A/N: So this was kind of a rush job, not my greatest work, but an idea I got in my head and had to follow. Just gonna be a two parter, I swear.
I've played in this space of post-season three extensively enough that I purposefully kept the more canon, realistic elements of that kind of brief so as to resist repeating myself, since my headcanons only go so far.
When there's nothing left to burn, you have to set yourself on fire.
Your Ex-Lover is Dead / Stars
Piper knows.
It's been twenty-nine days and no one will say it but Piper knows.
It ruins her, the knowing. Ruins, present tense, ruins, ongoing. Every day since she finds new ways to crumble.
Her hands shake, all the time - she can't really sew anymore, she's the worst one in the sweat shop. She doesn't sleep, or else she wakes up from nightmares where her throat is clogged with black. She forgets stupid things, like showering or the rules to Gin Rummy or going to the visitation room even two minutes after they call for her.
She spends most of her free time in the greenhouse, bringing the copy of the Quran Alex had been reading for the last two months. Piper doesn't really read it, though. That's another thing she forgets, turning pages when she finishes them or even moving onto the next sentence.
She is broken everywhere, but it's the thing with her arm that gets her sent to Psych. It would have been okay if Red hadn't let loose a string of obscenities when she realized what Piper was doing, pressing a towel covered in liquid drain cleaner against the tattoo on her forearm.
She should have waited until Red walked away. She meant to. That was another thing she forgot.
Red is supposed to be the only one with access to the heavy duty cleaning supplies like that - the ones that can poison or, with sodium hydroxide, give a chemical burn - but Piper had lied about why she needed it.
She doesn't remember the lie anymore, just knows she was good at telling it. She's good at everything wrong.
They thought she was trying to resist when they took her away, because she kept writhing and pulling from the CO's grasp, but all Piper wanted was to get a look at her arm, make sure each letter of white ink had dissolved.
It hurt, the burn, like acid soaked fangs gnawing at her skin, but it didn't hurt nearly as bad as knowing Alex is dead.
Piper doesn't mind Psych, the tiny empty room or the bed with straps buckled around her extremities or the blue paper jumpsuit that makes her think of the day the bed bugs infested, Alex crying in a garbage bag, Alex slapping her across the face, Alex, Alex, Alex.
That was the day she'd told Alex she would survive. Like a fucking cockroach.
Except Piper stepped on a cockroach in Chicago and killed it, and it's not really funny but she remembers the first night she's in Psych and laughs until her stomach hurts, until she's too tired to keep it from turning into sobbing.
Lying there, all day long, Piper strikes memories like matches and swallows them whole, lets them burn her insides. It doesn't matter what she thinks of - the smell of Alex's old leather jacket, the blood on her face in the greenhouse, pulsing club music and tequila kisses, 2 missed calls when Piper's flight from Paris landed - it always wallops her, and Piper doesn't know what to do about that, when the happy memories and sad ones feel the same.
When it starts to fuck with her head, she yells and fights the restraints until someone comes in and drugs her into oblivion. They play right into her hands
(because she's such a manipulative cunt).
Her arm still kind of hurts, a constant, prickling hum, which doesn't seem fair because it didn't do what it was supposed to, whatever she'd been going for in that moment of desperate, grim determination. It hasn't fixed anything.
She needs to get rid of more.
She wishes she could get rid of everything.
She wishes -
That she hadn't made that phone call, had let Alex run off to Dubai or Bali or wherever the fuck. Just let go and let her disappear.
Except Piper wouldn't have known all the bullets they'd dodged. She'd still have been left missing her, a dirty hollow pit dug into her chest where Alex used to go.
Damn her. Damn her for mattering this much. Damn her for having this much power over Piper, always. Even after eight years of nothing. Even when Piper loved someone else.
Even when Alex is dead.
She wishes she'd never fucking met Alex Vause.
"Jesus, Chapman. I leave you for five months and this is what happens?"
Slowly, Piper opens her eyes.
"Nicky?"
She's standing at the foot of Piper's bed wearing her standard issue khakis, with crossed arms and wild hair, lips twisted into a smirk.
Piper tries to sit up but remembers she can't. Craning her neck uncomfortably, she says, "You...we heard you went to max? They brought you here?"
"God, no. Don't lump me in with your crazy." Nicky starts circling the room, scrutinizing and obviously unimpressed. "Geez, and I thought SHU was bad. It's like the fuckin' Silence of the Lambs in here."
