Work Text:
It had always been a little weird whenever Miguel happened to call someone to the office for a conversation.
For the most part, all of their ‘communications’, which were really just instructions for her next mission, took place through Jess because he, according to Hobie, stayed cooped up in his weird, little office with its weird little elevator that had no real purpose other than for when he wanted a little more drama to color his interactions with his subordinates (or colleagues, as Jess sternly preferred referring to herself as whenever Gwen included herself and the others as the former) and those, too, were usually reprehensions more than actual conversations.
He was the boss. Everybody knew it, and respected it. She strongly doubted whether anybody had ever tested his authority, and it's not like she wanted to, per se. She just wondered how it would go if she hypothetically, maybe, perhaps, considered trying to.
(Laughable to even be thinking about this, she reminded herself. She chanted it to herself till it was a deep, funny, slightly fucking terrifying intrusive thought. Oh, she thought, you just know his anger and authority would throb as a painful reminder for days, maybe even weeks later.)
(but then, she has always been one of those people who would get their fingertips pierced and bloody, even though they knew the eye of the needle was sharp, knew it would definitely hurt at least a little bit, knew it would leave a bit of blood on the scene and everybody around her would either laugh or shake their heads and slap on a bandaid but nothing too permanent, right? Right. Exactly.)
Three whole months since her life had become emotionally, circumstantially, and spiritually completely cracked open and flipped on its back like one of the eggs her dad used to make for her before school that she would scarf down. Her back muscles would pain like there was no tomorrow and there would be tears of relish and hurt in her eyes, her dad would smile as he too would pour himself a cup of coffee and everything would be sunny, quiet, and subtly hurtful. The silence in and of itself acknowledged the person who wasn’t there, and they weren’t going to pretend like everything was normal, because it wasn’t. Her father barely acknowledged her outside of those times when he was severely struck by a fatherly urge to let her know that she was doing mostly everything really wrong, and to let her know that he didn’t really see her, not anymore, because how much more obvious could she make it all for him? She was practically screaming at him to notice every time she lied to him all too smoothly, the deliberate distance that she knew hurt so much more because all they both had was each other. Nobody else looked out for them but now, not even her own father would look out for her anymore.
Not that she needed him to. She held more ability to protect herself in her left arm than the entirety of his precious police force. And nevertheless, everything was great, she couldn’t even complain, even though Gwen’s back was trying to kill her after a night full of spiderwomaning and her dad’s eggs that were a little too raw even for her tastes.
And now, everybody around her was just another version of her, and everybody sort of truly fucking understood her, like she had never ever imagined she would ever get to experience.
Three whole months since she’d last seen her father, held up in the air, frozen, as he saw Gwen for the first time in her life. He saw what she was, and what he saw was a murderer, the murderer he had spent so many months looking for, the murderer Gwen had grieved of not just being the cause of her best friend’s death, but also just…being. She was a murderer to him, and she would never be anything else.
Entering headquarters, for what was only maybe her seventh time ever, was a different matter altogether. Over the past three months of imaginable freedom (from grief and her father who never understood her), she had barely spent a lot of time sitting around and just taking in how massively different her life now was. In her mind, and to her, it just was. It was different, and it didn’t matter because it was now her life. She wouldn’t trade it for the prickly discomfort of living with the man who was all she had and who, in return, also wanted her behind bars. This was so much better than that.
He wouldn’t believe what she threw herself headfirst into nowadays. He wouldn’t ever need to know how she was living.
Headquarters was a delight she only let herself indulge in sometimes because it was so fucking great being there. She also need to be there much anyway, Hobie’s universe was a great place to crash in those small intervals when she wasn’t hunting down another abnormality with her little team of friends who she was starting to feel like were starting to grow a little tired of her. Her workload had only increased ever since she joined the task force because Jess had only just given birth to her baby (she went to visit 20 minutes after she heard the announcement; holding Jess’s baby boy in her arms for anything more than a radiantly painful 30 seconds was still an impossible feat for her.) and because, Gwen assumed, Miguel refused to appoint anyone else for the cases with the most back and forth jumping between universes or maybe even leave his own office enough to go help out on himself.
