Chapter Text
It’s not the rooftops Peter likes; it’s the edge of the rooftops. The local cliché is that no one looks up and like all clichés it’s absolutely true — except for tourists, who are too baffled by the skyline itself to notice a scrap like him crouching or crawling or cartwheeling around near the top. So they don’t count.
Up here, Peter sees people but they don’t see him. He can read their movements like a lioness reading a herd of gazelles, but on the off chance they even notice him, he’s a cipher to them.
The role reversal is addictive, and probably it’s childish to get a thrill out of that, but after nine years as Spider-Man the thrill still hasn’t worn off, and until it does he’s determined to relish it with every part of his tongue. Good to the last drop.
The wind at the top, at the edge, is stronger, and relentless, and unblemished by obstacles. Its white noise is a godsend and Peter’s fairly confident that he wouldn’t be able to get through a full patrol without at least twenty minutes of this — just this — before the real work begins. Not with his sanity intact, anyway. He considers this basic prep work, the unskippable step between crawling out his window and tracking down the first gazelle.
Quiet, outdoor solitude in the middle of Manhattan. Amazing.
Even the birds don’t fly this high. They move between the buildings, not above. He likes to watch their backs pass below him in lazy flocks. Some of the flocks have patterns, territories, preestablished routes, and when those patterns are disrupted there’s always a reason and he can always backtrack to the source. It’s as good as hearing a call-in on a police scanner.
Better, even, because he doesn’t have to carry a police scanner, or wait for some bystander to put in a 911 and for dispatch to gather the information and then pass it on to the police… and then wait for his brain to sort out the location. Maps and street names are all fine and good on paper; they just don’t translate so well into three-dimensional space. Navigation is easy when he’s on the move, but if he has to think about where he’s going beforehand, then he has to go on thinking about it for an embarrassingly long time before it clicks.
And by then, two times out of three he reaches the scene too late.
So Spider-Man watches the birds instead.
Flock Six rounds the building he’s on, counter-clockwise, twice before moving on. Situation normal.
Pigeons are curiously well camouflaged for an urban environment, with all their shades of pavement-grey, and their flashing irridescent heads so close in hue and sparkle to TV screens behind apartment windows. Personal theory: It makes the searingly white seagulls jealous and self-conscious, and that’s why seagulls are so much louder and crankier and more likely to divebomb outdoor café tables to steal french fries, even when people are still sitting at the table.
Sparrows are quieter and less useful for crimefighting, but that’s only because they’re harder to tell apart, and harder to see from a distance. A sparrow isn’t an entity so much as a series of twitches, and when they do group flight they always look like they’re panicking. If they have readable patterns like the other birds, Peter has yet to pick up on them.
Peter would be a sparrow, he thinks. Maybe a house sparrow, or a chipping sparrow at a stretch. Spider-Man, conversely, definitely a bird of prey. He flips through his mental catalog of raptor species to try and find a good fit.
The wind is at his back and for once he smells Deadpool before hearing him. Peter pulls his mask back down to filter the air — Deadpool is not the nicest smell, although Peter’s willing to give him a bonus point or two for at least smelling like something organic.
Roadkill, Peter thinks, is also organic.
His fingers keep twitching at the hem of his mask, tap-tapping at his throat, tug-tugging at the fabric. “Hey,” says Peter.
“Aww, you heard me? But I was all full-stealth ninja mode! I was totally gonna get the drop on you this time and I had this fuckin’ sexy-ass victory dance all planned out and everything! …I could show you anyway if you want, but without an actual victory it might fall kinda flat. I’m more of a method actor.” His footsteps come closer. “How the hell d’you even do that anyway? You cheated, didn’t you. You’re a fuckin’ cheater! Not all of us have sensey-Spidey-vibrators or whatever the fuck it is you call ‘em. ’S no fair. Some of us actually have to try!”
“I don’t need my Spidey-sense to smell you from a mile away.”
“So, what, you got like heightened senses or some shit? Like Wolvy or Hornball?”
