The lights hum around him in a methodical whir that drums into his brain ceaselessly after so many endless hours here. The screens emit a hard glow, highlighting the sunken edges of his face, contrasting the shifting darkness of the room.
His hands glide from one screen to the next, fingers tapping, and moving in a pattern that Miguel has become inured too. His brain weighs on his skull numbingly. He can’t remember how long he’s been standing here.
His job has become glorified office work. Monitoring possible anomalies, until the universe caves and he finally gets to stretch his legs. It becomes more of a workout really, a way to take his anger out on the things that deserve it. The mistakes that slip through the cracks.
He cracks through the portals with a vicious fury, fangs bared behind his mask, and body pulsing with the unrelenting, unchanging rage that encompasses his brain any minute his body has the freedom to be disastrous again.
And then when that’s done, he goes back home- or the closest thing to it, and does it all again. It doesn’t take long for the anxiety to settle back in- it never really leaves, just goes to sleep. And then he’s back at his screens, with a numb body, and a twitching mind, too strained to let his body rest.
The past year he’d lost more weight and gained more muscle than he ever had in his life.
A few times in the past it had gotten so bad that even Lyla needed to remind him to eat.
“Your iron deficiency levels are high.” She had warned him once.
She’d been programmed to get smarter, to simulate emotions, to act independently. She was a little too good at it.
“What, are you monitoring my vitals now?”
He had growled back, unconvinced, uncaring.
A silence had followed.
“You used to be kinder to yourself.”
But kindness was not what the universe needed right now. He didn’t get the privilege of having a life outside of this, a choice outside of this. He had to be the one to do the things no one else could, even if that required sacrifices. There was nothing left in any world truly worth sacrificing that would mean anything anyway.
“Miguel.” Lyla appeared in a flicker of digital light, twitching over his shoulder suddenly. He didn’t look up from his work.
“Peter B. Parker has clocked in for the day, he’s heading up to your station now.” Miguel barely grunts a response, putting a hand up to say that he understands, before he starts swiping away at a few of the dimension monitors, closing them up.
He was one of the first recruits, which really might have been a stupid decision on Miguel’s part, if not for the fact that he’d been there when no one else could, and had stayed when no one else had.
It didn’t make his constant quips any less annoying though- really he was more of a constant reminder of the difference between Miguel, and everyone else. A reminder that everything about him was wrong, or different, or unkind. Down to the rapture in his blood.
Peter was a situated reminder that they were both the same and different and that Miguel was that and everything in between.
“Miguel!”
A chipper voice echoed through the room as Miguel closed the last of the monitors, turning his head slightly over his shoulder in acknowledgment of the man.
He lets out a small breath, a reminder to keep his patience- a reminder that he owes Peter a lot more than he thinks he does.
“I brought someone for you to meet!”
The words leave the other's mouth and stifle that thought where it stands. Miguel turns his head before he can think to respond, eyes narrowing as he finds the man pacing through the shadows and into the pale blue light of the room- and not just him-
His eyes catch Jess walking in behind them first, hand covered protectively over her belly- and then flick next to the disturbance in his vision. Miguel doesn’t process it at first, and then, after a disturbingly long moment of understanding, feels a shock run through him, and his feet become planted on the floor.
“I told you I had a baby right? Her names Mayday, she’s- Oh hey Jess.”
Their voices fade, as Miguel’s eyes wander up to Peter’s shoulders- up to the disturbance- where a baby sits atop him, tiny feet dangling off his shoulders, and where the man’s hands go to hold them steady.
Her- it's fingers are cradled in Peter's hair, chin sat atop his head with reddish brown hair falling softly around its rounded sleeping face. It lays there unbothered.
But Miguel feels his heart thud in his chest, and his thoughts return to that wrongness. That distance. He feels that pulsing inside of him again, as something crackles under the numbness of his body. He steps off the platform.
