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Wade finds Peter at high tide, waiting tables on roller skates at a coastal diner on the Pacific. It’s a world away from the life he knows in Queens, but hey, it’s not too much of a stretch. If there’s anything to be said about his Spidey, it’s that the guy loves to glide.
The wooden benches are laid with a red-and-white checkered print, and the clam strips leave grease on his fingers as he digs a potato roll into tartar sauce. The patio is only a few feet away from the beach, salt and seagull screeching in the air, and Peter looks like he just needs a hibiscus flower behind his ear to complete the finished look. Beneath the uniform, he wears bright pinks and oranges and even limes, almost-fluorescent bursts of color that complement the sandy softness of his hair.
So this is what a surfy Peter would wear, Wade thinks admiringly, his pupils edible discs of sherbet with the way they catch Peter’s light. Wade doesn’t know what kind of gay a neon pink and orange and green flag represents, but yeah, sure, fuck. Whatever that is, he’s that.
Wade flirts with him. Starts leaving him twenties tucked beneath the salt shakers. Comes back every other shift just to catch Peter’s attention.
The first time Peter sits down with him, swinging his skittering wheels over the side of the bench, he’s got a challenging gleam in his eye and a buttery smile on his lips.
“Do I know you?” he lilts, the question not entirely friendly. He knots his fingers together and then tucks them challengingly beneath his chin, searching the supposed stranger with his eyes.
“I mean, I’d hope so, skater boy,” Wade purrs back roughly. “I come here often enough.”
“No…” Peter’s eyes narrow and he tilts his head, to which Wade leans back, damsel-ing himself.
“You feel so familiar…” Peter mumbles, mostly to himself.
Wade pouts, a lilting kind of consideration on his face. “I suppose,” he finally answers, and a toothy smile unveils itself on his face. “We could have known each other at some point. Maybe in another life?”
“I’m from New York,” Peter says very quickly, like he’s trying to catch Wade off guard.
“Hmmm… you do look East Coast.” Wade’s eyes sparkle in a growling sort of way, gaze flicking up and down the baby blue dress shirt that’s tucked neatly beneath Peter’s apron today. “What’s a New Yorker even got to do way out here? Surf?”
“Surf,” Peter accedes, grinning suddenly, like a kid embarrassed by how much, despite his best efforts, he’s being entertained. He shrugs. “Eat clams. Collect sea shells.”
“Make sand castles?”
“Yep, sand castles. Sunbathe, work on my tan, you know. Good stuff.”
“Wear daisy dukes,” Wade inputs cloyingly. “Board shorts.”
“Tank tops, flip flops…” And then that examining look is back, investigative eyes drilling at Wade’s face. “Where are you from?”
“Canada.” Wade smiles, eyes flashing up at Peter through his lashes. “Which is, you know. Gotta wear coats there sometimes.”
“Sounds rough.”
“It is. Plus there’s all that free healthcare bullshit, Webs, like goddamn, pull up your fuckin’ bootstraps and bleed out on the sidewalk for a bit, build a little character for once, you get what I’m sayin’?”
“Webs,” Peter echoes. Wade blinks. Oops.
“Verbal tic,” he apologizes with a sharp shrug. “Got a few of those. Weirdo disease.”
Peter nods distantly, turning his eyes away. Wade can tell he’s puzzling by the way his eyebrows pull together.
In the sudden silence, Wade looks back down at his food. He tears the breading from the clams on his plate, then chews a little on his own fingers, crunching the sandy texture of the meat between his teeth. After swallowing, he clears his throat.
“Are you sure-” Peter suddenly says at the same time as Wade burps.
“Nevermind,” Webs mumbles.
Webs. But he’s not Webs here, Wade thinks, it would seem that he is not Spiderman in this universe at all.
Here, Peter Parker is just… Peter. Living a life free of baddies and avengers alike. His biggest enemy the tide, crouching in quickly to kill his sandcastles. He might not get to swing, but damn does he skate. Skate, and surf, and swim, and roll around in the sand with no world on his shoulders to shake the weight off of.
“No, I’m sure we don’t know each other, kiddo,” Wade says, resting his greasy hands on the table. “But I’d like to,” he gleams with a gotcha look on his face.
Peter looks at him from the side. “Nice,” he deadpans. “Very smooth.”
Wade gleams harder.
They talk. Wade shifts on the bench, repositioning, and feels himself moving within the area of Peter’s bubble. Their conversation pulses like braille offered in gooseflesh on skin, the words warm as flesh, and he feels himself utterly thrumming with it, salivating between his legs, body attuned to Peter in a way that pervades the gap between universes.
Across from him, Peter’s body feels something similar- it knows something that he himself doesn’t. It can feel the shape of something in the world that his mind cannot explain.
Two days later, Wade finds the two of them in a tide pool. Combing through rocks, Wade stuffs his pockets with only the best to take home to the Peter waiting for him in Queens.
