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Guillermo turns onto his side one last time, but it’s a lost cause. He’s not sleeping today.
It’s a little bit ridiculous, actually, considering he’s been up for just shy of fifty hours with all the stress of Nandor’s return(/kidnapping). Once Laszlo and Nadja were finally in their coffins, and Colin Robinson had gone to work, Guillermo had done nothing more but flop down on his bed under the stairs in the same clothes he’s been wearing since he went to get Nandor. He expected sleep to come right away, but he’s coming on forty-five minutes of staring at the dusty underside of the staircase.
He stands up, deciding that maybe giving sleep another shot after a short walk will do him some good.
“Hello,” says The Guide, as soon as he steps into the hallway, and Guillermo is comfortable enough in his masculinity to admit that he shrieks like a twelve-year-old girl.
“No need to be afraid,” she says. “I will not hurt you-” she smiles in a way that Guillermo does not like at all “-unless you want me to.”
“No, thank you. Uh, none of that.”
“What are you doing up, Guillermo? You should be resting.”
“I could say the same to you,” Guillermo tells her, irritability heightened by his sleep deprivation. “Shouldn’t you be slumbering, in a coffin that isn’t here?”
“Ah, yes, well, I do have a coffin of my own at the Vampiric Council headquarters, but I'm afraid that I was so caught up in everything that I failed to make it back before daylight. I suppose I'll have to wander here until nightfall, unless-” she rests a hand on Guillermo’s shoulder, and rubs it slowly along his upper arm, in a manner that Guillermo assumes is meant to be seductive “-you happen to have room in your bed.”
“I don’t, sorry,” Guillermo says, taking a wide step back. There legitimately isn’t space for her in the closet bedroom that’s starting to feel more and more like a tragically apt metaphor, but his answer would be the same regardless of what he had at his disposal.
“Hm. what a shame.”
“Something like that,” Guillermo says. He searches for the nearest exit, and his eyes land on the heavy wooden door a few feet away, covered with various chains and locks.
“Well, I came out here to go check on Nandor,” he lies. “So I should probably get to that.”
“I’m sure he’s fine. You secured him very well, yes? He needs a bit of time alone to really let him think.”
“Well, I'm sure you remember what happened last time we left a prisoner to his own devices,” Guillermo says, voice sharp, and The Guide shrinks a bit. Guillermo expects her to keep arguing, but she just slinks off into the fancy room, and he’s left to the process that is opening the door to the basement.
Guillermo isn’t sure if Nandor will be awake or not as he throws the switches for the lights, given that there are no windows down here and therefore no way to tell whether it’s day or night, but he finds Nandor sitting upright on the edge of his cot.
“I don’t want to hear that I am brainwashed right now, Guillermo,” he says, eyes trained on the concrete floor as Guillermo pushes the heavy wooden door shut behind him and comes down the stairs.
“That’s okay,” Guillermo says, pulling a crate from the small collection in the corner. The stack was far bigger a few months ago, but Nandor destroyed so many of them in various supernatural-strength-related incidents during Guillermo’s time down here that there’s only about a half dozen left.
Nandor spares a glance to Guillermo, but looks away quickly. “Where are the others?”
“Laszlo and Nadja are slumbering, and Colin Robinson is at work. The Guide is here too, actually, though I'm not sure why...”
“Yeesh,” Nandor says, looking at Guillermo and sticking out his tongue in a grossed-out face. “Do not tell her I am saying this, but she gives me the creeps.”
He smiles a bit as he says it, and Guillermo returns the grin as they both forget where they are for a moment, getting lost in the unsettling nature of the vampire currently doing god-knows-what upstairs. Their grins fade, though, and the basement is left in silence once more.
“What about you, Guillermo?” Nandor asks after a moment, in a quieter voice, eyes dropping back to his hands in his lap.
“What about me?”
“Have you slumbered at all since I was so rudely captured?”
