(no subject)
Title: An Everyday Part of the Workplace Environment
Author(s): Lemone
Pairing(s)/Character(s): Nathan/Charles, the boys
Summary: Charles finds a place where his brutality is appreciated
Rating: PG -13
Warning(s): Language, death, alcohol abuse, etc. The usual.
Word Count: 2,400
Disclaimer: I do not own Nathan, Charles, Metalocalypse, etc, so forth.
Author Notes: Written for the Business is Brutal theme. Pre-show. Usually my Author’s notes are long and rambling, but I can’t think of anything to really say here. It feels weird.
Charles watched impassively as the paramedics carried Sally from Accounting’s mangled corpse out of the office. The gurney left little bloody wheel tracks across the office. He noticed that both of the paramedics looked a little green and idly wondered if there was a stomach bug going around.
He noticed the drops of red in his peripheral and took out the handkerchief he kept for such occasions. As he industrially cleaned his glasses he began to think. That was, what? The third one this week? And there had been four the week before. Which made a total of ten this month. They were really starting to rack up the cleaning bills. Sally in particular had chosen a rather messy method in loosing herself from the mortal coil. Perhaps some sort of contract could be worked out with the custodial company? And a workplace safety seminar might be in order. He’d bring up the matter with Harkwood at the first opportunity. Charles pocketed his handkerchief.
He returned to his cubicle. He frowned when he noticed that a good deal of Sally from Accounting’s blood had gotten on the paperwork that had been nearly finished when she had her accident. That wasn’t good. The documents needed to be actually readable to be of any use to anyone. He’d have to redo them. Sighing, he went to work.
Debbie was sobbing in the cubicle behind him. Had she and her boyfriend broken up again? Charles appreciated that she felt that he was her last chance at getting married, and he hated to be insensitive, but surely she realized how unseemly and dare he say it, unprofessional, such behavior was? He did his best to ignore her.
After an hour his phone rang. Charles finished the line he was working on and answered it on the second ring. He recognized the voice instantly.
“Mr. Harkwood,” he said, his voice assuming the bright-yet-businesslike voice he saved for his boss, “what can I do for you?”
Harkwood’s voice gave him pause. Something about his tone was off. He sounded almost… fearful? “I, uhh. Umm. I’d like to see you in my office. If, uh, you duh-don’t mind.”
“Of course, Mr. Harkwood. I’ll be there in a minute.” Charles hung up the phone, used a post-it to mark his place in his paperwork so that he could more efficiently get back to work when his meeting was finished and headed towards the elevator.
~~~****~~~
Mr. Jonathon Harkwood was the last founding member of Harkwood Rowe & Murphy, the law firm where Charles had been working for the last two and a half months, alive. Rowe had died of a peculiar sort or food poisoning that caused him to vomit copious amounts of blood in the executive washroom and collapse. He was found hours later, face-first in a toilet bowl that was filled with his own blood. Murphy had walked underneath a piece of poorly installed lighting at precisely the wrong moment. The lighting had come loose and fallen, slicing open Mr. Murphy’s throat. Dark, nearly black blood had fountained from him, spraying the walls and ruining Charles’s best suit.
Harkwood himself was an older man, somewhat heavyset and balding. He wore thick frames that magnified his squinty eyes to a ridiculous degree. At the moment he was wearing a black suit and tie, probably as a showing of morning towards his deceased partners. He was also clutching a crucifix, which Charles found rather baffling. He had thought the man was an atheist.
“You, ah, wanted to see me about something, Mr. Harkwood?”
Harkwood’s bottom lip trembled for a moment. Charles frowned. Surely the man hadn’t called him in here for some sort of emotional heart-to-heart?
“Buh-blood,” Harkwood whimpered.
Charles lifted his eyebrows. “Excuse me?”
“Yuh- yuh- you’re cuh-cuh-cuh-covered in buh-blood.” Harkwood shakingly raised the crucifix until it was between his eyes. “Again.”
Charles looked himself over. Was that what this was all about? It was true, he was. He’d been standing behind Sally from Accounting when she’d had her fatal accident with the copy machine. His entire left shoulder had been soaked. The pants might be salvageable, but he’d probably end up having to throw away yet another good suit.
