Chapter Text
Later, when he knows better, he’ll remember the thought and be embarrassed, but the first thought Ned has when the stranger walks up to him in the bodega is Wow, he’s hot.
It's a calm Saturday afternoon, or as calm as Manhattan gets: sitting in the bodega with his lunch, working on the latest patch for the Spideytracker app. Serenely he swipes away work emails and a message from MJ about groceries; he’s in his happy place, The Zone, as he thinks of it, diligently and patiently tracking his favorite hero. Spidey hasn't been working for the past couple of weeks, understandably so, considering the severity of his injury, so Ned has been using the time to upgrade the app, fixing each bug that people report, testing new features. Not creepy, he repeats to himself for the thousandth time. Useful. He feels like he was born to do this.
Which is why it takes him a second to notice the young man, distantly familiar and incredibly handsome, standing in front of him, nervously clutching a small bouquet of flowers wrapped in cheap plastic. He sits up straight, tries to place the guy’s oddly anxious face.
"Hi," the guy says, a little breathless, like he's doing something that terrifies him.
Ned glances at the flowers and—you built the Spideytracker? a smile of recognition, maybe he’s a fan too—it clicks.
"Oh! flower guy, right?" he says brightly. "From the party?"
The guy doesn't respond directly, but instead says, "I'm Peter," and sticks out his hand.
Confused, Ned takes his hand and shakes. "Okay, hello.” Wondering where this is going, whether he should be looking around for someone filming a youtube prank or something. Then Peter, who Ned swears introduced himself by a different name at the party, shifts his grip, and something inexplicable happens.
As confident as you like, Ned's hand moves without him consciously deciding to move it. His hand and Peter's hand weave through a long, complicated handshake, separating, coming back together in different shapes, and Peter's not leading him—Ned’s just doing it, like it's something he and this total stranger have been doing for years and neither of them need to consciously think about it.
Perfectly in sync, they drift through the final two moves, a fistbump and fingerguns pointing to each other, and Ned blinks and shakes his head a little. Looks up in wonder at the guy, who's looking back at him with a strange smile, full of naked terror and hope. Something awfully familiar about that face...
"Peter," Ned says, barely hearing himself, and then—
The mother of all migraines slams into his head from behind out of nowhere, obliterating all thought. It’s easily the worst pain he’s ever felt, even beyond the time Peter accidentally dislocated his shoulder when they were wrestling—
Wait, who? He’d dislocated his shoulder falling out of bed. He doesn’t know anyone named Peter.
He clutches his head, locking an embarrassing moan behind his teeth. Someone's touching him, frantic hands fluttering around, someone—does he know them? The voice sounds—but that's—
"Ned," someone—Peter?—whispers, "Ned, can you hear me? What's wrong?"
Ned can't speak, can't do anything but sit there in the middle of the pain and try not to scream. Something's banging on the inside of his head, and with each bang he can sense a revelation coming. This is no ordinary headache, he thinks, semi-coherently, this is—is this—
The pain is blinding, but then suddenly an image—no, a memory—of himself breaks through, MJ beside him as he holds his hand out, a strange double ring connecting his index and middle fingers, swirling his other arm in a circle, saying Find Peter Parker, and he sees the memory, the golden hoop he’d drawn in the air, but even more clearly he remembers the feeling of that moment in time, of his heart reaching out to someone he knew and loved, someone who was in pain and alone.
Wetness under his nose, down his chin. He leans forward, cracks an eye open and sees blood dripping onto the table, just droplets first, then, quickly, in a stream.
