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Familiars are meant to be devoted to their masters. Loyal. Just because Laszlo and Nadja never gave any of theirs the chance of more than a week to exemplify this doesn’t mean that it isn’t true. But Guillermo has had years. Guillermo knows. Familiars are meant to be devoted to their masters, and so it stands to reason that Guillermo would feel that devotion, would feel it deep in the core of him and rattling through his bones and most of all in his veins, because they are just as promised to Nandor as he is.
So, no. He does not have feelings for Nandor. He is just a very committed familiar. Yet even that leaves a flat, bitter taste in the back of his throat: committed. He feels vaguely sick. He blames the nausea on the smoothie, too overwhelmingly sweet, and not the thought of something else even sweeter. And then, Guillermo does what he always does. He puts himself to work. He cleans the library meticulously, Laszlo had made a terrible mess of it. He reshelves books, he moves some back to their proper place, he rights chairs and mops up fluids he tries not to think too hard about. He brushes off the Cloak of Duplication and hangs it in its rightful place. He tries even harder not to think about donning it again, about wearing Nandor’s body like his master’s nice furs, about how at home he’d felt in a frame that should’ve been foreign. He tidies up. He tries not to think, he forgets to breathe. It’s some sorry sense of normalcy.
Guillermo is at least relieved to no longer be sleeping in a cage. For the first week or so he had snuck out to sleep at his mother’s house, but it became too risky when he’d forgotten to set an alarm and had to race back before the sun set. He had felt more adrenaline, then, racing back, than he had in the theater. He wasn’t scared in the theater. He was confident. Sure of his abilities, his strength, his inheritance. He drove stakes through the hearts of dead folk, and he did not think for a second that he might join them. But Laszlo, Nadja, Colin Robinson…Nandor. If they had found him loose and free, if they had known of yet another deception so soon, they would’ve likely decided to kill him. And this time around, he would be in a room of vampires he could not bring himself to defend from.
When he’s finished cleaning and rinsing and repeating, it’s nearing four in the morning. He wanders back almost mindlessly to the house, along a backdrop of the slowly rising sun, and he settles into his old room, his old bed, small and creaking. It is perhaps more uncomfortable than the cot in the cage. He smiles anyway, and breathes in the smell of it (mostly mothballs and desperation.) And then he collapses into sleep at once, quicker and deeper than ever before. He dreams of colors and feels the presence of a slowly approaching, nameless doom. He breathes heavy and shaking, but he is breathing. When he wakes, not long before the sun will set again, he counts his shallow breaths in and out, over and over. Just to be sure.
In the some odd hours left that still belong to him, he plays the vinyls Nadja keeps stacked and precise by the gramophone, and he hums along. He makes a little waltz of his sweeping, stepping in time and dipping the broom low. He pictures Nandor dipping him just the same, imagines tangling his arms around Nandor’s neck, his master’s hands securely locked on Guillermo’s waist, laughing and stepping on his toes as they guide each other through a dance that neither knows the steps of. He blinks. He shakes the image away, like clearing his etch-a-sketch of a brain. He sighs. He drops the broom. He sinks to the ground and leans against the gramophone, listens to some old lover croon about the sky and stars and all the pretty little ants beneath it. Bring on the pesticide, he thinks, and thunks his head against the record player until it scratches the vinyl with the force of it.
***
“Guillermo?” Less than an hour later, and Guillermo is standing beside Nandor’s closed coffin, idly thumbing over the designs carved into it. He knows them like the grooves in his palm, now. He knows them like old friends.
“Yes, master?”
Nandor raps against his coffin lid until Guillermo sighs and lifts it up and open, staring down at the vampire’s sleepy, unguarded face. He smiles a little, mostly with relief. Admittedly, he worried that Nandor would never again allow a moment of vulnerability considering the perceived threat of Guillermo’s heritage, even with the added precaution of quote-unquote hypnotism. “How do you feel about Laszlo?”
He blinks. “...I don’t know, he’s Laszlo. Same as I’ve always felt about him.” He narrows his eyes warily. “Why?”
