InsaneJournal

The diamond-sharp edge of her revenge had been dulled in a firestorm hardly a week hence, gone up in a hail of sparks and unnatural destruction and bloodshed, but in burning down the hospice Madeline had still failed to erase what had taken place there. She’d seen the changes in Wade happening over the time he was gone, to be sure, but hope sprang eternal even as the minutes slipped away; the remodeling of his psyche hadn’t quite been completed, but some cuts had been made that couldn’t be erased. No matter how she wrapped herself around his mind, a living bandage, even she couldn’t heal the unthinkable.

They’d been living like hermits weathering a storm, with no sign of change, but her patience hadn’t flagged. Even as she had to expand, to give him room for jittering rages and alternating fears, looming up at the smallest disturbances in the routine they’d cobbled together, she rarely left their home. She cleaned, she cooked, she arranged delivery, but most of all, she remained accessible, both the Shack and her mind becoming safe havens from the rest of the world--and from the newly-formed horrors of his own brain.

During the day she guarded the doors like an angry tigress, supporting his desire to remain in isolation with an almost jealous zeal. Days whittled themselves down into sleepless nights, faint blue light filtering through the dark curtains she’d put up upon first bringing him home, and they often found themselves tangled in some reverse, perverse arrangement, a Lennon/Yoko without any of the peace, seeking and giving solace desperately through the haze of exhaustion. She let him wrestle with his nightmares until he couldn’t any longer, and then soothed the unstable waves of his brain into an undisturbed rest.

That evening, hair and sleeves up in the “kitchen” to finish cleaning what few dishes remained from dinner, she felt him stirring behind her and turned, towel in her hands.

The noise from the bed was soft, just the barest of rustling sheets and a rumble in the back of his throat. Wade was visibly tired and he moved slowly. He hadn’t slept properly since getting back; all of his usually-vibrant thoughts were covered in a muted haze nowadays. His thoughts came trudging through treacle and sludge when she heard them, drifting tar-like and sticky -- until those moments of sudden bursts of energy, unpleasantly sharp and needle-edged. His mind oscillated between a depressive malaise and a malicious anger. He’d lost his temper over improperly-cooked pho; over Mel Gibson slurs on TMZ; over the smooth airbrushed skin of the Kardashians.

Where is my mind. Where is my mind.

“Good morning,” he said, disregarding the heavy darkness waiting just outside their curtains. He hadn’t slept long. Wade rolled out of bed with an acrobatic backwards tumble, his feet landing on the chilly and misshapen wooden floor. He’d never noticed it before, but this time Wade seemed distracted by his own toes, staring down at them, wiggling them on the creaking floorboards.

“Hey. My feet are cold. I need slippers. Are there any wild rabbits in Santa Monica?”

There was a slight thrum of curiosity behind his words, but mainly -- a distinctive lack of enthusiasm. If his mental playground spawned a Happy Tree Friends-esque mirage of cute cuddly slaughter, the colours are desaturated, washed out, and missing their trademark illustrative vibrancy.

Wade was tired.

Hands free, towel deposited over the edge of the sink, she looked him over, her eyes coming to rest somewhere in the dark semicircles beneath his. His thoughts snaked around the house like lethargic ghosts; she felt them circling her cranium like clouds around a peak. She was living in a muffled dream.

At least it was with him.

“Hey.”

Madeline pulled the elastic out of her hair and let it tumble gracelessly down her back, kinked from a day in restraint. Her face was drawn and wan, the visible toll of worry playing around her eyes and mouth. Wade’s return to Santa Monica with her was a relief, of course--she’d started eating again, and her dreams alongside him were mercifully blank--but it seemed at least for now that he wouldn’t be able to join her in the healing process.

She put her hands in the pockets of her jeans, meandered over to him, and stepped up on his feet as casual as you please, one sole resting on each foot, her small toes curling against his ankles. Somewhat closer to eye level, an expression tugged at the corner of her lips.

“Better?”

“Huh,” he articulated, partly as an unintelligible grunt, leaning his head back slightly to look down. Her feet looked small, her toes impossibly delicate and white beside his scarred skin. Wade wriggled slightly, testing his new centre of gravity and the weight of her against him, their balances slowly shifting. They did not fall over. The smallest of smiles seemed to be twitching in his mouth, like a fluttering insect beneath the skin.

“Loads. Can we walk around like this all day? Bet you can do it while washing dishes without falling over, either. Were you doing chores?” The derailing thoughts came rapid-fire. Wade couldn’t seem to pay attention properly; his attention span, already a worn and fragile thing, seemed to have finally crumbled this week. He hadn’t watched television at all since his return, save for a few Robot Chicken episodes which happened to slip through the cracks. Nothing else stuck. Everything else bounced back. His old amusements fell short of any actual enjoyment. His weapons had been stashed in the tub (their traditional and customary storage spot) or under their bed. For the first time in his life since his father’s bloody, brainy death, the mercenary seemed unnerved by the sight of violence.

