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“Have you ever lived with anyone before?”
At Wade’s question, Logan pauses to think. Scratches his balls for a second, and says, “I lived at Xavier’s school for a while, before I left. Lived in a clapboard boarding house about seventy years back. A couple of times, I slept in a park with other people nearby. Do those count?”
“That was a rhetorical question,” says Wade. “Some might even call it an accusatory one. Mostly because—dude. I’m a fucking mess. But you’re even worse.”
He gestures wildly around them. The sink is overflowing with dishes. There’s week-old Chinese takeout on the dining table that seems to have grown its own biblically accurate colony of mushrooms. Used boxers are draped over the chairs, and there’s a delicate musk floating around that flares to a righteous stink whenever one disturbs the balance of the air currents that run, or do not run, through the house.
Logan has been staying here for, hmm…two weeks?
Wade gestures at the mess some more. His hands are practically flying through the air, and he looks at Logan with a sort of wide-eyed exasperation, an expression that Logan has not previously seen on Deadpool before. He seems, for the first time since they met, speechless.
“If I’d known that this was what it would take for you to shut the fuck up, I’d have asked you to clean between my toes,” says Logan.
“I’ve seen the inside of your brain,” says Wade. “It’s sexy, I’d fuck it. This? Disaster. Not sexy. I’ve fucked in worse places. But not by much. But the real problem is that Blind Al has gone on strike and refuses to emerge from her room or release Mary Puppins until this is a livable situation. She might die there before it happens. Do you want the death of the most wonderful, mostly-blind, elderly girl in the world on your Edward Scissorhands? And also the death of Blind Al?”
Logan glares at him mutely. Wade takes it for an answer that it is not.
“I thought not, Logan. I’m glad you understand the optics. We’re R-Rated, but not for edgy shit like that. Well. Some of my fanbase might enjoy that. But they’re the sweaty neckbeard types, you know? We’re intersectional here.”
“If I clean up,” says Logan, “will you shut up again?”
Wade mimes locking his mouth. His eyes watch as Logan heaves himself out of the chair that has an imprint the shape of his sweaty butt, and gets to cleaning the biohazard of a living room.
He resents it for the first hour. And then he finds there’s something surprisingly cleansing about cleaning the filth he’s living in. It’s a ritual, one that he hasn’t really enjoyed before, because he’s never liked the place he lived in. But the barebones of Deadpool and Blind Al’s apartment are carved with warmth and security. It’s as if all the years of living here have given the beams and floorboards a comfortable weight, and strangely, Logan begins to feel some shame that he was so careless with his mess. That Wade, of all people, had to call him out.
Anyway, thinks Logan, it’s not like Wade is easy to live with either. He has no idea how Vanessa endured it for so long. Maybe Wade was sane at some point, and it’s not like he’s truly insane now, but he’s definitely teetering on some edge. He can be perfectly present and lucid for some conversations, and in others, he’s talking to someone faraway, laughing at a joke that Logan can’t hear, his head cocked and his body tense as if he’s bracing himself from being pulled away.
A lot of things about Deadpool bother Logan. Maybe this did once, too. But he’s got his own demons, his own voices, and he’d rather listen to Wade’s than his. Since you can’t listen to both at once, Wade’s tends to drown his out. Marvel H. Christ, that feeling of silence. It’s like a good fuck, a cold beer, a warm arm looped around his waist, all in one. A good cleaning, but of the gray matter in between his ears, a place he didn’t realize had grown dusty from want of closure.
X-23, Laura, comes by sometimes. She’s old enough to both want to and accomplish the phenomenal act of living alone, and the sort of wrinkled look on her face conveys exactly what she thinks about her alternate-universe fatherly figure living with two roommates at his ripe age. Logan wants to tell her: It’s not so easy, being lonely at my age. But that’s a lesson that’s not one for preaching, but instead one for learning.
“You going to college?” he asks instead, which he thinks is an age-appropriate question.
She snorts. “No.”
“Why not?”
Laura kicks up her feet, nearly kicking the tv remote off of the coffee table. “I like my job.”
She works security, late night shifts. One flash of her claws was enough to convince the team that she was good for it. This universe, from what Logan can tell, seems to be friendlier to mutants—of course they are, he didn’t fail here, he didn’t fuck up, he was the anchor for goddamnssake—and for that he is grateful. She’s also hanging out with Ellie and Yukio quite a bit, and he’s glad that she’s making friends. It’s a healthy development for teenagers her age, he hears.
“Classes,” he says. “You’ve got nothing during the day.”
Her eyes narrow. “Didn’t know you were so big on the books.”
He shrugs. Doesn’t know how to say, my brain can regenerate, but it’s never gonna get bigger. He knows who he is. That’s the knowledge that you get from hundreds of years of existing: a sense of self-identity. He’s the sack of meat you throw in the front line. Not the one moving the chess pieces.
But Laura? Laura’s different. Laura’s got that sharp look in her eyes that he’s seen in Hank McCoy’s eye, the cool observation of Jean’s lake-green gaze that could flare into white-gold heat in an instant—
He swallows, hard. It still hurts, even now.
Laura’s watching him, and her eyes do look like Jean’s, in another life, in another world. She says, with that discerning tone, “Online classes, maybe.”
“Yeah,” he says hoarsely. “Wait, what?”
Midway through her explaining to him that you can take classes online, at your own pace, Wade, Ellie, and Yukio waltz through the door, laughing and carrying brightly colored bobas. Yukio deposits one in Laura’s hand that’s a frothy swirl of red and pink and yellow, and hands one to Logan that’s a comparatively more modest tan color, the black tapioca balls pressing in and out of sight at the bottom.
He can guess, without even looking at Wade, that it was Wade’s idea to give him boba in the first place. Wade likes to declaw him in any way and this is just another example—give the Wolverine boba rather than whiskey. Pet his little ears. Either that or it’s poison, because Deadpool also likes finding fun ways to make Logan die. But he did a clever thing by asking Yukio to deliver it, because it is impossible to look at her sunny smile and deny her anything.
“Thanks,” Logan says gruffly and takes a sip.
Sugar milk. Nothing special. He takes a longer draught and chokes a little when one of the balls shoots into his mouth and hits the back of his throat; at that, Wade murmurs something about swallowing, baby, it’s a skill you learn or don’t, and Ellie elbows him in the side. Yukio, on the other hand, droops a little.
“Is it okay?” she asks. “I wasn’t sure what you’d like, so I thought brown sugar would be the safest—”
Oh hell, it wasn’t Wade after all. Though he’s sure that the other man had an encouraging hand in it. Logan forces a smile and says, tea still in his esophagus, “It’s good.”
Laura, sipping her own drink, grins behind the straw.
The three girls take their leave, then. Laura pauses before she leaves and says, “Get out of the house more, Logan, won’t you?” and then follows Ellie and Yukio out. The door closes, but not quick enough—Logan sees the hand that Ellie places on Laura then, the possessive and casual touch on her ass, the familiar caress of a lover.
The door clicks shut. Logan turns, wide-eyed, to Wade.
