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He’s just kicking back, chillin’ in his crib watching reruns of Golden Girls and throwing back Fritos when they “interrupt this program for breaking news.”
If there’s one thing people should know not to do, it’s interrupt his quality time with Bea. Cursing indignantly at the interruption, he hurls his half-empty bag in the air, angrily wipes his fingers on the arms of his recliner, then pulls his mask back down over his mouth to fully cover his face again. With the intention of giving the city a freebie and unleashing some whoopass on whatever dumbass was stealing this tv time, Wade Wilson pushes to his feet and begins looking around for his underwear.
At this point, anyone wondering why he’d be sitting there in his trademarked mask, a ratty old Deadpool tee-shirt and nothing else while watching sassy old women from a ‘classic’ American sitcom; you might want to double-check the tags. You may be in the wrong place and unprepared for what follows. If you know all too well why he’s letting off steam like this, welcome to the show. Tell your friends. Deadpool’s about to begin a new adventure!
He locates his Spidey briefs, personally modified with permanent marker renderings of Deadpool next to the images of Spiderman, and puts them back on. Corn chips crunch under his feet and he grumbles about the slob living in this apartment as he goes to retrieve his uniform from his bedroom.
He returns to the living room, zipping the bodysuit up and fastening his handy-dandy utility belt around his waist just as the live feed begins to blare from the television. His feet stop and he stares at the baddie wreaking havoc on lower Manhattan.
It’s a dust ball.
Just a big, whirling mass of mess whipping up cars and throwing debris.
Intrigued, he sits back down in his chair and turns up the volume of the newscast to listen for more details about what the hell this is.
As he watches, The Avengers begin to fall into the scene.
The Hulk is a big green beacon in the dust storm, vainly trying to smash the ‘enemy’ to a pulp only to have it poof away and reform around him, leaving the Hulk very angry and really really dirty.
Thor flies in, thunder booming through the speakers just before massive bolts of lightning strike out at the dust. The bolts shoot through the intangible mass without having any effect on it, but the streetlight on the other side of the mass catches the full force of the voltage and sparks wildly as it breaks in half and crashes to the ground.
Wade hoots out a laugh at that as pedestrians run from the falling pole. He looks around for a fresh bag of chips, pushes his mask back up and settles in to watch the show.
Iron Man swoops in, repulsors flaring as he fires at the cloud in a wasted attempt to stop its forward motion.
Captain America’s star-spangled discus sails straight through the storm, cuts through the windows of a nearby building then flies back to Rogers after doing nothing but property damage. Wade laughs himself to tears at the Cap’s crestfallen expression as “innocent civilians” begin to pour out of the building that he’d just attacked in error. The hero rushes to shield the people, probably apologizing to each and every one of them for his little bit of damage on the major scale of wreckage being left by the dust bunny.
These guys are better than the Keystone Cops.
He tosses back a handful of the crumbled chips he’d found and calls out the plays that he would have made if he’d been there with them. But the Avengers, sucks to be them, didn’t want him in their ranks so they’d have to do without his superior flanking strategies.
It goes on for several vastly entertaining minutes before Iron Man suddenly flies away.
The others continue to work as mere distractions for the villain. Intrigued by this unexpected departure, he leans forward to see what Stark’s up to.
Hawkeye breaks out a few windows with well-placed arrows that had been meant for the center of the swirling mass. The Black Widow shoots out three traffic lights. Thor blows up a car. Cap’s discus shaves the rag-top off a sweet looking convertible. The Hulk swats at cars swept up by the whirlwind and sends the debris careening into buildings. SHIELD Agents are running amok, trying to keep the streets clear of civilians and trying to dodge projectiles coming at them from friend and foe alike.
Wade is in stitches, laughing so hard he can’t breathe as he doubles over in his chair, by the time Iron Man reappears.
And trailing in his wake is something that stops Wade’s laughter cold.
The reporter on scene and cameraman both begin to exclaim as something begins to fill the sullied streets left behind by the dust storm.
Many somethings.
Tiny somethings.
Round, black, fast moving somethings that zoom over the pavement and care and up the damaged buildings just like those Scrubbing Bubbles in commercials. And, just like in those commercials, the incoming tide of unknown beings leaves the area clean.
Wade falls to his knees in wonder before his tv, moving closer to get a better look as the camera zooms in to do the same.
Roombas.
A whole army of Roombas is attacking the filth that is attacking the city.
