Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

The first day back at school is bewildering.

It feels to Peter like he’s just getting back into a routine following the longest few days of his life—stowing away on an alien ship, fighting an impossible villain, disintegrating in his mentor’s arms on an alien planet, then coming to only to be ushered by Dr. Strange through a sparking orange portal and into an all-out war. He fought alongside heroes he’d only once dreamed of meeting, his excitement dampened with the threatening specter of death looming over their heads the way the very real spaceship loomed above, blasting shots into the earth around them. And then, of course, there was Tony, the specter of death realized, the light leaving his eyes just the way Ben’s had, while Peter stood there and sobbed uselessly, powerless to stop it, just the way he’d done by Ben’s side years ago.

He barely remembers the funeral—flowers on the water, May’s hand a grounding weight on his shoulder when all he wanted was to float, untethered, out of this reality he’d woken up into. His reunion with her had been bittersweet, full of tears and anguish where there should have been joy and relief, because all he could think of was how he’d failed Tony, how a five-year-old child was fatherless because of him, how lucky he was that May remained but how likely it was that, some day, he’d fail her too. That night, sleep a distant dream set aside for some other time, he ran through every minute of the battle, scratching out, rewriting, calculating what he should have done to save Tony. Died to protect the gauntlet, snapped his fingers himself, stayed with his mentor so some other unlucky hero would be stuck with the task. In the morning, Tony was still dead, Morgan and Pepper woke alone, and Peter remained, an undeserving survivor of war.

In those blurry minutes before Peter had stepped through the portal, Dr. Strange had explained, as thoroughly as one could in such a high-stakes time crunch, that it had been five years. Five years since Peter’s—and half the universe’s—existences had blipped away, gone, just like that. To Peter, it had only felt like a loss of consciousness—albeit painful—that he’d wake from on any other particularly rough crime-fighting day, dismayed to hear from Karen that he’d been unresponsive for a few hours. Five years.

Through the heat of the battle, through the loss of Tony, the weight of those years had faded into background noise. But now, back at school, in a sea of unfamiliar faces, it comes screaming back. Five years.

He supposes he should feel lucky—he is, after all, alive, and finding Ned’s unaged face in the crowd is like finding an anchor to moor him in place. At least his best friend isn’t off at college building Lego Death Stars with new best friends, or maybe having Star Wars-themed parties because Legos are the hobbies of high school nerds with no parties to go to. When they hug in the busy hallway, it’s the first bit of relief Peter feels since he woke up on Titan.

Yes. He’s lucky. His aunt didn’t have to live five lonely years without him and find a way to fit him back into her new life, maybe one with a new partner if those years weren’t so lonely, maybe even one with a kid (Look at Tony—there was no telling what those five unknowable years could do). He didn’t have to live five years without May. Other familiar faces in the classroom are a comfort that day—MJ, Betty. There’s Flash too, of course, since it would be too much to ask for him to be grown and concerned with bullying some college freshman. But Peter can almost welcome the taunts—they’re soothing in their familiarity, in how harmless they feel compared to the words Peter feels he really deserves.

He should feel lucky. It’s actually quite ludicrous that he feels so displaced when he goes to his old locker and gets told off by some familiar-looking girl who’s grown a foot since he last saw her, a soft pudginess gone from her cheeks, that that’s her locker he’s breaking into. Or that he feels so embarrassed when he doesn’t recognize his Spanish teacher, whose appearance seems changed not only by the last five years, but by an illness she’s been diagnosed with within them. In chemistry, he’s ashamed at his irritation with the obvious lack of glassware and reagents. The school is struggling to accommodate a suddenly doubled student body, and here he is, annoyed at having to wait for someone to wash out a beaker before he can use it.

Peter finds it's fairly easy to tell who's been blipped by the way they carry themselves in the hallways and the classrooms, their faces varying degrees of shocked and uneasy, their movements tentative, their words halting, like they're terrified to disturb the still, steady lives of the ones who stayed, who lived five years of pain and history that the blipped have not. Some of the ones who stayed look at the blipped with sympathy, some with curiosity. Maybe Peter's imagining it, but some seem like they look at him with disdain, like they'd liked how things were before the blipped came back.