Wade saw, Logan knows he did. But he looks completely unsurprised, sipping out of a bright purple straw noisily. He’s down to ice with a few balls hidden like treasures, and the sound of him slurping away for them is abysmal.
“What?” he asks around a mouthful of balls.
“They—?”
Wade laughs at the look on his face. “Yeah?”
But Logan’s thoughts must betray him, for Wade’s face turns from laughing at an old man to a twist of emotion that registers as genuinely critical of whatever expression is splayed out on Logan’s face.
“Oh come on man,” says Wade. “I know you’re so ancient that you get it up every fifty years or so. But do I really gotta explain 21st century norms to you?”
“It’s not a good idea,” he says, trying to remain calm. “Getting in between a couple like that.”
“Negasonic and Yukio are poly!” says Wade with a huff. “They’re seeing Laura, casually. No pressure on all sides, daddi-o, so chill.”
Then he takes a closer look at Logan’s face and says, “That hit a sore point, didn’t it? Riiiiight. The whole, Cyclops-and-Jean thing, yeah, ouch. Man. See, if they had been poly—”
“Shut up,” says Logan. “Shut up, shut the fuck up.”
Mercifully, Wade quiets.
Logan rolls the boba cup between his hands before getting up to get himself a beer. They keep beer in the fridge, always. He finds that he reaches for hard alcohol less, these days, but in this moment, he wishes more than anything for a finger of whiskey. (Okay, a fist of whiskey. Okay, the whole damn bottle.) Beer’ll do, at this moment at least.
After a moment, he says, “I asked her, how life was going. She didn’t mention it at all.”
Wade understands the unspoken question. The tension dissipates then—it’s amazing, Wade’s voice never got less light-hearted, but his entire demeanor had changed when he thought Logan had something critical to say about lesbians. He says lightly, “Well, you’re not the most sex-positive.”
“I have nothing against them—”
“Nobody’s calling you a homophobe, Logan, but come on—you know what the kids say? Vibe check!” Wade makes a beeping sound that Logan is almost certain is not what the kids say or do, but Wade turns a blind eye to any suggestion that he might not actually be culturally relevant. “Yours is coming off as repressed and full of lust, like a boner for unrequited, self-sacrificial bullshit. Have you ever had sex without falling in love? I’m getting the—intense pining, the yearning gazes, the eyebrows going like this.” Wade hooks his fingers over his eyes to emphasize the deep grooves between Logan’s eyebrows. “No wonder your psuedo-daughter doesn’t want to talk to you about her casual sex.”
Logan groan-winces at the very thought. He doesn’t want to hear about that, yeah. But he wants … he wants her to want to talk to him about it, obliquely and awkwardly as anything. He wants for them to have a terrible conversation full of hypotheticals, one in which he isn’t absolutely sure that he gave the correct fatherly advice for. A conversation that they can look back and laugh at, years down the road. Proof that they can be something more than a stranger and her ghost.
The first part, though—
“I had plenty of casual sex,” he says.
“Even the way you say casual is so…” Wade pulls a face. “Formal. As Paul Hollywood would say, stodgy.”
“I fucked Cyclops,” he says lightly, and takes pleasure in the way that makes Wade choke violently on his boba. He hopes Wade dies a little bit, just so Logan can see him resurrect.
Wade, unfortunately, recovers like most human beings do. “When. How. Did he use his lasers? Do you have a Cyclops tramp stamp? Is it a portrait of Jean?”
Logan shrugs. “We were drunk. We were trying to prove our worthiness for Jean. We kissed. Then gave each other handies. We were kind of talking about her the whole time, though.”
He’s a little disturbed by the stars that appear in Wade’s eyes.
“I feel like Christmas has come early,” breathes Wade and Logan shoves his head to the side.
“But that’s why I don’t want Laura getting messed up in couple stuff,” says Logan. “Because they choose each other, in the end.”
He sees Wade look at him, but Logan doesn’t want eye contact in this moment; he doesn’t want to see the pity in Wade’s eyes that everyone gives him. Poor Wolverine, left out in the cold when the two most beautiful people in the world chose each other. He hates the pity, because he had refused to pity himself. Refuses to pity himself.
“Kids are different these days, though,” says Wade.
“They sure are,” says Logan.
He feels like something changes after this conversation. He’s not sure why, but it feels like Wade—it’s not that Wade tiptoes around him, Wade has never been catlike unless it’s to avoid getting an adamantium claw straight to his cerebral cortex.
No, Wade is watchful. And that’s different. It puts Logan in the mind of being watched by one of those big cats at a zoo, how they go from sloe-eyed and sleepy to suddenly pouncing with their claws unsheathed, all zero to sixty in a matter of a back being turned.
He knows it’s coming to a head, in the way you’re aware of where the heat of the sun is coming as it rises from east to west. But he doesn’t realize quite what’s happening until, suddenly, like heatstroke, it comes upon him, one milquetoast Tuesday, nothing auspicious about it at all until it became, suddenly, a day indeed.
“Hey,” says Logan when Wade enters the door, more of a grunt than a hey, really. Wade pulls his cowl off and looks at him; Logan is watching television, some shitty reality TV show about love and betrayal, whatever, yadda yadda, he’s really just rooting for Rose, because she’s the cleverest one of the bunch. It’s a meeting-the-siblings episode.
“Hey,” says Logan, a little indignantly, when Wade picks up the remote and turns off the television. Wade is smiling a smile that Logan has never seen before, this quirk of a smile that barely moves the scar tissue around his mouth; on anyone else, Logan might call it nervous. And then words die in Logan’s mouth when Wade, still saying nothing, sinks to his knees.
His hands slide up Logan’s thighs, hot and gloved, pausing in front of his zipper. A question. After a moment that seems to stretch on to eternity, Logan raises his hips. An answer.
Later—“Hey,” says Logan, warningly, his voice tight, his hand flexing on the back of Wade’s head, fighting the urge to have his hips buck up into that wet heat, trying to ignore the sounds Wade is making, sloppy and horrible sounds, the kind that remind you just how much horniness will override disgust. And underneath it, Logan can hear the wet sound of Wade jerking himself off, jerking himself off to Logan, sucking Logan’s dick, choking on it. He’s on the knife’s edge of coming, and his fingers curl around the scarred, pitted flesh at the curve of Wade’s head, but there’s no hair with which to try to pull him off.
Wade must taste it, taste the spate of precum that preludes actual cum, because he makes a half-laughing sound, a trademark, goddamn copyright Deadpool sound. To Logan’s horror, his entire world lights out in orgasm.
So they make it three weeks of living together before they fuck. After they do, Logan thinks he understand a little more how Vanessa endured Wade for so long. And even later, he’ll wonder why Wade had to be armored as Deadpool before he had made the first move. By that time, though, he’ll know the answer.
It doesn’t really change anything. Monumentally, at least. Well, Blind Al catches on pretty quickly about what they’re doing and makes it very clear that if she accidentally sits in a puddle of cum, regenerating superhero or not, they will not live to face another day. “She’s worse than matter and antimatter,” whispers Wade. “She matters. Don’t piss her off, Logan, I’m serious.”