Wade’s eyes grow wide and sparkle with awe as he whips off his mask for an unobscured view.
They’re beautiful.
Savage, fierce and fast little cleansers.
At Iron Man’s command, they stop focusing on the debris for a moment to turn on the culprit of the mess. They swoop in like a pack of rabid wolves; like an army of ants tearing down a large carcass with nothing more than the sheer number of their force. A shrieking, howling rage of despair echoes through the newsfeed as the little monsters vacuum up the threat and the sound is music to his ears.
He looks around his nasty apartment. The carelessly dropped trash, the crumbs and debris of forgotten food. His place is a dive because he hates to clean. His weapons he oils, cleans and polishes with all the love a mercenary should have for the tools of their trade, but his apartment? Eh.
He’s hired maids in the past, but they tend to think that the whole “hiring” part of the process means that he'll pay them after they’ve cleaned up his mess. They tend not to come back after he tells them they did a good enough job that he’ll let them live. He probably wouldn’t have killed any of them if they’d done a bad job, but they don’t know that and the fact that he’s sparing their lives should be worth so much more than money.
Damned capitalistic American culture. There’s just no pride left in doing a job well simply for the sake of doing it.
Yeah, he knows he’s a hypocrite considering that he’d expect billions in compensation if he had actually gone out there to help tackle this yahoo, but that’s just the way it is.
Anyhoo, enough with the exposition, back to the point.
Those Roombas?
He had to have.
Tony Stark wouldn’t possibly miss just one or two … or ten.
~*~
“Da, Da Da, Dun Dun Dun, Du-Du-Du-Dun
Du Du Dun, Du-Du-Du-Dun Da
Dun Dun Dun, Du-Du-Du-Dun
Dun Dun Dun, Du-Du-Du-Dun Da,
Du-Du-Dun, Du-Du-Dun
Dun Dun Daaaa; Dun Dun Daaaa!”
Wade’s stealthily creeping steps end with a flourish, as does his singing as he locates the door he’d been looking for within SHIELD operations.
On the other side is a familiar, sterile, white room with a delightful amount of padding for the occupants to bounce around on. Wade’s been a guest there twice and knew this was where they’d try locking up his babies.
He peers inside and confirms that some, but far from all, of Stark’s Roombas have been imprisoned inside. Some of them are dormant, unmoving black spots on the floor of the room; either they’d been successfully switched off by SHIELD operatives or they were just too bored to move in the cleanliness of the room. Some of them are attacking the stitches in the padding, mistaking the black lines of thread for dirt on the otherwise pristine walls.
His favorites are flying.
He has got to get one of these for Headpool. That would be far more dignified for the flying zombie head alternate universe version of himself that currently gets around by way of a propeller hat. And maybe one to throw around with Dogpool. Send a few off to earn points with Lady D.
He’s got the answer for his whole Christmas list in that room. As evidenced by the news footage that continues to air from their ‘cleaning up’ of the city, these handy buggers were perfect.
He looks down at his sack then back at the fifty or so occupants of the padded cell.
“We’re gonna need a bigger boat.”
He looks down the isolated corridor and gives his teeth a thoughtful suck before taking to his tip-toes to begin another dance across the tiles.
”Du Du Dun, Du-Du-Du-Dun Da.”
He slips into the supply closet and lifts his mask to stare around him at the assortment of office, medical and housekeeping supplies. He helps himself to a variety of items, cleaning out their inventory of duct tape, because one can never have enough duct tape.
He locates the trash bags and stares at them for a moment before pulling a few out to stretch and pull to test their strength. After tearing through a dozen, two for testing purposes and the other ten just for the hell of it, he accepts that he’s probably not going to be able to take all the little bots with him. He takes another handful of bags and puts them in the pouch on his belt before moving to peer out into the corridor.
No one’s about.
There’d been no one to stop his breaking into the building and there is still no one to stop his wandering this area. It’s nice to see that the Roombas have had such a traumatizing effect on SHIELD that no one dares to be near their containment area, but there’s all this awesome Deadpool stealth going to waste.
He sighs, knowing he’ll never get the appreciation that he deserves.
If only they’d listen to the fans and give Wade a movie so he could showcase his greatness to the world. Something big and flashy where he blows up a city, saves the gal and gets his Spiderman Cable …um…right. Rewrite! So he saves the city and gets the gal. That’s what he wants. A big, busty damsel to swoon in his arms, not some muscle-bound hunk like Nate to look at him with admiration and want or some snuggly blonde demigod like Thor to embrace him in shared celebration of a win. Nope. He wants none of that.
