:0 Absolutely Reading This When I Have The Time 😁😁

:0 absolutely reading this when I have the time 😁😁

[04.20.2100, 23:16]

Three months, ten days, eleven hours, and twenty-two minutes.

It has officially been three months, ten days, eleven hours, and twenty-two minutes since Miguel received the distress transmission from dimension TRN-38375277, and in a fit of impulsive urgency unbeknownst to him, left 928 without a trace.

This would have been a complicated, but still resolvable excursion; one Miguel estimated to be over in a few weeks. The Doctor Strange of this dimension had been influenced by the Dark Hold, raising his megalomania to new standards, and opened a rift in the sky— which melded “neighboring” dimensions as if the fabric of the multiverse were putty in his hands.

(An incident not unlike the collider of 1610.)

Miguel’s directive was to covertly establish his presence in that universe, fix the existing damage, send the stragglers home, then track down Strange and dispose of said dark power.

He did not expect SHIELD meddling, the demons, the possessions, the Spot’s recurrence, an unstable mutant girl making a wreck of everything, 616 Peter somehow getting briefly roped into this mess, LYLA being lost, and his watch going down.

By his estimate, it’s been roughly seventy-nine days since his last transmission, and seventy-eight of them were spent without a properly working gizmo. Any and all remaining function had been stuttering, just to keep his atoms stable and not much else. Even that was difficult, given he’d had to infiltrate this dimension’s Alchemax (which, of course, was the same cartoonishly evil corpo hell as the last one) just to pilfer parts to keep it alive.

This mission really couldn’t have gone any worse.

For all intents and purposes, he’s stuck in a dimension falling apart at the seams, forced to ally with the Spot to try to fix the hole in the sky (and get rid of the demons. Can’t forget the shocking demons), in an apartment owned by SHIELD with enough regulations and meddling to put the worst Nueva York landlord to shame.

(He despises how easy it was to meld back into Alchemax’s workforce, back to becoming a drone, even after all this time. He should’ve just Peter’ed it and kept sneaking in and outright stealing.)

(He’s tired. He’s so tired.)

His eyes, rimmed with dark circles from lack of sleep, are glued to the watch as if staring hard enough could somehow get it to work. His hands are moving quickly and carefully in a way that shows a learned diligence, but all the focus and care in the world can’t keep the agitation down as the watch continues to flicker and glitch like it’s mocking him.

"Come on… come on—”

He grits his teeth as the watch short-circuits again, nearly throwing it (maybe himself too) into the wall before he stops himself, inhaling slowly. He sets it down and scrubs a hand over his face. He knows he has to remain calm and keep working on the damn thing, but it’s so aggravating to watch his only way home keep flickering out like it’s mocking him.

He stretches again, and takes a few deep, grounding breaths to force himself into some vague resemblance of mental acuity to undo what he did and put the watch back to its (new) normal state— holding on by a prayer with only the ability to stabilize him. Absentmindedly, he takes a sip from an abandoned mug and grimaces at the taste.

(Cris would have made it better, his mind unhelpfully tosses at him.)

The cup is sat back down with a clatter just shy of too loud. Jesus, Mary, and Joseph, this- this has to stop. No work's going to get done like this— postulating over everything in that endlessly spiralling, maddening way his mind is wont to do this late at night. No matter the fact that he is effectively stranded in another dimension, stuck with a bunch of cobbled-together variants with the intelligence of a brick between them, under both SHIELD and Alchemax's thumb.

Nor the fact that LYLA had been cut off sometime when his watch first went on the fritz, and she was his only connection left to the Spider-Society, or that he has no clue how aforementioned society is functioning without him, or if it is....

Familiar as an old friend, that sinking paranoia creeps up his spine. Miguel has never been away from HQ this long, much less without How are they managing? Were they managing? How is Jessica doing coming off maternity leave? Who's been doing the assignments? The recuiting? How far have things fallen without him to manage it?

With a grunt, he pushes himself off the bench ignoring how his joints protest and paces around his room like a caged tiger. This isn’t working. He isn’t working. All he’s doing is getting stressed and then getting stressed about being stressed.

