FIC: In Strange Aeons (5/6)
Author: DJ_the_Writer
Rating: PG-13
Pairings: Charles/OFC
Beta: arymabeth
Characters: Charles, OCs, Selatcia, Crozier
Warnings: Character death (off-screen)
Summary: Angela gets to dust of her sleuthing skills when Charles takes a trip into the unknown.
I'm back! And this fic is almost over, so you may regret that. And once again, I'm cribbing from Avatar:TLA.
Chapter 5
Angela turned on her phone. It had reception and the GPS posted them in the Appalachian mountains in Maryland. “I’ll call for an extraction.”
Charles seated himself at the desk and hit a key to turn off the screensavers. One screen showed activity on a live webcam for a construction site, with a missile visible in the background. The other looked in on some kind of boardroom where all the men sat facing a ceiling-high screen, with Selatcia on a stone throne in the middle. “The exit ‘he’ uses,” Charles mused as Angela texted Mordhaus’s military wing. “We’re in Selatcia’s office.” He fumbled for the desk-mounted clock. “We’ve been gone for twenty-eight minutes. Text 82 and tell him to head back. And that I’m fine.” Though Angela would hardly call him fine, but she obeyed, because it felt so good to slip back into business mode again, and put something behind them that was unfathomable.
As if oblivious to their current danger, Charles was enraptured by the live feed. “What the hell are they talking about? Why are Murderface’s bare feet on the screen? Who would want to look at that?”
Extraction in twenty, the commandos texted back, and Angela looked over Charles’s shoulder. “Don’t you golf with that guy?”
“The guy in the gray suit? Yeah, he’s a UN delegate. Our next round is going to be awkward.” He was utterly fascinated by it all, and so was she. “That’s Senator Stampington,” he pointed. “He can’t sit for very long. Knee problems. And Father Orlaag - and Crozier you know - I don’t know who’s talking, though.”
“She used to run a Murderface website in Germany,” Angela said. “Now she must be billing herself as some kind of expert. Also I think Explosionsauce gave her diabetes, or something like that.”
“Gives her a reason to be angry.” He sat back, finishing his whiskey. “As tempted as I am to go through all this, I’m thinking we should escape instead.”
“I agree with you. We’ve got twenty minutes to get to a roof. Or just outside.”
“I don’t have the specs for this place yet but I know we must be underground,” he said, rising at last and abandoning the computer. “If we do get to ah, beat up some Tribunal cronies, it might not be the end of the world.”
They only made it one hallway past Selatcia’s office before they encountered two heavily-armed guards, but they had the element of surprise, as Angela figured people didn’t break out of Tribunal HQ very often, and it was almost easy to disarm the men, knock them out, and take their assault rifles and helmets. There was no time for a full costume change as one gun had fired into a wall and set of alarms, and now the hallway was a blinking red. They raced to the nearest elevator, trying not to shoot people in vital areas, as it seemed somehow unfair.
The elevator door opened to reveal an alarmed but still off-guard pair - Crozier and Orlaag. Maybe they didn’t recognize them - Charles was hard to recognize - but they didn’t react as quickly as their attackers. Charles went for Orlaag, butting him in the head with his rifle, and Angela followed in suit with Crozier, who had a very wide head, now that she thought about it. The men dropped, and Charles shrugged at Angela and climbed over them, into the elevator with the unconscious Tribunal members.
Charles hit the button for the top floor. “I’ve wanted to do that for a long time.” He gave Orlaag’s body a kick for good measure. “Fucker.”
Angela, thinking they had to make this look real, kicked Crozier, but not very hard. The elevator was fast, perhaps faster because of the alarms, and guards were running every which way when the doors opened to the top floor with its bright sign for “roof access.” “This is some seriously shitty security.”
“I know.” In fact, no one seemed to notice that two of the guards did not have corresponding uniforms but instead dirt-covered clothing, and one was female, until it was too late and they were already on the emergency staircase, firing down at the people who tried to follow them. “I am unimpressed,” Charles added as they turned the corner to the roof, and stopped in their tracks.
There were no guards, not yet. Only Selatcia, who barely fit in the hallway. He was weaponless and silent, but no less dangerous for it. He growled at them, and even if it was a very human growl, it couldn’t prepare them for what came next. He put his two forefingers together and pulled them apart violently, and from them came a blast of lightning that he hurled in their direction.
