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The first time Peter Parker has sex with his best friend is on a Thursday night in October.
They’re twenty-two years old each (forty-four collectively, which is a whole lotta wisdom, Ned, I’m telling you--) which puts them five months out from Ned graduating ESU and Peter having a meeting with his counselor to determine he needs one more year.
Peter says something crude about JJ Abrams and Ned says something or other in response and then there are clothes on the floor and hands on bodies-- but this isn’t how simple it is.
And this also isn’t where it starts.
***
“It doesn’t have to happen again,” Peter tells him, the next morning as they stand awkwardly on opposite sides of Ned’s kitchen. “If you don’t…”
“If I don’t want it to?” Ned asks, something in the tilt of his brow that disconnects itself from the rest of his body language.
Peter swallows, but that’s even farther from the start.
***
“Don’t stop,” Ned gasps into the crook of Peter’s neck, and we’re somewhere in the middle now, but that’s only because it’s so difficult to find a beginning and an ending to a story like this one.
A story with kids turned adults, or at least a couple of boys masquerading as such.
A story with love, too broad a word fitting into too many boxes for the same two people.
A story so simple it’s borderline incomprehensible, at least for the people stuck inside of it.
But that’s not the important bit, because the important bit is figuring out where to start. Not here, with Peter’s fingers in Ned’s hair and his heart beating too fast, but only because if Peter were to tell it, this isn’t where he’d start.
He’d start at a party five months earlier.
***
“I think we should play truth or dare.”
“Bad idea,” Peter shakes his head, the lamps scattered around Michelle’s apartment that they’ve covered with colorful scarves to diffuse the mood of the space into warm reds and oranges instead of the usual harsh white of her environmentally friendly bulbs spinning in his drunken state. “Very bad idea.”
“You’re boring,” Michelle frowns at him, sitting on the floor and leaning up against Betty’s legs across from where Peter’s slouched on the couch.
“You’ve had too much to drink,” Peter points an accusatory finger at her.
“You’ve had too much to drink,” she replies with a pout.
“Those two things aren’t mutually exclusive,” Flash snorts, completely sober and eating a bowl of macaroni and cheese he’d made for himself and no one else, sitting on the windowsill with legs dangling.
It’s a graduation party, a big collective one for everyone who actually is graduating, meaning Flash (who had taken a gap year for shitty dad reasons they don’t make him talk about anymore) and Peter (who has gotten better about his abysmal attendance but is still making up for Spider-Man-induced, withdrawn credits) are the only two that aren’t guests of honor.
Peter’s not embarrassed to be extending past the usual four-year college experience, and in fact he’s pretty proud of himself for how far he’s gotten with the number of labs and exams and study sessions he’s had to run out of halfway through for spider-related incidents.
And really, at the end of the day, drunk and happy and wrapped up in the glow of homemade light diffusion, Peter’s just proud of his friends.
Michelle Jones-- already with a job lined up at a gallery; Betty Brant-- whose internship at the Bugle is turning into a full-time beat position; and Ned Leeds.
Ned Leeds who has been there for every one of Peter’s incidents and has still managed to nail college so hard that he has his pick of tech jobs in the city and out of it. Ned Leeds, who sits next to Peter and takes a swig out of a bottle of whiskey Michelle keeps handing around and hasn’t stopped laughing all night.
It’s that laughter, that undeniable joy, that makes Peter feel good about where he stands in his life. Because who cares that he’s fallen behind some arbitrary norm if his friends are this happy, this successful, this beautiful in the dim light of Michelle Jones’ and Betty Brant’s apartment.
“Okay, okay,” Ned cuts into Michelle’s continued complaints that the party has gotten boring and it needs reviving with a stumbling laugh that betrays his inebriation. “Truth or dare, MJ-- you wanna truth or dare?”
Michelle holds her hands up triumphantly in the air as she beams, “truth, Nedward-- if you can handle it.”
“Truth,” Ned smirks, Peter leaning his cheek on the back of the couch to look at the way his face moves, cheeks pulling with the eagerness in the rest of his posture. “Are you and Gwen back together?”
Michelle’s hands and face fall in tandem as she scowls at Ned.
“Nevermind,” she says. “This game is stupid.”
That earns her a chorus of boisterous, good-humored jeers from everyone else in the room, Peter positively cackling at the look on her face when Betty calls out, “she’s been texting her all night!” with two hands pointing at the phone that does indeed glow bright white in Michelle’s lap.
“Shut up!” Michelle covers her face with her hands, but even if the game doesn’t continue after that, they do at least eventually get to hear the newest installment in the relationship of Michelle Jones and Gwen Stacy-- ever changing but certainly on its way to someplace real and stable.
As soon as they just fucking talk about it anyway, Peter thinks, wondering how the two of them could have such a good thing going and simply not bother to see it.
He has another drink, relishing in the feel of it until Flash categorically cuts them all off, and he finds himself bickering with Michelle for most of the remaining night, debating something or other that they’ll both probably realize they don’t actually care about in the morning but having a blast all the while.
Peter spends so long with Michelle, in fact, that when a sleepy, sluggish Ned puts a hand on his shoulder and asks, “ready to go home?” he realizes that he’s hardly spent any time at all with his best friend.
And that really won’t do.
“I missed you,” Peter says with a drunken sort of sincerity as he grabs Ned’s face in both of his hands just hard enough to smush his cheeks a little bit.
Ned laughs brightly, hands wrapping around Peter’s wrists but not pulling his touch away immediately as he says, “I’ve been here the whole time, bro.”
And that’s true, really, maybe the truest thing that Peter’s fuzzy head knows in the moment, as Ned pulls him to his feet and they both find their shoes in the pile by the door.
Michelle and Betty are hunched over a phone as they wave goodbye, probably crafting a text to Gwen that they’ll both regret in the morning, and Flash sees them out with the demand that they let him know when they get back to their apartment safe and sound, but Peter forgets all of it the moment the warm spring breeze hits his face and his arm finds its way around Ned’s shoulders.
“Oh, he’s a jolly good fellow!” Peter sings the whole walk home.
Ned repeatedly tells him to shut up, but he’s also laughing, and Peter knows where his own priorities lie.
***
Peter is half sober by the time they get back to their own place, but that doesn’t keep him from flopping onto the couch with a heave of exhaustion and a huff of breath.
Eyes closed but ears open with the loosening assistance of inebriation, Peter can hear Ned chuckle at him as he locks the front door behind them, toeing out of his shoes with the soft sound of socks hitting carpet, and then nudging at Peter to make room on the couch.
“Cushion hog,” he says, and Peter makes a show out of lifting his head enough for Ned to sit down, only to drop his cheek right back onto Ned’s thigh. “And dramatic too,” Ned laughs into a contented breath, Peter being able to feel the way he slumps and drops all the tension out of his shoulders from a prone, horizontal position.
“Tired,” Peter mutters, but it’s caught up half in the fabric of Ned’s jeans instead of finding passage along the air in the room.
“Then go to bed,” Ned tells him, sleepiness on his tongue too, in the weight of his hand on Peter’s shoulder.
“But celebratin’ you,” Peter explains. “Not done.”
“We celebrated enough,” Ned says, and when Peter sits up, letting Ned’s hand slip to the cushion between them, he gets to watch as his eyes crack open, as they look at Peter’s slouched form.
Elbow on the back of the couch, cheek in his hand, it’s not until he’s settled and comfortable that Peter realizes how close they’re sitting to one another.
“You graduated,” Peter implores with a lazy grin. “You did so good, Nedward.”
Ned’s gaze tips down and then back up as a smile spreads across his face.
“Would’ve happened a helluva lot easier without you around, Webs,” Ned teases, unable to keep the heavy sarcasm out of his tone and making Peter snort as his forehead falls forward to rest on Ned’s shoulder.
“That’s mean,” he laughs into Ned’s shirt, “but it’s also true so you get a pass.”
“Hey, come on,” Ned puts a hand at the nape of Peter’s neck, using the way the curls of hair wrap around his fingertips to gently pull Peter’s gaze back up to meet his. “I’m kidding, dude. Couldn’t have done it without you, yeah? You get that?”
“I mean, you totally could’ve,” Peter tells him, but not in a self deprecating way, just in an earnest, half-tipsy way that requires zero energy to produce and leaves all his focus free to drift to the faint flush to Ned’s cheeks, the spot at the crown of his head where one too many hair ruffles from Michelle had left their mark.
“Debatable,” Ned says, as Peter takes the opportunity to lift a hand, try and smooth out that spot in his hair.
“Nope,” he says. “Proud as hell of you, man. Just take the praise, huh?”
Fingers in Ned’s hair, Ned’s palm still at the nape of his neck, when Peter drops his gaze to Ned’s face he sees a new sort of light to his eyes, feels a new sort of weight to the air. It’s not a heavy sort of weight, but comfortable, like loads of blankets in the winter or when a friendly animal rests their head in your lap.
It’s like pride and it’s like familiarity; it’s like happiness too, dropped in a bottle of anticipation that Peter doesn’t even find the name for until later (closer towards the end, we’re still too close to the beginning).
Ultimately it’s like instinct, when Peter says, “super proud,” one more time, leaning forward with that same breath and pressing those same lips to Ned’s cheek.
Lingering.
Longing.
Warm, as he starts to pull back only for Ned’s fingers to twine tighter in his hair and direct his lips just an inch, a handful of centimeters.
Ned’s lips are even warmer than his cheek, or maybe they’re just softer, and wetter too, when Peter presses forward with the whole of his body and deepens the kiss with thighs pressed up against each other and one of Peter’s hands finding its way to Ned’s chest.
They’ve never done this before, and maybe Peter is sober enough to acknowledge that somewhere in the back of his brain, but maybe he’s not quite sober enough to feel like doing anything about that realization.
Because he really likes the feel of Ned’s fingers in his hair, and he’s a little bit enraptured by the sound of Ned’s hitching breath when they pull away just long enough to bring in oxygen into their lungs, and it’s human contact at the end of a joyful night with friends so what more could a guy want?
