Charlie Backstory, Child Abuse, TBO Canon
Charlie presses himself into a cabinet, holding his breath as he hears the door creak open. He hears the heavy steps of his father as he enters the library. There is a pause, then the steps leave, door clicking shut.
A few more cautious seconds, and Charlie emerges from the cabinet in one of the shelves. His relief doesn’t last long. A hand grabs his collar and yanks him out, Charlie yelping in his small voice.
The red face of his father has a deadly calm on it.
“Are you so confident in your abilities that you believe you don’t need to be schooled any longer?”
“I—”
“Good. You are in charge of the estate today. I am leaving for three days. If I return and things are less than stellar, you will regret ever having been born.”
Charlie’s knees are shaking. Tears are already bubbling up. He’s nine! What good can a nine year old do?! “I already regret being born!”
This earns him a ringing slap across the face, rings biting into skin, force enough to throw him into the corner of the cabinet door. He yelps once more, grasping at what will surely become a lovely bruise in a few hours.
“Then earn your right to live, Charles.”
A failure.
His incompetence is his fault, always skipping on classes. Failing to read the books. Even with his mother and Josiah helping him, he can barely handle the workload. They’re desperate to lighten his load while keeping a secret from Byron’s personal favorites, but there is only so much they could help with without Byron finding out.
The day he returns is dreaded. Many things run like clockwork, certainly, but what there is to do is only a mild success. There are endless sums in shaky writing, notes written illegibly, and worst of all, he was having trouble doing the accounting and is certain that he messed up somewhere.
Byron takes care to enumerate each failure in detail. He pours salt on the floor and has Charlie roll up his pants and kneel on it, arms out in front of him. He paces, resting a cane on his shoulder, as he reads off each error as if he were working through the child’s sins.
Each error is followed by a blow to his arms, his back, his shoulders.
Charlie stares straight ahead, tears dropping, frown deep, and a furrowed brow. He can’t make any noise. He can’t give his father the satisfaction. So he takes it all silently, even when he’s sure that something might have broken. Even when the welts rise and purple. Even when the salt digs deep into his legs, each grain like a bite into his flesh.
Charlie won’t make the same mistake. He’ll make sure that the old bastard doesn’t get the satisfaction again.