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Candles, Lanterns, Fairy Lights

Summary:

Day Six:
Prompt: Candles, lanterns, fairy lights.
Pair: Harry Potter/Deadpool
Timeline: What’s a timeline?

Notes:

5 times Deadpool asked out Auror Potter and got turned down 1 time it worked.
(Get it? 5 1=6 and it’s day 6? Fuck, I’m so funny.)

Work Text:

Candles, Lanterns, and Fairy Lights

Harry/Wade


Harry opened the door, took one look at the red and black suit, and snorted at the black roses shoved in front of his face.

“No,” Harry said firmly. “How did you get my address?”

It was absurd, but Harry knew somehow that Wade was wiggling his eyebrows beneath the bloody mask.

“Lucky guess,” Wade said in his chipper way. “And you know what would really make this night lucky? If you let me suck—”

“Go home, Wade, you’re drunk,” Harry said firmly before shutting the door in his face. Er, mask?

“Baby boy, why won’t you let me love you?” Wade wailed from the other side of the door.

Harry grinned, but only a little, and shook his head.

Ever since he had relocated to New York, taking a spot with MACUSA as they needed more aurors to match the levels of muggles in masks, he’d been subjected to Wade’s particular brand of insanity. It started when they met on a case Harry was working, a muggle super-killer who managed to kill two witches in his spree.

Wade, or ‘Deadpool’, a name Harry flatly refused to use, showed up and interrupted Harry’s undercover operation by shooting the bloody muggle in the head while he sang some song playing on his headphones. Then the muggle healed himself, exposing himself as one of the mutants that MACUSA informed Harry about, and Harry stepped in.

“Hey gorgeous, you should probably back up so I don’t scar that pretty face,” ‘Deadpool’ said coyly as he pulled two giant swords from his back.

Harry fluttered his lashes, playing along. “Ooh no, scary bad guys and possible scars, whatever shall I do?” He snorted and pulled his wand, aiming it at the self-healing and murderous muggle mutant. “Ah, magic, I suppose.”

Harry hadn’t realized that stunning and binding the mutant-man would cause Wade to become obsessed with him, but that was precisely what happened.

 

It hadn’t been two days after that fight when Harry was sitting outside a coffee shop with a muffin and foam cup when he felt the little hairs on the back of his neck stand up. He’d been an auror for ten years, and had been Harry-bloody-Potter for twenty-seven, and learned that if something felt off, it was because something was off.

Harry took a bite of the muffin that had become a part of his daily routine and looked around aimlessly, allowing himself to appear unconcerned and at ease.

All around him, people were walking and talking, unconcerned with the random black haired bloke people watching from his little café table. Nobody spared him a glance, so why did he feel like someone had been, and still was, staring him down?

Harry pasted a soft smile on his lips and let his eyes linger on the building across from where he sat. A bridal boutique, a ‘gourmet cookie’ store, and an empty store front, an abandoned area.

Harry moved his hand to his pocket, a casual movement, and fingered his wand while he silently cast a homenum revelio charm.

One human in the building.

Harry nodded at a group of passing businessmen then shifted side-to-side, faking discomfort, before ducking back in the cafe.

He no more than entered the windowless loo before he had his Invisibility Cloak on, his coffee regretfully tossed in the bin, and was back outside ready to tackle whoever the spy was.

Harry had crept silently through the abandoned building, crinkling his nose at the sound of upbeat pop music playing. Whoever it was, whatever reason they had for hiding, they weren’t exactly being subtle.

“Wade?” Harry ripped the cloak off and blinked dumbly as he saw Wade sitting in the windowsill of the twentieth floor room, his legs dangling, and poppy music playing over the phone on the sill beside him.

Wade turned and Harry saw he still wore his Deadpool mask.

“Harry!” Wade rolled backward from the windowsill and leapt to his feet with a flourish of arms and legs. “You came!”

Harry stood there with his brow furrowed, still invisible from the neck down.

“Did… was I invited?”

“Oh, yes,” Wade said. He tilted his head sideways and seemed like he was smiling beneath his mask. “I knew either you would show up or you wouldn’t, and you did!”

