Chapter Nineteen: Human Frailty
Feel I’ve been beaten down by the words
Of men who have no ground
Can’t sleep beneath the tree of wisdom
When your axe has cut the roots that feed them
Forked tongues in bitter mouths
Can drive a man to bleed from inside out
What if you did?
What if you lied?
What if I avenge?
What if eye for an eye?
~Creed
Somewhere north of Albany, New York
Twelve and a half hours later
Violation.
There was no other word for what he was made to endure now. Nightmares of pain and needles and men in masks were no match for this. They gave him no peace from the depravity, the inhumanity of it all.
Unlike the female victims, the lone male strapped to the operating table was wide awake. They fed him enough muscle relaxers to down a dinosaur. Limp and lifeless, he could only watch the horror he was powerless to stop. He was strapped to the bed by what smelled like adamantium. It held his wrists, chest, belly and legs motionless.
Helpless.
Groggy from the medications continually pumped intravenously through his rapid-healing veins, Logan would not give them the satisfaction of hearing him scream. Every tug and pull at his naked body was shoved aside. He could only concentrate on vengeance, on the reckoning he would exact in the name of justice.
They were speaking all around him, easy words he could not understand. Had they lost their souls in this cold-blooded quest? Did they not see that they were raping him as surely as they had raped the women before him?
Violation. It was one word slipping constantly past his emotional roadblocks. Try as he might to drown it out, his healing factor provided them with ample opportunity. He was hardened, pumped, and milked as though he were nothing more than a bull in the breeding shed.
The desecration of his body hit him harder than he thought it would. First, a man on another doomed crusade tore him apart, laced his skeleton with something alien. Now, they removed life from him just as heartlessly, just as cruelly.
No reprieve. No remorse. No excuses.
He could only lie prone and naked on the examination table.
Senses alert for any telltale sign of rescue, he picked up an acrid scent that reminded him of a cesspool which could only belong to his captor. Logan tilted his head slightly, coming face to face with pale skin, gleaming red eyes, and “ to his horror “ a pitying smile.
“Are the girls not treating you well?”
Logan tasted bile at the back of his throat when he felt them start again. He could not look. He did not want to see what they were doing to him.
“You should relax, Wolverine,” the man said as he came around to Logan’s side.
“Let me up,” he rasped in response. “An’ I’ll show ya how I relax.”
“Tut, tut,” Sinister chided. “You should be proud. Today, you become a father.”
He wanted to scream, kill someone, and throw up until he saw his own toenails.
“We have your DNA mapped out here, Wolverine,” Sinister continued as though his captive was sitting down to tea. “And as it turns out, you are the answer to all my prayers.”
“Yeah?” Logan grunted, closing his eyes when he hit that point again. It was quickly becoming painful along with the disgusting feel of being taken against his will.
“Your DNA is fascinating.” The pale-faced mutant sounded like a kid at Christmas. “Beautiful. Poetic. I have never seen anything quite like it.”
“I betcha say that ta all the girls.”
“Oh, no.” Essex’s face turned deadly and maniacal in an instant. “I never had the pleasure of talking to my girls. It was easier for them to not remember the ordeal. Why give them a horrifying death when they could be gifted with peace? I was, however, tempted to wake your weather manipulator.”
Don’t talk about her. Don’t talk about her. Get her outta yer mind. Logan’s defensive thought process gave Sinister the time to laugh. The sound was high pitched, reminding Wolverine of the cartoons his students watched in their nightclothes on Saturday mornings.
“She is a hypnotizing creature. It is no wonder your primitive nature sought her out,” Essex continued. “I risked everything to get my hands on her ova. Imagine the children, the mutants, I will be able to breed from her.”
“Over my dead body,” Logan ground out.
The females in white uniforms were moving around at the foot of the bed again. Logan braced himself.
“I am not going to kill you, Wolverine. You are an endless source of life essence that will father a generation of mutants unlike anything ever seen before. I will need you to produce these children.”
“What’s the problem? Can’t get laid on yer own?”
“I see I must thoroughly explain myself to you.” Sinister sighed, requesting a chair from one of the nurses in the room.
Talking was keeping Logan’s mind off of the abuse of his body. Entertaining thoughts of death, destruction and all-out violence were a tether to reality. Fear of losing his mind was very real inside of him, with the animal trying to break free. He wanted to revert to that feral state and stay there, as a child curling up in a parent’s bed after a nightmare.
