Chapter Text
Quiet days at the Spider-HQ were hard to come by. There was always bustling, some alarm blaring, some nosy Spidey who opened the wrong door and had to be ushered out. Whatever peace and quiet Miguel could carve out of his hectic routine came mostly around 4 am, when – barred any life-threatening emergency – there was significantly less noise to navigate through.
Complete silence, though, the kind of ear splitting, maddening silence where even the low buzz of machinery is unbearably loud, can get to your head. Without anything to drown out the noise, it’s much harder to chase away the ghosts of the past, not to get lost in somber reverie.
Maybe that’s why Miguel felt the hairs on the back of his neck rise and took a fraction of a second more than usual to register it as his Spidey Senses alerting him of the door about to slide open. Revealing no one behind it. Miguel snapped out of his thoughts and scanned the room for any sign of movement, any bot that might have slipped in, any bomb rolled across the floor, but was met with absolutely nothing.
He rose from his chair, leaped down from the platform, and crept towards the door, ready to pounce at any sign of danger. He poked his head outside the door frame. Still nothing. A voice in his head that sounded eerily familiar to a certain AI hologram chastized him for being too paranoid, and he almost told it to get lost out loud, as he shut the door once more.
And then his hairs rose again.
“That’s a nice little office you’ve made for yourself.”
His spring already loaded from the door incident, he went after the source of the noise almost on instinct, swinging back on the platform to face…
It was the red that first stood out: crimson coating the intruder’s hands, leaving streaks on the papers he had picked up from Miguel’s desk; splotches all over his white shirt, from the tip of the sleeve that was peeking from the suit jacket, to the unbuttoned collar; splatters across his face, matching the red hues of the irises pointing straight at him with a glint Miguel thought he could recognize from most super villains he had encountered.
“Oh, do you mind?” The intruder pointed at the papers he had just dropped, with a fake apologetic tone. “I only wanted to do some quick browsing. I’m just so damn impressed with all the work you do! Truly. You’ve spun quite the web.” He erupted into what resembled a laugh much like a venus fly trap resembles a flower. It was sharp, shrill, abrupt, and it was what snapped Miguel out of his stupor.
His brain working a thousand miles an hour, he managed to blurt out the most pressing question gnawing at his stomach. The blood. “What did you do?”
“Hm?” The intruder’s eyes strolled after Miguel’s gaze and seemed to stumble into his own hands like with an old acquaintance. “Oh, nothing yet. Why, do you think I should?” He rested his chin on his folded hands, offering Miguel a grin that flashed him back to Sunday school, to a priest holding open a picture book and recounting Jesus’ temptation in the desert. He managed to wrench himself from the memory and took a step forward. Every fiber of his body was tense, holding him back from lounging at the stranger and slamming him against the wall: as much as he was itching to act, his rational side compelled him to get more information out of him while he devised a course of action.
“What are you doing in my office?”
“Well, you’re always so. Damn. Busy! I couldn’t reach out to you anywhere else! Do you live in this room, big boy? I bet you do.”
Another step. Paralyze him? No, he wasn’t close enough. Even if his powers could have him at the desk in a fraction of a second, it could have been a fraction too long. He had no idea what this… presence was capable of. He struggled to even label him as human: he had battled with enough monsters to recognize one instantly, but even then he knew he was in front of the ocean and only seeing a puddle. “You infiltrated into my office just to talk?”
“Why does no one ever take the bait? Aren’t you Spider-People supposed to be all banter and quips and fun?”
That remark cut deep, right to the cramped closet where years ago he had stuffed the part of him that at the stranger's previous statement would have made a snide remark about rent prices in Nueva York. “You didn’t do enough research.”
“Oh, but I have. Riddled with guilt, lovely dead daughter, and they say I don’t have a type-”
The intruder cut himself short. Miguel didn’t need years of experience in combat to know that it’s a little hard to talk with a hand around your throat, but it was still satisfying to get practical confirmation every now and then. Throwing all caution to the wind, he had pounced forward and grabbed the stranger by the neck, the momentum of his lunge pushing them both against the wall.
“Don’t you dare talk about her.” He growled, pressing his claws into the intruder’s flesh almost deep enough to draw blood as he raised him above the ground: it was about neutralizing a threat, he had the presence of mind to rationalize to himself. “I let this go on for too long.”
The intruder made a drawn out sputtering sound, gasping and wheezing in abject terror. Right up until he dropped the act with the same grin as before. “I agree.”
A snap of his fingers and Miguel was suddenly prone on the floor, head turned, unable to move while the intruder landed gracefully next to him.
“Oh! Hm!” Miguel heard the sound of a soft slap where the voice was coming from. “I forgot to introduce myself! Why do I keep doing this?” A pair of legs came into his vision, bloody footprints on the floor trailing up to his face. The intruder squatted next to him and stretched out a hand. “I’m Kayne.”
A second elapsed. “Right! You can’t move. God I’m such a scatterbrain! Literally! I spray it all over the wall first chance I getl!” He laughed again, more shrill than the first time. Or maybe it just rang louder in Miguel’s ears now that he was incapacitated. Powerless on the floor. “See, now I’m gonna need you to pinky promise not to try any of that again. I mean there’s no harm to me, it’d just be reeaal annoying to try and have a conversation like this. Blink- blink twice if you promise.”
Miguel only glared. Half of him was trying to fight against the paralysis, and the other half was rummaging through his memory to figure out what kind of being he was dealing with.
