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Logan’s healed from a lot of painful shit in his time, but this?
This one blows ‘em all out of the fucking water.
He’d been dead, he was sure of it, he had to have been fucking dead. But no. Apparently he was just torn apart enough that his brain had been blown to bits along with the rest of him— atomized, right, that’s what was supposed to happen—and so everything had gone blissfully, beautifully silent for the first time in his two-hundred-plus years of life.
What a fucking relief that was. Finally letting go. Like falling asleep, but without all the nightmares and the aches and the pains that usually came with it.
And then, well, then the aches and the pains were the least of his worries. He was getting stitched back together, because he was always fucking getting stitched back together. Cells hesitantly wobbled back into their rightful places, tendons reformed and tightened and yanked half-formed bones back into sockets, nerves sat exposed to open air as his skin knit itself whole one agonizingly slow layer at a time. His thoughts came together as a badly taped collage of images: The cores of the time ripper, dazzling blue and orange and white and yellow. The steel door. That fucking idiot, attacking him with a fire extinguisher of all fucking things, ducking through that door and bolting it shut before Logan could stop him.
God damn it.
Fuck.
He’s gonna be the only one that made it through this, isn’t he? He’s the only poor shit who could’ve been unlucky enough to have survived something like that. He’s—
“Oh, fuck me in the ass and call me a corndog—”
Huh.
Alright. Apparently not.
“What the shit? Ow.”
There’s a twitch somewhere to his left, something bumping against his forearm and then gone half a second later. A shift of rubble moving. A groan, and then a very heartfelt motherfucker, a sentiment that Logan sure as hell agrees with.
“Hey, Wolvie, babe? You—? Ow, fuck me! I mean— no, don’t. Not yet at least. Better wait ‘til my fucking skin’s grown back. So, y’know, rhetorically, for now, fuck me. Hey, you ever notice how much ‘rhetorically’ sounds like ‘rectally’? Heh. Oh, that hurts. Ow.”
Another shift. It reeks in here, of burnt metal and burnt rubber and burnt flesh. Something crashes into something else, maybe a piece of the ceiling falling down. There’s the high-pitched whine of an electrical wire overheating and letting off a pop. The hum of fluorescent lights trying and failing to come back on. Something’s dripping somewhere, too.
They really did a number on this place, didn’t they? He’d open his eyes to look, but he’s not really sure whether he has eyes yet. He’s not trying to make this shit any worse by moving.
“Wolvie. Babycakes. Wolverino. Hey. Logan.”
That last one sounded— like something. Something different than the tone he’s gotten used to hearing from Wade.
It takes some effort, but he draws enough air into his lungs to let out a grunt.
“Oh, good. Good. For a second there I thought I was the only one coming back.”
“Hn,” Logan manages again, and then he finally cracks one eye open. It’s dark, but he can see, so at least one of his eyes and a set of eyelids are back online. And there’s that flickering fluorescent light he was hearing, straight above. A few feet away from that, a wire swinging from the demolished ceiling lets off a spark as he watches.
He turns his head just a bit to the left, and he’s greeted with the sight of a half-decayed corpse struggling up onto one elbow.
“Jesus,” Logan manages to say, “fucking Christ.”
“Yeah. Not my best look,” Wade says, as mottled skin starts to bubble up over his exposed jawbone, in an uneven kind of way that makes Logan think of a swarm of skin-colored bugs crawling over his naked skull. That whole half of his face is gone, slowly reforming, and the sight of his eyeball filling up its empty socket would be enough to churn even the sturdiest of stomachs. “Not my worst, but—”
“How,” Logan breathes, struggling with it, “the fuck are you even talking like that?”
“Would you believe I have no idea?” Wade says with a pained half-laugh. Then he gives up on trying to prop himself up on his elbows, dropping down on his stomach to rest his head against one forearm. He’s still talking, because of course he is, but it’s with a breathless sort of tiredness that Logan’s never heard from him before. “Fuck, that’s one hell of a regeneration, huh? Ow. Couple of cockroaches, you and me. No offense meant, of course. Cockroaches are highly misunderstood creatures. And you are the most beautiful, chiseled, rugged, far-too-ripped-for-a-fifty-five-year-old-theater-nerd cockroach that I ever did see.”
Logan can’t even find it in himself to be annoyed. He closes that one eye and lets his head rock back to neutral.
“Kinda surprised, though,” Wade says into the silence, and it almost sounds like he’s talking to himself now, but Logan’s still the only other fucking person around, so he can’t be. “Didn’t think I was coming back from that one.”
Logan hums in agreement. He didn’t, either.
The fluorescent lights keep humming and flickering. The exposed wires keep popping and sparking. And they keep on healing and healing and healing and healing. After a few seconds, Logan very slowly, very carefully, lifts his right hand and flexes his fingers. He doesn’t test the claws yet. Give it time.
There’s another shift to his left, and he thinks he might be losing his mind, because he could swear—
No, no, that is exactly what he’s hearing, isn’t it?
“What… the fuck,” Logan groans, opening both eyes now to glare at the ceiling, “are you laughing about?”
Wade takes a second to get his breathing under control, hiccuping through the laugh—with an occasional ow peppered in there—before he answers.
“Oh, man. Mr. Darcy’s gonna be so pissed when he finds out we didn’t die.”
Logan blinks.
The nickname takes a second to click before he realizes it’s a dig at that British TVA dickhead, and then he’s laughing, too. Like, laughing laughing. It’s a full on goddamn belly laugh, even when he’s not sure he’s got all of his stomach to laugh with yet, even when it feels like it’s ripping up all that shit that’s trying so fucking hard to heal.
And then he laughs some more. Fuck it. It’s insane that he’s alive, but it’s even more insane that he’s happy about it, and he gives himself a few seconds to sit with that.
It’s been a while.
They can’t fix anything.
They being the TVA, and anything being… everyone. Anyone. Jean, Storm, Scott, Hank, the Professor, any of them. Any of the poor bastards that Logan ripped apart afterward. All the fighting that he single-handedly escalated into a full scale war. None of it.
It’s… not exactly the gut punch that it probably should be. Not yet.
