Abigail chewed the end of her pen thoughtfully and stood up. It was one of those nights; ones where you were only assigned questions one to four, but each had subsequent questions that lettered up to G. It was also one of [I]those[/I] nights. She sat under the fluorescent bulb of the kitchen light, tense and staring with disinterest at a point just beyond her textbooks as her ears strained to hear what was going on upstairs. Her stomach growled and she pushed her feet into her trainers. She glanced once, twice at the ceiling as her features crumpled up with disgust. Her fingers found the end of her jacket sleeves and then ran through the seams of her pockets, checking for her things. She crossed the threshold from the kitchen to the living room and up the stairs. Oliver and Isaac were out, Joseph wouldn't be home till seven. She made a deliberate effort to land on the creaky step with some weight but it didn't muffle the choked sobs, so she stamped a little as she went down the corridor and knocked on a plain wooden door.

"Tyler, would you like me to heat dinner?" Abigail called out with trepidation.

Silence.

"...Tyler? It's in the fridge. You don't have to do anything…"

"...Y-you go on ahead, sweetheart. I'm not hungry right now," came a wobbly voice from the master bedroom. Abigail stood outside the door, her thumb worming between her lips as she gnashed her teeth on the stub of the nail. Her gaze went from the door to the landing and back at the door again.

"You sure?" She offered hopefully.

"Yeah. It's okay."

Abigail exhaled and went back down the stairs, again making an effort to hit the creaky step. She pulled out a greasy tupperware box from the top drawer of the fridge and her fingers hovered over the rim of the coke can in one of the shelves for a second or two before her shoulders sank and she shut the door, cracking the lid of the tupperware open and putting it - loudly - into the microwave. Her gaze slipped up to the ceiling. The sobbing had started again. She licked the blood off her thumb and punched in a few numbers into the keypad. 

Whilst the microwave buzzed and spun Abigail regarded her homework with a furrowed brow and then stumbled slightly as a great cracking rumble shook the foundations of the house itself. All the windows lit up with purple light. "...Tyler?" She called out, watching the purple line get bigger. Her eyes widened. "Fuck--Tyler!" A lot happened in a couple of seconds. Disregarding her own safety, Abigail raced up the stairs to get her guardian out of the house. As she took the stairs two at a time, Tyler burst out of the door to run down the corridor. Abigail slipped on the landing and the purple glow engulfed her and took the floor clear out from underneath her. She flailed and inhaled sharply as her stomach dropped…

Concrete was not a particularly forgiving surface to land on, especially at speed. Abigail landed on her side but her head bounced shortly after, knocking the wind out and briefly stunning the girl as she rolled confusedly onto her back and covered her eyes with her forearm. It took her a while to get her breath back and even longer to bother moving, partially paralysed with fear and pinned to the floor by the disorienting spinning sensation that inevitably followed such a knock.