TW: anxiety, mentions of death, blood, someone gets slapped (it's Miguel. Miguel gets slapped. And not on the ass, on the face)

  A teacup is placed on the dining table and slowly pushed towards me. I watch it suspiciously, eyes narrow. The steam curls, the scent a fragrant, calming chamomile. Miguel's fingers slide from the ceramic as he takes a seat opposite me.

  The clock ticks. In the trash can is a broken umbrella.

  My gaze flickers up to Miguel's imposter, who crosses his arm and stares me down like I'm a misbehaving child whom he doesn't know what to do with. I sit up straighter and try not to appear intimidated. Above me, I'm all too aware of Rosalina getting ready for bed. I'm so aware of her presence that it drives me up the wall.

  There is nothing more that I want to do than to grab her and run.

  I eye my opponent. He's Miguel copy-pasted, a perfect replica through-and-through; if you excuse the eyes and the horror-movie fangs. He's got the same solid build, the same strength. His hair is still in a disarray and pushed back from his face. He's still got the same thick eyebrows, the strong cheekbones, the same slope of his ox-like shoudlers.

  If I have to fight this thing, I'm not going to be the one winning.

  Miguel's cleaned the blood from his chin but I can still see it in my mind's eye; the forbidden ichor staining his stubble glossy, the redness that sits in tune with the vivid colour of his gaze. It had sickened me in the dark, but even more when he flicked the living room lights on and didn't turn away fast enough. Even now my stomach rolls at the sight of him, grows queasy at the memory of him sucking the blood from the man in the alley.

  His fingers, lithe and thick and dirty beneath the nails, wrap around his own cup. The storm rages on outside, and I feel as though it's a juxtaposition of our current predicament; quiet inside, and yet moments from shattering the windows. It's tense.

  I don't touch my tea. I don't have an appetite for it.

  "I'm not going to hurt you," Miguel prefaces. "That's not the reason I'm here."

His words are spoken with a deliberation designed to make me trust him. I ignore the pull to and furrow my brows.

  "I don't trust you."

  Miguel sighs and leans back in his seat. He stares at me intently. "I'm not a bad guy."

  I pull my teacup towards myself and take a small sip. It's too hot and I don't want to drink, but I take the excuse to hide my face. "Last I checked, good guys don't drink blood."

  Miguel tilts his head with a sly, thin smile. His eyes are slits of deadpan. "You're very judgemental, aren't you?" His brows tick upwards, almost in humour. "Do you judge books by their covers, too?"

  "You're haven't given me any good impressions to think otherwise," I remind bitterly.

  His shoulders roll with a hum of monotonous amusement, an acceptance of the fact I presented. He swirls his tea, and the liquid turns a tiny whirlpool within the cup's confines. It sloshes against the rim and threatens to spill. It doesn't.

  "I'm sorry for scaring you," he says. "And not just tonight. I'm sorry for scaring you for the last week."

  A tiny sliver of tension leaves my body when I don't detect any ill will or disingenuity in his apology. My hand reaches out of its own accord and brushes the tips of my fingers against his large, scarred knuckles.

  Taken aback, Miguel's red eyes jump to my face. My hand swiftly recoils. I wasn't meant to do that. He's so much like my Miguel that it confuses me.

"Where's my husband?" I plead to know. "What - who are you?"

The shocked look on his face ebbs away into more serious territory. His gaze drops to his own cup of tea, steam curling designs into the air before him.

"I am Miguel O'Hara," he quietly assures. "Just not the one you know."

I'm tempted to roll my eyes. "Great philosophies, Plato. Can you give me a real answer?"

Imposter-Miguel genuinely smiles at my snark, like my humour was adequate enough to entertain him. It doesn't last long, however, as his smile turns sad. He's building himself up for something. I'm suddenly not sure I want to hear it, but bolster myself for the oncoming truth bomb, anyway.

  He sighs and slides forth an arm. Attached to his wrist is a watch I've never noticed before, a big, bulky thing that looks like it's been built using some pretty hardcore machinery. He taps on the screen and it illuminates yellow, and a tiny hologram of a girl pops up.

