Archive of Our Own

It’s only his second week patrolling the streets with the team when Deadpool crashes the party. An inexplicable herd of giant bison are roaming free, spewing deadly acid all up and down the quiet suburbia of Staten Island. They’re about seven times the regular size of a buffalo. Naturally. He’s just wrangled a few back into a containment unit with a whole bunch of web when the figure in black and red whirls by, slicing and dicing through the towering bison. Things cool down quickly once the majority of the creatures have been contained, and the Avengers begin to reassemble.

“And who is this itty-bitty superhero?” Deadpool hop-skips in his direction with his hands pressed lightly to his mouth as if effusive emotion will gush out of it if he doesn’t stuff it back in. Which is kind of insulting, Peter isn’t even that short.

Steve raises his shield ever so slightly, as though to fend off the wild man, who seems… a little nutty?

Natasha’s the one to answer. “This is Spider-Man. He’s new.”

“Fresh blood! How darling.” Deadpool leans this way and that, trying to get a better look, but the team is slowly collecting in front of Peter, Hawkeye’s hand coming to rest on a holstered throwing knife. It seems like a good time to try and diffuse the tension.

“It’s nice to meet you,” Peter says. Yeah, his voice actually does sound pretty young, now that he’s listening to himself closely. Whatever, he’s sixteen - the fact that he’s running with the Avengers at his age is enough to cool the sting of Deadpool’s snide cooing. At least, he thinks it’s snide?

“Oh my goodness! A baby-hero – I just wanna pinch your cheeks!" Deadpool swoops in, fingers poised like crab claws, like he’s actually going to try. The wall of superheroes barricades him, though.

“Well,” Peter says, and doesn’t know how to finish. He makes an awkward hand gesture that somehow actually manages to express the idea ‘let’s all pretend this never happened and clear up the rest of the debris,’ instead of him having to say it. Cleanup takes forever, because giant buffalo equals giant poop. Deadpool slithers away in the middle of it; the man is probably allergic to responsibility or something.

Everybody goes home a little stinkier and a lot tireder, and Peter tries to forget about the guy.

He’s got a big ass paper for AP Lang & Comp due on Monday, and that’s probably why he’s out patrolling on Sunday night. It’s his fortune, good or ill, to stumble across a den of giant cockroaches in the Bronx. Mr. Mad Scientist (whatever his name may be) is actually in residence, and Peter figures there’s a fair chance that this is the same person responsible for the bison from six months ago. Working out of a storage unit, of all places. Peter wasn’t even aware those had power outlets. He radios in for backup and opts to wait for the team to get here before spooking the cockroaches into a frenzy and scaring their maker away, but one of the darn things sniffs him out in no time. It’s what he gets for hiding in an alleyway; definitely should have stuck to the rooftops, where he belongs.

And of course, these ones can shoot laser beams out of their eyeballs.

He’s executing an extremely complicated spinning technique to trap the cockroach in the air, suspending it between two buildings so that the thing can’t get purchase or break loose. He’s webbing the thing’s eyes over and over to snuff out the laser beams that keep burning through, but it isn’t enough. The scorching red glare of it keeps melting the web material faster than he can spin it and this is only one of these monsters right now, he can’t even imagine if he had to deal with more – and then Deadpool comes twirling into view, but maybe it’s Peter that’s moving – calling out, “What up, Spidey?” And then he’s pouncing right onto the cockroach, drawing out a katana and stabbing one of its bulging red eyes, then jerking it jaggedly through to the next eye with a sick crunch. The thing squeals like a stuck pig, but clearly it isn’t dead yet because its many legs are pulling at the webbing more frantically than ever. He has to hope that wasn’t a distress call to its brethren.

“What is it with you, me, and oversized members of the animal kingdom, huh?” Deadpool says, poking curiously at a scorched spot on his arm, the skin of it looking like blackened hunk of coal. The smell is really something else.

And then the whole horde is bearing down on them, an army 30-strong of hard-shelled arthropods washing in like the tide over every available surface, giant feet clinking like hail on a tin roof. Peter tangles their legs in webbing while Deadpool hacks through the masses. It turns out the things have limited eye range, so the coordinated effort is actually working smoothly until the Avengers arrive. In a large moving group, the devilish lamp-like glow of the cockroaches’ red eyes have an odd strobe light effect. It’s weirdly mesmerizing, pretty close to what Peter imagines going to a disco or a rave is like.

“You didn’t tell us Deadpool was here, Peter,” his earpiece says. It’s Ironman, soaring overhead and sounding strangely disapproving.

“To be fair, I didn’t know Deadpool was here, either.” It’s the only thing he can think to say; he has no idea how Deadpool knew he was in over his head.

“Aw, are you talking about me behind my back? Preteens can be so vicious,” replies Deadpool, delivering a hypocritically brutal stab to the gut of a giant cockroach. More of the things keep pouring in from nowhere. Cockroaches, as most New Yorkers could tell you, are slippery bastards.

Captain America’s radio presence is a stony, staticky silence.

“Not a pre-teen, actually.”

““Mhm. Whatever you say, little muchacho.” Then the focus is all on the fight, Tony chattering away in everyone’s ears.

As the number of live cockroaches dwindles after what seems like forever, a soundtrack of crunching and uncomfortable squelching on loop, Peter turns to face Deadpool in the dim yellow streetlight.

“I was going to say earlier, cockroaches technically belong to the—”

Deadpool makes a blah-blah-blah gesture with his hand. “Yeah, yeah, thanks for the history lesson, Insectoid.”

“That wasn’t really a—” Deadpool sighs so loudly it ends in a shouting sort of noise. He casts his hands out questioningly. “Are you always such a drag?” He turns to Black Widow and says, “Is he always such a drag?” She ignores him in favor of taking down another cockroach; the stacks of dead carcasses around her are piling high. She’s stacked the corpses around her in such a way that they almost look like modern art.

Peter is still formulating a comeback with a Little Rascals reference just to prove Deadpool wrong when a particularly speedy cockroach launches itself at him and cuts off that thought. He bundles the thing in web and lets Deadpool stab it into oblivion, ducking out of the way of wayward laser beams. All around, the team is cutting the remaining horde down by fractions every moment. It’s beautiful to watch them all work together in violent, laser-filled synchronicity.

Then Deadpool is sailing off into the night, calling out, "Love the suit concept, by the way,” before he’s out of sight.
And, five Mississipis later, someone remarks, “Man, that guy puts my teeth on edge.” It’s Steve, the words gritting out of his mouth sort of unwillingly as he scrapes goo off his shield, right before he hurls it at the last cockroach still moving.

“I don’t know, I think he’s pretty funny.” All Clint gets for his rooftop confession is a bunch of glares and a couple of jeered, You would’s.

Peter gets the paper turned in; it’s a piece of shit, but it’s a timely piece of shit.

The team is weirdly protective. It’s not really news to him, but sometimes it still takes him by surprise. On a general, day-to-day level, many of them are not especially cautious or even conscientious people. Maybe it’s because he’s the youngest, or the newest, or maybe it’s just the “adorbs babyface” that Deadpool claims Peter has, even when Peter protests that he hasn’t even seen him without a mask. To which Deadpool of course said, “I know ‘em when I see ‘em, buddy-o-boy.” He’s weirdly flattered, but to be fair, Deadpool also claims that Peter has “the heart of Atreyu and the wisdom of the Sphinxes,” to which Peter replied “Who’s Atreyu?” And that’s how they’d wound up watching The Neverending Story on Deadpool’s probably-definitely stolen laptop one rainy weekend in April. Peter’s never seen so many Hello Kitty stickers on one appliance in his life.
But the fact of the matter is, the team has some serious reservations about Deadpool straying into Peter’s lane.

Sadly, every time Deadpool whirls through like a human tornado, everyone else on the team just seems to get their hackles up. Even the ultra-chill Dr. Banner, on the few occasions that they need to call in the big guns. (Otherwise, as Peter understands it, having the Hulk out and about the town just creates more damage than it does solutions.) Peter tries to make friendly conversation to ease some of the tension, but eventually he catches on that it only makes things worse. The friction doesn’t keep Deadpool from popping in on their fights, prancing around like a lost giraffe, and leaving before someone can press him into cleanup duty.

“Is it because he’s unbalanced? You know, like, mentally?” he has to ask Natasha, after months of back and forth.

Her lips thin in displeasure. “Something like that. He’s too unpredictable. It’s smart to keep away from negative influences, if possible. He may teach you some bad habits.” Well, that’s fair. If ever there was a bad influence, Deadpool was it.

“Not to be rude, but why did you come fight off the bison that first time? Or the roaches? I’m pretty sure no one was paying you to fight those things. That’s not really your style, is it?”

They’re dangling their feet over the edge of a rooftop somewhere on the lower east side of Manhattan, an area Peter’s still never seen from street view, chowing down on burritos of a truly unholy size. They’ve just had a disagreement about pre-mixed burrito ingredients – the goods should naturally align themselves, Spidey - but given that Deadpool’s already on his second “unnatural” burrito while Peter’s only halfway through his first, Peter thinks he’s won this round.

Steve would bust a gasket if he knew they were breaking bread together, but he has no say in what Peter does with his downtime, even if his objections are (or would be) valid.
At Peter’s question, Deadpool lowers burrito number two from his mouth reluctantly, and he switches the hand holding it, keeping further away from Peter now, like he's worried Peter’s going to steal it or something. “Not my scene, true, true, true, but giant acid-spewing bison? Now that just sounded like so much fun. I’m sure the folks at home will agree.”

His grin is a little false, and Peter knows that because they’ve both got their masks pulled up around the mouth. Deadpool’s skin looks like nothing Peter has ever seen. Aesthetically, it reminds him of the coarse-grained sandstone he’d read about during his I-want-to-be-a-geologist-when-I-grow-up phase; the reddish, sedimentary kind. Rough texture, full of movement. It’s definitely interesting to look at.

“Huh,” Peter hums thoughtfully, tucking back into his own burrito. He chews, swallows. “That’s a decent rationality, I guess.”

"Oh, Deadpool swoons, hands clasped, head leaning against his forearms as if faint. “What large words you have!”

Peter thinks to himself, And what about the cockroaches?
But he only thinks it, because he’s a believer in non-confrontation. Deadpool doesn’t ask him for another wedge of lime, but Peter passes him one anyways.

And objectively, Deadpool’s a strange dude. Peter understands why the real adults in his life have their hesitations - people in general or society at large would reasonably recommend he stear clear. The guy says the weirdest shit.

“What up, baby boy?” Deadpool calls out from a nearby rooftop, waving both his arms over his head, X marks the spot style. Peter’s just doing some light reading on some schmuck’s lawnchair on the 40-somethingth floor.

“Why do you keep calling me that?” Peter has to ask. This has to be the fifth damn time.

“Well, I called you that once in Volume 2 #19, and I do mean one time, but it really seems to have caught on with the fans and whathaveyou.” Nonsense. Complete nonsense. It’s safest just to play along.

“Oh, huh . . . could’ve picked a worse nickname to get stuck with, I guess,” Peter reasons, because he is a reasonable person. Deadpool pats him on the shoulder in an aggressively affectionate sort of way. “Yeparoo, honeydew.”

On his seventeenth birthday, there’s a red rubber duck sitting on his doormat. The squeaky kind that sits in the bath with you. There’s little other explanation for it, other than it being a spectacularly wacky birthday gift. He’s got two guesses where it came from, and he knows which one he’s betting on. It’s not worth thinking about how the guy knows where he lives. Instead, he puts his energy into making a new home for it on his narrow bathroom sink and it keeps him company when brushes his teeth, in the morning and at night. He nearly knocks it over a few times as he's rushing out the door for a date, different people every time, futilely attempting to get there only ten minutes late and failing.

Nobody ever tells you how hard the superhero gig is going to be on your dating life. Or your general ability to be on time to anything ever.

With good reason, too. If Peter had known he was signing up to miss every dentist appointment and coffee date from that point onward, he might have given the super-powered career track a second thought. As an inconvenience to both him and his molars, it would be fine. But it makes other people feel bad, when he’s late--it makes them feel like he doesn’t care. When Aunt May starts gently hinting at wanting some “grandbabies” someday and he realizes that it’s never going to happen if he can’t follow through on a single date, he experiences a brief waffling over this dilemma.

“If you’re saving their asses,” Deadpool says, in that unpersuasive way he has of oversimplifying everything, “then they oughta get over you rolling up five minutes late.” But he shows up a lot more than five minutes late and they don’t know that he’s the one doing the saving and he is very confident that telling people about it would not make his life any simpler.

Then again, he thinks as he snatches some peanut M&Ms out of Deadpool’s hand and pops them into his mouth all in one go, maybe those people wouldn’t be in his life if he wasn’t out on the streets watching their backs.

Deadpool flails a little, unhappy with the theft, but he doesn’t employ thematically appropriate violence like pretending to cut off Peter’s hand Hammurabi-style or anything. Deadpool never touches his knives when it’s just the two of them, he’s beginning to realize. “Cotton-headed ninny muggins,” the merc grumbles under his breath. “Hey!” Peter retorts, mouth full of half-chewed candy, and stupid, quiet joy. “Language.”

