Chapter 21
Wolverine awoke in pain. Searing pain, tearing pain. The kind of pain he'd suppressed when they'd bonded the metal to his skeleton, peeling back the flesh piece by piece to expose each bone. He felt like he had been torn apart, piece by piece, all over again. Which was essentially what had happened.
Slade loomed over him, his back against the light. He was wearing a heavy rubberised apron smeared with fresh blood over his costume, and holding a bowie knife and a claw hammer. He looked like a last minute addition to get the coveted 'R' rating.
Kicking open the door, Deadpool strolled in wearing a coat and fedora over his costume. "Lucy, I'm home!" he called, taking his coat off and tossing it over a chair, the hat following suit. He looked around. "You've been holding out on me, brother mine! This is some prime real-estate here! Nice place, very roomy… wouldn't have gone with this colour scheme myself, but you can just smell the development potential! Say, what do you think about condos?"
"Wade!" Shikilah called out, waving excitedly as though he could somehow miss her - a colorful explosion of feminine sexuality, her every movement a physical expression of deep, penetrating eroticism. She had quite the voice as well. Husky. No, silky, like honey. Deadpool didn't have a type, exactly - he'd give anything a try a few times - just in case he wasn't as receptive as he should be the first time. But he set a great store by voices.
Without wasting another word, he swept over to her, dipped he as though the two of them were dancing, pulled up his mask and planted one hell of a kiss on her: lips, tongue, the entire osculant assemblage, and she thought ooh la la. She was probably the only one who would, given what he looked like without the mask, but demons had very different standards of beauty then humans were familiar with. Societal mores and definitions were full of crap anyway. While she was quivering, he assisted her back up, not that he was in much better shape. He could smell her perfume; and it filled his head with a musky purple mist.
She was, in the suitable parlance, one hell of a woman; a startlingly appealing woman; more woman then most people could handle - tall and slim in the right places and curvy in the others. Her lips were full, her long, straight, dark hair centre-parted, her eyes heavily lashed and exotically grey and suitable to attach a lot of adjectives. A master sculptor could not have improved upon her cheek bones. She didn't look a day over twenty-eight, which was flattering, since she was so old that Deadpool felt young beside her.
They'd been married a little over a year. The sex had been exceptional. The emotional intimacy had almost reduced him to tears.
It was a good thing she was doing so much to fill the room. Wolverine just lay there, on their improvised autopsy table, looking for all the world like a badly butchered slab of meat. In actuality, most of the incisions had been surgeon-like in their precision, but with his healing factor that was not readily apparent.
"You realise that's not doing any good, right?"
"Gotta start somewhere." Slade said, gritting his teeth.
"Straight down to business. I love this guy. So how do we keep him dead? Since it doesn't seem to matter how much of him we cut off or how much blood he loses, even if he can't heal?" Deadpool asked from somewhere to his left, like he was contributing - though since he'd asked him to be here, Slade wasn't in a position to complain. Slade was half-listening, figuring if anybody had some insight into this, it would be his brother. "I mean, look at him. We've really worked him over, both lungs punctured, heart stabbed out, every artery he has opened, ten of those special bullets in his chest, and he still has vitals signs. I know I die if my head gets cut off - not for long thanks to that arsehat Thanos, but all this should work on him."
He was in a dark place, that felt underground. His senses were too overwhelmed by pain to be much more useful then that.
"Suppose we'll just have to destroy all his soft-tissues." Deathstroke replied, sounding almost bored. It was the hunt that he lived for. Not this… miserable necessity.
"What, like lower him into a pool full of acid and let him dissolve? Or a pool full of sharks with freaking lazer beams attached to their heads? Or maybe a pool of acid, with a shark that breathes acid in it…" He paused. "Maybe with spikes at the bottom or something just in case, I don't know. I don't think you have one of those, more's the pity. And pet shops refuse to sell sharks wholesale. Looks like we'll have to just let him go… Release him back into the wild, and help he can reacclimatise to his new environment." He paused. "Though there is… this." He paused dramatically, drinking it for all it was worth, then removed something from one of the many pouches he always wore. "I hoped it would never come to this. May God understand my actions, and not judge me too harshly for them. But we have no choice. How can I? How can I let it come to this, cross this line? And yet, I must."
