#anyways i love henning and czerwinski so muchhh i was so stoked to write them :) i hope they read well!

[set-phasers-to-whump]

just keep swimming

prompt: drowning

whumpee: gereon rath

fandom: babylon berlin

hi! here is another babylon berlin fic and another drowning fic...listen water whump is simply top tier ok? anyway this is set after 2x08 and most likely after s3 but i am not super picky with timing so yeah. but this will make a lot more sense if you’ve seen 2x08 lol. i had so much fun writing this fic, i hope you like it!

They weren’t supposed to have been there, but the gate had been unlocked and Charlotte had given it a little push and stepped right on through and then looked back, beckoning the other three members of their party forwards, and Henning and Czerwinski had looked at each other and shrugged and Gereon had sighed and then they’d all tried to step through the gate at the same time. Once they’d sorted that out and all gotten inside the deserted courtyard (and once Charlotte had stopped laughing at them), they had decided to split up, which was where everything had gone wrong, Gereon reflects. They should have stayed together…

But they hadn’t, and now he’s here, inside one of the derelict buildings on the edge of the courtyard, struggling against the grip of a man much larger than him, who is dragging him steadily further back into the dark room. He’s kicking and shouting but it isn’t doing any good, and all he can do is pray that his comrades can hear him.

The man suddenly stops dragging him, and Gereon gets a hard kick in, his heel connecting with the man’s leg. The man barely even moves in response, and Gereon wonders if he’s about to be shot, which seems like the most likely outcome here. His hands start to shake. He clenches them into fists and tries to breathe and in the span of less than a second he’s being pushed forwards and his deep breath of air gets replaced by a deep breath of water. 

He immediately starts struggling against the hands holding him under, and he’s coughing at the same time, involuntarily, as his lungs try to expel the water he’s just inhaled. His nose burns and there’s a tightness in his chest and he thinks about his car going into the water and Charlotte and how long he’d been able to stay underwater then, and he tells himself that he will be fine, that he will be able to hold on until Charlotte and Henning and Czerwinski come for him, but he’s not even sure that they’d heard him and he’s still fighting against the man holding him beneath the water but he can feel the energy seeping out of his body and decides to stop fighting and conserve what little strength he has left. 

He doesn’t know how long the man holds him under. He begins to panic, and his lungs begin to burn from a lack of oxygen and he sees Charlotte, shaking her head, sees her succumbing to her body’s need to breathe, sees her jerky movements as she inhales water, and he struggles once more against his captor for all he’s worth before he, too, begins to breathe.

The first breath is awful. The water burns and he feels like he’s choking and the panic increases tenfold and he breathes again, and again, and - he is dying and he thinks perhaps it’s better to speed it up, and he takes another breath and then another and then another and then everything goes black.

--

Charlotte, Henning, and Czerwinski are carefully making their way into the building from which they’d heard Gereon shout. It’s taken them some time to get there, having all been off at different areas of the courtyard, and then having had to be very cautious about approaching what is probably a dangerous situation. It has been a few minutes since Gereon’s initial shout, and they haven’t heard anything since, which is worrying and comforting in equal parts. No indication that Gereon is okay, but no gunshots or noises of fighting either. 

The three of them step around a corner, Henning and Czerwinski slightly in front of Charlotte, guns drawn and sweeping the room. There’s someone in front of them, back turned, too large to be Gereon. The man is standing in front of some sort of large basin and he’s holding Gereon down inside of it and there are extremely faint, watery noises, and then Gereon’s body goes limp and slips from the man’s grasp and Charlotte shouts his name and Henning and Czerwinski fire at the same time and then there are two bodies on the floor.

They all rush forwards. Charlotte drops to her knees next to Gereon, who is lying in a heap on the floor, unmoving. Behind her, Henning and Czerwinski proclaim simultaneously that the man who has done this is dead. 

The two of them quickly join Charlotte, then, and together they carefully roll Gereon onto his back. His entire body is wet, though only his top half had been underwater, and that coupled with the scuff marks on his shoes and the wrinkles and tears in his clothing tells Charlotte that he’d fought hard against his drowning. 

For a second all three of them just look at him, and then Henning reaches forwards and holds a hand over Gereon’s mouth and presses his fingers to his neck and shakes his head, and Charlotte looks at Czerwinski who looks at Henning who looks back at Charlotte and then it is like they all remember what they are supposed to do at once, and they spring into action.

--

Charlotte doesn’t remember much of it, the moments after she’d come back to life. Mostly she remembers coughing and a pain in her chest and him. But she remembers very well what Gereon had told her at some point in the days afterwards. He had told her about pressing on her chest to make her heart beat and about breathing air into her mouth to get her lungs working and there had been this tension in his voice which had only caused her to pay more attention to what he was saying. He’d demonstrated it for her (and for Henning, Czerwinski, and Gräf) later, showing them where to press on the chest and how to pinch the nose shut when administering a breath and they’d all shared a look that spoke to their collective desire to never have to do this. 