Thing is, though, if he’s being honest, he never really thought it was on the table in the first place. From the second Wade opened his fat fucking mouth and said wait wait wait I can fix it, there was a part of Logan that knew it was horseshit, a part of him that was waiting for the other shoe to drop. Most of him, really. There was a reason he’d been so quick to pick up on that if, and a reason he’d been so ready to tear Wade apart—figuratively, emotionally at first and then literally, physically—for lying about it. Making an educated wish about it. Whatever.
He’d been waiting for that. The excuse to take some of his anger out on the nearest punching bag he could sink his claws into.
(And, of course, on the off-chance he was wrong, on the off-chance they could undo everything and bring them all back, he hadn’t planned on being alive to see it anyway. Didn’t deserve to be alive to see it.)
Nothing’s changed, really.
He’s still alive, they still aren’t, and on and on and fucking on it goes.
(It’ll probably hit him like a truck again at some point. But not right now, surrounded by TVA agents and the broken remnants of a nearly destroyed timeline and a hundred-some-odd severed Deadpool limbs littering the street above them. Later. Much later, if he’s got anything to say about it, if he can keep himself moving long enough, if he can keep the liquor flowing long enough.)
“Shawarma?”
“I could eat.”
“Y’know, he could’ve told us the cores were ten feet apart,” Wade says through a mouthful of food, flinging bits of meat and saliva onto the sidewalk in front of him.
“Fuckin’ asshole.”
“Oh, yeah. That’s a real Tom from Succession move, lemme tell you. And I’m usually pretty good at a reach-around but even I can only go so far, you know? But hey—” he nudges Logan with an elbow— “it’s a good thing you figured out what was going on and busted open that door in time, huh? And not just because I got a front row seat to the whole shredded shirtless Wolverine show. Which I did appreciate.”
Logan hesitates, slowly chewing.
The truth, of course, is that he’d had no fucking clue that Wade couldn’t reach across the cores on his own. He’d just known that the mouthy dipshit was gleefully skipping off to his certain death, and the second he was out of sight, Logan had started throwing himself at that door with everything he had in him.
“Mm-hmm,” he mumbles through his food, then swallows. “Good thing.”
Wade Wilson lives in a one bedroom apartment with a blind eighty-year-old coke addict and so much randomly assorted, badly assembled IKEA furniture that it’s hard to walk through the place without stubbing a toe.
It’s crowded without people in it, so of course Wade invites everyone he fucking knows to come over for dinner as soon as the Deadpool guts are cleaned up off the street outside. Within the first hour of Logan stepping through the front door, he is not only introduced to Althea but he’s also re-introduced to Peter, and then introduced to Wade’s friends Buck and Dopinder, this timeline’s version of Negasonic Teenage Warhead, her girlfriend Yukio, Wade’s ex-but-maybe-not Vanessa, some douche-y looking guy who calls himself Shatterstar, and a version of Colossus who must outweigh the Colossus that Logan knows (knew) by a good hundred pounds or so. Half of them are as chatty as Wade is, which blows his fucking mind.
It’s exhausting, but hell, at least there’s pizza.
And Laura.
About thirty-six hours ago—when he’d found out there was an infinite number of Wolverines from an infinite number of timelines, when he’d been told there was a version of him that was kinder, better, more heroic than he’d ever managed to be and that he’d sacrificed himself to save this girl—right around then, if you’d told Logan that he was gonna be stuck sitting next to her at a dinner party, he’d have made a quick exit and beelined for the nearest bar instead.
But that was before he actually met her.
“Did they give you a bank account, too?”
“Yeah,” Logan says, because he knows what she’s talking about without having to ask: the TVA, which apparently takes the risk of recidivism seriously enough to offer newly un-pruned variants a lump sum of money upon their re-entrance to the timeline, but which is also dogshit at keeping up with what year it is, since it came in the form of a fucking checkbook.
To help you adjust, the lady in charge had said. He wonders if she gave Laura the same talk.
“You, too, huh?”
Laura nods, reaching over to grab another slice from the nearest box. There’s about five different conversations going on around the table, and normally it’d be hell on his eardrums, but for some reason he’s alright with it. He scratches the dog behind its disgusting fucking ears, probably giving himself hand gonnorhea or something. Whatever. It’ll heal.
“It’s not much,” Laura shrugs. “I don’t think they actually know how much rent costs in this timeline.”
Logan frowns. “What, you don’t have a place to stay?”
“Oh,” Laura says, going still for a second, her slice of pizza poised in front of her face. Then she unfreezes. “Yeah. No, I’m fine. I’m staying with Ellie and Yukio. At the mansion.”
At the mansion.
Xavier’s mansion, she doesn’t say, because she doesn’t need to. And Logan doesn’t ask. Just like he doesn’t ask—hasn’t asked, won’t fucking ask—about who else is living there, who else is still around in this timeline, who’s still alive and happy and totally oblivious to the fact that there’s a whole world out there still spinning without any of them on it.
There are some things he doesn’t need to know.
“For now,” she adds, quietly, when he’s taken too long to say anything.
He shakes himself out of it. Clears his throat. Get a fucking grip, asshole. “Yeah, well, that sure beats where I’m staying.”
That earns him a quiet laugh, and she’s got a smile on her face when she reaches over to pet the dog, ruffling the thing’s uneven hair out of the mohawk she’d spiked it into. “I dunno,” she says, glancing up at the crowd gathered around the table. “It’s kind of nice.”
Logan scoffs. “Nice, huh?”
“Yeah,” she says, shrugging one shoulder, and she doesn’t bother explaining beyond that.
On his other side, Wade’s just said something that’s sent his ex into full laughing hysterics; she’s ducked her face into her hands, failing to hide how red it’s gotten, while Wade leans back in his seat beaming like a proud little kid. Across the table, there’s apparently a poker game getting started between Althea and whoever’s willing to join in—Logan catches Buck complaining that he can’t read the Braille on the cards while Althea says tough shit and keeps shuffling. It takes about three seconds for Wade to realize what’s happening and yell, ooh, ooh, Al, deal me in, I promise I won’t eat any of the cards this time, come on! And on Laura’s other side, Yukio and Negasonic have got their heads ducked down together, smiling and quietly talking about something that Logan’s got the common sense not to try eavesdropping on.
“Hey, whiskey dick.”
Logan blinks, then looks up at Althea, who’s fanning the cards from one hand to the other and somehow managing to make it clear she’s talking to him without looking directly at him. Logan shoots a glare at Wade, who makes a show of suddenly being preoccupied with the wood grain of the table.
