Work Text:
Spring, 1997.
Nathan looked around the apartment's living room for the tenth time, making sure everything was in order. He wasn't sure why he cared that much, except that Charles had imposed on them over and over how legally, this was a delicate situation or something like that. Charles had had to go to court and stuff to get that kid out of the place he was living because he was just a kid still. Not that he was that young, or anything. Okay, he was kind of young.
But he just worked with Dethklok, and after all the shit that went down with Magnus, Nathan wasn't really ready to let just anyone into their band. Skwisgaar had picked up this kid and liked him right away, but it wasn't really final until they heard him play. He wasn't as good as Skwisgaar, but he was already better than Magnus. Not like Nathan was about to say any of that out loud.
Skwisgaar told him he wanted this kid in the band because he would motivate him to play better. And when Nathan heard them play together, he had absolutely no arguments.
The kid was moving in today. Technically, Charles was in charge of him or owned him or something like that, that's why they had to go to court or something. Charles was the kid's legal guardian now. But even so, Charles was letting the kid move in with them in their crappy apartment. It seemed kind of brutal, like kind of unfair somehow. Nathan didn't know what kind of place the kid was coming from, and maybe it would have been cool if they were living somewhere as nice as where he and Pickles used to live down in Florida, but shit cost more in New York, and despite being signed, they weren't really making a hell of a lot of money yet. The point was, this apartment wasn't that great. There were mice and stuff in it, and sometimes they found creepy bugs, like under the sink and shit.
Nathan just wasn't sure if the kid was going to like it, living here with them. So he'd actually cleaned up a lot. It probably wasn't going to stay clean, but first impressions or something. Charles said something like that. Told him he should clean up. He wasn't sure why it was his job, but it was his band, so he would take some responsibility for it.
By time Charles brought the kid over, though, everyone was home and goofing off and fooling around and the place looked like it had barely been touched. Beer and liquor bottles littered the coffee table and Murderface had dropped an entire microwave dinner all over the carpet.
"Nathan, I thought I told you to make sure this place was presentable by time we got here," Charles sighed at him, pinching the bridge of his nose.
"I did," Nathan contested calmly. "But uh, it got messy again."
The kid stepped forward from behind Charles, looking damn younger than he actually was, and he looked around the apartment in wonder. Nathan didn't know what the hell he was thinking. He wasn't a fucking mind reader.
"Hey, dude!" Pickles said, waving the kid over. "Welcome home!"
The kid looked at Charles as if he were asking permission or something, and Nathan realised that even though they had played together with the kid a couple times, they didn't really know him at all. Skwisgaar was the only one who could really talk to him, kid barely knew any English at all, even though Skwisgaar told them he'd been in the US a couple years already.
"Now remember what we talked about, boys," Charles started. "Toki is younger than the rest of you, so I'm going to need you guys to be a little more responsible now that he's living with you."
"We're probably not gonna do... that... but don't worry so much, the kid's gonna be fine," Nathan told him.
"Yeah, just relax," said Murderface. "Pickles is here and he's practically an adult."
"Yeah, an' I was on my own when I was his age," Pickles agreed, even though Nathan suspected Murderface was making fun of Pickles' hair loss rather than complimenting his maturity. "I turned out just fine!"
"Ja, me too," added Skwisgaar.
"Regardless," Charles sighed. "I am legally responsible for whatever happens to him, so uh, I'd appreciate it if you didn't get me into any trouble."
"Dude, why not? You could use some extra, like, court practice or whatever, you know?"
Charles just sighed at Pickles, but then he stepped in far enough to set the bag down that he'd been carrying. The kid had one other in his hand and his guitar strapped on his back, but that seemed to be it, like that was all he owned or something. Huh. They were going to have to make sure he got some gear or something.
Well, that was Skwisgaar's deal, really.
"Well, Toki, this is your new home. I hope you're, ah, happy here," Charles said stiffly. "If there are any problems, you all have my number. Good day."
And he left the kid there, gawking like a little weirdo in the doorway.
"Jag ska visa dig ditt rum," Skwisgaar offered, and with a little sigh of annoyance, set his guitar aside.
"Hey, aren't you supposed to be teaching him English?" Nathan accused. He didn't want to rely on Skwisgaar to have to translate to this kid forever. Skwisgaar's grasp on the language wasn't that great in the first place.
"Ja, after todays." Skwisgaar said flippantly. "Rights now he adjusts."