And now here they are, she and Henning and Czerwinski, doing it. Czerwinski is providing the compressions and Charlotte is providing the breaths and Henning is counting - none of them are sure exactly what number he’s supposed to count to, but they have settled on twenty. Twenty seconds, twenty compressions, a breath. Twenty seconds, twenty compressions, a breath. Twenty seconds, twenty compressions...it isn’t working. 

But it has to. Charlotte remembers Gereon telling her, as he’d explained this procedure, you must keep going. She remembers his face as he’d said it, and she knows she’d been underwater for a very long time, knows it must have taken him a long time to revive her - certainly longer than this. But he’d kept going, and she’s here now, alive, and he is not going to die. 

“Press harder,” she tells Czerwinski, in between breaths. “He would rather wake up with his chest hurting than not wake up at all.”

He does as she says, pressing so hard that Charlotte wonders if his ribs will break, and they keep going, pressing, breathing, counting. This will work, Charlotte thinks, it has to work.

Finally, it does. 

--

He wakes up coughing violently, water spraying out of his mouth, and he gasps for breath and someone moves him so he’s on his side and he vomits once, twice, and it feels like an ocean has been poured into his lungs, like the water will never leave his body completely, and for a very long time he lies there, coughing and gagging and breathing and everything hurts, his lungs are aching and his chest feels like it’s been hit with a hammer and he’s trembling but not like he’s used to, like he’s just - cold.

He doesn’t know how long he lies there, but slowly, he becomes aware of things besides his own body. Warm hands are touching him, very slowly guiding him upwards into a sitting position, and someone is pulling his freezing, soaking coat away from him and then putting it back on - or, no, it’s a different coat, because his coat had been cold and this one is warm. It feels nice, he thinks, and unconsciously burrows himself deeper into its fabric. 

“Open your eyes, Gereon,” someone says, and his mind is fuzzy but he recognizes the voice. He opens his eyes, and everything is blurry and out of focus but he sees Henning - the owner of the voice - and there’s Czerwinski next to him, and the warm presence behind him, holding him up, can only be Charlotte. He gets the briefest flash of memory, of the two of them by that lake, positions reversed, but it’s quickly gone, replaced by an especially harsh bout of coughing that distracts him from everything else.

When the coughing subsides and the pain in his chest lessens, Gereon realizes that he’s moving. The entire left side of his body is warm and he’s still wrapped in someone else’s coat and he can feel arms beneath his knees and on his back which means that someone is carrying him. He tries to find the energy to say that he’s alright and can walk but barely manages a wheeze. 

The next thing Gereon knows, he’s in a moving car, and he remembers, vaguely, having driven here. He opens eyes that have drifted closed at some point on the walk to the car and watches as the blurry shapes in front of him resolve themselves into Henning and Czerwinski, oddly sideways. He isn’t quite sure what’s wrong until he gets the rest of his senses to focus and comes to the startling realization that he’s lying down with his head resting on one of Charlotte’s legs. 

He quickly tries to sit up, but barely moves at all. “Don’t try to move,” Charlotte says, placing a hand on the side of his head. “You’ll be alright, just rest. We will take care of you.” 

He doesn’t particularly want to obey Charlotte’s instructions, but is incapable of doing anything else. And so he lies there, uncomfortably aware of the fact that he is lying down with his head effectively on Charlotte’s lap, and he tries to ignore the pain in his chest and the burning in his lungs and the way his damp clothes stick to his skin, chilling him despite the coat still draped around him, despite the warmth of Charlotte’s body heat. 

As a distraction, he tries to listen in on Henning and Czerwinski’s conversation, which is evidently another one of their typical arguments about something wildly unimportant. The normalcy of it almost makes him smile, but he’s far too exhausted. At any rate, though, it’s enough to make him think that everything is going to be okay, or at least, as okay as it’s ever going to get for him. He lets out a shaky sigh at this revelation, takes a deep breath that mercifully doesn’t end in a cough, and allows himself to relax, ever so slightly, accepting for once the fact that these people are quite intent on taking care of him.

thanks so much for reading! i am gonna talk for a bit...so cpr wasn’t like, Officially A Thing until the 50′s but the chest compressions and breaths had been things on their own for quite a while leading up to 1929. as far as i can tell they weren’t used together back then, but seeing as how gereon does it i figure maybe he’d learned both things separately at some point and then was either taught to put them together or just sort of tried it and realized it worked. i know the most likely explanation is the show people didn’t look up the history of cpr like i did bc i was curious but yeah. it’s not Technically a thing at this time but since it’s used in the show i figure i don’t have to justify my including it too terribly much. but interesting facts for you! anyway onto other stuff - the ending is a bit wonky but it is a well documented fact that i Can’t Do Endings so this should not come as a shock lmao. anyways it again was weird to write this in english bc They Are German but i hope it was ok regardless!!!