Chapter Text
Pain was kind of like a light switch.
When Wade felt it, boom! On and he was alive again. When he didn’t feel it, he’d found something fun to do earlier, **clandestine winking**.
Or, you know, someone had gotten a headshot in.
[Details.]
But you had to respect the classics. And jumping off the roof of other people’s buildings was basically like brushing your teeth when you were a mutated mercenary freak. Except bad for your teeth, and doing it kind of defeated the purpose of digestion, but other than that, exactly the same.
{We should start writing these ideas down. For posterity.}
Step aside, dear Abby. Wade Wilson was on the case.
Back to the matter at hand, though: the whole Wade Wilson experience had a couple of non-negotiable trademarks. Post-death snacking, for one thing. For another, there was supposed to be a linearity of thought between one click of the light switch and the next, so when Wade woke up this time, his first thought understandably was holy shit, this trash heap is clean. The second, Wade having pried an eye open all the way, was fuck.
Not a trash heap. Not a dumpster. Definitely not a clothes line, like the one time he’d missed the ground. The sight spawned multiple little baby fucks, because instantly, the boxes echoing Wade’s sentiment.
[Fuck.]
{Fuuuuuuck.}
[We’re in a hospital.]
{A goddamn hospital. We have rights!}
Ever the more pragmatic of the two, White asserted, [Gun. No witnesses. Swan dive through window.]
That would work for Wade, but there was no one available to be shot. There was a lot of polished white tile and chromed out walls and—oh, look, a bay window for him to make a swan dive through. The boxes would appreciate that, and no one ever turned down a nice scenic view before a bloody defenestration; Wade just wished he could enjoy it. Instead, he was doing his best impression of a really, really pissed off mercenary slapping his hands all over himself and shouting, “Where the hell are my guns?!”
{What? Our arms are gone?}
[The other guns.]
{Ohhh.}
Wade patted carefully over the suit, but no dice.
No guns either, dammit.
{But we like to have guns when we wake up in medical strange facilities…}
[KILL. EVERYTHING. WITH OUR MIND.]
The ammo clips weren’t in his pouches. His katanas were noticeably absent—not just the blades, but the sheaths and the harnesses used to hold them in place. Yeah, those hadn’t fallen out of his pockets on the way down. His shit had been stolen! What kind of assholes just went ahead and looted corpses—okay, yeah, this was New York. Question answered. Wade could hear the little click-crack of dislocating knuckles as his fists tightened.
“Somebody’s up and about,” a new voice chirped, out of place in Wade’s panic in the most dramatic way.
[We’ve got company. Inbound, two o’clock.]
Wade glowered in the appropriate direction. There was a stiff—and the wall to his right was soundlessly folding in on itself to admit said stiff. That was nifty. It looked kind of like the gleaming, fancy version of a guy getting punched in the nuts—
[This visual was brought to you by violent video games and methylone.]
—which was vastly cooler than some dipshit with nerd glasses.
{Glasses, huh?}
Boring. Nondescript. Probably had never tried anything but vanilla ice cream.
Man, that wall.
[We’re in your head. We know where you’re looking.]
Oh fine.
So what if some apple pie wonder was strutting inside? You could probably statistically determine how many people would sell their souls for the gleaming white-toothed smile being flaunted in Wade’s direction, but Wade was seasoned in this sort of thing. All these luscious locks trying to goad Wade into thinking of them as ‘chocolatey’. None of that mattered beyond the guy being way too pretty to be up to anything good.
Without any warning, apple pie’s smile crumpled in on itself. Wade blamed the lurch in his stomach on gun separation anxiety.
“…And I have no idea why I just said that. Okay, do-over. This time with less talking like I’ve suddenly turned into my aunt. Hi—“ Apple pie coughed and gave an awkward little half-wave, which failed to commit between greeting and glasses adjustment. It looked like pitiful flailing. “You might be feeling a little disoriented. You kind of tripped. Off a building.”
Wade continued to stare. Credit for originality, this was a new tactic. None of the usual dickbags had ever tried to intimidate him with nerd before.
{The lab coat just makes it worse. It would be more convincing on a puppy.}
[Proof that wielding a clipboard is not actually capable of making some people look smarter.]
{Wait are we insulting him or is this foreplay? Do we need to rate him? 7/10 would bang?}
[Why not both?]
“Banging and shooting are completely separate,” Wade muttered under his breath, “Because one of them is a sure thing and the other is only an idle thought. Priorities.”
“Um,” said apple pie, clutching at his clipboard.
Wade jerked his thumb at the heart monitor, no-nonsense, “You have fifteen seconds to return my shit before I beat your skull in with that.”
Apple pie’s mouth fell open, and as long as these allegations of banging were hanging around, it really was a very nice mouth.
Wade, who had priorities, resorted to adding, “It’ll take about two hits.”
“Wow,” apple pie said after a moment, “You are so not a morning person.”
“Babe, I’m a twenty-four hour marathon,” Wade corrected, because banter was the only other reflex readily available. He wondered if the heart monitor had anything pointy buried in it somewhere. Pointy things made him feel better.
And like he could sense Wade trying to talk himself out of his murder, apple pie just had to blurt out, “I can cure you!”