Logan snorts at the idea of Wade being serious. But, when he thinks about it, Wade is serious, a lot of the time. He’s just so viciously unserious the other 70% of the time, it’s like he doesn’t understand that there’s a balance that other people strike. He wonders if pre-Deadpool Wade was like this.
But he doesn’t question Deadpool’s faith to Blind Al. They have this horrible relationship, at least to Logan, but the faith and trust there is undeniable, even layered as it is with memories and experiences that a person more sensitive than Logan might delicately label as traumatic. Logan thinks that Wade will take care of Blind Al until she dies.
No—Logan thinks that Wade will take care of Blind Al and try his damndest hard to die before she does. That’s what he’d do if he were in Wade’s place, after all.
The second time is when Logan is showering and Wade is apparently too impatient to wait the five minutes. “Because it doesn’t take five minutes,” says Wade. “You use up all the hot water. C’mon, just let me in. I’ll make it a special shower if you’d like—douche for a douche?”
“Stay away from my ass.”
Two grown men in the shower is straining the limits of a shower, and parts are always slapping up against each other; Logan can’t turn around to wash his hair without feeling Wade’s scarred cock hard against his ass, and he refuses to bend down for the soap because he already knows all the jokes Wade will start crassly making. It’s a game of will, and Logan is almost certain he’ll win.
And he does, because Wade has a toddler’s attention span and desire for immediate gratification. It’s Wade who sighs theatrically and says, “If you won’t get the soap, I suppose I will,” and crouches down to pick up the bar of soap from its innocuous place on the rim of the bath. Doing so puts him at direct eye level with Logan’s dick, shamefully straining for attention, and Wade traces the soap bar in his hand up Logan’s leg, a sudsy path left in its trail, up, and up, and up—
Logan seizes his hand and says, “What did I say.”
“Stay away from your ass,” says Wade, and he laughs, a little, shaking his head with the sort of scalded attitude of a child caught pushing the boundaries of a rule. He looks up at Logan, no lashes to make his gaze coquette, his lips brushing the tip of Logan’s cock, and sinks down with a sigh onto it.
Logan comes in his hot mouth, lets Wade spit out his cum to wash down the drain—“I only swallow, sweetheart, when there aren’t any other options, though you taste better than some other cocks I’ve sucked. Pineapple?”—then bullies Wade out of the tiled shower so that he can shove the other man onto the sink. Wade hisses at the cold of the marble on his bare ass, but the sibilant end of his sound transforms into a shocked sound, embarrassingly close to a high moan, when Logan takes him in his mouth.
The scarred texture of Wade’s dick is unlike anything Logan has ever felt before. He takes his time tracing the ridges of scar tissue with the pointed tip of his tongue, wondering how much Wade can feel. The answer, from the cursing Wade is making and the way his heel is kicking into Logan’s back, is enough.
“You, you fucker,” gasps out Wade when Logan pulls off for a breather. “Who knew Wolverine was a champion cocksucker?”
“I am going to break your dick off,” says Logan. “Don’t ever call me that again.”
Wade simpers at him. “Baby girl, I’m just saying you’re good.”
“Don’t call me that either.” But telling Deadpool what and what not to say is a lost war, Logan knows. And there’s a better way to shut him up, so Logan dips back down and crams as much of Wade’s dick, the thick heat of it, down his throat.
Wade comes with a shout, seems genuinely incapable of putting together his usual nonsensical string of words together afterward, and Logan feels nothing but victory.
He and Blind Al are alone in the apartment, Mary Puppins making her usual alarming wheezing sound in the corner, when Blind Al says abruptly, “When are you gonna leave?”
“You want me out?” barks Logan, haunches raising. It’s pure instinct, but it makes Mary Puppins whine.
Blind Al doesn’t flinch. It’s little traits like that which reveal how she managed to put up with Wade for so long. She wags a finger at him as a reprimand; the brown skin of her hand is wrinkled as a testament to the life she’s lived, the years she’s gone through, the work she’s done in all that time. More noble than any scar, marks that Logan is wondering if he’ll ever live to see on his own body. He ages, but slowly. He wonders if Deadpool is the same.
“I’m just saying,” she says, her lips pursed as she blows steam off the surface of her hot cup of tea. “You’re getting to the dangerous point.”
“What?”
“The tipping point,” she says. “Right now, you can still leave and it would be fine. But if you stay, you’ll never be rid of him.”
The statement perplexes him. It makes Wade sound like a parasite of some kind, something that early preventative action could nip in the bud—not an inaccurate statement about the most annoying man in the world, except it comes from one of his oldest, most loyal companions.
“If you want me to leave, just say so,” he says, jaw clenched. “But otherwise I’m going nowhere.”
“Because you have nowhere else to go?”
She’s right. Of course she’s right. He doesn’t really have anywhere else to go. But that has never stopped him from leaving anyway, from making the biggest mistake of his life and leaving the school, from drinking that entire bottle of whiskey and allowing himself to be dragged by a mercenary menace in red-and-black spandex. There’s nothing keeping him here other than himself.
He’s here because he wants to be here. And in that moment, he knows why she’s warning him off.
He says, gruffly, “I already tried my hardest to get rid of him. Didn’t work, did it?”
Blind Al says nothing more. Doesn’t call him out, doesn’t tell him what to do anymore. She just continues drinking her tea. But Mary Puppins puts her paws on Logan’s leg and makes a happy, whining sound.
Deadpool’s filthy mouth is just a given trait, but Logan always notices his hyperfocus on assplay in the expletive-filled tirades that he gives to whatever villain of the week they’re out stopping. This time, it’s to this two-dime villain that Deadpool took personal umbrage with because he skewered Wade’s favorite coffee cart.
“You wanna fuck my coffee cart!” shouts Deadpool as he fires shot after shot. “I’ll fuck you up. Nicely. Lots of rimplay first, nice and easy. We’ll have candles baby, the safe kind that don’t have flames. Rose petals, if you want! You into champagne? Rosé? I was drunk the first time I got pegged. Then I did it again sober.”
“Shut the hell up!” screams the villain, whose indifferent plot to rule the world seems to have melted into a personal vendetta against Deadpool. Logan can commiserate.
The villain dies skewered on Logan’s right hand. Wade makes a whining sound of complaint. “I built up to that murder! I earned that murder! Oh, very nice,” he says, when Logan wipes the blood off of his hand onto Wade’s shoulder. “See, I told you. Very practical to have a red suit.”
But his banter with the villain is still stuck with Logan by the time they’ve gone home and have used up all the hot water in the show. They’re alone in the house; Blind Al had taken a good whiff of them and announced that she and Mary Puppins going out for coffee, and Wade shouted at her, as she left, “I think we’re making you more agile in your old age!”
She called back at them, “It’s the flight of fear, asshole. C’mon, Mary.”
Logan makes coffee, because he wants coffee, and wants something hot to hold between his hands. Then he takes a breath and asks the question on his mind.
