Amoeba Man
The third day, Nate wakes up with a headache so bad he rolls out of bed and staggers into the bathroom retching. When he hears the splatter of puke in the toilet, Wade panics a little (Wade freaks Right The Fuck Out) and runs around trying to find any medicine in the place.
“Just...just get me some…” Nate gestures vaguely at the door; Wade runs and grabs the duffel and drags it down the hallway to the bathroom, fighting down his own nerves.
Nate’s not the one who gets sick like this; normally Wade is the one who’s been dosed with soemthing lethal that wrecks his digestive tract, at least for a few hours.
“What’s wrong? Did somebody hit you with something? Oh, Jiminy Christmas Christ, I knew we shouldn’t have eaten so much organic stuff! You gotta have some processed shit, so you can keep up your tolerances to Red Dye 40 and Yellow Lake! It’s like Westley and the iocane powder—” Wade babbles.
Nate surprises him with a sickly laugh, and another retch. He spits into the toilet a moment later, his ribs heaving like a bellows.
“Nobody dosed me with anything. S’not...not poison. I just...eugh...just...my head is fuckin’ killing me.” he slurs a little, when he can get enough breath to talk.
“You...you want me to get you anything?”
“Yeah,” Nate mumbles, “The duffel. There’s a...little orange pouch. Reflective stripe, white zipper pull. Grab that.”
Wade digs out the indicated pouch, and watches with mounting worry as Nate unzips the pouch with shaking hands, and pulls out...a bottle of Excedrin.
“You, uh, you sure you don’t want something a teensy bit stronger than that, babe?” Wade asks, and tries to laugh. It comes out like a sad little bleat.
“No,” Nate says. He sits down with his back to the frosted glass shower door, groaning softly. “Hand me a bottle of water? From the duffel.”
Wade obliges, and watches Nate swish a mouthful of water around, and spit into the toilet.
Nate takes two of the horse pills and chugs the rest of the bottle of water. Then for a long moment he sits there, head slumped back, breathing hard. He looks like he’s at the ass-end of a hard cardio workout, or like he’s running a fever—sweaty and flushed. Fat veins jump under the skin in his temples and neck, which is NOT usual; Wade’s seen him get like this in fights, when he was overdoing it with the TK and pushing himself.
“You sure you’re good, Nate? ‘Cause you got that whole Super Saiyan Stress Hypertension Forehead Vein situation going on right now. Pretty bad, actually.” Wade says this, and as he is saying this, feels like he’s being slapped in the face by his own uselessness. He is a sack of useless organs with an ass at either end—it’s just that the end with teeth makes stupid sounds that makes situations worse, and the ass between his buttcheeks only makes shit.
“It’ll pass,” Nate says. Gasps, more like. “Gimme a minute.”
After awhile, Nate cracks one eye open—the dud eye, so that it flashes an orange-and-blue opalescent light. He looks Wade over, strangely calm, and says, “What? No witticisms or sweet nothings for me?”
Wade blurts another uncertain, nervous laugh. “People don’t usually ask me to crack jokes when they’re sick and in the middle of blowing chunks.”
Nate manages half a smile, one side of his mouth quirking up. “Am I most people? And maybe it would...distract me from things.”
There it is again, the feeling of Wrongness.
Wade remembers another time, from a lifetime ago, as Nate slumped over, half in Wade’s lap and half on the floor. He remembers leaning over him, trying to pull Nate upright as his organic eye went glassy, and the TO one dimmed like a bulb with a dying filament. How heavy he’d been, the dead weight of him, smelling of burnt metal and ozone.
He remembers begging him to say something, to tell him something funny.
He remembers the sinking feeling as grief overtook horror, right about when it really sank in that Nate was actually out—as far as he knew, for good that time.
All Deadpool’s bullets and all two of his swords, hadn’t been enough to take Cable from the world—but his own power had fried his brain.
What, exactly, does Nate want to be distracted FROM?
The question sticks in the back of Wade’s throat, and the thought of asking chokes him.
SAY IT, DAMN IT! He thinks, as hard as he can.
But he can’t. He doesn’t know why, but he can’t; he’s gripped by some shock and fear so visceral it numbs him. He sits down next to Nate and scooches closer, hoping proximity will drive off the weird-wrong feeling. He nudges Nate’s armpit with his shoulder and eventually gives up with a little tsk! And a sigh, as he lifts Nate’s heavy TO arm and drapes it over his shoulder.
Being closer helps. Slightly.
And then his mouth gets away from him.
“Distracted? You? Nate, what would you ever need distractions from? We’ve got a nice place—and you said we’ve got it for awhile, so our little extended sexytimes-siesta-slash-holiday-episode can go as long as we want, right? And you’ve got me, and I’m a walking distraction all by myself!” the word-vomit is both giving him courage, and erupting out of him like a chain fountain.
Nate has closed his eye and is nodding along to what he says, and seems to be getting a bit better; he’s not so red, anymore, and Wade notes the veins in his face and neck have faded.
Something is wrong. Wade has to try to be sensible enough, and brave enough, to SAY SOMETHING. To ask ONE QUESTION.
