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Nandor watched Guillermo over the top of his book. Guillermo was tip-tapping away at the computer in that way of his, that one that made his eyebrows wrinkle just so as he worked.
Nandor really liked that wrinkle.
“You’re not being subtle,” Guillermo said, not looking up from whatever he was typing.
“I’m not trying to be.”
“Is there something you want, mi vida?”
Nandor allowed a smile at that. It had been years, but every pet name still felt like a caress when Guillermo said it like that. “Yes.”
“The usual?”
“Of course.” Nandor paused. “But not right now.”
That gave Guillermo pause. Nandor watched as Guillermo’s fingers stilled on his keyboard. “Oh?”
It was rare that Nandor wasn’t in the mood for love—or sex, rather—but there was something that had been bothering him, actually, and that little wrinkle had drawn it right out of him.
“I just…” Nandor ran his index finger along the top of his book. “You know, I’ve been wondering. You’ve been very friendly with Lilith, haven’t you? And the other witches?”
Guillermo frowned, then closed his laptop. “Sure, I guess. Do you need me to ask them something?”
“No, no.” Nandor didn’t close his book. He absolutely wasn’t hiding behind it. He wasn’t. But it did still feel nice to have a modicum of plausible deniability while they talked. “Nothing like that. I was just wondering… Well. You are a very skilled man, aren’t you?”
Guillermo’s eyebrows went up.
Nandor pressed on, ignoring that look. “Have you ever tried any magic? Perhaps you have hidden talents.”
Guillermo’s eyebrows just went further up, somehow. He was approaching that look that Nandor didn’t really like, the one that said he was questioning his lover’s intelligence again. “Are you asking me if I’m secretly a witch, Nandor?”
“Well… I mean…”
Guillermo shook his head as he opened his laptop again. “Really? Don’t you think the whole slayer thing is enough? I don’t need any more reasons to piss Nadja off.”
And the two of them had been together long enough for Nandor to recognize a brush-off.
He sighed and sank down a little further into the couch. “It was just a thought,” he said mulishly, and he resolutely ignored the way his stomach sank down, too, just a little.
* * *
“Lycanthropy.”
Guillermo paused, his sandwich halfway to his mouth. “Excuse me?”
“You know… we fought the werewolves again last week.”
“Don’t remind me,” Guillermo muttered. Whether he really was only a vampire slayer or not, Guillermo had still proven himself to be more than adept at putting down mongrels.
It had been really hot, actually, even if Guillermo had kept muttering about animal cruelty on the way home.
“You were not bitten, were you? You had that cut on your eye right—” Nandor brushed his fingertips right beneath Guillermo’s glasses and tried not to be too pleased at the way that made Guillermo’s breath catch. “Right here.”
“Nope. No bites.” Guillermo didn’t pull away. “Besides, you checked me out after we got back, remember?”
“Oh yes,” Nandor said, sitting back in his seat and giving Guillermo a somewhat wolfish grin—pun fully intended. “Very thoroughly.”
“A couple scratches, but nothing too bad. And the full moon was last night anyway, wasn’t it?” Guillermo put down his sandwich and wiggled his fingers. “No claws here.”
Nandor felt his smile starting to fade. “Yes, I know. But I just thought...” He gestured vaguely. “The hair. You know.”
Guillermo frowned. “The hair?”
Nandor reached forward again, this time letting his fingers catch against the hair at Guillermo’s temples. It wasn’t as curly as it had used to be, unfortunately, but it was still soft. And— “Silver.”
Guillermo reached up to touch where Nandor was. “What?”
“I thought maybe…”
Guillermo was pulling his phone out now, was turning the camera around so he could examine his hair. “Oh.” He looked at himself for a long moment before his lips tightened and—it wasn’t a smile, not quite. It was a complicated look there on his Guillermo’s face. “No, I think… I think I came by that naturally.”
“Oh,” Nandor echoed, his voice gone soft. “I hadn’t noticed.”
* * *
“You know… Laszlo was telling me about something very interesting last night, Guillermo.”
“Don’t move,” Guillermo murmured, but there was no heat in the command.
The first time they’d done this, years and years ago now, Guillermo had been a little dictator, pushing and pulling Nandor’s limbs until they’d lain exactly how he wanted and snapping at him every time he'd so much as scratched his nose.
But now, many years and many sketchbooks later, Guillermo had come to “enjoy the challenge” that was attempting to draw his lover. Whatever the hell that meant.