Ororo kept him from falling too swiftly into ferocity. When she came for him “ and he had no doubt that she would “ he did not want her to find him broken.
“You see, Wolverine,” Sinister was speaking again. “Men like Magneto wish for mutants to control the earth, as we rightly should. We are the next step of evolution. This process of changing one thing to another can now be manipulated.”
“By taking this egg,” he held up a clear paper. Logan recognized it immediately as Storm. “And your sperm I can create this.”
After showing Logan his own DNA sequence, Sinister brought one up that looked curiously like a mixture of the two. His stomach churned, threatening to empty on the clean white sheets beneath him when he realized what he was looking at.
“Isn’t it beautiful?”
It could have been, Logan mused. A child was something created by two people, usually a man and woman that loved one another. That child, whether brought to life by medical intervention or not, would have parents to welcome it into the world. The parents would fill the blank mind with love or hope…even indifference or hatred.
No child was to be created in a lab for the sole purpose of war. That was not a thing of beauty. Any child he had with his ‘Ro would not be the product of this madman.
“Your DNA is unique, Wolverine,” the scientist was saying, even as Logan tried to drown him out. “No matter how damaged or unstable an ova is, your healing factor repairs it. You bring life where there should be none.”
“That gonna repair the insides ya ripped outta Storm? Psylocke? The other women?”
Sinister shrugged. “Necessary losses in the battle to save our kind. It is a shame that poor Storm had to escape. I can only imagine what horrors wake her in the middle of the night. I wonder does she reach for you? Does she tell you about the emptiness in her womb? How it grieves her?”
Logan strained against the buckles holding him down. How dare this son of a bitch talk about Storm that way? “You did this ta her! I’m gonna tear ya apart.”
“Of course I did this to her,” Sinister replied as though speaking to an unruly child. “Her will to survive was simply too strong. She should have died, as all the rest.”
Crimson flooded Logan’s vision, a coppery taste flooding the back of his mouth. Just when he wanted to scream, to curse the very air this maniac breathed, the nurses started on him again. He deflated, closing his eyes against the torture.
“Then again,” mused his captor. “If she had not escaped, I may not have discovered your abilities. You are making all of this possible now. I could not have begun in earnest without your…help.” He glanced down Logan’s nude body as he said the last word, which dripped with amusement.
“She’s comin’ fer me, bub,” Logan said without thinking. “An’ hell’s comin’ with her.”
Sinister leaned down, close to Logan’s face. Inwardly grimacing from his terrible smell, he barely noticed the man’s sinister smirk.
“I would expect nothing less of a goddess.”
The pale mutant was gone a moment later. Logan was left with his torturers and more thoughts than he ever wanted to alone with. He tried to think of something, anything else. Violence was no longer helping.
Images of Ororo’s body flying across the New York street made his jaw clench. She had looked so frail, and yet she tried to help him. He promised to protect her but he needed her aid this time. She was coming for him, with her own army of mutants in tow.
He knew it. He could feel it. A storm is uncontrollable by nature, a force that could wipe out anything that got in its way. He saw no difference between the fury of nature and the mutant who reveled in it.
Sinister had no idea what he was in for.
~**~
Storm felt every moment that slipped by her as another nail in her beloved’s coffin. She gripped the steering wheel tightly, glancing at Henry as he pressed buttons on the communication equipment that linked the cavalry to the mansion.
“You are close.” Charles was saying over the crackle of static. “He is inside the building.”
Ororo felt her knuckles pop as she clenched her fingers in anticipation.
She would have been here sooner, had her exhausted and battered body not given out on her completely. While she began to command the troops, so to speak, her dizzy brain and worn out body just stopped.
From what Kitty said “ with more than a hint of admiration in her tone “ Peter had jumped forward, narrowly saving Ororo from cracking her skull on the counter. He’d insisted that all plans immediately stop until they gave their exhausted teammate some much-needed rest.
Had they left without her, she might have destroyed the school in a rage.
With the aid of a powerful sedative, Ororo tumbled into a dreamless sleep for over eight hours. When she woke, she picked back up nearly mid-sentence. Everyone jumped into action leading the team to arrive on Sinister’s proverbial doorstep, crammed into two borrowed military Humvees.