In conclusion: “Yeah, she pegged me,” says Wade when Logan asks if he was talking out of his ass when he said he’d been pegged before. Well, first Wade says, “I exclusively talk out of my ass,” and then tries to clap out a response before Logan threatens to scissor him open with the adamantium fingers. It didn’t work very well anyway. Wade’s got a tight ass but not a clappable one, though Logan’s not picky enough to prefer one over the other.
But maybe his face betrays a little too much of his interest because Wade looks at him with those beetle-bright eyes, beautiful in the ruin of his face, and says, a little slyly, “Wanna hear about it?”
“I don’t,” says Logan, but Wade, because he’s Wade, monologues anyway. Talks about how she used too much lube—“A real slip-and-slide moment!”—how she’d forced him to bend over, how she licked from the base of his cock to the tight rim of his ass—“My cinnamon ring, as a fiery soldier might say“—how she’d pressed into him, rocking the unyielding tip in and out of him, loosening him up with each push, before she’d fucked him silly; how he’d been tight and anxious at first, but the first punch to his prostrate had lit his whole brain up, lights-from-outer-space-style, until he was practically shivering as he came.
“And boy did I come,” says Wade. “Came and came and came. She milked me like a fucking cow, I thought I was going to die. My cum turned clear. I didn’t even realize that shit was possible.”
And Logan, hypnotized by this image, doesn’t realize that Wade has inched so close to him until the other man reaches out to press a hand against the tent in his sweatpants. The jolt of shock and pleasure makes Logan flinch. “Want to do something about this?”
“Fuck, yes,” growls out Logan, and pulls him down into a kiss.
They make it to the bedroom. They make it to the no-clothes stage off. They make it to the lube-on-fingers, Logan biting Wade’s neck as he made him take three, Wade trying his best to give Logan a footjob before Logan said, “Christ, stop that shit, I’m not into that,” and gave him a fourth finger to make him stop.
Wade says, between gasps for air, “I can make you into it,” and Logan really really really hopes he doesn’t. Or does. Whatever.
They get to what should’ve been the condom stage, except Wade laughs and says, “Baby I’m practically virginal, my ass pussy will heal up by the time you figure out how to put that thing on,” and Logan takes a look at him, really looks at him, hates himself a little bit for how the sight makes his cock twitch, and tosses the condom to the side.
“Fuck, you’re thick,” gasps out Wade when Logan begins to press in. “It’s like having a fucking—coke bottle up there. Glass kind, made with real cane sugar, not the fake shit. Oh, Marvel H. Christ. You did not feel this big when I sucked your dick.”
“Don’t say your own fucking name in bed,” snarls Logan, and when Wade begins to laugh, a half-desperate sound, he silences it by shoving fully in and Wade’s snickers fade into a long, drawn-out moan. Little hurt noises bleat out of him whenever Logan bumps against his prostrate and Logan presses himself all along the length of Wade’s back, so that the noises that Wade makes are all that he can hear, made better for the fact that he knows that they’re real. Those sounds lack the artifice that Deadpool likes to swathe himself in, and when he hears them, Logan could do this all day, every day. Marvel H. Christ indeed.
Afterward, Wade says, “Aren’t you tired of sleeping on the couch?” when Logan gets up to leave.
And, well, he’s not wrong.
So Logan stays.
They fuck all the time. They’re two half-rate superheroes, after all, and when they’re not doing contracted work together, or if Logan’s not watching reality tv show (he’s starting to get really invested in some of them), they’re probably fucking. Logan lifts the rule of “stay away from my ass” the first time he gets a rimjob from Deadpool, who eats him out for so long and so enthusiastically that Logan tingles every time he sits down for the following week just from the memory of it.
But he gives as good as he gets. He fucks Wade up against a wall, shoving so deep into him that the other man says hoarsely, “Fuck, I can fucking feel you in my stomach,” fucks him until he comes wrenchingly tight around Logan. Bends him over the couch, face buried in the cushions, spanking his lubed ass glowing red and then shoving in just to make him shout. Makes him watch an entire episode of Love Island with his ass stuffed full of cock—first a plug, then Logan, balls deep and grinding into him, refusing to let him move away. Wade comes twice during that one.
He likes the sound that Wade makes when he comes. It’s a little bit like the sound that he makes when he gets killed—the punched out sound like his lungs are collapsing, the sound he makes when he’s hurting and trying not to let anyone know it. That’s not really a good Pavlovian reaction to start building, but, well, it is what it is. If Logan pops a boner in the middle of a fight, his suit’s thick enough to hide it.
He likes even better the sounds that Wade makes when he’s sleeping. Not the nightmare sounds, the distressed sounds of a past that he knows Wade tries to suppress. Logan also has those nightmares, where Jean’s face is swimming in front of him, Magneto’s got that hateful look in his eyes, and he knows that he’ll only see them like this, in his dreams, and the sensation of grief and loss and fear all compounding into a deep, drowning sensation that wakes him up better than any alarm.
Wade is always awake when he surfaces, watching him silently from the other side of the bed. They’re soldiers—the slightest twitch awry wakes them up. But Wade doesn’t make him talk about it. Wade, in those moments, is preciously, uncommonly, silent. He lets Logan do what he needs to do, and sometimes the move is to leave the bed and go to where the hidden reserve of whiskey is, hidden atop of the refrigerator behind the Instant Pot that nobody in the house uses.
(And sometimes, after one of those dreams, what he needs is to pull Wade down into a kiss, their sleep-sour mouths clashing in desperation, clawing at each other to pull down the front of their sweatpants. Wrapping scarred and hairy hands around their erections, taking in Wade’s cock so deep into his mouth that he can fucking feel it in his skull. The only consolation for bodies lost is a reminder that life still exists, and while Wade is not a lot of things—he’ll be the first to tell you his list of failures, a list long enough to wrap around the world—Wade is eminently, infuriatingly, thankfully, alive.)
No, those aren’t the sounds that Logan likes to hear Wade make in his sleeps. He likes the snuffles, actually. He thinks Wade has a deviated septum or something, he’s so goddamn noisy. It worsens when he curls up into a tight ball on the side of the bed, lessens when Logan stretches him back out into a relaxed position, and sometimes if Logan wakes up from a bad dream that wasn’t quite bad enough to wake up Wade, he goes back to sleep listening to those snuffly sounds. Knowing that next to him, Wade is having sweet, honeyed dreams.
“You look happier,” says Laura, when they’re at another friend gathering. Peter’s introducing them to his girlfriend, who runs the TVA and is a formidable and familiar figure.
“Mm,” grunts Logan into his beer.
“Mm,” mocks Laura, but when he looks at her, she’s smiling.
“How’s Ellie and Yukio?” he says, with an edge of delighted malice that he thinks all vaguely paternal people are allowed to feel.
Her fingers freeze where they’re rubbing against the curve of her own cup. Her pale cheeks flush, just a little, and she spits out, flustered, “They’re—they’re fine.”
When she sees that he’s fighting back a smile, she scoffs and sinks a little lower in their seat. “Yeah,” she says. “They’re fine.”
