Disclaimer: I own nothing.
A/N: First Casson Family fic and also for a challenge. Beta-ed by the amazing Permanent Rose, who let me know that Casson Family fic existed.
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"Indy! I know you're in there! Come out or else!"
Those were never comforting words from anyone, but at least it was Caddy, who was hunting for me instead of Saffy or Rose. Caddy, at least, understood what a closed and badly locked (meaning the lock didn't usually work) bedroom door meant. She knew where I was, of course, and if she kept yelling, so would half the street.
"Can't you understand that I don't want to help with whatever mental idea you've come up with?" I shouted back. Life with my mother and sisters... well, you learn what proper yelling sounds like pretty fast, because usually there's too much going on for anyone to talk normally.
It was a quiet Saturday by our standards. Dad was in London, Mum was off painting at the hospital, Caddy had the day off work, Sarah wasn't over because she had to go to some event with her parents (I think they went to the theatre), and my sisters and I were floating around the house, minding our own business. If this were a different family, a slightly more ordinary one, we'd have each stayed in our little corners, not really caring what the others were doing. Since we were as far from ordinary as a family could get, however, it wasn't meant to last.
"We're painting the large guinea pig hutch," Caddy called. "Rose really wants you to help...."
Now Caddy had gotten to my weak spot. If Rose really wanted me to help... I simply couldn't say no if my little sister was involved.
"Let me put on an old shirt or something," I finally said. "I'll be down there in five minutes."
As I'd promised, five minutes later I was in the yard, watching as Caddy, Saffy, and Rose lugged borrowed painting supplies out of Mum's shed. (Borrowed because Mum had neither given us permission to use them nor said we couldn't) Because this was one of those ill-conceived ideas, Caddy hadn't thought to remove the guinea pigs and put them in one of the three or so other hutches. Not like there was room, though - the last time we'd checked, each hutch held 15 guinea pigs, and that had been three weeks ago.
"Here," Rose demanded, thrusting a can of paint and a paintbrush into my hands. "Paint flowers or something on the side with the door."
Rule Number One in my family: Never say no to Rose. So I found myself painting very poorly done flower outlines near the door of the hutch. My sisters, meanwhile, were doing some sort of mural on the other three sides. For a while, I thought it might work.
When the walls were finished, we all stepped back and waited for Rose's approval. She scrutinized our work carefully before speaking, "It nice…enough. But I should like to paint the roof. Then it would be perfect."
I exchanged glances with my two older sisters, knowing that this would not be the best idea. But Rose had such a determined, defiant look on her face that none of us dared to say no.
"All right, Rosie Pose," agreed Caddy. "Up you go." She hoisted Rose up to the roof, and Saffy handed her a tub of blue paint and a brush.
It seemed like it might work just as Rose began to situate herself on the middle of the hutch.
Now there are a few things you should know about the guinea pig hutches. One, they were completely homemade (and ill constructed) by Caddy when she was only twelve (which also makes them fairly old). The wood is old and rotted and most of the nails have either rusted or fallen out. They are in no way meant to support a person, not even an eight-year-old girl.
Rose let out a gasp just as the roof began to cave in.
"Rose!" Caddy screamed, grabbing her just in the nick of time.
But I was not so lucky.
The walls of the hutch collapsed around me, causing me to fall flat on my back, the remains of the guinea pig hutch on top of me.
"The guinea pigs!" I heard Caddy shriek, followed by foot steps headed in the opposite direction of my buried form.
My sisters, far from trying to help me, were instead off chasing the escaped guinea pigs.
What seemed like three minutes later, Saffy was back, and she'd noticed that I was barely able to move. In one swift movement, she lifted the very heavy wooden hutch supports off of me, at least enough that I could get up. I'd gotten lucky, I supposed - my right ankle hurt a little and my arms were a bloody wreck, but it could have been a lot worse.
"Come on, Indy," Saffy said, and I started to worry a little. "I learned a little bit of first aid in school last term - time to give it a go, I guess." With that, she took me by the upper arm, grabbing my shirtsleeve tightly, and dragged me into the house, where I sat on a chair in the kitchen while she went scavenging for what she thought she needed.
When one has an absent-minded artist for a mother, standard things like rubbing alcohol and iodine aren't considered worth purchasing on a regular basis. At any rate, we were one of the least injury-prone families I knew of (surprisingly), so it wasn't like anyone would notice if we ran out of things. Beyond a packet of bandages and a bottle of pain pills in one of the kitchen cabinets, we didn't have anything of the home medical variety, (or maybe we did—only we didn't know where.) The moment Saffy let me out of her sight, I was going to look in the boxes on top of my wardrobe - that was where all the odd stuff usually went, so it was probably near there.
Then Saffy was back. In her hands were a teapot, a bottle of cologne I remembered Dad leaving behind on one of his visits, a length of cloth that was probably an old t-shirt, and a book of some sort.
"Aha," she said, opening the book and flipping to a page in the middle. "'Minor Cuts and Scrapes' - says exactly what I was going to do anyways."
NOW I was panicking. If one of my sisters had to take an interest in my well-being, especially when it involved bandaging a lot of scrapes, I would have much preferred Caddy over Saffy. Though "common sense" was just as relative a term as "help" in my family, Caddy was more reasonable and more likely to know what was going on. At least it wasn't Rose. She'd spent three weeks exploring the art of tattooing and just now thought she knew how it was done. I couldn't speak for her, but if I'd been a nearly-nine-year-old girl, I would've had a good panic attack about pain before even thinking of something like that. But then again, we were dealing with Rose, and she was most definitely not your normal eight-year-old.
Five minutes later, a towel soaked in really bad tea (the horrible supposedly-decaffeinated kind) was wrapped around my arm.
"This is just step one," Saffy said, and I knew she saw me cringe. "In a few minutes I'm going to replace the tea-soaked towel with one soaked in diluted cologne - my book says it works fine if you haven't any rubbing alcohol or nail polish remover... Nail polish remover! Why didn't I think of that earlier?"
She disappeared for a few moments and came back with a nearly-full jumbo size bottle of nail polish remover. As a general rule, any person who has inventive family members knows that nail polish remover is one of those things that can be used for just about anything. I knew perfectly well that the cheap kind Saffy had in her hands was pretty far from rubbing alcohol in everything except smell, but I figured it was best to shut up and let her inflict even more pain. It's not like I knew what to do any better than she did…
As Saffy wrapped a nail-polish-remover-and-cologne-soaked tea towel around my arm (which roughly made my arm feel as though it were on fire), Caddy and Rose burst through the kitchen door.
"What's going on?" Caddy asked, and I know I looked so relieved. "What the... You're putting nail polish remover and cologne on Indy's cuts?!? Where'd you get that crazy idea?"
Did I mention that "crazy" is also a relative term? Odds were that Caddy and Saffy would have a minor shouting match while Rose, completely unsupervised, decided it was high time to put that modern-art tattoo idea she'd had in her skin. I would have been fine with that, but no such luck.
"LOOK at this!" Caddy screamed. "There's nothing we can do. Since you just had to put tea on it... Hate to say it, Indy, but you're probably going to have those marks on your arms forever."
I didn't think I could feel worse, or better, or anything, and then Rose came back from wherever she'd gone off to. Her eyes focused on me, and I knew what she was thinking. To her, scars were beautiful - almost like a tattoo (I still didn't get that) except without colors. I couldn't help but smile - endearing and slightly mental little sisters just make the world a better place, the same way older sisters with half-cooked plans make it a more interesting one.