Tell Me Inside Out
Title: Tell Me Inside Out
Author: seashadows
Rating: R
Words: 3,458
Pairing: none, for now
Warnings: bodily dissection
Disclaimer: not mine
Summary: Charles thought that he'd kept good tabs on the boys, but apparently, one slipped through the cracks. Light pre-slash. Title from Peter Paul and Mary's "Rocky Road."
Gross anat. 2day, teach them the abdomin. Don’t tell dumb kids theyre dumb.
It was just a tiny note, unnoticeable except to someone with Charles’s observational skills, that fluttered to the floor when the manager sat down at the kitchen table. Of course, a slice of blueberry pie captured his attention at the same time, which accounted for the fact that he didn’t examine the note until he was finished. After all, the boys got up to all sorts of easily-solved shenanigans every day; pie was once a week, at most.
Jean-Pierre, oddly enough, snapped his head up on its once-shattered neck vertebrae when Charles bent down to pick up the note; that was really the first sign that something was even more wrong than it usually was in Mordhaus. “Sire, there is no need -“
He was too late. Charles’s eyes widened in confusion and more than a little surprise as he read the note, then narrowed, sending dual hazel beams of doom in the chef’s direction. “This is Nathan’s handwriting. Jean-Pierre…where is he?”
Jean-Pierre’s shoulders slumped as he stared a little to Charles’s right - although, to be fair, the guilty look could have just been a consequence of his permanently-wandering left eye. “He is not here, sire.”
“I know that,” Charles said, tone tight. “Do you have any idea where he might be?” A few seconds passed without a response, which was a sure sign of guilt, even if nothing else was. “Jean-Pierre, you know where he is, don’t you?” For a band member to disappear wasn’t unusual in itself, but Nathan had written something about kids in the note, and children were his weak spot when it came to controlling his temper.
The chef sighed. “I do, sire. But I cannot tell you, because Seigneur Explosion has threatened the Klokateers with a painful death if we speak to anyone.”
Charles raised his left eyebrow. “You’ve survived being run through a propeller and you constantly claim that you don’t fear your mortality. What about this particular threat made you keep Nathan’s whereabouts from me?”
“If I die,” Jean-Pierre said, “then I will not be able to serve the meals and snacks to Dethklok. And I cannot bear to think of this.”
Charles had to admit that it was a legitimate concern, but he couldn’t neglect his job and let Nathan wander around the world unsupervised. There were too many things that could go wrong. “Tell me, and Nathan will never know it was you.”
“You will make a guarantee of this?”
“Ninety-nine percent.” It was the closest Charles could come to a guarantee without perjuring himself; in Mordhaus, it was safer not to make promises you couldn’t keep. There had been more than one gory death courtesy of a Klokateer who was stupid enough to break that unwritten rule. “Jean-Pierre, it’s my job to know what’s going on,” he added. “What if Nathan died because I couldn’t protect him?”
He knew that that jab had hit its mark when Jean-Pierre started gnawing on his stitched-together lower lip. “Seigneur Explosion teaches his class today at the, ah…sud…Southern Illinois University,” he said. “It is a class of anatomy.”
“Teaches? Who on earth would take him?” Jean-Pierre had to have his facts wrong; no self-respecting university would give Nathan Explosion a degree, let alone allow him to teach. He was completely and utterly incompetent when it came to most things, including algebra, making tea, and walking while chewing gum.
“The Southern Illinois University took him for a professor, sire. He is a fine anatomist.”
Then again…Jean-Pierre’s information did match up with the sloppy scribbles on the note. “Anatomy? You’re sure about this?” Jean-Pierre nodded. “How long has he been teaching there?”
Jean-Pierre’s brow wrinkled. “I believe two years. He is a…an occasional professor?”
“Adjunct,” Charles said, a little absently. Nathan, a professor? What bizarre world had he stumbled into?
“Yes, an adjunct. He teaches the anatomy to medical students.”
And of all the levels, Nathan was teaching to med students. Charles made a mental note to remember these hidden depths the next time Nathan smashed one of his desk lamps. “You said the University of Southern Illinois?”
“Oui, sire.”
“That’s hundreds of miles away,” Charles said. “Did he take a Dethchopper?”
“Oui. I will alert a person to prepare one for you.”
“No, you don’t need to do that.” Charles shook his head. Jean-Pierre looked so frazzled, as though it was his fault Nathan had threatened him with the worst death that Mordhaus’s facilities could provide. “It’s not your job. I’ll get another Gear to do it.” He looked at his watch. “What time is Nathan’s class?”
“I do not know.” Jean-Pierre shrugged his bony, mismatched shoulders. “He left…not long ago. Half an hour, perhaps? He does not tell me his schedules.”
