Fic: To Live and Die in Los Angeles (8/8)
“To Live and Die in Los Angeles”
Author: DJ_the_Writer
Rating: PG-13
Warnings: Cursing, Drugs, PTSD, off-screen sex
Pairings: Charles/OFC
Beta: wikdsushi
Characters: Charles, Pickles, OCs
Summary: Charles attempts to recover from his ordeal during a legal tussle in LA.
[ Start back at the beginning]
Thanks for sticking around, everybody! Man, this went fast. Yes, it was shorter than the lat story but not WAY shorter; I just made the chapters longer. And thanks to my beta, wikdsushi, for all the help!
Just wanted to say that I know a lot of people don't stop by FF.net, but there's a Charles/OFC story that's being posted and yesterday she posted a creepily-similar plotline to the one in this chapter, so we were both thinking along the same lines. Anyway, she deserves some love and I'm plugging it here.
One more thing: I have energy in me for another story (and we still have to do Sam's Bar Mitzvah), and my beta requested I go full-on with the mythology thing like we saw when Charles was in Denmark, something I've alluded to but avoided doing because I wanted this series to be very down-to-earth. What do you guys think?
lj-cut in honor of N/C month.
Chapter 8
“Oh, fuck.”
The simple phrase really covered so much. He was lost on the names - it was so hard to keep a train of thought from a dream going, especially if interrupted. He had read something about names having power, a while ago during more general research, and now he’d thought some pieces had slipped into place, though he couldn’t remember why, but he couldn’t explain a lot of why things came to him. Not even to himself.
He leaned over to pick up the paperwork, and felt like he wanted to throw up. He didn’t - it was just a churning in the pit of his stomach, and it had nothing to do with Sumerian incantations this time. He might be fucked. They might all be fucked. The Metalocalypse might be unstoppable, and that might be bad. But what he did know, for sure, was that he had royally fucked up.
“Why are you so eager to talk yourself out of something that’s making you happy?”
Dr. Bradley’s questions had a nasty habit of turning up when they weren’t wanted. G-d, that was all the damn shrink wanted to talk about these days. How Charles pushed people away. How he was afraid - really afraid - that the people around him were doomed, and it prevented him from forming attachments, as a defense mechanism. How miserable it made him. Even at the time, in the cramped office in New York, it made sense. Now it just made him fucking miserable.
This was going to require some thought. Definitely not while sober.
Brandy would be too slow. He had to be up in the morning and ready for LA. He tied his robe, found his shoes, and made his way to the Mordhaus kitchens, or the band end of it. The top shelf liquor was stored at precise temperatures for each type, often with an electronic lock, but he went for something simple. There was a bottle of grain alcohol on the shelf. He tasted as awful as the word “grain” implied, but it took a single shot glass, filled halfway, to make him woozy and comfortable and, unfortunately, no less miserable.
“Oh. Hey.”
Charles honestly had no idea how long Nathan had been sitting there, across from him and a bit to the right, with the customary amount of empties surrounding him. “Hello.” He worked hard to make that come out right.
“You’re not, um, working.”
“No.”
“That’s good. Or it’s bad. Fuck, I don’t know.” Nathan looked sullen, as he often did when he didn’t know something, and was aware of it. “Are you um, feeling OK? And don’t tell the band I asked.”
“I’m fine,” he said. Boldly a lie. Wouldn’t do. “I just ... women.”
“Oh man.” Nathan spoke as if he understood, this time really having no clue. “They are soul stealers. That’s what Murderface says.”
Charles didn’t look at anything in particular because he couldn’t focus his eyes. “Then Murderface must have enough soul to form his own blues band.”
Nathan laughed. “Like he’s one to fuckin’ talk, right?” He shook his head. Or something, because it was hard to tell without focusing, and Charles wasn’t interested in a whole lot of that. “Aren’t you fucking your assistant?”
“I am not, nor have I ever fucked my assistant,” Charles managed to cobble together as a sentence. “I am - was - sleeping with my assistant. And how does everyone in this fucking house know that?!?”
“Oh man, I was just guessing. Because she’s the only chick who goes near you and you don’t like groupies.”
“I like tasering groupies.” He lamented, “But it’s not a good idea for me to do that anymore. Shows up in pictures. ... Have the Klokateers do it for me.”
Nathan was still flabberghasted by his unusually lucky guess about Charles’s social life. “So, you’re not, um ...”
“I’m drinking grain alcohol at four in the morning. What do you think?”
“Do you want a shoulder to cry on?” Fortunately Nathan didn’t try to mimic Charles’s voice. “Woah, that’s really gay. Please say no.”
“No.” He added, because he was drunk, “But you do have very big shoulders.”
“Yeah, I guess so. Are you going to cry anyway?”
“I want to, but I’m on a lot of medicine to prevent that. Or I could just punch myself for being stupid. Or go apologize. I should apologize.” And then what? Tell her anything? Everything? Take her off scheduling and put her on decoding cuneiform prophecy texts? Watch her go mad, like all of the other Klokateers he assigned these tasks? He couldn’t watch that. He couldn’t watch her get hurt. Klokateer 129 stabbed his eyes with the chopsticks that came with his dinner. Charles couldn’t imagine Angela ... The thought made him shiver.
“Are you gonna be sick?”
“I’m OK.”
“There’s, uh, other women out there. Boats in the sea.”
“Fish.”
“What?”
“Fish in the sea,” Charles corrected. “There’s more fish in the sea.”
“Do they go on boats?”
Charles shook his head, not in response but in an attempt to shake himself of Nathan’s answer.
“So what happened?” In the rare occasion when Nathan showed an interest in anyone other than himself, he never felt the least bit hesitant about intruding on other people’s business.
“It’s complicated.” It was, but that wouldn’t do for Nathan, who looked like he was sitting there very intently. “I fucked up.”
“Did you forget her birthday or something?”
Charles chuckled, but only because he was drunk. “No.”
“Man, do not do that. Forget a chick’s birthday. I mean, if you’re serious about her. They hate that shit.”
Charles was inebriated enough to ponder Nathan’s bizarre history with girlfriends, all of whom were ordinary and despicable, but he put up with them until they died or cheated on him. Fucking groupies was one thing, but Nathan's serious dating history was downright pathological, and nothing a sane Charles Ofdensen would want to try to figure out, because it undoubtedly had to do with Nathan’s relationship with his mother. Shit, now he was getting Freudian. “If you have to know, I declined to talk about ... things I’d rather not talk about.”
“Ooooo. Chicks do love to talk. But usually about themselves, right?”
Charles rolled his eyes at Nathan’s misogyny. “She asked because she cared about me.”
“Huh.” Nathan didn’t know quite what to make of that, not because no one had ever cared about him, but because being a rockstar skewed his understanding of that. Hell, come to think of it, most of the people in life he ‘cared’ about - whether he would admit it or not - were guys. “That’s complicated shit, man. Maybe you’re better off - “
“No, I’m not. That’s the problem.”
“Go after her. It’s not like we’re going to cock-block you. Hoodies, man. I mean, there’s some I guess I would fuck, but you would get mad at that shit, wouldn’t you?”
Charles looked at Nathan incredulously - had this man totally forgotten how many roadies he’d pounded into the beds of motel rooms after shows? But maybe that was before they were wearing hoods and the women were assigned elsewhere. It still happened - just not with Nathan, the actual dater. “I would if it was Angela.”
“Who?”
“3201.”
“Who?”
“My assistant.”
“Woah. She has a name?”
Charles didn’t dignify that with a response. “I have to go ... sleep. And then get up a few minutes later.”
“You can’t take a fucking personal day? This shit sounds personal.”
“I have to go to LA.” With his assistant. He needed her with his legal team. He needed her for scheduling. He needed her.
“Pickles says LA is awesome, but it’s hot as shit. So ... uh, you know. Do what you gotta do.”
Thankfully, that was the end of Nathan’s advice. Charles held it together until Nathan left, whereupon he passed out on the table, waking only as he was carried back to his room by some discreet Klokateers- discreet if they knew what was good for them.
********************************************
Angela - or 3201 - was a professional. She didn’t get this far by being anything other than professional, blundering into her boss’s bed (though technically it was hers the first time) aside. So when it was time to get up, get dressed, and meet Charles Ofdensen on the tarmac with the legal team for the flight to California, she was there, and if she had to show her expression (which she didn’t), it would have been appropriate to the situation. Fortunately she had the hood and did not have to put eye drops in to keep them from being bloodshot, even though she could have passed anyway, and people would have assumed she was just hung over.
Which was the way Charles looked. His eyes were red, his hair wasn’t so perfectly moussed, and he showered them with vibes of crabbiness even when he didn’t say anything beyond the necessary exchange of information with the Gears he was leaving in charge. The briefing was yesterday, but there were last-minute details and he dispensed with them more quickly than usual, climbed into the plane, and fell asleep with his laptop open on his lap. It wasn’t the deep, refreshing sleep he looked like he needed (the Commander notoriously despised long plane rides and rarely slept on them), just a light doze that meant he picked his drooping head up every once in a while.
He did not have much to say. She was grateful.
