Chapter Text
one.
You’d never met the big boss before. That’s just how the timings worked out. Jess blazed into your universe on that crimson red bike and beams so high they were blinding, and the fabric of your reality bled like a shattered kaleidoscope as it tore open at the seams. Out roared someone almost just like you, wrangling the anomaly into submission in less time than it would’ve taken you to pull your phone out and snap a shot.
And that was that. In and out of your world in five minutes flat, with as much skilled precision as a trained surgeon and just as prepared to leave your head spinning afterwards. In terms of aftercare, she saddled you with an obnoxiously orange watch and an enticing job offer in her no-bullshit, take-it-or-leave-it delivery. For what it’s worth, that was more emotional support than you gave yourself every time you found yourself propped up against the door beneath the single flickering bulb in your bathroom, stitching up another wound you couldn’t bring yourself to explain to the hospital. The sickly fluorescent light was always just enough to wash out the redness of the blood.
So in an odd way, it had been sweet to know that someone out there gave enough of a shit to recruit you to a so-called taskforce. Made you feel less alone in the dark forest of the universe. And hope is one hell of a signing bonus.
It took you about three days to wrap your mind around the idea of the multiverse, though it’s not like you never understood it in theory. To be fair, half of that time was just spent contemplating whether you should even take another job on top of your mind-numbing nine-to-five, selling your soul to corporate America to pay the bills for a run-down New York City apartment that the rats spend more of their lives in than you. Then you had to account for your five-to-nine scouring the alleyways and dimly-lit streets for suspicious activities, police radio strapped to your hip like a gun. Sometimes that melds into another shift until dawn and the sun’s coming up and you just want one good night of sleep, why can’t criminals respect holidays and weekends and business hours?
(You agreed, of course; it was never really a question to begin with. Like you’re about to say no to part-timing in another universe?)
So the first time you meet him it’s a Friday afternoon and you’re wine-drunk at 4pm in the company cafeteria because if this spider society is just another corporation profiting off of your unpaid labor you might as well drink on the clock and on their dime. It’s not your fault they need to host a mixer every week for another round of much-needed introductions, they shouldn’t be recruiting everyone with a pulse who can hack some web-slinging contraption; there’s an infinite number of them out there. Soon they’ll have to worry about overpopulation, or at the very least pay attention to the fire code of the building.
You shake hands and exchange niceties. Being tipsy makes this experience much more bearable, but in the span of thirty minutes you’ve met twenty-three Peter Parkers and five animals and two abstract concepts and you swear you’re going to scream. You seek escape and find it in the tensed shoulders of the man hovering in the corner. He can’t help but stand out against the crowd (and this crowd is anything but ordinary), avoiding the throng by busying himself at the counter, muttering to himself beneath his breath, agitated—you can respect it. Do this job for a couple years longer and you might go insane as well. He’s more beast than spider really, the blades fashioned to his wrists capable of slitting your throat down to your stomach if he so much as flinches in the wrong direction.
You’ve never thought you liked your men armed and deadly, nor brooding and sullen, but the alternate-universe water supply must be absolutely contaminated with hormone-altering pollutants. Because you’re strangely captivated by the way he frowns crossly at the microwave rotating a lonely empanada on a paper plate, like if he glares any harder the countdown will sprint to the end out of self-preservation. It makes you laugh. You like a good challenge, wouldn’t be here if you didn’t.
You sidle up beside him. “At least use the toaster oven,” you say nonchalantly, in lieu of an introduction.
He turns to you blankly, apathy sewn into the harsh contours of his face like a second skin. His narrowed eyes sweep you head to toe, scorching in their intensity. More than ever you wish for your mask to hide behind; your skin burns where his gaze lingers, his stare ripping clean through your suit and his cynical eyes picking your flaws open like old scabs, like carrion birds cleaning your carcass off of sun-bleached bones. “Who are you?”
You jut your chin out, refusing to shrivel beneath his scrutiny. “Spider-Man,” you deadpan.
“We’re all—”
“That's the joke, genius.”
His eye twitches. The microwave beeps, sad little empanada finally spinning to a stop, a fittingly lackluster conclusion to its last dance. “Do I look like a humorous man to you?” he asks, lip curling in a grimace. You wonder what illicit thoughts he hides behind that impenetrable wall, whether he yearns for power or vengeance or redemption. Superhero levels of self-sacrifice do not stem from a lack of ulterior motives, from a person who is truly whole.
