Enter a very upset, shocked, and sleep-deprived Ned Leeds, the star of this show and the man of the hour. He springs from Peter’s bottom bunk and catapults himself across the room (narrowly avoiding a Lego Batman cave). He grabs Peter by the shoulders and shakes him like a Raggedy Anne doll. Peter, who’s just stepped in through the window, nearly falls out again at first contact.
“Ned, dude, calm down,” Peter hisses back weakly, partially in reprimand but mostly in pain. Ned’s fingers digging into the meat of his upper arms send jolts of terrible agony though him.
“But—bro, you’re... oh my god, you were stabbed. You ARE stabbed! Peter, why the hell is it still in your leg?!”
Now that’s what a smart person would ask. The answer to that million-dollar question is somewhere in an alley in Brooklyn.
“Uh, I actually... I actually don’t know?” Peter attempts to chuckle. It comes out more animated chipmunk than human boy.
Ned looks entirely unimpressed. “You come in with a freaking knife sticking out of your leg and expect me to accept that half-assed excuse? What are we going to do? Just drive you to the hospital?”
That's exactly what happens.
Blearily, Peter glances to his left, where a fuzzy Ned is channeling his inner Vin Diesel. The image vaguely reminds him of Tokyo Drift, except set in New York and with no actual drifting involved. So basically Ryan Gosling’s Drive, except they don’t even have the excitement of Ryan’s dragon jacket or somebody dying. Unless Peter dies here in Ned’s car while they wait for this damn red light to change. That could be fun.
“That’s a dumb idea, man,” MJ pipes up from the back seat as if reading his thoughts. Or perhaps he said that last bit out loud. He hopes Ned didn’t hear the Vin Diesel part; he’s losing clumps of his hair and bald jokes are a touchy subject.
“I can hear you,” Ned hisses.
Oops.
MJ leans forward from the back seat to flick Peter’s shoulder. “Dude, are you okay?” she asks around the straw of her iced coffee.
Somehow, Peter finds this hilarious. He can’t very well laugh in his current condition, though, so all that comes out is a weak little wheeze. “Of course I’m okay. I didn’t just get s-s-stabbed in the leg or anything.”
MJ snorts. “Yeah, yeah. I bleed that much once a month anyway.”
“Tee-em-i,” Ned comments, his nose scrunching.
“Don’t be an insensitive jerk, Ned. Menstruation is a natural process that is neither gross nor warranting your abhorrence.”
Ned groans. “That’s not what I—ugh, never-mind.”
Peter rests his head against the headrest. Blinking lights and neon signs pass the square of the passenger window. The whole city is a collage of color, swimming and swirling and swooping before Peter’s sleepy eyes. He doesn’t think he quite knows where they are. That definitely was a ramen shop they just passed, right? Peter squints at the blurry sign in the rearview mirror. He reaches a hand up to rub his face deftly, in search of his glasses, only to find they’re not perched on the bridge of his nose. Where'd they go? He had them on, like, an hour ago.
Ned guns it to make it through the next yellow light, only to slam on the breaks as they nearly collide with the back of a black Escalade. It sends Peter flying forward, seatbelt pulling taut and his stomach lurching dangerously. MJ curses colorfully (she’s not wearing a seatbelt) when her forehead smushes into the back of Ned’s headrest.
“Shit, sorry, guys,” Ned mumbles sheepishly as he narrowly avoids the Escalade by changing lanes. MJ buckles herself in with a few choice words regarding Ned’s manhood.
“Don’t... don’t do that again,” Peter grimaces. He clutches at his gurgling stomach with both hands. The whole world is shaking, spinning. His tummy is doing that thing it does when he goes on roller-coasters (or when May drives them to Jersey). He stares down at his socks. Red.
Ned’s car is red.
So are the socks peeping out from under Peter’s Hello Kitty pajama pants. But where Ned’s hand-me-down Mercedes-Benz convertible is the color of cherries and sin, Peter’s socks are almost brown. They’re also sticky, which the car has never been (save that time MJ spilled her slushy in the backseat last summer). Ned prides himself on keeping his ride impeccably clean. Peter usually shares his sentiment towards possessions of his own.
Like his blue Dino socks. They’re wearing party hats. And now they’re stained.
Peter suppresses a sigh as he glances down at himself. Crimson blood is drying in sporadic patterns on his pants and the torn Star Trek t-shirt Ned got him for Christmas last year. He’d always said the shirt would bring him good luck (“Like maybe a girlfriend.”), but Peter doesn’t think even Ned’s optimism will help him now. After all, there’s a no way his pajamas can be salvaged after this fiasco; there’s a knife stuck in the meat of his thigh and he’s currently bleeding out.
