Notice to the reader: this story takes place in the present time, and I usually make [Dark] Malik's family Copts, (and thus, Coptic) but, dunno, they're Muslim this time. Maybe they were Copts who converted into Islam.
About the names: Dark Malik is 'Malik' for the purpose of this story. I decided to call his younger brother (the regular Malik), Nam. And Dark Malik is the older brother. Because AU, and because I can : 3
I hope you enjoy this story… as much as it can be enjoyed.
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the injunction
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He remembers queuing in long, endless rows that sometimes overflowed the building and continued on the street. Most of what he recalls is tall women without faces, shoes, all kinds of shoes, and tension in the air, fear, the thick stench of fear- he believes that was when he learned to single it out.
There were other children, too, sometimes. he was not by any means the oldest, or the youngest, he was simply just one more person queuing the long queue, insisting; whenever his mother could sneak away from home (she never left him home alone, not for the life of her) she went and queued, and every time they were turned down she looked brave and unbroken, but he knew she was weak and very, very broken.
This was before his sister was born, long before his brother was born. But Rishid had been around before him.
They never spoke about the time before, but he knew that nothing had been different, if anything, it must have been worse.
When he lay in bed at night he imagined the desert, which he only knew from pictures, and wished he could be far away beyond the sand, exploring old temples like the heroes of the novels he hid under the mattress. But the muffled screams of his mother pervaded his imagination and became arrows of ice that, each time, dug deeper and deeper into his heat, and closer to his very soul.
And when he thought about those icy arrows, right before falling asleep, he sometimes wondered if the holes they left would patch up when he grew up, or if they would leave a scar. That is, if they healed at all.
He knew his mother wanted to keep the wounds buried below her long skirts and long-sleeved blouses, but though they might have been out of sight and out of mind to her, they were not so for him, and the rare times he saw her without her dark hijab her beautiful hair seemed lackluster to him.
When he looked at himself in the mirror he sometimes hated himself, because he was the vivid image of his father, and his father was the biggest monster in the entire world. A double-faced monster, who smiled and charmed their guests and their clients, and screamed and terrorized his family when no one was around. A monster, who hated Rishid with venom, but hated his mother the most, and he did not understand this.
And he did not want to be the one that got out of it the least damaged, because he did not deserve to be any different. He did not want to be his father's successor, although he did not know the meaning of the word back then, and he did not want to see his mother curled up in the corner holding her arm, covered to (maybe?) protect him from the sight of it.
He knew it would not be long until Rishid ran away, and when Rishid left, nothing changed at all. He found out he was gone early, before dawn, even, awoken by the nauseous sound of his father's belt hitting something, and he wished he did not know what it was, but then after every stroke came his mother's hushed yelping.
Rishid left, and then Isis was born. And then Nam, some years later. And he thinks they were lucky, in that Isis probably does not remember much of those days, and Nam doesn't remember anything at all.
Because some times, rare times, he remembers when his mother and he finally made it to the end of the row.
It was years after she'd started queuing, and Isis and Nam had been left with a friend of his mother's.
A fat woman behind a counter handed his mother what seemed to him to be hundreds of papers, and his mother wrote, and wrote, and nevertheless still had the strength to pat his head and smile gently at him. By then, it was rare for him to smile back at her, or anyone, or anything.
After that, every time the telephone rang in their home she sprang suddenly to catch the call, because there were no cell phones back then and she had needed to give a number to be contacted. And when she received the awaited call, telling her that she had qualified for legal aid, many weeks later, she was so relieved that she looked many years younger for the whole day.
The first time, he went with her to court.
He heard from her very lips, then, the story of all what he had overheard through the years. The beatings, the insults, the violence. His mother's isolation, her dependence, the need to provide for her children. The vicious circle she was stuck in, her growing physical pain, the sleepless nights. Her maddening grief at the thought of the departure of Rishid, who by becoming safe from her husband could have fallen prey to the evils of the world, and her inability to bring him back, and the heart-ache that came with the thought that, maybe, she would not see her child ever again.
And then, him. Malik. Her constant state of fear regarding him. The discomfiting knowledge in the back of her mind that something terrible would happen to him.
The judge was too distant a memory to not be blurred, but he does not remember hating him. He was given candy and asked what he felt about his father, and he knows he must have said something meaningful. But he does not remember what he said.
His mother was, some time later, called to court for the second time, where she learned she had been granted a non-molestation order. She told this to him in whispers while she cooked a great dinner, greater probably than the feasts after Ramadan. His father, however, returned from a lousy day at work, and ruined with their dinner with his malice.
Days later, when his father was notified of the court order, he kept his outrage coolly at bay. His eyes reminded Malik of a snake, cold and calculating, and his childish brain somehow thought it appropriate to remind him that in the desert, there were lots of snakes.
The following day, after school, he came back to an eerily empty home.
Hardly had he left his backpack on the ground that something hit him on the back of his head, and he fell unconscious.
What followed was what, in a way, gave birth to his present self. The curse of his heirloom branding him, forever, and what makes the leaders of other gangs wonder and guess and send pitiful spylets to pry it out of him.
That was the night he snapped, probably. When, finally awake, he saw his father lower the kitchen knife and felt it bury in his skin, carving a prayer that replaced his soul with hate and darkness.
Afterwards, all those days he lay on his stomach on a public hospital bed, he spent with his mind blank and his thoughts far away, deep in the desert, where they were distant and inaccessible.
He never really felt much after that night. There was nothing in his heart when he had healed enough to take a look at the product of his father's madness, nothing when he learned that his mother was nowhere to be found- not even when she turned up dead some days later, raped and tossed in a ditch somewhere in the suburbs, like a brown, withered flower.
They never enforced the court order, after all.
All those long days waiting in a queue were wasted in all but in that they became rare memories of his mother, back when it was only him and her, and Rishid had not run away, and Isis and Nam had not been taken by the authorities to be placed for adoption.
He sometimes wonders what it will be like, if he ever meets his siblings again.
They will not know him, and that will be fine. He'll be like a fiend to them, with his body only of muscle and his eyes without a shine.
They'll be scared of the fame he has amassed underground after his return from Egypt, horrified of the crimes he committed and of those he facilitated. They won't see him for who he was, behind his savage hair and guerrilla clothes and two-days' stubble, because there's nothing of that kid left in him anymore.
And that's how it should be, he reasons.
They'll never meet again, and if by any chance they do, he'll be the one to keep their beastly past where it belongs, buried in the sands of time, somewhere deep in that desert that, now, he would not care at all to explore.
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Author's note:
The social function of fanfiction: raising awareness for domestic violence…
I like this alternative version of how Dark Malik came to be so evil and heartless. It's a pretty possible way, in today's world…
fixing stuff equals reposting, not that anyone will mind.
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Malik's father will never be a good guy in any of my stories. Sorry, man.