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inklores · 10 months

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𝐩𝐮𝐭 𝐝𝐨𝐰𝐧 𝐭𝐡𝐚𝐭 𝐠𝐫𝐚𝐯𝐞𝐬𝐭𝐨𝐧𝐞 | (vi.) hurt carves itself in something’s bones

⇽ chapter v / chapter vii ⇾ | series masterlist. | wattpad | ao3

summary: nothing cuts like a scalpel. or a mother. (wc :: 12.5k)

content contains: brief mentions of alcohol, platonic fluff, mentions of surgery, bit of swearing, mommy issues, descriptions of pregnancy, portrayal(s) of grief,

HOSPITALS CAN BE A SCARY place for some. To others, it was a sanctuary.

There was some silent, startling chill someone could feel when they traipse dimly lit halls. It was scented with sanitizer and packaged, polyester sheets, carving through their senses like a scalpel. The squeaking of sneakers against waxed speckled tiles and the tittering of phones and overhead speakers was a woeful song. Medicine was memories and melancholia. A mausoleum to die in or a bed to live again. For most people, the operating room was the elevator between life and death. The surgeon was God and the operation was Judgement.

The hospital was Xiomara’s second home and second church. It had seen her through many different phases of her life. Infanthood when the world welcomed her to its blistering, skewed chaos. A childhood spent in the hospital’s daycare. In womanhood, she graduated from the Crayola-colored cubbies and into surgery. Through motherhood. Through widowing. Through loss and gain and loss again.

Xiomara had walked those halls as a dreamer, as a doctor, as the family, and as a patient.

It was her sanctuary.

Her dad was the captain of Brooklyn’s 72nd precinct. Her mom was an operating room nurse, after serving as a Navy nurse for seven years. Her older brother completed his residency at that very hospital. They were the scary family. The respected, proletarian, go-getting breed. Where success was, that six-letter last name typically was tagged onto it.

Supermom and superdad with their superson and superdaughter in their Bed-Stuy brownstone.

It was in their names. Victor, pretty self-explanatory. Xiomara, ready for battle. Never winning. Just ready for the grime and sludge to walk through. Blindly tossed between loss and triumph. Victor teethed on competition. Xo balked at second place. Soccer and gymnastics championship trophies battled for prestige. Her little height marks on the bathroom doorframe were always a smidge under her older brother’s. They had been weaned on hard work and service along with their mashed carrots and My First Bible passages. Passion slid between her teeth as cold and hard as the medals that studded the Solano household mantle.

Trailblazers were birthed and brought up in that household. Of course, Victor always got to be the number one boy. The first for everything— the first child, the first to go to an Ivy League, the first doctor, the first to get married before a pregnancy.

At least he wasn’t the first human mutate in the family.

That much was Xo’s special victory.

The sight of the dimensional watch filled Xo with the anticipation of ripping off a Band-Aid to reveal the macerated, pruney flesh beneath. Miguel could have sprung for a more inconspicuous design. Maybe toss in a beveled face, and streamline the band. Instead, it wrapped loudly against her wrist, begging for attention, piquing curiosities, and bringing unwarranted questions that she didn’t have the answer to. It was the world’s worst statement piece but Miguel was exact with his code of conduct. No intrusions. No noses poking where they shouldn’t. A Spider’s mask was the guard of their secrets, the guard to their identity. But Xo didn’t have a mask.

Swallowing her shudder, she pulled the sleeve of her coat over the ostentatious watch stirring to life with three numbers blinking on the congruent face. 510. So, it wasn’t a dream. Xo would blame the fatigue of being paged at five o’clock in the morning for an emergent trauma for why she was entertaining dimensional travel. She couldn’t help it. With a simple brandish of her fingers, she could input another sequence of digits. Conjure a portal. Surf on quantum particles. Travel to another world—

“Kavita Chaudhuri, 32 weeks pregnant. Sustained a fall down some stairs. Head C.T. shows a subdural hematoma but the baby’s in distress. I paged Strange and O.B.”

Travel later. Save lives, now.

Her instincts sprang, freed from her own bleary cognition. Xiomara looked down at the expectant mother and her shiny, tear-streaked face. Dark, anguished eyes were fluttering in and out of sentience. Her temple was roughed up, a red swelling promising a gnarly bruise in the coming days but that was the least of their worries.

The warbling of the ultrasound carried Dr. Cecilia Reyes’ recapitulating account through Xiomara’s consciousness like a battering ram. Her eyes darted to the grainy imaging, the ebbing black and gray blobs where she spotted the irregular wedge-shaped lesion flicker on the screen.

“It hurts, please, it really hurts—” Kavita pleaded, face screwing up as she hissed in pain.

Xo did the best she could to ignore the humming driving against her eardrum, tickling the nag that cocooned in the back of her brain for months and raising the hairs of her nape. No doubt Reyes saw the jolt in her shoulder, nudging at her ear like a mosquito perched on her lobe, telling her to look where only she can. Assess where only her eyes would let her look.

“Hold on, Reyes, wait, move the wand up a bit.” Xo’s hand gingerly wrapped around the probe that rubbed over Kavita’s stomach. She inched it upward, buffing out the hasty smear of gel that already thinned out over the curve of her womb. Xo looked at the ultrasound monitor. The black and gray amalgamation throbbed once, twice, centered in the head.

“We have a bleed,” Xo exhaled. “Baby’s brain is hemorrhaging. Okay, Kavita,” she looked down at the despairing woman, her face rounding out with softness, “you’re in no shape to push and the baby’s in distress so we’ll have to perform an emergency C-section.”

Then up to her resident. “Get ready to run, Reyes.”

A crash cesarean wasn’t the tricky part. It was the stuttering terror of glitching that strung her along, stoking tension in her muscles as she waited for the obstetrician to pull her fingers out from the folds of her patient’s womb. When the pace of her breaths fell out of synchronicity with the droning beeps of the vitals monitors, Xo felt her lungs burn with how quickly she sucked in air. To stay in balance. Find the rhythm to conduct her precise, delicate motions. Otherwise, the OR was drenched in the strained type of silence that was punctured by the metallic clink of forceps. None of her music was humming in the background. Xo almost craved this quiet even if it betrayed her own routine and comfort. It was as sobering as a plunge in Arctic waters. The trepidation that haunted her as she was shuttled between parallel realities, holding a palm over scars that were slit open, was quieted now. In this sterile cocoon where everything was within the bounds of understanding.

The O.B. was amused at her off-putting request for a silent procedure.

“Didn’t think I’d get a chance to bust out my new playlist, Dr. Solano,” she remarked over the rustic ambiance of Springsteen and The Ronettes.

The baby was out before the sanitized theater doors burst open, a familiar baritone demand cutting through Xo’s concentration and the bridge of Walking in the Rain:

“What’s mom’s status?”

Xo couldn’t see Stephen, but she could visualize cattish blue eyes zeroing in on her from over the cotton edge of a mask. Vigilant. Maybe slightly dubious.

“B.P. and heart rate’s been fluctuating but she’s ready for you, Dr. Strange,” Reyes reported from the neonatal incubator.

“Alright,” Stephen huffed, his arms crooked upward as a nurse fastened a crinkled surgical gown over his navy scrubs. His acute gaze roamed over two imaging scans. “Let’s prep her for a craniotomy.”

“Breathe, Stephen.” Xo suppressed a smile as she looked up from the preemie, eyes absorbing the fluctuating lines and numbers on the teeny monitor illustrating her vitals.

