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Ned heard the tell-tale sound of Spider-Man’s webs followed by the hero’s faint laughing and he pushed his running speed faster. It looked like he had responded to the alert of a Spider-Man spotting near campus fast enough. He cursed not working out more before as his breath came out in pants. His arms pumped through the air fast and he could feel a stitch forming in his side.
Sprinting around the corner, Ned was met with the scene of Spider-Man’s most recent victory. A group of villains were throwing curses out in the air aimed at the red-and-blue costumed superhero perched nearby on top of a light pole. Only the balls of his feet were pressed against the metal but it looked like he wasn’t struggling to balance in the slightest.
“Spider-Man!” Ned barked out. It might have been Ned’s imagination – but given the growing clues Ned was gathering, it mostly like was not his mind playing tricks on him – but he could have sworn he saw Spider-Man flinch at the sound of his voice. The masked hero looked over his shoulder and Ned waved an arm wildly in the arm when those pair of large white lens landed on him. “Spider-Man! I need to talk to you!”
There was a tenseness to Spider-Man’s posture that hadn’t been there before Ned’s arrival. Ned was shortening the distance between them and for a second, Ned thought that today would be the day he finally got his answers. Months of searching and following Spider-Man’s appearances like a trail would finally come to an end. Sadly, life was cruel and wanted to make a fool of him.
Spider-Man stood up on his toes, a backwards-flexing hand pointed up towards the tops of the buildings nearby. Ned’s eyes widened as Spider-Man shot a web and leapt off the light pole. The web went taunt and Spider-Man sailed over some citizen’s heads, making them cheer at their local hero.
“Spider-Man! Wait, please!” Ned begged, yelling into the air. He didn’t care how crazy he looked to the bystanders now casting their gazes between him and the webslinger. All that mattered was that Ned spoke to Spider-Man.
Spider-Man simply nodded at Ned before shooting another web farther away and swinging away on it. A short whine escaped the back of Ned’s throat as he slowed down, knowing that it was a lost cause to catch Spider-Man’s attention with their growing distance from each other.
The crowd begun to disperse now that the hero-of-the-hour had swung away out of sight. Ned stopped fully in place and stared at the space Spider-Man had swung through. The corners of his lips pulled down in a severe frown at failing again.
“That was odd,” one nearby lady commented to her friend. “Spidey usually loves to stop to talk to his fans.”
“Maybe he had something he had to get to on time?” the friend offered with a shrug. They were swiping through their photos that they had taken on their phone of Spider-Man’s recent fight. “Who knows? Spider-Man has a whole secret identity nobody knows about – maybe it is related to that.”
“Perhaps,” the lady nodded her head along in agreement as the two sauntered off together.
“Better luck next time, kid,” a random bystander said to Ned as they passed by with a clap on his shoulder.
Ned ground his teeth together before turning sharply on his heel to march away. The setting sun of the afternoon warmed his back and he stared at the cracked sidewalk moving underneath of his feet. No matter what he tried, he could never get close enough to Spider-Man to actually talk to him.
It was common knowledge that Spider-Man was one of the nicest and most personable superheroes among the entire roster of the world. There were so many stories and videos online of Spider-Man sitting on benches with random citizens as they talked about a wide array of topics or helping elderly citizens carry their groceries home or quickly joining an impromptu came of frisbee in central park. It was something that NYC’s citizens were proud about – that one of their resident heroes took the time out of his day to just enjoy the city with them and earned his name of the Friendly Neighborhood Spider-Man.
But never for Ned and MJ apparently.
There was a reason that Ned was considered a genius even amongst his class at MIT. He tended to look at things in a different way that others often overlooked. It was something he had learned from his best friend growing up and carried through his life.
That very same best friend that he could no longer remember clearly.
It had started off small. Ned didn’t even notice that something so important in his life had simply disappeared on him. He couldn’t even pinpoint when it had happened as it seemed to stretch far into the oldest of his memories. It was like his best friend had never been there to begin with.
But then he begun to find discrepancies in his own memories. Like how he was always over at May’s apartment – may she rest in peace – despite Ned not remembering her having a kid his age to warrant the trips. As easygoing as Ned’s parents could be, there was no way that they would let him spends hours upon hours for days every week at a random adult lady’s place.
It had bothered him for days as he thought back to class projects but not remembering who was his partner in any of them. Some of them, he could but there was a clear pattern to this forgotten classmate across his school years. Then he thought back to school trips and adventures from his childhood that he would never go on alone but seemed to have in his memories.
