Sarah Connor is cursed to be ever vigilant (ever_vigilant) wrote in valarlogs, @ 2012-10-07 17:12:00 |
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Entry tags: | !complete, cameron phillips, neena thurman (domino), wade wilson (deadpool) |
"Dommy, he's not really there..."
Who: Wade and Neena, also guest starring Cameron
What: Personal teleporters and "Burying" her brother.
When: Thursday, Friday, and Saturday
Where: Sarah Connor's house, Dani's house, Utah, and then an undisclosed CIA location
Rating: Pg-13 for Wade being lucid and symbolic rain
Triggers: Explicit mentions of bad childhoods and... well it's Neena.
Status: Complete
There was a flash of light, and Wade suddenly appeared in the kitchen. He looked around. Something was wrong. Something was very very wrong.
A girl looked up from a stack of pancakes and tilted her head. She looked calm, but panic was welling up inside her chest, “How did you get in here?”
“You’re not Neena.” Wade stared at her, “You’re not Neena at all!”
Cameron slowly reached under the table, but Wade was faster. He pointed a pistol at her, “Nuh uh uh!”
She put her hands on top of the table instead.
There was another flash, and Wade was gone. She looked at the space where he’d been standing, and then down at her pancakes. She got up, dumped the pancakes in the trash, and then ordered take out.
Several seconds later, Wade flashed into Dani’s kitchen, “THERE you are! Some chick was in your kitchen.”
"That's not my kitchen anymore, it's someone else's kitchen," Neena answered, without even skipping a beat. She'd been in the middle of smoking a joint while trying to drink a cup of coffee when he flashed in, but you know. Whatever.
Wade used to do that all the time where she came from. Where she used to come from. Or where she dreamed of. Whatever anyone was calling it these days, "Want a joint?"
"Oh no that stuff'll make you stupid." He pulled out a chair and sat it in backwards, "No, you're stupid! Fuck you yellow box!"
Wade had an argument with himself for the next several moments, that concluded when he had victory over his brain.
"And that's why I'm banned from Copenhagen."
Neena blew a smoke ring at his head, "Of course it is."
What was he doing here? How much did she care about that information? She pondered that while forcing herself to take another sip of coffee. Then she tilted her head to the side, and randomly said, "I have a box in Copenhagen. I really should go and move all of those to new locations now that jerkface is a jerkface and not a husbandface."
"Already done. That's also why I'm banned in Copenhagen," Wade said, waving his pistol reassuringly. Then he turned the safety back on and holstered it.
"Anyway a little birdy told me you wanted to talk to me."
"... wait, you did what?" Neena blinked her eyes at Wade, "You went and you re-did all my safety deposit boxes?"
That was above and beyond the call of duty, really. And she didn't recall actually asking him to do that, nor was he her employee or anything. Why did Wade keep doing such wonderful things for her? It was extremely confusing.
"I did, yes, but... why did you do that? I didn't ask you to do that."
Because, really, there wasn't anyone else out there from his world that he was really close to. Not Vanessa, not Nate, not Weasel. There was just Domino.
It was lonely, and the kind of lonely that not even Pinky could prevent.
So he did what he could to help, “You needed it done!”
"Wade..." Neena ran a hand up into her hair, squeezing back the tears that had sprung to her eyes, "You can't keep doing this."
"I can and I will. For totally." He gave her a thumbs up. "For totally real."
He scooted closer, eagerly, "So when are we gonna go and do something exciting again?"
"No. No, you can't. They're my messes. You just keep cleaning them up, and... You shouldn't have to. No one should have to clean this up but me."
The joint she'd smoked wasn't really helping to mellow her out anymore, and was more making her emotionally vulnerable. She was not about to go cry all over Wade. He didn't need that. He had enough to deal with. Neena squeezed her eyes shut.
"You were in the hospital," He said, simply. "I'm sure she looked great in a hospital gown." Neena's ass deserved to be hanging out, after all.
