The renovations to The Daily Bugle presents me with a highly-modernised building to work from. I step into my new office - my own, private office - and feel as though I'd been stuck in the middle of a void situated somewhere between my world and Miguel's.

It's white (why did everything modern have to be white? I'm so bored of white) and has light wood furnishings and a floor-to-ceiling window behind my desk. My new chair is leagues better than my old one, which had probably been the same age as me, and a weeping fig stretches spindly green-leafed burdened branches to the led-lit ceiling.

My desk utensils all match - a tidy shade of blue. My mousepad is spick and span and new. I have a shelf of beige coloured books - a thesaurus and dictionary included. A minimalist clock ticks from its spot on the wall. I have a door.

It's perfect. I brush invisible dust from my new desk. I boot up my new computer with its two new monitors and stretch back in my new chair and admire my new space. It's so peaceful - there's nothing to disturb me, no crazy multiverse shenanigans to distract me from my work. It's just me. Just me in my own office.

The clock ticks. It's so quiet.

I miss Miguel.

My chin drops onto the plush cushion of my mousepad and I stare at the framed photo I brought into work with me this morning. The frame is bright orange - the only bright colour in this entire office - and holds the photo of Miguel and Rosita from the day when she won her soccer championships.

Miguel. I turn onto my cheek as my computer flickers onto the login screen. I study his countenance; the joy in his eyes, so slightly hued red one would hardly notice. The brightness of his smile. The love so effortlessly melting from his expression as he laughs with our daughter. The pride of her accomplishment. The adoration he has for her. The admiration she has for him.

Miguel's an amazing father, but he'd promised to me that I knew all his secrets. He lied.

I lift myself up with effort and drop my head back with a sigh. My arm drapes across my eyes and snuffs out my vision until all I can see is black.

I'm not worried about whatever happened on Earth-1610 that Miguel's keeping secret. It's just the fact that he's keeping a secret. And, yes, he has a right to privacy within reason, but I'm so curious, and my want to know gnaws at me. It's driving me up the wall. It's almost making me turn to my Gizmo and portalling him straight into a haphazard interrogation.

Miguel had married (or almost married) a curious wife, so really, this was entirely his fault. I'm a bloody journalist - curiosity is what wakes me up in the morning.

Fuck. The clock ticks. My computer hums away. I drag my hands down my face with a groan. If I don't do something, this is going to eat at me for weeks.

And eat at me it does.

It lingers in the back of my head all morning - a rolling, festering ball that swells and swells. It hovers throughout a meeting I have with one of our photographers in the new meeting suites, and it pesters at my brain during one of my pitches to Jameson. I'm a journalist. Just as Miguel is anatomically built to be Spider-Man, I'm atomically built to find answers to my questions.

I'm so caught up in the ribbons of my frustration that I nearly bump into one of the juniors in the kitchen when I go to return to my office. I gasp and apologise, leaning back from where my tea spills over the edges of my cup and splatters on the tiles. Great. First spill on the new floor.

"Sorry, Y/n!" Kathleen sheepishly chuckles. Her eyes linger on the unsettled surface of my drink before dropping to my wrist. Her gaze narrows with hunger I know well. She's a beast snuffling through the bushes for prey. "Is that a new watch? That's pretty utilitarian for you."

Hardly new, but I have done well to hide the Gizmo until now. It's not exactly my style. It's not exactly any part of my universe's style.

"My husband made it for me for my birthday," I say.

Kathleen's prying eyes slip away and relaxes. Anyone can blame a husband for not having any fashion sense - it's one of the still-existing stereotypes.

"Oh," she says, which means she thinks it's ugly as hell. I wonder if she'd think the portals it creates would make it any more appealing. I'm not stupid enough to find out.

I wipe the dripping sides of my cup dry and flee to my office before Kathleen can raise any more questions. At least in the HQ I wouldn't have to hide Miguel's profession. Here, back in mundane-ville, I'm falsifying normalcy. It's a relief to shut the door to my office behind me, and a bigger relief to slump into my chair and lift my eyes to the ceiling in exasperation. Miguel's gaze from the picture burns.

Weeping Fig be damned. I want back. I need answers.

"Hey, Peter," I say when his holographic bust pops up from my Gizmo. I lock the door to my office and make sure the blinds to the window is at an angle that won't let anyone spy.

"My favourite otherworld normie!" Peter greets back happily. My irritation relaxes within a swift wave. "How are you liking the new digs?"

