Chapter Text
With incredible timing, just after Peter decides to trust Wade and not worry about it anymore, one of Peter’s fears comes true:
He has a nightmare.
Green Goblin Jr. somehow gets loose and Wade spends half the night dodging bombs and distracting him so that Peter can synthesize a new anti-serum and a powerful sedative.
The other half of the night is slowly wearing Gobbo down between the two of them so that he could be apprehended safely, which is an extremely important imperative for Pete.
When they’ve finally got him in a good spot, Peter plays rage bait to keep all of Gobbo’s attention fixated on him so Wade can get into position.
“Calm down, Harry,” Peter calls, “I know you’re in there, it’s going to be okay. I have some medicine that’s going to help.”
The Goblin—Harry—laughs maniacally.
“Help? Help? We’ve seen your help, Spider-Man. Ask Gwen what it’s like to receive your help,” he spits.
Peter freezes as the Goblin goes on, rising up on his glider, “You’re a fool, Peter. You think you can stop me? You think you can touch me? You don’t have a shot in hell!”
“No,” Wade agrees, “But I do,” and fires the anti-serum and sedative bullets in a quick double tap.
Gobbo Junior howls as they hit him, and then he lists woozily to the side. Peter quickly swings up and catches him before he can fall off the glider.
They land safely down on the ground, where Peter webs the unconscious Osborne with way more care than Wade would have offered him.
“I’m sorry, Harry,” Peter murmurs. He pulls off the Goblin mask and strokes his hair. “Truly, I’m so sorry.”
Peter looks up at Wade.
“Can you call Ravencroft and let them know they can pick him up?”
“Are you sure, Websy? He got out of there once.”
Peter takes a deep breath.
“Yeah. It’s…nicer. Than the Raft. Ravencroft will make sure he doesn’t slip through security again.” Peter looks down at the rapidly de-Gobbo-ing Harry Osborne. “He doesn’t deserve to be in that kind of prison, Wade. He’s just…sick. He’s just really sick.”
Bless his poor baby’s giant, bleeding heart. Wade looks around and then risks leaning down to press a quick kiss to Peter’s masked cheek.
“Okay, sweetheart,” Wade says quietly. “I’ll call ‘em.”
Once Ravencroft collects the still-unconscious Osborne, Wade and Peter split up: taking different routes back to the closest apartment, which happens to be Wade’s.
Wade gets home first because tons of people already know where he lives, so he just makes the direct path there. Peter has to take a more circular, wider path, and will probably end up ditching the suit in some roof stash and come in civvies.
It’s about twenty minutes of anxious waiting before the lock turns, and Peter comes through the door wearing a pair of Wade’s sweatpants and one of his hoodies.
“Found one of your stashes before I found mine,” Peter explains. “Figured you wouldn’t mind.”
“No, honey,” Wade says gently, “I don’t mind. Can I hug you?”
Peter tenses for a split, heart-wrenching second, and then nods.
“Yeah,” he says, his voice rough with emotion. “I’d like that.”
Wade steps forward and folds Peter into his arms. Peter clings to him and lets out a shaky exhale.
“I’m sorry, baby boy,” Wade whispers into his hair. “I know that was super-duper fucking hard. But you saved him.”
Peter chokes out a horrible laugh.
“No, I didn’t. Not until the anti-serum is permanent. I failed him a long time ago and this is just putting a band-aid on it.”
Wade presses a fierce kiss to the top of Peter’s head and pulls back.
“Baby,” he says gently, “If it were up to me, he’d be dead. This would have been over hours ago. Wouldn’t even have hesitated.”
“Wade,” Peter starts, but Wade interrupts him.
“You: your big, beautiful heart and that genius brain of yours are the only reason that kid still has a chance, Petey-pie. I don’t know about you, but that sounds like a save to me. When he’s in his right mind again, he’ll thank you.”
Or he fucking better, Wade thinks privately. Otherwise Wade will beat his ass until he finds an attitude change.
Peter shudders.
“I’m tired,” Peter says in a small voice. “Can we go to bed?”
It’s not exactly an enthusiastic agreement with what Wade said but it’s also not an outright rejection, so Wade lets it slide.
“Of course, baby.”
While Peter brushes his teeth and washes up, Wade pulls the blackout shades down in the bedroom now that it"s properly morning. He lays down on the bed, and waits for Peter. When he finally emerges, Peter crawls onto the bed and straight into Wade’s arms.
