A/N: Song from "Colors" by Halsey, because why does that song even exist if not to give our soulmate AUs weirdly perfect titles?
Since this follows the exact trajectory of canon, with the AU adjustments not really affecting the big narrative events, this is meant to be in fairly minimal vignette style. I churned this out in like two days, during kind of the first rush of the idea, but while it's meant to be short, hope it doesn't feel too surface level. I've always liked the cleverness of soulmate AUs, so I just wanted to experiment with the concept. Love to hear what you think, but no worries, turning fully to the next Dog Days chapter next.
When she's a kid, Piper's grandparents are the only people she knows for sure see colors.
Her mother says it's never polite to ask, but it doesn't count with family, and anyway, Grandpa's been calling Piper Blue Eyes from the moment she was born, and the story of when he met Grandmother in her pink dress is his favorite to tell.
When Piper's five, she crawls onto his lap and he calls her the pet name and Piper asks what blue looks like.
Grandpa has to think about it for so long she almost gets bored, but then he says, "Think about when you get in the swimming pool for the first time every summer, how good and cool it feels. Or the way it smells when your daddy lets you go outside and splash around in puddles right after it quits raining." He touches the tip of her nose. "Or the way it sounds when you laugh."
Piper grins big, because even though she still can't really picture it, she likes all those things and thinks it's nice if her eyes are like them. "Do you think I'll get colors one day, Grandpa?"
He smiles his crinkly smile. "I hope so, Blue Eyes. I hope you're that lucky."
Her parents don't have colors, Piper knows, and they always sigh and frown and eyeroll when her grandparents talk about theirs. But to Piper, it's like a superpower they have, and she wants it for herself someday. Over the years, she takes almost everything she owns up to her grandmother at some point, eagerly demanding to know what color it is. She wants to be ready, to recognize them when they arrive.
When she's seven years old, Piper's grandfather dies and no one calls her Blue Eyes anymore.
(By the time she gets to high school, she'll have basically forgotten she ever knew her eye color.)
They sleep over at her grandmother's house for a lot of days after the funeral, the whole family, and one morning Piper wears a new dress into the kitchen and asks her usual question, "What color is this one?"
Her grandmother stares at it for a long time, says she doesn't know, and then bursts into tears.
"Did you know my Dad cheats on my mom?"
"No. How'd you know that?"
"I saw him kiss another woman and they got in the car together." Piper watches her grandmother closely. Just like her mom, she doesn't seem very surprised, isn't behaving like this is a world shaking announcement.
Frowning, Piper hesitates for a moment, then adds, "Do you think maybe...she was his soul mate? The other woman?"
The question comes out hopeful. Piper at twelve can't help but get caught up in the idea of soulmates; it's the driving force of every love story. Every movie and TV show includes it, but Piper likes the books the best, when more than just subtitles on the screen indicate the colors' arrival; with good writers, she can almost imagine what they look like.
(She's been reading all of Jane Austen lately, and she loves it: the way Elizabeth and Mr. Darcy are both so infuriated when they lock eyes and saturate the world at the ball; the way Emma doesn't even remember a world without color, thinks it's always that way for everyone, and only Knightley has known the reason all along.)
So maybe, just maybe, it's a little more forgivable if her father is cheating on her mother with a woman who'd suddenly turned his world to color. He couldn't have seen that coming, and Piper understands it must be difficult to resist.
But her grandmother just gives her a small, sad smile. "No, sweetheart. I very much doubt that she is."
At Smith, Piper takes a freshmen seminar on Soulmate Theory. They learn that a compilation of the most comprehensive studies (which have an admitted, and hotly criticized, bias toward first world country data) has led to the estimate that 21% of people meet their soulmate at some point in their lives, overwhelmingly before the age of 45.
College students have grown cynical to the whole concept, and the classroom fills with assertions that of course most people never encounter their perfect match: seven billion people in the world, what are the odds? But Piper joins the smaller side of the debate that argues against such a luck based system; after all, if it were really a matter of entirely random chance, the percentage would be much smaller.
She raises her hand and says, "Just accepting the fact that soulmates exist means we're acknowledging some sort of hand of...fate, or the universe, right? If you have someone you're destined to be with, then surely you're also destined to actually meet them."
