By the time you joined the Spider Society, you already had one secret with Miguel O’Hara.

No one knew.

Not Jess. Not Hobie. Not any of the hundreds of spider people moving through HQ at all hours. They only knew there was something strange between you and Miguel. Something tense enough to be felt whenever the two of you ended up in the same room too long.

No one asked. Miguel was not the kind of person people casually poked at, and whatever this was, it clearly fell into the category of things better left alone.

It had started before either of you knew who the other was.

Miguel had been in your universe tracking you down, trying to recruit the spider person of your dimension. Only the Society was already too much on him by then. The pressure. The responsibility. The constant weight of holding everything together while still carrying the ruin of his own world on his back. In a rare lapse of judgment, he had done something reckless.

He had gone out and gotten drunk.

You had met him at a bar, not as Spider-Man or the head of the Spider Society. Just as a stranger. An older man with tired eyes, a controlled voice, and the kind of presence that made it impossible not to look at him twice. You had not known his name. He had not known yours. Somehow that made it easier.

One night. One mistake. One morning where he was gone before the sun fully came up.

Then, weeks later, Miguel had found you properly.

Not in a bar this time. In your apartment, flanked by other spider people and standing there in full suit like some cruel joke the universe had decided to play on both of you.

The look on his face when he recognized you had lasted less than a second. Just long enough for you to catch it. Then it was gone behind that familiar cold restraint, and he recruited you like nothing had happened.

That was months ago.

Neither of you had brought it up since.

Which was exactly why standing in HQ now, with Miguel glaring at you across the platform, felt like a problem.

“You were given a route,” he said.

His voice cut through the hum of machinery and holograms. Nearby spider people quickly found reasons to be interested in literally anything else.

You crossed your arms. “And I adapted when the route stopped working.”

“You disobeyed a direct order.”

“I saved the anomaly before it tore through half the street.”

“By ignoring protocol.”

Miguel stepped down, every movement tight with control. He was always intense, always difficult, but with you there was an extra edge to it. Like he was angry at things he could not say out loud.

“Protocol exists for a reason,” he said.

“So does common sense.”

That made something in his expression harden.

The rest of HQ had gone quieter by now. No one was openly watching, but you could feel the attention anyway. They just knew that whenever you and Miguel got like this, the air in the room changed.

He stopped in front of you, too close to really count as professional, though neither of you moved back.

“You don’t get to improvise every time you think you know better.”

You tilted your head. “And you don’t get to act like I’m incapable just because I don’t do things exactly your way.”

For one second, his jaw flexed. A tiny crack in the mask.

You knew that look. You had seen it once in dimmer lighting, with his hands on your waist and his mouth against yours before either of you knew better. It was almost worse now, seeing the ghost of that expression buried under all this anger.

Miguel seemed to realize it too, because he took one sharp step back.

“Control yourself,” he said quietly.

The words should have sounded like an order. Instead they landed somewhere more dangerous, heavy with meaning neither of you could acknowledge in the middle of HQ.

His eyes locked onto yours, dark and unreadable, and for a second the room felt too small. Too bright. Too full of people who had no idea that the reason Miguel was harder on you than anyone else had nothing to do with your work and everything to do with the fact that the two of you had crossed a line long before he ever became your leader.