Or, to be precise, Angela wasn’t prepared. She wasn’t the target, either. Charles took the full blast, his body lighting up with it, but he found a stance that prevented him by being further pushed back even as he was being electrocuted and after an obviously painful moment, he reached out with both arms. The left touched the wall, and the right swung as if he was throwing a ball, and instead redirected the lightning back at Selatcia, catching the be-suited monster by some surprise and knocking him right off his feet. The rest of the living electricity went into the walls, causing a power failure. The only light now was from the cracks in the door up the stairs behind Selatcia’s prone form, and the lights from their rifle scopes.
“Something I learned from my brother,” Charles said as he kicked open the door to the roof, and managed to raise his hand to block the direct stream of daylight from hitting his eyes. The helicopter was in sight - their helicopter, with red and black interiors and metal spikes protruding from the cockpit. The roof was otherwise empty, so they just continued firing into the stairwell, somewhat blindly at this point, to keep the Tribunal soldiers at bay while the copter lowered a rope ladder.
“You first, sir,” Angela said, done with him protecting her, and he dropped the rifle and climbed, but not without holding out a hand to make sure she was stable on the bottom level before the helicopter could pull away. By the time they reached the actual vehicle, they were exhausted and had to be pulled in by burley Gears with a comforting familiarity.
“Sir?” One of them dared, clearly stunned by the Commander’s appearance, and not just because of the location. If anything, the location made it more convincing that it was him.
Of course, Charles Ofdensen did not explain himself or his appearance. “How fast can you get us to Mordhaus?”
“Two hours, sir.”
“Good.” He looked back at Angela. “Did 82 text you back?”
“He wishes you well, sir,” she said. She didn’t say who she was, either, and either these were the dimmest Gears ever or they would get it from context and the Klokateer rumor mill. How many female assistant managers did Charles have?
A sign of the exhaustion he was not otherwise willing to show, Charles allowed himself to be strapped in for the ride and did not request a phone or a computer to resume business as he normally would. He only wanted water, and so did she, finding herself famished. When was the last time she ate? If she counted the jerky in the car on the way to the cemetery, about an hour. She did not explain to the Gears that it was much, much longer than that, but she was too tired and nervous to be hungry. Remembering Charles’s state of malnourishment when they found him in Australia, she forced herself to consume two protein bars and a bottle of Dethklok-brand Gatorade before allowing her mind to finally shut down. Even the loud spinning of the helicopter’s propellers could not prevent a solid and dreamless sleep.
************************************
Angela did not really want to be woken on the helicopter pad at Mordhaus, or be shuttled into the infirmary and prodded by the confused medics. She did not want to be in another room from Charles, the only person she could really talk to. Somewhere in her brain it registered that she’d lost about ten pounds, and that rest and some blood tests would be good, and they shot her up with b12 and who knows what else. The clothes she arrived in were destroyed, not sent back to wardrobe, and she did notice the weight loss when they gave her suit pants and they did not fit as they had “that morning,” that lifetime ago. She did agree with their stern prescription for rest, not that she wouldn’t have jumped off the table and gone back to work had Charles requested it of her. Somehow she made it back to Charles’s apartment, where she nodded off on the couch until he arrived, back in his own uniform, sans only suit jacket and tie. He smiled sheepishly at her, having no words to sum up how he felt, though this time around she could guess. More interesting was his smile, now visible without the thick barrier of fur-like hair. He was shaved and his haircut was on the short side, even for him.
“I spoke to 82,” he said. “So he’s not going to freak out and bother me when he gets back from Louisiana.” His phone vibrated but he didn’t answer it. “Crozier. So he must have survived. Thank you for not killing him.”
“If I didn’t know the difference between knocking someone unconscious and a killing blow, I wouldn’t have gotten far as a Gear,” she said. “Or as a cop. What are you going to tell him?”
“The truth. That Selatcia has a secret one-way portal from his dream world to his office and we unintentionally used it.”
She was too tired to laugh, or do anything, really. It was still daylight out but they climbed into bed - the real thing this time, not extra beautiful or mysteriously haunting. Just an ordinary bed. It was all she could handle.
