Matt and Peter get on like a goddamned house on fire.
Wade had expected before they’d met that they’d either find kindred spirits in one another or that Matt would be breaking his no killing rule less than a week into this fucked up team-up. Turns out it’s decisively the former.
The three of them walk away from Matt’s job having severely crippled the drug trade in lower Manhattan and the surrounding neighborhoods. Wade suspects the vacuum will extend to the adjacent boroughs and put a dent in crime rates associated with drug use for at least a couple of weeks.
It was a big job, too. Couple of Avengers came to Pete’s aid and Matt called in his cutesie little task force who like to call themselves the Defenders.
Unsurprisingly, none of Wade’s loyal compatriots felt compelled to accompany him into action. The no killing rule had been in full effect, which ruled Dom out by default. Nathan was in until he’d learned that Daredevil was behind it.
“I’m not going to facilitate that idiot’s holier-than-thou attitude and exploitation of the justice system. His god complex is gonna get him killed. God knows that if I’m anywhere near him when it happens I’ll get wiped out along with.”
Wade had tried to convince him, but he’d stayed resolute in his decision not to partake in such “superfluous displays of heroism”.
So Wade was on his own after all was said and done. Spidey went his way with the walking American flag and his personal Iron Bitch. Matt disappeared after the tiny pale woman produced two full bottles of bourbon from god knows where on her person. Wade sat on the roof of a building across the street from the location of the big showdown and watched cops and criminals milling around. They were indistinguishable from one another from this vantage point: little worker ants doing the bidding of some unknown queen.
He’d been up there for longer than he’d intended, looked on as the last flashing lights turned the corner and the street was plunged into darkness. He was contemplating falling face-first onto the ground beneath his dangling feet. Not that it would kill him, but he’d made it a sort of twisted game to see how many bones he could break in an isolated event.
Matt showed up just as his internal dialogue had convinced him to jump. Still suited up, Matt climbed the fire escape, stomps echoing on every rung. He jumped onto the lip of the roof, where he wobbled and swung his arms like a cartoon character. The guy was clearly wasted.
He swung his head towards Wade. Slurred, “You’ve been up here for too long. Gotta get you down b’fore someone finds you. ‘M way too drunk to pull your ass outta jail.”
Wade stood and bent over to stretch his stiff back. He crossed to Matt and pulled him down from the ledge. On the way down, Matt stumbled over his own feet and sent them both tumbling to the ground. Heads butted, legs twisted, and Matt’s prominent hips dug into the meat of Wade’s thigh.
Wade rolled his eyes and manhandled them both upright. He remarked, “For a guy with such a juicy set of thighs, you’ve got a bony ass pelvis.”
Matt cackled and replied, “All yours for the taking, sweetheart.”
“Not tonight, Beelzebub. You wouldn’t be sober enough to remember it. I’m not going to fucking assault you.”
Matt twisted so he was facing Wade. His mask had slipped in the fall. It now covered the entirety of one of his cheeks, which left one hollow brown eye exposed. That eye stared earnestly into the nothing above Wade’s left shoulder. He spoke in hushed tones: “You could never hurt me, Wade.”
Wade looked away from that face. It was full of too many complicated things and he wasn’t ready to unpack everything again only to have it all blow up in his face. If he allowed himself to do that, he’d end up alone in the middle of the mess he’d caused.
Way back at the beginning of his Deadpool days, Wade allowed himself to get cocky. He was riding on a nice streak of wins. His relationship with Vanessa was smooth sailing. He wasn’t dead broke and wasted on the lip of four different liquor bottles.
Then Vanessa had died. All of the associated shit had gone down with Russell. He’d tried to kill himself over and over and over. When he’d given up, the picture his future painted was unfathomably bleak. The only thing he knew to do was to stand on the balls of his feet and paint the sky with his blood in protest.
He’d shut down his heart, walled off his love, sat on the edge of numbness and made friends with it. Lo and behold, someone else was there. He’d been sat beside Wade for what felt like eons. It had taken just as many for Wade to notice his presence.
He met Matt Murdock before he met Daredevil. The guy pulled a seat up next to him at an empty dive bar in Brooklyn and ordered a bottle of vodka. Wade was in his civvies, dressed up in all his burn victim glory, so he was a bit surprised that the guy had chosen to sit right next to him when there was such a wide variety of seat choices.
Matt had been the one to strike up a conversation. He’d been wanting someone to vent to about all manner of legal drama. Wade was lulled to sleep by the guy’s incessant talking and the buzz of a toxic amount of alcohol tracing its way through his veins.
When he woke up, the bartender was shoving the pair of them out the door. Matt’s arm was slung around his shoulder, cane swinging methodically down the concrete. Wade’s brain clicked into place through the haze and he realized that his companion was blind.
