Chapter Text

Under pathological conditions, the instinct of ‘self-preservation’...would compel the individual to kill the whole surrounding world for the sake of his own complete instinct repose.

- Ernst Simmel

Let Me Follow - Son Lux

. . .

He’s with Deadpool when it happens.

Of course he is. The mission had been going so well, and Spider-Man had found a good lead. He was hunting down a man named Edgar Lascombe, a popular figurehead who runs one of the nation's biggest pharmaceutical companies while funneling major funding to Hydra off-record. Spider-Man found the hidden base underground first, before Deadpool showed up at the last second and nearly blew his cover while he snuck inside. He’d tried to tell the mercenary to go away, but he was persistent. He only relented because there had been at least five occasions in the last month where Deadpool had saved his life in a close shave, and he felt guilty. On the promise Deadpool would stay out of his way, listen to him, and not use any lethal forces.

Truth be told, Spider-Man didn’t even really like working with him. They’d known each other for a little under a month, so they were barely work acquaintances. Deadpool just wouldn’t leave him alone.

Despite his rules, he’s learned things never go smoothly with Deadpool. Should’ve known better, he realizes now, but hindsight is always 20-20. That was his first mistake.

The mercenary blows their cover early, when his phone animates with the cacophonous ringtone of some upbeat K-Pop boy group and the entire Hydra collective is pinged to their exact location, electronic device raised like a hot potato in the air. His Tamagotchi keychain swings obliviously side-to-side and Spider-Man has never wanted to k-i-double-hockey-sticks someone more.

The warehouse erupts in laser beams, blades, grenades and gunfire. He hates to admit it, but as his quips start running out and the Avengers send him to voicemail, he feels a pool of dread in his chest.

Things get hairy, like the dark hair sticking to his face through the tear in his mask when he gets batted aside by a brute thrice his size and spits blood on the steel grate flooring. His frays of brown cowlicks spring up for life faster than he does. He’s ten feet away when he watches Deadpool get skewered onto the end of a blade.

Fuck.

Deadpool is bent over as his guts cramp and constrict, abdominal muscles tight enough to fold him in two. A fresh burst of sweat paints his skin, craters and pockmarks carved with an apple corer in the light, and then the sword is ripped out and he’s flopped to the side like dead meat. Peter’s stomach drops.

There’s a timer ticking away in the background.

TWELVE… ELEVEN… TEN… NINE…

When it hits zero, Hydra will release a radioactive bomb over the state of New York, kind of like a welcome party for their years of remission. They really know how to come back with a bang. The Avengers had to have heard his message by now, but they’re not fast enough, and he’s running out of time. You have to understand, anyone in his shoes would be pushed to extremes.

The Hydra swarm him and trample over Deadpool’s body, lying limp a couple feet away from the control panel. Spider-Man winces for each boot print crunching into his skin. Sure, Peter didn’t have the highest opinion of him either, but he wasn’t just a smear on the pavement.

It makes him realize how utterly fucked he is. His backup, albeit an unreliable one, is dead. He’s completely alone.

Spider-Man swings through the industrial beaming, narrowly dodging stray bullets, barely escaping a particularly tall agent who attempts to grab his skinny leg mid-swing as if to flatten him to the ground like a pancake. His blood pounds in his ears. He makes his way towards the control panel because he has to do this, even if it kills him, he has to make it.

His eyes catch the clock just as he soars over Deadpool’s body.

FIVE… FOUR… THREE… TWO…

Even if he could reach the panel, he wouldn’t have the time to hack it, nor the help to watch his back. He’d be cut in half in a minute. He sees Deadpool’s body like a sad smear on a camera lens where the violence has left him.

Despite everything else, will Deadpool survive this, Peter wonders? Does his healing factor extend that far?

He isn’t sure. But he knows one thing: Spider-Man definitely won’t.