Two months later, the team’s in Prospect Park because the trees are coming alive and attacking park goers, tossing leaves and twigs every-which-way as they heave themselves out of the ground. Unbelievably enough, Deadpool is there before they are. It’s a sunny day, cheerful inside the lush woods of the Ravine; the place is totally alien from the rest of the city, from the rest of Brooklyn, even. The peaceful setting is sort of ruined by the malevolent flora and screaming people, though. And, of course, the area’s only halfway evacuated. Peter’s confident the NYPD had gotten plenty of people out before Deadpool, the Avengers, and him arrived, but on a nice day like today, practically the whole island was out looking for a tan and a game of frisbee.

Though alive and in some cases, literally kicking, the trees don’t make a sound other than the rustle of their leaves and the heavy, oaky groan of their bending branches. The trees move pretty slow, but they do pack a punch. Peter’s in small clearing, spinning around a live tree’s lumbering roots, trying to bind its leg-like appendages together in order to tip the thing over, but then he hears a rowdy cry of “Take that, Treebeard! Yeee-hah! from further afield, somewhere past Steve, and he knows his concentration on this one is shot.

Deadpool’s standing triumphantly atop a rock outcropping that overhangs the jut of a small waterfall, katana held aloft. A sloppy pile of chopped wood lies gathered at the bottom of the waterfall.

He catches Peter looking, just before Peter’s on the backswing, revolving behind the violent tree. Peter waves, just a little. Once he’s got the thing trussed up like a turkey, he jogs past Steve and his tree, over to Deadpool. He’s been dying for some conversation for a while now - they’ve been out here hauling trees around for a couple of hours and it feels unprofessional to use the comms just for smalltalk. “Man, this blows. Prospect Park is the best one.”

“Damn straight it is, Pete!” Deadpool exclaims, then seems confused to be agreeing with someone.

“It feels kinda wrong to be beating up the trees you’d usually come here for. See that gnarled one, over there?” Peter points his thumb at the stooped-over camperdown elm Steve is trying to gently wrap into submission with some heavy-duty rope. “That’s, like, my favorite tree.” Maybe Steve was acquainted with it before his deep freeze, and that’s why he’s giving it such gentle treatment. Or maybe that’s just how Steve operates, all the time and with everyone. (Well, everyone who isn’t HYDRA. But then again, who isn't
HYDRA?)

Of course, Tony had straight up blowtorched a few before Cap and Peter could talk him out of it. He’s still grumbling into their ears about it now - muttering about tree huggers and PC culture - but is managing to subdue them by non-inflammatory means. Clint and Natasha are radio silence, as per usual, tag teaming a troupe of conifers with professional precision.

Thor is out of town this week, spending some quality time with Dr. Foster. Peter had been this close to asking him to bring an autograph back. This
close.

“What? That tree’s totally lame. Check out this one - ” Wade jabs his finger out at a gracefully swaying black willow. It isn’t putting up much of a fight against Tony, but it sure is nice to look at.

“Very nice.”

Peter suddenly remembers that he never thanked him for the rubber duck, but then Steve’s asking him to come over and give him a hand with the camperdown. Peter’s happy to, if it keeps the fragile old thing from getting damaged.

Later, Peter will see this for the separation tactic that it is. Whenever Deadpool drops in to extemporaneously help them battle a baddy, the team does this thing - this, this maneuver - where one of them always manages to stay between him and Deadpool. At all times. It takes him a long time to catch on, but the tip off really comes when Thor stays on the fringes of the action for a seriously conspicuous amount of time during an aquatic robot takeover. Thor - who generally serves as the dictionary definition of conspicuous - lingers nearby while Peter beats back some of the smaller deathbots, and Deadpool is out in the margins with him, fighting a lone big one. The rest of the team clobbers away at the massive mama ’bot, even the damn Hulk comes out to play, and all the while Thor keeps right where he is, pummeling the small fries.

Peter’s touched by their care and attention - especially since he knows that Thor really, really loves being at the center of all the high-stakes action - but he’s confused about why they think it’s necessary. If they wanted to discuss it with him, though, they would have sat him down and, you know, had a discussion about it.

So the team can keep doing its thing without announcing itself, and he can keep doing his thing (alone, with Deadpool, decompressing over the best burritos in town) without announcing himself. It’ll probably all work itself out naturally.

And here’s the thing: over the months, Peter has come to pretty much trust Deadpool, murderous psycho that he is. Even if the Avengers don’t trust the guy as far as they could throw him. (To be fair, though, they could probably throw him pretty far.) And really, Spider-Man is the only one in this whole Avengers equation whose schtick doesn’t include bloodbaths and the occasional revenge spree. The team isn’t really fit to throw stones. Okay, except Dr. Banner, who’s so gifted at throwing stones that he doesn’t even bother with it.

So yeah, Peter understands that Deadpool has his back. And if that means that most of New York City has witnessed him being carried off like a damsel in distress from the scene of a fight after a legendary KO, well, at least he’s home in time for dinner.

“Don’t forget to be a tidy Spidey, mkay?” Deadpool sometimes says, when he’s dumping Peter into his bed, and Peter’s still thinking of ways to explain away his temporary state of limited mobility to Aunt May. She’s under the impression that he falls down in the shower a lot.

“I still don’t know what that means!” Peter calls back, by which he means thank you.

Then Deadpool’s out the window. It’s not the greatest feeling in the world, knowing that practically all of his superhero peers know where he lives, what his name is, where he goes to school, or all of the above. But it’s not the worst feeling in the world, either, and Peter accepts the anxiety for what it’s worth. It’s an honor to be doing what he’s doing. The ability to fight crime is a rare gift and it’s worth some personal sacrifices. Even if that sacrifice is always having half your curly fries stolen. Deadpool constantly takes, but at unexpected moments, he also gives.

Gives really weird gifts, that is.

Case in point: Deadpool leaves a Bop-It on his doormat for his eighteenth birthday. It’s wrapped in pages torn out of someone’s personal calendar, highlighting and scribble all over the place. (He’s pretty sure at least two of the appointments on them read, “Date with a Detonator!”) Peter’s not sure how much he’s supposed to read into the whole choice of gift, but he actually does get a kick out of fiddling around with the thing. Twist it! Bop it! Turn it! It has its merits.

All the note says is:

My condolences for the loss of your jailbait status.

Deadpool xoxoxo

Between muggings and movie marathons, they have their quiet moments in the assorted parks of New York City. Sadly, they don’t really hang out in Prospect Park; all of the oldest, most gorgeous trees still need a couple years to be nursed back to full health and as is, it’s a fairly depressing sight. So they find other quiet, lulling spaces where Deadpool can talk about the voices in his head without it being a punchline. At least, not always punchline.

It’s nice, rooting around in the crawlspace of Deadpool’s head. The experience is something akin to reading an X-rated version of a Dr. Seuss book, but in a fun sort of way.
In the field, his theatrical whispers and killer sense of timing always make it a struggle to maintain an air of sobriety. Deadpool’s the kind of guy that belts out “Dirty Pop” when he uncovers a dirty cop, rewriting the lyrics on the fly as he sings and dances along. The job commands a certain level of respect and most of the other heroes on the block end up looking pretty solemn most of the time because of it. Well, that and the haunting memories of their own traumatic origin stories. Anyway, Peter should probably be more like them, wants to, even, but maybe that’s just not who he is.

A few of the Avengers are actually upset when Tony offers him a job on his graduation day. It derails the College Plan that was always going to be derailed. He’s so much more excited about the next few months - the next few years, Christ on a cracker - because of it, though. That sort of tells him that this is probably the right choice. Maybe. He’s supposed to be happy, right? Aunt May sure is.

They don’t come to his graduation ceremony; it would be weird and conspicuous if any of them did. But someone does leave a box of White Castle for him on his front stoop. It’s cooled off a bit by the time Peter scoops it up, but the chicken rings have kept the some of the heat from the fryer and he’s always liked fries cold anyway.

After Deadpool loses a foot shoving Peter out of the way of an errant circular saw from the thirty foot-tall death machine of the week, the team starts to chill out a little. Not in the moment, of course. In the moment, Deadpool doesn’t make a sound, just tucks and rolls, popping right back up on one black-booted foot, waving his gun around some more and taunting the nearest arm of the machine. Peter’s twenty, still laid out on the ground and maybe in shock. The battle rages on, but the foot just lays there in a pool of blood. It’s a left foot. Peter dully realizes that Deadpool will have to refurbish his suit again. It’s a mystery where he even gets his super-suit tailoring done. Tony does everyone else’s.
The recoil from Deadpool’s biggest, clunkiest gun actually knocks the guy off his single foot, balance ruined, but Peter scoots over just in time to cushion his fall. “Oof! Oh, well hello there, muffin! You make a mighty nice pillow, if I may say so.”

Peter’s really at a loss for words. Deadpool just gave a foot for him and now he’s thanking Peter – in his own special way, of course – for breaking his fall after tipping over from yet another heroic act no one’s paying him for. He gently rolls Deadpool off of him and crawls over to the foot, picking it up and crawling back over. Carefully tugging Deadpool’s newly truncated leg straight, Peter kneels to carefully presses the severed leg and foot stump to stump. He holds them there, waiting for the magic to happen.

“Kid . . . what are you doing?” Deadpool’s voice sounds strangely staid.

“I’m letting them knit back together. That’s how it works, right?” Just like that, the guy starts giggling out of nowhere.

“That is . . . that is just so cute! No, that is super not how my healing factor works, you silly goose. But thank you. This might be a useful weapon against the baddies, though.” Deadpool sits up and plucks the severed foot from Peter’s grip, hefts it in his hand like he’s considering lobbing it at the big death machine they’ve all been fighting. Apparently he decides that it wouldn’t accomplish much because he tosses the foot over his shoulder with an irreverent shrug.

“Aren’t you going to save it?” Peter hears himself ask.

Deadpool whips his head around like he’s somehow managed to be scandalized.

Save it?! How macabre! Imagine what my place would look like if I kept every piece cut off of me.” He shudders in melodramatic disgust. “Trophies everywhere. We are not in Hannibal, Peter.” Then he leans over and whispers, “See. I know big words too.” It’s a genuine whisper, this time. The moment evaporates when Thor lands in front of them and starts pounding away at the towering contraption that is now gradually rolling towards them. Peter realizes they’ve just been sitting here, chatting casually like a couple of lazy jackasses on a day at the beach.

And even though he knows he shouldn’t, before getting back to work, he can’t help but quip back, “You’ve got a useful ability, though. If I had to be stranded on a deserted island with anyone . . .”

It takes Deadpool a moment, but when he does react, he’s a flurry of motion - flailing his muscular arms and pointing at Peter to shout: “OH! You are one dark, twisted soul, young padawan! Yowzah!”

Peter smiles under his mask and ducks his head, hoping no one can see it. The odds aren’t good.

Soon enough, the machine is defeated, the team’s ready to head back to their tower, and Peter’s got a dilemma on his hands. He wouldn’t feel comfortable hauling Deadpool around and there’s no way he’s letting Deadpool hop all over town one-legged, so he badgers the team, saying, “Come on guys, it’s just for the night.” Which is how Deadpool winds up spending the night on one of Tony’s guest floors. Peter sees him to the Tower, laid out on a huge king bed, guzzling Gatorade and clearly wondering what he did to get there, and then Peter heads home for the night.

The next morning is Tuesday, lab day. He throws on one of the two dress shirts he owns, the white one, and his sensible could-be-working/could-be-hiking shoes. Then he goes to work; he hadn’t slept well, so he’s out the door half an hour early. The subway is quick and painless. By the time he’s in the Tower lobby, there’s no ignoring it. Now is the ideal time to check in on Deadpool, to quietly make sure no one’s put him out on the curbside.

When he finds Deadpool standing in the communal kitchen with the sacred carton of fresh-squeezed orange juice at his mouth, the new foot is only about a third smaller than the old one.

“Woah,” Peter says, instead of hello. “You’re like a salamander.”

Deadpool turns and spares him a brief up-and-down glance; “I’m sorry gorgeous, do I fucking know you?” He swallows another gulp of orange juice, but it ends up spewed across the room as he puts two and two together. “Holy fuck, holy fucking shit, Petey--is that you?
Peter raises his hand in a small wave. “Hi.”
“Spidey, my man, you’ve been holding out on me. That is a five o’clock shadow worth getting burned on, damn. . . “

“I just wanted to check in on you - y’know, make sure they hadn’t kicked you out or anything.” He makes a little shrug, trying not to scratch the back of his neck and failing, completely unsure of what to say. “Also, I work here.”

“For the big, bad, daddy Stark? Oh no, young Theon – ”

“Yeah, yeah, save it for the Renaissance Fair, asshat,” Tony intones, as if summoned by his name. He strolls into the room, making a beeline for the sesame seed bagels that JARVIS refuses to stock on Tony’s own floor. Peter has long theorized that JARVIS does things like this in order to force Tony to see another human face at least once per day.
“Actually, that’s not - ” Peter attempts to clarify.

At the same exact moment, Tony and Deadpool both exclaim ugh with feeling.

“Hey!” Deadpool whines. “Don’t steal my line, bro.”

“Hey!” Tony parrots, stationing himself in front of the coffee machine and toaster. “Don’t steal my orange juice, bro.”

“A new carton is on its way from the store, Master Stark,” JARVIS helpfully chimes in.

“See!” Deadpool points and hops from one foot to the other, the way a child in need of a bathroom does. It’s miracle he doesn’t fall flat on his face; his balance still has to be pretty shot. “My joke totally works!”

Peter decides that it’s safer to focus on his boss than to tell Deadpool that his Game of Throne references aren’t clever. He never really handles criticism well. “Are you normally up this early, sir?” he asks. It’s barely 8AM. Tony waves a hand idly, but there’s a sly edge to his mouth.

