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The first person to tell Peter that he needs to work on his focus skills doesn’t so much tell him as tells his parents at his first grade parent-teacher conference.
Mrs. Kittman has a strict only school books in school policy during independent study time, claiming she’s giving them time to complete their homework and assigned reading in class, and spends Peter’s entire year in her class fighting with him over reading outside books.
“I already finished the book we were reading,” he pouts to his mother when she’s gotten a third email in as many weeks about your son’s disruptive, wandering focus and Mary just smiles at him sympathetically.
“I know, bud,” she says with a hand through his curls. “I’ll talk to her, okay?”
And Mary does talk to Mrs. Kittman and makes the argument that if her son is ahead of schedule on his schoolwork then who really pardon my French, but gives a shit if he rewards himself with a comic book here or there?
She makes a good case for herself and her kid, makes such a good case that the emails stop coming entirely after that and Peter hears Mary and Richard discussing their relief in the kitchen one night after they’ve tucked him in.
It’s not until the last day of school when Peter comes home with a stack of comics the height of his torso that they realize she hadn’t stopped confiscating them from him, asking Peter with aghast expressions why he hadn’t thought he should tell them.
“I just started bringing a back-up,” he had shrugged in response, not understanding until years later why they had burst out laughing at the image of their six-year-old having one comic book taken away only to immediately pull another out of his backpack.
***
It’s safe to say that Peter gets along a lot better with his second grade teacher.
Partially because she’s less of a jerk and partially because Peter actively tries not to get his little clothespin on the board moved from green to yellow to red as often, knowing it stresses out his parents when he gets in trouble.
So he does better and he only gets caught reading comic books under his desk a handful of times during his first semester and it’s good and he’s growing up and it’s better and then one day in January his parents leave for a trip and never come home.
And the distractions become that of a completely different kind, with dozing off in class after endless, sleepless nights, or asking to go to the nurse’s office for a stomach ache four days in a row because by the time he gets to twelve-thirty in the afternoon he feels like he’s going to burst with the loneliness of it.
Ben and May are good to him, they’re great parents, amazing even when you consider the circumstances of their parenthood, but he’s a grief-stricken second-grader and how is he meant to focus when the whole of the world feels like it’s coming down around him?
***
Peter almost has to repeat the second grade, but he makes it by the skin of his teeth and with the hands holding his, guiding him in the right direction even when his young and haunted eyes only want to look back, back, back.
By the skin of his teeth and the hands in his, but he does make it.
And he does keep going.
***
It’s in the fourth grade that Peter meets Ned Leeds, and his disruptive tendencies change in nature from mourning silently with a pit in his stomach, from quietly reading comic books by himself, to whispering about said comics at the back of the classroom mid-lesson.
It’s not that either of them don’t care about learning or care about doing well in school, but they get good grades and they always clean up after themselves after snack time, so why shouldn’t they be allowed to talk about the newest Captain America release and that thing he did with the shield this week, did you see that Peter?
Why shouldn’t they?
Ben and May don’t love it when they get their first call from the school saying that Peter has to stay after for detention because if he can’t focus in school, he’ll have to take the time after school.
They don’t love it, but they also can’t be too mad, because this is how they find out that Peter has stopped faking stomach aches to get away from the loneliness and has instead started faking them in gym class so he and Ned can read The Lord of the Rings in the little bleachers on the sidelines instead of running laps.
“We have to finish reading all the books so we can have a movie marathon,” Peter explains when Ben picks him up from detention. “And P.E. is stupid anyway.”
“Well,” Ben says, with effort to not show his giddiness that would be obvious to anyone but Peter, “May and I already decided you’re grounded this weekend for the whole detention issue--”
“Ben--”
“But!” Ben cuts him off with a laugh. “Maybe next weekend Mister Ned can ask his parents if he can come over for a little while.”
Peter lights up, gets three inches taller where he walks beside his uncle.
“Really?” he beams.
“Sure thing, bud,” Ben smiles back. “Any kid that wants to hang out with you must be pretty cool, huh?”
“The coolest,” he gushes. “You have no idea.”
***
And Peter grows up.
And Peter gets distracted.
By comic books, sure, but also Legos these days and movies about space and that new video game that Ned got for his birthday and Ned’s stories about his annoying little sister and Ned’s big goofy laugh that nine times out of ten is the reason they get caught whispering at the back of the classroom to begin with.
