It wasn't right. None of it was. Oh, it was deserved. But it wasn't right. That's all Piper could think about as she sat in Caputo's office. It wasn't right. Doggett had attacked her and now she was getting extra time added to her sentence. It wasn't fair. If Healy had done his job the fight wouldn't have happened and Piper wouldn't have spent the past eight days in the hospital.
Those eight days had been the best and the worst eight days of her sentence. She was allowed to stay in bed all day and the hospital food was minutely better than prison food. Although she would never admit that to Red, even if she wasn't running the kitchen anymore. Piper had spent the last eight days replaying the past several months, and when that got old, she branched out to the past ten years of her life. She had never been as honest with herself as she had been the past eight days.
And the conclusion that she had come to was that Doggett was right. She wasn't worthy of anybody's love.
Piper leaned forward in the chair and took a deep breath. Even thinking it was hard. She wasn't worthy. She hadn't ever been worthy. But she was damn well going to make sure that she grew to be worthy. And she was going to do her best to make sure that no one else suffered because of her.
Piper knew that she wasn't going to be able to walk back to her old bunk and expect that nothing had changed. Eight days was a long time and she was a different person now. She was aware of her faults and of the mess that she had made of things. Alex would never forgive her for choosing Larry. And Larry was gone. He hadn't visited her in the hospital and he wouldn't speak to Polly either. He was gone and Piper was alone. Deservedly so.
When Caputo walked in Piper got to her feet and waited for him to circle his desk before sitting again. "Chapman. Welcome back. I trust that you're feeling better." Caputo addressed her without looking up from a file he had opened and dropped onto his desk.
"Yes. Thanks." She raised her bandaged hand and turned it from side to side. It was still sore and stiff and there were still stitches from the surgery but it was feeling better. Piper suspected that Caputo wouldn't have cared if her hand had fallen off, but it was better to be pleasant and pretend that he was sincere. "Much better." Her voice trailed off as he looked up.
"Good." He turned a page and looked back at her again. "I don't know how much you've heard; I know there is a pipeline of information through this place that I'll never be privy to..." He raised an eyebrow at her.
"Nothing. I just came back in the van a few minutes ago. I didn't see or speak to anyone before I came here." It was true. Piper had been escorted from the van by Bennett. They had moved through the hallways silently and not seen anyone. It was lunchtime after all.
Caputo sighed and rubbed his balding head. "Huh. Well, Doggett has a severe infection. Her jaw was broken in the…uh…altercation. She had an abscessed tooth and when that pocket of infection was released it got into her bloodstream. They aren't sure if she'll make it." He was matter of fact as he relayed the information.
Piper's eyes widened at his word. She hadn't meant to kill her. Sure, Doggett was a piece of shit and crazy as could be, but Piper didn't want to kill anyone. If she could go back to that night she would have stayed right in her seat and avoided the whole thing. She would have listened to the inmates singing about being a wretch and cried in her seat. She realized her mouth was hanging open and she closed it. "What does that, er, this, mean for me?" She avoided eye contact with him and looked towards the door to her right. "What happens to me?"
Caputo rose and moved to stand behind his chair. Piper tried to look at him but found that she couldn't. Instead she focused on the foggy window just over his shoulder and hoped that he wouldn't notice. "We aren't sure yet. A judge has to make a decision and no one wants to rush to get this done before we find out if Doggett will make it. But the statements we collected after the incident do seem to work in your favor." He leaned over the back of the chair and lifted a small stack of papers. "It is the general consensus that you acted in fear for your life and that it was self-defense. Would you say that this is accurate?"
Piper thought about that. More than she already had. In fact she had been obsessing about this very question for days. Was what she did self-defense? It was hard for her to make sense of her feelings about that now. In the moment she was mad. She could admit that she lost her grip on reality and wasn't thinking about the consequences of her actions when she was straddling Doggett and pounding her face with her fist. Piper was sure that when she originally struck out she was trying to defend herself against a crazy person who wanted to kill her.
