Archive of Our Own

Ned is waiting for him when he slinks out of seventh period Physics.

“Jesus,” Peter exclaims, resting a palm on his chest. Ned has his hands fixed firmly on his hips. He must have prepared for this, since he immediately proceeds to place both feet in front of Peter, effectively trapping him by the classroom door.

“No,” Ned says, accusatory.

“How—how the hell did you get here so quickly?” Peter knows for a fact that Ned just had English on the other side of school, and that the bell rang, like, a minute ago.

“Never mind that,” Ned says. “You have your crime-stopping face on. Your whole—” he pauses. “—face. You know?”

Peter shakes his head.

Ned sighs. He glances around, and a moment later shuffles Peter to a more secluded area of the hallway. “Do you, Peter Parker, perhaps remember that we have an APUSH project due Monday?”

“Uh,” Peter starts. “Right. The project. On the—the—you know, the thing.”

His gaze has turned pleading. Ned sighs, again.

“Okay, bro. I love you, but you seriously need to stop running all over the city for like, a weekend. Oh my god.” Ned leans back and flits his eyes upward, toward the hypothetical heavens beyond Midtown’s depressingly muddy-colored ceiling. “I can’t believe I have to hold an intervention for my best friend who is also Spider-Man. I can’t believe this is my life. Like, it’s still really cool and everything, but also—you disgust me.”

Peter winces inwardly. After he’d narrowly avoided death by blazing-engine-blade, and Liz had moved away and Stark had offered him a spot on the team, things… surprisingly, had continued mostly as normal. But Peter is the first to admit that he has a tendency to throw himself into things too quickly, too eagerly; even now, months later, he’s still trying to balance the many moving parts of his somehow both supremely atypical but unendingly boring teenage experience.

Case in point: thanks to his accelerated healing abilities, there remains nothing but the fading mark of a once-nasty bruise on his cheek from when he’d slammed into concrete chasing after a convenience store burglar. It’s a wonder that he has somehow managed not to be majorly concussed yet, but at the same time can almost invariably wake up to a face full of acne every day. Certain hormones, it seems, cannot be beat.

Peter sheepishly scratches at his neck. “I’m sorry,” he says, and he means it. “You know I can get caught up in this stuff. I don’t mean to.”

“Yeah,” Ned reassures. “It’s okay. I’m just looking out for you. And me. And… our grade?” The curve of his smile turns apologetic, but he still holds out a fist. “Just being the best friend you need and deserve. Eh. Deserve most of the time, at least.”

They fist bump to it.

Ned looks at him. “So… your place?”

Peter Parker is: a junior in high school. The Spider-Man, from YouTube. Not an Avenger. Kind of dumb sometimes, but he has his moments. Peter Parker is—

Peter Parker is best friends with Ned Leeds.

Lesson 1: Your friends need you. Or—maybe friend, singular. Either way, someone needs you.

Lesson 2: You will save his life. Over and over and over again. Sometimes he will return the favor.

The first week Liz moved away, something strange settled over Peter. He and Ned had come to talk about almost everything by then, especially since the night on the ceiling. But—after Liz moved away, they stopped talking about her. Mostly Peter felt apologetic, and regretful; knew that he’d played a part in unjust collateral, that he’d seen it sewn into the fabric of a karmic timeline that didn’t give a shit about whoever was standing in the way, unknowingly or not, and that he’d still gone forward. That he was, at least partially, responsible for perpetrating it. That Liz would never know.

Ned snaps after two weeks.

“I get that this is hard on you, and everything,” he says, as kindly as a high school boy can manage, “but she’s not, you know, dead? I mean. It sucks, yeah. And you almost died. But she’s still our captain. Like, in our hearts! She’s still... Liz.”

It’s dumb. Peter is fifteen, but in that moment everything scares him. The fleetingness of it all. She’s still Liz, she’s still Liz and academic decathlon captain and straight-A student and probably MIT-bound but what is all that with your father gone?

That night, Peter hugs Aunt May extra hard.

“I love you,” he tells Ned. Ned is fifteen, too, so he looks at him extra hard and says, “Love you too, bro.”

And they fist bump to it.

Lesson 3: Time heals (some) wounds. Stay through the rest.

Lesson 4: Eleventh grade changes everything. You can’t tell what you hate more: APUSH, or how cute his hair is in the morning.