Ororo did not want to contemplate how many favors Henry called in to get them the equipment, but as she glared at the high fence keeping her from Logan, she was glad he had. Shadowcat, Iceman, and Colossus were with she and Beast in the first Humvee with Colossus, Psylocke, Angel, and Dazzler in the other.
“Godspeed, my X-Men.”
Knowing Charles was no longer linked to them, Storm pulled the two-way radio to her lips.
“Colossus?”
“Storm.”
“Go around to the back gate. Enter by any means necessary. If Shadowcat’s information is correct, they are holding Logan in the sub-basement. You have two minutes from now to meet me at the elevator banks. Are you clear?”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“Go.”
She heard the stoic young mutant squeal the tires of his Humvee as he flipped around. From the rearview mirror, she watched him go off road in his quest to complete her orders as asked.
One thing her darling, sweet Peter could not stand was someone experimenting on mutants. For some time now, she thought that it was his determination to wipe out such experiments that kept him from Russia and created his bond with the Wolverine. If he had to lift the entire building with his super-strength to save his teammate, he would not even bat an eyelash.
Kitty was typing on a laptop in the backseat with Iceman holding up another monitor like a faithful lapdog while she worked.
“The blueprints here are pretty clear. Everything on the top levels is empty from what I can see here,” she frowned at her Heat Sensory screen, another borrowed item from the Army.
“Remind me to thank Logan for teaching me how to read blueprints, kay guys?” The girl added in a low tone.
“Where am I going, Shadowcat?” Storm’s tone was curt. She wanted to get her hands on Logan, to ensure he was all right.
“Um, if you give me a minute, I can get the front gate open. That’s where I’d go in.”
“Perfect. Hold on.” Impatience had finally outgunned her rational side.
Storm roared the engine to life, slammed her foot on the gas and shifted the gear into drive. Startled cries from her teammates fell on deaf ears, even as the click of seatbelts sounded all around her. She drove, at fifty miles per hour, directly through the steel gate.
The resounding crash was music to her ears. Violence. She craved violence. This bastard had taken her unborn children, nearly taken her life, and was intent to robbing her of Logan as well. Nothing would satisfy her until every last one of them paid for their actions.
Right at that moment, she truly understood what the term “bloodlust” meant.
Both hands gripping the steering wheel as the gate twisted and fell before the might of her vehicle, Ororo contemplated for another moment.
“Beast?”
“Yes, (gulp) Storm?”
“Tell your friend the General that he can bill me.”
“What do you--”
Without so much as a warning this time, Storm drove the Humvee directly into the front door of the building. Her passengers screamed at the contact, as concrete and glass showered the powerful Humvee. She slammed on the brakes, creating an enormous block for the door. No one could get in or out.
Alarms went off all over, even as Beast began to laugh in the seat beside her. Seconds later, Bobby let out a loud whoop and shoved the backdoor open. Kitty began to giggle a little hysterically.
“In all my years at your side,” Beast was saying as the weight of what she had just done hit Storm in the face. “I have never seen such a thing.”
“Perhaps Wolverine is a bad influence on me,” she replied with a small, almost shy smile.
“If he is,” Kitty chirped from the back as she exited with Bobby. “Lets go get him so he can corrupt you some more.”
“She’s fun when she loses it, isn’t she? Tornados, mowing down fences, buildings. It’s like an ultimate survival TV show.”
Chortling at Bobby’s comment, glad that she could relax a fraction, Ororo climbed out of the driver’s side window. Her door, to her dismay, was pinned by a massive hunk of concrete and a mangled pole that she thought might have been part of the revolving door.
Amid the sirens and smoke, four mutants in matching leather strode into the decimated lobby. Colossus spoke up from the two-way in her belt, saying that they were inside. Storm let a wide, almost feral grin overtake her lips when her team came upon a group of gray-uniformed security guards with automatic weapons.
“Haven’t I kicked your asses somewhere before?” She tossed off as she walked right toward them.
For years to come, Bobby Drake would regale young mutants with hopes of becoming X-Men with this day’s events. He watched in a sort of awe as their former history teacher opened a can of serious whoop ass.
Shadowcat, Iceman, and Beast merely stood back at first, unable to move from the shock to their systems.
Storm, in her black leather and cape glory, marched directly into the fray. Her startled foes opened fire, only to have their bullets deflected by a sharp wind. And then, Storm got started.
