InsaneJournal

WADE: So. The eleventh floor. Way to make a man's life difficult, Madeline; her bedroom was too high to climb to, Romeo-style, but only clocking in at halfway up the building, it was still too low for rappelling down from the roof. Instead, he approached from the side of Paradise Hotel, clambering out of the universal stairwell and then, painstakingly, climbing from balcony to balcony. There was the occasional heartstopping moment as he sidled past bathroom windows -- on uncomfortably small ledges, no less -- but, eventually, with a rope tied to the railing and his backpack slung over his shoulders, Wade finally hefted himself over one last balcony and collapsed outside Madeline's door. He got back to his feet, flexing his gloves, with a quick check to make sure the backpack was unscathed.

That's right. Totally ninja.

Squeezing through the small open window was, however, more difficult than he imagined -- shit, son, this CIA infiltration business always looked easier in the movies -- and it was with a slamming of the frame and a shattering, ungraceful clatter that he crash-landed into her bedroom itself, knocking over a chair in the process.

Goddamnit, the backpack!

MADELINE: The whole eerie and intimidatingly supernatural impression given off by her knack for sensing other clouds of consciousness nearby was decidedly undermined when the approaching party didn't even bother to sustain the stealth factor. Her sleep was usually restless, what with people passing back and forth in the hallway outside sounding like phantoms shouting at her underwater, but the tossing and turning egged on by Wade's approach broke into full wakefulness when he crash-landed in the room. She sat up straight in bed, where she'd been sleeping right in the middle, like someone unaccustomed to sharing it with someone else.

Without thinking about it, she sent out waves of bright inquiries, that'd vibrate through the brain until they were answered: Who's there. It was probably like being really high, though she'd never experienced it herself. Like being trapped, still breathing, under the ocean surface while rolls of sunshine passed over you. Sometimes Madeline thought she should be sainted.

"Wade," she said, not entirely successful in hiding her lingering surprise. She dropped the covers--apparently she'd pulled them up to her neck. It wasn't very often she had a good shock. Sadly, she didn't really have one to offer him in return, besides the mild brain invasion: she was just wearing an oversized tee shirt.

WADE: "So you don't sleep in the nude," he remarked, instinctively. "Good. That could have made this awkward." As if it wasn't awkward already -- there he was, delivering a cheeky grin from his crumpled pile on the floor, and gingerly lifting the battered backpack off his shoulders. He wasn't masked.

"I could've just knocked on your door from the hall, but it would've meant coming in through the hotel and, y'know, I just wasn't in the mood for dealing with night watchmen." A flicker of recognition stirred at that, clearly visible to Madeline in his mind, were she watching -- despite his klutziness through her window, Wade obviously had some remembered experience in late-night breaking and entering.

MADELINE: "It'd have been all over the hotel gossip meter the next morning if you did that, anyway," Madeline said, crawling over the covers to the edge of the bed, her face as expressionless as her mind was excited.

"This place is a den of hot-headed cock-hops. So--thank you for keeping the platonic gift-giving just between us. I have zero desire to join their ranks, especially in speculation." It was funny, the way things came out of her mouth, sometimes. It was impossible to tell whether she was just speaking her own truth without tact, or trying to injure present company.

But then, there was the ghost of a smile as she crossed her arms and rested her head on her hands, peering down at her visitor. She had no reason to trust him, but it was clear she either a) didn't particularly care about the danger he posed, or b) was too titillated at the thought of someone or something breaking the mundane cycle of predictability that was observable human behavior to put much stock in her own well-being. That, or she did trust him, but we'll put that aside for the moment, far beyond the fourth wall. For now, she stayed stretched out on her stomach, watching him.

And she was listening, too, more than she usually was, allowing the edges of their minds to blur together as organically as possible in the dark room. Less than a third of the moon was illuminated beyond the window, but the eerie look in her eyes was plain as day. Her red hair was a bird's nest around her face, and she looked more like a quietly exhilarated Medea than a newly-minted nineteen-year-old psychology student in California. It was easy to see, in that moment, why she didn't consider herself particularly beautiful, compared to the rest of the polished beauties going about their business in the same earthly footprint.

"You brought me something," she said, or thought--it was almost impossible to tell. It had a muffled echo to it, though, something that signified that maybe she was speaking with something more than her lips, tongue, and lungs. If she smiled then, it was like a Cheshire grin, floating in the space between them.

