Merc with a Mouth

"So, what would you little maniacs like to do first?" Wade said as he clutched the trigger his finger was wrapped around, a flurry of bullets blazing around him, some coming towards him, some traveling around the perimeter as the targets had yet to determine exactly where he was firing from. One by one their numbers diminished, some to the sweet release of death and some to attrition as their diabolical intentions gave way to the cowardice of the standard HYDRAesque henchmen. 

It wasn’t long before a bullet finally hit its mark, embedding itself deep within Wade’s own center mass. The tearing pain as tissue gave way to lead caught him off guard, but it wasn’t an unfamiliar sensation in his line of work. “Now you’ve really pissed me off.” He said as he withdrew his blades from their spot at his back. He jumped down off the catwalk, a sickening crack of the neck below his feet snapping when he landed. His blades went up immediately as he began rushing towards the corner of the room where the henchmen would make their final stand before meeting their makers.

When he was done cutting smiley faces into their corpses, he tossed a grenade over his shoulder for good measure. Now all he had to do was go save the girl and he could call it a good day. He practically skipped his way down the halls, repainting them a crimson red with each person who got in his way. If only our high school guidance counsellor could see us now. They’d be so impressed. They’d be something alright... 

Wade’s world shattered the instant he crossed into the laboratory where he was certain Darcy was being held. What he saw was enough to send the chimichangas he had for breakfast up from his stomach and send it crashing to the floor along with the rest of him. This wasn’t the way things were supposed to go. This wasn’t how this was supposed to happen. Wade was supposed to be there to save her. Instead she was lifelessly laying out on the table, a look of horror on her face which no doubt mirrored her last moments on this world. 

He managed to pick himself up off the floor and force his legs to step closer to her body. She didn’t even look like Darcy any more. He had to keep telling himself that it wasn’t her, and that he still had a chance to save her. He kept telling himself that all the way until Thor tracked him down and pulled him away. They had never been close, but Thor was one person that might have cared even a fraction towards Darcy that Wade did. Thor was the one person who might understand. The moment Thor unhanded Wade, he was thanked with a left hook before Wade dashed back over to her body and ran his fingers through her bloodsoaked hair. “Whats gonna be left of the world if you’re not in it?” he managed to choke out between the tears streaming from his eyes and the lump that had built up in his throat.

----------- The days after her death were some of the hardest Wade had been through in his entire life. He woke up every day hoping it would be his last. Darcy has been the one bright spot in an otherwise dim and violent universe. She was the center of everything he held dear, and his reason to get out of bed every day and try to do some good. By the end of the first week, he had moved on from grief to anger and was drinking the voices away every night when they began to criticize about how he had failed her. The worst part was that they were right. If he had been quicker to try to save her and hadn’t spent so much time carving up the faceless bad guys thrown in his way, he might have saved her.

By the second month, he had started taking every contract he could. He wanted to get out of the tower and away from the constant looks of pity, the constant check-in calls, and the constant judgement. He painted HYDRA’s face on everything in his path in the back of his head, silently taking retribution for his loss at the cost of anyone who would do harm to another. Anyone who could take the one thing he had worth fighting for away from him.

By the third month, he was numb to his emotions, and to the horrors of the life he had walked back in to. He stumbled through the tower aimlessly, a bottle in one hand and a photograph in the other. Occasionally he would throw a punch in the direction of a sympathetic look. He desperately hoped that someone would fight him so that they’d stop looking at him like he was a broken puppy from the pound who never tried to perk up. He wanted them to hate him the way he hated himself every single day. They never did.

By the fourth month, he had tried to kill himself so often that Stark had ordered the cleaning bots to stop trying to clean his brain matter off of the room walls. The room had been soundproofed so that Wade’s attempts in vain wouldn’t disturb the other tenants. Of course, they all tried to talk him out of it, but it only ever ended up with the gun shakily being turned on them as he demanded privacy. Whether it was a dream or real, those few hours between life and death were his only hope for seeing Darcy again. He kept hoping that she’d be there waiting for him the next time; waiting to take him home to the house they had never wanted but he would have bought anyways if she had asked. Waiting to introduce him to the neighbors he would have hated if they hadn’t hated him first. Waiting to show him the life he never got to have with her. She never was.

By the 5th month, the killing of others or himself hadn’t done any good so far, and he gave up and hung his guns and blades up for good. He still stayed at the tower, the place he would never be alone. The place he had so many memories to fall back on if he ever felt lonely. ---------- “Every minute of every hour, I miss you.” Wade said as his fingers clutched the photo between them. It had been 8 months and everyone was honestly surprised at how little he had moved on. They expected that a contract would come in and Wade would take his guns off the mantle and go down blazing, but they were wrong. Wade hadn’t taken a job, paid or otherwise, since his retirement. He owed it to her to stop ending lives for good, the way hers had been ended. 

