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Emptiness is something Ned Leeds knows very well.
Empty homes when his parents are working double shifts, triple jobs, sometimes leaving Post-it notes on the fridge addressed to a misspelled name. "Love you, Niel. There’s food in the microwave.”
Empty, gutting tightness in his throat when he brings home another rejection letter to his Lola, who tells him not to worry, that God provides.
Empty afternoons where he lies flat on the hardwood floor of his room, the fan spinning too slowly above him, phone in one hand, scrolling through memes that don’t make him laugh, don’t even twitch the corner of his mouth, where even the brightest colours feel faded and the sound of his breathing starts to hurt.
Even the air feels empty these days. He breathes, but it doesn’t settle in his lungs. He’s never cared much for biology, but maybe it’s scientific, this hollowness. Genetic. Something inherited—like the roundness in his face that never photographs right, or the quiet ache that wakes him before sunrise, a feeling of having already disappointed the world before he’s even gotten out of bed.
He doesn’t remember when it started; only that it did quietly. Less rice at dinner. Less laughter. Less eye contact. Skipping meals not for a revenge body or because he wanted to lose weight, not at first, but because hunger gave him something sharp. Whether control or punishment, it didn’t matter. What mattered was that it cut through the fog searching for something whole, something real, something that could fill the holes left by memory.
You’re supposed to offer pain to God.
That’s what Lola always said, gently, when she kissed Ned’s scraped knees or held his head during fevers. “Ipagdasal mo ’yan. God gives His hardest battles to His strongest soldiers.” But Ned is tired of being strong. Tired of staring into mirrors, trying to reconcile the face that looked back with the one he felt inside—a face he hated for its softness, for the curve of his cheeks, for the stretch marks that snaked across his thighs. Tired of memorizing the pattern of imperfections, the way other people memorize prayers. Sinner, stupid, disgusting, weak. Tired of shamefully laughing the loudest in every room to be seen.
That was the real sin, he decided, being seen.
Because when people see Ned—really see him—they only know a punchline in someone else’s origin story. So when he began to refuse even water, telling Lola it was about preparing his spirit, about discipline, about holiness—he said it with a smile that hurt his face.
The MIT letter was supposed to save him.
He set the acceptance letter in his drawer, next to his newly-purchased box cutters and bottles of Tylenol, not daring to look at it. He feared he’d see what he saw opening the envelope the first time: proof that people believed in a version of him that didn’t exist. Ned wasn’t brilliant. He wasn’t confident. He wasn’t even sure he was alive half the time. His body moved, sure, it went to class and answered questions and laughed at lunch, but he felt like a puppet, strings held by someone who had long stopped caring.
His Lola cried when he told her, calling him her golden boy. His parents took a flurry of photos for Facebook. Then Ned went to the bathroom and threw up the celebratory ube cake they’d bought him, flushed the toilet, rinsed his mouth, and told himself he didn’t deserve sweetness.
The day after, he goes to church. Kneels until his knees ache, telling the priest he thinks about emptiness too much. About boys. About blood and pills and bridges. The priest’s voice is always the same: kind, but tired. “God loves you, anak.”
Sometimes he thinks maybe God doesn’t speak Tagalog. Or perhaps He only listens to skinny white kids with Ivy League jawlines and apps named after them.
Sometimes he thinks about the boy from his dreams—the one with the soft brown eyes and calloused hands, the one who kissed him like he mattered, the one who left. But that’s stupid. There’s no boy. There never was.
Peter hears the news by accident.
He jolts awake with the static of a half-tuned radio segment crackling through NY1. Hours have blurred since patrol ended, but he’s still half in the suit, mask pulled to his chin, lying on his back in bed like roadkill. Outside, the city is soaked and slow.
Then: “...road blockage 2:25 AM... jumper reported on Queensboro Bridge... male, late teens, slight build... blue sweatshirt. Graphic insignia unknown...”
Just one grainy sentence. No names. Nothing confirmed. Hell, the description didn’t even fully match, but Peter is out the window before the words are even done breathing.
He doesn’t think. Doesn’t plan. He goes — because something older than his Spidey-sense in his chest tightens — because something in him always knows when it’s Ned.
The suit seals against his clammy skin with a hiss, late-night rain already slick against the small of his back. The air is heavy and humid in that way August always is, like the whole city is holding its breath beneath a wet towel. Streetlights blur through raindrops. The East River is a great beast groaning below. Everything buzzes: car horns, ambulance sirens, the static hum of phones lifted toward tragedy, filming without understanding. The superhero swings low beneath the cables, sharp-eyed and breathless, until the bridge’s edge comes into view and the world, which had once been a blur, snaps into something cold and clear.
And there he is.
Ned.
On the wrong side of the railing.
He looks nothing like Peter remembers.