Harry nodded slowly. “Right, it’s just… that’s the same odds of anyone showing up, isn’t it?”

Wade laughed. “You’re right, he is funny.”

Harry looked around the empty and dusty room.

“Who are you talking to??”

Wade waved a dismissive hand. “Don’t worry about it, kitten. Listen, how do you feel about tacos and blow jobs?”

Frankly, Harry was very pro both tacos and blow jobs.

He must have looked at least mildly interested because Wade took a step toward Harry.

“Here’s the plan- you, me, tacos, oh…” Wade turned to the window and then held a finger up to Harry. “Un momento my tall, tan, and toned lover.”

Even with all his auror training, all the fighting he did in the war, all the mutants and superheroes he had dealt with since arriving in New York, nothing had the ability to freeze Harry to the spot such as someone calling him tall.

To say nothing of the fact that Harry was also not Wade’s lover.

Harry was still puzzling it out in his mind when he saw Wade whip a gun from his waistband and quickly shoot it three times down at the sidewalk.

“Bloody hell!” Harry yelped and rushed to the window beside Wade. He looked down at the ground, squinting to see better, and saw two bodies in an already rather large puddle of blood.

“Anyway, what I was saying—”

“You shot them!” Harry said. He took a breath and steadied himself to sound more official and less frazzled. “What the hell was that, Wade?”

Wade cocked his head to the side. “They are bad guys, I am slightly less bad guy. Gun goes ‘boom boom’. I really can’t explain it any clearer unless you want me to get my crayons and draw you a pretty picture? I’ll warn you now though, I think I’m all out of red.”

“That’s not what I meant!” Harry ran a hand through his hair and stared at Wade, flabbergasted. “You can’t just shoot people in the middle of the day, even if they are ‘bad guys’.”

“Why?”

“Why what?”

Wade’s mask stretched in to a grin. “Why can’t I kill bad guys in daylight? It’s such a cliche to only do it at night.”

Harry blinked. “You shouldn’t shoot anyone at all,” he said slowly. “It’s illegal. I’m going to have to take you to MACUSA, get a report done, and—”

“Boring!” Wade yawned. “Let’s skip the report and get straight to the kinky work sex. You can be the big bag magical policeman and I’ll be the naughty killer who will do anything if you’ll just let me go.”

It took everything inside of Harry to not laugh as Wade struck up a pose with his arse wiggling to the side.

“I’m serious, Wade.”

“And I’ve never been more serious about anything in my life, baby boy.”

Harry scowled at the name, Wade laughed.

“No, no, I think he’s interested,” Wade murmured, looking up toward the ceiling. “He’s probably getting a chubby from the arguing.”

Harry sputtered, “Who are you talking to?”

He wasn’t even going to dignify the actual words Wade said with a response.

Wade once more waved a hand, leading Harry to believe that he wasn’t entirely sane. That’s what the reports Harry read had stated anyway; Wade Wilson was unstable, impulsive, erratic, insane. Harry had ignored them though, it wasn’t as if he hadn’t read the same things about himself before.

Except it seemed like perhaps Wade’s were true.

“So back to those tacos…?”

Harry laughed and sounded half-mad himself. “No! We’ve got to deal with the bloody bodies on the sidewalk!”

Wade took a step closer to Harry, causing Harry to shift uncomfortably, though he didn’t feel unsafe. An odd sentiment, since Wade clearly had no problem just killing random blokes.

“As much as I love hearing that British accent describe bloody bodies…” Wade did a full body shiver before reaching out and touching a lock of Harry’s hair. “I’m afraid it’s adiós for now, kitten.”

Harry didn’t have a chance to do anything more than raise his wand before Wade leapt out the open window.

“Son of a…” Harry stuck his head out the window and shook his head at where Wade had landed on a fire escape a few floors down. Harry very carefully did not laugh as Wade slid down the rails, blowing kisses to Harry all the while.

That had been the first time Wade… asked him out? propositioned him? tried to trade tacos for a blow job? whatever it was.

 

And apparently now he’d moved on to following Harry to his flat.

 

The next time Harry saw Wade, it was mid-fight against some sort of fire mutant monster thing that had been intent on burning New York to the ground.

