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Published:
2021-05-28
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2021-06-21
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3/3
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Crashing Colors

Chapter 3

Notes:

part 3?? I think I'm done now.

This one takes place after both of the previous chapters.

Chapter Text

A knock on the door startles Rose from her zoned-out state. The deposition she'd been combing over slips from her lap as she sits up and checks the time on her watch at the inside of her wrist. It's late but not unreasonably so.

The TV is turned way down and set to the weather channel for background noise, and her tea sits mostly full on the coffee table, long cooled. She'd been working, sort of. It's been a long day.

The knocking starts up again as she crosses over to the door. She grabs the flannel shirt off the back of the couch- one of the millions of Bella's things scattered around her apartment- and slips it on. A glance through the peephole has her groaning as she reaches for the lock.

When the door swings open, however, Rose's mild irritation flatlines.

"Hi!" Bella chirps, looking like a trainwreck. She's leaning a shoulder against the outside of the doorframe, a bag of frozen peas pressed to the right side of her face, pink and green face paint smeared around her eyes. Maybe the strangest thing is the pair of roller skates hanging over her shoulder.

Rose lifts her glasses from the bridge of her nose to the top of her head then crosses her arms against the rush of worry at the sight of blood dribbled down the front of her white t-shirt.

"So I've taken up roller derby."

Rose sighs- partly for show, but mostly to dispel some of the staticky tension running up and down her nerves. She reaches for her coat on the hook beside the door.

"What are you doing?"

"I'm taking you to the hospital."

Bella's eyes go wide. Her hand drops from her face fully revealing her split lip and the beginnings of a nasty bruise settling in across the bridge of her nose and beneath her eyes. "No, I'm okay. Really, Rose."

"You look like hell."

"Well, you look… I don't have a comeback, you actually look really good right now." She grins. "Is that my shirt?"

Rose ignores that and ushers her inside with a semi-dramatic sweep of her arm. One of these days, she'll have a quiet evening to herself.

.

The bathroom light blinks a few times before it buzzes to life. Bella hops up on the counter before Rose has a chance to direct her. She swings her legs a little as Rose digs through her cabinet for her first-aid kit. She spent a whole afternoon putting it together following the Red Cross guidelines to the letter and hasn't since suffered a scratch that required a band-aid, let alone the ambulance she keeps beneath the sink.

"Dare I ask what happened?" She sets the kit on the counter and rolls up her sleeves.

"Turns out I can't take a punch."

Rose stills, her hands under the faucet. "What?"

"I'm kidding, Rose. One of Leah's teammates broke her clavicle, so she asked me to fill in. And-" She flinches away from the cool washcloth as Rose dabs the small cut on the bridge of her nose. "Okay, ow. Anyway, I guess I don't take an elbow to the face so well."

"I don't think someone who can barely walk a straight line should be filling in. Please stop squirming."

Bella makes an effort, but her pain threshold is so low, it's probably what she's always tripping on. She smiles sheepishly, face flushed and blotchy from the makeshift ice pack. "Sorry."

Rose grabs her by the chin to keep her still. "Let me get this paint off of you. And then I'll see what I can do about that lip."

"You know, this whole field medic thing you have going on right now is really hot. Just saying."

.

Five minutes later, however, all efforts of first aid are in shambles and any dignity the decorated lawyer thought she might have possessed goes flying out the window as her back hits the floor and Bella's full weight lands on her stomach.

"Bella!" she gasps. A thread of laughter sneaks in behind the shock. "Get off of me!"

Bella leans over her, one hand flat against the tile beside Rose's head. "Not until you put away that satan spray!"

"It's antiseptic! You're being a child."

Rose isn't quite sure how it got to this point. A lot of shrieking and flailing limbs, surely. She expected a little whining on Bella's part, but sitting on her?

Honestly, the woman is such a wimp about these things. Rose distinctly remembers the fuss Bella made during her own annulment proceeding when she got a tiny papercut while pretending to look busy flipping through a blank legal pad. Of course, Rose rushed in with her baby pink band-aids and plenty of reassurances, but she wasn't quite distracted enough to miss Bella's soon-to-be-non-existent wife whispering to her lawyer: You see?

Bella finally wrestles the little spray bottle out of her hand and tosses it somewhere over her shoulder. When she turns her head back, her smile is irritatingly triumphant. She bends down a little. "I told you, I'm fine."

