Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

In the burned house I am eating breakfast.

You understand: there is no house,  there is no breakfast,

yet here I am.

Ha! That’s my superpower. I’m a pick-a-path adventure where every choice ends in tragedy 

Wade puts a bullet in the chamber.

At the sound of the cock of the gun, Spider-Man shifts from where he’s standing in the corner, arms of justice crossed, shoulders of righteousness stiff, his fine fucking jawline tense beneath his mask.

“Deadpool--” He warns, and Wade rolls his eyes beneath his own mask.

“You asked me to help.” He says neutrally. Which maybe isn’t true. But that’s what it is, for the moment. “I’m helping.” 

“I don’t--” Spider-Man is uneasy. It's not new.

“Relax.” Wade clicks the trigger. Spidey flinches, but the gun doesn’t go off. It’s a new piece, but, “It’s jammed, Princess.”

“Don’t call me that.”

“I like how that’s all you got out of that.” Wade comments, and is delighted to feel Spidey’s glare sharpen.

“Please do not do anything I wouldn't do.” Spider-Man warns, crossing his arms again. Muscles. Nice.

"You got it, boss."

Wade soups on half a smile. Gun in hand, he moves to the other side of the room away from Spidey. His footsteps echo on the cement ground.

Tied to the chair in the middle of this conveniently abandoned warehouse is the guy that’s going to get them on the ground floor of the Canadian-based smuggling ring that both Wade and Spider-Man are trying to take down. Their team-up wasn’t planned, much to Wade’s delight and Spidey’s chagrin. Wade is here because...money. Spider-Man doesn’t know that there’s a hit involved here. Shh. Spider-Man is here because of something about cleaning up the streets of Brooklyn. Wade wasn’t listening; he wasn’t expected to, anyway, and isn’t really here for Spider-Man’s benefit. But, look, we’ll get to that in a second.

Wade reaches out and removes the duct tape from the tied-up guy’s mouth. “Make a sound and I’ll gut you.” He offers cheerily, absently noting that the duct tape had removed a good third of the man’s goatee. Solid.

“He won’t gut you.” Spidey cuts in immediately from his high horse over in the corner.

Wade winks beneath the mask and shares a conspiratorial look with the tied-up guy. “Isn’t he cute?” He says, and sobers. “Tell us what you know and it won’t even be an issue.”

The guy, let’s call him Craig, his eyes bulge. He’s a weak fucking grunt and, frankly, wasting Wade’s time. Wade is technically on assignment. In any other situation Wade would take his sweet ass time with this interrogation, but he doesn’t want to. Doesn’t care to. Craig has a rap sheet miles long; fifteen years of playing carrier pigeon to rapists and terrorists. It makes his stomach hot just thinking about it.

“I got nothin’” Craig says in his friendly, warm, Brooklyn accent. He spits in Wade’s face.

Wade clicks the trigger. Craig flinches backward hard with a wet little gasp. “Jesus,” he says, reeling back. It makes something malignant in Wade’s heart happy, makes laughter bubble around his lips.

“Wrong answer.” Wade replies.

“Dude, fuck you.”

Click. The gun shakes a little in Wade’s hand. Craig flinches like fuck again, Wade laughs again, slick smile, aching grin, hand curled around gunpowder and illegal fire. Lather. Rinse.

“Try again.”

“The damn thing’s jammed.” Craig says smugly, though he’s out of breath, sweating. His face has no color. “You’re not scaring me.”

Mildly, Wade replies. “Shit. You’re right.” He jokes, removes a glove. Expert fingers (conditioned in six months under the command of a slightly staff sergeant who taught Wade how to kill and taught him how to prioritize in the same breath) sweep the barrel from the muzzle to the rear sight. The bullet in the chamber tinkles to the floor. Wade sweeps a finger into the blockage, resets the cartridge, lifts the magazine release. He takes a bullet out, two, three, reloads.

It takes seconds. Fuck that dishonorable discharge.

“Deadpool, what--” Spidey starts, stops.

The Glock .22 goes back together just as easily as it was taken apart.

Click.

Wade loads a bullet into the chamber.

“Deadpool.” Spidey warns, voice gone flat. The gun is a weapon now. Who knew.

“You ain’t special, buddy.” Wade levels. “You’ve got ten seconds and then I’m going to find someone useful to answer my questions.”

“He wouldn’t.” Craig jerks his head back. “He won’t let you.” Spider-Man shifts in the background. Wade catches his uneasy gaze for a moment, two.

“Right again, buddy.” Wade lowers the gun a level.

(One two Wilson, take a breath in before you pull that trigger, if you don’t get it right the first time you won’t get a second.)

Click. The gun connects this time.

Craig starts screaming. The conveniently empty warehouse echoes the sound for a long time, and Wade’s ears ring. Across the room, Spider-Man jumps, surprised.

"What the hell are you doing?" Spidey shouts, over the yelling. 

"Just relax." Wade replies, waving the gun around. "It's a, um, a flesh wound." He says, without looking.

Craig’s screams form words. “You fucking shot me?” His agony bursts into his voice. Blood wells up, up from the wound on his thigh. Wade might have hit an artery. Craig’s got fifteen, twenty minutes to live. Maybe forty-five if he’s extra special lucky. Whoops. 

“I’m not him. For the last fucking time.” Wade says gesturing toward the back of the room. Spidey has unstuck himself from the corner, but hasn’t come too close. It’s cute; Spider-Man “doesn’t trust” Wade Wilson. Doesn’t like him. Doesn’t want to team-up or hang out or whatever, but right now Wade is convenient. Wade does the nasty business and so long as he doesn’t kill anybody he’ll still be useful when Spider-Man doesn’t have any other options.

Hell, even if Wade does kill someone, he’ll still come crawling back. Fucking black and white morals stay clean, and Wade just wastes a bullet.

Craig is still screaming. It takes Wade a moment to realize that some people have never been shot before, and don’t know what it feels like.

“You have another thigh.” Wade reminds him.

“Okay, fuck, okay, I’ll fucking tell you. Just don’t. Don’t shoot me again.” His pupils have blown wide. Shock. The man’s probably going to be hypovolemic in a few minutes.

Spidey, Pontius Pilate that he is, is still in the corner, and can’t tell.

Craig gasps heavy air into his lungs. “It’s Fridays. At the docks. Sutherland checks production numbers himself. Doesn’t trust others to do it for him. You’ll find him in the stockyard office and everything else on the ship.” Craig pauses. “He’ll be protected. Automatics. He hires out.”

“That it?” Wade says after a moment.

Craig is crying.  “Yes. Yes, yes that’s it. Please, I swear. Please, take--” He cuts off abruptly, as Wade has very, very gently put the gun to his lips.

“It's gonna be okay.” Wade says. Craig’s wild eyes meet his for a moment, and then...

Click.

His brains explode outward.

Wade took his first life at seven years old.

It was a cold winter, and Wade was hungry, constantly hungry. It was a type of ache that made the cold sink into the pit of his stomach and get stuck there. Dad had a new girlfriend and a new addiction and Wade had sleep for dinner because when she was around, the door to his bedroom got locked.

The loneliness was colder than anything a Canadian winter could throw at him through his threadbare gloves. At school he was bitter, cold into his bones, endothermic. Some might have called him a cute kid, big eyes and pert nose, ten tiny fingers shoved into pockets, shoulders hunched because when he was smaller he wasn’t in the way.

At seven Wade was frostbitten.

At seven he called the kid at recess a cocksucker because he didn't know what it meant, just knew that it was what adults call kids when they’ve been bad. Wade called Billy Bert a cocksucker because Billy Bert had big fists and played kickball like a bully: he slide-tackled the new girl at recess when she was not paying attention. The new girl went down and started to cry, bloodied leg filled with recess mud and upturned grass. Billy just grinned behind his scarf, and Wade watched the girl cry for an indeterminate amount of time before Billy said, “What’s the matter, Wilson? You gonna cry too?”

Wade turned his pert nose up, rose to his full height, set his shoulders. Billy Bert was not the most fearsome person Wade had ever met.

Besides, Wade knew how to take a punch.

By the end of it, Wade was sitting in the headmaster’s office with an ice pack to his knuckles, and Billy was crying sitting next to him. He asked his mom what a cocksucker was, and that was about the time that Mr. Wilson came in.

Wade’s dad was a hell of a man, built like a trucker and mean like the opposite of every Canadian stereotype. He looked like Wade, set shoulders, dark blond hair. When Wade used to be allowed to meet his dad’s new girlfriends, they told him he was cute, going to grow up handsome and big and strong and just like his father.

Dad took shifts at the lumberyard when he felt like it or when he was out of coke. The only time Wade was allowed to watch cartoons was when his dad passed out, high, in front of He Man: Master of the Universe. It was Wade’s favorite TV show.

Now, Dad was sober, surprising for noon on a Tuesday, and after Wade got suspended the car ride home was quiet. Wade learned, in those precious few moments, to be afraid of the sobriety.

He climbed in the cab of Dad’s truck and waited. Dad buckled in, turned the ignition, and eased out of the parking lot. It was so quiet that Wade focused on counting his breaths. The heat was broken in the old truck, and it was easy to see the steam from his mouth float into the air. In and out. Dad gripped the steering wheel and the car hit a bump.

It made Wade’s heart thump in his chest, made his blood turn colder, because with each moment Wade was relearning everything that had been beat into him; be quiet, be small, don’t make impact.

Dad said Wade didn’t know how to shut up, but words were all Wade had. Seven years old and small and hungry, his mother six months in the ground and his father in several shattered pieces. Wade’s hands were too small to defend himself. It was before he knew how this world worked--small people get swallowed. Quiet people don't get listened to. If a tree falls in a forest and no one is around to hear it, it does not make a sound.

People don't like a mercenary with a mouth, but they don't get a choice, either.

“I’m sorry.” He whined then, tears heavy in his eyes.

Dad didn’t flinch or acknowledge him, His mouth was set in a line. Wade had never heard Dad be quiet like this, except after Mom died, during those long months where Wade’s whole world was flayed open and his father didn’t like looking at him or talking to him or taking him to the store to get new shoes.

In the stretching silence that ached on after his apology, his dad shifted in his seat. “You’re sorry.” Dad replied, dull and flat.

And then his foot shifted off the accelerator and the brakes on that old truck shrieked as they slammed.

Wade was not wearing a seatbelt because the one on the passenger seat side was broken. He was too small, too tiny, and inertia cracked him hard into the dash.

There was a screaming agony inside him--a triple fracture in his left arm, he learned later. Wade was seven and knew the taste of his own blood, knew the cold, knew hunger and loneliness as if they were two sides of the same coin.

He dad watched him calmly in the stopped truck, the road around them silent and deserted, “You’re sorry.” Dad repeated in that same, dull tone and Wade started crying in earnest.

Dad took him home and locked him into his room for three days on the pain of a broken arm and a concussion.

On the third he took Wade to the ER and they spent eight screaming hours in silence while his arm got fixed. Dad filled the pain medication prescription and pocketed it before driving them back home.

When Wade got back to his room, broiling, rolling, freezing with hunger, he crawled beneath his bed to where his father wouldn’t see him, to where he kept his scraps from meals past. His arm hurt so much he didn’t want it attached anymore, and he wanted his mother more than he had ever wanted any sort of food. Curled beneath his own bed in his own house, Wade wanted to go home.

When he got to the cardboard box where he had stashed some stolen goods from last Halloween, all he found was a dead rat sprawled among the ruins of the wrapper of his last candy bar.

Wade took his first life at seven years old.

Throbbing and cowering beneath his own bed, Wade started crying again, seven years old and looking death down the throat and finding it a gaping, gnawing maw. He remembers this moment as an adult as an abstract sort of thing, not even sure if it’s real or not. Weapon X could have planted the memory, or the carcass he found could have been real. Wade still counts it as his first hit, the first body on his count, though he has long since lost count of how many have found death at his hands.

At the time, it had been four days since Wade ate more than crackers and more days than that since Wade had had enough to eat to actually save any of it. The rat must have starved, stuck in this dead room underneath an old bed, locked inside cold cardboard, with nobody to feed it or care for it.

That’s life, Wade thought. The small get swallowed, and Wade had to learn with each grueling moment of his life how to be big.

When he got back to school, Billy Bert signed his cast.

Bert said “Sorry,” and Wade watched him sprawl his own name in sharpie. Wade’s heart burst outward in rawness, and beneath it, beneath it all was a foreign emotion that plastered a desert into his throat and fire beneath his fingernails. He clenched his fist around the pain of a triple fracture and made his throat rasp a “thank you,” as if someone or something in his life had ever taught him how to be grateful at all.

Wade’s got three Quarter Pounders with cheese hidden around his person, and he’s perched on the hot roof of a midstreet Italian kitchen somewhere in Midtown. He’s munching a forth, humming contentedly around the trans fats, when from behind him comes a, “What the hell do you think you’re doing?”

It comes out scraped up and raw, from a voice who obviously still thinks he knows the value of a life. It’s kinda irksome, really, the fact that no one thinks Wade knows what human life is worth. He does, for the record. He’s seen it up close. You can’t blow a guys brains out without knowing what every inch of his innards look like.  Wade doesn’t kill people who have human worth, and he knows how to recognize it, or lack thereof. (He's looked in a mirror, after all.)

“Eating McDonald's.” He returns, crumpling up a wrapper. He pulls a somewhat dilapidated burger from his thigh holster, turns, and offers it, “You want one?”

“Absolutely not. Deadpool, I--” Spider-Man starts, and Wade cuts him off with a, “good because I don’t like sharing my food. Get your own, greedy.” He says. “Hey, what time is it? D’you think that place over on 77th is still serving?”

“How do you even have an appetite?” Spider-Man asks in disgust. There’s still blood on his suit.

“Uh. I dunno. Something to do with my enhanced metabolism?” Wade wonders aloud, “I have to eat a certain amount of calories to keep up with it, you know.”

“That’s--”

“Spidey, you got a favorite blood sausage place?” Wade asks, all serious, not even a single grin.

Spidey stops short. “I...” he pauses, mask blank, posture loose and confused. “What?”

Wade snorts a laugh. He plucks the burger from its wrapping. “Get back to me on that, yeah? I’m making a list.”

“A--” Spidey asks again, in that same kind of dazed, hilarious voice. “A list? Of what?”

“Blood sausage places that Spider-Man likes.” Wade replies, and Spider-Man shakes out of it.

“Okay... okay, seriously? Hold on. You just straight up shot a guy in the head in front of me and this is what you think we should talk about?”

“Uh.” Wade levels him a blank look, doesn’t really feel like getting lectured. “Yeah.”

“What the hell, Deadpool.”

“Look,” Wade replies biting a chunk out of his new burger, “Your schtick is so fucking cyclical. Lemme summarize it for you. Spidey fights bad guy. Bad guy goes to prison, until bad guy inevitably breaks out and starts doing bad enough shit that Spidey fights the bad guy again.”  Wade puts on a frown and straightens his shoulder. “You wanna put guys in jail. Fine. I take motherfuckers out.

“And I don’t take them out to dinner, or to the park, or to Mommy and Me daycare, I take them the fuck out. Your justice system is flawed.”

“You don’t get to play that game.”

“Flawless idealism, I commend you, really, but fuck you, gorgeous.” Wade pauses, and smirks, adds with a dangerous amount of sincerity, “Seriously. Any time, any place.”

Spider-Man is suddenly in his face, hooking him by the chest straps of the katanas. Wade loses balance and his grip on his quarter pounder.  “I should kick your ass.”

Wade frowns. “You made me drop my burger.”

“You are incapable of taking anything seriously.” Spidey spits, angry, fucking angry, and Wade loves it, revels in it. Nobody is as angry as he is, nobody gets close, but it’s fucking validating to see it reflected across another masked face, to see it brought into the warm summer air. “I really should kick your ass.”

“Ooh, you’re making me tingle.” Wade replies, and Spidey lets go of him.

“What’s your problem?” Spidey urges, angry and flustered, still close enough that he could crack Wade apart if he really wanted to. “That man might have had a family. A life.”

“Right, 'cause that was all that made him valuable." Wade points out, suddenly, surprising himself and kicking himself for it immediately, because it bubbled over, just then, and what’s the use. What’s the use of this at the surface, at its rawness, at its most blatant and painful. 

Who the fuck even cares?

He draws back from the statement. “Guess I unalived somebody’s Daddy, then, huh.” he says syrupy sweet, almost-innocent, and Spider-Man sucker-punches him.

And oh, it’s good, that sweet spot to press on, the feeling of reeling back and waiting for the fight, the sting of pain. It’s what he knows, what he’s good at. Spider-Man stands heaving ten feet away, his skin still so easy to get under.

“You have no idea..no conscious clue...of any real world consequences. You can’t just...just kill people you disagree with or that do bad things.” He says, and pauses, and there he is. Framed in light pollution and red and blue spandex, that right there is a hero. “Get the hell out of my city.”

Wade, still hunched and cupping his jaw, gets a grip around his own lungs. Dad’s girlfriends used to tell him he’d grow up just like his father, in search of a quick high and something to push around, but they didn’t tell him how fast the comedown broke, and how sometimes, somewhere, people push back.

“I got work to do.” Wade tells Spider-Man. “Nice try, though.”

“Please stop moping.” Weasel tells him unkindly. They’re doing this thing recently called Not Being Friends. “You look like old egg salad.”

“Fuck you.” Wade tells him around his bottle of Bacardi.

“Are you going to pay for that?” Weasel asks him, and Wade rolls his eyes.

He takes another long pull and flips another page in his file. Sutherland (you know, the guy that Wade had just found information about via torture) is a fifty year old guy from Toronto, and a real piece of shit. White supremacist, likes his drugs and his dirty bombs and his...other things. Spidey had caught wind of his operation because ostensibly this same syndicate had been rooting around in his boss, Peter Parker's, business. What they want with a CEO of an advanced biological technology company is anybody's guess. Wade isn't clear on the details, just knows now he has an arachnid problem.

Wade had caught wind of the operation because he was contracted to.

It’s hilarious and ironic, because in some half-cocked attempt at being better, a Good Guy™, whatever that means, this contract isn’t below the belt. Blood money is blood money, but this time his License to Kill comes directly from the State Department. CIA wants Sutherland, and Homeland wants his boss. Wade was in the right place at the right time, and the team-up with Spidey had just sort of happened, with Wade being vague on the details and Spidey being all gung-ho about truth, justice, and the American way. Like they'd both touched hands while trying to grab for the same bad guy. Hell of a meet cute.

Once Wade gets information on Sutherland and the CIA shells out, then he gets his boss’ body, Homeland shells out. Some evil fuckers become dead fuckers and the world turns rightside up for a second. It’ll still work out just fine, but Spidey won’t be happy about it. Wade guesses he’ll just have to deal with it come Friday, when Wade unalives Sutherland and Spider-Man gets personally offended like Sutherland was the Easter bunny or Martha Stewart or something.

“Is that a classified file?” Weasel asks, reading it upside down. Wade flips it closed, as part of the Not Being Friends thing. “Hot shot.” Weasel accuses, pouting.

“Fuck you.” Wade replies again, not in the mood. “What day is it?”

“Uh.” Weasel says. “Thursday.”

Wade checks his burner. The idea of a team-up is probably dead by now, but Wade still needs his guy, and Wade needs his guy’s boss. It would have probably been easier with Spider-Man’s help, and he really didn’t have to kill that guy, nor did he have to rile up Spidey on the roof after, but that’s Wade. It’s what he does.

Wade takes his file and the bottle, leaves a twenty on the table.

Weasel clears his throat.

“Seriously?” Wade asks him, and then leaves a four dollar tip. “Capitalist pig.”

“Egg salad.” Weasel reminds him, and Wade bristles.

Back at his apartment, he doesn’t turn on the lights. He drops the file on the stack of fifteen others he has and the bottle on top of that. Wade takes the .22 Glock from its holster and wipes what’s left of the blood on it off on his uniform. He pulls the mask off, eyes suddenly drawn and heavy.

He’s had the type of day that White and Yellow would love to chide him for, and if Wade’s not careful, they will.

He takes another drink of the rum, wipes his mouth on his blood-speckled arm.

He’s got a day to kill, and then he’ll take Spider-Man’s advice and get the hell out of the city. He drops his katanas on the floor, the mask, the unloaded Glock. He shucks his thigh holster, and finds the third burger. It’s cold now, smells like gunpowder, but Wade places it on the counter. Just in case he needs it later. 

Chapter Text

“Kinda sad though, innit?” There was another slurping sound as another bottle got finished off. Cigarette smoke was heavy in the air. Wade took another long drink of his own beer and hummed in agreement. “Thirty-six years.”

On his right, Billy Bert slapped the bar for another one. They were on their fifth, maybe six. And that wasn’t counting the shots. “Fuckin’ nostalgic prick.” The bartender topped him off. “Mourning the death of some fuckin’ capitalist corner store.”

“Hey,” Ricky, the kid on Wade’s other side, protested. “Take that back. It was Harold's .” He made a large looping gesture with his arms that Wade followed lazily with his eyes. “Harold's, where scratch-offs and cigarettes were buy one get one.”

“That can’t even be legal.” Bert said, taking a dark sip of his bourbon. He swallowed. “Wilson, you’re quiet.” He eyed Wade, his gaze like a threat. A familiar vitriol had settled between them since they were kids. Neither of them ever really learned to get along, but fell into the same social subcategory. They were the poor kids, the mean ones, the teenagers whose parents didn’t love them enough to teach them how to fit in.

It was the autumn of 2005, Wade was 15 going on 16 and drunk off his ass, the lights smearing together in his peripherals. “I think we should band together and save it.” Wade slurred into a half-hearted joke. His chest was a cavern today, empty and yet still so fucking weighty that the strength it took to lift his glass was almost too much. “Like a goddamn Disney Channel original movie.”

Ricky snorted. “Full-Court Miracle.” He offered, the only one who could go toe-to-toe with Wade without losing his mind. He’d been like that since Wade and his dad moved to a different apartment building when he was twelve. Ricky’s abuela lived next door, and sometimes when Wade wanted the bruises to fade he’d join Ricky on the fire escape smoking cheap cigarettes and pretending they didn’t hate each other.

Ricky went to his abuela’s house when his parents fought. Sometimes Wade would get invited in, and it was in that place where Wade ate his first authentic Mexican food: pulled enchiladas and spicy vegetable tamales. It was a clear memory, the smell of onions popping in a pan, a rack of spices lovingly procured and heavily used. Their apartment wasn’t warm, but it wasn’t cold, either, and Wade remembers what it felt like to feel spice explode into his mouth and sear into his lungs for the first time.

Abuela was a harsh woman and her grandson was a bully, but Wade traded cigarettes and barbs for a hot meal. Plus, when Ricky was mean, Wade had a viper’s bite, too. He just used it less, kept quiet more. Dad didn’t like it when Wade talked, so he didn’t. Words were too much of a reminder that Wade existed; the babbling--incessant, mindless, too bubbly, too Wade --was too much, too loud.

It was during this stint that Wade learned to push buttons. If he irritated Dad he would face the consequences, but if he irritated Abuela or Ricky he watched flush rise on their faces, watch eyes shutter into narrow anger, watch another person sink to the occasion. Ricky was a year younger and fifteen pounds lighter than Wade, so he was an easy contender.

Wade crawled out the window and onto the fire escape to have a personality again, and between nicotine and insults Wade found reality.

The one thing the two of them connected on was pop culture, and sometimes they jumped the fire escape and looked for trouble, like Bart Simpson or Beavis and Butthead or those jackass kids from South Park. Spray paint and sucking drops from the empties outside of bars was an escape, while Abuela sat on the phone yelling at her daughter and son-in-law, and Thomas Wilson fucked a freshly graduated co-ed on the living room couch.

This limbo was a hard time in Wade’s life.

Wade stole cigarettes from his dad’s pack, which was an irony, because his dad approved of the habit, approved of anything that would make Wade less of a pussy. He taught Wade early what it meant to be a man, take a hit, give one, make the world his bitch.

Wade Wilson was the son of a second private Canadian Special Ops Regime and he should fucking know what that meant.

It made Wade laugh, sometimes, because at 15 going on 16 and without the right vocabulary of labels Wade was pretty sure he was some sort of bisexual, and if Dad found out about that then he’d be eviscerated.

Christ, right now though, Wade hadn’t been home in six, maybe seven days. Dad was trying this new thing called “sobriety” and like all other things he was failing at it and Wade didn’t care to watch his dad crash again, didn’t want him to somehow find a way to blame Wade for it. Wade was a growth on his own family, the one that killed mom and sat swollen and wrongly inside the parts of his father’s brain. It wasn’t really worth it anymore.

He was dry to it, now. As a kid his fear was wet and bloody, but now his chest was hollow, the sockets beneath his eyes weathered. Family was too abstract of a concept to him, and the effort it took for him to care was far too great considering what caring would get him. An empty chest, a Tuesday night at a bar, and fading bruises.

It was a morbid game he was playing, tempt the beast. Mom had been dead for eight years and Wade was tired, so tired. Fifteen years old and he thought about it, he considered it, anything to stop this, to halt it, to show his Dad what it meant to be alive in this world and what it meant not to be. The thing is, though, he didn't exactly know what "it" was. What the details would be. How would he separate himself from the last sixteen years?

He was still too small though. Christmas morning Dad caught him across the face because it hurt still, hurt even though Mom had never lived in this place. She was always there though, in the cracks. Dad had nightmares about his ops, and sometimes weeks would go by where he would hit oblivion and Wade would skirt around the edges of the house while his dad broke needles on the couch. He thought about her, in those moments. Dad never had a drug problem until after Mom. He hadn’t been nice when she was around, but Dad loved with his fists. Wade knew that.

He also knew, from what little research that he had done, that Mom was Dad’s fortress. An anchor or whatever, something that made the anxiety a little less hot, a little less sharp. Now it was the drugs, the women.

It was why he was failing so much at the sobriety, because the world is an unfair fucking place and Dad for a really long time had found a way to avoid it, to hit nothingness and feel vindication, like something on the godforsaken planet had owed it to him.

Wade caught the other side of that deal. Life don’t owe you shit, and luck is for those fair few rich white people that can afford it. Everyone else gets the trenches.

But Wade wasn’t stupid. Unmotivated, sure, but not stupid. His pain was glass shards beneath his skin that hurt him every time he moved, and sometimes on cold nights with no moon Wade found the emptiness of the sky exhausting, but he wasn’t stupid. There’s a right way to live a life. A simple binary of right and wrong, a code of morals so infinitely complex that it’s simple.

This is something that follows him into his adult life, through every tragedy he lives through. There’s a right and a wrong, and the wrong just makes this shithole worse, makes the mud deeper, and anybody who makes this place worse doesn’t deserve to live in it.

What kind of man--what kind of person--are you when you come out of the other side of your headache and you’ve made the world worse by letting it infect you?

At fifteen the fear of Dad’s fists and the pain of his last living family hating him paled in comparison to the way that Wade was terrified of the dissolution, the forgetting, the illness . The way that Dad had infected the world.

(School forgot to teach him that most illness is genetic. His Dad’s girlfriends, though, used to tell him he’d be just like his father.)

Wade watched his father dissolve beneath his own brain and thought about how death mutated what went on behind his eyes until he looked in the mirror and saw a different person, until he formed fists instead of words, until he lost the shape of his own smile.

Most of all, Wade wondered what made Dad so angry that the life he was taking was his own.

(He’ll learn the answer to that one. He’ll learn how much sweeter blood tastes than trauma.)

“Stuck in the Suburbs.” Wade threw back.

Ricky said, “The Cheetah Girls.” And it caught a surprised laugh out of Wade, something that bubbled up his throat and into his drink.

“I don’t know what the fuck you’re talking about.” Billy Bert said then, swirling his Jim Beam in his glass.

“Get cultured, dickface.” Wade told him.

“Disney Channel is not culture.” Billy reminded dryly.

“Says you.” Ricky spat back and Wade took another long drag of his beer. It was cheap shit from a bar that didn’t care, but Wade had nothing better to do. Except maybe homework, but he was too indignant to really care about frivolities like that. His dad told him what to do enough, he didn’t need government sanctioned education to boss him around, either.

He glanced up heavily from his drink. The bar was made entirely of old, wet, dark-stained wood. A dusty speaker system crooned out Michael Bolton. It was late enough on a Tuesday night that only the real drunkards were out: a couple of old men in a booth near the front, a man in a suit with his head on the bar, and Wade and his two friends.

Wade ordered another drink. “Tequila,” he said. “Double.”

The bartender was an old woman, who Wade knew by name and by face and by story, and didn’t blink. She told him, once, that if he kept drinking like that he’d drink himself to death. But, Wilsons have resistance in their blood. Wade had sat by his father’s bedside enough times to wonder just when the drugs were going to kill that fucker to know they never would.

Tonight, though, Wade wanted to black out.

He downed one shot easy, felt the burn down his throat, when the door opened.

Thomas Wilson, button-up carefully fastened to the throat, sleeves pulled up, stepped through. As always, Wade’s eyes were drawn straight to the crook of his forearm, where three dark slashes were tattooed into the flesh. Covering a scar from his army days, sure, but Thomas Wilson worked special ops. Wade didn’t have to wonder what they meant.

“Wade.” He said immediately, soft in a way that usually meant trouble. Wade had a distinct flashback of calling Billy Bert a cocksucker, and looked up at Bert for a moment, two, until they made eye contact, until Bert threw back his drink and Thomas got into Wade’s personal space.

“It’s time to come home.”

Wade rolled his eyes. “I’ll come home when I want to.” He said, nasty, too drunk for rationality. At thirteen he’d said something similar and hadn’t been able to use his right hand for two weeks.

“Wade,” Ricky said from beside him, but the Wilsons ignored him.

“The hell are you doing here?” Dad asked, gesturing to the bar, the sticky floors, the scratched bar top. “The fuck do you think you are, talking to me like that?”

Wade lifted his chin. Fifteen going on sixteen, and the world was getting too small for him to fit inside, his body disfigured and broken from all the ways he’d had to contort to make himself fit.

Wade looked his father in the eye. He took his second shot.

Thomas yanked him in by the collar, suddenly, grip ripping the top end of Wade’s worn t-shirt. “You answer me when I talk to you, boy.” Dad threatened, breath clear and free, for once. The sobriety was a funny quirk. Dad didn’t get any nicer or meaner with it, so Wade didn’t see the fucking point of it. At least when Dad was high he didn’t make a lot of noise.

“Or what?” Wade challenged. He hadn’t seen his dad in seven days, hadn’t talked to him in longer. The alcohol gave him courage he’d never found before, and Wade thought it was because the tequila was pulling his blood taut.

Thomas shoved him backward, hard enough that Wade’s lower back collided with the curved edge of the bar. It knocked the breath out of him, orange lumps of pain forming around the new bruise.

“Hey.” Bert said suddenly, his voice controlled and low in that way that it always was. “Don’t touch him like that.”

The world felt shaky. The room spun.

Dad ignored Billy, and even into the future Wade wonders what the intervention meant, why Billy felt the need to say anything. Nobody else cared. They knew and they didn’t care. (They always know, and they never care.)

“C’mon Wade.” Thomas demanded, catching him by the bicep and pushing ice hard fingers into the muscle. Drunk and not under control, Wade lurched with the momentum, hit the ground with one foot, and his knee gave. “Goddammit,” Dad cursed, letting Wade fall. The hardwood bit heavy. “Useless sonofabitch.”

