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When a furious knock thunders at the basement door, Mischa isn’t sure what to expect. He momentarily takes his eyes away from his game of Overwatch, moving his bulky headphones off of one ear, but doesn’t get up from his spot on the couch.
It’s certainly weird that someone is knocking at the basement door instead of the front door upstairs, but it doesn’t matter. It could be a visitor for his adoptive parents who just got lost somehow or a solicitor of some kind, but either way, he doesn’t want to deal with them.
Though, it’s a little late to have anyone over… And who would be soliciting at this hour of the evening?
Still, it isn’t any of his business. He has more important things to attend to. Like carrying his whole team because some players don’t know how to pull their own weight in a game.
Even through the sound of gunfire in his headphones, Mischa is still able to hear the sound of persistent knocking. He grunts in annoyance, but he can’t pause the game to go chase the person off, since it’s an online game, nor is the match over yet. There are still seven minutes left. He just hopes whoever is out there will go away eventually.
They don’t.
The knocking continues, and now it just sounds like someone is trying to bust his door down. Worried about alerting his adoptive parents and very fed up, Mischa finally throws his controller and headphones down on the couch with a roared, “ALRIGHT!!”
Abandoning his game, Mischa stomps over to the basement door and flings it open, which nearly gets him rapped on the chest by the person standing outside. He stands up to his full height, trying to look intimidating so he can scare this person off already, and snarls, “What the FUCK do you w—”
And then the words die off.
Because it isn’t some degenerate annoyance trying to sell him something useless like shitty cable at all, but a small, stick-thin redhead that would never in a million years go door-to-door bartering useless crap to people.
“Ocean?” Mischa says.
Ocean O’Connell Rosenberg is standing there in his backyard, and Mischa realizes she technically trespassed on his adoptive parents’ property to get to this back door in the first place. What grabs his attention even more, though, is what she’s wearing. She’s donned in a rather ugly pinafore dress that looks like it was made from ripping off fabric from clothes that were actually nice and sewing them together to form this patchwork mess of a gown, and Mischa wonders what kind of self-respecting parent would ever let their kid leave the house like this.
However, it’s her face that is even more eye-catching.
Her usual pale ginger complexion has turned as red as her hair, and at first, Mischa thinks she’s managed to get sunburned in the middle of winter, but then he realizes that she’s crying. Tears run like rivers from bloodshot eyes that display an expression of fear back at him. They stream down over a nasty, oozing cut on her left cheek, the flesh all inflamed and swollen from some kind of impact, and her nose is bleeding.
She’s hurt.
Something—or someone—has hurt her.
Mischa opens his mouth to say something about how horrible she looks, but he can’t get a word in edgewise because Ocean has already started speaking. The words spew from her lips like blood from an arterial spray, and he can barely keep up with her thinly veiled panic.
“I’m sorry— didn’t know where else to go— I mean, I could have gone to Constance’s house, but I don’t want to bother her with this again, God knows she hears about it enough— you were the closest— I can leave— didn’t mean to intrude— I’m sorry—”
“Ocean!”
Like that, Ocean snaps her mouth shut, and she actually shrinks in on herself, and if Mischa weren’t already incredibly worried, then that certainly would have done the trick.
Ocean O’Connell Rosenberg never shows weakness such as something like that. More than that, though, she isn’t one for apologies, either. But here she is, apologizing and cowering.
Something really bad must have happened.
“Ocean,” Mischa says, calmer this time so as to not startle the poor girl again. She already looks one loud noise away from shattering into pieces; the last thing he wants is to accidentally make her spiral. “Take a breath for a moment.”
She does so, and it sounds like an asthmatic wheeze that rattles in her chest, making Mischa wince. He worries that she may actually be having an asthma attack, so he beckons her inside. She does so on wobbling legs, limping every few steps, and Mischa notices that she’s barefoot.
