Disclaimer & Author's Note: Except for some original characters who appeared in my previous fics, I don't own anything from Pixar or WALL·E. The title comes from a line in Beethoven's "Ode to Joy." Read on to find out why.
Her Trail Of Roses
Out of the colony's five Extraterrestrial Vegetation Evaluator probes, it could be said that Probe 2 liked plants the most.
Since she and her sisters had first begun their lives on Earth, they were all expected to perform duties outside their original directive of searching for plant life. Probe 2 could never quite let go of that original directive, but she did not try to collect vegetation samples to deliver to the Captain. Instead she decided to use her vast knowledge of plant life to develop a hobby for gardening.
Shortly after her activation, Probe 2 was brought with her sisters to survey the colony they would be serving. They had been in stasis for nearly fifteen years since the Axiom, their mother ship, had landed on Earth. The planet had changed much since they remembered from their past scouting missions there.
Earth was no longer a desert wasteland choked with garbage and decay, but a flourishing ecosystem with more plant varieties than any of them had ever seen. There were trees, fruits, vegetables, and best of all, flowers. All four of the probes liked flowers the best, to the point that they named themselves after their favorite ones. The favorite flower of Probe 2 was the rose, and from then on that was what she called herself.
Rose came to the colony's public garden regularly, where the tall tree that had been The Plant grew at the center. The Axiom had provided no official gardening-bots, so Rose took up the job herself. When she was not training or on scouting missions, she would spend hours in the garden weeding flower beds, trimming dead leaves and branches, and keeping pests away. But it was her namesake flowers she tended to the most carefully.
As she worked Rose would hum. The tunes she knew were not many, but her favorite was one she had heard one day at the spaceport. She had been on her way to report her findings of plant life beyond the colony when she heard it. It was coming from another robot, a welder, repairing a support beam in the hangar.
Rose stopped to listen, her head tilted in curiosity. His music was completely different from what she had learned from her elder sister EVE and her companion WALL·E. Something about it was totally unlike the peppy dance numbers and slow love ballads of Hello, Dolly!
Rose hovered closer to hear it better. The welder-bot was so absorbed in his work that he did not notice her until she was only about five feet away. Then he froze like a deer in the headlights and shut his torch off with a fizzle.
For a moment they just looked at each other. Then Rose spoke. "Name?"
The welder-bot blinked his rectangular eyes. The EVE probes rarely spoke to any robots besides each other, so this was very weird for him. He replied with a nervous stutter. "B…BURN-E…"
Rose made a smiling expression and repeated his name. "BURN-E." Then she pointed to the red letter 'R' drawn on the left side of her chest panel, the only obvious marking that distinguished her from her four identical sisters. "Rose."
BURN-E was still very confused. Nonetheless, he straightened himself a bit, rubbed his torch arm awkwardly with his claw hand, and replied. "Err…Rrr…Rose."
She smiled again and asked another question. "Music?"
He stared at her blankly for a moment, then realized what she wanted him to tell her. "Uh … 'Ode to Joy'… Beethoven."
Rose tilted her head again. Beethoven? That was a word she didn't know. She would have asked what it meant but the voices of her sisters were calling her. Rather then her usual firm salute Rose dismissed herself with a wave. BURN-E waved back with his claw hand, his joints squeaking slightly.
After that day, Rose hummed BURN-E's tune when she did her gardening. It always seemed to come to mind when she felt calm and peaceful. The flowers seemed to like it, too. Rose's scientific data-bank on plants did not explain this phenomenon, but since they grew stronger and bloomed brighter she continued humming to them.
As more days went by, Rose began to notice that she was not alone in the garden. Someone was following her there and watching her, trying to stay hidden behind large bushes and trees. He left a single wheel track behind him in the grass, and wasn't quite small enough for the bushes and trees to hide him. Despite the efforts of stealth, Rose knew exactly who was spying on her. It was BURN-E.
This sort of spying would have bothered anyone else, but not Rose. BURN-E was just a common welder-bot equipped with a torch, and she was a highly advanced probe-bot armed with a laser cannon. She had nothing to fear from him, so she went on with her work and her humming as if he wasn't there.
Then one day Rose noticed that BURN-E was not around. She looked for him, but there were no fresh wheel tracks in the grass or any telltale rustling in the leaves. He simply wasn't there. Confused, she went to her sister EVE's home that night, who said WALL·E had followed her around a lot, too, when she had first come to Earth. He had never suddenly disappeared like BURN-E did, though.
Still confused, Rose began questioning other robots she knew if they had seen BURN-E. Most of them didn't know where he was either, but there were rumors that he was working on a private project and wouldn't let anyone see it. That made some sense. She reasoned he must be doing something very important. So Rose went on with her own business, doing more scouting missions outside the colony and more gardening in her free time.
