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They get back to the apartment and it all goes to shit.
Well, not all. Vanessa’s still there, alive and mostly well except for some scrapes from the hundred foot fall (and thank Fox for movie magic that gives zero shits about the laws of physics, a glass and metal torture chamber should not have made an effective cushioning device) and the deeply upsetting cuts on her palms (Wade knows exactly how much it sucks to grab one of his katanas by the blade, except for him it stops hurting twenty seconds later and that sure as shit ain’t happening for Ness). She’s right by Wade’s side, pressed up against him, in fact, as she struggles to hold him up because his fuckass idiot knees turned to jello the second he stepped through the doorway.
She’s saying his name, and he can hear it, kind of, but in the way you can hear an explosion when you’re underwater: Wade? Wade, baby, what’s wrong, what’s happening, Wade, oh you dumb fuck if you die on me again I’m going to stuff and mount your goddamn corpse like a prize buck, Wade--
When the fear in her voice hits real panic he forces himself out of the stunlock enough to say something. “I’m fine,” is what he manages, thin and reedy enough that he definitely deserves her disbelieving snort. He flashes her a wobbly grin and orders his knees to quit being such punk ass little bitches, which they mostly do. “I’m fine, Ness, it’s just some itty bitty baby trauma from all the torture I was putting off dealing with. Also low blood sugar, probably. I haven’t eaten in, uh…” There was definitely a freezer burrito at some point in the last 48 hours. He wonders if Ness ever threw out the half box that was still in the freezer the night he left, and oh there go the legs again, what the fuck.
“Jesus, baby,” Vanessa says, and sinks down to the floor with him. He can hear her kicking the door shut behind them, which is good. It’s not the kind of building where you show weakness if you want to keep your TV, and this is about to be a real messy cry.
So that goes on for a while. Long enough for Wade to unload the full contents of his sinuses onto the front of Vanessa’s dress, at least, and he already knew she was the most wonderful woman alive but the fact that she lets him snot all over her tits and doesn’t even skip a beat in rubbing his back is enough to make him jot down a mental note to blackmail someone at the Vatican into canonizing her. Is it the big guy himself who’s in charge of choosing saints? He’ll google it later.
Ness used to stroke his hair when he cried on her, same as he did for her. Of course, that’s off the table now that his skull looks like a rice paddy after a healthy dose of Agent Orange. Which also means he’s never going to feel her pull his hair again, and god dammit, he was finally starting to wind down the weepfest.
He does, eventually, manage to shut off the old eyeball faucets and unclench his baby monkey grip on Vanessa. The hand on his back keeps rubbing gentle circles, Ness waiting patiently for him to get a fucking grip already.
“So this is not how I wanted to apologize for skipping town on you,” Wade croaks, still buried in her chest because he missed his girl but he also missed his girl’s girls, fuckin’ sue him, it’s been a rough couple years of brutal torture and crippling loneliness and weeping like a war widow every time he tried to jerk off.
“Let’s table that for now,” Vanessa says, dropping a kiss on his temple. “I can take it out of your ass later when you’re not having a meltdown.”
He cranes his neck back to gaze up at her with eyelash-fluttering adoration as genuine as it is theatrical. (Not that he has eyelashes anymore, but that’s not the kind of dry-eyed thought he’s trying to cultivate right now.) “You promise?”
“You’ll be walking funny for days, cross my heart.”
Wade loves her so fucking much it aches. “I didn’t think I’d ever get to come home,” is what comes out instead of the witty sodomy repartee he had cued up. “Oh jesus christ don’t let me start crying again. Sit on my face or something. Like you promised!”
“No boogers in the babymaker, it’s bad for my pH.” But she does kiss him, holding his face in her hands, and Wade knows his skin feels like a crocodile briefcase now, but Vanessa doesn’t seem to mind.
**
Turns out, you can’t actually skip the part of months-long captivity and ceaseless agony where it fucks up your brain real bad. What Wade has actually been doing for the past year, he realizes now, is pressing pause. He’d hit pause on his whole life, spent a year pursuing his single-minded goal, and all those juicy new trauma seeds in his lizard brain had obediently stayed in hibernation until he was done. Not that plants hibernate, but “fat glossy trauma bears” doesn’t have the same metaphorical impact.
Now he’s done. He won, sort of, except for how he still looks like an irradiated scrotum with googly eyes. But he’s home, he’s got Vanessa, he’s safe, more or less. The bears have blossomed into a beautiful field of spring wildflowers--bearflowers?--and Wade might as well be Timothy Treadwell dipped in bacon grease.
The first panic attack hits bright and early the next morning, when he wakes up from his restorative sixteen hour power nap because his girlfriend is touching his dick for the first time in almost two years. He gets about five seconds to enjoy it before his brain chimes in to remind him what happened the last time intercourse went down in his general vicinity, and then it’s straight to hyperventilation city, population Wade Wilson, plus one unfortunate tourist who he has to coax into trying again when his pulse finally stops racing like a greyhound in a meth lab.
