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Wade is sat on the stool furthest from the front door, doomscrolling through his TikTok account and drinking a Shirley Temple through a crazy straw, when the computer on the backbar pings with a notification. It's a familiar enough sound that Wade does not give it any notice until Weasel grabs the newly minted gold card from the laser etching printer and says, quite loudly, "Holy shit fuck."
Silence falls over the bar. The video Wade is watching—a compilation of Captain America's shield ping-ponging off villains to the beat of a newly viral song—practically screams into the quiet. Wade does not bother to turn it down; he already knows how the next few minutes are going to play out.
"Well?" one of the newbies asks as Weasel turns to look at the curious faces of the crowd. Weasel is flushed, the red somehow making the blotchy acne scars on his cheeks even more prominent. "What is it?"
In the dim light, the gold card flashes as Weasel holds it aloft. The name on it is too small to read at a distance.
"This," Weasel says, projecting his nasally voice as much as he can, "is a bounty offer from Kingpin. For fifty million dollars."
Wade can practically hear the crack of a couple dozen vertebrae as every neck in Sister Margaret's snaps to attention. There's the shuffle of feet and the murmurs of "Fifty million? Did he say fifty million?" and "Who the hell is Kingpin shelling that kind of dough out for?" and "Eh, that ain't even big yacht money."
"Who's it for?" someone with more than two connecting neurons shouts.
At this, Weasel pauses. The gold card dips a few inches, as Wade knew it would, and a giggle bursts out of his mouth like a delighted bullet. No one pays Wade any real attention, however; they are all too busy salivating at the thought of carrying out Kingpin's latest hit and cashing in that sweet sweet check—even if it is, to shamelessly steal another merc's phrase, not even big yacht money.
"Ah, well," Weasel hedges. "It's..." He clears his throat. "It's for... It's for the Spider-Man."
Weasel mumbles the last part as though saying 'Spider-Man' without articulation will soften the reality of the task. It doesn't. Wade looks up long enough to see the faces of those around him go ashen. It's almost as entertaining as the new video auto-playing on his phone screen.
"Spider-Man?" someone croaks. "The Spider-Man?"
"What, like there's more than one?" another snaps. "Jesus Christ, Greg—"
"Is that dead or alive?" a third guy asks.
Wade watches as the gold card dips down another few inches. Weasel is now holding it level to his mouth, which is twisted into a pained smile.
"Alive," Weasel says through his clearly fake veneers. "For... verification... purposes."
Several groans ripple through the air at the stipulation. Bringing in Spider-Man dead would have been a highly improbable task—but bringing him in alive?
Impossible.
"Any takers?" Weasel asks. His smile gets even stiffer. One of his watery blue eyes twitches. He wiggles the gold card as though trying to bait a small school of fish with a very tempting lure—except said lure is three inches in front of a very big predator fish with very big teeth and a very deadly bite. "Anyone?"
Every mercenary in the bar begins to mutter inaudibly. Excuses, excuses, excuses—except with Spider-Man, Wade actually understands the hesitance. The itsy bitsy spider is a formidable opponent even considering his relatively compact size and stature. Wade's been on the wrong end of his superhuman strength a few times and hot damn. Literally rib-crushing. The first time they met, Spider-Man had wrapped his lean thighs around Wade's torso and squeezed until Wade heard the snap crackle pop of bone—but oh, ♪ what a wonderful way to go ♪.
"Wade?" Weasel asks, eyes cutting to the right, where Wade is still slouched over the bar, watching videos and drinking his kid-friendly beveragino. He likes the maraschino cherries, alright? And when alcohol does nothing for you because of your fucked up inability to die despite being a big human-shaped lump of metastasizing cancer—
"Wade?" Weasel pleads again.
"You just want your ten percent," Wade accuses, waggling his finger at the mousy barkeep slash over-glorified murder pimp. "Your tiny yacht money."
"What I want is to not send this gold card back to the city's biggest, scariest crime boss when said crime boss knows exactly who contracts with me." Weasel sighs pathetically and leans against the counter. "C'mon, Wade. We both know this was really meant for you. And if you don't take it..."
