Raleigh Harper / Emily Watkins

"Okay." The moment that Les opens the door to his apartment, Raleigh's giving him a box full of food. There's vegetables and uncooked chicken and bags of rice and flour and butter and eggs; there's all sorts of food, but she shifts the bag on her shoulder as she gives him a pointed look.

"I meant it when I said today was for me," she said with a smile, moving up the stairs to his kitchen - she's slower than he is, she's always slower than he is - but she brought him a bunch of food, so she supposes she's allowed to be just as slow as she likes.

"And I hope you haven't eaten a lot. Have you?" She realises then- "How're you?" She should have asked that first, but she's a little bit a Woman On A Mission.

The smell of soup pretty much fills the house. It's a pattern that Raleigh doesn't even realise is establishing itself. Spencer withdraws, and Raleigh makes him soup. Sometimes he eats it, sometimes he doesn't, but she makes it, and it's a little different than last time. She doesn't leave it on the porch. Instead, she knocks on the door wherever he is, and usually tells him what kind it is, and sometimes she asks him if he wants company.

That's what happens right now, she knocks on the doorframe of his room, because he's sitting on the bed reading, and she's got two bowls of soup. "I made lunch," there's a smile, and worry in her eyes that's been there ever since this started the day before yesterday. "Chicken noodle. Feel like company?"

Finally - finally, Raleigh had finished reading Anne of Green Gables. She'd been working on it for what seemed like forever, even though it'd only been a week and a half or so. She wasn't the fastest reader, but she liked it. She liked both reading (usually based on Joel's suggestions), and the book itself. When Joel'd told her earlier that there were a set of them, she'd been thrilled - and Spencer had them in his library so it was even better.

Joel was still at work, but Raleigh knew where she'd gotten the first one. It should have been simple enough - get the book, put the old one back. Nothing was ever simple, it seemed like, since there was a much bigger problem this time around; when she'd swapped the books and turned 'round, she stepped wrong. Her leg decided - after a full day's work, and Raleigh hadn't been all that careful - that it'd had it, and she stumbled into one of the side tables, knocking a stack of books and a glass tumbler to the floor with a crash.

The glass broke on the wood floor, and Raleigh found herself standing in the middle broken glass with bare feet, her leg still spasming whenever she tried to put weight on her foot. "Shit," she said thickly, and she leaned heavily on the table. She bent, trying to pick up the biggest pieces of glass so she could get to a chair or sit on the floor or something, and she hissed as the second piece sliced her hand - not badly, it wasn't going to need stitches, but she was bleeding.

All she could think was that she prayed that Spencer hadn't heard - she was pretty sure the tumbler was his mother's, and she'd have to find a way to tell him - but this? This wasn't the way, with it broken all over the floor.

You request a baking lesson, and you get a girl standing on your doorstep at 9AM with a bag over her shoulder. This time, there's no crutches; there's no crutches, and even though Levi had said he'd get the ingredients, she's got more, because she found out a yesterday that she can bake again. She can bake, and that means they're not just making cookies, even though they were still going to make those.

She wonders about making this a thing, the teaching, but then Raleigh realises that she'd rather have it be like this. Friends, and teaching, not anything more formalized. There's sort of an elephant in the room, the sort of elephant that she doesn't know if it can be banished with cookies and well-intentioned half-explanations, but she figures she does want to be honest; she can't go around with half the town knowing her name and the other not. But they'd get to that bridge when they come to it.

So she rings the bell - not needing a cab, she wanted the walk, she needed it because she's been too long on crutches - and waits.

Trigger Warning: This thread contains references to violence and traumatic flashbacks. If you have any questions, please don't hesitate to tweet @thestarsplay for clarification. Thanks!

--Four batches of cookies. Four batches of the world's simplest cookies, and they'd all sucked. Every single one of them. One batch was burned on the edges with raw insides, the other she'd used salt instead of sugar (that was a nightmare), one she'd forgotten to put in the butter, and now, this.

She didn't even know what happened. Raleigh sat on Spencer's front porch, her crutches leaning against the railing as she did what she never thought she'd have to do again: she was scraping the burnt bottoms off the cookies with a butter knife, scowling. This? This hadn't happened since she was six.

What the hell was wrong with her?

"Damn it," she said to herself when she realised she only had a sliver of cookie left, and she made a face, putting it on the plate of 'salvaged' ones - or chips, really. They were mere shadows of the cookies they should have been.

Trigger Warning: This thread contains mentions and descriptions of violence and torture. If you have any questions, please don't hesitate to tweet @thestarsplay for clarification. Thanks!

--

In the end, she'd handled it herself.

Raleigh didn't have family, didn't have an emergency contact. She'd watched Levi be loaded onto the gurney, and she limped to follow him - but one of the EMTs sat her down and took one look at her, and she was on one as well. She's got no phone - and she doesn't know anyone's phone numbers off the back of her hand, so she goes alone.

Concussion, hairline fractures in her left wrist (her fault) and right cheekbone (not her fault), bruised ribs - bruises all over really, and the 7 inch long cut along the bottom of her foot, from her heel to her toes -- had stitches.

Which meant she had crutches.

She knew she had to be at the hospital to get the stitches, but what she didn't know - or didn't expect, really, was that they were expecting to keep her. They were expecting to keep her, and she couldn't do it. She couldn't, not and keep thinking of Les' words. Of Joseph's, of her own. She'd been through it, after she'd fallen into the basement of that rotted old house. Two days, she'd been down there, and half the people who visited her informed her that They didn't even know she was gone.

Raleigh can't live through that again.

That's why she checks herself out once it's all done, the stitches and the lectures and the questions. That's why she heads back into town - the clicking of the crutches something that's entirely old hat to her, given her leg - and she's thinking about tomorrow. About working, and she draws herself up short before she sits heavily on one of the little tables outside the coffeeshop, nevermind that she hasn't bought anything, that she looks like a wreck and that she's wearing scrubs for pants and a cheap flipflop on her good foot because the exceedingly nice nurse realised that they had to cut her jeans off of her, and she had no shoes - her hoodie had blood on the sleeve and the hem, oddly brown now, but she hasn't realised it.

She sits, and she can't help it as she starts to cry, her free hand still holding the crutches so they don't clatter onto the ground.

Usually, even on her day off, Raleigh tended to be a loner. It's not because she doesn't like people - she does, although she's usually awkward enough that her actual level of 'Hey! I like this interaction' falls like a rock off a cliff the moment she opens her mouth for more than four words.

Today, though - today, it's her day off and she's not spending it in her own company even though the guy who dropped her here told her explicitly to keep her head down, as well as changing her name as much as changing her name was a thing that needed to happen. She'd gotten off a Wait, what?! with no answer, and when she'd found a room she used the name Emily Watkins - from her mom and her eighth grade science teacher.

But Emily or not, and order to keep her head down or not, she'd ended up with mail that wasn't hers and it was the neighborly thing for her to actually drop it off, right? That's why she walked up onto the porch, and nervously rang the bell. The address on the envelope looked like it'd gotten caught in the rain, but she figured that Spencer Waters was probably the closest that she could get to what little she could put together on the envelope - Vera Waters.

The fact that they'd never actually formally met was besides the point - she at least had to try, and that's why she stood awkwardly on the porch, rocking from her heels to her toes as she waited.