I came up with this idea almost half a year ago, and as a birthday gift to myself I'm posting it. I can't guarantee swift updates, but I never dump a story, even if I grow to hate it (and I assure you I won't hate this).

This is extremely AU for both continuities. I have skewed all timelines to the point where I won't ever mention a specific year in here, because things are so squished together. People's ages have been messed with and reduced, as you'll see. What may have taken ten years in canon may be moved to a matter of months – it all depends on how I can fit things together, which is a mix n' match, cut n' paste sort of thing. The order of events has not been changed, but the times that they occurred have been. Also, this is kind of OC-centric. If you don't like any of this, leave now.

Another thing – there will be slash, yaoi, boy-love, whatever you want to call it. If you don't like it, again, you know where the back button is on your browser. Don't say I didn't warn you, and if you give me crap I will openly mock you, and maybe report you if I'm bored and what you say is against the rules for comments.

In case you're wondering, I am very familiar with Watchmen, both the movie and the graphic novel, and I have seen all movies in the X-Men movie 'verse. My extra Deadpool knowledge comes from my lovely friend rawhidewolf, who kindly lets me bounce ideas off of her.

Disclaimer: I do not own X-Men or Watchmen or any of their characters – they belong to their respective owners. I do own Jack and the situations used here.

On a particularly cold and wet New York City night, the Comedian's doorbell rang.

Now, being that his main line of work at the time was as a masked vigilante with occasional government ties, he wasn't exactly a person who was often visited without advance knowledge. He had no family to speak of, and no real friends unless you counted his "comrades in crimefighting," as Captain Metropolis would call them, and they barely tolerated him and usually openly hated him. Friends indeed.

Thus, on that night Eddie Blake was racking his brain, trying to think of who would be calling at such a late hour. His pizza had already been delivered and he was almost sure that he had given the correct amount of change, considering he had counted it out before getting completely hammered as his nightly regimen required.

Had he ordered a stripper in his inebriated state? He did call in girls every once in a while when he was feeling, ahem, lonely and didn't have a "date" for the night planned, but he couldn't recall doing so any time that night.

So who the hell was now pounding on his apartment's door at eleven at night?

Granted, being a masked vigilante he should have been out doing his civic duty or some bullshit like that, whatever sugarcoated term Metropolis was using this week to describe the heinous things they did. However, he had been a bit on the slow side the night before, and he had royally screwed up.

After who knew how long as the Comedian, one might have hoped he would have been able to avoid being shot. But he hadn't, and prying a bullet out of your own leg hurt like a bitch. Sewing your own wounds using whiskey as an anesthetic wasn't much better.

He had stayed in tonight to give his wound that small amount of time to heal. It wasn't like his nightly patrols of the city knocking around some street punks was really going to staunch the flow of disgusting activity that filled the vile streets of New York.

For a moment a sense of déjà vu passed through his mind, but he ignored it – good thing, because he hadn't yet met the person who his sense of déjà vu reminded him of.

The pounding on the door continued.

"I'm coming, for Chrissake!" he called in a slurred tone. Huh, usually his voice didn't slur until beer number four. Then again, there were five empty bottles lined up next to his couch. That might explain something.

After stumbling to the door, to his triumph not falling on his face when he tripped over the open pizza box, Eddie clumsily pulled back the multiple deadbolts on his door and wrenched it open, staring blearily at the person in front of him.

"Who the hell're you?" he slurred bluntly. Eddie was pretty sure he had never seen the old broad in front of him before.

The woman scowled, putting emphasis on the wrinkles that were crinkling her plain face. "Men, can't remember a damned thing, like who they've slept with!"

Okay, now Eddie was just confused. "Um...what?"

The woman sneered at him. "Two years ago you 'hired' me, you moron. You brought me back here, we did the nasty, you paid me. End of story, so I thought."

In his state of semi-drunkenness, Eddie was a little slow. "Uh... Are you sure?" How drunk was he, to have been with that harpy?

She scoffed and began wheezing heavily, the hacking coughs of a longtime smoker. "Yes I'm sure, jackass. 'Cause I got this thing out of it!" With her foot she nudged something on the ground.