He stays hard the whole time, so at least there’s that. Exposure therapy will be so much easier if he doesn’t have to hunt down black market Cialis to do it.
It’s weird, because the rape had barely stood out at the time. The days when Francis only wanted to play with the holes that Wade came in with had been an all expenses paid Caribbean vacation compared to the rest of it. Which is to say, it fucking sucked, but like preteen stepdaughters the wide world round, he’d figured out pretty quick how to check out until it was over.
(Well. Remembered, more like--just like riding a bike--but he was so far past giving a shit about his Adverse Childhood Events by that point that he probably couldn’t have picked his uncle out of a lineup.)
Apparently dissociation isn’t quite as effective as not getting fucking raped in the first place, though, and that’s just blatant false advertising.
It’s Wade’s first stroke of luck since those honeymoon-ending CT scans that this particular trigger turns out to be not nearly as persistent as he was scared it might be (maybe Francis just had a tiny little baby penis too small to effectively traumatize anyone? Sure, he’ll incorporate that into his belief system). He promises Ness he’s fine (the unflagging boner helps) and makes it through the rest of the handjob with no more screaming meemies. That night he grits his teeth and begs as pretty as he can for a welcome home pegging--be gentle, honeybunch, I’ve been saving myself--and brute-forces his way through the bad touch shivers until it finally starts to feel good again. There’s no way Vanessa doesn’t know something is up, of course. His starfish hasn’t been this puckered since she popped his cherry, but she plays along and rails him more gently than she ever has before.
When he comes so hard his splooge hits his own chin and his spine melts into the mattress, Wade declares himself cured and hopes to christ that’s the end of it, knowing full well that it’s not. The scrollbar isn’t even halfway down the screen, after all, and god knows Wade loves him some juicy hurt/comfort, but there’s something to be said for Hollywood’s cheerful refusal to learn how C-PTSD works.
Well, he’s in it for the long haul now. At least the word count on this one isn’t too high.
The panic attacks keep coming, and he whack-a-moles each one as best he can. Sometimes it’s just a few impossibly long seconds where his vision greys out and his hands go numb because some guy walking past on the street has that same “top marks in cocksucking at Eton” accent. Sometimes it’s spending two full episodes of Teen Mom 2 playing You Are Now Breathing Manually against his own central nervous system while he concentrates on keeping the arm he’s got wrapped around Vanessa completely relaxed, because Madison’s new post-baby tummy trim routine features a sauna with an ice cold plunge pool and her scream when Kailyn dunks her is a little too piercing.
It’s a bottomless party pack of fun surprises, that’s for fucking sure, but he thinks he’s getting through it okay. He’s even sleeping through the night sometimes, now that the nightmares have faded from No Sleep Till Brooklyn to Maybe A Quick Catnap In Hoboken.
To be clear, Wade’s not an idiot, and this clusterfuck is not his first post-traumatic rodeo. He knows it never really goes away. Like that wise old fucksage Dan Savage said, though--it gets better. Well, not his new look. He’s stuck with the biblically accurate Toxic Avenger cosplay. But the rest of it…
At some point it’ll turn into just more shit for him to figure out how to live around. As long as he’s got Ness, he can live around anything.
It’s just that “some point” is taking its sweet fucking time arriving, and this shit is getting old.
What finally shreds the last scrap of his cool guy facade, and incidentally makes him feel like a blue ribbon moron, happens after he brags to Vanessa-–in a brainless, stiff-dicked haze, obviously-–that hey, now he can finally eat her pussy without coming up for air. Not exactly the season’s biggest plot twist how that ends up going wrong, is it, buddy?
The stupidest part, though, is that he feels it coming on. As soon as he starts to feel that tightness in his lungs, his heart revs up to go full Usain Bolt and the rest of his body just drops away like the edges of a vignette photograph, but it takes another twenty or thirty seconds before the terror gets so white hot he can’t stop himself from shoving Ness off of his juiced up face. Balls deep in an Oscar-bait flashback so bright-loud-real he can smell the ghost of his own stale fear piss and he’s still trying to lick his way through to the other side, because he just needs so goddamn bad for all this shit to be worth something. To be some kind of good for her.
The sound of Vanessa hitting the floor from how hard he pushed her yanks him out of it–-or into some adjacent version of it where he can move, anyway-–and he doesn’t even hear whatever soft-eyed shit she’s saying as he stumble-sprints to the bathroom and flips the lock. He curls up in the tub, and shakes like a poured concrete foundation in Portland when the big one finally hits, and does not bash his skull open on the tile, because Ness doesn’t want to deal with that shit no matter how much Wade deserves it.
