Wade Wilson's Guide to Studying Your Spider

Chapter 3: Cracks in the Foundation

Wade threw his hands in the air. "Fuck it!"

He's reaching for the maintenance door when he notices the silver cuff still locked around his wrist. Spider-Man's web-shooter. Wade completely forgot he had it on. He whoops, sprinting back to the building edge. Web-slinging is exhausting, and if you weren't careful, you'd tear a muscle or pull your arm out of place. But it covered a lot more ground than going on foot. Besides, ripped tendons and dislocated arms aren't a problem for Wade.

Still, he takes a second to stretch his arms and adjust the web-shooter. He's never used one before (unless you counted that one comic issue), but he's seen Spider-Man do it a million times. How hard can it be?

He promptly shoots a web and misses his mark by a dozen feet. Wade scowls as the web-line drifts, flapping gently in the wind. Shaking the useless line off, he aims again, adjusting where he needs, and shoots.

It latches onto a building, and he whoops again.

"I'm coming, Webs!" He shouts, and jumps.

And crashes into a wall five seconds later. And then falls an additional 20 feet before shooting another webline, stopping his descent. His arm jerks, popping loud, and he almost lets go of the web as pain blooms in his shoulder. Dislocated. As to be expected.

"Fuck, fuck, fuck," Wade hisses, grabbing the line with his good arm and planting his feet on the side of the building, a lost mountain-climber sorely confused with his terrain. "Could've gone worse. My neck could've snapped."

He resets his arm when he makes it to the roof. Okay, Spider-Man made it a lot easier than it was. But Wade can figure this out. It's all in the body, right? Twist the back, point the hips, show off the booty—Spider-Man 101. Easy peasy.

He steps onto the ledge and aims again. "Alright, take two."

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For once in his life, Wade isn't batting zero with Lady Luck.

Being weapons-savant, Wade figures out the webshooter in no time and is swinging like the world's craziest Tarzan. It's a lot less graceful and impressive compared to the real deal, but Wade doesn't think he's doing half bad. Spider-Man can claim his little gadgets were "tools" all he liked, but Wade knows a weapon when it crosses his grubby hands. The things he could do with these doohickeys.

But that's not the lucky part.

He pauses after a particularly rough landing to wait for his broken ankle to mend when a shriek catches his attention. Followed by a bunch more shrieks, and what can he say? He's curious.

"What's going on over here?" he muses, dropping onto the building's fire-escape to peer into the slim alley below. The origin of the scream comes from a grungy woman pinned to a wall by something white.

"Ohhh. Shit." Wade scales the fire-escape with the speed and finesse of an amateur parkour-ist, landing with a loud thud. The woman flails, her screams turned to heaving breaths and grunts as she yanks on the web cocooning her entire left side. She's not very successful. That webbing was made to hold villains a lot stronger than her thin frame can provide. She's lucky none of it caught her face.

"Hey, hey, shhh," he shushes her when she notices him. She stops struggling for all of 10 seconds before Wade pulls out a knife and screams again. Yeah, he can't blame her. He should know better than pulling a weapon on someone already scared shitless. He lurches forward, pressing his hand to her mouth.

"Easy," he said. "I'm not going to hurt you, but I do need you to be an itsy bit more quiet. Capeesh?" She shakily nods. "Great! And your prize," he slices through the webbing, "a free detangling from this goopy goo. There we go. Now, speaking of aforementioned itsy bitsy, you wouldn't happen to have seen a red and blue superhero around here by any chance? About ye-high, goes by Spider-Man? Tight spandex, great ass, and loopier than a fruit loop?"