Chapter Text
In spring, the swallows come.
The swallows, out of all the birds, are his favorites. Peter sees a lot of birds in his line of work, probably more than almost anyone else in the city. Even the bird watchers see them most often when they’re still.
But Peter gets to see them fly, and the swallows fly like they know exactly what a gift it is.
As far as he’s concerned, spring in New York City doesn’t really start until he’s seen one.
Two days after Peter sees the first swallow of the year, he finds an egg on the ground.
This is probably unrelated to the appearance of the swallow, as the hot-pink plastic-ness of the egg seems to indicate that a person, and neither bird nor reptile nor weird experimental mammal placed it there.
He picks it up tentatively, and isn’t it sad that his lifestyle has made him so suspicious of an innocent plastic Easter egg?
He cracks it open to find a grenade.
In the next instant he’s off the civilian-riddled street and on the roof of a nearby building, heart thudding furiously in his chest. He fumbles with the device, hands shaking slightly, and finds, to his great relief and slight confusion, that the grenade doesn’t appear to have been activated in any way. He webs it five times to a structurally unimportant part of the roof just in case.
He swings back down to land on a lightpost next to where he found it. To his dawning horror, he spots pastel colors dotted all down the street, stuck in the windshields of cars, balanced in the windows of businesses, and lying on the ground beneath trees and street lamps.
“Mommy, Mommy, look! The Easter Bunny came early! See? There’s an egg!”
Peter freezes, then twists on his perch, honing in on the voice. There’s a little girl with red pigtails bouncing up and down excitedly beside her mother, a yellow egg clutched in her small hand.
“No!” Peter yelps, flinging himself off the post and towards the girl. “No, no no no no, don’t touch that!” He yanks it out of her hand, backing away quickly. She stares up at him in shock. Tears fill her eyes, and her face scrunches up. “Oh, no no, don’t cry, it’s okay,” he says hastily, cupping his hands between her and the egg. “You just don’t want this egg is all, it’s full of…” he cracks it open, and stares. “...vegetables. It’s full of vegetables.” He does his best to hide the packet of M&M’s within his hand.
Her face lights up. “I like vegetables!” she chirps.
“Of course you do,” Peter mumbles. “I mean.. of course you do! Vegetables are awesome and you should eat them all the time, but, uh, not these ones, okay? They’re all...uh, mushy and gross.”
He spots a blue egg in the window of the salon behind them, and he lunges over to snatch it. This one appears to contain a AAA battery. He looks back up at the girl and her mother, who are watching him in confusion and alarm, respectively. “Just...uh, don’t pick up anymore Easter eggs, okay? Ask your mom to buy you some broccoli or something,” he backs away down the sidewalk, pointing at the mom. “Buy your kid some veggies! Don’t let her touch any strange eggs!”
He fashions himself a web bag, and sets off on an egg hunt.
Within a few minutes, he has a collection of twenty-three plastic Easter eggs of various sizes and colors in the bag. Their contents range from candy, to coins, to what seems to be the entire contents of someone’s junk drawer. Several contain five and ten dollar bills. One has a hundred dollar bill, and he takes careful note of every one that has money in it, just on the off chance that they aren’t somehow rigged to explode or poison him or turn into a robot that will cut his nose off while he sleeps.
The trail stops at the opening of an alley. In the middle of the alley is a black-and-red-clad figure with pink bunny ears, skipping cheerfully away.
“Here comes Pe-ter Cotton-Tail,” he sings brightly, a large basket swinging from his arm.
“Hey!” Peter calls after him.
Without missing a beat, he spins gracefully on his toes, and Peter abruptly has a gun pointed at his forehead. “Shoo-ting you in the fuck-ing skull!” He finishes to the same tune.
Peter yanks the gun out of his hand with a strand of webbing before the last note has even died off. The other man barely seems to notice. He claps gloved hands against his cheeks, staring at him with the comically large white eyes on his mask.
