It’s a constant, now--this buzzing in the back of his brain, the static agony of skin stitching itself together, of air hitting open wounds. The agony of a body living in the space between life and death. The agony of a man whose pain keeps him from choosing one or the other.
Wade’s mind isn’t a quiet place. But sometimes, when things are a little clearer, he can let himself feel it.
Pain is familiar. Wade knows pain. Knows pain from the beginning: long before the cancer, the program, the dying.
He knows it from bruises marring a too small frame, shouting and shattering glass. Nobody noticing, or nobody caring, maybe.
He knows it from black eyes and split knuckles, starting fights in bars he’s too young to be in. Spittin’ blood and teeth onto cold concrete. Trying to feel something, or trying to feel nothing, maybe.
He knows it from sunburns and freezing rain and someone else’s blood. Rigor and order and a voice in his ear, seeing men blown apart beside him while he stays whole. Killing because he’s told to, because he’s supposed to, because it’s right.
And then he decides he doesn’t care what’s right, or stops noticing the difference, maybe.
He kills and he kills and he takes dirty bills and thinks it’s not pain, now. He thinks he doesn’t feel anything, now. He’s numb.
But he still knows pain. It’s in every part of him, even when he’s healthy and happy and doesn’t look like a meat tenderizer won a fight with his face. His body remembers.
So he thinks he can take it, all those weeks spent getting tortured by a man who can’t feel a thing. By a man who is numb.
He’s wrong. It’s the worst pain he’s ever felt, and it doesn’t matter if any other pain felt like that too. It doesn’t make it any easier.
But it is familiar.
People ask him if it hurts.
The dying. The maiming, the bleeding, the breaking.
The beheading, that one time.
“Yes,” he wants to tell them, “but it always hurts, so sometimes I can convince myself that nothing’s happened at all.”
“Everything hurts,” he says instead. (everything hurts, so nothing hurts.) “That’s life.”
Daredevil doesn’t ask. He’d like to say it’s because he’s an asshole who doesn’t care about other people, but Wade woke up after a particularly brutal fight that ended with a forced lobotomy to a gloved hand gripping his, slick with blood. They never spoke about it.
They don’t work together often. DD’s got the whole no-killing thing going on, and Wade’s got the opposite, so they’re sort of incompatible. It’s stupid, because Wade works with those moral high ground types all the time, but Daredevil doesn’t like or care about Wade. Wade knows, because Daredevil said it, in those exact words. Talk about blunt.
Still, their paths cross occasionally. The Devil doesn’t ask, but he stays with him, every time. Until Wade comes back to himself, just a little more broken than before.
The dying hurts, sure. As much as he says otherwise, as much as it’s familiar, Wade can never quite get used to the pain that comes in between a fatal wound and the whole, you know, fatal part. He’s felt the life leave him countless times and it still shocks him, just a bit, when it happens. He feels it deep in his chest, or his bones, or his brain or something, this biting cold sharp hot dull old new scraping burning stabbing drowning feeling. It doesn’t make sense.
It still hurts.
The dying hurts. But it’s coming back that hurts the most.
The living, after that too-short, peculiar quiet of death. Suspended in that in-between space, like a maraschino cherry floating in one of those awful jello molds, except he’s not surrounded by bits of lettuce and sour cream and whatever else 50s housewives shove in there.
The pain stops, just for a minute, or an hour, or a million years, in this space.
It stops, and he gets to pretend that none of it ever happened, the cancer and the program and the creation of this aching skin, desperate to destroy itself and desperate not to die; he gets to pretend that he’s fucking nomal, that he can close his eyes and feel nothing, can sink into nothingness and appreciate it like he never did before.
And then it all comes rushing back.
He breaks the surface, and he takes in the pain, all at once, and he gets to remember that too-long too-short lack of it, knowing that he’ll always be able to return but never be able to stay.
He wants to, sometimes.
After Ness. When his mind gets too loud, when he starts thinking too much, about the future and the agony of being intertwined with time but never touching, always in its orbit but never under its influence.
