This is a one-shot for now, but I'll probably add another chapter at a later date from Alex's point of view as well. So, don't you all just love this freaking show?! Sadly, I don't own it.
She gets a day in hospital, six weeks in SHU and another eighteen months on her sentence for beating the ever loving shit out of Pennsatucky.
Healy is a crying, guilty mess when they confront him with the surveillance footage and that alone saves her from getting sent down the road to maximum, seeing as she went a little bit past the point of simply defending herself. Pennsatucky's face resembling a piece of tenderized meat was proof of that. She doesn't regret doing it, defending herself, but she does regret going too far. Whether it's because she hurt someone badly enough that they needed reconstructive surgery or because of what it means to her sentence is something she spends a lot of time thinking about in SHU. Somewhere around the three week mark she decided that, fuck it, she can feel bad because of both those reasons. She's never going to be not selfish, but she's not a completely heartless bitch either and she's okay with that. Fuck the haters, as Tastey would say.
What she doesn't try to think about in the first few weeks, but fails at completely, is Larry and Alex. Because fuck them both. Alex lied and Larry's a dick and because of them she was angry and hurt and Pennsatucky was just there. If they hadn't wrecked her life, her stupid heart, then maybe the psycho Bible thumper wouldn't have needed new teeth and a nose job. Or twenty seven stitches in her face.
By week four she spends a day sobbing when she can't tell herself that lie anymore and does the most un-Piper like thing ever and accepts that she might have done the wrecking all by herself, faces the fact that it doesn't mean anything that she admits her mistakes if she keeps making the same ones over and over again. She couldn't keep blaming everyone else for her fuck-ups. She told her mother that being in prison was her own fault and no one else's. She'd taken responsibility for her actions and she'd felt better for doing it, but there she was again, pointlessly blaming someone else for her mistakes.
It wasn't Alex or Larry that hurt Pennsatucky. It wasn't Larry that had an affair. It wasn't Alex that kept hurting her and chose someone else. She made those choices all by herself and they were wrong. She didn't know how to reconcile that for herself; that being with Alex had been wrong, but leaving her was just as much of a mistake. She didn't know how to make that right, didn't know who she should try to make it right with. Weeks five and six were spent mostly thinking about that. That and masturbating.
The masturbating actually helped clear a lot of things up for her, because it was Alex's lips and hands and eyes and tattoos that featured most prominently in her fantasies. At first she thought that it proved that Larry was who she truly loved, that what she felt for Alex was base and shallow and doomed to fizzle out like most great passions do. Except that when she tried to think of Larry, of what she loved about him, she found that most of the things he gave her were generic and safe. He gave her comfort, security, but she could replace him with ten other people and they'd offer her those same things. It wasn't so much Larry that she loved as the surety of her future he provided for her. Larry represented kids and a nice house, a steady income one day when his writing took off and acceptance in her mother's eyes. Larry was the binky.
Alex was what scared her, why she needed the binky and the boy and the nice, settled future. She was never supposed to want the things that Alex offered, was never supposed to feel the way she did about a woman who didn't conform to anything in life, ever, not the way that Piper herself was brought up to do. Alex was beautiful, passionate, ruthless, a liar and a drug dealer and the only reason Piper left her to begin with was because of the fact that she didn't care about the drugs or the danger as long as she could be with Alex, but she felt Alex didn't even see her as more important that those things and it terrified her.
Polly once said that Piper purposefully looked for partners that would drive her crazy, that she had chemistry with but no future, and Piper said she wanted both. It was the truth, that's why there was a plethora of boys and girls that drove her crazy, but they never really lived up to what she had with Alex or gave the comfort she craved, so then she tried the opposite of crazy and chemical. She tried Larry. She settled for normal and predictable when she couldn't find crazy comfort.
Prison showed her that she could have that with Alex though, because Alex held her hand after she'd had a bad day and made her the little spoon, but she also fucked her in the shower until she saw stars. Alex was passion and comfort all wrapped up in a crazy hot package and Piper couldn't hide behind excuses anymore. Sure, Alex had lied, but Piper had strung her along and unconsciously rubbed Larry in her face even while they were falling in love all over again.
Piper was the dick.
Her last morning in SHU they let her shower and change into a new, clean prison uniform before they had her wait at a door for Morello to pick her up. She felt clean for the first time in a very long time, longer than the six weeks she spent in SHU or the months before when she started her sentence, and it didn't have anything to do with the shower or the clean clothes.
Piper Chapman was a changed woman. Through sheer force of will, she would not let herself be who she was before she entered solitary. She would never be perfect, she would never not put herself entirely first, but she would face those things about herself that scared her and try to make it better. Other people mattered; her actions mattered, because they didn't just affect her, but the people around her as well. She was going to apologize and accept that it wouldn't mean that she got what she wanted because of it. She would not have Alex, even if now she finally knew she wanted her above anyone else, because having her was not what Alex wanted anymore. That was on her, not Alex, and she couldn't blame her for it. Just respect her decision.
When Morello opened the door of the van for her five minutes later and looked her over, saying with a half-smile on her face, "You look different, Chapman.", Piper just agreed with a nod and got in.
There we have it for now, hope you liked it. Feel free to flame or praise, I don't mind either way;)