"I don't understand. How are you here?"
"Oh, I'm not," Nicky says, entirely matter-of-fact. "All in your head, Chapman. It's actually pretty flattering. And seems about right, given your current situation."
"No. No..." Piper lays flat again, shaking her head against the plastic mattress. "I'm not crazy."
Nicky comes right up to bed ane leans over, her smirk filling up Piper's field of vision, "Yeah, your current digs make a great case for that."
"Shut up."
"Now you're talking to yourself. Sad state of affairs, Chapman. And on Christmas Eve, too."
She squeezes her eyes shut, like a little kid trying to render themselves invisible. Trying to pretend they're somewhere, anywhere, else.
She feels Nicky kick the bed. Hard. "Not gonna work."
Piper doesn't answer. She's not going to spend four days (five?) in Psych and start talking to someone who isn't there.
"Guess I can't blame you for being suspicious." The pitch of Nicky's voice rises, lilting into a piss poor imitation of an Australian accent. "Trust no bitch, right?"
Abandoning her out of sight, out of mind strategy, Piper demands, "How do you know that?" Nicky never saw the tattoo. "You can't read it anymore. I made sure. You can't even see it."
"Wow, you're really not getting this, are ya? Not really here? Figment of your alleged insanity?" Nicky taps her head, smug. "I know everything you know." The smile drops. "Including what you were just thinking about Vause."
She shuts her eyes again. This isn't real. She hasn't been sleeping well, is maybe sleeping right now -
"Kind of a dramatic wish, Chapman. Granted, Vause getting beat down by a fake CO is already some high drama - "
"Fuck off."
" - which proves what I've always known: this beloved shithole falls apart without me." Nicky pauses. No. Nicky's voice in Piper's head pauses. Dream/Nightmare Nicky pauses. "Though I guess that one's your fault more than mine, huh?"
"FUCK YOU." Piper lunges forward, the restraints snapping her back like a rubber band.
Nicky just shoots her a fond smile. "Glad to see some things don't change. The old Piper temper."
Piper starts shaking her head; that's something Alex used to say. Not Nicky. Nicky doesn't call her Piper.
Nicky isn't actually here.
"But, FYI, you should be nicer to me. I'm only here to give you what you want."
Piper doesn't ask her what she means. She closes her eyes again. She obviously needs sleep.
"Fine. Be that way." Nicky's voice is closer than ever, almost by Piper's ear, and then she feels someone tugging on the restraints around her wrists. One slips off, her right hand suddenly unencumbered. "Stay lying on this shitty excuse for a bed just to prove you're not crazy." Her left hand is free now, too. Nicky's voice moves further away, and Piper feels the buckles around her right foot start to loosen. "Cause staying here voluntarily reeks of sanity." Finally, her left foot is guided out of the straps. Piper flexes her limbs, experimentally. But she still doesn't make a move to sit up.
"You are one stubborn fucker, Chapman," Nicky says, her voice a collision of pride and exasperation. She sighs. "Fine, look, will it help if I backpedal on the whole insanity thing? You're not crazy, okay? I was fucking with you. Don't think of me as a figment of your imagination. Think of me like, I don't know...a guardian angel. I come in peace. Angelically."
"You're not dead," Piper mutters. Then, frowning, "Wait, are you?"
She snorts. "Course not." She meets Piper's eyes, arches a brow. "You absolutely sure Vause is?"
Something shifts in Piper's chest, her heart finding its ache again. "I saw her. He...he gutted her, Nicky." Her voice comes out so small, and all of a sudden Piper doesn't care if Nicky's real or not, because she was maybe the closest thing Alex had to another friend here, and Piper wants someone else to be sad, to care. She wants to not be missing Alex all alone.
"I know," Nicky says softly, expression sympathetic now. "So you really meant it? You wish you'd never met her?"
Piper nods and nods and nods. "All we ever did was fucking...destroy each other. We blew each others' lives up, over and over. I was worse, I know that, since she's the one who's dead. And that's..." Her voice catches. "That's my fault."
"So you could give it all up? Just like that?"
"Yes." Nicky's face is clouded with judgement, and Piper is seized with the need to make her understand. Her voice rises and quivers and she says, "It hurts." It sounds so simple, and childish, not enough, but there's no other way to put it.