What more could he want, than chasing Ned’s lips as he lays down lengthwise on the couch, pulling Peter on top of him in the process and letting him slot a thigh between his legs?
What more could he possibly want, than his lips along Ned’s jawline and the sound of a quiet, breathy, “Peter,” rumbling in the chest beneath him.
“Yeah,” Peter exhales, lips tasting the skin of Ned’s neck as he makes his way back to his mouth, “yeah.”
There is something weighty, pulling him into Ned’s orbit, a potential energy to the heady heave of his lungs, the pulse of the semi in his pants, and when Peter feels Ned smiling up against his mouth he smiles back.
Teeth against teeth and tongues retreating, their presence needed for the slow burning laughter that blooms in the narrow space between them.
Peter’s eyes don’t leave Ned’s lips when he pulls away, forehead tipping to rest against a swath of dark hair and he is laughing. They both are.
They are tipsy and they are laughing and Peter is half hard, but he’s not planning on doing anything about it as he kisses the bridge of Ned’s nose and then lets the whole weight of him (heavy, like loads of blankets) collapse halfway on the couch and halfway on top of Ned.
“Don’t fall asleep on me,” Ned requests, but his eyes are already closed and the arm he has around Peter’s shoulders doesn’t move.
“I won’t,” Peter lies, already feeling the world slipping into the soft diffusion of sleep.
***
Peter wakes up and it’s different now than it will be next time, although we’re not quite there yet.
He wakes up and there is no longer the steady rise and fall of another man’s chest underneath his cheek. He wakes up and the apartment is empty save the smell of recently brewed coffee drifting out from the kitchen.
He wakes up and it’s a different sort of weightiness than the night before, a different sort too from next time (he’s not there yet either).
“Hey, you wanna order a pizza tonight?” Ned asks him later that day when he returns from wherever he’s gone and it’s different but maybe still the same because Peter just says, “yeah, I’ll pick it up at the end of patrol,” and they move on like usual.
Peter isn’t sure at first, whether or not it actually happened at all, or if he had imagined it entirely with the overactive fantasy machine that he has parading around as a brain. He thinks it happened, because he can still remember the taste of Ned’s tongue and when he studies the memory a little too long in the shower he gets hard, but maybe it didn’t actually.
Or maybe Ned just doesn’t remember, continuing on like they’d just fallen asleep on the couch together after a night of drinking which isn’t exactly out of character for the two of them.
So maybe it didn’t happen, but Peter thinks it did; and maybe Ned has just forgotten, was drunk enough to black it out, but Peter remembers walking home and he remembers being the one leaning on Ned so that doesn’t feel true either.
Peter uses all the self control available to himself and presses his palms into the shower wall, hangs his head as he staves off his growing erection because the thought that makes the most sense-- and the one that sits heavy, not like blankets in the wintertime or a dog’s head in his lap but like a car driven off a bridge, hanging from Peter’s own two hands by a literal thread-- is that Ned has chosen to ignore this thing that’s happened.
Ned Leeds, open and earnest to a fault, ready to talk about his feelings at the drop of a hat in a way that has always baffled Peter and all his lingering traumas and walls-- that Ned Leeds is pretending to have forgotten they kissed so he doesn’t have to talk about it.
And that does more for Peter than any cold shower ever could.
***
Peter is fifteen years old when it starts, at least this part of it.
It’s a dream he won’t remember the more salient details of years down the line, but he remembers the way his subconscious had concocted the look on Ned’s face, and he remembers the racing of a heart unmarred by his dreamworld, and he remembers how it felt like a turning point.
He goes to sleep one night living in a world where he’s never given any thought to the feel of Ned Leeds’ lips on his own, and wakes up pressing fingers to his mouth because it’s like he knows now. Just a dream, even if it is the visceral sort, but it still feels like he knows the answer.
It’s strange and it’s confusing, considering he had never even asked the question.
There’s a part of him that knows already, although a quiet part he’s never had the chance to explore in all of fifteen years and three heavy headstones, that he’s perhaps not entirely straight, but what’s the point in worrying about such a thing when there are girls like Liz Allan just walking around like that?
Peter has a dream and when he wakes up he knows that he was kissing Ned on the pier at Coney Island, but he’ll forget that, the same way he’ll forget whether or not there had been any context behind it, any conversation.
Peter has a dream in which he kisses his best friend.
And he remembers it the morning after he actually does.
***
The plan, such as it were, had always been for Ned to move closer to his job at the end of the summer.
Their joint lease ends on July the thirty-first, and Flash needs a new roommate at his place near ESU’s campus anyway so Peter’s set, but the plan (such as it were) still feels different now.
Packing up their things and pretending that nothing new has joined them in the room; trying to remember who brought which mismatched dishes with them when they started living together four years prior.
A part of Peter had been dreading this for months, despite understanding that Brooklyn isn’t that far and nothing, nothing could ever break apart the duo that has been Leeds and Parker for over a decade.
A part of him had been dreading it, and that part is really just most of Peter’s heart, because for a guy who spends half of his time swinging from webs and fighting mad scientists and their new abominations of experiments in the fucking sewers, he doesn’t particularly like change.
Maybe it’s because he’s had enough of it in his life, or maybe it’s because he’s just stubborn, but the summer passes and Peter finds his heart aching more often than not.
Aching not because it’s all that terribly awkward or because it feels like their friendship has been damaged in any way (it hasn’t, how could it be?) but perhaps precisely because there are no repercussions for their actions.
Peter had kissed him. Peter had kissed him and he knows it to be true because he’s not caught off guard by it in the same way he had been, fifteen years old and a dream out of nowhere, but it never finds its truth in their words and it never finds life outside of a quiet night at the end of a party.
Peter swings through the streets later into the night than he might usually, both because of the long days of summer and because when he goes home it’s to an apartment filled with unsaid things.
He doesn’t exactly want to hear Ned tell him that it had all been a mistake, even if it had been and even if Peter still isn’t sure (we’re not there yet; neither is he) but he needs-- he needs it to have been real and he needs it to exist in the black-and-white history of who they are.
Instead he swings, and he works it off and bleeds it out.
Instead he lets Ned take the lead, because who is Peter to force something like this when he has been responsible for the end of every relationship he’s ever had?
Instead he laughs over bad movies on the couch where Ned had breathed his name and instead he fights with his roommate goodnaturedly over who gets to keep those nice tupperwares.
Instead he keeps going.
Because that’s what he does.
***
“It’s gonna be different,” Peter says, sitting on the couch that Ned will take with him to his place tomorrow, watching as Ned tapes up a box on the floor.
It’s a simple statement, this one of change, but it feels bigger than that on Peter’s tongue, gaze filled wall-to-wall with the man before him.
“Yeah,” Ned says. “Might not be bad though, right? We can be-- y’know friends full-time instead of roommates too.”
“Right,” Peter agrees shortly, heart not really in it as he pulls a pillow into his lap. They’re going to need to pack those up too at some point.
“I just mean-- you won’t have to worry about me nagging you over the dishes anymore,” Ned offers him a faint smile, all forced levity and unspoken heaviness (like books in boxes).
And Peter reminds himself to just keep going, because he has to because this isn’t something worth risking, but he has to bite down on his molars just to keep from saying anything like why do you want so badly to forget?
Peter doesn’t want to forget, in fact he wants to try again, see if he can really give it all this time, convince Ned Leeds that such a thing should not be remotely forgettable. After all, he’d been drunk before, maybe it just hadn’t been the best performance of his life, maybe his first impression had been lacking, maybe he hadn’t injected his touch with the promises of loyalty and care that live inside of his chest.
So he bites down, but he does not, however, manage his face all that well.
Ned exhales, something shifting in the furrow of his brow as he meets Peter’s gaze.
“Peter…” he begins quietly, but it’s only that, a disembodied start.
“Do we talk about it before you’re gone forever?” Peter laughs sardonically, the words slipping out without his consent because two months of the biting down might finally be catching up with him. “Or do we just let it pass?”
Ned averts his gaze, head turned towards a curtained window and lips pursing together sternly.
“I’m not going away forever,” he says with an amount of exasperation to it that’s probably warranted.
“Can we just acknowledge it?” Peter presses on. “Never talk about it again, whatever, sure, but can we just fucking acknoweldge it?”
Ned looks like he’s going to argue, going to keep up the tense shoulders and deep turmoil across his brow, but he turns his head and his gaze meets Peter’s again. Finally and terribly in the way it softens on an exhale.
“Yeah,” he acquiesces quietly. “Yeah, sure, we can acknowledge it.”
A sharp breath in through Peter’s nose, surprise at something he had asked for but hadn’t entirely expected, especially not on this night when they are so close to just, simply, escaping it.
Walking away and starting over in a new era where they don’t have to look it (or each other) right in the eye any longer. But Ned Leeds, as well as Peter knows him, has always kept him on his toes.
“Okay,” Peter breathes. “Okay, good. It’s acknowledged.”
And, in proper keeping Peter on his toes fashion, Ned snorts, a hand coming up immediately to cover the unidentifiable sort of smirk growing on his face.
Peter feels his own eyebrows lift high on his face, a countenance of his own taking shape that’s equally incomprehensible, because Ned is laughing.
“Sorry,” Ned shakes his head, doubling over himself where he sits on the floor as peeling laughter forces its way out. “Sorry, sorry, not funny.”
It’s the kind of moment where Peter could feel hurt or annoyed or any number of awful things, but instead he looks at this man, this boy he’s grown up beside, who has held his hand through every major event in his life since the age of twelve, and maybe it is a little funny.
Because Peter starts to laugh too.
At the utter absurdity of it, at the way their friendship has always been complex, has faced ups and downs and swings across cities, and still it has survived. He feels punch-drunk on the mere understanding that he now knows what it feels like to bite down on Ned’s lower lip, the added fact that he realizes he’d like to do it again, and then the bonus little bow on top that he has no idea whether or not he ever will.
Absurd and sad and hilarious.
“You were so fucking stern,” Peter cackles, leaned forward on the couch.
