Awesome Plan Step Two: dupe more feebs.

warnings: lightly referenced het. slash. mild violence. reference to torture and human experimentation. reference to character death. Earth-339 (think of it as 'the Waking Man universe'). spoilers, i guess...for Messiah War. language: pg-13 (primetime tv plus s*** and f***).

pairing: Nate/Wade, Stryfe/Wade. reference to Laura/Julian (because Laura deserves some lovin' and Sofia is a hideous goddamn mary-sue).

timeline: 3922, a day and a half after Nate and Hope arrive in Earth-339.

disclaimer: marvel owns Cable & Deadpool, disney owns marvel.

notes: 1) Wade WM339 was an X-Man sometime in the 21st century. eat it, Marvel. XD 2) i couldn't resist the Crazy Earl line. best line in Borderlands (next to 'sweet jesus titty cinnamon' *rofl*). 3) how many video game lines can i squeeze in? i blame the fact that the feebs weren't giving Wade any good song lyrics to reference.

p.s. OHCRAP, i just now realized i skipped this chapter when i posted the fic to ! uh...well, it's here now. *sheepish*

Greenie

Wade has to use every trick he knows to herd Neena's crew in the right direction.

Fortunately, Nate was too tired and too distraught to go far from his original camp after Wade swiped Hope—that makes things a little easier.

Eventually, after several hours' work, Neena and her buddies duck around a building and practically trip over Nate. Wade gives them a little time to find better shelter and come to grips with their situation before he drops in on them.

Of course, the moment he does, Logan puts three claws through his head.

"Stop that, I'm ticklish," he says brightly. "Is this how you greet all your fellow X-Men, or am I just special?"

"You ain't and never were an X-Man," Logan growls.

"Au contraire," Wade counters, and just jerks his head backward to free himself from Logan's claws. "Go home and give it five to ten years."

"Wade, what are you doing here?" Neena demands.

He blinks at her. "Finding you before any bandits do?"

"No, I mean…how did you get here?"

He gestures vaguely. "I walked. By the way, I saw Tall-Armored-and-Evil carrying off the cute little redhead earlier. I said to myself, 'Wade, when did Stryfe ever have a thing for little girls?' and my little yellow boxes replied, 'Only when you wear the schoolgirl skirt.' And then I figured he must have figured she's important."

"Stryfe has Hope?" Nate yelps, trying to stand.

"Cool it, honeybunch," Wade says flatly. "You're in no fit state to do jack monkey squat about it. Yeah, the boss-man has the messianic munchkin. I'm pretty sure he doesn't know who she is, so she's probably safe-ish for a little bit. Definitely long enough for you to stop bleeding everywhere. Then we can just split up, half of us can draw fire while the other half sneak in and get Hope back. Piece of cake."

"Yeah, we buy that," Logan scoffs.

"Why not? Because the cake is a lie? I swear the princess isn't in another castle, Mario."

"Wilson, I wouldn't trust you as far as an infant could throw you."

Fair enough, all things considered. Wade shrugs and drops into a crouch at Nate's side. "That's a shame, since I know where she is, I know Stryfe's patrol schedules, and I have top security clearance."

Laura starts forward. "How the hell do you have that kind of information?"

Nate huffs a laugh. "Didn't you hear earlier? He called Stryfe 'boss-man.' Obviously, he's been working for Stryfe."

Wade grins. "Goin' on five hundred and…uh…" He frowns, digs Eight-ball out of its pouch. "Hey, Eight-ball, how long have I been working for that megalomaniacal piece of shit?"

~Five hundred and sixty-three years.~

"There ya have it," Wade says, gesturing to the crystal ball.

"What the hell year is this?" the tattoo-faced temporarily-enslaved bad guy squawks.

"Thirty-nine-twenty-two."

"Why?" Neena asks. She's making her 'I'm not sure just how misguided you are yet' frown (which is just a teeny bit insulting, because up to this point, she's always reserved that frown for Nate).

