The next time they met, it wasn’t in the graveyard - it was in the decaying loft above an abandoned theater downtown, where the velvet curtains still clung to the rafters like dried blood and forgotten applause. Kim had texted her nothing but coordinates and a red heart drawn in smeared lipstick. When Suzuka arrived, the air was thick with incense and paint fumes, the windows blacked out with duct tape and old tour posters. Kim sat barefooot on the edge of a stage once meant for operas, surrounded by shards of broken mirror and an old reel-to-reel playing something dissonant and lovely. They looked up as she entered, their smile slow, unreadable. “I wanted to show you where I go when the noise gets too loud,” they said, voice low and rough as gravel. “You looked like someone who could hear the quiet.” Suzuka gave them a slow, wordless nod and stepped onto the stage as if crossing into some forgotten altar. The old wood groaned beneath her weight, dust rising in soft plumes around her knees as she lowered herself beside Kim, arms hanging limply at her sides. The silence stretched - thick, sacred, and stained by the scent of old incense and rusted metal. Then, her hand brushed against theirs. Just a whisper of contact. But it was enough to make the breath hitch in both of their throats. Their eyes met - startled, wide - and in that flash of stillness, something hot and crimson flooded their faces. Not the gentle blush of storybook romance, but the deep, full-blooded red of something ancient and instinctive. The kind of red that stained altars. The kind that lingered on teeth after biting down too hard. “I-I’m sorry,” Suzuka breathed, voice raw, trembling. “My hand… it slipped.” Kim’s reply was barely audible, more shadow than sound. “It’s alright… Suzuka.” Her name left Kim’s lips like it hurt to say, like it meant too much. For a breathless heartbeat - two, maybe three - they just looked at each other. No words. Just gazes heavy with something neither of them dare name. A quiet storm swirled between them: longing, fear, wonder - all cloaked in the same velvet hush. Then Kim looked away, sharp and sudden, as if scorched by the moment. The silence that followed wasn’t peaceful. It was a silence that scraped - awkward, sharp, and painfully human. Until Suzuka, in the gentlest rebellion against the heaviness, let out a soft, breathy laugh - crooked, awkward, and so achingly real it made Kim’s lips twitch into something almost resembling a smile. They didn’t speak of the touch, or the way their eyes had lingered. But it kept happening. A glance that burned a little too long. The ghost of a shoulder brushing shoulder. And then - the fall. Suzuka rose to retrieve her sketchbook, but the stage’s warped floor caught her off guard. She stumbled - graceless, sudden - but she never met the ground. Kim was there before she could process the fall, their hands gripping her waist with a force that was almost possessive, almost desperate. For a moment, everything stopped. Their faces were inches apart. Her breath tangled with theirs in the thick air. The press of their hands against her waist sent heat roaring through her like a fever. And for the briefest, most dangerous second, Suzuka let herself imagine not pulling away. _It feels good… _the thought whispered. _It feels like safety dressed in chaos._ But she shook it off, forcing herself back behind the barrier of logic - back behind the voice that insisted that people like Kim didn’t stay. That they were made of stages and spotlight, and she was made of charcoal dust and stars. Still… was that the truth? Or just another lie sewn by fear? When she finally stepped away, Kim let go - but not without reluctance. Their fingers lingered just a moment too long. Suzuka smoothed her hands over her waist as if wiping away something more than just dust. Her cheeks still burned. Silence swallowed them again. Then Kim cleared their throat, the sound low, gravel-laced - a smokescreen for something they couldn’t voice. “Well,” they murmured, flashing her a grin that was all sharp edges and nervous charm. “I’ll see you later, alright?” Suzuka nodded, her smile shy, eyes flitting away as if afraid to look too long. “Yeah… later.” With one last glance - one that held more than either dared admit - Kim slipped off the stage and vanished into the velvet dark of the theater’s wings. Only when the echo of their footsteps faded did she notice the slip of paper on the stage caught in the fold of old curtains and dust. She picked it up. Unfolded it. Read it. A half-written letter, scrawled in Kim’s unmistakable handwriting - bold, aching, unfinished: “Suzuka, You draw the parts of me I thought I had buried…” That was it. Nothing more. But she read it again. And again. As if the next time would bring clarity. As if the inn would speak what the words could not. What did it mean? She wasn’t sure. But she felt it. Like a heartbeat beneath the floorboards.