He rolls his eyes and asks, “Yeah?”
“You in?”
“What?” Wade yells, smacking the table hard enough that one of the pizza boxes slides right off of it and onto the floor. “He gets to play, but I can’t?”
Logan cracks a smile. “Sure. I’m in.”
“Son of a bitch.”
The thing is.
Alright, so the thing is, years ago, way back before— before everything, there was this lecture Hank gave to the students, a lecture that Logan caught the tail end of when he’d gotten there a little too early. (Or, more accurately, he’d gotten there right on time and Hank was running over, as usual.) It had probably started off as a lecture on neurobiology judging by the scribbled diagrams all over the board, but by the time Logan got there Hank was sitting on his desk, elbows on his knees, his voice soft as he explained to the students how the brain handles grief.
They’d lost a student the week before. Not in some great big battle. Not some random shitty act of violence, either. Not even a training accident. Just a kid’s mutation working against his body, driving him to an early grave, because none of this shit was ever fair.
Now, in psychology…
Hank had hesitated there, just for a second, upon seeing Logan leaning against the doorframe, quiet and waiting.
Then he’d gone on: In psychology, a popular model is the “ball in a box” model. Imagine that your consciousness, your mind, your life is a box. Imagine that any time something touches the edges of that box, it hurts, badly. And just after the loss of someone we love, it can feel like someone’s chucked a beach ball into that box and let it bounce around, hitting the walls every other second. It hurts. It feels like it’s never going to stop hurting. It feels impossible to even address the presence of the ball at all, because at first, it’s taking up every square inch of space in the box.
Now, over time, that ball, our grief, it doesn’t get any smaller. It doesn’t hurt any less. We don’t miss what we’ve lost any less. But the box gets bigger. It’s just as painful when that ball hits one of the edges, but it starts to happen less frequently, at least. It becomes easier to handle the ball, to treat it with the care and respect it deserves, to remember what we lost and remember it fondly, rather than with nothing but grief.
He’d stopped there, clearly reluctant to cut the lecture short. But he’d smiled at them, sheepishly apologized for keeping them over time again, reminded them all that his door was always open, and sent them on their way.
So the thing is, at the time, it had made sense, right? The whole ball-in-a-box thing. Even to Logan, who’d always hated how roundabout people could get with their fucking metaphors. It had made sense, in the weird way that things always seemed to make sense when they came out of Hank McCoy’s mouth.
But then, after—
After, it hadn’t made any fucking sense at all. It’d felt like total horseshit, actually, like something a therapist might tell someone in their office so they’d finally stop whining and get the hell out. There was no box and there was no ball and Logan wasn’t hurting, he was fucking angry, and he was never gonna stop being fucking angry, and he didn’t want to stop being fucking angry, so what the fuck did it matter, anyway?
And now here he is, years later, sitting on the edge of the pullout mattress in Wade’s living room, and he’s thinking about the ball-in-a-box horseshit again.
It’s dark by now. The only light’s coming from the streetlights filtering in through the blinds and the unicorn-shaped night light plugged into the far wall. Behind him, sprawled across the other half of the mattress, Wade lets out a snore that’s probably loud enough to wake the whole fucking neighborhood, but neither he nor the dog stretched across his stomach nor Althea sleeping twenty feet away in the bedroom seem to notice.
The cards from their several-hours-long poker match are still scattered across the dining table, along with a couple of empty bottles and cans and one single pizza box that Colossus must’ve missed when he was stacking them all up to take out to the trash. Some of the cards got pilfered out of the set (Negasonic’s handiwork, he’s pretty sure) and are still carefully balanced as a three-tiered card castle on the kitchen counter (Yukio’s handiwork, he’s definitely sure).
He’s got a cell phone in his hand—the second of his two welcome-to-the-timeline gifts from the TVA—and it’s got one single text on it, from an unsaved number that he’ll eventually get around to saving as Laura’s.
Here’s my number. Call me whenever.
There’s an ache between his lungs, and he reaches up to press at it, digging into his sternum with the heel of his palm like that’s gonna do anything.
He thinks of Hank again, spewing that horseshit about the box getting bigger. He thinks of what Hank would’ve said, what he would’ve thought, if he’d seen what Logan did after— after. He’d wondered that plenty of times in those hazy, bloody few weeks, but the answer was always the same: It didn’t matter what any of them thought. Certainly not Hank, because the last Logan saw him, he was face down in the entrance to the school, torn apart by so many high-caliber rounds that there were pieces of him fifty fucking feet down the hall.
That ache pulses, expands, grabs at his ribs and tugs at them hard enough to crack.
Fuck.
He gets up, and the movement jostles Wade out of his sleep. Sort of. There’s a half-assed mumble behind him that sounds like a question, and Logan doesn’t look back as he pulls his flannel on and swipes his boots from beside the front door.
“Going for a walk,” he says, and he’s out the door half a second later.
The walk, of course, just takes him to the dive bar around the corner. He blows a good chunk of the TVA’s money on however many drinks it takes for his thoughts to start blending into each other, for all their fucking voices to quit calling out for help that’s never coming, for him to finally stop wondering how hard it would be for adamantium claws to pierce through an adamantium skull.
By the time he stumbles back to the apartment, it’s hours and hours and hours later, the sun’s coming up, and he collapses face-first onto the bed. Wade’s still snoring, but he doesn’t give a shit.
The spins last for about three uninterrupted seconds before everything goes black.
“Wakey, wakey!”
Logan groans, pulling a pillow over his face. He’s not hungover—he hasn’t gotten drunk enough to get that far past his healing factor in a damn long time—but he’s still exhausted.
The edge of the pillow gets pulled up, and Logan cracks open one eye to see Wade’s dumb fucking face three inches in front of his own. Mask. Not face. He’s in his suit.
“Hey there, snookums. I’m gonna go kill some bad guys,” Wade tells him. “You wanna come?”
Logan stares at him for a second, still just squinting with one eye. Wade doesn’t move, waiting for his answer.
“Time is it?”
“You know, technically time is a construct—”
“What. Time. Is. It.”
“Ugh. Fine. You’re lucky getting bossed around is a turn-on for me. It is—” Wade wiggles the hand that’s not holding up the pillow, shaking his wrist around and around until a watch emerges from under the sleeve of his suit— “hey, would you look at that, it’s almost ten AM! In Newfoundland, with their weird-ass partial time zone. See? Construct. Anyway, here it’s about 8:15.”
