Chapter Text
Peter
The thing about watching someone you love die is that it doesn't happen all at once.
Wade's healing factor means Peter has watched him die hundreds of times. Thousands, maybe. He's lost count. A bullet through the brain, and Wade's back up in thirty seconds, cracking jokes about scrambled eggs. Spine severed, and he's flopping around like a fish, making Monty Python references. It's horrible and it's Wade and Peter learned to live with it the way you learn to live with anything, by not thinking about it too hard, by trusting the bounce-back, by believing in the math of regeneration.
But this time is different.
Peter realizes it the moment he swings onto the warehouse rooftop and sees Wade, what's left of Wade, in a crater of his own blood. There's too much of it. Too much red, too much exposed bone, too much of Wade's insides on the outside. His tactical suit is shredded, his skin is shredded, and through the hole in his chest Peter can see his heart. Actually see it. Struggling to beat around the rebar that's punched clean through.
"Wade." Peter's voice cracks. He's already on his knees, hands hovering, not knowing where to touch that won't hurt. Everything will hurt. "Wade, stay with me."
"Always do, baby boy," Wade rasps, and blood bubbles at his lips. His mask is half-gone, showing the ruined landscape of his face, and one eye focuses on Peter while the other dangles by the optic nerve. "You should see... the other guy..."
"Don't. Don't talk, just-" Peter's trying to pull the rebar out but his hands are shaking too badly. If he does this wrong, if he makes it worse-
"Peter." Wade's hand finds his wrist. The grip is weak. "S'okay. I got this. New... personal record... for holes in torso..."
And then Wade stops breathing.
Peter knows it's temporary. The healing factor will kick in, it always does, Wade will gasp back to life in a few seconds or minutes and make some terrible joke about resurrection and Easter and that one time he dressed up as sexy Jesus. Peter knows this.
But Wade's hand goes slack in his, and Peter is holding a corpse.
He counts the seconds. Thirty. Forty-five. A minute. Wade's heart isn't beating. The visible parts of his organs are gray and still. There's no rise and fall of his chest because there's barely a chest left, just ribs and meat and—
Ninety seconds.
"Come on," Peter whispers. Then louder. "Come on, Wade. Come on, you bastard, don't do this, don't-"
Two minutes.
Peter's Spider-sense isn't screaming anymore. The danger's passed. The enhanced soldiers who tried to kill them are dead or gone. It's just Peter on a rooftop holding Wade's body, and the city is loud around them, car horns and sirens and someone's playing music too loud four blocks away, and Wade is dead.
"Please." Peter's crying inside his mask, hot and wet and his nose is running. "Please, baby, please come back, you always come back, just-"
At two minutes and thirty-seven seconds, Wade gasps.
It's not a clean gasp. It's drowning-on-dry-land, chest convulsing, blood spraying from his mouth. But his eye rolls wildly and focuses on Peter and his healing factor finally, finally kicks into overdrive. Peter watches muscles knit over bone, watches skin crawl across exposed viscera, watches Wade's body remember how to be whole.
"There you are," Peter says, and he's sobbing now, ugly-crying, pressing his forehead to Wade's. "There you are, I've got you, you're okay, you're-"
"Longest... foreplay... ever..." Wade wheezes.
Peter laughs. It sounds hysterical. He can't stop touching Wade's face, his chest, confirming that everything's back where it should be. "You died."
"I got better."
"Two and a half minutes, Wade. Two and a half-"
"New record?"
"This isn't funny." Peter's hands are shaking so badly he can barely hold on. "This isn't- you were gone."
Wade's healing eye finishes reforming, and both eyes lock on Peter now. Something shifts in his expression. "Hey. Pete. I'm okay. See? All better. Not even a sexy scar to show for it."
But Peter can't let go. He's clutching Wade's tactical suit, feeling the places where the fabric is shredded and wet with blood, and he can still see it. The crater of Wade's chest. His struggling heart. The moment it stopped.
Wade saves his life so many times. But this time Wade took something meant for Peter, a launcher designed to punch through Spider-Man's enhanced durability, and it destroyed him. It destroyed him because Peter wasn't fast enough, wasn't smart enough, didn't see the enhanced soldier flanking them until Wade was already moving, already throwing himself between Peter and the blast.
"We should go home," Wade says gently. His hands cup Peter's face through the mask. "C'mon, Spidey. Let's go home."