Charles hadn’t come crawling back to her, but she knew why. He was an insanely practical man (to the point of having almost been driven insane by it on at least one occasion), so he knew he couldn’t resolve the crux of the issue with an apology, and if she was going to give on her end, she would say so. And she’d already decided she wasn’t. 3201 the disposable assistant could be dismissed, but Angela the girlfriend (or, at worst, fuckbuddy) couldn’t. They had gone down this road once before, when she stayed silent, and he ended up in a mental hospital. (He could call it a clinic all he wanted, but that was what it was.) Angela, still 3201 then, had ended up rescuing just in time to prevent him from bleeding to death. She wouldn’t ask for everything, but he had to give a little on the many things that terrified him, the ones so obviously connected with Dethklok.
At least he was obviously miserable about it. Good for him.
In the back cabin, the legal Gears and assorted bodyguards were alternately napping, watching the inexhaustible collection of in-flight movies, or working. She joined them, and eventually, she put her seat back and slept, but not well.
Things moved quickly when they were on the ground. The legal team handled all the hotel arrangements and Charles went right to work, but not on the case. It was four hours earlier and that meant that even after a long flight he had daylight to spend being shuttled between appointments. Everyone looked more tanned, more relaxed than he did. Charles Ofdensen was an intense guy, and liked to be seen that way, so his mood only helped push negotiations with vendors through quickly. Even with one arm of his ten thousand dollar suit pinned up and his arm in a cast beneath the jacket, he never appeared weak or wounded. If anything, he looked pissed as hell.
They talked in the SUV, but only the necessary communication between a boss and his assistant. It wouldn’t have been anything different if it was a day ago, because other Gears were in the car. Maybe they didn’t know. Maybe they just thought the Commander was himself in LA - hot and unhappy about it - especially now that it was almost summer and he refused to take off his jacket even in the searing heat.
Only she could tell he was angry at himself.
He was furious when the car blew a tire on the highway, and 82 was given the nasty task of informing them that it would take at least twenty minutes for the local contingent to get out there and rescue them. After ten minutes of sitting in the car, fresh air was required. It was at least a little cooler now, with the sun beginning to set, and they stood silently on the shoulder, between the car and the concrete barrier, too exhausted to make even business conversation.
“What’s that?”
It was the first time Charles spoke and she looked up. Or down, which was where he was pointing. 82 and the other guard knelt down to inspect the other tire, the one he was pointing to. It had something stuck in it. They eventually pulled out a thin wooden dowel - with nails in it.
“Get down!”
Angela would never know whether 82 said it first or it was simultaneous with the gunshot, but she knew what followed. As the sniper emerged from his nest in the grass on the edge of highway, Charles shouldered past 82 and tackled Angela to shield her. He scrambled for his gun, but his good arm was useless. Angela pulled his handgun from his belt pushed him off her and fired at the sniper, then pushed Charles off her. He took a hit in the leg. Not a kill shot. They needed him alive. Another Gear moved in to tackle him while 82 helped the boss up.
“Were you hit?”
“No.” Charles pushes his fallen glasses back up on his nose and offered his hand to Angela. She was still shaking a little as she got to her feet, her pulse pounding and sending blood to her head. “Excellent shot, 3201.” He did sound impressed.
She handed his gun back to him, handle first. “Just doing my job, sir.” Technically, she was security, too. Everyone was. They would die for Dethklok, but they specifically would die for Ofdensen.
The Gear returned with a body, and 82 delivered the bad news. “He’s dead.” They gave him a quick inspection on the ground. “Cyanide. Looks like he had a false tooth.”
“Shit.” Charles definitely wasn’t concerned about the end of a human life. He knew the dead told no tales, which was why Angela had shot the guy in the leg in the first place. It wasn’t the first clear assassination attempt specifically on Ofdensen, and they all knew it wouldn’t be the last. And he still wouldn’t wear a G-ddamn vest. “He missed. That’s what’s important.” He was reassuring them, not himself. His mind was already working on other things. “3201, call the police commissioner on his private line. It’s in my files. Hopefully he’ll get here before a patrol car shows up.”
There was no further discussion. Charles paced back and forth even after 82 demanded he get in the bulletproof car. He insisted there wouldn’t be a second attempt, even as he made business calls. The police did arrive, and five minutes later, two officers on behalf of the commissioner of Los Angeles, a personal friend of Dethklok, who helped expedite the process and make sure it would stay out of the papers. The body would go to the coroner’s office, but the Klokateers would have access to it and perform their own inspection. If Angela’s hunch was right, the sniper would lack any form of ID and might not even have fingerprints in the national database.
All other appointments were cancelled, and it was dark by the time they were released (their car was detained but another one showed up at last) and returned to the hotel. They were all exhausted, both from jetlag and the crash after the adrenaline rush. The legal Gears got the message ahead and showed their hoods to see if their Commander was all right, but didn’t pepper him with questions. They needed visual assurance and he provided it in the time it took to get to his suite.
Angela followed him in, and waited until the door was closed and locked before she spoke. “What the hell was that?”
Charles was standing over the suitcase hoisted on his coffee table, as if he sat down for even a second, he would lose the will to get up ever again. “It was a poorly-trained assassin. What the hell do you think it was?”
“He almost hit you,” she said. “And that’s not what I’m talking about.”
Charles finally looked at her, the first eye contact he’d been willing to make since the incident, and she pulled her hood off. He flinched but didn’t say anything.
“I am supposed to die for you.” Her voice was trembling, maybe from exhaustion and maybe from something else. She was too tired to think about it.
“And you did an excellent job of making sure that didn’t happen,” he said, his voice flat, and maybe a little snooty. He was trying to blow her off. He was trying to get her to leave, to not explain why he’d put himself in harm’s way for a simple hoodie. “If it wasn’t for the cyanide he would still be alive and we would still be questioning him. And to be honest, if someone else had the shot, they might have just blown his head off.” He stopped pacing and frowned. “What do you want? A medal?”
“I want you to tell me what the fuck you were thinking. How you could possibly put yourself in danger like that.”
“I wasn’t in danger. He wasn’t a good - “
She grabbed him by the shoulder and pulled his jacket off, and reversed it so he could see the back. There was a tear in a smooth line across the shoulders. The bullet had been centimeters, maybe millimeters away from hitting him.
“OK.” Charles finally showed some reaction. “So he was pretty good. But not great.”
“Just answer my question.”
“I’ll wear a vest. How about that?”
“That’s not the deal on the table.”
“And what do I get in return?”
“You already owe me your life,” she said, not mincing words. There was no time for it now.
He was immensely tired and she was cornering him, but this was the only way it was going to happen. He swallowed, gearing himself for the answer. “I didn’t want you to get hurt.”
“And you just forgot that you’re Charles Fucking Ofdensen and I’m someone who signs randomly-assigned numbers on her legal documents, and that the world would end without you but no one would miss me.”
“I would miss you.” This time, he didn’t hesitate with his answer. “I would ... fuck, I don’t know what I would do without you. That was what was going through my mind, if you really have to know. That I couldn’t stand the thought of seeing you hurt and at that exact moment, I was willing to put myself on the line to make sure it didn’t happen.” He struggled to continue. She’d cut him too deep with her open accusation, even if she hadn’t said it. “I know it wasn’t a good security decision, but you don’t make complex security decisions when you’re dodging bullets. You protect what’s important to you. What you don’t want to imagine living without.”
Maybe it was because he was so short, so meek, as if his own words tore him down, and he was so scared and tired of being scared, but the only thing she could do was hug him and he could hug back, resting his chin on her shoulder. It lasted a very long time, until neither was sure who was supporting the other.
“What are we going to do?” she asked, because it was really up to him. She could hound him all she wanted, but he had to be the one to give in. “I can’t watch you self-destruct. I won’t do that again.”
“That was ... about something different.” But he didn’t sound all that confident. He had too many demons to banish all at once. “I’m sorry about last night. I just wanted to protect you.” But, it was clear, he was the one who needed protection.
“I shouldn’t have called you crazy. And I understood what you were doing, even if I didn’t agree with it.”
That was the heart of it, after all. They couldn’t just apologize; they had to change. They were too smart to think otherwise.
“82 warned me about prying into your secrets,” she said, when Charles couldn’t find the right thing to say.
“He did?”
“He put it in other words. He seemed concerned for me, but I think he was really concerned about you, because I would get myself killed.”
“82 is still alive for a very good reason,” Charles said. “I once gave one of the documents in my safe to 129, when I had a full translation. It drove him mad. He finished it over dinner and then put his eyes out with his chopsticks. He drove them into his brain. I was the only one who knew where he was working so I was the one who found him.”
“But you’ve read it?”
“Not all of it,” he said with a little humor in his voice. So he could still muster up some. “It’s an ancient prophecy text. At least four thousand years old.”
“And it has to do with Dethklok.”
“There are a lot of strange things about this band,” he said. “They get a lot of people killed, and not just from being jackasses. It became obvious over time that the only people I could talk to about it were expendable people.”
“And it gives you nightmares.”
“They’re not always nightmares,” he answered defensively. “I knew I was going to push you away. My shrink told me and I believed him, but I couldn’t stop it. I haven’t been close to anyone since ... Well, that ended badly, too. But for other reasons.” He was a veteran. He’d been surrounded by death long before he found Nathan Explosion singing in a bar on a hot Floridian afternoon.
“If you can’t live with me and you can’t live without me, you might as well chose the better option,” she said. “Because if I die anyway, for some random reason like the rest of your employees, you’ll be just as miserable as if it had been some other way.”
He considered it. His eyes moved around a lot when he was thinking about something important. “Are you sure you want to do this? Because it should be your decision, too.”