At the end of the day, after Ned goes home, he pauses to sit on the school steps, exhausted, heels of his hands pressed into his eyes to shut out the strangers pooling out of the school around him. He thinks about how he used to sneak out before the rush, eager to don the suit, go on patrol, put his backpack at risk for theft once again. He thinks about the days when Happy would be waiting outside to pick him up and ferry him to the compound to the fake-internship-turned-real, where he’d work on his web shooter fluid while bandying with a sarcastic Tony Stark. It was just last week that things were that way, to him. To the universe, though, it was really five years ago.

He doesn’t notice when she sits beside him, not until she says, “Hey, loser.” The insult is soft, almost edging on affectionate. He lifts his face, blinking against the harsh sunlight bearing down on them, catching her curls, the frizzy bits glowing like a soft halo around her head. Something like gratitude blooms inside his chest, heartened by a face he knows, a face that looks like one he saw what feels like a week ago in academic decathlon practice. He offers her a tight-lipped smile. “Hey, MJ. Waiting for someone?”

“Oh, uh… no.” She seems sheepish for a moment, like she’s been caught doing something she shouldn’t, something embarrassing, but it passes and she’s back to looking like her usual, unreadable self. “Are you?”

“No,” Peter admits.

They sit there in silence for a little while, but it doesn’t feel strained or awkward—it feels shared, like they’re present with each other while their eyes follow unfamiliar students into unfamiliar (or sometimes familiar) cars, trying to place who’s really new and who just looks new to them because they’re, suddenly, older.

“It’s weird, huh?” MJ comments. She’s looking at Lindsay Wells, the girl who’d admonished Peter for trying to get into her locker, laughing with her friend at something on her phone.

“Yeah,” Peter agrees. “Weird is an understatement.”

“It’s like we were all in some collective five-year coma,” MJ laughs, a hint of grimness to her voice, “and now we have to just, like… come back to a world that spent five years moving on without us.”

Peter thinks about Tony, Pepper, a cottage in the woods, a baby girl. Five years moving on without him, without the rest of the blipped Avengers, only to give his life to bring everyone back anyway, leaving his budding family in pieces. He twists his mouth, hard, and glues his gaze to Lindsay Wells’s sky blue-painted nails to stop the tears before they fall. He feels like MJ must notice, but she doesn’t say anything, just stares ahead with him. The silence comes back, gentle, comforting. They sit for a while and watch the crowd thin out.

“Hey. Peter.” This time, when MJ speaks, there’s something in her voice Peter hasn’t heard before, a softness. A vulnerability. It pulls his eyes to hers, magnetized, and he’s startled to see her face look so... open. “I’m really sorry about Tony Stark.”

“Oh,” Peter says, lamely, surprised. For a second his insides are gripped with panic, forgetting the internship farce, thinking she must know about Spider-Man, that everyone must know. But she goes on, “I mean, I don’t know how uh, closely you worked with him as an intern, but, still… I know you like, looked up to him and stuff.”

“You did?”

“I think I remember you talking about writing a dumb essay on Iron Man being the best superhero in fourth grade,” she says with a smirk, and Peter actually laughs.

“You remember that?” he asks, amused, and for a fleeting moment he thinks he catches her blushing, but she rolls her eyes and plows on.

“Confessions that unbelievably dorky are a little hard to forget,” she quips. They both laugh, a light thing, something that’s managed to escape the heavy weight of a new world.

“Didn’t you write an essay on the horrors of war profiteering with Mr. Stark as, like, your prime example?” Peter questions, and is it him, or does MJ look almost… pleased?

“Yeah,” she concedes, “and, like, I don’t take it back or anything. But,” she pauses for a moment as though to weigh a risky decision, and then covers his hand, splayed on the edge of the step, with her own. The warmth is nice, comforting, and sparks something strange deep in Peter’s belly. A flutter.