“His name is Daredevil, and no. You just need to shower more. Or maybe stay downwind once in a while.”
“You shouldn’t have said that. Now I know how to sneak up on you. I thought you were supposed to be smart.”
“You’ll never sneak up on me,” says Peter, flatly. “I have other ways of detecting you.”
“Oh yeah? Like what?”
“Sorry, that’s above your clearance level.”
“Oo, cloak and dagger, I like it. Look out, international man of mystery over here. The name’s Bond… Spider-Bond. Hey, you should totally start wearing a tux on patrol. That’d be hot. Do you even have a tux? I could get you one. But if I do then I wanna be there when you’re in your skivvies at the tailor. Also you have to promise to actually wear it, and let me take pictures. The internet would lose its shit over that. And you could, like, mod your web-shooter thingies to look like a handgun and do all those cool poses.” Deadpool plops down next to him, a good three feet between them, and dangles his feet over the edge, holding up one of his hands like a fake gun and pointing it around at imaginary TV cameras. Arching his back as he twists around in the way that Peter’s learned means he thinks he’s being sexy.
Peter laughs. “Stop posing. You look more like a Charlie’s Angel reject than 007.”
Deadpool grins and looks Peter up and down. “Hey, y’know, that could work, too… You sure as shit got the body for one of those outfits. Though I’m guessing you’d be more into the catsuits from the remake than the original stuff.” He wedges his hands under his thighs and wriggles his body around like a kid who has to pee. “Ohhhh man, oh man, I totally need to see you in a Farrah Fawcett wig now! I think I might actually have one? Remind me to bring it next time. You could rock that shit! It’d look totally natural too!”
“…Did you just say I look like a girl?”
“I said you look hot, but hey, however you wanna work it. Dat ass is too fine for any one gender.”
Peter tilts his head, giving that a moment’s consideration. “I’m quite comfortable with my gender identity,” he decides, “and would rather you leave it alone.”
“You never let me have any fun.” Deadpool crosses his arms and his pout is so exaggerated it looks cartoonish even with the panda-mask obfuscating his face.
And since the start, that’s probably the main reason Peter keeps letting Deadpool try to “get the drop” on him instead of taking his leave every time he hears (or smells) the merc approaching. The guy is a cartoon character, and except when one or both of them is having a Bad Brain Day — the definition of which is considerably different between the two — Peter never has to second-guess the merc’s social cues. For all the noise of him, he still gives Peter fewer stress-headaches than just about anyone else.
Which isn’t to say that being around him is easy, exactly.
Deadpool is definitely a seagull if ever Peter saw one.
But he’s slightly less heartless, or has slightly more brain, because that time he grabbed Peter’s ass (without warning, and on a Bad Brain Day, thank you very much) and sent Peter into an instant, admittedly dramatic, shutdown, fetal position and biting himself and the whole humiliating nine yards… Okay well first of all, it freaked Deadpool out so much that he actually fled, not just the alley but NYC itself, and didn’t show up again for eight months. And second of all, since he’s come back, he’s kept his hands and every other part of him very much to himself and is always so, so careful to keep his distance.
He even spent a few visits systematically testing Peter’s personal bubble by trial and error — carefully, dropping jokes the whole way — until he located its edge. And while Deadpool’s usually right at that edge, bouncing off the two-and-a-half-foot radius like a red rubber ball, he hasn’t breached it once.
Okay well, except that time he bodyslammed Peter into a water tower, but that was to take a bullet meant for Spider-Man. And it was just the once. And it was to take a freaking bullet for him.
Despite the flirting that’s so open and vulgar that Peter’s brain just cannot with that bullshit (but that the Avengers have explained away as “That’s just how he is sometimes, ignore it”), Deadpool’s not pushing it. Peter’s met Spidey fangirls who were a thousand times worse and never even knew how close they came to getting themselves punched or webbed to a streetlamp. (God help him if that ever does happen. Everyone has a camera on their phone and Jameson wouldn’t even have to distort the truth to slander him if he lashes out at a fan.)