“Tony, call me Tony, I’ve told you a million times.” He takes a sip of boiling coffee. “I didn’t sleep last night, just got to the good part of a project, and I’d say more that I really don’t keep a regular sleep schedule.”

Deadpool fakes a gagging noise, hunching over the sink. Apparently, he legitimately struggles to handle normal socialization and the required dose of small talk that it includes. Or maybe it does bug him that Peter works for Tony.

Then Steve wanders in, in search of toast and Tony. It’s almost as if he’s forgotten that Deadpool is temporarily in residence because Steve’s face falls when he spots him bowed over the sink.

“If you’re going to throw up, I suggest you do it in the toilet.” It’s possibly the cattiest thing Peter’s ever heard out of the man’s mouth, and that man gets into bi-annual catfights with Tony Stark.

The banter draws out and snaps forward, and before he knows it, Peter’s two minutes away from being late to punch-in. Not that it’s an actual punch-in clock, it’s actually an app-based geo-locater – but whatever, he’s got to get going, can’t have his coworkers thinking he’s slacking off.

He slips out of the room, trying to fly under the radar - which he rarely has trouble with - but when he peeks over his shoulder, Deadpool is waving silently at him from behind the counter as Steve and Tony continue their verbal tennis match. Peter nods and feels weirdly happy as he heads back to his day job.

Peter’s twenty and three-quarters when Deadpool finally, inevitably makes a crass comment he just can’t abide by.

They’re all squeezed into a stinky alleyway, pondering what Clint claims to be the remains of a homeless person. But for all Peter can tell, they’re just staring at a puddle of glowing green goo and trying to figure out how to track down the culprit.

“Just follow the trail of dead hobos. Seems pret-ty obvious to me, compadre. This baddy knows how to get away with stuff. I mean, what’s one, what’s twenty? Who’s gonna miss ‘em?” Peter clinches his jaw, molars grinding tensely. It’s the smart thing to do, walking away. He’s closest to the mouth of the grimy alley, so he turns on his heel and makes for it without delay. Disengage, disengage.

“Peter?” Natasha questions.

“Nope!” Peter answers, trying to compact his rejection of everything in sight in a single word.

“What’s the dealio?” Peter makes the mistake of looking back. Deadpool’s watching him, a questioning tilt to his head. Somehow innocent in a way, but still so, so jaded. He doesn’t even understand what he’s done wrong.

Peter wants to explain, calmly, rationally. Wants to exit smoothly. But the outrage bubbles up in his gut and he turns his head away to resist the doomed urge to yell some sense into someone he considers a friend. He can’t talk productively when his head is like this. But Deadpool is giving him these puzzled little blinks and Peter can’t help but snap, “You can’t just joke about human life like that, Deadpool!”

His outburst gets all misinterpreted and Steve is moving between them, then Natasha, then Clint. “Let him be,” Steve orders in his Serious Voice, like they’re in The Dark Knight or some crap.

He doesn’t know who Steve is talking to, really, but it doesn’t matter. Peter isn’t actually angry, he just needs to extract himself from this situation and cool off before he says something regrettable. Despite that, he does want to disincentivize Deadpool from making this kind of gross, mean, freaking uncool comment again.

He speaks to Deadpool over Steve’s meaty shoulder. It’s clear he’s still puzzled, glancing from face to face, arms flung out in perplexed supplication. “Look, I know - at least, I
hope you were kidding, but you can’t just. . . ” Peter shakes his head, plants his hands on his hips in dejection, and doesn’t know how to finish.

Then he turns to the team. “I appreciate what you guys are trying to do for me, but if you want me to be a fully autonomous adult, then you have to start treating me like one.”
With that, Peter strides out into the sunlit avenue and pretends not to hear the faint whisper of biiiiiiig word from the back end of the alley.

Peter takes himself on a long walk around Central Park, after that. He stares at the geese and tries to cool off, think it through, consider the reasons why on earth Deadpool would believe saying that kind of crap was okay.

He knows that Deadpool says things he doesn’t mean; that his verbal disregard for others’ lives is really just an outlet, a reflection of disregard for his own life. But what if Deadpool really does think that homeless people’s lives don’t matter? Peter’s not sure what he would do with that. Not sure they could still be friends. And he’s not sure how he’d convince Deadpool to think otherwise, either. Which would leave them at an impasse.

Maybe Deadpool has dealt with homeless people himself in the past? And feels like he knows enough to say shitty stuff about them, even though he has no right? As his feet tire, they turn Peter back towards his apartment. He’s off duty for the next few days and he takes advantage of them, tries to get some perspective.
It’s really quite possible Deadpool was observing a simple trend American society: nobody comes looking for missing homeless people. Honestly, it even gives the team a decent psychological profile of the baddy to work off of. Maybe he should just let it go; it may have been a one-off comment, anyway.

A few days later, he finds a dandelion taped to the window sill of his apartment, still in its white fluffy phase of life. There’s a strip of paper taped onto it. All it says is Sorry in wobbly green crayon, a doodle of Deadpool’s face shedding a single teardrop taking up half the available space. But Peter’s basically already forgiven him. He’ll keep an ear out for the next time Deadpool crosses the line and let him have it when he inevitably does. So the next time they respond to the same emergency, he gives Deadpool a single nod. And after the mission, they talk the issue to death until they both feel a lot better about it. It feels far too easy, but somehow, just like that, they’re cool again.

It’s midnight after a tag-team patrol and the broth from the pho is flying everywhere. That’s when Deadpool tugs his mask all the way off for the first time. He pinches it by the little Alfalfa bit of extra fabric at the top that always makes his head look like a baby ghost or a comment bubble - in a strangely charming sort of way - and yanks it up and over his head, tossing the mask over his shoulder.

Deadpool waves a dismissive hand at his scarred face, glancing quick and perfunctory in Peter’s general direction without really looking, and says, “I know, right?” before crouching back over his steaming bowl of pho.

He’s seen the dude’s mouth and chin plenty of times, from when they share dinner and he’ll pull the mask up to the underside of his nose. So he’s not exactly surprised, even if he’d always imagined the guy with a straight-edged buzz cut. Okay, and plus eyebrows.

The first thing out of Peter’s mouth, though, is: “Did you have a tattoo, before?” Which is weird. Objectively, it is a weird thing to say. Deadpool’s head raises and he stares directly at the building across from them as he thinks about the question for a moment, like he’s about to craft a ridiculous story about a burlesque Tinkerbell emblazoned across his back or the elven script on the One Ring looping around each nipple. But what he ends up saying is: “Yeah. Yeah I did. It was . . . ” He trails off, deep in thought. A sleeve tribal? A curved chessboard on one butt cheek? It suddenly feels very important to know.

Peter doesn’t interrupt the thought, though, and his patience is rewarded. “I had a gargoyle on this bicep, in a rectangle sort of shape . . . it made a lot sense looking at it, but it’s sort of hard to describe,” Deadpool says after a few more moments of thought. He taps his left bicep half-heartedly and Peter’s already nodding because, yeah, the visual does make sense to him.

“The kind you find on the side of gothic buildings?”

“Yeah, that’s right. Just like those.” He isn’t smiling, but seeing him like this is somehow better than seeing - or, more often, knowing
- that he’s smiling. The texture and shading of his face looks sort of like an up-close look at Mars in this lighting, the blinking red-yellow streetlight far below them. He looked textured, earthy. Like the shadowed side of Mars, out from under the glare of the sun.

Peter’s twenty-one, coming home from a grueling day of typing inertly at his desk in a roomful of neckless academics. He’s slowly wedging the door to his brand-new apartment open inch by inch while he checks his phone for new texts when the entryway blows sky high. It’s a good thing he kept the door mostly closed because it shields him from the brunt of the explosion, even as it slams him into and nearly through the plaster of the hallway wall.

His mind is whirring before he even sits up. Motion sensor activated? Wire-triggered? Either way, once the greyish smoke clears, his windows are in glittering pieces scattered across the street five stories below and his studio apartment is a smoldering wreck. The living room is essentially gone and the bathroom door hangs diagonally off its hinges, blackened on one side. There’s a decent chance someone might show up to make sure the job was done properly, so he ought to hightail it now. The urge to pick through the wreckage and see what’s managed to survive is strong, but urges don’t get you very far in this business. Which is probably why so many superheroes dislike Deadpool and can’t find it in themselves to respect his methods. The guy has zero impulse control, Peter thinks fondly.

Peter jogs sedately down the stairs and pushes out into the crowded sidewalk, trying to project an aura of serenity, like he’s not wondering who just incinerated his place and why. There’ve been a few coffee dates lately, all with different people, but none of them went that badly. He’s betting this is the work of a career villain. Rat bastard.
He calls the grad student he’s been sharing lab space with at Stark’s gig, Lisa, and asks if he can spend the night at their place. They’re pretty friendly and are apparently buying his story about a gas leak and an empty bank account. He’s welcome to crash at their apartment – they’re over at their boyfriend’s for the weekend, so he’s also welcome to any leftovers in the fridge. Lisa is a blessing.

It goes without saying that Aunt May cannot be alerted to any kind of disruption to his happy, hunky-dory life. Storyline. Thing. It’s just good fortune - or paranoia - that he’s gotten in the habit of leaving his most valuable possessions in the small safe built into his laboratory desk drawer at work. It’s a relief to know he’s got a few guaranteed non-incinerated things: a picture of him, his aunt, and uncle, a pressed flower from his kindergarten days, and some cash he’s been saving in case the stock market crashes again. He knows it’s all safe where it is, so he goes straight from his apartment to Lisa’s, a twenty-four block hike.

Their apartment building is nicer than any that he’s ever seen the inside of, and Lisa’s instructed concierge at the front desk – there’s a front desk! – to hand him a spare key that he’s required to return by Sunday at 5PM. As it turns out, the apartment is on the nineteenth floor. Further to fall, he thinks, but with a nicer view. He’s never begrudged someone so little for roosting someplace nice enough to have a working elevator. Inside the apartment, the first thing he does is drink a glass of water. Then another. Well, no; the first thing he does is find the cabinet where the drinking glasses are kept. Third thing is to check for injuries. There’s probably some debris stuck in him somewhere, if the wide-eyed look of the concierge was anything to go by.

He grasps his shirt from the back and yanks it over his head and throws it on the ground like the awful guest he is and moves languidly toward the bathroom, admiring the seamless glass windows circling the living room and the tasteful abstract paintings hung over Lisa’s couch.

Before he’s even out of the room, there’s a tap on the glass and Peter turns to see if there’s a bird in need of help. There is, except it’s Deadpool, hanging straight down from his toes on the window ledge from the next floor up. He tries to speak to Peter through the glass, but it comes out extremely muffled. Peter’s face must show it, too, because he stops what sounds like mid-sentence from the cadence of it, and scoots over to the next room, inch by inch and just by his toes. His arms sway at lot. It kind of looks like he’s upside down at a rave. Peter slowly follows his progress to Lisa’s bedroom, where he thankfully finds a window with a latch. Peter slides it open as wide as it will go and grasps Deadpool’s forearms to help haul him inside before he takes a nineteen story drop.

It’s only their combined upper body strength that makes the move possible. They still wind up on the floor, sprawled out.

“I swung by to say hi, would you like some pad see-ew, when I happened to notice that your crib has been buh-bombed. Not that it wasn’t the bomb before. It’s just that this time, there was a real bomb. And I thought to myself, well where did my little unicorn go? So I called Stark, had him triangulate your location through your cell phone, and voila here we are. So . . .” Deadpool gets up on one elbow and stares down at him dead on. “Whodunnit, Spidey? I’ll avenge you, my dove.”

Trust Deadpool to keep calling him every pet name under the sun even after he’s learned Peter’s real name.

“Don’t know. Probably a professional villain. And I don’t need you to avenge me, I can defend my own honor. I’m an adult.”

Deadpool swats at his arm like a miffed Southern belle. “I know that. But pumpkin-butt, they’ve wronged you. I’ll make it all better.” Peter sighs. This is not a debate worth having.

“You wanna make things better? I might have some shrapnel in me. You can help me check.” Something small and numerous is definitely digging into his back, now that the adrenaline is wearing off and he can actually feel his own body. Deadpool pops up, goes directly from lying prone to standing straight as a needle. He offers Peter a hand up, which Peter is not so proud as to refuse.

It’s quiet and bright in the bathroom. There are mirrors everywhere, even a little one in the shower, stuck to the wall with suction cups – to make sure you get all the suds out, maybe? – and going by the tenseness of his shoulders, making Deadpool face a mirror at length is a no go. Peter turns his back to the biggest mirror behind the sink so that Deadpool doesn’t have to see himself there. He gets the sense that Deadpool doesn’t like to be reminded that he’s just a suit to most people, maybe even to himself. The mask pulls tight across the cheekbones, a grin or a grit, then he’s turning Peter by his shoulders again so he can get at his back and sides.

Rifling through the cabinet below the sink, Deadpool comes back with a pair of tweezers. Peter knows this because the coldness of the metal feels nice, right before it’s digging into his skin and prying out something jagged and white-hot painful.

Conversation. Conversation is a good distraction.

“So what’s your name, anyway?” The painful piece of shrapnel stops moving at the - now that Peter thinks about it - rather abrupt question.

“You don’t know? I thought everyone knew. Didn’t the Avengers spoil it for you?”

“Nope.”

“That is . . . rare and unusual. They spoil everything. Well, baby boy. My name is Wade Wilson. Pretty sweet name, I know.”

