This is set about a month after Nick's death. Maru copes with Blade not-coping.
WARNINGS: Angst, grief, depression, survivor's guilt, pain, catharsis, body modification (akin to scarification, so if this is problematic for you, please feel free to skip!), mentions of alcohol abuse, generally inadvisable life decisions.
The core-engraving idea featured in this chapter is taken from a couple of Transformers fics that I read, several years ago, in which one of the Autobots has the names of his fellows who were lost in war engraved into the interior parts of his armor and/or his spark casing. Also, Optimus explaining the carvings on his helmet to curious humans.
As I can't recall the names or authors of these fanfictions, my apologies to the authors for having poached their ideas. If anyone can point me in the direction of the stories in question, I would be quite grateful!
While this was originally intended to be part of the main body of All Hallowed, it was really just too depressing to fit anywhere outside of chapters 7-8, and I was not going to pull attention away from Cabbie for more of Blade's old angst.
DISCLAIMER: Author makes no claim to ownership of Disney's Planes and no profit from this work.
MEMORY
"Are you sure about this?"
Chrysler knew Blade still had to be in pain. He'd only laid off the high-grade two days ago, guaranteed his head hadn't stopped hurting yet.
Pits knew Maru's hadn't. But if he drank enough, sometimes he could quiet his mind to the point that he almost stopped seeing that silent, half-transparent image of Nick out of the corner of his eye.
Blade's eyes, still achingly bloodshot and terrifyingly blank, turned slowly, narrowing into a dull glare as they focused on Maru.
He folded his tines and stared back, unimpressed. "Stop trying to intimidate me, you know it doesn't work. If I screw this up, it's probably going to kill you, so I need you to use words here."
"Yes."
Blade's voice was, if possible, even more terrifying than his eyes. A low rasp, dulled and roughened from days of silent drinking and nights of memories.
Maru knew it would be a long time before Blade stopped screaming in his sleep - and longer still before those screams stopped echoing in his waking mind.
"More than one word," Maru prodded, but he turned and lifted his toolkit onto the table anyway, flicking the lamp on and trying not to flinch too violently as the light hit his eyes. Chrysler above, that hurt.
"Yes, Maru, I want..." Blade stopped to cough, a violent, ugly sound that Maru resolutely did not turn around for, " - want you to do this," Blade finished, shifting on his tires and spitting whatever he'd hacked up off to one side.
Charming.
"You sound like death," Maru grumbled, fishing for his engraving tool, and winced at his own choice of words. His rear bumper was still to Blade, but he could feel the chopper's glare all the same.
His transparent guilty conscience was glowering at him as well. He wasn't sure if it was better or worse than the horrified pity that was usually on its face.
"Feel like it, too."
Neither the words nor the tone specified whether Blade meant 'feel like' as 'desire' or 'current physical condition'.
Just as well. Maru was pretty sure he didn't want to know, and equally certain he knew anyway.
"Let me go on record here as saying that this is a very bad idea."
"Most of mine seem to be," Blade shot back, a few of the rough edges of his voice sanded down from the talking or the coughing or both. "So let me go on record as saying I don't slagging care."
Maru turned back to face him at that, engraving tool held loosely in one fork, and fixed Blade with the expression that comment deserved; an undisguised mingling of anger, hurt, and disappointment.
Weirdly, his guilty conscience was shooting Blade the same look.
Blade's head probably still hurt like someone was hammering knives into his brain, and he'd never been the most emotionally perceptive of vehicles, but he caught on to Maru's feelings quick enough. "I mean I don't care that it's a bad idea, Maru. I need this, need to have something to... to keep him with me."
The omnipresent figment of Maru's imagination began mouthing soundless profanities at that, a flowing and creative combination of English and Spanish that he could read in the shapes of the snarling, transparent lips, and a few of them were creative enough that it was only the palpable weight of anguish still clouding the room that kept Maru from laughing out loud.
Muttering a few choice phrases of his own instead, Maru hefted the engraving tool in his tine and rolled forward.
Core engravings were, overall, an incredibly stupid thing to do. The core casings were sturdy, yeah, they had to be, but that didn't mean that carving into the metal was smart, or easy.
Or painless.