Nandor just hums, then rubs the sleep from his eyes and rises up and out of his coffin. Guillermo, as always, helps him dress. It feels almost the same as it did before, and he justifies in his mind that he had seen Nandor without his help dressing for months now, and he can no longer have his master walking around like that, so sloppy and uncoordinated. He scrambles for any excuse to keep this. Smooths little wrinkles from his cape, combs the ends of his hair with his fingers. His hands linger on Nandor’s collar when he fastens the clasp of his cloak, and he pointedly tries to ignore the echoing of his conversation with Meg still poking at him insistently. Feelings, it taunts, could be he has feelings for you, too.
“Thank you, Guillermo.” After a pause, and another hand smoothing out the creases in his shirt, “Thank you.” Nandor says, quietly, and it feels like he’s been punched in the gut. It feels like Nandor has drained him and left him limp and lifeless, it feels like he could sharpen a chair leg and hack away at Nandor’s chest until the carpet is too stained to get it out, it feels like he could eat his heart and Nandor’s too on a silver plate and lick it clean. It feels like Nandor has given him something precious. It feels like the bar has been too low for too many years to count, and Nandor is limbo dancing under it, and Guillermo is going to kill him, or kiss him, or something else devastating and irreversible.
But he says: “Of course,” because familiars are meant to be devoted to their masters, and he is meant to find the dinners and be the dinner and he feels devoured, and he is overwhelmed in the crushing feeling of the receptionist of a twenty-four hour gym reading him like a fucking book before he had thought to give himself a title. He commits it to memory, the shape of Nandor’s mouth around the words, the way they sound when he says them like this, murmured and secret and his, and likely never to be heard again. Thank you, Guillermo, Nandor said, and someone has lifted the sky from Atlas’ back so he might sigh and roll his shoulders. “It’s my job.”
Nandor is quiet for a moment, so quiet Guillermo can hear his own pulse. From the way his fingers are twitching, Guillermo is about 80% sure Nandor is considering trying to hypnotize the memory out of him. It’s too late, anyway. Even if he hadn’t built immunity, this (and Nandor’s conceding at the hospital, which he turns over in his hands and cradles some nights) has already been burned into him, somewhere, where Nandor couldn’t’ve yanked it out or waved it off anyway. He allows such few and far between little sweet things, Guillermo can’t help but hold onto them for dear life. He’d lose his footing, his loosely hanging hope, otherwise. After a sigh that Guillermo feels with his hands flitting over Nandor’s shoulders, “No. You’re a Bodyguard now.”
“So...You don’t want me to…?” Guillermo’s hands dart away immediately, as if burned.
“Just- Ah- You do not have to-” Nandor stammers, and he feels a pang of guilt for reveling in making his master stumble through a sentence. “This is not a task for Bodyguards, is all.”
“What, then?” He scoffs. “You’ll find another Familiar?”
“...Maybe.” Nandor shrugs. Guillermo wants to drag the sun up with his bare hands and throw the curtains open. “You got a, eh... promotion .”
“Bodyguards do this!” He blurts out before he can stop himself, and his tongue continues of its own accord. “They have to stick around all the time, and- and take care of everything, so their Masters can’t hurt themselves.”
“They do?” Nandor cocks his head like a confused puppy, and is so pathetically easy to convince of mortal customs that it’s almost cruel to take advantage of it.
“Yeah! Yeah. See- I know this better than you, now,” He says, unclipping the pin of Nandor’s cloak. “If you did it yourself…” He jabs the needle of it, quickly, into his pointer finger. “You’d prick yourself. Bodyguards don’t let that happen.”
Nandor is quiet again, and it’s near infuriating, to wait (mostly) in a cage day after day, desperate for any word from Nandor he could cling to, and now that he’s free again, Nandor has picked up a new and sudden interest in silence. Guillermo stews in his frustration for a moment before he realizes that Nandor is quiet not for some long consideration of the nature of Bodyguards, but because his gaze is transfixed, hungry, on the blood leaking from the pinprick of Guillermo’s finger. When at last he speaks, his voice is a little strained, and not in his usual sleep-addled rasp. “Guillermo.”