"Because the earth's gone around the sun that many times since Jesus was born?" Wade tries, without much hope. Neena is almost as good at seeing through his feigned ignorance as Nate is.

"Don't play dumb with me, Wade."

"But dumb is my favorite game—I'm good at it."

"You know damn well what I meant. Why work for Stryfe? And why for that long?"

Wade finds himself staring at Nate. He glances away, shrugs a bit. "Eh, the Dark Side has cookies."

"Wade!"

"Whaaat? It's true!" He tosses Eight-ball idly between his hands. "Stryfe's fortress has at least a dozen food synthesizers, and they all know how to make Double Stuf Oreos. But now that you're here, we can save Hope and depose the tyrant, and then I can have the cookies all to myself."

The ones who've met him before seem to go for that, and the ones who haven't seem a little worried.

Only Nate keeps looking at Wade with something between suspicion and knowing. That's okay; it's Nate, after all. If anybody could tell when Wade is hiding sappiness behind selfishness, it would be Nate.

He gets them to let Nate rest for the night. He watches Nate sleep (and it's admittedly creepy just how much he's missed doing that). It turns out that his memories of Nate are perfect—he hasn't forgotten a single thing. From the tone of his breathing to the exact length of his eyelashes, everything is the way he remembers it.

To his surprise, Laura warily approaches him just before dawn. She crouches a few meters away, mask off to show green eyes, pale and pretty in the dimness, and god she looks so young.

She was pushing eighty the last time he saw her, didn't look a day over twenty-five. Don't listen to them, she insisted, her grip strong enough to crack his bones even as she lay dying. Don't let them tell you it was your fault, because it wasn't. Not this, not the Big One, not Nathan.

"Look, Deadpool," she says. "You don't know me—"

"You don't know me," he corrects. "Yet. But I know you, Laura. And I kinda expected you to hate me as much as Logan does at this point. I guess it's not genetic, then."

She just watches him for a while. "You don't fool me with that crap about cookies. You did it because Stryfe looks like Nathan, didn't you?"

And smells like him, and sounds like him, and smiles like him, and frowns like him… He snorts. "You landed that Julian kid yet?"

"We're talking about you, not me."

He looks at Nate, wonders how long it's been since the big dork shaved. "Well, you will. And you're pretty much guaranteed to outlive him. And when you do, you'll understand."

"It's just…if that's what buys your loyalty, then how can we be sure you're really helping us?"

After thinking it over for a bit, he grins at her. "You haven't met Hope. Sure, I love Nate…but if it came down to it, I'd shoot him in the head to save her. I'd be real sorry about it, but I'd do it. You'll understand that when you have your first kid."

She frowns. "But she isn't important to this time—why do you care so much about her?"

"Because, almost two thousand years ago, I raised her. I may not've had anything to do with bringing her into the world, but she is my baby, and I'll be damned if I'm gonna let that holier-than-thou asshole Bishop harm one hair on her precious little head. Like I said, you'll understand when you have kids."

She seems to accept that. At length, she cocks her head to one side. "What was that talking globe you had earlier?"

"Eight-ball? It's a timeline resonance extrapolator. With a smart mouth and a bad sense of humor, but what can you expect from something made by Weasel and a bunch of other crazy geniuses? At least it works as advertised, which isn't really something I've come to expect from Richards. I guess Stark's awesomeness saved the day. It usually does—y'know, for everybody but him. I've noticed that trend with martyrs." He aims a mild glare at Nate's sleeping form.

She frowns again (this may just be the default facial expression of people with a certain amount of Logan's DNA, because Laura frowns a lot, and any time that Wade can remember Daken not smirking, it was because he was frowning). "Timeline…"

"Resonance extrapolator."

"That's some kind of computer?"

He realizes he's already told her too much. "Uh. Yeah, some kind. Just think of it as my Magic Eight-ball. I ask it questions, it gives me answers. Sometimes, I even understand them."

That makes her smile. "Quite a feat, from the way the others talk about you."

