Peter rolled sluggishly off of Wade, the sweat of their skin helping him slide with graceless tact onto the bed. His breath was ragged, filling his burning lungs with such urgency, it was almost like he had been denied air altogether. He briefly wondered if this was what it felt like for Wade after growing a new pair of lungs.
Wade rolled onto his side, draping a heavy arm around Peter's waist. He tried to pull him close, but Peter pushed him off, the motion rough. He sat up after a moment, eyes focused on anywhere and everywhere that wasn't Wade.
He was still angry with him. Still frustrated. Granted, the sex they just had helped distill some of that anger. But Peter had fucked him with a ceaseless rage, pushing all his hurt and worry deep within Wade, making him flinch and scream and writhe until it was too much for the both of them.
Wade just kept coming and going as he pleased, not giving a single damn as to how it affected Peter. How he had Peter wrapped tightly around his finger, watching and waiting for him to just come back every time. Dreading the inevitability that one day he wouldn't.
This thing that they had between them. He didn't know what to call it. It wasn't exactly a relationship. At least not to Wade. It didn't seem like he particularly gave too much thought to them.
But this … understanding that they had between them, it left Peter more confused than anything else. And with each passing minute, with each passing day, each unavoidably neglected week, it got worse and worse, leaving Peter questioning just why he cared so much for someone who never made an effort at stability.
Wade was an uncertainty. Wreckless energy, consuming him until he had nothing more to give, until he was a hollow projection of entropy.
Peter snorted.
Wade hummed beside him, not seeming too particularly worried at the lack of affection present after their rough sex.
"You're like the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle," Peter said.
"The Heineken what? How am I comparable to a stale beer? That's cold, Peter!" Wade threw his arms behind his head, tone light and amused, dripping with mock offence.
It ignited Peter's earlier rage to its full potential.
"The Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle," he stated slowly. "It's a theoretical principle in chemistry, stating that one can predict either the position or the momentum at which an electron orbits an atomic nucleus, but not both. You only know the value of one or the other at any given point in time, but never both."
He chanced a glance at Wade. In the darkness of his room, Peter could see confusion on his face. And something else. Fear, perhaps. But no, it couldn't be. To fear the embedded implication of Peter's words, Wade would first have to care.
"What are you trying to say?" he asked after a while.
"I'm saying that with you, I can only know either your position in space or the momentum at which you distort my emotions, but never both."
Wade hoisted himself up slowly, gaze level with Peter's. There was a glint of sharpness in his eyes, of pity and determination.
It made Peter want to vomit.
"What exactly are you trying to say?" his voice was low, a rough protest to the heavy silence in the space between them.
"What am I to you?" Damn right he was going to be blunt about it.
Wade snorted. "What the fuck does it look like?" He waved his hand toward Peter, the motion careless, then back toward himself before letting it rest firmly on the bed.
Peter felt something inside him slowly begin to die. "I'm not just some toy for you to play with! My emotions aren't a game, Wade!"
Not even half a second after, Wade barked out a laugh, and somehow, that affirmation hurt more than anything else. Because maybe he had been clinging onto a sliver of hope, waiting for Wade to tell him it was all an intricate misunderstanding, that somehow he had taken his stupid, misplaced sense of human interaction and flung it between them without so much as a second thought. That maybe this was Wade's own way of actually caring, and Peter just needed to adjust, to perceive their broken momentum in a different light, and let go of all his standards for what love was meant to be.
Love. He didn't want to think of it as that, didn't want to make it that much easier for Wade to hurt him, but it was an undeniable truth. Because at some point in their lost affair, he had fallen hard for Wade, hard enough to leave a bruise.
And Wade's blatant rejection let all that delicate hope, all that weakness, that pitiful emotional instability that mirrored Wade's dysfunctionality, crash and burn and leave him feeling so very raw on the inside. It was ironic, because if felt a lot like how Wade looked on the outside.
Peter was so lost in his thoughts that by the time he looked up again, Wade was already with one foot out the window, mask and all.
"I'm not your toy," he repeated, voice shaking, exhausted with this sudden liberation. Funny how it didn't feel like a victory at all.
"No, you're not." His voice was so even, so cold and unfeeling, it left chills crawling down Peter's spine, left the pit of his stomach burning with a dreadfully languid heat.
Before any more could be said, before he could demand clarification, Wade was gone. Only the cool breeze of the autumn night filling in his room with the scent of fresh rain, the gentle pitter patter a strangely fitting soundtrack to all that had transpired, an indication that he had been here at all.
Peter didn't know what to make of it. Stayed up all night running those three words over and over again through his mind.
Only when the first rays of light shone in through the still open window, and the tranquil buzz of a lawnmower struggling against wet grass filled his senses, did Peter finally close his eyes.