crash log updates
The thing about Wade’s version of a healing factor (combined with his various fascinating neurodivergencies) is that he doesn’t always sleep much.
Sometimes, yeah, he can knock out for a few days at a time, and usually wake up to Al banging on his door and demanding the rent, or for him to turn down that damn TV; or sometimes, finally, the repeated ping of phone notifications would finally get loud enough in his dreams to startle him back into waking life.
Those are interesting times.
This is not to say that Wade does not enjoy sleep. He loves a good sleep! Particularly in a clean bed that he doesn’t have to make himself. EXTRA particularly if someone else was sharing that bed with him, and the sleep comes after a few rounds of sex.
But between he and you, dear reader, he doesn’t actually tend to sleep very well. Neurodivergencies mean wild, vivid dreams, and trauma means wild, vivid nightmares. The kinds of things his many, various therapists have always been at a loss to deal with.
And of course, sometimes those dreams mean he can’t sleep at all.
This time it feels almost real.
Him and Nate, on a mission somewhere. They are in a building which has been reduced to panes of searing-white, and impossibly blue glass, the color of sky.
Nate turns to him, screaming something over gunfire. The bicep of the TO arm bulging as he unloads the clip of something uncommonly pedestrian into whoever is across the room from them.
Then they are on a balcony or ledge, very high. There is a helicopter, it looks like—or, no, one of those things with multiple rotors, like an Osprey, or something rejected from a Ridley Scott film for being too over-the-top even for him.
He sees his own arm come up, to toss Nate a gun. Nate’s hard-light cannon, his BFG.
Wade is standing just behind him, holding a duffel. It’s writhing like it’s full of snakes, but they’re metal cords wrapped in braided black rope, and the cords are so hot that the rope is beginning to smoke.
The cannon in Nate’s hand has a gauge on one side, a bunch of little tally marks that start at the side of the gun, and go up its barrel. They’re blank, but he can see them start to glow blue, one by one, advancing down the barrel of the gun.
Steam, or smoke, is coming off the gun, and Wade’s eyes follow it up, and up, and suddenly the plume of smoke is over a field of flowering trees.
Bartlett pears. There’s a little river. He and Nate have a campfire set up. Nate is laughing at something he says. The Catbus from My Neighbor Totoro is there, but it has tires like a monster truck (it’s balancing on the axles with its many cat feet) and Wade goes back to the Catbus, which winks at him and obligingly opens its furry door sphincter.
He climbs inside and is in a military personnel transport truck, a whole lifetime ago, climbing in next to some other unlucky bastard. He doesn’t know how he knows, but he’s on a secret mission, so classified that it will be wiped from records later.
Even he doesn’t fully remmeber the details, and there’s no way to recover them now.
The guy next to him is Latino, looking vaguely worried. His mouth moves, and the sound of chopper blades come out, and when Wade turns his head to look, he’s back there on the roof, next to Nate.
The hard-light cannon is smoking in Nate’s hand. The gauge’s tally marks are all fully blue.
Nate half-glances at him, yells something Wade can’t hear. He hears someone—someTHING?-- screaming, a constant drawn-out Eeeeeeaaaaeeeeeaaaaaeeee that goes on and on.
Nate pulls the trigger.
Hard-light guns don’t normally have recoil, but this one damn near erupts in Nate’s hand. There’s a white flash as bright as a bolt of lightning, and the beam that comes out of the gun’s business end is so bright it’s like looking into the heart of a blue flame.
The helicopter DOES erupt, electricity arcing around it in poisonous, gleeful little barbs.
This part DOES have real sound, and it’s the hungry, grinding, gnawing crackle of raw electricity, eagerly hopping around on a conductive surface.
Wade doesn’t know why he remembers this sound so acutely, so perfectly.
There is a moment where the helicopter’s rotors are still turning, and everything in it is smoking—and then, unlike in the movies where the explosion is instant—a few seconds later, the fried innards remember that they’ve just been superheated and massively overloaded, and remember to explode into flames.
The whole thing wavers in the air unsteadily, and begins an almost delicate pirouette in place, the rotors sighing in the air like a tired animal searching for a place to rest.
Nate must be holding it up, he realized, because it doesn’t fall.
Sparkling blue water is dripping from it. The water is pooling on the roof, near the heli-pad where they are standing.
It moves like mercury, as shiny-brigt as a mirror, and Wade realizes it’s not blue at all—it’s glowing silver, reflecting the sky. There’s a lot of it, and it’s running everywhere, and Wade can see that both trying to hold the helicopter and contain the fire in it is wearing on Nate. Nate, who has veins bulging in his neck and forehead and is gritting his teeth in effort.
The helicopter continues its almost dainty spiral above them, dripping the blue-silver mercury liquid. The liquid rings them on the roof.
In the dream, Wade gets the dream-feedback that touching that stuff would rip him to shreds at the molecular level, and scatter his atoms back and forth through time, or maybe turn him into an office chair. Or maybe an energy being. Or maybe just vaporize him instantly into A Gas Formerly Known as Wade Wilson.
Nate looks back over at him, and there is Something on Nate’s face that Wade rarely sees, and which never fails to chill him right to his fucking bones.
Nate looks terrified.
Wade looks down at the duffel he is still holding, quite innocently.
The nylon straps and the bag itself are melting in streaks and beads. Now that Wade is looking, he sees that some of the bottom of the bag has dripped down around his feet.
