Chapter 1: Domesticity; in which everything is questioned

It was all very domestic, Peter thought, as he watched his lover (ex-enemy/spandex guy/crazy mercenary with a soft spot for the tex-mex side of Mexican food) rifle through their mail. It was a good day. Spiderman and Deadpool had caught some really stupid bank robbers the night before (tried to rob an ATM for God sake. Who does that? Not to mention that they were armed with water pistols and wore pantyhose for masks. The flesh colored ones. You could totally see their faces) and it had been easy and fun to team up with his boyfriend. The banter was a constant comfort, and all together it was just warm and light to hear Wade screaming about halibut as Peter webbed a guy's face to a wall. It was the best kind of date.

And then they made out on the roof of their apartment, their masks riding up to just above their noses, and it was greedy and sloppy and Peter could feel his blood running hot beneath his skin, and his last really coherent thought went into swinging them both down into their bedroom through an open window before they ended up having completely steamy, spandexy sex as their alter egos on the roof of the apartment of their 'normal' egos. Again. But it was all good because Peter then lost any semblance of coherency and had completely steamy, spandexy sex in the comfort of their own bedroom (if not their own bed) and Wade took off his mask all the way which had Peter groaning and coming way sooner than he'd meant to.

And then round two.

And three.

Four five and six, and then again lazily when they woke up the next morning.

And the best bit was that it was a Saturday, which meant that they could just laze around the house the rest of the day, having languid sex, playing video games, and eating all of the tacos that Wade could order. Peter didn't even have any nagging worries about missing any homework because in some weird twist of fate, all of his professors had decided to go homework-free since it was the weekend before finals week.

He would regret it later, he knew. He could be studying. Majoring in bio-mechanical engineering was all good, but memorizing everything was hard, okay? And finals were going to be a bitch. But he didn't care, because right now he was too busy admiring Wade as he flipped through the mail (and insulted each one individually, sometimes even going so far as to curse their family in the name of jelly or something equally ridiculous). Because it was domestic and 50s-sitcomish, and also Wade was completely naked except for a pair of thigh-high stockings with little bows on the back of each leg and a garland of laurel leaves he was wearing around his head like he was some Caesar turned prostitute.

"Why the fuck do we gotta pay electricity each month?" Wade complained, gesticulating wildly with a ripped-open envelope in one hand. "We save this damn city, we should get light for free. And why do we need light anyway? Moles can do the whole life thing blind, why can't we?"

Peter blinked and had to force himself to not smile indulgently at his boyfriend. "Well, for one, no one knows we save the city, especially since you usually wreck it more than you protect it," Wade gave a little pout that pulled his scars into some jumbled, knotted mess. Peter had the sudden urge to kiss each one of them smooth again and then keep going until they were pulled into something equally messy but more delicious and moan-inducing.

"And two, no one else gets exempt from paying bills just because they do their jobs. Even the ones who work for the government. Besides, you have a shit ton of money from all those contracts from before you stopped killing innocents for cash. I like to call it your reformation."

"For love!" Wade drew the words out in a soft southern-belle sort of falsetto and swooned against the kitchen counter. Then he threw the shredded envelope at Peter's head. "Why do they call them bills anyway? Did they used to be called Williams and people just thought the name was too long?" He flipped to the next envelope "William!" which he also threw at Peter. "And why do we have to pay for them every month? What made months so important? Why couldn't it have been every day or every week? Every year? Every hour? I don't mean that I'm going to make you go to that paying place every hour on the hour, sweetie Petey, I just want to know – William!" He threw this one at Peter too, "why months? Oh hello—what's this?"

Wade held up plain white envelope and then flipped it over so Peter could see the giant "STARK INDUSTRIES" printed on it in bold black letters.

Peter sat up straighter in his chair, a frown marring his face. "Is it for you?"

Wade shook his head and Peter's eyebrows shot up, but before he could confirm that it was then for himself, Wade, for some reason, felt the need to elaborate and started talking again (which was no surprise actually, because he never really shut up).

"No, because they don't know I live here. It isn't exactly mercenary chic, or even ex-mercenary chic to give out my home address to people who have dirt on me, and bigger guns then me (sadly), and who don't know I'm living with my very hot, very young, very innocent and smart and sexy and oh my god Peter do you wanna do that thing we saw in the back of Kama Sutra last week? I know we've been saving it for a special occasion but I really can't wait and you're super flexible so I think we could probably handle it? You're even, like, more flexible than the chick in the drawing, so I bet we could get your leg all the way up there. Better angle." He blinked a few times, and Peter took the time to smile at his boyfriend (and internally grimace at himself because he shouldn't find rambling tangents to be that adorable) before clearing his throat and effectively putting Wade back on the right track. "Right, so no, the Avengers don't have my home address. I wouldn't give it to them even if they asked, and especially not Stark, but they wouldn't send me letters anyway, Petey-Pie because this is the 21st century and no one uses snail mail. There's this new technology? Telephones, you just hold them to your ear—" Peter threw a pillow at Wade's face, which he dodged, "or email, not that anyone uses that anymore either…texting? You could even Facebook message me, if you find out which Da Reelz Deadpool FB account is mine." He shrugged. "Either way, it's for you." And he held the envelope out for Peter to take.

Peter made a grabby motion with his hand and Wade sighed in a put-upon manner (as if Peter was the one who was being weird and troublesome) and threw the letter at Peter's head.

