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It always begins like this: Nandor, in the dark, surrounded by the irritating luxury of his plush fur coffin lining, his familiar nowhere to be found as he seethes about the human’s rank incompetence and pretends it is beneath him to push open his coffin lid himself.
(That is a lie, of course. Nandor has no leverage from this completely inert angle and no, he hasn’t been working out his core in some five-odd centuries because his vampire body is the body of a god.)
(How dare you ask him to put that to the test.)
“Guillermo!” Nandor hollers through the coffin lid. He curls his fist at his side. He is quite capable of pounding on the underside of the lid if he wished. He can pound on it. After all, he is the master of pounding. Guillermo should be grateful, really, that Nandor is such a generous employer, that he will refrain from frightening the human so with such rattling noises.
“Guillermo!” Nandor tries again. “Guillermoooo!”
As the seconds bleed on and it becomes increasingly obvious to him that his familiar’s familiarity has taken a turn for the worse--because surely there can be no other explanation for the human’s absence except his own impudence--Nandor begins to come to terms with the fact that the flexing capacity of his muscles will, in fact, have to be put to the test today.
“Fucking guy,” he mutters at the ornate and highly unnecessary carvings on the underside of the lid above him, and he lays his palms against the oiled wood and heaves.
(This is the point at which Lenore, who is, regretfully, the one in charge of editing, would take one look at the seven-minute stretch of raw footage of Nandor’s coffin shaking from side to side and show mercy by slivering it into jump cuts to get to the part where Nandor actually stumbles out with about ten percent of his previous dignity.)
Nandor rights himself and straightens out his sleeping tunic. How rude of Guillermo, who knows that his master ought not to be perturbed with the task of unlacing his shirt and sleeping trousers, when the human’s fingers are much more fit for such a menial task. He bares his teeth in a small growl and glances about his crypt, as if by giving it a perfunctory sweep he might discover his familiar somehow in the room when said familiar has never been known to be deaf or blind.
He sets out down the hallway, then, intent on tracking down the errant familiar for the purposes of discipline. He can hear vague jiggling and squeaking sounds from Nadja and Laszlo’s crypt--vague, he repeats to himself, since the alternative would be too averse to his early evening appetite if he were to seriously consider it--and as usual, there is no sign of Colin Robinson. The energy vampire has been taking to breaking his routine as of late, riding the bus route twice over before actually coming home, just for the precious wave of exasperation that he absorbs from the bus driver when he’s the only one left in the back row.
“Guillermo!” Nandor tries again. “Guillermo! I have been giving you many chances and you do not answer me. Your insolence has now officially broken the demerit system and we will be needing a new one!”
Just then his supernatural hearing catches the faintest of thumps from somewhere overhead. He pauses, craning his neck upward and turning round in a circle, as though the ritual of his bewilderment would spontaneously bestow upon him the gift of seeing through wooden ceilings and layers of rat-bitten insulation.
“Guillermo!” he shouts, halfway to anger now. “You’d better not be doing what I think you are doing!”
He takes to the stairs and swings upward, his shirt sleeves billowing after him. If he trips at the top of the staircase because he just remembers then that he is well equipped with the faculties to fly rather than deigning to pedestrian means of movement, well--no one is there to see it.
If he is correct, the sound he heard issued from the bathroom nearest to the landing. He stalks over to it and yanks the door open. “Guiller--!”
He cuts himself off at the sight that greets him. Guillermo is nothing but a lump of corduroy-clad ass, bent at the belly over the edge of the clawfoot tub, his head presumably submerged in whatever chemicals there are that get the human familiars high nowadays.
And then a far worse thought fills Nandor’s mind, and he springs forward to seize Guillermo by the shoulders and jerk him backwards.
“Wha--Huh? What. Ow!” Guillermo comes awake flailing in his grip. He twists away from pure instinct and dives for the nearest object--the poor thirty-something-year-old plunger in the corner--and whirls on his knees to face Nandor, wooden end of the plunger pointed at the vampire’s chest like a weapon. Like a stake.
“Please, Guillermo, put away your asinine instruments of defiance!” Nandor knocks the end of the plunger away and bares his fangs at him.
“What? Oh--master.” Guillermo blinks. Only now does he seem to come back to himself from a reverie. The mist of unconsciousness lifts from his eyes. A beat later, he lowers his fist and his plunger back down to the tiled floor.
“What have you been doing?” Nandor demands. “I thought you were committing the suicide!”
Without waiting for a proper answer from his familiar, the vampire leans over to better inspect the contents of the tub. To his shock, it is not filled with water or chemicals as he first feared, but spattered, rather, with lurid patches of drying blood.
“That is not nearly enough blood to drown yourself,” Nandor scolds him. Honestly, this human. First the impudence, then the annoying stabby instincts, and now this sheer stupidity.
