Warning: Graphic injury and multiple character deaths.

Note: Thanks to PrincessVenture, tinkfan14, and Penguinator27 for reviewing. Yes, PrincessVenture, you're quite right about the medicine, and that's important.

I may as well own up, this chapter was emotionally draining to write and that is why it took so long. I hope it doesn't suck.

As much as I like Twister and look the other way when there are inaccuracies (because of art, brevity, excitement, etc.), I cannot excuse one aspect of the ending: Two people strapping themselves to a pipe while a debris-laden F5 tornado passes right over them, and coming out of it without a scratch? That is unmitigated BS and I am not going to write such a thing here. And it can be pretty well predicted who's going to get hurt. This particular chapter does not deviate too much from what one would expect in this crossover. There is also a little detail in this chapter—a reference/AU carryover from the movie—that I realized, now that this fic is drawing to close, I really wanted to have in this story, and in a more appropriate, nicer way than a snow globe.

This is not the last chapter. What I've previously been calling the epilogue has more or less turned into a proper chapter 15, and that's the last one. There won't be an epilogue now.

The title of the chapter is taken from the instrumental Van Halen track "Respect the Wind." I don't own that either.

Chapter 14: Respecting the Wind

"Hey, you two need to get up. We're about there."

Eugene's eyes snapped open, and the first thing he sensed was that they were rolling along a fairly bumpy stretch of freeway. Lightning was flashing in the distance, the radio was crackling with chatter that he could not yet make out, and something was gripped to his sides, squeezing his torso almost painfully. He couldn't believe he had actually fallen asleep. He must have drifted off after Rapunzel finally fell away from him, while he was holding her close and stroking her soft but now very tangled hair. He looked down at her. Her snake was coiled around one of her ankles, apparently resting as well. He was amazed at Pascal by now; he'd never heard of such a thing, but apparently the animal really did recognize her and understand, on some level, when she was in need of his presence. Eugene then realized that she was the one holding him in a death grip, and her face was very troubled. Her eyes were flitting around behind her eyelids and her face was twitching. She was having a fitful, very uneasy sleep.

"Hey," he said to her, nudging her. "Wake up." As she did, her grip loosened.

"Oh," she moaned as she awoke, burying her face against his chest. She let out a dry sob.

"Nightmare?"

"Mmhmm."

He patted the back of her head. "It's all right," he said. "It wasn't real."

She shook involuntarily in his arms. "But it was about things that are."

Eugene didn't know what to say to that. It'll be all right? He knew from personal experience that it wouldn't be all right for some time, but she did have some things to look forward to, and he was going to remind her of that. "You're leaving all that behind, sweetie," he said. "We're going to the city after this. You'll get a job at the lab"—and almost certainly discover that the directors are your real parents, he thought—"and I'll probably be there too. And we'll go out and be together, if you want."

"Yeah," she said, but it was noncommittal. Something else was wrong, he could tell.

"What is it?" he asked.

"I don't know what happened to her," Rapunzel said. "I mean... I don't see how she could have..." She broke off.

At first he couldn't see how the woman could have survived in the south parking lot either. That was closer to the inner circulation of the tornado. But he knew there were nooks and crannies in all motels built like that one, things like utility closets, places where vending and soda machines were set up...

"She might have, Rapunzel," he said to her. "When we checked the news a couple of hours ago, or however long it was, there were no reports of deaths." That means the Stabbingtons are probably alive too, he thought darkly. Well, they would find out soon enough.

She nodded, apparently mollified by this, and stretched, drawing away from him and sitting upright on the seat. Pascal uncoiled from her ankle and slithered back into his box, darting his tongue out at them. Eugene instantly missed the feel of her warm body against him, but he knew that soon, he would want to take back the wheel. He was far bolder than the others about how close he would be willing to get to a tornado.

"I guess we need to start turning on your sensors," he muttered, reaching for them. The box had been moved into the back seat before they left. They grabbed it by the flaps and lifted it onto the seat between them. She took out about half the sensors, picked up the much lighter box, and unceremoniously dumped the rest on his lap.

"Hey," he complained, grabbing at one before it fell down beneath the seat.

"I want the box empty so they don't get mixed up after we start turning them on," she explained.

