Even as things were, the mere idea of Piper leaving still seemed to her completely ridiculous, and it had been necessary for her to see the blonde opening her black trolley just to get Alex to acknowledge the fact. When it did sink in, it nevertheless became impossible for her to see it as definitive, because very few things were set in stone and nothing was unchangeable. Piper might actually want to leave, yes, but that was only what she was saying now - not necessarily what she would be saying later.

She was certainly aware that this wasn't a spur of the moment thing, that it had been a slow burn, considerably more serious than what she had calculated, but that didn't make it unsolvable, did it? All she required was a way of preventing Piper from leaving right away, and it needed to be better than a ton of newly-baked butter croissants, freshly-brewed coffee, and a beautifully set table, because that hadn't worked, and attempting to lavish the girl had been a fiasco as well, judging by the bags from designer stores still lying around the bedroom like the proverbial breadcrumbs from the story. Actually, more bothersome than that was the fact that she'd had no luck either by making use of her own imposing physicality, which had proven to be deadly effective most of the time. She had sent her body to war and yet Piper had halted her every advance following the night in which they had argued but communicated, when she'd dared to presume that the blonde was once more hers. That hadn't been the case, though, however thoroughly Alex had touched her and made her hit the apartment's high ceilings with her screams. It somehow hadn't been enough; Alex had apparently overestimated Piper's dependence on her, but she still trusted her own abilities to be convincing - perhaps because she had already been successful before.

What she found unconceivable was the iciness with which Piper was handling the situation. She had started collecting her belongings with clinical precision, without any perceptible fury and without doing anything for show. It was kind of eerie how detached she looked, as if her mind was already focused on the next thing. Could it be? Not that Alex preferred white tears -this wasn't really about preferring-, but she had expected something, preferably an honest emotion of some sort, since she couldn't work with a blank stare. That was why she needed a little extra time; mainly to get a rise out of the girl and break through that layer of ice.

Given that that damn suitcase wouldn't take forever to pack, the brunette had bought herself some time by creeping up to Piper's bedside table, inconspicuously picking her passport, and hiding it in the dresser, under her own shirts, where Piper would never look thoroughly. Desperate times called for desperate measures, including the irritatingly pathetic ones. Besides, she had made her peace with playing dirty a long time ago. That she was a manipulative bitch wasn't exactly new information to anyone, but it was equally true that what they had together was far too grand to let it simply glaze over.

Alex had known from the beginning that Piper was an adaptable person, flexible, and that she had a way of effortlessly accepting that which appeared unchangeable, and so she had to wonder if that double feature was making it easier for the girl to leave. Instead of trying to change things, she was now ready to seek for new, more convenient circumstances, because she didn't want to be that Piper anymore. Was that it? Once again, Alex felt the familiar and bothersome pang in the mouth of her stomach which had presented itself more and more frequently and, for the first time, it occurred to her that it could be pure fear: the fear of finally having someone to share her life, the fear of needing her too fucking much, and the resulting and much larger fear of losing her.

This was the second time she had sat down to watch the parade of Piper coming and going, gathering her belongings, and Alex chose the kitchen do so, mainly because that was where the champagne was stored. She hadn't been in the mood for alcohol the first time, but the present situation was different. In fact, she had been drinking for days, because she'd needed to work and Piper had been sleeping in the living room, because she'd been hoping that her trips to the kitchen would make the girl call out for her and put an end to the stupid fucking bullshit that had been going on between them.

While she was pouring herself another glass, Alex heard the surprisingly loud, paralyzing sound of the zippers in Piper's suitcase closing. She stared at the bubbly, golden liquid for a couple of minutes and guzzled it down when she heard the girl's quick footsteps in the corridor. This wasn't a celebration, but there could still be one.

Piper poked her head inside the kitchen. "I can't find my passport. Have you seen it?"

"No."

"Would you help me look for it?"

"You're kidding, right?"

