Chapter Text
You first moved into the house with help from Sam and a couple of your cousins who lived close enough to the area that they were delighted to come and help when you’d tentatively asked in the family group chat. There were a few upsides to being the youngest one in the family—at least of your generation, since there’d been plenty of kids born in the years since you’d first moved to Coolsville—and having help in droves whenever you worked up the courage to ask was one of them.
It’s been a couple of years since you’d had the gumption to get out of the house and visit any of your niblings. You had to wonder if any of them remembered you.
The thought threatened to cause a tear to well up. Maybe Dorian was right—maybe you had managed to knock your head into Stella’s railing on the way down. You blinked, and tried to focus.
When you’d first moved in, your eldest cousin had stared at Stella’s central placement (though obviously you didn’t know her by that name then) in the house, wincing as they whistled lowly through their teeth.
“Damn, bug. Are you sure this was a good idea? Surely there’s another house nearby of a similar size…without the singing siren of destruction for your clumsy ass parked center-stage.”
“Well, I already put down the down payment,” you’d snapped back. “And signed off on the mortgage. So it’s a bit late for that.”
The money had, unfortunately, come from your half of your mother’s rather juicy life insurance policy. (Three cheers for women in extremely dangerous chemical-testing STEM! And also yet another reason you applied to Valdivian and not ByteWave—better worker safety standards, at least until they started the AI replacement stuff.)
It hadn’t taken long after her passing for you to realize that you needed to give your father time to grieve. Also he seemed to really want to sell your childhood home—go traveling abroad. Find himself. Whatever. You’d needed to move out fast, and while you’d taken the time to go to the open house the retailer had put on, you’d known as soon as you stepped inside that you weren’t going to find another house at a similar asking price with the same size as this one very soon. Or ever, with the—well—everything going on everywhere.
Thank god for the associated-with-a-suspicious-death discount.
Their expression changed as they realized what you weren’t saying. Your cousin raised their hands and took a step back, trying to lighten the mood again. “Whoa there! I was just worried about you. It wasn’t meant like that—look, Coolsville is a ways out from any of us, and with your dad…”
Collectively, none of your cousins had never been fond of your father. Considering how things had soured between you after your mother’s death, you were starting to see where they were coming from.
Your cousin coughed awkwardly. “Well, since we don’t really know where he’s going to end up, it’s concerning to know that you’ll be out here, far away from your family if something terrible were to happen.”
They softened. “Look bug, we love you. And want you to be okay. Which is why we’re all hoping that you won’t fall down the stairs too often. Chronic traumatic encephalopathy is no joke.”
“Yeah,” you sighed. “It’s not. Look, if I fall down it more than—I dunno—three, maybe four, times in a year, you have my full permission to make sure I have someone living with me full time who can wrap me up in bubble-wrap forever. Or just take over doorman duties, since I’m sure that’s how I’ll most likely fall.”
They snort. “I’ll get the others in on this. You’re going to regret this bet, bug.”
What your cousins would never learn was just how bad a bet they’d taken.
As a consummate klutz, who practiced rigorously your entire life in order to defend and maintain the title, you knew exactly how likely it was for you to manage to fall more than once or twice on the same thing in a similar way over the course of a year.
If any of your cousins had experience of their own doing similarly foolish things (like, say, rolling out of their lofted bed in their college dorm room) they’d know that once you did something stupid, your body would enter a period of alertness—you’d generally manage to go at least another six months without doing the same thing again.
Fallen out of bed? Six months before you did it again.
Slammed your—pinky in the car door? Three months before you did it again, though both times it happened you were in high-school. (And it had actually been the kid sister of your boyfriend at the time who was responsible for the second time. No, she wasn’t the reason you broke up, that was all on him cheating on you. You forgave him like an idiot, then he did it again two weeks later. Did that count as a clumsy thing for you to have done?)
That one time you managed to topple your entire bookshelf onto yourself while you were sitting and working? Ha, trick question, it hasn’t happened a second time because now you bolt all of your shelves to the wall.
Still, you were pretty confident that it was a bet they’d never get to collect on.
That was, until your house became a hotbed of chicanery and nonsense, and everything went topsy-turvy on you. By that, you meant that the first time you ever actually fell down the stairs in your house was about a week after the Dateviators first came into your life.
In your defense, you’d only prepared for the possibility of a guest at the door being the one to distract you. You hadn’t been prepared—could have never imagined that the door himself at the bottom of the stairs would be the one distracting you.