A Meeting of Minds
Summary: A two shot featuring a closer look at Larry's visit with Alex Season 1 as told from each of their perspectives.
Warnings: Rated M for language
Disclaimer: I wish.
A/N: For anyone still reading Mistakes, I promise an update is forthcoming. The muse is nothing if not persistent and more than a little spastic. I find it's usually best just to humor her.
Chapter 1: Larry
I thought I came prepared for this meeting. Armed with a plan and a promise commemorating my victory, I thought I knew what to expect from the felonious Alex Vause.
After everything I had heard about her—from Polly with her unabashed loathing, Piper's quietly apologetic explanations—I had somehow conjured up the image of a black widow spinning with long dexterous fingers a web of lies and manipulations, weaving my Piper into her trap with little more compassion than she'd show an errant fly.
I suppose I expected Arachne to take the form of my feminine rival—small and dark like the spider I had come to think of her, like her hidden, but predatory presence in our lives. In my life with Piper. I'd find her lurking in a secret corner plotting her subversive games, but, once confronted, easily quashed.
She was simply a schoolyard bully too used to getting her way. Surely, she'd back down from a real challenge. I was confident I had the trump card in my pocket—it's golden shine hidden safe and secure in the leather folds of my wallet. This meeting was a forgone conclusion.
Turns out, I couldn't have been more wrong.
It's not until I see her there in the doorway, that I realize how incongruous that image is with what I know of her. "Dark" is about the only similarity they share, but her black hair is where it ends.
Tall and luminescently pale, she seems to command the very air, drawing every breath and half-spoken word into the vortex of her bespectacled eyes, every eye in its turn drawn just as irresistibly into the gravitational pull.
Alex Vause is no insect; she is a Titan.
She pauses only briefly in the entrance before wing-tipped eyes catch mine through thick black frames and a room full of strangers. She recognizes me as easily as I had her, though I doubt my presence has quite the same impact.
Suddenly feeling the weight of that difference, I surge to my feet as she approaches, but felt dwarfed all the same. She has no more than a couple inches on me, but the distance feels like miles which only grew as it closed.
"Alex?" I verify, as though the answer isn't obvious.
She seems remarkably unimpressed by my wit. "Yeah?" she says, a single brow arching over the rim of her glasses as she stares me down.
I have never felt so small as I do beneath that grey-green gaze—like David armed only with a sling-shot. Her stare is hard and penetrating even through her lenses; they drive into me, plunging deep, taunting—daring me to speak.
The words leave my throat before I could even form the thought to hold them back. "Wow. You're tall."
Her face twists with contemptuous incredulity, her full pink lips twisting at the corner. "I've been told," she scoffs. She takes her seat with no further reaction than this, but the scornful laughter in those eyes is almost triumphant, as though it had been their intention all along to rip from me the evidence of my own inferiority.
A flush of white hot shame turns quickly to anger as she regards me with that condescending gaze, but I can hardly stand to meet those eyes. The intensity of them is blinding, impossible to meet and—though I hated to admit it even to myself—as impossible to ignore as her beauty.
She wears that beauty like an impenetrable armor and wields it like her greatest weapon with the skill and confidence of an undisputed champion. With an arched brow and a smirking lip she commands the air in a magnetic attraction of particles both concrete and psychological that brooks no argument, allows no deviance. It is more than a little intimidating, and I have no idea how to react.
I see it suddenly clear as day. She is a vacuum—a black hole, sucking everything into herself with little more than a glance in your direction. And if she can have this sort of effect on me, I can only imagine the force of that magnetism when she turns it on Piper. She'd be powerless to resist.
The image evokes another still more disturbing and a vision of hazy blonde and black, of green and blue, hands and lips and effortless, frenzied betrayal sends a jarring mix of emotion through my suddenly heated skin.
"Um," I start, my thumbs fidgeting as I try unsuccessfully to meet that pitiless gaze and, again, my thoughts come unbidden to my tongue under the assault of her silent challenge. "I'm sorry, this is uh…" My eyes skitter away from it, landing again on the cold laminate beneath my hands. I can't help the disbelieving huff or irritation at my own cowardice and her arrogance.
This last gives me the push I need to continue. "I had so many things planned to say to you and now I…I'm just picturing you uh—"
"Got you all flustered?" she taunts, a knowing smirk on her lips. She seemed singularly unbothered by any of this, entirely at ease strolling through the wreckage she's left in her wake.
"You got me pissed off!" I snap, finally angry enough to forget my discomfort as I glare hatefully into those cool green eyes.
