Five Roads Home

by Lindra

Dieter Hartmann doesn't have all the answers, and Johann Liebert's not one to take questions. But sometimes family is a thing you choose, and you don't have to believe in forgiveness to find the way back. Whole series spoilers.

Obligatory blather-blurb! This is my first Monster fic: roughly 18,000 words of PG-13 Dieter POV genfic five years post-series, featuring assorted series characters; primarily Nina, Lunge, Tenma, and Johann, with cameos by Eva, Reichwein, Suk, Gillen and Lotte. It's sort of a Five Things in very secret disguise but it's wrapped up really nicely and you'll barely notice, I promise. I don't have a beta, or know anyone into Monster who has finished the series (woe) so I proofread as far as I could get away with it but I am naturally long-winded. My characterisation's a little rough, still; please bear with me.

Warnings: references to child abuse, Dieter's sometimes-potty mouth, Johann being Johann. Whole series spoilers, blink-and-you-miss-it spoiler for Another Monster, nothing huge.

Otherwise I'd just like to note that there's a certain irony in writing anything related to Monster with O Come All Ye Faithful playing on repeat.

Five Roads Home

I: emergency brake.

'Are you lost?' and it's a familiar voice with unfamiliar inflection, a distance to its concern, and he turns to see a beautiful woman, so beautiful, so beautiful, and he looks closer at her blonde hair waving to her breasts and the messenger bag slung across her chest and her resemblance, and freezes.

'Are you lost?' Johann repeats, eyebrows rising a little, and then his face smooths, flattens into an expression so unlike Nina's that it's even clearer now who he is, even with all the bodily signals saying woman. 'You recognise me. You know who I am?' It's a question, but not one asking for an answer. 'You know my sister,' certain now. 'Dieter, isn't it?'

He holds his breath, blows it out, and takes stock. He can't see Dr Tenma or Nina or Lunge or Dr Reichwein, can't see them, and Johann's beautiful and absolutely not telegraphing any intent to hurt him. He just looks like a beautiful woman stopping to be momentarily concerned about a lost child, that's all, there's no coldness in him right now, and Dieter decides he can't be all bad. 'Yeah, Dieter. And you're Johann.'

He winces and puts a hand to his forehead to block the sunlight, hands fine and delicate and Dieter never thought a guy could be so pretty, but here he is in front of him in heels and a blue dress. 'Don't call me that today. Marya, please.'

'Okay.' They walk a little, and they fall into step with each other, his heels light on the ground next to his own feet, and it almost feels like he's not there, he's so insubstantial. It's been five years since Dr Tenma saved him the second time, four years and four months since he slipped out of the hospital room, and this guy seems so -- mild. Reserved and removed and so mild, and he still looks like his picture but different and all the same somehow.

'Where are you supposed to be?'

Dieter shrugs. His schoolbag's heavy and the strap on the left is pinching and he's too hot, and he can't see much shade anywhere, and where there is shade there's already so many people taking it all up. 'They were gonna meet at the big library later but we were going and seeing things and we got separated.' He knows he sounds sulky and he doesn't care. 'This is so stupid.'

Johann's voice is very gentle. 'No, it isn't. How about we wait for them on the library steps? There's a little shade, and an icecream stall.'

'I don't know where it is, though.'

'I do. Follow me,' and he starts wallking and Dieter trudges after him.

'How do I know you're not just gonna push me under a car or something?'

It's his turn to shrug, delicate and feminine and he just cannot get over how weird it is to know this is both Nina's-brother-a-guy and Marya-the-gorgeous-woman. 'You don't. Take my hand.' Dieter wipes his hand on his jeans and grabs for his, locks his fingers and lets himself be dragged through the crowd, small gaps and pushy people, but he sticks to his shadow and they make it through okay.

There's people on the steps of what he thinks must be the library but there aren't that many, and Johann's right, there's a bit of shade. Dieter bounces up the steps and puts down his bag, sits on blessedly cool stone and relaxes a bit. Marya-Johann's slower, more careful as he strides his way up, and he sits with a careful brush of his skirt under his bum that's so girly it might as well feature in the first issue of How To Crossdress Convincingly, and he stares harder, tries to make out differences from Nina, but all he can see are similarities, how pretty they both are, how alike, and the only real difference is that Johann's a little taller, and his hair is white-blond rather than Nina's straight-out blonde, wavier and curling at the ends.

'How is she?'

Dieter pulls back, embarrassed. 'What?'

'My sister,' patient. 'The one I look like. My twin. How is she?'

'Happy, I guess.' He shifts, bends to scratch his ankle, and Johann's still there in his beautiful dress with his beautiful legs crossed over each other, his elbow on his upper knee and his chin in the palm of his hand, facing him, beautiful and remote and incomprehensible and listening with something so vast that it scares him. 'I mean, she passed her bar exam, and she's, she's in Heidelberg still and, and I shouldn't be telling you this --'

'I won't do anything,' soft. 'I've lost her. I accept that. I only want to know how she is. Does she like her job?'

'Yeah, she does. She really, really does. And she finished her internship, and she's a junior lawyer, and she's, um, she's met someone. She met a guy, and, yeah, he's pretty awesome, and she's happy.'

'It's good to hear she's happy,' and he sounds truly sincere. 'I'm glad.'

Dieter nods and inspects the ground, his sneakers, scratches his ankle again. Johann's quiet and still next to him, the kind of focused people get when they're thinking about something a long way away, and he studies the arch of his neck and the thin sharpness of his face, the dip at his collarbones, the steady acceptance in his eyes. 'Why do you think you've lost her?' he asks finally, honestly curious; all he's seen from Nina over the last few years is that she loves her brother, misses him, has worked so hard and for so long to forgive him.

'I've done too much damage,' unflinching, and it's worse for how practical he is. 'We were close once, but that was a very long time ago.' He rummages through his bag, and Dieter tenses, not sure what to expect.

When Johann fishes out a cigarette packet and a lighter, he's torn between incredulity and relief. It's so odd to see someone so like Nina, someone so beautiful, do something so ugly as light a cigarette and bring it to his lips to puff smoke through his nose. Oddly, it's that which makes him real, finally; the steady glow of the cigarette, the soft, choking smell of ash, it all shows this is a person, a person with bad habits and vices, a person who blew smoke through their nose rather than through their mouth, a person who had to fumble for their lighter because they didn't quite remember where it was. A person, and Johann comes into focus for him, and he understands a little bit more.

'She's forgiven you, you know.'

'I haven't forgiven myself,' sharp and immediate, and it's like the cigarette gives him something he needed because he seems a little more alive in his skin, more present, the parts of him colouring in beneath the marble-white skin, his wheat-blond hair, the eyes. His eyes, a colour between blue and grey, so very complicated and so very human. Even dead people still look like people. 'First I couldn't talk to her because I didn't know there was anything to forgive myself for; and now I can't because I haven't. Not yet.' He inhales. 'Most likely never.'

'That's not fair,' Dieter objects.

He stubs out his cigarette half-smoked, lights another one. 'You're right. It isn't.'

'I think your forgiveness doesn't matter,' he says, sounding bolder than he feels, and Johann watches him, reserving judgement, and it feels like he's always waiting for the definitive answer explaining everything about what he thinks and Dieter's already tired of it. 'I think what matters is that you miss each other, and you love each other, and you're, you're family.'

'Dieter,' he says suddenly, leaning close as if to inspect him, match him up against a memory. 'Dieter. Dieter Hartmann?'

He flinches. 'Not anymore,' he whispers, struggling with the old fear, the memories of being the Hartmann boy, one in a long horrible string. 'What do you know?'

He stares at him, then looks away. 'I know I owe you an apology. Several apologies. I'm sorry that I didn't plan for Hartmann being called away from the orphanage when I burnt it down. I'm sorry that he tried to force you, all of you, to turn into me. I'm sorry that I collected years' worth of documentation and testimonials and medical evidence and forgot to care enough to hand it in.' His hand is shaking, Dieter notices, his voice thin and murky, his throat working. 'I'm sorry I forgot. I'm sorry I didn't get around to having him disqualified from foster care. I'm sorry I didn't do more. I'm sorry.'

Dieter tries to think of something to say and settles on, 'so you didn't want anyone to be like you?'

'No!' He exhales, exerts a control so fine, so enormous, over himself that Dieter would never have noticed if he hadn't been watching as carefully as he knew to. 'No. Never. That wasn't my doing. I'd never inflict my childhood on anyone else.'

'So even serial killers have ethics?' feeling rather daring, and Johann blinks at him. 'I mean, killing people is okay, but abuse,' and he barely stumbles, so proud of himself that he can say it now, he can say it, 'abusing children isn't?'

He looks as though he can't decide whether to laugh or rip his throat out.

'Um. Was that going too far?'

Johann musters something almost resembling a smile, mostly in the crinkles around his eyes. 'I've been asked more idiotic questions. Yes, serial killers have ethics.' He starts lecturing, taking a tone he's heard Tenma and Lunge adopt more than once, the sound of someone who knows what they're talking about. 'They generally have the most rigid morality, in fact. There are things they will do, and there are things they absolutely won't do. Sometimes it's professional pride, or a mark of personal honour, but those lines are always there. It's a part of why religion lends itself to murder so well. When that sense of right and wrong is skewed by outside influence, it's easy to fall outside of absolute moral bounds.'

'Is that what happened to you?'

His smile fades. 'Not quite. Outside influences and bad choices.'

Dieter plunges in. 'I heard it was a picture book, a weird picture book, and they'd be read to you, and Franz Bonaparta was what started it, and Kinderheim --'

'Careful,' mild and beautiful and emotionless. 'Tread softly, Dieter,' and he looks at him, at his face, and there's Johann, there he is, gorgeous and empty, so empty, those mesmerising empty eyes, those eyes, and he has to stop, to look away and remember he's not starving and hurting and alone anymore.

'I won't talk about Kinderheim 511 if you won't talk about Hartmann,' a peace offering, all he can manage after forcing the panic to go away, to rest quiet and silent and unneeded the way Tenma and Dr Reichwein taught him.

He sounds glad to accept, a little formal and stiff, whatever ease he had long gone. 'Of course. What are you doing these days, Dieter?'

'Well, I live with the doctor, and I go to school, and I visit Nina and the inspector a lot, and I see Tenma sometimes. Mostly I play soccer.'

'Argentina or Greece tomorrow?'

Dieter blinks. 'You follow the World Cup?'

'It comes up in conversation,' vague and unhelpful. 'I favour Greece this year.'

'I don't know, I like Argentina's new goalie, whatshisname. He's really good.'

