How Percy Deals with Bullies (Nonlethally)
Welcome back, welcome back!
Still kind on the fence about whether Percy and Thalia will become a couple or if they'll just be BFFs.
As for Nico and Bianca…a storyline I came up with goes that Bianca has the Mark, and that gets explored during the upcoming Titan's Curse arc, though she still dies and Nico blames Percy and seeks revenge. That's how Nico gets Marked, then we have the Battle of the Labyrinth that explores Nico's powers.
Just the first draft of the idea.
Also, there's going to be a horrendously nasty scene in this chapter, the one where Percy nonlethally deals with his siblings' bullies. So, just be on the lookout for that.
Disclaimer: I don't own PJO or Dishonored
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Cheeseburger macaroni was exactly what it sounded like: mac and cheese with hamburger meat ground to little pieces interspersed throughout the cheesy goodness. Then there was the humongous bowl of green beans with salt and pepper stirred in. And the brownies were baking in the oven already. Beverage was simple, just glasses of juice, with the juice coming from Great Value flavor packets. Wendy had two gallon-sized Rubbermaid jugs, and she just filled them with tap water, mixed the powder in, and stirred. The packets said they were good for two quarts, but they worked just fine in the gallon jug.
As was stated, Wendy wasn't hurting for money in looking after two kids, now three, but she wasn't rich. It all came down to budgeting and smart spending and savings.
The dinner table was rather crowded this evening, since it wasn't just Wendy and her children, but now Percy and Thalia.
"What was it like being a tree?" Bell asked without an ounce of tact.
"Eventful," Thalia said. "The Outsider came to visit me and offered me a choice. I could live in limbo as a tree, or I could come with him and live a new life."
"And?" Bell prompted.
"That's how I became Empress Emily Kaldwin."
Tea started in her seat. "You're that empress that Percy's mom was trying to kill?"
"Yes."
Tea looked at her little brother. "Um, is she alive right now for any particular reason, or…?"
Percy shrugged. "Turns out Delilah was a crazy lady. Her mom actually used to beat her, and when she finally died, Delilah's psyche cracked and she unintentionally twisted the truth of the matter to cope with the trauma. Or something like that. Bottom line is that she lied to Momma and the whole coven, which means my whole life, including my existence, is all a lie as well."
"No, it isn't," Bell insisted.
"Kind of is. Momma only made me because she wanted a living weapon that she could teach how to kill so that she could avenge the coven. Turns out there was nothing to avenge in the first place. If Momma had known that, I wouldn't be here. So, my life is a lie."
Percy said all of this so flippantly, like it didn't bother him in the slightest, but if you looked into his eyes and were intuitive enough, you could see how much he was agonizing over this.
Wendy pointed her fork at her legally adopted son. "You listen to me, young man. You, Percy Jackson, are not the product of Sally's revenge scheme. You are what came about of Sally and Poseidon's love for each other. What you were made for doesn't matter anymore. What matters is everything going forward. You get to choose who you'll be."
Tea nudged her brother's leg under the table and offered a supportive smile. Bell was over there in his chair, beaming with his thumbs up.
"Th-Thanks," Percy said with a blush.
Wendy nodded and took the spotlight off her adopted son by directing it at Thalia, who had was zoned out.
"And you, young lady."
Thalia was jarred back to reality. "Huh? I mean, pardon me?"
Wendy smiled as the teenager clashed with the elderly empress. "What will you be doing now that you're back home?"
Thalia twitched at the mention of home, not really having adjusted to being "back."
"I haven't really thought of any proper course of action. Just waking back up, the first thing I wanted to do was find Percy and tell him thank you for reviving me."
"You're welcome," Percy answered with a little sideways smirk as he went along with the little lie he had come up with minutes prior.
"Now that that's out of the way, I figured I'd go find Luke and Annabeth. You know, reunite and catch up. How are they, by the way?"
"Well, Annabeth's doing alright," Percy said, "Luke on the other hand…"
The demigods at the table gave Thalia the brief rundown on Luke and recent events.
Thalia was left staring at her bowl of hamburger helper and green beans. "Oh….That idiot. Doesn't he know that Kronos ate his own children? Does he really think a being like that is going to care about his great and great-great grandchildren?"