“It’s quite all right,” he reassured Harkwood, “I always bring an extra suit for situations like these. I’ll and get changed during my lunch break.”
Harkwood stared at the man across from him in rising terror. He’d prepared for this, really he had. He’d spent a week typing up a nice, long, diplomatic speech. Checked and re-checked it for something that might upset the man. Three people had died in his building in the meantime. He should be guilty over being indirectly responsible for so many deaths, for letting this... thing in to begin with, but really he was just scared stiff for his own hide. He looked down at the speech, which he’d arranged in front of him and took a deep shuddering breath.
“Muh-Mr. Ofdensen duh-do you know how muh-many people have duh-duh-died since you s-started working here?”
Charles did the math in his head quickly. “Twenty-seven that I know of, sir. Why do you ask?”
Harkwood staggered a bit as he rose and headed towards the bottle of high-end Kentucky bourbon he kept behind his desk. What in God’s name made him think doing this sober was a good idea? His hands fought not to shake as he poured himself a glass. “Don’t you think that-“ he paused, knocking it back in one determined swallow and pouring himself another. “Don’t you think that’s an awful lot?”
Charles blinked. “Death is an everyday part of the workplace, sir.”
Harkwood barked out a laugh: a harsh, mirthless sound. He’d laughed before, when Debbie had come to him, babbling about the nightmares she’d had about Ofdensen. Begging him to fire the man ‘before it was too late.’ He’d done impressions of her at lunch that day, mocking her hysterical tones. Then Rowe had excused himself to go use the john and had never come out.
A week later, he started having the nightmares himself. Blackened blood and corpse-strewn dreams where Ofdensen rode a pale horse under a blood-red sky, a hulking man with long black hair and balefully glowing eyes at his side. At first he thought was just the stress of losing Rowe, who he’d known since college. He’d gone to a shrink who told him that it was his mind trying to make sense of what had happened, find someone to blame. It seemed sensible enough. After all, Ofdensen was such a plain, unassuming man. He did his work and barely said hello or goodbye. Quiet. Efficient.
Then Rodriguez had been electrocuted by his own blood. O’Malley had been torn apart by blackbirds in front of the building. Lieberman had fallen through two inch thick glass from the twelfth floor and exploded into red jelly on the concrete below. The dreams started getting worse, more and more lurid… The shrink kept assuring him that it was just stress, that the pills would make them go away before he knew it, but they never did anything. And people had just kept dying…
Harkwood poured himself a third glass of bourbon, picked his crucifix back up, and sat back down across from Ofdensen. He kept his head down as he stuttered his way through his neatly typed speech.
~~~****~~~
Two hours later, Charles Ofdensen was hunched over a drink at the nearest bar. He hadn’t bothered to change. He couldn’t bring himself to care. Harkwood’s words kept floating back to his mind like pathetic storm clouds. This would make the third time that he had been let go over something like this.
Charles fiddled morosely with his tumbler as he nursed his bad mood. He had to be getting five times the work done of anyone else there. He never sat and yakked on the phone for thirty minutes about some idiotic household problem, or stood at the water cooler for a seeming eternity nattering on about some unfathomably dull sports team. He got things done. And yet, no one ever seemed to appreciate this. He was constantly getting the shaft.
People died. That’s what happened. Nobody was immortal. Sure, people had a tendency to die in fairly spectacular ways when he around, but he hardly saw how he could be blamed for that. It wasn’t as if he was killing them. Why was he always held responsible for the clumsiness of others? For simple coincidence?
Charles finished his drink in one convulsive swallow and ordered another round.
~~~****~~~
“Dude! Dude, check it out.”
“Ja?”
“Check it out. Dere’s totally a guy inna suit at da bar covered it blood.”
“…So’s?”
“So, I gaht five bucks dat says Nat’an comes on to him, like, five minutes after da show.”
Skwisgaar thought for a moment. “You’s ons.”
In the end, they decided to get the other members of the band (sans Nathan, of course) and the roadies in on the act, reasoning that more people involved meant more money for whoever won the bet, which meant that the winner could get drunk off his winnings.
~~~****~~~
Charles sipped his drink and watched the band that had started playing a few minutes ago appreciatively. They were good. Damn good. They had turned a rather disinterested crowd into a screaming, moshing, chanting mob. Charles couldn’t say he blamed them. The band… Dethklok, was it? Had music that was... dark, grinding. Enthralling.
