Chapter Text
So far, Deadpool's view of the New York prison system was… distinctly unimpressed.
To be fair, he'd only ever been in the ice box and S.H.I.E.L.D.'s 'containment facilities' before since they were too prim and proper to call a prison a prison, but essentially, if he could escape from maximum security areas intended to cage mutants, then an entirely too normal prison off the edge of New York City was not a problem he would struggle to overcome.
What he did struggle with however, was the whole, 'incognito' requirement of this particular job.
Deadpool was not, had not been, would never be, a quiet individual. In fact, if someone ever described him as quiet , he would take offence .
Hence, the issue at hand. He had to get into the prison, check. He had to find out which cell block his target was being held in and after plugging in the USB to the mainframe computer in the head honcho's office and giving Weasel remote access to the thing, well, check on that too! How exciting! But then he was required to stay out of sight which, umm, no thank you? He wore bright red and two long sharp katanas on his back, why the hell would anyone insist on him for a job that required subtlety? And to ice their fucking cake, the client paid extra to ensure that there would be absolutely no casualties outside of what was contractually agreed, meaning that Deadpool had to actively refrain from attacking anyone that attacked him or void his pay.
[Ridiculous.]
{Why can't we just blow up the whole thiiiiiing! This is taking too loooong!}
Cue the whining. Ugh.
He was frustrated enough without their input, but they never respected his wish for silence and it drove him insane.
[Right. Hate to break it to you, big guy, but that ship has sailed. ]
{Sailed, crashed, sunk, got ripped to pieces by sharks that smelled the rotting corpses on the inside and wanted a taste!}
Gross. Nasty.
Anyway.
Once Weasel finally sent him a text indicating the location of the target, it turned out that the guy was in the maximum security ward in one of the many isolation units because of a fight between him and another inmate earlier in the week. That wasn't the problem. The fucking problem was that this shitshow ward just happened to be on the opposite side of the mediocre little criminal lockup. It was bullshit.
[You're getting too mediocre in your methods anyway. Rusty.]
{We are not! There's nothing wrong with a little boom to get the party going!}
[A little?]
{Yes.} Yellow was practically hissing defensively and Wade struggled not to laugh as he usually would have.
Silence was key. It was horrible.
It reminded him of being in the military, back when it still mattered if he lost a limb because they were vital needs rather than regenerative commodities. You know, back when the damage mattered. It was so unnecessary to be this strategic now.
Usually, he could just barge in throw a grenade in the cell block and hide in the medical ward waiting for either a body or an injured target to appear and finish the job then, making sure any onsite doctors or nurses were just knocked out. A concussion wasn't going to kill anybody that was smart enough to seek treatment anyway, he wasn't offing anyone that was going to win at the Darwin awards so fuck it.
[New life motto, there?]
{So fuck it. Nice. I like it!}
[Giving yourself an excuse to murder people through negligence. Classy.]
"Shut up," Wade hissed as quietly as he could.
The boxes were distracting. It was hard to keep an ear out for anyone coming down the hallways when they were blaring off opinions in his head that he’d never asked for.
There were no less than three close calls, all of which Wade evaded by throwing knives into the cells of unsuspecting inmates who then turned on their cellmates with their new steel weapons. It was a shame too, that had been a nice set of disposable blades and it would cost a good five hundred dollars to replace. However, this caused brawls to break out, neighboring cells to cheer people on or watch in sleepy bewilderment, and prison guards to run in the direction of the altercations and away from Deadpool. Weasel disabled the cameras and Wade had no doubt that whoever was in their tech room at that moment was absolutely losing their shit, which combined with the chaos Wade left in his wake, made the entire jail break out in a finely timed series of fear and bloodshed. It was beautiful and since Wade was only providing knives, and not technically forcing anyone’s hand, he couldn’t be blamed for the following casualties! He would get his money and his bloody cake too!
[Negligence. Again.]
{Lies! And the verdict iiiiis not guilty! NOT GUILTY!}
Wade was guilty as sin, but… there would be no camera feeds to confirm that so S.H.I.E.L.D. wouldn’t be able to pin a new page to his ‘Confirmed Fatalities’ file and they could suck it.
And anyway, this was a maximum security prison. The vast majority of the people stuck in here belonged on death row. Wade felt no remorse, too far into his career of maiming and decapitating to be stunned over a small prison riot.
An announcement crackled from the speakers and as Wade heard the command for all available guards to go to A ward to subdue rioting prisoners and search their cells for weapons, he grinned unbearably wide, just a large toothy smile that stretched the seams of his mask.
