General Fic Warnings: PTSD, depression, lightly evocative of self-harm
I'll tell you my sins (and you can sharpen your knife)
Alex doesn't go back to sleep after Lorna gingerly wakes her up.
She'd startled awake fairly quickly, thank God, her chest jerking with shallow, gasping breaths and tears she hopes Morello didn't notice mingling with cold sweat on her cheeks.
A clean sock gets stuffed into her mouth for a good fifteen minutes because Alex is still tired and a little desperate; she's thinking it'll wake her up if she makes anymore noise, but instead her gag reflex jerks her to consciousness the second she starts to relax.
So Alex just lies there with her heart racing in the dark dormitory, listening intently to the quiet like she's expecting to be taunted.
She wonders if Piper heard.
In the morning, she's avoiding Lorna's eyes until her bunkmate says sympathetically, "Y'know it wasn't even that bad. Nothin' to be embarrassed about. You weren't even what woke me up, and I'm a very light sleeper."
Alex throws her an odd look. "What do you mean I didn't wake you?"
"Ah..." Lorna glances over in the direction of Piper's bunk. "Chapman started yelling at me to get you up."
"Fuck," Alex mutters, her face heating up. She remembers her old broken glasses hidden in Piper's cube; the last thing she needs right now is to here Alex screaming in her sleep like a goddamn little kid.
"She might've just been awake already," Lorna assures her helpfully.
Alex's eyes track back toward Piper's bunk. She can only see the top of Red's head moving around; Piper somehow manages to beat her out of the dorm every morning, not run into her in the bathroom, and see manage to show up at breakfast when Alex has already sat down.
The amount of effort she's putting in must be exhausting.
Later that day, Alex is waiting for Piper when she tries to leave the dorm directly after count. She falls into step beside her, starting like they're in the middle of a conversation, "So did you see I got assigned the library? There still aren't enough books for an organizational system, so I basically just sit and read while Washington naps on the table. It's a prime gig. But don't be jealous; if any Woolf or Oates come in, I'll set 'em aside for you." She grins. "I can even wave your late fees."
Piper slides her eyes sideways at Alex - she's standing to Piper's left, so her scar faces away - but in the next second they go back to darting wildly, looking for an escape.
She wants to run so bad it's practically radiating off her.
Alex's chest tightens, her momentum faltering in the silence. They're almost to the bathroom, and she can see Piper's eyes land on it, so Alex ends up blurting out, "You want to go to movie night with me?"
Jesus fuck. She sounds like an idiot teenager refusing to recognize that they're getting a brush off.
"No, thanks," Piper answers with robotic politeness, but there's a flicker of pain on her face before she shuts it down.
"Look, Pipes." Alex stops Piper by grabbing the crook of her elbow, and the gesture seems to startle them both. Piper stares down at Alex's hand like she can't believe it's there. Either that or it's just another way to avoid Alex's face. "Um. You were right, about the way I was acting with Lolly. I was being crazy...a hired killer would've probably made a point not to stare." She makes herself smile. Showing how okay she is. Showing she can laugh about it. Piper isn't looking at her anyway. "I'm really fucking lucky I didn't kill her. Or go to max for almost killing her, so...you were right."
It is barely skimming the surface, the easiest gift Alex can offer, but Piper is already backing away from her, expression stricken.
"Piper - "
"What is wrong with you?" Piper demands, tight and panicked, not waiting around to hear an answer.
What's wrong with her?
Alex keeps thinking about it.
She can tell that in the two months she was gone, Piper was burying herself in guilt, so deep she can't see light anymore. Too deep for Alex showing up, Alex being alive, to be all it takes to pull her out of it. Alex even knows - though she hates thinking about it - that she's marked with evidence of what Piper feels guilty about.
Alex knows all that.
But she also can't help thinking of this current version of herself: the weakened, broken, traumatized version, the version that cries in her sleep and has flashbacks over a pair of glasses and can't even go in the yard without the threat of a panic attack.
Hardly a pillar of strength and support.
Piper is so far gone and Alex is trying, but it should be better than this. She should be better than this.
But Alex can't lead Piper out of the swirling darkness when she can't even find her own way.
