Chapter Text
His world collapses down to pixelated images on a screen; coalesces around it. Grows around it. Devotes itself to it. Comes apart like the finely wound string of a tapestry left decaying in the ruins of a lost civilization.
When her face appears on the screen again, his fingers twitch by his sides.
This life doesn’t allow him room for softness. Softness has largely been ripped from Miguel in chunks, thrown from the glittering windows of Alchemax Headquarters to the unfathomable depths below. He’d invited it in once, once when pity had overwhelmed him at witnessing the fate of Mr Sims, casting a pall over the genetics program, and look where that had gotten him.
That life now sits behind him. Even in the very fabric of his DNA, he isn’t that man anymore. The split between the him of then and now is made obvious in the venom that slicks his mouth, dripping off the tips of fangs that took nigh on months to become accustomed to, and talons that stretch the UMF suit he now wears like a second skin. His life these days revolves around using the technology at his disposal to monitor and maintain order across the multiverse; there’s too much on his shoulders to consider indulging his own desires or needs.
In the years since gutting Alchemax, ripping apart programs with only the goal of creating supersoldiers and ushering in a new era of war and destruction, which he will not be at the helm of, Miguel has felt his essence ripple. Days and nights pass and hardly touch him; the hours of his days are spent in the bowels of the lab, pouring over studies and reports, fine-tuning the equipment that allow him and the growing number of other Spider-Men that now reside within Nueva York to travel between dimensions. There is a perpetual ache that sits right behind his eyes.
He can’t deny that he feels a singular purpose in being at the helm of this mission, ensuring that the effects of the particle collider incident on Earth-1610 are contained within that universe. Of course, there’s very little he can do to halt the effects of that catastrophe completely, but what he can salvage—what he can repair—infuses him with a sense of purpose that his prior life could never even hope to achieve.
“Found another one,” a voice chimes from the communicator strapped to his wrist. A small, blocky Spider-Man materializes in a gold-garnet hologram, face somber. “On Earth-322. The individual I was trailing disappeared without a trace—he’s supposed to stop a nuclear launch in three days.”
“Understood. How many do you need?”
“At least two. This one’ll be tricky.”
He’s already calling two of his best Spider-Men down before the call has ended, then allows his own mask to descend over his face as he follows them through the portal.
Miguel doesn’t think much about what it means for a deterministic multiverse to be unraveling at this rate; he doesn’t set his mind to what it means that canon events can be disrupted in the first place. He only thinks about the task at hand; he only focuses on putting the pieces back when they break.
The days and months are long and take their toll on him. He collects Spider-Men for his strike force like toy soldiers, building an army that rivals any throughout history. He makes himself into a weapon, turns his mind and body inside out because that’s what the world demands of him. There’s no other shoulder to tap on to relieve him of his duty.
Miguel has seen variations of himself spanning universes, every possible iteration, every possible configuration of who he is and who he might be; he has studied them like specimens in a lab, looking for deficiencies and strengths and anomalies.
He finds many and fixes even more, but what truly catches his attention is a pattern, not an aberration.
In all, without fail, apart from those universes doomed to tragedy, there is some version of a woman that appears from seemingly nowhere and throws his entire universe off course. He becomes aware of her existence over the span of months, the way she’s always there on the periphery of his other selves’ lives. The first time Miguel sees her with a version of himself in another dimension, he notes her attractiveness in passing before he’s distracted by something more pressing.
When it happens again and again, he starts to pay attention.
A slight thing compared to him. His curiosity grows at how easily other versions of himself are drawn to her. It’s as if there were some kind of magnetic force pulling the two of them together. LYLA plugs into camera footage from dimensions beyond his, but his curiosity festers instead of being sated.
Yet in his world, she never appears.
His search isn’t active at first; Miguel tells LYLA to keep an eye out for retinal scans in Nueva York that match her genetic code, which hadn’t been particularly difficult to obtain. He slips in and out of dimensions like a ghost these days, sometimes intersecting with his own, and when he does, it’s hardly absurd to think that he might run into a version of himself. A version of her even, often by his other self’s side.
The first time Miguel encounters her in the flesh, it’s like touching a live wire, like slipping and grabbing the third rail, like the effects of Rapture sizzling under his skin. It is nearly unbearable. The first time he sees them all in the flesh, Miguel has to hold back a guttural sound, like an animal in pain.
The portal opens and he falls into a crouch.
He watches them from a rooftop on the other side of the park, feet like lead and hands shaking by his sides. His other self lounges on a park bench, his wife sitting beside him while their daughter— his daughter, his mind screams, because even in another universe, his blood courses through her veins—tries unsuccessfully to climb up a slide. He watches as his other self tucks an arm around his wife’s shoulders, pulling her into his side. The way his fingers trail over her bare shoulder, toying with the strap of her sundress.
