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With his personality, one would expect Wade’s nightmares to be big, loud, dramatic—the same as the rest of him. Logan’s certainly are; he’s always violently tossing and turning, trapped in his blankets and memories, and awakes each time shouting and slashing at the air in preemptive defense. Fight and fear take over his body, heavy and mean, and even once Wade grounds him and he slumps back against the pillows he can feel the ache they’ve left behind.
Wade’s nightmares, though, are quiet. Peaceful, almost.
If he ever talks in his sleep, it’s nothing more than soft muttering, and he never thrashes like Logan does. He’s still—calm, almost. According to Ness, he looks no different than when he’s dreaming.
But the dreams themselves, of course, are anything but calm.
There’s the usual torture montages, dying loved ones, tragic backstory reruns—standard superhero nightmare fare, after all—but, lucky for him, he got the free upgrade to the creative version where his subconscious licks its lips and cooks up the worst possible combination of deep-seated fears and traumatic memories.
No matter the dream, though, he never screams when he wakes up. Rarely does he even bolt up in bed. Usually, waking feels as if he’s heard a balloon pop: he startles to consciousness, and then in an instant the flinch subsides. The memories don’t leave as easily as the shock, though, nor does the haze—if anything, the two work in tandem to take over his brain, until he feels like a puppet forced to comply as his rabbit-fast heartbeat blares retreat! Retreat! Retreat!
From nearly the moment he wakes, once the cold hand of dissociation seizes his brain like it’s PTSD Cassandra Nova, he feels like he’s watching all of his actions through a camera lens shifted just out of focus. He’s powerless to change the channel as his brain cycles sluggishly through a disorganized mess of remnants of the dream and all the memories it’s dredged up. It’s the opposite of dramatic—really, the antithesis of his whole personality. Boring, by all accounts. Logan’s nightmares are flailing, screaming—but Wade’s are quiet, pensive. Logan erupts; Wade retreats into himself.
His nightmares rarely rouse anyone, either. If they do, it’s only ever after, when Wade has drifted out of bed like a ghost, that whoever’s sleeping next to him usually wakes up.
The first time Wade has a nightmare after Logan moves in, Logan doesn’t even notice. In fact, he’s still asleep when Wade comes back to himself—maybe an hour and a half after he first woke up—and crawls back into bed.
Logan looks peaceful in his sleep, the way Vanessa says Wade does even when waging battles both figurative and literal on the bloodied field of his subconscious; that usual crease between his brows has been smoothed out, and his mouth is slack rather than frowning. Something in Wade wants to press himself against that peace in the hopes he’ll get lucky enough to soak some of it up, see if some of Logan’s warmth will stop his heart from shivering—but he decides against it. This… thing between them, whatever it is, is too fragile for Wade to disrupt. He’s a bull in a china shop when it comes to this stuff, and right now he’s too raw, too bone-tired, to handle the inevitable rejection.
So he settles back into his space, pressed against the armrest opposite Logan trying to pretend it’s a hand on his back keeping him steady. He fixes his eyes on the wall and waits resignedly for the next wave of sleep to pull him back under.
The second time, Logan stirs a few minutes after Wade has already left the bed.
He’s rolling over, about to fall back into a deep sleep, when the realization that his roommate is missing jolts him back to somewhere adjacent to consciousness. He’s still half-asleep as he feels around the mattress to make sure Wade hasn’t shrunk or something—logic hasn’t yet booted up in his brain. Blearily, he blinks and looks to the clock on the mantle and sees that it’s—
3 AM. That realization is what actually wakes him: Wade up at this hour can’t mean anything other than trouble. He heaves a long sigh, stretching out like a cat, and cracks his neck before forcing himself out of bed.
He wanders around the cramped apartment for maybe a minute, still blinking his exhaustion away, before the bathroom door catches his eye. It’s ajar, with light bleeding out from under it and onto the floor. Tentatively, he cracks it open further and peeks into the room.
Wade’s on the floor, slumped against the sink. His expression is blank, eyes dull, lifeless, and fixed on the wall in front of him. They don’t move when Logan comes into the bathroom, nor when he crouches down next to him—it’s not until Logan whispers his name that Wade even begins to register his presence.
