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i. After Benjy, Nandor had taken a much-needed break from familiars.
This Guillermo, his new familiar, was very different from Benjy. He was quieter, more docile, less prone to audibly voicing his desires to be a vampire. He was obedient too, though there was a flash of stubbornness and witty sarcasm that Nandor would never admit to enjoying in the little man.
Nandor was picky when it came to familiars. Most did not last long—either from choice, once the vampire’s overbearing nature became too much, or when they got too attached to him and Nandor felt it necessary to cut ties lest they think themselves as anything more than a familiar. Benjy had been an odd mix of both—forgetting his place as a familiar, forgetting that Nandor had lived centuries without him and would do so again long after his bones turned to dust, forgetting that it was Nandor’s choice when and if he turned him, and not something that was ever negotiable.
Nandor was certain that this time would be different. He would keep his distance, stay aloof, keep himself from letting his familiar get too familiar.
Unfortunately, that was already proving to be a problem--but not for the same reasons Nandor had to get rid of Benjy.
Looking at Guillermo’s soft smile, the candlelight casting his face half in shadow, Nandor feels strangely drawn to him. An unusual feeling since he was the one that usually did the enthralling and enticing. It had only been, what, a handful of days? And here Nandor already was, unexpectedly looking forward to every night when he woke and Guillermo was there to greet him.
Guillermo offers a hand. Nandor draws closer on instinct, but pauses, dark brows knitting together in confusion.
The crypt feels warmer somehow now that he has a human standing within his personal space. There is a warmth to the living that is lost when one becomes a vampire and, secretly, Nandor wonders if part of the appeal of drinking blood is that it makes the undead warm, if only for a few blissful moments.
Nandor stares at the upturned palm, at the faint network of veins at the surface of his wrist. He resists the urge to clamp down—either with his hand or his teeth—and instead folds his arms over his chest.
Guillermo had helped him in and out of his coffin for the past week, dragging the little wooden step ladder into his crypt so he could use it to disembark and enter his coffin. But Guillermo had veered off script for some reason, his little human heart beating at a rapid, rabbit-quick pace.
“Ready for coffin, Master?” Guillermo asks, hesitant, looking moments away from retracting his hand.
Nandor eyes him with a newfound glint of interest. Ah, Nandor thinks, he must still be scared of me. That won’t do.
Wordlessly, Nandor takes his hand, tempering his own strength as he lets Guillermo lead him up the steps and into his coffin. Guillermo’s hold is firm but gentle and far from clammy like he expected it to be. It’s surprisingly nice getting to hold his hand. It’s grounding, in some bizarre, unfamiliar way. A fleeting, irrational thought--that this human could be the anchor he’d been searching for ever since he became a vampire and his life had been tossed into the tumultuous seas of immortality--flickers to the forefront of his mind. Nandor swats it away as if it is merely a buzzing fly in his ear and not a testament to just how quickly he was growing attached to his familiar.
It was clearly time for him to go to sleep if he was having silly thoughts like this.
“Goodnight, Guillermo,” Nandor murmurs, listening to the human’s heart croon its steadfast song.
“Goodnight, Master,” Guillermo replies, giving another soft smile that makes something in Nandor’s stomach flop unsteadily at the sight.
In the quiet, private dark of his coffin, once Guillermo has gone back to his sad little room under the stairs, Nandor curses to himself.
“Shit.”
ii. Nandor watches silently from the threshold as Guillermo struggles to dust the top of the bookshelf, straining even with the stepladder balanced underneath him.
He’s still humming to himself, bobbing his head rhythmically to whatever music he’s listening to with his headphones, and, somehow, it’s endearing. It’s also highly inappropriate since Guillermo isn’t paid to be singing (or paid at all), but Nandor lets it slide--this time. He could show mercy, every now and again. As long as he didn’t make it a habit, he tells himself, then everything would be fine.
“You are going to be hurting yourself—“ Nandor begins, entering the library just as Guillermo lets out a startled yelp.
