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Maybe Peter should have hit snooze on his alarm this morning. In hindsight, it’s not like being five minutes late to work would’ve made a significant difference to how shitty his day has ended up being. His terrible, horrible, no good very bad day, if you want to get technical about it.
Unfortunately there’s no time for self-pity now, because there’s a street and a half on fire and Peter is already late. A grease fire that caught too fast and spread too far in one of the bad, bad sides of town. So no one calls the cops, and it was way too late before the firefighters even knew, and Spider-Man is faster than everyone else combined, but he still can’t save the day until he knows about it.
He hurtles through the air, swinging like he’s trying to pitch himself over the buildings. Peter’s muscles ache but it doesn’t matter because he’s already late. Spider-Man isn’t ever late, he’s always right on time to fight the supervillain or dodge the bullet or catch the civilian, but today he’s twenty minutes behind and it really fucking matters. The fires are bright and hot when he first sees them, able to feel the heat a street away. It’s not a good sign. None of it is - not when there’s still homeless folks on the street so close to being burnt, and children that are still playing, and people that just don’t have anywhere else to go as they stand and watch their homes go up in flames.
The only good thing is that Wade is already here, pulling people out of windows and reassuring parents that their kids will be okay. Peter doesn’t have time to dwell, but he’s proud of Wade for doing something good and finding compassion in a shitty situation.
“Hey, pass her here, ‘Pool.” Peter swings up and holds his arms out through an open window to Wade, who’s trying to get the family of three out of the fourth floor.
“ Spidey,” There’s no joke for once, only relief as Wade hands over the toddler so Peter can crawl back down with her.
The situation is bad and getting worse, but Peter clings to the spark of hope he gets when he gives the toddler back to her parents out on the streets. They cry and thank him and get ushered away from the worst of it by the firefighters, though there’s still more to do.
Spider-Man and Deadpool tag-team as seamlessly as they always do. Wade can handle the damage better so he pulls people out of the burning wreckage and leads the scared ones out of the building, and Peter’s always there to carry them to safety or hold up the infrastructure as it crumbles.
It’s hard, painful work, and they don’t save everybody. There were casualties before Peter even arrived on the scene. With every second, every minor happenstance, he oscillates wildly between wondering why he ever makes himself do this, and knowing that the hard shit is where he’s needed the most. He’s an emotional pendulum, swinging back and forth from the conviction that Spider-Man is known for and a tired, grieving Peter Parker.
He grieves for every person that they don’t save and almost everyone that they do. The people on this side of the streets - they’re all survivors, but it doesn’t mean that they’re going to bounce back so easily. Buildings don’t get rebuilt, and people aren’t given the opportunities to remake their lives. For every person that Peter doesn’t save, there’s someone he did and they will end up homeless now that theirs has burnt down.
That was one of the hardest things to realise about becoming Spider-Man. Grief has settled itself in Peter for as long as he’s known love for anything; casualties weren’t what hit him unexpectedly. It was the realisation that he could save a person, he could save hundreds, but he cannot give back what was taken. He can punch a thousand rapists and make them hurt for what they had done, but Peter can’t give the survivors a life that feels safe after the event is over. He can pull families out of burning buildings and give children to crying parents in the street, but he can’t give them a home once the fires have been doused.
Being a superhero is one of the most painful things you can make of yourself, Peter thinks. It’s fucking hard to grieve for everyone, but he wouldn’t be the Spider-Man that he is if he didn’t.
Eventually, the people that can be saved are saved, and Peter and Wade have to take a step back. The firefighters - god fucking bless them - are doing their jobs, although Peter will admit a lot of it is lost on him. Being superhero/vigilante is a self-taught gig, so he lets the professionals sort the rest out.
He swings off, intending to go home although he doesn’t quite make it that far. He only recognises that he’s completely spacing out until he drops off his swing and catches himself a second before he hits the pavement. When his feet hit the solid roof of the next building over, Peter stumbles like he hasn’t for years, clumsy.
His limbs are heavy and his focus is leaving him slowly, and Peter knows what this feeling is. It feels like still being in highschool, suffocating in his grief after Ben died but knowing if he dared to shed a tear he would be torn up and spat out by the other students. Keeping everything at an arm's length so he could make it through the day without cracking. If he didn’t inhabit his own mind, his own body, his limbs and his flesh and his synapses, then grief couldn’t reach him.
It’s that again. Standing on a rooftop ten years on, thick-framed glasses traded for a spandex mask, but the same familiar habit, like a path so well-worn that you take it every time without ever considering another way.
However long Peter stays there, he couldn’t tell you. His feet stay on the ground, but he’s not at all cognizant to the feeling of his weight on the bricks. Thoughts go by, but Peter watches them from a distance. He knows what they are and what they mean, he just doesn’t feel connected to them. His emotions are nowhere to be found.
Soon enough, heavy footsteps thump behind him. Peter thinks that he should probably send a message that he heard Wade, trade a joke like they usually do, or say anything at all really. But his thoughts are still out of reach and he feels like he’s lost the signal to communicate with his own body. So he stays there at the edge of the rooftop, like he’s looking out on the city.
