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Peter’s not expecting to be ambushed in his own apartment.
He’s wearing a ratty old hoodie and carrying three pizza boxes, humming fucking Europe to himself under his breath, and he doesn’t even turn on the light before kicking the door shut behind him. He goes straight for the kitchen, sets the pizzas down on the table, and manages to take two steps towards the lightswitch before someone’s catching him around the waist -
He feels his spine tense up for a second, because his hyper-senses didn’t even itch, but then there’s a familiar puff of breath against the side of his face, familiar lips skimming over his jaw, and calloused hands pulling at his clothes, running over the skin above his waistband. Peter’s hood falls away, and -
Wade’s voice is more a vibration against his skin than an actual sound, “What’s on the pizzas, spidey?”
Peter smiles and sinks back into him, muscles going jelly at Wade’s thumbs hooking under the front of his jeans. “They’re, uh - “ it’s hard to get full sentences out when Wade’s sucking bruises into the skin behind his ear, “one’s hawaiian, one’s meat lover, one’s just cheese.”
“Boring,” Wade declares, and Peter can feel the edge of teeth on his earlobe. “Your dick tastes better.”
Peter snorts a laugh, can’t help it, because that line, but Wade’s backing up into the kitchen and taking Peter with him, twisting him around so they’re face to face, still sucking kisses along the line of Peter’s throat, and Peter’s been running around the city all day trying to snap an exclusive photo of a visiting dignitary, so he lets himself be lifted up onto the counter, just wraps his legs around Wade’s waist -
Wade moves to his mouth, talking into his lips, “You would not be-lieve the day I had, spidey, I mean ri-diculous, didn’t even have time to stop for lunch, I was on the tail of this Norweigan fucking princess that some schmuck wants blown to bits, don’t know why you’d want to blow up tits like that, but - I follow this bird around all fucking day and you know what happens? I get beat to the punch, spidey, that’s what - “
Peter grabs him by one ear and pulls him back an inch. “Why are you always the source of my problems?”
The only parts of Wade not covered by his suit are his head and his hands, and the sheer material makes a swishing noise against the inseam of Peter’s jeans when he rolls his hips forward, grinding hard against him. Peter digs his fingers into Wade’s shoulder and squeezes his knees, pulling him in tighter.
“Bitch was wearing neon orange, some kind of fucking hunting get up, can you believe that, shoots her with a large game rifle from a hundred meters, her whole fucking head came off - “
“That would’ve been a pretty exclusive picture - “
Wade is rocking into him in sharp, shallow circles, he pulls Peter’s hoodie off his shoulders, Peter leans in quick to bite his bottom lip and retreat, Wade’s hands are on his fly, their mouths turn and smash together and Wade’s rough-hewn fingers are pulling his dick out of his boxers without preamble -
“I had a plan to get her while she was at the White House, it was gonna be gorgeous. I could get into the White House so easy, you could come with me, baby boy, I wanna fuck you on that big ole desk.”
He drops to his knees between Peter’s legs, grabs two handfuls of his ass and pulls him right to the edge, so Peter’s knees are hooked over his shoulders, the heels of his converse digging for purchase on Wade’s back, sliding over the suit. “I’m not sure the president would appreciate that,” he says, breathless because of Wade’s lips skimming along the head of his dick, “I’d like to hang on to my hero - mmm - sta - status - “
Wade swallows him all the way down to the base in one movement, his throat working, and every muscle in Peter’s body pulls impossibly taut, his vision exploding in white. Wade must be doing his best to suck his brains out, with just the barest hint of teeth, like Peter likes, his hands splayed over Peter’s ass, his thumbs in the crease of his thighs, still covered in denim -
The whole apartment is silent except for the rasp of Peter’s breath, the wet noises of Wade moving up and down, Peter’s head banging back against the cabinets when he comes like a firecracker, “Fuck - “
sss
Peter’s not expecting to be ambushed in his own apartment.
