warnings: slash. goofiness. mild angst. au with 616 references. post-apocalyptic (and post-Apocalypse). spoilers, i guess...for Messiah War. language: pg-13 (primetime tv plus s***).

pairing: Nate/Wade (Cable/Deadpool, for those just joining us) with hints of future Stryfe/Wade (don't do it, Wade! Hot-Evil-Clone Nate is not as nice as he seems! D=).

timeline: starts circa 2800 CE, 700-ish years before the Hypnic Twitch Sequence.

disclaimer: marvel owns Cable & Deadpool, disney owns marvel.

notes: 1) it amused me to imagine Wade being the reason the Askani sisterhood ever managed to survive long enough in Poccy-Land to meet Rachel and turn into a cult that could raise an anti-Poccy messiah. knowing Wade and the fact that he's essentially a walking plot-device (and Fate's whipping boy), it would be completely accidental.

Lost and Found or The Failure of World-Saving Endeavors Due to Cookies

Ak'virri is the language that will turn into Askani, once the Ak'virri meet Rachel/Askani/Whatever and make up their own language. Wade doesn't remember where he read that. He also doesn't remember when the Ak'virri or their language came about, though he's sure he was there at the time and may have had something to do with it. He speaks the language with an innate sense of its meaning, but with a lousy accent and the dialect of an old fogey.

He doesn't remember learning it.

…he doesn't remember a lot of things, these days. Maybe he's going senile. But he can remember every single thing about Nate—the way he looked when he was thinking, the way he looked when he was fixing to do something stupid, the way he looked when he was about to kiss Wade—so he can't be going senile…

It was mostly coincidence that he stumbled across the Ak'virri sisterhood in the first place. Just a matter of offing some high muckedy-muck who yelled at him and letting them rise to power. For some reason, they turned him into a mascot. A 'symbol of the revolution,' according to Lak'retla, their leader (he has trouble pronouncing her name the way she likes it, so he calls her Larry, which sounds like their word for 'beautiful' anyway). When they mentioned prophecies of Askani and the Dayspring child, he rambled a bit about Nate, and they started bowing and scraping. They started calling him Skanar, which means 'herald' (before that, he'd been Jenskot, 'warrior'). Some of them prefer Odlek, which means something along the lines of 'moldy old man,' and the longer he's around, the more people call him that.

He doesn't realize why until he sees that the first ones he met are white-haired old grannies.

The passage of time has been hard for him to pay attention to since Nate left. He hasn't found a way to die, yet, and realizing how long he's been alone would make living that much more unbearable.

He asks Larry the date, and her age. She tells him the year is twenty-nine-forty-three, and she just turned seventy.

He wants to say that seventy is old. But he was around hundreds of years ago, so he has no room to call any of these people old.

He hasn't seen Nate's smile in more than nine centuries.

They've found some promising ruins, and the kids are excited. They'll get some new technology to help them out, kicking it in the sticks as they are. Maybe just spare parts or emergency rations, maybe something as useful as a food synthesizer. It'll be fun, they say. Like a field trip.

Kids with strong backs come along, Larry's granddaughter and Vorn's nephew and Marrak's sons. Larry comes, too, because the sisterhood (which is more of a clan, these days, having lived as a colony for fifty years) doesn't like the idea of sending a bunch of kids out with only poor Odlek to watch them. He suspects it's almost as much because Larry worries he'll lose track of time somewhere and forget to come home. She's sweet like that, and they don't know that he'd be fine even if he played Buddha and sat under a tree for fifty days.

"Looks rickety," Wade pronounces when he sees the building. It's an old skyscraper, missing some of the upper floors and most of its windows. There's something familiar about it that makes his spider-sense tingle (or would, if he had a spider-sense).

"Lalda, Skanar?" Larry asks.

He repeats it in her own language.

She asks him what he thinks would be best.

So he holds up a hand in fine dramatic fashion and declares that he'll go in first. It'll be fine. He'll stay away from any industrial freezers.

The place creaks around him, but the floor seems to hold and the walls look stable. He's about to call out to them when he feels the concrete under his feet give way and sees the walls and ceiling rush in to follow.

When he wakes up, it's utterly dark. Around him and above him, the remains of the building have settled heavily, trapping him.

"Uh…Larry?" he calls. "Lak'retla? Vanelk? Jesan? Aliya?"

No answers. No echoes.

