Chapter 2: Pizza and a Soft Landing
The green neon sign from the bail bonds office across the street bled through the window, painting the room in pulsing, sickly hues. It flashed every few seconds: GET OUT. GET OUT.GET OUT. Ella’s eyes flickered open to the rhythm.
For three heartbeats, she didn’t know where she was. The smell was wrong. Not antiseptic. Old pepperoni, synthetic leather, and something chemical, like gun oil and cheap candy. The surface under her cheek was cool, worn smooth. A couch. She was curled on a couch, a fuzzy blanket tangled around her legs. Memory returned in a jumbled rush: the cell, the duct, the man, the hole in the world.
She didn’t move. Her invisibility shimmered over her skin on instinct, a protective gloss. She listened.
A low, steady shhk-shhk-shhk sound came from across the room. Peeking over the blanket’s edge, she saw him.
Wade was perched on a barstool at a cluttered kitchen island, his back to her. The red and black suit was gone, replaced by low-slung gray sweatpants. The scars mapped across his bare back and shoulders were brutal in the neon light—a topography of knotted, mottled flesh, a history written in ruin. He was sharpening a katanas. The long blade glinted green with each pass of the whetstone.
The rest of the apartment was a monument to chaotic indecision. One wall was a meticulous arsenal: rifles, pistols, and things she didn’t have names for, hung on pegs like deadly art. The adjacent wall was a shrine to plastic-wrapped collectibles and movie posters—The Sound of Music next to RoboCop. Empty chip bags and energy drink cans formed little monuments on every flat surface. A half-melted, novelty ice cream bar shaped like his own head lay abandoned on the coffee table.
“The invisibility thing is cool,” Wade said, not turning around. The whetstone never stopped its rhythmic slide. “But I can hear you thinking. It’s like a tiny, angry bee buzzing in a jar. Also, you’re crushing my favorite blanket. It’s infused with the tears of my enemies. And fabric softener.”
Ella let the invisibility drop, the blanket becoming visible around her form again. She sat up slowly, every muscle protesting. “How long was I out?”
“Three hours, seventeen minutes.” He set the katana down with a soft click and turned. The scars continued across his chest and stomach, a network of violent past tense. His face, without the mask, was harder, the lines around his eyes and mouth deeper. But the look in his eyes was the same—hyper-alert, curiously bright. “You drooled a little. On the Deadpool pillow. It’s fine, it’s signed. By me. To me.”
She ignored that, pulling the blanket tighter. The normalcy of the moment was disorienting. “You’re sharpening swords.”
“Maintaining a healthy work-life balance,” he said, sliding off the stool. He opened a monstrous stainless steel refrigerator. The interior light was burned out. “Pizza’s here. It’s congealing into a single, delicious organism, but I nuked a slice for you. Pepperoni and pineapple. A crime, I know, but it was the only one with extra cheese.” He pulled a plate from the microwave and brought it over, setting it on the crowded coffee table beside the melting ice cream head.
The smell hit her—tomato sauce, cheese, grease. Her stomach cramped violently. She couldn’t remember her last real meal. It was a sensation from another life.
“Eat,” he said, his tone losing its performative edge for a second. “Then you answer my incredibly invasive, multi-part questionnaire. Section one: basics. Favorite color. Last good dream. Mutant puberty, hit me with the details.”
She picked up the pizza. It was almost too hot. She took a small, careful bite. Flavor exploded, overwhelming and perfect. She had to close her eyes.
When she opened them, he was sitting on the floor opposite her, leaning against an old amplifier, watching her with an unnerving focus.
“Green,” she said softly, swallowing.
“What?”
“My favorite color. It’s green. Like leaves. Not that neon sign green. Real green.”
A slow smile touched his damaged mouth. “Noted. Dream?”
She took another bite, buying time. “I don’t remember. It’s been a while.” She looked around, at the glorious, terrifying mess. “This is your home.”
“It’s a strategic operations center with a high-frequency snack repository. The bathroom’s down the hall if you need to puke or ponder existence. Your call.”
She almost smiled. The dimple in her left cheek made a fleeting appearance. “You live like a teenage boy who won the lottery.”
“And lost the moral compass. Yeah.” He grabbed a remote, pointed it at a black screen. A security feed flickered to life, showing four different angles of the building’s exterior. “Also, I’m paranoid. Helps with the life expectancy. Speaking of.” He leaned forward, elbows on his knees. “The powers. Run me through the user manual. Invisibility I get. The force field in the bay… that’s new. To me. The file was vague. How’s it work?”
She set the pizza crust down. The questioning didn’t feel like an interrogation. It felt like a debriefing between allies. It felt… safe.