It’s frustrating. Everything about this situation is frustrating: the way he keeps getting lost in his head, the fact that he’s not making any progress on the watch, this universe, the coffee.

But the thoughts just keep coming. Miguel could be dead for all the others were concerned, and the whole operation could have fallen apart because of it. They needs him, the multiverse needs the Spider-Society, who knows how things have fallen apart, or who replaced him—

—No.

This— Goddamnit. This has to stop.

He grits his teeth, turns in his mindless pacing, as if he could force his rapidly spiraling thoughts down by sheer will alone. This does not matter right now. It can’t matter. He has no time to be stewing in the worry and frustration and anger— the latter directed mostly at himself for being so careless and useless.

You’re getting off task. Focus. Fix the watch. Contact HQ, contact LYLA, go home—

… but God, he’s tired, and he can feel it seeping into the bones. Not the kind that gets mended by a nap, or even a day off, but the kind of weary that comes with over-working and over-thinking and over-pushing for far too long, like a broken leg that keeps being used.

(Just another thing on that long, long list he can’t afford to think about.)

Slumping back into his seat, he scrubs a hand down his face again, before looking up skyward, begging, begging for help to force his ever-abusive brain to focus; to be practical and logical and grounded in his own expertise to get the watch back online, or at least get some contact with HQ.

It… doesn't work. Of course it doesn't work. When had it ever?

Still, he has to do… something. Has to keep working and pushing and trying because when had something so trivial and superficial and unimportant as “Miguel Not Feeling Good” ever stopped him? He rubs his eyes to try to clear them and goes back to what at this rate might just be mutilating his poor watch’s guts.

A deep sense of exhaustion is starting to weigh down on him— the kind that not even the strongest, overpriced coffee could ever alleviate. There’s an ache forming around his temples, an early warning sign of a splitting headache to come if he doesn’t get his damn brain to shut up and do what it’s supposed to be doing right now.

He doesn’t notice his hands are shaking ever-so-slightly as he deftly dismantles his watch.

Miguel gets a solid twenty-five minutes of work in before the damned thing shorts out again, and his fingers twitch as his jaw clenches. It's infuriating how he can't seem to get anywhere with this watch, how he keeps failing, or how there's so many other failures waiting in the wings.

(A universe that doesn't exist anymore, the people who got hurt because of him, his shortcomings, his temper, his misuse of his duties as a leader...)

Stop that.

What is wrong with him? He’s been through worse; why is it getting to him now?

It’s the lack of control you have, a voice in his head that sounds like LYLA chimes in. You can’t stand for one single second being unable to anticipate every variable and every outcome and where everyone is.

And your self care is dogshit.

God, he misses her.

He shakes his head, trying to shake those thoughts out of it before they can go anywhere. He’s just tired; he has a headache, he’s been working on this damn watch for God knows how many hours at this point— it’s just… everything. He knows he just has to stay calm and focus, keep at it until he can find a way to fix this mess. He can do this. He can, he has. He just has to force himself.

He’s pulled himself through worse. He’s pulled himself though worse.

Miguel doesn’t know how, or when, or what he did, given his current two-seconds-away-from-a-nervous-breakdown state, but the gizmo’s display fizzles fully back to life, the golden glow a shocking godsend. For a split second, he can’t believe it. He almost thinks he’s seeing things, or hallucinating— the screen’s display has kept flickering in and out for months, so this seems just as well to be another trick of his mind, a cruel tease of hope.

But then the display stays consistent and un-glitching, and the disbelief turns into an instant flood of relief.

“No way…”

Miguel stares at the watch screen in what honestly might just be awe, before he lets out a huff of exhausted, disbelieving laughter. Finally, finally, something seems to be going right. Maybe he will go back to church, just this once.

Then he quickly starts to check the different functions— the vitals monitors, the communications, the cross-dimensional connections— it’s all there, everything’s all back, working fine (mostly fine, anyway.)

He has to take a second to just be grateful for this— a connection to the outside, a way back to HQ, to home, to LYLA. With trembling hands, he fumbles to enter a line of communication.

(If he tears up when he sees LYLA’s signature after so long, that’s between him and God.)

“Lyls, is my office clean? I’m coming home.”