Chapter Text
It was a beautiful, solemn, dignified funeral.
Peggy would have been bored stupid, Wade thought as the assembled black-clad crowd sang I Vow To Thee, My Country.
Why isn’t anyone telling stories about the cool shit she did? Who’s this Sharon girl talking too quietly? What a crappy eulogy...
“Is there gonna be a proper wake?” he murmured to the man standing beside him. “Where we get drunk and reminisce?”
“That’s a good plan,” Logan murmured back. “I’m in.”
“Me too, mon ami,” Remy put in from Logan’s other side. “There’ll be plenty of folks at Sister Margaret’s talking about Peggy tonight anyway.”
“Yeah,” Wade cast a glance up towards the flag-draped coffin at the front of the church. “Yeah, she deserves a better send off than this.”
All right, I’ve had enough.
“What?” Wade cast a furtive glance around. “Er… who said that?”
You know who I am.
Logan and Remy were giving him odd looks. Wade offered a weak smile from behind the black hood he was doing his best to hide his scarred features beneath, pulled it lower.
“Ozhawk?” he whispered. “This… really doesn’t feel like a soulmate fic? I don’t think I have a mark, anyway...”
It’s not. I’m recruiting you for a fixit.
He froze, eyes darting around. “This? You want to fix THIS?”
I’ve got a plan.
“Why does that make me feel really nervous all of a sudden?”
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
“This is the weirdest plan you’ve ever come up with, and that’s really seriously saying something, mon ami,” Remy said. Logan was just shaking his head, arms folded, as they stood beside the grave.
“This is disrespectful, Wade. Even for you.”
“Can you guys please just trust me?” Wade begged. “I have insider information that this will work.”
“Insider information from where?” Logan demanded, but Remy just sighed and rolled up his sleeves.
“Come on, Logan. Grab a shovel. The quicker we do this, the sooner we can get the hell out of here and start drinking to the old girl’s memory.”
Logan sighed and grabbed another shovel. “I’m tempted to take this to his face, but seriously it wouldn’t make him any uglier,” he muttered to Remy, who only laughed.
With three of them working, all three with super-strength and speed, it didn’t take long to excavate the loose earth and bring the coffin back out of the grave.
“Grave-robbing,” Remy murmured, shaking his head as he knelt to unscrew the bolts securing the lid, “a crime even I hadn’t committed before. You are a bad influence, Wade.”
“It wasn’t my idea,” Wade defended himself.
“Please, tell me who I need to hit,” Logan growled, folding his arms and glaring.
“... let’s not go there. Okay.” Wade reached into a pouch and pulled out an empty syringe, attached a needle. “All right, Logan. You first.”
“Wait, what?” Logan took a rapid step backwards. “Wade, I ain’t nobody’s lab rat.”
“This is not for an experiment. It’s for Peggy.”
There was an electric silence for a moment before Remy, who’d also backed off a step, sighed. “We’ve humoured him this far, Logan.”
“For fuck’s sake,” Logan growled after a moment, swiping the syringe from Wade’s hand. “How much d’ya need?”
Peggy’s body looked tiny when they lifted the lid off the casket. Frail and wasted, much smaller without the sheer presence of the woman who’d inhabited it. Her white hair curled around her face, her body dressed in a stylish navy trouser suit. She looked as though she was sleeping peacefully.
“When did she get so old?” Remy said softly, reaching out to smooth her hair. “Mon Dieu, I remember dancing the night away with her not so many years ago…”
“It was 1987, Remy. Nearly thirty years ago,” Wade corrected.
“Was it really?” Remy shook his head with a rueful little smile. “How the years have flown.”
Oh for God’s sake, they’re getting maudlin. Just do it, Wade.
“How the hell do you know this is even going to work?”
Logan and Remy both stared at him. “It’s your plan!” Logan snarled irritably.
It’s MY story. It’ll work. NOW, Wade!
He would have closed his eyes, but he had strict instructions for where exactly the needle had to go. Taking a deep breath, Wade stabbed it straight into Peggy’s heart and depressed the plunger.
“Now what?” Remy said after a couple of minutes of absolutely nothing happening.
Wait.
“Um… let’s fill the grave back in,” Wade said hastily. “Put the casket back, you know. Make it look undisturbed.”
“That is the first sensible thing you’ve said today, mon ami,” Remy said dryly, getting to his feet. “D’accord. Logan…”
Logan growled.
