Chapter Text
Wade doesn’t understand Vanessa as well as he used to, now that he gets confused easier and they spend less time together and time feels like some kind of fucked up alternate universe bullshit.
Wade used to know what Vanessa was saying most of the time, not less than half the time.
She used to know what he meant too.
Now, though, with the boxes and the weird freakouts and the memory stuff, with the concentration issues (that he remembers having since forever that made everything hard to follow except for a few all-consuming things) so much worse now—she doesn’t see him the same anymore, and she doesn’t understand him anymore, or want him. He can see it in her smile and hear it in her laugh and feel it in the way she hesitates before kissing his ruined skin.
He tells her he gets it if she’s grossed out, he knows it’s really bad, but she brushes it off and doesn’t like bringing it up. She has a couple shots before they have sex, not enough to get drunk, but enough to loosen up, and it’s not even close to the same, because they’re not…
Wade doesn’t know if he’s in love anymore. He’s not sure of much of anything anymore. When he wasn’t with her, he had her, but not her, not this version of her, the real one, the new one.
And she, she had him pressed in bronze, memories of a guy with a bangin’ body that wasn’t covered in scar tissue on fucking scar tissue and the face of an angel and…and eyebrows. All Wade has left is his bangin’ body, and not even his great ass can make up for how much everything else has been fucked every way imaginable.
Wade knows, in some vague way, that Vanessa isn’t in love with him anymore, even if he’s not sure when it happened, and he kinda knows that he’s probably not in love with her anymore either. Their love story was from Before.
Now it’s more like a really disappointing sequel.
Wade thinks Vanessa doesn’t know he knows this.
That’s probably just another reason why their days as Wadessa are numbered.
They’re just not in sync anymore.
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No way he’s gonna be the one who breaks up, though. No way.
He doesn’t have the balls.
Vanessa can do it.
+
The last limping legs of their romance give out on what’s supposed to be a special day.
+
It’s their anniversary, and Wade gets Vanessa a necklace, one with as many diamonds as possible, because he’s hoping he really did just forget that he’s in love with her and he’s gonna remember now, and besides, that engagement was beautiful, okay, and he wants things to be beautiful again. He wants to rewind to the moments right before everything was ruined, to the very last time he and Vanessa were happy without sickness fucking everything up.
Wade’s been preparing for this anniversary for six weeks, ever since he realized it was coming. It’s lucky that he figured it out so much time in advance, so he could remember to definitely not forget. Wade’s not usually that lucky when it comes to his brain, these days, but on that day, he just knew. He had a thought and a feeling and it had to do with the engagement and he put two and two together and—
He thinks, too hopefully, that this might be what starts fixing him and Vanessa, what makes them remember if they’re in love. That they’re in love.
Vanessa’s sitting on the bed when he walks into the apartment, and when he says, “Knock knock?” she looks up and smiles.
He knows, somewhere in his gut, that she used to smile at him different, special, and she doesn’t ask who’s there?
“I have something for you!” Wade sing-songs, proud of himself and maybe a little (a lot) smug.
Her smile trembles, but she holds her hands out. “Gimme.”
He bounces over to the bed, excitement all bubbly in his chest, and gives her the box.
She doesn’t tear the wrapping paper like he vaguely remembers she used to, instead she peels the paper back, hesitant, and when she opens the box, her fingers just hover and flinch above the necklace, suspended in time and space, like she’s scared to touch it. Wade doesn’t remember Vanessa ever being scared of anything, but now he can see that she is most of the time. It makes him scared too.
“Well, you still know what I like,” she says very softly.
He beams. “I just found the shiniest, diamondiest thing.”
Her smile goes totally wobbly now, like it’ll melt off her face. “I wanted to talk. That’s why I called you over.”
Wade frowns. “What kind of talk?” he asks suspiciously.
“The…we need to talk kind of talk.”