“It’s four in the morning and I don’t have an Americano in my hand. Tell me to breathe again,” he dared.

“Baby’s APGAR is at 4, let’s move her to the NICU,” Xo directed, attaining an alert nod from Reyes.

Xiomara wouldn’t deny it, surgeons could be messed up. They find joy in the feel of a scalpel in their hand and are hyper-attuned to the beeping of monitors in pin-drop silence. It was giving a butcher a white coat, the license to cut, and the instinct to move on from tragedy. From patients dying on their watch to articulating the gravity of a diagnosis to a fragile family, the intrinsic quality that all surgeons shared was the ability to affect trauma and also feel it, heavily. Investment was different from attachment. It was a fine line that every surgeon must understand, to forfeit emotional outrage for logic. It struck a different chord when the patient was a child. When working with children, being embraced by their bright and buoyant souls, loving and growing fond of them was only human. To get caught up in cries and giggles. It was the biology of the healer to dote on the helpless, from the most wide-eyed of toddlers to the most despicable, reckless teenagers. No longer was it a matter of investment, of fulfilling an oath, but a responsibility. The promise of a future, of a young life, in trained gloved hands. A terrifying duty and the most lavish adoration.

Love was Xiomara’s building block. Her centric thread wove with the resilience that children had, allowing them to survive worse. Falling back on rainbows and fairy dust was easier than… the parts that made her world spin to a stop.

Xo felt the earth slow beneath her soles as she monitored the baby’s extubation in the Neonatal Intensive Care Unit. Truly, a little thing. Quiet, amidst the diminutive squalls of the other infants and premature deliveries tended to in the nursery. Xo felt scared to blink or breathe next to her. Tiny creases of her eyelids flanked a button nose smaller than a pinhead. Opaque skin stretched waxen and thin across brittle arms and legs and a chest that was given lift and fall by the manual ventilator pumping premature lungs with artificial oxygen. With frantic hope.

“She’s breathing over the vent, Dr. Solano,” Reyes said gently, lifting the diaphragm of the stethoscope off her minuscule chest.

“Hm, good.” Xo took in the dizzying web of wires and tubes that sprouted from the baby’s body and felt a flint ignite in her chest. Rough way to greet the world. “There’s still a lot of blood draining.”

“A stroke before your life starts…” Reyes shook her head, unable to tear her gaze away from the miracle nestled in a blush pink blanket. “She’s a fighter.”

A beat of pleasant silence pulsed between them, fed by the calming night that would retire for the dawn.

“You know, at this stage, the O.B. would tell you that the baby is the size of a squash. Or a Napa cabbage,” Xo remarked. “The 32-week mark.”

It was a simple, throwaway comment that uttered by anyone else would have been a cue for awe. It mattered, coming out of her mouth. She’d seen it in the way people tiptoed around her after those few months she took on leave. Interns and residents obeyed her directives with little protest— even those who were slammed with hours of scut work. The Chief kept a remarkable, busy man like Stephen Strange on her case. Xo heard it in the way people spoke in all these cruel hypotheticals. God, isn’t it sad that she was widowed so young? Husband and daughter both. Should’ve saved the daughter. Always saving other kids now. Xo Solano: childless widow. That cut a tragic figure. Dr. Xiomara Solano MD: Chief of Pediatric Surgery. Now that was a success story.

Any thought besides remediation was recycled for fuel to keep her running. Xo finished her rounds, mother-henning her first and second-year residents through the pediatric ward with a puzzling engagement that curbed many from believing she had less than three hours of sleep. Some of the residents had never been on a peds rotation, granting her the chance to remind them what they were doing and who they were helping.

She always said it best, earning a droll but impressed smirk from Strange: Peds was the toughest surgical specialty. Sure, there were fairy princesses and clowns that came to entertain brightly painted halls. But it was the elite of the elite.

Even after she orbited the breadth of the peds ward, sunlight continued to bleed into the bluish sky. A quick check at her phone made a heavy sigh loosen her shoulders.

Ten past nine. Xo had been awake for five hours and her day hadn’t even started.

Xo wondered if “Spider-Man” Miguel was riding a similar ship in his kaleidoscopic world. It was a curiosity she had dwelled on numerous times with her Miguel when he would spend pitch-black hours advancing on genetic research in his lab and home office. There were times when her juvenile cynicism would get the best of her. That clearly, the work she was doing greatly outranked his. It deserved the spot on the figurative mantle. He was staring at clumps of cells through a microscopic lens while she was repairing organs and sewing flesh. She supposed the thresholds of superiority were frail now. Being Spider-Man was a second job, saddled with presiding over his arachnoid assemblage. Miguel was not only a scientist and leader, he was a hero. The swift and dare she say, terrible sword of justice.

And he expected her to be one too?

A robotic songbird’s trill came muffled. Reyes was assigned to the NICU, allowing Xo to zip away and peel back her white sleeve. Lyla’s glamorous apparition beamed up from the graphical interface of her watch.

“Doc, you’ll want to keep an eye on the news,” warned the AI, “we’re getting reports of disturbances in Harlem. Could be an anomalous presence. It isn’t your birthday by any chance, is it?”

“Are-are you kidding— I have surgery in the next hour,” Xo whispered through tight teeth.

“Sorry. Miguel’s keeping an eye on it too. Like a training exercise. Baby’s First Vigilante Outing.”

Miguel O’Hara strove to fix what was broken, by his own accord or savage providence. Xiomara was familiar with damage and she only knew one way to heal it. “If there’s a civilian disturbance, it’ll come in as trauma. I can help then— in a legal way.”

“Oh-kay,” Lyla drawled, entirely unconvinced, “You need backup, don’t you?”

Was this her call? Xo pinched her eyes shut, nervous energy thrumming within her vessels. “Uh— what’s backup?”

“More like ‘who’ is backup.”

“Uh…” Xo shifted her weight. “Is-is he really backup? I mean, doesn’t he have people—spider minions— doing that?”

“Oh, he does.”

Xo’s tongue rolled thoughtfully against the wall of her cheek. Respiratory monitors beeped together, blending into a mismatched dissonance that fell behind the rising tempo of her heart. It was disorienting, all of it. Surgeons have always been a confident bunch but Xo had never felt more stranded than she did then. Bones breaking. Organs bursting. Flesh splicing. Run a needle, repair the damage, and alleviate the pain. Cold-cut, medical textbook jargon. Her breaking point was her starting line, once at work, but now as Spider-Woman? This wasn’t the same case. There was no science here. No rules. To a surgeon, there was nothing worse… and nothing better. The instinct to have an answer, to have assurance, even in the total absence of it was built into her nature.

“Let’s…” She flavored her response with a modicum of sangfroid, fueling the authority she carried beneath this roof. “Let’s wait it out, can we?”

Lyla blinked. Physically tilted her funky sunglasses and stared.

Suddenly, Xo felt like she was in third grade again, a nauseating uncertainty enveloping her like an oppressive weight. “Wait, was that the wrong answer—”

She vanished without a response, sucking back into her gadget and flipping Xo’s stomach simultaneously. It harangued her like a specter clinging to her ankles or a needle lodged in her shoe. Xo didn’t notice the extended amount of time she spent looking at the television monitors suspended around the sterile halls, absorbing the spewing of anchors and commentators. Of course, in her patients’ rooms, she was likely to find SpongeBob rather than CNN. A sobering yank to reality. But still… the prospect of devastation molded to the crevices of her brain. Unsteady as moonlight on water.

“Dr. Solano?”

