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“Will you take your mask off?”
I don’t think I should.
“If you don’t have a secret identity then why do you wear a mask all the time?”
I take it off every once in a while, kiddo. I don’t wear it ALL the time, just most of the time.
“Can you take it off now?”
Probably not the best idea.
“How do you eat with a mask over your mouth?”
I just fold it up a little bit. It’s pretty easy.
“You never eat anything when you’re here.”
… I know, kiddo.
It has been five weeks, two days, and sixteen hours since he first laid eyes on his daughter’s face.
And she still has yet to see his.
He is sitting on the floor of Ellie’s bedroom with his back against the side of her bed, while she lies down just behind him on her stomach, humming and coloring. He answers her every time she breaks from her humming to say something to him, but other than that, his mind isn’t really there. He can’t stop playing through Preston’s words from the day before, over and over again in his head. Preston had looked him down with that prying robot-eye stare of hers and said out of nowhere, I’m gonna suggest something that you probably aren’t gonna like too much, but I’m about to say it anyway. I think you should let Ellie see your face.
His reaction was almost a reflex; a scowl and a furrowed brow that she couldn’t really see past the mask, a shake of his head as he got up to leave Preston’s kitchen.
Wade, don’t be a child and storm out. I’m not saying you have to do it now. Wait til you’re good and ready. But I’m telling you, she feels left out. She knows that a lot of people have seen you under the mask, and she doesn’t get why you don’t feel comfortable taking it off around her.
“Dad?”
“Hmm?” he asks, breaking out of his trance for a second, and he turns to look at her out of the corner of his eye. Because of where his mind was just a second ago, he can’t help but worry that she’s going to ask him to take off the mask again.
She doesn’t, of course. She hasn’t so much as mentioned it in over a week. But apparently that doesn’t mean she’s not thinking about it. Instead she pushes her book toward him and asks, “Should I go with pink for the dress? Or blue because it’ll match the rest of his outfit?”
He twists around so he’s facing her more, one arm on the bed, and he looks over the drawing, being sure to make a show of really thinking it over. The mask pulls at his cheeks a bit as he grins like an idiot—something that happens so often around Ellie that he barely notices it anymore—but he has to bite his tongue to hold back the urge to laugh out loud. His daughter has a Spider-man coloring book, and she’s coloring over the lines to put Spider-man in a tutu and a tiara, complete with little fairy wings on his back. She’s already outlined everything she wants to add; all that’s left is filling it in with color.
And she’s a damn good artist, too, for an eight-year-old. Better than he is now, anyway.
“Ya know, I’m feeling pink.”
She seems to think over his answer for a second, pursing her lips and looking off into the distance with narrowed eyes, nodding slowly as she taps a red colored pencil against her chin—and Jesus, he’s really never gonna be over how freakin’ adorable she is, is he?
“Yeah, good idea,” she finally answers, already digging through the box of colored pencils.
As she sets about coloring in her tutu, there’s a knock on the door, and he and Ellie look up at the same time.
“Come in,” she shouts with a smile, but then she adds hastily, “but only if it’s Emily! No boys allowed right now!”
He can hear Preston laughing, and a second later she opens the door.
“What do you mean, no boys allowed, honey?” she asks, leaning back against the doorframe with her arms crossed. She nods toward Deadpool and adds, “He’s in here.”
“Well, yeah, but he’s my dad. He doesn’t really count as a boy. Besides, Terry Junior wouldn’t let me put a tutu on Spider-man. He said Spider-man wouldn’t wear a tutu because he’s a boy, and boys don’t wear girl stuff. But I just think that’s stupid,” she explains, scrunching up her nose on the last word. “Girls can wear pants and suits and stuff, so Spider-man should be able to wear a dress if he wants. It’s only fair, and I think it looks pretty on him. Plus if he has fairy wings then he has extra super powers, and who wouldn’t want extra super powers? Like, come on. He wouldn’t need those web things if he could just fly wherever he wanted. It makes sense, and boys are stupid.”
Whenever Ellie goes off on one of her tangents, Preston always gives Deadpool this look. It’s a look he never used to get before Ellie was around, a look with raised eyebrows and smile that she’s clearly trying to keep from getting any bigger by biting her lip. The one time he asked her what that look was for, she shook her head and said, Well, she is definitely your daughter, that’s for damn sure.
Preston’s giving him the look now, but she just says, “You go, girl. Draw a tutu on Spider-man if you want. And if Terry Junior gives you any more crap about it, remind me to tell you the story about his Halloween costume in kindergarten.”
“What was it?!” both Ellie and Wade shout at the same time, and then Wade adds, “You can’t just leave us hanging like that, Pres. Not cool.”
“Yeah!” Ellie agrees. “Tell us!”
Preston shakes her head.
“That’s a story for another time. And anyway I only came up because we’re all having some ice cream down there,” she says, nodding at the hallway behind her. “You guys wanna join us?”
Ah, crap.
