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blaisenova · 9 months

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how not to talk someone off of a ledge

Miguel O'Hara likes to go up to the roof of Spider-Society to think. What about? That's no one's business but his own. Though, unfortunately, Peter doesn't seem to agree.

or:

Peter B. Parker REALLY doesn't know how to talk someone off of a ledge.

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my first TRUE atsv work on here!

it's a bit of an exploration into miguel and the way that he reacts to things in atsv because i think it's really interesting. angry man? aggressive man? no, just stressed and afraid. plus can you really blame a guy for having a bit of a breakdown when everyone keeps pushing all of his buttons and doesn't stop even when he makes it VERY clear that they should?? he needs to learn how to handle his feelings better (read: learn to TALK ABOUT THEM AT ALL) and everyone else needs to learn when to BACK OFF. i'm looking at you peter. i love you so so much but you know how to push miguel's buttons and you USE THAT KNOWLEDGE.

you also get a bit of a parental miguel moment because he is soft for children and i will not be told otherwise. idiot parents or not, miguel would do anything for little mayday. apologies again for if any of my spanish is off at all. i'm fairly advanced but there's still some stuff i struggle with. if you speak spanish, please feel free to correct me! i am always always open and willing to learn!

i should warn you that there's some very brief religious exploration at the very beginning of the work, but it's not the main focus by far so i haven't tagged it. there is, however, a deep exploration of miguel's suicidal thoughts, so please watch out for that!

as always, the link to this work on ao3 is in the reblogs if you prefer to read there like i do, and thank you so much for reading!! <3

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A peculiar fact of life, as undeniable as the sky being blue or the sun being a star, was that the wind rushed with more and more desperate urgency the higher up into the atmosphere you got.

Of course, Miguel knew, logically, why that was – there was less friction at higher altitudes, so the air was able to travel more freely – and he knew, even more logically, that it was stupid to try and find some sort of bigger meaning in something; that it only ever made him feel even more small. But, sometimes, despite knowing it was stupid and that he was indescribably tired of trying to find meaning in the meaningless or humanity in the inhuman, Miguel would get caught up in his own head, and he would begin to wonder if, maybe, the wind at the top of Babylon Towers pulled at him so desperately because it was trying to bring him over the edge. As if it knew that, even though he could catch himself, he wouldn’t. As if it knew that, if he just got one sign that he was meant to fall, he’d let himself.

It shouldn’t have meant anything, that the earth was functioning the way that it was meant to, especially since Miguel was the furthest thing from a spiritual person, but it wasn’t as easy as he’d like to pretend to forget the way that he’d been raised.

Miguel didn’t believe in a god.

Maybe it would have been easier to blame all of his woes on some higher power that had written his suffering into the stars millenia before he was born, but it felt like a shitty excuse for all of the things that he’d done to himself. It was supposed to make him feel better, to know that it wasn’t his fault that everything he touched fell apart, but all it did was make him feel trapped; suffocated. Who would want to be written into a destiny like this?

No, Miguel didn’t believe in a god.

His mother had raised him to be Catholic; fearing of a God with a capital g that had the power to save and destroy him all at once, but Miguel had always thought that his father had possessed that same exact ability and there was nothing all too godly about him. Having power didn’t make you a god, he’d decided, and the sentiment had only been made to feel more and more true as time went on. After all, he had power, and he was even further from god than his dad had been.

Miguel didn’t believe in a god.

But he would be a liar if he said that there weren’t still times that he wanted to break down and pray to a higher power – that either didn’t exist or loathed him completely – to make his pain stop. It was stupid, and childish, and Miguel thought he’d grown out of the urge the first time he realised that he had the power to stop the pain. Miguel was no god, though his life was in his own hands, for better or for worse, so he’d stopped praying. Even when he could think of nothing else to do but plead, Miguel did not pray.

Nevertheless, as his legs hung off of the edge of the roof of Babylon Tower’s – Spider Society’s carefully built and refurbished headquarters and, also, the location of what used to feel like home – Miguel could only silently ask of the wind to do what he was too afraid to.

There was no afterlife. That’s what he was counting on.

Each inhale burned his lungs, and he couldn’t be sure if it was because of all of the pollution in Nueva York’s atmosphere or if it was just because he was trying so hard not to burst into tears. Daring to take a breath would be to invite a sob, and Miguel was far too tired to cry any more tears, so, instead, he stilled his chest until he could no longer, then sucked in as quick of an inhale as he could before stilling once more.

