Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

“No time to explain. I need you to keep an eye on Mary Puppins for a few hours. Papa got some divine justice to dish out,” says the Deadpool.

The familiar Deadpool. Who just walked out of a translucent amber square of pure light that materialized in the middle of the room with no warning at all.

Stepping into the Void out of thin air like that would have been dramatic enough, even if the man in red wasn’t currently holding the ugliest excuse for a dog in the multiverse. If Pyro had any doubts about who it was that just used one of TVA-issue TemPad’s for the sole purpose of disrupting his day, that detail alone made him feel like he was once again standing face to face with... What was it that he called himself?

Oh yes. The Marvel Jesus.

A Deadpool one would think had every reason never to venture into the Void again. And yet...

“Did you just ask me to dogsit for you?” Pyro asks incredulously after taking a long second to come to terms with what seemed to be happening here. 

“I did just do that. Points for being quick on the uptake. No wonder you made it as high as you did in Nova’s evil wasteland empire. Real grand Moff energy right there,” says the man even as he hands him the irradiated rat he dressed up in a shrunk down approximation of his own outfit for some unfathomable reason. Too taken aback by the situation he was suddenly finding himself in the middle of Pyro simply takes the improbable creature. But before he can say a thing on the subject the other man is already talking again... “Keep this unicorn alive for the next few hours and when I get back we can talk about upgrading you to a disciple.”

“Seriously?”

The Deadpool only shrugs, clearly choosing not to hear the tone the word was spoken in.

“Why should I care what happens to... whatever this thing is?”

To that the other man does seem to have an answer. A short and concise one at that...

“You owe me.”

“Excuse me?”

“You owe me. Not because I’m your lord and saviour, mind you. You, yes you specifically, owe me for...”

“For what exactly?” Pyro snorts, staring at the absurd figure of an antihero standing before him.

“Solving your biggest problem. Remember her? The reason you felt the need to hand in your last resignation in a form of half a magazine? Would have been the whole thing if Logan wasn’t feeling punchy, wouldn’t it, hot stuff?” the merc with the mouth replies, now actually sounding like he is in a hurry. Glancing over his shoulder at the half-translucent portal he just walked in through. “How do you think she died? You’re welcome.”

“You solved my problem,” he repeats, certain he couldn’t have heard that right. “The one I was in the process of solving before your pet Logan got involved? That problem?”

“The very same. And I know what you’re thinking. That does feel like a fun thing to have a prolonged argument about when I come back to pick up my dog.”

Pyro opens his mouth to say several things – not least of which being how sure are you this thing is a dog? – only to find the conversation to be over. For the simple reason that the stranger invading his living space has already stepped back to wherever and whenever it was he came from.

Because of course he did.

Timetravel. As fun as it sounded – unless you were the one on the outside looking in.

But he wasn’t even that, was he? He was the one holding a nearly hairless, Dark Crystal monster looking excuse for a dog, having no idea when – or if – her owner planned to be back. And why would he ever expect it to go any differently?

Life was good since Cassandra’s untimely death. His vague approximation of a plan that came down to putting on a TVA issue coverall and hi-tech slave collar and pretend he was a new arrival rather than the too-familiar figure that has survived this place for an unbearable-to-contemplate number of years was actually working. More often than not he was believed and left alone rather than pursued by the Void’s version of a pitchfork-wielding angry mob. Of course the false sense of security that gave him was only an illusion. One that took nothing but a minute or two in the presence of a familiar Deadpool to become a thing of the past. 

That was his thing, though, wasn’t it? The self-proclaimed messiah was nothing less than a harbinger of disruption. In a good way when it came to Nova and her post-apocalyptic empire, true, but... It proved a real struggle to feel grateful for the role this Wade Wilson played in that while holding the dog the merc had left in his care before disappearing who knew where. 

“I’ll watch you,” Pyro tells the unhealthy looking creature before putting her down on the floor, “but no one said anything about feeding you.”

All he gets in a way of reply is half-hearted waggle of a tail so fleshy it makes it hard not to assume there was a rat or two in the thing’s family tree.

“And what the hell did he mean by disciple...?”

...

“Come to papa, princess,” Deadpool opens with during his second zero-warning entrance of the day. Completely ignoring Pyro and his supremely annoyed expression, both.

“Crisis over then?” he asks wryly to get the other man’s attention.

“And what a crisis it was. That’s why papa had to find the last place anyone would ever look for you, didn’t he?” says the man in red, addressing his dressed-up rodent of unusual size. “Say what you want about the Human Torch extinguisher over there, he’s got an edge on everyone else in one area. The list of my known associates the authorities keep? He’s nowhere near it.”

The worst part? That actually made a kind of sense. From the other man’s point of view, anyway. Pyro, meanwhile, just had several hours of his life wasted. Which was unfortunate, since there was nothing more precious than every single hour he was not living on Cassandra’s time. 

“Guess this is where you take your deformed weasel and go,” he utters, even though he knows it for the wishful thinking it is.

“Don’t listen to him, princess,” the Deadpool says in a thoroughly un-offended tone. “Someone just needs an adjustment period.”

“Before I... What? Sign up to join you on one of your Marvel Jesus adventures?” Pyro snorts.

“You do know it only takes four of five moments, don’t you?”

“What?”

The wrong question, it turned out. Because Wade the-chosen-one Wilson immediately takes it as his excuse to start monologuing...

“... Feel free to chime in at any time and explain how the hell are you still alive, by the way. I’m sure the audience would appreciate that,” the cancer-ridden, immortal mutant says some ways into his rambling tangent. “Not like you were giving off much of a recurring character energy even before you got your head damn near torn off by the boss-lady.”

There is a pause there. One Pyro is apparently expected to fill. Too bad the Deadpool touched on the one subject he really didn’t feel like talking about. Too fresh a wound – never mind none of the other man’s business...

“Alright then,” Wilson sighs, as though he’s the aggrieved party here somehow. “I’ll schedule a flashback for later, shall I?”

“There’s not going to be a later,” he assures.

“Keep telling yourself that, hot stuff.”

And with that parting shot both the man in red and his dog are the hell out of Pyro’s current excuse for a life.

Too bad that what they leave behind was the distinct impression he was not seeing the last of them... 

Chapter Text

“Well if it isn’t my least promising disciple. Funny meeting you here...”

“In the Void?” Pyro replies, deadpan. Expecting nothing good to come from this interaction but, as ever, unable to find any way out of it.

If he was to keep up his paper-thin cover story of being a new and clueless variant of the same old mutant rather than a thoroughly jaded survivor of both this unforgiving excuse for a world and the worst of its megalomaniac warlords he was kinda stuck here.

Not daring to be out in the open unless there was no other option was the defining trait of those who had just made the acquaintance of the TVA. New arrivals were, as a rule, scared of their own shadow. The open spaces of the badlands with the threat of Alioth forever hanging over them were the stuff of nightmares to them. Which unfortunately meant that, to keep playing the part he cornered himself into, Pyro couldn’t just storm out.

Too bad. Felt like the best way to let Wade know how little he felt like getting involved in his latest stupid idea.

Didn’t make it any less tempting, of course. Self-preservation, though, did win in the end. And wasn’t that the story of his life?

“Well, since I have you...” starts the man in red, casually reaching back through the translucent door behind him only to drag a second uninvited guest into the room. “If you could point us in the direction of the nearest Madmax-themed fightclub full of variants we would be ever so grateful.”

He says that – but the other man, a complete stranger to Pyro, does seem like he’s about ready to faint at the prospect.

“Why would you think we have those?” 

“A garbage dump at the end of time. Of course you have fightclubs,” snorts the Deadpool with pretentions of divinity. “More now that there’s no need to keep them as far underground as it takes to stay hidden from Chuck’s evil twin.”

“Don’t call him Chuck,” Pyro says making a face.

He might not have been the biggest fan of the late professor but there was something particularly disrespectful about that horrific disfigurement of the old man’s name.

“He very specifically asked me to call him that. Wade, he said,” starts the merc with the mouth switching to a hard-to-listen-to approximation of British accent, “as the one and only Marvel Jesus you alone have the privilege of referring to me as...”

“God, Wilson, just shut the fuck up,” Pyro sighs, feeling exhausted by this conversation already.

“A mutant fight club. Directions to. Now,” retorts the other man. “Because I don’t think you appreciate the full gravity of the situation we have on our hands. My friend here might seem harmless at a first glance but the bloodlust is still very much there, waiting to be unleashed. Why, you could almost say that his body is an instrument of death.”

“Mister Pool, sir, I said that a very long time ago,” interjects Deadpool’s friend now that he’s over his initial shock at his new surroundings. That is to say a rusty, half-collapsed excuse for a room located inside of what was left of a hellicarrier – complete with a view of a bizarre, mostly  barren wasteland just outside.

“It is no less true today, brown panther. Remember your superpower, padawan. You gotta use it. It’s going to atrophy otherwise. The world needs you too much for us to let that happen. Right?”

“Right,” replies the stranger, slowly turning from freaked out to somewhat determined – though determined to do what Pyro wasn’t entirely sure he wanted to know.

“There’s my Kirsten Dunst. Kristen? Kirsten? I gotta google that.”

“Are you two done?” he growls, unamused.

“Ready to hear those directions to the...”

”There is no mutant fight club,” Pyro snaps, feeling disappointed in himself for even taking part in this conversation. But that was the really upsetting thing about this particular Deadpool, wasn’t it? Tha annoying asshole somehow always drawn him in.

“If you say so. Then again you figure they would be more inclusive here in the Void. Comes with the territory. How about a regular, every-variant-for-themselves fightclub? Got one of those in the old neighbourhood...?”

“Do you want to get killed?”

“That was a yes,” chuckles the so-called Marvel Jesus – a man rapidly proving himself to be the bane of Pyro’s current existence. “Where do I have to stab you to get pointed in the right direction, hot stuff?”

“If I tell you...” he starts, hating to find himself negotiating with terrorists but by now craving peace and quiet enough to consider it...

“If you tell me Dopinder here is going to wipe the floor with every contender this place has to offer. Ain’t that right, Captain Courage?”

The answer, at least going by the expression on Wilson’s friend’s face, seems to be a hell no.

It’s so blatant and so comically written over the man’s features and dramatically dilated pupils it takes actual effort for Pyro to smother a laugh. The mood leaves him quickly enough, though. Because he finds he does have something to say to the merc – and it does not involve any directions... 

“The people stuck here are too busy trying to survive the all-consuming monster that never sleeps to have the energy to spare to fight each other you fucking idiot,” he growls, too fed up with Wilson’s irreverence to phrase it any more diplomatically. “You want a fight? You have your pick of thousands of timelines. Those of us that are never going to leave this place are not here for your entertainment. Why don’t you make the use of all those privileges the TVA gave you for being so special,” he snaps, unable to refrain from making air-quotes as he says the word, “and go literally anywhere else.”

The red facemask remains perfectly expressionless for a long second – in a way that is just a little disquieting despite the fact no threat of violence has been made. It is the Deadpool’s friend – his so-called padawan – that speaks up to break the increasingly uncomfortable silence.

“What kind of monster, please?” the man wonders, his tone startlingly civil in contrast to Pyro’s outburst.

“The kind you can’t outrun. Get back to your own timeline,” he advises. “Now. Before this asshole starts really trying to get you killed.”

“Do you get what I meant by least promising disciple now?” is all the Marvel Jesus has to offer in a way of answer. Though he does open up the portal the hell out of there even as he says the words.

Good. If the plan really was getting his clearly superpower-deprived friend killed Wade could get that done literally anywhere. Life in the Void was nightmarish enough without having to deal with what was, as far as Pyro was concerned, one Deadpool too many.

Now if he could only convince the deluded idiot he had no interest in being his disciple...

In fact... Getting him to stop using the word at all would be the real endgame here. Not that that seemed possible.

Say what you want about this Deadpool, he did seem committed to the Jesus bit. To the annoyance of everyone in his immediate social circle, Pyro was sure.

“It was nice meeting you,” utters the still very confused stranger at Wilson’s side before departing through the time door. The worst part? The man sounded absolutely sincere.

Begged the question – what exactly was he doing in the company of the trigger happy psychopath with a world-class skin condition?

“I know what you’re doing,” says the man in red in a tone that is the closest to serious Pyro has ever heard out of him. “Trying your hardest to get me to take you off my list of disciples.”

“Can you?” he can’t help but wonder. “Because that would be great.”

“You have been burnt before. You’re not ready to love again.”

“Get the fuck out of here, Wade,” Pyro replies. In a tone civil enough to match the now departed Dopinder, strangely enough. Finding he had no energy to spare on further angry outbursts.

Sure, it was still just a bit blunt – but it really was the only answer the nonsense he was forced to listen to warrantied.

For once the other man foregoes his pathological need to have the last word and simply leaves. If not before spending several long seconds staring into Pyro’s soul with the creepy, nothing-but-whites eyes of his mask.

“Good riddance,” he sighs tiredly when first the Deadpool and shortly after the portal he just stepped through disappear from his personal space.

For now. Until he loses yet another game of cosmic Russian roulette and finds the same asshole walking right back into his life just as nonchalantly as he did the last few times.

And was there anything he could really do about it?

Pyro did not like the only answer he currently had to that question, he found. Didn’t like it at all... 

Chapter Text

“You seem on edge,” one of the other variants currently searching through the same half-collapsed building for anything remotely useful says, almost conversationally.

“Do I?” he replies. Hoping his tone alone might stop the conversation in its tracks...

Good to know, though. That he was as bad at hiding it as he thought.

As if his current existence wasn’t enough of a balancing act – never mind unsustainable in the long run – Pyro was now dealing with the added stress of never being sure when Wade fucking Wilson might barge back into his life for one stupid reason or another.

Things have gone to hell since the day he wasn’t quick enough to say take your freaky excuse for a dog and get out. They really have. 

What little luck he had in finding himself in an area of the Void where most local variants were either way too trusting for their own good or worse, knew damn well he was lying and didn’t care enough to assure he met the mob justice even he knew he deserved, was more than compensated for by the Marvel Jesus.

Only tenuously attached to TVA as – or so he claimed – a special agent. Emphasis on special, Pyro was sure.

Not in a good way...

One would think a being of such multiversial prominence would have better things to do than constantly invade a variant mutant’s excuse for a life. That, at the moment, was little more than the endless cycle of scavenge, sleep, scavenge again – with just a little worry about the neighbourhood witch giving you the evil eye thrown in for variety. A fact that, if anything, made him less tense. Because Harkness making damn sure Pyro knew she was onto him and will be exacting revenge for someone or other he was complicit in getting killed? Now that made him feel like the world still bothered to make sense from time to time...

That was much closer to how the story was supposed to go, wasn’t it?

Him being alive at all was questionable enough. His quality of life these days was making a mockery of the very idea there might be any justice at all in the universe.

Thinking of it in those terms almost mabe him wonder... What if he deserved Wilson?

With his constant, inconsistent talk of X-Force 2.0, never mind all the biblical stuff the delusional merc seemed no less committed to now than he was while his own timeline was actually in need of a saviour, the man was... As perfect an embodiment of divine punishment as Pyro could imagine. And wasn’t that what was making him tense? The way one week became two and he was yet to be seen for what he was. Yet to meet a variant that wouldn’t simply shrug off his undeniable similarity to one of the henchmen hunting people all across the wasteland.

Life wasn’t fair. He knew that. Figured as much around the time a bunch of people in TVA-branded riot gear showed up at his doorstep talking crimes against the timeline. So why did it still bother him? This lack of punishment for all the things he knew deserved some kind of retribution. Something far more severe than having to endure a few disruptions in form of a man in a red suit who loved hearing himself talk.

“What’s with him?” a variant passing by wonders after disinterestedly glancing in Pyro’s direction.

“Probably just mutant angst,” replies the young woman who’s been shadowing him for something close to two hours now. Whom he strongly suspected of being America Chavez. Though it was hard to be sure. Unlike this woman, most versions they got in the Void tended to be well under legal drinking age...

“They do get like that, don’t they?” the man says, not unkindly. A startling thing to hear from someone who used to be a Hydra scientist in another life.

And then the stranger just... moves on.

Because that was all there needed to be said on the subject, or so both of the other variants seem to believe. Pyro was in a mood and that was his prerogative – and they had a few more rooms to search for questionable valuables, so why would they waste time on telling him to lighten the hell up...?

Because that’s what he was now. Just another person to either give his space or drop everything to listen to if he ever found himself ready to talk traumas.

Just another variant.

Slate wiped clean, just like that. And no, it was not how the story was meant to go. Not even close.

So maybe it was a good thing it was only a matter of time before he was once again addressed as a disciple by the worst Deadpool he knew. Far from specific though he was, Pyro still got the impression the TVA signed off on allowing him to take people out of the Void to tag along for unspecified, timeline-saving missions. That’s what all the intrusions and requests to watch Wade’s dog for him were leading up to, he was sure. Danger. Something that, more likely than not, would lead to what someone who willingly worked for Cassandra Nova actually deserved.

A very unpleasant death, that was.

That would put the things back in balance, wouldn’t it?

Well, he’d just have to wait and see. If Wilson’s ramblings were anything to go by his second attempt at what he called the X-Force was about to receive a mission any day now.

Or the witch would get him first. There was always that...

In the end he found he didn’t quite care. 

Chapter Text

“Didn’t I tell you? Dark. DC dark.”

“I have no idea what that means,” Pyro replies. Surprised at himself for not going with something more along the lines no way the TVA signed off on this.

The place may have been dark – cyberpunky dark anyway, neon-tinted gloom as far as the eye could see – but he could still tell at a glance that this was someplace far more sharply defined than the Void was. As in a world. A real one.

Someone’s timeline.

One of the many the Time Variance Authority was graciously allowing to exist for now – which made it a place Pyro knew he should be nowhere near.

Even if this was just Wilson’s own native corner of the multiverse a few decades down the line he was still very much trespassing by being here. Sure, he was forcibly pushed through a time door – but Pyro doubted that little detail would make a difference to a nebulous, multiverse-overseeing peacekeeping force. As much as they might have let this one-of-a-kind Deadpool get away with while they were in process of figuring out how bad an idea was to sign him up as one of their consulting variants, there was no chance in hell they were going to be okay with this.

If there was a place to draw a line, getting a convicted variant out of the Void on a whim must have been it.

“Would be less dark if someone maybe lit the hell up,” points out the same old annoying voice from underneath the red mask. Making this headache of a situation infinitely worse with just a few words...

“Did you...” Pyro starts, forcing himself to remember that it wasn’t particularly smart to be raising his voice in an unfamiliar environment with who knows what threats looming behind the next corner. “Did you bring me here because you don’t like how dark it is... and you want me to light your way...”

“Well forgive me for wanting to make appropriate use of your powers.”

Right. In case Pyro doubted that the universe was punishing him by inflicting this idiot on him...

Something he found himself almost at peace with while going through the motions of surviving in the Void – accepting it as his due and honestly far better than he deserved after everything he’s done since leaving the world he was born in. But the moment he was actually in presence of the self-proclaimed Marvel Jesus those thoughts were the furthest thing from his mind. Usually traded for fantasies of strangling the red suited figure as soon as Wilson started talking.

And here they were again. With the added complication of being someplace Pyro definitely wasn’t allowed. All for a reason so absurdly dumb that... there really were no words, were there?

“Well? Flame on?”

If there was an appropriate answer to that – one that wouldn’t involve punching the other man – he struggled to find it.

“Oh, fine. But if I walk into an obstacle because I can’t see through all this Gotham City gloom I’m not letting you hear the end of it.”

“Wilson,” Pyro says in a dangerous tone. “You need to get me back where I belong. Now.”

“Oh, come on. The lengths you go to for a promise of being allowed to be a citizen of the multiverse again – and then it turns out you can’t survive a few minutes in my boring old timeline without getting a panic attack.”

Which was of course was not even close to what was happening here. Whether on purpose or out of genuine inability to treat the TVA as the people one didn’t want to cross, his self-proclaimed ticket out of the Void was not getting it.

Fine. Pyro was going to spell it out for him then. “Does the TVA know?”

“What?”

“I can almost believe they’re fine with you dropping in on me in the Void whenever you get bored. Why should they care? Any minute you spend there is a minute none of them have to spend listening to you. But there is no way you were given a permission to do this. I’m a convicted criminal as far as they’re concerned. Which makes this a jailbreak. Now open a time door for me so I can get back before anyone notices.”

Impossible to read as ever, what with the mask in the way, Wilson only stares at him for a long, silent second.

“I do have the permission to recruit. In case we need to put a team together in a hurry. But since no one needs the Guardians of the Multiverse...”

“Nope. Not that.”

“... The Guardians of the Multiverse,” Wade repeats, in an even more dramatic tone in reaction to Pyro’s apparent distaste for the  name, “right now, we’re just going to walk around this lovely neighbourhood we can barely see and work on our team dynamic. Because no one explicitly forbid me from doing that.”

“That’s not the same as having a permission... You know what? Forget it,” Pyro sighs, losing what desire he had to argue this.

Maybe if the TVA did show up to investigate what the hell was he doing this far from the garbage dump at the end of time he was supposed to be confined to forever he could talk to them about getting a restraining order against the merc with the mouth...

“Now light up, will you? Cable’s place is still a few blocks away and we’re not navigating this neighbourhood without some actual illumination.”

They should have reached the point where this conversation couldn’t get any worse. But it seemed that Wilson could still surprise him. In the worst possible ways...

“Did you say Cable?”

“Oh, relax. We’re old friends. The kind that kill perverts together.”

“Right,” Pyro comments, honestly at this point willing to take the other man’s word for it. “And we’re here to see him because...?”

“Just thought I’ll give him a chance to refuse to join the Timeline Avengers. Grumpily. It’s kind of his vibe.”

“Oh... So Cable gets to refuse...” Pyro nods to himself. Certain now. This really was some kind of cosmic punishment for his complicity in Cassandra’s many atrocities.

“Don’t give me that look. I can do without old man Thanos but I need a firebender. It’s my one recurring theme. Negasonic, Firefist, that sweet baby angel Johnny Storm... Every instalment has one,” Wilson tells him. With an unspoken and you’re next, hot stuff tagged to the end of that sentence.

“Was any of that supposed to make sense to me?”

Of course it wasn’t. It was one of those things. The ones spoken for the benefit of the audience – or so it was explained to him the one time Pyro, in burst of exasperation, asked the idiot in red who was he talking to...

Not wanting to get into it again he only sighs, ignites a fire around his fingers and waits for Wade to start leading the way through the neon-lit maze of a futuristic city. Because if the TVA wanted to shut down this daytrip they would have been here by now, wouldn’t they? Which meant that, as insane as it seemed, this was actually fine as far as the establishment was concerned.

So much for any hope of getting the disruptive approximation of a hero the hell out of his life...

Chapter Text

“But everything changed when the Fire Nation attacked.”

And there it was. The reason he was being dragged along into... Whatever the hell timeline this was.

Pyro knew there must have been one and knowing Wade he was damn sure it was something dumb. But bringing not one but, rather redundantly, two people with fire-based powers with him into a situation where that would be no use at all only so he could deliver that line was an extremely Deadpool thing to do. And why was he expecting anything else?

“Is he serious?” the kid, Russell wonders.

Rhetorical question, presumably. Didn’t the boy know the idiot referring to himself as Marvel Jesus for a good deal longer? How did he not pick up on the fact this was exactly what one could expect...

“Wade? Is he more flammable in this timeline than he is in ours...?” inquires the teenager.

Only to be ignored because their lord and saviour was not done basking in the fact he just got to step out of a timedoor and deliver that popcultural reference while flanked by a pyrokinetic mutant on either side...

“Wade?”

“Showtime, X-Force,” replies their excuse for a leader, unsheathing his katanas and proceeding to run straight at the soon-to-be-variant TVA blamed for this timeline’s drastic deterioration.

Having no chance in hell of even making a dent in the oversized Russian, but that did nothing to dissuade him from trying. God no. Not Wade Wilson. He was already ineffectually battering at the invulnerable mass of metal that was his opponent. Misquoting prequels at him while he was at it...