I cast another look around my office, as if I hadn't wasted the first hour of my morning exploring the Bugle's updated stomping ground. "It's nice. Very clean-cut." I turn back to Peter, who's inexplicably more interesting than interior design. "Are you surviving without me?"

His smile drops. "Absolutely not. Miguel's grumpy without you."

"Tell me something I don't know," I say with a curt grin. I lean against my desk and watch my friend laugh while my mind races. "I need to ask you something, and you have to promise to answer."

Peter's expression folds into suspicion. He rubs the back of his neck with a grimace.

"I dunno. That kinda sounds like a trap."

Just as I suspected. I pull my trump card. "Did I not help your wife give birth? Did I not come running when you called?" At his wavering frown, I send him a pout and go for the throat. "Aren't we besties?"

Peter's face crumples. "Gosh, Y/n, no need to attack my feelings. What is it you want to know?"

My smile of success only lasts a second before it fades with seriousness. Peter straightens at my turn of attitude, Spider-Man sarcasm slipping away.

"What happened on 1610?" I ask. I continue before he can open his mouth to reject to answer. "Please, Pete. If it's nothing, then it shouldn't matter. But if it's big then don't I deserve to know?"

Peter digests that for a while before stretching his head back with groan. He digs the bulbs of his palm into his temple and holds it there for some time. I watch his face shift as his thoughts tumble.

"You really got me in a box, here," Peter grumbles. He drops his brown eyes to me with a unhappy sigh and my grin grows at the look of defeat on his face. "Are you free now? Wanna get some lunch?"

I'm already grabbing my bag. "I was hoping you'd ask."

Ten minutes later, I find myself on one of the rooftops in Peter's world, unable to sit-in at a cafe due to how I look like I belong on one of his world's comic books and vice-versa. He drops a paper bag of wrapped club sandwiches between us and clambers down to sit on the edge of the roof.

"Do you usually guilt trip people you want to interview?" he asks as he grumpily unwraps a sandwich.

I carefully poke the fake-looking food. It certainly feels real. It smells real. "Only my friends."

"You're a terrible person."

I chuckle, taking a bite of my comic book lunch and gazing at the view of Peter's Queens. His world is vastly different than mine - more subtle in colour, the shadows bolder, the highlights in hatchets. It's nice. It's cozy. "I appreciate you humouring me."

"Yeah, well," he grunts, a sentence he never finds in him to finish. "Just know Miguel will be pissed at me when he finds out - and he will find out."

"Is it that serious?"

Peter sighs and drops his sandwich-holding-hands to his lap. "Yes. But also no. Miguel thinks it is but you might think differently."

My curiosity rises. That does sound complicated. I want to know everything about it.

"Miguel once told me that the multiverse is in shambles because of 1610. Why is it so..." I struggle to find the right word. "Central in all this? Why did Miguel ban traveling to it? Is it dangerous?"

Peter takes a slow bite and chews even slower. My own sandwich goes uneaten. Everything about him drips with reluctance.

  "Earth-1610 isn't dangerous," Peter finally answers. "The kid is."

Now that makes me take pause. What a contradiction to what I've been told. "Miles? How?"

Peter closes his eyes with a sigh. He tosses his sandwich aside and shuffles around to face me, legs crossed. He's dressed in the smart clothes of his other day job - a scientist. Biology, like Miguel.

"Miles wasn't meant to be Spider-Man," Peter says deliberately. "He's a canon-killer. His world is like yours. An anomaly."

I lean back from Peter and digest his words. "That does sound serious. How does a kid who's not meant to be Spider-Man become Spider-Man?"

Peter wearily shrugs. "We don't know. But Miles being bit is what caused his world's Peter Parker to die. It's what caused the collider to explode and to rip holes throughout the multiverse." His expression turns pained. "But it's not his fault, Y/n. He's a good kid, and he's a great Spider-Man - he was just in the wrong place at the wrong time."

I slowly nod, quiet with thoughtfulness. I pick together everything I've been told about Earth-1610 and Miles so far from the snippets Peter and Miguel have slipped me. It's the ground zero in the current mess of the multiverse, somehow the kid's fault, but it's also not his fault.

And his world is like mine. An anomaly universe. Canon-killer.

Poor Miles. Does he even know? If he does, then how does he live with the weight of something like that? And I'm still so confused - I'm still missing essential pieces.

"What happened in 1610, Peter?" I ask. "Tell me everything - from the top."

Peter jumps into his tale of the first ever account (to our knowledge) of multiversal travel. He tells me about how he'd been down on his luck - losing his aunt May, divorced, depressed, a failing hero - when a strange portal sucked him into an unfamiliar version of New York. A New York where Spider-Man had died.