"Oh, shit," Peter(?) hisses. "Oh shit. Oh shit. Uhh. Okay. Hang on, Ned, just, hang on," and then takes Ned's arm and wraps it around his own shoulder and lifts him to standing with no effort whatsoever. Handful of crumpled napkins shoved under his nose. Ned's knees buckle weakly and Peter changes tack in an instant and sweeps Ned up bridal style just as easily, something Ned didn’t think was possible; sure, the guy looked like he could be muscular under his jacket, but he was short, almost as short as Ned himself, how was he—
More glimmers of memories slip through the cracks created by the first one, mostly of that same night with him, holding Peter tightly as he cried on the roof of Midtown High, working in the lab with the other two Peters (how did he know their names?), watching the Peters save the villains (the what?). Using magic. Magic. Which is real. Which he knew, somehow.
Another memory breaks through with a thunderclap, of himself watching in silence as Peter crawls across the ceiling, closes his bedroom door quietly, hops down, and turns to see him, and this time Ned can't help the groan of pain that escapes him, thankfully muffled in Peter's shoulder. He's got his arms wrapped around Peter's neck—when did that happen?—and Peter's holding him so tightly, and—are they airborne?
Ned can't look, but he senses the swoop in his chest, the wind in his ears, the Doppler effect of sirens screeching away as they speed through the streets.
He's webbing, Ned realizes. Swinging them... somewhere. Maskless.
Because he's Spider-Man.
In his mind, Ned changes tack and pushes away the wind and the noise and the sound of Peter's panicked voice in his ear assuring him that it’s okay it’s okay please be okay; all of that dims around him as he concentrates on the pain. He plunges himself down into it as it crests and consciously pulls up more images like roots out of the dirt. Flashes of a bubbly woman with waist-length brown hair. A small cluttered apartment he spent more time in than in his own. Notes passed in class, doodles and in-jokes.
He can sense so much more underneath. He’s only pulling up little threads, flares and feelings, things that slip through his fingers. If he trusts and follows that feeling he was having in the first flash memory, of reaching out to Peter with everything in him, what will he find?
He digs his proverbial fingers into his mind and pulls.
And just like that the earth shifts, fault lines of his brain grinding against one another, and every memory—every real memory—floods in.
It's too much at once. Ned blacks out.
-
Something soft under his head. Smell of MJ’s incense. Two voices, both familiar and well-loved—
He’s sitting up before he's aware of commanding his limbs to move, drawing in a sharp gasp, eyes wide and shifting around. His glasses are missing, everything fuzzy and out of focus, but he knows this room; he's on his own living room couch, somehow.
"Oh, thank God," someone breathes by his ear, and then the presence falls back, collapsing onto the floor in a boneless heap. Beyond the immediate, MJ stands a few paces away; she hurries to Ned, kneeling, handing him his glasses and cupping his face in her hands.
“Hey, welcome back,” she says in her quiet, take-charge voice. “I think the bleeding stopped,” she says to the body on the floor. She's much calmer than Peter—oh my God, Peter—who’s still gasping for air like he just finished a marathon, flat on his back, hands covering his face.
“Hi,” Ned says breathlessly. He touches the skin under his nose and feels only sticky, partially dried blood, nothing fresh. MJ grabs the box of tissues from the end table and pulls a few out, begins wiping his chin clear. The headache is gone too, Ned realizes, and takes a minute to thank God for that.
“Do you remember what happened?” MJ asks. “How you got here?”
“Uhh… Not for sure, but I have a pretty good idea. Here, I got it–” Taking the tissues from MJ, he starts wiping at the blood himself.
He directs his next words toward Peter: “I guess it makes sense that there would be physical consequences to breaking a spell that strong."
Peter stops breathing.
MJ’s eyes meet Ned’s and her fingers fall to his shoulders, then down and away until she isn’t touching him at all. Ned feels a barrier go up between them, maybe not MJ’s intention, but it’s there nonetheless. Her gaze flicks between the two of them, and then she stands and backs out of the room. "I'll get you a clean shirt," she murmurs, before she is gone.
