FN: Wade can you do me a favor?
“Wade, you have a text message,” Peter told the man himself under the sink. All he could see were his legs and abs through the haze of pure hatred emanating from the cabinet.
What Wade needed to do was hire a professional to fix his house. What Wade would never in a million years do was hire a professional to fix his house. He called it a paranoia thing and said it was fine, he was learning new skills all the time and that eventually things got fixed.
Peter was pretty sure ‘skill’ meant that you had to be good at something. By this definition, Wade was learning only how to frustrate himself into oblivion. Not to actually fix things. Nevertheless, he watched the legs and didn’t mention that his uncle had taught him basic plumbing when he was like nine.
“Wade, you have a text message,” he repeated in case Wade hadn’t heard him over the clanking in his ears.
“Read it out to me,” Wade told him while screwing what Peter decided was probably a washer back into place. One of his hands snaked out from the Netherworld and felt around the pile of grimy tools on the towel for a better wrench.
Peter opened Wade’s phone because he was an idiot sometimes and “4445” was not a passcode.
“It’s from Mr. Nelson,” he said, “He’s asking if you can do him a favor.”
A wrench dropped under the sink and Wade jerked. The whole sink rattled and groaned and he swore.
“Ask him if he can fix a fucking sink.”
Peter pursed his lips and typed out the message.
FN: Can we made it a trade instead of a favor if I fix your sink?
“He says he knows and wants to know if you want to trade favors,” Peter announced. Wade wriggled out from the cabinet covered in years of nasty sink contagions. He turned around to wash his hands then remembered his sink was a piece of shit and had to brace his arms and forehead against it to contain the aggravation.
“Yes. Tell him yes.”
FN: On my way
Mr. Nelson knocked on the door while Wade was in the bathroom, scrubbing grime off his arms in the only functional sink in the apartment. Peter answered it and waved and let Mr. Nelson in.
Or Foggy, rather. It was a weekend and Mr. Nelson had feelings about names. Namely that Peter and his buddies could call him “Foggy” almost all of the time, now. None of them, Peter, MJ, or Ned could bring themselves to do this, however, because Mr. Nelson was an Adult. One of the adult-iest adults they knew. He had all kinds of adult knowledge, like what was a good price for tires and what a pound felt like in the hand. Peter loved his aunt dearly, but she knew neither of these things. She was the lady in the produce section who abused her scale privileges.
Foggy gave Peter a smile and immediately wove his way around the couches over to the sink. He poked around at its faucet and basin, then crouched to get a better look under it. He set the toolbox he’d brought with him down and fished out a flashlight to locate the problem.
“It’s fucking leaking,” Wade groused, having emerged from his bird bath.
“I can see that,” Foggy noted patiently.
“The mold culture in there is two days from staging a fucking coup,” Wade grumped. “I’ve changed all the hardware and bought that fucking blue goop that smells like ass, but the fucker is just determined to breed the next super-virus.”
Foggy made a contemplative noise as he examined Wade’s handiwork. Peter resumed sitting on the back of the couch, swinging his legs. It probably looked like a kindergartener’s craft project down there. The only things missing were the glue and feathers. Wade leaned against couch next to him, put out for having had to give in to the pro. Wade didn’t usually care about stuff like that, but for some reason the inability to successfully complete home improvement projects grated on his nerves like nothing else.
Peter wouldn’t dare point out that the root of the problem was the fact that he had no idea what the fuck he was doing, just on the off-chance Wade developed the need to make a bomb to compensate for the loss.
“You need a new sink,” Foggy diagnosed. Wade crossed his arms irritably.
“I don’t need a new sink, I just need a fucking handbook or some shit.”
“You need a new sink,” Foggy maintained, “You still have the model number? If not that’s fine, we can probably find you something similar.”
“I don’t need a new sink.”
Foggy gave him a look Peter had never seen directed at anyone but Matt before. It usually incited hissing and strategic retreat on that front.
“Wade. Your basin is cracked. Suck it up. You need a new sink.”
Wade made a frustrated grunt and pressed his fingers into his forehead.
“Is there any way—”
“Nope.”
“Are you—”
“Yep.”
“Uuuuuuuuuugh.” Wade slid down the back of the couch and hung his head between his legs on the floor.
“I can get you one today, if you don’t mind it not being the exact same model,” Foggy offered. “We can install it this evening, shouldn’t take too long.”
“Are you a plumbing angel?” Wade asked in defeat from the floor. Peter swung his foot just a little too close by accident and Wade grabbed it and made him fall back over the sofa. Foggy huffed out an amused laugh at the two of them.
“No, boo. I’m just the heir to Nelson’s Hardware and Home Improvement.”
Foggy dragged them all the way to Hell’s Kitchen to introduce Peter, Wade, and Wade’s misery to his honest-to-god father. And the man was so. Nice. He didn’t look anything like Foggy, balding as he was with dark eyes and big ears, but he held out his hand and asked Peter if he wanted a soda. He didn’t, but Foggy’s dad either hadn’t heard or couldn’t process that and went off to find one to shove into his hand anyways.
“Your sister is a menace,” he informed Foggy while Wade rubbed his hands all over every model of sink in their store. It was a considerable variety for it being a mom and pop place. It was a bit bigger shop than Peter would have thought, too, although that might have been the narrow aisles. It smelled like freshly cut wood and paint chips. From the looks of it, Foggy’s family lived upstairs and worked down.
“Water is wet,” Foggy observed.
“The boy’s she’s dating is one of them hipsters. One of those kids into micro- or macro- or I dunno, some fancy kind of beer.”
