Work Text:
The quiet of their home was deafening.
Years and years of silence couldn’t have prepared Laszlo for the way this silence felt. Without the boy’s banter or his singing, without Nadja lively discussing yet another matter regarding the nightclub with the Guide, without Nandor’s Djinn antics, hell, even without Guillermo talking on his phone in various spots of the house, it was all alien to him.
Everything was back to how it had been before Colin Robinson had died, before Nadja left for London and Nandor for his journey. Yet, nothing could ever be the same again, not after this whirlwind of a year.
Laszlo didn’t want to talk about it, he couldn’t talk about it. He tried and tried, once in his life bore such responsibility and took it upon himself to raise the odd baby that crawled out of his friend’s chest, worked so earnestly and he lost it. It slipped out of his reach, disappeared, as if it never mattered.
Eventually, it would all come back to him, every hundred years, but he didn’t deem that comforting at all. Just the thought of that endless cycle felt like torture and at last, he found himself beginning to understand Nandor’s despair caused by the stagnation of immortality.
And then, amidst the complete silence of the other rooms, he heard a muffled noise from his crypt, something between a sob and a chuckle. Nadja must have returned home without him noticing. He picked up his pace, hearing bits of words as he got closer to the door. Pushing the door open, he saw his wife, sitting on the floor beside one of the taxidermy animals, nails tapping on the shelf and mumbling something to herself.
She turned to him, peering with her half-lidded eyes and a smile that was wide, but lifeless. Sure, nobody would have really expected a vampire to look lively, but it was blank, devoid of any of the joy Nadja sparked with when she was truly happy. Laszlo could feel something was wrong. Then he could hear it, as she choked back tears and audibly swallowed before speaking.
“Hi there, love,” she slurred through her words, visibly drunk.
He took a few steps forward and moved to sit down in front of her.
“My darling,” his smile this time was also joyless, laden with worry, as he opened his mouth to get another word in, but Nadja was quicker.
“It’s pathetic, isn’t it?” her chuckle filled the air between them with a sour, ironic tone. The smile on her face widened, but eyes revealed a deep sorrow hiding inside of her.
“What?”
“Seeing your lady wife like this,” her unsteady hand pointed to herself, she continued mumbling, “Wretched, truly wretched state. Fucked up hard this time, didn’t I?”
Laszlo’s hand instinctively extended to hold her hand, arm, knee, anything that could be a hint of comfort.
“What is this bullshit, my dearest, you didn’t-“
Nadja’s grin was bitter and he wished he could kiss it away, but it really wasn’t the moment for that.
“Come on, I screwed it all up!” she yelled out, pressing her knees tighter to her chest, energetically gesticulating with one of her arms, “I should have known it would end like this and what did I do? I kept my hopes up, like an idiot.”
Nadja laughed, loud and throaty, the giggle morphing into a sob. Her lips pressed into a tight line and she bit down her bottom lip to keep it together. Laszlo felt something breaking inside him.
“But my dear, I think the club was quite the success,” he truly wasn’t sure of many things as much as this one, “Just a… string of misfortunes.”
It was obviously not enough for Nadja, as he saw her brow furrow. At this point, she kept looking down, wouldn’t face him, look him in the eye.
Laszlo had to admit, he wasn’t much of a talk-it-through, emotionally expressive guy. In times like these, he was cursing it in the back of his head, wishing he could just hold his wife while she rambled about what upset her. Then, he would kiss her cheeks and call her all the endearing terms it takes to make her laugh and call him silly. It wasn’t one of these nights, though.
“Oh, of course you do, cause you got baby Colin to sing and dance, huh?” the bitterness of her, now very loud, voice stung and just the mention of Colin himself burned with an ache in his chest, ”And now he’s all grown up, congratulations! I guess it worked out for one of us.”
Laszlo took a breath in, regardless of the fact that he didn’t need it.
“My darling, Colin does not remember a single thing from the past year.”
Nadja’s angry face fell momentarily. She looked almost as if that piece of news sobered her up completely, eyes wide and mouth agape and even her throat clenched, when she tried to speak.
