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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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."

"Well, how would you use it then?" Peter's defensiveness continues to hold.

Alec looked at him for a moment, long and hard like 'really'? He was trying to decide if the kid really couldn't see what he was talking about or if he was playing coy, but the longer he looked at Peter, the longer he realized this might not have ever crossed his mind. He almost starting off by 'I thought you weren't a kid' but he didn't and decided to see if he could make the kid blush instead because that would be way more fun.

He leaned on the counter with his elbow, causally, as he faced Peter. "I want you to picture your girlfriend." Pause, still with a straight face, so he could do it. "Now picture your bed. Now picture your girlfriend, naked, with that - " Nope, he was not going to call it fluid. "- stuff of yours, keeping her hands and legs spread wide open just for you." Alec had to work hard not to smile and he managed to keep that straight, matter of fact expression while watching the kid's reaction intently.

And when Alec instructs him to picture his girlfriend, he does, genuinely make an effort to. Eyes closed, he leans slightly against the bar, imagining Liz with her long hair and her perfect face and her pretty eyes and her soft hands and --

-- then, Alec tells her to imagine her naked, with his webfluid binding her, and something immediately shortwires inside of Peter's brain.

It's not that Peter doesn't have thoughts like that (minus the whole webfluid thing, which he had absolutely never considered until this very moment), it's that he's tried to avoid having thoughts like that about girls he actually knew. It always felt weird, like he should be, like, asking for permission or something.

And as Peter's brain shortwires, he somehow manages to lose his balance, and falls right out of his barstool.

So much for supernatural reflexes.

Alec can't help it. He chuckled the moment Peter's ass hit the floor. "Sorry kid. But you did ask." And that didn't even begin to cover all the creative ways Alec could think of using that fluid. That was pretty basic.

He did get up and offer a hand up for Peter. He could not believe that Peter had full out committed to that and he would give anything to have the ability to read minds at that very moment. It was probably a spectacular moment.

"Good to know you're brain still works that way though." It also clearly told Alec that Peter was a virgin - He was really going to need to fix this somehow. Like it was Alec's duty to help the kid get laid or something.

"How old are you, by the way?"

Peter can't even make eye contact with Alec right now, though he does accept the hand up from him and settles himself back on the barstool.

"Yeah," he says to Alec's brain comment. Now he's not sure he's going to get that particular mental image out of his head. How was he ever supposed to use his webslinging fluid again without thinking about whatever Alec had just put in his head?

"I'm fifteen," Peter says, grateful for the shift in conversation, though he is wary, the same way he is when anyone asks his age. "Or I was, at least, when I ended up here. I'll be sixteen in a few months, but I won't technically be celebrating on the day I was actually born."

Peter had been transported here when it was July here. It wasn't July in his world.

Fifteen. He was like, a baby. Of course, when he was fifteen he had already killed a bunch of people and knew how to arm and disarm bombs, among other things.

"Wait, what?" He didn't make a lot of sense there for Alec.

"It was," Peter has to think about it for a second. "Early October when I left my world, but it was August here. I was born in June, so here, I technically would be 16 --"

Peter pauses, putting together the mental tabulations.

"-- at the end of this month."

"I'd just go with that." He understood what he was saying, mathematically anyways, but birthdays were not really a thing in Manticore. He knew how old he was, but didn't have a birthday. The military didn't really care about that when they made you in the first place.

"Chicks like an older man."

"Yeah, I mean. Liz is older than me, so I can't really be an older man with her," Peter says, and he hopes it doesn't make a difference to her. He doesn't think it does, or else she wouldn't agree to go out with him in the first place.

"How old are you?" he asks, wrapping his hand around his glass of soda.

"And older woman." He nodded approvingly and a little more for amusement because somehow he couldn't picture Peter with an older woman so probably a year or two.

"Twenty-One. Probably, anyways. Maybe twenty-two. Somewhere in that ballpark. Birthdays weren't really a thing growing up."

"You don't know how old you are?"

This admission seems to befuddle Peter, who can't possibly imagine not knowing how old he is. Maybe he didn't have access to a calendar or something when he was a soldier. It wasn't entirely unreasonable. Weird, yeah, but not unreasonable.

"When's your birthday?"

"Don't know." He shrugged, then looked at Peter and realized he was stubborn and inquisitive. Alec sighed.

"They don't exactly care about those things when you're just made to be a tool." Alec decided to do something he had never done before, ever. He turned his head and pulled down the back of his collar exposing a barcode on his neck.

Peter looks at what Alec is showing him. It's a barcode, like something you'd find on a box at the store. Peter's neutral expression quickly turns into a growing frown.

It's then that Peter realizes that he's angry. A lot like he did twenty minutes before. And a part of him is afraid of it because outside of short bursts of anger at Mr. Stark, he hasn't ever really gotten really, truly angry at anyone or anything at the level he has since arriving here.

And when it comes down to it, it's the powerlessness that gets him. Not feeling like people treat him like an adult. Not feeling like people believe in him. Not feeling like anyone thinks he's capable. And probably even worse than anything else, it was hearing about all the awful things people had to live through, all while knowing there was nothing he could do about it.

So there's a moment there where Peter doesn't say anything. And he doesn't open his mouth again until it finally occurs to him that he should probably say something.

"We should figure out a birthday for you," he says without explanation. "It doesn't actually need to be on the day you were born, but we should -- we should figure one out."

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