It’s eight in the morning.
He’s been asleep for, at best guess, about forty minutes.
“Fuck you.”
“Now, darling, you know crime doesn’t sleep, and we—”
“Fuck,” Logan growls, yanking the pillow back down over his head, ejecting the claws with a shink so they form a cage above the pillow for good measure, “you.”
“Oh, they’re so cute and innocent when they’re sleeping, aren’t they?” Wade says. Then he finally starts walking away and shouts, “Miss Mary Puppins, you’re in charge while I’m gone! Oh, yes, you are. Mwah. Mwah, mwah, mwah. Ugh, I just wanna carry you around everywhere I go. Fuck! Alright. Be good for Daddy. Papa’s gotta go make a living, put a few bricks of cocaine on the table, you know how it is.”
The door opens, then shuts, and there’s nothing left behind but the dead silence of an empty apartment.
It goes like that, most days.
He tells Wade to fuck off. Wade fucks off. He drags himself out of bed a few hours later, cleans up a bit here and there—because he’s got some fucking manners, after all, and he’s not about to leave his or Wade’s shit lying around for an eighty-year-old woman to clean up—and then he leaves, wanders the city, tries to figure out what the hell he’s supposed to do now.
Usually, that ends with him at the same dive bar by the end of the night, drinking and keeping to himself. Hoping some piece of shit will make it worth his while to get up and put his fists to good use. But no one ever does, so he just drinks and drinks and drinks until the sun comes up, then shuffles back to the apartment to crash on the pullout mattress and start the whole thing over again.
Tell Wade to fuck off, go out, end up at the bar.
Rinse and repeat.
On the fifth day since he started living here, Althea sends him on an errand.
Or at least he thinks she’s sending him on an errand. Actually he assumes from the get-go that she’s sending him, specifically, to pick up a new resupply of coke. And who’s he to refuse, anyway? She’s eighty fucking years old and she’s been letting him live in her apartment for almost a week. Fuck it.
He follows her directions, winds his way through the city toward the cross street she told him about, and he ends up in the slummiest, shittiest part of town that he didn’t even know existed until now. (Which is saying something, because she and Wade don’t exactly live at the fucking Four Seasons.) He finds the bolted metal door that looks like it leads underneath a condemned building that used to be a bank, and he knocks, and he waits.
An eye flap opens up in the door. The lady on the other side’s got a few years on Althea by the look of her, and she squints at him.
“Yeah?”
“Al sent me,” Logan says, hands in his pockets. “Said she sent over payment already.”
The lady blinks, then squints again, looking him up and down as thoroughly as she can through the eye flap. “Powers?”
Logan frowns. “What?”
“You got powers? Super-soldier serum, psychic shit, eye lasers, anything like that? You gotta disclose it. That’s the rules.”
It’s weird to asked like that, straight up, no beating around the bush or anything, but he guesses it makes sense. They want to know who they’re about to let inside. He wonders, for a second, why they don’t just toss Al’s coke out through the eye flap and tell him to fuck off if they’re that worried, but then he decides he doesn’t really care. “Uh, yeah,” he says. “Healing factor. Adamantium skeleton.”
The lady snorts. “You fuckin’ with me?”
Logan just stares at her, frowning, waiting.
“Oh,” she says. “Oh, shit. No kiddin’. I coulda sworn you were dead. You got the claws, too?”
“Yeah.”
“Ha! Al, you fuckin’ nutcase. Yeah, screw it, you can come on in. This oughta be good. You going by the Wolverine, or you want some other name?”
“I really don’t give a shit.”
The lady barks another laugh, then the door clunks with the bolt unlocking, and it swings inward. She’s shorter than he was expecting; must have been up on her toes just to see out the door. And she’s got a cigarette in one hand, trailing ash down onto the musty carpet.
“Now, you’re gonna have to keep the claws in, baby,” she says, turning away and leading him down a dimly lit hall. In the distance, he can hear shouting, and something thudding against a wall. The place reeks of smoke, booze, sweat, and blood. “They’re gonna be considered an unfair advantage and get you disqualified if your ref’s a stickler. Everything else is fair game, though. We’ll get you signed in and find you somebody in your class real quick.”
Logan stops. “Wait. What?”
The lady stops, too, turning to look up at him with her hands on her hips. She eyes him down, takes a puff of her cigarette, then shrugs. “What? You here to fight, or not?”
Fight.
Jesus Christ, Al. This is a fucking underground boxing ring. An underground boxing ring where they don’t bar mutants from participating, and where anything other than literal goddamn daggers coming out of his hands counts as fair game.
“I…” think there’s been some kind of misunderstanding, he almost says. But then he thinks back on what Althea actually said to him when she sent him out. She never actually said anything about picking anything up, just said tell ‘em Al sent you, and they already got their fuckin’ payment.
“Well?”
Logan sighs. “Yeah,” he shrugs, because why not. “Sure. I’m here to fight.”
The lady grins around her cigarette, claps him on the back, and guides him down the hall.
It goes alright, at first.
It actually helps, if he’s being honest. The adrenaline, the violence, the excuse to hit something without worrying about whether he’ll kill someone.
At first.
They pit him up against a guy who’s about seven feet tall and built like the Hulk, betting odds two-to-one in his opponent’s favor. Logan takes a punch to the gut hard enough that he almost pukes, then another to his lower back that shuts off everything from his waist down for about half a second and sets him sprawling onto the boxing ring floor. Motherfucker punched his spine hard enough to paralyze him, but it only takes a second or two for the feeling to return to his legs, and when it does, he launches himself up and grabs a fistful of the guy’s collar in his left hand. He punches the guy in the face once, twice, three times—until his nose crunches in and he falls back, hitting the floor like a felled tree.
His second opponent’s a broad-shouldered woman about his height, smiling as she steps into the ring, cracking her knuckles. Odds three-to-one. She catches his first punch and dodges the second, manages to land an uppercut to his solar plexus and a rapidfire two punches after that, one to each side of his face. Logan staggers back, growls, and throws himself forward, driving his shoulder into her midsection and tackling her to the floor.
This one takes longer. They’re going back and forth, exchanging blow after blow until finally —with his face bloodied up and his nose aching like it’s broken—he gets her into a headlock and puts pressure on her windpipe for long enough that she taps out.