“You look after Peggy,” Wade said hastily. “Remy and I can take care of this!”
Logan held Peggy in his arms as the other two worked, petting her hair lightly. Sorrowing for the old friend he’d never really had the chance to say goodbye to. She hadn’t known him the last time he came to see her; had been frightened by him.
At first, he thought the gradual warming of her cold body in his arms was just his imagination, some of his own body heat passing into hers. But the flush of colour that slowly returned to her cheeks wasn’t just his imagination; eyes less sensitive than his wouldn’t have picked it up in the darkness, but he could almost see the blood beginning to stir again in her pale body.
And then her heart thudded a beat.
“Wade!” Logan yelled.
“What?” Startled, Wade dropped the shovel, whirled around.
“Her heart’s beating!”
“It worked. Hallelujah.” Wade grinned. Remy tossed a shovelful of dirt at him.
“Come on, lazybones, we need to finish this and get out of here before we’re caught!”
“I’ll take her to the car,” Logan scrambled up, holding Peggy carefully to him. “It’ll be warmer there.”
“Were those two ever…?” Wade asked Remy in an undertone as they watched Logan walk away.
“Tell you what, cher, you ask him,” Remy suggested with a sardonic grin. “Since you can come back from being dead and all.”
“... maybe not.”
“Peggy,” Logan said quietly. He’d laid her down on the back seat of the car, grateful that Remy wasn’t cheap and had hired a roomy Mercedes; covered her with a travel blanket from the trunk. “Peggy, can you hear me?”
Her heart was beating with a steady rhythm now, he could hear it. She even looked a little less frail, a little sturdier, somehow.
“Why did Wade need all three of us?” Logan mused, smoothing her hair again. “His ability to come back from the dead,” he started putting it together, “mine to heal, and Remy’s to… absorb energy.”
Peggy’s chest rose and fell in a deep breath.
“God damn it he’s smarter than I thought!”
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
She was sitting up, the blanket wrapped around her, drinking from Logan’s hip flask, when Wade and Remy arrived back at the car.
“Peggy?” Remy asked hesitantly. “Do you remember me, ma belle?”
Brown eyes studied him for a moment before she smiled. “Only too well, you Cajun disgrace.” Though her hair was still white, her skin looked smoother, and her voice was steadier, not cracked at all. She looked more like the Peggy Remy had danced the night away with almost thirty years before.
“And as for you,” Peggy’s voice took on an acerbic note, “Logan tells me that this was your bright idea.”
“Technically, no, but I did drag them into it,” Wade admitted. “Good to see you too, Peggy.”
“Hmm.” She eyed him, took another swig of Logan’s bourbon and then said “So, what are we waiting for? I’m assuming you went into the resurrection business for something special?”
“Er,” Wade said, “actually, no…”
“Excellent. Do you know how long it is since I had a holiday? Does Worthington still have that private island in the Caribbean?”
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
“... for fuck’s sake.” Peggy scowled at the television. She’d made Remy fly them all direct to the Caribbean. Now they were sitting at the bar in the swimming pool of Warren Worthington III’s luxurious private resort on his private island, being mixed cocktails by his personal bartender. Who’d just switched on the large flat-screen TV over the bar. “This is what happens when I let go of the reins for a decade or so, is it? Rightio. Well. I shall just have to sort that out, then.” Turning on her wet stool, she put two fingers to her mouth and whistled shrilly, smiled as all three of the large, exceptionally dangerous men in the pool jumped to attention.
“I’ve figured out why I’m back, boys. I’m needed to fix the Avengers.”
They all stared at her horror-struck.
“Well, don’t just look at me like that, hop to it!” With a slight sigh, Peggy set her untouched cocktail back down on the bar. “Should have known,” she murmured regretfully to it. “Just too good to be true.”
Never mind, Peggy, I’ll make sure you get another one soon.
She froze, head turning to look around her. “Who. Said. That.”
“Said what?” Remy asked, bemused.
“Oh, dear god, no,” Wade said in sudden horror. “You didn’t!”
In my defence, it wasn’t originally in the plan. Peggy’s got a mind of her own.
“Wade!” It was a rising yell of fury.
“It’s not my fault!” he said instinctively. “You were only supposed to get my ability to come back from the dead!”
“Well, since it appears that’s not the only ability I’ve mysteriously gained, I think you and I need to have a conversation.” She glanced up towards the sky, eyes narrowing dangerously. “And then, you and I are going to have a conversation.”
Yes, ma’am.