#chocfic

The Peter in question continues to hang off his shoulder, where he’s been since he swanned into the monitoring room ten whole minutes ago without an invitation. “-stay with me on this, I’m building to a point here - hello? Earth to Miguel?”

“What,” he snaps.

Peter pouts, an expression that he honestly didn’t think grown men were capable of until meeting this guy. “Did you hear anything I said?”

Easy. “No.”

And anyone who was, you know, sane, might take that as the insult he means it to be, but Peter just laughs and jostles his shoulder companionably. “You really are a grump sometimes, you know that? You gotta lighten up, you’re gonna give yourself a heart attack one of these days.”

“Tell me about it,” Lyla says from his other shoulder. She likes Peter, talks to him directly more than any of the other Spiders, and she’s programmed to gather information that she thinks he wants, which means - yeah, he’s going to go ahead and ignore the implications of that one.

Peter makes a thoughtful noise. Concerning. “Hey, Lyla, you’re around this guy twenty-four-seven, right - does he ever relax? When’s the last time he, I don’t know, smiled?”

Miguel expects a snarky reply, not Lyla’s glasses flashing opaque the way they do when she’s looking something up. “Hm, let me check. Pulling up a smile log…”

He’s focused on the latest multiverse model, like everyone else should be, so it takes him just a bit too long to realize that they’re ganging up on him. “Wait. Lyla, belay that-”

“Okay, we got the time your baby kicked you in the face and you thought you’d broken your nose. Nice, classic slapstick.”

“Lyla-”

“And then that time an anomaly accidentally tickled him-”

“Lyla, no-”

“And - aw, this one’s cute! - after a mission he helped a girl get her runaway balloon and she hugged him-”

“Lyla!” he snaps, slamming a fist onto his desk, and she finally stops. “Por dios, would you quit that? Why do you even remember that stuff, it’s a waste of storage space!”

She sticks her tongue out at him. “My data, my business.”

“Yeah, yeah, can’t you just run the scans like I asked you to and stop causing trouble?”

They keep bickering over the new extrapolation methods, and Peter -

Okay, look. Miguel doesn’t have a “spider sense” or whatever seems to warn the rest of the Spiders before anything happens, so he has to rely on his own judgment. And with Peter being around all the time, Miguel’s learned to more or less tune him out, figures it’s the only way he’s ever going to get any work done.

Which is more or less why he doesn’t notice that Peter’s still there until someone’s hands shove their way under Miguel’s arms and start tickling, because that’s when his brain decides to turn on the instant reactions. “Jammit - hAh-”

He clamps his arms down automatically, reeling backwards into Peter’s chest just in time for the attack to stop. “Wait - did you just laugh?” Peter demands. “Shit, I didn’t think that was actually going to work, do it again!”

Peter’s fingers start wriggling back into hypersensitive flesh, trapped in his armpits, and Miguel barely manages to keep his mouth shut as more embarrassing sounds start knocking loose inside his chest. Get away, he yells to himself, hit him, move, just fucking move - he can’t remember the last time his reflexes have been anything but overprotective, but right now every fiber of his body insists he has to stay exactly where his is because granting Peter’s hands even a millimetre more of freedom is going to be the death of him.

He refuses to think about the way his mouth is spasming at the corners entirely without his permission even as the rest of him locks in place. Lyla can record that one, if she wants. See if he cares, it doesn’t count. This is fine. All he has to do is stand here until Peter gets bored - the way he acts, the other man might not even know what an attention span is.

Peter sighs, proving his point. “I’m not asking for much, just one laugh,” he laments dramatically, though Miguel can hear the stupid big grin he gets in his voice. “Do I need to be more annoying? I can be more annoying.”

Miguel sincerely doubts it - at least, until Peter flips one hand around from where it’s pressed up against the top of his ribcage, locks onto his elbow, and starts trying to lever his right arm away from his body. “Geez, would you lay off with the triceps? I’m gonna give myself carpal tunnel over here.”

