I'm really messing around with what universe this is in. Right now it's some mix of MCU, Earth-TRN414, Earth-616, The Amazing Spider-Man, and whatever else is sloshing around in my brain.

This chapter's a little boring, but it finally gets the ball rolling! Hell yeah! Here comes the plot!

Chapter summary: Peter does some research and agrees to a date.

Chapter Three: PokéDates

Peter had wound up dropping the confiscated gun off at one of the local police departments, webbing it to a piece of paper that he scrawled a note on. Said note read that it was an illegally obtained firearm. (Now, whether or not that was true, he had no idea. But honestly, with how easy it was for anyone to get their hands on a weapon like this, it was most likely obtained over the internet or at a shop.) Then he'd knocked on the window and swung away.

Over the next few days, it was hard to get his mind off of Deadpool whenever he thought about or opened Pokémon Go. He just couldn't separate the two anymore. It was not really something he wanted to let his mind settle on for long. He wound up caving in and Googling information on the Merc, hoping to ease his thoughts with some backstory. If he could just stopwondering what the other man had been through, maybe he could get his brain to move past this apparent roadblock.

It turned out that there was a disturbing amount of facts about the mercenary, and it made Peter's skin crawl with unease. (What if someone had been logging this much on Spider-Man?) He'd found a superhero Wikipedia branch-off, and he couldn't stop from questioning how anyone had gotten this much info on one person. It wasn't like Deadpool (legal name Wade Winston Wilson) was tight-lipped about himself, but seriously, this was some stalker-level stuff. The guy was Canadian, somehow wound up in the U.S. Special Ops, got a dishonorable discharge, and then settled on being a man for hire. He could be found either through word of mouth or on the Dark Web. This whole article was like a trainwreck, and Peter couldn't stop himself from reading more of it. He'd tried, he really did, but it started driving him up a wall to not know what else there was. Wade had gone through multiple health facilities, became part of a black ops group of Mutants (which included Wolverine - Peter remembered Deadpool mentioning that man a few times), and then… it was like he'd disappeared. There was no record of where he'd been after that. He eventually showed back up again, with a different suit and no team affiliations.

Peter leaned back in his chair, which caused it to tilt and creak loudly, and he stared at his computer screen. He felt like there was something hot and heavy resting in his stomach, and it was making him nauseous. What had Deadpool been through? He felt like the MIA portion of the Wikia was where something really, really bad had happened to the Merc. To try to distract himself, he wound up looking up Spider-Man in the search bar.

It seemed that all of the eerily personal data had been taken from the S.H.I.E.L.D. files that had been dumped online back when the clusterfuck with Hydra infiltrating the highest ranked government facility came to a climax. It actually hadn't been too long before the Sokovia Accords had been the most trending search-slash-hashtag on every social media outlet around the world. Peter remembered that part pretty vividly, because he had been scared out of his wits that he would be roped into something branching off of that mess. It had been the topic of hot debate for a few months. Where would the laws stop, and would they wind up affecting every superhero out there? Jameson had printed several long, angry front-page articles about how such measures should be applied to Spider-Man, and every other 'masked vigilante freak' out there (even though the CEO of the Daily Bugle had shown his support for Captain America throughout, even going so far as to begging the super soldier to sign the Accords). Peter had lost a lot of sleep during those weeks.

Thankfully, no one with an account on the Wikia had figured out Spider-Man's secret identity, and there was mostly just security footage of the arachnid-powered Super, and guesses as to where in New York he lived. Okay, so that much was really worrying, but at least his face remained a complete mystery, even to the now non-existent S.H.I.E.L.D..

That night, Peter stumbled upon a news article that Facebook suggested to him about a Pokémon Go dating website. Before that, he'd been messing around on his phone until he fell asleep. The website appeared to cost money, but only after the second date was successfully put together by the site. Maybe it would serve as a distraction for his mind, give him something else to think about when it came to the game app. Besides, he'd been purposefully off the market for a long time. Maybe meeting up with someone could help him more than he knew… It didn't have to turn into anything serious.

He set up his profile, and his thumb hovered around the "what are you looking for?" option for nearly a minute. Finally, he allowed himself to say both men and women. He turned his phone off, and rolled over onto his side. Then he shoved one arm up under his pillow and finally got comfortable in the fetal position.

The next morning, he rolled himself up, went to the bathroom, got himself a bowl of cereal, groggily ate that, brushed his teeth, showered, and then checked his phone while his hair was drying.

He'd actually completely forgotten about signing up for a dating website until he saw the e-mail that let him know his profile had been approved by an admin and he already had a list of matches. He vaguely regretted the spur-of-the-moment decision from the night before, but it wouldn't hurt to just look at his matches, now would it?

The color drained from his face when he saw the name Wade Wilson as a match who had already green-lit Peter as a date. The photo was one of a very fucked up face with a similarly disfigured hand covering part of it. A baseball cap resting under a pulled-up hood gave just enough shadow to the horror that was this guy's face. Peter dropped his phone.

He was panicking, he was completely panicking. That picture was a now-permanent fixture in the back of his eyes, and his heart was beating a thousand times a minute. There was literally no way that this could be happening. There was over twenty-million people living in the state of New York, and Deadpool was the one to get a match on Peter, who had just had a profile up for a few hours? His hands were trembling.

It might not have been Deadpool, though. 'Wilson' was a common last name, and 'Wade' wasn't exactly unique, either. He picked up his mobile and stared at the photo again. The man looked like he'd been in a fire and had his skin absolutely destroyed in the process. Peter felt sick looking at the profile, but he also felt a little pity. It was unquestionably shitty to judge someone as being ugly just because something obviously horrific happened to them, wasn't it? Even if he did look a bit like Freddy Krueger with a different face structure. His gaze lingered on the man's eyes, and it was obvious that the tight smile on his lips didn't come close to reaching them. Peter wondered if he'd fought with himself over whether or not to join based on the requirement of needing a photograph of himself. He looked like he was forcing himself to even take the picture.

Aunt May would have hit him upside the head if his inner commentary on this guy passed his lips in her presence.

Okay, but seriously, it was statistically impossible for this to be Deadpool. It was just dumb luck alone that it was the same name. ...Right? He went back to the article of Wade Winston Wilson on the superheroes Wikia.

It said Deadpool was married. Someone named Shiklah. How he hadn't seen that before was beyond him, but that at least put his mind at ease. Good. It wasn't Deadpool, then. (He was a little disturbed about finding out that someone had married Deadpool. Were they okay? Did they accidentally stumble up the aisle and slip and fall into the wedding ring? Have a convenient seizure with a pen in their hand and just happened to sign their name on the documents?)

Okay, that was actually really mean, but he felt justified in his opinion. Deadpool was a really shitty human being. But then, maybe his spouse was just as shitty.

After fighting with himself until noon, Peter finally accepted the date. He'd thumbed through the other matches, and he gave up once he saw that there were two blondes and a redheaded girl. All three had left a sour taste in his mouth, and twisted up his intestines with the memories of Gewn Stacy and Mary Jane. He and Wade agreed to meet up on Saturday at a Pokéstop near a Starbucks, and get coffee afterward. Peter checked his wallet to make sure that he could actually afford the over-priced, watered-down excuse for a caffeine source that the chain swore by. He did, but it was going to be his entire week's spending money.

Now he felt sick to his gut again - but this time it was with anxiety. He for-real had a date. And it wasn't with some criminal for once. He had an honest, two-people-meeting-up-to-get-to-know-one-another date.

He texted Aunt May. She'd been hinting pretty strongly that he should put himself back out there for well over six months now. This would make her day. He only realized that he was grinning after he hit send.