Burn it Down

~Luke's POV~

She'd babbled on the entire time about being in a secret meadow, full of flowers, where it was sunny and raining at the same time.

I think the best part was when she told me she was turning into a butterfly. I couldn't help but smile at her, even if she was so high she was practically in another fucking dimension.

I scrubbed her with the bar of soap and rinsed her off. Her hair could wait until tomorrow. I wanted this to be over as soon as possible before my mom got up to take a piss and wondered why the shower was running.

I shut the water off, much to her dismay, and helped her out of the tub, standing her on the bath mat as I used the towel to dry her body which had started shivering again. When I finished, I grabbed another small towel and dried her face, lightly patting it as she watched me, her eyes huge and dark because her pupils were the size of dinner plates.

I stopped and stared at her mouth for a minute, before I touched a small scar on the side of her upper lip. This was new. This was from the last time she had been jumped and they'd busted her lips up really bad. Just as I felt angry again, Megan shouted no, startling me out of it.

"What?" I asked her.

"It was coming back." She said to me sadly. Her eyes were also a deep red and I wondered if she was tired, whether or not she could feel it.

I grinned and laughed a little. "Jesus Christ, Megan." I said, grabbing the large towel to dry her hair off.

"Do you think Jesus was real?" She asked me, like a kid asks why the sky is blue.

I did and didn't believe at the same time, but I didn't figure she was up for a religious debate right now so I gave her the simplest answer I could. "Yes, I think Jesus was real." I thought he was a real person, but I didn't know about being our lord and savior and all that bullshit, although as I escorted Megan, now dressed and clean to my room, I wished he was really our lord and savior and that before I destroyed myself, he'd come to me as an undeniably human person made of real flesh and blood that I could touch.

I was drowning every day, sucked in to something dark and brutal, and I felt terrible for the immense pleasure that it gave me. But I still wanted to be saved from it, because I knew no one else could change what was going to happen. Maybe Megan, but my own weakness for doing this thing told me enough and it made me want to do it more to escape the shame that I could do this to her. Of all people, I was sorry she ever knew me. Even my own mother I had less regret for, and she gave birth to me and raised me, all the while dealing with everything that I threw at her.

I pictured myself with the AK in my hands, gunning down Foley, Bauer and Bradshaw. Of ending the lives of all the pricks who threw actual shit at me, beer bottles, who shoved me into lockers. I dreamed of torturing the fuck out of the girls who jumped Megan. I was growing more scared of what I wanted, but the thrill of doing it kept me alive. I wanted to piss on the dead bodies before I offed myself.

I wanted to die. I wanted to be dead, and away from this place. The only person I wanted was Megan. She was all I needed, but I knew there was no way for us to exist in a place where it was just us in a blissful oblivion.

I never told anyone or spoke of it at all, of my depression. But it was definitely there.

As soon as I laid Megan down on the bed, she sprawled out across it and wrapped herself in the blankets. I smiled at her as I began changing my own clothes for bed. Blue flannel boxers and nothing else.

When I stepped to the bed, Megan scooted over for me to get in and join her and as I turned out the light and climbed onto the mattress, I felt Megan's hands roam across my chest and back, pulling me down with her, into an embrace.

Her smooth face rubbed against my prickly one that I needed to shave before she quickly pulled away.

I heard her sigh and then I felt the softness of her fingertips on my mouth, before it was the tenderness of her scarred lips kissing me.

"I love you, Luke. Do you love me?" Her voice broke in the middle of her sentence and I knew she wanted to cry again. She cried a lot these days, and I remember she didn't use to. It made me think again of how I was so unworthy of her love at all, and at times I wanted to reject it. To save her the hurt of what was to come.

But I was selfish.

"Yes. I love you." I told her, which seemed to content her because soon she nestled into the crook of my arm and relaxed.

This was what I wanted my life to be. Minus her being high and deserted by her friends on the outskirts of town in an abandoned house. I just wanted it to be us. But I couldn't ever figure out how I could get my life to work that way.

I was frustrated that I couldn't be happy with the world. I was angry about it. I just wanted to be treated normally. Or even ignored. But I was bullied, and so was my girlfriend, and my girlfriend only got it so bad because of me. I wanted to taste that vengeance. I also lived my life in fear. Fear of what would happen if I even stepped the wrong way in the hall at school. If I looked at the wrong person. If I said the wrong thing. I hated that life. But seeing my parents...seeing that you always have to put on this act to please people, pissed me off even more.

I thought about a few things as I held Megan to me. I thought about what it would be like if I didn't commit a massacre. I thought about what it would be like if I ignored the whole plan and killed myself and what it would be like if Megan joined me. Romeo and Juliet kind of stuff. But then again, I didn't want her life to be over. I wanted her to have every chance of happiness in her life. I thought of how I had gradually begun to hate Tyler's fucking guts. He started all of this, and I also wondered how I was born with such poor self control. I decided after the end of our rampage, that I'd turn on Tyler and shoot him before he could shoot himself. Or me.

The one thought that bothered me repeatedly was the fact that I loved Megan more than I loved this idea, but the idea was my priority in life. That was so disappointing.

My eyes focused in the darkness, on my closet door which was now stuffed with ammo and my supplies for making bombs. One day when my parents were out, I'd made a false wall, and all of it was hidden in the space between my false wall and my real one. My parents could look, Megan could look, the police could probably look, and they'd find nothing.

I was glad it was now Sunday morning, because I wouldn't have been able to make it to school if it were Monday morning.

By the time I had fallen asleep, I was so emotionally drained from my thoughts that my entire body was depressingly numb.

I wanted to tell Megan. I wanted her to know so she could tell me the perfect combination of words to stop me. Or, if she couldn't, I wanted her to join me. But she'd be disgusted. Not just because I planned on brutally slaughtering them, but because I invested so much time into people who I hated and who meant so little. I desperately wanted to be as forgiving as she was. I laughed to myself in my dream. I don't think forgiving is the word I want. She never forgives or forgets, but I wanted to be able to downsize people so much that everything they ever did to me was no longer relevant.

But I couldn't.