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Ned doesn’t mind getting drunk in familiar places.
That’s the best part of being back in the city as a bona fide adult—experiencing all the new and old together at once in a messy, tangled web of poor decision making.
And getting drunk. Getting insanely, ridiculously, disgustingly, off-his-face drunk.
Ned used to walk past this club on the way back from late night robotics practice at Midtown and the bouncer at the front door would wink at him, and Ned can admit that always made him feel a little bit special. A little bit grown up, building his own robots and winking at bouncers and taking the subway that late, all on his own.
Huh.
Thinking on it now, it’s a little strange that a mom as protective as Ned’s was letting him make that walk alone, twice a week.
It had been a different time, pre-Snap.
A different New York.
Ned takes another sip of his drink, nodding his head along to the song that’s just starting to blare through the speakers before he’s rudely jerked sideways by the arm.
“Dude!” his protest is drowned out by the music as Flash drags him bodily from the bar. Ned takes an emergency sip of his drink to keep it from spilling. He’s unsuccessful, and nearly half of the liquor in his cup sloshes out onto the floor.
“I NEED YOU,” Flash shouts over the music, face set in a scowl. He doesn’t look back, just continues to plough through the sea of miniskirts and faux-leather pants surrounding them. Ned yanks his arm free, curling it protectively around his drink as he nearly stumbles into a circle of dancing undergrads.
“WHERE HAVE YOU BEEN?” Ned shouts at Flash’s impatient face, just as loud if not louder. The music throbs around the two of them where they stand, buzzing low in Ned’s spine. “MJ’S WORRIED YOU’RE DOING COKE IN THE BATHROOM.”
The impatient look on Flash’s face is replaced by confusion. The stupid scarf he’d insisted on wearing despite the heat flops weakly as he leans in closer to Ned. “WHAT?”
“COKE,” Ned repeats, drunkenly. He mimes sniffing something off the back of his hand, then gestures to his dick, then points to Flash. “ARE YOU DOING URINAL COKE?”
The music swells even louder, sweaty bodies slipping past the two of them towards the dance floor as Flash’s brows knit together in confusion before he shakes his head, evidently giving up on deciphering whatever bullshit Ned’s spewing. Ned can’t even remember what bullshit Ned is spewing.
“COME ON,” Flash shouts, again taking hold of his arm. Unhappily and too drunk to protest, Ned downs as much of his sixteen-dollar drink as he can and sets the glass on the garbage can nearest to them.
Flash steers them outside, where Ned has to take a moment leaning up against the side of the building with his eyes screwed shut, readjusting to the stillness of his surroundings and making a very conscious effort to keep the contents of his stomach on the inside.
“Jesus,” Flash grumbles, taking in his admittedly pitiful form. “You’re not going to be any help at all, are you?”
Flash sounds…uncharacteristically sober.
Ned peeks an eye open. Flash swims a little ahead of him, running an impatient hand through his hair and glancing towards the nearest alleyway. His eyes are clear like Ned’s never seen them after a night out, and Ned isn’t sure he much likes this little reversal of roles.
“Where did you take me?” Ned demands. “Is this where the coke is? I’m not doing coke.”
“Is this—what the hell are you talking about?” Flash reaches forward to grab Ned’s face and squeeze it, forcing Ned to look into his eyes. They water in the brightness of the streetlight. “Coke? Did someone give you coke?”
Again, Ned bats him away. Something about the warm, humid air is sobering, and he blinks a few times, trying to get his bearings.
They’re on the west side of the building, a few steps from the mouth of an alleyway that, judging from the smell emanating in Ned’s and Flash’s direction, must contain a row of dumpsters.
“That’s rank,” Ned pants as a gust of air blows the odor into their faces, mopping the sweat from his face with his shirt and getting to his feet. “Are you trying to get me to puke? As payback for the Betty thing? Because that’s…fucked up. Even for you, Thompson. Just…” he trails off as Flash turns on his heel and disappears down the nasty alleyway. “Hey!”
Indignantly, Ned stumbles after Flash. The end of Flash’s scarf whips in the stale air as he glances over his shoulder, seeming satisfied when he sees Ned’s followed him. He picks up the pace.
“Dude!” Ned complains, fighting hard to keep from keeling over sideways as he hurries after Flash. The asphalt keeps coming up to meet him, and he’s becoming increasingly aware that he should’ve just stayed inside with MJ. MJ wouldn’t let Flash drag her into the tuna fish flavored alleyway without an explanation. MJ wouldn’t have left her hard-earned drink without receiving at least twenty bucks, cash, in return.
A pushover. That’s what Ned is. A goddamn pushover.
He’s just opened his mouth to shout again when Flash suddenly stops, dropping into a crouch facing one of the (many) dumpsters. His expression is a grimace, eyes strangely serious as he glances impatiently back at Ned.
Ned’s heart gives an anxious tick of anticipation, for whatever can carve so deep a line in Flash Thompson’s brow.