Within the next week - before the class moves onto discussing the privilege of the non-color blind - Piper writes a well received essay on the relatively new, and controversial, theory that the unlucky 79% aren't just those who never encounter their soulmate but, primarily, people who don't have one at all.
She doesn't include it in her essay, but Piper has grown into a gut feeling that she's one of those people.
After graduation, Piper doesn't want to leave Northampton. It's bad enough that she's being thrown out of academia, classrooms and books and grades that have always provided inarguable assurance that she's doing well.
She's not quite sure how she's supposed to tell anymore.
Polly is staying in town and waiting tables for at least the summer, and she urges Piper to do the same: one last summer vacation and then they can decide whether to renew their lease. Piper's resume is laughable - her parents never even made her get a summer job - so she does what Polly did and invents years of experience, as though she was a different kind of college student and a different kind of teenager, one who ever had to worry about money.
It makes her nervous, the idea of walking into restaurants and bars clutching a page of lies, but a little brave, too, like this is the kind of story she'll laughingly tell colleagues one day when she's successful at...whatever it is she ends up doing.
She walks through the door of the first place on her mental list; she has eight possibilities, just for tonight, and Piper is determined not to go home tonight without at least the possibility of a job offer.
"They took my moisturizer, guys...I had to walk through the airport barefoot."
A woman's voice is the first thing she hears, this low, confident rumble distinguishing itself from the general bar buzz, and Piper turns automatically to find the source.
It's a woman, at least a few years old than Piper, sitting at a table with a group of friends, and she's like nothing Piper has ever seen before in her life.
That's all she thinks at first, that only the woman is different, that she is more alive, somehow, and it takes Piper a second to realize it's spreading, seeping into Piper's entire field of vision.
This is the world, in color.
Because of a woman.
Piper stares at her for so long that she glances up, noticing. The woman smiles at her first, and it takes a few seconds before her eyes widen behind her glasses, just enough that Piper knows the world is changing for her, too.
Once, during one of the maybe ten or so times she and Polly smoked weed in college, they worked themselves into a fervent joint rant about soulmates.
"I mean, honestly, like, fuck you colors!" Polly had intoned dramatically while Piper giggled without stopping. "I don't want that choice made for me. How creepy is that? Oh, here's a stranger, now you better fall in love."
"Plus!" Piper had cut her off. "Like, you get all the colors for the first time ever, and you're what...supposed to just stay where you are and meet someone new? Fuck that, I'm gonna wanna go see what everything really looks like!"
Even once she was no longer stoned, Piper had believed it, that the colors themselves would be the first priority upon their arrival.
But what nobody talks about is the acute awareness that this new view, all this beauty, is because of the other person.
"It's a little cold out for a margarita, don't you think?"
They never mention it, but they don't have to; it's right there in the way the woman looks at Piper, like she is evidence of a world made new. The way Piper feels, she's sure she's looking back the same way.
A vast palette of colors has just spilled across the entire universe for her, but the only thing Piper wants to look at is Alex Vause.
It takes her some time to match the names with their hue, so Piper's very first favorite color is Alex's Eyes. It reminds her of tequila shots down her throat, of her favorite song, of the earth struck by lightning.
She also loves Alex's Lips, that first night, the same shade as her bed sheets, which Piper sees a few days later.
(For so long, red makes Piper think of Alex's taste and the smell of sex.)
After they kiss for the first time, the colors turn so bright and saturated that it hurts Piper's eyes, but she never wants it to stop.
"I don't get it."
Piper sighs and makes herself hold Polly's gaze. "Which part don't you get?"
"Uh, maybe the part where you took one look at a woman in a bar and suddenly you're into girls." She makes a face. "How hot can she be?"
"Gorgeous," Piper answers without thinking, the corners of her lips curving up without her consent.
"Uh-huh," Polly's voice is skeptical. She runs an agitated hand through her hair - which is actually a very pretty redbrown color, not that Piper can tell her that. "Still doesn't add up. Have you ever liked girls before?"
"No. Well. Not that I've realized."
"Hmmm." Polly squints at her. All of a sudden, her eyes fill with something almost like dread. "Holy shit, Pipe, she's not your soulmate or something, is she?"