Out of the corner of his eye Wade sees Ellie go through three distinct phases.
The first is immediate excitement, her eyes going all wide and a smile already growing on her face. But then she glances at him, and something seems to dawn on her. Her face falls for half a second, but she covers it up quickly and offers Preston a fake smile. “No thank you. I’m good here.”
It’s so obviously an act, and he knows exactly why.
Damn. She is way too good of a kid to be mine.
Deadpool chews on his lip, watching her for a second, and then he turns to Preston and says, “Count us in, Pres. We’ll meet you down there. Just, uh… I need a minute.”
Preston glances between the two of them, her brows knitting together just slightly, but whatever concerns she might have are never said aloud. She shrugs one shoulder and says, “Alright, but don’t take too long now. We’re thinking about starting a movie, too, but we’ll wait for you two.”
She offers a small smile and shuts the door quietly behind her as she leaves.
As soon as she’s gone, Ellie shoots him a confused look. “Dad, I’m fine, I don’t need any ice cream.”
“Oh, really?” he asks. “Because the way Preston tells it, you never turn down ice cream.”
She frowns. “I just don’t want any ice cream right now.”
“You don’t want ice cream ‘cause I’m here, right?” he asks, and by the surprised and sad look on her face he knows he hit the mark, though she still looks ready to argue. “Because you don’t wanna eat in front of me if I can’t have any ice cream. ‘Cause I would have to pull the mask up. Am I right?"
“No, Dad, that’s not…”
“Do you want me to take off my mask, Ellie?”
He asks it as carefully as possible, no accusation in his voice, all just innocently asking. She has the exact reaction he imagined, her eyes bugging out for a second as she stares at him in shock. “Seriously?”
“Seriously,” he says, smirking a bit. “I figure a bunch of people have seen me without the mask on, doesn’t make a whole lot of sense that my daughter hasn’t, ya know?”
“Yeah…” she trails off, chewing on her cheek. “But why now?”
She really is a smart kid.
He shrugs. “I want some ice cream. Pretty sure Preston bought the kind with caramel all swirled around in it.”
It works. She doesn’t look nearly as hesitant as she did, and she opens her mouth—probably to say okay—but he cuts in before she can say anything.
“I gotta warn you, though, kiddo. There’s a good reason I wear a mask most of the time,” he explains. “The reason I never take it off in front of you isn’t for me, or because I’m scared of you seeing my face—”
[Liar.]
“—but because I don’t want to scare you.”
Ellie wrinkles her nose and rolls her eyes. “You can’t scare me.”
He gives her a sad smile and then sighs. “Yeah, you say that. But I’m just saying, I look… well, there’s not really a better way to say it, I look really gross. Like, monster kind of gross. I’ve got really nasty scars all over. So far you’ve only ever seen me like this,” he says, gesturing vaguely at his costume-clad self. “You sure you wanna see what I look like underneath? It might ruin how you think about me, kiddo.”
Shakes her head and says without a single hint of doubt, “It won’t. I’m sure.”
She hops off the bed and sits next to him, facing him with her legs crossed, smiling in encouragement.
He gulps. “You sure you’re sure?”
She rolls her eyes again. “Yes, Dad. Jeez. I’m sure.”
Her eyes are all wide and shining and expecting, her face showing the smallest of smiles because maybe she’s happy that he’s finally showing her his face but—maybe—she’s also a tiny bit nervous about what she’s about to see.
Wade bites his lip for a second. He takes a slow breath to sooth his nerves.
{Just don’t think about it. We’ve taken our mask off in front of people plenty of times.}
[And there’s really no turning back now, so…]
He gets his fingers underneath the fabric at his neck and peels the mask off quickly, like he’s ripping off a band-aid. The ceiling fan has been gently running this whole time; it’s only now that he can feel the slightly cooler air hitting his skin, a refreshing change from the stuffiness of the inside of his mask.
He doesn’t realize for a second that his eyes are squeezed shut and his teeth are clenched, but when he does he takes another slow breath and opens his eyes.
Ellie’s expression is… well, it’s pretty damn close to what he would have expected. Her eyes are wide and still shining, but now the smile is gone.
She’s upset. She might be a little bit frightened. She even looks a little bit angry, and Wade’s heart sinks into his stomach and he wants to pull the mask right back on all over again—but that won’t do anything, she’s already seen him, the damage is done, idiot, you never should have—
“That must've hurt a whole lot.”
His thoughts come to screeching halt.
{What?}
[Error 404.]
He stares at her for a second, blinks, shakes his head, blinks again. “… Huh?”
Ellie cocks her head to the side, that unbearably sad look still on her face, and says, “That’s all scars, right?”
He nods slowly. More or less.
“I mean, I only have one scar,” she says, pulling back her upper lip with both hands to show him the tiny line up the inside of her lip that never properly healed, “from when I fell off my bike once. That hurt a lot, I remember. And that’s just one little scar. And you have them all over… Did it hurt a lot?”
