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The Worst Thing About Having Dracula as a House Guest

Summary:

"I make no secret of my purpose upon these shores," Dracula pronounces, snapping shut the book in his hands. "I have journeyed here with the anticipation of settling a long-held and very personal matter of revenge. Information has reached me that upon this very island, my ancient enemy, Van Helsing, has been reborn."

"Ohh..." says Nadja, nodding in a way that makes her whole upper body bob slightly. "Yes, okay. That would about do it, I suppose."

The camera doesn't linger on her. It's busy capturing Guillermo having what looks to be a small, quiet panic attack.

Notes:

Because I have far too many thoughts on just how absurdly compatible the Hammer Dracula films are with the WWDITS universe—especially with regards to the greater Van Helsing family tree and their grand, multi-generational, vampire-hunting tradition (complete with implied reincarnation mechanics*). Though also because the image of the WWDITS cast having to deal with Christopher Lee's Dracula raised far too many wonderful possibilities to pass up.

Not that you should need to have seen any of the Hammer Dracula films to follow this fic—your average pop-cultural understanding of the Dracula story should mostly do you fine. For those who haven't seen them though, I've taken the liberty of including a few handy visual references along the way.
 

* None of the Hammer Dracula films ever say any of their assorted Van Helsings are the reincarnation of any of their predecessors, but I think we all know what's going on there.

(See the end of the work for more notes.)

Chapter Text

Grinning from ear to ear and practically glowing with excitement, Guillermo beckons the camera down the hallway.

"You'll never guess who we've got staying with us right now," he says, opening the door to one of the guest bedrooms. The room beyond is, inexplicably, wreathed in smoke, which gradually clears to reveal...

Although the dark-robed figure is posed dramatically to best effect, he doesn't appear to have noticed the camera. Guillermo dutifully closes the door again, presumably not wanting to disturb their 'guest'.

"Yuh-huh," he tells the camera, still grinning as he thumbs backwards over his shoulder. "Dracula. The Count Dracula himself! This is such an enormous honour for the whole household." He glances briefly back over his shoulder at the closed door, like he can't quite believe anything inside that room is really there. "And seriously, it's just so cool."


"Bloody Dracula," says Nadja, seated beside her husband. "Ridiculous gothic peacock man! Thinks he's sooo coooool." The last two words come out in a dramatic squeal as she rolls her eyes.

"Man's a complete wanker if you ask me," says Laszlo. "Ever since he got that book deal, he's been completely insufferable."

"Lookit me, I am Dracula, everyone knows my name, I am so famous!" squeaks Nadja, hands raised, wiggling her fingers. "I have virgins practically throwing themselves at my feet! I have so many angry mobs outside my castle they have had to form a queue! I have been in more movies than anyone dead or alive! Feh! There is no end to it!"

"And it's not even true," says Laszlo. "I for one have been in far more film productions than Dracula could ever lay claim..."

"Lazlo, my dear, love of my life," Nadja cuts in, her smile suddenly rather wooden, "we agreed we weren't going to mention your 'movies' again."

"You agreed. I only said..."

"Laszlo, do you really want to do this now?" Nadja continues smiling, with all the enthusiasm of someone still waiting to see the flash go off a full minute after being told to say 'cheese'. "In front of the cameras?"

Laszlo gives an exaggerated sigh and gestures between them. "One day, he's been here, and look what he's driven us to!"

Previous digressions notwithstanding, Nadja plainly agrees. "Obviously it is a great honour for us, the new Vampiric Council, to host our distinguished cousin from the old country, and so on and so on," she says. "But frankly, it is an honour we could do without."


"Obviously, we can't tell the Count that there's a Van Helsing descendent living in the same house with him." Guillermo laughs nervously. "So, for the duration, I'm... back to being a familiar again. Officially. I mean, as far as he knows. The rest of the household knows better, of course, but they're all playing into it, to keep up the illusion. Maybe a little too enthusiastically, in some cases." An attentive viewer could find volumes of subtext in Guillermo's strained smile. "Meanwhile, I'm packing up most of my gear and hiding it up in the attic while he's here—just in case he comes snooping around."