That revelation sobered him up a bit. He’d let Matt take him home. He’d accepted the coffee offered to him, found himself sitting on a leather-clad couch. Matt found the seat next to him. Hours passed as they talked. He told Matt about his years spent in service, his exit from that way of living, his line of work, the rise and fall of Vanessa’s existence, her continued influence on the way he led his life. He hadn’t opened up to anyone the way he did that night in a long time. Not since Vanessa.
Matt told him stories of a life spent in a boxing ring. Of a constantly held guard, of being beaten down again and again. He led his life in contrast to that of Wade’s; every action carefully planned, every fall met with a rise onto bruised knees. Matt wove his life story with his words and the tapestry it spoke of was as black as the world he didn’t see.
Talking led to touching, touching led to kissing. Kissing led to Matt’s bedroom, a condom, and a bottle of lube. These objects pulled a fervent yes from the lips of each of them, one after another.
Pretty soon, a one night stand turned into three turned into too many to count. Wade and Matt fucked in the apartment, Matt’s tiny office space, a disgusting alley behind one of many bars visited.
Wade found himself falling in love. He’d known it subconsciously for a while, but when Matt took a step back in surprise one day at Wade’s presence in his office, it surged to the surface all at once. He told it all to Matt, introduced him to Deadpool. In turn, Matt pulled open a drawer at the base of his desk and produced a black mask.
Wade had heard about the up and coming vigilante roaming the streets of Hell’s Kitchen. Fitting that he’d find the guy out of the suit before he met him in action.
Their ventures bled from one identity to another. Deadpool and Daredevil started working together. They carved through Matt’s city, swept across rooftops and danced together under the moonlight hundreds of feet in the air.
The first time Wade died on a job with Matt, he came to in a crushing embrace. Matt was sobbing over him. He’d interrupted their mission and dragged Wade’s body several blocks away from the action to have a panic attack in an alley. He held Matt as he cried, shushed him with soft kisses.
He was more careful after that. As if in retaliation, Matt grew more and more reckless. They continued to cooperate with one another in the suits but mutually agreed to leave their personal lives out of it. It seemed simpler to be together when they weren't in mortal peril. It was less messy. It was easier to be authentic.
Then one day a gal by the name of Elektra showed up in Matt’s life and he fell off the face of the earth.
Wade’s heart broke in two for the second time in his miserable life. The part that bit the most was that this time it wasn’t even his fault.
He doesn’t remember what transpired in the following eight months. It’s a blur of inebriants, sharp objects, open air, the ache of an empty stomach. One night in the middle of it, he remembers waking up in a pool of vomit and blood to a television broadcaster announcing that Daredevil had disappeared after the collapse of some giant office building.
Wade put his face down into the puddle of bile and smelled the roses.
They bit the back of his throat and clawed it to shreds on the way up his esophagus.
He found Matt a second time when they’d both figured out how to exist again. This Matt was not the Matt he’d loved. This man was empty: void of passion, a husk running around doing nothing for no one.
He spent months pulling the man he loved so much out from under that damned office building. He was trapped under tons of concrete, suffocated by dust and held there by the cold hands of Elektra.
Bit by bit, his Matt came back to him. They tripped and dropped over the baggage he pulled up with him, but the Matt that had loved Wade was finally back above ground. He was preoccupied most of the time. When they slept together, he’d wake up screaming for Elektra, and if not for her, for his father or Foggy or occasionally for Wade.
It was a hard thing to watch the man Wade loved glue his shattered parts together every morning before he left for work. Wade knew he was a hypocrite; he did the same thing every time he left his home.
Peter pulled Wade into his orbit not long after Matt asked him if they could take a break. It had been a mutual agreement: they’d try again after Matt’s work life was steadier and once Wade was more consistently in the country.
Spider-Man tumbled into him in the midst of a job. He’d seen Wade’s costume with that freaky vision of his, gotten excited, and disrupted a very sensitive kill in which Wade was attempting to snipe several high-ups in a human trafficking ring.
It was unsurprising, really, that Spidey got shot for his troubles. He’d been blocking Wade’s sightline and the racket he made had alerted the perps to their position. Wade tried not to blame himself for it. The kid should have known what a stupid idea that was.
Then again, he was a kid. A tiny one at that.
Wade had felt obligated to take him home and patch him up. Upon the appearance of a needle which for all intents and purposes was going into the kid’s skin, the poor guy tumbled into a full-blown meltdown. He’d called his aunt and cried into the receiver as Wade sewed him up. Halfway through the process the woman on the other side of the line managed to convince him that it was okay to take his mask off. This was good because the kid was rapidly running out of air with the fabric covering his face.
So Wade met Peter. Peter met Wade. They stayed in touch. Wade helped the kid out on jobs that required a significant amount of contact with the underworld. It was a good distraction from the rest of Wade’s life. All of the free time had been rubbing his patience raw.