“I’m sorry,” she says, and she means it, puts a period at the end of it by squeezing his hand with hers before letting it retreat like it was never there at all. Peter’s heard this before, of course, but coming from her, it feels different. Ned had apologized too, was also grieving the loss of a revered superhero, and he could feel in Ned’s apologies swallowed questions, his friend yearning to know about the battle but too worried about how Peter was handling it to ask. MJ, meanwhile, was offering him empathy for a loss she didn’t share on even Ned’s level, having never particularly cared for Tony Stark.

“Thanks,” he says, and this time a tear slips out, and he hastens to swipe it away with a closed fist. There’s no pretending MJ doesn’t see, but she doesn’t look away in embarrassment or at him with pity. She just smiles her little grimace of a smile and nods.

They sit together, quiet, until they’re the last ones there. Peter imagines all the departed students eating family dinners, reading through syllabi, filling out school planners with future quiz dates. He knows, of course, that it’s silly to think they’re all not struggling in their own ways. But it’s good to know that MJ is here with him, present, grounding, not off in the picturesque, carefree homes he’s drawing up in his head, unreachable.

“I should get going before Aunt May gets worried,” he says apologetically, both because he feels guilty to leave her and genuinely doesn’t want to leave her.

MJ gets to her feet. “Yeah, sure,” she says kindly. She mentions nothing about anyone waiting, worried, for her. Peter isn’t sure if that’s because she’s just guarded about her family, or if her family doesn’t worry about her. But he would like to know, he thinks. He’d like to know a lot more about her than the careful image she presents.

He stands with her, glances down shyly at the ground, at the space between their feet, before he forces himself to meet her gaze. “Thanks, MJ,” he says, quiet but firm. He would say more, but he doesn’t exactly have the words, and he hopes she knows how grateful he is. She grins back.

“Any time, dork.”

When he walks away, he thinks about MJ's smile, the squeeze of her hand, and a lightness settles over him. It’s the first time he’s managed to breach the surface of grief, take a steadying breath. It’s small, but it’s a glimpse of something in this new reality that may finally be a good kind of different.

Chapter Text

When Peter does finally sleep, he wakes in a panic.

He blinks his eyes open, muddled at first, and then the terror seizes him in a vice, paralyzing. He never knows how long he’s been asleep. Hours? Days? Years? He’s scared to look at his phone and be faced with the time, the date. He read somewhere once that focusing on your surroundings and cataloguing things about a particular object can be helpful in staving off a panic attack, but the idea of scrutinizing anything in the dark of his room is terrifying, because what if he looks and nothing is familiar? What if it’s actually not his room at all?

Sometimes he jolts awake and calls desperately for May, before he’s conscious enough to even feel ashamed about it. When she arrives, looking like her—half-asleep, disheveled, tired eyes soft with concern, but otherwise looking like the aunt he saw just last night—he feels equal parts embarrassed and relieved. He apologizes profusely, swears he doesn’t even remember shouting her name, and she lies about believing him and sits up with him anyway. Sometimes they linger in silence, leant against the wall, her fingers kneading circles into his scalp, and other times she reminds him that he can talk to her, and he nods, but doesn’t.

Eventually, instead of talking, Peter gets into the habit of sleeping on the couch with the TV on. He falls asleep to nature documentaries, and when he wakes up in the middle of the night, panic-stricken, the familiar, drawling narration lulls him back to Earth—Earth, still now, and not five years in the future. He stops yelling for May, but some nights, he wakes up to find she’s joined him, head pillowed on the opposite armrest, knees curled towards her chest. Neither of them mentions it the next morning, but relatively speaking, those are the most peaceful nights of sleep Peter gets.

Since their afternoon out on the school steps, MJ has started joining Peter and Ned at their lunch table—a different table than the one they’d known as theirs pre-Blip, but theirs nonetheless. She’d arrived that first afternoon by briskly approaching them and unceremoniously dropping her lunch tray onto the table top, not even blinking when a quarter of her milk had sloshed out of the carton and onto the tray. Ned had looked almost terrified, cutting glances at Peter and haltingly asking if academic decathlon had finally been reinstated and if they had missed practice. “Nope,” MJ had replied, sitting down, picking up a French fry, and tearing it in two with her teeth. She’d offered no other explanation, and just like that, they’d become a table of three.