With a careful hand, Rose sweeps Bella's hair away from her bruising cheek. It's not that serious. Just a few little cuts and a lot of color blooming beneath her slightly blotted skin. Rose rests her hand against the side of Bella's neck.

She isn't used to this- this avalanche of worry ready to drop whenever Bella does something ridiculous. Abandon everything in the middle of a hearing, in the middle of the night; she's done it before and maybe she'll never stop. This thing she thought she had a good handle on might be getting a little out of her control.

Despite what it may inspire in her chest, Rose meets Bella's gaze. "Why do you always come to me?"

"My therap-"

"Bella."

Her face softens and the confidence her humor lends her slips away. With a hand on the counter, she hauls herself off of Rose and settles against the doors of the cabinet. She pulls the half-thawed bag of peas from the counter and turns it indecisively in her hands. "It's just- I always like being around you, Rose. You know that. But when I'm anxious or, uh...bruised, you're the first person on my mind. I know I do it too much, and I fight myself the whole way. Sometimes I can put the phone down or cancel the Uber, but-"

"Please don't do that."

"What?"

"Don't put the phone down," Rose says so abruptly, she feels a touch deranged. Ignoring the surprised look on Bella's face, she sits up and covers Bella's cool hand with her own. "I am always here when you need me, I've told you that before."

"It's too much, Rose. I know it is."

Rose smiles a little at that. Sometimes it is excessive. Like yesterday when she barged into Rose's office while she was on a conference call and squawked about how she thought she was developing a latent pineapple allergy. A few days before that, she FaceTimed Rose (who was in a very vulnerable position at the gynecologist at the time) from the cluttered back of her town car asking how many aspirin to take and whether or not it's okay to take them with orange juice and then proceeded to rehearse her speech for the Verdant Tower's grand opening ceremony.

"Would it make you feel better if we set some boundaries?"

"Like what?"

Rose shrugs one shoulder. "Text me first? That way I can let you know if it's not a good time."

"I can do that."

"Problem solved, then." Satisfied, Rose climbs to her feet.

Giant brown eyes peek up at her from behind the frozen peas. "Just like that?"

Rose extends a hand to pull her up. "Just like that."

.

At the door, Bella lingers awkwardly. She's clearly hurting pretty bad from the rink. It pulls at Rose so much the feeling is nearly unaccountable. Where does it all come from?

"I was going to call you tonight," Rose says.

"You were?"

Rose nods and glances idly above Bella's head for a few seconds, allowing the stall. "I had something to tell you."

She's always been a fantastic public speaker. Pauses like this feel instinctively like a wave of lost attention. But Bella's just standing there, faintly smiling like she could do this all night without getting bored. And her poor face. That bruise is going to look like hell in the morning, but right now it passes for a shadow under her eyes. Maybe Rose can take the elbower to court. Or the league organizer? The rink owner? The city? She'd do it in a heartbeat.

"I have an interview," she says finally.

"I know. Phil told me. Sat me down and everything."

"He did?"

"Yeah. He even promised to find me a shiny new lawyer," she says, her dark eyes twinkling, "but I'm pretty sure you're about one in ten trillion."

"You know I love working at Dwyer, but…"

"Rose, you didn't go to school to get stuck in some soulless, culture-crushing skyscraper farm. Platt and Brandon are the real thing. So are you."

An unhealthy amount of blood rushes up her neck then. Unsure how to recover, she just rolls her eyes- mostly at herself- and clears her throat. "You're not just saying that, are you?"

"No."

"Because I haven't forgotten the time you tried to get me a job at Sunglass Hut so you could take me to dinner without Linda from HR blowing up your inbox."

"This isn't like that!" She laughs a little and winces away from the frozen peas. "But I like where your head's at."

"I…will miss you. Really."

"Obviously. But don't worry. The second I get a handle on this… quarter-life crisis I'm going through right now, I'm asking you out for real."

Rose suppresses her smile, holding back a confusing ocean of unrehearsed words. Instead, she simply tugs Manhattan's Most Irritating in by her baggy t-shirt and kisses the uninjured corner of her mouth.

"Okay, I take it all back. There is literally a Sunglass Hut across the street from my hotel. Please, I know they're hiring."

Rose scoffs and gives her a slight push back out into the hallway. "You're such an idiot."