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Many, many people have accused Wade of being way too fond of the sound of his own voice, for fairly obvious reasons, but Wade would like to point out that he’s really just at the top of the curve on this one. Everybody talks, it’s a human-and-human-accessories thing. And if someone goes too long without someone to talk to — if, for example, they’re sadly wandering the world in an alcoholic haze as the face of every mutant-hating bigot’s nasty little wet dream — they’ll find themselves a substitute. Clever and charming asides to the fourth wall. Volleyballs on the beach. Narratively appropriate hallucinations that give actors a chance to flex their chops a bit even if they’ve technically been written out of the story.
Or, in the case of that very specific hypothetical from a moment ago, talking to dogs like they’re people.
Wade did catch Logan making judgmental and unwarranted remarks to Mary while Wade was busy with Nicepool’s tragic and untimely passing, but he considered it uncouth to bring up at the bedside of a dying man, even if it was shockingly adorable. However, it turns out that that was not the end of it. No, no, not in the slightest. It’s a full-on habit. Wade has successfully gotten video multiple times and gotten his fingers broken three times in the process (once by Blind Al, who was in her sleep T-shirt at the time and did not appreciate being filmed once the scuffle informed her it was happening).
Of course he has favorite incidents. Here’s a top five.
First one chronologically (and that is how we’re doing this, nonlinear storytelling is too much work) is Logan’s first morning in his bright new universe.
Wade wakes up to a bed (pullout couch) that smells like somebody else, for the first time in a long time, at least if you don’t count when he and Blind Al fall asleep sitting up with the TV on. Which he doesn’t, because waking up in yesterday’s jeans is its own thing. He takes a moment to just enjoy, sue him, and then remembers that today actually has a decent chance of being pretty great, and sits up.
“Whoa, hey, what the fuck?” is how he greets the world, because the first thing he sees is Logan on one knee in the kitchenette, in front of Mary, with the claws on one hand held out. “Are you threatening the dog? The sweetest little necrotizing nutsack in the whole world?”
“No, idiot,” Logan says, not moving, at the same time as Blind Al says, “Of course he’s not threatening the dog.” Oh, hey, Blind Al’s awake, wiping toothpaste off her mouth in the bathroom doorway.
“Well, I mean, you wouldn’t know this, Al,” Wade says, turning, “being blind and all, but he’s waving the claws — he has claws, by the way, maybe didn’t mention that — right under her innocent little face right now, so, I mean, it doesn’t look great —”
“I’m just letting her look at them, come on,” Logan says, and adds a lot of versimilitude to his story by gently tilting the claws away from her. “Uh-uh, bub, don’t lick that, you’ll cut your nasty tongue off. C’mon, there — ugh, okay, c’mon. That’s just a hand.”
“Okay,” Wade says slowly, “am I missing something here? Is this some kind of claw-having animal bonding ritual I don’t know about? Are you going to sniff each other’s butts next? Can I get in on this?”
Logan visibly decides that he doesn’t need to interact with that sentence and wipes his claws on the side of what are, in fact, Wade’s most boring sweatpants (plain gray for meat visibility, on Vanessa’s suggestion, which is going to give Wade plenty to think about in the shower later, at least until the hot water runs out.) “She started barking like crazy when I popped ‘em out. Figured a better look might calm her down.” Mary is at this point just licking the ordinary back of his hand, not an experience for the faint of heart; Logan withdraws the claws and pushes himself to his feet. Mary stands up on her little back feet to lick his jeans.
“The hell are you popping out claws in the middle of my kitchen for?” demands Blind Al, skipping right past any other questions, so she definitely A) recognized Logan’s voice from various X-Men related news coverage back in the day, B) has been conspiring with somebody or other to catch up on the plot details, or C) wake’n’baked this morning. Logan pauses, looking — oh, sweet baby Jesus — sheepish, and despite the fact that this is way too much inner monologue to be anything but a text-based medium, Wade can see the camera slowly shift to bring the counter behind him into focus, and the shrink-wrapped can sitting on it.
“Wanted to open the coffee,” Logan mumbles, resolutely and adorably avoiding eye contact.
