You have to admit, the whole place seems appropriate from the outside, if not a little dead at this time in the morning. Guitars loom over you from all sides as you pass through the front door to the music store, getting momentarily distracted and staring through the glass at all of the instruments. The Commander brings you back up to speed when the heel of his Converse presses firmly into your toes through your polished black shoes, and you bump into the back of him as he stops dead in the entryway. Looking over his shoulder, you try and see why he now appears to be recoiling, and it becomes apparent that the younger man behind the counter tried to shoot you in the face with a laser the last time he saw you.
"What?" grumbles Eaglebones' older brother, someone you weren't really expecting to see today, in all honesty. "What are you staring at?"
Eagleclaw sits there, now scowling at you as he scrapes against his namesake with a large metal file, making an awful sound.
"Are you gonna buy something, or are you just gonna stand there? If you've come to make fun of me again, I'll kick you out," he snaps, and it dawns on you that he has no idea who you are out of costume, even if you look exactly the same.
"We're… We're here to see your brother," confesses the Commander, while you just keep staring at Eagleclaw. Now he's rolling his eyes and huffing; he gets out of his seat with deliberately overdramatic effort, smacking the file against the desk, and heads into what appears to be the back room.
"Bones!" he shrieks, and it really is a shriek – a normal, human yell, but with an undercurrent that sounds like the cry of a bird of prey. Like a hawk, you suppose. "Some people wanna see you!"
Another shriek comes back, the bird call more audible through the door as the human speech is muffled, followed by the gentle 'thud' of feet coming down stairs. When Eaglebones appears from behind the door, chattering with his brother quietly, both you and the Commander are completely dumbstruck again. He looks so different, and it's not just because he's wearing a polo shirt and nametag instead of his costume. His once wild hair is now even wilder, curlier and longer, draped past his shoulders. But more than that, the edges of it around his ears and forehead aren't actually hair at all – there's feathers growing there, growing back from his face into the tangled mess and pushing it out of his eyes. They're mottled brown and look extremely soft, and you wonder why they weren't there before, until you realise you're being weird and staring at someone's face for too long for the third time already today.
"Uh, hey," he says, awkwardly waving at the pair of you, and the Commander waves back, smirking.
"It's good to see you," you blurt out, smiling more keenly than you'd anticipated, and then cringing when you realise how dumb you sound. But Eaglebones doesn't care, a smile creeping onto his face too as he waves a hand at the pair of you again, now gesturing for you both to come through the door.
"Do you guys own this place?" you find yourself asking as you follow Bones up the stairs, and he nods.
"Jeez, you really are out of the loop," sighs MCBC, unintentionally burying you in guilt.
"It's alright," Bones retorts, opening the door at the top of the stairs and leading the pair of you into his apartment. "I've not seen you in three years either, Commander. And sort of, Jimmy – me and my bro help to run stuff, anyway. My dad owns it, but he's not here at the moment. We kinda… Reconnected after the band split."
You're just watching the back of his neck and more feathers as he mentions his dad, and it's strange to think that more of this family exists. It makes you a little nervous in fact, when you consider what the Falconhawk brothers' father must look like in reference to them. And then you look around the room - around an apartment full of weaved wicker furniture, large houseplants, and what appears to be more guitars than downstairs. There are feathered dream-catchers and other bizarre items you presume are 'spiritual' things hung on the walls, but you daren't ask.
Yeah, you think. This is definitely their house.
The Commander's still being bizarrely quiet as the ex-guitarist explains to you that the pair of them met up exactly three years ago for the two-year anniversary of Crash's death, and promised they'd meet up again for the fifth. It makes you feel awful to know that it was only those two back then, and not you and Ricky as well, because you'd been rejecting their calls. In your own defence, you think about what a rough time you were having, and convince yourself that going out to his grave site when you struggled to not lie in bed all day and hate everything would be a bad idea. He goes on to tell you about coming back home, about him and his brother reconciling after having such a feud – it's clear by the way he tells it that Eaglebones has had some crisis about his own mortality. He's using the phrase "life's too short" far too much, and his whole demeanour seems a lot less hot-headed and reckless than he used to. Just like seeing the Commander being so humble, it throws you off how much they've changed, but you direct the conversation towards a change you feel less strange talking about.
"Oh, that?" smirks Bones. "Yeah, well… They used to grow like that, and I'd – I'd pluck them out, because I thought all of you guys would make fun of me, and I hated them."
There's a pause, and you can see him looking at his own feathers out of the corner of his eye, with what appears to be a mock-disgust.
"But, I mean, I don't really care anymore. We own this place and we all look like this. And honestly, I don't think I've got anything to be ashamed of."
He smiles, and when you look over at the silent figure of your leader, he's smiling, too – an admirable look that nearly matches the other man's pride.
"Anyway," starts up the Commander after another awkward pause in the conversation as you look around the room. "We, ah, we were gonna go out to his grave, if that's cool."
It takes you a minute to realise that this is directed at you, but you nod eagerly when you see the pair of them watching you, obviously not knowing what you're going to think of it after you rejected their reaching out to you last time.
"Of course," you reply, and the other two are already pulling themselves out of the wicker seats, the Bat Commander a lot less gracefully than your birdlike friend.
"I actually have a ride this time," chuckles Eaglebones, and you feel a little left out when they both start laughing over something you've missed… As if you could feel any worse for ignoring them. "We can take the van."
The ride out into the desert is a quiet one, but not because of any awkwardness any more. In fact, it's sort of comfortable, and you feel a lot more at home in silence with these two than you have done in any long conversation when they weren't there. As Eaglebones drives the three of you away, the cityscape trails off, mutating into small towns, smaller and smaller, and then nothing but cacti and tumbleweeds on a dead landscape. It's apt, you think, for the circumstances. When Crash passed away – not even during a battle, but afterwards, when you were all exhausted – that energy never seemed to come back. Maybe that was why you all started yelling so much, but Crash's then-unknown sickness left him when he went peacefully; infecting the rest of you with a bitterness you'd never known before. The Commander, once so full of life, didn't say a word for an excruciatingly long time. Ricky didn't take long to leave, and you and Eaglebones tried to hold the band together for as long as possible with next to no luck. Perhaps the long period of silence was a good thing, for the hostility at least seems to have dissipated, leaving the remnants of a friendship and ghosts of memories that fill your heads when you look at each other's faces, reminding you gently of everything you've lost. You bump your forehead against the window, looking out at the horizon, and that's when Eaglebones' hand-me-down van comes to a shuddering halt; the Commander leaning over the dashboard in the front seat to get a better look.
"What the…"
Out on the road in front of you, parked to the side, is a black car with matching tinted windows. It looks a lot fancier than your current ride, but you'd honestly have no idea what it was doing out here even if it was a crummy-looking 4x4. After a moment's staring in confusion, the three of you watch as a man comes back to the car – he's well dressed, and built to fill out his suit nicely, with the desert sand kicking up around his feet and marking his black slacks. When he turns to you, he stops dead, and a smile appears behind black sunglasses. Then, a grin. A big, white grin of perfectly straight teeth. It takes a minute of this presumably respectable figure running towards you, laughing with the innocence and eagerness of a child and pulling his expensive-looking sunglasses off his face before you realise exactly who you're looking at.
"Oh man. It is," starts the Commander, his voice getting louder as his expression changes to one of utter disbelief. "That's Ricky."
By the time he's in front of the van, waving with both arms and grinning like a lunatic, all three of you are howling with laughter. You were wrong – he's not changed a bit.