Johann takes off his shoe and rubs the underside of his foot, mashes it back in toe-first. 'But injury-prone. Greece has the stronger defense.'

Dieter scowls. 'Why does everyone pick Greece?'

'Sometimes the underdog triumphs,' Johann says. 'If Argentina wins, then you can inform everyone else how wrong they were to assume.' It's an awkward effort at the friendly teasing Reichwein sometimes indulges in and it falls a little short of the mark into something more serious and parental but Dieter makes sure to smile back anyway and reassure him a bit. Johann's trying, and it can't be easy for the guy to sit and be nice and actually make conversation when as far as Dieter knows he's hardly ever had to do it before.

'Do you miss her? Nina, I mean.'

'I always miss her,' like he doesn't even have to think about it. 'She was my other half.'

'Do you think you could talk to her? Give me your email or your phone number or something, and I can pass it on to her? She really misses you. I know she does.'

'It's not a good idea.'

'But --'

'No.' He drops his head to his hand, finger and thumb at his temple, rubbing the way Eva does when she has a really bad headache, and he almost feels guilty. 'Not yet.'

Dieter rolls his eyes at himself for asking more personal questions and giving the serial killer a headache, and he'll probably kill him or something, and why doesn't he ever listen to the inspector when he says he asks too many thoughtless questions? But his mouth keeps moving without him. 'It could be soon.'

'What is your stake in this?' He doesn't sound angry, just curious, honestly curious like he has no idea why Dieter cares, why he would.

'I want Nina to be happy,' he says, and he means it, really means it. 'She's happy right now, but she's not as happy as she could be. She's not really happy without you. Five years ago when you were, I mean, you were --'

'I was suicidal,' Johann says flatly, something ugly in the purse of his lips around the cigarette, like someone just farted in his face or something.

'Yeah. But she was, she looked like she was happy to follow you around. It, the whole finding her memories, finding you thing, she liked doing that. She says she didn't but she's lying,' a rushed breath. 'She's, she looked like she felt she was getting somewhere, with you. I don't know, maybe it was like getting to know you better, but from far away. And now maybe -- maybe --' He hesitates. 'Maybe it can be up close this time.'

'I'm still suicidal,' blunt truth. He's so beautiful, and so sad, and there's something he can't name, some kind of restraint in him he doesn't understand that he's trying to talk around, an internal warning against saying too much or maybe saying too little. 'I won't do that to her.'

'Isn't that kind of up to her?'

'No.' He's so sure, Dieter marvels.

'That's not fair either.'

'I'm not a fair person.' So sure, and he'd be angry on Nina's behalf if he didn't think Johann could be right, maybe it is his choice to make and maybe it's hers, but either way he could be right and he could not be, and he's not even going to see if it might work out. He's not even going to try.

'But that's --' He breaks off as Johann leans over his knees and digs into his temples again, his lips narrowing into white, something Dieter learnt to interpret as pain while staring into a mirror he could barely see above the sink at the bulges and bumps of what was done to him, and he doesn't like the way Johann's lips twist and straighten and twist and straighten. If Nina's pain tolerance is anything to go by, his headache must be a hammer and nail in his head to make him look like that. 'Are you okay?'

'Migrane,' he grits out, and it takes a few more breaths before he speaks again, and though he's still speaking in a woman's voice, a voice almost like Nina's, has been the whole time, that one word was rougher, an expression of feeling rather than detachment, and it's both terrifying and fascinating to watch him peel himself closed again, his face a beautiful mobile lie.

'Do you know why you get them?'

'The odds of twice having bullets removed from my brain without developing side effects are almost nil.' He sounds cheerful about it, in the way that Dieter's seen some people laugh at weird tombstones, and he reminds himself to be careful.

Johann won't hurt him, won't unless he really, really has to, will be gentle and a little bit real, will understand anything he tells him, and he knows this intuitively on a level that probably explains why every child that passes them stares at Johann like he's the answer to everything, but he's already had one warning and he knows just as deeply that Johann is not the sort of person to warn twice. 'You could talk to Tenma about it.'

'Enough.' He straightens, leans back on his palms and shakes his hair over his shoulders, so beautiful that Dieter is perpetually reminded that this isn't Nina, has to remember that this is a man, and Johann's voice remains the same but the aftertaste it leaves is one of unease. He sounds like Hartmann, serenity a promise to make it hurt. 'When were they scheduled to be here?'

'Um.' He strains to remember what they'd been talking about that morning; he'd been more excited at the prospect of eating lunch with all of his favourite people than by whatever they were going to make him listen to in the name of cultural appreciation. Before he got lost, anyway. 'Um, after the jazz thing finished.'

'Three-thirty, then. Half an hour,' he murmurs, and digs his arm into his bag up to the elbow, and he can hear things rattle as they're moved around. Johann comes up with a woman's purse, dark brown leather and gold zipper, untangling his arm from the strap, and he wonders just how far the pretense goes that he doesn't ever seem to slip, not once, not even in the choice of his wallet. 'Enough time for icecream.'

'Icecream? Really?' Dieter straightens, forgetting to be disconcerted at how fluidly Johann moves when he stands up, how he plucks at the back of his dress just like a real girl and absently smiles down at him. 'You don't have to.'

'I like icecream too. Which flavour?'

'Um, I want chocolate. Are you gonna need a hand?'

'No need,' he says, squinting a little, head tilted into the sun; it blazes on his hair, turns it to a colour he doesn't know the name of, and he doesn't know how Johann manages to be so breathtaking and lovely when Nina is just Nina, cheerful and expressive and pretty but not beautiful, not stunning like this. 'Look after my bag for me. I'll be back in a minute.'

He makes his way down the steps with perfect ease, a little sideways in his heels, stride interrupted and never halting as his hair swings and his dress froths around his knees and he draws admiring glances but as soon as they've looked their fill in the few seconds he's in natural sight, they rarely if ever turn back to look again; it's only the children who do that, children and some women and some men, but mostly the children, serious-eyed and holding on to their parents. Dieter has no idea what they're looking at, but he thinks he might have an outline forming in his head of the person they see, and it's not a good person, not particularly, or a bad person; but a person who, for one reason or another, gets something that Dieter can't begin to understand, and he knows it, and he knows Johann knows it, probably knows it about everyone who isn't him -- except maybe Nina -- and it annoys him. Johann isn't that much older than him, not really; he's what, twenty-five now, just ten years older than Dieter, but he's been through more by any stretch and there might be a reason for it but it's still starting to really, really annoy him.

It's a surprise when he finds him standing over him with his icecream outstretched and his body casting shadows and he takes in his beauty all over again, gapes and blushes and grapples with the paper napkin wrapped around his cone and starts to understand why they don't look back, because just now he'd forgotten too. Forgotten how nice he'd been and how pretty he was and only thought about the bad bits, the annoying things, only thought about how pissed off he was.

He doesn't know what Johann does to people but he thinks he just experienced a little of it and he doesn't like it, but Johann's placid face just looks weary now so he doesn't say anything, licks his icecream and watches him lap at his cone like it's a pair of shoes he's been told to polish with his tongue, watches him stretch out his legs and cross them at the ankle, the sharp metal point of his free heel tapping an odd rhythm, three-two-six-three-six-two.

They finish their icecreams in silence, and he occassionally puts his hand to his head and fights his mouth for control again, until they're both finished and Johann wipes his hands, swabs between his fingers and dips into his bag again, pulls out a notebook and a slim gold pen, clicks the nib into the barrel and folds the notebook open horizontally, writing perpendicular to the lines and tearing it out, folding over once. 'That's my email address and my mobile phone number. Give it to her, and only to her, when you think she's ready. Not before. I'll answer. I can't say when, but I'll answer.'

He blinks, accepts the piece of paper offered between two outstretched fingers, pinched the way he imagines a gambler would handle cash. The edges are exactly centered. 'Are you sure?'

'You're a persuasive child.' He doesn't know if he should thank him or not; it wasn't a compliment. Johann's earrings slide a liquid silver chain against his neck when he puts the notebook back and tosses the pen in along with it, tucking his hair back from his face with a gesture bright and sharp. The sun's moved, heat crawling warm and sticky over his shins, and he's grateful for the cold icecream in his stomach, for the chill of the man next to him. 'Three-twenty-four. Hail the cavalry,' he says distantly, and runs his hands over his skirt with a sigh, smoothing creases and making new ones. 'They're coming to find you. I'm going now.' He rises, balances on his heels and slings his bag over his shoulder, adjusts the cross-strap. He's lovely and more than a little fragile in the sunlight, inhuman and imperfect and thoroughly, painfully aware of it, and all it does is make him more beautiful.

This is the difference between him and Nina, he sees, trying to memorise the tall, proud line of his body in the peacock-blue dress. Nina is someone who talks and smiles and expresses things, says things, is things and does things, when all Johann has ever been able to do is be the one who makes other people do things and be things, an ideal and an idol and a fantasy without ever meaning to be. Johann's like that, he's beautiful and unearthly and striking every time Dieter looks and sees the lack of softness to his face, all concentrated in his eyes now, intelligence harsh in the bitten corners of his mouth, a man conjuring superlatives with nothing to anchor them. 'Jo -- Marya. Can I touch you?'

Johann tilts his head, and there's nothing much to give to the impression that he's suspicious, but it's obvious somehow, it's clear that he's wary. 'Excuse me?'

'Can I touch you?' He knows it sounds crazy. He knows, but he's already experienced how easy it is to let the image of Johann fade into hazy impressions of abstract nouns, the beauty of a waterfall deadened by drought and Aesop's fables gone rotten. 'Please?'

He holds out his forearm after a few seconds, steady enough to be used as a spirit level, and Dieter stands up, reaches out to clumsily pat his arm, to touch skin and know he's touching something human, a person. Johann's arm is a little damp with sweat, so very soft, a bit like a girl's. There's a light brown freckle on the outside curve of his forearm.

'You're warm,' he blurts, somehow surprised. He knew, but he didn't, and now that he does know he has no idea what to do with the knowledge that Nina's brother Johann, a monster and a devil and a killer, exists. He doesn't know what to do with the knowledge that Nina's brother Marya, kind and reserved with a pretty smile, exists too.

'It is summer,' even and relentlessly polite; he doesn't seem to like being touched, endures it with something like resignation, enough prickliness in his patience to make it clear that he's only doing this because he was asked, and maybe because he said please. He doesn't know if anyone's ever asked Johann please and meant it before.

Dieter drops his hand. 'Thanks,' and this is something to thank him for, something to treasure, the memory of living flesh and freckled skin and the hard edge of bone inside of his forearm, under his fingertips.

