Welcome to Gaia! ::

Most of his family was asleep at this time of night.

He presumed they were, at least. He had run into Ophelia at this time of night; he had figured out that sleeping with all of what felt like quiet to him felt like noise to her and it was hard. He sometimes ran into Viatrix; she was always on a new project or three and sometimes that would take her attention into the night, especially now that she was working on building herself a new spot in the basement. Sometimes he'd wake up to find Richard had vanished from his side, but Ignacio knew better than Richard had known for him. Arra was probably at his wonder, or perhaps he was taking a night patrol. It was fine.

That was to say when he found himself coming back after a late-night shoot for his current movie, he hadn't expected anyone to be awake. Maybe Ophelia or Viatrix, maybe Richard if he couldn't quite get to sleep, on a rarer occasion a busybody Luke making some food--

Well, in any case, he certainly wasn't expecting the sounds of tears.

Ignacio, with the expertise of someone who had spent literal years hiding a secret identity from even his boyfriend, closed the door behind him quietly and padded toward the sound, cautious not to surprise whoever it was or make them panic--

Livie.

No point in asking if she was okay: she clearly wasn't. He approached the fridge and squatted down so he wasn't towering over her.

"What's up?"

When he saw the way she put down her milk and curled into a ball, he opted to stop crouching and instead settled himself on the ground, leaning back slightly on the bar. Not close enough to crowd her space, but close enough that neither of them would need to raise their voices to hear each other speak.

Them.

He could take a few guesses on who they were. If she had her Negaverse memories, his first assumption would have been her former teammates. He didn't know much about who Sylvite kept around her, but considering other former members of the Negaverse he had met, he had assumed there were people she was connected to and even close to. With only her civilian memories remaining, though, he could extrapolate from that. Friends. Family.

People who wouldn't know who Livie was, people who had known who Sylvite had been, presumably, or at least had known who her civilian side had been.

"Understandable," he leaned forward, pulling his knees up so he could set his elbows on them. "You gave up a lot when you left the Negaverse. And even if it was the right choice, that doesn't make any of this easier."

Ignacio wished he could make it easier, honestly. It wasn't fair that leaving the Negaverse meant abandoning everything someone had known. It wasn't fair to them, it wasn't fair to the people they were leaving behind, and it was a horrible reward for something that was ultimately the right thing to do.

"Would it help to talk about them?"

Honestly, he couldn't quite imagine being in her position.

She had been in the Negaverse for a long time. There was no avoiding the truth of that. In the blink of an eye, she had gone from being a young teenager who had been tricked into being in the Negaverse to, as she said, old. It would be jarring for anyone, and he imagined especially jarring missing all of those formative years. To be honest, he couldn't remember much of his formative years. He knew they existed, he could even understand them, he could absolutely remember the worst parts of it!

But everything felt like it had started when he died.

He supposed there were some odd similarities, a jarring event that had changed a lot in almost an instant, and there was no going back to what life had been like before that point.

When she looked toward him, he offered a faint smile. Didn't want to seem happy considering the circumstances, but he did want to seem supportive. He realized in retrospect that he hadn't removed his makeup yet--

"It's like you woke up from a bad dream, except it's real," Ignacio murmured, leaning in a bit closer. "You don't sound ungrateful." She wasn't okay, but he would ignore that. No one was okay after dealing with the Negaverse, really. "I know Safira is already willing to mom you," perhaps Luke even moreso if they were thinking in the very cozy, warm sense, "but we're not the people you lost seemingly overnight, not even for reasons you really feel, and we can't pretend to be them."

He pursed his lips in thought, pondering what the most supportive route would be to take through this-- "My life changed really suddenly too. Not in the sense of losing my memory as you did, but," Ignacio's chest felt tight, and he breathed through it, "something traumatic happened to me that I couldn't go back from. It's hard. Nothing really feels the same afterward, and sometimes you miss the way things used to be."

Honestly, there was a part of him that still wondered what his life would have been like if he had never gotten his acceptance to Barren Pines.

Ignacio noticed her scooting closer to him and let her press her forehead against him. He unraveled himself to allow her closer, to wrap an arm around her if she was willing to accept it.

He had always been a more physical person, perhaps with the exception of the aftermath of what had happened. Touch had triggered a fear response when he had fallen particularly deep, and it drew a wince he did his best to keep internal as he remembered the bruises he noticed Richard had gotten when Ignacio crawled back out.

To her, it wasn't quite like waking up from a nightmare. From the way she said that...

He let out a small sigh of his own, glancing up to the ceiling as he pondered her question. The truth wasn't the most optimistic thing. The nightmares had haunted him for years. His waking reality had been haunted with feelings he didn't understand--the monsters, the monsters--as his mind worked through the trauma of being dead and then undead or a monster or something and tried to place himself. He lashed out. He self-isolated.

Ignacio had managed the best when people reached out.