“Oh Em Gee, you’re Spider-Man!” He squeals.
Peter looks at the gun now in his hand, wrinkling his nose in distaste, and then back up at the other red-and-black suited person in the alley, a growing suspicion as to his identity forming. “You wouldn’t happen to be Deadpool by any chance, would you?”
Deadpool makes a sound like a tea kettle with some sort of factory error, and bounces up and down on the balls of his feet. “He knows our name!” he squeaks. He freezes. “Wait. Did you just happen to know it, or do you have psychic powers in this universe? Did you see it in my mind?”
Peter blinks. “No. I saw it in an Avengers briefing.”
Deadpool nods thoughtfully. “That’s not as cool, but still, adorable that they talk about me when I’m not around.”
“They said you’re an unstable menace and I should ‘take extreme caution and not approach unless absolutely necessary’,” he says, mimicking the Captain’s lecture voice.
“Ooh, a menace, huh?” Deadpool repeats in a high-pitched voice. “So what exactly brings you to approach lil ol’ menacing me today?”
Peter raises an eyebrow under his mask. “Seriously?” he holds up a plastic egg. “I’ve got like fifty of these. Easter isn’t even for another two weeks, man.”
“Aw, someone doesn’t have much Easter spirit!”
“You could’ve blown someone up!”
He cocks his head, looking genuinely bemused. “Sounds fun, but that’s really more of a Valentines’ Day sort of celebration, Baby Boy.”
“Then why leave an egg with a grenade in it lying in the street?”
Deadpool does a double take, feeling for his belt. “I did no such - oh.” he pulls a half-melted Hershey’s chocolate belt and two grenades out of a pouch. “Well that’s not right.”
“Okay. I’m confiscating your basket. Hand it over.”
He narrows his eyes, clutching his basket tighter. “You know I can just buy more Easter eggs.”
“And I can just confiscate those too. I’ve got a collection going.”
“Fine!” Deadpool huffs, shoving the basket at him.
Peter takes it gingerly, wary of more explosives. “Appreciate the cooperation.”
“So is Easter Grinch your usual job, or is this just a night job? Because the outfit definitely screams ‘night job’, and that is not an insult, baby boy.”
“First of all, it’s day, as you can tell from the giant ball of fire in the sky. Second, I don’t get paid for this, and third, this is the first time I’ve ever had to steal Easter eggs from anyone, so congrats on being unique,” Peter says, busy checking the eggs in the basket. Deciding that there’s nothing rigged to explode, he attaches a line of web to the roof above them, landing neatly on the edge.
“Hey, you know if you ever need money, I’ve got some ideas for things I could pay you for!” Deadpool shouts up at him.
“I’m going to pretend I didn’t hear that!” Peter calls back. “Besides, you couldn’t afford me!”
He’s gone before he hears if there’s a response.
…
The next time he sees Deadpool is in the beginning of May, and this time it’s not even Deadpool’s fault. It’s the guy’s who thought it would be funny to release approximately fifty bajillion weird fuzzy caterpillar things the size of cats around the city.
As far as supervillain schemes goes, it’s really more on the ‘inconvenience’ side of things, rather than the ‘what kind of person does this shit’, so that makes it a pretty good day in Peter’s book. The Avengers are even here! Which probably just means they happened to have nothing better to do, but still.
Peter has three of the squirmy bundles of white fluff in his arms, and is busy trying to fish a fourth out from under a car when a pair of red-and-black booted feet appear in front of him. He looks up from where he’s laying on his stomach to see the merc watching him, head cocked, stroking a large caterpillar that’s curled comfortably in his arms.
“That looks uncomfortable,” he says cheerilly.
“How observant,” Peter snaps. “Want to help me out here?”
“Ooo, Baby Boy, there’s all sorts of things I’d be willing to help you out with,” he wiggles his eyebrows meaningfully.
