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Everything hurts.
His whole body is sore and aching, but especially in his neck, his jaw. His leg, too. It’s propped up on a pillow at the foot of the hospital bed, but it doesn’t really do much. Guillermo has spent the last handful of days in and out of restless sleep, but at least catching up on the very little downtime his job allows. They’ve got him so hopped up on painkillers he’s delirious, and what must be the hours he spends awake feel like flashes, like blinking rapidly and trying to see the shapes between the black.
In his clearest moments, he sees his mother cradling his hand at his bedside, rubbing her thumb over it in gentle, soothing circles. The other is clutched tightly around the cross at her neck. “Ay, mijo,” she whispers, and his jaw is still too tight to say anything in return. “pobrecito…”
She brings him food. The doctors have had to reiterate several times that the damage to his jaw means he’ll be eating mostly liquids, power shakes and stuff. Or soft things he won’t have to chew, like pudding. Yogurt, sometimes. The cafeteria jello. He wants the quesabirria she brought in one of her old, beat-up tupperwares. He has to settle for sipping the stew. It’s miserable.
Anyway, it’s admittedly nice to be looked after for once. Fussed over, cooed at. When it’s not his mother whispering concerns into his hairline, it’s the nurses readjusting his pillows for him or smiling with sympathy when they change the IV every couple days. And he’s certainly not getting any pity from the vampires, of which only Nandor makes any frequent appearance, mostly just to ask when he’ll be coming back and then huffing impatiently when the doctors tell him they’d be lucky if he was out in a week. He had flatlined several times, after all (no thanks to Laszlo.) Nandor only grumbles, but Guillermo laughs under his breath. He can hear it. Fucking guy...
“Guillermo,” Nandor hisses, inches from his face, “get well soon.” And it does not feel like the sweet reassurances of the card on his bedside (from his cousins in Maine.) It feels like an order.
Colin Robinson visits him every now and then, too. Guillermo can tell by the grin on his face and the shine in his eyes that he enjoys the hospital more than anyone else. There is a palpable air of pain and misery, and Guillermo’s muffled, frustrated attempts at communication are maybe enough to last him a lifetime. So Colin Robinson does not bring him anything, rather, he drops by whenever he’s hungry.
On a particularly lucid day, his mother spoonfeeds him key lime pie yogurt and berates him for never visiting anymore. It’s long deserved, and he takes it the way he doesn’t when she starts it over the phone, when he can tell her his boss is calling him and hang up to hold his head in his hands and miss her terribly. He’s getting older as quick and bitter as blackberries, and some small part of him wishes he had waited a little longer before he left home. Wishes he had let himself be a son, be held and loved, and not whatever mindless, spineless caretaker he’s taken the shape of. But even at his mother’s house there is always something to be done. He supposes that’s what makes him such a good familiar. He was already used to taking care of someone. He can’t recall the turning point of his life, when he made the conscious decision to always, always put himself last. But somewhere, that line had been drawn. In sand and permanent marker and chiseled into great stone tablets like a prophecy. But for now, his sluggish hands and broken bones keep him from putting anyone anywhere at all. He eats key lime pie yogurt. He leans into her hand and hums apologies.
On a much less lucid night, Nandor sits at the end of his bed and stares at him. He knows this, even in the dark, because he could sniff out Nandor’s presence from across a room. And also, his eyes sort of glint.
“Guillermo,” he whispers, and pokes at his injured foot until he winces and wrenches his head to nod, making a little noncommittal sound of acknowledgement. “I am sorry that I dropped you, but you have to stop now.”
“Mmm?” Guillermo says, unhelpfully, and hopes it conveys his confusion.
“That! The...that. I understand you are angry. That is okay.” Nandor sighs, and Guillermo feels the bed creak as he shifts. “But you must talk to me. Stop pretending and come home. I am asking you as your...friend.”
