Chapter Text
Wade is not a man of considerable will power. He’s easily bored, easily confused, and easily distracted. There are certain things that make him react so suddenly and predictably it’s almost embarrassing. The smell of tacos, for instance, makes him hungry, no matter how much he’s eaten or where he is. The sight of Outlaw shuffling a pack of cards turns him on.
And no matter how hard he tries to stop himself, no matter how angry he is, no matter how many times he tells himself never again, there’s one sentence that can make him drop everything and come running.
“Wade, it’s Nathan.”
Okay, two sentences.
“I need your help.”
Which is how he found himself leaning on the X Mansion doorbell in his mask and civvies, dufflebag of clothes and guns at his feet, at 6 o’clock in the goddamn morning. What a hellish hour. Wade hadn’t been awake at 6 by choice in…ever. That was the glory of mercenary work – murder was possible 24 hours. You could set your own schedule.
“Heh. Merc work. Merc work. Mercwork mercwork mercwork mercwork merc—”
The door was wrenched open by an extremely irritable looking Jubilee. Her expression did not improve upon seeing him. Wade let go of the doorbell.
“Howdy,” Wade said.
“They want you in the hanger,” was all the greeting he got in return. Well, what else was new? The X Men had never liked him that much. He shouldered his bag and trotted after her, still muttering ‘mercwork’ under his breath. He liked the way it felt on his tongue.
Disapproving stares followed them down the hall, collecting on Wade like dust on a ‘joys of abstinence’ pamphlet in a teenager’s bedroom. Wade ignored them – he was used to it, he reminded himself – and focused instead on how his mouth had automatically shifted to “workmerc”. It was so odd. The two words rhymed, yet workmerc was easier to say. Why had Nathan asked him to come with him on this super-secret mission when he had a whole mansion full of X-Men to pick from, plus the Six Pack? Nathan was up to something. Nathan was always up to something.
Hope this something doesn’t end with us blacklisted by the entire world. Again.
The hanger was surprisingly empty. Wade would have expected more people around for pre-mission prep, but he saw only Nathan, Logan, Cyclops and Jean.
“He’s here,” Jubilee called. Wade twiddled his fingers in a wave when everyone turned to look. It was hard to tell with the sunglasses in the way, but Wade was pretty sure from the wrinkles that appeared in Scott’s forehead, he was being glared at.
Jubilee rolled her eyes, which didn’t sting even though Wade hadn’t done anything to deserve it, and left abruptly.
“Do I get to know what the big secret mission is now?” Wade asked as he crossed the hangar to the Blackbird.
“Yes,” Nathan said at the same time Scott said “No.” Nathan sighed.
“He doesn’t need to know,” Scott argued. It was clear this was the continuation of an argument that had been going on for quite some time.
“He won’t help if he doesn’t know.”
“Fine! So get someone else to go with you! Literally anyone else.”
“I don’t want to bring someone else. Wade’s the best man for the job, and again,” Nathan said, interrupting Scott’s attempt to protest, “this is not up for discussion. I made my choice.”
“How do we know he’s not in on it?” Scott demanded. Jean’s expression shifted to ‘I don’t want to say it out loud and make the argument worse, but he kind of has a point’.
“If Wade had been hired to kill me, he’d have tried something by now. Wade doesn’t do sneaky.”
“What?” Wade’s irritation at being discussed as if he wasn’t four goddamn feet away from the conversation flew out the window, replaced by outrage. “I haven’t taken a job to kill Nathan in years!”
“I know,” Nathan said soothingly. “That’s why I want you with me on this.”
“On what?” Wade asked.
“It isn’t safe; he isn’t safe!”
“We’re just worried for you, Nathan. We want to make sure you’re with someone you can trust.”
“Trust for what?” Wade tried again.
“I do trust him.”
Oh snap, he does?
“With what?” Wade demanded, deciding to shelve that little heart skip for later examination. Like, say, after the heat death of the universe.
“With your life?”
Wade waved his hand frantically in between Scott and Nathan’s faces.
“Hellooooo! Trust me about what?”
“Someone is trying to kill me,” Nathan said, ignoring Scott’s noise of disapproval and Jean’s soft sigh.
“Oh for—that’s it? You make me pack an entire bag of clothes and haul my ass out to West-ass-ter, New York just to ask me to go kill a dude?”
“No. I don’t know who it is. Nobody does. We suspect they – or an ally – have infiltrated the X-Men. I’m going into hiding until they’re caught.”
Wade nodded, not understanding in the least.
“And…then I kill them?”
Logan let out a grunt that Wade chose to read as rude. Wade glared at him, but the man just ignored him and pulled a cigar out of his pocket.
“Look, I’m good at two things, and unless you guys are throwing a Mexican food eating contest, it’s safe to assume you’ve called me here to kill somebody.” He paused briefly. “Are you throwing--?”
“No!” Scott snapped.
“I want you to come with me,” Nathan said. “In case I get discovered.”
