In Which Peter Has a Panic Attack and Everyone (Both Of Them) Just Understand
Peter wakes up in a hospital bed, with an IV drip in his arm.
He screams in sheer terror not even a second later, tearing the drip out of his arm and leaping out of the bed. His movement impaired by the sharp pain in his body from the stab wound, which causes him to crash to the ground a screaming, writhing mess.
"No, no, no, no!" He chants, righting himself up and curling into the corner of the floor. Arms curled protectively over his knees as his spider legs bend out in front of him.
He was back. He was back. He was back, and this was it, and it was over. They had found him.
"Spindley! Spin-doll! Baby boy!" The voice pulls him back from the panicked state, and he looks up. Brown pupils small pinpricks and black irises shaking in a rush to focus. He feels his face, and horrified, realizes he isn't wearing his mask.
"Where am I?" He asks, voice high and terrified.
"Safe, baby boy," Deadpool responds. Peter looks around the room, let's his brain focus.
He's not in a hospital room. He's in a crummy bedroom, and the hospital bed is actually just a normal, shitty bed with not sheets. Just a mattress on a headboard. There's and IV drip and some health monitoring equipment, which seems to be of the stolen variety. His breathing evens out. He was safe enough.
Wearily, he snaps his mental Web out. Is lashes back, causing his head to thunk against the wall behind him. Stars and black swim in his disoriented vision for a secodn, and he stays staring at the cieling. Eyes dilating almost like camera lens as they focus. He chitters hesitantly, and some spiders respond back.
He finds out most are alive, but only a few are with him. The dead ones are unrecoverable, and a good three quarters of the living ones made it his home.
[Is he just gonna stare forever?]
[[Shut up, dumb fuck, he can hear us]]
"Spidey?" Deadpool calls. Peter recoils at the nickname immediately.
"Do not call me that," he hisses, and Deadpool nods. Peter nods. Good. He wasn't Spider-Man anymore. That was gone. There's a few somewhat tense beats of silence in which only the boxes fill with there commentary, which is pretty easy to block out.
"What happened?" Peter finally asks, once he's sure he's sane and human.
"Well, you passed out and dropped like a light," Deadpool begins, "and I caught you - you're as light as a fucking feather, by the way - and teleported us to my home, where I patched you up like a good doctor."
"Wear a nurse uniform, might treat me a little more," Peter grumbles, mostly to himself. It was a habit of his, and he hadn't even realized he'd said it out loud. Deadpool takes it in stride, not unused to Peter's random moments of honest out-loud thinking. They were both insane, and their quirks weren't hard to get used to. Just like how Peter never noticed Deadpool's rambles, or how Deadpool stopped being somewhat afraid of Peter when his sanity wavered or bent strangely.
"Want some food, baby boy? I looked up a buggy recipe. Cricket salad or some shit," Deadpool questions abruptly into the air. Peter perks up.
"Sure," he pipes up, even though his stomach is twisting from the stress of waking up. "But I need to vomit first," he giggles.
"Sure thing," Deadpool responds in stride, not bothering to question it. Peter skips out in search of the bathroom, which he finds by way of smell.
It doesn't smell bad, just like toilet water chemicals and barely used soap. The smell is honestly so overwhelming he ends up getting more sick because of it. The whole place isn't made for his senses, which are so heightened nothing is comfortable unless he makes it.
He knows in other universes, the other Peter's have heightened senses. But none like his. His ears ring if a phone rings in another room. He gets headaches when people whisper. He feels pain when a fly lands on him. He tastes before food touches his lips. He's so used to the constant stream of neverending pain caused by an over exertion of sensory intake, half the time he forgets hes feeling pain until he walks into his safe houses and the world around him becomes bearable.