In a more serious tone, he said, "I owe it to you."
"I looked horrible in a hospital gown, and you can tell your brain that too."
She got up from her chair and brought her coffee mug to the sink, then paced the kitchen a bit, "You don't owe it to me. If anything, I owe you."
Then something hit her and she stopped pacing and stared at him, "Did you know? Wade. Did you know he wasn't who he said he was? That she wasn't... did you know?"
Wade shook his head. He knew a lot of things. A lot of things that he really shouldn't know. He was more observant than most people gave him credit for and he saw the world in a different way. He paid attention. Even when he was in his own little world.
"You always know. You knew about my spot. You didn't know this?" Her voice sounded tiny, and a little forlorn.
"I didn't know about the spot, I just knew it was missing. They weren't... I don't know."
He would have put a bullet in the man's head. He wouldn't have hesitated. He'd had ample opportunity. He'd had plenty of opportunities to make the shot.
"I don't know everything."
Neena hugged herself and nodded. She went silent for a bit while she tried to master her emotions. If he had known, she would probably have asked him why it was he had let her marry the guy, or move in with him, or any of that. And that wasn't fair to him, either. She'd already just told him that she needed to clean up her own messes.
She chewed on her lip a bit, and then sighed, "Right. Well. I'm glad that you don't know everything."
"I know you're sad," Wade replied, staring at her with large, understanding eyes. "We know you're pissed."
He tapped his head, and nodded sagely, "I was going to bring you burritos but Brain nixed the idea."
She made a face at the thought of burritos, and shook her head, "Thanks for the thought, but I'm not really a fan of ... food... right now. So your brain was right about that."
Neena didn't want to be sad, but that seemed to be her default state lately. When she wasn't tired, or lonely, or tired, or utterly depressed. She hated it. Pissed was an emotion that was there, but buried so far underneath everything else that she sometimes couldn't find it.
What could she do about it now, anyway? Hindsight was the best foresight, and she hadn't paid attention to a single one of her instincts. She was getting old. Her insides were young and had bought her almost another 20 years. She didn't even want them.
In a few weeks, she would have been forty years old. She'd been ready to settle down, buy a house, take a less exciting job, raise a daughter. The thought of another 20 years like the ones she'd just lived made her want to end it all now.
She just had to cross some things off of her list first, "I want to go and do something, Wade, and I think you should come with me."
Eight hours later, they were parking Wade's car along the side of an old, dusty road. Deep within the desert of Southern Utah, rain pounded on the roof of the car. It was a hard rain, too cold for this time of year. It made an angry sound on the metal of the muscle car.
Lazarus had ridden in the car with them the entire time.
The cold rain seemed appropriate. Neena zipped her jacket up and got out of the car, then shoved her hands in her pockets and started making her way off the road and into the desert. The rain was, indeed, hard. It pelted against her hair and face, leaving an icy sting in its wake. She didn't care.
The ghost of her brother followed her.
Wade got out of the car, his boots sinking into the mud. He popped the trunk, and pulled out a shovel, then closed it and followed after her. He gave a respectful distance. There had to be room for her brother.
There was a clear memory of the place they'd burned him, and the place he was shot. There was no chance at all that there were any of his actual ashes remaining, but she still wanted to get a scoop of earth from the place that they'd burned the body. It was symbolic more than anything.
She headed in that direction, her brother hounding her heels and chattering at her in the process. She should have stayed in that place, and let them make a new one. The reapers were coming. He was supposed to stop them, to unite the world to stop them. She wasn't as powerful as he was. She never would be. She was a failure, and he was perfect.
She couldn't even shoot him when she'd needed to. She was too weak to make the call to pull the trigger. The man wasn't even who he'd said he was. Oh he'd known. He'd known, because he'd been inside his head.
"Shut up. SHUT UP."
Wade walked along, about twenty paces behind her. He knew a ghost haunted her. He suspected that it was her brother. He had nothing funny to say, and even his split personality had nothing to add. It was solemn. Wade could do solemn. It was rare. But he could do it.
