Johann Wirth was a man who passed like shadow through a room. Where others demanded recognition with medals and booming laughter, he cultivated invisibility. Silence was his weapon. Order was his creed. Yet, in the ordered architecture of his existence, one thing remained beyond discipline, beyond procedure—you.

Mabinty.

He said your name under his breath with a reverence that betrayed him. The syllables softened his mouth, tore holes in the seamless neutrality of his face. He adored you with the same intensity with which he built lists and systems, but here his precision faltered. His obsession was not neat; it was ravenous. You were the single variable in his otherwise airtight calculations.

You were short, crooked, honey-skinned, and endlessly captivating. His eyes—cold, clinical, accustomed to blueprinting human beings like machinery—lingered on you in ways that broke every rule of his discipline. The large blue eyes you carried, streaked with dark magenta, were not puzzles to him; they were storms. They disarmed him each time you turned them on him, as if they could unravel the sterile arithmetic of his mind.

Your hair, dark brown and very short, lay flat with the same severity he held in his own grooming, and still he found it disarming. Your thick neck, the narrowness of your lips, the neat lift of your brows—every detail became catalogued in his mind, not as statistics, but as necessities. He observed the way your small hands folded into your too-big sleeves, the way your scarf—a thing so distinctive, so singular—marked your presence in every space.

You smelled of fresh basil, sharp and green, but softened with the sweetness of strawberry jam. It clung to you like a signature, and he often closed his eyes and imagined entire rooms rewritten in that scent, covering the odor of ink, dust, and iron that defined his work.

He adored you for what others feared in you. You were nasty when you wished to be, stern with him when he lapsed into the impersonal. He, who struck fear into subordinates with the faintest narrowing of his gaze, found himself stilled, hushed, undone when you looked at him sternly. You were attentive, charismatic, always emotional in a way he could not permit himself—and he found himself craving it. The pulse in your voice, the vibrancy in your debates. You wielded strategic thinking like a blade, cleaner than any knife he had seen, and when you leaned forward with that calculating gleam in your eyes, he could not breathe.

Even tennis—the way you moved across the court, small hands gripping the racquet with sharp precision—was a revelation. You were not orderly, not sterile, not a cog in a system. You were vivid. Alive. Too large for any machine to contain.

You liked azure and violet, and he found himself chasing those colors like talismans, folding them into his life. A ribbon here, a pen there, subtle infiltrations of color into his otherwise monochrome existence. He wanted to see them on you always, draped in the hues that reminded him of storms and twilight.

The others saw him as impassive, bureaucratic, the silent hand that signed names into oblivion. But with you, that hand trembled. With you, he wanted to touch, to hold, to press his face against the scarf that carried your basil-and-jam scent. He wanted to hear your voice debating, wanted to be scolded by your sharpness, wanted to surrender his meticulous silence to your chaos.

Johann Wirth was the machine. But you, Mabinty, were the crack in its gears—the reason he believed, against all reason, that some things were worth more than obedience. And though he never said it aloud, in his quiet obsession, in the unblinking surveillance of his gaze, you were everything.

Trepidation, exuberance and a deep sated desperation with relief filled Johann as the Eastern Front was finally secured. Families of military men allowed to move into the secured area. Johann watched eagerly as jeeps rolled into the secured city of Lublin, Poland. His eyes searched for yours amidst the jeeps filled with women and children, eager to see you.