There isn't much someone like Kingpin can do to Wade. There is, however, a lot he can do to someone like Weasel who—for all his underhanded ways—is one of Wade's most reliable acquaintances, if not one of Wade's oldest friends.
"Ugh, fine," Wade concedes. It isn't so much as giving in as giving up. He had known from the beginning that this was going to be the outcome; he knew it was going to have to be him when he saw how Weasel's fingers trembled as they picked up the gold card. "I'll do it. Why the hell not? I haven't traipsed over to Queens and gotten my ass kicked in awhile. Gotta keep Spidey on his game, or some shit."
Wade punctuates the declaration by slamming back the last of his drink—which, gross, why is all the grenadine always at the bottom?—and snatching the gold card out of Weasel's grimy hand. The other mercenaries watch, bug-eyed, as Wade hops off his stool and heads towards the front door.
"Bye-bye boys!" he calls out, doing a little spin and blowing kisses. "Don't stay up waitin' for me!"
Then he leaves because... well, there really is no time like the present.
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Two hours and one minor pit stop later, Wade finds himself turning down an alleyway in Queens, humming that stupid catchy TikTok song—you know the one—while holding a plastic bag filled with takeout. There's a fire escape built alongside one of the buildings, which he climbs; then, when he's one level below the top floor, he plops down and sits criss-cross applesauce on the iron platform.
"Let's see," Wade says loudly as he pulls the cheap styrofoam boxes from the plastic bag. "Which one are you? You smell like—oh, fuck yeah, breadsticks."
Next to him, there is a soft thud and the gentle rattle of the fire escape as Spider-Man lands some overly complicated backflip next to him. Wade knows this because a) Spider-Man is the only person in existence who can sink such acrobatics with such eerie grace and b) Spider-Man has been following him for the past 1.3 miles, give or take a couple hundred feet.
"Oh, hey, baby boy!" Wade greets as he looks up at the friendliest, neighborhoodiest arachnosapien standing near him. "Got the usual from Cesare's."
"Deadpool," Spider-Man says, crossing his arms over his chest. "What are you doing here?"
"Not staring at your crotch and wondering if you're wearing a cup today or not, that's for sure—"
"Pool."
"Oooh, I bet the readers felt that tone change." Wade picks up a perfectly fluffy, perfectly buttery breadstick and offers it to Spider-Man. When the vigilante does not waver in the face of such starchy temptation, Wade adds, "I've got news. And the spicy marinara."
Spider-Man keeps his spine and shoulders straight for all of two seconds before he caves. His arms and legs go limber and his back curves into a slouch. He takes the gloves off both his hands, revealing pale skin and the metal shine of his web shooters, then plucks the breadstick from Wade's fingers as he sits down and mirrors Wade's posture.
"Alright," Spider-Man says. "You have until the spicy marinara runs out."
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Wade first met Spider-Man about a year ago. By then, the creepy crawly adjacent superhero had been scuttling up and down the streets for awhile, and had established a presence for himself both in the area and online. There were thousands of videos of him on the internet, ranging from professional news clips to shaky bystander footage, which was more than enough for Wade to lose himself in. He had spent an entire day watching Spider-Man do things: help old people carry their grocery bags; save ungrateful cats from trees; swing back and forth between buildings like some kind of modern Tarzan; lift cars over his head with one hand; get punched straight through the brick wall of a bank.
To top it all off, Spider-Man also cracked bad jokes, made terrible puns, and laughed at truly inappropriate moments. His body was lean. His legs were long. His ass was high and tight and formed by the loving hand of a horny as fuck god, and Wade wanted to smack it, wanted to watch that golden ratio of fat and muscle jiggle and bounce. Wade said as much as the first time they crossed paths and... well. Getting webbed to a wall was as good as foreplay to Wade, and he liked open communication with his partners.