"Probably," Percy shrugged. "But he's desperate for a way to make the changes he feels are needed, and so he's turned to Kronos. It'll probably bite him later."
"Then we need to stop him before he gets bit so hard he dies," Thalia said. "And the world is probably destroyed."
"Yep, but not right now."
"Why not right now?"
"Because dinner's still warm? Duh. Besides, do you know where Luke is right now? I don't. But last I checked he was on huge boat surrounded by an army of monsters. And he's a Voidwalker like us. We did mention that, didn't we?"
"You did," Thalia confirmed.
"Cool."
"Speaking of being on boats," Tea said. "Annabeth told me that you fought Luke on the deck of that boat but didn't kill him outright. You two dueled. Why'd you do that instead of just using, you know, the sea that was all around you?"
"I'd never fought another Voidwalker before. I wanted to see what it was like. It was fun. Actually challenging."
"What are you going to do if you fight him again on a boat?" Thalia asked with a hidden edge to her voice.
"I don't know. Knock him out, I guess. He's kind of important to you guys, right?"
Thalia blinked. "You'd spare him just for us?"
"Yeah. Why not? I mean, if it comes down to it, then I'll kill him, but if I don't have to, I won't."
Thalia rapidly blinked. "Thanks," she finally said.
"You're welcome."
"Alright," Wendy said. "Since we don't know where Luke's currently at, we can't go after him yet. As per your original plan, that leaves only Annabeth. Who's currently in Virginia. You're not hiking from New York to Virginia, especially now that it's nighttime."
"I'm a retired empress that is now a daughter of Zeus. I can handle myself."
"No, you're a fifteen-year-old girl that isn't in school somewhere. And that outfit of yours, ripped black jeans and a black jacket with all those pins and buttons on it, make you out to be some punk teenager that's out skipping class. I'm honestly amazed you made it all the way from camp to here without the police saying something to you."
Thalia blinked. "Like I said, I can handle myself. There was a time for two months where I had to make myself scarce and unseen. I can do it again. It's not like I forgot how to sneak around places. However, I will concede to leaving right now after dinner. Is the couch occupied?"
"No," Wendy said. "But there's a spare room, and I have a blowup mattress."
"Awesome."
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A self-aware grin spread across Thalia's face. She, the empress, relegated to the guest's quarters and not even on a bed, but a blowup mattress, given a blanket and a couple of pillows. Her pajamas came from Wendy's closet, a spare nightgown, and the clothes she woke up in were going through the wash since she'd trekked in them from CHB through Manhattan, and then fought Percy.
Not to mention how those were the same clothes she'd been wearing during her desperate fight against Hades' monsters, and during her seven years of limbo as a tree.
They were rather smelly.
Wendy was on the other side of the house, across the living room, in the master bedroom, by herself in her queen-size bed, and across the hall, a bathroom between them, were the siblings. Tea and Bell had always been in the same room since the boy had been born, to save on just a little bit of money on Wendy's end, and so had grown up together through diapers, potty training, bedwetting, to the present.
Despite having four years between them, the two were comfortable enough to change clothes down to their underwear before each other.
And the same with Percy.
It was a surprise to everyone to have returned home from camp to find that Wendy had renovated the kids' room, rearranging the dresser and her biological children's bunkbed to make room for Percy's own twin-sized bed. She correctly figured that they'd all be just fine sleeping in the same room together.
That was why, in this three-bedroom, two-bathroom house, there was a guest bedroom despite there being four permanent occupants.
Thalia wasn't complaining. She had a room to herself with a door that shut. She had privacy, as opposed to being out there on the couch.
Wendy's nighttime policy was that the kids had to be in their bedroom no later than ten-o'clock, and they could only come back out to get a snack or a drink from the kitchen, if they needed to use the bathroom, or if they needed to come get her for whatever reason. She also took that and applied it to Thalia, despite how she kept reminded everyone how she was really a 63-year-old woman.
She was grown, she was mature, and there was a reason they had named her Emily the Wise.
There was also those few months they called her Emily the Clever following her reclaiming of her throne, but she didn't like that name. Made her feel too much like Delilah.
With her own room, it being past curfew, and her senses on alert for any kind of unwanted company, Thalia felt a disturbance in the air. Living so many years with Corvo, training with her father for so long, Thalia had come to recognize the feeling of another Voidwalker using their powers in close enough proximity. It had kind of become a sixth sense, honed from Corvo using Blink so many times during their training.