“Did you open your eyes?” Charles said, largely out of nowhere.
“What?”
“When we were in the tunnel.” He did not sit up. He spoke into the pillow, but he was deadly serious. “Did you open your eyes?”
“No.”
He pondered this. “Good.”
The silence was heavenly in that it was not complete. They could hear the rumblings of Mordhaus, and the planes flying around it, and all the normal sounds of normal human beings in a normal world. “What did you see?” she asked at last.
“I couldn’t describe it to you if I wanted to.” He buried his face in the crook of her neck, an oddly scratchy sensation with his fresh shave. “And I don’t want to.”
************************************
The oddity - piled upon other oddities - was the way they tried to resume their normal life, because nothing had happened. Charles was never gone. He returned from New Orleans on time, and stayed in Mordhaus from then on. Angela made an unofficial trip to Louisiana, spent a total of a few hours there, and returned. Nobody knew otherwise beyond the circle of people who had to know, and they only knew pieces. Whatever Charles told 82, it was enough that 82 never asked Angela about it, though he did seem to regard her with newfound respect. And that all would have been fine, if she had really only been gone for twenty-eight minutes, and the nightmares did not stop even when she was awake.
How it came was too gradual for her to pick a point, though it did happen quickly. There were shadows on the walls where there shouldn’t have been. Horrific surroundings she had been numb to for years were how terrifying or laughable, one of the two. She broke into cold sweats when she was alone, and she slept badly. She wanted both to talk to someone and tell them, but she knew she didn’t have words for so much of it, and even with all that encompassed Dethklok as a company and a lifestyle, they wouldn’t believe her - and she wanted that part of her to go away forever and no one to learn a single moment of it. Her eyes would come unfocused and her work was difficult, and she couldn’t understand why.
She was in the middle of a panic of no source when Charles called her in for a routine question. He took one look at her, his eyes betraying some of the same hauntings, and said, “Go to the pharmacy.” He wrote out a prescription on a yellow notepad. There were no laws at Mordhaus. “Get Xanax and take the full dose. Lie down and listen to Dethklok. Don’t turn it off when you start to fall asleep. Keep it playing.”
She looked at the note and the dose. “This will make me a zombie.”
“Don’t put yourself through this,” he said. “I won’t allow it. It will get to you otherwise.” He did not say what would get her, because they both knew. “When you’re tired, it’s worse. Your barriers weaken. And Dethklok ... counteracts it somehow.”
She raised an eyebrow. “What about you?”
“I was always a goner,” he said, trying to make light of it, but his smile was weak. “I’ll join you later. I promise.”
Not knowing if she would be picking his head off the desk again whenever she up from the massive downer she was about to take, Angela got her prescription filled, took half a dose, and laid down on the couch with her iPhone set to an endless loop of the hardest, least soothing metal Dethklok could provide. When she couldn’t banish the imaginary monsters, she took the rest of the dose. She did not remember the rest of the day, and barely remembered stumbling into bed with Charles’s help. He smelled of smoke and that scented spice Pickles liked to use with his opium. He did not even fully undress and she put one of her earbuds in his ear as Nathan sang about blood and death and murder and the destruction of all mankind. And then they could sleep.
This routine continued for several days, rendering her practically an invalid, and either she was hallucinating or Charles was actually checking in on her from time to time. Her mind wandered as it was inclined to do, through a soupy haze of tranquilizers and confused lyrics about the blackest of the blackest black. She could find the memories of their journey if she wanted to, but she was less inclined to make that journey as time wore on. Not that she would ever forget a moment of it, especially the good moments, in that mystical life that had never existed and never could exist again, she now saw stark as day even at her highest point of medication-induced stupor. She would never be together with Charles, who put so many walls up between himself and others, and who was slated to die. He knew it, too - that was what he hadn’t been able to tell her when he could tell her everything else. He had started burning his bridges a long time ago. He had died once for Dethklok, and he would do it again.
She didn’t know how long she was sobbing into the cushion before she noticed Charles sitting on the edge, stroking her back. She didn’t have words and neither did he. Maybe he knew what she was crying about, maybe he didn’t. Did she really have to tell him? Didn’t he have enough on his plate?
