Felicia & Wade | Very Early Monday Morning

[x-deadpool.livejournal.com]

Wade gets an unexpected visitor, they chat.


Midnight. So early, but the mansion mostly slept, lights off and halls quiet but for the occasional door that muffled various playlists. Felicia wandered; when was the last time she had been in bed before 4am. She was New York! New York was 3am last call and a city that never slept.

Her feet on a lush rug said similar but different and she sighed. "Hello?" she asked, pushing open a door. It looked like it belonged to the rest of the suites, but it was ajar, pouring out light and some kind of music.

Wade looked up from where he sat on the couch, a cleaning rag and various cleansers laid out neatly on the coffee table before him while AC/DC played in the background. It wasn't often people just wandered into his suite, particularly not at this hour. Sure, Doug might show up with a request for a Guitar Hero marathon or Marie-Ange might pad in looking like she'd tried to sleep and failed, but not strangers. "Yo," he said, the battle ax he'd been cleaning held carefully in one hand. "Sup, chica?"

Stepping in, Felicia adjusted her kimono around herself; she'd tried to sleep, she really had, got into pajamas and everything. "Hello, Wade," she guessed. "People turn off the lights here at 10pm."

Folding herself onto a plush chair she reached over to pick up a roll of knives, making a happy noise. "Ooh, Chinese ring daggers. I haven't played with you in a while. Do you have a spare cloth?"

"Sure," Wade said, standing up to put the battle ax back on its wall mount. He took down a replica of a Mesopotamian sickle sword and then walked back to the couch. Reaching into his bag, he pulled out a spare cloth and handed it to his guest before sitting back down and beginning to methodically clean the blade. "And this is a school. Sort of. Most of the wild parties happen elsewhere, I think, and people trickle in at all hours to collapse in their beds."

Felicia smoothed out the leather roll and picked up the first dagger, holding it in both palms. "Delayed homesickness, I suppose." She smiled, looking up at him, and expertly began polishing the metal hilt. "This is possibly the worst introduction ever. I'm going to guess you're the muscle of the group?"

"Muscle, body shield - whatever they need. I'm good at blowing things up, too," Wade answered, nodding. "And getting them weapons wherever they wind up. You're another sneaky-sneak, though, right?"

"Nice." Felicia turned the dagger over, carefully working on the blade. "Yep. Much sneaky-sneak. Actually, that's probably the most concise description I've ever heard of what I do, off the books. On the books is number nerd, in case you haven't done your taxes." She looked up. "I'm not offering to do your taxes, but I am mentioning that I can be bribed."

Amused, Wade said, "I've got a guy who handles all my taxes. They're kind of complicated. Multiple aliases, all with various income streams, mostly legal. He handles my investments and any money laundering I need, too. And no, it's not North. Though you two would be the cutest, most number-crunching-est couple ever. I'm gonna lobby pretty hard for you. Just buy him nice things. He likes butterfly bombs circa WWII."

Felicia grinned and startled herself, looking embarrassed. "The worst part is I don't even know if that was thinking about how much fun it would be to wrangle those taxes or hitting that." She twirled the ring dagger around her index finger thoughtfully. "Thank you for your blessing, though. I'm looking forward to asking my dealer for something that doesn't run on electricity. Maybe I can get it packaged in a heart shaped box for kicks."

Wade hummed, "I've been inside your heart-shaped box for weeks." Badly. He badly hummed Nirvana for a moment, then said, "Electricity is fun. You should talk to my ladybird's cousin, Jean-Philippe. And Mav... he needs something or someone to ground him. Old soldiers get lost in their heads, y'know? He's been lost for a while."

"Truth. I'm a modern girl, most of my arsenal is appropriately made recently. I'm all for the classics but compact night vision goggles blow eye patches out of the water, pun intended," Felicia replied after the musical interlude, one eyebrow still slightly higher than the other. "I know nothing about him other than the gun, coffee, hot part but. I'm genuinely looking forward to finding out."

"I'm older than he is," Wade said, holding the sickle sword up to the light to see how sharp the blade was and whether or not he needed to use the whetstone on the coffee table. "But he's doing alright now. And my ladybird likes you. So that's a point in your favor. Especially right-off. Plus, he didn't shoot you. So there's another point in your favor."

Felicia tipped her head in gratitude, spinning the dagger in the other direction before grasping it in her palm and sliding it into it's pouch, clean. "Fair enough. I tend to be the lucky sort." She looked up, awkward and searching. "And, I. She seems nice. Marie-Ange. My mother's French."

"Oh, you're one of those - the lucky ones," Wade said, reaching for the whetstone. "We seem to've gotten a lot of them lately. Almost makes me wonder if the mansion can handle that much luck all in one place. Something's bound to snap back on somebody at some point."