It also doesn’t hurt Peter’s opinion of Deadpool that he usually comes bearing food. He’s a seagull who shares. Possibly the only seagull who shares, ever, in the history of the world.
Two crows swoop up, take up opposing positions on the roof across the street, and start yelling at each other.
“So what’re the little birdies saying tonight?” Deadpool asks, struggling at one of his pouches until he yanks free an impressively smooshed paper bag with grease stains leaking through on every side.
“Tweet tweet and caw caw, mostly.”
“Heh. Baby boy’s got jokes. Who knew?”
“I’ll have you know I’m hilarious.”
“Sure sure, Spidey, whatever helps you sleep at night.” Deadpool slaps the battered bag down next to Peter’s leg and starts digging out a second from a different pouch. The second bag is far less smooshed, obviously more care taken with that one, but that’s just pragmatic. Deadpool eats tacos and Peter eats burritos, and tacos — besides being clearly inferior due to their hard shells’ downright offensive texture-clash — aren’t as resilient in transport.
And Deadpool always gets Peter’s order with guac even though it’s extra and Peter never asked for it. It is medically impossible to be ungrateful in the face of that.
As he peels back the foil on the first flattened burrito he hears Flock Two wing down the cross-street behind him, a bit earlier than usual but not so early that it means trouble. Flock Two is his favorite because seven of the pigeons are piebald. He’s secretly named the piebalds after the seven dwarves.
Deadpool shoves his panda-mask up to his nose and his first bite is so enthusiastically aggressive it sends taco-shell shrapnel flying in every direction.
It took a while for Deadpool to get around to doing that — to pull back any part of his costume in front of Spider-Man even though his identity’s no secret — but whatever eventually convinced him to change his mind, the result of the “big reveal” was apparently less climactic than whatever Deadpool was expecting. (Peter just tilted his head at the pock-marked chin a while, said “You haz a texture,” and calmly ate his burrito-with-guac while Deadpool stared at him like he was a moron. It was a very familiar sort of stare, and it stopped fazing Peter years ago.)
Peter scrapes leaked bean juice from his own chin with the back of a wrist. His stubble’s long enough that he can feel it catch and drag against the fabric on his arm, surprising him. He pauses and counts the days backwards until he realizes he hasn’t shaved in six days. Again. Dammit. He scrubs hard at his jawline as if he could just rub the hair off with his palm.
“You growin’ a beard there, Spidey? Oh god. Are you secretly a hipster? Please say no. I don’t think I could hang out with you if you were a hipster. Or — oh! — maybe you’re just goin’ for the Scruffy White Guy trope? That’s weird, Spidey. I thought for sure you were more Boy Scout. Like a baby Captain America. Seriously, that guy’s so clean-cut and shoe-shined you could eat off him, like…”
Peter chews patiently until Deadpool finishes entertaining that mental imagery.
“…No way, cats are fuckin’ gross,” says Deadpool. Which is pretty much what Peter expected him to say. Not the cats specifically, but the complete non-sequitur. “They puke more often than a chemo patient and then lick every inch of themselves with the same tongue. And people are like, ‘Oh, but cats are so much cleaner than dogs!’ I call bullshit. Yeah, a dog’ll eat its own shit half the time but at least it has the decency to clean its fuckin’ mouth chewin’ on a stick or something.”
“Dogs’ mouths carry less bacteria than cats’ or humans’,” Peter says. “Human mouths are one of the worst. But Komodo dragons have so much bacteria in their mouths that people die from infected Komodo bites almost as reliably as they die from venomous snake bites.”
“What about spider bites?” Deadpool asks, leaning closer but not breaching boundaries.
“Death is pretty rare, even in Australia,” says Peter. “Superpowers, much rarer.”
“D’aww, I knew you were one in a million!”
“More like one in seven-point-three billion,” says Peter.
“That’s… oddly specific.”
“Current world population. Last time I checked, anyway.”
