asks himself, glancing and studying the ground as though it might provide some answers. He absentmindedly fiddles with the scruff on his face as she tries to remember. "Honestly, man, I don't really remember. I was ... so caught up in seeing her in front of me that it was like all the blood drained from my body." He points at Ravi as he looks to him, eyes wide again. "WAIT! There was sound, yeah! I could hear her moving things around in the fridge, and I could hear the like ... hum of it. There was definitely sound."

Major's so wrapped up in the retelling of this brief glimpse of home that he doesn't even protest Ravi's suggestions of doing tests, which is always his default means of trying to understand things. He does make a bit of a face at his friend once he takes a seat, one to suggest that it's a little bit strange to be getting examined in the middle of the town - but then again, so is seeing your ex-fiancee back in Seattle while you're who knows where, walking towards an Inn, still gleeful over the fact that you've somewhat recently gotten electricity in your house.

Po-tay-to, po-tah-to.

If there was sound, then it was both a visual and an auditory hallucination, which does rule out a few elements, though total psychotic break is still in the mix, unfortunately. Gesturing to the chair when they get inside the inn, he doesn't wait very long for Major to sit, because honestly, the sooner he can rule out a few urgent items, the better.

"Follow my finger with your eyes," he advises, letting it drift back and forth, paranoid that there's a brain bleed or something else going on, which he has absolutely no skills or equipment to be able to stop, so that's very high on the list of Ravi's 'Things I Pray It's Not'.

"So, you're not gonna say anything about -- okay, all right, let's just do your tests," Major replies with resigned agreement. He clears his throat, straightens his back and squares his shoulders, hands falling loosely onto his lap, as he allows Ravi to begin his series of tests. The finger following makes Major look beyond Ravi's hand to his face, where he gives a bit of an unenthusiastic look, before doing as instructed.

No issues there, Doc. Major's eyes - and his brain - are doing just fine.

Aside from the whole ... you know, panic.

Ravi doesn't want to do anything but try and make sure that Major is feeling fine, then he can ask questions about Liv after. Never mind that he's desperate for news about home and Peyton and even his work, but Major's health takes precedent. Making sure that Minor has trotted along with them, he works to check on his brain.

"Full name," he insists. "And tell me what happened before you got here, and then my full name." Just in case this is another case of Major-Forgets-About-Ravi.

Major half-thinks to pull a bit of a practical joke on Ravi, pretending he can't remember left from right, but he knows that'd be less funny and more heart-breaking. Even though Ravi's never really explicitly said so, Major's not a complete idiot; he knows that memory wipes are something his friend has worried about since the day he got here, still waiting for the lingering effects of teenage girl brain to wear off.

So, with a little bit of a sigh, he answers.

"Major Nathaniel Lilywhite. And, uh - you mean .. like, before I got to the village however many months ago?" That's not forgetfulness, that's simply not having an iPhone to keep track of the passage of time. "I had just joined up with Fillmore-Graves, on their mercenary team. I was also back to being a zombie after .. uh, you found me out as the Chaos Kidnapper back home in Seattle. And you are Ravi-I-don't-know-if-you-have-a-middle-name-Chakrabarti, shamed former CDC scientist who got dismissed for talking the zombie apocalypse as more than hypothetical. And that," he points to Ravi's beard, "is Princess Sparkles."

Ravi can feel the way his jaw tightens when Major talks about Fillmore-Graves, but also the whole Chaos Killer and re-zombification business, something that he's still trying not to process or deal with at most points in time, so it's not that he really enjoys the reminder, though he'll cope, seeing as he has to.

"It is not Princess Sparkles, but we can allow you to have some delusions before I go checking you into the non-existent mental hospital I haven't built yet," he says, settling in the chair opposite Major with a weary sigh. "You seem fine physically, but obviously I can't do the sorts of scans I'd like. So, let's talk about Liv."

"How long was this sighting?"

"It is absolutely, 100% Princess Sparkles, and I will never let you talk me out of calling her anything else." Major offers a shit-eating kind of grin, but it's all out of love and affection, of course. Minor hops up on his back legs and puts his front paws on Major's leg, having not see his other dad for much of the morning. Major leans over to pick the dog up, plopping him onto his lap happily. He scratches under the puppy's chin and behind his ears as he listens to Ravi.

"Like I said, it was a couple of seconds. I mean, it was that weird .. you know when time feels like it slows down? Like, stuff is in slow-motion almost? That's kind of what it felt like, but .. in reality, I know it was only a couple of seconds. Like, three? Four? Something like that? I wasn't exactly timing the experience with a watch."

"It's a him," Ravi weakly protests, aware that he's likely never actually going to win this argument, so all the better that he simply gives in, like a weary passenger giving up and drowning on a river (so cheery, he is, right now). Still, he has bigger concerns and he's grateful that Minor is aligned with them, hopping up to give Major some tender loving care.

"You're sure that you're not just missing Liv?" He feels like he has to put that out there. "I mean, I know that it's hard being away from home, maybe you wanted to see her so badly that you sort of created a little oasis for yourself?"

Wanda didn't know what was going on but she heard shouting. She heard Major shouting and her feet moved towards the source without a second thought. She didn't know a lot about him but she'd told him more than most in this god forsaken village and she wasn't about to abandon one of the few people she considered a friend.

"Major?" Her brow furrowed as she closed the distance between them. "Major. There is no one named Liv here." She didn't know how Liv was except that it was someone important to him; that's all that Wanda needed to know.

"Please, listen to me." Her palms gently held Major's cheeks. "You're in a village in the middle of no where. I promise, if there was someone named Liv here I'd find her for you."

