haunting ＊ percy jackson

i. amos hates the new kid (not really)

Amos Morgan was not a people person. That's not to say he didn't want to be one though.

For as long as he can remember, Amos had always been a bit... unsettling to some people. They didn't always realize it, but it was like they just couldn't help but steer clear of the scrawny boy; he remembered when he was eight and still living at the group home, they forgot to feed him dinner for three days, everyone going out of their way to avoid the young boy without realizing it. When he tried to make friends they avoided him, when he spoke up they ignored him, so at a certain point he had just... stopped.

Things got better once he got to camp. Amos was pretty sure he'd be dead if not for Gleeson, the satyr that dragged him to Camp Half Blood. The angry satyr was maybe the only person Amos could consider a friend — and wasn't that weird, his only friend was a middle aged goat man — but everyone else... Well it wasn't as though Amos didn't try to make friends.

He tried for a solid week — an accomplishment in his opinion — but it was just easier to fade into the background. And he didn't mind being alone, not really. Camp had too many cliques; everyone was supposed to fit neatly into their groups, their cabins organized by godly parent, but for an unclaimed kid like Amos? Things didn't come so easily. Not to mention his little problem.

He'd had it for as long as he could remember — vitiligo, he remembered Google called it, but the worker at the group home had always called it a blemish — starting as a few white patches on his hands, then a few more on his arms, then on his face then...

Amos didn't like a lot of things about himself, but he didn't truly hate anything except for that. Maybe if he were pale it would be fine, something he could brush off, but with skin so dark other kids often made racist remarks, telling him he blended in with the shadows, he just couldn't. His splotches of pale skin made him a freak, more so than whatever it was that made everyone avoid him.

It had been bad when he was young, not understanding why it was happening, not knowing what to do about it. It wasn't until he was ten, a year before Gleeson came for him, that one of the girls at the home had helped him out.

Penny was only a little older than him, with skin as dark as his and a kind, pretty smile. She had been new to the group home, unfamiliar with the weird hierarchy that had developed which often left Amos at the bottom, unliked and often unremembered. He remembered her finding him, crying in the bathroom after a particularly nasty group of kids harassed him. Her gentle hands wiped his tears, the touch so tender it almost made him cry more. Then she had pulled out a tube of some cheap concealer and sat with him in the bathroom as he learned how to put it on — a skill that he still remembered and put to use every day, never wanting anyone to see the odd white spots on his skin.

"There," She had said, patting his head lightly, "Now no one will ever know." She had said it so simply, had helped him as though it was nothing like kindness was something to be expected rather than something rare.

He still remembered trying to give the makeup back, his smaller hands shaky. Penny had simply laughed, shrugging him off with a sweet smile, "Kids like us have to stick together."

And they did stick together, for a little while at least. It was probably the best week of Amos' life, a small glimpse of sunshine in his otherwise dreary existence. She had left on a Tuesday the following week, her dark eyes sad as she left Amos alone once again. At the time it had been jarring, returning to his lonely life after Penny had left, like someone had doused him with cold water and brought him back to reality. So, Amos adapted, learning to find comfort in his solitude.

He had become somewhat of a hermit, staying alone at the home, at camp, it didn't matter. His seclusion became his new normal. Who cares if he could never find a sparring partner because everyone subconsciously avoided him? If he was often left without a spot to eat at the Hermes table and always had to squeeze in at the very end, almost falling off? Certainly not Amos! (Yeah he didn't believe that lie either.)