Chapter Text
“Hey,” MJ greets him as Ned slips in through the front door to their apartment, and he looks up at her, surprised to find her—anyone—still awake. Immediately, he wishes he’d thought to slip the energy shot he’d picked up at the 24-hour pharmacy on the corner into the band of his underwear.
“Hey,” he says back, tugging his sneakers off his aching feet. “You’re…awake.”
“And your face isn’t painted. I just lost a bet.”
Ned huffs a little laugh through his nose, leaning back against the frame of the entryway into their apartment. He’s tired. Exhausted, really, after the whirlwind of fucking—life, that has been the past twenty-four hours.
Everything that’s happened since Spider-Man showed up at their apartment is cool, examined on it’s own. Ridiculously cool. Maybe the coolest collected set of experiences Ned’s had since high school, when he’d kept accidentally finding himself in life-or-death situations that always seemed to end with Spider-Man judo-flipping super-villains out of Ned’s immediate vicinity. Or catching his runaway elevator. Or saving him from being melted into a pile of metallic goo on that ferris wheel in Prague.
Spider-Man had been in Ned’s apartment today, or—yesterday, technically, Ned guesses—and Ned hadn’t even had the chance to finish losing his ever-loving mind over that before he’d been onto life-altering experience two: being suddenly, completely frozen in space-time for an indeterminate number of minutes. It had felt like hours, to Ned, muscles locked and screaming in agony, eyes glued to MJ’s own frozen, terrified expression. The only thing moving was Ned’s mind. Moving, and moving, and tumbling over itself, and racing, the whole thing was—
Cooler in concept, to be honest. The idea of being frozen in space-time by a super-powered alien or mutant or ray gun. Much cooler in concept than in actual, lived experience. Zero out of ten stars, are what Ned would give the event as a whole.
He’d been online, when the news came in about Spider-Man being checked into Bellevue, researching and messaging and doing everything he could to figure out the how and who and why of his and thousands of other New Yorkers’ time spent trapped in the prison of their own bodies. Trying to figure out Spider-Man’s involvement through his app and a string of social media sightings, knowing somewhere in the back of his mind that this—whatever it was, was too much to be a coincidence. The Freeze (Ned’s name, for the record, already catching on on major social media platforms, not that he cares) had very nearly directly followed Spider-Man’s quick split from their place.
Ned’s not an idiot.
That doesn’t make the crushing confirmation that he’s right—
Shock today, as Spider-Man arrived at Bellevue Hospital with a bullet wound, seemingly at death’s door—
—feel any better.
“How was it?” MJ asks, and Ned blinks himself back to reality, realizing with a jolt he’d almost drifted off to sleep standing up.
“Oh, uh—good,” he says, removing his glasses to rub a bit at his bleary eyes. MJ cocks her head at him from the couch, laptop open on her lap. “Yeah, there were like, more than two thousand people, someone said. A lot of them are staying overnight. They’ve sectioned off that whole side of the street.”
MJ nods, glancing towards the silent but glowing television. A live feed of the vigil, cut with clips of different newscasters, the cleanup crews working through the damage from the Freeze, and updates from Bellevue on Spider-Man’s condition.
“No updates,” she informs Ned, the worry crease in her brow Ned usually only sees during finals making an off-season appearance as she looks back at him. “Not since they took him in for surgery.”
“Yeah,” Ned nods. “Yeah, I’ve been listening.”
To about six different news networks all at once, courtesy of a program he’d developed for the Spidey-tracker to sort through local Spider-Man news pings and separate the likely real from the definitely bull. All echoing slightly varied versions of the same line, when it comes to the odds of Spider-Man making it through the night.
Maybe with a miracle.
Meaning, there’s a non-zero chance Ned never meets him again. Meaning, he'll never get to say thank you for saving them from the Freeze. Meaning, the coolest experience of Ned’s life might be one of Spider-Man’s very last. Meaning, Ned could’ve stolen one of Spider-Man’s last living hours for his own stupid, Lord of the Rings, Q-and-A-with-a-superhero, Lego building purposes, and not even known it.
“Hey,” MJ says in a soft voice, closing her laptop and getting to her feet. “Are you okay?”
Ned opens his eyes again. He hadn’t even realized he’d shut them. “What?”
MJ closes the distance between them, going to lean against the other wall of the entryway, opposite from Ned. She studies him for a moment, looking the slightest bit conflicted. “Are you like, feeling okay? Feeling—normal?”
