You’re being unmade by a ghost—touched by something that looked like a man but felt like nothing at all. OR: You're having sex with Johan except you're more scared than horny.
EXPLICIT CONTENT BELOW. Read with discretion.
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The room is suffocatingly quiet, the only sound is the ragged hitch of your own breath against the stillness of his.
Having sex with Johan feels like having a mannequin doll maneuver you as if you're not human too, as if you're less than a thing yourself.
Indeed, you feel your center quivering as he moves with a slow deliberate rhythm—that you don't deny. His fingers are covered by your essence, too; a heavy, grounding weight in and out your core that pins your whole body to the mattress. He smiles whenever he feels you clench on him, or whenever you moan a bit too loud. He teases you just right whenever he feels your hips trying to meet his pace.
But there's something wrong, something you can't deny.
It's not that he's rough. In fact, he's terrifyingly gentle, but it's rather the gentleness of a collector handling a rare, fragile antique.
Beyond its physical sensation which is, by far, feeling normal so far (like you're having a sex with a normal person and you're positive you're going to cum), the texture of this experience is wrong because of Johan himself. There's a distinct lack of humanity in the friction. His skin is too smooth, flawless to the point of feeling synthetic—like cool, polished porcelain against your own sweat-dampened flesh. How can you not let it bother you when his smile is so flat, his teases empty, and his eyes utterly void? Hell, you can't even bring yourself to look at him in the eye when he pulled out his fingers and licked it clean before you. More than anything, you just bent your head away from him and let out a moan in hopes he wouldn't notice that small moment of wanting to stop out of jitters.
He doesn’t fumble, doesn't gasp, doesn’t lose his rhythm when he lined up his dick to your entrance either. In fact, as soon as he slides himself in your core, he lets out a ragged exhale—and this, by far, is the most human response he has ever given yet.
"Are you okay?" Johan asks while slowly pushing himself in.
No, I'm scared. My heart is beating fast. I'm scared. "Y-yes, ah—Johan. Feels good," you cling to his shoulders in support. "Please keep going."
"Yes," he cups your cheek then, "my good girl."
Physically, the remark made you wetter. But deep in your mind, the condition of you being his brought overwhelming fear to your nerves. To belong to someone this inhuman? You close your eyes shut, hoping he doesn't sense the voices in your head screaming, okay, let's stop this. Oh no, stop, stop. Please stop. I'm scared!
When he feels you have adjusted to his size, he starts moving with the hydraulic precision of a machine, every shift of his weight calculated for maximum efficiency.
He reaches out, fingers wrapping around your wrist. Only that he doesn't hold your hand; he moves it like its will lie upon his and not yours. He lifts your arm and places it above your head, adjusting the angle slightly as if he were posing a mannequin in a shop window to catch the best light.
You lie there, breath hitching, feeling less like a sexual partner and more like a prop. An accessory to his existence.
Then he asks, "Is this better?"
Stop. Just fucking stop. "Yeah, hah, this is good."
Why stop, when he sounded polite? You better cease asking yourself, however, because deep inside you know: he wasn't asking if you felt pleasure, he was asking if the mechanism was functioning correctly.
God, it shouldn’t have felt like this.
To distract yourself from vocalizing your looming regret, you stare up at him instead, right at his beautiful, sculpted face that showed no strain, no flush of desire. With your mouth open, his hand locks to your jaw—he tilts your chin, while his other hand shifts your hips so he can thrust deeper.
"Look me in the eye," he whispers. It's not a request.
Oh no. Oh no, oh no, oh no.
You force your eyes open, meeting his. That's the hardest part—and he doesn't close his eyes either. He doesn't lose himself in the sensation the way you're beginning to (only that it's difficult to reach your peak when you're this scared).
But you can't make it known.
Of course you can't; Johan is watching you—he's studying the way your breath catches in your throat, the way your fingers dig fruitlessly into his shoulders. You have to keep going and pretend you're feeling nothing but pleasure, even if his gaze is pale, abyssal blue, clear and unclouded by lust. Even if he's looking at you right now not like a lover, but a man observing a fascinating collapsing mountain.
He shifts, presses closer, and the sudden friction drawing a sharp gasp from your lips. He absorbs the sound, a faint, ghost of a smile touching his lips.
"You're trembling," he notes, voice steady, devoid of the raggedness tearing yours apart.
Your confusion then starts, whether to feel more of the physical pleasure or the emotional fear.
He reaches for your other hand as he lurches, interlacing his fingers to yours to pin you further to the bed. His grip is firm, inescapable (much to Johan being petite and feeble-looking, moreso when naked). He's not just touching you this time around; he's dismantling you, taking you apart piece by piece through this physical act to rummage what you really feel inside.
The pleasure is there, sharp and undeniable, but it's edged with fear that prevents you to fully relish the moment. To be this close to him is to be consumed.
And he can't know you're bothered by that. He can't know you're scared.