  I lean back in surprise.

  The hologram girl reclines on thin air and tucks her arms behind her head. Her thick fur coat gives the occasional glitch and behind her heart-shaped glasses she's smiling a little too smugly for something that I assume is supposed to be AI.

  "Hey guys." She leisurely rolls onto her stomach and swings her shoes through the air. "Are you finally talking to your-wife-who's-not-your-wife about how you're from another dimension?" She glitches close to me with a hand pulled up to her mouth in a theatrical whisper. "I've been trying to convince him for daaays."

  My bewilderment falls fast for the intensity of the shock that just double kicks me in the chest. Miguel groans lowly and runs a hand down his face. I look at him, brain finally quiet for the first time all week. I think a neuron snapped.

  "Another dimension?" I echo thinly. Miguel pinches the bridge of his nose and sends Lyla a sneer. She crosses a leg over the other and gives him a shit-eating grin in return.

  "Lyla." I don't miss the way Miguel looks at me. My cheeks flush hot with embarrassment. "Bring up Earth-928."

  "Hmm? What was that?" 

Miguel tenses. "Bring up Earth-"

"I didn't hear you say it."

He grinds his teeth. "Lyla."

"Come on," she goads, floating next to his cheek. "I wanna hear it."

Miguel heaves a deep-suffering sigh. "Please bring up Earth-928."

Lyla's smile widens and she disappears. In her place a small globe pops up. It's a hologram of Earth.

  I poke it. It spins, glitching around my finger.

  "This is Earth-928," Miguel explains. "It's where I came from."

  It looks similar to my Earth, except there's a wrong number of satellites surrounding its atmosphere and some type of line connecting it to the moon. I close my eyes and shake my head, trying to comprehend what he just said.

  "Wait, wait - you're saying that you're Miguel O'Hara from another dimension?"

Miguel nods. His brow knits tightly together when I begin to laugh. I think all this stress has finally made me go insane.

"Why- why are you laughing?" he asks. Lyla pops up next to him. When he looks at her, she shrugs.

"You can't honestly expect me to believe you." I wipe away a hysteric tear that wells in my eye. "I can believe a man who flies around the city pretending to be a spider-" his expression tightens "-and I believe his stupidly super-powered enemies - but a different dimension? And a different dimension where, what, Miguel's a fucking vampire?"

Miguel holds up his hands. "Now, hold on-"

"Do yourself a favour and stop trying to sell me some absurd lie." I grin at him. "Obviously, you're some villain of Spider-Man's and have taken the appearance of my husband. I'm not that stupid."

Miguel rubs his forehead. "Ay, dios mío." He drops his hand and gives me a weary glare. "Your husband is-"

  "Papa!" Lyla disappears as Rosalina suddenly bounds into the living room. I stumble upright with my heart in my throat. She launches herself into imposter-Miguel's arms before I can stop her, and he catches her effortlessly. She looks up at him and beams. "Read me a story!"

  Miguel looks at me for an answer. I've grown clammy, clenching my fingers into fists and struggling to breathe.

  "Pleeeeasee, please please please!" Rosalina begs. She grabs Miguel's cheeks and shakes his head around. "You haven't all week!"

  I know that if I pull Rosalina away, she'll throw a fit - she adores her dad, and she's missed him terribly. But at the same time everything within me is screaming to get her away from this creature.

  I still didn't even get an answer about what Miguel is.

  When I can't respond to Miguel's unspoken question, he smiles down at Rosalina.

  "Go pick one out, mija," he says softly. Rosalina cheers, slips from Miguel's lap, and races her little legs back up the steps.

  As soon as she's out of earshot, I round in on Miguel. My hands are shaking.

  "I swear if you hurt her-"

  "I won't," he reassures. "You have my word."

  "What good is that? I don't even know you," I stress. My legs begin to pace around the couches, pumping with the mounting adrenaline. "God- what if you bite her like you did-"

  "Hey, Y/n, Y/n." He cuts off my circles and places his hands on my shoulders. My gaze jumps up and I almost flinch from the way he towers over me. Miguel's height had never scared me before, but now the terror twists my veins into ropes. "Breathe."