Peter still has the video diary from Berlin. It’s saved in a nondescript folder on his laptop because, fuck the rules. He likes to watch the footage now and then, and each time he finds himself increasingly amused at his naivety. It’s funny how he used to think of his time beside the Avengers with such nostalgia and strong-hearted glory; as part of an unsteady history he would have to desperately toil away at to attain again. These days, he thinks he’s more satisfied being just one guy. Sticking close to the ground, laying low, knowing his roots, la la la.

It’s okay that on some afternoons all he does is pluck out a few bristly cats who’ve had had the misfortune of wandering into the protective grasps of lifeless New York trees, and that on others he finds himself as he does here. Cross-legged beside Ned in his own bedroom, their homework forgotten.

Peter picks up his phone and points the camera at Ned. Ned looks up at him from where his hands are fiddling with pieces of a Lego pirate ship. When he notices what Peter is holding, he gives him a questioning look.

“What?”

“Ned,” he begins. “I hear that you’re friends with the very, very, very famous Spider-Man.” He pauses. Ned snorts. “From YouTube. Why don’t you introduce yourself?”

Old beginnings. New stories.

Lesson 5: You enjoy being together like this the most. He makes you forget your responsibilities. (You get to wear his shirts.)

“The guy in the chair,” Peter had parroted in D.C., pleading.

Don’t do that. Don’t do this to me.

Later, Ned will tell him that sometimes he hates how easily he yields. Peter will want him to know that it’s the same, for him. They elect to meet in the middle.

The thing they don’t tell you about falling in love with your best friend is that these things take time.

You don’t notice it until one day you look at his face and suddenly—suddenly, you realize how long his eyelashes are, and how pretty his lips are. And maybe you wonder what it would be like to kiss them.

Peter is used to Ned hanging around his room. He’s used to having him sleep over, and used to sharing a bed with him. But he isn’t sure when the brush of exposed skin started to feel so heated. He isn’t sure when he started over-analyzing every touch; when he started to want more from him, and from their friendship. He isn’t sure when he started to want. So simply and strongly.

“I think—” he focuses, breath catching. “Ilikeyou.”

It’s not a squeak. Peter Parker does not squeak.

Or—okay. Maybe it is, a little.

But Peter thinks he can live with it when Ned finally reaches over. His fingers find Peter and curl.

The first kiss is hesitant. They take things in baby steps, slow-motion.

There’s something to like, Peter thinks, in being able to call Ned his first everything.

It feels like coming home.

Lesson 6: Remember, be brave. Hold his hand. Hold him close.

They tell Aunt May eventually, a month into it. Peter and Ned are squished on Peter’s TV couch, and Peter almost feels like he’s seated at the kiddy table of an awkward gathering for family he doesn’t even have.

“Ned and I—Ned,” He takes a breath. “We’re dating.”

For a moment, there’s silence. Then Aunt May cocks an eyebrow, and looks between the two of them, something vaguely warm and amused in her stare. Through the sheer panic pulsing through his skin, Peter registers that she looks… almost… unimpressed? It’s as though this is a response that doesn’t in the least surprise her, which—Peter thinks should almost offend him, remembering how much of a fuss she’d put up when she found out about the Spider-Man gig. What had she thought he’d been doing every single night? Selling cocaine???

Wait.

Actually, maybe he understands what she thought he'd been up to now.

Oh.

His trepidation is only validated when she points a finger between the two of them and asks, “Was I supposed to think otherwise when I walked in on you two and found you in nothing but boxers? Honestly, Peter, I know I’m getting older, but I was also in high school once! Honey,” she sighs. “You really didn’t have to sneak out to see Ned all the time.” Her expression borders on regretful when she brings a hand to her face, and that… that’s what hits Peter the most. “You should have just told me.”

“I—” Peter says, and then immediately chokes up. He doesn’t think he ever had an issue with her finding out; the nerves are just. The principle of the thing. People are unpredictable; he’s Spider-Man; Ned’s hand is always warm on his; these are things Peter’s brain knows, and continuously plays on loop.

So, whatever. He still cries a little when she holds him close, and has to hold back a whine when she tells them with definitive fervor that Ned is essentially her second son.

Everything comes best in threes, anyway. Even awkward family gatherings.

