Thank you for reading!

Major couldn't get Natalie's words out of his mind, her heartfelt pain at having to live with someone else inside her head, having to try to be herself when her very brain was telling her something diametrically opposed to who she was. Why that resonated with him so much more clearly than when Liv had tried to tell him the same thing, he wasn't sure. Maybe because he wasn't bound up in Natalie being who she used to be, so he had more space to think of her as something new.

Either way, he felt badly for not understanding Liv and what she was going through better. To make it up to her, he let himself into her apartment with the key that she had never asked him to give back, a small ray of hope in all the darkness that had been his life after that damned boat party, and found the Christmas decorations in the back of her closet. Humming to himself, slipping into the darker, more dirge-like carols whenever he lost focus, he carefully decorated her apartment, putting everything up just how she liked it, including the lights hanging down over the cabinet doors. He had always hated that, because then you had to move the lights every time you wanted to get something out, but Liv liked the swooping effect.

When she came in, he was putting the finishing touches on the best part. "Spiced apple cider!" he called out. "Holiday staple."

He turned to give her a mug, excited to see the smile on her face at what he had done, but his own smile faded and disappeared when he saw how distressed she looked.

She took the cider, but didn't look up at him.

"I'm not here to fight," Major promised. "I've done some soul-searching, and I think I get it now. The brains, and how they affect you? I'm going to be more empathetic."

Liv's face brightened at his words, but not enough. Cradling the mug of cider, she turned away from him. Only then did he see that her white hair was stained. Stained red.

"You've got blood in your hair." When she turned back to him, still concerningly silent, he noticed a hole in her jacket. "Is that a bullet hole?"

"Shop teacher brain was a little intense." Her voice was hushed, and the words came out like it was everyday stuff.

Which it was, Major reminded himself. What wasn't everyday stuff was Liv coming home having been shot and … bludgeoned? If she'd been alive, not a zombie, either one of those could have killed her. Maybe he was grateful? Maybe he couldn't help remembering that if she hadn't been a zombie, she'd have been safely in the hospital operating on people's hearts.

"Yeah. I … saw on the news." Although the news hadn't mentioned the ME's assistant having been so deeply involved in what had gone down. "Sidelined as a superhero." He had been thinking all day of potential solutions to her problem, and couldn't help bringing one up now. "You know, maybe there's a way for you to get brains that are a little … milder." She stared at him blankly, so he forged ahead. "I was reading about some research that's been done on synthetic brains. Now, it's a long way off—"

"I'm not eating synthetic brains!" she broke in, looking at him as though he had just kicked her cat.

"Well, they might work just like regular brains, but without you having to—"

"What? Serve a purpose? If I have to eat brains, I'm helping solve murders while doing it." She turned away from him, putting the cider down, still untouched.

"Okay, look, obviously this brain is affecting you—"

Liv turned around and stared at him, the hurt in her face deeper, more real. He had cut her to the quick somehow and he didn't even know what he'd said. "There it is. You think you get it now, but you just don't. This isn't the brain, Major, it's me."

Damn it, how much farther did he have to go to meet her halfway? How many ways could he put his foot in this brain mess before they could just be together and not have it be all about her condition? "You know, I'm sorry, but how am I ever supposed to know which is which?"

"Can we just be honest for a moment?" Major thought he had been, but there was no use pointing that out. Liv went on, "We both know, deep down, that this can't work."

Whatever he had expected her to say, it wasn't that.

"Being a zombie has changed me. You love the woman I was before. You tolerate the woman I am now."

"But who you are now is only temporary."

"This brain is temporary. But the not being able to have sex, the day-to-day personality changes, that's the new normal. And that's what neither one of us is okay with. You're not," she said, before he could protest. "The truth is, we belong with our own kind."

She couldn't really be doing this. She didn't mean that. She was still human, just … not for the moment. Someday there would be a cure. They had been holding on for that, hadn't they?

But she was doing this. It was there on her face, the calmness, the resolve.

"Is this— Are we breaking up?"

"We have to." It hurt her, he could see that, and he hated to see her hurt. And some part of him had known that things couldn't go on the way they had been. But that didn't make it feel any better.

Without a word, Major put down the mug of cider that he had been holding all this time and picked up his jacket, slowly moving toward the door. He stopped there, looking back at her. "It isn't going to be like this forever. Ravi's going to find a cure." He knew that better than anyone.

But it was clear from the way Liv struggled to find any semblance of a smile that she didn't believe it. "Maybe," she offered, in a voice that quivered with unshed tears. Major wanted nothing more than to hold her and reassure her that it was going to be all right … but he couldn't, and she wouldn't have believed him anyway.

"Be careful out there," he told her, and went out the door.