If Nathan was an adjunct professor, then that meant he probably taught one class a week, at most. That meant he’d have to do a lot of preparatory work beforehand, which meant that he’d probably have to get to class at least half an hour in advance. Allowing the Dethchopper an hour of travel time, that meant if Charles left right now, he might just catch Nathan in time to see if he was really teaching, and if he needed to do damage control to compensate for traumatized students. “Good,” he said, standing up. “I’m leaving, Jean-Pierre. If the boys get themselves into any trouble, call me immediately.”
Jean-Pierre made a bobbing forward motion that probably would have been a bow before his accident, but just looked like an epileptic twitch now. “Of course. Wait!” he called out as Charles started to cross the kitchen threshold. “If Seigneur Pickles comes in and he is, ah…”
“If Pickles is high, lock up the cinnamon, because he’ll try to snort it,” Charles interrupted. “You have my permission. He’s not going to make good on any of his threats; he never remembers them. Is that all?”
“Yes. Have a…good time in the university.”
“I graduated a long time ago,” Charles said, “but thank you.”
~
The lecture hall was crowded with students and noisy with their chatter when Charles slipped in with a quartet of backpacked women, but there was no sign of Nathan at the front of the room. There was a PowerPoint slide lit up on a screen, yes (apparently, today they were dissecting the abdomen), but no Nathan, and no cadaver. Either he’d arrived too early - which seemed unlikely, given how full the auditorium was - or Nathan didn’t teach after all.
Seating himself at the end of a row, Charles tapped the shoulder of the young man sitting next to him. “Excuse me, who teaches this class?”
The student blinked at him. “Why? Are you doing some kind of audit or something?”
Charles resisted the urge to roll his eyes. “No. I’m…observing. Who teaches this class?”
“Professor Explosion. Where have you been?” the kid said, tone making it abundantly clear that a) that was a rhetorical question, and b) he thought Charles was an idiot of the highest caliber. Or was that lowest? “Okay, look. If you’re gonna be in here, I should probably tell you that Professor Explosion’s kind of…famous. And if you take the class, you’re not really supposed to bother him about it. So if you do the fan freak-out thing, he’ll be really pissed off.”
“Good to know,” Charles said tersely. What on earth were they teaching kids these days? Apparently nothing good, if Nathan was their professor; it seemed that Jean-Pierre had been right after all.
‘Pissed off’, though…that didn’t sound good. Damn, he knew Nathan’s temper had to have gotten the better of him at some point. “What exactly do you mean by -“
“Hey!” The student elbowed him. “He’s coming in. Stop talking.” In fact, the entire lecture hall had stopped talking; a door near the PowerPoint screen had opened, and someone - Nathan? - was pushing a sheet-draped cart through. The shape on the cart looked suspiciously human, and Charles felt his gut tense, despite himself. He’d seen death upon death during his career with Dethklok, but he’d never actually sat in on a dissection.
If he threw up here, he would never forgive himself.
“Hey, douchebags!” Nathan called out, voice thundering up to the highest echelons and eliciting claps and cheers with every word. His dark hair, normally loose, was pulled back into a ponytail, and he was wearing the biggest lab coat that Charles had ever seen. Even the reading glasses he was wearing didn’t take away an iota of the threatening image he projected; in any environment, it seemed that Nathan Explosion could only be himself. “Ready to get into this cadaver’s fuckin’ guts?”
“Hell yes!” a woman’s voice rang out.
Nathan pointed towards the front row. “Fuck yeah. That’s fuckin’ enthusiasm! All the rest of you better be ready to watch me dissect this cadaver like she is, or you’re gonna…flunk or something.” He thumped a hand against the cart and kicked at the wheels with one foot, making a stabilizing stand hit the floor. “So who remembers what the fuck we’re doing today?”
“The abdomen!” a few students called back.
Nathan grinned. “You got it! We’re going into this motherfucker’s abdominal cavity, and it’s gonna be awesome.” He flipped back the sheet to reveal a large, thoroughly sliced-up square of the cadaver’s abdomen; the rest of the body was covered with what looked like blue hospital gowns. Knowing Nathan, that might well be what they were. “So we were in the, uhhh…the mesentery last time. Today, we’re gonna find out how this stupid motherfucker died, ‘cause all the clues are in here.” He gave the cadaver a light slap with his palm; the cart jumped slightly, but didn’t roll away.
Charles wouldn’t have truly believed it if he hadn’t been sitting right there, but fuck…Nathan actually was a professor, and from the reactions of his students, he was a good one, too. Students tended to be apathetic unless they had a teacher who actually motivated them; he remembered that well enough from his time in college. Even famous researchers got people sleeping in class if they were boring.