Peter realizes he’s going to die. He thinks a couple names, a couple faces, all flashing like images distilled over dust in his mind. Aunt May, MJ, Uncle Ben and Gwen…

Nothing matters. He can try his best to fight it, but there’s nothing he can do. He goes dead-weight mid-swing and lets himself free fall, feeling the wind whip his cheeks through the rents in his mask. He’s soaring down above Deadpool’s unconscious body. Peter couldn’t save him, or anyone.

ONE… ZERO.

The timer rings.

He hits the ground in a roll and collides into Deadpool’s corpse, slamming into his chest so hard his jaw hurts and his nose crunches into coarse leather. They can both die, or Deadpool can survive, and maybe be a meat shield for whatever remains of Spider-Man when they scavenge the rubble. It’s the only idea he has left at the last blinding second to save his own life. For a moment, he’s not Peter Parker, and he’s not Spider-Man. Just a scared, small little animal, burrowing into a husk for shelter.

If they survive, he’ll apologize. He’ll do better. He’ll be a better Spider-Man for the city. If there is any New York left.

He curls up into the smallest ball in the blanket of Wade’s remains, and he knows he’s failed.

. . .

Because God is cruel, Peter survives.

He wakes up in a lab. After a few moments of observation, Peter quickly realizes it’s a Stark lab. The label is engraved into the equipment, and his unusually silky hospital gown. He’s amazed he’s alive.

He’s in emergency care for almost a month, measuring vitals although his system bounces back profoundly fast with the superabilities. Apparently the nuke was meant to be launched aerially into New York, but it never took off, so the explosion remained underground. While the damage was still catastrophically vast, the casualties were cut down to nearly a third. Most of the bodies were identified as Hydra soldiers, which upon Tony explaining this to him, he imagines is meant to be some sort of comfort.

It’s not.

It’s not enough for Peter, letting the digits burn into the back of his eyelids like a searing cattle prod. A counter, each life put to a quantifiable number, for each one of his mistakes.

When he asks Tony how he survived, he avoids the answer, and Peter feels disturbed at the silence in its absence. It digs at him, driving him mad. He pressures more, asking again and again, until Tony caves.

“Survived is nearly an overstatement, Pete,” he finally says, a lick of exasperation in his voice. “If you saw how you looked when we found you… If you knew…” And then he trails off and shakes his head, like the imagery flashing behind his eyes is too painful to speak. Peter tries to imagine it, too. The kind of things shrapnel does to your skin. Limbs, and how they can be detached, or sometimes just barely clinging on to the body. Elongated tendons reaching for wholeness. It uneases Peter. So, he stops asking.

The next thing out of his mouth was this: “Is Deadpool alive?”

Tony only looked at him in confusion. “What do you mean?”

“He was with me when the bomb went off,” Peter says. “I hid in…”

His body? He thinks. He has half the mind to stop himself, because even in the best circumstances, as miserable as Deadpool can be, using him as a human meat shield is low. He tells himself he was scared and small, in the eyes of death. Some days he has to just be human.

“He was right next to me, that's all. Didn’t you at least find a body?”

Tony is silent for a long moment, studying Peter’s features. He shakes his head. “No, Peter. There was no sign of Deadpool anywhere.”

He studies the way Peter deflates slightly, head dropping to stare between his lap. Tony sucks in a deep breath before modifying his voice into something vaguely comforting.

“If he was there, then… I’m sorry, but he’s long dead. The bomb might’ve disintegrated him from that proximity. How you’re even alive is… I don’t know.” He shrugs vaguely. Tony tries his best to sound compassionate, perhaps out of sympathy for his loss, but Peter can tell he’s straining when he asks, reluctantly, “… Will he be missed?”

Peter considers, and he can’t think of a single person off the top of his head who’d care. Nobody knows what Deadpool’s life was like, or if he was even loved. Hell, not even him. He only feels bad because he was on the scene when the mysterious, mouthy mercenary died.

After a long moment of thought, Peter just shrugs. He can feel the silence and the electricity hum in the walls. A laboratory asylum in a white, vacant room.

“No idea.”