Wade’s life is amazing. He’s so glad they’re not dead.
“Yeah, yeah, laugh it up,” Logan says, and looks down at the dog. She’s still licking him. “So we don’t get to do anything around here without a peanut gallery, huh?”
“Yarp?”
“Alright, bub, I don’t know how they do things in your universe, but in this one that’s fuckin’ gross.”
Second memory also starts with Wade in bed, since when the couch is folded out there’s not really a whole lot of apartment that isn’t bed, kitchen, bathroom, or Blind Al’s room. There’s at least some nice visual contrast — or would be if this was a visual medium — in that it’s the middle of the night this time, all blue-gray shadows. Something woke Wade up, and he’s pretty sure it’s the absence of a nice warm body beside him, which totally isn’t going to be a problem at all when somebody finally can’t tolerate this extremely cramped living situation. It’s called being in the moment. And in this particular moment, Logan obviously hasn’t gone far.
It takes a little bit of squinting before shapes start to coalesce out of the dark. Logan is slouched against the fridge, a bottle hanging from his hand, and Mary Puppins is standing right smack the fuck in the middle of the kitchen table, like, all four paws. She pants softly and wags her tail at Logan.
Aaaand hold the shot…
The stalemate breaks with Logan laughing, just a quiet huff in the dark. “Alright, c’mere,” he says, and scoops her off the table, tucking her under his arm. She yips quietly, wriggling, but settles pretty comfortably against his shoulder — which, boldly putting himself in tongue range, but she doesn’t seem to be on the attack right now. “People eat off that.”
A little more quiet, enough that the camera is definitely a rhetorical thing. Logan fiddles with the beer bottle, one-handed — and if Logan isn’t the kind of guy who can open a beer bottle with his teeth, then Wade is Skincare Barbie, but he doesn’t. What he does do is say, quietly, “Dogs get fucked-up dreams?”
Oh, peanut.
“Yeah, don’t we all.” He shakes his head, tilting his cheek against the dog’s horrible coarse brush of hair — if he ever does that when Wade has a camera to hand it is so over — and turns to put the beer bottle back in the fridge. The light catches his face, rueful and tired, in that one brief slice of gold.
The door shuts, and by the time Wade’s eyes adjust back, Logan’s settling Mary back on the floor. “Behave,” he says, and boops her nose. He really is the best Wolverine. “None of that in this universe.”
He stands, stretches, vanishes through the bathroom door. The clanks and rattles of the running shower rumble through the building.
Huh. Logan definitely still drinks more days than not, hasn’t said anything about trying to cut back, but — huh. Maybe it’s a baby steps thing. Something something environmental factors.
Mary Puppins does get back on the table about ninety seconds later, but Wade heroically drags himself out of his nice warm bed and puts her back on the floor rather than let her ruin a perfectly good metaphor.
(Yeah, yeah, obviously there’s a whole lot more to that whole thing. This is a highlight reel of Logan being cute talking to the dog, not the entire accounting of their lives. Let a guy have a life outside of his illnesses, okay? God. Insensitive.)
Third time is not in the apartment, thank you, it’s not like we’re stuck working with a budget here. It’s on a total Windows-desktop gorgeous day, fat puffs of cloud across a gleaming sky. They’re out in the park, letting Mary Puppins lose her tiny mind sniffing other dogs’ pee and barking at street-tough city squirrels, who bounce two inches out of reach and go back to not giving a shit.
Logan is getting ogled, obviously, he’s got the whole rolled-sleeve-flannel, sexy-lumberjack look going on, and it’s going to take more than a plain pulled-down baseball cap to keep anyone from taking note of that jawline. Though the hat might be because he’s worried about people thinking he’s the old Wolverine, or, you know, trauma from years of hoboing around the country being universally despised and probably getting thinkpieces written about him. Logan doesn’t seem to have noticed any of the ogling, which means he’s ignoring it, since Wade is most definitely participating and he is not subtle. There’s music up ahead, which is revealed when they round a big clump of flowers to be some kid with a bluetooth speaker and, more importantly, fire poi.