“That is a pretty sweet name.”

“So tell me, Spidey,” and of course it’s right back to the love-names, “why come here, to some random work buddy’s digs, when, according to Lord Stark, your Aunt’s place is both closer and probably has a better stocked fridge?” Peter has to think about how to answer that one. Deadpool – Wade - has thrown the first few pieces of shrapnel in the little trashcan and is halfway through extracting the next one by the time Peter figures out something to say.

“I didn’t want her to know. Even if I told her it was just a bad plumbing leak, she’d still worry.”

“Are you –” Deadpool is interrupted by his own snicker, a billowing puff of air against his bare shoulder. “Are you spinnin’ lies to your little old lady?”

Peter can’t scrub the back of his neck without it pulling at the lacerations and whatnot, but he wants to. It is pretty shitty of him. But. “She’s too old to take bad news, man.”

Wade doesn’t seem to be able to resist, though. “But . . . aren’t you worried you’ll be caught in a web of lies one day?” His last word overlaps with Peter’s first, who is sort of done with this conversation.

Yes, yes I get the joke - webs, lies, spiders, I’m a horrible person, we are completely on the same page, Wade.”
“I never said that! You’re the nicest, politest, most thoughtfulest super-duper out there.” He’s still saying it in his sing-song way, but the proclamation still seems . . . candid?
Peter takes until they’re down to the last of the shrapnel to think of how to respond. “Well,” and, yeah, that’s as far as he got. “Thanks, I guess.”

Stark makes his move when he knows Peter is vulnerable, without housing and unwilling to seek out family for room and board. Before Sunday is up, the deal is struck. There’s no paperwork to sign, just a change of mailing address. Very convenient, if suspicious to any government official curious enough to inquire. Presumably, there aren’t any. But probably, there are. He takes off work on Monday to move what’s left of his stuff to the Tower. He stakes out the 47th floor, prowling through each of its too many rooms with a strange mix of joy and defeat. Luckily, the place is fully and artfully furnished, though he’d be willing to bet that half of this stuff wasn’t here a week ago. And then he unpacks his two boxes. He really needs some more clothes, and if he's thinking it, then the situation must be dire indeed.

Still, the walls are looking pretty bare by the time he’s done unpacking, which takes him all of forty minutes. He’s browsing through posters online (most of them soothing watercolors because he could use a little soothing in his life) when Wade careens in through his bedroom window carrying four milkshakes and a towering pair of swirly straws.

“I come bearing gifts!” he announces, stumbling over the empty cardboard boxes in his permanent state of drunk-on-sunshine and spilling the fourth milkshake all over Peter’s new bedspread. Chocolate. His favorite. One trip to the laundry room and three alternately calm and raucous hours of Super Smash Bros Melee on the hallowed Gamecube later, Deadpool flings himself out of the window from whence he came. Peter reclines on the ridiculous sectional, arms folded behind his head, feeling so, so content. There’s a knock at the door, and when he pops up and opens it, Clint is there.

“Hey, man!” Peter says, suddenly feeling kind of bad about not inviting Clint to join them, especially when he knows that Clint loves milkshakes and gaming almost as much as he does.

“Hey, Peter,” Clint begins, looking happy to see him but also a little awkward. “So, um . . . There’s sort of this alarm that goes off, whenever people on a certain list enter the building. It’s a JARVIS thing.”

“Yeah?”

“Yeah . . . and Wilson’s on that list. So like - is him coming over going to be a regular thing or was this just a housewarming party?”

“Oh, uhh, I don’t really know.” Peter’s never had to seriously consider the quantity of time they spend together. It mostly seems to just sort of happen. They happened to hang out today; it wasn’t planned or anything. Naturally occurring phenomena. Inevitable, almost. In a reassuring, universal constant kind of way. “Pretty often? If that’s okay?”

“Yeah! No, that’s totally okay, we’ll take him off the list then. I mean, I don’t have a problem with it, you guys can do whatever you want. You’re an adult, you can do whatever you want with your butt - FREE TIME, I MEAN YOUR FREE TIME, okay, yeah, I’m going to go -” He makes a hand-waving gesture that could mean ‘go eat dinner’ or, alternatively, ‘report to my Peter-surveilling overlords.’

Peter waves him out the door, well and truly past worrying about it.

They’re watching America’s Funniest Videos per Wade’s request; Peter suspects that he must be one of those people who refuses to use computers for their destined purpose of cat videos and schadenfreude. A sad being that only knows how to use the internet for work purposes. Otherwise, how else could he enjoy this crap?

The only reason Peter’s putting up with mind-numbing daytime television is that there’s coconut dal and goat curry to focus on instead. They go halfsies on both because sharing is caring.

Wade’s already chugged his mango lassi in a minute flat and gotten massive brain freeze. Purportedly, his healing factor doesn’t really help with that. Peter drinks his slow and steady while Wade bawls with laughter at an attempt to skateboard off a diving board gone horribly wrong. But really, was there a way for it to go right?

During a commercial break, Peter squats down in front of the couch to find a bunched up, discarded napkin. Apparently, his hairdo is riveting from this new angle. Wade pats the top of Peter’s hair very carefully, like he’s expecting to be electrocuted. Or punched. “Your hair is so voluptuous - I mean, voluminous.”

“Hey. . . uh, thanks.” Peter doesn’t move away from him, is in fact sort of enjoying the feeling, but Wade drops his hand anyway.

“I wish I had hair.” Wade says it simply, a failed attempt to make a loaded comment light-hearted.

“You look good without it, though,” Peter protests. His hand bumps into the napkin under the couch. He grabs it and puts it back on the table where it can’t escape its trashcan-bound fate.

"Uhhhh. . ." Wade intones, dripping disbelief. His mask is pulled up only to his nose, and only for the straw of his lassi.

“No, I mean, I like it the way it is. There’s no, y’know, distractions. From all the rest.”

“I don’t even have eyebrows, Peter!” Wade shouts it like he’s been insulted. Like Peter’s lying.

“Well. Who needs ‘em.” Peter resettles himself on his side of the couch.

“This face!” Wade points at his face vigorously. “This face does!”

“Yeah, okay, your skin texture kind of reminds me of the back of Quirrell’s head when he’s being incinerated by the power of love, but not like – in a bad
way. I meant, I mean—” But Wade’s already holding up a hand, hunkered down into a full-belly laugh.

“There—” he huffs for breath, resting his head on the back of the couch, “There is no coming back from that. Oh my Jonas. . . ”

Peter takes that for the topic change it is, concentrates on his plate, and tries not to talk anymore.

He knows that Wade stops by his floor of the tower sometimes when Peter’s not home because of the Cheeto dust left on the seat of his couch or the channel the TV’s on when it blinks on. He can usually retroactively chart his progress through the apartment from the dirty knife left in his kitchen sink or the smell of Irish Spring that his bathroom didn’t have before. What Peter doesn’t know is whether or not he intentionally drops in when he knows Peter won’t be there.

It is truly a wonder and a miracle Wade hasn’t just . . . shown up at R&D where Peter works downstairs, visiting out of curiosity and a complete disregard for personal boundaries. Peter doesn’t stress about the secret identity thing the way he did when he was first starting out, but it’s still his strong preference to remain under the radar at all times, if possible.

And it’s a good thing he’s got the superhero gig, too, otherwise he would literally never need to leave Stark Tower.

Wade’s quick to point it out, too, and insists that they go play some quality skeeball sometime, which is tempting. There may or may not be some childlike doodles of them playing skeeball together framed by Lucky Charms-themed magnets on his fridge. And bowling and mini putt. And doing one of those speed cup-stacking contests. At least, he thinks that’s what they’re doing - maybe they’re just drinking copious amounts of alcohol. But Peter’s always got miles of data sets and test models to run, and actual miles of the city to cover every night, so they have their nights in more often than not.

They do have a ball cooking together, though -- and what do you know, Wade’s better at it than him.

“No, silly goose, you have to do it like this," Wade instructs him, demonstrating how to knead the pasta dough with the heel of his hand. His hands have a rhythm to their movement that Peter cannot for life of him replicate, but it’s mesmerizing to watch.

“Did you, like, apprentice at a bakery or something? Where did you learn to do this?”

“Uhhh, watching the cooking channel when I’m trying to fall asleep, duh," Wade answers, like that’s obviously where all great chefs and bakers acquire their skills. Peter gives up on doing the dough right and applies himself to the vodka sauce. They switch jobs when it comes time to churn the dough through the gnocchi maker - of course Tony supplied his kitchen with a gnocchi maker, what’s a kitchen without one - because even Peter couldn’t screw that up. Except that apparently, he can. Wade has to unstick the thing, since the dough’s gotten in parts where it shouldn’t be and is jamming the whole machine up. He mocks Peter kindly for it, almost in a perfunctory sort of way, like he doesn’t want to but it’s his job, what are you going to do.

As Peter queues up tonight’s feature presentation, Mulan, Wade begs and begs to watch Adventure Time, but Peter just can’t do it. (He’s heard from a reliable source - god bless that Lisa - that the show has a very unflattering depiction of spider biology.)

When Wade thinks Peter isn’t looking, he adds more cream than the recipe calls for and whole fistfuls of basil. There are no doubts that it’s an improvement.

Wade crawls through his window and doesn’t do one of his patented paint-me-like-one-of-your-french-girls poses in front of the TV. Just a regular old flop onto the couch. That’s when Peter knows something is wrong.

There’s something about the guy that makes it a real challenge to comfort him, but Peter finds himself easing toward him hesitantly anyway. “Everything okay?”

“No, yeah, everything’s super duper.”

“Okay.” Peter finds himself grabbing a random book off the shelf and leaning up against it, pretending to read; feeling strangely obstinate. Five minutes pass. Peter starts counting the number of prepositions on the page.

Wade sighs. “It’s just -” He cuts himself off.

“It’s just?” Peter settles down on the footrest, book in hand. Damned if he’s even glanced at the title.

“Nothing,” Wade’s quick return, crossing his arms where he lays - like he wants to share, but he desperately doesn’t
to.

Wade stays that way for awhile, poised almost like a mummy, so Peter has to turn the page a few times until Wade sighs even louder this time, trying to expel some impotent frustration.

“So there was this lady today.”

“Okay.” Peter waits for the rest.

“Some of my mask got torn off - okay a lot of it got torn off - ‘cause there was this guy, shooting this big thingy-thing and everything was goin’ swell
until some apartment building fell on me, which, fine, I signed on for that. But then some more apartment building was gonna fall on this fucking lady, and I busted my ass to run over and move her out of the way, but she saw enough of my face that she screamed and ran away all on her own. Good news for that ungrateful bitch, it was the opposite direction of the falling shit, but then I got hit with more apartment building . . .”

“Oh, Wade . . .” That sounds like the worst day ever. Also, that seems like a really disproportionate reaction to an aesthetically challenging face, in Peter’s opinion. But hey, adrenaline does pretty crazy stuff to the people’s heads.

“I mean, it’s not like I can blame her, I have the same instinct every time I bump into a mirror. My face is a living poop emoji. But running and screaming? That’s some strong shit.”
“That’s not true.” Peter feels he has no choice but to protest. Because it isn’t true. “Your face is. . . is elegant, like a sculpture. It, ah . . . it - ”

Wade waves a hand to forestall him, still staring straight up at the ceiling, “Woah Nelly, I can take it from there. It’s sweet of you to try and console me about my butt-ugliness, sweet cheeks, but it just ain’t happenin’ today. The whole rest of the world is waiting out there, ready to enthusiastically reject my face.”

He doesn’t say it, but Peter can hear it in his voice, the words I was beautiful, once.

The apartment’s so quiet the cooing of the pigeons outside is audible.

“I mean,” Wade starts up again, gesturing expansively upwards, “I don’t even have a face, when you think about it.” He picks at the raised edge of an indent on his utility belt.

“Wade, you definitely have a face. And it’s a good one, even if it’s not the one you’ve always had.”

Wade sighs, medium force this time. “Yeah, fine, Petey.” He picks a paperweight off the coffee table, then immediately sets it back down. “Can we watch Adventure Time
now?”

All of the fight goes out of Peter at once. “Yeah, man,” he says, already glancing around the room for the remote. “We can.”

Wade starts sleeping his couch and never really stops.

It’s sort of fascinating, really, to realize that he snores and drools just like anyone else.

Peter likes it. It’s not unlike adopting a german shepard, this whole Wade thing.

On Peter’s twenty-second birthday, Wade delivers his gift in person. It’s a sugar-free, lemon-flavored lollipop, the kind you can only get at the dentist’s office. Peter accepts it gratefully, fervently hoping that he didn’t literally steal candy from a baby. Or, you know, rob a dentist’s office.

Wade hands it to him, says, “Happy birthday, snookums!” and backflips off the windowsill. Apparently, that’s it. Peter doesn’t know what more he was expecting, but it wasn’t a three word conversation and piece of candy.

Not that the thing isn’t delicious. It is. Maybe it’s just because he hasn’t been able to make it to a single dentist appointment in years, but it tastes incredible.

Tony and Peter are cracking away at a thermonuclear coupler (which is only a small working part of a larger machine that, in all honesty, neither of them have any idea what it will do, when Tony asks, with the sort of nonchalance that comes from desperately wanting to know something: “So how’d you tame him?”

“What do you mean?” Peter says, flipping the blueprints around with a swipe of his finger for the twentieth time.

“How do you tame a wild Deadpool?” Tony asks, nonchalance fading a little as Peter looks up to regard him, thoughtful and surprised. “What’s your secret?”