Those dark eyes remain trained on you, smoldering and assessing, cutting you down into inconsequential little pieces he can slap a label on and file away. You decide you hate it. “You look like a middle-aged divorcee with nothing more to live for but your job,” you say, blaming the inebriation for clouding your normally flawless judgment. You reach out, dauntless, if not a little bit reckless, and your fingers run down day-old stubble. He flinches away from your touch, as if you’re live wire. “Too close to home?”
His eyes are red. You think he might rip your throat out right there in the middle of the cafeteria. “It’s my duty. My responsibility.”
You scoff. “You’re not special, sweetheart. We’re all here to save the world.”
His hand slams down on the counter beside you and the empanada rolls skittishly on its plate. There’s an imprint where his claws have pierced through the wood, the contents of the cabinet underneath visible from above. A vein throbs in his temple.
His murderous expression screams that he wishes it was your chest he had punched through instead, but the hushed silence and conspicuous number of curious eyes lingering in the vicinity leads him to make the conscious effort to refrain. “Sweetheart,” he spits back, mocking, “you will never know what true power feels like.” His canines, long and curved, glint a greeting to you. A thinly veiled threat.
Perhaps you’ve got a death wish, but this danger tastes as sweet as wine, smooth as the timbre of his low voice and accented with bitter notes of mutually assured destruction. He might tear you to shreds on those sharp teeth and outstretched talons but you’ll be damned if you don’t take him down with you.
“Why don’t you show me what it feels like?” you purr, voice tinged with a challenge. You see him swallow, track the movement down his throat with hungry eyes. “We can see how much better I take it.”
He fixes you with that accusatory stare, merciless. You’re standing trial, but in his mind already convicted. “Why would I do that? I don’t make it a habit of picking up coworkers, no matter how attractive they are.”
The compliment gives you pause—so he does have taste. You press on, the grand prize so close you’re salivating. “It gives you something else to do instead of eating another frozen meal alone in front of the television.”
“It’s easy,” he says. Simple, plain, uncomplicated. “I like easy.” He’s not fooling anyone, least of all himself.
“If shit hits the fan, we’ll never have to see each other again. There’s more than enough spiders here for that.”
His lips twitch, briefly, so quick you think it might be a trick of the light. You’re not sure exactly what he finds so funny, but it’s the first positive reaction you’ve elicited from him all day.
“I’ll walk you to your door,” he acquiesces. The rest of the words hang unspoken in the negative spaces, implicit, a line drawn in the sand: there and no further.
“What a gentleman,” you grumble.
You get him past the door, of course. You can be convincing like that. Or maybe it’s eons of self-restraint and harsh discipline roaring past those raised floodgates and he’s just so so lonely and you start to see the outline of him, perhaps, under all the armor. It’s easy for him to just let you kiss him (or maybe he kisses you first), backing you against your door and dragging his claws down your suit and—
“I’ve got neighbors,” you breathe.
His nostrils flare in irritation, like he’s scenting you, the blood rushing through your veins and the alcohol heavy on your breath, and barely holds himself back. You stumble inside but make it no further than the foyer before he’s bending you over and ripping your suit open at your thighs.
“What’s your name?” you ask him, breathless, his fingers twisting in your hair as he shoves into you mercilessly.
“Privileged information,” he grunts.
“Shame I won't be able to moan it,” you laugh. His only response is to yank your hair back sharply, punishment for mouthing off, slamming his hips into you with a particularly vengeful growl.
He’s not gentle, anything but. He fucks you like he’s desperate, like he’s starving, a man searching for any semblance of meaning in the sanctity of your body. He fucks you like he’s carving his legacy into your skin, over and over again so he’ll never be worn away by the current of time. It's not pretty. It's claws piercing into your sides like the incarnation of wrath, hard and brutal and unforgiving until your legs tremble and your thighs are messy and dripping onto the floor and your lungs burn with each gasping breath and you’re crushed beneath the weight of it all. There’s no escape, not when he’s pressing you against him with one palm, forcing you to take each punishing stroke to the hilt.
He’s quiet apart from heavy breaths and the groans he stifles at the base of his throat, but when you lift your hips and arch your back further to take more of him you swear you hear him mutter to himself in something like awe, or reverence.
“I don’t do attachments,” he says at some point, and his timing is dismal because his claws are around your throat and you’re seeing white, high off the way he fills you up so completely, dragging against your walls with every deliberate move.
“I feel like we’re pretty attached,” you manage to whisper over his bruising grip on your windpipe, grinding your hips back into him pointedly.