He’s a good friend, Peter’s best friend, and any teacher that gets stuck with them in the same class learns quickly that they’re in for an interesting semester, with two smart boys who work ahead on assignments exclusively so they can use study time in class to pass notes back and forth far less subtly than they think they’re doing.
Peter loses focus easily, and it’s something that he has to work on, but right now? As he fumbles his way through middle school with all the pimples and the bad haircuts and the inhalers and the thick glasses and the kids who don’t get why he and Ned haven’t outgrown the Legos and the comics and the movies about space yet, at least the distractions are good.
At least when he gets in trouble with his teachers he still gets a fun story with his best friend out of it, at least there are the sleepovers where they both end up dozing off curled up in the bottom bunk because they fell asleep playing Ned’s GameBoy, at least he has Ned Leeds.
Especially, it turns out, when they finally make it through middle school, just very nearly fourteen years old and one summer away from Midtown High, and Peter’s world implodes all over again.
“I can’t leave May alone,” he hisses into his phone, curled up alone in the bottom bunk with a stomach ache that he knows is psychosomatic because he’s different now and he doesn’t even need his glasses anymore, let alone a flu shot. “I’m sorry, I know I promised, but if she needs me I have to be here.”
“Dude,” Ned replies on the other end of the line, gentle and empathetic but still tired. “It’s been almost two months, school starts in a week, you need to come to orientation with me.”
“I know, I’m so sorry,” Peter squeezes his eyes shut. “But I’ll get my schedule on the first day and we can compare classes then, alright?”
“You need to pick up your books,” Ned insists, “You need to get, like, a map of the school so you know where shit is. I know that everything sucks right now, but you’re gonna have to start leaving May for school every day in a week, Peter. Don’t you think it’ll be easier for both of you to ease into it a little?”
Peter takes a deep inhale that he knows gives away the shakiness in his lungs, because it’s been two months of really not good days but today is a particularly bad day for some reason and he can’t, he just can’t, it doesn’t matter how much he wants to, how much he cares about Ned, how excited he’s been to start this new era of their lives together, he just--
“I can’t,” he says. “I love you man, and I know I’ve been such a bummer, but--”
“No, hey, don’t do that,” Ned cuts him off with a quiet breath of a sigh. “Take today and I’ll-- help you find your way around before first period on Monday, okay?”
“You don’t have to--”
“Shut up,” Ned says without any heat. “Like I’m gonna let you wander around aimlessly.”
Peter lets himself exhale a laugh at that, watery and weak, but laughter all the same, and when three hours later Ned shows up with a stack of books high enough for Spider-Man to swing from, a neatly folded map tucked between the pages that he uses to show Peter where the classes on his schedule are while they tuck up on top of each other in that same bottom bunk, he realizes well and truly that he doesn’t deserve Ned Leeds.
That might be okay though, he thinks, because no one really does.
***
The distractions aren’t all bad after that, although they’re not all that good either.
He thinks maybe this is what growing up feels like though, the complexity of his feelings and the complexity of his attentions, of where they drag him.
It’s Spider-Man and it’s high school and it’s May who’s stronger than anyone he’s ever known but still has tough days the way he has tough days and it’s his tough days when doing the dishes feels like running a marathon pre-bite.
But it’s also still decathlon practice with Ned once a week.
It’s also a new trailer for a new space movie that they’re definitely saving up money to buy tickets to the midnight showing of, no matter if it makes them late to first period the next day or not. It’s also more of those same sleepovers, where they don’t both quite fit in the bottom bunk anymore, but they do fit on a nest of blankets in front of the couch where they fall asleep watching stupid YouTube videos on Peter’s laptop.
And life goes on and maybe the world ends once or twice and maybe Spider-Man suffers as much as Peter Parker suffers as much as Ned Leeds suffers just watching the whole thing happen, and it’s one distraction after another making his grades slip and making him burn dinner he’s meant to make for May, but it’s also the other things.
The best friend things.
The Ned Leeds things.
Because here’s the real thing, it all comes home to roost as Peter sits here, sixteen years old on one of these average days of his not-so-average life, with an old comic run they haven’t looked back on in years in his hands and his feet propped up on the coffee table because he loves this story, loves these characters, definitely loves them with all of his stupid, geeky heart, but he cannot for the life of him focus.
His heart is hammering out a drum solo and his palms are sweaty against the pages, making them stick to his fingers and giving him a reason other than just the distraction of it all to be unable to keep flipping through it casually.
Peter Parker has been distracted before, he’s been unable to focus before, he has, in fact, spent a great deal of his life focusing on things other than the thing he’s being told to focus on.