“We should probably get going. To do our part of the mission,” the younger mutant says a little uncertainly. Pyro glances his way, honestly glad to have an excuse to look away from the violent spectacle happening in the front lawn of Xavier’s school.

“There is an actual plan?” he frowns, not sure he was willing to believe that.

Not when he could clearly hear Wade utter a spectacularly melodramatic you were my brother, Evil Colossus. I loved you...

“I think that’s meant to be a diversion. While we take out the person that’s really responsible for... ruining the timeline...?” Russell says, clearly not yet having figured out how he felt about this timeline stuff. Most likely finding it to be something he should not be getting involved in – which was about right and Pyro had yet again the distinct feeling he was in the middle of something the TVA did not approve. They simply didn’t specifically prohibit it and that was all Wade needed to know before dragging a minor halfway across the multiverse for a so-called mission that probably didn’t even require someone of his skillset.

He’d say as much to the nervous looking boy, but that’s when they-call-me-Firefist hands him a folded piece of paper.

“What’s that?”

“The plan,” shrugs the kid.

“Is it...”

“Drawn in crayon. Yeah.”

Finding he’d be more surprised if it wasn’t, Pyro just stares at the childish drawing representing all the instructions they’re likely to get. Not liking what he’s seeing at all...

A crude approximation of the fight currently taking place not far from them does seem to have been pre-planned. Unfortunately there’s a big red arrow pointing to the crayon sketch of Wade attacking Colossus – one with the word diversion written along it. And as for the rest of the drawing...

“That sounds about right,” Pyro sighs, folding the paper up if only so he doesn’t have to look at it anymore.

“Do you know who that is? The lady with the bangs...?”

“Yeah,” he exhales. And leaves it at that.

The kid didn’t need to know the reason there wasn’t a mutant in existence he wouldn’t recognize on sight was that his employer of well over a decade was all about collecting them all in one variant form or another. Illyana Rasputin being no exception...

Not someone he thought he was ever going to have to deal with again, now that he was free to take no notice of newly arrived mutant variants while in the Void. But, as was happening more and more frequently, that was not where Pyro found himself. And here and now – in a timeline he was told absolutely nothing about – he was apparently expected to take out the crazy witch. However Wilson envisioned that happening.

“Does she really have a sword? Wade said she has a sword. Big anime looking thing. It’s basically as surfboard with a hilt, he said...” Russel rambles on as he follows.

“She always has a sword. They’re usually completely impractical. Now and then they can pass for regular-sized swords, but that’s pretty rare,” Pyro replies. Wishing he could forget just how many of them Cassandra collected over the years – often marvelling at how different each was, while every one of their wielders was more or less the same.

Not quite magic enough.

That was to say nowhere near enough to be able to stand her ground against the horrifying powerhouse of mutant ability that was Nova...

Not something he thought he would find himself thinking about, let alone while navigating the old, familiar mansion in search of the heavily accented Russian with powers he himself stood no chance against. Not unless she had severely less impressive powers in this timeline than she did in most others. And the fact she had her brother under some kind of spell seemed to indicate she was nothing of the kind.

“Right. I’m going to need you to hang back,” Pyro tells the kid still shadowing him.

“But Wade said...”

“Wade says a lot of things. Look... Russell? He brings me on missions like these because no one is going to care if he gets me killed. Which is fair. I’m not even sure I care what happens to me,” he admits, a tough wryly. “But you have a whole life ahead of you and we both know he only wanted both of us here so he can say that stupid line about the Fire nation.”

“Actually,” comes an annoyingly familiar voice from not too far behind them... “I brought Captain Firefist along so you can have a good look at a real success story. Firebender but not an arsonist? How crazy is that?”

Groaning in frustration, Pyro finds he doesn’t even want to know how the hell did the merc with the mouth manage to take out Colossus in the two or three minutes since they lost sight of him...

“Your powers don’t have to define who you are,” Wade adds, in a melodramatically heartfelt tone, putting a hand on his shoulder as he does so.

“I hate you.”

“What was that? I’m growing on you? Your life changed for the better the day I walked in...?”

Pyro doesn’t bother to dignify that with an answer. Only turns to continue on his way through the hauntingly familiar building housing a school for gifted youngsters in every single timeline there is...

“Come out, come out, wherever you are,” Wade utters in a sing-song voice as he falls in step beside him. Before raising his voice to add, “We’re here on the authority of the TVA. And you might not know this, being new to the whole timeline criminal thing, but those guys don’t take no for an answer. Well... not unless they have to, because the one and only Marvel Jesus got hold of an adamantium skeleton and things just kinda escalated from there...”

“What the hell are you talking about?” Pyro says, staring at the other man. Only to find that if he will be getting anything in a way of explanation he will not be getting it now...

For several reasons, not the least of which being that the mutant they were here to stop just stepped from around the corner.

“Aw. Did you set your sword on fire just for us? That’s so sweet...” Wade says in reaction to the sight of her.

And just like that Pyro knows exactly why he was dragged in the middle of this. And it’s about as idiotic a reason as he learned to expect from Wilson...

“So I’m going to need you to...” their self-proclaimed leader turns to him to say.

“Extinguish that thing?” he guesses. “Like I did...”

“Like you did to my dear friend and man-crush Johnny Storm, may he rest in pieces... Peace. Rest in peace. Seriously, though, are you going to flame off that thing or are we waiting for Archangel Michael over there to run at us first?” 

Chapter Text

“You’re coming along,” Wade announces. In a very was that not implied? tone. Which is, in context, only slightly more ridiculous than what Pyro was used to dealing with now that the merc with the mouth decided he was a part of his life now and not necessarily a dispensable extra, either.

“Because?” he asks. Bracing himself for the usual. That is to say an answer he’d hate...

“Promised the TVA I’ll have you checked for rabies...?”

There’s something about the way the other man says it. Very we can pretend that’s what it is – all it will take is for you to be willing to go with it.

And if the options are pretend that wasn’t a nonsensical answer or call Wade out on his bullshit and end up hearing something even stupider...

“Sure,” he replies, not missing a beat, “makes sense.”

“They do want to update your file, though. We can skip whatever horrific, unique-to-the-Void venereal deceases you may or may not have picked up since they stopped paying attention – but now that you work for the establishment there is some paperwork to file.”

Was that what he was doing these days? Working for them? The big, bad them every variant in their right mind despised to their very core...

Odds were good he was not. Not really. After all, this was Wade the-chosen-one Wilson delivering that piece of information so it was utterly possible there was a list of assets associated with Deadpool-led timeline cleanup missions but as far as official record was concerned Pyro was nowhere near it.

Recruiting someone they convicted and exiled to the desolation at the end of time just didn’t seem like a great look. Not that the TVA couldn’t afford that. Because what was there in a way of official oversight when it came to the people who more or less ran the multiverse?

“Can we just go?” he sighs. “Get this over with?”

“That’s the spirit,” Wade chuckles, reaching for his TemPad – probably the only one in existence ever to be covered in unicorn stickers – and opening a semi-translucent gateway into what was growing to be Pyro’s least favourite of all possible worlds.

Too bad it was also quickly becoming his new normal...

There were no surprises on the other side of that amber-coloured door into another world, not for him. He knew both the old lady and the questionable excuse for a dog he was about to see. Knew every room of the apartment they cohabited in. Even had a passing familiarity with the startlingly beautiful woman that seemed to drop by more and more frequently now that Wade started working on getting his act together.

Wade Wilson’s native timeline – the one that proved impervious to even Cassandra Nova at her most destructive – was becoming a major part of Pyro’s new normal. Worse, it seemed to be a little late to try to do something about it. And how crazy was that?

Worse, how easy to get used to? Being described as anything even close to an employee of the TVA he would still rebel at, but... He did find himself willing to take this.

A few hours worth of time spent in a world where getting food didn’t require hunting, laying traps or threatening to shiv another variant if they didn’t drop that can of beans right now...? Not something he was ready to start complaining about.

It was, after all, his reward. For putting up with Wade’s... Wade-ness. The nonstop stream of bizarre statements, deeply inappropriate jokes and popcultural references that was also more or less commonplace to him now. A part he was less than pleased with but... deep down still believed he probably deserved, didn’t he?

“Why exactly do you need someone else to come with you?” he wonders, even as he crosses the barrier between their respective realities.

“To witness me,” Wade replies, pausing for a too-long and way too melodramatic a moment before adding, “Be a responsible pet owner.”

“That’s not what you are if you waited this long to get a vet to see your rat monster,” Pyro points out.

“Tried to tell him,” comes Althea’s familiar voice from the next room. As ever assuming he’s nothing more than just another mutant Wade forcibly adopted. Having no idea he was entering this place though a TVA-issue time door, what with her less than perfect vision...

“Yeah,” Pyro sighs. “Can imagine how that went...”

“Wouldn’t mind having the little gremlin out of the apartment for a few hours,” the old woman adds. “You boys just take your time. No need to hurry back.”

“Couldn’t if we wanted to. Got two pets I’m trying to be responsible owner to,” Wade retorts. Sweeping up the upsetting excuse for a dog in his arms before heading for the door. “And I was not joking about having you tested for rabies, hot stuff.”

“Fuck off, Wade.”

He says that, but of course he follows. What other options are there? Not tagging along to the vet’s office to assure the one and only Deadpool doesn’t stand out too much in his blood-red superhero suit...? Putting into words just how little he cares about all the things that were no doubt wrong with Wade’s hard-to-look-at approximation of a dog...?

That really wasn’t how their dynamic worked these days. Pyro would sigh and protest and go along with the other man’s shenanigans anyway – and if he was really, really lucky he might be compensated by some food that didn’t come out of a can or a packet of space rations. And the threat of scurvy would be postponed by another day or two...

At least he wasn’t expected to risk his life in some badly derailed, rapidly disintegrating timeline today. Which wasn’t too bad a deal – even if he’d never admit it out loud. Let alone within the hearing of the messiah... 

Chapter Text

“Turns out Thor was crying because the man is all about challenging masculine stereotypes. Living proof being a big, burly Norse god will not stand in the way of also being a massive crybaby,” Wade announces. Stepping through the timedoor, as ever, already in the middle of a conversation.

This time, though, Pyro finds himself spared having to partake. Since the subject is abandoned as soon as Wilson takes in the scene he just invited himself into the middle of.

“This must be one of those famous Void ragers I keep hearing about. And let me just tell you,” says the merc with the mouth, turning to glare at him through the eyes of his mask, “would have been nice to be invited.”

“I didn’t invite you because it’s not a party, asshole,” Pyro informs him. Not having energy enough to make sure his annoyance was coming across, not when most of his focus was on the several fires he was keeping alive. Doing what little could be done about the sub-freezing temperatures in the half-collapsed room occupied by most of the variants currently struggling to survive this corner of the Void.

“Not much of one, anyway,” comments Wilson, after taking a moment to assess his surroundings. His brutally cold surroundings. “This might be something of a personal question, but... is there any chance you forgot to pay your heating bill?”

“We’ve got a frostgiant,” Elsa Bloodstone tells the Deadpool that never not referred to himself as the messiah, briefly glancing away from the open flame she’s been warming her gloved hands over.

Leaving it at that – if only because the statement demanded no further elaboration. She did, after all, sum it up perfectly.

They had a frostgiant.

One currently having some manner of spectacular mental breakdown not too far from the hellicarrier all the variants in the area converged on for shelter. The kind that caused instant hypothermia inducing temperature drops.

And so here they all were, huddling together for warmth and waiting for it to be over. It being the unnatural, deadly blizzard raging outside. That was bound to draw the attention of Alioth eventually and they all knew it, even if the blue giant making their lives needlessly complicated didn’t. But for once the roaring monstrosity residing in the Void’s sky seemed to be taking its sweet time – and so here they all were. Stuck.

Dozens of shivering people clustering around as many fires as could be ignited in the cavernous space without affecting the amount of oxygen available to them.

A far from ideal situation even before TVA’s favourite Deadpool invited himself in...

“That’s just slander,” Wade claims after giving it all a moment’s thought.

“What?”

“Loki would never throw a tantrum like this. He’s the good guy now. There was a redemption arc and everything.”

“What the hell is he talking about?” frowns Talos from his spot by one of the fires.

A question clearly aimed at Pyro. Who was by now identified by all as the reason the Marvel Jesus was being inflicted on them.

This day was just getting better and better, wasn’t it?

“No one said Loki,” one of the nearby variants tells Wilson before focusing all his attention right back to shivering.

“Odinsons don’t pull stunts like this. That’s a full-grown Jotun out there,” Pyro adds. “Heard of those? Big, blue, deadly as hell...”

“Sounds scary,” comments Wade in a perfectly conversational tone. Pausing for all of a second before adding a little too casual, “Presumably as flammable as anyone else, though.”

No surprise there. Not from the man who was always ready to volunteer him for a fight – whether in any number of endangered timelines or right here, in the one place in the multiverse safely out of the TVA’s jurisdiction.

As far as Wade Wilson was concerned there was no such thing as a danger that should not be run at with only a crayon drawing of a plan. Which was true for him but doubly so for every member of his questionable new take on the X-Force. So of course he was acting extremely disappointed on finding out Pyro for some insane reason prioritized keeping the fires alive over a pointless fight with a monster single-handedly causing a localized ice age...

“If he leaves the fires go out,” Elsa says, shaking her head at Wade. “You might end up with a dead frostgiant but you’re definitely end up with a room full of...”

“Corpsicles?” offers the man in red, earning a very unamused eyeroll from the monster hunter.

Was there any point in trying to tell someone who was at best a tourist in a world the rest of them had to consider their home that these things just happened around here? That this was, if not everyday occurrence at least common enough to give very few of them a pause. Frostgiants, fire giants, space monsters of any number of species – they were all just a part of the scenery around here.

The kind that never lasted beyond however long it took for Alioth to notice their presence. Not that the leader of the X-Force 2.0 was likely to understand that...

“Oh, fine. Not sure the budget could take another big CGI battle anyway,” Wade concedes pausing for a moment just long enough to qualify as melodramatic. Adding more than a touch sarcastic, “Who says it’s not heroic to just sit by the fire and wait for the danger to go away by itself.”

Far too used to comments like that to even bother to respond anymore, Pyro doesn’t.

But he’s currently far from the only person in the room, or so he’s reminded only a moment later. When the witch that is yet to look at him with anything less than the unspoken accusation of being the same goddamn mutant who did anything Cassandra Nova told him to says, “No one is stopping you from going out there and slaying the monster before Alioth can beat you to it, Mister Wilson.”

One loaded sentence right there. A challenge, really. One to which Wade replies to with a snort and an under-his-breath utterance of “Witch, please,” before heading for the nearest exit like the antihero he is...

“What the hell?” Pyro can’t keep himself from snapping, for once actually daring to meet the witch glare for glare.

“What?” Agatha Harkness replies, with an expression that is striving for innocent but, as ever, falls just on the wrong side of wicked.

“What exactly are you gaining by talking him into suicide?”

Her smile is all the answer he gets. One that seems to imply that losing him an ally, even one as ridiculous and unreliable as the only Deadpool ever to be employed by the TVA, is a plenty of a result as far as she’s concerned.

And he really doesn’t have the heart to break it to her that it would take far more than a single furious Jotun to destroy the unexpected powerhouse that was the Wade Wilson...

“Is your friend going to be okay?” Elsa asks, having made all the wrong assumptions from the briefest of interactions.

“Not my friend. And of course he fucking is,” Pyro sighs.

“Against a mythical monster straight out of the Nine realms? Really?”

“Really.”

The witch keeping to the gloom just out of the pale amber light of their few weak bonfires smiles her unimpressed smile. But at the end of the day all she’s doing is making an educated wish, while Pyro is the one that knows better.

This was only going to end one way...

“Is it just me or is it... getting warmer in here...?” brings up Talos, rather hesitantly not half an hour later

“Yeah,” Pyro comments, taking a moment to send a meaningful look the witch’s way. “It is, isn’t it? Wonder how that happened.” 

Chapter Text

“Some questions have been raised,” the man who introduced himself as Mobius says in the same casual, conversational tone in which he announced he’s coming along for their latest last-minute, completely improvised excuse for a mission. “About... unprofessional conduct.”

Hilarious on so many levels that they’d actually assign someone to look into what was, as far as Pyro could tell, Wade Wilson’s specialty. Because unprofessional really was the word...

“Now you listen to me, Mustache. We’ve got a job to do and we get it done, dammit. Do we always follow every little rule? We do not. Did I beg Pyro to stop torching every building, vehicle and small animal he doesn’t like the look of? Repeatedly. But that is the energy he brings to this operation and what choice we have but to put up with it? The man might be a lose canon,” Wade says, dropping his voice to a whisper as he say, “and a serial arsonist,” only to carry on as though he never uttered those four ridiculous words. Finishing his little rambling speech with, “But damn if he doesn’t get the job done.”

Knowing better than to engage when the other man gets like this Pyro does his best to ignore the nonsense coming out of Wilson. Something the TVA analyst seems not to know for the only solution to dealing with a Deadpool it is...

“Actually, Mister Wilson, the complaints have been largely against...”

Which is as far as the man is getting, because Wade is once again monologuing, this time about how difficult it is making for him to complete missions while being stuck with someone who can’t be within miles of a school... “Not implying he’s on some kind of registry, Mustache. I want that on record. I’m talking about a single, specific educational institution it’s been made very clear to us he’s not allowed on the premises of. And you’d think that wouldn’t complicate things too much. I know I did. Before the TVA decided to send us to deal with those pesky mutants and their drama, oh, about once a week? So now whenever the situation that needs de-escalating takes us to Chuck’s fancy mansion I end up having to bring Negasonic. And that girl does not appreciate being called my backup firebender.”

The possibility of simply not referring to her in those terms clearly never having crossed Wade's mind. But then it would be stranger if it did.

“Mister Wilson,” the man who introduced himself as Agent Mobius interjects.

“Yes, Mister Mustache?”

“You have done a lot of very important work for us and we all appreciate that you’re a volunteer. Risking your life the way you do on your timeline stabilizing missions is remarkably unselfish of you.”

“Really exceeded those four or five moments, didn’t I?” Wade says, nodding to himself. “You’re looking at the hero the multiverse deserves. Take it in.”

Pyro only shakes his head, internally wondering if this would be a good time to point out he didn’t have all day and they already spent an unnecessary amount of time gearing up for their current mission before the TVA analyst cornered them on their way out of the armoury. Not that him saying it would do anything to speed things up here. Wade was enjoying himself too much to cut the conversation short – which meant they might be here for a while. Maybe even long enough for him to fully appreciate all the implied dangers the timeline they were on their way to promised to inflict on them... 

“And that is admirable. We just have some concerns about the others partaking in the missions you do for us.”

“I think he’s trying to tell you you need to stop bringing teenagers into life threatening situations,” Pyro says, losing his patience with how much time was the TVA agent taking making his point.

“Nope,” Wade replies. “Can’t be. We had a whole intervention about that good two weeks ago, didn’t we, Mustache?”

“We did have that conversation,” Mobius nods. “The one we’re having right now is about something else.”

Saying that he only looks at them in a wordless appeal, clearly hoping either Pyro or the Marvel Jesus might pick up on whatever it is he’s very carefully just stopping short of saying.

“Think he might be talking about you, hot stuff,” Wade says just as the silence starts stretching a little too long.

“Yeah, right,” he snorts.

“Mister Wilson is correct, actually,” Mobius says. Looking all earnest, too which was a damn strange look for a Time Variance Authority office bureaucrat. So why was it so hard to dismiss the moustached man’s apparent honesty and concern as anything less than the real thing...? “We would just like to make sure that...” he starts. Only to be interrupted by Wade the second he pauses for a breath.

“Make sure that... What...? That I’m not recruiting from the Void because people condemned to that hellhole will do anything for even just a few hour’s respite from surviving on Alioth’s home turf?” says the merc with the mouth in a very is that what you don’t dare to say out loud tone. “Is that the concern? Because, Mustache, my man... Wasn’t me that exiled them there, was it?”

“What he said,” Pyro adds tonelessly. Knowing damn well this might be the only chance he’ll get to complain about his life’s new status quo and... Finding that he really couldn’t be bothered.

Didn’t they have a timeline to put back on track? This really was just wasting their time for no good reason. As if the TVA really cared whether he was enough of a consenting adult for this not to be an utterly problematic situation...

Of course they didn’t. As long as their derailed timelines course-corrected before they became unsalvageable the TVA didn’t give a damn – not about him or anyone else getting very little say about whether they wanted to get involved in guarding the multiverse.

“You heard the man,” Wade adds, giving Mobius one of his more intense masked glares. “We’ve got a world to save. A world you told us to save, may I add. And what are you doing with your life, Mustache? Wasting our time with unfounded suspicions. Accusing one of my best people of being anything less than a selfless, heroic volunteer risking his life for other people’s worlds? Come on, man. Get your act together.”

If there is a good answer to that complete dismissal Agent Mobius can’t seem to be able to think of one.

Worked for Pyro. After all, the sooner they got going to their latest endangered timeline the sooner they were going to be done and able to go their separate ways. And there was nothing in this – or any other – world that could measure up to even a single Wade-free hour...

“Ready?” he asks as they start heading away from the TVA bureaucrat and toward the familiar semi-translucent portal to someone else’s timeline.

“Unless you wanna file a report with the HR first,” Wade retorts.

“Let’s just get this done,” Pyro sighs, finding he has no energy to even entertain the thought.

“Let’s fucking go.”

Chapter Text

This was on him. He could have very easily told that genuinely concerned sounding TVA bureaucrat they ran into before their latest timeline-protecting exercise in gratuitous violence that there were in fact a few things he was not happy about. The opportunity was right there. But of course Pyro, ruled by a self-punishing instinct he had a damn hard time shaking, simply let it pass him by.

He really had no one else to blame for finding himself where he did. At the receiving end of one of Wade’s intense stares. The kind that as good as said I might not have figured you out yet, but I am getting damn close now...

Which would have been annoying enough – bordering on mildly unsettling – under normal circumstances.

These were not. Normal.

Not even close.

“How long have you been sitting there?” Pyro asks in a tone that hopefully doesn’t reveal just how seriously he’s currently considering riddle the other man’s torso with bullets.

“I have a better question. Why do you sleep with a gun?”

“For what insane reason have you been watching me sleep?” he snaps, not feeling like having a civil conversation about this when raising his voice at Wilson seemed more justified than ever before.

“It’s only weird if you make it...”

“Nope. No. It’s objectively really fucking weird,” Pyro interrupts, glaring at the man sitting at the end of his bed. “What exactly is wrong with you?”

Rhetorical question. There was a whole list and they both knew it. And for the most part he knew how to take Wade’s begging-to-be-punched-in-the-face personality in his stride. But this was definitely the kind of thing that needed to be brought up with the TVA. If not grounds to part ways for good... 

“What was that?” Pyro frowns, just barely catching the other man mumble something deliberately unintelligible.

“Thought you might say something interesting.”

“Interesting,” he repeats, feeling his fingers tighten around his weapon all over again.

“Something for the file we’re keeping on you,” Wade says in a way of further elaboration.

Not surprising, really. TVA wouldn’t have liked that pretty major gap in whatever paperwork they have been forced to fill out since Pyro got conscripted for Wade’s world-saving missions. Of course they were curious about how exactly was he still alive to partake when not too long ago he did everything in his power to make an enemy of an omega level mutant. Something that should have been unsurvivable. Nearly always had been. Yet here he was – alive and as well as someone forced to associate with Wade the messiah Wilson could be expected to be.

Whether it was something Wade was under orders to find out or a mystery he was solving for reasons to do with his own curiosity didn’t really matter. Not when there was so much to take issue with when it came to his methods...

“How often?”

“How often do I watch people sleep or how often do you make the list?” Wilson replies, still going out of his way to sound as though this was a perfectly normal conversation they were having. “Because I watch Al pretty much nightly. Lady’s ancient. What if she just stops breathing some night? It’s what happens when you’re well over a hundred, you know. You just fall asleep and that’s that. ”

Pyro rolls his eyes, not bothering to point out that Wade’s roommate was nowhere near as old as he was claiming.

“That wasn’t an answer,” he points out. Waiting. Because he’s owed a real answer and they both know it.  

