Spider-Son & Iron Dad two shots

Ned's First Bad Night

a/n: after about two months of some really rough mental health, a breakup, and forty hours of slime rancher, I'm slowly inching back into writing! hope you enjoy, wishing you all a wonderful day💛

⚠️TW: Blood, Gore, Grief⚠️

Ned mumbled some lyrics under his breath and shifted some papers around at his desk. Flicking on the table lamp in the corner, and then opening up his laptop, he let out a quiet hum.

"It's poetry in motion," he sung softly. He nodded his head to the beat, smiling a little. "And when sh—"

Ned jolted as his phone started vibrating, and he pulled his headphones off and answered the call. "Hey, man. What's up?"

"Ned!" Peter laughed breathlessly. "Oh thank god. Uh— Hey, um, are you busy or anything? I'm— Actually, I'm almost there."

"Okay, sure." Ned pushed back from his chair and stood up, walking over to his window and opening the thing up. He poked his head out and looked around for a figure moving around in the dark. "Please tell me you found another cool alien thing."

"Um?" Peter let out another bubbly laugh. It didn't sound right. "No, dude."

"Are you good?"

"Do you have a first aid kit?" Peter blurted out.

Ned blinked. His eyes widened. Then he was ducking down the hallway, nearly hitting his elbow on the wall, and sticking his phone between his ear and his shoulder. He headed directly to the bathroom. "What happened? New super villain? Were they cool? Was your suit ruined again? Do you need to call Tony Stark?"

"Ned—"

"I left my window open, and I'm getting the first aid kid now," Ned rattled off, pulling emergency first aid equipment from the bathroom cabinet. Things fell from the mini shelves as he hurried with shaking hands, clattering to the floor. He cursed under his breath. "Please tell me you're not like, dying, because I mainly only know how to wrap stuff with gauze and that's just from watching apocalypse movies!"

"Ned!" Peter took a gasping breath. "Geez, man. I'm at your window."

Ned heard a thud, and then quickly took off back down the hallway and back into his room. The sight seemed to rip his brain in halves.

When he pictured Peter Parker in any NORMAL occasion, the mental image is exactly what anybody should expect. Mousy brown hair. Baggy sweaters. Stubby nails. Big brown puppy-dog eyes. Ned imagined an exhausted grin, a twitch of furrowed eyebrows, clicking of legos and keyboard keys.

This isn't to say that Ned hadn't seen him beat-up before. No, that's not the case. The first time Ned saw him was after Peter got his glasses punched off of his face and the glass flew across the linoleum of a middle school hallway, and his face was a myriad of bruises and pimples and tiny freckles. But even afterwards, he smiled at Ned and asked if he was alright, because that's the kind of person Peter was.

Peter was someone soft and strong, able to bend, never to break. That's always how Ned had known him, from that second they first met to... whenever they talked before this.

Because this wasn't just a few bruises, not even a black eye. Not even two black eyes and a split lip.

Peter was pooling blood onto the carpet, and his mask was off, revealing the whiteness of his lips and glassiness of his eyes, and Ned has to blink once, twice, to ensure that it's really his best friend standing in front of him and that he's not having some awful nightmare.