He doesn't know how long he was passed out. He doesn't know if it was only one floor or the whole building that came down, doesn't know if the kids might've been hurt by debris or buried trying to come to his rescue.

"S'okay," he says. "No pressure, guys."

So he'll have to wait a few days, big deal.

But the days turn into weeks. Weeks to months. Sometimes the rubble settles. Sometimes parts of his prison cave in. Sometimes he thinks he hears people chanting as if in prayer.

Time loses meaning again. He wonders who'll find him, if anyone ever does. Will it be aliens? Robots? Poccy? Nah, Poccy never noticed him when he was prancing around starting rebel factions for fun and helping the Ak'virri grow up so they could become the Askani later. Or not, because that was a divergent timeline thing, wasn't it? Whatever.

Could be…time-travellers. Or mutants. Or mutant time-travellers. Or L, L, & L. Or an army of roach-people or something. Really, with all the multiverse possibilities, and plot devices like AU, it could be anything by this point. Time and timelines are fluid, unpredictable things when it comes to serialized literature.

He jumps when the rubble is disturbed above him. Dust clouds up, making him cough and sneeze.

"Hello?" he yells, fanning dust away from his face. He wants so much for the rubble to clear away instead of just settling more and burying him deeper again. He's been alone for so long…

High above, a familiar silhouette comes into view, left eye gleaming in the dimness. "Right where the rebels said," comes the matching familiar voice.

And Wade is old and foolish enough to hope. "Nate?"

A hand reaches down, and he scrambles up with its help, only to find himself held captive by a powerful grip on his wrist. "Not quite," the man says with a smile that Wade does not trust, and it's very creepy to see it on a face almost exactly like Nate's.

"I don't understand," he says. But then he realizes that he does. Nate mentioned a clone being raised by Poccy, some pulls-the-wings-off-flies kid named Stryfe. With a Y.

"You are something of a legend," Stryfe says. "The old rebels call you the 'Herald of Dayspring.' Older stories than that name you 'deathless,' and there are older stories still that call you Deadpool, and say that you were Dayspring's pet killer."

"Oh, so you've heard of me," Wade mumbles dully, hoping this is all another hallucination and his Nate, the real Nate will come and rescue him. Possibly followed by an epic Nate-catfight over him, in which both Nates end up with shredded wardrobes, because Stryfe is pretty hot.

"How would you like to be my pet killer?"

"Well, if the other option is that you stick me back down there, I guess I'd like it a lot. You're easier on the eyes than most of the people I've worked for. As long as you remember to change my litter and fill up my bowl with killer-kibbles…"

"Excellent." And there's that nasty smile again.

But it doesn't really matter to Wade how creepy Stryfe is, because he's lonely and Stryfe looks like Nate (sounds like Nate, smells like Nate) and he misses Nate so much. "Good. Great. Awesome," he babbles, and tries to find something witty to say. "So, uh. Not-Quite-Nate. Stryfe with a Y. Poccy's apprentice. What does this make me, exactly? I mean, it'd be cool to be a Horseman, 'n all that, but since I wouldn't be working directly for Poccy, I guess I'd haveta be something else. Unless you have Horsemen. Horsemen of Stryfe? Doesn't really have the same ring as Horsemen of Apocalypse."

"Riders of the Storm," Stryfe corrects. "And Apocalypse is no longer an issue. He was weak."

Great. Hot-Evil-Clone Nate has destroyed Sir Cackles-a-Lot. Probably not out of the goodness of his heart. Wade thinks that perhaps he should give saving the world a try…maybe wait for the opportune moment and stick a knife in Stryfe's back, or something.

"Come, Herald. After four centuries, you must be famished. There is food waiting for us back at my palace."

"Four cen—food?" That gets his attention. "You can call me Wade, by the way. Herald sounds all weirdly religious, and Skanar sounds kinda mean. I think it's the K that does it."

Stryfe stands, effortlessly tugs Wade to his feet, leads him off like one would a helpless elder or a treasured lover, one hand at his waist in case he falters. "All right, then. Wade. I assure you that my hospitality far exceeds that of those rag-tag bands of prophecy-spouting primitives."

"Hmmm…got those little toffee-flavored cookies like Larry used to make?"

That earns him a laugh (Nate's laugh, and it sends a shiver up Wade's spine that makes him press closer). "I have food synthesizers, Wade—you can have any kind of cookie you like."

"Any kind? Even Double Stuf Oreos?"

"Any kind."

Well, shit. So much for saving the world.

.End.