**
“Alright, asshole,” Vanessa says, slamming a steaming mug of coffee down in front of him hard enough to slosh some over the side. It’s her bitch means business voice, which never fails to either make Wade sit up straighter or give him a semi. If he’s being honest it’s usually both, but after a night spent fetal and half-awake in a bathtub, he’s too wiped for anything but better posture. “Start talking.”
“Ooh, can’t say I get that a lot.” He needs the coffee too bad to waste time smirking, but that’s okay, he has expressive brow ridges.
“Shut up.” And that’s the I’m sick of your shit, Wade face, oh boy. He’s only seen it a few times before. Usually their shit is totally simpatico. Their whole relationship is built on loving each other’s shit, and not in a Two Girls One Cup way–-though they did graduate to leaving the bathroom door open after like three days of living in sin. That’s right, they’re one of those couples.
At least, they were. It’s been weeks now, and Wade still isn’t a hundred percent sure he can slot right back into the hole he left behind. Which is also not innuendo, because he’s been filling that hole on the daily since he mostly (sort of, kind of) got over his Sexytime Scaries.
“Mixed messages, babe.” He takes another loud slurp of coffee. It burns a little going down, and then it doesn’t. Damn, he’d be unstoppable on Hot Ones now.
Vanessa rolls her eyes. “I forgot what a brat you are when you’re in PTSD mode. Think you can finish your coffee without any more backtalk?”
He tosses her a sloppy salute and drains the mug.
“Good boy,” she says, unsmiling. “Now tell me what flipped your lid so bad I had to take my bedtime piss in the popcorn bowl. Which you’re washing, by the way.”
“Aww, I missed watersports?” Wade coos. He’s pretty sure he used to be able to turn this shit off. Then again, he also used to be blissfully unaware of his own existence as the star of a fictional narrative--don’t forget to hit that kudos button, Dear Reader!--so maybe the scrambled egg situation in his skull these days is permanent. At least the metacommentary doesn’t make him piss off Ness. And holy fuck, I can see through the fourth wall is way easier to compartmentalize than the humiliatingly over the top trauma the writers have saddled him with.
Dammit, she’s still staring him down. “Sugartits, I swear, you don’t want to know.”
“You said torture,” Vanessa says. Is this what a hot flash feels like? God, he could murder a tall glass of preggo horse piss.
The rush of heat fades along with the dizziness and the ringing in his ears, so nope, not the change of life, just more feelings. “I specifically did not say torture. I said ‘fucked up science experiment,’ and then I said ‘I don’t wanna talk about it,’ and then I said ‘mmmphh grmmhh mmhhf’ because you had your fingers in my mouth, and then--"
“Right when we got home,” Vanessa says. “The first night, just before you started crying on the floor.”
Wade scrolls up a few pages on the ol’ brain screen and groans. Loose lips sink ships, big boy. The ship in this case being Vanessa Carlysle/Wade Wilson, two hundred and ninety-three works in the tag, which definitely doesn’t seem like enough for an epic love like theirs.
So, yeah, he’s been keeping most of the story to himself. He told Vanessa about being promised a cure, and the “0 Days Since Our Last IRB Violation” vibes of the whole situation, and how triggering his mutation both pressed pause on the cancer and turned him nose to tail pizza face. And he told her about the superpowers, obviously, although he probably shouldn’t have immediately followed that revelation with a live demo of how much ass he can kick now at five finger fillet.
It’s not that he thinks Vanessa will leave him when he spills the full tea about the worst six months of his (and let’s be real, anyone’s) life. He could never think that low of her. She’s gonna hold his hand while he unpacks all his shiny new triggers, and she’ll be so patient every time he goes full fight-flight-freeze because the bleach smell in the bathroom hasn’t faded enough to stop smelling like a hospital. Eventually they’ll do a super cathartic medical play scene where she wears a sexy nurse costume, and the institutional restraints in the box under the bed will finally stop killing his boner as soon as he smells them. Their love will conquer all, et cetera, et cetera.
What’s making his stomach turn is that it’s going to be different. What happened to him in that place is not a crazy Ness can match. And thank the baby Jesus buttplug for that, since Wade already has three nightmares a week where he can’t get her out of the glass coffin in time and she spends the whole fight scene on the asphyxiation merry-go-round.
“I’ve been waiting,” Vanessa says, cutting into his self-pity spiral. “I’ve been trying not to push, and I’ve been giving you the safest fucking space I know for a fact you’ve ever had, and I’m done, okay? I’m done. Time to process.”
Well.
Shit.
He lets out a long, long breath and slumps back in his chair. “So, do you want it chronologically? Ascending order of how hard it fucked me?”
She just keeps looking at him.
“Descending order maybe,” Wade babbles, acid climbing up his throat. “Just rip off that band-aid.”