Foggy appeared to be weighing this information against an image of his sister in his head.
“Yeah, sounds about right.”
“You have a sister?” Peter asked to avoid drinking any more grape soda.
“Half-sister technically. She’s younger than me, off in college right now; her name is Candace.”
“And she’s a bisexual,” Foggy’s dad added earnestly. Foggy sighed and rubbed his face. Peter bit the inside of his cheek and nodded in interest.
“Dad, you don’t need to tell everyone that,” Foggy groaned to the concrete flooring.
“I liked her last girlfriend better, you know. She was a nice girl, what was her name. Tonya? Toni?”
“Toula, Dad, she was Greek. And can you not with the bisexual thing?”
“Why not? What’s the matter with bisexuals now? Your mom read an article the other day. Said more people are bisexual than not. Speaking of which, where’s our Matthew? He’s a nice boy, too, Matthew. Can’t fix a damn thing, but he’s pretty enough to get by.”
“For the love of--Dad--here, what’s come in today? Are you lifting shit again? What shit can I lift for you?”
Peter was pretty sure if he’d puncture his cheek if this kept up, so he took a sip of the offensive soda and redirected his attention to Wade, who was petting a handle-less model with reverence.
Peter knew without asking he was thinking of all the blood he wouldn’t have to wash off the handles.
“She’s the one,” Wade murmured tearfully.
“Nelson, what do I owe you?” Wade asked as he turned the new sink on and off in awe. Peter would admit that it was a much better sink. It looked very sleek, despite all the punk rock and grunge kitsch in Wade’s kitchen.
“Oh, right. Can you go separate Matty and Jess? They are doing something nefarious and both lying to me about it,” Foggy said. Peter wondered if they both weren’t already dead given the three hours they’d just dedicated to dealing with Wade’s kitchen.
“Sure thing, chicken wing; where are they?” Wade asked. He turned off the sink for good and went to go grab his coat.
“No clue,” Foggy said, arms folded, shoulders slumping. “They were having too good of a time, though, on the last call, so hopefully passed out in a ditch somewhere.”
“As Daredevil and--?”
“Nope, just as morons,” Foggy assured him. “The harder we try to keep them apart, the more determined they are to be together.”
Peter had originally thought that Double D and Jessica Jones were an unlikely set of buddies. But the more he saw of them together, the more their unfortunate friendship made sense. They were both snarky assholes who bled angst and rage and both had a propensity for creeping on people without their permission. They were also both infuriatingly intelligent and incapable of not spouting off in the face of authority. Through this, Peter assumed, they’d fallen into dysfunctional love and best-friend-hood.
Jessica said ‘jump’ and Matt said, ‘bet you can’t higher than me’ and Jessica said ‘wanna fucking bet asshole?’ and they were off.
Peter had only experienced the true horror of their duo a handful of times, and every single one of them had been perfectly awful. And Matt had been shitfaced for all of them because he was terrifyingly susceptible to Jessica’s bad influence.
It had come abruptly to Peter’s attention on the first of these occasions that drunk Matt was not a drunk Double D; he was just a drunk Matt.
And that posed some problems.
Peter joined Wade in hunting the two of them down because it wasn’t like he had anything better to do and he felt like he needed to pay Foggy back for the soda his dad had refused to let him pay for.
He also really didn’t want a drunk Matt out attempting to conduct Double D business, for the sake of himself and the city.
They found the two giggling and shushing each other loudly in an alley by the docks, attempting (poorly) to menace some drug dealers out of the city. It was working by sheer virtue of them being more less coordinated, and therefore more dangerous, intoxicated than sober.
The drug dealers threw in the already frantically wavering towel at the arrival of Deadpool and Spiderman, and Wade flipped a coin and Peter got stuck with the task of half-dragging half-carrying Jessica Jones back to the city proper. She allowed this to the extent that she let Peter move her, although this was made difficult by her trying to hold Matt’s hand and him doing his damnedest to keep her from doing that for no reason that Peter or Wade could discern.
They were slurring too hard to understand what was going on. The only thing Wade could get out of them was ‘cooties’ and Jessica making a lewd gesture which made Matt laugh so hard he cried.
The news that they were going home and not together was met with staunch resistance. They ended up dropping Jessica off with her former associate and Trish Walker first. Trish Walker pointed at Matt and called him a menace and a bad influence. He responded to these accusations by growling at her finger.
Jessica told him she missed him already and he called her a wench and a whore and it was her turn to be incoherent with laughter.
Foggy accepted his idiot with grace and sobered him up a bit with sternly pointed silence.
“No more getting drunk with Jess,” he stipulated while Matt fidgeted with the edge of his coat guiltily. “You didn’t even take the suit, Matthew, if someone had seen you, we’d all be fucked.”
Matt wouldn’t look up into his face. But Foggy took the uncomfortable squirming as affirmation.
“Bed,” he said simply.
“Noooo,” drunk-Matt whined like a kid.
“It’s bed or self-induced vomiting; the ball’s in your court, pal.”
Matt pouted and groaned and extricated himself from Wade to drape himself all over Foggy in apology. Foggy sighed and wrapped him in a hug with his arms locked in the small of Matt’s back. He let Matt burrow into his neck. It was a rare public show of intimacy between the two of them, although cheapened by Foggy’s obvious exasperation. He thanked Wade and Peter for bringing Matt home and told Wade to call him if the sink didn’t work again.
They heard him sigh again just as the door closed.
WW: Hey Nelson, can you do me a favor?