She used every hand-to-hand technique taught at Xavier’s. Men were punched, kicked, and avoided as she darted between them. Even when the other three mutants managed to pick their jaws up from the floor and rush to help, they were a little afraid of the powerful woman.
While Kitty phased through the floor, playing an excellent decoy, Storm and Beast tossed opponents over their shoulders like dog toys. After he iced-up, the frosty young X-Man glided around, slicking the floor with his mutation. Several of the security guards were sent on their backs, flying across the room in a heap.
Ororo silently thanked all the gods she could think of that Beast outfitted the X-Men’s boots with special non-skid soles. The last thing they needed was someone sliding away and knocking themselves unconscious on the nearby walls.
In minutes, they had detained their counterparts. They piled them into a storage closet before Kitty phased through the lock. She pulled out the pins, making it impossible to pick from the inside. That, Storm thought with more than a little pride, was a trick she had taught her young friend.
They made their way toward the elevators again, ignoring the sirens and buzzing cameras. Around another corner, following Kitty’s directions, they came upon the rest of the X-Men.
Colossus, decked out in his full-metallic flesh, nodded to Storm. “We detained a security team.”
“So did we,” Iceman cut in. “Storm went all Chuck Norris on their asses.” He karate-chopped the air for emphasis with the appropriate yell.
“Bobby, shut up.” Storm ordered quickly. He immediately fell silent.
Psylocke, her glowing psi-blades still protruding from her hands, nodded toward the elevators. “He is down there. He is not happy, but alive.”
Ororo breathed a sigh of relief. “Opposition?”
“Seven nurses, six armed guards and the big bad. Sinister’s here. No sign of his freaky friends.”
Storm nodded. “Good. Our objective is to retrieve Wolverine and destroy the lab. Angel, with me, Colossus, and Beast. The rest of you, detain the staff.”
When everyone was ready, they piled into the elevators. The plan was to hit the expectant staff on both sides, hoping to divide them. Though Storm wanted to murder Sinister with her bare hands, she knew that if it came down to getting Logan out alive or exacting revenge, Logan would win every time.
Impatiently tapping her foot in the cramped elevator, she barely heard Colossus speak.
“Was that cut on Shadowcat’s arm bad, Beast? Will she need medical attention?”
Storm and Beast, despite the dire situation, shared an amused, knowing glance before her furry friend assured the other man that the girl would be fine.
The elevator dinged. Ororo readied herself for battle as the doors slid open.
~**~
Logan was laughing. Hysterically and filled with genuine mirth.
“Ya only sent twenty? Are ya fuckin’ retarded?”
Sinister was prowling around his table, where most of the staff had gathered. From what Logan understood of the man’s “plan”, his minions were to protect Wolverine and the stolen ovum at all costs.
“I’d be running fer the hills, Essex. Yer in fer a world of hurt an’ then I’ll start on ya.”
“Shut up!” Sinister roared weakly, which only made his captive laugh harder.
For some reason, the idiot had sent his mutant friends away for a few hours, leaving him more than a little vulnerable. Because Storm and the X-Men were causing a ruckus upstairs, they had ceased their torture of him. Which was a very large mistake on Sinister’s part.
Logan concentrated on moving his arm until he caught the IV tube on his arm restraint. Once it was out, his body began to heal, driving out the effects of the drugs they used on him. Not only did Sinister have the common sense of a rock, he was arrogant as hell.
He would wait now, patiently. Ororo’s scent was already drifting to him, promising relief. She would free him and once released, Sinister was going to have a very hard, very painful death.
The sound of automatic weaponry briefly frightened Logan. He closed his eyes, repeating over and over “Don’t get hit, ‘Ro. Don’t get hit.”
“Cheers, ya barmy wankers!”
Hi, Bets.
A not-so-docile growl. Nice ta hear ya, Hank.
Other sounds melded into one as Logan remained strapped to the table. He heard the resonating of metal on metal and allowed himself to grin. Wolverine had seen Colossus ticked off; it would terrify the devil into confession.
Several of his female guards were tossed negligently aside. Someone was standing behind him, though in the myriad of familiar scents of his friends, fear, and mutations, it was difficult to see who was rescuing him.