None.
Of.
It.
Nope. Forget anything that Black Mamba and those B.A.D. Girls have said about him; Wade wants boobies. Not the hot, hard, lotioned muscle of Cable’s torso. He sighs again, knowing he’s never going to live that one down. His affection for Marvel Girl cosplay isn’t likely to win him a leading role either. Hollywood just isn’t ready for the Deadpool.
Footsteps in the hallway snap him out of it and he slips back into the shadows as a guard makes his rounds. The man pauses to peer in the observation window of the Roomba’s room as he passes it and he presses the communicator in his ear to give report of what he sees.
“They’re still…awake,” Wade hears him say.
“I don’t care if they started as robots; this is Stark Tech now and these things are moving and flying of their own free will,” he argues after someone says something in his ear. “I'm not saying they're alive, but they’re awake. It’s frickin’ freaky.”
The guard frowns and presses against the window.
“Shit. I think they made more.” A pause. “I don’t know how, but I’m telling you…aren’t you monitoring the rooms? How could they possibly have taken the cameras offline?! … …. Aw, hell, no. I’m not going in there. Why don’t we just give them back to Stark like he wants? They’re his magically reproducing robots.”
The guard continues to whine as he continues on his way away from the area, completely ignoring the visibly ajar door to the supply closet.
Resisting the urge to do some whining of his own at that beautifully missed opportunity to fight with a SHIELD Agent, Wade pushes out of the closet and stalks back to the cell without bothering to tread lightly and avoid detection.
So his little bots could disable security systems?
He’s never known love as he feels it, looking once more at the Roombas contained in the cell.
The guard was right; there’s easily ten more bots than there had been when he went for supplies.
Wade’s heart flutters with pride.
He pulls out his lock-picking tools and deftly picks the lock to open the door.
Some might say that he just draws his katana, stabs it into the thin space between doorframe and door then slices downward to break the lock. But Wade says, shut up, critics, it worked, didn’t it?
The Roombas all seem to freeze in place as he steps boldly into the room to free them.
“Daddy’s home!” he announces, spreading his arms wide and surveying the occupants to begin picking out his favorites.
His words invoke a frenzy.
The robots converge on him like a mass of eager puppies all rushing to welcome him. They sweep over his feet, up his legs and Oooh, that’s nice then up over his torso; little bristles twirling, engines whirring and vacuums sucking as they go.
“Hey, now,” he tsks, pulling at a bot trying to suck the mask from his head. “Ow,” he shifts when a bot slams into his ankle. “Hey!,” he hops on one foot to lift the other out of range for the Roomba that rudely slammed back into his ankle.
Mr. Fantastic, he reads, written in black marker on the machine.
He frowns and start looking at other bots, seeing that several of them have names. He kicks Mr. Fantastic aside when the bot begins to attack his other ankle and starts pulling at the Roombas trying to suction off his clothes. The ones with names he tosses aside, not wanting to take any ‘pets’ because if someone in Avenger tower has named the Roomba then that Roomba might be missed if he takes it.
Unfortunately, they all grow tired of him rather quickly once they realize that, beyond him, there’s a wide new world of dusty corridors.
He hurriedly digs out a trash bag, shakes it open and begins to hurriedly grab unnamed bots to shove in the bag. He snags one from the air as it attempts to fly past, gives the surface a quick scan then puts it in with the three he’s gotten so far.
They race past him as he wades in to get more and that darn Mr. Fantastic clips his ankle and trips him up. He bobbles for balance, holding tight to his bag as the bots inside it struggle against the plastic sack.
A flying bot smacks into his head, hard, and he drops the bag in favor of reaching to see if his head is still fully attached and the Roombas find their way out to join the others in fleeing. One hits his knee and another his shin and he falls.
Instead of hitting the nice, padded floor, though, he lands on wonderful little Roombas that carry him on their backs like a champion as they dart out into the halls. He savors the feeling, drifting to a wonderfully concussed fantasy where he’s hoisted on the broad shoulders of Nate Summers and Thor Odinson with Spiderman staring on with envy at Wade’s hero scene.
He waves at his non-existent fans as they revel in his mind and throws out a few kisses as the bots carry him further into the SHIELD complex.
Then the alarms start to sound and the jig is up.
SHIELD knows that he’s here.
