The last word of Elara's story fell into the apartment and seemed to suck all the air out with it. The tale was so vast, so steeped in a pain that defied comprehension, it left the three friends utterly adrift. They were no longer sitting with a monster or a superhero; they were sitting with the sole survivor of a forgotten world, a walking, breathing ghost of a genocide.
Mike, for the first time in his life, was speechless. His usual bravado was a flimsy shield against the sheer weight of her tragedy. Sam was pale, his logical mind struggling to file away a thousand years of pain under any known category. It was impossible.
Elara pushed herself off the counter, her movements stiff. She seemed to regret the telling, the vulnerability. Her cynical armour was already reforming, piece by piece. She walked to a dark wooden cabinet, pulled out a bottle of amber liquid, and without a word, tossed it onto the coffee table in front of them. It landed with a heavy thud. An expensive-looking single malt whiskey.
"Drink," she commanded, her voice raspy and low. "You look like you need it." She retrieved a few glasses from her kitchen, her expression once again unreadable.
The first pour was silent. The first sip was hesitant. The whiskey burned, a welcome, grounding sensation against the cold horror of her story. For a long while, the only sound was the clinking of glasses and the quiet hum of the refrigerator.
Then, they began to talk.
It wasn't a conscious decision. The questions started as trickles, hesitant and respectful. Mike, surprisingly, was the first.
"So... you've been around for, like, all of it?" he asked, his voice uncharacteristically subdued. "Like, knights and castles and stuff?"
"I saw the first castles of stone replace the forts of wood," Elara answered, her gaze fixed on the swirling liquid in her glass. "I saw them crumble back into dust. Humans have a talent for building things. They have an even greater talent for knocking them down."
Sam, ever the engineer, was fascinated by the timeline. "You saw the Industrial Revolution. The invention of the steam engine, electricity... What was that like?"
"Loud," she said with a dry smirk. "And dirty. You mortals are always so proud of your latest inventions. You're like toddlers who've just learned to stack blocks. You can't imagine a world without your towers, and you can't imagine that one day, they'll all be gone too."
Something weird was happening in that small, modern apartment, lit by the predawn glow of the city outside. As the whiskey bottle emptied, so did the space between them. It was not friendship. Not yet. It was something more primal, an unspoken truce between beings of vastly different worlds, brought together by a shared, terrible secret. In their talks, the monster and the idiots were connecting. She spoke of centuries as if they were weeks, of historical figures as if they were annoying former neighbours. They spoke of student loans, bad dates, and the anxiety of choosing a career.
For the first time in a very, very long time, Elara wasn't being feared, hunted, or worshipped. She was just... talking.
But her attention kept drifting back to one of them. To Leo. He had been the quietest, but his eyes never left her, and in them, she didn't see the morbid curiosity of the others. She saw a deep, painful empathy.
He didn't ask about history or battles. His question, when it finally came, was simpler.
"It must have been so lonely," he said, his voice quiet but clear in the still room.
The words struck her with the force of a physical blow. She had been called a demon, a goddess, a plague, and a queen. She had been called beautiful and terrifying. But in a thousand years, she couldn't remember the last time someone had simply acknowledged her loneliness.
She looked at him, truly looked at him. The boy who followed her into a dark alley. The boy she had to save from his own distracted thoughts. The boy who saw her fangs and her rage, and whose first instinct was not to run, but to say thank you. The biggest idiot she had ever met.
And in that moment, she understood. His 'idiocy' was a profound lack of cynicism. He was a gaping wound of earnestness and kindness in a world that rewarded cruelty. He had a heart so big and so open that it was a miracle it hadn't been crushed long ago. He reminded her of the foolish kindness of her father, the gentle spirit of her mother, of the little girl who once ran laughing through a forest of green.
The monster was really connecting with, in her eyes, the biggest idiot with the biggest heart.
"Loneliness is a quiet thing," she finally answered, her voice softer than she intended. "You learn to live with it. It becomes the only company you can trust."
She held his gaze for a long moment, a silent, strange understanding passing between the ancient vampire and the art student. He was a fool. A beautiful, reckless fool. And a dangerous thought, the first of its kind in centuries, took root in her cold, dead heart: a fool like that was worth protecting.