So I just watched "Prom Queen," and – needless to say – it's rekindled that St. Berry spark. Enjoy this five-minute ficlet.
As always, it'd be amazing to know what I'm doing right/wrong – feedback of any sort is welcomed with open arms.
"Tell me if I was brilliant, or simply outstanding," she says to the indifferent painters.
Her back is turned, but he can hazard a guess that her million-dollar smile is on her face after those words as she sits down at the piano. Some things never change. Some people never change, and he belatedly recognizes the uneven thumping of his heart when he hears her voice. He greets it with a twinge of annoyance (how is he supposed to keep time when the metronome of his heart is off-beat?), but then relishes in the queer, aching sensation that it leaves behind. He hasn't felt that, not since ages ago when he broke her heart and she broke his and he childishly broke eggs on her forehead. He welcomes the sting, noting only distantly that this addiction is going to be a hard one to curb. It was last time.
(maybe, this time, he'll be a stronger man)
As the first tremulous notes of "Rolling in the Deep," reach his practiced ears, he bites back a groan and a frustrated smile. Figures. She'd choose the one song that he wasn't quite sure about singing, the one song that he knew wasn't in his range. Damn that powerful contralto sound for making him fall in love with it, teasing him, and then backing away when his own vocal chords tried to reproduce them. Damn them.
Her voice, however, is capable of what his is not, and the sound of that familiar voice caressing those words makes him go hot under the collar.
He is fully aware of the fact that he is currently butchering a beauty, his voice rougher with the strain as he walks in and on to the stage, forcing her to turn it into a duet, forcing himself back into her life. She's the leading lady, the soloist. She always has been, but damn it all if he isn't going to at least try and make some room for himself in her spotlight, because he is Jesse St. James and he is a marvelous bastard who's got an ego twice the size of Antarctica and a stubbornness to match the melting of the ice there in non-global warming conditions. Also known as non-Rachel Berry conditions.
For you see, any man with common sense would turn away when faced with that thousand-kilowatt smile. However, he hasn't really ever been one for common sense, and as she radiates the vitality of a small sun, he comes closer and closer to being burned every time.
That's addiction for you.