The metal holding him to his private torture chamber released, allowing Logan to sit up for the first time in nearly a day. He stretched his muscles, glad that his body had time to recover before his rescuers burst into the room.
“Wolverine.”
At his name, he turned to his savior.
“Angel.”
The blonde, angelic mutant thrust his wings out quickly. Logan ducked instinctively, though Angel’s feathers shielded him from the flying debris. In fact, they shielded him from everything. He could not see his captors nor the mutants come to liberate him. He needed to be out there, in the battle, exacting vengeance of his own.
Warren quickly pulled a pair of pants from his open uniform top, handing them to Logan without a word. There was no pity on the young man’s face, only cold, hard determination. Grateful that it wasn’t one of the women, whom would likely cry all over him, Wolverine covered himself and hopped off the bed.
“Son of a bitch!”
Dazzler was yelling at someone.
“You sick, twisted jerkoff.” Ah, Kitten.
“It’s so nice to be surrounded by people that love ya,” Logan said jokingly to Angel.
“Yeah? Well, I’m so ticked off that I mottled on the way over.”
Wolverine raised a brow when his friend revealed several balding spots on his shuddering wings. It was a rare thing indeed to see Angel so worked up. He could be as bad as the Elf with his pacifist attitude.
“Aww, Angelcake. I didn’t know ya cared.”
“Oh hush. I should get Colossus. He took a mean knock to the head with a storage cabinet in his fleshy form.
“Take care of the Tin-Man. I’m goin’ fer Sinister.”
Angel paused, worry creasing his brow. “You should hurry then. Storm and Psylocke were cornering him last I saw. My wife said on no uncertain terms for me to keep my shiny halo out of it.”
Logan was off the table and tearing through the lab before his friend finished speaking. He darted around empty lab tables, bubbling chemistry kits and cryogenic chambers. He spotted Dazzler and Shadowcat working as a flawless tag team on the two security guards. Iceman was giving the malicious nurses something to think about before they went raping mutants again.
Glancing at the cyro chamber, he halted himself. If he knew Storm, she would destroy the lab without thinking. As soon as she found him, she’d be on his ass to get out. Only when the team was out and the lab destroyed would she realize what she had done.
His beautiful Windrider would simply accept it as her fate. But Logan wasn’t going to.
He searched the thick glass doors for signs of her telltale number. He heard someone scream, but determined quickly that it wasn’t one of his own. He raced down long rows of storage chambers, trying to not think about what Ororo was doing wherever she and Betsy had run off to.
With a sharp cry of triumph, he found the door. Popping the lock with a single claw, he wrenched it open. Paying no mind to the cold, which might damage his already exhausted body, he reached in to pull the drawer out. He grit his teeth through the pain.
Lying innocently in three marked test tubes were Ororo’s eggs, her hope as she had told him that wintry night in Alaska. Logan took them out carefully, wrapping his hand around the thin glass and hoping he wouldn’t break it.
When Logan was off again, trying to locate his lover amid the dying battle, he came face to face with Beast. Seeing his friend as a savior, he gently, almost reverently dropped the three slender tubes into his furry palm.
“Don’t drop those.”
Beast’s eyes welled with tears. Realization dawned on the blue mutant’s face. He covered the tubes with both hands. “I would sooner rip my own heart out.”
Understand swelled between the two men for an instant. “Get the kids outta here. All of ‘em.”
“What about Storm and Psylocke? Sinister?”
Wolverine carefully unsheathed his claws, a feral growl leaving his throat.
“Leave ‘em ta me. We’ve gotta score ta settle.”
~**~
Locating two women and a sinister madman was not as hard as he thought it would be. Wolverine came around a corner of filling cabinets to see Psylocke on Sinister’s back.
And Storm in a heap on the floor.
She was moving, he could hear the ragged breath leaving her lips, but still rage overtook him. Even as Psylocke jammed a high voltage psi-blade into the back of Sinister’s neck, Logan roared.
The sound ricocheted on the walls until he thought it would shatter glass. A startled Sinister and Psylocke paused mid-battle to turn on him. Sinister thrust his hands out, a bright bolt of something that just smelled mean came directly at the snarling Wolverine.
Rushing across the room, Wolverine pounced on the man responsible for so much pain. Psylocke leapt from his back, rushing across the room to Ororo. But Logan’s sole concern was the evil before him.
“I told ya she’d come with hell.”