“Where’d we stop last time?” Nathan continued. “Does anyone remember?” He pointed somewhere in the middle of the lecture hall. “You.”
Charles strained his neck to see a student put their hand down and straighten up in their seat a little (from the back, he couldn’t tell if the student was male or female). “You exposed the mesentery, and we were about to go onto the internal organs.” Female, then.
“Good. That was a test, and you motherfucking passed it. Great job.” Nathan pointed at her again for good measure before putting his hand back on the cadaver. “Right. I opened up this motherfucker’s ab…abdominal cavity. Let’s see if anything grew in there.” He flipped back a slice of flesh and stared down into the cavity. “Nope, nothing grew in here. The formaldehyde’s fuckin’ strong. Anyone else getting light-headed?”
“Me,” piped up someone in the front row.
“Good, so I’m not just hungover.” Hesitant giggles drifted from a few students in response. “Okay. I got this oblique fissure right here, and here’s the guts. Let’s get the stomach out of the way.” Charles winced as Nathan peeled the stomach up with a very vivid, dry sort of slurping noise. “We’ll look at that later. Right here, there’s the - motherfucker, get the hell over here! It’s slippery.” Nathan poked the cadaver hard. “Can anyone see what the fuck I’m touching? I mean, I know what it is, but I don’t know if you dicks do.”
“The gallbladder?” someone ventured.
“No. How the motherfucking titty-twisting hell did you get into med school?” Nathan shook his head. “Oh, god, I’m sorry. I’m really hungover. Anyone else wanna tell me what this organ is?”
“The pancreas,” someone else said, his voice more confident.
“Yeah. Okay. Someone else who can see the pancreas - tell me what it looks like.” Nathan dug the scalpel into a section of pancreas and levered it up. “Does it look metal? I mean, you douchebags probably just think it looks gross, but I think it looks metal.”
“It’s discolored.” Charles wasn’t sure, but he thought that was the same student who had guessed that the pancreas was the gallbladder; he could only guess how Nathan would rip into him if this turned out to be a stupid guess, too. “And…misshapen, I think. Right on the end.”
“Good.” All right, so it wasn’t a stupid guess. “What’s that mean? Not you. Someone else. If it’s discolored and has a weird bulging end, what’s that mean?”
“God,” muttered the young man sitting next to Charles. “Could you get any easier?” He raised his hand high.
Charles realized the implications a split second before Nathan’s eyes lit on his row. “Yeah. You, in the middle.”
“Pancreatitis, or pancreatic cancer.” The student tucked a stray lock of hair behind one ear, shoving back the earflap of his grungy blue hat. “Probably fatal.”
“Right!” Nathan’s grin was approaching frightening proportions by this point. “I told you douches that something in the abdomen killed this g-“ His sentence trailed off mid-word as he stopped and squinted. Stared.
Charles tried his level best to sink into his seat.
As hard as he tried, though, he’d never quite perfected the art of invisi-vision. “Hey,” Nathan growled. “Is that you?”
Charles shrugged, trying to make the gesture look noncommittal. Nathan was nothing if not easy to confuse…or maybe not, given the career path in which he’d apparently excelled. Why the hell hadn’t he sat in the back row? At least the students there, statistically and experientially speaking, would have been less likely to answer the question.
“Fuck, yeah, it’s you.” Nathan looked around the lecture hall, his gaze sweeping over the students before landing back on Charles. If looks could kill, those eyes would probably be burning a hole right between his eyebrows. “Hey, I know this dickbag. He sneaked in here without asking me first!”
Charles’s mouth fell slightly open. Dickbag? Who the fuck did Nathan think he was? Apart from Dethklok’s singer, of course. “Nathan,” he said tightly, “I don’t think this is the appropriate time or place…”
“You sneaked in,” Nathan countered, glaring at him. “What the fuck’s my policy about squatters, everyone?”
“Kick the motherfuckers out,” a few people chorused.
“Yeah. Should I kick you the fuck out, Charles?”
Nathan had embarrassed himself in public before; the whole band had. But Nathan had never, not even when he was angry, directed that anger directly at Charles. Not in front of this many people. “You don’t need to do anything, Nathan,” he said.
“Hey. In here, I’m Professor Explosion.” Nathan’s eyes narrowed, and Charles felt the temperature of his blood drop about ten degrees in a tenth of a second. When Nathan got that look on his face, nothing good ever came of it. “You think you know a lot about anatomy, huh? Know so fucking much you can sneak in here and spy on my teaching?” He took a few steps away from the cadaver.