“Everyone has to die sometime,” he said. So maybe he was a mind reader. She wouldn’t put it past him. Now she was just embarrassed, for being weak when she should have been strong. “The band keeps reminding us, and we don’t listen. I don’t know how we miss it - it couldn’t be more clear. Dethklok has always provided us with the answers we’ve needed. If people really heard them ... I don’t know what they would do. So maybe it’s a blessing.” He swallowed. “But you don’t have to die. Not yet. Not even soon. I don’t have to share that with you. I’m determined not to share that responsibility with you.” He turned back to her, and she was happy that she’d stopped crying at last. “You can’t let it get inside you. The dream worlds of Ejvind and Selatcia, they do the same thing. They get inside you, and they eat you from the inside out. We weren’t supposed to be there. We were outside experiences we’re supposed to have.”
“But you’re not sick,” she said, meaning he wasn’t taking sick days to lounge around and listen to Dethwater.
He smiled sadly. “I haven’t been able to sleep for a very long time. Since Denmark, I think. When I die, it will be like going to sleep, and I don’t have to wake up. And I’m so tired, Angela. I can’t even begin to tell you, even if maybe you’re the only person on earth who can understand why.”
Charles didn’t speak anymore. He didn’t add the last part, the part she had to be blind and way more drugged not to see, that he was ready to die because he wanted to die. He felt used up, having already lived many times outside a human lifespan.
Then he found his voice again. “The boys will be OK. I know that now. No one will be able to touch them. They won’t need me and I won’t need them. But I don’t want to leave you.”
With a great deal of effort, Angela sat up, and kissed him on the shoulder before finding a place there to rest her head. The image of her mother, of all people, popped into her head. Her mother was not the kind of mother who said everything was going to be fine when it wasn’t. She was a woman of hard truths. She would have known what to say.
Charles filled in the gap. “We had that time together. Even if it twisted us both, it was ... nice.” He meant more than that. He didn’t have to say it. “And we have tomorrow. And the next day. And the next day. Every day until the end.”
Wondering why he was comforting her, she wrapped her slender fingers around his scarred ones. “We have today.”
"I can live with that."
To be continued...
Rating: PG-13
Pairings: Charles/OFC
Beta: arymabeth
Characters: Charles, OCs, Selatcia, Crozier
Warnings: Character death (off-screen)
Summary: Angela gets to dust of her sleuthing skills when Charles takes a trip into the unknown.
I'm back! And this fic is almost over, so you may regret that. And once again, I'm cribbing from Avatar:TLA.
Chapter 5
Angela turned on her phone. It had reception and the GPS posted them in the Appalachian mountains in Maryland. “I’ll call for an extraction.”
Charles seated himself at the desk and hit a key to turn off the screensavers. One screen showed activity on a live webcam for a construction site, with a missile visible in the background. The other looked in on some kind of boardroom where all the men sat facing a ceiling-high screen, with Selatcia on a stone throne in the middle. “The exit ‘he’ uses,” Charles mused as Angela texted Mordhaus’s military wing. “We’re in Selatcia’s office.” He fumbled for the desk-mounted clock. “We’ve been gone for twenty-eight minutes. Text 82 and tell him to head back. And that I’m fine.” Though Angela would hardly call him fine, but she obeyed, because it felt so good to slip back into business mode again, and put something behind them that was unfathomable.
As if oblivious to their current danger, Charles was enraptured by the live feed. “What the hell are they talking about? Why are Murderface’s bare feet on the screen? Who would want to look at that?”
Extraction in twenty, the commandos texted back, and Angela looked over Charles’s shoulder. “Don’t you golf with that guy?”
“The guy in the gray suit? Yeah, he’s a UN delegate. Our next round is going to be awkward.” He was utterly fascinated by it all, and so was she. “That’s Senator Stampington,” he pointed. “He can’t sit for very long. Knee problems. And Father Orlaag - and Crozier you know - I don’t know who’s talking, though.”
“She used to run a Murderface website in Germany,” Angela said. “Now she must be billing herself as some kind of expert. Also I think Explosionsauce gave her diabetes, or something like that.”
“Gives her a reason to be angry.” He sat back, finishing his whiskey. “As tempted as I am to go through all this, I’m thinking we should escape instead.”