“Hi—” Xo cringed as she became acutely aware of the charts she was examining and the fitful reflex of slamming the binder cover over her knuckles. Fingers throbbing, she met the doe-eyed gaze of her resident. “Hello, what can I— what is it, Reyes?”

“The labs for the kid in 319 are ready… unless that’s it?” she questioned, dusky face wrinkling with apprehension as she handed Xo a tablet.

“These?” Xo breathed out, jerking a thumb to the binder that enclosed her hand. “No, no, these are… purchase agreements. I’m buying a house. With a screened porch. I love sunlight.”

She should probably get used to it. The little lies smuggled like nettles in the grass.

“Okay, uh, I paged Dr. Strange like you asked me to. He’s…” Reyes’ lips puckered, snipping her tangent. “Well, he’s—”

Xo’s eyes crinkled with her subsequent grin, the bluish glare of the tablet lighting a puckish glint in her eyes. “Is the ice water in his veins a bit chilly today?”

“Frozen. Solid.”

“I’m sorry for siccing him on you,” Xo admitted, burying her hands in her coat pockets. “I thought after his craniotomy he would’ve been in an approachable mood but that’s just his warm-up.”

Stephen Strange was a smug, self-important glory hound oozing with braggadocio— also known as a neurosurgeon. He didn’t nest interns though they clamored over having the honor of assisting in the latest tumor he was besting. His name studded the OR scheduling system like gold stars. Patients flew from here, there, and yonder to get treated by him. Where other surgeons hesitated, Stephen was already scrubbing in. There was a reason why he was called Scalpel Jesus. But he was also the man who let her stand in front of her fellow interns when she couldn’t see a rare hemispherectomy. He was the mentor who saw her.

Xo wouldn’t do him the courtesy of pouring honey in his candied ears. But she was certain that she would’ve been just an ordinary surgeon without Stephen Strange. Not the extraordinary surgeon he had pushed her to be.

While her resident shrunk back from his glacial scowl, she grinned and waited for it to round at the edges.

Beams of light should have been bursting out from his marble spine. Perhaps a glow of sanctity crowned his head. He simply strutted down the hall toward the nurses’ station like his name was inscribed on each of the tiles that were blessed to keep him upright. Spartan, midnight blue scrub cap still wrapped around his coif, never disturbing the ludicrous amount of gel he treated his hair with.

“You’re my neuro on-call,” Xiomara reasoned when he brushed past her with barely a flutter of his lips. “Strange. Good morning.”

Finally pulling his attention away from his tablet dictating the OR schedule for the day, Strange released a long, sore sigh and scrutinized Xo. His caustic gaze darted to Reyes, peeking out from behind the beaming surgeon’s shoulder like a frightened cub. “Do you have a problem?” he questioned coolly.

“No,” Reyes said, wide-eyed.

“Are you holding a flat white?”

“No, I—”

“Then why am I still seeing you?”

Xo giggled. “Relax, killer, she’s on my service today. Monitoring our newest preemie while Mama recovers. I paged you.” She turned to Reyes. “Head to the NICU and you’ll call me if…” She pursed her lips.

“If she has apneic episodes,” recited Reyes.

“Good girl. Monitor her C.B.C. and keep an eye on the drain.”

The two attendings leaned against the desk herding busy nurses as the resident zipped away. “They’re like sticky things that won’t blow off,” Strange commented.

Xo’s head snapped toward him, a smirk edging her lips. “Do you ever wake up in the morning and realize that nobody likes you?”

The fatigued glare Stephen shot her made her shrug. “Watch it. I’m the only friend you have,” he threw back.

“Stephen, I get it, I get it. Peds is too dainty for you and so is teaching even though we are a teaching hospital with a Level One trauma center and an excellent fetal surgery fellowship program,” Xo prattled, her words punctuated by her drumming knuckles against the desk. “I guess the sad, sad faces of little kids is… not enough,” she twisted her head upside down, pouting at the disgruntled neurosurgeon, “for Dr. Stephen Strange.”

True to form, Stephen tapered the glaciers that were his eyes. Cold, firm, always moving. “You’re droning, Solano. What is it?”

“Please don’t kill me.”

“Oh, good God, what did you do?”

She stood on grass between the nettles.

“I have another job offer.”

Strange ended up getting his flat white. Xo ordered the first thing she could identify on the menu of the hospital’s coffee cart. Boiling and a bit watery but the caffeinated notes scraped against her tastebuds like varnish remover. Her long, stalling sip burned her mouth yet she couldn’t flinch beneath his watch. The pin-drop silence of the attendings’ lounge was rare—the absence of a coworker seizing some sleep on the creased red couch, was even rarer.

Arms came across Stephen’s chest, scrubs and coat faring little for his tall build. Silver striated the cowlick that arced over his lined temple. He wasn’t too mad, Xo deduced through the way he crossed his ankles and languidly rested his weight against the back of his chair.

She let little details fall from her lips, corpuscles of reassurance to tug at the disquieting tension that entwined them. “It’s in a very nice, up-and-coming area.”

Xo deliberately steered around the words that indicated any region. She was hesitant to even frame her explanation in geographic coordinates. Stephen had covert ties to nearly every hospital on the Eastern Seaboard, undoubtedly several in the West. Hidden threads and favors preserved in amber. He wrote the recommendation letter for Xo’s pediatrics fellowship. Singular. Wasn’t like she needed another one.

“What hospital?” he inquired, sifting through his granola for dried cranberries. He was hubristic as she expected, languid in his tone and the roll of his eyes. His presence alone seemed to overflow in the chair.

“It’s…” Xo swallowed, milking that bit of static for all it was worth, “Well, not really one, but it will be spectacular once I’m done with it, so…”

“Ugh, don’t tell me it’s L.A. Mercy,” Stephen groaned, arrogance compounded with each word.

“It’s not a bad word, Strange.”

“Well, it’s a bad hospital,” he popped a handful of mix into his mouth, snacking on oat clusters, “and they’re not poaching my firstborn.”

Xo sputtered, her stomach lurching in mortification. “Firstb— are you serious?”

His long sip of his coffee spoke a thousand, ostentatious protests.

“Okay, you can not keep helicopter-ing me,” she huffed and rubbed out a tired itch that took root in her eyelid. The vein tensed and seized, inviting a twitch that she blinked out. “I did my residency and I’m doing my fellowship here. I’m allowed to leave.”

“Uh-huh.” Curt, dismissive, snowballing to his verbal excavation. “And you’ll be leaving what, exactly? Your own service, a state-of-the-art PICU and NICU, and a salary that makes you one of the highest-paid surgeons in the Northeast.” Strange clicked his tongue. “No, no. You’ll be wasted there. You’re good. You’re good and gifted and ungrateful.”

“Ungrateful— really?” she huffed. “When I told you I wanted to specialize in peds, you didn’t talk to me for almost a year.”

“Now you have cartoon animals on your lab coat— you’re a surgeon, Xo.” Stephen inclined his chin toward the cutesy patches above her embroidered name.

“Do you want one too?” she jibed, ignoring his irritated mutter, “I-I think I’ve got a lion or a crocodile wearing sunglasses. Really spruces up your look.”

“All I’m saying is, everyone wants to dance with you, so maybe don’t pick someone who’ll step on your toes.”

“The new place is giving me a prestigious research grant to head the genome surgery program there.” Damn it. “The,” her throat was dry when she cleared it, “The Nuuu-eva York Grant. It’s privately owned. You won’t find it like online or anything. Besides, I didn’t make a decision yet.” She twisted her lips in thought. “Okay, it’s like buying a dress. I try it on, see if it makes me look nice—show off what I want, do a little twirl, make sure I have the best earrings for it—but I carry it around the store to see if I still like it at the end.”

