It's Understandable: A Tronnor AU

27. Black Eyed Baby

On the way home, Troye's driving nearly killed them both. He couldn't keep his eyes on the road half the time, because of Connor. He was really freaking him out, giving him some serious cold shoulder. His boyfriend wouldn't look at him, nor reply to him, and Troye found it difficult to stop observing his maimed face in alarm at this. 

Connor, he looked beaten down and positively blowzy. The skin all around his left eye was soil for a bruise, blossoming in a dark palette of blacks and purples and yellows. His nose was askew, the collar of his pretty, sky blue jumper splattered with blood. What made Troye cringe the most, what made it all too real, was how Connor's face--his upper lip, his chin, his nostrils--looked like a toddler had had a go at him with crimson Crayola. A few of his teeth had been shaken during the beating too, and Connor kept spitting blood from his gums into a napkin.

Even though it was so terrible, Troye couldn't look away. Like a car crash, which he nearly got into when his negligence of the road caused him to drift a little too far to the side. The car was about a meter away from slipping down a steep slope, when the sudden tilt of the world and crackle of earth and snow under his wheels thankfully shocked him back to focus. 

He righted the car, but Connor still gripped the handle above the window. "Where did you learn to drive?" He asked rather bitterly, in a way that made Troye feel a little sicker.

The entire way home, Troye didn't say a word. When he pulled into the driveway, he didn't say a word. When they went into the kitchen and he pulled out the First Aid kit, he didn't say a word. He didn't say a word, because anything he had said before that Connor had just ignored. It was best that he just not to talk at all. 

So, silently, he placed a roll of gauze on the counter and got some frozen peas from the fridge. To put on his black eye, he passed Connor the peas, and then unrolled some gauze. "Open." He allowed that one word, fitting the gauze next to Connor's set of bleeding gums so he didn't have to keep spitting.

Next, he gave in to the nursing instinct he had with Connor. He poured some water on a paper towel and started dabbing away the blood on Connor's face, tenderly, mildly as the chestnut haired boy seemed very irritable. He kept tensing under Troye's touch, but luckily it was pretty well dried, and wiped off quite easily--though Troye still needed a second paper towel to get everything. 

Sponging just under his nostrils, Troye tried to be as gentle as he could around Connor's broken nose, but turns out he couldn't be gentle enough. "Ow!" Connor yelped, recoiling as Troye tapped cartilage, triggering an achy pain throughout his face. "What the fuck are you trying to do? Break my nose off?" 

His voice was the artillery eager radicals fire off cue. An outburst, his emotions asking for a war he isn't fully equipped to fight.

Troye, the man under this unexpected fire, took a step back, crushed by the barrage of Connor's voice. He looked at Connor's uncovered eye; his eyelid was red and shiny, the shadow cast by his angrily positioned eyebrow adding a certain hostility to his glare. That glare, it was as if he saw not the bloody rag in his boyfriend's hand as an object of care, but a weapon. As if Troye would even dare try hurting him.

And Troye couldn't say nothing this time. This time, he felt too hurt being looked at like that. "Your nose is broken, it's going to hurt for a while." He said, waving off Connor's anger like he was a temperamental toddler, continuing to clean his face.

Though Connor wouldn't have that. He took Troye's wrist and moved it away, prohibiting him from touching him with the paper towel. Troye frowned, but Connor was too upset at him for it to have any effect. "When does your dad get home from work?" He asked sourly, not making direct eye contact. "I want my nose fixed so I can just go to bed."