Or maybe they’ve found out that sixty of Stark’s bots have just broken loose in their headquarters.
Deadpool struggles to get to his feet, stumbling against the passing wave of Roombas as they sweep along the floor and dart up the walls to rid the ceiling of cobwebs. He reaches out blindly and grabs one, tucking it under his arm like a football and running for the end zone to get the hell out before the guards start coming.
Its engine whirs and its vacuum sucks and those bristles twirl and Wade staggers to the wall as the tickling causes him to double-over laughing as he drops the Roomba. It darts away the moment it hits the floor and he realizes that they’ve all moved beyond his reach.
Lip sliding out in a pout, he feels his eyes grow moist at the thought that this has all been for nothing. Then he spies movement in another cell as he passes it and he stops to stare in wonder at the roomful of flying, whizzing Roombas that seem activated by the escape of the others.
Not about to waste time, he picks the lock; nearly breaking the steel blade of the sword in his impatience, and braces for another deluge.
These bots pass right by him in favor of racing to join the others and he rushes to collect as many as he can before he begins to hear the shouts of SHIELD Agents as they begin to encounter the freed Roomba Army. He plucks two from the sky and shoves them in a trash bag, grabs the one running over his foot to add to the collection then moves inside to sweep up a pair that appears to be turned off or broken.
He ties the bag shut and begins to run from the building; holding it tightly to his chest as the Roombas fight the plastic to get free.
“Just settle down,” he tells them as he slams through an emergency exit to hit the fire escape. “I’ve got lots and lots of dirt for you to clean up. You’ll love my place. I’ve got crumbs and trash; it’ll be heaven. Far dirtier for you than that sterile compound of the fancy Tower. I’ll keep you busy all the time!”
~*~
Across town, in the Avengers Tower, Phil Coulson is rudely awakened by the summons of his SHIELD issued phone ringing shrilly on the nightstand.
“Ignore it,” Clint Barton slurs against his shoulder, hand flopping out to swat blindly at the Blackberry.
“Coulson,” Phil ignores him; answering the call and sounded crisp, alert and wide-awake despite the sleep he’s rubbing from his eyes.
It’s a skill that Clint sincerely hates the man for no matter how sexy it is that he can switch gears from one extreme to another whenever the moment calls for action.
Clint reluctantly pushes up to move from the bed, hearing enough from the volume of Fury’s yelling to know that they were being called in even if he can’t make out a word of what the man is saying on the other end of the line.
“Jarvis,” he tips his head back in a stretch as he addresses the AI that runs the place. “Wake the team.”
“Yes, Hawkeye,” Jarvis’s crisp voices replies in their room alone before going Tower wide to announce; “Avengers. Assemble.”
~*~
As Earth’s Mightiest Heroes rush to wake and dress to tackle the mission of wrangling Tony’s escaped creations, Wade pops the top on a nice cold beer and kicks back in his recliner.
All around him, four of his five stolen Roombas whirl and zip to clean his apartment. The fifth he keeps on its back on his lap, bristle side up for him to pet as he reaches for his remote control. Its motors whir like a purr and Wade begins to wonder if he’ll need to feed his new pets.
Should he keep a bowl of oil out for them?
Does he need to walk them?
How does he change their batteries?
With that thought in mind, he flips the bot over to try taking the cover off. The Roomba zaps him for his efforts and darts down his legs.
“Fine, Sparky,” he calls after the fleeing disc; “see if I care when you run outta juice and just become another piece of junk in this place for the good ones to clean.”
He looks for the bag of chips that he’d left tucked against the arm of the chair and pulls it out as an episode of Maude starts on TVLand.
He reaches into the bag for a handful of crumbled potato crisps, tips his head back, opens his mouth in eager anticipation of the salty goodness about to be dropped to his tongue as he lifts his hand and then…nothing. Before he can enjoy the chips, one of the Roombas spots the crumbs and flies to suction Wade’s hand clean, taking all his snack away in one strong suction from the bots vacuum. Another one zips in and sucks the whole bag down before he can even blink. A third flies to the arm of the chair and sucks up the remote for no reason that can ever possibly be justified.
It darts away with his beloved remote suctioned to its underbelly and the others zip off in different directions to clean the rest of his apartment or hide. He thinks of giving chase, but it’s been a long day so he just sighs and slumps down in his chair to let the robots have their way.
He should have known better than to take Stark Tech.
It never came with any instructions you actually need and it always ends up costing you more than you expect.