A/N: okay dokay I have fallen victim to the unable-to-get-a-prompt-out-of-my-head bug again. This time the blame is on two people who asked for the same thing; maryska (again!) and a guest names Elly. You wanted a proposal one shot and here it is. Sort of. It's the lead up to the proposal because I didn't want to insert myself into a scene that already exists, I'm much more comfortable writing those little moments we miss between scenes and in this case its the time between Piper leaving that bunker and coming back to propose. I hope you all enjoy!
P.S. please forgive any grammar errors and/or typos, I only briefly edited this and my eyes are too heavy to do it again but I really wanted to just get this out!
When Piper left that bunker she made a bee-line to the prison entrance, knowing that the girls there would be the ones to know most about what was happening, and not stopping to check what was happening in the cafeteria when her peripheral vision caught sight of a roll of toilet paper flying through the air.
The news wasn't good. It wasn't particularly bad either, but finding out they were in a "wait-and-see" type of situation was less than ideal. It meant things were still uncertain, that no-one really knew when this was going to be over or how it was going to end. If they'd end up better off after this, if they'd get the justice they craved or if things would end up worse than before - no one knew. Perhaps the worst thing was that she was no closer to knowing how long it would be before she could get Alex some help.
The protest she saw going on outside resolved her to thinking things had to get better, and it had to be over soon. The people outside cared, they'd seen the horrific video of that disgusting beast of a man assaulting them and they cared. They knew it wasn't right.
Things were nearing the end and they were going to get better. She could feel it.
One thing she hadn't expected when she'd gone to that entrance, when she'd looked out through the window into that crowd and looked at the faces of the people shouting for their rights, of family members worried about their mothers or daughters or sister inside, was to see her mom. That feeling, that jump of her heart at the familiar, anxious face of her mother brought an instant lump to her throat and a tear to her eye. They'd had their issues, as all mother and daughters had, and maybe some of their issues were bigger than other peoples, but at the end of the day she was still her mom. She was still the woman who had brought her up and held her when she cried. Piper was, in that very moment, a young girl that needed a hug from her mother - not that she gave them out very often.
But she couldn't do that so she ran to the phone instead, grabbed it from the table it sat on and perched herself awkwardly beside the window so she could see her mom as she called, a small part of her thinking that it wouldn't be her. That her mom would pick up the phone and the woman outside wouldn't. That maybe after all the trauma she had been through she was seeing things. PTSD or something like it making her hallucinate.
She wasn't. Her mom picked up and so did the woman outside. They were one in the same. And the conversation they had was one she couldn't have imagined having. The conversation they had was probably one of the most valued, most honest and open they'd ever had.
It was rare that Piper ever heard her mother talk that fondly of her father, even rarer that she shared such a loving moment of their life together, and that she'd shown no signs of fighting against her relationship with Alex - the woman who had once squirmed at her calling her 'her girlfriend' now likening Piper's experience of loving her with her own - well that had simply never happened before.
It flicked a switch somewhere inside her. That conversation cleared a cloud in her mind she hadn't even noticed was there. A feeling that swam through the tips of her toes all the way up to the hairs on her head. It consumed her, it sent a shiver through her spine and she knew in that very instant what she had to do. She didn't know how or why, but she just knew that she had to do it. She had to ask Alex to marry her. They had to make that commitment.
It didn't matter that they were inside a prison in the midst of a riot. It was probably more appropriate actually. Nothing ever did happen conventionally for them.
Their love had thrived and intensified in this prison. It had been through tests that most lovers wouldn't ever have to experience. It had been broken down and snapped in two and it had been put back together again, all in this one setting. It was here where she truly realised that Alex was, and had always been, the greatest love of her life.
Some might say it was the environment they were in that brought that on. That prison is a place where people often develop strong feelings for their cellmates and dream of a future that just can't be on the outside, because out there they're different people, and in some ways it's true.
