It doesn't take long before the arguing starts. Of course, you and Eaglebones just stand around, looking awkwardly at each other and occasionally opening your mouths as if you're about to say something. No sound ever comes out. The Commander and Ricky stopped walking off the road with you a few paces back, and now they're just yelling at each other, five years of frustration spilling out into a shouting match that makes you glad you're in the middle of nowhere. It started as something simple – the pair of them making backhanded comments about each other's new jobs – but by now it's turning incredibly spiteful, to the point where it's making you genuinely uncomfortable. The fact that you keep hearing Crash's name is making it far worse, and you can hear your bird-like friend grinding his teeth next to you; something you've not heard in quite a while, but you generally used to associate with him being annoyed.
Still got the same habits, you think.
You turn to look at him for a moment – it's only a brief second, as when you turn away, you catch sight of Ricky practically diving on the Commander, tackling him to the ground in a moment of surprise and punching him square in the face. None of you know what to do, but Eaglebones and Ricky are yelling indiscriminately, the Commander's kicking up dust as he tries to get away, and it takes a minute for you to register your own actions before you've ran back to meet them and grabbed Ricky by the collar of his shirt, pulling him back up as he struggles. He's still yelling as he forces himself away from you before storming off, but you've already let him go and are bending down to hear the Commander's mumbling properly.
"It's okay," he sputters, now leaning over on all fours, his once blue hoodie covered in dirt. "I totally deserved that. Went too far." He adds a noise that sounds like 'pfft', and when you lean closer, you notice that there's blood pouring from his nose and across his lips, staining the sand red below him.
"No, no it isn't," you snap, already letting him go to chase after Ricky as he stomps off. "I don't care what you said, he has no right to—"
"No!" Eaglebones screeches, making all three of you stop and turn to look at him. "Do you know what really isn't okay? The fact that you guys are fighting – hell, even yelling – today! We are here to honour a dead man. A dead friend." He's staring at all 3 of you intensely, but you find you can't meet his eyes, and it's not just because he's glaring. "Do you really think Crash would be okay with you guys punching each other, if he was here? Would he be happy with you yelling about him at each other?"
The sound of the wind turning the ground beneath your feet is the only reply Bones gets, the rest of you now looking at each other painfully. It's like a punch in the gut, and you can't help feeling incredibly petty and insensitive for joining in on the bickering. Ricky, after a moment's hesitation, makes his way back over to you and immediately helps the Commander back to his feet, mumbling an apology to him.
"S'okay," the Commander reassures him, wiping blood across his face with his sleeve in an attempt to stop his nosebleed. "Although… Go a little easier on me in future. Your right hook's gotten a lot better."
You find yourself laughing, partially in relief, and they both start too – Eaglebones smiles nervously, looking somewhat embarrassed with the way he lost it. You return to walking together again, everyone following the Commander and looking a lot worse for wear.
Your clothes are discoloured, dirty, and in the Commander's case blood-stained, but there's still something strangely right about it when you sit together at Crash's grave. Not pleasant, of course, and you're all completely silent for a while. Bones runs his hand across the stone and wipes away a layer of dust, saying softly about how the band's all together now. And it's true, it's so true – it was great to see the Commander again after such a painfully long absence, and it was just as great to see Eaglebones and Ricky; you had no idea if they were okay, after all, and to see them doing so well settles you. But you still weren't a whole, even surrounded by your old friends. Because the big guy, the safety net, the over-protective puppy is never coming back. It still hurts, and you think it always will. Sometimes people say stuff about moving on, and you tried every trick in the book – including reading a lot of actual books on the subject – to understand the idea behind grieving and loss. It's a new subject to you in a way, after all. But try as you might to put these methods and apparent psychological facts to the test, nothing ever seems to come of it. You hope that it's just a robotic malfunction; that your human friends will adjust better to life without him and move on. But it's as if it was forced into your core programming to see Crash as a member of your little family here, and nothing will ever change that. No matter what happened, or what happens, Crash is family even if he's gone. They know that too, though, and you're starting to doubt your previous hypothesis as you notice how much it's hurting them all over again. Even just Eaglebones mentioning you all being together knocks your theory out of the window, and makes you realise that grief is a lot harder to deal with than the other humans said it was. Maybe this is because the other humans never had a friendship as strong, you think. Maybe they didn't know what it was like to have a big lug of a friend who demanded bedtime stories and always made you smile. A friend who would be strangely quiet with you all day and then present you with his new pride and joy, a portrait of you, lovingly adorned in poster paints. Some of the books you read said that you need to stop thinking about the person as much in the first place and that it'd help, but by God, you refuse to ever throw that painting away. You're glad you live on your own in some small way; because you think it'd be hard to explain the framed, wobbly painting of a blue robot up on your wall, the only piece of art in your apartment.
