st_x5_494 | Morning Run (Closed to Peter

"Shouldn't you take care of yourself first?" Peter asks, pointedly. "If you pass out or something, I'm not going to be able to do much to help."

Peter can at least admit he's in a sorry state right now.

"I've been in worse." He really had. "We're made to be durable... I have a little longer before I need to rest. So, the lesson for the day is how to stitch up a wound." Alec wasn't going to be able to fix his back, after all.

Alec's brow was sweating though. He would have to stop soon.

He picked up the needle after Peter's wound was clean. "This is going to sting." He started to stitch the wound up with careful hands.

Peter tenses up as Alec pierces through with the needle, but after that first intrusion, Peter finds himself slowly relaxing.

"Did you have to do this a lot?" he asks. Alec is surprisingly good at it -- his stitches are neat and even. Somehow Peter doubted that Alec was mending clothes, so that meant he had to have sewn someone else up at some point.

"In the field? No, not really. More in the last year, sure." Because Manticore was hunting them, so it gave for more occasion/need for it. "But we had lessons on it all the time. We're no good if we can't keep going. We're also universal blood donours, if you ever need a transfusion or an organ of mine."

"I hope I don't need your blood or your organs," Peter says. He winces as Alec pulls his needle through. Everything would be healed through soon enough, but this would probably help it.

"I'm B+," Peter says helpfully. "Would you be able to take my blood if you needed it, or is this a Type-O kind of thing?"

"I'm O-... but I can only take blood from another X5. Same with organs." It would be a one-way deal. The healers here like Pike made the idea far less likely to need something like that, though.

Alec's almost done. It seems like the bleeding has stopped for his arm which was good.

Peter feels a prickle of worry form at the back of his neck, but he tries really hard to ignore it. Alec was a super fast regenerator. There were also healers here, so blood transfusions and organs weren't likely to be a problem.

Those thoughts don't do much of anything to assuage his concern.

"You should take care of yourself first then," Peter grumbles.

Over Alec's dead body would he take care of himself over Peter, but he didn't say that. Instead, he finished dressing Peter's wound, put gauze overtop.

"I'm fine. It just needs to be cleaned and stitched so it closes without a scar." He tugged off his shirt and tossed it into the garbage from where he was and then practically fell down into the chair. "I can work on my leg while you get my back. Just don't mess up too much." The last part was meant as a joke as her ripped his pant leg open more and began to clean the bite mark.

Peter's not sure if he's capable enough to do this.

"Are you really going to let me do that?"

Let probably isn't the word he's looking for. Peter's by no means scrambling for the opportunity to stitch up someone else's back. Yeah, it might be a valuable life skill, but he was worried about screwing up and hurting Alec.

He's also pretty sure his stitches aren't going to look nearly as good as Alec's.

"Yeah. I meant it what I said about you." That he was capable. Peter just needed to stop making stupid decisions from time to time is all. "If you don't want to, It'll heal on it's own. It'll just take longer." And he'd probably have to rest a lot more.

Alec didn't really turn to put pressure on Peter to make a decision, but instead got to work on his leg. His leg was where he'd bleed out from the most, really.

Peter nods solemnly, then goes through the stuff that Alec pulled out. He spends a little longer than Alec cleaning Alec's wound -- in part because he's delaying the first stitches, but also because he wants to be sure he's doing a good job.

"I'm about to start, okay?" He wasn't sure if he was right or wrong to give Alec a warning, but he'd want a warning.

Peter takes a breath and starts his first stitch.

It's only his muscles around his shoulders that seem to twitch when Peter does the first pass with the needle, but then his skin relaxed. There is a moment where Alec felt his eyes droop close and he realized maybe there'd been more blood that was lost than he realized, but he also knew he'd be fine after a rest. And he was thankful Peter couldn't see his face either.

"You're doing fine." Probably, anyways.

"Yeah," Peter says, not in agreement because he needs to say something to acknowledge what Alec's saying and yeah seems as good enough a word to the affirmative as any. "I'll try and get this done quickly."

A beat.

"But not too quickly," Peter quickly reassures. "I'm not gonna rush through and mess up."

Still, Peter continues to work and before long, Alec's back is stitched up.

"You're not going to be able to sleep on your back," he says, bandaging it up. It looked bad. Peter couldn't help but feel guilty, even if he knew Alec was going to be fine. He didn't like people being hurt because of him.

"I'll survive." He rolled his shoulders a little, feeling the stitches strain, but not rolling them enough to rip them apart. By the time Peter was done, Alec was starting to feel better.

He turned to the kid. "How are you feeling? How are your legs?"

"I'll be fine," Peter says about his legs. He takes a breath.

"I should have just gone with you to begin with. I shouldn't have pushed myself."

Alec wondered if that was Peter showing personal growth.

"If you want to make that distance, I can have you there in a month or so." That was Alec's way of acknowledging Peter's acknowledgement.

Peter's not sure how he feels about it taking a month to happen, but considering what happened today, he's willing to defer to Alec's wisdom on this one.

"Yeah, I'd like to," he says. "As long as it's not going to be a hassle."

"it's not a hassle." Alec could give him the theory of body conditioning. It only just occurred to him that Peter had gone from a weakling to someone who can stop a car without actually working out.

"You can teach me how to daydream." He'd probably regret that remark.

"I don't know if that's really something that can be taught," Peter says. It's weird, but now that he thinks about it, it's something that comes to him naturally.

"I just think about the way I'd want things to turn out. And sometimes the way I don't want things to turn out because sometimes you have to have things not turn out in order for there to be a payoff at the end of the story."

The story here being the daydream.

Alex did not understand this need. "What sort of things do you think about?" And why he also wanted to ask, but didn't.

"You can't laugh," Peter says, eyes bearing down on Alec.

Alec now clearly needed to know the answer. "I won't laugh." Outwardly, anyways.

"Like..."

This is embarrassing.

"We're in the middle of class and there's suddenly a big alien attack on the school. Or maybe not on the school, but near it. Everyone's panicked and freaking out and I'm calm because I've handled this kind of stuff before. I can't change into my suit, but I've got my web-shooters on me and I pull on the mask. Everyone knows I'm Spider-Man, especially Flash."

Especially Flash.

"And I jump out of the window, and I'm fighting these aliens, and Mr. Stark's talking to me through the mask telling me the Avengers are being deployed and I'm like 'Little busy here!' and then there's a big fight with the boss, but the Avengers still aren't there, and I defeat him even though it's tough and then Thor and Iron Man show up and Thor gives me a high five and Mr. Stark says 'good job, kid'."

Peter can feel his face growing red.

"Like that."

Thankfully Alec was trained enough not to have his expression change as he listened. But really - that was probably the most embarrassing thing he had ever heard, and Peter talked a lot. He blinked, trying not to look too judgy. There were parts that didn't surprise him - like how Peter had to fight 'the boss' like it was some sort of video game or how Stark had to praise him. Alec was sure the Psy-ops division would have a field day psychoanalyzing that day dream.

"How would you be able to take on all the alien guys if you don't kill them? And why wouldn't the 'boss' just do whatever he wanted to do while you were fighting the other guys?"

"Web-shooters," Peter says, lifting the wrist of his good arm, as if to demonstrate. That reminds him -- he needs to replace his cartridges.

"And yeah, the boss would be... doing things --" Peter wasn't really thinking about what the boss was doing until he finally stopped an appropriate number of alien bad-guys. "-- and I'd have to stop him before he did more. Like, maybe he was coming close to achieving his objective--" Whatever that was. "--but I showed up just in time to stop him."

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