The other man sighs dramatically before finally addressing his inexcusably invasive behaviour. “Just tonight. Felt like something to try. This or slipping you a truth serum...”

“God, you’re a psycho.”

There’s nothing he can say in his defence and the merc with the mouth knows it. And so, for possibly the first time since their initial meeting, there is a silence Wade Wilson isn’t filling with whatever random thing just crossed his mind.

“Did you really expect I’d just...”

“Drop some crucial exposition while in throws of a nightmare? People almost always do, hot stuff. It’s the second best way of getting these things across. PTSD flashbacks, backstory-revealing nightmares, clunkily retelling what we didn’t have the budget to show,” Wade counts out on his fingers. “And it’s going to be none of the above, is it? I’m guessing. From the...” he closes with a gesture that seems to imply he’s talking about Pyro’s general body language, the death glare he’s currently aiming at him – never mind the weapon still aimed in his general direction...

“Does it matter?” Pyro wonders the moment he finds he can’t stand the silence that descended the moment Wilson stopped rambling.

There is no doubt any number of smartass answers the Marvel Jesus could deliver, but in a rare show of self-restraint all the he gives in a way of response is a vague shrug.

“Good. Because it shouldn’t,” Pyro tells him levelly. “How I survived is not important. Clealy not as important as making me wish I didn’t,” he adds, just a touch testily.

“It’s a tie, you know. They both matter. How you survived and what you survived – and I’m not talking about your definitely broken neck here. Though I did hear those bones snap. That’s what I had a nightmare or two about lately. That sound.”

It’s all just a little melodramatic and Wade no doubt knows it. But... knowing him that might just mean there’s something sincere just barely under the surface of all that facetiousness.

Of course to consider that would mean to get one step closer to thinking of Wade Wilson as someone who, despite quite a lot of evidence that might convince otherwise, cared. And he was not getting that.

Not when he just did everything in his power to earn being thought of as a crazy stalker with no respect for people’s boundaries.

“I’m going to need you to fuck off back to your own world now. And not come back for a while,” Pyro tells him, in a tone there’s no arguing with. Not even for unhinged mercenaries with pretentions of being Timeline Avengers.

“That’s fair,” Wade admits, reaching for his TemPad to open up a portal. “See you next time I’m stuck facing something that calls for serious mutant backup.”

“See you then, creep.” 

Chapter Text

“Let me guess,” Pyro says, in a way relieved to finally have a real confrontation replacing their constant and increasingly exhausting staring matches, “you want to know how I didn’t die.”

“Do I look like Wade Wilson to you?” snorts the witch.

“What?” he frowns, looking back at her in confusion.

“I don’t care,” Harkness spells out for him. “Not about you, not about your oh-so-precious secret. You’re simply the closest thing to a witness I can find, what with Cassandra’s army of minions having been so thoroughly wiped out.”

It takes a second but he gets there.

“You just want to see my memories. To find out...”

“How Pietro died.”

Not after the one part of his not-too-distant past he was desperately trying not to think about then. And why would she be? Pyro’s improbable survival wasn’t some big mystery to obsess over. It was lucky break that meant there remained someone who knew. Had the front row seat to every horrific execution, every twisted torment, each and every senseless death that could be traced to the unmourned tyrant that was Cassandra Nova.

Pyro was the witch’s window into the past, that was all. An answer she was after was hiding somewhere inside his skull. But not for long...

To be extracted in just a moment, by means no doubt only slightly less invasive than the ones he has grown so used to.  

“Thought you just hated me on principle,” he almost laughs, finding himself taking a step closer even as startling shades of purple start to dance around the other variant’s fingers.

“Because you were one of hers?” Harkness smirks. “Or because you had the nerve to lie to everyone about just having gotten here after her empire fell?”

“Either. Both. Plenty of reasons to hate me.”

There is a moment. The big bad witch almost says something. Almost. Before shaking her head instead, leaving whatever words just threatened to come out unspoken after all.

Just fine with him, Pyro finds. He was not up to some harsh and most likely impossible to argue with truth. Not in the state of exhaustion he found himself in after the latest X-Force assignment he agreed to join Wade for.

Having just dragged himself back, battered and bruised well beyond what was the norm for him on days spent doing the TVA’s dirty work he was more amused than disturbed by the determined looking witch he found waiting in his excuse for a home. Feels about right was his exact thought.

High time to get this over with. All the unspoken enmity was starting to get a little old if he was being honest.

Made it almost a letdown, to be told all she really wanted was every grisly detail about how the latest of the many, many Quicksilvers that passed through the Void died...

“Go on then,” Pyro says only, too tired to pretend there’s any fight left in him.

And the world turns the most vivid of purples just a heartbeat later.

...

It’s as bad as he remembers. What’s left of the body when Cassandra is done... And would there be any point of telling the stranger in his head that she wanted to see this...?

If this is what Harkness feels she owes to the only other person who came from the same doomed timeline she did, who was Pyro to tell her there was something fundamentally unhealthy about the kind of self-inflicted torture she was putting herself through by watching this? He could hardly pretend to understand what the dead Quicksilver meant to her. Not when, until he was just moments ago told otherwise, he honestly believed there were things she held against him. Things he would, sooner or later, be made to pay for...

But... god, even the way she slipped in an out of his memories gave the impression of someone who was too intent on finding what she came for to remember that now she was here it was all hers for the taking. Every moment. Every single day Pyro couldn’t wait to leave in the past and never think of again.

If the witch could find one specific day when he had to stand there and watch yet another mutant get torn to pieces for refusing to serve a drunk-on-power psychopath she could find it all.

All the things he was hiding.

Everything Pyro knew he couldn’t allow himself to dwell on if he was meant to retain his sanity.

“I told him not to go against her,” the woman says quietly. Subdued by a private grief he felt he unworthy of being a witness to. “It happened too many times before. And it always ended the same way. Always. Until your friend in red.”

“He’s not my friend,” Pyro tells her, not willing to let that stand.

He might have been a lot of things, but there was one misconception he was not willing to let take root. He could live with being a subordinate. Something damn close to a henchman all over again? Fine. With someone infinitely saner than Cassandra giving the orders he could let that be his life. But that word? It simply didn’t imply.

He worked for Wilson. Realized only too late it meant working for the same people who condemned him to the Void in the first place – but has grown too used to the perks of the arrangement to start pretending he had any moral objections to it. Friend, though? The word felt alien. Something that used to have a meaning in a life before this one. And that was so long ago it no longer felt like it ever could have been real...

“He’s... something,” Harkness says, smiling a little even as she lets the scene around them dissolve and be replaced by another. “Seems like all the other Deadpools, doesn’t he?”

Pyro makes no reply to that. Just stands there, same as he did on the day in question. Listens to the stream of some of the most inventive foul language he ever heard – all of it aimed squarely at the most terrifying mutant around. Who was going to lose her patience in three... two... 

One.

And what’s left of Johnny Storm collapses to the ground, gory and nightmarishly red.

“Did she ever not kill people in the most horrible way conceivable?” the witch asks, grimacing with distaste at the phantom of Cassandra conjured from his memory.

“What do you think?”

There is a silence. The woman holding him under a spell seems to think about it for a long time before she finally says the words.

“No horrible death for you, though,” she says. Doesn’t accuse – just... says.

“Just look,” Pyro tells her. Not that she needs his permission.

Only his exhaustion talking. Can’t be that he wants someone, anyone else to know the so damn anticlimactic truth about his survival...

But since the witch is right here and seemingly unrestrained in her power – why not revisit that nightmare too?

...

“Just... changed her mind?”

But it wasn’t that simple. “Her mind was made up. She just... Remembered how much more fun it is to take her time,” Pyro tells the unnaturally powerful stranger sharing the inside of his skull. An outsider observing the last handful of seconds before Cassandra took a final step to the other side of the portal.

Bizarre to say the least, to now have an outside perspective of it. To witness the moment he found himself literally tossed aside. All used up and serving no purpose now – just a body, colliding with the wall and breaking in too many places to count. The harsh sound of the cracking bones making him flinch, despite knowing exactly what came next.

One kind of agony traded for another as all those broken bones, torn tissues and bleeding organs started to... right themselves.

That’s how Cassandra always healed. Thought alone was enough to remake every cell, as good as new. And what a time to find out she could very easily do the same for others. Just as he was resigning himself to being put out of his misery.

But misery was the point.

Nova broke him and unbroke him with the same ease – and there was a promise in there somewhere. Of what she’ll do again and again and again as soon as she was back from her world-destroying sidequest.

Only she never came back.

Only...

Someone slayed that monster for him while he was just sitting there, too numb even consider running for it.

“And I thought how I survived Sokovia was fucked up,” Harkness tells him as she watches the shattered bones reassemble themselves under the skin of the broken thing Pyro has been only a few weeks ago.

“All our backstories are fucked up. That’s why the TVA puts us here,” he replies. “If we stay the hell out of sight they don’t have to think about any of it.”

To her credit she doesn’t take this perfect opportunity to point out which one of them worked for those destroyers of worlds...

“Now can we get the hell out of here?”

“Only because it’s making me sad.”

She probably wasn’t even lying. Going by how dark her eyes have gone. As for what it was making him... Pyro didn’t have a single, uncomplicated word to sum it up.

That was a bad day.

...

World fades out of harsh, purple hue that is the primal colour of witchcraft with the same ease with which it took over Pyro’s senses only a short moment earlier. And why did the world seem less harsh for it?

Why did the already retreating figure of the same old witch seem just a little less menacing now?

Was it the secret she was walking away with? The really not that surprising truth that he owed his continued existence to Cassandra’s very in-character decision to, on second thought, kill him as slowly and as painfully as she knew how.

The rest of his life was a gift given for all the wrong reasons. Talk about a cosmic joke. One made no less funny by how quickly it was followed by another.

The one that insisted on wearing a red suit, so that the bad guys don’t see him bleed...

Chapter Text

“Hi, Pyro.”

“Hi, Yukio,” he replies. Finding he’s not even surprised a random teen vaguely attached to Wade’s social circle somehow came into a possession of a TemPad.

It would honestly be weirder if she didn’t.

But now that he did force himself to regain consciousness for long enough to reply to her characteristically upbeat greeting he finds Yukio is not the only mutant to have invited herself in. And how... inevitable.

Familiar enough with Russell, though he was, Pyro never really managed to run into the third person Wade refused to stop referring to as his personal firebender. And now here she was, with no warning at all. A dark-haired, sullen girl just about ready to exit her teens and head for her early twenties. Not quite what he pictured, but... in a way she did complete the picture.

Something about the way she seemed ready to show her middle finger to anyone who’d dare to suggest she might belong anywhere in the vicinity of the ever-shifting lineup of the X-Force 2.0...

Pyro liked her on sight. Warned though he was of her sullen silences and mean comments, both.

“Yukio?” he inquires even as he slowly and very carefully sits up from the spot on the floor he was just napping on a moment ago.

“Yes, Pyro?”

“Why are you here?”

“Wade told us to come.”

Oh. So that’s what this was.

“Wade told you tocome or Wade told you to check on me?” he asks, even though the answer seems pretty obvious.

Only The-Marvel-Jesus Wilson would tell Pyro to take the day off so he could head out on a world-saving mission with no backup at all – only for it to turn out he also assigned a couple of not-old-enough-to-vote mutants to do the utterly unnecessary and come to the Void to see what trouble he was getting into while briefly freed from his X-Force duties.

“You look... tired,” Yukio lets him know in a way of answer.

“We had a Void rager last night. I’m still sleeping it off,” he reveals. Making the girl giggle. Because of course she did. 

“DouchePool keeps claiming those are just a myth,” her dark-haired friend says.

“That’s what we want him to think. They’re for variants only,” Pyro tells her. Before closing his eyes again. Hoping that when he finally gathers enough energy to reopen them both the B-team X-men currently in his space will be gone...

No such luck, turns out. 

“Wade said to just pop in, see if he’s still in one piece and get the hell out. You know. Because of the... Monster,” finishes Yukio in a hushed tone. 

“He didn’t really call him that, did he?” the girl Pyro heard went by Negasonic says, making a face. “He might be burned out, but... monster is a bit harsh.”

“He probably meant Alioth,” he tells the other mutant. Who... nope... still seemed to be in no great hurry to leave.

Slow day at the mansion, then. No wonder they were ready to volunteer for this. The savage environment of the Void was just a novelty to them – something to visit through a mysterious, glowy door in the air and leave by the same means whenever they grew tired of its timeless charm.

Tourists. Just like Wade was.

“You were just leaving,” Pyro reminds, hopefully. Praying there was nothing in the rust and ruin of their immediate surroundings that managed to capture their attention. Since he did feel burned the hell out.

Far too hungover to be dealing with visitors from a world that was... well, everything this one wasn’t.

“Where are we?” Negasonic frowns, looking around the room littered by what few possessions he managed to get together since settling on this section of a decrepit hellicarrier as a good enough shelter for the time being.

“The place I crawl back to when there are no worlds that need saving,” he tells her. Wondering what would it take for her and her girlfriend to take the hint and leave him to suffer the consequences of last night’s bad decisions in peace. “It’s... not ideal.”

“Pretty barren, yeah,” concedes the dark-haired mutant. “Very... postapo.”

“I think it’s an interesting aesthetic,” Yukio comments, smiling brightly. Sounding as genuine and as delighted with everything in her line of sight as ever.

“Sure,” Pyro sighs. Finding he doesn’t have the heart to spell out for her that the wasteland aesthetic she was enjoying so much also meant no running water, never mind living on the edge of starvation even on days when scavenging was good. Oh and... But she knew about the monster, apparently.

Only Wade Wilson would make sure to let his friends know that fun little piece of local trivia and still see no problem with sending them off to this ruin of a world to do something that did not need doing.

“Seen enough yet? Because this feels like a good time for you to head that way,” he tells the younger mutants, pointing at the amber square of pure light that was their way home. “The sooner you leave the sooner you can tell Wade I’m doing just fine.”

“That’s exactly what you look like,” the sullen, dark-haired mutant comments, smirking. “Just fine.”

The fact he was sleeping off the crazy blur that was last night in the middle of the floor when there was a perfectly good rickety excuse for a bed only a few feet away made it damn hard to take issue with her wry observation. “It’s my day off,” Pyro tells her, not entirely sure why he feels the need to explain himself. “Don’t get a lot of those. And all the others I have to spend listening to someone who will not stop calling me his disciple.”

He’d add do you get why I can’t always keep it sober? but Negasonic’s expression lets him know she got that part.

“We’ll let you get back to it then,” she says in a way of a parting shot. And it’s not not sarcastic. But it’s not even trying to pass for a mean comment, which is something.

“Bye, Pyro,” he hears the second he allows himself to close his eyes again.

“Bye, Yukio...” he grumbles automatically. Because to let her leave without offering a response would just feel wrong.

But god was he glad to see them go. Because nothing, not a single thing, in this room was even close to apocalyptic – not when compared to the hangover he was going to spend the rest of his day trying to survive...

Chapter Text

“Did you see him at any point in the last twenty-four hours?”

“Him who?” Pyro replies, not feeling particularly cooperative after having the question barked at him with no warning.

“The Red Guardian of the Multiverse,” snaps back the normally much more amiable TVA employee. “Who do you think?”

Considering how stressed the other man – introducing himself as Casey during a post-mission debrief a few weeks back, Pyro vaguely remembered – seemed, this probably wasn’t a great time to get sarcastic. But... did these people really not pick up on the dynamic he had with Wade? Could it have escaped them that there was no surer way of improving Pyro’s day that showing up unannounced and ask a question that heavily implied that the Time Variance Authority lost the one Deadpool they really didn’t want to lose sight of. Because the things he could do when unsupervised...

Going by the things Wilson did while supervised, they could not have been good for the continued well-being of the multiverse.

“You... do know that he only comes to me when he needs something, right?” Pyro says, refusing to rise to the level of panic the other man seemed to think this situation warrantied. “If you didn’t assign him any crisis to de-escalate there’s no reason for him to come to me.”

“That would account for about twelve percent of the trips to the Void he takes. We have a record of every time door he opens,” points out the unsettled looking agent of the TVA. “He visits you constantly. Are you sure he’s not just...”

“What? Loitering in some corner somewhere?” Pyro snorts. Because that probably isn’t completely out of the realm of possibility, is it? The hellicarrier was huge and people were forever coming and going. Who was to say one of them wasn’t wearing a red suit...? “Why don’t you search the premises? Make sure.”

The other man deflates a little at the suggestion. His judgement wasn’t completely compromised, then. Not enough to make him forget where he was. And what would the locals – last survivors of destroyed worlds – do at the sight of someone wearing the TVA’s slightly retro take on office casual.

They might have been the good guys out there, but in this timeless garbage dump TVA would always be the enemy. No one was going to have any sympathy for whatever crisis they were facing in the wake of losing their loose canon of an unhinged mercenary. Who they never should have signed up in the first place.

“It’s just... hard to understand why he’d do something like this...”

“Is it?” Pyro laughs. Not because he’s incapable of sympathizing with someone whose commitment to the TVA is the real thing rather than the mercenary attitude he himself could just about manage. Not even because he had any delusions about Wade being somehow gone for good. His luck was not even close to that good, Pyro knew that. No, the funny part was that... “You really don’t know what would make him slip your leash?”

“If you know something...” Casey starts, his eyes slightly narrowing with sudden suspicion. That wasn’t unjustified, actually.

Because coming here was a good idea, it turned out. There were plenty of other people that could have told the currently panicking employees of the Time Variance Authority what they needed to know, of course. And eventually they might even have figured it out themselves.

But...

Pyro didn’t feel like waiting for eventually. Not when he knew the quickest way to turn his living space into a TVA-free zone again was to state the obvious.

“Is there anyplace you specifically forbid him from going?”

The other man’s eyes go wide. It’s almost comical, really. Even before he says, “No... he wouldn’t...”

“We’re talking about Wade Wilson here,” Pyro reminds. “Of course he would.”

He doesn’t even need to know the details. Whatever the timetravel authorities tried to keep him from intervening in there was no doubt in his mind that the leader of the new-and-improved X-Force was in the middle of it right now.

Isn’t that how it always went...?

“But we explained to him, time and time again...” says the TVA agent, shaking his head in disbelief even as he starts feverishly typing on his TemPad. “And it’s probably too late already.”

“Probably,” Pyro agrees. Going unheard by the other man, too wrapped up in his Deadpool-themed crisis to register his comment. Already summoning himself a door the hell out of here.

He was going to be too late, of course. That was the problem with Wade. He could, on occasion, manage to be one step ahead. When he really wanted to...

The amber square of pure light winks out of existence and that’s that. Pyro’s part in whatever mysterious crisis was taking place in some undisclosed and no doubt dramatic location was done. Time to get back to what his life looked like when neither Wade Wilson nor the organization he was unofficially attached to intervened...

Half-heartedly spying on the other variants squatting in the few semi-habitable rooms the hellicarrier had to offer, then. Because how sure could he be that none of them were planning to kill him in his sleep? Oh, right. He couldn’t.

“So that just... happened,” a vaguely familiar voice says – in a tone that makes it clear the speaker just witnessed the whole thing, even if he can’t begin to make sense of it.

“It did,” Pyro confirms, turning to look at the kid. Because he was very young. One would think too young to be convicted as a timeline criminal – but as far as the TVA was concerned there was no such thing. And so this teenage boy, barely out of high school, became yet another of the variants he was forced to accept as just being... around. “It’s probably going to happen again, too. They are not great at respecting my space.”

“That man,” continues the boy Elsa Bloodstone brought back from one of her joyrides recently. Because the big, bad monster hunter simply couldn’t bring herself to ignore a hitchhiker... “Was he...?”

“TVA?”

“They told me you... do covert stuff for them sometimes? I just...” the boy shakes his head, blinking back his confusion. “It sounded like a joke.”

Reasonable enough assumption. Pyro only shrugs. What is there to say? Not like it was the most confusing thing inflicted on this kid in the recent days. When Elsa found him wondering about, clearly unaware he was strolling through Alioth’s hunting grounds, he still had on that beige coverall thing the Time Variance Authority outfitted them all with just before rushing them through a mock trial.

“What else did they tell you?” he wonders, genuinely curious.

“There’s a man in red that keeps showing up. And he’s... weird.”

“Well then,” Pyro chuckles, “you’re all caught up.”

“But... how? I mean... I have so many questions.”

Didn’t they all? If he remembered correctly the other variants all had plenty of questions not that long ago. Questions like how bad is your real name for you to consider Flash a preferable alternative and how did an ordinary highschool kid pick up an alien symbiont. And they didn’t get particularly illuminating answers to any of those, did they?

“Good for you, kid. But I’ve answered plenty of those for one day,” Pyro replies, dismissively. “Go ask your designated adult. Where is she, anyway? Because I can clearly remember her promising you won’t be leaving her side.”

“Miss Bloodstone was talking to some newcomer. Seemed like an old friend, so I thought I’d give them some space.”

“Don’t see how that ends with you spying on me, but... Sure.”

“I wasn’t spying,” the boy replies. And there was that teenage snark... “Anyway, I still don’t know what any of it meant. Why does the TVA even care about you?”

“They don’t,” Pyro informs him. “They just lost their most unpredictable, gratuitously violent temp and they thought... Oh, I don’t know what the hell they were thinking.”

“That you knew something,” Flash suggests. Pausing just a touch dramatically before adding, “And you did.”

“Guess being really good at jobs I hate is my second superpower,” he says, pausing for a tired laugh before turning his attention back at the boy looking startlingly normal for a host of a monstrous extra-terrestrial. “Now run along. Your surrogate mom is probably worried sick about you.”

“You... You do know miss Bloodstone is going to kill you if she hears you call her that, right?” says the kid, taken aback.

“She didn’t kill me for worse things. She’ll get over this too.”

The boy, Flash, seems to sincerely doubt that. But Pyro knows better. With all the chances the many variants sharing his current living arrangements had to end his misery, not one of them seemed so inclined.

Maybe it was time to give up on it ever happening. Accept that the stab in the back was not coming.

A mission for the TVA he would not be coming back from it would have to be...

Chapter Text

It wasn’t even funny how often his job came down to babysitting. If it wasn’t the creepy little mutt it was the Wolverine who needed keeping an eye on around the minibar. Or the old lady who was, at least according to Wade, receiving some damn descriptive death threats. That all tended to sound pretty made up. What with how they most likely were...

Lucky for Wade Pyro was now past the point when he questioned things like that. Usually he’d just sigh, snark a bit but ultimately go along with whatever contrived nonsense was being passed for a vital mission.

Today, though, it wasn’t the merc with the mouth giving the orders...

“Just keep an eye on him while we try to figure out what we’re going to do about this... situation he created,” Mobius tells Pyro tiredly, while the two combatants in TVA-issue riot gear bring in the not even remotely remorseful looking Wilson.

“This isn’t over, Mustache-Man,” Wade interjects, mock-struggling against his guards. “Gotham city has not heard the last of me...”

“Shut the fuck up, Wade,” Pyro tells him offhandedly. Expecting it to have about the same effect it usually had. For once, though, there must be something about his tone that gets through. Or so he assumes – based on the fact that Wilson does in fact shut the fuck up.

“I see we picked the right person for the job,” Mobius utters, sounding marginally more optimistic even as he nods to his underlings to let them know this is when they depart the premises. “We owe you one for doing this.”

Pyro doesn’t bother to reply. The words mean nothing, after all. It’s really just... Mobius being Mobius. Perplexingly nice for someone in his line of work.

And then he’s gone and so is the short-lived silence.

About half a second is all he gets before Wade clears his throat and, in a tone that’s nothing short of official, says, “Do you know what time is it?”

“Time to come up with some random nonsense to distract you from how badly you fucked up this time?” Pyro guesses.

Despite having absolutely no idea what it was Wilson actually did and how likely was the TVA to fire his ass over it seems to be close enough to the truth. Or so the unamused glare the man in red aims at him suggests...

“That’s right, padawan,” Wilson tells him in an upbeat tone. “It is time for your mandatory employee satisfaction survey.”

Pyro laughs at that. Can’t help it. “Is that what I am? An employee? Because I could swear I’m really just... Very easy to bribe. With things like regular meals and the occasional access to a shower.”