And it’s a concerningly long time, too, after Logan says his name—so long that he’s considering calling it again—before Wade finally blinks out of whatever the fuck he’s wrapped up in and turns to look at Logan. He has to manually blink again, like he’s forcing his eyes to focus, before he seems to actually process the fact that there’s a person right in front of him. Jesus. Is he…on something?
Logan frowns. “—Are you okay?"
Wade’s quiet for quite a while, before— “Yeah. Fine,” he says, voice still absent.
Wade’s…quiet, Logan realizes. Fuck. That’s a bad sign.
“You sure? You didn’t…take anything?”
Wade shakes his head. “I’m fine,” he repeats, and then lapses back into silence.
Logan’s concern deepens. The only times he’s ever seen Wade go more than ten seconds without saying something are when he’s taken enough drugs to kill a horse or been shot dead—but even then, he still hears a couple of mutters or groans. Now, though, the only responses he gets from Wade are when prompted. Besides that, he’s silent, with his breaths off and echoing uncomfortably in the small bathroom.
God, Logan is the farthest from equipped for this, considering he can’t even figure out what this is. He chews on his bottom lip. “...D’you need me to go get Althea?” he asks finally.
That seems to finally bring Wade back. He blinks again, more forcefully, and shakes his head as if to clear it. When his eyes finally find Logan, though, they’re still shifted slightly out of focus.
“No, don’t—don’t do that. I’m fine. Sorry.”
“You don’t seem like it,” Logan says. “C’n you tell me what’s up?” Even filtered through his gruff voice, his tone is unusually gentle.
But instead of answering it, Wade just clambers to his feet with about as much grace as a baby giraffe. He remains still on his feet instead of leaving, though, and Logan stands up next to him.
“Wade,” he says, worry bleeding across all of his features, “tell me what’s wrong. Please.”
“’S nothing.”
“I’m not gonna judge you. I just wanna help.”
Logan can’t tell if Wade hesitates or if his processing is just still at a snail’s pace. “Just a…bad dream. I really am fine, Logan.” He flashes a weak and thoroughly unconvincing smile at him. “I’m gonna take the dog for a walk. You can go back to sleep.”
Without another word, he turns and leaves the bathroom. Logan follows him into the hallway, brows knit together in a frown. He never calls her “the dog”—it’s always Dogpool or some ridiculous nickname. Come to think of it, he never calls Logan by his name, either—only peanut or some other stupid pet name.
“Wade,” Logan calls after him, “it’s three in the morning.”
He doesn’t respond. Instead, Wade busies himself with leashing up the dog. She, of course, sees nothing wrong with going out for a walk before the crack of dawn, but Logan watches Wade with worry from against the wall. Once Wade has finished putting Mary’s harness on, he picks her up and rubs his hand repetitively across her back, staring absently at the door. It looks like it takes him a few seconds to remember why he was looking at it in the first place and actually head out. Logan watches him leave with that same concerned frown.
After a few minutes, though, he returns resignedly to his bed—although he lays awake staring at the ceiling. When he finally hears the lock open and Wade come back in, he quickly turns to his side to feign sleep. In doing so, he catches a glimpse of the time on the mantle clock: 4 AM.
He hears Wade plant a kiss on the dog’s head and set her down to patter off to her pile of pillows/nest. A few seconds later, the mattress dips next to Logan, and he feels Wade settle into his own bed.
As he’s finally starting to drift off again, though, now that he’s assured Wade is home safe and sound—or something akin to it, at least—he swears he hears the sound of a sniffle next to him.
But when he wakes up the next morning, Wade’s all energetic and quippy like normal. The one time Logan tries to needle and ask about the previous night, he deflects it with a laugh and lighthearted joke—although Logan catches the way that his shoulders tense just slightly.
So, wordlessly, they agree to never speak of it again. It’s filed into the cabinet (already stuffed to the brim) of things they’re too emotionally constipated to unpack, right between all of Logan’s own nightmares, that night in the Honda Odyssey, and the growing romantic tension that’s started to crackle in the air between the two of them. Wade doesn’t think any of it will ever see the light of day again.