You arch into him, seeking an end to the tension, but he controls the pace, he keeps you suspended on that precipice, he forces you to endure his complete, undivided attention.
Even as he lets out a short moan then spills inside, he doesn't let you move your hands away, doesn't let your eyes stray far from his. Trapped, bound together, all to be consumed by him.
As if he's curious to see how the human body bends and reacts while he remains entirely separate from it. As if he's not human himself.
You're being unmade by a ghost—touched by something that looked like a man but felt like nothing at all.
˚ · .─ 𝐒𝐘𝐍𝐎𝐏𝐒𝐈𝐒: YOU, a college student at Frankfurt, start receiving emails that embarked on the dim of normalcy you worked so hard to build on your own; starting from a message claiming you as the light amidst the hell of Kinderheim, who came just in time to bring a paradise of doomsday and grime, something that pleased the monster inside him. Initially, you thought of reporting the email as spam until another ding came: the monster, so pleased and full, aims to return the favor—something to flesh out the paradise you had granted him back at Kinderheim.
˚ · .─ 𝐈𝐍𝐅𝐎: Johan Liebert/Fem!reader | 6.8k words
˚ · .─ 𝐖𝐀𝐑𝐍𝐈𝐍𝐆𝐒: explicit language, canon-typical violence, stalking, manipulation, obsessive tendencies, paranoia, abduction, threats of sexual assault, among many things that might arise
“They had joy, we had none; all had seasons in the sun
but the oil and the fire have burnt all and now are gone.
They had joy, we had none; all had seasons in the sun
but the oil and the fire leave us nothing but to die.”
Seasons in the Sun contrafactum by Rie, your resident author! (Listen on BANDLAB)
The dream is no longer a film stuck in the corner of your head. It doesn’t flicker anymore with bad tracking and skipped frames. It’s instead a surround-sound immersion of embers popping like gunshots, including the heat curling the hairs on your arms, including Daddy’s voice—not screaming, only wet with the blood bubbling in his throat. You remember the smell of him, of his blood and the burnt half of his body. It coats your tongue as if you consumed his flesh raw the moment you picked up the debris brought upon by none but Kinderheim 511’s fall.
You then remember the weight of the rock in your hands—a slab of masonry half as heavy as your ten-year-old body. You remember the drag of gravity as you lifted it, the way your muscles screamed, and the ragged, tearing sound of his name leaving your mouth as you brought it down.
Daddy!
But this time, there’s no gasp. No sweat-drenched sheets tangling around your legs like vines. You don’t hurt, nor are you tormented upon waking up. You stare blankly at the ceiling of your captivity, the white plaster smooth and unbroken, counting the invisible fissures in the paint.
You wake up, finally, not as the confused college student who wanted to be rescued, but as the girl who held the rock.
The "glitch" in your brain is gone. That static hum that has protected you for a decade—the white noise that allowed you to drink coffee with Frieda and study for exams—has been replaced by a high-definition horror. The horror settles in your marrow, familiar and cold, as if you swallowed that rock whole ten years ago and it has been sitting in your stomach ever since, waiting to be digested.
The room is still. The air conditioning hums a low, artificial note that grates against the newfound clarity of your mind. It smells of stale air and expensive fabric softener. A sterile, hotel-like scent that feels violent in its neutrality. You lie there, cataloging the sensations of your own body—the pulse in your wrist, the dryness of your throat, the phantom sensation of grit and dust on your palms.
It’s not a nightmare anymore. It’s just history. Unfortunate as it is, history is something you can’t simply be woken up from.
Not long after, the shift in the air pressure tells you that you are, in fact, not alone. You turn your head, heavy on the pillow, and finally acknowledge him.
Johan is sitting by your bed. He’s in a chair pulled uncomfortably close, legs crossed, watching you as you fully wake up. He looks smaller in the daylight filtering through the heavy curtains; less like a myth, more like a boy you once held dear. You take the time to notice him—really notice him—dismantled into parts.
It’s curious to see him this way. Monster to others, human to you. Made of skin and bone and blood. Only to you.
You reach out, arm feeling heavy. Your fingers find the scar on his thumb the same way eyes find constellations in a black sky—deliberate, unafraid of how small you are against the vastness of what he is. You now remember, much to your horror, that this was a scratch he acquired while sleeping atop the roots in the woods of Weißensee, back when you were both ghosts running from the Kinderheim 511’s fire. It has healed into a tiny, white scar.
He doesn’t flinch when you touch him. He doesn't pull away, nor does he lean in. He simply exists under your touch, as if a statue breathing. For a moment, his smile is a question, a small quirk of the lips that suggests he’s reading the electricity jumping from your fingertip to his skin.
You then bring your hands to his face, to trace the exact line of his jaw that’s sharp enough to cut. You count the pale lashes framing those eyes that reflect the vast nothingness.
"Slept well?" he asks, his voice thin as it always is, carrying no weight yet filling the room completely. "You seem to be in a lighter mood now."