There is a brief moment of chaos as the stepladder shakes, tilts, and ultimately collapses to the floor.
Reflexes that, truthfully, Nandor didn’t use much nowadays, stir from their slumber in record time. He is able to keep Guillermo from falling to the floor, arms lacing snugly around the human’s waist as he catches him against the broad expanse of his chest. He waits until Guillermo is steady on his feet before pulling away just enough to make eye contact with him.
Whatever stern reproach he had prepared dies on his tongue at his familiar’s downcast expression. Fucking guy, he thinks, making me experience an emotion that is not the emotion I want to be currently experiencing.
Nandor gently slips the headphones from his ears, fingers brushing over the soft hollow of his throat before he has a chance to think of doing otherwise. “For now on, I will hold you when you do these tasks. It would be very inconveniencing for me if you fall and hurt your frail human body. You would be of no use to me for ages--humans take so long to heal.”
Guillermo stares, lips parted slightly. It is then that Nandor realizes he still has one hand pressed to the warm flesh of his hip. He is much too close—and surely this wasn’t how other vampires treated their familiars, his ancient mind panics, unsure if this was even how vampires treated their occasional human friend—but Nandor is unable to pull away any faster than at a seemingly glacial pace.
He tries not to think too hard as to why Guillermo sways forward with him, why his familiar seemingly trusted him far more than he rationally knew he deserved. Nandor clears his throat and steps back, finally, hoping his expression looks as severe and imposing as he wanted it to be.
Guillermo smiles, but it doesn’t quite reach his eyes. Nandor does not know when he started to pay so much attention to Guillermo’s face. It is both infuriating and confusing.
“Well, you could always just eat me,” Guillermo jokes in his usual self-deprecating way. “I’m sure you’ve been tempted.”
Nandor opens his mouth in a fanged grimace, offended. “No, I haven’t! I wouldn’t!”
Well, it’s a bit of a lie—he had been very interested in eating Guillermo for the first few weeks. Especially when Guillermo had singed the end of one of his fancy capes with the steam iron. But it had been a long time since those days and Nandor really preferred eating people he didn’t know.
Guillermo’s smile brightens.
Nandor straightens up and puffs out his chest. There it was, then. He had made Guillermo happy again. The brief flicker of a reciprocating grin spreads across his face before he can help it.
“Anyway,” Nandor begins, clearing his throat. He sweeps his hand out from underneath his cape dramatically. “I wish to retire to my coffin early.”
“Of course.”
After that night, Nandor takes every opportunity to help Guillermo whenever his duties require an extra lift. He does not think about how there is a perfectly good ladder out in the tool shed that could be used by Guillermo. How it is unnecessary for him to be helping his own familiar with chores to begin with.
He definitely doesn’t acknowledge the knowing looks in Laszlo and Nadja’s eyes, not when it already feels like his heart is on a platter for all to see.
Guillermo, fortunately, seems completely unaware of just how close Nandor has come to unraveling at the seams.
iii. There is very obviously blood on Guillermo’s hands.
That in itself is not too surprising. After all, Guillermo was a familiar and it was a familiar’s duty to get rid of the bodies. Nandor had even taken to helping Guillermo—out of the kindness of his own undead heart and definitely not because the stench of decay was gross and overpowered Guillermo’s naturally pleasing scent—with body disposal every now and again. Once a month, at least. Or at least he tried to remember to do so every month.
Time was a fickle thing for vampires and Nandor was no exception to the rule. It ebbed and flowed like the tide, a limitless shoreline that he paced up and down, restless, stuck somewhere between the sands of the past and the oceans of an unfamiliar future. At times, Nandor did not experience life in a single, linear line, but rather as a constellation of memories strung together by singular blazing points of light. These memories were like beacons in the dark, experiences he could recall even at the edge of slumber when his mind was at its most vulnerable.
Guillermo had woken him through the worst of his nightmares, memories of rot-strewn breath fanning at his throat, teeth cutting into sweat-soaked skin, the horrible quiet afterwards when his body no longer needed oxygen or a heartbeat to exist.