Every time a prison guard blocked his way he sedated them, deciding finally to throw caution to the fucking wind and sing, “I CAME IN LIKE A WRECKING BALL-”
Guard after guard was shot up with enough tranquilizers to keep them immobile for the following eight hours at least. Wade took a few minutes to drag their asses into the laundry room. He took all their key rings and painstakingly tried each key until he managed to lock them in. It was for their own safety. If the prisoners all somehow managed to get out of their cells they would vastly outnumber the guards and he had already equipped a few with weapons, so it would be best for all parties involved if the riot was subdued until after emergency units and enforcers arrived. No need to unalive innocent men.
Now to find his pesky little target.
[Finally! I was beginning to think you’d forgotten about the moneymaker entirely.]
{Were you serious about the cake at the end of this? Have you chosen a flavor? I want poppy seed or strawberry shortcake and oreo crumbs! Ooh! And caramel drizzle! Strawberry drizzle? Can we get ice cream on top!?}
It was an extremely over-the-top request, but his stomach rumbled in enthusiastic agreement.
[You’re both disgusting.]
When, after over forty-seven goddamn minutes, Wade finally found the isolation ward he realized in bitter frustration that he should have cut off some of the guard’s thumbs or something to have a viable fingerprint. Of course isolation would be harder to get into and heavily secured. The padlock even had a secondary code probably meant for each guard to punch in after their fingerprint was scanned. The only way Wade could get in would be shooting the thing, but the problem was that Wade hadn’t even considered bringing bullets to this little fiesta since he was trigger happy at the best of times and if he brought anything other than rubber bullets or sedatives, he knew some poor innocent schmuck would have paid the price in bright red arcs on the grimy walls. To be perfectly honest, it would have given the place some desperately needed color. But the job called for no unnecessary casualties, so Wade couldn’t directly cause any unnecessary casualties.
[Have you considered that by law being an accesory to murder, in any capacity, makes you eligible for a lengthy prison sentence?]
Wade briefly snorted. “By who’s standards?”
{The law can’t hold us down! Can’t touch this! Dun-dun-dun-nun. Can’t touch this-}
Wade did do the small dance that went with the song, at least, the dance he’d seen on one of the Just Dance Wii games. Which one had it been? The first? The third? He wasn’t even sure how many were out at this point.
[By court standards.]
{Ha! Doesn’t matter! We break out all the time!}
[Uh huh. In more than one way, evidently.]
Wade shrugged and said nothing. White always made comments about their skin, it wasn’t anything new.
He focused back on his task and stared at the stupid padlock in mounting frustration, readying himself to just repeatedy stab the thing when he heard a creaking sound from one of the cells ahead. A sound he should not have heard given that A) there were currently no guards left on this side of the prison and B) none of the cells in isolation could be opened from the inside. He’d had to wait weeks during his first stint in prison to be let out to speak to an angry Logan about his rising kill count and refusal to listen to the X-men when they preached their purity shmurity. It was violently sweet in a way, and Deadpool had used the golden opportunity to raise absolute hell and blow up half of the compound. It had been glorious.
But those cells were impossible to pry open from a convict’s end, so, “What the fuck-”
He had no words for a moment, his voices all rendered silent as a rather average sized, scrawny but semi-toned man strolled out of his cell, breathed in some air, and then turned his head and only his head, to stare at Wade with a brief flash of complete and utter bloodlust in his eyes before they cleared into indifference and Wade took in the soft dark brown innocent doe-eyed look of the guy he was currently calling Houdini .
And then the voices were screaming over each other in an attempt to get their warnings through.
[Get the fuck out right now-]
{... Beautiful-}
[-This isn’t safe- ]
{-He’s perfect, can we kill for him? Please, oh, pretty please, can we just-}
[YOU’RE OUT OF YOUR FUCKING MINDS, MOVE.]
Never had White sounded so scared before and Wade felt like he’d seen that face, those innocent doe eyes, somewhere before, but he couldn’t for the life of himself place it or understand why it startled White so much he’d been reduced to shouting in desperation. In any case, he didn’t move. He couldn’t. The memory of that murderous stare rooted him to the spot, not in fear, but strangely, in curiosity. Who looks at a 210 pound 6 foot 2 man dressed in bright red with katanas portruding from behind him and immediately thinks, ‘Fuck yeah, I can take him.’
White was still shouting at him, and Yellow was waxing poetic about the strange figure that had begun creeping down the small hallway toward them.
A large part of Wade just wanted to wink and claim the precious prisoner a sight for sore eyes, but for once he wanted to see what someone else had to say. For the most part, Deadpool usually kept a long stream of loud conversation to drown out the silence and criticism of other people that judged him, but this guy, this precious little murderer couldn’t be any better than he was. There was no moral high ground for him to stand on, not from the inside of the isolation ward, and Wade wanted to hope, just once, that human interaction wouldn’t be so painfully awkward.
