As Metrocity's eyes opened, she noticed that she suddenly seemed to have a slightly better view of Bernard's face. Then again, she was less than an inch away. And she couldn't help but notice that if he only wore glasses, he might look almost nerdy.

Then his eyes opened. For a second, they were still filled with tenderness. Then they widened and he pulled back, eyes filled with surprise and disgust. Even before Metrocity looked down to see her leather-clad hands, she knew what it was. It was her holowatch. It had to have malfunctioned, or been deactivated, or both!

"You..." he snarled, standing and backing up. Metrocity leaped to her feet.

"Wait, I can explain!"

"Now it all makes sense," he mumbled. "Your speech, your attitude, why you didn't want your parents to meet me...!"

"Don't go!" Metrocity cried as he began to fly off. "I can explain!" But Bernard just took off in one swift motion, a look of pure hatred planted on his face. Metrocity fell to her knees as she watched him go. There wasn't anything. Not an "I hate you," not a "Go home, Metrocity," not even an "I should have known". There was just a "YOU!" And an "It all makes sense", and then he was gone. As she sat on the ground, hair hanging in her face and blue eyes glistening with tears, there was no rain, no crack of thunder, no ominous or dirge-like music in the background.

And she hurt all the more because of it.

***Break***

Metrocity walked through the door of the lair, slamming the door behind her and stomping up the stairs, soaking wet. She'd fallen in the lake on her way home, passing too close to the shore and tripping over a stone, straight into the water.

"Metrocity?" Megamind asked, standing.

"Little Miss?" questioned Minion.

"Honey?" Roxanne offered, each taking their turn as she passed them. She answered none of them, just stormed up the stairs and locked herself in her room. Metrocity threw her wet clothes against the wall after she had changed and sat down on her bed, throwing her blanket around her and pulling her knees to her chest.

Metrocity didn't know what to do. She'd never felt so confused, so angry and alarmed and betrayed and mortified. She didn't know what to do. She should be glad, glad that she had been found out and everything could now go back to normal, without this air of mystery and concealment, of deceit. But she didn't feel better at all. She felt worse, much worse, terrible, like her heart had been torn to shreds and ripped to pieces, then burned within a giant inferno until there was naught left but ash, and then the very ash had been scattered, each individual remain weighted with a cinderblock and drowned in the ocean, no less than a thousand feet between each fragment.

It was as if she'd been stabbed, and no one could heal the wound or staunch the blood, and she couldn't die. The blood just kept flowing, and flowing, and flowing, and no matter how much she wished it could be over, she knew it never would.

Metrocity had never known love. She loved her parents and siblings and Minion, but they were family. She'd heard about how her parents fell in love, and heard about love through an occasional book or the stories Minion watched on TV. She'd heard what it felt like to be in love, but she didn't understand that the experience was different for everyone, that no two examples were the same.

Metrocity didn't have a lot of time for television or books, and most of what she thought about when she thought of love was her parents, who had fallen in love over the course of years and years, and whose love, through thick and thin, was so unending that Roxanne had turned evil just to be with her man.

Metrocity had always thought it would be nice to be in love, to find the one person who could make her happy forever, but she had never thought she would fall in love, had never expected or even overly dwelled on the matter. In her eyes, a supervillain's life was supposed to be a solitary one, at least for a female supervillain.

Metrocity didn't know that love could come on quickly, with someone who one had known for years and never felt anything for, and she certainly didn't know that love could happen in a month. Metrocity knew her heart was breaking, but she didn't know why, because she didn't know that she had been in love, that she was still in love.

Metrocity didn't know a lot of things.

Author Comments:

Oh, poor Metrocity. :( Bernard's such a jerk! She didn't even kill anyone in the last year (that he knows of)! Poor, confused, misunderstanding, and underexposed Metrocity...