"I can now." He sucks frosting off the pad of his thumb without any shame, then grins around it. "I got a couple upgrades. I can heal from wounds now if I ever get hurt and..." He nods at the remains of cake. "Now I can eat. It felt like I was missing out on a lot."

Turns out he was. There's something truly satisfying about it, once he got past how strange the feeling of fullness was at first, the extra weight in a place he had never experienced extra weight going.

"I talked to a couple of them," he says, and his tone is neutral at first, but then, "They have no idea what they're doing and I think you're right - recruiting us means that they have someone to put into the line of fire before them.

"Not all of them," he clarifies, because he wants to be fair. "One of them's friends with Hank, she told him about all this."