Raleigh Harper / Emily Watkins

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.

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

--

The beeping of her alarm's incessant - it's got to be to get her out of bed at 3:30am, and that's after it's also gone off at 3:00. Groping to silence it, Raleigh's entirely blurry as she yawns, rubbing a hand over her face.

It's taken a lot to get used to waking up this early; it comes part and parcel with working at a bakery, and even if makes her miserable she's got a job and she really does need it - and honestly, she likes what she's doing. Maybe she's not all that fond of where she works, but she feels like she's found her calling with the bakery thing. It'd been a hobby, but now...

She loves it. Getting ready is minimal on purpose; she showers before bed, so now it's just pulling on jeans and a t-shirt, hobbling until the muscle in her leg finally gives up on it's mission to make her life suck. She pulls her hair back in a ponytail and brushes her teeth, trying to be quiet so she wouldn't wake the other people in the boarding house. It's a delicate situation, that she's got as much of a right as anyone else to be there, but she doesn't want to be the dick that's banging shit at 3:45.

It's 3:50 when she slips out the front door, her hands shoved in the front of her hoodie and her sneakers crunch on the rock driveway as she looks out at the green of pre-dawn and the birds start to sing incessantly loud. It's a little magical (as much as she hates using the descriptor now that she knows about the town a little) with the way it is in the morning, everything untouched and not a soul to be seen. You could almost taste the dew in the air when you inhale, and Raleigh smiles, for all that it's not even 4am.