It just really goddamn hurts. Hurts somewhere deep. Somewhere that all the chemicals or drugs in the world can't get to.
"Okay." Nicky says it like something's been decided.
"Okay, what?"
"Okay, we can do that. We gotta go back to the beginning, obviously, but you wanna make a world where you never met Vause...I can show you."
This declaration hovers between them for a moment, and then Piper remembers herself, that this is a conversation that actively cannot be happening, and it makes her feel very tired. "You're crazy."
"Nope, that's you, remember? Oh." Nicky covers her mouth with both hands, mock horrified. "Sorry, forgot we aren't using that word. Anyway." She moves across the room to the locked door - the one that's locked from the outside by the guards, always - and swings it open with no effort at all. She leans against the doorframe with a smug smile, waiting.
It isn't real.
"Take your time." Nicky shrugs. "I'll wait out here."
She disappears into the hallway, and Piper exhales a heavy sigh of relief. She rubs her hands from her eyes - and definitely doesn't think about how they got out of restraints - breathing and breathing and breathing, and finally she looks up again.
The door is still open.
"One stubborn fucker!" Nicky calls cheerfully from the hallway.
Piper sighs, annoyed. Slowly, she stands up from the bed, her legs strange and stiff beneath her.
"This is it?" Nicky sounds like a kid Santa forgot about on Christmas morning. "You and Vause just met in a bar like every idiot one night stand in America? Damn it. I was counting on a more epic story."
Piper ignores her; she feels like she might be sick. Not because she'd followed Nicky through a door in the hallway of Psych and somehow found herself in a bar in Northampton, but because it's like stepping into a photo album of her own memory, familiar in a way that's almost overwhelming.
"Damn." Nicky lets out a low whistle. "Look at Vause."
Piper's heart gets jammed inside her chest, her eyes darting wildly until they find the right table.
Alex.
Alex in that dress. That way she used to do her hair when they went out. The blue streaks. Her old glasses, the bigger, slightly rounder frames.
Alex.
She says her name without meaning to, and it leaves a scrape in Piper's throat. Her vision blurs with tears, and Piper blinks furiously, not wanting to lose the image. She's unprepared for the surge of longing that lunges through her chest at finally seeing Alex alive.
Oblivious, Nicky keeps talking. "And I thought she rocked the prison uniform. Sexy fucker." Piper jerks around to glare at her. "Hey, you can't be jealous. You don't even want to know her anymore."
Piper looks away from her, leaning against the wall in one corner of the bar and listening to the achingly familiar rumble of Alex's voice, louder than anyone else in the place. "They took my moisturizer, guys, I had to walk through the airport barefoot."
Then Nicky's elbow knocks into hers, and Piper follows her gaze to the door, the world shaking into a whole different kind of weird.
Piper is walking into the bar. Twenty-two year old Piper, not even three weeks beyond college graduation. God, she forgot her hair was ever that long.
And she forgot that she'd noticed Alex first.
The other Piper is en route to the bar with her resume in hand, but quite obviously scanning the bar, searching for the source of the low voice easily overpowering the general buzz of chatter. She finds it. Crooks out a tiny, private smile.
Piper watches as her younger self turns away from Alex, and not two seconds later Alex notices her.
They just miss each other.
"Hey, you." Alex actually cups a hand to her lips. "Laura Ingalls Wilder."
Beside Piper, Nicky snorts.
"We're skipping America before the apocalypse, wanna come?"
And, God, the first word Piper ever said to Alex is sorry.
She just never seemed to say it when it mattered.
"I don't understand," Piper breathes in a rush of panic. "This is how it happened, I thought you were changing it." She's apparently committing to the warped logic of this dream in spite of herself.
"Patience, Chapman. Jesus."
The twenty-two year old Piper is talking to the bartender, and for the first time Piper gets to see that Alex keeps stealing glances at her. The bartender is saying, "Honestly, it's just gonna end up in a drawer somewhere, so."
"Okay." Young Piper glances back at Alex, again just a moment too late to meet her eyes.
In the corner beside Nicky, Piper's chest surges with déjà vu, the decade old rush of spontaneous bravery almost dizzying.
But the Piper at the bar just nods. "Thanks, anyway."
With one more glance back at Alex's table, Piper the Smith grad with excellent listening skills leaves the bar, back to her regular, unextraordinary life.
At the table, Alex watches her go, a flicker of regret passing over her face before she easily goes back to laughing with her friends.
