Captive || 5sos AU

Thoughts

The day that Calum wrote his letter to Laurie was a pretty uneventful one. He sat in his room for most of the day going over what he had written to her in his head, and could only hope that she would have found it.

He paced around the room several times wondering if it was even a good idea to have written the note in the first place-- he had practically spilled his entire soul into that letter, and he wasn't sure if Laurie would understand or even care at this point.

Calum couldn't blame her, in fact, he didn't. He blamed himself- from the moment he felt a genuine connection with Laurie he blamed himself!- but he was in too deep with Luke to stop.

Luke and Calum had been friends since he could remember, and when he was kicked out of his house for dropping out at 17, Luke gave him a place to stay and an offer he couldn't pass up. All he had to do, Luke said, was reenroll in the United States, and stay out of his way when it came to the handling of the girls they held captive.

Calum was usually good at this, because he had a hard time seeing the faces of the girls he knew he was responsible for luring in, but this time, that's all he wanted to do. He had no clue what happened to the girls after he brought them to the house, and he was completely left in the dark on their treatment, despite being best friends with everyone in the operation. But with Laurie, Calum felt a deep desire to know every detail regarding the way she was treated, what she was being fed, how often she had contact with other people, and how much she knew about what was going on.

He wanted, from some place deep inside of him, to protect her, and his conscience was battling over whether this desire was from a brotherly place or a more amorous one. Suddenly, Calum's room phone buzzed and he was shaken out of his thoughts. He stood up and pressed the blinking red button, which indicated that someone outside of his room wanted in.

"Let me in!" A voice, fried and made strange by the electrical buzz of the microphone, demanded. Calum chuckled a bit and opened the door, revealing to him his older, hazel-eyed friend. "No need to be so bossy, Ashton." He teased, letting his friend in and closing the door behind him.

Ashton sat down on the love seat situated across from the bed which Calum was sitting on and got comfortable. "So what's up?" He asked, adjusting the pillows on the love seat and looking up at Calum expectantly. Calum squinted at him in confusion. "What do you mean? Nothing's up. I'm fine, everything's fine. Nothing's up." He said, fidgeting a bit.

Ashton scratched his head and looked around the room, trying to avoid meeting Calum's painfully awkward gaze. "Right..." He started. "Why did you call me up here then?" He asked, now genuinely concerned with Calum's state of mind. Calum squinted again, then his face relaxed as he remembered that he had called Ashton in.

Though he wasn't usually allowed to know much about the girls they took, he and Ashton had a particularly close bond among the boys, and he felt that if anyone would be willing to bend the rules a bit and help him out, it would be Ashton. "Oh yeah." He said, smiling awkwardly at his friend. "Well, I was kind of hoping you could tell me a little about that girl we're keeping." He said, trying to play it off casually.

He hated calling Laurie "that girl," but he didn't want Ashton to catch on to the fact that he may have actually felt something for her. Ashton sat up a little bit when Calum brought Laurie up and became serious. "Well," he started, "I haven't gotten a chance to talk to her yet."

Ashton's job was by far the easiest of them all in Calum's eyes. He was responsible for providing the captives with a sense of companionship while they were there, and though he didn't actually care much about a thing they said, he did a pretty good job at pretending like he did.