This time, his hopes weren't shattered. In the doctor's office, the mood was light. The doctor was smiling. There was no reason to worry. It was good news. They were going to be parents. He was going to be a dad.

A few days before, Jack had been terrified at the possibility, but that day, he was overwhelmed with joy. On the ride home, they stopped for pizza and started planning for the future. His house was big enough for all three of them and the pets. She had already agreed to move in with him before this had happened; it was perfect. One of the bedrooms would need to be cleared out and turned into a nursery, but they had nine months to plan for that.

Within a few months of finding out finding out they were having a healthy baby girl, the nursery was finished. They were living together, and all of his worries seemed irrelevant. This was the happiest he had ever been, and, today, he felt like the luckiest guy in the world.

Hell, maybe he was.

In spite of everything that had happened to him in the last three years, his life had still managed to come together. There was a lot of bad, but without this, he didn't know if he ever would have gotten to know her the way he had. Without the shift, they might not have clicked. They might not have gotten together. For all of the bad, there was just as much good – at least for him. Jack knew that he would need to step up and embrace his inner Deadpool in order to keep their daughter safe, but it was a task he was more than willing to take on. She would come first; he wouldn't make the mistake Wade had made with Ellie. Keeping his distance had been the right thing with her, but it wouldn't be with their unborn daughter.

They were going to be the parents all of theirs hadn't been, he was sure of it.

This was how things were supposed to be. It wasn't how he'd planned it, but when did anything ever go according to plan? Wade Wilson had lived his life with no real plan, so Jack knew he could too. All that mattered was that they were together. They would hit all of the steps he aspired for eventually. That was what mattered. He loved her, she loved him. The doubt that used to plague him about that had disappeared into the recesses of his mind. He wasn't worried any longer. No, he was confident that they could and would handle this. He knew with complete certainty that he was going to marry her someday, but he had held off on proposing as not to make it seem like he was doing it simply because she was pregnant.

That day, though, he realized he didn't want to wait any longer. They weren't even doing anything out of the ordinary, simply organizing a heap of clothing gifted to them from Drew and Whitney, but it was the way she looked at him – with love, amusement, and pure adoration – when he cracked a joke about storage space that changed his perspective.

"Let's get married," he said, without thinking. It wasn't over-the-top and romantic, like he'd planned, but it was spontaneous. A minute before, the thought hadn't crossed his mind, but it was all he could think about now. He knew he had likely taken her by surprise; part of him even worried that she might not approve of the lack of romance in his gesture. "Not right now, right this minute, but after the baby is born."

She didn't say anything at first, a move that threatened to bring his paranoia boiling back to the surface. He tried to remind himself that, before they'd found out about the baby, she had said if you asked me to marry you, I'd say yes. Those words were the only thing that prevented him from erupting into an apologetic word vomit. Before she could speak, he preemptively interrupted her with, "Hold that thought," and rushed out of the room.

He came back less than a minute later, greeting his dumbfounded girlfriend with a small box. "I bought it right after we found out, but I didn't want you to think I was proposing because of her. Because I'm not. I want to marry you because I love you, because I can't see my life without you in it, not because of some outdated social construct that says parents need to be married."

He bent down onto one knee and extended the open box upward. "Roxanne Addison, will you do me the honor of making Harleypool canon by becoming my wife?"

After another moment, she began nodding her head. He placed the ring onto her finger and subsequently scooped her into his arms, swinging her around the nursery.

How had he gotten so lucky? It almost didn't seem real. Somewhere in the back of his mind, there was a thought that it wasn't – that the pregnancy hadn't been anything more than chemical. He refused to listen to it, though. Reality was standing right in front of him. His fiancée and her round belly, their daughter growing inside. The ring on her finger. The smile on their faces. That was real. The numbness of realizing he'd gotten his hopes up for nothing wasn't real; it was all in his head.

This was his life, and it was perfect.