'Goodbye, Dieter,' a touch of unexpected warmth, and he turns away, quick quiet steps and his bag rattling against his hip. He doesn't so much walk away as flee, and just in time, because he's only just disappeared into the bright cocktail colours of the festival crowd when Nina runs up to him, gasping.

'Dieter! Oh, I thought something terrible had happened to you, but Dr Tenma said you'd know to go to the library,' and she stops to pant for air. 'Thank goodness he was right.'

'It wouldn't have been a problem if you'd just have bothered to tell me what you were gonna do,' he mutters.

'Dieter!'

He flushes, grabs his backpack and scurries into the library. It's still too soon after talking to Johann to be able to look at her, see her and not see her brother, the missing pieces between them and how they don't fit at all, the places where maybe they could come to some kind of understanding, and he doesn't like being mean to Nina, ever, but he just was, and he takes a random book off a shelf deep in one of the rooms and holds it open, tries to remember, but he's also trying not to cry and he doesn't know why. He doesn't know.

II: hazard lights.

Inspector Lunge waits half an hour before coming after him. 'Did something happen?'

He puts the book back on the shelf, takes a deep calming breath and strokes the gold-leafed spine. 'Do you think Johann could do good things? Be a good person sometimes?'

'At the end,' the inspector says, a professor now, and Dieter wipes the tears from his eyes and squares his feet parallel, waiting. Inspector Lunge has never lied to him, has always answered his questions as best as he can, and Tenma might be one of the smartest people he's ever met, but Lunge is special too. 'Johann was trying to be human. In search of that he did terrible things and he did beautiful things. It is a fact that his cruelties became lesser in scope. It is a fact that he engineered the destruction of an entire town. It it is a fact that he restored Madam Suk's memories when there was no imperative for him to do so. It is a fact that he was raised in an experiment to make him inhuman, and it is a fact that the experiment ultimately failed. Yes, it is possible. In fact, it is very likely it was always the case. What do you think of him?'

'You're not angry at me?' Dieter startles at the sound of his own voice and finds himself staring at the ground, wondering at how Lunge can just ask that. Nina would worry at him, give him that horrified haunted look he hates, and Tenma would pat him down for injuries, and Dr Reichwein would try and go after Johann immediately, to find him and demand an explanation or maybe kill him for daring to talk to Dieter, or maybe ground Dieter for being so stupid as to follow Johann, but Lunge just stands there.

'Should I be?'

'No? I guess.'

He can practically hear his eyebrows going up, and when he speaks it's not particularly gentle but it isn't unkind either. 'Johann exists. This is also a fact. You are not disorientated or in shock. All of your responses are normal, so I highly doubt that he has used any of his brainwashing techniques on you. You are therefore a useful witness. I'll ask again. What do you think of him?'

'I think. I think he doesn't mean to. The brainwashing thing. Not always.'

'How so?'

Dieter tries to think about it, get his thoughts in order, and the inspector waits patiently. He's the one who taught him to think this way, to arrange thoughts by logic so they come out sensible instead, and he's not all that good at it still but it's enough to give him somewhere to start from. 'I think it's, he doesn't mean to and just it's habit, maybe?' he tries. 'He's so pretty he's used to getting stuff and making people do things by accident? And it just went from there to get better at getting what he wanted and he didn't even think about it really, it just happened. I mean, not all of it. But some. Maybe?' He sounds silly even to himself.

Lunge actually thinks about it, listens to him and thinks about it, and Dieter thinks he could maybe love him forever for being the only person who always, always takes him seriously, even when he comes up with stupid ideas about people who kill other people. 'Interesting. The most successful serial killers and, indeed, mass murderers, are charismatic and attractive, and many do manipulate their appearance to appear more or less alluring. Do you feel Johann does this unconsciously?'

'He was trying not to, but it sort of, it sort of worked anyway. It was -- it was really weird. I'd, I'd look away and I'd look back and it'd just, all I could think about was how pretty he was, and, and, this is so stupid.' His face feels like it's on fire. 'Sorry.'

'No. Don't apologise. I'm not going to tell you how to feel about yourself or your sexuality --'

'Oh, don't,' Dieter whines, but Lunge just holds up a shut-up-and-listen hand and talks over him.

'However, know this: you are not at fault for being attracted to him. Neither of you are. From what you say, he was actively trying not to manipulate you, and you still felt its effects. Such is often the case where beauty is concerned.'

Dieter puts his face in his hands and peeks between his fingers at Lunge's shoes. 'Please stop. Please please stop.'

'What else?' He drops the subject, putting his hands in his pockets, and Dieter sighs relief.

'He's -- when I was little, I used to think I was alone. I thought there wasn't anything. And when Tenma came, it wasn't -- it was hard. It was really hard. And Tenma was really busy chasing him, so he didn't notice much, but it was really hard, and he was my friend but he wasn't, it was good to have him there but he wasn't --'

'He wasn't enough,' quiet and factual. 'You had to rely on yourself.'

'Yeah. Dr Reichwein helped, but most of it was up to me, and it was -- I think he's lost. I mean, today I was lost, but I wasn't, I knew where I was. I knew you were all around somewhere. But I don't think he knows where he is or where anyone is, and I know who I am but he doesn't, he's. He's not -- '

'He has no personal identity,' the inspector says, and it's like he can read minds. 'We know that Johann is not his name and that for most of his life others have attempted to control him, presuming that he has no wishes of his own. He must be at quite a loss.'

'I told him he should talk to Nina and he said --' Dieter doesn't know whether to say this, if it's too personal, 'he said he hadn't forgiven himself.'

'I think the immediate concern here is you.' Lunge is always serious but this is something else, troubled like someone dipped a toe into his stillwater-calm face. 'You want to talk to him again.'

'I, well, yeah.' He blushes.

'I forbid it. Johann is a fascinating mystery and yes, a beautiful one, but it is all too easy to become obssessed with him. If he gave you contact information, I assume he meant it for Miss Fortner, to be given at your discretion.' He twitches. 'I see, he did. He has trusted no-one else with such personal details that I know of. Will this be how you repay him?'

'I thought you didn't care about that sort of thing,' Dieter protests. 'You always said murderers can't be betrayed --'

'Johann is different,' rapid-fire. 'He is also like every other murderer in that he is easily incensed. Those who cross him die soon after. I am concerned for your safety.'

He'd like to say that Lunge's just being a worrywart, that he can take care of himself, but this is Johann and he's not so sure. 'What do you want me to do, then?'

'Rejoice that you are so fortunate as to be the third to converse with Johann and survive.'

Dieter winces. Oh, yeah. The serial killer thing.

Lunge puts a hand on his shoulder. 'I believe Johann is an excellent judge of character. You are fortunate, but not undeservedly so.'

'That doesn't really make me feel better.'

'I did not intend it to make you feel better. It was reckless and foolish of you to speak to him at all. Miss Fortner and Dr Reichwein were very worried about you.'

'Are you going to tell them? That I met Johann?'

'No. That is for you to decide.'

Dieter looks up at him. The inspector's learnt to be kind in the time Dieter's known him, but it still doesn't come all that easy, and he offers a smile, the same kind of reassurance he gave Johann, and like Johann, Lunge accepts it.

III: double-lane roundabout.

Nina cries the whole way through writing the return email, sobbing and deleting and typing some more, tissues crumpling in the bin next to her and Dieter stands awkwardly, reading over her shoulder the many, many variations of anger and fear and love and wonder that she highlights and clicks out of existence over and over again. Her initial email had been simple, a Hello, Johann. It's Nina letter, tentative reintroduction, and she hadn't cried then, just looked really stressed out, but Johann's return email, short and maybe a little affectionate if Dieter looks at in the right light, made her cry and even now, a few days later, she's crying bucketfuls as she clicks SEND.

If an email could sound tired, his reply a few hours later is it. If Dieter looks at it in that same right light, if he tilts his head, he'd almost think Johann's telling Nina that it's okay, that it's okay now, he's happy just to talk to her, but then the words curl in themselves and he has to blink and it becomes formal and standard-friendly and somehow long-winded for being so short.

Dieter leans over her shoulder and asks if he can write something, too, and Nina scoots her seat to the side and slumps back in her chair with her chin pointing at the ceiling, and it looks like it hurts to have her head forced back that far but he doesn't say anything because she looks so -- she looks like she did in the Red Rose Mansion getting her memories back, afraid and anticipatory and somehow determined all through it. It's the first time in five years she's actually taken an interest in what's going to happen to her, and Dieter remembers all over again just how much he hated Johann for putting her through that.

He's right, he thinks as he types p.s. hi its dieter. greece won. Johann can't forgive himself. And he shouldn't. He shouldn't ever. you were right. p.p.s. call her Dieter knows about things that are unforgiveable, and he knows about family. There's family and there's forgiveness, and you don't have to forgive to be family.

Johann's response a few minutes later is a sonnet: witty, clever, an endearment in fourteen lines. Nina laughs and kicks her feet against the table and the drumming tap-tap-tap sounds like she's still crying. Dieter stares at the second-to-last line, a fragment of beautiful, accomplished poetry sing, dresses of blue and shivers.

IV: stop at intersection.

Tenma isn't happy. At all.

'Why didn't you tell me, Dieter?' He looks worried. 'Johann is dangerous,' like he doesn't already know that, like he doesn't know it from the things the inspector has seen fit to tell him over the intervening years, like he hadn't already known it because he was with Nina when Johann broke her mind and Tenma wasn't, like he hadn't known it before then from the way Hartmann talked about Johann, admiring and afraid. 'You shouldn't have spoken to him once, let alone twice --'

'I did,' he interrupts. Tenma's great at caring, but not so much sharing anything, be it responsibility or secrets or whatever, and he's tired of putting up with it. 'I did, I talked to him and he didn't kill me and I got his email and number for Nina and Nina's happy, and he hasn't killed us yet! He waits for us to call first and everything, and if we don't want to call for a while, it's totally cool. We're okay. We're all okay. Can't we talk about something else?'

'You can't have known what he would do,' he frets. 'He could have killed you.'

'He wasn't going to kill me,' Dieter snaps, and he can feel himself unwinding, like the way Hartmann took a belt and coiled it and held the center bit and slapped the whole belt out to full length across his face, and it swung up, arched out and wrapped around the back of his head, left bruises ringing his head like a crown and it hurt, still hurts when he feels himself doing it to other people. When he does it to Tenma, and the guy doesn't deserve more of this, but. 'He wasn't going to hurt me, either. He just wasn't going to.'

