My heart's made of parts of all that surrounds me, and that's why the devil just can't get around me.

Every single night's a fight with my brain. - Fiona Apple

Freedom was, ironically, the most destabilizing thing Alex ever had to contend with.

She was thirteen days out of federal prison when she realized how illusory it was, and how distant a word could become from its own meaning.

She was at the corner grocery a few blocks away from her apartment, holding a paper bag full of generically branded, barely nutritious boxed food that her post-prison sensibilities considered to be nearly gourmet.

"Forty-three cents," the cashier told her, handing back her change. But just as Alex closed her fist around the coins, someone knocked into her from behind. The collision jostled her elbow and the change went flying, pennies dropped to the ground and rolling away.

Alex instinctively stomped her foot, managing to stop a runaway dime, and bent down to pick it up. She didn't want to care about small change, and in a different lifetime she would have ignored it— maybe someone else would walk in and pick up one of the pennies and consider it lucky. But that was before all of Alex's money had been confiscated by the feds, and she'd served eight months of a prison sentence only to somehow still owe money to the Federal Department of Corrections. So there she was, on her hands and knees, scrabbling after cents as if they were dollars and trying not to let the embarrassment of it show on her face.

Just when she thought her shame had subsided, the man who'd bumped into her bent down too. His fingers closed over a quarter just before Alex could grab it, and hers stilled uncertainly in midair.

They both stood up.

Alex raised her eyes to look at him and recognition hit her like a whiplash.

"Aydin," she murmured, her heart in her throat.

Even though the face he showed her was mild, there was a glint in his eye that suggested their little collision had not been an accident. She thought she'd never see him again after the bust in Chicago. He was there when the arrests happened, but not at the airport—at the hotel, waiting for the all-clear to go pick up one of the kids. She'd thought one of them would have given him up in court, and yet there he was, staring her down in her neighborhood grocery store.

"I think you dropped this," he told her. His expression was blank, inscrutable, which was a particular talent of his. He held out the coin and Alex's hand extended automatically to take it. The penny landed in her palm with a strange heaviness, a force of gravity far out of proportion with its actual weight.

"You really should have kept your mouth shut."

His tone was so casual it chilled her. Alex could see her own reflection in the sharp, black gleam of his pupils; could feel the blood draining from her face.

"Look," she said desperately, "you have to believe me. I never wanted this, okay? It wasn't my idea."

Aydin gave a little half-shrug. "Kubra is very unhappy."

"Tell him we can work something out."

"I don't think so."

"Aydin. You don't have to do this."

She shook her head slowly, like she was begging him to change his mind about whatever came next; like begging would mean anything to him anyway, when she'd already seen him shoot someone in cold blood right in front.

But nothing happened. A few seconds passed and then he simply turned away, striding down the aisle like he'd forgotten something on his shopping list.

Alex stood for a minute, clutching her bag of groceries and thinking probably even the cashier could hear her heat beating.

She'd been persuaded to testify against her former boss, Kubra Balik, on the promise that the charges would stick— that he would be locked away for good. They hadn't, and he wasn't, and now he knew exactly where to find her. So much for the plea deal her lawyer had gotten her. So much for her protection. There were no walls, no bars, nothing to prevent Kubra from coming after her. He'd sent Aydin to deliver a message, and the message was: you're dead.

Freedom— what a joke. It was like being released into the wild where the worst predators were still waiting for you. It was a clock ticking backwards, the hands rushing toward zero, and Alex's time was about to run out.

::::::::

When she got back to her apartment there was a black car parked on the street corner. Two men were sitting inside of it, and she couldn't be certain but she thought she recognized one of them: a thick-necked, solid-bodied guy she was pretty sure she'd met once in Cambodia—or had it been Phuket? Christ, it didn't matter. She was a target, now. A hit. A mark.

She climbed the stairs two at a time, barely able to breathe. It was only after she was safe in her apartment, her back pressed against the bolted door, that she remembered the change she'd left on the floor of the grocery store. Forty-three cents, equivalent to one package of ramen noodles.

She slid to the floor, feet falling out from under her, and the crack of her voice breaking open sounded like it belonged to somebody else. Death was closing in and all she could think about it was fucking affording food, which was hilarious only because corpses don't eat. Soon she'd be buried six feet under and the worms would be feeding on her.

It was a morbid image but she couldn't help laughing at it, her chest quaking with every rumble until it felt like her ribs were about to crack open.

The thing was, she'd always been a survivor. She'd endured childhood poverty, a nine-year gauntlet through the drug trade, her mother's death, a heroin addiction, and prison, only for it all to end like this: in a fucking brownstone in Queens, where the hot water barely worked and the corner walls were moldy and the building manager didn't even know she'd moved in. It was almost poetic: a fitting ending to her illustrious career as a professional fuck-up.