Slowly, Eddie's eyes drifted to the dirty hallway floor. A toddler sat at the woman's feet, looking up at him with big blue eyes peering out of a pale face from under a shock of messy black hair.

The Comedian suddenly felt sick to his stomach, and considering how good he was at holding his liquor, that probably wasn't the cause. "What are you saying?"

The woman rolled her eyes exaggeratedly. "I'm saying that 'cause of you, I gave birth to a freakin' kid. Do I look like the kinda gal who needs a kid around? No! I did you a favor, kept him 'til he was old enough to eat solid food. That's more than I should've done for the brat, two years of my hard-earned money wasted on the whelp. Already wasted my cash on the other ungrateful brats. I'm done looking after him; he's yours now."

Suddenly Eddie found his mind clearing. "Excuse me, whore? What makes you think he's my child, hmm? And better yet, what makes you think that I'm going to take him? Do I look like someone who wants to raise a child? How the hell did you even find where I live?" With dark realization, he noticed that he recognized the bitchy tones of that woman. But even if he had slept with her, he still wasn't taking the kid.

She smiled smugly. "I know he's yours because I'm not an idiot – I can count days, and your name is on the birth certificate. That's what you get for introducing yourself. How did I find you? I know how to use a phonebook, you ass. Besides, you took me back here. And I know you're going to take him because I know who you are, Comedian."

Eddie almost flinched at his secret identity. Vaguely he recalled bringing her to his apartment and after doing the deed, finding her trolling for valuables and coming across his costume which he had left out in one of his many stupors. She had responded to threats and a bribe then, but just barely.

Damn it, now the bitch had him pinned. He was damned if he took the kid and damned if he didn't. She was so lustful for money; she would sell him out in a heartbeat if she could have, but instead she passed the kid off on him.

"Why didn't you just get an abortion?" Eddie stared at the child who stared back at him. Prostitutes didn't often keep their bastard children – it tended to impede business unless their clients were kinky or desperate.

"Couldn't afford one. Couldn't put it up for adoption because they wouldn't have treated him right. Would've given him to some stuck-up yuppie couple who would've turned him into a pansy freak." She reached in her pocket and pulled out a cigarette, lighting it with a practiced ease. Eddie was mildly surprised that she seemed to care for the child, on some small, twisted level. "You're lucky I'm not even asking for money to keep quiet. Take the damned kid and I won't spill your name. Got it?"

Before Eddie could reply, she nudged the kid over the threshold and into the apartment and thrust a stack of papers into Eddie's hands. He blinked and she was already at the end of hallway, and then she was gone.

He looked at the papers in his hands, legal documents pertaining to the kid. The birth certificate said his name was Jonathan Matthew Blake, son of Sylvia Joanna Kovacs and Edward Morgan Blake. Well, damn.

Wait... this thing said the kid was born in January. He had slept with that bitch in December, thirteen months before the kid was born. It was one thing he was sure of, because he remembered passing those stupid holiday display cases in front of the department stores while taking her back to his place. Unless this had been the longest pregnancy ever, this wasn't his kid!

But she knew his name. Damn it, she probably knew it wasn't his kid, but couldn't pass it off on the real father because she had no dirt on him to blackmail him into it! That conniving bitch!

While Eddie was seething, glaring at a wall in the dimly lit hallway, the two-year old boy at his feet looked up at him questioningly and made a soft noise of confusion. Eddie's head shot down.

"What are you looking at?" he sneered at the toddler, who didn't reply, as he had expected. The vigilante sighed. "Let's get you inside, I guess, and I'll try to find someone to pass you off on. Maybe Sally will want another kid..."

He frowned. No, he had done enough to Sally, and she had enough on her plate raising his biological kid. He smiled a little thinking of Laurel Jane. The girl didn't know him, but he sure knew her. It was just that her mother wouldn't let him see her, ever. She thought he was unfit to be around children. Hell, he agreed with her, but he should still be allowed to see his own daughter!

If he hadn't been drunk and uncoordinated, Eddie would have snapped his fingers. That was it! He would raise this kid and prove to Sally that he wasn't a total jackass, and then she would let him see Laurie and she would forgive him and he could have them both...