“I don’t think I would be confronting my boss in what our bodies think is the middle of the night if I hadn’t made up my mind,” was her response.
Possibly for the first time in twenty-four very long hours, he smiled. They kissed, and though it was long, it wasn’t rushed or energizing. It was about reassurance, about feeling a presence that had been so painfully torn away for each of them.
They couldn’t stand anymore, and fell onto the couch. Angela rested on his good shoulder and he put her arm around her. He broke a comfortable silence to say, “Do you think you should at least unpack in your room?”
“If there was anyone on the team who didn’t know about us this morning, they’re talking about it with the people who did know right now.”
He chuckled and kissed her on the head. “I suppose so. But you’ll get the flack.”
“And if I have to hear the words ‘jungle fever’ one more time, I will punch someone.”
“You certainly have my permission. And I assume you haven’t done it because they didn’t mean it to be racially insensitive.”
“You’re the one who has it.”
“Then go to town.”
Now she laughed, and it felt good. No, it felt unimaginably fantastic.
They barely had enough energy to disrobe enough to get into bed. He was still in his sweat-stained undershirt from the day and she didn’t go back to her room for her pajamas or anything else, but it didn’t matter. Nothing would matter until the morning, and at the moment, that was comfortably far away.
********************************************
They woke well before the wake-up call. Their bodies were still on Mordland time, so Angela finally collected her things from her room and showered. This was a much better late-night experience, being wide awake so early in the morning with dawn far off, than the night before.
Charles was still drying his hair when he emerged from his own shower. “Make-up sex?” His eyes had that rare, adorable glee in anticipation.
“Make-up sex.”
At least they were of one mind about something.
She almost wished - OK, she didn’t wish - that someone would walk in and end the rumors once and for all with a definite yes. But then Charles would have to stop long enough to kill the intruder, and then possibly to deal with the hotel staff and the police. That would put a dent in the mood.
Charles, who was so rarely candid, simply laughed at the notion. “I don’t care what my staff thinks of me.”
“Bullshit. You work so hard at being terrifying.”
“That just comes naturally,” he said, which was probably the truth on the whole, but only because he was a unique man in a unique position. “You don’t have to be scared of me.”
“You’re just saying that because - “
“I know what you’re capable of. And it’s not hurting me. Except, apparently, when I need it. And if you’re not a threat to me then I’m not a threat to you, to be precise about it.” He pulled her closer. “I know how much I need you. And not just to shoot people for me, though that is a big plus.”
She liked examining his scars. He was too content to stop her. “That’s from ... um, let me think,” he said as she probed him about a jagged wound on his torso. “A concert in Monticello.”
“Someone knifed you?”
“No. The railing collapsed and I hit the edge of the art deco banister on my way down. A less interesting story, I know.”
“What was Dethklok doing in Monticello?”
“The Catskills Tour was not one of our finest moments, but they were gigs and it was before the contract, so I booked them. I made the boys play at a polka convention one time. The alcohol was overpriced, but the borscht was amazing.”
She laughed. “And how did you sell Dethklok to a polka convention?”
“With a very inaccurate description of their music style.”
“You should have been a salesman.”
Charles raised his eyebrows. “I thought I was.”
There was still time on the clock until the world kept calling, and they drifted in and out of wakefulness, without even turning on the morning news or looking at their phones. There were times when he would grow distant, when some force or another was bothering him, but business was never too far away.
She decided it was now or never. “What did you dream about?”
“When? Oh. I don’t remember that well. I just woke with some notion that names were important, and that was it.” He opened his eyes again. “You’re not going to buy that, are you?”
“No.”
He propped himself up on his elbow. “I went ... I dreamt I went to the place I went when I died.”
“At the release party?”
Charles nodded. “For six minutes and ten seconds. But it felt a hell of a lot longer on my end. Hours, maybe days.”
Still, Angela would have to coax him out of him. “I assume since you haven’t become some version of born-again, you didn’t see Heaven. Or Hell.”
“It was not ... one of those places. There were no other dead people there. There were no other people. It wasn’t ... let me put it this way. When I came back, I spent a lot of time analyzing what I’d seen, and trying to find an explanation on this side, and I’ve come to think that it’s some place I shouldn’t have seen, but was able to reach because I was dead. Temporarily. How I got there or how I got out, that part I still don’t know. It wasn’t of my own volition.”
“Are you able describe it? I mean, can it be described?”
“I know I’m not going to give it a fair description, but maybe that’s for the best.” Charles was working himself up to do this, maybe because he felt it owed it to her, or because he needed to tell someone after all this time. “It wasn’t quite like a photo negative, but it was very dark there. Like a night with no moon, but the things around me had light in them. There were some buildings - ruined buildings - and forest, but I couldn’t get a good look at anything.”
“Why?”
“Everything ... have you ever seen a picture, a painting or a photograph, where you took one look at it and knew it was wrong? That there was something inherently wrong with it?”
“In a creepy way?”
“Yes.”
“I can imagine it.”
“This was like that, but when you did look, it only got worse. Everything was twisted and demented and you would look deeper and eventually you would start screaming, because you would be so horrified, even though you never knew why. You just weren’t supposed to be looking. But there was nothing else to look at, nothing that didn’t do this to you. And I did want to look, because there were words on everything. Things were made of words - not like when someone does a drawing of something just using words in the shape of the object. More intricate than that. The only thing that wouldn’t do this to me was this castle on the horizon, which looked like a Disneyland castle you would see in a children’s book, not the real thing. It was yellow and the closer I came to it, the further it got. I never made any progress on reaching it, so I gave up.
“I must have wandered around for hours, going mad, wearing the ruined suit from the battle, and I came to this tower of light, shaped like a ziggurat. It was less dense than the other things and I was completely fixated by it. A single script ran up and down it and I couldn’t take my eyes off it, like the script was keeping the tower in existence. I probably would have been there forever, but someone pulled me out.”
“The medics?”
“They were zapping me. No, someone grabbed me.” He closed his left hand around her upper arm and tugged at it. “Like that, but from behind. That was the last thing before I was looking up at the hoodie.”
“That’s when you put your plan into motion.”
“I never intended to use it. I didn’t even think it would work. So much attention, so much publicity, the assassin hunting for me, knowing he didn’t finish the job himself - but when I woke up again, I was in Jakarta, breathing through a tube.” He let go of her arm. “I remembered that script. I wrote it down in the hospital. Spent months having it translated. It’s in a Sumerian dialect that’s never been fully decoded.”
“But it makes sense?”
“It does form sentences, but I haven’t read enough of it.” And they both knew why. “I’ve never been back, but I do dream about it. Like my mundane memories, it surfaces from time to time. I have the dream where I’m stuck in a meeting and late for another much more often.”
“And you’re only in your underwear?”
“No. Everyone else is.”
It broke the tension and he buried his forehead in her neck. “I know I’m crazy. I’m on too much medication to claim anything else. But I would stake my life on what I saw being the most important thing to Dethklok’s future. Can you handle that level of insanity?”
“As long as you don’t die on me again.”
He kissed her softly just behind her ear. “I can try. But no promises.”
********************************************
The real day began with a security briefing in the main room of Charles’s suite. If his guards were still shaken up by their wretched security failure, they weren’t showing it. There was no reason to punish them; assassins got in close from time to time. They were human. He was the only one who wasn’t allowed to be.
Nobody said anything about Angela’s behavior, other than to praise her quick thinking and good aim. More accurately, they didn’t say anything about his behavior during the shooting, and they never would, not if they valued their jobs-slash-lives. Charles had already decided not to call out 82 on it - the guy had done his best to jump in front of his boss.
Or maybe Charles was just in a very forgiving mood. He tried not to show it.
The coroner’s reports - LA county and his staffs’ - were disturbing. The shooter, Lou Stevens, had no known ties to any anti-Dethklok groups. He worked as a bank clerk, lived alone, and spent a lot of time fishing along the shore. A search of his house turned up some of the boys' albums, but no literature, for or against the band. His email was clean. He was not licensed to carry a firearm and had no record of any experience with a firearm, much less sniper training (maybe that was why he missed). He had no military training whatsoever, nor dental records to indicate a false tooth despite having one the day of death.
He’d disappeared two days before the incident. The flu was going around the office, so no one thought anything of it at the time. There was no reason, the police officers concluded, that he would take a shot at the manager of Dethklok, if he even knew at whom he was shooting. The tox screen came up negative for everything except cholesterol medicine.
“I’m sorry, sir,” the Klokateer in charge of the case said. “We’ll find the connection.”
Charles was about to tell them to forget about it, but there was a slim chance something would turn up. He dismissed them and began his normal routine, breaking only for a call on his encoded line.
Crozier picked up instantly. “What is it?”
“If you shot at me just to prove you’re not a mole, I’m going to have to insist you’re less precise.”
“I didn’t order a hit. The Tribunal ... well, we don’t discuss you. Or, we don’t come to any conclusions.” Crozier wasn’t exactly in the mood to be helpful, but he knew he had to be. “Don’t people try to kill you all the time?”
“This one raised some flags.”
“It wasn’t my men. They wouldn’t have missed.”
Charles decided to keep his comment on that to himself.
“Look, if Selatcia decides to try something ... the situation’s already complicated enough for me, but I’ll try to warn you. If you really need warning.”
“I’ll try not to. Thanks, General.”