“Like getting a giant bug out from under this car?” he asks, deciding the best way to deal with the innuendo was just to ignore it.
“Mm. Kinky.” Deadpool kneels down beside him. “Why don’t you just use your webbing to pull it out?”
Peter readjusts his grip on the three he’s holding, tugging one back from where it’s trying to crawl over his shoulder. He shuffles around to the other side of the car. “It sticks to their fur. Hair? I don’t know. Anyway, I don’t have time to cut it free and I don’t want to hurt them by just yanking it off.” With a quick lunge, he finally manages to grab the bug before it can inch away from him. “Nevermind, got it.” He stands, tucking the new addition into his armful of fluff. He nods with his chin towards the one in Deadpool’s arms. “Here, give me that one, I’ll take them to where we’re rounding the others up.”
Deadpool narrows his eyes, hugging it protectively to his chest. “Excuse you, ‘that one’ has a name. Her name is Beatrice, and I’ll have you know she is a purebred!” He says haughtily.
Peter raises an eyebrow. “A purebred what?”
Deadpool looks at Beatrice in silence for a second. “Bug,” he declares, with a confident nod.
Peter firmly resists the urge to be at all amused. “I mean. You’re probably right.”
“Hey, Spidey!” a voice calls behind him. He turns to find Hawkeye, staring warily past him at Deadpool, one hand on his bow. “You okay?”
Peter stares at him, puzzled. “What else would I be? They’re caterpillars, Clint, they don’t even bite.”
Clint’s eyes dart to Peter with that look he always gives him, which means ‘now is not the time for your bullshit, kid’, which is just plain insulting. Seriously, he’s fought with the Avengers before, are they really going to get all fussy about some harmless little bugs? He’s Spider-Man, for God’s sake. They should be his specialty.
He’s just beginning to work himself into serious irritation when Deadpool speaks up cheerfully behind him. “Nah, I don’t think it’s the fuzzy-wuzzy bugs he’s worried about. Or at least, not the miniature ones.”
Peter turns back to ask what he’s talking about, and finally picks up on the edge under his cheerful tone.
Ah. Right. The deadly merc with a mouth. Who he was warned not to interact with.
Clint steps forward, hand tightening slightly on his bow, and beckons Peter forward, as though he’s a small child who’s wandered too close to the tiger cage at the zoo. “Come on, SHIELD’s pretty much got this under control.”
Peter looks at Deadpool, who’s standing stiffly, still clutching Beatrice. The moment he notices Peter watching him, he appears to relax. Appears. Peter knows what calculated relaxation looks like.
“Aw man, I would love to come with you guys, but my evening is completely booked right now.” He saunters casually backwards, towards the entrance of a nearby alley. “But you fellas enjoy the after party! I know, I know, it’s not as much fun without me, but you’ll survive.” And with that, he’s gone, without giving either Peter or Clint a chance to respond.
Clint sets off down the street towards the containment cage SHIELD set up, and Peter hurriedly falls into step beside him. “He wasn’t actually doing anything, just being...weird,” he tells Clint, not entirely sure why he’s defending Deadpool to him, for some reason feeling he should.
Clint stops abruptly, and Peter almost stumbles in surprise. He looks Peter in the eye, as best he can through the mask. “Look kid, you’ve got a good heart, it’s what makes you a good hero. But Deadpool? He doesn’t. He’ll kill you the second someone pays him enough to cover the cost of the bullet, and he won’t think twice about it. He might not be a villain you need to fight, but he’s damn well not someone you should be spending time with,” he says firmly.
Peter fidgets, adjusting the caterpillars in his arms. “What are you, my dad?” he mumbles.
Clint grins, the tension broken. “Don’t let Stark hear you say that.”
Peter laughs, and they start off again, their conversation reverting back to its usual casual chatter.
But something keeps niggling at the back of his mind.
For all the warnings people keep giving him, his spidey sense never so much as hummed around the merc, not once.