#anyways i am blown away by my own timeliness for once...wednesdays are my Busy Days but somehow i had time?

[set-phasers-to-whump]

black eye

prompt: black eye (alt no.10)

whumpee: gereon rath

fandom: babylon berlin

hi! look at how early in the day i finished this fic for once :0 i am actually going to have free time!! anyways i hope you like this fic :) it’s pre-ship but you don’t need to read it like that if you’re not so inclined.

He has no idea how the fight starts - one minute he’s seated at the bar, smoking a cigarette and playing idly with his hat, trying to think about the latest case that’s landed on his desk; and the next there’s the sound of a glass shattering and someone shouting. He stands up to see what’s happening and promptly gets clocked in the face. 

He staggers backwards and finds himself in the middle of an all-out brawl. Everyone is punching everyone else, fists flying and legs kicking with apparently zero regard for who exactly they hit. 

Someone elbows him in the stomach. Someone else kicks him in the ankle, hard enough that his leg almost folds beneath him. He grabs someone’s shoulders to haul himself back up, and gets a punch to the eye for his troubles. 

His eye immediately begins to water, causing his vision to blur. The noise all around him is deafening, everyone shouting and screaming at everyone else. He has no hope of ending this by announcing himself as police (and anyway, he gets the feeling all that would accomplish is getting himself punched some more). 

The next person that punches him - square on the chin - gets a punch in return. Slowly, Gereon begins to fight his way towards the door, which is continually banging open and shut as people try (and often fail) to get out. 

He takes countless hits as he pushes through the crowd, shoving people aside when he can and punching and kicking his way through when he has to. 

By some miracle, he gets the door open, someone landing a final punch to his back before he stumbles out onto the sidewalk. 

The door slams behind him, muffling the noise of the fight. His ears are ringing, his vision’s still half-gone, and his body is thrumming with adrenaline. With no idea what else to do, and with far too much energy pumping through his veins to think rationally, he begins to run. 

He takes off, instinctively, in the direction of Alexanderplatz. 

He makes it perhaps two blocks before the adrenaline fades, leaving him shaky and exhausted and staggering rather than running. Still, he persists, now dead-set on getting to Alex, for the simple reason that he can think of nowhere else to go. 

It’s nearing dawn by the time he drags his aching body through the doors of the Castle. He trudges to Homicide, then to his desk, and promptly collapses with a groan onto his chair. He folds his arms, lies his head atop them, and is asleep in seconds. 

--

She finds him in his office, head pillowed on folded arms, dead asleep. She moves to quietly leave the room (it seems that there is not a person on earth getting enough sleep these days, and she does not want to disturb him), but the door squeaks just a bit when it opens, and suddenly he’s awake. 

He looks up, frantic for a second, reaching instinctively for his gun, until he sees that it’s her. He relaxes some, though he’s still tense. “Charlotte? What are you doing here?”

She doesn’t answer, too occupied with looking at him. His usually-perfect hair is a mess. His clothes are rumpled. There’s a scratch on his forehead and another on his chin, but most startling is the black eye. The bruise is dark and slightly swollen and it looks quite painful. 

“What is this?” she asks, instead of answering his question. She sits down atop his desk, reaches out her fingers towards his face. 

“It’s nothing,” he says, pulling away. 

“Nothing is nothing.” Her response is just unusual enough that he stops moving, trying to puzzle it out. She takes this opportunity to keep poking around his eye. A particularly hard prod has him pulling away again, from pain rather than from discomfort. 

“Sorry,” Charlotte says, but continues her poking anyway, a touch gentler. “What happened?”

There can be no harm in telling her now, he supposes. “There was a bar fight.”

Charlotte is mildly impressed. She wouldn't exactly take Gereon for the bar-fight type. “Did you win?”

“I do not think anybody won.”

“Hm,” she says. “Where else are you hurt?”

“What?”

“You can’t have only got punched in the eye. Where else?”

He shrugs, makes a sweeping gesture to encapsulate his whole body. There is virtually no part of him that isn’t aching, so the gesture is true enough. Charlotte raises her eyebrows. 

“Everywhere?”

“More or less.”

“Are you bleeding?”

“No. Only bruised.”

She considers this, wondering whether there is really an answer to her question. She asks it anyway. “What can be done?”

He shakes his head, quickly stopping the movement when it makes him dizzy. “Nothing.” There is not much to be done for mere bruises. All that can be done is to leave them alone and let them hurt.  

This is definitely not a satisfactory answer. Charlotte pauses for a moment and thinks. She supposes that, in his position, she’d probably quite like to either continue sleeping or have a drink to cut down the pain. But seeing as they must start working in - she looks at the clock - about an hour, neither of these options is going to work. “How about some coffee?” she suggests, at last. “And some conversation, to take your mind off things.”

This sounds a good deal better than sitting alone with nothing but silence and pain for company. Gereon nods. 

“Don’t go anywhere,” she warns him, and walks off to make the coffee. 

He stays put - where would he go? - and waits for Charlotte to come back, trying to focus on anything other than the insistent aching that pervades his entire body. His head is pounding, his eye is so tender that even blinking hurts, his chest and torso ache every time he breathes, his ankle throbs…there’s so much of it, all at once. He shuts his eyes and tries to make it stop, tries to just breathe, tries to focus on anything else. But all there is is this. 

And then there is Charlotte, stepping back into the room with the clinking sound of two steaming mugs of coffee. 

She walks behind his desk, sits down atop it again, closer to him this time, and hands him a mug. He wraps his aching hands around it - she notes the bruising on his knuckles - and raises the mug towards his face, inhaling the steam like this alone will wake him up. He takes a sip, makes an appreciative noise - there’s only so much that can be done with the Castle’s coffee machines, but Charlotte has managed to get them to produce something more than decent.

“This is good,” he says, and then falls silent, not quite looking at her but not quite looking away, either. 

Charlotte takes this as her cue to speak, deciding to simply narrate the events of her day thus far, and see where that takes her. She drums her heels lightly against the desk, takes a sip of her coffee, and begins, Gereon listening intently and resolutely not thinking about the scuff marks that’ll be left on his desk later. 

“So I thought I would come here early this morning to do some studying…”

thanks for reading! i think there is probably some book canon mixed in here bc i have been reading those and stuff gets mixed together in my mind lmao. what can ya do. also who knows if like, the time makes sense. who cares. what is time anyway, am i right? anyways i hope you enjoyed!! have a great day :)