“It’s a bit hot out here for you, kitten,” Wade said as he swooped in with a full sized car in hand to use as a shield for the flames.

Harry nodded appreciatively as he’d been caught up levitating people out of the burning apartment building to notice how close to him the fire had gotten.

“Reckon you can do something about the fire-lizard?” Harry asked, yelling to be heard over the sound of explosions and people screaming.

Harry jumped when Wade’s voice was suddenly right in his ear.

“For you? Anything,” he said.

Wade ran off, charging headfirst at the fire mutant thing with both swords pulled. Harry fought back a wildly inappropriate grin as he finished evacuating the trapped civilians with his fellow aurors.

“You go on,” Harry waved off his partner, Ramsey, an older bloke who was dead talented at silent spells. “I’ll heal the ones who need healed, you help Wade.”

“More like lock them both up,” Ramsey muttered. He followed Harry’s instructions though and ran off to join in the fight.

Harry focused on healing, once more grateful that the mutants and masked hero’s had made it so magic no longer needed to be hidden in the States. He had almost finished when Wade yelled and caught his attention.

“Hey, kitten!”

Harry looked up and saw Wade was straddling the fire mutant with his legs wrapped around its lizard-like face and his knives just above the back of its neck.

“When we’re done here, you should sit on my face just like this,” Wade yelled, startling a laugh from Harry.

“You’re—”

Harry didn’t get a chance to tell Wade what he was, because as Wade drove his knives through the mutant, it exploded.

“WADE!”

Harry put a shield up around the muggles as he full on sprinted to the explosion.

It didn’t matter how fast he ran, there was no way Wade could have survived sitting on the exploding mutant. Harry saw the spray of red, but he ran anyway.

 

What the reports Harry read didn’t mention, was that Wade could be blown to bits, and still survive to bother Harry.

 

“I see a light,” Wade whispered with a raspy and weak cough. “Mama? Is that you? You want me to come with you? But I can’t, not yet, mama, I have to stay and fight for love.”

Harry sat in a chair beside the cot in MACUSA that Wade had spent the last two hours regenerating in. He hooked one ankle over the other knee and snorted, catching Wade’s attention.

“Love now, is it?” Harry asked him. He kept writing his report, feigning indifference to the piercing gaze burning a hole in the side of his face. “I thought it was just a good shag you were after?”

Harry caught Wade’s mischievous grin from the edge of his vision.

“A good shag, huh? No need to be humble there, baby boy. Unless you assume I’m a sex God, which I am, because that would be stereotyping and shallow.”

Harry huffed a quiet laugh and put his report down.

“You just regrew your body and the first thing you do is hit on me?”

Wade’s raised brows were much easier to see without the mask covering them.

“I didn’t come back from the dead to not fight for what I believe in.”

“And what’s that?”

“That I bet you know some naughty spells you can use that wand for.”

Harry full on laughed, his voice echoing around the empty healers chambers. “You’re mad,” he said, sounding a bit more fond than intended.

Wade smiled, a nice smile, and sat up slowly. He stretched his arms out and then froze when he looked down at them.

“Kitten… where’s my super suit?”

Harry frowned at Wade’s suddenly tense voice. “Er… destroyed, I reckon. You blew up, Wade, you… you should have died.”

Wade lifted a hand up and touched his face. He hissed, actually hissed, when he felt the bare and scarred skin.

“Until next time,” Wade said as he wrapped the sheet he’d been covered with around his waist and sprinted from the room.

Harry furrowed his brows at Wade’s peculiar behavior. Was he… embarrassed about being naked? Or embarrassed about his scars?

Harry shook his head and picked his report back up. He wondered if all his interactions with Wade were going to be so peculiar.

 

They were, apparently.

 

Harry, unable to sleep, had tossed a jacket and pair of trainers on and decided to walk around his neighborhood. New York was the city that never slept, a perfect place for insomniacs.

As much as Harry missed his friends back in England, he didn’t regret accepting the well-paying position with MACUSA. He liked his job (most days), he liked his cozy flat (he still had boxes that needed unpacked), and he liked being able to go for walks in the middle of the night and still find things to see or do.