He shook his head in exasperation at her perfectionism and began to push the switches on the little sensors, marveling as they lit up with little white LED lights. As soon as one was turned on, Rapunzel or Eugene would drop it back in the box. Despite that there were several score of these little sensors—she really sacrificed a lot of balloon soundings to save up for this, Eugene thought—it did not take them that long to finish the job working together. As soon as the sensors were all lit up and operational, Eugene took out his phone and navigated to his radar application.

"Oh my God," he exclaimed, gaping at the screen. He could not believe his eyes. He blinked and looked at the screen again. There it was. The vivid red and green storm relative velocity couplet blared back at him, and right next to it were readings that he had never seen in his life before. There was only one possible tornado he had ever encountered that could have matched this.

"What?" she asked, leaning over the box to have a look.

"There's a 300 knot shear couplet on there," he said in awe.

"Wow," she said softly. "Is that the ground? That's unbelievable."

"No, it's at the base of the cloud, but still."

He was still gaping at the phone, when suddenly he realized that the tornado—and there had to be a tornado, and a major one, at that—would be visible whenever lightning struck. Night was slowly turning into morning, but it was only 5:00, so it was still very dark. This was ordinarily not a conducive time of day for a tornado to form, but the incredibly unstable environment and the kick of energy from the outflow boundaries had made that irrelevant. He craned his neck to look out the front windshield. This area looked very familiar, but he could not recall where he had seen it. Suddenly a bolt of lightning struck the ground, lighting up everything in front of it, and then he saw it. It was not as massive a wedge as the previous one, but it was much more intense. A cloud of dirt and debris was spinning and churning around the tornado at the surface. They were about ten miles away, Eugene guessed, but he could still see the enormous debris cloud. The tornado was quite possibly digging up the dirt itself.

As he glanced out at the horizon, he realized why this area looked so familiar. "This is where I used to live," he said in a hush.

"What?" Rapunzel asked.

"My parents' homestead was somewhere out here."

"Really?"

"I'm sure of it." He peered out at the prairie and saw an old, dead tree. His heart skipped a beat. He knew that tree. He recognized its shape, the form and location of its branches, and he knew them intimately. Something flashed into his mind, the memory of climbing that tree so many times as a little boy, when it still put out leaves, before the tornado stripped off its bark and killed it. That tree had saved his bag and the last gift his parents had given him. He took a deep, awed breath. This was almost like treading on sacred ground.

"Oh, Eugene," she said, taking his hand and giving him a sympathetic smile. He smiled back. The thought that this was his old stamping ground actually comforted him, however, rather than saddening him.

"Hey Bignose," said Hook over the radio, "are they awake yet?"

"We're up," Eugene called out before Bignose could respond. "We're wide awake and the sensors are all set."

"All right. If you think you can drive, I think we need to pull off and change over. We'll take the snake if you want."

Eugene turned to Rapunzel. "That's her call," he said.

"It's all right with me," she said. "I mean, we're going to be intercepting a tornado and they won't. He'll be safer with them."

"You heard her," Eugene said into the radio. "But you really think I should drive?"

"This is your element, man. You're the Extreme and don't you forget it! You're better than any of us at finding the right spot."

"I agree," chimed in Vladimir over the radio. The rest of the team concurred, even Ulf, who didn't like speaking.

Eugene felt suddenly self-conscious. "Flynn" had always reassured himself of how great he was, and he often had received compliments from people who were awed by his "extreme" storm chasing exploits, but to be complimented like this by people that he regarded as friends was something else. He smiled. "Thanks, guys," he said in surprise.

"Where are they?" Gothel exclaimed, looking out at the dark roads as the pickup truck approached the looming tornado. "I can't believe they wouldn't come out here."

"They're out here somewhere," Edvard growled. "No way in hell Rider'd miss something like this, 'specially if he's got your girl's sensors."

Along the way, the men and Gothel had pieced the facts together, based on what Rapunzel had told them and what Gothel knew she had bought for her for so many years, and they had worked out what the storm chasers likely intended to do. That was something Gothel could work with. Deploying anything would require that they leave the vehicle, giving Gothel a way to save Rapunzel from what she had planned for Flynn. Her intention was for the Stabbingtons to drive as close as they could to the tornado, which would hopefully tempt Flynn to get even closer in an attempt to one-up them in his instrument deployment, and then to snatch Rapunzel away from the danger.