It’s the third opponent that’s the problem.
It’s a kid, younger twenties maybe, sort of baby-faced but muscly, with spikes and bony knobs poking from limbs like the spines on a dinosaur. His knuckles are spiked, too. Betting odds are even. The ref announces that this time, there are no rules. Claws are allowed, because the kid can’t retract his. Killing won’t automatically disqualify, but it will if they can tell it’s intentional.
The kid’s fast, charging at him and feinting to the right, ducking back in and digging those spiked knuckles deep into Logan’s side. Logan knocks him back and then goes on the offensive, goes low and cuts a shallow swipe through the kid’s calf, aiming to trip him up. The kid goes down on one knee and spins around in the same movement, driving a spiked elbow into his gut.
Logan howls, extending the claws a few more inches and jamming them into the kid’s thigh. He rips them out and retracts them, throwing himself into a punch at the kid’s face—
And he realizes, all at once: He’s seen that face before.
Something in his chest seizes up. For one single split second, he wants to do it. He wants to bring the claws right back out and jam them straight through the kid’s eyes, out the other side of his skull. He wants to yank them back out and see the kid collapse on the boxing ring floor and not get back up again. It’s a split second, and then he’s frozen, and the kid takes advantage of his distraction to throw a punch at his face, taking his left eye along with a huge chunk of skin from his cheekbone up through his forehead.
“I’m— fuck, I’m done,” Logan shouts, backing up, wincing through the regeneration as his eye grows back and his skin stitches itself back together. “I’m done. I’m out.”
He doesn’t wait for the ref to call it, or the kid to say anything.
He turns and walks right out of the ring, shoving spectators and bookies aside, ignoring the lady who let him in here in the first place yelling, hey, don’t you want your winnings? She says something else, something he doesn’t catch past the sound of his own pulse hammering in his temples, but he yells over his shoulder for her just send the fucking winnings to Al—there’s gotta be a way for her to do it the same way Al send the original payment over, and if not, he doesn’t give a shit—and then he’s shouldering his way through the outer door and out into the night air.
It’s cold and humid, sticky like the first few minutes after it gets done raining. He staggers back against the closest wall, shoving the heel of his palm into his sternum with enough force to bruise, trying to get his breathing back in order. He feels like he’s drowning above water. He can’t get enough fucking air.
Why hadn’t he realized it before?
It’s not just the people he lost that are still around in this timeline. It’s also the people he killed. If he were in a better state of mind, he might want to laugh at the irony of it, at the fact that one of those sick fucks who went on a tirade against mutants in his timeline is a mutant in this one. He can’t even think about laughing right now, though, when he can barely breathe and he kind of wants to spill his guts all over the concrete and good fucking God does he want a drink.
Black dots burst in his vision. His eye finishes healing. His lungs stutter their way through the next few breaths. A strange numbness tingles through his hands, crawling up toward his elbows. He spits another heartfelt fuck, slamming his fist back against the wall, and the numbness retreats.
He shakes it off. He pushes himself forward.
And he starts walking to nearest bar.
He loses track of exactly how many days he’s been in this timeline—more than a week, he thinks, and probably less than two—when Wade finally gets tired of being told to fuck off.
“Nope! Come on, pumpkin! Up ya get.”
There’s a pair of hands gripping his ankles, yanking him off the bed. His knees collide with the hardwood and he stumbles on his way up, growling with it, his claws already out.
Fine, Wade wants to play? He’ll play.
“Woah!”
His claws clang against the knife that Wade hastily throws up. Now that Logan’s awake, he can see him, in his suit from the neck down except for his holsters and the bandolier and the katanas that are still hanging by the door, along with his mask. That shitty little knife never leaves his side, though.
“You know, it has been a while since our last homoerotically charged one-on-one fight scene, and Al did just take the dog out so we’ve got the place to ourselves if we wanna get frisky with it this time, but I don’t— ow, hey!” Wade shouts, backpedaling away from the other set of claws that just sank knuckle-deep into his ribs. “Bad kitty! Bad!”
“I’m only gonna say this one more time—”
“Oh, well, that’s a relief—”
“Fuck. Off.”
Wade rolls his eyes and throws the knife so that it thunks into the far wall, and he tosses his hands up. “Is that what you want? Really? You want to sulk around for another two hundred years? No, sure, go ahead, maybe we can start distilling the liquor from your fucking sweat for rent money, you pouty little neanderthal—”
“I’m paying your half of the rent, you dumb fuck!”
“That’s not the point!”
“Then what fucking is?”
“Ugh!” Wade all but screams, grinding his teeth, taking a step forward and raising his hands in front of him like he wants to grab Logan by the head and shake him like a ragdoll. “I don’t get it! What the fuck is your problem? No, no, no, I get the whole tall dark and broody thing you’ve got going on, and I get the moping and the rampant substance abuse and the depression shit— believe me I get that, and I even get the ‘oh, I can’t let anybody get close to me because everyone I care about inevitably dies, boo fucking hoo’ schtick, but newsflash, Logan—” and he throws his arms out to the sides, like he’s putting himself on display— “I literally cannot die!”
Logan takes a step closer, bringing them just about face to face.
“You’re right. You don’t get it,” he says, his voice carefully even, his jaw tight. He doesn’t bother denying there’s an it to get in the first place; he’s not that delusional. But he is angry, angrier than he’s been in weeks, angry enough that he can feel it bubbling up his throat like bile. “It’s not about you. I don’t give a single shit whether you live or die.”
Wade drops his hands to his sides. He frowns, confused, looking over Logan’s face like he’s trying to find a tell.
Christ, it’s like Logan can see the thought process running through his head before he takes a breath, nods, and says, “Look. What happened before, in your world, everything that made that dickbag Paradox call you the ‘worst Wolverine,’ it wasn’t—”
“Think real careful about how you finish that sentence, Wade.”
“What?! You don’t want me to say that it wasn’t your fault?” Wade shrugs, exaggerated with it, throwing his hands up again. “Sue me, it fucking wasn’t! You have any idea how many murder vengeance quests I’ve gone on? Huh? And for way fucking less than what they did to you, let me tell you! It’s not your fault a bunch of racist fuckwads couldn’t—”
Logan punches him.
He retracts the claws just beforehand, so it doesn’t spear through parts of Wade’s brain and knock him out, but it’s still enough to break his nose and send his head snapping backward.