"You're not right in the head," Spider-Man had hissed, their masked faces inches apart. Blood was pooling in one specific part of Wade's anatomy as he hung there—which was disappointingly his brain and not his cock, as Spider-Man had caught Wade mid-flip and glued him to the wall upside down.
"A freak in the streets and in the sheets," Wade had agreed. "Illegal scientific testing slash torture will do that to a fella."
Spider-Man left him without another word.
That first meeting had set a tone for the next few months. They'd run into each other; Wade would say or do something offensive; Spider-Man would respond in morally superior disgust; they'd part ways. Sometimes there would be a bad guy doing bad things nearby, and the pair of them would jointly handle the situation—not team-up, never that, because Spider-Man didn't work well with others like, at all, always snapping at Wade to get out of the way, to let him handle it, to take this seriously, DP, you can't just shoot that guy for no reason—
"Like fuck I can't!" Wade snarled as he fired a non-lethal round into a purse snatcher's kneecap. The impact of the rubber bullet sent the guy tumbling across the cement sidewalk. "Fucker stole the treasure chest of grandma candies! Do you know how many of those strawberry thingies can be found in one of those bad boys, if there was only someone brave enough to search?"
"Oh my god, Wade, please don't turn this into another side quest roleplay, I beg you."
Unfortunately, being told to stop mid-shenanigan was the surest way for Wade to continue. Wade felt his grin magnify as he brought a hand to his chest and dialed his theatrics up to Shakespearean proportions.
"Wouldst thou mock me, fearless paladin?" Wade cried dramatically. "I alone have the secret knowledge to lead you where you must go, to where you might find the oldest of candies, to those delights which have gone weirdly sticky—oh, hey Edith, glad you got your purse back. I thought we talked about this? You remember that sweet judo move I showed you last week, where you bring your knee up and—yep, okay, I see you remember just fine, but uh, even I think it's a little unethical to hit a dude in the nards while he's—whoa, Edith, baby, is that a nine mil?"
Wade doesn't know when Spider-Man's annoyance gave way to tolerance, nor when his tolerance gave way to trust. They still fight every now and then—sometimes over big things, sometimes over small things—but they've gotten to a point where Wade has learned a lot about the guy underneath the mask. He's in college, studying something science-y, and he's like, insanely smart. He's broke; he has opinions about Certain Textures™; and he constantly reaches up to adjust a pair of glasses he isn't wearing. Wade also knows which curry Spider-Man prefers (red curry from the Thai place, yellow from the Indian restaurant); his favorite dessert (strawberry mochi ice cream); and how many sauce cups of spicy marinara he will consume whenever Wade gets Cesare's (three cups if there are breadsticks, one cup if there isn't).
If Wade were a foolish optimist, he might even go as far as to call them friends. And—since he is clinically delusional—friends tell friends when a big bad mobster with no neck and a tendency to snap femurs like toothpicks puts a bounty out on said friend's capture.
"Wait wait wait," Spider-Man says incredulously around a mouthful of eggplant lasagna. "He's offering fifty million dollars to anyone who can bring me to him? "
"Insulting, right?" Wade agrees. "That's like, not even big yacht money."
Spider-Man snorts. Says, "Can't say I ever compared the prices of yachts. But..." He inhales deeply, contemplatively, then releases a long sigh. "I don't know. Still seems like a lot of money to me."
Turning his head away from his mostly demolished meal and towards the city beyond, Wade watches as Spider-Man's frown deepens in thought. There's a smear of red sauce in the corner of Spider-Man's mouth, and Wade is very manfully resisting the urge to wipe it away with his thumb. Not because Wade cares about table manners, or whatever, but because he's desperate for any excuse to touch any part of Spider-Man that he can.
"It is a lot of money," Spider-Man says definitively after a minute or two of silence. He shifts his gaze back to Wade. "So why..." He pauses to bite his bottom lip, his slightly too big front teeth digging into the swell. "So why didn't you take it?"
"The job?"
"Yeah."
"Well, I mean, technically I did," Wade clarifies. "Gold card came in with your name on it, and there's only one person at Sissy Marg's who might've stood a chance going up against you."