Her laughter ceased abruptly, the last of it echoing off the bare walls like a church bell ringing for a funeral. Because, Jesus, she couldn't believe it was ending like this, after everything she'd been through.

Alex tilted her head back, resting it against the door, aware that she was sweating even in the February freeze of her apartment.

She needed a plan. She'd have to make one.

Because she really wasn't ready to stop living.

:::::::

She stayed up all night, kneeling on the living floor with the lights off so she could watch the street through a gap in the blinds. The car remained parked there until just after two in the morning, but almost as soon as it drove away another one pulled up. This time the vehicle stopped on the far side of the street, directly across from her window.

The hours kept passing, and Alex checked the time on her phone: 4:07 AM. The inside of her mouth felt like sandpaper, and one eyelid was twitching intermittently. The darkness put her on edge; even in her own apartment, she didn't trust the shadows.

She was so tired she could barely think straight. It reminded her of another time she'd been up all night waiting for Kubra to make a move: years ago, in Paris, two weeks after her mother's funeral. The grief had been so raw, so insistent; she'd gone to a nightclub with Fahri and the two of them had done bump after bump, chasing them down with liquor and then sweating it out on the dance floor. A neon glow permeated everything, and in the trance created by the laser lights Alex almost managed for forget that she was an orphan, that part of her heart was now buried in a grave by the seaside. And then the phone call came— they'd missed a pickup, and one of their kids had gotten arrested.

Aydin had been there that night too. The three of them had barricaded themselves in a hotel room, trying to decide what to do. They were too high to think clearly, and Alex suspected the drugs were making Fahri paranoid. Kubra would understand, she'd said. 'I think I know him well enough to say that he's not going to murder us in our hotel room.' She didn't realize how wrong she was until she heard the gunshots and saw Fahri's body on the floor: a neat, crimson hole through his forehead, blood splattered across the painting on the wall behind him. He lay unmoving, a half-smoked cigarette still clutched between his lifeless fingers.

It had been Aydin who'd shot him. Aydin, who had been his colleague and his friend; who, hours before, had been doing lines with them and laughing.

After that, Alex no longer had any illusions about the limits of Kubra's forgiveness.

There was no question of involving her parole officer in this. The feds were essentially useless, and they'd probably rather see her dead than waste any resources trying to protect her.

She was on own. So what? She'd been on her own for as long as she could remember.

:::::::

For the next two days Alex lived mostly off coffee and instant noodles. She was starving, but she couldn't leave her apartment. Whenever she thought about ordering delivery the scene dissolved into nightmare: the pizza guy reaching into his canvas bag to grab her food, pulling out a pistol instead— Pop! Pop! Two rounds in the chest, game over.

She imagined her death a dozen different ways: gunshots, strangulation, bleeding out through stab wounds made by a knife from her own kitchen. At night she lay in bed with the lights on, barely sleeping, and every little noise was the sound of her own death coming to find her. When a car door slammed on the street she pictured the two men getting out of the vehicle, stalking toward her doorstep. The fire escape creaked and she was certain it must be Fahri climbing up the ladder.

She been drinking too much caffeine, relying on it to help her stay alert, and the composite effect of three days' exhaustion reminded her what it felt like to come down off a high: the room was starting to blur at the edges and everything around her felt distorted the same way a nightmare does, unreal and yet all too lucid.

She didn't think they'd actually try to break into her apartment. It had the potential to get too loud, too messy, which wasn't Kubra's style. He preferred his revenge to be quick, quiet, and neat. But if he did force the issue, Alex wasn't entirely defenseless. A few days out of Litchfield she'd bought a gun—off the record, obviously—and now she took it out of the drawer every few hours, seeking reassurance from the cold, metallic weight of it. She'd wrap her fingers around the handle and practice clicking the safety on and off, getting herself accustomed to the motion. It didn't make her feel better, though; it made her feel desperate.

It was the kind of thing people did when they were out of control, and now Alex knew that she was just like them. She'd never been in control in the first place, not really, because Kubra had always been pulling the strings.

Being stuck in the apartment made her feel more trapped, somehow, than she had in prison. She paced around the middle of the living room for hours, staying away from the shadows at the edges as if they might drown her. Adrenaline kept her heart in fifth gear and her blood racing. She took out the gun again, disarmed and then reloaded it and placed it back in the drawer, so dizzy with exhaustion that her own behavior was starting to frighten her.