“Ofdensen.” Crozier ended the call. He wasn’t exactly one to chat.
Charles spent the rest of the morning taking calls, or making them. Though he called Sarah, he did not tell her about the assassination attempt, as he did not usually tell her every time his life was in danger. There weren’t enough minutes in the month for that, never mind the cell phone plane. No one in the world had a monthly minute plan that covered that.
“Thank you for setting Wendy up,” she said. “She’s been going on about Skylar all morning. Which is a little annoying, now that I think about it, but is way better than her cursing about her love life.”
“Wait - he’s actually a nice guy?”
“You didn’t do a background check?”
“Of course I did a background check. I could tell you when he had his tonsils out. But that doesn’t mean I knew how he would act on a date. And I don’t know anything about Wendy.”
“She’s a pediatric gastroenterologist.”
He rolled his eyes. “I mean personality-wise.”
“I’m friends with her. Is anything else important?”
“I suppose not.”
Sarah was arguably as busy as he was, so she didn’t linger on the phone, and she didn’t ask about Angela. Or maybe she was just being polite and waiting to corner him at dinner on Friday.
Pickles arrived at noon, looking sober and eager to be otherwise. “Did yeh hear what Kixx was sayin’ aboot me?”
“Pickles, I advised you not to - “
“Dood said I was gay for Sammy’s fat ass. You - “ He poked Charles in the chest. “Make ‘im disappear.”
“I can’t do that.”
“Since when?”
“I would consider it in the future, but at the current time there’s no way the police would be able to overlook - “ He stopped. He had to make Pickles happy, right now. It was his job. And he could do anything his job required. “What if I get him to drop the lawsuit and eventually die of his own volition?”
“Yeh kin do that? Den why the feck haven’t you?”
“It’ll be expensive, Pickles. It might more than you’re willing to spend.”
“Dood, sell my panda rug. Get dis fecker off my back!”
Charles took that as a ‘yes.’
********************************************
Rikki Kixx was in pain. No, he was in agony. He was also freezing cold, so much so that his chest burned. He picked his face up out of the ice and a few cubes stuck to his chin before falling off. He wanted to sit up, and get away from all the burning ice against his bare skin, but his back screamed that maybe that wasn’t a good idea.
His eyes focused very slowly. It didn’t help that the motel room wasn’t well-lit, and that most of the figures were in black except for the center one, in gray, tapping one gray shoe impatiently on the stained carpet. “You’re awake.”
Rikki groaned in response.
Pickles’s lawyer - Rikki didn’t know his name - put a gigantic prescription bottle on the teetering bedstand. It was perhaps the biggest one he’d ever seen. This was followed by three more. “You’ll need to take one of each of these every day with a meal, preferably breakfast. Otherwise, your body might reject the transplant.”
A bathtub of ice. Rikki Kixx could not remember when he’d fallen asleep in his own bed, but now he was lying facedown in a bathtub of ice in a shitty motel, with a bunch of Dethklok executioners and that bastard lawyer, the one who looked like he would be the bad guy on those law shows.
This could not be good.
“The surgery was a remarkable success, considering the state you keep your body in and the state of the liver we acquired, which was not from what I would call a ‘legitimate’ donor. If it was a car, I would tell you to take it easy on the accelerator because I don’t know how many miles it has on it. But it is better than your old liver, and if you take your pills, it will stay that way.” He wasn’t smiling, even though it sounded like he was. Laughing on the inside, the bastard. “Also try to take your antibiotics at least an hour away from alcohol. And no, I do not require any thanks.”
The lawyer moved to leave, and Rikki rushed to sit up. Which really, really hurt and pulled at the bandages on his back. “You can’t do this! What the fuck did you do to me?”
“I gave you the only thing in life you really wanted, Mr. Kixx. A license to drink.” The lawyer sounded bored with it now.
“You cut me open? I’ll fuckin’ sue you!”
“Yes. Because a jury will believe that a CFO not only offered you a free organ, but then dumped you in a motel in a tub filled with ice. Aliens and kidney thieves are far more likely suspects. My alibi is available for your lawyers’ perusal, when they’re done laughing at you. Goodbye, Mr. Kixx.”
The slam of the door was all Rikki heard before he passed out again.
********************************************
Charles and Pickles appeared before the judge, sober and prepared. Kixx’s lawyers were late, and announced that they were unable to locate their client. Proceedings continued normally with the discussion of contracts and residuals, to establish entitlements for all parties. It cleared up a lot of misunderstandings, but created an equal amount of them along the way.
The next day, the lawyers called in to say Kixx was dropping the suit to enter a rehab program (after he was bailed out of jail for a drunken disorderly) as part of an agreement with his parole officer.
“I thought he couldn’t drink,” Pickles said.
“And I didn’t even have to sell your panda rug,” was Charles’s response, after which he changed the topic of conversation.
Charles told Angela that she should consider the party budget for the legal team “fairly unlimited,” and left the Klokateers to enjoy themselves in the hotel while he went down to the O.C. for dinner, taking Pickles with him because it seemed the easiest way of keeping the drummer out of trouble.
Dinner was roast chicken. “I cooked,” Sarah said, and endured a glare from Josh. “I turned the oven on.”
“You set the oven to four hundred degrees and I turned it on. But it is excellent progress,” her husband said.
“Hey, how’s saving the whales going?” she shot back, and he suddenly found the other side of the room to be very fascinating. “So no lawsuit? After all that?”
“Dethklok has been involved in far more complex and far more spurious lawsuits than counter-suing Rikki Kixx,” Charles said, and took a sip of his beer, then almost spat it out. “What is this?”
“Jew beer,” Josh announced. “See? I’m putting in an effort!”
Charles checked the label, which indeed said ‘He’brew - the Chosen Beer.’ “What is this crap? I thought most beer was kosher.”
“He’s putting in effort,” Sarah said, clearly as annoyed as he was. “Pickles seems to be enjoying it.”
Pickles was in fact deep into the ‘Messiah Bold’ brand beer. Two cases deep. “’sOK after da fifth pack.” He wavered, then passed out on the table.
Sarah just looked relieved. “I think he used most of it up.”
“I am putting in an effort to celebrate my culture!” Josh shouted from the kitchen.
“Just tell me Manischewitz doesn’t make beer,” Charles said. “Because that wine is sickeningly sweet.”
“When do you drink Manischewitz?”
“At the forty-something Jewish weddings and brises I’ve been to since I started working in the entertainment industry.”
Sam finally made his appearance. “Hey, Uncle Charlie. Wow, Pickles is passed out in my dining room!” He took out his phone for a picture.
Sarah looked at her brother, who shrugged and said, “We might get a licensing deal out of it. Sam, don’t frame out the labels.”
Dinner went as planned, with Pickles only passed out for the first half, and then briefly again at the end. No one bugged Charles about his health, or how overworked he was, or how he never visited his family. Sam didn’t hit Pickles up (when he was conscious) for any Dethklok-related secrets or favors beyond attending his Bar Mitzvah reception, which he could do incognito.
“Totally, kid. I wanna see what Nat’an’s so upset aboot.”
“And we have Dethklok to thank for being able to book a reception hall only three months in advance,” Josh said.
“What?”
“Turns out the owner is a huge Dethklok fan. Surprise, surprise,” Sarah said. “End of story.”
“That’s not the end of the story!” Josh insisted. “Tell him how you went all lawyer on that guy! It was terrifying. He would be so proud.”
Charles raised his eyebrow at his sister.
“I threatened to call you over their use of non-licensed Dethklok-themed decorations,” Sarah said. “And it worked.”
“I’m sure you’re so proud,” Josh said to Charles.
Withering under his sister’s stare, Charles just said, “Sure. Whatever.”
Of course, Sarah waited until they were leaving to corner him. “I’m putting a plus one on your invitation.”
“Good. My bodyguard is getting really insistent about following me around, and he might want dinner.”
“I was not talking about - ugh. I’m sending her an invitation.”
“No.”
“Should I address it to - what’s her number again? Because I don’t know her last name.”
“No.”
“Or I could email her a .pdf. But that seems cheap. Doesn’t that seem cheap?”
Charles rubbed the bridge of his nose. “It’s three months. Do you know how long my relationships usually last?”
“You’ve been in relationships?”
“Exactly.”
She kissed him on the cheek. “Good luck.”
Charles grumbled and climbed into the limo, where Pickles was experiencing a brief period of consciousness that, judging from the champagne bottle he’d opened, wasn’t going to last. “Family. Dey’re so good at pissin’ yah off.”
“Is that the only reason you’re willing to go to a Bar Mitzvah? To see me embarrassed?”
Pickles shrugged. “Dere’s also dat Manny shatvis wine. Really packs a wallop.”
“So, booze and embarrassment. This is because I made you go to your brother’s wedding, isn’t it?”
“Yep.”
Charles sighed. He could handle it. At least -
“And yer totally bringing yer girlfriend.”
The limo was supposed to be soundproofed, but the curses could be heard miles away.
********************************************
Many More Miles Away
“It is as we suspected, Master.” Orlaag sat down with his printouts. Selatcia never perused them himself; he never needed to. “The assassin cannot possibly be traced to us, but he still failed. Ofdensen could not be harmed.”
Selatcia was visibly furious. Orlaag had never seen him go through so much trouble to manipulate someone from afar, especially wholesale. “He is protected.”
“Impossible. Who could possibly protect him from you?”