There are sand worms spitting water out of clumps in the wet sand. Crabs scurrying left and right, diving back into their caverns whenever the waves lap too close to their feet.
Wade lies in the foaming shallows and Peter tells him that he looks like a mermaid. A buff, siren-y mermaid; bald head sparkling with the sea, his skin frying to a crisp olive in the sun.
Wade loves this Peter the way he loves all Peter Parkers: the way you’d love fish at the aquarium. Like shimmering creatures behind the glass. And then all of a sudden you’re in the tank, swimming with them, and you realize that you have room in your heart for all of them. That no great part of this is about the exoticism or the fantasies or even the fishbowl lives you imagine for the two of you in the loneliest of nights, but a simple truth: that you could love him in any universe, wearing whatever Peter Parker skin he has decided to wrap around his soul.
Peter, at high tide, is welling up and spilling over, eyes misting until they start to flood. At high tide he is blushing red, eyes heavy, letting Wade take him by the neck and set him onto his back so he can settle down on top of him. So he can take care of him, while he’s here.
At low tide, Peter is relaxed and wide-open. Content and purring and pungent, like a man lounging in the hot wind of a bladed fan, chest open and full of surprises.
“I came here for grad school,” Peter tells him suddenly. “Caltech. Took forever to save enough, and May- sorry, my aunt- hardly even let me go, but I did it.”
Wade collects secrets about this Peter that he will take home to share with his lover, tucked away with the rest of the sea shells.
Wade learns things about him on the beach. He uncovers details on dates. He finds truths tucked between his legs and hidden in his heart.
Lent over the side of the bed, with the whole weight of his body rested on one elbow, Peter pulls a vibrator out of Wade and his face changes at the sight, eyes impossibly blue and cheeks agonizingly pink. “Whoa,” he murmurs.
After a second, Wade lifts his head. “Why’d you stop?” he whines.
“I didn’t know it did that,” Peter says dumbfoundedly.
“Did what, baby boy?” Wade demands. Panting, he reaches out to grab Peter by the back of his head, seeking a point of contact.
“Open up like that. It reminds me of a stingray. It’s kind of beautiful.”
“You don’t cover this in the bioengineering classes?” Wade hisses teasingly through grinning teeth.
Dropped and forgotten, the vibrator buzzes muffledly in the sheets. Peter spreads his hands across Wade’s thighs, pulling them further apart, and looks at him.
After a moment, Wade lays his legs down around Peter’s shoulders and drapes them there.
“Excuse me, doctor, is my gynecology appointment almost over?” Wade asks.
Peter laughs. It’s easy, unburdened. It bursts out of his chest unmet by any resistance.
“Almost,” he promises.
-
Queens is even colder when Wade gets back. The sky has opened up again, sending thick clusters of snow piling on top of the already 5-foot frozen snowbanks. He braces himself against the wind, his skin having grown accustomed to sunscreen instead of scarves, and pushes through the storm until he reaches Peter’s apartment, glowing warmly on the corner.
He gets upstairs, stamping his boots on the mat, and lets himself into Webs’ apartment.
Sound and light spills out. Peter’s humble lamps glow defiantly against the bleakness of the night, his television tuned to some nostalgic sitcom, the room kept company by quiet chattering and a muted laugh track. Wade moves through the comforting familiarity of the living room and into the hall, reaching into his pockets and dumping out shells for Peter to find, then slips through the door to the bedroom where Peter lies drowsing on the bed.
He’s got his suit off at least, Wade thinks as he stumbles out of his wet socks, tossing them on the ground for Morning Peter to be disgusted by.
Webs doesn’t always manage to strip off the spandex before collapsing into bed, but tonight Wade is glad to see him in a t-shirt and striped pajama bottoms, lacking nothing but the bunny slippers and glass of milk. There is a book tucked cutely underneath his hand though, the sliver of light coming in through the cracked door still brightening the page he left off on.
Carefully, Wade slings a leg over his sleeping form and slides into the sheets, settling behind Peter as the boxframe groans welcomingly under his weight.
“Shh, shh, shh,” he coos as Peter begins to stir in his arms, small sounds of protest huffing past his lips. Wade delicately lifts the book out from beneath him, saving the page with his thumb and placing it spine-up on the bedside table. Webs squirms on his side, sleep properly disturbed.
“Wade?” he croaks out in a confused, cracked voice.
“Hey, Spideybaby,” Wade murmurs soothingly, tightening his hold and pulling a ragdolling Webs against his chest. “Hope I didn’t make too much noise opening a portal on 5th Avenue.”
“They’re used to it,” Peter sighs drowsily. He takes a drooly breath in, rolling his face against the sheets.
“Mmm,” Wade agrees. He strokes the arch of Peter’s slender shoulder, then trails his knuckles into the male’s hair, breathing in the scent of his shampoo. “You take good care of my Peter while I was gone?”