WADE: "A sacrifice at Jeannie's little genie altar," he answered with a flourish.

And this, ladies and gentlemen, is why he had come to Madeline Pryor. Even as he stood up and dusted off his knees, nonchalantly reaching for the platonic gift, he could still feel his heart and adrenaline jump-starting (beating one, two, three times harder than the average human). She probably wasn't going to stake him (again), so that wasn't it -- no, it was the fact that he didn't know very many people who could go all psychic wonder on his brain. Even as he tried his best to look unfazed, he was intrigued and fascinated by the blurring of the lines.

Everything in Wade Wilson blurred the line, to be honest. Between decency and impropriety, sanity and madness; even on the good days, he couldn't tell his ass from reality and where one ended and the other began. Even Vanessa's abilities. All the borders between people blurred.

MADELINE: Before he could hand her the rumpled package, Madeline reached out and touched him. His face, specifically, which was probably strictly off-limits, but she wasn't really one to pay attention to boundaries when they belonged to other people. It was spontaneous, anyway, just two fingers tracing along his left cheekbone. She could see impression of his damage in her head like a matrix of water and oil mixed with shards of glass. He was like what someone would look like after a spin in a rock polishing machine. Just from the footprints of his old thoughts she was picking up, Madeline had a feeling the inside of his skull would look rather similar to the outside. She wondered if the rest of his body looked the same.

"Come here," she said, drawing her hand away and motioning for Wade to join her on the bed. Each of her words had a certain kind of concussive force behind it, so the air around them both rippled with each syllable. The waves of silver mental mercury made it seem as though they were both halfway through the looking glass.

"I'll ask for permission this time," she said as she moved backward, "but if you're game, I'd like to have a look in there." It was fairly obvious at this point what 'there' meant.

WADE: "Sure you're prepared for what you might find in there, doc?" he quipped, instinctively, leaning back from her touch (nervously) and laughing, short and abrupt (and nervous). He tried his hardest to pretend otherwise, but touch put him on edge; female fingertips were too soft for ravaged skin and her voice was too low for addressing some demented, psychotic mindscape. People were supposed to be put off by the scars (both psychological and physical), not -- not curious!

But part of him was thrilled by the prospect. Sharing is caring, after all; if someone else got a glimpse of it, well. They'd know what it was like. He could get a second perspective, and if there was one thing Deadpool loved, it was perspectives.

And to put it another way, it wouldn't be quite so lonely in La Mental Casa de Wade.

MADELINE: "The more disturbing...the weirder...all the better," she said, her voice curling around his skull like a sated serpent. "You couldn't fathom how boring the heads around here are. After a while, it's like listening to a staged reading of the phonebook." Madeline pursed her lips and wiped a bead of sweat from his hairline with her thumb.

"Now lie down before I turn you into a human puppet." It was funny, really, when you sat back and thought about it: the only person besides Shaw with whom Madeline had any real interest in spending time hated touching as much as she did. But the more she stared at him, the more she felt a clinical sort of desire to see what ways those scars had whorled his brain. Everyone's brain had an electrical signature, like a thumbprint--to her, remembering one specific mind was as simple as recalling the lyrics to a song. She didn't seem the type to have a nearly infinite Rolodex for a psyche, but thus far it was working for her. It was the only way she knew to keep from being overwhelmed by the thoughts, emotions, and motivations of the entire city.

"Don't you want a little extra company up there?"

WADE: "Got plenty of company already, Mad," Wade quipped, tapping the side of his skull with a finger. "Voices in my head? Non-stop mental narration? You'd just be one more in the crowd."

But that was, very decidedly, a lie. He tossed himself onto her bed with an ungainly thump and a bounce, and after wriggling into a comfortable position on her blanket, he relaxed. Wade slowly let all his muscles unwind. And as our erstwhile hero prepares himself for mental surgery from our stunning heroine, the little mental voice chattered, but soon he even managed to relax that one, too.

MADELINE: She unfolded herself after he'd settled, a reasonable distance from Wade but not so far that she couldn't touch his fingertips, and closed her eyes. There were very few people on this earth for whom she would risk unhinging her brain and spilling out her carefully-guarded consciousness. In fact, she could probably count them on two fingers, and she didn't even know Wade all that well.

That was probably the source of her interest, really. He was impossible to know well, even to someone to whom knowing was as simple as breathing. Even as she slipped inside the projection of his mental landscape to see things first hand, the visuals were changing every second, like the invisible ground beneath a river. Madeline was still on her back, in what looked like a grassy field one moment and a bed of snakes or a desert the next. It was raining, light and warm, and the sky was turning from yellow to purple.

