Time Warp: We've All Got Bruises (Winter)

[Chris Rossi]

Wednesday, November 1, 2006

Chris had taken a sick day. 

Luckily, because she was practically never sick, her father hadn't questioned her when this morning she declared she wasn't feeling well. That wasn't even technically a lie. She really wasn't feeling well at all... That just has nothing to do with her health. 

Jeff had dumped her the night before. Well, he hadn't technically ended things, but he had been cheating on her with stupid Cindy Baxter for weeks and she had finally caught him red handed. He hadn't even tried to hide it. Everyone had known he had moved on - that's the only reason she had went to the party in the first place, to see if the rumors were true. Needless to say it had been a traumatizing experience. 

So she had done something she never did. She skipped school. Chris just couldn't imagine going to school. Not only would she have to face Jeff and Cindy, but she'd have to face everyone who had surely heard of her complete humiliation. 

And who knows what else Jeff had told them about her and their brief relationship.

She felt sick even thinking about that possibility. 

Which was all the more reason why she had stayed home, focusing her attentions on junk food and movies. They were almost enough to distract her from her heartbreak. Almost. Chris had cried more today than she had... well, pretty much ever in her sixteen years. A fact she would fervently deny to anyone. After all, she was a tough girl, a jock girl. She wasn't supposed to cry. She definitely wasn't supposed to cry over some asshole like Jeff. But right now she was alone, which meant she could cry, eat a pint of ice cream and not worry about her puffy eyes. 

It was the afternoon by now and she was finally starting to feel better. Perhaps it wasn't heartbreak at all. Her heart was feeling a little bruised, but it wasn't anything she couldn't bounce back from. Maybe she'd give Winter a call here soon after all. Maybe he'd even gone to class today and she could get notes from him. Doubtful, but she could hope. 

What she hadn't been expecting was the doorbell. She was home alone, so for a moment she debated waiting, and just letting whoever go away, but it rang again and she started to think it might be important. Of course there was no way she could have guessed what she would find on the other side of the door. 

"Winter Jay! What the hell happened to your face!"

[Winter Rowley]

The aforementioned “Winter Jay!” Rowley was bleeding into the sleeve of his trusty black hoodie, and was in no mood to be addressed by any combination of his first and middle names. He glowered at his best friend as well as he could with one eye swollen shut.

“Your stupid ex-boyfriend’s Christmas ham of a fist,” he said, words heavily muffled by fabric, “happened to my face. Thanks for asking. Can I come in? It’s fucking freezing.”

It was, indeed, very cold—it seemed as though winter in Vermont had come early and made itself comfortable. Of course, the fact that Rowley was dripping wet was also a factor. He fixed Chris with another steely look, as though he were challenging her to make note of this.

“It’s Gatorade,” he said shortly. He edged past her and into the foyer of the Rossi home, smelling of Glacier Freeze. He dropped his messenger bag unceremoniously on the tiled floor and took a moment to examine the fingernails of his right hand, which were topped with tiny half-circles of his own dried blood. He sniffled, and his face contorted with instant, painful regret.

There were a few moments of pause while he delicately peeled the blood-soaked fabric of his sleeve away from his alarmingly purple nose. Red was smeared all over the lower half of his face and congealed in thick rivulets under his puffy nostrils.

“How bad is it?” he asked, thickly. He hadn’t had the courage to look.

[Chris Rossi]

Chris thought her best friend was glaring at her, but with one eye swollen shut, the effect was underwhelming at best. He rather resembled a kicked puppy really, with far more bark than bite, and all in all looked more pitiful than menacing.

Still, she knew how he felt about the use of his full name and so she could hazard a guess at the effort he must be exerting in his futile attempt.

However, little could compare to the literally jaw-dropping revelation that the damage had been done by none other than her newly ex boyfriend. "Why the hell was his fist anywhere near your face?" she demanded to know. After a momentary pause, she stepped aside. "Funny that you complain about the cold when we're going to have to empty out the freezer on your face..." she muttered. She was still in shock and more than a little confused. Why would Jeff have picked a fight with Winter? It didn't make sense.

"Ah," she managed as he informed her the substance he was dripping was gatorade. "So wet and sticky. Fun combination," she said dryly. She quickly closed the door behind them, locking it behind them. It was only then that she was able to really take in the full image of the state of disaster he was really in. "Wow, he did a number on your nose," she said wincing at the same moment his own face contorted in a painful expression.

She didn't say anything more for a moment, not really even sure quite what she could say. The whole situation was entirely baffling to her.

"Well, on the bright side, it's hard to really see the damage through all the dried blood," she answered, trying not to grimace as she did and failing miserably. "Um... Let's go to the kitchen. I think we have a bag of peas that your eye is desperately searching for and then we can worry about cleaning you up." Pragmatic mode had kicked in. After all, taking care of Winter was one of the things she had always been good at.

"You might want to avoid mirrors though... at least the half of you that can actually see..." She chuckled slightly, though she quickly disguised it with a cough.

"So seriously, Win, what happened? Why on earth would Jeff come after you?"