A dead body? A dead animal? A dead kid? Ned’s drunk brain can’t generate any other ideas. They’ve seen enough of all of the above to last a lifetime. He holds his breath as he slows down and sidles up next to Flash, squinting to make out—
“Holy shit,” Ned yelps, as the recognition dawns. Flash glares up at him from where he’s crouched on the dirty ground—insanity, in those slacks, for the record—and Ned slaps a hand over his mouth, eyes wide.
“Dude,” Ned hisses, though it comes out more like “Mfphm.” Flash shoots him a look that says both I know and shut up at the same time.
Because slumped there on the dirty ground, limbs splayed across the asphalt like a mangled starfish, costume ripped to hell and back, is Spider-Man.
The same Spider-Man whose face glares down at Ned from Ned’s corkboard every night, milky white lenses as blank as Ned’s list of plausible theories.
Spider-Man isn't moving. A strangely familiar, panicked feeling sparks at the base of Ned's spine.
He’s dead, is Ned’s first irrational thought.
“Did you do coke and kill Spider-Man?” he hisses at Flash, feeling instantly sober. Feeling it, but maybe not acting it, from the way Flash cuffs him hard in the back of the knee. Ned nearly goes down.
“He’s not dead,” Flash hisses as he leans forward to prod Spider-Man, hard, in the chest, and no sooner has he said it than Spider-Man suddenly stirs, shifting sideways and lifting a hand to his head with what appears to be a great effort.
“Ouchies,” Spider-Man mumbles, attempting to prop himself up on an arm but missing. His head smacks back into the sidewalk. “Is that you, Flashy-poo?”
Ned’s mouth falls open. Flash grinds his teeth, even as he surges forward to help Spider-Man sit up straight.
“Yes, idiot,” Flash tells Spider-Man, who still can’t seem to hold his head up unassisted. It flops uselessly against the brick wall. “I brought help. This is Ned.”
Spider-Man makes a small sound, halfway between a laugh and a groan. His head flops forward again onto his chest, and Flash has to reach forward to hold it up by the top of his mask so that Spider-Man can actually see Ned standing there.
Ned straightens almost automatically, attempting to look a little less drunk, but his ears are ringing.
Flash knows Spider-Man.
Flash fucking knows Spider-Man.
It’s so ridiculous that Ned can’t even look at Spider-Man, himself, gaze fixing itself to Flash instead as Flash determinedly avoids his eyes.
“What the fuck, Flash.” Ned hisses, but Flash isn’t looking at him. “Flash.” He snaps his fingers. “Flash Thompson. Eugene.”
Now Flash shoots him a glare, momentarily distracted from supporting Spider-Man’s head. It thunks against his chest again.
“Ouch,” Spider-Man’s muffled voice remarks. His mask lenses are still wide and expressionless, his leg still protruding from the rest of him at an odd but not exactly painful-looking angle.
Ned is such an idiot.
“The whole time?” he asks, angrily, gesturing towards Spider-Man. “You’ve let me chase my tail around this for two fucking years, lose my actual mind over this, and the whole time you were—you were fucking—”
“Ned,” Flash says tightly, as Spider-Man stiffens. “Chill.”
Ned laughs, turning away and dragging a sweaty hand under his glasses. “I can’t believe this.”
“Get bent about it later,” Flash says flatly. “He needs our help.”
Ned glances back over his shoulder in disbelief, and Spider-Man has the audacity to wave at him. A limp wiggle of the fingers of his left hand, the one not currently propped up over Flash’s shoulder as Flash struggles to lift them both to their feet.
“No worries,” Spider-Man slurs, failing as he tries to get his feet under him. “Eugene and I can take it from here. He only dropped me twice, last time.”
Watching Flash attempt physical labor is a lot like the time they'd had to watch the video of a live birth in eighth-grade health. Weirdly wet and messy and with a high probability that someone ends up crying by the end.
It’s a painful picture.
“I can’t believe this,” Ned mutters, stepping forward to lift Spider-Man’s left arm over his own shoulder and mimicking Flash’s stance. “I can’t believe a, a single fucking bit of this.”
“Aw, come on,” Spider-Man mumbles, sounding drowsy. His head flops again onto Flash’s shoulder. “Like old times, right?”
Ned squints, but he’s drunk. So drunk and stupid to miss this—
“Ignore him.” Flash says tonelessly, if a little quickly. “He’s high. Poisoned, or some shit. Turned him useless.”
“It was me or the rest of you, pal,” Spider-Man slurs. “Not my fault you don’t listen.”
“I don’t listen,” Flash mutters under his breath. “Sure, you’re the one who followed the poison guy with the poison gun into the poison vent, but I’m the one who doesn’t listen. Sure.”
“Civilians,” Spider-Man says like this settles something. “Superhero.”
“Civilians and a fucking idiot, more like.”
“Mean.”
Cute, Ned thinks and possibly says, still annoyed and still drunk and body already aching from lugging the deceivingly heavy form of Spider-Man to the mouth of the alley.