That night it was a food truck festival.

Harry had been waiting in line behind a group of drunk blokes that were swapping crude jokes when someone tapped him on the shoulder.

The hoodie and jeans were unfamiliar, the red and black mask was.

“What a craaazy coincidence!” Wade cried with a smile. “Here I was, just wishing I could find a saucy little wizard to take back home to meet the folks, and tada! Here you are!”

Harry gave him a deadpan look, skeptical about it being a ‘coincidence’.

“Wow, what a crazy coincidence,” Harry repeated flatly. “And here I thought I might get through a whole week without bumping in to you.”

“I think you wanted to bump in to me,” Wade disagreed in a low tone that left little room for misinterpretation. “I think you came to my favorite taco truck especially just to bump in to me.”

Harry, in an impressive moment of bravery, stepped closer to Wade and lowered his voice to something almost resembling the flirtatious tone Wade used.

“I think… I came here for tacos,” Harry murmured. It was hard to tell, but he felt confident that Wade’s mouth popped open beneath his mask. Speaking of which… “Why are you wearing that?”

“Well, kitten, I took a vote and it was two to one that it would be too forward to show up without pants.” Wade’s hands moved to the button of his jeans, “I can fix that though.”

Harry laughed, drawing the attention of the drunks in front of them in line.

“I meant the mask?”

Wade’s casual position stiffened just enough for Harry to notice.

“It’s just good manners,” Wade said when they moved up in line. “I know this burly bod distracts you, but my chiseled jaw line isn’t the only thing I’m rocking under this mask.”

Harry felt a pang of empathy for him. He thought Wade was self-conscious of his scars, but he hadn’t realized how deep it ran. There were plenty of days that Harry would have loved to toss a mask on and hide his scar, but…

“You really think the scars are more noticeable than a mask?”

Wade seemed to stare hard at Harry for a moment before he tilted his head to the side and threw his hands up.

“It’s gotta be the glasses,” he mumbled to himself. “Yes I know he did. I don’t know? Do I ask?”

“You could,” Harry said drily, interrupting the apparently frequently occurring argument between Wade and himself. “Ask,” he explained when Wade somehow managed to convey his confusion through a mask.

Wade took a deep breath.

“Do you want to go back to your place and bend me over and give me a firm spanking for being very naughty?” he asked in a rush.

“Wade!” Harry’s face burned hot when the drunk blokes began laughing in the middle of making their order. “What the hell is wrong with you?” Harry hissed.

Wade cocked his head to the side. “Loads of things, sugarplum, for one, I’m extremely turned on by this whole,” he wiggled his hands in a curvy motion, “tall, mysterious, and uninterested vibe you’re putting out.”

“You’re ridiculous,” Harry scowled. He actually, shockingly, didn’t much like being mocked. The peculiar flirting thing Wade did was amusing, but Harry wasn’t under any false beliefs that it was genuine.

Wade grinned and stepped closer to Harry. “If that’s your way of saying you’d rather bottom, then I’ve got no problem bending you over and seeing if your butt’s as cute bare as it is in those pants.”

Harry held a hand up, as the drunk blokes moved on, and stepped up to order…

He actually had no idea because Wade distracted him from reading the chalkboard menu attached to the truck beside the window.

“We’ll take six beef tacos, six chicken tacos, four chimichangas, and your finest marbled tres leches cake,” Wade said confidently.

Harry tried to grab his wallet before Wade could pay, but Wade easily pushed his hand out of the way.

“Oh, no, it’s not a date if you pay,” Wade said.

“It’s not a date at all,” Harry pointed out. “In fact, I think it’s stalking at this point.”

Wade laughed quietly. “Do you feel threatened?”

It was no offense to Wade, because Harry read his information and knew he was probably the most effective assassin in the country, it was just that Harry faced down Voldemort as a teenager, Wade didn’t scare him.

“No,” Harry drawled, rolling his eyes for emphasis.

Wade brightened up and accepted the large bag of food the bloke in the food truck handed him.

