Fic: The King in Metal (0/15)
“The King in Metal”
Author: DJ_the_Writer
Rating: PG-13
Pairings: Charles/OFC
Beta: wikdsushi
Characters: Charles, Pickles, OCs
Warnings: Cursing, Drugs, PTSD, off-screen sex
Summary: Charles endures pretty much the worst family reunion ever.
I'm back with another novel-length fanfic that will probably be my last major undertaking in this fanfic universe. For those of you who haven't read the previous three fics, " Home for the Holidays," " The Two of Us Are Dying," and " To Live and Die in Los Angeles," you should probably go do that. Or hey, maybe you like a challenge. You can also find the links in my journal, where I dump stories.
For new people, this series revolves around Charles Ofdensen, his family, and his very messed up military history. By request, I decided to do one full-on mythology story, though I'm going to try to keep the characters down-to-earth despite what I just said in the first half of the sentence. This story was inspired by a good chunk of classic American horror, Lovecraft, and Avatar: The Last Airbender (tv show).
Points to anyone to who figures out what the title references. The points aren't good for anything, but I'll be impressed.
Posting will be a little inconsistent over the next week as I am offline a lot for Pesach (Passover), then will resume a normal daily-ish schedule.
Let's catch up a bit with the OCs I introduced in previous stories:
Charles has a younger sister named Sarah Ofdensen-Stern, who was briefly Dethklok's tour manager in the pre-Crystal Mountain days and therefore owns 1% of the company, which means she is very, very rich. Otherwise she has basically nothing to do with Dethklok and is a practicing pediatric neurosurgeon in California. She is married to Josh Stern, a surfer and self-proclaimed environmentalist who only seems to be good for cooking and taking potshots at his brother-in-law. They have a son, Sam Stern, who in the last story announced that he wants to have a Bar Mitzvah despite only being Jewish on his father's side so he can get a ton of money from friends and relatives. Everyone has reluctantly agreed to this plan.
On the Danish side, there's Ejvind Offdensen, Charles's older brother, who died 36 years ago of leukemia, when Charles was 2. His shadow hangs over the family, and Charles's grandmother, known simply as Bedstemor, quite literally thinks Charles and Sarah are demons who killed Ejvind by being born and was willing to tell them that when they attempted to visit her. Charles's defender (his parents are dead) is his uncle, the hard-drinking, amiable Hjalmar Offdensen.
On the Dethklok end, Charles is having a low-key romance with his current assistant 3201, also known as Angela. So far this has not managed to spill over into their professional lives aside from some off-color jokes on behalf of his staff because the band members, aside from Pickles, either don't know or honestly could give a shit as to whom their manager sleeps with. Angela has been warned by 82, Charles's personal bodyguard, not to get too close to the Sumerian prophecies Charles is always researching. She has promptly ignored his advice.
Onto the prologue...
Prologue
New Haven, Connecticut
1974
He’d once had hair.
People said it was yellow, or blond as they said in English, but he thought it was golden. Golden curls, his mother said, even though his hair wasn’t very curly, not in comparison to some of the others in the ward, especially the redheads, who seemed to be prone to it. And one kid, who was two years his senior and briefly his roommate, called his hair a “Jew-fro.”
Ejvind had no idea what that meant.
That was fine, because he smiled blankly at Americans and they took it for granted that he didn’t know what they were saying and he was being polite. He was being polite, but not for the reasons they thought. His English was pretty good - he could follow American movies, and television shows if they didn’t speak too quickly. He knew all the medical terms the doctors and nurses used. He just had trouble with pronunciation, so he didn’t try to speak. No one expected much of him, anyway.
He had many caps, most of them with an American baseball team, but all of them made his head itch so he left them off. He could scratch the soft fuzz on his scalp that always fell out when it got too long, as if it lacked the will to go on. Ejvind Offdensen knew the rest of his body was starting to feel the same way, but no one talked to him about that. They were upbeat and it was frustrating because he didn’t always feel like smiling.
