Butterfly, Caught
a collection of unrelated short stories spun into the tale of the world

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Character(s): Harry, Voldermort
Context: muggle, crime AU
Challenges: Off the Block Competition – Butterfly, Extra hard - Extra Hard: write an AU! with either the genres western, angst, mystery, or humour. / The AU Diversity Boot Camp, #009 – charades / The If You Dare Challenge, #006 – warmongering / The Anime/Manga Quotes Boot Camp, #043 - "From one murderer to another, I'll see you in hell." – Soichiro Yagami, Death Note / The Poetry Quotes Boot Camp, #024 - "Concupiscence, anger, pride, greed, attachment: wash these out of your consciousness." - Drink the Nectar, Mirabai / The Book Quotes Boot Camp, #041 - Courage is the quality most essential to understand the Language of the World. – The Alchemist. / Plethora of Phrases Challenge, "to beat a hasty retreat" / Simply Supernatural Boot Camp, #006 – zombie / The Diagon Alley Fic Crawl Challenge, Flourish and Botts – word: missing, colour: orange, quote: "I'm battling monsters, I'm pulling you out of the burning buildings/ and you say I'll give you anything but you never come through." -Richard Siken / The A-Maze-Ing Race Challenge, whiteboard / The Numerology Challenge, zero: write about someone who uses a disguise, "So this is it, then?" / The Poetry Quotes and Numbers Challenge, 10. "When I can feel you breathing into me I, like a stone gargoyle atop some crumbling building, spring to life, a resuscitated angel."- Saul Williams
Extra notes: this AU mutated on me; it wasn't supposed to be like this. The ending hopefully explains it. :D DON'T READ THE REST OF THIS NOTE UNTIL YOU'VE READ THE END! JUST SKIP AHEAD TO THE TWO DOTS BELOW WHERE THE STORY STARTS! Got it? Good. The monster coming back from the grave isn't a walking corpse; it's all in Harry's mind. Harry's the only one holding a gun in the last scene, a smoking gun no less. Ergo he shot himself.

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He was looking to kill a guy that had already died.

That was the crux of it anyway. The bastard had lived well beyond his time and died like a wrinkled skin emptied of anything within. And this wasn't a world where ghosts came back from the dead, or where zombies broke out of their graves and wandered. If a grave was broken, it meant there was a grave robber at work. If the murders had started up again with the same distinctive pattern, it meant there was a copycat out there.

And yet the world couldn't shake the feeling of evil incarnate having returned from its grave. And he couldn't most of all, even if rationality screamed so fiercely against it. Because part of him had been waiting for this, waiting for the slow happy dream to end and reality to cease him again: the reality that had locked him into an eternal battle with the monster of a man. The world thought he'd won; said he'd won. But his life after that was quiet, as though he waited for the other shoe to drop.

And now it had dropped, and their struggle had begun again.

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The fruitless searching and chasing took him back. Took him back to the days the man had been at large and unafraid, and yet still too far to touch. It took him back to the endless dances he'd danced, each one with him being several steps behind, lagging after the man he chased, had to catch.

Slowly, as the path he stepped on became more and more soaked with blood and bits of flesh from corpses scattered in his way, had to catch turned into had to kill. His job became something personal. His chase became a thing about revenge.

But it wasn't until they finally met, face to face with all the games ended and the barriers cast aside, that he discovered the man who'd murdered his parents and made him an orphan. It was only then he discovered the man who had changed his life, made his life. The man his world had, almost since birth, centred around.

And then he killed him. He won the fight, the war. He closed the case…and with that he closed the forward progression of his life as well, because it began to wander aimlessly in the peace that followed. He chased after no-one after that: he walked, and he caught them because they simply couldn't run fast enough. He sat, because they didn't drag him after them but came to him. He waited, because time was a luxury he had gained, because the purpose of his life, his dearest wish, had been fulfilled.

Except he hadn't, and the man was afoot again.

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The man was the worst type of bastard there was. Sure, the parents had been pretty bad themselves: a whore seducing the son of a rich kid who'd decided to be a spoilt brat and ran away from home, then got cold feet when he got a girl young enough to be his daughter pregnant and went straight back to his mummy and daddy. But that wasn't all: he was a sadist of the worst kind. A man who murdered without restraint, making the messiest scenes he could simply because they were too messy to follow back to him.