Wade isn’t sure what happened next. Just that it did. Ricky got to his feet, stepped in, Billy too, and Wade scrambled upward, trying to keep balance, to keep steady; he cocked his fist back and hit his father in the face. A weak punch, but a punch all the same.

Dad tried to hit back, but Wade looped over, too fucking drunk for this kind of fight, and hit the wall, so Dad hit Billy across the face, just like Wade did on the playground all those years ago.

“Hey!” Ricky shouted, Wade heavy against the wall. “What the fuck?”

Billy, cupping his nose, looked slowly upward. Bert was a hockey player and already pretty much set to go play for the Regina Pats, but Thomas was an ex special ops, so when Billy lunged Thomas faked, used his own momentum against him.

“Put him...” Wade managed around the nausea. Dad had Billy in a chokehold, big forearms crushing his windpipe. It was a paralyzing scene, one that Wade still remembers in HD clarity. His father with the life of another young man in his hands. It seemed so much more precious, more offensive, than all the times that Dad had hurt Wade. “Stop it.”

Wade scrambled with bitten off nails at his Dad’s shoulder, Ricky pulling at his forearm, and Dad grabbed for his service revolver.

The butt hit Wade first, blunt force to the center of his skull. With a crack, Wade went down, skin splitting open, skull caving, and the world went too bloody to see.

There was another crack.

Another body hit the ground.

Wade isn’t sure what happened. Just that it did.

Wade jerks awake.

Backcounting tells him he’s been out for about an hour and a half; the TV is still playing the same Hallmark movie it had been earlier, but the kidnapped woman has come home, so the movie is almost over.

On instinct he rocks to his feet, checks the window and the door, finds both latched and double locked. The silence is deafening. He’s still alone in here.

He’s a hand-shaking kind of jittery, which must be leftover from whatever he was dreaming about. Wade doesn’t get the pleasure of remembering his dreams anymore, but he knows he has them, knows colors burst in front of his eyelids. This particular one must have been bad, the kind that makes the earth feel unsteady at his feet, his mind still a groggy sort of panicked that can only mean it’s stuck on whatever trauma it had just relived.

It’s getting bad again.

But it’s manageable, okay? It is.

Wade hunts around for his mask and jerks it on, hands aching, skin aching, neck aching; it’s going to be one of those days.

He calls Weasel. It’s 4:23 in the morning but he doesn’t give a fuck, doesn’t really care about anything, can’t force himself. It takes about four tries before the call connects.

“Jesus,” Weasel says instead of a hello. “Did you die again? I hope you’re dead and in pieces somewhere.”

“Hey diddly-ho neighborino,” Wade ignores his mostly muddled mumblings, “I need a favor.”

Weasel grunts, “You always do.”

Wade ignores this too. He finds his thumb absently drumming a hummingbird heartbeat against his thigh.  “What do you know about the Canadians?”

“Seriously? What the hell time is it?” Weasel growls, and then there’s a thump on the other end as he apparently locates a clock. “Are you fucking kidding me? Are you losing your mind again?”

Wade opens his mouth and forces himself to take a breath in. “Is that a rhetorical question...or…?” He asks in an easy voice, forcing his thumb at his thigh to a halt.

“Of course it is, dickbag. Last time I tried to ask you that, you--”

Wade cuts him off, back to the point -- climb the ladder don’t fall down the chute. “Right. Right, look, you’re still my info guy. If I were Kim Possible you would be Wade. Hah. Call me beep me.”

“What? Wade are you--” He says, and then, “Okay. Okay.”  Weas takes a calming breath that floats into a yawn. “Info. About the Canadians.” Weasel starts, getting back to the core of Wade’s issue. He’s good about parsing through the shit, where Wade is not so good about limiting it. “You are Canadian.”

“We are the finest people on earth.” Wade says. “But I’m not talking about Canada in general. I mean the bad guys. Duh.”

“My point still stands. You are a Canadian bad guy.” Weas replies. There’s a rustling on the other end and then Weasel’s voice clears, some of the sleep sharpening in his tone. “Is this about the case you’re working?”

“Shh. Classified.” Wade whispers, like any of his promises, including the one he made about classified behavior, mean anything. “But yeah, dude, I gotta take down the Canadian mob.” He adds, “It sounds really fuckin’ stupid when you call it that. Illegal Zamboni deals. Moose trafficking. Oi, sorry eh, I’m just a small town hoosier from Regina, right, gotta make some money somehow, sorry.”

Weas sighs his I’m-Tired-of-Wade’s-Shit sigh. It’s been patent-pending since they met. “It’s 4:30 in the morning, Wade.” His voice sounds serious for the first time in days, weeks maybe. He pauses, and then asks. “Didn’t you take a hit for those guys once?”

Wade thinks on this a moment, and pulls up an unnerving sense of disquiet.

See, Wade thinks of it this way. He puts his clutter in boxes, labels them, stores them away. These boxes though, they’re dangerous. They come undone on their own, sometimes.

The shit’s all over the floor right now.

So

Wade thinks on this a moment, and when he can’t come up with anything, what he pulls up turns molten, turns frustrated, turns black.

When Wade doesn’t reply, Weasel continues on, an odd tone of voice curling his words. “Yeah, yeah a few years ago. You kept telling Vanessa about how these guys were quote ‘your people’.”

“There aren’t enough cool cats from Canada.” Wade grits. Sudden explosives in his temples make his eyes water.

“Yeah, you said that too.” Weas recalls.

“It sounds like me.” Wade replies, mind buzzing again, the world starting to go hazy-blue, and are the windows still latched? The door is.

“Oh.” Weasel makes a small noise. “You don’t...?”

Wade moves over to the windows. Draws the curtains.”No,” he says in a low voice. It’s not worth it, not worth it, just stop. Draw back. “Guy I questioned today said their bulk drugs go through the Brooklyn docks. Shipments generally come on Fridays. Can you find out if there’s one this Friday?” He barrels on. “And not just for the drugs.”

“You talking illegal moose transport?”

“It was funnier when I made that joke, Weas. I’m talkin’ drug mules. Humans full of heroin.” Wade cuts. Irritation he can’t hold back soaks his voice. “Rich trafficking bastards who need a bullet between their eyes.”

“Okay.” Weas says in a calm voice. He’s usually good about not snapping back. “I’m guessing the heroin gets to Toronto but the humans don’t?”

“That’s where the trail gets hazy. We know where the drugs go because, y'know, The Opiod Epidemic," He says, with all the gravitas the term deserves. "But the people? www.FindAmazingAmy.com.”

Weasel thinks about this for a moment. “You made it all the way through Gone Girl?”

Wade replies quickly, finally, something to grasp, “Ben Affleck is hung.” He stops, adds. “Plus there’s a cool murder. My kind of movie.”

“Of course it is.” Weasel replies dryly. “So you think the people stay in the States.”

Wade blows out a gust of air. “I think shit, Hammer. One of my guys and his op is in the wind. I want my money.”

Weasel ponders this a moment. “Okay. I’ll see what I can do. But you owe me.”

“Bill me.” Wade says, in the same tone that one would say bite me.

“Right.” Weas replies with an evident roll of his eyes, though Wade can’t see him. He stops again, and when he starts his voice has that pitched tone that he was using earlier. “Wade.”

“What.” Wade replies, and then. “If you ask about my mental health one more time I’m going to fucking shoot you.”

Weas snorts. They’re doing the Not Friends thing, remember? “Fuck you too, buddy.” Weas says, and hangs up.

In the morning--like, the actual morning--Weasel comes through. Wade gets an address of the Port Authority manager that will be on duty and a copy of his financials.

Though Wade is twenty-nine years old, fluent in several different languages, spent two years in US special ops and is contracted by billionaires to do detective work and kill people at the end, Weasel has ever so helpfully highlighted and summarized what they mean. Wade, who has apparently no financial knowledge and no idea where or how smarmy jackass businessmen launder their money, appreciates that the document is typed in twenty-point comic sans and written easily enough that a first grader could use it.

Like clockwork, Darnell Jenkins, overnight shift manager at the port has received a charitable donation of five grand to his not at all obviously fake charity on the third Thursday of every month. In short, the man is taking bribes to turn the other cheek.

Yesterday was the third Thursday of May. Craig, that guy from Chapter 1, had said shipments come in on Fridays, and it makes sense that the bribes would come in just before the shipments. With no real way of knowing if that logic is sound or not, Wade is choosing to spend the day tailing one of Jenkins close personal friends, Bill Roberston, Toronto-native and a subtle-but-not-subtle-enough white supremacist. If any guy is in the Canadian mob, it’s him.

Wade doesn’t really have to be doing this--tomorrow at the docks he’ll be there either way--but he doesn’t have enough on Sutherland yet, and he’s not about to go in there this blind. Homeland doesn’t even know the name of his boss, which isn’t a good sign, especially if they want his head.

Deadpool has been tricked before.

It’s not pretty for anyone involved.

So he does his due diligence. Whitey McWhiterface is enjoying a leisurely start outside the Park Avenue Starbucks, where he’s taken the last fifteen thousand years to enjoy his bagel and flat white.

Wade is impatient. Wearing a hoodie and an old pair of jeans, he’s set up at the patio in the corner, where it’s shadier and his back is to the buildings. His dreams from this morning are still itching beneath the surface. He hasn’t smoked weed since before he was ugly but he feels fucked up, kinda blurry and almost giggly, the knife edge-ride of paranoia that makes his heart slow down and race in equal measures, like a horse ride. Sleigh bells ring, are ya listenin.

Bill Robertson is taking a tiny bite of his overly schmeared bagel, testing it like he’s Gordon fucking Ramsey or some shit, and then suddenly Wade feels like he’s been made. It comes over him in a wave, the feeling that the op is blown, that there are eyes behind him, beneath him, above him.

It’s like Morrocco again, Belize, that patio in Vermont, those precious few moments of air they let him have before his cancer was cured and his skin died.

See, Wade likes to think of it this way.

He keeps his shit in boxes.

Right now, the lids are open.

He has two guns in ankle holsters and his hands rest on one of them. At his one o’clock there’s a business couple who are extremely late for work but obviously canoodling. She’s wearing a pant suit and he’s wearing a cravat. She’s blonde, maybe thirty, and he’s got a nick on his chin where he cut himself shaving.

At his two o'clock there’s a man on his phone, barking orders. Manicured fingers, brown summer suit, the outline of a pager in his right pocket. On the street traffic flows in halting patterns and people clip clop their way uptown, busy. Four cabs, a Lexus, a city bus, a kid with a briefcase.

Nobody is moving toward him or looking at him, and Bill Robertson is using a knife to cut his fucking bagel and seriously? Who does that.

Wade lets his hands relax and absently runs them up the tops of his thighs; on his right hip he has a switchblade sewn into the seam of his pants. Sloppy, but Wade can use it in a pinch.

At his three there’s a kid, college-aged maybe slightly older, feet kicked up on the table. There’s an empty cardboard cup of a competing, much cheaper coffee shop on the guy’s table. Wade can tell, then, from the set of this guy’s shoulders, the angle of his body just so, the coffee, that this is where the feeling is from.

It’s unnerving, because Wade usually can clock the SHIELD guys straight out, and this kid isn’t one of them. He’s skinny, wearing a pair of outdated glasses, smiling just slight enough that the tips of his canines are showing as he looks down at the screen of a 2007 or 2008 model Nikon.

Wade’s hand closes over the blade. He doesn’t let people do this to him anymore, doesn’t let his own world get manipulated into fracture. Whoever sent this kid is going to bleed too, because if there’s anything that Wade values in this world it’s the moments he’s sane enough to remember are real.

Right now the kid is making ten million Shia Labeoufs in Wade’s brain shout JUST DO IT on an incoherent and jarringly alarming loop, and Bill Robertson still has half a bagel to go. Seriously? Christ, what the fuck is wrong with this guy? Can’t he just shove it in and go?

The ten million Shia Leabeoufs, resentful of being ignored, get a little louder, Wade’s hand shifts the blade from its resting point, and, at that exact moment, Wade makes eye contact with his tail.

The guy glances up at him, very briefly, but it’s a moment all the same. Brown eyes, messy dishwater brown hair, a set to his jaw that looks familiar, only because Wade has seen it in heroes and villains alike. Funnily enough, Wade knows a lot of people who actually take themselves seriously.

His tail’s eyes jerk away, back down to the camera almost as soon as the contact occurs, but it’s enough for Wade. He slides the blade up his sleeve and wonders if it would be too gruesome to gut this guy in the street when Bill Roberston takes a giant chunky bite from his bagel, jerks up from the table, and stalks away.

Dammit.

Just when things were about to get interesting.

Inexplicably, the world got bigger. Infinitely bigger. This was Wade Wilson’s Big Bang Theory, where something incredibly small and unbearable exploded outward, fiery, excruciating. Left standing in the middle of the explosion was Wade, surrounded by an airless universe and several thousand angry, swirling lava pits that would one day become stars and planets and asteroids.

“Mr Wilson,” the good cop half of good-cop-bad-cop said, with a tone like she’d been saying it several times and Wade was ignoring her.

Which he was. He was watching the rain fall in the parking lot, picking idly at the bandage on his head.

“Mr. Wilson.” She said again, but Mr. Wilson was Wade’s father. “Wade.” She pressed.

Wade didn’t reply, but Officer Andrews got that he was listening now. “We’ve been through this, Wade, please. The bartender said you were with two friends, and that’s been confirmed by witness statements, but the details on what your friends looked like are not very clear.” She said, and Wade watched a police car splash through a puddle.

He had never felt smaller than he did in that moment.

“Wade.” She said. “I need to know. Who was with you?”

He let the silence seep in. “I want to go home.” Wade said, the petulance of a child in his voice, despite the fact that he was fifteen, despite the fact that forty eight hours ago he would’ve been fine with never going home again.

Officer Andrews sighed behind him. “We’ve been through this.” She said, soft, her voice pitying. In her eyes Wade was a little boy who just lost the last of his family. An orphan.  “You can’t go home.”

Wade swallowed. He said, loudly, “I don’t know who did it.”

“Wade, I know these boys are your friends, but--”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.” He said, “I wasn’t with anyone.” Ricky and Billy had left him to blink blearily at the cooling body beside him. Left him to the horror of discovery that death takes no mercy and only prisoners.

The hospital had forced Wade out of his clothes: a pair of blue jeans and a hoodie, both crusted with his father’s blood.

The gun had been gone.

“You need to be honest with me.” Andrews said. She was starting to get irritated.

And Wade...Wade was too. Wade was starting to hate himself, because he was shock-hot and bone-crushing terrified, because he wasn’t the one who killed his father, and despite hating that man and hating the life he’d been brought into, Wade still felt like his heart had been cracked in half.

Wade watched a threatening thunder settle over his home city of Regina and felt the storm settle in his chest.

He turned with grit in his mouth and a pit of grief so jagged in his stomach he felt like acid was leaking into his blood, and started, “I didn’t kill my father,” He said, the memory of the bullet crack, the squelch of blood, and his father’s last words ringing heavy in the air. Wade felt his fist clench up. “And I don’t know who did.”

Chapter Text

[Yo what the FUCK is up Kyle]

{Hah. Solid vine reference, grandpa.}

[Thank you]

{How is it that after all this time you still don’t understand sarcasm?}

[Because I’m a problematic character trait of a heavily traumatized man in a fictional universe and I am a facet and weapon of whomever is dictating my words]

{I thought your name was White?}

[Christ Jesus, Yellow, how did I manage to get stuck in here with you forever?]

{You’re special. Speaking of which, aren’t we supposed to be being carefully managed and suppressed right now? We didn’t exist for the last ten thousand words.}

[Yellow, you buffoon, we’re clever narrative indicators that this chapter is going to end poorly]

{Oh. Right.}

[Yeah so….what the fuck is up everyone. Welcome back.]

Deadpool follows Whitehead down Park, dodging traffic and people. He’s got a singular focus because that’s the only way to filter out the noise.

And there’s a lot of it. Cars bleeping, kids on skateboards, street vendors. All give him a generous amount of space, and it’s a wonder that Bill Robertson hasn’t noticed. He’s evidently not very bright. It’s okay. Wade loves spending his Thursday mornings wandering around in full costume in Midtown. He loves getting stared at and looked away from in equal measures, just like he loves the way the skin at his neck is tight and his lower organs feel stretched out. Wade is having oodles of fun today!

Bill Robertson ducks into the front doors of the Waldorf Astoria.

Wade watches him go, standing on the crowded sidewalk outside. His brain sends out a long line of cuss words. Robertson is white trash on a stick, so what’s he doing in the Waldorf on a Friday morning?

Something’s rotten in the state of Denmark, and it’s not the can of tuna Wade keeps on his left hip, okay, because that expires in February.

 It’s not the first time Wade has hated the fact that he’s too ugly for a secret identity. He can’t go in there all Scarface just as he can’t go in there looking like a murdery Spider-Man.

Wade waits a minute outside and then lets out a frustrated huff. He backtracks a block and circles around before ducking into the service alley. He pauses, there, again, just as he did before. This time it’s because that feeling is back, prickling at his neck.

Life just can’t leave him alone, can it. Wade wonders if it’s fair to blame his mom for all this. Because she left him when it mattered most. Because she brought a baby into a broken home and left him to string together years of emptiness without her. Because Wade has never been touched as gently as his mother did, wiping tears from his eyes, saying Baby, it’ll be okay . It makes his bones tired. He wants to blame her with a fierce and sudden fire that it scares him.

The thought crosses his mind and his hand pauses on the back door into the kitchen.

Wade hasn’t thought about his mother in years.

{She hasn’t thought about you either} Wade hears, inexplicably, and his head turns without his permission.

The alley stands empty, caked with the smell of nicotine from smoke breaks past. A piece of garbage lies dormant near his feet, untouched even by the May breeze.

{Miss Keisha’s fuckin dead} He hears again, and his hands slips from the door.

“What?” Wade asks to dead air, something like panic bubbling up his throat. But he doesn’t do that anymore. Deadpool doesn’t get scared. Deadpool doesn’t panic. He just kills people and makes stupid jokes. Hell, even the voices in his head are funny.

“I’m not crazy.” He tells Yellow firmly, because he’s not. He’s not he’s not he’s not he’s

“What are you doing?” And that’s a human voice, something that can be shot at. Wade responds with a Beretta 92, thumb along the back, trigger depressed. He unloads. Bang.

One shot but the figure on the fire escape is quicker. Enhanced. Before Wade knows it the gun’s muzzle is blocked by spider webs.

From his position stuck to the brick wall, Spider-Man shouts, “Are you kidding me?”

“Uh,” Wade says, chest heaving. “Have I ever given the impression that I’m not kidding you?”

“You shot at me!”

“Thought you were a ghost.”

“So you shot at me?” And this is funny, it really is, Wade wants to laugh. Spidey’s tight, high-strung voice echoes against the brick.

“A ghost possessing a body?”

“You mean like a human being? With a soul?”

“Eh, tomato tomato.” He doesn’t bother changing the pronunciation of either word.

“Deadpool.” Spider-Man says, dropping quietly down to ground-level. He approaches like one would approach a wounded animal, like Wade is something wild and dangerous. Which maybe he is. It takes Wade a moment to realize he’s still got his finger on the trigger, and the muzzle is following Spidey’s chest as it moves.

The last thirty seconds have left him a lot to unravel.

Spider-Man takes another step, a third. His hand cover’s Wade’s at the gun and helps him lower it. They pause a breath there, and Spider-Man takes it from his hands. “What are you doing?” He asks again, lower this time, and now Spider-Man is the dangerous one. This is a threat, like Wade’s unhinged and evil and all the kinds of the things that Spider-Man is too tired to deal with.

Deadpool sorta wants to lean over and kiss him, to play into both a fantasy and a ruse. Maybe he’ll get sucker-punched again. They’re standing close enough that it would be a hell of a combination.

But he won’t. He plays the ruse a different way, easier, like he did before. “The Macarena.” Wade replies, forcing himself to make eye-contact with his other.

“You shot at me.” Spidey says flatly.

“It’s an interactive dance, what can I say.” Wade says. His hands itch. “Can I have my Beretta back?”

“What are you doing here?” Spidey asks again. “I won’t ask you again.”

Spider-Man is not afraid of Wade. Most other heroes are. Most of them take his unpredictability and pension for murder and give him a wide berth, but Spidey looks him in the eyes. It’s weird. It makes Wade uncomfortable. It makes Wade want to take him by the shoulders and shake him. Stop playing my game, he wants to say.

Sometimes Spidey won’t treat him like garbage, and that’s the biggest mystery of them all.

Wade rolls his eyes. “Following a lead. I think Kiefer’s got the penthouse.”

“Kiefer?”

“Sutherland. Renowned Canadian mob boss? Also plays burned-but-sensitive counter-terrorism agent Jack Bauer in Fox’s hit series 24 . Keep up, Urkle. We’re trying to track this guy.”

“We?” Spidey asked, unamused. He shifts the gun from one hand to another. “I thought I told you--”

“You thought you told me what?” Wade asks, humor suddenly gone from his voice, and Spidey can’t quit mask his surprise. His left foot goes backward in a half step, hand tightening on Wade’s Beretta. He takes a moment to visibly sort through his options, to see if Wade still qualifies for a team-up, and then inevitably comes to the conclusion that he’ll still need someone to take the blame when this all goes to shit.

“I’m not giving you this back just so you can go kill our target.” Spidey says, squaring his shoulders. This is apparently some sort of lesson. The little kid stand up to big bad bully. Oh please, mister, it’d be awfully good of you to stop killing people! How heartwarming.

In the same tone as before, Wade replies, “If you think I don’t have any other firearm on my person you are deluding yourself. One Beretta isn't going to make a difference. Give it back.”

“I want a game plan first. One that doesn’t involve any death.”

“And I want a million hamburgers.”

“Deadpool.” Spidey states flatly. “Plan.”

"What do you care?" Wade says. "Let me off on my own. I promise I'll come home when the streetlights come on."

"I've already told you this." Spidey puts his hands on his hips. "Peter Parker found some weird documentation from a few years ago on an internal Parker Industries server that connected back to this guy--Sutherland--and I'm helping him get to the bottom of it."

"If you ask me, it sounds like your boss is probably one of the guys I'm gonna have to kill."

Spidey shifts Wade's gun from one hand to another. "Plan, Wade."

Wade huffs. “I sneak up there through the service elevator, kick ass, take names, bada bing bada boom. Give me my gun.”

“We should call the police. Or SHIELD.”

“Aw aren’t you just The Bugle’s little sweetheart.” Wade shifts his weight. Rolls his eyes. Gives in. “I gotta shake him up a little bit first. Then we can call the State Department. I have their business card somewhere.”

“You have a contact in the State Department?”

“That’s what happens after you graduate, Spidey. You’ll see. I know the seventh grade is tough but you’ll get out of middle school soon.”

Spidey huffs. “What’s the hurry, is your retirement home accepting new residents?”

Wade is too wigged to let this banter become anything even remotely comfortable. That happens sometimes too, which is another facet of the mystery of What the Hell Spider-Man is Doing. He acts put out about everything Wade ever does ever, but he comes back. He’ll lean into the joke. It’s a lot more than Wade can say for anybody else. It reminds him, startlingly, of Weasel.

Right now, though, it’s weird when he’s anything but hostile with Spider-Man, so Wade does what he does. “Yeah honeybuns, wanna see what I can do without my dentures?”

Spider-Man crosses his arms. “I can’t believe I asked you for help.” He says, predictably, the disdain in his voice clear. “To be clear, if you step one foot out of line--”

“You’ll what, Dad, ground me?” This is fucking rich. It occurs to Wade distantly that maybe the only reason Spider-Man is the only one who’s nice to him is because he thinks Wade can reform. The thought is both oddly vilifying and incredibly uplifting, but Wade discards it. Wade hasn’t had a role model since he was seven years old. “Get real, Rick Grimes. You were showering off little chunks of brain last night and now you’re back here ready to link arms with me and skip into the human trafficking sunset. I’m going up there. I’m getting what I need. If I help you along the way, then you’re welcome. I'll cooperate until it's not convenient for me anymore.”

Wade moves back to the door and glances back. Spidey is working his jaw, caught off guard again. Apparently Wade can still surprise people. It is, after all, very rare that Wade wins an argument based off logic.

“I’m going to climb the brick and come through the windows.” Spidey says at last. “I will stop you.” He doesn’t finish the sentence, but Wade gets it. It’s supposed to be a threat, like Wade is at all afraid of bodily harm now. Wade is made out of fucking used tissues, why should he give a shit about the meat factory that houses his molten brain.

“Whatever,” He says, pulling the knob and opening the service door. “You can keep the Beretta,” he says, wanting the last word. “It makes you look sexy.”

(He almost forgets about Yellow and his memories until seconds later when the mirrored elevator doors slide closed. For a moment the shadow behind his shoulder pulses and reshapes into her, the waxy skin and hollowed bones she’d had on the day of her death. And then it dissolves, like everything else he had left of her did, and Wade is left staring at his own mask’s eye holes. He watches his blank face in the mirrored doors for several long and uncomfortable seconds until the elevator dings, and Wade steps out into the penthouse.)

Wade is met by a guard. Six feet three, contracted muscle. Probably benches 100 and squats 150. Skips a few leg days. Wade thinks he looks like an uncut Josh Brolin, but that’s another story.

Wade wants to go old school so he pulls out what he knows of kickboxing. Block his movement so he can’t swing his gun around, right hook to the ribs, lower the gun. Ping ping. Two bullets go into his foot.

Distracted by the sudden pain, the guy gives a particularly uneducated jab into the opening that Wade left. Wade manages to duck it, and it skims past his jaw. He returns with an uppercut, twists the gun arm around, and disarms him.

“Go away.” Wade tells him, and the Thanos-wannabe stumbles over himself trying to get to the stairwell. Christ. Apparently even the contracted guns the Canadians hire out are lame.

The bullets have drawn some commotion, and two more guards have come into the foyer to inspect what’s going on. Wade shoots them both in the chest. They’re wearing vests, so they’ll live, but it knocks them both on their asses. It gives Wade enough time to get the upper-hand and collect their guns. He slings the third one over his shoulder. 

He puts a finger to his lips. “Shh,” He tells them, an automatic dangerously close to both of their skulls.

He’s not sure why he’s sparing their lives. Something about the weird combination of his mother and Spider-Man, the latter of which would probably be a very good Mom Friend. That is, if they were friends. Or if Wade could stop killing people.

He steps over them and stops, fully. Fuck, he has to stop letting whatever is going on with him affect him in the field. Something about Craig From Chapter One really got to him yesterday, and now today he’s already let one guy go, and why? Because Uncle Spidey told him to? Because whatever dust is left of his mother is making his ears fuzzy?

Wade’s not sure what the hell is going on. Spider-Man doesn’t care about him, never has. It’s not Wade’s job to be a facet in a corrupt justice system. Wade found that out the hard way, in the deserts of Kuwait, curled both into himself and around a dishonorable discharge. It’s not his job to be good. It’s his job to be right. To be loyal to whomever pays for it.

He takes a step back and puts two bullets into two skulls.

That’s the way his father went out. Two in the skull in a stupid situation. His mom died in a hospital bed. The first time Wade died was strapped to a table. It’s not like it matters. Die enough, taste enough death, and it all runs together, bloody watercolors on a soaked canvas.

Wade limps toward the white double doors at the north end of the living room.

 He nudges them open. Inside is Bill Robertson, sitting at a table covered in papers. Wade spots a mugshot-esque picture printed on one of them. A woman, maybe twenty-five, her cheeks gaunt. On the other side of the table sits Sutherland, dark features lit by the white light of the hotel room.

Wade catches Spidey peeking through the window. In the brief flash, Wade manages to translate the blank smear of his mask as an expression of How did Deadpool already get three semi-automatic weapons.

 Wade waits until he peeks over again and mouths “Stay.”

Spidey assesses him for a long moment, and then, to Wade’s incredible surprise, nods once. Maybe the reason this isn't more alarming and doesn't send up any red flags is because most of Wade's mental energy is being spent trying to ignore the sudden warmth in his chest at the thought of being trusted. 

Wade hooks both guns to rest at the top of his hips, like he’s Bruce Willis in an action movie. “Take me to your leader.” He quips to the room, a half-grin on his face. It’s not very comical. This is obviously some kind of sale, where the price is high and the product is female.

These idiots apparently didn’t hear the gunshots from before, because they both look very very startled. Apparently, the sound-proofing in this building is phenomenal, because not even Spider-Man heard. If he did, then he'd for sure be in here trying to kick Wade's ass.

“Hiya, folks.” Wade says, and shoots Bill Robertson. He trades a conspiratorial look with Sutherland. “That dude really can spend a whole hour eating a bagel, can’t he? Annoying, am I right ladies?”

Sutherland has brown eyes fixed on Robertson's body, which has slumped onto the table. He’s pooling blood over the papers. Ink smudges. Photos turn scarlet. Wade thinks it’s a little bit poetic, if he says so himself.

 He shrugs. “Fuck that guy.”

“What do you want?” Sutherland asks. He’s still fixed on Robertson, who is now dripping blood onto the pristine white carpet--they’re not getting their security deposit back (do you even do that with hotels?)--and Sutherland’s face betrays no emotion. His voice is flat and hard, almost like he runs some sort of criminal syndicate. Huh.

“Didn’t I say that already?” Wade turns both guns on him. “I want your boss. Preferably soon. Preferably easily.”

Sutherland smiles, then. He looks at Wade. “You’re Deadpool, right?” He asks. “Wade Wilson?”

Wade sets his jaw. “My reputation precedes me.”

“Indeed it has.” Sutherland says serenely. This reaction is a little offsetting. The bad guys either monologue or get scared or get macho. They’re rarely calm. They rarely watch blood soak into the table with such raw assessment.

It’s quiet.

“So, I’m going to shoot you now.” Wade says.

Sutherland smiles again. “I’m not going to tell you anything you don’t already know.”

Wade falters. His mouth forms around the word What when suddenly cold steel is at the back of his skull. “Drop ‘em” A gruff voice says. Dammit. Either this is the guy that got away, or this is another guy that Wade didn’t realize existed before.

“That’s cute.” Wade postures.

“I know you can’t die. I don’t care.” The voice says. “You either drop them and let us leave, or I blow your skull out and we leave anyway.” The voice says, something about it familiar. Wade thinks about his mother again. Hand at his skull. Baby, she said, it’s going to be okay .

Wade nudges his head to the side.

“It’s your choice.” The guy with the gun says. Blond hair and a set jaw. A scar beneath his eye, just barely visible. Built like a hockey player, wide shoulders.

A bunch of things happen at once.

Wade, suddenly, inexplicably, can’t breathe. It’s too hard, his head hurts too much, the world gets so, so small that he’s fifteen again, looking down from a cracked skull onto a sticky bar room floor.

He manages an easy. “Hey, Billy.”

His earth cracking at his feet, he fixes a smile on his face.

Billy Bert grins with teeth. “Wade Wilson.” He says, and suddenly Wade doesn’t know if anything in his brain is right, if anything is true. If this moment is even happening. Is it? His heart beats beneath the fragile skin of his wrists. Two guns grow heavier in his hands.