“There is only one person,” Selatcia replied. “But he is already dead.”
End
Author: DJ_the_Writer
Rating: PG-13
Warnings: Cursing, Drugs, PTSD, off-screen sex
Pairings: Charles/OFC
Beta: wikdsushi
Characters: Charles, Pickles, OCs
Summary: Charles attempts to recover from his ordeal during a legal tussle in LA.
[ Start back at the beginning]
Thanks for sticking around, everybody! Man, this went fast. Yes, it was shorter than the lat story but not WAY shorter; I just made the chapters longer. And thanks to my beta, wikdsushi, for all the help!
Just wanted to say that I know a lot of people don't stop by FF.net, but there's a Charles/OFC story that's being posted and yesterday she posted a creepily-similar plotline to the one in this chapter, so we were both thinking along the same lines. Anyway, she deserves some love and I'm plugging it here.
One more thing: I have energy in me for another story (and we still have to do Sam's Bar Mitzvah), and my beta requested I go full-on with the mythology thing like we saw when Charles was in Denmark, something I've alluded to but avoided doing because I wanted this series to be very down-to-earth. What do you guys think?
lj-cut in honor of N/C month.
Chapter 8
“Oh, fuck.”
The simple phrase really covered so much. He was lost on the names - it was so hard to keep a train of thought from a dream going, especially if interrupted. He had read something about names having power, a while ago during more general research, and now he’d thought some pieces had slipped into place, though he couldn’t remember why, but he couldn’t explain a lot of why things came to him. Not even to himself.
He leaned over to pick up the paperwork, and felt like he wanted to throw up. He didn’t - it was just a churning in the pit of his stomach, and it had nothing to do with Sumerian incantations this time. He might be fucked. They might all be fucked. The Metalocalypse might be unstoppable, and that might be bad. But what he did know, for sure, was that he had royally fucked up.
“Why are you so eager to talk yourself out of something that’s making you happy?”
Dr. Bradley’s questions had a nasty habit of turning up when they weren’t wanted. G-d, that was all the damn shrink wanted to talk about these days. How Charles pushed people away. How he was afraid - really afraid - that the people around him were doomed, and it prevented him from forming attachments, as a defense mechanism. How miserable it made him. Even at the time, in the cramped office in New York, it made sense. Now it just made him fucking miserable.
This was going to require some thought. Definitely not while sober.
Brandy would be too slow. He had to be up in the morning and ready for LA. He tied his robe, found his shoes, and made his way to the Mordhaus kitchens, or the band end of it. The top shelf liquor was stored at precise temperatures for each type, often with an electronic lock, but he went for something simple. There was a bottle of grain alcohol on the shelf. He tasted as awful as the word “grain” implied, but it took a single shot glass, filled halfway, to make him woozy and comfortable and, unfortunately, no less miserable.
“Oh. Hey.”
Charles honestly had no idea how long Nathan had been sitting there, across from him and a bit to the right, with the customary amount of empties surrounding him. “Hello.” He worked hard to make that come out right.
“You’re not, um, working.”
“No.”
“That’s good. Or it’s bad. Fuck, I don’t know.” Nathan looked sullen, as he often did when he didn’t know something, and was aware of it. “Are you um, feeling OK? And don’t tell the band I asked.”
“I’m fine,” he said. Boldly a lie. Wouldn’t do. “I just ... women.”
“Oh man.” Nathan spoke as if he understood, this time really having no clue. “They are soul stealers. That’s what Murderface says.”
Charles didn’t look at anything in particular because he couldn’t focus his eyes. “Then Murderface must have enough soul to form his own blues band.”
Nathan laughed. “Like he’s one to fuckin’ talk, right?” He shook his head. Or something, because it was hard to tell without focusing, and Charles wasn’t interested in a whole lot of that. “Aren’t you fucking your assistant?”
“I am not, nor have I ever fucked my assistant,” Charles managed to cobble together as a sentence. “I am - was - sleeping with my assistant. And how does everyone in this fucking house know that?!?”
“Oh man, I was just guessing. Because she’s the only chick who goes near you and you don’t like groupies.”
“I like tasering groupies.” He lamented, “But it’s not a good idea for me to do that anymore. Shows up in pictures. ... Have the Klokateers do it for me.”
Nathan was still flabberghasted by his unusually lucky guess about Charles’s social life. “So, you’re not, um ...”
“I’m drinking grain alcohol at four in the morning. What do you think?”
“Do you want a shoulder to cry on?” Fortunately Nathan didn’t try to mimic Charles’s voice. “Woah, that’s really gay. Please say no.”
“No.” He added, because he was drunk, “But you do have very big shoulders.”
“Yeah, I guess so. Are you going to cry anyway?”
“I want to, but I’m on a lot of medicine to prevent that. Or I could just punch myself for being stupid. Or go apologize. I should apologize.” And then what? Tell her anything? Everything? Take her off scheduling and put her on decoding cuneiform prophecy texts? Watch her go mad, like all of the other Klokateers he assigned these tasks? He couldn’t watch that. He couldn’t watch her get hurt. Klokateer 129 stabbed his eyes with the chopsticks that came with his dinner. Charles couldn’t imagine Angela ... The thought made him shiver.
“Are you gonna be sick?”
“I’m OK.”
“There’s, uh, other women out there. Boats in the sea.”
“Fish.”
“What?”
“Fish in the sea,” Charles corrected. “There’s more fish in the sea.”
“Do they go on boats?”
Charles shook his head, not in response but in an attempt to shake himself of Nathan’s answer.
“So what happened?” In the rare occasion when Nathan showed an interest in anyone other than himself, he never felt the least bit hesitant about intruding on other people’s business.
“It’s complicated.” It was, but that wouldn’t do for Nathan, who looked like he was sitting there very intently. “I fucked up.”
“Did you forget her birthday or something?”
Charles chuckled, but only because he was drunk. “No.”
“Man, do not do that. Forget a chick’s birthday. I mean, if you’re serious about her. They hate that shit.”
Charles was inebriated enough to ponder Nathan’s bizarre history with girlfriends, all of whom were ordinary and despicable, but he put up with them until they died or cheated on him. Fucking groupies was one thing, but Nathan's serious dating history was downright pathological, and nothing a sane Charles Ofdensen would want to try to figure out, because it undoubtedly had to do with Nathan’s relationship with his mother. Shit, now he was getting Freudian. “If you have to know, I declined to talk about ... things I’d rather not talk about.”
“Ooooo. Chicks do love to talk. But usually about themselves, right?”
Charles rolled his eyes at Nathan’s misogyny. “She asked because she cared about me.”
“Huh.” Nathan didn’t know quite what to make of that, not because no one had ever cared about him, but because being a rockstar skewed his understanding of that. Hell, come to think of it, most of the people in life he ‘cared’ about - whether he would admit it or not - were guys. “That’s complicated shit, man. Maybe you’re better off - “
“No, I’m not. That’s the problem.”
“Go after her. It’s not like we’re going to cock-block you. Hoodies, man. I mean, there’s some I guess I would fuck, but you would get mad at that shit, wouldn’t you?”
Charles looked at Nathan incredulously - had this man totally forgotten how many roadies he’d pounded into the beds of motel rooms after shows? But maybe that was before they were wearing hoods and the women were assigned elsewhere. It still happened - just not with Nathan, the actual dater. “I would if it was Angela.”
“Who?”
“3201.”
“Who?”
“My assistant.”
“Woah. She has a name?”
Charles didn’t dignify that with a response. “I have to go ... sleep. And then get up a few minutes later.”
“You can’t take a fucking personal day? This shit sounds personal.”
“I have to go to LA.” With his assistant. He needed her with his legal team. He needed her for scheduling. He needed her.
“Pickles says LA is awesome, but it’s hot as shit. So ... uh, you know. Do what you gotta do.”
Thankfully, that was the end of Nathan’s advice. Charles held it together until Nathan left, whereupon he passed out on the table, waking only as he was carried back to his room by some discreet Klokateers- discreet if they knew what was good for them.
********************************************
Angela - or 3201 - was a professional. She didn’t get this far by being anything other than professional, blundering into her boss’s bed (though technically it was hers the first time) aside. So when it was time to get up, get dressed, and meet Charles Ofdensen on the tarmac with the legal team for the flight to California, she was there, and if she had to show her expression (which she didn’t), it would have been appropriate to the situation. Fortunately she had the hood and did not have to put eye drops in to keep them from being bloodshot, even though she could have passed anyway, and people would have assumed she was just hung over.
Which was the way Charles looked. His eyes were red, his hair wasn’t so perfectly moussed, and he showered them with vibes of crabbiness even when he didn’t say anything beyond the necessary exchange of information with the Gears he was leaving in charge. The briefing was yesterday, but there were last-minute details and he dispensed with them more quickly than usual, climbed into the plane, and fell asleep with his laptop open on his lap. It wasn’t the deep, refreshing sleep he looked like he needed (the Commander notoriously despised long plane rides and rarely slept on them), just a light doze that meant he picked his drooping head up every once in a while.
He did not have much to say. She was grateful.