“I agree with you. We’ve got twenty minutes to get to a roof. Or just outside.”
“I don’t have the specs for this place yet but I know we must be underground,” he said, rising at last and abandoning the computer. “If we do get to ah, beat up some Tribunal cronies, it might not be the end of the world.”
They only made it one hallway past Selatcia’s office before they encountered two heavily-armed guards, but they had the element of surprise, as Angela figured people didn’t break out of Tribunal HQ very often, and it was almost easy to disarm the men, knock them out, and take their assault rifles and helmets. There was no time for a full costume change as one gun had fired into a wall and set of alarms, and now the hallway was a blinking red. They raced to the nearest elevator, trying not to shoot people in vital areas, as it seemed somehow unfair.
The elevator door opened to reveal an alarmed but still off-guard pair - Crozier and Orlaag. Maybe they didn’t recognize them - Charles was hard to recognize - but they didn’t react as quickly as their attackers. Charles went for Orlaag, butting him in the head with his rifle, and Angela followed in suit with Crozier, who had a very wide head, now that she thought about it. The men dropped, and Charles shrugged at Angela and climbed over them, into the elevator with the unconscious Tribunal members.
Charles hit the button for the top floor. “I’ve wanted to do that for a long time.” He gave Orlaag’s body a kick for good measure. “Fucker.”
Angela, thinking they had to make this look real, kicked Crozier, but not very hard. The elevator was fast, perhaps faster because of the alarms, and guards were running every which way when the doors opened to the top floor with its bright sign for “roof access.” “This is some seriously shitty security.”
“I know.” In fact, no one seemed to notice that two of the guards did not have corresponding uniforms but instead dirt-covered clothing, and one was female, until it was too late and they were already on the emergency staircase, firing down at the people who tried to follow them. “I am unimpressed,” Charles added as they turned the corner to the roof, and stopped in their tracks.
There were no guards, not yet. Only Selatcia, who barely fit in the hallway. He was weaponless and silent, but no less dangerous for it. He growled at them, and even if it was a very human growl, it couldn’t prepare them for what came next. He put his two forefingers together and pulled them apart violently, and from them came a blast of lightning that he hurled in their direction.
Or, to be precise, Angela wasn’t prepared. She wasn’t the target, either. Charles took the full blast, his body lighting up with it, but he found a stance that prevented him by being further pushed back even as he was being electrocuted and after an obviously painful moment, he reached out with both arms. The left touched the wall, and the right swung as if he was throwing a ball, and instead redirected the lightning back at Selatcia, catching the be-suited monster by some surprise and knocking him right off his feet. The rest of the living electricity went into the walls, causing a power failure. The only light now was from the cracks in the door up the stairs behind Selatcia’s prone form, and the lights from their rifle scopes.
“Something I learned from my brother,” Charles said as he kicked open the door to the roof, and managed to raise his hand to block the direct stream of daylight from hitting his eyes. The helicopter was in sight - their helicopter, with red and black interiors and metal spikes protruding from the cockpit. The roof was otherwise empty, so they just continued firing into the stairwell, somewhat blindly at this point, to keep the Tribunal soldiers at bay while the copter lowered a rope ladder.
“You first, sir,” Angela said, done with him protecting her, and he dropped the rifle and climbed, but not without holding out a hand to make sure she was stable on the bottom level before the helicopter could pull away. By the time they reached the actual vehicle, they were exhausted and had to be pulled in by burley Gears with a comforting familiarity.
“Sir?” One of them dared, clearly stunned by the Commander’s appearance, and not just because of the location. If anything, the location made it more convincing that it was him.
Of course, Charles Ofdensen did not explain himself or his appearance. “How fast can you get us to Mordhaus?”
“Two hours, sir.”
“Good.” He looked back at Angela. “Did 82 text you back?”
“He wishes you well, sir,” she said. She didn’t say who she was, either, and either these were the dimmest Gears ever or they would get it from context and the Klokateer rumor mill. How many female assistant managers did Charles have?