“I love you,” Peter whispers into his chest, and Wade squeezes him closer.
“I love you, too, sweetheart. My special boy.”
Peter shakes his head.
“Mine,” Peter says and presses a kiss over Wade’s heart.
Peter’s Special Boy, a million sparkly unicorn fireworks read as they explode in Wade’s head.
“Yours,” Wade agrees happily.
Wade falls asleep like that, curled up with his honey, with his face pressed into his hair…
…and wakes up sometime later to the sound of a harsh, ragged moan and a sharp spasm of Peter’s body.
“Baby?” Wade asks gently.
“No,” Peter moans, “No, no, no,”
Uh, oh. It doesn’t take a fucking genius to know what Peter might be dreaming of.
“Petey,” Wade says, a little louder, “You’re having a nightmare, honey. Wake up.”
“No!” Peter snaps and then rears back his fist to strike.
Time seems to slow down.
Shit, Wade has time to think. Motherfucking shit cock ass. Goddamnit. He’s so mad. Not at Peter, never at Peter, but at the whole fucked-up situation.
Peter’s going to punch him at full, unconscious Spidey-strength, which will definitely collapse his ribcage. If he’s lucky, his heart will go immediately and Wade will at least die fast.
It’ll be messy though. His heart aches more at the thought that Petey’s going to wake up to that shitshow than knowing it’s about to get pulverized. An injury like this will take hours to heal enough for Wade to come back. His poor baby’s going to be alone with his corpse for a long time.
They were doing so good and they’re going to end up right back at square-fucking-one. Worse than square one. Forget pillow barriers: it’ll be a fucking miracle if Peter still wants to be with him after this. This will be so fucking traumatizing for his baby boy that it’ll be game over.
“I love you,” Wade tells him before it all ends, and closes his eyes.
The punch never comes.
Wade peeks open an eye.
Peter’s arm hangs frozen in the air, then falls.
“Wade?” Peter asks groggily.
Holy shit. Holy shit.
“I’m here, baby,” Wade soothes even as he tries to get his own heart rate under control.
“Y’kay?”
“I’m okay, honey. You were having a bad dream.”
That wakes Peter all the way up. He stares at Wade with wide, startled eyes.
“I was,” Peter says slowly. “I remember.”
“You stopped yourself,” Wade tells him. “You pulled back to throw a punch but you stopped.”
“Yeah, I was…fighting Harry. The uh, first time, with Gwen.”
Wade reaches out and wraps a hand around Peter’s arm. He strokes it with his thumb. “Yeah, I figured that might be the case.”
“It was…like normal. Except right before things went really bad, Gwen turned to me and said, ‘You’re dreaming, silly goose. Wade’s right next to you,’ and then my spidey-sense went off and woke me up.”
Wade blinks rapidly.
“Your spidey-sense went off?”
“Yeah.”
“Your spidey-sense went off because it detected a threat to me?”
“Yeah.” Peter’s brows furrow as he thinks. “I think it did. I actually…I actually think it has been. The Doombot fight, and a couple other, smaller times out on patrol. It kept going off when you tried juggling the kitchen knives the other day, too.”
“I only dropped one of those,” Wade protests.
Wait, actually, now that he’s thinking about it:
“And you webbed it before it hit my foot anyway.”
They sit quietly for a moment while they consider that.
“I think it went off the night before my thesis,” Peter says slowly, “but I was so tired I didn’t realize it.”
“I wasn’t in danger then,” Wade reminds him. “I woke you up by tensing.”
But Peter is nodding.
“No, that tracks. You tensing up meant there was something you were worried about, which meant my senses wanted me awake to deal with it.”
Holy shit, fuckballs-McGee. Wade stares at him.
“You trained your spidey-sense,” he marvels, “to look out for me?”
Peter pauses, then nods slowly.
“Uh, yeah. I think so.”
“Baby!” Wade squeals. “That is the most romantic fucking—Jesus Christ. Get over here, I have to kiss you now. Peter Parker, the man that you are!”
Peter squirms under Wade’s affections, laughing and complaining as they roll around the bed.
Wade ends up on top of him; the frantic, joyful kisses gone slow and sweet. Wade keeps pulling back to just look at him, his beautiful silly boy, who loves him—loves Wade!—so much he subconsciously programmed his radioactive spider alarm system to protect him.