So, Flash didn’t just stumble across Spider-Man behind the club. Strangers don’t talk to each other like this. Strangers don’t cast tight, worried glances at each other’s limp form like this.
Ned tries to remember the first time he and MJ had roped Flash into their hunt for Spider-Man’s civilian identity. He tries to remember Flash’s suggestions.
Draw him out with a viral social media campaign.
Hire a PI.
Bribe the Bugle guy.
Had Flash been pulling their leg from the beginning? Coming up with an idea, adding a bogus lead or photo to the cork board, then laughing with Spider-Man behind their backs?
Ned shakes his head, but that just makes the world spin. He stumbles sideways a step or two, taking Spider-Man and Flash with him.
“Eurgh,” Spider-Man says, eloquently. He sounds ill. His head slumps against Ned’s shoulder, this time.
Ned stiffens.
Flash is too distracted berating Spider-Man’s impression of a drunken toddler to be paying very much attention to Ned’s entire deal, and Ned is thankful. Thankful, because he’s never been very good at keeping a secret from his friends in the first place—even less so after…three, maybe four tequila sunrises.
And Ned’s been keeping a secret, is the unfortunate thing. A stupid huge, spider-shaped secret, ever since his Neural Basis of Learning and Memory class at MIT, sophomore spring. A secret that’s been chewing him from the inside out, buried under red thread and pushpins and the never-ending string of ridiculous theories Ned’s been feeding MJ for well over eighteen months now.
The secret of Spider-Man stealing their memories.
Ned didn’t mean to figure it out. It was dumb fucking luck, that he’d been chosen as a test subject in Dr. Valdez’s demonstration. If she’d hooked the electrodes up to a different student in the lecture—someone without a magical stopper blocking up their neocortex—Ned would be just like MJ, still walking around with no memories of that morning on the Statue of Liberty other than the fact that they’d both passed out from exhaustion on top of it.
But it wasn’t another student. It was Ned, taped to the electrodes. Ned, who received the “utterly harmless” shock to the brain and had to bite back a shout, right there in the lab.
Ned, who went to bed that night with a pounding headache and found his dreams suddenly painted vivid shades of red and blue.
“Am I peeing?” Ned hears himself saying, staggering under the weight of Spider-Man. He feels the floaty type of drunk. The type of drunk that detaches his brain from his mouth. “I feel a little bit like I’m peeing.”
“Dude,” Spider-Man mumbles incoherently. “I’m peeing.”
“Neither of you better be fucking peeing,” Flash growls, waving a frantic hand at a passing taxi.
The taxi slows for half a second, then blows right past them.
Flash pinches the bridge of his nose with his free hand, scarf still flapping in the wind. “Great.”
“Taxis don’t like me,” Spider-Man informs them helpfully, then amends, “Well. They like me as a target, I guess. Same story with rideshares. If those drivers get their union…”
“We’ll have to go to yours,” Flash says, sounding put out by the idea.
Ned’s place, he means? Or Spider-Man’s?
Jesus, is Ned about to see an actual superhero lair? He could throw up. He might throw up. Actually, the fact that he’s going to throw up might be unrelated to any of this.
Ned shuts his eyes, swallowing back his tequila-induced nausea.
“It’s not that I’ve got anything against unions,” Spider-Man is still mumbling incoherently, leaning more heavily into Ned’s side and sagging, something wet Ned doesn’t want to identify leaking from his spandex onto Ned’s jacket. “I like unions. It’s more that the unions don’t like me, If you know what I mean. Matter of fact…I’m starting to think the whole city might be unionized.”
“Dude,” Ned says too loudly, gesturing at Spider-Man with his free hand. “What’s wrong with him?”
“Poison, tigers, bears, who fuckin’ knows,” Flash huffs, shrugging the rest of Spider-Man’s mass onto Ned while he fishes for his phone in his jeans pocket. “Take him. I’ve got a closer idea.” He turns away from them, talking into the phone. “Yeah,” he says, “Jess?”
Ned stumbles under the redistributed weight, instinctively folding Spider-Man into his arms to keep them both steady as the sky spins above them. Spider-Man’s head finds its way into the crook of Ned’s shoulder somehow, and Ned thinks, somewhat deliriously, that he can feel Spider-Man’s pulse, thready against Ned’s neck.
“Sorry,” Spider-Man slurs. “Legs are temporarily offline. Just set me down—” his hand flops in the direction of the nearest dumpster—“with the rats. Be back to normal in a jiffy.”
“No can do, man,” Ned says, patting Spider-Man’s back apologetically. “I’ve been looking for you for like, a stupid long time.”
Spider-Man’s spine goes rigid. “Ha,” he says stiltedly after a moment, voice muffled by Ned’s jacket. “I don’t have your money. Or, if I did…it got spent. Probably on pizza. Pepperoni with onions. God,” Spider-Man takes a deep, shuddering breath that Ned feels reverberating through his entire chest, like a thousand bees buzzing. “I am trying so hard to stop talking. I’ve done the hallucination shit before, with all the fuckin’ bells and whistles, but this is just mean.”
