([Flashback- 10 months prior]
Alex.
I stare at the back of her head until she mumbles incoherently and turns over on the bed, and looks at me.
"Oh. Oh. Shit, kid, the sunset. I wanted to watch it with you, it's just work is so overbearing and I didn't know I slep-", I kiss her very hard on the mouth to shut up her ramblings, she tastes like vanilla.
"It's okay sleepy head, it was beautiful and all but not as beautiful as you are when you're sleeping. You're so delicate and light when you're sleeping. Almost as if too perfect for this world. What's the word? Ethereal? You're ethereal."
Alex laughs deeply, and smiles so bright with a playful glint her eyes.
"I don't think anyone has ever said that about me. It could ruin my reputation as the bad ass Alex Vause! What is the world coming to?!" She over-exaggerates the last sentence, putting her hands on her head in mock-breakdown.)
When she hears the door click, she falls to her knees and cries.
A gut-wrenching sob escapes her mouth as she feels her world crashing down onto the floor, and she's cutting herself on the broken pieces trying so hard to piece them back together, in hopes that it'll somehow make her best friend and the love of her life come back and everything would be okay again.
She knows it's all her fault. She knows that if she just paid an ounce of attention to Piper while she was here, pulled her close and reminded her every reason she loves her and wants everything to do with her, they would be okay. She wouldn't be on the floor, suffocating on her tears and the pieces of her broken heart that are lodged intricately in her throat.
When Alex tells of her losses, Kubra doesn't blink twice when he tells her to take a few weeks to compose herself.
She's packing everything of hers into her suitcases, she usually doesn't take much when she's traveling but she thought Paris would be a good temporary placement for her and Piper. Look how that turned out. She sometimes stumbled upon an old t-shirt of Piper's which she holds close to her face and breathes, because she doesn't know if she'll ever smell her scent again for as long as she's alive. She throws away the shirts before she has time to process it and she moves on to the next box of stuff.
Some old business letters, letters from Diane (which Alex lingers a little while longer on and reads repeatedly until she feels she can move on to the next item), and then when she's almost done packing, she finds an old journal under the bed. It's leather-bound and when she opens it up to the first page, there's 'Piper Chapman + Alex Vause' scrawled on the top of the page in blue ink. She thinks it must be the notebook Piper was always writing in when she had to do business or when they had a moment worthy of remembering for a lifetime (and there was plenty of those). She debates in her head if she should read Piper's personal thoughts, but it was about them, about their memories, about her, her thoughts, her wishes. Her. She knows she needs to read this. She needs to find where she went wrong. If she can ever piece it back together.
Note: Reviews and thoughts on this would be gladly appreciated as I am new to writing Alex and Piper fiction. Thanks for reading!