If Peter would just stop tickling for one shocking second, he’d tell him that he sincerely hopes his stupid fingers break off and die. Instead, he wraps his arms around himself in a motion that’s definitely defiant and not at all panicked, getting as far as opening his mouth before the part of his brain that’s being lit up by every twitch of sensation decides to take over. “Nngh - no, nohoho, mierda!”

His entire face burns red as strangled snorts of laughter keep leaking out of him, has to fold over and brace one of his hands against his jaw to regain any kind of dignity - not that it helps, with Peter changing his hold to adapt to even that small bit of movement and using it to finally pry his arm up.

It’s really, really not fair that the most irritating Spider-Man is one of the most competent ones too. Miguel’s pretty sure luck hates Spiders in general, but it seems to love messing with him in particular.

“You know,” Peter starts conversationally, like he’s not wrapped around Miguel and taking half his weight because he’s shaking too hard to do it himself. “I think this is gonna be a good experience for us. Like, ah, coworker bonding. What’d you say we do this every week until you figure out how to loosen up like a normal person?”

Miguel’s going to kick his ass. He’s going to take his watch and ban him from Nueva York in perpetuity, as soon as he can stand up again. Earth-616 has other superheroes, they’ll survive their Spider-Man losing an arm or two.

Peter dodges the frantic headbutts and kicks he attempts and laughs, light and easy - it makes Miguel feel even stupider, twisted up on himself in desperation to avoid just that. “Hey, if it doesn’t work with your schedule you could just say so! I’ll pencil you in for biweekly, then.”

Idiota. Culero. Miguel doesn’t know if he’s cursing himself or Peter out anymore. He’s properly trapped now, sandwiched up against his own desk with one of Peter’s hands keeping his arm pinned and the other wiggling threateningly over a defenseless armpit. “Well? You gonna say something, or do I have to go full supervillain? I do a great Doc Ock impression, let me tell you.”

Miguel painstakingly loosens his death grip on his own jaw and opens his mouth just enough to wheeze out a heartfelt declaration of his undying hatred. Coughs before he can start, his throat raw from attempting to keep his laughter contained. There’s a movement out of the corner of his eye, and he turns his head to find Peter looking down at him with something between amusement and genuine concern.

Fine. Fine. “Can you just. Stop. Before I pass out?”

Peter laughs again, landing firmly in amusement and on Miguel’s list of dimensional threats. “Yeah. Yeah, fine, I’ll let you off easy this time.” He lets go, hovering for a moment and then swooping back in to pull Miguel upright when he can’t quite manage it himself. “Okay, super ticklish and super repressed. I can work with that.”

“Don’t,” Miguel growls, leaning on Peter’s shoulder entirely against his own will as he starts to walk both of them out of the office. Where are they even going? The cafeteria? It’s only been-

Oh. He hasn’t eaten in twelve hours. No wonder Lyla had decided to mess with him. But Peter wouldn’t have known that.

“Nope, too late, I’m invested now. Wasn’t kidding about the biweekly thing, by the way.”

Lyla perks up from behind a screen. “I’ll put it on his calendar.”

“Oye, I’m locking you both out of the monitor room.”

A week ago, he’d have pulled one of the staff aside and asked to be as far away from Mav as he could possibly get. The urge isn’t completely gone. Mav promised him they’d talk it out, when they got back, but after the mission - Mav saving his life and him saving Mav right back and sitting there in the backseat of that old as shit plane with nothing to do but trust him and try not to pass out - maybe they’ve bonded, okay? Maybe talking’s just going to make it worse. He’d rather wait until he has the option to walk away, if he needs to.

Really earning that Rooster callsign, huh. He’d be angrier at himself if he had the energy for it.

As things are, they’re pointed to adjacent cots and left to stew. Five minutes pass. Fifteen. He avoids looking at Mav like it’s his new vocation in life and starts counting wall rivets.

Half an hour in, he groans for the fifth time in as many minutes and slides down until he’s laid out flat enough to adequately convey his despair. “Come on.”

There’s a shuffle from the cot next to him. “I hope that’s not you realizing you broke something,” Mav says dryly.

He groans again. “I’m bored, Mav. Where the hell are the rest of the Daggers? You’d think they’d at least bring us a deck of cards or something.”