When Alex had touched her this morning, Piper's pulse had relocated to the center of her forearm, drumming against her skin. Piper had been sure Alex would feel it, that she'd push back Piper's sleeve and see Stella's goddamn tattoo.
It feels very important for Alex not to see it.
Piper starts taking the broken lens from Alex's glasses with her to the greenhouse every day, and she spends her afternoons sitting in the grass dragging the longest, dullest edge of the lens shard against Trust No Bitch. She doesn't dig deep or anything, this isn't like the tattoos, she's not trying to hurt herself.
She just wants to mangle the words, camouflage it. They're white and faded anyway, barely more than scar tissue. Soon it will be like there's no tattoo there, that it's all just something that needs to heal.
Alex is whimper-gasping in her sleep again, a few nights after the first time, and Piper decides to make herself stay awake and listen. She ends up wondering what sounds Alex made in the greenhouse.
The third time it happens, Piper actually gets out of bed to get the earbuds from her radio. She shoves them in and curls back up, her own heartbeat racing in her ears.
The fourth time, Alex is loud enough that someone else yells at her to shut up. Piper's face flames and her eyes sting and her fingers slide frantically over the I promise I was protecting you tattoo on her chest
Alex still tries talking to her, sometimes. Too casual, too funny, too obviously trying to make Piper smile. To trick Piper into thinking everything's okay.
She can't blame Alex for trying. There was a time Piper would have gladly latched onto that delusion. She'd always been good at convincing herself Alex would always, always be fine.
But Alex is crying out in her sleep, every few nights, and there's no illusion in that.
"Chapman, they've been paging you. Got a visitor."
Piper stares blankly at Bell, like she doesn't understand the words. For a second she wonders if she failed to realize it's a holiday, but no, just a random weekend.
She walks toward the visiting room with no real enthusiasm, or even curiosity. She assumes it's Cal, and just hopes he isn't here to talk about goddamn dirty panties. Or their parents. Or anything she can't just contain to the hour long visit and walk away from again.
It isn't Cal sitting on the other side of the table.
It's Polly.
Piper approaches slowly, anxiety bearing down on her. She doesn't like this, how unprepared she feels. She has routines now, but she hasn't seen Polly since that disastrous visit with her and Larry, hasn't spoken to her since -
Piper shudders. She'd been so fucking proud of herself back then, on the phone with Polly and Larry, setting her destruction of Alex in motion. She can't really remember what it felt like to be that person, blissfully unconcerned by what she wad doing.
Her skin starts crawling, pleading for punishment.
Polly looks startled by Piper's appearance, but Piper doesn't have enough knowledge of it herself to know why. Still, Polly gamely forces a smile and comes to hug her, a little sheepish. "Hey, you."
Piper lets herself be hugged. She curls her fingers around the edges of her sleeves, just in case.
They settle on opposite ends of the table. Polly seems stiff and thrown off, not sure where to start. It's never been this strange between them. "So...how is everything?"
"What are you doing here, Polly?" Piper asks, swiftly bursting the pretenses with a pin. It's been so many months without even a letter, from either of them, despite the fact that Polly's phone call to the probation officer had been sold as a way for her to make amends.
Polly seems to hesitate, probably debating whether to insist that there's no ulterior motive beyond dormant friendship, but finally she sighs. "Okay, fine. How's this for irony.." She smirks a little, injecting trying-too-hard levity into her voice. "Supercunt wrote me."
"What?" For the second time today, words simply won't compute. Alex couldn't have written Polly; they barely exist in the same universe.
"Yeah, I know. Surprised me, too. She didn't say much, just...that you maybe you could use a visitor. And not your parents." Polly's face twitches, fighting a wince. "Didn't sound like she knew you and I aren't really..." She waves a hand in lieu of voicing uncomfortable truths. "But I knew no one else has been in awhile, and I was worried. And...I miss you. So it was a good -"
"Do you have the letter?" Piper blurts out, too intense.
Disappointment flickers across Polly's features, but then she nods, reaching into her purse. "Here."
Piper reads it, pulled between shock that Alex did this and a sick, greedy hunger to see what she said. It's only a paragraph, but it is a paragraph of brand new sentences, in Alex's familiar all-caps writing. Piper is already picking out phrases, mentally cataloguing the space she has left on her skin.