“Here if you ever want to talk about it,” he says.
She raises an eyebrow. “Logan, willingly talking about feelings? Wade’s rubbing off on you.”
Their intimate little corner, and his response, is interrupted by Peter, waltzing on over with a smile that stretches from ear to ear. He jingles a little bit every time he moves and Logan winces, as he always does, at the remembrance of Peter’s piercings. “Hello hello,” he says in his blithe manner. “How are the wallflowers doing?”
They both glower at him.
“Matching wolverines,” he says, as jovial as ever. “Scary! Still living with Wade, right buddy? Six months now? It must be cramped, over there! You thinking about moving out, Big W?”
Logan stares at him, just long enough for Peter to acknowledge that the nickname is a failure. Peter’s voice is loud. It’s attracted the attention of some of the other partygoers, including Wade, but his gaze is carefully deflected away from Logan. Logan licks his hips and says, aiming for affable and reaching vaguely-not-monotonous: “It’s not too bad.”
That night, Wade practically leaps on him the minute they’re in the bedroom. He’s all over Logan, rising him to half-mast in a matter of seconds just due to sheer exuberance. It’s like being licked by a puppy.
Logan dumps him onto the bed and says, crossly, “What?”
Wade grins up at him. “What, I’m not allowed to want a little sugar from my sugar?”
Logan doesn’t respond. He doesn’t know how to tell Wade that he’s thinking about what Blind Al said, about the tipping point. He can see the tipping point now, in the brightness of Wade’s smile, which is starting to fade the longer Logan takes to respond.
And then he thinks, fuck it. Let it tip. Let me fucking plummet. No ladders, no steps to the top. Everyone’s always trying to move upward, fighting for the pinnacle, their eyes blinded by the dazzle of the sun at the height of its parabolic arc. I’ve been there, I’ve seen the light as it crests the hazed blue edge of the earth. And I shaded my eyes and looked at who had been shoved down by others to the bottom. And I jumped.
He takes a step forward and falls onto, into, Wade.
Seven months in, Wade gets a text. He squints at his phone and then turns to Logan, who’s crunching away on his eighth taco in the past hour. “Yukio’s got a piece of hers in a mutant art gallery. They want to know if we can make it out next week Thursday at 8 pm. How’s your social calendar looking, big guy? You think you can fit in our friends between your reality tv shows?”
Logan glares up at him, mouth full of tacos. Wade chuckles, a warm sound, and taps away his response. Then he shoves his phone back in his pocket and continues sitting there next to Logan, not quite looking at him, but being with him, and the world spins on.
Vanessa drops by, one day, when Deadpool is out deadpool-ing or whatever he does that Logan doesn’t really give a fuck about. She knocks on the door and when he opens it, she’s standing there, all poised and beautiful, her streaked hair pulled up in a chignon. The edge of her tattoo peeks out from where her sleeves are pulled up.
“Wade’s not here,” says Logan.
“I know.” Even her voice is beautiful. “I’m looking for you.”
Things with Vanessa have been awkward, ever since Wade and Logan started regularly doing whatever they’ve been regularly doing. They didn’t get back together after the whole, save-the-world thing, even though Wade says that he did it for Vanessa. Most chicks are into the whole, “I saved the world for you” sort of thing, Logan thought. After all, times like those were the only way he could ever get Jean’s attention away from Cyclops.
Vanessa sits, perching on the edge of the couch. Logan takes a seat on the armchair across from her. She looks at Logan and says, “I know about you and Wade.”
Logan sits there for a moment. Shifts, just a little bit, because he doesn’t know how else to express how supremely uncomfortable he is right now. He wipes at his mouth and nods and says, “Right. Who told you.”
“Wade did.”
Logan keeps nodding. He doesn’t know what else to do. “Right.”
“It’s not what you think,” she said, smiling now also from the sheer awkwardness of the situation they have found themselves in. “He actually didn’t tell me in those words.”
He feels, in that moment, a little hollowed out by dread.
“See, I had been afraid,” she says, and then sniffles a bit. Logan fixes his eyes on the ceiling and hopes she doesn’t start crying. “Afraid to tell him. Of my news.”
Her hands twist and Logan’s gaze drops to them. To the shiny rock on her finger.
“But I did,” she said, twisting her hands, her engaged hands, holy fuck Wade must be devastated. “And you know what he said?”
Logan can’t help it. His lips move, the barest of whispers. “What?”
“He said he was happy for me,” she said. “And he’s the worst liar in the world, see. So I knew he was telling the truth. He was really, truly happy for me. And you know how often you came up in the conversation? So many times. So many times. Logan this, and Logan that. So he didn’t tell me, really. He didn’t mean to tell me. But he did anyway.”
And then she came here. And Logan confirmed it. He feels like an idiot. To his horror, when she looks up, her eyes are wet.
“I know he loved me. Loves me,” she says. “I don’t think I can ever stop loving him, and I hope he feels the same way. But a pedestal isn’t enough, and I’ve never loved being on it in the first place.”
Logan shifts. Thinks to himself about his one cardinal rule: Don’t get between couples. A rule learned through blood and sweat. Maybe a few tears. He wonders if it qualifies right now.
“He used to say he did this for me, that for me. Saved the world for me, twice over. But I’ve only ever wanted him to do something for himself. And you—”
Vanessa looks at him, and now she’s smiling while she’s crying; she’s a fucking mess, in front of Logan, and all Logan can do is think is, Oh. This is how it feels to be on the other side. He thought it would be a sense of victory, but all he feels is this bone-deep guilt. This strong conviction that she’s wrong, that she needs to fight for Wade, but also, a sort of relief. He wonders if Cyclops ever felt that way about him.
“I just wanted to make sure you were good enough for him,” she says, dabbing delicately at her eyes. “But I think you’re better, actually. Thank you, Logan.”
Logan has never felt lower, more like scum, then when she hugs him. Long after she’s left, he’s standing there. Because he doesn’t love Wade in that pure way that she loves Wade, the way Wade probably deserves, no needs to be loved; he doesn’t even know if he’s capable of feeling love in a way that isn’t sick, isn’t twisted.
He has to get out of this apartment, this apartment that seems to be carved down to the bones with love.
Logan tears out of the apartment and down the street. He accidentally bumps into a few people, doesn’t even bother muttering an apology. He walks, all the way down the street, past the little corner park whose green grass is yellowed by all the dogs who come to piss on it, and then he starts running, sprinting really, channeling all that fearful energy in him into a run that blurs the faces of the startled passerby him. His feet dig gouges into the earth, he runs from concrete to wet dirt, then back to concrete, then to gravel that kicks up clouds of dust every time his feet make impact.
He runs all the way across the bridge, all the way to the base of a building that shimmer mirror-bright in the setting sun; he looks into it, at his own sweating, disheveled face, old and young all at once, a face he knows too well and also not at all. A face that Jean Grey touched with her cool hand, a face which Cyclops kissed with an angry urgency borne of mutual frustration, a face that Storm graced with her divine lips.
