Notes: This is basically just the intro. Part 2 will be longer. This fic is a bit of an experiment for me stylistically and content-wise (I usually stick to AUs), so let me know what you think.

Nightmares always lead Piper to the greenhouse.

The yard is quiet as she walks, wrapping her up in a cemetery silence. She pushes the door in with her elbow like she's afraid to leave fingerprints. It creaks open—or it would, if the dream weren't so soundless. Footsteps on floorboards, her beating heart, the blood pounding in her ears—it all muffles into mute silence as she drifts over the threshold.

Alex is inside, lying motionless on the concrete. There is a constellation of bruises blooming like nebulae across her skin. Her forearms are studding with shards of glass that make Piper think of a broken champagne flute, a toast gone wrong, all those future hopes dashed to pieces.

Her eyes are closed—swollen shut. Can't see anything, certainly can't see Piper, but her fingers twitch like she knows someone's there. Her mouth opens to make the shape of a name but then closes, unable to loosen the stranglehold of that choking silence.

Alex's body looks irreparably broken.

Piper's heart echoes like an empty drum.

She bends forward and tries to touch, but her fingers scrabble on empty air. Can't get close enough to press against the bleeding wound on Alex shoulder, or even to brush away the disheveled hair that falls across her forehead.

Suddenly Piper is holding a shovel—garden-variety, heavy, oxidized iron. She knows what's been done with it; the evidence is all over Alex's body. All the blood and bruises scream in vibrant color, so loud they almost manage to make a sound.

When she drops the weapon there is no sense of relief, only the knowledge of something else filling her palm. Metal again, this time small and cold as frostbite in her fingers.

A silver pistol, chambers loaded.

'I sleep with a gun,' she remembers hearing Alex whisper.

She remembers dismissing Alex's fear, too; remembers mocking her, lying to her, turning away into the arms of—

—she can't even think about it.

But she understands about the gun now, because she sleeps with one too. Every night she turns it in her hands, unsure which direction to point the barrel.

Every night the same nightmare, until she feels like a ghost in the making.

::::::::::

.

Daylight brings more of the same. She pretends to be asleep until Red leaves the cube, and even then she stays in bed until a minute before breakfast, trying to make the solitude last as long as possible.

She sits alone in the cafeteria, spooning a few tasteless bites into her mouth only because her hands want movement.

A shadow falls across the table.

"Do you mind if I sit down?"

It's Yoga Jones. Piper glances at her and then down again quickly, not wanting to talk. She spends most of her time avoiding people these days, either wandering the yard (but keeping far from the greenhouse) or sitting in the back of the chapel with the lights off. Most of the time people leave her alone, but Jones is persistent.

"Have you heard anything about Vause?" she asks. Her characteristically quavery voice holds an extra layer of caution—it's the same tone wound-be rescuers use on wounded, feral animals.

Piper's stomach seizes instantly. The four spoonfuls of unidentifiable kitchen slop she previously forced down now churn uneasily in her gut. Anytime she hears that name, even the last name and even in her own head…

It's been nearly a month since the paramedics took Alex away. Piper never saw the greenhouse afterward, couldn't bring herself to even go near it, but some of the girls say there's still a stain on the concrete floor where it happened. The COs wouldn't tell them anything, but Piper worked it out pretty easily on her own: there was a guard who obviously wasn't a guard, but rather a hired hand of Kubra's, and he did exactly what Alex said he would do—

He tried to kill her.

He may have even succeeded.

Piper glances up at Jones—only a glance, it's all the eye contact she can take—and shakes her head slowly.

Jones's eyes are soft. They hold an infinite, unwavering gentleness. When Piper first arrived at Litchfield, wearing her fears prominently on the sleeve of her orange uniform, Jones had looked at her with that same level compassion. 'Try to look at your experience here as a mandala, Chapman,' she'd told her. 'And when you're done, pack it in and know that it was all temporary.'