He’s wearing the suit, thank god, and he comes in through the fire escape window in his bedroom, which probably saves him from losing about three of his fingers and one of his ears in the booby-trapped front door. He knows something’s wrong the second one of his feet touches the floor inside the apartment, and he freezes with one leg in and one leg out.
The smart thing would be to slip quietly back out the window and swing away into the night, but you’d be hard pressed to find anyone in Peter’s line of work who would ever run from a fight - especially a fight on their home turf, when they’ve been invaded, when they don’t know what’s going on. So instead he twists fully inside, stays on the balls of his feet, and moves out the door into the apartment.
He turns the corner into the den, and some twitch at the back of his mind makes him dodge left. A split second later, the wall where his head just was explodes like it’s been hit by an artillery round.
His whole right side gets blasted with shrapnel, he hits the other side of the door jamb, bounces off, and launches himself at the opposite corner. There’s a huge man standing in the middle of the room with a gun bigger than anything Peter’s ever seen a human carry, dressed in fluorescent orance, his face camouflage -
He keeps blasting after Peter’s position, but Peter’s too fast, webbing around the room faster than the man’s reflexes can react. “Not so hard to trap the infamous spider after all!” he booms, pulling away merrily at the trigger. “Kraven truly is the best hunter on the planet!”
“Referring to yourself in the third person, huh?” Peter quips back, because he has to. “You know, they say that’s a sign of early onset bitch-ass-crazy.”
Kraven just cackles, but then his gun clicks instead of firing, rounds out, and he tosses it away. The den is decimated, couch shredded, tv a mess of sparks in the corner, about to come down. “I’ve been tracking you for days!” he announces. “And finally, Kraven the Hunter finds his prey!”
Peter’s head is careening wildly, his whole right side is on fire and bleeding fast, he can’t do anything but cling to the corner between the wall and the ceiling and breathe as deep as his cracked ribs will let him. He watches Kraven pull a huge knife, almost a sword, and lets his brain run rapid-fire over his options.
Before he can decide on anything, Kraven lunges at him, slashing with the knife, and he drops down on his head, hits the floor with his hands and flips the bigger man over his head, hard into the floor. He tries to get enough webbing down quick enough to stick him down, but Kraven’s already climbing to his feet -
Peter dives over him, shooting webbing at his eyes as he goes. He lands, shoots a burst hard enough at Kraven’s hand to stick it and the knife-sword to the wall, but Kraven just pulls a throwing star from somewhere and nails him in the hip -
Peter webs his other hand down fast, but he’s halfway through sawing through the other one already, he’s about to get himself free, so Peter turns and stumbles as fast as he can for the fire escape, even though he knows it’s stupid to turn his back on the enemy -
He makes it to the window just as he hears Kraven wrench himself free with an almighty scream, but he doesn’t wait around to get caught up to, just trips out onto the grating, shoots a web at the far building, and swings away, despite the pain in his everything.
sss
He breaks into a convenience store, changes into some new clothes, pops more aspirin than is probably medically advisable, leaves a couple of tens on the counter, leaves his unsalvageable suit stuffed into the trashcan in the bathroom, and checks into a Holiday Inn Express.
There’s a fair amount of blood leaking out of him onto the comforter, and he can’t really move his head from where he let it fall on the pillow, so he thinks it’s probably fair to shoot a text to Wade’s backup needed cell phone, the one he always has ferreted somewhere on his person in case there’s an opportunity to beat up alien robots, alien werewolves, or werewolf robots, but not any plain aliens or plain robots, Petey.
sos dying holidsy innnnnn asap
The passage of time feels goopy, so even though it feels like twelve hours before Wade shows up, with adjustment to reality it’s probably about fifteen minutes. He actually uses the door, and Peter will have to ask him later how he manages to pick a keycard lock, but then he’s there in sweatpants and a hoodie, a stuffed duffle bag over one shoulder, the mattress dips as he sits down -
“Holy shniz, spidey, do you know how many fucking Holiday Inns there are in this city, it’s an epidemic - fuck, look at you, someone’s gotta die, whodunnit - “
Peter’s vision isn’t really cooperating, but he feels Wade’s thumb on his lip, the rest of his fingers brushing over his cheek, under the gash where a chunk of shrapnel almost took out his eye. Peter tries to talk, just coughs up a spray of blood, tries again, and manages to grit out, “Neon orange bitch.”
