Butterflies

Chapter 21

Sitting alone in the middle of the room, Butcher read the page in his hands thoroughly. The one describing the place he woke up. He never thought he'd see her face again, the same woman he'd loved for years of his life. What he also never thought, was that there would be a little boy running past her, calling Homelander his father.

As soon as the moment passed, memorizing only the details of her shocked face and the pine tress around them, Butcher woke up on concrete. All he had were the clothes on his back, and a Tony Cicero's adjacent to him. Looking around everything was normal, families going about their day, confused why a man was lying on the ground. His muscles ached as he stood up, a headache of a hundreds drums hitting his brain. Where the hell was he? He ran into the restaurant first, being greeted politely by the hostess who didn't seem to mind his rough entrance.

"Welcome to Endless Pasta Week at Tony Cicero's," she said.

"Where the fuck am I?" He charged forward.

"You're at Tony Cicero's," the woman kept her sweetness up.

"No, no. What fucking city am I in?" He corrected.

"Uh, Fort Wayne," the woman began to slowly become concerned.

"You got a bit of paper, something I can write with?" He began to panic, "a pen anything? Ah fuck it."

When the woman fumbled over a pen and paper, Butcher rushed over to the crayons and colouring sheets. He flipped one over and began to write everything he could remember about where he was. The yellow homes to the trees, nothing that could ever indicate where they were, but enough for a lead. A TV above him was playing the news just as one story in particular rained interest. As his name slipped from the news anchors mouth, Butcher paused. He was being framed for the murder of Madelyn Stillwell, his picture beside hers on the screen. The anchor continued to speak, but one name had extra care. Talks of a defected Supe. Violet Henry.

And there was only one reason Butcher had in mind as to why. They had her. Why else would they go through so much effort to skip over her name in the report. When he woke she was the first person he looked for, the first person his mind could think of. Until it was replaced with her. Becca. He slowly turned to the hostess, who showed a face of fear as she looked at the suspected killer. And he couldn't blame her. So he grabbed the paper and rushed out the building, to find anyway he could get back to the only people who would help.

He stared at the paper one last time, his only connection to the woman he loves, and sniffled. Violet sat next to M.M. as they deciphered the chip in her neck. She was lucky to have friends who understood coding, as her original plan was the squash the tiny menace all together. Frenchie and Kimiko was sat with them at the table, Frenchie going through his phone while Kimiko wrote away in her pad.

"You're certain you disabled the tracker?" M.M. confirmed.

"Yeah I broke it remember? With the... Powers," she said, shuffling closer to get a look at the screen.

M.M. stared at open files and codes, numbers and letters scrambling across the screen until their basic code was formed. All of which undescribable. Violet thought it was her extremely limited knowledge of code that was the reason why she didn't understand anything, but when she turned to M.M., he was just as dumbfounded.

"You got anything...?" She asked.

"This shit is crazy. I've never seen code like this before," he said, Frenchie's head perking up, "okay so I gathered that this has to be the same shit as that collar they had you in right? But this other code makes no sense. It shouldn't work this way."

"What do you mean?"

"Look at this," he pointed at the screen, "that's not how you formulate code. The brackets, the words, I can't fucking do anything with this," he leaned back in his chair.