What was the cherry on top was Ned didn’t remember having a best friend at all growing up. Logically, it would make sense to have at least one ride-or-die person but there was no one in his memory. The only person was MJ but she came later on in high school.
It had led Ned to pull out his old yearbooks before his first college term began for the first time in a long while. There, in those old waxy pages of a mass produced book given to everyone that went to Ned’s school, was the evidence that broke the chain of the hidden memories. While his face and name were somehow scratched out or by coincidence too blurry or obscured by something else, there was another boy that looked to be the similar enough to be thought of as the same person throughout the years with Ned.
Slowly, the walls in Ned’s memories began to crack and crumble to show a boy growing alongside Ned’s side from elementary school to recently. He was in every year book and kind of appeared during videos taken during high school, including their trip to Europe when Mysterio tried to take over a Stark network. Someone whose voice was never audible and their defining features blurred out from memory. What the unknown boy said was faintly remembered but the tone to them was lost to the void.
The other thing that stood out in Ned’s memories that gave him a clue who this missing person was that he could remember so many instances of being the webslinger’s guy-in-the-chair.
It had freaked Ned at first. One day, he has no connection to Spider-Man. The next, his mind is flooded with memories of interacting and helping the hero behind the scenes with so many patrols and fights. He could remember their conversations but the secret identity name of the hero was always redacted in those memories.
Then, the one that angered and broke Ned’s heart at the same time, was that final memory of Ned with Michelle and a mask-less Spider-Man that had no features Ned could remember on Liberty Island. Ned could remember something about them having to forget who Spider-Man really was to save everything. The details were fuzzy at best but Ned definitely remembered Spider-Man promising that he would come find them and make them remember him again.
But then Spider-Man never did.
“That jerk,” Ned grumbled under his breath, kicking a rock as he crossed the border of being on university property. Students milled about around him, trying to soak up the last bits of warm weather before more early spring rainy weather rolled in.
Something happened that made Ned forget who was under the mask. What that something was, that was still up in the air but he could tell that it was big enough that even the closest people to Spider-Man had to forget who he was. Whatever it was, Ned would find out what it was along with the identity of his best friend.
If only said best friend would stop running away from him.
Ned pouted all the way to his shared college apartment. He would throw on a forced half-smile when some of his classmates would wave to him. While college helped distract him from the pain of missing such an important person in his life, it didn’t erase the worry he felt for how his best friend was faring every day.
He dragged his feet to his building and swiped his student ID to buzz in. The hallway was empty and Ned made his way to the elevator, having to wait a moment for it to arrive and he to step in. Ned pressed the button for his floor and tapped his foot on the ground as he watched his floor number slowly approach on the display.
The elevator was old and ran slow enough that Ned regretted not taking the stairs. Getting lost in thought, Ned looked down at his hand. Hesitating only for a second, he moved through a series of hand movements for a secret friend handshake – something else that had returned from the block with muscle memory – that he couldn’t find the other half of who knew it to complete it with him. Sighing when he was finished, Ned dropped his hand and heard the elevator ding as it reached the right floor.
The doors opened and Ned could spot someone not that far in. It looked like one of the building’s tenants was also getting home as Ned exited the elevator. The brown curly-haired boy looked up and nodded his head to Ned. “Hey, man,” the neighbor greeted politely.
“Hey, Peter,” Ned sighed, half-heartened waving to their across-the-hall neighbor. While Ned didn’t know all of them on the floor personally, this particular neighbor was always nice and willing to lend a hand with whatever whenever. Honestly, Ned thought Peter was on his way to becoming friends with him and MJ if he stuck around long enough.
It would definitely help to somewhat fill the void his mysterious best friend had left in their trio.
Peter opened the door to his room and before he entered, he hesitated. Ned could see the glance between Ned and the door. Whatever Peter had been thinking, he seemed to have decided against as he shook his head to himself and stepped inside his apartment with the door closing behind him.
Ned stopped in front of Peter’s door and hovered there for a second. It had looked like Peter wanted to talk but something stopped him. Ned played with the idea for a moment of knocking on Peter’s door and inviting him over but he remembered the stack of homework he had been ignoring in favor of hunting down Spider-Man that couldn’t be ignored tonight unless he wanted to fail out of college.
Besides, if it was that important, he was sure that Peter would come seek him out to talk about it.
Dragging his feet over to their apartment door, Ned put the key in the lock and turned it. Like usual, it stuck in place and he had to pull on the door to let the deadbolt slide out of place. While there were nicer buildings on campus, this one was the cheapest and right in the middle of Ned’s and Michelle’s main academic buildings. The perks of a shorter walking commute and saving a lot of money made them look over how dated their building was.