She felt Percy use his power to go from the bedroom across the hall to the roof of the house, no doubt brooding, trying to figure himself out. Thalia's feelings of sympathy had grown just a bit. It seemed her angry fire was burning out. Or rather, directed at the appropriate source.
Delilah.
It was all Delilah's fault. Everything was.
Well, even that wasn't entirely correct based on Thalia's chain of logic. It was actually Delilah's mother. The scullery maid pretty enough to bed the emperor, and then stupid enough to try and use that as leverage to further her position amongst the imperial house despite how impossible that was. Then she got especially stupid and assaulted the emperor himself in his own home after years of drink had wasted her mind.
Then she turned to beating her daughter during her misery at the debtor's prison.
When the woman hit the wrong guard, he had hit back hard enough to mortally wound her, and she spent her last days in dull pain until her body finally succumbed, the injury too much for her malnourished, drunk, body to handle. With her mother's passing, finally left all alone in the world, Delilah's mental state, unstable as it already was given everything that had happened in her life so far, shattered.
In her shattered mind, she became the chief victim in the treachery tale of Euhorn Kaldwin.
So, really, if it could be said that Percy had killed all those people, including Jessamine II, because of Sally, and Sally had taught Percy to kill because of Delilah, and Delilah had instilled hatred of the Kaldwin family because of her twisted perception of reality, and that twisted perception was the result of her mother, then could it not be said that Percy killed all of those people because of Delilah's mother?
How far up the ladder could one go to find the source of the disconnect? How far along the chain did the story make sense? Where did the butterfly effect start?
At one point did you say "that's their fault" instead of "that's their fault because of what this person did"?
Following these thoughts, now Thalia felt conflicted and confused. Who did she blame, who did she hold accountable, and why those specific people?
She shook her head, clearing these thoughts. People were responsible for their own actions. They made their own choices. They were presented with a circumstance and a situation, and it was up to them to figure it out. Outside influences obviously influenced, but ultimately, it was all up to the individual themselves make the choice.
That didn't mean that judgement couldn't be light in the face of total bogus information leading to what was overall some bad decisions, though.
Sally had been lied to by the woman she loved as a maternal figure. She loved Delilah, devoted her life to the woman in the same way Emily had devoted her life to honoring her own mother. Sally was honestly an unwitting victim of Delilah's insanity, which was the cause of Delilah's mother, so it was all that woman's fault.
Which meant it was actually Euhorn's fault because he'd fucked the woman in the first place.
Thalia sighed, rubbing the bridge of her nose. This was getting ridiculous. The blame game stopped now. Delilah sucked. End of story going forward.
Thalia activated her Shadow Walk power, turning into a smokey thing of darkness. In this form, she slipped under the space between the door and the floor and into the living room. She crawled over to the chimney, opened the flue, went up inside, shut the flue behind her, and crawled up the chute and to the outside, where took a seat next to Percy and turned into a human again.
"You look really creepy in that form," he said.
"Thank you. That means it works."
"What are you doing up here?"
"I felt you teleport up here. Something of a sixth sense I picked up is that I can feel when a Voidwalker uses their powers if they're close enough."
"Cool. That doesn't tell my why you're here."
"I'm up here for you."
Percy raised a brow in question.
Thalia smirked a little. "Well, I know how Sally made you by taking, ah, parts from little girls. I wanted to know whether or not she took a uterus, since she was making a girl, and whether it's somewhere inside you."
Percy's brow furrowed. "Well, yeah, she got a uterus for me. That's kind of the defining feature of a girl. But if it's still inside me somewhere, I don't know about it. Somehow, that essence stuff or whatever Daddy left Momma, it made me a boy. It's kind of weird, since gods don't have DNA. Like, how are any of us a different gender than what our mortal parent is since gods aren't passing on DNA?"
"Don't know. That is pretty weird. I suppose we'll know for sure whether that uterus is still inside of you by next year. You should start puberty by then."
"But, like, where would I bleed from? Out of penis, or out my butt? I mean, I looked. I don't have a third opening anywhere between my legs."
"I'd say if it's going to happen, it'll probably be your butt, since, you know…that's where you would have sex with a uterus in mind since you said there's nowhere else."
