MAIL ORDER BRIDE
MAIL ORDER BRIDE
“So, this one has been your husband. For years,” the tall one says. Shock and dismay battle on her face.
Bullseye knows she knows he’s the infamous Bullseye. Kudos for the restraint of her heroic tendencies. She must like the punk that much, for not trying to skewer him on sight. You have to give her that.
(That’s the only reason he’s showed the courtesy of not butchering the waiter who blundered their order earlier. It’s only fair.)
“On and off. But mostly on, yes, Laura,” Daken serenely replies.
Bullseye… doesn't want to be there, though. Daken doesn't want either, he thinks, but the punk hides it better. Because, for a mongrel, he is a damn pussycat unable to resist his sisters. And apparently, after all these years, a meeting was overdue. Huh.
The hitman details them, those girls. The big one is beautiful, quiet and oddly intense.
She doesn’t look like she particularly approves.
(Not that Bullseye would care, frankly.)
“Soooooooo. How did it happen!?” the little one says, almost raising from her seat, leaning over the table towards him in bubbly curiosity.
She’s… cute. Admittedly. Bullseye thinks it’s what sane people would say. And she’s… ebullient. Per the punk’s words. But Bullseye kinda sees it too, now.
“I blame Wilson,” Bullseye simply mutters.
“Wilson? As in DEADPOOL?” The pipsqueak’s sudden enthusiasm is kinda jarring.
(No, he didn’t jump out of his skin at the outburst. He’ll have to punch Daken in the face when they get home to get rid of this smirk of his he can perfectly see from the corner of his eye. Even belatedly. Revenge is his favorite dish, after all.)
“Yeah? That jerk.”
“That’s my BFF,” the girl, disapproving of his language, informs.
“That true?” Bullseye asks askance of the punk.
“Unfortunately,” Daken confirms. But also decides to pick up the tale-telling duty. “My little man here ordered me online.”
“Excuse me?”
Big sis’ seems totally confused, now. It’s kinda a funny expression on her, the hitman notices.
“I was soooo sloshed,” Bullseye recalls. “The degenerate put me to it. Jerk, I tell you. Couldn’t remember a thing in the morning.”
And a few days later, the evening had brought quite a surprise, in the form of a punk, while he was sitting at the same bar.
oOo
“I’m here,” the tall guy with the improbable hair and the cold clear eyes says, sliding on the stool next to his. He looks kinda out of place with his sissy purple shirt and his dapper vest. Worse, with the overblown tattoo peeking from under his clothes and the chain at his waist, he looks like a kind of hipster. The. Horror.
“I can see,” Bullseye replies, already glaring, as in: I’ll forcibly and quite definitively remove you if you’re still here in the next second.
Impossibly, the intruder’s smile only grows, underlined with a faint dare that finally sparks the hitman’s interest. This quiet assurance… Clearly, the guy has no clue who he is. (Unlike almost every one else in this criminal underworld’s waterhole.) It might prove fun teaching him…
“You’ve asked for me,” Mohawk informs.
“I haven’t.”
“You have.” And then, the damn intruder produces a contract, of all things. “See what it says, here?”
Bullseye cranes his neck to see better the paper negligently dropped on the bar:
Please fill in this form, and we'll have one of our reputable serial killers sent to your address by the end of the week.
The filled form follows, all scribbled in his own handwriting.
“Huh.”
“Lester…” The punk is elongating the vowels with utter relish and base triumph. “Is that your name, here?”
“Uh-huh.”
“Is that your signature?”
Bullseye’s horror spikes.
“Uh-huh.”
“Then, tadaaaaa! Congratulation. Payment has been wired. We’re literally engaged to be married in writing.”
“I’ll be damned,” Bullseye says in utter confusion and base revulsion.
“I think you’re rather blessed, dear. I mean, look at me.”
And the hitman, to his profound mortification, can’t help but do just that.
“I don't get it.” It’s almost whiny, the way Bullseye says this.
“Think Mail Order Bride, dear,” the punk patiently spells out.
“I do get that. But you're a bloke. I would have ordered a bride, not a broom.”
(Well he could see himself ordering a Elektra, for example, now that he thinks of it.)
“Groom.”
Bullseye points at the Mohawk, at that, smirking, because he never misses: “Broom.”
Daken, who had been called many names and most of them far worse, decides forbearance and magnanimity are the better part of valor.
“You ordered a killer,” Daken reminds, then, smiling with all his teeth. And the man must have seen something in his expression, because he looks suddenly more alert, even more alive.
Plus, Daken has to admit, the little man delights him. Truly. He’s oh so easy on the eye, compared to the dubious specimens usually ordering someone like him. That. Body! A work of art and hardships. He can tell.
Plus, smell wouldn’t lie. The man might play hard to get, but his body is already reacting to him, showing definite interest (if disingenuously). And Daken can’t seem to take his eyes off him. Which is fortunate, because the striking quality of the man’s own eyes would almost reconcile him with the color blue…
oOo
“You had ordered a killer to marry?” The big sister’s brows have risen sky-high.
“Sloshed, remember? Blame Wilson.” It’s tiring to repeat oneself. Plus, does one not say common interest is the bed of a solid union? He almost says it. In extremis reminds himself the stand of heroes on his professional occupation.
“People do that?” she keeps on. “Order killers to marry?”
“Well, this was a tiny company, but one that prided itself in catering to the most peculiar needs,” Daken comments. He looks way too amused, Bullseye notes.
“But, if you were so sloshed,” the little one interferes, addressing not her brother but him, “how did you know to be there at the right time and the right place for my brother to meet you?”
“Wilson texted me a time and place. I just thought I had forgotten a job with him. Obviously, he didn't show.”
“Well you traded up, didn't you?” Daken sententiously notes.