A sign of the exhaustion he was not otherwise willing to show, Charles allowed himself to be strapped in for the ride and did not request a phone or a computer to resume business as he normally would. He only wanted water, and so did she, finding herself famished. When was the last time she ate? If she counted the jerky in the car on the way to the cemetery, about an hour. She did not explain to the Gears that it was much, much longer than that, but she was too tired and nervous to be hungry. Remembering Charles’s state of malnourishment when they found him in Australia, she forced herself to consume two protein bars and a bottle of Dethklok-brand Gatorade before allowing her mind to finally shut down. Even the loud spinning of the helicopter’s propellers could not prevent a solid and dreamless sleep.
************************************
Angela did not really want to be woken on the helicopter pad at Mordhaus, or be shuttled into the infirmary and prodded by the confused medics. She did not want to be in another room from Charles, the only person she could really talk to. Somewhere in her brain it registered that she’d lost about ten pounds, and that rest and some blood tests would be good, and they shot her up with b12 and who knows what else. The clothes she arrived in were destroyed, not sent back to wardrobe, and she did notice the weight loss when they gave her suit pants and they did not fit as they had “that morning,” that lifetime ago. She did agree with their stern prescription for rest, not that she wouldn’t have jumped off the table and gone back to work had Charles requested it of her. Somehow she made it back to Charles’s apartment, where she nodded off on the couch until he arrived, back in his own uniform, sans only suit jacket and tie. He smiled sheepishly at her, having no words to sum up how he felt, though this time around she could guess. More interesting was his smile, now visible without the thick barrier of fur-like hair. He was shaved and his haircut was on the short side, even for him.
“I spoke to 82,” he said. “So he’s not going to freak out and bother me when he gets back from Louisiana.” His phone vibrated but he didn’t answer it. “Crozier. So he must have survived. Thank you for not killing him.”
“If I didn’t know the difference between knocking someone unconscious and a killing blow, I wouldn’t have gotten far as a Gear,” she said. “Or as a cop. What are you going to tell him?”
“The truth. That Selatcia has a secret one-way portal from his dream world to his office and we unintentionally used it.”
She was too tired to laugh, or do anything, really. It was still daylight out but they climbed into bed - the real thing this time, not extra beautiful or mysteriously haunting. Just an ordinary bed. It was all she could handle.
“Did you open your eyes?” Charles said, largely out of nowhere.
“What?”
“When we were in the tunnel.” He did not sit up. He spoke into the pillow, but he was deadly serious. “Did you open your eyes?”
“No.”
He pondered this. “Good.”
The silence was heavenly in that it was not complete. They could hear the rumblings of Mordhaus, and the planes flying around it, and all the normal sounds of normal human beings in a normal world. “What did you see?” she asked at last.
“I couldn’t describe it to you if I wanted to.” He buried his face in the crook of her neck, an oddly scratchy sensation with his fresh shave. “And I don’t want to.”
************************************
The oddity - piled upon other oddities - was the way they tried to resume their normal life, because nothing had happened. Charles was never gone. He returned from New Orleans on time, and stayed in Mordhaus from then on. Angela made an unofficial trip to Louisiana, spent a total of a few hours there, and returned. Nobody knew otherwise beyond the circle of people who had to know, and they only knew pieces. Whatever Charles told 82, it was enough that 82 never asked Angela about it, though he did seem to regard her with newfound respect. And that all would have been fine, if she had really only been gone for twenty-eight minutes, and the nightmares did not stop even when she was awake.
How it came was too gradual for her to pick a point, though it did happen quickly. There were shadows on the walls where there shouldn’t have been. Horrific surroundings she had been numb to for years were how terrifying or laughable, one of the two. She broke into cold sweats when she was alone, and she slept badly. She wanted both to talk to someone and tell them, but she knew she didn’t have words for so much of it, and even with all that encompassed Dethklok as a company and a lifestyle, they wouldn’t believe her - and she wanted that part of her to go away forever and no one to learn a single moment of it. Her eyes would come unfocused and her work was difficult, and she couldn’t understand why.
She was in the middle of a panic of no source when Charles called her in for a routine question. He took one look at her, his eyes betraying some of the same hauntings, and said, “Go to the pharmacy.” He wrote out a prescription on a yellow notepad. There were no laws at Mordhaus. “Get Xanax and take the full dose. Lie down and listen to Dethklok. Don’t turn it off when you start to fall asleep. Keep it playing.”