Piper was a different person outside. The woman she'd been last year wasn't the same one she is now, but the woman she is now is all the parts of her she didn't let show to the preppy circle surrounding her out there. Out there, with those people, she couldn't be as honest with herself as she can in here. In here she didn't care, and that raw, honesty of it was intense, and sometimes scary, because seeing the person you really are - flaws and all - well it is scary.
Those flaws were ones she'd been suppressing most of her life. The selfish side of her, the narcissistic side, the hot tempered side; those were one's she didn't want to show to the likes of Larry, because she couldn't be sure he'd stay with her knowing them.
Alex saw those flaws. Alex loved them and Alex hated them, but Alex stayed despite them.
No, Piper didn't leave that bunker with the intention of coming back to propose, but that's what she was going to do.
The subject was one that hadn't even graced her thought process before. Not seriously, anyway. Marriage may have briefly flashed into her mind while they played house in the yard with their make-shift home and scrolled through apartments in their bed/digger bucket, but she never genuinely considered popping that question.
Despite what Alex thought, Piper didn't leave that room to see what was going on upstairs either. She didn't leave so she could get more involved in the riot. The only cause she cared about at that time was Alex's. The only thing on her mind had been that she wanted to help make Alex better.
It was more than want though. It was a need. A deep, intense, instinctual need to do all she could to make the one she loved feel better. To get her out of pain.
Alex couldn't see that and Piper couldn't blame her. She still saw in her the Piper that left her when her mother died. The Piper that runs when things get tough. The Piper that can't handle complex feelings.
The Piper that she was trying hard not to be anymore.
That wasn't what had happened. This time Piper hadn't left though fear - she'd left for love, and the only thing Piper thought about as she left that bunker was how she was going to show her, really show her, that she wasn't going anywhere. That the causes she gets so involved in will come and go and she won't be able to help letting them take over her a little bit, but that they will always come second to her. Alex was her main cause in life and nothing would come before that.
She hadn't known at the time how she was going to do it, but she knew she'd figure out a way and now, with her mother's words ringing in her ears, she had.
If anything was going to show Alex just how serious she was about her, then proposing was it.
Blood rushed up to her ears as she headed hurriedly back to the bunker. Her heart racing too fast as she navigated the hallways and an excited grin on her face that must have looked out of place considering what was going on. The laughs and screams and shouts and thuds and crashes that all the other inmates made had all turned to white noise around her, because Piper's whole being was filling with adrenaline.
All sorts of words were flying through her head as she tried to put some sort of speech together, but she didn't know what she was going to say. She didn't know how to explain all the things she felt right now. She'd already tried earlier. Tried to explain how seeing that monster hurt Alex had felt, how seeing that had made her want to die… but that didn't seem true anymore.
Seeing her like that had been horrific, so much so she doubted she'd ever get rid of the image of Alex wrapped in a shower curtain and writhing in pain on the floor, her arm twisted back stiffly and unnaturally. Doubted that she'd ever forget the awful sound she had made when that arm snapped.
It made her sick to think about, and at the time the pain of seeing the person you love in a position like that… well it had felt like wanting to die and so she'd told her that because she'd thought it the only way to describe that feeling, but she'd realised now that was wrong.
After seeing Alex like that, all she wanted to do was hurt the man who caused it. She wanted to cause him infinite amounts of pain. It raged a fire in her the likes of which she'd never experienced before.
Piper didn't want to die - she wanted to fight.
When that brute had wrapped them in those shower curtains and dragged them down to that room; when she'd woken up to see her friends tied up and crying and that man towering above them, she'd thought they would die. She'd thought that it was the end and in that very moment Alex had been the one thing on her mind. The life with Alex that she wouldn't get to live. The things they wouldn't do and the places they wouldn't go.
The part of her that had been unafraid of the end, the part that had never seen death as a thing to be feared, finally feared it and she was so, so glad, because when you're not afraid of death you're reckless in life and Piper didn't want to be reckless anymore. Piper didn't want to die. She wanted to fight, and she wanted to live, and she wanted both those things because of her. Because a life with Alex was worth fighting for. Worth living for. And she wanted to live as much of her life with Alex as she possibly could.