“-i’m just about 7 months along, and it’s going really well.” Jess continues, mid conversation with Peter as he moves hastily to tear his phone from his pocket. “Oh this is such a fun stage, you’re gonna love it- tiring- but a lot of fun-“ Peter’s eyes glaze over captured moments on his screen- he can see it by the way he lights up, Miguel can see the tenderness in his eyes, and the way he shifts silently and carefully- mindful of the precious creature on his shoulders.
Miguel is not sure why, but his muscles tense. The gap between them grows, but their displacement, several meters apart, does not change.
“Hey Miguel, anything new for today? Any anomalies?” Peters eyes remained focused on his phone screen.
Miguel’s eyes remained focus on him. There’s another not so gentle reminder of his difference. A reality that he is not the same. He’s watched the dimensions and their spiderman. He’s watched them crack their jokes, and face their losses, and gain their powers, and learn how to gain their strength too. It’s a cruel insufficiency that sits inside Miguel, but this- this was something else.
His eyes flicker to Jess, who’s nodding politely to the cherishing moments Peter is showing her, and Miguel feels a twinge of something bubble up inside of him.
This was cruelty of another kind. With all the differences between them, Miguel thought maybe their losses were the thing that bound them all together. The rotting sadness that sits inside every spider person- impossible to articulate, but impossible to not share.
Their losses were what made them spiderman. Their suffering was what made it all real, all worth it. All worth the sacrifice.
“Miguel?”
But maybe even that was wrong. Because they get to move on, and he doesn’t. They get to have their happy endings, and their new beginnings, and he doesn’t. And he’s as much of Spiderman as they are.
Why is he the one still stuck on the outside?
“Miguel what are you doing?”
Jess’s voice cuts through his thoughts, cold and questioning, and Miguel feels like he’s pulled back into reality.
They are silent and staring, Peters phone still extended over to Jess as he looks at Miguel, with a hint of concern and… fear?
His muscles tense, his fingers flex, and he looks down in realization at the claws, unsheathed beneath his suit. He barely remembers letting himself go. He feels his face soften from the hard bitter look that must have been heavy in his expression, back into a neutral indifference, and he turns away, gaze flicking back to the ground and walls of the room.
“Get out.” His voice cuts through the silence, and it shakes with a subtle breathiness as he feels the stirring tension behind him.
He doesn’t want to argue, he doesn’t want questions, he doesn’t want the hot water to overflow and accidentally hit them.
“Miguel what-“ Peters voice tries anyway.
“I said get out didn’t I?” He feels a boiling cauldron bubble beneath the surface of his skin, and he worries, for a moment, that maybe they can see it popping up.
And then he reminds himself that of course they can.
As much as he keeps the cold stoic persona, and prides himself in remaining fluently untouched by emotional surrender, it’s just as plain in him as it is in any other person.
He hears them awkwardly shuffle out after a moment, but when Peters footsteps stop in the doorway, he’s worried the man might not leave at all.
Please go. He urges. I can’t lose it in front of you again.
He can’t tell if he said the words aloud, but the silence fills the void of his mind once again, until he hears the footsteps begin to retreat again, and he’s left alone again.
His eyes wander back to the screens, aglow with an orange that hums mockingly back to him. He steps back onto the platform, and his hands glide for a moment over the screen.
His claws dig and break into the metal with a ripping creak, and he tears it from its place.
It hits the wall with an echoing crash, shattering and breaking apart instantly with a degrading clatter. His breaths are untimely and furious, heaving with an exasperated pant that wracks his whole body.
From somewhere out of the corner of his eye he sees Lyla watching him, and a memory burns bright in his mind.
“What do you know? You’re just a computer.” He had rattled off with a hiss to her comment.
Silence had followed again.
Within the room Miguel can feel the steam rise from just under his skin, the boiling water dissipating as soon as the heat died down.
“You used to be kinder.”
She had said.
She was right. He used to be kinder.
But that wasn’t what the universe needed.
So Miguel got back to work.