“I knew that.”
“No you didn’t.”
Deadpool pauses, listening to something else. “Liar,” he says to the air over his left shoulder. “Yes you are! If you had pants I’d light ‘em up. You can’t know stuff that I don’t. It doesn’t work that way. You’re just tryin’ to look good in front of Spidey.”
Peter wads the rest of the burrito into his mouth and pulls the other out of the soggy bag. “Your brain lying to you?”
Deadpool picks a limp shred of lettuce from his third taco and pitches it sullenly over the edge of the roof. “Again,” he says.
Peter rolls the burrito between his palms, watching the light flash off the foil and drinking in the crinkly sound. “I know those feels,” he says.
“And that’s why we’re totally soulmates!” Deadpool screams.
Peter drops the burrito to slam his hands over his ears, flinching away, eyes screwed shut. The day’s been too long already — Jameson already yelled at him for twenty minutes during what was supposed to be Peter’s lunch break and he swears if that bastard calls him a “retard” one more goddamn time he’s going to ask Matt to help him file a lawsuit…
Deadpool could scream another day, maybe, or after Peter’s had more time with just him and the wind, but he can’t absorb a punch like that right now.
Which probably means he shouldn’t patrol at all tonight. He can deal with just about anything if he’s braced for it, and on patrol he’s always braced… but he’s always braced around Deadpool, too, and…
Actually, he wasn’t this time so much. Braced. He wasn’t braced.
Around Deadpool.
Um.
Breach of protocol. Breach of goddamn protocol!
Deadpool is waving a hand at him when he slits his eyes open. Sorry, he signs. Excited. Forgot. Stupid. Sorry. Don’t hate me.
Peter forces down a breath and pulls his hands away from his ears. Air horn asshole, he signs back, not because he has to but because it just feels better than talking right now.
Sorry sorry sorry sorry—
Long day, Peter interrupts. Shields at ten percent, captain.
Deadpool nods and knocks on the side of his own head like it’s a door. Then he hums. Kirk or Picard? he asks.
Picard, says Peter, happy for the subject change.
Deadpool grins. Data or Spock?
Spock, says Peter. Obvious.
Cool ranch or nacho cheese?
Peter laughs. “Mesquite barbecue,” he answers out loud.
“Oh, you just gotta be different,” says Deadpool. “You really are a hipster, aren’t you? Turn back before it’s too late! It’s a trap! I’m tellin’ ya, Spidey, Farrah Fawcett hair would look way better on you than a fedora.”
“…What about both at the same time?”
“I’d probably jizz in my pants,” he says with a shrug and no hesitation whatsoever.
Peter has nothing to say to that. That’s just how he is sometimes, ignore it. He watches the people-traffic below and the Dave Matthews song “Ants Marching” gets stuck in his head on repeat.
Deadpool shifts around and pulls in a stuttering breath. “Dogs or cats?” he asks in what, for him, is practically a whisper.
“You already know the answer to that.”
“Dogs all the way!” Deadpool cheers with a fist pump. He looks pointedly at the fallen burrito. “You gonna eat that?”
“Not right now. Why, do you want it?”
“I got it for you.”
“I know. But do you want it?”
“But I got it for you.”
Peter makes an exasperated noise. “This is really not that complicated. Do you want this burrito?”
Deadpool whines, and squirms, and says, “…Maybe?”
“This isn’t multiple choice. There is no ‘none of the above’. It’s true-false. You want this burrito right now. Yes or no?”
“Nnnyyyes?”
“Then eat it.”
“But I got it for you!”
“Oh my god, Deadpool!” He grabs the mushed burrito with one hand, snatches Deadpool’s wrist with the other, and physically forces the food into his hand. “It’s like pulling teeth. Eat the fucking burrito.”
But instead, the big badass merc just sits there like a catatonic frog, the shiny object in his hand unnoticed, staring at Peter.
“What now?” says Peter.
Deadpool swallows so hard Peter can hear it over the wind. “You… you touched me?”