All the while she pretended that BURN-E's absence did not bother her. She'd gotten used to having him around, even if he was just watching her from a distance. She began to ponder the logic of why he had done it in the first place. If WALL·E had done it to EVE before, it stood to reason that BURN-E did it to her for the same reason. That reason could only be that he was in love with her.
Rose had little understanding of what love was. She knew it was the emotion that bonded her elder sister to a funny garbage-bot. Besides that, love was a truly foreign concept to her. For seven hundred years, emotions and relationships had never been an issue for her. But she was learning.
Currently, Rose was learning that she wanted to see BURN-E again. She still wasn't totally sure that the emotion involved was love, but she knew it was not happiness. She continued her gardening, but she no longer felt like humming to her flowers anymore. Rose wondered if plants had emotions, too, because they began to sag in a very melancholy way.
Finally, on a very sunny day several weeks after his disappearance, BURN-E returned.
He made no attempt to hide himself from Rose this time. He stood right out in the open on his single wheel, fidgeting and squirming, and making some rather nervous noises. "Err…Rrr…Rose."
She hovered by her shrubs with her eyes wide for a while, then she happily flew to meet him. "BURN-E!"
She stopped about three feet in front of him, noticing something different. There were many black scorch marks marring his shiny paint and his joints squeaked even more than usual. Concerned, she leaned a bit closer to inspect the damage. Whatever he'd been doing these past weeks had obviously been a dirty job. He was also hiding both arms behind his back. She looked him in the face, curious and confused. "BURN-E?"
The welder-bot's rectangle eyes shifted around in his visor. He looked at the grass in front of him and fidgeted some more. He started muttering again. "Um … uhh … R-Rose …" Then he thrust his claw arm out in front of him, still looking at the grass. "Here."
She blinked several times. Tightly gripped in BURN-E's claw was a rose made entirely of metal. Each graceful steel leaf, curving copper petal and barbed wire thorn had been carefully chosen from pieces of scrap, cut and coaxed into shape, and welded onto a slender stem.
The flower looked so delicate that Rose was almost afraid to touch it. Very carefully she took it between her hands and studied it in admiration. It was practically identical to the real roses growing on her shrubs, right down to the tiny veins in the leaves. If it weren't made of metal she could have easily mistaken it for one of her own flowers.
Now she knew the answer to all her questions. This was why BURN-E had been gone for so long. All these weeks he had been making this small, beautiful object for her.
For her.
She looked at the welding-bot, who was still staring at the grass as if it were incredibly fascinating. His claw hand was gripping his torch arm tightly and rubbing it with a creaky scraping noise.
Rose began to hum. After the first eight notes she stopped.
BURN-E's head perked up. A moment of silence, then his nervous humming followed with the next seven notes.
She hummed the next eight notes. He replied with the following seven. And then, little by little, they began humming the same notes together.
The robots hummed their duet until they reached the end of the piece. When it was over, Rose began to giggle. This surprised her. She was not a very giggly robot. But BURN-E seemed to like it and made his own electrical chuckling sounds.
Then Rose had an idea. Holding his gift in one hand, she reached to him with the other, fingers open and extended. BURN-E looked at his claw. It was blackened with ugly scorch marks and desperately in need of oiling. Rose's small, slender hand, which was usually spotless white, was splotched with brown dirt from pulling up weeds. Her other hand was in the same condition, and it was holding his gift, his masterpiece.
Long ago BURN-E had developed a hobby of building things out of scrap metal for fun. All of those things had been large, simple pieces that were fairly easily constructed. But never had he toiled so feverishly and neglected his own maintenance to make something as small and complicated as that flower. He hadn't known it then, but now he was quite certain of what had driven him to such madness.
Like Rose, BURN-E had little understanding of love. He'd heard the word tossed around a lot, and he'd even been to the famous robot couple's wedding. But he'd never actually felt anything close to it until the day he met Rose.
After that he found it hard to think of anything but her. He wanted to talk to her again, but was too shy to do more than shadow her and admire her from afar. Finally he realized that he was in love with Rose. For the first time in fifteen years, BURN-E knew what the feeling of love really was. But he was not happy with the way things were. Hiding in the bushes wasn't doing him any good. He had to do something more.
That was how he had gotten the idea to create a flower from scrap metal, the single most difficult, painstaking, and frustrating piece of work he'd ever made in his life. He'd thrown away at least thirty-two failed attempts before he finally got it right.
And now, here in the garden, giving the scrap metal rose to her and humming his favorite song with her, made all that hard work worthwhile.
With a squeaky groan, BURN-E's claw hand opened just enough to allow Rose's hand to slip between the blunt pincers and clasp her dirty fingers around them.
BURN-E smiled. Rose smiled. If this was love, they wouldn't mind more of it.
The End