Work Text:
Ned knew he'd been lucky when it came to hospitals. He'd never really been forced to deal with tense bedside vigils or bad news delivered in antiseptic-scented waiting rooms before. He'd been fortunate, only venturing to the city's various hospitals and medical centers to see distant elderly relatives convalesce or for the birth of his baby sister when he was small. The rough stuff had never been for someone truly close to him. Not until this.
And, frankly, he doesn't really know what to do about it because this...this wasn't supposed to happen. It feels wrong in the same way that a particularly realistic nightmare would. Like reality, just shifted a half-step to the left of normality. Everything feels hazy and off-balance, as if Ned should wake up any second to find that he is anywhere but here. But no matter how hard he blinks or how many discreet little pinches he gives the already-sore flesh along his wrists, the scene doesn't change. Ned was still standing deep in the heart of the upstate compound's medical facility. Peter was still lost in the coma that had claimed him two days earlier. And nothing was the way it should have been.
Ned dragged his feet in the doorway of the little compartment within the compound's medical wing that had been assigned to Peter, not quite sure how close he was allowed to be or how delicate the machinery that walled Peter up like a fortress was. It was hard to even pick him out amongst the tubes and lines and cannulas that tied Peter down at his wrists, his chest, even his nose—he didn't look like himself. Ned swallowed hard and found his throat too dry to manage it without feeling like he was going to throw up. Peter looked...he looked dead, with the gray pallor of his skin under all the bruises and bandages and the stiff, unnatural way he's been laid out in his bed. After nearly a decade of sleepovers and sneaky naps in unoccupied classrooms, Ned knew how Peter slept almost better than he knew his own rest patterns. Peter was all languid limbs and awkward angles, arms thrown over his head and feet draped over the edges of the bed or body curled up to snuggle the nearest pillow. He was soft snores and nonsensical sleep-chatter. This...this corpse-pose, this eerie silence beneath the steady beep and hiss of the monitors and machinery was all kinds of wrong. If Ned had a tingle or a sixth sense or whatever Peter was calling it this week, it would be screaming. For that matter, he might just take up screaming if he had to look at this much longer.
Deep down, he knew that what Peter did was serious work. Dangerous work. Even deadly work, if things were ever to go wrong the way they had a few days prior. But it was hard to remember that when so much of what he had witnessed were Peter's triumphs, not his failures. He'd seen him struggle before, sure—he'd been there to see him quiver under the weight of the elevator at the Washington Monument, had seen him scramble this way and that in the desperate fight against the electric dude in the school parking lot, had even seen him battered and exhausted in the wake of the plane crash—but no matter how bad each of those situations went, Peter always came out on top. No matter how hard he got smacked down, Peter Parker always got back up (complete with a quip and a grin, nine times out of ten).
It’s that buoyant tenacity that has always made the risks okay.
That has eased whatever fears might have crept into the back of Ned’s subconscious in the brief months since he’d learned the truth. This stark proof that tenacity isn’t enough and that no amount of plucky attitude can keep a good night from turning bad has rocked Ned to his core.
Thirty minutes ago, he thought he was cool with being the Guy in the Chair, the Friend of Spider-Man, the second half of their own Dynamic Duo—now all he wanted was to be the plain old Ned Leeds to an alive and well Peter Parker.
Spider-Man could suck it.
It hit him with painful clarity that maybe he shouldn't have come. When May had offered to bring him along on today's visit, Ned had jumped at the chance. He'd been clamoring for a chance to see Peter almost since the minute the patrol accident that had put him here had taken place. Now he wished he hadn't. It felt unexpectedly selfish in the worst way, and the more he contemplated his building desire to bolt out the way he had come, the more he felt like a coward. Like a cheat, like a traitor—worst of all, like a bad friend. Peter was brave enough to face down all sorts of terror and trouble every singe night. Peter was brave enough to risk everything for strangers, let alone for his friends. Peter was brave enough to weather more losses than anyone should ever have to and still keep going while the thought of even just this one potential loss made Ned want to hyperventilate.
"Are you in or out?"
"Huh?" Ned startled at the grumble from the other side of Peter’s bed and very nearly stumbled right back out of the room when he found Peter’s asset manager giving him a hard look from the other side of the room.
"The door." Happy nodded toward the glass door that separated this bay from the rest of the medical wing. "You're in the threshold. Either get in or get out, but you gotta move. You're letting the warm air out."
"Oh." Ned shuffled mindlessly forward. Come to think of it, the room was warmer than the rest of the place. That was...thoughtful. Peter never seemed to stay warm enough these days. And he would probably need it now more than ever with his body struggling to right itself after its great trauma. "Sorry."