He lets out a frustrated hiss. “Everyone dies. You’ll lose people too, you’ll learn it’s best to keep a distance.”
You huff out a laugh. “I won’t let it happen.”
He must not like that answer because he’s silent after, hands loosening on your tense, aching body, and you whine needily when his weight leaves you hanging, teetering just on the wrong side of the edge.
Gravity shifts. You lose your balance, legs aching as you stumble into a wall and sink down to the ground. He’s gone.
(You learn who he is afterwards, anyway. It’s not like those cheekbones are a particularly forgettable feature. You ask Jess about it one night over wine and pizza and she wrinkles her nose at you in dismay. “You’re fucking Miguel?”
So, of course, you say, “Who’s Miguel?”
He’s the poster boy of the group, the fucking founder of the organization. So much for never seeing him again.)
two.
Miguel O’Hara cuts an imposing figure in a three-piece suit. His shoulders strain at the seams of his blazer, a sad bouquet of mismatched flowers in his hand. It must have been years since the last time he’s pulled this out of his closet. This is the last place you expected to see him again, but you don’t have the energy for that conversation.
You’re kneeling before a freshly turned grave, knees stained with dirt. Your throat is raw, the bite of the winter air like a thousand invisible cuts down your throat when you inhale too deeply. You think you could just let yourself freeze there, to immortalize your incompetence into stone for future generations to dig up and study. It would've been even better to not have existed in this timeline anyway.
“You shouldn’t have,” you say, mustering the self-assurance with which you faced him that first day. You can't bring yourself to meet his eyes.
“My condolences,” he says, monotonously. Lines he’s rehearsed thousands of times over, no doubt. At least it’s not worse, not I told you so and serves you right for trying to cheat destiny and you will never win a rigged game, should’ve just listened, though you’re sure he’s thinking it regardless. You can't say you aren't.
“No,” you sneer. The effect isn’t quite there, diluted by the way your voice wavers like brittle glass on the precipice of shattering and your eyes are red and puffy and all you are is a failure of a hero: helpless, useless, defeated. Nothing more than a fraud in a sleek suit; the truth is revealed, the emperor has no clothes. “You shouldn’t have come.”
He is ice, unmoved. “He was going to die. He needed to die.”
You bark out an incredulous laugh. “How can you say that in front of his fucking grave?” you say, almost delirious with spite. You grab his wrist, want to wrench through bone to test once and for all if he’s really as infallible and unfeeling as the image he projects or if he’s just a man after all, just flesh and blood and bone like the rest of you. "Get out."
You drag him out into the parking lot. You’re parked far. You had sat inside your car for an hour debating whether or not you had the audacity to show your face at the service after such a spectacular failure. (You didn’t, had waited for the last attendants to trickle out. Guiltily. You couldn’t bear to see Gwen cry.) “He needed to die? Who needed it? Not me, not his daughter, not this world, just lines of code on your fucking screen. Do you even have a life outside your fucking algorithm? Do you have any fucking humanity left, or are you perfectly content acting like God?”
Miguel’s hands sit tensely on his waist, his face impassive. The flowers you refuse to take lie discarded at his feet, a trail of crushed petals in his wake. You want to crush it beneath your feet but you've ruined enough beautiful things today.
“What we do is important. It comes with the job.”
“Important to you,” you spit, contempt bitter on your tongue like the bile rising in your throat, like the taste of his smoky mezcal from that first night. “You get to fuck around and play house with your little replacement family and I’m supposed to sit here and let everyone I love die?”
You don’t have time to flinch—his hand hurtles towards your face and there are claws digging into your shoulders, like nails in your coffin. He rips you up off your feet and flings you into the side of your car, hard enough to dent the doors and bruise your ego and shatter a couple bones. Then he’s up against you, snarling in your face. “Everyone dies. Everyone dies. You’re not special, princess, you’re not different.”
“At least I tried,” you taunt, a keg about to blow. “What did you do, just sit back and let them die? So bound by your duty and your responsibility and your sanctimonious bullshit. They’re still dead, Miguel.”
It’s cruel. The words scratch your throat coming up, but they sting even more spilling out into the open. His claws pierce through your shoulder as you pins you against the doors. You’re wheezing, still coughing up blood from the impact, and the handle of the door digs into an old wound. You shove at his chest, hard. He’s as unyielding as forged steel, as inevitable as goddamn fate itself. He doesn’t budge.
“You have no idea the sacrifices I've made,” he hisses. You think if he’s going to kill you, he might as well make it quick and easy.
