Chapter Text
Vanessa hates knowing when it’s time to give up, but if all the king’s horses and all the king’s men couldn’t put Humpty together again, she’s sure as hell not going to.
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First thing’s first: Wade died.
He was dead for a year, and just because he technically wasn’t doesn’t mean that Vanessa didn’t grieve for that fucking idiot who just left her. It didn’t mean that she didn’t spend every fucking second of every fucking day for fucking months wishing it had turned out different, wishing she’d had those last precious weeks with Wade. It doesn’t mean she didn’t cry rivers and ruin her make-up a million times. She always forgot to get the waterproof kind, because she’d never had to before.
She was never a crier.
She guesses Wade changed her.
She changed him.
It’s how things work sometimes.
They weren’t big changes. It’s not like they were suddenly good people or anything. They were just in love, and being in real, actual love changes you, not even necessarily in bad ways. Vanessa hadn’t known that before she met Wade. She fell for him when she suspected that “being in love” was just a prettier way of saying “being in pain”, a slave to feelings that made you think some asshole could really be different this time, Nessa. She’d always had the suspicion that the super special romantic love everyone was always harping about wasn’t worth it at all.
Of course, back then, she’d never been in love.
That’s why she hadn’t realized that that was what was happening with Wade, because he was a good guy and falling in love didn’t hurt in a bad way. It happened hard and fast, but that was how they liked it.
The year they spent stupid in love was the most perfect almost-year of her life, right up until everything got torn up by fucking cancer. Right up until his dumbass, misguided heroic tendencies (and God, those were just the worst fucking gift that kept on giving) decided that it made sense to leave just so she wouldn’t have to see him die.
It was worse to be left hanging.
That perfect almost-year, though?
It was worth it.
So after a while, she started packing away his stuff. Not throwing it away, but putting it in storage, because Wade loved clutter but Vanessa couldn’t handle looking at the million and one things he’d collected. After a while, she was able to look through those boxes and smile. Even laugh. But first she put it away.
She went back to work after she finally decided that waiting for him at their—her—apartment all day, Wham! on repeat, was pathetic, because even if Wade came back—and he wouldn’t—it’s not like he wouldn’t wait for her until she came home.
Then, after a while, she stopped hoping Wade would be there when she came home from work.
Eventually, the yawning hole in her heart that was Wade Wilson started patching itself, becoming easier to live with, and his absence didn’t choke her anymore, didn’t fill the whole world up.
She started wearing his coat and the Voltron ring once she finally could without her heart getting broken over and over again; and the coat and the ring reminded her of him and how he’d been worth all of this pain for the time she had with him. They had comforted her.
By the time he came back, she’d pretty much accepted that he was gone.
That didn’t stop her from getting excited at the idea that the impossible could have happened, that the man she fell in love with (maybe still was in love with) could be alive, that somehow, in some way, they were getting a second chance.
Then through the big damn battle and the elation and the adrenaline and the sudden knowledge that it was her dead fiancé killing people like it was his job (because it was) in a weirdly sexy red suit and the anger at his dumb ass for leaving her and then being alive and not telling her about it she still thought, second chance, second chance, second chance.
She didn’t believe him, when he said how bad he looked. She thought he was just being dramatic, he was always a dramatic kind of guy. But it really was that bad.
She’d kissed him anyway, because she was drunk on adrenaline and because she loved him, no matter what kind of love it turned out to be.
She’d kissed him, and her eyes had been closed, so it’d been easy to think, Maybe this won’t be that different. Maybe we can pick up where we left off.
Fucking idiot.
+
A lot can happen in a year.
A year can make someone a stranger.
A year of torture, of some dickhead tap-dancing your sanity into mush, of murder after murder after murder—it could make anyone a stranger.
It doesn’t do that to Wade.
He’s still Wade, and she knows that. It’s not hard to tell. His smile is the same, even if the skin around it isn’t, and his jokes are still really fucking funny (when she understands them, but sometimes she doesn’t, and that’s one of the first signs that things aren’t picture perfect, they’ll never be), and he’s still good to her, still her good guy, he still loves her, and—
Among all the things that’ve stayed the same, the differences are glaring. The scars, first. Then, even worse, the scars on his mind, the way his crazy’s far outstripped her crazy, the way he’s won the “who has it worse?” game twenty times over and left her in the dust.