'But it's Johann,' like Dieter's the one not getting it, but it's Tenma who doesn't understand, doesn't get what Reichwein and Lunge and even Eva get, and whether it's because he's away so often, or because he's only learnt to care about people he'll never meet again, Dieter can see the fraying hems of his coat hanging on the hook on the back of the door, can see the lines etching deeper in his face every time he comes back from the MSF; can see, has seen, and can't accept it as an excuse any more. 'There's no way you could possibly predict --'

'Don't you think I'd know?' he shouts and stands up, and his hands hurt from how tightly they're curled. He's gotten tall, he's taller than Tenma when they're standing together and much, much taller when he's sitting down, but it doesn't make him feel better at all to be yelling down at him, just worse. 'Don't you think I'd know when someone wants to hurt me?'

Tenma's face is surprise and shock, like it never occured to him, ever, and it probably hasn't. It's easier to calm himself down with that somehow, breathe hard and ease his stiff back into something that lets his hands bend enough to stuff them in his pockets. This is Dr Tenma, kind and gentle and utterly uncomprehending that it'll be a good day tomorrow didn't help much in the long term, and not much past a few days in the short term, and there's no point in getting angry with him. Never has been; Tenma is Tenma. It's what makes him a good doctor and crappy at everything else.

'If I didn't know that,' he says, and he's not sure if he wants to say it but it needs to be said, it's the thing that might make him understand: 'If I didn't, I'd never have gone with you.'

He can't bear to see the look on Tenma's face now, can't stand to hear what he might say, can't stand knowing that he won't have anything to say at all, and he escapes into the hallway, dodges Nina's attempt at catching him, stops at a playground a little way down the street. The swings are too low but the slides are too small, so he sits on the swings with his knees almost at the level of his shoulders and tucks his hands between his knees, scuffs his feet into freshly-raked pine chips.

It's after sunset when Tenma turns up, coat on and still a bit too big for him, the same coat as from then, and it might be faded now and a little discoloured from all the blood Temna's gotten on it, but it's a damn good coat to last this long. Another present from Johann, if indirect and roundabout, and Dieter knows he won't ever say that to Tenma, won't and can't because of that same martyred face he gets, remembering to feel guilty and being guilty that he had to remember to be and so heaping an extra bright green disgusting cherry of guilt on top. His thought process is so obvious that Dieter can time it even if Tenma's standing right where he can't see him. It usually takes about three sentences. Sometimes one, but more often four to six.

'I'm sorry, Dieter. It didn't occur to me to think of that.' Guilt. 'It was -- well, I was a man on a mission,' selfconscious chuckle. Falls flat. 'And I thought you were better now.' Misstep. 'Not that childhood abuse doesn't have long-term effects, of course it does,' hasty. More guilt. 'I really should have got back to you before he could take you to that awful place,' and Tenma gives himself a green guilt cherry with bonus totally missing the point.

It occurs to him that both Johann and Tenma have apologised to him for pretty much exactly the same thing, and they both fucking sucked at it, for different reasons, and it's funny enough that he can at least try to dig him out of his bright green cherry-shaped tarpit of guilt. Even if he knows it won't work and Tenma will brood, brood, brood all night and wake them all up at four in the morning with his nightmares. But Nina stays over a lot, so they're all used to it anyway. 'It wasn't your fault. It was Hartmann, and Johann, a bit. But mostly Hartmann. I mean, I don't know if Johann made him crazy, or if he made Johann crazy, or whatever the hell happened, but it was Hartmann. Not you.'

Tenma sounds like he might be getting it just a little: kind of curious, sad more than regretful, that embarrassed poke-the-ouch tone people get after they walk into a doorjamb too low for their heads. 'I wasn't paying much attention, was I?'

'Not really. But you had other things to think about, what with looking for him,' and even if he's decided not to accept his excuses anymore, he still finds himself making them for him, and he'd totally flip himself off in a mirror for being a hypocrite if he could, and if anyone in the house ever left him alone for more than five seconds.

For once, Tenma doesn't take the easy guilty-responsibilty way out. For once. 'I'm sorry.'

'It's okay, I don't hate you anymore. I used to, but the doctor helped out, and the inspector too, they made sense of things. It helped, anyway. So, yeah. Blame them.' He kicks pine chips off his shoes, digs his toes in again, steadies himself with his hands on the chains to either side of him. This is the hard part. 'Lunge told me about Milos. That Czech kid you and that Grimmer guy rescued.' He can feel Tenma's spine breaking under all the green guilt cherries and carries on. 'You thought he was going to do something like that to me. You thought he'd, I don't know, charm me, abandon me somewhere, let me learn a lesson, that he had already. But I'm the, I'm not the one he'd do that to. I know what it feels like to think there's nothing good anywhere, I still think like that sometimes. I know that and he knows it. He doesn't have to show me. I'm safe from him.'

'Because of Hartmann.'

Dieter's face twists into a grimace without his permission. Of course Tenma'd make the logical connection exactly when Dieter would've really liked it if he didn't. 'Yeah. It's pretty fucked up.'

Tenma sighs and he actually sounds like himself instead of a moody-broody glower machine. 'It always is with him. Come inside. They said they'd start dinner without us if we were late,' and Dieter doesn't mind the brush of Tenma's hand on his shoulder, manages to stifle his recoil almost entirely, just a bit of a twitch, and he's the only one who notices because Tenma just crunches through the bits of bark with his boots and doesn't say anything.

He knows it's stupid but he feels safer in the middling dark. These always were the safe hours, and they still are, memories of nights with -- what was his name? Henckel? -- in Frankfurt's Turkish quarter, and Nina, and Tenma. They were dangerous and stupid nights; actually he was stupid the whole year, like that thing with the rug, what was he thinking, and he saved a bunch of people, but still, think ahead, Dieter, before you go jumping on the nice warm flaming petrol, seriously now. But all of that was late at night and for a couple hours before then, before it got really dark, it was always okay.

Tense, maybe, but Nina always loosened up a bit when it started getting dark and Tenma did a bit too, something in his head ticking over like nighttime was the time to seek out a cafe lit with fluorescents and drink coffee that made him make a terrific ick-face but he drank it anyway. Dieter thought, still thinks, that the buzzing lights and stained mugs and weird keeping-to-yourself hush reminded Tenma of the hospital. The streets were like that, too: warmer somehow, and people talked instead of staring at nothing, but the streetlamps flickered on, and it was quiet enough to hear them buzz when he and Tenma walked under them.

It's like the world shuts up for a bit when the sun shuffles past the horizon, give him time to think and listen to street lamps whether someone's with him or not, and he appreciates that. Really, really appreciates it, some days, and this was definitely one of those days.

'Is that Johann's appeal? That he understands?' It's not hostile, or defensive or anything, just curious, like this is a scientific problem and he's trying to figure out the answer to why Dieter would defend Johann in anything at all but doesn't have enough information yet. Dieter doesn't really have the heart to tell him that he doesn't really get it either, except he kind of does, and then again he doesn't, and it's fucked up Johann-style, too complicated to explain in words, so he just answers the damn question.

'Yeah, some of it. I mean, he knew him too. Knew about him. I didn't really ask, but it -- it was there, that he knew exactly what he was like. It's so weird.'

Tenma, bless him, actually sounds interested. 'What is?'

'Getting all this shit come up when I thought it'd settled down. You know, I go to school now, and I play soccer and I want to compete, and most days I don't even think about him anymore, I didn't, and then all this comes up and it's like, well, it's more like I just tried to forget about it and I was just lucky that it worked for a while. The doctor says I'm doing well, that it's natural that this whole thing with Johann and Nina would stir up my own shit, but,' and he finds himself pulling faces again, 'it's a lot of shit and it hasn't gone away yet.' It's easier to swear in the dark, easier to use the words he wants to use, and Tenma never exactly minds, just frowns at him sometimes when he thinks Dieter can't see him doing it. 'I wish it fucking would.'

'These things take their own time,' calm and steady and totally infuriating.

He groans. 'You sound like the doctor.'

'I am a doctor,' and Dieter can hear him smiling, can see it in all the light coming from their house; there's always so much light. 'Here we are.'

It's easy to proceed him into the house, to take off his coat and watch Temna unwrap himself from his, tangling in too-big sleeves, and Dieter hangs his first, lets Tenma get the top hook, toes off his shoes as Tenma continues down the hallway and Nina cheerfully scolds him for being late, late, oh-so-late by two minutes, whatever, and Dr Reichwein consults him about which kind of wine to open even though Dr Tenma never grows a clue but the doctor keeps trying in case any of it sticks for the next time he visits.

Dieter listens to them and stuffs his socks deep inside his shoes, shoves them next to the rack and thinks, reminds himself: I'm home, and goes to ask Dr Reichwein if he's old enough to have beer yet. The answer will be no, but one day it'll be yes, and it'll be in this same house, with these same people, and that's good enough. It's pretty awesome, actually.

V: merge lanes.

He discovers Johann has really, really ticklish feet at five in the morning on a Saturday and he spends the next half-hour trying to grab his feet while he kicks and grumbles and turns over and says things like 'should be shot' and 'really, if I had a gun', and 'goddamn tickle-imp', and Dieter can't stop giggling, actually giggling, and it'd be mortifying if Johann didn't keep doing the same, this involuntary little high-pitched hee-hee noise that makes Dieter really, really curious about whether Nina is ticklish, because that'd be pretty funny if they both made the same noise, and if she did, whether he could tickle them both at the same time and get them to do a giggle duet. He's pretty sure it'd count as statistical research. Might even interest Inspector Lunge, if he was on holiday somewhere really far away and conveniently inaccessible, like the Maldives, or a nice island offshore Cyprus with a weekly-access boat.

Johann's feet are normal people-feet, thick soles and thick bumps on the undersides of his toes, dry skin piling grey at the cuticles of his warped, curved and flattened normal people-toenails, although his are weirder than most, some of the toenails squashed and arcing upward so high they look like they jut right out of the root, it looks like they hurt even if they're clipped pretty short, and Johann hisses when his hand brushes back too far and too hard over his toes one too many times.

'Stop, stop, please,' and it doesn't sound funny anymore, it sounds really, really unfunny, so he backs off and settles into one of the doctor's big poofy chairs with his feet thrown over one arm and his back over the other, inspects the wooden rafters in the ceiling and waits in the grey hazy light for Johann to stop freaking out. It sounded like he was freaking out, anyway.

Dieter's known kids who got that same weirdly calm-controlled tone of voice after something that seemed pretty harmless and kind of fun and stopped being fun for them for whatever reason really, really fast, and it always, always was better to back off and let them sort themselves out, because if you asked or kept doing whatever you were doing they'd punch you in the face and knock you stupid.