He doesn’t think this situation can get any worse, and then he picks up on how awful she smells. The rank stench of weed permeates from her body, more than it usually does, and he sees that she’s wet on a few parts of her body, like her chest and head. Whatever this liquid is, it’s in her hair, too, and it smells horrible. For now, though, he ignores it to tend to the more alarming features of the girl.
He gets Ocean to sit on the couch, and he’s only dimly aware that the game of Overwatch is still going on, and his character has been idle in the spawn room for several minutes now. He doesn’t care anymore. Right now, all he cares about is making sure Ocean is okay.
He isn’t sure what part of her he should attend to first. The odor of weed is anything but pleasant, but he can confidently say that it’s the least concerning thing at the moment; he can just deal with it until she’s well enough to be herded into the shower because he will make sure she gets him. Then there’s her injuries, and he doesn’t think a person can bleed out from a bloody nose or a cut on the cheek, but he’s sure neither of those things are very comfortable for her. And then there’s her unsteady breathing and quiet sobbing, and he rationalizes that maybe that is the most important thing right now. He can’t tell if she’s having a panic attack or an asthma attack or even an anxiety attack, but it’s certainly something, and that something is not good.
“Okay, Ocean, I need you to breathe,” he says. “Can you do that?”
Ocean nods feebly and takes a breath, making the same rasping wheeze from before as she inhales. Instead of exhaling, she coughs harshly, and her body hunches forward, making her look smaller than she already is. Mischa frowns and gently presses her back up into an upright sitting position.
“It’ll be harder to breathe if you sit like that,” he tells her. “If you want to bend forward, bend your head. It will help with the nosebleed. Now, try breathing again.”
Ocean does so, never one to disobey an order. This time, her inhale sounds a little less strangled, and she’s actually able to exhale it back out. Mischa encourages her to keep going until her breaths stop shuddering like the dying fronds of a tree in a rough winter wind.
As Ocean is slowly containing herself, Mischa retrieves a box of tissues sitting on the TV stand. He offers her one, which she takes and holds to her bloody nose.
Now about her cheek…
He doesn’t know if any of that smelly shit soaking her body managed to get into the cut, and even if it didn’t, it’ll still be good to disinfect the injury. The bad news is, he doesn’t have any kind of disinfectant down in the basement, which means he’ll have to go upstairs to get it.
He then finds that he doesn’t care. It’s for his friend.
“I'll be right back, okay?” he says to Ocean, who looks up at him with a desperate sort of gaze that makes his heart pinch painfully in his chest. From just her eyes, he can tell that she doesn’t want him to leave her alone, but for the sake of proper wound cleaning and care, he must. “I won’t be long, I promise.”
Ocean nods, not saying a word.
“Keep breathing like you are,” Mischa says. “You’re doing great.”
With that, he turns and walks to the steps leading upstairs.
He doesn’t tread his house like it’s a minefield; he walks with confidence toward the cabinet in the kitchen where all the medicine is held, and on the way, he encounters his adoptive mother.
His relationship with this woman isn’t all that bad; she’s very sympathetic with him and does her best, he knows she does, but she still tenses up in the same way she always does when she sees him, as though he’s a starving wolf that has just prowled into her home, and she’s a helpless rabbit that has nowhere to run to. They both stare at each other for a long moment, unblinking, frozen like deer in the lights of an oncoming semi-truck. Then, Mischa is moving again, remembering what he’s up there to do.
“What are you, ah, doing?” his adoptive mother asks as he starts digging through the medicine cabinet.
“My friend is hurt,” he answers, not looking at her. “I’m just grabbing something to help her.”
“I see.” His adoptive mother pauses. “Should I call an ambulance?”
This time, he does look back at her, a little surprised. He blinks twice, then says, “No…I think she’ll be okay.”
His adoptive mother nods. “Well…let me know if she gets worse.”
“I will.”
