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When Wade had informed Peter that they were going away from the city for a week to commune with their brethren the cows, he’d been expecting a picturesque farm landscape: rolling hills, a dilapidated hay barn, maybe a horse or two. He had not been expecting to be spending his days trudging through the rugged summer wilderness of West Virginia to the tune of twilight cicada songs, staring at the sweat rolling down Wade’s shirtless back and dampening his backpacking gear.
And yet here they are.
They’re after something. Wade has thus far refused to disclose what that something is—only that it’s unrelated to anything back home and that it shouldn’t entail any life-endangering activities. If it truly is cows, they must be generations separated from their domesticated cousins by now.
Peter had not been a boy scout as a child, and he had not enjoyed those mandatory school field trips in elementary and middle school which had brought a bus-full of shrieking children into the very heart of bumfuck nowhere for an “educational field day at a local nature preserve” which, to his halfway-developed brain, had been code for “standing around a sad little campfire until the last whisper of daylight disappears and pretending to listen to a superfluously verbose woman who resembles Aunt May so strongly that it’s a little creepy”.
They have Central Park for the wilds of New York City. Those rural preservation-conservation sites that haunt his grade school memories didn’t scream local; in fact, they’ve been quite effective repellents against any thoughts Peter may have been cooking about leaving the metro area for school or work as an adult entering the job market.
All this to say that he is very much a city bitch.
Wade is, unsurprisingly,—disappointingly—right the fuck at home among the trees. It’s a little warmer than the Canadian evergreen forests of his adolescence, Peter imagines, but aside from that the environment is much the same. The earthen smells of perennials in bloom and decaying shit grate at Peter’s sinuses and distract him from keeping track of his footing, but Wade takes deep, longing inhales as he strides through the underbrush. He’s let the tension run out of his spine.
Wade never releases his grip on his paranoia; it drives his constant compulsion to surveil his surroundings, holds his posture hostage and shows up in years-old secondhand worry lines on his face, knotted muscles in his neck and across his shoulders. Scars rippling over his clenching jaw.
It’s been especially apparent since Matt’s run-in with Abe, since the months afterward passed and piled up like dirty laundry. Peter tries to appreciate the release from stress, from work and from accountability, that being immersed in the world so far removed from civilization offers. He tries mirroring Wade’s languid gait, but it doesn’t do for him what it does for his companion. Every snapping twig sets him on edge, and the sweat tracing rivulets down his spine is a nagging reminder of the fact that it’s been three days since he was in the presence of air conditioning.
“How long are we gonna be out here?” he whines.
“Shhh. Ruinin’ my immersion.”
Oh, sure, his immersion. How inconsiderate of Peter. “Kick rocks, old man. I’m goin’ home,” he says, stopping in his tracks and turning to head in the direction from which they came.
“Pete—wait,” Wade calls. “C’mere, I’ll tell you what we’re doing.”
Uuuuuuugh.
Fine.
He trudges back to Wade and prays for the end.
“We’re going to a farm.”
Mhm. This is definitely true and not a lie to appease him for the next couple of days of hellishly hot walking.
“It’s not on the maps.”
He’s gathered that.
“All’s I got are the coords. The place is Barnes’s.”
Oh, now they’re talking. “Why’s Barnes got a Unabomber operation going on out here? And why’re we hikin’ through the wilderness to get there?” He asks, bouncing up onto the balls of his feet.
Wade turns, throws him a sidelong glance, and says, “Settle, you. Answers will come in time.”
Oooh, ominous. Peter’s fingers curl tighter around the straps of his backpack.
“Patience, grasshopper,” Wade adds as he takes off in the direction they’ve been heading for what feels like years.
“Blegh, don’t turn into Double-D on me: tryin’ to get me to meditate and breathe with purpose and shit,” Peter says to Wade’s hiking pack.
“How dare you, I’d never make you sit still for more’n ten minutes at a time.”
God, Wade just gets him. “See, that? That’s why you’re my favorite.”
“D’awww, you just say that ‘cause Red ain’t willing to kill for you.”
“So are you ever gonna tell me why we’re spending a week at Barnes’s postapocalyptic hideout?”
Wade supplies a single word in response, which he gasps out between heaving breaths as they scale a damn-near-vertical mountain face: “farmsittin’.”
Nothing else. They climb on.
“Are we there yet?”
“Take a quick little peek around you, Spidey, and tell me if you think we’re there.”
Hmph. “Just trying to make conversation.”
Wade pauses in the shade of an old-growth tree and makes Peter chug a liter of water before following suit. Wipes his mouth. Mumbles, “Tryin’ to get on my last nerve, more like.”