A bandolier of stakes lies across Guillermo's bed, along with his crucifix knuckle-dusters, a jar of garlic powder and various other odds and ends. Gathering the whole pile up in a roll of black cloth, he looks nervously both ways down the corridor before stepping through his closet door. Moving as quietly as he can, he starts up the stairs.

He's just reached the landing at the top when a voice hollers, "Guillermo!" making him yelp and fumble the package.

Behind him, Nadja emerges from a doorway, looking in entirely the wrong direction to notice that the person she's yelling at is only paces away.

"Guillermo, have you still not done the dusting?" she calls, in that particularly pointed tone people use when they intend to be overheard.

"Nadja!" Guillermo hisses, making her jump and turn around. "This isn't a great moment," he tells her in an urgent whisper, now fumbling on the floor for everything he'd been carrying.

"Well get to dusting then!" Nadja returns. "In case you haven't noticed, we have a very important guest here at the moment!" A significant elbow movement indicates the figure of Dracula, who's emerged from somewhere down below, and is even now crossing the entrance hall beneath them, a faint trail of smoke wafting in his wake. "Is that not very important among your familiar duties?"

"I will, I will!" Guillermo promises, juggling loose items inside the cloth. "I've just got to get this stuff up to storage first—Nandor asked me to do it, it's important too," he stammers, briefly losing the battle with his load.

To his horror, a single stake slips out of his fingers and falls point-downwards through the railing to the floor, far below—missing Dracula by inches. The Count himself looks up briefly at the sound of a falling object, but pays it no mind.

Frozen in horror up above, Nadja and Guillermo watch him leave with baited breath, before the inevitable urgently-hissed follow-up argument commences.


"Yeah," Guillermo admits, later, back in interview mode, "things have just been a little tense."


"I know what you're thinking," says Nandor, reclining on his sofa. "What is it like, having him around? It must be so awkward: a former Ottoman Viceroy sharing a house with the infamous Transylvanian warlord, Vlad Dracula himself—but who are we to hold grudges over so small a thing as a few centuries of Wallachian border conflict? Oh, we tangled a bit back in the day, him and me, but that's just what international diplomacy was like back then. You kidnap their young princes and attempt to raise them as brainwashed puppet rulers, they impale ten thousand of your peasants on wooden stakes and leave them to die in the sun." Nandor waves a hand and grins broadly. "It's all in good fun!"

The camera cuts briefly to a scene of him and Dracula engaged in a heated debate, which ends with Dracula flipping a table and he and Nandor hissing at each other like angry housecats. The cameraman panics and backs rapidly out of the room.

"Really," says Nandor, still sprawled on his sofa, "there's hardly any tension at all!"


"What are you talking to me for?" asks Colin Robinson, from within his basement bedroom, looking uncharacteristically irritated about being disturbed. "I thought you people were turning this into The Dracula Show this week. That walking stereotype has got nothing to do with the likes of me." What may have been an attempt at a smile instead turns Colin's face into more of a sneer. "Oh, did that come across as a little bitter? Do you have any idea how long we energy vampires have worked to reform the image of modern vampirism? I mean, we're not judgemental, we're not gonna get on your case about a pale complexion and a little gothic décor—but he walks in, and suddenly it's swooning Victorian maidens as far as the eye can see." He rolls his eyes. "Fucking guy..."


"So, it's been about two days now," says Guillermo, looking just a little strained, "and to be honest, we've had an... incident. Or two." He shifts uncomfortably in his seat. "The trouble with being a... you know," leaning conspiratorially close, he whispers, "a Van Helsing in the same house with Dracula is that some things... just kinda come naturally. A little too naturally.

