Raleigh Harper / Emily Watkins

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?"

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!

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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.