Percy Jackson Fanfics

Killers vs Murderers

Title: Killers vs Murderers
Author: Azza_Bynes
Site: Archive of Our Own
Link: https://archiveofourown.org/works/33084232

TW: AU-Mental institution, implied/referenced domestic violence, Implied/referenced Child abuse, implied/referenced self harm, selective mutism

(It's basically Percy and Leo meeting in an AU (they are still demigods but everything else is different

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Leo knew he was a killer, and thought he was a murderer. One and the same, right?

-

This place was objectively the worst. No one could decide if it was a group home, a mental hospital, or a juvenile detention facility. The way Jay described it, it was,

"The place they send kids who've committed heinous crimes but probably only did it because they're mentally ill and don't have families."

Leo saw how he fit that description. He knew it wasn't true, but he saw how it could be. His only objection was 'Pfsh, I'm not mentally ill!' Jay, his new friend who looked like he was sixteen at least but always carried around this one old teddy bear, disagreed.

"Why do you even have that?" Leo asked once, wanting to stop talking about himself. Jay's answer was simple, but loaded.

"It helps with the trauma."

Leo was content to just exist in this in between place, this earthly purgatory, with only Jay to keep him company. Until one Leonidas Valdez met one Perseus Jackson.

The new kid was unremarkable, except . . . except nothing, he was just unremarkable . . . where was Leo going with this . . . black hair, green eyes . . . scars all over (who didn't have those?) . . . Oh! Right! The weird-arse pretentious name. Of course, as a fellow pretentious name freak, Leo had to introduce himself. It went worse than expected.

"Hello, I hear you have a weirdly complicated name Perseus. I'm the same way. Leonidas 'Leo' Valdez, nice to meet you," he said, turning up the charm and charisma to a twelve out of ten. Perseus blinked at him, batted his outstretched hand back and forth like a cat toy a couple times, then turned away, seeminly losing interest. Leo wondered if he had brain damage.

-

"It's Percy," the first thing Leo ever heard him say. They were sitting down to their homey family dinner the next day when Percy whispered it. Everyone stopped and stared; Percy had Selective Mutism and hadn't spoken a word in the threeish days he'd been there.

"Um, okay," Leo said, not yet registering that he was responding to the previous day's introduction.

-

They didn't interact again until the next week. Leo had finally gotten up the courage to ask Jay what crime he committed (knowing he would ask about Leo's) and pulled the trigger on the couch in one of the two living rooms.

"I stalked a girl. My best friend, though I guess she hates me now. She helped me with a situation . . . a really f*cking bad situation, if you ask me. Like, I was going to either die or be driven to suicide. And she saved me when we were only seven years old. I got kind of . . . hyperfixated on her, you know? I called it attached, she called it obsessed. It wasn't so bad for the first nine years, even after my mom adopted her, but then my nightmares and stuff got worse and I . . . sort of . . . snuck into her room and watched her sleep so I could calm down. She found out and confronted me, and then while we were fighting my mom got sick and died and . . . and now she's sick too. The bear . . . sigh. It was my first toy, but the person who hurt me destroyed it. She sewed it back together for me. That's why I keep it with me; if I can't watch her, holding this is my one coping mechanism."

Leo didn't know what to say, and was spared having to say anything by a small voice saying,

"I killed my mom."

For just a moment, he was afraid he had spoken when he didn't want to. But that wasn't his voice. He looked up to see Percy sitting across from them, eyes wide like a scared animal.

"My stepdad hated us, and he never hit me, just my mom. I always watched. But one day he hurt her really badly, and I was so angry I just wanted him to die, and when I looked around the room was filled with water and he was drowning, but my mom was too, and I never realized that some people don't breathe underwater. I guess they put me here because I'm eleven, but I can take care of myself. I usually do."

"I don't even remember what happened, but I burst into flames and then there was this fire and my mom wasn't fire proof like me, " Leo explained, jumping at the chance there might be someone like him, "And after she died, some of the foster homes . . . weren't the best. Actually, they sucked. They hurt me a lot. I guess at some point I got so used to the pain . . ." He trailed off, rubbing his forarm absently and realizing he just bared his soul to one kid he's known for two months, and another he's only spoken to once before.

Still, with everything out on the table, things improve. Leo walks away from that conversation understanding, maybe for the first time, that there is a difference between a killer and a murderer. Leo and Percy are the former. They grow closer, even though Jay doesn't fully believe either of ther younger kids' stories. It doesn't matter, he can't judge how other people cope. They become so close, the three of them, that by the time a strange man shows up and tells Percy and Leo they're Greek demigods (and tells Jay he's half . . . some humanoid Greek monster or another, Leo can't remember), they're not even surprised because they have each other's back, like fire and water. And who knows, maybe the next time they stop by the underworld they could say hello to that moms they killed, but didn't murder.