Unfortunately, the set was cut short when one of the fans managed to set himself on fire owing to some faulty wiring. Charles couldn’t help but feel a little disappointed. He’d have liked to hear more.
~~~****~~~
“Um. Hey.”
Charles blinked. He recognized the young man talking to him as the singer (though it was more like heavy growling than anything else) from the band who had just finished playing. It occurred to Charles that he should congratulate him on the great show he had just put on, maybe say something about he would be going places someday, but… up close he looked even more imposing than he did on the stage, and up close he could see the piercing, breathtaking green of his eyes, and…
“H-hi.”
They stared at each other for a moment.
“Mind if I sit here?”
“Oh! Ah, not at all.” Charles needlessly slid over to make room.
The boy sat down next to him, and roughly ordered the bartender to send a pint of beer his way and keep them coming. After downing his first three, the young man regarded Charles stonily for a moment.
“You’re, like, covered in blood. Like, a lot of it.”
Charles looked over himself. A few hours ago he had been too busy being pissed off at being let go to care, but under the young man’s gaze he realized he must look a fright. He had a change of clothes in the car, why didn’t he just use that? Stupid, stupid.
“Oh, ah. It’s not mine,” he offered self-consciously.
The young man seemed impressed. “Really?”
“It’s from Sally, a girl who works, ah, worked in our accounting department. She had an, ah, bit of an unfortunate accident with the copy machine. She lost an arm and most of her skin was torn off. I don’t know how she managed that, to be honest.”
He chanced a glance over at the young man. Far from the horrified expression he expected, from the young man looked almost awed.
“Man. That’s the brutalest thing I’ve heard in, like, ever.”
Charles wasn’t sure what to say to that. Was he being complimented somehow? Maybe he should change the subject…
“I’m sorry, I don’t think we’ve been properly introduced. I’m Charles Ofdensen. I am, ah I mean was, an attorney at Harkwood Rowe & Murphy until recently. Though, I suppose technically it’s just Harkwood now.”
“Name’s Nathan.”
They shook hands and held on for longer than was strictly necessary. Afterwards, both men had to pretend to be more interested in their respective drinks than they really were until the awkward moment had sufficiently passed.
“So, um. Like, does that sorta stuff happen to you all the time? With the ladies getting their skin torn off and stuff?”
Charles half-shrugged. “It’s the first time that particular accident happened, but people die all time, you know? It wasn’t as bad as when I worked at Heiman & Gatz. There was a Christmas party held in a dining hall on 5th street. Nice place. Anyway, apparently the safety inspector wasn’t doing his job because…”
Hours passed that way, with Charles talking about whatever came to mind. Nathan seemed to love his various stories of people being mangled at the workplace, for whatever reason. Maybe they were interesting to people who had never worked in an office? He even wrote down the more lurid details of the way the blood had spouted out of Murphy’s throat.
“You never know how much blood is in a man until it starts spilling out. It got absolutely everywhere. This? Is nothing compared to that. In my briefcase, in my hair, soaked my socks… I found a little drop of it behind my ear in the shower two days later. How I had missed it the night before, I don’t know…”
“Brutal…”
Eventually the talk turned to Nathan’s band. They were doing fairly well, according to Nathan: “Well, I mean, we could probably use a manager. For numbers. ‘N Stuff. An’ like, a lawyer. For when Murderface is a dick an’ gets us sued. You think maybe you’d like to…”
It was probably the booze talking, but what the hell? At least working with a death metal band people might not blame him so much when someone else caused a catastrophic accident. Charles smiled. For the five hundredth time that night Nathan silently thanked whatever deity-like thing that might be listening and giving a shit that the guys weren’t here to fuck this up for him.
“I would like that, yes.”
“Awesome!” Thinking that he was on a roll, Nathan decided to go for it.
“Uhhhh. If you wanted, we could go to- I mean, we could go do the paperwork. To make you manager. At my place. Where the papers are.”
Normally Charles would suggest that such things wait until they were both sober, but something told him that waiting in this instance would mean passing up on the chance of a lifetime.
Also, if he was lucky then Nathan was talking about doing more than paperwork.
They paid their tab and Charles followed Nathan out of the bar.