Billy Bert signed his cast all those years ago. This is the kid that Wade called a cocksucker and the kid that stood up at an ugly bar on a Tuesday night. Wade hasn’t seen him since then. He knew Billy Bert before he knew what the taste of someone else’s blood was.

There is something not right about this. Any of it. In fact there’s something very, very  wrong, and he’s been on edge because of that all day. Since yesterday. For a week now.

But now all he can do is stand there and grin like a fucking circus clown with katanas. Like he isn’t dissolving. Like the earthquake hasn’t hit yet.

He feels like he’s standing at the bottom of a pit, nails caked with blood from all the effort he’s used to climb out. Wade is too small and this world is too big to be anything or anywhere but here. Chained to his own tragedies, cursed with the fact that he’ll never quite remember them.

“How are the Pats this year?” Wade asks him, easy, so easy, and his head is screaming, it’s whispering, there’s something picking through the fuzz, an airless universe that yields no questions, swirling hurricanes, pounding rain, that crack from the Kit-Kat bar commercials.

They coalesce. One noise. Two voices.

[Ask him]

{Do it right now, you’ll never get another chance}

[Ask him]

{Ask him!}

[Don’t you want to fucking know?]

“They’re good,” Bert says, over the noise. “Well, as good as they can be.”

“Huh.” Wade says. “Did you kill my father?”

{Maybe he did}

[Or maybe you did]

{Yeah dude you killed three people in this chapter alone}

[You probably killed him]

{Pathetic. You made yourself into an orphan}

[And for what, a sob story?]

{Took doin’ it for the vine too far}

Billy Bert starts laughing. “They really did a number on ya, pal.” He says, laughing still. Wade hasn’t dropped his guns but Billy Bert takes a step away. He moves over to Sutherland and helps him from the chair.

“Let me know if you want to catch a game sometime.” Billy says to him as they pass behind him. Wade stands still in the same position he was in before until he hears them leave.

[Hey, I bet it’ll take Bagel guy even longer to eat his bagel now]

Wade drops the semi-automatics. “Fuck, shut up.” He says. It’s still too hard to breathe. Everything smells like blood.

Spider-Man peeks back through the window.

Chapter Text

The morning before the funeral, Wade’s government-assigned case agent let him go back to the apartment he had once shared with his father. She didn’t go up with him, perhaps because she was lazy, or perhaps because she knew what this might have meant for Wade. Wade was not inclined to give her that much credit: this woman didn’t know him, didn’t owe him anything. She sat in the car while Wade climbed the five flights up to his home.

He let himself in quietly, and the first thing that hit him was the smell. Nicotine clung to the carpeting, the window coverings, the furniture. It tasted like Dad had just put out a cigarette. Wade for a moment feared that Thomas was just lurking around the corner. He wasn’t. In the same way that his mother never lived in this place, his father will never live in his next home. Thomas will become a memory to flinch at, a reason to withdraw.

Gray morning light filtered in through the grimy windows, and Wade made his way into his own father’s closet and took out a dress shirt and slacks. Wade didn’t have nice clothes like this, so he’d have to literally wear his father’s shoes.

He pulled off his thrift-store threadbare t-shirt and buttoned the new shirt over his chest, even as it seized and struggled for breath. He pretended like this was normal, like the air was easy here. It didn’t matter, as he was alone in the apartment, but Wade wouldn’t even let his ghosts know. He was ashamed.

How could he love a man who hurt him so much? His mother deserved to be mourned. But his father? Wade didn’t want to hurt about him. He didn’t want this feeling to slicken his eyes and turn his cheeks hot. He hadn’t asked for it. It just really wasn’t fair, was it, to feel sorry for the death of someone whom Wade for so long hated. Someone whom for so longed Wade had wished to be absolved of.

But Wade was still fiery around the edges. His fingers, long cleaned, still felt the hot pools of his father’s blood. His breath tasted like ash. Wade was finally alone, just like he’d always wanted, and the world looked no bigger or smaller. Just as gray and as broken as it was before.

Now standing in front of a mirror in a place that was never his home, Wade decided that he simply would not mourn this tragedy. He wouldn’t feel it. Wade, still beaten from the bar fight, needed something more solid to cling to than the slippery complexities of sadness.

The buttons reached his throat. He smoothed his own collar, straightened his own sleeves, and made a decision. He spat the grief out.

It’s a fresh burn that still seizes him, sometimes, because life has been unkind to Wade Wilson, and yet he mourns for it. He mourns his family and his father, in an abstract way that one mourns something fictional. And it’s some kind of tragedy, that the only thing he has to cling to now is bitter, a could-be in a cornucopia of things that weren’t. Like family dinners in the dying light of day, like a high school that wasn’t sand and bullets, like a diagnosis that wasn’t so bleak.

Instead Wade gets shot and the bullet squeezes out. Instead he gets broken bones and split organs that heal themselves and beg to be broken and split again.

It’s a lot easier to mold the grief into something else.

Not for the first time, that morning before the funeral, his mouth tasted the tang of unfairness. How life could be so cruel its victims. And, neither for the first time nor the last, he wished to be absolved of this sin, this life; to change it, to mold it, to make it something he could chew, could swallow, could spit out again.

“You killed... three people ...and you still managed to let our target get away.” Spider-Man is saying in a measured voice while Wade is fiddling idly with the webbing that has cemented his hands together. He tries to pull his palms apart, but they hold firm. Spidey really knew what he was doing when he webbed Wade up, didn’t he.

Wade isn’t sorry for what happened, but his voice comes out too small, less funny. It’s wrong, and he can hear it. There’s an unnamed emotion creeping up through him, tendrils seizing muscle, viscous icy liquid sliding through his organs.  Luckily for him, Spider-Man doesn’t give two single shits about Wade’s wellbeing, so he hasn’t noticed.

“I mean this is technically your fault for trusting me.” Wade says, and looks up. Spidey is standing across the room, not looking at him, combing through the leftover papers that are not ruined by brain matter. “Not sure why you did that.” He has a sudden memory of sitting silently on his Regina fire escape while Abuela raged on the other side of the wall in the apartment next door. He remembers fingers sticky with fresh tomatoes in the late summer heat, leaning his head against the brick and listening to the fight with his eyes closed and his own bruised wrists throbbing.

“Because I...” Spidey says, cutting off and looking up. “I don’t know what I thought, past that you’d have some basic fucking respect for me.”

Wade whistles. 

“Ooh big boy words.” Wade taunts, “You never use those in the comics.” He doesn’t point out that literally no one ever has had any respect for himself, because, well, whatever. That’s not the point here.

 [That’s never the point]

{Buddy no one gives a fuck about you}

 Wade twitches and mutters, “Shut up,” then, louder, to Spider-Man he says, “Can we get on with this? Just grit your teeth and kick me out of the city already. Our perp is getting away.”

 “Because you let him.” Spidey shoots back, “I mean, what the hell, Deadpool?”

 Wade makes a clucking sound, “You really gotta stop giving me second chances, man. It makes you look like you have a soft spot for me and--”

“Believe me, Wade, you’re actually just a big pain in my--”

“--I couldn’t have that happen because you’d damage my street cred. And probably yours too.”

 “This is not my fault.” Spidey says, gesturing to the prone body on the table and strewn papers. “Okay? I don’t…I don’t know--” Spider-Man trails off, almost helplessly.

Life is kinda a bitch when you can’t trust your own brain. Like, Wade doesn’t want to complain, okay, he doesn’t, everything is Hunky-Dory down in brainsville but...come on . There’s a lot happening here and nothing feels right, it all feels an itchy sort of wrong that Wade can’t pinpoint.

He thinks about Weasel, sleep-sodden voice trailing off into a didn’t you take a hit for them once? and one of his childhood friends putting a gun to his head. And he’s thinking about his father, and it’s making him feel sick, really, because he’s not sure what the hell conclusion he’s supposed to make here. Just that something is not right, not at all.

"This is not my fault.” Spider-Man says again, low but nonthreatening in way that Wade has never heard before. The unease grows. Wade wonders how many ghosts are in his brain.

“Sure, sure, it’s okay, I know it’ll probably take you another ten chapters to admit you have a crush on me but that’s fine.” Wade says, talking bullshit because he’s starting to get antsy again. Well, the feeling never went away, but he’s twitchy, now, shifting from leg to leg. The scars on his hands are beginning to throb. “Hey, can I ask you something? Like forreal? Why didn’t you come bursting in after the first two gunshots? Or the third? I’m serious. Why didn’t you just get involved?”

Spider-Man falters. Like, visibly.

The malignant, growing emotion reaches Wade’s chest.

“I--” Spidey cuts off, just like he did before. Wade is hit with a fresh memory, Billy Bert seven years old with a thick jaw and a bad mouth, scribbling angrily in the margins of his spelling test. They were desk neighbors. Wade watched the ink darken his page until there was nothing but angry scratch marks and indecipherable text.

Spider-Man finally meets Wade’s eyes, as best as he could beneath the mask. “I don’t know?” He says, like it’s a question, his voice gone quiet and serious. “I just---my senses didn’t act up and when I saw you through the window I just...I didn’t...I don’t know.”

Wade feels a lot like that particular spelling test right now. Scribbled into the margins, blacked out so excessively that there’s nothing left, no clues.

 “Fuck,” Wade breathes out, because life is really a bitch when you can’t trust your own brain, and apparently Wade isn’t the only one in this room that this is happening to.

Wade walked from his room to the living room with his luggage and what little personal belongings he had. He paused there, and crossed the room to put his hand against the window. The fire escape, as predicted, was empty. Wade didn’t know it now, but he would never see Ricky or Abuela ever again. Abuela will die alone in her Regina apartment, and Ricky will be lost to history. Wade himself didn’t understand yet how much of a clean break this was.

Nostalgia won’t drive him back to this place. Why bother returning to the nightmare? Why cement it into something real?

He wishes he’d burned the fucking place down.

For now, Wade spent a few moments with his hand to the cool glass, eyes unfocused, the world outside a blurred and incoherent mess. He had the whole world out in front of him but didn’t know what to do with it, like playdough in the hands of a wearied adult who had long lost his creativity. When he removed his hand, the hot press of his fingertips remained on the glass, and in the distance, the sun cracked over the horizon.

Wade turned, abruptly, and left. He locked the door behind him and that was it. Fifteen years of his life gone in a gunshot. He supposed it should have felt more monumental, like he should have been happier or sadder about it, but instead it was a lot like sweeping everything into a box and putting a lid over this darkness so that the world could call it baggage. As if it were something that Wade deserved to lug around, a burden he’d asked for. Like he’d purchased it straight from the Delta counter or picked it up in the revolving claim. It wasn’t. Wade had already decided he wasn’t going to deal with the death of his father, but the world was going to want to force him.

Wade wanted to take the pity by the shoulders and tell everyone that Thomas was a bad man, despite the little voice in his head that always, always whispered, “but he was all you had left?”

He wanted them to know. He wanted them to want to be the person left standing over the cooling body of this man, still holding the gun. Like he wanted.

It was a hatred that maybe should have scared him, then as he descended the steps from his old apartment, but he had four perfect cigarette burns carved bloody into the back of his neck, still. Sometimes hatred is just the grayness that’s hidden among fear.

In the car, his state-assigned agent looked at him, a tired pity on her face, “Are you okay, Wade?” She asked him, like he was fucking five years old, like she even cared or understood at all.

He set his jaw. “I’m okay,” he lied, and then, to seal the deal, let himself smile. A small, timid thing, but it did its job. She accepted the answer, put the car into drive, and Wade fought himself the whole time to make sure he didn’t look back.

Chapter Text

In the army, Wade was taught a lot about compartmentalization, where to stow your shit and when to take it out. Which part of yourself was top priority. More often than not, the part of him that was branded for his talents, the underage kid that could hit target from a mile away on no breakfast: that was his priority. The army taught him a lot about who he should project himself to be, and as a result those stowed places got dustier, got heavier. The dishonorable discharge didn’t do him a lot of favors in that department; the VA didn’t exactly have a therapist waiting for him on the other end of four years of playing paid hitman.

He remembers the army a lot like he remembers the back of his father’s hand.

Regardless, it comes in a handy a lot, especially considering the fact that while he left the army, he never left the field.

Case in point, Spider-Man evidently has never needed to be confronted with this kind of compartmentalization. Wade has worked with him before, of course, and even during those times his motivations read as both transparent and relatively simple. Do the right thing, or whatever. Kiss a baby, string up a bad guy, participate the heavily overdone cycle of fighting Doc Ock just to put him in a jail cell that can’t hold him. There’s probably nuances somewhere but Wade doesn’t really care. The fact of the matter is that there’s not a lot of upheaval in a world as small and cyclical as Spider-Man’s binary of petty crime and vanilla villains. It’s easy to be relatively unaffected by a world that doesn’t spend its every aching moment trying to traumatize you. Maybe he’s being unfair to Spider-Man, whoever the guy is, but it’s not like anyone ever looks into the nuances of his own story, so…again. Whatever.

Judge Judy over there has paused in his combing of the files and his head has dropped a little bit, tension cording through those fine shoulders of righteousness. It’s a classic case of someone who’s never had anyone delve a fist inside their gray matter and pull. He’s never had to deal with it, and doesn’t know how to move forward from it.

“Hey,” Wade says, after about a minute and a half of silence. He counted. Ninety seconds from a world upheaval and he’s ready to swallow it down. He learned to do that, right, he had to. The room still feels weird and smells weird and tastes weird and there’s something wrong, but Wade has a job to do. A person to catch. “Hey, you.”

“Shut up, Wade.” Spidey tells him, in that same shaken voice as before.

{He called us Wade}

[Us? Seriously. There is no us]

{If we’re stuck in this hell hole then it’s ‘us’, okay}

[“I would very much like to be excluded from this narrative, one that I have never asked to be a part of, since 2009” ~Taylor Swift, 18 July, 2016]

Wade stoops with his spider-bound hands toward his left boot. “That was halfhearted. Five out of ten. Do better.” He says, unkindly. With his pinkies, he wriggles inside the boot and grasps the sharp end of the buck knife he keeps there.

{$59.99 at Cabelas}

It slices easily through the suit and the skin on his fingers but not the bone, so he manages to balance the knife by lodging it deep into the meat of both of his pinkie fingers and slowly drawing it out.

“You don’t have an identity, Deadpool, you don’t have anything at stake if someone gets in your head.”

Which. Ouch. Okay.

“Eight out of ten,” Wade mutters, stung. Wade doesn’t even know how much is on the line for him quite yet, but it’s a hell of a lot more personal than Spider-Man knows. He’s starting to feel a little resentful of this whole situation, he can’t help it. It’s a default setting.

Spider-Man gets to sit here and act uprooted because someone’s dug around on him, and yet Wade’s gone his whole fucking life without--

“What are you doing?” Spider-Man interrupts his thoughts. He’s glanced back at Wade and caught him with the knife lodged in his hands. He spooks, just a little, under Spider-Man’s sudden glance and the knife clatters to the ground, a thin sheen of his blood covering the blade and its handle.

The room starts to feel weird again.

“Trying to get out of your fucking hog tie,” Wade grumbles. His pinkies sting. He’s not looking forward to picking the damn knife up again.

“It wouldn’t have been necessary if you’d have just stuck to the plan.”

“Well, sorry Geico, but life comes at you fast.” He starts. Fuck, he feels like there are flames in his stomach, his muscles feel clenched and atrophied like they would after a really heavy lift. His control is leaking all over the place.

[I’ll say.]

“I just don’t understand why you--”

“Did you ever stop to think,” Wade interrupts and this is bad. Because he likes Spider-Man, mostly. It’s a genuine sort of feeling, the kind that Wade doesn’t like to touch. “That maybe you weren’t the only one who got messed with today?” Wade says, which is the root of it. What was true about any of that interaction earlier?

What makes up this reality if his perception of it is all wrong?

Wade remembers Billy Bert in a bar all those years ago, standing, saying don’t touch him like that.

The memory just makes his stomach acid tumultuous, caustic. Spider-Man gets to act uprooted whenever he damn well pleases, but Wade never actually had roots in the first place.

“You think that maybe, just maybe, it’s not just you they’re trying to get to?” Wade asks, slowly.

Spider-Man pauses, as if this is the first time he’s thought about that as a viable option. It’s hard to think of Deadpool as a human being (because he’s not, right? Even his skin is wrong), harder still to remember that he has things like a brain and memories and validity, even to the bad guys.

[Maybe only to the bad guys]

Yeah, maybe Wade likes Spider-Man in a genuine sort of way, but Spider-Man still doesn’t get it. Doesn’t try to. There have been few people in Wade’s life that have tried, and it was never worth it, in the end.

Spider-Man is still processing the Oh Shit Wade is a Person? lightbulb, and Wade can’t help but let the bitterness breed.

“Really easy to blame me for the crazy shit, right Spidey?” He asks, mouth tasting like tree sap. “We all know Wade’s crazy.”

“That’s not--” He starts weakly, with a step closer.

Wade cuts him off with a reactionary step backward, his bound hands rising slightly, shoulders tightening. “I wouldn’t come closer right now if I were you.” Wade warns, and that’s a courtesy that not many people get. He’s a pot simmering over; most people just get scalded.

Spider-Man surprises him. “Okay,” He starts immediately, retreating from the step he’d just made. He opens his fists at his sides, takes a breath, and says, “I’m sorry.” His voice is measured, soft. “Okay? I’m sorry.”

The room ceases to feel weird, for a moment, and Wade suddenly feels flayed vulnerable in a way he hasn’t let himself be in a very long time.

“You’re right, okay. I’m being unfair.”

Abruptly, Wade realizes what this looks like, and without thinking too much about Spider-Man’s contrite stance and apology, his hands drop.

He starts to laugh.

“Christ.” He says, strung out and suddenly tired. “Can you get me out of this stupid stuff? I’ll buy you--what time is it?--brunch? Linner. Whatever. Just--just, we’ll call this in and get out of here.”

“You’re sure?”

“Yes.” Wade manages. “Let me loose.”

Spider-Man hesitates a half second to long, as if he’s afraid he’ll still have to put down the wild dog. But the feeling has passed, for the time being, and eventually Spider-Man figures that out.

He stoops to pick up the knife, and cuts Wade free of the bonds.

“So, uh--” Spidey says, awkward in the way that he has been for the last half hour. “So, you uh--”

They’re slouched on the apex of the Chrysler building, having stopped off along the way to get sandwiches from the Potbelly on 44th. Wade had ordered for both of them while Spider-Man called SHIELD about the debacle at the Waldorf, though Wade thinks he probably left out the little mind manipulation detail. Spider-Man is a teacher’s pet, but nobody wants SHIELD meddling in this. Lucky for Wade, the State Department is pretty hands off for this kind of stuff (it’s SHIELD’s business anyway, and for the US government literally everything is about exorbitant sums of money or reelection. So far, this mission involves neither, so there’s not a lot of pressure.)

Wade watches as a shred of lettuce drifts off into the wind, and inevitably onto some unsuspecting New Yorker’s head.

Spider-Man, bless his soul, is still trying. “You. Has this happened before?” He asks. “Uh, to you.”

Wade digs into his sandwich for a moment before replying. He sprinkles a few more pieces of lettuce into the wind. “Lettuce rain?” He asks, just to avoid the question.

Spidey snorts. “You know what I mean. Like. Do you know who’s doing this?” Spidey asks. 

“That would be convenient to the plot, wouldn’t it?” Wade tells him in a conspiratorial tone. “The start of my self-redemption arc would be the confident and competent take down of our new mysterious adversary.”

Spider-Man could not have understood more than 50% of that sentence, but he tries. Again, Wade likes him, on good days. “Here’s your one chance Fancy, don’t let me down.”

Wade pretends to think very seriously. “I don’t know what’s worse.” He says, in a serious tone. This is all very professional. They’ve established that. “The fact that you just quoted a Reba song at me, of all the godforsaken things on this planet, or the fact that I knew it was a Reba song.”

Wade is surprised when Spider-Man laughs at that. It throws him off guard for a moment, and Wade goes back to the lettuce.

“I’m serious, though.” Spidey sobers. “You think our smuggling ring has some sort of enhanced person with them?”

Wade surprises himself with a firm and immediate response. “Yes. I think everything is connected here.”

Spider-Man has apparently gathered that there’s something just a little bit off about Wade, and it has to do with the case and the ten minutes of time that he missed while his brain was playdough. “Um, can I ask why you think so?”

Wade carefully wipes the Italian dressing that had gotten on his glove on the thigh of his suit. As the windy quiet stretches, Wade decides to go with the version of the truth that has the least amount of vulnerability in it. The one that leaves Billy and his father and the gun and the distant past out of it. “It’s a Canadian crime syndicate,” he says, with all the drama that kind of statement should entail. “We have a history.”

Spidey’s face sours. “What’s that supposed to mean.”

Wade grins. “I dunno,” He shrugs, it’s fine, this is fine. “I don’t remember it.”

His face twists even more. “That is somehow not comforting.”

“Eh,” Wade replies, “You get used to it.”

Spider-Man leaves that as it is and takes another bite of his sandwich, looking away. It’s only twelve thirty; they have a long time until the drop at the docks tonight. That is, if it’s still happening. If Wade hadn’t spooked them.

For now though, he runs out of lettuce on his sandwich and frisbees a tomato slice. It catches the wind, impossibly, even more than the lettuce did, and soars above New York. A beautiful May afternoon reflects for a moment in the juices before the slice starts its plummet to the busy street below. A few seconds later, a car lies heavy on its horn. As the sound drifts above the din of noises that makes up Manhattan on a Friday, Wade allows himself a private moment to pretend the honking is because someone got plastered with a tomato.

“Are you going to eat your food or just sprinkle it all over midtown?” Spider-Man asks, not without amusement.

“Why, you want it?” Wade gestures with the half-decimated sandwich. “I’ve only bled a little on it.”

“Yeah, I’m gonna pass.”

“Suit yourself.” Wade says, and then tries to think of what he’s going to fling into traffic next. He’s not very hungry. Plus, it’s one thing to eat cheeseburgers in the dark while pissing someone off and another thing entirely to roll up the mask in broad daylight and share a meal with that same someone. Hard pass. “So what do we do now, Oh Captain my Captain?” He asks. The banana peppers are probably next, he decides.

“What time is it?”

Wade glances. “12:43,” He says, “I’m surprised you don’t have a watch in your shooters.”

“It’s 2018. Who wears a watch anymore?” Spidey asks, a little grumpy at the question. Wade wonders how often he has to stop his swinging to ask some rando what time it is. Probably a lot.

“It’s time for you to get a watch.” Wade says, with a seriousness that betrays the way he puts an emphasis on the word time.

“And it's time for that joke to die." He replies.

"Millenials are killing the joke industry." Wade declares, with a little wave of his hand. 

"News at eight." Spidey quips back, and then shakes his head. "We have a few hours to prepare ourselves for tonight, I guess. Maybe try to figure out who else we’re up against.”

Wade swirls a banana pepper sliver on his pointer finger. “So you’re still batting for my team?”

“That’s not what that phrase means, and you know that.” Spidey says, and then sighs. “I’m still kinda pissed at you.” He crumples up the wrapper from his sandwich and continues. “But yeah. Until my brain is unscrambled you have me.”

“Swoon.” Wade says. “For the record, I’d have you anytime.”

Spider-Man fixes him with an absolutely putrid look, fixes his mask over his chin, and jumps off the building.

Deadpool rolls his eyes. “I thought we were going to prepare for tonight!” He shouts at the retreating red pendulum, and, for good measure, throws the banana pepper after him.

During Wade’s twelfth year, rain fell hard down the broad back of summer. Even on this particular night, the air hung heavy with petrichor and the burnt smell of wet asphalt. The concrete was damp beneath Wade’s shorts, the humidity cloying. The rain had cleared the sky, though the only remaining daylight burst pink near the horizon. It was a Monday.

“You boys mind telling us what you were doing out here?” The police officer asked, under the guise of stern and friendly. As if this man was an adult of authority that could be trusted. Wade knew better. The only thing he saw here was his father, except this one wasn’t allowed to hit him without reason.

Wade kept his mouth shut, as did the two others sitting next to him. None of them could afford to get arrested. It was a little late for that, though, seeing as they’d been corralled on the curb, spray paint dotting their hands, three empty cans next to their half-painted mural.

Wade set his jaw, twelve and wet and scared, and silently urged the others next to him not to speak.

The police officer’s eyes slid from Ricky, pale in the twilight, over to Billy, grinding his teeth, to Wade. “You’re Wilson’s kid, aren’t you?” He asked. This was not Wade’s first trouble with the law. The last time the cops had carted his ass home and left him at the front door. Wade was lucky that night. Dad was too drunk for more than slurred shouting, and Wade kept quiet, pushed it down, said nothing, and escaped unscathed.

“Fess up, kid. Else your dad’s gonna have your hide for this.” The second officer said, from where he was leaning casually against the open door of the cruiser.

“You’d have thought he’d have taught you better by now,” the first replied, and Wade didn’t want to be quiet anymore. It was hard to keep it all down; even at twelve it felt like he was pressing his anger like one does a heavy spring. At some point, he knew it would coil back at him with all the force he’d been using to keep it away.

“You pigs talking to me?” He asked, lazily, nothing betraying the tremor of his veins. He felt the sharp eyes of his friends hit his profile, but he didn’t care.

When you grow up, often you come to realize that a lot of your bad traits come from your parents. Mom had a quick temper and zero tolerance for bullshit, which got on the particular nerves of Dad that were shaved thin with a razor by the military. They’d fought quick, before Mom got sick, and some of Wade’s earliest memories are the quick barbs they’d left in each other’s--and, as a result, his own--skin.

Wade at twelve was eager for a victim.

“Excuse me?” The first officer asked, cocking his head just so.

“Did you not hear me or something? I can say it slower if that’s easier to understand.”

The second officer whistled under his breath. “Somebody ought to teach you some respect, little boy.”

Silent until that moment, Billy chose this moment to speak up. “I’d like to say that, uh, he doesn’t speak for the rest of us.” He said, finishing with a glare at Wade. Billy’s parents were poor and tired, but ostensibly still loved him. Wade rolled his eyes back at him, irritated. The kid had very little at stake here. At twelve Wade was constantly on the edge of something, and the way down was dark. Maybe it was immaturity, but he knew, he knew with absolute certainty, that nobody could ever have it as bad as he did.

(The day that he learned that this thinking was wrong, the day he first met somebody who had it worse than him, would be five years from now. He’d be seventeen on his second mission as a United States special operative, and that day, that moment, would be the first day of the rest of his life.)

“If Abuela kills me for this, Wade, I’m gonna kill you.” Ricky threatened, just as scared as the rest of them.

The second cop sensed the weakness. “And who are you?”

“Um.” Ricky paused and looked at Wade for a moment. He turned away, rejecting whatever he’d found in Wade’s face. “Ricardo Butler.”

“And you?” Number two gestured to Billy.

Billy looked at his feet, restless in the gravelly asphalt that met the curb. “William Bert.” He replied.

Number two straightened his shoulders. “We’re going to run your names, okay boys?”

Ricky paled beside him. He’d had an incident a year ago, and was told to stay on the better side of the law if he didn’t want to go through the Juvenile Justice system. He leaned toward Wade. “We’re not getting off with a warning.”

“I knew that already.” Wade replied. This was getting worse by the moment. His hands stung from the way they clung to the curb beneath him. “What do you want me to do about it?”

“Does your dad know these guys?” Ricky asked, a tremble to his voice.

Wade’s face fixed, like a pause, like a stutter. In that moment on the curb, he had never felt more like a victim. Isolated and scared and quiet. Most of all, quiet.

“I don’t know.” Was all Wade returned, shaky. “I don’t think it matters.”

“We should run for it.” Billy whispered. “While they’re not looking.”

Wade looked down at the shoes he was too big for. He wriggled his big toe and the top flap of fabric moved to show his skin. “We’d never make it.”

Ricky’s face picked up, a little, hope shining dully. “We should try.”

“Y’all have fun now.” Wade replied, crossing his arms. In the cruiser across the street, the two cops glanced back at them.

“I can distract them.” Billy said, out of the silence, and traded a look with Ricky. A dull determination smoothed his features. Ricky smirked.

“You’d still get caught.” Wade said, looking between them.

“No I won’t.”

“Sounds like horseshi--” Wade said, but then Billy was off the curb, waving his hands, stalking toward the police.

It was now or never, and Wade might not be smart but he’s never been stupid. So he ran.

Ricky went left and Wade went right, his feet slapping hard against the pavement. He glanced behind him and saw Number One in pursuit, one hand on his weapon, though it wasn’t drawn.

Shit. He urged his legs forward, tightening his calves. He swung his arms wide, hoping the act would allow him to go just that much faster. Wade took an abrupt turn down a shortcut, dodged an oncoming car, and ducked a left through a side street. His heart boomed against his sternum, every breath a heavy burn around his ribs. The cracking static of his pursuer’s radio told him he hadn’t lost the cop.

He ran harder, his feet jamming into the street below him, the backs of his shoes cutting open the skin near the end of his Achilles tendon. It hurt sharply, and his breath was starting to blister. His face was beaten red, the heavy wind around him like a cloaking fog.

In a pothole, he lost his footing. The police officer gained a stride on him, and fear ate lazily into the lining of Wade’s stomach.

He felt like he was running for his life. He wasn’t, not really, but it always felt that way. The idea of what would be waiting for him at home terrified him.

As a kid, to be afraid was to be ashamed. There was no pride in fear.

And yet the whole world was too large and too angry to not to be afraid of. Wade wanted to run until he escaped it, and that, most of all, is what kept him going.

Distracted by himself, he missed an uneven slab of sidewalk, and hit the ground hard, skidding a few feet over the cement.

No time to lose, he scrambled upward, suddenly nauseous, a raw pain dripping down his limbs as blood welled up. Skinned and limping, he took off again. He glanced back, now no more than two strides from the officer.

However, right as he was turning around to look ahead, he collided heavily with a warm body. With his momentum they both went down.

“Yo what the hell are you running like that for?” The body beneath him asked.

Wade had hit something really hard, and he was bleeding. He knew pain very well, but he struggled to get up all the same.

“I can’t--” he heaved, “I’ve got to--”

Hands from behind him seized him by the bicep. “Wade, woah.” Wade yanked the grip away, but it was only Ricky.

“What the--we have to--” He gasped again, chest heaving. He realized belatedly that the person he had tackled was Billy. “He’s behind me!”

Ricky glanced around. “No he’s not.”

“What are you--he was just--” Wade was having trouble getting underneath his own breath. He glanced around, panicked. Number One had been half a step behind him. He’d been so close.

The only people around were Ricky and Billy.

“He was just--” Wade managed, his breath quickening somehow rather than slowing down. It felt like adrenaline was leaking out of his raw skin. “He was just there.”

Billy sat up, rubbing his collar. “I dunno what you mean, Wade.” He said. “You beat him. He’s gone.”

Wade looked desperately at the direction from which he just came. The officer was right behind him, gaining. He was there. Right there.

And then he wasn’t.

To this day, Wade can’t explain it.

Chapter Text

“Oh hey, Pretty Boy’s taking off his shirt.” A whistle, demure in the twilight of evening.

Wade scoffed, head trapped in the hole of a softly worn t-shirt. He scooped it off over his head, over the planes of his back and the dip in his collar. The shirt got tossed to the side and, not long after, the crushed aluminum of a beer can. “Blow me,” He spat, irritated. The beer was not his first.

