Chapter Text
Peter ropes Wade into the pet feud a couple of days after Labor Day. Shoves him through their front door and presents him to May on a dinner plate. Cries, “I called in the cavalry!” and puffs out his chest. Flails those lanky arms at the poor guy like he’s a circus master presenting an exciting new exhibition. “Neutral party. To tell us who’s right.”
Wade, through all his scarred, red-faced mortification, points out that the cavalry is, generally, very much not a neutral party.
May watches the ensuing argument unfold in her living room and rubs at her right temple, which has developed a twitch.
Wade is, indeed, not the cavalry; rather, he is the only mercenary-antihero-vigilante-type that Peter could drum up who does not have a pet. He says this to her through gritted teeth after his much smaller, much younger captor tackles him to the ground and sets to work on giving him a carpet burn.
May had previously been under the impression that he owned a cat.
“Oh, yeah, um—keyword there being ‘owned,’ past tense.”
Ah. She lets it drop.
Peter cuts in. “I thought you said last week that you had to pick the animal up after patrol!”
“I was talkin’ about my fuckin’ kid, Spidey!”
“Kids aren’t animals!” Peter retorts.
“Yeah, ‘kay, you come back and say that to my face after you babysit next week.”
May’s left temple joins in the rabble of thoughts calling for peace and quiet that have begun bouncing around inside her skull. “What were you gonna have Wade say to me to cause me to magically pull a one-eighty on my no-pets policy?” she asks, making sure to project over the noise happening all over her living room floor.
God, and she just vacuumed yesterday.
Peter freezes, the neck of Wade’s shirt balled up in his fist. Wade takes the opportunity to turn his head miserably in May’s direction. They make a very certain kind of eye contact that can only occur between two people who have existed for more than four consecutive decades and who hang around far too many naive and unremittingly youthful people too often.
Wade’s shirt remains imprisoned inside of Peter’s white-knuckled hand as he sighs and recites, “Peter wanted me to let you know that pets are very good for a person’s mental health, and that—and I’m quoting here, so don’t shoot the messenger—if you denied his requests to discuss the matter further, he’d be taking measures to emancipate himself.”
May lets her eyes disappear into the top of her head before finding her kid’s triumphant gaze and meeting its intensity beat for beat. She says, “Wade, love, you can tell Peter he can speak to me without pussyfooting around behind a forty-year-old flesh shield,” and turns to leave them to the rest of their business.
“D’you hear the woman, or do I need to repeat anything?” Wade rumbles beneath the weight of Peter’s pelvis, which is doing its damndest to crush his diaphragm.
There’s a muffled whack in response, then silence, and then May is closing the door to her sanctuary of a bedroom, and the four hundred pounds of testosterone rolling around on her living room floor is no longer her concern.
She summons Matt to call off his dog once her patience has waned, which takes only a quarter hour. It’s the longest fifteen minutes of her life. The boys wrestle their way slowly into the hallway and then spill into the office, which shares a wall with her room, and suddenly she can no longer stand to have any men in her home and she’s looking up her lawyer’s contact information so that he can come rid her of them.
Matt arrives on her doorstep in short order, looking rumpled. Every time she sees him, he seems somehow more heavily scarred than the last. His right arm is casted from shoulder to wrist, yet despite that, its hand holds his cane. His left arm carts behind him a collapsible portable crate full of case files. May steps silently aside to allow him entry and they stand there in awkward silence for several seconds before she realizes her mistake and asks him to come in.
Wade disengages from Peter’s sticky grip and rushes to take the crate, sheepish. “What you doin’ outside the office, dear?”
“Someone filed a noise complaint,” Matt replies coolly. May can see Wade’s nostrils flare with nerves at the tone of his response. The sight brings a smile dancing to her lips. She sees in these two a number of similarities to herself and Ben in their younger days; she and Matt are kindred spirits, she pins to her mental corkboard. Should make an effort to really befriend him, if the opportunity presents itself.
Or, she supposes aloud, they could stay for dinner.
May her long-suffering soul find rest before death claims it. Not five minutes ago she’d been counting the seconds until her unwelcome guests left, and look where she is now. Welcoming them.
Wade squints. “Dinner?”
“With us?” Matt asks, incredulous.