Wade feels numb. Yellow tells White to give him five bucks, he knew this was gonna happen in the next week, ha. White tells him they never had a bet going, and he doesn’t have five bucks, because they’re boxes. What would Yellow do with five bucks anyway? Yellow says he was making a point. White says it was a stupid one.
Wade shakes his head like that’ll actually drive the boxes away instead of just making them dizzy for a while, and says, disappointed, “On our anniversary?”
Now Vanessa’s not even trying to smile. She looks like Wade slapped her. Maybe he did, and he just forgot? His heart picks up, and he asks, panicked, “Did I hit you?”
But she just looks confused. And sad. Mostly, she looks sad. “No. I just…what anniversary, Wade?”
Wade’s kinda taken aback by that, honestly, considering how he’s usually the one who forgets things. He’s vaguely offended, honestly.
“Of when we got engaged,” he says, and manfully resists the urge to tack on duh to the end of that sentence.
“When we got engaged,” Vanessa says numbly, and her fingers go slack so the present tumbles to the floor. The string of diamonds catches the remnants of daylight spilling in through the window, and they glint like a broken disco ball.
Wade thinks Vanessa might be talking, and he tries to beat the now more intrusive boxes away to pay full attention to her, because she deserves full attention, especially when she’s about to break up with him.
But his gaze keeps getting pulled to the diamonds shining on the floor, and Wade’s always been easily distracted.
“Wade? Wade!”
“Whuh?” he asks. The boxes have faded and now there’s Vanessa. He looks at her intently, wishing he had his mask on so she could forget how much uglier he’s become. Once, he tried to memorize every bit of her face. He remembers that. He did memorize her, he thinks. At least, the face she had right then. He remembers her in that moment, asking about plans A through Z while he tried to be angry or something that wasn’t lost and sad and small; even if he forgets that her hair is shorter (or longer?) now and she’s gotten older.
“Wade!”
Wade snaps back to the real world, to the conversation, because they’re having a conversation, because Vanessa’s not a statue, not a work of art, and she’s not a memory. He can’t study her and not listen, she’ll know.
Vanessa’s voice is ragged and her mascara’s started to smudge and this is it. Wade thinks he knew this was coming. At least, now that he’s here, he knew this was coming.
“Are you with me?” Vanessa asks, and the question’s got a hopeless edge to it, like she won’t believe him if he says he is.
“Of course,” he says anyway. “Yeah, I’m here, nowhere else I’d be.”
“What about…” Vanessa starts, and then she raises her hands and puts them on the side of his head like she’s going to kiss him, but she doesn’t and he doesn’t dare try and close the gap. “Here?”
“…Where?”
“Your head.”
“Everyone lives in their head, don’t they?”
“What about the real world, Wade? What does your head tell you about that? I don’t know anymore, and it kills me. I love you, it’s just, I don’t know if we’re really together anymore. If we match.”
“Like the curvy pieces.”
“You remember that?”
“Um, duh? Why wouldn’t I?”
Vanessa’s breath skips. “Did you not hear me? Wade, our anniversary was six weeks ago.”
“Oh,” Wade says very quietly. He feels like he’s been kicked in the nads.
The nads of his heart.
“I thought it was today,” he says uselessly.
“I know,” Vanessa says, like the knowing is the worst part, and now the tears are really coming, rolling down her cheeks and making her eyes puffy and her mascara look really, really bad, and she’s still beautiful.
He never deserved her.
“I’m sorry?” he says hopefully, like saying an apology without even knowing why he’s saying it will change a single goddamn thing. It didn’t when he was a kid, and it doesn’t now. There are hot tears running down his cheeks, stinging his scars. He doesn’t care.
“No,” Vanessa chokes out before she takes a deep breath and leans her forehead against his, hands still on his head. It’s a weird kind of contact, but better than none. “Don’t be. No one should be sorry. No one did anything wrong. I’m the villain here, but no one actually did anything wrong.”
