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As the bombs fall, they talk about very simple things.
“I think I left the fire going,” says Parrot.
“You didn’t,” says Theo. “I checked. ‘Cause you get, like, you know.”
“Scatterbrained,” he replies, with a wry little smile. “I get scatterbrained before a battle.”
“Yeah,” says Parrot’s best friend. “That.”
Theo is shaking out his wings under the shelter of an upturned slab of stone where the ground has revolted and upturned and become a hiding-place from the hell-hail. His yellow-and-white feathers are usually the same color as quaking aspens in fall. Now they are soft smudged gray-brown with blood and grime. He has lost his sunglasses somewhere in the chaos. Above them, every star in the sky is falling.
“What is Wemmbu’s problem, even,” asks Parrot. The question feels a little empty in his mouth and in his head like Capital City is empty.
“Dunno,” says Theo. “It’s kinda pretty, though.”
In the sky they look like flower petals or maple seeds when the wind blows in the spring and sends each and every one pinwheeling, spiralling down from the sky in whirlpool wind eddies to land softly and fracture the bodies of beautiful innocent people who did not deserve this; who deserved better than this; who deserved good things.
“Don’t say that,” Parrot says, but he says it hollowly and thin ‘cause there’s nothing left in him for him to be angry with.
Theo’s feathers shiver, gently.
“Sorry,” he says, and crosses his hands over his chest.
“They deserved better than this,” Parrot says.
“We deserved better than this,” says Theo. He looks at Parrot, then, and he looks heartbroken, and Parrot, for the life of him, cannot understand why.
Parrot watches a bomb swallow the marble body of a lion in an arid central fountain. When he and Theo first came to this place, the fountains flowed clear and in their basins, coins and gems and little metallic momentos mosaiced the wishes of travellers and traders and new players alike; beneath the waters they were gilded and cool and airless and lovely. The fountains ran dry once the famine started and now in an instant they are being destroyed.
“How do you know him?” asks Parrot, after a long not-quiet moment.
“Who?”
“Shoebilly,” says Parrot. Theo becomes very still.
“I don’t,” says his best friend.
“Don’t lie to me,” Parrot snaps. In a fraction of a second his anger is back, ready and wanting and waiting, ravenous and ready-to-bite and white-hot like nerve pain. “I don’t care what you do but don’t lie to me.”
“You do too care what I do,” Theo says, petulantly, after a moment. Parrot doesn’t respond. Theo looks at him and through him and right into his eyes and then back down at his iron-toed boots.
“We used to be friends,” he says. “A long time ago.”
“I see,” says Parrot.
Theo watches the wreckage in the not-silence. The sound of skyfall is devastating, deafening. The ban-cannons choir; one note for every player with a ticket for the high road.
The orbital sings loud and low.
“Can I borrow your spyglass?” he asks.
“Sure,” says Parrot, and he hands his new life his old one. Theo’s talons close around burnished brass.
“Oh,” says Theo, lifting the sight to his eye. “Oh, wow.”
“What?”
“I don’t think you should look,” says Theo, but he hands it over anyway.
Theo was right; he shouldn’t have looked.
The dead are many and broken in the crevices of rocks and crumpled buildings and stone. They are blown apart and speckled with shrapnel; they are destroyed. Soldiers and civilians alike. Home-skeletons with black windows and exposed rib-beams; one small dead red shoe on the asphalt.
Across the battlefield, in the eye of his spyglass, Flamefrags ducks behind a pillar in the collapsed library. His friend-in-the-sunhat sprints past. Flame snags him by the collared edge of his chestplate and drags him just out of the way of another falling-star pulse of shrapnel.
Close, Parrot thinks.
“That was close,” Theo comments. He, too, is watching. He always did have good eyesight.
“Poor Flame,” Parrot says, with a little sigh all swallowed up by the song of bursting bombs.
Theo gets a sad look on his face. It’s so strange to watch him without his sunglasses—his downturned golden eyes are so good at grief.
“Yeah,” he agrees. “I really can’t see that ending well.”
“No,” says Parrot, absently. “I don’t think it will.”
Theo whistles. “I don’t wanna be there when that goes down.”
Parrot hums something agreeable. His gaze strays to where the central tower used to be and where is now a tangle of sandstone-colored concrete bones.
“You know,” Parrot says. “I talked Spoke down from that tower.”
“Spoke?” Theo says, and blinks. “The psychopath? The griefer?”
“Yeah,” Parrot hums. “That one.”
“The guy who wanted to blow up the city?”
“Mhm.”
“Oh,” says Theo. “Do you think he was really gonna do it?”
Parrot thinks, then, of Spoke; of his voice reeling off of rotating black discs; of chess and parkour and chunk-bans. Of his smiley white eyes and absent stare.
“No,” says Parrot. “I think he was probably going to jump.”