"Eww. Why are we talking about this—why did you bring this up—what the fuck is wrong with you?"
Thalia shrugged. "Trying to distract you."
Percy sighed. "Thanks.
"Are you okay?"
"I don't know how to answer that."
"How's your mom?"
"Quiet. We…I haven't gotten her to speak since earlier."
"Oh."
"She knew Delilah more than I did. I never actually met Delilah, but Mom was practically raised by her after her biological parents died of the Rat Plague. Weepers."
Thalia winced. The Rat Plague had killed two-thirds of Dunwall. It figured that Sally's parents were among the dead.
"How does Sally work, exactly?" the former empress asked.
"The Outsider said that she couldn't come with me to this world as she was, something about dimensional laws, and so he gave us the option of Momma becoming my Heart. Like how you and Corvo had the Heart, that housed your mother's spirit and she could help you find Runes and Bone Charms and tell you stuff about people? Well, being my Heart, Momma can do that for me too, only, she's not just some object that I can summon to my hand. She's literally my heart, pumping blood through my body. But she can manifest in a spirit form that I can talk to and see…but I can't touch her, and she can't touch me."
Percy drew his knees up to his chest. "I really need a hug from her right now."
Thalia didn't even hesitate to put her arm him and pull him close to her. A testament to how much Percy was hurting right now, going through an existential crisis, unable to reach his mother, unable to feel her embrace, was that he didn't even make a sound of protest when Thalia hugged him. He just put his head on her shoulder and sat there. Thalia rested her chin atop his head, reminded of so many nights long ago that Corvo held her like this when the stress of being the empress mounted, and the many nights that she held her own son like this.
"So…what are we now?" Thalia asked.
"Right now, you're my pillow."
Thalia snorted. "I suppose I am."
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Come morning, Thalia left for Virginia to go find Annabeth and meet up with her, something that honestly worried Wendy. Her maternal instincts were strong.
Just a little bit stronger than the relief her wallet felt with Thalia's departure.
The other three kids ate breakfast, had their turns in the bathroom, got dressed, and were on their way to school in less than 45 minutes. Everyone pretended not to notice how Percy seemed sad that Thalia had left.
During the car ride, Tea and Bell gave Percy the names and descriptions of the kids that had decided to single them out for the school year, and he nodded along, a plan already in his mind on how to handle this. Wendy was listening, eyes darting from her rearview mirror to the road. She was all for her kids having a largely hassle-free schoolyear, free of monsters, free of bullies, free of mean teachers, and if Percy could ensure that kind of freedom, then she was going to take it.
She was tired of her kids being victims, and tired of having to find schools for them to go to. At least they were old enough now that they didn't have to go to a daycare.
And Bell was quite happy that he was no longer required to ride in a booster seat by New York law.
"Now, remember what I said," Wendy spoke when her kids were done telling Percy who his targets were. "No killing, no maiming, no injuring. Got it?"
Percy gave her two thumbs up. "I know what I'm going to do. They won't die. Physically, anyway. Definitely socially, though."
"Whatever," Wendy waved her hand. "As long as I don't get a phone call or an email about it. Meaning there'd better be no way you're linked to it, okay?"
"Puh-lease. I'm an arcane assassin. I know how to get the job done without ever getting caught or raising an alarm."
And he was only thirteen.
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All the grades had their own classes, and none of them had upper or lower classmen in any class besides their grade. Meaning there weren't any eighth graders sharing a class with seventh graders, and there weren't any fourth graders up there with the fifth or sixth graders, baring some kind of educational need like a class was failed or a student had an IEP, an "individualized education plan."
Basically, a system of schooling that was tailormade for that particular student.
It was honestly something that Bell and Tea needed with their ADHD and dyslexia, and something that Percy needed as well since he also had those conditions, but this particular school's IEP concerns extended to kids with autism, or were deaf, or blind, or were essentially vegetables. As in the school had a small special needs program for the majorly mentally disabled children.
The way Bell had identified his bullies was that they had gotten in his face and suggested that he go to class with the sped retards.
Percy took that personally.
