Orange Is the New Black The Invisible Woman

_AN: This is a post prison story, but everything that happened after season two, episode ten never happened and Piper never opened Alex's letter. Wrote this at four a.m in the morning, so if it's not so good, I blame it on being delirious when writing it. _

**The Invisible Woman**

Your bed is freezing cold, you've always hated sleeping alone but you find your mind is clearer without another person occupying your thoughts and clouding your judgment. Sometimes you crave it, crave human contact, and crave for another person's hands on your body just so that you can feel something, so that you can forget the broken heart that resides in your chest for just one day, but you never give into the temptation as you once would have. Prison has changed you, you know this, and you're no longer that naive, innocent and needy woman you once were; you're not weak anymore. You avoid attention these days, prefer to stay in your apartment and read books, remember the places you've been and dreams of the places you'll go. You've been saving for years, working a nine to five job that you hate in hopes that one day you can relive the memories of your youth, when you travelled around the world with _her_ at your side. It's the only time that you've ever felt truly alive and you think you've been feeling this emptiness, this hollow ache in your chest for far too long.

You've been living in your memories for so long that you've become detached from the outside world. You've spent years building up barriers in your mind and around your heart and you've pushed away all of the people that ever cared about you, but you don't care. You feel nothing, you've just been going through the motions, and you've lost every ounce of life that once coursed through your veins so strongly. You dream of losing yourself in the paddy fields of Bali, of walking along the cobblestones streets of Paris and even drinking a pint in one of the many cafes in the dreaded Belgium, it's the only thing that has kept you going.

You lie in bed and think of all the places you could go, tomorrow if you want, since you've been out of prison for four years and you're probation is finished. You try not to think of those fifteen months behind bars, especially the last eight months, but you remember every fucking day. It's the reason you feel so empty, broken and shattered beyond repair, the reason you want to disappear into the foreign countries you once visited and lose yourself in memories of better times. Those last eight months were the worst of your life, a nightmare that you relive every day because it never ended and nothing has changed since the moment you were called to Caputo's office, the day your life and heart shattered into a thousand pieces that could never been mended.

You remember it clearly; the sympathetic look in his eyes as he gestured for you to take a seat, remember the feeling of dread that ran down your spine at the forced calm expression on his face. He had spent minutes beating around the bush and you remember feeling your anxiety rise, until your felt as if you were going to explode, especially when he brought up the possibility of a second furlough.

You remember feeling nothing when he finally said the words, nothing could have prepared you for it and your entire body shut down in the complete shock that followed. You could feel your heart pounding against your chest, could hear the blood rushing through your veins but you didn't feel anything. You nodded your head to say you understood, but you didn't, you couldn't possibly understand because what he said was impossible. You stood from your seat and you thanked him, you fucking thanked him, before you left the room and it wasn't until you were halfway back to your cube that everything fell apart.

You vaguely remember screaming, flailing and kicking, your fists pounding against the floor until your knuckles cracked and crunched and you were kneeling in a pool of your own blood. You didn't feel the pain, all you felt was anger, regret, self-loathing and hatred for yourself and for _her _and for the bars that kept you apart. You wailed and sobbed like a madwoman, even as you felt yourself being carried away, you never once stopped screaming and fighting. They threw you in Psych, but you didn't care, all you cared about, all you could think about is what Caputo told you in his office.

_Alex Vause is dead._

It was the last day that you ever felt anything.

They kept you in Psych for months, so drugged that you barely knew who you were, but no amount of drug could ever make you forget that she was gone. And once they let you out, you walked around the prison like a zombie, feeling nothing as if they were still inserting the needle into your arm every day. You barely ate, never slept; never spoke another word to your fellow inmates despite their attempts to comfort you. You saw her everywhere, in between the stacks in the library and sitting on her old bunk in her cube every time you walked past. It was like her ghost was following you around the prison and it only got worse once you were released. You'd see glimpses of her face when you walked down the street and you'd watch her in your kitchen, sipping from a mug of coffee as she gazed back at you from behind black rimmed glasses. She never spoke to you and every time you would blink, she would disappear and as the years passed by, you saw her less and less until she finally stopped making appearances in your life.

That's when you decided to start searching for her, when you started planning to revisit all the places you'd ever been with her, in an effort to feel her presence once more in your life.

You wished that you had never left her in the first place; wished that you'd stayed with her in Paris when you had the chance.

You hated yourself, loathed yourself for leaving her, for never calling and for never opening a single fucking letter that she sent you. You took them with you when you left and they still rest in your bottom drawer, still unopened more than four years later. You can't bear the read them, read the words written from her hands for fear of what you'll find there. You don't know what you're more scared of, finding anger in her words or love and forgiveness; you don't think you could bare either.

You think about getting up and reading them now but you make yourself stay still, curl tighter in on yourself in attempt to gain some warmth. You think about Paris and you think about Cambodia and you think about hot sand beneath your back and even hotter lips on your skin. It works for a moment, you can almost feel the sun on your face and her hands on your thighs but a quiet creak of floorboards alerts you to the fact that you're not alone and the cold shiver that runs down your spine destroys your efforts at keeping warm.

You're not the woman that you once were and you've learned from _her_, so you do not panic, you do not hide or scream. You roll over onto your back, your hand reaching for the baseball bat that is wedged between your bed and your bedside table and you attempt to focus your eyes in the darkness as your fingers curls around smooth wood. A figure stands in your doorway and you remember the last time this happened, can still feel the heat in your cheek from where a fist collided with your face and you grip the handle to the bat tighter. Your heart is pounding in your chest, more from adrenaline than from fear and you sit up in bed just as the light flicks on.

