Chapter 4 – Moment of Clarity

From the outside looking in, it would be easy to assume that Al had lost her mind a little in her time under Deadpool's care. There were documented cases of prisoners coming to sympathize with their captors. The phenomenon even had its own name in the Manual of Mental Disorders, but this wasn't Stockholm Syndrome and she wasn't any flavor of crazy. She was an old women who had done some bad things in her life. Women and men who did the work she had done didn't often live to be old. They didn't get to stop and think about the red in their ledger and wonder if the black would ever balance it out.

Being Deadpool's prisoner started out terrifying and painful, with regular visits to the original box, a maze of sharp surfaces and dangerous traps. Over time she stopped trying so hard to escape and she got to know the maniac sharing her space. Wade Wilson wasn't a good man, he was too broken for that. He lived by his own code and he would do almost anything. But he didn't hurt people that didn't to his mind deserve it, and he only killed people that crossed certain Deadpool-specific lines (or that he got paid a lot for). Sometimes that line was as simple as working for the wrong person, but it made sense to him. It held him back from becoming truly monstrous.

Keeping her here, alive but still punished for what she'd done, seemed to satisfy something in him. On some strange level they had become friends and the darkly dangerous times spread farther and farther apart until Al had decided that helping Deadpool not be the monster he could be was meant to be her golden years project. Some retired people took up gardening or joined a bridge club. Al became Deadpool's prisoner and family and friend. She became a buffer that helped keep him more sane.

What he was doing to Peter Parker fell so far out of character, that Al didn't know what to do. Wade Wilson did not hurt children, even the ones that to his mind kind of deserved it. He most definitely didn't torture them. Every day he took Peter to the training box he'd built and came back with an unconscious bloody mess. She couldn't see the wounds, but she could smell the coppery horror and she could hear the silence. Peter was getting quieter and quieter, almost like a ghost of the kid who fixed her television and smarted off to his captor despite her repeated warnings that Deadpool could be dangerously unpredictable.

The kid healed fast, not quite Deadpool fast, but it was still impressive. Survival wasn't all about physical wounds and Al knew she had to intervene somehow. She had come at the problem obliquely, pushing Deadpool to try and get him to talk to her, to change gears, to just stop, but tonight when the pattern repeated, Al resigned herself to changing gears herself and doing what she had warned Peter would be a mistake.

"What is your problem, Deadpool? Are you trying to break the kid? What did this scrawny little teenager do to deserve this?" Resolutely swallowing her fear, Al crossed her arms over her chest and did her best Jimminy Cricket impersonation. "In the years we've known one another, torturing children never came up. Were you just waiting for the right opportunity? I mean torturing random hydra agents that cross your path, fine. Did I say anything about what you did to the telemarketer that kept calling at all hours? But a kid?"

"I'm not torturing the kid. I'm preparing him." He brushed past her, making the noises of their life together, rummaging in the fridge for a beer, scraping the chair back over the linoleum and popping open the can with a hissing fizz. "Enhanced kid like that is going to be a commodity, and he is going to get picked up eventually. If he goes in all herbivorous without any sharp teeth, he won't survive long. He didn't when I knew him."

You could have knocked her over with a feather Al was so surprised at the calm response. Neither gleeful and manic or dark and brooding, this was the very rarely seen calm and cognizant Deadpool. She had had a conversation with him only once before that had hit this tone and it hadn't lasted long. He almost never wanted to discuss anything real, like the time travel that stranded him in the seventies but Al felt that he might want to right now if she just said the right thing. "So you knew Peter in the future, for real? This isn't torture it's altruism? Just so we're clear, I don't think the kid is going to see it that way."

"You get stranded that far in the past, I sort of thought I'd be long dead before catching back up to time, to things that I knew were going to happen. Fucking healing factor." He took a long slow drink, crushed the empty can, and tossed it into the corner. He popped another can open without missing a beat. "The plan was not to kidnap the bunny rabbit. I was stalking him to find the Shop because I knew he would be picked up soon. Hunting down every scientist that contributed to that horror show was my favorite hobby in my time and getting a chance to kill them all again, it just seemed like something fun to do."