He wants to, sometimes, but then he grounds himself in the now, does some bullshit breathing for, like, three seconds before he gets bored, and looks at his family, these people he’s collected all on his own.
Feels the hurt and the pain and thinks I’m living, I’m hurting but I’m laughing and I’m loving and I’m living. Just like one of those stupid fucking signs middle-aged white women put on their walls.
There’s a reason he gives a shit, about this world. About old ladies on the street and killer robots and aliens, that one time. There’s a reason he doesn’t put on one of those inhibitor collars and finally end it for good.
He has this fundamental desire to survive. It’s why he joined the program.
He thinks maybe that’s why he ended up like this, a cockroach of a man. Something inside of him is desperate to survive, survive anything and everything. The serum just took what was already there and made it something more.
And still, part of him wants to stay. There’s a dissonance. He wants what he can’t have.
Wade Wilson is a man torn in two. One foot in the grave. Untethered, undecided. His body doesn’t know what it wants to be. His mind knows too much.
When he’s in the world, he wants the in-between.
When he’s in the in-between, he wants the world.
There’s an exhaustion. Something heavy and thick that seeps deep into his bones.
He’s not really sure if it’s because of his condition, or the dying, or if it has nothing to do with his powers at all, if maybe it’s just a lifetime of pushing through catching up with him.
He’s tired. Always.
And yet he can’t sleep.
His mind is so, so loud sometimes. And that feeling of falling into sleep feels a little too much like death.
Colossus thinks he should see a psychiatrist. ‘Ness agreed. They once fought about it for about two hours before she dropped the subject.
Colossus is a little more persistent.
“You’re basically my therapist, Frigidaire™,” Wade tells him, “with the journaling shit and everything. I don’t need anything else.”
“That journal is empty,” Colossus says, and it’s very rude for him to assume things like that, because the journal isn’t empty.
“There are three portraits of you in there, actually,” Wade says with a wink, and Colossus tells him this is called deflection.
“See? Using therapist talk already.”
He knows there are shrinks for people like him. There’s that guy Banner and Barnes see, with the hair.
But Wade can’t be fixed with pills or a good vent sesh.
And maybe he doesn’t want to be. Maybe some part of him needs to hurt, because he doesn’t know how to live without pain.
The suit helps. Hides the ugly, the evidence of that awful, wonderful choice, of endless hurt fully realized yet incomplete.
The suit hurts. Fabric against open wounds, synthetic fibers sticking to blood and pus, the sting of a man exposed.
It’s his hands that get him the most. He can forget--or not quite forget, but pretend he has--that the rest of his body looks like this. Can wear long sleeves and bunny slippers and avoid the mirror. But then he looks down at his hands.
Wrinkled and red and crooked, made of bones healed wrong, these hands. Perpetually cracked and bleeding. He can’t see his lifeline anymore. Maybe it’s because he can’t have one, not now--a line ends. He never will.
He can’t remember what they used to look like, not anymore.
Ness didn’t like him to wear the suit in the house. Gloves, either.
That doesn’t matter now, though, does it?
Colossus wants him to try journaling. Gave him a little notebook and everything.
It’s ridiculous. But he thinks about deflection, and then he sits down and opens it anyway, just so he can say he tried.
He’s not planning on writing anything. Drawing some dicks, maybe. But as soon as he presses the pencil to paper, blood smudges the page.
There’s a difference, between someone like Weasel ragging on him and strangers staring.
The man scoffs at him. “What, are you gonna bandage your entire face?”
Wade ignores him and picks up a box of Hello-Kitty band-aids.
See, Wade is trying this thing called not engaging. Should result in less injury and or death on both sides.
“Hey, I’m talking to you.”
But the thing about not engaging is that it makes assholes like this guy angrier.
“Fuckin’ freak. Wouldn’t leave the house if I looked like that.”
