butterfly collector, rated pg. mikage-centric (garbage challenge). series-set. 572 words.
(you've achieved your aim by making the walking lame)
He is not an entomologist, but he can identify almost any butterfly that is brought before him. In one of the disused classrooms of Nemuro Memorial Hall, there is a large collection of butterflies sprawled upon their corkboards. Even though they are so long dead he knows they struggled against the pins that held them down, struggled even as the chloroform took their small minds somewhere far distant from the places where they died.
Sometimes Mikage goes to look at the butterflies. He likes to kid himself that it is a mere scientific past-time, going to the abandoned science classroom and looking at the specimen boxes upon the wall. In the end he knows it is not. He can stand before them all he likes, ungloved hands clasped behind his back as he recites the names like a mantra of forgotten potency, but he knows that it is about more than the names of a few dead butterflies.
He does wonder, upon occasion, who collected these butterflies in the first place. There is no name in the corner of the boxes, the same way there are no small hand-written cards identifying the butterflies and stating when they had been collected. Nobody claimed to have collected these butterflies. He wonders why it should bother him even as he names the dead insects for the collector who did not.
These butterflies remind him of those who come to his seminar, of course. He collects them himself, then he drives the knowledge of who they could really be through their hearts like the pin of a butterfly collector as they struggle in the net that is his elevator. He doesn't chloroform them before he uses those pins, nor does he feel any guilt to see their pain. Pain is cleansing, after all. Pain leads to a greater understanding of oneself than anybody who has never felt it could ever hope to comprehend.
There's another place he visits often in Nemuro Memorial Hall, similar in its way to the butterfly collection in the disused science classroom. It is a corridor not far from his office, painted pristine white and hung with photograph upon photograph. Each picture is only in shades of grey, not in any real colour at all. It is upon this wall that Mikage hangs his own butterfly collection, without either name nor date. The faces are nameless, their quests timeless…the same way the real dead butterflies are without name nor time in the distant classroom. The symmetry amuses his ordered mind as he uses another nail to hang another photograph.
Yes, this butterfly he recreated may not have succeeded, but science always has been about the fact that no experiment can ever be quite free from human error. More trials, more work, and the aim he wants to achieve will come to fruition…like a butterfly, it will emerge from the chrysalis, take flight in the skies so open and wide for its simple, dazzling beauty. Some butterflies are designed, after all, to be nothing more than specimens in a box. Others are destined to fly free and unhindered in the sky for all time.
He'll bring eternity to Mamiya by taking those other butterflies down from the sky, using them to give Mamiya the wings with which he can live eternally. He's the butterfly collector, after all, and only the butterfly collector can decide which butterflies will fall, and which will fly forever.