A/N: I will cry about Dirk Strider as frequent as possible and there is nothing you can do to stop me. Trickster drabble. Slightly DirkJake idk not really. Title from Neptune by Sleeping At Last.

It's a Technicolor rush of emotion and pain; the sting of sugar against a cavity or the gurgling at the bottom of your stomach from one too many squares of chocolate eaten. Every inch of your skin crackles like TV static, in a desperate rush to rid yourself of the psychedelic trip of pain and hyperactivity.

Colour. So much freaking colour. In a world that is black and green and the sky thunders with the promise of storms that never come, where the air so potent and strangling that a few seconds without a gas mask could have sprawled on the floor clutching at your purpling throat in horror; there is not supposed to be so much colour.

It shouldn't be like this. Not Jane in meek pastels. Not Roxy in deep neon. Not Jake in obnoxious fluorescent. Not you streaked in blue and vermillion.

Yet somehow being thrown into this strain of heat and madness helps. It dulls the anguish at the back of your mind, silences the endless cacophony that keeps you awake at night. The combining elements of exhaustion, depression and anxiety are gone, replaced by angry luminescence and a stomach ache. Your fears of not being good enough, being left behind, being forgotten, you can't seem to place them anymore, almost like you've lost them in the winding archives of your mind as they rot away from a sugar induced drug trip.

But with the loss of the old pain brings pain anew.

You want to cry. You want to blubber until your face is red and swollen, eyes puffing like car airbags and the bags from your lack of sleep enlarging like hideous bruises. Losing the bad parts of you is a welcomed experience (you never wanted to lie awake at night worrying about problems you didn't have, you never wanted the gnawing sensation of self-hatred burning at the back of your head and low in your stomach, you never wanted to be a nervous wreck in the eyes of those you cared about, you never asked, never never never asked for any of this) but you don't want them gone like this. You don't want to kick them to dust without a resolve.

You are a child. You are scared. You don't deserve this.

Or maybe you do.

Maybe this is how Jake felt. Maybe he was crushed not by the fizz and pop of metaphorical sugar against his skin but the unbearable intensity of your companionship. There is no doubt he was uncomfortable with the way you were, with the way you tried to be good at relationships. You tried so hard to be okay, to be a normal person who didn't have so many problems, who didn't hate themselves for the most minute of reasons, who wasn't messed up in every conceivable way.

You tried too hard. You drove him away. It's your fault.

You deserve this.