No way was he saying ‘Professor Explosion’ in here. Nathan would always be Nathan, no matter the degree he did or didn’t attain. “Nathan, that’s hardly -“
“All right.” Nathan cut him off again. “I’m not gonna kick you the fuck out. But if you know so much about anatomy, you’re gonna help me with the stupid motherfucking dissection. Come on.” Goddammit, now he was downright stalking up the aisles between seats, face still set in that cross between murderous and mischievous. “Come on down here and take a look at this cadaver.”
“Nathan.”
“Now.” Nathan stood over him, so large and imposing at this angle that he blocked out one of the ceiling lights. “Or you can leave.”
Charles had done the walk of shame in college, of course, but something about the one that Nathan was proposing now promised to be even more humiliating than sneaking out of some girl’s (or guy’s) dorm at some ungodly hour. “Fine,” he said, standing up. “One demonstration.”
“You don’t get to tell me that,” Nathan said. “Come on. Get down there!” At the last sentence, he raised his voice to make the command more like an announcement; applause broke out among the students, as if Nathan had just introduced a guest professor rather than metaphorically exposed his manager in public.
At least it was only metaphorical. Even he wouldn’t have been able to control the Internet’s explosion of squealing if the opposite had been true.
The cadaver was even more disgusting up close. Charles was well-acquainted with dead bodies, but the flesh that Nathan had peeled away from its abdomen was more yellow than anything, and it had the consistency and smell of very questionable steak. “All right,” Charles said; his voice came out in a disconcertingly high tone, and he cleared his throat. “All right,” he repeated, this time in a less frightened-sounding register. “What do you want me to do?”
Nathan pointed to the opened abdomen. “Find the appendix.”
“Find the…?”
“You fuckin’ heard me.”
Wonderful. “Can I have the, ah…scalpel?” Nathan raised a heavy eyebrow and passed it over to him.
Charles stared down into the cadaver, scalpel in hand. He was more than slightly acquainted with anatomy - at least enough to know which way joints did and didn’t bend, and where exactly one should be stabbed for maximum bleeding potential. Self-defense and its more offensive offshoots would do that…but he hadn’t ever taken a formal anatomy class.
How difficult would it be to find the appendix? He knew that it was on the right side and could cause some fairly excruciating pain if it swelled; maybe that was all he needed to know. Tentatively, he reached into the right side of the cavity and flipped up a section of an organ, like he’d seen Nathan do.
“Lower, dumbass,” Nathan said. “You’re by the liver.”
Damn. Charles bit his lip and moved a little ways down the body. Where was the fucking appendix? He’d heard something about it; he had to have, when he was an obsessive kid. Halfway between the…navel and hips! Right, that was it. The navel on the cadaver was fairly mangled, but he still thought he could make it out; the hips were easier to find.
“Here,” he finally said, pointing the scalpel at a lump in what looked like the right position. “There’s the appendix.”
Nathan grunted. “You wanna try again?”
Maybe he hadn’t been precise enough. “Here.” He poked the scalpel into a spot just to the right of the lump.
Nathan grabbed the scalpel. “Okay, one, that’s a ligament. Two, McBurney’s point is way over there.” He stabbed the scalpel a few inches to the right. “Three, this douchebag doesn’t have an appendix. He had it out years ago, probably, and there’s a scar. If you knew enough to take this fucking shit-pulling class, you’d check for it first.”
He’d sprung a trick question on him? Charles had to give Nathan credit for that one, but it was hardly enough to really test his knowledge. “That’s unfair, Nathan. You didn’t tell me -“
“Just because you know more about business and law and shit,” Nathan interrupted, “doesn’t mean you know more about everything.” Charles had to glance up at that; there was so much fury in his voice, a quiet sort that Charles hadn’t heard from him before, that there had to be more to this than anger. His face didn’t tell the story, though. His brows were knitted into his typical scowl and his mouth was set hard. “Now, you wanna let me teach?”
Charles cleared his throat again and spoke over the scared giggles he could hear from the students. “I think you’ve made enough fun of me for one day,” he said. At least he could still defend himself, and could extricate himself from one of the few situations that went beyond his control. “I’ll be speaking to you later, Nathan.”
“Don’t count on it,” Nathan rumbled. “And it’s Professor fucking Explosion. If I gotta tell you that again, I’m gonna punch something.”
That did it. “Then why don’t you start punching a little less and demonstrating a little more?” Charles spat, turned on his heel, and power-walked his way across the linoleum to the lower door.
He would be talking with Nathan later, for sure. At least in Mordhaus, the only person who even came close to being a professor was Charles himself, and an appendix was the section at the end of a law review.
