Moments where a character has to hide the warning signs of abuse at the hands of parents/guardians and mean teachers from their friends and teachers in Literature.
- The Halo novels imply that this happened to several Spartan trainees during, well, training. In a flashback chapter in Halo: First Strike, one Spartan trainee was captured by the OPFOR during a "Capture the Flag" training exercise and became badly injured. His Marine captors claimed he tripped down a flight of stairs... in a one-story building.
- In Summon the Keeper by Tanya Huff, the Dudley Do-Right character meets a badly bruised woman who claims she walked into a door. In a subversion, this is, in fact, true and she is pathetically clumsy.
- Heavily parodied in the book How to Be a Superhero, in which a sidekick explains away rope burns from a supervillain hostage situation to his teacher as him and his adopted father "getting into some really rough stuff." Naturally, this doesn't help the situation.
- Brawling pages in the Tortall Universe tend to offer excuses because it's dishonorable to tattle:
- "Alan" in Song of the Lioness explains away her injuries from being beaten up by Ralon with the excuse, "I fell down." A servant helpfully confirms that Alan did, indeed, fall down... and that Ralon helped him fall down, several times, with his fists.
- Keladry in Protector of the Small gives the same excuse to Lord Wyldon after her many fights as a Bully Hunter even though he keeps trying to get her to tell on them when he accepts the same excuse from the boys. She teaches Owen, a younger page, to do the same.
- Later subverted in Kel's squiring years. Kel takes a soak in the shared bathrooms after a hard day's training. The women there see her bruises and immediately come to her defense, thinking a man beat her. It takes a while for Kel to convince them that she really DID get those injuries from falling... off her horse, repeatedly, while learning how to Tilt.
- Like the pages' standard excuse of "I fell down" to explain injuries from fighting, the standard excuse given for an argument settled in a jousting match is that the participants had an irresolvable difference of opinions in a philosophical debate.
- Discworld:
- Commander Vimes would come down heavily on any actual police brutality in the Ankh-Morpork City Watch, but he has occasionally referenced the trope as a veiled threat, muttering that certain prisoners might fall down the stairs on the way to the cells... even though there aren't any. They can find some. Coppers are resourceful like that.
- In Monstrous Regiment, there's an inversion: the good Lieutenant Blouse manages to, somehow, slice open his hand while doing sword drills on his own. His sword hand. When William de Worde asks about the injury, Sergeant Jackrum hurriedly whispers, "You should have seen the other five men!"
- In Going Postal, a banshee attacks Mr. Groat and Moist sees it, but he doesn't want to discuss what happened. Adora Belle sees through it.Moist: Something fell on him.
Adora Belle: Right. Something with big claws. - There's an inversion, where Vimes really did cut himself shaving in Jingo but some visitors believe the injury is from a fight.
- Douglas Adams' The Meaning of Liff defines "Sluggan" as a facial bruise caused by walking into a door, but which everyone else assumes is the result of a fight with your partner. There's no point trying to tell them what really happened.
- In The Great Brain at the Academy, Tom challenges his rival Rory to a fight. Since they could get expelled for fighting, he says they can go to the dormitory bathroom, no one will see, and Rory can explain his black eye by saying he fell down the stairs.
- In Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, Umbridge asks Hagrid how he came to be covered in blood and bruises. He responds, "I tripped."
- In Dead Air by Iain Banks, the main character is beaten up by the mob, when his friends question him at work the next day he says that he fell down the stairs and then had the shit beaten out of him.
- Inverted in the novel Neverwhere. No one will believe that Richard broke his finger while being tortured, and they just attribute it to his own clumsiness."What happened, were you in a fight? Actually, you probably just slammed it in a door or something."
Richard: "Actually, it was in a...a door." - Older Than Radio: In the 1886 novel Heart by Edmondo D'Amici, Enrico's friend and classmate Pietro Precossi says similar stuff when people ask him about his bruises. Turns out he's being abused by his alcoholic father
- In John Steinbeck's East of Eden, Adam Trask's wife Cathy walks out and leaves him the parting gift of a bullet in the shoulder. When the sheriff questions him, he says that the gun went off while he was cleaning it. Since Adam is a cavalry officer and a really bad liar, this doesn't really fly.
- In Sandy Mitchell's Warhammer 40,000 novel Scourge The Heretic, in face of a corpse that had been torn to shreds, Kyrlock guesses that he didn't cut himself shaving. (Drake appreciates it; he had been on the verge of vomiting.)
