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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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."

Alec spent Peter's silence, at first, trying to read the boy, and then decided he was a complex bag of hormones and went for his beer. When he finally spoke, Alec turned his head and took a moment to respond. "My friend uses the day she escaped when we was little." Max was pretty sentimental though. Alec shrugged. "But, I mean, what's so good about a birthday anyways?" Since he had no real first hand experience with one.

"You should use that day too, then," Peter insists. "And birthdays are great. All the people you really like all come together to celebrate you. And, there's cake and presents and --"

Peter's not sure he's really selling Alec on this.

" -- it's just really fun. It's a fun thing to do."

Okay, he's definitely not selling Alec on this.

"I didn't break out." Maybe Alec would have eventually - Max was a bad influence like that. Or good, in this case. "My friend? She basically made it so we were all liabilities. So technically I was fired." He was supposed to be dead.

"What's yours? Maybe I'll just take that day." There was a spark of playfulness in his eyes.

Peter can't imagine he'd have any regrets being fired from the job Alec had. And when Alec asks him what his birthday is, he doesn't hesitate to answer:

"June 30th," he says. "And if you want to, I don't mind. I mean, there's plenty of people out there who have my birthday already."

Well, that kind of deflated Alec a little. He paused, took a long drink of alcohol, then finally said. "January 15th." Because Alec liked to punish himself, probably. "That way I don't have to worry about it for a whole year." He winked at Peter, hiding any ulterior motive for why he might pick that date.

"January 15th," Peter says, committing the date to memory. "I won't forget it."

But January 15th somehow seems super-specific. I mean, probably not as specific as July 18th or something, but --

"Is there -- is there any reason you chose it?"

Alec looked at Peter with the slightest of pauses before answering, "Nope." And then down the rest of his beer. Maybe he needed something more like scotch? Alec got up and went around the bar, rummaging through some of the bottles.

"You going to have a Spiderman themed birthday party when yours comes up?"

Peter can't tell if Alec is being serious or just making fun, so he decides to give him the benefit of the doubt an assume that he's actually being serious.

"I don't know, I mean, even with Piotr's classes I'm not all that good at drawing spiders. It took me like, two days, three different hoodies, and four fabric markers before I got a spider that looked good enough for my first spider-man costume. I'm not sure I'd be ready for putting together all that party decor."

He gestures helplessly.

Alec stared at Peter with a deadpanned expression for a long minute before pulling up a bottle of scotch and pouring himself a glass. "So I guess that means you go around fighting in an outfit, huh?"

"Well, yeah, I can't like --"

Peter gestures helplessly again.

" -- have everyone knowing who I am." Peter looks down at his soda. "If I did, I wouldn't be able to live a normal life, go to high school, go to college. And," he says, his thoughts trailing back to the Vulture. "The people around me, like my aunt, my best friend Ned -- they'd all be in danger."

Alec actually had to give Peter credit there, pursing his lips and nodding almost like he looked impressed. "That's fair. Of course, you could always just be so good no one ever sees you anyways." He winked to Peter as he downed some scotch.

"That's... not easy," Peter says. "I ended up on YouTube my first day as Spider-Man. And that was before I made my own YouTube channel."

... and started making his own videos.

"Even if I was good at being stealthy, I wouldn't -- I couldn't risk it," he insists. He stops there for a second, trying to think of some way to tell Alec this in a way that's not going to sound stupid.

"The first girl I ever went on a date with back home -- her dad was the Vulture. The first big villain I ever had to take on by myself. And -- I knew, I knew who he opened the door when I went to her house to meet her for Homecoming, and he figured out who I was on the drive to the dance. And he threatened to kill me and everyone I loved if I didn't just -- just let him do whatever he wanted, so."

Peter forces his gaze away from his drink and over to Alec.

"It's probably better that people don't know. And that I don't give them the opportunity to find out."

"You're probably right. Keeping civilians safe is important."

He thought back to when he arrived and how there were all those people he called friend at Jam Pony caught in the crossfire and how they had to work to keep them safe too. The kid's life sounded a bit more rough than a kid his age should handle, Alec would give him that.

The brief moment of sincerity was washed away as Alec rolled his eyes. "Does anyone in your world have names, though? I mean, what kind of name os the 'Vulture'?"

"Yeah, I mean, I think the Vulture called himself that because he scavenged for alien tech and had these huge mechanical wings," Peter explains. "It's not exactly a bad name when you think about it like that."

Peter takes another sip of his soda. "He's in prison now," he says. "So he shouldn't be making any trouble now that I'm not there. I don't wanna be the kind of superhero who like, kills people."

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