vail_kagami | Marvel 616 Fic: Undo

summary and story information this way

This time, when they throw him to the ground, he can’t even make a move to stop his fall. None at all. He hits the floor hard (concrete, slightly damp; a basement) and lies there, willing his body to move and managing no more than the twitch of a finger.

The kicks start raining down on him seconds later. It begins with a boot to his back, hard enough to maybe crack a rib or two, and before he can find his breath through the pain, the next boot hits him, and the next, kicking him in the stomach, the chest, the back and shoulders. Not holding back, either. They mean to hurt him badly, possibly kill him. But not at once; all three of them avoid hitting his head.

They want something from him still. He doesn’t know what. (He fears he does but there is no reason to fear this, is there, if he couldn’t do it even if he wanted to–)

He waits for death. Hopes for it. Whatever they want, they can’t get it if they kill him. He tries to throw himself into their kicks and punches, but his body won’t move. It has never been this bad before when they drugged him; they got better, or maybe they worked up to this. It’s like being trapped in a prison for flesh and broken bones and his mind is still so terribly, terribly clear.

(He thinks, Steve.)

His sense of time is as sharp as ever. He knows exactly how many minutes and seconds pass until they stop, and when they reach for him and pull him up, the touch of their hands terrifies him in a way their boots didn’t.

He can barely see, but he makes out enough. The surface they place him on is hard and cold and shaped like a dentist’s chair. He thinks he might have screamed in terror if he’d had the strength or the air. Maybe he coughs instead. (Maybe he doesn’t.)

The stabbing pain of the needles in his arm is almost drowned out by everything else and yet strangely sharp, as if it is the only thing that matters. Until they touch his neck. Until they jam something into his spine and his whole world goes white.

It takes a goddamn week to find Tony, and when they finally do, it’s almost too late. Almost too late to save his life, and definitely too late to get the ones who did this to him. The people who took Tony from right under their noses, who took him from Steve while Steve was less than twenty feet away and utterly clueless. (He didn’t even realize Tony was missing for another thirty minutes.)

The people Steve has wanted to get into his grasp for seven days.

Not for revenge. That would be wrong, wouldn’t make him better than the average villain. Revenge is never a good reason to do anything, and Captain America knows that, of course he does. But when they finally find Tony and he’s lying pale and broken in that monstrosity of a chair, attached to a monstrosity of a machine, not moving, Steve Rogers has a hard time remembering why.

They lift Tony off the thing, and they have to be careful because there are broken bones—a lot of broken bones—and there are wires leading into his body, tubes in his arms that they have to pull out and don’t know what they are for and Tony doesn’t move. He doesn’t open his eyes and tell them what to do and that he’s going to be okay. He just lies there.

There’s a heavy hand on Steve’s shoulder; it’s probably Sam, and Steve feels grateful because the simple contact keeps him from losing it when, for a long, horrible moment, he thinks Tony is dead and sees the future stretching out before him endlessly; the first, icy breath of grief.

Then they lift Tony’s head and there’s something embedded in his neck that makes a terrible sound as they slide it out and someone says something about Tony’s spinal cord and how they don’t know what this thing did to him. There’s a large machine, like a computer, like something out of a horror movie, but it’s turned off and cold like everything else. The kidnappers did something to Tony, used him somehow, and when they were done they left him behind like so much garbage.

They didn’t even care enough to make sure he’s dead. Because he isn’t. He’s alive, he’s breathing—when Steve stands very close to him and everyone is quiet for a blessed second, between one heartbeat and the next, Steve can hear his breath, soft and rattling from the blood in his lungs, but there. He holds Tony’s hand as they wheel him outside to where the ambulance is waiting, trying not to get in the way of the paramedics yet unable to let go. As though if Steve lets them, they might take him away again and not give him back.

Tony’s left hand is utterly still as Steve lifts it to his face and presses it to his lips. The right hand is broken, the fingers twisted and ivory bone just barely visible through the dried blood on the back. It’s okay. Tony is left-handed. It’s going to be okay.

There’s blood on Tony’s lips.

The doors of the ambulance slam closed and shut the world out.

Waiting is always the worst, and it seems that in the past several days it’s all Steve has done. Waiting for Tony to show up. Waiting for anyone to find a clue to what happened to him. Waiting until they figured out from the clues where he was being held. Waiting for the jet to get them there. Now, he’s waiting for Tony to wake up, for Steve to be allowed to see him, for the doctors to give him news, good or bad. He stares out of the window waiting for the night to end.