"Oh?" Felicia asked, eyebrow going up. "I've never met another one. But I guess we do sort of hide in plain sight." She scoffed, eyes alight, as she pulled out the other dagger. "I mean, I don't. But that's more to do with being beautiful, rich and talented and less to do with..." she continued, waggling her fingers to prompt a very dramatic switch of music from AC/DC to Joan Jett.

"Yeah, there's Arthur, but he's all good luck. Can't control it, I don't think. And Jennie's got good luck and bad luck. Wanda's chaos energy, so kind of everything all at once. There are other people, but you get the gist," Wade said, beginning the slow process of evenly sharpening the sickle sword's blade. In a conversation full of non sequiturs, he wasn't entirely sure how he'd wound up giving her a rundown of who could do what with their powers. "Which brand are you?"

Scrunching her nose slightly in thought, Felicia finally shrugged. "Good luck for me, bad for everyone else, mostly. I don't honestly know a lot about it. I didn't even really know I had it for a while, the odds just started getting ridiculous."

Wade pointed at her with the whetstone. "Like Madrid, 2013."

Felicia huffed a breathy laugh, and nodded. "Not that I was in Madrid, but like that, yeah. Though, I'd already figured out how to consciously tip things a little my way by then. I almost feel bad for all those girls ankles I sprained while competing, back in the day. Don't get me wrong, I was the best, but I rarely got to prove it." She glanced at her reflection in the ring dagger, checking the edge with her thumb. "So what about you makes you so shield worthy, other than the private arsenal?"

"Healing factor," Wade answered. She'd totally been in Madrid. This whole 'can neither confirm nor deny' thing - Wade was looking forward to just being able to shoot people. Blood spatter didn't lie. Usually. "And I'm trained in a few martial arts, so I'm a good distraction."

"Handy," Felicia replied, finishing up the last dagger and sliding it into it's pocket. She rolled them up and placed them on the table, tucking her ankle up under her as she sat back down. "My distractions are generally cleavage and ass, I haven't had to physically assault anyone in ages. But that's part of the good sneaky-sneak thing. And fitting into air ducts."

"Yeah, I don't fit in air ducts," Wade said, smiling a little again. "Never have. But they're good for delivering grenades, if you can get the specs right. No one expects grenades in the air ducts."

"See, that's the nice part of generally not doing jobs where people are actively trying to kill me at the time. Lasers and lots of pressure sensors, but no grenades," she pointed out, smiling in return. "I mean, I'm sure most of them want me dead after the job, but by then I already have what I want."

"Kind of like distance kills, only... less bloody," Wade offered. "Mav's good at those. He took care of that when we were in South Sudan. I did the up close and personal bits."

Felicia half nodded in response. "Sort of. My father always said if someone caught you on a job, you weren't smart enough to do it right. But we tend to just be in it for shiny things rather than payment or emotions."

Holding up the sickle sword again, Wade let the light glint off the edge. "Depends on the shiny thing, don't you think?"

"Hmm?" Felicia hummed, confused.

"I'm not a sneaky-sneak, but I'd do a job that paid me in shiny things like this," Wade said, indicating the sword with a smile.

"You're... kind of missing the point. For you, killing things is a means to an end. For me, it's a mistake when you didn't plan things out well enough," Felicia said, shifting in her chair. "If I have to kill someone who gets in my way, fine, but I'm hunting the thing, not the person. I mean, do you," she continued, shrugging. "I'm not judging, just pointing out it's different."

"Fair enough," Wade said, standing to put the cleaned, sharpened sword back in its wall mounting. "So how do you start planning a job? What's the information you need to get started and make sure things go the way you need them to, no killing involved?"

"Depends how big a job is. Small, low key mark, like an item in a private collection, those I can usually handle on my own. I thief and grift, so as long as I don't have to be too many places, it's fine. I try not to take on more than I can handle alone," Felicia replied, swinging her ankle gently as she spoke. "I've been on a couple teams, for larger items, but I don't particularly like it.

"Next comes casing, though you'd be surprised how many blue prints you can get without much effort, which cuts down on days and thus covers. Then plan and execution, which is experience, patience, and usually last, cleverness."

Wade nodded, thinking about the many different skill sets X-Force had accumulated so rapidly. Spies and thieves, heavy-hitters and brains. "So how do you feel about X-Force, then? I mean, it's a team. Different from what you usually do."

"It's not by choice. As I said, for the bigger jobs, well. You need a team. I'm... probably not going to be good at it," Felicia said frankly. "But the group seems competent enough, not total assholes, which is what you usually get with experts."

"So you're not in X-Force for the long haul," Wade said, not quite a statement but also not quite a question. He'd read what there was to read about things involving Miss Felicia Hardy, but sometimes a person's belief in how things would go didn't quite match up with how things actually went.

"Well," Felicia smiled. "Never say never."