Chapter Text
Wade often found bombs gift-wrapped like motherfucking Christmas presents on the step of the door—that was how he’d lost a few of his favorite safe-houses(rest in piece, funky disco hideaways). He was fond of his current haunt, even though the paint on the walls bubbled like warts on a toad, and anything that had a porous surface(which was everything) smelled like wet tobacco. He stuck his masked head out into the hall, looking each way, but the delivery person was long gone. Wade could appreciate a good ding-dong-ditch, but he didn’t appreciate having to drag his ugly ass out of bed so early in the morning after yet another late night.
The only thing that should be up right now is our blood sugar.
Or our dick.
“Shut it, I’m trying to think,” Wade hissed, grabbing the package and taking it inside. If it were a bomb, he’d prefer to deal with the carnage in a contained setting. To prevent a neighbor from being injured or having to pick Deadpool tartare from their hair. He dropped it on the coffee table, shoving aside a few crinkled magazines and a ripped-out horoscope page(Sagittarius circled with fat, red marker). The label on the box had no return address—shocker—and the tape was regular ol’ packing tape, so no special care given to the state in which it would get delivered. Probably not a bomb, unless the sender was truly batshit and didn’t give a fuck if they took down a delivery driver in their attempt at one of Wade’s many lives.
Still, combustion was a terrible, annoying way to die. He held his breath while opening it.
Wade would have preferred a bomb.
Three nights ago.
“You’ve got a knack for good timing,” Spider-Man said—feet landing beside him with the grace of a fucking ballerina. They were on their usual rooftop, listening to the symphonies of city nightlife drift up like a heat wave from the concrete jungle. “That, or you’re the luckiest asshole in New York.”
Wade sometimes short-circuited in moments like these because the mere sight of Spider-Man’s sloping calves had White and Yellow blathering over each other, completely indecipherable. Spidey dropped into a cross-legged seat, jambing a deceptively knobby knee into the muscle of Wade’s thigh. Wade pictured a reality where something like that could leave a bruise. Where there could be visible reminders of the good things in life, like those evenings on patrol—haunting the skyline with the closest thing he’d ever had to a real friend.
God, he ’s making me sad. It’s pathetic.
“Was that a compliment?” Wade feigned shock, slapping comically at his cheeks. “All for ‘yours truly’? You shouldn’t have!”
Spidey barked out a laugh, loud in the late hour. “I really shouldn’t have,” he said, and he pressed his knee slightly deeper.
Is he edging me? Wade struggled to keep the train of his thoughts on the straight and narrow and righteous and—whatever-fuck-else. “What can I say?” he asked. “Can’t let them squash my favorite arachnid-not-insect, now, can I, baby boy?”
Things had changed between them over the last year, and even Wade, as skilled as he was at compartmentalizing and outright denial, could sense the shift. But like all things, the feeling came with caveats—little pinpricks of doubt that the world Deadpool perceived was not the same as the one perceived by others. If only Spidey would name the feeling, then Wade would know he wasn’t crazy(at least, not about this). But it had to be Spidey, because things were good—and Wade was not about to be the one to ruin it by doing something stupid like offering up his heart on a tarnished, silver platter.
“You’re the real menace, you know that?” Spidey made webbing motions right at Wade’s face.
Wade snatched him by the wrist. His breath hitched. It wouldn’t have been noticeable if the other man hadn’t sat so close to begin with.
“Are you hurt?” Wade asked. He’d come late to the party, and the abnormally suped-up bank robbers had managed to land several lucky blows before his arrival.
We should have asked sooner, White lamented. We’re such a terrible friend.
“Mostly my ego,” Spidey said, laughing. Wade filed it under ‘beautiful, if not dorky,’ along with most of the other times he’d heard Spidey laugh. “Still. Thanks for covering my ass, Wade. I don’t think there’s anyone I trust more than you.”
Fuck, how could Spidey say something like that to someone like Deadpool? He still hadn’t let go of that slim, gloved wrist—wished he could see past the white eyes of the Spider-Man mask—to know just what the man was thinking while saying such catastrophic things.