Wade’s not new to fighting. Hell, he’s not even new to fighting Logan. He’s taken a lot of hits like that before in situations a lot more dire than this one, and so Logan’s expecting it when he returns the punch half a second later, socking him across the jaw. He’s not expecting it, though, when Wade yanks another tiny knife out from—somewhere, he doesn’t know where, and buries it into the side of his arm.
“Mother fucker,” Wade shouts, just before Logan shoves him in the chest and then grips a fistful of his suit, throwing him down so that his back slams into the hardwood floor. “Fucking—”
Wade manages to pull the knife out of his arm, only to dig it into a different part of his arm and twist. Logan howls, pinning Wade down with a knee in his stomach, one hand still gripping him by his suit, and he throws another punch into his nose before it can finish healing from the last hit.
“OW, will you—?” Wade pauses, just long enough to release a spray of blood from his mouth. “Fuck, come on, Logan, I’m really trying here, but—”
“So stop. Fucking. Trying.”
That, of all things, is what finally gets Wade to shut up. He goes totally still. Quits squirming. All the fight just abruptly falls right out of him.
Logan doesn’t want to give him the time to recover, to change his mind and stop shutting up, so he shoves himself off of him and stands, heaving for breath. He pulls the knife out of his arm and lets it clatter on the hardwood. And Wade, except for resetting his nose and spitting out some more blood, doesn’t move. He doesn’t get up. He just stays right there on the floor while Logan stomps away, shoves his feet into his boots, and walks out the door.
He goes straight to the bar.
It’s a little after three in the afternoon when he thinks to check, and he resolves to plant himself at the bar stool and not move until he’s too drunk to remember his own fucking name.
He’s well on his way there when the stool beside him screeches back a few hours later. Seven-thirty, according to the clock up on the far wall, assuming he’s reading that right with his vision swimming as much as it is. He’s had—actually, he doesn’t remember how much he’s had, but he’s drunk enough that some of that white-hot anger has been smothered down a bit. Enough that what’s leftover is just an aching little ball at the bottom of his stomach. Guilt, mostly. He’s familiar with that one.
Okay, asshole. Suck it up and apologize.
He sighs, turning and saying, “Look, I didn’t—”
Logan stops.
It’s not Wade sitting next to him. He pauses, thrown off, blinking down at her like an idiot.
“You’re… not old enough to be in here.” He hesitates, frowns, then asks, “Are you?”
Laura shrugs. She glances up at him, briefly, like she couldn’t actually care less that he happens to be sitting right next to where she decided to sit. Then she looks across the bar toward the bartender, flagging him down.
“It’s a dive bar,” she says. “They don’t usually card you if you don’t order a drink.”
The bartender walks up, the short Mexican guy with a thick accent who’s been providing Logan with glass after glass of whiskey for the last few hours. Laura’s all smiles for him, ordering something in Spanish. Multiple somethings, it sounds like. She nods toward Logan, smirking with the latter half of a long-winded sentence—but the word tío is definitely in there somewhere—and the guy says something back that Logan can’t parse but which ends with a señorita, and then he’s off.
He places another beer in front of Logan on his way, though, which might have been something Laura asked for or might have been him taking it upon himself.
Logan doesn’t care either way. He nods his thanks and then cracks the cap off with his teeth.
“So I’m your uncle, now, huh?”
“Well, they’re definitely not carding me if I’m your incredibly thoughtful niece coming here to be your DD,” she says, drumming her fingers on the bartop. “I put my order on your tab, by the way.”
“Yeah? What happened to all your TVA money?”
“It’s in savings,” she says. Then, with no preamble whatsoever, she asks, “What are you doing here?”
God damn it. He should have figured she wasn’t just here to sit and eat and drink in companionable silence. Logan sets down the beer with a clunk, and he turns to face her. “What the hell’s it look like I’m doing here?”
“You really want me to answer that?”
She watches him, meeting his eyes, unwavering and totally fucking unfazed. Like she’s daring him to look away first.
He does, but not without a muttered curse under his breath, and he rolls his eyes and downs the rest of his bottle in a few needy gulps. He releases it with a sigh, thunking the bottle on the bartop and keeping it in his hands, just to give himself the excuse to look at something that isn’t her.
“You haven’t called me,” she adds.
“Fuck off, Laura,” he says, hating himself even as he says it. But that’s nothing new. “I don’t— I can’t do this. Not right now. Go home.”
“Can’t. I already ordered wings.”
Logan gulps. “Look, you don’t have to do this, okay? You don’t have to do any of this. The whole… pep talk thing. There’s no big bad villain to fight. You don’t need me. And you sure as shit don’t owe me anything. I told you, I’m not— I’m not your Wolverine.”
“Yeah, no kidding.”
He frowns, shooting a look at her. “Fuck’s that supposed to mean?”
“It means you’re obviously not him,” she shrugs. “You’re more like his weird, alcoholic little brother. And you’re right, I don’t owe you anything, and I don’t have to do this.”
The bartender returns with a plate of wings and fries and a tall glass of some kind of soda. Laura flashes a grateful smile at him, a smile which drops away the second he leaves, and she picks up a wing and sucks the meat off it in one bite. She drops the bones on the plate, wipes her fingers on a napkin, chews, swallows. Takes her damn time.
Then, once she’s had a sip of her drink, she asks, “So? Why haven’t you called? It’s been two weeks, you know.”
“I don’t know. Lost track of the days, I guess,” Logan says, and he lifts his empty bottle, trying to catch the bartender’s attention. It doesn’t work.
“Mm,” she says. “Wade’s worried.”
“You’re talking to Wade now, huh?”
She sucks the meat off another wing, tossing the bones aside, and she nods. “Al’s worried, too.”
Logan brings the bottle up and rests his forehead against the glass, closing his eyes. The bottle’s not cold enough when it’s empty. And he’s not drunk enough. “They don’t need to be worried.”
“No?”
“No.”
“You’ve barely been talking to anyone,” Laura says. “Not Wade, not Al, not me. No one. Maybe you didn’t have to call me, but when I asked Wade what’s up with you, he said you go out so much and stay out so late and sleep in so late that he barely sees you, and you’re living with the guy.”
“Jesus Christ. Is it a crime to want some time to myself?”
“No,” she says, totally calm, still apparently unfazed. “No, I mean, I get it. Can’t have them thinking you want to be there, right?”