[Winter Rowley]

Rowley was able to ignore Chris’s question the first time; if there was anything Winter Rowley did well, it was being quiet.

Well, most of the time.

“Oh, yeah, super fun, let me tell you,” he said. “I can hardly contain my excitement. Reeking of an unidentifiable mix of artificial fruit flavors is the fucking best.”

The effort of forming clear, emphatic words was making his face throb all the harder. He ignored it as best he could—it was stupid, sure, but he had to salvage at least a few scraps of his injured pride. He studied Chris while Chris studied him. The worry in her eyes served to temporarily blunt the edge of his temper.

“I don’t think it’s broken,” he said. He stumbled over the consonants like they were marbles. “I didn’t hear it crack or anything.”

He mopped at his nose with the least saturated part of his sleeve. He followed her obediently into the kitchen, doing his best to ignore her quips at his expense along the way. He succeeded, if only because the soreness was setting in and his desire to snark back was waning. Despite her earlier advice, he chanced a look in the hallway mirror as he went by.

“Fuck,” he said, miserably. “My dad is going to kill me.”

He sank into the nearest wood-backed kitchen chair and rested his damp elbow on the tabletop. From there, he pressed his hand against his forehead and closed his eyes and sighed.

“I hit him,” he admitted, after a pause. He sniffled loudly and then held out his other, less bloody hand for Chris to examine. His knuckles were pink and swollen. “I punched him in the eye, and he beat the shit out of me. Alright? Just hand me the stupid peas.”

[Chris Rossi]

He wasn't answering. Normally she'd get annoyed and badger him until he cracked. Luckily for the moment she was far too distracted by the shock of the situation and the damage that had been inflicted to his face.

Naturally he didn't take her sarcasm well, responding with even more of his own. Chris merely rolled her eyes and huffed slightly. "Such a drama queen," she muttered under her breath. Of course she didn't really understand the situation yet herself either. "Damn, you're grumpy," she grumbled. Not that she could really blame him. As much blood as there was on him, he had to be hurting.

So she stopped mocking him for a moment to really take in everything. He was pretty beaten, but it wasn't nearly as bad as it could have been, which was a small blessing really "Well good. Trust me, you'd know if it was broken." She had never broken her own nose, but she'd had her fair share of fist fights in school when she was younger and she had developed a mean right hook over the years. "It'll still hurt like a bitch, but once we clean up the blood it won't look so bad," she said, nodding absently as she continues to study him.

They made their way to the kitchen, and as she heard him curse, she knew he hadn't listened to her. "I told you not to look, damn it!" she scolded. "It looks worse than it is," she added, only half convincingly. His eye was pretty bad though. "Besides, you can stay here for a couple of days until it heals a little. He probably won't notice and then you can just tell him I hit you in the face with a basketball. He can't really get mad at you over that." The last thing Winter needed was his dad getting on his case over this.

He took a seat and she opened the freezer, fishing out a bag of peas. However, as he offered his own confession and held out his hand, she grabbed a second bag as well. Chris walked over to stand in front of him, gently placing it against his eye. "Sorry," she said softly, knowing it would sting. "Just hold it here and try not to put too much pressure on it, okay? And here, put this one on your hand."

She was a bit quiet as she moved about the kitchen, going about the process of dampening a washcloth so she could wash the blood away. "Did he hit you anywhere else?" she asked after a slight pause, worried that there might be more injuries she couldn't see. Chris bit her lip, trying to process the information. "Why did you punch him? Was he hassling you or something?" She had spent so many years of their childhood protecting him that it somehow never occurred to her that for once he might have been defending her.

[Winter Rowley]

Rowley gave her another red-rimmed, wonk-eyed look.

“You’d be grumpy, too.”

Still, he listened to her advice about noses and cleaning and soreness—between the two of them, she’d know. Also, she almost certainly punched harder than he did. He wasn’t ashamed to admit it.

“I’ll have to tell him that I jumped in front of the basketball,” he said, dryly. “He’s more likely to believe that than he is to believe that your aim sucked hard enough to hit me in the face.”

She rewarded his admission with two fat bags of peas. She pressed one of them gingerly against his face, and he inhaled a sharp hiss of breath that made his head throb ominously.

“Oh, ugh,” he said. “I am never telling you the truth again. That is the worst.”

He held it in place anyway—he was smart enough to know when he had no room to argue. After he had strategically covered all of his sore spots with peas, he looked up to survey her with his good eye. She was quiet, and he could tell that she was thinking. He just didn’t know about what—or, rather, which part in particular.

“No,” he said. “He tried to kick me, but the teachers broke us up. Oh—I brought your homework. There might be Gatorade on it, though.”

He tilted his head jerkily in the direction of his bag with a wince. There was a long pause.

“He wasn’t hassling me,” said Rowley, carefully. “He just needed to be punched. Anyway, I took care of it. Well, he took care of me. It’s been taken care of. Whatever.”

He agitated the bag of peas over his eye.

“My contact’s still in,” he said. “I don’t suppose you have any magical pain-free remedies for that.”