“Seems that way, yes.”
“But…”
“I can touch you,” Peter says. “You can’t touch me. I don’t make the rules.”
“Whaa…?”
Peter sighs. “Use your words,” he says, slowly.
Instead, unsurprisingly, Deadpool slams both fists against his thighs so hard the burrito squelches out of its foil and splats across the rooftop. The blast radius of the rice is impressive.
“That is so not fair!” says Deadpool, and Peter gives him credit, because whatever bug is up his ass this time, even now he’s exercising considerable volume control. “Why didn’t you say something sooner? You could’ve been touching me this whole time? Oh my fucking hopscotching christ, Spidey, you need to be touching me all the time!”
“No I don’t.”
Deadpool harrumphs and sticks out his tongue. “I don’t make the rules.”
“No, you don’t, smartass. You don’t get to tell me what I do.”
“Oh, but you can make with the grabby-grabby all you want, except when I want it.”
...Hang on a second, time out, pause. There are several possible ways to interpret that: most severely, that Peter just violated Deadpool’s consent. But Spider-Man saves people all the time and he knows what they look like when that kind of thing happens, and Deadpool doesn’t look like that at all. He mostly looks like a tantruming kid… even though he got what he wanted? Wait, what? “You said you wanted the burrito.”
“Yeah, I’ve also said I want your hands down my pants, but you’re not particularly forthcoming with that now, are you?”
“Sex and Mexican takeout are not the same thing,” says Peter.
“To you, maybe.”
And that gives Peter pause, because… well, because Deadpool. “Hold up,” he says. “Does that mean you’ve equated buying me burritos with some kinda sexual exchange?”
“Wha—? Pff. Pfffft. No.”
“Because that makes no sense, and even if it made sense to you — which, the more I think about it the more likely that seems — not telling me about it is clearly removing the ‘informed’ from the ‘consent’.”
Deadpool kicks his heels against the side of the building. “Do flirting and obvious come-ons count as a ‘sexual exchange’?” he asks, putting finger-quotes around the phrase.
“Pretty sure not. I think that’s more like how people ask for sexual exchange.”
“Then no,” says Deadpool. “I buy you burritos so you’ll hang out with me and maybe hold still long enough for me to keep ‘asking’.”
Peter snorts. “You’d do better to actually just ask,” he says.
There’s a pause, in which Deadpool does not ask.
...Again with the Huh?! Peter actually presents him with an opportunity to blast off some creatively lascivious bullshit and he doesn’t take the bait?
Maybe he prefers the challenge of working it into parts of the conversation where it doesn’t belong?
Maybe he’s arguing with his boxes again. He doesn’t always do it out loud.
Seems most likely.
Peter’s never sure whether it’s okay for him to break into those internal conversations, but Deadpool never complains when he does. And from everything Deadpool’s said about the boxes, and based on what Peter can infer from the times when Deadpool responds to them out loud, frankly, the boxes sound like assholes.
Everyone is an asshole to Deadpool, whether he’s around to hear the abuse or not. Even the Avengers. Peter’s never liked that about the Avengers. He kills people, Spider-Man, they like to say.
Yes, well, Peter’s killed people too.
He kills people for money, Spider-Man, they like to say.
Yes, and Clint kills people because he’s ordered to, and Natasha kills people because they’re in the way of her mission, and Thor’s killed people for “glory” (which, as far as Peter can tell, is another way of saying “for fun”), and Bruce has killed people by simple proximity, and Tony’s killed people basically to appease his own ego…
And Peter’s killed people just because they were bad guys and they pissed him off and he lost it.
How any of their reasons or excuses for killing people are morally superior to Deadpool’s, Peter cannot fathom. And oh, he has tried. But as far as he can tell, the much simpler motivation of killing for money just makes the Avengers uncomfortable because they’re kind of lying to themselves about their own behavior.
Deadpool’s motivation at least gives him the benefit of being able to afford endless amounts of burritos, with guacamole.