It’s mentioned later that it was actually thanks to one of Deadpool’s hurdled katana blades wedged into the disengage locks that kept the nuke from going skybound. Peter gains a new perspective on those numbers: some 2,700 million of New York that Peter failed, and 5,600 million Deadpool saved.

. . .

Weeks pass. Peter is released from surveillance and he’s missed his nightly patrols so much he whoops and hollers while he soars through the sky. It feels so good to be alive, and he’s happy he is, for whatever miracle made it happen.

He knows which miracle. The one he has to assume Deadpool gave him, his body serving as the sacrifice so another could keep on living. And in universal ways, as the karmic cycles always do, with the passing of one thing comes the life and rebirth of another. It’s hard, and it weighs a hundred tons when he feels like he owes a person something he can never see, and never pay back. He just wishes Deadpool were around to tell him how sorry he is that he’s gone, and that Peter failed. Is that for Deadpool, though, or just to soothe his own guilty conscience?

His remorse doesn’t even make sense when he criticizes it, because they weren’t even really that close. He was already dead when Peter curled into him, so what is the roadkill to the vulture, the horse's carcass you slip into to survive the cold? What is this terrible, guilty hollow in his chest for the sheer fact that he’s lived?

It haunts him, so he drops himself to the ground to focus on the little things, the wind whipping too harsh in his ears and the sky swirling in his head. Even the rats in the alleys who’ve learned to drink from Coke cans with two hands seem marvelous to him now, something he sickly wonders if Deadpool would’ve found the appeal of. He remembers Deadpool mentioning something about coming to like the city during one of their patrols, before he died. If only Spider-Man had ever given him the time of day to share a joke or two.

Peter could’ve carried him to the top of the Empire State just once, like the mercenary continually begged him to. What was the harm? He’d never taken it seriously. Or he could’ve shown Deadpool the ‘spot’ which was really just a loveseat couch on the roof of an apartment building that overlooked all of lower Manhattan. Breathtaking and special at night, all because of this stupid couch someone had left, not knowing what it’d give to a nerdy kid from Queens on a quiet night or two.

In retrospect, Peter knew so little.

In death, people usually like to be in the warmth of their mothers, siblings, lovers. He has to remind himself people die in random places, by random people, all the time. Peter just never thought he’d be so careless as to let it slip by him, when all death was preventable, all lives could be saved, otherwise what did Uncle Ben ever teach him?

With Deadpool, Spider-Man was an estranged audience up to the last second, guilty for something he doesn’t even fully know. Now, he mourns what he doesn’t understand. The concept of Deadpool rings like an annoying bell in his head, and now he just feels shame for all the scathing rejections, the walls built up, all the things people have said. How even the mention of his name rewards long sighs under breaths and rubbed temples.

Was there more to Wade Wilson that they’ll never know? Why did he choose Spider-Man, of all people? What about his silhouette did Deadpool feel so secure to hide behind, content to bask in even the glory of his shadow?

Maybe it’s a flash of genius, or just a flash of guilt taking the final cliff-dive into thinly-veiled obsession, when Peter gets the idea to find Deadpool’s apartment.

What’s the harm, right? It's not like he lives there, or anywhere.

. . .

It takes some digging, but it’s not exactly impossible to find. The Avengers keep a database of these sorts of things in case people like Deadpool ever decide to become a problem in the future, and an address isn’t the only thing on these files. Peter skimmed it while he was at the tower and opted to print it and take it with him. The stack of documents was a rolled-up wad under his armpit as he arrived at the window of what appeared to be Deadpool’s apartment.

He carefully busted the lock and slid the window open. Nothing like a bit of light B&E for the footnotes of my hero resume.

Does it really count if it’s technically a dead man?

Don’t think about it.

He tries to clear the thoughts from his head and pushes himself inside, tip-toeing his first step onto the wooden floor. Peter looks around.

It’s an apartment building, maybe the seventh or eighth story. The room in question is neither upscale or offensively impoverished, but somewhere vaguely in-between. It’s decently large and lined with yellowing wallpaper which suggests the building's age, but it's a heck of a lot better than Peter's by a mile. He can see the city lights through the windows.

