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.