Work Text:
The Spider-Tracker was not cooperating.
Ned had the circuit board out on the kitchen table with the soldering iron balanced on a spare tile from the bathroom because they didn't own a soldering mat, which said most of what needed saying about his post-MIT financial situation. The signal processor kept throwing a voltage spike on the secondary antenna feed, and he'd replaced the capacitor twice, and both times it had fixed the problem for about forty minutes before the spike came back like it had never left and was, honestly, a little offended he'd tried.
MJ's sketchpad sat at the other end of the table. She was in her room on a call with a prospective roommate - her voice came through the wall in short, specific bursts that meant she was explaining something to somebody who wasn't getting it.
He set the soldering iron down and leaned back. The tracker stared up at him from the table, guts exposed, doing nothing.
He'd built it because he wanted to find Spider-Man. That part was true. The part he couldn't explain was why finding Spider-Man felt personal. Spider-Man saved people. Spider-Man had saved him, multiple times, in circumstances Ned remembered with the kind of clarity that adrenaline burns into your memory permanently. But Spider-Man saved a lot of people. That was the whole point of Spider-Man. You didn't build a tracking device for every person who'd done you a solid.
He'd built it because something was missing, and his brain kept treating the absence like an unsolved problem. The tracker gave him something to solder instead of an answer.
Then Peter showed up.
Not Spider-Man. Peter. Peter Parker, who Ned had first known as Flower Guy from the housewarming. Ned had been halfway through his food at a bodega table when Peter walked in, saw him, hesitated, and came over anyway.
"Hi."
"Uh, hey." Ned looked up. "Oh, whoa. Uh, Flower Guy, right? From the party?"
"I'm Peter."
"Okay. Hello."
Peter held out his hand. Ned took it. What started as a normal handshake shifted on the second beat. Peter moved, and Ned's hand met him there without thinking. Then came the third move, the fourth, and the rest of a sequence Ned had no memory of learning.
The handshake.
His hand had known the pattern. Not the first move - that could've been coincidence, a standard grip, everybody did that. But the whole thing. His conscious mind had arrived about three beats late going what the hell was that, and his hand had no answer except I don't know but it's right.
The name had already been sitting in Ned's head since MJ let it slip at the apartment. Spider-Man was Peter. Flower Guy was Peter. The handshake connected them before Ned did.
"Peter," Ned said.
Peter smiled. Three weeks later, Ned still couldn't think of a better way to describe it. Peter had looked like a person being told they existed.
Somehow, after that, they'd exchanged numbers. Peter's phone was cracked on one corner and had a case that had once been blue but was now the color of someone who didn't take care of his belongings and knew it. Ned had texted him a thumbs-up so Peter would have his number too. Peter had texted back a single "thanks." Neither of them had texted since.
Three weeks. Twenty-one days. Ned had opened the thread eleven times. He'd counted, because apparently that was what he did now - pull up a near-stranger's contact, draft something casual, stare at it, decide it sounded either too eager or too weird or like he was pretending the handshake hadn't happened, and close the app. Every draft read like a text from somebody who didn't know the handshake, and he couldn't figure out how to write one from somebody who did. At least acknowledging the handshake would be honest. Pretending it was nothing felt more dishonest than admitting he had no idea what it was.
His phone buzzed. Group text.
food hall saturday, 7ish. bring whoever
A few of their friends were meeting in Greenpoint. Every couple of months the group did some version of the same thing: too much food, somebody arriving forty minutes late, an argument about a movie that devolved into six people googling the same fact at the same time and arriving at different conclusions. Low stakes. Nobody had to be interesting. You showed up, you ate, you left when you felt like leaving.
Ned stared at the text.
bring whoever
His mind did what it had been doing since the bodega, which was to take any opening - any social invitation, any unscheduled evening, any possible reason to reach out - and attach Peter Parker to it before Ned had finished reading the sentence.
He put the phone face-down on the table. He picked up the soldering iron. He put the soldering iron back down.
"Hey," MJ said. She'd come out of her room without him noticing, which was her primary skill and had been for as long as he'd known her. She opened the fridge, pulled out a half-empty container of hummus and a bag of carrots.
"How's the tracker?"
"The tracker has a voltage spike on the secondary feed. I've replaced the same capacitor twice and it keeps coming back, which means the problem isn't the capacitor, which means I've been fixing the wrong thing."
MJ sat down at her end of the table and opened the hummus. "You want to invite Peter on Saturday."
Ned opened his mouth. Closed it.
"You've been staring at your phone like it insulted you since the group started making plans," she said. "And you only do that when you're thinking about texting someone you don't know how to text."
"I text lots of people."
"You text me, you text your mom, and you text the group chat. Everyone else you call. So it's either Peter or you finally caved and downloaded a dating app, and I need to know which one because one of those requires follow-up questions."
"It's Peter."
"I know it's Peter." She dipped a carrot. "So what's stopping you?"
Ned leaned back in his chair. It should have been the easiest invitation in the world. Instead, he still hadn't sent it.
"I don't know him."