You don't respond. The tranquility feels strange on your face, stiff and foreign, devoid of the mask you’ve worn for ten years. The mask of the good girl, the survivor. It cracks and falls away, leaving only the raw truth underneath. You look at him, seeing him in a completely different light this time around. Neither a monster nor a stranger.
Just…
"Johan."
"Hm?"
"Sorry," you say. The words fall out like flat stones dropped into a deep well. "For leaving you at Herr and Frau Richter’s house that night."
Johan’s face gleams. A look of pure, unadulterated satisfaction. A brightness that rivals the sun trying to push through the curtains. It is perhaps the best way to tell him that there’s no more memory left to recall. No more nightmares to relive for you are a hundred percent back to him. Flesh and blood. Body and soul.
As the silence permeates the room, heavy with nothing but your empty faces, the years dissolve. Johan and you go back to your child-like selves. The tiny, frail Johan in his oversized polo. The bubbly flower you were, hiding a rock behind your back.
And there you are reunited in the confines of this room, the only two people in the world who know the smell of an oil well fire.
The breakfast after your sweet reunion is a quiet affair, executed with the precision of a church service with you as the god.
The table is a small makeshift thing pushed against the far wall, covered in a white cloth that hangs a little too long on the sides. It’s set with a domesticity that tries to be more relevant than the reality of your situation. There’s expensive coffee brewed by Johan for you, its steam curling lazily into the stagnant air. Slices of fruit are arranged in a fan—strawberries, melon, kiwi—and a warm bread lays in a woven basket, and a small pot of jam that catches the light like a jewel.
It’s a "Hansel and Gretel" scene after the witch has been burned. But no witch is to be found here, just two children who burnt their world to shreds.
Johan sits opposite you. He spreads butter on a slice of toast, his movements graceful. He treats you with a terrifying reverence today. He doesn’t look at you anymore as a prisoner he has dragged into his hell of an existence; he looks at you as an artist looks at their completed masterpiece. He watches you sip your coffee, watches you chew, as if your very survival to it is a testament to his will.
After all, you’re no longer the prey here. You feel the shift in your own posture. You're the only person who stood by his side when the world tried to burn him and he brought it back tenfold. The one who made him outlive the grey concrete belly of Kinderheim 511.
"Where are they?" You gesture vaguely to the door, to the hallway beyond the house you used to regard as your prison. "The others. The men who stand guard when you’re not here. The ones who bring the food."
Johan doesn’t look up. "Gone," he answers simply. "We’re alone."
"Because?"
"We need to change places soon. Staying in one place too long creates a pattern; patterns are easily tracked,” he explains, his tone conversational, as if discussing the likelihood of rain. "And we have enemies who are very good at tracking them."
He looks up, his eyes locking onto yours. The blue is piercing, stripping away any pretense. He calls you by the name you’ve been using for the last ten years—your "normal" name—but he says it humorously, wrapping the syllables in irony. It sounds like a nickname for a pet that has run away. "Your dearest people are quite persistent, no?”
The words land softly, but they carry the weight of a threat. Grimmer. Frieda. Tenma. Lunge.
Johan sets his knife down. He reaches into the inner pocket of his coat. He brings out a stack of photographs—candid, small glossy rectangles. The chemical smell of them wafts across the table, mixing with the scent of the coffee he brewed.
Your brain almost short-circuited. Seeing their faces not long after recalling how dirty you are is no good. And Johan lays them out on your makeshift table like tarot cards because he knows.
The first one is Grimmer. He was standing at a bus stop, his back hunched in that oversized sweater that always looks like it belongs to a larger, happier man. He was taping a piece of paper to the glass of the shelter. Even in the grainy distance of the photo, you could see the desperate set of his shoulders, the way his head hung low. It was your missing poster. You could see the blurry black-and-white photo of your college ID on it.
The second is Frieda. She was leaving her grandmother’s house. Her hand was covering her mouth, and her eyes were red and swollen. In another photograph of her, she was handing a flyer to a passerby who wasn't looking her way, who was brushing past her grief with indifference. You could almost hear the hitch in her breath.
The third is Tenma. He was sitting alone in a train station café, a cup of untouched tea in front of him. His head was bowed over a newspaper you knew he wasn’t reading. He looked exhausted, hollowed out by guilt, his face drawn and grey. He looked like a man carrying the weight of every life he couldn't save.
The last is Lunge. He was in the distance, standing on a street corner, speaking to no one. His suit was sharp, rigid. His fingers were twitching in midair, typing on an invisible keyboard, processing data, hunting the ghost that you were. He looked terrifyingly competent, a machine built for pursuit.
Each photograph is a question you don’t want to answer. They’re windows into a world you have forfeited not long ago. A world of warmth, of concern, of people who worry when you don't come home.