"Please, Alex."

The brunette frowned and looked down at the counter while Piper went on about how she needed to pop out for a while, and asked her to search around just in case, if she didn't mind. Sensing the beginning of a sarcastic grin, Alex restrained herself and only raised her left eyebrow, because her natural reaction would be to lash out and deftly dissect the girl with her words. And then she would explain to her a thing or two about "minding", because the way in which Piper was handling both herself and the situation had to be bullshit, a front to make it easier.

She was weighing out the option of asking Piper to purchase something stronger so they could have a proper drink and the blonde could maybe open up a little, when her thoughts were interrupted by the ringing phone. Alex pushed herself up from the kitchen table, slid past a sighing Piper, and sauntered towards the main bedroom. Let her go buy her fucking plane ticket if that was what she wanted, because she was going to miss that flight anyway, and re-scheduling another one would be a bitch, far greater than Alex was.

"Yeah," the brunette breathed into the phone.

"Alex? Alex? Is that you, honey?"

Tilting her head upon hearing an unexpectedly alien voice, the brunette straightened up. For a moment she got distracted when she realized that the blonde's black trolley was standing upright in the center of the room, ready to leave, dutifully waiting for its owner, and the feeling of dread wasn't helped by the sharp sound of the front door closing. She had stopped paying attention to the person at the other side of the line, which had started rattling on and on, and so it took Alex a while to acknowledge that the female voice wasn't unknown to her at all; it was just that she wasn't used to hearing it over the phone. It was her aunt, and what made Alex finally focus on what the woman was saying was that her voice had become croaky with tears.

Her aunt was telling her that they had found Alex's number stuck to the fridge in her mother's house. Okay, but what was going on? Alex interrupted the woman's drabble, feeling her own voice getting louder and barely managing to hold back on the swearing, until she finally deciphered that when her aunt was saying "A neighbor found her lying on the floor" and "At first they thought she'd fallen down the stairs" she was talking about her mom.

Alex sat on the bed for a second, but then almost immediately jumped to her feet, her mind springing into action. It was going to be fine, it had to be. All she needed to do was get her ass there, be with her mom, and get her the best treatment money could buy.

"I'll be there as soon as I can. Where is she?"

"What do you mean?" her aunt sniffled.

"My mom! Where is she? What hospital?"

"Oh, sweetie…"

As soon as the woman bawled out those words, Alex knew, and automatically sat back down on the bed. She understood what her aunt had been telling her all along; only she had been too worried and worked up to really listen. Her ears clouded up again, and only the occasional phrase registered, like "They think it was an aneurism" and "I told her a thousand times she should quit smokin'," and Alex could do nothing to stop the woman's monologue. Finally, she just muttered that she was coming and let the phone slip between her lifeless fingers without even bothering to hang up.

Her eyes started to sting very badly, and then they seemed to flood with thick, burning, wavy tears, a purely physiological reaction which she found extremely irritating. Those tears weren't psychosomatic; they were just what her body thought she needed to express -sorrow-, but it wasn't, because her mind was in no way ready for that. Her mind appeared to be completely blocked, and her thoughts couldn't move past the word "dead" associated to the most important person in her life.

She felt the pang in her stomach claw its way up to her chest, where it hurt more, because it felt like a ravenous black hole that had every intention of sucking up everything. And, as was her habit whenever something bad happened, she reached down for the fallen phone to call her mom, because she would understand; she would dust her off, pat her on the ass, and send her straight back to the battlefield, self-assured and invigorated. Only that… that was now impossible.

So instead, she raised a trembling hand to her face and took off her glasses, folding them up and cradling them between her fingers. She stared straight ahead, not moving, not even blinking, facing her desk and her laptop, but completely unaware of her surroundings, for it felt like she was floating in a void of nothingness, with that searing pain in her chest as the single sign of life.

