Wade answered his phone with a “Didn’t I already tell you to fuck off?” and Peter lolled his head over to Matt for the gossip. Matt had it. He’d half-covered his face in scandalized delight. Peter squished in close to his chest and purred.
Matt grabbed at his head and shushed him.
“I’m not telling you a-fucking-gain, Joe. I don’t care. I don’t want it. Burn it and sell it to the city,” Wade snapped. “I’m hanging up. Blacklist me.”
Whatever the person on the other side said, it was juicy enough to make Matt practically crush Peter’s head in his arms. Peter wished he could say that Matt was warm and that this was somehow comforting, but Matt was never warm and really he was now about one choke-hold away from strangulation. He tried to pull away.
It did not work.
“I’m hanging up. Bye, Joe. Bye,” Wade repeated. “Bye.”
He hit end call and saw the other two all wrapped around each other.
“Whaddya lookin’ at?” he snapped.
“Fuck all,” Matt said automatically, just as Peter said, “You, asshole.”
Wade scoffed and waved the two of them off.
“What were we talkin’ about?” he grumbled, “Oh, right. Coming in from over or under. I dunno, Red, under’s got an element to surprise to it—”
“You have a house?” Matt blurted out.
Wade scowled.
“No,” he drawled. “An apartment. You’ve been there, Red. Come on, you ain’t had that many concussions—”
“A house?” Peter piped up. “You’re a homeowner, Wade? Do you got a lawnmower, too?”
Wade’s mask told them both they were entering Mega-noogie territory, but some risks deserved to be taken.
“I have no such thing,” he said acerbically. “I have an apartment. Which I am on the verge of purchasing. With blood money. You know what else I can do with blood money, children?”
“Pay for your retirement home up north?” Matt asked.
“Put in a patio and move that unsightly pillar in the game-room?” Peter piled on.
Matt seemed to think Peter was funnier these days. Peter loved it. With highschool behind him, it was like he was finally climbing onto a level playing field with these two. There was less babying now and more shoving and looming and posturing.
“Let me steer this conversation a little for the benefit of you two delinquents,” Wade said. “We ain’t talking about it. Over or under, pick.”
His phone rang again.
Matt beamed. Peter grabbed at his arm and made sad eyes at Wade.
Wade growled, gave them both the finger, and ripped his phone of his pocket again to go deal with the house that Joe Whatshisname was so worried about.
Wade had inherited his dad’s old house, it turned out. It was his own childhood home and it had been sitting empty for years now, since some cousins of his, who he claimed never to have heard of in his life, had moved out of the place. Folks in the neighborhood had finally had enough with the house rotting and propagating a weed forest and had called the municipal authorities to ask what was to be done with it.
The municipal folks hadn’t been sure who owned the place at that time. They’d had had to dig through homeowner records and deeds and wills, only to find out that it had, in fact, been left to a guy who’d fled the country.
Hence the phonecalls. The extremely insistent phonecalls.
Like it or not, the house was Wade’s.
Wade wanted it burned, which told Peter everything he needed to know about Wade’s relationship with his old man. Matt convinced him not to take a flight up to Wherever The Fuck, Canada to torch it himself that night.
“Think long-term, Wade,” he said. “You don’t have to live there. You could fix it up and give it to Ellie when she’s old enough. Maybe rent it out until she’s 18. Real estate is always great currency, you know?”
Ellie was the greatest weapon they now had in the face of Wade’s irritation and impenetrable stubbornness. This was excellent all around because Ellie was not above being bribed and Peter was Ellie’s favorite uncle and those two things came together to make Peter occasionally invincible in the face of one of the greatest assassins New York had ever known.
Wade combatted that by making Matt babysit Ellie as often as possible and by making Peter a last resort.
Matt and Ellie had a contentious relationship which involved her outing him as DD at every public opportunity and Matt having to laugh nervously and pull the whole ‘kids, amiright?’ thing to everyone in Hell’s Kitchen.
Ellie loved him. Matt considered her a minor inconvenience most of the time but thought it important that she have someone in her life to speak Spanish with since Wade was, in his words, ‘a disgrace to mankind in general and fatherhood in specific.’
Ellie’s happy place was attached to Matt’s waist while he tried to pry her off.
To this end, Wade grabbed Matt and forced him to have a conversation about property values with his daughter.
Matt glared over Ellie’s head as the two of them sat on the floor and Ellie walked her barrage of action figures over his shoes.
“Wade,” Matt said.
“No, no. Go on, lawyer man,” Wade said. “We’re making this decision as a family, ain’t that right, Bubs?”
Ellie’s head snapped up.
She’d decided two weeks ago that she was no longer Ellie. She was both Deadpool (as always) and Bub the Cat. Wade enabled this behavior.
“Ellie,” Matt said.
She ignored him.
Matt sought out Peter and pleaded silently for intervention. Peter shrugged a shoulder and slipped further down onto the couch.
“Bubs,” Matt amended.
Now he had the girl’s attention.
“Do you want a house?” Matt asked her. “You know, when you’re big?”
Ellie stared with a slightly loose jaw.
“I got a house,” she said.
“She’s got a house,” Wade repeated in case Matt hadn’t caught that.
“How about a house up where Dad’s from?” Matt tried.
Ellie didn’t get it.
“Daddy’s from here,” she said, pointing at the floor.
Matt glared over in Wade’s direction again. Wade sighed like it hurt him to have to explain.
“Dad’s from Canada, pooh-bear,” he said. “The Great North. Up, up, up.”
“UP, UP, UP,” Ellie shrieked, throwing herself to her feet. She abandoned Matt to go locate her true happy place, which was anywhere she could wedge herself in Wade’s personal space. This time, she tore off two of the utility packs on his belt so that there was room for her to cram herself into his belly. Wade didn’t stop her. She planted her chin in his abs and stared straight up at him.
“Daddy, let’s go up, up, up,” she said.
“Fuck no,” Wade snapped.
“UP, UP, UP.”
“Absolutely not. It may be a hellhole here, Bubs, but the hellhole Daddy crawled out of is twenty times worse. Besides, that house is haunted.”
Ellie froze and her eyes went huge. She whipped around toward Matt and with dead seriousness said,
“I want it.”
“Red, I fucking hate you,” Wade snarled once Ellie had been lured away from him by Peter and a bottle of green food dye.
Matt laughed and Peter grinned at the sound as he let Ellie dig the egg carton out of the fridge and shove it precariously onto Wade’s counter.
In revenge for tricking him into tricking Ellie into demanding the house as her future inheritance, Wade told Matt that he was coming to see for himself the shitshed his blessed father had left him. Matt practically vibrated with the need to make a joke, but Peter caught him in the arm and gave him a little squeeze.
He saw now, with age and clarity, that Matt’s self-preservation instincts were lacking. Matt couldn’t see Wade’s face and so couldn’t know how agitated he really was. And even then, he probably didn’t care enough to let that stop him from making Wade’s life as miserable as possible.