After Peter vomits what little he has left in his stomach - which he's pretty sure he vomited out in favor of the new one he probably grew - and the subsequent dry heave and gag session, he heads out to Deadpool's living room. His mask is sitting (thrown, by the looks of it) on the coffee table, along with his (ugh) bloody cloak. He pulls on the mask and inspects his shirtless (when did that happen?) body. Blood cakes a lot of his suit, along with the sticky remains of near completely disintegrated webbing. He groans, loud and irritated.
"This is gonna be a bitch to clean," He whines, and he strips from the pants to. Deadpool walks in at that moment, which is the moment Peter is inspecting his (thankfully) untouched underwear.
[HALT!]
[[Naked Spindly???]]
[So sexy]
[[That ass]]
"What's wrong with my ass?" Peter asks, mildly offended. "I thought you liked it!"
[We do]
[[Mmmm, yes, we most certainly do.]]
"Oh, okay," Peter relaxes. "Do you have some clothes I could borrow?"
[Say no, say no, say no, say n-]
[[HE CAN HEAR US.]]
[Oh, whoops]
[[Well, now he'll know we're lying if we say no]]
[How did he know I wasn't saying 'say no' because we had none?]
[[Shittttt]]
[Dumb ass]
[[Not as dumb as you!]]
[Hey!]
"Deadpool?" Peter prompts, pushing the (extremely) irritating voices to the back of his head.
"No?" Deadpool says questioningly. Peter giggles, but his eyes are somewhat serious.
"Right, sure, not even a spare suit?" Peter responds, voice questioning and he giggles again.
[Holyyyyyyyyyy]
[[Can you imagaine?]]
"Shut up," Peter and Deadpool snap in unison, before giggling at each other because they'd spoken at the same time.
"Yeah, I have a spare suit. One second, baby boy," Deadpool responds, and Peter nods. Deadpool turns and walks away, and Peter waits patiently in the living room. The very air makes his skin tingle, the dust particles settling on his skin are things he's hyper aware of. They don't burn, necessarily, but their uncomfortable and make him want to rake his very sharp nails down every inch of his skin. Through the hairs in his arms and legs (head, to), he can feel every remote vibration in the air, and there's so much. The spiders chittering to each other fill his ears as they move to perch on his shoulders. It fills his ears with a delicious white noise that, despite causing a painful headache and awful ringing sound to form, block out the other noises that would have droven him insane. He has seven spiders with him. Four of which are Wolf Spiders. The other three he doesn't know.
Deadpool walks in with a suit, and Peter pulls it on. It's loose and heavy, hanging from his body the way a shirt four sizes to big would. Predictable, as Deadpool was larger in size due to the amount of (delicious) muscle on him. Not larger as in four Peter's could fit in him, but he was an inch shorter and the other man had much more definable (discernable) muscles. Absent mindedly, Peter rubs a thumb over the sleeves and he hates how loose it is. The residual smell of blood suffocates him in copper and he can practically taste the gunpowder. Deadpool's smell was distinctive, but intoxicating (in a bad way) this close. He gets dizzy, just for a second.
The clothes are to loose, and he hates it. Every part of him screams to tear the cloth off. Loose clothing reminded him of normal clothes, of hospital gowns, of everything he didn't want be reminded of. His discomfort shows on his face, as he insects the loos sleeves and loose shirt and wrinkles his nose at the smell.
[Something wr-]
Peter could distinctly feel the disconnect. Strange, he could hear them longer than last time. Shrugging it off he pushes back his discomfort and looks at Deadpool with an expression of manic cheeriness. "Food?"
"Yup," Deadpool responds, and walks into the kitchen. He comes back with a bowl of what honestly looks like insect salad. With crickets in place of lettuce. Was that scorpions instead of crutons?
Peter beams, grabbing the bowl and throwing a scorpion into his mouth. It crunches and he feeds the spiders still chittering in his ears a few crickets and let's them snatched up fruit flies. He's handed a spoon.
There's a few minutes of near silence as Deadpool rambles to himself and the spiders chitter and Peter eats. Peter's beginning to realize that silent moments are really just him being quiet, which he's perfectly fine with.