“And cocaine,” Wade adds, waggling his non-existent eyebrows.

“That would be Al.”

“Right. Right,” nods the other man. Before growing just the slightest bit more serious as he adds, “Whole other set of issues there. And we’re here to discuss yours.”

“We’re here because you went off the grid and the people who casually destroy entire worlds are still trying to figure out if they’re angry or just disappointed,” Pyro corrects.

“You better hope it’s neither. I mean... What would you do if they did pull the plug on us? Unless... Are you still in denial about needing the X-Force much more than I do...?”

There it is again. Wade tone might be as irreverent as ever but for once it’s not reaching his eyes. That’s where Pyro catches a glint of... seriousness?

Something he finds it hard to reconcile with this absurd excuse for a TVA operative...

“What the fuck are you talking about?” he asks eventually, certain he’ll regret giving the other man an opening.

“Well, let’s see. I think it all started when life stopped delivering kicks on just about daily basis. And I’m not saying you missed them. No one misses those bony fingers digging through their skull. Obviously. That being said... It just doesn’t feel right, does it?”

That was... Not what Pyro expected to hear.

But Wilson isn’t done yet, it seems. “But with the X-Force to assure you’re getting your daily recommended dose of danger, violence and all the other good stuff to feed your stress levels...? Takes the edge off, I bet. Much easier to accept that nice, cosy normalcy the rest of your life is treating you to. As long as you still get the occasional kick. A broken rib or five, mild concussion, really awkward run-in with people you haven’t seen since high school... Things like that balance out how much less nightmarish the Void is becoming with your old boss out of the picture, don’t they?”

“Very insightful, Doctor Wilson,” Pyro replies, not even trying to keep the sarcasm down. “Did you figure all that out before or after you decided to get us both fired?”

“They’re not going to fire us,” snorts the one and only Marvel Jesus. “They’re probably just taking their time discussing how big a raise I should be getting for solving yet another problem of theirs without even needing to be assigned to it.”

And there it is. As perfect an opportunity to just ask Wilson what it was he actually did. But... Did it really matter?

Either it cost Pyro his weird coping mechanism – the shortcut to violence that were their TVA sanctioned missions – or it didn’t. He wasn’t entirely sure he cared.

It might have been for the best. With the option to get himself maimed in process of fighting for a multiverse he honestly couldn’t care less about he just might be forced to start looking into some healthier alternatives.

Might – but probably won’t. Knowing himself.

“Now let’s get back to that employee...”

“I’m not doing an employee satisfaction survey, Wade,” he replies tiredly.

“You say that but the alternative is having a long, serious conversation about how worrying your living conditions are. This place is always freezing.”

“It’s the middle of the night and there’s nothing but desert outside – what kind of temperatures are you expecting?” Pyro tells him, rolling his eyes. Never mind that what his place had instead of a window was a massive hole in the outer hull of the hellicarrier. That might have had something to do with the less than ideal room temperature...

“Good thing your mutation makes you immune to hypothermia. Not the case for the rest of us. Hint. Hint,” Wade comments. Deciding to switch back to his usual, annoying self – possibly to take the edge off being Captain Truth Bomb for a minute there. “Now, on a scale from one to ten, how opposed would you say you are to platonically spooning? Just so I don’t freeze to death, you understand.”

“How about you stay out of my personal space and we never have to find out just how flammable that suit is,” Pyro suggests in a way of counteroffer.

That shuts Wade up all over again. For however long that can ever last... 

Chapter Text

“It’s almost like you can’t have nice things,” Harkness tells him. Openly amused while completely failing to take delight in his suffering the way a wicked witch of her particular brand should.

Having one of her good days, then. One of those when she was more just another variant rather than a force of nature with no regard for the mere mortals she was stuck sharing the Void with.

“Who even told you?” Pyro wonders.

“Hard to narrow it down. They’re all talking about it,” the witch reveals, flashing that uncharacteristically non-threatening smile again. “Every new way your life gets just a little more difficult is making it easier for the rest of them to cope with their respective Void problems,” she adds.

It was a theory, anyway. And good for the other variants to be able to put things in perspective like that. Too bad it didn’t make the latest inconvenience Wade Wilson inflicted on Pyro any less annoying.

“Do you want to vent about it?” Harkness wonders, innocently enough. “Might make you feel better.”

“He’ll still be here when I’m done venting,” he points out. Because that was the problem in a nutshell.

Remy LeBeau was not going anywhere...

Pyro was stuck with the melodramatic idiot refusing to make it through even a single sentence without wildly swerving from one language to another. Because he was X-Force and this was what teammates did for each other. According to Wade, anyway. Who, of course, had a whole list of contrived reasons why it couldn’t have been his couch Gambit would be crashing on for the foreseeable future...

“How bad?” Agatha asks. And once again fails to sound gleefully amused at his misfortune.

“It’s actually... not,” Pyro admits. “That’s what’s so infuriating. Outside of the language thing he’s actually not doing anything wrong. Does a better job of staying out of my space than Wade ever did. Tell him not to do something and he just... doesn’t.”

It was worse than that, though. LeBeau was nothing like the intrusion he was braced for. Fine. That was on Pyro for having grown used to Wilson as the standard for what people were going to bring into his life, anyway. But the Cajun was just... refusing to complain. Not even about things like the kind of night-time temperatures that would be enough to put Steve Rogers down for a decades long nap. But worst of all he not only took the X-Force/Guardians of the Multiverse thing seriously, he also gave every impression of not particularly minding being on the same team as someone who was, for an untold number of years, the enemy.

“No wonder you hate this,” Harkness chuckles.

And what can he possibly say to that? “I’m the asshole here, aren’t I?” he sighs.

“Usually are. Or it’s a tie between you and your friend in the red suit.”

This time Pyro doesn’t even bother to remind her how he feels about that particular f-word. If only because she got everything else right.

“So what exactly happened, anyway? Didn’t the TVA put those guys in witness protection for their heroic indiscriminate murder of dozens of people who had no choice about working for the big baddie...?”

“They tried,” he says. “Worked with the others. Timelines they put them in accepted them just fine.”

“Not him, though,” Agatha guesses. “How many timelines did he send off the track before they realized he might have to be sent back into the Void?”

“They didn’t. Just kept relocating him. And then someone made the mistake of telling Wade what was going on and he just... Took matters into his own hands,” Pyro sighs. “And here we are.”

“And here you are – dealing with the fallout. I’m no expert but... It’s almost like you’re having an unhealthy dynamic with your superior. Again.”

Astute observation. Even if spoken in a tone of someone who, at the end of the day, didn’t actually care if said unhealthy dynamic ever changed – what with it having no effect on her life either way.

“One of these days you might have to ask yourself if it’s maybe you, not them,” she adds, almost as an afterthought.

“One of these days,” Pyro agrees. “When I’m not too busy assuming something is very wrong when an X-man isn’t openly hostile to me...”

Even though LeBeau never made it as far as that. Not this variant. He just generally gave off the vibe of someone who’d fit right in at the mansion. Up until the moment he opened his mouth and Johnny Storm level of inventively worded stream of upsetting language came out, anyway.

“This is why I love dropping by,” the witch tells him. Smiling almost fondly as she adds, “Every time I do I’m treated to yet another set of issues you just... Aren’t even thinking about addressing at some point, are you?”

“Do you want the honest answer?” Pyro wonders. Only to find he succeeded in making the big, bad Agatha Harkness laugh.

“What I want is confirmation of this weird rumour I heard from Elsa’s kid sidekick. About why Wilson really left him at your doorstep.”

Right. Because of course she heard about that. No wonder she was in one of her more pleasant moods since she came up here to talk to him...

“Why is it so hard for people to remember I did actually get a pretty decent education back in the day?” Pyro sighs.

“Way back. Long before you started to own the wasteland hobo look.”

He’d point out that they all looked like wasteland hobos, but Harkness would probably just accuse him of trying to change the subject. “Still can’t believe that psycho stalker dug out my school records,” Pyro sighs. “I mean who does that?”

“A team leader who wants to know your skillset in its entirety?” suggests the witch, unable to hide a smile. “And Wilson won the lottery with you, didn’t he? Firestarter and fluent in french...”

“And what does it say about Xavier that he insisted on us learning useless shit like that?”

“Useless until it isn’t,” Harkness points out. And she’s not wrong, is she?

Through no fault of his own Pyro was yet again proving himself one of the most crucial members of the new X-Force. What with his ability to puzzle out Remy’s bilingual jibberish.

“What else did you pick up in the school for gifted youngsters...?”

“A lot of my issues,” he replies, only to have Harkness shake her head at him and, at long last, turn her attention to the small crowd of other variants milling down in the lower levels of the defunct hellicarrier.

Having extracted all the amusement she could out of the fact Pyro was very much stuck with an unasked-for roommate she seemed on the brink of considering finding someone new to strike up a conversation with. Like the friendly, neighbourhood witch she was. Leaving him to be the jaded, difficult and just generally riddled with too many flaws to name. Very much the person the other variants really should know better than to waste their time on.

Not that anyone around here was getting that particular message.

Chapter Text

“They call me Gwen.”

“Oh?” Pyro says, glancing over. “Why do they do that?”

A smile someone slowly starving on a timeless wasteland should not be capable of makes her serious expression crumble in a heartbeat. That’s how openly delighted she seems to be at the fact he caught what she was and wasn’t saying, having phrased it like that...

“Honestly...?” the woman says, pulling her trenchcoat open as she does so. “You put on someone’s Pink Power Ranger outfit one time and next thing you know you’re stuck with a nickname for life...”

It must have been white and Barbie pink at some point – but by now the outfit faded into much less dramatic colours. Dusty grey and worn-out, faded memory of pink at best. Not something the pixie dreamgirl variants that referred to themselves as Gwenpool would ever be caught dead in. For this woman, though, it was somehow the right fit.

Unlike those invariably teenaged maniacs she was an adult, for one. One that most likely acquired the excuse for a superhero costume by stripping it off a real Gwen variant that happened to be no longer breathing, because that was just how these things worked in the Void. A place the real thing had next to no chance of surviving for longer than a week, or so Pyro’s few run-ins with them over the years suggested.

Those girls just didn’t have what it took. While the stranger borrowing the name was just about the perfect definition of what a survivor looked like. Thin from too many skipped meals, but not unhealthily so. Her hair might have been a too-dark strawberry blond to successfully impersonate the real thing, but at the end of the day she was clearly the kind of tough that might have dominated in a Void fight club if there ever was such a thing.

In no way did she pass for older, more jaded Gwenpool variant. Cassandra would have hired her in a heartbeat, though, Pyro was sure.

A fact that should have made him more uneasy than it did.

Must have been the fact that something about the woman’s general demeanour made it seem like she’d have a few things to say about what could the mutant warlord do with such a job offer...

“Well?” not-really-Gwen says after letting the absurd superhero onesie she had no business pulling off as well as she did disappear under the coat she wore over it. “Aren’t you going to ask me?”

“Ask you what?” Pyro frowns, having no idea where can this conversation be possibly going.

“What is my esteemed colleague the Red Power Ranger getting up to.”

“The Red...” he repeats – and gets no further before catching himself getting a really bad feeling. “Oh, god. Is Wade here?”

“If you mean your work friend – the one with the skin condition, not Captain Card Trick – the answer’s yes. And it gets worse from there.”

“It usually does...”

Something about his tone – of being just completely done – makes the woman’s brilliant smile reappear in full force.

“What is he doing?” Pyro forces himself to ask as they start the long descend down the several structurally unsound staircases and walkways between his area of the hellicarrier and the lower levels where most of the others claimed their own territories.

“His exact word was networking,” Gwen reveals, sounding just a touch amused. The kind only people with very little exposure to Deadpools ever were. Because the longer one spent around any variation on the mouthy merc the less funny the constant stream of jokes seemed...

Knowing even that little about Wade’s latest stupid idea makes Pyro put on a bit more speed. Having even just one person he fought battles all over the multiverse with still in his space once the missions were over was exhausting. The possibility of one of his fellow squatters in this defunct flying fortress being added to the ever-shifting X-Force line-up was just the kind of complication he really didn’t need.

But it in no way comes as a surprise that, by the time they reach the ground level, Wilson is in the middle of speech. One causing looks of the purest confusion in every variant close enough to hear.

“... Some of my best henchmen – no, henchfriends – are variants. Timeline disrupting criminals no one ever believed worthy of a second chance. But I gave them that chance. Because did not a great man once say,” Wade says, pausing a beat for the sheer melodrama of it before adding, “apes together strong.”

“You fucking idiot,” Pyro utters under his breath. Only reminded he might not be close enough to the man in red to be overheard but that didn’t mean everyone missed the remark when the woman beside him bursts out laughing.

“I’m sorry,” Gwen tells him, doing her best to stifle the sound, “you just... You sound so ready to file for divorce...”

“Last time I felt that way about someone I worked for there was a gun involved.”

“Oh,” the other variant says, her whole face just lighting up. And the next thing he knows her hand disappears into the folds of her coat only to reappear holding a weapon. One that he was more than welcome to borrow, going by her expression.

“That’s... I’m good,” he replies. “But thanks.”

Gwen only shrugs and reholsters what was no doubt only one of several weapons she had on her.

“... I know this is a lot to ask of the good people of the Void. But there is a wise, ancient woman in mortal danger. And I’m going to need a full security detail. Only the best of the best,” Wade continues on with his rambling monologue. Actually succeeding in making Pyro feel like his worst fears might not be realized. Not if he’s just going on about imaginary death threats against Althea...

“Wilson, what the hell are you doing?” he asks tiredly once he makes it to the front of the crowd gathered around the merc.

“Being the best roommate in the multiverse,” the other man replies, not missing a beat. “Not all of us can afford to be spending quality time with Princess Peach. There are lives at stake. I’d give Mario a call, by the way,” Wade adds, addressing Gwen, “pretty sure he’s looking for you in the wrong castle.”

To her credit she just grins and locks eyes with Wilson in an unspoken dare to come up with something better, because she heard that one before.

“No one’s threatening Al. What are you really doing here?” Pyro says quickly, to prevent anything along those lines happening. Strongly suspecting that if the word Barbie gets mentioned Wade might end up having to regrow limbs again...

“Are you suggesting I came up with a contrived excuse to get dozens of people forced to endure wasteland conditions into a world that has running water? And soap. And...”

“God, don’t say shawarma.”

“Shawarma. The food of the gods. God. Of Thunder,” Wade rephrases. “Now let me ask again – who’s getting a little sick of rat stew and rainwater?”

Spoken as a joke, but... There does seem to be an underlying seriousness to it. Which brought up the horrible possibility this was the Marvel Jesus just doing something... nice?

It wouldn’t be completely unprecedented. Pyro of all people could hardly claim that, not when a good few of his own assignments turned out to have been equally contrived reasons to provide him with the same things. Of course he thought of his access to running water and food with nutritional value undreamed of in the Void as his compensation for having to often endure several consecutive hours of the full Deadpool experience...

“I’d go with him before he realizes what that’s going to do to his water bill,” Pyro tells all the variants who, of course, turned to him for confirmation. Not that too many of them were really on the fence when it came to Wilson’s suspiciously generous offer.

Life in the Void being what it was, Wade had them at soap...

“Well, this took a turn,” Gwen chuckles, even as the man impossible not to mistake for the direct inspiration for her superhero outfit reaches for his TemPad. “And he’s definitely not luring us to a timeline where they’ll turn us into Soylent Green?”

“Don’t think so,” Pyro tells her. But his tone tips her off to the fact that he might have a theory about what made the man in red come over all altruistic all of a sudden.

“What is it?”

“I mean... Probably Vanessa? It’s not not going to help his case if she catches him selflessly feeding a bunch of...”

“... the worst criminals in the multiverse,” Gwen jumps in. Making a very good point. At the end of the day that’s what all of them were, no matter how pitiful they seemed at first glance.

Still, provided he brought them all right back the TVA wasn’t going to take an issue with this, was it? Forgiving of Wade’s antics as the organization was.

Besides, they set a terrible precedent long ago. Right around the time they approved a new X-Force. That one that included Pyro of all people.

“You coming, princess?” Wade says, addressing the not-really-Gwen variant once the time door is open and reluctantly walking through.

“What am I, a monster? A defenceless old woman is in grave danger. Of course I’m coming,” replies the woman before disappearing into the translucent square of light.

“She seems fun.”

Not something Pyro felt inclined to disagree with. Which is not to say he has nothing to add...

“Fun and armed,” he points out.

“Explains the suit. You only put on pastels if you’re damn sure it’s the bad guys that will be doing the bleeding.”

An insane thing to take from that, but... It was certainly a point.

Chapter Text

“Who’s hungry?”

“Can we not?” Pyro replies, really not feeling up to spending another minute exposed to the retro aesthetic of the TVA that extended even as far as their weird little cafeterias.

Refusing free food went against every one of his survival instincts but what they just went through could only be described as one of their more how are we still alive? missions. The timeline was an imploding mess when they arrived and it took calling for backup of dozens of TVA combatants to even get near the variant causing it all. And as for what followed once they did finally find themselves face to face with the power-mad psycho... It was bad.

Spectacularly so.

Leaving Pyro too sore and bruised to feel like hanging around the office. No, his plans for the immediate future were more along the lines of dragging himself home and sleeping through the next day or two.

“I’m serious, Wilson. Not today,” he says – slightly less insistently than he hoped to, but that was yet another testament to how exhausted he was.

“Because I’m thinking McDonald’s,” Wade carries on as though Pyro hasn’t spoken. “How about if I promise to make sure your Happymeal toy is a bottle of painkillers...?”

“Better be the good stuff,” LeBeau speaks up. “Gambit, he break a few things.”

Which would explain why the Cajun hasn’t stopped clutching his side since they dragged themselves back to the TVA headquarters...

“That’s what happens when you bring a pack of cards into a gunfight, handsome,” points out their excuse for a team leader. “Look – was this a clusterfuck? Absolutely. Do I have even a working theory for how is either of you still alive? I do not. And I can’t just go back in time and prevent us from doing all the stupid, suicidal shit we just did. But I can get us all the french fries it will take to make today better. And yes I will tell them to make them extra french for you.”

Pyro would argue but he was simply too battered to hold his own against Wilson just now. Never mind that the man in red – extra red right now, he did a lot of bleeding in the last few hours – was the only one of them in possession of a TemPad. And he seemed to have already decided they were headed home by the way of a drive thru, so... This was yet another perfect opportunity for him to simply go along with whatever Wilson decided. Worked out for him so far, right?

“But we’re not talking about the mission,” he says, coming to a stop just short of entering the luminous time door before him.

“Oh, I’m never speaking of anything from the last twenty-four hours outside of a therapy session,” Wade replies. Making it sound like a joke, because didn’t he always, but... Pyro was actually inclined to believe him about that.

There is brief agreement from Gambit, delivered in what is for once mostly straightforward french, and through they go.

“Why don’t you find us a table to compare new battlescars at while I let the nice Valkyrie know that we do in fact want fries with that,” Wilson tells them after they already more collapsed than sat down at the first available table in the joint. That actually was a McDonalds by the look of it. An 80s version of one, anyway.

“Valkyrie?” Gambit repeats in understandable confusion.

Pyro only shrugs, offering his best guess. “Looks a bit Scandinavian...?”

Though what the blonde woman behind the till looked like first an foremost was unhappy.

Understandable when one considered she was being exposed to Wade’s idea of banter. Except... Pyro could have sworn she tensed up the second they walked in.

Not entirely unfair. The three of them put together just couldn’t help looking like they meant trouble. More so right now than on the average day. Since Gambit made a serious attempt but definitely didn’t get all the blood off of his face. That, or his scalp wound reopened.

“Why do we let him drag us into these things...?” Pyro groans after catching a ghost of a reflection in a window and realising he looked, if anything, even worse than the other man at his table.

“The multiverse. It needs heroes,” LeBeau says simply.

And, god, was it actually that simple for him?

“Too bad all it’s got is a Deadpool and a few mutants that suck at telling him to take his hero complex and shove it...”

“Takes all kinds,” shrugs the other man. There’s something unspoken in that empty expression but if there’s a time and place to get into it it’s definitely not in a McDonald’s just after a mission.

Not this mission, that was for sure. Because how the fuck were they even still alive?

“Where is Wilson with our food...?” he complains.

Because he was spending an awful long time talking to the woman. Who progressively went from weary to... actually interested in what the leader of the X-Force had to say. In a way that suggested they were not talking their order.

Made sense. Beaten up as they were Wade still dragged them along for some covert meeting with... Well, whoever she was. An actual Valkyrie for all Pyro knew. And he didn’t even have the energy to get mad about it...

“The goddess of mischief says it’s on the house,” Wilson announces as he places the assorted fast-food before them.

“Friend of yours?” Gambit makes the mistake of asking.

“I’m going to make her brother cry at some point. It’s foretold,” is the utterly nonsensical answer they get. “Well, what are you waiting for? Dig in.”

“Mine is supposed to come with side of painkillers,” Pyro reminds. Expecting to be given at best an evasion wrapped up in a joke. But in an unexpected plot twist he finds himself on the receiving end of a few mystery pills from one of the belt pouches of the red suit.

“It’s the good stuff, too,” Wade assures him. “You’ll be back to some semblance of a healthy colour before you know it.”

Which was an outright lie and all three of them knew it. With how much blood Pyro lost it was a miracle he only fainted once so far.

Sure, the food was helping a little – and the pills, whatever they were, were helping a lot – but what he really needed right now were the familiar surroundings of the single barren room with a view of a graveyard of dead worlds right outside.

No place like home, right?

Chapter Text

“Think we found our least successful line-up yet,” Wade announces on marching them into one of TVA’s typically retro-looking oversized meeting rooms. That made up for the fact it had a projector capable of showing any instant from any timeline by having exactly two chairs. Not the ideal number considering the current size of their team. Plus Mobius because of course he attached himself to them the moment he saw them moving dejectedly through the corridors of the HQ.

“And don’t no one blame it on the fact that I bent the rules a little and brought another minor into a life threatening situation. Laura killed it out there,” Wade continues nodding to the mutant girl leaning against a wall. “And to think we were all certain nothing less than the real thing will work.”

“She is the real thing, asshole,” Pyro sighs. “Her bones are made from the same stuff, her powers are an exact match. She’s a Wolverine.”

“You’re telling me,” Wade chuckles. “Ever tried to get her through a metal detector?”

“Did you?” Mobius says. Asking a question while the rest of them – the ones with slightly more experience with Wilson’s thought processes – simply accepted that he absolutely did. On multiple occasions, more likely than not.

“Are we really going to stand around...” Laura starts, her impatience apparent.

“We do, cher,” LeBeau tells her. “We stand around, we talk about mission. Is what we do.”

“Not always. Sometimes we’re talking things over while TVA medics are stitching up our wounds. Because not all of us have healing factor. And one of us refuses to remember that little detail.”

Even as he’s saying the words Pyro knows he’s making a mistake by bringing it up. Legitimate complaint though it is, Wilson was only going to take it as the perfect excuse to deliver some dumb punchline.

“Yes, things would have gone very differently if I was able to bring Wolverine classic instead of the new and improved. And if someone didn’t insist he’s fine to do this even though he’s just one big bruise at this point,” is the response Wade settles on. Glaring at Pyro as though he’s ready to proclaim him the real culprit here. “If you’re not going to be bringing your A-game why even bother to come? No, don’t tell me. Is it because the best way to distract yourself from all the internal injuries you definitely have is by getting a few new ones...?”

“You’re done?” Pyro wonders.

“Just about,” Wade promises, before turning his attention to the fourth person he dragged into the latest crisis in someone else’s timeline. The one sitting curled up by the door of the room, looking the next best thing to catatonic while saying things under his breath, too quietly for anyone to be able to make out. “Shatterstar, buddy... I know, I know. War is hell. And a galactic war is hell with extra impressive explosions.”

“Do we have to go back?” says the man whose outfit has been mostly white earlier today but, as the hours went by he acquires an impressive array of shades of assorted alien body fluids.

“We might. You, not so much. I think this is when I disinvite you from any and all future X-Force missions.”

Wade might deliver the news in the same tone one might announce Christmas is cancelled this year, but Shatterstar looks about ready to hug the man in red, he’s so relieved at hearing the news.