All those people, and more, told him he was deserving of love. And yet, the lesson never sank in until now, when he looks at his face and thinks, It’s not that it’s deserving of love, maybe. But maybe it deserves to love, once more. Despite everything.
It’s a thought that he quite can’t internalize yet, but he could keep saying it, and maybe, someday, it would sink past that exhausted face and wrap its way around his bandaged, immortal heart. That’s far off in the future, though. In the end, in the present, he can only ever do what he promised Charles he would do, all those years, all those lives ago.
Just his best.
Logan starts the long walk home. He could jog, but after the frenzied, terrible run here, he finds himself content to walk as the sky turns over from blue to red, to dusk, to black. The stars, when not hidden by the veneer of smog, begin to peep out. By the time he makes it to the peeling, familiar door of their apartment, it’s well and truly dark.
He trudges up the stairs. They squeak, like they always have, and for the first time, Logan wonders if he can do anything to fix them.
When he emerges to the living room, it’s to the flickering pale light of an alive television, whose white fluorescents illuminate Wade, sitting on the couch. Waiting for Logan to come home. No—from the way he looks at Logan, like he’s seen a ghost, it looks more like he was wondering if Logan would come back.
“I taped The Bachelor for you,” said Wade, in that curiously polite tone that Logan hates so much, because it hails an uncertain Wade, a Wade who is trying to figure out if he has been, without fanfare, boxed out of someone’s life once more. “Saw all the spoilers, though. You’ll never believe who went to the honeymoon suite.”
Logan grabs the remote, mutes the television. Then he slides a hand over the wreckage of Wade’s skin and kisses him, lush and full on the mouth; after a moment, Wade kisses back.
“Let’s go to bed,” he says. “It’s fucking late.”
“All right,” says Wade. His voice is a little dazed. After a moment, he scrabbles for the remote and turns off the television.
That night, Logan wakes up to find Wade’s hand hooked in the waistline of his boxers. For once, there’s nothing sexual about it. The other man is dead asleep. Logan turns around, slings an arm around Wade’s body, and sinks right back into slumber.
Logan gets a text just as Wade finishes butchering the pedophilic mob boss that they’ve been sent to dispatch. “X-Men gala next week,” he says. “They want us to come.”
Wade raises an eyebrow at him, a movement that Logan can see even through the red mask. Logan can understand the skepticism—if you told him seven months ago that he would willingly invite Wade to a gala, which is an excellent place for Deadpool to make a fool of himself and, he thinks that Logan would’ve laughed and laughed and laughed. “Only if he has duct tape over his mouth,” he probably would’ve said.
He’d still put the duct tape over Wade’s mouth, he thinks. But now, probably because he likes the sort of muffled moan Wade makes when he’s strung out and desperate and unable to talk. Logan from seven months ago would never understand.
Wade says, “I don’t own a suit.” He says it like a challenge, even though he’s cleaning his guns idly as they speak. Logan can hear the real question: Do you want to be seen next to me, mask off and all? From what he knows about Vanessa, she had never been afraid to love Wade openly and in public. But one person’s opinion, Logan knows, is not enough to undo a lifetime of scrutiny
“We can go to that TVA tailor,” says Logan, and Wade rolls his head around on his neck and says, “Fuck yes.”
They go to the gala. Wade is, as always, a total disaster. He talks too much, jokes too much, says some wildly inappropriate stuff to some of the highest-paying donors, who look between him and Wolverine with a sort of wide-eyed look, like, how are we supposed to react to this? Logan just sits back and enjoys their faces.
He’s grabbing another round of drinks at the bar for them—whiskey for him, a seabreeze for Wade—when Hank McCoy approaches him, tentatively. None of the X-Men know what to do with him, he knows. They gracefully avoid him and he less-than-gracefully avoids them, because he’s not their Logan and they’re not his X-Men.
Case in point: Hank McCoy looks him for a long second and says, a little ruefully, “This is weird.”
“You sent the invite.”
“In your universe—did you and I—were we—”
Logan stops. Stares at Hank with genuine confusion and a little horror.
Hank turns bluer, laughs. “No, no, not like that. I just meant, were we friends?”
“No,” says Logan. “We didn’t talk much. And then I left.”
He doesn’t know how much Hank knows about his sudden appearance or how Deadpool explained it. All he knows is that, once they found out, the Xavier estate has generously funded their existence by giving Logan what they call back pay, and what he thinks is just their way of coping with the realization that their close friend is alive once more, but not really.
But he’s not that Logan. He doesn’t want to be that Logan. He tightens his fist and says, “Look kid, I know your Logan was great and everyone misses him. But nobody missed me when I left my universe. And I’m not here to fill a dead man’s shoes.”
“I know,” says Hank. “I know you’re not him. Trust me. The Logan I knew wouldn’t last two seconds without stabbing Deadpool through the head. But I’d like to think that I can be friends with any Logan. From any universe. So come around the estate more, won’t you? Give us a reason to miss you.”
His words linger in Logan’s head as he carries the drinks back to where Wade is regaling an enraptured seventy-year-old woman with a story about how he fucked Death once, “And she was really into me, I mean, I was just like the ultimate edger for her. I would be stabbed, blown up, whatever, I’d see the pearly gates of her legs open, get a lick or two, and then yoink, I’d be back here. Didn’t even get the tip in.”
The woman, whom Logan thinks might be a wealthy relative of Emma Frost’s, stares at him. “Death is a woman,” she says faintly.
“A real gorgeous one too,” he says. “Once you get past the whole skull face. But who am I to judge?”
“Do you miss her?” asks Logan dryly. “I can send you right back.”
Wade winks at him. “I’m good for now, baby.”
The first time Logan bottoms for Wade, he actually thinks Wade is more nervous than he is. Case in point: he overspills the lube, jabbers even more than normal, and spends an age just fucking with Logan’s prostrate to see what sounds he can coax out of Logan until Logan catches his wrist and says, “I will break this, if you do not get in me.”
Wade gasps when he bottoms out in Logan, tilts himself forward and says, “Holy fuck.”
“Move,” grits out Logan. Wade is—nice and big, and very much in him right now. It’s been a while since he last bottomed and he forgot how it feels, to have another man inside him, how it feels to clench around something so unyielding, and his cock is already starting to drip precum.
“Can’t. Holy fuck, I’m like a fucking virgin right now, I’m gonna come if I move,” he says. “Holy shit, baby girl, you’re so fucking tight. I gotta eat you out more.” He does something with his hips that has Logan seeing stars. “Better, baby?”
“I will stab you from both ends if you call me baby girl again,” says Logan. “Also, do that again.”
Logan doesn’t come from penetrative sex, he knows that about himself. But he gets close, hearing the frustrated little sounds Wade makes as he tries to keep himself from coming; Logan tightens up, just to fuck with him, and Wade falls over the edge cursing. His hand comes around, stripping over Logan’s cock with urgency, and Logan, groaning, comes all over his calloused fingers.
Wade slaps Logan’s ass when he pulls out. “Roll over,” he said. When Logan obeys, tired and satiated, Wade grins. “Good boy.”
