This chapter chronicles the first time Cable tries 'playing nice' on for size. It probably works better than he was expecting!
Well, Cable was wrong. Asking for help from folks you'd been seemingly trying to kill wasn't awkward. It was fucking awkward.
Especially once the guy who suddenly had a tiny set of baby legs instead of his regular, full grown legs started crying. Just because he'd walked in.
Didn't help that the Weasel ratted on him and his half-assed, impromptu attempt at an 'information session' the previous evening. Guy was lucky he still had fingernails. So Cable glared at him to remind him of that wonderful fact.
Spineless dude bowed out pretty quick after that.
The most surprising thing about the entire meeting turned out to have been when Cable'd walked in and no one had been happy to see him —not the surprising part— except the guy on the couch, sporting a pair of child sized legs and crying over his coming for a visit.
Hm.
Aside from that, it really hadn't been that bad. A few disbelieving looks here, a few 'if I ever meet you in a dark alley we both know who's going down' looks there; pretty standard fare overall.
And he'd come out of it with a brand new team to back him up. Or, at least, a new partner he was pretty sure he could count on to help him achieve his objective. Of tracking down Fire Fist and making sure that he never had the chance to take a human life.
One way or another.
As soon as Wade started in on his courteous host's food reserves, mentioning something about that being just the trick to get his legs grown back out, the Woman who'd nearly choked Cable out the day before on the transport, and the young man who topped out at her eyebrows, began the process of duct taping the 'Deadpool' costume back together.
Definitely at least A little annoyed by all the crunching, munching, and ripping tape noises in the small apartment, Cable decided to do the last of his prep out on the porch. Alone.
Comfortably seated on a lopsided pile of cinder blocks, just underneath the eves of the strange house, Cable pulled up any surveillance footage he could get his greedy mitts on. Within minutes he knew exactly where it was the destructive duo had gone after the crash through the freeway, and every stop they'd made after, leading all the way back to where all of this had originally started. For Fire Fist anyway.
The orphanage. For the gifted.
When Cable came out of his 'searching the web with my slightly cybernetic mind fugue', he gave his eyes a rub and focused his weary stare across the street instead of at the cragged concrete a few feet in front of his sorry excuse for a seat.
Scanning the opposite curb, he was startled to find that for once, someone had been watching him while his guard was down.
Pretty disconcerting thought. But at least the creep trying to psych him out with nothing but a constipated glower from the front seat of a ratty old sedan was more of a threat to himself than anyone else. Let alone Cable.
The Weasel lost all nerve after about five seconds of unwavering eye contact and ended up gunning the engine and tearing off down the narrow residential street at approximately one point three times the posted speed limit. Making a rude hand gesture out his missing driver's side window until he skidded around the corner. Where he pushed his clunker even harder when he realized he could still see Cable in his rear view.
The whole thing was laughable. But not so that Cable would actually laugh about it. Not out loud anyway.
...Not more than once. Quietly.
Wasn't ten minutes later that the reddest member of the new 'team' threw the front door open hard enough that it bounced off the peeling outer wall and slammed itself shut again. Right on the guy's face too.
Also only funny enough for one, quiet laugh. But funny all the same.
The group loaded up into the cab Cable hadn't realized belonged to the youngest of them, and Wade, fully decked out in his 'Deadpool' fight suit, pointed forward and yelled, "Alright, Dopinder, you know the way!"
Before his ears stopped ringing, Cable heard the cabbie respond with, "I'm humbled that you have such faith in me, Mr. Pool, but I am afraid I don't yet know where it is you wish me to drive."
"Oh. Right. In that case: Onward, to the X-Complex!"
"That, I can do!" Enthused the driver, less than a moment before the engine engaged and, like the Weasel from earlier, they were speeding down the street and nearly flipping over with the g-force of the hairpin corner turn.
Cable was getting too old for this shit.
After Wade got his pleas for mutant backup rejected by some douche called 'Colossus', the red weirdo spent the next stint of their drive weeping into his mask.
Cable understood the need for the healthy expression of emotions, positive and negative, and so spent that time staring out the window at the steadily worsening scenery zipping by. Their driver happily braking traffic laws as he drove them from the beautiful countryside surrounding the X-Manor to the most hideous part of the past it had yet been Cable's misfortune to-
"Wade, why the hell have you been sobbing for the last twelve and a half goddamn minutes?" Asked Domino from her seat next to Cable in the back of the cab.
"Mind your own 'goddamn' business; can't you see I'm getting psyched up for our upcoming fight?!" Argued the mutant in the front seat.
"By crying?"
"Yes, by crying! You should try it sometime, Dom. It's a great stress reliever!"