Or at least that was what he had thought.
Author: seashadows
Rating: R
Words: 3,458
Pairing: none, for now
Warnings: bodily dissection
Disclaimer: not mine
Summary: Charles thought that he'd kept good tabs on the boys, but apparently, one slipped through the cracks. Light pre-slash. Title from Peter Paul and Mary's "Rocky Road."
Gross anat. 2day, teach them the abdomin. Don’t tell dumb kids theyre dumb.
It was just a tiny note, unnoticeable except to someone with Charles’s observational skills, that fluttered to the floor when the manager sat down at the kitchen table. Of course, a slice of blueberry pie captured his attention at the same time, which accounted for the fact that he didn’t examine the note until he was finished. After all, the boys got up to all sorts of easily-solved shenanigans every day; pie was once a week, at most.
Jean-Pierre, oddly enough, snapped his head up on its once-shattered neck vertebrae when Charles bent down to pick up the note; that was really the first sign that something was even more wrong than it usually was in Mordhaus. “Sire, there is no need -“
He was too late. Charles’s eyes widened in confusion and more than a little surprise as he read the note, then narrowed, sending dual hazel beams of doom in the chef’s direction. “This is Nathan’s handwriting. Jean-Pierre…where is he?”
Jean-Pierre’s shoulders slumped as he stared a little to Charles’s right - although, to be fair, the guilty look could have just been a consequence of his permanently-wandering left eye. “He is not here, sire.”
“I know that,” Charles said, tone tight. “Do you have any idea where he might be?” A few seconds passed without a response, which was a sure sign of guilt, even if nothing else was. “Jean-Pierre, you know where he is, don’t you?” For a band member to disappear wasn’t unusual in itself, but Nathan had written something about kids in the note, and children were his weak spot when it came to controlling his temper.
The chef sighed. “I do, sire. But I cannot tell you, because Seigneur Explosion has threatened the Klokateers with a painful death if we speak to anyone.”
Charles raised his left eyebrow. “You’ve survived being run through a propeller and you constantly claim that you don’t fear your mortality. What about this particular threat made you keep Nathan’s whereabouts from me?”
“If I die,” Jean-Pierre said, “then I will not be able to serve the meals and snacks to Dethklok. And I cannot bear to think of this.”
Charles had to admit that it was a legitimate concern, but he couldn’t neglect his job and let Nathan wander around the world unsupervised. There were too many things that could go wrong. “Tell me, and Nathan will never know it was you.”
“You will make a guarantee of this?”
“Ninety-nine percent.” It was the closest Charles could come to a guarantee without perjuring himself; in Mordhaus, it was safer not to make promises you couldn’t keep. There had been more than one gory death courtesy of a Klokateer who was stupid enough to break that unwritten rule. “Jean-Pierre, it’s my job to know what’s going on,” he added. “What if Nathan died because I couldn’t protect him?”
He knew that that jab had hit its mark when Jean-Pierre started gnawing on his stitched-together lower lip. “Seigneur Explosion teaches his class today at the, ah…sud…Southern Illinois University,” he said. “It is a class of anatomy.”
“Teaches? Who on earth would take him?” Jean-Pierre had to have his facts wrong; no self-respecting university would give Nathan Explosion a degree, let alone allow him to teach. He was completely and utterly incompetent when it came to most things, including algebra, making tea, and walking while chewing gum.
“The Southern Illinois University took him for a professor, sire. He is a fine anatomist.”
Then again…Jean-Pierre’s information did match up with the sloppy scribbles on the note. “Anatomy? You’re sure about this?” Jean-Pierre nodded. “How long has he been teaching there?”
Jean-Pierre’s brow wrinkled. “I believe two years. He is a…an occasional professor?”
“Adjunct,” Charles said, a little absently. Nathan, a professor? What bizarre world had he stumbled into?
“Yes, an adjunct. He teaches the anatomy to medical students.”
And of all the levels, Nathan was teaching to med students. Charles made a mental note to remember these hidden depths the next time Nathan smashed one of his desk lamps. “You said the University of Southern Illinois?”
“Oui, sire.”
“That’s hundreds of miles away,” Charles said. “Did he take a Dethchopper?”
“Oui. I will alert a person to prepare one for you.”
“No, you don’t need to do that.” Charles shook his head. Jean-Pierre looked so frazzled, as though it was his fault Nathan had threatened him with the worst death that Mordhaus’s facilities could provide. “It’s not your job. I’ll get another Gear to do it.” He looked at his watch. “What time is Nathan’s class?”
“I do not know.” Jean-Pierre shrugged his bony, mismatched shoulders. “He left…not long ago. Half an hour, perhaps? He does not tell me his schedules.”
