Original Notes: Although I'm not hugely happy with this piece, it's not improving by being left to gather metaphorical dust in my hard drive. The bones of it are right, and there are not enough Nick+Maru snuggles in my Hallowed 'verse so this is NECESSARY, but it's still not quite what I wanted it to be.

(A comment discussion on AO3 made me realize what dissatisfied me was the dissonance between Maru's narration and my vocabulary, but that the dissonant tone suited the work. It's still not my favorite, but I've warmed up to it a little.)

Chapter 6: Lullaby

It was a quiet day.

Almost eerily quiet, really; Maru couldn't remember the last time he'd been alone on the base, even previous mid-Januaries, when the majority of the team had dispersed to various corners of the country. Patch and the Smokejumpers were all at their respective homes, Dipper was spending time with family in Washington state, and Cabbie, with Wally in attendance as always, was visiting a few of his surviving wingmates at the retirement yards in Tucson. Windlifter was ostensibly helping Liz with something down at the Lodge, although exactly what they were trying to work on halfway through January, Maru couldn't begin to guess.

And the other permanently-permanent residents of the base, Blade and Nick, had left before Maru had woken up that morning, destined for an annual meeting with the chiefs of several of the surrounding fire companies.

To both take advantage of the quiet and distract himself from it, Maru was taking the opportunity to do a thorough inventory of his workshop. There was a particular stack of heavy travel crates stuffed into the furthest-back corner of his quarters, under a decade and a half of dust, that he'd been hauling around since L.A.. At this point, he couldn't honestly remember what was in half of them - stuff from the CHoPs set, he remembered; picture albums, newspaper and magazine clippings, a set of Blade and Nick's old decals that he'd swiped, a couple things of Nick's that Blade hadn't had the will to pack up after the accident, but that didn't account for more than two of the five containers. Some of their contents had to be his own personal stuff, but damned if he could remember what any of it actually was.

He'd hauled them out into the open air of the shop and dusted them off before breakfast, mostly so that he didn't get distracted creating another wish-list of necessities they might actually be able to afford this year and put off investigating them again. The stuff in them clearly wasn't necessary if he'd gone this long without it, so it was definitely lower priority than meticulously cross-checking his supplies of hydraulic line for the third time. Right?

Wise enough to be aware of his own avoidance mechanisms, he'd placed the containers in the most inconvenient positions possible in the middle of the repair bay, which left him the choice of either moving them back where they'd been or actually opening them up and dealing with them properly if he wanted to stop backing into them every five minutes.

"Oh," he muttered in surprise, when popping open the first of the containers revealed a distinctively shaped hardside case. "So that's where that went..."

With the faint, vague sense of reverence reserved for objects steeped in nostalgia, he reached into the container and extracted the case, setting it carefully on the cement before popping the latches. The lid tipped back easily, the hinges not protesting in the least despite decades of immobility, and the light spilled over the case's contents for the first time in longer than Maru cared to remember.

Amazingly, it was still in pristine condition; sleek, glossy, and untouched by the ravages of time. The wood was smooth and unwarped, varnish still bright and clear, and the brushed metal of the pegs and posts still threw back a soft gleam in the light, not a speck of rust or corrosion in sight.

The guitar had been a gift from Nick, decades ago, when Maru's old Fender had finally cracked around the neck bolts. It had taken him months to master playing this particular model, but now, as he restrung it and tried a few, cautious strums, he found he hadn't lost the skill.

"I didn't realize you still had it."

Over the last few decades, Maru had managed to pretty much eliminate his startle reflex - it was a side-effect of working alongside a ten-ton ninja Skycrane and the occasional obnoxiously omnipresent ghost. But when he'd spent more than six straight hours assuming he was entirely alone, without anyone correcting him, the unexpected voice from almost directly behind him managed to garner a much bigger reaction than it should have. He managed not to drop the guitar, but more than a few creative expletives tumbled out instead.

"Chrysler, Nick," he sighed, once he'd finished venting. "Don't do that unless you wanna find out how useful I'll be as a ghost!" Sometimes, he really regretted making those skid wheels for Nick. At least the distinctive clunks of Nick's hopping would have alerted him to the chopper's presence.

"Sorry, 'ru, I really thought you knew I was here," Nick offered, the apology half-swallowed by a yawn. "What language was that last one, anyway?"

It took Maru a second to parse the question before he realized Nick was talking about his burst of profanity from a moment earlier. He'd acquired a wide and diverse library of rudeness over the years, not all of it in English - it was one of the weirder benefits of working with a multilingual crew.

"Vietnamese for 'tractor-fragger'," he answered, after backtracking through exactly what he'd said.

"Who -" Nick began, but his higher brain functions caught up with him before he could finish the question. "Cabbie?"

"Natch." The big plane had a surprisingly good head for languages; he still spoke fluent French that he'd picked up during the Indochina Wars, along with a fair helping of Vietnamese and Korean. Most of it wasn't even that rude - once, Cabbie and Maru had stopped off at a Korean restaurant on their way back from a supply run, and Cabbie had astounded Maru and delighted their waitress by exchanging pleasantries and placing their order in Korean without missing a beat.

Nick yawned again, and Maru took a moment to glance him over. There were damn few reasons why Nick wouldn't have gone along with Blade this morning, and the pinched expression around his mouth and the tight exhaustion at the corners of his eyes was enough to clue Maru in.

He'd seen those same signs on Blade, day after day, after nights of haunted dreams that often-as-not had woken them both up to the echos of Blade's screams.

Adjusting his grip on the guitar a little, Maru picked out a quick, careful scale. "July or November?" he asked, keeping his tone carefully bland. There weren't many things that gave Nick nightmares; his own crash, if it had ever bothered him, had stopped being an issue years ago. Blade's crashes, though...

Nick's eyes narrowed slightly, but when Maru began picking out the bones of the CHoPs theme - not an easy task, on an acoustic guitar - he relented with a sigh.

"Both," Nick admitted, sagging a little lower on his gear, his nose brushing Maru's flank. "And then some."

Maru leaned back into the slight pressure against his side without comment, absently picking out melodies as his tines remembered the feel of the strings. Soon, though, a different memory drifted back to him - an old memory, years before the Smokejumpers or even Dipper - the night they'd lost Richter. A memory of sitting on the tarmac between Blade and Windlifter, listening to Cabbie, deeper in his cups that night than Maru had ever seen him, quietly singing Korean lullabies.

Those haunting, melancholy songs had clung to Maru's memory, enough so that he'd searched them out and learned the words as best he could even after Richter's picture on The Wall had begun collecting dust.

Carefully, quietly, he began picking out the simple melody of Story of the Sky, the words slipping from him with stumbling care as Nick's breathing slowed and he leaned more heavily against Maru's side.

When Blade returned from the meeting hours later, he found the pair of them leaning together, soundly asleep in the sunlight, while Maru's guitar gleamed brightly in his tines.

~ End Chapter ~

END NOTES:

In CHiPs, both Ponch and Jon are shown to own guitars, although neither one is ever actually shown playing said guitars.

Maru's guitar is a Martin D25K, koa wood body and spruce top. Very pretty guitar, but I'm sure it would not hold up to decades of storage without issue in the real world, even if it was properly destrung and kept in a semi-controlled environment inside both a travel case and a storage container. However, this is a world in which vehicles are sapient beings. The guitar, therefore, is fine.

Maru's old Fender cracking around the neck bolts - 1970's Fender Stratocasters had the neck of the guitar held to the body with only three bolts (rather than the more stable four of previous eras) on a triangular plate. This design allowed for movement in the neck of the guitar, which, as you can guess, was not conducive to long lifespans for the instruments.