Pulling his mind back from his happy, highly unlikely fantasies, Eddie forced himself to address the task at hand – a toddler who he had no idea how to raise. "What the hell am I supposed to do with you..." He consulted the paper again. "...Jonathan..."

Jonathan, what a terrible name. Too stiff, too formal for a kid who was currently drooling all down his chin. "I ain't calling you that. What about...Jack? Yeah, I can live with that. Jack it is, runt."

The newly dubbed Jack cocked his head to the side, paused for a moment, and then threw up on Eddie's bare feet.

The Comedian scowled at the mess. You're doing this to get Sally back, he reminded himself. Don't kill the kid and you could get Sally back, and you could see your daughter.

Desperately trying to think on the bright side of things, Eddie stared at the child and said, "Eh, least I'm not wearing socks."

That was probably the only upside of that night.

Eddie had no place to put the kid, so at first he dumped it on his couch, threw a blanket on it, and then went off to his own bed for the night. That didn't work, because the thing woke up shrieking like some unholy creature of the night – no, not the Comedian – and wouldn't stop screaming until Eddie came out and held it, and oh, what a picture that was: Edward Blake, the feared and revered Comedian, holding a two-year old child while looking at it like it was the most disgusting thing he had ever seen in his life.

When the child had calmed Eddie put the sleepy toddler back on the couch and went back to bed. This cycle was repeated at least once more.

The next time he woke he found the boy nestled next to him in his bed, asleep, and damned if he knew how it got there. He stared at the child, affronted.

"How the hell did you get here?" He couldn't fathom how such a small child would have made it onto the bed, but at the moment he was too tired to care, and his hangover was starting up with a vengeance. Shaking his head – and wincing at the effect it brought his aching head – he turned over and tried to ignore the kid.

If he was lucky, he would "accidentally" smother it in the night.

The next morning he was woken up at the ungodly hour of ten, not by the child, amazingly, but by a pounding on his door. Eddie threw himself out of bed, trying to ignore the way his head was pounding in time with the knocks, and stumbled to the door of his apartment. Once again throwing back the deadbolts, he was deciding to just kill whoever was on the other side of the door when he opened it to reveal – oh damn, he couldn't kill them. Great, just friggin' great, now he was angry and wanted to hurt something and he couldn't because they were just kids. The Comedian was a randy jackass, but he didn't hurt kids – that was, unless they deserved it.

"Are you Edward Blake?" asked the older one. He was some redhead kid in his teens with a mug only a mother could love. Freckles splashed across his face, which was almost a little apelike in appearance. This kid was definitely not winning any beauty contests anytime soon. And what was with that voice? He spoke in a creepy, almost monotonous tone, his eyes half-closed as if he didn't really care about the answer.

But the steely emotion in his eyes showed that he did.

"What if I am?" he grumbled. Damn, he could use a cigar about now.

"Is he here? Is he here?" Eddie looked down with disdain at the disturbance. With one hand firmly clenched in the jacket of the redhead was a brunet boy of about ten who looked nothing like the red-haired teen. His skin wasn't as pale and was completely devoid of the other's freckles, and his features showed that he would grow up to be quite the charmer – that was, if he wasn't so busy hopping around like the Easter Bunny on crack.

"Wade." The redhead said that one word and the younger boy calmed, but Eddie could swear he was vibrating with excitement. The older of the boys looked back up at Eddie.

"Are you Edward Blake?" he repeated.

Feeling benevolent, and really just wanting to get rid of these kids, he nodded sharply. "Yeah, what do you want?"

The teenager watched him with those creepy eyes, nonplussed. "A woman gave you a toddler last night." It wasn't a question.

Eddie felt a little defensive now. "What makes you think that?" Best not to give himself away before he had to.

A loud wail came from his bedroom, drawing a wince from Eddie, both at being found out and because the screaming wasn't helping his hangover one bit. Dammit, there went his plan.

"He's here!" cried the young boy. He let go of the elder's coat and shoved past Eddie, following the sound of the cries into the vigilante's bedroom, paying no heed to the fact that he was blatantly and rudely ignoring the other's privacy. Eddie would have run after the kid, but he was kind of in shock at the boy's audacity.

