pairing: miguel o'hara x 'wraith' f!reader
rating: mature
word count: 5.4k
summary: both you and miguel are given some food for thought following your tryst at the gym
warnings: enemies to lovers, angst, talks of consent, miguel o'hara is kind of nice (?), hobie is s a real one as per usual, self-hatred, violent imagery, no use of y/n
notes: sorry for the long wait, have a whole scene in miguel's pov as an apology teehee. these chapters are getting longer as our feelings get more complicated (and more dialogue heavy) so bear with me and pls let me know what y'all think! i live for the feedback
It feels like a dream. The memory.
As tricky as a handful of sand, scooped up into your fist. For as much as you tighten your clutch around it, it evades you, trickling out from between the imperfect gaps of your fingers. You scramble to catch it, to cross your legs so it piles onto your lap, but you’re not as quick or sticky as it requires you to be. It joins the shore, and you’re left piecing it together, one grain at a time.
Your foolishness. His reciprocation. The sheer debauchery of it all.
Time, too, works against you. It gorges on the bank, like a gluttonous ocean. Every passing hour, the reality of what happened wears thinner and thinner. The details are lost amidst the foam.
It feels like a dream, and you can’t rationalise it for all you try.
You’ve had your fair share of regretful hookups; tough mornings after parties, waking up by a person you hardly remember chatting up, your phone clogged with messages from the date you abandoned. The memories are piled up somewhere, tamping the shame that occasionally spiles at their mention. When ratioed against your life as of late, however, they surmount to nothing. Small blips in judgement made by the woman you no longer are.
What happened with Miguel was no blip.
You’re ruined. The one avenue towards redemption now soiled with spit.
Because sure, it was entirely consensual. You can’t deny the heat that had transpired between you, disgorging the pent up aggression into something unanticipated. He’d been on top, straddling your chest, pinching the breath from collapsing lungs – and maybe the hypoxia had contributed to your delirium, but you’d taken him in just the same. With a fervour; filthily, drunk off the scent seemingly woven into his flesh. You stopped him from moving away, your hand caressing a thick thigh. You directed him into an ever-pliant mouth.
(What’s worse, you’re still halfway there; stuck between your lust and rationale.
Left high and dry, as one might say.)
Regardless, it doesn’t change what you’ve done, nor the consequences it’ll inevitably source. That’s how it is with him – difficult, a meandering path away from the most immediate answer, leading into a compromise that only ever complicates things. That’s how you imagine it going, anyway, towards either of two conclusions:
This stops. Everything – not just the boundary broaching, but your training too. Chances are he rues his misdemeanour far more than you do, prized discipline shattered across a gym floor. And, if it means as much to him as you guess it does, then he’ll take every measure to ensure your temptation is as far away as possible. You’ll be pulled by the scruff – a naughty kitten caught knocking cups off a table – and sent back home by dawn.
Or–
You suppress the shiver that slithers up your spine.
He glazes over it, keeps you around. You’ll bump into him eventually – when your guard lowers enough for his presence to creep up on you – and he’ll call you out for lacking commitment. The lecture already congeals in your imagination, taking on the same stern tone he reserves for your worst, unaffected by your mutual transgression. It would imply he does this often, or is otherwise desensitised to your salacity – which registers as plausible, if only for the ways he’s ignored it in the past.
In any case, you can’t be normal about it.
Dawn’s pink fingers press you flush against your mattress, cocooned in sheets that have adapted to your warmth overnight. You stretch, working the muscles that have compressed in your sleep, before quickly settling back in again, your face buried in a feather soft pillow. You feel like a cat, lounging in a patch of latticed sunlight, drunk off pure sloth. The indulgence is good for once. Your overthinking tends to be loud, an overstimulating confluence of doubt that leaves you reeling, like you’ve been dipped in static. Here, cozied up somewhere comfortable, it slows to a healthier pace. Contemplative almost, floating beside the dust motes bobbing mid-air.
He’d reciprocated.
You won’t forget it. Won’t let yourself heal the bruises on the roof of your mouth, or the soreness of your tonsils. He’d cradled your jaw and sought release down your throat, in spite of all the mess staining your relationship’s history. The Miguel who’d tracked you to that quarry wouldn’t have succumbed, nor would he have done so in that storelot, patting you down for your day pass. In much the same fashion that he wouldn’t have remedied his use of that cursed name – Wraith – before you’d told him how much it irked you.
You knew that something shifted following your confession, cramped between bone-dry rubble. You’d flayed yourself out, a frog killed for dissection, and let him examine the innermost, vilest parts of you. You thought it might’ve been resignation – that tired look in his eyes – the fallout in realising you were beyond reason. But then he’d granted you room and board, this sheltered haven much more favourable than the intermittent state of an apocalyptic world. You’re fed, and clothed, and are physically separated from the criminal anomalies in laser cells. He met you in that gym, ready to push you to the potential he must’ve spotted in order for all the above to be viable.
You hesitate to say it, but perhaps this is the purgatory you’ve been looking for.
(Had you failed your first test, by tempting an otherwise moral man to spill himself into you?
Or was it the only one; like Eve in Eden, grazing her teeth along the skin of a damned apple?
You don’t want to fall.)
Your belly rumbles with the intensity of coins rolling down a cobblestone path. It lurches and chatters and draws awareness to the fact that you haven’t eaten in a while, running purely off your will to avoid any human interaction. You’d taken a shower last night after spending the whole day marked with dry cum, heaving within closed quarters in panic. It’s ebbed to a distant hum now, not as prevalent in the backwash of prolonged rest and a cleanse. Your skin feels soft, scrubbed raw with generic-scented soap, and you know that some filling food will bolster you back onto your feet again.
Only then will you think about where to go from here. Only then will you be able to, sated with everything you can lose if you don’t traverse carefully.
The henley you slip on is cool against your sleep-soaked flesh, wrinkled in places but snug enough for you not to mind. Already, by wearing civilian clothes, you stand out – a speck of normality amidst the bustling crowd of spider-heroes in spandex. Add it to your reputation for being the bane of Miguel O’Hara’s existence, and you already have a picture not worth changing anytime soon.
Your joggers follow soon after, loose and sitting low on your hips. You remind yourself to thank Hobie, should you cross paths with him.
Spider Headquarters must have been built to confound you – or any outsider, for that matter.
Yesterday, you’d carefully mapped your way to the cafeteria, taking note of every sudden turn and the shifting distinctions between up and down. It’d been rudimentary enough, an eventuality if you kept one hand glued to a wall and kept walking straight. But today, the layout has capsized into another labyrinthe entirely. You duck around corners, keeping note of the inverted pathways bridging over your head, only to end up exactly where you started.
Your stomach continues to clench furiously, revolting at your inattention. Perhaps it would be easier if you attempt one of the alternate routes – the upside down lanes designed for spider-people who can defy gravity – but you aren’t exactly assured in your abilities to stick to upended surfaces. Which you are capable of, just as much as the next, but the blood rush and internal effects are hardly negligible. Your last bid had found you dizzy with chronic vertigo, swallowing the sick threatening to expel from your gut.
Of course, if you could control your more unique powers, then none of this would be necessary. You’d walk through walls until happening across your destination, like a spectre haunting the wings of a manor refurbished to a point it is not used to.
Biting your cheek, you turn into an entryway leading to a larger common area. A few strangers hang around, donning masks with upturned eyes and absent mouths. You can’t tell whether they notice your ingress; whether the searing holes along your back are their stares or your own, phantom construction of it. You’ve never been anxious around unfamiliar crowds, but since coming here, your nerves constantly crackle like they do at the end of a bad joke. You feel skinned, exposed to the elements and whatever judgements these heroes might have of you.
(You wonder whether they can see how rotten you are. Are there senses honed to detect criminals, carnage-destined girls who ruin everything in their wake?
You’re afraid that, if they do, it’ll confirm all the worst things you feel about yourself.)
Steering out of the room, you step into the monumental embrace of the lobby. It’s busier here – you seek both reassurance and fault in that. You’re less likely to be noticed. If you are, though, it would mean hundreds of eyes on you. You hug your torso and walk faster, faced directly to where you believe the cafeteria is.
You wish you had a suit of your own; a mask to hide you from the outside world. To occupy yourself from the anxiety torrenting through you, you imagine what it would look like. Surely, you’d take inspiration from the thousands of pre-existing ones. An insignia on the chest, between the clefts of your breasts. Skin-tight, with dual colours in bold shapes. You ponder on whether the scalp should be left open, to allow space for your hair, or if you favour a more streamlined look.
And the eyes. You filter through the trends you’ve seen thus far. Those cat-like, upturned pits. Jess Drew and her goggles, though those remind you too much of your previous ones. Miguel’s mirrored contours – you’ve always thought his could be likened to a skull’s silhouette, so you vow off the pattern entirely.
Isn’t it tradition, though, to pull inspiration from your mentor’s design? You assume so, but the notion sits on your brain, unable to dissolve into anything real. After everything that’s happened, besides the shitshow at the gym, he doesn’t feel like a mentor at all. He isn’t the type to coax you on as you carefully tread up a wall, combatting the innate fear keeping from doing so, or to give you the secret recipe for web-fluid. He didn’t even seem occupied in helping you control your power – in fact, it would probably be in his best interests if you kept on living without them.
But when you’d asked to be taught in the ways of a hero, you’d been under the impression that his tutelage would pertain to all of those things. You’d never been given the chance to learn them for yourself – your home-world a wasteland with limited resources – but Spider-HQ fosters the perfect place for it. Its leader, on the other hand, seems to be more focused on the philosophical, which you’ve no room for. You already grapple too much with your existence as it is.
By the time you reach the cafeteria, you’ve worked yourself into another frenzy. It doesn’t help that, when you order your burger, it comes out blue and adorned with Spiderman 2099 embellishments.
Jesus Christ.
“Bit egomaniacal, innit?” A deep voice sounds from your right. You nearly jolt out of your skin, clutching the edge of the bar to keep you from falling off your raised chair.
“Hobie,” You squeak, blinking rapidly to dispel the shock from your expression. He gives you a lopsided smile, wiggling his fingers to signal he means no harm.
“He insists it wasn’t his idea, but I know the truth.” His wicks bounce to obscure his forehead as he nods to the plate. You have to bite your knuckle to hide your pleased smile, delighted at having someone who shares your exasperation. The air balances on the imagery of Miguel going through themed food proposals, amusement imbued while the punk finds a seat next to you. “I heard what happened.” He adds, stretching a long leg to touch the floor, his guitar placed on the table. “With the deal ‘n’ that.”
It doesn’t feel as serious as it ought to be. Had it been anyone else, you would’ve been pushed back into your troubled stupor. Hobie brings a levity to it though, his broaching of the topic bordering on casual, as if anomalies being allowed to stay by the boss that hates them is nothing remarkable.
“Is it common knowledge?” You ask.
“Nah.” He grabs a fry. You push the plate towards him. “‘Course that’s just how he wants it.”
“Miguel?” The prod is unnecessary. You can imagine a few reasons as to why he’d require your situation to be kept confidential. None of them appear to be that big of a deal, not with the man you know, but Hobie’s suggestion points to something larger. He doesn’t address it any further, however. You appreciate it, the trust – he’s given you the idea to consider and doesn’t shove it down your throat. It’s a novelty, a bout of crisp air after being compressed in a claustrophobic blind spot for months.
“Why stick around? You don’t need all this.” He capers on to his next concern. You mark it amongst the others to return to later.
“I’m starting to think that maybe I do.” You reply, candidly. The truth floods from you before you can do anything to stop it, consequence to the quickly alleviating weight on your chest. You guess that it’s the way he listens and inputs his own opinion. It isn’t in patronising riddles, the manner in which everyone else addresses you lately. He lays it down, clear as sea water, to help you find your own reflection on it all. “I don’t know the first thing about being a hero.”
“Hero, eh? Self-mythologizing term, if you ask me. Case in point,” He points to the burger. A laugh bubbles up your chest. “Everyone here, they’ve lost the plot. Whole point of being a spider-person is your independence.”
(Look where that’s gotten you.)
“That hasn’t done very well for me in the past.” You tell him, because despite the perspicuous advice, you don’t have the advantage of hope on your side. You can’t leg it and define your own path like he might do – God knows you’ve tried. You’re condemned to this game, this realm of waiting on salvation.
(You can’t help but imagine it, though.
Incredulity will accompany you in everything you do. The last time you put your faith in purgatory, it didn’t end so well.)
“Hey. Don’t let me tell you what to do.” Hobie relents. He eyes you like he can plainly read your demurral, tattooed across your cheek. And, when his voice lowers to a whisper, your appetite broils into an anticipatory angst. “But don’t let him do, either.”
The warning seeps into you, nesting a home within your marrow.
He finds you on a rooftop, hugging your knees to your chest.
The night had come quicker than the last, like a knife lowering over Nueva York’s pale throat. It’s in preparation for the incoming winter, he knows, the sky bruising to the colour of captured blood, skipping over the blooming orange of a sunset entirely. Regardless, Miguel hardly had time to complete his afternoon patrol when the cloudless dark distended over him, plunging the city into its favoured state for illicit activities. He’d only come back to grab a quick meal before venturing out again – the work of a spider-man, never done.
But he spots you on his way to his penthouse room, and the blur of flaming adrenaline that sears his lungs is enough to stop him dead in his tracks.
It’s unjustified, really. Even at first glance, you look thoroughly innocent. You’re slouched in a relaxed – almost foetal-like – position, definitely not one that alludes to your potential self-harm. Nor are you dressed for escape, encompassed in a striped sweater with way too many makeshift mends to offer any real warmth. Your chin is tipped towards the stars, or the train that leads up to them, and he’s got a whole host of spiders on call should you try anything he can’t predict from sight alone.
He has no reason to suspect you of anything at all. No reason to pause on it.
Though his instincts blear with panic, ribs compressing to crowd his organs until they scream for respite. It echoes a defunct alarm, from back when spotting you meant catching you and his hatred made all the sense in the world. He’s still so fine tuned for that reality, adapted to the cat and mouse chase of the past year, that its alteration alone is enough to throw him off course. His steps stutter on the ledge of a nearby balcony, neon web dissolving as he retracts it from the wall.
Part of it too is the memory your frame evokes. It blinks into his mind’s eye so rapidly that it might as well be playing out right in front of him, a lewd illustration of what happened on that gym floor. Your face, framed by his thighs, doing your best to take him in for all his brute thrusts. He swallows the sharp guilt that knots his throat. No lust sparks at the recollection.
The past week he’s forced himself to revisit a more consistent routine, from back before you portalled your way onto his table. Send at least four anomalies home, then go on morning, afternoon, and night patrols, all the while staying on call. On the occasion that he is asked to assist in apprehending another threat to the multiverse, then he will do so with little effort. Those missions don’t last as long as yours had, and they don’t do much to disrupt his day. It’s painless, uninvolved.
He needs something difficult, though. A focus that will grind on his nerves, macerating them like pestle on mortar, reducing it to a bitter puree that masks the taste of penitence. He’s alway been better off challenged; the hero's life had found him and reshaped a purpose from frayed bits of arrogance. Then, it was the threat of multiversal collapse, solely levered to his shoulders. He sought for peace in Gabriella, with the life that wasn’t his, but even that had dissolved to make everything all the more punishing. He thinks he’s destined for it now, for a labour that adds to the calluses on his palm. Or – it is perhaps the only thing he deserves, an end for all the misdeeds on his ledger.
He tallies the tryst at the gym alongside them. It’s been six days since that ended so abruptly, and while the memory smoulders like a scabbing brand, his cynicism can’t heal. He knows he won’t stop doubting what happened – how recklessly he’d taken advantage of you – until he settles it verbally.
That’s grounds for what happens next, then. To revive something difficult. To settle it verbally.
He swings to the rooftop you’re slotted on. Although his landing is light, you sense his arrival, jaw tipping towards his presence but doing nothing to look directly at him. He takes it as consolation that you don’t immediately turn away.
Miguel realises how rare it is a sight, at least to him. In every encounter prior to this, you’ve been running or hiding. Ducking, evading. Fighting with your teeth bared like a cornered viper. You’ve been bloodied or bruised, drained as a hung fawn in a butcher’s shop, cowering from his advance that only threatened to exacerbate it all. There has never been a circumstance between the both of you that called for propriety, for anything other than venom to be exchanged.
Somehow, if it is possible, you look smaller when you are still.
Clean too, with gleaming skin that reflects the dim wash of the moon. There are the bandages peeking from beneath your sleeves, bound at your wrist, but it cannot take away from the remarkable chasm between the girl he sees now and the one that was trapped with him on Earth-15. Healthier, with diminished eyebags he remembers being ten degrees darker than your complexion, and a certain air to the way you stoop over your stomach, like it was just sated with a hearty meal. You lack any of the chaos he’s come to associate with you.
