Flash Forward Fic: First You Grieve, Then You Get Over It (Demetri)

[ozmissage]

Title: First You Grieve, Then You Get Over It
Character: Demetri (Demetri/Zoey)
Rating: R
Words: 1,604
Warnings: Sexual content, language, a whole lot of talking about death.
Spoilers: For episode one, some speculation based on that epically long promo ABC aired after the episode was over.
Disclaimer: Not mine.
Summary: Demetri tries to get on with his life.
A/N: What do you mean it’s too early to be writing fic?

The day after the flash Demetri is asked approximately nine hundred times what he saw. Everybody has a story---Mark’s hitting the bottle again, the security guard at the front desk was eating dinner at a new Thai place, the pizza delivery guy was screwing a hot blonde---they’ve all got something to look forward to come April 29.

He’s got a blank, a hole, a big gapping blackness with not a damn thing in it; nothing good, nothing bad…nothing at all. When he tries telling people this they duck their heads and avert their eyes. They say maybe you were asleep, maybe you were somewhere dark, maybe you were just unconscious, maybe…

And they never finish the last maybe, but they don’t have to. Demetri can finish it for them---maybe he’s a dead man walking.

***

He’s pissed off at first, beyond pissed off. It’s not fair; he’s got things to do. He’s getting married. He has a good job. He’s a good guy. He doesn’t deserve this.

He takes his anger out on everyone around him. Mark. Zoey. He pushes them away, he screams at them. Zoey doesn’t know what the hell is wrong with him, but she doesn’t threaten to leave and that just makes it worse.

Mark is patient as always. He feeds Demetri a line about how they’ll get through this together, something corny about how he’s not dying on his watch.

After awhile Demetri gets tired of being pissed. It’s exhausting and seems like a waste of energy given the circumstances. He apologizes. He asks for forgiveness. He tries to believe Mark when he says it might not mean what he thinks. He tries. But it doesn’t work.

***

He resolves not to be a bastard anymore. If he really is living on borrowed time he doesn’t want people to remember him as an asshole.

He won’t slam some perp up against the car for mouthing off. He won’t blow off Mark when he’s whining about how his marriage is going to implode at any minute. He won’t snap at Zoey when she asks him to help her pick out the china for the place settings. He’ll be a better man. A kinder man. When people go to his funeral they’ll sob and say it’s such a shame that such a nice young man had to die so tragically.

He writes it on a post-it note as a reminder to himself: “Don’t Be a Bastard”, he writes it in big blocky letters and sticks it to the inside of his wallet.

Then some jackass cuts him off on the freeway and a fresh faced teenager bumps into him on the elevator causing him to spill an entire cup of piping hot coffee down his white shirt. Later, Zoey calls to complain about some mix up with the dining hall and talks all the way through his lunch break, so he has to go back to helping Mark with his stupid clue board on an empty stomach.

Finally he says, “Fuck it,” and crumples the cheerful, yellow post-it into a tiny ball and tosses it into the nearest trash bin.

***

He wishes he knew how it was going to happen. When would be nice too, but it’s the how that he can’t stop thinking about. Statistically speaking given his line of work he figures he’ll probably get shot.

The question then becomes where is he going to be shot? Will it be a clean shot straight to the heart, quick and relatively painless or will it be something like a shot to the gut, the kind that bleeds out slow so that you can feel yourself dying by degrees?

He killed a guy once, a drug runner. Demetri told him to lower his weapon, but the idiot just kept coming closer to him, his gun held high like Demetri was just going to stand back and let the bastard walk out of there alive.

He shot him twice in the chest. He died a few minutes later; a quick burst of blood dribbling out of his mouth and down his chin and then it was over.

Demetri starts wearing a bullet-proof vest under his shirt just in case.

***

He fucks Zoey more. Every time he pretends it’s the last time (and maybe it is).

He used to let his mind wander during sex. He’d think about the case he was working on or about the Lakers game he could be watching. He doesn’t think about anything but her now.

He memorizes the way her hands feel sliding down his chest, the way she digs her nails into his back just enough to sting, but not enough to leave a mark. He runs his hands across every inch of her, stopping to feel the weight of her breast in his palm and the sharp curve of her hip.

And he tells her he loves her. He says it against her lips before he kisses her and then again when he’s deep inside of her and once more when it’s done and she’s curled against him, her long legs draped across his waist.

She wants to know what’s gotten into him, why he’s being so gentle, so attentive. She looks at him with just a hint of suspicion and he shrugs and rolls his eyes and says, “Do I need a reason?”

***

Mark’s obsessed with finding out why this happened. He’s all conspiracy this, cover-up that. Demetri doesn’t really care why it happened or what it all means. It doesn’t look like it’s going to matter much for him anyway.

He has his own obsession. He wants to find others like him; he knows he can’t be the only one. There’s a whole fucking bunch of people in Los Angeles and there’s no way he’s the only one that’s going to kick it in six months.

He finds a flyer pinned to a board in a coffee shop, it’s for a support group for people without a future. There really is a support group for everything.

He goes because he doesn’t know what else to do.

***

The meeting is held in a church basement. He finds twelve people, some old, some younger than him all sitting in a circle of gray folding chairs, the kind that squeak every time you shift in your seat. He makes thirteen. It’s an unlucky number, but somehow he guesses people won’t care much about bad luck in this group.

There’s a table in the back with a plate of stale donuts and coffee so weak you would be better off drinking a glass of water instead.

He looks around at the faces in the room and he can tell they’re all scared shitless and for the first time since he woke up facedown on the freeway he doesn’t feel like he’s completely alone.

Everybody is going to die here.

***

He wonders if it will be something stupid. Slipped on a banana peal or a bar of soap, death by toaster or choking on an M&M---he could hear the stories now.

“How did Demetri die?”

“He choked on an M&M.”

“Death by chocolate was it?”

And then they’ll laugh their damn heads off. He’d rather be shot.

***

He makes time to play his guitar. He has to dig it out of the closet; there’s a layer of dust on it that’s so thick he could write his name in it.

 He sits on the couch and balances the guitar on his knees. Zoey watches as he tightens the strings. She always liked to watch him play. It used to turn her on when they first started dating. They would sit in his apartment and she would shout songs at him and he would play them for her until she got bored and took the guitar from him so she could climb on his lap and slip her hand down the front of his pants.

“Islands in the Stream!” she shouts and he wrinkles his nose, but his fingers find the cords and he can’t help but join her when she starts to sing.

***

He shows up to a meeting one afternoon and there are two empty chairs instead of one.

“Is Bernadette late?” he asks.

The others shake their heads and Demetri feels his heart sink.

She’s dead. Car accident.

He walks out of the meeting and never goes back.

***

He wakes up on April 29. He wakes up and that’s more than he ever imagined he would get. His heart is beating too fast and there’s a buzzing sound in his ears and he thinks, Oh great, heart attack.

But it’s just panic, just fear. He takes a couple of deep breathes and tries to focus on the smell of pancakes drifting into the bedroom. Zoey must have woken up first. She usually does.

He thinks about not getting up. He could pull the covers up over his head like he used to when he was a kid and his big brother convinced him there was a monster named Henry living in his closet. He could lock the door, turn out the lights, he could just stay here until tomorrow. He could. But he won’t.

Mark’s going to be at work all day. Apparently he’s got ninjas coming after him tonight---or something like that. Something’s going to happen today, something huge; the kind of something that turns everything upside down and leaves the whole world scrambling to make sense of it.

But that’s later.

Right now he has a hot fiancée making him pancakes and a desperate partner waiting for him in his office and he can’t just stop.

He’s probably going to die today.

But he’s going to eat his breakfast first.