Ned takes a long moment to look Peter over as his friend sits up slowly, like he’s afraid any sudden movement will snap the spell back into place. His hair has gone wild, curls sticking up everywhere—presumably from webbing home without the mask. Ned wants to ask how the fuck they got here without anyone seeing them, how on earth he carried his deadweight, passed-out, fat friend through the air with just one arm—but when he sees the look on Peter's face, he shoves the questions to the back of his mind.
"Did it work?" Peter asks.
He’s afraid of the answer, Ned realizes.
Ned doesn't reply with a simple yes or no. He knows his friend; now he knows his friend. He knows Peter will want evidence. So he says: "Ask me."
Peter has his questions ready. "What's my middle name?"
"Benjamin."
"What are my parents' names?"
Ned smirks. "Trick question. I never met them and you never told me, but I know the answer because I snooped on your baby pictures once. Their names were John and Lisa."
Peter's eyes are starting to flood but he swallows it back. Ned isn't sure what he's feeling, but there's a lot of it. Adrenaline racing like six Sharkfire shots directly into his bloodstream. If he raised a hand, it would be shaking. He feels like he could pick up a car barehanded.
"When did I..." Peter hesitates, gestures vaguely toward himself.
"Become Spider-Man? A week after you turned fifteen. Come on, man, give me something hard."
His answers are flawless, thoughtless, delivered with no hesitation. Like these are things he has always known. Because he has always known them. Except for the four and a half years when he didn't.
"You, uh," Peter's voice starts to shake. He takes a beat to wipe his nose, to hide behind his hand for a split second and gather himself. "Tell me, uh—tell me something only you and I would know."
"Like what?” He thinks for a second, and then grabs at a memory, buried deeper than the others, the two of them thirteen and drunk, alone together in Ned’s apartment on New Year’s Eve while Lola was out with her Bridge friends. “I got it. We were each other’s first kiss, remember?” Peter barks out a helpless laugh at that. “That one New Year’s? When we stole Lola’s wine? We swore never to tell anyone.”
As Ned stands up, he realizes it’s not just his hands that are shaky, it’s his whole body, everything vibrating with emotions he can’t decipher, anger and fear and elation and guilt and sorrow and love cycling through him over and over. Peter scrambles to his feet as well. "What else do you need? I got it all, man. You want our Super Smash Brothers stats? Biggest Lego build? The name of that squirrel we made friends with in sixth grade during recess by feeding it Cheetos?"
"Uh," Peter says. He shakes his head, trying to smile but it trembles and breaks as tears start to spill down his cheeks, his throat already jerking with sobs bubbling up. He looks so much younger like this. Distantly, Ned recognizes the look on Peter's face—it’s the look people always have in those viral videos Ned likes to watch sometimes when he needs a good cry. The ones of people seeing loved ones who Blipped for the first time in five years, instantly overcome once understanding hits with its full force. Peter’s arms come up almost involuntarily to reach out, childlike, a kid asking for comfort.
"I am so fucking pissed at you right now," Ned says, and then simultaneously they both surge forward and collide in a hug. Scrabbling clumsy fingers twisting into fabric, pressed together ear to ear. Ned’s half-dried blood rubbing off on Peter’s collar. Peter clutching at Ned's jacket with both hands and pulling tighter, closer. It's a desperate kind of holding, less a returned embrace and more a death grip on a life raft.
Ned has seen Peter cry before, a dozen times—you don't live out of each other's pockets since early elementary school without going through some shit together. But Peter crying into his neck, pushing his face into Ned so that the hard ridge of his nose digs into Ned's muscle—that’s different. Peter crying because of him. Because of missing him.
Ned isn’t crying, beyond a few automatic sympathy tears he always seems to shed whenever Peter is upset (God, he can't believe he forgot that he used to do that, how could he forget how connected they were). He's so overloaded with feeling and memory that it's shut down his whole system; all he can do is shake. Looking over Peter's shoulder he sees MJ, who's watching them—just like she always did, even though she doesn't remember doing it. She swipes a quick hand under her teary eyes, smiles tightly at him, and Ned can tell she's at war with something internally—jealousy, maybe.