"What?" Piper had actually been prepared for this, so she's able to instantly twist her expression into a perfect portrait of incredulity. "Why would you even think that?"
"Because that at least would explain your insta-gayness," Polly says, but the rush of the theory is already deflating from her voice. She doesn't really believe it could be true.
"She's not my soulmate," Piper says firmly. "And I'm not gay, Pol...I'm just experimenting."
Piper hadn't even decided to lie, really. It's more that telling the truth never even occurred to her as an option. Being with Alex feels completely separate from the rest of Piper's life: Alex is the world in color. Everyone else is still black and white.
Except, of course, Piper carries color with her everywhere.
"You know I used to think I didn't want a soulmate," Alex hums against her neck one morning, and Piper can hear her smile. "Makes things complicated."
"I always just assumed I didn't have one." Alex lifts her head and Piper arches up to kiss her before adding, "But this is better."
"Damn right," Alex murmurs against the corner of Piper's mouth.
"This way, you knew from the beginning you're stuck with me." She means it as a joke, just teasing banter, but it comes out serious. The words sound like the blackbluepurple of an old bruise.
"Hey." Alex leans back just enough to look at her, her eyes softening at the edges. "I'd have gone up to you, anyway. It still would have happened just like this."
Piper's throat tunnels and her eyes go hot. "You don't know that."
Alex is beautiful and funny and fearless, and she wouldn't have looked twice at Piper in black and white.
"Don't argue with me, kid," Alex says sternly, winding her finger around a strand of Piper's hair she's always comparing to sunshine and lemonade. "I would have chosen you all on my own."
One of their first official dates, Alex takes Piper to a tattoo parlor, lets her watch while the artist fills in the black outlines of a rose inked on her arm.
"You knew what color roses were when you got it," Piper says. "Couldn't you have just had the artist fill it in anyway?"
Alex rolls her eyes. "I could have, Pipes, but then what if I started seeing colors one day and hated red? Not smart."
The tattoo gun keeps buzzing and Alex barely even flinches. Piper runs a finger absently across the band lower down on Alex's arm, the one that's just black. "I want one," she declares abruptly.
Alex grins. "Yeah? What would you get?"
"Who cares?" She touches her own shoulder, experimentally. "I'd just take splotches of color, all down my arm."
The tattoo artist flicks smirking eyes over at her. "How long since you two met?"
Piper flushes at the question. She grabs for Alex's hand again. "Almost three weeks."
"Figured. In my experience, I'd hold out on the tattoo decision. You'll get used to the colors, won't even care enough to want 'em all over your body forever."
The artist turns back to work, and Alex catches Piper's eye and shakes her head, mouthing the word wrong. It makes Piper smile.
Maybe she will get used to colors, but she'll never stop thinking they're beautiful.
Piper goes to visit family for a weekend, and she learns things about her childhood home.
Her bedroom is mostly yellows and light purples. The colors in their living room are dull. Her mother's hair and eyes look like her own.
Her father asks her what's new. She doesn't say everything.
Piper wakes up to the touch of lips against the corner of her eye, so feather light she thinks she might be dreaming it.
"Morning, babe."
Her eyes fly open and a smile breaks across her face. "Hey..." Piper twines her arms around Alex's neck and pulls her onto the mattress beside her, grinning into her hair. "I thought you weren't back until tonight."
"Changed to a red eye flight. Didn't want to miss today."
Piper's face folds in early morning confusion. It's the fourth of July, but they hadn't made plans. "Because...you feel unpatriotic being in another country on America's day of birth?"
"No, dumbass. I want to see fireworks."
"You've seen fireworks."
"Yeah, when they were inferior and all white. Like sitcoms in the 90's."
Piper forces herself not to laugh so she can say, "If the whole drug cartel doesn't work out, there's always a career for you in mediocre standup comedy."
"Thank you, means a lot."
Piper always liked fireworks anyway, even before: they remind her of exploding stars. But that night, she and Alex and a bottle of tequila under a blanket on the apartment roof, the darkness beautifully broken by sparks of goldredmagentagreensilverorangepink...if someone were to ask her, right at that moment, how Alex makes her feel, Piper could just point at the sky.