“Well,” Peter says, trying to recall the process. “I stayed calm, I fed him, I let him know I wasn’t a threat . . . ” Peter feels ashamed of himself for talking about Wade in those terms, but it’s not even a bit inaccurate.

“Huh,” Tony says, eyebrows raised in slight bemusement, like that wasn’t the answer he was expecting. Wasn’t expecting him to play along, maybe.

But apparently, he hasn’t tamed Wade well enough. House training’s a tricky business.

He’s just finishing some French toast at the communal dining table when they corner him.

“Peter, I hate to tell you this, but that bitch keeps stealing all of my super chunky peanut butter. Can’t you get him to keep out for one goddamn day? I mean,
you guys have your own kitchen up there.” Clint says it snappily, with played-up frustration and jabbing his finger emphatically upwards, like he’s expecting a laugh track to play. But nobody laughs, because it turns out they’re all actually a little pissed, if the frowns carved in their faces are any indication.

“I think he’s harmless,” Dr. Banner calls from over from the settee, poised over his laptop. A rare moment of interjection. Peter deeply appreciates his support.

“Look, Peter. I understand that having Deadpool here makes you feel more at home. But he has no respect for personal boundaries. It would be different if he brought his own food, but he doesn’t.” He wants to feel betrayed that Natasha doesn’t have his back on this one, but she’s got sushi and protein powder on the line. He can respect that.
This is the moment Deadpool chooses to waltz in on, wearing that boozy air of his like a heavy cologne.

He clasps his hands together insouciantly and announces: “Well hello there, super friends! And how are we this lovely afternoon? Hmmm?”

With the object of contention in the room, half of the team looks ready to grab torches and pitchforks, so Peter steps around Clint and herds Wade right back into the elevator. “Okay guys, we’ll work on that,” he informs them very seriously, mashing the close door button madly as Wade waves excitedly at them from over his shoulder. It’s like he knows, simultaneously, exactly what he does to people and also has no clue at all. They hop out on the 47th floor and immediately fall onto the couch and into Halo; as it loads, Peter tells Wade in brief terms that he needs to stop eating other people’s food and holds little hope that the request will stick.

That night, he and Tony are working on a different design, one for an underwater motorcycle, when Tony can no longer resist throwing his two cents in. Again. It’s like watching earthquakes steadily increase in frequency. Nothing to do for it but sit there and ride it out.

“Well, you guys are practically dating anyway.” Tony tosses the comment over his shoulder, offhand, the way you throw away a balled up piece of paper without really aiming. Out of nowhere, too, no prelude or previous conversation it segued from. Peter shakes his head, trying shy away from what his thoughts are doing, but the wires twist in his head and realization rushes in.

“. . . I'm sorry, what?” Suddenly, he can’t think of a single intelligent thing to say.

Tony turns around like this is news to him and it makes everything even worse: “You mean you haven't fucked yet?”

He says it like he’s prodding at something he thought was only a corner of the bigger picture, before. Looking for confirmation of a suspicion. Is that what everyone thinks is going on? How long has the team assumed that they’re . . . a thing?

And okay, Wade’s over. A lot.

And the Avengers’ running commentary on Wade tends to be pretty accurate, but . . .

Dating?

Fucking?

Peter can’t imagine it.

But hell, now he's starting to.

They’re making paninis together for brunch when the message comes through. JARVIS announces it with total matter of factness, a hollow echo all around them, rebounding off of every surface in the warmly lit kitchen. Fury’s on his way to the tower and he wants to talk to them. Both of them. Alone.

This moment has been a long time in coming. They move to a living room on one of the communal floors so it feels like less of an invasion of any one person’s territory. Peter, who’s never run afoul of Nick Fury before, is shaking in his boots. Wondering if he’s about to get kicked off the team, wondering if it’s worth it. And then deciding, nervous sweat beading up on the back of his neck, Yeah, it’d probably be worth it.

Wade is just sitting there, literally filing his nails.

Then Fury marches into the room; Wade’s response is out of his mouth before anyone can even draw breath.

"Shiver me timbers! I've got the jimjams, Spidey: the great pirate king has made his appearance!" Wade flounces around like a mackerel on dry land, then tucks himself against Peter's back. His head pops over Peter's shoulder just long enough to stage-whisper, "Protect meeeeeee. . . " in his ear.

"Save the theatrics, Wilson." Fury actually doesn't look as pissed as he could be. Maybe he sees what Peter sees. Probably not. “I’m here to make you aware of the fact that you’re not breaking any rules by permanently residing or briefly habitating - or whatever the fuck you two chuckleheads do in your free time - in Stark Tower. It’s a privately owned building and it’s entirely up to Stark who’s allowed inside. I’m also here to tell you that you’ve been taken off the suspected terrorist watch list. You’ll be on a general government watchlist for the rest of your life, naturally, but Jesus, look at your goddamn outfit.”

Yeah, Peter has to admit, that is a lot of stabby gear for one guy to be wearing. And just like that, Fury’s wheeling back out of the room again. Apparently, that’s all he had to say.

Peter sags, a popped balloon of anxious energy, and splays himself lifelessly across the couch. Wade perches on the arm of the couch. He leans over and asks, “Twilight Princess?”
Peter shuts his eyes, wills himself not to think, to just go with his gut, and replies: “Twilight Princess.”

“Are we going to do anything for Veterans Day? I’d say we all count,” Steve says.

“Movie night?” Tony suggests with tentative hope for the millionth time, as he does every holiday season; a broken record, waiting to be struck from the shelf.

“Stop trying to make movie night happen, Tony,” Clint snaps. “Movie night is never going to happen. So they all end up potlucking their Veteran's Day dinner, where the argument still continues.

“None of us count except Steve,” Natasha weighs in. Apparently spywork doesn’t count as service to your country anymore. Or maybe it’s just the sorts of things they’ve done in the name of spywork that disqualify them from being celebrated in Natasha’s book.

“Actually, I,” Wade corrects with his pointer finger in the air, “am a veteran.”

“Woah, really?” Peter can’t help but say in surprise.

“Yeparoo. Me and authority didn’t get along so good, though. And viola! Now I’m my own boss.”

“Yeah?”

“Oh yeah. I pick my jobs as I like, kickin’ asses and takin’ heads at my liesure. You know, as you do, as you do,” Wade nods affirmingly as he carves into the ham. "Sure, that’s what you do with your day,” Natasha says. Doubt hangs heavy on her words.

“I’m a goddamn mercenary!” Wade exclaims, jamming the carving knife deep into the roast in a sudden fit of pique. “Mercenary,” he whispers, wiggling fanned-out fingers beneath his chin.

Natasha glares witheringly at him. “When was the last time you killed someone for money?” she accuses.

He tries to count the months on his fingers, but it doesn’t pan out because he runs out of hands. Incredibly, he doesn’t say anything in response.

Instead, Wade throws his arms up in the air, whips off the apron, throws it down on table, and stomps out of the dining room. “Yeah,” she says to the room. “That’s what I thought.”

“Sorry about Veteran’s Day dinner,” Peter says as he suffers through some early Jim Carrey comedy sketches for Wade. The guy still seems a little sullen from Natasha’s commentary from the day before - his version of sullen, anyway.

“Nah,” Wade denies. “I’m just glad I probably won’t get invited to Thanksgiving now. We don’t even do Thanksgiving, not really. Definitely not on the same day.”

“We?” Peter asks, totally lost.

“Canadians,” Wade clues him in, channel surfing to find something new to watch now that the last sketch has come to a blessed end.

“Ca-Canadians?!” Peter exclaims.

“Uh, yeah, Canadian. You know, maple syrup, Wolverine, ham masquerading as bacon.” Wade turns to him like he doesn’t understand what Peter’s deal is. “Is that going to be a problem?”

“Wha - no! No!” Peter waves his hands frantically. “I just . . . Oh I don’t know, I guess I always thought of you as this red-blooded, alpha male Amurrican . . . y’know?”
“Eh,” Wade shrugs, tugging his mask off casually. “I guess I can see it.”

They decide to leave it at that.

There’s a marathon of raunchy and extremely insensitive SNL broadcasts from the late 80’s on and Wade hops right on it. Peter figures he’s in for the long haul then, too, so he go grabs his laptop and brings it back to the couch to entertain himself properly. He’s pulling up Starcraft, waiting for it to load, when he comes to the realization that he’ll be waiting till the day he dies to hear a Canadian “a” coming out of Wade’s mouth. Better yet, a Canadian “eh.” Peter can dream.

JARVIS dings in, tells them the delivery dude’s arrived, and Peter goes down to the lobby to pay him. Tamales this time. The marathon runs and runs and runs while Starcraft continues to be infinitely more interesting, but the tamales are the real point of unity in the room. Like little sleeping bags of love, cornmeal, and comfort.

As he digs into his tamale, Peter closes his eyes for a little while, since they’ve started to sting from staring at the screen for so long. Once his eyes have gotten a bit of rest, he settles in to watch Wade, who is totally absorbed in his food.

He’s admiring how peaceful Wade is, how even the texture of his skin seems to have a smooth, calm movement to it. The harsh glare of the TV actually manages to accentuate the planes of his face - and there’s still something very chiseled about Wade’s face, as if hewn from red-veined marble. There’s something in the shape of his brow, the firm line of his nose. Something elegant. Something sexy.

Peter finds himself inspecting the way his brow wrinkles and unwrinkles as Wade unwraps the corn husk of his el pastor tamale with his eyes glued to the TV screen. The image is ruined when he shoves the entire tamale into his mouth and takes about a full minute to swallow it.

He can understand why Wade’s self-conscious, of course. He just doesn’t agree.

When the team ends up rescuing a pack of bigwigs from a troop of miniature tornadoes parading through Wall Street, the suits pool their spare pocket money together and foist a
generous donation upon everyone on the team. They do not take no for an answer.

“Ugh,” Clint shudders. “I feel so dirty.”

Peter nods in agreement. This is the kind of unclean that never washes off. Still, he really wants a shower.

“They do realize we’re not bellhops, right?” Dr. Banner questions. “As in, we don’t work for tips?” He’s liable to give his to the nearest Red Cross.

“No need to enlighten them!” Wade is rubbing crisp stacks of hundred dollar bills over his masked cheeks like they’re the hottest new exfoliant.

Tony holds onto his donation for all of two minutes before thunking it down in cupped hands held above the head of a mendicant swathed in tattered blankets on a street corner, rocking silently back and forth. Steve’s face had done a weird thing, then, like he has just as many mixed feelings about it as Peter did.

Natasha looks like she’s regretting having done the top one percent any favors, but she’s carefully thumbing through the bills all the same, counting.

The team splits up, going their separate ways for dinner. Steve and Clint are partial to Thai, Natasha partial to solitude, and Tony just plain picky.

Peter and Wade order take out from the nearest trusted deli. Peter goes in alone and meets Wade in front of the Balto statue, their usual Thursday spot. Wade likes to sit on the dog’s back.

“What are you gonna spend your cut on?” Peter considers the likely options as he unwraps his turkey sandwich. “A moped? 3-D stickers? Weed?”

Wade shakes his head, heavy with sagacity. “Weed is fun, Peter, but guns are forever.” He yanks his mask over his head, flings it somewhere behind them, and chomps down on his sandwich. Three kinds of meat. Chipotle sauce everywhere.

His mouth works around the food, and Peter watches the words spill from his mouth without tuning in, until Wade throws in some vigorous hand gestures.

"So then I said: holy Pontius Pilot, Batman! And then the guy didn't even laugh! What a jerk. Wait, Batman exists in this universe right? Is he Marvel or DC? Marvel? No, DC. That’s gotta be DC . . . right?"

The delightful curve of his musculature, those arms. You could stack crates on those shoulders, no problem. And how did he never notice all the dips and hugs in the cut of Deadpool’s supersuit as a hormonal teenager?

“Right,” Peter answers distantly.

“Whew! Okay, good. I was kinda freakin’ out, there.”

Peter’s mid-battle with a volcano monster, about to get splashed with a ball of lava he won’t come back from, when he thinks he’s about to die. The molten ball looms closer, too huge and too fast to maneuver away from - there’s too few grappling points out here in New York’s apple country. He thinks he’s about to die, feels very very sure, and he finds himself wishing, desperately, that he’d made a move on Wade. That he’d gone for it, that he hadn’t let his fear of things changing or scaring Wade off get in the way. Then Thor swoops in and rescues his ass, bridal style and everything. Thor’s a stand up guy.

But Peter can’t afford to ignore it any more. They lead dangerous lives. Not the kind that lend themselves to hesitation or regret.

There’s no other way to conceive of the feeling, no better box to fit it into. Wade’s the person he likes best. Likes in conversation, likes in his apartment, likes in his space. There is, to Peter’s mind, no other person on the planet he would rather spend a free Saturday afternoon with. And he doesn’t get too many of those. A kind of attachment like that is not the kind you quietly ignore or relegate to a see-as-needed basis. It’s worth being uncomfortable for. Worth gambling for. And here’s the million dollar question: is Wade willing to gamble with him?

There isn’t really much room for wondering. Wade is going to be weird about this. Wade is always weird about feelings. They’ll need the right setting, the right timing. Wade needs to feel safe and comfortable if this discussion is going to go anywhere. So Peter orders six chimichangas from what they’ve both agreed is the probably best provider in NYC. It’s all the way across town, far and away out of the delivery zone; he has to go in uniform just to pick them up and bring them back swiftly enough that they’ll still be hot. He pays, crouches on the rooftop of the restaurant, and texts Wade a picture of the goods, without words or context.