Now, his plan was to publicly humiliate his siblings' bullies so badly they couldn't show their faces in school anymore. However, his experience with the other kids was extremely limited, and he hadn't watched a lot of children's programs growing up, Sally letting him watch adult movies with violence and death in order to desensitize him to that kind of phenomena, and so when it came to humiliating another kid around his age so badly that they never appeared again was limited to only one stand-out memory from the playground….
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Percy raised his hand in first period English.
"Yes?" Ms. Goodwin asked tersely.
"Can I go to the bathroom?"
"I hope so at your age." The teacher stared at Percy.
The other kids snickered and giggled.
"May I go to the bathroom."
"Take the hall pass. You have seven minutes after you walk out the door before I send someone to make sure you aren't roaming the halls."
Percy took the hall pass, a little plastic clipboard that was blue, and resisted the urge to slam it over Goodwin's head on his way out. The school restrooms weren't far down the hall, and thankfully, this early in the morning, no other boy had been in here yet to ruin the atmosphere. Percy occupied the big stall at the end, summoned a Doppelganger just to cover himself, handed it the hall pass, put a penny on the ground, marked for Swap, and then activated Foresight.
Time stopped and his spirit traveled through the school unimpeded by physics. A testament to the fact that Percy hadn't started puberty yet was that he didn't use his power to make a few stops in the girls' facilities along the way to where his sister's chief bully was right now.
Percy's spirit went through the walls and ceilings to the eighth-grade wing, right to the class that his big sister and her bully and her bully's little clique all shared. First period science. In this classroom, there were no desks, only those big, blacktop tables that had chair arranged around them. There were sinks and cabinets lining the perimeter, and an eyewash station at the back of the room.
Essentially, what you remembered your high school/middle school science room looking like is what Percy was looking at.
Percy linked the bully, some ugly white girl with too much makeup, claw-like nails, too many fake diamond rings, and in her hand was the brand new, top of the line, state of the art, super cool, widely desired, game changer in the life of a teenager:
The iPhone.
…
Not the iPhone 3 or the iPhone 4 or 5 or 6, and not even the iPhone 2—just the iPhone.
This was 2007, after all.
Anyway, using Foresight, Percy used Domino to link the girl, unoriginally named Ashleigh, and her two little friends, a couple of unremarkable specimens that Tea had identified as Brittney and Stacey, and then set a Displacement marker atop the cabinet at the back of the room.
Percy canceled his power, his spirit returning to his body, and then he Displaced. He appeared in a crouch atop the cabinet, luckily not bursting through the flimsy ceiling tiles upon entry, and before anyone could turn their head, all their eyes focused on the projector screen as the teacher went over lab safety, Percy used Possession on Ashleigh.
This part was the gamble, but as Percy assumed total control of the prissy girl's body, he smiled a little. It was just perfect.
When Possessing someone, the Possessor was in total control of the Possessed. They could make the body run, jump, climb, grab things, drop things, throw them, etc. They could move the mouth and make words come out in the person's voice, and they could make the eyes move. They had total control over the person. Granted, they were powerful enough to assert that control, and the person in question wasn't strong enough to boot them out of their head.
Percy, the experienced and trained arcane assassin, had zero problems maintaining control over Ashleigh's body.
Of course, total control meant total control over everything. The muscles of the arms, those of the legs and torso, the back, the head, and that did include the muscles that were known as the sphincters. Also included in this total control over the body was all the feelings and signals travelling through the body, like aches, pains, and the message from the sphincters that it was time.
The gamble paid off.
"Oh, my god!" someone shouted. "She's pissing herself!"
"Brittney is too!"
"And so is Stacey!"
Because the latter two were linked with the former, what happened to Ashleigh happened to them, and so as Percy made Ashleigh's bladder release into her khaki shorts, Brittney and Stacey's bodies also acted against them.
Laughter erupted throughout the class as the girls wet their pants right there in front of everyone. Brittney and Stacey could only stare in numb shock, totally dumbfounded at what was happening, while Ashleigh couldn't do anything anyway. Phones that weren't the iPhone were out and filming and taking pictures. The teacher watched with a slack jaw as a trio of eighth grade girls seemingly peed their pants on purpose like a trio of toddlers.
But wetting their pants was nothing compared to what Percy did next.
A loud chorus of ewww seemed to shake the school when Ashleigh's butt released a very unladylike sound, and the seat of her wet shorts was pushed downward. The same went for Brittney and Stacey. When that happened, those two went sprinting from the room in hysteric sobs.