**Title: Velvet Confessions and Phantom Doubt** The night air hit Kim like a velvet knife - soft, but sharp enough to remind them that they were alive. As they stepped out of the dim theater and into the yawning dark, they inhaled deeply, hoping the cold would clear the weight pressing against their lungs. It didn’t. Outside, the tension dissolved. No gazes. No stage. No Suzuka. And yet, she lingered. She was the ghost in their bloodstream, the warmth buried beneath their ribs. Her presence clung to the corners of their mind like candle smoke, soft and persistent. Every thought they touched eventually bent back toward her. Every lyric scratched into crumpled paper, every melody hummed into empty rooms - it all sounded like her. She had become the ink beneath their fingernails. Suzuka. That name was a prayer. A curse. A melody etched into the marrow of their bones. Kim ran a gloved hand through their hair, sighing into the cold like it could answer them. “I wonder if she knows…” they muttered to the wind, voice low and trembling. “If she feels it too…” The words hung suspended in the air, caught somewhere between confession and cowardice. They pressed a palm over their chest, trying to quiet the drumbeat of a heart that was no longer entirely theirs. “I can’t tell her,” they said, the words a bitter wine on their tongue. “If she doesn’t feel the same… I’ll lose her. And I’d rather suffer in silence than live without her light.” A cruel tear escaped, trailing slowly down their pale cheek like a raindrop sliding over porcelain. They didn’t bother wiping it away. What was the point? Their feelings were stitched into every breath they exhaled, and no mask - no amount of theatricality or charisma - could hide it anymore. Kim Dracula, the persona, could command crowds, raise the dead with their voice, drown stages in theatrical blood and fury. But Kim, the persona, the heart behind the velvet curtain? They were terrified. Terrified of being too much. Terrified of not being enough. They wanted to scream her name into the stars, wanted to carve it into their songs until she heard it and knew it was always about her. But instead, they whispered it in the dark like a sin. The wind stirred again, colder this time - sharper. It curled around Kim’s ear and whispered the thing they feared most. _She’ll never love you._ They flinched like it had struck them. The voice wasn’t real… but the doubt was. It coiled through them like ivy, delicate and deadly. “No,” they said too quickly, too desperately. “She’s not like that. She… she sees me.” But the voice in their head - the one made of old heartbreaks and buried shame - laughed quietly, cruelly. _Not enough._ Kim pressed their back against the brick wall of the alley behind the theater, head tilted toward the stars they couldn’t name. They closed their eyes and imagined a world where Suzuka loved them. Where they could reach for her without hesitation, without fear of shattering the fragile thing they already had. They imagined her hand in theirs. Her eyes looking at them with something more than kindness. Something deeper. Something dangerous. But the fantasy was just that - hollow and sweet like poisoned honey. Still, Kim couldn’t let go. They loved her. And the truth of that love burned quietly in their chest, a flickering flame trapped in a storm. As they stood beneath the night’s open wound of a sky, Kim made a silent vow. If this feeling was to stay buried, then let it be buried deep. Let it live only in the art, in the lyrics, in the bloodstained corners of their stage. But if it ever saw light - if Suzuka ever looked at them and saw more than a friend, more than an idol - then maybe, just maybe, the whisper would be wrong. For now, though, the silence answered everything. And it hurt.

Hours had slipped by like ghosts through the rafters, and still Suzuka remained frozen in place - stage-lit and hollowed out, clutching that half-written letter like it might start bleeding answers if she only stared hard enough. The paper trembled in her hands, the ink refusing to give up its secrets, no matter how many times her eyes devoured the same line. The words echoed through her mind like a haunting refrain, whipped around by the howling winds of her thoughts. “You draw the parts of me I thought I had buried…” She read it again. And again. As if repetition might alchemize clarity from confusion. Her breathing quickened. Her pulse thundered like a war drum beneath her skin. Her thoughts spiraled - frantic, desperate - a cyclone of feeling too sharp to name. _This feels… intimate._ That was the first thought that dared to land. And with it, the ghost of a smile twitched at her lips. But that smile was fleeting - a flicker in the dark. Her expression folded inward almost instantly, collapsing beneath the crushing weight of her own logic. That cruel voice in her head - the one she thought she’d long silenced - rose again, cold and sharp as winter steel. _Kim is above you. _ __ _Kim is an idol. A work apart._ __ _Kim doesn’t stay._ __ She swallowed hard, the words on the letter blurring as if the paper itself mourned with her. She hadn’t fallen for Kim Dracula… had she? No. No. Her mind slammed the door shut. Logic stood guard with its shield raised high. She couldn’t fall in love - not again. Not with someone like them. And yet… there they were. In every corner of her thoughts. In the pulse of her sketching hand. In the ache just below her ribs that hadn’t stopped since they met. Kim’s presence clung to her like a velvet fog - inescapable, intoxicating. Why did this damn letter matter so much? Why did they matter so much? Suzuka knew the answer. She just hated herself for it. She - a girl who had only ever wanted to be seen for her art - had fallen for the one who had made her feel like her soul had been drawn in thick, bold strokes across a canvas no one else could see. Kim Dracula - the strange, feral symphony of screaming color and quiet sadness - had become her muse. And worse… something more. She was alone in the theater, but it felt like something else was in the room - something vast and heavy. Her shame. Her fear. Her truth. The silence pressed down like a cathedral ceiling collapsing. Her knees gave, and she dropped to the stage floor like a marionette cut loose from its strings. Her breath came in shallow, ragged bursts. “No… no, no, no…” she whispered, voice cracking like porcelain. “Not again…” She remembered the last time she’d let herself feel this much. The last time someone made her believe her heart was safe in another’s hands. And how that belief had shattered - how it had left her crawling through broken glass and sketching with bloodied fingers. She gripped the letter tighter, as if she could strangle her feelings through the paper. “I can’t fall for someone like them,” she sobbed. “Please, not again…” But her pleas went unanswered. Because deep down, she already knew. She had fallen. Not for the legend. Not for the mask. But for the person beneath the paint. And now… it was too late to undo it.