“You’re a coward, Miguel,” you say, because he let you fight the inevitable. Because he won't just end your agony right here and now. Because it's all your fault and you should have died to stop it and even now you can't bring yourself to say what you really are. Your eyes well with tears, pathetically, angry and stinging. Because if he’s right then what’s the point of all this, of any of this, of donning the mask and carrying the mantle and giving up your entirety to save people already marked for death?
You're just so tired.
His hand grabs your jaw, forcing you to look at him. His pupils are blown out with bloodlust where he fixates on your lips, bitten raw and stained crimson. You’re not prepared for the sheer vitriol in his burning eyes, the cold cruelty spliced between the gravel of his voice.
“So pretty for me,” he mutters viciously. “Like a little doll.”
Maybe he’s right, with your eyes glassy with tears and lips red as wine, cheeks flushed with a futile anger that is smothered before it can fully ignite. He drags his thumb roughly across your mouth, down to your jaw. The blood smears. He brings his finger to his mouth and your eyes hone in on the way his tongue flicks out eagerly to taste it, like he’s partaking in some consecrated communion, like it’ll bring him some sort of twisted salvation, some long-awaited redemption. His teeth bare in the semblance of a smile; it pleases him.
The smile turns feral, his voice dropping until it’s darker, deadlier. Irreverent. “Dolls don’t talk.”
He takes you in the back of your car, his tie shoved roughly between your teeth. You’re not so much riding him as he is bouncing you up and down on his lap like a ragdoll, talons digging into your waist and leaving behind ten perfect crescent-moon cuts. You’re crying regret-loss-failure into his chest, sobs soaked up by the fabric in your mouth like that makes it somehow more acceptable, less vulnerable. You claw through his clothes, raking angry scarlet gashes down his skin, like if he bleeds too he’ll finally hurt as deeply as you.
It feels like an escape, like self-destruction. You think, if everyone dies anyway then maybe it would be okay to let him tear you to shreds with his bruising grip and punishing tongue. You’re ready to beg him to sink his teeth into your neck, because you’d rather feel numb than any of this, rather feel nothing than everything. His fangs pierce the outer layer and you flutter your lashes shut to let that blissful relief spread through you, but then you feel the vibration of his watch against your bare skin and you want to yell in frustration.
He pauses, turns to look. Doesn’t make eye contact with you as he reads.
“Out.” you say. You’re pressing the remnants of your tears away with the heels of your hands, but it doesn't fill the hollow he leaves in you. The car door slams shut. You refuse to look but you know he’s gone.
three.
You’re grabbing him coffee and a sandwich, swinging up to pitch the little brown bag up towards his head. “I’m not a damn intern,” you grumble.
“Uh huh.” Miguel doesn’t look at you, hadn’t even offered a hello when you walked in.
“I got your coffee with cream and two sugars,” you say, knowing full well he takes it black.
He’s not listening. “Uh huh.”
You push his screen away and hop up onto his desk, crossing your legs. “Miguel.”
He makes eye contact for once. It's scathing. “Get off my table.”
“Not until you give me a mission. It's been long enough.”
“I gave you a mission. To the bodega,” he says, mildly pleased with himself, raising a brow like this technicality changes anything about how frustrated you feel cooped up like a prisoner inside the compound. You're a porcelain vase locked away behind so many safety measures and walls that it loses its original purpose.
It had been a pleasant trip. You pet the resident (spider)cat and flirted with the cashier and bought an elaborate spread to eat for lunch since you were swiping the company card anyway. Pleasant isn’t what you’re looking for. You’re looking for power, for conquest, for an adrenaline rush so potent it’ll make you lose your mind.
You kick at his chest with the heel of your foot. “Don’t treat me like I'm fragile.”
Miguel gives you a skeptical look. You know that look, the I could crush your wrist between two fingers machismo that reeks of smug self-satisfaction and unchecked chauvinism. It makes you bristle.
“It’s alright to be searching for purpose after loss,” he says drily. It sounds mocking from his mouth. He’s probably never learned to be gentle in his life.
(Maybe he was once. You’ve seen glimpses of it, fractions of weakness when his eyes alight on you for the first time in days and they soften, like snow on the beach and just as uncharacteristic. The slow kisses when he’s seated deep inside you, claws sheathed carefully away from your still-healing wounds. When you’re gritting your teeth determinedly as he splits you open and he rubs circles into your scalp, whispering sweet nothings into your ears. Doing so well, cariño, he breathes before he catches himself. Remembers himself and that legacy he’s built, so untouchable and impenetrable in that fortress on the hill. A god amongst men to his acolytes, a deity encased in marble, art made to be admired from a distance but never touched.)