- In The English Patient, the title character acquires a number of scars during his affair with Katharine Clifton (ranging from punches to a stabbing with a fork). He explains them away as accidents; the rest of the group seem to believe him and decide he's incredibly clumsy.
- The poem "In Detention
" by South African poet Christopher van Wyck is made up of excuses made by prison officials regarding prisoners who died in their custody. - Forest Kingdom: In the Hawk & Fisher spinoff series' book 1, when a noblewoman asks one-eyed Hawk what became of his eye, he gives the ridiculous excuse that he lost it in a card game. In a later book, he claims to have pawned it.
- Subverted in Dolores Claiborne by Stephen King. Although Joe does have a history of beating her, she stopped him from doing so months before. She really, honestly did simply injure herself by accident. But the checkout lady refuses to believe her. However, both her and Joe do use the large bruise to let him save face by pretending that he gave it to her. It's complicated.
- In the Swedish novel Ondskan (The Evil), the main character goes to a Boarding School of Horrors where the students are punished by the student body through sadistic means, one of them being beaten up. Sometimes, a few get bruised so badly they have to be taken to a nearby hospital, where everyone gives the Fell Down The Stairs explanation. The doctor doesn't buy for a moment and asks what is going on but not before lampshading that it "must be one hell of a long staircase."
- In The Angel Experiment, Fang gives this exact explanation to a runaway MIT graduate after he's made the victim of a No-Holds-Barred Beatdown by Ari.
- In Robin Hobb's Dragon Keeper, Sedric explained coming home at dawn with torn clothes and puffy lips after his first encounter with Hest as being very drunk and falling into a ditch.
- In The Kingdom Keepers, Finn has to explain away an injury he got from Energy Weapons by saying a bully burned him with a cigarette.
- Subverted in Airframe. In one scene, the main character is pushed out of an airplane under inspection in a hangar and lands on some safety netting around it, getting bruised in the process. Later on, when someone else asks her how she got those bruises, she says truthfully (though vaguely) that she fell. The woman who asked the question doesn't believe her and gives her a card to a shelter for battered women.
- Roddy Doyle wrote a novel about a battered wife entitled The Woman Who Walked Into Doors.
- In This Can't Be Happening At Mac Donald Hall! by Gordon Korman, Bruno and Boots kidnap the rival hockey team's mascot (a large domestic cat) before the first game of the season, and it scratches Boots' face. The coach later asks what happened to his face and Boots says he cut himself shaving. The coach says he knows darn well that Boots is too young to be shaving, and that if the scratch came from a cat, he doesn't want to know about it.
- In Twilight, when Bella is in the hospital after being attacked by a vampire, the Cullens tell her to explain her wounds this way: "You fell down two flights of stairs and through a window. You have to admit, it could happen."
- In The Dresden Files short story "The Warrior", Harry saves a girl from being hit by a hybrid car (its near-silent engine means she doesn’t hear it coming), and when her mother comes to see what happened, Harry spots a bruise on the girl and asks if he gave it to her when he pulled her out of the car's path. The girl says no, she was bruised when she fell off her bike. Harry then asks how that happened without her scraping her hands. The mother's eyes go wide with realization and she promptly marches the girl home. Later in the story, Harry learns that her father had been hitting her, and Harry mentioning it meant that the mother was finally going to leave him with her daughter and that one act saved the girl from a childhood of continued abuse. Which is actually rather a Conviction by Counterfactual Clue, given that it's incredibly easy to fall off a bike without scraping your hands. While the mother may have known or suspected what was going on, there was no reason for Harry to notice anything suspicious.
- In Cursor's Fury of the Codex Alera, Crassus attacks Tavi, his superior officer, trying to get back the purse Tavi stole from Crassus's mother, only for Tavi to beat him. Crassus thinks he's going to get cashiered out of the Legion for it until Tavi realizes why he really did it—to protect Tavi from his mother's wrath—and says they don't kick you out of the Legion for falling down the stairs. Crassus then asks what happens if he 'remembers' that Tavi stole his mother's purse, and Tavi responds, in that case, he'll remember that there are no stairs anywhere near where they are.
- In The Wasp Factory, Frank mentions a relative who moved to South Africa and died when he walked past a police station and was crushed under a black suspect who had fallen out the window and somehow managed to yank all his fingernails out on the way.