Charles hadn’t come crawling back to her, but she knew why. He was an insanely practical man (to the point of having almost been driven insane by it on at least one occasion), so he knew he couldn’t resolve the crux of the issue with an apology, and if she was going to give on her end, she would say so. And she’d already decided she wasn’t. 3201 the disposable assistant could be dismissed, but Angela the girlfriend (or, at worst, fuckbuddy) couldn’t. They had gone down this road once before, when she stayed silent, and he ended up in a mental hospital. (He could call it a clinic all he wanted, but that was what it was.) Angela, still 3201 then, had ended up rescuing just in time to prevent him from bleeding to death. She wouldn’t ask for everything, but he had to give a little on the many things that terrified him, the ones so obviously connected with Dethklok.
At least he was obviously miserable about it. Good for him.
In the back cabin, the legal Gears and assorted bodyguards were alternately napping, watching the inexhaustible collection of in-flight movies, or working. She joined them, and eventually, she put her seat back and slept, but not well.
Things moved quickly when they were on the ground. The legal team handled all the hotel arrangements and Charles went right to work, but not on the case. It was four hours earlier and that meant that even after a long flight he had daylight to spend being shuttled between appointments. Everyone looked more tanned, more relaxed than he did. Charles Ofdensen was an intense guy, and liked to be seen that way, so his mood only helped push negotiations with vendors through quickly. Even with one arm of his ten thousand dollar suit pinned up and his arm in a cast beneath the jacket, he never appeared weak or wounded. If anything, he looked pissed as hell.
They talked in the SUV, but only the necessary communication between a boss and his assistant. It wouldn’t have been anything different if it was a day ago, because other Gears were in the car. Maybe they didn’t know. Maybe they just thought the Commander was himself in LA - hot and unhappy about it - especially now that it was almost summer and he refused to take off his jacket even in the searing heat.
Only she could tell he was angry at himself.
He was furious when the car blew a tire on the highway, and 82 was given the nasty task of informing them that it would take at least twenty minutes for the local contingent to get out there and rescue them. After ten minutes of sitting in the car, fresh air was required. It was at least a little cooler now, with the sun beginning to set, and they stood silently on the shoulder, between the car and the concrete barrier, too exhausted to make even business conversation.
“What’s that?”
It was the first time Charles spoke and she looked up. Or down, which was where he was pointing. 82 and the other guard knelt down to inspect the other tire, the one he was pointing to. It had something stuck in it. They eventually pulled out a thin wooden dowel - with nails in it.
“Get down!”
Angela would never know whether 82 said it first or it was simultaneous with the gunshot, but she knew what followed. As the sniper emerged from his nest in the grass on the edge of highway, Charles shouldered past 82 and tackled Angela to shield her. He scrambled for his gun, but his good arm was useless. Angela pulled his handgun from his belt pushed him off her and fired at the sniper, then pushed Charles off her. He took a hit in the leg. Not a kill shot. They needed him alive. Another Gear moved in to tackle him while 82 helped the boss up.
“Were you hit?”
“No.” Charles pushes his fallen glasses back up on his nose and offered his hand to Angela. She was still shaking a little as she got to her feet, her pulse pounding and sending blood to her head. “Excellent shot, 3201.” He did sound impressed.
She handed his gun back to him, handle first. “Just doing my job, sir.” Technically, she was security, too. Everyone was. They would die for Dethklok, but they specifically would die for Ofdensen.
The Gear returned with a body, and 82 delivered the bad news. “He’s dead.” They gave him a quick inspection on the ground. “Cyanide. Looks like he had a false tooth.”
“Shit.” Charles definitely wasn’t concerned about the end of a human life. He knew the dead told no tales, which was why Angela had shot the guy in the leg in the first place. It wasn’t the first clear assassination attempt specifically on Ofdensen, and they all knew it wouldn’t be the last. And he still wouldn’t wear a G-ddamn vest. “He missed. That’s what’s important.” He was reassuring them, not himself. His mind was already working on other things. “3201, call the police commissioner on his private line. It’s in my files. Hopefully he’ll get here before a patrol car shows up.”
There was no further discussion. Charles paced back and forth even after 82 demanded he get in the bulletproof car. He insisted there wouldn’t be a second attempt, even as he made business calls. The police did arrive, and five minutes later, two officers on behalf of the commissioner of Los Angeles, a personal friend of Dethklok, who helped expedite the process and make sure it would stay out of the papers. The body would go to the coroner’s office, but the Klokateers would have access to it and perform their own inspection. If Angela’s hunch was right, the sniper would lack any form of ID and might not even have fingerprints in the national database.
All other appointments were cancelled, and it was dark by the time they were released (their car was detained but another one showed up at last) and returned to the hotel. They were all exhausted, both from jetlag and the crash after the adrenaline rush. The legal Gears got the message ahead and showed their hoods to see if their Commander was all right, but didn’t pepper him with questions. They needed visual assurance and he provided it in the time it took to get to his suite.
Angela followed him in, and waited until the door was closed and locked before she spoke. “What the hell was that?”
Charles was standing over the suitcase hoisted on his coffee table, as if he sat down for even a second, he would lose the will to get up ever again. “It was a poorly-trained assassin. What the hell do you think it was?”
“He almost hit you,” she said. “And that’s not what I’m talking about.”
Charles finally looked at her, the first eye contact he’d been willing to make since the incident, and she pulled her hood off. He flinched but didn’t say anything.
“I am supposed to die for you.” Her voice was trembling, maybe from exhaustion and maybe from something else. She was too tired to think about it.
“And you did an excellent job of making sure that didn’t happen,” he said, his voice flat, and maybe a little snooty. He was trying to blow her off. He was trying to get her to leave, to not explain why he’d put himself in harm’s way for a simple hoodie. “If it wasn’t for the cyanide he would still be alive and we would still be questioning him. And to be honest, if someone else had the shot, they might have just blown his head off.” He stopped pacing and frowned. “What do you want? A medal?”
“I want you to tell me what the fuck you were thinking. How you could possibly put yourself in danger like that.”
“I wasn’t in danger. He wasn’t a good - “
She grabbed him by the shoulder and pulled his jacket off, and reversed it so he could see the back. There was a tear in a smooth line across the shoulders. The bullet had been centimeters, maybe millimeters away from hitting him.
“OK.” Charles finally showed some reaction. “So he was pretty good. But not great.”
“Just answer my question.”
“I’ll wear a vest. How about that?”
“That’s not the deal on the table.”
“And what do I get in return?”
“You already owe me your life,” she said, not mincing words. There was no time for it now.
He was immensely tired and she was cornering him, but this was the only way it was going to happen. He swallowed, gearing himself for the answer. “I didn’t want you to get hurt.”
“And you just forgot that you’re Charles Fucking Ofdensen and I’m someone who signs randomly-assigned numbers on her legal documents, and that the world would end without you but no one would miss me.”
“I would miss you.” This time, he didn’t hesitate with his answer. “I would ... fuck, I don’t know what I would do without you. That was what was going through my mind, if you really have to know. That I couldn’t stand the thought of seeing you hurt and at that exact moment, I was willing to put myself on the line to make sure it didn’t happen.” He struggled to continue. She’d cut him too deep with her open accusation, even if she hadn’t said it. “I know it wasn’t a good security decision, but you don’t make complex security decisions when you’re dodging bullets. You protect what’s important to you. What you don’t want to imagine living without.”
Maybe it was because he was so short, so meek, as if his own words tore him down, and he was so scared and tired of being scared, but the only thing she could do was hug him and he could hug back, resting his chin on her shoulder. It lasted a very long time, until neither was sure who was supporting the other.
“What are we going to do?” she asked, because it was really up to him. She could hound him all she wanted, but he had to be the one to give in. “I can’t watch you self-destruct. I won’t do that again.”
“That was ... about something different.” But he didn’t sound all that confident. He had too many demons to banish all at once. “I’m sorry about last night. I just wanted to protect you.” But, it was clear, he was the one who needed protection.
“I shouldn’t have called you crazy. And I understood what you were doing, even if I didn’t agree with it.”
That was the heart of it, after all. They couldn’t just apologize; they had to change. They were too smart to think otherwise.
“82 warned me about prying into your secrets,” she said, when Charles couldn’t find the right thing to say.
“He did?”
“He put it in other words. He seemed concerned for me, but I think he was really concerned about you, because I would get myself killed.”
“82 is still alive for a very good reason,” Charles said. “I once gave one of the documents in my safe to 129, when I had a full translation. It drove him mad. He finished it over dinner and then put his eyes out with his chopsticks. He drove them into his brain. I was the only one who knew where he was working so I was the one who found him.”
“But you’ve read it?”
“Not all of it,” he said with a little humor in his voice. So he could still muster up some. “It’s an ancient prophecy text. At least four thousand years old.”
“And it has to do with Dethklok.”
“There are a lot of strange things about this band,” he said. “They get a lot of people killed, and not just from being jackasses. It became obvious over time that the only people I could talk to about it were expendable people.”
“And it gives you nightmares.”
“They’re not always nightmares,” he answered defensively. “I knew I was going to push you away. My shrink told me and I believed him, but I couldn’t stop it. I haven’t been close to anyone since ... Well, that ended badly, too. But for other reasons.” He was a veteran. He’d been surrounded by death long before he found Nathan Explosion singing in a bar on a hot Floridian afternoon.
“If you can’t live with me and you can’t live without me, you might as well chose the better option,” she said. “Because if I die anyway, for some random reason like the rest of your employees, you’ll be just as miserable as if it had been some other way.”
He considered it. His eyes moved around a lot when he was thinking about something important. “Are you sure you want to do this? Because it should be your decision, too.”
