Chapter Text
Percival Whitfield learned the word "disappointment" at age six.
He had brought home a drawing from school. A garden, scribbled in green crayon with flowers that looked more like explosions than petals. His father had glanced at it and said nothing. His mother had smiled but it was the smile she used for burnt toast and late arrivals. The smile that meant this is not what I wanted.
Percy threw the drawing away and he never drew another.
By age ten he understood the rules without being told. Speak when spoken to, finish every task, excel quietly and never want anything. Wanting was dangerous, wanting led to mistakes and mistakes led to that smile, the burnt toast smile, the you could have done better silence that filled their house like cold air through a cracked window.
By age fourteen, he had perfected the art of being small.
Straight A's, impeccable posture and apologizes ready before anyone asked for them. He organized his sock drawer by color, then by fabric, then by purpose because order was something he could control.
He practiced piano for two hours every evening. Bach and never Chopin; Chopin was too emotional. His mother said emotion was unseemly in a young man.
He agreed. It was easier to agree.
At fifteen, he kissed a boy behind the chapel at his old school. The boy name was Daniel. He had freckles on his knuckles and laughed with his whole chest and when he kissed Percy, Percy forgot to breathe. For three weeks, they met in secret—For three weeks Percy felt something that wasn't fear or duty or the weight of his father's expectations.
Then someone saw. Someone told.
The headmaster called his parents. His father didn't shout. Shouting would have been emotional. Instead, he sat Percy down in the study, closed the door and said very calmly: "This is a phase. You will outgrow it and we will help you."
His mother said nothing. She wore the burnt toast smile for a full week.
Daniel was pulled from the school soon after without Percy being able to say goodbye. The word "disappointment" appeared seventeen times in the conversation that followed and Percy absorbed each one like a stone dropping into still water, ripples and then nothing.
He stopped looking at boys. He stopped looking at anyone really. He folded his desires into halves, then quarters, then eighths until they were small enough to ignore.
At seventeen, he slipped.
A journal entry, Hidden inside a hollowed out dictionary. A single sentence: "I don't think I want to be fixed."
His mother found it while cleaning his room. She didn't knock, she never knocked and she read the sentence. She read the pages before it, the terrible poetry, the metaphors about birds and cages and windows that wouldn't open.
She didn't cry nor did she shout. She called his father and they stood in the doorway of his room like judges presiding over a sentence already decided.
"We've found a school," his father said. "It specializes in... cases like yours."
"It's strict," his mother added. "But strictness is what you need. Structure and discipline."
Percy nodded. Percy always nodded.
They didn't ask what he wanted, they never asked what he wanted and somewhere along the way, Percy had stopped wanting anything at all.
The school was called Thornfield Academy. The brochure showed grey stone and iron gates. The tagline read: Veritas Per Severitatem, Truth Through Strictness.
His parents saw a cure, a correction. A place where their son would be scrubbed clean of his "confusion" and returned to them polished and proper.
They saw a reformatory.
They were wrong.
But Percy didn't know that yet All he knew, sitting in the backseat of his father's car with a suitcase he hadn't packed, was that he had failed. Again. Irreparably. The word "disappointment" sat in his chest like a stone and he was so busy carrying it that he didn't notice the first thing about the school as they approached:
The motto above the gate had been crossed out with spray paint. Underneath someone had written:
Or Whatever.
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End of prologue