  The single word reminds me to do exactly that. I didn't even realise I'd stopped breathing, but now I'm aware of the way my head has grown significantly lighter. I force myself to breathe and feel the wooziness ebb away.

  "Good," he murmurs. "I promise - promise - that I'm not going to hurt you or Rosa." He holds out his smallest finger. "Pinkie promise."

  I stare at his outstretched finger. Pinkie promises are something Miguel and I do often. How does this Miguel know that? Unless he is telling the truth, which... which starts to unravel the wriggles in my brain at an alarming rate.

  I glance up at his eyes again. The colour of them still unnerve me, but I can't deny the sincerity that sits behind the red.

  "I'm not letting you leave my sight," I demand.

  "I wouldn't expect any less," he agrees, and then holds his pinkie finger higher, insistent. His brows jerk to the ceiling. "Rosita won't wait forever."

  I chew my lip. He's right, she'll start whining that we're taking too long. I still can't get past the feeling of wrongness that this Miguel evokes, but he seems to be telling the truth. And the man from before had tried to break into my home. Who knows what would have happened if this Miguel didn't stop him?

   I mean, the vampirism of it all was a bit excessive. I send him another scrutinising look before sighing in defeat.

  "Fine." I link my pinkie through his. I stare him dead in the eyes. "But if you hurt a hair on her head, I'll kill you."

  Miguel smirks. "I believe you."

  I quickly slide my finger from his. "Now, where's my Miguel?"

  Miguel's amusement disappears. Before he can answer, Rosalina calls a complaint from the floor above.

  "Later," I sigh. "She'll hate us forever if we don't get a move on. But he's- he's okay, right?"

  Miguel tries to speak but gets cut off by Rosalina's impatience again. I shake my head in exasperation and turn to head up the stairs. Miguel silently follows.

  "You took foreverrr," Rosalina whines when we enter her room. She's already sitting beneath her covers with a book on her lap. She holds it out for Miguel.

  I eye him warily as he gently takes the book from Rosalina's grasp and takes a seat beside her. He almost startles when she immediately clambers into his lap and snuggles into his chest. His surprise turns into a fond smile.

  I sit at the end of the bed and lean against the wall, watching with eagle eyes as he opens the children's novel book with a picture of a dog on the front and begins to read.

  If I ignore every part of me that's on edge, I can pretend that this is my Miguel. My Miguel with his low, attractive voice as he quietly reads to our daughter. My Miguel with the warmth he effortlessly emits and the smile that makes my heart flutter.

  But this isn't my Miguel. I force myself to remember that as I watch him read, and I remember it as my eyelids grow heavy with the exhaustion of everything that's happened. I remember it as I try to fight sleep, sitting on the end of my daughter's bed and lulled by the familiar rumble of the imposter's voice.

  When I wake, it's early morning. After a brief spell of confusion and panic, I realise that I'm curled up on the end of my daughter's bed and covered by a warm, thick blanket. Rosalina is still asleep, dozing peacefully and hugging her favourite stuffed lion.

  Beside her Miguel sleeps, sitting on the floor with his chin against his chest. 

••🕷️••

  "You're not really from another dimension, right?" I ask Miguel as he makes himself a coffee. The morning sun leaks through the kitchen window, outlining his dark hair with sunflower yellow. "Are you going to tell me what you are?"

"Just a man," he sighs. "Doesn't Rosita need to get to school?"

Just a man, my ass. Normal men don't drink the blood from other people's necks.

"Yeah." I take a frustrated sip of my coffee and glare at his back. When he turns to me I purposefully narrow my eyes.

He's got the morning look that Miguel normally has - messy hair, lidded eyes and a deep, rough voice. He's so like my Miguel that it freaks me out when I feel myself be attracted to him. It's not this Miguel I love - it's just a visage of my husband, and it twists my feelings into knots.

"You're staring," he says.