What did make him smile was the radio, when the set he’d smuggled from the regular ward played Led Zeppelin, or Black Sabbath, and sometimes Judas Priest, the one with the ironic name. Ejvind knew what a black Sabbath was, and what the lyrics to all of the songs were. If his mother knew what he was listening to, she would be furious, so he didn’t tell her, or show her his sketchbook full of symbols from the album covers one of the orderlies brought him.
“What is this crap?” his uncle asked him in Danish as he entered, carrying his little brother Charlie. “Do your parents know what you’re listening to?”
“They can’t understand it,” he said.
“Well, neither can I! It’s just noise, I think.” His uncle set Charlie down on the floor and kissed Ejvind on the cheek. “Did you do your schoolwork?”
“No.”
“What am I going to tell your mother?”
Ejvind shrugged and continued drawing. He had the only seat in the room, and Uncle Hjalmar sat down on the empty bed. There were blocks on the shelves and little wooden vehicles for Charlie to play with, and Ejvind momentarily stopped his work to pull out the blocks so his brother could get to them. At first, Charlie had just put them in his mouth, but now he was older, and he started to stack them.
“You’ve got some spirit in you!” Hjalmar sounded somewhat proud. “That’s from your mother, you know. My brother is such a pushover.”
“I know.”
“Hey! You don’t get to say that. He’s your father. Show some respect.” Now he was more serious, but still not very. Hjalmar was never very serious. Ejvind wished he was around more, but it had been so expensive for him to come to America for Sarah’s birth. He would stay for the christening, but probably not much longer. His wife didn’t like him gone, he said. “You’re such a little know-it-all.”
“I have a lot of time to think,” Ejvind replied.
Hjalmar gave him a look, then opened the brown plastic bag. “I brought you candy. And your order, from the store.”
Ejvind held out his arms eagerly. “Thank you, Uncle!”
“I thought you would maybe want to buy some lady magazines, at your age. What is this?” He looked at the title but his English wasn’t very good. “What does this say?”
“It’s a book on the history of Sumeria.”
“Where is that? New York?” Hjalmar thought everything he didn’t know about was in New York or California.
“Mesopotamia,” Ejvind said, taking the used paperback from his uncle’s hands. “Persia,” he clarified. That seemed to help.
“And this one.” Hjalmar squinted. “‘Die.’ I know this word.”
“‘How to Die,’” Ejvind said and grabbed it from him before he could inspect it further.
“How could someone write about how to die? Wouldn’t they have to be dead? You can’t write about something you’ve never done.”
“The author is a monk. He believes when you die you are reborn again and again.”
“Eh, is that what this is about?” His uncle leaned over and shook his bald head. “It’s just going to depress you. You’re going to go to Heaven like a good little boy and play football with Jesus.”
“Is that what you believe?”
His uncle shrugged, and leaned over to pull Charlie away from some of the hospital equipment he’d wandered over to. “I have the good sense not to speak about something I haven’t done. And maybe the son of G-d doesn’t like football.”
“He’s just curious,” Ejvind said, coming to his brother’s defense. “Charlie, come here. I’ll show you the machines.” His brother was barely two, and he could understand them, even if he didn’t speak back. Like his big brother. “This is the machine that feeds me,” he said, pointing to the pump for his intravenous feeding. “And this,” he said as he turned the dial on the other machine, knowing it was unplugged, “is the machine that poisons my cancer.”
“Ach, I hope he doesn’t understand,” Hjalmar said, lying down on Ejvind’s bed. It was as if he wasn’t adjusted to the time change, two weeks in.
Ejvind guided Charlie’s fingers so he could play with the knobs on the disabled device. “I heard my parents talking. They’re going to stay here, raise Charlie and Sarah in America.”
“Why wouldn’t they?”
“I mean, after I’m dead.”
Hjalmar picked his head up. “Don’t talk like that. It’s strange.”