“Does this mean that the pillow wall is officially done-zo?” Wade asks hopefully.
Peter rolls his eyes, but he’s smiling.
“Yeah, big guy,” Peter says, then he gets a little shit-eating grin. “I think we can put the pillows to bed.”
Peter waggles his eyebrows at the pun, and listen: Wade’s only a man. He has to have his way with him after that.
The next couple of weeks are some of the best Wade’s ever had in his life.
It helps that with Peter’s thesis complete, Peter’s mostly just riding out the last few weeks of the semester before he is officially done-done and can get his diploma.
Obviously, crime doesn’t take a break, but besides daily patrol and the occasional Avengers mission Wade gets sent out on, they get about two full weeks to just hang. Relax. Vibe.
They fuck a ton, they finish watching Bridgerton, Wade tries and fails to get Peter to watch Love is Blind—(“I can’t,” Peter begs as yet another woman drunkenly embarrasses herself on TV over a doofy, undeserving man, “Please, Wade, this is actual torture,”)—and otherwise just spend time with each other.
Peter even drags him out to Brooklyn one day on a date. Wade gets all dressed up for it.
“We’re getting pancakes and walking around a museum,” Peter says, amused, as Wade puts on his lashes.
“So?” Wade pouts. “A girl can’t look pretty?”
“That’s not what I said,” Peter says, smiling. “You always look pretty, Wade.”
Wade feels himself blush and he bats his eyes at him. “Flatterer.”
Peter shrugs.
“I just tell it how it is.”
Wade does end up going for the flat boots over heels, but that’s fine. Practical girls are pretty girls, too.
When he’s done with all his final touches, he presents himself to Peter with a twirl.
“Very nice,” Peter says approvingly and leans up, kissing the side of Wade’s mouth to avoid messing up his lipstick.
It is nice, Wade thinks, satisfied. He’s wearing fleecy tights, a brown suede mini-skirt, and a cream turtleneck. He looks hella cute while still covering as much of his skin as possible.
They take the 2 all the way down to the Brooklyn Museum stop. Peter catches his hand when they get out of the subway, and holds it the whole walk over to Tom’s Restaurant. It’s cold as shit outside, but there’s still a healthy wait outside the place.
Wade just about floats the entire time, just barely able to listen to Peter as he explains that Ben used to bring him here when he was a kid for pancakes, and then either a trip to the Prospect Park Zoo or to the museum to walk it all off. Peter also laments how overlooked the place is because of the other—more famous but worse—Tom’s.
“Wait, this isn’t the Seinfeld one?” Wade asks, his brain catching up.
“Nope, that one’s up on the Upper West. It’s overrated. This Tom’s never misses. Their pancakes are the best.”
“The best?” Wade gasps, “That’s big talk, baby boy. The best? You know I am kind of a pancake expert. A pancake connoisseur.”
Pete just smiles at him and runs his thumb over Wade’s hand. Wade shivers.
“You’ll see. You’re gonna love it,” Peter promises.
The line moves up enough that they’re able actually get into the place, and Wade already approves. It’s got that special something: a place that’s been around and loved well enough to get a soul of its own. Wade notices a sign on the back wall: EST. 1936.
“I wonder if Barnes and Noble ever came round here back in the day,” Wade muses, peering at the old photos behind the counter. They’d have been running around Brooklyn around then, the little scamps.
“Huh,” Pete pauses. “Dang, I never even thought about that. They might have seen it brand new. That’s really cool.”
“I’ll ask the next time I see them,” Wade promises.
Peter flashes him a smile, and then they’re seated.
Peter does not lead him astray: the pancakes at Tom’s Restaurant are fucking phenomenal. Huge and fluffy and served with different types of special butters, Wade’s going to dream about them for weeks. Between the two of them, they put away three full plates each, much to the amusement and disbelief of their server.
Peter insists on paying the bill—“Hey, hey, hey, pretty lady,” Peter scolds Wade when he goes to pay, “I’m taking you out on a date, let me get it.”—which suitably melts Wade enough to stop fighting for it. He does slip the waiter a Benjamin on the way out, but what Peter doesn’t know won’t hurt him.
They slowly make their way to the museum, pleasantly full of pancakes and holding hands.
Once inside, they mosey through it, sometimes reading the plaques and sometimes just making up their own interpretations and titles that they like better.