“Then it’s not stalking,” he said cheerfully. He began walking away, leaving Harry to follow after him. “Legally you have to feel emotionally, mentally or physically threatened for it to be a crime, kitten.”

Harry rolled his eyes once more as Wade was quite obviously walking toward Harry’s apartment building.

“You would know the legal definition of stalking,” Harry said with a huff. “Oh, I’m sorry, would you like to come inside?”

Wade, who already entered the apartment building and was headed up the flight of stairs to Harry’s flat, tossed him a smile over his shoulder.

“It’s good first date manners to invite me inside and since you forgot, I did it for you.” He bowed at the waist, balancing precariously on the edge of the step, “You’re welcome.”

“This is not a date,” Harry told him. He smirked when Wade tried to jimmy his door open. “It’s lock— WADE!”

Wade shouldered his damn door open, ripping the lock off the door.

“Oops.” Wade held the silver knob in his hand and turned his entirely-too-sentient-mask towards Harry. “Don’t worry, I can fix it.”

“I’ll fix it myself,” Harry muttered in an almost irritated tone. He glanced around before pulling out his wand; just because Americans didn’t seem to mind magic didn’t mean Harry wanted his neighbors knocking on his door at odd hours asking for him to repair their belongings.

“Reparo,” Harry murmured, touching the broken door.

Wade chuckled lowly when the doorknob flew from his hands to the door, instantly repairing itself.

“You know it gets me all spicy and tingly when you use your magic,” Wade chirped.

How… how did Harry know Wade was licking his lips beneath his mask?

Harry didn’t have time to ruminate on it, because Wade waltzed right in his flat and stopped in the sitting room to look around.

“This is exactly what I imagined,” Wade said, bobbing his head as if agreeing with himself. “I mean, I also imagined you naked and lubed up on the floor, maybe a bearskin rug, but other than that, this is pretty spot on.”

Harry was a grown man, he did not need to blush, but he was embarrassed all the same by his mess. There were books all across the coffee table, socks strewn about the floor, photos hung haphazardly on the walls, and about a week worth of dishes in the sink.

“It’s a bit of a mess,” Harry said apologetically. Wait… why was he apologizing?? “I would have cleaned up, except I didn’t plan on having company…”

Wade laughed and made himself at home on the sofa, easily moving Harry’s stacks of books to the side of the table for the bag of food.

“Boy Scout like you? I thought you were always prepared for all possibilities,” Wade said playfully.

Harry hesitated for a moment before deciding he may as well sit beside Wade, as he really only had the sofa and recliner as furniture for his least used room.

“I’d clean up now, but I’d hate to make you all ‘spicy and tingly’,” Harry deadpanned.

“Too late!” Wade cried. He pulled out two of the tinfoil wrapped tacos from the bag and gave one to Harry. “Every time I see you it’s just… brr.” He shivered dramatically.

Harry took a bite of the surprisingly tasty chicken taco he’d been handed and then leveled Wade with a challenging look.

“Bit hard to eat with a mask on, isn’t it?”

Wade seemed caught off guard as he looked between the taco he held and Harry with an almost pathetic desperation.

“Unfortunately, I’m too turned on by your presence to be hungry,” Wade said with a dramatic sigh. He went to put the taco on the table and Harry snagged his wrist before he could.

“Everyone’s got scars, Wade,” Harry said quietly, injecting as much kindness and understanding in his tone as he could. “I don’t mind. You don’t have to hide them from me.”

Wade deflected Harry’s genuine statement with a joke, as Harry suspected he did rather often.

“Here’s the thing, I’m definitely trying to get in those too tight pants- are you even legally allowed to wear pants so tight, Mister Officer?- and I was thinking I’d be the big, bad, burglar in a mask and you could be the officer. You get some handcuffs, I’ve already got the lube, and—”

“Just keep the bloody mask on then…” Harry scowled. “For the love of god, you don’t have to pretend to hit on me to distract me.”

“I am not ‘pretending to hit on you’,” Wade scoffed. “Way to cheapen my entirely chivalrous intentions.”

“You said handcuffs and lube,” Harry reminded him.

“It’s called foreplay and it’s important,” Wade stressed. He waved a hand around and then screwed the big white circle eyes of his mask up. “I’m not being polite? This is polite!”