The Commander, standing in front of the gravestone you engraved with the tip of your finger, decides on some parting words as you all get up to leave with no idea of how much time has passed. It's definitely been more than a couple of hours of you all sat around, swapping stories and being nostalgic. He stammers and fills the one-sided conversation with a lot of "uhhs" and slowing down; something you know wouldn't happen if Crash was actually able to talk back, recalling the hours they spent discussing absolutely nothing. But the content of what he's saying doesn't matter, because the message behind it is emanating from him entirely. He stands there, looking down at that stone, and you see the history they had. The faltering in his voice and the awkwardness lets you know that he feels sort of dumb saying it, but finds it necessary all the same. The way he lowers his head and presses against his own fingers a sure sign of how much it's damaged his feelings. The Commander hides it all away behind a half-hearted smile, waving you over to follow him back to the roadside as he walks away, leaving the memories and melancholy in the dust with your dear friend.
In an awkward moment of discussion that shows off how much you've all changed and lost what you know about each other, the four of you try and decide what to do after your little 'reunion get-together', not yet wanting to separate for an unknown amount of time again.
"You guys can come back to mine," offers Ricky, with a slight shrug that wrinkles up the sleeves of his blazer and shows off just how filthy half of it is. "I know you've not seen me in like, forever, so we could, y'know, catch up properly?"
The rest of you nod keenly, Eaglebones scratching at the root of the feathers on his face as he offers to follow Ricky's car and take you and the Commander in the van again. You can't help but notice how oddly different Ricky's voice sounds now that he's got his braces off. Although it might also be because he seems a lot more self-assured and confident now, too – maybe it was the slight growth spurt he's had, or the ability to get a good tailor. Either way, you eventually managed to find common ground and stop talking so nervously, splitting up from Ricky to pile back in with Bones and finding the drive out of the desert a lot more pleasant than the one there. You can't really explain that, other than a subconscious feeling that you actually have a purpose and something to do again.
Coming back into the city again feels strange, as if that bustling world that held you for the past five years was now alien to you within a day. It's loud, and busy, and daunting compared to the almost complete silence you spent hours in before – that quiet and peace made you feel more welcome and at home, even out in a land of nothingness. You suppose that just shows how much you've missed the other Aquabats, but you're not telling them that again today. Bones struggles with the manual drive on the van, and you and the Commander laugh at his utter failure to drive stick in a vehicle that looks like it'd have trouble even if you were an expert.
"Yeah, yeah," he grumbles sarcastically, rolling his eyes at you. "Go ahead, laugh it up. It's not like this is my hunk o' junk anyway."
You continue to mock him for the van, before conversation turns to the Battletram, the three of you start talking about it as if it were a life-long friend. Truth be told, it sort of was, and you honour it as such by telling each other stories about the more bizarre antics that happened within its walls and laughing so hard you shake the seats. But after a few minutes of this to pass the time, everything seems to slow down in one crystallising moment. Your ears ring far more than you thought they actually could, and every other sound seems to disappear as the noise around you forms a crescendo of nothingness. There's an earth-shattering slam that you can feel, at least, accompanied by the sound of metal scraping across metal and concrete as your hearing returns a minute later. By the time you've adjusted to your now rather uncomfortable seating position – your head forced into the back of the Commander's headrest – you've finally realised what's happened. That you'd just been screaming as another car, one far more large and with more protection than an egg carton (unlike yours), hurtled into the driver's side as it rolled across the intersection, clearly out of control. There's a hissing noise you don't understand from the van, and the ringing doesn't subside at all. Imagining it for a minute as you move, you figure that all of your systems firing off and overloading in the way that they did wouldn't be too far off from how humans feel shock – which explains why the Commander is just sat there, trembling and hyperventilating. You go to reassure him, leaning forward between the seats to tell him that it's gonna be okay, before you realise that Eaglebones is face down against the steering wheel.
This time, the shock feels a lot more human.