She just wants to feel something besides the soul crushing emptiness. The state capital trick stopped working around the time she had to scrub blood off the walls of Sophia's cell. She spent half the night puking her guts up after that, her nose full of the tangy copper scent that the entire cell had been saturated in.

She rips apart a razor head she hides in her hair after a shower, strategically piling her tangled curls on top of her head to hide it. She learned quickly that if you can't hide it on your body, you're not keeping it. The blade isn't exactly sharp, and it's a little bent by the time she digs it out of the plastic casing, but it'll do the trick. She wraps it in a piece of her blanket that she tears off and keeps it in her sock.

In the dark, Nicky takes it out and rolls the waistband of her pants down. She hasn't done this in years, not since she discovered that needles hurt more and have a much more enjoyable and long term result inside them than a couple tiny cuts can ever produce, but old habits die hard and she still remembers exactly what to do.

The first one is tentative, her hands are shaking and she can't angle the blade quite right. It stings, then the pain deepens and the blood flows out. Another, another, over and over and over until the noise in her head shuts the fuck up.

She presses a clean sock to the cuts for a solid twenty minutes to get the bleeding to stop and then passes out the second she puts her head on the pillow.

The pain high isn't quite as good as a real high, the kind she misses so badly some days her entire body aches with it, but it's enough to keep her calm for a few days, just so she doesn't lose her head completely.

The razor works for three weeks. It's enough to numb the anxiety and the fear and the desire for death, but then it dulls too much to actually make a mark on her skin.

She flushes it down the toilet in her cell when nobody is in there but her. She's not happy to see it go, but it was getting too risky.

The next day, she basically prostitutes herself for drugs and she doesn't regret it for a second, not when she's got a tiny baggie of white powder. She snorts what is probably way too fuckin much at once for having been off it for three years and sure enough, within twenty minutes she's half conscious on her bed, head spinning.

It feels amazing, being this high again off something other than her own blood dripping down her skin. Her eyes roll back in her head and she sighs.

She's stuck here, in this hell. She's never going to see Red again, or Lorna, Alex, Piper. People she cares about, people that were her main reason for staying sober. Without Red she wouldn't have made it three hours sober, let alone three years. Speaking of sobriety, three years clean don't mean anything in here, and she can't even have her chip to remind her that she's less of a fuckup than her brain tells her she is.

Nothing means shit in here. So she lets herself roll with the high and loses herself to the drugs in her bloodstream, just like old times.

Sobriety can go fuck itself. Nicky Nichols is officially off the wagon.

It's not like there's anyone in this godforsaken place that gives a damn, anyways.