"And this was your idea of a chance?" Spider-Man taps his disposable fork against the styrofoam take-out box. "Ply me with food to lower my guard and then... what? I can break out of most restraints, and I doubt you have vibranium handcuffs."
"Uhh, they're adamantium, thank you, and covered in a delightful fuzzy blue fabric. For your comfort, of course. Don't want my sweet baby boy hurting himself."
Normally, such a tease would inspire a response in Spider-Man. A smile if he was in a good mood; an irritated flick against Wade's temple if he wasn't. Right now, however, Spider-Man does nothing. He simply sits there, unmoving and assessing and staring straight at Wade as though he were trying to see inside him, trying to see if Wade is actually joking or if this is all some elaborate ploy.
The hesitation stings. Wade understands that Spider-Man is a paranoid little bastard with massive trust issues, but Wade has been actively trying to be a safe space for him, and Wade can't help but panic a little bit. He blurts, "Not that I'm actually going to do anything about it, okay? I just—ah. My hands are kinda tied with this one, Webs. If I didn't take that gold card, it would look bad, you know? Or maybe you don't, because you're not in the mercenary business. Anyway, there's this like, weird bad guy professional courtesy thing that happens sometimes, in which someone like Kingpin puts out a hit, or whatever, and even if the job is impossible, or if the merc really doesn't want to take the job, they still take it because they have to—"
One of Spider-Man's hands lands on Wade's knee, and it shuts Wade up instantly. His jaw clicks shut. He swallows. He can feel his own heart pounding in his chest, still fearful that he's fucked up somehow.
"I believe you," Spider-Man says quietly, carefully. "I'm sorry if I made you feel otherwise. I don't want you to think that I doubted you or anything like that. I just didn't realize that I was... that I was worth that much to you."
It is then that Wade realizes, with crystal clear clarity, that he did not fuck up. He actually somehow managed to do the complete opposite of fuck up. Which is deeply surprising since Wade was simply being himself. It leaves him feeling simultaneously light-hearted and wrong-footed, like he missed a rung going up the ladder of the fire escape and can't help but laugh at the swoop of sensation.
"Yeah, well." Wade clears his throat. Every ounce of charm has abandoned him, and he is left feeling painfully awkward, hyperaware of himself and Spider-Man's lingering touch. "Can't really put a price on true bromance, right?"
"No," Spider-Man whispers. "I guess you can't."
Then—without warning—Spider-Man shifts his weight towards Wade, angles his chin upwards, and kisses him.
The kiss does not last long. Spider-Man's momentum could only hold him at the height he needed to reach Wade for a split second, and Wade barely has time to register the action let alone return it. They part with a mutual gasp and are left blinking at one another.
Wade croaks, "Sweetheart—"
"Peter," Spider-Man answers, his voice as strained as Wade's. "Call me—"
They reach for each other. Wade feels wild, his nerves suddenly and desperately aflame as Spider-Man—as Peter—swings one of his long legs over Wade's hips and settles into his lap, wrapping both arms around Wade's neck and diving in for another kiss. Wade's hands settle on either side of Peter's waist, trembling with greed. He opens his mouth to lick at the seam of Peter's lips, to push his tongue past Peter's teeth when Peter releases a breathy moan—
"Fuck," Wade curses when he pulls away, bunting his nose against Peter's jaw. His head is spinning and he cannot open his eyes, not yet, not when he feels like he'll die if he sees what Peter looks like with Wade's spit slicking his mouth. "You taste like spicy marinara."
Peter laughs—breathless, choked—and says, "Sorry," in a way that isn't sorry at all. It makes Wade want to kiss him again. Which is apparently an option now, Wade realizes, and Wade is nothing if not an opportunist.
The wet heat of Peter's mouth is a haven that Wade savors, delighting in the way Peter moves with him and against him, an instinctive push-pull that makes Wade want more, and more, and more. He becomes steadily braver as he and Peter make-out, wrapped around one another on the platform of the fire escape. Wade's hands slip further and further down Peter's back until he's got that perfect ass cupped in his palms, squeezing, encouraging Peter to roll his hips forward into Wade's body.