But, as it turns out, he is sorely mistaken.
The first skeleton to get dragged kicking and screaming out of their packed-full closet is the one for whom a closet is the most fitting — the romantic tension. They tumble head-first more than elect to get into a relationship, and in doing so fling open the doors for every other secret to pour out.
And, boy, do they.
Logan doesn’t know that much about Wade’s past, and all that he can puzzle out is a reconstruction of jokes and offhand comments that he’s not even entirely sure are truthful. According to Logan’s hazy understanding, Wade grew up in Canada, and his father left when he was born, or six, or maybe thirteen; his scars are the result of a fire, or some sort of skin cancer, or perhaps he was just born this way (although Logan is less inclined to believe the last, considering it ended in Wade doing an incredibly flamboyant Lady Gaga impression); he’s been in prison seventeen different times (Logan does believe that one); and before becoming Deadpool he worked as a mercenary, or stripper, or maybe it had something to do with that one time he called himself a professional lab rat.
The point is that Wade, for all his chatter, is effectively an enigma. And the problem is that, much as he’d love to deny it, Logan is desperate to figure him out.
So after they finally really open up to each other, mapping and memorizing the other’s body with their fingers, while Logan is laying next to Wade and running his hand over the uneven ridges of his chest he decides to finally ask, “So what really happened to your skin?”
He feels the sharp catch of Wade’s breath under his fingers. When he lifts his eyes up to Wade’s face, he’s met with a grim smile.
“It’s not really a pretty story, peanut,” he says, voice tensed up like his drawn-together shoulders.
Logan shrugs.
“I don’t care about pretty,” he says simply. “I care about you.”
Wade looks away, refusing to meet Logan’s eyes as they search his face. “Fucking sweet-talker,” he grumbles. “You’re trying to lure me into an epic trauma dump by being all nice and lovey-dovey to me.” He looks back at Logan. “And it’s totally working. Fuck.” He sighs. “Buckle up, peanut. It'll be a bumpy ride.”
And he’s certainly not wrong. The story leaves Logan about thirty times more worried about Wade than he’s ever before been and still, if he’s being honest, incredibly confused—but it just seems to leave Wade drained. He tries to mask it, but Logan can see it in his eyes and the slump of his shoulders: the sadness, the defeat, of being forced to recall all his mistakes, all his worst moments, and know there will never be a thing he can do to change them.
He seems better by the time Logan starts to nod off – his smile is still tinged with grief, or perhaps resignation, but when Logan gives him a drowsy goodnight-kiss his eyes crinkle up at the corners and shine with a fondness so loud it fits him perfectly.
But again Logan is awoken a few hours later to a strange emptiness next to him—a strange Wade-less-ness. He blinks awake more quickly this time, lifting himself onto his elbows and casting his eyes around the room. No Wade on the mattress, or in Al’s chair—
But he’s by the window. Shoulders drawn together, staring out it like the night is consuming him. Logan pushes himself to a sitting position, and calls out his name.
“Wade?”
No response comes, and Logan sighs, the corners of his lips pulling down into a worried frown. That never means anything good.
He swings himself out of the bed and crosses over to the window. Even though he walks quietly, he doubts that Wade would move even if a train drove through their room.
Futilely, he hopes that he’s woken up in time—that he’s caught Wade before he’s closed himself off to Logan and the world.
But, of course, he’s too late—he always is. Wade’s eyes are shuttered, and he looks as though his mind is in that same faraway place. He’s not sure if Wade’s reliving more memories or hiding from them there, but either way it worries him immensely. Logan may not be well-known for confronting his own issues with anything but six claws, but he’s smart enough to realize that Wade pushing it all down won’t lead to anything good.
The problem is that he doesn’t know how to open Wade up—because when he gets like this, he’s not really Wade anymore. He’s a husk, a shell, only his scarred body rather than the bright soul that inhabits it. Wade can talk Logan off ledges and out of flashbacks, but Logan can’t do anything.
Except maybe wrap his arms around Wade, and feel his tight muscles soften just slightly. And maybe it’s not enough—but then, maybe it could be.