At dawn, a doctor comes and tells him: Yes, Tony is going to live. No, he hasn’t woken up yet. No, Steve can’t see him.

When she’s gone, Steve sits down for the first time in hours, relieved and lost, out of place.

Jan’s hand on his shoulder is small and fragile. “Tony is going to be okay. You heard the doctor.” It’s supposed to be comforting. Maybe for both of them.

“She said he’s going to live,” Steve corrects her. “Not that he will be okay.” They don’t know enough yet because no one will tell them. Jan falls silent and together they resume waiting.

The people who did this to Tony are still out there, and Steve is not looking for them. He stares at his hands, willing them to unclench, but they don’t. Jan’s head lists to the side when she falls asleep after hours of being here. Two other people enter the small waiting room, a mother and son by the look of it, and they keep staring with wide eyes at the superheroes’ bright costumes until Steve stares back and they flee.

Just after eight a.m. Pepper Potts calls, asking for news, but Steve has little to give her. She’s on her way, but on the other side of the country. Steve wants to tell her there’s nothing she can do when she’s here but hangs up with only a sound of acknowledgement.

Just after nine he’s finally allowed to see Tony, but not to be with him. He stands outside the room in the ICU and watches through the window as a nurse checks all the machines surrounding Tony’s bed and then leaves. She greets Steve when she passes him and Tony is on life-support, with a tube down his throat and needles in his arms and wires everywhere. Steve thinks of the machine they found him in and all the things it did to him that they don’t know about. He still looks vulnerable and defenseless: pale, thin, and fragile. Like this bed is something Steve has to save him from.

He’s still standing frozen in front of the window when Maria Hill walks up to him what feels like hours later but probably isn’t. Steve acknowledges her presence with a nod.

For a moment they watch Tony together, and Steve briefly thinks about how Maria once had something with Tony; how Tony doesn’t remember and Maria doesn’t care. But maybe she cares about Tony nonetheless and Steve should have called her and given her something other than what the news might be saying.

“How is he?” she eventually asks. Chances are she already knows, but then, Maria is not one to waste time with redundancy.

“Broken ribs,” Steve tells her. “Punctured lung. Cracked collarbone. Fractured wrist and seven broken bones in his right hand. Dislocated knee, shattered ankle. Internal bleeding.” He shrugs, feeling helpless in the face of his own words. “He’ll live.”

“Well, obviously.” Maria’s tone is hard to interpret. “When will he wake up?”

“They don’t know. The men who took him did something to him. They drugged him and the doctors don’t know with what. And Extremis changed his body; even if it’s not active anymore, there are still things about his anatomy that aren’t normal. Not to mention the RT. A nurse let slip he would probably have died without it.”

“Keeping him from dying is what the thing is for,” Maria points out, but she obviously knows what Steve means. “Are they all recent injuries?”

She wants to know if they tortured Tony for days or only at the end of it. Steve is glad that he can nod, say “Yes,” even though it’s not the entire truth. Tony is malnourished, has evidently been starved. The broken bones are all new but the fresh bruises layer over older ones and Tony’s wrists are a mess from days of fighting against bonds or handcuffs. But they did not keep him tied up with broken arms for days on end; at least that kind of torture was spared him this time.

“I want him to be taken to the Helicarrier as soon as he can be transported,” Steve finally says. Tony hates hospitals enough as it is, and while he’s guaranteed a single room here, the doctors and nurses are always curious when Tony Stark is involved, and reporters always manage to sneak in.

Most of all, Steve wants him somewhere where he’s safe and among people who can protect him all the time.

Maria nods like she didn’t expect anything else. Out of the corner of his eye, Steve sees her biting her lip, hesitating. She wants to say something and doesn’t know how to bring it up, that much is obvious.

Steve doesn’t know if he wants to hear it. He has to at least ask, though. There might be things he has to do that go beyond standing in front of this window staring at Tony, even if he doesn’t feel up to anything else. “What is it?”

“There’s a lot of press outside. I don’t know how much longer until the first will get in here.”

Steve sighs. He’d expected that but thought they would have a little more time. “We need to make sure they don’t, then.”