He goes a bit breathless at the sight of his daughter—the one he also sees in so many universes, with her flushed brown cheeks and her nose that looks identical to his—even though Miguel’s grown used to seeing holograms of her in his lab. His whole chest feels like it’s on the verge of collapsing as he watches her run circles around the park, shrieking with laughter when she’s caught during a game of tag. The core of him aches when her father scoops her up into his arms, teasingly holding her upside down until she screams.
In a second, it saps him of every other desire he's ever had. In the middle of a park in some dimension that he's not supposed to be in, everything else shows its true face. The truth of it is that this is what finally makes sense.
There are times when Miguel feels choked with power. He sits at the helm of a vast technological empire, armed to the teeth with weaponry and Spider-Men that have shown time and time again that they are willing to follow his directives almost without question.
It’s not as if he’s some grand dictator lording over Nueva York. He’s just an important man in an important city. Miguel tosses money their way and the elected officials are happy to pretend that this all isn’t a thinly crafted veneer of democracy; that he couldn’t, on a whim, upturn the whole thing. Twice in the same week after a string of failures in locating his wife, he considers doing just that.
All this power and still one little woman eludes him.
He knows he’s cracking under the weight of the world. He spends more time in those other dimensions than he has any business spending. It’s reckless, dangerous even. He can’t help becoming his own voyeur; if the woman meant to be his wife would just show up in his own universe, he wouldn’t have to resort to sinking into fantasies and other worlds. The bolts holding him together are unscrewing.
“I get what you’re doing,” LYLA says. She’s a flash of prismatic light hovering over his shoulder as he combs through the list of registered city employees. “It’s not right.”
He ignores her, swiping through another batch. It’s convenient that he has the resources for this; it would be a lot harder to find her otherwise. “She’s there in seventy percent of all universes. In another twenty, near misses.”
She’s there in almost every iteration. Other versions of himself often marry her, or live together long enough to be considered married. Sometimes it’s just a one-night stand, the one that got away; sometimes she’s married and he corners her in a bar or an office or somewhere else and softens his voice, tracing his hand down her side and taking her home with him anyway.
He has no compunctions about doing that in this universe as well; if she was unfortunate enough to find someone else, he’ll rectify that situation. Sometimes he knows she feels so guilty for cheating on her spouse that she cries, but she also cries when he crams his cock in her and that also tires her out, wrings her free of guilt. He’s almost impressed with how many of his other selves have seduced her into leaving her ex.
“Ten percent where she doesn’t exist. Dies early on.”
“Means nothing.”
“Why don’t you use a dating app? Or let me sequence your DNA with the database and find you someone more compatible.”
The insinuation that anyone could replace her almost makes him laugh. It would’ve been a mocking laugh. He doesn’t, though, because his chest is slowly cracking open and his innards are leaking out onto the floor with every passing day that he doesn’t know the feel of her skin. “Save it. Not interested.”
“At some point, you might have to consider—” LYLA cuts herself off abruptly, brows furrowing under her heart-shaped glasses. She looks rightfully worried when Miguel turns his full attention on her.
“Consider what?” His voice is deathly quiet.
“The possibility that she’s—that you might be in that ten percent.”
It’s like the air gets sucked out of the room, and it’s a big room.
LYLA doesn’t have a corporeal form, but still she shifts from foot to foot like she’s worried about how he might retaliate. It speaks volumes that she knows how the notion will affect him. Miguel’s face is stone from where he stares at the monitors encircling him, the gold glow across his face like stars on water, illuminating something moving in the depths below.
“Stop harboring doubts.” His eyes shift back to the screens, tension rolling off him when he exhales, his eyes sliding shut. “Just do your job and help me locate her.”
“And if we can’t?”
“You’re pushing it, LYLA.”
She dematerializes and then rematerializes a few feet away. “Actually, maybe it’s worse if she does exist. You’re already too intense. I can’t imagine you with a wife and kids.” He’s told no other soul about his side project, but LYLA is embedded in the Alchemax systems, so her knowing about his search was more or less unavoidable. The best he can do is keep her somewhat ignorant to the decaying state of his sanity that has been eroding away more and more as the weeks have gone on.
“For your sake, you should hope we do find her,” Miguel says blithely. “I’m going to rip apart the city if we don’t.”
She stares at him, but Miguel’s lips don’t so much as twitch.
“The lack of techno consolidation across the city is going to make this search almost impossible.” On a screen off to the side, charts appear with tech upgrade requests from neighboring cities. The thought that his wife might not live in the city itself has sat on the periphery of his mind, but Miguel’s held off on truly confronting it because LYLA’s right. Even across the state, not all companies are required to submit their employee records to the main database. There are potentially thousands of people outside of his purview.