"It's okay, I'm here," Ned murmurs, the words automatic and mostly meaningless, just something to say. "It's okay, I'm here now, it's okay." Letting his voice mingle with Peter's, smooth and soothing against his best friend's jagged breath. God, his best friend. Clinging to him like Ned's just come back from war, only he's been here this whole time, living in perfect ignorance, studying and working and making friends and wondering idly if he should stay in Boston after college, completely oblivious to having left the most important person in his life behind.
"I missed you so much," Peter gasps. "I can't believe it worked, oh my god."
He's sobbing so hard it must be hurting him. Ned just holds him, feeling simultaneously like he's lost and gained the whole world, split between a wrenching grief he never got to feel and a rightness he didn't know he was missing.
-
"We need to find Dr. Strange."
It’s the first thing Ned says after Peter calms down. Peter’s head snaps up as he reaches for a tissue and blows his nose.
“What? Why?”
“Uh, so MJ can get her memories back? Duh?”
“I... that's not a good idea. Strange was pretty clear that it shouldn't be reversed.”
Ned opens his arms wide. “You're looking directly at proof that it can be, though. And nothing happened. Did the universe split open while I was out?”
“No, but—”
“Did it break for anyone else?”
Peter looks stunlocked, as though he’d never even considered the possibility. “I mean, I don’t know—I don’t think so, but—”
“Then what’s one more?”
“You almost died.”
Ned scoffs. “Oh, come on, I did not almost die. I had a headache for five minutes.”
“And a nosebleed!”
“I had worse ones when I was a kid.”
“You had a seizure when we were swinging.”
That stops him up short. Finally, the worry on Peter’s face makes sense. “Oh.”
“Yeah, I had to stop on a rooftop until it was over. The only reason I brought you home was so I could get out my phone and call an ambulance, but… Then you woke up, so.”
“Well. Interesting.” Ned puzzles over it, then cracks, “That was some handshake, huh?”
Peter groans. “I'm serious, dude. I thought you were dying.”
“Okay, well. I'm sorry about that, but I’m fine now. Look.” He stands up, walks from one end of the room to the other, closes his eyes and touches his finger to the tip of his nose. Perfect. “See? Wanna check my reflexes too?”
“We don't know—” Peter protests.
“Maybe,” Ned interrupts, trying to head off the worry spiral he can see coming, “maybe I only reacted badly because it was done by someone non-magical. If it’s done by a wizard, like, he probably knows how to do it without hurting MJ, right? He'd have to. Or maybe it was bad because I’ve known you for so much longer. I had a lot of memories to mess around with, you know?”
“We don’t know if that’s even how magic works.”
“It could be—”
“And, also, I don’t know if she even wants them back!”
Ned stares at Peter, aghast. “Why wouldn't she?”
“I.... she's had a whole happy life without me! She has a boyfriend!”
“Who has a boyfriend?”
MJ steps into the room. Ned sees Peter freeze.
“Uh—no one—”
“I’m messing with you,” MJ sighs. “I heard the whole thing.”
"You know that we knew him, right?" Ned asks.
"Yeah, there was a letter... I'll tell you later." She waves it away.
“Good, so tell him, MJ,” Ned says.
“Tell him what?”
“That you want your memories back!”
MJ closes her mouth, sighs through her nose. Ned’s heart sinks. “MJ,” he implores, hardly able to believe it.
“Do I? I don’t know,” she says softly. “I’m sorry.”
Ned opens his mouth, not quite sure what he’s going to say—what could he say to convince her that she was in love with this stranger—when an unfamiliar electronic chime goes off.
Peter starts digging for his phone, muttering oh crap under his breath, yanks it out and checks the message. “I have to go, I’m so sorry,” he says hurriedly. “Can I use your bathroom to change? I’ll be so fast, I promise.”