He was obvious: he left his mark, knowing they wouldn't be able to catch him if he did. He made a name for himself, a name the special agents worked night and day to stop. And the man enjoyed toying with them, enjoyed the uproar he created, the bloodbath he left as obstacles in their way, the way it twisted with their minds while his remained unchanged.

The man was insane; he simply had to be, to spill that much blood and be the same he always was. A man who had no conscience. A man who feared nothing, loved nothing: only hated, hated and hated.

He who had people to love lost too much to him, and one measly victory at the end of it didn't bring them back to him.

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When his parents died, he was one and had no clue about the world, and the world had no close about the murderer either. They were the first: the first that followed a long period of dormancy where the blood that painted the quaint little cottage in Godric's Hollow was forgotten by most except those who were intimately related: him, their only son and family, and others, close friends. And he couldn't forget; wouldn't forget. He vowed to find the man responsible, vowed to find out why, why his parents had to die such horrible deaths, what they'd done to deserve it.

They'd done absolutely nothing. The man had just seen something in his then baby green eyes and decided on the person who would kill him.

And the moment he got his badge and gun, the game began. Another murder, just as bloody and horrific at the first, appeared before him, and if he hadn't been so well trained he'd have been refined to the psychiatric word for a long time after.

But he'd been prepared, though not for that. Not to be thrown into a case like that, but that was his first assignment and he devoted himself to it. He did his best, thinking he would save other victims before they paid too high a price, thinking he would follow this twisting trail of blood and many many after until, one day, he found the murderer of his parents, and by then he'd be too old or too frail and he'd retire to a little house of loneliness.

He didn't expect to find the man before he was ready, before he'd even shot a man and killed him or put him behind bars. He hadn't expected that first blood trail to be the only one he needed to lead him to the murderer. He hadn't expected a man who'd seen his face as a baby and left him with nothing but a scar to be waiting for him.

And he hadn't really expected to kill the man with the flame of hatred strong in his heart, but that was what happened. He'd been shot as well, almost fatal but not quite enough to drop him dead – just enough to put him in the hospital for a long long time after and give him time to mourn all the lives that had been lost just because such a monster had been toying with him.

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They were the same: the murders. The parents he had: the ones who'd adopted him this time, since his birth ones had already been snatched away. Then others: people he'd never known, never met, and others who were the closest to him in the world. They left a bloody trail, and he felt the flame of vengeance burn in him again as he chased after it, faster than before. And he was faster, because he'd ran that path before, because he knew what lay at the end of it and he had a purpose again.

The victims didn't go missing for long; he was on the move the moment the news reached his ears and their bodies were waiting for him. His mark was waiting for him: large, obvious, grinning. And he'd grit his teeth and give chase even though the path had died and the trail gone cold until the prelude to another blood-splattering death arose.

The man, the monster of a man wasn't running away. Just like he'd never run away before. He was leading him on a merry chase, and he the obedient puppy dog of fate was following along.

And he'd continue following, because this was what he lived for, what he existed for. It didn't matter if the man had already died once – whether he was the same, or different, or just a figment of his imagination. He needed to die again. One of them needed to die again.

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They met again, and it was the same man oh my god it was the same man and this time it was him bleeding on the floor, a bullet in his gut and a smoking gun in his hand. And the other man's flesh was peeling away to show where the worms had bitten him, where the enzymes in the dirt had digested him, and it was something so disgusting the special agent had no words for it and he was going to turn into that too.

But, at the same time, it was over. He was dead. They were both dead. The sky was no longer red but orange and giving way to the rising sun behind them – behind both of them even though they were facing each other.

He'd killed his parents' murderer – the first and only person he'd ever killed, without asking the questions he'd meant to ask, wanted to ask, had to ask even though emergency had stripped the protocol to its bare boxers. He'd needed that closure, and maybe that's why he hadn't been able to live afterwards.

But a corpse raised from the grave to kill him couldn't give him any closure; just enact their revenge. Even if he wasn't holding a gun or any sort of weapon to do it with. It wasn't last time: last time they'd both fired, they'd both fallen. This time it was only him.

The murderer had won. They'd be meeting in hell to settle the score.