strangetrip | [EP] Frustration of a Caged Animal

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[EP] Frustration of a Caged Animal - OTA

It was Max's fault, really. She had shown him what freedom looked like back home in Seattle and he had gotten used to not having to follow orders or be stuck within the confines of a complex like this. Had she just left well enough alone, he might have at least been okay with the routine here.

Deciding he needed a snack, he walked over to the vending machine filled with chocolate bars and chips and inserted a coin. Nothing happened. He pressed the retrieve button and still, nothing. He gently shook the machine and still nothing. Frustrated, Alec turned to drive his elbow into the glass to break it. Extreme? Maybe. But he was sure it would be satisfying too.

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"Magical hotel." Alec shouted back with a vague hand gesture in the air, only slowly down a fraction. "It'll fix itself."

Peter turns to look at Alec for a brief moment. "Yeah, but--"

He looks back down at the snack machine, disappointed, then trails off after Alec, rubbing his tender side.

"Are you like--" A beat. "--superpowered, too?"

Nope, he can't do it - a wry smile formed on his face. "What gave it away?" He side-eyed him with a look of amusement.

"I mean, you hit kinda hard," Peter informs him, as if Alec's not already painfully aware of this particular fact. "I'm probably going to be sore until tomorrow, at least."

"Accelerated healing, huh?" He sounded like it was familiar to him. Alec walked a bit before answering. "Yeah, you could say I'm super-powered. Don't have any fancy name though."

"Yeah," Peter says, the wariness he felt a few minutes ago slowly starting to ebb away. "It comes in handy, especially when you don't want your aunt thinking you're getting in trouble at school."

Not that the kind of trouble Peter was getting to was school trouble, but before Aunt May knew he was Spider-Man, it would have been the first conclusion she had jumped to.

"And," he pronounces, "You don't have a name yet. You just need to think of a good one."

"I don't have a name because I'm not a superhero." He glanced over to Peter as they walked. "Those kind of people don't exist in my world." If they did, there'd be no need for Manticore in the first place and he'd never exist.

Of course he was ignoring he had a boxer name but that wasn't the same thing.

"But... they exist here," Peter says, as if this alone should be enough for Alec to consider a name for his alter-ego.

"Sure, but like I said, I'm not a superhero." He entered the bar area and sat down at the counter. "I don't need a title to help people." He side-eyed the kid because he had a feeling Peter didn't have a lot of experience, "And I've killed people."

That's...

Peter's not entirely sure what to say to that. He's pretty sure all the Avengers have had to kill someone at some point. But Peter hasn't had to, and he's really grateful for that, because he's pretty sure at some point, he's going to have to, too.

He sits down at the bar next to Alec, not sure what to say. So instead, he asks a question:

"Why did you kill them?" he asks quietly. There's no one in the bar area -- not even Kitty -- but somehow, this just sorta feels like this sort of thing you don't talk about loudly.

He reached over the bar for a glass and poured beer for himself. He did the same for Peter, but was a good boy and poured soda into another glass. He did a mental note to get this kid drunk sometime. He needed to loosen up.

Alec shrugged slightly at the question. "Because it was my job and that's what I was trained to do." He took a long draw of his beer before continuing because he had a feeling Peter might be picturing a certain type of person.

"Bad men, good men, women, children. I followed my orders." The locket in his breast pocket seemed to get particularly heavy for a moment and Alex decided to drink some more beer, almost downing the rest in one go - it helped he could hold his breath for a long time.

He reach over to start refilling his glass with more beer.

Peter watches as Alec finishes his first drink rather quickly before refilling his glass with another one. The look Peter gives him is one of concern, but he doesn't comment on it either way. Not yet, anyway.

"Were you like --" Peter pauses briefly. "-- a solider or something?"

Peter curls his hand around the glass and takes a sip of his soda. His eyes never leave Alec's face.

He nodded as he pulled his glass back from the beer tap. "That's exactly what I was. Until the whole operation was exposed and they burned the place to the ground and almost everyone inside it." Alec finally looked back over to Peter, his expression pointedly neutral - he didn't like oversharing his feelings anyways, but he was also trained not to give anything away. "So, again. Not a superhero."

Peter frowns at that. "Why can't you be a superhero?" he insists. "There's plenty of comic book superheroes with origin stories like that. They came from bad places and did bad things, but then realize that they don't have to actually be that person if they don't want to."

