Chapter Text
1
Ever since New Hope reverted, Ravi has felt like an overwound spring, frustrated and tense 24 hours a day, this close to snapping at any given moment. He goes over it and over it in his head, trying to understand exactly why the rat reverted. He spends late hours in his bedroom with his old neurology textbooks and newly printed out articles spread out all over his bed, but it’s hard enough to develop a cure for a disease when you’ve got hundreds of other doctors all over the world working on it with you, when you can sort of piggyback on their work and they can do the same with yours.
It’s quite another story when you are literally the only person in the world trying to fix it.
He tries his best to hide how much the whole thing is running him into the ground. Coffee helps hide how little he’s been sleeping—turns out the caffeine tolerance he built up in medical school hasn’t entirely gone away—and he tries to focus most of his energy on finding the tainted Utopium. That at least gives him a definitive goal, something he knows will help.
… Well, it’s something that will buy him time to find a more permanent solution, at least.
It is two and a half weeks after the rat reverts, after two and a half weeks of roughly two hours of sleep a night (if that), after two and a half weeks of virtually zero progress, that Liv notices something’s wrong with him.
They’re in the office, working a case. He types away on his laptop, filling out the paperwork for the latest autopsy. It’s a sad one—they’re all sad, really, but usually he can push that out of his head. Not this time, though.
Maybe it’s the lack of sleep. Maybe it’s the fact that their victim was only in high school.
“And I told Peyton, hey, you could get any guy in Seattle if you really wanted to,” Liv chats away, sitting cross-legged on his couch with her plate in her lap. She takes another chomp out of her sandwich and says through half a mouthful of food, “I don’t care how cute this guy is, he is not worth all this drama. And then she said…”
Name: Abigail Shaw, female, 17 years. Blunt force trauma to the cranium, as evidenced by the cracked temporal bone and…
He barely notices that he’s stopped typing. He stares at the three open tabs in his web browser, the latest articles on frontal lobe disorders and neurodegeneration that he has yet to read. They might help him connect some of the dots. But they also probably won’t.
Stop it. Don’t think like that.
He puts his head in his hands for a moment, trying to push the thoughts away.
“… and, like, I’m just trying to help her, you know?” Liv goes on. “But it’s like she literally doesn’t care, you know? Like, she just wants to…”
Liv trails off.
“Uh… Ravi? You good?”
He gulps and then, with a huff, he runs his hands down his face. “I’m fine,” he says, shooting her a half-hearted smile. He turns in his chair and starts to get up, but in doing so he only manages to knock his elbow into the coffee mug on his desk, sending it toppling off the edge. It shatters on the floor, leaving a tiny puddle of what was left off his coffee among the ceramic shards.
“Shit,” he all but shouts, and he forces himself to take a slow breath, running his hands through his hair and tugging on it a bit, then bringing both hands down to the back of his neck as he closes his eyes.
He isn’t going to lose it here. Not right now.
“Woah,” he hears Liv say, and she gets up from the couch. “Okay, it’s just a broken mug, not a big deal. Good thing you never leave a coffee unfinished, right? There’s barely anything to mop up.”
He opens his eyes to look down at her, his hands still on the back of his neck. He nods, giving her the barest hint of forced smile, but even that doesn’t last long.
Liv has her arms crossed over her chest, and she’s eyeing him down with a concerned frown.
“What?” he asks. “What’s the look for?”
“You know what it’s for, Ravi, come on. You’re definitely not fine,” she says. “You’ve been acting off for like, weeks now. And looking at you right now I suddenly have the urge to hide anything that can be used as a weapon. Can you please just tell me what’s going on?”
He manages to maintain the half-hearted annoyed glare on his face for a few seconds, but then he just sighs and shakes his head, falling back down into his chair. He drops his hands into his lap and avoids eye contact, chewing on his lip. She’s right, of course. And he doesn’t want to lie to her.
“I just… It’s been a difficult couple of weeks, is all,” he finally says. “Searching for the tainted Utopium, not knowing how to make the cure permanent or how to make enough of it to last, the threat of a literal zombie apocalypse if I can’t manage to figure this thing out…”
Liv gives him a sad smile. “You haven’t been sleeping much, huh?”
He almost snorts. “Understatement of the century.”
She tip-toes around the broken bits of his mug, coming up to his side and lightly hugging his shoulders. “Don’t stress yourself out so much, dude,” she says, and despite himself he smirks at the latest brain making her call him dude. It almost makes him feel normal again; this is the norm for them, this is her, how he’s always known her, with little spikes of other people’s personalities and mannerisms woven into hers.