Piper turned one corner and then she turned another, through Poussey's memorial library and past the cafeteria where people were still throwing stuff, and past the bathrooms - the one she and Alex had been taken from, and it was there that she stopped and turned back.
Alex needs her glasses, she'd realised. And not only because they looked so good on her, but because Piper knew a small portion of Alex's grumpiness was because she didn't have them, because straining her eyes to see all the time will be giving her a headache and if Piper couldn't fix the pain in her arm, at least she could fix the pain in her head.
The glasses were sitting on the bench, beside a towel and her crumpled up clothes. Taken off and left discarded before what was supposed to be a spontaneous romp in the shower.
Piper let herself savour the thought of that only for a second. Let the image of Alex's naked body stepping into the shower and pressing up behind her grace her memory just long enough to make her smile and tug on her lip with her teeth, before forcing it away again. Now wasn't the time to be thinking things like that, so she popped Alex's glasses into her chest pocket and set off again.
She got to the room where they'd been held captive a few minutes later. The room that now held so many awful memories, and it was there that she stopped again. She stopped and she took a breath and she thought about her tattoo, because for some reason it had been on her mind a lot lately. The little fish on the back of her neck that she did sometimes forget existed but that held so much meaning. The little fish she could take no pleasure in really, because she couldn't even see it. The one she'd gotten to remind Alex of beauty. A selfless act borne out of love.
A complete contrast to the 'Love is Pain' Alex adorned her arm with. A tattoo to remind her that love isn't enough because love hurts. A tattoo borne out of spite, out of retaliation, a 'how can you be so naive, love isn't beauty fish, love is pain' type of tattoo.
That was true, of course, love is pain. So much of the time Alex and Piper had spent together was painful. The fighting and the walking out, the selfishness and the thoughtlessness, the betrayals and the abandonment. They'd hurt each other more times than they could count. Done it purposely and recklessly. Played with each other's hearts like they were elastic that could bounce back into place, but they couldn't.
The wounds they'd given each other had taken time to heal, but they were almost there. Piper doubted Alex would ever truly feel confident that she wasn't going to abandon her again - that wound was probably one that went too deep - but maybe this would help that a little. Maybe commitment was what she needed.
She hoped so, anyway, otherwise this whole thing was probably about to blow up in her face.
It was only then that fear started to cripple in. Only then that she stopped to consider that Alex might not appreciate this gesture right now and might tell her she was crazy. She might say no.
But it couldn't wait. Their immediate future was uncertain. They didn't know where they would end up after this and if they'd even be together.
It had to be now.
Summoning all the courage she had, Piper stepped through the locker and down into the bunker, through the little sea of people and straight to Alex, with a silly grin on her face.
The way Alex said 'hey', the way she looked at Piper with such gratitude as she handed her back her precious black rimmed glasses and the sarcastic quip she retorted to Piper's 'sexy librarian' comment, told her she'd softened. It told her she was glad she was back, even if she had been the one to tell her to go.
Piper smiled at her broken girlfriend, she told her that she was sure this whole riot thing was almost over and that she would be able to get her some help soon - both things she wasn't entirely convinced of yet herself but Alex didn't need to know that - and she paused.
She didn't know what to say, or rather, she didn't know how to say it. A glance to her left, a look down into the box filled with cans of food and she thought of her father, paddling across a flooded lawn to bring food to her mother. She picked up ones of the cans and she thought of love and the many ways it shows itself. In the pain that shows us when love is worth fighting and living for; in the beauty fish meant to remind us all that life and love is full of beauty and wonder and magic; and in cans of corn that show the lengths people will go to keep the people they love safe, free of hurt and hunger.
All of a sudden she knew what she was going to say. She knew how she was going to do it.
She handed Alex the can of beans.