There weren’t even stars anymore. The lights of the city were so blindingly bright that they drowned out the entire sky. Before figuring out how to jump universes, Miguel had never seen a star except for in pictures. Before he knew how beautiful they really were, it hadn’t really bothered him; he couldn’t have known what he was missing without having seen it for himself.

Even the most high definition of screens couldn’t capture the way that a million stars dappled the sky like freckles, twinkling and dancing; unmoving yet ever-changing.

The first time Miguel had seen the stars – really looked at them – on Earth 47219 (he could never forget), he’d been frozen in place. It felt as if he was being gazed upon by the universe itself, and he was staring right back; unabashedly marvelling at them. He remembered feeling small, and that was hardly a new feeling to him but he’d never felt it quite like he had in that moment. It wasn’t something he was being made to feel by another person, and, somehow, that had made it okay. He was small, but small in the way that he never got to be; small in the way a child was, or should have been.

And, really, stars shouldn’t have been the thing to wow him; after all, there was an entire, infinite multiverse with billions of versions of himself and every other person. The scope of the infinity of a single universe shouldn’t have compared to the scope of the infinity of the multiverse that contained it, but they were both infinities, weren’t they? So, in the end, they were the same, right?

Nevertheless, there was something about being faced with the natural vision of space’s endlessness that didn’t compare to computer generated strands of code that simply painted a picture of what infinity might look like. Nothing could be such a wholly genuine picture of boundlessness other than the real thing.

As Miguel looked up at the sky now, though, and was met with nothing but a blank grey-blue, he almost felt even smaller than he did when looking up at the stars. Small, but in the way that he was used to feeling; small, but in the way that made him afraid.

There were more Spider-People resting within the confines of the building beneath him than he would ever bother to count, so why did he still feel so alone? Infinite universes, infinite people, infinite opportunities, and, yet, Miguel had never felt so lonely. He’d searched for a solution to the hollowness once before, and he’d only found great loss – a loss he shouldn’t get to grieve when he was the one who’d caused it. Why weren’t the people he had here enough for him? Why couldn’t he just believe that Gabriel loved him, and that Xina no longer loathed him for how he’d hurt her?

None of it was ever enough, and, at a certain point, Miguel had to admit that it wasn’t something lacking in anyone else that left him so empty; it was the fact that he tore himself open further and further each day in search of anything to fix him and was bled out in the process.

Infinity really was an unfathomably large concept. How could anyone be expected to stop the bleeding of a wound that was ever-expanding?

The wind whistled loudly in his ears, almost deafening. It urged him ever closer to the edge and the great fall that could swallow him up if he’d let it. It felt like a comfort; an assurance that maybe everything could be okay, even if only in those brief moments before it stopped, though that was a bit of a comforting promise, too.

The wind, thousands of feet in the air on top of Babylon Towers, was so loud, in fact, that Miguel missed the sound of footsteps approaching the door until it had already swung open and it was too late.

“Miguel?!” a voice shouted over the whipping air current.

Miguel’s shoulders grew even more tense, if possible. He peered over his shoulder, scowling at a certain Spider in a fluffy pink robe before he turned his attention back to the cityscape before him. If he tried hard enough, he could almost pretend that the passing headlights of cars and the faraway lit up windows of apartments were a starscape; one that didn’t inspire such unfathomable fear.

“Hey, man, what are you doing up here?” came the call once more, and Miguel tucked his head down as he hunched over.

“Avoiding you,” he shouted back, voice whisked away by the wind, but Peter seemed to hear him anyway.

“Well, you’re not doing a very good job of it!” he said, and Miguel was sure he could almost hear a laugh.

He grumbled, twisting his body just enough so that he could glare at the intruder without breaking his neck in the process. “I was.”

“Yeah, well, you know how it is,” Peter called, stumbling forward against the wind to unceremoniously plop himself down next to Miguel with a huff of exhaustion. He scooted himself over, pressing his shoulder against Miguel’s – which Miguel narrowed his eyes at and leaned, ever so slightly, away – and swung his feet in the open air with an almost irreverent glee. “Spidey-sense takes me all sorts of places that I’m not invited.”

As Miguel opened his mouth to tell Peter off, he felt a small hand press against his arm, and he looked down in horror at the bright eyes and wild red hair of Mayday parker. With one hand, he took her hand into his own, then gently brought up his other to cover her eyes. His gaze immediately darted back up to her father, who he flashed his fangs at unabashedly in a snarl.

“Peter, did you bring your sho- Did you bring your baby up here?” he seethed.