Not as strange as I was expecting, really she thought--and thus, said, to Wade--rising to her feet, feeling as though she weighed somewhere between eight and thirteen pounds.

That was when the ground before her yawned open, and Ashley--or was it Mary-Kate?--Olsen, no less than thirty feet tall, stepped from the void. Madeline dodged a bare, shining leg as it was levered past her, and bounced a bit when the stiletto the nubile giant was wearing punctured and shook the earth.

"Really?" she said, more disappointed than incredulous. The other twin was coming into view on the horizon, similarly baby-oiled, and clad in what looked like banana leaves.

"I mean, there are better-looking girls out there than the Olsens." Madeline started to float, and the leaves of grass were snakes again.

WADE: "Yeah, sometimes they've got that strung-out anorexic maybe even drug addict look to them, don't they?"

His voice was casual and ponderous, and—it came from everywhere at once, a bodiless entity, Wade's omniscient narrator, his God-speak, his proverbial yellow boxes all rolled into one. You generally don't picture yourself when you think. Wade even less so. But after a moment — realising that he had a guest, and well, it was the host's job to entertain, right? — Wade managed to appear, but scrambled, a chimera mixture of seventeen-year-old and twenty-year-old and scarred and non-scarred and red-masked and unmasked, his skin flickering kaleidoscopic. Self-esteem's hard to coalesce into a visual form, kids. Meanwhile, the closest twin marched onwards, monument-tall, taking gigantic Godzilla strides across his mental landscape. A blimp-sized chocolate muffin floated ponderously in front of her, and Mary-Kate — or was it Ashley? — chased it in futile slo-mo. Wade watched the chase with an even slower grin, which formed Cheshire-like.

"Thousands of young men marked their calendars for the day those twins turned eighteen. I guess it was the anticipation more than anything else? I mean, it's like Christmas, but with jailbat wrapping."

There was an annoying buzz of almost-voices off in the distance. Half-formulated ideas. Semi-complete sentences. The background noise was louder in here.

MADELINE: She was floating upside-down, now, and if iconic scenes from mediocre movies were the theme of the day, Madeline supposed this made her Spiderman, and her ghoulishly kaleidoscopic friend (?) Mary Jane. Even if the hair was misplaced on her head, he had enough blood-red for the both of them.

Speaking of hair, Madeline noticed hers, though still red, wasn't exactly obeying the expected laws of gravity, still hanging down--or up, as it were--at her shoulders. Perhaps, she thought, reaching out to her host for some sort of anchor before she floated away completely, she should work on giving more credence to the concept of 'up' as a completely relative assignation.

"You didn't have to do that," she said to the forming Wade cloud, moving her fingers through a tendril of his consciousness and watching the bits and bytes of hidden neuroelectricity flicker and spit in her hand's wake. If she looked very closely, she could just see little onomatopoeic words trapped in multicolored balloons, fizzing Pow! Krrack! BOOM! through the air like champagne bubbles before disappearing altogether.

"You look like you're wearing one of those bodyscramblers from 'A Scanner Darkly,' she said, after another pause, the weight of concentration showing through her voice as she made a deliberate effort to put her feet back on his version of the ground. One of the snakes reached up/down to curl around her leg and bring her back up to earth. It felt like a good handshake. 'Good,' being strange, as Madeline hated handshakes.

It was only then that she realized someone had dressed her in Phoebe Cate's red bikini, a la Fast Times At Ridgemont High. Oh, Jesus. Once settled in her new uprightness, she looked down at her new threads--or lack thereof--and fixed Wade with the kind of flat stare he was probably accustomed to by now.

"This isn't going to work for me, Wade." There was a beat. "And no, in case you were wondering. It isn't coming off."

WADE: Everything felt more tactile -- colours here were more vibrant than some other minds, and the textures grittier. It wasn't just his boundless imagination or that steady pervasive bleed of references (drip, drip, drop, like a psychedelic coffee machine); no, everything felt realer here because, let's be honest, sometimes Deadpool didn't even know it wasn't.

But he knew how to shape his world to his liking, and in a second, the red bikini had melded and become another pop culture landmark entirely.

"Does Princess Leia work for you?"

