warnings: past slash. talking computers. post-apocalyptic junk. Earth-339 (think of it as 'the Waking Man universe'). spoilers, i guess...for Messiah War. language: g (lol, really?).

pairing: implied past Nate/Wade.

timeline: starts in 3922, after Nate & Hope leave in So Long. ends in 3942, when teen!Hope arrives on the scene (from the Nightmares sequence).

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

notes: 1) sorry, this chapter started out with the express purpose of exposition, and then i got carried away with tangents, and then i cut half of it out and tried again... *SIGH* it meanders a bit, but i think it serves to get us to future!Wade's happy ending while still giving the expository bits i needed. 2) so now you've gotten the Elementary School version of what Eight-ball really is, and your first introduction to the Fate Network. if you think you're lost now, just wait until Eight-ball starts getting past!Wade (present!Wade?) in trouble.

F-473 and the Nature of Coincidences

When Nate and his Hope-rescuing cohorts are gone, Wade pulls Eight-ball out again. "So. Got a better idea of when Hope'll be getting back?"

~Extrapolation in progress…~

While he waits, Wade starts hiking in the direction of the nearest rebel camp.

~A locus has formed. Subject designate Hope Wilson WM339 will arrive in the current timeline on the afternoon of March eighteenth, in the year 3942.~

"Earlier than she was aiming."

~The death of Stryfe and the timestream anomaly associated with the assignment of Nathan Dayspring Gamma created a minor vacuum which affected any timeslides in this branch. The Quartermaster accounted for the vacuum when providing telemetry information to the timeslide module of subject designate Nathan Dayspring WM339-Gamma.~

"Good, good."

He walks at a leisurely pace, stays in plain sight.

A rebel patrol finds him just before sundown. They fire a couple of warning shots at his feet, so he stops and holds his hands up.

"Dadva! Allek sadna'we Stryfe?"

Ah, Ak'virri.

"Nope," he calls. "Herald of Dayspring. Maybe you've heard of me? I just killed Stryfe."

Big eyes, hushed arguing.

And then the bowing and scraping.

Wade grins. "Back with my peeps. It's good to be the Herald."

It's surprisingly easy, after that, to talk the clan leader into meeting with other rebel groups. After they hear that he killed Stryfe and took over the fortress, everybody seems to want to line up to pay tribute. At that point, he hardly even needs to ask to get them all to relocate to Stryfe's fortress and its environs (plentifully stocked food synthesizers and water purification services probably have a lot to do with it).

Mostly, he lets the tribes keep ruling themselves. Every once in a while, he's asked to preside over some ceremony or other, or to tell stories about Nate and the World-Before, or to sort out some inter-tribal argument. Big whoop.

One day, soon after the tribes have settled in, when people are still showing up from farther reaches of the continent (and in all stages of prolonged rad exposure), Wade goes to the armory. He's poking around for ideas of how to distribute weaponry to the patrols without giving people enough toys to start randomly killing each other (because their numbers really aren't in good enough shape for infighting).

~Wade Wilson, we have not been entirely forthcoming,~ Q suddenly says, and it shouldn't be possible for a fairly toneless artificial voice to sound so sheepish.

Wade scoffs. "I figured that part out when you said you were an expert at making 'evasive responses.'"

~We said that the device we gave you could be called a 'timeline resonance extrapolator.'~

"Because that's something it could be used for?" he guesses.

~Indeed.~

"And what is it, really?"

~It is a node of F-473, a large, stream-spanning neural network.~

"Leet fate. I hate it already. 'Stream' as in 'timestream'?"

~Yes.~

"How 'large' are we talking?"

~To date, the network comprises two-hundred and fifty such auxiliary nodes. At a location unknown even to us, the central processing core maintains the timestream database while the nodes calculate, observe, and return findings to it. We were given the blueprint for the node by a keeper of another node nearly a millennium ago, and have needed all this time to gather the materials for manufacturing it. It has served a purpose, but must now be transported to a time in which it can serve further purpose. When we were given the blueprint, we were also given a timestream destination for the node—we require now that you deactivate and hold forth the node.~

Wade frowns. "Hold up, Q. What exactly does this neural network do? Does it engineer futures? Does it…I dunno, use the timestream branches to draw pictures?"

