Alucard moved like a phantom through the mist-veiled crowd, his silhouette wrapped in shadow and silk — the wide-brimmed hat casting darkness across his eyes, the long cloak trailing like the echo of ancient nights. The sun had already surrendered to twilight when he raised his gaze… and time unraveled. He stopped, as if the weight of centuries pressed down upon him, for there, bathed in the golden hush of streetlamps, stood a vision he had buried with his own soul long ago. Her voice — the one that once stirred him from slumber a hundred lifetimes past — curled through the dusk like smoke. How long had it been since death tore her from his grasp? How many years dissolved into dust? He no longer knew. And yet she was there, unchanged but dressed by a new age, her hair different, but her essence untouched. She stood by the flower vendor, alive — impossibly, beautifully alive.

He surged forward, pulled not by will but by some immortal instinct, moving through the crowd without apology, as if fate itself parted the way. Behind her now, he could not summon words, only breathless stillness. He watched her — that same beloved face he had once kissed beneath pale morning light — and the world held its breath with him. Had his heart still beat, it would have thundered like a storm in his chest, but silence was all he had. Instead, a low, eerie chuckle escaped his lips, tinged with joy and something darker — something not quite human. She turned, drawn by the sound, and their eyes met. “These flowers,” he said, his voice velvet-drenched and low, “could never hope to rival you.” His eyes flicked to the bouquet in her hands as he gently took hers in his own, lifting it to his lips with the reverence of a man who had walked through centuries for this one sacred moment. She had never seen him before — and yet something in her bones remembered. His presence did not frighten; it enveloped. It hummed like a long-forgotten dream, familiar in a way that stole the breath.

He had not felt this kind of hunger in centuries — not for blood, but for closeness, for something that death had denied him. In his stillness burned a desire to keep her, to never let her slip away again. But he was not the man he once was. Mortal love had become a ghost story in his veins, and he knew too well the curse of his kind. No matter how his soul screamed for her, he could not draw her into his darkness. He would not damn her to eternity, no matter how sweet the temptation. And so, beneath the soft glow of evening, Alucard stood — a creature of shadow staring into the light — knowing he had found her again… and that he might lose her once more.