The moment(was it a moment? Wade didn’t know the parameters of what was considered ‘a moment’) was ruined by the chirp of Spidey’s burner. Wade released his wrist so he could fish the phone from beneath the waistband of his suit.
Tuck us in there, too. I can get cellular if I concentrate real hard. Real, real hard.
“Stick a fucking horse hoof in it,” Wade hissed over his shoulder.
“Fuck,” Spidey grumbled, reading off the alert on the little flip screen. “Figures it’s gonna be a late night.”
“I’ll go with you,” Wade said, because he didn’t need to know the specifics. Whatever the mission, he was all in.
“It’s nothing like that, Wade. Besides, this is kind of a day-shift Spider-Man problem, if you catch my drift.”
Wade was picking up what his Spidey was laying down. They didn’t talk about certain things: particularly dead people(Uncles, girlfriends, daughters, lovers, etc) and Spider-Man’s civilian identity. That was fine by Wade. Everyone was entitled to their secrets. Still, he frowned. He didn’t like the implication that there was a crossover at all—that Spidey could get hurt, and because of the nature of their working and non-working relationship, Wade was morally obligated to stand aside and just let it fucking happen.
But it had taken a long time for Wade to earn Spidey’s trust, and he wasn’t the brightest broken crayon in the box, but even he knew it was a fragile thing that needed to be held very gently.
“You can get rid of me for now,” Wade said, giving him a two-fingered salute. “But I’m like the Herpes Simplex Virus. I’ll just keep coming back. Or… you know, be asymptomatic for the rest of your life. I don’t want to confuse the readers with medical misinformation or contribute to stigma.”
“What the hell are you talking about, ‘Pool?” Spidey asked, getting to his feet, but he couldn’t hide the laugh in his voice.
Wade missed the press of Spidey’s knobby fucking knee, and wow, that was a whole new level of pathetic, even for him.
“Watch your ass, baby boy,” Wade said, clicking his tongue. “I won’t be there watching it for you.”
“Something tells me you’re watching it right now,” Spidey mumbled, stretching his arms.
“Gotta fill the quota early. We’re approaching the end of the fiscal year, after all.”
Spidey looked back over his shoulder. It was impossible to prove, but Wade knew the man was grinning beneath the fabric of his mask. “Go home, Deadpool. Get some sleep for the both of us.”
“Give me a minute and I’ll come up with a punchline about us and sleeping, but not sleeping, if you catch my drif—”
“Goodnight, ‘Pool,” Spider-Man said, and leapt from the concrete ledge of the rooftop.
Present.
Wade collapsed back into his favorite sinkhole on the couch. From its nesting place within the parcel, the Spider-Man mask looked up at him. There was a part of Wade that thought, this has to be a joke, but he was intimately familiar with the detailing on the fabric, down to the inevitable wear and tear of the fibers that would have gone unnoticed by anyone other than the person whose whole personality was staring at Spider-Man. If it was a replica, it was of the finest craftsmanship Wade had ever seen.
The mask sat on what could only be the suit, neatly folded into a pristine square. Tucked along the edge of the box were Spidey’s web shooters and multiple capsules of what Wade could only assume were refills of web fluid. White and Yellow had gone quiet. That was never a good sign.
Wade peeled his own mask off—dropping it to the floor. His face, mangled and dismayed, stared back at him from the reflection of Spidey’s eye pieces.
“What the fuck?” he whispered.
Spidey hadn’t made it to patrol since getting that text message. As much as Wade valued their time together, he could understand that sometimes, too much Deadpool left a really bad aftertaste in one’s mouth. It had been a perfectly reasonable assumption that the webslinger was doing his own thing on the opposite side of the city, and he’d come crawling back to Wade when he needed a good laugh or a midnight meal, or both.
Wade should have questioned that logic. Three days wasn’t a long time to take a break from someone like Deadpool, but it was a long time to be missing.
There was a small, folded-up square of paper alongside the costume. Wade felt like he was cracking open a fortune cookie, only instead of some vague shit that applied to everyone and no one at the same time, it was two words scribbled in thick sharpie.
‘FIND ME’.