Peter doesn’t mind. In fact, he finds he looks forward to lunch more than usual. He’d feared, after their conversation, that maybe things would be awkward, that maybe MJ would look at him with pity, but instead she acts like her usual, intelligent, mildly scary self. She spends most lunches with a book blocking her face from view, lowering it to interject sarcastic comments about Peter and Ned’s “nerdy” conversations, or to educate them on a particular issue about which she finds their knowledge sorely lacking (“Actually, Ned, Mrs. Fung isn’t just protesting the lack of school supplies, she’s requesting transparency to find out where exactly school funds are going.”). At first, her presence and unpredictable commentary clearly make Ned uncomfortable—when she’s not looking, he widens his eyes at Peter as if to commiserate on how weird she is, lowers his voice at other times to avoid her input. But, eventually, he realizes Peter isn’t exactly in his corner—sure, at times she’s intimidating, but Peter is more intrigued than scared, and so Ned accepts defeat and learns that MJ’s prickly behavior is just her odd way of making friends.

Peter doesn’t admit it, of course, but a benefit of having MJ join them (a benefit, no doubt, that Ned must consider to be a downside) is that it keeps all Spider-Man-related talks off limits. He still hasn’t shared the details of the battle with Ned, terrified to revisit it out loud, sure he won’t be able to hold it together, and he can feel Ned’s curiosity—and worry—growing.

In fact, Peter hasn’t worn the suit—any suit—since that day. The Iron Spider taunts him from the corner of his room despite being shielded from view with a spare blanket; the first suit Tony made for him is stuffed in the back of his closet, hidden behind ninth grade science and math textbooks he’d put off reselling, an ill-fitting resting place that would probably cause Tony to fly off the handle if he were alive to know about it. Spider-Man’s hiatus is a detail Peter’s sure is not lost on his friend, even though Ned, surprisingly, still has not brought up the conversation with Peter. But as the days slog on, Peter is sure Ned won’t be able to contain himself much longer; so he avoids being alone with Ned, reveling in MJ’s company at lunch, dodging spending time with Ned after school, insisting May wants him home for unspecified chores, pretending he doesn’t notice the hurt and wariness in Ned’s eyes as he says he’ll see Peter tomorrow.

Peter doesn’t want to spend more time than he already has thinking on Spider-Man and all his spectacular failures, doesn’t want to put on the suit and add even more failures to the already-lengthy list. So on nights when the guilt is heavy on his chest, his mind buzzing with accusations it’s just waiting to lob at him the second he turns his attention inward, he tunes into the nature documentaries instead. He focuses on snow in the Gobi Desert, converts its temperature ranges from Celsius to Fahrenheit in his head. He drifts off to the image of Bactrian camels swallowing mouthfuls of ice and wakes to the sound of trumpeting elephants rooting through sand. Through the night, in moments of consciousness, he latches onto the sounds of oceans and mountains and jungles before he has the chance to think too deeply about anything else.

One afternoon at lunch, when Ned has elected to meet with his English teacher to go over an assignment and join them later, MJ asks Peter a question.

“What’s up with you and Ned?”

Peter reaches up to cover the chocolate milk that has come suddenly dribbling out of his mouth. He swallows noisily, swipes at his face with his palm, makes a choking noise. “What?”

MJ looks completely unfazed. “What’s up with you and Ned?” she repeats, loudly, like he’s hard of hearing.

“I, uhhh… I don’t know what you mean,” Peter responds weakly, glancing around them to make sure no one’s listening in.

“Cut the bullshit, Parker. Anyone can see you’re avoiding him. And if that wasn’t obvious, the forlorn, abandoned puppy dog eyes he’s constantly giving you would make it clear.” She’s looking at him now, her gaze slicing right through him, like she’s daring him to give another dismissive answer. MJ has a way of making Peter feel like she’s peeling back his skin and turning him inside out for examination, cataloguing every organ in his body. Nowhere to hide.