Peter, on the other hand, now had not one, but two mentors to protect. From each other, mostly. At least until he was twenty-one and freed from their combined obnoxious training routines and nagging.
“Wade, why don’t I come with you?” Peter offered. “It’s winter break soon. I’ll have a month off from courses. That’s probably long enough to get some work done, right?”
“No, no,” Matt interrupted, shoving Peter aside. “I am the best at home improvement. Ask Foggy’s dad.”
Not a single person in Foggy’s family trusted Matt with so much as a wrench. They loved him, though. That much was undeniable.
Wade scowled at them both.
“Nevermind,” he barked, tossing up his hands. “I’m asking Nate.”
Boo.
No.
Nate was no fun.
Matt and Peter protested this insult as one.
“I don’t need fun,” Wade snapped at them. “I need an accomplice. And lighter fluid. Maybe some matches—actually no. Fuck y’all. I need Russell. Y’all are dismissed.”
“Hey, who the fuck is Russell?” Peter found himself snapping, maybe a little more insulted than intended.
Wade ignored the question. Matt started to get agitated, too.
“Kid’s talking to you,” he sniffed.
This was his way of telling Wade to stop being a dick to Peter. It usually came out during training when Wade was trying to beg off for some inane reason or another.
Wade muttered and gestured vaguely their way in a ‘it doesn’t matter’ fashion.
Peter did not know this Russell person, but he decided that he was prepared to fight them to the death.
Matt thought that that was very cute.
Matt sometimes needed to take his old ass and go drown himself in the Hudson.
He said that Peter was jealous. Which he was not. He’d already been replaced as the primary kid in Wade’s life by Ellie. And he loved Ellie just fine. No, this was not about replacement.
This was about favoritism.
Wade didn’t trust Matt or Peter with his tragic backstory as much as he trusted this Russell dude, and Peter had been training under Wade’s thumb for nearly half a year now. Day in, day out. Doing exactly what Wade told him to, even when it hurt and when it was stupid and when it showed no discernable purpose outside making Peter suffer.
“Imma find this guy,” he told Matt in a cool pretzel shape on the gym’s floor mat, “And Imma make Wade see the error of his ways.”
Matt laughed and pulled his weight off of the back of Peter’s thighs and stood up. He held a hand down and pulled Peter up with him.
“Sure thing, kid,” he said. “Whatever you want. Bring me back a moose.”
“Peter,” Wade said with untold patience.
Peter clamped on tighter. Wade’s expression darkened.
“Peter,” he warned again.
“I want to come,” Peter mumbled into his ribs.
“Kid.”
“I want to cooooooome.”
“Spidey.”
“Waaaaaade.”
“I never shoulda introduced you to Ellie. The two of you are corrupting each other.”
“Please?” Peter put on his best pout and puppy eyes. Wade lifted a brow down at him.
“It’s not going to be fun,” he said. “We’re literally going to commit arson.”
Peter lit up and pulled away.
“Is that a yes?” he asked.
“Pete.”
“Is it? Is it, is it??”
“Do you even have a passport?”
“IT IS.”
“Whatever. Ask your fuckin’ aunt. Go. Now. Before I change my mind.”
Peter was, in the eyes of the law, an adult, and so he didn’t need to be asking no aunts for permission to go places or do things.
He did, though.
He still did.
“Where exactly in Canada are you going? Do you need to book a flight? Or are you driving?” May asked like a perfectly reasonable human being with foresight.
Peter realized abruptly that he had no fucking clue. But that didn’t matter. He had a passport and he was young and spry and could absolutely handle a roadtrip to Montreal or Toronto or wherever the hell Wade was from.
“Oh, honey,” May said. “No. Wade’s not from directly north.”
“He’s not?” Peter asked. “How do you know?”
“I asked him if he spoke French once and he told me not to further disgrace his family’s bad name.”
“Ontario, then?” Peter asked.
May hummed.
“Maybe,” she said, “Ontario’s a pretty big province. I was thinking more British Columbia.”
Well, fuck.
How far away could that be?
A long way.
Jesus.
It was nearly 3,000 miles to Vancouver. And nearly 500 to Toronto.
He texted Wade a little anxiously, confirming the passport situation and his aunt’s willingness to set him off into the world like a flustered pigeon.
WW: damn. She was supposed to talk you out of it and you were supposed to have a dramatic fight where you realized she only wants the best for you and your safety and you were supposed to cry and then take a bonding trip upstate or smth and make gingerbread houses and discover the true meaning of christmas
PP: okay sure
PP: different, much stupider topic/question: where are we going?
WW: to hell
PP: which is located?
WW: UGH
PP: wade I kind of need this information. I get you don’t want me to have it, but like? Should I book a flight or??
WW: what the fuck no
WW: Nate couldn’t get through airport security if we paid off half the damn TSA. I mean we could probably pass of Russ as a normal human if we duct tape his goddamn mouth shut.
That was foreboding.
PP: so we’re…driving? Taking a train? How far away is it? In hours pls?
WW: lol
What did that mean???
May said that that meant it was going to take an age and a half and Peter should prepare accordingly.
Ellie was distraught that she was not coming to see the haunted house. Ellie made this known by sobbing in Peter’s arms while Wade talked to her foster mom at the door. Peter promised her he’d take pictures for her and this did some minor comforting. The wailing had just died down when Cable said, ‘knock, knock’ from the hallway and stepped in around Ellie’s foster mom.
Then Peter was abandoned for newer, more sympathetic pastures.
Cable picked Ellie up and listened to her woes, then agreed that her dad was the meanest meanie ever for not letting her come see her haunted house. He promised to avenge her. Only then did she settle down and allow herself to be taken home.
Wade crossed his arms irritably at Cable once Ellie had gone.
“Stop making friends,” he told him.
“Can’t,” Cable said.
“Try.”
“Ehn.”
Peter didn’t understand how those two worked. They didn’t have the same kind of dynamic that Matt and Wade did. Wade either annoyed the living shit out of Cable or they had these weirdly flat, painfully straightforward discussions with each other.
Peter wasn’t quite sure how that dynamic would work on a road trip.
“Where’s Russ?” Wade asked, still with no affect.
“Dom’s signing him out of school,” Cable said.
Wade snorted.
“That’s gonna go well,” he said.
“She has informed me that it is proving challenging. She’s recruited Colossus to do it for her.”
Wade groaned.
“Russ is a kid?” Peter asked, hugging his travel pillow. Cable glanced over at him and raised an eyebrow. He looked meaningfully back at Wade.
“They’re gonna be fine,” Wade said.
Half and hour of playing with Bella later found Peter having an Experience and subsequently hiding in Wade’s back.
“Russ, you need to calm down,” Wade said to the person in front of him with his hands out. “Be cool, man.”