They were all about One Warning Only too, and Johann might sound like that normally, might be like that all the freaking time, but there's a difference there and Dieter thinks he's probably one of only three staying in the house right now -- himself, the inspector and Nina -- who'd be able to spot it. Dieter doesn't bother wondering what it's like to know that there's almost no-one else in the world that would have stopped if he'd asked because he's been there and sucks. And he'd really like to get over this thing already and stop thinking about it, so he can save the brain space for his family and school and more soccer triva.

'Why are you awake?' Johann's not interested, just asking because it occured to him to.

'I'm supposed to have practice, but it's raining and I just can't be bothered.' Dieter humours him because, seriously, it's five-fucking-thirty and it's raining. He still hates being out in the rain, hates it, and it feels like being a dipshit to the rest of his team to wuss out and stay home because of a little raincloud, but he ran the checklist on himself this morning and he knows if he tried it today it wouldn't work, the coach would just turn him round and send him back home five minutes in. Which leaves him awake and bored at five-thirty in the morning with only Johann for company. Speaking of. 'Why are you up?'

'You have in this house five people who have attempted to kill me in the past, and three who are or were affiliated with the police,' bald fact, unsympathetic to himself. 'But I was making the attempt when a certain tickle-imp ambushed me.'

'No, you weren't. You were all --' He searches for the word '-- akimbo,' and he flails out his arms and legs to demonstrate. 'No way can anyone sleep like that.'

'Most people can be trained to sleep standing up.' It's only a nonsense answer if he's not actually listening, and Dieter scowls at being caught out. 'I can. I don't,' he continues, 'because it's a losing proposition.'

'So you sleep all,' and he demonstrates again, 'like this?' He makes sure to sound extra-doubtful.

'It's a question of choice, not practicality.' He sounds like he just might start to get irritated at any moment if Dieter's not careful, and he can't see any of his face because the blankets are pulled up so high. Dieter doesn't think he's a morning person.

'What's the real reason?'

Johann makes an inarticulate noise and turns over again, kicking his feet against the arm the same way Nina does, toes first, splayed out and upwards. 'For?'

'You could take out all of us in less than five minutes, police or not. Wouldn't bother you. What's the real reason you're not sleeping?'

He can practically hear Johann incanting BE PATIENT WITH THE SMALL ANNOYING CHILD in his head. Dieter grins at the ceiling. Johann doesn't get any less threatening the more Dieter gets to know him, or talks to him, rather, because nobody really gets to know Johann, but he's not so scary anymore. Tickling him kind of took the wind out of the sails of that idea. 'I generally sleep during the day. From this time onwards.'

'Huh. Cool. Like a vampire?'

Johann snorts. It's still pretty, even though it's a snort, and Dieter marvels again at how the hell he gets away with this stuff. 'No. I'm not Schubert.'

'But do you visit prostitutes?' If it were anyone else, he wouldn't dare say this, but he can swear himself blue in the face in front of Johann, and the guy doesn't blink, doesn't react, just waits for him to get done with whatever he's angry about. One time a few months ago he was pissed off enough at Dr Reichwein's questions to throw things and Johann just told him to go get a broom and dustpan instead of standing around being sorry.

'I am a prostitute,' he says, and it slips out, slips into his train of thought, into the air, settles like unintentional accidental truth.

Dieter blinks.

'Don't tell Nina,' after a few seconds where Dieter tries to reacquaint himself with his eyebrows after, you know, flying off his forehead, and Johann sits up, blankets falling to his lap. He looks mussed and half-awake and scared in the same delicate hackled way mice look scared when they're cornered and preparing to fight back. 'Don't tell her. That's something I'd prefer to say myself.' He's always felt sorry for the mice, and he sort of feels sorry for Johann now, who drops his shoulders and lies back down without waiting for an answer, mumbling something about those goddamn pyschologists probably bugging the whole place anyway.

'Reichwein wouldn't,' Dieter says, because he feels compelled to defend him, because Johann sounds so resigned to the whole business like he's used to being bugged and spied upon and so what if it came from the people who were supposed to be on the good side of things. It doesn't sound like anyone ever helped him, just made things worse, and Johann knows it, knows badly and painfully.

'I don't like men with doctorates,' he says, his toes flexing into the couch, up and down and up and down. The blanket's yellow and too short for him to bunch it around his face like that and still have it down over his feet. 'Locke devotees. Fucking tabula rasa. All about the empty child, the empty mind. Open up their minds and pour in only the shit you want, they're all yours, long as you keep telling them it's the only thing going. Basis of Prussia's millitary, 511 Kinderheim, Klaus Poppe's picture books, all of it. I hate Locke. And Rosseau. Never should've written Emile. Children defined only by absence: absence of fear, pain, unhappiness. Then what? Make them into spies and whores and leaders and then what?' He brings his foot to his face, frowning, picks under the nail of his little toe, so red and swollen it doesn't look as though it has a joint at all. 'People like that annoy me,' a special emphasis Dieter thinks probably translates into and meet the business end of my gun. 'Most people with doctorates do.'

'Reichwein doesn't,' and Dieter's trying to defend something he doesn't know how to defend, he just knows that Johann's being unfair to the doctor somehow and he's not sure if he's arguing it right.

'Doesn't he?' He sounds contemplative, like he knows the answer but he's considering what Dieter says anyway out of politeness. Johann is so relentlessly teeth-grinding mannered that sometimes he just wants to thump him and see if it makes him break the act. 'The fact of his doctorate implies otherwise. We'll see.'

'Does it make a lot of money?'

Johann seems startled that he asks at all but he gears up to answer anyway, and Dieter decided a while back that Johann had some sort of pact with himself to answer everything a kid ever asked regardless of how weird and personal the question was, but it's eerie to see it in action, applied to him. He's so used to being told later: later tonight, when we're not running; later tomorrow, when I've slept; later next week, when we know where we're going next; later next month, now that we know where he'll be; later next year when this is all over and done with.

Most of the later-not-now shit is Johann's influence, really, but it's not like he gives him the impression he had a choice; more like Dieter's had it bad and Johann's had it worse, and he'll never ever tell anyone just how bad it really was, the intricacies of why and how he did what he did, because it would mean explaining everything. Explaining even a little bit of his original parents drives Dieter crazy, and the whole had-it-bad-but-he's-had-it-worse thing still goes here too. Seeing the trails of Johann's fuckups that year was enough to prove that whatever else he is, he's smart and driven and kind of totally fucking stupid and it's probably mostly not his fault.

'Enough to live on,' and it's not surprising that his scale of 'enough' is so far off the mark when he wears D&G sunglasses and the brown tanktop he's got on reads YSL in big fat black letters. He can't decide whether Johann's just used to being really rich, or if it's his job, or if it's a deprivation thing, and he doesn't care all that much because it's so not his business. 'Enough to keep working. It always was my favourite line of work,' and yeah, he didn't have to say that, and Dieter's pleasantly surprised that he's decided to start volunteering stuff today instead of making him dig it out of him with a crowbar, but he's suspicious anyway.

Not so much, though. 'I've never even kissed anyone.'

Johann is Johann, like Gillen's so fond of saying and he hates to say it so he doesn't, just thinks it to himself, but Johann's right, Gillen is an annoying dickhead and he probably would bug the place for evidence later just because, not because it would be helpful in court or anything, but just because it'd be Insight Into The Mind Of A Serial Killer(tm) and give him more material for his research papers. Maybe. It bothers him that he doesn't know either way, and he's struggling to remember why having Johann over was a good idea at all when he starts talking again.

'While we're sharing personal details, I was never fond of murder,' he says. 'It was just something. Same went for smuggling, arms dealing, war zones. Didn't mean much. But I always liked prostitution, or I got to like it. Either way. Sex is so easy. It probably doesn't seem like this to you, being brought up differently,' Dieter can hear the cryptography, substitutes more normally for differently, and Johann's scratching his chest, searching for an inside pocket stuffed with cigarettes and a lighter in a jacket he's not wearing at the moment, is in fact hanging over a chair in the kitchen where it was left last night, and when he doesn't find it his hand drops. 'Sex is easy. It was easy to go back and say, I won't kill anymore, but I'll fuck. I'll fuck anyone, and it was a good deal all 'round. It was the deal I aimed for in the first place, but there were other things he wanted me to do first.'

Dieter treads carefully. It's the first time Johann's ever referenced the possibility of Someone Else, maybe his Hartmann, maybe someone worse, but Dieter's suspected for a long time that there was Someone Else (or a whole bunch of Someone Elses) who fucked him up like Hartmann fucked him up. He's suspected it ever since he saw Hilfe! Hilfe! Das Monstrum im mir wird explodieren! because it's totally fucking classic. He's had a shitload of thoughts like that himself, more than he really wants to think about in detail even though the doctor tells him it's a good idea to do it sometimes, and the sympathy got really uncomfortable sometimes when Tenma was doing his 'must kill him must kill him' routine.

The crazy talk turned out to be from a picture book, but he'd bet his soccer ball that the Franz Bonaparta guy who made it based it on Johann instead of the other way around, but it's not like anyone ever listens to him. 'Who was he? I mean, who'd you make the deal with?'

'No-one you know.' His face darkens, draws in on itself. It's not fear, more like remembering rage, and he's not sitting up snarling but he might as well be from his expression. 'No-one you should. I could kiss you,' he says, as though it's a perfectly reasonable extension of talking about his Someone Else (or Someone Elses).

It could be -- seriously, eww -- or it could not be, but either way Dieter's brain takes a while to catch up with Johann's placid obviously-up-to-no-good face. 'What?'

'Never mind,' and he doesn't sound disconcerted at all, just talking at the ceiling like Dieter just happens to be there and listening to him because he can't not after that. It's kind of infuriating. 'Offer's open.' Okay, a lot infuriating.

'What the hell?' Dieter sputters. 'Do you just randomly hit on people or what?'

'It's almost six in the morning,' Johann points out. Or what, then. Which is fair enough, because it really is kind of insanely early and it's still fucking raining and his butt is going numb and he still looks ridiculously hot and kind of cute with the blankets all wadded up short of his twitching feet.

'That doesn't mean you get to say shit like that,' almost-fake offense. It's really distracting now that he's noticed that Johann wiggles his toes pretty much all the time, and they settle down when he's thinking and dance around when he's decided on whatever it is he's going to say, big toes overlapping and the nails bending into each other while he winds himself up to it like a great big clockwork toy. He can practially hear the key grinding in his back, screech-screech-doink as it hits its limit and he starts to unspool himself in words. It's fascinating and sort of horrifying to watch.