“It’s not,” Harry grinned, assuming he was interrupting another argument Wade liked to have with himself. This time he was the one who waved a hand when Wade’s eyes widened back to normal size and he looked at him. “By all means, carry on though. I love a good row with myself occasionally as well.”

Wade laughed, a bright and joyful sound, and slid a heavy arm behind Harry’s shoulders.

“That’s what I like about you, kitten, you’re always down with the weirdness, or whatever that shit song said. Anyway, be our referee, is it polite to say…”

The two of them sat there for a while longer while Wade propositioned Harry for almost every sexual position he knew, and several he didn’t that Wade was happy to explain—

“No, it’s more ropes and less chains, hold on, where’s my crayon?”

—until Harry eventually kicked the moping-merc out as the first rays of sunlight began filtering through his curtains.

“Let’s do this again some time,” Wade said, bouncing on the balls of his feet outside Harry’s flat. “Maybe less clothes? More candles and sex?”

“Sure, Wade, we’ll do that.”

Wade quit bouncing and seemed shocked to silence, for the first time since Harry met him.

“Really?”

Harry laughed and shook his head before closing the door.

“No.”

He wasn’t shagging some bloke in a mask named after death. Harry had standards, thanks so much.

 

“Fancy running in to you here!”

“Jesus fucking Christ,” Ramsey muttered. “Potter! We’re busy enough with the murder robots, we don’t need to add a murder mercenary to our agenda!”

Harry huffed, a bit breathless, as he shot spell after spell at the robots that some mad ‘evil villain’ (honestly, Harry didn’t give Tom a lot of credit, but at least he didn’t wear these absurd costumes) decided to release in downtown New York.

“Excuse you, I am here to help,” Wade said. A quick glance at him confirmed it, he was back in his red and black suit with the weapons attached to it. He pulled a sword from the holster on his back and gave Harry what could only be described as an eager puppy dog look. “Kill the bad guys?”

“Kill the robots,” Harry corrected him. He shot another blasting hex at one of the metal contraptions and smiled smugly as it blew up the one beside it as well.

“Kill them all, got it.”

“That is not what I— Damn it!”

While Harry argued with Wade, one of the robots blew a spray of bullets in a building, hitting some sort of main gas line and causing an explosion inside of it.

“You two kill the bloody robots, arrest whatever super bloke that is,” Harry barked out, already running toward the explosion with water pouring from his wand. “I’ll deal with this!”

 

Wade grinned at Harry’s partner the instant Harry was out of earshot.

“Just you and me, toots,” he said brightly.

Ramsey appraised him for half a second before snorting. “No.”

“Stupefy.”

 

When the robots were demolished, and the villain was locked up at MACUSA waiting for his trial, Harry stormed down to holding to find Wade, unconscious, tied to a chair.

“Bit of overkill, mate,” Harry told Ramsey dryly.

Ramsey shrugged as he wrote out his report. “Your assassin, your problem.”

“He isn’t my assassin,” Harry sighed.

Ramsey leveled Harry with a look so skeptical he may as well have snorted. “I never even saw the guy until he met you.”

“Really?” Harry ran a hand through his hair and watched Wade breathe evenly. He was rather unassuming when he was unconscious. “He doesn’t, er… hit on you?”

Ramsey laughed and got to his feet as he gathered his papers up.

“Sorry, Potter, I guess the two of you have something special.” He patted Harry’s shoulder on his way out of holding and his laughter trailed behind him.

Harry grinned just a bit. He’d honestly thought Wade hit on every person carrying a wand.

Nothing for it, Harry took Ramsey’s seat and aimed his wand at Wade;

“Rennervate.”

True to character, Wade woke up in a flurry of words.

“His ass looks great, doesn’t it? It’s not creepy, it’s called admiring, and some people do it in secret. It’s creepy to do it in— oh, shit, what have we gotten in to now?”

Harry cleared his throat, drawing Wade’s attention to his presence. “Apparently Ramsey didn’t feel like bothering with you, and now you’ve been taken hostage by MACUSA. They’ve sworn to release you if you’ll stop stalking their aurors.”