“Did your shrink tell you that?” you say, resentfully. “Don’t try to psychoanalyze me.”
He shrugs, eyes flitting away. Onto another screen, another problem only he has the ability (the right) to resolve, shuffling you like an errant thought to the back of his mind. “It was on a poster.”
“I went, I did my five meetings, I'm done,” you insist. “I want more. I need more.”
“Be patient,” he sighs, brushing your hands away from a stack of notes he’s jotted down for himself. “Treat it like being on leave, just unpaid.”
Stingy bastard. “I want to be of use. You need more hands on deck, use me.”
His eyes flicker up at your words. You don’t like the look in them, like he’s misconstruing your words towards his favor. That’s how it always works with him, he demands and he takes and you are helpless before the lazy arrogance in those domineering eyes, calling for your blood to be spilt as easy as water—nothing less than your complete and utter submission.
“On your knees.”
“I’m not begging, Miguel, just send me out with Jess and I promise I’ll be useful.“
“On your knees,” he repeats, a languid drawl to his voice. A challenge. A chance, perhaps, to prove yourself and your loyalty, to pledge your fealty to your anointed ruler. Or maybe the power’s gone to his head and he just enjoys twirling you around to his command, a marionette on a string.
You swallow, sliding to the ground beneath his table, folding your knees beneath you. “You’re sick,” you say, but you can’t deny the way desire spirals relentlessly in the pit of your stomach. You open your mouth obediently, salivating as he presses the tip to your tongue.
Miguel moves you just how he likes. You taste the salty-sweet pearls of arousal on your tongue as he guides your head down in gentle bobbing motions. There’s something intoxicating in the choked groans he tries to stifle with his forearm so the sounds don’t echo off the walls and the way his hands tighten painfully on your hair, claws digging into your scalp every time your tongue teases that spot on the underside just right. It makes you want to push him farther, force him to the precipice, watch as his iron-fisted control begins to fracture.
His mouth is so filthy when he’s overwhelmed, possessed by some wild being of lust. “So good,” he says, hoarsely. “So pretty, muñeca, choking on my cock like this.” He’s watching you with some rapturous expression on his face, eyes hungry and fixated on the way his length disappears into your eager mouth, the line of spit demarcating how far down your throat he fits.
You glance up through your lashes to meet his gaze and he’s so devastatingly beautiful like this, his dark skin flushed with heat, fangs sinking into his bottom lip, chest heaving as he fights to contain his voice. He might be the one with the control, but you hold an irrevocable power even there at his feet.
But he locks eyes with you, defiantly, a smirk playing over those bleeding lips like he isn’t going insane beneath your tongue, and presses your head down until you're choking and fighting for shallow intakes of air through your nose. “You want it, don’t you? Show me how much you want it.”
More than once you hear the soft pad of feet outside, voices echoing in the corridor, and freeze with him halfway down your throat. Miguel must be more of an exhibitionist than you think because his hips will buck suddenly, hitting the back of your mouth. You gag on his length, trying to relax your throat to ease him in, and he hushes you, unsuccessfully trying to hide the vicious delight lurking in his voice. “Be quiet, you don’t want them to hear, do you?” he reprimands.
Despite his words, Miguel is the loud one, one hand on the back of your head as he falls over the edge, a whine building at the base of his throat as he fills your mouth. He drags the tip over your swollen lips, then reaches down to cup your jaw and press a thumb flat against your bottom lip. You open your mouth obediently, let him see the mess he’s made on your tongue. He groans, lowly.
“Does this mean you’re giving me my role back?” you say, a coy smile on your swollen lips. Eyes locked on your prize; you know he likes that about you.
He scoffs, straightening up, tempers the ghost of a smile lingering on the corners of his mouth. “Never said that, sweetheart. That would be some sort of nepotism.”
You sulk. “Then what’s the point of fucking my boss? Can they fire you for abuse of power?”
Miguel exhales an amused puff of air. “Go home,” he says. “I’ve got a meeting in five.”
You’re not proud of how hopefully the words come out. “I can stay,” you suggest.
His breath hitches. (You, beneath his table, so good and pliant and obedient. It would make dealing with the rest of the horde bearable, he thinks. You’re insatiable.