Peter's grim expression slowly brightens when he talks about meeting Miles - or the snippets he remembers from their escape from the cops. He recalls their infiltration attempt into Alchemax and how proud he was when Miles had taught himself to swing with his webs.

Then he lists off the other Spideys they met; a girl called Gwen that Miles had taken a shining to, Peni with her telepathic spider buddy and his robot, a Spider-Pig whose best ability is making people uncomfortable, and-

"Spider-Noir?" I interrupt. "I met him."

Peter sends me a startled look, pulled from his reminiscences. "You have?"

"Yeah!" I nod. "He's cool. I mean, I can barely understand what he says, but he's still cool." I shake my head with amused disbelief. How ironic. The multiverse really is tiny. "No wonder he didn't want to join the HQ, he must know how Miguel doesn't like Miles."

"Yeah." Peter smiles in memory. "He's pretty stubborn."

"Why did you join?" I ask.

"Why else do I put my mask on?" Peter shrugs. "I want to save the world. Worlds. And..." he sighs. "I thought it would give me a chance to see Miles again. I wanted to tell him that it worked."

Worked? My brows furrow in confusion before a thought strikes me - another conversation we had about Miles, months ago. "The leap of faith?"

Peter tugs at the hem of his slacks with a smile. "Mayday."

I reflect his happy look. "It doesn't sound that bad. Why wouldn't Miguel want to tell me about this?"

Peter tenses for a brief moment, and then he slumps with a sigh of acceptance and peeks up at me. His eyes jump between acorn and mahogany, slipping between the cozy colours of his reality.

"It's not the canon-killer part that he doesn't want you to know about," he says quietly, "it's the Kingpin part."

I vaguely remember being told about someone called Kingpin, and how he built the collider that blew holes throughout the multiverse. "What about him?"

"Did he tell you about why Kingpin did what he did?" At the shake of my head, Peter continues. "Kingpin lost his wife and son and, you know, villains are people, too. He wanted them back, so he tried to use the multiverse to replace the family he lost." He stares down at the street and watches the lunch-time rush of pedestrians. "Anyone can see the similarities, and Miguel hates it. I can't blame him - it's not a great comparison to have. I'm pretty sure he sometimes thinks he's a terrible person."

  Well. That's a lot to take in. I follow his gaze to the street and ruminate in silence. I don't like it when Miguel thinks low of himself. I also don't like it when he keeps things from me - inconsequential things, like how an eerie similarity to a villain doesn't mean he's one.

Why is he so intent on keeping it from me? Because he's ashamed? Is this not the guy who proudly wears the girly bracelet his daughter made to work? Is this not the man who drank my blood while we were still basically strangers? To be ashamed is absurd. To keep it from me because he's afraid of what I'd think of him is hurtful.

"Are you okay?" Peter slowly asks, as if I'd just been told that my husband had Anakin'd a bunch of kids.

"I just don't get why he'd want to keep that from me," I say shortly. "Because he's afraid of what I'd think of him? Because he's a hypocrite?"

"He's not-" Peter breaks off to sigh. "It's not like that. I mean - yeah, it looks like that, but it isn't. I knew Kingpin, I faced him. Their values don't align."

"They both went through the multiverse to find an alternate family."

"You're wrong," Peter says, though not unkindly. "Kingpin didn't go through the multiverse, he tried to destroy it to bring his family to him. He didn't care about the consequences or who he'd hurt. But Miguel - he's careful, he understands the multiverse and knows how fragile it can be. He came through it to protect his family, the last version of you, and I can understand that - if it was MJ and Mayday I'd do the same." Peter shrugs. "Besides, your reality... doesn't exactly abide by canon events. It's its own anomaly."

I cross my arms and fume. I get that. I do, I get it. I just wish Miguel would have more faith in me.

"Aside from Gabriel, he had nothing here," Peter reminds softly. "I can't blame the guy for being afraid of losing you."

My eyes close. When he puts it like that... I can't blame him, either. I turn my head and open my gaze to the horizon of not-my-Queens and am entirely unsurprised by the way the irritation in my chest has faded. Look at me - I'm so soft when it comes to him.

"Thanks for talking with me, Pete," I say.

"You kind of guilted me into it, so-" he breaks to laugh when I slap his knee. "I'm kidding! I'm kidding."

I shake my head with a grin and lean back on my arms. The midday summer sun in Peter's world is less harsh than mine - it's more of a pleasant burn than a scalding skin peel.