“We really were just awful today,” Wade sighs, looking around the room.

“Maybe don’t take us to space next time?” Pyro suggests. “Not if your plan for getting aboard Kree ships is let’s just have a Wolverine cut us a way in.”

“Hey,” Wade snaps, mock angrily. “Did she or did she not execute the hell out of that? I know we’re all disappointed we didn’t get to see Logan go to town on some genocidal, blue space soldiers. But we’ve been through this. My world starts deteriorating all over again the second everyone’s favourite Canadian even thinks about checking out other timelines. Like it or not, claws is under house arrest.”

“Wade, please,” Gambit says, flinching at hearing one of the words that rambling monologue ends on. “Do not say claws.”

“Why? Because it’s the name of the guy we almost didn’t stop from nuking Wakanda...? You need to get over that, handsome.”

“That was a bad day,” LeBeau shudders.

“They’re all bad,” Pyro counters. Unable to resist glancing at the addition to the team that didn’t seem to be on the brink of a meltdown to add, “Welcome to the X-Force.”

“Hey. I said this before – it’s the Timeline Avengers,” Wade snaps, sounding like he’s somehow the injured party for no one respecting his attempts at rebranding.

“Is he fucking serious?” Laura wonders, turning to Pyro for an answer. But he can’t give the one she’s clearly hoping for, can he? Not when he knows damn well that’s what Wade is.

As serious about avenging as they got. And too bad for everyone who got dragged into his quest to protect every endangered timeline out there from the kind of utter destruction that threatened his own not too long ago.

“Look, this was...” Laura starts, only to be brought short by finding herself unable to settle on an actual word to sum up the last few nerve-wrecking hours. Pausing for full two seconds before settling on, “A fucking blast. But I’d like to go home now. Promised a friend I’ll take his dog to the park,” she adds meaningfully.

A good strategy, he has to admit. When was Wade not ready to drop everything – including but not limited to world-saving – to prioritize the needs of his pet gremlin...?

“And you shall. We can talk about the self-destructive bender some of us are on,” Wade says, locking eyes with Pyro. “Might even be on a day when only some of your internal organs are actively bleeding.”

“I’m fine.”

Which is blatantly untrue, but still no reason for both Gambit and the next best thing to the Wolverine bursting out laughing on hearing him say that.

“Mustache, my man, any word on how soon can TVA supply us with that team therapist I requested?” Wade adds, turning to the unhappy looking Mobius. “I’d say we’re pretty overdue. Wouldn’t you?”

“Quite worrying,” is the other man’s openly concerned sounding answer. Making Pyro roll his eyes.

“Not the only one around here that needs therapy,” he points out, getting up from the spot on the meeting room’s floor he’s been occupying. Surprised to find Wade was actually already reaching for his TemPad to open him a doorway to his corner of the multiverse. The way things were sounding he was half afraid they were on the brink of staging him an intervention.

“You’re lucky Shatterstar needs a cup of hot cocoa and all the valium in the world,” Wade tells him. “But we’re talking about this.”

“I know,” Pyro admits. “No stopping you from talking, is there?”

If there’s a smartass answer he doesn’t hear it. Not from his side of the luminous portal.

Chapter Text

Silence. That really was the thing he has come to appreciate about the Void. As unnerving as the utter, deathly quiet before one of Alioth’s daily flybys tended to be it was nothing short of his favourite thing in the world whenever he dragged himself back into his... lair?

Was that the word best describing the space Pyro occupied while living it up in the purgatory at the end of time...?

It probably was if he was being honest. Not that there was much he could do about that now. Not in the state he was in, anyway... 

“You’re out of candy,” a voice he didn’t expect to hear – what with how he assumed he was finally alone – informs him.

Of course. Right in what was his blind spot only a moment ago. Long, dusty overcoat on top of a quirky, pink-addicted teenager’s idea of a superhero outfit and yes, there is a smile on her face.

But then there usually is.

“That’s because strangers keep taking it from me,” he replies to her comment about the lack of sweets on the premises. “Did I walk in on you going through our stuff?”

“It’s mostly your stuff,” Gwen points out. “Won’t even let the poor Cajun have a drawer to put his spare pack of playing cards in. Now, I’m pretty territorial myself, but... Keep it up and he’d be perfectly justified in dumping you.”

“Funny,” Pyro comments wryly. A remark like that out of Wade would annoy him, but there was just something about her delivery that made it feel like the joke was never on him. Like she was laughing with him – or would be, if he knew how to begin to match the light-heartedness she brought into everything.

Gwen doesn’t even try to refute it. The thing he just accused her of being. Funny, that was – not someone casually invading his privacy.

Not that she wasn’t both. 

“So, this might be a personal question, but... What happened to your face?”

“A wall,” he replies, having no good reason to lie.

“Oh,” she nods to herself. Crossing the distance between them to softly, but quite insistently push him towards the single rickety chair in the corner of the room. “Wanna hear about my day?”

“I do, actually,” Pyro realizes to his surprise. Yes, a big part of it is how little he wants to talk about the minor galactic war that took up the better part of his morning but... there’s some genuine curiosity there too.

Gwen wasn’t the only one of the variants keeping out of Alioth’s way inside the same oversized wreck he found himself getting closer to than he ever intended. There were others. People he’s probably refer to as friends, if this was still his first life – those now so distant days before he landed himself in a penal colony for timeline criminals.

But the others managed to do that by being a constant presence for weeks, while this not-quite-Gwenpool has just showed up. And wasted no time getting past his defences.

“Had a girl’s night out with Elsa and her pet Venom. Went monster hunting, since anything else would be off-brand for the owner of the bloodstone. Anyway, had a blast. The black space goo is kinda hilarious, believe it or not. Next the sun was coming up and we completely forgot to get any sleep. So I come up here to look for an emergency dose of caffeine or, failing that, at least something sugary. And there you were, looking all damaged and barely holding it together and in a serious need of a hug...”

“Don’t need a hug, Gwen,” he says, waving off her clearly genuine concern.

“Not ready to be touched,” she nods to herself.

“God, you sound like Wilson.”

“Yeah – but Wilson looks like Boris Karloff’s stunt double and I’m a wasteland ten,” she points out.

That actually gets a tired laugh out of him. Not great for his already aching ribs but it does momentarily make him feel less... Well... all the things he’s feeling.

“Used to be a regular ten. Nine and a half anyway. Back when I got to wash my hair more than once a month,” Gwen sighs, seating herself on the armrest of his chair. “Those were the days...”

“You don’t sound like you actually miss them,” Pyro realizes.

“I keep trying to imagine the version of me that never got to leave. And now she’s this adult in some timeline somewhere. Probably doing her taxes as we speak. And she’ll never know what a rush it is to realize you’re actually going to outrun the cloud monster that’s supposed to be the worst thing that can happen to you around these parts,” she replies, her smile growing just a little bittersweet around the edges. “Just makes me sad for her, you know?”

Pyro never really caught himself contemplating other variants of himself. Hard to let his mind go there when his work for the TVA meant he was forever in danger of actually running into one. Finding himself a hell of a disturbing ghost of Christmas yet to come for some unsuspecting John Allerdyce out there somewhere...

“I think I might be the one the others would feel sad for,” he realizes.

“Makes sense. That that’s something you’d believe,” Gwen adds before he can misinterpret what she’s saying. The look she’s giving him making it very clear she can tell exactly how much of a mess he is.

So why did it feel like he was in no danger of being told to maybe think about sorting himself out before his self-destructiveness actually gets him killed...?

“Any particular reason why you came back without Remy?” she inquires casually, dropping the subject rather than doing what everyone else would have and trying to make Pyro to get into it. “Thought you clock out at the same time. Being on the same off-brand, pseudo X-men team.”

“He stays to hang out with Wade. And to give me space, I think.”

“He’s considerate, he can do card tricks – truly the whole package,” chuckles Gwen. “How the hell is he still single?”

It’s amazing – the ease with which she can deliver a line like that without making it sound like an insult. There’s just no meanness in the things she’s saying. If anything there seems to be genuine curiosity.

“Do you think...”

“That if he starts hooking up with one of the other variants he might move out and you’ll get your own space back?” she finishes for him. “I mean, it’s a theory. And a fun thing to spend my weekend on. Do you want me to ask around? There must be a few people who don’t believe there is such a thing as too much purple.”

“Are you an evil genius?” Pyro wonders, staring at the delightedly smiling woman. Who appears to have meant everything she just said.

“What did you think the TVA sent me here for?” she laughs.

Completely failing at sounding even remotely evil, of course. Not that he expected anything else.

“You’re actually going to, aren’t you?”

“It’s going to be a lot easier to loot your place if there’s no roommate to be on the lookout for,” she shrugs. “Besides... I feel like I don’t do nearly enough shipping these days. And last I checked that’s the closest thing I have to a superpower.” 

Chapter Text

For a day when nothing particularly intervention-worthy was happening in the multiverse this one was already feeling longer than it had any right to be.

“Red. I should wear something red. Brings out the bloodshot in my eyes,” Wade announces before rushing back through the time door.

But he would be back.

And rambling and generally a nervous mess and convinced he’s going to get a call any second, letting him know the whole thing was off because Vanessa got back together with whatever-his-name-was, the guy who never once got her shot and of course she did and... Yeah, the other two core members of the X-Force endured several panicky spirals on that subject already.

“Does this seem weird?” Pyro turns to the other mutant forced to endure what was, in a way, really just more of Wilson’s nonsense – even if this time around it was all adding up to making the merc with the mouth seem all... human.

“Weird the Deadpool he has so many outfits, non?” Gambit nods, visibly taken aback by this new revelation about their boss.

“Weird he thinks either of us can have any valuable input when it comes to this,” he clarifies. “I mean... How long have you been single?”

LeBeau shrugs noncommittally. And seems to be about to bring up something related to the subject when Wade returns. Still in his bathrobe – unicorn themed, of course – and holding the vaguely doglike creature he affectionately referred to as Mary Puppins.

Still not settled on what it was going to wear to his date with Vanessa then. Wonderful.

This really was going to consume their entire day, wasn’t it...?

“Pyro he thinks we are maybe bad people to ask,” Gambit announces. Because of course he does. And there goes another thing for Wade to joke about to distract himself from how ridiculously nervous he was about his plans for the evening.

“Yeah, but Pyro is an idiot. Who should be killing it on Void tinder, by the way,” Wade utters conversationally, putting the dog down and refocusing his attention on the pile of clothes he’s been depositing on the Cajun’s bed for the last two hours. “Just another example of him self-sabotaging because how could someone with his backstory ever deserve anything good.”

“That’s it. That’s what’s wrong with me in a nutshell.”

On any other day an agreement with such a spot on observation would have meant the end to this conversation Pyro was in no mood to be having. But this was unlike any other day. Because what happened today was going to effect the rest of Wade Wilson’s life. Or so he seemed to believe.

On top of believing that he was going to fuck it up and die alone, of course.

“I mean, look at him,” Wade continues, speaking to LeBeau. “He’s semi-clean these days, has a job that isn’t even Mad Max themed... the vet assured us the rabies are all cleared out, so that can’t be the issue...”

“Never did a card trick in my life, so that can’t be it either,” Pyro can’t resist adding to Wilson’s list of things that were making his current relationship status such a source of confusion.

Gambit half-heartedly flips him the bird and adds a few comments of his own. All valid points, even if worded as though coming straight from the genius of foul language that was the late Johnny Storm.

“I’m just going to say something and hope it’s not going to earn me my next spontaneous combustion,” Wade says while intensely regarding what appeared to be two nearly identical dress shirts.

“Can’t wait to hear that...” Pyro snorts.

“We’re all familiar with that vision in pink I graciously decided not to sue for shamelessly copying my look, yes? And she seems very... single for a reason?” Wilson settles on after a moment. “Always figured that’s your type.”

It’s not a joke and it’s not a provocation. Just... an observation. One that seems to be attached to no weird agenda only a Deadpool could conceive of.

Makes it nearly impossible to figure out what Pyro can even say to that.

“You’re not going to fuck it up,” he settles on eventually. And yes it was a transparent attempt at changing the subject. Better double down before Wilson gets the chance to point it out, then... “She’s going to take you back regardless of what fucking shirt you wear so just pick one and get out of here. We have a poker game we’re going to be late for...”

Gambit helpfully points out that the game has been pushed to tomorrow because Zemo got held up out in the badlands, but luckily he sticks mostly to the language Wilson can’t understand a word of.

Pyro shoots him a quick look to let him know he better not repeat that in a less incomprehensible manner. And how was the Cajun not picking up on the fact that Wade needed to be banished back into his own timeline. Him lingering here for another panic attack or three was helping no one. Not the merc’s love life and not the people that had to sit here and listen to him be equal part miserable and hopeful about it...

“You’re not exactly...” Wilson starts.

“An expert? No, I’m really fucking not,” Pyro replies. Because who was he to argue with objective facts...? “But I see the way she looks at you.”

“That’s exactly what Al said.”

Which is about the answer he expected. Still, the Marvel Jesus is looking just a little less like he’s about to start naming all the ways tonight can go wrong...

“We’ll watch your gremlin if you leave in the next five minutes,” Pyro offers – since that was clearly going to happen no matter what. The creature known as Dogpool would never have been on this side of a time door if she wasn’t meant to become their responsibility for the evening.

“I knew I should have gone to Logan instead,” Wade replies, shaking his head. “You two are no help.”

“Logan he is single also, yes?” Gambit points out.

“Very. Now there’s a fucking mystery. Have you seen his abs?”

“Wade,” Pyro says sharply, refusing to let them get sidetracked. “Pick a shirt. There must be a few left with no dog drool on them.”

“There’s nothing like the emotional support of your core group of male friends... that want you to get the fuck out of their house,” Wilson adds, not willing to leave things as they were. Without a punchline, that was.

But he does pick a shirt. Even goes as far as starting to button it up before deciding that it’s completely wrong...

Pyro would focus all his energy into glaring the nuisance refusing to leave his space into submission, but that’s when a muttered sentence from LeBeau catches his attention. “He’s making a good point about what?” he turns to stare at the other mutant. Only to be treated to some more quick and a touch too colloquial French clarifying the point...

“Is a little strange, non?”

“No,” Pyro sighs, “it’s not. It’s because we have no work/life balance. Just another fun side effect of working for the X-Force.”

“That’s not why you’re single, hot stuff,” Wade, unable to leave without having the last word, says.

“Wade?”

“Yes?“

“Get the fuck out of here. You’re keeping your girl waiting.” 

Chapter Text

“Well? Don’t keep us in suspense, boss. Who needs to get their faces rearranged today? A villain we absolutely expected this kind of nonsense out of or a really dark variant of a hero we’ll feel deeply conflicted about attacking?” Wade opens with after just stopping short of kicking the door in to enter. Not in the slightest deterred when he finds himself up against one of B-15’s least amused expressions. “Because I will punch Cap in the face. Whether or not he tries to go all hail hydra on me.”

“You’re not going to be fighting any version of Steve Rogers today,” the high-ranking TVA officer tells them. Pausing for a long moment while she proceeds to try to stare her least reliable freelancer into bringing down his energy a little.

Fat chance. Since doing what everyone in his immediate circle saw coming a mile off and getting back together with Vanessa, Wade was more or less unstoppable. To put it mildly.

“You win this time, PG-13 Johnny...” the X-Force leader utters under his breath.

“Mr Wilson, I’m going to need you to take this seriously,” B-15 chastises. “The timeline we’re considering sending you into is can’t hold out for much longer.”

“Did I or did I not bring my slight-of-hand expert and my second best firebender? Things don’t get more serious than that. Now are you going to exposition me or what are we doing...?”

“We are trying to decide if your team is the right fit. There is a reason why we tend not to send you into worlds whose disturbances are caused by the Brotherhood of...”

Which is as far as the woman manages to get before a sharp intake of breath from Wilson interrupts her.

“We have one rule. Just the one. No one whose mom is named Martha is allowed to join,” announces the Marvel Jesus in his best mock serious tone. “We don’t do avoidable emotional triggers. Wouldn’t do that to my disciples. Which is why, with heavy heart...

“Oh, just shut the fuck up. I get it. I’m not going anywhere,” Pyro says, cutting Wade off before any more melodrama can get piled on top of what he already extracted from this really not that uncommon situation.

The first time it happened he actually tried to argue against what felt like the worst tactical decision Wilson could have made. After all, if it was the Brotherhood of Mutants that was causing some timeline-breaking cataclysm, bringing someone who could easily infiltrate the group and find out vital intel inside a few minutes just seemed like the solution.

Of course Pyro was the only one who thought so back then and things have not changed a few dozens of missions down the line. The leader of the X-Force was still protecting him from any emotional damage he might end up suffering if forced to confront any version of his old mentor. And bringing up just how many Magnetos – both familiar and utterly unrecognizable – he saw die horribly in the Void did nothing to make the man in red see reason.

As good an enabler as WIlson was for the self-destructive habits Pyro picked up since Cassandra’s untimely death, these kinds of missions were where he drew a line. He might have wrapped it up in jokes but that didn’t change the fact he was not letting it happen.

This time Pyro didn’t even bother to put up a fight. Why waste breath when he could just mentally check out instead? Contemplate the hours of uninterrupted silence he’ll be getting while the merc with the mouth was busy being obnoxious in someone’s mutant overrun timeline...

“Do you ever wonder why he does things like that?” B-15 surprises Pyro by saying as soon as the other two leave to gear up for what promised to be a particularly suicidal assignment.

“Talks? Nonstop? Until he gave you every reason to punch him you’ll ever need?”

“Protects you like that,” clarifies the TVA operative. Sounding so convinced that was what just happened it’s actually impossible to laugh at the preposterous thing she just said.

“Oh, he protects the entire multiverse,” Pyro can’t help but remind. “I’m not special. Everyone is worth saving in the eyes of Marvel Jesus.”

“Humour as a coping mechanism?” the woman comments, raising her eyebrow just the slightest bit. “The X-Force really must be becoming a cohesive team.”

“Look...” he sighs, struggling to imagine what is it he’s still doing here. “Whatever it is you’re trying to tell me, just say it. I have...”

“A life to get back to.”

And why did she have to sound as though she respects the fact and will not be keeping him from it much longer...?

Being treated as an actual human being by the TVA. Of course. That’s what he was stuck with. And how was that in any way less emotionally taxing than interfering with some extra-murderous Magneto’s plans for world domination?

“I will be providing you a way back to your...”

“Back home,” Pyro says, not feeling like waiting around while B-15 tries to figure out some diplomatic way of phrasing it. It was what it was. The worst place the TVA could have conceived of – the destination for everyone that messed with their designs on the multiverse – was just that for him. Home. 

How sad was that? And how true all the same.

“There’s something I believe need to see. It won’t take long.”

She’s telling the truth too. It’s nothing more than a few seconds worth of footage from a job interview Wade took in the place TVA liked to refer to as the sacred timeline.

Something that’s mostly just Wade being Wade. Until it isn’t.

I care. I know I turn everything into a joke, but I... I care. And I want to use that feeling for something important.

It’s not the words, it’s the sincerity of them. That’s what makes it impossible to just dismiss whatever attempt at emotional manipulation this was trying to be.

Impossible to say anything at all for several seconds after the footage ends.

“That’s why we trust him to fight for our cause,” B-15 reveals after giving him a few moments to come to terms with what he just saw. “I can tell you’ve been wondering.”

“And now I don’t have to anymore,” Pyro manages. But it’s nowhere near as wry and detached as it could have been and they both know it.

“But you guessed as much about him, I think,” she continues even as she reaches for her TemPad to provide him with the way back home she promised moments ago. “That’s not the part you’re struggling with, is it? It’s how did you end up on the list of things he cares about.”

For a moment Pyro seriously considers asking her if she was secretly the team therapist Mobius has been threatening them with for weeks now.

In the end, though, he decides against it. It would have been too much of a Wade Wilson exit line. While leaving without even trying to come up with an appropriate response... Now that felt right.

Whether or not it was a corner he was backed into by that a little too spot on observation.

Chapter Text

“Did it turn out to be nowhere near as bad as the TVA hyped it up?” Elsa wonders as soon as she spots him making his way through the cavernous central space of the hellicarrier.

“Oh, it’s bad. Just the kind I’m not allowed near because Wade is trying to spare my feelings.”

The monster hunter only lifts an eyebrow in an unspoken comment of since when are we allowed to admit you have those?, but that’s as far as she’s willing to go into Pyro’s dynamic with the obnoxious merc that was literally the boss of him. Something to do with how not-so-secretly she was proud of him for upgrading. Because Wilson was a lot of things but at the end of the day he wasn’t even in the same league as the nightmare that was Cassandra Nova.

“Brotherhood of mutants?” inquires the klyntar symbiote infected teenager Elsa was still treating as the kid sidekick she never needed, but kept around just in case.

“Brotherhood of  mutants,” he confirms. “Because friends don’t let friends show up on their old gang’s turf, no matter how unfamiliar the timeline.”

“Guess you’ll just have to make it through today without a severe concussion. And how dare Wilson deny you when you so clearly deserve all the punishment the multiverse can inflict,” Elsa utters and of course it’s just sarcastic enough to annoy but making it clear that Pyro was the asshole here if he took offence. “The things you do to yourself to make up for the fact you signed up for the wrong internship.”

“You have a very skewed idea about what it is I did for her.”

“That’s because you never share your feelings with the group,” points out the monster hunter. “But you’re right. You’re not half as interesting a subject as we pretend you are.”

“Who is?” Pyro wonders. “Interesting around here...?”

“You want the whole list?” Elsa chuckles. “Or are you just looking for an excuse to talk about my prettiest friend.”

“Who’s a maniac,” Flash says under his breath. Only succeeding in making the woman who took him under her wing to turn at him with something just short of a glare.

“I’m sorry – what did you just say your auntie Gwen was?”

“Probably my favourite variant in the entire Void,” the boy replies, not missing a beat. “But... When she says she’s going for a run she means she’s gonna walk out into the open and yell at the sky until Alioth notices her. Her morning cardio is outrunning a monster. That’s not sane. I mean, right?”

“Is she still doing that?” Pyro wonders.

He wasn’t completely out of the loop on what his neighbours got up to but finding out it was a regular thing for the pseudo-Gwenpool was still news to him.

“Pretty much every day. And if she really works up a sweat she follows it with taking a dip in the creepy underground lake. The one that whispers.”

“There’s Water of Sight right under this wreck,” Elsa translates. “You know – the creepy Asgardian one, with spirits in it.”

“And your prettiest friend bathes in that?”

Elsa only shrugs. In a way that makes it clear that of course she doyes, and why wouldn’t she? Especially since they all knew who they were talking about here and what she was capable of even at her tamest.

“Anyone else around here worth gossiping about or are we just going to...”

... keep expanding at what might be one of the very few fun subjects available to those stuck in the Void.

But Pyro never gets to finish that thought. Not when Elsa, in a tone anyone else would use to comment on the weather, says, “I’d be on a lookout for Helmut if I were you. And only you. That is a man who’s in dire need of help torching some evidence.”

A lot to unpack there.  

“Or someone could just let him borrow a lighter...” he suggests. Earning a less-than-amused look from the legendary monster of a long since destroyed timeline.  

“I think he might be on the brink of having the Void epiphany. The epiphany. The one that hits everyone sooner or later,” Elsa says after giving it a moment’s thought. “Can’t go back to yesterday. Time to figure out who you are right now – and if you want to stick with that or...”

“Rebrand,” suggests the boy harbouring a monster under his skin.

“Or that.”

Pyro only shakes his head at the way this so unlikely duo just summed up someone else’s turmoil. Sure, the Sokovian baron was undeniably going through something – maybe even something that was part of the growing pains for everyone whose long-term plan included surviving this graveyard of lost worlds – but... Their been there, done that attitude was making it sound like nothing more than the next thing on the checklist. Something you got over and once you did you were better off for it. Less prone to waste energy on things that would never be realized. Things like hope. Because was there a greater symptom of insanity?

Not for a variant, that was damn sure. A convicted one, that was. Someone who that was the thing that went wrong with a timeline. Banished into purgatory, to be hunted by a monster that could be outrun, yes, but not forever.