“I fear it’s not quite that simple.” Finally, Maria moves and holds something out to Steve; a newspaper, by the look of it. When he reaches out to take it, she says, “There were reporters around when you guys got Tony out. I’m sorry.”

It’s not her fault, of course, so Steve thinks it must be a general expression of sympathy. It’s his own fault, no one else’s. “I didn’t think in that moment,” he admits as he looks at the front page, feeling oddly disconnected from everything. “I should have considered the possibility that someone would snap a photo.”

The picture is black-and-white and a little grainy, the way newspaper prints are, but it shows him clearly enough, sitting beside Tony in the ambulance and pressing Tony’s hand to his lips. The headline leaves little doubt that the reporter interpreted the gesture in exactly the right way.

“There’s little to go on for them,” Maria brings up. “Just this one picture that could mean anything. Leaves a lot of room for denial.”

Steve doesn’t even know how she knows. Or if she’d known before today. She doesn’t seem surprised in any case.

He shakes his head. “We would have made it official eventually anyway,” he tells her. “The time was never right. Now that it’s out, it would be silly to take it back.” He’ll just have to deal with it on his own, then. Deal with the press and everyone else and worry about Tony, who might not wake up for a long time.

But denying it would be like saying there’s something wrong with it, and it’s not like it would make them leave Steve and Tony alone.

Again, Maria doesn’t seem to be surprised by his decision, even though she looks skeptical, probably thinking, like him, about all the ways this can make their lives more difficult.

For now, Steve leaves her standing there and enters Tony’s room, sitting down on a chair by his bedside. Since there is no more reason not to, he takes Tony’s good hand and runs his fingers through his hair and tries to make the best of this one moment he has before he is needed elsewhere.

Tony’s mind swims to the surface and it’s a long time before any conscious thought emerges. His head is a mess, his thoughts jumbled. He seems to be thinking a million things at once but can’t grasp anything.

Eventually, the steady beating of a heart monitor penetrates his awareness. Hospital, then. He opens his eyes with effort and corrects himself: the sickbay onboard the Helicarrier. For a while he tries to remember what went wrong (or right) to land him here this time, but too much thinking makes him sick. He’s pretty sure it’s important – there’s something enormous waiting just outside the grasp of his mind, but whenever he tries to reach for it, the nausea gets worse and he feels like screaming. Like tearing his skin off. It’s driving him crazy.

His head is killing him. The last time it hurt so badly was when…

When Steve had…

“Tony,” Steve says, taking his hand, and Tony blacks out.

The RT in Tony’s chest doesn’t have quite the same regenerative potential the Extremis used to give him, but it still helps him heal at an impressive rate. A normal person would have been bound to the hospital bed for several weeks, if not months. Tony is ready to leave after twelve days. Not healed, far from it—he’ll need crutches for a while, and his skin is still showing traces of the bruises and cuts that used to decorate so much of it—but ready and oh-so-willing to go home.

Steve will take care of him there. At this point there is no use in pretending otherwise. Everyone knows by now, though no one really seems willing to talk about it. Perhaps they were all giving Steve a break while his partner was unconscious and hooked up to machines. Perhaps it has something to do with the way he glared at anyone who looked like they had something to say about his private life, as if it were any of their business.

Some SHIELD agents have given Steve funny looks the past few days, and he knows there is talking behind his back. Fortunately, he has a lot of friends who join him in the glaring game, and he heard that Carol chewed someone who made a stupid joke out on his and Tony’s behalf. Normally, Steve doesn’t appreciate others fighting his battles for him, but this time he simply does not have the energy to deal with all this.

He’s been avoiding journalists for almost two weeks now, and that, he thinks, is quite admirable, since they seem to be anywhere he goes. Except on the Helicarrier, of course. And the lair of Acido the Chemicist, an up-and-coming super villain he fought last week, had been amazingly free of journalists as well.

Funny how that goes.

He’s been called away on missions three times in the last two weeks, and each mission lasted at least two days. It was as if the universe were conspiring to keep him away from Tony as much as possible, even though, from an objective point of view, he didn’t miss much. Every time Tony woke up, his vitals went all over the place, so they kept him in an artificially-induced coma until his body was stronger. Today is the first time Steve even sees him awake, since he only just got back from his latest job, and Tony has barely looked at him so far. He still seems a little out of it; weak, listless and strangely nervous. The fingers of his good hand are tightening around the edge of the examination table he’s sitting on while waiting for the doctor to check him over one last time before he can go home.