“Well, you were being so serious,” Ned insists through his own hitching laughter.
“Never had such a moment over fucking-- just--”
“A drunk makeout!” Ned finishes his sentence. Neither of them are looking at each other anymore. “God. Fuck.”
“Yeah,” Peter’s laughter settles into itself.
“Yeah,” Ned pulls off another strip of packing tape.
If Peter realizes that this is the same way they’d gotten out of discussing it the first time, he doesn’t say so.
He doesn’t acknowledge that.
***
They play music loud enough in the apartment the next day that they can’t really talk over the booming bass as they carry boxes down to the moving truck Ned had rented.
Peter dances with a heavy box balanced on the palm of each hand and Ned laughs.
They both laugh, and they act like nothing is changing, like the whole of the world they’ve known for years isn’t being turned on its head.
Leeds and Parker, dynamic duo, splitting apart in a way that no one else seems to see the profundity in.
Because, yes, they’re still both staying within city limits, and yes, they certainly have more than enough technology available to make the distance of not living in the same apartment essentially nonexistent, but Peter waves from the curb as Ned pulls away down the street and he will not be mocked for how profound it feels.
How big it is.
To walk back inside and have it be the same walls he’s lived in for two years but feel so desperately unlike any sort of home he’s ever had.
Bare floors and empty walls and a bedroom stripped bare.
Peter sits down on the floor of Ned’s empty room and he tries to process it, how big it all is-- a room without furniture, a transition away from each other instead of towards for perhaps the first time ever.
Peter sits on the floor, and then he lays flat on his back and stares up at the ceiling as a summer breeze flows through the open window.
Because things are changing and he isn’t sure whether or not he likes the direction they’re taking, but maybe this is just life and maybe it always has been.
The starting again.
And again.
And again and again forever until it all stops at once.
Maybe, Peter thinks, that in reality the complexity of life means that starts don’t even exist without ends, that something must stop before it’s beginning can be properly catalogued. Maybe, in that way, nothing is ever really starting and is instead just going.
Maybe, just maybe, Peter can have hope that because he can’t pinpoint the beginning of it all, this thing that sits heavy in his chest, that means it hasn’t actually ended.
Not yet.
Not now.
Not with boxes and moving trucks and empty rooms.
It’s not ending, because Peter doesn’t think he could stomach it if it was.
***
Peter’s seventeen years old and it’s not weird how often his best friend sees him half naked.
It’s the same as if they were on some sort of sports team-- changing in a locker room with a bunch of other dudes isn’t all that dissimilar from changing out of your superhero costume after climbing in through your best friend’s fire escape in case his mom comes in and sees you there.
It’s the same, although there’s something different about the one-on-one sort of intimacy-- no, something else-- of being shirtless in his boxers while Ned sits on his bed and listens to a recounting of the night with rapt attention.
Peter is slow to put his clothes back on and it doesn’t start here, but ignoring it does.
***
“I’m just saying, I always assumed that the mess was entirely your doing, but even living alone he’s-- not unclean, just-- disorganized.”
“Really?” Peter asks, hunched over his cup of coffee, eyebrows knitting together as the heavy backpack by his feet (heavy, like a conversation about Ned Leeds) tips and falls further under the table. “What’s his place-- How’s it-- He good?”
Michelle levels him with a look across the table, and she doesn’t have to say anything to make Peter sit up straighter under her scrutiny, but she does anyway.
“You’re a mess, Parker.”
“What?” he balks. “No I’m not.”
The look on her face just doubles down on itself as she leans back in her chair, cocks her head to the side.
“Look at you,” she laughs humorlessly. “Fucking lovesick puppy sitting across from me-- would you just talk to him already?”
Peter blanches at that particular word choice, nose scrunching up in resistance to such an implication.
It doesn’t matter whether or not she’s right, after all, what matters is that she has the audacity to verbalize it.
“I don’t know what you’re on about,” Peter tells her, picks up his coffee and immediately scalds his tongue on it.
“Literally a disaster,” she deadpans, but slides her ice water across the table for him, waiting patiently for him to pluck a piece of ice into his mouth and start sucking before she continues. “I’m not saying you go confess your undying--”
“--nope--”
“-- for him, but it’s Ned, Pete,” she ignores his interjection, leans forward on her forearms and meets his gaze imploringly. “He misses you like crazy and you’re kidding yourself if you think you’re not itching to pay him a visit.”
“We text all the time,” Peter grouses, and it’s the truth even if in context it hurts his side of this argument, not that he’ll be saying out loud that--
“How many times does he have to invite you over before you get over yourself, then?”
Peter works his jaw, phone heavy in his pocket (like messages and invitations dodged) because he needs more than invitation to brave such a thing. He needs to get ahold of himself, first and foremost, he needs to stop pining over a drunken makeout and he needs to accept that sometimes a fantasy in his head has no bearing in the real world.
No solid ground to stand on besides that of his own aching chest.
There’s only so many times, Peter knows, that he can laugh it off, but he says, “I’ll text him,” because Michelle needs to stop looking at him like that and he says, “I’ve just been busy, but I’ll text him,” even though they both know what’s really going on.
“Good,” she replies, “because I’m gonna get tired of being your go-between here eventually.”
It’s blunt but it’s kind, in the lilt of her voice and the empathy in her eyes, knowing him perhaps a touch too well for comfort, but just well enough to know what he needs to hear.
Because she takes a beat, lets him chuckle off her quip and take a slightly less scorching sip of his coffee before she points out, “Pete, if any of us were scared off by a little bit of discomfort, we wouldn’t have stuck around this long.”
“Yeah,” he exhales for what feels like the first time in twenty minutes, clears his throat. “Yeah. Okay… So, you gonna tell me what’s up with you and Stacy now?”
Michelle drops her forehead to the surface of the table with a groan, and Peter feels a little less alone.
***
Peter crouches on the ledge of the building across the street from Ned’s new apartment halfway through his patrol and past his usual neighborhood borders later that night and it’s not stalking because he doesn’t even see Ned.
He just.
He wants to see the place, that’s all, wants to make sure Ned is living in a safe area (he is) and wants to make sure he knows the fastest route to get here.
Just in case there’s ever an emergency that needs his intervention.
Just in case.
Peter falls out of his crouch, using his hands to hold himself up as he swings his legs out in front of him and sits flat on his sit-bones on the ledge, shoulders slumped as he pulls his phone out of the pocket at his belt.
There’s a warm yellow glow filtering out from the window that Peter counts up from the bottom floor, knows is where Ned Leeds resides these days, and the softness of it is in stark contrast to the sharp white of his cracked phone screen reflecting in the eye lenses of his mask.
Sharp like light, sharp like the edge of a message from his best friend that he hasn’t known how to respond to for the last three days.
place is mostly put together now if you want to come over
we can get Thai
He stares at it, feels the presence across the street from him and tells himself he’s not allowed to look back up at that window, the half-sheer curtains blocking his view to the inside but not the light from reaching the outside-- an on-the-nose metaphor if Peter’s ever seen one.
Having to bask in the warmth of Ned without ever being able to reach inside, root around, grab on and not let go.
Peter taps an index finger against the edge of his phone, taps the heel of his foot against the brick of the building, and then brings in a sharp breath through his nose as he begins to type.
friday?
i’ll bring dinner
He tucks his phone away and leaps from the roof into a low swing before he can suffer the torture of watching three little dots appear and disappear on his screen.
***
There’s a confirmation waiting in his notifications when he gets home and strips out of his suit.
While he makes grilled cheese for dinner, Flash asks him what he’s so jittery about.
***
There’s definitely some sort of start to it when Peter shows up at Ned’s door five days later, windswept with his suit in the bag slung over his shoulder and a purpling mark on his jaw.
He’s twenty-five minutes late, but he also has Thai food so when Ned lets him in with a question of, “first aid?” before rolling his eyes at Peter’s denial and leading him into the kitchen, Peter thinks it’s not done as much damage as the near panic he’d gotten himself into on his trip in the elevator up convinced him of.
“Wow, look at this place,” Peter gapes as Ned sets the food down on the little table in the kitchen. “It’s looking good, man.”
Ned snorts.
“It’s a shoebox of a studio,” he brushes off the compliment. “Don’t get too excited.”
“Yeah, but living on your own,” Peter points out insistently. “You’re really moving up in the world.”
Ned finishes untying the plastic bag and smirks directly into Peter’s face in a way that definitely doesn’t affect the heartbeats in the room.
“Okay, Spider-Man,” he teases, but Peter isn’t much of a fan of the self-deprecation.
He rolls his eyes as he begins rooting around in cabinets like he lives there until he finds two plates, sets them on the counter, and says, “swung face-first into a street sign today, but yeah, you’re making a real mess of things, Leeds.”
The look they share is a passing thing, barely carrying a moment, but it feels like as close to normal as they’ve been recently, even if it does make Peter’s heart do a twist inside of his chest.
“You gotta stop doing that,” Ned tells him, and Peter is delusional so it sounds a little bit like I care about you.
“Sure,” Peter clears his throat and drops his attention back to the unpacking of the food, holding out an empty plate in Ned’s direction without looking. “Plate up-- I was super late getting this and it definitely needs a trip through the microwave.”
In the moment it takes to pass a plate from one hand to the next, Ned’s fingers overlap with Peter’s. They are warm and they are calloused at the tips and Peter’s breath goes hot in his lungs.
He wants to drop the plate and let it shatter; he wants to grab on with first one hand and then both; he wants to wrap the whole of his body around this endless, infinite moment and he wants Ned to do the same.
“Yeah, I figured,” Ned chuckles instead of any of that.
Peter lets the plate pass.
***
Pining is a lot like waiting for the sun to rise in winter. All overcast skies and short days and the forever sort of nights that come around during the colder months.
Peter Parker is not, however, pining.
He is spending time with his best friend and he is nurturing a relationship that has followed him through more eras of life than anyone had ever told him was possible.