It never got easier for him. By month 12, the rest of the team couldn’t tell when he was drunk or sober any longer. What they didn’t realize, or at least had the decency not to mention, was that he was never sober anymore. Clint, for all of his tactless comments, had managed to hide the slight joy he felt that he wasn’t the most disastrous person living at the tower any longer. Everyone missed Darcy as well, but they had wanted to honor her a different way. They’d honor her with every life they saved. Wade was only ever good for killing. In his own way, he was saving lives too. 

That was the way he had intended to stay too, and he was doing such a good job at that. He was sure she would have been proud too. That was until Thor came in one day, asking if anyone had seen Jane. Wade hadn’t of course. He didn’t see much of anything anymore except the bottom of a bottle of tequila and a picture of Darcy. But when the rest of the team confirmed that they had not seen Jane in a couple of days, Thor went by her apartment to check on her and discovered the place thrown about with no sign of her. The team assembled and Wade wasn’t going. He wasn’t invited to either, but Jane had stayed up many nights with Wade exchanging Darcy stories and letting him cry himself to sleep on her sofa. If anyone had truly made an effort to help Wade, it had been her and he knew he needed to return that kindness. He needed the Deadpool. 

He grabbed his guns and retrieved his blades before he rummaged through his closet, barely locating and getting into his suit before the others rushed out the door and into the elevator. He shoved his blade in the elevator door to keep it open long enough for him to slip in with the others. He shot Stark a look that almost dared him to tell Wade that he wasn’t a part of this anymore. He was a disaster of drunken remorse waiting to be aimed in the direction of anything he could pretend was responsible for Darcy’s death. He was willing to die to save Jane and redeem himself for Darcy, even if he had tried so many times on his own to take care of that job himself. The downside to immortality is that he couldn’t join Darcy on the other side when she left him. 

When they got to the HYDRA base, everyone split up to cover as much ground as they could in the shortest amount of time, not wanting history to repeat itself. Wade’s vision was doubled over, maybe tripled but he was as alert as ever as far as he thought. That was until the first few bullets ripped into his flesh and left crimson strains of his life force trickling out of his wounds and pooling at his feet. “Fuck. Get your head in the game, Wilson.” He wasn’t sure if the last part was him or Natasha speaking, but he spotted the spy making her way through the other side of the storage bunker he had wandered in to. He stumbled around, his gun firing wildly towards the uniformed lackeys that were heading his way. The majority of them were about as accurate as Wade’s ability to stand and pee, but the rest of them hit where it counted.

He retreated behind a corner and pulled out Darcy’s iPod, and flicked it to shuffle. He was caught off guard by her favorite song playing first. So caught off guard that he took another gut shot at close range before he could pull out his knife and jam it into the man’s skull. He was drunk and irritated, so he stuck a grenade in the man’s mouth and then tossed him towards the group of his friends that were marching towards him just to watch them all burn. The wounds in his stomach were not healing, but he’d have to deal with that later because there were people counting on him again, and he couldn’t stand to fail someone else again. 

He treked down the hallway, painting a familiar but no less violent scene down the corridors until he heard a woman’s muffled scream coming from what appeared to be a storage closet. He slung it open to reveal a frightened but alive Jane tied up within. He paused for a second, confused why they’d have her in a closet. She was making noises that sounded like a muffled warning but he put his finger up and looked around. “One sec, this is too weird.” He closed the closet door to notice the lumbering mech of a machine heading towards him. Something out of Tony Stark’s worst nightmare or wettest dreams, he wasn’t sure. A gatling gun was already spooling up and firing and Wade had just a few moments to bridge the gap and stick his blade deep within the small crevice between the visor and the chest plate. The blood seeping down his blade meant he met his mark as he always did. 

He took a few steps towards the closet, his breath more strained than usual, air practically escaping by the time it had made it to his lungs. He looked down to see a macabre display of guts and gore that would make Eli Roth wretch. He took a few more steps and collapsed. He fought his way to his feet, a few more steps. They were getting harder to take, and he was getting more tired. He opened the closet door again and untied her, carefully removing the tape from her mouth before he collapsed practically on top of her. “Sorry...you’ll have to excuse me...I seem to have lost control of my legs.” His voice was raspy and gargled, the blood from his lungs rising up with each word. “Wade, I tried to tell you. They aren’t using normal bullets. You can’t heal from these.”