“I am so cool right now,” the new bane of Peter’s existence swore. “I have never been cooler in my life.”
Cable did not let go of Russell’s green hoodie, despite this so-called coolness. Peter pressed in closer against Wade’s back.
Russ was not necessarily a threat.
He was a fan.
Which was worse.
Peter was aware that he had amassed a fairly substantial support base over the last couple of years. He was aware that many of these people were young like him and a fair number of those wanted to meet him and know everything about his life.
He did not know how to internalize this information, however. Matt told him to ignore it. It didn’t matter. Wade told him to embrace it. He now had minions.
The Spidey Sense told him that this person in front of him wanted to rip him limb from limb and the thought of spending significant car time with Russell incited it produce colorful spots in Peter’s vision.
Wade seemed to be able to sense this.
“Russ,” he ordered, suddenly serious. “Take it to a two.”
The room’s energy took a turn at the tone.
Russell stiffened, then sagged.
Peter peeked out from Wade’s back. The Spidey Sense made him shiver.
“Better,” Wade said. He grabbed the scruff of Peter’s neck and dragged him out into the open. “Here. Peter, Russell. Russell, Peter.
Russell lit up again. He seemed…nice. Enough. He was a little shorter than Peter and chubby. He reminded Peter of a younger Ned, actually, with a strong accent like Ned’s mom had.
“Hi,” Russell chirped. “I’m Russell. Also known as Firefist. You’re Spiderman, right? That’s cool—like, so cool. Like, it’s an honor to meet you.”
Peter stared at the hand held out his way and flicked his eyes back up to Russell’s face. He looked back pleadingly at Wade for help.
Wade did not help. Wade made little shooing gestures which meant ‘go on, now. Make friends.’
Traitor.
This was not what Peter had been expecting when he’d heard he was being replaced.
“Hi,” he relented, taking the hand and shaking it. “You can, uh--you can just call me Peter.”
“Spidey,” Russell said. “It’s cooler.”
“Also super conspicuous,” Peter pointed out gently. “How about Peter?”
“Spidey-Peter. Peter-Spidey?”
Dude.
Peter gave Wade another long, sad look, hoping to convey his dire need for help.
“His name’s Peter, Russ,” Wade announced, taking pity on him. “We call each other by the names we are asked to, remember?”
Russell lit up in remembrance.
“Right, right,” he said. “Peter. Like, I said. I’m Firefist. You can call me that. Or Russell.”
Yes…they had established this.
“I’m gonna call you Russell,” Peter said.
“Or Firefist,” Russell reminded him.
Peter caught Cable dragging a hand over his face in secondhand embarrassment.
They were driving. Peter had gathered this much. He wasn’t sure how he felt about Wade driving. He knew for a fact that he felt more positively about it than how he felt about Matt driving.
Matt loved driving. But that did not necessarily mean that driving loved Matt back.
Matt had also thus far only managed to get stuck in manual cars which meant that, in his experience, all cars were involved stick shifts. He was surprisingly good at figuring those out, although he was terrifyingly--damn near numbingly terrifyingly--bad at every other element of driving. Such as, oh, Peter didn’t know.
The seeing part.
Bless him.
Never again.
Wade, on the other hand, had taken it upon himself to teach Peter how to drive in case of emergency.
Peter would not call Wade a ‘safe’ driver. He would, however, say that if you needed to get out of place in a fucking hurry and your only stipulation was that you came out alive on the other end of the journey, Wade was absolutely your guy.
In the end, Peter had thrown everything down and thrown his hands up and gone to Cap for a lesson.
Cap wasn’t mad about the whole Avengers fiasco.
Cap said that this type of thing was inevitable in the grander narrative of class struggle which was, Peter came to be aware, a highly characteristic thing of Cap to say.
Steve called him ‘comrade’ sometimes these days. Mr. Wilson and Sergeant Barnes told Peter not to worry about it. It was a compliment.
In the end, compliment or not, Cap taught Peter how to drive. Mostly stick, which he was bad at, and then, alongside much huffing and judgment, automatic, which was much, much easier.
But knowing how to drive often only made sitting in the backseat while someone else drove a heart-stopping endeavor. Especially when Wade was behind the wheel. And now, even more so with Cable behind it.
Cable and Dom had a strong ‘discussion’ on the way to the car rental place about who would take the honored position of driver.
Wade, in Dad-Wade fashion, told them to shut up, they were both pretty, and there would be plenty of time for everyone to drive if they wanted to. Dom called first go.
Peter clutched at his travel pillow and attempted to do deep breathing exercises.
“Hey, Spidey,” Russell whispered next to him on the curb.
Peter was 99.9% sure they’d just had a conversation about this name business, but he was having anxiety, he didn’t need an argument on top of that.
“You think Wade lived in a POW camp up north? You know, for like, penguins and polar bears and stuff?”
Peter looked back out into the street and suddenly missed Matt so much.
Peter had never seen anyone as excited as Dom was to drive a minivan.
She crowed in delight when Wade handed her the keys and then flung herself into the driver’s seat, duffle bag and all, fully ready to pull out of the lot just like that. Wade took her bag off of her which gave her room to pull her feet in.
The bag went in the trunk with everyone else’s and a cooler of snacks and a mysterious khaki canvas bag which made a lot of strange noises when Cable handed it off to Wade.
Peter was intrigued. It sounded like tools.
He liked tools.
“No touching,” Wade threatened him. He smiled and ducked down behind the backseat. Wade leaned over and put a finger in his face to repeat the warning.
When he closed the trunk, Russell turned around in the seat and gave Peter a quizzical face.
“Do you eat metal or something?” he asked.
Peter stared straight ahead and considered all his options.
“No,” he said. “I eat spiders.”
Finally, finally, Wade got into the passenger’s seat and grabbed the GPS. And finally, finally, after nearly three years of knowing him, Peter learned the city which had birthed Wade Wilson.
“Destination, 127 Powers Street, Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada,” the GPS said. “1,661 miles. 25 hours. Take the I-78 West to NJ-139 West.”
There was a pause.
“Winnipeg, Wade?” Dom said for everyone.
Wade groaned, covered his face, and melted against the passenger side door.
“Just fucking drive,” he said.
MM: hey peter
MM: are you alive? Have you found any bears yet?
PP: matt wade is from Winnipeg
MM: where the fuck is that?
PP: 20 goddamn more hours from wherever we are now, god help me
MM: I have dodged a bullet!
MM: what is in Winnipeg?
PP: I don’t know. wade doesn’t want to talk about it. And he’s mad cuz I told Russell I laid eggs last year.
MM: atta boy pete.
Wade’s idea of a road trip was usually a lot more fun than this. Peter had gone up state with him a couple of times before. He and MJ and Ned had. Wade was a champion outdoorsman. Which kind of made sense now, given all of the googling Peter had just conducted.
Compared to New York, Winnipeg seemed super small and quiet.
