desiderium | m. o'hara

eight

  "I'll let them know," Jess says on her way out. "Enjoy your class, Dr. O'Hara. Pleasure to meet you, Y/n."

  "You, too," I reply.

  When the doors shut behind her, I turn to Miguel. His red eyes find mine in the darkness, glowing inhumanly, like a cat's, and I try not to flinch or seize up at the intimacy the lack of light creates now that we're alone. He's a creature full of shadows.

  I clear my throat. "Jess said something about people being in the wrong universes..?"

  Miguel chuckles softy. "Let's start somewhere a little easier. Lyla, can you do the thing?"

  Lyla slips into existence, lounging on the top of Miguel's head. "Do I have to? I was gonna redesign myself..."

  Miguel heaves a sigh. "Lyla, please, can you just do as told?"

  Lyla drops her head back with a reluctant groan. "Fineee." She zips back into the aether and, in her steed, a white tree blossoms from the ground between Miguel and I.

  I take a step back, watching with wide eyes as it grows in the darkness, unfurling bare branches glowing in an ethereal, divine white. I reach out and touch the closest twig. It slips around my fingertip, though I feel nothing.

  "What is this?" I ask.

  "This is everything," he answers, watching as I twist my fingers through the hologram. "Universes, galaxies, black holes, big bangs. It's everything that ever was and will be."

  I glance at him through the branches. He's already staring at me, and the pretty glow of the hologram caresses his shapes with a softness that makes my heart stumble. He's so much like my husband.

  I have to clear my throat. "... this is the multiverse?"

  Miguel nods. "That's right." He curls a finger around a branch and flattens it with his thumb. "Each of these threads is a universe, and in each of these universes are galaxies."

  My brain begins to hurt at the sheer fact that the world is massive - and it seems to just keep on growing. "That's a lot of threads."

  "It is," Miguel agrees. He drops the branch and it furls back into position, threads wrapping around each other. He watches as I circle the tree to examine it from every angle. "There's a Spider-Man for almost each of these galaxies. My original goal was to travel dimensions, explore the realities and study the differences between multiverses. But that... I didn't get to."

  I frown at him through the branches. "What happened?"

  Miguel swipes his hand through the air and the tree curls back into the ground. In its place the inside of a giant lab surrounds me. People rush around in white coats, manning long desk stations before a large contraption - something bigger than two city blocks.

  Miguel's briefly quiet as I peer curiously at the scene, stepping aside on instinct for the frantic scientists who run past me. I look at him curiously.

  "Two months ago, there was an incident in Earth-1610," Miguel begins grimly. "Wilson Fisk created an inter-dimensional collider that blew a hole in the multiverse."

  The hologram of the collider explodes. I grimace away from it.

  "That sounds... bad."

  Miguel's lips pull into a half-smile. "Very bad. Beings from other universes started slipping into worlds that weren't their own. They started to cause dimensional merging, where the molecular DNA of one place gets confused when it meets a structure from another earth."