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Dreams of an anemic winter sky reflected in the mirror of a still lake; of bare feet moving lightly over frozen ground; of labyrinthine snow-capped evergreens; of a rabbit twitching in his mouth, its blood a welcome balm on his painfully dry throat, pooling magma-hot in his starved stomach. Dreams of firestorm hair, searching eyes, a girl and the brush of her trembling fingers over his cheeks. These dreams aren't nightmares, not yet.
A smell like rotting flesh touches his nose, a smell that's not quite death but close to it, permeating sickness. This is what wakes him, and he lifts his head from the pillow, sniffing intently, his nose the first part of him to reach full consciousness.
His ears follow; that's when he hears the crying.
“Wade?” Logan peels his eyes open, and a sheet of ice breaks over him when he sees Wade curled on the other side of the bed, facing away from Logan, back trembling. Panic spurs Logan up, and he's quickly sitting over Wade, reaching for Wade’s shoulder. “What’s wrong, bub? Did you have a nightmare? Fuck, you're shaking like —”
Wade screams at the first brush of Logan's fingertips to his skin, and flinches so violently it makes Logan afraid that his claws are out, that he's stabbed Wade, though they're not. “Don't touch me,” Wade says, every word a sob. “I'm so sorry, peanut, but please don't touch me. Oh my god, it hurts so bad.”
Logan feels frantic now, because this isn't just another nightmare to be kissed away; this is physical pain. Wade’s hurt, and he smells like death. “What’s wrong?” Logan asks again. He leans over Wade without touching, and suffers through a flinch of his own when he catches the tortured, scrunched-up look on Wade’s face. But Wade sleeps naked, and Logan sees that he's not wounded, not bleeding. “Wade, what happened?”
“Just — just gonna be a bad day.” Wade takes an uneven breath. Logan hears his lungs rattling and wheezing, his heart skipping erratically, then beginning to slow like an exhausted horse. “It's okay, baby, I'm okay.”
“Your heart.” Logan's throat is almost too tight to speak. He's heard that heartbeat before, shuddering inside the chests of people who died in front of him, around him, under him. Wade smells like approaching death, and now he sounds like it, too. “It's…”
“It’s slowing down, I know.” Wade gasps again, and Logan hears how hard a time he's having just getting the air into his lungs. “I'm, uh. I'm kind of dying, I guess.”
“What!” Logan shouts. “Wade —”
“No, no, I'm not — I'm not gonna die. I'm dying, but I'm not gonna die, I promise,” Wade says. With a sharp, pained breath he rolls himself over to face Logan, and Logan feels like a spring shoved down, wanting so much to move, to do something to fix this, but he can't get Wade’s scream out of his head. Logan can't touch him. “Oh, peanut,” Wade says, and gives Logan a queasy smile, brow pinched as though Logan’s the pitiable one here. “Don't look so sad, I'm sorry. Some days the cancer comes on faster than my powers can heal it, that's all, like flare-ups. They don't last long, I'll be okay again by tonight, tomorrow at the latest. Just a day of whump.”
“I don't understand,” Logan says. He hovers his hands over Wade, but refrains from touching. “I thought your powers got rid of the cancer.” Wade's never smelled like this before. There's always an underlying rot, a hint of sickness, but it's usually so faint.
“They do, most of the time.” Wade laughs, then winces, presumably at more pain. A strangling fist closes around Logan's heart. “But — but it's never fully gone. It's, like, in my blood or something, traces of it, and it's always fighting to come back. That's why I start dying when I'm depowered. I think of it like, um. I have a healing factor, right? So I heal. But I'm not cured. Same rules apply for my burns; they heal enough not to hurt, but they're still there.”
“I’ve been with you every day for six months,” Logan says. Ever since the day he moved in, the night Wade kissed him. “And this is the first time, I mean — I don't…”
“Bad days like this only happen a few times a year, it's okay.” Wade smiles again, strained and so obviously forced for the sake of reassuring Logan. It has the opposite effect. “Can you do me a favor, peanut?”
Logan snaps out of his daze, leaps at the prospect of helping Wade. “Anything,” he says, voice rough with how much he means it. “What do you need?”
“It's, um. My skin is what hurts.” Wade shifts a little, winces again. “My scars, fuck. When this shit happens it's like my powers are so busy fighting off the cancer they don't have time to heal the burns, y'know? So it hurts like a bitch. But there's this, um, numbing cream, in the bathroom? It's like an anesthetic, I have a stockpile in that cabinet under the sink. Can you grab a few tubes of it for me?”
“It’ll take the pain away?” Logan asks, already climbing out of bed, carefully avoiding Wade.