Peter stuck onto him like glue. He tried to make an appearance in Wade’s nightly routine at least once every week or so. He discovered Wade’s distaste for houseplants and made it his life’s mission to inundate his home with greenery. The two adopted a sort of teacher/student rapport. He quickly became Wade’s steadiest relationship. He saw Wade at his best for the most part, but eventually, he discovered the privilege of dealing with him at his worst.
“Wade, please. Get down from there.”
Wade blinked his eyes open. He hadn’t realized that Peter was right behind him. It was only a couple of months into their acquaintance with one another. They were standing on the edge of one of the tallest buildings Wade had ever known. He slowly rotated his head, allowed his body to follow until his front was facing Peter, back to the sky. He let his eyes drift closed. The crust in the corners of his eyelids poked into his skin.
Peter took a step forward. Wade wished he had the courage to take a step back. He’d done it countless times before. It was easy, really. To step off into the air and let gravity do the hard work. Whatever fucked up part of his brain that still had a survival instinct always piped up from the back row: what if this was the limit? What if this was truly the end?
Wade opened his eyes, looked directly into Peter’s, and said, “I don’t think I’m ready to find out.”
Peter furrowed his brow in confusion. That was okay, he didn’t need to know the context. That was for Wade and Wade alone.
Wade went home and stared at his empty couch and his spoiled coffee in its disgusting pot. He sighed, turned to his phone, and called Matt.
He picked up on the third ring.
Wade spent a lot of time outside of New York City. He had connections all over the world. He knew some Japanese and Mandarin from his time spent in East Asia. He’d learned a good bit of Russian over the course of his three-month stint there.
When he got back from that one, the kid was still desperate to meet good old Mephistopheles. Wade called Matt up and begged him to allow Peter to work with them on something. He used such gratuitous descriptors as “responsible” and “adult-minded”.
Matt supplied that he knew who Peter was. The sneaky bastard had gone and conscripted the kid into interning for his plucky little firm. Wade was furious that the kid had ignored his warnings, but Matt calmed him down by reading aloud a document he was analyzing. Wade fell asleep on the phone. He woke up an hour later and Matt was still reading the same fucking paper.
Neither of them hung up.
The two of them hadn’t fucked the night after the big bust. Matt had tried with every drunken fiber of his being to get Wade to succumb, but Wade knew that such a line of thinking would only end in regret.
He carried Matt home because the dumb bastard had nearly given himself alcohol poisoning. He watched as Matt fumbled with the laces on his dumbass boots for five minutes, then took over undressing him and sent him to bed. Matt grumbled and grabbed onto Wade’s arms and begged him to join him, but Wade slid the door closed and stole a blanket from the closet to crash on the couch.
He may or may not have taken some of Matt’s fancy coffee. Sue him, the guy had a fucking insane palate. Just because Wade could drink literal chemical waste didn’t mean he had to every time he needed a pick me up.
It’s a couple of months after that night and the memories of it have grown clouded with fatigue.
Peter’s passed out, swallowed up by Wade’s giant armchair in the living room. He did good work this evening, listened when Matt and Wade gave him orders. The kid deserves his rest. Only thing Wade wishes is that he’d changed out of his suit. He’s got a clean set of clothes hidden somewhere in this apartment. Kid’s going to smell like piss and vinegar when he wakes up. Wade can already hear the whining.
Kids, man. So damn needy.
Wade voices as such to Matt’s head, which is tucked up into his lap on the couch. The two of them are showered and changed into civvies. He cards his fingers through the man’s hair. Matt nods, tilts his head in Peter’s direction and says, “He’s dreaming up a storm over there.”
“How in the fuck can you tell that?”
“Don’t really know. His sleeping pattern just shifted. His breath keeps hitching, can’t you hear it?”
Wade listens closely, but all he hears is the rattle of the heater and the hiss of the coffee maker crapping out. “I can’t hear jack shit. You’re a fucking bat, Matthew.”
Matt shifts so he’s facing Wade. His lips press into a frown. “It’s pretty loud, bud. Sure you ain’t going deaf?”
Ha. Hear no evil see no evil, much?
“Fuck off,” Matt grunts as he pulls himself up. He settles back into the couch, legs twisted into some horrible kind of pretzel. Wade leans his head on his shoulder as he watches Peter’s chest rise and fall. It catches on the way down, barely noticeable.
“Oh, I see it now. Alright, I concede. You and your bat ears win.”
Matt laughs, reaches around Wade’s back in what Wade assumes is a gesture of comfort. His arm doesn’t stop at Wade’s shoulder like he anticipated it would. It turns sharply and boxes him in the ear. Wade startles and yelps.
Matt’s still laughing, the fucker. Wade shoves him and hisses, “You’re such a bitch. That hurt!”