“Fuck, that bitch?” Wade says. “He’s gonna have to die a painful fucking death, I’ll draw and quarter him, or pour boiling oil all over him, or - shit, spidey, is that a ninja star - forced seppuku, that’s what - “
“Wade,” says Peter.
Wade presses a kiss against his forehead, and tugs his fingers once through Peter’s overgrown hair. “Sorry, baby boy, I gotcha,” and having the world’s foremost mercenary murmuring that over him should probably not be as soothing as it is, it should probably make his heart kick into double time instead of slow down, but.
His stolen tee shirt is being torn off him, as gently as something can be torn, his pants are being pulled off slowly, his shoes untied and thrown away. He knows, from the brief glance that he caught of himself while he was changing in the convenience store, that he must look awful - tiny bits of drywall peppered up and down his side, from head to toe, a dark bruise spreading across his torso, impact damage -
Wade is muttering to himself, and Peter can only catch snippets, but he can tell that he’s still dreaming up ways to take Kraven apart. He doesn’t really want to think about death by a thousand cuts while he’s laying here with damn near a thousand cuts on him, so he says, “Hey, that asteroid mining act.”
“The Commercial Space Launch Competitiveness Act?” Wade asks.
The little pinpricks of pain when each bit of shrapnel comes out is nothing compared to when it went in, but the antiseptic sting after each piece is removed is a bitch, so listening to Wade’s rambling voice makes it easier, makes it more like waking up easy to pale yellow light through the window and Wade’s Jackson Pollock scarred smile pressed against the pillow, katanas at the end of the bed and what used to be a toaster scattered across the floor, halfway to being a better web shooter -
“This opens up so many avenues, spidey, I mean, have you thought about it, hot damn, vast unlimited resources, shits all over the energy crisis, doesn’t it, obviously no oil in space but you know, other stuff, and what if they let us mine the sun next, hydrogen and fusion and fission and shit, space is international waters from now on, okay, five four three - “
He yanks the ninja star out of Peter’s hip, tearing some stuff while he does, but there’s really no better way to do it, and Peter shouts a little and arches off the bed, spine popping. “Sorry, it’s better with no warning,” Wade says, and proceeds to dump what feels like a whole fucking bottle of antiseptic over the open wound.
Then there’s just a bandage, some band-aids over the bigger shrapnel gashes, and Peter’s whole body is throbbing distantly, his eyes are opening and closing of their own accord, the picture of Wade’s brown eyes shuttering in and out, and by the time everything stabilizes, Wade’s on the bed next to him, carefully not touching him, just on his back and staring up at the ceiling.
“Did some time as a sumo wrestler,” Wade’s saying, and Peter gets the sense that he’s been talking for a while, and he’s just now tuning in. “Almost a year, trying to get into a sumo-wrestling gang, got hired to kill the head honcho, but he was hard to get to, only time he didn’t have an army on him was in the ring, so I had to learn the ways, but lemme tell you, spidey, I was not cut out for sumo-wrestling.”
Peter reaches out and sort of flops his fingers over Wade’s, which is about as good as he can manage at the current point in time. “Hey,” he says. Wade looks at him. “Be here when I wake up.”
He won’t be, Peter knows he won’t be. But Wade just turns their hands over, squeezes Peter’s fingers, and says, “Sure thing, baby boy.”
sss
He’s gone when Peter wakes up.
It’s three p.m, the bloody comforter is piled in a heap in the corner, there’s an industrial sized bottle of aspirin and a box of band-aids on the bedside table, and the tv is playing a rerun of Family Fued on mute. Peter groans, rolls over, stretches pathetically, and latches onto his cell phone.