“Yes! Here. Now. I’ve got enough planned for leftovers already, plus a fridge I don’t wanna clean out to find room for ‘em, so it works out,” she replies.
Oh, the poor things. Even Peter is flabbergasted enough to shut the fuck up for a few seconds.
They do spaghetti. Wade helps May cook by watching over the pot of boiling water while Matt makes himself comfortable chatting with Peter at their dining room table.
May stirs a pan of ground beef (with a wooden spoon that Matt asked her to rewash a few too many times) and listens to Wade’s soft humming next to her. He dwarfs her in height, his head nearly touching the light fixture hanging down in the middle of the kitchen ceiling. It’s nice, in a lot of ways, to have such a big presence in her home again. Ben wasn’t a huge person, but he filled a room like no one else, and her life has been so lonely since he left it.
Wade’s humming is not very musical, nor would she consider it a song. It sounds like he’s pulling his train of thought directly through his vocal cords and letting the sound escape out his nose. Lilting, up-and-down, certainly, but also erratic and changing in tempo like the rate at which a stream of consciousness comes and goes through a brain.
Matt and Peter’s conversation wafts over, rises and falls in volume and harmonizes with Wade’s hums. May catches the words “dog” and “useful” as the noise swells particularly loud. She turns to add the onion to the meat and asks, “Do you think you two would ever actually get a pet?”
Wade looks into the column of steam rising from his pot. He has the pink welt of an already-healed scrape from his tussle with Peter running the length of his left forearm. “Don’t think we need that kind of commitment right now, if I’m being honest. But I had shepherds as a kid. Was always a fan of a good ol’ big dog. If Matt were any kinda fall risk, I’m sure Pete’s argument for a service dog would have more weight. It’d be a lot of work, I think, to adj—”
Something—maybe a hand—slams the table in the dining room and interrupts their cooking. At the same time, Matt cries, “Dammit, Peter, I’m not getting a dog, let it fucking go!”
“But I can do all the training, and I’ll take care of it when you can’t and—”
“You want me to kill myself tripping over a walking pile of shit smells and flea-ridden fur just so—”
“It wouldn’t have fleas if you kept up on its meds!”
“That is so not what this is about right now, child.” Matt is hissing with rage. May can feel it from a room away. “Look into my ugly fucking mug right now and know that I am not joking. The way to a dog is not through me. Drop it.”
The ensuing silence steams the whole space. Raises the temperature a few degrees.
Wade abandons his pot to go glare at them. May makes a face at her pan when it pops at her and rummages around for the sauce jars she grabbed out of the pantry earlier.
“Wade: help me out here. Consider the benefits of an emotional support dog,” Peter tries in the other room.
He’s beaten for his efforts. May pulls the noodles off the burner and wishes to herself that she’d sent her guests home when she had the chance.
---
May’s shift is almost over.
Her feet hurt worse than they have in a long time. Her head, too. It’s been a long day. Long night.
She lets herself fall into autopilot as the intakes ebb before the dawn rush. Peter’s supposed to have called or texted to let her know he’s back from patrol, but he frequently forgets to do so out of exhaustion. May takes a moment after finally catching the neuro resident in an almost-comical half hour chase around the ED to shoot Peter a question mark and a heart, and when she looks up from her phone, the ambulance bay is miraculously full again.
Samaya, her saint of a dayshift counterpart, takes mercy on her and shows up a full hour early, right as the waiting room runs out of seating. May’s convinced she can read minds, because she gets to work early almost exclusively on the days May gets overwhelmed at the end of her shift. She says she comes to “catch up on charts,” as if she doesn’t have time built into her schedule for that. Whatever her reason, May is grateful.
She drags her feet on her way to shower and change. Everything hurts. Fuck, is it past time to see someone about a knee replacement.
A bald head catches her eye as she’s passing the nurse’s station. Patchwork scars depict a planetscape across the crown of its scalp. Pockmarked and shivering and bowed low on a thick neck, dressed in signature gray hoodie and jeans.
Wade. He sticks out like a zoo animal in here.
She sidles over to a spot at the corner of the station, where Catherine, the charge nurse, is trying and apparently failing to coax a sign of life from his inanimate bulk. “What’s goin’ on over here? I know this guy,” she asks.