"Liv - Liv's not here?" Major asks, brows stitched together, eyes on the verge of tears. He swears he can feel something crack in his chest at the realization that he's alone again. It's funny, because part of him would never want to subject her to being stuck here with he and Ravi, but the other part of him wants her here more than anything. What he wouldn't give to hear her voice.

He takes a deep inhale at the touch of her hands on his face. He feels some stray muscle in his cheek twitch with tension and the adrenaline in his veins.

He nods, trying to catch his breath again, trying to keep it together.

"I ... I saw her," he whispers, biting his lip to keep himself from falling apart. "I saw her. She was ... no, I was .. I was there. She was .. right in front of me."

Wanda didn't want to see him cry but she wasn't going to lie to him either. Sometimes the truth was hard. "No. She isn't." She kept her voice calm though there was worry reflected in the light green hue of her eyes. Wanda had experienced people seeing visions in the past, she didn't want that to be the case again.

She gently brushes her thumb against his cheek, hoping that the gesture was comforting.

"I know. You might have seen her but that doesn't mean she is here." Wanda paused but only for a moment before she continued. "I thought I saw my brother here once too. This place plays tricks on the mind... summing those we care about."

It hurt to talk about her brother but Wanda wanted him to know that he wasn't alone.

The gesture is comforting, even if Major's entire body feels like it's breaking in two. The touch is grounding for him, too, reminding him of where he is, who he's with, that he's still breathing. It's just enough to keep him from free-falling over the proverbial edge of sanity and sorrow.

"It was - It felt so real, Wanda. I could .. hear everything. I could hear the hum of the fridge, I could hear her moving things around, I could smell her smell and that shampoo she uses. It was like I was there. It was .. more vivid, more real than anything I've experienced since I've gotten here." He reaches up to take a hold of her hand and gives it a gentle squeeze. He exhales a breath. "You .. have a brother?"

Wanda felt tears prickle at the corner of her eyes as she met Major's gaze. He was breaking her heart though he had no idea how potent his words were. "I know. I know." She had seen so many version of her brother here and they had only cemented his memory in her mind.

"My brother died two years ago. Saving Clint and a young boy." She had asked Clint to tell her the story over and over again. "He was my twin. We were all each other hand for so long." Her voice shook. "I've seen him here. In dreams or alternate versions of him but he's gone. I know he's gone." Knowing didn't make it hurt any less.

Suddenly, Major feels like a chump for complaining about his ex-fiancee when Wanda's lost her friggin' twin. Although grief can't be compared and assigned points for "which situation sucks more," it does put his pain and his sadness into harsh perspective. At least for Major, Liv was back in Seattle, safe and sound. Or, he hoped she was. Who knows, with the way things were going the last he'd seen her? But for Wanda, there was no uncertainty about her brother's fate for her. And he figures that while not knowing can suck, knowing the negative is worse.

He squeezes her hand again, shaking his head sadly.

"I'm sorry, Wanda. I - I've got no right to complain." The corner of his lip curls into a slight, kind smile. "Do you wanna tell me about him? I'd love to hear about you guys growing up together."

Wanda gently released her hold on Major's jaw and lowered her hands to her sides. She hadn't meant to mention her brother or to make him feel worse than he already did. "There is no helping how you feel." She offered him a small smile though it was a little weaker than what she had intended.

She didn't like comparing pains but Wanda wanted him to realize that he would see Liv again. It might take time but there was a chance; even if it wasn't right now.

"My brother? He was a brat. Technically older and he never let me forget it." Wanda's expression softened and her smile became more earnest. "For most of our lives it was just the two of us. Now I try and live enough for both of us. It's what he would have wanted." Her brother was always very stubborn.

Major nods in agreement, but it's a sad sort of nod. She has a point, though. He used to say something similar to the kids he'd mentor at Helton Shelter - emotions aren't wrong or right, they just are; it's what you do with them that can be good or bad, right or wrong. Still, Major's never been particularly great at taking his own advice, and right now, these emotions feel bad.

"What was his name?" He pauses for a second before adding, "I'm an only child, so I've always wondered about siblings. I knew some people who were super, super close with theirs, and I knew others who had nightmares for siblings. Some of the most horrific stories. But I still always wanted one, even if I ran the risk of Terror Brother or Sister."

"Pietro."

Wanda's expression softened. "Siblings are always those people who we love and then at times hate. He could be a real pain in the ass but after we lost our parents." Her fingers twisted together as she looked up at Major. "All we had was each other. We were very close."

She missed him. Ever single day.

"Sure, I imagine .. that sort of thing would bring you really close." A sort of bonding in grief, he imagined. Kind of like how he, Ravi, Peyton, and Liv were all bonded in the crap they'd seen and experienced back in Seattle, even if the Ravi currently in the village was from months before when Major was from, which was .. weird in itself.

"I'm sorry that you lost him. Maybe he'll .. show up here someday."

"We all have pain." She smiled up at him. "I miss him. One day he might arrive but it's okay if he doesn't." Wanda will always miss him and she hoped that wherever he was in death, he was at peace. She'd live enough for both of them.

"Maybe your Liv will show up here too."

".. Yeah, maybe." Major pauses for a second before giving his head a slight shaking, letting out a quiet laugh. "You know, I always go back and forth of whether or not I want her to show up here. I mean, I do, but for selfish reasons. I want her here because i I want her here. But that isn't fair for her. I don't know how well she'd adjust to living here."

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[you know you feel too much like home, dear, and i've got to teach myself goodbye]

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awww ravi you'll never lose major /sniff

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