Fuck.
God fucking damn it. It’s like she’s gone ahead and pierced her claws right through his lungs. That ache spreads, sends his hands shaking. Logan sets the bottle down.
“It’s not like that,” he says, and his voice is embarrassingly quiet, struggling to get around the lump in his throat.
“It seems like that.”
“It—” Logan starts to say, but his voice catches, and anyway he’s not sure where he was going with it to begin with. He takes a second, forcing himself to take a breath. Then he pushes his stool back. “I gotta go.”
“What?” Laura asks. Then, “Wait, shit, I’m sorry, I shouldn’t have— Logan—”
But he’s already gone, out the door before she can try to stop him.
There’s a bus that stops a few blocks away from the bar. He takes it, not sure where he’s going and at the same time knowing exactly where he’s going—but first, of course, he steps into a liquor store and buys himself another handle of whiskey. This is gonna be a long ride, and he doesn’t plan on letting his healing factor sober him up between now and then.
Plus, he’s got plenty of time to change his mind and get off the bus, and the whiskey helps with that, too. Blurring the time between stops. Quieting the voice in the back of his mind that wants to panic and tell him to run as far as he can in the opposite direction.
The closest the bus can get is about a mile away from his destination.
He gets off, stumbling a little, and has to close his eyes for a second when his boots hit solid ground. Once he’s steady, he walks, sipping straight from the handle on the way. He’s outside the city by now, where there aren’t so many cars and horns honking and people shouting all over the place, where it’s quiet, where there are way more trees than he thinks he’s seen in over a week. It’s just a long, winding road, punctuated with a street light every hundred feet or so, bordered on either side by miles and miles of woods.
The mansion comes out from behind those trees so quickly that it feels like a gut punch.
Logan wobbles to a stop. He almost drops the handle, but he tightens his grip on it instead. Takes another swig, his eyes never leaving the building sitting in the middle of its huge plot of land, some fifty or sixty yards in front of him. Where the street leading up to it had been devoid of anybody but his drunk ass stumbling up the shoulder, there are a few people still out and about here while the sun lazily sets in the distance. Students. There’s a pair sitting by the fountain, leaning against each other. There’s a group of six or seven teenagers on the lawn way over on the left side of the school, gathering up the remains of a picnic and preparing to head inside.
One foot in front of the other. That’s all this is.
Walk up to the front door, he thinks. Come on, you chickenshit. Walk up there and knock on the fucking door.
He doesn’t move. One of the pair at the fountain looks up, noticing him, but she doesn’t call out or move to approach him. He’s too far away to be a threat—or, hell, maybe a stranger standing here on the lawn of their school doesn’t register as a threat at all, not to these kids, not in this timeline.
Logan turns around.
First he’s walking away, and then he’s running, before he’s even made the decision to. He’s running through the trees away from the mansion, boots kicking up dirt behind him. He’s running until his lungs feel like they’ve been scraped raw, until his legs are burning, until his feet ache. He’s running until he’s put who-fucking-knows how much distance between him and those kids that never had to worry about some sick fuck marching into their school and tearing them all apart for the crime of being mutants.
It still doesn’t feel like enough distance, whenever he does stop. He doesn’t know. He’s not really thinking. He stops with one hand on a tree trunk, the other still clutching that handle of whiskey, and he’s too out of breath to even bother with another swig, as badly as he wants it. He’s sucking in gaping lungfuls of air that still don’t feel like enough, and that tingling numbness is back in his hands and creeping its way up to his elbows again.
The scream he lets out feels like it echoes back at him. His throat hurts. He still can’t breathe. He drops the handle, throws a fist into the tree in front of him, and it answers with a spray of bark and a rippling pain in his knuckles.
It’s not enough.
His claws go through the tree next, digging deep into the wood and slicing through it like it’s rotten. He throws another punch, and another, and another, and another and another and another.
He loses some time. Eventually, he doesn’t know when—but he’s vaguely aware of it being full dark out here now, the sun long since set—he finds himself on his hands and knees in the dirt. His claws are back in, but his knuckles are raw and bloodied and slowly healing, always fucking healing. The ache hasn’t left the center of his chest, and he still can’t breathe but he still won’t fucking die, and he keeps thinking about those kids and their nice safe school and their fucking sunset picnics, and he keeps thinking about that fucking kid at the boxing ring with his mutant spikes in this timeline and with his high-caliber rifle in the other one, and he keeps thinking about Hank and his goddamn horseshit ball in its goddamn horseshit box.
And then he’s fully falling apart, with one arm wrapped around his stomach, with his forehead down in the dirt, with his screams dissolving into sobs that no one’s around to hear anyway.
“Love what you’ve done with the place.”
He doesn’t know how long he’s been out—he hadn’t even realized he was falling asleep, was too fucking out of it to even notice—when the shadow falls over his face, and someone lets out a low, impressed whistle.
“Fuck those adorable woodland critters, am I right? They’ve had it too good for too long if you ask me.”
The shadow vanishes, and in its place is sunlight that hurts his head before he even opens his eyes. He opens his eyes anyway, squinting against the light, scrunching up his whole face against the onslaught of a pounding headache. (Christ, how much did he drink last night? Did he really go that far, outdrank his healing factor enough to get hungover this time? He hasn’t done that since— since…)
To his right, through the fogginess of his determinedly narrow vision, there’s a vaguely reddish silhouette crouched down beside him. The silhouette is holding something in one hand that’s bright yellow-green, and it takes a few seconds for his view to resolve into sharp enough focus to see what exactly he’s looking at.
Wade, in his full Deadpool get-up—except for the mask pulled up over the bridge of his nose so the bottom half of his face is exposed. An extra-large drink from a fast food joint is dangling from one hand, filled to the brim with some kind of neon green soda. A greasy brown paper bag sits on the ground at his feet.
And, behind him, there’s a stretch of what probably used to be a respectable bit of woods but is now a bunch of bloodied mulch and branches strewn across the dirt.
Shit.
“I, uh…” Logan starts to say, then swallows, trying to get his throat back in speaking order. “I’m not adjusting very well, am I?”
“No,” Wade says. “God, no.”
“How’d you find me?”
