Many Talents


Wade Wilson was a man of many talents.

There were the obvious things—an encyclopedic knowledge of sitcoms, the ability to put a bullet between the eyes of a man standing behind a brick wall two hundred feet away without looking or slowing down, a limitless imagination for pranks…things he made plain every day.

And then there were the things you might miss even after knowing him for a year or three.

Wade could do certain kinds of fairly complex math quickly in his head.  Rattle off twenty numbers and he could spit back the mean, the trendline, and the differential with barely a second’s pause.  Show him a setup and he could name all the firing lines at any given point of time and give a lot of impressive probabilities to back them up, made all the more impressive because he’d never even finished high school.  Needless to say, he was a crafty gambler, and none of them would play cards with him anymore.

Wade had an excellent singing voice, if he thought no one was listening.  The moment he suspected he had an audience, he yowled like an amorous tomcat.  The music selection tended to vary by audience as well—jingles for Nord, Broadway musicals for Fred, TV themes for Victor, dopey love songs for Logan.

Logan had heard Wade converse fluently or semi-fluently in at least half a dozen languages, including Spanish, German, and Japanese.  He could swear in another dozen or so.  It was entirely possible he could understand more than those, but he had a habit of looking completely disinterested when people around him weren’t speaking English.  Okay, so Wade always looked like that when people weren’t talking about things he liked…but that didn’t eliminate the possibility that it was feigned.

Wade could move silently enough to sneak up on anyone.  Nord still jumped and bitched every time, but Victor had reached the point of constantly expecting Wade to turn up at his elbow.  When Stryker needed something or someone retrieved in utter secrecy with no body count, Wade was the man he sent.

Aside from Logan and Victor, Wade was the only member of the team who could see in the dark.  In fact, he saw a lot of things nobody else did, Elvis and little green men notwithstanding.  For example, there was an op in Laos where they had to retrieve some guy who could change the color of his skin.  The weather had been suspiciously, unseasonably bad, which made it hard for Logan and Victor to track, Wraith’s hayfever had been making him sneeze himself backward a few feet every ten seconds, and there were some nasty little biting flies everywhere.  Wade, who’d tagged along by virtue of being the only one who could speak Lao, managed to wander along happily without a single bug bite.  After four hours of wading through swampy jungle muck and being bitten and sneezed on, Victor finally snapped and said, ‘Why the hell aren’t they biting Wade?’ to which Wade simply replied, ‘All the ones who tried croaked from diabetes.  And by the way, the chameleon dude’s been following us for two hours.’  Victor had not been pleased.

Wade had the knack of walking between raindrops.  No bullshit.  As long as he didn’t want to get wet and the rain wasn’t an all-out monsoon-style deluge, Wade simply didn’t get rained on.  Nord was fast, but even he got rained on...this added to the list of ‘Reasons Nord and Wade Did Not Get Along.’  Wraith postulated that it had to do with figuring trajectories and velocities, and that it was possible that anybody who could do that kind of mental math and move that fast could do it.  Wade insisted that he did it ‘by not being where the raindrops are.’  Logan figured dodging raindrops must be pretty easy, compared to dodging bullets.

Wade was far more flexible than any man outside of gymnastics or circuses had any right to be.  Once, in retaliation for a well-placed bucket of spoiled milk, Victor had literally tied Wade in knots, and the merc had still managed to bloody his nose and knock out a fang (which he’d kept, crowing that he could probably get a dollar out of the tooth fairy for it).

Wade could identify any gun by the sound it made when firing, and several by the sound they made when loading or cocking.  He could take his pistol and his submachine guns apart and put them back together blindfolded and hanging by his ankles from the ceiling (Nord could, too, but Wade was faster).  Wade could also accurately fire his guns with any of his fingers and either of his thumbs (in case he lost one, he said, but but it was more likely so that he could show off), which also meant that he could shoot while holding a gun upside-down or backward (or both).

And Wade had a talented enough tongue that he could probably tie a cherry stem into a knot.

“Twenty says he can,” Bradley proposed.

“No way,” Wraith scoffed with a shake of his head.  “Thirty says he can’t.”

“Fifty says he can’t,” put in Nord.

“’Ey, Fred,” Bradley called.  “You want a piece o’ this?”

“What’re we bettin’ on, now?” the big man asked, lumbering over.

Victor finally set his book down and stalked to the table.  “Whether or not Wade can tie a knot in a cherry stem.  With his tongue.”

“Is that even possible?” Fred wondered.

“Oh, it’s possible,” Victor assured him.  “Knew a prostitute in Saigon who could do it.”

“No way…what’d John bet?”

“Thirty against,” Wraith replied.

“Okay.  Me, too.”

“I’m likin’ these odds,” Wade commented.  “Shall we make it more interesting?  Who here thinks I could tie the knot with the cherry still attached?”

Everyone scoffed and jeered.  Even Logan shook his head incredulously.

“Never happen,” Nord said flatly.

Wade grinned.  “I think I can do it.  In fact, I’ll lay a pair of crisp new Benjamins that I can.”  And he pulled the bills out of his pocket, set them down on the table next to the bowl of cherries.  “Wanna lay a little more against?  Even odds, perhaps?”

Suddenly, he had four takers.

“If I was a bettin’ man, I’d be tempted,” Victor said.  “As it is, I’ll pay twenty just to see him try.”  And he fished out some beer money and slapped it down on top of the pile.

Six pairs of eyes watched intently as Wade tipped his head back, lowered a cherry into his mouth by the stem…and pulled it out five seconds later, knotted as promised, cherry intact, to a chorus of groans and complaints.

“Y’see, now, Jimmy didn’t take the bet ‘cause he knew better,” Victor declared, grinning.  “Never take a bet against somebody’s tongue when the guy he’s sleepin’ with won’t take it.”

Logan choked on his beer.


.End.