A/N: Hello everybody! I have two quick things to tell you all before you go on to read this chapter. The first is that I want to apologize for the lack of frequency in which this was updated. I won't bore you with any details or excuses, I just wanted to say that my life has become very hectic as of late and I had literally no time to sit down and write. The next chapter will be up much, much sooner. The second thing that I wanted to say is, again, an apology. This time it's for the length of this chapter. I know that it isn't very long but the plot dictates that I don't give out long chapters until Chapter Three or Chapter Four. You can expect longer parts soon though! Please stick with me everybody!
Cold. Biting, gnawing, freezing cold clawed at his thin jacket and blew hair into his face. The wind was more than harsh and each gust of it hit him hard and tore into his skin. It tore into the exposed flesh of his face and his arms and his chest. And it tore into his back and the open, ragged streaks of inflamed flesh that lined it. It hit him sharply, stabbing at every pore and making his nerves scream.
But Toki remained silent. Completely and utterly silent. If he made a noise, even just a small hiss or a grunt of pain, of coldness, then his father would hear and he wouldn't be let back into the house. The door would be bolted shut and the blinds pulled down over the windows and he would be left out in the forest all night long. In the snow and the dark, unable to do anything but listen to the howling of the wolves and try to keep himself awake - Toki knew the stories of what happened when one fell asleep in the wilds of Norway.
So the young Wartooth wrapped his bare and bruised arms around his legs, the only part of him with any form of protection from the sharp winds, and did his best not to move around. Moving would keep the blood flowing to his arms and fingers, sure, but it would also tug at the lacerations that coated his back and shoulders. And that would hurt. It would also probably cause the wounds to start bleeding again which certaintly wasn't something that the young boy wanted.
It would just be luck if he didn't get frost-bite from sitting out there without a shirt on: his father had taken that into the house with him, claiming that it would be ruined if it was left in the snow or put back on yet. Just luck. And Toki Wartooth was not known for being lucky.
Breakfast that morning was a quiet, almost subdued affair. It appeared that the cold agreed with everyone even less than they thought it would. Even Nathan, underneath of several layers of blankets and the heaviest jacket that he owned, was scowling and hunched over the table - and the large mug of black Duncan Hills coffee that sat in front of him.
Skwisgaar seemed to be the only exception out of the four members of Dethklock that had made it down to the table so far. He wore a long-sleeved shirt made out of a light material with a pair of jeans and looked perfectly at home.
"Dood, how the fuck can you wear that?" Pickles grumbled, annoyed, as he took a seat next to the lead guitarist with his own mug of coffee. Unlike the front man though, he'd already added a liberal amount of suger and brandy into it.
Skwisgaar gave him an unconcerned shrug. "It amsnest so cold. Whys ams you complaininks anyways? Yous have all of de jackets."
"Damn right I took all of the jackets. I just about froze my ass off last night!" Pickles snapped.
It was at this point, normally, that Toki would have piped up and added his own opinion about the weather. He would have agreed with Skwisgaar, because that was what he always did, and made some snide but playful comment about Pickles not being brutal. But he didn't. In fact, Toki wasn't even paying attention to the conversation going on around him.
The rhythem guitarist was hunkered down over his own mug of coffee, which had plenty of milk and fancy flavored creamer mixed in, in a manner similar to Nathan's. The bright blue quilt from his bed was draped over his shoulders, covering up the fact that he was wearing the only jacket he owned. It was a thin, ratty looking thing. Faded green and slightly stained on the back, the hems fraying, and the zipper to it had gone missing a long, long time ago. It was also one of the only things that Toki had brought with him from Norway.
Silence reigned over the table for several moments before Skwisgaar raised a thin, blond eyebrow in the younger guitarists direction. "Why ams you wearinks a blanket, Tokis? Ams cold?"
