Charlie paused as the scenery changed behind him. His arms spread wide, he stared into the inky darkness of the theatre, which barely failed to obscure the hundreds of people packed into the theatre. It was time for his aside, the one practiced over hundreds of hours, the words that he had burned deep into his soul. This play, he knew, would be his last. It would be his swan song, his *magnum opus*. He drew a breath, feeling all the pain and sorrow of his life brewing in a cauldron of resentment deep within his chest. And he raised a hand, tapping the hard metal that lay directly above that ball, hidden beneath the dark coat he wore. 
“*Fuck* you.”
Silence dominated the room. The orchestra watched in silence, and not a single member of the audience dared to even blink. Charlie looked again around the room, scanning the audience, desperately trying to find her. Finally, he caught her eyes, in the third row, with her curly, blonde hair and blue eyes. In a moment, the tight ball of anger that lived in his chest exploded, shooting nervous energy through every muscle in his body. He opened his mouth, dumbly, and found he had lost the words he had so carefully prepared. 
A few seconds passed. A single chair creaked as a violinist shifted in his seat. A few more crucial seconds passed, as Charlie desperately tried to refocus. He knew the audience was slipping away and away and still, *still* those eyes stared back into his own, drilling into the core of his being. He slipped a hand under his coat, feeling the metal with the obsessive touches of a madman. Fuck it. He was gone anyway. Some in the audience were whispering, but Charlie ignored them now, speaking only to the eyes that glinted unnaturally bright in the darkness. 
“*Fuck* you. Like a lot of us, I grew up thinking I was destined for something better. That I would be president, or an astronaut, or a professional baseball player or something. I did pretty good in school, and I worked hard, and I thought I was getting somewhere. I was getting somewhere. And all that disappeared the moment I met you.”
For a single moment, those eyes blinked, losing the hard edge that had robbed Charlie of his voice. He stepped forward now, feeling energy rushing once again to his limbs and the words he had prepared to his lips. 
“I found you, and all my ambition went to shit. You waltzed in, with your blue eyes, and your blonde hair, and your breathless, beautiful laugh, and you made everything else in my world grey. I told you I loved you, and you said it back, and you were a prism, a rainbow of light that meant everything to me.”
Audience members were whispering, louder. The female lead was a brunette – what was this man going on about? From the corner, the director stood, quizzically watching Charlie, whose eyes never wavered from the left side of the third row. Charlie’s hand, he noticed, was compulsively shifting, twitching underneath the man’s jacket. 
“And then you go and fuck it all up, by fucking that asshole in his goddamn Prius. You took everything I had – all the money I ever saved, the car and even the damn dog. You came back, and I took you back, and you left and left again, and my world crashed around me. Finally, I saw you for what you really were, and you were just as grey everything else I saw in the world. You were grey, my rainbow was gone, but the world never turned back.”
In a sudden flurry of motion, Charlie pulled a gun, pointing it directly into the side of his head. He saw the director running, the curtains fallings, the spotlight desperately flicking away from his face. It swiveled, and in an instant Charlie saw that those blue eyes were not blue at all, but brown. In the darkness, he had been confused. An instant too late – the explosion sounded in his ear, and his last sight was a brown-eyed stranger, mouth open in shock.