He can tell she only means for the hug to be a passing thing, but just as she begins to pull away he finds himself turning toward her and wrapping his arms around her middle.
As he pulls her closer and hides his face in her shoulder, he feels more than hears her laugh, but she returns the hug without hesitation. “Yeah, okay. I’m fine, he says. Sure you are, Chakrabarti.”
He doesn’t shoot any quips back at her, just tightens his hold on her and takes a slow breath to try and shrink the awful lump in his throat.
Liv doesn’t push him. She just has one hand on the back of his head, the other hand gently running over his back. “Really though,” she adds quietly. “This isn’t all on you, okay? You can’t make every zombie in Seattle your responsibility. That’s way too much for one person to handle.”
He nods into her shoulder, even though he doesn’t entirely agree. This is his responsibility, only because no one but him can take responsibility for it. And even without all the other zombies wandering about Seattle… well, he still has one very important zombie to worry about.
“And as for me,” Liv goes on, as if she’s read his mind, “I’m dealing. I can wait. I’ve got a lot going for me as a zombie, you know? Abbie Shaw and all the other people we bring into the morgue, who knows if any of them would’ve gotten justice without us, right? And like, yeah, maybe Major will turn back before we can get more cure, but you know what? I’m not even worried about that anymore. He’d be dead if I hadn’t infected him, so he can get over it and live on brains for a little while until we do get more cure, you know? So it’s not all bad.”
He nods again, and he takes a deep breath before finally loosening his arms from around her waist.
She takes that cue to pull away as well, but not before she pecks a quick kiss to his cheek.
Ravi blinks. “Er—?”
After a beat she seems to realize what she just did, and her eyes suddenly get wider than he has ever seen them.
“Uh…”
“Did you just—?”
“That,” Liv interrupts, holding up a finger to stop him, “was the overly affectionate hormonal teenager I just ate. That never happened.”
He can’t help the smile growing on his face. Making fun of her is something that will pull him out of a bad mood any day. “Oh, Liv,” he says, grabbing her hands in both of his. “I had no idea you felt this way. This is so sudden!”
She’s clearly trying (and failing) to hide the fact that she wants to laugh, and she pulls her hands away and points at him again.
“Never happened,” she repeats, but the smile tugging at the corners of her mouth undercuts her tone a bit. “Understand?”
“And she’s already breaking up with me,” he laments, one hand on his chest as he shakes his head. “Breaking my heart, you are.”
Liv rolls her eyes and turns away from him, beginning to make her way out of the office. She waves at the broken remnants of his coffee mug on her way out and says, “I’ll get the dust pan.”
“Oh, that’s so sweet of you, darling, thank you!”
“Not listening!"
2
“… Liv?”
Until he says her name she doesn’t even realize he’s been talking to her. She’s just been letting his voice become background noise, barely registering somewhere in the back of her mind. She still makes no attempt to answer, instead choosing to gulp down the lump in her throat and pull her feet up onto the little couch so she can hug her knees to her chest.
With any luck, he might not come into the office. Maybe Ravi will just keep doing what he’s doing, talking about the case, half directed at her but half just thinking out loud.
The sound of his footsteps approaching the office tells her pretty quickly that that won’t be the case.
“Hey,” he says, and he somehow manages to pack so much concern into that one word that it makes Liv want to cry. She drops her head down and hides in her folded arms so she won’t have to see his face.
“I’m okay,” she says, almost out of reflex. It has to be reflex, because she is definitely not okay, and there is no way Ravi is going to believe she is.
And her voice just had to crack when she said it, too.
She feels the couch dip when Ravi sits beside her, but he doesn’t say anything right away. He just takes in a slow breath and lets it out all at once.
“… Your mother, is it?”
Liv only gives a sniff in response.
“Yeah, I thought that might be it,” he answers, and she feels his hand on her back. The two of them saw her mom only a few hours ago; they were working a case that led them to the very same hospital where Evan is still staying, and Liv still isn’t sure if her mom even saw them all the way on the other end of the hall before they kept moving along.
Still, seeing her mom at all felt like a stab in the stomach. Ravi had seen her, too, and when he did he shot a look toward Liv, a quick look that was clearly meant to ask if she was alright. And she just shrugged and shook her head, brushed it off.
She knows Ravi kept watching her out of the corner of his eye the rest of the day, waiting for her calm reserve to drop.
And it didn’t.