::::::

There was a map spread out on the kitchen table. It was like a relic from another century, left in a drawer by a previous tenant.

Mexico was the obvious choice of destination, but Alex hadn't a fucking clue how she was supposed to cross the border. Pay someone to smuggle her over in a cargo van? Human trafficking seemed simultaneously too gritty and too Hollywood; everything she knew about the US southern border had been gleaned from dramatic renditions in movies.

Her work with the cartel had never involved moving anything directly into, or out of, Mexico, because Kubra wanted nothing to do with the cartels down there. There was too much competition. It was too messy, too squalid, and Kubra always saw himself as a more of a white-collar criminal anyway. A real moral, upstanding guy… who just happened to be trying to kill her. Ironically it was his disdain for business in Mexico that made the country a perfect safe haven.

Alex folded up the map and shoved it into her duffel bag. She looked around the apartment, glancing at the cracks on the ceiling and the scuffs on the floor, the secondhand couch and fiberboard bookcase that was only half full. It had all been hers for just under three weeks, and there wasn't exactly anything about it worth mourning. The things that mattered she'd already lost a long time ago.

She checked the time. The six-hour shift was up for Kubra's watchmen, and she heard the sound of a car starting up on the street. It was now or never.

She used the fire escape outside her bedroom, tossing the duffel bag down one flight at a time and then following it hand-over-hand down the ladder. It was snowing, and the metal was cold beneath her grip. By the time she reached the bottom her fingers were almost numb.

She turned east of the alleyway and walked a few blocks, her feet moving so fast she was almost jogging. She kept glancing behind her to see if she was being followed, but there was hardly anybody else on the street.

It seemed, at least for the moment, that fortune had decided to favor her.

Her first bus stopped somewhere outside of Cincinnati.

There was a man sitting a few yards away from her on bench outside the station, and Alex recognized him. He'd been sitting a few rows ahead of her, sleeping for most of the drive. Shaggy blond hair was falling into his face, and he swept it away with a practiced motion as he raised a cigarette to his lips. The cherry glowing a warm golden red in the darkness.

He glanced over and caught her staring. "Smoke?" he offered.

"Sure." She didn't want to, not really, but she decided to pretend she'd been craving tobacco rather than staring at him out of paranoid suspicion.

He tamped one out of the pack and lit it for her.

"Thanks," Alex told him.

"Where are you headed?"

"Chicago."

"Me too." The wind was coming in from the wrong direction, blowing smoke back into their faces.

"Bus doesn't leave for another two hours. Lots of time to kill." He squinted at her from beneath his messy fringe of hair. "Bet there's a bar close by. We could go have a drink."

Alex's body stiffened, and she became acutely aware of the gun she carried tucked into the back of her jeans. She studied the man more closely, taking in the narrow shoulders and the thin, lanky frame before realizing suddenly how young he looked. He couldn't be a day over twenty-five, which made him practically a kid, and more likely a mule than an assassin. She felt bad for him, in fact. He seemed desperate for some scrap of attention, and it reminded her of the kinds of people she used to rope in to work for Kubra. All of a sudden she felt desperate to get away.

"Sorry," she told him, standing. "I have to make a phone call."

It was a lie, and she didn't have the right prop to sell it—she'd ditched her phone in a garbage can during a stop in Pennsylvania. But there was a pay phone on the side of the building and she walked over to it, fishing a few quarters out of her pocket and feeding them into the slot.

She stared at the keypad, not knowing who to call. She had no real friends outside of prison, and no family other than the aunt she hadn't spoken to in years. She dialed the only number she could think of: the one for her mom's old mobile home. It was a stupid thing to do. She knew the line had been disconnected years ago, a few months after the funeral. She expected the familiar operator's message informing her that the number was invalid, but instead someone picked up on the second ring.

"Hello?"

Alex's breath caught in her throat. The voice sounded like her mother's.

"Hi," she breathed.

"Who is this?"

And then, with sick feeling in her stomach, Alex realized it had been so long since she'd heard her mom speak that she couldn't even trust the memory. The woman's voice didn't sound like Diane's at all, and Alex's hands shook as they clutched the receiver.

"Sorry. I think I have the wrong number."

"Who are you trying to reach?"

"No one," she murmured. "Sorry to bother you."

Alex pressed the hookswitch but kept holding the phone to her ear, like maybe if she waited a little longer her mom would actually start speaking. She breathed raggedly into the receiver, hoping for a miracle, but the only reply was the buzz of the dial tone.

Disappointment ballooned within her chest, forcing her empty from the inside it. The life she had known— it was over. It was as if the fragile remnants of her past had converged only to shatter upon impact, fragments raining down like shards of glass as the snow swirled around her. She knew what loss felt like when it concerned another person, but she'd never imagined what it would feel like to lose herself too: her past, her memories, all suddenly irrelevant. It felt like the end of everything.

