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Being Wade Wilson’s friend is a wild ride. It’s like being one of those fucktards who rides bulls in rodeos for the adrenaline thrill, but gets their foot caught in the saddle and then dragged behind said bull for the rest of his life.
There have been times when Weasel hated Wade. Like the time he told Wade his real name, and Wade let out a loud, obnoxious guffaw and said, “Jack Hammer? Your parents hate you!” Or the time that Wade refused to help him out of a conviction for breaking into a CIA database to help Wade find information on one of the people in the Weapon X program, just because they’d been arguing earlier about gun calibers and whether enchiladas should have pepper in them. Or the time that Wade, through a series of events Weasel still doesn’t like to recall, got Weasel stranded in Las Vegas and being questioned by police in connection with a casino heist. Finally, there were all the times when Wade’s idea of “protecting” him when they used to do jobs together was to lock him in small, confined, dark spaces “just until the fighting’s over, love ya, brb!” And then when Weasel finally snapped and confronted Wade with, “I’m claustrophobic, you ass!” Wade’s response had been, “That’s such a terrible weakness for a mercenary! Why don’t you retire and tend bar or something? That’s a good movie trope.” What the actual fuck?
Weasel only bartends at Hellhouse, otherwise known as Sister Margaret’s School for Wayward Girls, because it’s a great way to pick up information. He’s still in the information business. And networking is better than ever. He knows all the jobs on offer in sixty countries. He can arrange for anyone to get a valid passport, anytime. No gun is too esoteric or rare for him to be able to lay his hands on. He keeps in touch with some of the employees of Oscorp’s factories and always skims off the ‘slightly defective’ tech and fixes it himself so that he can sell it at a premium to carefully vetted buyers. Not morally, of course. By carefully vetted, he means deep pockets and willing to part with the money. Lately, since Stark Industries has been getting rid of its surplus, he’s been scooping it up thanks to a deal with one of the transport services who is supposed to be delivering the goods to special facilities to be decommissioned. Yeah, his name is Weasel, but maybe it should be Packrat. It’s so hard to pass up good deals, and it pains him to think of all this technology getting destroyed because some namby-pamby neo-hippie is wringing their hands over implications for the planet. Um, the planet is fucked. Nothing’s going to save Earth from what humankind’s already done to her.
On good days, Weasel knows Wade cares about him. When he’s sick, Wade somehow always knows and picks up his prescriptions for him. Which is weird, and sometimes actually illegal. But that’s Wade. When it seems like Weasel might actually die, it’s Wade to the rescue. Including a time when he definitely would have died but Wade spread the rumor that he was dead and then had him change his alias and hide out in Las Vegas. And, hey, the memories of Vegas are not great, and Wade also got him accused of robbing a casino, but he got out of that scrape with little to no effort (his favorite kind of solution) and Wade evacuated him to Los Angeles to hide out with Blind Al. And Blind Al is a lot of fun. Also convinced that Wade is holding her hostage, which may simply be because Wade is very, very protective of the “little old blind lady with the potty mouth,” as Wade called her when introducing them to each other. Wade makes sure Blind Al has her diabetes medication and as much cocaine as she wants. The former is cute and the latter is fucked up. Again, that’s Wade. Shit boundaries, but trying to be helpful in his own mind. Wade may forget over half of anything Weasel tells him, but in the end, Wade is the one hauling him to the hospital when he’s nearly killed by drug dealers and the one breaking him out of prison if anyone sentences him to anything longer than six months with good behavior.
So when Wade says, “I’ll be in New York for three days, see you later,” and then doesn’t show back up in Chicago for six months – and doesn’t text weird gifs at 3am – Weasel wonders if Wade is dead or in a prison that can actually hold the psycho. Because someone who saws his own hands off when someone cuffs him is a psycho. You can’t convince Weasel otherwise.
At six months and one day, Wade drags himself into the bar of Sister Margaret’s like he’s already drunk, which means he’s high instead, and flops down on a barstool, and thunks his head down on the bar, and groans pathetically. Wade is like a wild animal. All his noises mean something. This is the wail of a rejected lover. It’s like a mating call of defeat.
“Who is it this time?” Weasel asks. The last time Wade looked and sounded this fucked up, it was because Siryn changed her name to Banshee and cut Wade out of her life.
“Vodka. With gasoline. And a shotgun shell to the head.”
“You stink too much when you die. Go die somewhere else and come back when you’re better.”
Wade makes that awful mating call of defeat again, sounding a little like a water buffalo. “You’re mean. And bad.” He is definitely high. It gives him this annoying little-boy voice when he’s particularly far gone. All whiny and shit. “If you were my real friend, you’d kill me to make me feel better instead of making me commit suicide. You’d make a guy feel wanted. I want to feel wanted, Weas-y.”
