A/N- Look here I am again. Just so you guys don't get your hopes up, the chapters won't be coming out nearly as fast as Irresistible did because that pace is unsustainable and that story just dropped out of my head, whereas this one, the plot isn't as fully formed and I'm working on about three other things right now (seriously that OTHER THING is being written I swear)... but... this has just been kind of tugging at me for awhile, and I had most of this written already and someone lit a fire under my ass, so I decided to kind of... throw it at the wall and see if it stuck (this is mostly just setup). So y'know... lemme know what you think. (see end for more notes).

Prologue- The Woman with No Name

The town was called Haven. It was a dusty, isolated speck amongst dozens of other dusty, isolated specks in this part of the territory. Settlements that had been forged out of nothing by the daring and the desperate. Folks with everything to gain or nothing more to lose or both. Folks who had dreams or thought it was destiny... Or, as was too often the case, wanted to escape.

It was a land of vast opportunity and little or no law. Out here, the idea of a territorial government seemed like the barest wisp of a thing, so folks made due on their own. Formed their own community, made their own law... their own justice. The kind of justice the circuit judges who blew through the county seat once a month rarely had much to do with (the county seat... twenty miles away when twenty miles might as well have been a million... might as well have been the damned moon).

Like most places this far out drifters came through fairly regular. Most minded their own business. Didn't give anyone any trouble. And it was the kind of town where if you didn't hassle the locals (all 50 of them), they wouldn't hassle you.

The good people of Haven and the surrounding ranches didn't have a lot of judgment in them. They didn't care who you were, because it wasn't like you could be that much worse than them: there was the standard whorehouse, and there was even some talk that one of the ranches outside town often sheltered a gang of bank robbers. You could be anyone you wanted to be outside of Haven. But you had damned well better abide by the rules inside it.

Most people coming through sussed this out pretty quick. It was in the way of the townsfolk: polite smiles under guarded eyes. The energy was distinct. This place wasn't chaotic, wasn't entirely without order. And there was a subtle warning on even the friendliest face that those who tried to make it so would be made to regret it.

But of course there were always a few. Out here there always were.

The sheriff was a baby faced fellow, brown hair, earnest guileless brown eyes. The scruff of a stubble on his face. Open smile. The sort of face that didn't exactly scream danger. He was the guy came and talked to you when you started making trouble. Used calm words, and a friendly, cautious smile that didn't quite reach his eyes to convince you your path should stay straight and narrow. But he wasn't necessarily the gent you ran up against if you kept riling folks up...

In fact, if you started trouble in Haven and young Sheriff Bennett couldn't talk you into cooling down, it was unlikely you'd be running up against a gent at all.

A quick look around showed you that the good Sheriff was one of the few men in town. Most every business, from the stables run by the black women, to the grocery run by the Chinese lady and her irritatingly talkative assistant, to the inn run by the Mexican lady and the two skinny girls she called her daughters, was run by women. And none of them looked like the weaker anything. A man with any sense would know to keep his head down and his nose clean. But lord knew that not all men had sense...

Everyone always mistook Piper Chapman for a whore. It raised her hackles every damned time even though everyone insisted she should've been used to it by now.

She was a woman alone this far out west. No husband. No family. So it was evidently the logical assumption despite the fact she lived in a ranch house a couple miles (one she owned thank you...) out of town rather than actually in the damned whorehouse (a small but clean affair with four or five girls and an imposing Russian madam who made sure everyone who walked in the door adhered to her rules).

She wasn't any more judgmental than anyone else in town, at least not now after five years here, but she couldn't help but be rankled by the comparison. Not that she thought the girls beneath her (leastways not after getting to know them, having scrabbled through more than a couple hard winters out here by their sides) just that sometimes, no matter how long she lived out here, as far from the debutante balls and finishing schools of her Boston youth as you could get, working alongside her two ranch hands, never hesitating to do any task she would ask of them, she still had some vanity. Some things the west could never take out of her.

When she was working the ranch she dressed like her hands, but when she went into town, for any reason, she dressed fancy, fancier than anyone in the town would've required. They thought it passing odd but if she'd learned their ways after five years, they'd learned hers. Most of them just grinned at her and shook their heads, though if they were being real honest, she and her New York made dresses and fancy words made them all feel just a little classier.

Today she'd come in alone to buy supplies from the old Chinese lady's general store. Usually she was accompanied by her head hand but they'd been out of town for a week. It was odd not to see the two of them together and everyone remarked on it.