She looked at the note and the dose. “This will make me a zombie.”
“Don’t put yourself through this,” he said. “I won’t allow it. It will get to you otherwise.” He did not say what would get her, because they both knew. “When you’re tired, it’s worse. Your barriers weaken. And Dethklok ... counteracts it somehow.”
She raised an eyebrow. “What about you?”
“I was always a goner,” he said, trying to make light of it, but his smile was weak. “I’ll join you later. I promise.”
Not knowing if she would be picking his head off the desk again whenever she up from the massive downer she was about to take, Angela got her prescription filled, took half a dose, and laid down on the couch with her iPhone set to an endless loop of the hardest, least soothing metal Dethklok could provide. When she couldn’t banish the imaginary monsters, she took the rest of the dose. She did not remember the rest of the day, and barely remembered stumbling into bed with Charles’s help. He smelled of smoke and that scented spice Pickles liked to use with his opium. He did not even fully undress and she put one of her earbuds in his ear as Nathan sang about blood and death and murder and the destruction of all mankind. And then they could sleep.
This routine continued for several days, rendering her practically an invalid, and either she was hallucinating or Charles was actually checking in on her from time to time. Her mind wandered as it was inclined to do, through a soupy haze of tranquilizers and confused lyrics about the blackest of the blackest black. She could find the memories of their journey if she wanted to, but she was less inclined to make that journey as time wore on. Not that she would ever forget a moment of it, especially the good moments, in that mystical life that had never existed and never could exist again, she now saw stark as day even at her highest point of medication-induced stupor. She would never be together with Charles, who put so many walls up between himself and others, and who was slated to die. He knew it, too - that was what he hadn’t been able to tell her when he could tell her everything else. He had started burning his bridges a long time ago. He had died once for Dethklok, and he would do it again.
She didn’t know how long she was sobbing into the cushion before she noticed Charles sitting on the edge, stroking her back. She didn’t have words and neither did he. Maybe he knew what she was crying about, maybe he didn’t. Did she really have to tell him? Didn’t he have enough on his plate?
“Everyone has to die sometime,” he said. So maybe he was a mind reader. She wouldn’t put it past him. Now she was just embarrassed, for being weak when she should have been strong. “The band keeps reminding us, and we don’t listen. I don’t know how we miss it - it couldn’t be more clear. Dethklok has always provided us with the answers we’ve needed. If people really heard them ... I don’t know what they would do. So maybe it’s a blessing.” He swallowed. “But you don’t have to die. Not yet. Not even soon. I don’t have to share that with you. I’m determined not to share that responsibility with you.” He turned back to her, and she was happy that she’d stopped crying at last. “You can’t let it get inside you. The dream worlds of Ejvind and Selatcia, they do the same thing. They get inside you, and they eat you from the inside out. We weren’t supposed to be there. We were outside experiences we’re supposed to have.”
“But you’re not sick,” she said, meaning he wasn’t taking sick days to lounge around and listen to Dethwater.
He smiled sadly. “I haven’t been able to sleep for a very long time. Since Denmark, I think. When I die, it will be like going to sleep, and I don’t have to wake up. And I’m so tired, Angela. I can’t even begin to tell you, even if maybe you’re the only person on earth who can understand why.”
Charles didn’t speak anymore. He didn’t add the last part, the part she had to be blind and way more drugged not to see, that he was ready to die because he wanted to die. He felt used up, having already lived many times outside a human lifespan.
Then he found his voice again. “The boys will be OK. I know that now. No one will be able to touch them. They won’t need me and I won’t need them. But I don’t want to leave you.”
With a great deal of effort, Angela sat up, and kissed him on the shoulder before finding a place there to rest her head. The image of her mother, of all people, popped into her head. Her mother was not the kind of mother who said everything was going to be fine when it wasn’t. She was a woman of hard truths. She would have known what to say.
Charles filled in the gap. “We had that time together. Even if it twisted us both, it was ... nice.” He meant more than that. He didn’t have to say it. “And we have tomorrow. And the next day. And the next day. Every day until the end.”
Wondering why he was comforting her, she wrapped her slender fingers around his scarred ones. “We have today.”
"I can live with that."
To be continued...