“And what about your old dress?” he inquired. Her current research, she translated. “You still,” his brow crinkled, “fit in it.”

It’s almost like I asked that myself. Xo withered, hearing vocal reverberations bounce against her skull in waves. Did she say that out loud?

Flippant words fell in dominos and she shrugged. “I can have two dresses.”

The humor wasn’t lost on Strange. His lower lip snagged on his teeth in a sore motion, eyes surveying the interns, nurses, and residents who were scarfing down what little breakfast and coffee they could sniff before a Code Blue could go off.

Welcome the soft, rare visage of Dr. Stephen Strange.

“Xiomara, word runs quickly around this hospital. You had an issue in the OR? With the multi-organ transplant case?” he listed. “Blake said you had a seizure and you were kicked out. Then you disappear for the night, you don’t pick up your phone, your mom is blowing up my work cell—”

The neutral line of her lips wilted. “My mother has your phone number?”

“Figured it was her when she started asking a neurosurgeon with a Ph.D. what the fertility rate for a 31-year-old woman was.”

Xo took a rather large gulp of her latte to stop from screaming.

“Xiomara, are you in trouble? Do I need to get you help?” he probed with a benign amplification. She felt like one of his post-op patients. Placid from morphine that anesthetized the measured incisions, the fresh stitches, and atrophied muscles. Snared by the modulated tone Strange always took with his post-op patients. Firm and cool, a brain surgeon’s arrogance expunged in favor of cold-cut wisdom.

Wrapped in an unfathomable tactic that made her stomach shrivel in remorse.

“Do you… need to go back to grief group?”

And have widows in their 60s and 70s and 80s look at me like that? No. Xo adored the women she met. Got coffee or dinner with some of them occasionally. But she couldn’t fall back into that uncertain path. She could at least appreciate his offer.

The tension that strung his face visibly melted. “Don’t make me sound old and uncool.”

“Cool people don’t say they’re cool,” she mused.

“Are you taking steroids?”

Xo’s forehead creased, exhausted curiosity coiling around her tongue. “Did you get calls from my grandma too?”

“Dr. Solano, even through your lab coat, I can see that you’ve…” Strange’s free hand made swivels, shoving in a tangible clumsiness that made his neck flare red. “Bulked up.”

“Oh, I feel like that violates ten different workplace harassment policies.” Xo grinned to placate him and ward off the bodies that were scurrying around carrying labs and cycling through patient rooms. Perhaps the most puzzling aspect of their presence was not the weight of Stephen’s accusation, but the fact they were as immobile as pillars.

Two years ago, she could’ve flung him the standard replies. Late-night trips to the craft store to get supplies for a school project due the next day, dirty dishes that had passed her comfortable threshold of thirty-six hours of sitting in the sink, chaperoning field trips, fucking croup or colic or the pox. Xo could feel how barren her armoire was now, the odd moth flitting out in a cloud of dust. Surgery seemed to swallow all of her time and touch none of it at the same time.

Relentless, Stephen continued to hypothesize, tilting his pouch of trail mix for Xo to defeatedly scour. She popped a sultana in her mouth, sucking on the wrinkled sugary skin as she was laid bare to his conflated sentiments of bemusement, indignation, and perhaps—using the other superpower she carved out through their years—a mentor-mentee affection that he so often liked to sweep under a see-through rug.

“Dr. Strange to the ER. Dr. Strange to the ER.” The page crackled through the intercom.

“Ah. A poor mortal is in need of a god,” Xo sighed.

Strange fixed her with a squint although the anticipation of the page wormed in his statuesque poise. “Look, I taught you better so for my own ego, I’m gonna level with you in that, sure, maybe you aren’t doing anything stupid that will endanger your life, your job, and your medical license.”

Xo drew in a breath, letting it ice her lungs. “Thank you,” she stressed, with a sincere squeeze of his shoulder. “For believing in me.”

His courtesy to her dignity was equally negligent to his heroics of sliding the world back beneath her feet.

“Joke all you want, kid. But if you want to yell or scream or punch something because whatever’s happening is happening, then do it. Be a mess. I can take it,” Stephen affirmed. “But in the OR, you will not be a mess. Leave it at the scrub sink and pick it up when you’re done.”

Even when he was duly called away, she heard his words sink into her marrow, sending rolls of nausea throughout her body.

One of Strange’s more desperate and naturally corrosive wiles really. Just a few words though they stuck as she too was whisked away for a consult. A meditation to gnaw on, laying siege to the control she mailed herself in.

Mami wouldn’t like this new dress.

Xo had thoughts. She was the head of Peds, after all. She’s repaired everything from a toddler’s failing liver to a teenager’s hernia. But three hours post-rounds, with the endless chittering of beepers and phone lines and code calls, her own skin crawling with endless predictions of disaster and the crowning cataclysm that would be the missed phone call she just received from her mother, Xo couldn’t stand it anymore.

Right on cue. Victor texted her a gif of Kermit the frog falling off a roof.

V: This is what Mami thinks ur gonna do.

X: Ur so annoying

V: Where were u on Tuesday? She was calling me

Party popper emoji. Clinking glasses emoji.

V: Do u even have any friends to party with?

Hello

My bad, jesus

Maritaaa

X: I’m busyyy.

Xo pursed her lips, brewing in thought and vindication. Her thumbs tapped on the keyboard.

X: I’ve got a partial splenectomy for my spherocytosis kid.

V: Uh-oh me no like big Band-Aid words :(

X: ass

She watched the tiny messaging bubbles ripple in waves. Disappeared once, then came back, jumpstarting her nerves like it was a car battery. Xo wondered, briefly, whether he might send her good tidings, even a thumbs-up emoticon. The notion to ask her older brother about her new “job offer” burned like light against a lantern. For a middle-aged cardiologist operating in solo practice, he could understand. He progressed through life. She watched it happen in monosyllabic sentences and arid text messages. Victor could defrost and heat up some of that fabled big-brother advice that he otherwise stowed in his emotional freezer for their entire lives. Just a bite was plenty—

He sent her a link to the Doc McStuffins theme song.

X: It’s after 5, don’t u have a PA to overwork and a bland spaghetti dinner to eat

V: Nah, Cat’s on some new celebrity food kick now. U wanna come over for dinner tonight?

Xo bit her nails for a Convenient Page, or, with an extra serving of regret, a Code Blue that a nurse or resident would be frantically calling her to tend to. A catalyst for a polite evacuation— something to give her an excuse to hang up. Hit her Do Not Disturb function and see her screen go black. Leave and return to her sanctuary—

V: Cat’s been asking. She and the twins were asking cause they want to see u.

Mami’s coming too.

Xooooo

She chewed on a soggy curl of orecchiette. Her fork prodded at clumps of beef, red pepper, and onion all slathered in whatever jar of marinara shirked in the lonely pantry. Her phone was sandwiched between her shoulder and ear, nestled in her neck as she stacked her coasters, then took it apart, before assembling the stout ceramic tower again.

The line rang once, twice too long before she heard the click. Immediately, her finger hit the speakerphone button.

“Hi, Mami.” She uttered in a tiny voice. The distance in her tone was almost too computed. Hinging on just enough affection so she wouldn’t get any static about why she sounds so bereft to speak to her mother. “Sorry, I didn’t get to call you back quicker. There was an emergency trauma that came in— ran longer than I thought.”

