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“Y’know what fucking sucks?” Wade asks semi-rhetorically, speaking mostly into one of the stupid throw pillows Colossus likes to keep primly on the sofa in one of the many living rooms of the X Mansion.
“Language, Wade,” Colossus returns without batting an eye, sounding tired. Wade hears a page in his magazine flip and sighs dramatically, shoving his face further into the pillow. Fine. If Colossus won’t give him any attention, then he won’t talk to Colossus.
“Y’know what fucking sucks?” Wade asks semi-rhetorically, after following three steps behind Cable for about five blocks without saying anything at all. Cable sighs like he’s suffering and steps to the side of the busy sidewalk, turning around to glare at Wade.
“The fact that
some people
don’t know when they’re not wanted around?” Cable snaps, and Wade gives an immediate snort to play off the fact that his chest has tightened considerably at the look on the other man’s face.
That tortured, soul-wrenching, desperate stare, like everything is too much and not enough at the same time… Wade knows that stare. He knows that
feeling.
“I’ll stop following you,” Wade says quietly after a second of relative silence, much more subdued than he’d been only moments before. Cable studies him carefully, and then jerks his head in a half-nod like he catches the mutual understanding and strides away.
Wade just… won’t talk to Cable, then.
“Yo, fuckface.” Negasonic Teenage Whatever-the-shit crosses her arms, staring warily down at Wade, who’s sitting on her floor in his civilian clothing.
“Language, Ellie,”
Colossus calls from down the hall, and she rolls her eyes with a scoff Wade knows Colossus won’t be able to hear before she steps fully into her room and shuts the door.
“What’s up with the random house call?” she asks dryly, ignoring Wade and walking past him to her closet. She yanks off the stupid jacket-vest-thing she has to wear —yay for the discount Avengers!— and the shirt underneath, leaving her in just a tank top, before she pulls a dark jean jacket out of the mess of clothes in the closet and pulls it on. “Did you get bored of Colossus’ knitting magazines?”
Wade tries to summon the energy to snipe at her, he really does. “For your information, Little Miss Know It All, Colossus’ knitting magazines are actually incredibly riveting,” he says, but even he can hear the lack of his normal vive in his tone. He looks down at the floor, away from Ellie, and listens as she slowly closes the closet door.
There’s a hesitation. Wade understands. She’s a teenage girl —a punk-ass, rockin’ lesbian with a mean streak and a dirty look that could kill the dead— and Wade is… Wade. A grown-ass man who shouldn’t be sitting in the middle of a teenage girl’s room, picking at the black shag rug in the middle like he doesn’t know what else to do with his hands. But he’s here.
And Ellie, bless her fiery little lesbian heart, doesn’t kick him out right away. “Wade?” she says instead, slowly. Wade glances up through his lashes to see her sink onto her bed. “What’s going on?”
Wade swallows hard, past the lump that’s been blocking his throat for days. “Y’know what really fucking sucks?” he asks, and he doesn’t know why he keeps trying, because nobody in his life
actually
understands. Nobody
wants
to, because he’s Wade Wilson. He’s Deadpool! And Deadpool is quirky and witty and murders people for fun and doesn’t have actual feelings, god fucking forbid.
He’s expecting a snarky answer, because Ellie is Negasonic Teenage Warhead and she’s been full of shit (in the best way possible, Jesus Christ) since the first time she’d showed up in his life attached to Colossus’ hip. Snarky answers are her
thing.
He’s here because he needs to get his snark back, his light, his
fire,
and as stupid as it sounds, bickering with a bitchy teenager might just do the trick.
So yeah, Wade is expecting a fight. What he’s not expecting is for Ellie to sit back with her arms behind her to keep her upright, for Ellie to look at him speculatively, for Ellie to simply say, “What?” like she actually cares about the answer.
And
this
is so fucked up, because why the
fuck
is this kid the only one who’s been able to ask for an answer? Why the
fuck
is Negasonic Teenage Bullshitter the only one who’s bothered to try? It’s stupid and ridiculous and so, so fucked up, but Wade’s head snaps up and he looks at her properly anyways because she sounds
sure
of herself and Wade
wasn’t expecting that,
goddammit!
She arches an eyebrow at him, and Wade feels his own eyes sting. He looks away from her abruptly, gaze landing on a poster of some teenage pop punk star covered in crosses that Wade doesn’t remotely recognise.
“What really fucking sucks,” Wade begins, ignoring the way his voice cracks and threatens to break. He forces himself to continue, as brittle and thin as his voice feels. “Is that even though my body physically can’t get any more fucked up than it is now, my fucking brain didn’t get any of the luck with the whole magic healing mutant powers thing.”
Ellie is silent for a good, long time. Wade spends a second wondering if her powers actually include invisibility, too, and if she’s just slipped from the room without him knowing, because he absolutely refuses to look up at her, and he can’t hear her moving or breathing or anything over the sound of his own blood rushing in his ears.
“You’re depressed,” she states, all at once, like she’s figured something out. Wade isn’t proud of it, but he jumps, startled, when she finally speaks. “You have depression, Wade.”
Wade huffs out a breath that he hopes doesn’t sound as panicked and pained as it feels. “Oh, yeah.” He shoves a hand beneath the collar of his sweatshirt, gripping the back of his neck tightly to try and keep himself grounded in the moment. It doesn’t work as well as it used to— he’s not immune to pain, but he’s definitely got a high fucking tolorance for the stuff. “Depression, and PTSD, and Schizophrenia, and a whole other fucking cocktail of bullshit. And I can guarantee that all the shit Francis did to me didn’t actually do me any good up in the old braincase, which is—“ Fuck, Wade
actually
might start crying on the floor of his teenage sometimes-teammate. How goddamn pathetic could he
be?