They travel the world together, see every color that exists, sometimes all at once, in sunrises and sunsets over every ocean.
Piper etches blues and yellows and oranges on the back of her neck in the form of a fish they see scuba diving. She wants it small, easy to hide if she needs to, but otherwise Piper might have inked the skin all around it with the crystal blue of the ocean, let it flow down her back and add the red orange pink of all the coral.
She finds herself standing in Brussels airport, watching and waiting for a suitcase, and Piper learns that fear feels like gray creeping back in.
She loves Alex more than anything, and Piper leaves anyway.
Alex is her soulmate, and Piper leaves anyway.
Alex's mom dies, but Piper leaves anyway, and she cries so much on the plane ride from Paris that for weeks after, she convinces herself that's the reason all the colors seem washed out.
Piper drives to the Northampton apartment when she knows Diane Vause's funeral is taking place. She takes only what is unequivocally hers. No photos, nothing the two of them bought together, no shirts of Alex's, even the ones Piper used to sleep in.
After that, the colors are all Piper has left of her.
She dates only girls for awhile; Polly rolls her eyes and sighs when she sees them, asks Piper what she's trying to recapture. The thing is, they all disappoint her from the very first moment, even though Piper's not sure what she's expecting: they can't give her something she already has.
When she meets Larry Bloom in Polly and Pete's apartment, the world doesn't change at all. He is just a small portion of her field of vision, doesn't spread all the way to the corners and edges.
Piper tells herself that's okay.
It's hard sometimes, not giving herself away, especially with people she's comfortable with - and she does become comfortable with Larry, in time. But Piper gets good at catching off handed remarks, checking instincts she and Alex had developed with each other - "hand me the green plate" or "it's the red one with blue dots."
She only paints her nails black, and she never looks at the sky during sunsets.
Once, she almost fucks up when they're trying to decide on a movie to watch. Larry stops on some romance made in the 1940's and Piper blurts out in response, "I don't really like black and white movies."
He gives her an odd look. "Um...what are other kind are you seeing?"
"I just meant old movies." He's still looking at her strange, so she lies, "I took a film class in school, that's what the professor always called them."
Larry laughs and asks what made her take a film class, and the moment passes.
She's been living with Larry for over a year, and they've started to reference a long term, domestic future, not as though it's especially close, but like it's a given they'll both be there.
"Does it bother you, that we're not soulmates?" The question comes out of nowhere when they're cuddled up in bed one night, and nerves spring to life somewhere deep in Piper's gut.
"Why would it?"
"I just mean if we...got married one day, or whatever. Would it freak you out to know your soulmate could still come along later? Or that you'd be giving up the search to meet them?"
Piper's stomach feels like a garden sprouting guilt, but she doesn't let it show on her face. "Not at all. Most people don't even have a real, universe approved soulmate.
"Well, sure, but I thought women always kind of...hold onto the idea."
"That's because you watch too many rom-coms."
He grins, kisses her cheek, and Piper thinks and hopes the discussion is over, but then Larry adds, "And what about color? You okay with never seeing colors if you end up with me?"
"Of course." She swallows, the fish tattoo with its bluesyellowsoranges flaring hot on the back of her neck. "Can't miss something I never had."
It's been six and a half years since Paris when it happens.
Piper wakes up one morning and there's no color left.
She just thinks she's sleeping at first; sometimes she still dreams in black and white. But then Larry shifts beside her and the alarm starts crying and realization slices Piper right to the bone.
Larry wakes to find her in a full blown panic attack, hyperventilating and dizzy and certain her chest is cracking open. Piper fights off his worried, calming arms to grab her cell phone from the bedside table, fingers shaking like they're caught in a private earthquake while she frantically searches her contacts for a name deleted years ago.
Later, when Piper can breathe again, when she's only crying, there's nothing honest she can say to Larry. And there's nothing she can do to hold back tears.
She keeps thinking about her grandmother at her grandpa's funeral, and in all the years after. She hasn't smiled the same way since; the world became an uglier, desolate place without her husband, and her own vision never stopped reminding her.