"Why are you showing me this?" you ask, your voice trembling despite the numbness you felt until this moment. Johan watches your reaction closely, leans forward—elbows on the table, chin resting on his interlaced fingers. "There’s no reason to bring these to me."
He holds your gaze so gently you almost hate him for it. It’s the look of a parent explaining a difficult truth to a toddler who doesn't understand why the sun has to go down.
"Because you still believe they will save you."
“I don't.”
He brings two photographs closer to you, sliding them across the tablecloth until they touch your fingertips. The paper feels cool and slick against your skin. One contains Grimmer’s sad smile. The other contains Frieda’s tear-stricken eyes.
"And because they still believe you want to be saved."
“They can’t.”
Then, gentle as ever, he slides their photos right into your palm, curling your fingers over it like a closing door.
"It’s sweet, isn’t it?" he muses. "A lie both sides agree to keep alive."
You look down at the glossy paper crinkling in your fist. You can feel the heat of Frieda’s tears through the image. You remember the warmth of Grimmer’s palm as he patted your head. They’re real. They’re good. They belong to the light.
And you’re sitting here, eating jam with your long-lost bestfriend, feeling the blood of your father on your hands. You’re the darkness they’re trying to shine a light into, not realizing that the darkness is infinite.
The dissonance tears at your chest. It’s a ripping sensation between who you were and who you are. You look up at Johan, defiance flaring in the ash of your resignation. He showed it to you desiring a reaction, after all, and so a reaction he will get.
"I would choose them," you glare. Then louder, "I would—even a hundred times over," you blurt out, the words rushing out before you can check them. "Even if it means I'll never get to recollect my memories with you. Even if I forget the fire that saved us, I would choose them."
Johan looks at you for a while. The smile never leaves his face. It doesn't falter, doesn't tighten. It just hangs there, suspended in the silence that permeates the room.
Then he chuckles. Soft, devoid of humor. "And yet," he says, leaning back in his chair, "you can't take it in your heart to repeat it while looking me in the eye."
You open your mouth to argue, to scream it at him, to tell him he’s wrong. But the words die in your throat. You look at his blue eyes—the very mirror of your own horrors—and there you realize how right he is.
Saying it would mean denying the part of you that held the rock. Saying it would mean lying about the relief you felt when your father ceased his incessant threats against you and Johan because he's dead on the ground. Saying it would mean pretending you didn't choose Johan in the fire ten years ago. You chose him then. You’re choosing him now.
You find it funny that you feel this way right now, when a life where you live with Johan is all your naive self had ever wanted. Isn't that the sharpest irony? To finally hold the answer you begged for, long after the wishing self has perished.
"Why did you drag me back?” you say quietly. "I escaped. I made a life of my own. Why?"
"Well, for starters, you weren't free." Johan picks up his tea, blowing softly on the steam. "You were asleep. You were walking through a dream. I woke you up so we could finish the story."
"Finish the story?" you repeat, confused. "What ending do you plan for it?"
Johan doesn’t answer. He turns his head, looking out at the window where the curtains are slightly parted. Through the slit, you can see the bustling streets of a town you don’t even know. People walking to work, cars driving by, life happening in a mundane, beautiful rhythm that you’re no longer part of.
If Johan intended to do that just to distract you, then he’s successful.
After all, now that you think of it, you have lost track of time and space since Johan took you here. The calendar in your head has dissolved. And how much development has occurred within you since then? Now, as you watch the light hit his profile, illuminating the sharp angle of his nose and the curve of his lip, you realize you’re not afraid of him anymore.
The fear has burned away, leaving only a cold, hard clarity.
What sends shivers up your spine is the fact that you really, genuinely understand him now.
You realize that your entire "normal" life for the last decade was a lie. The college classes, the part-time job, the laughter with Frieda and your friends, the stress over exams—it was all a performance. A play put on by a little girl trying to convince herself she hadn't burned down her childhood. It was a costume you wore to hide the scars.
This—sitting with your Johan, surrounded by the evidence of your friends' despair, discussing the mechanics of patterns and the futility of care—is the only truth. This is the only place where you don't have to pretend you didn't help spread the fires, the only place where your bloodied hands make sense.
When breakfast is over, Johan cleans everything up. He stacks the plates, wipes the crumbs, and restores the dining area to its pristine, impersonal state. And then, the day continues with its domestic pantomime.
Amid the domesticity of it all, you do nothing but look down at the glossy photograph of Frieda, Grimmer, among others, still lying where Johan had left it. You pick it up. The student you were—the one who admired these people—is gone. The sight of Frieda's bright, soft face now inspires a cold pity. Her earnestness feels like foolishness. You feel no affection, only an agitating detachment from the idea of goodness that she represented. You set the photo face down.
The need to confront the physical, final consequence of your patricide, the very act that unlocked this new self, is urgent. It’s the final knot to cut before the complete surrender.
“I need to know where the body went,” you say, the words surprisingly steady, echoing the same flat tone Johan often uses. You don't refer to him as my father or daddy this time around. “The man I killed. Where is he buried?”