The melted-away spots reveal a big aluminum-colored canister, with contact heads on either end, and something written on the side. (This is a dream, dear reader, and unlike the author, Wade cannot read in his dreams. All he sees are symbols that might as well be Klingon or Kryptonian.)
The bag is also smoldering, just a little, in a way that would hurt if he could feel in these kinds of dreams--
When he looks back at Nate, the other man reaches for him and grabs his arm. He pulls him closer.
Wade knows this part.
Nate says, “Bodyslide by two!”
But he says that at the same time as a big chunk of burning, melting nylon falls off the bag, and lands in the growing puddle of silver-blue rapidly spreading towards Wade’s foot. And then everything is bright and white-hot as lightning, and Wade is falling and sliding through time and space. Burning.
Falling. The horrible spinning sensation, like falling forward from a great height, with terrible certainty he is going to land face-first. A real head-splitter!
He hates regrowing his jaw. Every regrowing tooth feels like someone is shoving a molten, red-hot spike up into his mouth, through the bone. He understands completely why babies scream when they grow theirs, the first time. He’d scream too, if he had to deal with that without being able to swallow a handful of pills or drink an entire bottle of cough syrup to deaden the pain.
Present-day Wade startles into full wakefulness, where he has been sitting. He’s got his Bowie knife in one hand, and the other curled into a fist.
He’s standing in a nice living room, sock feet on a hardwood floor. Behind him is a nice, overstuffed plush armchair, and the chair is rocking slightly with the force of how fast he’d jumped out of it.
Around him the place is silent, and totally dark.
For a moment this freaks him out—there’s no noise of city traffic, but there also aren’t any nature sounds; no owls or crickets or coyotes, even. He realizes he’s forgotten what safe-house they’re in, remembers it’s not the East Coast one near the water, or…
No. they’re in a new place. A town-home. Too big, too nice.
Upstairs, Nate is sleeping.
The information comes to him in fits and starts, like a montage of snapshots.
Wade groans quietly and ran a hand down his face.
He tries to shake off the feeling of wrongness as just a dream, and mostly succeeds.
He also knows he can’t go back upstairs like this—all twitchy and riled up.
So he sneaks to the door, borrows a pair of house slippers, and steals Nate’s jacket again. Just a little. Just for a walk so he can clear his head.
It was stupid, he thinks—fighting valiantly and even biting his own lips to remind himself not to think out loud—it was stupid of him not to do basic recon the first day, like finding out where exactly they were.
He’ll fix that now, he thinks, and it will help him clear his head.
He quietly ransacks the downstairs looking for a hat, or a hoodie to wear under Nate’s jacket, or a bandanna—ANYTHING to hide his bare head. He finds a gray and white baseball cap on the shelf in the entryway closet, embroidered with a company logo he doesn’t recognize.
He pulls it on, snugs it down so the brim will hide his eyes. It’s already been shaped to somebody else’s head, but Wade’s fine with that: most of the things in his own apartment are second-hand, or they were free dollars and no cents, courtesy of the sidewalk.
He locks the door before pulling it closed behind himself so it’s quieter, and then heads down the street.
He’s not going anywhere intentionally.
The clock had put the time at a little past two, and so of course he expects the streets to be quiet—but there’s nothing and no one out. The silence is complete, except for a faint breeze.
Now that it’s dark, he can look up and out, and see there ARE a few taller buildings nearby—what looks like a city center, with a few towers. High-rise apartments, maybe, or hotels?
The skyline is unfamiliar, though, with the buildings’ lights shining in the distance. One of them is a pale tower, gray with distance now. All the taller buildings are the sort of nondescript, generic office buildings you see in the backgrounds of comics, to show that they take place in A City.
He walks aimlessly, passing parked cars and other town-homes with their porch lights on.
The place is so quiet it’s creepy—HOA quiet, with no music playing, no dogs barking in yards, not so much as an intentionally/forcibly-feral—excuse the authoress-- “outside cat”—walking along the top of a wall. The street really IS as still as a picture, with the cute little old-fashioned style street lamps throwing down saucers of yellow light onto the pavement.
Just when things are starting to feel unbearable, he notices something real and human: there’s a little blue sedan parked under one light, and the driver seems to have left the light in the car on. There’s also a corner of a canvas shopping bag poking out of it, as if the car’s owner had grabbed the other bags and gone inside in a hurry, and closed the door on the bag without noticing.
The house it was parked in front of was a cute little two-storey thing, built in a vaguely Spanish/Italian/Southwestern style, with white plaster walls and a reddish tile roof. A light is on upstairs in one window, but the curtains are drawn. All Wade can see is a faint line of yellow around the sides and bottom of the frame.
He listens hard, waiting (hoping, even, he realized) to hear music, a voice, a toilet flush—ANYTHING.
What actually happens is, after about two minutes of him standing there, just to the side of the car like a creep, the light goes off. Another light comes on in an adjacent window a moment later, but only on for a few seconds before this is turned off, too.
Wade realizes he has been staring at the house pretty hard, and that this looks like the type of neighborhood where half the houses have doorbell and yard cameras, and homeowners who DEFINITELY checked them...and would probably call the cops on some weirdo in a baggy jacket with his hat pulled down to cover half his face, standing and staring at one house.
He stuffs his hands in his pockets (in Nate’s pockets, actually) and walks away.