Fast as a whip, Logan’s hand snaps out and closes around Wade’s throat. Wraps around it, like a collar would. Wade flushes, goes silent. His eyes have their pupils blown wide.
“Hmm,” says Logan, and releases. Wade rubs a finger over the bruise already forming around his neck, eyes still wide. “We’ll play with that another day.”
“Fucking hell, Wolv,” says Wade. He’s already half-mast once more, despite already coming. “I—”
He shakes his head. He’s looking at Logan like he can’t believe Logan exists; it’s a heady feeling, to be perceived. Logan can’t imagine what look is on his own face. But whatever it is, it makes Wade huff out a half-laugh and say, “Round two, you in me?” And, well, Logan can always get behind that.
Logan doesn’t know why he goes to Happy. But he does, because that’s who everyone says is the first man to convince. If you can get Happy on your side, that’s one level of bureaucracy less. And Logan hates nothing more than bureaucracy.
“Well, Wolverine,” says the former-chauffeur. “I admit, it’s a surprise, you coming to me rather than to the Xavier estate. Wanting to be an Avenger? Doesn’t really seem your style, really.”
Logan crosses his arms. “Your secretary didn’t inform you?”
“Inform you of what?”
“My conditions.”
Happy folds his fingers. They’re worn hands, hands used to hard work. Not the usual hands you’ll see in an environment like this. “And what conditions are those?”
“Deadpool gets full membership to the Avengers.”
Happy laughs and the sound is dry, condescending. “He’s not full-time quality. He demonstrably has no ability to be on a team. He’s a distraction, a mercenary, a buffoon.”
Logan grits his teeth. “He was on a team. He was the head of a team.” Sure, the team had been half-junk heroes that had been thrown in the void. But still. “I was part of it.”
“Yes,” says Happy, raising an eyebrow. “And I should take your word on it, given your history of being a team player?”
Heat rises in Logan’s face, at this man’s bald-faced disbelief. “Look,” he growled. “Believe what you want. But if it weren’t for that buffoon, your world wouldn’t even be standing. Isn’t that what a goddamn Avenger is? The people who keep the world spinning? He’s the real deal. A fucking hero. Not some fucking pencil pusher who sits around telling people, people who risk their goddamn lives for a thankless job, that they’re not good enough—”
He stops, because Happy’s face is turning pink. Not from fury, not from embarrassment. But from glee.
“You’re fucking with me,” he says.
And Happy, whom Logan is now privately promoting in his head as one of the ballsiest motherfuckers he’s met, perhaps ever, nods and breaks into an outright smile.
“You’re fucking with me,” he says again, incredulous, verging on rage. “Why?”
At that, Happy laughs. “Well for one,” he says, “there are not many ways in which I can get one over a superhero as powerful as you. Only way to keep living in this world, man. You gotta laugh.”
Logan glares at him. Happy’s laugh dies in his mouth and he clears his throat. “You know why I’m offering you this position, despite the fact that it could get us in trouble with the Xavier foundation, potentially ruin the donation of some high-profile donors?”
“Why?”
“Because Deadpool came to me, two weeks ago. Two years after I last rejected him. I told him, my opinion once given is final, and he said, I’m not here to ask for myself. Talked you up. Said the same shit that you did, that you’re a hero, better than anyone else. I told him I’d think about it.”
Logan sits there and processes.
Happy smirks at the expression on his face; Logan thinks to himself that the other man has a very punchable face. “Of course,” Happy says. “There are caveats. I’ve already talked to the Xavier estate; they’ve made it very clear that you’re free to do what you want but they’ve been historically unhappy with how we’ve handled our mutants in the past. And you’ve also made it clear in your paperwork that you still want to be involved in X-men activities, you and Deadpool both. So I’m thinking that you two can be satellite members, rather than full-time, and we pull you in for missions that we think require your particular specialties. Two-man missions, maybe with a few others once we figure out how you both work with some of our other team members.”
Logan raises an eyebrow. Happy understands the question.”I’ve seen the way you two work together,” he says. “Honestly, it’s more collaboration than I’ve ever seen from either of you. So I’d rather not split you up, if possible, and subject you to other people. Not yet at least.”
Logan raises his other eyebrow. Happy understands the question. “Good benefits,” he says. “Excellent pay. We aren’t salaried for specialist employees, but you’ll be paid a very generous hourly rate.”
Logan frowns. In response, Happy frowns as well. “I don’t understand your question.”
Logan leans forward and clarifies, his voice hoarse. “But we’ll be full Avengers?”
“Yes,” confirms Happy. “Full Avengers.”
Logan nods. “I’ll talk to Wade.”
He stops by the little wine store a few blocks away from home on his way back, picks up a bottle of champagne that’s been chilled and costs a pretty penny, whistles on his walk up the apartment. Wade is playing a video game, one that involves a lot of hollering and shooting guns, some team game. He’s playing a sexy sniper and Logan pauses to watch. For someone whose real-life aim is dead on, Wade’s got terrible accuracy in the digital crosshairs.
Wade’s team loses. He swears and throws down the controller. “Hey,” he says. His hairless eyebrows shoot up when he sees the champagne. “Oh my god. You’re pregnant. I knew it.”
“I can drink it all myself, you know.”
“You can’t drink. Think of the baby.” Wade catches the bottle when Logan throws it at his head. “Very fancy. Probably going to explode now if we open it, now that you’ve thrown it. But it’s kind of fun when it’s frothy, you know? I can lick it off your tits. Before I do that, though, what’s it for?”
In response, Logan fishes in his pocket and takes out the ID cards that he’s been carrying ever since he walked back from the Avengers HQ. He tosses them to Wade, who picks them up and looks at them; they’re shiny, made of some sort of metal, stamped with the Avengers logo in the bottom corner. Laser-cut into the center are their superhero names and identification numbers.
Wade’s thumb traces the words, Specialist, Satellite, and says, his voice stunned, “Happy doesn’t change his mind.”
“He told me you changed it.”
Wade’s voice is shaking a little when he holds up the champagne bottle and says, “I am going to lick this off your tits. Go to the bedroom, now. We are going to get that bed soaking.”
“That’s disgusting,” says Logan, but when Wade says impatiently, “Just take off your fucking shirt,” Logan complies and tosses the t-shirt right at Wade’s happy, delighted face.
Their first Avengers mission goes strangely. They have to wear ear comms that are too loud for Logan’s sensitive ears, and they have a crew they have to report to, who are constantly feeding them new information. It lacks the intimacy of the X-men that Logan is used to, but that makes sense—the Avengers is a large, global-scale organization.
Their mission is to break into the hideout of a supervillain. Basically be meat-bags, since the supervillain has the unnerving ability to keep replicating himself, and the only way to get him down is to kill him enough. “Seeing the footage of you with the void Deadpool mass, we figured you guys could handle it,” says the captain of the plane dryly.
It’s a success, of course. But by a far narrower margin than Logan expected. Deadpool gets his fucking arm chopped off, a regeneration that will take longer than his usual instantaneous healing. It’s still quick—there’s already a disgusting little stem-cell nubbin sprouting—but it slowed them down crucial minutes and hampered Deadpool’s ability significantly.