As for Ashleigh, Percy had her sit down on her soaking wet chair, the yellowish puddle that had collected under her sloshing at her impact.
"A-Ashleigh?" the teacher asked uncertainly. "Um…go to the nurse's office. Please."
"And hurry up," a girl said, pinching her nose, eliciting giggles and snickers from the class.
That's when Percy acted fast. When Possession was cancelled, the Possessor just appeared outside of the Possessed body, leaving themselves exposed. That was why the best tactic to use with Possession, when aiming for a nonlethal approach, was to get the body somewhere away from other people's eyes. However, every eye was on Ashleigh, and for Percy to really hammer this home, he needed her conscious of this last part. That's why he had to leave her body.
But he did it in the smartest way he could.
He had Ashleigh duck under the table, and while far from totally obscured, it was enough. He popped out of her and instantly used Swap with the penny he placed earlier. While there were cameras rolling, Ashleigh's body had ducked out of the way enough that nothing clear had been seen. A flicker of something maybe, but nothing that could be discerned as Percy.
He appeared in the bathroom where he'd left his Doppelganger, and he shuddered and shivered.
"That felt gross."
As for Ashleigh, she slowly came out from under the table and came face to face with about two dozen rolling camera phones. She smelled, her bottoms were clinging to her skin, her socks and shoes were drenched, and it felt like mud had been poured down the back of her thong. She was shell-shocked, terrified, numb, and confused. She couldn't explain what had happened, like suddenly her body was no longer hers.
Ashleigh screamed and bolted, cameras on her butt as she fled.
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"Where did you come up with that idea?" Tea asked with a grin at lunch when her little brother sat down next to her.
"Playground," Percy answered. "I'd been watching this group of kids playing around for a few months, a bunch of bullies that picked on the other kids, and then the leader fell off from the top of the slide. He wet and messed his pants, and his little friends all laughed at him. He ran away, crying, and the next day he showed up, he was more or less kicked out of the group and turned into one of their victims. I figured that was the best way to keep your bullies off your back."
"By making them wet and crap their pants in the middle of class?"
"I mean, did it work?"
Tea snorted. "It's the talk of the whole school. I heard their parents came up here and spanked them in the office before having to take them home. I'd be surprised if they show up tomorrow. But, I also wouldn't be surprised that when the heat dies down, they come after me, somehow pinning that all on me, or using me as an outlet."
"Well, if they do that, I can make sure they end up back in a nursery. I doubt their parents would take kindly to getting daily phone calls from the nurse that they need to come get their daughters because they shit themselves again, for like, the fourth day in a row."
Tea giggled at the thought of her bullies yanked out of school and relegated to daycare with the babies.
"And, you know," Percy continued, "I can also make sure they never find the bodies if they keep pushing."
"Let's hope it doesn't come to that." Tea wrapped her arm around her brother, pulling him closer and down so she could kiss the top of his head. "Thanks, Percy. That was awesome—super gross and totally disgusting, but awesome."
Percy smiled. "I was raised by a witch. Super gross and totally disgusting are kinda my thing."
Before the day was over, the school nurse was left baffled, disgusted, and angry when no less than four little fourth grade boys came crying into her clinic needing their own changes of pants and underwear on top of the three eighth grade girls from the morning.
What was going on that all these big kids were coming in with wet and soiled clothes like a bunch of preschoolers?! She took this job specifically to avoid those kinds of situations, dammit!
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And that's how a Percy with the upbringing of a witch assassin makes sure that bullies stay away from his siblings. From the perspective of the narrative, the only thing Percy had to go on in regards of knocking a kid so low that they lost all status and reputation was the described playground scene, and so that's what he went with. From the real-life perspective, the Inspiration for all of that comes from the movie Kick-Ass 2.
Sick Stick, anybody?
No?
That's okay. Honestly, I much prefer the NON-CANON lethal method.
Enjoy, if only for the sake of bleaching your brain and having something to read so you feel better.
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When Tea was given the note by Ashleigh to meet her in the restroom before lunch, she knew then and there that the day was going to end in disaster.