“Who have you been seeing in New York?” Weasel asks. It’s like a ripping off a Band-Aid. Wade is going to spend the next six to one hundred and six hours telling him. So he may as well ask and make it seem like he has some control over the situation. Whoever it is, he’ll tell Wade to get over it, Wade will refuse, it will drag out for a few years, and then Wade will act one day like it never happened. He knows the person Wade likes isn’t dead. If they were dead, Wade would show up with a completely different demeanor, probably stone-cold sober, and start asking pointedly specific questions, getting louder and louder, and then blow his own brains out all over the bar, being a drama queen and making Weasel clean it all up while Wade regenerates. That’s what Wade did when Vanessa died. Then he went on some fruity adventure with the X-Men and exorcised all his feelings and came back months later saying Vanessa was alive in an alternate universe and that was good enough for him. Whatever. As long as it brought Wade back to his usual self, Weasel doesn’t care what the hell that means.
Wade is suspiciously silent.
“I don’t care or anything,” Weasel reassures him.
Wade lets out a long sigh. “No one.”
“You better not have just pissed yourself. I’m not cleaning that up. I’m making you do it.”
“He’s perfect. An angel in blue tights. He’s too good for me. That’s why…”
At the pathetic way that Wade trails off, Weasel knows that even his minimal emotional involvement is too much for Wade to handle right now. “I’m not actually listening.” He picks up a cloth and dries some of the freshly washed beer glasses in the rack. Now that he’s not looking at Wade and is pretending not to pay any attention, Wade might talk to him.
“Spidey,” Wade breathes. “My hero…”
“Good trip or bad trip?” Weasel asks, assuming Wade has lost contact with reality.
“He loves me, maybe. Or he hates me. But it’s not – not meant to be. I’m going to fuck this up. We slept together and it was great so I’m going to fuck it up.”
This is not what Weasel expects to hear – or pretend not to hear. He bites back an instinctive question. “Yep.”
“I thought so. That’s why I want vodka and gasoline.”
“I’m not making you a vodka and gasoline cocktail.”
“I want to burn down The Daily Bugle’s office.”
“For free? Or for a job?”
“For free.” Wade lifts his head and gestures in a vaguely Shakespearian way. “For love!”
“Love of what?”
Wade covers the lenses of his mask with his hands. “But Spidey says no kill. What do I do, Weas? No matter what I do, I’m going to fuck this up. If I don’t defend him, don’t show him I can be a man, that I can defend his honor, then he’ll lose respect for me. Maybe even break up with me. But if I do what I would usually do to shut someone up, then Spider-Man will be mad at me. And sad. And disappointed.”
Setting down the glass he was drying, Weasel says wryly, “I hate saying this, but start from the beginning. I know I’m going to regret this. You’re lucky that I’m self-destructive.”
“My honey-bun was slandered in The Daily Bugle and it hurt his feelings and I wanna cheer him up by killing them all, but that wouldn’t cheer him up at all, so now I don’t know what to do. And it hurts his big soft Spidey heart.”
“Remember when you tried to make Siryn feel all better by killing Multi-Man and showing the bag of body parts to her?”
Wade lets out a horrible moan that sounds like a blue whale with a stomachache and flops over the bar again.
“I’m trying to save you from that.”
“Weasssssel…” Wade starts crying inside of his mask. Definitely shitfaced high. “What do I doooooo?”
“Buy him flowers or something. Take him out to see a movie. Tell him how much you love him. Don’t set anything on fire, don’t kill anyone, don’t maim anyone, don’t kidnap anyone, don’t vandalize anything. Just…pretend you’re in a sitcom.”
“Golden Girls?”
“Yeah. Pretend you and Spider-Man are in Golden Girls.”
“I’m Rose,” Wade wails, sounding horrified.
“Yeah, you pretend to be Blanche, but you’re Rose,” Weasel agrees, unperturbed until he imagines Wade cosplaying Betty White.
“And Spider-Man is Dorothy! I’m doomed!”
“Don’t overthink this.”
“It’s too late for that. It’s too late for anything except death, dismemberment, blood –”
“You ruin relationships by choosing violence as a solution for everything when the people you’re wooing probably just want a hug.”
“They hurt Spidey.”
“Hurting them back hurts Spidey.”
“Not fair…not fair…”
Weasel finally loses patience. He comes out from behind the bar, takes Wade by the shoulders, drags Wade into the hall behind the bar and into the lounge. Then he presses Wade down on the mostly clean sofa. “Lie down, stop talking, and go to sleep. When you’re not high I’ll give you the same advice again, you’ll go back to New York, and you’ll act like a normal person instead of a fucked up mutant with a healing factor and a penchant for Death and guns and violence.”
“You’re my bes’friend,” Wade slurs.
“Then God help you.”
Wade hugs Weasel to him when Weasel tries to straighten up and leave. “You smell like Cheerios and corn chips,” Weasel complains.
“M’practicing for Spider-Man.”
“I should be really, really insulted right now.”