She was wrong, though. Prison isn't a mandala; it's permanence. Whatever designs you make in here stay with you, sure as the words scarring Piper's forearm. A monk may make beauty out of sand, but a prisoner makes only this: a scar, a brand, a painful itch she'll never be rid of.

Her fingers move without thinking to touch the tattoo, tracing the jagged lines of lettering.

Trust no bitch. Piper's three word biography.

If only it had been written in time to warn Alex away.

"She'll pull through," Jones says. Piper waits for more: some words of wisdom, some grand metaphor, but nothing else follows. It's just blind hope, totally useless to her.

"Last time," Piper says, her voice weak with disuse, "she sent me letters. I didn't answer them, but every week…"

She trails off, thinking of the envelopes addressed in Alex's hand and the little heart drawn beside her initials. It's enough to make her eyes water even though she hasn't cried in weeks.

"She's probably still recovering," Jones says, in what she probably thinks is a comforting tone. "I'm sure if she could contact you, she would. She cares about you."

Piper swallows hard. Even if that's true it only makes things worse, because either Alex has finally stopped caring enough to write to her, or Alex can't write because she's… gone.

Both possibilities hit hard as a gut punch.

Piper's chest burns like arson in an abandoned building, just rubble on fire in an empty room.

"I have to go," she says blankly.

She slips out of the cafeteria when CO Bayley's back is turned—not that he would try to stop her, given their previous interactions. She wants to write Alex a letter. She rushes back to her cube with more purpose than she's had in weeks. It's mercifully empty now that Red's back in the kitchen, and Piper is on her bunk in an instant, poised over a blank sheet of paper.

But as soon as she presses the pen to the page all of the urgency leaves her. Even if she knew how to do this, even if she knew what to say, there would still be nowhere to send it. She doesn't know where Alex is or if she's even alive. The only certainty is that she's gone, and no apology can fix it.

Piper never meant for any of this to happen, but that's the problem: she keeps making choices and hoping the fallout won't hurt her, and it hurts somebody else instead. Alex keeps taking the the collateral damage, and Piper doesn't know how to live with it.

She lays down with her head at the wrong end of the bed and listens to the way the sound mutes around her, the scene distilling itself down to the simplest of images and the sharpest of regrets.

Her tattoo itches, but she doesn't scratch. Her hands twitch like she's aching for something to fill her palms with. It should be Alex's hand, but she batted that away too often. Now all she has is the imaginary pistol gleaming between her fingers, barrel pointed uncertainly at the celling.

:::::::::

.

When she wakes again there's a figure sitting at the end of the bed.

Piper jolts and pulls her legs away, scooting her body backwards as she blinks in disbelief. It's not who it looks like; it can't be.

Her hands are shaking badly as she flings the covers off and stumbles out of her bunk, still backing away. She stares wild-eyed at the woman sitting on the mattress, and god, it is—

it's Alex.

"I thought you'd be happier to see me." The voice is right but the clothes are wrong; not prison khakis but jeans and a grey sweater. Piper recognizes them as the clothes she was wearing in the visitation room when she told Piper she was leaving town, and the reminder of that occasion compounds the panic.

"You're not real," she says breathlessly. "This is a dream. A nightmare. You're not real. You're not real."

She repeats it as if doing so can make the whole scene dissipate, but it doesn't do anything except make Alex laugh a little.

"I show up in your prison cube in the middle of the night, and that's all you have to say?"

Piper's mouth opens, but no words come out. She can't believe how good Alex looks. Her eyes are winged with real eyeliner, not sharpie ink. She seems softer somehow, and younger, the way she looked before the grief and the drugs and the heartbreak. Before prison. Before Piper.

The thought makes Piper's lungs constrict. She's incapable of speech. She wants to throw herself into Alex's arms; she wants to fall to her knees and beg for forgiveness.

But this isn't Alex. Not the real one, anyway.

"Whatever," the apparition says with a shrug. She seizes Piper's jacket from its hook and tosses it at her. "Put that on—we've got places to be."