But what could she do? She could not show up and escalate the situation. Girls like Ashleigh viewed themselves as queens of the world, and they viewed girls like Tea as peasants to serve them—ironic given that a girl like Tea could hit a girl like Ashleigh in the head with more force than a sledgehammer swung by a grown man—and so came up with creative ways to punish those lowly girls that disobeyed. Tea didn't want Bell to get in some kind of trouble on her behalf, and she didn't want someone going after Percy only to end up having their skeleton turned into an arcane art project.
There was also her mother to think of. Tea loathed disappointing her mom who had already done so much for her. She hated the idea of putting her mom through the ordeal of more court appearances, more investigations, more stress, more anything, really. But she also wasn't keen on bowing her knee to a bitch like Ashleigh, especially in a place as dangerous as a restroom.
Dangerous because very nasty things happened in that place, and dangerous because water was literally right there.
Then again, maybe it was something simple. Maybe they wanted to extend a truce or something. Tea doubted it, but she decided to keep her hopes low yet optimistic.
So, when lunch came, she was in the specified restroom.
"Aw, what a good little bitch," Ashleigh cooed. "And to show how proud we are of you, obeying simple commands, here's a treat."
She held her hand out and Brittney placed something in it with a snicker. Ashleigh tossed the item to Tea, who caught it and furrowed her brow when she saw what it was.
"A dog biscuit?"
"Yep. For the good little bitch. You'll get another here in a second, if you perform how I want you to. I need to see if I my little bitch is housebroken." They must've rehearsed this, because that's when Stacey pushed the door to the stall open. Ashleigh gestured to the toilet with a nasty grin. "Well? Show us you're housebroken."
Tea stared at them. "Yeah, that's not going to happen. Bye."
She tossed the bone-shaped treat back at them, not caring if someone caught it or not.
"Ooh, wouldn't do that. Think of those baby brothers of yours."
Tea stopped in her tracks and spun around. "If you come anywhere near by brothers, I'll peel your face off and feed it to your dog."
"Yeah, that's not going to happen," Ashleigh mocked. "What will happen if you don't do what you're told is that all those boys that drool at my ass will get a picture of you in just your panties in exchange for beating the shit out of your brothers. Understand that? Now get over here and piss—and do it like a dog, on your hands with your leg up—or Bell and Percy will spend the rest of their lives eating through a straw."
Tea was once again left staring at this girl, wondering just how she got to be this crazy. But she was also left worrying about her brothers. Not really for their health in the wake of attackers, but for the consequences of what they'd do to their attackers. Never mind how deceptively strong Bell was, just think about the human blender Percy would become if some group of stupid punks decided to gang up on him.
With that in mind, thinking about her brothers' future, Tea took one step forward and then stopped. Her eyes widened and a little gasp left her. The color drained from her face, and she got two syllables out of her mouth.
"Percy-"
He had appeared behind the trio of devil children, and he had scarcely finished doing that before he was storming forward, silent as a mouse. He only needed two steps to get close enough to Ashleigh to grab her neck from behind. She didn't get a chance to scream before Percy lifted her clear off the ground, spun, brought his arm down, having hoisted the girl all the way over his body, and slammed her head so hard onto the tile floor of the bathroom that it exploded open like an egg.
Ashleigh's body, skull fragments, little bits of brain, and everything else, all turned to a puddle of seawater. Not a trace of her was left.
Percy's spin was not for show. That maneuver had left him facing the other two girls. His hands came up, grabbing their throats and squeezing, cutting off their screams. With some more pressure, a wet crunch was heard. Brittney and Stacey's heads lulled to the side and their bodies went limp, their dangling, twitching feet going still.
Like Ashleigh, their bodies turned to seawater.
With a motion of his hand, all the water on the ground rose and went into the toilet. Percy went over and flushed.
Tea said, "It's going to be really interesting seeing how this plays out. As far as any of the cameras in this place goes, they're gonna show them coming in, me coming in, me coming out, and them never coming out, so they'll be considered missing, and I'll end up the prime suspect."
"Yep. Should be fun."
"You have a weird definition of fun."
"To be fair, I am a witch."
XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX
Percy's guide to dealing with bullies if he breaks his promise about not killing them:
Step One—kill them.
Y'all just wait for this new story I'm planning about Shin'en, Persephone, and Annabeth spending a year together and the latter two go to a party and end up getting roofied and Shin'en comes for their would-be rapists—
Oops.
Spoiler alert.