Title: Muted Eyes
Prompt: Write a story from the point of view of a birdcage who's occupant recently died.
Characters: The 'Cursed' Cockatiel, his true spirit, and his birdcage.
Word Count: 1,754
AN: I was bored and so I looked up random prompts. I came across this one and immediately thought of the Cockatiel that brought Chad such trouble in the beginning of the series. It was anime episodes 4-5 or manga chapters 7-12 if you're curious.

I have seen death before. Many times, in fact. Each person who has come into contact with me and my occupant has died. Many of them seem to have been from this force called the 'Shinigami' that the masked menace talked about sometimes. It's because of the masked thing that works with us. My occupant just wanted his mother back. That's all. I don't see why they had to drag me into it, but I know that I will never be the same again. I will not forget the people who died trying to save my occupant from the masked menace. Not even as I lay here, silent and forgotten, rolling empty in the destroyed leftover mess that was once an unsuspecting street in a small town.

It was cruel, what it did. It warped his desire and my bad circumstance into its plans. I miss the bird who had my loyalty before it was taken over by the human boy, blinded by desperation and a sliver of hope that the one who killed his mother could bring her back. He told me the story, murmuring it in his dreams and nightmares as I recall what I saw.

We were just perched on the bridge's railing, Sunny and I. Sunny was the name of the bird that tagged along with me, inside of me, since I got out of the pet store. I've heard the name far too many times to forget it. The little brown haired child on a walk with his mother had put us down for just a moment as he spun around, eyes shut. His mother was inhaling the view the bridge provided. Eventually, the boy joined her, smiling with cherry-stroked cheeks.

Sunny looked over at them for a few moments. The boy's name was Yuuichi. Neither of us had the mother's name figured out. He simply referred to her as 'Okaa-san'. They were both reasonably nice people. We liked them well enough. But that was the day something was wrong.

Sunny looked past them. He squawked. The pair of them ignored it, but I knew better. Sunny had sensed some sort of trouble. I tore my face from the river which was so beautiful in the bright sunshine of the afternoon that it practically sparkled. But I knew better than to ignore a possible warning from the cockatiel. Sunny had quite a nose for that kind of stuff. I couldn't ever match it.

Maybe it's just being alive. Everything has a spirit. We all have feelings, thoughts. We all notice things. The difference is whether we can do something about it. If you're alive, if you have any degree of life, you can do much more than inanimate things. Hence Sunny always noticed things before me. Even a caged bird can do more than its birdcage.

Anyway, it was a human watching the Shibatas. That's not too terrible. Except this human had quite the negative aura around it. It was very dangerous. Very disruptive in the face of the calm we had felt only moments previously. It now ran through my little grooves put in by a younger Sunny's sharp talons and fell into the river. Its beauty suddenly felt out of place.

This human only hurt other people. It was very possible that he would try to hurt Yuuichi or Okaa-san. They had taken care of Sunny well, and they hadn't slammed me around. They were good people. We didn't want to see anything happen to them. So Sunny made a ruckus. I acquired some more grooves as I permitted Sunny to create even more noise to get the attention of the oblivious pair.

We got their attention! Success! That's what I thought, anyway. Sunny too. Okaa-san turned to us. "What's gotten into you, silly bird!" She exclaimed. I felt like crying.

Well, I would have if I had tear ducts. Yuuichi told me about crying during those months after it was all over. But let's not get ahead of ourselves.

Sunny just tried to bang louder, but we couldn't come up with any way to get louder. Moreover, it seemed that they were done giving us attention. I looked back over at the dangerous man. He hadn't paid us any mind. His eyes were focused on Okaa-san.

Eventually they picked us up and kept walking. They went home for the night. We were put in the hanging stand on the veranda. It was warm outside, a good warmth. I could feel Sunny relax into it. We were both a little sleepy but Sunny said that he had seen the dangerous human follow us here. We agreed to sleep in shifts. Sunny took the first one so I went and took a short nap.

We had based the shifts off of the Shibata's normal end-of-day routine. Sunny woke me up by pecking at the spot nearest his bedtime perch. I woke Sunny up by pushing more of my 'self', as I would call it, (Though I heard the word 'soul' used later) into his perch. It was a good system until we both jolted awake via a loud scream.