“Oh shit,” Wade says, handing Mary’s leash off to Logan, and leaps into action. The kid’s just winding down a song, poi neatly in front of him, and it’s easy as ABC to scoot in behind him and grab the poi by the base of the cords. “Here, lemme see that.” The kid’s stunned enough that Wade gets them neatly unwound from his hands before he figures out what’s going on, with plenty of time left to skip out of reach.
“Oh for fuck’s sake,” Logan says.
“Sir, uh, please give me that back, that’s real fire —”
“Of course it’s real fire, what else would it be, CGI?” Wade lets the poi sway artlessly above the ground. “Neat. How hard can it be?”
“Okay, pal, give me — shit — give —” Oooh, downgraded from sir to pal in two seconds!
“Look, kid,” Logan says, grabbing the kid’s elbow in an unexpected show of support. “You’re not gonna stop him from being a stupid asshole. He has it coming and he heals fast.”
“And besides, if burns scared me, would my skin look like this?” Wade points out, because a little bit of artful misdirection keeps you young and an actually topical skin joke is not to be passed up. He gives the poi another sloppy, unbalanced swing, and then, because it looks like there’s plenty of fuel on the wicks, another. The kid groans. Mary barks.
“Uh-uh,” Logan tells her, “we gotta watch your dad set himself on fire, then you can go back to the squirrels.”
Wade grins, puts one more ugly back-and-forth wobble on the poi just to sell it, and says, “Siri, play Disco Inferno.”
This is where he’d like to remind you that he dual-wields katanas and he can canonically dance like a motherfucker.
The Apple-based gamble pays off, thank you Steve Jobs’ contributions to the techno-dystopia, and Wade drops all pretense with the first brassy notes of the synth. Those poi hit the top of their arcs like midday shooting stars, they trail in zigzag spirals around him as he lets his body pick up the beat. The heat brushes his face and it just makes it better, makes him throw in a few more flourishes: behind his back, between his legs, tight parallel loops that flick apart into wild figure-eights, sharp staccato back-and-forths, the works. Gravity is his bitch right now.
God, it’s been a while since he danced without the suit on. Too long.
By the time he’s done he’s got a little crowd, and even without the mask on it’s actually almost fine for once. He bows over the near-burned-out poi and hands them back to the kid, flicks the kid’s jaw shut with a fingertip, and bounces back to Logan. “So, whatcha think, honey badger?”
Oh, right, Wade is actually very sensitive to rejection. Funny how he manages to forget that. Mary whines, because she is a very clever and narratively sensitive animal, or maybe because there’s another squirrel and they’re not moving. Logan looks down at her. “Yeah, yeah, rub it in.”
“Uh, run that back for a second? I make the enigmatic remarks around here?”
“I was sure I knew how that was gonna go,” and then Logan’s eyes are going all crinkly at the corners and Wade’s heart is doing a thing. “Where the hell did you learn to do that?”
“Base camp, YouTube, and socks full of rocks and moonshine. And yes, I did scorch my nutsack a little bit while I was learning, thank you for asking.”
“I didn’t.” Logan kneels to pick — hang on now — pick his hat up off the grass and scoop what looks like at least $20 in small bills out of it.
“Wait, what the hell? Where did that come from?”
“What?” Logan looks from him to the hat. “We’ve got rent to pay. And you to feed, picky,” he adds to Mary, who has a refined palate, and who completely ignores him.
There’s a lot of versions of “Disco Inferno” out there, but the one Siri pulled up this time clocks in at three minutes and thirty-six seconds. That’s pretty damn fast to go from “I’m about to watch this moron set his ass on fire” to “people would pay money to watch this” and still have time to actually collect the cash.
Wade feels totally normal about it.
Fourth does actually remember we’re in an R-rated franchise for reasons other than just the language, since the memory does start with Wade bleeding a lot. Hey, a lot of his favorite memories do.
To be a little more specific here, the relevant part of the whole thing starts with him stumbling into the apartment, one arm slung over Logan’s shoulders while he busily coughs a last couple spurts of O Negative all over Logan’s honestly really flattering flannel, hopefully Blind Al can help them salvage that thing. Mary, of course, loses her tiny mind barking her head off, then figures out they’re her own personal criminals rather than unspecified home invaders or the UPS guy, then slightly changes the pitch of her racket and starts bouncing around their feet like she’s actively trying to trip them both onto her fragile little bones.