(It prickled unpleasant memories. Every possible weapon was a possible injury and one which he’d experienced a hundred, thousand times over, knives against skin and bullets lodged in the bone and ribs snapped open to the sky and he simply could not forget the repetition the absolutely non-stop loop of it all, as if he’d crashed, frozen, as if he were a program running endlessly through the same cycles and routines over and over and over and over and over and ov---)

He kissed her cheek.

The surface of his mind was full of eddies and ripples, a wide lake covered in choppy little foaming waves, the jagged warnings before a storm. If she hadn't been plugged into his mind without a break since he'd returned--indeed, since he'd disappeared--the creatures roiling in the depths of Wade's consciousness might have been too much for her to take. They made her head spin as it was, pings and razor-sharp buzzers going off at all hours, without peace, frenetic, manic.

She caught herself staring as he rambled, trying to take it all in. As though trying to anchor the both of them to the earth and draw them closer together in the same fell swoop, Madeline hooked her index fingers through the front belt loops of his jeans and tugged lightly. Though they ended up hooked and tangled in one another every night, the two hadn't actually slept together since Wade's return.

"Yeah. Cleaning up after us, as usual."

And then, his consciousness careened away from her again, a fire-soaked bomber spiraling towards the earth in a plume of thick smoke. The information--the carnage--was being mainlined into her skull like scorching toxic waste, but she absorbed all of it because it was him. It was true, what she'd suspected when she'd pulled him from the wreckage: she still loved every hopeless fragment of him that was left. For better or for endlessly worse. She would claw her way across the finish line with him slung over her back, if she had to. It didn’t matter anymore.

--But then, the chaste signal of affection brought them both back in an instant, for an instant. The brief pressure of his lips on her cheek pulled her back to the kitchen, back to the coarse denim between her fingertips, the skin and sinew and bone shifting beneath her feet. Madeline darted her hands to the sides of Wade’s head, tangling her fingers in his hair the way children grip the grass beneath them after tumbling down a hill: to keep from spinning right off the surface of the earth.

“Hey,” she said, the sound of force in her voice like the flat side of a blade, stretching out the mutual pause in their mental dialogues until it was singing with tension, with silence. “Hey. Look at me.”

Hey hey listen and while his kiss dragged her back from the sweltering, drowning eddy of his memories, her voice snapped him out of the cycle. Wade latched onto the sound of that voice, achingly familiar, the one consistency between hallucination and memory and dream. If her hands were the anchor, her voice was the breadcrumbs. He followed it back.

When Wade next raised his head and looked at her, there was a surprising clarity in his eyes. The dull haze in his irises had, if temporarily, dissipated. He no longer seemed as if he were staring past her, looking beyond her left ear and directly into a Pay-Per-View of recorded, replayed horrors. His right hand automatically latched onto her wrist, fingers digging into her skin. He was looking at her.

She hardly noticed the pressure around her wrist beyond what it signified for him: that he was here, with her, at least for a few seconds. She pulled the moment taut, wrapping the thread of it around her fingers like a cat’s cradle. A child’s game, instead of the battle for what was left of Wade’s mind.

“Hi.”

The sound of her voice didn’t echo, or portend any sense of hope or doom beyond the shack, beyond the two of them. It was simply present, and nothing short of that. She was afraid to move, for fear of marring the tiny gap they’d forged for themselves in the haze, but she had to take advantage of the window while it lasted, to remind him of what he had and where he was. Haltingly, and with an almost excruciating slowness, she moved into him for a kiss.

Synapses fired sporadically; his neurons lit up like a Christmas tree, a fireworks display, an urban city skyline at night. But Wade was out of his head, and in his bones and flesh instead. For the first time in a week, he didn't feel disconnected and detached from his body; he'd been living in a haze, forcibly removed from the healing skeleton which had caused him so much infuriating, unwanted agony.

But now his blood was on fire, his heart was on fire, and Wade's grip tightened and crushed her face to his. With building urgency, like a rolling boulder slowly gathering speed. They finally lost their balance now, with her feet slipping off his; they tripped backwards into the kitchen counter (and Wade acknowledged the pain distantly, hardly even noticing what would soon become a bruise on his hip). He was intensely aware of every movement, every sensation, as he lifted his girlfriend effortlessly off the floor and stumbled back across the shack, half-tripping with exhaustion.

The milestone was not the time they spent in the bed; it was the uninterrupted five hours of rest he had afterwards. For the first time in a week since Killebrew’s hospice, Wade Wilson finally slept. Properly.