“Oh, okay, okay.” Julieta Solano sang softly from her end of the line. Xo almost flinched at how it blared over the loudspeaker but she hovered over her screen nonetheless. “I’m just checking in, mija. Seeing if your phone works or that I wasn’t erased from your contacts.” She let out a giggle that sounded cut from ice.

Xo exhaled through her nostrils to quell the fatigue that began to weigh down her bones. “No, Mami. I’m busy like I told you.”

Agonizing silence. Then—

“So,” Julieta began with her patented mild and sweet drawl, a beautiful intonation of a two-letter precursor to something that would likely make Xo bash her head against a wall, “Vico tells me you didn’t respond to his invite for dinner. Are you on-call tonight? Again?”

“Psh, he tattled on me?”

(X: you cried to mommy srsly?

V: huhhhh? can’t hear u over the delicious smell of smoked mackerel)

“So, it’s true?”

Xo could have said yes, enunciating that she preferred to live in the hospital than come to the place she was oriented to call home. Instead, she cast her gaze across the studio like a fisherman tossing a hopeless net in the Dead Sea. Trying to capture fish instead of algae and microorganisms that survived off of sunlight. There were abandoned cardboard boxes glued together by a varnish of dust. A stainless steel pan accompanied a saucer that was still bound in its cellophane coat. A thing of Motrin in her bathroom cabinet, a singular fork jammed in three-day-old pasta, and to wash it, a bristle sponge sopping in the sink. Moldy brie and fig jam and cabernet sauvignon in her skeletal refrigerator. The strange apartment left much to be desired. 916 square feet of desolation. A pathetic nab at reincarnation? Her own personal olive branch?

“Who knows?” Xo’s clipped voice diced her words into uneven fragments. Harsher than she intended and cautious, all of a sudden. “Hospital is enforcing an 80-hour work limit. Maybe I’ll push my luck. Do some surgeries in the basement.” Sew a mask and become a nocturnal, insect-themed vigilante. “Keep me on my toes. You’ll never see me again.”

“Mm. What’s a bit longer?”

A sliver of onion crunched between Xo’s molars, flooding her mouth with sulfur.

When Julieta spoke again, her tone was a few degrees colder. “Well, Marita, if I can stand in an OR for over thirty years, serve two tours, and raise two children, you can manage to tear yourself away from the scalpels and scrubs for a night. Come to dinner. It won’t be as painful as you think it’ll be, sitting with your family, I promise. Catalina is inviting her friend— cómo se llamaba… ah, Lawrence. Very handsome. He’s an actuary. Catholic.”

“Lawrence.” Xo tried out the gaudy name on her tongue. Her fork pushed around the remnants of food in her bowl like it was a hockey puck. “But that’s a little too pale for you, isn’t it? Salt-and-peppery? Lobster red sunburnt?”

“Marita, it doesn’t matter what I think.”

Ah, yes. The old “honey-on-the-bear-trap” voice. Fly close enough to saccharine clouds and wind up with torn ligaments and ruptured tendons. Julieta was right, it didn’t matter what she thought. It didn’t matter until it always, inevitably, did.

“Well,” Xo chose to elevate her own authority, like a child bartering for a late curfew, “I’ll spare you the drive to Tribeca so you don’t have to stomach the crappy wine Vico’s gonna serve but Lawrence is going to be a Gregory-failure. Just like Greg was a Philip-failure and Philip was a Harry—”

“Don’t be parochial, Xiomara. I don’t need these stupid comments when you can’t be bothered to be honest with me.”

She fell silent. Her fingers frisked over a prickly sensation that skittered across her blotchy neck. The light bulb above her head buzzed. She should change it.

“And don’t pick on your brother. He didn’t tell you this— good thing, but the clinic’s losing their patients. It’s a-an unplugged sink.” Xo could almost hear her mother shaking her head. “Everyone they treat falls through the drain.”

Xo lurched forward abruptly enough for the granite counter to jam into her stomach. “Victor never had a business mind, Mami, you and I both talked about this but why does it sound like he only heard it from me? Is it because he did?”

“Well,” Julieta sputtered, “now you see why he doesn’t tell you things.”

She hoped her mother heard the clattering of her bowl in the sink. Right in the soft part of her eardrum.

Yeah, when has he ever? Xo felt the dangerous words sear on the cap of her tongue, down to her toes.

“Well,” Xo smacked her lips, “if he told me what was happening when it did—for once—I could’ve helped him. Our cardiologist is on maternity leave, Victor could have filled in for a time and-and then get transferred to another hospital.”

“Ay, you know Vico. He needed somewhere to stand when he came back from Iraq. How can he fall to his knees when he’s always so busy looking up?”

Xo shifted on her feet. “He was always looking up at Daddy, ma. Vic’s a good doctor, I know that— I believe it but opening his own clinic was just a way for him to flash his feathers at Daddy because he always thought Victor was wandering in a desert with his pants sagging at his hips.”

“Oh. Okay. Well, what would I know about my own children? I’ve only been a mother for 40 years.”

“Mami—”

“Mm, no, no. Mama will be quiet now. Marita knows everything there is.”

Though it was easy to get chucked into this tumultuous rhythm, Xo had to concede. Five minutes was a new record.

Bringing up Papi was the friction against the proverbial matchstick. It was easier to zero in on the waving smoke. Xo tried to put the pieces together. To a mother, even her mother, being helpless like that. A kindred ache in her bones. She wanted to grovel and vomit and cackle all at once.

“Mami, I’m proud of Victor,” Xo confessed in a voice that barely punctured the numbing quietude. “I’m just saying, maybe he should listen to me for a change. I listened to him when he told me to take the fetal surgery fellowship at Metro-General.”

“It’s a dangerous world, Marita, and you are a young woman. Why do you think your Papi spent $3,000 on those hoo-joo-jutsu classes you were taking?”

Irritation unwound a pulse in her temple. “Ma, it’s jiu-jitsu— yeah.”

“Anyway, Vico agreed it wasn’t a good idea for you to go to UCLA. Away from your family. All alone, you would never survive, no matter how hard you think you can.”

It was different of course, when Victor gathered and wrapped up his life to ship off to Fallujah then Stanford for twenty years. But her? She would be an anathema.

Xo looked down at the sauce-stained Tupperware in the sink, the tiny bits of onion swimming in the murky, soapy water. You ate three-day-old scraps of pasta and washed it down with boxed wine, Xiomara. Maybe she has a point.

Still, her finger pulsed over the red decline button. She couldn’t tolerate the soft humming of the line in their gaps of silence, the angelic clinks of the ceramic teacup she pictured her mother was also scorching her skin with. Was it hibiscus tonight? Or earthy chamomile? Something acerbic, Xo was sure, and targeted. She wanted to make sure she was drinking acid before she picked up the call, to spit it into her daughter’s mouth, fingers squeezing her cheeks. Diligent mama bird. And her stupid, sheltered, featherless hatchling.

Xo only opened her mouth after she was sure her throat wouldn’t betray her and her retaliations wouldn’t waver. But her mother couldn’t see her, and so she couldn’t snipe on the way Xo raised her thumb to quickly swipe away a slug of salt beading at the inner corner of her eye. “Maybe I have aspirations that you never took seriously because you didn’t like them. It’s okay, Mami, I was supported enough by the right people to chase after them and I did.”

“Hm, that’s all fine. The right people and me, the villain. Your dream killer. You’re allowed your aspirations, Marita. Would it be so horrible for you to make room for someone else’s?”

