Chapter Text
Neena isn’t expecting Nathan to invite her to anything resembling a date, and she certainly isn’t expecting him to invite her to a formal state dinner. Yet that’s exactly what happened and why she’s currently in her Providence apartment, double-checking her makeup while she waits for Nathan to come to her door.
It’s weird, honestly. Recalls other times and places when they’d tried to pretend they were normal people and could go on normal dates at normal restaurants with normal results afterwards.
Then again, this entire Providence thing is weird. Being near Nathan, not as a fighter but just as … support? Firepower, if needed, but so far her firepower’s been just for show. She can stand around looking intimidating all she likes and still no one is attacking Providence.
She’s bored to tears.
Almost makes attending a peace conference of smaller nations seem exciting.
A knock interrupts her musings, and she straightens away from the mirror in the hallway, picking up her handbag from the table underneath. She quickly smoothes her dress one final time and moves to answer, heels clicking purposefully.
Nathan smiles when the door opens, eyes flicking up and down just long enough to be appreciative, just quickly enough to stay politely casual. She smiles back, although she wishes the effect of the long, shimmering black dress, with its high thigh slit on one side and diving curves of white and light blue along the deep vee of the neck line, would get a little bit more of a rise out of him. Figuratively. Maybe literally.
After all, he looks pretty spectacular himself in his dark suit and light blue tie, highlighted by white hair and the occasional startling flicker from his left eye and the glint of metal at cuff and collar, techno-organic fibers crawling up the side of his neck. That much muscle and metal really wasn’t made to be contained in formal wear, but it works for him, emphasizing the breadth of his shoulders and, well, the breadth everywhere else too. Nathan really is not a small man.
“You look beautiful,” he says sincerely, bending to press a kiss to her lips, one that lingers just a little bit longer than necessary, and she feels gratified and a little smug that he’s thinking about more than business this evening. Maybe this will be more like a date. “Ready?”
“Of course,” she nods. “We’re going by jet?”
“Quicker and easier to bodyslide,” he counters.
She frowns. She’s traveled by bodyslide with Nathan many times, but these days there’s a bit of a problem with that. A glitch. An unavoidable addition, as it were. “But that means …”
“Nate!” someone calls loudly from down the corridor. Two heads turn to see Deadpool striding toward them.
Deadpool wearing a suit, to be precise.
He’s decked out in the same dark shade as Nathan, which he fills out almost as broadly, a little less massively and a little proportionally narrower at the hip, and he’s wearing his mask tucked into the neck of the white dress shirt. An untied black tie covered with red Deadpool logos is dangling around his neck. The absence of his katanas, nothing but empty space jutting above his shoulders, is almost disconcerting.
“That means you’re bringing Deadpool,” she finishes, suddenly feeling tired, drained before the evening even starts.
“I’m on time, right? I know you said be on time. And wear nice clothes. Hope you don’t mind the mask, but it’s kinda my thing and you said state dinner, so I don’t want any of the government people throwing up in their fancy food.”
“Yes, Wade, you’re on time,” Nathan confirms, sounding vaguely amused, gaze sweeping up and down, slower than he had with her, and Neena feels a startled flush of jealousy. She’s telling herself it’s just her imagination even as there’s a flash from Nathan’s eye, as if to further imply he likes what he sees.
Nathan takes a step, closing the space between himself and Deadpool, and Neena sees the other man freeze, sees him startle slightly as Nathan reaches for the tie. Sees what follows.
“Hey! I was gonna, just hadn’t gotten to it…” Deadpool protests weakly.
Nate ignores him, flipping up the other man’s collar and expertly adjusting the length on each side, as if this was something he’d been doing his whole life instead of something he probably learned in his thirties or forties. Sometimes Neena thinks that Nathan’s real superpower isn’t his telekinesis or his telepathy, but his resiliency. His ability to take a situation and learn it, adapt to it, master it, outstrip the people he learned it from.
Deadpool makes a grumpy noise but tips his head back, neck a tense but willing curve, letting Nathan’s fingers pick at the Deadpool-print silk, pulling and looping and adjusting.
“Are you doing a Windsor?” he complains. “Everyone does a Windsor. It’s like writers have no creativity.”
“It’s classic,” Nate replies calmly, giving some firmer tugs as he coaxes the knot into shape, pulls the tie snug around Wade’s neck and smoothes his shirt collar back down over it.
He even fiddles with Deadpool’s suit jacket, twitching it into place. And if that wasn’t bad enough, his hands linger for a moment on Deadpool’s shoulders, just a light brush of fingertips and half a breath too long standing too close before hands drop and Nathan steps back next to her.
“Feels like a noose,” Deadpool grumbles, scarred finger already pulling at the back of the knot to try to loosen it.
“Stop that,” Nathan says, and amazingly Deadpool does, hands twitching down to his sides instead. “Your suit has a collar, Wade. I can’t imagine it feels any tighter than that.”
“Principle of the thing,” Deadpool … Wade? ... mutters, glancing at her and Nathan and then quickly away, body language strained and … not irritable exactly. Certainly tense. Embarrassed? Defensive?
She sighs quietly. The image of a nice, intimate date with Nathan, maybe some subtle international espionage or having to intimidate some politicians, drains away. It’s replaced by reality: a date with Nathan with Deadpool as the third wheel. No, that's not quite right. Deadpool as … as … she’s not sure. Third something.
She’d wonder what the hell Nathan was thinking, except she’d just seen the way his fingers had just touched as if permission was already given, and the way Deadpool had stood perfectly still and let him. It’s the same way she’s seen him line up a shot for Nathan, take his orders without question. Apparently whatever Nathan wants, Deadpool is willing to give.
It’s exactly the kind of loyalty Nathan prefers in his fighters.
She doesn’t exactly want to think about what that says about her.
Or about the comparison it draws between her and a certain scarred merc.
What even is her life anyway?
“Fine,” she says brusquely. “Let’s get this over with.”