Fuck her and her power plays, for reeling Piper in and screwing her over again. For ruining everything we had built together these past few years, for throwing a grenade into the middle of our future plans—our dreams. For stealing Piper's happiness out of some malicious whim, some sociopathic desire to win her back just to prove she could.
And, more even than any of that, fuck her for not caring.
"How many times do you think you can come around and fuck up Piper's life, huh?" I sneer, the heat of my sudden anger fueling the stare down. "I—I don't know what kind of psychic black void your little game with her fills, but you need to end it now," I warn with force. "And stay away from her."
I glare harshly into her eyes, awaiting her reaction. Nothing. Not even a blink at my threatening tone. If anything, she looks amused. Anger gives way to confusion.
"Not a problem," she answers, the shadow of a smirk in her eyes. "She's all yours, champ. We done here?"
She throws the last at me like the final impossible challenge; delivered with no expectation of a response. The gauntlet hits the dirt and she turns her back.
My hands reach as though to halt her exit and my voice echo the gesture. "Whoa, whoa, whoa. Hold on," I exclaim, and, surprisingly, she listens.
She levers herself back into the folding chair with a huff of irritation. Her impatience is obvious, but it is the furthest thing from my mind.
"Suddenly she's 'all mine'?" I question incredulously, "when you have been…working her over since she got here?"
That, at last, prompts a reaction, but it isn't the one I expected. "'Working her over'?" she repeats, disbelief and anger warring for dominance in those stormy eyes. "Are you fucking kidding me?"
My brows wrinkle in confusion at her tone, but I remain silent.
"She came to me, dragged me into that chapel, and fucked me." Every word is punctuated with a pointed finger, stabbing the hard plastic table and my heart in one.
She watches me closely, no doubt seeing every distressed thought flicker across my slackened face. It brings a smug smile to her lips and a sadistic glint to her eyes.
"Surprised me too," she admits. "She never used to be the aggressor. I guess it was a new color she was trying on. Or maybe she was bored. Eh, who knows?" She shrugs audibly, making no effort to hide her delight at my pain as the horror of this revelation pierces the veil of my indignation.
I refuse to reveal to her how deep her words have cut me; I am unwilling to give her that satisfaction. Instead, I hold my anger like a shield between us, between her words and my own thoughts, and all I can see there is the insult of the image. That she would choose to break her vow to me in such a place, in such a way. With this woman of all people.
"You fucked in a chapel?" I snap, allowing only that anger to make it through the haze of betrayal and hurt at this news.
"It's prison. There aren't a whole lot of options," she taunts, still smirking.
Still, something flashes in those hard eyes. It's there and gone too quickly to identify, and if I hadn't been watching so closely I would never have seen it. I can't know what it means, but it tells me something. She's hurt too. My own gaze sticks fast to the table-top at the sight of it.
"But I'm done," she spits as grey-green eyes ice over in the wake of buried pain, the frost in them hard and impenetrable. "Can't survive another spin on her merry-go-round, and clearly you're still into it so…enjoy the ride."
I glance at her quickly, desperately clutching at the slippery folds of my rage with shaking fingers. "Fuck you!" I hiss, but the insult sounds pathetic even to my ears. I am losing ground quickly beneath the chill of that glare. "It's not a ride. We're getting married."
"Great," she smiles, but her eyes are still cold. "So why are you here?"
"I wanted to meet you," I whisper, suddenly mortified by the confession and my own naiveté. I can no longer bear to meet her eyes.
She leans toward me anyway, refusing to permit my retreat. She looks almost sorry for me. "Larry, my heart is with you," she tells me, green eyes consuming brown. "She's hot. She's read everything. We both know what she's like in bed," the wistful movement of her gaze releases me briefly and my eyes return to my hands, memories swimming with words like passionate, wild, curious and Piper's blazing eyes. They hold new meaning now.
The thought sends a jolt of heat through my body that is not entirely painful, and I hate myself a little more for the reaction.
They were words I had come to equate with loving Piper, ones that I know I will see matched if not magnified in that grey-green stare should I find the courage to meet it.
I want to sigh with relief at the narrow escape as her eyes drift to the ceiling on the crest of that sigh, stay huddled and blind to that swirling vortex, but she is having none of it. She seizes them again with a single movement.
"But she is fucked up" she concludes, and the conviction in the statement tears the remaining shreds of denial from my weakening grasp. "I know it…and you do too. Or else you wouldn't be here warning me to stay away. I'm not your problem."
Alex Vause watches me a moment longer, her pitiless eyes staring me down as I crumble beneath this final killing blow, before she rises again to her feet, towering above my defeated and bleeding form, and walks away.