Rachel & Wade | Sunday Morning

[x-deadpool.livejournal.com]

Rachel and Wade meet in an unlikely place and shenanigans ensue. Hopefully you expected nothing less.


The art classroom table was littered with pieces of paper. Some had doodles on them, but others had the rough workings of mathematical and science problems scribbled on it. Not quite what you would expect to find in art class either way… Not that the person responsible for the mess really cared.

Rachel had her feet propped up on the table, the chair she was sitting on precariously balanced on its two hind legs as she tapped her pencil against the thick SAT prep textbook she had on her lap. The redhead let out a jaw-cracking yawn, clearly intellectually stimulated by its riveting contents.

Wade was looking for glitter. The problem was, of course, that with Molly in the mansion, there seemed to be a pretty continuous lack of it in the main building. That was why he'd trekked out to the boathouse-cum-art building. He wasn't expecting to find anybody else out there, not at this time of day, but there was a stick of a girl who looked to be in danger of falling backward, chair and all, if she yawned any harder.

"Hola, chiquita," he said, moving over to the cabinets so he could rummage through them.

“… Ola,” came the belated answer from her as she watched him with equal parts of fascination and trepidation. She'd seem him around the mansion a couple of times -- he was a little hard to miss. The Deadpool here looked exactly like the man she ‘knew’ – the crazy mercenary who talked too much too fast for his own good, and somehow or another always made sure Molly (and the trickster whom she now suspected was Matt) were safe and fed regardless of the ridiculous situations she always seemed to find them in. He’d even saved her life a couple of times, and always, always treated her like the weird grown up teenager that she was, even when she was sixteen and commanding a unit.

Rachel willed the ache in her chest away before it could come and drummed her pencil against her heart to ease the ache that had formed. The front two legs of her chair landed on the ground with a thump as she dumped the textbook on the messy table. “Whatcha lookin’ for?”

"Glitter," Wade answered. "You seen any? I'd settle for glitter glue at this point. Or anything that's vaguely sparkly and will stay where I put it with a minimal amount of effort." Not finding what he was looking for in the cabinets, he turned around and leaned back against them. "Pretty sure I've seen you around. Also pretty sure we've never said hello. Molly speaks highly of you, though. I'm Wade."

“Rachel,” she replied, standing and walking to the teacher’s desk at the front of the classroom and pulling out a tray of… sparkly stuff(!) from the shelf beneath it. She gestured at it, with a small smile. “Are you a teacher?”

"Ha! No," Wade said, grinning as he headed toward her to examine the tray of sparkly things. "That'd be hilarious, though. Kyle joked about having me sub for him, once. Then we extrapolated all the things I'd probably make his sophomore English class do when they didn't do their work and we decided it'd be for the best not to tempt fate. Or me. Or whatever." Nodding toward the papers and books strewn haphazardly across the table, he asked, "So what're you in for?"

"SATs," she replied, shrugging as she extracted a tube of gold glitter from the tray and tossed it at him. Yeah, the man would probably string them up by their toes and demand they finish their work before they could come down. Or something. "Heard they're easier than taking the 'A' levels, and my parents insist that I need it. Who am I to argue against such impeccable logic?"

"See, I just went from high school to the military," Wade said, quirking a smile after catching the tube of glitter. "So I managed to avoid all that higher education stuff." Leaning over the table, he took a gander at one of the open books. "Word analogies." He made a face. "I'd take a gun over a word analogy any day."

“So would I. In a heartbeat.” Rachel made a dissatisfied noise under her breath – she had a feeling that at the first mention of any thoughts of enlisting, her mother would turn away to hide her tears and temper, and her father’s defensiveness would rise like a battering ram. Truth be told she simply had no heart to defy them in any way right then. The redhead sighed and dropped back onto her seat with a loud thump. “But needs must.”

"Sometimes needs must suck," Wade said. "A lot. You should take a break and help me set up this glitter bomb. I figure it's only right to get back at my roommate. She keeps putting her David Bowie stuff on my Bea Arthur shrine."