“It’s a fact. It’s why they didn’t want me to hear. But I don’t like to pretend. I’m too old for games.” He cut off his uncle’s response. “I think they should do it. You could encourage them. There’s nothing for them there. Just crazy old Grandma.”
“Don’t talk about your grandmother that way. But yes, she is crazy.” Hjalmar sighed, between a rock and a hard place, as the Americans said. “Your parents have always done what’s best for you, and they will do what’s best for Charles and Sarah. Of this I’m sure. Argh, I need a drink.”
“There’s a bar across the street. I’ll watch Charlie. Just put him in my arms.” He couldn’t lift his brother himself. Sometimes it was hard to just get across the hall to the bathroom. Hjalmar set Charlie on the cushion next to him.
“Don’t tell your father where I went,” Hjalmar said, even though it was unlikely Father would be back from work yet, and Mother was still in the maternity ward. Hjalmar was supposed to watch Charlie, but Charlie wasn’t too wild for a toddler, especially in the afternoon when it was probably time for his nap anyway. Unlike Ejvind, he resembled their father instead of their mother, with his brown hair. Sarah did, too, though it was harder to tell with an infant.
Charlie was always curious, and pointed to one of the drawings. “Dis.” It was his way of asking for an explanation.
“That?” Ejvind guided his brother’s tiny fingers away so they wouldn’t smudge it. “That’s a castle. Like they have in Denmark. Not many here, though.” He spoke to him in Danish; his English wasn’t good enough and he was momentarily ashamed.
“Dis.”
“That’s a pentagram. Some people say it’s an evil symbol, but the pentagram can also be used for good. It depends on the way it’s turned. Cultures all over the world use it for different things.” He knew Charlie really didn’t understand, but he spoke anyway.
“Dis.”
Charlie was pointing to the little man with a sword and shield, standing atop of circle. Ejvind just drew it from time to time; he could never escape it. “That’s the man who is supposed to save the world. But he’s not going to.
Charlie looked up at his brother in confusion.
“He’s going to die instead.”
To Be Continued...
Author: DJ_the_Writer
Rating: PG-13
Pairings: Charles/OFC
Beta: wikdsushi
Characters: Charles, Pickles, OCs
Warnings: Cursing, Drugs, PTSD, off-screen sex
Summary: Charles endures pretty much the worst family reunion ever.
I'm back with another novel-length fanfic that will probably be my last major undertaking in this fanfic universe. For those of you who haven't read the previous three fics, " Home for the Holidays," " The Two of Us Are Dying," and " To Live and Die in Los Angeles," you should probably go do that. Or hey, maybe you like a challenge. You can also find the links in my journal, where I dump stories.
For new people, this series revolves around Charles Ofdensen, his family, and his very messed up military history. By request, I decided to do one full-on mythology story, though I'm going to try to keep the characters down-to-earth despite what I just said in the first half of the sentence. This story was inspired by a good chunk of classic American horror, Lovecraft, and Avatar: The Last Airbender (tv show).
Points to anyone to who figures out what the title references. The points aren't good for anything, but I'll be impressed.
Posting will be a little inconsistent over the next week as I am offline a lot for Pesach (Passover), then will resume a normal daily-ish schedule.
Let's catch up a bit with the OCs I introduced in previous stories:
Charles has a younger sister named Sarah Ofdensen-Stern, who was briefly Dethklok's tour manager in the pre-Crystal Mountain days and therefore owns 1% of the company, which means she is very, very rich. Otherwise she has basically nothing to do with Dethklok and is a practicing pediatric neurosurgeon in California. She is married to Josh Stern, a surfer and self-proclaimed environmentalist who only seems to be good for cooking and taking potshots at his brother-in-law. They have a son, Sam Stern, who in the last story announced that he wants to have a Bar Mitzvah despite only being Jewish on his father's side so he can get a ton of money from friends and relatives. Everyone has reluctantly agreed to this plan.