Meant to grow apart from our childhood friends by the time we reach adulthood, Peter and Ned had never been good at following the rules, and certainly aren’t now, with the overhanging tension going fully and completely ignored in favor of starting each new day with whatever justifications they each individually need to keep going the way they’re going.
It’s not worth the risk.
It’s good as it is.
It’s not the kind of thing you just start over after.
And so Peter realizes that distance and distance are two different things entirely, because suddenly his friendship with Ned is able to be something it never has before.
(This is the start of something, but it’s not the start. Those are two different things as well.)
They text constantly, every day, Peter finding himself checking his phone like a tween with his first crush in the back of a lecture hall and grinning absentmindedly down at his texts when Flash has convinced him to drink beer and help him root for his favorite soccer team.
Peter almost wants to say that it’s a lot like being teenagers again, but even then they had seen each other every day at school, and even then, they were still becoming the people they now are. People who have grown and regressed and grown again, apart and together, towards and away, but somehow always choosing a path that they get to at least partially share at the end of each passing day.
Each new era of Parker and Leeds starts with a choice, and Peter makes his when he starts communicating through the most absurd Spidey selfies he can, and Ned responds with delightful voice memos telling him to keep both hands on your web!
Peter makes his choice that whatever happens, and whatever direction it needs to shift in, this thing he has with Ned isn’t going anywhere.
It can reform and it can start over and he will agonize over it, sure, but he will be grateful in the end, simply because it is not, in fact, the end.
***
Their freshman year of college, sharing a dorm with two beds only a handful of feet apart from one another, Peter and Ned come up with a system.
The primary goal of the system is to ideally not bring people back to the room, if only because in case of an emergency, Peter won’t have the option to not swing back in through the window of home-base, even if Ned were to have a special guest that night.
And wouldn’t that be just the worst way for his identity to leak.
So, no socks on the doorknob for these two, but a system nonetheless. It’s built on communication and coded text messages and being terribly, bluntly honest with each other about just how often they’re hooking up both in the room and outside of it.
(Peter can’t just disappear for a night after all, not when Ned has seen him bleeding in an alleyway, not when being out of contact for too long might mean he needs his guy in the chair.)
The first time that Ned, sometime during their second semester at ESU, tells Peter that he’s staying the night at someone’s apartment, Peter feels an annoyance that he chalks down to the stress of college on top of working at the Bugle on top of being who he is.
He chalks it up to stress and so he pushes it aside and doesn’t explore it any further.
For the second time in his life he has a dream about a boy and wakes to press the palm of his hand over his lips.
***
“No, listen to me--” Peter starts.
“You’re just gonna say it again!” Ned laughs boisterously. “You’re just gonna say--”
“It is my right as a lifelong Star Wars lover to punch J.J. Abrams in the face for what he did!” Peter exclaims, indignant and grinning at the way it always makes Ned cackle, Episode V playing forgotten on the small television set in Ned’s living space.
The sun’s long dipped below the horizon, lights of the city filtering through half-sheer curtains and the whole of the apartment lit only by the overheads in the kitchen and one standing lamp in the corner.
Ned had been complaining earlier in the week, about his new boss and the way Ned’s ideas were going largely ignored despite being objectively more efficient than the already in-place way of doing things, and Peter doesn’t have any classes early on Friday mornings so here he is.
A Thursday night in October, empty pizza boxes scattered and a movie they know well enough that it’s not a problem to talk over it, laugh over it, blow off a little bit of the frustration that is inherent in the lives of young men like them.
Trying so hard to make the world livable when the world refuses to return the favor.
Peter tells him, “I’m just saying, Spider-Man can get into pretty much any event he wants. If he just so happened to end up at that guy’s next movie premiere…”
“If the Bugle thinks you’re a menace now,” Ned twists on the couch, a leg tucked under himself as he faces Peter, cheeks flushed with laughter, “imagine what they’ll have to say about you when you assault some Hollywood guy.”
“God, you’re right,” Peter slumps into the opposite arm of the couch, similarly facing Ned instead of the movie playing in its third act. “Me and the JJ’s of the world really have something going on, don’t we?”
“Yeah,” Ned shoves gently at his shoulder, a touch that sends a thrill through Peter’s bloodstream, “that’s just your charm.”
“And my charm is my heaviest burden,” Peter clutches a hand to his chest melodramatically, a smirk shining through the act and his eyes working of their own volition as they flit across Ned’s face.
They’ve been here before, in a man-made naturality, a chosen ease built on a basis of blind-eyed desperation, and as warm as Peter is, as much gratitude as he carries with him on a day to day basis to be lucky enough to share an upbringing and a city and a life with one Ned Leeds, there is a twist in his gut as his gaze meets Ned’s.
A twist in his gut that he thinks probably shows on his face because it’s certainly showing on Ned’s, that pinch of his brows, that subtle tension in his jaw.
In a passing moment Peter’s eyes drift down to Ned’s lips-- a dream without context except for a feeling-- and in that same passing moment, Ned is breathing out, “oh, fuck it,” and taking Peter’s face in his hands as he kisses him hard on the mouth.
It happens all at once and in slow motion, it happens in such a way that Peter feels the option to pull away right there in front of him, but chooses not to take it. Why would he? Why would he, when he can clutch a fist in the fabric of Ned’s shirt, let the other trail up the length of his spine?
Peter knows the option is there, but it’s not really much of an option from his perspective, because Ned’s body is pressing up against his and his mouth tastes less like beer and whiskey this time around and more just like him.
Peter lets his tongue slip into Ned’s mouth, heart slamming against his ribcage when he meets no resistance. None, no hesitance, no anything, because Ned is initiating and even if it’s only going to last for ten minutes and a night curled up together on the couch, Peter isn’t going to disparage such a thing.
Such an opportunity, on this side of the curtains as Ned pushes him back on the couch and hovers over him with eager lips and a thrumming pulse.
In all of his exploits, Peter Parker has never felt more like Icarus, so close to the sun and willing to fall for the sake of reaching it, even if only for a moment.
“Are you sure?” Peter breathes, planting a socked foot on the cushion upon which they lay and letting his other fall to the carpeted ground to make room for Ned’ knees on either side of his hips. “Ned, are you--”
Ned responds, not with words, but with a surge of his lips forward, a gentle bite at Peter’s lower lips, and a rutting of hips downwards that has Peter feeling like maybe they are still teenagers after all with the way his body reacts so instantly.
He lets his hands play at the waistband of Ned’s pants, fingers slipping just under the hem of his shirt and neck craning to chase his lips when Ned pulls away to kiss at Peter’s neck instead.
It’s a gasp of a thing when Peter uses the moment to catch his breath and try to inject just a modicum of steadiness into his hands as they pull open Ned’s belt on feel alone, slide down the zipper with a ferocious desire, an age-old want.
Ned tugs out the buttons of Peter’s flannel and in response Peter dips his hand down the front of Ned’s pants, still over his boxers but feeling more of him than he’d even dared to dream.
“I’m gonna make you feel so good,” Peter breathes, turning so he can press his forehead to Ned’s and eyes falling shut as he just processes the feeling of Ned’s breath on his face, his growing erection cupped beneath his hand, the sheath of his underwear. “I’m gonna make you feel unbelievably good.”
“You always do,” Ned responds in a moment of earnestness that’s so reminiscent of their teenage years, before it started getting so complicated, that Peter’s heart stutters in his chest. “In between scaring the shit out of me by putting yourself in mortal peril, but yeah-- yeah-- you-- Peter, always--”
“Fuck,” Peter croaks, unable to find any sort of words to respond to such a revelation and instead putting his mouth to better use, kissing just under Ned’s jawline, pulling with his teeth enough that there will be a mark left behind.
His mark.
On Ned and this place and this time amidst the chaos, for right now, at the start of it all (if that’s what it can be called) Peter feels good and it ought to be recorded somewhere.
Somehow.
Cherish is a strong word, one that evokes a certain level of worship, but Peter feels cherished in his cherishing of this moment. He feels the memory of it solidifying even as it happens, as they get their shirts off, as Ned leads him to his bed that sits at the edge of the studio behind a portable room divider.
Over here the lights are dimmer, the glow of the kitchen a distant memory while Peter gently arranges himself on top of Ned, looks for permission in a kiss before pulling at both the pants and boxers that he’s already acquainted himself with, untangling them from around ankles and dropping them to the floor.
Over here the lights are dimmer and the outermost wall of the apartment lets off a chill from the October night happening outside, but Ned’s cock is warm in Peter’s hand, warmer still when he moves down towards the foot of the bed and wraps his lips around the very tip.
“Fuck,” Ned gasps, propped up on his elbows and looking down as Peter looks up, two sets of eyes and two jaws working in very different ways. “Peter-- Peter, you’re-- God--”
Peter runs his tongue from the base of Ned’s shaft all the way to the tip, pulling off as Ned makes a choked off sound to request, “let me know if you don’t like something and-- let me know if you do.”
“Yeah, yeah, we can-- oh,” Ned’s head falls back onto the pillows at the head of the bed and his hands wind their way into Peter’s hair and it’s gone from impossible to just simply improbable, this feeling.
Real and physical in his hands and in his mouth, aching and throbbing in between his legs and hitching in his lungs, the beat of his lovesick heart.
Ned’s cock is big in his mouth, but not so big that he chokes on it until he actively starts trying to, going as deep as he can down his throat with a hand playing with Ned’s balls and another reaching up his chest only for Ned, even in his pleasure-blind state, to intertwine their fingers.
There aren’t any identifiable words coming out of Ned’s mouth, but the sounds he makes tell Peter that he’s doing a good job, that he’s accomplishing the only thing that matters-- making Ned feel good, good, better than so.
His tongue swirls and he palms his own erection through his boxers and his eyes sting with tears from taking Ned deep, deep, never deep enough and when Ned grips his hair a bit tighter, starts obviously holding back thrusts of his hips, Peter gets the customary warning of--
“If you don’t stop-- Peter-- Peter, I’m gonna--”
“I want you to,” Peter tells him, voice hoarse as he pulls off just long enough to say it, to drag his hand up the length of Ned’s shaft using the lingering slickness of his own saliva and back down again, stroking as he squeezes the hand Ned still holds against his chest.