(Pretty.)
It occurs to him that a stable environment might’ve tamed the ferality in you, pinched your paws and declawed any remaining spunk. But, then again, he’s likely wrong about that too.
Ever since you slipped from his capture that very first time, he’s painted you out to be an opponent of able intensity. Everything you did seemed intentional; the worlds you destroyed, the moments of miraculous circumvention. When you’d phase out from between his arms, he’d curse your timed defence and feel none the more incompetent at having let you go. It only ever spurred him, for he believed that every second you spent roaming free, you were stewing over ways in which you could wreak more havoc. You grew and grew in his mind, transforming into a villain actually worth diverting all that effort to.
Parasite. A fucking parasite who just won’t quit.
He attributed malice to what had always just been rotten circumstance.
Perhaps there was never any spunk to begin with.
Because you’re not a villain. You’re hardly even a criminal. You proved as much, crowded underneath that collapsed building, spilling your secrets out onto his lap like a tapped maple tree. The accident with the antimatter, your post-apocalyptic providence. You can’t even control your powers, for goodness sake.
He feels foolish that his hostility towards you still lingers. There’s no reason for it to hold reign over his brain.
“Where does it go?”
He doesn’t have to follow your gaze to know what you’re asking about – the ninety-degree highway, with the train that pierces the sky.
“Up.”
You scoff, wiping your cheek with your sleeve. He takes a beat to assess the odd-looking cardigan. It glitches through an array of grunge textures, a peculiarity when paired with your basic joggers. Something bites at his gut when he realises why exactly that is, or who exactly it belongs to. Unease – he attributes the discomfort to – for the trouble you might cause should you develop a further friendship with the spider-pink.
“I can’t see its end.”
“It doesn’t have one. Not really.” He sighs, turning away from you and towards the glimmering beam at the centre of the city. “It leads up to the exosphere.”
You stay quiet. He glances at you in his peripheral. Your eyes are anything but. They’re wide, flicking through bright little calculations and questions you seem hesitant to speak.
“There’s a space station there.” He adds.
You shift, posture straightening. “Like the ISS?”
“I don’t know what that is.”
The conversation peters out, like a rock skipping over a lake, sinking into an awkward suspension. He crosses his arms, then uncrosses them to hook onto his waist. He wishes he could take the hard reality of things and observe it as a third party, as he does with his dimensional surveillance tablets. It would make it easier to sketch the perfect plan – a way to bend this conversation into something more productive than the topic at hand. He’d watch you for any indication of what you’re thinking – which he feels problematic for doing in real life – and pinpoint the exact moment where it’d be acceptable to bring up what had happened. He doesn’t want to stretch this longer than it needs to be.
Miguel’s about to throw caution into the wind, when you happen to do the same.
“A–”
“What’s the space station for?”
Irritation strings him thin, pulsing through the muscles that tense when he clenches his jaw. He counts his breaths, then grounds himself to the hollowness of his anger. When he’d been a father, it was a practice he’d utilised daily. Gabriella was so naturally curious, and his alternate self was a better man than him, raising her in an environment where questions were always encouraged. It took him a while to adapt to her constant quizzing, but he eventually understood how little she knew and how much she relied on him.
Patience came easier upon extending his regard.
The source to your current fascination doesn’t escape him, either. He remembers it clearly; the backstory that crystallises in his imagination every night before bed. The risks you took to touch the stars, how much it had all meant to you. He closes his eyes, nostrils flaring, before sitting adjacent to you, facing the city.
“That depends on who you ask.” He starts, slowly. “Originally built by Alchemex for their Mars colony project, it was their base of operations. Launch point too, for those rich enough to afford private space travel. But it was mainly scientists who worked there to maintain the artificial habitats and conduct experiments for further colonisation.”
“Space travel?” Subconsciously, you inch closer. Your voice climbs a higher pitch, and he can tell he’s piqued your interest.
“Nothing revolutionary. It’s fourteen months to Mars and back.”
“Thirty thousandth the speed of light…” Your nod is solemn, almost comically grim. He’s far from familiar with the scientific intricacies behind your statement, but he mirrors your gesture regardless. “Is Alchemax still investing in extraterrestrial colonisation?”
“No. They’re hardly anything anymore.” He doesn’t add that it’s to his credit, and the work he’s done to dismantle their oppressive grip on the country.
“So…”
“The space station is publicly funded now. To give a wider population of scientists access to astro-resources, as well as the opportunity to research them without relying on select, potentially corrupt parties.” He recites it like it’s scripture. You absorb it, though, every last syllable, letting it marinate before urging him to continue. “It’s called Second Base.”
“That’s…” You skip over the awe glazing your gullet, coughing into a snicker instead. “Almost as original as go-home machine. Did you come up with that?”
“Funny.” He counters, suppressing the smirk tickling his lips. “I might’ve pitched the winning vote.”
“They really need to stop listening to you.”
You don’t emphasise it. In fact, it’s the least conspicuous dig you’ve ever made. But it harks back to who you are – not a partner he can easily fall into a pattern with, this secure camaraderie where jibes are taken in equal measure. He can’t sit here until night dissolves to dawn, entertaining your precise fantasies, or worse yet, give you any hopes of sticking around.
You’re an anomaly, his responsibility and nothing more.
(He’s already toeing the line by not sending you back, breaking rules he’s established for everybody else. Despite any good reason for it – the longer you stay, the greater threat you pose to his authority and the society he’s built so meticulously.
‘They really need to stop listening to you.’
He’s afraid he’s manifesting that reality by talking to you beyond duty.)
“We shouldn’t have done what we did.” He says, because delaying it any longer brings a sick sort of dread. What he really means is I, not we – I shouldn’t have done that to you. But it’s easier to force the words when the blame in them is divided.
Your smile quivers, then drops. The reality of this hits you too. Your eyes harden from their previous, soft wonder.
“You’re telling me.” Your response lacks any hurt. Monotone, and he’s thankful for it.
“It was dangerous.”
“You weren’t the one suffocating.”
The seed of guilt in his stomach sprouts, branches tearing the tissue attempting to suppress it. The momentum dips as he takes a second to gulp it down. When he speaks again, his voice is weaker. Quieter.
“I di–”
“Don’t. It’s fine. I liked it for what it was.” You interrupt, shrugging. He takes the confession, bunching it up into a pill meant for swallowing. You liked it. You liked it. He loathes to admit that he did too, the issue of consent now aside. “I sucked your dick and you came down my throat. It’s hardly the most romantic thing ever, and I haven’t gotten that twisted. We’re adults. It’s fine.”
“Por Dios.” He rubs his forehead to dissuade the blush that arises at your explicit phrasing.
“It hasn’t changed my decision, if that’s what you’re worried about. I’m still going to go home.”
“It’s not.”
“Then?”
“It… doesn’t have to change anything else. You’ve been hiding for the past week, your resolve along with you. Are you no longer interested in learning what you can?” Is it because of him, and his gross misuse of power as your mentor?
But then you look at him, for the first time all night. Your brows are furrowed like he’d just said the most nonsensical thing in the English language. Perhaps he did. He’s not being truthful with his words, this hurried confession strung together with clumsy sentiment. He can sense you trying to piece it all together.
“Of course I am.” You reply after much deliberation.
“To me, it seems like you’ve given up.”
“I haven’t, asshole.” He reels over the hiss, knocked off kilter. It’s only when he revisits his accusation does it hit him how insulting he must’ve sounded. “I was giving you your space. I didn’t think you’d want to see me.”
“It doesn’t matter what I want.” He’s long forsworn his own proclivity. He’s not like the others. “I can’t send you back unless I’m certain you’re dedicated to the greater good. You said so yourself. I’ll continue so long as I can ensure that future.” You pick at your cuticles. He breaks his tone, so the next question doesn’t ring as interrogative. “Is that still what you want for yourself?”
“I… I don’t know.”
Miguel doesn’t speak in the following spell of silence. He waits for you to work together the explanation he hears forming on your tongue – a snowball of self-doubt and unsure superstitions, rolling, rumbling.
Eventually, you muster enough eloquence to spit it out.
“I’m scared to want for anything.” You draw in a shuddering inhale. “My ambition feels like a curse, or the plaque beneath my fingernails. Everything I touch with it turns to rot, festering beyond my control and contaminating everything within its vicinity. With my research, I condemned a whole world. With my running away, I replicated that onto many more. Just look at the repercussions of what happened with…” You gesture vaguely to his crotch. “The smallest things, the trivialest of desires. And perhaps it’s my own selfish inclination towards them, but in what world could they be anything but? I can’t… I can’t rely on my encouragement alone. I don’t trust myself enough.”
You could’ve stopped at the first sentence, and he would’ve still understood. It hits him almost scarily close to home, right where his heart is still tender and hurting over the fleeting family he once had.
He’d wanted for something once, too.
And he appreciates exactly what you need.
(He’s only seen you work so hard for one thing, and it was in that moment of arrested passion only six days prior – your eyes rolled to the back of your head, working him like a woman starved.
A temporary solution, then; one he has to watch over with hawk-like vigour so that it doesn’t moulder into something else. So long as you understand the boundaries – nothing romantic, only an addition to the encouragement you rely on. So long as he doesn’t lose the plot. So long as you agree, and go home by the end of all of it.
So long as the multiverse stays intact.)
“Tomorrow. Same gym.” He says, standing up. You blink up at him, and it’s only then does he notice the dry tears streaking your cheeks. He opts to ignore it. “Don’t be late.”
chapter ten coming soon...
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AHHHHHHH DEE THIS IS SO GOOD. IT’S LIKE A LITTLE DEBRIEF ABOUT THE EVENTS THAT HAPPENED AND GOOD TRANSITION IN THEIR RELATIONSHIP. AS ALWAYS, YOUR WRITING IS STELLAR.
warnings: sex work, masturbation, exhibitionism, voyeurism, it’s literally porn, age gap (unspecified), oral sex, dirty talk, explicit p in v sex, praise, catholic guilt, cowboy puns
summary: it's the golden age of porn. sex and sin are the national pastime. you're paired with joel miller for your first scene.
You’re going to hell.
That’s what all the billboards say. The televangelists. Nixon and his whole committee.
You’ve spent your whole life hearing that sex is a sin. Every Sunday, pressed into a pew wearing your pretty dresses, you’d listen to the pastor praise those who kept themselves pure, chaste. You’d learned that a good girl kept her knees shut tight. That those led astray by lust would fall into the Devil’s clutches. That sex would ruin you. And it hadn’t once stopped you from wanting it.
Well, now you’re waiting in line to get your tits out for a room full of strangers. If sex is a sin, what you’re doing is downright blasphemy.
But there’s good money in dirty movies. And you figure if the Devil is already keeping a seat warm for you, then you might as well earn it.
When they call your name, you feel like you might be sick. Which is stupid, since you’ve been waiting in the goddamn hallway for half an hour, sitting on a sticky plastic chair in a whole line of girls who look a whole lot like you.
The casting office is small, almost cozy. A mustard-yellow carpet stretches between you and a small folding table, where a man and a woman sit. Another man stands a few paces back, fiddling with the view-finder on a film camera.
It’s the woman who speaks first.
“Go ahead and stand on the mark there,” she indicates a spot on the carpet. She’s got a harsh, angular kind of beauty. Her gaze is sharp as it meets yours. “My name’s Tess. What’s yours?”
You tell her, conscious of the way your accent softens the syllables, makes it all too obvious that you’re a long way from home.
“So,” Tess says, leaning forward and folding her hands under her chin, “You like sex?”
You feel a blush rise on your cheeks, but hope it isn’t too obvious.
“Yes, ma’am.”
It slips out without your permission. You’ve tried so hard to beat out that good-breeding, the debutante bullshit, but sometimes it sneaks up on you. You see the corner of Tess’s mouth quirk up at it, like she’s trying not to laugh.
“You any good at it?”
She’s testing — teasing. But you hold her gaze.
“Never had any complaints.”
Tess nods. Gives a slight flick of her pen.
“Can you take your top off for us?”
Your breath catches in your throat. And you knew this was coming, knew it was part of the whole deal. But still — it sends a nervous sort of thrill through you, and you have to suppress a shiver as you reach for the buttons of your blouse.
The air is cool against your bare skin, and you feel the way your nipples stiffen. The camera whirrs and you clench your teeth, painfully self conscious. You’re not sure where to set your gaze. It’s strange to be looked at just for the sake of looking, not as a prelude to anything else.
Then Tess let out a low whistle.
“Linda Lovelace who?” she smirks, “Where the hell have they been hiding you?”
You flush, the praise washing over you; that warm reassurance that you are worth looking at.
Tess tilts her head, “You know what you’re getting into here, right? This isn’t a business for nice girls.”
You think of your mother. Your tidy, Catholic upbringing. The chastity balls and purity rings. The housewives and the husbands that hated them. All the ways women were stripped of themselves in the name of being nice.
You meet her gaze.
“Never said I was a nice girl.”
Tess grins, and there’s something wolfish in her smile.
“Well, then. Welcome to the sexual revolution.”
x x x x x x x x
You’ve done three films for Tess since then. All solos — splayed out on silk sheets, touching yourself while she told you what to do from off-camera. Proof of concept, she’d called them, and paid you fifty dollars for each.
You were the concept. The idea that was only half-formed. A bit lip, a slip of pink. Girlish pieces waiting to be shaped into a sex symbol. She said she was still figuring out where to put you, finding the right role.
God, your mother would cry if she could see you like this. And your father would curse and shout and try to scare you into behaving, like he has so many times before. But you’re too far away to hear them now. Besides, they haven’t answered any of your postcards. Maybe they knew you were a lost cause the second you stepped foot out their door.
But you don’t feel lost. Not when you’re sweaty and sated and smiling at the camera. Not when there’s a song playing on the radio, and the windows are rolled down, and it feels like the first time you’ve ever really breathed. Not in the tiny apartment you share with three other girls, where you never feel lonely.
You’re not some sob story, not a lost kid clinging to a last resort. You chose this, all of it. You’ve been a sinner since the day you found out what that thing between your legs was really for. And all the pearl-clutching in the world couldn’t have kept you shut up in that small town.
You want to be seen.
You want to shock, to disgust. To rip away all the ribbons and bows tying you to some expectation of decency. You’re so tired of being decent, being clean. You like being messy, like the sheen of sweat and sex that makes you feel like life is something that belongs to you.
Tess calls.
“I’ve got a scene for you.”
You coil the phone cord around your hand, trying to force down the little thrill of excitement that zips through you. You keep waiting for the shame to sink in, but it never does.
“It’s not a big part, but it could get you some attention,” Tess goes on, “You know anything about Joel Miller?”
You don’t. You’re still new to all of this, green in a way that Tess warns could get you in trouble if you’re not careful.
“Should I?” you ask.
“He’s an old friend,” Tess says, “Does a couple of films a year under the name Texas. The housewives love him, they eat his shit right up. Not a bad way to make a name for yourself.”
That was important too, the name. You were still trying to figure out yours. What would they call you when they watched your scenes? What name would they say when they came thinking of your face?
You take the bus downtown to the video rental store and slip through the beaded curtain at the back. The air inside is heavy with the smoke of someone’s joint, the tapes bathed in blue lighting. It turns out Texas occupies a whole shelf all to himself. The titles range, but they all convey a similar sense of rugged masculinity.
Cowboy Take Me Away
Lone Star
Fix Her, Up Her
Saddle Tramp
The Mechanic
Spur Me On
You rent three tapes and try not to blush when the cashier tells you which one is her favorite.
Your roommates go out for the night, but you stay in. Wedge the window open with the phone book. Pour a finger of vodka over a single, sweating ice cube. Turn the volume dial low and start up the first tape.
It’s all sort of silly at first. The sun-baked ranch. The farmer's daughter. The cowboy hat and coveralls. A soft, twanging guitar underscores the whole thing and it feels just shy of parody.
Then he enters the scene. Tall and broad. Sharp jaw, strong nose. Handsome in a way that’s solid, sure of itself. He looks like he belongs there, leaning against the barn door, his dark eyes taking in the scene.
And there’s no posturing with him, no clumsy performance. Suddenly the whole thing feels that much more real, and it’s like you can see the tension simmering on screen. You press your legs together at the low rasp of his voice, laced with suggestion, as he offers to teach her how to ride.
You watch, enraptured, as the scene unfolds. They move together in a way that doesn’t feel rehearsed, lacks any sort of pretension. You watch as he bends her over, tugs down her cotton panties, and fucks her with his fingers until she’s coming hard all over his hand.