He averts his gaze and swallows again, against the tight feeling in his chest. He’s thinking about the battle, about Spider-Man, about the things he wants to get as far away from as possible, the things he feels he has no choice but to face if he finds himself alone with Ned.

“It’s just, um,” he begins, lamely, “things are just… different now.”

MJ arches an eyebrow and waits.

“Since, uh, you know… The Thing.”

“The Thing,” MJ repeats, pursing her lips around the beginnings of an exasperated smile. “The Vanishing from Existence for Five Years Thing, I presume?”

Peter winces at her flippancy, but nods and grimaces in an attempt at a smile. For a moment he thinks he sees a change in her gaze, a wrinkle in her brow, a faltering, like she’s worried she went too far. But it’s gone quickly, like any rare glimpse of vulnerability he thinks he catches her in. She is ever composed, ever in control.

“Well, I mean, it is a pretty big Thing,” she concedes, gentler this time. “But, and please never make me repeat something this disgusting again, so is your friendship.”

Despite himself, this gets an actual smile out of Peter. “Oh, wow, MJ. That was… really beautiful.”

“Shut up,” she says, and it would be lethal if he couldn’t tell that she was swallowing down a laugh with every muscle in her body.

“No, seriously,” Peter goes on, feeling lighter, “I think I like this sappy MJ. That was really sweet.”

MJ squints her eyes, lifts her fork and points it in the direction of his throat, and he laughs, holding up his hands in surrender.

“Sorry, don’t murder me. I mean, I know it’s plastic, but I’m sure you’d find a way.”

“Of course I would,” she replies, and makes a show of stabbing it into a baby carrot instead. When he laughs again, she finally lets him see a smirk. “Anyway, I’m not repeating that, but I’m serious. You guys have practically been fused together since grade school. I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but it’s not exactly common, what the two of you have.”

She isn’t being vulnerable, not really, stating all this like it’s a matter of fact, but Peter watches her chew for a moment and thinks. He rifles through all his memories of MJ through the years: idling in corners, nose in a book, alone at lunch tables. He thinks about how she would silently linger around him and Ned, how she used to announce her lack of friendship almost like it was a badge of honor. He feels a pang of sadness for her, and guilt that they never bothered to include her in their insular world. He knows she’s right.

“Yeah,” he sighs. “No, yeah… I love Ned, obviously, it’s just, you know Ned, he’s kinda nosy and asks a million questions and I haven’t really felt like talking about it… The Thing,” he adds, hastily.

“The Thing, right,” she says, eyes calculating again. “Well, you could try asking him not to ask. But also, it might not be bad to just get over with talking about it. You know, The Thing.”

“Right,” Peter says solemnly. He bites down on his lip against the tightness growing in his chest again, but nods. “Thanks, MJ.”

“You’re welcome. I take cash or thoughtful gifts,” she replies, and at that, Ned finally joins them, and Peter can’t believe he hadn’t noticed before how constant the puppy dog eyes really were.

“Ned! It’s been so long!” May exclaims when they come trundling through the door. She slings an arm around his shoulders and presses a kiss into his hair. Ned looks a little skittish, like he’s nervous to be back, but he returns May’s hug and thanks her for letting him come by. Peter decides it would be best to fix his gaze on the living room window and try to will his heart to slow to a normal pace.

In a fleeting moment of courage, he’d taken MJ’s advice to heart, told Ned he was sorry he’d “been weird,” and invited him to come over after school. The train ride home had been uncharacteristically awkward and quiet, and now that they were here, the terror of everything yet unsaid was pressing down on him.

“You know you’re always welcome, Ned. So good to see you. Do you boys need anything?” May sends a sidelong glance to Peter, who quickly shakes his head no. Though he hadn’t gone into detail, Peter had been honest with his aunt about his and Ned’s recently strained relationship. She nods at him and sends him an encouraging smile over Ned’s shoulder. “Okay then. See you two later.”