If Nathan was an adjunct professor, then that meant he probably taught one class a week, at most. That meant he’d have to do a lot of preparatory work beforehand, which meant that he’d probably have to get to class at least half an hour in advance. Allowing the Dethchopper an hour of travel time, that meant if Charles left right now, he might just catch Nathan in time to see if he was really teaching, and if he needed to do damage control to compensate for traumatized students. “Good,” he said, standing up. “I’m leaving, Jean-Pierre. If the boys get themselves into any trouble, call me immediately.”
Jean-Pierre made a bobbing forward motion that probably would have been a bow before his accident, but just looked like an epileptic twitch now. “Of course. Wait!” he called out as Charles started to cross the kitchen threshold. “If Seigneur Pickles comes in and he is, ah…”
“If Pickles is high, lock up the cinnamon, because he’ll try to snort it,” Charles interrupted. “You have my permission. He’s not going to make good on any of his threats; he never remembers them. Is that all?”
“Yes. Have a…good time in the university.”
“I graduated a long time ago,” Charles said, “but thank you.”
~
The lecture hall was crowded with students and noisy with their chatter when Charles slipped in with a quartet of backpacked women, but there was no sign of Nathan at the front of the room. There was a PowerPoint slide lit up on a screen, yes (apparently, today they were dissecting the abdomen), but no Nathan, and no cadaver. Either he’d arrived too early - which seemed unlikely, given how full the auditorium was - or Nathan didn’t teach after all.
Seating himself at the end of a row, Charles tapped the shoulder of the young man sitting next to him. “Excuse me, who teaches this class?”
The student blinked at him. “Why? Are you doing some kind of audit or something?”
Charles resisted the urge to roll his eyes. “No. I’m…observing. Who teaches this class?”
“Professor Explosion. Where have you been?” the kid said, tone making it abundantly clear that a) that was a rhetorical question, and b) he thought Charles was an idiot of the highest caliber. Or was that lowest? “Okay, look. If you’re gonna be in here, I should probably tell you that Professor Explosion’s kind of…famous. And if you take the class, you’re not really supposed to bother him about it. So if you do the fan freak-out thing, he’ll be really pissed off.”
“Good to know,” Charles said tersely. What on earth were they teaching kids these days? Apparently nothing good, if Nathan was their professor; it seemed that Jean-Pierre had been right after all.
‘Pissed off’, though…that didn’t sound good. Damn, he knew Nathan’s temper had to have gotten the better of him at some point. “What exactly do you mean by -“
“Hey!” The student elbowed him. “He’s coming in. Stop talking.” In fact, the entire lecture hall had stopped talking; a door near the PowerPoint screen had opened, and someone - Nathan? - was pushing a sheet-draped cart through. The shape on the cart looked suspiciously human, and Charles felt his gut tense, despite himself. He’d seen death upon death during his career with Dethklok, but he’d never actually sat in on a dissection.
If he threw up here, he would never forgive himself.
“Hey, douchebags!” Nathan called out, voice thundering up to the highest echelons and eliciting claps and cheers with every word. His dark hair, normally loose, was pulled back into a ponytail, and he was wearing the biggest lab coat that Charles had ever seen. Even the reading glasses he was wearing didn’t take away an iota of the threatening image he projected; in any environment, it seemed that Nathan Explosion could only be himself. “Ready to get into this cadaver’s fuckin’ guts?”
“Hell yes!” a woman’s voice rang out.
Nathan pointed towards the front row. “Fuck yeah. That’s fuckin’ enthusiasm! All the rest of you better be ready to watch me dissect this cadaver like she is, or you’re gonna…flunk or something.” He thumped a hand against the cart and kicked at the wheels with one foot, making a stabilizing stand hit the floor. “So who remembers what the fuck we’re doing today?”
“The abdomen!” a few students called back.
Nathan grinned. “You got it! We’re going into this motherfucker’s abdominal cavity, and it’s gonna be awesome.” He flipped back the sheet to reveal a large, thoroughly sliced-up square of the cadaver’s abdomen; the rest of the body was covered with what looked like blue hospital gowns. Knowing Nathan, that might well be what they were. “So we were in the, uhhh…the mesentery last time. Today, we’re gonna find out how this stupid motherfucker died, ‘cause all the clues are in here.” He gave the cadaver a light slap with his palm; the cart jumped slightly, but didn’t roll away.
Charles wouldn’t have truly believed it if he hadn’t been sitting right there, but fuck…Nathan actually was a professor, and from the reactions of his students, he was a good one, too. Students tended to be apathetic unless they had a teacher who actually motivated them; he remembered that well enough from his time in college. Even famous researchers got people sleeping in class if they were boring.