MADELINE: She should have seen it coming. The metallic gold was as ridiculous as it was--cold? Something about being cold inside someone else's head was always unexpected, no matter how many times she walked where she wasn't meant to walk. Just as her bodily projection's skin started to get gooseflesh, Madeline frowned, and the skies darkened to the color of a mud-choked pond. She could feel her physical body shiver beside Wade's on the hotel bed. Thus far, she'd let him determine the direction of his brain's currents, and drifted along amiably, like a castaway in an empty ocean.

"Keep this up, though, and I'll put an oar in your head." Her voice echoed across the suddenly dry plain. A crimson-colored orchid bloomed behind her, sprouting up through the writhing dirt until it was too large even by prehistoric hothouse standards. A profound reservoir of prose and unfortunate imagery was bubbling in Wade's air; she had the distinct impression that she was breathing his thoughts and bathing in them too (she was certainly wearing them). The orchid drooped over her shoulder, and she ran the flat of her hand down an oversized, veiny petal before ripping it from its mooring and draping it over her more sensitive bits like some prematurely aware Eve. The place where she'd torn the flower flesh dripped with something that looked suspiciously like blood, and her hands were stained with it even as the giant piece of flora melted into something resembling a long, floor-grazing dress. Red went bleached bone white as the color drained from the organic fabric in the direction of gravity. Blood pooled at her feet; the dress became silk.

She looked at the new outfit, the vague outlines of herself within it, and recognized it was not entirely her doing. If she wanted to exist here without hurting him, Madeline had to play by Wade's rules. And that meant appreciating that much of who he was--even the demented, joyful parts--were forged in pain. Dried blood flaked off her palms, and when she directed her eyes at her host, it was like looking at him through multicolored venetian blinds. Each slat was a different shade of bruise: eggplant, greenish, dead sea blue, and sickly yellow. There was a beat.

"I'm sorry."

WADE: Everything was lurching a little to the left. The controls were slipping through his fingers; the longer they stayed here, the more this unconscious (subconscious) mindscape took on a life of its own, and Wade even looked a little embarrassed about it. The sky writhed after her apology; it turned an uncomfortable shade of ultraviolet and dark purple, shot through with crimson. The Olsens were long-gone, presumably trampling prey off in the distance. The ground tilted.

And then, just as suddenly, the desert sands were back again, and Wade was sitting cross-legged on a small hill. He shrugged. A little and to the left.

"Sooo, doc, tell me: can you fix it?" He pointed at the broken landscape (the clouds had detached and taken on the jagged shape of jigsaw puzzles). His skin had finally settled into something stable. He was wearing no mask, no hood, carrying no weapons, wearing no violently red clothes. Just dressed in a white t-shirt, jeans, and bare feet, looking a little younger than his actual age, with a twitchy and nervous smile flickering almost spasmodically across his face. There weren't any scars.

"Not that I'd want you to. I'm a little past my warranty."

MADELINE: She sat on the ground beneath him, without thinking, while the stump of the orchid stretched again into a spiky alien palm that shaded them both. Wade Wilson: Yogi on the mental mount. His finger pointed out how the sky kept fracturing in on itself, and she followed his gaze; it was a perpetual cold burn, and she was reminded again of his nickname for her. Neo and Doc were better than Toots and Baby, she supposed. The landscape kept rolling fractionally to the left, like a clock ticking backwards. The lights in the sky left white tracks as the ground rotated, the whole earth like a camera with the lens left open.

"Fix what?" She said, dropping onto to her back so that Wade seemed cartoonishly far away, his eerily smooth face as small as his toes were large. One of her hands floated up, and she traced the outline of one of the puzzle-piece bits of cloud with her index finger. Superficially, she understood what he meant, that maybe he wanted to want what everyone else wanted. Her fingers gestured at the ground next to them, and a little blue ranch house materialized on a little manicured lawn, little white fence encircling a sexy little American family and their big little oak tree. Grass sprouted through her fingers, and she frowned. The estate disappeared.

"You really don't want me to?" Swears made on holy books moved through the reeds. "I wish you were telling the truth."

Mad didn't much appreciate similarity of opinions, but she did wish it in this capacity: that Wade could see what she saw when she looked at his ravaged, sandpapered face. A text of recorded violence, of hate, of greed gone awry: his was the most truthful ugliness she'd ever seen.