The immediate space isn’t populated with much: a great big chair and a TV in the center, a bullet-hole-laden couch pushed off to the side, a bookcase cramped against the wall overflowing with DVDs. Broken bottles litter the floor along with piles of magazines of a broad, mostly pornographic variety, as well as a general assortment of trash. Pizza boxes, to-go cups, cables and chords trailing off to nowhere. He has a PC pushed against the wall in one corner, and an opened door suggests it leads off into a kitchen. Peter immediately recognizes far too many knives and firearms laying around in broad daylight across his floor and any flat surface, far more than should be humanly necessary, much less plunged into walls in the place of dart boards. He mindlessly kicks one dagger aside with the toe of his shoe as he steps into the space, sliding the window shut behind him.

Well, who is he to judge, right? Mental illness isn’t always pretty. And it’s not like Deadpool was expecting company.

It’s a bleak place. Colorful with personality, definitely, but there’s a pungent smell of gunpowder and dirty laundry. Does he really live here? Peter thinks to himself, failing to school his own pity. Then he grimaces. Lived.

He makes an effort to tip-toe over the knives, afraid to touch too many things. The lights are all off, so he flicks on a lamp by the armchair and basks the room in a dim, yellow light, illuminating the black strings of text to his eyes. His eyes skim over the first page as he unrolls the wad of papers from his armpit.

WADE WINSTON WILSON, DEADPOOL

HIGH KILL HAZARD

He finds the opening line to be a bit harsh. The red letters burn like splattered blood onto his eyeballs, painting his profile into a gory light. Apart from it, Peter has to admit his technical resume is highly distinguished. It almost shocks him to remember how much Deadpool was capable of, all while affecting that immature and insouciant facade he’d only ever shown in their encounters. The words on the page and the Deadpool in his mind feel like two completely different people.

He has to be honest with himself, even now, that Peter feels a slight disdain for the man in his memory. Deadpool was overly-chatty and clingy every chance he got, to a point of selfishness. He liked to pretend he wanted to ‘be good,’ but he was short-sighted, and impulsive. Spider-Man was always waiting for the day he jumped out and revealed that all of this ‘good guy’ schmooze was a gag, some twisted bet he’d been paid enough to indulge, and he got sent after poor, perfect Spider-Man to do it. He hates to admit he’s open-minded enough, and hopeful enough, to be the perfect target.

He almost wishes the mercenary held the same humors about his own death, that he’d jump out from behind his own recliner in a little party hat and a blow horn. Even if Peter wouldn’t be happy about it. Even if it meant Deadpool continued to be a thorn in his side.

Annoying was much better than dead. Even Wade Wilson didn’t deserve to die. He seemed to be the sole benefactor of that cause, apparently.

He sighs a deep breath and walks past Deadpool’s bookshelf, stocked with an impressive collection of comics, a myriad of action figurines and novelty displays including historical pistols set up on weird holsters. He has collections of DVDs varying from extremely cliche to extremely obscure and unheard of, and a few of which wearing hand-scrawled titles such as “Bump and Run” which Peter’s 99% sure are CD-burn pornos. It has an archaic and debauched vibe that feels distinctly like Deadpool, intimately so, and it bothers him. Like finding someone’s dirty laundry in their bedroom. He knows things he’s pretty sure Deadpool wouldn’t care that he knows, but the concept of finding out in a dishonest way lingers with him. It isn’t like his perfectly polished morals.

He counts two bullet holes in the peeling wallpaper as he passes towards the bathroom, directing his eyes back to the file and being mindful of the floor-daggers.

He brings the paper closer to his face and slows to a crawl.

The list goes on to name some names Peter’s never heard of in his life, but he hates every one of them by mere principle.

He feels his stomach knot with a strange mixture of guilt and disgust. First with the content on the pages, and then with himself. He didn’t deserve to know like this. Without privacy, just typed onto a sheet of crisp white paper, detached and so clinical. It makes the nature of Deadpool’s death suddenly feel so real. He was a person. He was tortured. It settles in his gut like a hard, heavy rock.

