Standing on the deck of the evacuation ferry from Providence Island, Irene Merryweather stares longingly into the ocean. Both Cable and Deadpool chose to stay behind on Providence to prevent its secrets from falling into the wrong hands, a job apparently so dangerous that not even Cable’s love, Domino, was allowed to stay behind. Does Cable expect to survive this mission, Irene wonders? If the dreamer dies, what happens to his dream?
Providence…
“It always seemed like the fighting would never end,” Cable tells Deadpool as he recounts a situation from his past similar to their current one. Cable and his charges had been defending a transport hub for four days solid. Their attackers were mutates from Apocalypse’s twisted ‘mechagenics’ labs. After evacuating all the civilians, they held the line of defense while their programmers hurried to delete the destination code from the transport matrix; if the villains found it intact, they could have easily found every transport and slaughtered the refugees. Cable vowed to destroy this information, even at the cost of his own life. He ordered his team to evacuate while he detonated his plasma charges, but one of his soldiers protested and activated her own detonation sequence instead. To her, Cable was too important to die. “She sacrificed herself for me…” Cable says to Deadpool, “…and I don’t even remember her name.”
“You just totally made up the word ‘mechagenics,’ right?” is Deadpool’s response. If Cable is so certain his enemies have already arrived on Providence to steal its technology, then Deadpool proposes he and Cable take them out before it comes to that. Unfortunately, Cable thinks they need to split up; he needs to encrypt as much archival data he can, and wants Deadpool to retrieve his backup bypass, which Cable says is the one ace they have up their sleeve. He left it in his apartment inside a souvenir maquette of Anton Kruch. Deadpool agrees to go get it. Meanwhile, from a bombed-out building up above, a red-eyed, long-haired man holding a playing card observes Cable and Deadpool in anticipation.
“Wade…” Cable begins, but Deadpool cuts him off right there; he tells him not to say thank-you, not to say he is proud of him, and not to say good-bye. “Your zipper is down,” Cable finishes. Deadpool looks down, but sees his pants have no zipper. “Made you look,” Cable says with a satisfied grin on his face.
“You are so immature,” Wade says as he departs.
As Cable walks away, he thinks about each thing Deadpool told him not to say. Thank you. I’m proud of you. Goodbye. Perhaps he missed his last chance to say all three. He activates the Professor, his copy of the sentient computer program integrated into Cable’s tech. Since Professor must be deleted as well, it may as well spend its last sentient moments with Cable. Professor verifies the electrical connections on Providence and gives Cable an updated countdown to the island’s destruction: thirty-five hours, thirty-six minutes, and fourteen seconds until Providence loses power and sinks into the ocean. Plenty of time to encrypt or delete the archives, Cable says to himself, unfortunately, that’s plenty of time for my guests to stop me, too. In the distance, he spots a man in a trench coat slinking through the shadows. He decides to keep the enemy busy until Deadpool completes his task.
Cable runs toward the mysterious man and orders him to show himself. If not, Cable will bring the building down on his head. “Liar, liar, pans on fire,” the shrouded man says. “I meant dat literally.” He charges a wayward Spider-Man doll with kinetic energy and hurls it at Cable. The explosion nearly kills him. What is he doing here, Cable asks?
“Hey, Nate. Nice day t’die, isn’ it…?” The former X-Man Gambit emerges from the shadows and hurls a quartet of charged cards, spread out in an elegant arc toward Cable’s general direction. To Cable, Gambit represents mainly an annoyance. He has no idea who the former Horseman of Apocalypse is working with, and for now, he does not care. All he knows for sure is that he’s annoyed.
Meanwhile, Deadpool scours the trophy case in Cable’s apartment for the Anton Kutch statuette. He pores through some of Cable’s items: Tony Roberts motivational tapes, the Colin Firth DVD collection, and an autographed picture of Howie Long, to name a few. Why doesn’t Cable also have a giant penny, Deadpool asks? He finally comes across the statue of a robed, blue man. “Ah! Here’s little so-and-so,” Wade says. “Remember when you tried to eliminate racial prejudice by turning everyone blue? Good times,” he tells the statue.
Suddenly, a glowing metal coil wraps itself around Deadpool’s arm, and he is yanked off his feet. Senyaka, one of Magneto’s original Acolytes, stands over him, now holding the statuette in one of his glowing adamantium coils. Deadpool greets him enthusiastically. “You got the bestest whips ever, but you probably know that, huh?” he asks the Sri Lankan mutant. Deadpool continues rambling, first about the significance of the Acolytes as enemies, then about the religious significance of the statue. “You get what I’m hintin’ at here? I know you do, Senyaka-Dabba-Do. Right?”