"So, yeah—I may have accidentallyalmost—killed Dracula." Guillermo's smile is extremely nervous as he adds, "A couple of times."

The camera cuts to a scene of Guillermo on his way out of the house. Checking something in his bag, he reaches for the door without looking, and has it halfway open before he looks up, only to see Dracula lurking in a corner.

Yelping in surprise, Guillermo slams the door shut again, inches away from letting the sunlight fall on their guest. Dracula regards him coldly as Guillermo clutches his chest and turns around, panting, apparently oblivious to how close to fiery death he just was.

"He's up at the weirdest hours," says Guillermo, back in his room. "And he has this awkward habit of kind of sneaking up on you. Appearing where you don't expect it."

Another scene shows Guillermo checking the curtains against the late afternoon sun, then dutifully lighting candles around an open coffin in which Dracula lies in repose, fast asleep.

Turning to attend to candles on the dresser, Guillermo gives a startled yelp and jumps half out of his skin at the discovery that Dracula is now suddenly standing right in front of him, looming from the corner of the room. In his surprise, Guillermo throws the lighter into the air, which flies across the room and falls into the curtains, setting them ablaze.

"Oh shit... I... you... I am so sorry, I didn't mean... I'll just..." he gabbles. Now frantic, Guillermo is caught between trying to tear the curtains down and put them out, and the risk of opening them with the sun still shining outside.

With a look of disinterested disdain, Dracula stalks from the room, finally leaving Guillermo to tear the curtains down properly and stamp them out on the floor.

"I mean, he's Dracula," Guillermo narrates. "Even if I did kill him, he'd probably come back, right? Right?" He drums his fingers nervously on the table. "I don't really wanna test it though."


"As vampires, we are all undead," says Nadja, "but it is what it is. Most of us don't like to make a big deal out of it. But Dracula, he will never let you hear the end of it—I am the immortal Dracula! I have been reborn more times than the phoenix! I have returned from death more times than the little death has come to you! I have..."

"Which is not even close to true," Laszlo puts in. "Why..."

"Laszlo," Nadja pointedly cuts him off. "We are not doing this now."

Laszlo coughs self-consciously. "The point is, he expects you to be impressed with all that bullshit about coming back from the dead all the time."

"You know what would be really impressive?" agrees Nadja, thumping her armrest with some force, "Not dying so much to begin with!"

"And some of the waysDracula has died over the years—any decent vampire would be ashamed," says Laszlo. "I mean, stakes, sunlight—that'll happen to the best of us, but if half of what you hear about Dracula is true, he once died of getting hit by lightning, because he was holding up an iron rod on his own castle roof!"

"They say he once died of standing too close to a church window," says Nadja. "That he walked in front of!"

"Not to mention that time he was killed by the shadow of a windmill. I mean—come on, that's just taking the piss!"

Nadja hesitates, looking at Laszlo uncertainly. "Are you sure that one was him?"

Laszlo gives an expansive shrug. "It certainly had his name on it."

"Well, if it wasn't him, it might as well have been," says Nadja, declining to let herself get side-tracked by this point. "And that's not even getting into his ridiculous thing with running water!"

"Ah, but what's wrong with that, you say?" Laszlo waves a finger. "Surely running water is among the oldest of traditional vampire weaknesses!"

"And no-one is more traditional than Dracula," Nadja agrees, "But as usual, he just has to take this sort of thing too far."


"The good news about that last incident," says Guillermo, standing in the foyer, "is I've finally talked everyone into shelling out to get our sprinkler system fixed. We had one installed years ago, but it was never properly hooked up to the smoke detectors, and with how much they all love candles, this place has been a fire hazard for too long. So now, the next time someone..."

He trails off in response to a hissing noise, followed by a sudden shower of water from a sprinkler above. Guillermo looks up and around himself in alarm.

"THAT WASN'T A SUGGESTION!" he hollers.

Nandor materialises beside him in a whirl of dark smoke.