It was practically quaint.
Peter imagined that Wade had spent a lot of his childhood tromping around prairie and going out to the lake.
Or not.
When asked, Wade said that he didn’t know what there was to do. He’d been exhausted, drunk, or high for most of the time he’d lived there. He didn’t disclose much more than that. He didn’t really engage with the 90s and early 2000s pop that Russell put on for him, either.
He was pretty determined to be miserable. Enough that Peter had started to feel uncomfortable. He leaned up against the back of Wade’s seat and touched his shoulder and Wade patted at his hand in a ‘don’t worry, I’m okay’ type of gesture that didn’t have a whole lot of feeling behind it.
He woke up slightly more when Cable decided it was his turn to drive. And to be fair, everyone woke up more then. Wade braced hands and feet on the dashboard while Peter and Russell clung to the handles above the windows. Dom cheered in the very back like all the snow and ice they were getting slapped with was part of a ride at Disneyland.
“I fucking hate this planet,” Wade snarled about 12 hours in at a rest stop while poor Russell ralphed his heart out in the toilet.
Peter shivered.
Wade noticed him and yanked his hood up over his head. Peter took the opening and crunched himself in under Wade’s arm.
“H-how d-d-did you do this?” he mumbled.
“Oh, honey,” Wade sighed without even a shiver. “It’s about to get a whole lot worse.”
PP: fuck Minnesota
MM: oh yeah?
PP: nothing exists here
MM: where’s Minnesota?
PP: You know Wisconsin?
MM: yes. Cheese. Lakes.
PP: up.
MM: oh. Fun.
MM: bears yet?
PP: you and the bears. No, no bears yet. Wade says they’re way up north. Like way, way up. He said we aren’t seeing any, it’s not gonna happen.
MM: damn. spoilsport.
Cable did not come with them over the border. No one explained why he stayed back. He met them again when they stopped at a tiny town on the other side called Letellier.
Only then did Peter realize that Cable didn’t have any type of passport or ID. It didn’t seem to bother him too much, though. Him or anyone else.
Peter had forgotten who he was working with there.
Manitoba, Wade’s home province, was one huge block of white dotted with the occasional skeleton of a tree, as far as Peter could tell.
“It gets slightly better,” Wade told him and Russell as they both tried very hard not to shit on the place.
“Where?” Russell asked.
“Round the rivers,” Wade said over the steering wheel. “Very Christmas card-y.”
“Wade, say ‘eh,’” Dom announced, scaring the shit out of everyone in the front seats.
Wade held up a single bird for her while hanging a left into the snow-scraped parking lot of a motel.
Peter wasn’t made for this kind of weather.
“Come on, Pete, you’re laggin’,” Wade called back to him. Peter scowled his way and readdressed the holes in the snow in front of him. In New York, this would have been cause for a snow day. Here in Bumfuck, Canada, it seemed like just another day’s work.
“Peter!”
UGH.
He was going to fall. He was going to fall flat on his face and all the little Canadian children around here would start laughing at him.
He started to take a step forward but didn’t make it before giant frigid hands caught him and tossed him over an equally frigid shoulder.
It hurt. You know, because it was metal.
Cable trudged through the snow like it was barely more than a puddle. He dropped Peter down on the icy concrete of a recently shoveled pavement and let him try his luck again there.
It took what felt like an eternity before Wade finally stopped stomping along, puffing and mugging at everything, left, right and center. He put his hands on his hips and blew out an irritated breath at the house before him. It had seen better days.
Russell came tearing along and crashed into his back. It sent him stumbling, which certainly broke whatever train of thought he had been cultivating there.
Russell didn’t let Wade’s scolding and flailing stop him, though. He looked at the house Wade had been glaring at from around his bulk and said, without a care in the world,
“Damn, it’s really a shithole isn’t it, Wade?”
That got Wade back on track.
“It looks exactly the same as it always has,” Wade spat, flinging a hand at the place. “These people are off their fuckin’ rockers, man—out here complainin’ ‘bout all the fuckin’ rot—what fuckin’ rot, dipshit? It don’t look a damn bit of—I mean, just look. Door’s exactly as I left it coming on twenty years ago.”
No one really had anything to say to that because the screen door was…mangled. It appeared to be attempting to be a screen door with the aid of only one set of hinges for the job. And honestly the whole house seemed grimy. Peeling. Almost bubbling; like mold under a coat of paint.
It looked like Wade’s cousins who’d stayed at the place for a while had had a kid or a dog who they treated like a kid, because a blue, crunched-up kiddie pool covered in snow had been stuffed up against the side of the house. The front yard was a tangled mess of dead, dried weeds which had been covered in a thick blanket of snow, and it was all contained within an ancient, warped and short chain link fence.
Cable sniffed.
“Well I guess you didn’t grow up in a cave after all,” he said.
“I told you,” Wade snapped back at him. “Roof and everything. Dandelions out front and shit.”
Peter glanced over at Russell who seemed similarly disaffected.
“Did you have a dog?” he asked. “There’s a dog house—you never said you had a dog.”
“That ain’t a doghouse, that’s a dishwasher,” Wade scolded. “Look with your eyes, child. My old man—”
He cut himself off.
“Lazy piece of shit,” he decided on. “Thing’s been out there since I was—sixteen, must have been. Fuck, man. Gotta be a squirrel sanctuary by now, let’s go give it a tap.”
And just like that, he was tromping off again, disrupting quiet and snow as he went.
Peter looked back at the house.
It looked, more than anything else, like it was sagging. Heavy. Bearing more weight and water than it was meant to hold.
Dom’s hand slid onto his shoulder from behind.
“Hey,” she said right by his ear. “Do me and Nate a favor?”
Peter turned back to her and tipped his head silently in question.
“Keep Wade out here,” she said.
“He don’t need to be going back in there for a minute,” Cable added lowly.
Peter looked between them and then back at the house.
“Wade’s dad abused him, didn’t he?” he asked without asking.
Dom gave him a little smile.
Wade and Russell were so busy antagonizing their newfound squirrels’ nest that Peter didn’t have to do a whole lot of shepherding. He did, however, take a moment to go have a wander and find a spider’s egg sack which he took the liberty of bringing over to the other two and terrorizing Russell with while Wade watched.
Eventually, Wade decided that Russell had suffered enough and separated him and Peter. He told Peter to go put his cousins back somewhere warm so that they could wreak chaos on the neighborhood in the future. And right after that, as though they shared a sixth sense, Dom and Cable stepped out of the house looking slightly haunted.
“Something definitely died in there,” Dom informed them once they’d all trudged over to the porch.
“Yeah, that’ll be the old man,” Wade said.
“On the stairs?”
“Fuck if I know. I ain’t come home to check.”
“Nah, man. Pretty sure it’s a possum or something. A bear, maybe.”
Matt would be stoked.