He gets a grip. Fate of the world over thinking with his dick. Something like that.)
“Go home,” he says, a decisive finality to his voice.
four.
You’re not one to sit pretty and wait. There’s nothing that makes you feel quite as alive as gliding through the air, eyes burning against the bite of the wind, spinning and dodging and striking off pure instinct. (Moments so right, so real they must have been woven into the fabric of reality itself.)
Nothing, except when you’ve got a beast of a man on his knees before you, snarling and fighting to sink his teeth into the flesh of your inner thighs. You’ve never seen him as vulnerable as when he’s buried deep in you, teeth snapping at your throat and fingers bruising your thighs, letting himself be selfish with you.
Miguel’s a good fuck but a terrible lover—his venom isn’t the only thing toxic about him, Jess says. He doesn’t stay, he doesn’t call, doesn’t court you, but he’s over more nights than not, feet leading him right back to your doorstep like it's his compass’ true north. He shows up drunk, guilty, needy. Says please (“I need you”), and you fall into his steady arms and his cutting tongue and the way he rambles into your hair when he comes. He’s never there when you wake up.
You’re not one to wait for a man. If he won’t assign you to cases you’ll just dig them up yourself, and really, this is no different from your days as a vigilante, this time with a tweaked watch strapped to your wrist instead of a police radio hooked to your hip.
It works well; you’re not half as incompetent as Miguel thinks you are. You’ve managed New York on your own for years, keeping the streets free of failed experiments and terrorists and bioweapons of mass destruction, even if that meant dozing off during your day job. Your body bore the scars to attest to your skills—he’s traced those same scars with his tongue, in a moment of uncharacteristic gentleness. Out of everyone, he should know what you’re capable of, and yet he’s the one insisting on keeping you safe and out of trouble and smothering you in bubble wrap until you’re drowning in it, itching for any way to relieve this gnawing feeling of uselessness.
So the vast majority of these secret missions go smoothly. So smoothly you’re able to sidle into flagged dimensions and apprehend the targets before Lyla dispatches anyone, and you’re just the shipping service that delivers the incapacitated bodies to the assigned agents wrapped in a pretty bow. It makes their jobs easier, and who in their right mind would complain about an extra set of hands? In a sea of repeating masks, anonymity’s no chore.
Therefore, statistically speaking, one little slip up shouldn’t mar your impeccable record. Miguel's overreacting, really, when he shows up fuming to the hostage exchange you’ve gotten yourself entangled in. You would have extricated yourself eventually, surely before the collapse of the multiverse he so fears. You hadn't even called for him to rescue you and yet here he appears anyway, storming in with a scowl as thunderous as a parent picking their troublesome child up from the principal’s office to drag them home by the ear.
His hand around your wrist is like a brand, searing in its anger. He marches you home without reacting to any one of your pointed quips like he usually would; you feel it building up within him like a volcano primed for eruption, some long-winded diatribe, some lecture. You’re surprised he isn’t at your throat already, that he’s even letting you walk on your own two feet behind him (read: dragged, staggering to keep up with his ridiculously long strides).
You couldn’t slip away if you tried, unless you wanted to dislocate your entire wrist in the process. The prospect had become more enticing the closer you got to your place, his expression borderline murderous.
Miguel points to your bed, a silent command. Sit.
“Say please,” you taunt, a derisive lilt to your words. You tug at your wrist resentfully, raw and chafing. It’s going to leave an ugly bruise in the morning.
He looks down at you scornfully, fire smoldering in his eyes and blazing on the tips of his fingers, because what else would explain why your skin burned at his touch? “Why should I ask when you’re mine? ” he growls. He throws you over his shoulder and onto your bed, hard enough to knock the air out of your lungs and set the world spinning. Your wrists are bound to the bedposts, a mirror of the restraints trapping you in that damp cellar mere hours ago. So this entire trek was for what? A change in scenery?
Miguel kisses you fiercely, teeth pricking open the skin on the inside of your mouth. He bites down on your tongue when you attempt a noise of protest, drawing blood, and your lips are bruising under the onslaught.
If you thought his default state was rough, he’s brutal today, pistoning his hips into yours without so much as a finger to ease the transition. He’s clawing through your suit for a touch of skin, of flesh, laying more stinging gashes on top of the wounds you’ve sustained already. Every time you tremble or flinch from the pain he grabs your waist and slams in to the hilt, waves of pleasure washing out the sting from the pain until you’re delirious, conditioning you to enjoy it.
