Chapter Text
When Nandor woke up, he found his nose to be pressed into something fleshy and full of hair. He grunted, and scrunched up his face, before realizing that his face was sandwiched into Laszlo’s armpit.
“Disgusting,” he muttered, picking up Laszlo’s arm and dropping it heavily over the other man’s chest. Laszlo didn’t stir; he was slack-jawed and sprawled out like a starfish on the bed, Nadja curled up against his other side.
For a moment, Nandor felt a spark of embarrassment for having fallen asleep next to them. Certainly, he was not usually invited. But when he moved to get up, something held him in place. It was nice, to feel the heavy weight of somebody in the bed beside him, against his arm – and he was the only one awake anyway, except for Colin Robinson, who was still sitting by his singing television. He did not need to stand up just yet. He laid back down on his back, staring up at the ceiling.
The hotel room was blue with twilight, the ceiling wrinkled like a bed sheet. Nandor felt strength slowly returning to his limbs; though he didn’t breathe, it felt like taking a full breath, getting a full day’s sleep. He felt the pressure of the bag of dirt at his knee that Guillermo had brought for him, all the way from Al Quolanudar, which meant, of course, that Guillermo had been to Al Quolanudar; this thought woke up the last part of his brain that was left in slumber, and he turned his head to the side, thinking, Guillermo.
On the other bed, where Colin sat at its foot, Guillermo was asleep. He was lying on his side, facing Nandor; a blanket was pulled around his shoulders and his head sunk into the pillow. He looked like he hadn’t intended to fall asleep; he was still dressed in his travelling clothes. He must be very tired. He travelled a very long way, Nandor thought. But there was something strange about seeing Guillermo like this, his face all soft and lax, his hair messy and curly around his face. Nandor realized he had never seen Guillermo sleeping before.
A strange little guy, Nandor thought, a strange man; he always had been, since the day they met, but especially recently, with all this talk of bodyguards and family. Why did Guillermo care? None of Nandor’s familiars had ever stuck around this long. Within a few years, they got tired of him, left, as they were meant to. Nandor had learned not to count on them, but Guillermo was different. Guillermo travelled the world for him, Nandor thought, remembering their great journey across the Atlantic, the treachery and terror; and suddenly he felt the urgent need to speak to Guillermo, to hear his voice, to know about his journey.
“Guillermo,” Nandor said in a low rumble. His voice barely made it past the brick wall of noise from the television, and Laszlo and Nadja hardly ruffled their feathers.
But Guillermo must have heard him, because his face crinkled up a little bit, and then he slowly blinked his eyes open, making a little sound in his throat. His eyes slowly focused on Nandor. They were very round and dark.
“Guillermo,” Nandor whispered, not sitting up. “You look very sleepy.”
Then Guillermo squinted. “Well, I was sleeping, so..."
“Oh,” Nandor said. Neither one got up. Guillermo yawned, bringing a hand up to rub his eyes and snuggling his head a little further into the pillow. It was a very endearing action and one that made Nandor feel very embarrassed.
“I wanted to ask you,” he said, finding his footing. “Did you see Al Quolanudar?”
Guillermo looked at him again. His face had that sort of pitying look he got sometimes, the one that made Nandor feel distantly ashamed. “Nandor. You remember that Al Quo -,”
“No, I know, I mean,” Nandor waved his hand in the air and used the foreign word: “Iran, or whatever they are calling it these days. You saw it? Did you meet its new ruler? Is it still a mighty nation?”
The pitying look didn’t leave. “I didn’t get very far in,” Guillermo said, hesitating. “Or at all, really. There’s… there’s still war, there, I guess.”
“So it has not changed too much,” Nandor said.
“Maybe not.”
But something had changed, that much was clear from Guillermo’s voice, something Nandor didn’t know, something that made his chest feel hollow. There was so much, he realized, that had happened during the centuries he had shut himself away; and not everything he believed to be true was true after all. Colin Robinson’s words about the world were still rattling around in his brain. Far from the stable foundation he had always pictured, he now pictured the five of them in that room as tiny specks trapped on a spinning top, whirling, flying away, out, out into the universe, unmoored and toppling through the void. He felt suddenly seasick.
“Are you feeling any better?” Guillermo asked.
No, Nandor wanted to say, it’s all so big and meaningless and lonely, but when he opened his mouth to say it, the words felt heavy in his throat, and he decided not to. “Yes,” he said. “I think so.”
“You staved off your existential crisis?” Guillermo said with a wry grin.
“Is that what this horrible feeling is called?”
His question came out very seriously, apparently, because the grin dropped off of Guillermo’s face. “Oh,” he said, and seemed to recalibrate. “Um, sure. It happens sometimes. Did something get in your head?”
“Only the unknowability of everything in the universe,” Nandor said slowly.
Guillermo’s eyebrows raised. “Oh, that.”
Nandor rolled over on his side, getting just a little bit closer to the wide chasm of carpet that separated the two hotel beds. “Guillermo,” he said gravely. “Do you ever feel like you are terribly and completely alone?”
Guillermo looked surprised. And then he looked a way that Nandor didn’t quite know how to quantify. It was a little empty and a little scared, maybe, and Guillermo took a deep breath. “Yeah,” he said, his voice small. It got bigger when he said: “But look at you. You’re not alone.”
As though to prove his point, Laszlo rolled over in his sleep and draped his arm over Nandor’s shoulder again. Nandor made a face and shrugged his arm out again. Laszlo mumbled something into Nandor’s back that sounded like “not there, dear.”
“And I’m here,” Guillermo said, sounding small again. “We have each other, right?”
And something in the way Guillermo was there – very physical, very human, very alive, and looking at him, waiting for a response – something about him made all those thoughts seem a little silly. Nandor was here. And so was Guillermo. He felt his chest deflate a little bit.
“You’re right,” he said. “Thank you, Guillermo.”
Guillermo gave him a little smile. “You’re welcome, Nandor.”
“Can you two please be quiet?” Colin Robinson said. “This is my favorite part.”
And that woke up Nadja, who flailed around with a dramatic groan, kicking Nandor in the shins; he yelped and jumped up, and got in the way of the television set, which made Colin Robinson complain very loudly, and then Guillermo was sitting up too and Nadja was shouting something over the music. Laszlo still didn’t wake up until Nadja shook him by holding him up in the air by his shoulders and shaking him the way you are not supposed to shake a human baby. Then he woke up with a yell and looked at his wife with great confusion and wonder, like a human baby. And Guillermo got back to sorting things out, and making sure everything was going to be okay, which he was remarkably good at, and he lost the soft, sleepy look Nandor had seen on him in the morning. But that look came back, every now and then, when Guillermo smiled at Nandor, or even when he was laughing at him; and Nandor thought, very privately to himself, that he wouldn’t mind seeing Guillermo fall asleep again.