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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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."

"I still don't get why there needs to be a name. Can't he just steal and be a terrible person without having a name?"

He shrugged and drank from his scotch. "But you're right, kid. You don't want to kill people. It's not exactly the best part of the job."

Any job, really.

"I mean, we can't just go around in masks and just call ourselves by name. I'm pretty sure after I saved the Decathlon team if I just went around calling myself Peter, they'd have figured out who I was then," Peter says.

He pauses for a second, thinking, and then asks:

"Can I ask you a question? I mean, about the whole killing thing."

Alec still didn't see the need to run around needing a name. If he was going to try to do something like the culture dude, he'd just do it and not monologue about who he is.

"Yeah, sure. What do you want to know?" Alec leaned against the countertop facing Peter since he was still behind the bar.

"The first time you were responsible for someone's death," Peter begins uneasily, thinking of Uncle Ben. "What did you do? I mean -- how, how did you deal with it?"

He swallows, then dampens his lips.

He looked at Peter for a long moment, trying to decide what he wanted to say to him.

He paused a moment longer to down the rest of the scotch and pour some more. Being a transgenic meant you needed to work really hard to get drunk.

"It's different for me. Where I'm from. Manticore. They had ways of convincing you that you didn't care. That feeling bad for taking a life was stupid." Torture and reprogramming.

He swirled the scotch now in his glass and decided honestly maybe this time. Peter was getting more from him than most people did in weeks.

"I was eight. There were these... Failed experiments. We called them anomalies. One escaped. My unit was sent to capture it but it wasn't taking no for an answer. We were strong, but we were still kids so it was stronger. It was going to get away and we were going to fail our mission so I shot it. Him. Went to confirm the kill and realized it had the same code as me only it was a older version. They called them X3s."

His first kill was technically killing himself which Logan would probably point out was poetic or something.

"I cried in my bunk that night." He look a long draw of alcohol. "Then one of the soldiers on duty heard me, came in, and... Convinced me to stop." It was the last time he cried until Max forced Manticore to be destroyed.

Peter takes this all in without saying anything, though he's not really sure that he could say anything about any of this. Alec's life is so far removed from his own that all of this sounds like a movie or a TV show or a book or something that's not actual reality.

And once again, the feeling of helplessness he's already felt a few times since arriving at the Madonna Inn settles somewhere in the pit of his stomach, small but hard, like a tiny ball bearing. So many people had experienced so many terrible things, and there wasn't anything he could do about it. Even if one of the portals actually opened up to their particular timeline (which Peter somehow doubted would ever happen), he couldn't change the past.

There's a half-minute of silence as Peter scrambles for something, anything to say, but it's hard. It's hard to know the right thing to say or do, and as much as Peter tries, he's rarely convinced that what he's doing is the best thing -- the thing he should be doing.

"I'm so sorry," Peter says, because he really, truly is. "But that -- that really sucks, all of it. And it, it really pisses me off that you'd have to go through all that."

That isn't the kind of language Peter usually uses, but the situation really seems to call for it.

"I know that it probably seems weird to say this since we were just punching one another in the hall twenty minutes ago, but like, if there's anything I can do, like even just listening, I'm okay with that."

Alec usually said stronger words, but he got the feeling those were hard ones for Peter. Alec was kind of impressed.

"I'm okay." He said it while taking another sip of scotch, but almost sounded like he might believe that himself. "I'm always okay." He winked at Peter with a smile.

"But enough about me. I want to know how you became a superhero. Your dad pass on the mantle or something?"

Peter's not entirely convinced. "Don't you think you've had enough to drink?" he asks, gesturing to Alec's glass. He's gunning through drinks pretty quickly, and Peter's not sure if it's because Alec's got an iron constitution or if there's some other problem there.

Still, Alec asked him a question, so he should probably give him an answer.

"My mom and dad died when I was still a kid," Peter says. "But I got my powers when I was bit by a spider. No one on Reddit was able to identify it, so I think it was probably some sort of mutated spider or something. Spiders don't usually give people powers where I come from."

Usually.

"Accelerated metabolism. Makes it hard for me to get drunk." But Alec could try and sometimes he got a good buzz if he drank like a fish.

"Sorry about your folks... but I guess that answers why you go by Spiderman."

