Authors notes:
A) my first OITNB fic ever! Yay me.
B) spoilers for the end of season 2 at the end, no spoilers anywhere else I don't think.
C) if you've never heard "She Wants To Know" by half moon run, you should. It will give you many Piper/Alex feelings.
"I'm guessing that it happens all the time through no fault of mine
She can turn it around
And she wasn't like the best thing under the sun but yeah I guess I needed to learn from her
I guess I needed to open up and let it all out."
-Half Moon Run, She Wants To Know
It's not as though Alex was a completely evil person.
She could be a lot of things, overly sarcastic and periodically wrathful, she could be stubborn and impatient, and when her survival skills kicked in, those survival skills built upon so many years of being beaten down until her only defence mechanism was "don't fucking die, protect yourself at all costs", but she was not evil.
And Piper was the only person she had ever really loved, so it stood to reason that should an evil streak develop, she would not be on the receiving end. But that fucking survival instinct kicked in, and now Alex was standing alone in the front room of an empty apartment blinking back tears. She hadn't cried in a long time, longer than she could even remember, but here she was.
She hadn't considered life on the outs without Piper. Maybe that was childish-no-it was definitely childish-but she'd had so long on her sentence and Piper's sentence was so short, and once Piper was back in her life she had planned it all out, a life on the outside with her, an apartment and normal people jobs and a life ungoverned by others, for the most part, save for the parole officers. She wasn't even sure what kind of normal person job she was even capable of doing, but she would have figured something out.
But of course, she had to fuck it all up. And this time, her self-preservation instinct hadn't even done it's job, fucking instinct, and here she was without Piper and with an angry and virtually untouchable drug lord presumably watching her every move. She had nobody to blame for this but herself, but it was still scary. It was overwhelming. And it just plain old fucking sucked.
For three days she did absolutely nothing. She was too scared to leave the apartment, and it wasn't like she could phone Piper, even if she did know where she was. She spent three sleepless nights pacing the floor of the apartment, jumping at every sound and obsessively dreaming up worst case scenarios of what could have happened to Piper, until finally, on the third day, convinced that Piper was dead and nobody would tell her, so she would never really know, and she'd spend the rest of her life regretting what she'd done even more than she was going to anyway, she planned her suicide, left a note for her parole officer on the front door to the apartment, and walked out.
She spent a long time standing on the Brooklyn bridge. She wasn't even willing herself to jump off, by the time she got there it seemed like a foolish idea, the moment of weakness had past. She was thinking, though. About Piper the first day they met, all flaily and wet behind the ears with a total bullshit resume she thought would get her a job despite no work experience and even less life experience. About Piper on a million trips with her, by her side and somehow keeping her safe. About the first time she realized she loved her and the way it hit all at once, after so many years of thinking she was incapable of love and then all of a sudden, no, there had just never been anybody quite like Piper in her world before, nobody quite as worthy of being loved. She thought about the void that it had left when there was no more Piper, the way it felt when she knew that she'd fucked up badly enough that there was no possible way that she'd ever see Piper again, and how the only way to cope had been heroin, and how even that wasn't quite strong enough to take the edge off. She thought about how it felt to see Piper back, the feeling of giddy pleasure it caused to swell in her chest. She thought about how falling in love the second time was like slipping into your old favorite tshirt, soft and a little worn around the edges, but more comfortable than anything. And that was the time she felt it better to stop thinking. It only went down from there. Instead, she turned and walked away from the bridge, toward the nearest bodega, and popped inside.
Piper was no less imperfect than Alex was, she had been equipped with her own set of privileges that made it easier for her to pick up the pieces and move on as if Alex was a figment of her imagination or an exciting adventure of her wild past to giggle about with her similarly white, straight, blonde, educated friends, but she was not without imperfections. She could be petulant and selfish and narcissistic, she had horrific taste in men (if Alex could have a free pass to murder any person on the planet, it wouldn't be the drug lord, it wouldn't be the guy who got her into it, it wouldn't have been any of the shadow figures of her past, but it would have been Larry, just to do the world a favor, because the last thing anybody needs is another self-involved Nice Guy). She was deeply flawed, but so was Alex, so was everyone in this goddamn fucked up world, and it didn't matter, because she was Alex's, she would always be Alex's, and Alex didn't care.
In the bodega she bought a notebook and a thing of pens, and then, as an afterthought went back to the apartment and stuck a new sign on the door, this one reading "not dead. At the library". Somehow, writing love letters to someone who effectively hated you seemed less pathetic when sitting in a public library than it did while sitting at the Formica kitchen table in a cramped, slightly depressingly lit apartment.
The first letter ran ten pages, and by the time she finished writing it her printing was almost unreadable and her hand had cramped up, and it seemed sort of lame and pathetic, pouring out her heart in the very first letter. So instead she walked across the street and bought her a stupid "I heart NY" postcard. She filled it up with apologies and words of love and signed it "I heart you", praying that Piper would remember. And then before she had time to change her mind, she stuck it in the envelope and mailed it.
She didn't expect an answer at first but she wrote once a week, sometimes twice, at the peak of her missing her, when even the antidepressants she'd started taking again because now she could buy eyeliner at any damn store she pleased couldn't do anything to stop the darkness in her brain, when she woke up crying every morning and fell asleep crying every night, she wrote every day for two weeks.
"She's not even opening them," Nicky said over the phone.
"I don't care. She will."
"She just needs time, you know? She needs to hurt for a little while longer, she needs to see you as the bad guy while she's licking her wounds, she can't see you as a person when she's hurting, but she'll come around. I mean, you fucked her, she'd be stupid not to."
For the first time in what felt like an eternity, Alex laughed.
Weeks passed and turned into months of nothing, nothing, fucking nothing, but when the cops came one morning, knocking on the door and politely informing her that she was under arrest, it didn't feel like anything but a weight off her shoulders, because in a way, it felt like a message from Piper, like in her weird twisted Piper way, she was telling her she couldn't live without her, and Alex was completely okay with that.