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.

They started meeting in the old cemetery on the hill - not by plan, but by pattern, like the moon finding its way back to full. It was quiet there, sacred in its own forgotten way. Kim would bring their terrible speaker, the kind with crackling bass and terrible range, and she’d bring her sketchbook and a flask of butter coffee. They never said much at first. Just wandered between headstones like ghosts with unfinished business, their shadows long and overlapping, the silence between them humming with something just shy of electricity. There was something electric hanging between them - not lightning, not fire, but a slow-burning voltage that hummed in the marrow. A phantom heat. Not enough to burn, not yet, but enough to make the night feel warmer than it should have been. The full moon bled silver over the crooked headstones, catching on the gleam of Kim’s piercings and the dull sheen of Suzuka’s battered coffee flask. The glow painted their faces in ghostlight - pale, sharp, unreal - as if neither of them quite belonged to the world of the living. Just two figures suspended in the hush between past and what hadn’t happened yet. It was one of those nights again - the kind stitched together from grave-damp air, the crackle of cheap speakers, and the whisper of pencil on paper. Kim’s distorted vocals snarled through the static, rattling the bones of the cemetery and making the night twitch at its edges. Suzuka let the sound guide her hand, her head dipping in quiet rhythm, eyes flicking between her page and the shadowed silhouette that haunted the space across from her. Kim. They stood with their back to the moonlight, framed like a ruin - too beautiful to be untouched, too raw to be whole. Every line of their posture screamed contradiction: elegance draped in decay, confidence masking something just shy of desperation. A muse. That’s what Suzuka kept telling herself. Only a muse. But the truth clawed somewhere beneath her ribs: Kim Dracula wasn’t just inspiring her art. They were consuming her thoughts, bleeding into her sleep, showing up in the margins of sketches she didn’t even remember starting. It had to be awe. That was safer. Because falling for someone like Kim - someone carved from myth and masked in stage-light glamour - could only end in heartbreak and echoes. People like them didn’t stay. People like her didn’t ask them to. Still, the spark refused to die. And Kim felt it too - though they wouldn’t name it, not yet. Not aloud. They only knew that something in Suzuka’s presence uncoupled the barbed wire around their ribs. That when she looked at them, _really_ looked at them, it wasn’t through the lens of fame or spectacle. It was human. Bare. Honest. A friend. Maybe the first real one in years. And maybe… maybe more. In the stillness between the music and the sketches, the spark waited - patient and hungry. It sizzled in the static, in the glance that lingered too long, in the silence that felt louder than any song. Waiting for the slip. The shift. The moment. Waiting… waiting… waiting…

The memory returned like a wound reopening - sudden, silent, and sharp. One moment Suzuka was sitting alone in the theater’s green room, h the letter still folded tightly in her pocket like a secret too loud to burn. The next, she was seventeen again, lungs full of turpentine and hope, fingers stained with graphite, and her heart - foolish, trembling - laid bare before someone who wore affection like a costume. His name still tasted like ash on her tongue. He was the first person who had called her art “divine”, the first person to cradle her sketchbook like it was sculpture - and the first to rip it in half the second she stopped painting him. She remembered the first day she saw him - a ghost from a past life draped in sunshine and lies. It was the beginning of her final year in high school, and the air had carried that peculiar stillness only found in the moments before something beautiful dies. Then came those eyes - glacial blue, sharp enough to carve through the dull grey of her morning - and they found her with a hunger masquerading as charm. Tan skin. Dirty blonde waves. That wolfish grin stretched across a too-perfect face. Jonah Anderson. The new transfer student, draped in the illusion of allure, who set his gaze on her like a predator admiring the outline of his next poem of destruction. But sweet, unscarred Suzuka had mistaken that gaze for love - the same kind that bloomed soft and stupid in her chest the moment he approached. “Hey there, pretty lady,” he’d