'My deepest apologies,' formal. 'That was inexcusable of me. Obviously, as a young man of impeccable breeding, you are above such things as kissing, regardless of whether your partner is a prostitute or not. Yes, of course.' He nods to himself, decisively. 'I understand that your first kiss shall be at the altar, as is only entirely right and proper --'

Dieter realises Johann's fucking with him and throws a cushion. It almost smacks him in the face and when it drops from his upraised arm he's smiling, actual amusement that crinkles up the little lines under his eyes. It's the first real thing he's seen out of Johann since he knocked on the door a few days ago. He's gotten truth and a couple lies and some moments here and there where it feels like Johann's still taking him seriously, really really seriously and still-as-ever weighing him up somehow, but this is the first real thing he's been given to keep so far.

There's always something each time, some weird brief touch of genuine thought or feeling or whatever, and Dieter was getting worried at the delay. Maybe it was just the stress of having to deal with Dr Gillen and Tenma and Nina and the inspector and the doctor all at once. And Detective Suk, and that was awkward for everybody but Johann. His protocol for facing down people he's framed for murder and indirectly tried to kill seemed to be 'breeze it out', and it works brilliantly, but he wonders a bit. Wondered, anyway, since he looks better now, if a bit tense about the whole thing with staying at their place. Which, yeah, duh.

Johann looks at him from behind his hair, draped across his face and he's too lazy to move it so the bits over his mouth puff up when he talks. 'I don't hit on people I don't like.'

'You like me,' Dieter repeats, skeptical. 'You're way too old.'

'Not like that,' impatient. 'My offer was sincere. Besides, I'm only twenty-seven. You can call me old when I'm fifty.' His nose wrinkles and he looks so much like Nina when Dieter says she's started acting like an old lady that he can't help but laugh. 'That's better,' he says, soft and not kind, but thoughtful. 'You've been jumpy all morning.'

'I don't like rain,' honest truth, and it doesn't cost him anything to say it because he's pretty sure Johann noticed the first time he flipped off the window.

'I don't like Mondays,' Johann offers, and sings, quiet and sad: 'Tell me why I don't like Mondays, tell me why I don't like Mondays; I don't like, I don't like, I don't like Mondays.' His voice is beautiful as everything else about him, pretty and girly. They sound a lot alike, but Nina's deeper than her brother, more timbre and substance, like she's learnt to grow up and Johann's stuck at being ten years old when no-one could really tell the difference between them. He wonders if he's been castrated or something, and winces. Johann ignores it. 'Have you heard the song?'

Dieter knows better than to assume he doesn't know exactly what he was thinking about. 'I dunno. Maybe?' He tries to remember it. 'The doctor listens to a lot of old stuff. Boomtown Rats?'

'Yes,' he says. 'They were terrible.'

'Then why do you know them?'

Johann doesn't shut down, exactly, but he closes off, pulls back. 'They're overplayed,' and on anybody else it'd be damn chilly, but on him it's just a few clipped cosonants, and he still sounds weirdly open to being told anything Dieter would ever want to tell him, even if he was just making random shit up. He's just not friendly anymore, although he wasn't all that friendly in the first place.

'Do you listen to a lot of classic stuff?'

'I listen to what interests me.' He turns over and kicks the couch again, tucking blankets deeper around himself and flipping his hair back and doing all these little fussy trying-to-get-to-sleep things that make it pretty obvious that his mental Greek chorus of BE PATIENT WITH THE SMALL ANNOYING CHILD is running out of petrol. Dieter decides Johann really, really isn't a morning person, and with the sky going bright and how much light's getting through the lead-lit windows, he can see Johann's hasn't got any sleep all night, hasn't got much sleep for a while, his bags smudged dark and his eyelids are all thin and delicate and purplish, the way Tenma's got that year when he hadn't slept more than a few hours in a row at any one time for ages because of the whole hunting-a-serial-killer thing. It'd make sense, since Johann's been staying with them for a week, couple weeks now with a few days here and there in the first week where he left after dinner to go do whatever.

It strikes to him to remember that the couch is really, really uncomfortable, lumpy and full of springs poking in weird places and kind of squashy in the bad way and chilly-damp even after you've laid on it for hours, and it slams into him how spectacularly unfair this is, that Johann's sleeping on the couch when he knows that Reichwien's been able to pack twice as many people into the bedrooms upstairs without ever forcing any of them to try to sleep on the Couch of Evil. The only reason Dieter's ever had the opportunity to nickname it is because he didn't want to take up the more-or-less permanent Real Guest status an actual room implied because he still thought Tenma or Nina or Hartmann somebody would be coming for him really soon, and he only lasted one night before he complained at the doctor about his sore back and that night slunk upstairs to find one of the rooms Reichwein had kept for his nephews all aired out and ready for him with fresh bedding and a pair of pyjamas.

He really can't work out why Johann's sleeping on the couch, and everything comes a little clearer: that's why this whole conversation's been so fucking weird. He just can't work it out, and it's been bugging him since he first opened the door to find Johann on the step with the same blue messenger bag as when he first saw him slung over his shoulder and packed full, and it bugged him more when he saw Johann was awake when he came down to see if he could sneak past him into the kitchen to grab something. Yeah, okay, he's technically part of the household now so it's partially his responsibility to care about how the doctor's guests are, host duties, that sort of thing, but this just doesn't make any sense. Nina's mostly family and that kind of makes Johann family too, and Reichwein's told him a zillion times that family doesn't make family sleep on the couch. But they did. They have.

'Why are you on the couch?'

Johann drags his palms over his face in a long slow drag from his forehead to his collarbone and leaves his hands limp where they are on the blanket. It's one of those too-tired-for-this-conversation gestures, asking for time or mercy or both and Dieter's not going anywhere. 'Dr Gillen insists on privacy, and Miss Franke is with Nina. The others made it quite clear that I am not welcome to share a room with them.'

It's still amazing, Dieter thinks hazily, that he can say this so smoothly, so easily, like he's talking about their reactions to someone else, describing something that happened to someone who was his best friend a long, long time ago, making it all sound like gossipy rumours he's verified secondhand instead of being told straight to his face. He doesn't doubt they said it straight to his face.

The inspector would, at least, in his relentless this-isn't-personal factual way, and Dr Gillen might specialise in serial killers but he tries to provokes Johann all the time for no reason and the doctor doesn't do much to stop it at all, and Nina just looks uncomfortable and doesn't speak up except when Dr Gillen says something really creepy and it's not like Tenma cares anymore; he knows too much about Johann now to want to see it. And Dieter'd noticed, and then again he hadn't noticed at all, it was just them getting used to him, it was just that hadn't noticed, hadn't cared enough to actually think about it.

'Their fear is eminently reasonable.' He shrugs, the only person he's ever met who can shrug just as well lying down as he can standing up, and it's still freaky no matter how often he does it. 'I have no grudges against them; to the contrary, I am grateful. I am also firmly entrenched in another line of work, one which I much prefer, and I have no reason to murder again. These things do not change their logic. Who knows what I might do? My word is that of a murderer. It holds no value. Nor should it.'

'You could have asked me.'

Johann looks over at him. 'I sincerely doubt --'

'I would've said yes,' Dieter interrupts, and no, he wouldn't've, not right away, but that's not the point. He decides he hates that couch, and if anyone says anybody should sleep on it again, including Johann, he'll set it on fire and let the fucker burn. The doctor can afford to get a new one. 'I'll share with you. You can come up and sleep in my room. I've got homework to do anyway. Where's your stuff?'

It stings how suspicious Johann is, how careful he is not to react. It's like he doesn't know how to take a gift, and Dieter used not to be able to, either, remembers the weirdness of Tenma giving him that soccer ball, of expecting that maybe there was a bomb in it, the razor in the apple, and he had to keep examining it over and over to make sure it was exactly what he thought it was. But neither of them say anything or do anything, however much his tongue itches to apologise with something like I'm sorry I didn't notice or just so you know, you're a bastard but you don't actually deserve this or just stop being stubborn for once.

Eventually he peels back the blankets, stands up, leans behind the couch and waits tall with that same blue bag, expressionless, wearing his messy hair and bare feet with a kind of acceptance that basically says go ahead and give me shit. 'Lead the way.' He doesn't even have to brace himself that Dieter can see because in here, probably everywhere but especially here, he's always braced for the next round of shit. Always.

Dieter feels like a dickhead and Johann's face hasn't even moved except to smile that once. If Gillen were smarter he'd write one of his huge papers on Serial Killer Body Language with Johann as a case study and actually find out something useful, like how the hell he's so good at guilt-tripping. 'I'm upstairs this way, last room on the right,' and he follows him out and up the stairs, silent and so eerily light-footed that the stairs don't creak. The house is asleep and grey-lit.

Johann looks around his room like he's studying it, wondering at it, puts down his bag by the chest at the foot of his bed and slowly pinwheels on his heels in the center of the floor. Dieter starts dragging textbooks out of his schoolbag, leaning over his desk and acutely, weirdly conscious of the hairs on the back of his neck prickling at the fact that he's barely aware of Johann's existence at all. Another question for Dr Gillen or the doctor or the inspector or somebody to explain: how does he mute himself like that? It's downright creepy to watch himself forget that someone exists when he knows they're standing barely three feet away from him. 'It's a nice room.'

'Thanks.' He doesn't know how to say it without sounding awkward, so it comes out awkward anyway. 'You can borrow my bed for now, and I'll get the trundle sorted out later. You don't mind if I do my homework?'

'Not at all,' and he climbs into the bed, smooth and beautiful and sighs when he straightens out and curls over facing Dieter's back, sighs some more as his cheek finds the pillow. 'Thank you. I'm grateful,' just before his eyes shut, and then they do and it's like all the strings in his body have been cut because he slumps all over the bed like a disused marionette, only the very slight movement of his mouth to indicate that he's still breathing, going straight from awake to practically comatose with no inbetween.

It takes a while before Dieter stops glancing over his shoulder to check that he's still alive, this beautiful man who is absolutely nothing like him but they know enough of how the other thinks that they've got to be alike somehow, and they are similar. They are. Dieter had somebody, even if it was somebody wrapped up in killing somebody else, and Johann had nobody and Nina didn't count, and maybe that's all the difference between how Dieter can say my room as though he takes it and its meaning for granted and mostly does some days while Johann looks at it as though giving a room bits and pieces of yourself to make it yours is the most bewildering thing he's ever seen.

He gets through his maths and science homework and he's well into finishing an essay draft, wondering how his Saturdays became school and soccer and serial killers and finding that he doesn't really mind, lulled into some kind of peace that finally, finally blocks out the rain by the even breathing behind him, the presence-not-presence of someone who chose to be with him in a way very few people have ever chosen him, when Nina knocks on the door at ten and peers in, says it's breakfast time soon with a bright smile, and shuts up really quickly when she sees her brother.