“Where’d we stop last time?” Nathan continued. “Does anyone remember?” He pointed somewhere in the middle of the lecture hall. “You.”
Charles strained his neck to see a student put their hand down and straighten up in their seat a little (from the back, he couldn’t tell if the student was male or female). “You exposed the mesentery, and we were about to go onto the internal organs.” Female, then.
“Good. That was a test, and you motherfucking passed it. Great job.” Nathan pointed at her again for good measure before putting his hand back on the cadaver. “Right. I opened up this motherfucker’s ab…abdominal cavity. Let’s see if anything grew in there.” He flipped back a slice of flesh and stared down into the cavity. “Nope, nothing grew in here. The formaldehyde’s fuckin’ strong. Anyone else getting light-headed?”
“Me,” piped up someone in the front row.
“Good, so I’m not just hungover.” Hesitant giggles drifted from a few students in response. “Okay. I got this oblique fissure right here, and here’s the guts. Let’s get the stomach out of the way.” Charles winced as Nathan peeled the stomach up with a very vivid, dry sort of slurping noise. “We’ll look at that later. Right here, there’s the - motherfucker, get the hell over here! It’s slippery.” Nathan poked the cadaver hard. “Can anyone see what the fuck I’m touching? I mean, I know what it is, but I don’t know if you dicks do.”
“The gallbladder?” someone ventured.
“No. How the motherfucking titty-twisting hell did you get into med school?” Nathan shook his head. “Oh, god, I’m sorry. I’m really hungover. Anyone else wanna tell me what this organ is?”
“The pancreas,” someone else said, his voice more confident.
“Yeah. Okay. Someone else who can see the pancreas - tell me what it looks like.” Nathan dug the scalpel into a section of pancreas and levered it up. “Does it look metal? I mean, you douchebags probably just think it looks gross, but I think it looks metal.”
“It’s discolored.” Charles wasn’t sure, but he thought that was the same student who had guessed that the pancreas was the gallbladder; he could only guess how Nathan would rip into him if this turned out to be a stupid guess, too. “And…misshapen, I think. Right on the end.”
“Good.” All right, so it wasn’t a stupid guess. “What’s that mean? Not you. Someone else. If it’s discolored and has a weird bulging end, what’s that mean?”
“God,” muttered the young man sitting next to Charles. “Could you get any easier?” He raised his hand high.
Charles realized the implications a split second before Nathan’s eyes lit on his row. “Yeah. You, in the middle.”
“Pancreatitis, or pancreatic cancer.” The student tucked a stray lock of hair behind one ear, shoving back the earflap of his grungy blue hat. “Probably fatal.”
“Right!” Nathan’s grin was approaching frightening proportions by this point. “I told you douches that something in the abdomen killed this g-“ His sentence trailed off mid-word as he stopped and squinted. Stared.
Charles tried his level best to sink into his seat.
As hard as he tried, though, he’d never quite perfected the art of invisi-vision. “Hey,” Nathan growled. “Is that you?”
Charles shrugged, trying to make the gesture look noncommittal. Nathan was nothing if not easy to confuse…or maybe not, given the career path in which he’d apparently excelled. Why the hell hadn’t he sat in the back row? At least the students there, statistically and experientially speaking, would have been less likely to answer the question.
“Fuck, yeah, it’s you.” Nathan looked around the lecture hall, his gaze sweeping over the students before landing back on Charles. If looks could kill, those eyes would probably be burning a hole right between his eyebrows. “Hey, I know this dickbag. He sneaked in here without asking me first!”
Charles’s mouth fell slightly open. Dickbag? Who the fuck did Nathan think he was? Apart from Dethklok’s singer, of course. “Nathan,” he said tightly, “I don’t think this is the appropriate time or place…”
“You sneaked in,” Nathan countered, glaring at him. “What the fuck’s my policy about squatters, everyone?”
“Kick the motherfuckers out,” a few people chorused.
“Yeah. Should I kick you the fuck out, Charles?”
Nathan had embarrassed himself in public before; the whole band had. But Nathan had never, not even when he was angry, directed that anger directly at Charles. Not in front of this many people. “You don’t need to do anything, Nathan,” he said.
“Hey. In here, I’m Professor Explosion.” Nathan’s eyes narrowed, and Charles felt the temperature of his blood drop about ten degrees in a tenth of a second. When Nathan got that look on his face, nothing good ever came of it. “You think you know a lot about anatomy, huh? Know so fucking much you can sneak in here and spy on my teaching?” He took a few steps away from the cadaver.
