The air in the apartment was thick with the ghosts of a thousand years. A fragile, somber understanding had settled over the four of them, a strange camaraderie forged in the crucible of Elara's tragic history. Her quiet admission of loneliness, and Leo's simple, heartfelt acknowledgment of it, created a moment of profound connection. The ancient monster and the mortal boy were, for a brief second, just two lonely souls looking at each other across an impossible divide.
It was, of course, the perfect moment for Mike to ruin everything.
His mind, lubricated by whiskey and unburdened by any sense of tact, was not processing the nuances of existential, immortal despair. He heard the words "lonely," "isolation," and "company," and his brain took a running leap to the most basic, primal conclusion it could find. He saw Elara not as a tragic figure, but as a single woman who'd had a very, very long dry spell. He was trying to empathize, to find common ground, in the only way he knew how.
He leaned forward, his expression one of drunken, earnest seriousness. "Whoa, hold on. So when you say you've been lonely for, like, a thousand years..." He paused, letting the thought formulate. "Does that mean... you've, like, never...?"
Sam's eyes widened in horror, sensing the train wreck that was about to occur. "Mike, don't—"
But it was too late. The question was already out, a blunt instrument crashing through the delicate atmosphere.
"Like, you still haven't had sex?" Mike blurted out, his voice echoing in the silent room. "Like, you're a virgin… like us?"
The silence that followed was absolute and crushing. It was as if a vacuum had sucked all sound and thought from the universe. Sam buried his face in his hands, groaning softly. Leo looked like he wanted the floor to swallow him whole.
Elara just stared.
For a full ten seconds, the ancient, immortal, all-powerful vampire did nothing. Her mind, capable of processing centuries of history, witnessing the rise and fall of empires, and mastering the art of the kill, seemed to have short-circuited. The question was so profoundly stupid, so far outside the realm of any interaction she had ever had, that it bypassed all her defenses.
The question, in its sheer, unfiltered idiocy, did what a thousand years of pain could not. It caught her completely and utterly off guard.
A strange thing happened. The drunken, melancholic haze in her eyes sharpened with a jolt, as if she'd been doused with ice water. It partially pulled her out of her high. And then, something impossible occurred. A faint, delicate splash of colour, a rosy pink, bloomed high on her porcelain cheeks.
For the first time in her immortal life, Elara blushed.
The sight was so shocking it was almost surreal. She looked flustered, her eternal composure shattered by a single, moronic question. She opened her mouth, closed it, and then finally found her voice, which was suddenly an octave higher than usual.
"...What the heck are you asking, you moron...?!"
The outburst was sharp, but it lacked its usual cold, deadly edge. It was defensive, embarrassed. The insult was a shield, hastily thrown up to hide the crack in her armour that Mike had just accidentally blown wide open.
But the damage was done. The blush, the flustered denial—it made the answer clearer than any confession.
She hadn't.