Graphic description of panic attacks and torture...child abuse.
"It is only to let you learn well! Do not be afraid of my ways, for it will protect you well in future."
"No, Dad, let go of me! Let go!"
"I'm NOT your FUCKING dad, you shameful piece of crap! I am only here to teach you my ways to live well!"
"And who would, so willingly be a father to an ungrateful brat like you?" His chin was tilted to up, the speaker's breath warming up his blindfolded eyes, before his head was shook painfully by the hair. "No one. You are worse than a dog."
Law woke up with a flinch, sweat stinging his eyes and tears lucidly leaking down his face. He smoothed his hair out while still in process of wiping his face with the back of his hand, heart hammering like a incapacitated drummer trying to pound a hole through the drum. Swallowing saliva had never made him feel so alive, so he licked his lips once again to reassure his own foggy existence in the world. The night air was cool on his sweaty face through the window, neatly tied curtains fluttering against a restraining strip of cloth.
What did he dream of again?
Ah, he remembered. The suffocating darkness, wrapping him tight, holding him down. Intrusive hands that were tight, dry, like a anhydrous carcass of a shriveled lizard. His father, trying another of his strange methods to teach his son life lessons.
Lessons, no, but definitely staying with Law for life.
This time he tried to bound Law, and blindfold him. Law had obeyed cautiously at first, hoping that his father was in his right mind, even though his father's actions was a like siren wailing, warning of danger. Who is he to disobey his father, anyway, where in the end his father would always overpower him, and bend Law accordingly to his own will.
Memories flooding back, he remembered that his father always had an odd fetish for implementing weak points and using those to completely crush a person slowly, this method his father calls similar to poking at Achilles' heel. Law didn't have an injured heel, no, but he was scared of two things since young; water, and human's natural enemy, darkness. It has always been there as long as he could remember, a common and impersonal fear like some people are afraid of spiders, some of snakes, others of other fears. Impersonal it was, but not for long once his father found out.
The process of learning from someone like his father is hard and painful.
"Law, come here."
"..."
"Here, hold out your hands." Law frowned, the knots of the binds biting into his skin, but he didn't say anything. He chanced a glance at his father, by slowly leaking tears a blurry image he will never be able to focus on for long. A figure who scares him, sends shivers shocking down his spine like waves of electric currents, sends immediate tears to his eyelids, sends his knees into a chattering and uncontrollable ride, and sends his muscles to sleep.
He tried swallowing, nervous, licking his teeth and smoothing his tongue against the walls and roof of his mouth, trying to generate saliva and wet up the desert mouth of his. What was his father going to do? An unpredictable man, with high tempers and tantrums, could easily break the child's scrawny bones in a few hits if he wanted to. Law did not anticipate the thought of broken bones, or what was to come.
Darkness ensued the bindings, a piece of cloth tightened over his eyes, and another layer added to ensure full coverage.
"Sir...?" Law broke the silent air as his father worked on the blindfolds, addressing in a way his father has implemented into him as far as he could remember. "What are you going to do...?" He was scared, and couldn't resist the urge to ask the man wielding Law's near future in his hands for some information.
"Did I ask you to speak?" Came the reply after few scary pauses.
Law got the point and stood where he was last touched, not able to see where he would be heading if he was to move anyway.
He felt a hard push in the small of his back and staggered a few steps forward, trying to balance, a natural reflex made into a challenge because of the binds on his hands. It was expected, this treatment, but still always frighteningly new and heartbreaking.
"Law, when you grow up, you must learn to face your fears. Learn to grow over them and stand on them. Use them as a step on a ladder to tower over others. Ladders have many steps, and today's lesson will be one of the many steps. Become fearless and nothing can hold you back in life. You will become what I expect you to be, and I will hone you to become the object I want to be proud of." The footsteps suddenly stopped its pacing around Law, and the betraying sound of a pail falling onto water reached Law's ears.
Blindfolded and heart pounding,a sick sort of sinking feeling engulfing him, Law turn his head towards the source of sound. "...Sir, please wait-"
His nostrils and mouth was attacked by cold, unforgiving water, aimed directly at his face. Law choked and jumped backwards, crying out once his mouth was cleared of water, his nose and windpipe burning at the feel of foreign water. He tried coughing and hacking out the unwanted presence of inhaled water, his heart pumping painfully to the point that he want to cry out again, and he bent himself over at the waist, bound hands on one of his knees and panting towards the floor.
His father's hand came into contact with the back of his head and he was dragged along forcefully, and Law was screaming and trying to stop his father, digging his bare feet onto the cement floor, his bound hands pushing and clawing at the hand tangled among his short cropped hair.
"Stop, please! Stop!"
He felt the pull of gravity as his body was flung up over his father's shoulders, before he was falling, and with a loud splash he was thrown into a large tank of water, big enough to fit a couple of full grown seals into it. The child tried pushing off the unseen floor of the tank with his feet, only to find out that not matter how he stretched his legs, there was no luxury of standing for him, simply because he was too small. Blind and bound, he panicked and started flailing around.
Can't breathe...his chest heavy, the pressure of the surrounding water around him, pushing him, pulling him...Like a bath rubber duck, he bobbed up and down, into the water before desperately plunging out for air, mouth open wide, panting, his hair slicked down his head...
"DAD! HEL-buurrr hELLP"
"DAD!"
Law was scared, scared shitless, scared for his life, scared that his father would leave him here to drown.
He couldn't swim and was tiring rapidly.