There was something so wrong with that man in the way he treated everybody around him, even by Spiderpeople standards.
First off, she had never had a conversation with him outside of him barking orders on a call while he did who-even-knows-what in his office. She imagined him slumped over his desk, cursorily hacking into everybody’s designated multi-universal travel watches, broad shoulders hunched over while he monitored and angrily grumbled to himself about every little thing they did wrong.
Well, she was about to find out if what she thought he spent his time doing was actually true. For the first time in all the three months she had been working for him, he had called specifically for her to come to see him. She almost thought Hobie was fucking with her for a few minutes when he told her.
“What could he want from me that he couldn’t just pass along through you or Jess? Hasn’t he done that for months now?” she asked Hobie while searching for her shoes in his tiny apartment.
“Dunno. It really doesn’t help to not go when he calls, though,” Hobie replied through another puff of his morning blunt. It smelt strong and thick as it clouded around the tiny room and he exhaled once more, being as obnoxious as he could about it. He smiled at her with teeth. “You hungry?”
“Yes.”
“Wanna make breakfast, then?”
“Fuck you.”
Gwen reached the highest floor of the Headquarters, the end of the hallway on the right, just as Hobie said it would be, doorless, and why would it be? He didn’t need a door to be left completely alone with all the privacy a man like him could ever need.
Walking into his ‘office’, she realized that the first weird thing about it was the elevator he had installed on a tall pole, floors within a room within an office. She couldn’t even tell if he was actually even in there. And she definitely did not want to test that theory out by calling out for him in his own office. He had to be in here. Should she come back later? Call Jess, ask her how the whole interaction was supposed to work out? Why didn’t she bother with doing that before she turned up in his office like an absolute mor—
There was a sudden whirring noise— the elevator, it had to be the elevator— it was descending at a crawling, ever so patient speed that made Gwen’s palms which never felt sweaty in the deadliest of situations feel horrifyingly moist. What in the ever-loving fuck was he up to?
And she knew he was there in the office. She could sense him, smell him, hear him the lower the elevator dropped, and the point of it dawned on her, she realized, embarrassingly late.
“Miss Stacy,” she heard his familiar, low voice call from the depths of that infuriating elevator, and all she could feel was dread, now. She could admit it, she was a grown-adult woman. She was scared of him the way everyone told her she should be, and now she was. She was so scared of what exactly it was that made him sound so… well, somber? Serious? Miss Stacy? The last time she was addressed as such was in high school, and his tone really reminded her of all of the times she was reprimanded for doing something wrong. Her dad took on that tone when he had bad news to deliver and he didn’t know the appropriate emotional balance between the good kind of concern and the adult kind of responsibility to not your kid as best as you can ( Gwen, I have some bad news about Peter. Your friend, Peter.) . That tone had never held good news in her life.
The worst thing she could imagine happening to her could be on the other side of this… conversation with her boss and she wanted nothing more than to just leave and never have to hear it. She would leave and try to never look back ever again if she didn’t have to hear him give her false niceties and reasons for why the best thing that had ever happened to her had to be taken away.
She took a step onto the elevator as soon as it reached the ground. There was no delaying this. And there he was. What a sight he was for sore eyes, sitting in the darkness with his palms folded together in front of him, the picture of professionalism. His office was, for the lack of a better term, in a complete state of havoc. She could see at least five laptops off the top of her head on different surfaces open to pages with pictures of different people she could not recognize, files, and papers scattered everywhere on his desk also with faces and names and ID numbers assigned to them by him and people who worked for him. She saw scrawled writing in red ink on some before she decided to get her act together and look him in the eye while he shot her down. His hair and the black shirt he had were neat, betraying every other aspect of his appearance she could pick up on. His eyes were red, bloodshot, sleepless. The barely restrained anger he held in his shoulders was there wound up so tightly she could smell it.