“What- completely nothing?” the question came in a high, quiet voice after a sharp inhale.
Laszlo felt the realization flood him with even more strength. It was heavy, especially when he looked over at Nadja, her eyes full of concern and pity and it made his skin crawl, because the last thing he wanted was her to pity him.
“Nothing,” he felt small, weak and his tone was grim, “It seems that by regaining his old memories, he lost all recollection of the existing ones.”
“Oh, Laszlo…”
Cold fingers ran across his cheeks. When Nadja cradled his face with her hands, he had to squeeze his eyelids shut, feeling tears threatening to fall, prickling at the corners of his eyes. He reached out his hand to intertwine their fingers. When he opened his eyes again, Nadja’s eyes looked like two glass marbles. Laszlo only wished not to make his wife cry once again.
“You know, in those last moments I’ve had with him,” he inhaled, voice breaking already, so he tried to replace the sadness with blunt frustration, hint of anger that piled up inside of him, “He said that he hated me, so I guess none of that shit mattered, how hard I tried not to be like my father, I ended up exactly the same.”
Nadja frowned once again, taking his hands in hers and looking deep into his eyes.
“No,” with her being so firm, both of them knew he couldn’t disregard her, ”No, you were a good father, Laszlo. Don’t you dare compare yourself to that man ever again.”
A good father.
Laszlo felt those words echoing through his entire self, almost as if she had just tried to hypnotize him. Could he really have been a good father , everything he wanted, up until the age of almost two centuries, when he began to forget how his father’s voice sounded like? And, everything he wanted to be when he gazed at Colin doing his little dances or showing him those ugly little toy figures.
It was too much for him not to give in.
Nadja pulled him closer, wrapping her arms around him tightly and with his head on her shoulder, he sobbed for what felt like hours. It would have felt odd, since he didn’t cry much, not even on his own, in the darkness of his coffin, practically never. But in his sweet darling’s arms, it was different, it was safe and felt just right. She rubbed circles on his back and her voice seemed to be on the edge of breaking, when she spoke:
“Thank you.”
Laszlo’s eyebrows knitted together, all he could let out was a quiet “Hm?”
“For being here. I love you.”
It felt like it’s been a while since she said that, directly, word for word.
Her sob echoed his own, muffled ones when tears started streaming down her cheeks. Laszlo cuddled her even closer, both of them existing as one mass of tangled arms and low weeps.
All that had happened felt so rough, so harsh and they would have argued they deserved something nicer, softer, but right now, the closeness they had was enough.
Laszlo breathed in and whispered:
“I’m really sorry about the club. Really fucking sorry, I know how much it meant to you.”
“I know, my love.”
They let themselves get lost in the moment. Nandor wouldn’t have heard, too engaged in some book he was apparently into and the door was locked, so Colin couldn’t sneak in and feed on their pitiful energy.
Nadja squeezed the back of Laszlo’s head, pressing a kiss to his forehead. She lost the club, lost her dream, lost a piece of herself along the way, but for now, in his arms, she felt like maybe she could find everything bit by bit, all over again.
It was hard when the morning came, when they had to head to their own coffins. Both of them found trying to fall asleep practically impossible, but then Nadja heard a knock on the door of her coffin. She was happy to open it and try if it could fit two people inside. Once again, they found out that if they embraced each other close enough, it obviously would.
—
The silence was slowly getting bearable. Sometimes Nandor would get his nose out of another book for more than two minutes, which was nice, even if most of what he said was him trying to convince the others how he didn’t care about Guillermo leaving, not even a little bit. Sometimes it even felt like the old days and Laszlo thought that maybe he could get used to it. An evening felt like some evening back in 1919 or some other year that he couldn’t remember, but did it really matter? Nothing ever changed and nothing was going to change, anyway.
However, it did feel out of place for the music room, specifically, to be this quiet. Someone should have been singing, he should have been tinkering around with his piano, but nobody had energy for that anymore. Instead, it was just him lounging in an armchair and Nadja reading.
If she had been just the slightest bit more tired, the sound of pages turning would have lulled her to sleep alone. Regardless of how hard she tried to focus, it felt like with each page her mind trailed further off. Ready to go search for another way to keep herself busy, she closed the book and set it aside.