Wade’s muscles tensed beneath the ropes, and Harry smirked as his strength was unable to break the enchanted ropes.

“Do you feel threatened?” Wade asked Harry curiously. “Because I’m personally the one tied to a chair. Not that I mind,” he added quickly, “I just didn’t take you for a BDSM-babe.”

“You caught the hostage part, right?”

“Hostage or not, sometimes it’s nice to just be held,” Wade quipped brightly.

Harry laughed and waved his wand again, releasing Wade as he wasn’t actually a hostage, just an irritation to Ramsey.

“Do you take anything seriously?” Harry asked as Wade stretched his arms over his head, his muscles flexing beneath his suit.

“Oh I take so many things seriously,” Wade said, lowering his voice to a very near purr. “Did you know chickens and ostriches are thought to be descendants of the tyrannosaurus rex?”

Harry blinked in surprise. “Er… no, I didn’t.”

Wade jumped up, a single fluid motion, and smiled down at Harry.

“See? I’m a very serious person. And as such, I seriously think we should go back to my place- no, your place, and get to the blow job part of our first date.”

Harry barked out a startled laugh. He stood up, not enjoying being loomed over, and gave Wade an appreciative look.

“We didn’t have a first date, Wade.”

Wade gasped and put a hand over his mouth. “We haven’t? Oh, kitten, we should do that. Hurry!” He held a hand out to Harry, “Take my hand! Let’s go, quick!”

Harry pretended to reach for him, then yanked his hand back at the last second.

“Take the costume off and I’ll go.”

“Done.”

Harry no more than blinked twice and Wade was naked from the neck down right in front of him.

And he was…

Fuck. He was fit.

Scarred too, but Harry already knew that.

Wade was almost pure muscle and the lower Harry looked…

“Bloody hell! Wade! You’re not wearing any pants!” Harry yelped, averting his gaze to the ceiling quickly.

“Did you think I wore pants under my skintight onesie, kitten?”

Harry saw the flash of red and black that was Wade’s mask and carefully kept his eyes on it.

“I mean… er… boxers? Underwear?”

“Panties?” Wade said in a husky and playful voice.

Harry scowled as irritably as he could. “You’re naked,” he said dumbly.

Wade looked down at himself then back up at Harry. “You said take the costume off?”

Harry decided that if Wade was going to purposefully misunderstand him, that he wasn’t going to dignify anything he said in that nature with a response.

Also, Harry didn’t exactly cover ‘How to Speak with Naked Anti-Heroes’ in auror training.

“You’ve still got the mask on,” he pointed out instead.

Wade shrugged and used the wadded up suit in his hand to cover his groin.

“It’ll be hard for you to get an erection— get it? Hard to get hard? No? Never mind— if I’m all scaly and scarred, kitten.”

Harry frowned and absently reached for the mask, only to have his hand grabbed mid-air. Wade held his hand loosely, stopping him, but not hurting him.

“I like your face better than the mask,” Harry said slowly. “I’m, er… I’m not big on masks.”

Wade lowered Harry’s hand slowly before dropping it.

“I’m afraid I’m not big on my face,” he said with a wry attempt at sarcasm. He smiles widely, undoubtedly about to make another deflective joke, and sure enough. “Unless you’re offering to be my new mask?”

Harry rubbed his eyes beneath his glasses, abruptly exhausted by Wade’s… Wade-ness.

“Listen, you’re fun, and Merlin knows you’re fit as fuck, but here’s the thing- when I say I’m not big on masks, I mean it. And, er… I’ve already seen you’re face, you know? And… and it’s a nice face,” Harry lost a fight with a heavy blush creeping up his neck, “so if you want to take the mask off, we can go to my place, order tacos, and… and hang out. If not, then I’ll see you later.”

Wade didn’t say anything, Harry wondered how many people had the ability to make him shut up, and then abruptly turned around and walked out of the room.

Harry’s shoulders slumped as he watched Wade’s rather firm, and still entirely bare, arse walk out.

He half-expected that. He didn’t think Wade was serious, not serious enough to even be vulnerable in a small way around him, but…

But he was rather disappointed all the same.