Spider-Man extricates his head from the crook of Ned’s neck, flopping so he’s facing heavenward. “Hear that, you magical green bastard?” he shouts. “This is low, even for you.”
“Shut him up,” Flash commands Ned, hanging up the phone. “He’s out of his mind. Jessie will be here in ten minutes.”
“That’s adorable,” Ned informs Flash, making no move to shut anyone up, much less the enhanced vigilante he’s holding up by the scruff of the neck, whose un-flexed back muscles Ned can actually feel against his forearm. “Team Thompson to the rescue. You guys need t-shirts.”
“Who’s Jessie?” Spider-Man asks blurrily. He tries and fails, again, to get his feet under him, and Ned barely manages to catch him before he hits the cement. “No doctors.”
“She’s not a doctor, dipshit,” Flash says as he scoops Spider-Man’s other side back up into his arms, grunting with effort. “She’s my sister.”
“Ah, fuck,” Spider-Man mumbles again. “More civilians.”
Then, he promptly passes out in Ned’s arms.
---
Ned can get over the Flash and Spider-Man thing.
It’s easier once Ned’s sobered up a bit, and the presence of Jessie softens the blow, because even if a sixteen-year-old is a Thompson and has, therefore, been cussing as fluently as any sailor since she was nine years old, there’s still something about the presence of a sixteen-year-old that makes it hard to justify Ned telling Flash the hundred different ways he can go fuck himself for hiding this from them for three months right this very moment.
Okay. Ned can pretend to get over the Flash and Spider-Man thing. He can be very good at pretending that for any needed number of hours.
“The dumpster,” Flash says, dropping into the chair opposite Ned, looking as tired as Ned feels and still so very, very sober. “That’s where I found him, for the record. I was smoking. He fell out of the sky. I wasn’t on some spy-op. I’ve never been part of a fucking—spy-op.”
“I thought you quit,” Ned says dully, unsure why he chooses that specific detail to latch onto. Another lie if it’s true, another lie if it’s false. Maybe he’s just trying to prove something.
“Just because MJ repeats something half a million times doesn’t make it true,” Flash mutters, sinking back into the chair and rubbing two tired hands down his face.
Spider-Man is asleep in Jessie’s bed. Asleep or in some drug-induced trance, Ned and Flash can’t tell, because they aren’t doctors, dammit. Mask pulled up over his nose so he can breathe without betraying his identity, whole body tucked into itself like he’s staving off the flu.
Red and blue. Red and blue. It’s always flashing through Ned’s head like a fucked-up game of laser tag.
Flash must have been able to tell, somehow, that Ned was on the edge of an ugly mental breakdown as they tucked Spider-Man into bed, because he steered them out there. Left the red-and-blue problem asleep under Jessie’s watchful eye and stuck a bottle of fancy ice water in Ned’s hands and plopped him down on the couch like a kid with a bee sting.
Ned is fully twenty-two, but he accepts it. The water. The hole-filled explanation of how Spider-Man had hijacked Flash’s MIT ID to access Dr. Warren’s lab, only for Flash to catch him in the act, and that somehow being a story Flash didn’t think necessary to divulge to his very close, very Spider-Man focused circle of friends. Ned thinks he’s actually doing a good job accepting all of it, bullshit included.
“I’ve gotta pee,” he finally says when the silence becomes too stifling, getting to his feet, and Flash points wordlessly down the hallway. Ned leaves him there, staring into space, looking lost in a way that reminds Ned of other nights. The more common nights, when Flash is invariably the one wasted and Ned and MJ are the two in charge of picking up the pieces.
On the way back from the bathroom, Ned hears it. Faint, stifled, but as damning as a dropped anvil in such a silent apartment at two in the morning.
A groan. From the direction of Jessie’s bedroom.
Glancing quickly over his shoulder towards the front room where he’d left Flash, Ned tiptoes his way towards the sound before he can think too much about it, slipping into the bedroom and closing the door silently behind him.
There’s a half-formed thought in his mind about shaking Spider-Man down for answers about his memories now that he’s regained consciousness, but it dies the second Ned lays eyes on Spider-Man’s rigid form, the gloved fingers gripping at the top sheet like a vice.
The sheets surrounding Spider-Man are dark and the scent of sweat hangs heavy in the air, and Ned freezes, unsure now what to do with himself as Spider-Man groans again softly, curling further in on himself like a kid with a stomach ache.
“Is everything okay, dude?” he asks uncertainly, stomach turning as Spider-Man’s head tilts toward him slightly, lenses blinking a few times. “Can I like, get you anything?”
“You’re still here,” Spider-Man mumbles deliriously, tugging the pillow under his head as if speaking to himself. “Why are you still here?”
“We’ve been here the whole time,” Ned says, hovering next to the door. “You’re in my friend’s bed.”
Friend’s sister, but whatever. Spider-Man close enough that Ned could reach out and touch him, but whatever.