And you must be fucking dreaming because this is impossible. You've been thinking about her so much that you're sure that you're hallucinating, imagining her standing in your doorway, looking exactly the same as she did more than four years ago. She's dead, you think to yourself as you stare into her green eyes; but there she is, standing in your bedroom as if it's the most natural thing in the world.

You've finally lost your fucking mind, you think, and you find that you don't care one single bit. It's so good to see her face.

_"Alex?"_

Her smile is both hesitant and excited and she reaches up to push her hood back from her head to reveal hair as black as night. She looks like the same woman that you met when you were twenty two, with her perfect black eyeliner, skin tight black leather pants and doc martin boots. She wears a black hoody beneath a leather jacket, zipped up to cover the t-shirt beneath and you feel an disbelieving smile jerking the corner of your mouth, the first one you've felt in a long time.

_"Hey." _Her voice is soft and croaky, as if she's on the verge of crying and her green eyes are darting over your face, as if she's trying to memorize every tiny detail. She looks exhausted and there are deep lines that crease the corners of her eyes and she honestly looks as if she's going to collapse right in the doorway. _"Did I wake you?"_

_"Am I not still dreaming?" _It's more of a plea for her to tell you this is real than it is a question; you want for this so badly to be real. Her smile cracks at your words, her bottom lip tremors and there are tears in her eyes, which mirror the ones you can feel welling up in your own. You're falling apart at the mere sight of her and don't care if this is an illusion, created by your lonely mind, you're just glad that she's back.

It never occurs to you that this is the first time she's ever spoken to you; in all the times you've seen her in the past four years. It never occurs to you that this could be real.

It's so sudden when it happens, like a dam crumbling beneath the weight of the water it is trying to contain, how she just breaks apart right in front of your eyes. Her steps are quick but shaky as she crosses the room to where you lay and when her hands cup your face, so warm and real and _alive_, you can feel every tiny tremor in her fingers against your cheeks. Her knees buckle and she falls to the floor beside your bed, choking on her words as she pulls you down until your foreheads are pressed together.

_"I'm so sorry." _Her words are strained and choked with sadness and regret. _"I'm so fucking sorry, Piper."_

Your hands come up to cover the ones that cling to your cheeks and your fingers graze her pulse point and the steady thump of her heart sends your own into a frenzy. Your chest begins to ache and your defenses that you've been building for years are crumbling and you're still convinced that you're hallucinating but you pray that this doesn't end. You've lost the filter between your brain and your mouth, not that you ever had much of one to begin with and your words comes out strained and broken.

_"You're dead." _It's a bare whisper and your heart is breaking and you're fucking insane, but you stopped caring a long time ago. _"You're dead, Alex."_

You're trying to come to terms with the fact that she's here, the fact that this woman in front of you is _alive _and _breathing_, instead of burnt to nothing as you were told. You remember what Caputo told you, word for word, about the series of shots that were loosed in her apartment, of her blood and skin that was found in the wreckage after the bomb Kubra's men left in her home exploded.

Pink mist, they had called her, since the explosion had been so strong that nothing had been left but a few strands of hair and splatters of blood.

_"I'm so sorry, Pipes." _She says again and then she tells you the story; she tells you of Kubra's men breaking into her apartment and the gun fight that followed. Your push your hand beneath her shirt and feel the knotted scar on her shoulder from where she was shot, where her blood splattered against the wall. She tells you of taking two lives that night, of finding the suitcase waiting outside the door, complete with homemade bomb to destroy any evidence. She tells you of becoming the invisible woman, of losing herself in a village in Africa and washing her clothes in a dirty stream deep in the heart of India. She tells you that she wanted to call every day, to write, to make contact and how much she missed you and she doesn't stop apologizing for a second.

And you tell her that you forgave her the second she turned on the light.

She has migrated from the floor and onto your bed, lying on the covers while your body is still hidden beneath the sheets, though you are no longer cold. Your foreheads are pressed together and she hasn't stopped touching you, your hands, your face, your arms and your hair. Each touch is like being dipped into warm water, revitalizing your skin and returning feeling to your body and soul, you feel alive for the first time in four years.

But it cannot last forever and it's not long before she tells you that she has to go.

_"I'm still dead, Piper." _She whispers with her fingers tangled in your hair and her green eyes full of sadness and regret. _"I'll always be the invisible woman, I can't stay here."_

It almost makes you angry; you want to be angry, because why did she even bother to show back up in your life if she only planned to leave again? You want to beg her to stay but you understand her predicament and your grateful to her if only for her letting you know that she's still alive, for taking that aching weight off your chest that has been suffocating your for years, slowly killing you. You suddenly think about Paris and Cambodia again and the money you've saved in your bank account and it would be so easy. You haven't made many friends since you've left prison and it wouldn't be hard for you to just disappear, to become an invisible woman. You're barely a ghost of the woman you've were and you know that Alex will take every shred of you with her when she leaves, so you make a choice.

_"I haven't been able to stop thinking about Cambodia." _There's a hidden meaning behind your words and you know she understands by the way her green eyes twinkle and flicker with hope.

_"Me too." _She whispers.

And in the morning, your bed is still freezing, but you don't even notice because you're already on a plane and you can feel the warmth of the sun on your skin and the hot sand at your back and your heart is full and with her warm hand in your own, you feel alive, even as you disappear.


End file.
