When Alec blinks his eyes open, the first thing he notices is how singularly, perfectly blue the sky is. The second is the dark shapes circling against it. The third is that he has no idea where he is.

He spends a while sitting on the sand considering that, flipping the white hood of the poncho he's swathed in up over his dark hair to shield himself from the sunlight. Thinking about it doesn't get him anything except a worsening headache.

So up he gets. He picks a direction, and he starts walking, trudging in his white cowboy boots over the sand. Someone stitched rhinestones into them, and he watches the sunlight bounce off them as he walks. When he looks up, he spots another wanderer, and he changes direction to intercept them. It seems like the thing to do.

He doesn't cut much of an inspiring figure for anyone hoping for rescue, being a slender-limbed, shortish teenage boy who stops short a healthy distance from whoever he's approaching with a flat, slightly curious stare, but maybe he's better than nothing.

"Hey," he says, and looks a little surprised at the softness of his own voice.

After claiming his hotel room, Alec spent a whole hour in it. He tested out the springiness of the mattress, fiddled with the shower to achieve the perfect water temperature, used a healthy dollop of the hotel soap getting rid of the clinging sand, swaddled himself in the plush robe, brushed his gritty teeth, tested out the mattress again, examined the furniture and fixtures, pawed through the wardrobe, changed into a new outfit (different white poncho, black pants, soft white ruffled shirt), and decided he was bored.

So he pulled on his rhinestoned boots and went back down to the lobby, where he can be found sitting cross-legged on top of the front desk, eyeballing the receptionist with mild interest. When he notices you approaching, he turns his attention your way.

"Do you mind doing me a favor?" He tilts his head in the receptionist's direction, messy, damp curls falling loosely around his face. "Ask him a question. Anything, doesn't matter."

The mechanical bull is stupid. Alec may not have the memories to contextualize why he immediately knows it's stupid, but it's an intuition he has the second he sees it, and every embarrassing performance that people put on confirms it beyond a doubt. You'd have to be a complete idiot to hop onto a machine designed to fling you ass first on the ground in front of a room of cheering drunks.

What's stupider is that it doesn't even look that hard. All you should have to do to stay on for longer than a minute is to work with the momentum, not against it. Alec could see that from across the room, and it's even more obvious once he's sidled up to the ropes around it. It should be easy, but people just can't seem to stop fucking up.

As soon as he's sitting on it and it thrums to life, he knows he was right. A tiny smile crooks his mouth as the bull starts to buck, and - maybe it's not actually that stupid, if you're good at it.

Alec's good at it. The skinny teenager clings to the back of the bull through its violent mechanical jerking as if riding wild beasts comes naturally to him, his smile never faltering. Even when it finally flings him off several seconds past the challenge time limit he dismounts with grace that almost seems practised, twisting to land on his feet and one hand braced against the floor. He unfolds with a cocky gleam in his pale blue eyes, running his fingers through his mussed hair as he swaggers over to the bar.

"You can all go ahead and give up now," he declares, graciously, to the crowd at large.