Burn it Down

~Megan's POV~

I was like a block of ice, spinning inside a cup of soda. The bubbles pushing me up and up. I was so cold that I could tell I was shivering, so I moved closer to Luke, who felt like a stream of light from the sun coming in through the dark canopy of a jungle.

He was spinning too, and as he spun around me, trails of light lagged after him, desperately trying to keep up.

I eyed the way his body danced, the way the dark night repelled off of his skin and fluttered to the ground where it turned to dense smoke and billowed away.

Except that it didn't billow away for long. Like in a horror movie, that black smoke slowly latched onto his legs, climbing like vines up his body. Where it had been, it left a trail of red sludge behind, a lot like blood, I thought, that dripped from his body. It was as if this were a poisonous snail, except it wasn't as funny as a snail, and it scared me in every cell of my vibrating body.

"Does it hurt?" I asked him.

"Does what hurt, love?" He responded, opening his front door for me, the hinges creaking so slightly I doubted I would have been able to hear them if I wasn't overtaken with intoxication right now.

His last word, his love turned pink as he spoke it, and I watched, for one second, the consuming darkness, pull back from it. As the pink faded away, it turned to a golden ray, like the sun and fluttered around my head, a butterfly that I desperately wanted to keep in a glass jar. But once the golden light had danced away, the darkness crept over him again, strangling his limbs and reaching into his heart.

"NO!" I lurched forward, trying to grab it like it were a snake preparing for a fatal strike. But when I thought I could feel it writhing in my hands, I looked down to find my hand full of nothing but the fabric of Luke's shirt.

"What is it?" He said, looking down at my empty hand as I looked at it myself, in disbelief I had not caught that creeping void that was trying to infect him.

I couldn't even speak words, everything seemed wrong, foreign, and my tongue flailed clumsily in my mouth. I had to slow down.

"Something dark is trying to take you from me. Something dark, and angry. It covers you in blood where it touches you. Are you angry, Luke? Are you angry at me?"

He was quiet for what felt like years, and I yearned for more of his pink, sunny words.

"I'm not angry at you, Megan. I can never be angry at you. You are my world, and nothing will take me from you." He said softly, his voice running across me like a satin sheet. These were pink words. They weren't as vibrant, as passionate, as deep a pink, but they were still pink, and instead of the sun, I got a silver beam of light, like the moon. This pink was like a baby pink, mixed with a hint of blue, of sadness.

He held tightly to me, and I watched as we ascended the many miles of steps, as our bodies fused together at the sides. Lace ribbons weaved between us and held us together, some odd Siamese twins.

"You need to take a shower, sweetheart, so lay down and I'll come get you when I've got everything ready."

I didn't remember finishing the marathon of stairs, but we were in his room, and as he left me, my eyes wandered his things. Most of it was gray to me, or a subtle blue gray. My white shirt on the bed was freckled with deep spots of what looked like sapphires. I held it in my lap and looked up at Luke as he ran back and forth from his room to the bathroom. When my eyes traced through the room again, a black drawer caught my attention. I held my shirt speckled with indigo jewels to me, and slowly opened the drawer.

A static covered book sat on top and I pulled it out and ran my fingers across it. It felt sharp, and mean, like a cactus, or a bed of nails. I opened it anyways, turning through the pages of broken glass that were morphing as I looked at them.

I couldn't read much, but this was his diary. Most of the diary was red, full of hate, passionate and undying hate, and black. He was writing about the creeping infection of blood and black smoke, but I couldn't read what it said. I flipped through more broken glass, and the words would turn vivid pink, and I couldn't read it either, but I knew it was about me. Pages and pages filled with his clear affection and love for me. These last pages were also flecked with blue jewels, and I eyed the way the gems popped from the page before I felt them. They felt disappointingly flat but I understood that these last times he wrote about me, he'd cried.

I put back the static covered notebook and closed the drawer silently, my shirt dropping to the ground as I ran on my tip toes to the bathroom, where Luke was testing the water that seemed to run out of the faucet like Niagara Falls.

Leaning up, he spotted me, his hair swishing softly across his forehead, the way a long haired cat's tail sometimes grazes the ground when he is relaxed.

"You cried." I stumbled on the words, they left a copper taste in my mouth and it hurt. It sucked the moisture out of my mouth and squeezed my throat until I couldn't breathe. I felt my way to Luke, since the room was breathing and I wouldn't be able to get to him correctly. I'd be out of reach, or slam into him. Once I got where I needed, his arm stretched out and pulled me forward, sitting me down on the closed lid of the toilet. I touched his face, my fingers tracing over his lips, his nose, his forehead, and around his closed eyes. "You cried for me?" I asked, my hands, stroking the prickliness of his little whiskers.

He sat on the edge of the white canyon of the bath tub and took my hand, his warmth invading my arm and making me shiver with an unknown emotion.

"Yes," he said. "I cried a lot for you." His eyes turned sad, and his words were the deepest purple I'd ever seen, so sad they were, that it made me sad.

"Why?" I spit out, my eyes feeling like they were about to burst open and flood the room with tears.

"Because I love you and I missed you being with me." I became drunk on those words, hopelessly drunk. But I became sad with my drunkenness on his pink words.

I could say no words, but instead curled the edges of myself inwards, as if I were a sticker that could be picked up and placed somewhere better.

"Come on." Luke said, standing me up. He unzipped the hoodie, and I listened to the metals pull apart from each other slowly, each link of the zipper a steady thump in a rhythm.

He made me step out of my shoes and underwear after he slid my panties off, until I was naked again, the warm steam of the shower enveloping me in a fine mist of heat.

Something was pulled up, by a hand I could not see, and Niagara Falls turned into a summer rain and Luke had to slow me down before I ran into it.

"Careful." Was all he told me, his words yellow with caution.

I stepped into the white canyon and closed my eyes as the warm summer rain caressed my body. I closed my eyes and let it cover me like a child's blanket. A blanket that was impenetrable by evil and hate and darkness, and the rest of this mean world.

"Luke!" I gasped.