“You’re not a villain, Vanessa. Did you sprout horns and change your name to Francis in the last two seconds or something?” Wade’s joke splats right onto the floor. His boxes groan. Yellow boos.
Vanessa, because she’s still perfect, laughs, tiny and miserable. “No. It’s just that the girlfriend who doesn’t stay when her boyfriend gets…” she trails off.
Wade helps her finish: “…gets turned into the lovechild of a dalmatian and the demon who gets his lunch money stolen by all the other demons?”
She snorts and says, “You said it, not me. Anyway, the girlfriend that leaves is always the villain. The shallow chick who couldn’t deal. I want to be your friend, Wade, I don’t want that to stop, but I can’t…”
“Deal.”
Vanessa takes a deep, shuddering breath, and says, “Do you remember what happened when we got engaged?”
“The Ring Pop and the proposal and you said yes and then I had cancer?”
“Yeah. You remember what you said?”
Wade furrows his brow (which, by the way, looks pretty weird without eyebrows) and tries not to let on that he has to try to remember.
He thinks Vanessa knows anyway, because she waits until he finally manages to solidify one of those less-solid wisps of memory threaded through that almost-perfect night. Christmas. It was Christmas. “Marry me? Your crazy matches my crazy? The puzzle? What was it?”
“The second one.”
Wade feels sick. No, he feels sad. Just sad. All of this is just really fucking sad.
He knows what she means. “Our crazy doesn’t match anymore.”
“I’m so sorry, Wade. I love you, just not…I didn’t fall in love with you when you were like this, and I didn’t let you go but I moved on and I fell out of love and I can’t stay just because you’re…fuck, Wade, we just don’t…match. We can’t be what each other needs anymore.”
“I don’t even know what I need anymore.”
“All I know is I don’t think you need me as a girlfriend. Wade, I can’t let us get married or something, because I love you too much and I love me too much to let us be all miserable and…Wade, if you don’t fit me anymore, I don’t fit you either, and I can’t pretend to, and…I’m scared of just hurting you more. I don’t…I don’t want to break you.”
“I’m not an egg.”
“Maybe you kind of are, right now. And you’re already all cracked and…I don’t want to leave little pieces of your shell everywhere.”
The words are kind of slurred because Vanessa’s started crying again, but Wade gets it. He was a puzzle piece, but Weapon X and time made him into an egg that’s already cracked, and Vanessa’s still a puzzle piece, but older and a little bent so she’s not the same shape as before anyway, and if you stick a puzzle piece into a cracked egg, all the yolk just comes out and leaves the puzzle piece sticky and gross and the egg broken and empty.
But…
“I don’t want you to leave,” Wade whispers, and his voice comes out so thin and scared and broken through his fucked up throat that it makes him wince. He sounds like a little kid that smokes like a pack a day.
Vanessa pulls away from their previous position and wraps him in a hug in a couple fluid motions. Sometimes she’s almost as graceful as him.
She holds him like he might break. He still holds her like she won’t.
“I’m not gonna leave you,” she whispers fiercely, with an edge to her voice that betrays annoyance at him not understanding yet again. “That’s not what I’m trying to say. I want to be your friend, but I can’t…I can’t be in love with you, I can’t be your wife, I can’t…I can’t take care of you. I wouldn’t be any good at it.”
“I love you, Vanessa,” Wade says, though he’s not even sure what he means by it.
“I know. I love you too, just not…Wade, if we still have those feelings for each other, we have to not. I can’t do this. I still want to be friends, just…I can’t be the emergency contact. Even if that means you won’t have one. It’s still better that way, you know?”
Not completely, but he thinks eventually he’ll understand. Or forget. Instead of saying much of anything, he tightens his hold on her and says, “We’ve never been just friends before, have we?”
“No,” Vanessa agrees. “We haven’t. But things have changed.”
Wade murmurs, “Ain’t that the truth.”
The diamonds are still lying sadly on the floor, dull under the dim moonlight.
Wade wonders who’s gonna pick them up.