Something is wrong with him that goes beyond the lingering pain from his injuries. Once again, Steve wonders, helplessly, what those bastards have done to him.

Unfortunately, none of the recent missions had anything to do with finding them. They are still out there, and Steve won’t rest until he found them and took them out. Tony himself was no help so far—he doesn’t seem to remember anything, although the doctor told Steve that he went pale and twitchy whenever he tried to recall anything and his heart rate did things it wasn’t supposed to do.

The memory will probably come back eventually. And someone should be there for Tony when it does.

He hasn’t spoken a single word since Steve got here ten minutes ago. That, more than anything else, speaks of how damaged he is in ways they cannot see. Usually, no matter how hurt Tony is, or how much something affects him, he will at least pretend. Now he’s not even trying and Steve is more worried by the minute.

He should have been here much more than he was, but Tony knows as well as Steve does that in the life they’ve chosen, being there for friends, lovers or family is one of the aspects of their personal lives they have to sacrifice all too often.

But now he’s here, and Tony is trembling before him, almost imperceptibly, and Steve can do something, even if it’s not much, and certainly not enough. He reaches out to place his hand on Tony’s shoulder; it feels thin and almost brittle under his palm, the lean muscles of his arms worn away by captivity and the hospital bed, and when Steve touches him, he freezes. He doesn’t flinch, he just goes very still, and barely breathes, and looks like he thinks moving will make something terrible happen.

Steve feels his mouth twist into an unhappy line, but that’s okay because Tony can’t see it since he’s not looking up. If this was a normal hospital and a lot of people were not convinced that at this point being here would do Tony more harm than good, they probably wouldn’t have let him go this easily.

“You’re going to be home soon,” Steve tells him, trying to sound reassuring. He looks around, wondering where the doctor is, but a low moan brings his attention right back to Tony. “What’s wrong?” he asks, alarmed.

“I don’t know,” Tony whispers, his voice barely there. He slumps forward, pressing his hands against his temples, and groans loudly. “My head,” he gasps. What color was left in his face drains away and his chest heaves with fast, heavy breaths. Steve fears he is going to throw up. Instead, Tony sinks forward, all tension leaving his body at once. Steve barely manages to catch him before he hits the ground.

“I think it’s Extremis,” Hank says, looking thoughtful. Steve, for his part, looks mostly incredulous.

“You what?”

“It makes sense. There is no physical reason for Tony to have passed out like that,” Hank defends his theory. After a second he amends, “No normal, obvious reason anyway.”

“Extremis is gone.”

“It’s inactive. That’s not the same. And something is definitely going on there. Maybe whatever those people did to Tony woke it up and now he can’t control it. All the electronics surrounding him might have overloaded his consciousness.”

“That’s just a theory.”

“True. But it’s not unlikely, and so far it’s the only one we have.”

Steve looks down at Tony, once again still and unaware on a hospital bed. “So what does that mean? If it really is Extremis, we need to get him away from the electronics until he can control it.”

“Yes. Congratulations: You get to take him home.”

The words take Steve by surprise; usually patients don’t get released from medical care thirty minutes after passing out without warning. But if Hank’s theory is correct, he has to take Tony away from here before he wakes up again.

Hank seems to notice his doubts. “Don’t worry, he’s physically fine. Or not worse than he was before,in any case. He’ll wake up soon, but if anything happens anyway, someone can be there within three minutes.”

“All right,” Steve gives in. He doesn’t really have a good feeling about this, but he wants to take Tony away from here, and if Hank says it’s okay, if the doctors approve, he’s going to do it. Maybe when they are alone, away from all this and in a place where Tony feels safe, he will relax enough to give Steve a chance to figure out what’s wrong with him.

So he carefully gathers Tony in his arms, shifts him until his head is resting against Steve’s shoulder, and carries him out of the room and towards the hangar.

Everything swims into awareness and then Tony finds himself in a bed, staring at the ceiling of a room.

This is his bed, his bedroom in his penthouse in the tower. He doesn’t know why he’s here, hasn’t seen the tower much at all since becoming director of…

No, that’s not right. He’s not director anymore, they gave that position to…

Tony sits up with a start, sudden terror running through him. Osborn is after him and he doesn’t have time to linger here, not in this building, how can he be here, did they get him, get the database…?