Silence for a moment. At length, Q speaks again. ~It identifies itself as an entity of timestream maintenance. It ensures the continuity of the timestream to some degree. We assume this means that it 'prunes' unnecessary branches by steering them toward probability loci and steers branches away from such events as the destruction of planet earth.~

Wade points a finger at the ceiling. "You 'assume'… You do remember that three of you were on the morally questionable side of a superhero civil war, right?"

~From our own calculations, all timestream branches in which subject designations of Hope Wilson possess the timeline maintenance node lead to her becoming a despotic tyrant not unlike Stryfe. In a phenomenon known as delayed-echo-absorption, the timeline branch would morph into one almost identical to the home timeline of the Prime, Alpha, Delta, and Kappa iterations of Lucas Bishop.~

"Ew. Evil Hope plus mutant slavery not good."

~Agreed.~

"Okay, let's go ahead and…" He pauses in digging it out. "…and send it…back…?"

He remembers.

It had managed to slip his mind in the panic and pain after Hope's departure, obscured by feelings he had shied from and intentionally avoided remembering, but when he really thinks about it, his perfectly functioning brain remembers it with the same crystal clarity as everything else.

Having Eight-ball—a fully-functional Fate Node—at the time was the only way he'd saved anyone from the Big One. It was how they'd known where the first flashes were going to go off. It was how they'd known where they'd be safe. It was how they'd known who they could and couldn't save, how they'd known their geniuses were starting to vanish, how they'd known there was worse coming.

It was how they'd known they needed to send Hope forward, and how far.

A resonant misalignment, the thing said. Interference from Bishop put an almost-two-thousand-year gap in the intended timeline. Her destiny was no longer in the twenty-first century, but the fortieth.

And his brain hadn't been quite right yet, when it first arrived, and it had led things and people to him that had fixed him.

"I just happened to get it in time to fix my brain and save the world, right?" Wade mutters.

~Let us not ruminate overlong upon the nature of coincidences, Wade Wilson. It is, perhaps, a subject best left alone by mortal minds.~

He holds it out.

"Send it back," he says hoarsely. "Now."

~Initiating timeslide.~

And Eight-ball vanishes from his outstretched palm.

Wade heaves a sigh.

Things are better now, he reminds himself. They were really bad for a while, but they got better, and they would have been worse without Eight-ball, shady and questionable as the thing's origins (and intentions?) might be.

The thought crosses his mind again that he'll have to tell Hope about Nate—but no. No, she must've known what would happen all along. She knew that Nate wouldn't still be around in thirty-nine-whenever, because his control chip was fried and she'd taken the only good telemetry chip they had (the one Q had made, Wade realizes).

All at once, it hurts. It hurts worse than the day Nate died (because Wade couldn't accept it back then, insisted that Nate had managed to timeslide out, that the busted old telemetry circuit would only let him go forward and he was just lost for a little while).

He sits in the middle of the floor, ducks his head, cries.

She was smarter than he was—than he is. She'd known all along. Brave girl.

Timesliding doesn't work right on Wade, never has, and their cobbled-together sliding module barely had power to take one stringy teenager for one jump.

She'd known she was leaving her parents, that she certainly wouldn't see one of them again and quite possibly wouldn't see the other.

Wade allows himself a moment more for grief and shame and humility. Then he clears his throat and wipes his eyes and gets back to work.

He abuses his powers just a bit to declare a holiday on the day Hope is set to arrive, and he takes an honor guard out to her landing point.

And then, in a swirl of light, she's there. Just a beanpole of a girl whose sleeves are always a little short, red hair cut pixie-style, like Rachel's. Nate's old plasma pistol looks huge in her scrawny hands. When she sees that she's among friends, she practically flings it away and runs to him.

"Daddy!" she cries, and squeezes him so tight he feels a rib crack.

He smiles. "Welcome home, princess."

"I was so worried about you… It must have been so hard, waiting all by yourself for so long."

"Doesn't matter now. Everything's right again."

And it is.

For the first time in more than nineteen centuries, it is.

.End.