On a whim, Peter ducks into a drugstore and buys a liter of Cherry Coke and another of Mountain Dew: Code Red. He de-suits himself, puts on some sweatpants, and cues up the musical episode of Buffy for - oh god, the number of times they’ve watched this doesn’t bear contemplation. To think he’d never even seen Buffy before he met Wade. Actually, it is a bit difficult to absorb. Life before Wade’s a funny thought. He’s not totally sure how he managed to fill the days.

It’s not two minutes later that Wade’s barrelling through his window, launching off the sill to execute one of his patented just-because-I-can-backflips. He takes a knee, spreads his arms, magic fingers wriggling out at sides and says: “You rang?”

It’s Peter’s personal assessment that Wade wouldn’t be out of place at the circus. He’s never shared that thought with anyone, though - afraid it might somehow wound Clint.
Peter gestures at the stretch of empty couch sitting next him. The chimichangas and soda are carefully arranged on the long table in front of the couch. “Why, I’m so honored, honey bun!” Wade proclaims, rising and tugging his mask up around his mouth. He plops down on the couch, legs falling into an automatic manspread, wholly unsuspecting. If Peter’s unprompted willingness to watch the musical episode of Buffy for the millionth fucking time wasn’t enough to tip Wade off, nothing was ever really going to.
Right at commercial break, Peter decides to make his bid.

Slowly, trying to prevent a startle, Peter reaches for the remote and quietly pauses the recording. He turns to Wade, whose last bite of chimichanga number three is hanging halfway out of his mouth -- Wade slurps it up and manages to keep every last drop of it away from his halfway-off mask.

Peter offers his opening gambit. He’s been working on it for two months.

“Wade, I don’t want to be presumptuous, but it feels like we’ve been dancing around the natural progression of our relationship for a while now. I think it would be healthy to air out some feelings you and I may be having about this. But I honestly believe we’re at a point where we can choose between maintaining the friendship we have or . . . or exploring the potential of having something more.”

He’s instantly spooked. From the very first word, Wade’s shoulders bunch, curling in on himself in a defensive hunch. His brow knots tighter and tighter as Peter goes on; even through the weave of the mask, Peter can see it. Wade’s hand clutches the open liter of Mountain Dew: Code Red he’s been drinking. The bottle creaks under the pressure.
“Woah, woah, woahhh, Petey! Easy, boy. This has been nice, but I think I need to go explore my own potential for having something more, if you know what I’m saying! Ayoooo!!” He exclaims, oozing with desperation as he high fives himself. It’s classic, a lascivious misdirect, trying to move them back to square one of their normal fucked up candyland of conversation, but Peter’s come prepared for that.

"Wade, please. Let me speak." To his credit, Wade does pause. Peter tries to make good use of it.

“I’m really committed to being your friend - I mean, I really, really, care about you, and I don’t want anything to jeopardize what he have now. I just think it would be fun to try dating. I’m great, you’re great . . . we should date?”

He actually seems okay with that, appeased by the rhyme perhaps, but then Peter gets confident and adds: “I realize commitment scares you. No matter what, our relationship definitely has,” and here comes his grave mistake, “a future.”

Wade loses his shit; he stands, a straight line, a figural exclamation point turned on its head.

“Look, Spider-boy -”

It’s the final straw on the back of a very fatigued camel.

“How is my age even relevant here? Were you waiting until I consistently had a five o’clock shadow?” Peter snaps, suddenly on his feet, patience evaporating all at once. “Until I got a college degree? An apartment of my own with a fully stocked kitchen? Because I hate to break it to you, but only one of those things is probably ever going to happen.”

“You shut your facehole, Petey! Believe in yourself and all your wildest dreams will come true!” He’s yelling that encouragement at the top of his lungs while he backs away from Peter, creeping around the couch, body angling for the window.

“Stop being so damn obtuse, Wade. I’m trying to say that we should stop avoiding this.”

Wade gasps dramatically and points with his entire arm at Peter. “You said a wordy dird!”

Peter has to resist the urge to stomp his foot; exhibiting frustration will only encourage him, and make Peter look even more like a child. “I meant it.”

“Peter,” Wade gestures a hand vigorously at himself. “This is a face not even a mother could love.”

"No, I'm actually . . ." Peter falters, then tries again. "Your physique is . . ." He shrugs helplessly and flips his hand back and forth meaningfully. "Well. I don’t agree, let’s just leave it at that."

Peter is so, so sure he's just made an ass of himself, but no, Wade's head is slowly rising, the commas of his white eyeholes growing wider and wider. "Spidey, you don't - you don't."

It's a definitive statement, but the question's right there in his tone. So close.

“I do.”

“Okay, so you can abide by my ugly duckling status, but that doesn't fix our age difference, and it definitely doesn't fix my crazy.” Wade hunches in on himself, but his words are reasonable.

"It doesn't fix anything! I'm not trying to fix you." Peter blows out a hard breath and tries to relax himself, knowing that body language makes all the difference. "I just like you. And I think, with time, I could like you even more. I think it's worth the gamble. I think potential for benefit outweighs the potential costs.”

“You been runnin’ cost-benefit analyses behind my back, Spidey?”

“Yeah, a little bit,” Peter nods and shrugs, relieved to have it off his chest. "Okay, so now that this is all out on the table . . ." And Peter can see Wade withholding the comment, Oh yeah, baby, let's have it on the table, sensing that it doesn't suit the moment at hand. His shoulders draw tight, body fit to burst with the need to use sexual innuendo, to diffuse the situation at hand, to divert divert divert. But he doesn’t. He resists. Instead, he breaks.

“Okay! Okay. Fine,” Wade says, fists balled at his sides. “Would you . . .” the white of his eyeholes scrunch tight until they’re totally out of sight, bracing for impact. “ . . . like to go to White Castle with me?”

“Like a date?” Peter presses mercilessly.

“Yeah,” Wade exhales the word. “Like a date.”

“Sure, why not. In fact, I’d love to. Let me get my coat.” Peter turns to go do just that and then says, “Oh. And you’d better be here when I get back. In fifteen seconds.”

“Okay,” Wade says in a tiny, wind up toy version of his regular speaking voice.

Peter’s just shouldering on his denim jacket when he realizes Wade’s still in his supersuit. So, if they go out together, Peter will essentially be out on a date with Deadpool. Arm hanging half in the sleeve, he stands there contemplating the ramifications. Photos snapped, videos, maybe even audio recordings. Of Peter Parker the Civilian fraternizing with Deadpool, the Merc with a Mouth. It could blow his fucking anonymity right out of the water.

It will be a cold day in hell when Wade opts to go barefaced in public, opts to offer himself up on the cruel altar of aesthetic scrutiny upon which the whole world lavishes worship. Peter couldn’t ask it of him on their first fucking date. But if they just order out and eat on someone’s rooftop, it’ll just feel like any old regular day. Peter sighs, heavily.

There’s a solution. It’s not an elegant one.

“Let’s both go in our suits.” Wade whips his head up from where he’d been tinkering with a stubborn side zipper on his arm. He probably has a purple Lifesaver in there awaiting rescue or something.

“What?”

“We’re going in our suits.” Peter turns on his heel and heads straight for his closet again.

“ . . . Spidey?”

He’s already got his shoes off, working on his socks as leans against the doorframe of the walk-in closet. “I can’t go with you as some rando civilian, it’ll draw too much attention. Peter Parker’s supposed to be a nobody who somehow got lucky enough to score a job at Stark Industries. Not someone who grabs a burger with Deadpool just because he feels like it.”

Peter gets the sense Wade doesn’t really know what to say to that. He closes the door to the closet and changes into his uniform with calm resolution. He scoops his wallet out from the pocket of his jeans puddled on the floor and jams it into his utility belt.

If they’re gonna do this as equals, they have to do it as Spider-Man and Deadpool. Maybe they both know it. Or maybe Peter’s whirlwind determination to go through with this has frightened Wade into timid silence.

They walk there in uniform, split a Castle Pack. The cashier doesn’t even make a pretense of not staring. Thank god it’s already past two in the afternoon and there’s no line.

Peter pays; Wade’s a cheapo and no amount of care or affection will change that. In fact, if what Natasha alleges about his lack of mercenary activity is true, then it’s actually a mystery how Wade is managing to support himself. Now that he thinks about it, maybe that’s why he spends so much time in Peter’s apartment, using his bathroom and raiding the Avenger’s communal food pantry. Sleeping on his couch. Oh my god, what if Wade’s homeless? Maybe that’s why he made that shitty comment forever ago . . . !

But that’s genuinely horrible conversation for a date, so Peter chows down on his burger and asks Wade if he reads books, as a general activity. He hadn’t realized this was something he was curious about, but the question jumps right out of his mouth before he even thinks about it. Wade instantly claims, through a mouthful of fries and sauce, that the only book to his name is a copy of The Stranger with a phony Camus autograph, which Peter seriously doesn’t buy. Probably trying to look intellectual on his first date with a nerd like Peter.

There are the other customers, of course. Pedestrians watching through the scratched glass of the storefront, observers outside the fish tank. Phones are out, lights blinking steadily, but they only have their masks drawn up to their noses. Anonymity: preserved. They don’t share a milkshake with separate straws or anything, but something in their body language must convey something along those lines because people aren’t normally in a tizzy like this when they’re just picking up take-out in their suits.

Peter can see it now: champagne glasses clinking at The National Inquirer, The Daily Mail's people doing cartwheels in the street. Twitter imploding. It's a good thing he doesn't do the whole social media thing. All he has to do is avoid newsstands for a few days. Weeks. Okay, maybe a couple months.

Still worth it.

It’s a Tuesday after that, when Lisa steps into the elevator with him at the end of work and presses the button with the downward arrow, but he clarifies, “Oh no, I’m going up, let me just - ” Immediately, he wants to punch himself in the face. There’s no good reason for him to be heading up, in Lisa’s mind; their lab is on the eleventh floor. Everything north of here is beyond their official security clearances. He could have just as easily hustled out of the elevator and claimed to need the restroom - it would have been awkward, but it would’ve saved both of them the confusion.

Too late for that, though. Peter hops out of the elevator as casually as he can and says, “Have a nice night!” waving goodbye.
“I’m sorry, why are you - how are you going to - ?”

Peter doesn’t know how to answer that question, so he stalls until the elevator doors are whooshing closed; Lisa seems too bemused to press the ‘hold doors’ button as he says, “What? Lisa, that’s crazy talk. Where - ” Then the elevator’s off, earning him a whole night to think on how to explain this.

By the next morning, all he has to offer is this: “So, I’m dating a guy in the . . . financial department. And that’s why I was headed up a few floors.” That is what he manages to come up with, given twelve plus hours to develop his most persuasive story.

“Oh wow,” Lisa says, clasping their hands around their coffee mug.

“Yeah.”

“How long?”

“Well, I don’t really know, we’ve been seeing each other . . . since forever, but we haven’t been . . .
seeing each other for very long.”

Lisa nods their head, a movement heavy with knowing. “I’ve been there.”

“Yeah.”

Wade swoops in through the window, making himself at home as always. Peter knows this because he hears the window whoosh open and doesn’t hear it close. Then there’s steps towards the bathroom, a rifling through the medicine cabinet, and a pause. It’s been three days since White Castle and according to Natasha, Twitter has indeed experienced sizeable implosion.

“You do realize that people are going to think that I’ve seduced you into joining the Dark Side, right?” Wade waltzes into Peter’s bedroom, a walking non sequitur, holding the red rubber duck which had fortuitously managed to survive the last apartment exploding and the subsequent move nine months ago.

Peter want to protest, but it’s kind of true. “Yeah.”

“And that I’m completely nuts?”

Again. “Yeah.”

“And that I look like this,” Wade yanks his mask up to a cheek and points, “all over.” He rubs his open hand through the air in a circle, gesturing at his own body.

“Yeah.”

“Well, then.” He claps his hands too loudly and sits on the edge of the bed with a little bounce. “Sounds good to me.”

Peter lays there, feeling a bit run over by the straightforwardness of the interaction they’ve just had, and grateful, then says, “You know what else sounds good? Some saag paneer.”

“Christ on a pogo stick, yes! Get out of my head, Spidey.”

Then they go to an Indian buffet, a fancy one. They dine in this time, in regular people clothing. Wade ties a kerchief around the lower half of his face and keeps his hood up, like he's about to rob a train. Peter's smile and general aura of innocence seems to convince the hostess that they really were just there for the paneer.

Peter’s swinging through the streets, patrolling Queens, when high-rises start exploding. No visible projectiles. He calls 911 and suggests that the operator send a few fire trucks in his best scared civilian voice. Then he keeps swinging, trying to help the people on the topmost floors. As he’s hoisting a young mother and an infant into his arms, another explosion rocks the building. Closer this time. Peter holds them tight, swooping down to street level and depositing them in the middle of the road. Another explosion, blasting away dully at the asphalt of the road.

Two options: the blasts are targeting this woman and child. Or they’re targeting him.

Peter jogs away from the little family to test his hypothesis and, yes, an explosion dents the sidewalk to his left. Yes! This will be much easier to deal with than the alternative.
It’s nearly 5pm. It’ll be rush hour soon, people coming home from work en masse. Peter needs to be out from under the city’s feet by then. As it stands, he’s in Forest Hills, right in the middle of the island’s land mass. Most importantly, he needs to get to the water, and fast. The situation is now firmly in Avengers territory. Pressing down on his earpiece, Peter says, “Guys, I’m gonna need some backup. Explosions in Queens. You’ll know where by the smoke.” He gets a choppy chorus of "Roger."That has to be a little confusing for Steve.