Johan pauses, his hand hovering over the wet counter. He doesn’t question the request or subject you to another long, silent appraisal.
“A pilgrimage, hm,” he simply turns and nods. “Very well. We’ll go together; lead the way, wear your mask.”
The mask. The clothes of the dutiful college student you had worn for the last ten years. You walk to the closet and pull out simple, civilian clothes—a dark sweater, plain jeans—something Johan would also wear. The fabric feels alien against your skin, less like protection and more like a costume you are putting on for a role you’ve just quit.
Stepping out into the street is a shock that hits harder than any fear you felt in the room. After all it’s too bright. The early afternoon sun is a harsh, judgmental light. The noise of traffic, the blaring horns, the random shouting of voices—it is all too loud, too random. The structured, silent isolation of the room with Johan, with its predictable rituals and clean lines, felt safer.
You walk through the crowds. Johan walks beside you, easily matching your pace—a silent, invisible anchor.
Not long after, you arrive at the old, abandoned churchyard at Lichtenberg, just near the village where the fire had happened years ago. It’s overgrown, forgotten, smelling of damp soil and rocks.
You walk the rows of tilting headstones, reading names, dates, small, sentimental epitaphs. You search for your father’s name. Johan remains at the iron fence, a dark silhouette against the brighter sky, allowing you to search alone, knowing what you’ll find.
Unfortunately, you find graves of other victims of the fire whose names you barely remember instead—the matron, a measly Kinderheim janitor, and more people erased in the same blaze. After circling twice, your search ends. The stone you seek, the final marker of the crime that defines you, doesn’t even exist here.
You turn to Johan, desperation finally breaking your carefully constructed facade. “He has to be here. I hit him with the stone. He was dead.”
And you can’t fathom the fact that you couldn’t find anything. Not finding anything would mean you didn't just kill the man; you, with Johan, erased him from history. There’s no physical tie to the “normal” world left. There is only the quiet place.
You turn your back from the grave and Johan, a silent plea to go back to that quiet place. For now, at least.
By evening, the quiet place is new. After a brief conversation between Johan and one of his associates (the conversation consisted of two words and a handshake), Johan leads you to a small, unassuming hotel at the edge of Lichtenberg—anonymous, clean, utterly forgettable. The small suite has a built-in kitchen and sink, another piece of the domestic pantomime. You have dinner with Johan, the silence between you now heavy, not with tension but with complicity. The world outside is receding rapidly.
You stand at the small sink in the corner of the room, washing the dishes you and Johan used. The water is warm, the soap suds slick and white on your skin. It bubbles up over your wrists, smelling of lemon and chemicals. It reminds you of the foam in the fire extinguishers back at the Kinderheim 511, the ones that you made sure would never work. You remember cutting the hoses.
Here, at the expanse of the kitchen room, your hands look normal. Awfully, terribly normal. Ten fingers wrapped with veins and covered with skin. But you just feel what lies beneath them. You know the bone structure that absorbed the shock of the impact when you brought the debris down on your father's skull. You know the muscles that tensed to deliver the killing blow. Why are you thinking of it now when you have plates to put at the rack?
Johan appears beside you. He doesn't startle you. Turns out he’s offering a towel.
You reach for it, but before you can take it, he reaches out and takes your wet hands on his own.
He begins to wipe your hands dry for you.
It’s a slow, intimate process. Johan dries each finger with deliberate care, rubbing the towel over your knuckles, your palms, the spaces between your fingers. He’s gentle with it, meticulous as if he’s cleaning a blessed relic. You stand there, paralyzed by the contact, watching his head bent over your hands.
What you feel then isn’t cleaning. Quite the opposite, in fact. It flows from his skin to yours, a dark current connecting you both. You believe you’re just as dirty as he is now. You’re two vessels filled with the same black oil, spilled from the same well, bounded by the same fires.
"Before the building fell," Johan starts softly, his eyes focused on the task of drying your hands, "you saw me being attacked by the teachers who were against Kinderheim 511’s fall.” Then, ever so softly his eyes lift to you. “You saw me being called a monster. You saw me bleeding."
He pauses, thumbing over the pulse in your wrist. It jumps against his touch, a traitorous beat.
“Do you know why I was being treated as such that night?”
You shake your head. All you knew back then was that they’re bad, bad people for manhandling a frail child like Johan.
"The teachers saw what I could become if they let me be. They saw the end of the world in my eyes. And yet there you were—shielding me as if your life depended on it too. What did you say again?"
He looks up, his eyes wide and innocent, mocking the memory with his purity. "You told me, ‘We’ll see the fireworks together.’"
He laughs—that hollow, breathy sound that doesn’t belong to any child you used to know. It’s the sound of wind whistling through the ribs of a skeleton.
"Nobody else would've done that for me. Even Anna never said that. She left when she saw who I really was. She ran into the night. You didn’t. That’s why you’re here now. That’s why you’re now the only one who matters."
