Sometimes I start feeling poetic and write short drabbles in between working on longer fic chapters, so I figured I'd start posting them here.
Alex's POV about the breakup & the concept of free falling through life.
No matter how hard she tried to convince herself otherwise, Alex eventually learned that free fall wasn't fearless.
She always told herself she chose it. That stepping over the edge was a deliberate act of courage, her way of spitting in the face of a universe that wouldn't stop fucking her over. But the thing was, she'd aways had a weak foothold. Slowly, so slowly at first that Alex barely noticed, the ledge she was standing on began to crumble.
There was a close call in Jakarta, where one of her mules almost missed a huge delivery; she worked overtime for two weeks just to tie up the loose ends. There were missed phone calls, canceled dinner plans, perfunctory kisses. Some nights Piper's voice was an echo rebounding between two pairs of pained expressions, the questions reaching Alex long moments after they left her girlfriend's mouth.
She never seemed to have the right answer for them, and that scared her. At night she held Piper tightly, replaying their last conversation while tracing fingertips over her girlfriend's skin as if she could write a better script on the contours of her body.
'Alex, I miss you.'
'Pipes, I'm right here.'
But while the words were true in the ink-dark honesty of night, they never quite held up the next morning. Alex would wake early and slip out of bed to check her messages while Piper slept on, bedsheets balled up in her fists.
Their life become a splintering of fault lines, the space between them widening like a rift in the landscape. Eventually the ground split open, the resultant chasm swallowing everything whole.
Alex hadn't known until then what real free fall felt likeāthe way it sucked the breath from her lungs, whipped her skin raw, made her eyes sting. The downward motion required a certain reckless abandon, a conviction that there was nothing left to lose because she'd already lost everything. What was she supposed to do, except lean into her own momentum? Constant velocity, that was the key. A heavy heart turning her into dead weight, dropping her faster than the ghosts she was running from.
She continued to travel. At that speed every city looked distorted, and Alex started using smack to further erase the shapes of their skylines. All she wanted to see was the universe shattering above her, so she could look for beauty inside the collapse of it.
"You are a drug dealer," Piper once told her, "and it's ruining everything good in your life." But it wasn't the drugs; it was the whole broken world, and the void that got left when the dust settled.
Of course Alex ended up at the bottom; it's what happens when the girl you love twirls you to the edge and then shoves you over. It's what happens when everyone you tried to make a home inside of just leaves, and all that remains is a cracked foundation.
Alex never chose free fall. It was created by the absence of better things- by the death of her mother, by Piper leaving, by a world that offering nothing but emptiness to fill her outstretched hands with.