Though his voice was calm, Wade could sense the irritation bubbling below the surface of Nathan’s messiah face. He was playing his part as the voice of reason, but if Scott kept pushing, Nate was going to pop one way or another.
Waitwaitwait hold up, what did he say?
“You want me to be a bodyguard? For you? Mr six-foot-eight, three-hundred-fifty-pound telekinetic mutant messiah, and you need a bodyguard?”
Nathan sighed his familiar “Wade is being Wade” sigh. Wade liked it better than everyone else’s “Wade is being Wade” sigh, because Nathan’s version was always a little bit fond. Today it was very fond, bordering on affectionate.
“I need someone there to watch my back, and I trust you.”
“Oh,” Wade said stupidly. “Okay. That’s. Okay.” He wasn’t entirely sure how to feel or react to that, so rather than try and examine those emotions at any depth, he changed the subject. “Where are we going?”
Scott folded his arms and scowled, but Nathan perked up a little.
“So you’ll go?”
“I mean…yeah? Why wouldn’t I?” Wade realized how very…very that sounded, and scrambled. “I mean, I’m already here. And let’s be real, this is not the first time you’ve come running to me for help.”
“He’s not running,” Scott began, bristling, but Jean grabbed his elbow and whispered not-quite-quietly-enough in his ear “He’s joking.”
Wade decided, just this once, to focus on the topic at hand, namely keeping Cable’s big stupid messiah butt alive.
“So where are we going? You didn’t specify clothes, so I’m assuming not Siberia.”
“We can’t tell you,” Logan said around the cigar.
“Oh my god! He can talk! Nathan, your dog can talk!”
Logan growled and Nathan stepped swiftly between them.
“It’s in the tropics. You’ll like it.”
“That’s all I get?”
“Even I don’t know where we’re going. The fewer people who know, the less-likely it is whoever is after me will be able to get it out of them. Only Logan knows where we’re going, and nobody will be able to get it out of him, even with a telepath.”
“How long is this going to take?”
“Depends on how fast they can find the person trying to kill me.”
“Ballpark estimate for me, Nathan.”
Nathan shrugged.
“Probably less than a month.”
“A month? Oh my god. I already agreed to this didn’t I? It’s too late to back out?”
“Yes,” Nathan said with a smile.
“Ugh. Please tell me this remote tropical location has wi-fi.”
Logan barked a laugh. “You barely have a cell signal out there.”
“Aw man, I’m gonna miss all my shows!” Wade grumped.
“Think of it as a vacation,” Nathan said.
Worst. Vacation. Ever.
One intercontinental plane ride later, Wade did have to admit that the safe house was very vacation-y. The island was a small dot in the center of a dazzlingly blue ocean. Half of it was covered by a small jungle of palm trees; the other half was tropical grasses and a white sand beach. A small cottage had been built smack in the middle, pretty as a picture.
“Very picturesque,” Wade said, stretching as high as he could go, trying to crack the kinks out of his back.
“You want to give us a hand with this?” Logan asked, dumping a box down by the stairs up to the cottage.
“No. That took for-eh-verrrr. Isn’t this jet supposed to be super-duper fast, or something?”
“It’s supersonic.” Nathan said. “Four times faster than the average commercial airline, so be thankful. It could have been worse.” He turned to Logan. “Are you sure we weren’t followed?”
“Positive. No one knows where we are but me.”
“We’re in Malaysia, east off the coast of Sabah.” Wade raised a hand to shield his eyes from the sun, looking out over the water at the distant horizon.
Logan swore, tossing Wade’s bag unceremoniously onto the ground.
“How the hell do you know that?”
“It took us almost five hours to get here, travelling south-east from upstate New York. If Nathan is right and the Blackbird is four times faster than a regular plane, we’re talking somewhere in the 20 to 22 hour flight zone, which is pretty much on the other side of the world. General temperature, local flora, wind direction, position of the sun, etcetera. Malaysia. Sabah. East.” He looked back to find both Nathan and Logan staring. “Should I take a bow, or do you just want to do, like, art house finger snaps?”
“You should have enough supplies to last you for a few weeks. If you run out, radio in and I’ll bring more.” Logan shot Wade a dirty look and stomped off towards the plane.
Wade and Nathan stood and watched in silence while the plane took off. Only when it was a speck in the distance did Nathan speak.
“That was very impressive, Wade.”
“I’m not an idiot, you know. Just crazy.”
Nathan chuckled.
“I know.” He turned and headed towards the house. Wade watched him go for a moment.
Think we should tell him we just read the coordinates off the ship’s navigation while we were fucking around in the cockpit three hours ago?
“…Naaah.”
The house was single story and small, with high windows and fresh white paint. Built partway into a hill, a long flight of stairs led up to the single doorway. The area beneath the house was hidden in shadow and a few tastefully positioned but overgrown plants, but when Wade squinted he could see a few kayaks and the squat bulk of a generator.
“I’ll go get the generator started if you’ll take the bags up,” Nathan offered. Wade, not particularly mechanically inclined, shrugged and began to lug the supplies up the stairs. He regretted it almost immediately.