“..I know it’s stupid. I know it’ll never,” Deadpool mutters, not to Peter.
So he is talking to the boxes. And they are being assholes. Again.
Peter wishes he knew what they were saying so he could argue with them for a while in Deadpool’s place. Peter’s rather talented at arguing. The way you win is simple: don’t get upset. The person who gets upset loses, every time, even if they made better points at first. And the way to not get upset is to keep it extremely logical. Logic keeps Peter calm, and simultaneously drives the other person out of their mind. Sort of fun, actually. It is not a game he plays with Bruce.
“Not my fault he’s like that!” Deadpool’s saying. “…No, if we’re lookin’ specifically at brains here, I’m pretty fucking certain he’s got the advantage. If anything that’d make him the Creepy McCreepy-Pants.”
Whatever the internal reply is to that, it makes Deadpool’s face fall, hard.
They’re probably arguing about Captain America; if Deadpool was spectrum, Cap would be his third special interest, after combustibles and Mexican food — but Peter wants them to stop arguing anyway. And now that Deadpool’s gotten mopey, another quickdraw subject change won’t do the trick; it’ll only send him packing until Thursday. No, the smart thing here is to backtrack to where their own conversation left off, to make a loop in Deadpool’s thoughts that cuts off the chunk of time where the boxes were talking.
(And people say Deadpool has no predictable patterns.)
“I don’t like hanging out with you because I get to eat burritos,” Peter says. “I eat the burritos because I like hanging out with you.”
Deadpool twitches, like Peter just snuck up on him even though he’s been sitting here the whole time.
“I… wha?”
“Well I mean, I like the burritos, too,” says Peter. “Keep ‘em coming. Please. I can only afford an expensive meal every other week, and it has to be pizza.”
“Pizza’s not expensive,” Deadpool says, speaking much more slowly than ususal. “Neither is this.” He flicks at the destroyed burrito.
“If it’s more than a box of Velveeta, it’s expensive,” says Peter. “And I only like the deep dish, and that’s like ten bucks extra.”
“…Why?”
“Presumably because it’s like three times the dough as thin crust and financially speak—”
“No, I mean the other thing.”
“What other thing?”
“The other thing! Before the pizza!”
Peter puzzles for a second. “You mean why do I like hanging out with you?”
“Yeah. That. I mean. Okay I’ve actually been meaning to ask you that for, like, months, but I mean. What the hell? I know you’re, like… different, in the head, y’know, but you’re not crazy and you’re definitely not stupid so. I mean. What the fuck?”
“Um. I like hanging out with people I like.”
Deadpool clutches at his masked eyeballs and makes a sound that… well, yes, is very much a seagull type of sound. “God, Spidey, why d’you gotta be so…”
“…Stupid?” Peter supplies. “Impossible? Oblivious? Obtuse? Rational?”
“No! No no god no — well okay maybe the last one but—“
“You want to know why I’d voluntarily hang out with a possibly schizophrenic soldier of fortune, much less enjoy the company,” Peter says. “When I’m a superhero wearing the same colors as the American flag and am ostensibly a source of unvarnished moral goodness in the world. And when I have a working relationship with most of the Avengers. And when I spend most of my free time trying to save lives while you spend your professional life working to end them, and when we’ve gotten in each other’s way about that and fought each other a few times and pissed each other off.”
He gives Deadpool a moment to respond, to confirm or correct, but evidently he can’t, and gives no indication of wanting to. Peter waits anyway.
Eventually Deadpool signs, Talk.
“My brain’s weird,” says Peter, tapping the side of his head. “And your brain’s weird but in a different way. You take my weirdness mostly in stride, and you don’t push my boundaries except for that one time, and you talk a little different to me than how I’ve heard you talk to other people — not like you’re talking down to me, but like you’re learning to speak Spider-Man. Which is more than most people bother to do and that's... really cool of you actually. And I think I’ve got a lot of your weirdness figured out pretty well, too, or at least well enough to deal with. We get each other’s jokes and references and I bet you know as well as I do that that’s not easy to find. I like to think I’m less of a hypocrite than the Avengers when it comes to things like killing people, so except when we have a direct conflict of interest in that regard, honestly? It really doesn’t bother me that much.