He thinks he’s going to be sick. Then, suddenly, he realizes the biting smell coiling into his nostrils. His growing nausea is partly due to the fact he’s being assaulted by a pungent odor in the air, seeping out the closer he’d unknowingly gotten to the bathroom. He jerks his head up, on the precipice of the doorway, boots bumping the threshold.

He looks in.

It reeks of bleach, like it’s been doused on every square inch of the space to drown out something that just won’t be purged. He can smell it even now, the ghost of whatever was trying to be exorcized, persistent and haunted. It’s tangy and metallic, like iron underscored in the air. It makes his nostril hairs burn even through the mask.

The bathroom is dirty. A sink to the left crowned by a scratched and shattered mirror that looks like it could’ve been a sheet of aluminum drilled into the wall. The bathtub catches his eye. There’s a history of blood caked into the grout from a lifetime of injuries, stubborn where bleach won’t purge. He becomes plagued with the vivid imagery of Deadpool positioned in his own porcelain basin, where he has lived so many days before and let so much of himself seep into, a frame big enough to take up all the porcelain and still spill over the edges.

Arms in leather draped across the edges. Water beating down. Bullet holes and knives all fished out from his insides and… His mind draws a blank. Cast to the floor with reckless abandon, lead shells tinkering to the tile like crystalline stars?

Peter looks around himself, at all the weapons scattered on the floors. He thinks he knows why there’s so many blades laying around now. The collection of assorted weaponry rolled under the tub to be forever forgotten, all crusted with what Peter knows isn’t the red of rust. These knives and bullets could have belonged to anybody, with enough hatred to put Deadpool on the other side of them. Now they’ll never be getting them back. He’s sure the man was quite smug about that.

Spider-Man suddenly wonders about a part of Wade Wilson, and not the “Deadpool the Mercenary”, in a way nobody else has before. Would he gloat about the collection? Have stories for his favorite ones? It burrows into his mind like a maggot.

He tiptoes out, taking another look at the papers. More information about his work history, any known jobs he’s taken public credit for, crimes he’s been accounted in… Peter promptly folds the document away and stuffs it under his armpit. He doesn’t think he can stomach reading anymore, not while he’s here in this house. There’s a door on his left that hangs ajar, but he can’t tell what it is immediately through the narrow crack, so he chooses to inch forward and gently push the door aside.

It swings aside slowly, almost heavily, then Peter hears a click. His spider sense flashes like a grenade.

Before he can process the instinct, he’s flung to the ceiling, narrowly dodging a crossbow firing an arrow precisely where his head would be. It plunges into the wall across the room with a heavy thunk. He whirls around to stare at the source, expecting someone, anyone— only to find a tripwire connected to a crossbow on a bookshelf in the corner, half-hidden behind a novel with a shirtless man on the front.

Peter blinks repeatedly, dazed by adrenaline and a disorientingly handsome Fabio winking at him atop an ivory stallion. Who booby-traps their own damn bedroom?!

A quick scan around tells Spider-Man he seems to have found Deadpool’s armory— and his bedroom, if he could even call it that, because emphasis seems to be heavily placed on the former. There’s little more than a bare mattress on the floor and a single sheet bunched over it, accompanied by an uncomfortable-looking pillow and one dirty, tattered unicorn plushie. Which, Peter just… finds so weird. He squints at it for several seconds. Then again, Deadpool.

On the far side of the room is a workout bench with some weights, and a huge rack against the wall strung up with guns in impressively varying sizes. Some as big as Peter’s torso, others no larger than his palm. Deadpool has an end table with more questionable magazines (accessory bottle of lotion too, ew) and a lamp, which is strangely turned on. If Deadpool were here right now, Spider-Man feels the aching urge to chastise him about his electric bill. He left his light on and then went and got killed, racking up numbers forever. It hurts his shared-room, 7th-story, New Yorker heart.

