And the rest, is Johann

Chapter 8. Carpe diem, memento mori (II)

As soon as the first lights of the day reached her bedroom, Nina jumped out of the bed, anxious, annoyed and exhausted. Her first thought was to get into the shower, hoping it would clean all those awful feelings from her mind as it would do with the tears and sweat.

She was leaving behind a horrific night, like she hadn't dealt with since the times of the chasing, when periods like this could almost disable her to do practically anything. Grabbing some clothes from her wardrobe, a simple t-shirt and shorts -her customary home clothing- she silently opened the door. Her head turned left, towards the guest room and its closed door. It seemed Johann was still there, so it was her chance to get into the bathroom.

It was astonishing to discover how the hard work of months could be dissolved like that, in just few hours, a single night. It had been enough to see him standing in the middle of the living room, his curious stare absorbing any detail on their surroundings, to destroy all her naively optimistic thoughts of future and happiness, the ones constructed around him. Little effort was required to imagine that same stare upon the bloody corpses on the ground. In Heidelberg, in Düsseldorf. Anywhere.

It had been a defensive strategy, she acknowledged, putting as much distance as possible between all that happened before his coma and the present. And it had been surprisingly easy, with her new life in a new city, everything feeling fresh and exciting. She didn't have to cross the same floor in which she had found her parents bodies', the same streets in which she had felt stalked and threatened, the same cities in which she had learned about his most sadistic entertainments. And Johann played a marvelous role, so ideal, honest enough for her to take him seriously and well-behaved enough to make all of it possible. She had the monster but no the criminal and she had begged for that opportunity, for years. Nina needed to face him, alone, and attack her brother with accusations, arguments and questions instead of bullets.

Johann had been the best therapy she had ever been offered, the most brutal one. He was right on that matter.

She was never going to regret her decision... up until that same night.

It all had started with Johann's extremely quiet presence, unusual even for him, accompanied by a random silly thought:

'I've opened the door to their killer.'

It had been the first shake in what became a downfall. An unstoppable train of thoughts rushing to collapse her as she desperately started ordering her stuff and cleaning the house, putting some distance between her mind and the trigger that was him. But the more distance created the more eccentric her thoughts became. It was like the previous months meant nothing to her growing paranoia, but a confirmation of what was never going to happen. She remembered a similar sensation -that chaotic panic, the fear, the sense of danger- as the Lieberts suddenly appeared dead and he exposed himself as the killer.

She just went back to that night, the same that required a decade of amnesia as a shield.

It had been easy to finally offer some excuse and hide in her bedroom. But that was when the nightmare had begun.

That reality was striking back at full force, the awareness that Johann was indeed a killer, with twenty years of experience by now. A killer without a single regret. There was a huge difference between registering that facet of him in the back of her mind while their memories were all that mattered in those discussions and the concrete idea of the emptiness of that house being completely his fault. His decision.

Johann was, before anything else, a killer. That night in Vienna had just been the softest showcase of the violence that existed within him. Becoming a leader was his fantasy, being a killer, his reality.

Nina might have been angry at him... but Anna... she was still terrified, somehow, deep down, despite of it all, because she was the one who saw a twin, herself.