Not until she found herself alone in the office for the span of about two seconds, anyway.
Liv lifts her head out of her arms to glance at Ravi now, who is sitting with one leg up on the couch, facing her. The concern on his face is exactly as unbearable as she expected it to be. She gulps, trying to pull it together again, and failing. She can’t even blame it on the latest brain; she’s in that in-between period now, a little hungry, still not full-on zombie, but all one hundred percent Liv Moore in the brain.
She knows Ravi is waiting for her to say something. She also knows he won’t actually make her say anything… but maybe she needs to say it out loud.
Maybe it’ll help.
“I just… I miss them,” she finally says, staring determinedly at anything but Ravi, and the words just sound so stupid and so childish coming out of her mouth. But they’re the truth. “I miss them both, all the time. I barely ever stop thinking about it.”
She bites her lip, but she knows she’s fighting a losing battle.
“They’ll come round, Liv,” he says, his voice all quiet and careful, like he’s afraid speaking too loudly might break her. “They will.”
She sniffs and slowly shakes her head. “You don’t know that.”
“I do,” he answers right away, and he sounds ready to explain exactly why he’s so sure they’ll come around, but it is at that exact moment that the already crumbling dam finally breaks. Liv hiccups, tears finally spilling over, and she buries her head again just in time to hear Ravi sigh, “Oh, Liv…”
His hand is still on her back, and now he gently tugs her toward him. She doesn’t even attempt to fight it. She falls sideways into his chest, turning her head to muffle the sound of her crying against his shirt. She can feel him running his hands over her arm—the arm that isn’t currently pinned between her side and his stomach—and somehow in between sobs she manages to choke out the words, “I don’t… I don’t know what to do. How am I supposed to keep—? I just, I miss them all the time.”
She feels him drop his chin onto her head, and he sighs again.
“There’s nothing to be done just yet, Liv. I know it’s awful, but waiting for them is all you can do right now,” he says.
She continues to sob and hiccup into his chest, and he just waits and holds her as she lets it all out. He doesn’t say anything else, but she does feel him gently kiss the top of her head before he goes back to resting his chin on her. She doesn’t have the energy to wonder whether he’s subtly making fun of her for that time she kissed his cheek, or if he just did it without thinking and hasn’t even realized that he did it at all.
It’s probably the latter, but she appreciates it all the same.
After a minute or so he says, “… Well, there is something you could do.”
She sniffs. “Hmm?”
“You could try—and I mean, I’m just throwing this out there—you could try not bottling this all up and acting like you’re fine for weeks on end, until you wind up collapsing into a sobbing heap at work surrounded by dead bodies. Just a suggestion though.”
She can practically hear the smirk in his voice, and she can’t help but let out a little teary laugh as she shakes her head.
“Hey, I’m serious,” he says. “I do know at least some of what you’re feeling, Liv. I know it’s not quite the same thing, but my mum and dad and all three of my sisters are halfway across the world. So you don’t have to act like you’re made of stone and you don’t miss them, because I know that’s just not true. Point is—you can talk to me. And your mum and your brother, they’ll come round. Even if you don’t think they will.”
She huffs, because mustering up the energy to actually say bullshit out loud feels a bit out of her reach right now.
“They will,” he insists. “They love you. They just need time, but they’ll come back to you. And in the meantime, you’re not alone. You have Peyton. And Major, most of the time. And I can’t speak for Peyton and Major, but I know I’m not going anywhere.”
That one actually gets a smile out of her, and she nods, her face still half buried in his shirt.
“Yeah, alright, laugh all you want, Moore, but you’re stuck with me.”
She actually does laugh this time, and she wipes her face with the sleeve of her lab coat. She’s still leaning on him, resting her head on his chest while he sits with his chin on the crown of her head, his thumb running back and forth over her shoulder.
She sniffs again. It’s becoming a little bit easier to breathe.
3
Ravi hears the very distinct sound of a feral zombie outside the door—the first sound he’s heard outside that door since being taken here four days ago—and he slowly stands from where he’s been sitting on the cot, wincing as he does so. When they took him here, he didn’t go down without a fight, and he has been paying for it ever since. He still suspects he has a broken rib.
There is no window on the door. There are no windows at all, actually, and he’s fairly certain this room is underground. Still, he can hear it; growling, a panicked shout, someone else screaming. He listens carefully. There’s one gunshot that makes him jump, the shrill shriek that can only have come from a very angry zombie, more growling, another gunshot. Whoever was screaming stops abruptly, but whoever has been shouting only gets louder.
