desiderium | m. o'hara

seven

"Forgive me, Mig," I sigh.

••🕷️••

"I've never been in here before," I admit, watching as Miguel turns the handle to the home office. 

He'd managed to convince me to stay home - I succumbed after he annoyed me about it for an hour straight and threatened not to stop, so I relented and we returned home after dropping Rosa off at school.

Miguel sends me a smile like we're sharing a secret and opens the door.

  "Oh," I say. "Oh. There is an entire lab in my home."

Miguel chuckles and leads me inside the small, decked-out lab. It's pristine but cluttered, with shelves full of containers with miscellaneous contents and a large microscope, a centrifuge, and - classic - a fridge full of serums and whiskey.

On the left wall is a large corkboard plastered with photos and gathered information about Spider-Man's enemies. On the right wall is a row of hero suits in protective glass tubes.

"Wow," I say shortly. Was I ever going to find out about this? My guess is no. Mig went this long without me finding out, after all.

Miguel takes a seat on the only chair in the lab. This place was clearly only ever intended for a single person. He crosses his ankles and watches as I slowly explore this unfamiliar section of my own house.

"The tech from this dimension is a little primitive compared to the stuff I'm used to, but it mostly works," Miguel adds when I wander up to the microscope. "I've had to bring over some of my own equipment from my lab to replicate my serums here."

I side-eye him. Primitive? This is probably the same shit SANA has, and he thinks it's primitive?

Ignoring that, I peer into the eyepiece of the microscope. I blink in surprise when something greets me - tiny, eight-legged robots scurrying about green liquid upon the specimen stage. My mouth opens in surprise.

"Is this your serum?" I ask.

"Yep."

"Did you seriously design your nanobots to look like spiders?" I ask monotonously.

"I have a brand to keep."

I step away from the microscope and send him a dry look. He smiles back, unashamed in the teasing he knows that will follow.

Miguel hops up from his chair and plants his hand on the small of my back, sending an unignorable, warm tingle up my spine and blossoming across the base of my neck. He leads me to the opposite bench.

"But this is what I want to show you," Miguel says, oblivious to the way my entire sense of self has just frozen in horror at my reaction to his touch. He picks up a watch similar to his own and proudly shows it to me. "This is a Gizmo."

I manage to regain myself enough to smile. "A Gizmo."

"Not the best name, I know. Lyla came up with it," he defends. He holds out his palm. "Give me your wrist."

I glance unsurely between his face and his hand, before finally placing my arm in his grip. He presses a hidden button on the Gizmo and it breaks apart, hovering in three different segments, before snapping back together around my wrist with a snip of skin.