Ned squints at her. “Are you? Are…any of us?”
MJ gives a little snort of concurrence, and she sounds tired, too. Ned feels bad, keeping her up, realizing now that she must’ve been waiting for him since he’d texted her that he was heading home from Bellevue. “Yeah, no, that’s…” she exhales slowly. “No. We're not. I guess I'm just…”
“Being weird?” Ned finishes for her, eyebrows raised.
MJ gives a tight smile, looking up at the ceiling above Ned as if seeing something entirely different. After a moment, the smile fades. “Can I ask you to do something for me? And have you promise you won’t like, ask me any follow-up questions, or turn it into some big, out of proportion thing, or like, get worried I’ve fallen down one of those conspiracy rabbit holes again?”
“The way you phrased that, just now, I’m already worried you’ve fallen down one of those conspiracy rabbit holes again.”
“Well,” MJ says certainly, “I haven’t. And I need you to promise.”
She’s been quiet, ever since Spider-Man left. The type of quiet she gets when she’s lost in her head, stuck on a problem, turning it over in her mind. And she’s been like that…a lot, recently, to be completely fair, but Ned had chalked today’s wave of silence up to today’s…everything else. Nearly getting hit by a train, and Spider-Man, and the Freeze, and all of it.
He’s not so sure, all of the sudden.
Ned knows she’s been struggling, ever since they moved back to the city. Knows that sometimes his attempts to help do—the opposite, of that. Which just, sucks, because MJ’s just—
The best. Ned’s favorite person, honestly. His favorite anyone.
“Yeah,” Ned tells her. “Yeah, MJ. You know you can always tell me whatever, right? Always.”
MJ nods again, eyes fixed on the wall above his head. “Okay.”
“Okay,” Ned parrots, drawing the word out a little and squinting at her.
A long beat passes. And another. And…a third.
“MJ,” Ned prompts. He raises a hand and waves it in front of her face. “Earth to MJ.”
MJ blinks a few times, then meets his eyes intently. “I need you to tell me," she says, firmly. "If you ever feel like something’s weird, with you. In, your brain, or, or your mind, or—anything. Anything that feels…off, and it’s uncomfortable, or, hurting you somehow or—” she cuts herself off, swallowing. “I just, I need you to tell me.”
Ned blinks at her a few times, certain that the late hour is messing with him somehow. “Like…physically? Or, emotionally, or…?”
“Like, I don’t know—ly,” MJ grits out, sounding frustrated. “I don’t think—but just, you will, right? You’ll tell me. If something’s wrong, you’ll tell me.”
“MJ,” Ned says honestly, “Have I ever kept even like, the tiniest bit of discomfort I’m experiencing to myself in my life? Remember our shitty dorm mattresses? Or the time I got bit by those two mosquitos in like, the exact same spot?”
MJ considers this, relaxing a little. “Right.”
“I’m a wuss,” Ned tells her emphatically. “Like a toddler in a grown man’s body. There is no pain I feel that is not immediately shared with the world at large.”
“Okay,” MJ puts up both of her hands, placatingly.
“I’m like a chihuahua. Or a guinea pig. Or a baby with colic.”
“I get it,” MJ says flatly. “You promise.”
“I promise without even needing to promise anything,” Ned agrees bracingly. “And I can tell this is about the Eiffel Tower mind control thing again, and I want you to know that I accept that, and I love it about you.”
MJ opens her mouth, then seems to think better of it. It shuts. “Right,” she says, again.
Ned looks at her for a moment, waiting her to continue. When she doesn’t, he heaves a sigh, holding his arms out to her and gesturing her towards him with his fingertips. “C’mon, Watson. Get in here.”
MJ’s eyes drop down to his open arms, then back up to his face. She says, voice flat, “Why would I do that?”
“Uh, because you love me,” Ned tells her confidently, “And we both survived, yet another, apocolypse-level, possibly-city-ending event, unharmed. And, you almost got killed by a train. And, Spider-Man might be dead when we wake up tomorrow, which would suck ass, so it’s kind of your job as my roommate to comfort me. And what would comfort me right now is a loving embrace from a loving friend.”
MJ eyes his arms with mild distaste, but Ned can see right through her. Reading MJ Watson is a skill, best learned with time and attention and a crazy number of obscure literature references, and Ned? Ned’s gone platinum.