“Nuh-uh, bub, not now, your goddamn daddy here had to get his lungs blown up — no, nuh-uh, down — dammit, dog, please, can you calm down for two seconds, I swear to God —” He gets Wade onto the couch, which, not where Wade would have chosen to bleed in this apartment, and grabs Mary long enough to — huh — drop her in the bathroom. “Back in a second, okay, just shut the fuck up for a minute,” he tells her, still gentle, and shuts the door.
“Uh,” Wade says. “You’re remembering I heal, right? I’m gonna be fine in, like, two seconds, it only lasted this long because I had to heal the rest of the shrapnel out of there — and it is all landing in the waistband of my underpants, by the way, that’s gonna fall all over the floor as soon as I take these off and then I’m gonna have to vacuum, so, y’know, if you wanna help me with that —”
“Shut up.” Logan crouches at the side of the couch and starts tugging the shredded remains of Wade’s costume — honestly the biggest loss of the night — out of the way, picking little blood-stuck bits of fabric off of Wade’s skin like Wade is going to die of a shirt infected wound like the Napoleonic Wars. Those are still older than Logan, right? Or Logan would’ve been a little bony mutant baby still banging his claws on the crib bars when he decided it wasn’t naptime anymore, at least. “I know, okay, I know, you’re gonna be fine, just — didn’t want her nasty tongue all over you, that’s just unsanitary —”
“Kind of don’t get sick either, peanut,” Wade points out, more gently now because this is starting to set off his hey the music just went all emotional moment on us alarms even in a medium without a soundtrack. “Seriously, I’m fine.”
“I know. You’re fine. I’m fine. It’s goddamn fine, everybody’s fine, I’m fine.”
“O-kay, we are definitely well into the suspicious number of reassurances there, take it from an expert in relationship-ruining repression, so how about we pause for a second and you explain what the hell is going on in your fluffy head right now? That was very aggressive, I was going for relatively serious but I think I overcompensated, I’m not great at it. I mean, you know that.”
“Yeah, I figured that one out when I was watching you mugging it up about your own death.” And oh, shit, this is for sure a thing, because that’s not even angry, that’s scared. Logan sits back on his heels, scrubbing his palms over his face, and it’s probably not appropriate and also a little hypocritical for Wade to grab his wrists and pull his hands away so Wade can see him, but the temptation is there. “This is so fucking stupid, I’ve cut you up how many times and had fun doing it, just…” (This is true, they’ve been sparring whenever they can find a spot where they won’t get the police called on them, there’s an underused parking garage that is never gonna be a non-horrifying color again.)
“Yeah, that’s the bitchy thing about trauma, it doesn’t have to make sense. We have that in common.” Wade gives in to temptation and curves his hand over Logan’s shoulder in what is probably a fairly normal situationally appropriate gesture of reassurance, he’s not sure, sincere masculine emotion is usually where he actually starts pinging people’s gaydar no matter how many dicks he offers to suck. Logan sighs and shifts his weight until he can lean back against the creaking couch, moving like he can’t regenerate the years off his bones.
“They skinned Rogue,” he says, low and heavy. “I think they thought it was how her power worked, they turned Chuck’s head to fuckin’ pulp. I found Ororo in front of the kids’ dorm. They had some kind of power suppression, never found out what it was or how it worked, and she was never a hand to hand fighter, but she still tried to hold the door.” Wade can feel the shudder roll through him under his fingers. “It didn’t work.”
God, Wade might’ve gone absolutely bugfuck murder crazy too.
“Sorry,” Logan mutters. “You’re fine, I know you’re fuckin’ fine, you’re even harder to kill than I am, I just… I saw you go down, and you didn’t answer, and…”
“Temporary throat injury, that’s all,” Wade promises, thumbing a slow and sincerely-not-sensually-intended circle on Logan’s shoulder. The temporary injury was that he didn’t have much throat left, but in his defense, he got better. “Not even a big deal. Basically laryngitis. Don’t get me wrong, I know you missed the melodious sound of my voice, but here I am, back in form.”