He jumps again when something hits the metal door, and then there is the crack of breaking bone and yet another gunshot. Ravi can feel his pulse hammering against his chest. He hears something metal being thrown to the floor. Probably the gun, he thinks.
The only sound now is heavy panting, and Ravi gulps.
There are two possibilities. One is that a full-on 28 Days Later zombie somehow was released upon the people who have been keeping him here. If that’s the case, well, his kidnappers may be dead, but there is still a zombie outside that door and he is still very much trapped in this room.
He hears the telltale beeping of the door’s lock being deactivated.
Okay, so possibility one is gone.
The door slowly opens, and it occurs to Ravi that anyone else would be terrified, standing here considerably injured with no method of defense while a red-eyed, quietly growling zombie slowly shambles into the room with flecks of blood on her shirt, no more than ten feet away.
But Ravi doesn’t think he’s ever been more relieved. “Oh, thank God,” he breathes, shoulders sagging.
Liv looks up at him, eyes wide, and he watches as the red slowly recedes from her sclera and the dark veins in her cheeks fade to nothing.
“Oh my God, Ravi!”
She closes the distance between them so quickly that he doesn’t have time to stop her before she leaps up and wraps her arms around his neck. He lets out a breathless, “Ow,” and falls backward so that he’s sitting on the cot again. “Ow, ow, ow, Liv.”
Finally she seems to realize that she’s hurting him, and she lets go of him. Well, she almost lets go of him, pulling away just barely and keeping her hands on his shoulders. There’s less than a foot of space between them, and he can see that either she’s crying now or she’s been crying, but either way there are tear tracks on her cheeks. She doesn’t say anything, just stares at him with questioning eyes.
“Think I’ve got a broken rib,” he explains, giving her a strained smile. “Nasty bruise on my back, too. Other than that I’m alright, though. I’m okay.”
She laughs then, and she brings her hands to either side of his jaw, running her thumbs over his cheeks. “Ravi, I thought… I thought they…”
Her voice trails off, like she can’t bear to finish the sentence out loud. Ravi gets the gist, though. “They didn’t,” he tells her, bringing his hand up to cover one of hers. “I’m alright, Liv. Well, I am now, anyway.”
She looks over his whole face, down at his tee shirt, back up at him. He gets the feeling she’s inspecting him for any damage he may have neglected to tell her about; either that or she really did think he was dead, and she still isn’t quite over the shock of discovering that he isn’t.
When she finally seems satisfied, she shakes her head and pulls him closer to gently press a kiss to his forehead.
He leans into it, closing his eyes as warmth blooms in his chest. Any other time he might worry about that—how his heart automatically surges in response to her kissing him in even the most platonic of ways. Right now, though, he can’t be bothered. Liv stays like that for a few seconds before she very carefully and very gently hugs his shoulders again, pressing her cheek to the side of his head. “I swear to God, Chakrabarti, if you ever disappear like that again…”
Ravi returns the hug and has to hold back the urge to laugh. He already knows that laughing will hurt.
“I’ll do my best, Olivia.”
At that, she laughs enough for the both of them.
4
“Hey, Earth to Liv?”
She’s been staring blankly into space while fiddling with her necklace—a new habit picked up from the latest brain—but now she snaps her gaze back to Ravi.
“Welcome back,” he says, offering her a small smile. “Vision?”
Liv shakes her head.
“I haven’t had another vision since the first one,” she tells him, careful to keep her voice low. They’re standing in a secluded area of the restaurant, in the hallway near the restrooms where no one can see them, but she still worries that someone might hear them—particularly their person of interest at Table 3. “You think he suspects anything?”
Ravi runs a hand through his hair, and he sighs. “Well, you were staring at him for quite a while, but I think he only noticed toward the end there. What was that about, anyway?”
“I don’t know,” she admits. “Penelope had a habit of staring, I guess.”
“And fidgeting, I take it.”
Liv frowns, forcing herself to lower her hands, though she feels like the necklace sits far too heavily on her chest if she’s not touching it, like it’s burning her skin. Penelope really had an anxiety problem, as it turns out.
“You’re sure it was him? He seems… pretty normal, Liv.”
She barely holds back an annoyed groan. “Yes, I’m sure, Ravi. I know it was him,” she says. Though she admits, to herself if no one else, that it doesn’t make sense. All she saw was a strange man flirting with her at this restaurant, then in the back seat of a car. It shouldn’t have been so distressing, but somehow the very thought of him set her teeth on edge and gave her the inexplicable urge to cry.
