And the rest, is Johann

Chapter 11. Alea iacta est (I)

Nina had probably lost track of the days she had spent in that room.

Johann simply observed her from the door from time to time, mildly curious as to why someone would find anything in that place remotely engaging.

His existence, if he remembered correctly, was nothing more than a succession of unfinished plans, and megalomaniac ideas, with no particular connection between them beyond the closeness in time. Whatever fantasies roamed her head were surely more interesting.

And yet, she wanted to know. Needed to know.

What a particular way of thinking.

When he finally entered the room, he found Nina bent over the coffee table, scribbling on that red notebook of hers that was meant to keep track of something, maybe her own sanity. So she almost jumped as Johann placed, as gracefully as his body could, the tray by her side.

He simply smiled as an answer.

"Caprese sandwich," he added, like it was necessary, as he sat on that one armchair that was miraculously free of papers. Maybe even on purpose.

"Thaaaanks," she almost sang, as she had already done a few times to all the other meals she had been delivered in that which was now her domain. It was Johann's way of paying back for all the unnecessary attention he had received the previous days. Paying back the lack of attention now, as she had thankfully forgotten about his still-depleted health.

But the lack of attention also came with some drawbacks. And he was bored, so incredibly bored. For being the epicenter of that investigation, she hadn't questioned him a single time in all those hundreds of pages of notes and reports and diaries she had already read and reread a dozen times by now.

"How's it going?" Johann felt magnanimous, selfishly so.

And he waited as she was voraciously devouring the meal, taking the second mug on the tray, his own tea.

"Well, very well..." Johann found that picture quite amusing, as Anna sat on the floor with both hands clasped over the meal like a small child. He couldn't recall an actual memory, but he was certain of having witnessed it, in some past life. "Well... it's being a little chaotic, all of it... your organization is..."

What organization?

"I just dumped the results here as soon as I was done with it. Don't expect any order or logic beyond the chronology of their acquisition." He stared at those metallic shelves he had stuck there at some point, so out of place.

He could also be messy sometimes, she had to know.

"Why didn't you destroy... all of this? I thought..." Johann really wanted to know what made her so insecure sometimes. But he withstood her eyes going back and forth between the room and him. "I thought you wanted to disappear."

She thought right.

"After our meeting in that abandoned house in Frankfurt, my mental state was very much compromised." A frantic rush towards death in which he lost his ability to plan or even think. If Johann had ever felt like he was going insane, like he was losing grasp on reality and at the same time more aware than he had ever been, it had been then.

"Yes... it was quite unsettling... seeing you..." What did she see then? And more importantly, what was she seeing now?

Because Nina's stare was piercing.

Anyway.

Johann observed the chaotic display of documents over the coffee table. He could recognize his own calligraphy in the pages of an opened dossier, a never-ending succession of words with neither purpose nor structure. She was desperate indeed if she was capable of enduring that read for the sake of learning something, at all, about anything relating to him. And not even while eating she could take her eyes off the writing, not even when he was sitting right next to her.