Logan drags him aside before they go back on the plane. “You need to get your head out of your ass.”
Wade laughs, but the sound is shaky. He rips off the cowl, and his eyes, underneath, are a little wild. “Turns out I’m just not good with titles. It’s getting in my head. Hey, have you been on a commercial flight lately? You know when they shout out, Is there a doctor here when there’s a mid-flight emergency? Do you think that if there’s a mid-flight villain, they shout out, Is there an Avenger here? And I’m going to have to fucking say yes and show up. Well, first I’d have to get back on a commercial flight. They stopped letting me go through them years ago.”
“Shut up,” says Logan, grabbing him by the collar. “You wanted this, didn’t you?”
“I didn’t know what it’d mean,” whines Wade. “Never got a masters or a PhD because I’ve got performance anxiety. Should’ve realized this was the same way.”
“You didn’t get a PhD because you’ve got the attention span of a gnat,” says Logan, just to hear Wade laugh out a half-huff of amusement. Then he says, “We can quit today, or tomorrow, or whenever. But only if you decide you don’t want to do this. Not that you can’t do this. I thought, after failing to save mine, I couldn’t save anybody else’s universe. And you forced me to anyway, because you knew that every Logan wants to do the right thing. So. I’m here to tell you—every Wade is an idiot, a smart-mouthed asshole, and a goddamn hero. You were an Avenger before they gave you the stupid metal card. So, again, get your head out of your ass. Unless you want your other arm to be chopped off.”
He’s panting a little when he finishes his tirade. And Wade—Wade’s eyes are enormous. He nods, just a little, slowly and then faster as he comprehends, and then smiles.
Logan’s seen many beautiful people—it’s hard not to, in the superhero industry—and look, objectively speaking, Deadpool doesn’t hold a candle to them. (No, he looks like a goddamn half-melted candle himself.) But in that moment, he thinks that when Wade smiles like that, without a sarcastic slant, without some facade or veneer, but because he believes Logan, because what Logan said made him happy—
Well. All else falls away, that’s what Logan’s saying.
“When this arm grows back,” says Wade, “it’s going to be such a small, baby arm at first. And I’m going to jerk you off with it. Your coke-bottle dick is going to be enormous in my hand. It’s the best fucking thing.”
“Don’t touch me with that thing.”
“I’m going to touch you all over with it.”
“Um,” says one of the junior members, crackling alive in their ears, “the comms are—still on—”
“Oh, I know,” says Wade. “And I love it.”
Logan smacks Wade’s ass. Wade makes a high-pitched squeal, and after that, things are normal.
“Do you think,” says Wade, one balmy summer night, “that any other Deadpool and Wolverine had…this?”
They’ve just come back from Wakanda, helping with a mission that took them two grueling weeks and ended with them falling asleep in caves for multiple days on end. After that, the shitty mattress that Wade owns feel like a cloud. But they only enjoyed it for a few seconds before Wade turned over and said, “I can’t believe you only let us have cave sex twice,” and set to thoroughly divesting Logan of his clothes.
So they’re naked, with the boneless pliancy that only happens after really good orgasms, and Logan is silent as he thinks about what Wade means. They’ve lived together for one year at this point. And Logan thinks: it shows. The sex was always spectacular, but it’s only gotten better with familiarity. More than that, though, is everything else. The way Wade will make coffee for the both of them and it’s perfect, every time. The way Logan went grocery shopping the other day and automatically pulled in the snacks that Wade likes, then the snacks that Blind Al likes, then the treats that Mary Puppins likes. The way they’ve started making the bed after they get up in the morning, because they’ve realized they love fucking on a tucked-in bed.
“No fucking way that any other Wolverine has put up with your sorry ass as long as me,” says Logan.
A long pause. It’s like he can hear Wade thinking, so palpable are his thoughts. Logan knows this about him, now. The not-so-secret-yet-also-surprising tenderness of the mercenary. Logan once thought he couldn’t bruise at all, and now he knows that Wade is just one entire bruise, purple and black all over, and that’s how he maintains his ineffability.
Then Logan says, “They’re missing out.” And Wade exhales, open-mouthed and hot, against Logan’s neck.
“Maybe you put up with me because you’re the worst Logan of them all.”
“Don’t make me get blood on these sheets.”
Wade laughs. “Don’t threaten me with a good time.
They lapse into silence. Idly, Logan’s hand moves up and down Wade’s back. He’s starting to get familiar with the scar tissue, starting to be able to identify rougher patches from smoother patches. He’s kissed that back, all over.
“We should move,” says Logan. “Get a bigger place. Bigger bed.”
For a long moment, Wade doesn’t say anything, and Logan realizes the enormity of what he’s just said. He had just spoken out of pure instinct, thinking about how they were making a good amount of money between the Avengers and the X-men, enough that they might as well get a king bed, but a king bed wouldn’t fit in this shithole, so they would have to move to a bigger place and—suddenly he’s thinking about moving into a place with Wade. A place with bare bones, with endless potential. This apartment Wade lives in, it’s seeped with the joys and tragedies that have played out under its stippled ceiling. He wants to live in a bigger place with Wade and make even more.
It’s a new feeling, one that feels enormous in his chest. He’s never been able to die, but he’s never tried hard to live; never tried hard to make roots. It’s always been at odds with his restless spirit. And yet, he wants a fucking house. With fucking Wade.
Wade, who’s been silent ever since Logan spoke. Logan grows tenser with each passing moment, waiting for Wade to drop the facade. Admit, awkwardly, that Logan, like he always had, took things too seriously.
Wade takes in a deep breath. Logan braces for it.
“A whole suite for Blind Al,” says Wade, thoughtfully.
“In addition to a guest suite?” asks Logan, barely able to hear himself over the rush of relief in his ears.
“Guest suite can go over the gym,” says Wade. “Or the four-car garage.”
“I don’t want to hear people fucking as I work out.”
Wade snickers. “That’s the point. You’re louder lifting weights than anybody is fucking. It’s an easy way to get guests out.”
“Fine,” says Logan. “I think there are easier ways. Like throwing them out.”
“I want a sex dungeon,” says Wade. “Proper sex dungeon. I want it to look like we’re murderers.”
“No.”
“Sex closet.”
“Fine.”
“Gaming room?”
“A living room is a place of entertainment already.”
“God, you’re so two hundred years old,” moans Wade. “I’m fucking a supercentenarian. You’re practically a bag of bones.” He runs a hand down Logan’s abs. “Halfway rotting. I’d fuck your skeleton, baby, I practically already have.”
“Please stop talking about desecrating my corpse while you’re jerking me off.”
“You signed up for this,” said Wade, his hand still busily working away between Logan’s thighs, and his eyes flick up to meet Logan’s gaze.
Logan kisses him, then. “I did,” he says, and rolls Wade back into the tangled sheets. He overshoots; they roll off the side of the bed. Wade falls easy, laughing. And Logan, in a move he’s growing to like more and more every day, follows.