And that was just the vision . Seeing him in person had instantly sent a spike of panic through her chest—a feeling she forced down through sheer force of will, and only because she saw that he was with another woman at the same restaurant.
“I know it was him,” she repeats, tracing her eyes along the pattern on Ravi’s tie in an attempt to prevent the vision from coming back.
Then Ravi’s hand is on her upper arm, giving her a little squeeze, and she looks up. “Okay,” he concedes with that usual supportive half-smile on his face, “then we’re going to have to get back to our table, aren’t we?”
She nods. “Yeah. I can do this.”
“You can,” he agrees, and his smirk turns playful as he nudges her with his elbow. “This is far from our first fake date. You should have this entire routine memorized by now.”
Liv can’t help but smile at that, and she lightly shoves him in the chest. “Yeah, you have to admit—” she starts to say, but the rest of her sentence, that we’re pretty good at this, dies in her throat as she looks behind him. The smile falls away from her face. Her eyes widen as that terrified feeling returns to her chest, the feeling that makes her want to vomit on the spot, and from the look on Ravi’s face she might as well have.
“Liv? What is it?” he asks, leaning closer and gently grabbing hold of her shoulders.
“He’s— shit, Ravi, he’s coming this way, I can’t—” she stammers, because she sees him, all six feet of him, broad-shouldered and clean shaven and so infuriatingly normal looking. He’s headed right toward them and Liv can feel her stomach turning over itself—
“ Liv, hey, it’s okay,” Ravi tells her while the man is still far enough away that they’re out of earshot. “He has no idea who you are. You’re on a date with me, remember? You’re just some girl he’s never seen before who’s on a date with someone else.”
She knows, logically, that he's right, but Penelope’s murderer is still coming closer and he is definitely going to notice her staring at him and shaking like a leaf—
“Kiss me.”
“I’m—what? Now?”
She nods quickly, already grabbing onto the front of his blazer. She hadn't given it more than half a second of thought before she said it aloud, but the more she thinks about it the more it makes sense, the more it seems the only way she'll survive this guy walking by without blowing their cover.
Liv stands up on her toes, and Ravi, true to form, only hesitates for a beat before he moves right along with her.
And then it's happening, they're kissing, and his beard is scratchy but she’s surprised to find that she doesn't really mind it at all. But he's being too hesitant, too chaste about it—they're supposed to be a couple sneaking away toward the bathrooms, and that means they can't look like a pair of nervous high school kids on a first date. Is she overthinking this? Maybe, she thinks, but maybe not.
She leans up into him, winding her arms around his neck and consequently pressing her entire torso against his. He responds quickly enough, and the way he wraps his arms around her waist has the added bonus of making her feel much safer, shielding her from view of the man she knows must be nearly passing them by now.
It doesn't hurt that Ravi has at least a few inches on the guy, either. Later she might berate herself for letting Penelope’s anxiety make her forget all about her zombie strength, but for now she lets herself indulge in the security of having a man twice her size standing between her and the potential killer in their midst.
Plus, Ravi is… a really good kisser, as it turns out. A distractingly good kisser.
That's… a good thing, isn’t it?
Distantly she hears the sound of a low chuckle from somewhere behind Ravi, and though the sound of it sends a nervous tremor down her spine, she somehow resists the urge to press herself even closer to Ravi and instead waits for the sound of the bathroom door opening and closing.
“Okay,” she says, breaking away from the kiss and trying to quietly catch her breath, her hands slowly lowering from the back of Ravi’s neck. “He's gone.”
“Hmm?” Ravi asks, his glazed over eyes slowly coming back into focus. He shakes his head, blinking. “Right—er, good. He's gone. That's—um, good. You're alright?”
She bites her bottom lip, staring at him, at the slight flush in his skin and the trimmed beard and the hair that she suddenly has the urge to reach up and run her fingers through. Her eyes flick down to where her hands now rests against his chest, which at the moment is rising and falling a bit more quickly than usual, and she busies herself with straightening his tie for him.
It's just the brain, she thinks. She doesn't actually want to kiss him again. It's the brain, and their closeness, and the fact that she can still feel the way his beard tickled her skin. And the fact that they're both dressed to the nines in a dimly lit restaurant. You always did have a weakness for a suit and tie .
It's just the brain, but all the same she finds herself very, very grateful that she is not physically capable of blushing.
“Yeah,” she says, somehow still out of breath. “Yeah, I’m alright.”