Marked (5SOS Gay Imagine)

Chapter 1

Ever since your eighteenth birthday, your life has been turned upside down and all because of this wretched mark on your left arm. People – your family, friends and even strangers – started to attack you because of it and it made you feel utterly lost and confused.

Why did you get that mark? And why does it cause such violence towards you in people? Did you do anything to insult them? To hurt them? You didn't know what to think anymore. You've always been very polite and helpful to people. You didn't dare to refuse someone and you always put your needs in front of your own.

It's no secret that you've always been a people's pleaser. Even if you didn't see it as a problem, your parents did. "You need to learn how to say no for a change," they always told you. You tried to listen to your mom and dad but no matter how hard you tried, you couldn't change that part of yourself.

It's so deeply integrated into you. You're not sure you even wanted to change that part of you. Your parents didn't like this at all and they started to use desperate measures – they wanted to force you and change into their "perfect son".

What a wrong decision it was. Everything they did in the hopes to change you to their image, it had a contradicting result as it completely ruined your self-image and your confidence, but you wouldn't go down that easy. No, you showed your parents that, even though they did those things to you, you still had life inside of you.

They didn't like you being stubborn one bit but you couldn't care less. Weeks, months after that, they realized that it was no use, that they couldn't change you, so they did what all the useless parents do: they left you alone to deal with life yourself.

And that only happened six years ago. Your parents have changed a lot since then.

You don't know what happened but they walked up to you to apologize for their actions in the past. It made no sense to you at all – after all, they hadn't talked to you in over weeks and now they suddenly decide that what they did all those years ago was wrong? You ignored the part in you that warned you about them, that you shouldn't accept their apology and that they cannot be trusted, but you still had that small spark of hope inside of you that hoped that your relationship with your parents would restore itself to its former glory.

So you accepted their apology that day and since then, they always did their best to make up for it. Even though you're on better terms with your parents now and you're happy that you made up with them, you knew that the bond you shared would never be the same.

And then their "business trips" happened. They never told you where they went or what they did, only that they didn't know when exactly they would be return. Their trips usually take them a few weeks, but there have been occasions in which they've been away for months on end. You only communicated with them via text messages because it only seemed fair to you: they didn't tell you what they were doing on their trips so you wouldn't let them hear your voice.

You wish you hadn't done that because now you refuse to call your parents to tell them about everything that has happened to you in their absence, about your friends acting weird and above all, about that wretched mark of yours.

You looked down and stared at your mark – that wretched 'S' – on your bare left arm. Does it even do anything at all other than bringing violence upon you? Or does it serve a higher purpose? You just didn't know. Absentmindedly, your fingers brushed over this mark only for it to burn instantly. You hissed and pulled your hand away in pain, before being engulfed by brief flashes of memory.