“Jesus, what did you put in here, rocks?”
“Books,” Nathan called from under the deck.
“Buy a fucking kindle! You’re from the future!”
He got no direct answer, but he was pretty sure he heard a chuckle.
The inside of the house was the slightly twee, pseudo-rustic aesthetic of every Pottery Barn catalogue ever printed. Everything was either sandy-colored or blue or covered in rough hemp rope and seashells. All that was missing was a piece of artfully distressed wood with ‘every day is beach day’ painted on it. Maybe even a ‘live laugh love’ picked out in sea glass.
There was a click and a whirr as the air conditioning turned on, cool air brushing away the stuffy, disused smell that hung thick in the air. Eager to stretch his legs and start exploring after sitting still for so long, Wade hurried to put away the supplies. The kitchen was already stocked with the usual safe-house store of non-perishables, so the X Men had sent the perishables. Fruits, vegetables, meat, all meant to make the stay pleasant instead of a brutal necessity. No cold beans out of a can or military surplus MRE’s for mutant Jesus, no sir!
In a stroke of very convenient timing, Nathan arrived at the top of the stairs just as Wade was finishing up. Hmm. Narrative convention or Nate hovering outside until he was sure Wade was done so he wouldn’t have to do any extra work?
“Who lives here?” Wade asked him instead of accusing, just in case.
“It’s one of the X Men’s more secure safe houses. I think Logan comes here sometimes.”
“Oh my god, please tell me he did the décor. I need to know that Wolverine has the style of a fifty-year-old housewife from Rhode Island.”
Nathan snorted.
“Don’t say that where he can hear you.”
“Or what, he’ll stab me?”
“Yes.”
“Like he’s never done that before.”
Supplies away, Wade began to wander in and out of the rooms. He found a dining room (“boring”), a library (“yawn”), and “sweet baby Jesus and the mother Mary, there is a god!”
A room containing a giant, top-of-the-line flatscreen and a wall of DVDs. He eagerly ran through the available titles.
Lotta rom-coms in here.
“I guess Wolvie has a soft side.”
Or this is secretly where he brings his love interests before they’re tragically fridged before his eyes.
“Or that. Ooh, You’ve Got Mail. Hey Nate, we should spend our vaycay expanding your knowledge of twenty-first century media. Yeah, yeah, I know you can just look it up, but reading the Wikipedia plot synopsis and actually watching the film are two different—Nate?”
Nathan was no longer in the kitchen. Wade glanced down the hallway and saw him standing in the doorway to another room, a very strange expression on his face.
“What is it? What’s wrong?”
Nathan opened his mouth and closed it again, at a loss for words. Starting to worry, Wade dropped Must Love Dogs on the counter and hurried over.
“…oh.”
The king sized bed, the only bed in the entire house, sat passively in the center of the bedroom, as if it didn’t even care how much trouble it was causing.
“How good are you at sharing?” Nathan asked weakly. Wade leaned on the doorjam and gave Nathan a Look. “That’s what I was afraid of.” He let out a huge sigh and dumped his bag in the corner of the room. “We’ll switch off every other night.”
“Yawn.”
Nathan looked at him quizzically. Wade grinned.
“Fight you for it.”
“Okay,” Wade said, face down in the sand. “This was maybe a bad idea.”
“Give up yet?” Nathan asked conversationally.
“Not quite.” Wade, who had managed to keep his legs tucked under him when he went down, kicked back, hard. There was a grunt and the weight on his head vanished. Wade got up and brushed himself off. Nathan stayed down, curled up in a protective comma shape.
“I’m going to assume I get the bed tonight?”
His answer was a noise like a rusty hinge.
“Great! I’m gonna go get some lunch. I always get hungry after I absolutely trash somebody in hand-to-hand combat.”
He left Nathan on the ground and trotted back up the path to the house, whistling.
Wade had nearly finished putting together sandwiches when Nathan limped in.
“Hey, I made roast beef. That cool with you?”
“That’s fine,” Nathan said, still sounding a little breathless.
“Great. Hey, uh… no hard feelings, right?”
Nathan’s expression promised a swift and terrible revenge.
“You cheated,” he said.
“I fought dirty,” Wade corrected, taking a large bite of his sandwich.
“That’s the same thing!”
“No, it’s not. There’s a very important strategic difference.”
“Which is?” Nathan asked, gingerly sitting down on one of the chairs at the table. Wade tore off a piece of bread and flicked it at Nathan’s head.
“I say so.”
Nathan glared at him again and Wade grinned.
“Regret bringing me yet?”
“Of course not,” Nathan said. “I just regret not bringing enough duct tape to tie you to a chair.”
Wade stuck his tongue out and took a huge bite of his sandwich to hide the fact that his stomach had just done some very un-manly flip flops.
Of course not. Wade had just kicked Nathan right in the intimates, but of course not. Nathan had been on a five hour flight with Wade bouncing off the walls, but of course not. There should be rules about saying things that like that to people. You should at least have to give a head’s up.