The silence in the few seconds after Peter shuts his bedroom door behind them is suffocating, making Peter feel like he’s got a bird trying to rattle its way out of his ribcage. But before he can even take a breath and steady himself, Ned begins.

“Peter, dude, I’m so sorry, I don’t really know what I did but it’s got to be bad, but I swear I won’t come between you and Michelle, I won’t tell her about Spider-Man—”

“Whoa, whoa, wait—what?!” Peter blurts. The stab of guilt he’d felt at Ned’s desperate and unnecessary apology recedes for a moment, swallowed up by confusion.

“Yeah dude, listen, I get it, you guys have your thing or whatever, I totally respect it, but you’re not gonna be one of those people who totally ditches their friends for a relationship right? ‘Cuz I don’t think I could survive Midtown without you, Peter, seriously, I mean I get I can’t always be around you guys but I just want to make sure we don’t lose our friendship—”

Peter holds his hands up to his temples to ground himself, feeling like he’s just been taken by the shoulders and violently shaken, barely registering whatever Ned keeps going on about. Ned is freaking out because he thinks he’s ditching him? To be with MJ? For a moment, he imagines that reality—being with MJ—and his insides twist. He banishes the thought as quickly as he can.

“Whoa, Ned, please, calm down, hang on. I’m not ‘with’ MJ.”

The waterfall of desperate words tumbling out of Ned’s mouth finally stops. “You’re not?”

“No, dude.”

“But I thought… you haven’t been avoiding me to hang out with her?”

“No, no, that’s—no, I haven’t been doing that at all. I haven’t seen MJ outside of school.” Peter collapses onto his bed and lets out a laugh despite himself.

“… Oh.” Ned looks more confused than ever, and slowly lowers himself into the chair at Peter’s desk. “I thought… so what have you really been doing after school all this time?”

“Nothing, Ned,” Peter replies with an exasperated laugh. “Nothing. Coming home.”

Ned looks like he can’t decide whether to be relieved or stricken by this news. “Okay… so… you’re not secretly dating MJ without telling me and slowly phasing me out of your life forever.”

The words “dating MJ” send a jolt of electricity through Peter’s body, but Peter chooses to handle that the way he’s handled most of his feelings lately: ignore it. “Jeez, Ned. No. Absolutely not.”

“Great! Awesome.” Ned pauses for a moment and fiddles with his hands in his lap, looking meek. “You’re not phasing me out of your life forever for reasons unrelated to MJ?”

At this, Peter sighs and heaves himself up to a sitting position, slumped on the edge of his bed. “No. I mean, maybe I was kind of doing that unintentionally, but it isn’t what I want.” Seeing the fear in Ned’s eyes, he quickly continues, “You didn’t do anything wrong, Ned. I’ve just been, I don’t know. Having a hard time.”

“Okay… well… you know you can talk to me, right? That’s what friends are for.”

Peter buries his face in his hands and sighs. “I know I can, Ned, and I know you want me to, and that’s the problem. I haven’t wanted to talk about anything. So I’ve just been… I don’t know… trying to be alone.”

“That seems… unhealthy?” Ned offers. Peter snorts.

“Yeah, I’m sure you’re right about that.”

“So… did you ask me to come here because you want to talk about it now? Or do you not want to talk about it yet? Or do you never want to talk about it? I mean, I feel like as your friend, I should say I don’t think that’s a good idea, but it’s also your choice so—”

“Ned,” Peter says, looking at him pointedly. Ned stops and gives a few rapid nods, mumbling apologies.

“I just… I invited you because I didn’t want to keep being a jerk. Actually, it was MJ who told me I should talk to you.”

“Oh,” Ned answers, pleasantly surprised.

“Yeah. I just… I was worried you were gonna ask me stuff about everything that happened after I ditched the field trip, about the…” Peter pauses, tenses all his muscles, continues in as deliberately measured of a tone as he can, “the battle, and… and I just really didn’t want to talk about it.” He clamps down on the inside of his cheek, willing his bubbling emotions to settle.

