Author's Note: This chapter takes place in S1, episode 5, "The Chickening"

If you whisper I'll hear

And if you go I will know.

Your effort to disappear

Is no match for an old scarecrow.

My light cuts through the fog

And I can see it in your eyes.

What you're hiding I will find.

You can't hide this time.

"If Then" - Bad Veins

Chapter 12

Red refused to look at him. Her eyes were intense, penetrating, her gaze withering, but, for now, all her rage was focused on the wall behind Healy's head. Healy tried to plot this conversation out in his mind, tried to think of some strategy—any fucking strategy—for keeping it that way.

He told himself that it didn't matter if she was angry with him. After today, half of the goddamn prison would be mad at him. It was part of his job description—his least favorite part, but still—to tell the inmates things that they didn't want to hear, to dole out punishments and to be blamed and hated for it no matter how reasonable it was or what the inmate had done to deserve it. At this point in his career, he'd been cursed out and yelled at—and even, once, had his genitals threatened with a voodoo curse—enough times that he hardly even batted an eye at it.

But it was different with Red, and he hated that it was different, but there it was. He tried to think back over the whole course of the time she'd been here, the twelve years he'd known her, to see if he could remember her ever getting violently, screaming-and-spitting angry. Healy couldn't recall a single incident; he couldn't even picture her yelling at anyone, much less throwing punches.

Not that she never got angry. She was angry now. But when Red got angry, she got even, and Healy told himself that this was what he was afraid of. He ate her food, he drank multiple cups of coffee from her kitchen almost every single day of his life. What did she have access to, what could she poison him with, if he punished her too harshly and upset her even further?

Healy tried to reassure himself that this was stupid. She was an inmate; he was, after all, the one in charge here. She was too smart to try and poison him. He thought back, years and years and years, to the incident in the kitchen with Parker, the fear, however fleeting, he'd seen in her eyes when she knew that he'd guessed what she was up to. It was one of the few trump cards he had with her, the fact that he knew she wasn't above poison and had done it before.

Besides, if he was being honest with himself, he knew that he wasn't afraid of retaliation, not really. He wasn't scared that she'd lace his food with anything. Just the thought of her being angry with him was enough to frighten him, and he didn't know why. They weren't friends anymore, not for years, if they ever had been to begin with. They rarely spoke. She would nod at him when their paths crossed in the hallway or the cafeteria, and she knew how to be just pleasant enough to get what she wanted from him without being chummy, and that was about it.

Still, Healy felt as though he'd be losing something, something important and irreplaceable, if he alienated Red, and so he chose to tread carefully. He shifted in his chair, removed his glasses and cleaned them with a cloth before putting them back on and turning to her, his face carefully neutral.

"Really, Red? The chicken again?" He kept his tone light, as though they were just friends having a conversation and he was just sneaking in some good-natured ribbing, but all this did was make her more sullen.

"Do you at least want to tell me your side of this whole crazy story?" Healy asked.

Red sighed, and did not take her eyes off the wall behind him. "No," she replied.

"Why not?"

"Because you won't listen to me either way," Red said, "So what's the damn point? I'm not going to beg you not to take away my visitation or not to send me to Seg or whatever the hell you're planning on doing, so just tell me my punishment and let me go."

She looked at him then, and in her blue eyes was a challenge, the same one he'd seen leveled against other Litchfield guards, but never directed at him. Go ahead; break me. If you can. Healy was unsettled by it, just like she knew he would be, and he was playing right into whatever game she had engaged him in, and was really in a bad way now because didn't know how to extract himself.

"I'm not going to send you to Seg, or take anything away," Healy said, "But I do want to make a deal with you."

Red scoffed; they both knew that whatever he had planned was no deal at all, because she almost certainly would have no choice in the matter. Still, he went on.

"I'm…uhh…I'm having…certain problems. At home. With my wife."

Healy could see the change in Red's demeanor as she tried to hold her tongue, no doubt biting back some kind of remark about little blue pills.

"It's…it's…umm…a language problem," he continued, fully aware that he had long ago surrendered the upper hand because he was the one sweating and fidgeting in his own chair, while Red just looked as though she was fighting laughter.

"So what do you want?" she asked, "Recommendations for a good Russian class, maybe my opinion on that whole Rosetta Stone bullshit? Sorry, but there was none of that back when I was learning English. I had to do it all myself."

"No. I mean, I-I'm trying to…" Healy sighed. "Fuck it," he said, "What I want is to know if you'd agree to meet with her. And me, obviously I'd be there, too. I want her to be able to talk to me about, I don't know, anything that might be on her mind, that I might need to know, but she's not making any more headway with English than I am with Russian, so I think we might need a translator."

Red's mouth folded into a single, harsh little line as she thought this over, clearly not relishing the prospect and on the verge of asking if she could be sent to the box for a few days instead.

In a way, it was sweet, what he was proposing. He obviously cared a great deal about his wife's happiness, and Red supposed that was touching. Still, if he thought that she was going to be their go-between in some kind of weird United Nations/Handmaid's Tale bullshit arrangement…

"Sure," Red said, "And where would we all get together? Should I come over to your house for tea, or would you prefer to meet up at the Starbucks on Main?"

"I would bring her here. Obviously."

"Oh, I'm sure she'll love that. I don't know what your other dates have been like, but I'm sure this one will take the cake."

"Knock it off, Red," Healy said, "I could still send you down to the SHU. With the shit you pulled, you should consider yourself lucky that I'm giving you this option instead."

Oh, yeah, I'm a lucky, lucky girl, Red thought. To Healy, though, she only nodded her acquiescence.

"Sure. Fine. I have weighed my many, many options and decided, out of the goodness of my heart, to help you. Now, am I free to go?"

Healy nodded, making a dismissive motion with his hands and watching her stand up and head to the door.

"You know, this might be good for you, too," he said, just as her hand was on the doorknob, "It might be nice for you to have someone you can speak your own language with."

Red rolled her eyes. She had plenty of people she could speak Russian with. Dmitri visited her every two weeks, and her sons were fluent, too, whenever the little ingrates bothered to call their mother.

"Yes, who knows? I'm sure it'll be wonderful," Red replied. When she exited the room, she looked down the line of women who were still awaiting their own fates. She caught sight of Chapman, locked eyes with the younger woman, and narrowed her eyes and shook her head, pleased when she saw how the blonde inmate quailed under her gaze.