No way was he saying ‘Professor Explosion’ in here. Nathan would always be Nathan, no matter the degree he did or didn’t attain. “Nathan, that’s hardly -“
“All right.” Nathan cut him off again. “I’m not gonna kick you the fuck out. But if you know so much about anatomy, you’re gonna help me with the stupid motherfucking dissection. Come on.” Goddammit, now he was downright stalking up the aisles between seats, face still set in that cross between murderous and mischievous. “Come on down here and take a look at this cadaver.”
“Nathan.”
“Now.” Nathan stood over him, so large and imposing at this angle that he blocked out one of the ceiling lights. “Or you can leave.”
Charles had done the walk of shame in college, of course, but something about the one that Nathan was proposing now promised to be even more humiliating than sneaking out of some girl’s (or guy’s) dorm at some ungodly hour. “Fine,” he said, standing up. “One demonstration.”
“You don’t get to tell me that,” Nathan said. “Come on. Get down there!” At the last sentence, he raised his voice to make the command more like an announcement; applause broke out among the students, as if Nathan had just introduced a guest professor rather than metaphorically exposed his manager in public.
At least it was only metaphorical. Even he wouldn’t have been able to control the Internet’s explosion of squealing if the opposite had been true.
The cadaver was even more disgusting up close. Charles was well-acquainted with dead bodies, but the flesh that Nathan had peeled away from its abdomen was more yellow than anything, and it had the consistency and smell of very questionable steak. “All right,” Charles said; his voice came out in a disconcertingly high tone, and he cleared his throat. “All right,” he repeated, this time in a less frightened-sounding register. “What do you want me to do?”
Nathan pointed to the opened abdomen. “Find the appendix.”
“Find the…?”
“You fuckin’ heard me.”
Wonderful. “Can I have the, ah…scalpel?” Nathan raised a heavy eyebrow and passed it over to him.
Charles stared down into the cadaver, scalpel in hand. He was more than slightly acquainted with anatomy - at least enough to know which way joints did and didn’t bend, and where exactly one should be stabbed for maximum bleeding potential. Self-defense and its more offensive offshoots would do that…but he hadn’t ever taken a formal anatomy class.
How difficult would it be to find the appendix? He knew that it was on the right side and could cause some fairly excruciating pain if it swelled; maybe that was all he needed to know. Tentatively, he reached into the right side of the cavity and flipped up a section of an organ, like he’d seen Nathan do.
“Lower, dumbass,” Nathan said. “You’re by the liver.”
Damn. Charles bit his lip and moved a little ways down the body. Where was the fucking appendix? He’d heard something about it; he had to have, when he was an obsessive kid. Halfway between the…navel and hips! Right, that was it. The navel on the cadaver was fairly mangled, but he still thought he could make it out; the hips were easier to find.
“Here,” he finally said, pointing the scalpel at a lump in what looked like the right position. “There’s the appendix.”
Nathan grunted. “You wanna try again?”
Maybe he hadn’t been precise enough. “Here.” He poked the scalpel into a spot just to the right of the lump.
Nathan grabbed the scalpel. “Okay, one, that’s a ligament. Two, McBurney’s point is way over there.” He stabbed the scalpel a few inches to the right. “Three, this douchebag doesn’t have an appendix. He had it out years ago, probably, and there’s a scar. If you knew enough to take this fucking shit-pulling class, you’d check for it first.”
He’d sprung a trick question on him? Charles had to give Nathan credit for that one, but it was hardly enough to really test his knowledge. “That’s unfair, Nathan. You didn’t tell me -“
“Just because you know more about business and law and shit,” Nathan interrupted, “doesn’t mean you know more about everything.” Charles had to glance up at that; there was so much fury in his voice, a quiet sort that Charles hadn’t heard from him before, that there had to be more to this than anger. His face didn’t tell the story, though. His brows were knitted into his typical scowl and his mouth was set hard. “Now, you wanna let me teach?”
Charles cleared his throat again and spoke over the scared giggles he could hear from the students. “I think you’ve made enough fun of me for one day,” he said. At least he could still defend himself, and could extricate himself from one of the few situations that went beyond his control. “I’ll be speaking to you later, Nathan.”
“Don’t count on it,” Nathan rumbled. “And it’s Professor fucking Explosion. If I gotta tell you that again, I’m gonna punch something.”
That did it. “Then why don’t you start punching a little less and demonstrating a little more?” Charles spat, turned on his heel, and power-walked his way across the linoleum to the lower door.
He would be talking with Nathan later, for sure. At least in Mordhaus, the only person who even came close to being a professor was Charles himself, and an appendix was the section at the end of a law review.
Or at least that was what he had thought.