He waits until Ned gives him a look that feels like approval, squeezes back as he takes in a deep lungful of air, and only then does Peter return to his ruminations, tongue and lips working, hollowing his cheeks around Ned’s cock and feeling his own arousal grow near unbearable to the point of rutting erratically against the sheets just to feel some of the pressure alleviating.
Peter knows that he’s good at this, has had years to get good at it, but he also thinks, as Ned says his name and grips his hair and clenches the thighs that bracket his ears, that this is some of his best work.
Not that he hasn’t made someone fall apart before, or that he hasn’t enjoyed doing so immensely on a number of various occasions with various partners, but this is so wholly different of a thing and Peter’s body is buzzing with it.
All the hotter for being Ned beneath him, all the better for learning new ways to drive his best friend crazy.
All the more, more, more for being them and here and now.
When Ned comes down Peter's throat it’s like any other time except for the fact that it isn’t and it’s like it’s happened a hundred times before except it hasn’t.
It’s like the beginning of something, another leg finished in their trip to the surface of the sun, except that sometimes Peter thinks they’ve been standing among the flames for a lot longer than either of them are ready to accept.
Ned says his name when he comes and it sounds like a plea, although for what Peter can’t be sure, too preoccupied with swallowing so as to not get any mess on Ned's nice clean sheets.
“Oh my God,” Ned pants out, Peter squeezing fingers into his thigh, just watching him catch his breath with all the attention of standing before a marble statue at a museum.
Intention and care to it, adoration and examination.
“You’re really beautiful,” he says quietly, a slip of the tongue on which he still tastes the results of his efforts, and although it’s not something he’d be saying were he maybe less unbelievably turned on, he’s rewarded for it still.
“C’mere,” Ned pulls at the hand that he hasn’t let go of this whole time, “Peter, come--”
“Yeah,” Peter crawls up his body, presses his lips to Ned's hot cheek only for Ned to drag him into a full, sloppy kiss, rolling them over and switching places in the process. “Oh-- yeah.”
“It’s annoying how good you are at that,” Ned tells him flatly even as he’s pulling Peter's boxers off and freeing his erection. “I mean seriously-- fucking universe gave you superpowers you oughta be a shitty fucking lay, it’s only fair.”
“Oh, so now you start complaining,” Peter teases back, letting the fingers of one hand push back the hair from Ned's forehead as he kisses over Peter's chest. “You weren’t bothered by it when I had your dick in my mouth, but-- oh.”
Ned catches him off guard when he first kisses across, and then swirls his tongue around a nipple, sucking for a moment before lifting off just long enough to smirk up at Peter's gaping expression.
“So, that’s how to shut you up,” he chuckles, “good to know.”
Peter balks at him, caught for a moment outside of his body and looking down at this scene, this thing that he couldn’t have planned. But a moment only it is, before he’s snapping back into his body and letting a smile bloom on his lips.
“What is this, are you testing your tight five?”
“Why?” Ned reaches down and lithely wraps his hand around Peter, swiping the bead of precum from his tip and using it to lubricate the length of him. “You wanna help me workshop it?”
Peter, thinking he’s doing pretty well holding his own despite the weight of this man on top of him, loses his composure then. His shoulder blades press down into the mattress as his hips lift up, aching for Ned to move faster, to thrust his way to completion, chasing it up, up, all the way up.
“You know,” he says, having to clear his throat around a lump of pure arousal, “I’d let you fuck me if I had had time to prepare for this.”
And Peter’s serious as much as he’s running on adrenaline, heart stuttering pleasantly when Ned laughs, leaning in so his nose knocks against the crooked bridge of Peter’s.
“Yeah, same,” he says up against Peter’s lips, just very nearly kissing him until he actually is.
Kissing and stroking and holding Peter’s hips down with the flat of his hand in a way Peter knows he could easily escape but doesn’t want to.
There’s not a lot Peter wouldn’t give to Ned in this moment, though, if he were to have the capacity to admit such a thing to himself with Ned sucking a mark into his collar bone (his mark, a quantifiable piece of proof).
When Peter moans out a request of faster Ned complies, and when he pulls Ned’s lips back to his with both hands tangled in his hair there’s a spark of electric feeling that can’t be denied, no matter how they’ve tried.
Ned uses his free hand to hitch Peter’s leg up higher, using the extra space to tuck a hand behind his balls and slide a single spit-slicked finger into his entrance. Not far enough to hit his prostate, but far enough to combine with the sped up stroking of his hand to make Peter gasp, bear down on it, thrust back up, and collect Ned’s lips in a surge of a kiss before he finally comes all over both of their stomachs in shuddering, half-blind pleasure that he clings to for as long as he can.
His body feels boneless, weighed down, heavy (like a warm sleepiness at the end of a good party).
“Holy shit,” he says, eyes slipping closed while his chest rises and falls rapidly, as he returns to his body and Ned climbs off of him. Peter listens closely without opening his eyes as Ned crosses the space to the bathroom, water running. “Dude, you killed me.”
Ned’s returned footsteps are accompanied by a quiet chuckle, “when I kill you, you won’t be able to talk after, Pete.”
Peter cracks an eye open at the dip of the mattress, followed closely by a warm, wet cloth collecting the mess on his stomach. He props his hands behind his head, watching appraisingly as Ned dutifully cleans up after him, not for the first time, but certainly so in this context.
“It’s getting late,” Ned says without looking him in the face, dropping the washcloth off the edge of the bed unceremoniously and untucking the covers from underneath the both of them. “If you don’t wanna swing home…”
“Yeah,” Peter agrees, slipping his legs under Ned’s quilt, rolling onto his side and watching him get comfortable on his pillow, “thanks.”
“Just don’t want you to slam your face into anything in the dark,” Ned says, eyes drifting over to look less so at Peter than at the yellowing bruise on his jawline.
“Good call,” Peter replies, casual as he takes Ned’s hand on top of the covers.
Ned’s chest rises, lungs filling with a sharp breath through his nose before his muscles unclench and he relaxes into the mattress, doesn’t try to pull away when Peter tucks himself just an inch closer. Not touching, but the implication that they might start sometime in the night.
“Goodnight,” Peter says softly, and he hopes it’s not an invasion of privacy to be listening to the thump of Ned’s heart behind his ribs. A pattern, starting over and again lulling the room out of adrenaline and instinct and into something a bit more tender.
“Night,” Ned replies simply, heart slowing and breath evening out.
Peter brings their intertwined fingers to his lips where he lays on his side, eyes never leaving Ned’s face. A kiss so tender that Peter himself feels the weight of it in his heart (weight, like the squeeze of a good hug), and in that moment he finds the usual uncertainty about whether or not this is where something new is starting.
He isn’t sure, there’s no way to know whether or not it’s begun, because he doesn’t know what it is yet, but more than anything he hopes, even if this isn’t where it starts, that it turns out to be where it’s going.
Where they’re going.
Together.
***
The first time Peter sleeps with a man he’s nineteen years old, in his second semester at ESU, and recently broken up with one Michelle Jones.
A mutual breaking of things, it’s still his first love shifting into something new, not a loss so much as a transformation, but real and profound nonetheless. He pines for weeks which turn into months until Ned drags him out of their dorm and to a party in some attempt to make sure his life doesn’t exclusively consist of school and getting beat up in alleyways on Thursday nights.
It’s there that Peter makes an acquaintance, leaves with a fellow student who he’ll have sloppy, mediocre sex with and whose name he’ll forget within the coming year. And even if it’s not good and even if it’s not MJ it’s still this release of a pressure that’s been building in him since high school urges pushed aside and dreams about a friend that he still chooses not to think about for fear of it showing on his face.
As though Ned might be able to look at him and see a little cartoon thought bubble appear above his head with a comically audible pop! It’s not like he doesn’t know him well enough that it might be possible, after all.
Peter scrambles into their dorm the morning after his escapades, shoving a book and a laptop into his backpack and crossing his fingers that he won’t be late for class yet again, and Ned wakes up groggily.
“Have a good time?” he asks, barely half awake as he rolls onto his side and watches Peter change into clothes out of his laundry basket because they might be dirty but at least they don’t smell like sex.
“Uh. Slept with a dude,” Peter tells him, abrupt and startling even to his own self as he buttons his pants. “Might wanna talk about that later.”
Ned sits up on his elbows, posture betraying his sudden awareness of the situation even if he’s clearly trying to be casual about it when he says, “oh, sure. We can do that.”
Peter just nods because he’s having trouble looking Ned in the eye and he’s having even more trouble calming down the pace of his thrumming heart as he slings his mostly-zipped backpack over his shoulder.
“Alright, gotta go,” he says, gaze still averted as he hurries out of the room.
He can feel Ned’s eyes on him as he slips out the door, damns his own super hearing when he catches a quiet shit follow the click of the door shut behind him.
It’s not a big deal except that it is, and it’ll keep being an even smaller deal once he has a tall glass of water, or maybe beer or something stronger, but for now it’s got his hands fumbling as he finishes zipping his bag up all of the way.
For now he puts it off, like most things, to be processed later on.
***
Peter wakes up the next morning and it’s different than it was the last time.
They’re in a bed for one, and they’re both there for two. For three, Peter feels less groggy and for four there’s autumn rain pattering against the window.
It’s different for all of these reasons, but mostly it’s different because Peter’s stomach doesn’t sink when he realizes what’s happened. Ned still dozes softly beside him, face peaceful in rest and sheets tucked up around his shoulders as if he’d gotten cold in the night, so Peter grabs a blanket that’s slid to the foot of the bed and carefully drapes it over both of them as he reclines back on his pillow.
And just watches, not for long and not all that intensely, just feeling the rise and fall of Ned’s breath and listening to the tap tap tap of droplets on the fire escape outside of Ned’s window.
The clock on the bedside table blinks sluggishly, tells Peter that he doesn’t need to be at the Bugle for hours yet.