With a huge yawn, Peter crawls up onto his elbows. He lifts his hands and balls them, digging at his fists with his eyes, until he’s awake and adjusted enough to turn over in Wade’s arms, meeting the other man’s intense, burning eyes in the deep blue of the room.
“Hi,” Peter laughs quietly, suddenly bashful. He laughs even more abandonedly, delighted, when Wade scoops him up and pulls him into an embrace hard enough to make a flat stanley out of him.
“Did you take care of my Peter?” he asks again, more intensely this time.
“Did you take care of yours?” he laughs back.
“Mhm,” Wade answers, burying his face in Peter’s neck. Peter feels him nodding, feels the heavy breaths exhaling on his neck, and he realizes, with the same startling gut-punch that gets every time, how much he missed Wade.
“What… what was he like?”
Peter blushes, though none of this embarrasses or unsettles him anymore at all really. Still, in a way, he is… self-conscious of how badly he wants to know. How desperately he slurps down the juice of whatever information Wade brings back to him.
“Pretty,” Wade says, punctuating the word with a kiss to Peter’s neck. “Fun. Carefree.”
“Carefree,” Peter echoes interestedly.
“A roller skating waiter,” Wade purrs incredulously, enthralled by just the words alone. “At a diner on the West Coast. Getting his MS in bioengineering at Caltech.”
“Oh, wow.” Peter rolls the picture over in his mind, thinking about what it would be like to slip into that man’s skin. Or what it would be like to build that particular coat of skin around him, he supposes. “Not a Spiderman, then?”
“Nope. Just a Peter.”
“Wow,” Peter says again.
“I don’t think he’d ever seen pussy before.”
“Wade,” Peter scoffs, then laughs, rolling his eyes harshly in his head. “What else? Was…” He swallows. “Aunt May…?”
“She was still alive,” Wade says, and Peter doesn’t know why he releases such a heavy breath. It’s as though her presence in another universe means, somehow, that she is not entirely gone. And it does, he supposes. In some weirdly unhelpful yet comforting way, it does.
“He was young though,” Wade goes on, “Maybe mid-twenties. I would have to go back and check in a couple years to see if she’s still there when he turns thirty-one.
Frowning, Peter thinks for so long that Wade eventually pokes his head out of the cave of Peter’s neck to check on him.
“Nah, don’t go back,” Peter says before Wade can ask if he’s alright. “Don’t completely devastate the guy twice in his lifetime.”
Grinning, Wade nudges Peter with an elbow. “What makes you think I left him wanting more? I totally satisfied that guy. Or, totally unsatisfied him, and he never wants to see my guts again.”
Peter stops rolling his eyes long enough to grab Wade by the face and hold it steady in front of him, brown eyes meeting the challenge in Peter’s. “Wade,” he says, “You could never.”
Wade splits into a grin. “My ego’s a little big, yeah,” he hisses. “Leo thing. You understand.”
“I am nothing if not understanding,” Peter scoffs.
“Oh thank god,” Wade breathes out. He quickly grabs Webs around the waist and tumbles them across the bed, landing flat on his back with Peter perched above him. “Then you’ll understand when I tell you, Spidey, you have to get a pair of roller skates. I need you to sit on my lap with the fuckin’ wheels going, oh my god.” He arches back and breathes out, thinking he could come right now just from the thought of it.
“You’re insatiable,” Peter says dryly, planting his palms on Wade’s chest, and Wade nods.
“You don’t get the half of it, baby boy,” he whispers, dripping with lust, reaching out to trace Peter’s arms with his hands. “I’m drowning in you- fucking drowning in all the Peter’s out there, and I can’t get enough.” He reaches up, pawing at Peter’s face, and Peter can see the need in his eyes. “They’re all you, Webs. They’re all you.”
Wade brings them all back to Peter. In a way, it feels like bringing them home.
It’s never enough, not until he takes them and puts their stories into this Peter, because this one is his center. This is the one that fills him.
Peter, a boy trying to piece his life back together one universe at a time. It do be like that; Wade knows more than anyone. When trauma splits your life open at an early age, and when it just keeps taking and taking after that, it can be very hard to see yourself. It can become impossible to remember where you come from. What you are made of.
Peter wants to know all the things he could have been, all the lives he could have led, so that he has the ability to know what he is now. He wants to know what in his life was inevitable, and what is as flexible as the spine that curves beneath his own damn skin. He wants to know which of his traits stay, and which melt away, the details morphing and transforming depending on the environment they germinated within.
He hasn’t grappled with a ton of religious texts in his life, but Wade finds himself moving closer and closer to the Gita with every universe he explores. He’s sure of it now; a soul cannot be judged based on one lifetime alone. A soul must show, over and over, through time and change and shifting circumstances, what remains regardless. What is central. What is core.
There are certain things the soul can’t shake.
And as for him… well. Wade’s peered into a window or two of his own, and so far, he hasn’t met a Wade without webs around his heart.