st_x5_494 | Morning Run (Closed to Peter

Peter somehow manages to force his legs to meet Alec's pace. But before long, Peter starts to feel like a little kid in the back seat of a car during a long road trip. It makes him feel uncool to be wondering how much longer, especially since he's sure that Alec isn't even thinking about that at all.

And yeah, maybe it was stupid, but he really did want to impress Alec. He just doesn't feel impressive at all right now, especially when his legs feel both heavy and on fire all at the same time.

They're about another 20 minutes in before Peter feels his legs on the verge of buckling again. He reaches for the sleeve of Alec's t-shirt.

"Okay," he says, embarrassed. "We need to stop."

Unlike last time, Alec stopped abruptly. He turned slightly to take in Peter's stance and sweat and general look. "Maybe we should call it a day for now."

Peter looks wiped. He feels wiped. He was trying really hard not to look wiped because he didn't want to seem like he wasn't up to the challenge, but Peter's not sure how many more miles he can fake it, and he's pretty sure that his legs won't let him find out.

Peter lowers himself to the ground and presses his palms hard against the top of his thighs. There's nothing wrong with them beyond him obviously pushing himself past his limits; Peter just finds sometimes that if you press really hard against something that's hurting that sometimes it doesn't hurt as much.

Just sometimes, though. Other times it just makes things a lot worse.

"Sorry," Peter says, looking down at his legs. "I know you're on a schedule. If you need to keep going, I can catch up with you later."

Alec rolled his eyes and crouched beside him, hands resting on his knees. "You know we're stuck at an Inn right?" He surveyed Peter's legs.

"How bad is it?"

"Yeah, but your four hour goal," Peter insists. He feels like he's bringing down Alec with his not-nearly-as-athletic-as-Alec's legs. Why didn't he work out his legs more?

"They're fine," he says, pulling his hands off his legs so he can shift them into a more comfortable position. "I just need a break."

Alec shifted so he was sitting on the ground, legs up. "The four hour thing is okay because we'll end up back near the Inn. It's not an actual 'goal'. I don't make goals."

Peter can't help but think that Alec's just telling him these things to make him feel better about ruining his goal.

"You don't have to do this anymore, so why do you do it?"

Even Peter's not sure why he asks it. Maybe it's because he thinks that there's got to be some sort of goal -- some sort of objective -- that Alec's not admitting to, even if it's not the whole four hour thing like Peter thinks it is.

It was a good question and Alec wasn't actually sure he had an answer for it. He was quiet for a moment, then shrugged. "Gives me something to do."

Peter doesn't look convinced by this answer.

"There's other things you can be doing," Peter points out. "And it's not like you do any daydreaming, either." Which is one of the major perks of doing anything solo. Even when Peter was patrolling and there wasn't much to do, he'd find himself daydreaming about scenarios that would require his heroic intervention.

Peter lifts one of his legs into a V, then shifts it down flat again, as if testing out his leg. He really needed to get better at this if he was ever going to be able to come close to catching up to Alec.

Peter really didn't understand conditioning, which was a good thing, really. Most of the people here who knew about his upbringing seemed to just understand. Not that Alec really understood why he did most of the things he did either.

"I'm just used to it." He shrugged and then frowned. "Why does it matter if I do this or not?"

"There's nothing wrong with it," Peter says. At least he doesn't think so. "Do you get anything out of it, though?"

Other than, apparently, the ability to still feel something in your legs other than burning pain after running 30 miles.

He thought about that question, even looking out at the desert before them for a moment. Maybe there was a part of him that felt like a 'good soldier' when he completed it.

"I want to be ready when shit hits the fan and we need to fight or escape." It was a tactical thing.

"Nothing bad has happened since we got here," Peter says. "Outside of the Other-Worlds." Obviously they had problems there.

Peter presses his lips together, his brows knotted.

"Are you just always preparing for the next big threat?" Even when there isn't one.

"Of course. Sometimes going to happen eventually. It always does. I think whoever's in charge of this place is waiting for all of us to get complacent and dull and then whatever the end goal is, we'll know it." Alec didn't think this was necessarily a free vacation. He felt there were pretty thick strings attached.

"If they wanted us to get complacent, they wouldn't do things like open portals to other worlds or bring new people here," Peter argues. "If I wanted to launch some sort of secret attack on everyone at the inn for whatever nefarious purposes, I'd just let everything go on normally with nothing really crazy until I decided to do whatever I wanted to do. I'd probably give people things to do other than sit around and study and train all day because I wouldn't want people doing that."

"Hope is a powerful thing." He glanced out at the expanse. It was part of it. You could see it going out forever. It gave you this feeling like maybe if you went long enough or fast enough you might get somewhere else.