Fetching herself a cup of water from the tap, Xo huffed— translated: You’re right. I’m sorry. I’m so sorry.

“Christ… I hope one day, reugo a Dios, you’ll have another child. Another daughter, quién sabe? I had you when I was your age but I wonder if you’ll at least have the choice to contend with her or love her.”

That was sick. The air in the room was sick. She was sick, to her core. Xo could imagine dissonant strings being plucked and pulsing keys, a chaotic explosion of cellos and violas all shrieking together, prophesying a bloodthirsty shark in the waves. Or her mother. Instead, there was silence and the tri-tone beeping of the refrigerator. Oh. Xo left the door wide open. Bathing her face in the brisk air that circulated naked shelves. Reluctantly, she retrieved a plastic carton of pre-cubed pineapple.

But Julieta was relentless. “It’s difficult. Your brother called for a massacre on my body. You… you fired the killing shot.”

She spoke with the same grave coating that Victor did when Xiomara mustered the courage to ask about the day she was born. All Victor remembered at the ripe age of nine, was being traded off from their tío to their abuela while their Papi stayed in the hospital after his long shifts. The constant shifting and constant terror of watching Julieta recover. Was it really all he remembered? Probably not. But it was all he chose to tell her. Being who she was, Xo tried to fill in the teeny gaps that prodded at her mind, begging for fruition. There was a simple solution that she began to assemble as she grew up:

“You could’ve stopped at one.”

Julieta laughed. A quiet, tired, frustrated one which made something go sideways and sharp-teethed in Xo’s stomach. “You think your Papi would hear any of that? No, no. Anything for Javier to have his little girl, su princesita.”

She swallowed the pineapple chunk she was chewing on. “Yeah, well, what a Greek tragedy, Mother.”

It was more of an ancient comedy if she put some thought into the deriding parallels. She was, in succinct, maternal terms, the planned and unwanted offspring. Meanwhile, Gabriella was her unplanned yet desired treasure. “Wanted” was too weak of a term, reckless of the adulation that rooted in Xiomara the second she felt the flutter against her stomach walls. A beloved presence.

Then, she struck colder and drier. “Try being the tyrant. Your Papi wanted what he wanted and he got it and he left me with the discipline. That was the tragedy. He could never raise a hand toward you. Could’ve burned the house down. All you’d get was a pinch of the ear but not if you stuck out that bottom lip, only then, he would put you on his lap and you’d eat pastelitos past your bedtime.”

Those words dragged their talons across Xo’s innards, yet she suffocated her fork in her grip. She wondered what the most gruesome laceration was. The hazy memory of her father that Julieta tried to macerate or the sheer falsity of it all.

“That’s just what you thought.”

“No. That was what I lived through.”

Xo slammed her fork on the counter and watched it scuttle across the granite. Something began to fossilize her lungs, forcing her to conserve what little, pure oxygen she had remaining with slow, gravelly breaths. Was it the worst sin that her father held her and fed her sweets? To huddle her close into the light of the sun when she had been nursed in the endless shade.

“You— okay. You can say whatever you want about me and Papi but you don’t know everything.” Xiomara floundered, aqueous words getting mangled in her throat.

“You’re right. I don’t,” Julieta sighed heavily. “Because I was never taught your secret handshake, was I?”

A grating sound ruptured the line. Maybe an animal was chewing on the telephone wires. That didn’t make sense, she was using a cell phone. Whatever. Xo hoped one was or she would chew an electrical cable herself.

“Mami… it’s been a long day. I’m exhausted.” Xo wished she hadn’t called. “Aren’t you?”

“I am. Very.”

Xiomara continued to speculate even when, deep down, she knew the truth. That she was the piece of her mother that had to be bottled up to keep from spilling foolishly. To not drown in a house that always flooded. But instead of coughing up water or building a dam, that worry of hers simply leaked into her womb and grew a daughter.

“Well,” said Julieta, with a decisive smack of her tongue. “I have to go and get ready for dinner. I will give Victor and Catalina your best but ay, Vera and Victoria wanted to see their tía, but I guess I will hug them for you too.”

(X: tell the girls tía xo loves them so so much

Thumbs up emoji

don’t kill urself 2nite)

“Ah, and tomorrow, Victor and I are meeting with your Tío Benedict tomorrow. I want to change the backsplash in the kitchen to Moroccan zellige. Re-do the living room to beige silks.”

“Mid-century?” guessed Xiomara bleakly. “Nice, I like it. Yeah, the backsplash needed some changing.”

“Hm. Don’t forget to pray. Sueña con los angelitos.”

“Buenas noches, Mami.”

The line clicked and went quiet. Xo breathed.

When Xiomara was younger and would study for tests or prepare book reports, Julieta would come into her bedroom holding a platter of cut fruit. Watermelon, pineapple, papaya—which would be fervently left untouched until Victor came to finish it off. Xo ate the fruit even as she plucked out her eyebrows over a chemistry equation. She swallowed down this sweet, sliced-up modicum of love. Ameliorating some chasm that seemed to lengthen as she grew into her hips and tugged her hair out of curly pigtails.

She looked down at her bowl of pineapple, the measly few chunks swimming in tinted pulpy water.

Xo didn’t recall asking for remorse fruit again. She ate it anyway.

In a place that felt little like home and less like a sanctuary.

─────────EARTH-928, NUEVA YORK─────────

From the rooftop, he lifted a hand down the length of his face, sweeping down the rivulets of water that hailed from the weeping sky.

The storm was forecasted but the illicit stain of Nueva York’s inner workings managed to corrupt even the most purifying mechanism of nature. Harsh droplets battered against the sonic overhead lines that arced into the charcoal brume. The glittering beam at the center of the city flashed each time lightning shattered the sky. He narrowed his eyes, a soft exhale hitting against the molecular composite of his mask and ricocheting the warm puff back against his lips. The worst thunderstorms couldn’t inhibit criminal activity, at least not the type that operated to the degree that made Miguel O’Hara’s blood roil with rage. In anticipation of his events for the night, he skipped his usual scraps of a meal before setting out on his cyclic patrol. A spider-man’s work was never done and never found recess.

“Lyla?” His voice croaked, tempered by the odd tranquility of the drowning night. “What’s their ETA? Or do I have to swing by a donut shop and leave ‘em a note?”

The humanoid projection of his LYrate lifeform approximation flickered into his vision, standing over the face of his watch. “We’ve got a unit en route. Estimated, thirty seconds.”

The timely wail of sirens punctured the wind-beaten silence.

“Guess that means you’re off duty,” remarked Lyla. “There’s uh, something else by the way.”

“What now? An ax murderer?” Miguel deadpanned, glissading between towers. Vehicular lights zipped by in fluorescence lines beneath him, failing to disrupt his visual acumen as the city sank deeper into the umbra of the moon.

“Wouldn’t that be fun?” Lyla marveled with an equal scoop of sauce. “No, no. It’s uh, Earth-501. The disturbance I alerted Dr. Solano about.”

Miguel’s instincts were sharpened with panic. His ribs caved in, grazing against his lungs like steel serrated on a whetstone.

Lyla, for the sake of his mangled dignity, reined in her merciful solace… and the emotional cutlass that she had raised over his neck. “Calm down, Miguel. Seems like it resolved on its own. No spider needed, squeaky clean.”