"Um...Pipe?" Polly prods uneasily when Piper's reading it through for the fifth time. "You okay?"
"Sorry." Piper makes herself look up, but she splays her palms flat on the piece of paper, possessive.
"Cal said you were with someone else last time he was here." Someone else. Piper's forearm starts simmering. "Did, uh, Alex...did she find out you had me call...?"
"She knew. But she forgave me. She always does that," Piper delivers this in a dull, almost clinical voice. "I think she must be a really fucked up person."
Polly doesn't seem to know what to say to that. "Well...we always kind of assumed that, Pipe. But because of the drug dealing, not her ability to forgive you." Piper's eyes drift to the letter again, and Polly presses for her attention. "Besides, she's the reason you were here in the first place, right? Kinda makes it even."
"You don't know all of it. You don't know what happened. What I did..."
Trying hard, Polly says earnestly, "You can tell me."
Instead, Piper shakes her head hard, veering abruptly away from the topic. "Do you feel like I ever fucked up your life?"
"What? Jesus..." Polly's face pinches in bewilderment. "Of course not. I'm the one living with your ex-fiancee. You've got all the high ground here, Pipe."
"That's okay. I'm glad. I fucked Larry up, too. But he at least knew to get away, so it wasn't forever - "
Polly is starting to look severely unsettled. "Pipe, what's going on? And don't say nothing, you're...you don't seem like yourself."
"That's good," Piper replies in total sincerity. "I've been trying not to be."
"What does that mean?"
Piper doesn't answer. Polly leans back in her chair and sighs in frustration. The concern isn't gone from her face, but after too long of a moment she desperately grasps for levity again, joking, "Talk about not being like yourself...were you going to show me your new tattoo?"
Piper's torso lights up in alarm. "What?"
"Cal told me. Your mom's going to lose her shit." Before Piper realizing what's happening, Polly is reaching across the table and pushing back her sleeve. "C'mon, let me see the infamous gangster ink..."
"No," Piper yelps, jerking back, but Polly's hand follows, all amusement gone from her face, and she grabs Piper's wrist hard.
"Jesus, Piper," she murmurs, going pale. "What did you do?"
With a forceful tug, Piper succeeds in freeing herself from Polly's grip, jerking her sleeve back in place before Polly can get a proper assessment of the damage, particularly the freshness of it. "Nothing. It was a stupid tattoo. I needed it off me."
"So wait until you're out and go to a fucking removalclinic!" Polly shakes her head, upset and confused. "This isn't okay."
"Look, it wasn't..." Piper closes her eyes, trying to gather up the words she needs to sound reasonable. She can't have Polly walk away worried, spreading concerns and pulling everyone else back into her screwed up orbit. So she needs to remember how to do this. "It was just a really bad time. Alex - " Her voice splinters, the name trailing tears down the column of her throat. "Alex got attacked, okay? And no one would tell me if she was alive. She was in the hospital for awhile, but I didn't know...it was just bad. I maybe went a little crazy. But now she's back. So everything's fine."
Polly still looks doubtful. "So why did she write me?"
It's getting harder to blink back tears. "Alex...she just worries." The inadvertent, sickening truth of that is a stone dropped heavily into Piper's stomach. Alex worries. "I'm sorry. She shouldn't have done that...I'm not your problem, Polly."
Polly rolls her eyes, but whole face gentles. "You're nobody's problem, Pipe."
"I'm trying not to be."
At that, Polly reaches across the table. Piper tenses automatically, thinking she's going for her sleeve again, but Polly just rests her hand on top of Piper's. "Promise me you're okay?"
Piper's throat narrows again, a sudden rush of affection warming her chest. For a moment, Piper just wants to tell Polly the truth. To say it out loud, that she's not okay, that every day ushers in a fresh struggle to live with herself and everything she's done.
But that's not how this works. She doesn't get to pick and choose, pull one person into her own crossfire and blindly hope they'll turn out to be immune.
Besides, there's a part of her that would be telling Polly everything with the hope for absolution. Polly's instinct will be understanding. She will want to tell Piper all the reasons it's not so bad, to deny the pattern of awfulness and excuse things with circumstances.
Piper's done being let off the hook.