She needs this.
With a roll of her eyes, MJ leans forward, gives him a perfunctory squeeze, and lets go.
Huh. Maybe Ned was wrong. Maybe she didn’t need that.
Maybe that was Ned, projecting. He does that. He’s been told he does that.
“‘Night, Nedward,” MJ calls behind her as she makes her way back to the bedrooms, arms wrapped tightly around herself. “Sweet dreams and bee stings, or whatever the fuck.”
“You’re the love of my life,” Ned calls after her, yawning. “My candle on the water. The wind beneath my wings.”
“Ditto,” she calls back, deadpan, as the door to her room swings shut with a click.
It’s not until he’s sat himself down in front of his computer, thinking he’ll spend another hour or two combing for news and data about the Freeze and figuring it into his Spider-Man calculations, that Ned reaches into his pocket and realizes his energy shot is gone.
He curses with feeling, tipping his head forward until it meets the desk, and it feels as heavy as the defeat on his tongue. His eyes are heavy, too, sandbags that drag at his lids every time he blinks, every time he squints through his glasses at the bright light of the screen.
“I don’t get it,” he mutters to the desk. “How does she do that?”
Thirty seconds later he’s passed out cold, a missed lego pressing into his cheek and the newscast still on and flickering from the television screen.
--
Finishing the secret handshake with a flourish, tapping into a layer of muscle recall and memory and maybe even magic that Ned had been completely unaware existed inside of him up until this very moment, is a lot like being dumped in a vat of freezing cold water.
Ned feels like he’s gasping for air as Peter—Peter, fucking Peter—stands and watches, what had been a timid smile quickly fading from his face as Ned sits there looking like an idiot and just trying to, to breathe as so many small parts of it come trickling back, memories crawling through the folds of his mind and fucking—repopulating, re-colonizing, re-Peter-izing, his synapses.
You got bit by a spider? Can it bite me? Does it—
—need another coat of paint, Ned. It’s supposed to look like a real Medieval shield. Otherwise Betty is gonna to kick our—
—asses in your seats, boys. We’re going to be late, and Ben can’t start the car until you’re both—
—a couple of losers. Only losers get themselves into these kinds of loser situations. You’re lucky that I was the one Harrington told to come—
—and find you, okay? I’m going to come and find you.
I know you will.
I know you will.
I know you will. I know you will, I know you—
Peter asks something, a question, but it’s garbled, like his voice is coming from underwater. Ned shakes his head, trying and failing to clear the fog from his mind.
He turns to the window, attempting to latch onto one of the sets of passing feet just to give his brain something to focus on, somewhere to put his consciousness that isn’t five, ten, fifteen years in the past. He watches a woman’s black heels click down the street and turn the corner. A man’s leather boots. Ned blinks, rapidly.
Peter’s voice sounds again, but Ned doesn’t hear it. He’s staring at a small child’s Captain America sneakers, fumbling down the sidewalk. He’s eleven years old, lightsaber fighting his best friend through the living room. He’s fifteen, kicking at the top bunk in an attempt to wake Peter up for breakfast. He’s twelve, he’s seventeen, he’s ten, he’s a pair of sensible loafers finding their way around the corner, he’s—
Alone.
That’s what Ned is, when the dust settles, when the feeling of the freezing water finally recedes and Ned can take a deep breath again, can set down the bag of chips he hadn’t realized he was still holding.
He feels—raw. Split open and sewn back together, so many hunks and bits and pieces of it still missing that his head is practically a colander. Ned squeezes his eyes shut tight, pressing the heels of his hands in under his glasses until a smattering of stars breaks across his vision, and counts to ten.
Then he opens them again and he’s still—Peterless.
Five years and a lifetime and the guy couldn’t, what? Wait thirty fucking seconds for Ned to catch his breath? To gather a couple of the shattered shards of his brain together from wherever they’ve been floating around, out there in the infinite cosmos?
“Jesus fucking—” Ned mutters, fumbling with his chair as he extracts himself from his seat, chucking his napkin on the plate and nearly knocking the table over in his mad dash to the front door.
He throws the door open, heart pounding, and steps out into the middle of the sidewalk, ignoring the disgruntled huffs and strings of profanities that follow him as he completely disrupts the flow of traffic.
Ned swivels around, scanning and searching, scanning and searching, scanning and—
—scan complete. EMP web grenades are now fully operational.