Slade raised an eyebrow. "What are you babbling about?"
"I picked this up in Haiti, from a sinister man all in white, with no shirt and awesome tophat, and his skin all painted to look like a skeleton." Deadpool lied glibly. "He thought it was just some bizarre piece of edgy merchandising, but I could tell what it was straight away, and knew I couldn't let it fall into the wrong hands." Slade was suddenly grateful that the mask made his facial expression impossible to read.
Deadpool had reached into one of his belt pouches, and removed a highly disturbing - disturbingly adorable - cutesy stuffed doll dressed up in a surprisingly accurate Wolverine costume. It had no hands or feet, only rounded, fluffy stumps. "How could it come to this?" He asked himself rhetorically, milking the moment for everything it had. "A part of me wishes I'd never even come across it."
"Then how come you keep it in our bed and hug it sometimes when you feel lonely?" Shiklah asked, sounding curious.
"That's a pretty specific thing to have in your pouches. Do you always carry that around?" Slade asked.
Deadpool waved away their questions with an air of importance, removing a switchblade and flicking it open. "Don't worry, I've seen Doctor Strange do this hundreds of times. Well, once." He lied some more, working on the principle that as long as he was lying about where the doll came from he should make the same effort for his qualifications.
Closing his eyes and taking a deep breath, he said a few of the words that Harry Potter, protagonist of some rather excellent young-adult novels, always used in what he hoped was an appropriately mystical tone of voice, then stabbed the doll as hard as he could, directly into the torso. Some white fluff came out. That was all. It certainly didn't have any effect Wolverine.
"Huh. Could’ve sworn. Well, maybe I needed to sacrifice a chicken or something." Deadpool said. "The pieces are all here. I just need to figure out how to put them together."
Slade made a sucking sound and bit his lip, forcibly repressing laughter. If he so much as cracked a smile, he'd never hear the end of it ever. "Or we could strap him to the business end of a cyclotron." he said when he was sure he'd gotten his sense of humour under control.
"Where the hell are we supposed to get one of them?" Deadpool asked, tossing the doll away. "You might as well suggest we…"
Slade shrugged. "The internet?"
Deadpool conceded that with a nod. "Alright then. Long as I can keep it for my headquarters." He been planning on reforming his own group of costumed adventurers called 'The Deadpool Corps', and a cyclotron was just the thing for their ever-so-secret hide-out (soon as he found one). Maybe a Phantom Zone projector, and a portal to the Negative Zone. The basic mainstays.
"We could put it in the TV room!" Shiklah suggested, not really following the suggestions (where she came from, manner of death tended to be highly traditional - which wasn't to say lacking in brutality) but feeling one could never have too much clutter. That room was her favourite part of Deadpool's apartment. Over the course of their relationship, she'd become addicted to watching soaps, and frequently shirked her royal responsibilities passing judgement in the Underworld to sneak into his apartment and watch reruns of 'Passions', so that Deadpool waking up to find her adorably curled up on his couch, fast asleep with the television still on and her little dragon thing 'Bug' curled up for warmth was becoming a semi-regular occurrence.
"And if that doesn't work?"
"Toss him into space. He'll drift around for a while, and eventually become the Skrulls problem or something."
"Well, genius, you got it all figured out nice and laterally. Only one problem. What's your plan for getting him into space? Give NASA some funding? I hear for a billion dollars they can delay a project until they get more funding."
Slade paused. "…Zetta Beams?" He hazarded with a shrug.
Deadpool sighed. No matter how crazy he might be, what bizarre tangents of imagination he might take, how his crazed mind chose to observe the world, he could never quite be as bizarre as real life managed to be with distressing regularity. That thought very nearly depressed him.
"Look I think space is bigger then that." He said when he could trust himself to speak.
"So what if it is?" He shrugged. "Then the Kree? Or Colu - wherever it is that Braniac comes from, or whatever. Like I care where he is frozen." Quite frankly, there was no number that existed which was small enough to indicate the number of %$#@'s he gave about outer space. Which Deadpool rather thought was a shame.
"Look, you don't actually freeze in space. Space isn't cold." Deadpool said, shaking his head.
Slade blinked. He was pretty sure that contradicted his own experiences to the subject. "It's not?"
"No."
"You're sure? How come when people get pulled out, they're all frozen then?"