“Do you want to have a seat?” he nudged his chin just the slightest towards the chair opposite him.
“Thanks for inviting me, Miguel. Is this serious?” she swallowed the bile she felt rise up to her mouth, there was no reason for her to be nervous if he’d made up his mind to fire her and let her go back to the ruination that was her past life that he knew awaited her. He saw the entire confrontation she had had with her dad. He was there the last time she saw her dad, too.
“Yes.” his eye had just twitched. She was so very sure that it had. “I'm assuming you don’t have a problem skipping the small talk?”
“Absolutely not.” Rip the bandaid off. I'll make sure you know how much it hurts.
“ How well did you know Miles Morales?”
“Well. He was my friend for a while.” Strange detour, but she wanted to see where he was going to take it. “Can I ask? Is this— is this about him?”
His eyes gave her nothing . They were so dark and angry and tired.
“Were you together?”
Gwen blinked. “Excuse me?”
“You knew he was also like you.” he stared at her, narrowing his eyes infinitesimally, not quite asking a question. It was a statement he was just asking for as confirmation. “It would be natural for people like us to bond over… being us.”
There was no denying that this was the most unexpected turn this conversation could’ve taken for Gwen. She was about to get fired, wasn’t she? Why would Miles be a part of this? Was he the reason she was called here?
“I’m confused, Miguel.”
“About your relationship with Miles?”
“No.”
“We’re aware you haven’t seen him in the months you’ve been here.” Miguel threw another squinting, suspicious look at her, his head tilting to the left. “Have you?”
“I— I know that!” Oh, she hated him. “And I haven’t met him since I joined you. I’ve been too busy working, as I'm sure you know. And why is this about Miles? Is there something wrong with him?”
And there was finally something in his face. He was angry. He leaned against the desk towards her, folding his arms against his chest, and she felt her eyes follow the movement, gauging. He looked nothing less than furious about something, and Gwen had a strong feeling this was what people referred to when they spoke of him, of what it was that made him the most fearsome of her kind. There had to be something that kept the most free-spirited of her kind to bend their will for him. There was a violence to his gaze that was highlighted by the light of his open laptop on his face, now visible as he leaned forward.
Her relief hadn’t even barely begun to settle in before it was replaced by fear. Her throat was dry as the moment she walked in. She wasn’t scared of losing her job anymore. She wasn’t even really afraid of anything happening to Miles. There was something irrational behind why the appearance of a bulging vein in his forehead left her silently apprehensive.
“All you really need to know,” he leaned forward further, his dark red eyes aglow in the light, trying to look her in the eyes as much as possible, “is that he’s about to do something wrong. Something terrible. The fate of the entire multiverse, the entire infinity of them, depends on what he’s about to do.”
His breath was on her face, hot on her nose. There was no way to be sure but he had just looked down at her mouth when he said “thousands”, there was almost no denying it. She could not tell if he was even trying to scare her into understanding the severity of the situation anymore. He would not succeed at it, even if he was. She would not let him.
“What is he about to do?”
“I’m sorry?” He asked, a trail of mean, mocking air following his words.
“If you know he's about to do something destructive of that magnitude, I'm assuming you know what that is.” She just barely got the words out before she swallowed as inconspicuously as she could, trying to placate her prickly throat. There was no helping how breathless she sounded now.
“It doesn’t matter. What matters is that Jess thinks you deserve to go see him before it does.” He paused for effect, his bright eyes roaming her face while his own remained as impassive as ever. “You care about that boy, don’t you?”
“Of course, I do,” Gwen professed slowly, thinking her answer through, and it still sounded involuntarily small and whispery, as if she was confessing to something deep and horrible under the weight of his horrid, all-seeing gaze. “He was the only friend I made since—”
“—Peter,” he completed, sitting back. “We know all about that.”