Neither of us was sure whose shift it had been. It didn't matter. It sounded like Okaa-san was screaming. Sunny started squawking. I looked, eyes wide with the influx of adrenaline pulsing through my 'self' (Well, my version of adrenaline. I also heard about adrenaline from Yuuichi. And besides, it's not like I have eyes. Birdcages don't have eyes. It's more like what humans call a 'sixth sense'.) at where he was.

The reason the scream was so loud was because the veranda's door to the apartment was open and Okaa-san was outside. The man we had seen was stabbing her. My nonexistent voice was too low to be heard, but Sunny squawked for all he was worth. Then we saw Yuuichi. He was hiding under the table on the veranda looking scared. As the man stabbed Yuuichi's Okaa-san one last time and turned to him, he gained some courage.

It's amazing what a child can come up with and do. Yuuichi pulled on the man's shoelaces. He lost his balance and somehow managed to drag Yuuichi along with him as he fell off of the edge of the veranda. Yuuichi's feet managed to knock us off of our post as he flew by as well.

When we reached the ground, Sunny and I landed on top of Yuuichi. Or what looked a lot like Yuuichi. But when we looked up, we saw another Yuuichi, this one with a chain on his chest. And we saw the man, also with a chain on his chest, turning into the masked menace.

It had shocked all of us into stillness until its transformation was complete. And then, once it was, we couldn't move for other reasons. What we had faintly tasted as a bad stench coming off of this guy, marking him as dangerous, was now overbearing. It pushed us all into the road.

We thought he was going to kill us too, or eat us since he had such a big mouth and it was open and salivating. Sunny and I were scared for our lives. Yuuichi was looking up, not at the monster. He was looking at the apartment we had fallen from.

"Okaa-san." His mother's name was forever on his lips. She was dead, most likely. Even someone as widely travelled as me knows that someone doesn't survive stab wounds.

She fell next to us right after, scarily fast into the asphalt. The masked menace ate her. Yuuichi started to scream and create a scene and Sunny squawked in outrage.

Yuuichi, however, was the first to speak. "What did you do to Okaa-san? Give her back!"

The masked menace only grinned—menacingly. Hardy harr harr. No? Maliciously works too, if that's how it is. It's voice sounded like static-y radio or television. "Boy, I can't give her back right now. If you do something for me, though, maybe I can. But you have to do what I say, or you won't see your mother again."

Yuuichi was only fearful on the part of his dear Okaa-san, I understand quite well. Sunny understands quite well. But that didn't mean that we liked what came next any better.

The masked menace picked Yuuichi up and pushed him into the birdcage, into Sunny, through my tough metal bars and many layers of skin and bone. If my metal was so easy to cross, then why hadn't Sunny been able to go free? Why? But it didn't seem to matter. It was over in a matter of seconds. Sunny wasn't Sunny any more. He was being overshadowed by Shibata Yuuichi.

The menace just laughed at us and explained that he just wanted us to act like a lost bird, waiting to be taken in. That all he could say was 'I am Shibata Yuuichi.' 'Hello' or something that the humans had repeated to us enough times for them to think we had just learned it or something.

My shallow heart panged. Yes, Yuuichi was a nice little happy-go-lucky kid with a nice mom who fed Sunny and didn't bang me around and were generally good people. But that didn't mean that we wanted to have him intrude on our worn companionship like this!

But there was nothing I could do. There was nothing Sunny could do. There wasn't anything Yuuichi could do either, except follow the murderer's directions. The heartbrokenness that I felt from Yuuichi at the loss of his mother only increased as he was used as an instrument for the menace to eat the shinigami. I didn't like it very much either, and neither did Sunny, but there was nothing for us.

Then, finally, came one human with weird arms. He survived the menace, who was defeated later (much to our collective relief) by two shinigami. One of them, with hair more fiery than that first sunrise, sent Yuuichi on. We'd guessed that he had died a long time ago. But I wasn't dead (if I could die) and neither was Sunny, and they left us out.

This time, no one found us in time to save Sunny's life.

This time, I sit on the street with no one to talk to and the bones of my one true friend rotting away on my skin. This time, the torture is perhaps the worst it has ever been. This time, there seems to be no end to my loneliness and woe.