Guillermo isn’t sure what to do with the hint of concern laced into his voice. “I couldn’t sleep, Master.”
“Will you stop with that shit?” Nandor asks, head whipping up to face Guillermo.
“What shit?”
“That master shit. I am nobody's master- I am a human man, just like you.”
Guillermo takes a deep breath. From what he’s learned in his cursory research since bringing Nandor home, it’s best not to completely feed into his delusions. But he doesn’t think that indulging this one small thing will hurt anyone, especially if that’s what lets him talk to Nandor.
“Okay.”
“Okay?” Nandor asks, not quite sounding like he believes Guillermo.
“Okay. I can do that- Nandor.”
The name feels foreign on his tongue, after eleven years of the honorific, but Nandor nods curtly when he says it.
“Thank you for that, Guillermo.”
Guillermo searches his brain for something else to say. The idea of not having anything to say to Nandor is almost disconcerting, though he supposes that Nandor did lead most of their conversations before, primarily through orders and long stories about himself.
Reconnect over memories of their former self , the article on how to deal with a brainwashed person that he read this morning said. Laszlo has an old friend coming in soon that will be better at helping Nandor than Guillermo’s cursory google search- her familiar is currently on the way up from New Mexico with her coffin in the back of a van -but she instructed them to try and have light conversations with Nandor in the meantime, just to keep him from shrinking too far into himself.
“Since I can’t sleep, I was wondering if you could tell me about the time that, uh...” Guillermo wracks his brain for a single story about Nandor’s time in Al Quolanudar. The problem, of course, isn’t that he doesn’t know any, but that Nandor loved to talk about his victories so much that they all blend together.
Guillermo takes a shot in the dark. “Remember when you told me how John stepped on that villager’s chest? How did that story go, again?”
Nandor perks up slightly at the mention of this, and he clears his throat. “Well, yes, it was a very successful pillaging that I did as a manly, human leader. I was lucky to have my horse, John, by my side as we entered the village...”
Nandor turns toward Guillermo as he tells the story of the conquering of the village, eyes lighting up as he describes the smell of burning homes, hands reenacting the slice of his sword through a man’s stomach in a sweeping motion. Nandor’s stories of wartime lost a bit of their lustre around year three of his familliarship, when the monotony of things was just starting to set in, but the smile on Nandor’s face fades all of that annoyance into nothing. Guillermo hangs off Nandor’s every word, enraptured by his tale of conquest.
“And when I met his eyes as he took his dying breath, although he said nothing- this was because his throat was cut open, if you will remember -I know that he respected me, and my power,” Nandor finishes, with a final flourish of his hands.
“Wow, M- Nandor. That was incredible.”
“Yes, well-” Nandor waves Guillermo off dismissively. “I could not have done it without John.”
“Do you have any more tales from battle?” Guillermo asks, and Nandor is quiet for a minute.
“I know what you are doing, Guillermo.”
Shit. “What do you mean?”
Nandor scowls. “With the crate-sitting, and the agreeing to call me by name, and the making me tell my awesome pillaging stories. I am not brainwashed, Guillermo. I do not need your patronizing, and I do not need your fixing.”
“That’s not what’s happening,” Guillermo protests, weakly, but Nandor rises to his feet in anger.
“No? Then when is Laszlo's vampire therapist friend coming, hm? Is she here now?”
Guillermo stands too. “Did you ever consider that we’re trying to goddamn help you, Nandor?”
Nandor hisses at the word choice, and the rage that Guillermo’s been tamping down in the name of Nandor’s vulnerable state flares, red-hot and dangerous. “Do you see? Do you fucking see?” he’s yelling, now, but he doesn’t know what else to do. “You still wanna say you’re human? Jesus Christ.”
He spits the name at Nandor, who hisses again, before stepping to the edge of the cage. He doesn’t yell, but his voice is low and dangerous when he speaks. “Do you think I am stupid, Guillermo? I know this. I know that I am not human. But I thought that I could be, and I need you to understand that there is nothing that could keep me from that. Nothing. Even if it was just pretending.”