“Got used to your yapping, I guess.”
“Wow, I’m flattered. No, sincerely, peanut,” he squeezes Logan’s shoulder, “I mean it. I mean, not that I’m glad you had a miserable trauma semi-flashback, that looked like it sucked, but you know, if you had to have it about somebody in the first place, it feels pretty good that it’s me. In a horrible morbid kind of way. I’m honored.”
Logan rolls his eyes, half to look at Wade and half out of a heartstoppingly fond-looking exasperation. “Honored? Why do you sound like I just came on to you?”
“Baby, this is not how I’d sound if you just came on to me.”
He almost elaborates — starting with how about we go ahead and take the ‘to’ riiiight out of that sentence, first of all — but Logan tilts his head back enough to look at him properly, and he ’s smiling, this soft crinkle-eyed romance hero look that’s a little bit like wonder and a lot like coming home, and Wade burns the second of his twice-a-year ability to shut up for a minute. Logan’s hand comes up to cover Wade’s, pressing Wade’s grip into his shoulder.
The moment is interrupted by a brief scrabbling noise and a high-pitched canine wail. Logan laughs, a soft huff of air against Wade’s wrist.
“Yeah, I’ll keep that in mind,” he says, all warm and gentle, and it sounds a whole hopeful lot like a promise, like I just need a little more time. “I’m gonna go spring the dog before she starts anxiety pissing in there.”
“I mean, who hasn’t?”
“Most of us,” Logan calls, clumping over to the bathroom door. “C’mon, girl, you’re fine. Yeah, just needed a minute. We’re a real neurotic set of assholes, huh?” He scoops Mary up, nestling his chin onto her horrible wiry head — and by this point in the timeline Wade has extensive photographic evidence of this habit, including as his lock screen, though that’s not gonna stop him from digging out his phone in pursuit of one more. “Hey, we’re not going anywhere, we’re right here.”
God, Wade is stupidly in love with him, and that might actually just turn out to be fine. “You’re pretty enough for all three of us, peanut!”
It totally does turn out to be just fine, which is why the fifth time is very, very close to being a different kind of favorite memory. Specifically it starts with Wade sprawled out on the couch, head lolling back, eyes half-lidded as he moans, “Oh, yeah, baby, fuck that’s good…”
(Obviously, they’re not on Disney anymore.)
Logan on his knees for Wade is already hotter than some sex Wade’s had in his life, first of all, and Logan sucks cock like he’s starving for it. His hands on Wade’s thighs are huge and gentle and so carefully, deliberately still that Wade’s going to spend the next two weeks making increasingly sincere jokes about handcuffs, and they have all the time in the world before Blind Al gets home from bingo, and all in all life is pretty much perfect —
“JESUS FUCKING CHRIST!” —
— right up until Logan fucking explodes backwards like Wade’s dick is a ticking bomb and bellows at the actual top of his lungs. That’s more of an ice water to the taint kind of experience.
“Uh, peanut,” Wade says, sounding a pretty normal amount of hoarse for a guy who was getting a pretty all-time blowjob until one point three seconds ago, “normally I’d be thrilled to make you scream like that in bed, but…”
“Fucking.” Logan’s chest heaves, which is criminally wasted on Wade’s already bluing balls and increasingly genuine concern. “Dog. Scared the shit out of me.”
“…What?”
Logan gestures to the corner of the room. The claws are out, which he doesn’t usually do in the living room because he is literally more afraid of Blind Al’s disappointment than he is of getting shot. Wade follows the fairly obvious cue and, sure enough, Mary is under the corner chair, eying them both suspiciously with her huge vacant eyes. “Fucking. Slimy goddamn tongue right on my ankle. You need to learn to read the fucking room, bub,” he informs Mary, in enough of a gentle growl that she visibly eases up on the cringing. “Gonna get yourself stabbed pulling that shit. I haven’t been spooked like that in thirty years.”
“That seems a little extreme.” Wade considers the evolving situation, sighs, and puts his dick away. “Did you pick up some kind of tongue-ankle-based trauma while you were sadly hitchhiking between dive bars? Do I need to scratch all of the kinky foot stuff off the to-do list?”