After a beat or two, Nandor shifts again, uncomfortably. It jostles Guillermo’s leg. “That still doesn’t sound right- I’m going to try it again.” As his eyes adjust to the darkness, he watches as Nandor waves his hand in an attempt at hypnotism that has long since stopped affecting him. “Guillermo, I order you as your master to come home at once!”
Guillermo sighs. He nudges at Nandor with the foot closest to him, offering him a weak, tired smile. Then he shakes his head, and slips back into sleep.
***
When he does eventually return, it’s with a crutch. His arm is out of the sling, at least, but the cast will be on his leg for another week or so more. Nandor is standing in the doorway when he reaches it, bouncing on his heels.
“Guillermo,” he says, sighing, like he’s water in the desert. “you’re back.”
“I am, Master-”
“You talk!” Nandor grins, and juts his head until Guillermo comes inside, slowly, and with all the grace and ease of a newborn fawn. Nandor takes the crutch from under his arm and he staggers. “And you brought a...stick!” Nandor gives the cameramen one of his unsubtly grimacing smiles. “How thoughtful.”
“It’s a crutch, Master. For my leg.” He half-glares up at him, gripping the banister for dear life. “I need it to walk.”
“Oh.” He hands it back to him carelessly, not waiting for Guillermo to take it before it falls to the floor. “Of course.”
It takes Guillermo about two minutes to collect the crutch again, a series of catching himself as he attempts to crouch. He keeps folding, like amatuer origami. Nandor watches, unimpressed. When he’s righted himself, Nandor gives him a once over. “Take it easy, Guillermo.” After a pause of hesitation: “Not too easy. We are behind on the laundry.”
He folds the clothes. He washes and dries them, some by hand and then strung up. He takes out the near endless piles of trash, and puts out all the curtainside candles that will one day be the end of him, he’s sure of it. He sets Nandor to sleep. He promises to be there when he wakes.
When the house is bright and silent and his, he goes downtown for pasta, because he had dearly missed real, chewable food. The chicken parmesan is by no means fantastic, but to his unpracticed jaw and watering mouth, it is good enough to ask for on his deathbed. He goes for a walk in a park, and then sits on a bench in a park, because the crutch takes a lot out of him and he only has the walk to the street to catch a taxi left in him. On the drive back, he stares out the window, pleased to see living, breathing people with beating, pumping hearts, and tries to find himself in the shape of their glasses or the hitch in their step. He makes little stories for the ones that catch his eye: he’s off to work a job he hates, but he’d had a lovely breakfast with his family before he caught the metro, or she looks pretty lonely, but two blocks away, she’ll bump into a stranger and they’ll fall madly in love. (He tries to find himself in those, too.)
He comes home, he takes his medicine, he stares at the kitchen tiles and wishes he knew how to cook. But there would be no time, anyway, to make a meal for himself, and if he could force his hands to roll out dough or tie up a roast, he suspects it would only taste as good as the approving nods of those he serves it to. There is no one in this house to cook for, and so he does not cook.
It is remarkably difficult to dispose of a body with a broken leg.
It is remarkably difficult to climb several sets of extravagant staircases with a broken leg.
It is remarkably difficult to comfortably stuff yourself into a bed in a closet with a broken leg.
It is not very difficult at all to sit beside Nandor’s coffin, patiently waiting for him to rise and give him a purpose again. It is not difficult to trace the grooves on his coffin, or to pull back the curtains, or to stare at the moon and wonder how far he could fly to it once he’s been turned. There are many things that are really quite easy.
Understanding the ache in his chest when Nandor wakes and immediately scans the room to find him is not one of them. No more comprehensible is the urge to touch when his master smiles at the sight of him, and murmurs, so as not to be heard by any prying ears, (read: Nadja) “Hello.”
Guillermo laughs at the conspiratorial tone, and whispers back a secret little “hi.”
Nandor’s eyes stay crinkled at the ends, smile lines on his cheeks, and Guillermo is doing it again. Staring, pleased. Finding himself.