On the Danish side, there's Ejvind Offdensen, Charles's older brother, who died 36 years ago of leukemia, when Charles was 2. His shadow hangs over the family, and Charles's grandmother, known simply as Bedstemor, quite literally thinks Charles and Sarah are demons who killed Ejvind by being born and was willing to tell them that when they attempted to visit her. Charles's defender (his parents are dead) is his uncle, the hard-drinking, amiable Hjalmar Offdensen.
On the Dethklok end, Charles is having a low-key romance with his current assistant 3201, also known as Angela. So far this has not managed to spill over into their professional lives aside from some off-color jokes on behalf of his staff because the band members, aside from Pickles, either don't know or honestly could give a shit as to whom their manager sleeps with. Angela has been warned by 82, Charles's personal bodyguard, not to get too close to the Sumerian prophecies Charles is always researching. She has promptly ignored his advice.
Onto the prologue...
Prologue
New Haven, Connecticut
1974
He’d once had hair.
People said it was yellow, or blond as they said in English, but he thought it was golden. Golden curls, his mother said, even though his hair wasn’t very curly, not in comparison to some of the others in the ward, especially the redheads, who seemed to be prone to it. And one kid, who was two years his senior and briefly his roommate, called his hair a “Jew-fro.”
Ejvind had no idea what that meant.
That was fine, because he smiled blankly at Americans and they took it for granted that he didn’t know what they were saying and he was being polite. He was being polite, but not for the reasons they thought. His English was pretty good - he could follow American movies, and television shows if they didn’t speak too quickly. He knew all the medical terms the doctors and nurses used. He just had trouble with pronunciation, so he didn’t try to speak. No one expected much of him, anyway.
He had many caps, most of them with an American baseball team, but all of them made his head itch so he left them off. He could scratch the soft fuzz on his scalp that always fell out when it got too long, as if it lacked the will to go on. Ejvind Offdensen knew the rest of his body was starting to feel the same way, but no one talked to him about that. They were upbeat and it was frustrating because he didn’t always feel like smiling.
What did make him smile was the radio, when the set he’d smuggled from the regular ward played Led Zeppelin, or Black Sabbath, and sometimes Judas Priest, the one with the ironic name. Ejvind knew what a black Sabbath was, and what the lyrics to all of the songs were. If his mother knew what he was listening to, she would be furious, so he didn’t tell her, or show her his sketchbook full of symbols from the album covers one of the orderlies brought him.
“What is this crap?” his uncle asked him in Danish as he entered, carrying his little brother Charlie. “Do your parents know what you’re listening to?”
“They can’t understand it,” he said.
“Well, neither can I! It’s just noise, I think.” His uncle set Charlie down on the floor and kissed Ejvind on the cheek. “Did you do your schoolwork?”
“No.”
“What am I going to tell your mother?”
Ejvind shrugged and continued drawing. He had the only seat in the room, and Uncle Hjalmar sat down on the empty bed. There were blocks on the shelves and little wooden vehicles for Charlie to play with, and Ejvind momentarily stopped his work to pull out the blocks so his brother could get to them. At first, Charlie had just put them in his mouth, but now he was older, and he started to stack them.
“You’ve got some spirit in you!” Hjalmar sounded somewhat proud. “That’s from your mother, you know. My brother is such a pushover.”
“I know.”
“Hey! You don’t get to say that. He’s your father. Show some respect.” Now he was more serious, but still not very. Hjalmar was never very serious. Ejvind wished he was around more, but it had been so expensive for him to come to America for Sarah’s birth. He would stay for the christening, but probably not much longer. His wife didn’t like him gone, he said. “You’re such a little know-it-all.”
“I have a lot of time to think,” Ejvind replied.
Hjalmar gave him a look, then opened the brown plastic bag. “I brought you candy. And your order, from the store.”
Ejvind held out his arms eagerly. “Thank you, Uncle!”
“I thought you would maybe want to buy some lady magazines, at your age. What is this?” He looked at the title but his English wasn’t very good. “What does this say?”