"He wouldn't have let you pull the trigger," Wade said.
"He knew. His ghost used to mess with him. I don't know if he was trying to mock me or warn me. Maybe he was trying to do both. I could have pulled the trigger if I'd been fast enough."
She walked up to a spot and pointed at the dirt, which was more like mud in all of this rain. Lazarus stood atop the site, shaking his head at her. He would have made the man pull the trigger and shoot her before he'd ever have let her kill him.
Neena could look back on the situation. She could identify all of the risks, she knew every possible way that would have panned out. But she was still too close to it. Somewhere in her mind, she still thought that her known immunity to his powers should have prepared her.
Some part of her had certainly been trying to prepare for it.
Lazarus mocked her with his eyes. She sighed, "Let's get some dirt here..."
Kerthunk.
The shovel bit into the mud. Wade handed an umbrella, and then began to dig. To get below the mud, to where the earth had yet to soak into the rain. The umbrella would let them get the dirt before it became mud.
"When I was a kid, I'd make mud pies. Not just any mud pies. Designer mud pies. Like Ace of Cakes. With mud. Then I'd feed them to my little brother. Dad would beat me over it. Which wasn't too much different from Other!dad. Who was an ass." There was a lot more to dream!dad, but Wade didn't remember it. Just that he was an ass.
Wade hit paydirt, and scooped some into an empty big-gulp cup.
"My mother started a cult, gave birth to twins, and abandoned me. She took the other twin, and raised her. She left me. The cult thought I was number two. They thought I'd lead them. Instead most of them are dead, and I ended up in a mental hospital where men decided that, since I didn't respond to the world and couldn't scream, they could touch me wherever they wanted and use me like a play thing. And I have been used like that for the entire rest of my life." Neena whispered, matter-of-factly.
Things like that were the things she used to avoid talking about. Who wanted to know? They were hard topics of conversation. They made most people uncomfortable, like the rest of the things she'd been through recently. But that was the past, and she'd told all of her secrets to a complete stranger who, despite all that, knew her better than anyone she had ever known or would know, again.
Most secrets didn't matter anymore.
She took the cup of dirt from Wade so that he could get up off of the ground, and kept the umbrella over both of them so they could have a reprieve from the rain for a while.
The rain beat on the umbrella, a staccato machine gun rhythm. Wade hugged his shovel to himself. He never told anyone about his family. Most of the time when he did it was a lie. But every lie had a kernel of truth he just didn't want to face.
Wade stood in silence, as thunder rolled across the desert. His mind raced, argued with itself, and finally settled the argument with rock paper scissors.
"Is that why you don't know what to do with your freedom? Strings are cut, the baddies buried. Most of them."
"A lot of them aren't buried yet, Wade."
And you couldn't bury ghosts. Or you could try, which is what they were doing, but would it work? She had no idea if it would work. She stared down at the cup in her hand, and shook her head, "You can't bury all of them. All the people who ever used and abused and hurt you. They go on and live their lives, and so do you. If you can."
"The worst ones are buried. Some of them in their own heads. Believe me, I know what it's like to be buried in your own head." He twisted the umbrella around, making it splash water around them, "I'm dying. So I just live, and let them stay buried."
"I was dying... We're still not sure if I am or not." Neena frowned. Had she known that about Wade? He'd probably mentioned Cancer a dozen times, but she recalled something about him being pretty damn immortal, "You'll probably live forever, you know. I'm sorry. No one ever really wants that."
She couldn't let the things stay buried, was maybe the problem. They always seemed to come back up when she least expected it. Milo had been buried in her head for years and then suddenly, all of the feelings were back. Everything she'd felt for Nate returned after she'd dreamed about him.
Feelings and emotions couldn't really be trusted, and neither could anyone in her life. Every time she turned around, someone she thought would never betray her had a gun to her head. Even Wade would probably shoot her if the right person paid him. The fact that he held the highest level of trust in her life currently was kind of hysterically funny.