"There they are," Gudric suddenly said, pointing at another road to their left—the freeway, from the look of it. The white Mustang led the way, followed by the battered radar-topped van and the unicorn-painted truck. They were coming at a basically perpendicular angle to the path of the storm, but the Stabbingtons' truck had a closer approach to the tornado.

"Gun it," Edvard ordered his brother, and immediately Gudric stomped the accelerator, making the truck lurch forward and start to cruise at the faster speed. Within seconds, the white Mustang pulled away from the chase caravan, looking very much as if its driver was trying to catch the tornado first. Gothel smiled to herself. So far, so good. People were so predictable.

Eugene could not believe his eyes. The Stabbingtons were out here, trying to chase a tornado that their rip-off instrument cylinder absolutely could not stand up to, and driving in a truck that definitely had both side mirrors missing, from how it looked, and probably had more damage than that. And they were speeding up, taking dead aim directly for the tornado. Approaching it from due east, as they were, rather than southeast from the freeway, they would have difficulty evading the thing if they got in the path. He knew they were idiots, but this really took the cake.

Rapunzel was staring at the swirling mass of wind, water, dirt, and debris as lightning struck around it. "Eugene," she said, "that thing is really dangerous."

Well, that's obvious, he thought. "No kidding," he said, raising an eyebrow at her.

"I'm scared," she said. "Maybe it's just that it's dark and my mind has been thinking dark thoughts already and this is a totally desolate area, but I just feel like... like it's a beast, some kind of wild terror. I don't know if I can go outside and put anything in the path of that. It's almost like... challenging it." Her voice was quiet and strangely calm. It unnerved Eugene, and he gave her an uneasy look.

"It's not alive, you know," he said. "You had to remind me that it wasn't good to look at it as me against the storm in some anthropomorphic way, you know, when the deployment failed. Don't start thinking that way yourself."

She nodded and swallowed hard, looking down. "I just have a really bad feeling about this, is all."

"You are letting your thoughts about everything else get to you. C'mon, Rapunzel, you said in the parking lot that you wanted to do this. I wouldn't have gone along with it otherwise."

"Mother!" Rapunzel suddenly screamed. She gripped the sides of her seat and turned white as the blood drained from her face. "Eugene, she's got to be with them! I don't care if they get picked up by the tornado, but I don't want her to—"

"I'll call them," he said. He still had their numbers in his phone, though the only reason for it was that he was too lazy to ever remove old contacts. He was glad he still had them, though. He didn't try to argue with Rapunzel that this probably wasn't her real mother and certainly didn't try to argue that she was no good and deserved to die too. Even if she wasn't Rapunzel's real mother, even if she wasn't a particularly good person, she was the only mother figure she had ever known—the only person she had known until yesterday—and though he personally didn't care what happened to the woman, he would do this for Rapunzel's sake. Holding the wheel with one hand, he dialed the first Stabbington brother in his contact list and waited.

"You got a lot of nerve calling us," Edvard snarled over the phone after he answered.

"I'm not calling because I give a damn about either of you," Eugene said nastily. "It's for Rapunzel. You got her mom with you?"

"I'm here." Gothel's voice was fainter than the man's, but she was not next to the phone, apparently. Eugene put the phone on speaker and held it out to Rapunzel, keeping his eyes on the road the whole time.

"Mother!" Rapunzel cried, staring out the window as the truck approached the circulation. She winced as the truck swerved to the right and had to jerk hard to get back on the road. "Mother, tell them to turn around and get out of there! You're in danger! It's going northeast and you are going to be really close—"

"Rapunzel, they know what they are doing." Her voice was tight and cold.

"No they don't!" Eugene exclaimed without thinking. "They've done asinine things for years! They're just never gotten anyone killed before because they were lucky."

"Fuck you, Rider," Gudric snarled. Over the phone, Eugene and Rapunzel heard wheels squealing.

"Eugene, be quiet," Rapunzel said in irritation. "Mother, please make them turn around!"

Gothel laughed. "Did your storm chaser put you up to this? He just wants to get all the fame and glory with a closer shot, you know."

"Yeah, Rider's pissed about our instruments and he'll do anything to keep us from deploying. That's all this shit is about."

"You can't deploy it, you idiots!" Eugene shouted. "That one's too strong, and the design is flawed anyway. You're wasting your time!"

"Yeah, yeah," one of them said sarcastically.

"Mother, trust me!" Rapunzel screamed.

"Rapunzel, we're done talking about this."

