Broken Solitude

A solitary vampire finds love in a modern world that never knew he existed.

On that square, filled with people, Lucious St. John stood perfectly still and utterly alone, reflecting, somewhat bitterly, on the fact that he had finally resorted to speed dating.

It wasn’t loneliness that had driven him there. He was well past that indulgence. It was efficiency. A controlled environment. A rotating selection of humans already open to brief intimacy, light connection, and forgetting. Feeding without mess. Feeding without consequence. It had seemed, on paper, like a practical solution for someone who had no intention of staying.

The plaza belonged to a modern western city, Seattle, Washington, stone fountains, street musicians, food carts perfuming the air with roasted meat and garlic aioli (which Lucious found himself briefly craving). The sun sat high overhead, bright and rude. He wore sunglasses and a thin layer of SPF 100 across his pale skin. It dulled the sting, nothing more. The discomfort was manageable, like a low fever that never quite broke.

He had endured worse.

He watched humans move the way he always did, carefully, respectfully, as if observing a fragile species he once belonged to. They laughed easily. They touched each other without thinking. They loved without fear of what eternity would do to that love.

Lucious had stopped doing all of that decades ago.

Feeding was transactional. Necessary. Clean. He chose donors who wanted forgetting, who needed something taken from them, pain, addiction, memory. Speed dating had promised a steady stream of candidates who wouldn’t ask for permanence, or worse, meaning. Three minutes was more than enough time to decide compatibility. Three minutes was safe.

It turned out even that was too much.
Vampires in this world were not monsters lurking in alleys. They were curators. Eight clans governed themselves quietly, hidden in layers of bureaucracy, misinformation, and human disbelief. Three clans resided in the Western world. The rest remained close to their ancestral roots in Romania, where the old cities remembered things humanity preferred to forget.

Lucious belonged to the Bloodborne clan.

Their leader, Perseus, ruled in name only. He preferred freedom over dominion, structure over spectacle. He involved himself only when secrecy was threatened, which, thankfully, was rare. The last true breach had been nearly thirty years ago, when a fool named Harold had allowed himself to be filmed. He had believed proof would free vampires from hiding.

Instead, it had earned him a final death.

Lucious had watched that lesson echo through the clans like a warning bell.

Power came with age. Not fangs or glowing eyes or theatrical nonsense. Vampires didn’t burn in sunlight. They didn’t turn into bats. They evolved. Their brains unlocked capacity humans never reached, accelerated perception, heightened empathy, cellular control, mental influence so subtle it passed for coincidence. What humans called magic was simply mastery.

Lucious had mastered many things.

Love was not one of them.

He remembered his human life with painful clarity. Early 1800s. Wyoming Territory. Endless sky and stolen horses. He had been young and reckless, surviving by speed and charm, outrunning lawmen and consequences alike. When the Bloodborne found him, they saw potential, adaptability, intelligence, restraint. He had accepted the change the way he did everything else back then: without thinking it would last forever.

It had.

The square shifted as a woman stepped into his line of sight.

She wasn’t remarkable at first glance. No dramatic entrance. No supernatural pull. She was reading a flyer with a slight frown; her brow furrowed in concentration. Brown hair caught in the breeze. Comfortable clothes. A coffee cup balanced precariously in one hand.

Lucious felt it then.

A subtle click inside his mind. Recognition without reason.

He stiffened.

The woman looked up.

Their eyes met.

Lucious felt something ancient and unwelcome stir in his chest.

She smiled, not flirtatious, not knowing. Just human warmth, offered freely. Then she stepped closer, holding out the flyer.

“Sorry,” she said. “Do you know where this street performance is supposed to be? The map’s...not great.”

Her voice grounded him. Warm. Real.

Lucious could hear her heartbeat, steady and calm. He could taste the iron beneath her skin if he wanted to. He didn’t.

“That fountain,” he said, gesturing. His voice sounded unused, like an instrument forgotten and not played for a while. “Around the corner there just past it.”

“Thank you.” She hesitated. “Are you...okay? You look like you’re about to disappear.”

Lucious almost laughed.

“I do that sometimes.”

Something in his answer made her smile again, softer this time. “I’m Eliza.”

Names mattered. Vampires knew that. To offer one freely was to invite memory.

“Lucious,” he said before he could stop himself.

“Well,” she said, “Would you like to come with me?”

Lucious found himself nodding before he had time to question it.

They walked together. Talked. Small things at first. music drifting from street performers, places they had traveled, foods they missed. Lucious found himself slowing his pace to match hers, a habit he hadn’t needed in decades. She spoke with her hands, animated when she laughed, thoughtful when she paused.

Eliza asked questions and truly waited for answers. Lucious listened like a starving man, savoring every word, every shared silence, every moment that felt inexplicably earned. She laughed when Lucious explained why he’d been standing alone in the square to begin with.

“Speed dating,” he said, adjusting his sunglasses. “A failed experiment.”

She raised an eyebrow. “Failed how?”

“I stayed for exactly one round,” he replied. “Long enough to realize eternity doesn’t pair well with three-minute conversations and laminated name tags.”

He did not feed that night.

Or the next.

Days turned into weeks. He learned the way Eliza took her coffee. The scar on her wrist from a childhood fall. The way she looked at him like he was something solid, something present.

Eventually, he told her the truth.

Not dramatically. No fangs. No threats. Just honesty.

She believed.

“I don’t care what you are,” she said, her hand steady in his. “I care who you choose to be.”


Word Count: 997
Written for: "The Writer's Cramp 24th Birthday" 
Prompt: Start your story or poem with the following: On that square, filled with people...
Make your genre Romance/love