Well, that was unlikely. Lyla knew better than to gloss over the fine details that would’ve held reign over Miguel’s conscience. Nevertheless, he grunted in response, choosing to ignore the alarm that was ready to blare in the back of his head. If by any hope it could wait, he would begrudgingly let it. Miguel had somewhere to be, a respite from the obligations that he forced himself to include within everything else in his periphery. Even the chance of an alteration in this monthly routine was enough to jostle his faithful motions. He caught himself rebounding off the facet of a tower with a neon web retracting as quickly as it was fired.

Before long, the contours of Babylon Towers realigned his atoms. The sterile air of his apartments was a nippy, but familiar welcome to Miguel, but he had no time to dwell on somber greetings. He fleshed out time for a rinse, focusing on soap and suds to sluice the day’s feverish grime off his flesh, and traded in his arachnoid suit for a practical, synthetic wool ensemble.

A thorough check-up in the mirror felt necessary, to ensure he didn’t leave with an offending bruise or a split lip. And a cramped minute dedicated to studying the three surveillance monitors set up in his office wouldn’t hurt. Bringing work home had always been a fault of his, and Miguel was once promised it would earn him a nasty earful down the road. For that blustery evening, one transparent tablet stole his succor.

“Lyla,” he rumbled, perched on a razor’s edge of a dissociative episode. A mechanical chirrup emanated from the leftmost monitor his assistant was fiddling with. With a single perusal, Miguel recognized the gridlock of concrete lattices. Cushioned by the bottom half of Manhattan, hugged by Greenwich Village from above. It was a consolidated, rosy chip of the arachno-humanoid poly multiverse, one he had calculated an impulsive, disastrous visit to not long ago. His heart stuttered in his chest.

“No signs of an anomalous presence on 501,” reported Lyla.

“So. Local,” he assumed with a half-hearted lift of his shoulders.

“It’s how it always starts out, doesn’t it? The handmade suit, bank robbery, or convenience store if you’re feeling spicy.”

A low hum vibrated in his throat, seemingly conveying the heavy message that Lyla was implicating: She needs to take the first step.

“Seems like she’s more ticked off over having you clean up a mess than doing it herself, Miguel.”

“Sounds about right.” The hologram jutted her chin at his tired surrender to her wisecrack. “Hook me to her comms. Keep it quiet.”

“You’re still spying on her? And admitting it this time?” Lyla gaped. “Miguel, this is some growth.”

His glare snapped up to duel her glittering eyes. “Funny. Would ya just do it?”

A heartbeat later, wisps of tawny and amber light spun together into a lifelike silhouette.

It took him a second to adjust to her surroundings. It wasn’t the penthouse. A pitiful excuse for a home, her home. Urban and rather chic, yes, representative of the upper middle class she was seated in. Miguel would wager his variant’s life insurance payout was split between her grief group and the enameled cookie jar gathering dust by the vase of browned carnations. The ruffled blooms were a rich red, once, when they were handed to her by the teary-eyed, smiling mother of a little boy who underwent a tumor resection. Even wilted, those flowers were the only semblance of life in that apartment.

(No one has yelled there. No one has slammed a door or gone to bed angry.)

Wrapped in fleece, she leaned against the counter poking at an unappetizing pasta dinner. For her sake, the loungewear fit astronomically better than the rags he issued her. A visibly soft pink thing that clung to her skin like a protective blanket. He could hear another voice in her midst, saw the splintered second where she flicked away a tear, and a primordial, cognizant grief cleaved open in his sternum.

“Maybe I have aspirations that you never took seriously because you didn’t like them. It’s okay, Mami, I was supported enough by the right people to chase after them and I did.”

“Hm, that’s all fine. The right people and me, the villain. Your dream killer. You’re allowed your aspirations, Marita. Would it be so horrible for you to make room for someone else’s?”

Miguel felt tangled in the silence too. A regressive dread spread throughout his veins like the paralytic he could so easily inject from his canines. That was his natural state, after all, when mother and daughter’s serrated voices would overlap. One, youthful and strangled by desperate tears, and the other, suffused with an ancient, biting regret. Miguel was a neutral power during those rifts. An unwilling spectator at the first and last Christmas repast that felt normal. Back then, his loyalty was silently declared yet never expressed with more than a hug or a soothing kiss on the hair.

But now, Miguel could watch and only watch from a thousand galaxies away. Barbed wire coiled around his throat as it did hers in the inhospitable haven of her mother.

He felt a painful spasm behind his ribcage. It worsened with the way her face crumpled. The projection was painfully crystalline and he could see flecks of glassy light burnishing her artificial eyes. A new shade of agony, birthed.

It forced him to confront the ignorance he would execute in a matter of minutes—the punishment he inflicted on himself with every turn of the moon. Miguel chose self-imprisonment in the past, lingering in a waiting room in figurative detention. You owe this to them, was his incriminating verdict. You. Sinner. Now… it felt like another betrayal to her. Another stain in his ledger.

“Miguel? It’s late.”

Like fingers snapping in his face, he straightened up. With a swipe of his hand, the monitors disappeared, as did the quarreling voices, and her face.

“Right.” Get back on track. “Keep Jess on standby. Route all outgoing cases to Kess. Kid never sleeps, might as well keep her busy.”

“Got it, boss.”

Lyla retreated to an icon in his watch, a contraption he was poised to unclasp and set aside. Just for an evening, an hour.

Miguel felt a sharp guilt knot his throat and he rolled the sleeve of his turtleneck over its glassy face instead.

He chose wheels over webs. Driving soothed him in a way howling winds and laser silk failed to. The droning hum of the voltaic motor spread a balm over his cluttered conscience but trod around a chaos of trepidation that grew louder as he approached the door.

Panes of frosted, tempered glass flanked by strips of black mahogany.

And when it swung open, Miguel’s sanctum of control was plucked from his hands. Part of it all too was the memory that everything spurred. The picture frame behind the man’s head stuck to its same spot on the harsh, angular wall. A sweetly smiling face captured in a moment, this world’s moment—his world—he was due to remind himself.

Because most recently, Miguel O’Hara refused to accept that time did not heal all wounds.

And some wounds were cut deeper than his.

Captain was a whole head and a half shorter than him—which, at Miguel’s lofty height, was pleasantly average—yet he always felt like he was looking up at him. Whether it be the jitters of a first-time boyfriend or the cool press of a ring in his palm, intent on asking for a blessing. The delicate arch of Captain’s iron spinal cord shrunk him down another inch or so and rather than a navy suit embellished with a brass badge, he wore a starched button-up and slacks. But his was not a delicate constitution. When Captain spoke, the gravitas of his presence was enough to straighten the hairs of Miguel’s nape. The smallest corpuscle of Javier Solano’s authority demanded Miguel stand humbly, and he did. Sheepishly. Like a little boy. The man who would be son.

“Miguel.” A hand extended, age and vigor buried in the wrinkles of his spotted skin.

“Captain.” A word so delicately uttered, framed by a pang of instinctive guilt which made Javier Solano of Earth-928 nod with the trimmest hint of approval.

Even at his age, Captain was as formidable as a chunk of marble, all rough edges and haunted contours. Grief had cast ten years on his visage. Irredeemable loss, carved in the pockmarks and lines that creased his skin and rendered him scarily reticent.

Even as the air grew ever-volatile.

She was diminutive in a sage blouse with sleeves of lace, fine as gossamer, and tailored ivory pants. Iridescent, like a lacewing, and just as invasive. A string of turquoise and pearl and gold draped down the front of her body in two modest layers. It was a penchant she passed down to her daughter, Miguel noticed when he first met Julieta Solano. Manicured elegance. As flighty as a hummingbird, disappearing behind pantry doors, shouting for help, and spitting on any friendly hand. Dazed and distracted. Strung like a bead on a thread.