"Yeah, I guess I can kinda understand that," Peter admits, because he can. "After the whole spider thing, I started eating a lot more than I used to. May just thought it was puberty."

That was a good excuse enough as any for I'm eating a lot because I have an accelerated metabolism triggered by a bite from a mutant spider that gave me superpowers.

"But yeah, that's how I became Spider-Man. I kinda wanted to be a superhero since I was little. Iron Man saved me once, when I was younger, and I thought it was the coolest thing -- saving people, helping others, fighting bad guys. I never really thought that someday it'd actually happen."

Alec thought that sounded way too idealistic and naive, but it seemed like this was the case with Peter in general. Alec also wondered if they had been from the same world, Peter would have been fighting people like him. Manticore was not made of good people.

"And now what you do it, do you like it? Is it everything you've hoped for?"

"Yeah, I mean, sometimes it's tough," he says with ease, thinking of his fight with the Vulture done in his hoodie and sweatpants. He was terrified so many times during that fight that even in spite of the ending, he couldn't really label it as a good or satisfying memory.

Especially since it hurt Liz so much.

"But there's some good parts," he says, pulling his cell phone out of his back pocket. He pulls up a video. "Parts that really make all the tough parts of the job really worth it."

Alex watched the video with an expression of 'of course you made a video'. He identified with the the grumpy guy in charge of Peter a lot. "Who's this guy?" He pointed to the grumpy dude in plane.

And then there was fighting and there wasn't a lot that he could see, but from what he could see, Peter was holding his own, if not overly excited. "You really like to talk while you fight, huh?"

"That's Happy," Peter says, and then helpfully, he offers: "He's not actually very happy. He's kinda like, Mr. Stark's Head of Security now and like, Asset Management. I had to report to him any time there was trouble." And any time there wasn't. Peter reported everything to him. Well, except all the stuff about modifying the suit and going after the Vulture. But he couldn't exactly tell Happy that when Mr. Stark had explicitly forbidden him from doing that.

"A fight's a lot more fun when you get to talk to the people you're fighting." Excluding the fight he had with Alec a few minutes ago. "Well, most of the time. When I was fighting with the other Avengers, we actually got to talk a little. I mean, these are guys who were my heroes growing up."

Peter talks about all this with such enthusiasm that it's basically radiating off of him. This superhero business? Basically Peter's favorite thing.

"And yet, you fought them, huh?" Alec was kind of impressed. That took guts. "If I talked that much during a fight I'd get my ass kicked."

"Well, yeah. I mean, they were the bad guys, right?" Peter somehow manages an awkward little laugh. His thoughts are similar to Alec's; maybe, if the organization Alec worked for were present in his timeline, he'd be fighting Alec and all the people like him.

And Peter didn't particularly like that thought, so he quickly changes the subject.

"A lot of the time, I do end up getting my ass kicked," Peter says. "But I'm still starting out, and I mean, if things end up all right in the end, what does it matter if I have a few cuts and bruises?"

And as if on cue, his side aches painfully with the reminder of their combat.

"Like now," Peter says. Now was all right, too.

Alec didn't have the heart to tell the kid that he kind of went easy on him. Max would have told him he was 'growing as a person' because of that.

"You hit pretty hard yourself." But with the accelerated healing even his would-be bruises were healing. "You just need some better techniques."

Peter frowns at that. "I got plenty of techniques," he insists, defensively. "If I had my webslingers, that fight would have ended a lot sooner than it did."

"Dude, you're 15. If you think you don't have anything else to learn, you're going to get killed or get other people killed." Alec said it before he could even stop himself and say something more glib.

"If you knew what I've dealt with, you'd seriously reconsider that." Peter is clearly on the defense here; Alec is reminding him a little of Mr. Stark. Not because the two of them are anything alike, but because the jist of it feels just like the conversation he had with him after the ferry incident.

Teenagers had so much sass. Which was an ironic thing for Alec to think because most people thought Alec acted like a teenage boy - and he did.

He lifted his hands up in mock defeat. "Alright, fine, sure. But I bet you talk to any of your superhero friends here will tell you they're still learning new ways to fight and adapt." He thought about Maya, not that he knew she was a superhero, and how Maya was good at adapting.

[EP] Frustration of a Caged Animal - OTA

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