Hunched forward like gravity’s got claws in his spine. Rain plastered dark strands of hair to his forehead, some longer now, curling at the edges, sticking to the bruised skin of his face. There’s a rawness to him that Peter doesn’t have a word for (not quite hollow, not quite burning) just gone. His sweatshirt is soaked, clinging to sharp shoulders, the Midtown logo on his chest faded and indecipherable. His arms, once soft and warm and freckled with sun, are now ashy and brittle, wrists too thin, the skin along them red with friction or something worse. He holds the railing like a dying man might have a prayer. Tight, desperate, shaking.
Peter’s throat locks.
A single gust of wind and the boy he once trusted with his blood, his identity, his entire life — the boy who once balanced on monkey bars and shouted “watch me do a flip!” before falling on his ass — will be swallowed by the East River.
Peter lands like his soul might break through his chest, heart crashing against his ribs, breath strangled. “Ned,” he says, voice low, ragged, barely audible over the wind. “Hey. Hey, it’s me.” The vigilante swallows a shout, bites it back like blood. Every atom in him screams to lunge forward, to grab him, to fix it, but one wrong move—
“I don’t know you,” Ned says. Voice flat. Broken-glass calm. “I don’t want to know you.”
“Okay. That’s okay. You don’t have to know me. I remember enough for both of us.”
And then Ned laughs. A sound that isn’t joy, or humour, or anything human. It sounds like something tearing, like a balloon let go under water.
“Do you remember, though? I used to come here when it rained,” Ned murmurs. “I’d bring wires and bottle caps and try to make a radio... it never worked. I just wanted to reach someone.”
Peter’s breath hitches, images of a muddy playground flashing through his mind. Ned, seven years old, with a red hoodie soaked through and a tangle of wires in a lunchbox, babbling about AM frequencies and walkie-talkies that could “maybe talk to aliens if we climb high enough on the money bars.” His smile gap-toothed, soaked, radiant. He’d looked up at Peter then, just as soaked, and said, “Bet I could do a flip off ’em too, if you taught me. Bet I could land it.”
Fuck the universe. Fuck Strange. Ned was his best friend.
“I think...” Ned says now, “I think there was someone who mattered. Someone who didn’t treat me like I was too much or too weird or too… loud.” He exhales shakily. “But I must’ve made him up. Because he’s not here.”
“I am here,” Peter breathes, stepping forward, soaking in every edge of him, trying to memorize Ned’s outline before it’s too late. “I had to make you forget, but I never left—”
“You did leave,” Ned says sharply. He turns then, eyes shining with rain (or tears, Peter can’t tell which). “Everyone leaves. That’s just what people do.”
Peter flinches. “I didn’t want to. The universe... You have to believe me. If I could undo it—”
“You did something to me.” Ned’s voice is a cracked whisper now, jagged and barely held together. “I know it. I know it even if I can’t name it. Even if no one believes me, it’s like part of me is… missing. No one believes me, and none of it works. None of it fills the emptiness you left, Peter.”
The name hangs between them.
Peter stares. “You remembered my name.”
Ned’s jaw clenches. “I guess I wasn’t supposed to, huh?”
Another gust hits. Ned’s knees wobble. His fingers tighten. Peter’s world narrows to that trembling grip, the bend of rusted metal, the unbearable tilt of time.
Then Ned shifts. It’s barely an inch. A toe-off. The kind of movement no one would notice, except Peter.
One web fires fast, catching the support beam. Another catches Ned’s thin arm, slick with rain. Peter slams into him with the force of a collapsing building, arms locking around Ned’s middle, yanking him backward just as his shoe loses contact with the ledge, not daring to let go.
Even when they slam against the bridge understructure. Even when the shock knocks the air from both their lungs, even when Ned collapses into him, bones jutting out at angles they didn’t use to, fists clenched in the spider-symbol across Peter’s chest like he’s trying to rip his way inside.
“I didn’t want to forget,” Ned chokes. “I didn’t ask to forget, I loved—”
“I know,” Peter whispers, eyes burning. “I’m sorry. I love you. I’m so sorry.”
He holds Ned tighter as sirens echo from above, as lights flare, someone yells something about dispatch, and passers-by on the sidewalk cheer like this was just another rescue by the friendly neighbourhood Spider-Man.
Peter knows it wasn’t a rescue.
It was a near-loss. And it wasn’t over.
Forgetting isn’t a cut, it’s an emptiness that scabs and splits over and over, always fresh beneath the surface—and remembering? That’s the hardest miracle of all. Because how do you apologize for protecting someone so hard that you erased yourself from their life?
Peter doesn’t know. He only knows to press his lips to Ned’s, soft and slow and patient,
like penance,
like prayer,
like whatever will remain for the boy who built radios in the rain to feel less alone.