“We? You keep saying that.” this was all she needed from this conversation. She felt dangerously close to breaking under that ridiculously intense, microscopic scrutinization. “You keep saying that. Are you referring to just yourself or does everyone know about who died so I could land up here?”
He smoothly interjected, emotionless, pricelessly unbothered by her tone, “Just me. If Jess knows it would only be either because you probably told her or she found out on her own. It's important for me to know about your background.”
“Because I’m new,” Gwen posited.
“No. Because you now work here.”
“And I’m one of the best you have?”
He stared back at her, responselessly. A long moment passed before Gwen felt almost compelled to blink under his ridiculous power.
“You know, I would still like to know what it is that he does. I wouldn’t tell anyone. Maybe I could even help talk him out of it. Very subtly, of course. He would never know.”
Something shockingly resembling a smile pulled on the corners of his mouth. He almost looked away before he looked even more closely, his skin glowing under the light. “You remind me of somebody I used to know.”
Her eyebrows knitted together, and Gwen almost laughed at how afraid she felt of his full attention at that particular moment. “What, was she blond?”
Miguel only looked away cryptically before continuing. “Jess will let you know when you can go visit him. You cannot leave the headquarters before you hear from her.”
Oh, I see. Absolutely the fuck not. “As much as I like this place and think it's so fun, I’m assuming that will be very soon?”
“It will be when I decide to give her notice that she can let you go.”
“Which will be soon?”
“That will be all, I think, Miss Stacy.”
“I would prefer it if you didn’t call me that. Do I have to call you Mr. O’Hara too?”
“If you wanted to, you would’ve already.” he was studiously avoiding looking at her, and she had never felt so dizzyingly dismissed, so quickly. “That will all, Gwen. Remember what I just told you.”
“The part where i can’t leave? I won’t, of course not.” Gwen pushed herself off the chair, feet planted firmly on the ground and still just about reaching eye contact with him seated, which he of course, wasn’t meeting equally. “Not until I find out what it is that you think Miles is about to do.”
Gwen was so exhausted by the time she laid her head down on a pillow that she couldn’t even complain about the lack of a private bathroom. Her room was fine, of course, it was better than anywhere she’d crashed over the past three months, oh it was definitely better than Hobie’s couch.
Sighing contentedly as she stretched her arms and legs all she could think about before her eyes drifted shut and into unconsciousness were red eyes and olive, tanned skin glinting ominously under dull light.
It was the pressure over her mouth that woke her up, very methodically just enough to wake all of her enhanced senses up, but not enough to make her nervous system react impulsively immediately. And there was anyway no reason to panic before assessing the situation fully, Gwen decided before she even opened her eyes to face it fully. Even before she had opened her eyes fully, she knew this was something she would either fight to death, or die if she even tried to fight. Gwen’s eyes were watering in panic before she even opened them.
The glint of his red eyes was the first thing she saw when she did, of course. Her body knew it, it recognized his distinctive smell, smoky and squeaky-clean, just as it had been in his office. It had only been her brain trying to deny the obvious telltales of her body and his identity.
“This will go so much better for you if you don’t resist.”
Gwen’s eyes were blurring with tears of panic, and she rapidly blinked, trying to will them away.
“I’ve thought about what you said. I did. Over the past few hours.”
“Fuck you,” she muttered, inducing as much venom as she could into words that were muffled by his large fucking palm anyway.
“Easy.”
“Fuck. you.”
His hand pressed over her mouth, hard, and his hand pushed her face towards her extreme right, bending her neck painfully.
“Let me remind you that this will be painful for you if you try to fight. Don’t. We can talk and this will not go as badly as you can fucking make it go for yourself.”