And Peter, in all of his carefree naivete – which Miguel knew wasn’t fair to think when he was well aware of all the hurt the other Spider had gone through to get here – had the gall to shrug. “She needed the fresh air!” Then, after a sniff, he corrected, “air.” Then, another sniff, and his face screwed up into one of disgust. “Actually, I’m not even sure I can call this air. What do they do in your dimension, man?”

Having enough, Miguel hissed out, “Ay, pendejo, ¡cállate!” and he carefully removed his hand from May’s face to give her a fangless smile. “Hola, criatura pequeña,” he cooed, and her hand wrapped around his finger even tighter as she beamed back up at him. “Está bien. Tu papá es un idiota. ¡Sí! ¡Sí! No tiene ningún cerebro. No. Es muy tonto, yo sé. Yo sé.”

She babbled up at him in glee, and Miguel couldn’t help but to laugh, rubbing his thumb over her little hand as he babbled back.

Apparently deciding that he’d had his fill of being left out, Peter joined in on the laugh a bit awkwardly. “Hey, Miguel, I-”

“¡Cállate!” Miguel hissed again, shooting the other man a glare once more, though far more muted now that Mayday could see. “We’re having a conversation.”

And, seamlessly, he shot back into a stream of lovingly spoken Spanish. “Sí, me entiendes, arañita, yo sé. ¿Puedes decir ‘¡qué lástima!’? ‘¡Es una pena que mi papá sea tan estúpido!’” He hissed the last word with a pointed glare at Peter, knowing the man would know what the word meant, and, sure enough, he frowned. Then, Miguel immediately turned his attention back to Mayday, voice sweet once more. “Está bien, criaturita. No permitiré que nada te pase a ti. Lo prometo.”

“Miguel, please,” Peter interrupted again, tone desperate. “Don’t teach my daughter how to trash talk me in Spanish. I don’t know what I’ll do if I accidentally upset her one day and she starts prattling off fluent Spanish insults that I only half-understand. Or, god forbid, if it happened to M.J. instead. She took French in school, Miguel.”

More than happy to oblige, Miguel sat up, looking Peter straight in the face, and, in the same sweet tone as he’d used with Mayday, deadpanned, “You’re a moron.”

May blew a raspberry up at her father, giggling delightedly.

To his credit, Peter did manage to laugh, albeit a bit breathlessly, and he ran a hand through his hair. “Yeah, alright, I guess I did kind of ask for that.”

“Do you ever think?” Miguel shot back, voice finally falling back into frustration, though only enough for Peter to pick up on.

“Well, I do have a degree-” he began only to cut himself at the look he was receiving. “Look, she’s fine!” he insisted, gesturing down to Mayday who was pulling at the yarn ends of her Spider-Man hat as they were whisked in every which way by the wind, secure in her carrier. Peter moved his hand to lay on Miguel’s shoulder, and Miguel immediately batted him away, which earned a frown but, fortunately, a bit of distance. “It’s you that I’m worried about, Mig.”

At that, Miguel’s eyes narrowed. “What are you talking about?”

A finger pointing to his own skull, Peter smiled a bit grimly. “The Spider-Sense never lies.”

“Right,” Miguel drawled, rolling his eyes and biting down the rising sense of dread in his stomach. “Let’s put complete trust in your magic psychic abilities you got from a Spider over two decades ago. What could go wrong?”

“It hasn’t failed me yet,” Peter hummed. Out of the corner of his eye, Miguel could see the way his hand gripped onto Mayday’s when a particularly strong gust of wind hit their backs and minutely pushed them forward. It was a small comfort. Then, “You never answered my question. What’re you doing on the roof, man?”

Questioning why all of the people he associated himself with now were insufferably stubborn – and, more importantly, what that said about him – Miguel leaned forward, elbow on his knee and head resting on his hand. His other hand was still occupied by a little Mayday hand, and he wouldn’t dare let go until she decided she wanted to. His eyes peered over the edge of the roof, at the staggeringly long way down – so high that it almost gave him vertigo – then shifted slightly up to focus on the buildings that littered the view beneath them.

“Thinking,” he finally replied after a long pause. “I came up here because nobody bothers me.” The words were punctuated with another glare, albeit somewhat half-heartedly.

Smiling a bit sheepishly, Peter leaned back onto his free hand. “Well, you can’t win ‘em all.”

“You make it very difficult to win any,” Miguel grumbled.

“Hey, I have my moments,” came the retort, backed by a snort. Then, “y’know, if you really wanted to be alone, you could’ve just locked yourself in your room, angsty teen style.”