His eyes have gone back to their russet colour. But there's still a subtle tinge of maroon to them, the only visible difference between him and my husband. I down the rest of my coffee with grit.

"Trying to figure out what you are." I lean my elbows onto the kitchen island. "Are you a shapeshifter?"

Miguel rolls his eyes. "I'm not dignifying that with an answer."

"That just makes me think you are one."

Miguel stares at me silently. When he tilts his head, I grow uneasy again. I stand upright.

"What?"

"Call in sick today," he says. "We're going on a trip."

"What?" I repeat, spluttering. When he turns to rinse his plate in the sink, I scamper to the space beside him to glare at his face. "No! I don't even know you."

"You don't take me by my word," he reasons, "so I need to prove it to you."

It takes a moment for my sleep-addled brain to realise what he's saying. My brows raise in doubt.

"You're going to prove dimensional travel to me?" I ask.

He shrugs, stopping the tap. "I have to at this point."

I stare at him in contemplation as he loads his plate into the dishwasher. He takes my empty mug from my hands and loads that, too. "Why are you even here?"

Miguel falters. "Do you want to travel to another dimension or not?"

I raise my palms in surrender. "Fine. I'm not expecting it to work, though."

Miguel just smiles as he pulls the dishwasher door shut. His smile doesn't hold for long.

After we drop Rosalina off at school, Miguel drives us back home. Instead of heading inside, however, he leads me to the alleyway beside my brownstone. I hesitate at the entrance.

  "What are you-?" When Miguel turns and sees me holding my neck with an apprehensive look, he exhales. "I'm not going to bite you."

  I squint at him.

"You know, that kind of attitude actually really bums me out," Miguel mumbles. He holds up his wrist and begins tapping on the watch. "It's just assumptions based on my physical attributes and not my actual personality, and it-"

"Oh my god, can you do whatever you need to do already?" I groan. "You're just like Miguel."

  He sends me a scathed look. "I am Miguel."

  "You keep saying that."

  "You're gonna give me an identity crisis at this point, I swear on it, I do."

  "That'll be fun to watch," I say under my breath.

  Miguel scoffs but doesn't take the bait of my jab. Instead, he stalks over and grabs my elbow. I yank back, but his grip is steel.

  "You'll want to hold on for this," Miguel warns, so I stop my struggling and resolve instead to scowl at the side of his face.

  My attention is quickly dragged by the sound of something popping in the air before us. Before my very eyes, thin air is sliced through and colours I'd never even seen before blossoms through a tiny hole in space-time. The dimensional portal jolts and glitches, growing out and clinging to the sides of the neighbouring brownstones.

  "Ready?" Miguel asks.

  I stare at the portal, breathless and definitely, absolutely eating my words from earlier. "How do I know it won't kill me?"

  "Because it didn't kill me," he answers. He grins wide, giddy. "Vamos."

  I let him lead me through the portal. My heart rate stutters when I feel myself get sucked into the vortex like water down a drain, but it only lasts a second, and I'm so woozy from it that I stumble into Miguel's arms. When I blink my eyes open from my involuntary wince, I stop breathing.

  What greets me is a world that's totally unfamiliar; angular and clean and with a sun that shines differently and a wind that tangles my hair unfamiliarly, carrying scents I can't even recognise. It's a world so modern that if I didn't know any better, I would've assumed that we'd stepped a century into the future.

We stand on a balcony overlooking a city of Picasso-shape buildings, a gleaming, celestial city and a crystal ocean beyond. This is so not Neuva York.

  "This is where I come from," Miguel says. He watches my face eagerly, eyes pinned to the way my moving expressions shifts. Shock, disbelief, awe, horror. The ultimate, squashing feeling of realising that the universe is so, so much larger than I imagined, and that I am so, so insignificant, so infinitesimal, smaller even than a speck of dust, smaller than a fraction of a molecule.

  "Do you believe me now?" he asks. I nod slowly,  unable to form words. I turn to take in the impossible, deep blue of the sky, the flock of strange birds - and is that a train to the moon?!