Matt doubles over, wheezing. Wade glares at him until he unfolds himself, wiping tears from his eyes. Wade takes the moment of weakness to grab at his head, delivering a swift and effective noogie. Matt cries out from within his bicep.
The two of them separate when Peter snuffles in his sleep, turning into the back of the armchair.
Matt un-pretzels himself. He reaches down and grabs his suit from beneath the couch. He asks, “Are you okay keeping him tonight? We need to let his aunt know where he is.”
“I’m fine with him. Already texted his Aunt. That lady freaks me out. She responded with about seven emojis. They all seem pretty upbeat, but this one is a black heart. What’s that supposed to mean?”
Wade holds his phone up to Matt before he can stop himself. Matt snatches it from his grasp, holding it up to the light and squinting his eyes at it. “Well it looks to me like she’s going to personally disembowel you and feed the scraps to a dog on the street.”
“Haha. Very funny. Give it back.”
“What do I get in return?”
“I don’t know, you get to keep your lungs? I’ve got a couple kilos of coke lying around somewhere if you want those.”
Matt makes a face and tosses the phone back to Wade. He bumps his shoulder on his way up from the couch.
Wade catches him before he can escape through the window. “Hey, are you going to be okay?”
Matt gives him a lawyer smile and responds, “Of course. Why wouldn’t I be?”
“You made five isolated jokes about suicide over the course of a one hour job, Matt. Don’t bullshit me.”
The smile melts off of his face. “I’ve been thinking about Elektra a lot. It’ll be a year next week.”
Wade pulls Matt in, captures his lithe frame in a tight hug. “I’m sorry.”
Matt folds into Wade, tucks his face into his shoulder. His breath shudders. He doesn’t cry.
They stay like that for a long time. At some point, Matt starts swaying. They stand in the light of the overhead and hold each other. Pretty soon, they’re dancing to the tune of a song that isn’t playing.
Matt pulls away first. He doesn’t pretend to make eye contact. Wade watches his unfocused eyes wander around. They’re impossibly deep, somehow unmarred by the chemicals that took their function. They settle somewhere north of Wade’s sternum.
Matt twists his mouth into a grimace. He whispers, “Do you want to try again?”
Wade takes a measured breath. He takes Matt’s hand, finds the scar on its back from his own katana driven between the thumb and forefinger. Rubs it back and forth while he contemplates those words. They dig into his eardrums. Every alarm bell in his head goes off. The suture lines in his heart tug in protest.
His stomach settles. “Yes.”
It’s Matt’s turn to pull him into an embrace. This one is hard and desperate, heavy with the weight of the past couple of years. Wade braces himself and says into the meat of Matt’s neck, “You can’t leave me hanging like last time. I can’t feel like that again.”
Matt’s definitely crying now. He squeezes tighter and says, “I’ll never leave you again. Not like that.”
Wade closes his eyes, opens his walls, and accepts it. There isn’t anything else to do. He removes his head from Matt’s shoulder and takes the mouth of the man he loves in his own.
They fall asleep together on the couch, tangled between each other and a blanket.
Pete wakes them up with the shutter of a camera.
Matt roars upright, confused. Wade watches this through groggy eyes. His brain hasn’t fully caught up with the events from last night. Or the events from right now.
Peter dances backward. “I fucking knew it!”
Matt stands, ready to chase the kid if it comes to it, Wade’s sure. He steps cautiously forward and holds up his hands in a placating gesture. He tilts his head in a question. “Knew what?”
“That you two are fucking!” Peter waggles his eyebrows for emphasis.
Wade leans his head back against the couch. He says, “That’s a smart ass mouth you got there, kiddo.”
Peter sticks his tongue out like he’s a goddamned four-year-old and scurries to the mouth of the hallway. “I’m sending this to Ned.”
Matt pales and cries, “No!” just before Wade does the same thing. Peter hesitates in the walkway.
“Why not?”
Wade sits up. “You ever think about identity security? Red’s whole ass face is exposed there. People are gonna connect some dots.”
Peter deflates. He looks down at his phone and replies, “Fine. But I’m keeping it for leverage.”
Okay, champ. Have fun with the devil clawing at your phone every second of every day.
Matt proves his point by huffing and saying, “Like Hell you are. First time you leave that little torture device unattended I’m deleting all your photos without discrimination.”
Peter looks scandalized. He holds his phone close to his chest and widens his eyes. “You wouldn’t dare.”
“It’s in my name, bucko. Try me.”
Wade heaves himself off the couch and heads to the kitchen. “Down, boys. Settle, or I’ll kick your sorry asses to the curb and no one’s getting any breakfast.”
That does it. Peter slinks back into the room. When he passes Matt, they exchange growls, but they both end up in the kitchen in one piece.
Such is life. At the very least, Wade can rely on these two. However feral they may be.