“Even-” Guillermo swallows down the anxiety about what he’s going to say, about how it’s going to sound, because he knows he needs to get it out. He thanks God for Nandor’s vampire hearing as he says it, knowing that his brain would never allow him to say what he wants to in a register audible to human ears. “Even if that meant leaving me?”
The rage on Nandor’s features doesn’t fade, but it does ebb into something different. Like he’s still angry, but it isn’t quite directed at Guillermo anymore. “Is that really what you think?”
“How the fuck else was I supposed to interpret everything you said to me on the porch? You wouldn’t even turn me before you left, Nandor. In what world was that not you abandoning me?”
“Guillermo,” Nandor says, quiet, gentle. “Why do you think that you had to do that ?”
He points to one side of the cell, where Guillermo has secured his former escape point with so much silver chain that he couldn’t even get the section of bars out with his normal, non-burning hands. Guillermo had been keeping the details of his captivity to himself in fear of the fallout it would have for Nandor’s ego, but he’s past that, now.
“Because I used to sneak out through your faulty cage every fucking day, and didn’t want you to do the same.”
Nandor doesn’t flinch, though. He barely even reacts. “And why do you think that you were able to do this?”
Guillermo frowns.
“Did you ever look at the melted edges of the bars, Guillermo? Did you ever think about how odd it was that a man did not know about the perfect, Guillermo-sized hole in the side of his own prisoner’s cage? Did it ever cross your mind that, while you were chained to the radiator upstairs as I did the shit work of preparing your cell myself, I made sure that you could escape if you ever wanted to?”
Nandor’s voice is steady, but the look in his eyes betrays the emotionless front as he speaks. Guillermo feels like he’s had the air knocked out of his chest.
“All I want is to keep you safe, Guillermo,” Nandor continues. “So do not tell me that I am leaving you, like you mean nothing to me. That is not fair.”
Guillermo can’t make his body respond to Nandor, who still stands mere inches away from the edge of his cell. His hair has wilted from the curls it was set into when he arrived, and he’s lost a shoe at some point, likely during one of the multiple struggles he’s had with Guillermo in an effort to transport him, but the intensity of the way he stares at Guillermo offsets all of that.
Guillermo doesn’t know what to do but stare back.
Suddenly, there’s the heavy creak of the basement door, and soft light pours into the bottom of the stairs as The Guide’s shock of blonde hair appears in the doorway.
“Um, Guillermo? Not to interrupt all of your therapy, or fucking, or interrogation, or whatever it is you’re doing, but there is a very skinny familiar boy outside the front door talking about needing help bringing in the coffin of Maria the Mending. And if I open the door, I will be burned to a crisp by the afternoon sun, just like a certain someone did to the baron. So I need you to come and handle this.”
“Looks like you have important duties to attend to,” Nandor says, the bitterness of his tone not escaping Guillermo’s notice for a second.
“Looks like it,” Guillermo agrees. “Look, Nandor-”
“Save it. Go deal with Maria,” he pauses. “You can give her my old room, if you like.”
“Oh, well, it’s actually Colin Robinson's at the moment. I was just going to stick her in the library, so I don't have to take her upstairs.”
“Oh. I see.”
“Yep,” Guillermo says, popping the p . He turns around, but Nandor calls out to him just as he reaches the top of the stairs, where The Guide is waiting expectantly.
“Wait- Guillermo?”
“Yes?”
“I think that- I think maybe you should call me master again. It is just a respect thing, and it really sounds more natural. Plus it is obviously easier for you, so...”
There’s a hint of vulnerability in his tone, but Guillermo just smiles.
“If that’s what you want.”
Nandor nods.
“Lights on or off?”
“Off, please.”
“Sure thing, Master.”
Guillermo throws the switches, and the basement is plunged into darkness once more.