And Lazarus thought so, too. He followed her as she made her way over to the place where he'd been shot.
"I don't want it." He'd fallen in love with Death. The actual physical embodiment of Death. And he knew he'd never be with her, though he tried. And here, there was Pinkie, and the realization that as his healing factor slowly returned to him he'd outlive her. It was depressing. It was much better to think of tacos and balloons and giraffes.
Wade would shoot Neena. He'd shoot her just enough to make it look like he killed her, while at the same time ensuring she'd live and he'd still collect the payday. Then he'd give her 10%.
Because he can be a dick like that.
10% was better than nothing.
Lazarus hounded her all the way to the next site. His voice had gotten louder and louder, and Neena felt like the steps needed to walk forward got heavier and heavier. It was like she was walking through quicksand, or thick sludge - thicker than the mud caused by the rain that was still pouring down.
It was colder, too, and a thick fog had set in out of nowhere. Neena stopped short of the location she'd been trying to walk to, and stared towards it, "Are you seeing this? Tell me you're seeing this."
"I'm seeing..." rainbows and lollipops and little cherubs, "Fog. Lots of fog. It's really cold too. Like the freezer at the chop shop where I bought a whole pig for armor. Meat armor."
Wade knelt, trying to peer through the fog, and the rain, but he couldn't see through it.
Think she's crazy?
"Maybe, but it's the good kind."
There's no good kind of crazy. Wade, none of this makes any sense.
"Nothing ever makes sense with you."
Neena would have agreed with Wade's brain, if she'd been party to the conversation. But she'd been thinking she was crazy ever since Lazarus had shown up and Moira had told her she'd had a psychotic break.
Well, at least it hadn't turned her into a serial killer, right?
She tried to peer through the fog, too, but the only thing in the fog was Lazarus's figure. She pulled a flashlight out of her pocket, and tried walking forward again. This place was supposed to be concentrated evil. Whoever else Romany was, she had not lied about that. Lazarus was the product of it. Some part of him might have been stuck behind, maybe, but she'd always thought that was the part that followed her around.
"None of this makes sense. And why meat armor? Does that really work?" Chatting made this feel less creepy. The hairs on the back of her neck were starting to rise.
"Yep! Works great!" Wade stood. He had an idea. It was a good idea, or so Brain thought, and in fact Brain had come up with it. For once, he listened to Brain, pulled a flare out of his pocket, lit it, and tossed it into the darkness.
"I cast fireball at the darkness!"
The flare lit the fog in a reddish light, then caused it to part and burn away into threads of mist. The mist coiled around a bit, disturbed by the rain, before it, too, cleared off. Lazarus was all that remained.
Your friend isn't right in the head. Not right at all.
"Well, you know Wade. Trying to talk to him is like trying to talk to a guy being attacked by bees." Neena stepped forward a few more paces, taking care to give the flare a wide berth, and stood in front of the figure. As expected, her flashlight shone right through him, but she couldn't get past the feeling like he was really there.
You want to die. I could make him shoot you.
Neena blinked at the spirit, "I'm pretty sure that's impossible. We're just going to bury this sand here for you, and make a nice little tombstone."
"Dommy, he's not really there," Wade said, staring right through her. He tapped his heart, "He's here, in the guilt center. And up here." Tapping his forehead, "In the brainpan. He's not there. He's just waiting to be buried."
"He didn't even start talking to me until I goaded him into it..." Neena frowned, and took the shovel from Wade, handing him both the cup and the umbrella. She sunk it into the ground, and started digging. She was going to ignore him. She was just going to ignore him. Wade was - scarily - right. He wasn't really there. He couldn't make Wade do anything because he wasn't alive.
You think this will put me to rest? Do I even want to rest? Will it make YOU rest? Maybe I don't want you to ever find that kind of peace...
"That's exactly something my brain would say to me..."
Really, Wade would rather take a bullet himself, right now, and even then he was finally having some things to live for, rather than things to die for.