The blonde found herself at the saloon next door to the whorehouse after her supplies had been loaded. It was mid day so she was really the only custom they had. A few of the girls were lounging at the tables, talking and eating their lunches. Nicky, the bushy haired bartender, was holding court, regaling a couple of Red's boys with some outrageous tale of her adventures back in New York before she'd come here. Bennett's lady, Daya, a quiet, sweet Mexican who used to be one of Red's girls but now just cleaned up around the place, was nearby, sweeping and listening and grinning occasionally at Nicky's bullshit.

Sometimes Piper would join in, but today she quietly sat at a table near the entrance, eating a bowl of some Russian stew, reading a large book she had been waiting for her when she's ducked in to check her post.

She was so absorbed that she didn't hear the newcomer sidle in and order a beer. Nicky put it in front of him and he paid up and she went back to her story. If it'd been night, the boys would've been keeping a closer eye on the gent at the bar as he surveyed the room. Might have noticed that he was already pretty well progressed towards drunk when he bellied up to the bar.

But it wasn't night time. So by the time the drunk sloshed off his stool and staggered over to the table where the pretty blonde in the expensive dress sat, no one was watching.

"Well hey there honey... You're a damn sight prettier'n any o these other bits..."

Piper frowned, her temper flaring. She pulled her ice cold cobalt blue eyes away from her book and up to the watery, slightly unfocused brown ones in front of her, "I am not a whore," she said slowly and clearly.

Usually that was all it took. Her anger plus her words, spoken with that sheen of education and refinement which she took care never to lose was generally sufficient to either shock or embarrass them enough to make them go away. But of course, this man was too stupid or too drunk or some combination of the two and he couldn't see the light of the approaching freight train...

"You're sittin in a whorehouse..."

"The brothel is next door," It was a common mistake. Both occupied the same building and were run by Red.

"Look darlin', I understand you may be restin' up but I'm a payin' customer..."

"I. Am. Not. A. Whore," she said again, slowly and carefully. Voice deadly calm. Nicky had gone silent. The boys looked over.

He grabbed her wrist and pulled her towards him with surprising speed and strength, "I don't really like hard to get, honey."

Before anyone could move, Piper had curled her hand into a fist and hit him hard in the side of the face.

He toppled to the side, bellowing. The blonde sprang to her feet, shaking out her hand and scowling, fully prepared to give him more if it came down to it. The man started scrambling to stand up, rage and humiliation coloring his features.

He was barely on his feet before Vasily and Maxim had him by his arms and had hauled him out the door, still swearing and spitting with outrage.

Piper stayed standing, breathing hard until Nicky came around the bar with a wet cloth and a glass of whiskey. She put the whiskey on the table and gently guided Piper back to her seat, then she sat across from her and handed her the cloth. Piper took it and held it to her now aching fist. Nicky pushed the whiskey across.

Piper frowned at the glass of amber liquid, "No thank you, Nicky, you know I don't..."

"Come on, Chapman," the bartender half smiled, clapping Piper on the shoulder, "Settle the nerves."

Piper sighed, staring at Nicky then at the glass again. Finally, she nodded and took a drink.

The whiskey burned its way down her throat and she winced slightly, even as the warm feeling that trailed behind it really did give her a feeling of general well being. Nicky grinned at her expression, "Shit, Blondie... didn't know y'had that in ya..."

Piper sighed, staring down at her fist, at the already flowering bruise forming there, eyes going a shade darker as she thought of all the reasons she'd come out here in the first place. "You have no idea..."

No one would mistake Alex Vause for anything other than what she seemed, which was someone who would gladly kill you in a split second if you crossed her. Most people correctly assumed she knew how to take care of herself. She was tall and solidly built, and carried herself with an air of deadly calm competence. There was no fear in her, leastways not any she showed to strangers or those who might pose a threat. The assumption that she was good with her fists and deadly with the battered twin six shooters always at her waist was correct. She was more than good, she was near untouchable...

...but there was always a second assumption that came whenever anyone looked at someone with that kind of air about them, the assumption that the violence came second nature, that she'd welcome it with little provocation. And that... that wasn't near as close to true as folk thought.

It was beneficial to keep up the illusion that she was trigger happy, but if anyone took the time to actually look, to really examine how she handled those rare times when she was truly challenged, they would cotton to the fact that Alex was all about words. The woman didn't talk a whole lot, being the strong brooding silent type like so many gun fighters, but when she did she was like a snake charmer. She could talk her way out of trouble like the best grifter, and she always seemed to know what to say and do to keep herself from having to utilize her prodigious and distinctly deadly skills.

Some might have called this yellow bellied cowardice, an unwillingness to stand up, but that neglected the fact that she always got her way and, maybe more important, the fact she'd been living by her wits and her gun since she was little more than a pup, and she was still walking upright rather than reclining in a shallow grave up in the small, bleak cemetery overlooking the town.