“Baby, you wish.” Was the response, as Wade laid back, tucked his legs up to engage his lower core, and lifted the bar from its cradle. To his left, tent flaps shook in the evening desert wind. Radio static crackled from somewhere closeby.

Wade felt the weight almost immediately after unracking it; he took a moment to tighten his navel and adjust the blades of his shoulders against the bench.

“What are you at today?” Hands appeared in his line of sight, a gentle cup underneath the bar. The face of a private named Jennings peered over him, her hair tied back, a bandage on her upper arm.

They’d met an arms deal in downtown Kuwait City this morning, when the air was smokey and bright with the November sun. Wade didn’t speak Arabic, so he largely served as bulk. Intimidation offered by eyes behind a kevlar green helmet.

The US housing market collapsed almost a full year ago and the US army was preparing to serve a grand Thanksgiving for those poor fucks that couldn’t get the leave to see their families, if they had them.

Bush was on his way out, the war in Iraq no more futile than it was yesterday, the men still tired and angry and bloody. But Wade was 19, cared little for politics, just wanted to be a part of something. A lot of his teammates saw the buildings fall, were aware and awake enough to care, (were also American enough to care). They’d enlisted as some kind of patriotism. Wade didn’t have a righteous bone in his body, just killed because he was good at it.

Poverty and rage sat rigid in his blood; 2008 in the Middle East was the first time Wade felt at home in his own skin.

Now, outside, a group of soldiers stumbled past, roughhousing, kicking up clouds of dirt and sand beneath bloodied boots. A rhythm followed them, camaraderie picked up in boot camp and over long hours in the sun. Wade’s unit had no home here. Tonight they’ll rest in the barracks, and then they were expected to land in Saudi Arabia before the sun rises tomorrow morning.

Wade was hazy on the details--the why, the how-- he sort of trailed after them like raindrops down a car window. In the end, they all blurred together. He got to shoot people that were guaranteed to be bad people. It was easier this way, like taking the passenger seat instead of having to parallel park the car.

“I just put a buncha weight on. I’ve got it.” Wade slurred on a breath in. He lowered the weight, the bar cold against the hot skin of his chest. It didn’t rest there, but it touched, a long line against his sternum and the unmarred skin beneath his nipples. He let out the breath on the slow lift upward. One.

His hands were already starting to tremble.

“Don’t be stupid, Wade.” Down again. The hands didn’t disappear.  “You need a spot for that much weight.” He could feel the press into the wings of his pectorals. Two.

This morning he hadn’t even fired a shot, no death. No excuse to make a warranted play.

“You need to mind your own business.”

“Why are you trying to max out right now?”

“You don’t ever wonder how much you can bench press while blasted on Natty Light?”

“Wait.” Jennings hands clenched over the bar. “What?”

“To each his own, I guess.” Wade sent her a winning grin over the worn steel of the weight. He’d been in Kuwait for under 48 hours, and already this place felt dirty.
The weight got heavier in his hands. He tasted the beer on the back of his tongue.

There was a silence, marked only by the tap tap gunfire of Bob, who was across the room playing Halo on an Xbox from last month and a TV from 1997 plugged straight into the generator.

“What are you trying to pull here, Wade?”

“Maybe I’m tryna kill myself.” Wade said, elbows straight, the weight resting too wholy in his wrists. Fuck, he should have chalked up, and probably strapped in the guards.

Down.

Bob said. “Yo, Wilson there’s ample time for that tomorrow.”

His spotter laughed at that. She leaned over, thighs on either side of his head. Wade looked upward across the curve of her body.

Up. Three.

“He’s right. You’re gonna be sore tomorrow. Might make your aim off.”

Wade lifted his voice. “Then I might get the pleasure of getting Bob killed, too.” He said, and heard Bob get another kill on his video game. Boom.

“Suck my dick, Pretty Boy.” Bob scoffed.

“Hard pass.” Down again. There was sweat on his chest now, and the bar wasn’t as cold. “Everything here tastes like sand.”

“That your only objection?” Bob barked, surprised.

“I’d let you fuck me if you bought me breakfast after.” He cut, and then the weight caught, too heavy. No more up. There was a moment where he was going to drop the weight. Finally let it crush him. He wasn’t strong enough. Thousands of miles from a home he didn’t even have, and the thing that was going to kill him was himself. All those years ago he’d made a decision that people who made life shittier didn’t deserve to live it, and now the morality was turning on him, a speeding bullet heading toward the gaps in his vest.

“Wade, dammit.” Jennings caught the bar. She was not strong enough to curl it, but they were both strong enough to hold, Wade half bent at the elbow. It sat there, suspended, neither able to hold forever.

Jennings let out a curt, desperate breath. “Wade!” She said, as it dropped minutely, as they both trembled together. “Wade, you have to fucking try.”

He lowered his feet, planted them, and suddenly there was lift again.

Up.

Four.

“Do you live here?” Spider-Man asks, easing through the window like the place is made of bombs.

This place is kind of kitschy, even for Brooklyn. As it stands, Wade is sprawled back against a wall, upon which hangs a wooden box sign that says “Life is what happens between Coffee and Wine.”

He’s got both hands buried in the fur of an elderly golden retriever, whose collar says her name is Luna. “Yeah.” He lies, and the dog’s tail gives a happy thump against the floor.

Spider-Man pauses, as if to look around. The place is homey, warm if not large. It’s also dark, no lights on. Wade doesn’t know how long he’s been here. His ass is starting to hurt from the hours he’s spent sitting on hardwood.

“I didn’t know you were a dog person.”

Wade has a retort on the tip of his tongue, but decides not to be a little bitch about this anymore. He’s cool, he’s calm, it’s collected. “I’m a man of many diverse interests.”

“Huh.” Spidey replies, not having moved yet. “So you really live here.”

As it stands, Wade does not, but the dog had been barking in the window, and Wade had wanted to pet it. So.

“Uh, yeah.” He says anyway. Instead of a door into the bedroom there’s a beaded curtain. The floor is clean. “I’ve always enjoyed my time in,” He glances up, to where an extra-large magnet eats up most of the face of the fridge. On it is a Puerto Rican couple obviously getting married on the beach. “Nantucket Great Point Lighthouse 1996,” he reads.

“Do you even know where Nantucket is?” Spidey asks smugly, and Wade sees it for the joke that it is.

“Uh, yes?” He tries.

Spidey laughs, something surprisingly genuine, and Wade’s heart goes a little funny. Luna perks beneath him and then gets to her feet. Her nails scratch against the wood as she pads over to Spidey, who bends to pet her too.

Outside, thunder yawns overhead.

“I guess she’s worth a B and E.” He gives. Luna yips like she understands English.

“Unlawful entry. I broke nothing.” Wade asserts.

“Even better.”

“First stop burglary second stop murder.” Wade says, leveraging himself off the ground. “Ready?”

Spidey scratches behind Luna’s ears. “I’m ignoring you.”

“And doin a mighty fine job at it.” Wade replies, opening the fridge. LED light spills over the kitchen. Wade has a bloodstain on his suit, indescribable against the red of the spandex, but his eyes catch it all the same. “You wanna Capri Sun?”

“Still ignoring you”

“Man if you don’t stay hydrated you’re gonna get cramps.”

Spidey pauses. “Do they have Strawberry Kiwi?”

“Ugh.” Wade complains, reaching into the fridge and grabbing one. He sneaks a Fruit Punch into one of his empty gun holsters. “To think I ever thought we’d be a compatible match.”

“A true tragedy.” Spidey deadpans, and Wade contemplates squirting the flavored water over his head. Instead, like a true gentleman, he opens the straw, stabs it through, and only squirts a little toward his face.

Luna licks it off the ground, and Spider-Man scowls at him. “Mature.” He snatches the drink, levers the window open again, and starts climbing up toward the roof. Wade tumbles ass over ankles out after him, and then from his sprawl on the fire escape watches Spidey ascend up to the roof.

“Hey it’s rude that you get to take the expressway and I have to climb all these ladders.”

“I’m not a pack mule.” He calls over his shoulder.

Wade roots around for his wallet. “I have, uh, fifty bucks and a Dunkin coupon. I’ll give them to you so I can hitch a ride next time?”

Spidey, who has now reached the top, perches on the edge, legs swinging, elbows on his knees, teeth at the edge of the Capri Sun straw. “Damn.” He says, with faux apology, crumpling the drained packaging. “If only it was a coupon to Tim’s.”

Wade drops his neck, his head hitting the floor with a ringing thud. “Oh my god.” He groans. “Spidey.”

With a certain level of alarm, Wade hears him say, “What?” from all the way up the side of the building.

Wade closes his eyes for a moment, two. “I think we just became friends.”

“Oh,” Spidey says. The minute amount of alarm is still solid at the bottom of his voice. “Okay.”

Between them sits the decimated Deluxe Pack of assorted Capri Sun juice bags, crammed with empty pouches. Wade burps and it tastes like Fruit Punch.

“Disgusting.” Spidey says, sucking his way through his fifth Strawberry Kiwi, chin in his fist, eyes focused on the docks. “6.5”

“Seriously?” Wade scoffs. He’s lying down on the roof, head fixed on his palms, watching the clouds roll in the light-polluted dark. Occasionally, lightning pops violently, and the city's normal muddied orange shears into violet heat as thunderheads gather just offshore. “I’ve been robbed.”

“That was me being generous.” Spidey allows. How very gracious. “It was actually more of a 6.25.”

“Dude, we said we weren’t doing quarters.”

“I know, so I very kindly rounded up.”

“Lame.” Wade throws an empty pouch at him. “Anything new?”

“Don’t litter.” Spidey says, pretentiously enough that Wade actually can’t tell if he’s joking. “No. Boat’s still just sitting there. Time?”

“11:37, and are you seriously going to try to find a garbage can for this, Watchless Wonderboy?”

“Shift change is in twenty minutes. And yes.”

“You probably left a dollar in the fridge when you went back and stole the box, too.”

Spidey is silent for a moment. “It was a five.”

Wade barks a laugh, sitting up. “Martha Stewart.”

“She went to jail, you know.”

Wade smiles beneath his mask, husks his voice. “Are you saying I can tempt you?”

Spider-Man freezes, and Wade watches his mouth. “Shift change is in twenty minutes, Wade.”

[That wasn’t a no!]

{Dude shut the fuck up we don’t have the mental capacity to deal with this right now}

[Do we ever?]

{Also, that was for sure a no. Duh.}

“Alright Martha, let’s get down to business.”

Spider-Man looks away, eyes fixed to the harbor, the small freighter fixed to the dock. He rolls his mask over his chin and replies, “Those huns won’t defeat themselves.”

“Hey, dude, I don’t know if you know this or not but this is a serious matter.”

Spidey blows out a breath, “You know, you’re really getting on my nerves.”

“Oh no, am I?”

“Wade.”

“For the record, I’m always on your nerves.” Wade points out. “Fine. Game-plan. You clear the boat, I clear the offices, rendezvous at 12:30.”

Spidey snorts. “Nope.”

“Last I recalled this was a partnership, and you can’t just--”

“I think we should stick together.” Spidey looks back at Wade. “We don’t really know what we’re facing, and I would rather face it with--” He trips over the last word, “you.”

Wade is suddenly irritated, a prickle beneath his esophagus. Convenience, that’s all this is. He’s got to stop looking harder at this team-up, as if it means anything. It’s convenience. Wade’s already got scrambled eggs in his noodles, so let’s put him out front, like a shield, like a minimum wage employee.

[Would you like fries with that?]

“How romantic,” He quips, dryly, unable to keep the resentment out of his voice.

At shift change, Spidey takes down both guards at the station with an ease that should not be legal, especially for a guy who hates violence. Wade takes point, though, and approaches the bow of the boat silently, water sloshing against the sides.

“You’re not going to like this, Spidey.” Wade warns.

Spidey shoots a web to the railing. “And you will?” He returns, unkindly. “Thanks for the warning, Deadpool.”

“Oh my god.” Wade rolls his eyes. “No offense but Black Ops missions probably do a better job at desensitization than drug store robberies.”

Spidey flinches, just a little, as he pulls the web taught. “I didn’t know you worked for the military.” He replies, without the snap from before.

Wade puts a gloved hand on the thick rope that extends from the starboard bow to the concrete. “It was a long time ago.” He says, regretting even bringing it up. Wade pulls himself up the rope until he finds his footing on the warped flooring of the deck.

They don’t talk much, after that.

The ship is a small cargo container vessel, one that fits less than a thousand containers. It slumbers at the dock, docile beneath the sodium lights, even as wind drives the water sloshing up the sides. Plastered in chipping paint across the planks of the captain’s office in ultra-large letters is the acronym CSL, short for Canada Shipping Lines, a perfectly above-board company that operates out of Montreal. Ostensibly.

The boat is industrial, a little like the bowels of the aircraft carrier Wade lived on for two months while he was in on one mission for the military: thick steel panels, cast-iron structures puckered with rust and salt, buoys and life preservers that came straight out of the year 1987.

The dock and the boat are empty of people, eerily so. It’s like stepping into a ghost story.

Spidey follows him down the starboard side of the boat, near the rails and the three story drop to the dark ocean, until they round the captain’s quarters and approach the flat loading bay. It’s not full, which is uncommon for transatlantic shipping vessel. On a hit once a couple years ago in China, Wade hitched a ride back on a ship that largely carried Amazon containers. The hit had gone bad, to say the least, and he’d spent a long part of the trip bleeding, without the proper amount of calories and care to fuel his healing factor and heal the wounds.

Whatever. That was a Thing that Happened.

The yellow emergency lights on the ship flicker in their sockets; shadows cut across their harsh glow between containers.

“Where do we start?” Spidey asks from behind him, having slowed to examine the ship.

Wade points. “Eenie,” He says, and points at a new one, “Meenie. Miny.”

Wade can’t see Spider-Man roll his eyes, but he’d bet his left arm he does. Before Wade can finish the rhyme, Spidey hops to the nearest one, gets his hand into the lock, and crushes it open. He pulls the front wide with a metallic squeal, unholy in the quiet midnight.

It’s completely empty.

Wade stands at the mouth for a moment, and then drives his fist into its gunmetal gray side. It reverberates through the hollow core. “They’re not even fucking pretending.” He mutters, and Spider-Man stands stiff with his arms crossed.

He doesn’t offer a response, instead uncrosses his arms and moves to the next one. Wade doesn’t have the strength to open the doors, so he watches as Spider-Man does the work. Rain begins to pat on the stainless steel shipping container. Pat pat pat. A soft sprinkle beneath the yellow glow. Wade has disgusting memories of a gray day in Qingdao, early morning puddles pink with blood.

It’s all a cycle, isn’t it. They’re all empty.

They work in silence as the storm moves in.

On the seventeenth container, Spider-Man lays a hand on the front and pauses. “It’s this one.”

Wade is sloshy with rainwater, cold into his fingertips, and there’s a familiar heat in his chest that folds his fingers together at his sides. Who does this. Why empty containers. Why human beings .

“I’m feeling murdery, Spidey.” Wade grunts.

Spider-Man takes a calming breath next to him. “Um,” He offers weakly. His palm is flat on the metal. “Nice ‘I Statement.’ Healthy.”

Wade crosses his arms, “Just save the fucking day already.” The rain starts to fall harder, sprinkles turning to spit. “We don’t have a lot of time.”

Spidey glances back at him, and then rips open the door.

It’s empty inside, again.

Wade steps in. “I thought you said--”

Warning bells go off in the back of Wade’s head.

Spider-Man must hear similar bells, because he starts, “Yeah my senses…” and then cuts into, “I wouldn’t go in there, Wade.”

Wade is already walking farther into the container. His foot hits something solid. It goes clattering into the wall. Outside, sea air wooshes around like it’s telling secrets. Wade follows the sound of the object, and picks out its silhouette among the dim grayness.

He crouches to feel the sides of it, the empty barrel, the dented loadstock. His heart beats wrongly, breath coming a little shallow.

{Oops}

[To the tune of Lemonade Mouth’s “Breakthrough”]

{Here comes a breakdown!}

“What’d you find?”

He takes a glove off just to make sure. Three deep gouges on the handle, one for each kill. But it should be four, right? This gun took four lives.

Canadian issue, 1981.

On the bottom, two initials. TW.

Wade drops the gun. “It’s a trap.”

“Wait, what?”

He rises, something like panic in his feet. “Get out.”

“Wade, what are you--”

He reaches the mouth of the container, and takes Spider-Man by the upper arm. “Come on. Mission’s blown.” He starts walking, faster and faster, dragging Spider-Man by the muscle in his arm before Spidey flails around and grabs Wade back, forcing them to a stop.

“Explain this to me. Now.” It’s a demand. His fingers cut into Wade’s forearm, and Wade desperately wants to entertain the fantasy of a bruise.

Wade’s had it. He’s through. He forces Spider-Man back a step, which usually wouldn’t work, but he’s sufficiently taken off guard that his back slams into the nearest container.

“You don’t get it, I’m not explaining it to you, let’s go.”

“ Why .” Spidey hasn’t released the grip, nor has Wade. He notes that he hasn’t put his glove back on, and his white scarred hand stands in creamed contrast against Spidey’s suit.“Is this personal?” Spider-Man asks, like the thought is new and he’s trying it on.

Wade swallows. “I’m being played.”

“ You’re being--what does that even mean?” Spidey squirms a little and slaps Wade’s hand away. “Let go of me.”

Wade relents. “Come on.” He whirls, booted feet on slippery steel flooring.

They reach the captain's deck near the bow. There are no guards on the concrete land; the light isn’t even on in the dock’s receivings building. The sky opens up. It starts to pour.

It is particularly well lit here, two adjacent LEDs making the boat scream brightness like midafternoon.

Inside the navigation deck, the phone starts to ring.

Spider-Man comes to a stop just behind Wade. “Answer it.” He says, resentment steamed in his voice. “If this is so personal you can’t even tell me, then it’s probably for you.”

Wade turns to look back at Spider-Man, whose hands have found his hips. He takes a step back to him, gets into his personal space. Spidey stiffens, rising to his full height, but lets his personal bubble get popped.

Wade lowers his voice, almost a growl over the rain. “I don’t owe you anything.” He says, turns, and then yanks open the door into the navigation consul.  

Safe from the rain, it sounds like a roar around him, broken only by the shrill yell of the emergency telephone. Wade doesn’t notice that Spider-Man doesn’t follow him inside.

He lifts the phone from its cradle and offers no greeting.

“Hey man!” It’s Billy on the other end. Who else? “What’s up?”

“What do you want?” He wants to ask what’s going on, but no villain is ever that transparent, especially if there’s some level of manipulation of reality.

{Ooh, maybe they have the reality stone!}

[We’re not getting into that here.]

{Oh shit my b...wrong movie}

“Look,” Bert replies conspiratorially, like this is a surprise baby shower,  “I know we were friends before your dad kicked the bucket--”

“The fuck does that have to do with anything?” Wade feels the plastic of the phone crack beneath his hand as he grips it. His jaw is starting to ache from the clenching.

“Nothing. I’m just, ah, asking. Old friend to old friend.” Billy lowers his voice. “Stay out of it, y’know?”

“Stay out of it ?” Wade’s bubbling with it. “They’re human beings, asshole.”

“C’mon, Wade, you’re one of us. Where’s your nationalism?”

“Nationalism.” He spits, like a cuss. “You’re an idiot.”

Billy just laughs. “I figured you’d say something like that. It’s cool, man. It’s just...your time is up with us? We’re all out of apologies, which, when you think about it must be a hard thing to do.”

“Bert--”

Wade gets cut off. “Hey, man, we’re cool. We just sent along some incentive to get you to, y’know, to back off.”

Wade feels like a Thunderbird hitting a brick wall. “Incentive?”

The line is dead.

They were interrupted by a harsh pounding on the door, something bony and sharp and intimidating. Wade was startled, his companion decidedly more so. If he was flushed before, his pale features turned bloody with palor.

He started whispering harshly in Ukrainian, maybe Russian. Wade was on the wrong side of tipsy and didn’t give much of a fuck, and the banging on the door continued, Knock Knock Knock. Let us come in. This was probably a Bad Thing, but Wade didn’t open his eyes in the morning without packing at least two weapons on his person. Currently he had a pistol he’d picked off a dead cop strapped beneath his shirt and a hunting knife duct taped to his ankle.

The whispering shorted out over a groan, and then reappeared, and Wade blinked open his eyes and imagined he could see the cyrillic alphabet appear over his head in white hot speech bubbles. Perhaps if Wade knew the language he would have understood why, twenty seconds later, he was pushed unceremoniously over, hands and knees on the dirty bathroom floor. Above him, the door rattled on its hinges.

“The fuck?” Wade slurred. Right, Blondie didn’t speak English. Wade was a new student of German, prep for a long upcoming assignment, but wasn’t in the place to recall any of it, other than Das Auto , which was from those Volkswagen ads.

He spent most of his late teen years drunk.

His friend babbled overtop him, fear layering the room, his belt clinking, pants coming up. Wade rolled the taste of him on his tongue.

He didn’t speak Russian, or Ukrainian, or whatever, but he thought him and the pretty blond thing at the end of the bar had been on the same page. His dick, Wade’s mouth, not that hard to agree on.

However, Ukraine guy is freaking out, hands in his thin hair, belt pulled tight, shirt tucked in.

“S’alright, I know ‘em.” Wade told him, from his spot kneeling over the grungy bathroom drain. His mouth tasted bad, like Russian vodka and a bathroom blow job.

Ukraine guy barked at him, something like a mortal ferocity in his voice, and Wade was kind of glad they had the whole language barrier. He was tired of getting bitched out.

Wade took a few more breaths on the floor and then stood up, shakily, still very much so on the wrong side of drunk. Wade unlocked the door and blond guy shrieked , like the world was ending.

On the other side, four of Wade’s coworkers, black ops boots still crusted with blood and the asphalt of Kiev’s shitty streets.

“Wilson, what the fuck are you doing?” Bob, at the front asked, eyes going from Wade to the guy in the corner, who was shrinking to make himself smaller. “Report time was three hours ago.”

“We’re playin’ chess, Bob, what d’you think?” Wade focused on zipping his pants. “Let him outta here.” He jerked his head at his friend, and his men made room for him to pass. Blond kid went running.

In the bar proper, the music playing had a beat that sounded toxic.

“Wade, buddy, let’s get back.” Bob said, with (weirdly enough) pity striped across his face. Wade felt his ears get hot, Bob put his hand on his shoulder, and lead the four of them out of the bar.

Bob was only five years older than him, but for some reason had a family, a life, a reason to want something bigger, something better.

Outside, early spring in Kiev granted no mercy. They walked silently in the freezing cold dark for a moment, until from the back of a group, someone decided to speak up.

“Y’know, it’s a crime to be like that here.” One of them said, from the rear of the group. Russel, his name was.

Wade fixed up his button, which he’d apparently forgotten to do in the bathroom.. “Like what.” He asked flatly, feeling a sudden delayed shame, that probably should have hit when he was face first on the floor. Head hung, blood full of alcohol, Wade could almost allow himself to feel it again, what it was like to be 12 and hate himself. At 20, Wade didn’t hate himself for this, for what and whom he loved. There were far better things to pick.

Russel snorted. “Y’know.” He shrugged. “Like that .” He said, like this was all just a dirty word. Like identity is a box you’re supposed to fit inside, instead of a way the world fits to you.

“Like what , Russel.” Wade started, a challenge this time. He grew up afraid and small and Wade was tired of picking apart parts of himself. He came to a stop in the middle of the road, turned to face this asshole.

This time he was the drunk one with a temper.

“It’s punishable by death.” He continued, none of Wade’s other teammates stepping in, not even Bob who was watching Wade with steady, concerned eyes.

“Dude, you’ve seen me commit murder, and this is legit what you think I should die for?” Wade laughed, something hysteric and drunk and vulnerable.

“Wade--” Bob warned, “C’mon kid. Just let it go.”

“Why do I gotta let it go?” He pointed his next words over Bob’s shoulder. “You got something to say to me, go for it sweetheart.”

Russel grinned, frat-boy predatory. “I’m just saying.” Wade grew up in an abusive home, knew the way the tide rose behind words. He knew what it felt like to be picked apart and squashed just for existing, just for taking up space. “Here you’re just a useless--”

So he moved before the slur could finish, not quick enough so the F still slid next to the A, but the G didn’t run soft from his mouth, never got the chance to, because Wade had him up against the gritty stone wall before the word could finish.

“The could kill me for a hell of a lot more than liking dick.” Wade said, twisting until he heard cracking, until the man beneath him started whimpering.

Bob pulled him back. He found no redemption in the cracking, the dismantling, the winning . It wasn’t there. It never would be.

The line is dead.

There’s a brief silence, the boat rocking slightly with the waves in port, the rain running rivers down the windows.

Incentive.

Wade abruptly drops the phone. He fumbles for the knob to yank open the door, and steps back into the rain. He’s soaked to skin almost instantly, the roar of the rain rising to a din, unavoidable.

Spider-Man is leaning against the slanted wall, head inclined to the sky. “What’d they want?” He asks off-handedly, as if uninterested.

Wade glances back toward the railing, “I’ll explain when we get out of here.”

Spider-Man decides to be stubborn. He lowers his head to make eye contact, water dripping down the bridge of his nose. “Just...just tell me now.”

Incentive.

“This thing is either rigged to blow, or…” He trails off, hand coming down to rest at the Glock on his hip.

“Or.” Spider-Man says quietly, and takes a ragged breath in.

Wade goes cold.

Like the rainwater has turned to sleet, or Elsa her goddamned self has frozen him in the fjord, Wade gets it.

Spider-Man is standing in a pink puddle.

The wall is supporting most of his weight.

“Spidey?” Pat pat pat. The rain is relentless.

“‘M Sorry,” He responds, kind of wetly. “I guess I wasn’t paying attention.”

Wade draws the weapon, blindsided by a sudden emotion he can’t quite name, something juicy and thick like sludge. Compartmentalization is what’s kept him alive; this is Wade Wilson at 12, fucked up and fucked with. This is Wade Wilson at 19, that same 12-year-old with an automatic. This is Wade Wilson at 25, cancerous, still a growth.

This is Wade Wilson at 29, Deadpool. They don’t get to combine. The lives he lived before don’t get to come back at him, not now, not like this.

“I’m going to kill him, I swear on my father’s fucking blown out head, I’m going to--” He cuts off, “Okay. Okay. They got a sniper around here? Is that it?” His words become real as he speaks them. “Fuck, okay, come on, sit down.”

“I’m good, I think. Don’t really wanna move.”

“This is not me asking.” Wade gestures with the gun. Spider-Man braces one hand on the wall behind him, and the droplets of rain sliding down the siding start to swirl pink, like putting bloody creamer into an iced coffee.

“You’re not going to kill anybody.”

“Are you serious? You’re actually serious right now, standing here bleeding, and--” As he speaks, Spider-Man’s hand starts to slip. His other comes from around his torso to stop the buckling, and Wade is forcibly reminded that he’s been shot when he first sees the wound. It’s nothing more than a slice in his suit just beneath his eighth rib.

Precariously balanced on the wall, Spidey mumbles, “Okay, I’ll sit now.” Just as he loses his footing and knocks hard into Wade, who is suddenly supporting most of his weight. Wade’s gloved hand comes down to Spidey’s side, from which hot blood is coursing through the tiny bullet wound. He drops the gun into the ether, and it goes skidding away.

“Can you breathe okay? Is there an exit wound?”

Spider-Man makes a little bit of an effort to stand again, but Wade is already snaking his other arm around Spider-Man’s shoulders to support him better.

“Sounds like you know what you’re talking about.” He breathes. “You come here much?”

“Alright, bud, we’re still in his line of sight, and you’re definitely in shock.” Wade says. “Let’s get outta here.”

“Got it, Cap’n Crunch.”

“Funny guy still got quips.”

“That a good sign?”

Wade starts moving. Spidey’s feet fight to keep from dragging, but Wade is walking too fast. As a result their gait is lumpy and stumbling. Beneath Wade’s glove, Spider-Man’s torso is sticky with blood, his skin overwarm as his diaphragm expands with each breath.

“You tell me. How many fingers am I holding up.”

Spider-Man moves his hand to cover Wade’s at the bullet hole in his side. “Eight.”

“Aw, darn. It was twenty-seven.”

Spider-Man groans, something like pain squeaking his voice. “Don’t make me laugh.”

They reach the railing, the dock so close, when Wade’s vision goes suddenly white.

Getting shot is an exquisite pain, familiar like a hard pinch. This time it emanates from his right side, maybe a leg, the zinging fuzz buzzing through his muscles having no clear epicenter. The first bullet he took was three months before his discharge, right in the meat of his arm. He had not been awarded the chance to recover, and that was back when he was human, fragile skin and fresh blood. The last bullet he took was last week or something.

Now, this one bullet isn’t enough to topple him. The next one, however, is. It’s a much larger caliber, buckshot from a military-grade weapon, and it explodes from the front of his leg, chunking away most of the muscle in his quadricep. Wade stumbles, Spider-Man falls from his arm and hits the deck hard, and Wade goes to one knee. His right leg has been blown useless.

Pain tinges his peripheral vision with black, makes the world go fuzzy all over, makes the deck slippery with more than just rainwater. Wade barks a laugh, trying to push down the instant replay going in his head -- the bullet through his muscle, the air racing from this lungs,  the fucking flesh of his thigh going gooey. He laughs again. “Fuck, we are definitely still in his line of sight.”

“Ow.” Spidey says, a bit belatedly. Wade reaches up to grasp the railing, the first bullet (which he discovers is in his ass) making it hard to get up. When he does, another bullet goes through his hand and pings off the metal. He rips it away, drooling blood through the rain. The decimated hand goes to the leg, as if they’ll meld together, as if holding them together will keep the blood in.

“They’re not gonna let us off the boat.” Spidey groans, rolling to try to get up using his not-wounded-by-a-bullet side. His hand is still cupping his wound. “Want me to bleed out.”

“Do they not know you’re an Avenger?”

Spidey coughs, “Well, I’m not technically--”

“Really?” Wade asks, his voice coming out a little high, all the right tones of flippancy underneath. Nice. “You’re going to argue with me about that now?”

Spidey manages to sit up, fishing a phone out as he does. It’s quiet, save for the rain, enough so that Wade can almost hear it as Spider-Man dials. It’s dark enough, too, that the white light of the phone lights up the side of his face, and Wade sees the tremble in his hand.

Wade is low on the deck, sat back on his butt, but he has no idea where they’d even sit a sniper, not in this thundering dark, not when surrounded on three sides by water. Maybe the pain is making him groggy, stupid, crazy. Maybe just in general he’s all three -- groggy, stupid, crazy. Sounds like a rom-com.

{Crazy Stupid Love, but close}

Spidey gets the emergency code in and his identification, but before he can continue his body jerks, something slight, but his voice cuts off. He chokes, a little.

Wade has been shot three times but that little sound still feels like a suckerpunch.

“Spidey?” Wade asks, an uncomfortable amount of alarm in his voice.

On the other end of the line, Wade can hear a tinny voice asking for more details.

So quiet. These bullets are so quiet.

The phone drops from his hand, still glowing, the call still ticking away seconds on the screen. Now empty, his hand moves across his body to his left side, high across his chest.

