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“So… you were in a different dimension?”
Peter lets his legs kick back and forth over the edge of the roof as he bites into his lunch. He missed Delmar’s sandwiches a lot, he knows, but the bread just sticks to the roof of his mouth and the crowns of his teeth. It tastes like ash.
“Yeah,” he says when he manages to swallow his food down. “Yeah. I was– it was crazy, Ned. You totally would have– would have freaked.”
“I bet,” Ned grins at him.
He’s so young, Peter thinks. Just a kid who doesn’t really understand what it means that Peter is suddenly an adult, now.
It isn’t that Ned doesn’t understand at all, though. They both came back to a world moved on, progress made without them and five years just… gone. Wasted.
“Are you coming back to school…?”
Peter blows out a long breath, setting his sandwich down and leaning back on his hands. “I graduated,” he points out. “I mean– technically. Not here, but I could probably petition to graduate early somehow.”
“Oh,” Ned’s brows furrow. “But, like, we’re still friends, right? I’m still your guy in the chair?”
No, he wants to say.
“Yeah, man,” Peter nudges Ned gently with his elbow. “Of course you are. I wouldn’t ask anybody else.”
Ned relaxes at that, going back to his sandwich without much care. “That’s good,” he says through a mouthful of food.
He wonders, briefly, if this is how Dick felt when he first saw Peter. Just a kid. Just a kid who's deep in over his head and doesn't even know it yet. Ned's still got some baby fat clinging to his face, eyes still just a bit too wide and innocent.
It feels like an eternity ago that Peter accidentally left this same kid in charge of mysterious alien tech. It feels like an eternity since he asked this kid— child, just a child— to hack into the Spider-Man suit Tony had made him.
(And isn't it awful? He understands Tony so much more now than he ever did before. When he was young and seventeen and desperate to prove himself. And Peter just went and died on him.)
(It's only through the grace of Pepper Potts and becoming a parent that Tony didn't become Bruce 2.0. Peter breathes a thank God for that and… does not think about it anymore.)
"You would've loved the tech they had," Peter continues. "You would have— it was pretty behind ours in a lot of ways, but it was so much cooler in a lot of others."
Ned laughs. "Oh, man," he says. "How different is it?"
He tries not to think about his WE-made and bat-improved phone, tucked firmly into the back pocket of his jeans with the speaker on.
"Different," he chokes out. "I had to get used to a whole new OS, man. They don't even— they don't even have Windows over there. It's crazy. And no—" he cuts himself off. No Stark Industries, he wants to say. The first thing I looked for when I showed up. "The phones weren't as sleek. And Gotham was sort of like— like something right out of a comic book."
Ned hums around the final bite of his food, leaning back on his palms. "Did you get any cool autographs?"
And Peter—
He laughs. A real laugh, for the first time since he came home. Because, of course, that's what Ned is worried about.
Peter thinks about cold, dark alleys. He thinks about the Lazarus pit under the city and the men in owl masks who found him when he first appeared.
He thinks about trying to survive.
"They all got left behind," he polishes off his own sandwich, shrugging. "I mean— it'd been five years. I wasn't really expecting to go home, you know? Didn't think I needed to have them on me."
Ned is Ned about it. Peter can only watch as he makes exaggerated faces and whines of despair, his own face softening in response.
He misses home— he misses Gotham— but… maybe things here aren't so bad.