He tries not to think too hard at all as he continues, blathering, “Besides, obviously we won the last fight, or else why would we be all comfy-cozy? You’d think there would be, like, cyborg clone ninjas with robotic eyes coming after us, if we fucked it up, right? And the only cyborg here I see is you, Natey, and we both know you only know gun fu and not ninjutsu, so…we must’ve won. Right?” he gestures around at the dim, cool bathroom.
Nate doesn’t flinch when he asks, but just barely. He’s giving Wade another quiet, studying look.
And then he says, very carefully and slowly, “We did. Didn’t we?”
“Hell YEAH we did! With the explosions and me, with the katanas, and you with your Big Fucking Gun, and the—wow, you sure got ‘em good!” Wade continues rambling, actually feeling nervous sweat start prickling all down his sides and his back.
He’s bluffing and he’s certain Nate knows it, and right now he’s not even sure whose benefit it is that he’s trying to lie for.
How badly had he fucked up the last mission? Was this Nate’s bizarre new way to go to ground? Was this a secret Fake Married-style mission, where they were supposed to meet and convince some marks? Was there some crucial intel he’d given Wade, that Wade had forgotten?
All of this kept roiling inside Wade’s brain and his gut, until he was sitting there tense and stiff, and still, his mouth running entirely freely of his brain, continuing, “I don’t think I’ve ever seen--”
“Wade…” Nate says, quietly.
Wade pauses mid-word, his mouth wide open, and closes it slowly enough that he feels the temperature of the air inside his mouth change.
“...Yeah?”
“It’s...it’s OK. We can talk about the...mission...later.” Nate says slowly, and quietly.
“Oh god somebody melted me down to cellular sludge again, didn’t they?” Wade pulls away from Nate, covering his mouth with his hands.
“Wade, your hands were just on the bathroom floor,” Nate chides.
Wade continues, “Oh my god, and you probably had to scoop up, like a Thermos full of me-goo and carry me back here and watch me regrow my everything.” He looks back at Nate. “Did I...do a good job, before they Got Me?” he asks. And then, “Also, I figure if anything can get the jump on my souped-up, juiced-up immune system and the permanent Regen that Wolvie’s juices gave me, then it’d probably give me another, even more fucked-up super power. How does Amoeba Man sound?”
This gets a snort from Nate, but when he dares to look back at him, his eyes are still sad, and guarded, somehow.
“I think you should still wash your hands after touching the floor ANYWHERE, indoors or ot, because that’s basic sanitation. I also think Amoeba Man would only work if you had powers to absorb other organic things through your skin.” Nate closes his eye and leans back against the shower wall, and draws a slow breath.
The smile that works its way across his face is content. He continues, “Either that, or if you could somehow manage to make people shit themselves, or if you ate their brains. But we both know you’re really good at one of those. And it isn’t making people ruin their underwear.”
Wade gasps, feigning insult. “Are you saying that contact with me causes BRAIN DAMAGE? Also, I’ll have you know, I HAVE TOO made people piss and/or shit themselves in sheer terror at the sight of me! I’m scary! See? Grr!” he does a claw-hand motion towards Nate, whose head lolls back against the glass as he smiles, and shakes his head.
“Well, you certainly occupy a lot of my brain. Being with you is all-consuming, all the time.” Nate’s smile is a little smirk now, and then gone.
He gets to his feet, sighing, and Wade watches him stand. He is more than a little awed, as he always is to look straight UP—and having to CONTINUE looking up—at Nate.
Nate’s face is illuminated with the pale light coming through the window, diffused further by the frosted shower glass. Like this he looks more like a sculpture of some forgotten saint, the last silver of his armor being only his arm.
When he offers Wade his hand to get up, as well, Wade takes it and tries to make sense of the conversation they just had.
“Is that just your way of saying you were having too many horny dreams about me and you pulled a mental muscle over it?” Wade asks, because he has to.
Nate has turned to the sink washes his hands, and Wade watches him, and loves all the mundane details: the way Nate runs his thumbnail into the grooves and striations in the TO of his wrist and hand and between his fingers; the way the wirelike veins on the back of his hand shift around as he cleans them, methodical and careful.
He’s seen Nate make them both delicious food, with that hand. Has pulled him out of the line of fire and hauled him the last few steps and into a transport that would DEFINITELY have left without him, with that hand.
He’s seen him use that hand to crush mens’ throats, and monsters’. He’s fantasized about —and actually been on the receiving end more than once, in both combat and the bedroom.
But here, like this, it’s just another part of Nate’s body, mundane and normal and beautiful and evidence that he is strange, and marvellously alive.
Nate does the soft sigh-laugh thing through his nose and dries his hands.
Instead of saying a witty quip about it, Nate just says, “Not everything is your fault, Wade.”
As if that makes any sense.
And then, because he doesn’t know what the hell is going on and DEFINITELY doesn’t want to pry too much now, he shoos Nate back to bed, and plies him with pancakes and blowjobs. (Both of which he is good enough at making and giving, that he can just enjoy himself, and tamp down the weird feeling that keeps threatening to roil up and out of the surface of his consciousness.