"All these little things. Just a way to make people feel safe and distracted. Keep us guessing." Alec didn't trust the Inn at all. "I think it or whoever has exact control over who comes in and out and what the hell happens when we're here." Some big ass science experiment.

"It could be that whoever's doing this doesn't have any nefarious reasons at all," Peter says, feeling irritated at Alec for reasons he can't really understand. "They could be helping us. It really all depends on how you look at it. If I weren't brought here, I wouldn't have met you or Liz or Piotr or Kitty or the Professor or anyone else. I can't imagine how meeting you guys wouldn't be a good thing."

"And at some point either you'll leave or I'll leave or one of the others -" Not that he had any clue of who the Professor was. "And then your whole 'nice' theory goes out the window."

Alec briefly thought about Kitty when her boyfriend left or how Corbie was so sad about being stuck here for a year.

"The best prisons are the ones no one knows they're in."

"Isn't just having met them enough, though? I mean, hasn't your life somehow been impacted positively by the people here? Would that really change if they left?"

Peter is really insistent on this one.

"And if we go back and have no memories of this place? How would you feel if-" Alec actually stopped himself. He wasn't going to go there with Peter. The kid didn't deserve to think about it.

"You went through all this stuff and learned like, how to be a great fighter and then it's worth nothing when you get back?"

"I already know I'm not going to remember," Peter says. That was definitive. "If I met Mr. Star-Lord here, I really doubt that I would be able to hide it when we met."

Peter at least was able to acknowledge that.

"It doesn't matter if I don't remember all the things I learned here as long as I was able to use what I learned to help people while I was."

This was a moment where Peter was much more mature than Alec. When Alec thought about going home without knowing some of the things here, it made him angry. Upset maybe was the better word, but he wasn't the type to channel those emotions into anything other than anger. That he'd be upset if he forgot about Corbie or Emma or Peter or the others - it confirmed this place sucked.

Alec climbed to his feet, standing. "Maybe you don't care, but I do and it pisses me off. And it's proof this place is just some shitty science experiment and we're the lab rats. Trust me I know what being under observation feels like.

"There's no way a good thing would bring people here and then have them forget. Look at Sam and Dean. So they get time with their mom -" who was hot, but now wasn't the time. " And go back and forget they had all that time with them? Or Kitty had to go through all that bullshit she did with her boyfriend-" Alec was observant, even if he didn't say anything about it. "To what? For fun? Jane gets back her memories to just lose them again? That's all fucked up." And Alec was purposefully avoiding anything to do with Peter. Like how he'd been punched in the face or how Alec gave him pointers on better combat. Not to mention it occurred to him that that meant a bunch of shit with Liz. And also, Peter would have to lose his V card twice and how cruel was that?

Peter's not sure he'd want to remember the people here. Not because he wants to forget, but it'd be painful to remember what he'd left behind. That he'd left Liz behind.

Maybe it was a blessing to know that he was reasonable confident that he wouldn't remember things. It made it easier to know that when he left this place behind, he wouldn't have to come to grips with that pain. There'd just be Midtown High and Ned and the LEGO Taj Mahal that was coming out in December and the new Star Wars film.

"There's no way to know if it's intentionally malicious," Peter says. "It might just be what happens when you get sent back. If there's someone doing this, they might not be able to do anything about it."

Peter'd come up with many theories as to why they were here and what might have happened. It used to bother him. But this one was the one he preferred to believe. The positive one. Peter wanted to believe they were here for a good reason. Not for a bad one.

"Why can't you believe that this might be good? That all this," Peter extends his arms. "...might actually be something good?"

For plenty of people, this was a reprieve from a life that sounded far worse than this one.

Alec was suddenly raising his voice, angry, even though he hadn't seen it coming "Because is ever just 'for good' there's always something underneath it all or some catch or price to pay!"

He looked down where Peter sat, his anger evident, but there was a hint of something like hurt in his eyes.

He turned around, back to Peter, and paced a bit before turning around. "And if you're right and we don't remember, then you have to throw your first argument out the window because everything you learn here is useless." Alec couldn't quite seem to get his voice to lower, it seems. Even he was a little confused over his sudden anger. Anger he wasn't sure if it was directed to Peter or to this place or what.

He stood there, practically glaring at Peter for a moment before he exhaled, turned away a little and rubbed the back of his neck agitatedly.

Peter's used to Alec getting angry at him. A few months ago, it might have upset him to have Alec raising his voice at him, but he kinda understands why he'd be upset. Peter had done a lot of thinking on this ever since Quill had showed up and come to his conclusions on his own.

"It makes sense if you think of this as a second life and you think of leaving as dying," he says. "We probably won't remember anything when we die either, but I don't think the things we do while we're alive are useless because we die and won't remember them afterwards."

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