Works in Progress

Untitled Part 1

So someone played a game I’d posted on Marked & they won & they requested a fic! The prompt is going to be challenging, but I’m looking forward to it!

Prompt from “R” on AO3: I was thinking like a malum one where cal is just terribly insecure with fans’ comments and self harms and just pushes everyone away and not tell them anything..(?)((is that too dark?))and michael notices or somethingits terribly vague,so you can do whatever you like with it:/I’m sorry if I’m making this more difficult than it should be

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Calum closes his eyes and lets his head tilt back against the back wall. The cocaine is coursing through his brain, and in this moment he can forget. Forget the jeering and the taunts, the laughter that follows him when he passes through the crowds.

Go home, you talentless hack. You still write like you’re 15.

Is that bush on top of your head made of pubic hair?

The people calling you Asian must be blind. You just look like horse-shit to me.

Calum is not delusional. He knows the other three face their share of ridicule. After all, 5SOS has always been divisive. At best, they have a lukewarm relationship with the critics. Even after two solid albums, most of the general public are either unaware of who they are or seem to dislike them on principal.

But the thing is, Calum gets more than his fair share. And it’s not just from the hipsters who think they’re too cool for main-stream radio. Even some of their target demographic, the coveted album-buying, tour-attending tween-girl set, have started to try and publicly humiliate him.

The first hints of abuse started when he was caught smoking that cigarette by the gas-station. Yeah, it was irresponsible, but he didn’t think it was such a big deal. Unfortunately, he’d made a couple of other public blunders, each one slowly chipping away at his image as a perfect, confident, squeaky-clean boy next door. Management noticed. The result was he ended up with instructions not to open his mouth during interviews, playing his bass way up stage near Ashton while Michael and Luke jammed on their guitars towards front and center like always. He was even stuck in the background of their photo-shoots.

Back in those early days, he hadn’t given the changes a lot of thought. He was still getting to make music he liked, working with people who liked him, and all the pootang he wanted. Sure, not as many fans hounded him for autographs, but Calum had never liked crowds in the first place. So he’d embraced his bad-boy image, gleefully trashing hotel rooms and generally making an ass of himself.

There was space in time when he would have been able to laugh all this off. He thinks fondly back on those days. He had so much self-confidence back then.