Wade aggressively snuggles him. He is full-on on top of Wade and Wade is doing stupid, squishing, stroking things with both hands. The more Weasel tries to get away, the more it embarrassingly turns him on.
“Think Spidey will like this?” Wade whispers in his ear.
“You moron,” he groans.
“Who else’m I gonna practice with, Weas?”
“You’re groping my butt, and it’s weird.” Weasel is not good at lying, and he is hard as granite against Wade’s firm, muscular heat. It’s not fair.
“If I cheat on Peter with you, then does that make me bad?” Wade wonders aloud in a little boy angel voice that is disturbingly innocent.
Weasel sees people this unhinged and undone on drugs all the time. Thank God he’s sober right now. Otherwise, he’s jump Wade’s bones. This feels like solid dubcon territory, but who is dubconning who? Damn it, Wade. You make everything make no sense. “Whoever Peter is, he might think so. And you can’t count on him not finding out. Also, I don’t want to help you cheat on your boyfriend. Or prostitute you like. Either one. Both.”
Wade’s arms go slack.
Sighing, Weasel scrambles off of Wade with as much dignity as he can. “I want you, but I’m also not going to have you. Also, you’re more trouble than you’re worth to me. If you start getting all clingy I won’t be able to work. And I like my job. Besides, you need to save all of…whatever that was…for Peter or Spider-Man or both.”
“Petey,” Wade sighs. “Spidey…”
“Go to sleep and dream of threesomes,” Weasel advises him, and leaves the lounge. He walks off his raging boner by walking up and down the hallway, grumpy at how handsy Wade gets when he gets all needy, and grumpier at the fact that he loves Wade and hates Wade at the same time. We’re a classic dysfunctional relationship. Ugh. How pathetic. Then he puts another bartender on duty, goes to the lounge, sits, and watches over Wade. Wade is already asleep.
Internally he feels he has a dilemma. Wade talks a big game about people-watching the beautiful members of society, and Wade fantasizes and composes lists of his favorite celebrities and fictional characters that he would totally have sex with. But this is the first time Wade’s given him reason to seriously consider that Wade is bisexual or pansexual, whichever one it turns out to be. And Weasel doesn’t want Wade. But he does, kinda. Wade is familiar, and the anger he feels sometimes makes him feel more alive. He’s depressed as shit and Wade mercilessly injects color into his gray world. But he’s not a fucking damsel.
And Wade’s overprotectiveness is smothering. Like one time he happened to sneeze in front of Wade, and Wade dragged him to Wade’s favorite Chicago safe house, took his temperature every ten minutes, made him take Tylenol, and fed him nothing but weird Korean soup pouches that are supposed to be herbal medicine or something. It went on like that for three days, until Wade kidnapped a doctor from a local hospital and made the man look Weasel over and declare Weasel healthy. Wade threatened the man, “I know where you live. I know where you work. If my friend dies, I’m coming for you.” And then let the man go. I mean, Jesus, who wouldn’t want and yet also hate a friend like that?
So Weasel doesn’t know if he wants Wade’s thing with Peter and/or Wade’s thing with Spider-Man to work out, or if he wants Wade to come crashing back into his life and crush him in those big, strong arms. But he sides with the more peaceful, boring option: make Wade someone else’s problem. Mostly because, secretly, Weasel is sure that he’s a shitty person deep down and that no matter how shitty Wade is, Wade deserves someone a little bit better. Because Weasel never kills any scum-of-the-Earth, and Wade does that all the time. Wade also gives way more of a shit about politics. It’s exhausting. If superheroes suddenly got rid of their no-killing rule, then Wade would instantly pop up into their ranks. Weasel wouldn’t. So he needs Wade to leave Chicago again.
In the morning Wade is sober and alert and hungry enough to “order the Grand Slam at Denny’s – no, two Grand Slams!” and Weasel accompanies him to Denny’s and patiently reiterates his entire argument from the day before. Wade offers to buy him the chocolate chip pancakes with whipped cream from IHOP. Weasel says, “I’m not a child. Also, yes and thank you.” And they go to IHOP next. This is such a them-from-the-old-days thing that it feels comfortable and horribly uncomfortable. He abruptly remembers Wade begging him to build a Gundam for Wade’s birthday and him refusing because Wade would wreak too much destruction with something like that and then Iron Man would come blasting in and Weasel would be arrested.
“Remember,” Weasel says, stern and weary. “No matter what happens, Spider-Man wants you to give him a hug and tell him that it’s all okay. No burning. No killing. No maiming. No kidnapping. Just a hug. Not that I care whether you fuck this all up.”
Wade takes a deep breath. “A hug.”
“Yes.”
“I can do that.”
Weasel eats his pancakes and firmly wishes Wade well with Peter and Spider-Man. Wade is too much trouble to keep around. It’s safer to hunker down in Chicago and half-heartedly pine. Weasel is much more comfortable with deprivation and loneliness and being pathetic. It’s kind of his brand. Gotta keep it on brand.