You think it’s real. Fuck, it looks real, the way her fingers flex against his forearm, her stomach tenses, and her mouth falls open with a faint cry. No screaming or flailing, none of the overwrought drama. The camera catches the way her legs quake, the way she sucks in a breath before turning to face him.
There’s a close up on his crotch as he palms himself through the rough denim of his jeans. He undoes his belt to reveal a dark thatch of hair and then the long, thick shape of him. His heavy hand slides to the hilt, lining himself up against the gleam of her wet and waiting cunt. The tip of him presses against her entrance, parting her swollen lips as he pushes inside.
Your own hand is between your thighs before you realize what you’re doing. But you're aching — restless and unsettled as you stare at the screen.
You can’t take your eyes off of Joel. The way he moves, the way he fucks. All long, slow thrusts at the start, letting her feel every inch. Then the steady increase in speed until he’s fucking her in earnest, his massive hand holding her down as he drives in deep.
Your own fingers slide beneath your shorts, slipping through your slick to press against the hard nub of your clit. You try to relieve some of the pressure, the overwhelming arousal as you watch the farmer’s daughter whine and writhe on his cock.
Only, in your mind it’s you. Your hips he’s holding, your hair he’s tugging on as he drives deeper into your aching cunt. Your hands are the ones reaching back to feel him, to scratch along his forearms, searching for purchase as he pushes you closer to climax.
It’s his voice that undoes you. The low growl of it, the way he grits his teeth and tells her to just —
“Take it. Yeah, that it’s. Take this fucking cock.”
It pushes you over the edge and you’re coming, hard, drenching the sheets beneath you. You watch in a daze as the scene finishes, the farmer’s daughter smiling through her facial and giving the camera a cheeky wink. The credits roll over a cactus.
The tape whirrs and then clicks to a halt. The only sound in the apartment is the distant grind of traffic, your own heavy breathing. You stare up at the ceiling, still reeling from the force of your orgasm.
So. That’s Joel Miller.
x x x x x x x x
You tell Tess that you’ll take the part.
You run out the rental period on the first three tapes and return to the store for the rest of them. You’ve orgasmed more in this past week than you have in your entire life. All to thoughts of him. His hands, his voice— God, his fucking cock.
You feel untethered by your attraction to him, the raw want that he awakens inside of you. And even though you tell Tess yes, you feel a thread of panic rise as the shoot day approaches. Because watching him is one thing. Fucking him, actually fucking him, feels like another beast entirely.
The idea of it terrifies you. He terrifies you, if you’re being honest. There’s nothing warm or welcoming about his onscreen presence. He’s all stern silence and stoicism, only ever losing composure when he comes, and then just for a second. You’ve memorized the expression he makes. How his eyes fall shut and his jaw goes slack, the way he loses himself in that moment.
You want that. You want to be the reason.
The late summer heat washes over you as you step out of the cab; August in all her sweat and shine. You have the address Tess told you scrawled on a scrap of paper, held tight in your hand. You’re somewhere in the Arts District, but the area looks rough, rundown. The building in front of you seems abandoned, but the cab is pulling off the curb before you can question it. You check the paper in your hand, matching the numbers to the faded paint above the boarded front entrance.
There’s the screech of metal as a side door is kicked open, and Tess sticks her head out, squinting against the sunlight.
“Come on then,” she calls, waving you over. You hurry to catch up before the door closes on you.
Inside is dark, musty. Peeling wallpaper, yellowed posters clinging to bulletin boards. Dust catches the light as it filters in through dirty windows. None of the sleek, sexy style you’d come to associate with this line of work. You cast a sideways glance at Tess as she leads you down the hall.
“What is this place?”
“Not a real school, obviously. We’d all go to jail,” Tess says, “It used to be a rec center. We got it on the cheap.”
You’re not sure what to say to that, but she seems to sense what you’re thinking.
“It’s not all silk sheets, kid. Think you can handle that?”
That’s the thing you’ve liked about Tess from the beginning — the blunt edge of her honesty. She didn’t bullshit, it’s not in her nature. She calls it like it is, doesn't try to spin it into something else. It makes you feel safer, somehow. She’ll tell you if you get too close to the sun.
“I can handle it.”
You can. You didn’t come here to be coddled.
“You got your list?” she asks.
“Oh, yeah.” You dig in your pocket and pull out your hastily scribbled list of hard no’s. It had taken a while to come up with. The trouble was, there wasn’t much you didn’t want Joel to do to you. Even the most debased things made you feel all fluttery if you thought about him doing them.
Still. You had some limits.
Tess scans over the paper and she nods.
“Great, no issues here. Joel’s not really a piss-shit-puke kinda guy.”
You raise an eyebrow. “What about knives?”
Tess gives you a wry smile. “No knives for the cheerleader movie. At least, not yet. We’ve still got three more scenes after yours, so who knows.”
She stops short in front of an open door and motions you inside.
“This is your dressing room.”
There’s a rack of flimsy cheerleader costumes up against the wall, bright blue with red accents. Cosmetic bags are spread across the counter, spilling out eyeshadow and tubes of lipgloss. It’s all a reminder that you’re not the first girl to come through here, not the star of anything. Not yet, anyways.
“You good to do your own makeup?” Tess asks
You nod, dropping your bag onto a chair. “Yeah, sure.”
“Try not to go too heavy. We’re playing the fresh-faced innocent thing here.”
You glance at the mirror, as if trying to catch a glimpse of exactly what she’s describing. It’s funny to think about yourself like that, the way Tess sees you. It feels like you straddle the line — too hard for your hometown, too soft for this city.
“And here’s the script.”
She slides a stapled stack of papers over to you.
From what you’ve gathered, there isn’t much to the premise: a coach fucking his way through a cheerleading squad. But it’s not like anyone would be watching for the plot. Each scene had a loose sort of set up — stretching, showering, showing up late to practice. And they all end with a cheerleader taking a load somewhere the camera likes looking at.
You flip through the pages, searching for your scene. It’s noticeably scant on both dialogue and direction. The words “they fuck” appear more than once.
When you reach the end, you look up at Tess. “This is the whole thing?”
“Were you expecting a monologue?”
And no. Not exactly. But you always sort of assumed these things were more structured. At least, you had hoped they might be.
“There's no dialogue.”
Tess shrugs, “Most of these girls will go cross-eyed if we try to get ‘em to memorize lines. And nobody gives a shit what you’re saying anyways.”
A nervous coil twists in your belly.
“What if I say something stupid?”
“You won’t,” Tess says firmly, “I’ve seen your stuff, you’re a natural. And Joel will take care of you.”
That did nothing to ease your anxiety. You look away to hide the heat rising in your cheeks.
A door opens in the hall, and Tess glances over her shoulder.
“Speak of the devil,” she waves someone over, “Come here a sec.”
There’s the head tread of boots down the hall, and then he’s there. Standing in the doorway.
Joel fucking Miller. In the flesh.
The subject of so many fantasies, so many wet dreams. How many times have you made yourself come to his videos? Hand between your legs, fingers drenched in your own slick, fucking yourself as he railed someone else on screen. You know the exact cadence of his voice, the way his breath hitches when he’s close. You could pick his dick out of a line-up.
And now he’s here, all broad shoulders and deep brown eyes. The tousled dark hair, the beard that is just starting to gray. The videos don’t do him justice. He’s painfully handsome, good-looking in a way that unmoors you, makes you feel small and sort of silly. Like a kid with a crush, girlish and inconsequential.
You’re in way over your head.
“Hell of a place you found,” he says to Tess, and the low timbre of his voice scrapes through you. That familiar rasp, the heavy Texan drawl.
“Yeah, well, you want big budget, you go work for Spielberg,” Tess tells him, “This is what we call in vérité, asshole.”
Joel scoffs at her.
“That a fancy way of saying asbestos?”
Tess flips him off, then jerks her head towards you.
“This is your girl, by the way,” she says, “Lucky cheerleader number seven.”
His gaze finds you for the first time and it feels like you’ve been struck by lightning. His eyes are dark, a deep brown that doesn’t catch the light, that seems to go on and on. You feel the weight of his gaze dragging over you, giving you a full-once over before it slides back to your face.
You feel a familiar, anxious unease. That ache for approval. Did he think you were pretty? Was he disappointed? Or had he become numb to things like that. Maybe for him, sex was narrowed to its essential parts — aesthetics were irrelevant.
Joel nods once, then turns back to Tess.
“You got a room for me or was that out of budget too?”
“Second door on the left,” she tells him, “Extra roaches, on the house.”
He gives a sort of unimpressed grumble and heads back down the hallway.
You look at Tess, hoping that the heat in your cheeks isn’t too obvious. You want her to think you can handle this, handle him.
“He always that friendly?”
“Pretty much,” she smirks, then pulls a tidy slip of paper from her back pocket, “Speaking of - here’s his rider.”
You look it over the list. Many of the same extremes you had included in your own. From everything you’ve seen, he isn’t much of a sadist. No biting, no scratching, no hickeys. Reasonable, assuming he has more scenes to shoot. Even if all you want is to sink your teeth into him.
You stop short on the last bullet point.
“No kissing?”
Tess rolls her eyes, “Don’t take it personally. He’s just like that.”
You try to think back, but you can’t recall seeing him kiss any of his co-stars. How had you missed that? All the hours you spent watching him fuck, and you hadn’t even noticed.
You ignore the slight sting of disappointment. You wanted that — the scrape of his beard, the slide of his tongue, the taste of him. But you’re a big girl. You don’t need it, really.
You’re going to get everything else.
x x x x x x x x
The stupid cheerleader costume clings to you, the fabric flimsy and coarse. It doesn’t make you feel particularly sexy. It’s like playing dress up. But your hair looks nice, high in its ponytail, and you’ve done your makeup just so.
You aren’t exactly some blushing virgin. But still — the idea of stripping down in a room full of strangers has you all riled up, anxiety thrumming through you as you hover at the edge of the set.
No one seems to pay you much mind. The crew moves easily around you, cracking jokes as they adjust the lighting and clear the cables from the shot. Your scene takes place in the hallway outside the gymnasium, where you catch the coach coming out after practice.
You try not to think too hard about the set up, the absurdity of it all. You feel the buzz of anxiety and excitement, the tangle of nerves, the taste of arousal already on your tongue. You stare down at the waxed linoleum, counting your breaths, waiting to get fucked in a room full of strangers.
“Well, look at you.” Tess’s voice jolts you out of your own head. You turn to find her giving you an approving smile. “You look like a wet dream.”
You raise an eyebrow. “Yours?”
She laughs, “You wish, kiddo. But every man in America is going to be creaming his jeans seeing you like that.”
You’re not sure what to make of that, to think of the eyes of every man on you. You’re mostly worried about the one waiting down the hall.
“Your mark is over here,” she indicates, “Joel’s going to enter from that door down there. Give us a couple lines to set the scene, then get to the good stuff. Easy enough, right?”
“Sure. Easy.”
Tess settles into a chair to the right of the camera. Everyone else seems to have found their places, the set quieting around you. You find your mark, white sneakers squeaking against the tile. The set lights heat against your skin, and your heart hammers against your ribcage.
“Let Joel take the lead. He’ll get you where you need to go,” Tess says, then catches the look on your face and asks, “You ready?”
You must look nervous. Unsure, out of place. Wide-eyed, waiting to be told what to do. The good Christian girl, always minding your goddamn manners. Saying your prayers, your pleases and thank-yous.
But you’re not that girl anymore.
You straighten. Set your spine. Remind yourself that this is something you can do.
Sex is easy. It’s a skin you can slip into. You’ve been tying cherry stems with your tongue since you were eleven, and by now you’ve perfected the art. You like playing the part: wearing the gloss and glitter, getting all dolled up just to get stripped down. It makes you feel powerful, being watched. Being wanted. Like you’re more than some soft kid from a small town. Like you’re someone who could mean something.
“Ready,” you tell Tess.
She smiles and she sits back in her chair, giving the crew a once over before calling out —
“Action.”
The door at the ends of the hall slams open and you jump, turning around to face Joel.
He's wearing gray sweats and a t-shirt that stretches across the broad expanse of his chest. There’s a whistle around his neck. It should be ridiculous, but it is definitely not. You can’t think of anything less funny than the way he’s looking at you right now.
“What are you doing here?”
His voice is rough, decidedly unfriendly. It’s the role, it’s exactly what was written in the script, but it still stirs a strange embarrassment in you. You shouldn’t be here. You’re going to get in trouble.
“I, um -“ you swallow and start over, “I was looking for you.”
“Is that right?”
Fuck, his voice. The low rasp of it seems to reverberate in your ribcage, stoking a flame that started burning from the first the second you saw him.
You nod, “I - I wanted to ask you something.”
You feel the scorch of his gaze against your skin, and when his eyes meet yours he looks pissed. You’re wasting his time. He doesn’t want you here.
“Practice is over. You got a question, you can ask me tomorrow.”
He starts to walk past you, like he’s going to leave, like he has better things to do. You speak before you know what you’re going to say.
“Some of the other girls were talking,” you say quickly, and he stops short. You have his attention, so you keep going, “They said you helped them. I was hoping you could help me too.”
He takes a step closer, and he towers over you. This is the closest he’s ever been. You can feel the heat of him, his skin sun-warmed and tan. You notice the flecks of amber in his dark eyes.
“Help you with what?” he asks.
You don’t know what to say. Everything you think of sounds too crass, too cringey. There’s nothing explicitly sexual about the scene so far; you can tell he’s waiting for you to take it there. To cross that boundary.
You take his hand in yours. His palm is rough, calluses catching against the soft pads of your fingertips. You draw his hand slowly down your body, his knuckles dragging across the thin fabric of your dress. When you reach the top of your thighs, you feel him tense. You hold him there, between your legs. Let him feel the heat of you. The want already burning in your core.
“Here?” he asks, and you nod.
He cups you, his hand covering your whole sex.
“Does that needy little pussy want some attention?”
You nod, and his hand moves against you, pressing hard against your clit. Even through the fabric, the feeling is intense. A whimper slips through your lips.
And oh, he likes that. You can see the way his gaze darkens, his pupils blown wide with arousal.
“Gonna have to ask nice,” Joel tells you.
You feel tense — taught. A bowstring about to snap. You’re not above begging.
“Please.”
“Please what?”
“Please touch me.”
He grabs you by the hips, turning you, pulling you tight against his chest. You sink into the warmth of him, the scent of sweat and sun. You feel his hardness stiff against your lower back, already straining in his sweatpants.
Joel flips up your skirt, exposing the pretty lace of your panties to the cameras.
Oh right, the cameras.
You almost forgot, so caught up in his gaze, the furious heat of his attention. But his eyes aren’t the only ones on you. You’re being watched. Your gaze skims the edge of the scene, sees the eyes staring back. You wonder if they can see the way you tremble, taught in Joel’s grip.
“You already wet for me?” he murmurs against your ear.
You tense slightly as he pulls your panties aside and dips his finger into your slit. You’re wet. You’re so fucking wet. It’s almost embarrassing.
His finger drags through your slick, the heavy drip of your arousal. He groans against your neck, and his grip on you tightens.
“Fuck,” his teeth scrape along your jaw, “You’re soaking. All this for me?”
“Yes,” you pant, “All for you. Just for you.”
“Poor baby,” he coos, his finger ghosting over your clit. You flinch, the feeling almost overwhelming, “Sitting through practice with your panties soaked. You just wanted some attention, huh? Wanted me to play with you like all the other girls.”
He presses hard against your clit and you gasp, writhing in his grasp. You’re already so close, on the knife’s edge of it. You just need a little more, just the tiniest bit of friction —
But then he’s gone, stepping away. Palming himself through his sweats. His gaze is dark, burning, but he still looks so composed.
“You’re gonna have to earn it,” he tells you, “Get on your knees.”
You felt almost dizzy, overwhelmed with arousal. You know that you’re wrecked already, cheeks flushed, eyes bright and shining. You can barely catch your breath.
“You heard me. On your knees.”
You don’t wait to be told a third time. You drop to your knees, feel the cool linoleum against your bare calves. You position yourself beneath him, folding your hands in your lap. Waiting for instructions, waiting to worship at the altar of the man above you.
Joel rubs the outline of his cock through his sweatpants, his eyes tracking over you.
“You gonna be good for me?”
You take that as permission, reaching out and carefully tugging down the sweatpants to release him. The thick length of him slaps up against his belly, fully at attention. He’s big. You knew that already, had admired the size of him in so many of his tapes.