He reaches for Extremis and doesn’t find anything. Of course, the virus disabled it and he shudders with the all-too-recent memory of that pain even as he jumps up and out of bed, the pain that shoots up his leg only registering as something that slows him down. He needs his armor, needs–

The virus. Of Skrull origin. Oh God, they have been here all long and he didn’t notice, didn’t see it coming, was too busy hunting down heroes and old friends to notice…

Jarvis is a Skrull. He has been all along and Tony didn’t see it. The horror of the realization makes him feel dizzy. He has to warn everyone, can only hope they will listen–

–and Jarvis gave him a lecture yesterday, like he’s still a little boy, but Jarvis is a Skrull, but Tony doesn’t know that, but he does and it doesn’t make any sense and he falls to the carpet, retching. Nothing comes up.

He feels like shit and everything aches because Cap beat him up; had Vision disable his armor so he could kill him when they met at the mansion who gave him that device it was a trap all along and oh god Bill is dead they should never have let that happen let that abomination happen how could it go so wrong

He must have passed out for a moment. His mind goes blank and when awareness returns he tries to keep it that way, think of nothing. He’s still drenched in sweat, still breathing hard with his heart pounding wildly in his chest. Can’t have been long. Something is wrong with him. Something happened and it’s…

With effort, Tony concentrates only on the here and now. The carpet under his palms as he pushes himself upright. The fading light of dusk filling the room through the large windows. The coolness of the windowpanes. He looks outside and expects to see the city on fire.

Tony swallows drily and struggles to remain upright. He needs to figure out what’s going on, has to find someone who can help him.

The door opens to his touch without resistance; a part of him is surprised, but he refuses to analyze why. Everything is quiet. There is no one around. Maybe the kids are out on a mission, but then why didn’t they take him?

The door to the office is only half-closed, though, and there is light falling through it. As he comes close, Tony can hear the sound of typing, but it’s not Maya he finds when he pushes it open but Steve, staring at the screen of the computer with worry lines etched deep into his face. Tony makes all of two steps into the room, his heart stopping for a second and then doing something painful that makes it hurt to breathe.

Steve is dead. Oh God, he’s dead and it’s Tony’s fault, because and he hates him, maybe he came to talk but why would he now when he was never willing to listen and Tony hopes so much but this is Steve’s office now why wouldn’t he be here and no. No. Steve is dead and everything else doesn’t make sense, happened before, happened a long time ago even if Tony still smells the sweat and the blood and the horrible guilt and triumph after he broke his jaw because Steve is dead and that fact trumps everything, that’s what happened last, that’s what’s final.

Steve is sitting right there. He’s turning around, having noticed he’s not alone, and his damned, beautiful, whole face lights up like he has reason to be happy to see Tony.

“You’re awake,” he acknowledges. And he stands and looms over Tony like he’s going to bring down his shield but he doesn’t carry it and Tony doesn’t understand. “I didn’t… they couldn’t tell me when you’d wake up, and I’m sorry I left you alone, but Sam needed this file ASAP. I was going to come back in a minute.” He takes a step towards Tony and Tony takes a step back and the relief vanishes off Steve’s face as quickly as it came. “Tony, what’s wrong? You look bad, you shouldn’t have gotten up.”

“Who are you?” Tony whispers, his voice struggling through his closing throat.

“Tony?” Alarm and confusion sound in the voice that can only be fake. “I’m Steve. Your—”

“Steve Rogers is dead,” Tony chokes out. “Stop pretending. Stop wearing his face, I know what you a– Ah!” The Steve-thing reaches for Tony and he can’t get out of range in time. His arm is trapped in a vice-like grip that only gets tighter and more painful when he tries to break free and he doesn’t have his armor, doesn’t have anything but his nails and teeth and naked feet. They do little to free him, or kill this thing, or do anything to help anyone and he should have seen this coming, should never have walked into this trap and he can’t breathe. For a while, everything goes white.

Then everything goes black.

When he got involved with Tony Stark, Steve knew he would spend a lot of time in hospital waiting rooms or sitting by the man’s bedside, because Tony has next to no self-preservation instincts and a list of potentially fatal health problems that Steve simply refuses to consider on his better days, for the sake of his own sanity. That doesn’t mean it gets any easier with repetition. By this point, Steve feels worn thin with worry and frustration.