She chances a look at Wade. His eyes are determinedly vacant; his mouth hangs open a half an inch. His fingers grip the countertop so hard their scars have blanched out of existence.
“He walked up about five minutes ago and stopped moving, and I haven’t seen him react to anything since. He won’t budge, and I’ve got patients I don’t even know exist waiting on me,” Catherine says, nostrils flaring. She shoots May a desperate look.
“I can take care of ‘im—you go worry about your work, okay?” May proposes.
Catherine nods and walks off, shedding grateful ‘thank you’s in her wake.
Wade white-knuckles the counter some more while May takes him in. His gaze is locked resolutely at the linoleum surface. Around them, the ED swells with noise; from monitors, from the ambulance bay, from people whose moans of pain cannot be quieted with medication, it spills forth from every visible corner to batter them. May watches him sway, ever so slightly, with the breeze of it.
“Wade.”
No acknowledgment.
“Wade, it’s May. You’re at my work.”
An old woman pushing a rollator tries to pass behind Wade and runs over his foot in the process of trying to avoid the gurneys lining the hallway.
“Wade, my knees ache, let’s go sit. We’re in the way.”
Unblinking. Unthinking. She can see his personhood retreating.
“Come on, come on,” she insists, waving her hand in broad, sweeping, beckoning arcs in his periphery. His fingers unlatch from the countertop and come to rest at his sides, clawed. She reaches for his right hand, slow, and pries it gently open to hold it in hers. She applies a bit of pressure, steps away from the nurse’s station.
Wade stays planted where he is. Doesn’t even turn around, just lets his shoulder wrench as she moves. She sighs, lets go of his hand, takes a step back. Ducks into her pocket and dials Peter.
“Wade’s at the hospital,” she starts when he picks up.
She catches the dumbstruck squeak he fails to suppress and waits. He takes a beat, unbreathing, and then asks, “For Matt?” in the shakiest, hollowest croak she’s ever heard.
“No, baby, no. Matt’s fine. For himself,” she supplies. “I think.”
Another beat. “For… Wade? For him? Is he…hurt?”
“He seems to be having some sort of panic attack or dissociative episode. I didn’t know who to call.”
“Okay, uh. I don’t… I’ve never—” Peter lets out a huff of air through his nose all at once that blows interference into the receiver. Tries again. “Wade doesn’t really seek out medical care, I don’t know what to do.”
“Call Matt?”
“Hmmph, duh, dunno why I didn’t thinkofthatonesecond—”
He hangs up. May glances up at Wade, whose eyes, initially rock hard, have grown confused. Dazed. Scared. She tilts her chin at him and asks, “Wade?”
His head drifts in her direction and, after a second, his body follows suit. Her hand finds his balled fist and she guides him out of the ED proper, down a meandering hallway, and past a pair of double doors. The thrumming ‘wub-wub-wub’ of an MRI scanner carries over from half a floor away. She makes her way into a bereavement room that hasn’t seen use since the construction of the annex on the east wing. Pushes Wade gently in the direction of a chair, excuses herself, closes the door, and jogs halfway back to triage for water and a couple of meds.
She hasn’t cleared what she’s doing with Catherine, but in doing this she is keeping a bed open that would otherwise be full of catatonic John Doe, so she hopes that trade-off will suffice to keep her out of trouble.
Her phone buzzes in her pocket while she’s prepping a rescue injection (she loves Wade, but he’s a massive, dangerous, unstable mercenary, and she has no help). She fishes the thing out of her pocket and presses it to her ear. “What’s up?”
“I’m a mile from the hospital, where can I find you?” Matt’s tenor demands, garbled by the speed with which he’s walking.
She relays the directions, but falters trying to convey how to navigate the sectioned hallways beyond the ED without using visual references until he discloses that Peter is with him. “Oh, he’ll know how to get there,” she replies lamely.
“Don’t do anything to him until I get there.”
They hang up. May makes a note to herself that none of these boys is particularly considerate about their phone call etiquette. Needs to brush up on that with Peter. She gathers an armload of pill bottles and syringes and warm blankets and heads back toward Wade’s room.
May ignores the fuck out of Matt’s final command, because when she gets back to the room, Wade has found his way to the far corner and assumed the fetal position, back braced against that ninety-degree angle, head pressed between his knees in a feat of flexibility May would have assumed was beyond his abilities.