Piper had returned to the apartment at some point, which Alex hadn't noticed, and was now frantically running around. Her frostiness was still there, of course; this nervousness of hers wasn't an emotion - it simply meant that she was in a hurry. Barely aware of the blonde's muffled exclamations around the flat and the different noises of her futile search for her passport, Alex didn't turn around when she got to the bedroom.

"Are you off the phone now?" Piper asked, with that tired tone she had adopted lately, surely believing that Alex had been conducting business. "It wasn't in the bathroom either. Did you look at all while I was out?"

The girl continued moving around the room, opening and closing drawers, taking her silence as sadness or sullenness, when in fact Alex couldn't move, her tears congealed, her eyes made of glass.

"Alex? I understand you're upset, but could you at least acknowledge I'm a person who's speaking?"

No. No, she couldn't. Her body felt like a larger shell containing a much smaller Alex, a tiny version of herself, just a little girl with big, horn-rimmed glasses who was crying and whining because she needed her mother.

"If I miss this flight I'm… screwed," the girl went on, and then raised her voice to make her snap out of it. "Alex! Passport! Hello?"

It made the brunette flinch inside, and yes, in a way it woke her up. It made her look outside herself and vocalize the horrifying truth.

"My mom died," she said, frowning at the strangeness of her own voice, and at the words themselves. She tried to swallow the thick lump stuck in her throat, but only managed to crack the barrier in her eyes and make them teary again. Or maybe it was just that voicing out what had happened finally made it real.

"What?"

Alex felt the girl getting closer, and dared to face her while she sat on the bed, her face finally expressing something - shock and worry.

"My aunt just called. It happened this morning I guess." Even as she was recounting what had happened, it still seemed outrageous to her, offensive, like a crappy story in a cheap novel.

The blonde placed a gentle hand on her thigh, told her that she was sorry, and didn't hesitate to embrace her, caressing her hair and settling into the crook of her neck. As she rested her chin on Piper's shoulder, she realized that she was starting to lose some of that numbness she had been conquered by since the phone call.

Her watery eyes focused on an undetermined point in the distance. "My first instinct was to call her to talk about it."

She knew that it was dumb, but that had always been her natural reaction, because it had always been the two of them, and even when they had been miles and oceans apart, Alex had never failed to contact the woman. Even when they didn't see each other frequently, there was an unbreakable link between them, and Alex would've never allowed the distance to make them strangers. This, however, was unsolvable.

The girl dug her fingers into her hair for a moment and then broke the embrace to ask her what had happened. Her hand nevertheless kept stroking her hair, her cheek, her neck, with an intimacy that kept pulling Alex out of that numbness.

"An aneurysm… I don't know, my aunt said so many things I don't even remember now." It still sounded absurd, particularly when uttered by her broken voice. She shook her head and pressed her lips tightly, telling herself that she nevertheless needed to move.

"What can I do?" Piper asked, and it hardly registered, because Alex had started to think that even if her mother was no longer in this world, her strong, hardworking body still was, miles and miles away, alone among family members who had never cared that much. It was her duty and her responsibility.

"I don't know, I mean… I need to fly home. I need to figure out the funeral because there's no one else to do it." The brunette forced herself to stand up, because she needed to pack all her shit fast and get moving at once. She set her glasses and phone on the big armchair she had been using as a dumper for her clothes and stuff and picked the first t-shirt she saw.

"Okay."

"Will you see if you could find us two seats out in a flight today?" Alex asked, while inefficiently trying to fold that same fucking shirt, since she didn't quite know what trembled more, her voice or her hands.

"Al, I can't go with you."

The tone of Piper's voice was back to being level, and it took Alex a couple of seconds to react to the actual words, because she couldn't believe them even when she understood them, and was left mumbling like an idiot.

"What?"

"I'm so sorry about your mom, but this doesn't change anything."