“Spider-Man, dude, talk to me right now.”

His hand drops from his chest, and his other hand drops from his ribs. “Sn’t very fun.”

Wade rasps, “I’m usually a cheap date.” He’s afraid to move. Another bullet might kill him. Another bullet will kill Spider-Man. They sitting ducks, exposed to whoever is up there.

Incentive.

Spider-Man has one bullet probably in his lungs and another just ripped through his upper chest.

Wade’s weak spots are usually very hard to find.

“I’m getting us outta here.” Wade tells him, head woozy from all the bloodloss.

“In a minute.”

"Hey. Spidey" Wade grabs him by the ankle, like a threat. “I can die.”

“Not that cheap of a date, then.” He mutters.

“Spider-Man.” Wade warns.

Spider-Man lifts an arm and puts it on the cap of Wade’s shoulder. “Okay.” He slurs, “It’s Peter.”

Wade says, “What?” As if he didn’t hear, though he did, but there’s not time for that now, there’s only rain and a deck covered in runny blood.

“Peter.” Spider-Man says again, this time decisively, this time with gumption.

Incentive.

Wade is in over his head.

Wade scoops Spider-Man underneath the knees, summons the rest of his strength, stands, and tosses Spidey off the port side of the boat. The act causes acid-like pain to lick every one of his molecules, like he’s being smited by God-with-a-capital-G himself.

He gets two more in the back for his effort. The world goes sideways in the impact, but he launches himself over the railing all the same, through the freefall with the rain, and into the frigid ocean below.

Chapter Text

The scene opens in Winnipeg, sky clear with a summer morning, cars clipping through the streets. A billboard advertises Mulan, opening June 5th. That’s soon. Four days.

Wade has a double shot of espresso in a cute porcelain cup in front of him. It rattles on the wicker table, which has one leg that is slightly longer than the other three. Here on the patio of this nondescript coffee shop, Wade shifts uneasily.

They’d taken the bus here. Wade remembers.

But today--or right now--or back then--or however time works, his companion is young, younger than she usually appears, which probably means she’s not in the mood. It’s okay. Neither is Wade.

In any case, she looks like a stereotype, heavy-framed glasses, black hair chopped to her shoulders, mom jeans and scuffed white New Balance. Dark lipstick. Her coffee is untouched in front of her, arms folded beneath her chest. She’s slumped back in her chair, assessing him.

He looks away, to the street, to the sun, “Take a picture, it’ll last longer.”

“I do not need one. I see you enough as it is.” She scoffs, and Wade realizes he has forgotten the sound of her voice.

“It’s been three-hundred days.” He asserts.

“A new record. You must be pleased with yourself.”

Wade knocks his knuckles against the side of the table just to watch his coffee slosh. “I’m not.”

“You look well.” She gives. It’s a peasantry Wade doesn’t much get with people he’s been romantically involved with, especially people he’s had sex with. Then again, he notes idly, staring at the hair on his knuckles, she doesn’t really know him, does she.

“You look like an art student.” He replies, too much vitriol in his voice. It’s hard to control here.

In his peripheral vision, her mouth quirks, “I have forgotten your charm.”

Wade rolls his eyes. “Can I go back now?”

She shrugs. In the summer heat she’s all dewy skin and smirks, and Wade startles himself with how much he wants to bruise her. She traps him like this, every time. It makes him feel like a captured wild animal.

Yearning is a yawning maw inside him.

Upon her nonresponse, Wade starts shifting, uncomfortable. “Why did you take me here? I like your lair much better.”

“You took us here.” She leans forward, acrylic nails tapping against the rim of her latte. The art in the foam is of a raven. She dips a nail into it, destroying the art, and then licks the foam from the pad of her finger. “Something on your mind, Wade?”

“I took the bus here.” Wade states. “I remember that.”

“The bus.” She repeats, no emotion, no temptation, just statement.

“You wanna make this worse?” He scoots away from the table. “Your life is way too fucking easy to act like this.”

“My life,” She repeats, dull as before. “I am older than you, Wade Wilson. Take care to remember that.” In the flash of her face, Wade can see the cruel whiteness of bone beneath it.

He pushes his hair out of his face, already sweaty in the summer heat. “What are you gonna do, kill me?”

“No, Wade. Yours is a spectacular torture.” She aims at him, calm and cool, while he stands heaving. “I would simply send you back.”

Despite the heat, he feels ice in his spine. “Good.” He says with false bravado. “I’m ready.”

She smiles at him, and this smile is blatantly full of pity. “You may go back.” She says, and then quirks her head. Wade follows her line of sight to the bus stop, where people are pouring out of an old city bus. Wade watches a young woman, thin in the face, slowly climb down the stairs. She’s clutching tightly to a little boy’s hand. The boy, blond, ruddy, maybe seven, looks sticky and irritated.

“Or,” Death says. Wade doesn’t look at her; he can’t look away. “You may follow her.”

Wade glances back, for a moment.

“You brought us here.” Death says again. “And I have no wanting for your company.” She takes a robust sip of her coffee. “You have several hours until you can regain the use of your spinal fluid and you’ve already given me a migraine. Off you go, Wilson.”

When Wade was six years old, months before the death of his mother, they’d taken the bus to Winnipeg for a consultation. One of mom’s nurses had suggested it to her, and while Thomas didn’t care to take her, she’d gone anyway.

This was Wade’s first time somewhere new, and he remembered the wonder he felt while his mother clutched his hand and dragged him to her appointment. Afterward, she’d bought him an ice cream and they’d sat in the park, waiting for the city bus to take them to a separate bus station so they could catch the bus home.

Mom had been sick for so long that the sun didn’t really shine anymore, and at the time Wade didn’t really get it. At six death isn’t in the lexicon. Then again, at six he shouldn’t have known about a lot of things.

The day wasn’t nice or special or even remarkable in any way. Mom was still dying and Wade was still alone all the way through it. But he remembers the clutch of her hand the same way he remembers the clutch of his father’s. Though hers was out of love and protection, they both still hurt the same, in the end.

She stands before him now, as living as Death could conjure her to be, a phantasm no more fantastic than a stranger on the street. She’s wearing jeans too big for her and a sweatshirt with Winnie the Pooh on it.

In death Wade has always beautiful, but he bears little resemblance to her. Even with hair and clean skin and eyebrows.  He instead catches glimpses of himself in passing windows as he trails after the boy and his mother. Death is the only place Wade can appreciate what was done to him in life, because in death Wade just looks like his father.

Thirty paces ahead of him and about ten paces ahead of his mother, Little Wade, bitching about something as he walks, keeps tripping over his shoelaces. They aren’t tied. But he is unbruised and his smile is gummy, and keeps glancing back to his mother like are you still here? Do you see this? And the world brims with potential.

But Wade’s mom dies, and that stupid kid up there is going to grow new teeth and new scars and one day this will be a memory that Death forces him to walk down, to follow, until they reach the doctor’s office and disappear into the building, into the oblivion of memory.

“Yo what the fuck is this.”

“What the fuck man that’s so fucking gross.”

“Dude, poke at it.”

“I’m not poking at it what if it’s gooey?”

“It’s not gooey it looks like a human.”

“Humans are gooey, Charles!”

“I didn’t know that legs could look like...that.”

“This has got to be some super villain bullshit. I swear to god I’m going to call whoever left this here and give ‘em a piece of my--”

“Oh god it just twitched.”

“Ah, I think it’s breathing.”

Wade’s got gravel in his mouth somehow. “It can hear you.” He mumbles into the pavement.

One of the voices screeches. “It can talk!”

“It can hear!”

“It can do party tricks!” Wade asserts, and then kicks his leg out. His booted foot (the good one, not the one attached to the regrowing thigh) hits the soft cartilage of a knee. With great pain and effort, Wade rolls on his back with one good hand and one that’s still pink with regrowth, and looks at the guy he’d taken down.

“Dude, where the fuck were y’all last night?” He inquires, and strips the dock security guy of his gun. His name badge says Washington. “Did you know you have a sniper problem? I don’t own this place but I’d call the exterminator if I were you.”

It’s still raining, but the sky is now a light gray. Morning.

The boat that he and Spidey were on last night still gleams in the harbor, taunting him.

He points the gun, swallowing around his own failure. “I misplaced all my weapons last night when I went for a swim in the harbor and then died from it.” He grins. “Imma need you to give me yours.”

Dock Security 2--the one that had been called Charles earlier--looks like a terrified Ken doll. He drops the weapon abruptly. “Holy shit are you a talking blob?”

“I am clearly a person.” Wade harrumphs, rolling over and army crawling to the second gun. Holy fuck this is an ungodly amount of pain. All his skin feels chafed, his muscles raw. “I could not be more clearly a person.”

“Uh--” Washington says, from his sprawl next to Wade. God these guys are idiots. “Uh, you--”

And Wade remembers. He’s got half his suit missing. He was dead like thirty seconds ago. “Christ.” He spits. “I am now an armed talking blob so I suggest you start saying nice things to me instead of mean ones.”

“Dude you--”

“I’m being cyberbullied.” Wade states blandly, and then it occurs to him to ask. “Hey is there another dead red blob around here?”

Washington shares a glance with Charles. “Uh,” He says, awkwardly. “No sir. You were the only blob we found.”

“A ‘sir’, eh.” Wade says, and then remembers. Oh. “So no other dead guy in a suit?” And then, “No other guy in a suit at all?”

“It’s just the three of us, man.”

“You know who Spider-Man is, right?”

They share another glance. “Um yes. Why?”

“Oof.” Wade replies, lightly, like he hadn’t just woken up after four hours of being dead and following his mother around Winnipeg and like he hadn’t just found out that his childhood friend was using the fact that Wade was a clingy bitch when he made a friend against him and like he hadn’t just found out that said friend had left him to die .

“You may run screaming now.” Wade waves his hand.

“Thank you sir.” Charles said, and then they haul ass away. Idiots.

Alone, Wade puts his new guns in his holsters.

[Don’t jump to any conclusions here buddy or somebody you like is gonna get deaded]

{Aw shucks White he’s probably already deaded--the Avengers just scooped his body out of the bay!}

[Why didn’t they scoop our body out of the bay too ]

Wade rubs his temples and makes an attempt at a deep breath. Okay. Great. Painstakingly, he stands up. His leg is still new, still tender. The skin isn’t even scarred yet, and gives sickeningly underneath his dirtied gloved finger. His back, too, feels lumpy and strained, which means one of the bullets hasn’t worked its way out yet. Once standing, he has to pause a second to catch his breath.

[This is so much cooler in the movies]

For his own sake, he does a sweep of the docks, just in case. Just in case. Coming up empty, he stands a mirror image of himself last night beneath the boat and feels charcoal in his chest.

The guns in his holster are too cold, and he’s got a criminal syndicate to take down but he’s standing here gritting his fucking teeth trying to piece together the flashes, the memories of last night.

Spider-Man clutching the concrete, water up to his chest, dragging Wade by the upper arm.

Both of them sprawled out at the end of the pier, coughing. Wade had made a joke.

Spidey cracking a response, a light punch to the shoulder, and then--

Then darkness.

The scene opens in Winnipeg.

“ Fuck ,” Wade says harshly, because he woke up dead and alone and abandoned, but also because, despite all of that, there’s still something he’s got to do.

Spidey’s call to the Avengers had gone through last night, so there’s a logical place where he’d gone.

The only issue with said logical place is that nobody is fucking answering the door.

He pounds again. “I am technically one of you!” Wade insists at the unhearing mahogany. “At least kinda. Partially. If you’ll have me?”

{Fuck you’re getting off track}

“Look I don’t really give a fuck about anything or anyone in there except for one fucking douchebag so just--”

The door opens abruptly to a prim butler, his face contracted in concern. Wade almost punches him in the face.

“Yo, does Stark really pay you to open the door after like, five minutes, or are you just slacking?”

“Can I help you, sir?”

“Thanks Jeeves, but I think I’ll just--” Wade moves to duck around the mild-mannered butler but he grabs Wade by the arm.

“I’m afraid I’m going to have to ask you to leave.”

Wade grasps his wrist. “Excuse me, Alfred, but get your fucking hands off of me.”

Jeeves' face has gone pale, but his grip remains.

“Look,” Wade raises his voice. “I am very angry right now, and I know you can’t tell because I am sunshine embodied but I will not be responsible for drop-kicking you into next week, sir, so if Spider-Man is alive I would appreciate it if you kindly let me know.”

Jeeves lets go, and Wade lets go too. He’s standing half inside the house and half out of it. “I’m afraid I don’t know what you’re talking about.” Jeeves rubs his wrist. “And as I’m sure you’re well aware, but the people who live in this mansion don’t take very kindly to threats.”

“Fine. I’ll ask nicely.” Wade grasps the butler by the lapels of his suit jacket and forces him back a step. “Is.” He asks, and forces another. “He.” A third step, now, and Jeeves' feet are starting to stumble. “Alive.”

“Why do you ask?” Jeeves asks, and by now Wade is sure he’s sounded a silent alarm or something and Wade’s head is going to be ripped clean off by the twang of Cap’s shield, but he really couldn’t give less of a fuck about it.

Wade grins beneath his mask. With teeth. “Because if he’s dead then I can forgive him.”

The butler audibly swallows. “I really must ask you to leave, sir, I don’t--”

They’re interrupted by a door swinging open, a voice coming through it. “Jarvis what’s going on? The door alarm has been going off for like five--” the voice trails off. “Minutes.”

Wade glances up, and is struck with such an impenetrable barrier of unfairness that he glances immediately back to Jarvis and then lets him go. He smooths the lapels. Inside his stomach feels like a swamp, like he’d just eaten something bad or just heard a stupid news story or that one time he’d been cursed with fire.

“That will be all, Jarvis.” Wade says, and turns on his heel.

Spidey, at his back, mask shoved messily on, clad only in a pair of fresh joggers and an oversized crewneck, an IV in his arm, barefoot, has the absolute audacity to tell him. “Wait!”

He shoulders through the door, absently noting he’s starting to drip blood from his new leg. They’d left him to die on that shitty fucking dock, left him sprawled out and openly vulnerable, like they hadn’t given a single shit about any of it, about him. Like he wasn’t ‘clearly a human being.’

Wade wants to find anger at that but all his finds is old stitches, they itch, they burn, but they’ll never go away. Instead of anger he finds resignation, something that doesn’t burn hot nor slide wet but instead doesn’t budge at all. There’s no energy behind it.

Wade never really had parents, but he imagines this is what I’m Not Mad I’m Just Disappointed feels like, like a Worse than Mad, or something else equally as shitty, like a Def Leppard concert.

{Are you aware you aren’t making sense, ya dumbass}

[No wonder they didn’t rescue lil Timmy from the well….who would?]

“Wade, hold on a second.” Spidey says at his back. It’s still openly raining and the droplets on his mask make it sound like fat drops on tent flaps all around him.

Wade doesn’t bother with a response, just continues to limp out of the sprawling yard of Avengers mansion.

Spidey, mostly healed and on a fucking IV drip, catches up to him. “Hey hey hey.” He falls into step with him. “I want to explain, okay.”

“You ever had eggs benedict?” Wade asks, dragging a thumb over the splitting skin covering his new thigh. “It always looks so good but I’m not much of a yolk person, so I probably wouldn’t like it, would I?” He tarts. “It’s like biopics. Like that new one, with Rami Malek? It always looks so good but, like, pick up a documentary sometime. Read a book. Listen to a Queen record. You know. Bullshit.”

“Wade, shut up, okay.”

Which. Okay. He halts, so abruptly that Spider-Man accidentally walks a few extra feet. So. Wade should deal with this. He should. Because he’s in an astounding amount of pain and he’s hungry and cold and wet and feeling a little -- well -- more than a little left-at-the-altar, so he’s going to put this to rest before he accidentally does something bad like shoot the guy he just walked across town on a fucking bum leg and a torn-up back for.

{when u accidentally kill ur crush}

[haha relatable]

Right pointer finger to left thumb, Wade counts. “I don’t really care what you have to say.” Pointer to pointer. “I already know what you have to say.” Pointer to middle. “You obviously don’t think I deserve an explanation anyway.” Pointer to ring. “I don’t want to talk to you.”

Pointer to pinky. “I just wanted to make sure you were alive.”

He drops his hands in fists at his sides. “And you are. Congratulations on having a full arsenal of support to drag you from death’s door. I’m going to go kill a bunch of Canadians. Have a nice life, Peter.”

Spidey just stands there. Wade can’t tell, but maybe he’s gaping? Either way he wants to punch him in his stupid perfect mask.

“What, Marvel’s Mouthiest is speechless? I’ll be damned.”

“Wade.” Spidey states, and something about his posture, his voice, gets Wade to pause.

There is a long silence.

“Wade, I told you that in confidence.”

Wade’s eyes bug out. “ Ooo I wanna hurt you so bad.” He turns. Please dear god get us out of here. Get us away from this. Make the feelings go away. Wade starts to march away but Spidey follows. “You are so goddamned lucky that I have warm fuzzies for you sometimes because otherwise I would have tossed you off the side of that boat in a not-nice way.”

“You weren’t mad at me then.”

“I’m not mad at you now. Is there a place for eggs benedict around here for cheap? I want to try it but I don’t want to spend any of my hard earned millions that I earn by savagely murdering people on something that I don’t like.”

“Okay now you’re just being cruel.”

Wade turns on him. Doesn’t say anything. Stops right there in the middle of the sidewalk, two blocks from Avengers mansion.

“Well, Pot.” Wade says, cheery. He clasps Spidey (Peter) by the shoulder--oops, the bad one!--and continues. “I’ve got to go, you know, a busy day in the life of being a Kettle and all.”

“That hurts.” Spidey shrugs out of his grip.

“Well, I saved your life. Just checking to make sure it’s all in working order.” He leans down to whisper, conspiratorial, “I did die, you know.”

Spidey (Peter!) flinches, and it’s not at all gratifying like it should be, instead Wade just feels bloodied and down, like Rocky after a big fight or that one movie where Apollo Creed died. Shit.

Oh shit this is bad. And not the good type of bad like earlier, but the bad type, like before, like...like.

“Why did you leave me?” Wade asks without meaning to, and it sounds way more vulnerable than he would ever want it to. He walks it back just as quickly as it was asked. “Yikes wait nevermind.”

Peter (Spidey?) has ditched the IV back at the mansion, but the quick insert needle still sits in the fleshy inside of his arm. Now, bandages almost soaked through, he fiddles with it. “By the time Carol got there you had, uh--”

“You should get back.” Wade announces, too loud around the rain.

“We didn’t--I wasn’t in the right mind. I wasn’t thinking straight and--oh--” He says, like he’s coming to a conclusion. “I think maybe it was--”

Wade interrupts, antsy and isolated. “Imma let you finish in a minute.” He says, “You’re hurt and about to make a fool out of yourself.” And isn’t that weak? Pathetic? That even after everything Wade’s giving him an out, because that’s what he does. Like a kicked puppy. Or those times when Thomas had been nice to him, just brief segments, but they’d been everything , and they’d kept Wade weak, kept him spitting out blood and asking for more. “Go home, Peter.”

“You’re hurt too.”

Bitter like a sour candy, Wade deadpans, “I didn’t get the cushy invite.”

Another silence. Spidey--Peter-- flexes his hand against his arm. “We should visit Doctor Strange.”

“ We think that veganism is going to save the whales. We think Neptune is in retrograde so that’s why we’re getting in so many little domestic arguments, isn’t that right, darling? Christ.” Wade quotes, “We.” He continues. “I gotta go kill one of my childhood best friends. Later, gater.” He turns again, another please let me leave please leave me alone please make me stop feeling this way , but Peter (Spidey.) reaches out to touch him, to stop him, cold fingers on his elbow.

“ We think that neither one of us understand what’s fully going on. Especially you.”

{Is he playing the crazy card?}

[I think he’s playing the crazy card.]

{Kick his ass baby!}

Wade tries very desperately to take a deep breath but he can’t find it. “I really think you should go back now.” He manages.

“I’m just--your childhood friend?” Spidey (Peter.) asks. “Seriously? Somebody is out there making us believe things that aren’t true and your--your childhood friend is involved.”

“I’m not--” Wade grits, “What are you trying to say? Because I suggest you say it delicately.”

Peter swallows. “Don’t you--can’t you see you’re the main character here?” He asks, punctuated by a long rumble of soft thunder. The rain picks up, like the heavy gray sky above wants to drown the both of them.

Wade shoves a finger in his face. “I’m not crazy.”

Peter gently pushes Wade’s hand away. “I never said that.”

Despite himself, Wade thinks about Death at that coffeeshop. Yours is a spectacular torture , she’d said, and then he’d woken up alone and covered in dirty salt water, and stumbled across town without the guy who should have been with him in the first place.

Despite himself, Wade feels the back of his throat go wet and achy. “C’mon,” He sighs, angry and useless and weak. He yanks his elbow away from Peter’s cold fingers. “I’ll walk you back.”

Chapter Text

“So, you’re, uh...what?” Strange asks, at Wade’s back. It’s still raining outside but the light has shifted. Midmorning. Peter is gray on the couch. Wade’s back is to him. His mind is somewhere else.

They’re back at Avengers mansion, Jarvis, Tony Stark’s butler, had eyed him very warily, but had let the two of them back inside before wandering off to call Stephen Strange on their behalf.

The hour or so it had taken him to come from uptown was torture. Wade knows. He’s been tortured before.

[It’s hard for the big guy to reconcile liking somebody with the fact that they very much Do Not Like him.]

“We’re out of our depths here, doc.” Peter says.

“And this is my problem?” It’s a question, not a statement.

“I mean, we were kinda--”

“I don’t really even like you.”

Spidey, ever the hero, jumps in, “Hey, you know, that’s not fair. We’re working together on this.”

Strange laughs, a dry sort of thing. “I was talking to the both of you.” And then he adds, like an afterthought, “It doesn’t seem like Deadpool is even a part of this conversation.”

From his position slouching in the windowsill, Wade inputs, “Deadpool is completely used to having things in his head.”

{Damn straight}

“Deadpool doesn’t think we need any help.” Peter says, clearly unhappy about it.

He tilts his chin to look Peter in the eye, like a dare, like a challenge. Peter can’t hold the eye contact, won’t look at him. Figures.

“I can take care of this on my own.” Wade says.

“He can’t.” Peter interrupts.

“Aren't you like twelve?” Wade says. “Call me when you can drink and then tell me I’m not capable of making my own decisions.”

“I can drink!”

“And I can do a double back flip.”

“Don’t be condescending.”

“I’m a big boy, buddy,” Wade shifts, elbows coming onto his knees. “I would have had this finished way earlier if you hadn’t gotten involved.”

Peter’s knuckles go white on the couch. “Finished what?” He says, slowly.

Wade wants to hurt him. “Dude. I’m on a job.” Wade deadpans, and Peter’s posture changes. “Yeah. Ya know. Bodies. Blood. Bullets. All the good B’s. Plus cash, but that’s a C”

“You never--”

“Bears. Beets. Battlestar--”

“This was a hit ? You took me on one of your hits?” The words are incredulous, but Wade doubts he can hurt Peter as much as Peter can hurt him.

“Boys,” Strange interrupts, literally facepalming. “Please. Dear god. And you wonder why nobody wants to work with you two.”

“I’m a delight, fuck you.” Wade demures.

There’s a silence.

“I can’t believe that this isn’t anything more to you than a paycheck.” Peter says, quietly, like it hurts him physically.

Wade stops himself from flinching, but barely. He’s glad for the mask because he can feel his face go gummy, but he swallows it and makes sure his voice sounds just on the right side of cutting and flippant. “Well, I can’t believe you left me to die. Sounds like we both have a personal problem.”

It lands all wrong, all sticky, and suddenly everything is viscous around him.

“Okay.” Strange says from somewhere far away. “I suppose I could--reveal to you the things you’re having trouble working through yourself. I can’t guarantee it’ll be helpful. I can only draw on the most recent of--” Strange pauses and gives an odd look to Spider-Man before his eyes slide to Wade. “Feelings. I suppose that’s the word.”

“How’s that going to help?” Wade says, hands on his hips.

“I dunno.” Strange shrugs. “But if anybody else has been digging...that’ll be there too.”

“What the hell is that supposed to mean?”

“Your brain knows what’s right.” Strange says mysteriously. Jackass. “It can be a guide of sorts, a pointer toward the darker stains.” His fingers flick a spark. “Even for you, Wade Wilson. I think you’d be surprised how resilient you can be. How much even an altered brain can retain, with a little digging. This will dig for you."

“My mind is a steel trap.” Wade says, and Strange smiles, sickly, but genuine.

“Sure.” He says. “Fair warning, though, this might hurt.” Strange starts, and then everything tips sideways.

The room Wade is standing in is a museum of gleaming white marble.

His head pounds, the blood beating behind his eyes like fireworks.

“Ow.” He states, expecting to taste blood or feel tender flesh somewhere, but he’s clean, he’s fine. He’s uninjured. In front of him is a rack of info pamphlets. Wade doesn’t know where he is.

He expects a flippant response to that, but his brain is silent.

His arm extends of its own volition and grabs a pamphlet. On the front is an advertisement for the museum's new exhibit, here May 17 through August 5. The Mystery of Richard Parker it says Intelligent Scientist, Unknown Father . There’s a picture of a goofy looking man, someone Wade has never seen or heard of before.

“Hey.” Wade hears, and turns on his heel to find Spider-Man, in full uniform unlike before, and Wade remembers. This is that weird Doctor Strange thing. Right. “Where are we?”

“I hope it’s my mind palace.” Wade walks the perimeter for a moment. “But I don’t see any of the busty women. And there’s no new gun smell.”

“Stop it.”

“Do I make you uncomfortable, Peter?” Wade says. “Like you don’t want to be around me?”

“I’m serious.”

“Is it hard for you to work with somebody so fucking horrible?”

“Deadpool.” Peter finally snaps. “Are you incapable of approaching anything the right way?” And he sounds almost disappointed. Angry mostly, but also disappointed.

“Don’t tell me you don’t want these motherfuckers dead, too.” Wade says, surprising himself with the seriousness of it. He then adds. “I didn’t do it for the money. It’s just a perk.”

At that, Peter evidently doesn’t have a response. He sighs. “I don’t get you.”

“I’m not a science project, you fucking nerd.” Wade says, but it lacks the bite from before. He feels suddenly very scrutinized, and for lack of anything to do other than sit there and let Peter try to take him apart, he opens the pamphlet as if to read it.

“What is that?” Peter says.

Wade holds it up. “This?” He says. “I dunno.”

Spidey snatches it from him. “What the hell is this place?”

“That was mine.” Wade pouts.

“Mine now.”

“I’ll just get another.”

“No. Nope.” Peter says. “I mean, do you really think this is the key to what’s going on with us?” His gaze falls down to the picture of the man for a moment, and then Spidey turns away, walking a few feet to stand beneath the only other thing in the room, which is a full sized-statue of a middle-aged to elderly man. “Seems like a scam.” He trails off.

“You were the one who wanted to call Strange.”

“Yeah but I didn’t think it would be so--” he stops himself, and then sighs again. “personal.”

Peter looks up at the man and Wade feels weird, so he asks, “Do you know that dude?”

“It’s a statue.” Wade looks down at the plaque and reads, “Benjamin.”

Peter cuts a look at him through the mask and then paces toward Wade, shoving the crumpled pamphlet into his chest. He stalks into the next room through a white marble archway, leaving Wade standing alone in the first room. His stomach threatens to turn over, the pain in his head sharpening.

Finally, he trots after Peter, like he always does, like a fucking dog gone to heel.

The next room is massively different, sand and rock, and endless sky above them. The only thing in sight is a small white building, rising two stories above the sand.

Wade knows this place.

“This is...different.” Spidey says, booted feet dug into the hot sand. He glances back toward the archway. “Should we go back?”

Wade ignores him and continues forward, toward the building, around to the other side and...yeah. There he is.

Wade Wilson stands before him, twenty-some years old, short blond hair cropped to his temples, blood around the corner of his mouth, wearing nothing but his fatigue pants and an undershirt, dusty with sweat and speckled with blood. His bicep is wrapped in a considerable amount of gauze. He looks fresh, fit, destroyed. He's a wax sculpture, a snapshot of emotion.

He’s leaning against the building, head in his hands.

Wade remembers this moment, remembers it clearly. This was directly after his discharge from the military. The discharge, the mission, all of it swirls around this Wade’s head, and here he stands, uprooted, outside the commanding officer’s offices.

He remembers being officially dishonorable discharged. When it was all over--blissfully, brutally over--Wade had that look on his face again. The one he’d had as a kid, looking up at his father. He could feel it then, all those swampy emotions caked into a pressed mouth and shining eyes.

He remembers all the feelings that came with it: a blaze in his eyes and tremble in his fingers, an ache like getting his teeth kicked in. Skin gone cold, he was infinitely aware of the way the gear touched his skin and sat on his shoulders, his knees and the way he was standing, the blood beating between his eyes, top of his mouth gone hot. His chest had been inky with unfairness. His jaw had been clenched, his eyes hot.

He’d left the hearing, walked down the crisp hall of the commander offices, took a sharp right and then a left, and hit sunlight. In the heat as the door closed behind him he dug his fingers into his eyelids, as if he could grasp the rawness from his face, as if he could cover it.

This is not a good moment for Wade Wilson. He hadn’t even done anything wrong . He’d in fact, done something right, and US Special Ops had discharged him for it, like he was nothing. Like they’d gotten what they needed from him, wrung him from his morals like an old washcloth.

“Woah.” Spidey says, now here in the present, having caught up. “Who is that?”

Wade moves toward him, lifts his arm as if to touch and then doesn’t, at the last second. This young Wade’s expression is mostly covered by his hands, but this is too personal, and Real-Wade can’t tell how much devastation this wax sculpture communicates.  “He’s made of wax.”

Spider-Man approaches, as well, but he touches, reaching a gloved hand to follow the curve of the muscles in Wax-Wade’s arms. He’s not actually physically touching Wade, but Wade feels weird about it all the same. “Tryna cop a feel?” Wade asks, instead of telling him to stop, instead of telling the truth.

“He’s wax.” Peter says. “And honestly this bicep is unreal.”

“You jealous or flirting?”

Peter’s gloved hand drops from where it was resting at the top of the wax soldier’s shoulder. “Did you know this person?” At Wade’s nonresponse, Peter continues. “What happened to him?” So yeah. Maybe the pain was obvious, even in the wax.

Wade gestures to his arm. “Got shot in the arm.” He doesn’t want to look at his own failure anymore. Wade walks on, toward what looks to be the end of the exhibit.

“Come on, Deadpool, you have to work with me. Whatever this is, it matters. Otherwise why would we be seeing it?”

“You don’t want to work together, Spidey.” Wade says, stalking toward the exit.

“Don’t put words in my mouth.” Peter is following close behind.

Wade turns, backing up through the door. “You want something else in your mouth?”

The door opens, “Who,” Peter starts, moving into the new room, “was it?”

Peter stops short.

This new room is colorless, two figures on the floor completely devoid of most defining details. The one sprawled, almost one with the floor, is obviously Deadpool from a few hours ago, dead, missing a thigh. The bullet holes in his body are holes straight through the floor.

“This is like art or something.” Wade snorts. “A museum.”