It sucks that the punk can smells lies. Bullseye can't deny. So he hides his face in the foam of his craft beer.
“So it's really Deadpool's doing!”
Gabby is so delighted her BFF (Best Friend Forever) gave her brother his BFF (Boy Friend Forever, aka. husband.), that it seems she has to text him. His reply comes impossibly fast.
“What does he say,” Bullseye asks, already regretting it.
“I'm not sure,” the kid muses. “He says: See, there was a plothole so the author used me. I have that reputation to be always game to have a hole pegged, even a plot one, apparently.”
They collectively proceed to ignore what they don’t understand.
But it appears it’s Daken’s turn to be grilled by the big sister:
“But why did you do that? Offer yourself like that to… a stranger?”
Well, Bullseye’s curious too, actually.
“Money,” Daken says, devastatingly matter-of-fact. An alternative revenue stream of which even Romulus, who was invisible but everywhere, would never know anything about. He’d needed that, once. A safety net of his own. “And it wasn't the first time I played that game.”
“It wasn't?” both Laura and Bullseye exclaim. The little sister sniggers: their unison was that perfect, their shock indubitably similar.
“I never married them others,” Daken a tad defensively elaborates.
“Tell me you didn't kill them…” The big sister truly sounds like she’s almost at the end of her horrified rope.
“Fleeced them, rather. They wanted to please me and keep me so much… Hitting where the money is? Even worse, it was, for some of them. I was low on cash and I played them for all they had, then more, and sometimes would blackmail a bit on the top of that, them or people wanting to, hah, protect their reputation, I guess. Then, I disappeared on them.”
They try to digest this.
“Wait, I killed one, once,” Daken adds somewhat out of the blue. “I wanted to try that merry widow thing.”
“I can’t tell if you’re joking,” the big sister says. Her knuckles are almost white around her own beer.
“Of course,” Daken replies.
It doesn’t exactly clear the matter, Bullseye privately notes, but she clearly chooses to hear what pleases her better. Yes, a joke. But something troubles him still.
“Widow?” he snarls.
“Figure of speech, dear. I hadn’t married this one either. I swear.”
Bullseye gauges the punk’s expression. Punk’s a liar. But Daken seems more interested to figure out what seems to have set him off rather than selling anything with his face. So he lets it go. Otherwise he’ll have to explain this unexpected spike of white hot jealousy he’s just experienced.
“So, how did my brother made you fall head over heels, then?” the little one shrewdly redirects.
Daken beats him to an answer, though:
“Well, the mail order agency? They didn't do refund. He could as well try me.”
“He blew me in the men's room,” Bullseye completes for pure shock value.
Big sister almost chokes on her gulp of beer and her hands are on the kid’s ears soooo fast it’s uncanny.
“I've heard,” the little one still delightfully mentions, with a glint of mischief in her eyes.
“And the rest is history,” Daken concludes, thin smile in place, unperturbed.
“Well, that was a memorable blow job,” Bullseye points, because he's starting to see the little shit's point. Flustering the big sister is fun.
They don't tell about what came before. How Bullseye has found himself with that mad hard on to take care of in the first place… Obviously not.
oOo
Their conversation is a private affair (but not that kind of affair… yet), for fuck’s sake. And on a… sensitive subject. In the crowded bar, of course Bullseye is leaning in very close (and maybe trying to lean on that punk a bit) while trying to find a loophole to his predicament. The finding fees of this damn agency? Ridiculous. He’d have to take at last two high-end jobs to compensate for the dry loss. It won’t do.
Problem is, their hushed closeness draws the wrong kind of attention. Before long, a shadow falls on them. One big burly biker guy Bullseye knows from sight, a newcomer he’s already noticed here once or twice, who plays bruiser for hire, he’s heard, and seems intend to upgrade to bruiser for ire, this time:
“We don’t take kindly to faggots, here,” the poor deluded man threatens.
Bullseye was already in a bit of a foul mood. He almost might welcome the intrusion and the potential for violence to erupt. He straightens himself on his stool. Stares coolly at the big guy.
“Well, for my part, guilty as charged, of course,” Daken pleasantly enough informs.
But in the curling of his mouth, Bullseye surprises acid and ice in a heady cocktail. And an arresting sight, by the way. That’s why the punk so easily catch his eye, next :
“I'm not saying you are, dear,” the damn broom tells him. “But, will you let this one tell you who you should be? Ô great Bullseye?”
Because yes, Bullseye had thought mentioning his name in passing to that punk would give him some leverage. No such luck. The damn broom had acted like it meant nothing to him, that liar. But it’s now obvious he’d known him from reputation.
The hitman's also pretty sure his not-bride has said this as much to incense him as to see the biker's face decompose at the mention of his name. (That’s the problem with newcomers. They sometimes don’t recognize him at once, when he wears his beanie.) Biker man seems ready to politely back off, now. But the punk’s heavy gaze won’t let Bulleye forget the matter so easily.
(Not that he would have, in all justice.)
So he unfolds himself from his seat, palming the little dispenser of toothpicks on the counter.
To his utter surprise, the punk joins his side, losing shirt and vest in a shameless display of skin and ink.
Bikers tend to move in pack, though. Let it just be said it degenerates inevitably in quite a wholesome general brawl. Scratch that: massacre. Because true to the advertisement, the punk shows that he is indeed a killer too (a consummate one at that) and even savage claws Bullseye can’t help but gawk at.
When they’re done, and he sees his mail order not-bride standing ankle deep among the fallen corpses of his enemies, wide stripes of fresh blood competing with the dark lines of his tattoo on his naked chest…
Well… Bullseye has never seen anything more beautiful.
Hence the hard on.
oOo
(Bullseye still blames Deadpool, though. To this day.)