- In I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, Maya Angelou chronicles how, when she was eight years old, her mother's boyfriend molested her, though at that time she just understood it as him holding her and making her feel good. After molesting her, the bed got wet and he poured a glass of water over the wet spot, telling her that she wet the bed. She got confused because she knew that she didn't wet the bed, and yet she didn't say anything to contradict him. He manages to ensure that this situation of her sleeping with him continues and no one suspects him to be the pedophile that he is until he violently rapes her and her mother finds her bloody underwear that she hid.
- In the Holes companion book Stanley Yelnats' Survival Guide to Camp Green Lake, the default answer to how one got an injury if ever asked, is: "I slammed the tent door on it." No other answers. Never mind that the tents don't actually have doors, just canvas flaps — that is still what you must say. This point is further emphasized when a quiz is held asking the reader how you got a black eye. Was it from a fight? Stepping on a shovel? Not bathing? The right answer is still "The tent door slammed in your face."
- Near the end of the Vatta's War arc of books, a person who suddenly landed in Rafe Dunbarger's bad books (and by assumed extension, Kylara's), is found later with suspicious injuries. He insists that he just fell down a ladder. The medics ask him if he pissed the ladder off first.
- In the Dick Francis novel "Nerve", Rob the protagonist won't tell a doctor how he'd gotten injuries from being tied and hung up by the wrists in a barn, and the doctor distastefully concludes he'd been involved in some kinky orgy.
- In the SPQR novel ''A Point of Law", Fulvia's late husband Clodius used to come home gravely wounded due to his position as a gangster and tell her he cut himself shaving. This comes up because her new fiancé Curio comes home with a wound he informs her is minor and she has to be talked out of going on a Roaring Rampage of Revenge. Unfortunately for Curio, one of the concessions the authorities make to avert the rampage is launching a thorough investigation, exposing his Wounded Gazelle Gambit.
- In the X-Wing Series, when Wedge walks in on two of his pilots fighting, one tries to explain that they were demonstrating a martial arts move. Wedge interrupts to ask them how many times they think he's heard that explanation before.
- In Solo Command, after inadvertently insulting Han Solo new Wraith Squadron recruit Elessar Targon makes a Running Gag out of trying to convince his fellow pilots to Mercy Kill him to save him from his shame, complete with suggestions on how to Make It Look Like an Accident. When he gets to Thalassian pilot Runt Elessar's idea is for Runt to rip his arm off and claim it was a handshaking accident.
- In Polgara the Sorceress, Polgara (While living in a town that has precisely one two story building in it), mentions to some of the friends of her recently deceased 'nephew' how insulting she thought an offer a man had made for the family cooperage while the family was still in mourning. The next day Polgara had to set the businessman's broken bones after he fell down the stairs about half a dozen times.
- Squire Roland, in Magician: Apprentice, has a more believable explanation than most. Sergeant of the Guard Gardan still doesn't buy it:Roland: Ah...I was giving Pug a fist-boxing lesson.
Gardan: Roland, remind me never to ask you to instruct my men in swordplay — we couldn't withstand the casualty rate. - Sara in Relativity manages to hide being a superhero by using stories like this to explain her various injuries. It works for the most part because most people don't hang around with her enough to see how many injuries she sustains. For people she sees all the time, it doesn't work as well.Greg: There’s only so many times you can fall off a ladder changing a lightbulb.
- In the Sidney Sheldon novel Nothing Lasts Forever, Dr. Kat Hunter has been roped into working for the mob in order to pay off her brother's debts and also because the kingpin doesn't want his underlings going to the hospital where the staff would have to report their injuries to the police. Her first patient is a man who has gotten the tar beaten out of him, but when Kat asks what happened to him, the kingpin looks her straight in the eye and tells her, "He fell down a flight of stairs
- In a Fabulous Five novel, one of the main characters is trying to help a girl who basically has her every move controlled by her smothering, strict, and overprotective parents. At one point, when the girl comes over to her house, the main character and her mother notice a large bruise on her arm. The girl quickly covers it up, claiming to have walked into a door. Not until near the end of the book does the reader learn this was the truth, but that the girl let them think otherwise. Whether because she knew there was no point in arguing as she wouldn't be believed or wanted them to think that her parents were physically abusive as well isn't clear.