The other figure is less definitive, but he’s male, lithe, thinly muscled. The figure is leaning over the dead Wade, head hanging, his hands on both of Wade’s dead shoulders.

The curves of their bodies together communicates something sickly, like grief, but Wade is probably casting his own aspersions on the situation.

Peter says, “This is us.”

“Yeah, Sterling K Brown, this is us.” Wade circles the two figures. Spidey’s marble fingers bite into Deadpool’s marble shoulders. 

“Were you kissing me goodbye?” He says, and turns from the figures.

Spidey looks at him sharply. “You want to let me explain or do you want to continue to feel sorry for yourself?

“Why should I bother?” Wade demands. “You’re never wrong, are you Spidey?” He looks down back at the two of them, marble on the floor. Spider-Man is stiff, head bowed, back curled. It almost looks protective. Wade develops a weird taste in his mouth.

“You’d be surprised.” The real Spider-Man says, clear and almost too loud in the echoing space.

Wade shakes his head and moves toward the next door, heavy black oak. He pushes forward and into the room.

This room is small. On the far wall, a video of the same soldier from before, the Wade with the cropped hair and the devilish smile, this time he’s not wax. This time he’s movement on a screen, naked to the waist.

Wade immediately steps back, but he hits warmth and spandex and muscle. Trapped in here. Panic tastes raw in his mouth, like sucking on an open sewage line.

“‘M Wade by the way,” On-screen him was saying. “Wade Wilson.” A darker image stepped into the spot, larger than Wade, male. “Wade Winston Wilson.” On-screen him was saying, slurring his words, fighting to keep his eyes open. He was perched on the sink in what was obviously a shitty dive bar’s  bathroom.

“I don’t care.” The dark headed man said, threading his hand through Wade’s hair and tugging, hard enough for Wade’s hand to come down and smack the wall for balance, for him to list dangerously to the side.

Wade doesn’t remember this.

“Wade?” A quiet voice, in his ear, not the screen has Wade almost jumping, stepping out of Spidey’s personal bubble, consequently toward the screen, the nightmare.

On screen, Wade laughs. “Me neither.” It sounds pathetic and thin, even to Wade’s own ears. “How d’you want me?”

Dark-haired man tugs again, and this time Wade comes down from the sink, uncoordinated, but lands on his feet.

He leans forward, heavy-lidded, flushed with drink. The screen fills with Wade’s young face. Prim eyebrows, long lashes. He can’t be more than twenty.

Behind him, Spider-Man swears.

Twenty-year old, beautiful Wade opens his mouth, wet and pink, and says. “I don’t kiss on the lips.”

And in the room, Wade’s breath catches in his throat.

To his surprise, there is a warm hand on his wrist. Wade reacts without thinking, eyes on the screen. He rotates his arm to plant his hand on the other’s forearm, takes a step forward, and brings his attacker near. Spider-Man plants his hand on Wade’s chest and resists the tug, the proximity. Wade is way better at hand-to-hand, but Spider-Man is stronger.

“Wade!” Peter says, and Wade’s eyes snap to the polarized lenses. “Hey!”

Wade realizes his chest is heaving with a great up-and-down force beneath Spidey’s palm.

“I don’t think we should watch this.” Spidey says, and tugs his arm. For a moment, Wade can’t do anything but stand there, feeling the pressure of Peter’s hands.

On screen, the dark haired man says, “On your knees.”

So Wade lets himself be pulled out of the room, through a set of french double-doors, and then they’re standing on the Brooklyn Bridge.

Spider-Man immediately lets go of him, and Wade takes several large steps away, tasting the sewage and trash of New York in the early summer through great big lungfuls of air.

A taxi roars by them, and Wade plants his hands into the railing, hunching away.

“So that was-” Peter begins. “That was you?”

Wade rocks back from the railing, straightening. “Are my biceps actually unreal?”

Spidey approaches again, slowly.

“Peter.” Wade says, and Spidey stops. “Don’t push.”

There’s a moment. “I have to.” Spidey says, almost apologetic.

It feels like the tug of a stitch in his sternum, and Wade doesn’t want that feeling. Hadn’t asked for it. “I am not asking you.”

“But there--”

“None of those were connected.” Wade says, tilting his face into the wind. “I don’t know what you expected from Strange but we’re just wading through the swamp that is my head.”

Spider-Man starts, “Not just--” and then he stops himself, looking out over the bridge and into the waters below. “Where the hell are we?” He asks absently, as if distracted. Which. How?

Wade just rolls his eyes. More cars rush past, and the breeze they leave is hot and musty.

Spidey blows out a breath and plucks at his glove, like a nervous habit, twirling a shooter around his wrist. “Shit.” He says, and then with obvious effort, focuses back on Wade. With renewed fervor, he says.  “What connects those three scenes?”

“Nothing.” Wade says. He doesn’t want this. “I don’t even remember one of them.”

“There’s something. Has to be.”

Wade turns. “Military. Sex. And you.” He says, unkindly. There is no give in him today. “Sounds like a kink.”

“You are grossly oversimplifying what we saw.”

“Yeah? Doc? Wanna diagnose me as a headcase?” Wade snarls. “What the fuck do you know about any of what we saw?”

Peter pauses. “I was in one of them.”

Wade snorts. “So you’re saying what, exactly? All three of those instances were snapshots of the parts of my life right before I was about to get fucked?”

Spider-Man’s jaw clicks shut, breath coming in sharp. His hands clench at his sides. Wade wants to enjoy the reaction, he does, but he can’t stop thinking about that drunk him, that young him, that beautiful him, knees biting into the bathroom floor. That was not the only time that happened in his youth. He thinks absently about the Russian boy in the Ukrainian bar, the taste of his fear.

“Um.” Peter says, and woah there’s a waver there, a distinct up-and-down to the cadence. “I’m saying,” Peter says, carefully, measured, controlled. It sounds like the words are coming out from a tense jaw. “That the common denominator is that you were…” He stops, looks away. “You were being used.”

And oh.

Okay.

“Fuck you, Peter.” Wade says, pushing past Spider-Man and toward the end of the bridge. He has no fucking clue why they’re on the Brooklyn bridge but when he looks back, Spider-Man is still standing there, thumbs brushing over the rust on the railing, staring deep into the water below.

The next room is a single painting, floor to ceiling, brushed in even strokes with vibrant paints. In it is Spider-Man, seemingly floating in midair. Bursting through his chest are eight mechanical arms. His mouth is bound with duct tape over the mask. When Wade gets closer to the painting, the image blurs until it’s nothing but clobs of paint rising from the parchment.

“Now this is a kink.” Wade says, mostly to himself. Spider-Man does not pause long in this room. He glances and stalks away, hands still clenched at his sides.

There’s no much else to see in here, and Wade doesn’t get the painting, so he follows soon after. He’s not sure what it’s supposed to mean, especially after a string of very personal exhibits. Perhaps this one is not Wade’s to claim, which means that the last one wasn’t, either. For that matter, the first place they were in was not Wade’s tragedy, either. So, those must have been Spider-Man’s.

Wade pushes out through the emergency exit, which leads into a dark hallway, lit only by the eery LED of an exit sign. The roof is tin, or something of the sort, because Wade can hear rain in a steady pour.

Spider-Man is pacing underneath the exit sign, muttering, hands still clenched. Wade leans against the wall opposite and watches the movement through the darkness. He looks down to examine his nails beneath his leather gloves.

“When you’re done.” Wade drawls.

“Shut up.” Peter says.

“Ooh, that had some bite to it.” Wade says. “Wanna bring some of that on over here?”

To his astonishment, Spider-Man grinds to a halt, and Wade watches his head rotate. Spider-Man comes closer, and Wade straightens, his heart starting to pick up in pace.

“You don’t actually like me.” Peter says. “You flirt, but you hate my guts right now. Why? Do you think it makes me uncomfortable? Is it deflection?”

Wade doesn’t really have much of a response to that. His feelings regarding Spider-Man are sticky and weird and often contradictory. Like right now, he’s so mad at Peter he could maybe kinda kill him, but the reason he’s so mad? Well that goes much deeper.

Often his anger does not have an easy answer. Relationships are messy and stupid and often deeper than anyone can imagine. That’s why it’s easy to redirect to causes that are simpler. Cleaner. Easier to palate. Like human traffickers, or Nazis, ‘cause fuck those guys.

“You don’t like me.” Wade returns, easy, smooth.

Peter doesn’t reply. Maybe their relationship is more complicated than Wade thought.

After a moment, Spider-Man says, “Failure.”

And Wade says. “Yeah. Okay.” And then his brain catches up. “What?”

“Strange said this would just explore the last things we’d been feeling. Vestiges of what happened last night at the docks. Let’s operate under the assumption that whoever’s been messing with our minds was there last night. Has been there at every step.”

“Why would we assume that?”

“This player is their best asset.”

“They also had a sniper that shot you twice.”

"No. It wasn't just the sniper there last night." Peter says, with surprising force. “You really think that I would fucking leave you there of my own volition?” Spidey grinds out. The air whooshes from Wade’s chest. “That I would choose to leave you dead on the pavement?”

“Um.” Wade says. “Yes?”

Spidey snorts, head shaking. “So you don’t actually like me at all.” He says, an air of self-deprecation falling around him. “I want to make this very clear. We are in this together. I wouldn't just fucking let you die.”

There’s room for a High School Musical reference, but Wade doesn’t want to break the moment, for some reason. Peter is on edge and kinda vulnerable, open in a way that Wade has never seen before.

“The last thing you were feeling was used.” Peter says. “And the last thing I was feeling was failure.”

At his admission, the lights in the hallway come on with a hearty clang. Through the blare of a quick blindness, Wade discovers they’re not in a hallway at all, and instead back in that room with the two statue figures of themselves. This time, the room is in color, almost life-like. Deadpool is definitely dead, and there’s blood pooled underneath him like a sickening puddle.

It takes him a moment, but Wade realizes the puddle is growing, and the Spider-Man statue is saying something. He glances at the real Spider-Man at his side, and confirms that yes, it’s the thing in the middle that’s speaking. Which, maybe it is less of a statue and more of a mechatronic recreation.

Wade moves to step forward, only to find Spidey’s hand at his bicep.

“What is this?” Wade demands.

Peter clears his throat. “Last night.”

“Fuck, Deadpool.” Spider-Man is saying, his voice hoarse, water sluicing from his suit. He shakes non-responsive shoulders once, twice, and then pleads. “Come on. Come on, we gotta go.”

Spider-Man releases one of Wade’s shoulders to cup the wound at his ribs, a choke broken up on his lips. The second hand moves very suddenly to the bottom of his mask to rip it up over his mouth. Then he’s on his hands and knees on the concrete, coughing up blood. On the ship, Wade hadn’t been sure if the bullet was in Peter’s lungs, but this confirms it.

“Wade.” Spidey says, head bowing more, voice a blazing plea. It breaks a little on the second half of the word, as Spidey fits two fingers beneath the neck of Wade’s mask, to his skin. After a moment. “No, hey, Wade.” Spidey says, and then has to move his hands again to stem the blood from himself. “No no no, you can’t--we can’t” Spidey says. “Dammit!”

There’s another choke, and Spidey slumps to the side, barely supporting himself, his arm pressed flush with Wade’s side.

At Real-Wade’s side, across the room, Real-Peter’s hand tightens at his arm. “I don’t remember anything after this.” He says, low. Wade glances over at him. “After this I woke up in Carol’s arms.”

Wade is about to reply, but he’s interrupted by the mechatronic Spider-Man across the room. “Stay--Stay away from him.” He says, struggling to lift his head and his body from the ground.

“Buddy, we don’t want him.” That’s Billy Bert’s voice, his body not far behind. He comes from around the corner, a weapon slung around his shoulder. There’s someone next to him, holding an umbrella. The other man is balding, but has dark hair, a mustache, and a grimace.

“It would be better if you hadn’t harmed him.” The dark-haired man replies, shifting the umbrella to his other hand.

“How else were we gonna give Wade a crutch? He’s physically invulnerable.” Wade doesn’t miss the emphasis on the word “physically”, a heavy implication that his emotions are the opposite. That he’s vulnerable. Which is true. He’s lying there dead, and the person he died for is struggling to aim his shooters.

Spidey shoots, but the web goes awry, hits the umbrella and knocks it out of the man’s hand.

“He’s cute.”

“I’m taking that as a compliment.” Spidey shouts,trembling, and Bert grins and turns to his companion.

“He’ll still be a jewel in your crown or whatever, you perv.” Bert says, shrugging the gun up his shoulder farther. “Make us a pretty penny. Bullet holes and all.” At a nonresponse, Billy grins and nudges the other. “Come on, Butler, this is like three birds, one stone.”

“Whatever.” The man dismisses. “Collect him.”

Real-Wade makes an aborted step forward, only to be stopped once more by the real Peter. “It’s not real.” He hisses.

Real-Wade drags Real-Peter forward. “I know who that is.” He hisses, the bottom dropping out of his stomach.

Mechatronic Billy Bert is ambling forward, swinging the rifle lazily into his hands. “Get Wade out of the way, take his boyfriend out of commission at the same time, settle a lifelong score, make a buck. Four birds, Ricardo!” Billy laughs.

“Do not come near me.” Mechatronic Spider-Man says. “Or him.”

“You gonna bleed on me?” Bert taunts, and gets a web to the center of the stomach for his efforts. “Fuck!” He grunts. “I’m going to rip you in half.” The gun goes level again. “Wilson won’t even be able to recognize you.”

“Jokes on you, he’s never seen my face.” Spidey wheezes, and webs the gun out of Billy’s hand. It goes clattering across the concrete, Billy driven a few steps back.

Wade notices that Spider-Man has his hand curled into the loop of Deadpool’s utility belt at his hip.

Billy draws a wicked looking knife from his own belt and tips it toward Spider-Man’s chest. Then, like cracked lightning, he punches Spider-Man across the face, taking advantage of the tactical mistakes Spidey has made and digging a hand into his bullet wound.

Spider-Man gasps, loosens his hold on Wade, and Bert pulls him away by the upper arm. He hangs from the hold, barely conscious, in obviously too much pain to struggle. He drags Spidey around the corner, out of sight. Far enough from Deadpool that without explicitly knowing he was there, someone would never find him.

Oh.

Ricky moves as if to follow, and then he stops. “Bert.” He says, and looks up, almost as if he’s looking across the room at right at Real-Wade. Wade goes cold all over. How could he have missed this? It was so easy to assume that Ricky had been lost to time instead of...instead of…

Apparently, Wade had underestimated him, all those years ago on the fire escape in Regina.

“We have incoming.” He says. “The Danvers girl.”

“Seriously?” Bert demands. “What are we gonna--”

Ricky smiles, something slight. He keeps looking at Real-Wade, maintaining the eye contact, even if it’s not real. “He will forget.”

The lights go out again.

There is silence, save for the rain on the roof.

"What the hell?" Wade manages. "Fucking...this is just...fucking shit on Wade hour, for god's sake. I didn't sign up for this, I'm not--"

“Wade?” Peter has not let go of his arm. “The gunman?”

Wade is gaping. For a man with usually so many words, it’s almost terrifying to find he can’t procure any right now. “An old friend.”

Peter’s hand slides down to his elbow. He tugs a little, reeling Wade to look at him. “The enhanced?” He asks, softer.

Wade searches Peter’s masked face in the darkness. “Another old friend.” He says, and then forces a laugh. “So I guess this thing worked then, huh.” he closes his eyes beneath the mask. Peter squeezes his elbow in what could be construed as comfort, and Wade very much so does not lean into it. 

Peter swallows. "For the record," he says, and his thumb does something weird and complicated on the soft part of Wade's inner elbow. “I wouldn’t leave you.” He says. It’s kind of a non-sequitur, and it’s definitely ignoring the fact that Wade’s childhood friends are both predators and one is enhanced. But for a bizarre and uncountable moment, Wade feels relieved, feels the warmth at his elbow.

“Yeah.” He manages. “I got that now.” The silence seeps in for a moment. Wade says, "So how do we get outta here?"

Chapter Text

In the early abscess of Wade’s memory, there’s one indelible recollection that comes up sometimes, usually at all the wrong times, usually when Wade is at a low point.

It slides through him like water through an open palm, vague and runny. 

At six, in the middle of the night, his parents were fighting. His mother had a temper but his father was stronger, and usually their fights all ended the same way. This time, though, all Wade could hear through his bedroom wall was whispered words, something cutoff and intimate and very, very dangerous. 

Though Wade doesn’t remember the words, he remembers that his mother had been soft, careful. She’d been unflinching, but supportive. I am here for you. Do not do this to yourself. Let me touch you. Let me ground you.

Wade was sitting up in his bed, curled around himself, trying to understand the nuance of words. It had felt so earth-shatteringly lonely, sitting there listening to his mother calm his father. Even at six Wade did not like Thomas, and did not feel he deserved the height of his mother’s affections.

When Dad had fallen asleep on the couch or the equivalent (Wade did not leave his room, and did not know what happened), Mom cracked the door, dull hallway light creating a new geometry in his room.

“Wade, baby?” His mom had said, coming inside, leaving the door cracked, the light on. “It’s late, honey, you should be asleep.”

In response, Wade had shrunk away, small and scared and solitary in his bed, under his sheets. Mom crossed the room carefully, as if Wade was something delicate to behold, and sat on his bed near his feet.

“What’s wrong with Dad?” Wade had asked, firm and small. Mom’s hand came around his ankle, thumb soft on the bone. Her warmth seeped through the sheets.

Wade knows now that this was all just a symptom of the abuse--the constant excuses, the sine wave undulating back and forth between soft touches and shattered coffee tables. It had mangled his mom into a shell, kicked her when she was low, and she used to smile through bloody teeth like there was redemption in the form of ten knuckles and two hands.

“Your father is hurting, baby.” Mom had said, which maybe wasn’t a lie. Maybe that was true. “He’s hurting so deep that it’s hard for him to not hurt.” An excuse, of course it was, but his mother had clung to it. “Sometimes when you hurt like this having...somebody...makes it better.”

Wade sniffled, unaware that he was crying. “‘M scared.” He stuttered, and Mom moved closer to him, hand coming off his ankle and over his chest, protecting his heart. 

“I know baby.” She said, something dark and thick in her own voice. “Me too.”

Wade comes to in a way that’s not dissimilar to being hit with something firm and hard. Waking up hurts.

All that he’d discovered swirls around him, Billy and the gun, Ricky and the powers, and it’s a classic Wade Wilson moment because he doesn’t even go one goddamned moment without relating it back to his father.

Of course he does. Wade has the heart of his mother but the emotions of his father. It’s a deadly combination.

Trauma sticks to him like a ghost.

Wade stumbles upward, trying to stand with the world spinning, feeling very close to passing out or puking, muttering, “Killed my fucking father, tried to take fucking Spider-Man, I’m--”

{Oof, he’s off his rocker!}

[How will we ever recover from this!]

{I doubt it will have anything to do with that carefully placed flashback from before!}

“Shut up shut up shut up, Christ, just--” Wade lists dangerously to the side and crashes into a bookshelf, feeling acute pain up his side. His mind fills with the imagery of ceaseless hands through blond hair, a scalp stretched with insistent tugging, the cloying scent of musk and alcohol. 

His stomach threatens to climb up his esophagus.

He has to cling to the shelf for his balance, but it’s heavy with large engineering tomes and doesn’t support all 200 plus pounds of Wade Wilson. With a sharp click Wade is on the floor, and not one, not two, but three textbooks clonk him in the head on the fall. It would be comical, but at the end Wade is sitting amongst a half dozen textbooks, feeling like he’s just been shit out by the devil himself, and all he wants to do is run someone through with the business end of a katana.

It’s still raining outside, a dull sort of gray. Like nothing has happened or changed. The light slanting into Tony Stark’s library is calm and unfiltered. 

For the first time in a very long time, Wade can’t bring the humor to the surface. It’s burned out beneath the weight of his anger. And it scares him, like it usually does, the fact that he’s often only one or two steps away from his own chaos.

Wade knows--he knows --that Spider-Man wants him to be good. And it sucks really hard disappointing him, really, it does, but, “I can’t do it, Spidey” Wade says, aloud, “Can’t...fucking…I know their motives are so...so fucking obvious but it’s too--”

Across the room, still slumped out the couch, Spidey twitches. He’s not in his suit, like he was in Strange’s experiment, but he’s in sweats and bandages like he was before. He twitches again, and then his hands come up to cover his masked eyes. “Oh god.” Peter groans, “I’m gonna puke.” And then, “Ooh I can’t move. Nope. Yeah I can’t move.” And further. “Oh man, remind me to worship Carol Danvers, holy cow. I was--they were--”

“They won’t.” Wade says. There is tar in his words, in his mouth. 

In his mind, Billy Bert’s hand in Spider-Man’s wounds. 

In his mind, a dark-haired man in a dive bar restroom. 

Wade takes a ragged breath in and fits his wrists under him, shaky, blurry. He’s overwhelmed with the mindless need to take, to get up, stand up, to go .

“Where you goin?” Peter turns, getting an arm under himself and sitting up, one hand pulling himself up by the back of the couch. 

Wade is hit by another pain, like an arrow through the eye, and his head drops into his hands. He is aware that the look is weirdly reminiscent of the wax soldier, the broken up boy with a world on fire. “I gotta go.”

“Where?” Peter demands, incredulous. “Augh, I feel like I’ve been eaten and digested.” he blows out a long breath of air. “I’m gonna puke.”

Wade is trying to wait for the acute pain in his head to ease, but it won’t, it’s getting a lot worse and stealing his breath. Regardless, he drops his hands, straightens up, and--

--and his hand is caught by a spider web. 

“Do not.” Spidey says, one wrist with the shooter, the other hand around his ribs. “Go anywhere.”

“I am not putting you in any more danger. They’re targeting you to hurt me. You heard them.” Wade tugs, but Spider-Man is stronger, the web that’s tangling his fingers unbreakable.

“We can handle it.” Peter groans. “Maybe not, like, now, but in a half hour or something. Jesus, this hurts. How long did Doctor Strange say this was gonna last?” And then Peter recoils, a little, obviously thinking about what Wade said. “They’re targeting me to hurt you?”

 “Incentive. He called it incentive. To stay away. Fuck , I can’t be here. I--” his throat closes around the words, the pain spreading out to the back of his skull. Wade makes a sound, a grunt almost, stomach rolling over itself. God, this hurts. It’s like going through a meat grinder. Today’s lunch: Wade burgers. Did Strange say this was gonna be this bad? He said "might hurt". Wade is going to sue. Jackass.

“Deadpool.” Peter says, voice gone low and soft and, wow, what the hell is happening? How much time has passed? The pain is making the world fuzzy, and everything he’d just seen is trying to sharpen it.

Peter gingerly slides off the couch, onto the floor, dangerously close to where Wade is vibrating with energy in the center of a book explosion. “Hey, talk to me.”

Wade’s heart burns in his chest. “Let me go.” He warns. His fingers tangle in the webs.

This Deadpool usually doesn’t come out to play when Spider-Man is around. This Deadpool is good at his job, does not take no as an answer, doesn’t make friends but doesn’t leave enemies behind.

“I’m on your side.” Peter says, hands twitching at his wounds. As if to prove his point, he clips the web, freeing Wade’s hand. They are close enough now that Wade can almost visualize the abstract heat map he’d create. Peter moves a book to the side with a grunt of exertion and lingers there, legs crossed, bare big toes just barely touching the outside of Wade’s right thigh.

Wade looks down to that vulnerable stretch of skin, blinking.

There is a moment of stillness, everything both wrong and right, and every beat of Wade’s heart hurts inside his chest.

“You don’t scare me.” Peter says, and the stillness breaks.

“Yeah?” Wade spits, and responds without thinking, just feeling the burn of what’s happened to him. 

He lunges forward.  His hand clamps to the gathering of fabric at Peter’s throat and draws him forward by his crewneck. Wade’s other hand comes up, two fingers going beneath Peter’s mask and tugging .

The mask slides up his throat but stops at the chin, going taut. Wade’s fingers are trembling.

Peter’s neck is warm, and through the back of Wade’s knuckles he can feel Spider-Man’s pulse.

“I could ruin you.” Wade threatens. 

Peter’s breath catches. Nothing, save for the hitch in his throat and the strange puff of air, moves. There is no further reaction. Just his neck and Wade’s fingers. Spider-Man could break Wade’s fingers into a thousand shards if he wanted, but he doesn’t. Instead, he just freezes. Lets Wade do it.

If he is surprised by the word choice, the threat not of exposure or pain, but of ruin, Spidey doesn’t show it.

Wade feels it when Peter swallows, the thump of his heart unceasing. He tilts his head, the line of his throat lengthening. The new position angles their faces too close together and Wade realizes that he’s not entirely sure who has the upper hand here.  

“Wade.” Peter warns, but it lacks heat. It’s almost like Spider-Man wants something from him, or that there’s something about this situation that Wade isn’t getting.

He tugs a little higher, exposing an angled view of Spidey’s chin, the corner of his lips. 

Wade doesn’t know how long they’ve been sitting like that, but he’s suddenly aware of his erratic breathing, the pain beneath his eyes. 

What a pair they make--Spider-Man with his back arched into Wade’s hold, throat long, one palm planted on the ground. Deadpool all but looming over him, hands blossoming into a dull pain from the way they’re clenched in Peter’s clothes. 

Wade thinks maybe he could do it. Maybe he could ruin Spider-Man, and maybe Spider-Man would let him.

Three fingers trace up the center of Wade’s arm, the one that ends with Wade’s fingers and Spidey’s mask. Spidey spreads his hand at the center of Wade’s forearm and says. “Come on. Work with me here.”

“I’ve never asked for your pity. Or your--your redemption.” Wade swallows hard against the burn. “Why try now?” 

Peter’s lips part, a little, hot breath against leather gloves. His mouth closes again. No response.

“I’ve killed four people for this mission alone and I have money riding on two more and I don’t scare you? I don’t offend those delicate morals? Five minutes ago you were about to kick my ass just because this was a mission.”

“This isn’t about that. Not right now.”

“Then what’s it about ?”

Peter’s left hand departs from the floor, thumb and forefinger coming around the wrist of the hand Wade has at Peter’s throat.  “It’s just like I’ve been trying to tell you all day.” Peter says. “This is about you.”

Wade feels like someone has kicked him in the throat.

There must be something on Wade’s face, because Peter’s left hand moves from his wrist and fits over-top his hand, tangling with Wade’s fingers and with Peter’s own crewneck. 

“Hey.” Peter says softly. “Come on. I’ve got you.” Wade realizes that Peter's fingers are mostly curling around Wade’s, hanging on not because they’re at his own neck, but because Wade is there

Wade, abruptly, doesn’t quite know how they ended up like this, tangled in each other.

“Come on, Wade. Don’t do something you’d regret.” Peter says, quietly.

“You think I’d regret it?” Wade asks, but his hands don’t move. The mask stays where it is.

“I know you would.”

“You always ask too much of me.” Wade manages. “Like you think--”

Peter cuts in. “You’re better?” He says, harder now, an edge. “You are.” 

Wade tugs the mask just a little more taut. He could do it. It wouldn’t be hard. But, Peter’s hand stills at his arm, and his neck is still tilted like he’s looking Wade in the eyes, and Wade can’t stop thinking about what it had looked like when the mechatronic Spider-Man had disappeared around the corner, into the arms of the enemy.

“Do you trust me?” He says, before he can stop himself. 

Peter’s fingers bite into his arm, hard, the fingers of his other hand squeezing in between Wade’s. 

That’s answer enough.

Wade abruptly lets go, shaking Spidey’s grip away, suddenly in need of way more space than the couple of inches they have between them. The mask goes lopsided on Spidey’s face, too much skin and not enough skin exposed. 

Despite the fact that Wade had just made a sizable threat, Peter tries to touch him again, as if he deserves some sort of comfort. Wade isn’t actually sure what he was trying to do, but now that it’s done, it feels like he was that one dumbass Florida Man stupid enough to shoot at the hurricane, as if that would stop it. He can’t tell if he’s destroying something or just destroying himself.

So, When Peter’s hand comes down gently on his shoulder, Wade flinches away.

There is a long silence. They are both breathing hard. 

With a breath through his nose, Peter says, “You’re not okay.”

“No shit,” Wade coughs, unable to even look at him.

“Okay. Well.” Peter says, “If you’re done trying to intimidate me…” he trails off.

Wade is flooded with the desperate need to run. “I thought I didn’t scare you.’

A soft dance of touch, a thumb into the leather seam of his suit on his back. Wade looks at Spidey sharply, who’s looking at his own fingers. “Maybe you do.” He says.

It’s getting too hard to breathe, like crawling through a house fire. Wade pauses for a breath, two, and then abruptly feels overwhelmed and bad, like, really bad.

It’s a deep, dark sort of feeling, like a panic.

Possessed by his own motion, he moves with an unthinking volition. He rolls to his knee, plants a hand, and leans over Spider-Man, mouth to his ear. “I suppose if this is about me...”

“What--” Spidey begins, mouth parting with a damp sound. But Wade plants a palm into his chest, driving him over hard onto his elbow, caught off guard. “Wade!” 

But Wade isn’t listening. “Stay away from this.” He spreads his palm out over Peter’s overwarm chest and, for a moment, feels as it heaves into his grip.

He gets to his feet and stalks from the room. Peter does not follow.

He winds up at a hovel in Harlem, shimmying through a window barely larger than his shoulders, and landing silent next to the bed. 

Wade leans over and kisses Weasel on the forehead. “Wake up, sweetheart.” It’s like...ten in the morning. Get a job, you greasy hobo. 

Weasel mutters something, shifts in his sleep.”Hey, shitstain.” Wade says, louder, and Weasel’s eyes flutter open all dainty-like. “Morning princess.”

Startled, Weasel’s hands fly up. Wade catches them easily, shoving Weasel away. To Wade’s surprise, the first thing Weasel says is, “What the fuck Pool? I coulda had a woman over.”

Wade lets Weasel go and sits on the edge of the bed, laughing, though he doesn’t feel it. “Okay horny.”

“Only for your mom.” Weasel says, rubbing at his eyes. “God I hate you.”

“I need your help.”

Weasel visibly pauses. “Are you, uh, okay?”

“I’m gonna be real honest, buddy, I’ve been better.” Wade says, looking down at his hands. “You said I took a job for the Canadians a while back. I don’t remember it.”

“Uh.”

“Do you?”

Weasel sits up and feels around the bedside table for his glasses. “It was a while ago.” He says, sliding them on.

“Weasel. This is important.”

“I dunno, Wade. You disappeared for a while. Didn’t answer your calls.” Weasel grimaces. “Came back extra fucked up. Memory problems, that sort. Not surprised you don’t remember what happened at all.”

Fuck. “How do I get those memories back?”

“What do I look like, your therapist? Christ, Wade,” Weasel throws up his hands. “What’s going on?”

"Ricky Butler. Billy Bert. Names ring a bell?” 

“I mean...I dunno. Maybe. Butler, maybe.” Weasel pokes at Wade’s chest. “Why the hell does this matter?”

“Butler’s an enhanced. Memory alteration. Got a vendetta against me and I stumbled into one of his stings by accident, and he wants me out of it. I can’t obviously do that, because--” his throat goes itchy. “I can’t do it. I wanna blow him up.”

Weasel shrugs. “Then do it.”

