The first time Suzuka saw Kim Dracula in person, it felt like being struck by lightning- slow, searing, and impossible to forget. She wasn’t supposed to be at the tattoo parlor that night. The last-minute art show had been advertised in whispers and half-torn flyers, tucked between coffee shop bulletin boards and record store counters. It was more rumor than reality, until she stepped through the smoke-sweet air of Needle & Vein, clutching her sketchbook like a lifeline. The room was lit in bruised reds and drowning blues. Every wall pulsed with canvases that bled chaos: sharp, angular portraits of angels with missing mouths, teeth made of piano keys, and wolves howling into fractured mirrors. The centerpiece though, wasn’t the art. It was them. Kim Dracula stood beneath a flickering neon crucifix, dressed in a black silk suit that shimmered like oil. Their mouth was painted a wicked red, eyes rimmed in coal, hair falling in stark waves around their sharp, deliberate face. They didn’t speak. They performed - breathing poetry over a stripped-back beat, while a saxophonist howled beside them. It was violent and beautiful, a cathedral of sound crashing into silence. Suzuka stood in the back, too stunned to breathe, too enraptured to leave. Her fingers moved on instinct, tracing their shape in graphite - not just the outline of their face, but the ache in their brow, the tremor in their jaw when the crowd erupted. She sketched the sadness they wore like a velvet cloak, and somehow, it felt like she was trespassing and being welcomed in all at once. She didn’t notice them watching her until the final note rang out and there crowd began to dissolve into murmurs and cigarettes. They crossed the room in silence, their boots a whisper against the stained floor. The lights caught on their piercings like stars dying slow deaths “You drew me,” they said. Not a question. A low observation. Their voice was a roughened thing, dark honey with edges. Suzuka blinked. “You were… hard not to.” A smile curled at the edge of their lips - not amused, but intrigued. They held out their hand. “Kim.” She hesitated, then took it. Their fingers were warm, calloused, inked in fragments of lyrics and symbols she didn’t understand. “Suzuka,” she replied. Their eyes flicked down to her sketchbook. “Can I see?” Reluctantly, she opened it to the page - the portrait still smudged from her trembling grip, raw and unfinished. They stared for a long time, silent. “You saw it,” they finally murmured. “The part I try to drown.” Suzuka swallowed hard, unsure how to respond. No one had ever looked at her art like that before. Like it mattered. Like _she_ mattered. And just like that, something invisible snapped taut between them - a thread spin from shared and unspoken things. That night didn’t end like other nights. There were no numbers exchanged, no promises made. Just a moment in the alleyway behind the parlor, their shadows cast long under the flickering red neon sign that read _BLEED BEAUTY_. They leaned in close, close enough that she could smell the smoke on their skin, and the ache in their breath. “You ever think some people don’t belong in the world?” they whispered, almost to themself. Suzuka nodded, chest tight. “Only all the time.” They smiled again, this time softer - not for the crowd, not for the mask. For her. That was the beginning. Before the graveyard walks, before the whispered dreams painted on motel ceilings, before she found herself sketching their silhouette not from memory, but from the space beside her pillow. Before the rumors. Before the silence. Before Tasmania.

The rain came down in sheets the night they made something together for the first time - not just art, but a communication of chaos. It started in their studio, a converted church in the edge of the city. Stained glass windows still watched from above, casting fractured lights across amps, wires, and canvases. The altar had been replaced with a blood red piano, its keys half-stripped, half-painted with her sketches from that first night - their face, mid-scream, drawn over ivory. Kim handed her a pair of noise-canceling headphones like they were offering a relic. “You’ll want these,” they said, grin sharp enough to cut bone. “It gets loud when I open my head.” Suzuka took them but didn’t put them on. The track they cued up wasn’t finished - more pulse than song, a tangle of distorted strings, guttural breaths, and the distant echo of something that sounded like regret dressed in armor. They didn’t sing. Not at first. They watched her listen, eyes flicking over her expression like they were reading a score. When the sound began to fracture into silence, they finally asked, “What do you see?” Suzuka closed her eyes. “A woman,” she murmured. “Mouth sewn shut. She’s trying to scream through her eyes.” They didn’t move for a moment, then nodded once - sharp and fast. “Draw her.” She hesitated. “On what?” Kim grinned, already pulling down a massive, black canvas from the rafters. “Whatever the hell you want.” The night unraveled from there - paint and ink splattered between beat drops, Kim improvising verses as she sketched, her lines twisting and blooming with the rhythm of their growl. They didn’t direct her. They reacted. She didn’t follow them. She led. And somewhere in that electric storm of feedback and charcoal, they found a kind of harmony neither of them knew they were aching for. When it was over, the canvas stood dripping - a woman with threads in her mouth, tears of fire, and wings made of broken violins. “She’s beautiful,” Kim said quietly, brushing a thumb across a smear of black. “Just like the noise inside me.” Suzuka didn’t speak, just leaned against the piano, heart hammering like a snare drum. For the first time in years, she felt seen. Not observed. Recognized. And neither of them knew it yet, but that night’s creation would become the cover of their next single.