He makes a call.
“Well, go ahead and wave to your dignity as it goes flying out the window, kid,” Romanoff says.
She’s standing at the foot of the bed with a garment bag over one shoulder, intimidating in a short dress and trashy makeup as she is in her full-out assassin SHIELD gear. He knows she came straight from a job, and he knows she’s probably not happy about it, but she’s here, at least, throwing the garment bag down over his legs where he’s sitting up uncomfortably in bed, still in only his tighty whities.
“You’ll be discreet about this,” he says, but the confidence is one hundred percent bullshit.
Romanoff smiles. “If SHIELD asks, I’ll tell them. I have to tell them, it’s part of my contract. It’s also part of why I’m not currently in some secret military black-site prison in Bangladesh.”
“But as long as they don’t ask,” Peter says. “We’re all kosher.”
“Sure,” she shrugs, “why not. I’m intrigued, I’ve never had an emergency call from Spiderman interrupt an undercover job at a strip club before. So shoot.”
Peter’s brain still hasn’t quite sorted itself out yet after being shorted out last night, but he thinks he has a pretty good handle on what’s going on. “Wade’s about to go kamikaze on a bad guy, and neither of them have any problems with killing innocent bystanders,” he says, to start. “So unless we want them nuking each other, and half the city along with them, we should probably get in there and get to the bad guy first.”
Romanoff’s quiet for a moment, like the quiet before a president gives an order to go to war. A deliberate, terrifying quiet. Then she says, “Did he do this to you?”
“Yeah, of course,” Peter says. “Who the fuck else would have done it?”
Romanoff purses her lips. “Peter, if you’re in an abusive relationship - “
“What the - no,” Peter says, vehemently, defensively, because Wade. “No, not Wade. Jesus, not Wade. The other guy did this, K-something, Kraven, I think. That’s why Wade’s going to go at him so hard.”
And - every atom of his being is violently rejecting the idea, of Wade ever hurting him, ever being anyting but amazing and impossible and ridiculous and perfect, always like he’s getting all his softness out with Peter so he can go out and crush everything else, because two days ago he made Peter blueberry pancakes in the nude, sang Taylor Swift all morning, and Peter knows that his Wade and everyone else’s are two very different things, but the idea of Wade ever hurting him is just -
Romanoff looks unsure, but she doesn’t say anything more on the subject. “Where will they be?”
Peter takes a breath, unzipping the garment bag to reveal his suit, patched. “I don’t know, but I can give you a phone number to triangulate.”
sss
Peter’s not exactly in the best fighting shape of his life this afternoon.
His cuts are like fire, the hip that the throwing star went into isn’t working so hot, neither is that entire leg, his ribs stab him every time he breathes, and he needs about twenty four more hours of sleep. He figures he’ll let the SHIELD strike team he brought with him do most of the heavy lifting.
They find them in the slummier part of Hell’s Kitchen, laying waste to what looks like an apartment building, hopefully abandoned, hopefully ignored by squatters. Kraven must have some sort of superhuman enhancements, because he’s meeting Wade hit for hit, both of them blasting each other through walls and both of them taking hits from big guns and bigger knives, and Peter is so tired of superheroes.
The SHIELD team drops in a block or so away from the carnage, but Peter webs down right into the middle of it, because that’s where screaming, crying, perfect storm is coming from.
Wade’s fighting without half of his fucking arm, and that’s more than kind of the reason that Peter makes sure to web Kraven good and hard in the nuts as soon as he gets the opening. He knows the arm will grow back in a couple of hours, but it’s - he hates to see that, see Wade so badly hurt and not even caring, just still going at it with a katana in one hand and a mean looking knife between his teeth.
He gets Kraven good and stuck to what looks like it used to be a foundational column while he’s distracted fighting off Wade, and then turns around to his idiot mercenary. “SHIELD’s coming, let’s clear out.”