“I can’t,” Wade breaks, flicking out a switchblade in frustration. “He’s got leverage. Found a weak spot.” He flicks the blade back in.

Weasel laughs, derisive. “What, did he bring your Mom back to life?”

It stings. Wade flicks the blade out. Weasel jumps back. “No.” Wade spits. “But I’m pretty sure he killed my dad. Or--” I killed him and he made me forget .

“I still don’t get why that means you can’t end him? Like. dude.”

“My father isn’t the leverage. I can’t trust myself on this one, Weasel. I can’t make sure everyone comes out the other end of it, and it--” Wade swallows. “It matters to me that everyone does.”

Wade flicks the knife in.

 “I need you to spell this out for me.” Weasel says, eyeing the gleam of silver wearily.

“I grew up with them. Bert. Butler. They were--they were there the night my father died. I can’t--” He swears, “I can’t remember how he died. It’s gone, and I think. I think Butler had his powers back then. And I think he kept tabs on me. Recruited me for whatever he wanted last time, but I bet it was something just as shitty as he’s doing now and I resisted. So he gets mad at me. Pouts about it. I forget, life moves on, until the State Department starts sniffing out drug mules and kidnappings but don’t have enough evidence to do anything about it. Or they do, but people keep forgetting.  Shady deal, back alley contract, and I’m in the way again. Butler knows I can fuck up his plans because I’ve done it before and he wants to kill a coupla birds with one stone.” Wade flicks the blade out. “Take me down a peg, hit me where it hurts, finish his sting. Bada bing. Bada boom. Kick it up a notch.”

“Okay. So. Then don’t get involved? Screw that dude. Whatever your leverage is, it’s not leverage if you stay away.”

“That’s not an option.”

“Well. Then. You’re fucked. You got head issues already, Pool, there’s no way you can charge in there without getting yourself killed or putting your lady friend or whoever the hell they’re threatening in danger.”

“Not a lady friend.”

Weasel looks at him sideways. “Ugh, ew, is it Spider-Man?” Wade doesn’t reply so Weasel continues. “It’s literally always Spider-Man with you, jeee-sus.” He says, drawing out the word. Weasel leans forward, conspiratorial. “Honestly, baby, you deserve someone that would treat you right .”

Wade stands, ignoring the outburst. “I gotta take em down alone.”

“Okay stud. That sounds like a terrible idea.”

“I can’t bring him near this.”

“It doesn’t matter. You can’t win.” Weasel says, looking up at Wade with cold, clear eyes. “Isn’t that their point? You can’t really lose, but you do have things to lose? And not just some other guy in a mask. I’m not talking about him.” 

Wade doesn’t reply for a moment and the silence sinks around them.

“You’re going to lose,” Weasel says, quiet, like he’s delivering a cancer diagnosis.

Wade cocks a shoulder. “Does it matter?” He asks, wry.

Weasel assesses him with a face like he’s watching some kind of tragedy. “I suppose it doesn’t.”

{We’re coming full circle baby}

[Chapter freakin one]

{Or two, I guess. Kinda three. Honestly too lazy to go back and look.}

Back at Wade’s apartment, Deadpool brings himself back to square one. The only new information that the State Department hadn’t known is what Craig from Chapter One told him, and Wade has all the info Weasel pulled before the deal at the docks.That’s the only stuff he’s got to go on, but it’s something. A foundation. He figures that this all started with Sutherland and his previously unknown boss, and it’s going to end with them. Wade’s worked enough missions to connect the dots. Butler is definitely the head of things here--Sutherland is just a fall guy.

“Fuck,” Wade verbalizes, tripping through the files on his kitchen counter, trying to figure out where to go from here. Alone. With a personal vendetta. “I’m fucked.” He says again, out loud.

[Must be Tuesday.]

{It’s actually Saturday...stick with the continuity, bitch}

[That was another thing we were too lazy to figure out]

When did the mind games start? How long has he been feeling unmoored? Wade can’t remember. All Wade can think about is running from a cop at twelve years old, barreling into Butler, and the cop not being there anymore. Had that been a trick of the light, too? Was Wade just remembering it wrong?

The files go everywhere, in a flop of paper and manila. 

He’d been covered in his father’s brains and they’d left him there, just some broken drunk little boy who didn’t know right from wrong, who’d loved the wrong thing so deeply it made the world around him drip red.

At the top of the paper avalanche sits Weasel’s run down of the situation at the docks, the failed mission that got Spidey shot and Wade dead, that almost lost the two of them to each other.

What would have happened if Carol hadn’t arrived in time?

The same thing that’s happened to every other person they’ve taken? Drugs and abuse?

The thought tastes familiar, if only because it’s a family recipe.

Wade’s got a plan. It’s simple, really, elegant. Something he should have done the second they’d gotten the information from Craig from Chapter One.

Darnell Jenkins lives in a fifth floor walk-up in Brooklyn, way too far from his work as the overnight shift manager to walk, but he does. Darnell Jenkins takes a pretty penny to turn a blind eye on his evening shift. You’d think he’d get a closer apartment. Or a car. Or a bus pass.

“It’s not safe to walk alone at night.” Wade tells him, dropping beside him and resuming a casual gait despite the fact that he totally just rolled his ankle trying to do the cool drop-down thing.

Darnell Jenkins just about has a heart attack. On both the wrong side of middle age and gray, he’s probably at risk for a heart attack. He starts, hard, and it’s only Wade that keeps him upright. Well. For now.

Wade drives him hard against the side of the parked Honda on the street, hands biting into his wrists. “Who.”

“Please, oh god, please, I don’t have any money.”

“I’m not mugging you, you idiot.” Wade grins, lopsided. “I’m saving you.”

“You’re not--please, I don’t--”

“Who gave you the money?” Wade lifts the man from the car and slams him back into it. “Who gave it to you.”

Darnell, a little woozy, stutters. “I don’t-- I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“Really? Not a clue? Not a fancy?” Wade asks him. “Let me enlighten you, Guantanamo style.” He kicks the side of his boot into Jenkins' ankle, who screeches and starts to cry, hitting his knees. The crack his ankle makes is satisfying.

Wade uses the same boot to toe into Jenkins' sternum, a clear threat. “You’ve been taking a nice little sum once a month to turn a blind eye to the docks one night a month. Ring a fucking bell?”

“Please, he said he’d--”

“He’d kill you? He’d kill you!” Wade kicks Jenkins in the sternum. His head cracks back into the car. “I’m going to kill you.” Wade says, and Spider-fucking-Man in the back of his head says this is about you.

“Please don’t kill me, please, I swear I didn’t know what they were doing, just that they wanted to docks. Please. I needed the money. My--my wife, she has ovarian cancer, and I can’t--”

“It is not,” Wade says, “My fault that you can’t afford your own healthcare. Take that up with your senator. I ain’t from here.” Wade takes a step back from the man, who is snotty and a little bloody and crying, trembling. And it’s just some guy , just some nobody. Some nobody with a wife and a debt and desperation. “It is, however, your fault that your motherfucking little side hustle is costing people their lives.”

“Their lives?”

Wade crouches down to this pathetic little nobody with his stupid looking glasses and his pinched looking face and his stupid, stupid life and says, “You’ve been taking money from human traffickers.”

Jenkins eyes widen. “I--” he stutters, and fresh tears well from his eyes. He’s just some whatever that was trying to save his wife. 

This is about you .

“I need everything you know about the money. Where it came from. How it got to you.”

Jenkins says, “And?”

“And? And I let you live with yourself.” Wade thinks he might understand what Death was saying to him the other day. Yours is a spectacular torture . “I let you try to live with this for the rest of your wife’s life and whatever is left of your own.”

As expected, Darnell’s face twists even more at the cruelty in Wade’s words. There is no give, today. No, today, Wade spits out exactly what the world gives to him.

“Okay,” Jenkins sobs. “Okay, I’ll tell you. I’ll tell you everything.” He says, and then he does.

Chapter Text

Darnell Jenkins informs that Wade’s old friends had set up a base camp in the Waldorf. Said dock manager himself had even been there once. But Wade had already burned that bridge when he left Bagel Guy cooling in his own blood in the penthouse.

He curses himself, again, for everything that went down that day. 

However, the whole thing is not a fool’s errand, because Weasel can hack into the Waldorf’s system like it’s a poorly made third grade diorama. This yields Wade the number of a Capital One travel card, which as of fifteen minutes ago made a purchase for $10.76 at a bar on the wrong end of the Bronx.

Wade takes a very awkward twenty-minute Uber ride, where the driver is too distracted by his mask to drive particularly well, but he makes it there in one piece. Four stars. 

After being dropped three blocks away, he slinks around some of the adjoining buildings to make a plan.

Katanas or Glock? Announce himself or play it cool? He’s not entirely sure who’s on the other side of the card, so he might have to kiss a lot of frogs, so they say.

{Kill a buncha idiots}

[Aw man Wade you suck.]

In a demented moment of irresponsibility, he thumbs out is phone, on silent since this morning. He has only two missed calls, but Spidey is pretty mad at him, considering the texts.

[He’s gonna be madder at you when he figures out who you really are, meatbag]

{Something tells me he’s not into patricide]

Wade thumbs up through the messages, each one either pleading for his location or a threat. Before his eyes, it looks like a weird combination of Spider-Man, the Morality Police, and Peter, Wade’s friend. Each one is texting him, and maybe, bizarrely, they’ve both got the same goal in mind.

For some reason, Spider-Man cares about Wade.

It’s cute that he thinks Wade’s learned anything in the past 40,000 words, cute that he really, genuinely believes that Wade can change, can pull himself from the chasm. He might have been able to, a chapter or two ago, but this anger is both Deadpool’s and Wade’s, and it’s cold, like black ice.

Or. Well. Maybe Wade got something out of this shitshow, because before he can think about it, he shoots a text message back with his location.

He doesn’t want Spider-Man here, but Peter is his friend.

Not a moment later, Wade is getting an incoming call.

He stares down at it a moment and can’t help himself. He answers.

“What the fuck.” Is the first thing between them. “What the fuck is wrong with you? You better not be standing in a pool of blood, Deadpool, I swear to god--”

“I’m not.” Wade says, low.

Spidey must be swinging. There is wind in the receiver. “Don’t do anything stupid, Wade.”

Wade drops his head, rubbing at his nose. “That implies you believe I have the capability to do something not stupid.”

Spidey must be surprised at the exhaustion in Wade’s voice. There’s a moment of windy silence. 

“I’m not a kid, Wade, so stop underestimating me. I am perfectly capable of helping you on this.”

“I know.” Is all Wade’s response. “You’re the only motherfucker in this town that can handle me.”

A thwip, an impact of spandex and brick. Spidey must be pausing his pursuit. “Don’t joke like that.”

“Like what?”

“Like--” Spidey stops. “Like it’s not a joke at all.”

Wade wants to smile, soup it all back on again, but he doesn’t. He’ll give Spider-Man the peak behind the curtain he’s so doggedly pursued.  “You’re right.” He says, upon which Wade comes to the realization that they're about to have their first real conversation through two ends of a phone connection. A heart to heart separated by wind and air and each other. “It’s not.”

“What the hell does that mean?” Peter says, with a growing alarm.

“Sometimes, some things matter to me.” Wade says, closing his eyes. “Believe it or not, you’re one of those things at the moment. Ta da.”

“Wade.” Peter says, slow, low, with a hardness that betrays his own fear. “Why does it sound like you’re trying to say goodbye?”

“Because I am, Pete.” Wade manages, a wobbly frown tugging around the words. “Did you mean it, this morning? When you thought I could be better?”

There is nothing between them, for a moment, like a freefall. “Yeah. I did.” Peter says

Wade’s mouth is dry. “I’m sorry, then.” He says, the most genuine feeling he’s had in years.

“Deadpool.” And Spidey sounds a little desperate, a little pained.

“Once I’m done, you don’t ever have to see me again.” Wade promises. “You asked me to get the hell out of New York, and I will.”

“Dammit.” Spidey says. “Wade.”

“Goodbye, Peter.” He says. “Hell. Maybe I’ll even forget your name”

“Wade, I don’t want you to do this alo--” But Wade hangs up before Peter can finish, before Peter’s mouth can shape around the word alone.

{When you lose, I wonder how much of him you’ll lose, too.}

At the bar, he slides into a seat beside Billy Bert. Wade is not surprised that he’s the cardholder of the Capitol One card.

“Tequila,” Wade tells the bartender. “Double.”

Billy shoots him a sideways glance. “White flag, Wilson?”

“Something like that.” Wade replies, folding up his mask to take one shot and then the next. “Tell me something.”

“Really?” Billy asks, surprised. “Not straight to killing? I’m honored.”

Wade hits the bar, tapping out the chorus to Jingle Bells. “Barkeep. Keep them coming. Double tequila.” He turns to Billy as the bartender sloshes a few more shots over. “I’m in a giving mood, friend.”

Billy freezes. “You can’t win.”

Wade smiles, cracked. One of the scars that juts through the corner of his mouth splits open, wet and bright. “Sure.” He says. “What’s it matter?”

“It doesn’t.” Ricky sits down next to him, smooth with an idle grace. “Hey Wade.” Ricky says. He looks older, different. He’s grown stocky in his older age, face tighter. 

{Holy god can you make the parallelism literally any more obvious?}

[Yeah.]

Ricky’s got his dad’s service revolver in the back waistband of his pants. 

[Wait does that mean Spidey is the equivalent of Thomas because seriously how does that work. Or maybe we're Thomas?]

{We’ll let the readers figure that out for themselves}

[Uh oh. Smells like a climax]

“You ladies want the hard way, or the easy way?” Wade asks, eyes painted toward Ricky. From here on out, the rest of this might not even be real. He might forget. Butler can change Spider-Man’s senses, plant memories, take them away. 

He can manipulate the past, but what he can do with the present is much subtler. Wade can win this. Even though that he’s already come up against Butler once in the past (at some point) and once in the present (at the docks), and lost both times, now Wade has a target and enough of a half-shelled brain to finish this for good. 

Wade can kill him. Wade can end this, and find the women, and put his father to rest.

“Where’s your boyfriend?” Ricky Butler asks, snagging one of Wade’s shots like they’re still the old friends they once were. The air between them could be sliced like an envelope, paper thin.

Wade replies, “On his way.” 

“You don’t wanna know why Spider-Man is on this case with you?” Butler asks, morbid curiosity nothing more. “Why your friend Weasel says you’ve worked with us before? Why you don’t remember?”

“He’s not my friend.”

“You’re shitting me.”

“I don’t want anything from you.” Well. Maybe one thing. Or, maybe that one thing doesn’t even matter. Wade feels like he’s sitting in boiling water, and nothing else but that has any importance. “I’m ready whenever you are.”

“You wanted something from Abuela. Back then.” Butler presses. He glances down briefly at Billy. “It’s a shame how you treat the people that raised you.”

This is a distraction tactic. Wade wants to fall for it, and he will, because what does it matter? He either wins or loses. Who cares. 

“I didn’t do anything to your grandma.” Wade snarks. “No matter how hot she was.”

Butler smiles, angrily. “That you remember.” He says. “She died two years ago.” A pause. “Cancer really is a bitch. But you know that.”

Wade bristles. His thumbs twitch toward his katanas. His back is to the door but he’s aware of two mooks moving toward it. Exits blocked. 

“Parker Industries also knows that.” Butler continues, twirling his watch around on his wrist. Butler can make him feel things that aren’t there, can make him feel unmoored and not sane, but he can’t change the present. He can’t plant anything more than the vestiges of a policeman chasing him through the street or an offput signal that stirs away Spider-Man’s senses. Wade grounds himself to the thought.

Focus on the anger.

“Parker…” Wade says. Wade is struck with a feeling of stupidity, like there is some dot he’s not connecting. He’s missing something. Maybe Butler is doing something, already. “What’s that matter?”

“Parker is a changed man, so they say. It’s probably why he sent his hound spider to look into us. Found a little discrepancy in the cancer research division. A few payments, a couple hundred hours of lab time. A body and an immortal idiot who wouldn’t help us. I’m not one for a narrative, but do you get what I’m saying?”

“I’m not--” Wade tastes fuzzy. It’s not paranoia, but it seems like there are a million eyes on him. “I doubt I wanted to be your lab rat.”

“Ding ding! The circus clown can do math.” Butler says. “You let her die.”

“Were you killing people? To try to save her? With my DNA?” Wade intones. “Classy.” His mouth tastes too slick and all wrong. This is wrong. He’s not supposed to be here.

[Focus on the anger]

“Coming from you?” Butler retorts, “Your hands are as dirty as mine. What’s a few extra lives between you and I? Not sure why it mattered so much to you. It was for my abuela.”

“Did you kill my father?” Wade shoots back.

Ricky smiles at him, wide and real. 

There’s Wade’s answer.

It does not make him feel any better, but his sideways vision turns rightside up. Clarity drips over him like a shower.

“You’re a hypocrite and a human trafficker.” Wade scrapes away from the bar. “I gotta get this done before the hubby gets in.” He unsheathes a katana. This is going to be bloody and fast. “So. Not sure why you told me all this, especially after all that trouble you took to make me forget about it.”

Ricky spins in the barstool, crossing his arms. “Because it doesn’t matter, Wade.” He stands, too. “You should know this by now. Nothing ever matters.” He says. “Push back. Go ahead. See where that gets you.”

Wade was eight the first time he pushed back.

He called Billy Bert a cocksucker and punched him in the face, something nobody thought would come from the sweet kid that just lost his mom. It was the start of something, the end of another.

It had been sweet, malignant, the comforting warmth of violence, this blanket cover of a bruise.

Wade was ten the first time he pushed back.

He stole a notebook from a girl at school in the waning minutes before she needed it just to light it on fire in the trashcan outside.

Simple carnage, was all it was. Loss threw all its heat to him, as the rest of the garbage caught, and smoked.

Wade was twelve the first time he’d pushed back. It wasn’t easy for him, the belligerence. He’d had to force it upon himself, like pulling on a costume. But he’d done it, two broad palms in the center of his father’s chest, everything he’d gathered inside springing out from him, feet digging into the carpet.

Thomas had stumbled back no more than a few feet, heaving, thundering mad and high. He’d smacked his lips together, surprised and angry all at once, and Wade felt like he was looking down the maw of a monster.

That belligerence stuck inside him, like a seed slowly expanding in his esophagus, something that hurt to breathe around. It had turned silky and smooth and annoying, had brought forth humor when there was none, because that was the only way to navigate around it.

In that moment a smile had tugged onto his face, not because he was happy, but because inside the emptiness threatened to rip him apart.

Dad had come back at him again, a reciprocation twelve times in magnitude and Wade had darted around it, out through the door, and into the streets below. They’d wrapped around him, an inky familiarity. 

There was no longer anyone to perform for, nobody to pretend that the pain didn’t hurt, nothing more than brick and asphalt and him.

He didn’t smile, then.

Wade was nineteen the first time he’d pushed back.

His head knocked against the headboard of a motel bed he wasn’t going to sleep in, a guy he didn’t know between his legs. Identity was a box he didn’t fit into.

The result was inelegant and filthy and painful, and at the end he was in need of a cigarette and a shower and fifteen minutes with his head between his knees.

When his mouth tasted enough like ash and his body started to bruise, he pulled his clothes back on and left like it hadn’t happened. There was a hum of something beneath his skin, rotten and beautiful. In the moments before climax, Wade had been nothing. A good sort of nothing. In the moments after, well. He’d been nothing then, too.

Wade was twenty-one the first time he’d pushed back. He’d cocked his head and told his superior officers that he hadn’t done anything wrong, and they’d discharged him anyway. The army didn’t want him and Bob was working for Hydra, so why the hell did any of it matter? Why bother? The foundation he’d tried to build had turned on him, crumbled beneath him, just like the first one had.

Wade couldn’t build a damn thing for himself.

So he took a paycheck and a burner phone, and learned to talk through a murder, learned that his weaving of words can get him somewhere. He learned how to mold the frustration, the heat, the loneliness into something that took shape. He learned morality, and then he unlearned it.

Wade was like a crystal piece of glassware after someone had knocked a fork into it, sheer and hard to look at, loud, difficult to hear, but open and empty on the inside and very, very easily shattered. 

Wade was twenty-nine when he first pushed back, open and raw with wanting, desperately trying to push it all down.

Spider-Man made it easy, made his own horse too high, but, then, made it hard again. Wade’s facade knocked into Spider-Man’s, who pushed him, challenged him, who did not make him a better person, but instead made Wade overfilled by the person he was, like a car bursting with gravel.

Spider-Man had a mouth quicker than his webs and kept beat-for- beat with Wade, and it scared him more than Vanessa or Cable had, because Spider-Man peeled him back, exposed the mottled intricacy of who Wade wasn’t.

Because. See? Wade has a defense mechanism.

Grin and bear it. 

Thing is, Wade’s angry into his bones.

It’s not enough to be asked to be more, not even enough to want to be more. He’s not enough, never has been. Wasn’t enough for his father or his friends, wasn’t enough for his own frail, human body. Wasn’t enough for the army. Won’t be enough for Peter.

He was too small and too scrappy and couldn’t fit into this world the way it asked him to.

It was this terrible madness that made him enough, this terrible, fragile flippancy that covered it, like waves over a bed of sharp rocks.

Wade is twenty-nine when anger starts to hurt, too.

Chapter Text

“Push back.” Ricky wields, “Go ahead. See where that gets you.” He says. “Because from where I’m standing? It’s gotten you nowhere. Still orbiting around the same trauma, alone and worthless the same way you were when we first met.”

Wade’s mouth is dry of a response. 

“Well?” Billy asks, like he’s waiting for Wade to take his turn playing Monopoly rather than Wade to slice him to death.

“I don’t really care if you killed my father.” He says, and after years and years and years, he’s absolutely flummoxed to find that it’s true.

Because the death part was never the issue. The issue was always Wade.

Inside, he is nothing, He is quiescent. He is water. Big drums of it, cool and still in the evening breeze.

He is rain. Puddles of it, the deep kind that cars splash through. He’s never been anything more than a tide, crashing into himself, directed listlessly, infinitely. Love hadn’t been enough to save his Mom, hate not enough to spare his father, sex not enough to crack open his chest, special ops too much direction, hits for hire not enough.

He’d always been too small to be chained here. This life- this icy Everest - has been a search that yielded nothing but altitude and homesickness for a place he can’t see through the clouds. 

The realest, genuine thing he’s felt in the past few years beneath the heat, beneath the skimmed milk smile and hot sweet joke was this morning. Spider-Man’s foundation in his fist, Peter trusting him enough to not let it crumble.

Wade, for an indescribable moment, entertains the idea of exhaustion.

His head is quiet.

"Tell me where the women are, Ricky.” Wade says. His voice is soft. 

Ricky, at that, balks. Surprised. For the first time since this started, it seems as if Wade is starting to scare him. Which is ridiculous, Wade thinks, as he sheathes his katana, because Wade isn’t going to kill either of them.

He’s not going to kill them.

Wade is not his father.

Blood-lipped women told him he’d grow up to be him, set him on the same path his father went down. And to some extent, they’d been right. He grew up hard and wrong and his life rippled from a stolen childhood into a bare adulthood, bereft of everything but oxygen and fuel, measured only by the lives he was taking. Search for meaning yielded nothing but vodka and wheels down a runway.

Thing is, it’s never been quite revenge he was seeking, but something else that even now he cannot name.

But after hitting and missing, hitting and missing, hitting and missing, his frustration had done nothing but mutate until he had no choice but to face his failures with a sense of self-deprecation because he had no other choice, didn’t he? He couldn’t even end it, just got back up again and did the same fucking thing, took another blade to the throbbing carotid of life.

So yeah. Maybe his approach has always been the thing that’s wrong.

Wade is not his father.

Wade is a glacial stream, cold and clear. No mud. No forest fire. What he’d expected from today was carnage, blood, something feral to make himself even with the world. That’s, after all, what he’s been trying for since he got discharged. Since his dad died. Since Mom died. What he’d expected is to destroy himself, again, destroy those four little words Peter had uttered to him this morning. You’re better. You are. 

What he gets is a stone dropped in an alpine, clear, lake. Wade thinks about that night almost every day. He thinks about waking up covered in brains the same way he thinks about his mom’s waxy smile in death, the way she’d grinned around her own demise. They occur in succession, one after another, and maybe he’s been drawing the conclusion wrong about them both.

From beside him, Billy drops to the ground.

This is not an entirely accurate description. A figure drops on top of Billy, from where said figure was crawling along the cleaning.

Spider-Man, favoring his left side as he’s obviously still injured, is standing with one foot on Billy’s chest and the other on his neck, Billy’s hands webbed to the floor. 

“Sorry to drop in.” He says. He turns to Wade, thrusts a finger out. “We need to talk.”

Wade just stares at him. How much time had passed? How long has he been caught in this? How much of this introspection was his own, and how much was Ricky's? In an idle way in the back of his throat, Wade doesn’t even care about his original motivations in keeping Spider-Man away from this.

Ricky already has the revolver trained on Peter. They’ve already proven that neither of them are going to be able to dodge this bullet. The whole room is a china plate full of potential energy, a tree balancing on a power line.

“You’re not going to say anything?” Spidey asks, his tone a tick off, despite the fact that they have bigger fish to fry. ”O-kay.” He drawls, turns to face down Wade’s father’s own gun. “Didn’t mean to eavesdrop.” Spidey says now, even in the face of Wade’s Big Bad Silence unable to resist the pun. “But Pool’s not alone.” Peter says. “We kinda have a thing.”

“Plucky,” Ricky comments, pivots the gun, and shoots Wade in the head.

In the smoldering remains of Wade’s Regina apartment, Death sits down next to him.

Wade is burned, this time, in death. 

He’s burned wearing a suit and a tie and too-big shoes. There is smoke all around them, the creaking of charred wood, the settling of a home after inferno. He’s sitting on a couch so familiar he still knows the most comfortable cushion, though it has melted and puckered in the heat.

Wade stares listlessly at the smoldering remains of his event horizon, the drain his world circles around.

“I’ve died so many times.” He tells Death. His chest crackles. “But I’ve never come back here.” Here, where he came the first time he died.

His first death had been strapped to a table. He’d opened his eyes to smoke and her. At the time, he’d thought this was an elaborate torture or another hallucination. But she had been ethereal, untouched by the smoke. He remembers that she’d called him an ‘oddity’, someone she could touch but could not keep forever. Wade hadn’t known that she was really telling him was that he was cursed, damaged goods that would never be able to rot all the way.

He’d come here wanting, hurt, naive. The only way to tell a man that a concrete end to the suffering will never happen is in the destroyed ruins of where the suffering began. Death is cruel, in that way. She brought him here when he least needed to come. 

Here, to the home where his mother lived, to where his father dissolved, to where he was forced into this world.

Here where he came ragged and dirty after months of experimentation. Here where even after being used and wrung out like an oilcloth, he’d returned. Trauma is like that. A tar. It sticks, slides together. Solidifies. Lava, eventual rock.

Wade’s volcano has been coughing ash for so long now, for twenty-two years. It’s rock prison has built around him, walls forever hot to the touch.

This place tastes like home and Weapon X, a meld of Deadpool and Wade Wilson. Cancer. Regrowth.

“When we first met, you were very young.” Death says, in lieu of a real answer. Today Death is a small woman, pixie black eyes, straight black hair. She’s wearing clothes that Wade can’t describe, an outfit that hides the white rise of her curves Wade knows are underneath.

“I wasn’t.” He says. His youth had drained from him early.

“You are.” She replies. “Too young for immortality.”

He rolls his eyes. “That doesn’t even make sense.” It comes out grumbly and a little desperate, all wrong.

“One tragedy stretches life into a complex infinity.” She says. “You lived many lifetimes before we even met. You have always been too young for that many lives.” She presses her shoulder into his. She’s so human-like, sometimes. Soft. “You have lived many more since.”

Wade blinks and his eyes won’t reopen, glued together by a foreign dampness he hasn’t even dreamed about in half a dozen years. He is saltwater and beach sand; around him, dusk after a forest combustion, the seared smell of steak.

It has been a very long time since someone else has acknowledged the pain that has led him here.

“I don’t care.” He manages.

“You have never fooled me.” Death says. “About how wounded you are.” Her voice is small. Wade has to fold his lips over each other, a pressure building inside him.

She rubs a thumb up the top of his thigh, the long line it makes feeling like lemon juice in a wound. “You are not a hero. You are not glazed. You are a chasm.” He can hear the wry grin in her voice. “It is why I tolerate you.” It’s a joke.

Wade doesn’t laugh.

“I’ve died so many times.” He presses, finally, when he finds his voice again. He can’t suppress what’s inside him anymore, can’t fit a joke around it. So he doesn’t. “Why have I never come back here?”

“You have never needed to.” She says. “Here you are ugly.”

It’s true. His skin is puckered, split in long, ragged lines made by hundreds of minutes of torture. He’s never ugly in death, never ugly in death anywhere but here. But home.

Is this even still home, past the way he’s bastardized it? It’s wrangled itself in his mind, multiplied and divided by the fractional geometry of the rest of his life.

This fantastical home is simply a place where he can coexist with himself. He wipes his hands down his thighs and streaks hot ash.

“I needed to come here?” He echoes.

“Yes.” She looks around, serene. “Is this enough, for you?”

Wade considers this. “What is that supposed to mean?”

“Look around at the ruins you have created.” Death says, threat in her voice. “Is it enough, Wade?” 

Wade swallows, throat too try and too big. “Yes.” He croaks.

“Okay.” Death considers this. He loves her, a moment. He’s always loved her. No one understands him better. “Will you rest, now?” She asks. “Can you?” 

“Can I stay?” He asks, scraping a palm down the charcoal back of the couch. The three words are feeble, ripped from fire-scarred lungs.

“No.” Death says. 

“Please?” He asks, seven years old again in shoes that don’t fit. He turns to her. Her eyes are wide and broad. He could lose his mind in them. She has done less to other mortals.

“I am sorry, Wade Wilson.”

Wade isn’t mortal.

He leans his head against hers, breathing in the decaying scent of her hair, her skull preternaturally cool against his seeping forehead. Around them, small licks of flame begin to climb up the walls.

She slides her fingers up his jaw, pressing their heads together. He wants to wrap himself up inside her, to be gripped around the middle by her, to be sheared in half by the two of them. For now, this has to be enough. For now, her fingers pressing into his jaw have to be enough.

It doesn’t touch the feelings he has about Spider-Man, the sticky, viscosity between them, but that’s when he’s alive. When he’s alive it’s like he wants to be filled too heavy, overwhelmed by all of it. When he’s alive he wants hot dogs and elbows, normalcy on the back of late nights, and, more than anything, he wants to laugh and for it to be real.

When he’s here all he has is here. 

“So what now? Another lifetime?” He asks, dread in his kneecaps. Flames tongue the flaps of the window shades, the bottom of the couch.

Her thumb smooths over the rigid bumps of his skin. “Hopefully not.” She tells him, and he hopes not, too.

Chapter Text

When Wade comes to, his entire being is alight with flame, down to the marrow. His eyes flutter open with little fanfare past a choke of pain in the back of his throat. As he becomes cognizant beyond the steam of his own agony, he realizes he’s staring at the black interface of a thin flatscreen TV.