But it’s different now. Almost overwhelming. The tip of him flushed red and angry, already weeping. Your mouth waters.
You look up at him from under your lashes and he nods. Go ahead.
Your hand wraps around him, marveling at the way your fingertips barely touch. You stroke along his length, feeling the silky warmth of him, the heat. You squeeze softly at the tip and precum beads at the slit. You lead forward quickly, tongue darting out to taste him.
Joel groans above you, tangling his hand in your hair and tilting your head up.
“Mouth open.”
You open obediently, sticking your tongue out.
“You gonna let me fuck your pretty face?”
Pretty. The word stirs something low in your stomach. He thinks you’re pretty.
He slides inside your waiting mouth. He stays shallow at first, gliding across your tongue, wetting himself with your spit. His forehead is furrowed in concentration, dark eyes fixed on yours.
Fuck. Arousal burns in your core, heavy and molten. You know you’re soaking through your panties. You want so badly to touch yourself, but he hasn’t told you to. You want to be good. Want to impress him, show him how well you can play your role.
“This what you wanted?” Joel grunts, “Got jealous of me fucking all those other girls. Wanted some of me for yourself, huh?”
You moan around him. He’s just playing his part, but fuck if it doesn’t strike a nerve. You were jealous of all the other girls in his videos, had wanted so desperately to be in their place. But you hadn’t known it would be like this, the want so powerful, so overwhelming.
He pulls you back, holding your head away from his cock. It shines with your spit.
“I want to hear it.”
You look up at him, eyes wide, chest heaving. Barely able to catch your breath, to form words through the haze of arousal.
“Yes,” you pant, “I wanted you. Wanted to taste you. So bad.”
Joel makes a satisfied sound, tapping the head of his cock against your lips so you open again. He presses back inside, the salt and musk sliding heavy over your tongue.
He picks up his pace, his cock kissing the back of your throat with each stroke. He holds your head steady, ponytail wrapped around his fist, keeping your mouth in place as he begins to fuck your face.
Your eyes water, but you stay put. Letting him use you, chase his high, press deeper and deeper into your throat with each thrust. Spit pools at the corner of your mouth, dribbling over your lips and down your chin.
“Fuck, look at you. Being such a good girl, such a good hole for me.”
You whimper, his words going straight to the heat between your legs.
He presses you down until your lips are wrapped around the base of him, your nose buried in the dark curls there. You’re surrounded by his scent, struggling to breathe. You can feel him down your throat.
He groans, low and guttural. “Jesus, fuck.”
You gag and Joel pulls out, a strand of saliva trailing between the tip of his dick to your lips. You fight to catch your breath, blinking back tears as you stare up at him.
His jaw has gone slack, and there’s something new in the heat of his gaze. His hand cups your cheek, feeling the flushed heat of your skin. His thumb traced over your cheekbone, down to your mouth, running over your spit soaked lips.
“So good for me, baby. You feel so goddamn good.”
He slips back between your lips, pressing deep. You dig your nails into the flesh of your own thighs, fighting against your gag reflex. Tears spill down your cheeks, mixing with the spit dripping down your neck. You choke and he pulls out, letting you catch your breath.
“Taking it like a champ. One more time.”
Joel presses forward again, forcing himself further down. His hand moves down to your neck, and he gives it a careful squeeze, feeling himself in your throat. You gag, but he holds you there a second longer, letting your throat flex around him. He groans as he pulls out.
He uses his grip on your hair to pull you up, pressing your back to the lockers that line the hall. There’s a new sense of urgency in his touch, a kind of fervor. He grabs roughly at your breast, thumbing your nipple through the fabric. You arch into his hand, craving his touch.
“So desperate, baby. You like this? Like me using you?”
He runs his hand along your body, over the swell of your breasts, across your stomach. Feeling the way you tense and tremble for him. He reaches beneath the hem of your skirt, and his hand meets the sticky slick of your inner thighs. You’re fucking dripping for him.
“Jesus Christ,” his eyes move over your face, taking in the flushed cheeks and tear tracks, “Show me.”
You fumble for your skirt, but he’s already tugging the uniform up and over you, impatient. He balls up the cheap fabric and tosses it aside, leaving you bare and aching for him. Only the damp scrap of your panties between you. His fingers skate along the band of them, inches away from where you need him.
“Shit,” you gasp, hips bucking involuntarily, “Please.”
You expect him to fuck you then. It feels like he might, the length of him hard against your hip, slowly rocking against you, dragging spit and precum across your stomach.
Instead, Joel lowers himself to his knees. His hands skate up your thighs, thumbs hooking under the band of your panties and dragging them down your legs. You stand above him, fully exposed, your skin flushed and feverish from his attention.
He takes your thighs in hands, carefully coaxing them apart. His eyes go dark as he stares at your wet cunt. Your swollen clit, skin damp with slick. His palms slide up to your burning core. His thumbs drag up your lips and pull them apart, exposing you — to him, to the camera, to the room full of strangers. But you can only see him. The way he’s looking at you.
He leans forwards and spits.
His thumb moves up to rub your clit, mixing his spit with your slick. A whine slips through your lips,
“So pretty, baby,” Joel mutters, voice low, “Got you all worked up, huh.”
He begins drawing tight circles over your clit, finally, finally giving you the friction you so desperately need. You bite your lip, nerves sparking, already close to overstimulated. He drags your wetness down to your entrance and slides two fingers deep inside you. You both groan at the feeling.
“Fuck, you’re tight.”
His fingers are so much thicker than your own. His knuckles rub against your inner walls, hitting you exactly where you need him. His thumb drags over your clit with every stroke.
Your legs begin to shake. He hooks his free hand around your calf and lifts your leg, hitching it over his shoulder. You lean back against the lockers, letting him hold you up like this, keep you open.
“There you go.”
His fingers drive deep up into you, thumb grinding against your clit. Your hips move against his hand, chasing the feeling. His gaze stays fixed on your cunt, focused on the way you grip his fingers, your arousal dripping down his wrist. He twists up into you and scrapes against a spot that makes you see stars. Your breath catches in your throat, you’re so fucking close —
“Come on, baby. Let me feel you.”
His flicker up to meet yours, and then tension inside you releases all at once, snaps and sends you hurtling over the end. Heat flares inside of you and your cunt clenches around his hand, walls rippling as you ride out your orgasm. Joel works you through it, his fingers keeping a steady rhythm inside you.
You struggle to catch your breath. Trying to remember what’s supposed to happen next.
But Joel's eyes haven’t left you. He looks up from between your legs, roving over your body, taking it all in. The flush on your chest. The faint sheen of sweat. The slick shining at the apex of your thighs.
“Fuck, that was pretty,” he murmurs, real quiet. Too low for the cameras. His thumb ghosts over your clit and your body jerks in his grasp, already so sensitive.
“Want you to give me another one.”
You open your mouth to respond — to say what, you’re not sure. You feel unfocused, television static fuzzing your brain, scattering your thoughts.
“Can you do that? Can you come again for me?”
Joel presses harder against your clit and you choke on a moan.
“Yes,” you whine, the words catching in your throat, “God, yes. Please.”
There’s a gleam of approval in his eye.
“Good girl.”
Then he leans forward and licks a broad stripe over your dripping cunt. You flinch at the sudden intensity, thousands of nerve endings lighting up at once. His grip tightens on your thighs and he holds you steady as he buries his face between your legs.
His tongue slips through your soaking folds, lapping up the slick that has gathered there. His mouth moves hungrily, devouring you, drinking you down. His beard scratches along your sensitive lips, sending little shockwaves through you. Your hand shoots out, tangling in his hair. He lets out a low groan of approval.
You can feel your second orgasm building, sparking up your spine as he scrapes his teeth carefully across your clit. The tension in your stomach coils tighter and tighter, everything inside you drawing taught. No one has ever made you feel this good, nothing has ever felt like this.
Joel slides two thick fingers inside, sucks hard at your clit, and you’re gone.
Your vision goes white as you clench down on him, coming hard, your orgasm ripping through you in a way that’s almost painful. Joel’s tongue catches your sweetness as it spills from you, tasting you from the source, letting you soak his face.
When you whimper at the overstimulation, he pulls away, beard shining with your release. His eyes are so dark they look black, pupils blown wide with lust.
He slides out from under your leg, standing and keeping you steady with a hand on your hip. He drags his damp fingers across your flush skin, over your stomach, between your breasts. Up to your mouth, swiping across your bottom lip.
You hold his gaze as you wrap your lips around them, tasting yourself, licking him clean. You’re panting when he pulls away.
He gives you a long look, chest heaving, the heavy scent of you on his breath.
“Gonna fuck you now,” Joel murmurs.
You feel his cock rub up against your belly, and you look down to where it’s trapped between your sweaty bodies. He thrusts against you, smearing precum across your stomach.
You bite your lip. He’s so big. And even though you’ve had him in your mouth, all the way down the back of your throat, you’re overwhelmed by the idea of all that inside of you.
Your eyes flicker up to meet his, and it’s like he can see what you’re thinking. He thumbs over your cheek. Almost affectionate.
“It’s alright. We’ll make it fit.”
Joel turns you around, hands sliding over your waist. He drags your hips out so that you’re bent over, exposed, breasts flush against the cool metal of the locker. His hand smooths down your spine, forcing you to arch for him. You feel his fingers drag through your folds, teasing your entrance.
Your breath catches as his head presses against you, the weeping tip parting your lips. You brace yourself, cheek pressed against the metal, looking over your shoulder as he finally, finally slides inside. A moan tears itself from your throat at the stretch, the way your walls flex around him.
He fills you in one slow stroke, until his hips are flush with yours, cock kissing your cervix. You’re so full you can barely breathe. It’s like he’s everywhere all at once, choking the air from your lungs.
“Fuck, baby,” Joel growls, “So fucking good. Gripping me so goddamn tight.”
He sounds almost as wrecked as you feel, voice low and hoarse. His fingertips dig into the meat of your hips, holding you tight to him. You can feel yourself bruising beneath him, but you don’t pull away. You want him to mark you, to leave something of himself behind.
He gives you a second to adjust, then pulls back, almost all the way out. The slow drag of him is excruciating. You whine when he thrusts back in, nails scratching against smooth metal, struggling to catch your breath. You can feel the way your walls grip him, clinging to the hard length of his cock as he takes you in long, deep strokes.
“That’s it,” he grits his teeth, “Taking it so well.”
All you can do is take it, barely holding yourself up against the locker, letting him set the pace. He increases the speed of his thrusts, his hips snapping against yours. The sound is filthy, wet and wanton, the slap of skin on skin.
He gathers your sweaty hair in his hand, pulling your head back, baring your throat. His teeth scrape against the sensitive skin there, and you keen, high and reedy. You’re already so fucked out, unable to focus on anything but the slide of him inside you, slick and raw.
He lifts your leg, exposing the place where your bodies are joined, where your sex is stretched so obscenely around him. His hand slides over your stomach, down between your legs, to where you’re still so raw, soaking wet. You cry out — it’s too much, way too sensitive — but he’s relentless, fingers rubbing hard against your overwrought clit, wringing a third orgasm out of you.
“Good girl. Good fucking girl.”
You shiver through it, feel the weak flutter of your cunt around his cock. His arm wraps around your waist, holding you up. You can tell he’s close, the way his body draws tense, how he crowds even closer.
“Look at me.”
He cups your jaw with his hand, tilting your head back, angling it so he can see you. Your eyes are glassy, tears clinging to your lashes. Your spine bows in a delicate curve, and all you can feel is him. The hand on your face, the one at your hip, and his cock driving deep, deep inside you.
His jaw goes slack — that expression you’ve memorized, the one you know means he’s close — but his eyes stay open this time. He stares down at you, brown furrowed, his hips stuttering through the final few thrusts, and then he’s coming. He pulls out at the last second, spilling over your skin, streaks of thick cum painting your pussy.
His hand is still wrapped around your jaw, thumb pressed against your frantic pulse. You stay like that, breathing hard, gazing up at him.
“And cut.”
You blink. It’s like coming back to yourself. Everything is suddenly in sharp focus. You feel the floor beneath you, the sweat cooling on your bare skin. The sticky tack of his cum over your aching cunt, slipping down your thighs.
Joel releases your leg, steadying you before stepping away. His touch feels different now. Formal, almost. Perfunctory. He doesn’t quite meet your eye as he tucks himself back into his sweatpants.
He looks so composed, like he hasn’t just fucked you within an inch of your life. You’re suddenly conscious of just how naked you are.
“Great job, guys,” Tess says, stepping out from behind the camera and passing you a robe. You slip it over your shoulders, tying the front, tucking yourself away. Even though everyone had already seen everything, your nudity now stings with a kind of self-consciousness, a strange obscenity.
Tess is saying something, and you have to shake your head to refocus on her.
“Sorry, what?”
Your throat feels raw, stripped from sex.
“Statement of consent,” Tess repeats, pointing, “Straight into camera.”
“Oh, right.”
Your knees are shaking, and Joel’s semen is slowly dripping down your thighs. Your pulse hasn’t slowed, still racing beneath your skin. You’ve barely had a second to catch your breath.
You make eye contact with the camera lens.
“My name is —“ you start, but cut yourself off with a breathy laugh, “Shit, sorry. My name is —“
A fresh wave of giggles overwhelms you. You feel giddy. Freshly-fucked and freer than you have in your whole life. You manage to gasp out your name before biting down on your knuckles, trying to suppress the laughter.
Joel glances at you.
You struggle to pull yourself together.
“Right, sorry. I consented to, you know,” you wave your hand, “Everything.”
Tess gives you an amused look.
“Good enough for me,” she says, then claps her hands together, “That’s a wrap, everybody.”
There’s a general shuffling as the crew begins to move, striking the sparse set, packing up the equipment. Tess turns away to speak to one of the grips, and you linger at the edge of the hallway, unsure of what to do with yourself.
You feel raw, every inch of your skin oversensitive. There’s a tenderness between your legs, bruises ripening on your hips, but nothing hurts. It’s a good kind of sore. You lean into it and find you like it. You search yourself — for shame, for regret — but find nothing but a low hum of satisfaction, the pleasure that still pulses through you.
“You did good.”
You look up sharply and find Joel watching you. You feel yourself flush, the blush rising high on your cheeks. Which is ridiculous, after everything. After he’s touched every soft and secret part of you, laid you bare and made you come undone.
But still, you blush.
“Thanks.”
Joel’s expression is unreadable, but the earlier intensity is gone. He’s just looking.
You feel like you should say something, anything, so you stammer out, “You too. I mean. You were — that was. Thank you, for that.”
Stupid. What a stupid thing to say. But you think you see the corner of his mouth twitch up, the faint suggestion of a smile. He opens his mouth to say something else, then seems to think better of it.
He gives you another, slightly stilted nod, then turns back down the hallway. And there’s a funny sort of feeling low in your stomach, a longing. You want so badly for him to look back at you.
But he doesn’t.
x x x x x x x x
author’s note: this fic is pro-sex work and anti-patriarchy. i do not believe in the exploitation of female bodies for male profit or entertainment. capitalism is evil and all men should die. xo
Summary: You bring your husband back from the hospital after he was in a car crash that nearly took his life. Once the joy wears off of learning he survived, you’re stuck with the nagging dread that the man you brought home is not the one you married.
Word Count: 2k
Warnings: anxiety, mentions of death, nothing really aside from a general feeling of unease throughout it.
Author’s note: wanted to approach Miguel from a vaguely 80′s-ish horror vibe because the dude is WEIRD and I want to see more of that. Romance + invasion of the body snatchers type beat. Big thanks to @thesadvampire and @madhyanas for being my beta readers and editors on this one. I love you both a fuck ton <3
Credit for divider goes to @mmadeinheavenn !
Miguel wonders if you think he’s having an affair.
Granted, he doesn’t have much context to judge your personality off of, he’s learning more about you with each day going on- but he knows that most wives don’t jump when their husband calls their name or watch him out of the corner of their eye as he sings their daughter to sleep in the nursery.
pairing: miguel o'hara x f!reader
rating: mature
word count: 4.7k
summary: a proposition for new beginnings
warnings: enemies to lovers, forced proximity, apocalypses, death, decay, blood, injury, sexual tension, angst, no use of y/n
notes: I ACCIDENTALLY DELETED THE ORIGINAL. anyway repost lol
During the liminal period between detonation and your understanding of it, you’d been convinced of your own fatality. Dead girl walking; the shell-shocked mantra playing in an unremitting loop as you navigated the flattened planes of your once-home.