Wade snorted. For a punch line, that sucked. It wasn’t like the mask didn’t get torn up when Wade did stuff like this, so he didn’t go around wreaking havoc on the passerby. But his mask had weathered the last fall pretty well, so the notion of apple pie sticking his fucking nose where it didn’t belong hit Wade in the gut like a sledgehammer. People liked to claim they could cure Wade.
For some reason, they thought holding that over his head would prevent him from killing them.
“I’m serious. Only disregard that thing I just said because that’s the kind of thing that people say right before they turn into a raging lizard monster, which I’m not, I swear. I’m not a bad guy… which isn’t at all what a bad guy would say, oh god, I’m making it worse. Look, can you please just—“
Wade swung the heart monitor up one handed, listening to one last dwindling beep as the electrical cords tore out of the wall. Apple pie cringed. With his shoulders. Like limbo, only his feet didn’t move, and he just kind of hissed through his teeth in defense.
[Ineffectual.]
{Calling bullshit on Bambi’s survival instincts.}
“Hey, your weapons are one room away!” Apple pie exclaimed, all wide-eyed and too dumb to live. “We only removed them because we thought you might kind of panic waking up in a new place—fears I now see were totally unfounded—“ he added, as Wade advanced, “—but you can have them back! Informing you about this procedure was kind of non-voluntary because of, well—but the rest of it is totally voluntary! Including the part where you can voluntarily decide to put that piece of equipment down and not break it and maybe just talk, please?” He gave his clipboard a forlorn little wave.
It was more interesting to Wade, though, that he still hadn’t backed away from the angry guy wanting to bludgeon him into a pancake.
[He could be pretending to be harmless.]
{Or a naïve dreamboat doctor to sweep us off our feet!} Because this was the kind of bullshit Yellow insisted on a regular basis.
[Please. If anyone’s doing the sweeping—]
Wade narrowed his eyes, focusing past the clamoring voices. “You just kidnapped a mercenary and now you want an interview? About what, the finer points of shooting a motherfucker?” His voice lowered to a growl, “Buddy, what gives you the idea that you’re going to survive the next five minutes?”
Apple pie offered up a crooked, wincing sort of smile. “I’m not threatening you?”
Wade nudged him with the edge of the heart monitor pointedly. “Because you could, huh?”
This got him an eye-roll.
{Well I never!}
“This is Stark Tower,” apple pie said, and Wade heard more than felt the thunk of his clipboard bumping against the heart monitor. “Probably no one should be threatening anyone. It puts Captain Rogers in a mood.”
“Let me guess,” Wade sniped, because he’d seen Avengers tower before, “You’re also a superhero and you have a girlfriend who lives in Canada.”
{Maybe we met her!}
[Maybe we kidnapped her and this is revenge.]
{Plot twist!}
“No. Look, I work with Dr. Banner,” apple pie said, with this sort of slow patience that probably meant sarcasm. Wade’s arms were full of heart monitor, so he couldn’t exactly cross them right now, but he thought about it very strongly. Perhaps he should set the machine down, he thought, and then was instantly horrified. “Dr. Peter Parker, PHD. I’d shake your hand, but you’re trying to threaten me with a metal box.”
Wade looked down at the heart monitor. He looked back at the apple pie, determined that Peter was indeed a nerdy name, and then declared, “I’m threatening.”
“Your fists are ten times more threatening than that,” Peter explained, “You chose literally the least menacing object in the room.”
“Hey, I could make it threatening,” Wade protested, but alright, Peter had found his one true weakness. Banter. His shoulders relaxed, and simultaneously, his wounded pride surfaced. Wade hadn’t had a lot to work with. His katanas had been wrongfully removed from his personage. His guns had been gun-napped.
{They’re probably cold and alone.}
[Yeah, what happened to the plan about killing this guy dead?]
Wade scowled at Peter ominously.
Peter was giving him that awkward little (gorgeous) smile again.
“I could intimidate the shit out of you, if I wanted,” Wade decided. Peter nodded reassuringly.
“Absolutely. Hey, but while you do that, maybe I could tell you about the program we’re offering here? And return your weapons. Still sorry about that.” He brandished the clipboard a little more. “Freaking you out wasn’t part of my evidently evil master plan.”
Wade sighed dramatically. He did contemplate flinging the heart monitor at the floor as hard as he could just to see what interesting things that did to Peter’s face. Instead he shuffled over to the bed and dumped it into the mattress before spinning around, leaning directly into Peter’s space. “Pamphlets.”
“Um,” Peter said. His eyebrows scrunched. “We don’t have any? I could get some.”
The boxes conferred briefly. White subsided, reluctantly.
[Okay, he’s probably harmless.]
“Pamphlets are a nine on the douchebag scale.” Wade swung an arm around Peter's shoulders, making the command decision to propel them towards the amazing folding-wall. Peter gave a little squeak of alarm and hugged his clipboard to his chest, taking two steps to every stride of Wade’s. “This is the clearest sign of your moral alignment that I could have been presented with. I mean, no pamphlets, and sarcasm in the face of danger? You either hang with the lippiest environmentalists ever, or you’re somebody’s doe-eyed sidekick. I don’t have to shoot either of those.”
[His superpower is probably wearing magic glasses or something.]
{Hey, he might rock a skintight suit. You never know!}
“Um,” Peter choked slightly, failing to burrow out from under Wade’s arm as the mercenary mercilessly adjusted his hold. “Yeah. Let’s go with that.”