"Thanks, Babe," Peter said as he caught the letter between two dexterous fingers before it had even thought about leaving a paper cut on his face. Wade stuck his tongue out at Peter in a perfect imitation of a five year old.

Peter ripped open the envelope, unfolded the letter, swatted at Wade who was trying to sit in Peter's lap and who was thus effectively blocking the letter from Peter's line of sight, and then read the troublesome thing (not Wade, the letter).

Then he read it again because it just didn't seem likely that he wasn't hallucinating (he wasn't on any kind of drugs, he'd had the perfect amount of sleep and he wasn't drunk), but it seemed less likely that what he was reading was real.

Peter cleared his throat and flapped the letter, embossed and shiny and everything that screamed I-make-more-money-in-a-day-than-you-do-in-a-year, at his boyfriend.

"Uh, hmm," Peter cleared his throat, "Wade, darling, could you read this please? I could swear it was a letter from the great Tony Stark himself congratulating me for being accepted into his internship program, but that can't be right." Peter blinked a few times.

Wade slid across the room in his stocking feet and grabbed the letter out of Peter's hand.

"Yeah, honey-boo-boo. You got in. Congrats!" Wade looked at Peter's rapidly paling face and amended his statement, "Not-congrats?"

Peter breathed out harshly through his nose, and Wade sat down next to him on the couch. Peter's eyes were drawn almost at once to first the dangly bits between Wade's legs that were casually hanging out on their sofa, and then to Wade's eyes, which looked muddled and confused.

"Well, I didn't really mean to apply." Wade raised his eyebrows and the laurels tottered over his ears in an endearing way, "I mean, I did, but I never thought I'd get in!" Wade did not look impressed, but he obviously knew enough about Peter by now to know to be silent and let the younger man explain himself fully before telling Peter he was a self-degrading dumbass. "Aunt May told me I should do it, and I did, just to make her happy! I really didn't think I'd get in. It's a great program, super prestigious. I thought, what's the harm in trying, it isn't going to happen. Because if it did happen, if I did get in," here his words were coming quicker, a note that real panic was setting in, "then I'd be working side by side with Bruce Banner and Tony Stark who are both amazing creatures of intellect and light, but also super super super smart Avengers who will definitely find out my secret identity and then I'll get them all killed or they'll throw me in jail for being an arachnid vigilante fighting guy and I just can't take that. Plus, I'll be in the same building as the rest of the Avengers, and if by some weird lucky-fate-chance-thing the two smartest scientists in the continental US don't figure out who I really am, there are lots of others who would be more than willing to de-mask me. And spies! SHIELD spies everywhere!"

"Breathe, baby boy," Wade intoned, his lips pulled wide in his own special version of the indulgent-boyfriend smile. "Here's what you are going to do. You are going to take the internship because if you don't you will literally regret if for the rest of your life, which means that you'll be thinking about it a lot, and I can't have that because you need to be thinking about me a lot for the rest of your life. I'm not going to compete with regret; it has the kind of nag power that I can only dream about. And after you start working there, you're gonna see how ridiculous you are because no one expects little Petey-piper to be sex-in-spandex—rhyming!—spidey-dude because he's way more witty than you are, my man!"

"I am just as witty!" Peter snapped.

"No you aren't."

Peter gaped at his boyfriend. "I am literally the same person."

Wade gave him the same smile you would give a child who insisted he were a duck, the patronizing 'yes, of course you are,' chuckled and blew off Peter's statement. "And then you're gonna be super smarter, and you'll wow Hulk and Ironman with your big, gorgeous, pulsating brain, and they'll love you. And then in a decade or so, once everyone is all buddy-buddy, then you can tell them you're Spiderman and they'll say 'Oh Em Gee! That's so great because you're so great and now you can be on the team! Hashtag May I have your children?' and then I'll have to kill them all because you are mine and no one but me can have your children."

"Wade, we are both men. Neither of us are bearing any children."

Wade scoffed. "You don't know that." Then he looked off into a middle distance for a second before saying, "K'duh! Science is super advanced! No—ugh, I hate arguing with you."

Peter let Wade finish whatever debate he was having with his boxes but couldn't stop himself from wringing his hands in nervous anticipation.

Could Wade be right? He was always super careful about keeping his mouth shut about the super hero thing, and he made sure to appear as not-threatening and as human as possible at all times. He never even jumped on the ceiling when Wade flew at him with both katanas drawn anymore (though that might actually be more of a problem considering that swords actually were dangerous and he most definitely didn't want to die). And maybe the scientists would be too busy being part-time scientists, part-time super heroes to notice that Peter was also part-time scientist (college-student, good boyfriend, etc), part-time super hero.

"Plus!" Wade squealed, interrupting Peter's internal debate, "I'll be working with the Avengers pretty often now that SHIELD's psych people have given me the green light and I've proved that I probably won't be murdering anyone in the near future, so we can have lunch dates!" He squealed and jumped to his feet, doing a little happy-dance that somehow incorporated the waltz, the robot, and some Irish jig Peter had never seen before.

The younger man's resolve melted. It was a paid internship, which was good, he'd be meeting the foremost smartest scientists to ever be alive during Peter's lifetime, which was pretty awesome, and he'd get to eat lunch with Wade every day, which he would adore. No downside. He let a huff of laughter pass through his lips and he nodded. He would accept the internship.