Sinister did not look afraid or even amused. Logan growled.
“Do you think you can kill me, Wolverine?” he said mildly. “I have accumulated powers unlike any you have seen.”
“Oh yeah?” Wolverine rasped, allowing the beast to come to the surface. “Ya ain’t seen nothin’, bub.”
At the first flash of adamantium, he heard Ororo call his name. He didn’t know what Sinister had done to her this time, but the rage it created was Wolverine’s weapon. Crimson over his vision, Wolverine fell on his captor.
“Ya like guttin’ women? Rapin’ ‘em of somethin’ ain’t yers? Ya picked the wrong mutants, asshole!”
“Wolverine!”
“Kinda busy, Bets!”
Sinister dodged Logan’s claws for several seconds, but the animal was alive inside of the feral. He was all instinct, all millions of years of survival. He sliced through Sinister’s forearm quickly, watching as blood poured from the wound.
To his horror, the wound stitched up faster than Logan’s healing factor.
“What the…?”
He was jolted across the room by the same beam he’d avoided earlier. It felt like pure chaos, ripping through him like an electric bolt.
Landing in a heap beside the girls, Logan opened his eyes to find Storm over him.
“Hey, darlin’.”
“Hi, baby,” she smiled softly. He smelled no blood from her and the way her eyes flashed ensured him that she was all right.
“He repairs at the molecular level,” Psylocke said as Sinister laughed manically.
“Why do the villains gotta do that?” Wolverine asked no on in particular.
“Logan, take his head off.” Storm said quietly making the other two stare at her. “Nothing with higher brain function can live without thought. Even if he does repair himself…”
“Without a head, there isn’t much he can do.” Psylocke finished.
“Feelin’ frisky, ‘Ro?” Logan asked, raising a brow.
She mirrored his expression. “How frisky?”
“Offensive Pattern Delta.”
Both women smirked at the exact same moment, their eyes gleaming wickedly.
“Bets, take point. ‘Ro, yer bait. I’ll finish the job.”
They broke apart quickly. Psylocke and Wolverine went opposite directions, claws and blades gleaming from their hands as they stalked their prey. Storm stood shakily as ozone filled the air. When Wolverine glanced at her, he saw she was channeling lightning into her already charged body, her glowing eyes fixed on Sinister with hatred.
“I normally abhor murder,” she said in a ringing tone. “But you are not human enough to warrant mercy.”
Her deliberately taunting words drew Sinister’s attention to her. Psylocke brought up one of her most deadly blade, evidenced by the shivering aura of it.
Never, in all his life, had Logan believed the old adage “Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned.” He didn’t know if it completely applied here, but he was suddenly certain that not even all the demons of hell would want to come face to face with these two.
Rage was etched into their bodies, radiating from every move of their muscles. Though neither of them was particularly fond of killing, they knew what had to be done.
Three victims faced their tormentor without fear, without pain. There was only fury, only vengeance and the need to exact it on those who could not. Logan nodded slowly to Psylocke and the agile woman leapt onto Sinister’s back.
Her war cry would have been amusing had it not scared Wolverine shitless for a moment. Her blade plunged into Sinister’s neck, the jolt sending him into immediate seizure. Without so much as missing a beat, a flash of lightning like the wrath of God came down on the man, narrowly missing Psylocke as she jumped out of the way.
Now, it was Logan’s turn.
As Sinister fell onto his back, shaking and frothing at the mouth as his body was ravaged by the mental and electrical attacks, Wolverine advanced. He stepped onto the sadistic bastard’s chest, his claws gleaming in the dim light.
“Yer gonna remember us in hell, you son of a bitch.”
There was genuine, mortal fear in Sinister’s eyes as Logan’s claws swept sharply downward. He made no sound when the severed head flopped away from the still-seizing body.
All was quiet. Like gentle night, there was little sound around them now. Occasional whimpers came from the immediate area, along with falling debris and groaning metal. Slowly, Logan turned to the two women who shared his kill.
There was no remorse or regret in their eyes. Release from the horror was palpable, even when his eyes met the flashing blue of Storm’s.
Without saying a word, he reached out. She moved to him with a limp, stepping carefully over the body on the ground. Psylocke came up to Logan’s other side as Ororo’s fingers threaded with his.
Together, they walked out of the lab in silence and left their demons behind.