“It’s comfy,” Spider-Man says in a muffled, defeated voice, grip going tight on the sheets again and body stiffening as what looks to be a wave of something washes over him and he writhes, legs kicking out in little stiff, painful looking motions. “Silk sheets. Tell your friend I’ll…get them cleaned. Unless they’re into the idea of…eau de Spider-Man. Some sickos are.” He presses his masked face, hard, into the pillow, exhaling harshly. “Fuck.”
“What’s happening?” Ned asks, inching closer. “My mom’s a doctor, I could ask her if there’s anything—”
Spider-Man laughs, sounding weirdly hysterical. “Your mom. Damn. He hit me with the good stuff, didn’t he?”
His entire suit is sweat-soaked, Ned can see upon closer inspection, and this time when Spider-Man’s muscles lock up he rides the wave out silently, almost like he’s holding his breath. Ned finds himself doing the same unbidden, a natural mirror, only exhaling when Spider-Man slumps into the bed again after a few infinite, writhing seconds, like his strings have been cut.
“I don’t suppose your friend keeps chloroform handy,” Spider-Man says shakily, voice hoarse, a minute or so later. “Or—a baseball bat. A bat would work, if all three of you swing it.”
Ned catches the drift quickly. He’s asking him—them—to knock him out. Spider-Man must catch sight of Ned’s face, because he mutters, “Yeah. Figured.”
“We have Tylenol,” Ned offers quickly, knowing somewhere in the depth of his brain that it won’t do anything. “Or ice packs. There’s probably some alcohol somewhere. Or maybe—would, like, Motrin somehow do something for you? That’s gotta be around. Or—“
“Won’t help,” Spider-Man cuts him off, sounding strung-out and exhausted. “Only way out is through. Maybe. Probably.” He turns his head toward Ned and says, again, blearily, “You’re still here. Don’t get it. Why are you still here?”
Ned gapes at him with open confusion and Spider-Man just lays there, looking beat to hell and disinclined to explain himself, muttering about hallucinations and this sucks ass and for some reason, Beastslayer. Ned should go, probably, leave him to sweat out the rest of whatever he’s been dosed with in peace, but somehow finds himself sitting down in Jessie’s desk chair, instead.
He feels bad, is part of it. Guilty, if he’d understood correctly and the nightclub has been the target of whatever freak had drugged Spider-Man. Spider-Man had put himself on the line to protect Ned’s right to simultaneously do shots and shake ass to Single Ladies blaring from the speakers, so they owe him one. Ned, in particular, owes him one.
And there’s the other part. The part where Ned looks at Spider-Man’s trembling, pain-laced form and feels an old kind of ache deep in his ribs, like a broken bone that never got set and healed correctly.
The memories part.
So Ned sits and for the next hour he watches as Spider-Man fights off whatever poison or drugs have ended up in his system, feeling equal parts awe and horror at each wave of whatever-it-is that washes over Spider-Man’s prone form and leaves him a shaking, trembling mess. Occasionally a particularly bad wave hits and Spider-Man’s grunts turn into hoarse yells, loud enough to bring Jessie in with a cup of ice water that she places on the night stand next to Spider-Man’s head before fleeing the room, looking stricken.
Flash mutters something to Ned through the doorway about running for cigarettes.
MJ texts something along the lines of heading out wuthth addy, u gold? that only takes Ned a few minutes to decipher as the drunk version of a Jones-Watson night-out check in.
Somehow (read: four tequila sunrises and an adrenaline crash) Ned dozes off.
---
Red and blue, swirling through the Midtown parking lot.
Red and blue, a handmade Christmas card made of construction paper that sends Ned doubling over in laughter.
Red and blue, shredded fabric mixed with blood mixed with the steady beep, beep, beep of a heartrate monitor in Avengers Tower.
Red and blue, red and blue, red and—
---
“Shit.”
Ned startles awake, nearly falling over sideways out of Jessie’s office chair.
He blinks blearily, noticing the empty bed and emptier glass of water, eyes catching on the red and blue figure fumbling with the window in the far corner and, a moment later, the tangled trail of bed sheets still attached to Spider-Man’s foot.
Weak light is beginning to illuminate the bedroom, and the something-ugly-died-here taste in his mouth added to the mother of all cricks in his neck tells Ned that it’s been at least a few hours since he’d conked out, possibly much longer.
“Hey,” he croaks, and Spider-Man actually jumps, leg buckling strangely under him as he continues his assault on the window.
The fact that he’s standing means whatever super-strength or super-healing or super-stupidity has done at least part of its job, but Ned isn’t a doctor, isn’t even fully awake, and even he can tell that using your arms isn’t supposed to look so…heavy.
“Where are you going?” Ned asks blearily, rubbing at his eyes.
Spider-Man carefully avoids his gaze, yanking harder on the window with a little grunt, and if Ned didn’t know better he’d say he seems…embarrassed. Ned supposes accusing a guy of being a hallucination for several hours and then sweating your way through three layers of bedding all while intermittently calling out in prayer to Whitney Houston can do that to you, probably. Or stealing said guy’s memories.
It’s probably the memories.