"Honestly?" His laugh was airy. "What I did? I broke. I felt like I was losing my mind. I thought I was in a living nightmare, and sometimes I felt out of touch with reality because I was having trouble identifying with it and seeing myself beyond what I had experienced. I was formally diagnosed with PTSD a few years afterward, got put on medication I still take." That was something he didn't talk about terribly often. He sucked on his bottom lip. "It was hard. I had to work through that. And sometimes it swallowed me whole."

He squeezed her shoulder.

"But what helped me? Letting people in. Finding people who even if they didn't understand, were willing to help. Going to therapy. And ... giving myself time and patience. It's not easy. It's never easy. And I still wonder about my life before I--" he swallowed, "but the grief becomes smaller over time. You won't notice it as much. And eventually, you start to manage."

Ignacio glanced down at her, offering a light smile. "When that happened to me, the Negaverse was this relatively unknown thing. There are people you can lean on and talk to who do understand. Me, of course, but others. And when it's hard, we can help support you."

He hadn't expected her to declare that she'd fight the Negaverse for him, and his laughter in response was still airy, almost instinctual, but it had a warm note. "You don't have to do that. I mean," he paused, and snickered, "I guess we're opposed to the Negaverse and fighting them anyway, and they do suck, but you don't need to for my sake..."

It felt like in some ways she was minimizing her own problems. Was she traumatized? Did she have PTSD? Maybe, maybe not. He couldn't exactly determine that for her being that he wasn't a therapist, but what she had gone through was traumatic. Losing access to her whole family in a blink and losing seven years of her life on top of that would be a lot for anyone. It was jarring at best. It was a loss of everything she knew and it felt nightmarish at worst.

He didn't need to say that, though, because she was slurring her words, and she sounded choked up, and then she was choked up, and she was crying on him.

"You're okay," he returned, even though he knew that wasn't true, because that wasn't what he was communicating.

She would be okay.

Even if it took time.

"What you've gone through is traumatic."

He wrapped his arms around her to pull her in a bit closer.

"I'm here."

Ignacio let her have as long as she needed.

He stayed quiet, breathing evenly in hopes it might help her, too. Richard had done the same for him, a lot of times. Remembering the aftermath of Barren Pines brought that to mind, brought Richard's support of him to mind, reminded him of other people like Grayson--Leo--the Zodiac Court--his months shuffled in loneliness where he pushed himself through the same droll every day because he had to in order to survive but that was all he was doing--he wiped it from his mind as he focused on helping Livie out, or at least, he hoped.

Perhaps the fact she was settling and talking again was a sign of that.

Lots of people did get cut off from their families, it was true. Some people also cut off their families. Ignacio hadn't talked to his father in years and didn't plan on ever changing that. His relationship with his mother was strained, even if they had been working on it. But that had been by choice. That was the crux of it.

"It's no problem," because it wasn't, being nice to her. "Promise." He liked her, felt protective of her, and wanted to see her thrive now that she had taken the dangerous step to leave. But, "you're not wrong. People do get cut off from their families. Sometimes it's on purpose. But sometimes it's because something bad happens that separates people, or there's no other choice left. That's where the trauma comes in, right? You had to leave because something bad had happened -- the Negaverse in general, but also what they had done. There wasn't another good option. And as a consequence, you had to leave them, too."

He squeezed her gently again.

"The worst part is that you blink and, suddenly, you can't call your mom anymore. That is traumatic. It all sucks, and it counts."

She was talking now, and he listened, looking at her in turn when she moved to look at him to show he was listening. He shook his head lightly when she said they weren't perfect--no family was, not even the one he had found himself taken into--and otherwise kept his movements to a minimum beyond his usual fidgeting as she spoke.

Ignacio's lips lifted as she said that most people who lost their family overnight probably didn't get taken in like people like them. "No, probably not. It'd be nice though, right? I'm sure if Dad could, he'd make everyone food." He shifted where he sat as he worked through his response in his mind. "But it doesn't invalidate your experiences, nor does it invalidate the fact that you miss them. They're still your family, and they're important to you, right?"

He reached out to squeeze her shoulder once more.

"No family's perfect. Not even this one is. They've stopped, but Mom and Dad used to put a lot of pressure on the older siblings to get married, for example." Even on Richard, Ignacio had found out later, but Richard had also thrown everything off by showing up with Ignacio in the first place-- "Doesn't mean you love them any less. Your life didn't need to be perfect for you to miss the people from it or even the life you lived yourself, and that's fair."

In this case, he didn't bring up his own experiences, because he did come from the background that she cited as more serious. His parents had gotten divorced. They had gotten divorced after Ignacio had run away from home and stayed with other people and eventually by himself, and he had run away from home because his father had--

Well.

He rubbed at his nose.

"Also, there's a place for the old comfort foods, okay?" He winked. "I still sometimes grab myself a pack of cabinet ramen even when there's better options."