"Guillermo," he says, oblivious to the preceding moments, "the attic door is stuck again! I was just up there, I had to turn into smoke to get..." He pauses, finally noticing the water, his fingers twitching as he holds up a hand. "Is it raining indoors now?"

Guillermo puts his head in his hands. He's yet to come up with a more eloquent response when a blood-curdling scream rises from near the stairs. The camera pans to reveal Dracula, twisting and writhing on the floor in pain under a shower of water.

"Shit. SHIT!" Guillermo babbles, dashing for the sprinklers' emergency cut-off. Nandor looks awkwardly at the still-writhing Dracula, gives the camera a nervous grin, and sidles out of the scene, evidently deciding that the better part of valour now involves making himself scarce.


"When we say 'running water'," says Laszlo, "I think we can all agree the implicit meaning is like in a river or a stream. You're not supposed to find yourself suddenly incapacitated by taking a bloody shower!"

"I mean, hello? We are supposed to be vampires!" agrees Nadja, "Not the fucking Wicked Witch of the West!"

"But you just try telling him that." Laszlo shivers at the thought. "And that's not even getting into the time he was apparently killed—I shit you not—by walking into a bush."

"This is what we have living in our home." Nadja rolls her eyes and throws up her hands. "And what an honour it is!"


Stopping by the curtain separating off the fancy room, Guillermo takes a deep breath and self-consciously straightens his cuffs. Only then does he step inside.

Dracula is sitting on the couch, wearing his usual expression of undirected disdain.

"Hi," says Guillermo, nervously. "I just wanted to let you know, sir, that we've had your curtains replaced with new ones that are flame retardant, and we've deactivated the sprinkler system again, so there shouldn't be any more..." he gives an awkward cough, "so nothing like that should happen again."

Dracula gives him a brief, dispassionate look, but declines to respond.

Guillermo rocks awkwardly on his heels, unsure how to proceed. "Well, unless there's anything else I can do for you, I'll just..."

"There is one thing, boy," Dracula intones, rising to his feet—and he's tall enough that the rising goes on for some time.

Guillermo swallows as the imposing figure of Dracula looms over him, waiting.

"In future," Dracula pronounces, with dread solemnity, "you shall address me only as Master."

Somewhere in the distance, thunder rumbles. The lights flicker dramatically. Guillermo swallows again.

"Uhh..." he manages, clearly torn. "Technically, Nandor is supposed to be..."

"Guillermo!" The interjection comes from Nandor, appearing at the curtain. He beckons urgently at Guillermo, who gives Dracula a quick, nodding semi-bow, and hurries over. Nandor lets the curtain fall behind him, giving them at least the illusion of some privacy.

"I know it is unusual," he tells Guillermo, still visibly nervous, "but maybe just while he is here, you could call him Master too? Just to be polite."

Guillermo looks at him in disbelief, and possibly just a little betrayal. "What, really?"

"I just think it might be a nice gesture, you know?" Nandor tries, vaguely wringing his hands. "As hosts, and that sort of thing. You see, it turns out he is still a little bit bitter about that whole thing with the Ottomans and his brother—I wasn't even really involved, you understand, but it was only a few hundred years ago—it is understandable if he is still a little raw about it."

"What... thing?" asks Guillermo, who is now completely at sea.


"Vlad Dracula and his brother Radu," Laszlo explains, "were raised in the Ottoman court during the reign of Murad II. And in that time, they say Radu grew and blossomed into a young man of remarkable beauty."

"They called him Radu the Handsome, you know," Nadja puts in.

"Beautiful enough to catch the eye of Mehmed, the young Sultan-to-be—a man who could have surely had his pick of the entire court, so Radu must have been something truly special. Not that things got off to the most auspicious start—the story goes that the first time the young Sultan pressed his suit, so to speak..."

"They say he invited the beautiful Radu to his bedchamber and fell upon him with kisses before he had hardly closed the door," Nadja supplies.