Mav makes a noncommittal noise. Emboldened, he props himself up on an elbow and dares to look over. “How are you okay with this, anyways? You hate sitting still.”

Mav’s reclining into the curve of his rickety half-raised bed, arms folded neatly over his chest like he hasn’t got a care in the world. Bradley’s struck by an intense, childish urge to get up and flip the whole thing. “Believe me, I’m not thrilled either. Not my first time playing the waiting game, though.”

Of course it isn’t. Come to think of it, he’d be surprised if a mission for Mav didn’t end in medical intervention.

He says as much, a little more snidely than he means to, and Mav turns his head with glacial indolence to raise an eyebrow in his direction. “Bad mood, huh.”

And doesn’t that just - it makes him feel like he’s a teenager again, gangly and sweaty and more upset about everything than he should be. Not the tone, even, just that Mav hasn’t been around to look at him like that in so long - and the words come out almost without his permission. “Yeah - well, I’m stuck in here with you, aren’t I?”

Mav’s bland expression flickers, just for a moment, and he instantly feels like the worst person on earth. The man saved his life less than twenty four hours ago, and here he is mouthing off like he’d used to when they’d known each other well enough not to take it seriously.

He lays himself back down, too much of a coward to see whatever else Mav’s face is broadcasting at him. “Sorry. I didn’t mean that.”

Mav’s still looking at him, he can feel it. The silence stretches out before them like a ship’s runway, pitching and yawing like he’ll launch straight off it and into the water if he’s not careful.

And then, like he always does, Mav takes the challenge and starts taxiing. “Lighten up, kid, or I’m going to have to cheer you up the way your dad used to.”

Bradley’s surprised enough to look back at him. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

Mav cocks his head, mouth twitching. “What, you don’t remember?”

Something about the tilt of Mav’s smile, the not-entirely-begrudging amusement in his eyes, registers somewhere in the back of his brain - and he does remember, then, though it’s not his dad he’s thinking of.

It’s Mav - Mav sneaking behind him and sweeping him up before he can run, Mav reaching over to him in the passenger seat where he’s buckled in and can only move so far before the seat belt catches him, Mav dumping him onto the couch and grabbing one of his legs before he can start kicking and-

He scoffs. “I’m not ticklish anymore, Mav. That’s kid shit.”

Mav uncrosses his arms. “Yeah? Wanna bet?”

He tells himself firmly that the reflexive flinch when Mav starts getting up is fear for the old man’s spine and absolutely nothing else. “Mav, come on, you’re not supposed to be moving around - Mav!”

He scrambles back the singular inch that his cot allows, barely managing to sit up before Mav’s perching on the edge of it and smirking at him. “Hey, you don’t look bored anymore.”

Well, Mav’s got one thing right. His entire brain’s diverted from boredom to run a diagnostic on what feels like every single one of his nerve endings, and he’s more than a little suspicious of the results. “You’re - I’m being threatened here, that’s not-”

Mav shakes his head disbelievingly, still grinning like the devil himself. “Threatened? What happened to ‘kid shit’?”

“I’m not ticklish,” he insists. He can almost make himself believe it, too, that his body’s just operating on decade-old instinct, responding disproportionately to a memory meant to stay in the past. “Try me, it’s just going to be awkward for both of us. You probably pulled something just coming over here, old man.”

It’s not a go fuck off and die, and Mav knows it - Bradley watches him pause for a moment and mull it over, grin softening into something warmer and less provocative, and has to consciously pull the corners of his mouth back into the stern line he wants them in to prevent himself from smiling back. “Bold words, kid.”

“True words,” he fires back, just before Mav’s wriggling fingers hit his stomach and prove him very definitively wrong.

He’s laughing before he can even try to stop himself, doubled over and curling up like he can somehow still manage to keep Mav’s hands away from the spot they’re already attacking. “Shihihit! Mav!”

“That’s me,” Mav says flippantly, sliding close enough to get an arm around him when his body makes a commendable attempt to escape by rolling off the far side of the bed. “Not ticklish, huh? Pretty sure things went in the other direction.”