The silence stretches, taut—it is until a chuckle escapes your lips. You sound disjointed, bordering on hysterical. You laugh as if you both share the same humor, as if destroying those lives is a private joke between childhood sweethearts.
Now that you recall it, all you can see is how stupid it all was. How naive.
Then, you pull your hands away from his.
“You see, Johan, if I’d known what you’d become—what I would become," you meet his gaze, "I would have let ourselves die with Da—" you cut yourself off. The word Daddy still leaves a bitter taste in your mouth, a flavor of ash and old pennies, "—I would've let us die with that man."
"Liar."
He steps closer, grasping both your hands this time to pull you even further. The space between you evaporates. You can smell Johan this way—sulfur soap, coffee beans, and something underlying it all, something cold and old like deep earth.
"Say it again, then. Look me in the eye and say you would have let me, the only person who can stay beside you, burn with him."
You look up. You try to form the words. I would've left you. I would’ve let you die. But your mouth remembers the taste of smoke before the words can form. Your heart remembers the frantic, desperate need to protect the small, frail little Johan. The way he looked at you then—like you were the only real thing in the world. And he knows it. He can see the truth sitting behind your teeth. He can see the loyalty that was forged in the fire.
When you don’t answer, he smiles sweetly at you and bends his head sideward, a mockery of curiosity.
"Do you know what you were?" he murmurs. "Why they kept you alive after the Kinderheim 511 teachers were divided in half, and the majority of them wanted to get rid of me because ‘I was too dangerous’?"
All eyes, ears out. You crave the validation of your own damnation. You want him to say it.
When you don't answer, he asks, "You didn’t notice in some of the quizzes we did together?"
You remember how everything he said felt, but oh, there's absolutely nothing of the quizzes in your memory.
"You let them use your hands when mine were tied down," Johan continues, his voice hypnotic, weaving a spell around you. Your eyes widen. "You thought you were saving me. But you were just proving them right—that the best monsters are to have their own matchsticks."
He laughs, a laugh too quiet to echo.
You remember nothing of them, yes, but the phantom sensation of doing things you didn't understand, of hurting other Kinderheim 511 kids because he needed you to, of being the conduit for his will—they felt too real to disregard. The guilt is a physical weight in your stomach. Johan right now isn’t lying.
He releases your hands. They fall to your sides, heavy and useless.
“Let’s try again tomorrow,” Johan tells you. “Perhaps other cemeteries have that man's corpse.”
As soon as the sun rose, you and Johan travelled to another cemetery. This time, it’s a much more crowded one.
The unfamiliar street is alive. You see a woman adjusting her scarf against the wind. You see a man parking a bicycle. You see a couple laughing, their heads thrown back in a shared moment of joy.
They look like aliens.
A wave of vertigo hits you. How are they walking? How are they breathing? Don't they know the ground is just a thin crust over a pit of fire? You look at their mundane movements and they feel performative, absurd, as if they’re actors on a set that’s about to be struck. You’re the only one who can see the boom mics and the wires. You’re the only one who knows the genre of this world is tragedy.
On top of that, the search here is yet another feverish attempt. You’re surrounded by hundreds of names, yet you desperately scan for the one that signifies closure only to no avail. Another cemetery you go. Nothing. Then another cemetery. Nothing. You searched for the world to acknowledge the gravity of the sin you committed, and it flat out refused as a punishment.
Finally, you can’t stand it. You turn to Johan, eyes dead and your voice nowhere to be found. The cold composure of the afternoon finally shatters.
Johan gives you nothing. Nothing but a flat plain smile.
“You see,” Johan walks over, his expression utterly serene as he examines another plot. “The fire consumed most of the building,” his voice clinical, detached from the emotional weight of the event. “The authorities categorized many of the bodies as ‘unidentified remains’ or ‘cremated by fire.’ Your father was erased by the same event you created. He has no resting place.”
Indeed, you and him didn’t just commit murder; you succeeded in an act of absolute erasure.
The lack of a grave is not a failure; it is the final, undeniable truth.
“He is just ash. He exists only in our memories now. There is nothing left to go back to,” he confirms, as if your face is saying your horror outloud.
And indeed, the world outside spins faster; it starts receding away from you. The sound of the wind, the scraping of the shovel by a measly cemetery boy, the gentle breeze—it’s all becoming distant noise. You need a tether. You instinctively reach for Johan's hand—not for affection, not for passion, but for grounding. His hand is the only thing that feels real, structured, and true in this chaotic, hostile world of the living.
“Then let’s go,” you whisper, After all, there’s no physical tie to the normal world left to anchor you. The past is ash, and the present is built only on the shared, solid foundation of your sin.
“Where do you want to go?” Johan asks, his voice soft.
This is the question he had longed to ask you back when you two were still trapped within the confines of Kinderheim 511. To have the capacity to decide whatever and wherever. He has waited his whole life to finally ask you this—as equals, as partners.
