Bye-Bye, Spidey | Spideypool

i.

Death was a concept that escaped Wade. He'd died plenty of times, sure, but he'd never experienced death. Cold, hard, jarring death. No reaper had come for him, no Hell has housed him, and no angels would be seeing his pretty little face for a while. Yeah, Wade'd seen plenty of death (real death that you ain't never waking up from, no siree), but it wasn't his own. It was mainly that of the guys (and gals, etc.) he went after, the ones he didn't particularly give a single shit about.

That's why it hurt so bad that Peter was dead. And Wade could do nothing about it.

Wade's fingers trembled, numb and unsteady as he took a drag of his cigarette. It was cold -a biting chill that whipped at his cheeks- and he was wearing an unfamiliar jacket. He could practically feel how red the tip of his nose was, how cracked his poor lips were. But he didn't care. Wasn't any worse than how he usually looked, anyway.

He thought about the night before: the rum, the dull hurt coursing through his veins. He thought about that first sip of alcohol, how it stung his throat and left his tongue tingling and numb afterward. By the time he'd gotten to the bottom of the bottle, the sting was gone.

He turned his attention back to his cigarette and sighed. Cars passed and he idly watched them, pretending to care about the destination of each and every driver. A woman drove by with a german shepherd hanging out of her back window and he thought about how he always wanted a dog. Couldn't ever have one though.

He stubbed the tiny stump of his cigarette out and rested his hands on the rough concrete of the stoop.

"Fuck...." he breathed. The memory was still fresh in his mind, a hammer knocking at the walls of his skull and causing him to cringe. This was more than pain. This was fucking agony.

Hazy and pulsating, the memory flooded Wade's brain.

---

Peter was sprawled in Wade's arms, a thin stream of blood dripping from the corner of his mouth onto the floor. Wade had checked for Peter's pulse at least twenty times, taking off his gloves and pulling away the fabric at Peter's neck to dismiss any obstructions, but there was still nothing there. No thump of the blood pulsing through his veins. Just stillness.

Wade heard voices around him, shouting from someone who'd been fighting the same fight he and Peter had. The fight was still happening around them, debris falling like rain and movement encapsulating Wade in his own little bubble. He didn't know what had happened to Peter; what had hit him and caused him to fall from the roof of a building. Wade's back had been turned when he'd heard someone scream his name. He immediately shoved a knife through the chest of the robot-alien-whatever he'd been dealing with and turned to find Peter falling and the suddenness of it hit Wade like he'd been the one to receive a knife to the chest.

When Wade reached the grass that Peter had fallen onto, his heart was already somewhere near his feet. That's how he found himself sitting on the damp grass of a midtown park with his dead lover in his arms, already ripped from him by the minion of some villainous asshole with a plan to take over the world.

Wade has just began to stand up when he felt a sharp pain in the back of his head, and then it all went black.

When he woke up, the world around him was quiet and still. It took a few minutes before he realized where he was. When he did, he immediately shot up and searched for anyone familiar. But there was no one. No Avengers, no civilians, just a whole lot of corpses. And no Peter.