Mischa then finds a small bottle of antiseptic and grabs it, along with some antiseptic cream. He has painkillers downstairs already, but he also takes a bandage from the cabinet and a hand towel from one of the drawers. As he’s walking back to the basement door, he hears his mother speak, and he stops to listen to what she has to say.
“I hope your friend feels better soon.”
“Me too.”
Mischa returns to the basement.
Still on the couch, Ocean looks a little better. She isn’t crying anymore, though her face is still red and puffy, and her breathing is back to normal. However, the cut on her cheek has turned the left side of her face into a sort of gruesome black hole—literally, seeing as the blood is so dark it legitimately looks black. Mischa curses himself for not attending to that sooner; it’s been bleeding this whole time.
“I’m back,” Mischa says. He dips into the bathroom downstairs for a moment to wet the hand towel he had grabbed, then returns to Ocean’s side on the couch. “How are you doing?”
“Better,” Ocean says.
“And your nose?”
Ocean pulls away the bloody tissue from her nose. Her nostrils are ringed with red, and her nose has begun to take on a purplish tint on the left side, but the bleeding seems to have mostly stopped.
“Also better,” Ocean says.
Mischa nods. “Good. I’m going to take care of that cut on your cheek now, okay? Try to sit still.”
Ocean nods, and Mischa carefully begins to clean the cut on her face. With gentle hands, he wipes away the sticky, tacky blood plastered against her cheek using the wet hand towel. Ocean winces at different moments, and Mischa apologizes every time. Eventually, all the blood is cleaned away, letting Mischa see the injury itself when not coated in gore.
It’s a nasty little thing, maybe three inches in length. Fat beads of blood keep trying to ooze out of the angry red maw of the wound, and Mischa presses the hand towel firmly against it to stop further bleeding, causing Ocean to hiss in pain.
“Sorry,” he says.
“It’s alright,” she grunts.
Mischa holds the rag to Ocean’s face for several minutes, and without anything better to do, he decides to interrogate her on what exactly happened to get her this way.
“What happened?” he asks, and he notices the way Ocean’s shoulders tense. She’s probably been dreading this question, but Mischa has to know. If someone did this to her, he has to know who he needs to beat the shit out of.
Ocean closes her eyes for a long moment. “I don’t… I don’t want to talk about it. Not right now. Maybe later. Please?”
Mischa looks at her, and her gaze is silently begging him to just drop it for now, so he relents with a sigh. “Alright.”
“Thank you.”
A few moments later, he pulls the rag away. Her whole cheek is swollen, but the bleeding has stopped, which is good.
“I’m going to use this antiseptic now, okay?” Mischa says to Ocean. “It’s going to sting a little.”
Ocean braces herself, then says, “Okay.”
Mischa pours some antiseptic on the dry side of the hand towel, then presses it to the cut on Ocean’s face. Instantly, she goes stiff and lets out a sharp hiss of pain, her eyes screwing shut.
“Ow,” she whispers.
“You okay?” Mischa asks worriedly.
“Yeah,” Ocean assures him, opening her eyes again. “I’m fine.”
Mischa nods. He counts to ten in his head, then removes the hand towel. He can’t see any difference in the cut, but he hopes the antiseptic will do its job and ward off any infection from getting into Ocean’s blood.
Finally, he uses the antiseptic cream on the cut, then puts an adhesive pad over it to keep it protected, and maybe he’s laying it on a little thick, but he’s worried, and he wants to make sure this injury won’t cause Ocean any problems.
Once he’s done, he admires his handiwork with small glimmers of pride and says to her, “How do you feel now?”
“Better,” she replies.
“Are you going to answer with that every time?”
Ocean shrugs, then smirks thinly. “Maybe.”
At least she seems to be in better spirits enough to joke around with him. That’s good, at least.
“Okay, next,” Mischa claps his hands together. “A shower. Because, no offense, you stink.”
He expects Ocean to get angry because of the comment, but instead, strangely, she looks a little nervous.
“Right, yeah, okay,” she says, her eyes darting away from him.