Mav’s obviously messing with him, but he’s not wrong - Bradley doesn’t remember anything tickling as badly as Mav’s fingertips kneading into the bend of his waist do. “No!” he yelps anyways, smashing one arm over his mouth in a desperate attempt to stay quiet and throwing the other out frantically to get Mav the hell off him.

Mav’s arm tightens across his chest. He’s being reeled back in, forced out of the fetal position he’s locked himself into and giving Mav even more room to wreak havoc - it’s too much, all at once, and he squeals. Squeals, like he’s a teenage girl at a concert and not a naval aviator in his thirties. He has the sudden, paranoid thought that Hangman might hear him through the vents.

The thought of it makes him laugh even harder, frantic - smothering himself in his elbow is keeping him quiet enough for now, but if Mav keeps tickling him like this it’s only going to last so long. “Ha - ahaHA - quit it,” he pleads, sacrificing his assault on Mav’s iron band of a grip to wrap an extra arm around his face. “Ihihi - I can’t-”

Mav releases him almost instantly, letting him flop onto his side and curl back up until he can stop wheezing out giggles into his kneecaps. “Well, that’s different,” he offers - Bradley can hear him grinning, the bastard. “You never used to ask me to stop.”

Just the thought of being tickled more nearly sets him off again. Thankfully, Mav decides to shut up and wait for him to catch his breath before he coughs himself to death on Navy property.

He calms down. It’s easier, now, less charged, to roll over onto his back with his hip mashed up against Mav’s thigh and reach up to smack him in the shoulder. “Well, yeah. We’re in public, Mav,” he says defensively. “You can’t just go around doing that to people.”

Mav catches his hand before it can drop back down to his chest, squeezes it playfully with his eyes lit up like fireworks. “Hey, you asked for it!”

Bradley hasn’t seen him this happy in - well. That’s kind of his fault, isn’t it. He wrestles his hand free for a moment before thinking better of it, relenting and letting it fall somewhere in the vicinity of Mav’s legs. “Yeah, I guess I did.”

Mav laughs to himself, then, just long enough that it’s worth Bradley cracking an eye open to glare at him. “What.”

“Nothing,” Mav says quickly.

Bradley glares harder.

“Nothing!” he promises, then just as quickly retracts it. Typical Mav. “It’s just - my hangar, I’m working on a P-51 Mustang out there. You could come out and see it sometime, if you wanted to.”

He’s not sure what’s so funny about it, but he lets himself grin anyway. “As long as we don’t have to dogfight in it - that sounds good, Mav.”

“It’s about as far as you can get from public, though,” Mav adds, teasing, “so I can go around tickling anyone I want. Fair warning.”

Oh, there’s the joke. He can’t even bring himself to pretend he doesn’t want to go, though, just scoffs and shoves at Mav’s arm again before letting his eyes fall shut. “Go lie down before I change my mind, Mav, I saw that wince.”

“Yeah, yeah.” A hand ruffles through his hair. It’s nice. “You look tired, kid, knock it off.”

“Jayce?” Viktor says, and then stops clacking entirely. Presumably he’s caught sight of the lightly smoldering mass of circuits that’s still ventilating on the other side of the room. “Ah. Didn’t I say that I was going to finish those?”

He did, in fact, and Jayce had wholeheartedly agreed. In defiance of God and man and several physical laws, Viktor can solder at unnatural speeds that make Jayce wonder if he’s put any of his late-night ramblings about mechanical augmentation into practice. But Viktor’s been out doing something for Heimerdinger all day, and Jayce is a Man Of Progress (coffee mugs? They should have coffee mugs) and a perfectly respectable engineer in his own right - and now, the regretful owner of about fourteen different hand cramps.

He can tell exactly when Viktor spots the transistor he’d tried to solder in place about twenty times before his fingers gave up on being functional limbs, because he hums consideringly and then asks, “What hurts more right now, your hands or your ego?”

Well. Now it’s the second one. “Shut up,” Jayce groans.

Victor wanders over and - hmmmm, shoulder pats. “There, there. Listen to me next time and maybe you will lose your hands in a very exciting explosion instead, hm?”

