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…