“I don’t think I would be confronting my boss in what our bodies think is the middle of the night if I hadn’t made up my mind,” was her response.
Possibly for the first time in twenty-four very long hours, he smiled. They kissed, and though it was long, it wasn’t rushed or energizing. It was about reassurance, about feeling a presence that had been so painfully torn away for each of them.
They couldn’t stand anymore, and fell onto the couch. Angela rested on his good shoulder and he put her arm around her. He broke a comfortable silence to say, “Do you think you should at least unpack in your room?”
“If there was anyone on the team who didn’t know about us this morning, they’re talking about it with the people who did know right now.”
He chuckled and kissed her on the head. “I suppose so. But you’ll get the flack.”
“And if I have to hear the words ‘jungle fever’ one more time, I will punch someone.”
“You certainly have my permission. And I assume you haven’t done it because they didn’t mean it to be racially insensitive.”
“You’re the one who has it.”
“Then go to town.”
Now she laughed, and it felt good. No, it felt unimaginably fantastic.
They barely had enough energy to disrobe enough to get into bed. He was still in his sweat-stained undershirt from the day and she didn’t go back to her room for her pajamas or anything else, but it didn’t matter. Nothing would matter until the morning, and at the moment, that was comfortably far away.
********************************************
They woke well before the wake-up call. Their bodies were still on Mordland time, so Angela finally collected her things from her room and showered. This was a much better late-night experience, being wide awake so early in the morning with dawn far off, than the night before.
Charles was still drying his hair when he emerged from his own shower. “Make-up sex?” His eyes had that rare, adorable glee in anticipation.
“Make-up sex.”
At least they were of one mind about something.
She almost wished - OK, she didn’t wish - that someone would walk in and end the rumors once and for all with a definite yes. But then Charles would have to stop long enough to kill the intruder, and then possibly to deal with the hotel staff and the police. That would put a dent in the mood.
Charles, who was so rarely candid, simply laughed at the notion. “I don’t care what my staff thinks of me.”
“Bullshit. You work so hard at being terrifying.”
“That just comes naturally,” he said, which was probably the truth on the whole, but only because he was a unique man in a unique position. “You don’t have to be scared of me.”
“You’re just saying that because - “
“I know what you’re capable of. And it’s not hurting me. Except, apparently, when I need it. And if you’re not a threat to me then I’m not a threat to you, to be precise about it.” He pulled her closer. “I know how much I need you. And not just to shoot people for me, though that is a big plus.”
She liked examining his scars. He was too content to stop her. “That’s from ... um, let me think,” he said as she probed him about a jagged wound on his torso. “A concert in Monticello.”
“Someone knifed you?”
“No. The railing collapsed and I hit the edge of the art deco banister on my way down. A less interesting story, I know.”
“What was Dethklok doing in Monticello?”
“The Catskills Tour was not one of our finest moments, but they were gigs and it was before the contract, so I booked them. I made the boys play at a polka convention one time. The alcohol was overpriced, but the borscht was amazing.”
She laughed. “And how did you sell Dethklok to a polka convention?”
“With a very inaccurate description of their music style.”
“You should have been a salesman.”
Charles raised his eyebrows. “I thought I was.”
There was still time on the clock until the world kept calling, and they drifted in and out of wakefulness, without even turning on the morning news or looking at their phones. There were times when he would grow distant, when some force or another was bothering him, but business was never too far away.
She decided it was now or never. “What did you dream about?”
“When? Oh. I don’t remember that well. I just woke with some notion that names were important, and that was it.” He opened his eyes again. “You’re not going to buy that, are you?”
“No.”
He propped himself up on his elbow. “I went ... I dreamt I went to the place I went when I died.”
“At the release party?”
Charles nodded. “For six minutes and ten seconds. But it felt a hell of a lot longer on my end. Hours, maybe days.”
Still, Angela would have to coax him out of him. “I assume since you haven’t become some version of born-again, you didn’t see Heaven. Or Hell.”
“It was not ... one of those places. There were no other dead people there. There were no other people. It wasn’t ... let me put it this way. When I came back, I spent a lot of time analyzing what I’d seen, and trying to find an explanation on this side, and I’ve come to think that it’s some place I shouldn’t have seen, but was able to reach because I was dead. Temporarily. How I got there or how I got out, that part I still don’t know. It wasn’t of my own volition.”
“Are you able describe it? I mean, can it be described?”
“I know I’m not going to give it a fair description, but maybe that’s for the best.” Charles was working himself up to do this, maybe because he felt it owed it to her, or because he needed to tell someone after all this time. “It wasn’t quite like a photo negative, but it was very dark there. Like a night with no moon, but the things around me had light in them. There were some buildings - ruined buildings - and forest, but I couldn’t get a good look at anything.”
“Why?”
“Everything ... have you ever seen a picture, a painting or a photograph, where you took one look at it and knew it was wrong? That there was something inherently wrong with it?”
“In a creepy way?”
“Yes.”
“I can imagine it.”
“This was like that, but when you did look, it only got worse. Everything was twisted and demented and you would look deeper and eventually you would start screaming, because you would be so horrified, even though you never knew why. You just weren’t supposed to be looking. But there was nothing else to look at, nothing that didn’t do this to you. And I did want to look, because there were words on everything. Things were made of words - not like when someone does a drawing of something just using words in the shape of the object. More intricate than that. The only thing that wouldn’t do this to me was this castle on the horizon, which looked like a Disneyland castle you would see in a children’s book, not the real thing. It was yellow and the closer I came to it, the further it got. I never made any progress on reaching it, so I gave up.
“I must have wandered around for hours, going mad, wearing the ruined suit from the battle, and I came to this tower of light, shaped like a ziggurat. It was less dense than the other things and I was completely fixated by it. A single script ran up and down it and I couldn’t take my eyes off it, like the script was keeping the tower in existence. I probably would have been there forever, but someone pulled me out.”
“The medics?”
“They were zapping me. No, someone grabbed me.” He closed his left hand around her upper arm and tugged at it. “Like that, but from behind. That was the last thing before I was looking up at the hoodie.”
“That’s when you put your plan into motion.”
“I never intended to use it. I didn’t even think it would work. So much attention, so much publicity, the assassin hunting for me, knowing he didn’t finish the job himself - but when I woke up again, I was in Jakarta, breathing through a tube.” He let go of her arm. “I remembered that script. I wrote it down in the hospital. Spent months having it translated. It’s in a Sumerian dialect that’s never been fully decoded.”
“But it makes sense?”
“It does form sentences, but I haven’t read enough of it.” And they both knew why. “I’ve never been back, but I do dream about it. Like my mundane memories, it surfaces from time to time. I have the dream where I’m stuck in a meeting and late for another much more often.”
“And you’re only in your underwear?”
“No. Everyone else is.”
It broke the tension and he buried his forehead in her neck. “I know I’m crazy. I’m on too much medication to claim anything else. But I would stake my life on what I saw being the most important thing to Dethklok’s future. Can you handle that level of insanity?”
“As long as you don’t die on me again.”
He kissed her softly just behind her ear. “I can try. But no promises.”
********************************************
The real day began with a security briefing in the main room of Charles’s suite. If his guards were still shaken up by their wretched security failure, they weren’t showing it. There was no reason to punish them; assassins got in close from time to time. They were human. He was the only one who wasn’t allowed to be.
Nobody said anything about Angela’s behavior, other than to praise her quick thinking and good aim. More accurately, they didn’t say anything about his behavior during the shooting, and they never would, not if they valued their jobs-slash-lives. Charles had already decided not to call out 82 on it - the guy had done his best to jump in front of his boss.
Or maybe Charles was just in a very forgiving mood. He tried not to show it.
The coroner’s reports - LA county and his staffs’ - were disturbing. The shooter, Lou Stevens, had no known ties to any anti-Dethklok groups. He worked as a bank clerk, lived alone, and spent a lot of time fishing along the shore. A search of his house turned up some of the boys' albums, but no literature, for or against the band. His email was clean. He was not licensed to carry a firearm and had no record of any experience with a firearm, much less sniper training (maybe that was why he missed). He had no military training whatsoever, nor dental records to indicate a false tooth despite having one the day of death.
He’d disappeared two days before the incident. The flu was going around the office, so no one thought anything of it at the time. There was no reason, the police officers concluded, that he would take a shot at the manager of Dethklok, if he even knew at whom he was shooting. The tox screen came up negative for everything except cholesterol medicine.
“I’m sorry, sir,” the Klokateer in charge of the case said. “We’ll find the connection.”
Charles was about to tell them to forget about it, but there was a slim chance something would turn up. He dismissed them and began his normal routine, breaking only for a call on his encoded line.
Crozier picked up instantly. “What is it?”
“If you shot at me just to prove you’re not a mole, I’m going to have to insist you’re less precise.”
“I didn’t order a hit. The Tribunal ... well, we don’t discuss you. Or, we don’t come to any conclusions.” Crozier wasn’t exactly in the mood to be helpful, but he knew he had to be. “Don’t people try to kill you all the time?”
“This one raised some flags.”
“It wasn’t my men. They wouldn’t have missed.”
Charles decided to keep his comment on that to himself.
“Look, if Selatcia decides to try something ... the situation’s already complicated enough for me, but I’ll try to warn you. If you really need warning.”
“I’ll try not to. Thanks, General.”
“Ofdensen.” Crozier ended the call. He wasn’t exactly one to chat.