“It’s intention,” she said, her voice finding a firmer register. “I have to want to protect something. A person, a space. The stronger the want, the stronger the field. It’s… tiring.”
“And the healing?”
“That’s just… always on. Cuts close. Bruises fade. Nothing major. I don’t know if it works on, like, a bullet to the head.” She looked at his scars, a question she couldn’t form.
“Mine’s less elegant,” he said, answering the unasked. “It’s a biochemical bulldozer. Everything heals, always. Cancer included. It’s a whole thing.” He waved a hand, dismissing the tragedy of his own existence. “So you’ve never been shot.”
“No.”
“Lucky you.”
“They were studying me. Not shooting me. They wanted to replicate the field effect. For soldiers.”
Wade went very still. The playful light in his eyes hardened into something cold and sharp. “Of course they did.” He stood up abruptly, pacing a short path through the debris. “Stryker’s a collector. Likes to break useful things and see how they work.” He stopped, looked at her. “How’d they catch you?”
This was the heavier territory. She looked at her hands. “I was careless. I was living in Portland. In a little apartment over a Thai restaurant. I worked at a library. I used the invisibility to… be alone. To feel normal. But one night, a man followed me home from work. He was just a guy. A bad guy. I got inside, but he was trying the door. I was scared. I made a field. A big one, around the whole building. It flashed. Like a dome of bent light for a second. Must have been seen.”
“Or measured,” Wade muttered. “They have sensors for that weird shit.”
“Two days later, a woman claiming to be from the power company knocked. I opened the door. There was a dart. Then the white room.”
The silence that followed was filled only by the hum of the neon and the distant sirens of the city. Wade walked to the window, peering through the blinds at the street below.
“You saved my ass in that bay,” he said, his back to her. “With the field. You didn’t have to.”
“You were getting out of there anyway.”
“Yeah, but I would’ve had a new ventilation hole in my spleen. Which, hilarious for party tricks, but messy.” He turned. “You trusted a stranger in a red suit to not be a worse monster than the ones in lab coats. Why?”
Ella looked at him, at the stark reality of him in the messy apartment, surrounded by weapons and childish things. The man who smelled her fear and made a joke about it. The man who carried her through a wall.
“Because you asked,” she said simply. “And you didn’t try to touch me until you had to. And you mentioned my perfume.”
He blinked. A genuine surprise flashed across his face, quickly buried under a layer of mock offense. “I have standards. Fear-sweat is one scent profile. Gardenia is another. I’m a connoisseur.” He rubbed a hand over his jaw. “Alright. New rule. You stay here until we figure out your next move. Which isn’t a library in Portland. Stryker will have traps there.”
“We?” she asked.
“You and the voices in my head. We’re a package deal. They like you. They think you’re ‘atmospheric.’”
She finished the pizza, the warmth spreading through her. The exhaustion was still there, but it was softer now, cushioned by cheese and absurdity. “What’s your next move?”
“My next move is to find where Stryker keeps his good Scotch and burn the rest of his data to the ground. But that’s me. You need clothes that aren’t generic prison-chic sweats.” He gestured to the ones she wore, which were his, swallowed her small frame. “And a bed that isn’t a crime scene of condiments. You can have the bedroom. I don’t sleep there. The ceiling fan is judgemental.”
He moved toward a hallway, but stopped, not looking at her. His voice lowered, the gravel in it more pronounced. “The door locks from the inside. There’s a fire escape outside the window. I monitor the feeds. All of them. If anything bigger than a raccoon with ill intent comes within a block of this building, I’ll know. You’re not in a cage here, Ella. You can leave whenever. But you can also stay.”
He disappeared down the hall before she could respond.
She heard a door open, the rustle of fabric. She sat in the pulsating green light, surrounded by his chaotic world. She looked at the security feeds, the silent, empty streets. She looked at the katana, gleaming on the counter. She looked at the blanket, infused with fictional tears and very real softener.
After a while, she stood, her body remembering how to move without fear. She walked to the window, peered out beside the blind. The city was a grid of yellow and white lights, alive and unconcerned. The GET OUT sign continued its relentless pulse.
She didn’t want to get out. Not yet.
Wade reappeared, tossing a stack of clothes onto the couch beside her—soft-looking black leggings, a faded gray hoodie that read ‘I ♡ NY’ with a bullet hole through the heart, socks. “Found these. Don’t ask. They’re clean.”
“Thank you,” she said.
He grunted, busying himself with rearranging a pile of comic books. “Bathroom’s all yours. Don’t mind the rubber ducky. He’s seen things.”
As she gathered the clothes and walked toward the hallway he’d indicated, she paused. He was pretending to be very interested in a X-Force issue.
“Wade?”
“Hmm?”