"He's right. It does relieve stress." The ensuing silence suggested to Cable that what he'd said was not common knowledge in this ass-backwards excuse for a time period.
The staring got him to offer an explanation. "What? The future's not a happy place."
Why do you encourage him?" Asked Cable as soon as Wade finished up telling their cab driver to stay behind while they fought a couple apocalypse level mutants outside a run-down orphanage.
"Uh, I don't know, Cable. Why do you carry that dirty hobo bear around?" The guy in red parried, managing to catch the man from the future off guard.
"...Because it reminds me that there's good in this world. It belonged to my daughter," Cable explained, a little surprised by his openness.
"Your hobo daughter?" At that bit of insensitivity, Cable made a noise of derision and pulled ahead of the group. All seriousness once again. After all, it was about fucking time he and his extremely capable team of freaks got serious about bringing down two of the most dangerous mutants who'd ever ravaged their planet.
Sometime around when Cable was busy getting his head ground into the cheap, cragged to shit, decades old pavement in front of the orphanage —courtesy, his worst nightmares come to life in the form of the mutant known as the Juggernaut— he noticed a few new players had entered the arena.
A kid with a kusarigama type chain weapon which appeared to be a conduit for some form of self generated electricity, a second kid in a yellow jumpsuit who looked like she had exploding shield powers, and some colossal, shiny, silver dude who better not have been making eyes at his annoying, red, pain in the ass while he pulled that cast iron fence stake out of his stupid, babbling head. Or else.
It wasn't until the only mutant around who was even close to the Juggernaut's size joined the fight that Cable had a second to breathe, and he took full advantage of it by getting himself a lungful and making for the back of the building. Where he thought he heard squeaky, prepubescent threats along with the occasional fire blast causing untold destruction to the ancient, likely privately owned, property.
When he looked to his side, Cable saw that his new partner had also taken advantage of the unexpected, no doubt soon-to-be-dead backup, followed him, and was gearing up to help with the inconvenient arrival of a double handful of armed orderlies.
"You take the ones on the right, I take the ones on the left?" Cable suggested, pistols coming to his hands as they always did when needed.
"Any chance I could borrow one of those?" Cable heard Wade ask as he checked the breeches for live rounds.
Glancing over at the indestructible weirdo in the outfit that hugged his ass even better than his prison jumpsuit had, Cable took a moment to reign in a chuckle before answering. "...I think you'll manage without."
"Right. Guess I'll use this brick then," Wade said as he picked up a brick that was just laying in the middle of the blatantly, unforgivably, non child safe playground.
"Maximum effort," Cable thought he heard, right before the two of them jumped weapons-first into one of the easiest fights in the history of extremely deadly fights.
"Watch out!" Cable felts shouted into his ear as he was pulled under a metal slide and held in a tight, unmistakably protective, embrace which left him both unsinged and thoroughly confused.
One which took him longer than he would have liked it to wrench himself from after the fire and brimstone had dissipated from all around them.
"You sure you can still stop this kid from going dark side? He's trying to roast us," Cable said, hoping none of the cowardly 'fear for his life' he was beginning to feel poked through his well-envied poker face.
"We're still alive, aren't we? Besides, we can't give up on him! He's got goodness in his heart, and if there's good in a heart, there's always hope!"
"I'll fuckin' kill you and your cyborg boyfriend if you try to get in my way again, Wade! You can't stop me!"
Cable gave Wade his best 'told you so' face and re-raised his remaining pistol.
"No, I still have thirty seconds. Let me have them." Cable met the white eye areas of Wade's mask with a harsh, disapproving gaze. Not enjoying the idea of giving Fire Fist more opportunities in which to roast someone, but knowing that he'd given his word on the matter. So he let the weirdo finish his piece. "I can do this. The kid deserves to live."
"Thirty seconds. I'll give you that, but I'm not letting him kill anyone," Cable agree-warned, gesturing minutely with the hand filled with the grip of the only of his pistols that still had ammunition in the chamber. Or still had a chamber, for that matter.
"That's all I ask. Thanks for believing in me, sweet-"
"Clock's ticking," he cut off the guy before he could really get going.
"I'm going, I'm going!" Cable let Wade say before watching the guy in red step out into the open with his hands up.
Watching the attempt at a peace talk from the questionable safety of the underside of the metal slide. Unaware that he was about to fill his new partner's heart with a lead bullet it wasn't going to be able to spit back out.
Doubly unaware the pain the completely unexpected, unintended turn of events was going to cause his own, completely organic ticker.
Uh-Oh. Sounds like more than one person's getting a broken heart today. Too bad one has to be literally. Yikes. Wonder what Cable's gonna do about it in the next part?