“Yeah, of course,” Ned says. “You don’t—” but Peter is already through the doorway and disappearing into the bathroom, closing the door behind him “—have to ask,” Ned finishes, deflating.
Lightning quick, MJ dashes into the kitchen and comes back with a pen and the small notebook they use for writing notes to each other about groceries and bills. She writes something down and hands the pad to Ned. “Our phone numbers,” she explains. “Hurry up, before he jumps out the window again.” Ned snaps to and writes his number down under hers, then labels their numbers with their names and a smiley face after each name. He tears the paper out just as Peter—well, Spider-Man now—whirls through the room, costumed head-to-toe, pulling his mask on and adjusting it so it sits just right.
“Okay, thank you again, I’m really sorry, I have to go,” he apologizes again, this time muffled a little by the mask.
“It’s okay,” Ned assures him, “and, here, turn around—”
He shoves the paper into Peter’s still-open bag. “Our numbers,” he explains as he zips the bag closed. “Call us when you’re done working.”
Peter stands still for a minute, inscrutable under the mask but clearly taken aback.
“If you want to,” Ned adds, uncertain.
“Yes,” Peter says quickly, relief in his voice. “Yes, sorry, I want to. I want to.”
“Okay, well,” Ned says when he doesn’t move. “Go get ‘em, tiger.”
“Right, yeah,” and then he’s through the window and whisking himself away.
-
“So you… really remember everything, huh?” MJ asks about an hour later.
They’re sitting on either end of the couch, staring at but not really watching the cooking show that’s playing on the television screen. Both of them have been silent up until now, each processing the whirlwind that is Peter Parker in their own individual ways.
“Everything, yeah,” Ned says. “Like it was yesterday.”
“How?”
Ned looks at her.
She continues, “He didn’t explain, when he brought you in through the window. He was too freaked out. And then you woke up right when he was about to call the ambulance.”
“We made up a secret handshake, when we were kids,” Ned says distantly. “He came up to me in the bodega and introduced himself, shook my hand and then we were just doing the secret handshake.” He looks down at his hands. “Like my hand remembered it flawlessly even though I had no idea what was happening. And then the final boss of headaches hit me and I remembered one thing, and then another and another and then it all came back like a dam breaking and that’s when I blacked out.”
“Wow,” MJ says, soft. She’s not the sentimental type, but Ned feels the sincerity in her voice. There’s something else on her mind, though, and Ned watches the chef on tv mince up clove after clove of garlic while she works through it.
“So…” MJ says eventually. “You know how I told you Jean bodysnatched me for a bit, right?”
Ned turns to her. “Yeah?”
“Well, apparently, I… Jean, I mean, in my body—I kissed him,” she says, all in a rush. “Like, she must have made him think it was me and that I remembered him, somehow.”
Ned’s heart twists in pain for Peter, always decent and respectful almost to the point of primness, and for MJ too, who’s obviously wrestling with it. “That sucks,” he says sincerely.
MJ shifts uncomfortably in her seat. “And I know true love’s kiss is bullshit and all, but—” She shakes her head, smiling her rueful, one-sided smile. “If I really loved him, why didn’t it work, you know?”
Ned reaches out and covers her hand with his, and to his surprise she doesn’t pull away, but turns her hand up and clasps his. “I don’t know,” he says, apologetic. “From everything that’s happened… Jean seems like a super powerful psychic. She completely shut your mind off to take over your body, right? You don’t remember any of it when she was in there?”
“No,” MJ says. Ned feels her suppress a shudder.
“So,” Ned says, thinking it out, “if your whole mind was basically offline at the time, doesn’t it… kind of make sense that it wouldn’t work? Your body wasn’t you at all, so your memories couldn’t be activated. Which… maybe means that your memories are still in your mind somewhere. Just like, suppressed.”
“Oh, is that how memory spells work, mister wizard?” MJ says sarcastically, no real bite to it.
“I have done magic, actually,” Ned says proudly.
MJ narrows her eyes. “Shut up.”