New York was a ghost town. Or – town isn’t exactly the proper verbiage, not when it comes to describing the hollowed locale. It’d been flushed of all its previous pomp; skeletal buildings with their windows blown to bits, light posts bent at the root, central park a glorified bonfire pit for skyscraping flames. In truth, when you’d awoken, you couldn’t recognise your whereabouts.
That was the basis for which you told yourself it was a dream. Everything existed as a distorted reflection of what you were familiar with, a fucked plane capable only of occuring in feverish delirium. The bite, you’d accepted – nodding to yourself grimly. You must’ve gotten sick again and passed out before the speech, transported to some stuffy hospital that pinned you with needles full of hallucinogens. How else could you have explained your occult ability to phase through walls, or the complete absence of people?
(In hindsight, it was denial more than anything.)
Yet time progressed on a tortoise’s shell, marching with all the leisure of reality. It didn’t jump like it would’ve had your consciousness been in charge, with its aversion to the mundane and grotesque. No; you’d started to see the faults in your logic when the substance that perpetually fell from the sky proved to be human ash, or when – the further down you travelled – maturating flesh increasingly marked your path. You’ve never known your mind to be so cruel.
So, dead.
If so, then you’d settled on purgatory. A state where souls atone for their unforgiven sins and are purified. It was an interim solution; you weren’t the religious type, anyway. But maybe that'd been it. Maybe you’d been given a last hope at redemption, thrust in a distinctive nightmare to comprehend how much worse hell could be. At least you lacked pain, at least you were dressed – clad in the silk of your gala gown. But the sky had been red, covered in a sheet of dismal smoke, and you couldn’t see the stars at night.
It was a sign; you’d failed at reaching them.
The notion had paralysed you for days, tearing at the false comfort you’d wrapped yourself in up to that point. You’d weeped, and tested the limits to your intangibility with lacking enthusiasm. Blotchy faced, snotty nosed – passing your arm through rubble, succeeding, then trying the same with your feet, which abraded against the rough surface instead. The inconsistency was hard to keep up with, but the task at least distracted you from a profuse existentialism.
You’d heeded no patterns; some days, you were completely nonphysical. Or, parts of you remained that way, while others shifted back to palpability. It’d been a tug of war, dependent entirely on your mood and a greater scheme you had no part of. With your limited comprehension, it’d only guaranteed the purgatory hypothesis. Not mortal, nor spirit. Stuck in a great between.
(What heaven was worth this? Who deemed it so?)
The guessing game got old. You’d needed something else – more than water, or a fresh change of clothes; good, honest science. Truth. You couldn’t move on until you’d had reason to believe the outcome could justify this.
You turned to the cosmos then, impartial as ever, despite their discernible absence. They were still there, you knew. Just beyond the firestorms, the sun burnt bright enough to penetrate smog. Its hazy glow provided an alternate reminder of something for you to still pursue – wherever it was, wherever you were. You couldn’t be sure that an afterlife meant nirvana or elysian fields, yet fulfilment looked to be the common denominator. An underscore.
To you, that would only ever be one thing.
Deep space, your stars – your Sol.
(It was hope in the one way you could define it.)
The threads started to converge in an instant of poetic cognizance. The Phoenicians had done it, and so too had ancient sailors. Stars for navigation, for reasoning. Of course. All that entailed for you was to certify you were worth it.
You’d started by cleaning. Little things, far from where you’d originated. A neighbourhood of collapsing houses, nested in beds of fine porcelain and dust. The times where you could use your hands, you’d sweep the debris onto them and deposit it in a hole, harrowed from a singed lawn at the end of the row. When you were immaterial – a state that had begun gaining rarity the better you were able to cope – you’d focus on mentally tallying inventory. Some to set aside, for whatever poor individual would visit next, and the rest for you. A diet of canned beans and bottled water was better than nothing.
Then, you’d dealt with the bodies.
There were none within the city, nor the suburbs. It was only when you’d ventured outwards did they start to crop up; thin corpses with leathery skin still stretched over their frames, starved or burnt or both. The smell had been putrid, reeking of pure rot, and you’d surmised that perhaps they’d taken too long to find salvation. It’d motivated you to keep working, burying them in marked graves with a plug fastened over your nose. You didn’t want to end up like them, as a chore for the next.
It was near impossible to keep a timeline of it all. Now, you estimate it as months, though it had felt longer. You’d gone through it with no milestones, or any inclination as to whether you were finally getting close. Cleaning the entire expanse of purgatory seemed too big a task to ask of anyone, immortal or not. Yet as the weeks crawled by, you’d started to reckon that was exactly it. You’d felt nothing special, no sweeping message from God alerting you of your success. Just more devastation, more labour.
(Were you wrong?)
You’d started to get sick again. Irritated sinuses, a scratchy throat. Every breath you took was more useless than the last, oxygen unable to circumvent your system. Smoke inhalation, likely. You’d searched for ventilators to help treat the symptoms, alongside pain relief for the sores spotting along your palms. There’d been nothing, and that wasn’t to say it had always been that way. Empty, orange bottles decorated every barren street, purged by apocalyptic gluttons.
(You couldn’t trick yourself – the dead had no use for medicine.)
Some fate must have willed it, though. It was there, in the seventh hospital you’d scavenged, that it’d happened.
A… being, no taller than five foot four, decked in a bright yellow suit and a hazmat mask. Loitering the entryway with a trash bag full of salvaged goodies. It hadn’t noticed you, preoccupied with routing the way back home – so you rushed into a nearby room to change into your gown. It was wrinkled and torn in places, having been the outfit you’d initially spent weeks in, but it was far better off than the grimy cargoes you’d adopted in its place.
You’d kept it for this; your day of judgement.
It – he, as it turns out – lived in a bunker, deep beneath the catastrophic surface of the state. You’d followed him there. A perfectly normal thing to do, candidly, for someone who’d forgone social interaction since death. It couldn’t dawn on you that he was surely in the same boat; isolated, cornered like an animal on its haunches. If it had, you would've made an effort to approach him with caution.
So, it certainly shouldn’t have come as a surprise when your ecstatic hello was met with an axe to the face. Naturally, it’d phased right through you, a feat which only furthered the old being’s terror.
God had turned out to be more skittish than you’d expected.
(“Blimey, whit the hell are ye supposit tae be.”
“I’ve been waiting so long–”
“Ye're gonnae get yourself killed wearin tha’ flimsy thing, lass.”
You’d felt so stupid. You should have surmised that the occasion called for modesty.
“Forgive me,”
“Whit is it ye want? I don’ have any food for sharin’.”
“Redemption, if you please. I promise I’ve been good, I just want to see the stars.” But of course he’d know that. “Sir. Lord, sir.”
“Is somethin wrong wi yer head?” He’d huffed. “It's tha’ radiation, I'm tellin’ ye. Or maybe I'm dead an’ seein’ things.”
Dead? Another lost soul?
“Are you not God?”
“God? Ha!” The human scoffed. “Trust that I wouldn’ be livin’ in this rat’s ass if I was.”)
It turned out that he did have food, and plenty – stuffed cans stacked in rows atop rows of nourishment. Medicine too, an age old ventilator that he’d tapped with a knuckle to spur into function. He’d agreed to let you replenish if you’d take a gander at his malfunctioning radio, of which you had limited knowledge on but were willing to give a try. You’d no idea what he needed a radio for in the afterlife, anyway.
(“The battery contacts are corroded, I think.” You had spit through a mouthful of corn. It’d tasted like pure sugar to your neglected tongue. “If it matters to you this much: baking soda to neutralise the acid, then a bit of vinegar over it to help wipe off the gunk.”
“Smart one ye are,” He’d pulled a cigarette from one of his various pockets, lip curling at your inquisitive gaze. “Don’ give me tha’ look, I ain' got none for ye.”
“I’m okay, thanks.” After a bit of deliberation, you’d added, “I’m afraid I don’t understand something.”
“Whit is it this time?”
“Why’d you set up permanent camp here? Don’t you want to leave?”
“An’ where wad I go?” His lighter had taken several starts to sputter a flame.
“Heaven. Hell – if that’s your thing. The cosmos?”
He’d barked another one of those sturdy laughs. “Ye one o’ them fanatics? That say wha’ happened wis for good cause?”
“Huh?” Tentatively, you’d placed the radio back on its rickety stool. “What happened?”
And all humour had drained from his face, his pupils hardening to flat beads. If it hadn’t been for the sudden shift in mood, you’d have gone forever traipsing on a fantasy. No; it was the tremor, the breaks in his once haughty inflection – idiosyncrasies that could’ve only been described as sympathy-triggered. It’d built upon your doubt, your already wavering faith, to strike you out of your mental regression.
“The Alchemax bomb, lassie.”)
He had a bucket for you to throw up in, slick with panicked sweat, unable to hold on to anything as your body oscillated between materialities. He’d made no comment on how your hands fell through the floor, or the knees that started to sink alongside them. Your fault, your fault. Any thought besides blame hadn’t time to develop, recycled for fuel to keep the cognition running. Your fault. Your fault. All this time.
(Who could you have turned to? You’d been praying to deities who’ve long since left.)
Night bled, and the man had retired. You’d stayed plastered to the ground, crouched over a slosh of your purged innards. The foulness hardly moved you; it’d felt good to punish yourself in that way. You’d taken to being your own arbiter, and such was one of the many reparations to come.
(You’d shunned the voice that insisted you deserve none of it. If you hadn’t been so ambitious, so blind to the flaws–)
You’d wanted to leave. So desperately that the wish had seized every cell in you, shaking them with a vigour unparallel to even celestial fury. You’d wanted to leave. There’d been nothing for you to divert your efforts to after learning the truth. Nothing you could have done to fix it. You’d wanted to leave. To anywhere but there.
Please. Please. Please.
Just this one thing.
The air warped.
You hadn’t noticed it immediately, still wrapped in your own misery. Scratchy skin accredited to grief, you kept rocking in place, bathing in muggy sobs. But it’d only grown worse, like a fraying fabric chafing along every appendage. Your dirty nails dug into your palms.
The friction peaked, rubbing you raw. You’d heaved in large gulps of oxygen, pulling at your flesh like it could’ve stopped it. Your jaw had unhinged, teeth clamping down on your thumb to muffle the overstimulated scream that’d threatened to break. Tears sealed your lash lines shut.
Almost a second later, it stopped, interrupted by the blare of car horns.
And, when you’d opened your eyes, you found that you were someplace else entirely.
Your fingers graze along something rough. At first, it’s easy to mistake as your jeans, the denim hardened in places with lack of care.
The space seems to have shrunk since Miguel fell asleep, slumping inwards, its rock walls poking your elbows and curved spine with a clinical brutality. It’s difficult to imagine how he feels; twice your size, unused to fitting those muscles through tight squeezes. Disastrous still, the low creak of the steel arch above puts a timer on your misfortune. The topic of your demise is of increasing relevance.
Perhaps he drifted off for that exact reason. To hinge on ignorance; an avoidance of this waiting game. Or, more credibly, to force you into a figurative detention. Think about what you’ve done, and what I’m asking of you.
In any case, it’s working. The trauma you’ve tried repressing thus far rushes through your conscience, carving gaping canals of remorse, lapping at its banks to keep it fresh. You’re convinced your heart could give out, wrenched in innumerable directions, the only respite afforded being the glitches that rip through you. You deserve to stay here, but he doesn’t. He’s always only sought what was right.
(You can fix it, do this one thing.
Though you can’t grasp where to begin.)
You pinch the fabric, tugging at it in a nervous tick. You don’t feel the tension across your calf, an observation that grows stranger the harder you pull. Reaching over with your free hand, you smooth over your pants. They’re still level with your shin bone, unmoved.
Huh.
There’s a mortifying moment where you fear that it’s Miguel’s suit you’re fiddling with, before taking into account that it’s impossible to twist the nanotechnology.
And it’s too close in to be a wall.
You delicately trace the surface with your pinky, searching for any discernible edge, intent on mapping out the overall shape to deduce its origins. Your arms wave about in a frantic fashion, but to your bewilderment, you find no real boundary. Weirder yet, it appears to slice through your shoe and a portion of Miguel's thigh.
Feels like–
Your stomach lurches, broiling in a bold concoction of thrill and trepidation. It throws you off guard, your brain lagging behind the reality your body already accepts. You know what it could be, having undergone the phenomena in several situations similar. An answered prayer during your lowest points – back at the man’s bunker, a few times since then.
Nerves humming with electric fervency, you tamp your hope into something more manageable, unable to handle another blow should this turn out poorly. Or – comparably – should you succeed; if this is, indeed, a portal. Your resolve trembles with the strength of a baby bird's wing, missing the survival instincts that once bolstered it.
(What would it mean for you?)
Biting your lip, you plunge your fist through to the other side.
It comes in contact with something cold, unlike anything in your little cave. Cold, glossy and… crinkly. A plastic bag of sorts, packed full of a pulpy filling. You’re tempted to draw away, disgusted, but redirect that intensity into inspecting instead.
The bag rests upon an uneven floor, marred by pebbles that lend a sense of ruggedness to the place. Outdoors. Downright filthy, too; judging by the clammy residue that sticks to your knuckles. Bile nudges up your oesophagus, inspired by the unidentified refuse you’re granted access to. Squalid; a dumpster, probably. Decorated in bursting trash bags.
But then–
Mooring yourself upon Miguel’s abdomen, you dip your forearm further in. The static off the portal’s perimeter sings with discordant vibrations, its intensity bordering on painful. It prickles the fine hairs along your limb, scouring any goosebumps raised with a grating ferocity. You stifle the whimper that arises as a consequence.
Your fingers dip under the trash, grazing something that makes you pause. Rubber. Ring-like.
The day pass?
Swallowing, you jerk it towards you. It doesn’t budge, stuck under the refuse.
(It occurs to you to give up. The moral dilemma its purpose poses is abundantly clear.)
Hooking all four digits around its circumference, you pull harder. The portal eats at you, hostile to the foreign intrusion. Any longer and you’re afraid it’ll cut your arm clean off, right under where that gutter almost did the same. Your adrenaline had been enough to numb the torturous incident then, both physically and in memory – and though you lack that direct threat to your life now, the setup is much the same. A situation where you’re finally in control, a reclamation to the morality you’ve long since lost. It’s personal – the scolding he’d given you like a knife to old wounds.
The prospect fuels the surge you need, distending through your biceps, reinforcing their efforts as you finally yank the bracelet out. The portal makes no noise when it zips back shut, but you feel the lull, its energy abandoning you to wallow, alone again. Or, not alone; you gently settle between Miguel’s legs, careful not to disturb him.
There’s a stark silence that passes afterward, a line of astonishment keeping it intact. You allow it, needing time to process the staunch implications of the day pass sagging upon your lap. Its lilac hue gives a faint light to your surroundings, illuminating the cranny you’ve only been able to picture so far. It’s about what you expected – save for the resting face of your companion.
He looks good. Which isn’t to say he doesn’t usually, but the peace that graces his features compliments him, rounding out any harsher edges. You trail your gaze up his neck, to the jaw that points to a pronounced chin. Lips that pout even over retracted fangs. An aquiline, masculine nose. It fits him, you think. Lends itself to the fluffy hair that frames his sharp cheekbones. You linger on it probably longer than you should.
That is, until you catch sight of the blooming discolouration marring his temple.
It’s partially obscured in shadow, yellowing along the ends and purple in places you don’t have the advantage of properly observing. Yet, the bruise communicates all it needs to, loud and explicit. You’re not in a position to procrastinate any longer; you’ve already spent a year running from fate. It might make you sick, your organs tying together in a nauseating knot – and every impulse in you might scream against it. To run away; to leave him here for dead. Live the rest of your life in peace – it’s only right, it’s only right.
Then, you remember what he’d said to you.
(“Explain this to me, O’Hara – what just providence made me spider-woman to a barren land?”
“It’s not fair.” He didn’t skip a beat, tone laced with a hard understanding. “But it’s fact.”)
You really hate him sometimes.
Bracing yourself, you shake his shoulder. He’s up in an instant, snatching your wrist in one warm palm. You wait for the tired mist over his awareness to melt, a stone lodged in your throat.
“¿Qué es?” He whisper-shouts. “What?”
“I–” Your voice warbles. Pathetic. “I have something for you.”
He squints.
(Rightfully so.)
Breathing through the hesitation that strikes the rungs of your ribcage, you hold up the day pass.
He doesn’t realise what you mean immediately, flicking back and forth between the bracelet and your furrowed brows. Realistically, his doubt can’t have lasted longer than a few seconds, yet you’re eternally paralysed within the anticipatory dread – a fossilised mosquito captured in amber. Even when he does eventually catch up, you stay still, letting him pilfer the key to your freedom and watching as his drowsiness sharpens into a pointed resolve.