Peter nods. He webs Wade to his back, carefully, so carefully, and swings them toward their apartment in Queens. Wade keeps up a running commentary the whole way, jokes about the view, about Peter's web-slinging form, about what they should order for dinner. Peter barely hears him over the sound of Wade's stopped heart echoing in his memory.
At home, Peter peels them both out of their suits in the bathroom. Wade's gear is garbage, shredded beyond repair, so Peter throws it away while Wade showers. He can hear Wade singing something off-key, some 80s power ballad, and the sound should be comforting but Peter's hands won't stop shaking.
He sits on the closed toilet lid and stares at his own hands. There's Wade's blood under his fingernails. In the creases of his knuckles. He washes them three times and can still see it.
Wade emerges from the shower pink and clean and whole, toweling his bald head. "You gonna get in, or are we doing the sexy brooding thing? Because I'm down for either, but I should know if I need to put on mood lighting."
"I'm fine," Peter says automatically.
"Pete-"
"I'm fine." Peter stands, strips efficiently, steps into the shower. The water's still warm from Wade's use. He scrubs himself mechanically, watching pink-tinged water circle the drain, and tries not to think about the fact that it took two and a half minutes for Wade to come back.
Two and a half minutes.
In two and a half minutes, you can soft-boil an egg. You can run a quarter mile. You can tell someone you love them fifty times.
You can also lose everything.
When Peter comes out, Wade's made dinner. Nothing fancy, just pasta with jarred sauce and pre-shredded mozzarella, but he's set the table, poured wine into their mismatched mugs, even lit a candle that smells like "Mountain Cabin" according to the label.
"M'lady," Wade says, pulling out Peter's chair with a flourish.
Peter sits. Picks up his fork. Puts it down. His appetite is gone.
"Not hungry?" Wade asks around a mouthful of pasta.
"Not really."
"You gotta eat, Petey. Spidey-metabolism and all that."
"I know."
They eat in silence. Or Wade eats, and Peter pushes food around his plate, and the candle flickers between them casting weird shadows, and Peter can't stop seeing it. Wade's body in a crater. Wade's stopped heart. Two and a half minutes of nothing.
"What're you thinking about?" Wade asks.
You dying, Peter thinks. You dead. You gone. You taking a hit meant for me because I wasn't fast enough.
"Nothing," Peter says.
Wade's eyes narrow slightly, but he doesn't push. Just twirls more pasta onto his fork and says, "Ooh, you know what we should watch? That documentary about the Fyre Festival. I've been saving it for a cozy night in."
"Sure," Peter says.
They curl up on the couch after dinner, Peter tucked under Wade's arm, Wade's hand playing with Peter's hair. The documentary plays. Peter doesn't absorb a single word. He's hyperaware of Wade's heartbeat under his ear, steady, strong, alive, but he can't stop remembering the silence.
"You're really quiet tonight," Wade murmurs during a commercial break.
"Just tired."
"We could go to bed early. Do bed things. Or not-bed things in the bed. I'm flexible. Literally and figuratively."
Peter forces a smile. "Maybe. Let's finish this first."
But when the documentary ends and Wade stands, stretching, already talking about how they were robbed and at least the cheese sandwich guy became a meme, Peter feels it. The weight. The truth he's been pushing down all night.
He almost lost Wade today.
No. Scratch that.
He did lose Wade today. For two and a half minutes, Wade was gone, and it was Peter's fault because Peter wasn't good enough, fast enough, smart enough to see the threat. And Wade died for it.
"Coming to bed?" Wade asks, hand extended.
Peter takes it. Lets Wade pull him to their bedroom, lets Wade kiss him slow and sweet, lets Wade's hands slip under his shirt. And when Wade pulls back, searching Peter's face for the go-ahead, Peter nods even though everything in him feels wrong and hollow.
They have sex. Wade's gentle, attentive, hitting all the right buttons like he always does. Peter moves through it mechanically, makes the right sounds, touches Wade back, but he's not really there. He's back on that rooftop, counting seconds, watching Wade's body fail to breathe.
After, Wade curls around him, arm heavy across Peter's chest, already drifting toward sleep. "Love you, Petey-pie," he mumbles.
"Love you too," Peter whispers to the dark.
And means it.
And knows, with a sick certainty that sits heavy in his gut, that love isn't going to be enough.