She turns off the overhead, ups the volume of the white noise machine on the corner table, and sits on the floor with him.
His breathing is shallow; she can hear his fibrotic diaphragm struggling to keep from spasming as he hyperventilates. Those scars he carries on his skin go deep into his body, whorling and paralyzing, stretching and in other places calcifying his various tissues. Turning his physical existence ragged at the edges. She suppresses a grimace thinking about her insides catching on themselves, serrated. Just making more scar tissue.
God, she would never untense. Not anything. Ever.
“I’m gonna touch your shoulder with my hand,” she says. “Okay?”
His breath shudders.
She places an open palm on his hunched shoulder blade. He doesn’t recoil. He hiccups and it sounds like nothing she’s ever heard come from a pair of human lungs.
Her thumb makes little circles on the flat plane of his upper back, and she presses the butt of her palm firmly into his shoulder, willing the warmth of her hands to thaw him back into the present. Her fingers make their way to his trapezius, where she occupies herself massaging a muscle that hasn’t come unclenched since the first Bush administration.
He hiccups again. And again. And then she thinks he maybe sobs, though it could just as well be another alien hiccup.
They sit in the buzzing of the white noise for several minutes, punctuated by hiccups and intermittent low whimpers, before a knock on the door startles them both. May removes her hand from Wade’s shoulder and stands to open the door.
Matt pushes past her, cane forgotten at the threshold, and beelines for the corner where he finds a place at Wade’s side. There, he hunches and whispers and clings.
Something cold pokes her above the knee and she yelps, clamping her hand over her mouth a moment too late. The something is a dog. A golden retriever, with a nose wet enough to leave an impression on her pants. It enters the room bubbling with excitement, attached by a teal leash to Peter, who comes in last. “I’m sorry, how did you sneak a dog in here?” she asks in a furious whisper.
Peter smirks at her. “I just gave her to Matt when we walked in and everyone assumed she was a guide dog.”
Wade’s hyperventilating has not improved. His inhales are irregular and overlapping and May can hear how his lungs don’t want to cooperate. Peter passes the lady dog to May and crosses to exchange hushed tones with Matt. May glances down at the dog she’s been gifted, who looks up at her to make adoring eye contact and pant with her tongue flopping out the side of her mouth. Peter addresses Wade directly and receives no response, then turns back to Matt to deliberate.
May watches all this and ponders the inversion of power dynamics happening in front of her. How Peter’s grown. How these weird, sensitive, fucking strange men have shaped him. How stupid she was to let him get involved with anyone remotely as dangerous as them. How lucky.
She’s waved over. Peter stands and takes the leash, and the lady dog, whose fluffy monstrosity of a tail has been going at a low clip since she entered the room, wags with a renewed ferocity. She cozies up to Wade and cracks his shell right open. He clutches fistfuls of her golden locks and sinks his face into her shoulder, where May thinks she can hear him sobbing silently. She notices she has a dusting of powdered sugar hairs along the lady’s snout. They match the silvery curls cropping up along Matt’s temples. The two lean into Wade and try to pull him back into himself.
Peter prods her in the upper arm and leans in to ask, “Do you have any ideas for what to do? Matt and I—we haven’t been able to get ‘im to go see anyone about his trauma, an’ he has these episodes—” he chokes up. Inhales, exhales. “He’s never gone to the hospital for it. I think he maybe was going to ask for meds. Tol’ me last week he felt like he was gonna go crazy, and I dunno, I didn’t know this time was any different. I thought—” He cuts himself off with a quiet sob, and she envelops him in her arms.
Her sensitive baby. Fuck this day.
She gives Wade the rescue dose and then realizes that he is so massive that she needs to steal two full additional doses to adjust adequately for his weight. The sedative helps, but really, it’s the lady dog who gets him out of it. Walking her, Peter tells May, is what he was up to when she called him. Instead of getting the four hours of sleep he alots himself on patrol nights, she realizes with some venom, he’s walking dogs for people who are very much able to do it on their own. “Peter, you need to sleep.”
He vibrates at her. “I really like dogs.”
The lady dog pants sunnily at Wade and May watches the impression of a smile cross from one side of his face to the other.