“Not enough blood to--Jesus.” Guillermo lifts a hand in apology at the swear. “Master, I wasn’t drowning myself. I was cleaning the blood.” He yawns and shrugs. “Or, well. I was trying to, at least.”
Nandor’s nose is still wrinkled from the stench of the aging blood. “What crawled up and died in here?”
“Laszlo and Nadja’s latest meal,” Guillermo sighs. “Don’t worry, I already took care of the actual body.”
“This is what I have been telling them. Half-finishing their meal! What kind of uncouth behaving is that! You humans don’t let your chickens run around headless and half-dead, do you? No? See what I mean!”
“Generally, chickens aren’t capable of...being half-dead once they have no head,” Guillermo corrects him half-heartedly.
Nandor replies with a moody hum. “And so why are you not answering my call, Guillermo? I have been summoning you for several minutes.”
“I don’t have access to the ether, master.”
“I was doing the regular summoning. By yelling.”
“Oh.” Guillermo lowers his gaze to his lap. “Sorry, master. I guess I didn’t hear you. I must have been sleeping.”
“All you do is sleep,” Nandor grumbles. “You are not just here to stow the virgins and sweep the blood, you know. You have a duty to be dressing and undressing me, and attending to my basic needs. And that coffin lid! Did you put something in my coffin lid?”
“No, master…”
“I told you not to be doing any alterations without my consent.”
“I didn’t, master.”
“Because you know, I know all about the light bulbs that you changed in the foyer.”
“They were--they were literally dead, master.”
“Alterations, I tell you.”
“...I prefer the term maintenance.”
“What do vampires need with light bulbs, anyway? We are creatures of the night,” Nandor expounds, with a wide and airy gesture of his hands.
“I need the light bulbs,” Guillermo says smally.
Nandor gives him a nonplussed look. “Well,” he says. “What have you been doing in the day hours if you have not been sleeping?”
“Oh, um.” Guillermo twists his hands together in his lap and sets aside his blood-soaked scrubber at the bottom of the tub. “This and that. Catching up with all my familiar duties that I haven’t been able to do during the night. Cleaning out the cells, burying the victims’ personal effects, contacting more virgins--”
“--Yes, good. Essential.”
“--Tracking missing persons’ cases. Mopping the floors, shopping for supplies, going to the DMV, updating the home and car insurance…”
“Yeesh. You should be reading me bedtime stories instead. You could put a hyena to sleep,” Nandor says with a dismissive wave of his hand.
Guillermo’s mouth presses into a thin line. “Sorry, master. I’ll...try to make sure I hear you next time.”
Nandor considers that with an empty look in his eyes for a moment. He is not an unreasonable master, after all. “Why are you cleaning after Nadja and Laszlo’s meal? You are my familiar.”
Guillermo chuckles bitterly. “Yeah, well. They don’t seem to be aware of that even after almost ten years. I mean. They didn’t say it explicitly, but Nadja did make it pretty clear it was either clean up this mess or watch out for my balls.”
Nandor grunts. He turns back to the disgusting blood-spattered tub with the same level of enthusiasm as any human faced with a kitchen sink full to the brim with week-old dishes and food waste.
He glances back at the scrubber. He points. “And this instrument is up to the task?”
Guillermo grabs the scrubber and demonstrates. “Yes, master.”
“Hand me another one.”
Guillermo balks. He stares.
“What, has Nadja already pulled your brains out through your ears?” Nandor beckons impatiently with his fingers. “Produce another instrument like that and hand it to me. It is not fitting for one of my station to go crawling about on hands and knees to look for one on my own.”
Guillermo seems to briefly consider pointing out that searching for an extra scrubber in the cupboard requires neither crawling nor loss of dignity, but thinks better of it and simply does as he is told.
The two set to work in silence, Guillermo too stunned by this turn of events to think of anything to throw out as small talk, Nandor too deep in his simmering over his plans to confront his vampire roommates for usurping the services of his personal human to clean up after their immature mess.
Finally Nandor clears his throat. He’s not making much headway with his end of the bloodied tub--patience never was his strong suit, and it’s not like he ever had to take care of his own blood-stained clothing back in Al Quolanudar, anyway--so he decides he will make more progress with pursuing a plan of action for Guillermo’s sleep problem.
Because sleepless and stumbling human familiars, as adorable as they may be when they are draped over the edge of the tub with their ass to the door, are a very grave inconvenience to a vampire like Nandor. A very important vampire with important vampire business to attend to.
“How long has this been a problem?” he asks.
“What, Nadja and Laszlo? As long as I’ve been living here.”
“No, Guillermo. The sleeping problem.”