Pickles collected on the betting pool.
~Fin~
Author(s): Lemone
Pairing(s)/Character(s): Nathan/Charles, the boys
Summary: Charles finds a place where his brutality is appreciated
Rating: PG -13
Warning(s): Language, death, alcohol abuse, etc. The usual.
Word Count: 2,400
Disclaimer: I do not own Nathan, Charles, Metalocalypse, etc, so forth.
Author Notes: Written for the Business is Brutal theme. Pre-show. Usually my Author’s notes are long and rambling, but I can’t think of anything to really say here. It feels weird.
Charles watched impassively as the paramedics carried Sally from Accounting’s mangled corpse out of the office. The gurney left little bloody wheel tracks across the office. He noticed that both of the paramedics looked a little green and idly wondered if there was a stomach bug going around.
He noticed the drops of red in his peripheral and took out the handkerchief he kept for such occasions. As he industrially cleaned his glasses he began to think. That was, what? The third one this week? And there had been four the week before. Which made a total of ten this month. They were really starting to rack up the cleaning bills. Sally in particular had chosen a rather messy method in loosing herself from the mortal coil. Perhaps some sort of contract could be worked out with the custodial company? And a workplace safety seminar might be in order. He’d bring up the matter with Harkwood at the first opportunity. Charles pocketed his handkerchief.
He returned to his cubicle. He frowned when he noticed that a good deal of Sally from Accounting’s blood had gotten on the paperwork that had been nearly finished when she had her accident. That wasn’t good. The documents needed to be actually readable to be of any use to anyone. He’d have to redo them. Sighing, he went to work.
Debbie was sobbing in the cubicle behind him. Had she and her boyfriend broken up again? Charles appreciated that she felt that he was her last chance at getting married, and he hated to be insensitive, but surely she realized how unseemly and dare he say it, unprofessional, such behavior was? He did his best to ignore her.
After an hour his phone rang. Charles finished the line he was working on and answered it on the second ring. He recognized the voice instantly.
“Mr. Harkwood,” he said, his voice assuming the bright-yet-businesslike voice he saved for his boss, “what can I do for you?”
Harkwood’s voice gave him pause. Something about his tone was off. He sounded almost… fearful? “I, uhh. Umm. I’d like to see you in my office. If, uh, you duh-don’t mind.”
“Of course, Mr. Harkwood. I’ll be there in a minute.” Charles hung up the phone, used a post-it to mark his place in his paperwork so that he could more efficiently get back to work when his meeting was finished and headed towards the elevator.
~~~****~~~
Mr. Jonathon Harkwood was the last founding member of Harkwood Rowe & Murphy, the law firm where Charles had been working for the last two and a half months, alive. Rowe had died of a peculiar sort or food poisoning that caused him to vomit copious amounts of blood in the executive washroom and collapse. He was found hours later, face-first in a toilet bowl that was filled with his own blood. Murphy had walked underneath a piece of poorly installed lighting at precisely the wrong moment. The lighting had come loose and fallen, slicing open Mr. Murphy’s throat. Dark, nearly black blood had fountained from him, spraying the walls and ruining Charles’s best suit.
Harkwood himself was an older man, somewhat heavyset and balding. He wore thick frames that magnified his squinty eyes to a ridiculous degree. At the moment he was wearing a black suit and tie, probably as a showing of morning towards his deceased partners. He was also clutching a crucifix, which Charles found rather baffling. He had thought the man was an atheist.
“You, ah, wanted to see me about something, Mr. Harkwood?”
Harkwood’s bottom lip trembled for a moment. Charles frowned. Surely the man hadn’t called him in here for some sort of emotional heart-to-heart?
“Buh-blood,” Harkwood whimpered.
Charles lifted his eyebrows. “Excuse me?”
“Yuh- yuh- you’re cuh-cuh-cuh-covered in buh-blood.” Harkwood shakingly raised the crucifix until it was between his eyes. “Again.”
Charles looked himself over. Was that what this was all about? It was true, he was. He’d been standing behind Sally from Accounting when she’d had her fatal accident with the copy machine. His entire left shoulder had been soaked. The pants might be salvageable, but he’d probably end up having to throw away yet another good suit.
“It’s quite all right,” he reassured Harkwood, “I always bring an extra suit for situations like these. I’ll and get changed during my lunch break.”