And you don’t stray, not for the entire stretch during which he tinkers with its components. It’s not his aforementioned allure that encourages it, nor the sudden flashbacks to your earlier breakdown. Ridiculously enough, it’s satisfaction – a contentment at having finally defied your self-interests. You look to him like you had the sun back home. For validation on the path you’re headed towards, a small hint of a job well done. You’re too cautious of your own pride, betrayed by it more often than anyone else, but he–
He knows what it means to be a true spider-hero.
You hope that one day, you will too.
“Lyla?” Miguel demands into his watch, testing to see whether the spare parts of your contribution resolved its issues.
“You’re alive! Huh,” A miniscule projection of his LYrate lifeform approximation blinks into existence, tilting her heart-shaped glasses down as if to punctuate her disbelief.
“I came across a few obstacles, but I’ve got the Wr-” He catches your wince. “Our target. Set coordinates for 928. I’m coming home.”
“Gotcha. Can you wait until Reilly coughs up a twenty, though?”
“You bet on my survival?”
“Silver linings!”
“Lyra.”
“Okay! Alright. Home it is, boss.”
“And tell Jess to be on stand-by with an empty cell,” He adds, lowering his pitch to one more understated. You can’t lie and imply your appreciation – no matter what he does to soften your circumstance, it retains its somberness. You’re going back to that desolate wasteland, and this time, you have no will in ever leaving.
“Figured you’d want to get her in the go-home machine as soon as possible. No?”
“No.” He asserts, the decision rumbling from deep within his chest. You steel yourself against the shiver that wobbles through you. “I’m not done with her, yet.”
“Explain something to me, would you?”
You smell of lemon antiseptic and dirt, arms wrapped in fresh bandages from shoulder to wrist. It’s an unpleasant combination, exacerbating the headache that gnashes on your skull under these fluorescent lights – darkness having been an ally to your concussion. The acetaminophen they’d given you at the med-bay has done nothing to aid your pain, and you’re convinced that the only thing that would work is a long, hot bath.
That is to say, you’re not ready to have this conversation.
When you don’t respond, Miguel stands from his seat, exercising the prominent muscles in his legs. His sweats do their best to conceal them, but you’d been in close quarters with him for far too long to have forgotten the way they bulge and shift with every move. If you focus, you can sense them now, pressing against your ass, pinning you in place.
He huffs. You doubt your glassy-eyed ogle is doing you any favours.
“Can’t make any promises.” You murmur, before deciding against it. It probably isn’t the best time to test him. “I’ll try my best.”
It’s the first time you see him in casual clothing, which changes him – much like sleep does. Outside of his suit, he looks younger, on a pedestal closer to common man. A white t-shirt stretched taut across his chest, loose pants. Lighter colours, in complement to his bronzed complexion.
Get a hold of yourself.
“For as long as I’ve known you, you’ve managed to weasel your way out of responsibility.” He starts. Wrong, you want to say, because your breakouts have always been based on pure luck. “You threaten falling into floors, to phase through walls. Except, when we were trapped back on 15. You silently accepted our fate, despite having every means to prevent it. It’s telling, in my opinion.”
You nod, already aware of what he’s getting at. “Sounds like you don’t need me to explain, so–”
“You can’t control your powers, can you?”
“Bit late in figuring that one out.”
“Then how’d you come about the day pass?” He presses, not so much questioning anymore.
As it stands, you have two options:
To lie. It’s easy, natural after a full year of it. Your interrogator doesn’t need to know the truth if all he’s going to do is send you back, and with his newfound revelation about the nature of your abilities, it could prove advantageous to keep their full scope from his knowledge. You don’t owe him shit.
That’s Wraith talking, of course.
The you you want to be, however, beckons for candour. There pervades the confessional once more, a box drawn around you, prompting you to relieve yourself of all your secrets so you can be cleansed. Religion – a fickle thing, but it feels right, here.
Besides, who knows when you’ll be able to talk to anyone again.
“I’m not… entirely sure.” Your frown tucks underneath your teeth, and you suck on your lip while trying to formulate a coherent answer. “It’s happened previously. It’s like a portal, except it’s invisible and appears on the irregular occasion. I was thinking of ho– my earth when it materialised by my hand.”
His forehead creases, drawing in incredulously.
“You can create gateways into other dimensions?”
“Not quite. My working theory is that, somehow, the boundaries between worlds are thinning. I think I mentioned how my intangibility works?” He gives an affirming blink. “My atoms find the quickest way through something, so maybe they’re able to do the same through, ya know, the literal fabric of space-time.”
It really does sound idiotic to put out loud.
Miguel cups his face, rubbing away the weariness gathered in his wrinkles. There’s a plaster over the contusion on his forehead, overcast by rowdy tresses of wet hair. You do your best to suppress the image of him in the shower, steeling your expression into one of indifference.
“That holds up. This started a year ago?”
“Yeah,”
“There was a thing with a super-collider.”
“A… thing.” The scientist in you cringes. Though, you have no room to talk.
“All I’m getting from this is that, if I were to send you home, you could just high-tail out of there whenever the opportunity arises.”
His distrust shouldn’t shock you as much as it does. You ponder the best way to go about this, yet your tongue betrays you, speaking before you can lasso it back under command.
“In theory, yes.” You pause, waiting for it to sink in. “But I won’t.”
Some grand gesture of faith that was, you imbecile.
“Sure.” He stresses, unconvinced.
Taking a step forward, you crane your neck to meet his eye. Patchouli catches the office draft, clouding your head until all that comes from you is unintelligible nonsense.
“I’m sick of this game of cat and mouse. I don’t want to be the bad guy any more.” Your thunderous heartbeat drowns the effect of your proclamation. It’s hard to tell whether you come across as genuine or not. “All my life, I’ve only ever done what was wrong, what was selfish.” You rephrase his earlier reproach. “Let me be right, just this once.”
Your conviction sways when he tenses. No; this doesn’t feel honest, not even to you.
You want to be good. With all the fire of every star in this goddamn universe, blazing hot and colliding to expel devastation upon its neighbours. It shrinks up in your core, skyrocketing in temperature. It verges on explosion; a supernovae, life-giving. You want. You want. You want.
But, you’re afraid you don’t know how.
“We can make a deal?” You offer, plummeting to new depths of uncertainty. A deal requires mutual credence; for every skipped vow, you’ll lose out on something too. “Let me stay, just until I learn how to be the hero you need me to be. After that, I’ll go home – I swear it. And you’ll never have to worry about me again.”
He gives no blatant indication as to whether he’s seriously considering it. His head dips, and he turns his back to you, likely calculating collective factors to form the best solution. The way you perceive it, though – this elongated reticence:
He sees no other choice.
chapter eight coming soon...
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Okay, if I haven't already emphasized your writing enough; I literally read the first paragraph, looked to my right and left even though there's nobody else in the room with me, and had a 'you-seeing-this-shit?' expression because I was just absolutely floored by the prose.
Ugh, Wraith's world has such an insane apocalyptic vibe to it!!! The way you captured it was amazing and really kind of solidifies how alone she is.
Also, there was a very specific paragraph where you described Miguel and I tried not to drool, especially after seeing the hint for chapter 8 beforehand.
But the idea of tending to Miguel’s wounds after he comes back from a fight – he’s sitting on the couch while you’re straddling his thigh, knees sinking into the cushions; in hindsight, it was, reasonably, the closest look you could get at the fresh cut right above his eyebrow. He’s got a hand settled on your waist, his way of wordlessly apologizing to you, even though he doesn’t actually feel sorry. Miguel’s tipping his damn head back – won’t keep it forward so you have to lean in and dab at it with a towel drenched in antiseptic.
Your lips are pressed in a thin line, thoroughly unamused. ❝ This is the last time O’Hara. Don’t bother showing up after your next fight. I’m done. Got me dragging myself out of bed at two in the morning again—knock all you want, bleed all over my welcome mat. Go ahead. I’m not answering the door anymore. ❞
The corner of his mouth tugs up into something that’s not quite a smile, but comes pretty damn close considering his typical scowling and general broodiness. ❝ Don’t kid yourself. We both know you’ll let me in. You always do. ❞
imagine price, mist clouding his eyes, and irrationality wanting to take over his brain, and every single fibre of his being.
imagine price, wanting, and wanting desperately to grasp at nothing but the feel of your touch to seep his senses, and do nothing but melt into a puddle.
but, he knows he can't. not when he's biting down on air, grinding his teeth so hard it might break— because he has to make a choice.
you, or the world.
it's one he had never wanted to have to choose from, one he had never wished to come true from the rippling depths of the void that it came from. but it's happening, and he can do nothing but watch painfully as your get trapped in some kind of contraption, unable to get yourself out and the man he needed to secure runs with the important parcel to ruin the world. the building is shaking, collapsing—
he knows he should chase down the target. chase him down to the ends of the world if he must, and finish everything so the whole of the earth can find momentary peace again. he knows, but he freezes anyway when he the decision is placed in his hands. he can't make the decision in time—
so you make the decision for him. you give him one last look, and whisper words to him before you smile as you push him out of the building with all your might.
it snaps him out of his trance, before he steels himself, and makes a break for it, running, and chasing their target. he doesn't look back as the building collapses, doesn't falter.
and you've saved the world again, people would sing to the others, telling him of how brave he was.
no. price would reply. all that haunts him is the smile you had on your face. his beloved, his heart, his—
Honestly this is so perfect because I’ve always liked the characterization that everything Price does is for the greater good. Then I went back to the beginning because my favorite part was the ‘you or the world’ line. After finishing, the angst was so palpable, I reread that as him choosing between ‘his world or the world.’
pairing: miguel o'hara x f!reader
rating: mature
word count: 4k
summary: misery makes good company
warnings: enemies to lovers, forced proximity, angst, i mean it guys, miguel o'hara is really not nice in this one, fighting, death/extinction, morally questionable characters, weapons of mass destruction, implied drug withdrawal, reader is given a backstory
notes: apologies for what's to come. it's okay if you hate me after
“Don’t move. You’ll make it worse.”
There’s a warm hand cupping the back of your head, callused fingers spread to steady the junction between it and your shoulder. It’s the first thing you notice when you wake; that, and the breath fanning across your face.
You think it odd. Signs of life pound beneath you like the febrile concoction of a dream, burning hot in emphasis that you’d survived. A heavy pulse behind your brow, the headache pinching at every sense until they all dim to conductive static. Your tongue, pasty on the roof of your mouth. The hind of your arm itches, the urge running bone-deep, humming from flesh gracelessly torn apart by a gutter. When you shift to examine it, a fire roars up your neck, the smouldering pain robbing you of any effort.
(The only other time you’d been this uncomfortable, you were bitten by a spider the third month of your internship with Alchemax. The puncture site didn’t burn so much as the delirium that followed.)
“What did I just say?”
And, there’s that voice. You find it difficult to discern its more unique attributes, words muffled from behind the wavering pane of your lucidity – yet, even still, it stands as the most tangible thing present. Deep, resonant. Smoked with a ruggedness you can feel in your teeth. It doesn’t occur to you why it seems so unfamiliar; perhaps it’s the fact that you catch it through its source, your ear pressed to a muscled chest. Or, that’s it’s whispering.
You’ve never heard him whisper. Not to you.
The need to retaliate swells once you realise who holds you. It’s nothing productive, not the string of questions you should be asking – what’s happening, where are we; but it’s the only natural instinct that overcomes you. When you attempt to make good on it, though, the clutter of jokes, gripes, and snubs tangle in your throat, emerging as little more than a groan.
And the act wears you more than it probably should, exhausted tremors wracking your frame. A tender ache ripples from a point on your ribcage – separate from the area you’d fractured at the quarry. The pressure here is more centralised, a focused bruise you locate the source of with a wriggle of your elbow, when a rock comes loose and clatters to settle underneath you. It joins a mound of similar rubble, a pseudo-cushion of chalky cement broken off the larger slabs surrounding you.
You assume they do, at least – based on what you can tell of the terrain behind your back. In reality, you have no means to confirm your circumstances. The space around you swims in ink-blot darkness, the type that is almost material, where sheer absence of light could be considered an element of its own. You squeeze your eyes shut, then widen them, and find that there’s no difference between the two.
So – dark, dusty and… cramped. You’re positioned across Miguel’s lap, his legs running under and perpendicular to yours. Neither of you can stretch them to their full extent, however, forced to cross and bend in unwieldy ways, tangling further in each other's limbs. Your clothes are worn out enough to allow you to detect when any surface of his body – tense abdomen and thick thighs – twitches, thrumming with a molasses-slow tension that starts to diffuse through you.
Not a scenario of his own choosing, then.
But the turn of events that might’ve converged to this are lost on you, white noise fluffing the space they’d evacuated. Last you recall, you were staring down a cop car, the lingering comfort of a child’s trust filling you with a remarkable sort of purpose, that which you cannot place. Had you acted against that convict? Or left it up to the man cradling you?
As if on cue, he speaks.
“You’re trapped under a collapsed building.”
He says you like he’s not a confounding variable in this equation. You know it’s meant to single your blame in this, stranding it somewhere where you can brood without cross-examining him or why he’s here too. It nests on a well of guilt you keep suppressed for good reason, irking you in a particularly special way.
“Figured that out for myself, thanks.” Despite the trouble you put into getting the retort out undisturbed, it ends up sounding more unconvincing than not. Miguel waits for the coughing fit you have afterwards to subside before pitching in his acknowledgment.
“Did you, now?”
Little shit isn’t even trying to hide his sarcasm.
You ignore him, continuing with your scepticism. “I’m just wondering why we’re still here.”
Because it’s a genuine conjecture. While you’re not a part of the educated camp in spider-hero abilities – being so clueless to the extent of your own – you’re far too familiar with that infamous super strength. You’d sensed the difference for yourself; your increasing aptness in carrying hefty weights, the fluidity with which you cruise through life, physically unperturbed. And you’ve been on the receiving end of the spectrum too, your skin littered with scars that point to the sheer power of your companion.
A few tonnes of demolished concrete should be a walk in the park for him.
He clicks his tongue like it’s obvious. “I pulled under a steel arc in time for the debris not to crush us. If I disturb this pocket, or try to rearrange a tunnel, then I run the risk again.”
The logic makes sense, as much as you hate to admit it. Of course, that doesn’t stop you from picking at the contrivances in his language. It was you when discussing what went wrong, and now it’s I when it comes to the out. You realise it’s probably unintentional. Somehow, that makes it worse. He must truly believe you’re nothing beyond a malevolent fuck-up; some villain willing to sacrifice herself for the greater demise.
(The latter might have its validity. It’s the former you hold issue with.)
Likewise, you also ascertain an easy fix to all this – on account of your spectral properties. And, if you were a better woman, it would’ve been feasible. Phase out, crawl through until you breach the open, get help.
It’s long since been established that you’re not that person, though – and you’ve come to accept your own incompetence. You don’t mean to die here; you’re not sure if you want him too either, for all your ire. But your immateriality is a fickle thing, recurring at the most inopportune times, in the smallest increments – a potential problem for the doubtlessly long crawl it’d take to escape. You don’t want to imagine what would happen should you solidify within the walls.
Resignation seems easier than tempting it.
Miguel must recognise the option as well. As it stands for him, he can’t afford to let you go, nor is he desperate enough to trust you yet despite it. You don’t bring it up then, maintaining the upper-hand by his misunderstanding of your capacity.
(Maybe you are evil.
Or, just tired.)
“That’s okay. I think it would be funny if we passed like this.” You pitch, nudging your cheek to urge the smile clearly lacking in your tone. There’s no humour behind your choice of phrase, and it’s a jarring step back from where he’d been, expounding himself. You suppose it might be a clumsy distraction from the exact gravity of your predicament, yet even that rolls over in your brain, not quite satisfactory to dissolve as truth. “It’ll make a nice story for the people who dig us up.”
His chest puffs, filling with an irritated inhale. In the same movement, his fingers constrict onto your cranial base; it has the adverse effect of bracing your neck for the sudden shift, minimising the soreness triggered by any activity. You decide to take it as the warning it’s meant to be instead.
“Eres patética.” He murmurs, sinking back down. You wince when his clutch weakens, pain flaring. “And whiplashed.”
You purse your lips, critical. “I’ve had worse.”
“Sure.”
“My arm–”
“Will be fine.” As if to punctuate, he reaches for the wound. A clink sounds when he taps it. “Used the nanotech off my suit as a bandage.”
You should have caught that it doesn’t sting like it would’ve if exposed. Similarly, his hands are gloveless. Bare – while the rest of him isn’t. You’d felt the dry surface of his palm, the fixed warmth it emanated, but for some oversight, you hadn’t considered that he was touching you. Skin-to-skin, the simple size of his fists dwarfing you in every measure.