Wade sniffed and shook his head then made to walk up the steps to the porch, but he stopped and narrowed his eyes at them.
He carefully chose to put his weight on the left side of the first step, the center of the middle one, and the left of the top. He went still at the top one and tested it a little. Then opted for the right side instead.
“You ain’t gonna get me,” he told it.
Then smashed his foot right through it.
Wade was having a rough day and nothing anyone could do could fix it.
He and his newly fucked up knee had no patience for the house after the screen door finally gave up the ghost and crashed down right on top of him which he called ‘a kind of poetic fuckin’ justice, I guess.’
The house inside was pretty barebones and frigid. Old and dirty. Whoever had moved in and then out had done a shit job both ways. The hardwood floors were scratched to hell; so scratched they were pale. There was mold in the grout between the of tiles in the kitchen floor and on the counters. The stove was nearly black with caked on, ancient charred food and in some places the ceiling seemed sunken with water.
Wade surveyed all of this and sniffed.
“Yeah, no,” he decided. “Me and my blood money got better things to do than fix this dump up. Let’s just sledgehammer the whole thing and sell the lot.”
Cable of all people talked Wade into putting down the sledgehammer he’d brought in that mysterious khaki bag of his. He told him that they needed to appraise their enemy and see if there was A) anything worth looting around the place and B) if there was anything structural worth saving.
Part B there involved some minor cleaning just to see exactly what it was they were working with.
Wade despised this idea. He had to take a couple of breaks while wandering around with Dom and Cable, talking about things old people got excited about, like baseboards and double pane windows. Russell asked Peter if he thought Wade was okay.
“No,” Peter said. “But he’s trying really hard. So we’re gonna let him try until he doesn’t want to anymore.”
“I guess that’s fair,” Russell hummed.
While the old folks attempted to identify the blackened mass on the stairs, Peter and Russell poked around the downstairs living room and kitchen. It was small. It might have been cozy at one point, but now it was just small and cold and oozing. Peter noticed a mark on the kitchen door and found a set of notches there, scratched into the wood. They were filled with dust, but Peter knew what they were.
Ben used to keep track of Peter’s height the same way. The lines he’d drawn in pen were still there in the apartment back home’s kitchen. May said that she’d paint over them when she moved out of that place.
Wade’s marks didn’t make it past Peter’s chest. Which was strange. And ominous.
“It’s gotta be a skunk,” he heard Wade decide on the stairs.
“Are you sure? Could be a possum,” Dom speculated.
“Or a cat,” Cable added.
There was a pause.
“You’re a sick man, Nate,” Wade said.
Wade finally had enough of the place after about two hours. He announced abruptly that he needed coffee and a burger if he was going to be in these parts for much longer. He shooed everyone out of his dad’s house and sneered at it, then shooed everyone further back into the van and to a very particular part of town.
This time, when he got out of the car, it was with praising hands.
“There she stands like Helen of Troy,” he said tearfully at a joint which Peter was pretty sure was held together by old griddle grease and salmonella.
Cable analyzed it and deemed it suitable for food. Dom called it ‘charming.’
Peter had never felt more like a disgusting city slicker than sitting there twenty minutes later, perched in a booth between Wade and Dom, poking at what people out this way thought a chicken burger looked like.
It was…soggy.
Wade slapped his back and told him to eat up.
Dom delicately offered to share her fries and chili.
Wade did not talk to other Winnipeg people, Peter noticed. He pointed this out and asked, naively, if this wasn’t strange, given that everything he knew about small towns said that folks all knew each other. Wade gave him a strong look.
“I get that it ain’t New York, kiddo, but this ain’t that small of a town,” he said.
Peter blinked at him. Then deferred to Dom’s wisdom for confirmation. She shrugged in agreement.
Fucking blasphemy.
PP: matt Winnipeg is not a small town
MM: bullshit
PP: it has like almost 800,000 people in it.
MM: okay? That’s like a medium sized town then?
PP: Wade says that’s big.
MM: lol
PP: how many people live in nyc?
MM: 8.62 mil
PP: right?
MM: right
PP: its def a small town then
MM: absolutely don’t listen to him he doesn’t know what he’s talking about.
Wade had gleefully booked all the accommodation for this trip, which meant that the moose head in the room that Peter and Russell were sharing was entirely his fault. Wade called it ‘classy.’ Russell called it ‘cool.’
Peter covered it with a sheet and even then, still felt like it was watching him.
Dom tried to get Peter to come get into the motel’s jacuzzi with her, but he wasn’t falling for it. Anywhere that unironically placed a moose head in its customers’ rooms could not be trusted to properly chlorinate its pool water. He refused to hear anything different.
Wade took it upon himself to drag Nate and his metal arm down the hall for the job instead.
Peter locked his and Russell’s door to prevent any association between those numbskulls and them, but Russell seemed to like the idea and ruined all Peter’s attempts by crashing out into the hall to chase after Cable’s swearing and Wade’s hot pink pineapple swim trunks.
Peter curled up on the far bed with only his phone for comfort.
PP: Matt I fucked up I want to come home
MM: you made that bed
PP: I realize that now and I’m scared. Daredevil come save me.
MM: Daredevil is old, frail, and tired. Daredevil thinks he’s going to have a nap.
PP: Don’t leave me like this matt you’re my only hope.
MM: catholic school tip: fake sick and cry a little. It will move mountains.
PP: I can’t this is wade he knows when I’m faking. And also its 25 hours back.
MM: I guarantee you that wade wants to be there less than you right now. He will take any excuse to come home. Try the crying. Night kiddo.
Goddamnit.
Day two at the house saw Wade in a much better mood and more determined than ever that the thing which was decorating the stairs was once a skunk.
His way of ritually cleansing the space involved banging shit around and calling ‘Dad? Dad? Daddy? Are you in there?” into closets and at ceilings and over bits of smashed glass.
He seemed to find humor in that. Peter wasn’t going to question it, even if it was kind of sick.
What is cathartic for you is not necessarily cathartic for others, May used to tell him in highschool.
More importantly than Wade’s sardonic crooning was the fact that, once the house’s doors were closed and water was sluiced over the counters and an unfathomable amount of floor cleaning liquid was splashed out and scrubbed up from the bare floors, the place actually looked almost inhabitable.
Freezing cold, yes. Definitely in need of some serious repair work on the foundation and ceilings, absolutely. But more or less salvageable.
It really threw a damper on Wade’s plans to salt and burn the property.
By about 11, he’d developed a very menacing scowl and fucked off to go do something on his own for a long while. By the time he got back, it was time to head out for lunch.
Naturally, Wade had more grease to inflict upon them in a different part of town. Russell made the mistake of asking if Winnipeg was poutine territory, to which Wade responded well, not like, strictly, but if you want it, boy, do I have the worst version in Canada for you.
Which resulted in a completely avoidable detour and completely avoidable trauma.