“I mean, if you wanna try,” Logan says, with a distracted casualness that makes Wade’s heart seize up hot somewhere under his breastbone. “It’s not some kind of — tongue trauma, how do you even come up with this shit — it’s not like that, I just.” Oh, shit, he’s actually embarrassed about this. “’S not usually that easy to sneak up on me unless — eh, not even if I’m wasted.”
“I’ve definitely never seen you jump like that.” And Wade has tried. And then the math starts to add up — “Wait. Waitwaitwait. Are you seriously saying that sucking my dick is the most relaxed you’ve been in thirty years?”
Logan is blushing. Wade wants a million pictures immediately except if anyone else saw this he might have to kill them and also he kind of doesn’t actually want to make Logan wrestle him for his phone right now, hey, look at him and his emotional maturity. “Shut the hell up.”
“Oh my God. That is actually so romantic it basically makes up for the ruined blowjob, and in case I haven’t said this yet, you give really good blowjobs.” The blush gets better. Is it the romance thing or the sober sex compliment? Wade’s going to have to experiment.
“You shouldn’t be hearing this,” Logan tells Mary, who’s still under the armchair. “But that’s what you get for cockblocking me. Shit, did I actually scare her?”
“She might just be a little dramatic? Don’t get me wrong, if you’re ever that mean to her on purpose I’m going to be genuinely pissed off and we don’t have a free car to wreck this time, but she’ll get over it.”
“C’mon, girl.” Logan offers her his hand, carefully upturned (and, yes, with the claws retracted, Wade wasn’t really paying attention to that). “Get out from under there. Yeah, it’s just me. What’d you learn here, huh? Yeah, there we go.” This last is prompted by Mary scrabbling out from under the chair and climbing directly into his lap. “Ugh, nope, no tongue. You didn’t learn a damn thing, didja? Not a thought in your empty head. We have got to get someplace big enough to shut the goddamn door on you.”
“Okay, never tell her I said this or she’ll kick my ass all the way to New Jersey but I don’t wanna leave Blind Al on her own,” Wade admits. “She’s not getting around as well as she used to and her sister’s a judgy asshole who never visits.” That is a wild oversimplification of a story Wade’s only ever gotten pieces of, but he loves exactly one of the people in this equation, so. Logan frowns at him between Mary’s ears.
“Does she not wanna move out of this place? Been here too long?”
“Oh, no, she’d only lived here for like two years before I moved in, it’s not like her lifetime home or anything. I just…” …didn’t realize Logan had just assumed Blind Al would be coming with them, but he obviously did, because he loves her too, and he spent two hours in his dubiously legally acquired car picking Yukio up from the airport last week, and he adores their hideous yappy little dog every bit as much as Wade does, fuck, book him that literal and metaphorical U-haul because, “hey, is it long enough after the cockblocking that if I tell you I’m, like, crazy in love with you it doesn’t seem like the blowjob talking?”
“What, because I can think of getting a two-bedroom apartment?”
God, it’s been a minute since Wade got an adorably confused scrunchface out of Logan, which, fuck, go ahead and add that to the list of reasons he’s in love: Logan just treats his fourth-wall-breaking bullshit like ASMR at this point. That’s the nice thing about puzzle pieces, they’ve got a lot of sides. You can fit with one of them, for real, truly, and then some shit happens, and then another one of your edges matches up with someone else and it’ll look completely different. Saying that would require an awful lot of context and also kind of undermine Wade’s own metaphor, though, so he goes with, “I mean, a little bit. That’s the thing about love, right, it’s never because of any one thing, no matter how great your jawline is. And that ass! But, no, seriously, I’m making jokes because it’s a nervous habit but I do mean it, I am one hundred percent in love with you, it is not just about your bootylicious body — are you laughing? Are you laughing at me right now?”
Logan totally is, but it’s the kind of almost-silent joyous doubled-over laughter that is probably the least emotionally devastating kind of laugh to be getting right now. “Fuck, bub,” he chokes, “the day I know how a single goddamn thing with you is gonna go is the day they put us both in the ground, huh? Fuckin’ hell, I love you too.”