A stone lodges in your throat.
“Did– How’d you know?” You pry, referencing the perpetual tenebrosity you’re suspended in.
What he replies with shouldn't shock you, not as much as it does. But the air’s shifted to a nuanced degree, a hesitation substituting loud anger. It's the awareness that he's just as tuned in to you as you are him, sympathetic to try and redirect you off the brink of death. Or, more likely, it’s the poignant impression of his fangs, wedged in your flesh, his tongue lapping up the very same path.
(And the wanton moan it’d triggered.)
“I could smell the blood.”
Oh.
Truthfully, you’ve no clue whether you respond aloud or keep your contemplation close to your psyche. He admits it almost… awkwardly, like it’s a condition he’s not so fond of himself. Yet it’s one that reverberates in the strained silence, plucking at taut strings that stretch with every passing second. You play it on repeat, stewing over the way in which he spoke; the diction, the stressors, the slight roll of his accent.
I could smell it. I could smell you. The blood.
Your life on the run hardly ever allows for moments like these. Over the past year, stress has anchored itself by the dock of your being, streamlining a flow of cortisol to every major organ. Continuity hinges on an alertness to the forces propelling you, and while the occasional wisecrack can alleviate some effects it has on your health, you don’t have the luxury of sinking into whatever fear bolsters it all.
It’s with him, though – hanging from a crane, or cornered in a pen of his own design. Only ever with him are you slapped with the resounding, festering distress of your own weakness. It consumes you, gnawing on your gut with its brutal teeth, tearing away the indifference you’d built around your systems. How dissimilar the two of you are; a girl unwilling to fight for even herself, and a man capable of wrapping a slash in the dark.
(He could smell it. And he can probably see, too.
By just how much does he outmatch you?)
“You’re welcome.” Miguel growls. You scold yourself for your elongated reticence, the pace of your heart overtaking the anxious torrent of thoughts that pump through you. It’s good practice to thank the man who’d saved your life four times over. Be that as it may, does it really count if he’s the reason it was necessary to begin with? He’d dropped you off that crane, he’d swung you a hundred feet high. Him, him, him.
You curl your tongue, desperate to quell the barrage of resentment that escalates at his prodding. Despite it pulling you from your rapid dissociation, your fight-or-flight peaks, forcing you to face a confrontation you don’t need. There’s nowhere to run – presently, you’re moored into place, his physicality and unique provocation blocking the possibility all together.
You scoff to placate the spiralling desire to argue.
It doesn’t work.
“For what?” You hiss.
All too quickly, his legs spread, creating a trough for you to slide down into. When your ass hits the unforgiving floor, you involuntarily cringe at the contrast it poses to his leg. A calculated effect, you’re sure – so too is the newfound freedom of his grip releasing your head, the crossing of his forearms pushing you away from the post his pecs provided.
It’s what you wanted, to distance yourself from his overbearing stature. And he manipulates it to his own favour; you’re made to bear your burden, the agony of your injured state tripling as if to exclaim: ‘see?’
Touché.
Nevertheless, it palliates your memory. The chill of the earth under you spikes your nerves, clearing the brume overcasting your day previous. You’d driven a car into that symbiote based on a groundless hypothesis; bold, any scientist would tell you. Yet, as far as your perception extends, it worked.
“Selfish.” He announces, far from discrete. It’s so unlike him that it smites the ego beginning to coagulate at your remembered success.
Your eyes snap to where you assume his face is, squinting like your glare makes any difference. “Excuse me?”
Undeterred by the threat inherent in your tone – that which is all talk – he persists. “Who do you think you are exactly, Wraith?”
The interrogation holds a dangerous quality; again, it feels out of place, a spirit tugging at the strings of his hollow self.
“Don’t call me that.”
“Why? What would you prefer? Anomaly, banshee? You drag death behind you like it’s a curse, only you’ve opted into it. I told you it wasn’t our place to interfere, and you had to push it–”
He can be jaded, or subtle. Oftentimes, he’s dismissive and passively rude.
But Miguel O’Hara is never heedlessly hostile. Not like this.
“That wasn’t my fault, asshole. I fucking glitched!”
“¡Órale, estás bien pendeja! Nothing ever is, of course! Has it never occurred to you to take a good look in the mirror?”
The irregularity scares you. Your voice breaks with it.
“O’Hara–”
“Because I’ll tell you what I see; a girl who can’t face what she’s done.”
“You don’t know me.” You shake your head, tamping the stiffness in your shoulder. It does nothing to exercise the sharp unease that flays you alive.
“A self-serving criminal who refuses to listen.”
“I d– I tried.” Hiccupping, the edge worsens.
“You’d have gone back home–”
“There’s nothing left for me there!”
“Like there is anywhere else? You’ve devastated them!”
“Stop it–”
“Wrecked entire worlds! I’ve been the only one holding it all together,” He yells, pushing his knees closer to one another. You’re slowly crushed in the process, thighs drawing up to press against your torso. “You’re no victim. You’re no hero.”
“Stop it!”
“Tell me I’m wrong!”
Feverish tears slice down your cheeks, spouting to escape the pressure that balloons within you. Your lungs tighten alongside it, heart aching. It’s progressed past the point of prevention – no longer do you retain control of how this turns out. All you can do is drift; a feather, seized in this tempest, stirred by a disembodied man.
When you don’t respond, preferring to preserve your energy for the sobs that rip from you, he inches closer. You sense it when he repeats himself, his hot breath lining the shell of your ear.
“Well,” His claws sharpen, grazing the small of your back. “Am I?”
His lisp is more pronounced like this, fangs extended to affect the natural position of his mouth. It warps the undertone, like a pool does light, and sends it back more viscous than ever. He’s uninhibited – an addict missing his fix.
It’s almost impossible to choke the admission out against the hatred churning your stomach. When you unhinge your jaw, it’s a credible wager that you retch all over yourself instead.
“No.” You manage to warble, a mixture of snot and wet misery streaking down your chin. Your wrists stay plastered, allowing the mess to mask your countenance, tucking between your legs in a childlike attempt at comfort. Cruelty crackles – self-propagated now – assaulting your faux-confidence until it plummets to a fraction of what it was.
Cursed. A wraith – haunting the multiverse with her unfinished business.
There’s nothing left to declare as his impressions are confirmed. You both mark it, this changed, spoken into existence by your divulgence. By some miracle, if you were to slip his capture, it’d be no more of a victory than the gore crusting your fingernails. Proof for his belittlement; that you truly are so inconsiderate as to further endanger the lives of millions.
(Would you be able to live with yourself?)
You relapse, agonising over the past week. Not a victim – you’d taken advantage of him with a kiss for an unsure opportunity. Not a hero – you’d punched a robber and gotten a civilian killed in the process. You’d run over a murderer and buried several under an early grave.
(Can you live with yourself?)
And home–
Trapped, you boil in a pond of your transgressions. It’d been a long time coming – your fault, in fact. You should’ve noticed the water was gradually heating.
There’d been a dam of careful construction at this bank, stacked tirelessly over the several nights you’d been given to think on what you’ve done. To prevent your clear culpability from catching up to you, to blind others to it too. He’s right, but not about all things. You’ve memorised your reflection at this point. Put it in a line up, and you’ll point your place in hell with facile certainty.
So, there’s no need to admit anything else. Regardless, his sabotage compels you to. Here, loitering purgatory with the one person who’d never understand; what harm could confession do? His opinion of you skims rock bottom, and you’ve no hope at seeing a priest before you rot.
Forgive me, for I have sinned.
“I’m not innocent.” You start. “Never have been.”
Alpha Centauri, that was the goal.
Located only four light years away, it’s the closest star system to Earth; with suns Rigil Kentaurus, Toliman and Proxima Centauri forming a trinary network. All main sequence stars – like humanity’s very own Sol – orbited by suspected habitable exoplanets. With the average chemical rocket, it’d take upwards of six thousand years to get there.
There lay alternatives, of course. Nuclear fission, with an energy yield of almost zero from its original mass. Fusion, ten times as efficient – still, not nearly enough. Ion accelerators, sunlight capture. Interstellar arks were of no interest; no, you’d wanted to achieve extrasolar travel within your lifetime. Warp drives and hyperspace – all theoretical.
As an undergrad, you’d settled on matter-antimatter collision.
The latter, antimatter, exists as an inverted twin to ordinary subatomic particles, with flipped states on every front. Antiprotons – negative protons with oppositely directed magnetism, and positrons – positively charged electrons. When the two meet their counterparts, their entire mass is converted into energy. And, when such annihilation is modelled within engines, a ship can accelerate to ninety percent the speed of light.
Therein subsisted your only chance to touch the stars.
Of course, like all hypotheticals, it came with its own array of issues. No natural reservoir of the substance is known, and producing at least one tonne would take more power than mankind has used in all its history. Moreover, it’s near nonviable to store. Any container that has ever touched regular matter would only cause preemptive decimation.
You wrote papers and studied computer-generated prototypes. You argued with professors, and attended pro-conferences. Months worth of minimum wage were blown on trips to Argentina, where the neighbouring system can be spotted through a telescope, winking above the horizon. And, just when it all appeared fruitless, you caught wind of Alchemex’s exploits within the field.
It was a young company, hobbling on its feet after a rocky merger with Oscorp. But they were daring, and rich, endeavouring into categories that most deemed nonprofit. You’d applied for an internship, waited months to hear back. By some cosmic karma, it turned out to be good news when you eventually did.
They were already working on manufacturing the antimatter. It was your suggestion that encouraged them to use magnets to store it within a vacuum.
It looked auspicious. It had been.
Then, you were bit.
The spider was from another division – radiation, you suppose. By some breach on account of a more negligent temp, the critter had found its way into your improvised cubicle. And so the story goes; it’d champed down on the webbing between your thumb and forefinger, before promptly suffocating under the cup you’d snared it in. The area stung for a while, venom having directly found your veins. Yet, by the time you’d returned to your dorm, your immunity seemed to have diluted its effects.
Until, you’d gotten sick. The hysteria was slow to consolidate, starting as a sore throat. You’d used your one day off then, ignorant to just how bad it could get; because the fever only deepened, lesions on the lining of your oesophagus oozing ichor into bile. Your doctor waived the possibility of tuberculosis, mistrusting the notes your instructors sent with you, complaining of in-class fainting bouts.
You couldn’t miss work, though. Never. Not when you were so close.
So you stuffed sheets of pills in your pockets and braved each shift with trembling joints. You’d no friends to notice your suffering, and for such an ambitious company, overtime was expected. Sweating through multiple layers of clothing, you kept an eye on your poster of the galaxy and lagged on those long nights. At the rate you were going, you genuinely dreaded a life cut short before you could realise your objective.
If nothing else, it urged you to work harder.
Your first milestone came at the one kilogram mark. A party was hosted to celebrate, billionaires invited to gather around the vessel which held such a revolutionary feat. Despite your interloper status, you’d been summoned too, to play big girl scientist and present Alchemex’s future course of action. Your affliction was improving, and you were the inspiration behind the project’s advance. It felt like the biggest night of your career.
(‘Magnets! What a genius solution.’ From a nobel prize runner up.
‘That ambition will get you far, mark my words.’ The CEO’s cousin.)
In truth, it was the last.
Because the antimatter had taken centre stage, security slackening with its continued stability. So long as the magnetism wasn’t tampered with, so long as the vacuumed vessel remained airtight, things looked to be fine for your speech. You’d cycled through every known variable, staring down the container, a champagne flute tucked in your sweaty palms.
Your skin prickled.
The glass smashed to the floor. In your embarrassment, you’d brushed it off as clumsiness prompted by the perspiration – notwithstanding your recount, having seen the drink fall through your mass. Did it matter, though? You couldn’t put it past your illness to cause such hallucinations. It was impossible, a trick of sight.
The festivities progressed, yet the tingle of your nerves didn’t subside. Anxiety – you chalked it up to common apprehension. So, when your boss announced your name for all to hear, and the agitation flared, it wasn’t alarming. You could think of nothing else anyway, honed in to the address you’d practised all morning.
Good evening, ladies and gentlemen.
Your gut flipped. Your vision blackened.
The steps lost depth; you stumbled up them with all the grace of a hunted fawn.
Today–
Your skin prickled once more, and you collapsed. Through the antimatter’s vessel, through the floor.
There’s nothing to recall after that. Not for a long while.
“I don’t become intangible.” Your brow bone rests on the curve of your knee, body curled in a foetal position. “My particles merely… find the best way through something.”
Miguel has remained eerily quiet throughout your chronicle. You try not to let it dissuade you.
“So–”
“Some came in contact with the antimatter.”
“Yeah.” You murmur, moved by an unnamed emotion. “It detonated, naturally, with a force roughly equivalent to a nuclear bomb. Wiped out everyone in the city upon discharge, then everyone in the state with its impact. Or– maybe, I don’t know. I was discarnate for weeks – the explosion had no effect on my immaterial self, and the radiation couldn’t hurt me when that spider damn well sought and failed at it already.”
You hug yourself tighter.
“I only witnessed the winter that followed. The blast was large-scale enough to trigger firestorms and a global climate cooling – similar to the one they scare you with when talking about nuclear warfare. Crop failure, famine. Millions died and my home devolved into cataclysm. It was mass extinction,” You school yourself, waving the snivel crawling up your nose. “Because of me.”
An end by starvation or infection, confined to this tomb, seems a perfectly fitting penance.
“Explain this to me, O’Hara – what just providence made me spider-woman to a barren land?”
chapter seven coming soon...
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Dee, I can't keep doing this. Anytime you post a new part up, I have to prepare myself because your writing has me by the fucking throat. I'm serious. Like, I'll see the update but then I have to wait to set aside a specific amount of time so that I can read it more than once, back-to-back.
The last one? I felt so Victorian-era blushing the way you described just his hands. Your writing has such a drastic effect on me.
"There’s a warm hand cupping the back of your head, callused fingers spread to steady the junction between it and your shoulder."
and
Similarly, his hands are gloveless. Bare – while the rest of him isn’t. You’d felt the dry surface of his palm, the fixed warmth it emanated, but for some oversight, you hadn’t considered that he was touching you. Skin-to-skin, the simple size of his fists dwarfing you in every measure.
Hello??? I feel like I could write a dissertation about the way you write, but I think my favorite parts of your prose are how you can describe a specific act with that much detail and turn it into something else completely. He's literally just touching her.
Jesus Christ.
And the second-half was so interesting to read knowing how much research you did!
That's another thing I love about your stories. How much time and effort goes into them. I think I saw you answer an ask a while ago that mentioned how you say it takes you a long time to write because you craft each line with care. Please don't ever feel like you owe anyone anything when it comes to posting. The text is so rich that I could literally go back over any paragraph a thousand times. I could honestly live in your writing. Does that make sense?
There's that age-old question: if you were stranded on an island, what would you take with you? I feel like I should take something practical, like water or food or some kind of form of shelter but honestly, I would just bring your masterlist.
Pairing: Simon “Ghost” Riley x Medic!Reader
Synopsis: Five times Soap questions the relationship between Ghost and the 141's Medic, and the one time he gets an answer.
Word Count: 2.9k
Warnings: mentions of blood, mild swearing
Disclaimer: I do not own modern warfare or any of the modern warfare characters.
part two. part three. part four.
The first time is purely by accident.
It’s not like he’s trying to eavesdrop; it isn’t his fault the infirmary doors were left wide open, and it doesn’t seem like you and Ghost are trying to be quiet. Price called everyone for a meeting in twenty and, since the infirmary’s on the way, Soap figures he’d swing by and grab you. He’s walking towards the doors, paying attention to nothing in particular, when your unmistakable laugh echoes into the hallway. Soap stumbles slightly, caught off guard by the sudden noise.
Someone’s enjoying themselves, he thinks. He’s almost six steps from the door when you laugh again, this time followed by the deep timbre of a familiar voice that makes Soap stop in his tracks.
Price was the one who had brought you onto the team, but it was supposedly Ghost who had recommended you. “Only medic I ever met who actually knew what they were doing,” he had said. Apparently the two of you had previously worked on multiple missions together, and that was made obvious by the way you two worked flawlessly around each other with an efficiency that could only have been cultivated through a deep trust and years of teamwork.
Soap slowly approaches, all his stealth training coming to the forefront as he leans next to the door and focuses in on what you’re saying.
“It’ll only take a day, two tops. I promise.” Soap can hear the smile in your voice. Glancing at the glass panes of the doors, he can just make out your reflection. You’re standing beside an empty bed, behind an overbed table that’s covered in papers, leaning on your elbows to smile widely up at Ghost as he stands against the wall on the opposite side of the bed looking wholly unimpressed.