So she extracts her hand from her former best friend's and lets her face glaze over into a smile, knowing that if Polly comes again she will have to refuse the visit. "I'm fine. Really."
She tattoos I'm a little worried about her under her collarbone, and the letters are even shakier than most. She adds I know this is fucking strange to her stomach
Then, for the first time in so long, Piper goes looking for Alex.
She's in her bunk, reading.
"Alex."
She looks up, and Piper's eyes are trained on a point over her right shoulder, but she still catches Alex's smile, and her whole voice lights up with surprised delight. "Hey!"
Piper's chest goes hot, and she's suddenly, absurdly furious. She thinks of what she said to Polly, that Alex must be a pretty fucked up person. She can't believe it took her so long to see it.
"You wrote Polly a letter," she says coldly, tone making it clear Alex shouldn't be happy to see her.
"Yeah." Alex is completely unapologetic. "You won't talk to me, but I figure someone should - "
Piper talks right over top of her, loud and firm. "That's none of your business."
There's a pause, and when Alex speaks again, there's an edge to her voice. Finally. "Weirdly enough, Pipes, it kinda feels like my business. You feel like my business."
"I'm not."
"You are when you're freaking me the fuck out." Alex exhales sharply, running a hand through her hair before she's able to soften her voice, "You don't have to talk to me, if it just...make things worse, or something. But you're not talking to anyone. So no one's noticing something's wrong. I just...I thought someone should notice."
Alex voice is soft around the edges and her voice is familiar and everything hurts. All the cuts in Piper feel ripped open and revealed. She can feel herself wanting to be selfish again, to break down crying and walk into Alex's arms, let herself be held even though she can never do the holding.
She fights it. She has to squeeze her eyes shut to keep them off Alex's face.
"Why?" the word shoves itself between her clenched teeth.
"Why what?"
"Why do you care?" It's a question that already sounds scared of the answer.
Tender and quiet, Alex answers, "You know why."
Piper does know.
She just doesn't understand.
"Pipes..." Alex's voice is closer now, too close, and Piper's eyes fly open in a panic.
"I fucked Stella."
The words are a sudden gunshot, fired into the sky. A warning.
The air trembles violently in their wake.
A few painful heartbeats pass, and then Piper adds, "I cheated on you." They hadn't actually had sex until Alex broke up with her, but Piper doesn't clarify. That's a technicality, and she doesn't deserve even the smallest of concessions. "More than once. I didn't even feel bad about it."
Alex is standing very, very still. "I don't believe you."
Piper isn't sure what she means, if she doesn't believe any of it or just the lack of guilt. Either way, she counters quietly, "Yeah, you do." The truth of that hangs heavily between them. "You knew, Alex." She releases a wild, scornful laugh. "And you let me get away with it. You let me lie to your face."
Alex doesn't say anything. Piper can't stop herself from lifting her gaze, checking Alex's reaction.
She pictures herself ripping into Alex's scar, gouging out rubble with her own two hands.
That's how wrecked Alex looks. But she's still fucking standing here.
Piper's throat constricts and her eyes fill up, and it's all wrong because she's not supposed to be the one crying.
"I had you sent back here just so I could fuck you," Piper spits out with dirty sharp edges. Her eyes are off Alex's face again, listlessly fixed on the pale hollow of her throat. She pictures herself wrapping hands around it, attacking. "But you were scared and that was annoying so I just found someone else." Piper advances on Alex, goading. She wants the version of Alex that slapped her in the library. She wants to be close enough for her to do it again. "She was a stranger. I didn't even really like her." Piper's eyes flit up again. She makes herself look. "All that mattered was that she was hot."
Alex's face twists, and she huffs out something breathless, barely audible.
"What was that?"
"Fuck you, Piper." More than anything, Alex just sounds tired. Her eyes are glittering. "That's what I have to say now, right? Fuck you." She turns her head, but not before Piper sees a tear streak from her eye, parallel to the scar. "Good job. You can go now."
Alex turns her back on Piper, wanting her to go away. Piper makes it out of the dormitory and into the bathroom before a crooked, strangled sound lurches out of her, and she crumples to the floor in a fit of uncontrollable weeping, all because she got exactly what she wanted.