"You sort of know him."
"I know his name, his number, and that he's Spider-Man. I know my hand remembers a handshake I don't. That's not knowing somebody. That's a Wikipedia stub." He paused. "But when he came up to the apartment and we built that Lego set - it was just easy. Like I'd known him forever."
MJ ate the carrot. Her face was doing the careful version, which was no expression at all unless you'd lived with her long enough to know that no expression was her most deliberate one.
"What do you actually want to do?" she asked.
"I want to invite him on Saturday."
"Then invite him."
"But it's weird."
"It's a little weird."
"See? It's weird. You just said it's weird."
"I said it's a little weird. You said it's weird. There's a range." She took another carrot. "Weird isn't a reason not to do something."
Ned glanced at the circuit board between them. Months of weekends. A piece of technology built to find a person he'd since met in a bodega.
"He looked at me like he'd been waiting," Ned said.
MJ's carrot stopped halfway to the hummus.
"At the bodega. When the handshake happened. He looked at me like he'd been waiting a really long time for it to work. I don't know what it worked on. My hand knew the whole thing, MJ, and his face when it happened -"
He stopped because his voice was doing something he didn't want it to do.
MJ set the carrot down. She didn't say anything for a few seconds. When she spoke, her voice was the version she used when she was saying something she'd already thought about more than once.
"I know."
Two words. Ned watched her.
"He wore the mask the whole time you two built the X-Wing," she said. "And I drew his face anyway. I'd seen it at the housewarming and on Frank's boat, but not while you were sitting there." She paused. "I left the drawing beside his hospital bed. I don't have an explanation either."
"You left it?"
"Yeah."
The apartment was quiet except for the fridge humming and somebody downstairs watching something with a bass line that vibrated through the floor.
"So what do I do?" Ned asked.
"You already know what you want to do."
"I know what I want to do. I'm asking if it's okay."
MJ held his eyes. Ned couldn't tell whether she was angry, uncomfortable, or just thinking. He only knew this was the part he couldn't decide for her.
"You don't need my permission to text somebody, Ned."
"That's not what I'm asking."
She held his gaze another second. "I know what you're asking." She picked the carrot back up. "I don't know if it's fine. Invite him anyway."
Ned searched her face for a lie. He didn't find one, which either meant it wasn't there or she was better at hiding things than he was at finding them. Both were possible. Both had always been possible.
"Okay," he said.
He picked up his phone. He opened the text thread. The last message was still there: thanks, from three weeks ago, sitting at the bottom of the screen like the world's smallest conversation.
He started typing.
hey, it's ned
Deleted that. Peter knew it was Ned. His name would show up.
hey man, some friends are getting food saturday
Too normal. It didn't acknowledge anything. It sounded like he was texting someone from a networking event.
hey, this might be kind of random but
Too apologetic. Also "kind of random" was underselling it. This was extremely random. He was inviting a guy he barely knew to dinner with his friends based on a handshake neither of them could explain. There was no casual way to text that.
MJ was watching him draft-and-delete without commenting, which was its own form of commentary.
"Just send something," she said.
"I'm trying to find the right -"
"There isn't a right version. That's why you've been staring at it for three weeks."
He typed:
hey - MJ and I are getting food with some friends saturday in greenpoint. low key. you should come if you're free
He stared at it. It was fine. It was totally fine. It was a normal text from a normal person inviting another normal person to a normal Saturday, and neither of them was normal and nothing about this was normal and the text was fine.
He pressed send before he could delete it again.
The message sent. The little delivered appeared underneath. Ned set the phone on the table and pushed it an inch away from him.
"Great," MJ said. "You survived."
"He hasn't responded yet."
"It's been four seconds."
"A lot can happen in four seconds."
MJ went back to the hummus. Ned went back to pretending he wasn't watching the phone from the corner of his eye. Two minutes passed. Three. The bass line downstairs changed songs. Ned caught himself tapping four beats against the edge of the table. For half a second, there was a school desk under his hand and Peter laughing to his right. Then the fridge motor kicked on and he was back in the kitchen. He stared at his fingertips. Before he could decide whether to say anything, his phone buzzed.
Ned grabbed it so fast he knocked the spool of solder onto the floor. He let it go. Priorities.
One text. Four words.
yeah I'd like that
Ned read it twice. By the third read, he was smiling. He let himself.
He typed back:
cool. I'll send you the address
His fingertips still felt like they had been resting on a school desk. He didn't tell MJ. He wasn't sure what there was to tell.
"He said yes," Ned said.
MJ was leaning against the kitchen counter with her arms crossed. "I know. You look ridiculous." But her face had softened into something she'd probably deny later if he mentioned it.
MJ pushed off the counter and headed toward her room. She paused in the doorway.
"Ned."
"Yeah?"
"If he does the handshake again and you two just stand there doing it for like a full minute in front of everyone, I'm pretending I don't know either of you."
"Totally fair."
"Goodnight."
"Goodnight, MJ."
Her door closed. Ned sat at the kitchen table and opened the group text.
bringing someone