Chapter Text
Percy had settled into the routine of going to school, coming home and doing homework, and then swimming for a bit before bed. He struggled with a lot of the homework but he managed to do it. It helped that Tim or one of the others was always willing to check over his math and chemistry homework to check the answers. He didn’t have much history homework yet aside from readings, but he’d managed to get an audiobook version of the textbook that he was able to listen to which helped. English was a struggle, they’d had a few assignments to write poetry using certain poetic devices, but he used a text to speech app on his laptop and Alfred was willing to check if over and help him with his spelling and walk him through his punctuation. It helped that punctuation wasn’t as strict for poetry anyways.
It was a Friday, the end of the second week of school. They were starting to get into the swing of the school year now, he had a quiz in his math class. He did okay he thought, fortunately there weren’t any word problems. In English, they had to read out one of the poems they had written for homework. He had gone ahead and memorized his so he wouldn’t have to struggle with trying to read it. He’d written about the nature of memories using the ocean as a metaphor, the way memories came and went with the tides and were distorted by time and the erosive waters. He was nervous about doing it in class since it was kind of personal, but it was vague enough through the metaphor he tried not to worry about it. A couple of the guys in the back of the class were sniggering at it which made him extra nervous but he realized afterwards that they were doing that to everyone, not just him. Guess that made sense, those guys were just jerks. The teacher seemed to like his poem well enough and seemed impressed he’d memorized it, so that was what really mattered.
He had worn his blue charm bracelet today so he had something to fidget with during his math quiz and stuff. He’d noticed over the last couple weeks that the girls regularly wore all sorts of jewelry, so he knew jewelry was allowed despite the school uniforms. He ate lunch with just Tim, Steph didn’t have lunch with them on B-days. He went to Gym class after lunch.
They’d started dressing out for Gym class that week. He had a doctor’s note for his sprained ankle, he could still participate but it ensured that if he overdid it and his ankle started hurting, he could bow out of whatever they were doing and the gym teacher, Coach T, wouldn’t give him crap about it. He was still wearing the brace for his ankle even though it was mostly fine. It had been about 4 weeks since his injury and it’s supposed to take 3-6 weeks to heal, but he was still trying to be careful with it. They played half-court basketball today; he was kinda bad at aiming to shoot but he was fairly good at boxing people out and getting rebounds, so he was able to contribute.
He didn’t want people seeing the scars on his back so he always changed in the shower stall in the locker room. He’d been doing that all week, but this particular day someone decided to harass him about it after class when he was changing back to his regular clothes.
Brad decided to jeer at him, “What’s wrong Jackson, not man enough to change in front of everyone like the rest of us?”
“Whatever,” Percy said, ignoring him as he stowed his clothes in his locker and took out his jewelry, his bracelet and shark tooth necklace, and put them on.
“Don’t ignore me, Prissy. You’re even wearing jewelry like a prissy little girl,” Brad said, two of his friends backing him up, looking menacing.
“I don’t think a sharktooth necklace is exactly considered feminine,” Percy snarked back.
“Don’t talk back to me, punk. Don’t you know who I am?” Brad said.
“Don’t know, don’t care, I’m outta here,” Percy said. They were technically supposed to stay in the locker room until the bell rang to dismiss them to their next class, but Percy decided to remove himself from the escalating situation, this guy was clearly looking for a fight. He left and started heading to his locker to get his school supplies.
He heard footsteps behind him and realized the three guys were following him.
“Just leave me alone, I’m not interested in fighting with you,” Percy said.
“I don’t care what you want. You scholarship students are always so worried about getting into fights, you think you’re so smart coming here but you’re just poor charity cases, you don’t belong here,” Brad rambled.
Percy quirked his eyebrow but didn’t correct the assumption that he was a scholarship student. He wasn’t wrong that Percy was raised poor.
“Look, Brad, I could totally kick your ass if I wanted to, but quite frankly you aren’t worth the trouble. I don’t give a shit what you think of me, so just leave me alone,” Percy said.
Brad, with his short-fused temper, threw a punch which Percy casually dodged. “I’m serious, I don’t want to have to hurt you,” Percy said as he took a step back. The other two guys, Chris and James, moved to surround him.
All three of them started trying to hit Percy, while he dodged and blocked the blows, trying to talk them down. He didn’t want to get expelled again, and getting into fights was bad for staying in schools so he didn’t want to escalate, but these guys just wouldn’t see reason. Eventually, with the three of them surrounding him and attacking him while he only fought defensively without trying to bring them down, one of them got a blow in on him. Staggered by the punch to the back of his kidneys, another guy managed to get him in a choke hold before he could react.
He tried to fight down his instincts to hurt them but it became hard with the lack of oxygen, as he started to slowly lose consciousness. Right when he was about to lose consciousness, he snapped and started fighting back in earnest.
He stomped down on the ankle of the boy holding him, Brad, snapping his ankle with the force of the strike. He pulled the guy off of him, pushing him to the ground so he hit his head and grabbing his arm, twisting it behind his back and dislocating it from his shoulder. One of the other guys, James, tried to punch him again, he ducked under the blow, grabbing the arm and shoving his face into a locker, twisting the arm behind the guy’s back to dislocate it as well. The third guy, Chris, approached and he moved faster, punching the guy hard in the ribs such that he heard a crack. The guy stayed on the ground from the one hit so he didn’t hit him again.
His ears were ringing with adrenaline and he didn’t hear the boys scream in pain when he hit them. The sounds had attracted attention; a security guard was walking towards them from the direction of the front entrance and he was brandishing a taser, ready to stop the fight. Percy wasn’t thinking clearly, he wasn’t thinking that this was a security guard at school and he just needed to stop fighting, he was operating on instinct and he was scared of getting tased and kidnapped again, so he ran.
He ran away from the security guard, bolting up the stairs. He got to the very top of the stairs where there was roof access, it was locked. He heard an alarm (the school bell) and he had to escape, he kicked the door knob to break it and open it. He was on the roof, he looked around, no buildings nearby enough to jump to.
There was a flag pole next to the building. He got a running start and jumped over, grabbing hold of the flag pole and sliding down like a firefighter. He jumped down with a roll to distribute his weight to minimize the impact on his ankle and he took off running. He didn’t look back, he just kept running in a blind panic, trying to get far away.
CH.1 Author's Note:
Percy really did try not to get in a fight, but alas he had to defend himself and he has a very strong and violent survival instinct.
The next chapter is titled "A Familiar Face". Any predictions regarding who he runs into?