Alex stood very still for some moments, as if she had been struck by lightning. The void which had made its way up to her chest seemed to grow again, making her feel lightheaded, as if the floor had been yanked from her feet, because the most valuable thing she had in her life had just been taken away from her without warning, and now the other most important person was reminding her of the fact that it was still over, as if what had happened wasn't much larger than whatever had been troubling Piper.

The possibility that the girl wasn't going to be there for her hadn't even occurred to Alex, and so she stared at her incredulously. And if it was all over for Piper, wasn't Alex important enough -or hadn't she been important enough during all those months they'd been together- for the blonde to change her plans?

"You're still leaving? Right now?"

She could safely affirm that Piper had never seen her like this, and had very rarely witnessed her weakness and neediness, and yet it was proving impossible to find an actual emotion in that face. There was not much else Alex could do besides pitifully stating the obvious, that her mother had just died, for fuck's sake, and Piper was deliberately abandoning her and leaving her all alone in the world precisely when she was at her worst.

"I can't fucking believe you!" She was trying to lash out, she really was, because that was her innate impulse. When life bit you, you had to bite back, and when you perceived somebody's bullshit, you had to call them on it. She had always been able to do that with Piper pretty easily, making her react, making her see, but now Alex felt deflated, devoid of energy, and in no position to be her usual strong self.

Still sitting on the bed, Piper moved slightly, for a second making her believe -or rather hope- that she was going to stand up and go to her, but she didn't; she seemed to be gathering her strength or just sifting through what she wanted to say. "I can't be your girlfriend anymore."

"Yeah, and apparently not even my friend."

So it appeared that the entire experience had been so incredibly horrifying for Piper that she couldn't even be there for her to see her through this. That was good to know. Now she was convinced that Piper's mind was already in the process of moving on, that the blonde intended to evaporate into thin air or get reabsorbed into the soil, reappearing somewhere else as somebody else, unrecognizable, believing that she was actually being herself.

She had been naïve enough to believe that they would always be together no matter what, like a team, no matter how much shit they threw at each other - a rookie mistake. She had been wrong to believe that they were on top of that, when the truth was that Piper hadn't been able to step up in those moments in which Alex had really needed her. And while she had thought that they still had time, Alex understood that Piper had already been envisioning them as mortally wounded.

"Top drawer underneath my t-shirts," she said, with defeat, pointing with her thumb and thus surrendering the location of the "lost" item.

"Jesus, Alex!" the blonde chastised her." You fucking hid it?"

That made her stand up alright. The blonde walked straight to the dresser and rummaged for a few seconds before extracting her passport from the first drawer. They were now standing very close to each other, but Piper was looking at her with the worst expression of offense and resentment. Alex wanted to tell her that yes, she had been trying to control the situation, but it had been an action born out of pure desperation. She was surrendering now; she was giving Piper the option of leaving or staying - and yes, maybe the option was not hers to give and, she'd had no right to decide for her, and perhaps that was why the girl was looking at her like that. But she hadn't done it out of malice - Piper had to know that, she just had to. But did it matter?

"Please don't leave. Not now." She was looking at the girl straight in the eye, burning her last round. Of course Piper knew everything; there was no need to tell her why she should want to stay and help her - just that, just help her. And, following that same reasoning, she knew that she shouldn't ask for things that needed to come naturally; people either did those things or they didn't - making them do it or asking for them wasn't natural, was it? However, she was feeling crushed enough to throw all her beliefs out the window and straight-out beg.

And yet Piper proved to be impenetrable. Her expression went back to being opaque, and she appeared to be all determination while she seized her trolley and walked towards the door without once turning around. Alex believed she understood the reasons behind the coldness, because the blonde's emotions went through a filter, and if she let them pass she would have to stay, and if she stayed perhaps she wouldn't be able to garner enough strength to leave again.

As she heard the front door close, Alex shook her head, feeling the floors getting wider and the ceilings getting higher. What was the use of understanding, of having all those words, if it didn't change one fucking thing?