Wade spits out the knife, breathing heavy. “What the hell? No, fuck this bitch, spidey - “
“Look,” Peter says, short and angry, because the one time he really cared if Wade stayed he had to go, Peter had to wake up alone and hurting and call a predator, “if you have to kill him, kill him now before they get here, but you better do it clean and you better not fucking show up at my place for at least a month.”
Wade’s katana-wielding hand falls limply to his side. If he weren’t in the mask, Peter knows he’d be gaping. “He hurt you,” he says, “he fucking touched you, he tore you up - “
“So he gets locked up!” Peter snaps. “He goes away for the rest of his life, somewhere where he’ll never even see the light of day, but he doesn’t get heinously murdered by a fucking assassin. That’s not justice, that’s revenge, and that’s not how I operate.”
This feels so wrong, yelling at Wade in the middle of a radius of rubble and wreckage, but Wade’s only number two or three on the list of thing’s Peter’s willing to fight for, and the first is the right thing.
Wade says nothing, which also is so fundamentally against how the universe should be that Peter wants to scream a little, or maybe puke, but he thinks the nausea is mostly because of his ribs.
“Put the sword down,” Peter says, “so we can go back to the fucking Holiday Inn and bleed all over the place a little more, take a shower, have really low key sex, and sleep for three days.”
Wade says, finally, “And chimichangas.”
sss
“Let’s just not fight each other’s battles any more,” Peter decides, in the shower.
The curtain’s pulled away, and there’s water spraying all over the bathroom, but Wade’s sitting on the counter next to the sink while his arm regenerates, he still doesn’t want Peter where he can’t see him, and Peter doesn’t particularly mind the sensation of Wade’s eyes on his body, anyways.
“Fine,” Wade says, easy as nothing. Peter knows he’s lying, but once they’ve had this argument one time, they can have it again and again until it sinks in. “Anyway, back to asteroid mining,” even though that was at least twenty-four hours ago that he left off, “d’you think they’re gonna run into that same problem they had with the moon guy, you know, private citizenship, they didn’t write it out - “
His arm’s grown back all the way down to his fingers, and the smaller muscles down there are weaving themselves back together as Peter watches, Wade’s wiggling them like they’re tingling.
“You know, and then that could lead to interplanetary war, fuck, baby boy, ever thought about that, interplanetary war, and then we’d have to face off against those norse god mo-fuckers, a whole army of Hemsworths probably, fucking Thanos, too, hate that guy - “
Peter starts scrubbing shampoo into his hair, vigorously, because he has two days’ worth of battle soot in there now, and that’s nasty. “Do you think you could survive in space?” he asks.
Wade trips up for a second. “Dunno. Huh, I’ve lived through asphyxiation before, and hypothermia, all fine, all good, dandy, but I never tried exploding my insides out through pressure changes, that could be a fucking bitch, imagine that, killed by your own popping spleen - “
Peter makes a face, and glances at Wade’s fingers. “That’s good enough, get in here.”
Wade grins, slides off the counter and strips out of the bottom half of his suit. He’s already hard, just from sitting there watching him, and maybe it’s just because they’re still in some sort of weird twisted honeymoon phase but Peter feels his own blood rushing south so fast his head spins.
“We gotta try it sometime,” Wade says, stepping in behind him and pulling the shower curtain closed, isolating them. “Deadpool and spidey, interplanetary heroes, our name in lights, can you picture it, it would be glorious, there’d be fucking ballads about us, oh my cheese - “
Peter snorts, snickers, and presses his smile to Wade’s mouth, stepping in so they’re pressed flush together, and his hair is plastered against his forehead and Wade’s fingers sliding down his spine still have that weird unfinished, twitching-movement feeling that his skin always has when it’s remaking itself, but right now there’s nothing to argue about, even if there are explosive confrontations in their future, sure as anything.
Wade says against his lips, “Imma do my best not to blow up bystanders.”
It might not quite be the war, but Peter says, “Unless they’re alien robot werewolf bystanders, then go wild.”