"But—"

The phone went dead. Rapunzel let out a cry of despair and fear, her eyes glued to the window. The truck passed into an eddy of dust churned up by the tornado and emerged on the other side swerving around the road almost out of control.

"Eugene, the storm's shifting!" she cried. He craned his neck to look at the tornado. It was shifting its path rightward. It would now pass even closer to the truck.

Eugene dialed the number again. "It's a right-mover!" he exclaimed into the phone without any introduction. "Get out of there now!"

"Shut up, Rider. Losing your nerve?" The phone went dead again.

Eugene was about to redial the number one last time, for Rapunzel's sake, when his mouth went dry. The tornado picked the truck up off the ground and lifted it about 100 feet in the air. Rapunzel watched, eyes wide with horror and dread, as it circled the outskirts of the funnel, rising ever so slightly, then began to fall. Time seemed to slow down as the tragedy unfolded before them. Eugene froze, driving as if it were autopilot, holding the phone in hand. His face fell.

The truck crashed to the ground and exploded in a fireball.

Rapunzel let out a cry of despair and buried her face in her hands. Muffled sobs escaped from her. Eugene let his phone fall out of his hand onto the seat and reached out to pat her shoulder. "I'm sorry," he said softly. "I'm so sorry."

"You tried," she whispered, her voice choked with tears. "She just wouldn't listen. She never trusted anyone, even... even me. She always thought"—Rapunzel let out a sob—"that it would save her."

After a moment he spoke again. "Do you want to turn around?"

"No," she said determinedly, wiping her eyes and sitting upright. "We're going to do this."

The tornado was now less than a mile away, and the circulation was starting to blow the car around. Eugene looked ahead, judging the path, and finally spoke. "We're going to cut through the field between the roads," he said. He peered out at the horizon. They would have to park on the side of the road far enough away that it would not get hurled about by the winds, dash ahead into the tornado's expected path, set down the box, and make a run for it back to the car. He took a deep breath. This was going to require hair-trigger timing, but they could do it. At least the car had pep and could get them out of there in a hurry.

Rapunzel nodded, sniffling and taking a deep breath. "Let's do it."

Eugene braked hard, swerved off the road, and began driving along the shoulder as he slowed down. That tornado was ferocious, almost certainly an F5, and he wanted to have a good head start on it. He braked again, stopped the car on the shoulder, and opened the doors. He and Rapunzel grabbed the box of sensors and ran toward the other road as hard as they could.

The tornado shifted its path again, this time back to the left, putting more distance between itself and them. Eugene swore in frustration and ran harder. Rapunzel struggled to keep up. She was dragging him behind, and she knew it and hated it. Now the deployment spot would be in the field on the other side of the road rather than the road itself, and that field was bounded by a barbed-wire fence.

"I think this is private property," Rapunzel remarked as she tried to ease through the fence. Her braid caught on the wire, and she let out a squeal of pain.

Eugene dropped the box and came back to help her. He untangled her hair and helped her the rest of the way through the fence, but the delay had cost them. The tornado was also picking up forward speed.

"Come on!" he exclaimed, grabbing one side of the box. She grabbed the other and began running, trying very hard to keep pace with him this time. They stopped in the middle of the field, which appeared to be a pasture.

Eugene pulled out his phone and dialed the others. "Hey!" he called over the roar of the wind. "Turn on the computer! We're about to go."

"Done," Hook said.

Without hanging up, he turned to Rapunzel. "Come on, let's get out of here!"

They began to run, harder than they had ever run before, at a right angle to the path of the tornado. Eugene could not help himself; he had to watch this to see if it worked. He stopped and whirled around. Rapunzel followed suit. They stared at the tornado as the massive swirling black cloud approached their box of sensors. Rapunzel held her breath.

"Look!" Eugene cried out as the winds made contact. The tornado threw the box around, then immediately picked it up. Rapunzel and Eugene watched as the sensors lofted up into the air, white lights shining like a swarm of fireflies, and began to sparkle from a distance as they passed in and out of debris clouds. The propellers gave them some buoyancy and resistance to the air, making it seem that the lights were almost floating instead of merely being shot around like bullets by the ferocious winds. Her face seemed to light up in joy as the lights went higher and higher in the dark funnel.

"It's beautiful!" she exclaimed, enraptured by the lights. She took his hand.

"We're getting data!" Hook called over the speakerphone, jerking them back to reality.