‘It actually worked? Dude, that’s nuts.’
‘I'm telling you, we’re geniuses, dude. This is going to make that Destructo guy so much easier to nab. His whole suit is basically one big microchip, and with these maybe I’ll actually be able to actually—‘
Finds him.
A bobbing head in the mass of bodies, eyes fixed on the ground. A bouquet of flowers clenched in a tight fist, a backpack slung over a shoulder. Ned sees him, sees him, sees him.
And he runs.
“Sorry,” he says breathlessly, to women with strollers and men with briefcases and children with cellphones. “Sorry, gotta just, make this light, gotta just—sorry, just—sorry—”
Ned weaves, between strollers and toddlers and bicycles and there’s the loafers, again, he’s caught up, he’s caught up, he’s—
“Peter!” he shouts. “Peter Parker!”
The bobbing head fifteen feet in front of him freezes, bouquet drooping in his hand.
Slowly, the guy turns.
And it’s—him.
It’s fucking him.
It’s like—one of those double images, where the angle changes, and the sun reflects, and suddenly—poof, different picture. But then you tilt it back, squint a little, and the image hovers, right on the edge, and for just a moment, you can see both. The past, still fragmented, foggy, blurry even as Ned’s subconscious tries, adjacently, to sort through the shattered pieces. The present, this—this man, right in front of him, with all these new, sharp angles to his face but still, at the root of it, at the end of Ned’s old memories and the beginning of his new ones, the same. fucking. face.
“Holy shit,” Ned breathes, or thinks, or maybe says out loud, coming to a stop two, three feet from Peter's front.
Peter says nothing, eyes searching Ned’s face with a fragile, desperate sort of hope. People mill around them, some of them huffing out annoyed grunts, some of them brushing against Ned’s back and shoulders, rustling the cellophane on Peter’s bouquet. Ned can’t feel them. He can’t feel anything but five years, dissolving before his face.
“Dude,” Ned whispers, barely managing to contain the break of his voice. “Dude.”
Peter is still looking at him with all that simultaneously cautious and desperate, bleeding disbelief. His hand is on his backpack strap, knuckles white from the strength of his grip as he stands there, frozen. Like he can’t believe that this, that Ned, is real.
Like Ned is the one who fell off the face of the earth for five years. Like Ned is the one who, who buried his aunt, and then got forgotten by the entire world, and then went and got himself fucking shot—
And then Ned’s moving, before he’s even fully processing he’s doing it. More of that muscle memory, maybe.
He reaches out a hand to grab Peter’s arm there in the middle of the sidewalk and tugs him, hard, pulling him firmly into a fiercely brutal, bone-crushing hug.
Peter stiffens at the feeling, breath catching, and Ned just—holds him tighter. Squeezes that much harder, around Peter’s solid shoulders and worn jacket and seemingly frozen limbs.
“Peter,” Ned says numbly. “Peter.”
The sounds of the city around them are chaotic, horns honking in the distance and music playing from somewhere, random blasts of chilly AC from the apartment building behind them tickling Ned’s neck as he stands there wrapped around Peter like a toddler begging for attention.
A car alarm sounds.
A group of kids with a basketball thunder by.
And then something…breaks.
Peter slumps like his strings have been cut, wrapping the arm not holding his flowers around Ned’s shoulders, gripping him cautiously and then tight, tighter, so tightly Ned thinks there must be some super-strength involved, in some way or another. After a moment, when it's clear it's not a fluke, when it’s clear Ned’s not planning on letting up any time soon, he buries his face in the crook of Ned’s neck, eyes squeezed shut.
Ned can feel Peter breathing, deep, trembling breaths that shake his entire rib cage under Ned’s arms as they stand there gripping each other, in the way and not giving a shit about it. He can feel when he starts crying, too, and how quickly Peter manages to reign himself in, releasing Ned immediately and taking a step back, wiping quickly at his eyes with the shoulder of his jacket and blinking rapidly back any additional moisture.
“Sorry,” he tells Ned in a slightly hoarse voice, eyes still desperately searching his face. He clears his throat. “I…yeah. Sorry.”
“Of course the first thing out of your mouth would be an apology for the wrong fuckin’ thing,” Ned mutters with an exasperated shake of his head, still drinking Peter in. Eyes flicking back and forth across his face so fast it almost makes Ned dizzy as he attempts to memorize him, commit him to memory for good this time, store that memory somewhere where magic can never touch it.