“Oh.” Theo’s mouth falls open in a little ‘o.’ “Why?”
“I’m not entirely sure,” says Parrot. He presses his thumbprint into the copper and the heat imprints a maze of lines down there for just a second before it fades. “Said his best friend died.”
“Did he?”
“No,” says Parrot. “No way. Best friends don’t die on you that easy.”
“Is that what you told him?” Theo asks. He’s smiling a stupid little grin. “That’s sweet, bro.”
“Something like that,” Parrot sighs. He closes his eyes. The light of falling bombs-stars make sunbursts on the inside of his eyes. Once upon a time, he built a machine like this.
“You sound old,” Theo teases.
Parrot cracks open an eye to look at him.
“Shoebilly called you his student,” he says. “Not friend. He didn’t say friend. He said student.”
Theo reaches up to adjust his sunglasses, realizes they’re lost somewhere, and looks at his hand with an expression of annoyed grief.
“I wasn’t lying,” he says, hoarsely. He doesn’t look Parrot in the eyes. “I didn’t lie.”
“I’m disappointed, Theo,” says Parrot.
“Don’t do that with me,” snaps his friend. “Don’t talk to me like that.”
“You lied to me.”
Theo turns away. There is a tenseness in his square jaw that means he is gritting his teeth.
“I didn’t lie to you,” he says. “I hate when you use that tone of voice.”
Parrot furrows his brow. “What tone of voice?”
“That one,” says Theobald. He still won’t look at Parrot. It’s the same as he was after Parrot massacred the Law, only this time with less wild-eyed horror. “The one you used just now. That one.”
Parrot tilts his head. The crown on his head slides, slightly, tilting to rest on his ear. It never did fit quite right. “What’s wrong with it?”
“You sound like a general.”
He blinks. “Aren’t I?”
“No,” says Theobald. “You’re my best friend.”
At last, Theo looks back at him with a wary, baleful glance. He looks nervous; he looks scared. Of Parrot, perhaps, which is a strange and remarkable thing to be afraid of.
He’s tapping his talons restlessly against the stone. Theo traces the shapes of shattered blue-green-yellow mosaic tile under his hands. Once, in this city, in a clean, well-lit bedroom, Theo ran those talons through Parrot’s feathers for the first time since the Director and Parrot crushed blaze rods into blaze powder. He had to remake those potions five times because saltwater kept crawling into the mortar and ruining it.
Theo bristles his wings again. His long white wing-feathers are choked in brown-black dried blood. Parrot’s own fingers twitch.
“What did he teach you?”
Theo glances back away. “Lotta stuff. Doesn’t matter. I don’t remember any of it.”
He nods. “Kay.”
“Okay.”
“Your wings look awful,” says Parrot.
“They feel awful,” says Theo.
“Will you let me fix them,” Parrot asks. “When this is all over?”
“Dunno,” Theo says. “I really don’t know. No. I will, probably. Maybe. I don’t know. Ask me again when all this is over.”
Parrot watches the dead and dying clutch at the sky for stars in the wreckage of their homes.
“Okay,” he says. “Okay.”
“I bet he lost somebody,” says Theo.
“What?”
“Wemmbu’s problem,” Theo clarifies, after a moment. “I bet he lost somebody. He doesn’t seem like the type.”
Parrot laughs, a little, to himself, and Theo gives him a look. “The type?”
“The type to do this, bro,” Theo says, and he gestures with a gentle, scarred hand to the ruin.
“There is no type,” says Parrot. “Everybody can do this. Anybody could do this. There is no type.”
Theo is quiet.
“You’re probably right,” says Parrot, after a moment. “I think you’re right.”
“I wonder who he lost,” Theo says, and three cannons ring across the ruin of Capital City in quick succession. Parrot doesn’t reply.
“I feel old,” he says, instead, just under his breath.
“What?”
“You said I sound old, earlier. I feel old.”
In the same moment, Theo inhales in quick through his teeth; the thunder slows over the valley. The orbitals are silenced.
All around the ruins, the innocent peek out from their shelters and turn their faces towards the sky.
“Is that it?” Theo asks.
“I think so,” Parrot whispers.
His best friend tilts his head, curiously, reaches for his crossbow. “Should we get back in it?”
Parrot reaches up; adjusts his crown. “Yeah.”
“Do you want to get back in it?” Theo asks.
“No,” says Parrot, honestly.
“Hm,” Theo hums. “Yeah, me neither.”
Then his best friend claps Parrot on the shoulder, hard enough to shake the dust from his clothes, and tugs him into a side-hug, one arm laid over his shoulders as they stand. Theo plucks the crown off his head, ruffles his hair, and then sets it back down.
“C’mon, your highness,” he teases. “Buck up. It ain’t over ‘till it’s over.”