A/N: This is the first time I've ever posted any of my writing, so I'm keen to know what you guys think. I didn't like my first attempt at this chaper so this is sort of a repost. Be kind, I'm new- Zoe
Chapter 1: Shock
The first thing Piper Chapman knew as she started to drift back into consciousness was that the ground below her was cold. She didn't know where she was or how she had even gotten there but she did know that she was absolutely frozen. Forcing her eyelids open, as if waking from a long night of heavy drinking, she allowed her eyes to focus on the room. The lights seared her eyes, causing her to throw her hand up to shield them. As her eyes steadily adjusted, Piper felt the haziness of her mind steadily recede. Blinking slowly, she dimly observed that she was sitting slumped up against one of the shower cubical in the shower room.
And, she was naked. Piper made a face; she was sitting on those foul, fungal harbouring, germ manufacturing shower tiles in the nude. As she looked down at herself, something red and glistening caught her eye.
Blood… a lot of it.
Piper watched as it flowed down her thigh, to her knee, onto her calf and before running down onto the grubby shower tiles beneath her. The shower wasn't on; no hot or cold water ran over her naked body. Just a lot of her own warm, sticky blood and what appeared to be a rather ragged and nasty looking stab wound on her thigh. She frowned down at it…that was not good. She decided fleetingly that had she been a woman of pray, she might have taken this opportunity to do so.
Doggett had been a praying woman… a small malevolent voice in reminded her intentionally.
Piper smiled, an expression so pained and far removed from its usual radiance that it would have appeared as a grimace to an onlooker. That she had been, and look where she ended up… lying in the snow, bloody, pulverised, unconscious… dea- she shook her aching head suddenly, the images starting to form a little too much clarity for her liking. No, she would not think about that now. She was not ready to face what she had done and so she forced back the little nagging thoughts, back into the darkest crevices of her mind. Back into the fog. She hoped naively, that she would never have to remember.
Piper licked her lips, the gravity of her situation suddenly all the extant.
She was alone.
In more than one sense. The emptiness of the bathroom echoed the emptiness of her existence and she found this somewhat funny. Life really was a funny thing. Once, Piper Chapman had the world. A fiancé and a lover, a house and a home, a life and life itself…and in the blink of an eye, those worlds were gone. Everything and everyone that she'd loved was gone, and now, Piper sat in a dirty, empty prison shower stall with a stab wound delivered by an ex-junky meth head dressed as an angel armed with a sharpened cross: hilarious.
She looked over at her cloths, lying in a bloody pile beside her.
Staring at those cloths, she wondered fleetingly how she'd gotten there in the first place. Shouldn't the halls be crawling with guards? Surely one of them would have seen a severely injured inmate covered in blood staggering down the hallway. Blinking back the fuzziness of her mind, she decided that this too would be something to remember at a different point in time. At this time, she needed to stop the bleeding. Nothing else mattered, everything else she would deal with when the moment came. With a quick nod, and a sudden surge of strength Piper reached up and turned on the shower.
As the freezing cold water ran down over her, it mixed with the blood flowing from her thigh and her stomach. She knew that she should have been applying pressure to the wound, and she also knew that she should probably start washing the blood off her uniform but at that moment Piper could only watch as she was surrounded by swirling red water. Tilting her head to the side until it came to rest gently on the wall beside her; she wondered faintly why it was that she felt no pain.
As this thought idly drifted through her mind, she heard footsteps echo through the bathroom. Her heart gave an abrupt jerk and she came fully alert. Cold terror flooded her veins, and to her horror she let out an involuntary whimper. The footsteps stopped, and Pipers wide eyes flew to the closed curtain in sudden panic. The bathroom was silent, except for the cold water hitting the tiles around her. Time seemed to stand still, her heart rocketing in her ear.
The curtains flew open and Piper closed her eyes.
"Chapman."