"We're The Paylinsons!"

5.

A/N: First of all, thank you to all who sent me prompts! It's very much appreciated! Secondly, I want to dedicate this chapter to @underthecitylightss since she gave me the idea. And I will definitely being do the rest of the prompts that were sent in because they're all great! 

WARNING: This chapter does contain physical abuse! 

Zayn always had nightmares. There wasn't really any logical explanation for it, he just did. Because of this, Liam and Louis were especially overprotective of him. 

But things were different this month. For four weeks straight, Zayn had had absolutely no nightmares. And for that Liam and Louis were extremely grateful. You see, it wasn't that the minded Zayn barging in to their bedroom at three o'clock in the morning (well they did mind, quite a lot actually), going on about how 'they' were coming for him and he saw 'them' again. 

Louis and Liam had a clear idea as to who 'they' were.

Zayn's biological parents. 

You see, when Zayn Malik was only two and half years old, police tore him from his birth parents. To keep things short, things at Zayn's former house were far from good. His mother suffered from split personality disorder and his father was absent most of the time, usually out getting drunk or passed out in an alleyway. Incidentally, Zayn's mother disorder not only affected her, but also her son. Her alter ego would tell her to do terrible and immoral things to her child. These things would include beating him, starving him and the awful and long list went on. The rare moments that Zayn's father was present at home, he was usually too intoxicated to help his poor hurting son and would brush his wfie's doings to his son over his shoulder as if it were nothing.

Incidentally, just because Zayn's father wasn't paying attention to what it was that his wife was doing, didn't mean that nobody else was. 

A friendly elderly couple from next door had been hearing the boy's cries and pleas for help for some time now and when they had finally sensed that something was terribly wrong, they went over to Zayn's house. But when Zayn's mother had denied their request to come inside, they returned back to their home, swiftly dialed the number to the police and explained what they assumed to be the situation going on in the Malik household. Within minutes, the police were rapping their fists against the front door of the Mlaik hosue. 

The sight that they saw when they had entered the household completely tore them apart. There, in what they assumed to be his bedroom, was poor little two year old Zayn under his tacky excuse for a bed, clutching his knees to his chest sporting a purple bruise on his arm. He had tears running down his face like a waterfall of some sort and his cheeks were etched a light pink in colour.

Zayn's mother denied everything. Denied that she suffered from any medical condition of any sort, denied that she had starved her child and denied that she had even laid a hand on her child. Fortunately, the police were able to see through her pitiful shams and sent her to prison. And after Zayn had expressed that he had a father, too, his father also was locked up. As for Zayn, he was sent straight to an orphange. 

At first, Zayn had it bad. He would cry every night and wake up with his sheets stained. The other kids of the orphanage would titter and laugh at him, but it really wasn't his fault, he couldn't help that he had those dreadful nightmares about those evil souls that were his biological parents. But after a while things got better as he warmed up to the cartakers there. 

Luckily, a couple months after he had been admitted in to the orphanage he was adopted by a happily married couple. And that's where Liam and Louis came in. 

Now, Zayn was seven and those nightmares were back. It all happened one dingy and gloomy summer night. The Paylinson's had just arrived back from their trip to their neighbourhood pool. Unfortunately, they had to cut it short as a certain Zayn Javadd was acting up. He was refusing to wear his floaties even though he knew that once he set foot in to the water that he stood no chance (Zayn was incapable of swimming), he pushed his Papa off when he tried to apply sunscreen on him and to add on to that, he was just being plain rude and grouchy. And all of this was after Liam had administered a few smacks painful to his bum in the pool changing room for acting up in the car.