“Is he really that bad?” Pyro wonders. He didn’t actively dislike Zemo, after all. That, and he could go for some casual arson right about now.

“Looked ready to burn that collar the TVA fitted him with just before his trial, if you ask me,” Elsa says. Just stating the facts. “And... well... There is something quite cathartic about watching things burn.”

“That’s my line.”

Both her and the half-baked Agent Venom she chose to become a surrogate parent to find that hilarious for some reason.

“Go on. Go find Captain Sokovia. Guide him through that breakthrough he’s about to have. Then...”

“Come back and tell you everything?” Pyro guesses.

“Good Void gossip is worth its weight in gold,” Elsa points out. Grinning. Like only someone who calls Gwen an old friend can...

“I would have been better off fighting Magneto,” Pyro grumbles. But off he goes, in search of the only full-blooded Sokovian in this entire wreck of a pseudo-airship.

Those mementoes of a life now forever lost were not going to burn themselves, were they?

Chapter Text

“Doing home renovation in the Void?” a familiar voice comments. “Are you two for real?“

“This place, it is falling apart, cher,” Gambit lets know the familiar mutant that just snuck up on them through a time door. Because of course she did.

Wilson was as capable of keeping an eye on his TemPad as he was of resisting putting unicorn stickers all over it. And the thing was nothing but pink glitter at this point...

“You guys want some help with that?” Laura offers.

To say this whole place was structurally unsound was an understatement. But, as ever, a casual offer of assistance from someone whose track record put them pretty conclusively one the list of the good mutants just felt... off. These were the people he was only supposed to be interacting in combat situations, Pyro vaguely recalled. How the fuck did it come to this, anyway...?

Life lost something of its simplicity once you knew there was a whole, terrifyingly big multiverse out there – and the people policing it were not fans of what you’ve been up to in your timeline.

“That’s not why you’re here, is it?” Pyro inquires. But no, it wasn’t possible for Wilson to somehow sense – through the force, no doubt – that his best henchmen were finally getting around to welding together some of the more about-to-collapse areas of the hellicarrier.

“Not really. The boss sent me to let you know there will be no missions for a while,” the mutant girl tells them, pocketing the pink abomination that was Wilson’s personal TemPad.

“Because everything is well in the multiverse or is there some dumb reason. He didn’t try to tell the TVA he needs a mental health day again, did he?” Pyro asks.

“Dopinder was in a carcrash.”

A sentence spoken too casually for it to mean anything half as dramatic as the description is making it sound.

“Wade is doing a thing, right? Like when Al got one bad review on etsy and he turned it into her receiving death threats?”

“Pretty much,” Laura confirms. “The way Dopinder tells it he was more banged up after he parked his taxi on top of some guy who ran a mutant orphanage. It’s... less hate crimey than that sounds,” she adds quickly.

“Yeah, we heard the story,” Pyro nods, waving it off. If anything that minor case of vehicular manslaughter made Dopinder one of those humans Magneto was always convinced simply didn’t exist. A decent one, that was. Not only harbouring no anti-mutant sympathies, but if anything being on their team in a little too dramatic manner.

But even if that wasn’t the case Wade counted the man among one of his closest friends and that could only mean one thing. “Captain Deadpool has gone all ridiculously overprotective, hasn’t he?”

“Remember the thing I said just a second ago? About us getting no missions for the foreseeable future?” Laura reminds. Which really is answer enough.

“But is that really what he sent you to tell us?” Pyro asks, having his own suspicions.

“No,” admits the girl. “He wanted to know your bloodtypes. And how willing you’ll be to torch some insurance agency offices if they don’t pay up.”

“There it is,” he nods to himself. Only to hear Gambit echo the sentiment in his usual tangled mix of languages.

Well, they all knew who they were dealing with, didn’t they? Wade was a lot of things, many of them hard to tolerate for prolonged periods of time – but as a friend he tended to be just about the best. In the worst possible way, one could argue. Especially after burgling several pharmacies the second he suspected LeBeau was getting the sniffles... Never mind the killing spree he almost went on when Peter got his bike stolen... Yeah, Wilson was a lot.

And of course nowhere in sight now that they could actually use a few more people to help with the heavy lifting.

“So what exactly are we doing?” Laura says, looking around the room that was looking a good deal more apocalyptic than usual, what with all the random bits and prices what either used to be or was soon to become a part of the wall scattered all around.

“We...”

“Don’t you dare say improvise,” Pyro interjects before Gambit makes it any further than that. “I told you. There’s a plan. It’s going badly wrong because we’re working with a different type of metal than I originally assumed, but... It’s... slightly less likely to collapse under the weight of the roof than it was yesterday?”

It’s not much of a lie. Hopefully. Though the way the long overdue repairs were going was making him appreciate all over again why most people tended to stick to the lower levels where things were far from ideal, true, but nowhere near as exposed to the elements and therefore far more structurally sound.

“So you’re making a mess of it,” Laura sums up, unable to hide a possibly too delighted grin. “Now I have to stay and watch.”

“Or you could use your powers for good and go slice up a few of those completely rusted through walkways outside,” he suggests.

“Or I’ll just stay right here,” the girl replies, not budging. “Ask some probing questions about the melting point of whatever that is – and how the hell can you reach those. Didn’t you use to be screwed if your lighter ran out of fluid?”

“That was another life. I have been in the Void a long time,” Pyro reminds. Only to get nothing more than a slightly confused frown in return. “Aren’t you better at being a Wolverine than you were back when you were six...?”

“I was eleven,” Laura corrects automatically. Looking back at him in expectation of some actual explanation. Because she still seemed to have no working theory about why he appeared hell of a lot more powerful  than the average Pyro.

Sighing when he realizes she is going to make him say it he stops focusing on the sheet of metal he’s been trying to add to their excuse for an outer wall. “It all comes down to motivation. You wouldn’t believe what you can push your powers to when someone wrist-deep in your skull tells you I know you can do better.”

Only a few words but they change the atmosphere in the room in a hurry.

“Don’t,” Pyro says tiredly before either of the other mutants get a chance to speak. Very glad he’s currently dealing with people who only look like they’re about to ask him if he needs a hug, rather than Wade who would just force one on him long before he was done spelling out what it was that gave him the edge.

“I’ll just be outside. Cutting up all the rusty metal you were talking about,” Laura says moments later. Suddenly the embodiment of helpfulness rather than the teenager who can just about be bothered to get underfoot. And all he had to do was unintentionally remind her was still the member of the X-Force that made no sense as part of their line-up.

“Your life, it was très tragique,” Gambit ads for good measure. Letting Pyro know that they were not done talking about this. Apparently... “But it is less sad now, non?”

“For however long that can last,” he comments wryly, refocusing on bringing up the heat high enough to melt steel beams. “There’s always another villain waiting for their chance to fuck things up for everyone just because they’re bored.”

“There is that,” nods the other mutant after giving it a moment’s thought.

“Makes you wonder why we’re even patching this up. Someone’s gonna punch one of us through this wall eventually. Just a part of the deal, right?”

“Pessimiste.”

“It’s pronounced realist,” Pyro corrects.

Chapter Text

“I’m going to ask you some questions you might find you’re not entirely comfortable answering.”

“You want me to snitch on Wade,” Pyro says, not particularly in a mood to tiptoe around the subject.

Mobius didn’t look this ready to ask to be reassigned since the merc with the mouth dropped off the map only to return with Gambit in tow. That alone told him all he needed to know about what they were doing here.

“I think we’re having a miscommunication here. I am not here on behalf of the TVA. I have some... personal concerns.”

“Is he stalking you?”

“Excuse me?” Mobius replies, quite confused now.

“Is he popping by your place in the middle of the night to listen in what you mumble in your sleep?” Pyro clarifies, since this feels like a situation worth getting extra specific in. If only to see the taken aback look on the analyst’s face.

“Has he...?” starts the man Wade routinely referred to as Captain Moustache.

“Done that to me? Oh, yes. Multiple times.”

“Why have you never complained about such a clear violation of your privacy?” the other man asks, openly disturbed by the idea.

Pyro only laughs. Not quite feeling up to spelling out for someone like Mobius just how little the average convicted variant trusted his organization.

Last he checked they were the ones that signed him up for an indefinite stay in this fun place just outside of time and space.

“You don’t trust us,” the other man nods to himself a heartbeat later. “And there is no point in getting into things like...”

“Like what?”

“The distinction between Kang’s TVA and... We’re under different leadership these days. Before we never would have entertained the idea of employing a team like yours. And yet, here we are...” Mobius says meaningfully.

“Discussing my team leader behind his back,” Pyro reminds.

“Mr. Wilson is quite the wild card,” points out the other man. Looking just a touch troubled.

And this would be the perfect time to go and you people are still perfectly willing to sign his paycheck, but would that make any difference? The TVA seemed quite happy with having a team of mutants that really should not have worked, let alone be able to come together to stop multiple world-destroying threats, on their speed-dial. Which meant all the things Wade bring to the table they were willing to overlook or, worse yet, considered a price worth paying for the results he got.

And here Pyro was, as ever stuck in the middle. About to be asked the real question here, he was sure...

“Did our friend in red at any point take you to... Asgard?”

“No,” he admits. “But that doesn’t mean he didn’t visit any. Paradox did get him all riled up about a teamup with Thor.”

“So I gather,” Mobius sighs. Looking just a little closer to admitting defeat than he did when they started talking. That was to say when he simply walked in on Pyro with no warning at all – as people tended to do these days. 

“What are you really worried about?” 

“A timeline I promised to keep my distance from,” says the TVA analyst after giving the question a moment’s thought. “There’s a little McDonald’s there. One I have quite fond memories of. But I promised not to return there unless the circumstances were truly dire. And... Our mutual friend promised no such thing, did he?” Mobius adds, through a smile that is just short of amused. 

“He might have taken us there. Me and Gambit. Laura too, a few times,” Pyro tells the other man. “Never bothered to tell us what it’s really about, but... The Valkyrie behind the counter gives us free fries, so we never really ask too many questions.”

“Sounds like something she’d do,” Mobius says, smiling wryly. “Sylvie is not a Valkyrie, though. It’s worse than that. She’s...”

“A Loki.”

The other man chuckles on hearing that. “Seems like Mr. Wilson has access to a whole lot of information he was never cleared for. And made sure his entire team is in the loop. Because why wouldn’t he?”

“I’m also pretty sure We took Vanessa to an Asgard or two,” Pyro says. Not to be a snitch, just... giving the other man the full picture. Since he came all this way to interrogate him and all. “Just to make sure she knows he has a less depressing day-job these days. One with some serious benefits...”

“An Asgard,” Mobius repeats.

“Told you – he’s really weird about Thor.”

All the rest of them too, come to think of it. Or so the fact Wade would routinely show up sporting some distinctly Asgardian armour seemed to imply.

And the less was said about the eyepatches clearly stolen from several timeline’s Odin’s the better...

“This is all quite troubling to hear,” Mobius replies. Strangely, though, he seemed far more disturbed by the whole McDonald’s thing than the possibility of multiple Asgards having Wade Wilson inflicted on them.

“I can tell,” Pyro tells him. “Want me to tell him to stop doing it? It’s going to have no effect whatsoever – but I can try.”

“No need. I... think I’m just going to go. I suddenly feel like having a burger. And a conversation with an old friend...”

“Sure. You do that.”

If Mobius hears he gives no sign of it – one foot already out of this world and into someone else’s timeline. But that was the TVA for you, wasn’t it? Always doing their own thing. Not always bothering to spell out what exactly was it to any of the rest of them. 

What a fun group of people to be tentatively attached to...

Chapter Text

“This isn’t us complaining,” the please-don’t-refer-to-me-as-America-Chavez variant opens with, “but...”

“But what?” Pyro sighs.

“You’ve been around a lot,” Flash finishes for her.

“Is everything okay in the multiverse?” just-Amy-is-fine follows with, sounding genuinely concerned.

A loaded question right there. And how was Pyro supposed to answer to these 20-something or younger variants...? Because what exactly was their frame of reference here?

“The multiverse is still in one piece,” he settles on. “Wade’s just suddenly decided to get some work/life balance, which means the rest of us get a break from his hero complex.”

“And the TVA is okay with that?” Flash asks in his Venom voice.

“What are they going to do, fire him?” Pyro tells them, not even trying to hide his amusement. “No one else is volunteering to head a maximum deniability team they can unleash on any timeline they need pacified.”

That silences the other two variants for all of two consecutive seconds. But that’s all the respite from their questions he gets before Chavez grins at him. “Your job is so weird...”

“Makes me wish I could go back to being a full-time... well, whatever it was I used to be. A career henchman?”

“Thought that’s what you are now,” Elsa’s surrogate son tells Pyro with a grin of his own. Growing only marginally more serious as he adds. “So the multiverse is fine? You’re sure?”

“Why wouldn’t it be?”

“No Captain Deadpool to protect it...?”

There’s a lot he could say to that, but... It’s surprisingly easy to resist, he finds. Between the abundance of free time he was treated to now that the leader of the X-Force let the multiverse take care of itself whenever he had plans with Vanessa and Pyro’s stress levels just generally dropping way the hell down to a manageable level, things were... better?

Just the slightest bit better, if he was being honest.

Too bad that only made him paranoid. Bracing himself for a cataclysm that was definitely coming – because since when was he allowed nice things?

“What do the two of you care? No matter what happens to anyone’s timeline this place isn’t going to change one bit,” Pyro points out for the younger variants. That look back at him as though that never occurred to them. Because of course it didn’t.

“It still feels... I don’t know, reassuring? To know that no matter what’s going wrong out there the X-Force is on it,” Flash tells him. And though it’s a sentence that just begs for some serious sarcasm there just isn’t any...

God, what was Bloodstone teaching this kid?

But before Pyro gets to address that the normally quite murky central space of the forever grounded hellicarrier gets momentarily brighter with the too-familiar amber glow.

“You summoned him,” he tells the other two variants, giving them his most withering look. “Hope you’re pleased with yourselves.”

“You do know you’re the only person around who doesn’t think Wade is fun, right?” Chavez points out. Visibly amused, because of course she is.

“I’m the only one who can’t just walk away from him. Because Wilson will stalk me through time and space.”

For whatever reason the variants Pyro can’t help but think of as the kids find that hilarious. And good for them – but the deeply jaded days of their middle-age were coming, even if they couldn’t even imagine them right now.

Not something he felt like forewarning them about, so he just walks away. Towards the amber light promising a time door at its source, and regretting the decision every step of the way. Because even from a distance he can tell the Marvel Jesus didn’t just pop in to look in on his favourite timeline criminals. Not if he was already making a speech, only seconds after exiting his portal into this world.

“... Now, I know you’re afraid. I was too when Chuck’s evil twin dug her fingers in. But I defeated that monster and I will defeat this one too. Who’s with me?”

It’s all Pyro catches from that particular excuse for a rousing speech but it’s plenty to go on.

“No one,” he informs the man in red before anyone else gets the chance to reply. “No one’s with you. Not when you’re planning to go up against an objectively unkillable monster.”

“Defeatist,” Wilson scoffs, before deciding to beam at the crowd all around him with renewed intensity.

“Alioth is the embodiment of entropy, Red,” Gwen informs him. Looking particularly dehydrated and just possibly a touch hungover this morning. “You can outrun it, you can distract it with something shiny, but you cannot kill it. It’s a fucking cloud, man. A bit magic, a bit pure cosmic energy, but mostly just a fucking cloud. What were you planning to use against it, anyway?”

“Not that attitude,” is Wilson’s reply to her very reasonable question. “Do you not want to be free, people of the Void?”

A very good question. Unfortunately for Wilson Pyro has one of his own...

“Does Vanessa have plans with her work friends tonight?”

“I don’t see how that’s relevant,” pouts the leader of the X-Force, “when we have a monster to kill.”

“An unkillable monster,” Gwen snaps back at him, raising her voice. Looking just about ready to start throwing things in Wade’s general direction if he doesn’t accept that particular fact. “Don’t you think that if anyone could take the creepy thing out it would have been dead by now? Nova couldn’t think of a way and she was a hell of a lot smarter than some X-Men reject who never made it past a trainee phase.”

“You just think that because she was British,” Wade says dismissively. “The accent makes them sound smarter then they are, but at the end of the day the blow up just like the rest of us.”

A loaded sentence right there. Enough of one for even their resident not-technically-Gwenpool not to have a comeback ready.

“Just ignore him,” Pyro tells her.

“No way. That’s what you’ve been doing and you constantly look like you need a hug. I’m talking every second of every day.”

“Hey,” Wilson says a touch sharply. “That’s unrelated and you know it, little miss come up with your own costume design, I worked damn hard on putting together this one.”

“Fuck off, Wilson,” Gwen snaps back at him. Not much of a comeback but for some reason it does silence the obnoxious merc for just a moment. And by then the crowd that got tricked into assembling by the abruptness of his appearance is already halfway to scattered. Because who in their right mind would be taking on Alioth of all the monsters...?

“You guys are no fun,” pouts the Deadpool.

“Or are you too much fun,” counters his dust-grey-and-faded-pink counterpart, shaking her head. “Look, just... Go take your dog for a walk or something. We’re busy. Doing Madmax stuff,” she finishes vaguely. Really not having thought that through, it seems...

“Not buying it, princess. Wanna try again?”

Gwen, apparently, does.

“Alioth already did one flyby today. He won’t be back for at least another twenty-four hours. You’re just wasting your time here.”

“Here’s a fun fact, your highness. There’s a time machine in my pocket. It’s not just me being happy to see Pyro.”

That goes on for a while. Or it would if it was any other variant matching their wits against the one-of-a-kind Deadpool. But it’s not. And Gwen, being who she is, outmanoeuvres the leader of the X-Force in three moves.

“You win this time, Pinkpool,” Wilson yells after her even as she retreats into the underground room she’s taking her naps in whenever she can think of no new adrenaline sport to try in the badlands outside.

“Are you done?” Pyro wonders, coming to stand next to the idiot who found him a job with the worst watchdog organization in the multiverse.

“You’ll know when I’m done by the purple corpse that will be at my feet.”

“It’s a fucking cloud, Wade.”

“You sound just like my nemesis...” 

Chapter Text

“What was so important you two were willing to miss entertainment this good for it?” Gwen inquires as Pyro and Gambit drag themselves to the central space of the hellicarrier. Where a speech is in the process of being made and not by the usual culprit for once.

“PeterPool,” LeBeau tells her in a way of explanation. Which of course leads to her turning to Pyro for the real thing – what with that single word only having raised more questions.

“One of Wade’s civilian friends. Very civilian. Sells cars for a living.”

“Okay?” Gwen frowns, still not having heard the part where the man was good enough reason for two Void-dwellers to be getting involved.

“Except when he doesn’t, because for some mid-life crisis reason he...”

“Peter, he put on the suit,” Gambit helps explain.

“The red one? That people who do plenty of bleeding but none of the regenerating really shouldn’t be wearing?” she points out, her frown only deepening.

“It’s not as suicidal as that sounds. The most dangerous thing he ever does is come here to hang out with the Deadpools.”

“The roving band of maniacs that kill anyone they see just because killing is what they do...? Those Deadpools?” Gwen says in a mock well-this-is-making-perfect-sense-now tone as she takes in that new information.

It makes sense that it, well, doesn’t make sense. Not to someone who only knows the small tribe of Deadpools roving the wastelands of the Void as a thing to run away from, at just about the same speed one usually put on when trying to put some distance between themselves and Alioth.

Damn hard to reconcile the idea of those bloodthirsty maniacs with something normal people did. Having a friend, that was. Or, as was the case with the moustache-sporting car salesman, the closest thing they could get to the friend they all used to have in their respective timelines.

But based on the evidence of the now several weekend trips the man going by PeterPool has so far returned from in one piece and with some crazy stories to tell he really did seem to have the power to bring out the non-lethal side in every single crazed merc with the mouth variant out there. Weird enough – if nowhere near as startling as the fact Peter himself seemed to want to spend time with the violent weirdos in red. Which was only partially a testament to how boring his daily life must have been.

A lot of it really just seemed to be... genuine conviction the Pools were fun people to hang out with?

Pyro long since stopped trying to make sense of it. Treating the man Wade never failed to refer to as Sugarbear and the increasingly common instances of him passing through their lair on his way to see his whacky friends as just another part of life. 

“So let me get this straight. You let someone use your place as a waiting room. Someone unhinged enough to come here specifically to spend time with the worst ultra-violent Madmaxy tribe we have left,” Gwen says, glancing from him to Gambit and back again. “And I’m the reason you two are considering getting a door for your place?”

“Peter, he never goes through my stuff,” LeBeau points out, even if he stops short of making it sound like something he’s particularly upset about.

“It’s called doing your research. I’m perfectly willing to oversell you to anyone who gives me a-little-too-single vibe – but I need to know if there are any red flags, handsome. How else am I supposed to know what to lie about when I’m talking to my fellow wasteland tens with super low standards?”

“Gambit, he does not ask you to do this, cher,” points out the mutant.

“Not in so many words. But don’t stand there and pretend it wouldn’t be a massive improvement to your quality of life to maybe get laid at some point,” Gwen tells him in a perfectly matter-of-fact tone. “Now, hush. We’re missing it.”

LeBeau seems far from willing to stop discussing the subject. But what other option did he have now that the variant in a grey-and-pink suit only slightly less ridiculous than his own bright purple getup turned all her attention back to the stranger currently taking centre stage.

The man – or god, rather – she seemed to think of as tonight’s entertainment.

And to be fair it was quite funny for this particular Loki strolling in as though he owned the place and proceeding to make a whole speech about what his leadership was going to do for them. Still radiating his most presidential energy, despite how long ago the TVA put a stop to that particular campaign.

“He is genuinely convinced he’d be the best thing to ever happen to us, isn’t he?” Pyro comments a few minutes into the monologue the son of Odin seemed perfectly capable of continuing indefinitely.

“I know, right? How adorably deluded is that?” Gwen chuckles. Raising her voice to call out her first of no doubt many heckles, “Why should we vote for you and not the alligator that can clearly beat you in a fight?”

“Is that how he lose the hand?” Gambit frowns, not having been told that bit of Void gossip before, apparently.

“That’s exactly how he lost it. Man can’t even hold his own against an oversized lizard and...”

“There is more to that story,” calls back the Asgardian commonly known as President Loki.

“Go on, then,” Gwen yells back at him, “tell us. Or do you have a problem with sharing such things with your constituency...? Because if there’s one thing I personally look for in my frostgiant overlord it’s honesty.”

The dark-haired Asgardian, momentarily lost for an answer, simply stares back at her. Not having expected such a reception, clearly. This was, after all, just another semi-protected refuge for variants who were, for one reason or another, opposed to the idea of becoming Alioth’s next meal. Winning the likes of them over was child’s play – or so the deluded son of Odin must have assumed.

And Gwen was going to have a blast giving the arrogant variant a reality check if her mischievous expression was anything to go by.

“Peter, he is out there having fun with friends,” Gambit comments as the woman in the faded pink superhero outfit moves closer to their wannabe new supreme leader, “but I think we have fun tonight also. Non?”

“Looks that way,” Pyro confirms. Just about managing to keep his face straight when the subject of gender equality among roving tribes of murderous raiders comes up absolutely out of nowhere, immediately proving LeBeau right.

Fun really was the word for what was about to go down... 

Chapter Text

As far as the X-Force definition of a bad day went this one really was worse than most. Definitely in the top ten as far as Pyro was concerned.

Weird how much more upsetting it was to be given the order to burn that abomination when he knew for a fact the toothy black goo of klyntar origin wasn’t just some mindless alien parasite. It had a mind of its own, wholly separate from that of its host. Not something he was all that bothered by just a month or two back. But things were different since one of the people he would hesitantly call a friend if given no other option brought home a traumatized boy with an alien passenger of his own.

Not that his klyntar lives matter attitude did anything to change the TVA’s assessment of what was going wrong with this specific timeline. One way or another the aliens had to go. Pyro might hate being the instrument of their destruction but that did nothing to change the facts. All the difference his attitude really made had to do with whether or not he’ll be forced to sit through a pseudo-therapy session in the aftermath of what they were doing here. Saving the world, that was.