“I’m hardly moving, Guillermo. Besides,” he said, just barely resisting the urge to adjust his hair, “this is very boring.”
“So you’ve said.”
“We could always do this with—”
“Less clothing?”
Nandor grinned. “How did you know I was about to say that?”
“Because you always say that, amor.”
“And yet we never do it—”
“We did it last week—”
“—even though,” Nandor persisted, “the beauty of the natural form—”
“I have entire sketchbooks full of the natural form.”
“—and the intimacy of our bond—”
“That keeps me from finishing most of those sketches.“
“—would make a much finer subject,” Nandor said.
Guillermo just looked at him. “Are you finished?”
“No,” Nandor said, a little waspishly now. “I was telling you about Laszlo.”
Guillermo sighed and started drawing again. “What about Laszlo?”
“He was telling me about his latest experiment.” Nandor wiggled his eyebrows. “He is working on an elixir of vitality.”
Guillermo made a face. “Is that code for some kind of dick potion?”
Nandor frowned. “I don’t think so.”
“So what is it?” Guillermo asked, putting his pencil down so he could pick up a fucking identical one. “The… elixir.”
Nandor shrugged, ignoring the way that made Guillermo make a wordless and yet still very decipherable noise at him. “He said that he wanted to capture life and death again. Hold it right there in those grimy little fingers.”
Guillermo’s very fine fingers stilled for a moment. Just one brief second. And then Guillermo was back to those long, broad strokes that he’d been practicing for decades now. “Are you sure that’s a good idea?”
Nandor made a dismissive noise and flapped one hand. Guillermo didn’t even whine this time, so maybe he was actually serious about his concerns. “Fuck if I know. He’s done worse, though, hasn’t he?” he said.
And that was true, more or less. Laszlo had given and taken life from countless creatures by now. What did it matter, really, if this time he was trying to stopper death altogether?
Nandor watched the way Guillermo bit at his lower lip and tried not to move.
Besides. It didn’t sound like an entirely awful idea.
“Has he?” Guillermo asked, and ah shit. His voice was going all high and nervous now, and that meant the odds of this little arts and crafts hour ending in sex had gone down to almost nil. “Maybe I should…”
“Do what?” Nandor asked, raising his eyebrows. “Go and bitch at him?”
“Talk to him,” Guillermo corrected, and fuck it all, now he was putting his supplies away.
Definitely no sex, then.
“Would it be such a bad thing?” Nandor asked, and the tightness of his voice surprised even him. He felt the odd urge to rub at his chest, trying to ease whatever had caught his breath there, but he forced himself to still. “It would make him happy, and…”
“Yes, Nandor,” Guillermo said, and he was getting those miserable little lines in his forehead that he’d had more and more often these days. “It—we can talk about this later. But yes. It would be a very bad thing.”
“For Laszlo to have it?” Nandor pressed.
Guillermo shook his head, and he wasn’t even looking at him now. Was halfway out the room already. “For anyone to have it.”
Nandor let him go, letting the familiar sound of Guillermo’s muttered gripes about unintended consequences and playing—well, playing G-word—wash over him.
It was a small, private revenge for the way that the pit of his stomach felt… empty somehow, but Nandor didn’t bother warning Guillermo that, the last he’d checked, Nadja had been down in Laszlo’s lab as well.
Well. It wasn’t as if Laszlo had ever been going to figure it out, anyway.
* * *
“You know…” Nandor said conversationally, his voice sounding very loud in the quiet bed that they shared.
(Sometimes. Sometimes.)
“What, Nandor?” Guillermo asked. His face was mashed against Nandor’s shoulder and he sounded very, very tired.
Nandor did his best to ignore the way that last breath against his skin had felt very much like a sigh.
“That movie we watched last week. The one with the… the binding of the souls. You know.”
Guillermo didn’t say anything for a long moment, but Nandor was sure that he wasn’t asleep. He could feel Guillermo’s eyelids against his skin, pinched together so tight that Nandor could actually feel them twitching. And then Guillermo pulled away, flopping onto his back next to Nandor on the bed. “Nandor…”
“What do you think would happen, if a human and a vampire had a soul bond like that?”
“Nothing,” Guillermo said, “because soul bonds don’t exist.”
Nandor stared up at the ceiling. “They might. There are many things in this world that we don’t understand. Just.” He made a vague noise that he hoped communicated the vastness of the universe. “All kinds of shit out there.”