Gwen took a breath and forced her breath to calm. It was now or never. Slipping out both of her legs from under him, with nothing but half a breath to her lips, she wrapped both of her legs around his hips, forcing his weight off her, off, off—
His weight was almost half off her when it became obvious to her that it was too late for her to get any further than that, because at that moment Miguel grabbed her jaw, pushed it up to open up the juncture of her neck, nice and clean, and without a moment’s delay, sunk his sharp, sharp fangs in, breaking skin, Gwen brokenly moaning around his deep exhale through his nose. He drew in another deep breath through his nose before sucking on her neck, taking blood more and more, deeper and deeper draws into his mouth. After two deep draws of blood that she could hear him gulp down, Gwen realized something that brought her attention back to the mission at hand— escaping from under him— but one thing was also becoming startlingly clear to her.
She couldn’t move her arms and legs anymore. Her limbs wouldn’t cooperate with her. Neither would her toes, fingers, her neck that he was licking clean of blood.
“I’m sealing the wound shut so you don’t bleed out to death right here,” he answered as if in response to the unspoken thought.
But he hadn’t spoken at all either. His tongue was busy leisurely laving away at the bite on her neck.
“That’s right. Telepathy. I don't have to talk out loud for you to hear me now. And neither do you. Because you can’t speak. You’re paralyzed because you wouldn’t fucking listen to me when you’re told to shut up and listen. ”
He paused to push himself off her slightly, to inspect both her neck and her face now. There was an angry tear flowing freely down her face. He grabbed her chin, with dangerous, horrible gentleness, and looked down at her eyes straight now.
“Has nobody ever taught you to listen to people who know more than you?”
He stroked her cheek so softly. “Of course not. Look at you. Would you have ever abandoned your father the way you did if you had been taught to respect your elders?” he laughed, a gust of air landing on her tender, healing neck, and she flinched.
“Would you be acting as recklessly as you have on your missions if you’d been taught to value and take care of your life? You wanted to get hurt. Didn’t you, Gwen? You wanted to get hurt badly at least once so you could see how badly you’ve failed at that, too. Just like everything else.”
A feather-light kiss on her neck, trailing down to her collarbone and Gwen wanted to writhe. There was no protesting, and now she couldn’t even have the luxury of reaction.
“If you had been taught to respect authority, you wouldn’t ever have questioned me. Not when I’ve given you a chance to say goodbye to your friend. Hmm, little spider? Why can’t you appreciate what I’ve allowed you?”
Gwen mentally fisted the sheets when she felt him breathe over her breast, her nipple hardening devastatingly quickly in response. Assumingly pleased with her reaction, he moved his hands under her thin tank top, smoothing his rough, warm hands over her hipbones for a moment before pulling it off, her torso, her chest, pulling it all the way up to her face, right up to her eyes and then leaving them there. With her sight being covered by her white translucent top, Miguel’s mouth descended directly over an uncovered nipple, drawing in a deep breath through his nose, and then sucking deeply as if he was trying to drain her of all the poison he had filled in her blood in the first place. Gwen sobbed out a moan, to her own shock, when he moved on to the other one. Not even his venom could hold her noises in, and she found herself wishing that the venom had lasted longer.
His mouth worked remorselessly while his fingers dipped inside her panties to find her core, soaked and wet right up to the bedsheet.
“All for me, huh? Is this all for me, pobecita? Did you do this all by yourself?” She felt him test the pressure of his sharpest teeth on her thigh, as if testing if it actually hurt her if he did that.
Dragging his mouth up to her cunt, wet and feverishly warm, he licked her long and slow over the crotch of her panties. Then he did it again. And again.
“Take it off,” Gwen gritted out in between pants that she tried to hold in as best as she could. “Take it off.”
“Miles’s father is going to die,” he told her as he pulled her own tank top off her eyes, already pulling his t-shirt back on. Gwen stared at him as he buttoned his pants next. She wanted to sit up but it would be a few days before she could maybe even walk properly again.
“But he’s going to try to stop that from happening. Change the sequence of events as they should take place. As they need to happen.” he bent to look at her face, red and tear-stained. A tiny smile of satisfaction pulled at the corner of his mouth.
He kissed her forehead, it was the most tender thing he could’ve done when she was feeling this ruined. “Get some sleep, Gwen.”