It doesn’t help that no one knows what is actually wrong with Tony, even though Hank and Doc Samson claim to have a theory.

Because Hank’s theory worked so well last time…

At least they didn’t see the need to take Tony anywhere else, but left him in his bedroom. They kicked Steve out while they checked him over, though, and even after he came to, Steve wasn’t allowed in there. Samson wanted to talk to him alone, leaving Steve pacing the corridor and snapping at Hank whenever Hank feels the need to point out that, for all they can tell, Tony is all right.

Tony has always had a somewhat loose definition of “all right”, but even for him, this is pushing it.

Eventually, the door to the bedroom opens and Samson emerges. Steve doesn’t even feel like asking what he’s been discussing with Tony. He tries to brush past the man and into the room, but Samson blocks his way.

“I gave Tony a sedative. He’s asleep.”

“I’ll be quiet,” Steve snaps, and for the sake of the argument makes an effort to snap quietly.

But Samson shakes his head. “I need to talk to you,” he says in a way Steve doesn’t like at all.

They end up talking in the living area, far away from Tony. It would be better than pacing the corridor, but Steve is still pacing, unable to sit still.

“You think he remembers everything?” he asks for the second time. “I thought it was deleted. Lost forever.”

“No data is ever lost forever,” Hank points out. He looks uncomfortable. “If you know where to look, you can reconstruct deleted data from basically any wiped hard drive.”

Steve glares at him. “Tony’s mind is not a hard drive.”

Hank looks even more uncomfortable, but insists on his point. “For all intents and purposes, it is. Or was, when he deleted it. Whatever these people did to him, they have found a way to dig up the deleted files, so to speak.”

“Are you sure?” Steve turns to Samson, his stomach turning with apprehension.

“Yes. He remembers a lot of things he didn’t know before. His memories are definitely back.” Samson doesn’t look like that is a good thing. He looks grim.

Steve stops in his pacing, thinking back to the way Tony had fought him and insisted he was dead. Before he realises what he is doing, he unconsciously pulls the sleeves of his shirt down to hide the already-healing scratches and bite marks Tony left on his arm before he went limp.

Samson notices the gesture; of course he does. “Has he forgotten everything after wiping his memory now?” Steve asks before anyone can say anything. “He thought I was still dead.”

“No, I think he remembers. He’s just overwhelmed. From what I can tell…”

“What?” Steve snaps when Samson trails off.

“From what I can tell, he remembers everything like it only just happened. Everything, you understand? There is not just the grief over your death that is fresh, there’s everything else as well. The emotions simply overwhelmed him, and until he’s worked through that onslaught, that’ll happen again.” Samson leans forward, his green hair falling into his face as he looks up at Steve from his position on the couch. “For the moment, I managed to calm him down with medication, but we can’t leave him drugged forever. And Steve…” The psychologist sighs. “This is going to take time.”

“Something tells me you’re not talking about a week here.”

“No, I’m not. Tony’s memory is a mess. Instead of not remembering anything, he remembers too much, too intensely. He’s feeling the emotional fallout of everything that happened in the time formerly deleted all at once, and… well, very little of what happened then was actually good.”

That is a kind way to put it. Steve wasn’t the only loss Tony suffered in that time, and that’s not even touching all the guilt and self-loathing he felt over what he did during their Civil War. That Tony thought he had to do certain things doesn’t mean he actually wanted to do them. Steve understood that long ago.

Tony has always been fragile, psychologically. He’s battled depression and self-hatred to the point of being downright suicidal for as long as Steve has known him, and the time when they were fighting each other, Steve’s death and everything that came after have been an all-time low for him. Things got so bad that Tony thought deleting his own mind until he forgot how to breathe was a good idea. Steve cannot imagine how it must feel to have all that crash down on him at once, but yeah, he gets that it is bad.

“What can we do?” he asks. It’s the one question that matters right now. There is a problem, and he needs to know what actions he can take to make it go away.

“I’m afraid there is not much you can do, Steve,” Samson tells him. “Except hold his hand and give him something to hold on to until the storm has passed.”

He says it with regret, but Steve only nods. Hold Tony’s hand, keep him stable. He can do that. After all these years, he has finally figured out how.

chapter 2