And it also neglected the fact that if you were tallying up the ledger, she had more than enough red there to last anyone a lifetime.

There was a time in her life when she was angry enough she'd kill about anyone for a wrong look. But things had changed. She had changed and most figured that was for the better. Calm, collected Alex Vause was much better than twitchy trigger happy Alex Vause for everyone involved...

The hair trigger temper of her youth had given way to a distaste for bloodshed and a kind of calm that was almost unnatural. Very few knew exactly why, but if the map of scars on right side of her face, beneath her wire-rimmed glasses, and the others that peaked out from under the sleeves of her duster when she reached for a drink were any indication, it had been through cold hard experience that she'd arrived at this place.

These days there wasn't much that could stir her to action instantly. In fact there was really only one thing that could. There weren't many living that Alex could call friend, who she could really truly trust, who she could honestly say she loved. If she were being plain honest (and she was almost always plain honest these days), there were very few she could say she'd loved in her entire life. But most of them were gone now, and she'd be damned if she was going to let anyone take away the rest.

And so the surest way to ignite the flash behind Alex's generally placid green gray eyes was to threaten someone she loved... no one in town would dare even joke about such a thing. And most outsiders took one look at her and knew that she was the type it was best to stay on the right side of... but not every man was blessed with the brains God gave a horned toad...

There was a woman at the table and Little Joel didn't like it. If they were all real honest none of them had liked it initially either, but O'Neill, the bar's fat, amiable red haired owner made it clear she was part of the game. And whether that was because it's what he wanted or because his wife (a sour faced dragon lady who wasn't so amiable) told him to be it didn't matter.

She came in once a month or so, riding down from the next town over where word had it she worked as a hand on a ranch (which was odd in itself... a woman with broad shoulders and calloused hands, not to mention the bearing and deadly gaze of a gunfighter). She was usually picking up fancy looking packages from back East or talking with some of the cattlemen about buying some of their stock. Some of them hadn't taken her serious at first, but she had proved herself shrewd, clever and not to be trifled with in matters of business. After one of them had underestimated her and made a spectacularly bad deal, they didn't make that mistake again.

Like the cattlemen, most of the poker players got used to her after a bit. She was quiet, she didn't cheat, she didn't make trouble unless her hand was forced. And it took a lot to force her hand. A couple stray underhanded comments about her being a woman, no matter how heinous, weren't enough to do it. She would just look at the (usually drunk) instigator with a placid half smirk on her face, letting them know just how little she cared what they said. When there was trouble, she carefully kept out of it.

But occasionally someone would get sore about being taken out of the game by a woman and words would be exchanged and the whole bar would hold its collective breath, waiting for things to be resolved the way such matters generally were out in this part of the territory. Somehow though... somehow it never got that far.

Little Joel was a regular at the game but had never played on the same night the woman had. He was slovenly and overfed, with small brown eyes, always half closed, and a scraggly half beard. He worked as an apprentice up at the blacksmith and it was generally known that if you were foolish enough to entrust either property or secrets to him, he would promptly find a way to spread them around town, usually at a profit.

He was also almost always half drunk. Tonight he had been drinking steadily since the game started, nearly two hours prior. He'd started with a tidy pile amounting to near $50. Somehow, of the other four people at the table, it always seemed to be the woman he ended up losing his biggest hands to. He'd been making the expected angry, insulting comments towards her for a half hour when she finally cleaned him out entirely... a full house, queens over fives to his sad little pair of aces (he'd put great store in a third ace that never materialized).

As she leaned forward to gather up the pile of cash in front of her, he rose unsteadily and laid his hand heavily on her sleeve, "You're a god damn fuckin' cheat, you bitch!" he slurred.

At the word "cheat" the woman went completely still, every muscle in her body grinding to a halt except her eyes, which swiveled upwards and looked straight into Joel's, the usually languid casualness completely gone from them, replaced with the sort of intensity that made every person at the table automatically slide their chairs half a foot back in a way that would've been near comical had it not been for the fact that danger was radiating out of the woman's eyes like a physical force.

Little Joel, never known for his dizzying intellect to start with, was further dulled by the cheap rotgut whiskey he paid five cents a shot for because he was too cheap to pay an extra nickel for something not made scorpion venom. He took no note of the woman's sudden change of mood, or the table's sudden urgent need to be farther away. His unsteady eyes were still on hers, a drunken scowl on his face. "Ain't no way I got beat honest by some fuckin' whore..." he growled.