Just as she was about to leave the room, she heard a scratch of the record player and a familiar tune started playing. Her gaze shifted, finding Laszlo standing next to the gramophone, with the slightest trace of a smile on his face.
It was one of her favorite songs she had ever written with Laszlo. He knew it, he obviously did. Every time she thought he paid little attention to her rambling, he would always prove her wrong.
She looked at him as he walked closer to the futon and extended his hand to her.
“Can I have this dance?”
Suddenly, looking at her husband of hundreds of years, she felt like an adolescent, being invited to dance by a suitor. A sweet smile crept up her face.
“Of course, my darling.”
This, they were adept at. After lavish balls organized by the crème de la crème of the vampiric society, nights in Laszlo’s residency just outside of Brighton and their friends’ weddings, it was completely natural, as if his hand had a designated place on the side of her waist and her hand on his shoulder. Even in lazy, imperfect steps, they were perfectly in tune with each other, just like their hands were perfectly intertwined. With eyes locked, faces only inches away, they spun. Occasionally, they shared a laugh or a knowing look about some lyric from their song, soon not being able to wash away mirthful smiles from their faces.
They began picking up a faster pace, getting more loose and clumsy with each step. After a while, Nadja couldn’t stop giggling. Laszlo felt warmth spreading through his chest, because this giggle was different from what he had heard from her most recently.
She was stone cold sober, just utterly and delightfully in love.
Neither of them seemed to notice when the record ended and the needle began to tick. Still dancing, accompanied by silence, they could have spent a whole century like this, just aimlessly spinning around. It wouldn’t make much difference, anyway, so at least they would enjoy each other’s company. They were even closer now, Nadja’s arms around Laszlo’s neck, their foreheads resting against each other.
No word had to be said.
—
The doors of the subway car closed with a loud whir. At that time of night, it was in the perfect middle ground between crowded and empty. Nadja snuck a look at Nandor, who squinted at some advert and chuckled at the wordplay. Laszlo tapped his foot as Colin Robinson counted the cents of change he had just dug out of his pockets.
Yet another boring night, coming back from Manhattan, but for Colin it apparently wasn’t boring enough.
“So, back to what I was saying, it’s not just Bitcoin. There’s hundreds of these. And remember the monkey pictures? Yeah, they operate on a similar principle.”
“Oh, for fucks’ sake.”
Laszlo and Nadja rolled their eyes while Nandor twisted his face into a grimace. The drain was working well, he succeeded in picking the most fucking dull topic possible.
“…Now what it does is create a blockchain, which essentially is the proof verifying said cryptocurrency and Laszlo, guess what?”
Laszlo’s face fell as he completely froze in place. Flashes of memories hit him, petrifying his mind to the point that no matter how hard he tried to ignore them, his friend’s voice echoed in his head repeatedly and made it impossible. The subway was even colder than before.
Then, he felt a squeeze of his hand.
Nadja looked at him with an understanding, wistful glance and a smile that held so much sadness, yet somehow, he felt comfort just looking at it. The smile that transcended centuries, the smile he looked at for years and years and could never truly get enough of it.
And he wouldn’t get enough of it, wouldn’t get enough of her, not in a million years they would share.
Throughout them, their regrets, their memories would haunt them forever, the length of their immortal life would hang over them like a dark cloud, it was an obvious constant they had been aware of for years. There was one constant, though, which wasn’t miserable and depressing, just like the others, but reassuring. One that always made everything make sense again, it was each other’s presence.
The knowing smile they shared, their hands clasped together. They had each other and their fucked up little family. Maybe this could finally be their year. They would be okay. They always, eventually, were.
“What?” Laszlo turned back to Colin’s impatient gaze, his eyes already glowing.
“The blockchains are being mined in the crypto mines and these are a sticky subject, the climate activists whine about it all the time, and it’s like, yeah, you whined about coal mines, you whined about crypto mines, what mines do you have in store next, am I right?”
“Uh-huh, yeah,” Laszlo answered, already dozing off.