“Oh…” Ned says, again. Peter won’t meet his gaze, but he can feel the concern practically radiating in waves off his friend. They sit in silence for a moment, and then Ned tries, “Peter, uh… is it okay if I come sit next to you?”

This takes Peter by enough surprise that he does look up and catch Ned’s eyes, beseeching, a little nervous, but compassionate. “Uh… yeah, sure, Ned. Thanks.”

He lets his gaze fall again, closes his eyes as he feels the bed sink against Ned’s weight beside him. Ned’s quiet for a moment, casting about for the right words. Peter keeps his eyes shut as his friend finally speaks.

“Listen, I know, um… the superhero stuff can seem like, really cool and all, but I also know it can be pretty messed up. I know sometimes I don’t think about the messed up stuff because it’s also so cool, but… everything that happened with the Blip was really messed up.”

Peter winces, but nods. “Yeah.”

“I mean, for me, too. For everybody,” Ned says, not unkindly. “Trust me, Pete, it’s not like I’ve been sitting around waiting for you to tell me fun stories or anything. I mean, I almost couldn’t even come here today because my parents are so freaked to let me out of their sight like I’m gonna disappear again any second. They text me constantly to make sure I’m still alive. My grandma died three years ago, but to me it’s like she died a few weeks ago and I don’t even get to go to a funeral, you know? It’s all over.”

“Oh, man, Ned… I’m sorry,” Peter says. His stomach feels like it’s bottoming out of him, his heart constricting with guilt. He can’t believe he’s spent so much time avoiding Ned, afraid to talk about his struggles, but never considering that Ned might want to talk about his own.

“No, Peter, it’s okay—”

“No, it’s really not though, Ned,” Peter replies, and this time he can’t stem the tears before they start falling. “I’ve been a really crappy friend to you, dude, I’m sorry.”

For a moment, Ned looks terrified, but he seems to come to a quick decision, pitching forward and wrapping his arms around Peter in a hug. “Listen, Pete, it’s okay,” he says after a moment, Peter returning the hug but doing everything he can to remain perfectly still while the tears continue, “I’m sorry, man, I really wasn’t telling you that to make you feel bad. I just wanted you to know you weren’t alone.”

Peter sniffs hard and nods against Ned’s shoulder. He rubs his eyes after they finally pull apart, collecting his tears in the sleeves of his sweater. He sucks in a huge breath, lets it out. “Thanks, Ned. I can… if you want. I can tell you about all the… stuff.”

“Only if you want to, dude,” Ned says gently.

Peter nods almost imperceptibly in response, taking a moment to clear his throat. “No, I mean, I should. If you’re okay with hearing it. I should talk about it.”

Ned gives an encouraging nod.

And so Peter does.

May pretends not to notice the boys’ red-rimmed eyes when they finally emerge from Peter’s room, Ned quickly gathering his things and stopping at the front door to give Peter a long hug goodbye. “Thanks again, Ms. Parker,” he calls on his way out, the door closing against May’s exasperated yet affectionate shout of “IT’S MAY!”

She lets Peter collect himself, go to the bathroom and wash up while she scrolls through some takeout menus on her phone. When he joins her, quiet and pensive, she pats the open seat on the couch beside her. He clambers over the coffee table and sits cross-legged next to her like he did when he was little, and she rests a hand on his knee. “You wanna split some lasagna?” she asks.

“Sure,” he agrees. May smiles tenderly at him and gives his knee a squeeze. “Okay. I’ll order. Proud of you, kiddo.” Peter ducks his head a little sheepishly, his cheeks tingeing pink, and May laughs and taps in the order.

Later, stomachs full of pasta, Peter and May watch a movie together and dissolve into laughter over a background character’s face in a scene, a stupid, silly detail that would probably go unnoticed by anyone else. They rewind, replay it, pause it, laugh some more.

When it’s all over, Peter hugs his aunt goodnight and heads to his room. He climbs into bed, closes his eyes, takes in the quiet dark around him. He sleeps through the night.