Peter takes another sip of his soda. "I know that you probably don't think of it like this, but you being brought here -- it might be the universe's way of giving you a second chance."

His shoulders rolled back a little. "Superhero is just a title -" Alec actually stopped himself from saying 'kid', but it was probably implied a bit. "I don't need a title to tell me what to do. I did that already when I was a soldier. A title's not going to limit me on what I can or can't do anymore."

Peter doesn't challenge him, though he does think that the title of superhero has never stopped him from doing what he wanted to do.

"What do you want to do?" he asks, looking over at Alec. He hopes he doesn't want to keep destroying vending machines, at least.

"Live my life." He hadn't done that for twenty years of his twenty-one year life. "Help people like me live, too. But I won't be able to do that here so I'm just trying to enjoy myself here."

"You know you can enjoy yourself without hitting on vending machines," Peter comments. Still a little bitter? Yes. "Or hitting me."

"Not as much fun." Alec smirk, but his expression should have told Peter he was joking. Mostly joking, anyways.

"Alright then. What should I do to enjoy myself while I'm here?" He looked to Peter. Please, tell him Madonna Inn recreation committee.

"I don't know," Peter says, thinking. "I mean, I study and read books, but I don't know if that's your idea of fun."

He's pretty sure it isn't, but he's been wrong before, and might be wrong again.

"I also do science experiments, and make more webslinging fluid when I'm about to run out." Peter's idea of "about to run out" was probably pretty different from other peoples'. The Madonna Inn was safe, but he'd rather have all the fluid he might need on-hand than needing it and not having it. It'd already happened before.

"And -- you know, if I can find an old camcorder, I'm going to make a movie," he says. "You can be in it, if you want to."

Alec wasn't into science experiments, but that probably had more to do with the fact he was one himself. But the video thing was kind of cool. "What kind of videos?" Probably dopey ones, but Alec wasn't too sure since the kid seemed to be pretty particular about things. "And what the hell is webslinging fluid because it does not come out sounding the way you think it does."

"I don't know, I probably want to get a screenwriter," Peter says. "I wasn't very good at creative writing. But I really want something that we can use practical effects on."

That's vague, but that's all Peter's got in the ideas department right now.

"Oh, webslinging fluid," Peter says, as if it just occurred to him that that might be deserving of explanation. "Uh, well, a spider bit me to give me powers." That's probably weird, but Peter doesn't know much about the spider that bit him. "And when I was trying to figure out my powers, I thought it'd be useful to have something that'd help me in combat. So I designed these webshooters with some old parts I got from the junkyard and a few dumpsters, and spent a lot of time in the chem lab putting together a formula for a super-strong, super-adaptable synthetic material I could manipulate like a spider thread."

Peter swallows, looking at Alec for some shift in expression.

"It, uh, doesn't get much use here, though. Most of the time I use it to pin people down or swing from one building to another." Which makes it pretty much useless at the Madonna Inn.

"Do you have to call it 'fluid'?" He could hear Max telling him to get his head out of the gutter, but he couldn't help it. Especially since, if Alec was visualizing it correctly, white fluid shot from the kid's hand. It was right there. Had no one ever brought this up to him in his world? How was this normal?

"How come you didn't use it on me?" He took another long drink from his glass. "And you're just not being creative enough. I can think of plenty of uses. Of course, you'd need to actually have a girlfriend." Alec did not think Peter could manage that. "- Or boyfriend. No judgement there." ,Maybe Peter could manage a boyfriend, but even then, the kid seemed so... nerdy.

"Well, I mean, that's what it is." Peter doesn't seem to grasp the implication, which probably is no surprise to anyone who knows him.

"I didn't have them on me," Peter says. "I usually don't carry them around unless I think I'm going to need them." And Peter didn't exactly expect to be accosted in the hallway of the hotel he called home. "And I do have some creative uses for it," Peter continues, defensively, not knowing that the next line is very unlikely to impress Alec at all. "I made a hammock for me and my girlfriend."

Alec deadpanned. "Wow. A hammock."

Although, okay, he had to give Peter credit for having a girlfriend. But then he wondered just how many teenagers there were and maybe whoever the girl was was just settling.

"I feel like this stuff is going to waste with you. Definitely not how I'd use it."

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