His fists clench by his sides, talons biting into the skin of his hands, puncturing enough for a few drops of blood to drip out onto the platform he stands on.
“Let me make a few calls.”
Sometimes fate just needs a nudge in the right direction.
The city sits like a beacon across the river, the sleek enchantment of a dream that protrudes on the horizon, skyscrapers and obelisk tributes to the coming centennial. Overhead, cumulus clouds blow across the scooped out belly of the sky and you follow them with your eyes. Even in the perfect tranquility of the moment, a vibrancy emanates from the city; there’s always something happening over there, always something new and exciting and everlasting.
But you live across the river, where nothing ever happens.
You drop down from where you’re perched on the ledge, the ruins of a long abandoned construction project, what might once have been a bridge. It’s just the remnants of that now, a slab of concrete that seems misplaced amongst the rocks and sand of the beach. The city you live in resides outside the bounds of Nueva York, but it’s built in the same upward trajectory; towering highrises and lush gardens sprouting from rooftops, all shimmering glass and smooth surfaces.
Sometimes you detour this way before work because it’s nice to look at something beautiful before the hours of your day are eaten up by the smell of garbage and sewer mulch. It humanizes you. It tends to the small flame in your chest that burns quite low most of the time, almost down to the end of the wick.
You take the tram to work and it speeds through the streets almost completely silently, only a faint humming noise and the sound of conversation from other passengers reaching your ears. You slip your earbuds in and fiddle with the volume of your music.
It’s fortunate that even outside of Nueva York proper, you still benefit from some of the perks of living so close by, like the out-of-date tramcars and fourth generation wireless hair wraps. Makes life still bearable.
You wonder sometimes what it might be like to live in the city, riding in the sleek overground subway, glass unsmudged and no peeling plastic on the windows. It’s a silly daydream, but it makes the hours go by when you’re hanging off the back of the truck and trying to catch your breath after hauling in a street’s worth of garbage cans.
There’s a lineup outside the sanitation building when you arrive, all of your coworkers in their navy blue jumpsuits and hats slung low over their eyes. It’s too early to be dealing with whatever’s going on. You fall in line behind one of your coworkers, an older woman who works on the admin side, fielding customer complaints and scheduling maintenance crews. Your palms get a bit sweaty when the line only trickles forward; clock-in time is in the next ten minutes and the line hardly seems to be moving.
You tap your coworker on the shoulder. “Hey, what’s—do you know what the hold up’s for?”
The look she sends you is exhausted but not annoyed, not like you should know better. She’s ticked as well. “Corporate installed eye scanners to get into the building. Everyone’s getting registered.”
“Wait, why? We’ve never needed to before.” You frown, fingering the lanyard with your keycard hanging around your neck. They’ve never bothered with anything more sophisticated before; now you’re going to have to remember to get up a whole half hour earlier in the morning, maybe even skip your morning beachside routine altogether.
“Don’t know. Some new law got passed.”
“That’s such bullshit.”
Your coworker cocks an eyebrow. “You got somewhere to be in a hurry?”
Her judgment makes your cheeks go red and splotchy. “Pay’s gonna be docked…we’re supposed to clock in by eight.”
“Should’ve gotten here earlier then.”
You shoot her a look that could curdle milk. “Won’t your pay also be docked? We’re in the same place in line.”
“I’m a salaried worker. I don’t get paid by the hour,” she sniffs, turning around to face the front.
You sigh and roll your shoulders back, working out the ache. It’s a long way to the front of the line. Anxiety rolls off you in waves as the minutes tick by and soon enough, it’s been nearly half an hour and you’re only just approaching the front.
Two government workers dressed in city regalia stand on either side of the main door, instructing each worker to place their forehead against a silicone headrest and line their eyes up with the scanner embedded in the wall beside the door. You can see the brief flicker of light as the scanner passes over their eye and then the door clicks, swishing open and allowing them in.
When it’s your turn, the unpleasant woman from earlier slipping in through the doors as soon as they crack open, not bothering to say goodbye to you, you take a step closer and align your eye with the scanner. You clench your palms because they get clammy for some reason, sweaty like when you stare up at the highest highrises and wonder at who built them. The city official instructs you in a low voice to not blink as the scanner passes over your eye.
The light that shines into your eye is red, the sudden burst of it like another eye staring into yours.
An alert chimes from the bottom left hand side of his screen and for the first time in as long as he can remember—so long that his cheeks physically ache from the strain—Miguel smiles.
“There you are, gatita.”