She closes the door behind her and wanders in like she's not sure of where her feet are going, stands over him with her hands cupped at her sides like she wants to reach out and curve them over his face, whether to hold him or kill him Dieter has no fucking clue, but the impulse's there and visible like Johann's relief at finally getting to be in a bed. They're both kind of really obvious only when they're trying not to be. 'Dieter, why --'

'You let him sleep downstairs,' more accusing than he means to be. 'Have you even sat there for more than five minutes? It's the couch from hell.'

'I didn't,' Nina says, and he has no idea if she's talking to him or to something he didn't say but meant anyway. She does that a lot, they both do.

'It's not fair, Nina.'

Deja vu. If he were talking to Johann he wouldn't say anything and the measured glance of when it is it ever, not a question, would sweep over and shut him up for a bit. But he's talking to Nina, and she steps back from the bed and settles on the floor, pulls her legs up until her bare dirt-brown soles are both facing upward on the insides of her knees and watches her brother sleep. 'I don't know what to do with him, Dieter. He's my twin brother, but we don't speak the same language. I don't think we ever did. I -- he looks different when he's sleeping. He doesn't smile when he's sleeping. When he's awake he still looks at me like he's laughing and crying at the same time.'

'He always looks like that,' Dieter says, because it's true. He saw it when he visited Johann with Nina in the hospital and sees it now, but he's not sure Nina could ever. Johann always seems to happy to have Nina around, even when he's asleep or unconscious or whatever, not even to talk to her but just to know she's somewhere close, and he always seems so sad to have her around, too, and if Dieter dared to guess he'd say it's for the same reason: having her around means she's in more danger, because as much as nobody seems to trust Johann at all, it's like he trusts himself less, and there's probably a whole lot of risk in associating with Johann at all even if Dieter's never even pissed on a kitten in his life.

He wonders how much of his job (and he has to call it that, has to think it's a job to himself because he knows if he really thinks about what it means, lets the mental images sink into his head, he'll treat him differently and Johann'll know and he won't ever say anything, won't stop talking to Dieter because of it, just accept it, take it as read, and he promised himself a while back he won't be that guy, won't ever) is because he likes it and how much is because it'd keep him in enough contact with the right wrong people to stop them from tracking down and killing Nina. Not that he's ever going to get an answer, because that's a question for a really good day and Johann never has days like that.

'He doesn't talk to me,' she continues, her voice steady and emotional, the same way she deals with difficult court cases, the same way she deals with the ever-increasing numbers and details of Johann's victims coming out of the desultory ongoing investigation now that they're working under the assumption that he's been forcibly defanged by whatever it was that happened in Ruhenheim.

It's not quite that he's on parole, or any kind of legal restriction. They all know he did it, but even with the mountains of conjecture and supposition that ring absolutely true, there's no evidence to present, nothing to convict or charge him because it's so logical and so perfectly insane, so beyond the capability of a normal person that nobody would ever believe it without some kind of proof. So they just all keep note that there are people who can get into contact with him and none of them dare to dig too deeply into whatever it is he does now. Johann's not hurting anyone, and as long as that's true they can pay attention to the stories of the victims that haven't been found yet. He's heard Nina crying and crying after five minutes on the phone with Detective Suk.

Her back is very straight. 'I ask him things and he says all the polite things back but he's not talking to me. When we were children, I don't remember him ever talking to me. It was always him asking me to talk to him. He didn't tell me anything. He still doesn't. It was always, 'trust me, I'll take care of you', and 'it's yours, you can have it,' and he never said anything that wasn't a question about how I felt, if I was okay, if I was too hot or too cold or if I was sad, and what was I thinking about to make me sad. I didn't notice.' She bows her head. 'Does he talk to you?'

Don't tell Nina, he remembers, and takes a chance. Johann never said not to tell Nina anything else. 'Today he said he doesn't like Mondays, and he knows the song by the Boomtown Rats,' he starts. 'He sings it pretty well, but he thinks it's overplayed and the band sucks.'

Nina's shoulders move. It could've been a laugh or a sob, he can't tell, and why Nina thinks her brother's the only annoyingly ambiguous one is beyond him. 'Really? I didn't know he didn't like anything. I didn't know he liked anything at all.' She sounds lost. 'Does he -- is there more?'

'He doesn't talk about things that make him happy, if you know what I mean,' cautious not to give her false expectations. It's not hard to talk to Johann; it's really fucking hard to get him to talk back. 'Just. Things, when they come up.'

She leans back on her elbows to look at him upside-down, feet still propped on her knees, her hair brushing the floor, and she's pretty too, pretty in her own way, pretty like -- not like antithesis of Johann, but more the edge of the coin between Johann's weird ethereality and whoever it was in their family that had enough reality in their genetics to give her some. 'Like what?' And, hasty, glancing over at her sleeping, relaxed brother: 'Are you allowed to tell me?'

'Guess we'll find out.' He offers a smile; she just looks back, the lines of her face carved grave. He fumbles for words, starts with the things he's most sure of. Johann's said them more than once, at least. 'Never bet against him when it comes to the FIFA World Cup. He hates institutionalised schooling,' Dieter says. Johann had used those exact words. He's kind of proud that he remembered how to pronounce it without stumbling. 'I mean, he helps me with my homework if I want him to, and teaches me things, but he doesn't like to hear about it. One time he said' -- he tries to remember his unusually irritated exact wording '-- "Kinderheim 511 was an extreme, not an abberation".'

Nina blinks, slow pondering confusion. 'He actually spoke to you about Kinderheim 511?'

Dieter shifts uncomfortably, notices he's doing it, and tries to stop. 'Well. Yeah. We had a truce. I wouldn't bring up stuff he didn't want to talk about and he wouldn't bring up stuff I didn't want to talk about, and we'd get around to it eventually. We sort of got around to some of it.'

'Do you think he's right?' Nina straightens on the heels of her palms and pivots so she's sideways to both of them while only her hands and heels touch the ground. It's kind of impressive how strong she actually is.

Dieter shrugs. 'Everyone knows school is kind of pointless. The only reason I'm getting good marks on my essays isn't just because Johann taught me the vocab, like what a thesis sentence is and stuff, but because the inspector taught me how to lay things out so they made sense. He didn't do that because he wanted me to write better essays.'

Nina waits. She and her brother are both uncannily good at waiting.

'I don't know. I think he thinks --' This isn't something he's really said before, but he's thought about it, thought about it when he saw the detention lists, how the teachers were, the stuff in his textbooks. 'I mean, at my school, we know we're not really being taught to be the best of anything. And we don't really learn anything. But if we were taught to be the best, like at 511, and that meant that to be the best we had to not feel things anymore, then I think we wouldn't learn to be the best, we'd learn not to feel things. It's not that different, really. So.'

She nods, slow like she's thinking it over, and she's staring at Johann again in a way that says she's used to him disappearing once he's out of her sight so she's getting her fill of him while she can, and Dieter's starting to get used to doing that too. 'He told you that? He remembered?'

'He told me enough to make me think it,' Dieter says, because it might not matter much to anyone else but he knows the difference like the difference between sunrise and sunset. 'I got obssessed with my grades for a bit there, because our coach last year was all about my grades and if they weren't good enough I couldn't play on his team anymore. That's why he told me that stuff about Kinderheim. It took a bit before I got it, but it made me to stop licking the coach's butt.'

'Dieter,' reproving, although she's met the bastard and didn't like him either, made that funny frowny face that said that if he were her client and she had to defend him in court, she'd do it but she wouldn't like it at all. 'That's not very nice.'

'Johann says to be kind, not nice. It's one of his rules. Not the top three rules, though. First rule's "take responsibility for your consequences",' he ticks them off on his fingers, '"perfect practice makes perfect", and the last one was "don't let the bastards grind you down". Johann said that kind of thing's generally for kids, but good advice's always worth giving.'

She looks so sad, and he thinks about it, thinks about Johann and children, Johann and daughters. Johann and sons. His first reaction -- his skin trying to shrivel off his arms -- when he remembers how convinced that boy in the hospital with the broken leg was that life was a game and that it'd be awesome if he risked death and the deaths of multiple other children just to win by being the last one standing and hey, it'd be even better if he was a dickhead to everyone else too, is probably not unjustified. From what the kid said -- what was his name? Martin? -- Johann caused most of it. Maybe. He'd forgotten about that, actually, and now he kind of wishes he could immediately forget again. Speaking of forgetting, that reminds him. He hesitates. 'Um.'

Nina raises her eyebrows. 'What is it?'

'You know how you asked if he remembered?'

'Yes.' She's very still, repeats, stresses 'What is it?' like she's afraid of the answer but it's vitally important that she know, and there's such a spark to her.

'I don't know if I should say this, but. He said he always remembered everything. It just felt like he was sleeping until that picture book woke him up. Talking to you woke him up.' They both glance over at him, studying his loose, settled sprawl, the clean tired lines of him under the blanket, his beauty.

It's the same guy. The guy who made Martin learn that horrible game, the guy who almost killed Nina and she's still kind of twitchy when she sees guns anywhere and can't stand closed doors, the guy who almost made Tenma kill him, the guy who, at last count, is directly and indirectly responsible for over two thousand people dead and isn't sorry. It's the same guy who asked him if he was lost a year ago, the guy who smiled when Dieter's team won their soccer tournament, the guy who listens to him when he needs him to and politely tunes out the crap he thinks, the guy who hates the existence of reality television shows because it reminds him too much of Kinderheim 511, the guy who tried to give Nina everything and loves her so much he doesn't have words for her, just feeling, so much feeling it looks like it might kill him some days. The same guy.

This shit is complicated.

What's not complicated, what's true are these things: Nina misses her brother. Johann misses his sister. They love each other. It's fucked up, but it's definitely there, and they'd go so far for each other if they'd just face up to the risk and ask and, hell, answer each other.

Dieter's so tired of waiting for them both to get a grip and work up the nerve to start first. Time to interfere and poke his nose where it doesn't belong. He's not as slick at it as Johann -- no-one is -- but he likes to think he's not too bad at it. Dealing with Nina and Tenma made him get okay at this sort of thing quick-smart. They were both so stubborn and so stupid and so self-sacrificial. 'You could wake him up again.'

'No, I couldn't,' she says, quick instinctive denial, physically backing away from the bed. 'He hates being woken up.'

'If it's you he won't mind.' It's true. Johann forgives things from Nina that he's seen him get narrow-eyed at from other people, and it takes a lot to work him up to actually showing anything on his face. But with Nina it's like it hardly even occurs to him to be annoyed, and that'd be annoying in itself if Nina weren't the sort of person who completely defied any resentment at the double standard by being just as openly confused by it as everyone else.