Happy grunted and returned his attention to Peter, idly swirling the coffee in his cup while he kept watch. He'd been there since Ned had arrived, ensconced in one of the several plastic chairs that adjoined Peter's bed. Aside from a brief salute to May before she'd peeled off to join Tony in a consultation with the attending physicians, he hadn't moved. That didn’t change when Ned sank gingerly into a chair on Peter's opposite side. He watched Peter's chest rise and fall for a minute that swiftly ticks into two, then three, then four. The longer he watches, the longer the pressure of it builds in his chest like steam in a kettle. Eventually, it bursts.
"Mr. Happy?"
"Hmm?" Happy didn’t seem any more flustered than usual. His face was red, his brows drew down in the standard frown, and he stayed sharply focused on the various monitors spread out around them, but it was all tempered by a weary sense of calm. Of…experience, as if he’d endured this exact thing a few million times before. Ned realized, with a rather nasty flop of his stomach, that given who the man worked for, he probably had. He wondered if that would be him in thirty (or forty—who knew how old the dude was?) years. A superhero’s dutiful friend, waiting out the comas and the traumas and rapidly going gray with the stress of never really knowing whether this would be the last vigil or not. The thought of that task stretching ahead of him for the rest of his life made his stomach clench again.
"How do you...how do you do this?"
"Do what?"
"The waiting...the not-knowing thing," Ned muttered, his voice dropping in his best attempt to keep it from cracking. His eyes are burning and he knows it, but he can't help it. This isn't supposed to happen...He isn't supposed to have to deal with this. Dying friends were a problem he didn't foresee dealing with until he was old and gray and hobbling around the same nursing home halls with Peter (that was a thing, a late-night pact made on too much sugar and too little sleep), and quite frankly, he didn’t know how to deal with moving that schedule up.
He glanced up to find Happy looking at him, the stony lines of his voice softening ever so slightly into a sort of shared sorrow that resonated deep in Ned's chest.
Happy pursed his lips as he glanced back to Peter and sighed.
"You sit, you wait, you drink a lot of coffee...Not a lot you can do, kid. Besides being here, anyway."
Ned wrinkled his nose, muttering almost under his breath.
"I don't like coffee."
He didn't like this.
"Just as well." Happy took a long draw from the paper cup in his hand and grimaced. "Hospital coffee's never good, anyway."
They lapsed into silence again, both watching Peter breathe as if that was really all that mattered. The distraction made the uneasy air a little less heavy on Ned’s shoulders, but it didn’t keep his thoughts from whirring on. He wondered why this was felt so vastly different from all the other trials he and Peter had weathered. Ned knew he wasn’t great in crises—not usually, anyway. He’d been there for Peter during the aftermath of the whole situation with his uncle, providing a steady shoulder to cry on (and sympathetic tears, too, because if Peter cried, then Ned did, too—that was always just how it was) and a spare apartment to run to if the ghosts of the Parker place were too vivid, but that had been different. He’d charged in on Homecoming night with the spare webshooter, but that had been impulse more than anything else. There’d been no time to think about anything, just time to move. Even after Peter had squealed away in Flash’s car, there’d been little time when Ned couldn’t reach him via phone or track his movements through the city via the various news outlets or social media mentions or even the city cameras Ned had long since figured out how to “borrow” through a little discreet hacking. It wasn’t the breathless pins-and-needles agony of waiting out an indefinite crisis like the one in front of them now. Ned almost wished it had been. At least then, he would’ve known what to do now.
There was a sigh from the other side of the bed before Happy spoke again, slow and gruffly tentative, as if he wasn’t entirely sure about putting any of this into words, but still felt the need to plow through it anyway.
“Look…kid…this stuff isn’t easy. It’s never going to be. But it’s a whole lot easier once you decide what—who—your priorities are.” He knocked back another shot of coffee as if it were something much stronger and grimaced again, though whether that was from the coffee or the conversation, Ned couldn’t say. “You focus on that, you can get through just about anything for ‘em.”
“Oh,” Ned said. The eloquent part of his brain wasn’t home at the moment, mostly because he had other things to mull over. He was beginning to feel somewhat short-circuited, as if the stress of the last half hour had fried everything important, but…it still made him pause. Priorities. Focus. In or out. The last one crystallized, freezing a hundred whirling thoughts into a single conclusion because there was only one possible answer when it came to Peter Parker: Ned was in.
He was never going to be truly cool with this part of the job, he knew that already—but he was in. Ned hated the thought of watching Peter in pain or in peril, now or forty years from now or in any of the space in between. He hates it with every fiber of his being. But he loves Peter. Of that, he's never been more sure. And as much as this hurt, as much as the knowledge that this will be far from the last time he holds a vigil at his best friend's bedside, Ned knows he's in for good.
There's never a question about that.
He looked up to hazard a glance at Happy and cleared his throat.
“So…uh…where’s that coffee machine?”