“—ah, god. Which is really fucked, y’know? He could’ve at least made it so that
everything
in me healed all superhero-y.”
“Do you talk about this with Colossus?” Ellie asks, and Wade still refuses to look at her. Instead, he casts his gaze back down to her carpet and wishes he’d never wandered in here in the first place.
“Oh, yeah,” Wade says sarcastically, and he’s pretty sure he’s bordering hysteria at this point, but he’s also pretty sure he doesn’t give a shit anymore. He’s already hit pathetic— the bar doesn’t have any lower to go. “The big metal asshole’s
real
understanding when it comes to all the really squishy body parts.”
Ellie lets out a frustrated sigh that Wade can
feel.
She doesn’t say anything, though, so Wade continues to stew in his general angst until he feels a hand brush the one he’s got tangled in the shag beneath him. He jerks his hand away, eyes going wide, body tensing, and looks up to see Ellie looking steadily at him.
It takes too long for Wade to force himself to calm down, and by the time he’s convinced himself that Ellie isn’t a threat, she’s disentangled his fingers from the carpet and forced something into his hand.
“...What is this?” Wade asks, once he can semi-process thought. Ellie sits back on her heels.
“It’s a fidget toy,” she says, and when Wade stares at her blankly, she makes that almost-fond groaning sound that means she’s not
really
annoyed and shakes her head.
“God,
sometimes I forget you’re old.” It’s not enough to make Wade laugh, but his lips twitch in an attempt at a smile, and he doubts Ellie misses it, given that she’s a foot away from him.
She points at the little cube in his hand, so Wade looks down at it. “It’s a stim thing,” she explains. “Stim, like… stimming, like stimulation.”
“I know what stimulation is,” Wade mutters, turning the toy over in his fingers. Ellie promptly ignores him. He can’t really blame her.
She reaches down and pokes at one of the various buttons on the little plastic box. It clicks down the same way a light switch might, and Wade reaches with his thumb to do it again, curious despite himself.
“When you’re feeling depressed, or anxious, or manic, or anything else that goes on in that fucked up head of yours, you use this. Hold it, click things, there’s—“ She turns it in Wade’s hand, pointing. “—this, which rolls, and these, which… kinda click and roll, like weird gears or something? I don’t know.” She pulls her hand away, and Wade notices then and there that she hasn’t actually touched him since she’d put the toy in his hand. It’s… so fucking weird —and fucked up, honestly, the state of the world these days needed some goddamn help, which was why Wade was even parading around in a red clown suit in the first place— but Wade feels
understood
, in a different way than the rushed, panicked understanding that he’d come to with Cable.
The fact that this little toy is a thing Ellie has in her room in the first place is a testament to the fact that she obviously knows
something
about what he’s dealing with.
“I don’t know why it helps,” she continues, oblivious to Wade’s inner monologue. “But sometimes it does? And there’s also, like, therapy and shit.” She sits back on her heels once more and gives Wade a Look™ that might’ve had lesser men running for the hills. “Which you
should
look into. There are a whole bunch of therapists for like, mutants and supers and shit.” She says it casually, but there’s a strange undercurrent to the statement that Wade can’t quite place. “I’m not a therapist, Wade,” she tells him, and
there
, that’s the undercurrent.
“You’ve done this before,” Wade says quietly, and Ellie snorts. This time, it’s Wade who watches her while she looks away, towards that same weird pop star poster Wade had been staring at before.
“No,” she says, and Wade knows she has to be lying, because there’s no way she sounds the way she does without a reason. Unless—
Ellie clears her throat. “Yukio and I found each other when I was in a… very dark place in my life,” she says, and Wade
gets
it, and he wants to slap himself in the face or go back in time two minutes and pull off his own arm and beat himself with it. “It wasn’t pretty, for awhile.” She takes a pause, is quiet for a second, and Wade looks down at the toy. His fingers are already working it, rolling the little silver circle that reminds him of a trackball on an old computer mouse. It’s no miracle cure, but it
does
feel nice to have something like this in his hands.
“We worked through a lot, obviously,” she states, and she sounds like she’s just tugged herself back to the present. “It’s… whatever.” She stands up and then flops onto her bed, wiggling until she’s lying on her stomach, facing him. “Keep that with you. And talk to someone who’s not me, alright, dickwad?” Wade blinks, a rough, startled laugh bubbling thickly from his throat before he even realises he’s amused. Ellie smirks. Wade likes that smirk. It means the kid isn’t as done with his shit as she pretends to be. “Contrary to popular belief, I don’t
actually
hate you, and I’d have to hunt you down and kill you myself if something especially shitty happened.”
For the first time in weeks, Wade can swallow without that fucking lump blocking his throat. He hadn’t felt it disappear, but he notices it now, because he takes a good breath and lets out a laugh that’s real, one that lightens his chest as much as it highlights his now-lumpless throat.
“I’d like to see you try, punk Betty Boop,” Wade snarks easily, and it’s as much of a
thank you
as he can toss at her without getting all fucking teary and gross again. He stands up, clutching the toy tightly in one hand. “I’ll leave you to your sulking or your masturbating or whatever you kids do when you’re alone these days,” he adds, and Ellie makes a disgusted noise and tosses what he’s pretty sure is a teddy bear at him as he makes his exit.
“Gross old bastard!” Ellie yells, and Wade laughs again and shuts her door, cube clicking like a pen against his thumb. That was a teenager
you’re welcome
if he’s ever heard one, alright.