Piper used to have Alex's number memorized, but those seven digits got left behind somewhere in the last six years. Alex called her a few times, mostly in the first year or so after the breakup. Piper never answered, but Polly was with her once when the name flashed across her screen and she'd asked why Piper even still had it. Her best friend watching, she deleted Alex like it was nothing.
So the first thing she searches for that morning, before even news reports about cartel incidents or drug related homicides, is instances of colors disappearing. Save for some wild conspiracy theories, the internet does not provide an answer besides a soulmates death. There are a few supposed cases that are uncertain, a death never confirmed or proven false, but even those are all second or third hand accounts.
So Piper puts Alex's name in to search for a news report, even though it's probably too soon. For the next week, nearly once an hour, she keeps looking, but there's never anything. No news stories, and no obituaries from Alex's home town - there's barely any record Alex ever existed, just her name listed as a survivor of Diane Vause in an obit written six and a half years ago.
Piper wants to think this means she's okay, that if Alex isn't alive there would be record of it, but that logic collapses almost instantly. If something bad happened to her, Kubra would have quietly taken care of it.
And there would be no one to notice she was gone.
Except for Piper, who wouldn't even have known if some light in her goddamn literal soul hadn't burned out, taking so much of the beauty of the world with it.
Piper wishes she could talk to her grandmother about this. But even if she could tell her about Alex (she can't), it would probably be insulting, comparing the loss of Celeste Chapman's husband of forty-five years to Piper's grief over a person she walked away from, someone she made small in her memory.
Because her life doesn't really change. It churns on, with Larry and her job and their friends and her tentatively approving parents, even though Piper is beaten with the reminder that Alex is dead every minute her eyes are open.
The first morning, she'd told Larry it must have been a bad dream, one she didn't even remember, but she still catches him watching her, worried and almost scared, so Piper tries to pretend. It means answering yes every time someone asks if she's okay, and only crying when she's alone.
She starts to have nightmares, filled with gunshots and blood.
When she's asleep like that, Piper swears she can see red again.
Once, in the kitchen, she wraps a finger too tight around a steak knife, trying to draw the color out from beneath her skin.
But her blood is thick and black and the smell makes her think of death.
Grief preys on silence and stillness, so as time passes, Piper avoids it. She tries to be alone as little as possible.
She hates the moment at night when the lights go out and she's meant to fall asleep, when she's left with only blackness and her thoughts careening back to Alex. Almost every night she keeps Larry awake and fucks him, frenzied and desperate, like sex can maybe reach something deep insider her, bring it back to life.
But Larry was never the one with the power to alter.
It feels to Piper like she's doing well, keeping up appearances. She functions. She forces smiles. Sometimes she half convinces herself it's easier this way, now that she no longer has to pretend to be color blind.
But Larry knows her just well enough to see something's wrong.
"Maybe you should talk to someone, Pipes," he says once, all nerves and worry. He doesn't use the word depressed or even therapy, just adds, "At least about the nightmares."
"I'm fine," she answers like a habit.
He doesn't seem convinced, so Piper gets better at pretending; she shoves the grief into the same hatch that for six years has been bursting with all her memories of Alex. It's a tight fit, and there are cracks. It leaks out in stupid moments: Piper tears up every time she sees flowers, or when some song on the radio hits her at just the wrong angle, or when she hears the New Year's Eve or Fourth of July crackle of fireworks that she knows just look like exploding stars.
It's been a year, and Piper still types Alex's name into search engines, or Kubra's, or Fahri's, anyone she remembers, just looking for anything that could lead to confirmation, as though her desaturated vision isn't proof enough that Alex is gone.
One weekend, when Larry's out of town for a friend's bachelor party weekend, she drives to Northampton. She buys ugly gray flowers and calls the office of two cemeteries until she finds which one can direct her to Diane Vause's plot.
At Alex's mother's grave, Piper stains her knees in the dirt and lets herself cry with noise for the first time in months.
Alex isn't there, but it's the best Piper can do to say goodbye.
She tells herself the graveyard is the end of it. She stops searching for an answer, forces herself to accept that this is what her world looks like now. That there's no point in missing someone she'd already lost.
It almost works for a month.
Then Piper gets arrested and Alex Vause shakes up her world yet again.