He could kill him. He could kill him right here in this Rite Aid, in front of shelves and shelves of bandaids and tampons and condoms. Spill blood all over the linoleum floor and traumatize--
“That’s not nice.”
Wade looks over. There’s no one there.
Then he looks down.
The girl is...small. A small child--definitely a child. Maybe five, six years old?
“I’m eight.”
“I’m not,” Wade says reflexively. He looks around. The asshole has vanished. Scared off by an eight-year-old.
“Do you have fish skin?”
“What?”
The girl points towards the pharmacy. “That’s what my dad has.”
Wade looks over, half expecting to see some hybrid fish man. You never know, these days.
The man in line at the pharmacy has large patches of red, flaky skin. Unnaturally shiny, like someone has placed a film over it, but that thing happened where the plastic doesn’t tear right and it gets all wrinkled and eventually you decide that fine, I’ll just eat the rest of this burrito right now. Peeling, like a sunburn, but not really.
“No,” Wade says, still staring at the man, “No, I, uh, I was in an accident.”
“A fire?”
“Yeah.” It’s true, technically.
“Do you get prescriptions?”
“No.” Meds are meant to heal. Wade never can.
Wade always heals.
Now the kid’s dad is walking towards him. Great.
“Don’t talk to strangers,” the man says. The little girl disappears, then reappears behind him, sneakers lighting up with every step. Is this what all kids are like? Little teleporters? “He could be an ax murderer.” He looks at Wade. “Sorry,” he says. “I don’t actually think you’re an ax murderer.”
“No, I am,” Wade says. “I prefer swords, though.”
The man stares at him. Shit, he’s not supposed to say stuff like that.
“Don’t worry,” Wade says. “I would never kill either of you.” He points to the man. “Well, if someone paid me enough. But I don’t hurt kids.”
That’s worse. Definitely worse.
The man stares at him, then starts laughing.
Wade laughs with him. “It’s not a joke,” he whispers to the girl.
She grins at him.
“Okay, time to go,” her dad says, but he’s still fucking laughing. He waves at Wade. “You have a good one, alright?”
Yeah.
Yeah, alright.
Wade pays for the band-aids.
He sees them again outside, that guy and his kid. She’s doing cartwheels on the pavement.
“Hi!” she shouts, and does another cartwheel. She’s very bad at it.
“Oh, hey ax murderer,” the man says, smiling. He holds out a hand. “I’m Mac.”
Wade takes it, hoping his hand isn’t bleeding anymore. “Wade.”
“You know, it’s June,” Mac says without letting go, looking Wade in the eyes. The man has nice eyes. Kind of a grayish-blue. “You shouldn’t wear a sweatshirt.”
Wade pulls his hand away. “Fuck you, maybe I’m cold.”
Mac shrugs and turns back to the kid. “One more cartwheel and then we’re leaving,” he says.
“Fuck you!” she says cheerfully.
He glares at Wade.
Wade shrugs.
He looks after them as they cross the parking lot, and wonders if it hurts, living in that peeling, scaly skin. If he’s like Wade, if the inside is just as fucked up as the outside. If the pain is on the inside, too.
Wade grips the neck of his sweatshirt.
And he doesn’t take it off. He pulls the hood tight around his face and walks away, because this isn’t a lifetime movie.
He thinks about crawling out of his skin, about shedding like a lizard and emerging new, perfect, normal. But when he looks in the mirror he’s just muscle and tendons wrapped around bone, a skeleton draped in red.
He wakes to blood on his sheets. His knuckles have split, again.
They used to do that a lot, but usually the skin tore against someone’s jaw, or a brick wall, maybe. He bled from too much punching and too much surviving.
Now he bleeds just from living (dying), from existing.
He makes his way to the bathroom and takes the box of Hello-Kitty band-aids out of the medicine cabinet. He peels one open and slaps it on his hand. It’s got the cute little frog on it.
It sticks for about thirty seconds before it falls off.
Wade Wilson is a man torn in two.
He will never be put back together.