“Besides,” Peter adds, watching the one remaining crow on the roof across the way wing up to the top of the water tower and caw a few empty times. “You hang out with me.”
“Uh, yeah… the stairs that go up? They go down, too.”
“No, I mean you actively seek me out, and you shoot the shit with me, and you don’t spend the whole time looking for an excuse to take off. And you’re not family so you’re not obligated. …It’s weird. The good kind of weird.”
That face Deadpool’s making now means surprise and confusion, Peter’s sure of it. “Dude, people love you! Don’t you have, like, a million friends?”
“I have a million fangirls,” says Peter. “One of my friends died and the other one went crazy. Like, crazy-crazy, not like you-crazy. I have an aunt who doesn’t know I’m Spider-Man and who seems to be laboring under the delusion that I’m still a kid. I know the Avengers, but I’m not an Avenger, and I’m pretty sure we’re not friends. I think they see me as more of a stray cat who sleeps under your porch sometimes and who you leave bowls of kibble out for, and who you worry about when it snows, and who kills your mice for you, but you don’t let it in the house because it’ll scratch up your couch, and you don’t give it a name because you don’t want to feel too bad when it stops showing up one day.”
Peter looks at Deadpool’s shoulder. “I think we’re friends,” he concludes.
He lets the pause slide slowly by. Other people always say they’re surprised when Deadpool goes more than thirty seconds without talking, but when it’s just the two of them, Deadpool’s quiet a lot. (“A lot” by Deadpool-standards, not by Peter-standards.) Peter doesn’t mind. He knows that sometimes he says things that other people need time to figure out. Not nearly as often as the reverse, but Peter resolved a long time ago to always give people however much processing-time they need, not to steamroller them the way they do Peter. This rule is not in effect during immediately dangerous situations, but other than that.
(And he knows every one of the Avengers would qualify this as an immediately dangerous situation based purely on the fact that he’s within choking-range of Deadpool, but the Avengers are kind of stupid sometimes.)
His eye shifts from Deadpool’s shoulder to his elbow, and he’s thinking that it’s been enough seconds now that there’ll be another change of subject, and he starts pick-picking at the strap on his left webshooter.
An abrupt movement gets his attention — for a split-second he thinks he miscalculated something and Deadpool’s going to bolt — then he sees what Deadpool’s hands are doing.
WHAT, he signs in a huge gesture… pause for emphasis… is your favorite color?
Peter laughs. Green, he says.
“Now I know you’re lying,” says Deadpool.
“No, it’s green.”
“Then why the red suit? Is it so the bad guys can’t see you bleed?”
“No, that’s your version of logic. Mine was based on studies they did about how the average American interprets and responds to different colors. Blue is the most common favorite color and I wanted people to like me, and also it makes people think of authority and order — like how cops wear blue. Red is to let the bad guys know I’ll be violent if I have to. Plus there’s the whole patriotic flag-colors thing. People tend to respond to that subconsciously even if they don’t want to.”
“…Sorry, I know you were just saying something smart, but I couldn’t hear you over the sound of me picturing your suit in green. I think you could do it. I mean it’d take some getting used to and people wouldn’t think I’m you anymore, which maybe now that I think about it is something you might want anyway, but with a few mods it could…”
“Most of the supers who wear green are bad guys,” says Peter. “I already get enough bad press as it stands.”
“But you gotta do you, Spidey! Be true to who you are!”
“Says the guy who wants me to wear Farrah Fawcett hair.”
“That’s different.”
“My choice was deliberate and I stand by it.”
“…Army wears green. That’s patriotic.”
“I don’t want to be associated with the army. I’m a free agent.”
Deadpool laughs. “You and me both, baby boy.”
Tug-tug-tug at the webshooter.