"Sorry, we can't watch!" Eugene exclaimed, beginning to run again, still holding her hand. She gasped and tried to keep pace with him.

Dirt and bits of plant material began to pelt them. "Run!" Eugene shouted above the roar of the wind, mud and blades of grass marking his boots as he tore through the field. "I think it's getting faster!"

Rapunzel gazed over her shoulder at the tornado. It was not just getting faster. "It's moving back to the right!" she exclaimed.

He whirled around. She was correct. "Oh no," he said. All of a sudden he really did not feel good about this. They couldn't take the same path back to the car that they had before. That would take them too close to the circulation. But a longer return path came with its own set of risks. And the car—but no, Eugene would not think of what might happen if his car were thrown.

They ran hard through the rest of the field. The wind roared, and the size of the debris that the tornado was throwing at them increased. They were now dodging sticks, branches, and what looked very much like gardening tools and fragments of treated wood. At some point along its path, the tornado had apparently hit a building. The realization made Eugene feel ill, but he couldn't think about that right now.

They reached the fence. He quickly leaped over it, but she did not follow. "Eugene!" she cried in terror, and as he turned around, his heart skipped a beat. She was caught by her hair again, this time on two different wires. Eugene stopped, doubled back, and began trying to undo her hair. It was really badly tangled now.

Unidentifiable debris began pelting them as the black funnel approached, leaving small bloody marks on both of them as it hit. Rapunzel began to weep. "I'm so sorry!" she exclaimed. Eugene didn't know what to say. For the first time since this particular chase began, he really was not sure that they were going to survive, but he didn't want to tell her that. He had a feeling she knew it already. But he was not going to abandon her to her fate, tied to a fence by her own hair, while selfishly saving himself. They were in this together.

Suddenly, unbelievably, a set of garden shears dropped a few feet away. Eugene lunged at them, grabbed them as if the tornado would take away the gift it had given—which it very well might—and without even thinking about it, sliced through the golden braid, cropping her hair only a few inches away from her scalp. He tossed the shears aside and helped her through the fence. "Come on!" he exclaimed. They stood up, but immediately were knocked over as something hit them. It was a piece of tire. Eugene tried to stand up again, but the wind was now too strong. Pieces of small debris were hitting both of them, leaving bruises and scrapes as they dug into their battered bodies.

He frantically looked around for something, anything, to crawl under, and noticed a big drainage pipe running under a bridge on the road. The pipe looked to be about 30 feet long and was about four feet high. It would be a tight fit, but they had nothing else. Eugene and Rapunzel crawled into the pipe, trying to get as close to the center as possible, and gazed at each other. Sheer terror was in her face.

"Eugene," she whimpered, curling against him and holding him as tight as she could. He gripped her firmly.

"I'm not letting go," he said. "Understand? Whatever happens."

She nodded, seemingly calmed by his words. "Whatever happens."

They stared out the end of the pipe that faced the field. The tornado drew closer and closer, the roar increasing as it came, until finally there was nothing visible out there but the fierce black debris cloud. Bits of destroyed material danced around at the end of the pipe, rattling the metal, but they could hear very little now except the roar, that unearthly roar. The ground and the metal pipe began to vibrate above them. Winds blasted down the pipe, making whistling and moaning sounds against the metal wall as if it were part of some giant pipe organ. Eugene stretched out his legs to brace himself against both sides of the pipe. They clutched each other tighter. Unable to stand looking at it any longer, Rapunzel buried her face in his right shoulder.

Then it happened. A thud. A gasp. Eugene was jerked backward by something and slammed against the metal. A cry of sheer, unreserved agony escaped his lips, and he doubled over. Something hot and wet splashed in Rapunzel's face. She snapped her head up and gasped in horror. A piece of metal had impelled itself into his left shoulder, poking all the way through his body, and blood was pouring out of the wound, spurting everywhere. His jacket and shirt were becoming stained bright red. Without thinking, Rapunzel moved to take the metal in her hands.

"Don't take it out," he gasped. She realized what would happen if she removed the object and drew away. The wind continued to howl, completely oblivious to what was happening inside the little pipe, an uncaring, nonliving force of nature.