He didn’t have nightmares too often nowadays, his mind soothed with the knowledge that Guillermo was near.
Nandor eyes the human’s clearly blood-stained attire yet again. There is a strange scent to it, one that Nandor can’t quite place. Like the smell of a hospital’s sick ward beneath the layers of lemon-scented disinfectant. It smells wrong. Almost inhuman, really.
But Nandor brushes it off as easily as he brushes off every other infraction Guillermo has made in his time as a familiar.
Why would Guillermo be smelling of vampire blood? It didn’t make sense. And, the rusted cogs of his strategist mind reasons, what good did it do for Guillermo to go about killing random vampires when he wanted so badly to be a vampire himself?
Pleased with his very logical and definitely not desperate conclusion, Nandor is eager to go through his usual nightly routine. He is still somewhat vexed that Guillermo was nowhere to be found when he was in the grips of Bloody Mary’s curse, but there is something in his familiar’s tired smile that has him stopping short.
Settling into his coffin, Nandor asks Guillermo to stay until he falls asleep.
Ever dutiful, Guillermo obliges, and Nandor reaches out, wanting to touch Guillermo’s hand. To remind himself that his familiar was here and that he was not in danger and that he could drift off into a peaceful slumber. He stops himself when he realizes that there are cuts on Guillermo’s knuckles.
The sweet smell of Guillermo’s blood calls to him as it always does, but Nandor merely grits his teeth into an awkward smile, letting the coffin lid fall like a guillotine between them.
Nandor does not let himself linger on the sinking, dreadful feeling in the pit of his stomach. The feeling that he is finally seeing Guillermo for who he truly was.
iv. Things are not the same after the theatre.
To begin with, Guillermo is pissed as shit at him for not knowing his last name.
Nandor wants to prove that this social faux pas means nothing, that he still could point out Guillermo in any crowd, in any place, at any time, prove that he could recognize him solely by the flutter of his heart or the sound of his laugh or the shape of his smile. But words, as they usually do, fail him entirely.
“Well you don’t even know my surname either,” Nandor says once they cross the threshold to his crypt, the dawn unfurling dangerously fast over the horizon.
It is, very obviously, the wrong thing to say.
Guillermo looks at him in a way that makes Nandor’s blood run cold. Ice creeps up his spine, freezing him in place as Guillermo stalks closer. An ancient spark of a memory, of locking eyes with an enemy soldier on the battlefield, sweeps over him. He’s seen this expression before, countless times, but never did he think his familiar—ex-familiar, he reminds himself bitterly—would look at him like that. Like he was prepared to kill him. Like he wanted to kill him.
Back when he was a warlord, such a look would be met with a similar glare of disdain. But this is Guillermo, not some random enemy soldier, and Nandor doubts he’d be able to so much as lift a finger against him.
Like a passing shadow, the once icy veneer melts into a familiar tiredness. Guillermo’s shoulders slump, defeated. “I can’t stay here,” he says, turning to leave the crypt, and Nandor feels something in his chest painfully constrict.
“Then I’ll go where you go.” Please, he thinks, worrying his bottom lip with the tip of his fang.
This somehow rouses a chuckle from Guillermo, but it’s still tinged with an unfamiliar darkness. “I don’t think you’ll like where I’m going.”
“Is it Delaware?” Nandor asks, wrinkling his nose. “I do not like to travel much nowadays. It’s so inconveniencing, what with having to transport my coffin, finding new hunting grounds, and you know, other vampire things. But I would do it—“
“Not Delaware,” Guillermo finally interrupts. “I made some friends. Vampire hunter friends. I… I think I might go and see them.”
This time, when Guillermo leaves, Nandor does not try to stop him.