When Julieta laid glazed eyes on him, she shrieked and kissed his cheek. Miguel steadied her hand “in the nick of time”—thanks to the superhuman disposition he concealed—keeping the glass of red she held upright.

“Oh, pobrecito, Miguel, your eye bags have their own bags.” Five talons dug into his cheeks, the others balancing a tray of silver branzino. “¿Quieres café?”

“Gracias, señora, but I’m—”

“No, no— you need something to drink— Victor! Vico, ven aca!” The metal tray slammed down with an echoing bang. The skin of the branzino crisped against their foil envelopes. “Why is no one here— no one is helping me! Victor!”

“I’ve got it, I’ve got it, ma, let me.” Miguel inched his hands toward her worn ones still clasped fervently to the etched handles of the hot tray. It was as close to defusing an active IED as he could get though at that moment, Miguel was certain he would rather cradle an explosive.

His gaze darted to catch Victor for a fleeting second as he melted into the boiling paracosm of steam, perfume, caramelized onion, and masa flour. A silent nod was traded, wherein Miguel glimpsed the exhausted apprehension flooding the Solano firstborn’s eyes. He looked thinner than he did the month before, a thick scruff shrouding the lower half of his face. Though, Victor was not entirely a husk of who he was. He inserted himself into the crevices he could find— moving a boiling pot from one burner to a cold one, swabbing at a dollop of mole that dried on the oven timer.

“Ay, it is too hot in this kitchen. I need peace and quiet but people keep coming in and out.” Julieta’s scarlet nails came to frantically comb back jet-black strands, stuck in a loop of the meticulous habit.

“Everything looks beautiful, Mami,” came Victor’s timely, terrified compliment.

“Smells good, really,” chimed in Miguel. He felt diluted ice crack beneath his feet and wondered just how long it would take for him to plunge through.

Julieta sagged against the juncture of the kitchen sink and the counter. “Beautiful… Victor.” Her voice was hoarse. “Get out of here. Go.”

He did without argument, though the lingering gaze he gave his mother struck a sympathetic twinge in Miguel’s chest. It was just him and Julieta now and he felt inclined to sit or hug himself to look smaller. He amassed too much space in that kitchen, thickened shoulders nearly threatening to break the walls that sheathed them. Not quite fitting in but forcing himself to do so. Some lessons were never learned.

Miguel took a moment to look at the woman. Invisible tears had melted black beneath her waterline, in a shadow, flecked by some harsher globs.

“Ma,” he tried again, ducking his head to conserve her dignity, “everything smells good. Everything looks beautiful.”

“I can’t do this myself,” Julieta muttered, taking a sip of her endless red. Her foggy gaze raised to burn into his. “I can’t do this alone. I can’t— I don’t think.”

Miguel shifted on his feet. “You’re not alone. We’re here, we love you. I’m happy to be here.”

“I’ve been here since the morning. Feels like forever.” Julieta pointed a tired finger down at the tiles. The stove sizzled with a forgotten component of an entrée. “It’s hard.”

He pivoted, letting himself rest his body weight against the counter. Poised to listen and silently assure her that he would. “What’s hard? What is it?”

She laughed. Or performed something similar to it. Either way, her tinted lips stretched into a face-splitting grin. Weariness was gathered in the creases of her foundation and powder. A rasp of amusement was wrenched from her larynx. “How she got so lucky… I don’t know. Being at rest. I can’t get out. She did.”

“C’mon, ma— don’t…”

She hummed, long and sonorously. Like the pull of a cello string at a funeral march. “You are a good boy, niño. You are. You should’ve married her. Take her away. She never said she wanted to leave but I know she did.” Another sip, taken with a molasses-slow cherishing of the heady numbing it offered.

Miguel struggled with this imbalance. Before, hatred and grief were split between them, unwillingly. Fed through the umbilical cord and undisturbed by its severance. But what happened to one half when its host vessel was cold and buried?

He looked at Julieta now. At the beads of salt water that brimmed lashes, framing bloodshot eyes.

Perhaps it returned to its creator.

(It was impossible to extract it. To take this agony upon himself. In plain summation, it was an easy calculus to solve but he could never get close to an answer. Despite these visits, with a clean sweater and a cajoling word, a firm handshake, an anecdote of his research post-Daughter, and a demure drop of his gaze.

Because no one leaves home.)

“For your happiness, Miguel, I regret that every day. But she would’ve been your nightmare.”

Julieta said she like he was a victim, even if he dodged the bullet.

“C’mon, let’s sit down. Let’s eat.” He couldn’t help the brittle nature of his words— comforts he despised yet needed to say. To atone.

Miguel waited out the fit of breathy rejections, then tried again to encourage her for dinner. Like always, her blame was misfired but he had no right to tamp a mother who was mourning? Drowning? Maybe, he swallowed thickly, jealous? He foolishly decided on sympathetic.

“Look, uh, I’m gonna go sit down, ma, okay?” He lifted a hand, brushing an imaginary itch on his upper lip. “Would you come with me?”

“No—”

“—We’ll sit, have dinner, c’mon—”

She warded him off with a trembling hand, the overhead lighting glinting on the points of her nails. Her eyes were shut tightly into creases, a knife flanked between teeth where a tongue should be. “I hear you, Marita. I know. I will come in a minute. Go.”

It took him a moment to find his voice, to feel level with the earth. “Are you good?”

“I said go,” she bit, “I’m good. Now go, Miguel. Have a drink with him. Leave.”

Miguel crept away and found the gall to inhale once again. He welcomed Captain, who spoke to him over mouthfuls of a peaty whisky. Ice clinked in the lapses of quietude. Victor left his drink untouched, letting a finger coast the rim. Not quite there but not distracted in his father’s presence. He dared not slouch and he appropriately nodded at the Captain’s tales of the notorious Spider-Man’s exploits— “notorious” attached so hesitantly, even if they shared in the same perverted, self-made definition of justice.

Captain told Miguel about the percentage increase of muggers hauled into the station. Seized with extreme prejudice, hunted down by his teeth and piercing sirens. He noted the pattern, how they all fit a similar slew of charges— attempted murder, possession of an illegal firearm, armed robbery, assault. Most of the victims, Captain said, were women.

A plate shattered. Julieta cursed. Chair legs screeched as Victor ran up to help her. Captain barely flinched. He only took another sip and informed Miguel that most of the victims were women. Sweet, sniveling chickadees who were caught in the wrong place at the wrong time.

But as shards of ceramic swept together, offset by Victor’s calming mewls, Miguel concentrated on how Captain stared at the most imperceptible gouge on the mahogany table. He lifted his tumbler to his lips and drank. Miguel copied him.

He had skulked in as guilty as a sinner under that splintering roof.

(Mother cried. Captain was quiet. Victor pleaded. She, haunted.)

Yet now, Miguel was terrified that he was the saint.

──translations: cómo se llamaba; what was his name?; I’m Mexican and Spanish, but; reugo a Dios; I beg God; quién sabe?; who knows; su princesita; his princess; pastelitos; small cakes/pastries; Sueña con los angelitos; dream of little angels; Buenas noches; good night; pobrecito; poor thing; ¿Quieres café?; do you want coffee?; ven aca; come here

#⁎⋆ ꙳✧∘ pdtg.#fanfiction #miguel ohara #miguel o'hara x oc #miguel o'hara fanfiction #spiderman: across the spiderverse #atsv miguel #spiderman 2099

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