It takes his brain a second to catch up with what she’s said. After a second, he huffs a little laugh that isn’t really a full laugh, and somewhere in the back of his mind the instinctual urge is there to play it off. He wants to shrug and say, nah, it didn’t hurt, because he’s a superhero, remember?
Instead he finds himself quietly answering, “Yeah. Yeah, it did, kiddo.”
“Can you tell me how you got some of them?”
He gulps and chews on the inside of his cheek. What happened to him is not exactly the kind of thing an eight-year-old needs to hear about.
[Or just not something you want to talk about.]
{Both. Let’s go with both.}
“Just… a bunch of bad guys did this to me, a long, long time ago,” he tells her. “One of the hazards of being a superhero, right?”
Her brow furrows, and she thinks for a moment before her eyes widen and she says, “Wait! All those scars happened all at the same time?”
He bites his lip, remembers half a second too late that she can see him biting his lip, and stops. “Kind of. It was… I don’t know, all in the same few months, I guess.”
[Like we remember.]
{Let’s be real, it could have been years for all we know.}
Ellie frowns, playing with her hands in her lap for a bit, and when she looks up at him she asks, “But you beat the bad guys that did it, right?”
“Oh yeah, you kidding? Of course I did.”
It’s not a lie, more like a… careful omission? He’s okay with it, though. There are some things no eight-year-old needs to know about, and even more things he never wants Ellie to know about. She’s too nice, too cute and small and innocent. She doesn’t need to know just how awful the world can be—or how awful he can be—even if she’s already gotten a glimpse of it once. He’ll be damned if he ever lets her see any more of that.
“That’s good,” she says with a nod. “And it doesn’t hurt anymore, right?”
He gulps again. He can’t outright lie to her.
“Not… uh, not as bad anymore, no,” he says. “And not all the time.”
“It still hurts sometimes, though?”
He strains to offer her a reassuring smile, but he has a feeling it probably just looks sad. There is a moment in which he debates answering her, and then he just gulps again and says, “Eh, don’t worry about it, kiddo. It’s nothing I can’t handle. Now, do you want to get some ice cream or not?”
Her expression brightens a bit, and she stubbornly says, “Well I said I didn’t want ice cream, but I mean, if you want ice cream, I guess I’ll have some, too.”
Now he doesn’t have to fake a smile. It comes naturally, like it so often does around Ellie, and it occurs to him as he shakes his head at her that this is the first time she’s ever actually seen him smile at her shenanigans.
“Yeah, yeah, if you say so,” he tells her, already starting to get up.
… But before he can even start to stand, Ellie jumps up to her feet and—so quickly that he barely registers it before he’s got a face full of brown curls—she lunges forward and wraps her arms around his neck. The force of her hug knocks his back against the bedframe, and he lets out a little, “Oof!”
His hands automatically come up to steady her, but for a moment that is the only movement he is capable of.
“Uh… Ellie?”
“I’m sorry you got hurt,” she murmurs, her voice muffled by his shoulder, and she tightens her hold on him.
The damn lump in his throat has been getting steadily bigger for the last ten minutes, and it just won’t go away. He tries again to gulp it down and tentatively wraps his arms around her middle. “Wasn’t your fault, kiddo. Heck, you weren’t even born yet.”
“I know it wasn’t my fault,” she says. “I’m still sorry it happened, though.”
Damn it. Damn it, damn it, damn it. The lump in his throat is way too big now, and he’s not about to let her see him cry. Not right now. He wraps his arms more tightly around her and drops his face down onto her shoulder so that his face is even more buried in her hair.
He takes the world’s slowest breath, forcing some steadiness into his voice.
“… Thanks, Ellie.”
“Uh-huh,” she says in lieu of you’re welcome. Her voice isn’t as muffled anymore; she’s lifted her head and elected to simply rest her chin on his shoulder. Wade still isn’t quite ready to mirror her yet, and in any case, she doesn’t rush him. She asks, “Did you try an ice bag yet? Like when I tripped in the backyard after school on Wednesday and Emily gave me an ice bag to put on my knee, remember? It was really cold, but it made my knee stop hurting. Maybe you could try that. It might help.”
Wade chuckles. “It’d have to be a pretty big ice bag.”
She shrugs the shoulder that his head isn’t on, “I guess. It wouldn’t hurt to try, though.”
“Yeah, you’re probably right,” he says. He takes another slow breath, and the lump in his throat has shrunken down to a slightly manageable size. “I guess I’ll have to try that sometime. But first”—without warning he stands in one swift movement, hoisting her up along with him, and she lets out a surprised squeak—“how’s about we get ourselves some ice cream?”
He tosses her up in the air a bit and catches her around her waist, gently setting her down on her feet. She giggles and then beams up at him with one of her biggest, brighten-up-the-whole-room smiles. And then she grabs him by the hand and starts tugging him out of the room.
“I want crushed up peanut butter cups on mine!”