Pale bambi eyes reached the barred door at last and Wade noticed how the large bright orange jumpsuit hung off his lean frame, how the low light of the hallway shone harshly on one side of the guy’s face, leaving shadows on the other half that seemed to dance when the guy moved or blinked, how his hair was growing out in small curls that were naturally messier than all hell. It all painted a beautiful picture.
The man tilted his head to the side in what seemed to be light contemplation, his eyes flickering between the whites of Deadpool’s mask, analyzing him in silence, and finally he asked, in such a quiet volume that Deadpool could barely make out the words, “Did Harry send you to end me?”
Deadpool blinked. More than once. “Who is Harry?”
Honestly, even if the employer’s name had been Harry, Deadpool would have no way of knowing. He didn’t deal with the clients, he dealt with Weasel and Weasel alone, he didn’t ask questions other than the standard, ‘Does my target deserve it?’ and Weasel knew better by now than to lie to him because Wade always, always knew. The one time Weasel lied to him, Wade had hunted down the client instead and unalived him, an act that cost Weasel a good two million in revenue and took the following three years to repair in terms of his reputation among frequent buyers. And it wasn’t like he could fire Wade. Deadpool was the biggest name in their pool of mercenaries, the indestructible one, the only one who had never missed a target, the only one who was guaranteed to come back.
Bambi blinked back at him. Slowly. Like he couldn’t comprehend that his employer was not in fact the supposed ‘Harry’ in question.
Deadpool grinned, feeling a small stab of disappointment when one of the stitches in his mask actually did tear. “Sorry, Sweetcheeks, guess I’m not here on behalf of a secret admirer. If you’re feeling lonely, though, looking for some attention-,” he paused to whistle lowly and watched as a flicker of a blush rose on the inmate’s skin even as his face remained as impassive as ever, “Sign me the fuck up and call me a Bambite. Bambier? Bambirectioner? How do I express that I’m devoted to the bambi lifestyle, dearling?”
That blush, much to his displeasure, disappeared quickly and a bit of annoyance graced his pretty’s features.
“If you aren’t here to kill me,” Bambi began, “And you went through all the trouble of causing a prison riot-”
“And how does dearest know I started a riot exactly?” Wade queried, leaning into the bars of the door that led to his target.
Pretty scoffed at him, like the very sight of him was ludicrous, and stated slowly as if speaking to a brand new species of idiot, “The announcement was heard everywhere , genius. In case you didn’t notice that guards vacated our area as well as every other area where you must have disposed of them, since you managed to arrive here without a scratch on you. Given your ridiculous costume, you’re either a killer trying to off someone or a superhero trying to break somebody out.” His voice then dropped to a whisper and Wade leaned closer to listen, “Now I don’t know if you think I’m stupid enough to believe that a man with two swords strapped to his person and several grenades on his belt is some sort of hero, but I’d like to inform you: I wasn’t born yesterday.”
Wade took a step back and laughed, he laughed so loudly that there was a sudden pounding from the other cells in that block and inmates were yelling at what they must have presumed were other convicts making noise.
He took a second to catch his breath and echoed Yellow with the word, “Beautiful.”
He said nothing else, and Bambi grew impatient with him, leaning toward the bars slightly and asking, “Who are you after?”
The client had asked for discretion, but at this point discretion was completely out of the window and in the true spirit of his new life motto, Wade decided, “Fuck it. The name’s Thompson. You know him?.”
Dark brown eyes widened a fraction before closing as the guy hmm’d in thought, and then came the question. “Flash Thompson?”
“Uh, no? Is there more than one Thompson in this shithole? I mean, I guess it is a common name but two in isolation ward? Maybe it’s just not the best last name to keep in general. The guy’s named Eugene, actually.”
At first, disappointment plagued the guy’s face like a disease, but as Wade finished speaking, those eyes opened up again and this pretty little thing leaned all up against the bars and yanked Deadpool toward him by the belt over his suit, jostling his grenades and making fear crawl up his spine raw and wild and foreign.
And then… he smiled. Wade would spend the next few weeks trying to describe that smile, and though at the moment he couldn’t come up with the right words, the phrase ‘ephemeral, like a sharp dagger before the rain rusted out all of its edges,’ settled somewhere deep in his mind and refused to be forgotten even when he’d spent many, many nights people watching on rooftops, trying to find anything half as mesmerizing to compare it to and failing ever so miserably by the day.
Wade became so helplessly distracted by the sight that he didn’t realize the smol dude had used his body as a shield from the cameras, he probably had no idea they weren’t working, and has used his free hand to crush the padlock in half.
He then, carefully slid the door open and stepped aside to let Deadpool in who was still trying to process the fact that his new little crush was a mutant and the state didn’t know about it since he’d taken the extra caution to hide it. “You- you’re-.”