All she can think, the whole time the huge guys with badges are talking, is that Alex is the only person who could have named her.
She's standing there in her pajamas, and Larry just keeps asking what the hell it's about, saying there must be a mistake, and the first thing Piper blurts out is, "Did Alex tell you this? Was she arrested?"
Everyone looks at her: Larry incredulous, the agents stone faced.
Her throat knots up tighter. "Was it Alex Vause?"
Larry's the only one to reply, completely baffled. "Who the hell is that?"
The indictment doesn't name the Witness who accused Piper, but it isn't hard to find a record of Alex's own arrest, just a few weeks before.
Alex is alive.
Sometimes, that drowns out everything else. Like the fact that Piper is going to prison, and even the knowledge that Alex named her.
Because Alex is alive.
So Piper doesn't understand what could have happened to the colors.
She has to tell everyone, finally.
The hatch cracks open and the memories flood out, but so does the grief. Piper can't shake it yet; she's still got the instinct of the past year, so saying Alex's name out loud feels like digging her fingers into a raw, open wound.
Even though she's alive.
She tells everyone parts of the truth, but she still doesn't say Alex is her soulmate, even though it might have made them understand. Or at least, blame her less.
But Piper isn't even sure if it's still true.
"Maybe this is a bad time to say hi."
Piper's hands are on her knees and she can't catch her breath and when she looks up Alex is there, the way Piper's never, ever seen her: devoid of color.
Her eyes just look gray.
Alex is the reason she's here, in this fucked up hellhole where she's served a fucking bloody tampon with her food, so Piper should probably be slapping her, cursing her, screaming in her face.
Instead she starts sobbing.
"Pipes, hey..."
Her voice and the nickname throw Piper back in time, and suddenly she's clutching fistfuls of Alex's shirt, proving she's solid and here and alive. She's still crying, and choking out this jumbled mess, a tangled loop of "Fuck you" and "I thought you died."
"Whoa, Piper...slow down, okay?" Alex wraps her hands around Piper's wrists and she can hardly stand it. "Why the fuck would you think I was dead?"
Piper shakes her head hard, breath still hitching unevenly.
"Piper."
She doesn't know what to say. Alex's face is pinched in confusion, eye roaming Piper's face like she'll find the answer there - she was always able to before.
And now, even eight years removed from each other, Alex's expression slowly settles into realization, and her eyes flash a kaleidoscope of shock and hurt and anger before she jerks the Prisoner ID badge off her shirt and holds it up to Piper. "What color is this?"
The harshness of the question makes Piper feel sick to her stomach (darkgreenpaleyellow sort of sick). Her gaze darts away, unable to hold Alex's goddamn gray eyes.
"What color, Piper?"
Belatedly, something hits her. "You mean...you still see them?"
Alex takes a physical step back to her, face constricting into a dazed sort of hurt. "Wow," she exhales, blade sharp. "That took some real fucking work, Pipes."
"I don't even know what you're saying," Piper says weakly. "I told you, I...I thought you were dead, for over a year I thought that - "
"Nope." Alex's jaw tightens. "Just dead to you, I guess."
Piper hates the way Alex is looking at her, like she's done something horrible, like this is her fault, like she hasn't been a fucking heap of wreckage the whole year since it happened...
"Fuck you, Alex," she spits poisonously, the first time in so long that saying her name doesn't feel like a cut torn open. "You're the one who fucking ruined me."
She shoves past her then, going back inside and gathering up her anger, reminding herself that while she was grieving, Alex was giving her name to the FBI.
"You stole my life. You stole my good life I made after you."
"Your life that was so fucking dull it went back to black and white, you mean?" Alex grits out, her own anger flaring that fast.
Piper's face heats up, and she ignores that. "Stay the fuck away from me."
A few minutes later, when Alex gets pies thrown at her and hurries off to a cacophony of cheers and catcalls, Piper tells herself she deserves it.
"And, yeah, maybe I never forgave you for leaving. Because you broke my fucking heart."
Alex's face is a broken portrait of eight years worth of pain, and in the second before she walks away, Piper swears she glimpses the color of her eyes.
Or maybe she just remembers it really, really well.