There was a growl from the redhead before he, too, shoved past Eddie, heading after the younger of the two.

Eddie shook his head, at a complete loss. "Sure, c'mon in!" he called after the two. With a sigh and a hand pressed to his pounding head, he shut the door and followed the boys back to his bedroom.

He was surprised to see that the young boy had made himself comfortable on his bed and had Jack sitting in his lap. The toddler was still sniffling a little, but he was calming quickly at the little phrases the boy was cooing to him.

As soon as Eddie entered the room, the boy's head shot up. "Do you not know how to change a pull-up? What kind of caretaker are you? Did you even try to get him to use the toilet?" He shook his head as if he was ashamed by the adult before he swung a backpack off his shoulder and onto the bed and dug through it, pulling out a clean pull-up. "He'll never learn if nobody teaches him."

Deciding to play along, Eddie leaned against the doorframe and raised an eyebrow. "You are going to change him?"

The boy thrust the pull-up and the toddler at the redhead. "Walter."

The teenager sighed and rolled his eyes before he picked up the toddler and, without a word to the owner of the apartment, stalked into the bathroom attached to the bedroom and closed the door.

Confused and a little amused by the situation, Eddie decided to stare at the kid on his bed, who stared back before a bright, sunny grin lit his face and he began to babble.

"Hi, I'm Wilson, Wade Wilson. Doesn't that make me sound like 007? I think so, but Walter just rolls his eyes at me. He's the red-haired guy, Walter Kovacs. He's my big brother. Well, half-brother – we have different dads. That's why we have different last names."

"Uh-huh." Eddie nodded his head as if he understood the hyperactive runt. "And, uh, why did you decide to come barging into my home?"

"For Jack, of course!" Eddie reeled a bit when he heard someone use his newly given name for the toddler. "Well, mom probably just told you his name was Jonathan. Actually, she probably just gave you the papers and didn't say his name at all. But it's Jonathan, and we call him Jack 'cause he's too little to have such a big name."

"Wait a minute, the kid's your brother?" The Comedian rubbed the back of his head in confusion. All he wanted to do was pass out somewhere without any lights, but he couldn't do that with these weird kids in his home.

"Of course!" Wade raised an eyebrow at him. "You aren't very quick on the uptake, are you? Never fear, I'll explain everything. Okay, see, our mom – well, she's not actually a mom, really just the person who gave birth to us – anyways, she's a whore."

It was Eddie's turn again to raise a brow. "Aren't you a little young to be saying things like that?"

Wade looked affronted. "I'm eleven years old! Besides, Walter says it all the time, but he says I'm not supposed to, so don't tell him I did. Where was I? Oh yeah, so our mom's a whore, so she ended up with three unexpected kids over the years. First came Walter, obviously. Next came me, and then Jack. He's only two. Mom doesn't like us, so she ships us all off to our dads. Well, me and Jack; Walter's dad ran out when he was little, and mom couldn't find where he went, but she knew who my dad was – or at least she decided she did – and she pawned me off on him. I think she blackmailed him into it, 'cause he hates me. Is that what she did to you?"

Astonished, Eddie nodded slowly. "Very astute of you." Silently, he cursed himself for spending too much time around those stuck up pricks that called themselves his comrades. Their stupid vocabularies were rubbing off on him.

The boy laughed. "I guessed, 'cause you don't seem like the type who likes kids, either. So what'd she get you for?"

Eddie's eyes narrowed in, surprisingly, a good-natured way. "It wouldn't be very good blackmail if it was something I go around spouting off to every runt I see, now would it?"

Wade gaped. "I am not a runt! I'll grow taller when I hit puberty!"

There was a soft snort from the teenager exiting the bathroom, who held Jack in his arms. The toddler sat happily in his hold, muttering little statements to the boy who was apparently his oldest brother, though the three boys looked nothing alike.

At that moment Eddie realized that he hadn't heard one word from the toddler until now. There had been screaming, yes, and crying, but no actual talking, or even gibberish. Wondering why this was, he said, "Huh, kid can talk. Why was he so quiet before, then?"