“I gotta say, sweetheart, you don’t make it easy to find you. Why here of all places?” Wade says, not yet clocking Peter’s strange sense of vacancy. He wanders up to the edge of the rooftop and peers over, exaggeratedly checking every angle like he’s looking to see what Peter’s watching. He doesn’t see anything interesting, assuming you don’t count the sight of Spider-Man singed around the edges and a little ragged-looking to be fascinating.
“Uhh, Pete, you alright?” Wade’s tone drops into something concerned. A beat passes of silence. “Right, shit, sorry. That’s a stupid fucking question, isn’t it?”
“Yeah, it kind of is.” Peter replies, finally managing to pull in the parts of himself and feel like a person.
Wade wanders up next to him and puts an arm around Peter’s waist, pulling him in close, and Peter lets him easily. The Deadpool mask isn’t anywhere to be seen, so he takes his own mask off and shoves his face into Wade’s shoulder in an approximation of affection. Soon enough, there’s a gloved hand through his hair, gentle. Distantly Peter thinks that if his hair didn’t already smell kind of singed and smoky, it definitely would now.
“Being a superhero is a shitty job.” Peter mumbles into Wade’s shoulder.
“Yeah, so why’d you drag me into it, Webs?”
Peter pulls his head away to grumble and poke at Wade’s teasing face. “Because you wanted me to. You came to me, remember?”
“I wanted to win over your heart, actually, and you had too many of those pesky morals to do that as a killer for hire.”
Peter flicks him hard on the nose. And then adds quietly, “You’re doing well, you know. I’m proud of you.”
It’s Wade’s turn now to shove his face into Peter’s hair and grumble. “It’s exhausting .”
“It is.”
A few seconds of quiet pass, Wade’s head still pressed into the top of his own, his big frame draped over Peter like a particularly heavy weighted blanket. It’s not an uncomfortable silence, they rarely are anymore with Wade, but if it stretches on any longer then Peter’s mind might drift from him again. Wade’s body is warm at his side, and he’s already finding it harder to reach out to the feeling and tether himself to it.
“I’m tired Wade, I want to go home.”
“Alright, baby boy.”
They go to Peter’s apartment, even though Wade hates that it’s so shabby and Peter won’t let him buy replacements for every appliance he owns. It’s an ongoing argument, just not one that gets rehashed tonight. Tonight, they crash in a heap on Peter’s bed, all but tumbling straight through the window. Peter pulls the boots off but stays in the suit. If he takes the suit off, then he’d have to wash it and take a shower himself to scrub the smell out of him and he’s tired. So he decides, fuck it, he’ll sleep in spandex tonight. If it’s comfortable enough to be doing acrobatics and wall-crawling in, it’ll be a good enough substitution for Ben’s old shirts and the booty shorts Peter owns that should never see the light of day.
Peter flops onto his bed and Wade falls in on top of him, heavy like a sack of meat and stones. If it were anyone else, he’d feel smothered, but it’s Wade, so it’s comforting instead.
Still though, “You are not wearing those fucking boots on my bed. Off.”
“ Rude.” Wade took them off anyway.
With his head settled on Peter’s chest and his now-bare feet hanging over the edge of the bed, Wade is like a particularly heavy puppy. Especially given how he responds when Peter holds his face gently and traces the bumpy scars with the rough pads of his fingers.
Time passes and Peter expects to fall asleep, soft and comfortable like this, but it doesn’t happen. For all that he is exhausted and barely able to feel coherent, his mind won’t quiet. It’s all white noise - TV static and indistinct chatter bouncing off the insides of his own skull.
“How do you do it, baby?” Wade asks into the quiet. He should be asleep.
“How do I- what?”
“It fucking hurts to care so much all of the time.”
Peter considers, and the white noise quiets.
“You know, first time I couldn’t save someone, they died in a burning building that collapsed on them. A few days later, I was watching reruns of Cosmos on PBS and heard Carl Sagan say that quote, ‘ we are all made of star stuff’ .” A tear rolls idly down Peter’s face and he tastes the salt of it in his mouth with his words. “Everyone is a universe. Millions of experiences and feelings, people we’ve all loved and lost, things we want from our future. When someone dies, that’s... that’s an entire world gone.”
Peter thinks and Wade says nothing. He waits, as patient as he’s ever been, for Peter to untangle his feelings into something to say that matters.
“In a life like this, catastrophes and city-levelling threats and this- this constant fucking numbers game that people expect me to play with their lives, it can be so easy to forget what a life actually is. How can we possibly quantify universes?” Peter says. “Truth is, Wade, is that I don’t know how I do it. Sometimes I wish I didn’t care so much, either. But people deserve to be grieved. And I won’t ever know if I’m the only one mourning them.”
“All of them?”
“I’m still human, there are some monsters even I can’t find compassion for. But yeah, all of the people I’ve failed to save.”
Wade stares at him and it’s a heavy feeling. Peter shrugs.
“You get used to grief.” He says, because it’s true. Loss isn’t something that gets easier, only something you learn to live around. “I don’t really know a life without it.”
Wade is quiet and Peter thinks that the conversation has waned until he speaks again.
“Jeez, baby, you are way more fucked up than I gave you credit for.” He says, and Peter startles himself with a laugh.