“My last good dream,” she said quietly. “I think it was about a Thai restaurant. And feeling normal.”
He didn’t look up, but his shoulders relaxed a fraction. “We’ll find you a new normal. Probably one with more explosive ordinances, but still. Progress.”
She closed the bathroom door behind her, locking it. The room was surprisingly clean, the rubber ducky wearing a tiny pirate hat on the edge of the tub. She let out a breath she felt like she’d been holding for months.
In the living room, Wade Wilson stared at the security feed, his eyes fixed on a black sedan that had been parked two blocks down for the past twenty minutes. It hadn’t moved. He picked up the whetstone and the katana again.
The rhythmic shhk-shhk-shhk filled the apartment once more, a steady, promise of vigilance in the neon night.
The rhythmic shhk-shhk-shhk filled the apartment once more, a steady promise of vigilance in the neon night. Ella emerged from the bathroom clothed in the borrowed hoodie and leggings, the fabric smelling faintly of detergent and something metallic. She padded silently back into the living room, her curls damp from splashing water on her face.
Wade didn’t turn from his post at the window, his attention fixed on the security feed screens. The black sedan was still there. “All good?” he asked, his voice a low rumble.
“Yes.” She hovered near the couch, uncertainty a tangible weight. “You’re not sleeping.”
“Sleep is for people with predictable metabolisms and clean consciences.” He finally glanced over, taking in her drowned-in-fabric appearance. “The bedroom’s yours. No pressure. Just saying it exists, like Bolivia or a good decision.”
She nodded, clutching the blanket from earlier. The adrenaline had fully drained now, leaving a hollow, shaky fatigue. “Thank you. For all of it.”
“Don’t thank me yet. The water pressure’s a temperamental bastard and the toaster occasionally screams.” He waved a hand toward the hallway. “Go. Unwind. Attempt to not dream of white rooms. I’ll be here, communing with the glow of our corporate neighbor.” He gestured at the pulsating GET OUT sign.
Ella retreated to the bedroom, closing the door behind her. The lock clicked with a solid, reassuring sound. The room was sparse—a rumpled king-sized bed, a nightstand buried under stacked magazines, and a single closet door hanging open to reveal more tactical gear. The judgemental ceiling fan was still. She crawled onto the bed, not bothering with the sheets, and wrapped the blanket around herself.
The muffled city sounds were a lullaby compared to the sterile silence of the facility. Car horns, distant sirens, the occasional shout. They were noises of life, uncontrolled and messy. She focused on the steady, distant scrape of the whetstone from the other room. It was a strange anchor. Her eyes grew heavy.
Wade listened until her breathing evened out into the deep, slow rhythm of sleep. He muted the security feed audio, leaving only the flickering images. The sedan hadn’t moved. He set the katana aside and picked up a pistol, disassembling it with practiced, automatic movements on the cluttered coffee table. His mind replayed her words: I was scared. I made a field. He cleaned the firing pin, his movements precise and focused.
Hours bled away, marked by the changing patterns of light from the street below. The neon sign across the way finally sputtered and died just before dawn. The green phantom-limb glow faded from the walls, replaced by a gradual, gray dilution of the darkness. The city’s soundtrack shifted from night’s erratic beats to the deeper rumble of early trucks making deliveries.
Wade didn’t sleep. He monitored, he cleaned weapons, and he thought. The sedan eventually drove away at 4:37 AM, but that meant nothing. He repositioned a small sensor near the fire escape, just in case.
A soft, amber light began to seep around the edges of the window blinds. It touched the empty pizza box, the melted ice cream head now a sad puddle of wax, and the gleam of steel on the counter. The oppressive pulse of the night was gone. In its place was a flat, quiet stillness, holding its breath.
The bedroom door clicked open. Ella stood there, the oversized hoodie swallowing her hands, her hair a wild brown corona around her head. She blinked against the growing light. Wade was in the same spot, now reassembling the pistol, his scarred hands moving with sure efficiency.
“You’re still here,” she said, her voice husky with sleep.
“Told you. I’m a fixture. Like mold, but with better commentary.” He didn’t look up, snapping the magazine into place with a definitive click. “Coffee?”
She nodded, stepping fully into the room. The morning light caught the dust motes dancing in the air, turning them into fleeting gold specks. It warmed the side of her face, highlighting the constellation of freckles across her cheeks. She looked out the window at the now-visible brick facade of the opposing building, the sky behind it bleeding from gray to a pale, watery blue.
Wade stood and moved to the kitchen, filling a grimy carafe with water. The mundane act was surreal after the night’s intensity. The silence between them was different now—not strained, but spacious, allowing the reality of a new day to settle in.
MORNING ARRIVES.