Wade attempted to gain back Peter’s favor by introducing him to Tim Horton’s coffee. Peter considered this gift with wariness.
Cable found a new love.
When they got back to the house, a contractor was there waiting for them and Wade told the rest of them to go fuck off and drown in the snow until he was done with this guy.
Dom lit up and declared this a sign of hope and healing.
Cable wondered if it was wise to leave Wade alone with a perfectly normal human while he was still in a ‘dishonor thy father’ type of mood.
“It’ll be fine,” Dom promised. “Let’s take pictures for Ellie. We need to find a lake.”
Dom took them to a fucking cemetery.
PP: matt help
PP: im begging you
MM: what fun has befallen you now?
PP: we are disgracing the dead. I am going to cry there are so many dead people. Dom and Russ and Cable taking pictures on frozen GRAVES. They’re doing charlie’s angels on graves Matt I can’t I can’t I can’t
MM: wow we really are the B team aren’t we
PP: help me I’m not cut out for this
MM: fuck bud you want me to book you a flight?
PP: idk
PP: matt is god punishing me?
MM: yes. always.
They got back to Wade shaking hands with the contractor who jammed his fists back into his pockets afterwards and waddled himself and his giant Michelin-man jacket back to his car. Wade raised an eyebrow at the calm that his A-team brought back with them from the cemetery.
Peter scrambled away from them as soon as possible and latched himself to Wade’s other side, making the saddest noises he could manage.
“Spidey thinks the dead are sacred,” Russell tattled.
“We’re cursed,” Peter whimpered, muffled by Wade’s coat.
Wade hummed.
“We’re cursed,” Peter repeated miserably.
Wade patted lightly at his shoulder blades.
“It’s okay, bud,” he said, “We’ve been cursed for a while now.”
This would not do.
Peter would not stand for this.
He waited until the others were fucking around at the hotel again, grabbed his coat and his phone and headed off for 127 Powers Street on his own.
A lot of the local places were closed and the streets were unusually quiet when Peter got out there. It was kind of peaceful.
He kind of liked it.
It was easier to walk when there was no one shouting at him and it was easier to navigate with fewer distractions. The streetlights made the snow look like clouds.
He crunched along for a while with frigid toes.
It wouldn’t be long now, his phone said.
By the time he found the house again, his lips were cold and his fingers burned a little. He scrambled up onto the porch, avoiding the step of betrayal, and slipped into the house. It was cold in there, too, and the place looked more empty than ever in the bluish streetlight which flooded in from outside.
He blew on his hands and tucked them into his armpits.
The Spidey Sense twinged and he looked around.
No one behind him. Nothing in front of him. Probably a rusty nail sticking up somewhere close.
He took a couple steps and the sound echoed through the house. He turned towards the stairs. He hadn’t gone up there in the last two days. The older folks had been scuffling around up there while he and Russell busied themselves with scrubbing at the downstairs rooms.
He set a foot on the first stair and then the second. The sound echoed again, dully this time. Looking down once he got to the top, Peter saw that the middle parts of the steps had been worn such that there was a dip in their middles.
He looked around. It was darker up there, with only one circular window to light it up in the absence of electricity. There were three doorways, but only two of them held doors. The doorless frame revealed a large, empty room. There were fixtures in there that looked lonely with no bed beneath them.
Peter turned away from that and slunk cautiously away. He stepped back into the light of the circular window, then carefully nudged his fingers against the door between that frame and the one on the left.
It creaked open into a cramped bathroom.
One of the walls in there was a whole different color from the others. As though it had been replaced entirely.
Peter chose not to think about that too closely.
He looked over at the final door.
The final door gave way like the bathroom door had, creaking on hinges that hadn’t seen oil in years. It didn’t lead to a room. It led to another staircase. This one was narrower than the first and dustier too. It led, with the same hollow-sounding steps, up to a room cut at a slant by the triangle of the roof.
There was no door to that room. There were hinges, but they were twisted and bent, as though someone had pulled the door down before completely lifting it off them.
Like the other rooms in the house, this one was empty. But Peter knew it had once been Wade’s.
There were tiny holes in all the walls. The size made by pushpins. The kind used to hold up posters like those that Wade’s current home was plastered with.
Peter also knew this had been Wade’s space because there were marks upon marks on the floorboards in one corner. Straight lines which hashed over themselves. Deep groves that someone scraped into wood over time and anxiety.
Peter crouched next to the boards and wondered if Wade had been little or big when he’d scraped these lines into the wood. Maybe his bed had been right there, up against the wall, and he’d pressed himself against it and the wall while scratching, hidden that way, from someone looking in from the stair entrance.
Maybe this was where Wade had hidden from whoever had ripped that door from those hinges.
Peter settled into the space and breathed out clouds of moisture.
He closed his eyes and tucked his hand into the inside pocket of his coat and pulled out a perfectly round bead of amethyst warmer than his own fingers now.
It was one of the beads that May had put into a tiny little bag for him. He put that bag in whatever bag he was carting around at the time. It had spent most of its time in New York, that little bag. But now it was in Canada. In a place which was lonely, aching, and heavy with heartache.
Maybe it wouldn’t mean anything to Wade, but Peter placed the stone in the valley of a couple of the ridges of the grooves in the floor.
“Protect this place,” he asked of the stone. “And know that someone has visited the person who once sat here.”
A hollow sound rang out.
He shivered.
“I’m not scared of you,” he said towards the door.
Nothing.
He started to stand up.
Another hollow thud echoed its way up the staircase.
“I’m not scared of you,” Peter told it again, with chills running up and down his spine in waves. He rolled his shoulders in challenge.
Silence again.
There was another, softer sound. Farther away now.
Peter scoffed.
“Yeah, that’s what I thought, you fucking coward,” he said.
He stood up all the way and took one last look at the bead. It looked a pale, milky lavender there on the dark floor. Then he climbed out the window, carefully coaxed its cold grimy pane down behind him, and leapt down back into the snow from the roof.
Like hell he was following the footsteps of an angry ghost back down the stairs of an empty house.
He got just to the end of the yard when he looked back and saw that the front door had fallen open.
He stared at it. Then wrinkled his nose in the beginning of a hiss.
Then—
“Peter!”
He nearly sent a fist right through Wade’s ribs, but Wade caught the blow solidly in his fist. He looked upset, more so without his mask.
“What’re you doing out here?” he asked lowly.
Peter didn’t have an answer that he’d accept. He dropped his eyes.
“Peter,” Wade said in a warning tone. “You can’t go running around these parts at night, especially not by yourself. Especially not in winter. Do you even know how cold you are right now?”
Peter flicked his eyes back towards the front door.
It was closed.
His heart started pounding.
“—ter. kid. HEY.”
Peter snapped his attention back in front of him with his pulse racing.
Wade’s expression was hard to discern, but worry was there, that was for sure.
“Come on,” he said. “Let’s get you inside.”
