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The courtroom is mostly quiet as Parrot watches.
“So we’ll call up our first witness, pineengine. Did you see Parrot anywhere near Capital City at the time of the deaths?”
Chewing her lips nervously, she gives a half-hearted, wavering smile. (Almost like Boomie, before they died.) “Um,” she says haltingly. “I didn’t.” Pine looks guiltily at her feet, her red jacket (red like blood, like Spepticle’s blood) rustling in the silent room. Suddenly a stone block is mined above her, and Parrot already knows - dreads - what’s coming.
Theo glances at him sharply, a message in his gaze. Parrot can read it clearly: Don’t get involved with this. But he’s already trying to push past the broad-shouldered avian to reach the moderator, to say something, to exonerate him.
“I-” he starts to say, but traces of fear seep their way into his voice, the inky tendrils pulling him back and silencing his sentence. He’s so useless, failing his friends again, when they need him most.
“Please, I-”
No one listens to what he says. Someone places a cauldron down, the iron glinting sharply, cunningly in the dim, clouded light of the sun. Snow starts to fall around him, drifting gently through the air. Too gentle for what’s going to happen. (Too gentle for Wifies’ sharp knife, designed to skewer him through).
“Spepticle, if you would,” Lettuce says, gesturing at the moderator’s glinting netherite armor. LettuceK’s own armor glints malignantly, the oil-black sheen of enchantments racing up and down the black metal. LettuceK grins at Parrot with a smile full of sharp, needle-like teeth.
“Spepticle, no-” Parrot chokes out through the black that’s choking him. The Owl gives him one long, regretful glance, before slipping into the freezing metal tomb. There’s the deafening -
There’s the deafening metal clang of an anvil being placed. Parrot sucks in a useless breath between his useless teeth as his useless hand twitches at his side, trying to pull Pine out of the death-machine, out of his grave. (Useless, useless, useless) Pine, Parrot tries to say, move, but his words die somewhere in his throat, never reaching his lips as the cannon booms. Pine explodes-
Spepticle explodes in a bright, sharp shower of painful crimson. His items fly through the air, landing with loud thuds and clangs. His helmet rolls onto the blood-carpeted stone bricks by Parrot’s feet. It’s like a pinata being smashed open, except it’s Spepticle instead of some stupid bag. Parrot’s vaguely aware that the snow has soaked red, the crystalline, pure, angelic white turning the devil’s shade of red, the one that Parrot dreads so much. His wings are coated in a cheerful, deceitful cherry red, he realizes from a distant, far-away place - a place where the TNT is still exploding in Paragon, where Luigi is halfway skewered with an axe, where Dean has just popped his totem falling. It’s a place where Parrot is useless, where he has to watch his friends die over and over again as he stands uselessly by the side, unable to do anything, useless. Someone’s-
No one’s shaking him, hard. Parrot’s eyes are fixated on the spot where Pine once was. The planks are coated in a sheet of red, just like on that forsaken winter day. “Parrot?” Theo’s voice cuts through his memories - a knife slicing cleanly through his brain. “Mm,” Parrot hums in reply. There’s planks underneath his feet, and the judge is talking again, and-
And he’s in a courtroom, in Capital City, and Spepticle is long gone not here. Parrot just has to make sure that no one else says he’s innocent.