Or so Wade never let them forget.

Because they were the best of the best. The heroes the multiverse frankly didn’t deserve...

That was the furthest thing from what he felt like while torching his way through the klyntar invasion, of course. But at the end of the day it did need doing. And Pyro was the member of their excuse for a team with the right skills to do what little could be done against the less fun variants of the Venom he knew from back home.

So, yeah... A bad day.

The kind that made him question why was it he’s been prevented from going up against any version of the Brotherhood of Mutants if such fights couldn’t come close to being as traumatising as torching dozens of sentient beings that made the mistake of attaching themselves to the wrong Avengers...

“That... Happened,” Wilson says, pretty much summing up their last forty-eight hours right there even as they all stumble out of their respective time doors.

“I think I might need a mental health leave,” Pyro says under his breath.

“Understandable,” the merc with the mouth lets him know. “I’ll fill out the paperwork myself, MVP.”

He’d say something more but that’s when Gambit starts recounting his experience and making a point of how little he wants to be repeating it – and of course most of it is in French so next thing Pyro knows he’s translating it all for their fearless leader. Whose red suit is currently covered by chunks of flaming symbiote.

Would be weirder if it wasn’t...

“You have done an excellent job,” their current TVA handler informs them. No longer looking like he’s about to faint – which was impressive because that was exactly what he seemed on the brink of doing while giving them their mission briefing some hours back.

“We always do,” Wade says, waving the man’s praise off. But then he would. They were not doing it for the praise of random Time Variance Authority paper-pushers.

Why were they doing it was still something of a mystery. Especially in the aftermath of missions this emotionally taxing. But there did seem to be some kind of plan, Pyro gathered.

Something to do with keeping the multiverse safe – or so he assumed. But he was only really joining the dots of Wade’s sporadic heroic speeches that never quite landed, what with them being too full of puns to be taken seriously...

“Did we nail it or did we nail it?” Wilson asks the beaming TVA operative welcoming them back into the HQ.

“The timeline has been successfully put back on track, if that’s what you’re asking, sir,” the man replies. “Your team truly as exceptional as B-15 promised.”

“Well,” Wade says, removing his mask to be able to give the TVA lackey the full force of his Marvel Jesus smile, “they don’t call us the Timeline Avengers for nothing.”

“Because they don’t,” Pyro can’t keep himself from adding. “No one calls us that. Ever.”

“Don’t mind Mr. Grumpy, the human flamethrower. He gets like that when we keep him from his favourite Gwenpool for too long...”

“Not even close to what’s happening here. Now can we get to the post-mission briefing?” Pyro says, too worn down to respond to Wade’s nonsense with the level of sarcasm it deserves. “Some of us have new traumas to try to drink away.”

“Of course. Right this way,” says the TVA guy obligingly, pointing the X-Force towards the nearest meeting room hidden away behind a fancy golden door. Doing a damn good job of pretending he’s okay with all of them smelling like a freshly barbecued alien parasite... “There’s just one small thing we need to take care of first.”

“Finally getting them electronically tagged?” Wilson guesses. “About damn time you people followed my lead and became responsible pet owners.”

“B-15 instructed us to pass on these to your men,” the still very grateful extra in charge of the timeline they just saved from imminent destruction says – taking not one but two brand-new TemPads out of his suitcase. “They are for emergencies only, of course. Allowing you to access the TVA medical facilities, among other things...”

There were five destinations in total, pre-loaded into the gold-plated little devices. Including Wilson’s native timeline – because of course it was. And as for the rest it makes some amount of sense for them to be given the access to. Still, that one out-of-the-way McDonalds tucked away in a supremely inconsequential timeline is immediately worrying. Giving very in case of Ragnarok, break glass vibes the other places they were restricted to didn’t. “Is this for real?” Pyro frowns.

“You earned it,” the paper-pusher says. Leaving it at that. Before diving right back into discussing the latest trauma they brought home with them.

And to be fair there was a lot to go through this time around.

It didn’t make the two TemPads being handed over to not-necessarily-reformed timeline criminals any less bizarre, but... That was the deal once you made the mistake of signing on with the X-Force, wasn’t it? Getting forever blindsided by out of nowhere developments like that.

Being granted access – limited or not – to parts of the multiverse outside of the Void was... Overdue, really. If he was being honest.

“Who says this job comes with no perks?” Wade beams at him as soon as Pyro manages to tear his eyes away from the TVA-issue gadget he should not be in the possession of.

He’d reply, but right about then LeBeau manages to beat him to it with just a touch shellshocked, “A dead extra-terrestre... it is in my hair...”

“Yeah,” Pyro comments wryly, even as he pockets the compact little machine that was guaranteed to improve his life immeasurably. “What he said.” 

Chapter Text

“There’s some way to get to the roof, right?” Gwen asks, leaning into the room. And though he’s used to getting questions like that – the most randomly sounding ones and invariably coming with no warning at all – her tone is definitely off as she asks that one.

“You okay?”

“Sure,” she shrugs noncommittally. “Still waiting for an answer, but otherwise doing just fine.”

“There is a way to get to the roof,” Pyro tells her. Putting down the paperback he grabbed on one of his off-world trips and getting up to join the for once not smiling variant in pink. “Come on, I’ll show you.”

Not like sleep was threatening to come anytime soon, so this wasn’t an unwelcome distraction, really. But then Gwen never was. And how could she be? Vibrant and forever laughing at the cosmic joke played on all of them she was, if anything, the main attraction.

“You seem...” he starts, not sure how to ask the question that needed asking. Because he couldn’t recall ever seeing her as subdued as she was right now.

“And do I seem like I want to talk about it?” she retorts, though there’s no bite in it. Just tiredness. “But you do. Because I’m slightly less me than usual and it’s freaking you out.”

“Didn’t say that.”

“You were thinking it pretty loudly, though,” Gwen accuses. This time actually flashing that familiar smile for just a second. It seems to have gone all melancholy around the edges tonight but it’s still reassuring to see. “Sometimes I just shrug it off and go right back to being my wonderful self and sometimes it hits a little harder and I need a minute. You went down the memory lane with Harkness, didn’t you? It’s basically therapy. Damn effective, too.”

“You let the witch go through your head?” Pyro asks. Not sure what he expected to be behind her mood – but it wasn’t this.

“That witch happens to be an old friend,” the other variant tells him, giving him a hard look before disappearing into a claustrophobic little passage whose other end opened to the roof of the tilted hellicarrier. Only her voice carrying to him as he follows her through the too-tight space. “Who knows damn well that if she didn’t remind me of the mistakes of the past I will repeat them. Try to break my speed record, more likely than not. She’s looking out for me because that’s what friends do and she’s as mindblown as you are to have actually managed to acquire some.”

“So you were just... walking through your memories,” he comments in a just so I’m getting this straight tone. Getting a nod in reply. That, and another smile, once again just a little closer to the real thing.

“Walked through my memories – and now I just want to look at the stars. To feel small and forgotten by the universe, the multiverse and all the gods. You’d think that’s not something a sane person would be after, but I find it helps. Knowing you don’t matter? Not even a little bit? There’s freedom in that. You can do anything you want if there’s no chance in hell the universe will take any notice. A few minutes with a view like this,” Gwen tells him, gesturing at the stars swirling above them in vague excuses for constellations, “and I’ll be back to my usual brand of optimistic nihilism before you know it.”

“Hanging out with Agatha makes you go all philosophical. Got it.”

That gets a small laugh out of her. And it’s most likely all there is to it. Just because Pyro was so far getting to see only the fun side of who she was didn’t mean that was all there was to her. People were more complicated than that. It really was on him for letting himself forget that.

“What’s that?” he frowns, catching a soft golden glow far in the distance.

“That would be Asgard. A memory of a memory of it,” Gwen says, a strange expression settling on her face. “I was actually hanging around the moorlands back when it happened. Called it the Lokiland because I was a dumb kid that had no business still being alive. Out there, doing my own thing. Hiding. Slowly starving to death... You know how Void gets. And then, out of nowhere, I see Alioth circling some people in the distance. And I’m thinking... that’s it. They’re done. And better them then me – because this place turns all of us into those kinds of assholes, right?”

“Last I checked,” Pyro confirms. “How long ago was this?”

“Is that a serious question?” she laughs. “Years, decades – you know what time is like around here.”

Fair point. Or so he’d say if that strange glow in the distance didn’t just start to burn with renewed intensity, momentarily drawing his attention. Because Gwen wasn’t wrong – that really did look like buildings.

“It all happened pretty fast. Big purple closes in on them and then this insane golden illusion comes up out of nowhere. And you hear about Asgard. Lokis will not shut up about the city they were meant to rule. But nothing really prepares you,” she falters, lost in the memory for a moment. “It was breath-taking. A place worthy of the gods. And I knew I was looking at just another illusion – the guy standing in the middle of it yelling about glorious purpose was something of a giveaway – but... It was still something, you know? Made you remember we could have nice things even here in this crazy place. We could have magic. For a while, anyway. Alioth did get him inside a few seconds. Didn’t feel like a bad thing, though. It was a damn good way to go.”

“But... if that was years ago,” Pyro realizes, “why...?”

“Why is it still happening sometimes?” she finishes. “My theory? Because the land remembers. Because it wants to be magic. To glow golden in defiance of that horrible grey sky hanging over it. Or maybe it’s just something those horny sons of Odin are doing to pass the time because they saw the same thing I did that day and they were just as impressed. And why wouldn’t they recreate it? It’s Asgard. It’s...”

“Home.”

She nods and falls silent and seems a little better for having revisited that particular memory as opposed to whatever the friendly neighbourhood witch showed her.

“At least that one has an explanation,” she says eventually, once the last of the golden buildings in the distance fade like the trickster’s illusion they always were. “No one knows how to explain the tree.”

“The tree,” Pyro frown. “Wait, do you mean the creepy green thing that stretches between the stars sometimes...?”

“Yeah,” Gwen nods. Adding, with nothing short of complete conviction, “The Yggdrasil.”

“Who’s been telling you that’s the Yggdrasil. It’s just some glowing lines of... cosmic radiation probably.”

“Then why are they green?”

The explain that tone of her too-quick answer makes it impossible not to laugh. Even if he does seem to be expected to provide her with an actual answer once he’s done finding it amusing...

“Why does the colour matter?”

“Because it’s not just any green, it’s Loki green. No way there’s no connection.”

“Or maybe sometimes things are just random and they don’t mean anything? The sky isn’t populated by stories. It’s just... the sky. Weird glowing lights if we’re lucky and a giant purple monster if we’re not.”

Gwen only looks at him with an expression of someone who absolutely was living in a world where the sky was filled to bursting with weird, hard-to-make-sense-of myths and ancient legends. If for no other reason that because that would make it more fun to live under. And she was nothing if not fun – the brief period of solemnness of minutes being the exception, not the rule.

“What?” she says, catching something in his expression despite the night-time gloom thickening around them.

“Did you ever hear the one about that wolverine that’s supposed to be living on the moon?”

“That’s not how that story goes,” Gwen laughs. “Can’t believe you heard that Kuekuatsheu thing too. Wait... was there a Kayla in your mutant gang?”

“Kayla Silverfox. Yeah,” Pyro nods. “We had one. For a while, anyway. It was years back, but... She would tell that story to anyone who’d listen.”

“Mine would start sneaking wolverines into literally anything she could. I mean I get that some people are hard to get over, but... Kayla had a problem. Doesn’t anymore, not since Alioth got her, but... I’ll always remember the time she told me a story that was literally just the plot of the Wolfman with a were-wolverine instead,” she grins, the memory smoothing away the last of the melancholy still etched into her face. “You mutants really are some of the funniest people I’ve ever met.”

“You think I’m funny,” Pyro says, not sure what else to take from everything she just said.

“There’s a lot of things I’d call you. But... Yeah. Weirdly enough funny made the list too.”

“Did arsonist?”

“Sure. But some of my favourite people always were,” Gwen winks. Before turning her attention right back to the currently tree-less sky. Ready to blame the glowing thing on space vikings the second it dared to disturb their sky with its eerie, Loki green glow, Pyro was sure.

A one-of-a-kind mind right there. And someone he in no way deserved to have in his life, he was pretty sure. But... she wasn’t going anywhere, was she?

Chapter Text

“What if a really big threat appears? How am I supposed to stop it with just two guys?” Wade starts up again. Simply refusing to leave the subject no matter how many times he heard a decisive no from the person he out of nowhere decided belonged on his team.

“You stopped plenty of things with just two guys. And the odd teenager you convinced it’s basically a school trip to go into someone else’s timeline and try not to get killed there.”

“But you’ve got skills. Using them for good of all mutantkind all over the multiverse is the right thing to do. The heroic thing to do,” adds the man in red apparently trying his best to do a Steve Rogers thing.

Not quite succeeding, going by the chuckle Gwen treats him to just before starting to shake her head at him.

“Good of all mutantkind. Right. Because there is that quite prominent X in your team’s name,” she says. Still more amused than anything else at the way Wilson kept on trying to recruit her for his, admittedly not particularly large, superhero team. “Tell me one thing. What exactly are you going to be changing it to when there’s a puny human doing your fighting for you? I say yes and you’re no longer mutants only special ops unit. And I bet it took an all-night brainstorming session to even come up with X-Force. Because good team names are kinda hard, aren’t they?”

Wilson might have an answer to that – because when doesn’t he? – but he never gets to say it. Because that’s when Pyro finally joins the conversation.

Not because he let it go on for long enough. Not because the situation was the kind of mildly amusing he was for the most part just content to listen to without interfering. No. It was because hearing Gwen say all those pretty accurate things made him realize what was this out of nowhere decision of Wilson’s about...

“If we have a non-mutant and we do have to get rid of the X...” he starts.

“Oh,” says the variant in pink, catching up. “They’d have to start calling you something else. Like the Guardians of the Multiverse, for instance.”

“Tell me that’s not a great team name,” Wade says, not even trying to deny what they’re accusing him of here.

“I can’t. It is that,” Gwen admits. Before pausing for a beat and adding, in a tone that is only a touch sarcastic, “Doesn’t oversell what a single group of people is capable of doing at all...”

“So it’s a bit melodramatic. But it is a better fit for what we’ve been doing for the TVA. I mean... I haven’t been using the force – have you?” Wade says, half-serious, turning to Pyro.

“Look,” sighs the variant blatantly uninterested in joining Wade’s or anyone else’s superhero team, “as flattering as it is to be considered, I’m not the right fit. The skills I have were honed by this place. Put me somewhere civilized and who knows how many panic attacks you’d have to sit through before I’m ready to join the fight.”

“Seriously, Wilson. Just drop it,” Pyro adds. Since this was never about Gwen and her almost Red-Room-trained ability to beat people senseless without even getting out of breath and they all knew it. “No one is ever going to call us the Guardians of anything. That ship has sailed when you had the stupid idea to make me join up.”

“How dare you say such a thing about my best henchman,” Wade bursts out, actually glaring at him.

“No way to talk about someone who helped save countless unstable timelines,” joins in the Pink Power Ranger version of Deadpool, also sounding mock-offended at the completely accurate thing Pyro just said.

He rolls his eyes at them. “Are you two done?”

“I mean, probably? I might have to say absolutely not and fuck off with that job offer, Wilson a few more times but he’s pretty close to accepting it now, I think,” Gwen says casually enough.

“A supersoldier like you can’t stay out of the fight forever...”

“Not a supersoldier,” she counters before the merc with the mouth can get any further. “Just a variant. Who spent a lot of time around a lot of other variants. Picked up a few things. That’s it. That’s my superpower. I have the ability to walk up to the biggest, scariest guy in the prison and go holy fuck, how did you do that – and can you teach me?”

That probably wasn’t even too far from the truth, knowing her. Sadly it was also the reason why the Marvel Jesus might take his time giving up on the idea of adding her to his elite group of pet mutants despite the fact there was nothing that exotic in her genetics.

“Fine, be like that,” Wilson sighs. “But we both know that when the world – worlds – truly need you you’ll be there, fighting with me. For truth, justice and the American way.”

She actually laughs at that. And it doesn’t seem to be about the melodramatic way in which Wade delivered his last few words.

“Not even close.”

“Well, where are you from, then – please say Canada...”

Gwen only shakes her head at that. Not telling.

Fair enough. Having had enough of her time wasted already, of course she didn’t feel like getting into another subject Wilson was guaranteed to turn into a whole thing.

“This was fun but I’ve got a Sokovian noble to catch stealing my liquor,” she announces, slowly inching her way towards the exit. “I swear my stash has been getting smaller since Helmut got all whiny about never finding his ex in a place as big as the Void...”

“Unacceptable behaviour,” Wade says on hearing that. “You go get that emotionally fragile man a piece of your mind, princess.”

Laughing softly Gwen heads out before she can be drawn into yet another fruitless discussion of her job prospects. Which of course means she never hears Wilson get right back to the subject the second she’s out of sight.

“What a magnificent, deadly Void weirdo. She’s going to be a hell of a Guardian of the Multiverse one day.”

“Hey, Wade?”

“Yes, hot stuff?”

“No one is ever going to call us that.”

But Wilson, as in denial about that objective fact as he ever was, simply laughs it off. “They’ll have to call us something more dramatic than the X-Force once we have the god of thunder fighting with us.”

“You’ll get Gwen to work for you before that happens.”

“Well, yeah,” Wade reveals in something startlingly close to a serious tone. “That is the plan.”

Chapter Text

She did say she was on it.

Said she’ll have his personal space becoming just that once again. Personal. As in not being shared with anyone. But to hear that from someone who could be, at times, less than serious wasn’t quite the same as knowing it might actually be becoming reality.

Then again this might have been just Pyro getting his hopes up over the fact LeBeau left claiming he won’t be back until sometime next morning. But he was definitely promised something along those lines by the resident Gwenpool impersonator.

“So remember a few weeks back when you said...”

“We’re getting Gambit laid whether he likes it or not?” she jumps in, guessing what he came to talk to her about from those few words alone. “Yeah. You’re welcome.”

That leaves him momentarily speechless. For several reasons, not the least of which being the whole my work here is done tone the words carry.

“What did you do exactly?”

Gwen smiles at that. Brilliantly – if in a way that promises she’s few words from making him wish he never asked.

“He’s just out for the night. Might not even be meeting anyone,” Pyro starts.

“Oh, he’s meeting someone. Someone he’ll want to meet again... and again... And before you know it it’ll finally dawn on him he should have been looking around for a postapocalyptic lair of his own a while ago. Outcome that works for everyone, right?”

And there’s that smile again and he just can’t keep himself from asking, “And what exactly are you getting out of it?”

“There he goes, asking questions he can’t handle the answers to,” she says only, shaking her head. And she’d probably explain if pressed but... Pyro suspected she was right. He probably didn’t want to hear why it mattered to her whether he had a roommate that was constantly underfoot or not.

“So you...”

“Tracked down someone who can get past both the random outbursts of french and the card tricks, both? Damn straight I did.”

“Who are you?” Pyro asks, simply staring at her for a long moment.

“We’ve been through this. Turns out people are less volatile and much easier to deal with if they’re getting laid on a semi-regular basis. It’s in everyone best interest when variants pair up. Right?”

“Sound logic,” he has to admit.

“I’m basically a saint for giving them a nudge in the right direction,” Gwen replies, beaming. Clearly very pleased with herself. “The Void cupid, that’s me.”

“That still makes you someone armed with a deadly weapon,” he can’t keep from pointing out.

“Yeah, but... That’s just me every second of every day anyway, isn’t it?”

So that was it then. The minor nuisance of having to share his space was soon to be a thing of the past. At least according to Gwen’s unshakeable confidence in her skills as a wingman.

And who was he to doubt the expert?

“Don’t expect immediate results, though. Still the early days,” warns the variant in pink. “I’ll be doing some follow-up nudging for a while. But I want it on record than for the most part I do get results. Introduced the leader of the last group of raiders I was hanging around to his wife and those two are still going strong. Real wasteland power couple.”

“Why do I believe you?” Pyro asks once he’s done digesting all he just heard.

All he gets in a way of answer is a shrug.

There has been a lot of things like that – references to what Gwen has been up to in her years of wandering through the Void, dropped into conversations with no preamble and as though the revelations were of no special significance. Still, they did paint a picture. Of someone who probably shouldn’t be anywhere as content at being stuck in the same place for weeks on end. But... there really was nothing about Gwen that implied she might be ready to be moving on, was there?  

“What?” she wonders, catching something in his expression.

“You like it here.”

“No – I fucking love it here. Do you not get how fun this neighbourhood is? It’s all the perks of being in a roving gang of scavengers and none of the stress of having to constantly worry about running out of fuel,” she explains. “Kept pretty safe from the elements, too. Plus I have that private jacuzzi downstairs...”

“Do you mean that haunted Asgardian cave pond that gives you vis...?” Pyro snort.

“A few visions never hurt anyone. In fact that’s how I’ve been able to locate a potential love interest for our mutual friend who wears bright purple body armour,” she finishes. With a lot of emphasis, to let him know just how difficult her task has been.

“I have so many questions...” is all he can manage in a way of an answer.

“Oh. Well, I just have the one so we’re doing mine first,” Gwen grins. “Remy has plans for tonight and, not to make any assumptions, but... You definitely don’t, do you?”

“Would you make plans if you knew Wade Wilson can show up at any moment to derail them because some timeline somewhere needs saving from imminent destruction?”

She only gives him a look that seems to say that sounded like a no to me before carrying on. “How about you help me in my next self-assigned mission. Because getting all mopey and Eastern European drunk – so much worse than regular drunk, don’t even ask – isn’t locating Zemo’s girl, is it? If I don’t do it Baron I-truly-lost-everything-now will be a whiny mess bringing the mood down at every Void rager we throw from now until the end of time. And that is unacceptable.”

There was, once again, a lot to unpack there. But... This really did seem just what she did for people in her life. Purely out of the goodness of her heart, apparently. That was to say for the fun of it. Because wasn’t that why she did most things?

“I still don’t know the whole story there,” Pyro points out.

“Well sit the hell down and let me exposition you. But you better brace yourself. Our friend Helmut came from a weird goddamn timeline.”

“We all came from weird goddamn timelines.”

“Before we landed in the best of all possible worlds. Now do you wanna hear this or not?”

A good question. One that could only ever have one answer.

“Go on. Exposition me.”

Chapter Text

Last he checked he wasn’t going to come. But...

A cavernous excuse for a room filled with variants, all of them loud and drunk and celebrating the fact they were still clinging to existence in a multiverse that wanted them gone? How was anyone supposed to prioritize their self-punishing first instinct over a prospect like that?

Especially since everyone in possession of one of those old cassette tapes that littered the Void handed them over at the beginning of the evening and it’s been nothing but the awesome-mix-worthy songs since...

“Meredith Quill is an absolute legend,” he hears Gwen yell from further into the crowd – prompting everyone who heard to raise their respective glasses or bottles in a toast to the woman none of them have ever met. But whose taste in music they have been enjoying for... forever, really.

“Shouldn’t you be as drunk as them?” a familiar voice from the shadows clinging to the walls comments.

“Maybe I don’t feel like hurting my liver too much,” Pyro shrugs. “Got a mission tomorrow.”

Harkness smiles on hearing that. “A world needs saving and there you are. Ready to get all weird when someone dares to suggest that’s what heroes do. Don’t worry – I would never,” she adds the moment he turns to her to give her a full view of his unamused expression. “I know when I’m looking at someone with red in their ledger.”

A peculiar way of phrasing it. But... not necessarily inaccurate.

“Are you going to ask me if I have any memories I feel like revisiting? Gwen keeps talking you up to anyone who’ll listen. The best therapy there is. And we all need so much therapy,” he adds, unable to hide a smile as he repeats the phrase the variant wearing the threadbare Gwenpool suit always delivered with so much emphasis.

“God no. You look like you revisit your memories plenty without anyone’s assistance. It’s dropping the habit you might need help with,” Agatha suggests.

“Professional help. Yeah. Wade keeps bringing that up.”

If the witch agrees she doesn’t bother saying it. Not in so many words. But then she does seem a little distracted by the song that just started playing. Smiling at some memory of her own as she hums along.

