Lover Let Me In

 Colour, admittedly, is his drug. His fix. His high. But, like all drug dependencies, he is shattered without it. Cold turkey is not an option. He needs it to survive.

He pushes his black matted hair from his forehead, wiping the sheen of sweat that covers it off with the back of his hand. The gentle rocking of the train lulls him into a painfully oblivious limbo where, for just a moment, he forgets what he is. It's not a superpower. It's a God damn curse.

His carriage is empty bar an old woman sat seven seats away from him, dressed from head to foot in black. Coming home from a funeral or just another day at the office. No colour for him to steal from her. She makes nervous eye contact with the dark spectre of a boy sitting a while across from her and blinks away to the window as the train grinds to a halt. He lifts himself shakily from his chair and climbs down the carriage and out the door.

Plunging his hands into his pockets, he trudges along the empty platform. Even underground, the cold night air gnaws at the hem of his jacket and he glances around the empty station as the train pulls away. No one around. No one colourful, anyway.

He doesn't remember becoming this person. He doesn't remember the moment when he stopped surviving and started needing. The moment when he traded real human emotion for scraps of energy that bounced so briefly through his veins. A brush of fingertips. A bolt of lightning. Someone who stood a chance in this world being reduced to a withered heap of a person because his own addictions dictated that a decision needed to be made.

“I don't believe that.”

“What?”

“That you hurt the ones you love.”

It was on a night not dissimilar to this one that he met her. With the moon blotted out by cloud, the fluorescent lights pooling on cold concrete in the distance and a girl in a red coat looking for a reason to give someone a purpose.

And then, sure, she was just 'a girl'.

He shuddered, but not from the cold.

No one stopped walking. Not a single person. Dressed in their black jackets with their popped collars and their shiny black shoes. The sky swelled with smog, the late evening light shrouded by the angry underbelly of an ever encroaching cloud bringing with it a sharp January wind and rain. It was London city at its best.

And on a Thursday evening they all had somewhere to be. Other things to consume their thoughts. They were not unfeeling to his situation. They were too blind to realise that his situation even existed.

Hours of deliberation. He leaned over the stone wall that prevented clumsy tourists from toppling off Westminster Bridge all together. Ribbons of light rippled across the water below, and in the dark he could vaguely make out the outline of his face reflected in its surface. It was getting quiet. If he was fast enough, he could get over the wall and jump before anyone had a chance to slam on the brakes and get out. It had been days since his last fix, and he was fading fast.

“A slow, excruciating death...” he murmured, “...or this.”

He could barely feel his heart beating in his chest as he straddled the cold stone and with some effort brought the other leg over.

“Don't.”

The comment was so quiet, so low, he considered for a brief, fleeting moment that maybe it was his own subconscious. But all of a sudden, his brain distinguished it as a voice not belonging to him, but to a girl, a girl who stood three feet away with her muscles frozen in place. Holding herself still as if her movement would send him toppling over the edge.