For the first few days, Nathan sat back and watched. The kid was kind of disgustingly innocent and he kind of hated it. He almost felt bad that the kid had to share a room with Murderface. The second morning he was here, though, he got up and made an awesome breakfast for all of them, and that was a damn welcome surprise, because none of the rest of them could manage much more than the basics, but Nathan watched him cook it, floundering around the kitchen like he didn't know up from down, and he wasn't sure this kid was right in the fucking head.
Whenever Skwisgaar was home, the kid was like a conjoined twin, attached at the fucking hip with that guy. It made sense since they both had that like Scandinavian... thing... going on, and Skwisgaar was the one who invited him to the band and all. The kid was kind of his responsibility. But in a way, he was Nathan's responsibility, too. It was his band. And since all that shit with Magnus went down, he had realised he needed to take more responsibility over his band.
And this little goofball, he was practically a fucking baby. A fucking helpless little baby. He was like a dumb baby bird or something, like the stupid ones that fell out of their nest and just fucking died because they were too stupid to fly yet, but they were too stupid to stay up in their nest where they belonged, too. Nathan watched it happen once- he had a robin's nest on his front porch when he was a kid, and a dumb little ugly robin fell out of the nest and there was just nothing to be done for it. Fucking hopeless. This kid was like that, like a dumb little bird, and Nathan felt like he had to make sure this idiot didn't fall out of the nest and die.
And part of that maybe included teaching the kid some fucking English, because Skwisgaar was not holding up his end of the bargain on that one.
"Goofball. You know. That's what you are. You're kind of young and don't know a lot of shit yet... And uh... I dunno."
"I am en goofball?" the kid worked out with some effort.
"Yeah."
The kid grinned stupidly. "Teach mores."
"Uhh... okay, how about jackoff," Nathan suggested, stretched out across the couch. The kid was sitting on the floor, leaning an elbow on the ratty ottoman.
"What means?" the kid asked.
"It's like, uhhh... It's what you call someone when they're a useless waste of space, or if they're just annoying or something. But also means, you know, to jack off. Uh, like..." Nathan lowered his voice. "Uh, masturbate."
The kid looked at him in confusion.
"Onanera," Skwisgaar offered from across the room after a long silence. The kid's eyes lit up in comprehension then, and his face dissolved into a wicked little smirk, an expression Nathan hadn't seen on his face yet.
"Skwisgaar."
"Ja?"
"Shouldn't you be teaching him this shit? I don't think this kid understands half of what I'm saying."
Skwisgaar raised an eyebrow, but his fingers didn't stop moving over the frets of his guitar. "Hej, Toki."
"Hva?"
"Förstår du honom?"
"Shuts in, Skwisgaar- I unstands fine!"
"Sees, Nathans, you does just fines with him," Skwisgaar said, barely withholding a laugh.
"Hnnngh... Whatever." Nathan shifted on the couch, staring back at the ceiling. This kid wasn't going to remember any of this, but it was a way to pass the time. It seemed to make the kid happy, or whatever. "How about, uhh.... brutal. You know what brutal is, right?"
Toki played idly with his bare toes with one hand, thinking through what Nathan asked him.
"Brutal, ja, we has i Norsk, like when guy heads smash out."
"Yeah!" Nathan agreed. See, this kid wasn't totally stupid. He knew some things. "But it's also when something's really cool, or like if a song's really good..." Nathan trailed off, thinking about it. He actually wasn't sure he could explain what 'brutal' was very well, but he had a feeling the kid got it.
And if he didn't now, he probably would eventually.
Something felt weird. Nathan writhed around in bed for a while, but he couldn't fall back to sleep because something just felt weird. He finally sat up and he looked across the room at Pickles, but before he saw the outline of him in his bed, he could already hear his steady breathing.
Beyond that, he listened hard, but he couldn't hear a sound other than maybe like cars passing outside, typical noises of the city.
Nathan turned over, trying to get comfortable, but instead, he just ended up staring at the wall. A dream was still clear in his head; he wished he could go back to sleep to finish it. But the weird feeling got worse and worse, and he finally pushed his covers off and sat up, shoving his feet out onto the ragged carpet. The door creaked open and he paused, but Pickles' breathing hadn't changed, so he opened it further and squeezed out into the hallway.