After a while they start talking and the files are brought up. Deadpool goes to get them, and they look over them. There's more of the same, hard drives full of information of them, but mostly just facilities that are interested in them and it's really more nothing. Some files Peter couldn't retrieve, and other files refer to them.
The files make him feel like he's not in control, and the added situation of being in Deadpool's home adds to the feeling. Soon, he begins spiraling into panic, and then eventually his breathing shortens.
Deadpool notices, just as Peter's vision starts spinning and he feels sick. He can feel the inner spider, trying to control but he shoves it back with a considerable amount of effort and focuses on the sense of panic rushing through him.
Peter's sweating to much now, and Deadpool's voice filters in.
"Spindly, breathe. C'mon, you need to breathe."
Peter's breath shortens more. He was not in control, this was wrong. He couldn't be controlled. No, no, no. Peter feels tears burn at his eyes and wishes he could scream and react in at different way. The feeling adds to his panic, because ehe can't even control himself.
There's a moment of genuine silence before Deadpool speaks up again.
"You are in control. It's just a little harder now, baby boy. That's all. Get back your breathing, then you can tell me what to do. You are in control."
Peter focuses on breathing. He was in control. Slowly, agonizingly slowly, the panic blaring in his brain lessens until his body starts to comply to wishes.
"I won't be controlled," Peter states once his voice was back. "I won't be controlled!"
"Nope, course not baby boy," Deadpool agrees.
Panic attacks, anxiety attacks, break downs, melt downs, full blown freak outs, anything of that sort. They weren't uncommon to the two, and they both had their own ways with dealing with them in a(n unhealthy) manner that left them somewhat okay.
They were both far better at helping someone else out then helping themselves. Comes with the territory of insane. Not that they really ever did help anyone, but the fact remained. Peter squeezeso his eyes shut for a second, before the panic fades. He could barely remember waking up, and the memory of the attack is beginning to slip away from him like quicksand.
"Take your mask off," Peter demands, "Then tell me your name. Then make me more food."
The demands are not him taking advantage of the situation. It's him taking control of it. Peter's life revolved around control, and his surplus of it. Losing control was not something he could have, he did not want these orders followed. He needed it.
And Deadpool understood that.
"Wade," Deadpool says finally. "Wade Winston Wilson at your service! Do you want more of the same thing?"
"Yes, please!" Peter cheers, giggling. Deadpool won't take off his mask yet. He's not ready, he needs his own level of control.
And Peter understood that.
It's strange really, but the understanding was so deep and true and almost subconscious. They hadn't talked very much except brief calls over the phone. Peter had twenty favors and he had managed to get everything he wanted without using one. Deadpool no longer felt distrust towards Peter because after knowing him just a little, he recognized the favors for what they were. Peter couldn't not be in control of a situation, it led to full scale panic. The favors were the insurance that insured his control.
Deadpool's issues were more deep seated, though they included his looks. He diliked being ignored, he couldn't be in hospital settings. He killed for the mind numbness. He hated himself, he was in constant pain. But he didn't have control issues the way Peter did, and he already knew the other merc didn't seem to notice his scars, so after a minute of mixing together insects in his kitchen, he pulls it off.
Peter eats silently. Deadpool rambles. He never really stops. Peter understands the coping mechanism.
It's all sort of strange, but they both understand. They're smart, and they'e mercenaries. It was in their job description to observe and read people. They were insane. Their screws were a little loose, even though everything they did seemed complex and unrelated, it was easy to see the connections when you thought the same way. Really, in the end, they had simple minds.
So if Peter snaps out his mental Web when he hears Deadpool's frustration so he can talk to the boxes to, it's because Peter understands. And if Deadpool hands Peter the remote because he looks unnerved and he knows it's because he can feel the control slipping away, it because how knows. And if maybe they both avoid certain topics because they both know the other might react negatively, it's because, in the end, the insane are quicker to understand the insane.