“...Also just as long as I’ve been living here,” Guillermo mutters. “I...really haven’t slept in ages. Not properly.”
“This is what happens when you do not sleep in a coffin,” Nandor muses.
Guillermo gives him a funny look just then, but as per usual, the vampire misses it completely.
“Tonight, we shall solve the problem of your slumber,” Nandor says decisively. “We shall search for ways to make you fall asleep.”
Guillermo opens his mouth to correct Nandor, to point out that the problem isn’t that he can’t fall asleep, but that he simply doesn’t have the time to fall asleep, but he gives up with a spectacular sigh and a shrug.
“What, Guillermo?”
His familiar shakes his head.
“I am not telepathic, Guillermo. Well.” Nandor tilts his head from side to side. “I actually think I am rather gifted in telepathy, because that cousin of Blobbin the Beheader told me about two hundred and fifty-three years ago that I have the look about me of a mind-reader, but I have not seen that cousin in many years.” He pauses. “Nor have I seen Blobbin.”
Guillermo simply stares at him.
Coming back to himself and realizing how far he has diverged from the topic at the hand, Nandor shakes his head at him. “Fine. Don’t tell me and make me worry.”
That--of all things--makes Guillermo still, and then break into a ridiculous little smile. “You worry about me?”
“What? No. I worry about your laziness and your obstinacy, and how your laziness and obstinacy will slow down my very important vampire business.”
“Okay,” says Guillermo, but he’s still grinning unabashedly.
Nandor finishes his end of the tub (finishes by his standards, which are looking rather pink and under-bleached) and thrusts the scrubber back in Guillermo’s direction. “Finish this at once, and then meet me in the crypt. We must set to devising a plan immediately.”
And he flees the scene before the importunate human can tax him any further.
--
Predictably, Guillermo doesn’t come down for an hour. Grumbling, Nandor stomps back up the stairs and flings open the bathroom door.
He should be irritated, really--downright enraged--that his familiar dared to disobey his orders after he so explicitly commanded him to meet his master downstairs posthaste.
Instead, he is filled with an awful, disgusting swell of affection and amusement at the deja vu of finding Guillermo in almost the same position as before: hand slack with the scrubber fallen out, head cradled uncomfortably against the now spotless tub, bent over with his torso inside and his ass and legs hanging out in a kneeling position.
This time, Nandor cannot find it in him to bellow Guillermo’s name and startle the human awake. Instead, he steps inside, treading lightly, and before he can register quite what he’s doing, he tips Guillermo back and slips his arms gently under his familiar’s neck and knees. Then he stands and makes his way cautiously down the stairs, taking care not to creak too heavily on the ancient slabs of wood, and carries Guillermo all the way back to his crypt.
He almost considers plopping the human on the floor as soon as they arrive. Almost. But then he glances back down at Guillermo’s face, peaceful and de-aged by at least a decade for the first time, with his lips slightly parted and his breaths whistling softly through his teeth, and he decides he can be an accommodating master for a few minutes more.
(They really will have to devise a new system of discipline, though. It is apparent that the human lost all respect for the value of demerits long ago.)
Nandor steps over to the open coffin and lowers Guillermo into it. He pays heed not to knock Guillermo’s skull against any of the harder edges. He does not listen often to Nadja’s anatomically oriented speeches and musings, but he did learn from her some centuries ago that humans have such very fragile skulls. He remembers Nadja’s distinct disappointment in the fragility of said skulls as it became increasingly difficult to find an unblemished one from among their victims.
“Nandor,” Guillermo mumbles. The vampire freezes a moment. But the human doesn’t speak again--he simply shifts in his sleep and turns slightly to his side, snuggling into the rich fur lining of the coffin, and goes back to his deep sleepy breathing.
Blankets, Nandor thinks. He has observed from the classic movies like Twilight and Princess Diaries that humans have a propensity for wrapping themselves in those highly unnecessary blankets to induce a supposedly more peaceful slumber.
He seizes one of the fur throws from his settee and pulls it up over Guillermo’s soft, curved form until it covers his shoulders to his toes. Nandor steps back to admire his work. (Admire his work, yes, not Guillermo’s completely alluring shape underneath his cozy trappings.) He brushes his hand one last time, ever so lightly, over the surface of Guillermo’s cheek and through the warm fur of the throw. And then he reaches over and tugs the coffin lid toward him, not quite closed, but letting a sliver of the soft candlelight ambience of the crypt slip through the crack.
He should be annoyed that now his familiar will be napping the night away and Nandor will have to go looking for a meal himself. He really should.
Oh, well. Colin Robinson is always saying that moving about is good for the lymphatic systems, whatever those things might be. And Nandor has always enjoyed the thrill of a fresh hunt.
It will be good for working out his core again, he thinks. Yes, very good.