Harkwood stared at the man across from him in rising terror. He’d prepared for this, really he had. He’d spent a week typing up a nice, long, diplomatic speech. Checked and re-checked it for something that might upset the man. Three people had died in his building in the meantime. He should be guilty over being indirectly responsible for so many deaths, for letting this... thing in to begin with, but really he was just scared stiff for his own hide. He looked down at the speech, which he’d arranged in front of him and took a deep shuddering breath.
“Muh-Mr. Ofdensen duh-do you know how muh-many people have duh-duh-died since you s-started working here?”
Charles did the math in his head quickly. “Twenty-seven that I know of, sir. Why do you ask?”
Harkwood staggered a bit as he rose and headed towards the bottle of high-end Kentucky bourbon he kept behind his desk. What in God’s name made him think doing this sober was a good idea? His hands fought not to shake as he poured himself a glass. “Don’t you think that-“ he paused, knocking it back in one determined swallow and pouring himself another. “Don’t you think that’s an awful lot?”
Charles blinked. “Death is an everyday part of the workplace, sir.”
Harkwood barked out a laugh: a harsh, mirthless sound. He’d laughed before, when Debbie had come to him, babbling about the nightmares she’d had about Ofdensen. Begging him to fire the man ‘before it was too late.’ He’d done impressions of her at lunch that day, mocking her hysterical tones. Then Rowe had excused himself to go use the john and had never come out.
A week later, he started having the nightmares himself. Blackened blood and corpse-strewn dreams where Ofdensen rode a pale horse under a blood-red sky, a hulking man with long black hair and balefully glowing eyes at his side. At first he thought was just the stress of losing Rowe, who he’d known since college. He’d gone to a shrink who told him that it was his mind trying to make sense of what had happened, find someone to blame. It seemed sensible enough. After all, Ofdensen was such a plain, unassuming man. He did his work and barely said hello or goodbye. Quiet. Efficient.
Then Rodriguez had been electrocuted by his own blood. O’Malley had been torn apart by blackbirds in front of the building. Lieberman had fallen through two inch thick glass from the twelfth floor and exploded into red jelly on the concrete below. The dreams started getting worse, more and more lurid… The shrink kept assuring him that it was just stress, that the pills would make them go away before he knew it, but they never did anything. And people had just kept dying…
Harkwood poured himself a third glass of bourbon, picked his crucifix back up, and sat back down across from Ofdensen. He kept his head down as he stuttered his way through his neatly typed speech.
~~~****~~~
Two hours later, Charles Ofdensen was hunched over a drink at the nearest bar. He hadn’t bothered to change. He couldn’t bring himself to care. Harkwood’s words kept floating back to his mind like pathetic storm clouds. This would make the third time that he had been let go over something like this.
Charles fiddled morosely with his tumbler as he nursed his bad mood. He had to be getting five times the work done of anyone else there. He never sat and yakked on the phone for thirty minutes about some idiotic household problem, or stood at the water cooler for a seeming eternity nattering on about some unfathomably dull sports team. He got things done. And yet, no one ever seemed to appreciate this. He was constantly getting the shaft.
People died. That’s what happened. Nobody was immortal. Sure, people had a tendency to die in fairly spectacular ways when he around, but he hardly saw how he could be blamed for that. It wasn’t as if he was killing them. Why was he always held responsible for the clumsiness of others? For simple coincidence?
Charles finished his drink in one convulsive swallow and ordered another round.
~~~****~~~
“Dude! Dude, check it out.”
“Ja?”
“Check it out. Dere’s totally a guy inna suit at da bar covered it blood.”
“…So’s?”
“So, I gaht five bucks dat says Nat’an comes on to him, like, five minutes after da show.”
Skwisgaar thought for a moment. “You’s ons.”
In the end, they decided to get the other members of the band (sans Nathan, of course) and the roadies in on the act, reasoning that more people involved meant more money for whoever won the bet, which meant that the winner could get drunk off his winnings.
~~~****~~~
Charles sipped his drink and watched the band that had started playing a few minutes ago appreciatively. They were good. Damn good. They had turned a rather disinterested crowd into a screaming, moshing, chanting mob. Charles couldn’t say he blamed them. The band… Dethklok, was it? Had music that was... dark, grinding. Enthralling.