He watches him go, Guillermo’s familiar outline drifting out of his line of sight. Nandor flexes his hand, taking in an unnecessary, deep breath. The subtle trembling of his fingers does not dissipate—nor does the feeling that he’s, once again, watching Guillermo walk out of his life. It’s as close to a prayer as he can manage without the taste of brimstone crowding his throat, this desire for Guillermo to return, if only to hold his hand one last time.
v. Nandor wants intimacy—wants to let the battlements of his heart crumble, let the rusted armor of an ancient, powerful warlord fall at his feet.
He wants someone to see him, understand him, know him as intimately as a river knows the sea. To know him as blood knows its way to the heart. But vulnerability is a language he hasn’t spoken for centuries and he’s always been shit at talking about his feelings to begin with.
Fortunately, Guillermo holds a seemingly infinite amount of patience wherever Nandor’s concerned.
Nandor finds himself grabbing Guillermo’s shoulders before his mind has the wherewithal to remind him that Guillermo is currently holding a stake. He is mildly surprised to see that despite the unfortunately not-so-sexy tension between them, Guillermo drops the stake into one of his handy little utility pouches.
“I do not like you,” Nandor begins, cringing immediately.
Guillermo narrows his eyes, but does not immediately pull away.
“You make me feel things I do not like feeling,” Nandor tries again. Fucking shit!
“Okay, you know what? Fuck you,” Guillermo replies, annoyed. He tries to wiggle out of the vampire’s grasp.
Nandor panics. He releases Guillermo’s shoulders only to snatch up Guillermo’s hands in a death grip.
“Ouch!” Guillermo hisses, unable to pull his hands away. “What the Hell is your problem, Nandor?”
“You! You are my problem!” Nandor growls. “Do you know how inconveniencing it is for me to have fallen in love with a vampire slayer?”
It is nowhere near what Nandor had wanted to say, and he’s tempted to try and erase Guillermo’s memory again, because, really, emotional vulnerability made him nauseous, but the thought flies away the moment Guillermo squeezes his hand.
Nandor stares wordlessly at Guillermo’s face, unable to hide his slack-jawed surprise.
“Well, it’s pretty inconveniencing for a vampire slayer to fall in love with a vampire too, you know,” Guillermo says, lips slowly pulling into a smile.
Nandor gives his own lopsided grin, fangs poking against his bottom lip.
+1 “Eughh,” Colin Robinson says with a grimace, jabbing a thumb over his shoulder.
The camera pans to Nandor and Guillermo. They were sitting in a pair of matching armchairs in the hallway, seemingly oblivious to both the energy vampire and the documentary crew.
Nandor was reading an old, faded tome, the title Parerga and Paralipomena barely visible on the fraying spine. Reflexively, he reached one arm over the armrest, fingers brushing rhythmically against Guillermo’s knuckles. Guillermo, meanwhile, was smiling softly to himself, pencil gliding over the sketchbook in his lap, free hand knocking against Nandor’s fingers until his pinky finger eventually looped snugly around Nandor’s.
“I--I think I’m gonna be sick,” the energy vampire mutters, face paling. “I wish they’d just aggressively make out like Laszlo and Nadja. That shit’s easier to deal with than whatever that is.” He clamps his hand over his mouth a moment later, shoving past the camera man and into the downstairs bathroom.
As soon as the lock clicked, Nandor and Guillermo turned to the cameras in-sync, grins scarily similar. Their pinky fingers were still looped together as they addressed the documentary crew.
“We are just giving Colin Robinson a taste of his own herbs,” Nandor says smugly, immediately swiveling towards Guillermo expectantly.
“A taste of his own medicine,” Guillermo corrects sweetly, intertwining their fingers to bring Nandor’s hand up to his face. He gives a quick peck to the vampire’s knuckles with practiced ease.
Nandor’s expression softens, dark eyes lidded with obvious adoration. “Yes… what Guillermo said.”
**
"The hedgehog's dilemma is a metaphor about the challenges of human intimacy. It describes a situation in which a group of hedgehogs seek to move close to one another to share heat during cold weather. They must remain apart, however, as they cannot avoid hurting one another with their sharp spines. Though they all share the intention of a close reciprocal relationship, this may not occur, for reasons they cannot avoid."