But, laying in the hospital bed with nothing to think about outside of her own failings as a decent human being, it had been hard for Piper to justify what she had done. Even to herself. Every throb in her swollen hand was a reminder that she had beaten, unmercifully, another person. Nearly to death as it turns out. If you had asked her six months ago if she would be capable of such a thing she would have laughed and sworn that she couldn't imagine hurting another person. Now Piper wasn't so sure. She had done it. And she had been lost in the feeling of having that kind of power. The power to decide whether someone else lived or died. Even if that hadn't been a conscious thought in her head at the time.
Self-defense. In Piper's mind that was a tricky thing. In order for her to tell Caputo that she had been acting in fear for her own life she would have to be able to say that she deserved to live. And after the realizations she had come to about her own shortcomings and wrongdoings, she wasn't so sure that she did. Her intention was to become the kind of person who deserved to live, and who made a difference for the better with the life that they had, but at the time of the 'incident' she wasn't sure that she was someone who deserved that chance.
Piper looked up at Caputo and realized she had been silent for too long. "Yeah. Yes. She came at me and after Healy turned his back and walked away I thought for sure that she was going to kill me. She said that she was going to kill me. That it was time for me to die. I screamed for help but no one came and then there wasn't a chance to get away from her. It was either fight back or be killed. I'm sorry that she is sick and I regret that it had to happen but I don't regret not letting her kill me."
Piper tried to keep her feelings in check long enough to judge Caputo's reaction to her words. He seemed satisfied. She was shocked at the words that came out of her own mouth. In the hospital she had thought she would lay herself at their mercy and admit that she lost control. Apparently, her self-preservation drive was kicking in again.
Caputo seemed to think for a moment and then sighed. "That's what we figured happened." He lifted another stack of papers and picked up a pen. "I'm going to need you to write a statement about this. About Healy." He handed her the pen and several forms. "Just fill this out and we'll take care of him." He walked around the desk and to the door. "I'll be back in a second. Get that done and then we'll talk about what we're going to do with you."
That sounded ominous and Piper found herself very distracted while she wrote out her statement. She tried to be as factual and unbiased as possible. There was no need for her to embellish what had happened, it was horrible enough on its own. Her mind was stuck on Caputo's last words though, 'we'll talk about what we're going to do with you'. What did he mean? Was it just his way of saying that he would send her back to her bunk to wait out a judge's decision? Was she going to SHU? Was she going to maximum?
Piper shook her head in an effort to clear the worries racing around inside it. She turned her attention to the form in front of her and wrote about Healy turning his back and leaving her to die. What was his problem? Was it that she was a lesbian? Was she a lesbian? She must be because the only thing in her mind was making things right with Alex. Not Larry. She needed to know that Alex was going to eventually be able to forgive her and that they could at least be civil to each other.
Shaking her head again she finished the last few lines of what she wanted to say. She signed her name at the bottom and took a small pleasure in signing Piper Chapman and not Piper Bloom. If nothing else at least she hadn't married Larry. Even thinking about how close she had come to being married to him made her heart pound and that in turn made her hand throb. She lifted it up and rested it over her heart to alleviate some of the pressure. It had been hard to hold the pen and as she looked back over the form she smiled at how sloppy her handwriting looked. It was a mess and she could imagine that Caputo would give her grief for it.
A minute later when he lifted the form and read over it quickly he apologized. "Sorry, I didn't think that you might find it difficult to write. Were you able to get everything down that you wanted to say?"
She nodded and tried to hide her surprise at his words. He sat back in his chair and slipped her statement into the file on his desk. "Your bunk was filled by a new inmate. Doggett's bed is empty but we can't put you in there for obvious reasons concerning your safety. Another inmate has been moved to SHU on a long term basis based on her repeated outbursts. You can have her bunk." He paused and seemed to notice the surprised look on Piper's face. "We have to wait until a decision is made before we can make more permanent arrangements for you. You'll know what those are as soon as we do."
He rubbed the bridge of his nose and looked at her again. "Is there anything else?" When Piper shook her head he called for Bennett to come in. "Take her to her new bunk. Make sure she is settled and then take her to get lunch." Piper stood up. "There will be some backlash for you around here. But I imagine that you've also earned yourself a bit of respect." He shook his head. "Sadly, that's just how things work around here." He turned his attention back to his desk and waved his hand in a dismissal. Piper was going back to gen pop.