Deadpool wasn't even going to try and answer that. "Just… just trust me, it's not. There is no temperature at all in a vacuum."
Slade was almost certain he'd had direct experience to the contrary. "Oh. So what happens?"
"You explode." Deadpool wasn't sure if this was true, or a if it was another very well circulated rumour like the cold thing, but it seemed good enough to him.
Slade smiled slowly. "And with his healing factor…"
Deadpool cringed a little (he had an excellent imagination), and changed the subject. "It seems a waste. If we want to put him in an environment so hostile to human life he can't survive, why not just drive to Basin City?" Deadpool added.
"Can I go with him? I've heard about it, it sounds like home!" Shiklah adding.
"…Uhhhh," Wolverine forced out.
"Trust me, you don't want to go there. Once you get past all the danger, the poverty and grime and ugliness, the institutional callousness and retro feel like it's out of sync with the rest of the world, it's just generally tacky." Deadpool replied to his wife, then glanced down at the victim, and made a sympathetic noise. "There's our little trooper. How's he doing? Wow. You're a mess. You want a band-aid or something?"
"The trick is not to mind that it hurts." Slade added helpfully. Deadpool nudged him, to remind him he was overplaying the 'hardcore mercenary badass' thing he had going for him, but Slade didn't notice. He was too busy overplaying it.
Wolverine made another noise.
"The pit of despair. Don't even think of trying to escape, nobody ever has. And don't hold out for a rescue either, trust me, not even Kurt Russel himself could break you out of here." Deadpool replied.
"Oh, he knows where we are. Don't you, Jimmy?" Slade said, stepping back with the flourish of a circus ringman introducing his show. "Even with his generally unreliable memory, I doubt he could entirely forget this place. Could you, Jimmy?"
Wolverine tried to speak again, but couldn't find the strength. Deadpool withdrew, and Slade stepped close, taking a comically over-sized syringe usually used for basing roasts, loaded it up with enough oxycontin and phencyclidine to sedate a herd of elephants. "But enough of memory-lane. Go back to sleep. And don't wake again, or I'll shoot you some more." He said, and as if perfectly timed to ruin the atmosphere, Slade's phone rang.
Slade growled, low in his throat, and for a long moment very nearly ignored it. At last, his professionalism won him over. Only his current employer had that number. So he could hardly ignore it, much as he'd like to.
"You seem singularly blessed with poor timing." Slade growled into the telephone.
"Yes. We've begun, but to little effect. I was about to try something a bit more drastic."
"No, he's been no trouble at all. We've kept him well restrained, and…"
"We had a deal." He spoke very quietly, and very sharply.
"If you think your reasons matter to me, you clearly don't have a grasp on the situation at hand. We have an agreement. I don't see any reason to go altering it."
"Spare me. What do you have to hang over me, really? Why do you think I deferred payment? You don't have a thing…"
"…You son of a bitch." Slade hung up, dropped the phone onto the ground, then crushed it under the heel of his boot. He took a deep breath, then snapped out of his little tantrum, and got himself back under control. Or seemed to, because the next thing he did was glower down at Wolverine with a very homicidal gleam in his eye. "I suppose you think that was pretty &*%^ing funny." Slade said, eye narrowing. Apparently, his efforts hadn't worked.
"I suppose so, yeah." Wolverine forced out. He even forced himself to smile, or at least, flash his teeth. It wasn't easy. His facial muscles didn't all seem to be there.
"Well laugh while you can. Oh sure, you're getting a fresh lease. But Vandal Savage is a bigger bastard then me. I doubt you'll like whatever he has in store with you. And if you somehow do get free, remember this." Slade leaned close. "I beat you. I beat you easily. It wasn't a trick. It wasn't a fluke. It wasn't an imaginary story. I am better then you, Jimmy. And I can do it again." He leaned closer still, until his lips were just inches away from Wolverine's ear. "I can do it as many times as I want, whenever I want. I can find you. Bring friends next time. Maybe we can have a party. Maybe I can hurt them too. Just remember, you and me ever meet again, and you'll be back here. Except I won't aestheticize you first." He leaned closer still.
"See you real soon."
He jabbed the syringe into Wolverine's carteroid artery, and the world went dark.
Deadpool was sure now. Slade was happy.