Back in the proper light of the motel lobby, Peter saw that his fingers were a bright, raw red. Wade took him back to his and Russell’s room and made him take off his shoes to reveal red toes too.
Wade sighed.
“There are cooler ways to lose some digits, kid,” he said.
He made Peter put on dry socks and get under the motel’s blanket.
“What’s gotten into you, Pete? You bored? Are we boring you?” Wade asked, rubbing wide circles into his back.
Absolutely not. If anything, Peter was overstimulated by the A-team.
“I wasn’t thinking,” he said.
“You really think I believe that?”
There was no lying to Wade. There were only negotiated half-truths and only when he was willing to entertain them.
“I don’t like that place,” Peter admitted.
“Me neither,” Wade said. “Gives me the heebie-jeebies.”
“There’s a ghost there,” Peter told him.
Wade rubbed his lips together and said nothing, then looked away.
“He can’t hurt you, Peter,” he said. “Or anyone else. Not anymore.”
“He hurt you,” Peter murmured.
“Not for a long time now.”
“I left a stone back there.”
Wade sighed.
“Pete—”
“I know you don’t believe in it,” Peter interrupted. “But I just—it makes me feel better to leave it. Sorry for worrying you.”
He wrapped the blanket more tightly around himself. Wade’s hand felt rough when it came down on top of his head.
“Don’t go out by yourself again,” Wade said.
He thought Wade was still upset with him the next day and so tried to be quiet and stay out of the way. Russell noticed, though, and elbowed him in the ribs and asked if he was sick.
“No, I just fucked up I think,” Peter told him.
Russell sniffed.
“Don’t worry about that,” he said, “You’re with a bunch of fuck-ups, you fit right in.”
Peter didn’t know what to make of this guy.
“That’s not comforting,” he said.
“That’s ‘cause you still care too much,” Russell told him.
“I don’t know what that means,” Peter said, suddenly understanding completely what Frank Castle felt like when Matt shimmied his way over to him and told him that he needed to stop killing people.
“It’s okay, you will,” Russell said.
“I honestly hope that I never do,” Peter told him flat out.
The task doled out to Peter and Russell for the day was shoveling snow and, in the process, divesting the front yard of its many tangles of weeds. It wasn’t too hard, not with Peter’s strength, although there was something particularly entertaining about watching Russell get fed up with all the stones in the ground and thereafter take up the habit of threatening to burn especially troublesome frozen weeds.
Once they were done, the yard looked, well. Really bare. And full of weird things that had gotten stuck in the underbrush. Ancient, cracked plastic toys and balls. A tire. A load of rusty tools and bits of metal. Peter and Russell stacked them all in a corner of the yard sheltered now by the remains of the kiddie pool.
Eventually Wade came out and narrowly missed putting his foot right back into the hole on the last step up onto the porch, he was so shocked.
“Well fuck,” he said. “There’s dirt there. Who knew?”
“What’d it look like when you were a kid?” Russell asked.
“A car,” Wade said. “Piece of shit the old man thought he was gonna fix up.”
Peter didn’t meet his eyes. He looked past them up to the window he’d crawled out of the night before. His footsteps were gone. The window looked different.
Peter set his jaw.
Peter had to sneak past Cable to get back up to the attic room.
It wasn’t very good sneaking. Cable watched him the whole time. He just didn’t seem to care about whatever it was Peter was doing. Which was chill. As long as he didn’t alert Wade, Peter didn’t really care that he didn’t care.
He held eye contact with the guy until he dipped around the corner to the second staircase. He checked after himself and saw Cable still watching him. The Spidey Sense made him shiver. He reached and slowly closed the door after himself. Cable didn’t shout or follow him, so he hiked up the stairs.
The window looked different from the outside because it had a weird layer of mold growing on it that hadn’t been there the night before.
Peter bared his teeth at it. Then spun around and reset his teeth so that he could sink them into his lip at the lack of bead sitting on the groves. He traced the edges of the room and found it in the opposite corner, behind where the door would open out into, if it had still existed. He picked it up and glared at the other corner.
“So that’s how you wanna play, huh?” he hissed.
He jumped at the sound of the downstairs door being opened. He peeked back and over the stairs and saw Wade standing there with his hands on his hips.
He edged back just out of sight.
“Peter,” Wade drawled.
Peter scampered forward and replaced the stone before Wade got to the top of the stairs. Wade watched him stand up out of his stoop.
He glanced down at the stone, then came over to clap a hand onto Peter’s shoulder. He shook his head down at the grooves on the floor.
“They shoulda diagnosed me with something way earlier,” he said. “Come on.”
“He moved it,” Peter told him.
“No, kiddo. Rats moved it. Come on.”
“He moved it,” Peter said, firmer this time. “And he did that to the window.” He pointed. Wade noticed the mold blooming across the glass.
“You were in here yesterday right?” Peter asked. “Was that there yesterday?”
Wade considered it.
“Musta been activated by the fresh air or something,” he said.
“Wade.”
“Peter.”
“Wade.”
Wade rolled his head back.
“Kid, not everyone believes in ghosts like you do,” he said. “Or stones or signs or whatever it is you’re fixating on, okay?”
It hurt.
It always hurt when people blew off the rituals and beliefs. But it hurt especially coming from someone who Peter trusted.
He shut up and swallowed hard against his closing throat.
“Come on, let’s go for now,” Wade said. “I think we need a break.”
It hurt.
It hurt.
It hurt.
He wasn’t hungry. Dom noticed and touched his arm. She gestured to her plate. Peter shook his head and went back to watching out the window.
He tugged out his phone while the others agitated each other over jukebox music.
PP: I want to come home
MM: more nightmares?
PP: yes.
MM: any bears?
PP: ghosts.
MM: yikes. Any priests out that way?
PP: no. I tried to leave a bead.
MM: no dice?
PP: wade’s upset. says im fixating.
MM: that’s rude. Did the bead not work?
PP: no.
MM: should have sent you with some holy water, kiddo. Sorry for the lack of foresight.
Matt got it. Matt believed in things, too.
PP: don’t know what to do now.
MM: are you upset peter?
PP: the ghost moved the stone.
PP: he moved it and it wasn’t for him.
MM: maybe you need something a little heavier
There was an idea now.
The contractor and a couple of his guys were at the house when they got back. They were taking pictures of things. Peter dipped away from the discussions and hopped up the side of the house up towards the window. It was hard to use the sticky hands with the snow, but he managed and shoved open the black window. He scooped up the bead before any of the contractor’s men got up there to disturb it.
“Are you okay?”
Peter looked up from rolling the amethyst in his fingers and saw Russell frowning his way from the other side of the motel room.
“Yeah,” he said.
“You aren’t acting okay,” Russell pointed out.
“I’m fine,” Peter said. “Just fixating.”
He knew Russell would tell Wade about that exchange and, a little vindictively, he hoped it would make Wade feel bad.