His precious little bean didn’t allow him to finish his sentence, just crowded him against the wall, pressed one hand over his mask where his mouth was, and mumbled, “Last door on the left, Bambite,” mockingly into his ear and then swayed away from him, right out the door with another small flash of pure white teeth and the soft spoken words, “Thank you… for everything,” on his way out.
Deadpool was lost. He hadn’t… he hadn’t even done anything. Sure, he’d caused a riot, but riots happened in prisons all the time. What the hell had he done to earn such a soft and heartfelt thank you from an isolation convict?
[We have to leave. We have to do our job and leave. You don’t know what you’ve done. You don’t know what the fuck you’ve done.]
“What is your problem, Asswipe? He liked us. We did good.”
{I saw an angel! Of that I’m sure!-}
[Stop fucking singing. Stop fucking feeling good about yourself, you fucked up! You. Fucked. Up. This is serious. ]
Wade ignored White and sang along with Yellow as he reached the end of the hall and painstakingly went about finding the key to the cell before giving up in fury and stabbing the thing open.
The blonde stocky guy inside paled when he looked up and saw a strange man in full leather ensemble, and he looked outright nauseous when Deadpool unsheathed one katana. However, his fear soon faded into resignation at the continuous sound of lyrics from Wade’s mouth and he closed his eyes. A stream of tears ran down his face and Wade wondered curiously why he’d received no customary begging or pleading when Eugene said, “Tell them I was sorry. Tell them… tell them I-”
Wade quickly lined the katana with his throat and pierced it, the rest of the impromptu speech ending in a crimson mess of gurgling and suffocation as his target’s lungs filled with his own blood.
“I’m no one’s messenger boy, Eugene.”
The next few moments were awkward as Wade waited for the guy to croak so he could confirm the death, and haphazardly wiped his blade down on the sheets of the bed so that it wouldn’t be such abitch to clean when he got to his new safehouse. Water was not the best at removing bloodstains without some good cleaning products on hand.
Getting out of the prison wasn’t particularly difficult.
Getting the client to agree to paying the money over the phone when the prison riot had been reported on every news station thus far was tedious, but a well placed threat here and there and boom, would you look at that? Magically, four million had been transferred into Weasel’s account and shortly after, Weasel transferred his half over to him. Such a pleasure doing business with the rich types.
What came afterwards though, was what Wade had been looking forward to the moment Bambi eyes got out of his sight. The news the next morning was stuffed to the brim with the number of casualties reported, the search for someone to blame. It all came to a screeching halt when word got out that a convict was missing in the headcount. For about six hours, the public panicked at the idea of a convict on the loose, but when the actual name of the escapee was released, people broke down. It wasn’t even the innocents either, no, it was the criminals, the ex-cons that had complete meltdowns. Families of the victims were paranoid, furious, but not afraid. It was the guilty that refused to go out at night. Within the next few weeks crime had dropped by sixty-seven percent and Wade was damn near salivating at the sheer terror that the name Peter Parker, also known as the Angel of Death, caused.
Wade knew why White was terrified now. Parker was famous for killing the untouchable, he was the man who tracked down every rapist, murderer, and extortioner that evaded the justice system based on a technicality and eviscerated them. He would follow these people for months gathering evidence, stalking them, hacking their devices, memorizing their schedules, and then he would print copies upon copies of the crime reports, the photos of victims, the contracts that these people had used to scam people out of their livelihoods, all of the evidence a jury would require, and played a dripping red game of executioner. He destroyed people on behalf of those they had hurt, ending their lives and ruining their reputations.
His namesake came from his first victim, Norman Osborn. Pictures of the crime scene had been leaked to the public and apparently, when Parker killed the billionaire, he had gone a little unhinged and practically tore the man's chest from his body leaving nothing but a gaping empty cavity to display his ribs and blood soaking the white one-thousand thread count Egyptian cotton sheets that spread in either direction on the king-sized mattress that made the shape of, well, wings. It was a mere coincidence. But when a rapist got off on a technicality even when three women testified against him, Parker made a similar bloody scene and one of those women claimed to be grateful, so, so grateful that her guardian angel had rid her of that monster. The Parker case was so graphic and nauseating in nature that many people had stood camping for weeks outside of the courts, demanding the death penalty, while others protested on the kid’s behalf as he was performing a public service by defending the community and, at the time of his trial, the kid had just turned sixteen. He had been locked up in that prison for the past three years , and as Wade dug into the kid’s records, he realized that he’d been on his best behavior up until the incident that landed him and Eugene ‘Flash’ Thompson in isolation.
If anyone in the world could possibly be insane enough, sufficiently obsessed with a skewed perception of morality, reckless enough to try and succeed at killing Deadpool permanently… it would definitely be Peter Parker, Angel of Death.
And, White be damned, Wade couldn’t wait to find out if Bambi would try his luck.