“For the most part. Maybe the bottle of Pepto-Bismol, too? I'm kinda nauseous.” Wade sighs, and it's such a broken, beaten-down sound that it stops Logan in his tracks, freezes him in the bedroom doorway. “Fucking cancer,” Wade says to himself.
Logan shakes it off and gets moving, all but sprints down the hallway to the bathroom and rips open the cabinet. He has his arms full of lidocaine cream and Pepto-Bismol when he returns to the bedroom, to find Wade still curled up in a tight ball, trembling and gasping between breaths, as if just the act of living hurts, and it must. Logan's been burned before, doused in fire; that's some of the worst pain he's ever felt, hands down. And that's what Wade's feeling right now, constantly.
Burning behind his eyes, Logan rushes to the bed, sits on the edge, as close as he can be to Wade without touching. “I've got it, I'm here,” Logan says, and drops everything at the foot of the mattress. He picks up one of the tubes of cream and hesitates. “How should we, um…?”
Wade whines, blinking hard, and Logan's fists clench when tears roll down Wade's cheeks, so tight that he nearly crushes the tube. The tips of his claws poke out, though cancer and burn scars aren't threats he can slash away. “It's gonna hurt at first, no getting around that,” Wade says, and sniffles, but he's smiling again when he meets Logan's eyes. “Will you put it on for me? I can't move my arms.”
“Yeah, I've got you.” Logan pops open the tube with hands that shake; he doesn't want it to hurt at first, he never wants to hurt Wade.
“Hold on, peanut, you're gonna numb your hands, too,” Wade says with a more genuine smile. “You should use a tissue or something.”
“I don't give a fuck about that.” Logan fills his palm with the stuff, then pauses to consider strategy. He decides to start at Wade's chest and move outward from there. “Okay, here we go…”
He's braced for Wade's pained gasp, but his full-body flinch, the way he shudders and automatically tries to twist away from Logan's hands, that’s what strikes Logan like an ice pick to the gut. He perseveres, ignoring the way his instincts scream at him to stop touching Wade, stop hurting him. All the while Logan mutters bullshit he barely hears himself, something about how everything's going to be okay, rolling Wade gently onto his stomach to get at his back. Logan can't feel his hands when he rolls Wade over again, but this time Wade doesn't flinch.
“Fuck, that's so much better,” Wade says, sort of half-sobbing with relief. He reaches for Logan, who's tossing aside the next empty tube; they went through five. “C'mere, baby, it's okay now, I want you to hold me.”
Logan lies down beside Wade and touches his waist, tentative, then pulls Wade completely into his arms when Wade doesn't scream. “You want the Pepto-Bismol now?” Logan asks, his mouth at Wade's temple. They're both sticky from the cream, and Logan's hands are numb, he can only feel Wade against his arms and chest, but it's perfect. The panic subsides.
“In a little while. Just let me…” Wade nuzzles his face up under Logan's jaw, but the reprieve proves short-lived when Wade whimpers, fingers twitching weakly against Logan's waist. “Fuck.”
“What?” Logan asks, panic reignited.
“I — I can't feel you,” Wade says. “The pain’s gone, but I can't feel you.”
Logan aches, the part of him still stunned that Wade even wants to feel him. He squeezes Wade a little tighter, as tight as he dares. “Can you feel this?” he asks.
“Barely.” Wade sniffles. “It's okay, sorry. You can get up if you want, you gotta feed Mary Puppins and —”
Still squeezing Wade flush against his chest, Logan forces the loudest purr he can manage, so deep he feels the rumbling in his marrow and the roots of his teeth. Wade sighs, pressing impossibly closer. “How about this?” Logan asks.
“Yeah. Yeah, that's perfect.” Wade's smile curves against Logan's neck. “I feel it all the way in my chest, kitty cat. Let's stay like this forever.”
“As long as you want,” Logan says through his purr, voice quaking with it. The rotting smell still stings his nose, and the sound of Wade's lagging heartbeat still registers as an imminent threat in his ears. He hates this, playing defense, unable to actively attack the thing that's hurting Wade. He can't fight this with his claws, and he's not smart like Hank was, he can't make a cure, he wouldn't know where to start. He feels useless, guarding Wade from an enemy that's already inside him.
Wade kisses Logan's cheek, drawing him out of the spiral of his thoughts. “Thanks, peanut,” Wade says, and his smile seems more real when Logan pulls back to appreciate it, brightening his eyes. “For making a shitty morning better.”
Logan just hugs Wade, leans their cheeks together, and suddenly his purr is genuine, exploding out of him as if in an effort to reach Wade, to share the warmth.
He's not going anywhere; Al can feed the damn dog today.