Jayce would protest that if he wasn’t too busy mashing the side of his face into Viktor’s forearm, intent on leeching as much human contact as he can without moving his arms. His sleeve is soft and smells vaguely like the sugar water that his partner insists on calling coffee. Much better than burnt solder. Clearly the only logical choice is to claim it as his pillow for the foreseeable future.

“Jayce,” Viktor chides. “Come on, sit up and tell me where it hurts.”

He’s running his hand down the side of Jayce’s arm and then back up, now, like he’ll be able to feel out the soreness from touch alone. On a better day, Jayce might be able to suppress his involuntary shiver as thin fingers skim a little too close to the underside of his bicep - he has an image to maintain, after all.

He nudges into Viktor’s hand before he even realizes it. “Mmmnn…that tickles.”

The hand stops. “Oh? It tickles?”

Jayce’s brain kicks clumsily back into gear. “Oh - uh-”

“What, here?” A fingertip pokes lightly under his arm. Jayce refuses to lean into it this time.

Instead, he very manfully starts giggling into his desk. There’s a subtle clack-scrape-thunk as something warm nudges up against his elbow, and then there’s a second fingertip tickling under his other arm, and he’s pretty sure his muscles have just given up at this point.

“Hm,” Viktor hums after a minute. “This is not quite the effect I was looking for. If I didn’t know better, I’d say you were enjoying yourself.”

He can’t possibly be expected to respond to that, so Jayce settles for wriggling in a way that he hopes clearly conveys his disapproval even as he curls his fingers over a lip of polished wood and holds himself in place.

Viktor makes an amused noise over his head. Maybe he was supposed to answer. “Sh - ah, heh - shuddup-”

“Maybe I should try somewhere else,” he muses. “Do you have a - eh, what’s the word - death spot?”

Jayce is pretty sure that death and tickling are mutually exclusive - at least, until Victor’s fingers start wriggling into the sides of his neck. “N-noO, nahaha - ‘m up, I’m uhuhup-”

He’s yelping between outraged squawks of laughter, scrambling upright to get sensitive skin out of reach of pure evil - and then he’s blinking up at Viktor, perched smugly on the edge of his desk with his good leg curled up under him for support.

There’s a glint in his eyes. Jayce shivers again.

Viktor fishes out a packet of pills and taps them brusquely on the desk between them. “Eat.”

Because he’s an idiot, Jayce asks, “Where - you just carry medicine around with you?”

Viktor stuffs one of them into his mouth instead of dignifying that with a response.

He levers himself back up onto his cane as Jayce gags on the chalky aftertaste. “You’re going to want some coffee with that.”

Jayce has a sudden prophetic vision of himself, vibrating out of his skin with ten cups’ worth of sugar in his system and zero hand dexterity to work any of it off. “Hey - wait, I can make my own-”

“Of course you can,” Viktor tosses back. “Why don’t you get started with that, and I’ll find the sugar cup.”

Cup - Viktor’s doing this on purpose, the bastard. Jayce drags himself into their tiny lab kitchen and wedges himself in front of the coffee machine. “Spoon, Vik,” he stresses.

“Mhm,” Viktor replies, rummaging through a cabinet. “Cup is faster.”

“Precision?” Jayce tries hopefully, already reaching for the coffee grounds - if he hurries, maybe it’ll cool enough for the sugar to precipitate out.

Viktor comes back over with a coffee cup and a balance beam scale that he really shouldn’t be dangling in one hand. “Yes, precision,” he says smugly.

Jayce clutches the coffee scoop like the final bastion of sanity it is, and wow his cramped hands don’t like that at all. “Ow - fuck-”

A warm weight nudges his chest. Jayce leans into it as far as he can without falling over, eyes squeezed shut as he tries to take deep breaths and flex his fingers slowly. Viktor smells like sugar and paper and ink, thin but solid where he’s pressed up against him, and slowly, slowly, the engine that’s been thundering along inside him all day starts to wind down. “Okay, maybe I can’t make my own coffee.”

“Neither can I, if I’m holding you up,” Viktor points out dryly, and then - “Eh, I’ll just get your neck again when I need you to move. Pass the grounds.”