 

****

Harry opened his door and crossed his arms.

Wade stood in the corridor outside his flat, mask on, hoodie and jeans on, and held out yet another bouquet of roses, red this time.

“Before you tell me in your unfairly adorable accent to go fuck myself, to which I would say: ‘do it yourself, you coward’, I’d like to invite you to come outside.”

Harry looked from the flowers to Wade’s uncharacterically serious masked face.

“Are there bullet spraying robots?”

“Nope.”

“Fire breathing lizard-men?”

“I didn’t see any, no.”

“Some creep in a costume?”

“Besides moi?” Wade laughed loudly, his laughter always as loud as his entire presence was. “Afraid not, kitten.”

Harry arched a brow at him. “Afraid I’ll have to say no then.”

Wade propped his empty hand in the doorway and stuck his hip out in a provocative pose. “What if I said I’ve got tacos and tequila?”

It wasn’t as if Harry had been doing anything other than dishes, and honestly he could just spell them clean later.

“Alright, let me grab a jacket.”

 

Harry let out a soft huff of surprise when he followed Wade down the stairs and found the small back garden for the complex to be entirely decorated.

“Did you… did you do this?” Harry asked, bewildered as he took it all in. There were white candles lit on the picnic table, fairy lights strung around the metal gate that kept non-residents out, and paper lanterns lit all in the trees.

It certainly hadn’t looked like that last time Harry saw it.

There was also another bag from the taco truck on the picnic table, confirming Wade’s previous statement that the food truck had been his favorite, a bottle of booze that was dark colored enough to not actually be tequila, two glasses, and…

It was rather romantic, truthfully.

Romantic and surprising, as Wade stood in front of Harry, shifting from side to side.

“I did, because here’s the thing- I think you’re lying when you say ‘oh, Wade, your face isn’t the most revolting thing I’ve ever seen’, and I think you’re adorable…” Wade spun his hand around the top of his head, “We all do. So what if we compromise? I’ll do this…”

Harry inhaled sharply when Wade rolled the bottom of his mark up, showing just the bottom half of his face.

“And you can pretend I’m not a freak and this is the greatest date you’ve ever been on?”

Harry considered how much of a compromise it was for Wade, with all his blatant insecurities, to roll his mask even halfway up. He also considered how serious Wade was about it being a date for him to go through so much effort.

He also didn’t much like Wade calling himself a freak, but he knew from experience that it was something rather difficult to train yourself not to do once it had been hammered in your head.

“That’s not tequila.”

“What?”

Harry nodded toward the bottle on the table and smirked. “You said tacos and tequila, but that’s not tequila.”

Wade’s frown slowly shifted in to a grin. A nice grin, at that. A much better grin to see than the odd one the mask gave him.

“Oh, kitten, I can go get a bottle of tequila and a bag of limes before you can say ‘I like blow jobs more than tacos’.”

Harry laughed and sat at the picnic table, waving a hand for Wade to sit across from him.

Wade sat right next to him. Literally, smushed right up against Harry’s side.

“Name me a single bloke who likes tacos more than blow jobs,” Harry said with mock-solemnity.

Wade’s lips twisted in a smirk as well when he held his hand out to Harry.

“Wade Wilson, huge fan of tacos, quesadillas, chimichangas, all things Mexican and British.”

Harry shook his hand with all the pomp and circumstance that the peculiar date required.

“Harry Potter,” he said. He winked before adding, “Perhaps you’ve simply never had a blow job worth a damn.”

Wade was smiling widely, all straight teeth and pink lips, when he poured them each a glass of ‘not-tequila’.

“Here’s to praying to the big man in the sky himself, by which I mean Thor of course, have you seen his hammer?, that your magical mouth can blow me away.” Wade nudged Harry’s shoulder as he slid him a glass. “It’ll be a tough job, kitten. Get it?”

Harry rolled his eyes and clicked his glass to Wade’s. “I get it.”

“No, no, wait! I’ve got a better one!”

 

Harry figured there were much worse ways to spend a Friday night than listen to Wade make bad sex puns while they ate, drank, and laughed together.