He shoots out a web and swings up, hard and high, staying as far away from the ground and buildings as possible. “They’re targeting me. I don’t know how the explosions are being triggered. I’m staying up high to minimize casualties and heading north to the waterfront.”

If he heads south, he’ll lead the chaos straight to JFK.

The explosions really lose frequency once he’s gained speed, high in the air. He makes it across the 495 smoothly, utilizing the tall lamp posts to get by. The team will have turned on his tracker by now, no need to verbally track his progress.

“Standby, Peter,” Steve comms in. “We’re headed to you. ETA six minutes.”

He’s bypassing a tempting lake that’s probably too small and too densely surrounded by flammable trees for his purposes, and then a park, when he says, “Good news, the blasts have l--” And then he spies it.

A flying beetle ahead of him, fanning out its tiny brown wings in the wind to slow itself, to pull closer, just before -

BOOM

He’s blown out of the sky, falling, wham he hits the street like a freight train, and there are cars honking, charging toward him, but the explosions -

BOOM, BOOM, BOOM.

The ground tears itself apart all around him and he has to get up, right now, can’t focus on the people around him because it’ll just get more of them hurt. He jerks himself up off the ground with an inhaled moan of pain. Something’s really wrong with his left shoulder, maybe something missing. No time.

He’s off the street before thought, swinging steadily north. Trying to leave his shoulder alone, mostly failing. His head rings like bitch, a blunt ache from where his head might have smacked the street. There are voices screeching in his ear and he can almost see the water now. “Hey, ‘m fine. They fly. It’s beetles . . . exploding ones,” he sighs, because of course someone decided flying beetles ought to be able to explode. It almost feels like he’s inside a hallucination.

“Peter,” someone barks. It’s Natasha. “What’s your status?"

“My shoulder. S’not so good. But don’t, don’t worry - ” There are blasts midair he has to swing very carefully to avoid, barely visible until they’re about to blow. It’s hell on his shoulder, but he can’t feel it all that well, anyway.

It takes him a lot longer to reach the bay than it ought to. He’s got to cross another highway now, this one has like a million lanes, but he’s swinging limply from lamp post to lamp post to lamp post before he can think about it too hard. He has to extend both arms to get the angles to work for him, operating this close to the ground while swerving out of the way of oncoming traffic; but he’s not even cognizant of noises coming out of his mouth - if they are, indeed, coming from his mouth. Because he’s nearly to waterfront and there’s a parking lot and some really sparse lamp posts that’ll get him there.

He latches onto the lamp posts and has to throw all his weight into the upswing to make it to the decorative treeline, clutching to a treetop with his everything he’s got. Its spiky leaves itch. And there it is, the rocky shore. But from this vantage point, he can see across the bay, can see exactly where he’s miscalculated. “Guys, I’ve . . . I’ve led this straight to La Guardia . . .”

This is what he deserves for never leaving the island; he doesn’t even know his own backyard.

Then the tree explodes around him in fiery combustion. He slams onto his back on the warm asphalt of the parking lot. Peter can hear himself groan distantly when he picks himself back up and takes off at a faltering run across the parking lot, picking up speed, blasts right on his heels.

He sprints over an unmarked road, and then he’s there, diving straight off the jagged rocks into the water. It’s shallow, more so than expected, so he paddles as far out as he can, as fast as can. Which is not very fast at all. The last time he swam was in middle school, when participating in competitive sports hadn’t felt like cheating just by virtue of participating at all. The water gets deeper fast. Colder, too.

Peter’s passing through a line of wooden posts sticking out of the water by the time he notices the big white boat anchored in the water, unmoving, motor off. A man appears at the bow. He is vaguely reminiscent of a gerbil.

“Ah!” He proclaims, stepping forward triumphantly. “The infamous Spider-Man. So glad you could drop in.” Peter treads water where he is, because he doesn’t know this guy and this is awkward.

“Well? Aren’t you going to say anything? Ask me how I did it - how I broke out of jail, how I continued my research, and how I mutated a form of Gyrinus natator so devious and effective even you could not subdue it?”

“Uh,” Peter says, because the guy’s pretty much just answered any questions he might have had, excluding who the fuck he is.

“You don’t -” the guy, the cockroach/bison mutation guy, mad scientist type guy, looks fit to burst a vein. “You don’t even REMEMBER ME? That - that TEARS IT!” He raises an arm, ready to press something in hand, when the hand is sliced clean off. It plops in the water with a merry splash.

Wade appears, a boiling shadow behind Mr. Mad Scientist.

“Yo, how many baddies do you think he puts away in a week? Of course he doesn’t remember you. You’re not even,” Wade lifts the man off the deck of the boat by the collar of his shirt and snarls, "original."

“Oh yeah?” Mr. Mad Scientist chokes out. He’s gurgling in pain as he presses his thumb down on something held in the hand he still has. “How about this?”
The surface of the bay explodes.

Peter jerks away from the surface and peddles frantically to get deeper into the water. He gives it his very best breaststroke and tries to stay under for as long as he can, kicking at the bright, sunset-colored water above him to keep from floating back up. Looking up at the damage from below, it’s clearer that the explosions were ringed around him and not the bay in general. Plus, the boat looks like it’s still afloat in the darkening water. He runs out of air. There’s no telling what’s in this water, because when he resurfaces some of it is actually still on fire.

Wade’s got the guy by the throat, shaking him like a rag doll as fire licks at the sides of the hull.

“Wade!” Peter shouts. It’s really fucking hard to speak through the mask when it’s this soaked. Hard to breathe, too. He’s got Wade’s attention, so he waves his hand above the water in a clear “come here” gesture.

Wade drops Mr. Mad Scientist on a pile of his now-crushed gadgets, nose pointed towards Peter like a Great Dane diverted from a juicy bone, and he pounces from the boat and into the water, wading over to Peter. “Heyyyy,” Wade says very softly. “Let’s get you back on dry land, sailor.” Mr. Mad Scientist looks trapped enough on his boat, preoccupied with his missing limb and what looks to be some really intense self-pity.

Peter doesn’t spy anymore beetles flying around, so he consents to being lugged around by the more seaworthy Wade. They try weaving his arms around Wade’s shoulders from behind, but that’s a no go now that Peter’s realizing he’s missing a small chunk of his shoulder. Wade snaps his fingers like he’s thought of just the thing and hoists Peter legs over his shoulders from behind. Peter is hooked by the knees as he’s tugged along floating on his back. Turns out Wade’s a pretty strong swimmer. The sky seems to spin, like it’s forming itself into the spin art that Peter used to love so much, but only in shades of orange and purple. The shifting muscles under Wade’s sopping wet suit are very, very easy to feel. Each flex . . . Peter might close his eyes for a moment.

By the time they’re halfway to shore, the team is swooping in on a sleek helicopter, leaping out of the airlock. It occurs to Peter that he hasn’t heard the team chattering in his ear for a good while now. Earpiece must have fallen out somewhere along the way. He’s not especially concerned about it.

And then Tony’s hovering over them, talking, and the words are meaningless, but Wade’s nodding his head like they’re in agreement, unhooking Peter’s legs from his shoulders. He raises Peter’s body as high out of the water as he can without sinking himself, and Tony’s reaching out from above, but Peter doesn’t want to go, even if the water is kind of nasty. “No,” he says, and hugs his arms around Wade’s sodden shoulders. “Ow!” he yelps. He forgot his shoulder’s no good. Now Wade’s talking too, but Peter has no idea what he’s trying to say. It’s obvious they want him to leave with Tony, which makes no sense but whatever, they’re older and have more field experience so he’ll do what they tell him to. Resigned to it, he lifts his right arm up to Tony, who scoops him up and jets him away. The metal of the Ironman suit is very cold. They’re not even in the helicopter by the time Peter’s out.

He wakes up again when they land, however smooth a ride it may be. It feels like he’s only blinked and arrived out of one moment and inside the next. The baddy is strapped up to the gills next to him; Bruce has created a tourniquet to staunch the bleeding at the open wrist of his missing hand. When Peter looks down, his chin brushes heavy padding on his own shoulder. “You’ve got a pretty severe concussion, plus some superficial burns,” Bruce says with a threadbare smile. “And you lost a good chunk of your shoulder. How are you feeling?”

Peter rolls his right shoulder with a moan and protests, “Awesome. But I didn’t hit my head that hard.”

“Yeah, there are a lot of different ways to acquire a concussion. You’ve probably done at least three of them in the last half hour.”

“Okay,” Peter agrees drowsily.

Clint waves at him from the cockpit and Natasha keeps Peter from walking out the open door of the jet. He peers out of the opening. They’re . . . on the roof of somewhere?
“He needs an ER before he needs a trial,” Natasha announces, jabbing her thumb at Mr. Mad Scientist. Hospital, then. Bruce is shuffling him out of the helicopter. The guy turns as he’s passing Peter and says, "Well?"

He summons all of his superhero sagacity through the haze of pain meds and exhaustion, but the only thing he has to say to him is: “What you do is cruel to the animals and insects you use.” Peter pauses, then adds: “And Wade was right. You are unoriginal.” Then Bruce carts him away. Peter sits there, dripping blood and freshwater.

The team’s weird about letting him sleep. Someone comes by and checks on him every two hours. The first two haven’t even gone by when Wade’s rolling through the window with a big brown bag of something that smells amazing.

Clint had helped him change into dry sweatpants and a t-shirt a while back and Bruce patched him up some more, checked his pupils and disinfected his flesh wounds. Gave him another painkiller. One of the good ones.

“Heyyyyyyy,” Peter greets the skulking form in his darkened bedroom. He’s feeling about as woozy as he was in the water, before. Just a nice woozy this time. His face still stings, though.

Doctor Cho is flying in from Seoul in the morning to fix him up; he’s hoping he’ll still be out of it enough to actually ask her for an autograph.

“Hey, buddy,” Wade says softly, all whispery. Like Peter’s a dog; everyone knows Wade’s the dog in this situation, but Wade doesn’t have to know that. He sets the bag on the dresser, closes the blinds, and sits tentatively on the very edge of his bed. Peter’s under the covers. He tells Wade to come on in. “Nope, I’m good here,” Wade says in a tight voice. “Don’t you like me?” Peter asks, when what he’d meant to ask is, Aren’t you cold?

“Of course I like you,” Wade reassures him, toeing forward to ease onto the bed, laying down atop the duvet to appease him.

“What smells so good?” Peter asks.

“Burgers and cheese fries, love muffin.”

“Oh yum. Gimme.” Peter makes grabby hands at the burger once it’s revealed from the bag. He takes a huge bite. “Oh my god. Peter says with a mouth half full. “You’re my favorite.”

Wade pauses, pecking at the box of cheese fries, and says, “Yeah?” Like it’s a question.

“Oh yeah.”

By some miracle of God or healing factor, Peter doesn’t see his blessed burger twice. The fact that Wade helped him polish off the last of it may have contributed.
Wade stays with him through the night and doesn’t try to leave. Not that Peter would have let him.

People definitely still come and check on him every two hours. Peter isn’t really conscious for most of it - or if he is, he doesn’t remember it later - but he doesn’t doubt that they do. At one point, Peter does register conversation happening, though a very hushed one. Maybe Steve’s there. There’s something whispered about “at least taking your shoes off” before Peter’s drifting deeper under.

In the morning, Wade uses his shower. This gives Peter a brief moment of time to reflect on his choices. There’s nothing he would have really done differently yesterday. No true regrets, except for the embarrassing quantity of drool on his pillow there has to have been an audience for.

There’s nothing, to his mind, that he could have done differently to resolve the mayhem quicker, nothing he did wrong to earn being targeted like he was yesterday. If anything or anyone’s at fault, it’s the prison system for not securing Mr. Mad Scientist away from the general populace properly. No, it’s a failure of the American mental health care system that the guy got to a point in life where he thought creating giant mutated animals and setting them loose on an unsuspecting city would solve his problems, and no one thought to disabuse of him of that notion. And there’s fuck all he can do about that, except do an interview about it. Which, hey, maybe he’ll actually do. Be proactive and stuff. He’s never done interviews as Spider-Man or even really interacted with journalists, unless they’re screaming wildly and clutching at him for safety. Only a few of the Avengers have ever been comfortable enough to actually attend a press conference, as stand ins for the rest of the team. But if it’ll help him sleep at night to do it, he will. That’s the conclusion he comes to by breakfast time. It’s surprisingly non-self-flagellatory of him and he has to pat himself on the back a little. Maybe that knock to the head knocked something right. This is what he’s thinking when Wade sets a steep stack of fluffy waffles pooled in syrup in front him, zesting a third of an orange right on top. “Wow,” is all Peter can say. Digging in, it’s like sinking into a cloud. The syrup, he discovers, is maple, but Peter doesn’t say a word.

It would be great to eat with the team but there’s just too much light in the communal dining spaces. Also, it would feel really selfish to ask Jarvis to shade everything and have them trip all over their shoelaces in the dark, just for him. All painkilling substances have totally and indisputably worn off. Even with every window shaded in his own dining room, the place feels too bright.

Doctor Cho is the essence of casual brilliance. Peter’s pretty lucid for their appointment in Bruce’s lab. So he doesn’t get that autograph, but he gets a firm handshake instead, which might be even better. There had been an urge to dress business casual for their appointment, but thankfully he was still too exhausted to make the effort.