“You want me to spend an entire day sitting in the corner and watching you give everyone on base flu shots?”
“No, I’m asking if you’ll sit in the corner and look intimidating while I give everyone on base flu shots. The “look intimidating” part’s important,” you speak matter-of-factly.
“I’ve seen you amputate a man’s leg at the knee mid-combat. You’re telling me you can’t handle a few shots by yourself?”
Soap makes a note to ask about that story later.
“I can handle myself just fine, thank you. It’s everyone else that’s the problem here.” Ghost blinks at you, seemingly not believing you. “I get it, you’re all big, tough guys who face death every day-” Soap sinks his teeth into his cheek to fight back a laugh as you try to lower your voice in a very poor imitation of Ghost, “-but the way some of these guys act, you’d think I was coming at them with some kind of medieval torture device. I just think-”
“That’d be a first.”
“-If I had someone that everyone respects, and is a little bit afraid of, sitting nearby then they’d stop with the whining and I can get my job done faster.”
There’s a long pause as you and Ghost stand locked into a staring contest. Soap swears that, for a moment, something like amusement crosses Ghost’s eyes.
“You think people are only a little afraid of me?” Ghost asks, tilting his head ever-so-slightly. You let out a loud, exaggerated scoff, throwing your hands up.
“Fine! Go lurk in a dark corner and scare children, or whatever it is you do, instead of helping me. Just don’t be surprised if I’m suddenly out of painkillers the next time you get shot.” You’re facing away from him, pouting like a child with your arms crossed over your chest. Both Soap and Ghost know you don’t mean it, your flawless reputation is too important to you, but Ghost sighs and nods anyways.
“Just tell me what days-” Ghost is barely done talking when you’re spinning around, nearly knocking the table over.
“Really?”
“Whatever will get you to stop being a brat.” Like water off a duck’s back, the insult runs right off of you as you clap your hands together. “Now, come on. Don’t want to be late to Price’s meeting.” Ghost pushes himself off the wall as you shuffle your scattered papers into organized piles to look through later. Soap leans back, taking a few quiet steps back from the door as you and Ghost start to leave the infirmary.
“Hold on, one sec.” Soap pauses as he hears your hurried footsteps, looking back to your reflection in the glass. Eyes widening, his jaw drops as he watches Ghost let you grab his arm and push yourself up onto your toes to place a quick kiss to the cheekbone of the larger man’s plated skull mask. “Thank you,” you speak softly, taking a couple small steps back.
Soap doesn’t have time to process as you and Ghost step out of the infirmary, immediately spotting him as he stands dumbly in the hallway.
“Hey Soap! You heading to Price’s office, too?” Soap blinks, shaking off the shock and giving you a quick nod.
“Yeah, I was just about to come get the two of you.”
“Let’s go, then,” Ghost says, turning and walking away without waiting for you or Soap. You fall in step behind him almost instantly, waving Soap over. Soap glances between the two of you as he follows. He knew the two of you weren’t strangers. He’d even speculated you might’ve been friends, but he’d never imagined you might’ve been something more. He wants to know more, but also gets the sneaking suspicion that this isn’t something he should be prying into. Ghost has always been a private man.
Either way, he has no time to think on it further as the three of you enter Price’s office.
-
The second time, he’s in far too much pain and far too tired to really remember if it actually happened.
Despite everything, the mission had been a success, though the cost had almost been too much. Your team of seven has two unconscious, three severely injured, and the rest sporting a variety of bullet grazes and knife wounds. None dead, thanks to your quick thinking and efficient work. It’s late and the team’s holed up in an old safehouse overnight waiting for evac. Soap is sat up against the far wall, watching you with drooping eyes as you flit around the safehouse, tending to everyone’s wounds. He had been fortunate enough to only have a few minor wounds, but the adrenaline of the fight is fading fast and the comedown is hitting hard.
Ghost is on watch and is the last person you check on, at his own insistence and much to your annoyance. He bats you away from any of the minor cuts and bruises, so you pull up a chair next to his and focus on the deep gash running across his right forearm. Through his sleep-hazed gaze, Soap watches you expertly stitch Ghost’s arm. He can hear the two of you mumbling to each other, but doesn’t have the energy to try and decipher your words. Once you’ve finished wrapping Ghost’s arm, you glance around at the others.
You must assume everyone is asleep by the way you deflate, running a tired hand down your face and stretching your neck with a grimace. You scoot your chair closer to Ghost’s, shutting your eyes and letting your head fall against his armored shoulder. To Soap’s surprise and not to yours, Ghost makes no move to push you away, instead shifting so your head’s not at such an awkward angle and settling into his own chair. Soap can feel his curiosity creeping up, but sleep wins out in the end and he passes out not long after.
When he wakes, Ghost is in the same spot, but you’re curled up in a beaten up arm chair across the room still asleep.
When evac finally arrives, everyone is awake, and you and Ghost hardly acknowledge each other as he briefs Price over comms and you help load wounded into the helicopter.
-
The third time, he’s sneaking through the rain and blood-soaked streets of Las Almas, Ghost guiding him through his ear as he makes his way to the church.
He knows he should’ve seen it coming, but Graves’s betrayal stings nonetheless. Soap pushes the anger down, instead focusing on reaching the rendezvous point so they can escape and rescue Alejandro. The banter helps, but there’s an edge to Ghost’s voice that Soap understands as worry.
They haven’t heard from you since you all were separated.
They both know you can handle yourself, and worrying about it won’t help, so they talk and sort through their situation: what supplies Soap can pick up, how bad tequila tastes, the tactical uses for dog piss. Everything is as fine as it can be while on the run from deadly mercenaries. Until-
“The mask. Take it off.”
“Show my face?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Negative.”
“Are you ugly?”
“Quite the opposite.”
“Can confirm.” Soap nearly jumps out of his skin at the sudden sound of your voice.
“Holy hell, where have you been?”
“Aw, you worried about me, Soap?” The teasing tells him you’re not in too much danger, or are at least somewhere you feel safe, but something in your voice feels…off.
“What’s your status?” Ghost cuts in.
“Managed to get out of the village,” you groan through a deep exhale, and give a haggard laugh, “can’t say the same for the Shadows.”
Ghost gives a quiet hum of praise, but all Soap can hear is the strain in your winded voice. “You alright, Doc? You sound-”
“Dings and scrapes, Soap. I’ll be fine. Meet up with you later.”
“Wh-”
“Don’t worry about it, Johnny,” Ghost sighs, “just focus on getting to the church.”
“Right,” Soap mutters. He returns his focus back to the mission at hand, rummaging through the drawers in front of him for rope he can wrap around his extra fan blade.
It hits him just as he spots the reflective shine of a shard of glass on the floor. Can confirm, is what you’d said. Did that mean-
“The Doc’s seen you without the mask.” It comes out as more of a statement than a question.
“Let’s worry about you, Sergeant.”
-
The fourth time, he lands hard on his feet in the pitch black of Alejandro’s safehouse. Soap has his back turned as Ghost climbs in the window behind him. Luckily for him, as Ghost sees the laser sight aiming right for Soap’s back.
“Don’t move!” Ghost calls out, before launching a knife into the support beam across the room. Soap whirls around to shine his light at the beam just as someone calls out from behind it.
“¿Quién está ahí?”
Before either he or Ghost can answer, someone else stands and walks around to the front, “About time you two showed up!” Your voice is an instant relief as they both relax while you turn back to let Rodolfo know it’s safe to come out.
“Either of you injured?” you ask, eyes scanning over Soap as Ghost hops down from the open window and Rudy returns his knife.
“Nothing major,” Soap assures you, though your eyes linger on the bullet hole in his arm.
“Found this one trying to climb in through the same window,” Rudy explains, nodding towards you.
“I almost had it,” you laugh, leaning to the side to put your weight on the beam. They don’t miss the way you wince, and it doesn’t take long to notice your right leg is a deep red from the knee up.
“Your leg-”
“Looks worse than it is.”
Soap doesn’t believe you, but the subject changes to Graves and he lets it go. The four of you settle around the table as the guys formulate their plan for Alejandro’s prison break. You set your palms atop the table, leaning forward to take as much weight off of your leg as you can so you can focus on the conversation. It doesn’t help much, but it helps enough and soon the plan is concrete enough to take action. While Rudy leads Soap to the weapons locker, you take a seat on a nearby box to check the haphazard bandages you’ve wrapped around your thigh.
“You’re staying here.” Soap glances over as Ghost speaks. You laugh quietly, leaning back on your hands to stare up at the man towering over you.
“Leaving me all by my lonesome?” You sound like you’re complaining, but even from a distance Soap can see the relief in your face. Your teasing does little to soothe the stress radiating from Ghost.
“Just-” Ghost lets out a long sigh before dropping his voice so low, Soap can barely hear his words. “Be careful. Please.” You sit up straight, face suddenly serious as you set a gentle hand on Ghost’s wrist.
“For you? Always.”
“Soap, can you grab the rest of the guns?” Soap snaps back to attention, nodding at Rudy and collecting what guns he can. It takes all of two minutes, and when he turns back, Ghost is sorting through papers and you’ve set to properly bandaging your leg.
-
By the fifth time something happens, Soap is absolutely sure there’s something between you and the Lieutenant. He notices it everytime the two of you are together: the quiet banter, the dark jokes only the two of you enjoy, the way Ghost always seems to hover near where you’re standing. It isn’t until the 141’s every-so-often night out that his suspicions are confirmed. Gaz and Price stepped away for a round of darts ten minutes ago, and now Soap finds himself sitting alone watching you and Ghost talk at the opposite end of the bar.
“You keep staring like that, and they’re going to notice.” Soap chokes on his drink as Price takes a seat next to him, Gaz snickering as he flops down on Soap’s other side and claps him on the back.
“I…I don’t know what you’re talking about, sir,” Soap coughs out, clearing his throat and looking anywhere but the other end of the bar. Price sees straight through his lie, of course.
“Gaz, why don’t you see if the Doc wants to try a hand at darts?”
“Sure thing, boss.” Another clap on the back and Gaz is making his way over to you and Ghost. Soap startles as Price leans close and nudges him in the side with his elbow.
“Keep your eyes on him,” Price whispers, and leans away to sip at his own glass. Soap takes another drink, sneakily glancing up just as Gaz reaches you and Ghost. You smile widely at him, nodding when he gestures towards the darts board. You turn and say something to Ghost before standing from the bar and following after Gaz to the other side of the room. Ghost’s eyes follow you the entire way, never once leaving your form.
“Watches like a hawk, that one,” Price hums, “and I thought he’d be better at subtlety.” Soap turns to his Captain, brows furrowed in confusion.
“You-” Price shushes him, and nods back towards Ghost. Soap looks back, and they watch as Ghost sets down his empty glass, stands, then makes his way over to you and Gaz. He posts up, leaning against the wall closest to you where you can easily smile at him every time one of your throws lands.
“Like a lost puppy,” Price laughs.
“What’s the situation there?” Soap asks, glancing back at Price, but all Price can offer is a lazy shrug.
“Don’t know, but whatever it is, it’s been happening for a long time.”
-
“Alright, just got a couple papers for you to sign and you should be good to go,” you smile, gently turning Soap’s head to examine the area you’ve just pulled his stitches from.
“Thanks, Doc. ‘Preciate it.” You give a playfully dismissive wave, disappearing behind the dividing curtain.
“I’ll be right back!” you call and Soap nods, more to himself than you. He glances around at his sterile surroundings, eyes bouncing from the white walls to the white floor to the white bedsheets. The overbed table sits just next to him, though this time there’s no mess of papers scattered atop it. Instead, there sits a single file and after twenty seconds of solid boredom, Soap can’t help himself.
Lifting from the bottom corner of the file, Soap nearly drops it as he sees your picture clipped to a pile of papers. He looks behind him, pulling the curtain just enough to peer through. He spots you on the far side of the infirmary, waiting patiently at the printer. Letting the curtain fall, he quickly turns back to your file. He flips it open, picking up the paper with your photo attached. It’s an older picture, maybe from three or four years ago, but your smile is still as wide as ever.
Flipping the picture up reveals almost two entire pages of solid black lines. There’s more redacted information here than Soap has ever seen. Soap skims through what few sentences are available, every so often catching things like SIS and specialty interrogation tactics and a slew of words he never would’ve associated with your cheerful demeanor. He gets to the final page that appears to be a printed copy of the photo and his heart nearly stops as he reads the name written at the bottom and everything clicks together in his head.
One of the first Ghost fics I ever read, and it's stayed with me ever since then. The fact that it’s told through Soap’s POV and the amazing relationship you wrote felt so real and organic through his eyes, like we as the audience were kind of outsiders looking in. I know it’s been up for a long time, but I can’t help but think about it often because this is the Ghost fic. I can’t emphasize that enough. So, so great.
Miguel’s conducting a census on the spider-verse when he lands himself on 𝐄𝐀𝐑𝐓𝐇-𝟐𝟏𝟑𝟕 – has no prior information since this is his initial visit, but on first glance recognizes that this is Nueva York; that usually means that the local superhero is Miguel O’Hara, or at least another variant of him. Only he finds out that here, it’s actually someone named Web-Shot, a souped-up version of his own late wife.
"Cariño." It was easier to say before – when everything was right, when his entire world hadn't collapsed in on itself. Now, the word feels strange. His brain reacts as if no time's passed at all; it takes effort for his mouth to form around each of the vowels and the consonants, though – like a rusted cog forced into service after being made stiff from years of disuse.
And while you may walk and talk like her, you’re not. He tells himself not to be fooled by the way your face lights up when you see him, by the way your laughter fills the space between the two of you, and by the way you still tell jokes at his expense.
But then you take the few steps necessary to close the distance to get to him, wrap your arms around his frame like he’s just come home after a long day of being out. It’s all too familiar – your body folding into his, how well the pieces fit together, the softness that he remembers so well; it’s every single inch of his wife that had been catalogued and filed away in the back of his mind for safekeeping – dust-ridden archives that he’d never thought he’d dig up again. You’re a memory in the flesh.
“Web-Shot, because—”
“You shoot webs. That’s cute,” he says in a dry tone.
“Alright, then. Let’s hear yours. You got something better?”
“Spider-man. It’s simple. Clean. Rolls off the tongue.”
“Wow, original. Was ‘Daddy Long Legs’ already taken?”
“Oh, you’ve got jokes. I see your sense of humor is consistent.”
“It’s why you fell for me, isn’t it?”
“Among other things,” he murmurs. “Pain in my ass—”
He asks where your Miguel is, needs to know if the two of you are together, but finds out that he died three months ago – fell from a clocktower during a bad fight he wasn’t supposed to be at, snapped his neck clean in half from the tension when you tried to catch him with your webbing and he ricocheted back up from the concrete like a damn bungee cord. The ring was in his pocket; he was supposed to propose that night before everything went to shit. So your time ended with him fast, early. Before you even really got to start your lives together.
And this other Miguel, the one who shows up in your universe alive (sure) and well (debatable), gives you some insight to his world. His wife was a romantic – an idealist, a dreamer. He’s always been pragmatic – a man of science, an engineer, doing everything within his realm of possibility to make her visions come true. It’s been a long time since he talked about his history and his family: how he proposed, where they had the wedding, his daughter – the way everything was good and perfect until it wasn’t.
After spending the night with you on the Empire State Building, he realizes how much you’re like his wife. It hits him hard, brings up too many emotions to the surface that he’d been tamping down all these years.
Nothing about any of this is fair. And it’s sad, heartbreaking. Especially—
“I didn’t get to grow old with you.”
“We could’ve had a lifetime together and it still wouldn’t have been enough. You get that, right?”
You convince him to stay. Try to, at least. He can be your Miguel, and it would all be so easy. He can take his retired wedding ring off the chain around his neck and slip it on where it belongs.
But it’s not possible. He tells you that much – what can happen, the repercussions that ripple out and affect the multiverse web. Because he’s already attempted that – wouldn’t have given up without trying to get you back.
A part of him wants you to say it one last time. I love you. I love you. I love you.
Instead, he gets:
“Every version of me loves every version of you. And even though I haven’t gotten to see it for myself, I know that there’s no universe where that isn’t true.”
Before he leaves, you ask if he thinks there’s any chance the two of you are allowed to be happy, allowed to live normal lives in all of the places he’s seen.
He tells you that he has: breakfast on the balcony, slow Sunday mornings, and weekend fútbol tourneys with your daughter. This story ends on a good note, but he doesn’t mention that it only exists inside his head.