“Nandor.” Guillermo sighed, and it wasn’t that little exasperated one that was almost fond. This one sounded bone-tired and very, very done. “What is this?”
“This?”
Guillermo shrugged. “All this.”
“The—”
“The you knows.”
Nandor could still taste the words there on his tongue and maybe… maybe he hadn’t been quite as subtle as he’d thought.
Hell. He hadn’t even realized that he was trying to be subtle this time.
He hadn’t realized that he’d been thinking, either.
He still didn’t really want to think. Not really. That was the nice part about being with Guillermo. It was so easy to stop thinking and just—just feel. Warm lips on his, a giggle against his neck. Heat in the dark of the night and ecstasy as light eased into morning.
Nandor’s heart had felt… hell. There had been this void there in the center of his chest for years. For centuries, really. It’d felt like there was an emptiness there that he’d never be able to fill. An emptiness that couldn’t be filled, perhaps, because it kept gnawing away at itself and devouring anything he tried to put inside it.
He’d felt like there was a maelstrom of thought there in his head, sweeping the light from his eyes and stopping the breath up in his throat and preventing him from—from moving on at all.
From living at all, really.
But then Guillermo had come. It had been uncomfortable at first, the way their moving parts had moved together, but then one day Nandor had realized that the noise in his head was quiet and the place inside of him was full.
Somehow, the broken, jumbled-up moving parts had found a pattern together that Nandor hadn’t even known existed, and they’d made something… whole perhaps.
Or at least something that passed for it, on the good days.
Nandor looked up at Guillermo’s ceiling and he thought about it. An empty heart and an empty grave.
A broken heart and a grave just filled.
“How long do vampire hunters generally live, Guillermo?” he asked, his voice quiet in an old, old house that wasn’t empty anymore.
But probably would be again, someday.
Nandor heard Guillermo’s voice catch next to him. “Oh. I—”
He waited, knowing that this silence wasn’t Guillermo ignoring him. No, Guillermo’s awful I’m-ignoring-you silences were the coldest thing in the world.
Guillermo’s hand now, when he slipped it into Nandor’s, was warm.
“A normal amount, I think,” Guillermo finally said, his voice soft. “My grandma’s pretty old, but…” He shrugged. “My great-grandma died when I was a teenager. It happened eventually.”
Nandor’s eyes flickered back and forth as he did some mental math. “Fifty years maybe.”
Guillermo shifted a little closer. “Maybe.”
Guillermo was so strong, so bright. It felt like his light would never, could never go out.
But it would.
“You’re not a witch,” Nandor said softly. “Or a werewolf or an immortal or a—”
“I’m not a vampire, Nandor.”
“No,” Nandor said. “You’re not.”
He’d closed that door long ago.
Guillermo turned in the bed next to him, and Nandor swallowed hard. He felt Guillermo follow that movement with his fingers, soothing its path down his throat.
“It sounded nice when I was young,” Guillermo admitted. “The whole… immortality thing.”
Nandor caught Guillermo’s fingers in his own and held them there against his chest. “But?”
“But…” Guillermo sighed. “I realized I wasn’t even living the life I already had. I was just… waiting. And what’s the point of living forever if you spend the whole time waiting for your life to begin?”
Nandor felt his breath still.
“I feel alive with you.” Guillermo pressed a kiss to his chest. “With all you guys, but… especially you.”
“I…”
“I’m living now. And it might not be for forever, but… at least I’m living now.”
Guillermo didn’t say it, what they both were thinking.
Guillermo was alive now, but Nandor wasn’t.
“I feel alive with you, too,” Nandor finally whispered. “I—Guillermo, I only feel alive with you.”
It had been seven hundred fucking years of being dead. Of staring at covered windows and trying to remember what the sun had felt like on his skin. Of drinking blood in a desperate attempt to taste the life that still clung to it. Of filling his beds with secondhand heat.
It wasn’t until he’d held Guillermo that he’d remembered what it felt like to make it himself.
“I…” He heard it, the way Guillermo’s breath shook in his throat. “I know. But there will be…”
“Others?” Nandor opened his mouth and a—fuck, an awful, wrecked noise came out. He’d never heard a sound like that come from his own lips before, like anguish had stolen the breath away from a scream, and Guillermo’s fingers tensed against his chest. “Guillermo, you waited thirty years to start living. It took me seven hundred and fifty.”