Walter simply stared at him, apparently allowing Wade to explain. "He was probably just scared, that's all. You don't look like you've been very kind to him. You gotta smile lots, or else he thinks you're upset with him, and Jack stops talking when people are upset with him. Babies are real good at telling someone's mood, you know."

Again, Eddie just nodded. "Yeah, and if you two are so good with kids and all, why did your, ahem, mother dump the brat here, and better yet, what the hell are you doing in my apartment?"

"Language," Walter chastised with narrowed, annoyed eyes. Eddie just glared right back. For God's sake, his head was pounding, some bitch had dumped a kid on him that wasn't even his, and he really, really didn't want to be stuck with these two idiots to top it all off.

Once again, Wade decided to explain. "We've been looking after him all the time, 'cause he's our brother and we couldn't just leave him with mom. She shouldn't have had Jack anyway 'cause the court deemed her an unfit mother and that's why Walter lives in a foster home -" This received a glare from said brother, which Wade ignored with aplomb. "- and I live with my dad, or supposed dad, so I really don't know how she held onto Jack for so long or anything, other than the government just doesn't care anymore, which is fine by me 'cause then me and Walter still get to see Jack. We went looking to see him this morning and mom said she gave him to you, so now we're here to see him!"

Eddie stared for a moment. "Wait, see him? You mean you ain't taking him with you?"

Wade laughed as if this was the most hilarious thing he'd heard in a long time. Damn, that talkative kid was a freak.

"My dad would never let me take him back to our place, being that he hates me already, and Walter's foster family can't take him. They don't even know that the three of us still see each other, 'cause they don't care about anything that doesn't involve a check from the government, but that's fine with us."

"And how old are you?" The question was aimed at Walter, but the teenager didn't answer past a grunt. Wade, per usual, spoke up.

"He's seventeen, but almost eighteen. That's why my dad let's me go with him places. Well, actually he doesn't care, but if anyone asks him that's what he says."

Eddie grunted in response and was silent. In fact, so were the other occupants of the room with the exception of Jack, who was mumbling nonsense to himself.

Suddenly, Wade shot to a stand. He moved over to Walter and took Jack from him, moving the toddler in his arms until he was in a more comfortable position. "Who's a good boy?" he cooed.

"Jack!" the little boy replied with a sunny smile.

Deep in Eddie's chest, a trickle of water dripped from his heart of ice.

Wade smiled and bounced him a little. "And who am I?"

"Wade!"

Eddie fought a quirk of a smile.

"And who's this?" He gestured at his older brother.

"Walty!" The dubbed "Walty" grimaced slightly, but remained silent.

Okay, this just wasn't fair.

Wade pointed at Eddie. "And this is Eddie. He's gonna be your new daddy. Can you say 'Daddy'?"

The little boy screwed up his face in confusion, as if thinking this over in his diminutive head. Abruptly his smile returned and he set it on Eddie, full force.

It was as if a blow-dryer set on "high" had been pointed at the ice-heart.

"Hi Daddy!" Jack called, beaming with joy at his own small statement. He even waved a bit.

A crack formed in the ice.

Eddie told himself the look on his face was only because he was surprised at being called...that and he didn't know that two-year olds talked so much. After all, he hadn't been around any since he was one.

The Comedian shook his head. He was stuck with Jack, and apparently his brothers came as a bonus pack. Well, if they wanted to visit, then he could at least use them as free babysitters. Might as well make the best of their presence.

"So how do you take care of the kid, anyway?"

Wade looked aghast, and even the stoic, enigmatic Walter raised a brow. Then the younger brother smiled at the boy in his arms. "Don't worry Jackie; we'll set your daddy straight."

"Daddy!" he repeated, still beaming widely.

The ice shattered.

Well, I like that beginning well enough. Question: I want to do one chapter from the "past" like this one and one from the "present" after it, alternating like this for most of the story (until I run out of "past" ones). Does anyone mind this? Heck, is anyone going to review this? No, probably not, but if you do give your input before the next chapter I will take it into consideration.

Please review, if you would be so kind. I need to know that somebody is reading this.