Disclaimer: I don't own Charmed. Not even a little, itty bit.
A/n: This is another request story! WhitelighterLeo21 requested a story about Piper and Leo and their teenage years. This is a take on that prompt (though probably not what was expected). Hopefully this still lives up to any expectations.
Someday I plan to do a story about the girls in their teen years. There are ideas spinning through my mind and eventually they'll find their way to paper. Anyway, I hope you all enjoy this story.
Katie
Black and White
A story by Ryeloza
Sometimes she imagines what Leo must have been like when he was young, trying to figure out whether they would have been friends—or more—in high school. Several pictures run through her mind, and she thinks that the truth must be some conglomeration of her ideas.
She thinks that Leo was popular, but not because he was the kind of guy who picked on other kids or made snide jokes for his own amusement. No, he was popular because he was just a really nice guy who tried to get along with everyone. So everyone liked him. Probably he had positions of power, like class president or editor of the school newspaper, thrust upon him, to which he would respond with a small smile, running his hand through his hair nervously.
They wouldn't have been friends because he would have been too busy with all of his activities. She didn't do activities in high school; not after that disastrous attempt at student council. She thinks that to this Leo, she would have been just another face in the hall to smile politely at.
Other times her mind lets her believe that Leo was quiet in high school. That he spent lunch periods with his nose buried in a book and that instead of going out on weekends he stayed home and studied. This is easy to imagine; Leo is very smart. He can quote poetry and he knows history and mythology off the top of his head; it can't all be from his time as a Whitelighter. Plus he was a medic in the army when he was only eighteen. This Leo graduated early because he was just that intelligent, and that's why he already had medical training when he joined the army. She thinks that it would have been hard to get even the polite smile from this Leo.
There are versions where he plays a sport and has a steady girlfriend—maybe, probably, Lillian—and when the war breaks out he can't wait to join the army. An all American boy.
At times she can picture him as a deep thinker. One who has intellectual conversations in a vacant lot sitting on the hood of a car with someone and staring up at the stars. Or maybe he was a loud, boisterous kid who grew into an adult when the older brother she sometimes pretends he has died in the war before Leo ever enlisted.
All of the images she has swim in her head to the point where it makes her dizzy to even think about it.
She worries a little, though, about what it means that in every version of her bizarre fantasy she never entertains the possibility that Leo would have liked a quiet, bitter girl with hand-drawn designs on her jeans and an ache for acceptance.