The night ticks on, both of them unchanged.
"I remember when you came home that night."
Piper actually jumps, startled by the unexpected voice. Beside her, Nicky's been replaced with Polly, shaking her head in disbelief. "I hate to agree with Supercunt, but you really did rock a Little House on the Prairie vibe. Did I dress like that, too? God, I hope I never have to do one of these things. Freaky."
"Um. Pol? What are you doing here?"
"Hmm? Oh, right." She shakes her head slightly, back on task. "I remember when you came home that night. Not this version - " She waves a hand in front of them, indicating Alex still blissfully unaware at the table. "The old one. Remember what I said?"
She hadn't, until right this moment. Her face heats up. "You said I looked like someone who just got laid. And asked if I slept with the manager for a job." Piper drags her eyes away from Alex to give her former best friend a look. "You were kinda bitchy."
Polly grins. "I know."
"And you were still convinced I met a guy. I kept saying no - "
"- and you weren't lying."
They're quiet for awhile, Piper's eyes settled on Alex, lost in the details. Her favorite beer. The jewelry that had become familiar. A few pale planes of skin where she's yet to get tattoos.
"You know what you'd be giving up, right?" Polly says quietly after awhile.
"What are you talking about? You should be happy. You hated her."
"Well, yeah. And I kinda hated you for those two years, too."
"What? Why?"
"I've never seen you like that, Pipe...so blissed out happy. It was like you were living off her. Which meant you didn't need anything else...including me."
"Oh. Sorry."
"Don't be. I'm pretty sure it's what's supposed to happen when people fall in love."
Something about the way Polly says it, soft and understanding, makes Piper want to cry. For a second, she forgets they're in a dream version of the past, and that Polly isn't really here. She wants to tell her best friend what happened to Alex last month. She wants to be hugged.
"And you know it totally changed you," Polly is saying. "You were so bold and funny."
"I wasn't funny before?"
"You were. But when you met her, you got even more. More everything, really. It was like...she turned your volume up. Piper on full blast."
Piper closes her eyes for a moment, recalling the feeling of this night, the way it had gone the first time. Alex looking at her like no one ever had, like she was some fascinating, wonderful puzzle. Her own heartbeat delirious and drunken, thrills singing in her bones. The sensation that she'd wandered into something beyond her control and not minding a bit.
Then reality stings in her chest, red and bleeding.
"Remember when I stayed with you, the first two months after I got back from Paris?"
"Sure." Polly smiles. "We went wild, going out all the time. That was so much fun."
"Yeah..." Piper's voice dulls. "I cried every night."
"What? Piper. You could have told me."
"I know." Her throat narrows, but Piper sets her jaw, determined. "That was just the first time. Now it's even worse." She touches her fingers to the burn on her arm, then nods determinedly at the innocuous scene in front of them. "This is better."
"Okay." Polly nods, nonjudgmental. "Then let's keep going."
She starts toward the door, but Piper can't make herself follow. Her eyes are locked on Alex, hungry for her. For Alex young and beautiful and alive.
"Pipe." Polly's voice is gentle.
This is good. She can do this, she can walk away, because the Alex she'll be leaving behind looks happy. She has never had her heart broken by Piper, not even once, has never been trapped and afraid for her life. Some hurts this won't save her from - her mother will still die, she will still go to prison. But Piper had only made those low points worse.
So, yeah. This is good, for the best. If she and Alex had been just a moment - still a spark between them, Piper can't change that, but they should never have given it a chance to ignite.
She and Alex had been wild and hot and beautiful
until they weren't.
Their flame always, always burned out. And they ended up living in the pit of ash with burnt skin and lungs full of smoke.
So Piper follows Polly out of the bar, further into the world where she and Alex never met. And she hopes, when it's over, crazy or not, she gets to stay here.
A/N: This will just a two shot (and not on of my things where a two-shot turns into a five-shot or something). I know it's not particularly Christmassy yet, other than the inspiration being a Christmas movie, but I swear we'll get to that. I'll probably update 'like ice' before I finish this one, so no worries.
I also have no idea about the liquid drain cleaner access in prison...but I did find an article online where an inmate burned another inmate's face with it, and Litchfield is canonically a place where they freak out over a missing screwdriver but also send inmates walking around with toolbelts of potential weapons, so like...suspend the disbelief, if possible.