Inhale.
Tap tap tap.
Exhale.
Tap tap tap.
Peter falls back to sleep.
***
When he wakes up again, it’s a bit more abrupt.
Tap tap tap-- and this time it’s knuckles on the frame of the room separator instead of rain on the window (although the rain is still there too, heavier now, heavy like loaded spaces between words).
“I made eggs,” Ned says as Peter snorts himself awake and rolls onto his side in one single moment. “I know you’ve got work soon, so I made-- eggs.”
“Oh,” is all Peter manages as the gears in his brain grind together at the sight of Ned-- gray sweatpants and the oversized flannel Peter had been wearing the night before hanging open on his chest.
He breathes in, and then he notices Ned’s index finger, still anxiously tapping at the wooden edge of the room divider and shoves himself bodily back into reality.
“Yeah, thank you,” he says more coherently, “I’ll-- that sounds great actually.”
He doesn’t drag his gaze up from Ned’s chest quickly enough, however, noticing the self-conscious look on his face when their gazes finally meet. Ned looks down at his shirt (Peter’s shirt) and says, “great-- yep,” before practically running away, as if maybe he hadn’t intended for Peter to see him like this.
But Peter has, and the chill of the rainy morning strikes him in between his ribs, warmed only by the heat in his gut, the warmth of his heart as he hears Ned start clattering around in the kitchen on the other end of the apartment.
There’s no denying the state they’re both in, confused and waiting for the other shoe to drop, even if confused is maybe not the right word for it as Peter slips into his own boxers and socks and a sweatshirt of Ned’s that’s slung over the radiator-- toasty warm even where the neck of it hangs wide and shows off the hickey on his collar bone that Peter’s surprised hasn’t faded by now.
The sound of fumbling movement from the kitchen hasn’t stopped, and still doesn’t as Peter takes a deep breath and steps out of the bedroom nook and into the rest of the apartment. It looks different than it had last night, and Peter isn’t sure whether it’s because of the light of day, or because of the way his whole body feels anew after the way it’s been touched, or if it’s just because Ned is wearing his shirt while he scoops scrambled eggs onto two plates that had once sat in a cupboard in a shared apartment.
“Smells good,” Peter offers at the place in the floor where tile meets carpet, a harsh line that he steps over, feels the cold bleeding through his thick socks.
“I didn’t have much to add to it,” Ned apologizes, setting down both plates without looking at Peter. “I was gonna do groceries tomorrow, but-- oh, coffee--”
He cuts himself off abruptly and hurries to the other side of the small kitchen, beginning the coffee-making process as Peter, still standing there, sweatered arms crossing carefully over his chest, watches.
“Ned,” he starts quietly, but Ned is preoccupied, busying his hands with a task and ignoring the man in his kitchen.
“It’ll only take a minute--”
“Ned.”
And Peter isn’t sure what it is about his tone of voice that does it, except that he knows it’s worked before and that it will probably work again, the one piece of consistency left in this space after breaking the mold so entirely.
Ned stops what he’s doing with a sharp breath out through his nose, hesitates as he sets aside the mugs he’d been pulling out of a cabinet, and turns to face Peter.
Wearing his shirt and a desperate look on his face as their eyes finally, properly, inevitably meet.
“Peter,” he says, and it’s a plea of a thing, in his eyes and brows and that lilt of his voice.
“Yeah,” Peter breathes, unmoving.
Ned shakes his head minutely, leans back against the countertop with a hand on either side of him, gripping the surface and clenching his jaw before he pushes his next words out of his lungs with quiet determination.
“What happens next?” he questions bluntly, “What is this?”
Peter breathes in.
Considers breathing out again, but fears for the way such a massive thing might disrupt the delicacy between them.
“What do you want it to be?” he still asks, however much the world shakes with the way the words seem to slap Ned across the face.
A tilt to his head and a half-amused purse of his lips before a loud mockery of a laugh escapes his lungs, all that pent up something making its way out into the world.
“It doesn’t have to happen again,” Peter tells him, the reluctance in his tone tumbling and slipping across kitchen tile, “if you don’t…”
“If I don’t want it to?” Ned’s brows knit together and Peter can’t read it, can’t tell what this man is feeling over the inescapable volume of his own pounding heart. “God, you can’t really think…?”
Peter swallows thickly, wants to do something with his hands but doesn’t want to look like he’s lacking even a modicum of the attention he’s offering to this conversation. He opens his mouth to speak, closes it when his jaw feels heavy (like the weight of feelings gone unspoken), and then opens it again only for the begging of a word to be cut off by a loud buzzing.
A phone-- Peter’s phone-- vibrating in a terribly familiar pattern on the coffee table just a handful of feet away.
And they both know-- terribly well-- what that means.
“Fuck,” Peter mutters, just under his breath as he glances over his shoulder, his focus crumbling at the continued beat of it.
“Go,” Ned tells him simply.
“Ned--”
“Go, Peter,” Ned insists, and it’s not frustration that colors his tone so much as a melancholy understanding, the pressure of knowledge and getting it that manages to make all of them-- all of the people connected to Peter Parker-- feel a certain type of way that Peter knows he’ll never really get to understand. No matter how much he might try.
Peter holds his jaw shut tight, bounces a little bit on the balls of restless feet.
The buzzing feels like it gets louder in the short beat it takes for him to make up his mind, although it’s been made up for a long time, ever since he put the suit on for the first time.
“Later,” he tells Ned, “we’ll talk, okay? We’ll-- I’m not running away--”
“Yeah, yeah,” Ned waves him off. “Get outta here, Parker.”
Peter purses his lips, offers Ned one final glance, and then turns on his heel so he can become a different man.
He doesn’t even get to eat his breakfast.
***
Ben Parker dies when Peter is fourteen years old, and a handful of weeks later Spider-Man makes his way onto the streets for the first time.
Peter doesn’t realize right away, that all of his desire to help the general public might in some ways have a negative outcome for the people that love him-- Peter Parker-- but it doesn’t take him all that long to realize it either.
Why else would he keep it a secret from May, who loses and loses and keeps losing? Why would he keep it from Ned, too-- his very best friend who started checking in on Peter every day after Ben’s death and never stopped?
Ben Parker dies and Spider-Man is born and Peter isn’t sure that he’s actually easing any of the guilt that sits deep in his heart, when there’s so much bad to overcome and so much good just waiting to be ruined by his clumsy steps and reckless choices.
He can’t stop, and he knows this about himself from the moment he starts, but moving forward he becomes very aware that one day his quest to save the world may become too much for the people who try so desperately to stand by his side through all of it.
Peter accepts young-- when his Homecoming date’s father tries to kill him, and then again a little older, when he realizes that sometimes he really can’t prioritize a relationship over the rest of it, not even for a woman like Michelle Jones-- that there are some harms he’ll never be able to protect his people from.
Namely and mostly?
Himself.
***
Peter stumbles out of Ned’s window early in the morning and stumbles back in through Michelle’s some handful of hours later.
She’s cooking when he comes clambering inside, leaving a bloody handprint on the windowsill as he tries to close it behind him, legs giving out in the process as he slides to the floor. She’s cooking, but then she’s not, turning off the burner she’s using and hurrying across the living room with a frantic, “Peter-- Shit.”
“I’m good-- I’m good,” he insists. “Just-- bandages probably. Just-- um-- yeah--”
“Can you get to the bathroom if I help you?” she asks, already jumping into a long standing tradition of making sure he makes it home at the end of the night.
“Yeah,” Peter says even though she’s already got an arm around him, a hand in his as she helps him get sluggishly to his feet. “Oh-- Got blood on your carpet,” he says, looking back over his shoulder while she leads him away and towards the bathroom.
“I’m really good at getting blood out of things,” she assures him flatly. “Bullet or knife?”
“Huh?” Peter frowns, letting her direct him to sit in the bathtub, letting her pull his mask up off his face.
“Your wound,” Michelle clarifies, pulling a bulging first aid kit out from under the sink and crouching on her knees outside the tub where he slumps, starts gingerly pulling his suit down to his hips. “Is it a slash? Stab? Gunshot?”
“Uh-- slash,” Peter says upon revealing it, instinctively pressing a hand down on it while he waits for Michelle to get the supplies all lined up and ready to go on the bath mat where she kneels.
“Alright, I’m gonna disinfect,” she tells him. “Wanna bite down on something?”
Peter looks at the bottle of disinfectant in her hands, winces in anticipation, and then points a hand towards a hook on the wall.
“Towel, please.”
Michelle takes his outstretched hand and squeezes.
“You got it, tiger.”
***
“Been awhile,” Michelle says, washing her hands in the sink, “since we’ve had to do this.”
“Yeah,” Peter winces, cleaning away stray, dried blood from around the wound in his side, freshly-stitched and bandaged by the steady hands of Michelle Jones.
“A little surprised you came here actually,” she continues leadingly, looking at him sideways until he glances up with his eyes alone, a stern warning there at which she rolls her eyes. “Come on, he knows how to deal with this shit better than me at this point since you lived together so long.”
“Maybe I like keeping you on your toes,” Peter grumbles, carefully scrubbing away sticky blood from just above the waistband of his underwear.
Michelle turns off the faucet and grabs a nearby towel on which to dry her hands, lets out an exasperated breath as she leans back against the sink and just, simply, looks at him.
She doesn’t need to do much more than that to get him to talk, after all.
“Peter,” she presses for good measure anyway.
“I think I got my hopes up,” he says, gaze downturned. “And I think I’ve made things just-- so fucking awkward in the process.”
“And how’d you manage that?” she asks, a bit gentler with each passing word.
Peter snorts, unamused in the way he spits out, “sex, mostly. Always. That’s the main thing.”
“Okay, and what’s the secondary thing?”
There’s breath in his lungs, which Peter knows because he’s inhaling it, but still he feels without oxygen.