It happens a few more times, when Alex gets close, and it's not just her eyes. It's barely a twinge of awareness, color there and then gone, so fast Piper can't be certain it isn't just her memory.
"We were never friends, Piper."
"We weren't?"
"No! Not for a second. I loved you...Jesus, you're my fucking soulmate! We knew that literally from the beginning." Alex tilts her head and raises an eyebrow the way she does when she think she's astutely calling out bullshit. "Even if you've somehow willed yourself to forget it."
"I never forgot," Piper mutters between her teeth, her fingers sweaty and tight around the wrench.
"Well, some part of your goddamn college brain has."
Piper closes her eyes for a moment, because she still knows Alex well enough to hear the hurt shadowing the words. Before she can respond, though, Alex continues, "And more importantly, I am not suggesting that I want you back, you Park Slope narcissist. I mean for you to come around like an actual human being. Maybe you'll even snap yourself out of this fucking color blind denial thing you've got going - "
"Fuck you." The words feel hurled out of her by the sudden, dangerous fury launching itself through Piper's whole body. "You don't know what the fuck you're talking about, Alex, so shut the hell up. You have any idea what it was like for me? I thought you were dead. I was searching for obituaries or fucking...cartel homicide articles constantly for a year and a half. I went to your mom's grave because I figured you didn't have one." Alex visibly reacts to that, her face slipping into this wide open sorrow that makes Piper's chest hurt. "I don't know why the fuck this happened, but if you think I wanted it, then fuck you. And this dryer! This fucking shitty piece of goddamn dryer!" There are tears on her face by then, and she's pounding on the dryer like a crazy person when Luschek interrupts them.
She misses Polly's baby being born, and Larry's article leaves her with a bad taste in her mouth, and somehow Piper ends up in Alex's cube.
Everything about her feels like like nostalgia - the way she laughs at her own jokes and the way she reads Piper's mood in all of three seconds - and it comforts Piper in a way that it makes her want to tell Alex things. She has always made Piper feel understood, so when Alex asks what's wrong it all just comes spilling out.
"...but he got he got so much of it so wrong. I'm not somebody's girlfriend. I'm not some cool story at a yuppie fucking cocktail party.
You did a year in the Peace Corps? I did a year in prison. Fuck. No." It's only right now, saying this out loud to Alex, that Piper really understands why the article bothered her so much, why every single thing Larry or her family or even Polly has said to her about this whole thing never sounds right. "Those things we did, you and me, that wasn't adventure or a romp..."
Piper trails off, throat constricting, unexpected, sudden tears springing to her eyes. There's some tectonic shift happening inside her chest, her heart readjusting until it settles against a truth that knocks the wind out of her. "That was my life."
Her life in technicolor, in reds and yellows and greens and blues and purples and oranges, in tattoo ink and island sunsets and sky shattering fireworks. Her life at its most beautiful. Not an adventure, not a phase, not something Alex tricked her into, not any of the lies Piper had been telling herself for years before she passed them along to Larry and everyone else.
Alex is quiet for a moment, letting it settle, letting Piper breathe and breathe and breathe through what feels like clarity. Then, softly, her voice golden-warm, she teases, "You want me to kill him?" A fetal smile tugs at Piper's lips, more from the sound of Alex laughing than the joke. It ripples through her, again, how glad Piper is that she's alive. "I may be a sick lesbian in a prison bunk, but I got a couple tricks up my sleeve."
Slowly, Piper allows herself to look at Alex again. Softly, she says, "I feel like I am missing so much," and hopes Alex doesn't ask her what she means.
She doesn't. She only meets Piper's eyes, every trace of amusement fading away. Almost smiling in a way that seems wistfully sad, Alex says quietly, "Me, too."
And then she reaches for Piper's hand.
It's slow, and careful, like she never had to be before. Piper looks down as soon as they touch, watching Alex gently turn her hand over and fit herself perfectly into the spaces between Piper's fingers for the first time in eight years. She lets her thumb gently stroke the pad of Piper's finger. It feels like their pulses are racing between their palms.
Piper looks up again, their gazes locking. Alex looks beautiful and vulnerable and familiar, so fucking familiar that it takes Piper a few moments to realize what's changed.
Or, rather, changed back.