“It’s a book on the history of Sumeria.”
“Where is that? New York?” Hjalmar thought everything he didn’t know about was in New York or California.
“Mesopotamia,” Ejvind said, taking the used paperback from his uncle’s hands. “Persia,” he clarified. That seemed to help.
“And this one.” Hjalmar squinted. “‘Die.’ I know this word.”
“‘How to Die,’” Ejvind said and grabbed it from him before he could inspect it further.
“How could someone write about how to die? Wouldn’t they have to be dead? You can’t write about something you’ve never done.”
“The author is a monk. He believes when you die you are reborn again and again.”
“Eh, is that what this is about?” His uncle leaned over and shook his bald head. “It’s just going to depress you. You’re going to go to Heaven like a good little boy and play football with Jesus.”
“Is that what you believe?”
His uncle shrugged, and leaned over to pull Charlie away from some of the hospital equipment he’d wandered over to. “I have the good sense not to speak about something I haven’t done. And maybe the son of G-d doesn’t like football.”
“He’s just curious,” Ejvind said, coming to his brother’s defense. “Charlie, come here. I’ll show you the machines.” His brother was barely two, and he could understand them, even if he didn’t speak back. Like his big brother. “This is the machine that feeds me,” he said, pointing to the pump for his intravenous feeding. “And this,” he said as he turned the dial on the other machine, knowing it was unplugged, “is the machine that poisons my cancer.”
“Ach, I hope he doesn’t understand,” Hjalmar said, lying down on Ejvind’s bed. It was as if he wasn’t adjusted to the time change, two weeks in.
Ejvind guided Charlie’s fingers so he could play with the knobs on the disabled device. “I heard my parents talking. They’re going to stay here, raise Charlie and Sarah in America.”
“Why wouldn’t they?”
“I mean, after I’m dead.”
Hjalmar picked his head up. “Don’t talk like that. It’s strange.”
“It’s a fact. It’s why they didn’t want me to hear. But I don’t like to pretend. I’m too old for games.” He cut off his uncle’s response. “I think they should do it. You could encourage them. There’s nothing for them there. Just crazy old Grandma.”
“Don’t talk about your grandmother that way. But yes, she is crazy.” Hjalmar sighed, between a rock and a hard place, as the Americans said. “Your parents have always done what’s best for you, and they will do what’s best for Charles and Sarah. Of this I’m sure. Argh, I need a drink.”
“There’s a bar across the street. I’ll watch Charlie. Just put him in my arms.” He couldn’t lift his brother himself. Sometimes it was hard to just get across the hall to the bathroom. Hjalmar set Charlie on the cushion next to him.
“Don’t tell your father where I went,” Hjalmar said, even though it was unlikely Father would be back from work yet, and Mother was still in the maternity ward. Hjalmar was supposed to watch Charlie, but Charlie wasn’t too wild for a toddler, especially in the afternoon when it was probably time for his nap anyway. Unlike Ejvind, he resembled their father instead of their mother, with his brown hair. Sarah did, too, though it was harder to tell with an infant.
Charlie was always curious, and pointed to one of the drawings. “Dis.” It was his way of asking for an explanation.
“That?” Ejvind guided his brother’s tiny fingers away so they wouldn’t smudge it. “That’s a castle. Like they have in Denmark. Not many here, though.” He spoke to him in Danish; his English wasn’t good enough and he was momentarily ashamed.
“Dis.”
“That’s a pentagram. Some people say it’s an evil symbol, but the pentagram can also be used for good. It depends on the way it’s turned. Cultures all over the world use it for different things.” He knew Charlie really didn’t understand, but he spoke anyway.
“Dis.”
Charlie was pointing to the little man with a sword and shield, standing atop of circle. Ejvind just drew it from time to time; he could never escape it. “That’s the man who is supposed to save the world. But he’s not going to.
Charlie looked up at his brother in confusion.
“He’s going to die instead.”
To Be Continued...