The blood from the wound on his outer thigh has made a trail down his leg and soaked into the soft cotton of his right Party Hat Dino Sock. The other sock, the left, has sponged up a bit of blood from somewhere and it’s coated most of the bottom of his foot in sticky, itchy, drying red goo. It’s probably from the scene of the stabbing, Peter guesses. Wrong place, wrong time. Leftie was a good guy.
For some reason, this thought progression makes Peter sad. He got these socks for himself with his first paycheck from the Bugle. They have sentimental value, damn it.
“Don’t you dare puke in my car,” Ned warns icily. His head turns to glare at Peter, but he blanches at the sight that greets him. “Peter... are you—are you crying?”
Peter sniffles. “No.”
It’s not very convincing. Both MJ and Ned give him varying You’re Full of Shit looks, MJ’s complete with the dead-inside eyes. Peter rubs at his watery (read: mutinous) eyes to avoid their gazes. He can’t deal with this right now. He’s here, crying over fucking Dinosocks. He should be sobbing at the pain of literally being stabbed. But, Peter realizes a little too late, it doesn’t really hurt.
But wait. Back up. That doesn’t make sense. Anyone would be writhing with the throbbing, aching, relentless agony. Anyone would feel something other than excessively... sleepy.
Peter comes to realization as if hit by a semi. He sits up straight in his seat.
Is he HIGH?!
Peter Parker doesn’t do drugs.
He could swear, really. Needle in the eye and all that. He was raised by May Parker and while she never explicitly said he couldn’t smoke weed with MJ on the roof, that’s exactly what he’s avoided doing at all costs. Peter would consider himself to be a generally drug-free kind of guy. His body has been blessedly free from anything of the sort for the nineteen years he’s been wading his way around the underbelly of Queens. He’s seen the effects drugs can have on a person. He’s seen what the consequences of being caught with drugs entail. Hell, Peter takes down drug rings every other week like they’re freaking piñatas. Peter Parker and drugs are about as synonymous as Martha Stuart and a fucking Apache attack helicopter.
Was that how the analogy went?
Peter shakes his head. In consequence, this jostles his brain around in his skull and sends a sprout of fresh pain crackling across his forehead. His neck hurts. His eyes hurt. They feel so, so heavy. All he wants is to close them and sleep for the rest of eternity. Or twenty minutes. He’ll take either.
He can’t remember much of what he did today. He thinks he was out, maybe. He snorts privately. Of course he was out. It’s not like he accidentally stabbed himself in his apartment or anything.
Actually, that’s not entirely implausible. Aunt May did give him a knife set for his last birthday. But still, he doesn’t think that’s what really happened. The knife peeking out of his leg isn’t one of the cheap knockoffs May saw in that infomercial. Besides, how could he have been drugged otherwise?
Maybe he was out as Spider-Man. Maybe a fight went south somewhere. It’s definitely late enough for that to make sense. Who would be sleazy enough to drop Peter something strong enough to drown out all of his senses? How could they have? To take effect, Peter would have had to digest it—and a hell of a lot of it, too. But Peter has hardly eaten in the last few days (he’s a broke college student, okay?).
He closes his eyes briefly. None of this makes sense.
Ned, sleep-deprived and very pissed off, turns sharply and stops the car, jerking Peter and MJ (who sloshes iced coffee on herself) again. Peter’s heavy eyelids crack open. The car is parked, presumably. Peter squints hard out the window, to where a big building stands. There’s some kind of logo on it. To the side, he spots an ambulance. Oh. They’ve pulled into a parking space near the Emergency wing of some hospital.
Before he can fully process the new information, Ned is getting out of his seat and jogging around the back of the car to yank the passenger door open. Peter blinks up at him owlishly. “Why are we at a hospital?” His words slur together without his permission or consent.
“You need to get this out,” Ned replies simply, gesturing to Peter’s leg with a hand. He bends down and surprises Peter by scooping him into his arms easily.
“Have you been working out?” Peter grins sloppily. His mouth feels weird.
“He’s been working out just for you, sweet cheeks,” MJ interjects helpfully from where she’s joined Ned on the blacktop. She bounces a bit on the toes of her Nike sneakers innocently as Ned gives her a scathing glare.
Peter lays his head against Ned’s shoulder and it’s nice for a brief moment, Peter relaxing and settling in against the familiar body warmth before Ned drops him cold.
Peter burbles something incomprehensible as his (thankfully) un-stabbed leg and hip crash into the hard and frankly unforgiving earth. There’s something in there about a Falling for You joke, but Peter’s treading a thin line here between living to see Attack on Titan to the bitter end and dying right here, right now, so his brain is understandably jumbled. He’ll die alone. Alone save MJ.
(Ned doesn’t count; the traitor.)