“But you know now. You know how to—”
“Yes, Guillermo. I will know exactly what I have lost when I lose it.”
“But that’s—that’s why it matters, right?” Guillermo’s fingers curled up against Nandor’s skin, and he was clutching at him now, almost. “That’s why things matter so much to humans. They’re—they’re temporary. You value things more when they don’t last forever. You know to cherish something if you know it might go away. Things may be temporary, but love’s not. That’s—”
“That’s how humans think, Guillermo,” Nandor said, and Guillermo’s voice fell silent. “Vampires know that all things are temporary, too, and that temporary things will drive you mad. You can’t—you can’t trust anything when you know it’ll go away. You can’t love anything. Not with all of you.”
And hell if he hadn’t learned that lesson the hard way.
“You love me with all of you.”
“You can’t,” Nandor continued, “because a little piece of you knows that it will destroy you. But your dumb, stupid heart keeps fooling you into believing that it’s real this time. That you’ve finally found something real that will keep existing on and on forever, just like you.” Nandor closed his eyes. “Things may be temporary, but you’re right. Love’s not. And that’s why love will drive you mad one day.”
“And you think…?”
Nandor didn’t say anything. He and Guillermo both knew that Nandor had been half-mad already when the two of them had met.
Guillermo had learned to match him beat for beat, madness for madness, but that didn’t change the fact that love and loss chipped away at a man. And one day, after centuries of chipping, you realize that there’s very little of you left.
“It’s not fair!” Nandor snapped. It felt like an explosion of heat and anger inside him, one that perhaps had been building for quite some time. “Why shouldn’t you live forever? Why does this shit keep happening over and over and over? Other vampires find happiness! But not Nandor! Nandor just keeps—I keep falling in love with fucking ghosts, Guillermo.”
Wives that might have loved him, once. Lovers that didn’t mind being bitten, apparently, but never by him. Family members that fell dead at the sight of him.
And now Guillermo. Precious, perfect Guillermo who seemed to believe that it was only his impermanence that made him valuable.
“Humans might like temporary things, Guillermo. You might like 'changing it up,'” he said, making a dismissive little motion with his hand, “but we don’t. Vampires know that finding something permanent is…” His voice broke, just a bit. “It is very, very precious.”
“I know.” Guillermo’s voice was calm and it was—it was knowing. Like Guillermo had sensed this slowly mounting explosion as well, like he’d been expecting this conversation for some time.
He wasn’t arguing with Nandor. Wasn’t pushing back against his words with the fire that Nandor had become accustomed to.
No. His voice was calming, like a man gentling a terrified horse. It was the voice of a man who’d already accepted all the things that Nandor was still struggling with, and a man who’d decided to pour his resources into soothing Nandor’s inevitable grief rather than trying to avert it.
All of the fight seemed to go out of him at once, unable to withstand its own weight without Guillermo’s strength helping to prop it up, and he felt tears prick at the corners of his eyes.
Guillermo brushed Nandor’s hair off his neck, gentle, and Nandor remembered the way he’d done it when they’d first met. How shy he’d been then, and how sure he was now.
So much had changed. So much time had passed.
So little was left.
“I’ve squandered our time together,” Nandor whispered, and it was true. Like Guillermo, he’d spent so much time living in a nonexistent future that he’d neglected the very real present right next to him.
“I should have been kissing you every day,” he whispered, fierce now. “Kiss, kiss, kiss. Every day.”
“I would’ve liked that,” Guillermo said, his voice a little wistful. “But you didn’t know the real me back then. I didn’t know the real you, either. I was in love with a fantasy.”
Nandor let Guillermo run his fingers along the breaths in his chest and he thought about that. “So was I,” he said softly, and the words ached.
It had been so easy to love a person that didn’t exist. Imaginary lovers were perfect. They were kind and adoring and loved exactly as long as you did. Imaginary lovers lived and died in your arms.
But ultimately, their arms were always empty.
“I don’t think that time together was a waste, though,” Guillermo said.
“No,” Nandor said. “Never.”
Guillermo smiled against his skin. “What I mean is…” He ran his fingers through Nandor’s hair again, absently this time, before returning his hand to his chest. “I think that time learning each other was valuable. We learned about ourselves, too. What we really…” He paused in that measuring way he had, and Nandor waited. “What we needed.”
“I need you.” The words were well-worn in his mouth, but this time they dragged at his lips.
“And I need you. But I need other things, too, and so do you. I need to grow and change and I can’t—I can’t live in stasis the way you guys do.”