“Should you even be, like, moving?” Ned asks the first thing that pops into his head, getting cautiously to his feet.
Spider-Man yanks harder. Desperately harder. A small fissure snakes its way up Jessie’s wall and Spider-Man freezes, then takes a deep breath as if steeling himself.
He turns to Ned, and somehow even his eye lenses look tired. “I have to go,” he says. His voice sounds the same and different than it had hopped up on alien drugs, a bit lower but still laughably, inarguably Queens. “That guy’s still out there.”
“Can’t it wait?” Ned asks incredulously. “You look like you got hit by a train, dude.” Then, after he hears himself, Ned tacks on, “No offense.”
“Offense taken,” Spider-Man huffs, but then he slumps against the wall like he doesn’t have it in him to hold himself upright, so the point stands.
“He’s weaker in the daytime,” Spider-Man mumbles like he has to explain himself to Ned, who knows he is standing there looking so very super-powerless and civilian-like. Spider-Man slides down the wall until he’s sitting on the floor, elbows on his knees. “Makes it easier.”
Ned squints. “Like a vampire?”
Spider-Man says, with a sound that could be a laugh if it didn’t sound so exhausted, “You’d be shocked by just how much of vigilante life is dealing with ‘like a vampire'-s.”
That’s the coolest sentence Ned’s ever heard.
“That’s the coolest sentence I’ve ever heard,” Ned says diplomatically, gripping the back of the desk chair, hard. “But, just so you know…I actually can’t let you leave.”
Spider-Man does laugh out loud a little at that, and Ned is all at once reminded of the hundreds of headlines sitting between them.
MASKED MENACE BOTCHES DOWNTOWN RESCUE; THREE BLOCKS LEVELED IN ENSUING CIRCUS
SPIDER-MAN APPREHENDS WOULD-BE WALL STREET BOMBERS JUST MINUTES BEFORE RIGGED EXPLOSIVES SET TO DETONATE
NO CASUALTIES IN TRIPLE SUBWAY CAR PILEUP AS SPIDER-MAN SWINGS TO MTA’S AID
Years of MJ trying to knock into Ned’s head the concept of superheroes: they’re just like us! does nothing for him in this moment, swallowing down the anxious knot in his throat as he tries his best to avoid thoughts of Spider-Man bench pressing trains. Putting his fist through alien faces. Slide-tackling the Scorpion through a solid brick wall.
Tiny ant Ned, meet the human equivalent of God’s giant flip-flop.
“Sorry.” Spider-Man leans his head back against the wall behind him, evidently choosing not to take this particular opportunity to crush Ned like a bug. “That was dickish. I’d just—I’d be real interested in your plan to try and stop me.”
Ned would be interested in that plan, too, if he’s honest. Somehow he doubts the semi-hungover state of him is going to be good for much of anything, much less throwing down with Spider-Man in a teenage girl’s bedroom. Thankfully, it doesn’t look like Spider-Man’s in much of a fit state to be going anywhere, himself.
“How long have you been chasing this guy?” Ned slides down the wall opposite Spider-Man, so they’re facing each other amongst the poster-plastered walls.
Spider-Man shrugs, almost like a tired tick. “What day is it?”
An awkward beat passes before Ned realizes he isn’t joking, and he clears his throat. “Um,” he says, “Sunday. The twenty-third.”
Spider-Man nods, adjusting his sitting position with his right hand, clearly taking some weight off the hip Ned knows from their three-legged crawl home last night is currently in less than stellar shape. “About ninety-six, ninety-seven hours, then.”
Ned does some quick math.
“Four days?” he asks, dismayed. “How has he not made the news?”
“I take that as a compliment,” Spider-Man says with a small groan as he stretches out the knee of the bad leg in front of him. “For the record. And he hasn’t actually hit anyone with his mad scientist mix yet, is how.”
“Besides you,” Ned says flatly.
Spider-Man inclines his head slightly like Ned’s made a fair but irrelevant point. “Right. Besides that.”
Ned swallows, remembering the look of Spider-Man deep in the throes of the drug he’d walked in on the night before, all…twitchy, and anguish-y, and tormented. “Was that…your first time getting shot with it?”
Slowly, Spider-Man lowers the leg. If Ned didn’t know better, he’d say the look his plastic lenses give Ned is assessing. “What’s that gotta do with anything?”
Ned shrugs. “Tells me how worried we normies should be. And, if you get hit again, gives us a benchmark for whether or not increased exposure escalates the symptoms, or if separate dosing creates isolated incidents. Type of stuff that would be helpful for hospitals if he ever gets a successful hit off.”
Spider-Man looks at Ned for a long time, long enough that Ned wonders if he’s actually seeing anything, or if it's possible he's fallen back asleep sitting up. Finally, he says, with a limp gesture toward Jessie’s vacated bed, “That was twice. Second time was worse.”
Ned nods eagerly like he’ll do something with this information, even though all of his internal systems are screaming different versions of the same instructions to JUST BE FUCKING COOL, NED.