"Kinky fucker," Wade laughs as he feels Peter's half-soft dick squishing against his stomach. "I knew you weren't wearing a cup."
"Your powers of observation are unparalleled," Peter drawls, the sarcasm belied by his breathlessness. "Now shut up and make me come, okay?"
Wade does not need to be told twice. He has already played out this scenario in his head roughly a million times, and he knows exactly what he wants to do to the man wriggling in his lap. It helps that Peter is a little selfish and a lot of responsive, hissing and squirming and scratching as Wade somehow manages to get their pants down their thighs and pull their dicks out. Peter swears when he sees Wade's cock for the first time, saying, "I knew it was big," in a slightly awed way that really strokes Wade's ego.
Neither of them last long after that. Wade is so overwhelmed by the fact that he gets to touch Peter like this that his normal stamina is shot, and Peter is so sensitive that Wade doesn't have to do anything fancy to get him close.
"Fuck, Wade," Peter grunts between uncoordinated kisses, his mouth sloppy against Wade's. "I want—ahh, fuck, just like that—"
Peter comes first, making Wade's fist wet, and he twitches and makes little whining protests as Wade continues to jack them both—but he does not pull away, instead burying his face into the crook of Wade's neck and letting Wade work his oversensitive dick against his still hard cock.
"Does it hurt?" Wade asks, panting as he jacks himself and Peter. "Not too much?"
Peter makes a pathetic little noise against Wade's skin that means yes, it hurts, and no, it is not too much, and the confirmation of Peter's masochism is all Wade needs to follow. His cock jerks against his palm. Come shoots out in thick pulses, slipping over his fingers, and Peter leans back far enough to watch it all happen.
"Gross," Peter giggles—then proceeds to bring Wade's come-covered hand to his mouth and suck one of Wade's dirty fingers into his mouth. Wade nearly passes out as Peter's cheeks hollow, as he feels the slip of Peter's tongue against his skin, as Peter pulls back with a slow, showy glide.
There is no weirdness afterwards. They clean up and redress, then make sure all their trash is gathered into the plastic bag. They move around each other, wordless and easy, until it is all done and they are standing in front of one another, their masks still rolled up over their noses and exposing their soft smiles. Peter loops a finger through Wade's shoulder holster to reel him in closer while Wade settles both hands on Peter's narrow hips.
"Kingpin will have sent the contract out to other mercenaries," Wade warns Peter as they sway together. "And while we both know that I'm the best of the best—"
"I can handle it," Peter answers. It is not defensive or boasting; it is a simple statement of fact. "I've beat all of them before. Kraven, Taskmaster, Silver Sable... you."
"You're gonna have a few extra wild cards too," Wade says, not rising to such obvious bait. "Kingpin's bounty is probably going to attract more than the usual suspects."
Peter tilts his head. He can probably hear the worry in Wade's voice and the seriousness of Wade's tone. He probably also knows that Wade is actively considering getting him out of the country for a few weeks—except they both know that wouldn't do anything except make Peter extremely grumpy. Wade's long since learned that the best course of action with Spider-Man was to provide support, not to shield or protect.
"I'll be careful," Peter says after a moment. He stands on tiptoe to press a peck to Wade's lips, then drops back down. "I promise."
The kiss isn't filled with the same heat their previous kisses were but Wade still feels it down to his toes. It speaks to a future that is worth more than a tiny yacht, or a big yacht, or all the yachts in the world combined, and Wade couldn't be happier. Such joy blooms on his face, spreading outward in a smile that is big and dopey and more than a little lovestruck.
"C'mon then, Pool," Peter says as steps back, covering his own smile with the familiar red of his mask. "Kingpin's gonna want proof that you at least tried to fulfill that contract. So... what do you say we head downtown and chase each other around for a bit?"
"Ah, Webs," Wade says, pressing a wrist to his forehead and pretending to swoon. "You always take me on the best dates."
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