Piper hesitates only a moment before surrendering and thrusting her arms into the sleeves. If this is a dream, at least it starts with Alex alive and well instead of cold and dying on the the greenhouse floor.

She finds the courage to speak as they're exiting the dorm. "Where are we going?"

Alex regards her with a sidelong glance. "You'll see," she says vaguely.

Everything is quiet around them except for the buzz of fluorescent lights. The prison is empty; no bunks occupied, no COs in the corridors. The administrative offices are open and vacant.

They pass by the cafeteria and then out through the door to the yard, where dawn is lighting up a milky sky. Piper's boots squeak through the dewey grass; Alex doesn't seem to make a sound.

They stop abruptly at the gate to the track. It's closed, chained and secured with a forbiddingly large padlock.

Piper stares at it in confusion. "Why did you bring me here?"

"Because I wanted you to see that it's closed."

"So?" She's feeling impatient now. The dream is drawing out longer than she expected—there's no immediacy to it, no sense of impending horror like in her usually nightly visions.

"You're the one who fought to reopen it," Alex tells her. "Doesn't it bother you at all?"

"No," she says passively, because this whole discussion feels pointless.

Alex sighs. "You're not yourself any more, Piper."

It's the first time she's heard Alex say her first name in weeks. Even before the attack it was last names only—impersonal to the extreme, the way two people act when they're trying to sidestep each other. Or rather, Piper was sidestepping; Alex was confrontational as always, sincere and straightforward with both her concern and her disdain to the point where Piper just couldn't face it.

"I know you," Alex continues, "and I know what you're doing. You're burying yourself a little bit at a time. You want the nightmares."

"Fuck you."

She didn't mean to say it. The words are pure instinct, her only viable retort, but they don't deter Alex at all.

"Look," she says, pointing at the track. "You fought for this. You did this for Janae. And if you stop believing that you're capable of kindness, if you just give up, then all the good you've done just goes away."

"All the good that I've done?" Piper repeats. "All the good? I turned Blanca's phone in to Healy. I took away her happiness and gave it to someone else! That's not good, Alex. That's crap. Every time I try to do the right thing it turns out wrong anyway. I can't do it anymore. I'm done."

She can't remember the last time she felt angry instead of apathetic, but she's so hot now that she's sweating. Inside her pockets her hands are clenched into fists.

"You don't get to just quit," Alex informs her. "That's not how this works."

"What is 'this,' exactly?"

"An intervention. You obviously need some reminders."

"Of what? All the stupid, fucked up things I've done in my life? Don't you think that you standing here is reminder enough?"

Piper doesn't mean it to sound so accusatory; she knows this is her fault. And, fuck, this isn't even the real Alex that she's talking to—it's just some manifestation of her subconscious, the last resistant part of herself that she hasn't managed to shut down yet. The real Alex is gone, and even if she's still alive she couldn't possibly want anything to do with Piper.

But the look in this imaginary Alex's eyes is pure determination. She tosses her head impatiently, dark hair falling back behind her shoulders.

"Come with me."

"No."

"Come with me, Piper."

She says it softer the second time; a sad mimicry of the moment when she asked Piper to leave her life behind and leap into an unknown future. Piper had been happy to do it then, and she'd be happy to do it now. But that's not what this Alex is asking.

"I still don't see the point," she says slowly.

"I know. That's why you have to do it."

Alex extends her hand toward Piper. The sleeves of her sweater are rolled up, baring the tattoo on her forearm. Piper's eyes linger on the pattern. She wishes hers was as innocuous.

"Give me your hand," Alex demands, and the low timbre of her voice is enough to make Piper obey.

Her chest fills with a bittersweet ache at the touch of their fingers. The warmth of Alex's palm is a reminder of something Piper is certain she's lost forever. Still, it can't hurt to pretend for one night that this is real; that Alex is alive and unharmed and still wants her.

When the dream is over, all of that disappears. Might as well make the most of it while she still can.