"Man has got to have a hobby." Al didn't try to quibble with Wade over the ethics of killing people who hadn't committed the sins he hated them for yet. "If kidnapping Peter wasn't the plan, why is he here?"

"I never was completely sure if Stark needed killing, not in the future and not now. He signed the fucking Sokovia Accords and doesn't that just say everything? I should just kill him for that and be done with it." Wade drained his current beer and popped open another.

Why Stark's innocence or guilt mattered enough for Deadpool to scrap plan A and kidnap Peter was a mystery that maybe he felt like sharing tonight? It wasn't like he needed a good excuse to kill the man if he felt like it. Wade had killed men and women for downright silly, superfluous things before. As a war profiteer, Tony Stark was responsible for more human suffering than most. Granted, he'd cleaned his act up recently.

Maybe it was because the scientists of the Shop were a specially hated group for Deadpool? Those men and women had literally stripped away his humanity, modifying his body and damaging his mind until all that remained was a simple deadly and dangerous creature that barely bore any resemblance to whomever he had been before? Deadpool had described his treatments there in gory detail at various times during her confinement. "How does taking Peter help you figure out Stark's complicity?"

"I thought I'd be able to tell when I left my ultimatum, but he either really doesn't know about the Shop, or he is a fucking good actor. So I set him the job of finding the Shop for me since I'd kidnapped Peter before the goon squad could. They've already got big green. Stark can take care of the imprisoned when he finds them, and I'll kill the assholes that set it up." Deadpool sucked down the rest of his six pack and went to the fridge for another.

"So, are we pretending that your healing factor is going to let you get drunk today?" Al asked. "Seems a waste of good beer."

"As if I ever wasted money on good beer. This is terrible beer and I added a little something so, yeah, I'll be getting drunk today, don't you worry." Wade stumbled a step on his way back to the table.

The last time he added a little something to his beer, he had poisoned himself into a three day coma, but Al didn't try to stop him. "If you've decided not to kill Stark and have a plan to deal with the Shop, why not return Peter now?"

"Cause he's too soft. I watched the Shop skin the bunny rabbit alive and I want him to fucking bite the fingers off the next asshole that tries something like that on him. Once he learns how to bite, I'll cut him loose."

Al was so focused on Deadpool that she almost missed Peter moving quietly into the kitchen. "Are you really from the future?" Peter asked. "You keep insinuating that you are, that you knew me, but how is that possible?"

"And the kid wats to talk quantum physics." Deadpool waved him over to the table and pulled a black marker out of his belt. "I dropped out of school so I can't show you the math that makes it all work, but in a nutshell you had Cable (asshole I was trying to kill for a contract)." Deadpool drew a stick man with a frowning face and a big gun right on the table top. "He had a quantum gravity device that he was planning to travel to the past with. I had just started burying my favorite katana in his overly muscled chest when the device sent him to the past and drug me down a fucking rabbit hole to the seventies. Bell bottoms, BeeGees, it was Hell, but I didn't have a way forward except to live it." Deadpool drew a relatively nice rendition of himself with an Afro and bell bottoms.

"And you knew me from this Shop? You said they skinned me alive. Who are they? Why would they do that?" Peter asked.

"They were building soldiers, very patriotic really. You weren't human to them so to their mind you weren't even collateral damage, just a failed test subject. They burned you in the furnace, with the other laboratory waste." Deadpool offered Peter one of his beers. "It's got a little extra poison in it, but you have enough healing factor to survive one or two and it will stimulate your healing factor to pay attention to poisons. Drink it, go on."

Peter accepted the can of Wild Blue, blueberry lager, and took a slow sip of the foul tasting liquid. What would Mr. Stark say to him sitting at a table and drinking a beverage that he knew was poisoned with his kidnapper? What would May say? "Why is your beer poisoned?" Peter asked.