Even in his half asleep state Toki knew when he was being mocked. Knew that Skwisgaar was just trying to get a rise out of him, like the older man always did. The Norwegian just didn't care that morning. It had been too long of a night - filled with him tossing and turning, sleeping but not resting, and he just was not in the mood to banter with the lead guitarist.
"Yes, I ams very cold." Toki said, nodding. He didn't look up from his drink. As such, he didn't miss the slight flash of concern in Pickles eyes nor the way that Skwisgaar wrinkled up his nose, something that everyone in the band took as a sign that he was about to say something particularly nasty.
"You ams cold?" Skwisgaar asked, tone taking on the slight drawl that he normally spoke in when talking to Toki. "What happened to you just being pissed offs, Little Tokis? I thought you ams Norwegian?"
Last night, the comment had bothered Toki. He didn't like being thought of as weak and that was obviously what the other man was implying. That he was weak. Weaker than Skwisgaar was and, in turn, not as good as the other man. A small part of his mind equated that with being bad. And that same part, in turn, told him that being bad made him everything that his parents had accused him of being.
Worthless boy.
Sinner child.
Forsaken and forever unforgiven.
With almost alarming speed, Toki stood up from his chair. The mug was still firmly clutched with both hands, the now cold coffee it held sloshing over the sides and onto his hands. His mouth formed a thin line across his face - keeping back the angry response he'd been about to throw at Skwisgaar, one which would have been an almost identicle response to what he'd said the night before. His mind was suddenly whirling and all he could think about was what he had dreamed about the night before. About how, as a child, it had been hammered into his very being that complaining brought only a lack of respect towards himself.
So he said nothing more to Skwisgaar, or to the other three members of Dethklok, all of which were staring at him, before he left the room.
XX-XX-XX-XX
For most of the day, Toki kept to himself. He stayed mostly in his bedroom, curled up in bed under all of the covers, reading. It was an old book that he'd bought on a whim during the first few weeks of his stay at Mord House. The pages of it were creased from the many dog-ears he'd folded into it and some of them even had small tears. It had been a well used book even before he'd owned it and it showed. Still, Toki enjoyed reading through it.
It had proved to be an invaluable thing to have brought with him on the trip. The difficulty that he still had when it came to reading English proved to be a welcome challenge. It kept his mind busy - off of how cold he was and the niggling remants of his dream that insisted on lurking in the back of his mind. The stories themselves, because the book contained many more than just a single tale, were an even greater distraction.
The fact that few of the classic stories had a happy ending, as the newer versions almost always did, proved to be almost comforting in a bitter-sweet way.
XX-XX-XX-XX
"Hey, uh, where's Toki at?" Nathan asked.
The frontman was standing in the doorway to the Deth-Bus's living room. His many layers of blankets were still wrapped around him, forming a multi-colored coccoon that did wonders for keeping out the coldness of the bus. Metal, it seemed, didn't hold in the heat very well as the temperature in the bus had dropped drastically within minutes of the heat going off the night before.
Murderface and Skwisgaar didn't look up from the television. After much argueing and grappling for the remote, the two had finally agreed on watching a program on TruthTv. They were both thoroughly engrossed in watching the rather pathetic criminals being caught and laughing at the comments that the shows hosts all made.
Pickles, who had curled up in one of the plush chairs spattered across the room, gave a shrug. "I dunno. Last time I saw him he was in his room readin' some book."
"Reading?" Nathan blinked. That was...Odd. Toki had never really struck him as being the type that liked reading.
"Yup." Pickles nodded, turning away when Murderface let out a particularly loud guffaw. He was just in time to catch someone walk into a bank with gun, demanding money to be put into a plastic bag.
"Is he wearing a mop on his head?" Nathan asked.
Skwisgaar snorted at the television. "These peoples ams so stupid! Even I could be robbinks things better then them."
And just like that, whatever question Nathan had wanted to ask Toki dissapeared from his mind. He grunted a 'move over' at the two band members taking up the couch before squeezing himself inbetween them. In moments, all four of them were lost in their show.