“Mine,” Miguel snarls into your mouth. “How could you let that filthy criminal leave his mark on your body?”
He fucks you with your legs thrown over his shoulders and claws digging painfully into your thighs. Sometimes, he hooks one thumb into the corner of your mouth and the tip of his claw digs into your tongue and even the blood pooling in your mouth is so, so sweet. He lifts your hips up the way he knows you like it, when every collision is drawing desperate, keening whines from your throat and striking sparks straight into your core.
He drags you up to the edge, so close you can almost taste it, and time and time again denies you release. When your thighs clench and your stomach tightens he backs clean out, hands tightening around your throat until you’re lightheaded and begging, pleading for just a little more, please Miguel please I need it.
His laugh is cruel. “Do you deserve it, cariño?” Even the sweetest endearment is poison on that tongue, a stake straight through your heart. “Prove you deserve to come, prove that you’re mine.”
When he’s reduced you to nothing more than a writhing mess on soaked-through sheets, eyes unfocused and mouth thick, every stroke making you shudder from the shocks of overstimulation so sharp they’re stabbing through your stomach, he leaves you there. Slips your watch off your wrist and keeps you bound to the headboard, even as you’re coming back to your senses and thrashing futilely against the ties.
“Miguel,” you hiss, a warning bubbling on your tongue.
“You’re on probation,” he says, that deadly look in his eyes pinning you to the spot. “Indefinitely.”
“If you walk away now,” you say, fear and desperation like a noose circling your neck, “don’t come crawling back.”
Gravity warps. He doesn’t look back.
five.
It takes weeks, maybe months, but Miguel stumbles back to your place again. Raps on your door like the cops, pounding hard and insistent and accusatory. You almost don’t open up for him.
He’s bleeding from a gash on his side, blood soaking through his palms and pooling on the sidewalk, as red as vengeance. They’re going to think you murdered someone in the morning. You might murder him for even daring to darken your door again, strike him down where he stands while he’s weak; no better chance than now. You block the doorway. “Go home,” you say, words like ice, crossing your arms across your chest so he doesn’t see you shake beneath the myriad of emotions simmering in your chest and threatening to boil over.
Miguel looks at you, dizzy, delirious, swaying on his feet. “Home?” he asks, voice lilting up at the end. Vulnerable. Scared. He’s wandered too far out and now he’s lost himself, with no footsteps in the sand left to guide him back.
“Home,” you repeat firmly. "Your dimension, your building—whatever."
“Home,” he says, and he’s looking at you pointedly. He grabs your wrist, tighter than you’d expect given his ragged state.
You erupt. “Fuck, Miguel, you can’t just come around whenever you feel like it. I have a schedule, I have shit to do. I have fucking self-respect,” you plead, but his chest heaves with every breath and his dark lashes flutter like wings as he struggles to hold himself together. How far the mighty have fallen, you think bitterly. You can’t bring yourself to revel in his misery.
You snatch your wrist away, his nails scraping your skin, and stalk away. “I'll get some disinfectant, don’t bleed on my furniture or you’re replacing it.”
You’ve got a first-aid kit in the kitchen, but the medical facilities at headquarters are much nicer than travel-sized rubbing alcohol and gauze. You wonder what drew him here despite that fact, like a stray cat wandering back to the house that once fed and loved him.
Arms wrap around you from behind and he buries his face in your neck. You can smell his scent, the earthy notes of his hair oil interwoven with smoke and dirt and blood. It’s not easy supporting the weight of a grown man, let alone one built like a fucking mountain, but you hold your own.
“The most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen,” he mumbles. You feel the ridges of his teeth pressing against his lips, leaving light impressions on your shoulder. He’s sucking bruises into your neck, ravenous, a man starved. “Smell so fucking good.”
You try to push his head away. “Priorities, O’Hara. Let’s patch you up first.”
He’s docile under your hands, a dog on a leash. Gentle. You don’t know how much longer he’ll remain like this, fangs tucked and claws sheathed. You want to keep him.
“Please, baby,” he’s begging, as soon as your movements still. ”Let me have a taste.”
He’s pulling your hair to the side and like you’re lost in a trance, hypnotized, you bare your neck for him. His teeth sink into your skin, a knife cutting through butter. His blood sinks into your clothes, your palms left glistening red where you touch his skin. In a brief moment of lucidity, you wonder if this is what it feels like to be one.
You melt, involuntarily.
