Rock Your World
Part 3 – When It Rains, It Pours
He snuck up on my somehow. I didn't think he could, but he masked his energy completely and was three inches from my rain-slicked face before I even deigned to think of looking for him. At first I hadn't thought he'd heard, judging from the fact that he hadn't interrupted me, and that he wasn't shouting at me now. But then I looked up, and I saw the truth in his too-wide ebony eyes.
He'd heard every word, every note.
Shit. I tried to look back on my lyrics, tried to look at them as if I were an outsider, desperately searching for some word or phrase I'd used that would tell the prince who the song was about. One line from one of the last verses came rushing back:
"The prince of the Devil, You lord over me
You've even awakened the Devil in me…"
The prince of the Devil…. I cursed my word choice then, wishing I had been more creative, less brash. Vegeta's expression said it all, he knew.
At first he said nothing, and I wanted to kick myself repeatedly at the horrified expression crawling across His Majesty's face. Even with his hair damp and drooping in the rain, he looked terrifying, his coal eyes blazing.
"What are you doing?" he demanded at last.
I remember then, I was struck dumb. The question was obviously rhetorical; it was pretty damn obvious what I was doing.
"What…what was all that about? Answer me, Kakarot!"
I hung my head in shame, rivulets of rainwater trickling down my face. I couldn't look at him, the man I loved and hated right then with equal passion. I'd offered him my heart, handed him my soul on a platter, and he wasn't only not interested; he was mortified.
"S-sorry," I murmured at the ground ten feet below the fire escape on which I still perched, "I d-didn't… mean…for you…t-to hear…" I had never been closer to tears in my life than I was just then; my voice sounded choked, even as I attempted to chuckle nervously to diffuse the tension, it came out like a bark of pain.
"You…you honestly…" his voice cracked and I looked up at last, his eyes were like stone now, expressionless and cold, "You felt…" he seemed to shy away from what he'd been about to say and changed the sentence to a harsh question; "You wrote this?"
I nodded mutely, refusing to look away from those hard, slightly confused eyes.
The next word he uttered was little more than a whisper, "Why?"
I was brave to say what I said next, in hindsight; right then I felt like the biggest idiot on Earth.
"I write what I feel, Vegeta. My lyrics don't lie,"
He gave me one last shredding glare before turning in midair and rocketing away; leaving me standing alone in the downpour. And I think, even if I didn't admit it to myself then, that my tears mixed with the rain.
TBC