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Miguel O’Hara, his dimension’s one and only Spider-Man, seldom spent time not doing something that was vital to the stability of the universe(s). Or as Peter B. called it, downtime—when he was downstairs from his platform of endless computer screens and holoscreens and webs of life and destiny was when he deigned to come to the ground and mingle with the common masses.
“Won’t you spare a penny for this poor beggar and grace us with your presence,” Peter said, completely deadpan, swishing his bathrobe back and forth. Mayday was conspicuously absent, sleeping off her latest child high—a concept that was utterly alien to a (spider-)man such as Miguel O’Hara. Their glorious, brooding leader had been birthed fully formed with the perfect combination of tragic backstory, emotionally moving (and traumatizing) deaths, and a savior complex so deep it went all the way to bedrock; probably from all that trauma.
“No,” Miguel said flatly, leaning over the flat surface too clean and uncluttered to be considered a proper desk . Where had he gotten a desk in the first place? He was on a goddamn levitating platform with goddamn holoscreens and goddamn futuristic shit, with his face two inches from a glowing green hologram.
“That’s gonna destroy your eyesight one of these days,” Peter said casually. Aside from his wacko vampire-spider serum shots that no doubt contributed to Miguel’s needless brooding, sustenance was required in dealing with the stubborn spider at the top of his self-built ivory tower of isolation. He patted down his bathrobe, fingers absentmindedly in search of some kind of—“Aha!”
Triumphantly, he fished a bag of chips from the inside pocket in the inside pocket in the inside pocket on the inside of the main pocket, scrap fabric from the Spider-Suit experimentation room crudely stitched with lasers and fabric glue. Even as Mayday was more often strapped to the front of this very bathrobe as she was doing things that an actual toddler should do (like not being dangerously slung around a dubiously legal superhero society in an alternate universe), she had not yet managed to breach his inner compartments to steal his most prized possessions.
“Your ‘aha’ signals my detriment,” Miguel deadpanned. Or perhaps he said with his usual candace, between a deadpan and a resting-bitch-face. Just as Peter had popped open the bag—and actually popped, with a pop noise and crumbs flying and all—a laser-web of blinding neon colors sent him blinking and staggering back. All of a sudden, his chips weren’t in his hands, trapped between hungry fingers, or on the floor or anywhere near him—
—Miguel was crunching on them, a sly, satisfying smile on his face.
Peter didn’t get his way on all things. But for some things, being responsible for a toddler had helped him learn to weather out temper tantrums. Right now, Miguel O’Hara wasn’t in a temper tantrum because he was an adult that could control his emotions, but Peter still needed to weather the storm that was getting his chips stolen—but he could kind of justify it for himself. Character development and canon events and interconnected webs and all that bullshit was stressful —AKA: Miguel O’Hara needed to touch grass. And eat food.
“Dude,” Peter deadpanned. “If you wanted my chips so badly, let’s go to the Buckstar.”
A pause. “The… what?”
“The café. That is at the very bottom of this tower. You know, Starbucks but knockoff?”
More hesitation. “What’s Starbucks?”
“You don’t know—? You know, never mind.” Starbucks aside, Miguel probably didn’t know that the Buckstar existed; his current routine consisted of sleep, raid the cafeteria for food, sit on his platform for ten hours, repeat. Nowhere did ‘going outside’ fit in that, aside from Jess dragging him on occasional missions for him to stretch his legs and stop brooding on his past.
“I doubt they’re open.”
“Of course they’re open, dumbass! Half their clientele is nocturnal! And-slash-or moonlights as a spider! ”
“I’m not even going to ask—”
“Good, because you don’t need to know! All you need to do is come with me!”
It only took a few more minutes of aggressive convincing and threats of violence until Peter was triumphant, at last. If Miguel hadn’t come, Peter would’ve webbed him up like Mayday and dragged him, kicking and screaming, to the café.
“I could do with some coffee,” Miguel grumbled, as if trying to justify it for himself. As if trying to convince himself that it wasn’t Peter’s desire that finally made him capitulate, it was Miguel’s own concern for his own well-being and uncaffeinated soul.
Whatever floats your boat, man, Peter didn’t say. “That’s the spirit!” he did say. And he beamed—and then two thwips of webs.
Crash. From off Miguel O’Hara's platform he fell, his torso webbed and sailing through the air straight towards the ground. With an inhuman, furious roar, “Hey—!”
Peter fired another web, this time towards the exit—or was it away? Miguel couldn’t really tell, on account of free-falling upside down with his face in his hands. “ Don’t worry, I know a shortcut!”
The Buckstar was cozy, homey, and well-accustomed to trans-dimensional spider-humans taking up temporary residence, constantly exhausted and sleep-deprived from the everyday occurrence of saving the universe. If it didn’t operate a night shift that was strictly for nocturnal vigilantes who moonlighted as arachnids, it would’ve been yet another café that served overpriced-but-still-delicious chocolate chip cookies. Per the super-metabolism and to the delight of the café’s owners, there was a secret (more expensive) spider-menu that featured drinks with caffeine four times the amount that was safe for a generic human to consume.