“You’re just here to enjoy the music, aren’t you?” it dawns on Pyro.

“As opposed to... What? Coming here specifically to take another look at that troubled mind of yours? Seen all I cared to the first time around. And I bet things didn’t change one bit. Not in there,” Harkness says as she reaches over to tap his temple for emphasis. “No matter how different everything out here is...”

He only sighs. Spot on observation, as ever.

“You can stand here and obsess over how much better life is than it has any right to be for someone with your imaginary karmic debts, of course,” the witch points out, sensing she might not be getting through just yet. “But don’t tell me the alternative isn’t its own kind of tempting. Your ledger is still going to be just as bloody a red tomorrow as it is right now. All you can do about that tonight is allow yourself to forget. Have another drink. Go dance with your girl. Live. It beats just surviving.”

“Gwen is right you know. No way an actual licensed therapist could compete with... that,” Pyro says, shaking his head at the pleased-with-herself witch. Who knew damn well she just got as close to making him see sense as anyone could manage these days...

“Go,” is all the other variant has to say to that before pressing a bottle she conjured out of somewhere into his hand and pushing him towards the crowd she herself seemed pretty content to stay on the outskirts of.

“What did my witchy godmother want?” Gwen asks when he eventually fights his way to her through the crowd of happy-drunk variants. “No, don’t tell me. Had some wisdom to share, didn’t she? Deep stuff, about how you’re your own worst enemy. Right?”

“Did she ever accuse you of having red in your ledger?”

“Harkness... never did, no. The Red Guardian,” she says, briefly switching into a parody of slavic accent, “now, he said that to me plenty of times. And who knew those two hung out?” she grins. But being Gwen, she seems unable to leave it at that, turning mock-outraged in a heartbeat, as she adds, “No, seriously. Who knew that crucial piece of Void gossip and didn’t tell me? I’m supposed to be on top of these things, dammit.”

“Here, have a drink,” Pyro suggests, handing over the bottle he was just gifted.

“I’ll be still furious about that when I’m properly inebriated,” points out the other variant. But she does take a swig before handing the bottle back to him. “Your turn – or it’s going to look like you’re trying to get me drunk.”

“When it’s you who’s supposed to be trying to get you drunk?” Pyro guesses.

“Exactly.”

A song ends and another starts and it’s the hardest thing in the world not to follow the witch’s advice.

He’d blame Meredith Quill and her in every way awesome mix, but... The person that was really to blame for how easy it was to forget he was far from done punishing himself for his very recent past was that one-of-a-kind variant wearing someone else’s excuse for a superhero outfit. Leaning on him whenever she found herself a little too happy drunk to maintain her balance and just generally refusing to let him leave the party early. Not when her favourite song was playing.

“So they’re all your favourite,” he surmises eventually.

“I mean you hear how good these are, right?”

“Any chance you were a Starlord in your first life?”

“I was a lot of things in my first life. Not even done scratching the surface of what I can be in the second one,” she adds grinning. “Is anyone here?”

Pyro could try to answer that – but there was an equally valid option of just taking another swig of the honey-flavoured liquor Harkness gave him and not do any talking for a while. It would be rude to, anyway. What with Gwen’s favourite song playing and all...

“Surrender... surrender... but don’t give yourself away...” blares from the speakers and there’s a Venom singing loudly – and quite terribly – along and...

Life is all the things Cassandra assured him someone like him was unworthy of, if only for a moment.

And what the fuck did she know, anyway? Not how to survive a single, more or less unremarkable Deadpool, that was for sure. Pyro, meanwhile, was still here. Doing just fine, even if he knew damn well how underserved everything about his current existence was considering the person he’s been only a few months ago.

“I fucking love this song,” Gwen laughs – and he laughs with her, if for no other reason than because he knows she’s going to say the same thing about the next one...

“I fucking love this song too,” he admits.

“Meredith fucking Quill,” his favourite person in all the Void replies. “Terrible taste in men – great taste in music.” 

Chapter Text

“We’re on an important world-saving mission.”

“No,” Vanessa says, looking back at them with a very try again look.

“We’re here to ask you – yes you – for help. Alderaan is in big trouble and you’re my only hope,” Gwen says, not missing a beat.

“Alderaan is in pieces. Why are you here?”

“Escaping a timeless wasteland warlord who took an issue with something I said, because don’t they always?”

“That I can actually buy,” admits the woman who happened to belong in both this timeline and this apartment. And though it doesn’t sound half as you two better have a good reason for showing up with no warning as her responses to the rest of Gwen’s made up reasons, it does manage to make the variant in a shabby, pink superhero suit buckle.

“Fine. We’re here to do our laundry. And to steal your conditioner. Again. That’s right – it’s been me all along.”

“Thought so,” says the dark-haired woman, cracking a smile. “Your hair looks amazing.”

“I know, right? All the real Gwens in the multiverse can dream about looking this good, those pink-haired basic bitches.”

It’s at this point of their exchange he realizes this would be when he left the two women to their own devices. Since they seemed to be on the same wavelength and all. And Pyro did have some laundry to do, in fact.

“I mean how great it is that the TVA let’s my favourite mutant have access to exactly two timelines and this one made the cut somehow? This world... It’s really something. But then so are you hair products,” the variant in pink grins. Before abruptly switching the subject with, “How’s life anyway, now that you’re seriously considering cohabiting with Captain Deadpool again?”

“Are you asking as one of his personal stormtroopers or just...”

“Just as your average timeline criminal starved for some girltalk.”

“Well in that case...” Vanessa starts and then just... keeps going. For a while.

And what was he expecting, exactly – those two not hitting it off?

They had about the same energy of graciously putting up with someone bringing unnecessary drama into their life. That alone seemed enough to start a conversation. One that was well underway by the time he returned from the laundry room attached to Althea’s building...

“Do I even want to know?” Pyro wonders on re-entering the room. Since there seemed to have been a bottle of wine opened in his absence. One not only poured into three glasses – for Vanessa, Althea and Gwen respectively – but into a dog bowl for Mary Puppins as well...

“How dare you suggest we were talking about you behind your back,” the variant that basically bullied him into bringing her along for this very mundane trip out of the Void says, narrowing her eyes. “We’re passing the hell out of the Bechtel test over here, I’ll have you know.”

“Never doubted you for a second.”

“Oh,” Vanessa says, glancing from Gwen to Pyro and back again. “That’s what you meant by every kind of sarcastic.”

“I know, right? Just adorable.”

“I’ll just be over here, trying to not to take that personally,” he tells the women. Not even surprised when all the response the comment gets is laughter.

And what did he think bringing Gwen somewhere civilized was going to do?

Then again she made a damn good point about how she was going to start screaming if Helmut came to her for another update on how close was she to finding the woman responsible for the nexus event that put him on TVA’s naughty list – because he’s just missing her so much, the lovesick idiot.

Unhappy Gwen was a scary prospect. And Pyro wasn’t monster enough to inflict that on the innocent variants just trying to do their own thing on Alioth’s turf. So he made the strategic decision to for once use the TemPad he was entrusted with and put some distance between her and the unreasonably needy Sokovian. And, god – maybe he did get into the habit of doing heroic stuff since starting to hang out with Wilson.

“What?”

“Nothing? Was I staring at you again?” frowns the variant in pink, possibly a little too tipsy from too much rosé to be sure. “Because that would be on you for being so aesthetically pleasing in this light...”

“Thank... you?” he replies, not sure what else to say here. “You okay?”

“Obviously not. Did we not just have a whole conversation about how bringing me into a real timeline with real, not-TVA-traumatized people in it was going to make stuff weird for me?”

“We did. But you assured me it wouldn’t. Several times,” he points out.

“Who’s the greatest liar in all of the Void now?” Gwen chuckles, starting a chain reaction in the other two women at the kitchen table.

“Still you,” Pyro comments. Just a touch wryly.

“So sarcastic,” Vanessa says immediately. Too amused by his overall vibe to hold it against him, or so it seems.

“I know,” Gwen chuckles. “But that’s how I like my men. Snarky assholes or nothing, that’s my rule.”

“Horrible rule,” Al comments.

“I live in the Void. Beggars can’t be choosers,” points out the copycat Gwenpool. “Anyways... The way I remember it we were supposed to be in and out, not causing any drama with the locals. And look at how you botched that mission, superhero...”

“Is there any wine left?” Pyro finds himself wondering. “Think I might need some.”

There was, it turned out. Not for lack of trying...  

But then he did know who he was bringing along into this world. That might have been able to put up with the real Gwendolyn Poole, but that in no way guaranteed it could hold it together when the Void’s answer to that pixie dream girl rolled into town.

“Hey, any chance you can get Wade to stop trying to add me to his little team? Because he’s been at it again – and I can only say no in so many languages,” Gwen says semi-seriously, turning to Vanessa.

“Oh. That’s why you seemed familiar. You’re her. The most promising new recruit.”

“Please tell me he didn’t actually call me that,” she sighs, visibly annoyed under her wine-happy glow.

“He thinks you have potential,” Wade’s girlfriend says with a shrug.

“That just means he’s observant. I have all the potential. But... I’m a solo act. The multiverse is yet to throw together a crisis big enough to change that.”

Words that were basically begging for a cosmic threat to come along, but it wasn’t really Pyro’s place to say that, was it? “Our laundry is done,” he points out instead.

“Please tell me you don’t think that’s why we’re really here,” Gwen laughs.

“I know you better than that.”

“Yeah, you do. Now how much money do you have on you? Because I’m gonna need some stuff.”

“Of course you will,” he sighs, getting ready to empty his pockets.

“You guys are adorable,” Vanessa says, looking from one of them to the other.

“Oh, go find someone else to ship, you gorgeous, gorgeous woman,” Gwen dismisses her with before getting up and leading the way on their retreat out of the apartment. “Or better yet, go buy us some more conditioner. We’re almost out.”

Chapter Text

“Isn’t it amazing how slaver convoys are basically our main industry but the second you need someone who actually knows how to keep your basic terrestrial motor vehicle running it turns out almost none of us have a clue how to do that.”

“Why do you need a car, anyway?” Pyro wonders. “Last I checked you had no trouble out-running Alioth on foot.”

Not that it was ever about out-running the monster. Not for Gwen. What she really lived for was the part when she got to turn around the second she made it to safety of a structure the cloud monster couldn’t hope to enter, turn around and yell better luck next time, you purple muppet at the top of her lungs.

Which was why it was so hard to understand why she suddenly felt like adding a car to the equation...

“I might want to take a roadtrip,” she says vaguely, looking over at the beat-up machine she spotted on one of her morning runs and had Flash – in his Venom form – drag back to the hellicarrier for her. Only to find that making the vehicle move under its own power might be an impossible task even for someone with her social connections all over the Void. “Maybe it doesn’t need an engine. I mean...”

“No, cars definitely need engines,” Pyro replies in a very even I know that much – and I’m no expert on the subject tone.

“But what if – and hear me out here – what... if... I got a Loki to enchant it to run without one. I definitely have one or two of those Asgardian dickheads owing me a favour.”

“A Loki,” he repeats, making sure he heard that right. “Who can at best create an illusion of an engine under that hood, but... That’s all it’s going to be. An illusion. It will not make this thing move.”

Gwen only sighs, just about willing to accept that, but not even close to giving up on her shiny new pet project.

“But it’s so pretty, though,” she says. And how can anyone in their right mind argue with that while looking at the Rolls Royce that just about screamed old Hollywood even in its current decrepit state...?

“It is that. But unless you can get it running with hope and fairy dust, you’re unlikely to be taking road trips anytime soon,” Pyro can’t help but point out. Which would usually prompt a discussion that would last for hours, but...

That fails to happen for one simple reason. Namely a Loki.

One stepping out of a time door and into their lives, looking grim and as little as Asgardian royalty as possible in her 80s McDonald’s uniform.

“Your friend was right,” the blonde woman tells Pyro as soon as she sets foot in the Void – the amber rectangle of pure light winking out of existence behind her. “We missed one.”

“So, so many questions,” Gwen comments at the sight of the stranger. Taking in her retro look and no doubt completely missing the fact this woman was as much a child of Odin as all those self-important frostgiants that owed her favours. “Who are you and why do you sound like we need to come with you if we wanna live?”

“I’m Sylvie,” the blonde says while taking in her surroundings – the discontinued model of an old-Hollywood limousine and all.

“Not a very Viking name, but I’ll take your word for it,” replies the variant in pink, not missing a beat. “Now what’s with the dramatic entrance? Not to make things weird but we already got a guy with monopoly on those. He wears red. And you look nothing like him.”

“Is his name Wade Wilson, by any chance?” Sylvie wonders.

“That’s the one. The Marvel Jesus himself,” Gwen grins, “and no, we don’t know why he keeps calling himself that.”

There is a moment of silence then. Brief enough, but at the same time seeming to stretch all the way into eternity. Because this? This is one of those moments that change lives, Pyro realizes as the blonde Asgardian stares at Gwen and Gwen, being the chaotic neutral that she is, stares right back at her with just about the same intensity. One of the four or five moments, even.

Worse, this is of the times when the future of the multiverse is going to get decided by the people the watchdogs of the TVA long since convicted as the worst criminals ever to inflict their presence on a timeline...

“So you want Wilson. To assemble his Timeline Avengers and...”

“No one calls us that,” Pyro interjects automatically.

“... And take out some big, bad baddie threatening the very fabric of reality,” Gwen finishes as though he hasn’t spoken.

“Yes. To all of that,” the Asgardian tells them.

Because of course she does.

“I’ll get Wade,” Pyro sighs. “What else will you need?”

“An army?” the woman calling herself Sylvie tells him.

“Sure. Why not. Let’s get you one of those,” Gwen says through a grin. And she looks just a bit bloodthirsty. But then someone who served their time in plenty of postapocalyptic convoys of forever breaking down vehicles would... “Not to sound like I wasn’t listening at any point, but... Who are we fighting, exactly?” 

Chapter Text

“Look alive, folks. This is what we’ve been preparing for.”

“It in no way is,” Gwen calls out, derailing the speech before it can get properly started.

“Pyro, please control your Void waifu,” Wilson yells back, while maintaining quite the aggressive eyecontact with his pink-clad heckler. “I will have no further interruptions while I spell out to you, the good people of this depressing purgatory, just how fucked we all are.”

“How fucked are we?” Elsa calls out, sounding more intrigued than in any way worried about her immediate future.

“I have four words for you. We... missed... a... Kang.”

“Two questions,” Gwen says, casually removing a katana from under her long, noir trench coat. “Who exactly do you mean by we? And what... the fuck... is a Kang?”

“Oh boy,” Wilson says shaking his head. “We have a lot of exposition to get through, I see.”

Which was one hell of an understatement. Because last he checked Pyro was the first mutant recruited for the reboot of the short-lived X-Force and one would think that would make him someone who was as caught up as it was possible to be. But... Kang? That honestly did not ring a bell.

Made it incredibly unfortunate that going by the general energy of both Wade and Sylvie he must have been some kind of a big deal.

“Some of you must remember how much less fun the TVA used to be back in the day. Pruning entire timelines like there was no tomorrow, putting on mock-trials for the fun of it – just generally giving off a supremely ominous vibe. Kang was the guy who made them that way,” Wade explains. “Now, the multiverse being what it is...”

“There are multiple Kang variants,” Pyro says, getting the idea. “And we want there to be none. Right?”

“Ten points for Slytherin. That’s why you’re my favourite disciple,” Wilson beams. “What the mutant with the haunted past said. We’re killing this psycho once and for all, people. In any and every timeline. Which is a very Loki season 2 thing to do, I know, I know. But I guess they didn’t do thorough enough of a job so we’re getting a do-over. So this is me getting together everyone who ever felt personally victimized by any version of the multiverse police. Committing to blowing our entire CGI budget on this thing. I’m talking full Endgame, people. Who’s with me?”

“Does anyone know if he got a concussion at any point in the last twenty-four hours?” Gwen wonders, for once not loudly enough for the words to be meant for the self-proclaimed Marvel Jesus. “Because so little of that sounded like it was meant to make sense.”

“Is confusing, yes?” Gambit agrees. Not that it was going to stop him from joining whatever fight they were headed into, his dynamic with Wade being what it was...

“Inevitable, though,” Gwen sighs. “I’ll go get my extra ammo together.”

“Wait, really?” Pyro says, turning only to already catch her retreating in the general direction of her place. “But...”

“There’s a multiverse threatening bad guy. We kill him first – then we can skin Wilson alive for what the fuck he just called me. Or burn him to a crisp,” she adds in a very on second thought tone. “We can brainstorm the appropriate punishment once when we’re digging a shallow grave for this Kang guy, right?”

“Right.”

“You terrify me, cher,” LeBeau can’t keep himself from contributing to that particular exchange.

Gwen only chuckles at that. Before turning to leave all over again – only to find there’s now a hand on her shoulder halting her retreat. “Not so fast, Ruby Tuesday. You’re not fighting anyone looking like that,” Wade tells her a moment later. But by then his arm is firmly in her grasp. In fact twisted behind his back, with the shoulder looking on the brink of being dislocated. And he has no one but himself to blame, does he...?

“What was that?” Gwen asks just before bending his arm just a little bit further in the direction it was not meant to bend in.

“We’re getting you a proper suit, PinkPool. Something with a layer of vibranium over your vital organs – and I’m not taking no for an answer, so don’t even try.”

“Oh, I’ll take a new suit. And an apology.”

There’s no hesitation from the man in red before he starts to gravel. “... so excuse me from trying to get you as angry as I can before we face one of the serious A-listers,” he finished on, some minutes later.

“We’ll talk about how forgiven you are when I see that new suit I’ve been promised,” Gwen decides after giving it a moment’s thought.

“You got it, you absolute menace,” Wade says, getting up from the ground now that he no longer had a heavily armed woman pressing his face into the dirt why he explained why he thought the word waifu was in any way appropriate for describing her. “Now, about that army I’m meant to be getting together...”

“About that army,” Pyro interjects. “Why exactly do you think you’ll be needing one?”

“Just a hunch. Based on the postcredit scene of Quantumania. Those Kang’s looked kinda unhinged, okay? So excuse me for wanting some backup.”

This was a perfect time to point out that didn’t make half as much sense as Wilson thought it did, but... That would only lead to some more talking, wouldn’t it? And their fearless leader was well on his way towards breaking his record for making as little sense as he possibly could – all the while giving the impression the things he was saying were making sense to someone somewhere, the way only a Deadpool knew how.

“Now are we doing this or what?”

Chapter Text

“Pretty underwhelming for a Kang, wasn’t he?” Wade says, though not before nudging the dead man with the tip of his shoe yet again.

It’s hard to agree or disagree with that statement since Pyro, much like all the other variants present, was still waiting for an explanation of what a Kang was exactly. Other than nowhere near as big a threat as he was made out to be, that was.

Went down about as quickly as Sabretooth did when he got all overconfident at the wrong Logan.

So much for a multiverse threatening power-hungry psycho with no equals. “So how much of this did you just make up to have an excuse to get half the Void in one place?” Pyro asks the man in red still killing time by prodding the dead guy’s ribs with his foot every few seconds.

“I see how this might all seem as me misinterpreting some facts in order to be able to yell variants assemble at all of you. But... I honestly thought this will be a bigger deal. I mean – didn’t everyone? It’s Kang.”

“It was Kang,” Sylvie corrects.

Just about the only person around that seemed to know why Wilson always delivered the dead man’s name in such a melodramatic manner – and she looked exactly as unimpressed as everyone else who got dragged into this overkill of a pre-emptive attack. On the brink of admitting she regretted skipping her shift at McDonald’s for this, most likely.

“We’re still going to cut him up into a bunch of pieces and scatter him across a thousand timelines, right? Or would that be an overkill?” Gwen wonders, swinging her katana about in what can only be described as playful manner.

“It would. But overkill has been the theme of the day, so we might as well,” Wade replies in a light tone. Having no objections to desecration of a corpse because when did he ever? “Oh, well. Can’t be an Omega level mutant every time. Every now and then it’s gonna be a forgettable time traveller who can even throw a decent punch.”

“Think this is the part when you send everyone home before they start looking for someone else to have a fight with,” Sylvie says, reaching for her own TemPad so she can make herself scarce.

“Sure. Or...” Wilson starts, raising his voice to make sure as many of the variants loitering at the central chamber of the futuristic facility the man known as Kang was occupying can hear, “do we loot the place first?”

It has about the effect one would expect. Everyone that might have been tempted to get into Wade’s face for having their time waste is suddenly too busy searching their surroundings for anything valuable to remember how upset they may or may not be about not getting to fight anyone.

It really did seem to be the day for things going as undramatically as they possibly could. All it was missing was a bunch of TVA officials talking about filling out an official report...

“The closest I’m ever going to get to being on the X-Force and this is the best we could do for a villain?” Gwen sighs, looking down at the corpse at her feet. “Did he look more impressive when he was alive?”

“Not really,” Pyro tells her.

“Just goes to show – I was absolutely right about not joining. You introduce a single puny human into a team with a big, dramatic X in its name and things get a whole lot more boring before you know it.”

There’s a lot he could say to that, what with boring being the last word that comes to mind where she was concerned. But arguing with the crazy thing she just said, out loud and in front of several witnesses, was not the priority right now, was it?

“Want to get out of here? Leave Captain Deadpool to get everyone to form orderly lines and head for the nearest time door without anyone to help him with crowd control...?”

“Are you reading my mind?” Gwen says, grinning back at him.

“Not my superpower,” Pyro tells her. Reaching for his TemPad, because if they were bailing early they better do it while Wade’s back was turned.

“Isn’t it, though?”

“Nope. Still just the fire thing.”

“So convenient when you have some evidence to torch,” the other variant replies, heading for amber portal he just summoned for her.

“Or TVA paperwork none of us were ever going to fill out,” he can’t keep himself from adding.

“I knew it,” Gwen bursts out laughing. Still at it when she reaches the metaphysical purgatory at the end of time they called home whenever there wasn’t a multiverse-threatening crisis that required intervention.

“What did you think Wade wanted me around for when he first started this thing?” 

Chapter Text

“What’s this?” he wonders, looking up from the pocket-sized notebook he was just handed.

“Look – normally I just do what everyone else does. Let time be its own thing and not-so-secretly revel in the fact I seem to have aged about two years for every decade that passed me by in Alioth-land. But. I have been keeping track of time lately. For... reasons...”

Reasons that become obvious as soon as he opens the small – and extremely pink – notebook. What with the only words on page one being Days since last mutant psycho related accident...

“Oh,” Pyro says only, getting the idea.

There rest is pretty self-explanatory. Vertical lines for a page and another and another. And there’s an inescapable conclusion to what he’s seeing in the pastel-pink pages. “Has it really been a year already?”

“Three hundred and sixty-five days,” Gwen confirms. “As of today.”

“Wouldn’t have guessed,” he admits.

“I know,” nods the other variant, studying his expression with more than her usual intensity. “Thought I’d mention it, that’s all. We can go back to pretending it’s just a normal day if you want to. Or we can...”

“Yes?” Pyro replies, actually catching himself hoping to hear some absolutely crazy pitch for what they might do to commemorate the day a year ago when Cassandra Nova made the mistake of messing with the wrong Deadpool...

“Take a trip to Casa Antman? Set the place on fire?” Gwen suggests. “Visit Paradox in TVA lockup just to rub it in? Whatever you feel like, I’m in. Cleared my whole day so I can be there for you. And believe me when I say, I make one hell of an accomplice...”

“Of course you do,” he laughs.

“So? What’s the plan?”

“How about all of the above? And anything else we can think of.”

“The things I can think of might require you to get naked,” Gwen points out.

“Works for me,” Pyro replies, handing over the bright pink notebook in which she was keeping note of every day since the fall of Cassandra’s wasteland empire.

There’s some reply the other variant just stops short of saying. Settling instead for grabbing a handful of his shirt to pull him in for a kiss.

“Arson first, though, right?” she asks eventually. “Then the fun stuff.”

“Arson is fun and you know it,” Pyro can’t keep from saying.

“God, you’re a weirdo,” Gwen laughs, burying her face in his shoulder. “Let’s go before I remember how easy it is to get out of my new and improved Pink Power Ranger suit...”