st_x5_494 | 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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From:

st_x5_494

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?

From:

st_arkintern

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."

From:

st_x5_494

"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.

From:

st_arkintern

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

From:

st_x5_494

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.

From:

st_arkintern

"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.

From:

st_x5_494

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

From:

st_arkintern

"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.

From:

st_x5_494

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'.

From:

st_arkintern

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?"

From:

st_x5_494

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."

From:

st_arkintern

"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?"

From:

st_x5_494

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."

From:

st_arkintern

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."

From:

st_x5_494

"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.

From:

st_arkintern

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?"

From:

st_x5_494

"Hell no." That answer came quickly and easily without the need to think about it.

"But I know a few who would. Most of the kids your age and under would. We don't exactly have a lot of parents to spare for the seven year old who need direction." He looked at Peter. "Regular people like being told what to think all the time. What clothes to buy, who to worship, what to look like, what car to buy..."

From:

st_arkintern

Peter frowns at that.

"Yeah, everyone needs direction sometime," Peter says. "Even I do. But there's still things I'd never do. Even if Mr. Stark told me to. Even if it were just easier to listen to him and do what he said."

Peter can think of a few times when listening to Mr. Stark would have made his life significantly easier, but he refused to do so anyway.

From:

st_x5_494

"Sure. But until you're sent out in missions all you know is Manticore. And then when you do, you find poverty and disease and starvation. Most people can't feed themselves or have a job. More people living in shacks than houses." He shrugged. "The clean, three meal-a-day, warm bed place you've grown up in looks pretty peachy to most."

From:

st_arkintern

Peter knows he can't argue any more than he has already. Even if he doesn't understand it, he can at least accept that someone might be more inclined to accept a life of taking orders from others if that guaranteed a better life than others.

Peter takes a big breath, as if he's about to say something --

-- and then doesn't actually say anything at all.

Peter doesn't know what to say.

From:

st_x5_494

"Look, don't worry about it." He knew his world upset Peter for some reason. Alec brought the chair back to all for legs on the ground. "You have your own thoughts, I have my own thoughts." They couldn't do anything about the people at home. "That's why I want to punch you in the face sometimes." He joked, but it was also kind of true - Peter's ability to think contrary meant a lot of clashes that way.

From:

st_arkintern

"I just wish things weren't so awful for you back home," he says. "It makes me really angry that things can get that bad and no one is doing anything to stop it." He thinks about all the bad things happening back home that even he can't stop. The stuff he talked about with River Song. "That no one did anything to stop it before it got where it is now."

From:

st_x5_494

"We were supposed to be the solution." Alec shrugged. He wasn't as bothered by it as Peter was.

From:

st_arkintern

It bothers Peter how cool Alec is being about all this.

"Yeah, but shouldn't they have had a solution before things got that bad? Shouldn't they have a solution that didn't involve brainwashing people?"