Rapunzel frantically looked around for something that she could use as a tourniquet. There was nothing except the clothes on her back. Without a thought, she removed the shirt she was wearing, his shirt, and tied it around the wound as tightly as she could. It was not a good place for a wound. The tourniquet was barely above the wound, but Rapunzel could not get it any farther away. The blood stopped spurting through the air as she tied off the shirt, but it still flowed at an alarming rate, soaking his clothes. Her hands were sticky and red, but she didn't think of that—except for the fact that this was his blood, his life fluid, covering her hands. Eugene was turning white and his breaths were becoming shallower. The wind was slacking off, at least. The tornado was passing. They could hear each other.

"Rapunzel—" he gasped out. There was a note of farewell in his voice, and it sent a chill over her body.

"Don't you die on me!" she shouted. "Don't you dare die on me, Eugene!"

"Rapunzel—you have to tell the lab directors about your life—the cabin and your mom and everything. You'll understand why after you do it. Tell them everything. The flower. The medicine."

"The medicine!" she screamed suddenly. She had used that medicine a lot as a little girl for scratches and splinters that she picked up around the wooden cabin. It could help blood coagulate. She didn't know if it would work for a wound like this, but she had to try. Did he have his satchel? She looked around. There it was! She frantically opened the flap and fumbled around for the little bottle that he had—thank God, she thought—stolen from her dresser yesterday. She opened it. Her hands were shaking as she poured the entire contents of the bottle on Eugene's wounded shoulder.

Instantly the blood flow began to moderate. Blood began to collect around the wound, helping to seal it off, but Eugene was still deathly white, and his eyes were closed. His breathing was very slow and shallow now. There was no more noise from the outside, and Rapuzel vaguely noticed that debris was no longer churning outside the other end of the pipe. The sky was becoming brighter as the sun rose. The sight was disgusting to her, a cruel mockery.

"Rapunzel, look at me," he whispered, forcing his eyes open. She held his wrist, feeling the faint, slow heartbeat, and looked miserably at his face. Tears fell from her eyes and landed on his cheek.

"I love you," she said.

"I love you too," he said, struggling to speak. He closed his eyes and exhaled.

She drew back in horror and utter, raw grief. "No," she said dumbly. "No. Eugene, please don't leave me," she whispered. "Please. Please don't." She leaned over his body. There was no breathing, and the heartbeat was very, very faint.

Rapunzel knew nothing about CPR or emergency resuscitation, but she did know that she was not going to let him go without a fight. Eugene wasn't breathing and his heart was barely working, but she could make him breathe. She could force his heart to pump. She leaned over him and began mouthing air into his body, pushing his chest periodically. His heartbeat became a little stronger, but he didn't wake up. "No," she cried in between pushes and breaths. "No." Hope was leaving her, but she just couldn't stop. Something told her to keep going. She couldn't just let him go.

"Eugene," she finally cried out, collapsing against his shoulder and sobbing into his neck.

Then she felt arms gripping her back. Movement. Intention. Life.

"Rapunzel," he said hoarsely.

"Eugene?" she whispered, hardly believing. She drew back and looked at him. He was still ghostly white, and very, very weak, but he was alive. Breathing. Talking.

"I... I said no," he whispered.

"What?"

"You kept crying out for me and I told them no. I need to be here with you."

She wiped away tears. He didn't seem to be making a lot of sense, and she had no idea what he was trying to tell her, but that wasn't what she was thinking about right now. What mattered was that he was still alive. "Eugene, you've got to get to a hospital," she said. Always practical, she pulled out his satchel, now spattered with his blood, and took out his phone.

"I'm not dying now," he said, a bit of a laugh in his words, though his voice was still very weak. "I don't know how... but they said so."

"Eugene, what do you mean?"

"My parents."

She pulled away and stared at him open-mouthed. "Eugene, do you really think...?"

"Yes. I do." He took the phone away from her, dialed a number, and handed it back to her. "Here. You handle it."

She barely remembered what she told the dispatcher on the phone, but apparently it was sufficient to indicate what had happened, because she found herself ending the call and staring at him in almost reverent awe. "You chose me," she whispered to him, caressing his pale cheek.

He smiled back. They could not say anything else to each other, but they did not have to. They stayed like that until the ambulance arrived.

End note: In case it's not blindingly obvious, Eugene had a near-death experience. And from what I know of the topic, apparently it's not at all uncommon for "miraculous" spontaneous remissions and healings to occur in conjunction with them. So that's what I'm going with.

One more chapter left. I feel a little wistful about it.