  My knees give out beneath the weight of my shock. Miguel catches me before I hit the deck, hooking his hands beneath my arms and gently easing me to the floor. He grins through his worry as he crouches before me.

  "Are you okay?" he asked, equal parts concerned and amused.

  I make an undignified sound. He chuckles. I force my unfocused vision to sharpen upon his face.

  "You're really Miguel?" I ask breathlessly. He nods. My sight goes blurry again. "Holy shit..."

Miguel snickers. "Finally."

"But what about... you..." I exhale desperately as I find my words failing me. I hook my fingers before my teeth in the shape of fangs and send him a baffled look. "Uh??"

Miguel grimaces with a smirk. "Yeah, that'll take a little longer to explain. You might not have the capacity right now for more shock." He gives me a worried once-over. "Besides, we should head back. You might start glitching soon."

  "Glitching-?" As soon as the word leaves my mouth it hits; a shiver of the atomic level, like a thousand bee stings and lemon-juice-on-open-wounds. I'm both kicked in the chest and flayed alive.

  And it all happens so quickly that when it ends, I wonder if I just imagined it. All I'm left with is the intense feeling of fuzzy drowsiness and an intense weakness. I lean against Miguel's arm, boneless and dizzy.

  "What was that?" I complain.

  "Glitching," he answers. "It's the disunity of your molecular structure on a different facet of reality. Are you okay?"

  I hold a palm to my head and urge the dizziness to fade. "Dimensional travelling sucks. Why didn't you ever glitch?"

  Miguel shows me his watch. "This device. It took a few years of trial and error to get right." He helps me upright and I teeter on wobbly legs like a baby deer.

  "Okay, I concede," I sigh. "You win. You really are Miguel O'Hara."

  "There you go." Miguel smiles softly. "I'll make you a watch and give you a proper tour next time we visit."

  I shake my head. "That still doesn't explain why you took the place of my Miguel." I send him a confused grin. "Did you guys do some kind of inter-dimensional exchange program? He could have at least told me. Is he here?"

  Miguel's face hardens. My smile slowly slips.

  "... what?" I nervously laugh. "Why are you looking at me like that?" When his stony expression doesn't lift, a pit of dread wrenches itself open within my stomach. "Where's my husband?"

  Miguel sighs low and long and it makes my panic build. When he turns to look out at the view, I shove him back around to face me. My clammy hands twists the front of his jacket.

  "Where is he?" At his silence, my voice raises into a yell. "TELL ME!"

  Miguel stares down at me. Intense pity crosses his face, and I already know what he's going to say before he says it.

"Your husband is dead."

  My hands fall to my side. "No."

  "I'm sorry."

  I go numb. "No."

  "I have a lab." He gestures his arm towards the city, but I'm not seeing anything. "I saw it during my dimensional surveillances. I thought that- I thought if I could be him, you and Rosita wouldn't hurt." He pauses. "But you knew as soon as you saw me."

  I turn away from him. My vision swims. I feel hollow with shock.

  Dead. Dead. Dead. Your husband is dead.
 
  Miguel is dead. The man I spent fourteen of my life loving, had a child with, a life with, is dead. He's gone. And I didn't know for an entire week.

  "Y/n-" Miguel places a hand on my shoulder. I hear the sharp slap before I feel the sting in my palm, before I notice the way he's holding his cheek.

  My pain tumbles into a blinding rage.

  "What is wrong with you?!" I hiss. "What were you thinking? You see an alternate version of yourself die and think it's okay to step into his place?!" I push his chest. "Fuck you!" I push at him again and he takes a single step back. "How dare you!"

  "I thought-"

  "I don't give a shit what you thought!" I cry. The tears come swiftly and he flinches. "I don't care that you're Miguel! My husband died and you didn't tell me!"

  Miguel goes to speak but I raise my hand. He bites his words back.

  "Take me home." I can't stand to be here anymore, in the world where some Miguel knock-off came from to try and take over my husband. "Take me home right now. Take me to him - and then get the fuck out of my home."

  Miguel, resigned, taps on his watch. I can't bear to look at him - the sight of him sickens me - and I march through the portal home without another word.