She imagined looking down at her own body and watching the night swallow up her outline, the darkness burying her with a methodical slowness like dirt shoveled onto casket.

Her cheeks were wet with tears, but she didn't bother to dry them. She decided she was allowed to cry at her own funeral.

:::::::

She traveled for several more days, sleeping on the bus and wasting the hours between transfers by walking around cities she'd never been to: St. Louis, Tulsa, Dallas. Sometimes she'd take the map out of her bag and study it, hoping she'd have some kind of revelation about what to do when she reached the border, but nothing came to her. She should have stopped running in El Paso but instead she decided to head further west. It felt safer to keep moving.

Alex hadn't traveled like this, the slow way, since she was seventeen. She'd grown accustomed to flying business class, to watching entire continents pass away beneath her in a matter of hours. Now she watched the landscape go by outside her window and it seemed so unnervingly large, so dry and dull and desolate. The bus took her to Tucson and Phoenix and then on to California, where they'd drive for miles along a single-lane highway and lone stations hung signs that said things like 'last gas for forty miles' and 'bathroom for paying customers only.' Alex felt like she was riding toward the edge of the earth and would soon fall off of it, flung out beyond the atmosphere.

The bus broke down in a valley somewhere on the edge of the Mojave. It only took two minutes for the passengers to start complaining about the lack of air conditioning, rolling down the windows to try and tempt a breeze. The wind was hot and dusty, probably worse than no wind at all. It would take hours, the driver said, for a repair mechanic to reach them.

"Fuck that," muttered the guy sitting beside Alex. He grabbed his backpack and stood up, stepping out in the aisle.

"Where are you going?"

"Anywhere," he told her. "I'm not waiting around all day in this fucking oven. I'll hitch if I have to."

He had a point. They could either sit tight in here, wasting the day, or get out and try to find somewhere better. After a moment's consideration Alex followed him off the bus. She watched him start down the road, headed west, and decided to go back in the opposite direction. They'd passed a town maybe ten, fifteen minutes ago. It would be a few miles' walk, which seemed doable. She hitched her duffel bag over her shoulder and started walking, sticking to the shoulder of the road.

Within half an hour Alex was drenched in sweat. Her t-shirt grew so damp that it stuck to her skin. She could taste salt on her tongue each time she wet her lips, and she had to keep wiping the perspiration off her face with her forearm. The sun was sinking lower as she walking, dipping toward the horizon, and she was starting to worry she wouldn't reach the town before dark. But then she saw a building up ahead, and another, and knew that she was almost there.

The entire town was situated right on the highway. She stumbled past the gas station, where skinny boys with grease-stained t-shirts were standing around drinking cans of soda and kicking the empties across the pavement; past a post office that was the size of a toolshed, and general store that looked like it had once been a hotel or at least a boarding house.

The sky was turning a burnt orange at the edges, the same color as the land beneath it.

There was a neon sign in a window up ahead, a blazing, electric blue that contrasted with the dirty white clapboard of the building. 'Open all night,' it said, and the faded paint above the doorway read 'Highway Diner.'

Alex pushed the door open and stumbled through. She tossed her bag down on the floor and then slid onto the synthetic leather of a barstool, every muscle in her body aching. She leaning forward, pressing her forehead against the cool wood of the counter and sighing with relief.

"What can I get for you?"

Alex jerked her head up. A waitress was staring at her. She was blonde and thin and wearing a pale blue, sleeveless blouse beneath her apron. She looked down at Alex with her eyebrows half raised in a stare of frank curiosity.

Alex sat up a little straighter. "Uh, hey," she said, sheepishly.

"Been walking a while?"

"Forever, basically."

"Get you something cold?"

"God, yes. Please."

The waitress brought Alex a beer in a frosted glass, which practically had her salivating. "Just need to see your ID," she said, as she set it down on the counter.

"Seriously? I don't look twenty-one to you?"

"Is that a trick question? Because if I say no it proves the necessity of you showing me your ID. But if I say yes I'm saying you don't look young, which is borderline insulting."

"It's so kind of you to consider a stranger's feelings."

"ID, please," the waitress repeated. She held out her palm, gesturing for Alex to hand it to her.

"Okay, here's the thing… " Alex paused, peering at the name tag on the girl's apron. "Here's the thing, Piper. I lost it."

"You lost it?" the woman repeated.

"Yeah."

"What, like it fell out of your pocket?"