“Aw, don’t do that.” He sighed. “I knew this was a waste of time. A stupid idea, really.” His hand trailed to Miguel’s chin and absentmindedly tilted it up: even in his state, Miguel could feel wet blood coating his skin. Kayne seemed to be looking past him, searching his eyes for something until he startled back into presence. “Well! I guess you don’t want to see your daughter, then.” He let go of Miguel’s chin, and the drop of his stomach coincided with the thud of his head against the floor. He perceived a second snap as if underwater, and by the time he raised himself up with the weakest “Wait” he had ever heard himself utter, Kayne was already halfway to the door. He did a half pirouette, theatrically bringing his hand to his ear. “What was that?”
“What… what did you say about my daughter?”
“I knew you’d come around!” He sauntered towards Miguel again, offering out a hand which Miguel didn’t even so much as glance at. “See, I came here to offer you an exclusive deal. An offer you can’t refuse!”
“About… about Ga…” He couldn’t even bring himself to finish the name. He pulled himself up, legs about to buckle beneath him, clinging to one thought he repeated in his mind over and over again. It’s a trap. “What do you want from me?”
“It’s not what I want, it’s what you want. You want your daughter back. And I can give her to you.”
Grief made way to anger again: he moved a tentative step towards Kayne, baring his claws again. “You’re bluffing.” He had to be, he said to himself to squash the stubborn, pernicious feeling that had dared begin to take root. He had to be.
Kayne brought a hand to his chest with a melodramatic gasp. “Moi? I would never! Here, let me show you.”
Before Miguel could even register what Kayne had said, reality had warped. It felt extremely different from technological universe-hopping: it was much more visceral, like his guts had been seized and yanked forward, forcing his body to follow suit.
“Ta da!”
Miguel recognized the room as soon as his vision came into focus again. He had put all the glow-in-the-dark star stickers on the ceiling himself, laughing about the way the Andromeda constellation looked so crooked with…
Her school backpack was leaning against the wall, half emptied. A textbook laid on her desk, still open. He traced with a trembling finger the small doodle of an eye.
“Yes, I know it’s more impressive where there’s no technology for dimension travel, but I prefer a more organic method. What can I say, I’m old-school.”
“This is…” He turned to face Kayne, and again those eyes, that smile, they had him instinctively glance at the crucifix on the wall.
“Exactly what you think it is. A universe where she’s here. Well, now she’s at a friend’s house, but she is alive. Isn’t it nice?”
“No.” Miguel shook his head to dislodge the thought that was sinking its claws in his brain, refusing to let go. “No, I did this before and-”
“And before you didn’t have me. Hi. I’m Kayne. And not to brag, but I’m pretty powerful.” He picked up a stuffed lion and began absentmindedly toying with it. “I can set you in a nice universe. Give you your daughter back. No multiverse-ending crisis, no more Spider Folk, just a boring boring human life.”
Miguel struggled to think straight when everything his eye laid on was a punch to the gut.
Her wonky friendship bracelets, her posters for boy bands he had endured during endless car rides just to hear her sing along and laugh, her drawings framed on the walls...
He couldn’t just drop everything. He had a duty, without him the Timeline, the universe, everything he had worked for and sacrificed would-
A framed picture on the desk. Gabriella in her soccer uniform, grinning from ear to ear while holding up a trophy cup. She had a band-aid on her forehead, and her shirt had a visible grass streak, but she was over the moon. And most importantly, the trophy cup reflected an all too familiar pair on hands, holding the camera.
“… What do you want me to do?”
Kayne gasped, feigning excitement. “Is that a yes?”
“What. Do you want me to do?” He hissed out, almost feeling the bitter taste of his own venom in his tongue.
“Well, I need to kill some time while my dear close personal friend Arthur is doing me a favor, and what better way to spend some time than travel abroad? See, I’m not from around here. Not this universe, I mean. This whole plane of existence. Don’t think about it too hard, your head might explode. And I should know, like I said, I’m an expert at exploding heads!” That laugh again. It was starting to nauseate Miguel. “Anyway. Consider me a tourist passing through, doing some sightseeing, sampling the local cuisine, the whole shebang.”
“And what does that have to do with me?”
“Ugh, everyone is so self absorbed. I just told you I’m from another plane of existence, you could at least pretend to be interested.” Kayne sighed dramatically, making Miguel’s hands itch. He wanted nothing more than to grab his neck and squeeze until he begged for mercy, as much of a bad idea as that was. “Don’t worry, I’ll mostly let you go on your merry way, doing your silly little tasks, protecting the big mean universe. You’ll just be like a… hotel. Or maybe a local guide. Listen, it’s my vacation, I’m not supposed to work my brain. It’s about resting. Relaxing. Maybe even not killing anyone, I’ll workshop the details later.”
Every single alarm bell in Miguel’s head was blaring full volume. Even looking at the being in front of him filled him with visceral disgust, and he was supposed to help him, possibly endangering lives in the process, and for what?
His eyes fell back to the photograph. His daughter, happy and healthy and alive
“How about this. You think about it, big boy, I’ll be back in three days.”
“Why are you doing this?” Miguel locked eyes with Kayne, as if he could get even a glimpse of the soul behind them. Provided he had one to begin with.
“Because, my dear, I am immensely bored. Toodles!”
With a cheerful grin, Kayne waved his hand, and Miguel was whisked back to his office, alone and once again shrouded in silence. The loudest silence he had experienced in a very long time.