Unamused, Miguel didn’t grace the suggestion with any more than a scoff. His eyes were once again drawn downward, fingers curling upwards around his jaw to dig into his cheek minutely, and he hummed in thought, the sound barely inaudible over the rushing air. The sheer wind cut right through Miguel’s suit, and he shivered as a chill ran over his skin, though the feeling wasn’t entirely unwelcome; a reminder that its silent urges hadn’t given up on him just yet. Unfortunately, though, neither had Peter, who leaned over to briefly brush his shoulder with his own, brows furrowed.

“I don’t like the way you’re looking at that drop, Mig,” he said. Then, with a bit of a nervous laugh, “I mean, I’ve looked at drops plenty of times, but in a ‘I think that’d be fun to skydive off of’ sorta way, not… whatever this is.”

“I’m not talking about this in front of a child, Peter,” came the immediate retort.

“Miguel, she’s a baby,” Peter insisted. “She can’t understand anything that’s going on.”

“You don’t know that,” Miguel insisted in turn, his brows furrowing. He tore his eyes from the ground below to peer at May with thinly veiled concern.

“You can’t keep cutting everyone off, Mig,” he tried again. If Peter was trying to meet Miguel’s eyes, he wouldn’t let him, keeping his full attention on Mayday instead. “You keep finding excuses to not talk about things, and I-”

“It’s not an excuse,” he interrupted, a bit too quickly.

“Miguel-”

“Don’t make me argue with you in front of Mayday,” Miguel practically demanded, finally meeting Peter’s gaze with a vulnerability neither of them were prepared for. “Please.”

Startled, Peter’s eyes went wide, and he immediately went silent, mouth, mercifully, snapping shut. Miguel heaved in a breath and forced himself to look back out at the city. He steeled himself, forcing the weakness back out of his mind, but wasn’t quite prepared for the gentle way that Mayday squeezed his finger. The feeling made Miguel perk up a bit, and he snapped his attention right back onto the baby, on unreasonably high alert. May’s big blue eyes shifted from their hands to Miguel’s face, and she babbled at him, a strange worry in her gaze, too.

“Is- Is she okay?” Miguel asked, hating the way that he stuttered without meaning to.

With a hum, Peter glanced down at the baby, shifting her hat so he could see her face. She glanced up at her father, making more nonsensical sounds that somehow still resounded as urgent in Miguel’s ears, but Peter just smiled at her softly, petting her head. “Seems like she’s worried about you, too, big guy.”

“Wha- Worried about me?” he echoed, voice strained. “Peter, she’s a baby. She can’t understand anything that’s going on.”

“You don’t know that,” Peter countered, giving him such a stupid grin that Miguel couldn’t help but to frown.

“Don’t do that.”

“Don’t do what?”

“Use my words against me,” Miguel hissed. “That’s not funny.”

Holding back a smile, Peter raised a hand and tilted it from side to side. “It’s a little funny.”

“You brought your baby onto a roof, Peter,” he reminded almost exasperatedly. “Don’t try to act smart now.”

“I have a degree-”

“In what? Incompetency?”

Giving an irritated laugh, Peter shook a finger in Miguel’s direction. “You know, you are a very difficult man to talk off a ledge.”

“I’d say you’re doing a fantastic job,” Miguel said with false sweetness, then pointed towards the ground thousands of feet below, “if that’s the direction you want me to go.”

“Okay. Alright. I’ll give you that one because it was actually kind of funny-”

Miguel scoffed, letting his head fall back onto his hand. “How kind of you.”

“-but I’m being serious here.”

“Wow,” he deadpanned. “First time?”

Seemingly not as amused now, Peter frowned, and his hand gently fell back onto Mayday’s head, who squealed delightedly despite the confrontation. “Alright, you’re pushing your luck now.”

“I am?”

“How is it even possible for one guy to be in this bad of a mood?!” Peter half-shouted, throwing his head back in frustration.

Again, Miguel scoffed, and his head fell to one side to stare at the other man, unimpressed. “Would you like your answer in the form of a list or an essay?”

“I’d like an answer at all, actually,” he said desperately.

“Ah, now that’s asking too much of me,” came the response, and Miguel turned his gaze away once more.

Gawking, Peter sputtered for words for a moment before pausing, falling silent, then trying again. “Are you impossible to talk to on purpose? Jess says it’s on purpose, but Ben… Well, actually, I don’t remember what Ben said.” He laughed awkwardly, waving a hand. “It’s kinda hard to focus on the words coming out of his mouth when he’s basically a clone of me. Or- Or literally a clone of me, actually. Isn’t that freaky? Poor guy. But the point is that it was probably the same answer. Everyone thinks that-”

“Are you done?” Miguel finally interjected, glaring with every bit of vitriol he could muster, but Peter wasn’t impressed.