Peter’s too worn out to supply a response. He’d thought, before this trip, that he’d been keeping in pretty good shape for someone of his age.
Not so, if his shrieking lungs have anything to say about it.
Goats. It’s goats. That’s what they trekked out here for.
“You’re coming in here sooner or later, kiddo!”
Wade’s lost it. Has finally gone off the deep end.
“Look, this one’s named Lolly!” he hollers across the heads of a veritable herd of goats at his hip, every member of which is scrambling to get at the peppermint treats in his pockets and pushing ever-closer in the pursuit of physical affection. The one to whom he’s referring sports a blue plastic chain collar with a dog tag and has ears the size and shape of a bloodhound’s.
Peter makes eye contact with one a bit further back in the pack. She turns from her compatriots and sidles over to where he’s leaning against the fence, curious. He sticks a hesitant hand through the boards for an inspection. The tip of her nose is soft, a little damp, and she shoves his fingers up its bridge and onto her forehead, where she uses them as a scratching post.
Okay—this, Peter can get behind. This innate, whimsical sociability; those optimistic, ever-wondering eyes. The silly wag her tail does as she itches spots she can’t get to on her own.
And then she contorts her back legs into some odd squatting position while he’s still petting her and lets forth a torrential flow of amber piss.
“Eugh!” he cries, skipping backward to escape the splash zone.
Wade cackles like the fucking demon he is.
There’s a dog half his height and twice his weight here and she just about makes Peter forget the grudge against Wade and Mr. Barnes that he’s been letting simmer in his belly.
She lives with the goats.
Why’s she live out with the goats? Ain’t there room in the barn-loft apartment?
“That’s Ol’ Nellie. She’s a livestock guardian dog. Keeps predators away. She wouldn’t like being inside all the time; ain’t what she’s bred for,” Wade supplies from the depths of a gargantuan water trough he’s halfway through scrubbing.
Ohoho, a working lady. With a job. Peter’s heart melts more than he thought possible.
He lies on the shit-covered ground in the paddock and allows her to smother him completely with her white shag rug of a coat and the experience is fucking heaven on earth.
“I’m not putting my hand on that.”
“C’mon, Petey, it’s not like you’ve never fondled a teat before.”
Wow, that was such an incredibly punchable thing to say!
“Not in an ‘I’m being a pedo’ way, damnit. In a ‘most babies are breastfed at some point or another’ way.”
Peter stares and tries his best to look disappointed against the laugh bubbling up in his chest. “I don’t remember the last time I touched an operational mammary system, and I’d really prefer to keep it that way.”
Wade shrugs, gives the headstall fastening a once-over, and turns to track down the rolling stool he’d shoved out of the way. He grabs the buckets he prepped from their spot on the milkroom counter and sets about cleaning the goat’s udder.
The goat gazes at Peter with a single imploring horizontal eye. He caves and ambles over to lavish her with the scratches and treats she deserves.
Goatherd Wade is a person Peter’s never met before. He’s altogether distinct from City Wade, from Assassin Wade, from the debilitatingly paranoid, deeply traumatized Wade that Peter encounters on the occasional bad day.
He’s lighter. The scars in varying stages of healing that cover him head to toe have time to recover. He laughs at dumb shit the goats do while he throws hay.
He flinches when the wind slams the screen door of the milk room closed.
Peter sleeps in one morning and wakes up to the smell of something carb-heavy, buttery, breakfast wafting from the kitchen and into the living room, where his pull-out couch nest of a bed lives.
Wade’s made fucking pigs-in-a-blanket, almost from scratch.
The hell is this domestic ass facade? Peter tilts a contemptuous chin at the proffered plate.
“Used to make ‘em with Vanessa on Sunday mornings,” Wade explains.
D’aw, Peter can’t say no to that. He takes the thing.
“Since I milked and fed and made you breakfast, you get to milk tonight.”
Traitorous pigs in blankets, these are. Evil, conniving things, hellbent on making him touch goat boobs.
“Technically, they’re called udders.”
“Six of one, half dozen of the other,” Peter spits, pursing his lips at the suspicious foodstuffs on his plate.
Wade scrapes his fork along the ceramic surface of his plate and smirks when Peter cringes because he’s a sadistic fucking psychopath. “I don’t care what you call it, you’re still milking tonight.”
This is not what Peter signed up for when he agreed to come.
“It’s cute that you think you had a choice in coming.”
What’s that supposed to mean? Is Wade in cahoots with Aunt May?
A chilling silence.
Oh, fuck. Wade’s in cahoots with Aunt May.
Oh, this is not good. This is bad. He’s been out-manipulated.
Wade lets loose another of those carefree cackles. Outside, a goat produces an identical sound.