The apartment was quiet. Next door to their room, Murderface and Toki's room was dark. Nathan paused outside it for just a moment, then continued to the living room, but as he approached, he could make out in the moonlight a figure standing next to the pull-out couch, looming over Skwisgaar.
All of his fighting instincts flared up at once. He cursed himself for getting up without grabbing the knife from beside his bed. But even as these thoughts sprang into his mind, he realised the person standing there was kind of small, kind of scrawny, and Nathan took a few steps into the room, figuring out pretty quick that it was the kid.
The floor creaked under Nathan's weight. The kid turned quickly, looking at him wide-eyed and terrified.
"What're you doing?" Nathan asked quietly, already not really sure he wanted to know.
Toki looked too scared to say anything, and Nathan didn't really get it. Why the hell was he so on edge? But finally the kid muttered, "Has nightscares to sleep."
Nathan wasn't really sure why he was lurking around Skwisgaar's bed, then, but... he felt like he should do something. Take care of this idiot. He was just a dumb baby bird or something, after all. Fuck.
"Uh... just go back to bed. You'll be fine."
"Is scares," Toki protested quietly.
Nathan just looked him in the eye. See, the problem was, he knew what it was like, having disturbing dreams. Not wanting to sleep. He knew all that, so he couldn't just totally disregard it, even if admitting to being scared was totally not brutal or metal in any way. This kid was going to have to shape up.
But for now...
"Come on," Nathan grunted, and he turned away, hoping the kid was following him.
Nathan led the kid right back into his room, Murderface's snores filling the room with them, and he pointed silently at the bed, waiting for the kid to get back into it. He was holding some kind of stuffed animal or something, Nathan just noticed, but he wasn't going to say anything. Not now, anyway. Even if that was totally not brutal.
"Don't wants alone," the kid mumbled.
"Shut up," Nathan sighed, and he slid down to the floor, leaning back against Toki's bed. "I'm not going anywhere. I'm gonna tell you a story. So you can sleep. Now get comfortable."
It was quiet at first, but then he heard the kid shuffling around in his blankets, presumably doing as Nathan told him. Good thing Murderface was a heavy sleeper.
"Once upon a time there was a guy," Nathan started off, realising pretty quickly that he had no idea how to actually tell a story. Sure, he could do it in song and stuff, but like a bedtime story? He had never done that shit before. But that was how you were supposed to do it, right, 'once upon a time'. That's how they all started.
"That guy lived near a beach. And in the middle of the night, he always woke up and heard a voice calling him. The guy didn't know what the voice was, and every time he tried to find it, it disappeared."
Nathan paused for a second, like he was daring the kid to laugh, but he was totally silent.
"One night, the guy walked outside all the way to the beach, following the voice. He got all the way to the edge of the waves, and he kept walking. He walked all the way into the water. I guess normally you'd float or whatever, but the sand sucked his feet down so that he kept walking until the water was up over his head..."
Stupid kid probably couldn't understand what he was saying anyway...
"...And just when he thought he was going to suffocate and drown, he started to transform."
Actually, that made it a little easier. If the kid didn't understand, it didn't matter what he said.
"He grew gills and he could suddenly breathe the water in. And for some reason, the voice he heard started to become clearer. He started to swim toward where the voice was coming from. He swam all the way out to the middle of the ocean."
Nathan closed his eyes and leaned his head back on the mattress, visualizing it all. He'd seen it all so many times.
"That's when he finally met her. The, uh, the voice. It was a whale's voice. He looked face to face with the whale and asked her, 'Why do you keep calling me?' but that time, when the whale talked, he couldn't understand her voice anymore."
Saying it out loud was stupid. Of course the guy couldn't understand a whale, it didn't fucking speak English or anything...
"And all of a sudden, the guy realised he couldn't breathe in the water anymore, so he started kicking and shit, trying to swim back to the surface. Somehow he managed to get all the way up, and he swam back home like nothing happened."
He heard the kid's breathing start to even out. That was fast. Stupid little goofball.
"But after that, the guy still knew: he had to do something. There was something really big going on, and it was up to that guy to stop it."
Nathan tried to turn his head, check to see if the kid was sleeping, but he didn't move too far before he realised that something was pinning down his hair. This fucking idiot.
He sighed- annoyed, but not quite willing to wake the kid back up. Apparently he wasn't fucking moving tonight.
The guy in the story had some kind of power, like some power to save the world or something, but Nathan couldn't even keep this kid from latching onto his hair in his sleep. Great.