Wade’s always been the kind of guy who’ll chatter away at anyone, including himself, but now when he talks to himself, he’s—not.
He’s talking to the fucking boxes, or to the audience, whoever they are. He understands that no one else sees or hears the boxes, and no one else thinks they’re in a movie or comic or fanfiction or whatever the fuck it is this week, but that’s all he understands. He still thinks the boxes are real, he still thinks there’s a fourth wall to break, he just figures he’s the only one who knows it, who can sense it.
Vanessa doesn’t live in Wade’s reality anymore. She wishes she did.
Another thing that hurts so much it physically burns is how he forgets things, how he gets confused. It’s a toss-up, with him, what month it is, what year it is, where he is. Worse, there are memories that she has that he should be able to share but can’t. Sometimes they have a conversation and by the end of it, he’s forgotten she’s even there.
Of course, that’s when they can hold a conversation at all.
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It’s not his fault.
That makes it so much worse, because it makes Vanessa the villain in this story.
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Something Vanessa knows: if you live with a sick person, you’ve got to take care of them, and Vanessa could do it when Wade was going to either get cured or die, but now he’s never gonna get cured, and literally never going to die.
Look, it’s not like she wanted him to die back then or wants him to die now, but she’d been willing to take care of him when she knew for a fact that it would be over soon. She wanted it to end in the cure, but she knew how else it could, and no matter what, she was secure in the knowledge that it would end.
Turns out Vanessa’s not someone you can really count on when things get hard, not when it’s forever.
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Sometimes when Wade’s not lucid, Vanessa wants to just yell, Why can’t you stop being Deadpool? Why can’t you just be like you used to be?
She wants to yell at him a lot, but she keeps her mouth shut. She never used to have to do that around Wade.
Vanessa can’t be what he needs in a romantic partner, not anymore, and he can’t be what she needs. Maybe things would be different if she was still in love with him.
Maybe she’d still be in love with him if he hadn’t come back like this.
(And isn’t that just a shitty fucking thing to think? She doesn’t want him to be dead, fuck no, she loves him and would rather have him here than not, but she’s not that good a person, so she still wishes he hadn’t gotten scarred, hadn’t lost his mind.)
Maybe.
None of those maybes matter when everything’s stripped away and the truth is right there: Vanessa isn’t in love with Wade anymore, even though she’s been trying.
Vanessa doesn’t want to be with him forever as husband and wife.
Vanessa can’t be the emergency contact.
Honestly, she’s not sure if he’s even in love with her or just the her he left hanging months and months ago. All she knows for a fact is that they do love each other, and if they keep this relationship up, it’ll ruin what they can have, the love that comes with the kind of intimacy that you only have once in a lifetime, the fond, friendly love.
Because Vanessa will get bitter. That’s what happens when you forget that someone’s a person and they become a responsibility instead. You get bitter. She doesn’t want to be that person. She doesn’t want to be the kind of shitty person that sees another human being as a burden, and she knows that’s exactly what she’d become. Why would she inflict that on herself just because she wants to still be in love with him, just because she wants to be good enough to be patient and kind?
Why would she inflict that on Wade?
She’ll fuck him up. He’ll fuck her up too, but she’s honestly more afraid of the other thing, because it turns out that now that Wade is indestructible, he’s more breakable than he’s ever been. He’s unpredictable and unstable, not just to the world but to Vanessa, and Vanessa doesn’t know how to get through to him anymore, not like she used to.
Vanessa can’t be the Devoted Wife That Stays Because He Needs Her. She’s not that kind of woman, and she’s definitely not that kind of asshole.
Wade cares about her, and she knows he would try to help her if she had problems, that he’d want to fix them. It would fucking destroy him to realize that he was a problem.
So she keeps telling herself that she can’t do that to him, to her, to them, especially when there’s a perfectly okay future where Wade Wilson isn’t a problem, he’s a friend.
She knows what she has to do, but she’s still trying to find the courage to say goodbye to the her and him that wanted to spend the rest of their lives together, now that she knows the truth.
Wade is the man she fell in love with, but he isn’t the man she was in love with. Not anymore, and never again.
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In a movie, the villain is the one who leaves the person who she should be strong enough to love. The villain is the person who gives up. In the real world, sometimes the villain is the one who stays.
Vanessa lives in the real world.