He waited until Russell got bored of being in the room and left to go harass the older folks down the hall before popping open the window and dropping out onto the side of the building. He closed the window behind him and set off in search of something heavy.
If Wade didn’t want to face up to the fact that the ghost in that house was the main thing corroding it, that was his problem. Not Peter’s.
Peter’s job was to respect the dead, honor the ancestors and the earth, and be Spiderman.
And there was a death in that house which was suffocating under the pressure of the ghost.
There was a park nearby. And it was covered in snow, but a little digging found Peter a couple of rocks. He threw the first several away for being too big, too small, and too jagged. He went hunting for a different planter with different gravel under the snow and ice settled on top of it. He found one that was covered in a sheet of ice. He had to smash it and the water underneath made his hands feel hot.
But that was the one where he found the stone he was looking for. Round and smooth. Heavy, but small enough to fit in the palm of his hand.
He stuffed it into the coat pocket with the beads and abandoned the park to head west, back towards the house.
Wade was waiting for him outside the chain link fence with his arms crossed. Peter saw him from a distance but carried on in his straightforward path.
He came right up to Wade’s chest and stared at him in the face.
“Peter,” Wade said. “We talked about this. You’re going to get frostbite.”
“Sorry, I’m fixating,” Peter told him.
Wade lowered his head.
“I’m not apologizing,” he said. “You making my fuckin’ abuser out to be a ghost is triggering for me, Peter.”
“You calling my religion a crock of shit is triggering for me, Wade,” Peter snapped back. “You wanna burn the house? Fine. Burn the house. I get ritual cleansing. I get catharsis. But don’t be telling me that I can’t do what I feel is right to try to protect the spirit of that kid who died in there. He’s my friend, too. And that ghost keeps on scaring him, even if he’s not real to some people.”
“I’m not dead,” Wade said. “There is no kid in there. Hasn’t been for twenty years.”
“Yes, there is and yes, you are,” Peter said. “You’ve been dying for the last three days.”
“Peter.”
“You don’t have to believe it, Wade,” Peter said. “I’m not asking you to believe it. I’m just asking you to let me honor the dead the way I know how. Is that so much to ask?”
“Grieving someone who’s not dead can’t be kosher,” Wade jabbed.
“The dead are always grieved while they’re still living,” Peter jabbed back. “Why do you think goodbye hurts so bad?”
There was a long pause. Peter’s fingers ached with the cold and the front of his coat felt heavy from the stone.
“Bud, if I knew it was going to upset you this much, I wouldn’t have let you come out here,” Wade finally said.
“Why can’t people be upset for you, Wade?” Peter asked.
Wade’s shields started to come up. Peter could see it in the angle of his neck. He sucked in a deep breath of icy air.
“Just let me go put the fucking rock in the room, man,” he breathed out. “It’s not hurting anyone. You won’t feel it and you can throw it out the window or whatever in the morning, alright? I won’t stop you.”
“Fine,” Wade said. “If it makes you happy, go dump the thing on the floor. Why not?”
It rankled, but it was supposed to. Wade was trying to push his buttons now.
Peter tore his gaze away and lifted his chin. Then purposefully walked past Wade up to the porch.
He set the stone down on the grooves in the floor.
“You don’t scare me either,” he told it.
He felt just the slightest breeze across his cheek and jerked his head to the side to mug at the stairs. He fumbled through his pocket and found the amethyst bead again. He balanced it on its hollow hole on the top of the stone.
“Protect,” he whispered to it.
“Satisfied?” Wade asked him when he came back out.
Peter didn’t answer him.
“Hey Spidey?”
Peter didn’t feel like answering Russell.
“Hey, are you awake?”
No.
“Listen, Wade didn’t mean to hurt your feelings. You know how he is, don’t you? Maybe you guys should apologize to each other.”
Maybe you should mind your own business, champ.
He took orders the next day and didn’t once mention the stone or the fact that it, nor its bead, hadn’t moved so much as a hair.
They only moved when the afternoon contractors tripped over them and moved them downstairs. Peter came back and moved them back to their home later that night.
He did the same the next night.
He didn’t say anything when enough work had been done that the A-team could leave everything in the contractors’ hands. But he did go break some more ice in the park, so as to burn his hands one more time on in pursuit of another couple of stones.
He stole a cinderblock from a construction site. Apologized to the site for it before leaving but took it all the same. He dug a hole on the side of the house deep enough to set the stone into.
He picked up one of the rocks he’d fished out of the freezing park water—the one with the edge to it—and dragged it across the cinder block’s surface, pressing down with just enough force to leave a mark. He did it for a while, until his hand hurt and his lips felt cold again and he had a cinderblock dusty with grooves like those in the attic bedroom.
He washed the top with a couple handfuls of snow, then took the amethyst bead and the first pebble he’d taken from the bedroom and put them inside one of the cinderblock’s holes. He packed it with freezing dirt so they were stuck inside and then he did the same with the other side, this time with the etching stone encased within.
Finally, he set the whole thing in the hole, grooved side up.
He packed dirt around that, too, and once it seemed to be immobile, he set the last, smallest stone he had on top of it.
“There you go,” he said. “This way you can come out of that room now. I don’t think he can come outside, and anyways, they’re gonna break down those stairs soon and rebuild them, so even if you don’t want to come here, you can be assured that he won’t have anything to haunt anymore soon.”
“Peter.”
He turned around this time.
Wade laughed.
“Did you just make me a grave, honey?” he asked.
“Don’t get uppity,” Peter huffed at him. “It ain’t for you-you.”
Wade gave him a lopsided smile and held his hands up placatingly.
“Alright, alright,” he said. “Not getting uppity.”
He peeked over Peter’s shoulder.
“What’s the rock for?” he asked.
Peter sat back on his heels and considered it.
“We leave stones on graves,” he said. “Or we did. My dad’s side of the family. They last longer than flowers. My uncle didn’t believe in the witch stuff, he was just a good old fashioned Jew.”
Wade seemed charmed by the idea.
“You’re a complicated little thing, you know that?” he asked.
Peter scoffed and stood up, dusting dirt and snow off his knees.
“Why do you think I got anxiety?” he huffed.
MM: when are you coming home
PP: what did you do
MM: aggravated assault
PP: nevermind. Less honesty please
MM: I kissed a cop
PP: what would it take for me to get a happy medium here?
MM: ten grand
PP: okay so you’re in a mood. What’s up?
MM: I am bored. Jessica will not come out with me. Danny will come out but continues not to be subtle. Luke will only come out if there is no aggravated assault.
PP: we’ll be home in exactly 18.5 hours.
MM: that’s an eon.
PP: you’re telling me. These guys have been trying to get Cable to sing since Fargo.
MM: did you leave the ghost?
PP: yeah. The heavy thing worked.
MM: glad to hear it. Would you go back?
PP: not a chance in hell.