"Maybe we can convince Miguel into letting you visit Miles," I ponder.

"Yeah, that'd be nice." But he doesn't sound convinced. He sounds like he's tried that before and was met with a stern 'no.' "Can you... keep this between us?"

My gaze wanders back to Peter. He watches me intently, bringing me to sit up straight again. "The thing about Kingpin? Why?"

Peter's face darkens and his eyes drop to his shoes. "I know we crack jokes at Miguel's expense, and it's funny, it is, but you didn't see what he was like before he found you. I only saw it for a month, but..."

My chest grows heavy. I can imagine what Miguel would've been like; still suffering beneath the horrors of his girlfriend's murder, the abrupt loss of their future, the snap of their history. And then to learn that it happened in every single universe except for mine...

Sometimes, he doesn't even sleep at night. Sometimes I wake and he's staring at the ceiling with a gaze in another world's past.

"I know you know he's been through a lot," Peter gently concludes. "The less stress the better, right?"

I glance down at my three rings - promise, engagement, wedding. Three facets of a relationship that Miguel never got to experience. If I consider myself to be missing a piece of me after my husband died, then Miguel must be broken completely.

No one really ever returns from being like that. What's a single secret to the loss of a lover across every dimension? Wouldn't that change someone? Wouldn't that hurt them enough into becoming so cautious? So guarded?

Miles is a canon-killer. My world is one that ignored it. The unknown is terrifying.

The less stress the better, right?

I curl my fingers into my palm. The rings glint under the sun, and then fold away until they're hidden.

"Yeah," I murmur.

••🕷️••

Lyla plaits her short hair into multiple braids as she sits on the edge of my desk. It's 2pm, just after I got back. She sometimes glitches through the coffee mug she leans against.

She hasn't said anything since she popped out of the Gizmo, and I kept waiting for her to speak but she never did, so we exist in companionable silence. Lyla knows about the conversation I had with Peter (of course she knows - she's an AI on my wrist, she's always listening) but I know her well enough that she'll remain quiet about it.

Even AI girls know girl code. Specifically the 'don't tell my alternate-dimension husband that I know his secret because he already has so much stress to deal with and any more might incapacitate him' code. It's a solid code.

My eyes keep flicking to my office door, as if a co-worker's going to barge in, spot Lyla braiding her hair, and accuse me of something ridiculous like stealing tech from Parker Industries. But no-one interrupts us, so Lyla keeps braiding her hair, and I keep typing up my current piece, still waiting for her to speak her 1s and 0s mind.

"It's your birthday soon," Lyla finally mentions into the silence. She folds her legs and holds her feet with half of her braids sticking out in the air. Add in her oversized heart-shaped glasses and she looks like one of Rosalina's abandoned barbie dolls. "What are you gonna do for it?"

"Have a sleep-in," I murmur. My fingers pause over the keys. "Maybe swing a breakfast-in-bed kinda scenario."

Lyla nods slowly. I peek at her from out the corner of my eyes and narrow them. She's never been quiet for this long, and now my curiosity is winning me over just like how it did before. Why is everyone suddenly hiding things from me?

"What is it?" I ask.

Lyla doesn't evade me. "I'm not sure how Miguel is going to handle your birthday," she confesses, voice clipped with uncertainty. "He hasn't celebrated your-and-alternate you's birthday in two years. And both times that the date passed..." Lyla's lips slowly thin and purse. "He didn't take it so well."

I let that sink in. Lyla takes her glasses from her eyes and rubs invisible smears from the lenses with the sleeve of her fluffy coat. I'm ashamed that I haven't even considered how Miguel might feel about my birthday passing. I haven't thought about my birthday at all.

Then I come to the startling realisation that this'll be my first birthday without my Miguel. The thought makes my stomach sink. I'm heartsick.

"What was he like?" I dare to ask.

"Not great," Lyla huffs. "He wouldn't leave his room for days." She pauses. Her expression grows sad. "I think he blames himself for her death."

"But it wasn't his fault?"

Lyla shrugs, and the smile that pulls at her mouth isn't all convincing. "Grief works in mysterious ways."

The more I learn about this Miguel, the more my heart yearns for him to be happy. He is everything I had loved, the same man as mine in essence, but somehow he is far, far more damaged. And with each new ache of his revealed, there's always another waiting for me to stumble upon it. Miguel is a book of scratched-out pages.

I don't know how to help him. I don't know if I can.

I spend the rest of the day trying to focus on my work and failing miserably.