When Otto first heard the noise, his head jerked up sharply, his breath catching. It wasn't uncommon for people to be awake in the night; Otto himself was frequently up till midnight, gazing over book after book in the dim candlelight; which was what he had just been doing. But Otto recognised a noise that shouldn't be there.
The noise – like a soft thud – had come from downstairs, but Otto knew that everyone slept upstairs, and to take the stairs meant stepping on the fourth step from the bottom, and the fourth step's creak was loud enough to be heard in Otto's bedroom. He hadn't heard the creak. Otto doubted that anyone was taking the stairs two at a time in pitch darkness.
He remained deathly silent for several seconds; maybe he had just imagined the noise, maybe he'd been too engrossed in his book to hear the creak. Then the noise happened again.
Thud. Click. Creak.
Someone was breaking in.
Otto got out of his bed, leaving his book, and picked up his cricket bat. He briefly considered bringing his candle with him, but he realised that the intruder didn't know that Otto was there, and the candle would alert them to his presence. Instead, he left it burning in his room.
As he descended the stairs he could hear the quiet movement from the ground floor; his heart thudded in his chest, his throat felt tight, he began to regret trying heroics. What good would he be against a grown man? Why didn't he just wake the others in the home up? He should just go back up to his room and pretend he hadn't –
Creak.
In all his worrying he'd forgotten the fourth step. Otto froze, as did the muffled noise from the darkness below him. There went the element of surprise.
Otto moved first, hurrying down the last few stairs as quietly as possible, and huddling in the darkest gap that he could get to. Otto hoped that the intruder would lose where he was if he was quiet enough, and Otto was pretty sure that the noises had been coming from the living room, there wasn't anywhere to go from there but back out the window or into the hall, right next to where Otto was hiding.
Otto was barely breathing by this point, his grip on the bat so tight that his knuckles hurt, he was sure they'd be white if he could have seen them.
Suddenly, there was a scuffling noise from the other side of the hall, Otto turned his head sharply and –
…
The intruder winced as he looked down at the person's limp body on the floor. The hit on the head from the lamp had sent him down quickly, but he wasn't sure how quiet it had been, and he certainly didn't want to have to sort out anyone else. He'd just been lucky that the person had made the mistake of thinking he was in a different room.
He squinted in the darkness – the body was pretty small. And very… limp. Was it still breathing?
"Oh," muttered the intruder, "pissing hell."
...
Author's Note: This is pretty rough, and may later be subject to revisions, or complete destruction. Also, if some characters are acting OOC, I know it's a little weird to read (it's certainly a little weird to write) I hope to rectify this with character development later on as this is supposed to be an origins story.