“Little known fact: Merc is actually short for mercenary. Part of the job’s tracking people down,” Wade says. He sucks down a long slurp of soda through his straw, lets out a cartoonishly loud burp into his fist, and then shakes the cup back and forth so the ice swishes and clinks around like a baby’s rattle. “And you left your location on. C’mon, girlypop, up and at ‘em.”
Logan groans, closing his eyes and bringing one hand up to scrub at his face. The last thing he wants to do right now is get up, but the first thing he wants to do is sink into the ground and wait for the earth to swallow him up and finally fucking kill him, and Wade’ll probably have a few choice words to say about that. So that’s out.
There’s a red-and-black gloved hand swimming in front of his face when he opens his eyes again. He takes it, letting himself get hauled up to standing.
“There ya go.”
And Wade, thank fucking God, doesn’t say anything about the fact that Logan clings with a death grip to his forearm as he stands up. Everything around them spins for one nauseating second before it returns to even keel, and when it does, Wade lifts the plastic cup up and gives it another rattle-like shake.
Logan wrinkles his nose at it. He can smell it, and he does not like what he’s smelling.
“Fuck is that?”
“That, my friend, is Baja Blast straight from the Taco Bell fountain’s teet. Sorry, no alcohol in this one, but I’m sure it’ll still fuck your liver up something good,” he says, and he shakes it again, then presses it right into Logan’s chest. “Hate to break it to you, but we still got bad guys to kill, and you need to hydrate.”
Once he’s sure he can stand on his own without tipping over, Logan releases his grip on Wade’s forearm and snatches the cup out of his hand. He pries the lid off, gives it a cursory sniff, and thinks fuck it, you’ve had worse than this, before he knocks it back and starts chugging. It tastes exactly as disgusting as it smells, but he keeps on going and going and going until his lungs have started screaming for air and there’s nothing left in the cup but a bunch of green-tinged ice.
He feels so much better, immediately. Like it was some kind of magic fucking elixir.
“It’s good, right?” Wade says, and he grins wide before he pulls the mask down, tucking it into the collar of his suit. “I do love a 500-calorie, possibly radioactive soft drink.”
“Mm.”
“Seriously, I do. It’s not even product placement. They don’t do that here. Pretty sure they take you out back and shoot you if you even think about it—”
“What bad guys are we killing?” Logan asks, cutting him off before he can go on another tangent that makes no fucking sense. Again.
“Oh, I don’t know.”
“Jesus Christ.”
“Please, call me Deadpool. And you didn’t let me finish. I don’t know yet,” Wade says. Then he hooks his boot under the greasy brown paper bag on the ground, kicking it up into the air and catching it, in a move that probably crushes whatever was in it. “All I know is it might be a human trafficking situation, which means we get free reign to kill whoever the fuck we want. I specifically requested the grimiest bad guys possible, actually.”
“Requested?”
“Yeah. Where do you think I find all these jobs, huh? Sister Margaret’s School for Wayward Children is a font of assholes in need of bleaching. And kill contracts. This particular job’s a bit of a hike from here, but luckily I brought—” he waves the brown bag with a flourish— “road trip snacks!”
“Road trip snacks,” Logan repeats, deadpan and skeptical.
“Twenty dollar-menu burritos, to be precise.”
“Right.”
“Nothing like giving yourself the squirts right before a big mission,” Wade says, spinning away from him and beckoning him to follow. From the way he’s acting, you’d never know that Logan stabbed him in the ribs and punched him in the face less than twenty-four hours ago. It’s like it’s just another day. “Your suit’s in the car, by the way. And don’t worry, I promise not to take two peeks while you’re changing.”
“Two, huh?”
“I’m just a man, Logan. You gotta give me the one.”
Logan huffs a laugh. He stops, scrubbing a hand over his face again, and he calls out: “Wade.”
Of course Wade stops immediately, pivoting on his heel to face him. “Yes, dear?”
“Look, I…” he stops, grinding his teeth. Huffs a frustrated sigh. “Thanks. For… trying. I’m trying, too, I am, I just… I haven’t been doing a good job with it.” Come on, chickenshit, say the rest. “I, uh. I said some shit I shouldn’t have said yesterday. And for the record, I do. You know. Give a shit. About you not dying, so…” He shrugs. Fuck, he’s bad at this. “You know. Sorry.”
There’s a few seconds where Wade just stands there and stares at him. And usually that mask’s pretty damn expressive, but for the life of him Logan has no fucking clue what he’s thinking.
Then—
“Oh, my God,” Wade says, dropping the bag on the ground and bending over, hands on his knees. “How did you get through that looking that constipated? Did you pop a blood vessel?”
“Oh, fuck off, you piece of—”
But Wade’s laughing, and then he's on him before Logan can even finish the insult, ramming into him with all the force of a hyperactive toddler in a grown man’s body, both arms wrapped tight around his shoulders.
“It’s okay, gorgeous. I hear what you’re stepping in, and I love you, too.”
Logan gulps.
“Yeah. Okay,” he says, raising one arm to give Wade a pat between the shoulder blades. Wade doesn’t let go, though, and he probably doesn’t plan on doing so any time soon, so Logan sighs and drops his face down against Wade’s shoulder and actually returns the hug, at least with the one arm.
Then with the other one, too. Fuck it.
“I get dibs on the next emotional breakdown, though. Deal?”
Logan snorts. “Sure.”
They stay like that for a minute, a minute during which Wade, for the first time they met, does not say a fucking word.
Eventually he's gotta put a stop to that. “Wade.”
“Mm-hmm?”
“Are we done here?”
“Oh, no, not yet.”
“Wade. Bad guys.”
“Hm? What’s that? Oh, right, bad guys,” Wade breaks away, only a bit, with both hands still on Logan’s shoulders for a few seconds before he finally steps back. “The scummiest bad guys Our Lady of Margaret could find. Of course! You ready to put some claws in skulls?”
Logan eyes him up for a second, thinking. Technically he should take a shower. And drink something that has more water than sugar in it. And he’s gotta find a minute to call Laura, or at least text her, after he ran out on her like that last night and probably worried the hell out of her. More than she already was.
There’ll be time for that, though. The text, not the shower. Apparently they’ve got a long drive ahead of them anyway.
There’ll be time.
One foot in front of the other. Take the step. Don’t fight it when the box gets bigger. That’s all.
He tucks his hands into his pockets, and he nods toward wherever Wade had been beckoning him to follow earlier, where he assumes the car is gonna be.
“Lead the way.”