- In Shadow Kiss, Brandon Lazar and Brett Ozera explained their torture wounds by claiming they fell.
- John Varley’s Red Thunder: “Veneration ‘Vinnie’ Broussard fell fifty feet from a live oak(…) Or so (his father) Avery said.” Surprisingly Realistic Outcome occurs. “The parish coroner said that was hogwash(…) The sheriff looked at the tree (…) and concluded there was no possible way to fall through it and receive forty-eight bruises(…) Avery was sentenced to one year for manslaughter.”
- In Wolf Hall, young Thomas Cromwell explains his bruises by saying that he walked into a door, privately adding that it was a door named Walter Cromwell.
- In Alexis Carew: Into the Dark, Alexis fights off a drunken crewman who sexually assaulted her, then lies to the bosun and the captain that "he fell" to explain his injuries, not wanting a man hanged on her account. They don't buy it for a minute but since there were no other witnesses, they flog him for being drunk on duty and let him go. It all works out: the other crew take it as an act of mercy and take a shine to Alexis, and Alan quits drinking and later has a Redemption Equals Death moment.
- In I Am J, J's friend Melissa claims that her self-inflicted cuts are caused by her cats scratching her.
- In the Warrior Cats book Veil of Shadows, Kitescratch is one of the cats that attempts to kill the fake Bramblestar, and manages to escape during the ensuing fight. He tells his Clanmates afterward that his injuries were from an owl, but they don't really believe him.
- Earlier, in the fourth arc, several cats secretly go to the Dark Forest (the cat version of hell) in their dreams in order to get some literal Training from Hell to be better warriors. The wounds they get in the training show up on the real cats in the waking world, and they make excuses for where these injuries came from, like saying they were attacked by rogue cats.
- Miracle Creek: The week before his death, Henry had scratches on his arms, which he told Kitt were from bug bites and Detective Heights were from being scratched by the neighbor's cat. In fact, Elizabeth scratched him for making them late to speech therapy. Later, she said, "Oh, sweetie, look at that scratch! Have you been playing with that cat again? You need to be more careful."
- Wicked Good: When Judge Murphy asks Archer where her black eye came from, she says that she slipped on an ice cube and hit her face on the kitchen counter. In fact, Rory hit her, for the first time in his life.
- When Hoshi from Hoshi and the Red City Circuit is beaten up in a hate crime, she tells her integration officer that she fell downstairs, as she knows she could be stripped of her freedoms if she shows any sign of weakness.
- In Harmonic Feedback, Justin gets into a fistfight with Naomi's douchey boyfriend Scott, giving him a bloody nose. When a neighbor calls the police, Justin tells him he tripped and smacked his nose on the coffee table playing Wii.
- Underground: The excuses Robyn initially gives Andrew for her myriad of injuries include: an accident in the kitchen, falling down the stairs, and walking into a door. She actually got them street fighting.
- Where the Crawdads Sing:
- Kya tells Tate that her bruise from being punched by Chase during an Attempted Rape is from running into a door in the middle of the night.
- She tells her lawyer, Tom Milton, that the scratches on her arms are from bug bites. They're really from Self-Harm.
- In Lola Rose, Jayni says that if Nikki has to go to hospital after being beaten by her husband, she never tells on him, instead claiming she got her injuries tripping and falling over, or some such. After Jay punches her and gives her a bloody nose for defending Jayni, Nikki tells a cab driver she got it walking into a lamppost. He instantly guesses she's actually been hit by her husband and suggests going to the police. Nikki gives the same excuse to a hotel receptionist, though he's barely paying attention (it's that kind of hotel).
- In The Nowhere Girls, Otis Goldberg overhears two of Lucy's rapists bragging about the time they raped a drunk girl in another city. When they see him eavesdropping, they chase him down and beat him up. He tells his parents he fell off his bike.
- The Roosevelt: In Carry the Ocean, Emmet punches David for threatening to steal Emmet's boyfriend. David feels like he had it coming, so he tells people the mark on his forehead is from accidentally driving his wheelchair into a doorway.
- The Syrena Legacy: In Of Neptune, Tyrden tells Emma his injuries from fighting her boyfriend Galen, whom he kidnapped are from falling downstairs.
- After their fight in Brotherband, Hal and Tursgud both use the "I walked into a tree," excuse to explain their bruises. Their instructor notes dryly that the branches must have been really thrashing around in the wind.