Mischa’s eyebrows furrow together like storm clouds. He reaches out to touch her shoulder. “Are you alright?”
“Fine! Fine! Perfectly fine!” Ocean says, and her sudden shrill, chipper tone startles Mischa a little. “A shower! Wonderful idea! Let me go do that now!” She turns and strides to a door in the basement.
“Uhh, Ocean?”
“Yes?”
“That’s the boiler room. The shower is the door on the other side.”
Ocean blinks into the room of the door she had opened, sure enough seeing the boiler inside. She then shuts the door and turns around, a red tinge of embarrassment heating up on her cheeks.
“Right. I knew that.”
Mischa chuckles. “Here, let me get you some clothes you can wear.”
He then does that, and Ocean takes them with a soft “thank you.” While she’s in the shower, washing herself clean from whatever was making her smell so bad, Mischa picks up all the supplies he had used, tidying the place up since it seems like she’ll be spending the night with him. Not that he minds.
As he does so, his thoughts run wildly in his head. What had happened to Ocean?
Eventually, Ocean finishes showering and comes out of the bathroom, wearing a t-shirt and some shorts Mischa had lent to her. The shirt is two sizes too big and is drowning her small frame, and she had to tie the laces of the shorts into a tight knot to keep them from falling right off, but they seem to work well enough, and she looks rather comfortable. Plus, she no longer reeks of weed.
Mischa and Ocean end up playing on Mischa’s Xbox for a few hours, chatting and hanging out. Ocean is surprisingly good at some of the games, despite not owning any kind of gaming console. She’s very competitive, too. Overall, it’s a good time, and the two of them enjoy each other’s company greatly, but eventually, the topic of discussion has to circle back around to exactly why Ocean was over at Mischa’s house in the first place.
It takes a bit of prying, but Ocean finally concedes.
“My parents… Well, you know they smoke stuff. That should have been obvious a long time ago. But, umm… I guess my dad had a little too much of it? I don’t know how marijuana works, and I don’t really want to know, but let’s just say he was having a bit of a bad trip. And I guess I scared him or something, and he freaked out, and he tried to defend himself with his whole bong, and…” She looks embarrassed, scratching the side of her neck and avoiding Mischa’s eyes. “Well, my face just happened to be in the way.”
Well, that would explain the smell she was covered in. She had been soaked in fucking bong water.
Mischa stares at her in shock. “Your dad hit you with a bong?”
“It was an accident!” Ocean says quickly. “And it’s not that big of a deal, really. This is the first time it’s happened, and it probably won’t happen ever again, and I’m sure he didn’t mean it, so there’s no need to get so worked up.”
“No, there’s every reason to get worked up,” Mischa says. “Ocean, your father hit you. Not only did he hit you, he hit you with a fucking bong.”
“It sounds so embarrassing when you say it like that,” Ocean says, her face turning red with shame.
“What if the glass had broken and cut you?”
“Well, it didn’t.”
“But he still hit you hard enough to slice open your cheek.”
“I— that’s— he—” Ocean is floundering, Mischa can tell, frantically trying to come up with an excuse to justify the actions of her father. “Okay, I can see how that looks bad, but I promise this is the first time something like this has happened. And, as I said before, I’m sure it won’t happen ever again! So, really, there’s no need to worry. Alright?”
Mischa looks at her, then sighs. Ocean is as stubborn as a mule, so the likelihood of him winning this quarrel is very low. It’s best to just drop it before it turns into a full-blown argument.
“Alright,” he says. “But if it ever does happen again, you can come over here to get away from it, okay?”
Ocean gives him a small smile. “Okay. Thank you.”
When the two of them eventually turn in for the night, Mischa lets Ocean take his bed, while he lays on the couch. And as he’s trying to fall asleep, one thing keeps cycling through his head.
If this sort of incident has only happened once…then why had Ocean said she didn’t want to bother Constance with it “again”?