He stands in the cylindrical healing chamber and watches the flesh of his shoulder knit itself back together, wonders if this is what it feels like for Wade all the time. Minus the wonderment, obviously. Wade had opted not to tag along his treatment session, to Peter’s idle confusion. But it seemed like a choice better left alone.

Peter respectfully asks her about the science of the procedure as it’s ongoing; starting out, she answers succinctly. That unravels as his questions pierce deeper into the mechanics of it. They’re really in the thick of it by the end, once he’s all healed up, shoulder smooth as a baby’s bottom. It seems unfair that they have access to this kind of medical tech and normal hospital-goers don’t, but he doesn’t know how to ask Doctor Cho about that without being disrespectful.

She can’t do much for his concussion, though. It’ll take weeks to resolve itself, possibly a month or so with his modest healing factor.

He offers for her to join them for lunch, but Doctor Cho says she’s unfortunately made prior engagement with a friend in town. Good. Less occasion to make a fool of himself. In the elevator, he can’t stop reaching under his faded Jurassic Park t-shirt and touching his seamless shoulder, rolling it, and so on. Science is the shit.

“Look,” he says straight off the elevator, tugging his collar to the side as far as it will go. “This is amazing!”

Wade’s lounging on the couch, mask on, watching South Park. Peter makes a heroic attempt not to make a face once he catches a glance of what’s on the screen. Both for the brightness and the content. All the blinds are still down.

The channel changes, and it’s Last Week Tonight. They both like John Oliver. Wade pats the couch cushion next to him. Peter grabs a blanket off the back of a chair first, then lies down. He reaches over for the pillow and props it up against the side of Wade’s leg. Peter plops his head down on it and drags the blanket over his face, listening to Oliver rant righteously and hoping Wade’s comfortable with this.

Twenty minutes into the segment, still under the blanket, he pokes the leg acting as second pillow for his head and asks, “Hey, Wade. Are you comfortable with this?”
Wade pats his head through the blanket and responds, “Yeah. This is real nice, snugglebear.”

It probably isn't just Peter's imagination that the tone of it isn’t sarcastic.

Dr. Banner brings him an adult coloring book. Claims they help him relax. Peter’s got a nice set of fine point pens out on loan. Dr. Cho’s ordered him to strict bedrest for a few days and TV can only hold so much appeal. He’s two days into bedrest and on his fourth page, a psychedelic sailboat riding a tessellating ocean, when Wade climbs over his windowsill. Wade, it turns out, is not a fan of the coloring book. But it’s pretty much the only thing keeping Peter sane while he sits on his ass and tries not to feel guilty about literally everything. Maybe he needs another knock to the head.

So yeah, Wade doesn’t appreciate what a boon this coloring book is. Probably because he is more broadly not a fan of lacking Peter’s complete and undivided attention.
“You are so pretty.” Wade’s just sitting there with his chin leaning on his fist whimsically, crouched beside the bed.

“Uh huh.” This one super-detailed seashell is giving him a bitch of a time. He can’t decide which combination of colors will look best on it. Sixteen different colors to choose from in the set and he struggles to put two together that look right. Figures.

“Just sayin.”

“Okay.” Yellow and pink, that ought to do.

Wade pats at his face, murmuring, “Pretty, pretty, pretty.” Peter jerks his coloring pen away from the page, careful of making stray marks. “Hey, cut it out! I can’t see the sheet when you do that.”

Wade pulls his hands away and tucks them under his armpits, grumblingly.

“Sorry, what was that?”

“I said, fine, your coloring sheets are stupid anyway.”

“Well,” Peter acknowledges, drawing the purple pen back to the page again. “You’re certainly entitled to your own opinion.”

That doesn’t seem to appease Wade, who huffs and stands, wandering out of the room to hitch a ride on the elevator. Maybe he’ll make some friends.

After about a week, his head is good enough to handle regular sunlight for extended periods of time. He joins Steve in his little art studio, coloring while Steve does actual Art. Thor comes by once, wishing him a rapid recovery. He sticks around long enough to try his hand at pottery and break the wheel beyond the very notion of repair. Peter and Steve try to get him to stay, but he’s too sheepish to stick around after that.

Wade wanders in and out of the studio, stating very random things like “Do monarch butterflies fly south for the winter and just keep deciding they like the weather better in Florida? Did you ever think about that? Huh?” and then exiting the room without waiting for a reply. Like he just thought of something to say, came in to say it, and then decided that’s all there was to that social transaction. There’s a little something weirdly charming about it, in an ADHD kindergartner type of way. Peter’s never claimed to have good taste. And in no time at all, as if sensing a challenge to his own tastelessness, Wade sets about proving that thoroughly.

It starts with a dick joke carted across the lunch table, a surprised chuckle stuffed into Clint’s reuben at Wade’s inappropriate comment to Peter about mystery meat.
The day following, Bruce makes everyone egg white omelets, saving the yolks for Steve’s much anticipated dinner casserole. Peter witnesses Clint’s glance to Wade before he announces that he’s in dire need of some sausage, that he’s no good in the morning before he’s had his daily dose. Wade doesn’t exactly snort into his orange juice, but it’s a near thing.

Suddenly, it’s a back and forth, practically a tennis match, the double entendre and puns so well crafted they had to have been devised in advance.

They marathon Futurama while Peter convalesces and no one questions Wade’s reluctance to leave the Tower.

It gets to a point where Wade and Clint facetiously theorize about the sexual kinks of their Smash Bros characters while they compete viciously at Melee. Peter’s not jealous. He just really fucking wishes the TV screen weren’t so bright that it’s difficult to face in its general direction. As such, he sits with his chair turned in the other direction and reads a book, Frankenstein, then The Goblet of Fire. With all of his newfound free time, he’s been hopping back and forth from modern fantasy to old. Letting their banter wash over him is definitely nice. Watching Wade make a buddy is adorable.

And anyway, they’re mostly playing a rotating roster of Peach, Ice Climbers, and Ganondorf. So yeah, Peter’s not interested. Wade always gives him shit for only ever playing with Captain Falcon or Fox, but like, fucking sue him for focussing on finesse.

Once Tony gets in on the gaming addiction, it devolves into a week-long Brawl competition. First player to 500 wins, wins. Stakes are a Stark Industries jacuzzi, design and patent pending. Tony’s proclaimed favorite character is Bowser, so the week doesn’t go too hot for him.

Hawkeye snatches victory right out from under them, lulling Wade into a false sense of security until the last day, then pulling out all the stops to soar right to the top. Tony’s probably just there for the dick jokes. Or maybe for the event’s passable likeness to a movie night, the poor guy.

Being on the Avenger version of bedrest is great for the first little while, but then you start to go stir crazy. Peter’s week has seen a major uptick in puzzle-related frustration, reality TV-related frustration, and sexual frustration.

Take Wade, for a random and totally non-specific example.

The guy is crazy jacked. Just to look at him standing there is a sexual experience. To Peter, anyway. He hardly ever takes the mask off, except to eat, sleep, and shower. And even then. Peter’s never seen anything of him that wasn’t his hands or face. Or his regrown foot.

The powerful slope of his shoulders, the loose hang of his wrists, corded muscle wrapped around every part of him. It’s all served very well by the skin tight fit of his body suit. And it’s enough to sit close on the couch, enough to share more meals than not. Peter doesn’t ask, doesn’t press. It’s enough.

He lets the body heat soak in through two layers of super-suit and prays for strength.

Clint’s making them watch a sad and creepy crime show on that one particularly quirky floor of the Tower that’s literally a bunch of different living rooms all clumped together. They’re in the coziest one, nestled in the middle with zero windows, where the walls feel carpeted and there’s a round stove in the middle that inadvisably doubles as a footrest. The thing has a pull-out compartment that holds any kind of cooking utensil imaginable. Peter and Wade are roasting giant slabs of marshmallow for s’mores over it. Clint’s kind of an on-again-off-again healthnut and refuses to participate, munching resolutely on some apple slices.

Natasha’s reclined on a settee in the back corner, reading an ebook and ignoring them all with her headphones plugged in. Peter would kill to know what kind of music she likes; it can’t all be classical, one hundred percent of the time. That’s what she would have the world believe. Peter is A Skeptic.

Someone on screen screams shrilly. They finish assembling their s’mores. Wade’s marshmallow is an intentional solid black char, Peter’s a careful gold. Clint huffs with dissatisfaction as they chomp down and reaches behind the couch cushion to pulls a jar of Skippy seemingly out of thin air. Does he have them stashed all over the Tower? These are the questions.

“Omigod!” Wade exclaims, snapping his fingers vigorously. “That’s it!”

“Hunf?” Peter’s mouth is very, very full. He over-committed.

“That’s the one thing left in the universe I’ve never tried with peanut butter! S'mores. Peanut butter s’mores.”

And to the shock of the room at large, Clint extends his arm to offer the jar of super chunky peanut butter to Wade. With a significant degree of caution, granted, but he does it all the same. Wade didn’t even ask, not really. The bend of Natasha’s brow indicates deep concern. She still has her earbuds in; it’s a total mystery how she’s following along in this situation.

It’s possible, maybe even likely, that Wade has no clue what symbolism is contained in the gesture. Either in ignorance or in spite of his contrarian nature, Wade accepts the gift, snatches a knife out of the storage compartment in the stove, dips into the jar for a heaping clump. All Peter can think is thank god he didn’t use his finger.

He slathers the peanut butter on top of the graham cracker with a captive audience. Sets down the knife, leans forward into the bite, crumbs shooting in every direction. Leans back as he chews with careful assessment. His is the expression of a dedicated researcher on the cusp of breakthrough. He sits back.

“The world isn’t ready.”

Peter can’t read his tone at all, isn’t sure if the experiment is a success or failure, but Clint seems somewhat appeased. If he cradles the jar to his chest for the rest of the episode while strangers cry and shout at the walls, at least no one stares.

Peter’s twenty three and three hours old by the time Wade permits him a proper, normal people, skin to skin kiss.

It’s been something on the order of three weeks since the exploding beetle debacle. For his birthday, the whole crew had hauled themselves down to an arcade bar and eaten platter after platter of nachos. Peter had watched Wade’s mouth the entire time. And when the two of them stumble back into his apartment, Peter lets his coat fall right off and starts crowding Wade toward the couch. The sexual frustration must be wafting right off of Peter, because Wade yanks his own mask off, looking excited but a little uncertain.

“Just a kiss, Wade.”

“M-hm, works for me” he says, nodding his head the littlest bit.

“It’s like riding a bike, Wade,” Peter soothes as he pushes him down onto the couch.

“A sexy tandem bike.”

“Sure, a sexy tandem bike.”

Peter crawls over him and tries not to cage Wade in. Wade’s eyes are wide, eager and anxious. Neither of them are very sure of how this will go. Leaning down on his forearms, Peter carefully closes in.

It’s . . . not like any kiss Peter’s had before. The lips are very slightly lined and indented by scarring. Instead of being off-putting, it adds a sort of texture to the kiss, a disarming realness. Peter could never forget who it is he’s locking lips with. They stay like that, pressing their lips together every now and then as they doze somewhere in the middle, faintly dusted with salt from the nachos they’ve eaten on this couch for years and the nachos they will eat in the years to come.

“Move in with me.”

Wade is waltzing out of the kitchen. He drops his glass of beer, and then, because he’s a superhero, manages to catch it again just before it smashes to bits. His mouth is gaping, a dark red shadow of mask. “Whaaa - ?”

“I said, I think you should move in with me.”

“But - ” Wade stops short.

“But?”

“We’ve been dating for four months, sugarbutt. If you want to put an expiration date on this shindig, that’s the fastest way to do it. I drive people nuts, my little baguette. No one is immune.”

Peter isn’t so idealistic as to discount Wade’s point out of hand. He has to chew on that one for a few, and then answers: “Wade, how long would you say we’ve spending more time together than not? Just in the Tower, not even counting out on the town.”

Wade draws himself together like a cinching curtain, finger raised into the air. Peter expects a pun about making time, but Wade surprises him. He folds, fits his fist to his chin in thought, really giving it some consideration. “Liiiike . . . two years?”

“Huh. So it’s almost like we’ve been living together for two years already. All that’s missing is your stuff. And you’d sleep in my bed instead of on my couch. If you were comfortable with that, of course.”

Blinking rapidly, Wade looks to Peter like he’s trying to find some objections and failing.

“Aha!” He points and shouts. “Fire Lord Stark owns the place! It’s up to him and he hates my guts!”

“JARVIS?” Peter politely addresses the ceiling. “Could you ask Tony if it would be okay, theoretically, for Wade to move in?”

Not four seconds later, JARVIS replies: “Yes, sir. Mr. Stark offers his congratulations.” Peter can imagine the kind of heavy duty translation JARVIS had to do in order to produce that sentence.

He turns to Wade, says “Well, the option’s here if you want it,” and heads for the balcony to give the poor guy some space. But he doesn’t get there, doesn’t even make it past the long couch. Wade’s got him from behind, arms rippling with emotion. He tucks his masked face into the crook of Peter’s neck, breath whistling through his nose.

“Thank you, baby bear.”

Peter runs his hands over the red-wrapped arms, a smile bending his mouth. He savors the contact, just for a moment or two, then leads Wade out onto the porch, into the bright bath of sunlight, and gives them room to breathe when the afternoon grows too warm to share each other’s heat.