He panics. He takes a step back. He shoves his finger in his mouth and sucks, and then he runs off to rummage through his carry-on first aid kit for a bandaid. He wonders, after it’s been wrapped and stuck on tight, if Nandor will still be able to smell the copper. If he’ll crave it. It gives him some sort of sick satisfaction, some leverage. See? He wants to say, wants to rub it in his face. If you’d make me a vampire, you could taste it.
***
Laszlo appears, as always, drunken and entirely uninterested. Guillermo is thankful, at least, for one less hand at his throat (and a couple less, too, if he can get Laszlo to call Nadja off.) Either way, he is only here because Nandor asked him to be, and likewise, so is Laszlo.
“Right. What does the old bastard want, then?” Laszlo wipes his hands on his pants and frowns, then goes back to fussing with his nails.
“I...don’t know, actually, he just asked to meet here.”
“Fucking brilliant.” Laszlo groans, and flops back onto the sofa. “House meeting?”
“Maybe.” Guillermo hesitates. “Well, no, he wouldn’t ask me to be here.”
“Hm.” The vampire mulls this over, then shifts until his legs are curled and propped up on the couch along with him. “Then I’m taking a nap.”
He sighs and nods, then watches Laszlo nod off. It’s at least better than any other cure for boredom Laszlo could’ve produced in the meantime, likely involving his right hand and something that would haunt Guillermo and take a thousand and one showers to feel clean of. “Alrighty.” He whispers to himself, and then settles into an armchair and waits for Nandor.
***
Nandor does not come. Not after an hour, not after two. Not after he’s counted up from one and down from one hundred and into the negatives, or when he’s exhausted the braindead appeal of scrolling through his rarely used socials.
He’s beginning to get very angry. If this was some sort of ploy to avoid Guillermo and be sure that he knows it, or to torture him with small talk with Laszlo for any short number of minutes, he is going to quit and return to Bath & Bodyworks, or Subway, or Macy’s, or any other hundred droning jobs he’d had a decade ago, with worse bosses and better pay. Any pay.
But then he thinks of Nandor’s strong, sure hands, and he hears the thank you, knows the friend, and his fist unclenches. He waits another half hour. Nandor throws the door open.
“Hello! I hope I am not interr-” Nandor walks in beaming, and his face falls upon his scanning the room, eyes landing on the snoring lump of Laszlo and blanket. “Oh.”
Guillermo offers a sorry, awkward little wave. Nandor’s frown remains unchanged. It’s a dance they know the steps of.
“What did you need?” He asks, and tries to lace some old part of himself into it. The Guillermo from months ago, who was meek and eager to please and desperate to be needed. “You asked for me?”
The crease in Nandor’s brow only tightens. “It does not matter. I’m dealing with it myself.”
Guillermo feels something harden in his stomach, leaden and heavy. “Master…”
He stands and steps closer, sees the disappointment in the sink of Nandor’s shoulders. “Master, can I help?”
Nandor shakes his head, and brushes away the hand Guillermo hadn’t realized he’d set gently at the base of his neck. “No. No, Guillermo. Two people can not be one winged man. It’s not your part, anyway.”
“...What?” He just sort of blinks for a second, one of the rare moments that Nandor manages to completely and utterly perplex him.
Nandor chances a look at Laszlo’s unconscious body, glancing back and forth with obvious urgency. He lowers his voice to a hush, so that Guillermo has to lean in his ear. “Laszlo eh- did me a solid. He talked to my...ex...Meg for me. She told me he talked about you. He was- into you.”
Guillermo is going to break something. He is going to shatter something into a million little pieces. Meg, maybe. His own fist on the wall. That vase in the corner Colin Robinson loves to drone on about. He is going to break something beyond repair, and then he’s going to go outside and scream until his throat aches, and then he’s going to have a cry and a lie down. Finally, choked, he manages: “Wingman, Master. Not winged man.”
“Wuzzat?” Laszlo stirs to life on the couch, bolting upright with his eyes half open.
