st_x5_494 | Sock on the Door (For Peter)

Sock on the Door (For Peter)

It was sometime in the afternoon when Alec returned to the room. He hadn't been back since he came upon a sock on the door and so he spent the night with someone else. He had to give Peter props for the amount of times the kid was using the sock, but he was slightly surprised every time he'd come in, take one look at Peter, and just know nothing happened. Alec often wondered what the hell was wrong with Peter since it seemed like they were both willing to get busy with one another, but at least he was having sex and at the end of the day, that was wall that mattered.

When he pushed through the door, he called out a 'hey! I'm back." In case Peter cared, which Alec knew he would.

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Peter has to resist the urge to rub the side of his nose; it feels funny.

"I don't know. I'm scared, I guess." He frowns, then runs a hand through his hair.

The fact that Peter found it easier to say he was scared about sex over scared about fighting bad guys was probably indicative of something, but Alec wasn't a therapist.

"It's fine to be scared about that." He shrugged. "Just try not to overthink everything. Sex is pretty basic at is core."

Alec looked at Peter again. "If you're still worried... Think of it this way. If the roles were reversed, how would you feel?"

"You're not scared of sex," Peter points out. He's pretty sure if sex were sentient, it'd be scared of Alec.

Peter leans up a little to look at Alec at his next challenge.

"What, if I wanted to have sex and Liz didn't?"

Peter's brows furrows. He lays down.

"I wouldn't want Liz to do anything she wasn't ready for," he says. "Ever. Not even for me."

"There you go - she probably feels that way too." She seemed pretty similar to Peter in the whole 'meek and over-whelmed' thing, except she had boobs and might be a league or two over Peter, but Alec would never say that.

"You know her better than me though, so -" He shrugged.

Peter leans up and looks over at Alec again, frowning thoughtfully.

"Why are you helping me?"

Alec's expression was, to his credit, less stunned than he felt, but when he spoke, his tone was a little defensive. It almost mimicked Peter's tone with him often. "What's that supposed to mean?"

"I just -- this isn't something you'd normally talk to me about unless you were trying to give me a hard time. And yeah, it started out that way, but..."

Peter lays back down and closes his eyes, embarrassed. Embarrassed felt like his default state of being lately.

"...you're giving good advice."

Alec pouted, mostly because Peter couldn't see it and he very rarely actually physically expressed any of other emotion other than stoic and annoyed. Even with that, though, the expression was gone quickly.

"I'm sorry. I could go back to that if you want. Make you turn red by explaining the 5 key steps in good oral sex." He really would if Peter wanted.

He paused. "But, you know, I thought I'd be helpful or whatever. I remember my first time. Maybe I remember feeling some of the same shit as you."

"No, no, no," Peter says, this time pushing himself upright and into a fully-seated position. "Don't apologize."

A beat.

"And don't tell me those steps to oral sex either," he adds. That might be too much for one day, and Peter was already feeling overwhelmed with sexual knowledge today.

Alec tossed the book at Peter. "You tell anyone I actually talked to you about this stuff and I'll shave your hair off." Better than face-punching, right?

Peter catches the book easily and sets it down on the bed next to him.

"I won't tell anyone, so don't worry," he says. "I just have a hard time seeing you as being insecure or worried about this kinda stuff."

"I'm not anymore." Which was the truth. He was very confident in his abilities now.

Alec paused, then glanced over at him. "When do you think I first did it?" He meant the sex, of course.

"I don't know. Fourteen?" Definitely younger than him.

Alec sent Peter a 'I thought you were smart' look. "Yeah, you're right. I was fourteen in a secretly military facility being trained in espionage and assassination and somehow found time to bunk with one of the other X5s in my unit." He deadpanned.

"You're stealthy," Peter argues. "You'd be able to hear anyone coming from a quarter mile away, so it'd probably be hard for you to get caught."

This probably meant that 14 was off-base, though.

"I met Rachel two years ago." He was twenty-one now. He'd let Peter do the math there.

"You didn't sleep with anyone until Rachel?" Peter asks.

Even if Peter had been trying (and he wasn't), he'd have a hard time masking his surprise. He always just assumed that Alec had been sleeping around for years. None of his activities at the inn would have given him any reason to believe otherwise.

He felt the need to drink and he eyed Peter's dresser. He had been rather 'good' lately about excessive drinking, but this subject...

"She was my first everything." He paused, thinking about it. "You're trained not to have individual thought. You get told what to think.... When Max destroyed the DNA lab, they designated us breeding partners so we could attempt to create more soldiers. Every other soldier except the few who had been trained in seduction and honey pot techniques treated it like some weird clinical homework assignment." Unsurprisingly some of them hadn't been able to 'achieve objective parameters'.

Whenever Alec talks about Manticore, Peter starts to feel helpless. It's not a familiar feeling; since becoming Spider-Man, he's often felt the opposite of helpless: now he could do more, more easily than he could ever before.

As Spider-Man, he can stop bad things from happening. But he can't stop bad things that already have. Even if they're things he really, really wish he could stop, like Manticore.

He should probably stop here, but the conversation is already happening and Peter thinks that maybe it might help Alec to talk about it because he doesn't usually talk about these things, and sometimes Peter knows talking about them really helps. Even if it's really painful at first.

"No one's telling you what to think now," Peter says. "So what do you think?"

Alec looked a little confused. "About what?" He wasn't being difficult at the moment, he just didn't see what Peter might have seen to ask the question. "About sex?" He shrugged. "It's great. And I don't want to be a dad so I'm glad Max didn't want anything to do with me when we first met."

"No, not about sex," Peter says, shaking his head. "You couldn't think for yourself before, and now you can. You've changed your mind on things --"

Like sex.

"-- because someone's no longer telling you how you feel. And you seem to realize now that it's pretty screwed up."

Or at least that's what Peter was getting from Alec's explanation of Manticore and sex earlier.

"How do you feel about everything they made you think? About them for making you think it?"

That was a pretty complex question. Something Max would ask him and expect some profound meaning of life revelation because she seemed to have them all the time. Max was constantly trying to come to terms with how Manticore fit into her life and how to deal with it.

"Manticore tried to barbeque us alive, so I'm not really fond of them, but I see their point in what they were trying to do. I mean, who wouldn't want the best soldiers to defend a country?" Alec was being truthful here. He knew how valuable he was as an asset.

"I like being able to take naps."

There were times where Peter was completely and entirely capable of understanding where Alec was coming from, and this was definitely one of them.

Peter shifts to the edge of the bed so he's closer to Alec and lets his legs hang down.

"Don't you think it's important for those people to have autonomy? To be able to make their own decisions? Yeah, maybe some people would say that it's important for everyone to be aligned or something, but if everyone's blindly following the same orders, if something happens and everyone reacts the wrong way, everybody's dead."

"You learn to like it." Alec leaned back idly on the chair, teetering it on two legs. "You'd be surprised how much easier things feel when you don't have to figure shit out for yourself."

The kids had it the worse. They would find one hiding and the kid would have a hard time not just following them around like a lap dog.

This still isn't making any sense to him. Yeah, sometimes it helped to have someone else making the calls. Like when Mr. Stark told him what to do in Germany. But that was because it was his first big fight and he wasn't exactly sure what he was supposed to do. All that was new to him, and they had to work as a team.

But all the time? Constantly? How could he like that? How could he ever even begin to like that?

"Would you rather go back to someone telling you what to do?"

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