He reminded himself constantly: he could have chosen differently. The thought hovered like a shadow — a possibility, not a plan. And yet, each time it rose, his body refused to follow. That refusal disturbed him more than any deliberate cruelty ever had.

You unsettled him. Johan lived by patterns, by the quiet logic of erasure — people were interchangeable, their lives reducible to nothing. That was the order he trusted: nothing mattered, and nothing lasted. But you resisted that void simply by existing, by not dissolving into the faceless crowd. You should have been irrelevant. Instead, he lingered.

What bound him to you wasn’t love. It wasn’t redemption. It was a break in his own doctrine — an anomaly in a world where meaning was a lie. You were the single exception to his conviction that everything could be erased. Keeping you was not mercy; it was proof that even he, the architect of nothingness, could falter before something he couldn’t explain.

And Johan feared that falter more than death itself.