The X-Project

Doug's been being a little weird about Wade possibly being Kyle's biological father, but everyone knows Wade doesn't do awkward. Rather, he drowns the awkward under piles and piles of meatballs.


Wade walked into the brownstone, got passed through the front, and then headed up. He didn't stop at Amanda and Marie-Ange's apartment, though. Instead, he kept on going until he got to Doug's. Because they were maybe having an awkward turtle moment and the mercenary figured food would make it go away. Food fixed everything. Unless that food was a grub or worm you'd had to hack out of a tree, but that was neither here nor there. In fact, the food Wade had brought with him was delectably delicious - he'd found a Swedish place randomly and they had the best meatballs.

Sitting the bag of food on the floor, he pulled out the lock picks he'd removed from his roll of small, useful tools and set to work. Since nothing buzzed, shocked, or electrocuted him, Wade thought he was pretty safe to continue. Which is how he wound up nudging the door open and peering inside. Since he'd never been into Doug's apartment, he was just going to assume it was laid out in the same way Amanda's and Marie-Ange's was, or maybe reversed from that, and proceed. Putting his lock picks away, he grabbed the food and forged onward, into the depths of what quickly became... an electronic sort of... jungle. Thing. At least to Wade's untrained eye. Pushing open a door, he held the food in front of him and said, "I'm crashing your LAN party or... whatever this is, Ramsey. I come bearing food."

It wasn't so much that Doug kept any particular amount of computer hardware in his apartment, but rather that he tended to expand his collection to fit whatever available space there was. So when he'd been a student rooming with Jamie, it'd been one desktop and one laptop. When the pair had moved into a grad suite, it had been several desktops and a server box, but he'd generally kept only a laptop out in the common area. When he'd moved into the brownstone, it had grown exponentially, but then shrunk to more reasonable dimensions when Marie-Ange had moved in with him. Now that he was back to having his own space, it had grown again. And right now he was elbow-deep in a case, fiddling with things. "Do you even know what a LAN party is, Wade?" he asked with a roll of his eyes.

"A party heading for the Lansing/Capital City Airport?" Wade asked, grinning.

Doug merely pulled his hand out of the CPU and covered his face with it. "Not even close," he said. "LAN means Local Area Network. It's what nerds used to do to play games together before everything and its dog got on the internet. Don't even get me started on Diablo III requiring an internet connection. It's a travesty against god and man."

Wade decided that asking what Diablo III was wouldn't really improve his position, so instead he shook the bag a little. "Food, Ramsey. Lots of delicious food. Step away from the box of wires and motherboards and come eat."

"Okay, okay," Doug said, taking the time to carefully organize parts and cover the open CPU before venturing over to his kitchen table where Wade had set the food. "What'd you bring?"

"A smorgasbord of Swedish delight," Wade replied. "Also, meatballs. Lots of meatballs. And, y'know, some other stuff." After getting the bag on the table, he'd pulled out one of the containers of meatballs and grabbed himself a fork. "Fend for yourself from the smorgasbord."

"Either this place must have just opened, or you've actually succeeded in finding a place I didn't know about. Either way," Doug spoke around a mouthful of his own meatballs, "nice find."

"I'm a very talented man," Wade said, taking a whole meatball off the end of his fork after getting the container open and chewing. Only swallowing half the food in his mouth, he continued, "And I will never share my food-finding secrets, Ramsey. Never. So enjoy my benevolence while it lasts." He was still grinning, though, eyebrows wiggling a little.

"While it lasts, huh?" Doug raised an eyebrow in response to Wade's wiggling. "That sounds suitably implication-y that there's an endpoint." He smirked. "I'll just make a note to hack into your financial records or something. Or track you with traffic cameras to find out where you went." He was quite good at his job, after all. Not that he tended to use his skills on friends and teammates. Much. At least not for malicious purposes...

"Or," Wade said, pausing for a moment to actually chew and swallow the meatball he'd put in his mouth a moment before, "You could google it. I don't need you getting all creepy stalker on me, dude." He ate another meatball, humming low in his throat before swallowing again and saying, "Besides, everything ends. Benevolence is just one thing amongst a great many things that will eventually come to an end. Especially if you use traffic cameras to stalk me." He pointed at Doug with his fork to illustrate the seriousness of what he was saying, but the effect was somewhat marred by the fact that he couldn't stop himself from grinning.

"Okay, fine," Doug raised his hands in surrender. "Crookedness is sort of a habit with me these days, I guess." He chuckled. "It would have been better if you'd gone to 'let-me-google-that-for-you-dot-com' and brought up the place, I think." Passive-aggressive internet searches were hilarious sometimes.

"Pssh. That would require a level of competence with the interwebs that I let my technologically inclined friends handle," Wade said, waving around his fork even though he still had a meatball stuck to the end of it. "But hey - knowing you can use the traffic cams to stalk people could totally come in handy later. I'll remember it and bribe you with food if I ever need you to do that."

"Oh Wade, you say the sweetest things," Doug replied, clutching his hands to where a set of pearls would have been around his throat and simpering in overblown fashion. His eyes twinkled with amusement.

"It's not my fault you're easily bought, Ramsey," Wade said, grinning. "But, you know. If you manage to do something The Wheeze can't, I would totally spring for an actual meal with, like. Bread sticks and salad and all kinds of all you can eat pasta - oh my God, I want to go to the Olive Garden now."