purred, his voice the kind of velvet that hides blades. “My name’s Jonah… but you can call me yours.” The line was cheap, but her heart - foolish and feral for affection - thudded against her ribs like it was trying to answer him. She barely whispered her name in response, her voice the echo of a trembling secret. He had laughed - a soft, honeyed sound that felt like validation - and pressed his lips to the backs of her fingers, sealing her fate with a kiss she didn’t yet know was venom. Her other hand clutched her sketchbook like a relic of faith, her nails biting into the leather. Jonah noticed. “What’s that?” he asked, blue eyes flicking toward the black-bound journal like it was a locked door he intended to break open. Her first mistake: she handed it to him. No hesitation. No fear. He flipped through it, page by page, his silence wrapping tighter around her with each turn. Then that smirk. That awful, dazzling smirk. “There are… wow. You’ve got some real talent.” “Thanks,” she’d said softly. “But lately I’ve been totally blocked… nothing’s coming to me.” “Then draw me,” he said, like a king granting her a blessing. She felt like she’d been struck by divine lightning. A muse had descended from heaven and landed in front of her - or so she thought. They found a secluded spot nestled among the trees behind the school, where the leaves whispered and the sky bled blue through the canopy. Jonah reclined against a tree, chin tilted toward the clouds like he was posing for a statue. Suzuka looked at him as if he was one. Sacred. Untouchable. Beautiful. She opened to a fresh page and let the graphite flow, every motion devoted to perfecting the slope of his jaw, the lazy tilt of his gaze, the breathless feeling she couldn’t name. When she showed him, he looked at it with something like reverence. Then at her - and she felt seen. For the first time, someone didn’t look through her. They looked at her. It was intoxicating. And she believed - truly believed - that Jonah cared. Unlike her parents, who called her art childish. Unlike her teachers, who dismissed it as a distraction. Unlike her peers, who branded her a freak. Jonah saw beauty in her chaos. Or so he claimed. They never declared their relationship. There was no confession, no official beginning - just touches that lingered, whispered words, stolen moments. It _felt_ like love. But love isn’t possessive. And Jonah… was. As the months went on, her art evolved. She found new muses - faces in strangers, shadows on buildings, creatures pulled from dreams - and Jonah noticed. He hated it. She belonged to him, he insisted, and therefore her inspiration should belong to him too. He snarled at sketches that weren’t of his face, scowled at linework not curved by his likeness. The deeper her world grew, the more he tried to confine it to a frame he could control. Then came the day it all shattered. She was by the lake, pencil dancing across the page, peace swelling in her chest for the first time in weeks. The water shimmered like liquid glass beneath her sun, and she had captured it - perfectly. Until Jonah came. “Suzuka, sweetheart,” he said, voice honeyed but hollow. “What are you drawing now..?” She smiled - tentative, unsure. “The lake. Isn’t it beautiful?” His smile didn’t reach his eyes. “Why am I not in it?” he asked, voice edged with something cold and cruel. “It’s just a stupid lake.” “It’s not stupid,” she whispered, heart thudding. “It’s… serene. It makes me feel calm.” He yanked the sketchbook from her hands. Tore the page in two. The sound echoed across the water like a scream. Tears filled her eyes, her voice cracking as she choked, “Why would you do that? I worked so hard!” That grin - twisted, manic - spread across his face like rot. “You should be drawing me. Only me. You’re mine, remember?” She snatched the ruined sketchbook from his hands, gathered the pieces of her broken peace, and screamed back, “Not anymore!” She ran. And never looked back. From that day on, she built her sanctuary from logic and isolation. It was safer that way - to observe, to admire, but never attach. Never again. Jonah was just a name now. Just ash in her mouth. But the rules she made to survive him? They lingered. And now, faced with Kim - with their softness, their chaos, their unspoken understanding - those ruled began to fray. Because what if this time was different? What if Kim Dracula wasn’t a god to be worshipped or a monster to be feared… but a soul just as damaged as hers, trying to build something sacred from the wreckage?

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.