Senyaka screams for him to shut up! With Deadpool caught in the grip of his coil, he flicks his arms toward the window, sending his captive hurling through the glass. Please, let him be dead, Senyaka prays to his idol, Magneto. His prayer goes unanswered. While he runs from the building, Deadpool attacks him from behind and smashes his head in with a traffic light. He grabs the statue and runs, but Senyaka gets up and snares Wade’s neck with one of his whips. He lifts him into the air, strangling him, and with the other coil, crushes Deadpool’s wrist, causing him to drop the statue.
As Cable fights with Gambit, he struggles to remember the name of the girl who saved his life. He should not let this distract him during a fight, but how could he have possibly forgotten her name? “I’ll show you a card trick instead,” Gambit says, hurling a glowing king-card at Cable. Cable manages to halt it using what remains of his telekinesis. Not gonna happen Gambit, he says. “Well, I said it was a trick, Cable…” From behind, an eruption of flames scorches the distracted Cable. Gambit continues to mock him; isn’t he supposed to be some great strategist?
Cable notices his name, Summers, is said as if it were a curse. Maybe it is. Sunfire, the source of the flames, arrives, and comments Cable must be complacent on his home turf. The frustrated Nathan Summers wonders what any of this has to do with Sunfire, and wishes they would leave him alone. After Sunfire mocks him for missing the obvious, Cable’s mind once again returns to the girl whose name he cannot remember. This distraction proves dangerous, as he forgets about the stagnant, charged-card Gambit left at his feet. It explodes. The impact would have killed Cable, had he not buffered it with his telekinesis.
Picking himself up, Cable stumbles through the wreckage in a pitiful attempt at escape. Sunfire raises his hands to incinerate him, but Gambit advises he let the man run. “Only hand we got to win is de last one,” he says to Sunfire. Cable, meanwhile, remembers a lesson he learned long ago: even when losing a battle, a real soldier remembers how to win.
Elsewhere, Deadpool fights to keep the statue out of Senyaka’s grasp. He refuses to let Senyaka obtain all the information about the future. He would know too much: will the Cubs ever win the World Series? Will Bershire Hathaway stock go up or down? Who will win Dancing with the Stars in 2010? Cable entrusted it to Deadpool for a reason after all; he knew Wade would be too stupid to look for any important information! He crawls across the ground while Senyaka grips his ankle with a coil. The statue lies only a few feet away. “Must…use…Shatner…voice…to…reach…statue,” Wade says as he reaches for it. Suddenly, he has an epiphany: if the statue is as important as Cable says, why would he ever entrust it with Wade?
Cable finally stumbles into a room housing the central computer terminal. He orders Professor to seal and lock the doors behind him while he encrypts the remaining files. Professor reports the power supply nears empty; Cable asks it to draw from non-essential services. The only sufficient non-essential source available, Professor replies, is the teleportation matrix omega. Leave that alone, Cable firmly requests. With the door sealed, he figures he has a few moments before his attackers arrive, but knows it will not be enough to encrypt all the files. He prepares the island’s self-destruct sequence instead.
An explosion at the door announces the arrival of Gambit and Sunspot. He was hoping they would follow him; the best way to take out one’s opponents is to lead them to exactly what it is one wants to protect. He cannot let them have the data core. Sunfire lifts his hand in preparation to execute Cable. So now it comes down to this: make sure you win even win you lose. “Professor,” Cable says. “Requiem.”
At that same moment, Deadpool finally grabs hold of the Anton Krutch statuette, inadvertently triggering its hidden function. Teleportation matrix omega activated, it begins. Bodyslide by one. Wade curses Cable’s trickery as he is whisked away from Providence Island. Senyaka stares at Deadpool’s void in confusion.
If you’re going to sacrifice yourself, you do it for something that matters, Cable tells himself as the Requiem sequence engages. You sacrifice yourself for a cause, to protect your men, your leader, or a worthwhile target. Gambit and Sunspot finally understand the danger they’re in, and charge out of the compound as fast as they can. That’s funny, Cable says as they leave. Now I remember her name.
An explosion begins at the island’s core, instantly spreading outward and obliterating all in its path. Providence Island is erased from existence.
Deadpool reappears on the armchair in his apartment, still clutching the statuette. It announces its power supply is entirely drained, thus terminating its function. Deadpool snaps it in half. After looking out the window, he grabs his remote control and switches on the TV. “It wasn’t worth it…and I won’t let you down,” he says as news reports stream in about the destruction of Providence Island.
