A/N: Apologies for leaving you with that cliffhanger for so long - I had intended to update sooner, but then ended up having to travel for work again unexpectedly. Thank you as always to those reading and to those who took time to review. I always enjoy hearing what readers think and, to the guest who confessed to shipping a certain CO and counsellor, that definitely made me smile lol! :) Anyway, here we go ...

10. Clusterfuck

"The fuck you doin'?"

It would sound like such a cliché afterwards, but it all happened so fast. In a split second really. And it would only be later that anyone would piece together exactly what had happened – when they came to realise that the Litchfield resident who had inadvertently intruded on the little stand-off had swiftly sussed what was going on and tackled her fellow inmate to make her drop the makeshift weapon.

As it was, amid a white-hot sting of pain, Dallas simply found herself knocked to the ground in a tangle with her caught-off-guard captor, both of them scrambling to get back on their feet and both spotting the discarded blade at the same time. It was closer to Zirconia though, and she knew it, grinning as she reached for it – only for a booted foot to come down heavily on her hand, making her howl.

"Back up, bitch," came the terse order.

"This ain't your business," Zirconia said from where she was still sprawled on the ground, her voice coming out in a hiss of pain as she tried to free her trapped fingers. "Get the fuck offa me! Don't just stand there – get her offa me!"

But Mercy had already bent down to retrieve the shiv by the time anyone could think about moving and she brandished it in one tightly clenched fist, as if daring the rest of them to try something. No one did.

"Get the hell out," she snapped, watching as the rest of the crew scuttled off with dark glares but not a word of protest, leaving a furious Zirconia on the floor in front of her and the counsellor huddled in the corner with her head down. "The fuck did you do to her?"

"She's a guard, puta. Whose side you on?" Zirconia scowled.

"Not yours, that's for sure," Mercy scoffed, grinding her boot down a little harder on the trapped fingers beneath it and making her fellow inmate howl again. "She could actually make this place better and this is the shit you pull! You dumb bitch, you ain't got a clue. You better hope she ain't hurt-"

"Or what? You gonna snitch? For a guard?"

"I ain't no snitch and she ain't no fucking guard," Mercy all but spat, lifting her foot from Zirconia's hand only to plant it square on her chest and use it to shove her backwards, sending her sprawling. "Go on, get the fuck outta here and don't make me tell you twice."

Spitting curses in Spanish, Zirconia did as she was told, shifting her dark glare from Mercy to Dallas as she went – her exit finally allowing the counsellor's shoulders to slump in relief as she sat leaning against the cold tiles of the bathroom wall.

"Uh, Miss Ford? You okay?" Mercy tried, seeming less sure of what to do now the threat had gone.

"M-Mercy …" Dallas managed, thrown by the extent of the violence and feeling they had gotten off lightly, all things considered. "Thank you. I … I'm okay."

But as the counsellor tried to get to her feet, she finally lifted her head and Mercy just about managed to hold back a gasp.

"You … You don't look okay," the inmate said, dropping the shiv as if it had burned her, knowing the blade had to be responsible for the blood pouring from the other woman's face and staining her shirt. "Oh shit!"

"It's … It's just a … little cut …" Dallas tried, her fingers seeking out the wound and coming away bright red.

That was as far as she got before Mercy's anxious voice seemed to drift so very far away, and the world simply kaleidoscoped as the floor rushed up to meet her, before everything faded into welcome black.

All it took was one glimpse of the latest clusterfuck coming his way and Caputo feared his heart, which suddenly seemed lodged in his throat, might actually stop.

He'd already had to deal with two dead prison officers in the space of a few months. He did not need any more goddamn staff upping the body count. Especially an attractive civilian the press would have a field day with. Christ, he could already see the headlines. And Fig's reaction.

Fuck. Fuck, fuck, fuck.

His eyes were still wide in shock at the sight of the barely conscious blood-soaked counsellor stumbling as she made her way towards him, an arm slung around the shoulders of an inmate who was struggling to keep her upright, and he wiped a hand over his face before stepping forward and finally finding his voice. "Valduto, what the holy hell are you doing?! Let Miss Ford go and back away."

"I can't," Mercy tried to explain, one arm around the blonde's waist as she tried to support her weight. "She blacked out and-"

"Let her go or, so help me, you'll spent the rest of your sentence in solitary! In Max!" Caputo barked, panic in his voice and a finger hovering over the call button of his radio. Although the last thing he wanted to have to do was make that call for back-up and draw attention to yet another shit-storm unfolding on his watch.

"I didn't do nothing!" Mercy protested. "For real, Mr Caputo – I found her like this!"

That did make him pause for a second. Aside from a few run-ins with other inmates, and not usually of her own making, Valduto didn't really have a track record of violence – certainly not against staff. It was plausible that she might have simply stumbled on something she wasn't really a part of.

Or, of course, she could be lying through her teeth to save her own sorry skin. Who the fuck could you trust in a goddamn prison? Certainly not the inmates. And, as it happened, not even all the staff.

Fuck.

"You got a weapon?" Caputo demanded, inwardly chastising himself for his own stupidity in thinking even for a second that she might tell him if she did. But, at the same time, he did fancy himself as a fairly good judge of people. He thought he'd be able to tell if she was lying. Helluva gamble, he realised.

Mercy shook her head.

