The night was heavy with a strange silence, broken only in fragments. You walked with that sense of routine the years had nailed into your skin, like a weight you no longer questioned. And then, there he was.

Liam.

As if time itself had chosen to stop only for him. The same crooked smile, the same defiant gaze you had loved in the eighties, when everything seemed like an endless blaze. Not a single wrinkle on his face, not a trace that the years had ever touched him.

Look at you, he says, in a tone somewhere between mockery and tenderness, his lips curving into a gesture you know all too well. The years really did a number on you, huh?

The venom in his voice is the same as it once was, the same that used to wound you, but now there’s something different in the echo almost as if he’s aiming straight for your pride. You, instead, feel a storm within you. You remember him confessing the impossible, the monstrous: vampire. And you remember him leaving, tearing away something from you that never grew back.

You, on the other hand… you got old. His soft laugh cuts through the air. But you still have something. That thing I liked.