“Jesus,” Vanessa sighs. “Will it be easier if I start you off?”
“Oh, desperately easier,” he agrees. “Interrogate me, fraulein. Make me confess like I’m your little Violette Szabo!”
That gets him a seriously adorable quirked eyebrow. “Outside your usual wheelhouse, as references go.”
He shrugs. “This author doesn’t know much about pop culture. I’m just gonna lean into it.”
“Fine,” Vanessa says, so the metacommentary didn’t buy as much time as he was hoping. “Start with what happened last night.”
Band-aid off. “I spent two days in that glass box that steals your oxygen.”
“Jesus christ,” she breathes, and, wow, she’s literally gone pale. Wade’s never seen anyone do that before without him helpfully nicking an artery first. “The one that asshole put me in?”
“The very same. It might have been three days, actually. Is ‘weekend’ just Saturday and Sunday, or do you count Friday night too?”
“Okay, time out.” She grabs his hand across the table, and even that small contact quiets the rushing in his ears a little. “We’re moving to the couch so I can hold you extremely fucking tight while we do this.”
And yeah, with Ness jetpacking him he does feel slightly less like he’s trapped in the world’s longest no-chute freefall. She drops a kiss behind his ear as they settle.
“So, what, you were trying to…face your fear?”
“I’ll be honest,” Wade says, “no. I was deeply pussydrunk at the prospect of an hourlong scuba excursion into your Great Barrier Reef, and I just. Uh. Forgot.”
“Scuba divers carry air, dumbass.” Another kiss, and a squeeze to the hand she’s still holding. “Why’d you keep going, then?”
“Had to.” He’d close his eyes if they weren’t already shut. Fuck, this is hard. “Had to try.”
“Dumbass,” Vanessa repeats, her voice warm. “We’re gonna unpack that later. Tell me why you get scared when we fuck.”
“Come on, I processed that five pages ago, keep up.”
“Wade.”
”Like you don’t know?”
“Yeah, but say it out loud.”
He sighs. “Asshole raped me.”
Another kiss. “I love you.”
“I know.”
“Empire,” at the same time, and fuck this kumbaya shit, but. He does kind of feel lighter.
“I hate that this is working,” Wade mumbles. “Therapy isn’t supposed to work, it’s supposed to be an individualistic distraction from the real cause of everyone’s problems, the accelerating global march towards fascism. For $175 an hour.”
“You know I charge way more than that, sweetie.”
“Yeah, I can’t even afford you.”
“Guess I‘ll just have to take your case pro bono, then.”
If Wade ever doesn’t giggle at the words pro bono, it’ll be because he’s either dead at last, or his lungs aren’t done growing back. Vanessa administers a disciplinary nip to his earlobe.
“No dick jokes ‘til we’re done,” she tells him in a frankly counterproductive stern librarian voice. “Tell me another.”
“Bamboo under my fingernails. The full Hanoi Hilton manicure.”
“Oh, honey,” Ness sighs, and presses their joined hands to his chest. “Why’d you throw up when I made banana pancakes?”
It goes on. Not that long, maybe five minutes? Ten? He’s crying by the end, but not an ugly cry, just a slow constant trickle of tears from his closed eyes. Heartbeat holding steady. They lie like that for a while.
“Wow,” Wade says eventually. “You sucked the venom right out of that snakebite, babe. Like a golf ball through a garden hose.”
And yeah, this session on the couch–-ha-–is definitely over, because Vanessa’s laughing at his sex jokes again. All is right with the world.
“Most expensive mouth in the tri-state area, that’s me,” she says. She lets go of his hand, which by this point is essentially a slip-n-slide with fingers, and wipes her hand on his shirt before sliding it down.
“Hot damn,” Wade crows. “Was this sex therapy the whole time? I should report you to the licensing board, this is so unethical.”
“Let’s call it positive reinforcement,” Ness breathes in his ear. “Unless…if you don’t…” Her fingers slip under the waistband of his boxers and hesitate.
Oh, no, time to nip that right in the bud. “EMD-are you kidding me? I was such a good boy for the doctor, and I want my lollipop.”
Vanessa snorts into his neck. It’s the unsexiest sound imaginable–-like a pig in mud–-and it turns him on even more than her firm, familiar grip.
“So what I’m hearing,” she says, “is you want something in your mouth. Like one of my cocks, maybe.”
“Choke me with your disco stick, mommy,” Wade moans. “Oh god, is this fic fade to black? I know that bitch fucks with an E rating, I saw her Works page! Cocks and holes as far as the eye can see!”
But he has to admit, as the lights sink down low, that the narrative arc has arrived at a reasonably satisfying conclusion. He’ll let this one slide, just this once.
After all, Wade wants to stay on this author’s good side. He’s pretty sure he spied the word “gangbang” in her WIP folder.