Because he’d forgotten. A small part of Ned—a small part of stupid, brilliant, in-over-his-head, seventeen-year-old Ned—had believed that maybe, it just wouldn’t work. That it couldn’t, with just how much there was, volume-wise, in history between Ned Leeds and Peter Parker. Years and years and years worth of memories, of pictures, of orbiting each other’s digital footprints. Years of Spider-Man tech, coded into Ned’s computer systems. Years of Peter’s clothing, left in Ned’s closet. But—
It did, is the thing. It did work. God help him, it worked. Better than Ned ever could’ve imagined.
Because he had no idea. Genuinely, honestly. Up until this moment, right here, right now, Ned had—no fucking idea.
Peter doesn’t take it back or try to apologize again. He just looks at Ned, really looks at him again, Ned’s face and clothes and shoes, and actually laughs a little, overwrought, like he still can’t believe what he’s seeing.
“You couldn’t wait?” Ned asks abruptly as a woman in a blazer, typing at her phone in a way that seems important, cuts between the two of them. Ned gestures back to the corner store he’d sprinted out of. “Took you—five fucking years, and you couldn’t wait another minute?”
Peter opens his mouth, smile fading. Closes it. “You…you told me to go,” he finally says, haltingly, gesturing limply with the flowers. His voice is deeper, a little bit. More worn at the edges.“You—I asked you, if you were okay, and you just, turned away.”
“I couldn’t hear you,” Ned says incredulously because, this guy. This absolutely idiotic, idiot of a guy. Ned wants to hug him again. He kind of wants to hit him. He wants to drag him home and tie him to a chair, and grill him until both their voices go out. “I was inside a fucking—memory blizzard. You could’ve given me a minute.”
“I gave you like, five,” Peter says, but he seems to be having a hard time keeping the emotion off of his face, and any sting he’d intended with the words is lost. He swallows, eyes searching. “You—do you actually remember? Like—actually, actually?”
Ned thinks about making a joke, instinctually wants to roll his eyes and say, no, dude, I just thought I’d run up and hug the random guy that introduced himself to me in the corner store, to see what would happen. But he gets the feeling from the expression on Peter’s face that Peter might actually break in half if he does that, might shatter into little pieces of Spider-Man here on the sidewalk.
So Ned shakes his head a little, instead. Says, “Yeah. Some. Bits and pieces. Not—there’s a lot, still gone.”
“Yeah?” Peter asks in an impossibly soft voice, brows furrowing like he doesn’t dare to believe him. Doesn’t dare to hope.
Five years.
Ned nods again, throat feeling tight. “Yeah, dude.”
Peter scrubs a hand over his mouth, turning away from Ned for a moment as if overwhelmed by the look of him, the feeling of this, and something old inside of Ned, something so old it’s ancient, pangs.
A thought occurs, and Ned straightens, managing to drag his gaze from Peter to the bodies milling around them for a few seconds. “It’s just me, right? No one else got the memories zapped back into them at the same time, in some giant—cosmic fluke, or wizard blast, or something?”
Peter shakes his head as if trying to clear it, dragging his eyes quickly over to the women chatting on the other side of the sidewalk before they jump right back to Ned. “No. I don’t think so. Nobody’s tried to mob me, yet, at least. It’s—it’s just you, I think.”
Ned nods slowly, screwing his eyes shut for a moment against the flurry of motion and emotion surrounding him. He’s tired, suddenly, like the energy it took his body to process the return of so many memories held on just long enough to get him down the sidewalk, and was then unceremoniously drained from his limbs.
“We should talk,” Peter says, then immediately backtracks, “If you want to. If you—do you? Want to? It doesn’t have to be now. It could be later. Whenever, later. Or another time, if that’s better, or—”
“Yeah,” Ned cuts him off with a snort, incredulous. “Yeah, Pete. We should talk. We should like, definitely, talk.”
“Yeah?” Peter asks again, the relief in his voice obvious as the bouquet droops again in his hand. “You want—I mean, you want to?”
“I’ve been looking for you for like, five fuckin’ years, man,” Ned tells him helplessly, unsure where the words come from, but something about them rings hollow and true. The look on Peter’s face is like Ned’s stabbed him in the gut, eyes swimming with unnamed emotion. Ned swallows, ignoring the feeling of tears pricking at his eyes.
“Of course I want to talk.”