InsaneJournal

DeRo Fic

Title:  All that’s in the flesh

Author: Spaghettitoes

Rating: PG

Word Count: 900

Fandom/Pairing: Alles was zählt/In the Flesh – DeRo, DeRoMarc if you wanna see it

Warnings:  Aldi made me do it – consider yourself warned.

Summary:  You thought CCS was the real story? Come-on, you know better than that. As if death could stop Roman Wild.

A/N: I purposefully didn’t look at dates from the shows because they won’t fit but *handwaves* The dates work out perfectly.
Thank you Anna for the beta - I've tried to address all concerns but I couldn't do all my usual re-checks, it was post or die!

Declaration:  I have nothing to do with either of these shows and this fic certainly isn’t going to change that.

Deniz knew he’d made mistakes in his life. One of the things he’d come to terms with in group therapy was how his own decisions had been the source of a lot of his problems. Nevertheless, it felt like this particular turn of events was a betrayal on the part of his mind.

His psychiatrist, Dr Grüber, called it a dissociative episode. Deniz’s mind had been so traumatised by what he had seen during the Rising, on top of the loss he’d already experienced, that it had checked out from reality.

Marc – the only survivor who was sympathetic enough about his situation to visit – had laughed and said it sounded like some bad soap opera. Deniz had looked coldly out into the gardens and shaken his head, what Deniz had imagined for himself was far worse, “This? It’s the most sensible thing I’ve heard in a while,” he confessed.

“A world without the Rising?” Scoffed Marc, “I wouldn’t mind a little melodrama to forget that.”

It was Marc’s visits that finally pierced Deniz’s illusion. Their shared history, the animosity, had made the sympathy and compassion Marc showed him an inexcusable divergence from the fiction he had created.

In his reality Deniz had continued life without Roman, a parade of increasingly bad decisions plaguing him. It wasn’t what you’d think of as a retreat from the world but self-recrimination was something Deniz could do. He’d learnt from the master how to bear with unbearable sorrow, how to hold his head up and plough on when he kept getting things wrong. Compared to the dead rising from their graves and eating the brains of the living, it was easy. Who do you blame when zombies, sorry the partially deceased, walk the streets and kill people? No, a miserable half life of poor decisions was better.

The truth was introduced slowly to Deniz, you can’t tell someone they’ve had a dissociative episode and then expect them to easily accommodate news like the Rising. Deniz had watched old news footage together with his support group. They watched short videos in chronological order over weeks; Deniz had expected Essen to be one of the worst hit, if only because everything happened bigger there. But it made sense too, you don’t go as mad as Deniz did without seeing the worst.

After a few weeks it settled in his brain as fact, he could accept that it had happened. Marc, who still visited despite Deniz’s initial hostility and his own self-doubt, relayed some of his experiences, pre-agreed with Dr Grüber. Two months later Marc was discussing when he first encountered a risen friend and it hit Deniz. Everything that had happened before and everything he knew about the rising condensed to a single point, “Roman?”

Marc looked anxiously to the glass door that separated them from the medical staff, “I don’t know if I’m allowed to discuss…”

“Did he…one year, one year…when did the Rising start?” As Deniz fumbled with dates and times, trying to remember the month, the year and count time on his fingers, Marc looked to the room behind them, then turned slowly to Deniz.

“He’s still in rehabilitation,” admitted Marc.

“Rehabilitation?”

“Rott...When PDS suffers were caught, when they found the treatment...”

Deniz nodded excitedly, “I remember that, they’ve saved some, they’ve helped some.”

Marc nodded once, solemnly, “Well, Roman was caught safely and treated. But, well – you know him, he’s found it hard moving past what happened. Add in the physical impairment, the limitations that’s put on him...”

“He can’t skate?” Deniz could feel it as Roman would, the crippling agony of being held back from the thing he needed to really live.

Marc huffed, almost laughed, “I think it bothers him more than what he can remember about the Rising.”

“So rehabilitation is like...like this?” Drugs and therapy, disenchanted medical staff moving you around mindlessly.

“Yeah, although it’s a bit less comfortable, a bit more governmental.”

Deniz retreated into his thoughts and Marc was ushered away by the nurses. Deniz was only partially aware of what was happening, of people talking about how he’d been told too much too soon. Time passed without meaning, they told him it had been days.

Marc visited again a month later with permission and a mobile phone. There was one number stored on it, “I visit - when it’s allowed. I tell him how you’re doing. What’s happening outside.”

Deniz clutched the phone to his chest to the defiance of everything until that evening when the phone buzzed once –

I don’t remember much.

Deniz held the phone and laughed until he cried. A nurse looked in on him as he curled up on his bed and typed back –

Everything I remember is fake.

Their conversations were stilted at first, each held back by their circumstances, but as the days and weeks passed something returned. Deniz remembered moments from the Rising, things he had been forced to do, and his artificial life faded into the background like a half remembered dream. Roman found something of himself, so he said, in Deniz; in the bond they had recovered.

Months passed before they met again. They’d had video chats and telephone calls but when the day came Deniz felt exhilaration like never before. Roman sat in the garden with him and they talked; about the future, about Deniz’s release date and their new home in Hamburg.