A long, heavy silence followed this declaration. The woman's gaze remained on the drunk's, but the hand that he didn't have a grip on moved oh so slowly, oh so very casually to rest gently on the handle of the gun at her belt. Finally, after thirty seconds that felt to everyone else like three days, a half smile unfurled itself across her lips, one that didn't reach even half up to her eyes. Then she said, voice a soft rasp, even and low and with a thrumming note of something deadly, that set the hairs on everyone's neck to standing at attention, "I'm sorry, friend. Perhaps, you'd care to repeat that? I really don't think I heard you right..."

Somewhere between the smile and the tone, the gravity of the situation had finally worked its way through to Little Joel's lizard brain. He examined the woman in front of him, and then swiveled his head a few degrees, looking around at the other players, who had all found something a might more interesting to look at, not wanting to be associated with him even by meeting his eyes. The perpetual sheen of sweat on his forehead intensified as he realized what was happening. He turned back to the woman, the hand her wrist was now shaking just slightly. "Ummmm..."

"I think maybe you aren't feeling so well, hmmm?" said the woman quietly, conversationally, "maybe you're seeing things ain't there... maybe you're sayin' things without thinkin' 'em through entirely? I mean... you look a little feverish, and as bad as you were playin'... well, maybe you ought to go 'cross the street and see the doc rather than sit here and running your fuckin' mouth... what do you think?" Her tone never changed and the smile never left her face, but by the time she finished having her say, even Little Joel had a very vivid idea of just how precarious his position was...

Another weighted pause... and finally, he cleared his throat and said, "Yeah... well, you know... yeah, I... I ain't been... I ain't been feelin' so good yeah... maybe ate some... some bad... somethin'..." he removed his hand with a sudden jerk, like he'd been burned, and then, with as much dignity as he could muster, he grabbed up his hat, smashed it onto his head, and turned and practically ran out the door.

The woman watched him leave, then her face relaxed back into its normal almost lazy expression of calm, and she finished sweeping her winnings into the pile in front of her. She leaned back and looked around. The bar was still quiet, the rest of the patrons still not quite released from the tension of what they were certain had almost happened. The other players were eyeing her warily.

She took a sip of her beer, set the mug down with a quiet thunk and said lightly, "Benny, it's your deal..."

Her statement released the tension like a hot air balloon pierced with a spear, and everyone released breaths they hadn't known they'd been holding. The bar filled back up with noise, and the other players slid closer to the table, every one of them grateful they hadn't been on the receiving end of that stare.

She hit a run of bad luck a few hands later and excused herself from the game. She was no reckless gambler, always in complete control. If she couldn't leave with more than she'd sat down with, there was no point. So she'd stood up, nodded amiably at the other players (all vaguely relieved she was going), stuffed the money in the saddlebag slung over her shoulder and walked up to the bar, leaning against it and gesturing for a drink.

O'Neill's wife, Wanda, slid a beer across the bar at her and tilted her head, her shrewd eyes boring into the tall woman's, "Never know how you manage to keep your temper, Vause..." she was one of the few in town knew the woman's name, "guy like that... I'd have had him on his ass..."

"Don't like to make trouble," the woman said, sipping the beer.

"You'd have finished what he started easy... Little Joel's all talk..."

"Funny thing about what other people start... ain't got a whole lot of control of where it goes, and who knows who else in your fine establishment might feel the need to test me..." her eyes behind her lenses flicked lazily around the bar... more than one patron (many of whom she'd taken more than a few dollars off of) was eyeing her in a way they probably thought subtle, "...and I ain't quite as eager to die of lead poisoning as some of them are," for a moment her eyes went soft, faraway, "unlike them, I got someone to go home to, and I wouldn't want to disappoint 'em by makin' that trip in a pine box..."

Wanda nodded, waiting a moment to see if she would add anything else, but the woman's eyes had come back to the present and the usual calm mask had fallen over them again. Nothing more was forthcoming. It was already one of the longest conversations Wanda could remember having with her. Before the bartender could think to inquire further, the beer glass slid, empty, back towards her, and a five dollar note followed, more than enough for the four ten cent beers the woman consumed over the course of the night. Wanda took it and turned to get change.

"Keep it," the woman said, putting two fingers to the brim of her hat, nodding minimally, "For your trouble..." And then she slung her saddlebags over her shoulder, turned on her heel and walked toward the exit, her long ambling gait relaxed. A dozen sets of eyes followed her until she disappeared out the doors and they stopped swinging.

A/N- So I know that all the Latinas in Orange aren't all Mexican, I get it, but for this particular story having them all be works. So it's an AU and I'm putting everyone in the Wild West for god's sake so... mainly just wanted everyone to know that I knew that and meant no offense by it...