Nandor just tightened his grip.
“My body needs to change, too, mi vida.”
“Your hair,” Nandor said softly. “The lines around your eyes.”
“Do you hate them that much?”
Nandor shook his head. “Gray looks nice on you. Silver, as befits a slayer.” He swallowed hard. “And I like the way laughter leaves its marks on you.”
“Yeah?”
Nandor nodded, his throat thick. “Yes. Nothing leaves marks on me. Not anymore.”
“Except me.”
Nandor’s breath caught. “Except you.”
Guillermo’s love bites were always gone by evening, and the bruises from their squabbles faded even faster. But Guillermo’s touch was like a brand against his heart, and even if those marks couldn’t be seen, Nandor could feel them, livid, every time his breath stuck in his chest.
“One day you’ll die,” Nandor said, finally admitting a reality that Guillermo seemed to have accepted long ago. “And—” He tapped his chest, his fingers dipping into the spaces between Guillermo’s as he did. “It will leave a mark.” He breathed for a minute, just feeling the way that their fingers rose and fell together. “A terrible one, Guillermo.”
“I know,” Guillermo said softly. “I’m sorry.”
It made a terrible sort of sense, in a way. Back in the beginning, when Guillermo had wanted nothing more than to become a vampire, he’d promised to do anything Nandor wanted. And he had, for a while.
Now, though, now Guillermo lived for himself. He still loved Nandor and he still wanted to make him happy. But he could say no to him now. He had learned how to prioritize his own happiness when it counted, and sometimes that meant denying Nandor the things he demanded.
They’d certainly fought more than once about it.
But independence, like change, was something that Guillermo needed. He’d needed to step out of Nandor’s shadow before he could grow into something lovely, something fierce and kind and entirely his own.
He’d learned to claim what he wanted with clever fingers and a silver spine and Nandor usually liked that. He usually loved it, even.
But it also meant that occasionally Guillermo would claim something that Nandor didn’t want him to, like his humanity. Like mortality.
Like an inevitable end.
The shy, pathetic Guillermo that had waited on him hand and foot wasn’t the Guillermo he was always meant to be, nor was he the Guillermo that Nandor had fallen in love with.
That Guillermo would have done exactly what he wanted. That Guillermo would have stayed.
It was only the Guillermo that loved him that would eventually leave him behind.
“So what do we do?” Nandor asked. “There must be something—”
One of Guillermo’s marvelous ideas. One of his rallies to battle that always left Nandor’s heart (and occasionally his cock) feeling full.
Guillermo just sighed, though, and kissed him on the shoulder. The collar. “We kiss each other every day. Just…” He sighed again. “Kiss, kiss, kiss.”
“And we lie here together.”
“And we stay together for as long as we can.” Guillermo brought their linked fingers up to his lips. “We live.”
It wouldn’t be forever. This life that he shared with Guillermo, the only real life he’d ever known, would end eventually. He would be returned to the terrible half-life that he’d endured before he’d known how beautiful breath could be.
Guillermo curled his fingers around Nandor’s, bringing them more securely against his lips. “Do you think it’ll be worth it?”
“What?” Nandor asked, the brief question a minor miracle what with the way all that beautiful breath had left his lungs.
“Loving with all of you. Just for a little while.”
Nandor didn’t answer him. He just looked up at the ceiling and tried to ignore the way that his eyes burned. Tried to ignore that the edges of the warm life they’d created together were already beginning to cool. Then, “I don’t know. But I don’t think I could have done anything else.”
Guillermo kissed his fingertips one by one. “Maybe… Who knows, Nandor? Maybe I will become a witch one day. Or get bitten by a werewolf. Or drink a potion that will make me live forever.”
He wouldn’t. Nandor knew that he wouldn’t. “It wouldn’t make you happy.”
Guillermo sighed, soft. “But maybe I won’t be able to do anything else.”
It was a nice idea. A dream that Nandor didn’t quite want to wake up from. A vampire slayer that would grow old with his prey, a lover that could move seamlessly through night and day and eternity.
Maybe, as Guillermo seemed to think, maybe the miracle of it all would be not to know. Not to know how many days he had left or how he would fill them.
Maybe that’s what living was, really.
And maybe the memory of warmth, of soft lips and softer kisses, would make it worth it when all that was gone.
Nandor closed his eyes and tried to pretend that he didn’t know exactly how long he would live.