The expression on Ravi's face was almost as heart-breaking as the results printed in bold on the sheet of paper clutched in his hand, and Liv's first thought was that she needed to do something to stop him from crying. Her second thought was (What?) because the last brain she'd eaten had been extracted from the thirty-seven year old victim of a car accident, a man with very little empathy who had most definitely preferred women.
Still, Liv pushed her pathetic concerns aside and shifted her weight a little so the wall of the Lab fully supported her, then waited for the hammer to fall.
"I'm sorry, Liv, but the disease took your temporal lobe-it's not something we can get back. There's no prosthetic, no medication-"
She'd known, really, that first time when she'd almost gone crazy trying to stuff brains into her gob. It was similar to the cravings of a pregnant woman, she needed what she didn't have enough of. Her little theory had been proven right when a lack of sustenance had drained her of both intellect and everything human.
So Liv smiled even as she cried, and leant in for a hug. Ravi returned it with no small amount of bewilderment because she wasn't really a touchy-feely person (zombie) but no doubt he attributed it to her latest meal and returned it with only a hint of trepidation. The warmth was more than welcome, alien as it was, although logically Liv knew that it was the result of her own poor blood circulation and low core body temperature.
She could live with the white hair, the pale skin, and even the unusual appetite for grey matter. It was a little harder to cope with the unwarranted disapproval and judgement from her family, and maybe it wasn't too healthy to help cases along by eating the victims and reliving their worst memories, but she had Ravi. If desperate times called for desperate measures, Clive was just as sturdy a support and highly unlikely to judge her for the already dead thing. Maybe Major wasn't someone Liv could recover, not with his recent behaviour, but she hadn't burned so many bridges that Peyton was no longer a safe harbour.
Liv had her own family, she didn't need to be alive to appreciate that. If she had never gone to that party, then her own ambition would have pushed her into a miserable life of too much work and expectations that were near impossible to meet. She was a talented Doctor, but her new occupation had come with its own job requirements that she'd struggled to meet-it was just as challenging to shape herself into something human as it was to stabilise a motorcycle crash victim.
She had to actually talk to people, to her boss and Clive and suspects. Liv had to interpret what the corpse on the slab had known and volunteer her findings without looking crazy. She had to protect her friends (family) from bad apples like Blaine, and then somehow….she had to take care of herself. She wasn't too happy with that one, but Ravi had made sure that she knew he didn't want a suicidal zombie in his workspace.
Even with no future, no ambition or goals excluding her need to feed herself, Liv still had little things to look forward to. Dying had turned her focus inward, and she knew for certain that she was just as selfish, just as unbalanced and broken as every other zombie she'd ever met-but she'd realised that they'd all been damaged goods as humans too. Being infected had just brought out the worst, and made her work to find the best of herself.
Liv's friends didn't mind her nature, in fact they seemed to appreciate it, so she didn't bother to sugar-coat herself. Ravi saw her bets and called her, down in their little safe haven where only dead bodies bore witness. He didn't hide his all-consuming need to fix things, she didn't disguise her issues. He reduced living (and dead) people to test subjects and she ate brains in front of him. There were no secrets, no lies, and it was a relief.
As a human, Liv never would have had this with Ravi.