After that, Aunt May is especially eager to let Ned into Peter’s room, even when Peter is busy making his rounds of New York. Things are the same as always: they spend their afternoons doing homework, or playing video games, or watching shitty movies curled up around each other, stealing kisses while the gory climax of a questionable action movie plays noisily through the speakers of Peter’s laptop.

Peter swings in through the window to find Ned waiting for him on his bed. It’s a Friday, which means movie night.

“Sorry ‘m late,” he calls out, draping his mask over the desk chair. “Got held up with a bank robbery.”

He starts making his way over. Only—Peter can barely get a step in before Ned holds an arm out, stopping him in place. “Are you bleeding?” he asks, incredulous.

“Huh?” He brings a hand to his neck, where Ned was gesturing. When he pulls his fingertips back, he finds they’ve stained red. “Huh. I guess.”

“You guess?”

Peter shrugs. “Must’ve scratched myself somehow. It’ll be gone in a bit, don’t worry!”

Peter’s muscles are aching at this point. Wanting to relax for the next possibly century and a half, he goes to settle himself next to his boyfriend, but to his dismay Ned is already getting up.

“Seriously,” Ned mock-huffs, “you superheroes. Come on, let me wipe it off at least.” He reaches for Peter’s desk, where the tissue box stands. “I’m not kissing you with blood on your neck.”

“Mmmm,” Peter mumbles in acquiescence. He lies down. The suit is still on, but he’s too out of it to do anything about it. Instead he stretches back and lets Ned dab at his neck. They both know his body is fast-forwarding the healing process and it’ll be gone soon enough, anyway, but Peter is still comfortable, and the indoor heating feels good on his winter-chilled skin, and that’s what matters.

He doesn’t even have to think twice before he pulls Ned back in again.

“Woah, woah,” Ned goes, laughing despite himself. “”M here. Jesus. You’re fucking cold.”

“We could be doing something about that,” Peter suggests. Ned just snorts again.

God. Sometimes he really is the worst.

Wordlessly, Peter hoists himself onto Ned’s lap. He brings his legs comfortably around his waist. Ned is lying back by the time Peter reaches over to cradle his cheeks in his hands.

He wouldn’t dare tell anyone, but Peter really, really enjoys how easily their bodies mold together. How Ned holds him like he can’t believe he actually has him in his hands.

“Hey,” Ned says, grin stretching. Peter cocks his head and feels his own smile split a little, fond and settled. They take a moment like that to absorb: the two of them in this moment, so enveloped and so acutely, physically together.

When Ned leans in, he kisses with warmth. His lips feel nice on Peter’s, and the pressure is soft, then building, then buzzing. Something curls in his stomach as the press of Ned’s mouth on his grows breathier, grows more numbing. Peter finds himself getting lost in it as Ned’s hands travel from Peter’s shoulders to his chest, soothing motions over electrified skin, before they crawl downward, and downward, and dow—

Detecting elevated heart rate. Would you like to commence full-body medical scan?

Fucking—

Her voice jolts him upright, and for a second Peter reevaluates every aspect of his life and where he has ever gone wrong. Then he realizes what he’s doing right now—making out with his boyfriend in the fucking Spider-Man suit, and. Peter can’t help but laugh at the absurdity of it all. He lets his head fall on Ned’s chest and snorts, voice disbelieving as he manages a weak, “Oh my god.”

In an instant, Ned’s frantic hands are back on his shoulders. “What is it? Are you okay?” It’s cute and genuine and so sincerely Ned; impossibly, Peter feels his heart twinge again.

“Don’t panic,” he says. “But, uh. Karen films everything I do in this suit.”

I was kidding, Peter. But I should let you know that Mr. Stark has installed the Sexual Education: Stay Aware! module for when you, ah, quote-on-quote enter the appropriate stage in your life.

Peter can’t help it; he groans. As if the Cap PSAs hadn’t been enough, he thinks, the exasperation leaden in his gut.

But then Ned is tugging at his fingers, cradling them in his own. The mental roll of his eyes turns fond. He leans back, and breathes.

Lesson 7: There is something like, seriously wrong with Iron Man.

*Ned Leeds is: a teenage hacker extraordinaire. Unendingly loyal. A little loud-mouthed.

The right to Peter’s left.