Peter’s brain got stuck somewhere before the subject change. A question occurred to him. And it’s bothering him. Because while his own answer to it seems sound, there’s a chance that some of the data he based it on is inaccurate or incomplete. And that’s always, in every situation, maddening. Tug-tug-tug.
“Are we?” Peter asks.
“Absolutely! Free as birds! Card-carrying members of the Fuck You I Do What I Want You’re Not My Real Dad Club!”
“No, I mean.” Tug-tug-tug. “Are we friends?”
“Don’t get mushy on me, Spidey.”
“It’s not multiple choice.”
This silence, unlike its predecessors, is excruciating.
Tug-tug-TUG-TUG-TUG—
“If you’re sure that’s what you even want,” says Deadpool.
“But do you? It’s not exactly a one-way—“
“Yeah well I’m not exactly the pick of the—“
“I already said I like you and explained why. You tracking me down every Tuesday and Thursday and sometimes Saturday sure as hell makes it seem like you like me too, but I know I can be extremely useful, and have been used. And if that’s your aim then believe it or not I’m actually fine with that as long as you’re upfront about it. The Avengers use me and that’s fine, I let them, I offer it, common goals and all that. And I like you so I’d probably let you, too, but I really really need to know about it beforehand because there’s some stuff I don’t want to be used for and I want to have the choice. Pretending to be friends to try and sneak around that does not end well, for anyone involved. Just because you can’t stay dead doesn’t mean I can’t or won’t kill you repeatedly if you bullshit me like that.”
Deadpool doesn’t move for a second or two. “…Christ on a cracker. Dammit, Spidey, you have no idea how much I wish I could hug you right now and that you’d actually not freak out about it.”
“Yeah, well. Same. But still no.”
“Okay so — to be reeeaally honest I wouldn’t put it past me to bullshit someone like that. I’m actually pretty fuckin’ sure that I do it all the time. Like, all the time. But to give myself the benefit of the doubt. because who the fuck else is gonna — the ol’ memory ain’t always that reliable, y’know? Too many headshots. Really fucks a guy up. Grey matter’s squishy and splattery to begin with. Not all of us get to have computers in our skulls.”
Peter glares at the rumpled edge of Deadpool’s mask.
“Buuut that said, there’s… kinda not much I want from you. For realsies. I mean I totally wanna fuck you into the asphalt until the only word you can remember is my name, but, y’know. You got that whole no-touchie thing goin’ on, so…”
Deadpool tilts his head and stares into the middle distance, and Peter waits, again, for him to finish with his mental imagery, and just hopes that when it’s done Deadpool can find his way back to the thread of conversation and just answer the damn question already.
“Of course I like you,” Deadpool says, and Peter can’t read the inflection because it’s so, so quiet. “‘Course we’re friends. Dumbass. I think the sun’ll probably explode the day you ask if I wanna be pals and I turn you down. I mean. You’re cooler than a chest freezer stuffed with cucumbers!”
Peter blanks out a little.
“I have been called many things,” he says, and he can hear how monotone his own voice is, which, according to popular opinion, is really saying something. “‘Cool’ is not often among them. Just from the fangirls, and they don’t know shit about me.”
Deadpool snorts, and pulls his mask back down, smoothing out the panda circles, which means he’s going to leave soon. “Then I think it’s pretty fuckin’ obvious,” he says, “that the rest of ‘em don’t know shit about you either. Fuck ‘em. Only don’t really because ew.”
By the time Peter figures out what all the parts of that even meant, Deadpool’s gone.
And, okay, it sounds very sappy and extremely pathetic even just inside his own head, but… damn, Peter has a friend again. A probably-for-real, no-expectations, explicitly confirmed friend. Seriously: whoa.
Cool.
…This’ll take some mental reorganization.
Flock Nine spooks up from the wrong place, the birds’ flight patterns so erratic one of them hits a window in panic. Peter can think later. Spider-Man aims his web (signs an upside-down I love you to the city) and swings off. Go time.