Beneath his bare cheek is a comfortable couch, fabric made of a high-end polyester. It has just the littlest amount of give beneath the bones in his cheek. Which is perhaps good, as his bones and skin are hypersensitive with regrowth. He’s overcome with the acute sensation of his skull still knitting itself together, the dry raw air around him sandpaper on tender skin. His mouth tingles, and he entertains the idea of thousands of tiny cells buzzing inside his teeth as they coalesce. These cells had just been made moments ago, stretched and new over his bones. His brain throbs, happy to be whole again. Mad at him for ever being broken in the first place. 

The thought tacks blood and bile into the back of Wade’s throat, the world around him slowly starting to spin. His heart thumps inside his eyeballs, making the flatscreen in front of him jump and land, jump and land.

He still can’t quite move past blinking, can’t feel the tips of his boots or move his head to see the rest of his body. In fact, he’s not even sure if he’s back to the land of the living. His hearing is patchy, and what he can hear is little more than a high-pitched noise reminiscent of tinnitus after a loud sound.

To be fair, it was loud. The pop of the gun, the bullet in the meat of his cheek. His brain exploding backward. 

His fingers, he realizes, are curled into the couch beneath him, each knuckle dull with how it is clenched into the fabric.

He blinks. Finds heat.

Oh god.

Through the sliced lemon pie of pain, something flits across his vision, and his hearing clicks together with the motion.

“...deal with it right now, Ana Maria. Yes I know. Yes I know. Okay? Just-- just leave it for the weekend. I’m not-- no, that’s not right. Just don’t--I can’t, okay? Please just let it be. Actually I--. Yes, but don’t bring Deadpool into this. They deal with me, and only me.” A swirl of nonsense. A voice he barely recognizes. “I’m signing off. Keep the sharks circling. I’ll see you on Monday.” A clatter. Something small on wood. A cell phone on a kitchen table? “Fuck.” Clipped. Cutoff. Damp.

Wade closes his eyes just as the blur of motion paces past him again. His mouth tastes greasy, like the inside of a sausage. His neck itches where new cells have melded to old ones.

The figure has paused next to him. “Dammit.” It comes out at two different decibels at once, something strained overtop something too low. A breath that takes two tries to complete.

Wade’s in so, so much pain. 

He squeezes his eyes shut against life and wishes it away again.

When he wakes for the second time, it’s like waking up from a nap. His eyes are a little crusty, his mouth too dry, but the pain is gone. He can move now, so he does, checking the time on his watch. It’s closing on two in the morning. He’d been dead for maybe four or five hours.

There’s a warmth pressed into the side of his outer thigh, and closer inspection reveals Spidey is sprawled out on the floor, back to the couch, his head at what looks like a very unpleasant angle. The crown of Peter’s masked head is pressed tightly to Wade’s thigh. Peter’s hand is splayed over his own chest, approximately where he got shot the other night. 

Wade blows out a breath, stomach growling. It’s warm here, and ultimately more comfortable than almost every place he’s woken up in combined. But though his body has healed, he’s not ready for this, not ready for people. Especially not Spider-Man.

Gingerly, Wade sits up, eyes on the head not quite in his lap.

Wade closes his eyes for a moment and runs two fingers over the bridge of his nose, absently thinking about Thomas, how empty this place feels without his ghost lingering. It’s an odd feeling, and perhaps the shadow will return once Wade returns more firmly to awareness. The air just feels dry and empty around him. He quietly drowns in this feeling before panic strips it from him, because what else had the past four or five hours stripped from him?

Had they won?

At what cost?

The universe does not wish rest upon Wade Wilson, because just as he’s figuring out how to extract himself and flee the city (state? Country? universe?) without Spidey noticing, the man jerks awake with a gasp.

Spidey is on his feet in an instant, around the other side of the couch. Wade hears him gasp, “Aw god.” And then. “Dammit.” His breath is coming hard and heavy. And then. “Wade?”

Wade winces, but steels himself. He’s going to have to rip this one, band-aid style. “Boy howdy wonderman.” He says, inane. “You got an extra mask?” 

“You’re awake?” Spidey asks. Wade peeks open one eye, his head spinning with the last vestiges of healing, and then the room rights itself.

Spidey has the mask pulled up to his mouth, his face very pale beneath it. He is still spattered with blood. There is a moment of silence as Peter stares at a maskless, scarred Wade and Wade stares at the blood beneath Peter’s mouth, wondering the specifics of how this is going to shatter.

“Awake, alert, alive, enthusiatic.” Wade snaps, all bite, no levity. “Mask?” It doesn’t have to be so demanding, doesn’t have to be as rude as he’s asking, but Wade’s walking a sharp tightrope that cuts every step to the bone. Now is not the time.

Spider-Man, it seems, feels almost the same way. “You have got to be kidding me.” He replies, breathless the same way he was before he knew Wade was awake. “You are--You--” He stutters over his panicked fury, one hand scrubbing at the black splotches of dried blood on his skin, on his own mask.

“Fuckin’ hell Wade.” Spidey says. To Wade’s absolute horror, his gloved hand comes to the crown of his skull and pulls the mask up and off. “What the hell is your problem?”

The flashes of jawline have not done him justice. 

This man...Wade has seen him (up close, personally) and watched him (in the news, on TV) and right now it’s like seeing him for the first time. The ambling wobble of his jaw, straight nose, slightly parted lips. The thick frame of lashes around his eyes, clench of his eyebrows, floppy mess of dark hair. 

“Do you--did you have any idea what you were doing?” Peter blinks, and the blood beneath his eyes dampens and turns redder. It’s concentrated on the right side of his face, the side that had been closest to Wade. “I cannot believe that you walked in there like an idiot and, I--I am never going to get that--get you.” He’s panicking, that much is clear. “Your head just. It just.”

“Peter.” Wade says, loudly.

“What? Seriously? What is it?”

“Parker.” Wade finishes. 

Peter blanches. “I can’t even believe you, Wade. I’m so--.” He cuts off. “I get that you felt like you had some personal bullshit to sort through, not that you’ll tell me what it is, but I thought that you--” He glances up, faltering. “Don’t you trust me?”

Wade scrambles for a response. “Apparently you trust me.” He finishes, darkly. “Peter Parker” 

Peter starts, a little, in a graceless way that Wade would have thought Spider-Man would have to try just to achieve. But no, Peter jerks into a pace looks like he just put on a fresh skin as he turns to look at Wade. “What? What do you--” 

Wade is not familiar enough with his face to discern what emotion is on it. 

“You can’t be so cavalier about this, Wade, you just. Can’t.”

“Parker.” Wade says, trying and failing around a cotton mouth to wet his lips.
The shift in Peter’s face solidifies, and Wade knows enough to not like what he sees. “Oh.” Peter swallows “You didn’t, uh--”

Wade is still staring at him, thoughts absolutely blank. “No.” He replies. 

They stare at each other for a long time. Until it hurts.

Wade stands, empty enough that maybe if he jumped out of Peter’s penthouse window, maybe he might float. “I don’t care.” He says, even though the lie will sting the both of them. 

God, Peter looks so wide open, standing there across the apartment. His eyes are ringed with red, blood all the way up the right side of his face.

He looks like he has so much to say, so much to yell. Wade knows that expression, because he’s felt it before, can see the tremble in Peter’s lips and knows what it means. 

But maybe Peter knows Wade more than he cares to admit, because instead he just manages. “Leave, then. Do whatever you want.”

“Yeah. Okay.” Wade replies but doesn’t leave. Peter rubs the back of his hand over his right eye, flaking off dried blood beneath his eye and smearing some of what was is freshly wet. 

“You scared the hell out of me.” Peter says, small.

Wade clears his throat of the stickiness there. His new head is too heavy for his shoulders. “Sorry that was so traumatic for you.” He says, disingenuous.

It has the desired effect. Peter’s nostrils flare, his breath coming sharp once.

Wade barrels on, unable to stop even if he wanted to. “Sorry that was so hard for you to deal with, so much of a personal investment. So sorry that watching me get shot with my father’s revolver by the guys that killed him was such a cross for your little shoulders to bear. Sorry that I was never--” Wade cuts off without his own permission. Sorry that I was never enough.

Thirty years of this, and it’s never been enough, and nothing he’s done has big enough or small enough or anything. Blood soaks soil that asks and asks and asks for more.

“Sorry I can’t--” be enough. And he can’t continue, he has to turn, he has to leave, but once he turns toward the door, his feet freeze.

His whole body has frozen up, his own rigor mortis. What is left of him? There are new cells and new eyes and ear and gray matter, but what’s left now? What is this wreckage?

There is nothing between his ears but fuzz.

“Wade.” A breath, nothing more, from behind him.

“I’m sorry.” Wade says, the tone different. His hands coming up to his temples, folding over his brows, like he can force back his own emotion here. “Okay? I’m sorry.”

“I’m just.” Peter is right behind him now, voice much quieter. “I’m just glad you’re okay.”

There is a long moment where this bounces around in Wade’s brain, he holds his breath as if to wait for a snappy comment to ruin it, to destroy the words from the inside out, but they don’t come.

Wade coughs, finally. “Did you, uh, get…?”

“Yeah, Wade.” Peter says, and in the pause that follows, leans his forehead in between Wade’s shoulder blades. “It’s over. Everyone is safe.” His forehead is warm through Wade’s uniform, and heavy, like it means more than it should. 

“Okay.” Wade says.

“Including you.” Peter adds. Hands, palms open, a slow spread at the center of Wade’s stomach. 

Wade lets his head drop, too warm now for anything but the shake of breath through his chest. 

“I don’t fully understand what that just was.” Peter says, clutching him around the middle just a little tighter. “But I--” he falters. “Just don’t--” He says. “Don’t leave me out again. I can be there.”

Wade swallows. “You don’t know what you’re saying.”

“I think I do.” Just a whisper, an edge of current. “I’m just asking you to trust that.”

“Spidey, I--”

“Just--” Peter says, both of them stumbling over each other. Peter’s hands tighten around him. “Tell me what to do.”

Wade is digging his hands so sharply into his eyes he might remove them. “Can we have some sort of food?” He asks, watery. “It takes a lot to grow another brain.”

“Yeah.” Peter breathes, but he doesn’t move, not just yet.

Peter burns toast and slathers off-brand, old jelly on it and they sit with a plate full of it between them on the couch. Wade’s headache has returned.

“So you really--” Peter begins. He kicks his legs up, wrapping his hands around his knees, his back to the couch’s armrest. “You didn’t know?”
“Uh.”

“Okay. Well.” Peter says, exhaustion heavy in his face. “Surprise?”

“You thought I knew?”

“Of course I did I told you my name.”

“You said your name is Peter!”

“And Spider-Man works for Peter Parker. I thought you would draw the conclusion!” Peter says shrilly.

That draws Wade short. “I was missing a leg.”

“You grew it back. I figured...uh.” Peter swallows and then visibly withdraws. “Whatever.”

Wade points, “You were following me.”

“Uh.”

“That day in Manhattan. When that guy was eating his bagel. That was you.”

“You had better intel than me.” Peter says. “All I had were some shady financial records from my company from a couple of years ago. Back when I--” He pauses, “Wasn’t myself. And plus you’re very dangerous.”

“I almost killed you.”

“Um. What?”

“I thought you were a spy!”

“I mean. I was.” Peter shrugs. “Wait. You noticed me following you?”

Wade groans. “I follow people for a living. I have a good idea when I’ve been made” He rubs his nose. “You are such a hypocrite. Immediately after that you bitched me out for following said intel.”

“You were going to kill them. Scratch that. You did kill them. Three people.”

“Yeah, for the money.” Wade says, and Peter cuts him a look that Wade recognizes even without the mask.

Wade continues, “So yesterday morning on the street, you were all bitchy like ‘I told you that in confidence’” Wade screws up his voice to sound like a bad, childish imitation. “You were just mad because you thought I was lording your identity around.” Wade thinks about this. “I would never do that, dude. Come on.”

“Uh.”

“Is that why you were the literal worst to me that morning?”

Peter sighs. “I didn’t feel good and you weren’t being nice either.”

“I thought you’d left me in pieces scattered around the pavement!”

“I got shot and almost kidnapped and there was a mind controller around, Wade, and you still didn’t want to give me the benefit of the doubt?” There is fresh hurt there, uncontained, something that Wade didn’t know still existed.

“You never do the same to me.”

“I don’t know if you’ve noticed this, Deadpool.” Peter says, low, “But I’ve been trying my very best with you through this.”

Wade scoffs. “Every step through this has been like pulling teeth.” He says. “I didn’t ask for your help.”

Peter says. “Sounds like a personal problem.” His jaw is set, lips a thin line. 

“It is! Bingo!”

“Dammit, Wade.” Peter groans. “You’re so fucking frustrating. You try to get under my skin all the livelong day buy the moment I start to--” he cuts off. Sharply. “This is going to go nowhere.” He says. “Feel free to go do whatever the hell you want, regardless of how it effects other people.”

“You are proving my point.”

“You aren’t listening.”

Peter shifts, feet to the floor, elbows on his knees, hands through his hair. No eye contact.

Wade watches this movement, this fluid frustration and then starts. “That morning. In Stark’s library.”

Peter’s head turns to look at him, face carefully blank. It’s amazing to see. This is Spider-Man in his rawest, purest, most vulnerable form.

Staring at him, absolutely terrible case of bedhead and clenched fingers, Wade gets why Peter wants the identity. It’s like a casing, and Wade, for a moment, feels like he’s peeling Peter Parker out of it.

Voice lower, now, Wade asks. “You thought I already knew your identity.” Wade remembers the heat of Peter’s skin and the stretch of his mask. “So what did you think I was threatening you with?”

They both stare at each other for a long moment. 

“I didn’t.” Peter swallows, and his voice sounds different on the other side. “I didn’t think you…Look, I just--”

“We were having two different conversations.” Wade realizes. “I was threatening to unmask you, and you thought I was--what, going to tell the world?”

“I--yeah. Yeah. That’s it.” Peter says, unflinching, unwavering, all the confidence in the world.

“For the second time? That morning?” Wade says.

“Yeah.” Peter says.

But Wade can see his face.

“You’re lying to me right now.” Wade replies, in an almost wonderous tone. “Holy hell.” His mind reels back through their conversation, digging in like hands in the mud. He cycles through it all, but his brain keeps coming back to one part. A few little words.

This is about you.

When he looks back at Peter it feels like his chest is ripping open just for something to gallop out of it, something yet unnamed, something he’s tried for years to dance around. Something he’s always bastardized into a joke. 

His anger has never been anything more than an amalgamation of fear and ill-processed grief, all the sticky parts of frustration, all the dark parts of desperation. That anger makes his bones ache.

There’s no space between them for the defense, for the joke. Just Peter’s bare face and pinched, kind of sad look, and Wade’s parted mouth and ugly realization.

“I thought you said that you didn’t trust me.” Wade says.

Peter sets his shoulders. “I said you didn’t scare me.”

A pause. “But that was a lie.” Wade says.

Peter wets his lips. “I just. I get it.” He looks down at his hands and long, calloused fingers. “I don’t know when, but you just.” There’s a pause. “I don’t know how to articulate this, but you’re just--” Peter lifts his eyes. “Despite everything you do to get me to see it differently, you’re just trying to do the right thing, even if it’s in the wrong way. And I. I don’t know. Sometime in the last 72 hours I realized that there’s been something so empty about every interaction we’ve had, and it.” He cuts off. “I see through you. I think I get it.”

Wade’s mouth parts, but he doesn’t find a response.

Peter looks away again. “I didn’t think you were threatening me.” He lifts his eyes. “I thought you were warning me away. I thought that you would--” Wade can’t possibly fill in that sentence, but he can hazard a guess. He’d lifted Spider-Man’s mask to the nose and threatened to ruin him. “But you didn’t.”

“And when you asked me not to do something I’d regret?” Wade pushes. He can tell that Peter is not having a very good time relenting this, that his frown is becoming fixed and distant. But he needs to know. He has to.

“You were hurt, Wade.” Peter asserts. “And defensive and I could tell you were scared. Would any decision you made in that moment be a good one?” Peter snorts. “As evidenced by recent events.”

“Don’t” Wade warns.

Peter’s brows raise, unamused. “So what? You’re gonna call the last seven hours a success on your end? Or are we going to continue to dance around that conversation?”

A burn, like too-hot water down his throat. “I’ve already talked about it enough with Death.” he mutters.

“Fine.”

“Fine.”

“Just.” Peter lets out a long breath. And then, like a suckerpunch. “Are you okay?”

Wade swallows. Snags a piece of toast. “I can’t believe you’re a cazillionare now and you’re eating off-brand jam.”

“Wade.” Peter says. “Will you tell me about it?” He asks. “Those guys. And. And your dad?”

Wade’s chest seizes, and he’s absolutely gobsmacked to realize it’s not all a bad feeling. It instead hurts crisply, like he’s taken too big a sip of something.

“You don’t have to.” Peter laughs, a timid thing. “But. I’d like you to.”

Wade fiddles with the toast in his hand for a moment, jam sticky as it drips onto the fingertips of his gloves.

Peter shifts closer, one leg coming up onto the couch, hand coming down by the toast plate. He’s too close. Wade aches with it.

“Hey.” Peter says, soft because they’re too close, the fight has wound down to this moment, to right here, to fit into this small little box. “We don’t have to talk about it.”

Wade doesn’t know why he does it, still seized by that not-unpleasant feeling, but before he can reign it in he’s leaning forward, knocking the toast aside, and he’s got his mouth on Peter’s.

Wade doesn’t know why he does it, but he’s even more confused when Peter indulges him, surges to meet him for a moment, his hand on Wade’s new cheek. But, finally, he turns away. 

“This isn’t smart.” Peter says. “Wade.”

Wade is still leaning over him, breath heaving, toast all over the floor.

“Wade, you’re scaring me.” Peter says, softly. His hand slides from Wade’s cheek around the back of his neck.

“What did I forget?” Wade vocalizes. But he remembers. He remembers the conversation in the bar, the gunshot, but nothing after. Ricky can alter memories, skew reality in the tiniest of ways - make a fake cop chase him, blind him to his father’s own death - but nothing this severe, not like this. Butler can’t do this. “What’s gone?”

“I don’t know.” Spidey says. He has brown eyes. Wild hair. There are flecks of Wade’s blood in his eyelashes. 

“Why are you being so nice to me?” Wade asks.

Peter makes a face that looks like heartbreak. “I’m not, really.” His breath tastes the same way it tasted this morning, warm and encouraging and right there.

“Who are you?”

“It’s me.” Spidey says. “It’s Peter.” Spidey swallows. “I don’t think you forgot anything.” He says. “He didn’t win, Wade. We did. I got every one of those women out, and as soon as that bullet was out of the chamber I had him webbed to the wall. He was just.” Peter pulls a face. “Taunting you. Like he expected to always have the upper-hand.”

Wade searches his eyes. Brown and wide with concern. “I don’t--I don’t know how I got like this.” His whole chest seizes up. He’s not talking about their precarious position, Peter’s hand around his neck, Wade looming over him. “I don’t know what to do.”

“Okay.” Peter says. “That’s okay.” His other hand hooks around Wade’s neck too. “You don’t have to.”

Even without his father or the boxes leaning into this interaction, even without them swirling in the air around him, Wade thinks he gets it what Death was saying when she had asked him if these ruins were enough. 

“Can I stay?” Wade asks, the same way he’d asked Death. 

“Yeah.” Peter says, and Wade is filled with the feeling of standing under a waterfall, relief cold and sharp down his shoulder blades and welling in his eyes. They are enough. This is enough. For now, perhaps, for this moment. Enough lifetimes, enough ruins, enough fire.

“Please.” Peter says, “Stay.”

Chapter Text

Wade goes to Fiji. Mostly because that’s where Sinbad wanted to go in the 2003 animated film, but also because nothing for him is in Fiji.  He’s never been there before. Suva, the capital city, glitters on the shores of a shiny, serene Pacific Ocean. The world feels small here. Suva’s just an outcropping of surrounded the deepest ocean in the world.

Wade remembers to take an image inducer and a few pieces of clothing that’ll help him blend in, and parks out at a tiki bar for an indeterminate amount of time. The days and nights blur together without him carefully tracking them.

Wade doesn’t sunburn, and the sand here is soft.

He doesn’t think about New York City, or the things he’s left behind. He rents a beach chair. Stays in a suite at a resort. Drinks blue curacao and coconut rum from the hairy lip of a whole coconut. This is not healing, but it’s something that is maybe shaped the same.

Wade leaves all but one gun behind. He’s not on a job, not making money from this, no boogie monster to get rid of. When he thinks about it, it leaves him on edge, jittery, so he tries not to think about it. Maybe he’s just running away from all he’d just had to face. Maybe he’s not.

Mostly, he rolls around what he’s going to do next. His foundation is still cracked. So, what’s going to support the rest of his life? He’s almost out of money. A decision is fast approaching, one that he can’t avoid, even with all the relaxation in the world.

He picks up whispers, here and there. Fiji had a coup back when Wade still had a father. Not long ago. The scars of it are still in this place. It wouldn’t be hard to find a job. To infect Suva alongside all the other capitals he’d torn through.

He chews on the idea for longer than he should. Here, there is sun. There is sand.

For the first time since Weapon X, Wade dreams.

His mother is sitting next to him at the kitchen table. She’s feeble, days from death. Her eyes have sunk like ships in a wax ocean. She smiles at him, though, and it makes the whole world light up. Golden hour.

Wade is not dead and not remembering, so Wade is ugly. He is branded. His mother lifts a hand and puts it on his bare forearm. Her thumb edges along the ridges of a canyon in the meat of it. Her smile has dimmed. She doesn’t say anything, doesn’t look at the scars. Looks at him.

Across the table, Thomas Wilson leans forward. He too, doesn’t speak, but his lips curl into a sneer that says enough.

Wade remembers Death, the taste of ashes.

His mother’s hand tightens on his arm. She clings on, and Wade loosens his fist, looks at his father in the eye. Doesn’t flinch.

It doesn’t take long to hop a puddle jumper to Sydney, and from there Wade blows his last dollar on a first-class ticket to JFK. It’s 21 hours to LAX, and another five before delays back to Queens. By the time he’s trying to hail a cab in front of the terminal, he’s tired and grumpy and his stomach feels rigid from airplane food.

He lets himself into his stupid, shitty apartment with the peeling linoleum, takes a deep breath of stale air. Wonders when this place started feeling like home.

He kicks off sandals that somehow are still fricken sandy. His keys hit the counter, and his head hits the pillow, and then he sleeps a full, dreamless ten point two hours.

When he wakes up, it’s to a deep afternoon sun. He has no HVAC of any sort turned on, so it’s cool in his bedroom. He fumbles for the phone he’d left on the charger at his bedside, and is deeply surprised to find that three months have passed since the last time he was here. It’s the crisp edge of fall, here in the city, whereas in Fiji it had been an eternal summer. It had been like that in Kuwait too, but Wade doesn’t conflate the two. For one thing, he’d drank more than just lukewarm Bud Light in Suva, and for another, there’d been no false pretenses. Wade was granted the solace of a kind of anonymity he wasn’t being paid to have. He’d made choices, ate crisp cassava, floated over his own steps like he images normal people get to do. Maybe soldiering was never his job, even if it’s always felt like it.

He wonders what he’s missed in the meantime.

He thinks, very briefly, of Peter Parker, and then lets the phone clatter to its home on his side table. Wade hauls himself out of bed and into the shower, and then down to his favorite Thai place. As he walks back home with his food, he feels out of place again, like he’s missing something integral. It’s because of this unmooring that he puts back on the leather and the katanas and forgets about the Thai food.

He doesn’t do anything though. Just finds a building to sit on, watches the sun burn through the horizon, shifting colors over the bustle below. He is abruptly pulled into a dozen different places by an emotion he doesn’t like to feel, because Jesus, what’s even the difference? Why does it matter?

It feels cyclical. Nothing’s changed. He hasn’t changed. And there’s nothing he can do about it. Death had even said that. Yours is an exquisite torture she’d said. Life is a curse, still. So why does it matter how he lives it? Maybe he should just start killing people. Fuck the money. Fuck the morality.

Why did he come back?

“Hey, stranger.” Spider-Man says, from behind him. His voice is distant, though when Wade turns, the man is only a few feet away.

Wade feels shaky. He curls his fingers into his thighs and turns back to the twilight. “Did I set off an alert or something when I came back?” He says. “I guess I did say I’d leave and not come back once the op was done.”

“No.” Spidey says. He hasn’t moved, and his tone hasn’t changed. “I just noticed you.” He says. “It’s not even dark yet, Pool, and you’re on my turf.”

Oh. “Right.” Wade says.

There’s a long silence.

“So where ya been?” Spider-Man asks, and shifts, comes to stand next to Wade, leans against the bend of the roof.

“Around.” Wade shrugs, and turns around to peer up at Peter. “Had some stuff to work through.”

Peter’s posture changes. Wade notices his shoulders relax just a bit, blades drawing down slightly, ribs loosening. “And did you?”

“Did I what?” Wade says, toneless, turning to look away.

“Work through it.”

“Not really.” Wade says, and then, abruptly, “How do you do it?”

“Do what?”

“You’re rude, and kinda stupid sometimes, and immature, and honestly not super nice,” Wade starts, to which Peter begins to interject, but Wade is quicker, continues with, “But you’re not angry.”

“Who says that?”

“I do.” Wade says. “How come you don’t kill people?”

“Wade--”

“How come you’ve never had a grudge like that? Given what you do? Who you fight?” He says, “How come you’ve never held what I do against me?”

“I have.” Peter says.

“Not very well.”

“What’s your point?”

“I want--” Wade starts, and then gives a dry, uninviting laugh. What a wild fucking concept. I want.

Peter is patient. He waits for all the things that Wade doesn’t think he’s allowed to say. Finally, Peter says. “I just hold myself to my own standards.” He kicks a rock over the side of the roof. “And I try not to flinch.”

Wade glances at him. Glances away. “How do you know that this unshakeable ideology is the right thing to do?”

“Wade, where is this coming from?”

Wade smacks his lips. “I want,” He starts again, and now he’s swirling with it.

Curling into a ball at eight years old, a fist stuffed in his mouth to stop the sobs. Girls a decade older than him ruffling his hair at ten, telling him he was cute, like his dad. At sixteen, watching bleary eyed through a summer rain at a coffin in the ground; nineteen in Kiev and Kuwait City and Dubai; twenty with his legs wide open, twenty five taking out rapists, twenty nine trying to hide his ugliness beneath a suit.

“I’ve always just wanted to be good.” He says, finally.

Because that’s it, isn’t it? Be good. Don’t make noise, or make too much of it. Get rid of the bad people, do it because they’re bad, because you’re good, because life’s been bad to you and you turned out not as bad as they have. It’s never worked. It’s never been right, because it’s always been borne from hatred.

Peter takes a deep breath in. Wade beats him to it. “What would Peter Parker do?” And then, “WWPPD?”

Peter laughs, one breath through his nose. There’s another silence.

“I don’t like blood sausage, by the way.” Peter says.

“What?”

“You asked? A long time ago.” Peter says. “I’ve never eaten it, but it sounds grody.”

“Grody.” Wade quotes.

“Hey,” Peter says, kicking his foot a little, touching Wade’s knee with the pad of his boot. “If you want to be good…” He says, and then trails off. He fidgets, drums his hands against his own thighs. “You wanna, uh, you wanna patrol tonight?”

Wade is filled to the brim with an emotion he can’t name. It’s not heavy, but it’s so full he feels it in the back of his throat. “At least buy me dinner first.” He says.

“After.” Peter says, not giving in to the joke, the deflection.

The emotion becomes panic, becomes fear. Wade looks from the fading light of the horizon to Spider-Man, ringed in the silhouette of evening.

“Okay.” Wade says, finally, and it feels like a thousand years have passed since that day in the bar, sticky with his father’s blood.

He checks in with Weasel to put in his request for ops to be nonlethal only.

Weasel gives him an incredulous look. “You’ve changed, man.” He says, almost disappointed.

Wade shrugs. “I put CBD in my vape. You should try it.”

Weasel groans. “Dumbass.” He says, and it’s almost fond.

Wade’s hands are tacky with his own blood, cupped around a raw abdomen. He’s bleeding all over his couch.

“This would be way easier if I were allowed to shoot back.” He groans, bile in his throat.

Peter is puttering about in Wade’s kitchen. God knows why. “Wade.” He’s testy, today. The little bastard is as moody as a teenager. He comes around to the other side of the couch with a bag of McNuggets.

“Where’d you get those?” Wade asks.

“Your freezer.” Peter says, pulling a face and lifting the bag to his black eye.

“Huh. Weird.”

Peter removes the frozen nuggets to level Wade with a blank stare. “Yes.” He says, which makes Wade grin.

“Grumpy!” Wade declares. “And I didn’t even kill anybody.”

“Yeah and you won’t shut up about how you wanted to.”

Wade rolls his head along the couch armrest to smile sweetly at Peter. “Keep that up and I won’t let you hang out with me after patrol.”

“A tragedy.” Peter says.

At this, Wade lets a grin blossom, and Peter is obviously struggling to keep up the grumpy facade.

“You wanna give me a nug?” Wade says, removing one hand from the stab wound. It’s starting to heal. Wade can feel it, the tug of regrowth, the cell death, renewal. Yours is a spectacular torture.

“For what?” Peter says, one full lip curling from a small smile into a pinched look of bewilderment.

“Munchin.” Wade replies, and makes a grabby hand.

Peter catches him by the wrist. “I think I understand less and less of you every day.”

 “I’m an open book, baby.” He says. “Just ask my readers.”

“Seriously.” Peter sobers, slowly, his face coming back to neutral. Wade thinks he can see the blood under the surface of the skin at Peter’s face, see it pooling into purple. Peter hasn’t let go of his arm. “You did good, today.”

Wade spares a moment to let this sink in. “Okay.” He says. The knife wound has stopped bleeding, but still splits between the fibers of his muscle. What’s left is the itch of a scab, dried blood. Perhaps, if it were still possible, he’d bruise too. For a moment, he indulges into the thought of being able to process an injury like that.

Peter releases Wade’s wrist. “How are you--”

Wade cuts him off. “Peter.” He says. It’s been four months since the meltdown. Wade still isn’t ready. It still makes him hot and gnarled inside, and the fact that Spider-Man got to see those insides in plain view doesn’t make it any easier.

Spidey lifts the bag of nugs back to his eye and glances away with the other. “I just don’t--” He stops and starts again. “I don’t want you to...go back.” He says.

Wade feels a familiar flicker inside him, an anger. “Fuck off.” He mumbles, but Spider-Man is right.

Wade doesn’t want to go back either.

“You wish.” Peter says.

Wade settles his hands over his wound again. He swallows the flame. “So, you said I did good today, eh?” He says, trying his damndest to let the humor in his voice be genuine.

“Don’t quote me,” Peter says in that grumpy-but-indulgent voice he’s ever so fond of.

“I won’t.” Wade says, but he grins, and what he really means is I will.

Hey, pal. You look a little lost... like maybe you need a friend. Don't worry... I'm not talking about me. Sooner or later, I rub everybody the wrong way. But... you never know. You might find what you're looking for inside.   

(The photograph was taken

the day after I drowned.

I am in the lake, in the center

of the picture, just under the surface.

It is difficult to say where

precisely, or to say

how large or small I am:

the effect of water

on light is a distortion

but if you look long enough,

eventually

you will be able to see me.)