“It’s Spider-Man,” he admits, tears in his eyes and something heavy in his lungs (like the air it takes to say it). “It’s always fucking Spider-Man, and I don’t know why I ever expect to hold onto people when all I do is use the-- the damn mask to push them back, but Ned--” he chokes, shakes his head, drops his gaze so he doesn’t have to watch the complicated empathy going on behind her eyes. “He just knows it all so well. He knows it won’t work and I can’t blame him, can I? I can’t blame him because I should know better than to fucking try.”
Peter doesn’t look up from his task, but he can feel Michelle’s eyes on him, can hear the breath leaving her lungs as she takes a quiet beat before sitting back down cross-legged on the mat outside the tub and resting her forearms on the lip of it, her chin atop those.
“You know Spider-Man didn’t break us up, right?” she asks, point-blank but not pushy.
Peter finishes carefully shucking off his suit, letting it pile up at the other end of the tub and leaving him in his underwear, blood staining the waistband just like it stains the front of Michelle’s shirt.
He looks at said stain, and then he looks up to meet her eye pointedly, but Michelle just rolls her eyes.
“I mean obviously that was a factor,” she brushes off his skepticism. “But it wasn’t an isolated thing. You’re fixating on a corner piece and forgetting the big picture, Parker.”
“Alright,” Peter chuckles sardonically. “Show it to me then. What am I missing?”
“How young we were, for one,” she shrugs. “We hadn’t figured out how to work for a relationship yet, y’know? And we were both coming to terms with these other parts of our identities that we’d never had the chance to explore,” a meaningful look which he dutifully dodges, “and in the time we took apart, in finding the people we are now, we found what we really want to be to each other.”
“Friends with detriments?” Peter jokes, but it doesn’t hit its mark from the way Michelle looks at him, unimpressed.
“Family,” she corrects.
Peter breathes in sharply, something heavy sitting at the back of his throat as he lets his head tip back to rest on the lip of the tub.
“Listen,” Michelle continues softly. “The Spider-Man thing? It’s hard for all of us to cope with sometimes, it’s why I ignore your messages when I get overwhelmed by it and it’s why Betty can’t do the crime beat anymore. But-- and don’t let this go to your head-- but any of us that stick around for more than a year or two? It’s because we see the bits that are worth it. You get that?”
“I-- MJ, you just had to sew up a hole in my side,” he lifts his head, gives her an imploring look. “I made you--”
“Shut off the guilt complex for five minutes,” Michelle cuts him off. “It’s not a good look and no offense to you but you look enough like shit as it is.”
“Michelle.”
“No one-- no one-- has willingly put up with more of your bullshit than Edward Leeds,” she insists. “If you don’t want to be together because you don’t want to be together then that’s fine, we’ll have a fucking rom-com night and cry about it or something. But if you break that boy’s heart because you’re all stuck in this death trap,” she taps a finger against his temple, “then I’m gonna have to beat you up myself next time.”
Against his better judgment, and with a hint of choked off tears, Peter laughs.
Because as much as he can push back against it all day, every day, he knows how she’s right about this stuff at least seventy percent of the time (or maybe just a few notches less). He wants to fight it, but not because he doesn’t want the opportunities available to him at the other side of this bramble bush of emotional vulnerabilities.
He’s just scared. So he looks Michelle in the eye and tries to remember that he has no reason to be, that Ned Leeds doesn’t do anything he doesn’t want to do, and that even applies to Peter himself.
Peter would have to be stupid, years of blunt observations and do it yourself’s mixed in with all the endless loyalty telling him exactly how willing Ned is to say no to him.
And he hadn’t. He hasn’t. Not about this.
Not yet, anyway.
So Peter laughs, and he says, “it’s fucking stupid that you’re so good at this and can’t even get Gwen Stacy to go on a date with you.”
Michelle turns on the tub faucet and dunks his head under it for all of a second and a half in one fluid movement, leaving Peter laughing even harder as he sputters through the water on his face, soaked hair hanging in his eyes.
“I’m gonna ask her!” she exclaims as she pushes herself to her feet and storms away. “You’re all so annoying!”
It’s good, Peter thinks as he dries his face off with the palm of his hand, to have found family in Michelle Jones.
***
Maybe it’s here, where the whole thing starts.
Peter parks Flash Thompson’s father’s car out front of Midtown High as Ned is already jumping up from his seat on the steps and running towards him.
One of the car’s headlights is shattered, blown out, and there are multiple deep scrapes along the doors but it’s done it’s job of getting him back to where he started, dragging a terrified Ned into the nearest alley where Peter can change.
(Not before leaving a note on the windshield, though, apologizing and telling them Tony Stark would cover the damages. Peter hasn’t asked permission to offer such a thing, but feels he’s owed one mistake covered after saving all that tech.)
“Peter, holy shit--” Ned is practically trembling with anxious energy as Peter tugs off his mask, takes the backpack with a crumpled suit-- two sizes too big-- from Ned’s grip and crouches down to dig through it. “You need medical attention-- you’re-- you’re bleeding--”
“I’m okay,” Peter tells him, even as the pull of his makeshift suit away from clotting blood on his chest makes him wince, trying to maneuver the thing over his head without actually having to lift his arms over his head.
“Dude,” Ned exhales with exasperation as he steps forward, helps to gently extricate Peter from his patchwork sweatshirt, pulling paper napkins and a bottle of water out of his backpack to clean up his chest enough that they can see where all the blood originates from.
It’s mostly stopped, just a slow ooze where he’s disrupted healing wounds, but Peter, slumped on the dirty ground in an alleyway, looks exclusively at Ned’s worried face and it doesn’t feel like much of a win.
Because Peter can watch it become real to him in that moment, the dangers of what Peter does on his weeknights.
It’s so cool and it’s so wild and it’s the best fucking thing to ever happen to either of them until now, because Ned looks at Peter and they both understand they’ve been living under false pretenses.
Spider-Man is a hero and he will do what it takes to save just about anyone who faces trouble in his city, except for maybe Peter Parker.
Peter looks at Ned’s trembling hands as he stuffs the bloody suit into his backpack and Peter gets to watch-- that moment when Ned Leeds realizes that Spider-Man might kill his best friend one day.
***
The train ride home from Michelle’s apartment is long, every rattle of the rails jolting at his injury and his heart strings in equal measure.
He stares at his empty inbox on his phone and is grateful at least for the lack of reception underground so he doesn’t have the option to do anything reckless.
A moment to think is what he needs, as a dark tunnel becomes a fluorescent subway platform.
A moment is what he takes.
***
Ned pounds on the door of Peter and Flash’s shared apartment on a Friday evening in October.
There are orange leaves, soggy with the rain of the day clinging to the edges of their windows and there is Flash on the couch, looking at Peter with intrigue as Ned’s fist hits their door and his voice filters through the wood.
“I know you’re home, Parker, open the damn door.”
Peter makes a sheepish face as he motions towards the source of the sound, saying, “I’m gonna…”
“Yep,” Flash hauls himself up off of the couch, making his way to shut himself in his room. “Gonna leave you to whatever that is.”
Peter flicks off the news program they had been watching-- coverage of Spider-Man’s fight earlier in the day because Flash wanted an update and because Peter likes to self-flagellate-- and then he waits for Flash’s door to shut before he gingerly pushes himself to his feet without pulling too much at the still-healing wound in his side and swings open the door just as Ned’s mouth opens as if to loudly call out to him again.
Ned’s jaw clamps shut and he gives Peter a cursory once over before Peter manages a quiet, “hey, man.”
“Hey, man?” Ned repeats with an exasperated tilt to his tone as his eyes shoot up to meet Peter’s. “Are you serious? Are you-- God, you’re annoying, I’m coming in.”
He pushes his way into the apartment, but it’s not aggressive, not from what Peter knows of the Big Book of Ned Leeds Body Language, anyway. It’s anxious, and it’s wound up, and sure it’s also a little bit angry but the sort of anger that comes along with fear-- quick to fizzle out in favor of something more like sadness.
“Ned--”
“What were you thinking today?” Ned cuts him off, Peter shutting and locking the door before taking him by the shoulder and leading him across the room despite his ongoing ranting. “What were you thinking not calling me, Peter? You want to handle this stuff on your own from now on? You think you can just jump headfirst into this shit without anyone having your six?”
“Come on, outside,” Peter says, slinging a blanket across his shoulders as he opens the window and motions towards the rain-slicked fire escape. “Thin walls and Flash is home.”
Ned looks at him, studying him in that same scared way before he relents and climbs out into the October chill, holding out a hand to help Peter through after him and making a sound of discontent at the careful way Peter moves despite trying to look uninjured.
“Don’t pull your stitches,” Ned says flatly as he closes the window behind them and then starts fussing with the blanket around Peter’s shoulders, tugging it tighter around him with restless hands.
“How did you…?” Peter blanches.
“God, dude, MJ called me,” Ned pulls his hands away abruptly, crosses them tight over his own chest.
“Oh, I--”
“She said you got hurt-- she said-- she gave you stitches?” he’s frantic and he’s on edge and there’s a missing breath to his voice that would bring it down to its usual level, the place where he finds comfort and the place where he calls home. “Peter you can’t just-- you have to tell me when shit like that happens, I don’t-- if it were to go wrong and I wasn’t there to help--”
“Ned.”
The sky is a deep, deep blue as it shifts to the darkness of an early autumn night, and Ned lets it close around him as he shuts his mouth.
“I’m okay,” Peter tells him.
“You got hurt,” Ned insists, a cracking in his voice, in the look on his face.
“Yeah, but MJ’s really good at getting my blood outta shit.”
“Peter.”
“Sorry,” Peter grimaces, “not funny.”
“God, this is why-- this is why it’s so dangerous, you know?” Ned scrubs a hand over his eyes, looking for all the world like exhaustion personified.
Peter's face morphs into quiet confusion as a car horn honks somewhere below them, the sounds of the city filtering up and filling the heavy spaces between them. (Heavy, like both danger and safety.)
“I don’t…” Peter holds the blanket around his shoulders tightly. “I don’t know what you mean.”