Ned turned the handle and pushed the door open. MJ peeked over her shoulder from hearing the door open and looked at Ned. She noticed immediately his gloom and her eyes softened sadly in the corners. “He gave you the slip again?” MJ sighed, turning fully from her desk – another sketch of a featureless boy in the works to join the pile stuffed in her desk drawer. Ned couldn’t hide how his grimace deepened and he slammed the door harder than it needed.
“He’s quick,” Ned grunted, throwing his bookbag onto their ratty old couch they found on the curb and that Peter had helped them carry in when he saw them struggling with it. Ned had been honestly amazed how Peter seemed to carry it with such ease as if he didn’t need their help getting it up the rest of the stairs.
MJ shook her head and combed a hand through the front of her curly hair to clear her vision. “You’ll catch him one day,” Michelle told him. “He can’t avoid you forever.”
“I won’t give him the chance to,” Ned grumbled and dropped down on the couch next to his bag. He leaned back and looked up the yellowed-by-age ceiling of the apartment. “Why does he keep running? He obviously remembers us even if we don’t remember him.”
MJ crossed her arms and looked out the window near her desk. The buds for the upcoming spring were dotted along the tree branch in view. With the growing warm weather, it was only a matter of time until the buds blossomed. “Maybe he’s scared,” Michelle said softly.
Ned inhaled and exhaled deeply, reaching over to grab a throw pillow and hug it to himself. “I just want to help him. He has no clue how worried I am for him,” Ned said in a whisper. Any louder and his voice would betray him. “I miss him.”
Michelle stood up from her chair and made her way over to Ned. Sitting down next to him, she leaned close and wrapped her arms around his shoulders in a hug. She dropped the side of her head on top of his heads and offered a comforting sound. “I miss him, too,” Michelle murmured. “We’ll find him at some point. We just have to have hope and keep trying.”
Ned nodded and leaned into the hug, placing a hand on one of her forearms. He knew that MJ missed her boyfriend even she didn’t remember most of their relationship truly. MJ realized that something had been off, too, but it didn’t have the same depth to her entire life like Ned did. Not to minimize her pain – Ned wasn’t trying to do that at all – but all her childhood memories hadn’t been altered like Ned’s memories were.
Sniffling, Michelle leaned away and rubbed at her face. “Let’s turn on the TV,” MJ murmured, leaning forward to grab their remote off the coffee table Michelle’s parents had given them for the apartment. Pressing the power button, the TV lit up and the news story that they jumped halfway into started playing.
On the screen, Spider-Man stood next to the mayor of the city. He was being presented a key to the city. Even behind the mask, Ned could feel the hesitant embarrassment radiating off his best friend.
“A key to the city?” Michelle snorted jokingly. “Our boy there sure is getting more love from the city.”
Ned leaned forward and smiled softly at the screen, pride swelling in his chest as Spider-Man was once against acknowledge for all he did to help people with getting one of the highest honors the city could give him. He remembered not long ago when the city had nearly turned on him when Mysterio tried to frame Spider-Man for his death but the video glitched out before the villain could reveal who the hero was. After some deep investigating, the justice department found that Mysterio had lied and cleared Spider-Man’s name of any wrongdoings…not like the Daily Bugle listened, though, as they continued their smear campaign against the webslinger.
The news moved onto another story a minute later and Ned leaned back against the couch when it finished. MJ pressed her lips together before shaking her head, getting up off the couch to get a glass of water before she went back to schoolwork that was interrupted by her incomplete sketching of her boyfriend that she couldn’t remember. There was almost an entire drawer filled with the sketches and that’s how Ned found out to begin with that MJ somewhat remembered her relationship with Spider-Man.
Ned peeked over at their research board. It was less of a board and more of a wall that they pasted so many different pictures of Spider-Man they had scoured the internet for on. While it didn’t really do much in actually help find out who Spider-Man was, it did remind them of who they need to find – the best friend and boyfriend underneath the mask.
Pushing away the disappointment of today’s failure, Ned sat up from the couch and dropped the pillow. He grabbed his bookbag from the couch and made his way to his desk to work on his schoolwork. As much as he wanted to find Spider-Man’s identity, he knew his best friend would be so disappointed in him if he failed out for not doing his studying and schoolwork.
While it might not be today, Ned wasn’t going to give up. He didn’t expect it to be the following day or perhaps the one after that. As much as it went against his hope, Ned also didn’t expect to find out Spider-Man’s identity when within the next month. But that was okay because Ned was in this for the long haul and would never give up.
Because, no matter what, Ned was going to bring his best friend home.