She leans back toward the bed a bit, but she doesn't move any closer. 'I shouldn't.'

'It's breakfast anyway,' he points out, the very model of reasonableness, and he really hopes she doesn't bring up just how fucking late they are. 'He's probably one of those people who get cranky when they skip meals.'

Nina sounds uncertain. 'Is he?'

'Dunno.' He prods her thigh with his foot. Honestly. 'You could ask him. He likes vanilla icecream on his pancakes,' he offers, another lure, because he knows she bought icecream yesterday and she always gets vanilla for the doctor and chocolate for him and boysenberry for herself, and if Dieter whines enough she lets him have some for breakfast. Her nose wrinkles. She's probably imagining Johann eating icecream and pancakes like he does, which is so far off the mark she should know better. Johann eats his icecream quiet and dignified and totally fucking gleeful every time, and it makes Dieter weirdly happy to watch him do it.

'I really doubt that,' but she's smiling a bit, and she keeps looking at Johann, frozen back-and-forth, like she doesn't know what the risks would be but she knows there are some, and it shouldn't be surprising that she hasn't worked out that there aren't any risks here, just the ones she's invented in her head to use as excuses.

'Find out. Come on, Nina,' impatient, introduces a bit of his almost-patented Small Child Whine, guaranteeed to annoy every adult within hearing distance. It works on everyone except Nina and Johann; it just makes them smile, somewhere between wistfulness and nostalgia. Dieter hasn't asked. 'He won't bite.'

She smiles now. 'I suppose not. We are rather late,' and gets to her feet. 'Johann?' The lump in the bed doesn't move. He's probably actually asleep. Figures. 'Johann?' Louder now, and she moves closer, tucking her hair back behind her ear with the exact same delicacy of movement as her brother. From behind, it's only the colour of their hair and the cut of their clothes that tells them apart. 'Johann, it's Nina. Wake up,' and he stirs, rolls onto his back.

His eyes snap open when she shakes his shoulder and he looks about a half-second away from killing her, not quite recognising who she is in a moment of anger so overwhelming and uncomprehending, so brutal it leaves Dieter's elbows shaking, but Johann relaxes, rage spooling somewhere hidden, and smiles up at her. 'Anna,' blurred and sleepy. 'No, I'm sorry, it's Nina now, isn't it? What is it?' Nina stares down at him, frozen in mute horror, and Johann looks confused now, glancing between them and around on alert to see what's got her so frightened. He doesn't know. He doesn't know, didn't notice, he was actually asleep and he didn't notice, and it just makes it worse.

Dieter gets to his feet, uses the back of the chair to steady his balance and intervene. 'It's breakfast time, that's what,' he says more cheerfully than he feels. 'Your job is to make her give us icecream.'

'There's icecream?' he murmurs, still blinking, relaxing back into sleepiness. 'What time is it?'

'Twenty to. We're so late,' Dieter chimes in while Nina puts her visibly-shaking hands to her face and shudders a bit, and all the distraction in the world wouldn't make Johann stop looking at her.

'Nina,' not quite a question. 'What's wrong?'

'Nothing,' wan and way too pale through her fingers, and wow, she totally fucking sucks at lying. Dieter darts forward, grabs her elbow and tugs her to the door, waving at Johann.

'Get dressed and meet us downstairs, okay?'

'Wait.' For all that it's soft and polite-sounding it's a command that goes straight to his bones, deep somewhere in his feet where Hartmann still lives and stops him dead with his hand on the doorknob, stops both of them, and he's sure that if he thought about for a long time he could figure out a way not to react like this, but right now moving is impossible, unthinkable. 'Nina, tell me.'

'I didn't know you could look like that,' and she sounds lost again, foreign country with no way home, facing the door like it's one that'll never open. 'I didn't know. Do you hate me that much?'

'No,' quick and sure. It's a promise. 'Not you. Never you. I was dreaming.' Dieter's the one who turns to watch him wake up again and get out of bed, walk up to put a hand on his sister's back. Nina quivers, doesn't move, just keeps staring wide-eyed at the door, and Dieter decides to keep his mouth shut, hold Nina up if he has to and stay out of it. It feels like a conversation needs having. 'It was about our mother. Sometimes I think it's possible to inherit hatred.' Then, with the sort of wonder other people reserve for spectacular views off Gothic castle battlements: 'You look so much like her. If she ever smiled, she would have looked like you.'

Nina leans her forehead against the door, her eyes closed. She's started crying sometime in the last couple minutes. 'You hate her.'

'I reserve my hatred for Klaus Poppe and the men who made me,' implacable. 'I am simply content to never encounter our mother again. I wire her money each week, she informs me of her new account number as necessary and says nothing otherwise, and we are in agreement.'

'You know where she is? You --' Nina sniffles, scrubs tears off her cheeks with the backs of her hands. 'You knew and you didn't tell me?'

'We agreed it would be for the best.' Johann's very focused now, hair mussed and curling around his shoulders and his lips shaping careful words. 'She was -- not someone to talk to. It's possible she's recovered.'

She manages a wheezy noise. 'Like you.'

'No. Like you. She's stronger than I am.' He's patient; waiting, all his words run dry, his palm still flat on her shoulderblade. 'You both are.' Then: 'I've always been so proud of you for that.'

Nina whips around and flings herself at him, a hug to knock him over or squeeze him to death, Dieter has no clue which, but she throws her arm into him so hard he staggers back a bit, gets a doorknob in his kidney for his trouble, and then the twins both go down, fold to the floor on their knees. She cries, really cries, cries like he's never seen her cry; maybe Tenma has, he doesn't know, but he's never seen this howling and shaking, like tapwater bursting out in thin sharp lines over the pad of his thumb, and Johann's got her tight, pressed to his shoulder, singing to her in a language that might be Czech.

Dieter fumbles for the doorknob; this isn't his place anymore, whatever right he had to see this officially expired as soon as Johann started waking up and he's way overstayed his welcome. 'Um, I'm just gonna, I'm just gonna tell them you'll be late. Um, later,' and prepares to flee when Johann looks up from burying his face in Nina's hair and catches his eye with a look that screams.

His voice is tonelessly even, if shaky. 'Thank you. We'll be down later.'

Dieter nods and steps back, stumbles through, closes his bedroom door in his own face. The black dots swimming in his eyes confuse him for a moment until he recognises that he's forgotten to breathe, and has to force himself to relearn how, starts from the belly up, his lungs, his throat, holds the breath and exhales. Does it again and again until the panicky trapped feeling making everything's edges wobble jaggedy-sharp goes away.

That look was the sound Nina had. The same wildness in both of them, Dieter thinks. The same something he can only look at sideways, and Tenma mentioned before that Johann had this thing, a landscape of the end, a scenario where everything was dead and gone, where there was some kind of final choice for who was the monster, an execution maybe, and it's in both of them, they both see it, they both have it. He can still hear her crying through the door, muffled and horrible.

'Come on, Dieter,' the inspector. Dieter doesn't know how long he's been standing there watching him watch the door, watching him listen to them in the same way people half-listen to songs they hate on the radio. 'We're not waiting any longer.'

'You actually waited?' He pretends shock, and it's familiar to fall into step with the inspector, accept the brief, heavily reassuring touch of his arm around his shoulders.

'Suk reported Johann was no longer in the lounge room and we sent Nina to fetch you two,' summary of the facts. 'We assumed you would all come to breakfast eventually.'

'Yeah, sorry about that.' He shifts a bit and he can feel how Lunge's eyebrows go up. 'I sort of, um. You know how you just want to smash some people's heads together sometimes?'

'Indeed,' drier than the doctor's burnt toast, and Dieter gets the impression he's been one of those heads the inspector wanted to smash, but friendly, like he doesn't really mind, and yeah, even a guy like the inspector gets all spectacularly mellowed out by having grandkids. Dieter feels like an honorary grandchild sometimes. It's pretty awesome.

'I kind of did that. Will they be angry at me?'

'I doubt it would occur to either of them. Mind your step,' and he always says that like the fussy old man he is, so Dieter ignores it and bounces down two at a time, deliberately not minding his steps and almost slipping off the third-to-last stair, flailing and clutching at the banister for balance. Lunge chuckles behind him, still striding down with the creaky firm steps of someone getting on in years, and Dieter so would not put it past him to make sure that one stair was extra polished or something.

Dr Reichwein frowns at him from the head of the dining table. Old man always insists on eating in the dining room breakfast, lunch, tea, and dinner when there's so many of them even if they could all easily cram in around the table in the kitchen where its warmer. The silverware's out in force too because they just don't have enough plain stuff and Suk's okay with it, plowing through his omlettes, but Dr Gillen keeps looking like someone's going to up and do an IMPOSTOR sign over his head in neon skywriting. Tenma's chatting with Lotte in that way that means he's not sure what to do with himself and his fork keeps missing his mouth when she says something outrageous, which is all the time, and he really likes her. That she's the only one aside from Johann who can fluster Tenma like that is just a really sweet bonus. 'Where are Johann and Nina?'

'They'll be down later. They've just got a lot of catching up to do.'

It's not Johann and Nina anymore, split down the middle, but them, they're a them, a pair, twins, a we in Johann's words and Nina's crying agreement. Dieter has his we too, a family of the inspector and the doctor and Tenma and Nina, his lesser we of his team and his class at school and the huge we of everyone Johann encountered and talked to and hurt and killed and injured, and most of them, almost all of them, are sitting at this table, are in this house, even the ghosts.

They wouldn't be here, knowing each other and talking to each other and being so close and so solid without Johann, without the former-always-never we of Nina and Johann; they wouldn't be a we, and he thinks Johann just might be part of his family now, its creator and not just acting as the elephant in the room whose back they put a tablecloth over and eat from, but getting up to sit and eat with the rest of them too, if they let him. Dieter, at least, will let him.

Things might be okay now. He's pretty sure they will be, because Tenma wasn't always right when he said it'll always be a better day tomorrow, and Johann wasn't always wrong when he said it'd always be a bad day, but there's room for both of them in Dieter's world of we.

The doctor nods like he understands and they start eating together, Eva and Tenma and Dieter and Reichwein and Lunge and Lotte and Gillen and Suk, two more places set across from each other in the middle of the table, waiting to be filled. They're already there with him, really. They're family, each other's and Dieter's, and this is Dieter's own truth that he'll believe probably forever: the doctor and Tenma and the inspector and the twins are family, the family he's chosen and has chosen him, and the rest, ghosts and secrets and all -- well, that's details, and he can wait for them to be worked out; Dieter's not going anywhere, and neither are they.

'Where's the icecream?'

fin