“This,” Ned motions between the two of them with a single hand. “Putting this up high somewhere where it can fall and-- and break. Because we can’t break, Peter. We can’t-- What happens if we fall out and you don’t have a guy in the chair and something… You need me. You need me.”
Peter’s lungs feel suddenly too big for his chest and too small to bring in enough oxygen at the same time, because it’s a scenario he’s thought about, but with a brand new perspective piled on top.
He’s thought about what it would be like to lose Ned in his life, and the answer has always been unbearable. He’s thought about what happens when it all becomes too much, when he and his life become too much to reasonably ask Ned to stick around for, and although part of him has already accepted the possibility of it one day, he hasn’t considered this.
Ned’s point of view on the subject.
And God it’s pretty fucking unbearable too.
“Is that what you’re worried about?” Peter asks. “Is that the only reason you think I want you?”
Something shifts. Peter thinks he can see it in Ned’s eyes when he breathes a quiet, “what?”
“Ned, I-- you’re the greatest guy in the chair I could’ve ever asked for, but that’s not why I’ve been fucking-- pining over you with a helluva lot less subtlety than I was aiming for,” Peter insists, a breath of a laugh right at the edges of it, floating out onto the breeze and up towards darkening sky. “You have to know that, you have to know.”
Ned’s jaw trembles almost imperceptibly for a moment of tension, brows furrowed but eyes big and hopeful.
“Peter,” he says on an exhale, “I don’t know if I’m cut out for being more than the backup. I don’t know if my heart can fucking take it.”
“I know,” Peter responds earnestly. “But you’ve been a lot more than backup since-- always. Since always, dude.”
Ned’s eyes retreat from Peter’s face, but only for the moment it takes for him to look out over the railing of the fire escape, yellow and white and red lights of a city being sent to bed before it wants to go flickering to life. Ned takes a beat and Peter lets him, wants him to really absorb everything he is, that he is everything.
Something, if not that thought precisely, seems to sink in.
Because before he knows it, Peter’s face is back in Ned’s hands and they are kissing and all of the chill of the night is expelled from the whole of his body all at once.
All at once, Peter is warm again, and even if the kiss is short-lasting, the warmth certainly isn’t.
“I need you to understand,” Ned implores, still holding Peter’s face, “that if we do this, I’m not gonna get used to watching you get hurt; I’m not gonna start being chill about it just because we share a-- a part of our lives other than Spider-Man and other than Midtown and ESU and roommates. I’m gonna freak out even more than I usually do and I’m gonna be insufferable about it.”
“I know,” Peter tells him, face close enough to Ned’s that he has to shift his gaze between two eyes just to make sure Ned understands how seriously he’s taking this conversation. For once in his life, taking it nothing but seriously. “As long as you understand from the start that that guy’s not going anywhere.”
“Christ, Pete,” Ned chuckles, dry but true, “you think I’ve been around this long and don’t know that?”
“You think I’ve been around this long and don’t know how protective you are?” Peter fires back with a growing spread of lips, a speeding heart.
Ned drops his hands from Peter’s face, winds his fingers up in the fabric of the blanket where Peter holds it close instead, and Peter uses the opportunity to untangle one of his own hands and cup Ned’s cheek with cold, calloused skin.
He leans in, presses a sure kiss to Ned’s opposite cheek, and tells him, “I don’t want you to agree to anything that you don’t want. If you don’t want this.”
“I do. It just feels-- sometimes it feels like we’re flying a bit too close to the sun,” Ned breathes, but the tension in his jaw goes slack under Peter’s gentle palm.
“Yeah,” Peter agrees softly.
“So how do we keep from-- burning?” Ned asks, the lean of his body, the language of his stance pointing directly into Peter’s space, invading, and not remotely unpleasantly so.
“I dunno,” Peter shrugs, a melancholy, albeit hopeful sort of smile finding its way onto his face, “but Icarus is kind of an old friend. I’m sure we can figure something out.”
Ned laughs, quiet and watery but more earnest than either of the times they’ve tried to laugh it off and walk on. This isn’t a new wall, after all, but an opening of a door.
And for Peter of all people.
“You know that guy fell from the sky, right?” Ned hooks a finger into one of Peter’s belt loops, tugs him closer.
“I know,” Peter says, “but he still got to fly first.”
***
The first time that Peter leaps off of the roof of his building-- fourteen years old, grieving the most influential loss of his young life, and wearing a sweatsuit parading as armor-- there’s a part of him that knows he might just fall.
He’s practiced in lower stakes, and he’s tested out these new webs of his plenty of times to know they’re durable enough to carry far more than his body weight, but it’s always a risk, isn’t it? Any new endeavor, no matter how much preparation you think you might have, there are always unexpected obstacles, twists that don’t match up to your carefully crafted plan.
Peter stands at the edge of the roof and secures his goggles over his eyes with hands wrapped up in fingerless gloves and he takes a deep, steadying breath.
There’s always a risk of falling, but he knows that if he doesn’t try, if he doesn’t have just a bit of faith in himself, that he’ll never even have the chance to succeed.
Peter Parker has a lot of power running through his veins-- even fourteen years old and grieving the most significant loss of his life-- and the longer it goes unused, the longer he tries to make it sit separate from the responsibility he knows it gives him, the bigger the hole it burns in his gut.
Toes inched out over the ledge, Peter holds his arms out on either side of him. He leans, and he leans, and he drops.
Rushing wind and a dip in his stomach he drops.
Ground rushing towards him and sky falling behind he drops and drops and drops until he shoots out a hand, triggers the little invention on his wrist, and then, for the first time…
He flies.
“Woohoooo!” Peter shouts, both hands holding a web as he reaches the bottom of his arc, back up to the top, and does it all again.
And again.
Once more.
He only makes it three blocks before he wraps his body around a lamp post and slides to the ground with bruised ribs and a bloodied nose.
But he grins, laughing brightly as he falls flat on his back and looks up at the looming buildings, the bright blue sky above.
Because he got to fly first.
***
“Peter, you are now ninety minutes late.”
“Yes, yes, yes, Karen,” Peter lets go at the top of a swing and shoots out another web on instinct alone as he begins to drop again towards a group of drunken celebrators making their way down the icy winter street. “I’m aware-- I’m very aware. Why d’you think I’m going so fast?”
“Just keeping you up to date,” Karen tells him, and if Peter didn’t know better he’d think she’s teasing him. “You have that message from Ned still if you’d like to give him an ETA.”
“Are you micromanaging my relationship now?” Peter balks, another freefall, another web to catch his fall.
“He’s asking if you expect to arrive in time for midnight,” she ignores his question and Peter rolls his eyes, looking at the clock that appears on his HUD every time he passes a certain amount of tardiness.
“Ask him to meet me on the fire escape,” Peter tells her as he rounds a corner, waves to a group of people outside a bar who call out Happy New Year, Spider-Man! “I’ll be there right on time.”
And not a minute before.
***
Ned is stepping out onto the fire escape, pulling a coat around him and dipping his face into the scarf around his neck, in the same moment that Peter arrives.
It’s not showing off, except that it is, when he flips off of one web with a flourish and uses another to lower himself upside down from the platform above them, startling a bright laugh out of Ned when he says, “heard there was a party going on around these parts, wanted to make sure it was all up to code.”
“So Spider-man really is the fun police these days, huh?” Ned teases back, taking a step closer to where Peter hangs and letting his eyes rove over the eyes of the mask, the jacket that Peter wears over his suit in the winter months. “I thought you might not make it.”
There’s music playing inside, a television too, tuned into the celebration in Times Square which Peter had swung by earlier in the night, and the warm yellow light that glows from the window beside their perch reflects off of the flush to Ned's cheeks.
The cold outside is biting and Peter's toes have long gone numb, but he’s smiling under his mask, breathing deep through the chill.
“Busy night out there,” he explains to Ned softly under the bustle of a city preparing to restart, “but I wanted to start the year here.”
“Yeah?” Ned grins at him.
Inside, a countdown begins at ten.
Outside, Peter swings his weight gently towards this man, all his earnest hope and terrible realism, all of his choice and the miracle that it’s brought him back to Peter time after time despite it all.
“Yeah,” he agrees softly, and the countdown is at six now, pushing them against their will into something new while out here, with Ned's gentle hands rolling Peter’s mask up to his nose, they step into an era all their own, an era of their own free will. “Feels like a good omen.”
“Right on time then, I guess,” Ned says, a breath of a thing as the city cries out a collective three!
“Aren’t we always?” Peter smirks back, the curve of his lips doing the work of the thing with a two!
“Shut up, Webs,” Ned chuckles, catching a one! right between two sets of lips, locked upside down and right side up.
The uncertainty of the future is heavy like feelings growing, like names given and tenderness accepted, like a window frosted shut.
The uncertainty of all life, but especially this shared one they’ve continuously survived is weighed down with life and death and the potential for both.
And maybe too, at least at the beginning of it all, with love.
Somehow, Peter knows that this is a start of something, if only, like a changing year, because it is also the end.
The end of a world in which they aren’t allowed to do this, aren’t allowed to explore all the facets of human connection in the way that they so desperately want to with one another.
Peter wants to know Ned in every sense, and this is where they start-- two months in and still finding their footing, but happy nonetheless. Happy with smiles on faces and butterflies in stomachs and forgiveness, easy on tongues.
It may not last forever, and when this era inevitably ends and shifts into another beginning, no matter whether it be in a direction that this version of him in the present can see or want or sense, Peter knows that the end will not make it any less worth the doing.
Peter’s whole life has been things stopping before he’s ready, before he’s even considered the possibility of such a thing, but he looks at the photographs of a younger self with a bigger family hanging on the walls of his aunt’s apartment and it is not, not, not worth less for the stopping.
Right now, with Ned Leeds’ warm palms on his cheeks, as a new year begins and an old one logs itself snuggly into history, Peter’s feet are far from the ground, soaring higher and higher with every passing moment that he gets to call this his life.
He’s unafraid for the moment, though, with the sun dipped long behind the horizon and this man he remains tethered to.
Because this is when they get to fly.