"Your baby healing factor will be able to protect you from one or two cans of my special beers. My healing factor is so good at protecting me from poison that if I don't add something good and deadly to the brew I can't even get a buzz. Alcohol is poison you know. Just poison." Deadpool downed two more beers in rapid succession, then struggled to get the next one open.

"I think you may have had enough," Al said.

"Yer not the bossa me," Deadpool slurred before falling out of his chair.

Peter set his hardly touched beverage on the table and scrubbed at his lips that had become numb with just a couple of sips. "Are you awake? Hello?" He crouched next to Deadpool and considered trying to steal the technology on his belt to either escape his cuffs or even generate one of those instant exit portals that the mercenary used to get around. Before he could decide what to attempt, one of Deadpool's hands shot out, grabbed Peter by the back of the neck and pulled him close. Like a human-sized teddy bear he tucked Peter under his arm, pinning him in place. "In the Shop, you were a right good bro to me, talked to me when they had pulled me apart. I tried to talk to you when they pulled you apart but you were gone. Gone gone gone. Bunny rabbits don't survive, but we'll fix you."

Peter tried to squirm out of Deadpool's iron grip but he just held on tighter the harder Peter fought. "I can't breathe. Let go."

"Peter relax," Al said. "You relax and he'll relax. When he passes all the way out you slip free and get away from him. Semiconscious Deadpool is extremely dangerous. He's a ball of instincts and his go to is disembowel."

Making himself take slow, shallow breaths, Peter stopped fighting. It took a few long moments but Deadpool's grip slowly relaxed and Peter was able to take a proper breath again. He waited until soft snores were just audible from under Deadpool's mask, then Peter slipped carefully away from him.

Pulling his chair as far away from the snoring madman as the kitchen would allow, Peter sat with his knees pulled up to his chin. "Was all that true that he said? Is he really from the future? Did he really watch me die in some Mengele-style horror-hospital?"

"Probably? Mostly?" Al sighed. "It might all be a delusion, but I think it's the truth as he remembers it."

"I'm supposed to be in chemistry camp and physics camp this summer. I'm supposed to be learning the math that would explain things like quantum gravity." Peter realized that he was shaking and bit his fist to make himself stop. "I think the best way out of here is to show Deadpool that I'm not a bunny rabbit." He looked at Al, and nodded though she couldn't see the gesture. "I'm really not a bunny rabbit. I've done things. I had a fight, mid-plane crash at like ten thousand feet on the outside of the plane. I walked away and I got the bad guy. I fought Captain America and didn't embarrass myself. Not a bunny rabbit."

"I think that's a good plan, kid. Let me get you some food and then you can get some sleep. Things won't feel so overwhelming in the morning. Yeah?"


It wasn't a lucky satellite scan that produced the first clue on Bruce Banner's location. Tony was elbow deep in the mainframe, tweaking the security protocols to try and trap Deadpool the next time he made the mistake of popping into the Avengers' facility when he found the breach. The program running in the background was well made, subtle. It was efficiently recording his every keystroke and one file at a time, copying his mainframe. Careful not to disrupt the program and alert its owner that it had been discovered, Tony started isolating the program from the truly sensitive areas of the system.

With finesse and skill he backtracked the program's thefts and the loss was staggering. It had successfully downloaded security protocols and hundreds of documents. Most damning, it had secured documents detailing the experiments they had performed on Bruce and his big green alter ego. Containment protocols and cocktails of drugs to best control him and his transformation.

This type of breach wasn't possible from an external computer. Someone had to walk in the building and install this sinister little piece of spyware. "F.R.I.D.A.Y. do you see what I see? How did that avoid your notice?"

"My apologies, boss. It has to have been brought in under the firewalls and it was placed in my blind spot. Would you like me to scrub it?"

"No, no, we need to follow it to its leader. I think we may have the first sign of that dirty house Deadpool was ranting about. There is a mole in this building. I want to know who. F.R.I.D.A.Y. are you in the mood for a scavenger hunt?"

"Always boss."