“Oh, what blasphemy,” Rachel gasped, expertly twirling the pencil between her fingers. “I dunno. What’s in it for me?”

"The satisfaction of knowing you helped someone?" Wade tried. He didn't even wait for a verbal reply from Rachel - her face said volumes. "And pizza. And an excuse to stop studying. And maybe I'll let you check out the weaponry I keep at the mansion if you can prove you're not going to accidentally shoot yourself in the foot."

Tempting. Very tempting. And strange considering that Wade seemed to have no clue at all as to who she was, and was thus offering to show a complete stranger some very dangerous weapons.

“Fine, then,” the girl shrugged, starting to clear up her mess and ending by sweeping the used papers into a rough pile. “But a glitter bomb, really? I did those when I was seven.”

"It's sort of a thing for my roommate, apparently," Wade said. "She used to glitterbomb other people. So I figure turnabout's fair play and everything. It's not like the glitter'll hurt her. She'll probably enjoy it." He snorted at that thought. "I think we're gonna need more glitter. And some balloons."

They hunted the art supplies down, and Rachel wondered briefly about who the hell stocked the art room. It was a little difficult imagining Fred Dukes in the art store buying mounds of glitter, after all. It took a while, though, but their resulting loot consisted of a couple of balloons, a fair amount of glitter, glitter glue and shiny, reflective pieces of silver and gold paper that Rachel was now shredding into small pieces.

“Who’s your roommate, by the way?” She asked, somewhat belatedly.

"Clarice Fergusson," Wade said, working on getting the glitter into the balloons before he attempted to blow them up. "She's purple and a fashionista that my girlfriend does not agree with on much so far as fashion is concerned. I'm pretty sure they were roommates, maybe, and there were shoes thrown."

Finally, three balloons of glitter sat before Wade on the table. He was only sort of sparkly, which he considered a win. "You know her?"

Living memories flashed before her eyes – of intel reports and terrifying news and finally of that one time she met the purple demon with an innocuous code name in person and had to retreat from her alien demonic powers. One wouldn't usually associate that sort of a character with childish pranks of sparkle.

“Nope, not really.” Rachel blinked, hoping that the episode had gone undetected. She brushed her hands off and watched the fine glitter slowly drift to the floor. “Don’t really need to know someone to help their roommate get revenge on them. I think it’s for the better – less moral dilemmas involved.”

Wade noticed the pause, the way Rachel's eyes went distant, her pupils dilating. He didn't say anything, though, because really. Who was he to judge somebody else's neuroses? If it even was a neurosis she had going on - after all, maybe she just really liked the color purple. "Fewer moral qualms are always pretty awesome," he agreed once she'd tuned back in. "C'mon, chickadee - let's do this thing.”

Rachel stood and waited for Wade to pick up their masterpieces, dusting purple glitter off her fingers as she tilted her head at Wade and asked: “So, how exactly are you going to pop these? I mean, they aren't exactly very explodey.”

"Well, the air pressure's enough that if we rig up a clever mechanism with thumb tacks, they should explode well enough," Wade said. Then, eyebrows waggling, he continued, "Or I could go find some C4. I'm sure Skittles'd love that."

“Oooor I could just blow it up for you?” Rachel offered, holding the door open for him with her book under an arm and pencil behind her ear. Not directly because then Wade’s roommate may not have a room left to come back to, but she could charge ‘em thumbtacks and let ‘em fly. Unless of course Wade got off on rigging clever mechanisms in which case, who was she to interfere. “That is, if you were planning to stay an’ watch it explode in her face.”

"Totally planning to stay and watch it explode in her face," Wade said, exiting the art room and heading toward the mansion proper. "You are my favorite TK, you know that? Hot Doc Jean wouldn't help me blow up glittery balloons. Probably. Though technically I've never asked her to and sometimes her sense of humor's as twisted as mine."

“Well, it’d be tough, but if you caught her in the right mood, the margins would be slightly more in your favour. But even then,” Rachel grinned. “You bet your arse I’m the coolest TK around.”