The thing he’s meant to focus on.
Comics instead of class, his grief instead of his teacher, a boy named Ned instead of the lesson, the hurt in his chest instead of his grades, Ned’s voice instead of the teacher’s, Spider-Man instead of Peter Parker, Ned’s sloppy handwriting on a note passed between desks, Ned’s loud laugh in line at the cafeteria, Ned’s shoulder bumping into his when he runs up to meet him at his locker, Ned’s smile and Ned’s kindness and Ned’s humor and Ned and Ned and Ned.
It’s always Ned, the thing-- the person-- that most consistently draws his attention away from anything else going on in the world. He’s magnetic in that way, charming but earnestly so, and Peter thinks maybe the sky could be falling and he would get distracted by Ned Leeds’ smile.
So it really shouldn’t be a shock that he can’t focus on the comic in his hands, not when he has Ned’s head in his lap, sprawled out across the length of the couch and periodically laughing out loud at the issue he’s reading.
His hair looks nice today, Peter notices when he sneaks a glance down past the bottom edge of his reading material. Soft, like something he could enjoy running his fingers through if given the chance. And he’s wearing that Jurassic Park sweatshirt that Peter bought him a few years ago now, because he’d just so happened to have passed it in a shop window the week after Ned had stayed up all night trying to figure out how to build his own dinosaur animatronic out of scrap metal and a graphing calculator.
Peter’s known Ned for enough of his life that it’s kind of annoying-- definitely frustrating-- how quickly the understanding of his thrumming heart and sweaty hands becomes clear to him on this average, average day. As though it hadn’t been so perfectly obvious for-- when Peter does some quick introspection-- at least two years at this point already.
“Hey, Pete?”
“Huh?” Peter’s pulled straight out of his spiral, looking down the gap between his comic and his chest to see Ned looking up at him with curious amusement.
“You good?”
Peter frowns. “Yeah of course I’m good,” he says. “Why wouldn’t I be good? I’m-- great even.”
Ned makes a face.
“Dude,” he says flatly. “You like, fully stopped breathing there for a second.”
“No I didn’t,” Peter replies defensively, but also without a very convincing tone to his voice.
“Yeah, you super did,” Ned says, still with his head in Peter’s lap. It’s the head in the lap thing that’s making him incoherent, Peter thinks, so it’s not technically his fault at all that he sounds like a dunce. “I-- uh, felt it.”
Now, Peter has a few options here.
He can laugh it off, brush it aside, treat the rest of this day as average as it was meant to be and deal with the heart of the thing later. He can just ignore the way he feels like his insides are melting when Ned turns his head and it rolls along the top of Peter’s thigh up towards his hip bone and the way Ned had said he could feel Peter breathing and everything else that’s making him think that leaning forward and kissing him right then and there might be a very smart and thoughtful idea.
Or, he can not ignore it.
Peter can wax poetic and take all these feelings and put them into just-- truly beautiful words, a real Shakespearan sonnet of a declaration, right here in the place where they’ve spent so many years getting to know each other, where Peter has apparently spent so many years developing a major crush on his best friend.
These are his options and he knows that these are his options, except the problem is he doesn’t really have time to figure out that knowledge until about seven hours later when he’s in bed, and thus doesn’t manage to properly grab ahold of either in the moment.
“You’re really pretty,” he says, not ignoring it but also not being remotely poetic as the words just bubble up out of his throat and fling themselves at Ned’s face.
Something weird-- distracting-- goes on with Ned’s face before it turns into an intrigued smirk and he ducks under Peter’s arms so he can sit up and face him on the couch.
(The not having his head in his lap thing anymore doesn’t actually help as much as Peter had hoped.)
“I mean--” he flounders. “You just look nice today? The-- sweatshirt is nice.”
“You bought me this sweatshirt,” Ned says simply, and in Peter’s focus on his own stumbling, he fails to even notice the blush spreading across Ned’s cheeks, the bridge of his nose. “Did you… Um-- did you really just call me pretty?”
Peter hesitates, because he can’t tell for the life of him whether Ned is asking because he’s offended or because of-- something else entirely.
He wants it to be something else. He wants it to and he’s losing his mind about it just a little as he stares at Ned’s face, those big earnest eyes and the soft, soft hair, and the-- wait is he blushing?
“I-- Um. Maybe?” he says uncertainly, swallowing thickly before he can continue, “I didn’t mean to be-- weird about--”
“So are you,” Ned blurts out and Peter doesn’t feel distracted anymore.