"...well, the young Radu panicked, drew a knife and stabbed him in the leg. And upon realising he'd just wilfully wounded one of the most important men in the entire Ottoman Empire, he panicked again, ran away, and hid himself up a tree. And there he stayed, refusing to come down, until Mehmed himself limped over and assured him that he wasn't going to be in any trouble."

"It's all so very romantic!" Nadja sighs.

"Anyway, they must have sorted it all out," Laszlo goes on, "because they say that not long after, Radu the Handsome had become Mehmed's lover—and he remained a loyal supporter of the Ottomans to the end of his days. Which can't be said for his brother Vlad, who was swift to cut all ties with the Ottoman court in that characteristically decisive fashion he's so known for, once he assumed power in Transylvania after their father's death. When next the brothers met, it would be at the heads of rival armies, warring for control of the territory."

Nadja nods. "It is always so very sad when a little thing like international politics comes between a family in that way."

"This was all long before Vlad became the Dracula we know today, of course," says Laszlo. "Say what you like about the man, he's never one to let go of a grudge. In fact, it turns out that's pretty much what brought him to these shores to begin with."


"Well I can't ask him, can I?" says Nandor. "He won't even hardly talk to me!"

He and the others are standing in a huddle outside the curtain dividing off the fancy room, which Dracula appears to have taken over. Guillermo peers nervously through a crack, but quickly lets the curtain fall back again.

"I don't even see the point of broaching the subject," says Laszlo. "It's perfectly obvious what this is about. It's always the same with his type: he's here to conquer the New World and all the rest of that tired, old song-and-dance. It'll be like the Baron all over again—and don't imagine one big night out on the town will make any impression on him. We may as well just accept it and move on."

"If it's so important, why don't you just send Gizmo to ask him?" suggests Nadja.

"Uhh..." says Guillermo, who is clearly not a fan of this plan.

"Oh, that'll do it," says Laszlo, rolling his eyes. "Just send the help in to do a vampire's job. Yeah, that'll send exactly the right impression." He twitches and looks around as the curtain billows faintly. "Shit, is he looking this way?"

"He knows we're here!" Nandor hisses. "He's not stupid! Better someone goes in to ask him now, and then at least we are not all hanging around for nothing!"

The conversation fades into hushed whispers as the camera moves into the fancy room proper, where Dracula sits, apparently engrossed in some old book—though closer inspection would reveal the spine identifies it as the New York street directory of 1897. A moment later, Nadja enters, having evidently been delegated for this task.

"Um, hi! Hello?" she begins, hunching forward a little, in the universal language of one who fears that bowing might be the only safe way to approach. "I hope I am not disturbing you from your obviously very important... whatever it is you are actually doing in here."

Dracula raises his eyes from his book to look at her, but doesn't respond.

"So, we were all sort of just thinking," Nadja offers, with a very awkward smile, "now that our guest, the Count, has had a couple of days to get all settled in and make himself comfortable—perhaps we might now know why it is that we have had the honour bestowed on us of having such an honourable guest in our house, in this particular place and part of the world, and in this particular time, and, like, what he's even doing here and stuff?"

Dracula regards her coolly for some moments before offering any reply.

"I make no secret of my purpose upon these shores," he pronounces, snapping closed the book in his hands. "I have journeyed here with the anticipation of settling a long-held and very personal matter of revenge."

On the far side of the curtain, Nandor gives the camera an extremely nervous look. "He's not talking about me, is he?"

"Nandor, my friend," Laszlo whispers back, "I sincerely doubt he'd bother to leave his own house on your account."

"Information has reached me," Dracula goes on, "that upon this very island, my ancient enemy, Van Helsing, has been reborn."

"Ohh..." says Nadja, nodding in a way that makes her whole upper body bob slightly. "Yes, okay. That would about do it, I suppose."

The camera doesn't linger on her. It's busy capturing Guillermo having what looks to be a small, quiet panic attack.