"I'll let ya in on a little secret," Wade says, eyeing Jimmy and bird-boy, who are on watch ten yards off.

Laura inches closer (even though she probably could have heard him just as well if she were sitting on Jimmy's shoulders).

"These days, I'm not as dumb or crazy as I used to be. My brain works just fine—better than fine. I ain't sayin' I'm a genius or nothin'…but just trust me a little. I know what I'm doin', Greenie."

For a few seconds, Laura just looks at him, still as a predator waiting for its prey to make the wrong move. Then she shrugs. "Well, you don't smell like you're lying this time. I suppose there's really no more reason to distrust you than anyone else."

Slowly, so that she doesn't claw his arm off, Wade pokes her on the nose. "Exactly."

In the east, the haze has turned from blue-black to reddish.

"Let's get everyone up so we can eat something before we set out," Laura suggests, and gracefully unwinds from her crouched position.

"Hold up—how much time d'you guys have before those chronometric displacement bands run out of juice?"

Her gaze locks on him sharply, and he sees a tiny twitch of her eyebrow. "How do you know what they are?"

He rolls his eyes. "It's the fortieth century, kid—chronometric displacement is child's play compared to timesliding. How long have you got?"

She glances at the armband. "A little under ten hours. Is it far?"

He shakes his head. "Not really, but the going's rough, especially until the light gets brighter…and we're still in no-man's-land right now, where bandits and rebels and Stryfe's people all range. For you guys? Four hours in good light; longer if we don't wait and somebody trips and breaks a leg."

"And how long would we need to wait?" she counters impatiently.

"I give it maybe three or four. Sorry, but your friends stay broken when they fall off ledges or get ambushed by bandits."

Slowly—very slowly—she backs away from him. "There's something you're not telling me. I don't know what you're trying to accomplish…whether you're intentionally delaying us…buying favor with Stryfe to protect Hope, maybe… Just remember that there will be twelve claws waiting for you if you fuck us over."

Ah, there's the Laura he remembers. Meaner than Logan, when she wants to be, especially to strangers. He grins and draws an X over his heart. "Not fuckin' ya over, Greenie. Cross my heart and hope t' cry."

Still slowly, always with her eyes on him, she backs toward Jimmy.

"How long've you been awake?" Wade murmurs, chewing on a fingernail.

"You don't know?" Nate asks. He sits up, wincing and holding his right side.

"Was payin' attention to Laura. The better to know when I'm about to get a pair of claws in my face."

"What's the real reason you don't want us setting out for another four hours?"

Wade has been playing in the wastes long enough to know every faction's patrol schedules like the back of his hand. On his own, he could slip through in under two hours. Between Nate's injuries and the whiny ex-villain-guy, they'll have to take the broadest corridor of safety possible. That means waiting for the highest rads. No native with half a brain would be outside between ten and two—a week of that would probably bake off every inch of a guy's skin, with the state of the atmosphere these days. Wade figures just once won't do anything irreparable to Nate's happy parade of mouseketeers.

Nate stares at him.

"It's the best time," Wade says. "High sun means we can see traps and pitfalls. Stepping on a pulse mine would put a real damper on the whole 'hey, let's rescue Hope' thing, and the light these days is less than ideal, thanks to Skywalker's warmongering. This is the…third nuclear winter we've had, I think. The nearest big boom went down way south of here, that's the only reason we have daylight at all, and why we aren't ass-deep in ash."

"I appreciate the concern, Wade, but she was right; we're pressed for time. I don't want Hope in Stryfe's hands any longer than absolutely necessary."

Wade laughs. "Nate, I don't think you get it. Hope is way safer than we are. Almost everyone out here with us will shoot first and ask questions if anybody's left alive. Stryfe isn't likely to kill her, especially since he knows she's leverage against you."

"And how do you know that? Your 'magic eight-ball'?"

"Yup. I know it's against your nature, but don't do anything dumb, Nate. Just trust me."

For a long time, Nate just watches him in blank-faced silence. "Okay," Nate says at last.

.End.