There’s some shelves on the wall decorated with figurines of Wolverine, Captain America and others, as well as several large posters— and some small— pasted up. Most of them look to be crude bikini model cosplays of superhero women like Rogue and Domino, and one of… Thor? Thrown on his “bed” by the pillow is an opened laptop with the screen emitting a dull light, which Peter feels gravitated to like a moth to flame.

He carefully crawls across the ceiling and waits for any triggers to go off, only to be pleasantly surprised when there are none. To be fair to Deadpool, most people aren’t able to walk on ceilings.

He drops down delicately onto Wade’s mattress, the lenses of his mask blowing wide as they reflect the laptop screen. Immediately, there’s a lot to take in.

The monitor is covered in several nested windows. Front and center is a website to an arms dealer catalog, with Wade apparently shopping for a gun called “Nuthals 220S”, which looks to be a sub-machine gun of some sort. Under the picture, and the heavily jacked up price tag, is a note that says “courtesy of the Castro Bro’s.” He delicately minimizes it and chooses to selectively amnesia it from his memory.

Once the webpage is gone, it reveals a handful of other nested tabs.

The web pages don’t look like public sites, the addresses all encrypted or opened via a weird program to a host server somewhere Peter guesses is across the world. Similarly encrypted is a file window to the side— maybe a spreadsheet document, or a wordpad of some sort— which is loaded with locational information and a tab on the side with a list of cash amounts. There are a lot of zeroes, so much that it makes Peter’s head spin, baffled that anyone can make this much for a living and begin to know what to do with it. He quickly minimizes it because it simply hurts to see.

There’s a tiny chat window in the corner, and all the way in the back, a single internet browser opened to a simple forum page. It’s hard to tell what it is at first glance apart from being some kind of obvious thread discussion, but it’s filled with lots of caps lock “LOLs” being thrown around and cat gifs. He safely assumes he can ignore it and squints closer at the foremost chat instead.

A tiny black box with neon-green coding text. It looks campishly retro, like it was ripped out of the Matrix.

Peter doesn’t have to guess what followed shortly after his last message. The wet shnk of a blade still echoes around his skull as if it were his own. So him “bumping into” Peter wasn’t a coincidence; he had a job to whack the figurehead who Spider-Man was also after, and for a lot of money, too. Guess he figured two heads would work together better than one. Figured, head… Figurehead…

He tries not to think about how messed up it is. How angry he feels that Deadpool was using him up until the very last second, and Spider-Man was none the wiser for it. How he’s not happy Deadpool had only bumped into him because he was on another job to kill someone, but that it didn't necessarily mean he deserved to die for it, either.

It flashes through his mind the amount of conversations they’d had about his ambiguous morals. It seemed to be a frequent, almost candid topic, discussed over post-patrol gyros on the roof in meaningless banter, mouths full of fries and too many opinions. It was practically the first thing out of the mercs mouth after he’d flung himself at Spider-Man in what could’ve only been a month ago, insisting something absurd about “changing his ways” and that Peter was the “perfect role model for his total 180-zenification.”

He never wanted to believe it, not for a wide plethora of reasons, but a small part of him had hoped for the best. He’d never tell Deadpool that, because that would betray some level of care or investment which he didn’t have, and was mainly afraid of being exploited for his naivety like the distrustful mercenary was certainly angling for. So, he withheld the truth.

The truth he admits to himself now is, Peter did have hope for him. He would’ve genuinely liked to see a better Deadpool shake out. He would have supported him when nobody else did, if the efforts to make the change were really true.

Clearly, Wade hadn’t been informed about the involvement of nuclear warheads when he took this job. He got in over his head, just like Peter did, and before they knew it things escalated out of control. They were no different from each other in that sense, and yet unlike him, Deadpool paid the price for it. So he supposes all those intentions, real or not, no longer matter. He’s pretty sure even his superhuman regeneration can’t grow him back from atomic-level disintegration.

Peter sighs a deep sigh and flops back onto Wade’s bed. That would be nice, he thinks to himself, feeling a strange comfort in the concept. Or maybe he should just be happy Deadpool is gone, and maybe finally at peace.

… Right?