"Brains will do that. Most of the time it's good to listen to them, but sometimes they're acting like not brain and then you need to ignore them. Ignore the not brain."
You abandoned me. You left me alone and then you didn't come for me.
Neena closed her eyes and kept on digging. It was true. She had done those things. It'd been chief among her reasons for feeling so guilty about how it had ended up. If she'd just been there with him the entire time...
... She'd probably be in the same place she might have been if they'd left her in that facility. Precog baby machine. Or she'd be dead. But that wouldn't have been so bad.
I will never go away. This won't work. It's futile. The Reapers are coming and then you'll all die, but not before you go crazy like our mother. I'll haunt you until you lose your mind.
"SHUT UP. Just shut up." Neena dropped the shovel and pulled her gun, "I swear to God..."
Wade had stopped paying attention to what Neena was doing. He knew what she had to do, and he could have no part of it. He was looking up at the sky, the rain pounding on his face now. He lifted his hands and watched the water wash over them, in wonderment.
There were a few more moments of back and forth between Neena and the ghost, hallucination, or otherwise not-present third party, before two shots rang clearly through the air. Neena sunk to her knees in the mud after that, gun still in her hand.
The rain poured down over the scene, still stinging and cold, and bounced off the top of her gun, making tiny little metallic tinging noises every so often. It was the only sound that filled the space until she clicked the safety back on, holstered it, and got back to work shoveling.
The ghost had stood there with a bullet hole in his head and chest for a few seconds, and what Neena could only read as a satisfied look on his face, before he'd finally faded away.
She took the cup from Wade's hands and dumped its into the earth, covered everything back up, and built a cairn out of nearby stones.
Then she walked back over to him, "I thought you were the one who needed to put him to rest, but obviously it was me."
Wade took Neena's arms by the wrists, and lifted them into the air. The rain was cold, cleansing. The water washed over them, washing away the mud. Washing away the blood.
She let him, and raised her face to the rain, too. If it was washing away tears along with it, she never would have admitted it, and Wade would never have asked.
One thing, ready to cross off of her list. It was freeing, in a way she wasn't sure she was ready to accept.
They stood there for a long time. Evening had rolled in, and the storm had rolled away, leaving behind nothing but muddy landscape and a clear, star-studded sky. Neena dropped her arms, and kissed Wade's cheek. He might have gotten a real one if he wasn't dating the Taco Princess.
"Thanks. For this."
There was silence, then he said, "I know where he is."
She set her jaw, "Take me."
Twenty-four hours later, Wade was sitting in the car, doing MLP cross-stitch with all the seriousness of a world-class chess player at the most important tournament of his life.
He'd identified the exact place that Neena's Pete had moved on to, and she would never really grasp how he'd managed to do that. In the beginning she hadn't even bothered asking, because she hadn't cared. She'd spent most of the trip field stripping her pistols, cleaning them, and putting them back together.
She wanted to use a pistol he was familiar with. One that he'd know, just by the sound of the safety clicking off, that it was her. She wanted that knowledge to sink down into his balls before she blew the back of his head off.
They pulled up near the safehouse and she'd walked the rest of the way. He'd have set up all kinds of means of detection if she came in through the front door, so she'd climbed up into a window and jacked it open. The floor around his bed was covered in broken glass, and the sound of the window opening should have been enough for him to wake up.
But for whatever reason, he hadn't. She sat there, on the windowsill, and watched him sleep. This was the man she'd allowed herself to love beyond all reason. Beyond the ability to handle it at all if he was gone. That was a chance she had taken, but she wasn't sure if killing him was worth the consequences. Milo had been a weight she'd carried for most of her life. And that had been mercy. This was just empty revenge.
30 minutes later, she got back into the car, and shut the door. Her face was streaked with tears, but most of them had dried on the walk back. She shook her head, "I couldn't do it. I couldn't."
He didn't look up from his cross stitch. But his voice was even, "Now you're free."