“Nothing.” Guillermo levels Nandor with a stern gaze, never breaking it as he addresses the vampire behind him. “Go back to sleep.”
Laszlo shrugs and obeys happily, and Guillermo would be inordinately pleased with this if he weren’t so busy trying not to shake Nandor back and forth by the shoulders until his brain (or lack thereof) turns to slosh.
“Laszlo is not-” He coughs into his fist. “ into me.”
“Meg said so!” Nandor insists, voice a now much harsher, spit-out whisper.
“Well Meg is wrong!” His bandaged finger jabs itself into Nandor’s chest, seemingly of its own accord. “If she knew everything, she’d be a matchmaker, not a clerk at a gym!”
Nandor sucks in a sharp breath, and Guillermo waits for his finger to be swatted away, maybe splintered for his blatant disrespect. “...I didn’t say where she worked, Guillermo.”
The color drains from his face, like Nandor had sucked all the blood and life right out of him. He drops his finger and nudges past the mass that is Nandor to creak the door open. “Lucky guess.”
***
If Nandor wasn’t avoiding him before, he is now.
When Guillermo enters a room, he can hear heavy footsteps in quick succession, or spot the faint red smoke accompanied by the muffled shriek of a bat. When he sits by Nandor’s coffin, it is left empty and waiting. When he paces around the house with quiet whispers of Master?, he is left unanswered until he nearly wants to cry with it. But it’s far from the first time Nandor has fallen back on such a childish form of punishment, and so he patiently waits it out. Which consists mostly of tapping his feet and tugging his hair.
“Young Gizmo!”
Guillermo is caught between sighing heavy with relief at being acknowledged, and sighing heavier with frustration at the idea of talking to Laszlo. He comes when called, regardless. He always does.
“Gizmo, fetch me my drink.” Laszlo is half dangling off the couch, pointing vaguely in the direction of a glass of scotch by the windowsill. It is about four feet away. When it takes him too long to get moving, Laszlo repeats the order with a wave of his hand, and he supposes it’s meant to hypnotize him. Guillermo is going to snap, one of these days.
Once his drink is in hand, Laszlo lifts and tilts it in cheers, then immediately downs it. Guillermo doesn’t know how much alcohol a vampire needs to be tipsy, but he figures Laszlo drinks scotch like water, so it doesn’t matter much anyway. “Pour yourself one, if you like.”
Guillermo pauses, staring wide-eyed at Laszlo like the earth beneath his feet has shifted, like Laszlo has grown a second, kinder head. Then he nods and finds his way to the minibar before Laszlo changes his mind. He’s very practiced in readying drinks. He knows how Laszlo likes his brandy, knows the right balance of vodka and cranberry in Nadja’s glass, Colin Robinson’s staunch insistence on his own microbrews, and how Nandor will drink nothing between moonshine and the sweetest, fruitiest cocktails. He’s not quite used to mixing drinks for himself. He settles on the bottle of wine tucked away at the back of the cart, and nearly fumbles the wine glass as he grabs it by the stem.
“Oh- What are you doing?” Laszlo chuckles, and Guillermo freezes, terrified for a moment that he’d misunderstood, that he wasn’t allowed this one little thing after all. That he was really meant to march it over to Nadja, or to look Laszlo in the eye as he swipes it from him and downs it in one swallow. “You’re holding it wrong.”
He lets out a breath he hadn’t known he was holding, and tries to readjust his fingers on the stem of the glass. After a beat or two, Laszlo sighs and forces himself up. He walks slowly over, and then he moves Guillermo’s hand himself, until it’s cupping the base of the glass. “Like this.”
“Mama always said to pinch-”
“Your mother is inexperienced, surely.”
Guillermo bites his tongue. And then he nods, and takes a slow sip, hand loosely fitted the way he’d instructed. He feels Laszlo watching him with approval.
When Laszlo slinks away, empty glass of scotch left dirtied on the coffee table, Guillermo feels a sudden presence behind him. “See? Into you.”
He does not need to turn to know that it’s Nandor.
