#muse;pierce

Pierce had always preferred... more traditional methods to his killings. Sure, the killing curse was convenient. But it wasn’t fun. It made the whole thing quick and easy, and impersonal.

No, Pierce wanted to feel the life drain from the person. To wrap his hands around their neck and watch as they took their last breaths. To bury a knife deep in their chest and listen to them whimper and gurgle. 

Being in prison prevented him from that human contact he craved so much. That feeling of a man trapped prone beneath him as he carved into his flesh. So the minute he escaped, the first person to cross his path was unlucky. 

He took his sweet time with this one. By time he was finished, the person was barely recognisable. 

He got to his feet, his chest heaving with heavy breaths, and tilted his head to admire his handiwork.

There was a sound deeper in the alley - the skittering of a stone across pavement. Pierce went rigid, his grip tightening on his bloodied knife and turning to the shadows.

“I know you’re there,” he crooned, “Come out. I won’t hurt you.” 

If there was one thing Pierce was good at it (besides murder, of course), it was sniffing out people who were like-minded.

It wasn’t that he was particularly good at reading people. But their surroundings, the consequences that rippled outwards from their actions - now that, that was something he noticed. 

So when several corpses showed up in his morgue with a very similar M.O., Pierce went out of his way to take note of it. All of them had been killed in a similar fashion - and, unbeknownst to the eye of a Muggle, had been killed using magic. 

Before Pierce knew it, he was following the faint magical signature left behind on one of the more recent bodies. One of his specialties were tracking spells. And he was fixated on this faceless killer - he had to meet them, had to know their motive. 

And that was how he found himself apparating to a place in the Scottish Highlands, where a swarm of swans descended on him immediately.

“Oh - bloody - bugger off!” he cursed at the birds as they squawked at him (did swans squawk?). He tried to shoo them away, but they just continued pecking at his legs and flapping their wings threateningly. He’d obviously encroached on their territory. 

“I’m warning you, you - you absolute devilspawn!”

It was amazing what a haircut could do - a trim, and suddenly Pierce was just Basil again, a functional member of society. The Muggle police force, of course, had no inkling of his past; the perks of being a renowned wizard killer was that Muggles didn’t know any better. A few fake references and a bulked up resume, and he had a job as their coroner. He was an expert on death, after all - who better to be the medical examiner? 

It thrilled him, being right under their noses, hiding in plain sight.

Pierce had a dingy flat in some old landlady’s basement who didn’t ask any questions, but he spent most of his nights at the morgue under the guise of ‘work’. When one’s entire career was dependent on corpses, the occasional extra body never really went noticed. And so, he seized the opportunity to use his workspace as a means of body disposal. 

Besides, none of the policemen came to see him in the morgue at night. They said it creeped them out. 

Pierce was in the midst of dissolving what was left of a victim with concentrated sulphuric when he heard the sound of footsteps coming down the stairs. Hastily covering the industrial sink up with a white sheet, he turned to face his uninvited guest as casually as he could.

He did not recognise the woman before him. She didn’t work there, and he was hard-pressed to remember ever meeting her before. He assumed she was a civilian, which had him exhaling on an irritated sigh. 

“You can’t be back here,” he stated. “If you have a statement for the police, please head back upstairs.”