Usually, in the event that someone was stupid enough to want to get a core engraving done, they went to a specialty clinic connected to a hospital and enjoyed the benefits of anesthesia while a trained and licensed professional carved bits out of the metal protecting their core with specialized equipment.
Blade was on the thirty-seventh hour of a hangover and wide awake in a hotel hanger while a jack-of-all-trades former set medic bit his tongue bloody with the stress of trying not to let his all-purpose engraver cut too deeply into Blade's core.
Maru could hear the chopper's teeth grinding even through the twisted shop rags Blade had finally allowed Maru to set between his teeth twenty minutes ago, biting down on the cloth against what were undoubtedly screams of pain trying to escape him.
Every now and again, a thin whimper would slip through the makeshift gag, and each time, Maru had leaned back to look Blade in the eye, reminding him that they could stop, he didn't have to do this, didn't have to go through with this.
Each time, those bloodshot blue eyes would narrow in response, and Maru would silently return to work, the diamond tip of his engraver slowly forcing its way through the dense metal of Blade's core casing, tracing the loops of Nick's signature into Blade's very being.
In the corner of the room, the silent, transparent echo of his guilt wept.
He was only half finished.
Blade was shaking by the time it was done, and Maru's tines had gone numb in the concrete hanger's chill.
He'd lost track of the hours, somewhere, by the time he finally sat back on his tires and delicately traced a damp cloth over the carved letters. Blade, who hadn't so much as twitched a rotor at the harsh bite of the engraver, flinched almost violently at the gentle touch of the cloth.
Out of bitter, perverse anger, Maru stroked the cloth over the engraving again, and again, continuing the cautious, gentle movement until Blade finally stopped flinching away.
Beside them, his imagination was muttering a steady stream of words that had become audible somewhere around the first time Blade had actually screamed, while Maru had incised the long, arching curve of the 'L' in Lopez.
"...rotor-slap the pair of you, you're both such idiots, Blade, mi amado, you're not gonna lose me, never gonna lose me, Maru, you idiot, why are you agreeing to any of this?"
He'd asked himself that a few times already, but he knew the answer. When someone couldn't bear kindness, sometimes pain was the only way to heal them.
"Feel better now?" he asked, instead of dignifying his guilt with an answer, giving the cloth a quick, final swipe around Blade's core chamber to pick up the tiny slivers of metal.
And Blade's voice, despite the torture he'd just put himself through, was steadier than it had been in weeks when he answered.
"Yeah. Thanks, Maru."
"Don't mention it," Maru sighed, carefully fitting the access panels back in place. "And don't ever ask me to do that again, Blade, you understand?"
"Seconded!" bellowed his conscience, close enough to Maru's ears that he flinched at the sound. What had he been saying earlier, about pain healing?
Very carefully, Blade straightened up on his gear, stretching slightly, testing the undoubtedly still-throbbing pain of his core. "Not exactly an issue," he muttered, a flash of the old Blade's impertinence showing through for the first time since That Day.
Maru rolled his eyes as he packed his engraver away. Blade didn't love easy, he knew that, but the kid had fallen for Nick fast and hard, and it wasn't completely out of the question that it would happen again, even as scarred as he was now. "I'm gonna hold you to that the next time you love someone who does something stupid," he grumbled, ignoring his conscience's growl as he shook the metal shavings out of the cloth. The floor was a catastrophic mess anyway.
But when he turned around, Blade had those blue eyes pinned on him, and there was an intensity, a life, behind them that he hadn't thought he'd ever see again.
"You're the only other name I'd put on my core, Maru," Blade said, his voice quiet and intent. "You're the only one who would ever deserve to be next to him."
It was an apology as much as an expression of gratitude, Maru knew that. And maybe even a bit more. Letting a rueful grin creep across his face, he rolled forward to pat the helicopter lightly in front of his hoist hatch. "You too, Blade," he sighed. "You, too."
The words might never come, and, thank Chrysler, neither would the passion that Nick and Blade had shared, but the emotion was there.
That, Maru was sure of.
[END]
For some reason (author transference, perhaps?) Maru is asexual in my headcanon, and quite deeply in love with Blade. Blade, being demisexual in my hc and his only romantic interest having been/being Nick, reciprocates. So they roll along being snarkily awesome platonic life partners until Nick comes back and they form their awesome platonic/romantic/snarktastic love triangle.
