Serah went out whenever there was free time.

Sometimes she headed to the place where she had first encountered Kai; other times she simply went north for no apparent reason.

She had never told Kai the reason. It just happened, in the moments between missions and training, when the territory around Valdris called to her more than the inside of the inn.

Kai had noticed it the third or fourth time and had decided not to ask, because Serah also deserved to have her secrets and her own time. She would do it if she needed to, and she would stop when she no longer needed to.

That afternoon she went north.

Kai was in the common room with the fire low and nothing in particular to do.

---

Lira came down the stairs twenty minutes later.

She looked at the room.

Looked at Kai.

Looked at the fire.

She sat down in the chair she had established as hers without anyone questioning it — and said nothing for a moment.

Neither did Kai.

The fire made the sound fires make when there’s nothing else to listen to.

It wasn’t the silence of two people with nothing to say to each other.

Lira noticed it.

She didn’t mention it.

---

"I’m hungry."

Kai looked at her.

He tilted his head to the side — the gesture he had established as the most direct way to resolve that without turning it into a negotiation every time.

Lira stood up.

She crossed the room.

She stopped in front of him.

Without Serah’s audience.

Without the active chat — the stream was off. Kai had closed it when Serah left because he knew nothing exciting would happen that day.

Without the thirty vampires from the catacombs or the guild or any of the contexts where this had happened before.

Just the room with the low fire.

Lira leaned in.

---

In public she made a calculated theater for Serah to see and provoke her, with the typical comment at the end, the performance of someone who knew exactly what effect she intended to produce.

Here there was nothing to produce.

It was direct. Calm.

Kai’s blood was something she had never experienced, and it made her wonder if everyone who came from his world produced the same sweetness that Kai’s blood had, but she had already tasted that of other Streamers and Kai’s was different from anything else Lira had processed in eight hundred years.

That sensation made her enter a frenzy or perhaps ecstasy.

She didn’t think about that while drinking.

She just noted it.

---

When she finished she didn’t pull away immediately.

One second.

Two.

The distance between her face and Kai’s neck was the distance she had always fought to move away from so she could continue the theater in front of Serah, but this time Serah wasn’t there, and for two seconds that distance didn’t change.

Kai didn’t move.

Neither did Lira.

Then Lira straightened up and returned to her chair with her usual stride.

Kai looked at the fire.

Neither of them mentioned the two seconds.

---

The silence that followed was different from before — not uncomfortable, but with something extra that both processed in different ways and that neither was going to examine out loud.

Lira was the first to speak.

"What did you do in your world?"

Kai looked at her.

"Fight," he said. "For money, mainly."

"Only that?"

"Mainly that." He looked at the fire.

"The underground rings in the industrial sector of the city. You showed up, you fought, they paid you if you won. If you lost they paid you less." Pause.

"The money covered the month. Sometimes it reached the next one."

"And the rest of the time?"

"Train. Eat whatever there was. Watch videos on my phone." Kai considered it. "Life was small."

"Did that bother you?"

"No." He said it without pause, the way you say something you’ve thought about before. "It was enough. I had what I needed for what I did."

Lira processed this.

"And now?"

Kai looked at the room. The fire. Lira’s chair on the other side.

"Now it’s bigger." A pause. "And it’s also enough."

---

Lira looked at the fire for a moment.

"Eight hundred years," she said, "has a lot of empty time."

Kai looked at her.

"How did you handle it?"

"I learned not to think about time. It can be more boring to keep it in mind than to simply let it pass."

"How?"

"Sleeping all day."

Kai looked at her.

"But during the fish mission you said vampires don’t need to sleep."

Lira looked at him.

"I don’t need to." A pause. "But I never said I couldn’t."

Kai processed this.

The fire made its sound.

Kai laughed first — short, genuine, the kind that comes out when something is simpler and more honest than expected.

Lira looked at him for a second.

Then she laughed too.

Not the awkward little laugh when Serah called her a voyeur.

The laugh of someone in a quiet room with a low fire who has just found something genuinely funny for no additional reason.

It lasted a short time.

Enough.

The silence that returned afterward was different from all the previous ones. 𝗳𝗿𝐞𝕖𝘄𝗲𝕓𝗻𝚘𝚟𝕖𝐥.𝚌𝕠𝕞

---

The inn door opened.

Serah came in with her hair slightly different from when she left — the kind of difference the northern sector wind leaves — and her markings in the glow of traversed territory.

She looked at the room.

Looked at Kai by the fire.

Looked at Lira in her chair.

The low fire. The silence left from the conversation.

Her markings rose two degrees.

Serah crossed the room.

She sat down beside Kai — not in front of him.

"How was the north?" Kai said.

"Fine."

She didn’t say anything else.

Lira looked at the fire.

No one spoke for a while.

That night, in the bedroom, Serah fell asleep with her head on Kai’s shoulder.

Kai noticed it.

He didn’t say it.

---

In the room at the end of the hallway, Lira was on the ceiling.

Not looking at it — eyes open, fingers on her fangs, the touch of her fangs that was the closest thing she had to the point on Kai’s neck where she had been.

She didn’t think about the two seconds.

She thought about them anyway.

’A quiet room.’

’Without an audience.’

’Without a reason to be there except that it’s where I live now.’

’And it was different.’

Fingers on fangs.

’I don’t want it to be different.’

Long pause.

’But it was different.’

The fire in her room.

Lira listened to it until she fell asleep.

Which took longer than usual.

[Exxs’s note: I apologize for the mistake in the previous Chapter; I didn’t even realize it was so badly edited when I copied it to Webnovel.]