A decade ago, if you asked Guillermo if he believed in God, (despite his mother’s devout catholicism) he would’ve told you he wasn’t sure. After the effect the cross, holy water, any Godly word has upon the little family he’s cultivated, he might’ve told you he’s a little less skeptical. Now, he is resoundingly sure that God exists. God exists, and He hates Guillermo.
***
After deciphering that Nandor’s motivations for avoidance were to force he and Laszlo into a room together, Guillermo stays stubbornly at his side; even when Nandor looks askance and murmurs something about being right back, or needing to get something, battled defiantly by Guillermo with an I’ll come with you, Master! or I’ll get it for you. He is met, always, with a look of exasperation that puffs his chest with pride. He’s winning.
By the end of the week, Nandor seems to have half given up on his efforts. He’ll nudge Laszlo every now and then, wink and whisper something to him, but is met with confusion and disgust that puts Guillermo safely at ease. But distantly he is reminded that he never feels so simultaneously familiar and unsure of himself as when he is around Nandor, predictable in his unpredictability.
The next stunt he pulls is a week later.
Laszlo walks over to him, grabs his face, and kisses him square on the lips. It’s close-mouthed, but still with the ever present nip of his fangs, and it makes him feel queasy and unclean. Guillermo shoves him off and yelps. “What the fuck!”
“Nope! Didn’t feel a thing.” Laszlo announces to the air, and then turns and walks away.
Guillermo half considers launching a stake at his back, but instead turns his quivering hands to ball them in the cloak of who he knows is just behind him, now, surely about to rattle off something about Laszlo’s nerves getting the best of him. “Stop it! Stop it, stop it, stop it!” Each accompanied by a slamming of his fists into Nandor’s still chest.
“Guillermo! What-”
“Laszlo is not into me!”
“Now, Guillermo, it’s just that Laszlo isn’t as good at showing it as we are! Meg told me herself, Laszlo said-”
“Laszlo didn’t say that!” Guillermo’s breathing is labored, angry and hot as he watches Nandor’s brow furrow. “He’s not the one who spoke to her.”
“Then who-”
“Oh my god- I did! You’re so…”
Nandor sits in confusion for a moment, then laughs. “Guillermo, you are into yourself?”
Oh my god. Oh my god. Guillermo is going to erupt like a long overdue volcano, going to tear the house and Nandor and everything else apart like a sudden, frenzied hurricane. He can feel his blood boiling, making his face run red and hot, making the fists still weakly, uselessly thudding against Nandor’s chest molten compared to the fifty below skin of his long-dead master. It is everything, now, to have the power, the assurance, to have Nandor reduced to ash in his hands in thirty seconds flat and choose not to. It is everything, now, to know he couldn’t if he tried. His hands would not let him.
“No, Master.” His fists unravel and fall, defeated. He thunks his forehead into Nandor’s chest, feels him still and knows that Nandor’s hands are hovering, unsure of where is safe to land. “You.”
He can’t see Nandor’s face, but he can feel the realization in the sharp intake of breath he doesn’t need, in the weight of his hands settling on Guillermo’s shoulders.
Nandor’s hand slides from his shoulder to his chin, tilts Guillermo’s face to meet his eye. He smiles, soft and reassuring, and Guillermo is knocked quiet and breathless.
The fangs are still there, when Nandor kisses him, just as Laszlo’s had been. But he’s careful with them, withholding this from him even now. Somehow, it is not quite as good as the thank you. He supposes they’re one in the same.
Guillermo knows how Nandor likes his drinks, what fur and cape are his favorites, which of Nadja’s records he will groan at, and which he will smile and loudly sing along to. He knows how to brush the tangles from his hair, how he likes his baths at night, that he asks him to stay some nights, beside his coffin, because the mortal man somewhere burrowed inside of him still harbors acute claustrophobia. He knows his measurements exactly, he knows the planes and dips of his skin memorized by sight alone, he knows anything and everything there is to know about Nandor. And yet he adds one little, secret thing: Nandor kisses like he does anything else. Relentlessly, and aided by Guillermo.