“Anything else?” Spider-Man asks politely, and Ned can tell he’s being humored.
“Yeah,” Ned says unthinkingly, “do you know me?”
Whatever Spider-Man had been expecting, it clearly wasn’t that. He stiffens.
“You do,” Ned presses, slightly awed, scooting forward slightly. A laugh bubbles out of him. “I fucking knew it.”
“I’ve never seen you before in my life,” Spider-Man says dully, quickly recovering and leaning away from him. “Ask your friend. We’re pals.”
The word pals stretches like something brittle, something Ned doesn’t have the pieces to examine the way he wants to, because the pieces are gone. The pieces got fucking stolen, by the half-god-half-clown in the onesie across from him.
“Bullshit,” Ned frowns. “You’re in my dreams, dude. In a not-weird, super manly kind of way.”
BE COOL BE COOL BE COOL BE—
Ned commands his subconscious to be silent.
“Sounds like you should talk to your doctor,” Spider-Man says shortly, shifting his weight again and looking everywhere but into Ned’s eye. “Or your psychic. Whichever quack deals in parasomnia these days.”
Ned points at him accusingly. “No. No, you were talking to me. When you were hallucinating. You kept asking why I was here.”
“An obvious question,” Spider-Man retorts, running a masked hand over an equally masked face. “For the random guy I don’t know, insisting on watching me sweat in my sleep. That was super weird, man.”
“You said I—”
“Look,” Spider-Man bites, “I don’t have answers for you, okay?”
Ned frowns, shrinking back a little, stung and unsure why.
“It’s not up to me,” Spider-Man says cryptically, whole body tense. “None of this is. There are fucking—cosmic forces. Space-time continuum, ripping-open-the-fabric-of-reality, not to be fuckin’ trifled with types cosmic forces. Not to mention the wizards, who are their own annoying as all hell, low-budget Halloween problem. Believe me, if I could help you…” he hesitates, right there on the precipice of something so important, it makes Ned’s spine tingle. “It doesn’t matter. The best thing to do would be to…forget. Whatever you think you know.”
“Been there, done that, got the t-shirt.” Ned’s voice comes out steelier than expected. “Wasn’t a fan.”
Spider-Man shakes his head. “You don’t understand.”
“I knew Spider-Man,” Ned presses, a desperate edge to his voice as Spider-Man starts to get to his feet again in a clear attempt to escape this conversation, letting out a bitten-back groan at the effort. “I helped him. I helped you. On the Statue of Liberty. We knew you.”
“You think you did,” Spider-Man grunts as he makes his way to the door of Jessie’s room, hand pressed to his hip as he practically drags the bad leg along with him like a kid with a limp stuffed animal. He reaches a hand toward the doorknob, and Ned sees that he’s shaking. “But you’re wrong.”
Ned scrambles to his own feet, ignoring the pound of his head that indicates what he’s experiencing now is just a small taste of the misery that will be his imminent hangover. Panic sparks in his gut. “Wait,” he says, “You can’t just leave.”
“Wrong again,” Spider-Man mutters, twisting the knob. “I appreciate the assist from the dream team. Seriously. But that guy’s still out there, and every second I’m in here could be tonight’s difference between a nightclub and a mass-fuckin’-grave. You understand.”
And Ned was wrong, earlier, is the thing, but not about this.
Because watching the answer to nearly two years of hand-coded tracking apps, brainstorm sessions over old news articles, brain zapping, and all other forms of his unrewarded effort attempting to walk out the door, something in Ned snaps. His common sense, probably.
He throws himself at Spider-Man.
Seriously. Fully, actually, chucks himself across the room into a legitimate, bonafide superhero, like a linebacker with the Heisman on the line and nothing else left to live for.
Ned has so much to live for.
He gets lucky and somehow catches Spider-Man both by surprise and on his bad leg, and they both go tumbling to the floor, taking the lamp on Jessie’s bedside table with them. It lands with a crash and Ned scrambles to his feet, adrenaline pounding in his veins like nothing he’s ever experienced as Spider-Man lays there holding his skull, groaning in pain.
“Holy shit,” Spider-Man wheezes. “What the fuck was that for?”
“You were going!” Ned trills, tugging at his own hair in panic. “I had to stop you before you—smashed through the front door. You weren’t listening.”
“And there was no middle ground!?” Spider-Man’s voice sounds equal parts pained and winded. “Other than—the full Strahan?”
Spider-Man shakily gets a hand under him, propping himself up as the masked eyes slowly blink. At the same time Ned can hear footsteps in the hall, and it only takes a moment before Flash appears in the doorway, expression apprehensive as he quickly takes in the sorry scene of them.
“The fuck happened?” he asks, sounding amazed.
“I just laid Spider-Man out,” Ned says disbelievingly, flexing his own hands in front of himself in a careful examination at the same time Spider-Man wheezes, “nothing.”
“You didn’t lay me out,” Spider-Man scoffs, getting shakily back to his feet. “There was no laying out of any kind.”