“Somewhere far from here.”
The drive passes in a blur of gray highway and rain. Inside the car, the silence is absolute, not empty but heavy with the new covenant between you. You watch his hands on the wheel—steady, casual, the hands of a partner driving home rather than a monster transporting his accomplice. It is the most terrifyingly mundane thing you have ever seen. By afternoon, the car stops at a small, anonymous hotel, and the domestic pantomime begins again.
The afternoon light in your new place thins quickly, bleeding out into a bruised purple dusk. The silence in the room, already quiet as it is, has thickened.
The question—which had lurked quietly in the back of your mind during the car ride as the streets began to look familiar—now coils violently, a tangible weight pressing against your eardrums: Why? Why are you two back in Frankfurt?
The suitcases, recently removed from the car, now sit like inert prophecies in the room. The heap of bags seem to hold breath as well, no longer anticipating your and Johan's departure, but rather the heavy tread of the authorities come to claim them.
Why are you back in Frankfurt, indeed?
The lone person who can answer the question sits beside the suitcases himself. His hands rest lightly on the armrests, his eyes tracking your movements with the calm focus of a cat watching a moth beat against glass. He wanders in your wonders, ruminating the inevitable. Time is running out. The sand in the hourglass has turned to ash.
“I thought we stayed from one place to another to escape them because they tracked us,” you start, feeling the agitation reap your nerves. “Why did you choose to stay here then? In Frankfurt no less?”
“Remember when I said staying in one place too long creates a pattern?” He stands up, walks toward you, closing the distance without seeming to hurry. “The truth is… the break in pattern itself is also a giveaway.”
Despite knowing Johan now head to toe, he still never fails to confuse you.
“Why this place? Why make it easier for them to capture you?”
“You’re more concerned about them capturing me than you being ‘saved.’ That speaks a lot,” Johan chuckles, as if you have just said the most ridiculous thing. You did, indeed, for he is the least of your concerns right now. “I’m not trying to be captured. I’m just feeling rather courageous is all. You see, given how pleasant your behavior has changed in a matter of weeks,” he says, as if it’s nothing. “Tonight, your dear Grimmer, Doctor Tenma, and Inspector Lunge—they will all come here in a while to try and take you back.”
“Johan!”
“They’ll insist the rooms we shared were cages. They’ll say you were trapped, that you were prey, that you were waiting to be rescued.” A murmur so low it might as well be heard by nothing but the tremble in your nerves. “And that you don’t have to worry about anything else anymore because being beside them apparently solves everything. They’ll try to wash the soot off your hands and tell you it was never there.” He tilts his head, almost curious. “Perhaps, they’ll even claim the soot was never yours, because they can never bear the thought that you walked into the fire on your own.”
He stops in front of you, close enough that you can smell him—the faint but nonetheless hypnotizing scent clinging to his coat.
"But I know you. I know the shape of your soul because we were shaped by the same hands," he whispers. "I know the oldest name you’ve had. I don’t need your memories to recognize you. I carry them myself."
He reaches out. You don't realize you’re shaking—a fine, high-frequency tremor rattling your bones—until he cups both your cheeks to still you. His hands are cool, his fingers long and strong. He tilts your head up, forcing you to look into the abyss of his eyes.
“After all, you managed to come here in this very place, of your own accord, instead of thinking how to escape my confines while we were out searching for your father’s remains.”
There’s no malice there. Only a terrifying, empty understanding. He looks at you with the sheer, overwhelming level of empathy he lacks for the rest of the human race. He sees you. He sees the rot and the ruin and the rock in your hand, and he loves you so ardently for it.
“You were so good for me the past few days, weren’t you? But you still haven't unveiled everything—“
“Johan, you’re—“
“Such as your reason for being. About why you were really there at Kinderheim.”
Your whole body goes rigid. He feels it. You feel it, too, how your breath stutters against his sleeve.
He leans in, close enough that you can feel the tremor in his exhale.
And then he whispers it to your ear.
The thing you didn’t know you’d been waiting for.
Only one sentence. But too ugly to say twice.
It’s so quiet you can’t tell if you’re hearing it through your ears or your teeth or your bones. It seeps into you like matchstick smoke.
“Say it back to me,” he whispers as he guides you to repeat it. One line, like a vow scratched into the softest part of your brain.
"Say what you really are," his thumbs press just below your lip, dragging the skin down slightly, exposing the vulnerability of your mouth.
"Say what they built you for."
The command bypasses your logic and strikes the dormant programming in your brain stem. Your voice comes out smaller than you expect—raw, rasping, like coughing up the same smoke you had caused. It sounds just like it did back in the day, when the Kinderheim instructors stood over you in the dark, ordering you to repeat the same actions over and over and over until your body or others bled.
Johan watches you as you say the words only two of you know, as the only two people in this room blessed by the sacrilege Kinderheim 511 was.