Charles spent the rest of the morning taking calls, or making them. Though he called Sarah, he did not tell her about the assassination attempt, as he did not usually tell her every time his life was in danger. There weren’t enough minutes in the month for that, never mind the cell phone plane. No one in the world had a monthly minute plan that covered that.
“Thank you for setting Wendy up,” she said. “She’s been going on about Skylar all morning. Which is a little annoying, now that I think about it, but is way better than her cursing about her love life.”
“Wait - he’s actually a nice guy?”
“You didn’t do a background check?”
“Of course I did a background check. I could tell you when he had his tonsils out. But that doesn’t mean I knew how he would act on a date. And I don’t know anything about Wendy.”
“She’s a pediatric gastroenterologist.”
He rolled his eyes. “I mean personality-wise.”
“I’m friends with her. Is anything else important?”
“I suppose not.”
Sarah was arguably as busy as he was, so she didn’t linger on the phone, and she didn’t ask about Angela. Or maybe she was just being polite and waiting to corner him at dinner on Friday.
Pickles arrived at noon, looking sober and eager to be otherwise. “Did yeh hear what Kixx was sayin’ aboot me?”
“Pickles, I advised you not to - “
“Dood said I was gay for Sammy’s fat ass. You - “ He poked Charles in the chest. “Make ‘im disappear.”
“I can’t do that.”
“Since when?”
“I would consider it in the future, but at the current time there’s no way the police would be able to overlook - “ He stopped. He had to make Pickles happy, right now. It was his job. And he could do anything his job required. “What if I get him to drop the lawsuit and eventually die of his own volition?”
“Yeh kin do that? Den why the feck haven’t you?”
“It’ll be expensive, Pickles. It might more than you’re willing to spend.”
“Dood, sell my panda rug. Get dis fecker off my back!”
Charles took that as a ‘yes.’
********************************************
Rikki Kixx was in pain. No, he was in agony. He was also freezing cold, so much so that his chest burned. He picked his face up out of the ice and a few cubes stuck to his chin before falling off. He wanted to sit up, and get away from all the burning ice against his bare skin, but his back screamed that maybe that wasn’t a good idea.
His eyes focused very slowly. It didn’t help that the motel room wasn’t well-lit, and that most of the figures were in black except for the center one, in gray, tapping one gray shoe impatiently on the stained carpet. “You’re awake.”
Rikki groaned in response.
Pickles’s lawyer - Rikki didn’t know his name - put a gigantic prescription bottle on the teetering bedstand. It was perhaps the biggest one he’d ever seen. This was followed by three more. “You’ll need to take one of each of these every day with a meal, preferably breakfast. Otherwise, your body might reject the transplant.”
A bathtub of ice. Rikki Kixx could not remember when he’d fallen asleep in his own bed, but now he was lying facedown in a bathtub of ice in a shitty motel, with a bunch of Dethklok executioners and that bastard lawyer, the one who looked like he would be the bad guy on those law shows.
This could not be good.
“The surgery was a remarkable success, considering the state you keep your body in and the state of the liver we acquired, which was not from what I would call a ‘legitimate’ donor. If it was a car, I would tell you to take it easy on the accelerator because I don’t know how many miles it has on it. But it is better than your old liver, and if you take your pills, it will stay that way.” He wasn’t smiling, even though it sounded like he was. Laughing on the inside, the bastard. “Also try to take your antibiotics at least an hour away from alcohol. And no, I do not require any thanks.”
The lawyer moved to leave, and Rikki rushed to sit up. Which really, really hurt and pulled at the bandages on his back. “You can’t do this! What the fuck did you do to me?”
“I gave you the only thing in life you really wanted, Mr. Kixx. A license to drink.” The lawyer sounded bored with it now.
“You cut me open? I’ll fuckin’ sue you!”
“Yes. Because a jury will believe that a CFO not only offered you a free organ, but then dumped you in a motel in a tub filled with ice. Aliens and kidney thieves are far more likely suspects. My alibi is available for your lawyers’ perusal, when they’re done laughing at you. Goodbye, Mr. Kixx.”
The slam of the door was all Rikki heard before he passed out again.
********************************************
Charles and Pickles appeared before the judge, sober and prepared. Kixx’s lawyers were late, and announced that they were unable to locate their client. Proceedings continued normally with the discussion of contracts and residuals, to establish entitlements for all parties. It cleared up a lot of misunderstandings, but created an equal amount of them along the way.
The next day, the lawyers called in to say Kixx was dropping the suit to enter a rehab program (after he was bailed out of jail for a drunken disorderly) as part of an agreement with his parole officer.
“I thought he couldn’t drink,” Pickles said.
“And I didn’t even have to sell your panda rug,” was Charles’s response, after which he changed the topic of conversation.
Charles told Angela that she should consider the party budget for the legal team “fairly unlimited,” and left the Klokateers to enjoy themselves in the hotel while he went down to the O.C. for dinner, taking Pickles with him because it seemed the easiest way of keeping the drummer out of trouble.
Dinner was roast chicken. “I cooked,” Sarah said, and endured a glare from Josh. “I turned the oven on.”
“You set the oven to four hundred degrees and I turned it on. But it is excellent progress,” her husband said.
“Hey, how’s saving the whales going?” she shot back, and he suddenly found the other side of the room to be very fascinating. “So no lawsuit? After all that?”
“Dethklok has been involved in far more complex and far more spurious lawsuits than counter-suing Rikki Kixx,” Charles said, and took a sip of his beer, then almost spat it out. “What is this?”
“Jew beer,” Josh announced. “See? I’m putting in an effort!”
Charles checked the label, which indeed said ‘He’brew - the Chosen Beer.’ “What is this crap? I thought most beer was kosher.”
“He’s putting in effort,” Sarah said, clearly as annoyed as he was. “Pickles seems to be enjoying it.”
Pickles was in fact deep into the ‘Messiah Bold’ brand beer. Two cases deep. “’sOK after da fifth pack.” He wavered, then passed out on the table.
Sarah just looked relieved. “I think he used most of it up.”
“I am putting in an effort to celebrate my culture!” Josh shouted from the kitchen.
“Just tell me Manischewitz doesn’t make beer,” Charles said. “Because that wine is sickeningly sweet.”
“When do you drink Manischewitz?”
“At the forty-something Jewish weddings and brises I’ve been to since I started working in the entertainment industry.”
Sam finally made his appearance. “Hey, Uncle Charlie. Wow, Pickles is passed out in my dining room!” He took out his phone for a picture.
Sarah looked at her brother, who shrugged and said, “We might get a licensing deal out of it. Sam, don’t frame out the labels.”
Dinner went as planned, with Pickles only passed out for the first half, and then briefly again at the end. No one bugged Charles about his health, or how overworked he was, or how he never visited his family. Sam didn’t hit Pickles up (when he was conscious) for any Dethklok-related secrets or favors beyond attending his Bar Mitzvah reception, which he could do incognito.
“Totally, kid. I wanna see what Nat’an’s so upset aboot.”
“And we have Dethklok to thank for being able to book a reception hall only three months in advance,” Josh said.
“What?”
“Turns out the owner is a huge Dethklok fan. Surprise, surprise,” Sarah said. “End of story.”
“That’s not the end of the story!” Josh insisted. “Tell him how you went all lawyer on that guy! It was terrifying. He would be so proud.”
Charles raised his eyebrow at his sister.
“I threatened to call you over their use of non-licensed Dethklok-themed decorations,” Sarah said. “And it worked.”
“I’m sure you’re so proud,” Josh said to Charles.
Withering under his sister’s stare, Charles just said, “Sure. Whatever.”
Of course, Sarah waited until they were leaving to corner him. “I’m putting a plus one on your invitation.”
“Good. My bodyguard is getting really insistent about following me around, and he might want dinner.”
“I was not talking about - ugh. I’m sending her an invitation.”
“No.”
“Should I address it to - what’s her number again? Because I don’t know her last name.”
“No.”
“Or I could email her a .pdf. But that seems cheap. Doesn’t that seem cheap?”
Charles rubbed the bridge of his nose. “It’s three months. Do you know how long my relationships usually last?”
“You’ve been in relationships?”
“Exactly.”
She kissed him on the cheek. “Good luck.”
Charles grumbled and climbed into the limo, where Pickles was experiencing a brief period of consciousness that, judging from the champagne bottle he’d opened, wasn’t going to last. “Family. Dey’re so good at pissin’ yah off.”
“Is that the only reason you’re willing to go to a Bar Mitzvah? To see me embarrassed?”
Pickles shrugged. “Dere’s also dat Manny shatvis wine. Really packs a wallop.”
“So, booze and embarrassment. This is because I made you go to your brother’s wedding, isn’t it?”
“Yep.”
Charles sighed. He could handle it. At least -
“And yer totally bringing yer girlfriend.”
The limo was supposed to be soundproofed, but the curses could be heard miles away.
********************************************
Many More Miles Away
“It is as we suspected, Master.” Orlaag sat down with his printouts. Selatcia never perused them himself; he never needed to. “The assassin cannot possibly be traced to us, but he still failed. Ofdensen could not be harmed.”
Selatcia was visibly furious. Orlaag had never seen him go through so much trouble to manipulate someone from afar, especially wholesale. “He is protected.”
“Impossible. Who could possibly protect him from you?”
“There is only one person,” Selatcia replied. “But he is already dead.”
End