Unfortunately, the set was cut short when one of the fans managed to set himself on fire owing to some faulty wiring. Charles couldn’t help but feel a little disappointed. He’d have liked to hear more.
~~~****~~~
“Um. Hey.”
Charles blinked. He recognized the young man talking to him as the singer (though it was more like heavy growling than anything else) from the band who had just finished playing. It occurred to Charles that he should congratulate him on the great show he had just put on, maybe say something about he would be going places someday, but… up close he looked even more imposing than he did on the stage, and up close he could see the piercing, breathtaking green of his eyes, and…
“H-hi.”
They stared at each other for a moment.
“Mind if I sit here?”
“Oh! Ah, not at all.” Charles needlessly slid over to make room.
The boy sat down next to him, and roughly ordered the bartender to send a pint of beer his way and keep them coming. After downing his first three, the young man regarded Charles stonily for a moment.
“You’re, like, covered in blood. Like, a lot of it.”
Charles looked over himself. A few hours ago he had been too busy being pissed off at being let go to care, but under the young man’s gaze he realized he must look a fright. He had a change of clothes in the car, why didn’t he just use that? Stupid, stupid.
“Oh, ah. It’s not mine,” he offered self-consciously.
The young man seemed impressed. “Really?”
“It’s from Sally, a girl who works, ah, worked in our accounting department. She had an, ah, bit of an unfortunate accident with the copy machine. She lost an arm and most of her skin was torn off. I don’t know how she managed that, to be honest.”
He chanced a glance over at the young man. Far from the horrified expression he expected, from the young man looked almost awed.
“Man. That’s the brutalest thing I’ve heard in, like, ever.”
Charles wasn’t sure what to say to that. Was he being complimented somehow? Maybe he should change the subject…
“I’m sorry, I don’t think we’ve been properly introduced. I’m Charles Ofdensen. I am, ah I mean was, an attorney at Harkwood Rowe & Murphy until recently. Though, I suppose technically it’s just Harkwood now.”
“Name’s Nathan.”
They shook hands and held on for longer than was strictly necessary. Afterwards, both men had to pretend to be more interested in their respective drinks than they really were until the awkward moment had sufficiently passed.
“So, um. Like, does that sorta stuff happen to you all the time? With the ladies getting their skin torn off and stuff?”
Charles half-shrugged. “It’s the first time that particular accident happened, but people die all time, you know? It wasn’t as bad as when I worked at Heiman & Gatz. There was a Christmas party held in a dining hall on 5th street. Nice place. Anyway, apparently the safety inspector wasn’t doing his job because…”
Hours passed that way, with Charles talking about whatever came to mind. Nathan seemed to love his various stories of people being mangled at the workplace, for whatever reason. Maybe they were interesting to people who had never worked in an office? He even wrote down the more lurid details of the way the blood had spouted out of Murphy’s throat.
“You never know how much blood is in a man until it starts spilling out. It got absolutely everywhere. This? Is nothing compared to that. In my briefcase, in my hair, soaked my socks… I found a little drop of it behind my ear in the shower two days later. How I had missed it the night before, I don’t know…”
“Brutal…”
Eventually the talk turned to Nathan’s band. They were doing fairly well, according to Nathan: “Well, I mean, we could probably use a manager. For numbers. ‘N Stuff. An’ like, a lawyer. For when Murderface is a dick an’ gets us sued. You think maybe you’d like to…”
It was probably the booze talking, but what the hell? At least working with a death metal band people might not blame him so much when someone else caused a catastrophic accident. Charles smiled. For the five hundredth time that night Nathan silently thanked whatever deity-like thing that might be listening and giving a shit that the guys weren’t here to fuck this up for him.
“I would like that, yes.”
“Awesome!” Thinking that he was on a roll, Nathan decided to go for it.
“Uhhhh. If you wanted, we could go to- I mean, we could go do the paperwork. To make you manager. At my place. Where the papers are.”
Normally Charles would suggest that such things wait until they were both sober, but something told him that waiting in this instance would mean passing up on the chance of a lifetime.
Also, if he was lucky then Nathan was talking about doing more than paperwork.
They paid their tab and Charles followed Nathan out of the bar.
Pickles collected on the betting pool.
~Fin~