"Yes. I'm, you know, backpacking. Lot of stuff to carry, a lot of little things to keep track of. Tons of thieves on the road. Someone probably stole it. You know how it is- can't trust drifters."

"It sounds like you're describing Sherwood Forest, not southern California."

Alex suppressed a groan and decided to try another tactic. She leaned forward, placing her elbows delicately against the counter, and gave her best, most guileless smile.

"I'm really not trying to make trouble. I'd love to show it to you, but I genuinely can't." A drug lord is tracking me to have me killed; also I skipped out on my parole officer and am an ex-con fugitive. "Let's make a deal: you let me have that beer, and I'll buy you one on your next break." She leaned back a little, pulling her hands innocently back into her lap. "Everybody wins."

Piper laughed, folding her arms over her chest. "It's not optional, you know. It's the law."

"Yeah, but laws are meant to broken. Isn't that what they always say?"

Piper rolled her eyes, but she was smiling. "Fine," she said, shoving the drink forward.

The glass was sweating, rivulets of water dripping down onto the counter, which in that moment was basically the most beautiful thing Alex had ever seen. She was parched; she couldn't wait another second. She grabbed for it, trying to look casual but knowing the desperation must have been plain on her face as she took a long, refreshing drink.

"Better?"

"Much," she agreed, between sips.

"That was, possibly, the most shamelessly a customer has ever flirted with me."

"It worked, didn't it?"

"Oh, it worked. And my break's in ten minutes, at which time you will definitely be buying me a drink. I believe that was the deal, right? Everybody wins?"

"Careful," Alex warned. "I could have you fired for failing to require proper identification."

"But then I'd have to take your beer away, so it'd be a lose-lose situation."

"Well, fuck, you got me there."

Alex was enjoying the banter. She honestly couldn't remember the last time she'd talked to a stranger and not felt like they were an imminent threat. Without the paranoia she slipped easily back into her old, routine way of speaking, which was strange but also supremely comforting. It made her feel the way she had back when she was still recruiting: in control, untouchable, almost.

And just as quickly as it had sprung up, the thought induced a rush of guilt. She wasn't supposed to be doing that anymore. She was supposed to be starting over.

"Point me toward the bathroom?"

Piper did, promising to watch Alex's bag while she was gone.

Inside the restroom the lighting was florescent. It reminded Alex of the hallway lights in prison, and how you could hear them humming in the dormitory all night long: a constant buzzing that was annoying at first but then somehow began to seem comforting, if only because it broke the ever-present silence.

She looked at herself in the mirror for the first time in nearly two weeks, and what she saw there surprised her: she looked older. Her cheeks were thinner, and although she'd known she was losing weight on the road she didn't expect it to be so visible. Without the eyeliner, her face seemed naked. Except for the thin coating of dust the desert had left on her skin she looked washed out. Faded, almost. Suddenly she just wanted to be alone.

"Hey," she said, when she came back from the bathroom. "Sorry about earlier. Didn't mean to be such an asshole."

Piper looked unconcerned. "Don't worry about it. Like you said— never can trust drifters." She smiled to signify that she was joking, and Alex smiled back.

"Rain check on the drink? I just realized I still have to find somewhere to sleep tonight, and it's already dark."

"Sure." She slid Alex's check onto the counter. "There's a motor lodge you could try, quarter mile down the road. They usually have vacancies."

"Thanks."

Alex hitched her duffel bag onto her back and took off in the direction opposite the one she'd walked in on. There were a few other small businesses on the street—an auto mechanic, and minuscule library—but all of them were closed. The streetlights worked only intermittently, flickering on and off disconcertingly as Alex passed beneath them. One minute she'd be bathed in a halo of light— the next, in absolute darkness.

She found the motel Piper mentioned and booked a room for the night. It it wasn't cheap, but it felt worth it for the safety of sleeping behind a locked door. Alex hadn't looked at the map all day. She didn't have a clue where the fuck she was. But she felt, at least for the moment, mildly safe, which seemed like a small miracle.

For the first time since leaving New York she allowed herself to relax just a little. She poured a bath and lowered herself into it, muscles aching in protest. Then she got into bed and tried not to think about Kubra, or Queens, or prison, or her mom, or the fact that she was now essentially a non-person.

She closed her eyes and, with considerable effort, managed to think of nothing at all just long enough to let herself sleep.

A/N: Hi! New fic, obviously. Probably going to be a long one, and also probably the last thing I'll write before season four. Just to clarify, I'm still working on Marvelous Things, so have no fear about it getting abandoned. Next chapter is half written.

I know this started off pretty dark, but there will be fluff and domesticity throughout. Let me know what you think, and thanks for reading!