Peter leaves him at one point to go to the bathroom, and Wade finds himself idly putzing in front of One Basquiat while he waits.
A teenager pulls up next to Wade to look at the painting.
“Cool, right?” the teen says, and Wade blinks.
He’s not normally a teen’s numero uno choice to strike up conversations when he’s not in the Pool suit. Especially not to a ‘cool’ kid like this: patched jacket, fresh kicks, and dreads artfully styled. He’s got a spray can sticking out of his backpack—how the kid got that through security, Wade has no idea.
The kid is watching him expectantly though, like he’s actually expecting an answer.
“Yeah,” Wade says slowly. “It is.”
There’s something about this kid—what is it?
The kid nods.
“I like his work a lot. My favorite’s Irony of Negro Policeman.”
There’s a bright, devious sparkle in his eye when he adds, “But maybe that’s just ‘cause I like the irony of me liking it, you know?”
Wait. Wait. Wait. Wade feels his eyes go wide as the math starts mathing. No way. No way!
“There you are,” Peter says as he approaches, “I was just trying to call you.” He looks at the kid with amused exasperation. “You missed pancakes.”
Wade stares at them, dumbfounded, as Kid Spidey and Peter do their cute little handshake-fist-bump routine.
“Sorry, boss,” Spidey Junior says, “Hate to miss Tom’s, but I had some errands to run, you know how it goes.”
He mimics web-shooting, thwip-thwip. Peter laughs.
“Yeah,” Peter says with a smile. “I know how it goes.”
“I’m Miles, by the way,” Spidey Junior—Miles—says to Wade. “This is a good look for you, ‘Pool. Pete did say you could rock a mini-skirt.”
“Damn right,” Wade says automatically.
Internally, he’s freaking out. Holy shit. Kid Spidey! Unmasked! In the flesh! All…Wade squints at him…however-many-teen years of him. Christ.
“You’re just a baby,” Wade blurts, mildly horrified. “Kid was supposed to be a joke!”
Miles rolls his eyes while Peter visibly bites his cheek and avoids eye contact.
“I’m seventeen,” Miles complains. “I’m not a kid.”
“Au contraire,” Wade hisses and rounds on Peter. “You let him run errands?”
Peter winces.
“I was fourteen when I started, uh, running errands,” Peter starts.
“I hate that,” Wade tells him seriously, “You know I hate that.”
Looking back at the early photos of Spider-Man makes him queasy now: knowing now how young Peter was, fighting bad guys all alone and getting his ass kicked. Just a baby, with no one to help him, no one who knew to take care of him.
Wade missed that early Spidey timeframe because he was busy being a science experiment for psychos. By the time Wade had finished hunting said psychos down and started paying attention to New York’s finest spider-themed vigilante, Spidey was an adult. Legally, anyway.
“I’ve been told keeping him from errands is hugely hypocritical at best and douchebaggy at worst,” Peter is saying now, “Given that Miles was sixteen when, uh. Stuff happened. It’s at least a little better.”
Not really, but this does explain why Peter is so reluctant to put Spidey Jr. out on tougher jobs.
“Ugh, does this mean you’re gonna baby me too, "Pool?” Miles complains. “I thought you were cooler than that.”
“Aw, Junior,” Wade coos instantly, “You think I’m cool?”
Pete snorts as Miles rolls his eyes.
“Sometimes, I guess,” Miles mutters, one-hundred percent awkward youth. He glances sidelong at Peter. “You’ve been pretty cool to Peter.”
All reports to the contrary, Wade is not an idiot. He knows that this is huge. This is a huge, incredible, monumental show of trust from both of them, letting Wade into this fiercely protected secret.
“Well,” Wade says, getting choked up, “You’re wrong. I’m super uncool. Get over here, kid,” and he pulls Miles into a hug. “I’m gonna baby the shit out of you.”
“Aww,” Miles whines, muffled into Wade’s chest, “Noooo….”
“Aww, yissss,” Wade counters. He meets Peter’s gaze over Miles’ head. Peter’s eyes are warm, shining with love and affection.
“Hey, Miles, don’t complain. It’s a pretty sweet deal having Wade take care of you,” Peter says, patting Miles back sympathetically. “I should know.”
Wade yanks him into the hug, making a Kid-Spidey sandwich and both Spider-Men squeak when he squeezes them.
Yeah, Wade thinks. Wade’s life is pretty fuckin’ good right now.