WADE: He bowed forwards, peering at Madeline's suburban diorama over the edge of his tattered knees. The young man -- boy, really, looking all of seventeen right now -- chuckled and ground some of the grass under the heel of one palm. "No. They gave me all sorts of notifications that something had gone wrong," the leaves of the spiky palm tree turned into documents, pale sheafs of legalese and medicalese, Wade Wilson's signature at the bottom of more than a few, "but from where I'm sitting? Party on, Garth, 'cause there's nothing wrong with me. Aside from the chic Elephant Man look, of course. But aside from that, I'm still ticking and getting a kick out of--" (out of everything) "--life, and I beat the big C. So all of this?"

Wade waved an arm, motioning, gesturing towards their entire habitat. Sand dunes in the distance moved when he moved.

"Is totally worth the tradeoff. Plus the healing, too. And the stamina. Insert dirty joke here."

He tucked his hands behind his head and gently leaned back, cushioned by nothing, the Yogi all but reclining in an invisible armchair. The jokes were less prevalent here, for some reason. She knew what he was thinking. Which meant, for once, that Wade didn't have to vocalise.

MADELINE: She laughed, louder than--no exaggeration--she'd laughed in years, or ever would, for that matter. Her spine arched and she tipped her head back into the sand, looking like a swan on fire. The tree started molting, bits of Wade's life falling around her like toxic cherry blossoms, each one folding itself origami-like into a white bird and flitting away before they could hit the ground. Her laugh was bigger, purer, more beautiful than was possible for a moment, and then it disintegrated into an ashy crackling, like a potentially exquisite record with an irreparable scratch across the vinyl. Madeline made a sand angel and lifted one leg into the air, toes pointed. It was all a fake ballet on par with Mikhail; faking was her specialty, but this was a special occasion. Hell, a celebration, even.

"You realize you live the kind of life everyone should live, right? I can't believe you haven't slaughtered the world, yet." The lone remaining origami bird alighted on her nose, and she snapped at it with teeth a good sight sharper than they were in real life.

"I'm glad for the healing, too." That was all she said out loud, but trees started twisting out of mid-air, a forest from nothing snaking into existence. Each trunk was stained, and some were impaled with familiar swords. There was a possibility she'd entertained more than once that--if he hadn't had the eerie ability to regrow himself as easily as she'd grown herself a dress--this little tête-à-tête would never have happened. It was only now she was sure she was glad for the way things had turned out.

"But I can do without the dirty jokes, for now. You've already gotten to use me as your Barbie; pace yourself."

WADE: "♪You’ve nowhere to hide, nowhere to run, your village will burn like the heart of the sun -- with infinite glee, it’s going to be me, that slaughters the world,♫" he half-hummed, half-sang under his breath, his voice suddenly an older baritone which didn't quite fit with the younger body. It jarred, strange and unnatural. And so he seamlessly melded back into what he used to be -- is -- was -- was going to be. It was a comfortable sight. And if Madeline was too busy analysing her surroundings and the state of his face to notice what had happened to her, well, her loss; because miss Pryor, practically from the moment she nosed into his head, was taller. Brighter. Even more strikingly beautiful. And parts of the mindscape seemed to cave to her and obey in ways it simply wouldn't obey him.

When the bloodied forest sprouted around them, however, Wade clambered to his feet and dusted off his hands. "Let's take a tour," he suggested, catching hold of her hand and glancing to the side; in a heartbeat, everything flew. The two of them didn't move -- instead, the world rearranged itself to parade past for their liking, and on the way, he saw himself in full masked attire flinging himself against a closed, locked door. Deadpool would barrel all his body weight forward until, before actually reaching the door, he would suddenly disappear and reappear a few feet away. An exercise in futility; a little mental Sisyphus. As he watched himself struggle, a large bank of computers materialized beside the ordeal, showing one lone, ominous red light.

"I'm sorry, Wade. I'm afraid I can't let you do that."

Disappeared and reappeared.

Offices and cubicles scrolled past, with men at desks and editors hurrying through doorways. There was a flicker of girls at laptops. Bea Arthur wrestled dinosaurs in some distant land while he simultaneously took bets and watched the live coverage on TV. His outfit morphed into a Santa uniform and he absentmindedly adjusted the fuzzy white-and-red hat. Next to him, Madeline had taken on the look of a Bond girl silhouette as they dragged their feet through molasses of bleeding colour. When the skies turned into water, they went wading and twirling and madelining their way through what felt like the opening to Thunderball or For Your Eyes Only.

When the conveyor belt of bizarrity finally concluded, Wade Wilson looked contemplative.

He didn't say anything else.