“You look laid out.” Flash blinks a few times at Spider-Man, then back at Ned, then back at Spider-Man again, clearly trying to connect pieces to a puzzle he’s not privy to. “Why the fuck would he lay you out?”
“Don’t ask me,” Spider-Man says indignantly, gesturing to Ned. He sways where he stands. “Ask the human battering ram.”
“Flash,” Ned says without thinking, pulse jumping again as Spider-Man reaches for the doorknob. “Don’t let him leave.”
“What?” Flash asks, bemused.
“Don’t listen to him,” Spider-Man commands, but Flash must be less dazed by the whole situation than he looks, managing to hold firm to the doorknob and refusing to let the door open fully.
Spider-Man tries twice to open it anyway, then looks up at the ceiling with one hand on the other side of the knob as if praying for patience.
“He’s got our memories,” Ned blurts out, and Spider-Man makes an annoyed sound, one that sounds like it comes from low in his throat. “Mine and MJ’s, probably yours. It’s why we’ve been looking for him. And why he made you swear not to tell either of us that you’d met. He’s had them. The whole time, he’s had them.”
That last part’s a guess, but it must near, if not exactly on, the money, because Flash looks back at Spider-Man, whose shoulders have gone hunched, with open dismay. “You’re kidding.”
Ned shakes his head vigorously. “I’m not.”
“Flash,” Spider-Man says evenly. “Step away from the door.”
Flash glances at Ned, who uses his eyes to convey just how insanely fucking serious he is. He swallows, then straightens.
“No,” he says firmly, to Spider-Man. “Tell us about the memories.”
Spider-Man does what Ned thinks is the superhero equivalent of a facepalm, dragging his gloved fingers down his face in a slow, slightly zombie-adjacent motion. “There are no memories.”
“Bullshit,” Flash and Ned say at the same time.
“Like I told your friend, there are bigger things at play, here. It’s not up to me. I can’t just—”
“You hacked my ID,” Flash accuses, pointing an indignant finger in Spider-Man’s face. “You said it was random, but it wasn’t, was it? You pegged me for a sucker. You already knew.”
Spider-Man takes a very deep breath.
“Alright,” he sighs, sounding almost regretful. “I’m out of time, so we’re gonna do it your way. But remember that it didn’t have to come to this, alright? You two made me do this. Mention that when you give an interview to the Bugle.”
Ned barely has time to process before Spider-Man moves, faster than anything Ned’s ever seen. He’s clearly not as injured as he’d led Ned to believe, or maybe he’s just practiced in functioning through crippling pain, because before Ned can think much more than a belated, oh fuck, his feet have been webbed together and yanked forward, his entire body slamming into Flash like a bowling ball as the both of them go sprawling across the carpet.
Spider-Man flips out of the way of their bodies, landing in a crouch behind them, and before Ned can even process what’s happened enough to yell, Spider-Man shoots another web, this one splitting to wrap itself fully around his and Flash’s entangled bodies, not tight enough to restrict any of Ned’s bloodflow, but certainly not allowing much room for Jesus.
When it’s over, Spider-Man sags again, catching himself against the wall as if the wind has been sucked from his sails.
“Don’t yell,” he begs, holding a placating hand up as if reading Ned’s mind. “If you yell, I’m going to have to web up the sister and, fuck me, man, I really do not have that in the tank.”
“This is fucked,” Flash laughs hysterically, writhing on the ground. “We helped you, you asshole.”
“And I appreciate it,” Spider-Man says hoarsely, limping past them and towards the door. “Believe me. Or don’t. Not like it matters. But hey, assuming everything else goes according to plan, you’ll know you helped save the city from a naked green alien with a weird hate-boner for house music, and that’ll be something.”
“You can’t seriously be thinking of fighting that guy right now,” Ned scoffs, annoyed at the fact that hot tears are pricking at the corners of his eyes. He blinks them back, because if he cries in front of Flash Thompson at the big age of twenty-two, he’ll end up wishing Spider-Man had just finished him off. “He’ll just beat the shit out of you again, and this time we’re not going to be there to drag your—sorry ass, back home.”
“That’ll wear off in two hours,” Spider-Man says, electing to ignore Ned. “Struggling will just make it worse. And for what it’s worth…” Spider-Man pauses melodramatically in the doorway, glancing back at Ned and Flash’s trussed up form like it physically pains him. “I am sorry, dude. I really do wish I could help you.”
And then he’s gone. Just—slips away. A wisp of red and blue.
Something undefinable and very, very sharp inside of Ned’s chest deflates, and he lets his head fall onto the carpet below them, squeezing his eyes shut. His shoulder aches uncomfortably from the awkward way it’s attached to Flash’s torso.
Ned stays that way for a very long time.
---
Jessie’s brunch ends ninety minutes into their two-hour sentence, long after Ned and Flash have given up their thrashing and become resigned to their fate, slumping fully into each other in a bid to find a comfortable position. She finds them on the floor, her eyes wide as dinner plates, dark hair swishing around her shoulders as she looks from Flash, to Ned, back to Flash again.
“What the fuck?”