And when you finish telling him what you really are, his eyes close. His lashes brush your temple, a soft, fluttering touch like a benediction from a dark god.
"Good," he breathes, the word vibrating against your skin. "Good. You keep that for yourself."
You brace yourself for further contamination—perhaps something that seals the deal with the witch—anything that will shatter the tension. Instead, he presses his forehead to yours. Bone against bone. Mind against mind. He’s so close you can feel how steady his pulse is—a slow, rhythmic beat against your skin. He breathes your air. You breathe his.
It’s a different kind of contamination, one more intimate, one more absolute.
"When they pull you out of here," he murmurs; you can feel the air coming out his mouth with every syllable he drops, "when they promise you you’re safe, when they wrap you in blankets and give you a hot drink to ease your nerves... you’ll remember what you were built for."
He pulls back just an inch, his eyes locking onto yours, pinning you to the window curtains.
“…And no longer will you envy the normal people you come across outside…”
Your ribs hold the words tight, clenching around them like a fist. You think you’d scream if your lungs worked. But they don’t. The air in the room has been consumed by him.
“…And nothing will permeate your mind except the want—the need—to come back to me.”
And so the secret, as well as Johan’s words himself, sink down your throat instead. It slides past your heart and settles in your stomach—coiled, burning, waiting for the moment you wake up somewhere warm and wonder how you’ll ever live with it.
Then, the sound cuts through the intimacy like a knife.
Wail.
Sirens. Distant at first, then rising, swelling, screaming closer. The screech of tires on pavement. The heavy slam of car doors.
And then, a heavy, authoritative knock at the door.
Boom! Boom! Boom!
"Polizei! Open up!"
The spell doesn't break. In fact, it activates even further.
Johan smiles. A genuine, soft smile. He doesn't reach for a gun. He doesn't look at the window to escape either. He looks only at you. He watches as you turn your back at him and shield him from the threat once again, like a damned habit, just as you did back at Kinderheim 511.
As you step forward to the door, hands splay out to cover the thing they called monster, his fingers trail slowly to your ear, leaving a phantom trail, as he still has more to say.
“You’ve awakened from the dream,” Johan whispers, ever so softly. "Don't let them put you back to sleep.”
Just in time, as if that’s the cue, the door bursts open.
You face authorities, their guns pointed at the space behind you.
“No, don’t!” you try to negotiate.
But then, you feel a cold draft ghost across the nape of your neck. You turn, expecting to meet his gaze, but the space he occupied is now empty. There was no click of a latch, no creak of a floorboard, no rustle of a coat. He didn't leave; he simply ceased to be there, evaporating like mist burned off by the morning sun.
Only one thing betrays his departure: the window, which you are certain was shut against the chill of dusk, now hangs open by a hair. The hem of the curtain stirs, carrying the faint, metallic scent of wet gravel and iron. On the sill sits a pale half-moon of smeared dirt—the only evidence that a physical being was here at all, and not just a phantom of your shared psychosis.
Before you can even process his sudden disappearance, Grimmer catches you in a big tight hug, his coat smells of wet wool and cold winter air. His hands, always gentle, tremble once as they steady your shoulders. You don’t remember the last time someone touched you without calculation.
“Hey,” Grimmer breathes, too soft for the police behind him to hear.
His thumb presses behind your ear, as if confirming you’re real and that you’re here. You realize then that he’s shaking from that terrible uncertainty—whether you’re here in his arms, whole and alive, or whether he has arrived too late again.
“You’re safe now, you hear me? You’re safe.”
And for reasons you can’t explain, you let yourself lean into Grimmer—his warmth, his breath, his unguarded relief. It should comfort you. It almost does. But you now know why you can’t, yeah? After all;
“When they promise you you’re safe,”
Doctor Tenma walks in next, wrapping your trembling figure with a blanket.
“…when they wrap you in blankets…"
The hot drink is next to come, for sure, for Johan had said it himself.
“You’ll remember what you were built for,
and you’ll come back to me.”
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AUTHOR’S NOTE: happy holidays everyone ! was able to update sooner bc i got inspired. here's a cover i made for oil well fires (seasons in the sun by blackbox recorder but the lyrics were changed) listen via bandlab! 𐔌՞ ܸ.ˬ.ܸ՞𐦯
Random, but did you know everytime I needed to search an image of a pjsk card or to check the trained/untrained I always search them on your acc?🥰😆🙏It's just so much more convenient, plus the fact that the info is there and that it's better quality than searching elsewhere🫶💕
AAAA THANK YOU!!!! I'm glad I get to be of service (*´ω｀*) More updates are coming just for you <3
I'm honestly surprised. I didn't even think I'd have any drawing at all to show, let alone fill up a template meant for 13 works. But here I am on this art account I made
I picked up a pencil again this year. I'm glad, at least. Thanks 2025 self, you drew this year. I hope to keep drawing.