He doesn’t feel distracted because instead he feels like the whole entire world is right there in his and May’s living room, on the old green couch that has seen enough pizza grease over the years to be properly considered gross.
It’s the whole world, in that room, sitting in front of him, and telling him he’s pretty.
“You’re pretty too,” Ned clarifies, although he didn’t need to because Peter feels the tips of his ears heating up as a small, uncontrollable smile plays at the corners of his mouth.
“Thanks,” Peter says, chuckling softly to break some of the weird tension that’s gathered between them as Ned finally starts to smile back, something like giddiness coming off of him in droves for a beat right up until--
“Oh,” Peter exclaims, a quiet sort of thrill to his voice as Ned pulls back with record-breaking speed from having kissed Peter once on the lips.
He kissed him. Ned kissed him.
Ned kissed him and it went by so quickly that Peter doesn’t feel like he even got the chance to feel it, so he looks Ned in the eye and searches until he finds the expecting, the waiting, the everything else that he’s too distracted to name.
And then Peter leans forward, hesitation in the slowness of it because he still doesn’t quite believe that their quiet day in has turned into this, until he’s very carefully pressing his lips to Ned’s and letting his eyes fall shut for a beat.
And a second.
And a third.
When he pulls away Ned’s eyes flutter open to look at him and Peter can’t help but laugh at the absurdity of it all, the utter beauty of it, and how it’s been looking at him in the face since the fourth grade.
“Are you laughing at me?” Ned asks, but he’s laughing too now, so Peter knows he’s not serious.
“No-- No, absolutely not,” Peter beams. “I’m laughing at-- me.”
“Okay, yeah, you totally should be actually,” Ned cackles. “You really, so should be. You deserve to be laughed at, Parker.”
“What?!” Peter balks. “Why?”
“Because I’ve been flirting with you for two years, man!” Ned exclaims with glee. “Two years, and you just decide to tell me I’m pretty right here and now!”
“You are pretty,” Peter implores, laughter dying down but faces and breath and heartbeats no less joyful, filling up their little universe in the central room of the Parker residence.
“You’re an idiot,” Ned grins, but who fucking cares really because he’s already leaning into Peter’s space again and Peter is welcoming him with open arms.
He’s ready for the kiss this time, so it’s no surprise that it’s better. Slower and fuller and still clumsy because they’re sixteen and neither of them is exactly experienced at this, but the enthusiasm is there, and Peter’s hand is on Ned’s cheek and Ned’s hand is on Peter’s thigh where his head had been resting earlier and god if anything was ever going to distract him from the sound of the door opening it might as well be this.
“Oh! Okay,” May startles in the doorway as Peter and Ned immediately fly to opposite ends of the couch. “Hi, Ned,” she lights up with obvious amusement that has Peter wanting to jump out the window.
“Hi--” Ned clears his throat. “Hi, May.”
She looks between the two of them, positively delighted and Peter is really eyeing that window.
“You know what?” she says faux-casually. “I totally forgot to pick up milk. We need milk, don’t we, Peter?”
“What?” he furrows his brow, still too distracted by everything else to understand what on God’s green Earth she’s talking about.
“Milk,” she raises her eyebrows leadingly. “We’re out and you’ll need it for cereal in the morning, so I’m gonna just run to the store real quick-- Shouldn’t be more than, oh, thirty, thirty-five minutes?”
“Oh,” Peter catches on. “Oh, God,” he lets his elbows fall to his knees and his head into his hands.
“Forty minutes tops and then I’m-- right back here,” she says meaningfully. “Bye, boys!”
And then the door is shutting solidly behind her and all Peter can think about is that he’s humiliated, and that this is definitely going to be one of May’s Big Conversations later, and that he has super hearing, how did he not hear her coming, and--
“Peter?”
-- Ned.
At the end of it all, when Ned speaks, that’s all he really wants to focus on.
“Sorry about that,” he says sheepishly, but Ned just shrugs.
“I don’t mind,” he says honestly. “She probably would’ve figured it out right away anyways.”
Peter makes a face, almost a grimace but mostly still amused.
“Yeah,” he agrees. “You’re definitely right about that.”
“I’m right about a lot of things,” Ned says, shuffling closer on the couch once more. “Speaking of which…”
“I don’t have two years to give you back,” Peter says. “But I can give you thirty minutes?”
Ned lifts a finger and gently traces the arc of Peter’s eyebrow, a look on his face that there doesn’t even need to be a name for.
Because it’s Ned.
“Thirty minutes?” he grins. “I’ll take it.”