“No, really, it’s the first thing I remembered.” He draws one arm back, other arm outstretched. “Like this. Find Peter Parker.” He swirls his left arm in a large circle.
Nothing happens.
MJ raises an eyebrow at him.
Ned drops his arms, disappointed but not surprised, and turns his hands up in a what can ya do gesture. “I had Dr. Strange’s ring on at the time, so.”
“Oh, sure,” MJ says.
“Come on, don’t tell me you don’t believe me.”
“I do,” she insists. “It’s just.” She leans forward, elbows on her knees, frustrated. “Why don’t I feel it?”
The question hangs heavily over the room, and Ned doesn’t have an answer.
A half hour later, another cooking show playing on the television, the sky darkening into a chilly, cloudy evening, Ned speaks into that heaviness.
“Maybe you did.”
MJ looks at him. “What do you mean?”
“Do you remember senior year of high school, around the middle of November?” Ned starts carefully, gathering his thoughts. He tries to put himself back in the headspace he’d suddenly and for no apparent reason found himself in, inexplicably depressed and achingly lonely despite having been mostly (in his faulty memory) friendless and alone and fine with it his whole life. He’d woken up crying in the middle of the night more than once that month, unsure what was wrong but feeling an awful wrongness nevertheless.
“I remember us both being really depressed,” Ned says, and MJ nods slowly, her eyebrows drawing together as she thinks about it. “It went away after a couple of weeks.”
“Yeah,” MJ says. “I couldn’t sleep. I couldn’t figure out why.”
“That was right after everything,” Ned says. “Right after the spell.”
He watches MJ turn that over in her head as they both settle back into watching but not seeing the television.
Another long silence. The clock ticks past eight, past nine. The Spideytracker chimes in clusters, then slows and stops as Spider-Man moves off and swings away to… wherever he goes. Ned waits for one of their phones to ring.
Neither one does.
"You know what else I remember? With absolute perfect clarity?"
MJ mutes the television. Ned realizes she's been waiting for this. "What?"
"I remember him promising us, both of us, together and individually, that he would come find us. And make us remember him. It was the last thing he said to me. I can hear him in my head saying it, I can remember trusting him. And then he just. Didn't." He turned to MJ, who's watching him with an inscrutable expression. "Why would he do that?"
MJ sighs. "When we were at the Punisher's place, we got to talking a little. He said that he used to have someone in his life that he... loved." The word is clearly painful to get out. "And he had to let her go to keep her safe."
"Okay, counterpoint: bullshit," Ned says immediately. MJ raises an eyebrow. Shock has curdled, surprisingly for Ned, into a bitter, hurt kind of helpless frustration, like beating a wall bloody with his fists and getting nowhere. "It's the same with every superhero in the comics, I swear to God! Always with the keeping you safe bullshit and never realizing that keeping you safe, at least half the time, is the reason the person they're trying to keep safe gets put in danger! Like, people proximate to superheroes get hurt when we don't know what's going on, because we never know if we're walking into danger or not and we can't prepare ourselves. We're safer with more information and so are they. He knew that. I was his guy in the chair, I watched his back. And you did too, in a different way. Why would he just leave us behind like that?"
"You're asking me to psychoanalyze a man I've only met like three times," MJ says sardonically.
"Sorry."
"I don't know, Ned. He's probably lost people before, right?"
“Yeah, but…”
“But?”
“But it’s us,” Ned says, and then surprises himself by bursting into tears.
In an instant, as though she’s been waiting for this too, MJ scoots down to his end of the couch, tissue box in hand.
“Sorry,” he chokes, wiping his face.
“Nuh-uh, zip it.” She wraps one arm around him, tugging him in close, and he pulls his glasses off and buries his face in her shoulder.
“I don’t know what to do,” he admits in a small voice.
She wraps her other arm around him too, closing him in a warm MJ loop, and rests her cheek on top of his head.