"If you're lying to me …"

"I ain't, I swear. Mr Caputo, you gotta fucking help her. It looks bad and she … She's been good to me."

Something about the look on the young woman's anxious face hit home and, in that moment, he found he couldn't doubt her sincerity. He hurried forward, cursing under his breath the entire time, and grabbed the counsellor just as she seemed to completely pass out again.

"I'll get her to Medical. You get cleaned up. No, I don't wanna hear it - no arguments. And don't breathe a word about this to anyone, you hear me?"

Mercy could do nothing but nod.

Distracted by her concern for the counsellor who had somehow gained her trust, Mercy drifted back to the bathroom, her stomach churning at the sight of the blood on her own hands and smeared over the floor.

She hurried to the sinks and started to scrub her skin clean under the hot faucet. But all at once, another thought struck her and she abandoned her task, even leaving the water running to search the floor.

No sign of the shiv.

She'd dropped it after Zirconia had crawled out of there, but she supposed she could have come back and found it. Or anyone who wandered into the bathroom could have stumbled across it and taken it. They couldn't have thought it through though. Who would want to risk getting their prints on a blade that had clearly been used to cut someone? And from the amount of blood on the floor, anyone walking in would have quickly worked out that some seriously messed up shit had gone down.

"Jesus Christ, Mercy, what did you do?"

Mercy supposed she must have looked plenty guilty with blood still on her hands and staining her khaki scrub top, but she couldn't help rolling her eyes nonetheless.

"Why's everyone always gotta think the worst of me, huh?" she snapped, rounding on a wide-eyed Alex Vause.

"Uh, because you're stood in the middle of a blood-bath, looking like an extra from Carrie?"

"This ain't on me," Mercy said. "But I ain't got time to explain right now. We got bigger problems."

"Oh no," Alex shook her head immediately. "What's this we bullshit? I do not need to be caught in the middle of anything right now. I'm keeping my head down. You should be doing the same."

"Listen, this was those Mexican bitches – the crazy one with the teeth had a blade and now it's gone!"

"I'm pretty sure they're Dominican, for a start …"

"Did you fucking hear me?" Mercy said, incredulous that she was apparently being brushed aside. "Someone out there's got a blade. We gotta find it before they decide to use it!"

"You keep saying we," Alex said, adjusting her glasses. "Why is that again?"

"Because it could be your throat, or your little girlfriend's, next time. Now, you gonna help or not?"

Alex tutted loudly before turning on her heel. "Fine," she said shortly, the words thrown over her shoulder. "But we have to get some of the others in on this. We can't search the whole prison between the two of us."

"We can't let word get out though, or every crazy bitch in this place is gonna be looking. And some of these skanks are plenty dangerous enough already."

Alex conceded the point with a little nod. "Red needs to know. She can decide who else. Keep it in the family."

"Fine, whatever," Mercy said, prepared to agree to almost anything if it would see some action being taken. "Now, let's go!"

Given the turn the conversation had taken in the staff break room, Luschek was almost glad of the sudden interruption when it came. He was pretty sure most people would have assumed Stratman's line of frat boy-style bragging and bravado about women would have been right up his street too. But, as he was finding out himself, it turned out even he wasn't that juvenile. Or at least not in quite the same way. Maybe it was just a by-product of not having had a whole lot to brag about in that department of late …

Although, there was also the fact he wasn't really enjoying the detailed breakdown of their new counsellor's many attributes. He wasn't exactly in a position to be hitching his cart to some feminist wagon, but he was pretty sure Dallas ever finding out her male colleagues passed the time by trying to guess her bra size was only ever going to make her super uncomfortable and he didn't want any part of that.

"Hey, you're keeping pretty quiet, man," Stratman grinned. "Come on, what you sayin'? Cs, am I right?"

It was at that point, just as Luschek was trying to think of a subtle diversion, that the door opened with a bang and a red-faced Scott O'Neill lumbered in, huffing as if he'd been running – although, if precedent was anything to go by, that was fairly unlikely.

"Have you guys heard the latest? Wanda's gonna go ape-shit when she hears …" he panted, dropping down onto the nearest chair and mopping at his brow with an over-sized handkerchief. "Jesus, it's all over the prison. I heard it from a couple of the old timers out in the yard – y'know, over by the patch of the garden where they grow the beans-"

"Heard what?" Blake interrupted, seeing that the huge corrections officer was headed off on a tangent there might be no turning him from.

"Stabbing," O'Neill declared, with surprising brevity after all. "In one of the bathrooms."

"Shit," Stratman shook his head. "Are these crazy bitches always trying to kill each other? Who got shanked? I'm betting it was one of the Spanish chicas. You can see the power struggle coming a mile off-"

"That's just it. Wasn't an inmate that got it."

"Fuck, they got a CO?" Luschek chimed in. "How come there was nothing on the radios? No alarm?"

"Not a CO. And you make sure you tell Wanda that if she asks, or she'll have me back delivering mail or stacking shelves before you can say voluntary resignation."

"But hang on, if it wasn't an inmate and it wasn't a CO …"

Almost seeming to relish having a captive audience, O'Neill took a long moment to look around at those gathered, taking in the obvious confusion on their faces in the pause for optimum dramatic effect.

"They got the counsellor," he said solemnly, unwittingly sending Luschek's heart plummeting into his boots. "On her goddamn first day too."

To be continued ...