Peter waltzed in, pink bathrobe sweeping behind him like a cape he didn’t have, and perched on the chair nearest to the door. Miguel trailed behind, awkward, rarely a patron of the café everyone seemed to rave about, as Peter with his mussed-up dad hair and sleep-deprived parent look ordered a black coffee— “like my soul, please” — with an extra four shots of espresso. With a familiar, exasperated sigh, the sleep-deprived barista punched a series of numbers into the register, while her other hand drifted to slide the basket of sugar packets and drink add-ons behind the counter.
What a tremendous waste of time. Miguel wanted to bang his head on the table, against the wall, on the cash register, on the veritable army of coffee machines behind the counter—except that would cost him brain cells. He needed those brain cells to track the most recent Anomaly. He needed to get back to his workstation. Work awaited no man, Spider or no—
He was brought back to his unfortunate present as Peter ordered something that seemed right up his alley.
“—that much caffeine is definitely a war crime in some countries. Thanks, Emmy!” Peter said, yawning, casually webbing up a packet of sugar from behind the counter.
The barista shot him a dirty look.
Peter gave a sheepish smile as he tore open the neon-pink sugar packet and tipped it back into his mouth.
What the actual fuck am I witnessing right now. Oh no oh no oh noooooo—
Miguel stood in abject horror in the middle of a café with twinkle lights and pink walls at two in the morning as Peter B. Parker, father of a child, resident Spider-Man (retired or no?) of a foreign earth, ate an entire packet of raw sugar.
“Thanks,” Peter said casually, leaning forward as if aiming for another sugar packet.
“No,” the barista said flatly. “Five bucks for another one. Alternatively, you could buy your own! From the corner store! Like normal people!”
“What, you guys are charging me for sugar packets now? Heathens,” Peter grumbled. Still, he acquiesced—if acquiescing meant ‘only webbing up two more when the barista wasn’t looking.’
“And for you…?” the barista asked him, eyes raking over his figure. Miguel was being analyzed by a minimum-wage café worker, and for once in his life, he was at a loss for words. He could monologue for days about himself and his tragic backstory and the necessity for keeping the timelines straight and clean like an arrow—in fact, he had weaponized this into an inspirational pitch for new recruits—but talking to normal, non-spider humans? Entirely alien to him.
Thankfully—or perhaps, unthankfully—Peter B. Parker swooped in to save the day.
“He’ll take the extra strong”—Peter wagged his eyebrows when saying this, surely communicating some unspoken farce with the barista—“pink drink.”
Perhaps this was hell. Perhaps Miguel had finally snapped, yet again, and he was going crazy.
… Why did he agree to this, again?
The drink was pink. It was called a… ‘pink drink.’ Uncreative, whoever decided that would be a good idea.
“It’s actually strawberry açaí,” Peter said, nonchalantly stirring a fourth packet of sugar into his coffee monstrosity. “It’s good.”
“It looks like juice,” Miguel said flatly, at a loss for words for anything else. Somehow, running a society—a Spider-Society—of dozens and hundreds of the wackiest, wildest, weirdest people in the known universes failed to phase him. Yet, the simplistic routine of coffee—and buying said coffee, even if said coffee was currently suspended in a pink abomination of liquid that was too taunting him in his fruity-drink misery—seemed to be his downfall.
“Stop staring at it and drink the damn thing, dude,” Peter said casually. He was going to down the entire cup of coffee like a shot, and Miguel would’ve spared a cent or two of sympathy for his heart, if he wasn’t having his own mini-heart attack with the sheer audacity of the color of his own drink. In its little plastic container with its little heart drawn on the side. Taunting him.
For once, Miguel longed for the empanadas from the cafeteria. They had a perfectly good cafeteria with a veritable army of coffee machines, slowly built up from when the spider-recruits would complain about lack of caffeine, bring sources of caffeine from their home universes, and pile them in the bar at the back-end of the cafeteria. But he never dared touch them, the circuitry and sentiments glitching in between universes and cups of coffee. Peter (the one with the muscles) from universe five bajillion got salmonella from a Keurig manufactured in the so-called “Coffee Bean Apocalypse Universe” for whatever reason. Cross-dimensional allergy? Everything was weird when you added the multiverse—the Spider-Verse— to the fold.
Anyway. Pink drink. The quality of being intimidated by a beverage. Inherent misery in the Buckstar.
“Why did you get this for me again?” he near-growled, but he wasn’t sure what else was appropriate in this scenario.
“You’re not supposed to order the same thing twice at the same time,” Peter said, and wow, that opened a whole new—incorrect—can of worms that Miguel didn’t want to dwell on currently! The longer he stared at it, the more he hated it. But, oh, the perils he would go through to get his necessary dose of artificial energy boost! The perils he would go through to put up with Peter B. Parker of the bathrobe and bad decisions.
Hey. At least it had caffeine in it.
“You have to admit you at least liked it, right?”
“... Fine.”