Miguel catches you, lifting you on top of the kitchen counter. Blissful warmth floods your mind, smooth and warm as molten sunshine. You should feel cold, weak, where he’s drank in your blood, but instead you feel like you’re flying or maybe falling, suspended in a cloud of infinities. Your head spins deliciously, every brush of his skin against yours sending butterflies to your stomach, liquid pooling between the apex of your thighs.
You catch a glimpse of his red eyes, dark and mesmerizing and hungry, and realize that you’ve just welcomed a predator through your front door. He’s spun a web and you’re caught in it, resolve crumbling like sand as his tongue laps at your neck and his fingers sink into you, gently, thumb rubbing soothing circles into your skin. He drinks in all your pretty noises, your gasping moans, catches them on his tongue and presses them like a promise into your skin.
You swear he must have injected you with kerosene, stoking this wildfire raging from within. Heat emanates from the punctures on your neck. It’s only a matter of time before you’re nothing but a pile of ashes before him. The way his clever tongue glides warmly over your ears and down the crook of your neck is nothing short of sinful, only further fuel for the fire.
He sucks the blood off your hands, your skin, reverent and devout, worshipping the way only a sinner can at the altar of your thighs. “Mi cielo, mi vida,” he rasps. “I’ve wanted you since the moment I laid eyes on you. Knew I had to have you.”
He kneels before you, pulls your legs over his shoulders. Presses his tongue flat to your entrance, teasing you in slow, loving strokes. Makes you come twice in a row on his fingers and his tongue before he even lines himself up to slide into you, rubbing the tip over the wetness gathered between your thighs, a mixture of his saliva and your leaking arousal. “I can’t live without you,” he confesses, a little guilty, a little defeated, fist squeezing tightly around his base as he holds himself back. “Needed you so bad, thought about you every night.”
He carries you to bed after, presses a lingering kiss to your forehead. Slips out the door before the sun comes up.
and one.
You catch him before he’s gone, with one well-timed shot to the back of his arm and a second around his thighs. A flick of your wrist and you’ve pulled him back to bed, wrapping the webs around your bedposts. “Running away again, Miguel?”
He strains against the webs to no avail, the muscles in his chest flexing as he struggles to break free. You’ve had plenty of time in his absence to manufacture a synthetic material focused less on distance or elasticity but rather tensile strength, a compound crafted solely for the purpose of holding this beast of a man back and bending him to your will.
“I need to go to work,” he bites, fangs extended. “I need to clean up a mess.”
“Jess told me you had a hard day.” Your faux-sympathy is sickly sweet, saccharine deception dripping thick off your tongue. You widen your eyes and bat your lashes, playing incredulous. “All of you couldn’t stop a fifteen-year old boy?”
He hisses out a frustrated curse, choked, throwing his back against the wall so hard he rattles the foundations of the building. “He’s going to destroy everything we’ve built.”
You swing up onto Miguel’s lap, splaying your palm flat against his chest to shove him solidly back into your headboard. His breath hitches, his eyes following every movement of your hand cautiously. He’s going to open the wounds from last night if he keeps fighting, his skin battered and bruised and painted with a myriad of sickly colors. You’ve never seen him this hurt before, not even after you finish with him.
“Everything you built,” you correct. “You can’t bear this empire on just your shoulders. Can’t you take a day off? Stay with me, for once?”
“How can I have you,” he says brokenly, “if I can't save everyone? If I can’t guarantee a world in which we’ll be together?”
“Then we’ll fight it together. I will be by your side, cariño.” Your hand sits over his heart, your hair a tether between your faces. Lips close enough you can feel the pull of his orbit and he yours, teetering on the edge of collision, the precipice of surrender.
Something must give.
He looks so tortured, so split. He straddles the boundaries between every world but can’t bring himself to live in just one. “Please,” he breathes. Begs. “Let me protect you.”
“I’m not letting you go again, Miguel,” you say, your words unyielding certainty, an anchor embedded firmly into the ocean floor. A threat, an assurance, a vow.
He must find some answer in your eyes, some solace or truth or redemption. Or maybe he surrenders, hands you the reins and gives you control, because if the horses go hurtling off the track then at least you go down together. Because endless sacrifice has scraped him hollow and the fate of eternity is a burden crushing him alive and he cannot ask for any more weight and still hope to survive.
He finally relents, chasing your mouth with his. “You have to stay beside me. Never leave my field of vision.”
You smile and press your foreheads together, lips glancing over his. “Promise you’ll stay?”
“Para siempre,” he says, conviction burning in his eyes like starlight. “'Til forever.”