“I could be,” he hummed, “or I could keep going. I didn’t think you were going to answer the question, and someone’s got to fill the silence.”

Now it was Miguel’s turn to gawk, and it took a few blinks for him to muster up the wherewithal to actually answer. “You are so childish.”

“Sticks and stones, Mig,” Peter mused. “I haven’t even gotten started. I could talk for days, if you let me. Next topic?”

Still holding onto both of their hands, Mayday squealed and bounced a bit in her carrier with a spitty razzberry, and Peter immediately smiled, drawing a preemptive groan from the man by his side. “Mayday!” he exclaimed. “Oh, I could write a book about Mayday. She’s only a baby, but she really is sophisticated, you know. She’s a baby with layers! With complexities! I know I’ve already shown you all of her pictures, but-”

“Ay, Dios, enough!” Miguel hissed, his free hand running through his hair and his eyes wide with exasperation. “Yes, it’s on purpose. Because I want to avoid this!” He gestured between Peter and himself vigorously. “This drives me nuts, get it? You drive me nuts. I don’t want to talk, and everyone seems to get that but you.”

An exasperated laugh fell from him, though he gently squeezed Mayday’s hand to assure her that everything was okay. “I came up here because I didn’t want to talk to anyone, Peter. Do you not get that? Do you not understand that I don’t want you here?” He pointed a clawed finger in Peter’s face, mouth open in a snarl. “Listen to me closely because I need you to understand this before you get hurt. Leave me alone. Leave me alone.

“If you want to talk to me about work,” Miguel continued, “or if you want to talk to me about Mayday, or M.J., or anything other than this when I’m not trying to be alone, then, please, be my guest. But I am not talking about this.” He pulled his hand to his chest roughly, the fabric of his suit getting caught on the talon he pointed directly at himself. “I will not talk about this. Leave me alone.” Then, more insistently, “leave me alone.”

For a moment, then, there was silence, only filled by the whistling rush of the wind around them and Miguel’s heaving breaths. His nostrils were flared in rage, hand hanging in the air, but his anger faltered when he finally caught sight of the look on the other man’s face; a chill ran over him that was almost worse than the one caused by the roaring wind. Beside him, Peter wore the most impassive expression Miguel had ever seen on him, and the look, admittedly, scared him a bit. His hand fell back to his side, and his brows quirked upward in quiet unease as his eyes darted between Peter and literally anything else.

“Miguel,” Peter finally said, and his tone matched his face, “I’m not just going to leave you to kill yourself on a roof.”

And, all at once, with a startled and impossibly frustrated bark of laughter, the fury returned to Miguel’s chest, chasing away the chill of fear and concern that had previously gripped him. Gently, Miguel slid his hand out of Mayday’s grasp and, less so, stood to his feet.

Immediately, Peter’s eyes widened, and he half-shuffled to get up himself, stumbling onto one knee. “Wait. What are you-”

Without a word, Miguel stepped off the edge and into the open air, a strangled screech following him.

“Miguel!”

A horrified face popped over the edge of the building, where Miguel’s talons dug into the metal plated siding, and he couldn’t help the bitter sort of amusement he found in the reaction. Served him right. The thought was chased away as the wind continued to pull at him, beckoning him downward, but Miguel didn’t give in to its pleas. There was a strange sort of satisfaction to defying what was asked of him both by Peter and by the very world, though such nauseating satisfaction was probably what had kept him around for so long in the first place; whenever the promise to himself to be useful in his wretched existence managed to fail him. Maybe, for now, bitter contentment could be enough.

He snarled up at the other man, pointing at him with his free hand. “I’m not riding the elevator down with you.”

And, with that, he loosed his grip on the building a bit, allowing himself to slide down the side, followed by a half-enraged, half-relieved shout of, “yeah, fuck you, too!” and an even quieter, “don’t repeat that, Mayday.”

#blaise writes #miguel o'hara #peter b parker #mayday parker #spiderman 2099 #spiderman 2099 comics #spider man 2099 #atsv #across the spiderverse #spider man: across the spider verse #spiderman across the spiderverse #atsv fanfiction #fanfiction #cw: suicide #i do love peter so so much but also i think sometimes he pushes miguel's buttons a bit too much #like i know he means well and that miguel can see and appreciate that but also goddamn he doesn't know when to stop sometimes

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