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Nicky is difficult, and she knows this.
At her core, she’s a scared little girl who craves love with her entire being, but she never quite gets it the way she needs it. This shapes her.
She seeks it until it almost destroys her, and when she can’t quite find it, she turns to alternative ways of trying to live the way she wants.
The drugs make things worse, and they take over her completely, scraping out who she used to be and leaving behind a shell.
Or maybe, she thinks, that was just her mother’s work.
Jokes are one of the few things she has left—humor is armor against the very people she’d like to love and trust her, which is pretty fucking funny if you ask her.
But that’s life.
~~
The moments when she comes closest to death are the ones that make her feel the most—maybe the most she’ll ever feel, she wonders, but she doesn’t die.
This is feeling, even if it’s not what she wants to feel. Maybe it’s better than the alternative, maybe it’s more than what she deserves anyway.
~~
Prison is an adjustment, as you might imagine.
She wonders if this is rock bottom, or if lying in a ditch somewhere dying of a drug overdose would be a little closer to rock bottom. It doesn't really matter, because that can still happen.
She’ll get out, and she’ll fall back into old habits, because that’s what she knows.
~~
She falls into patterns—eat, sleep, and fuck on the side when no one is watching.
And let’s be honest here, there are blind spots, and it’s easy to find them.
Then, with time, she makes friends.
She’s got a dealer inside the prison, and that’s all the friendship she thinks she needs.
Others seem to disagree. There’s Red, who pulls her out of the trash and tosses her in the shower, as if trying to rinse away her sins, but this is not a baptism.
Red pulls her back up, and offers her family, and opportunity.
Nicky’s not a fool, she knows what this is. Save people from themselves, and their loyalty is yours forever.
Nicky knows what Red’s doing, but Nicky craves what she’s offering, and so she takes it with both hands.
~~
Then—then there’s Morello, who Nicky wants desperately.
She’s beautiful, yes, but she’s a fairytale too.
She’s all red lips with pretty smiles and fanciful stories of the fiancé who never comes to visit.
They strike up a friendship, yes, and Nicky falls in love with her(or maybe the idea of her? who knows), yes, but if you start at the beginning, Morello comes to her first, she kisses Nicky first.
She pulls back first too, and tells Nicky that it doesn’t mean anything, that Christopher wouldn’t mind, that she’s just lonely, you know?
Yeah, Nicky knows.
~~
People come and go, because that’s how prison is. And sometimes they come back, because that’s how the outside world is.
Morello ends things, and that’s okay, that’s just how this goes, isn’t it?
People always eventually say no, they all eventually say goodbye.
She moves on, and she somehow loses almost everyone else in her life too.
Red falls from grace, and her girls are all scattered, and then it’s just Nicky again.
She has Big Boo, whose idea of friendship is a sex competition, but Nicky’s game, she always is.
Then there’s Chapman, of course, but she’s in the middle of some screwed-up drama of her own making, and that’s something Nicky understands well.
~~
Family is still family, and things come back together, because life can’t just be shit, it has to give you hope too, just to make sure it really hurts when the rug is pulled out from under you again and again and again.
~~
Now here’s the part where things change again, because they have a habit of doing that.
There’s an attempted prison escape—well, two, but who's counting?
Then Rosa(good on you Rosa, Nicky thinks, I always knew you had it in you) runs over Vee, and wow prison is fucked up.
Well, well, well.
“I’m not getting transferred to Virginia,” Piper says, flopping down next to her. “And here I thought that would be the biggest news of the week. Next to the change in leadership, of course.”
“Sorry your news got a little overwhelmed by the shitstorm of prison escapees and people dying,” Nicky says with a smile, and it’s not mean, just Nicky.
“I know,” Piper says. “It’s ridiculous,” she snorts, and then laughs full on.
“Are you having an aneurysm?” Nicky asks. “Should I be worried?”
“I’m not worried,” Piper says with a shrug. “Anyway, I have to get back. They’re really going overboard enforcing the rules in this place.”
“Two inmates did just escape,” Nicky points out, and Piper waves it off and shakes her head.
“I know. I’ll see you later, okay?”
“Okay,” Nicky says with a shrug.
Weirdly enough, life almost feels normal again.
~~
The first time Nicky meets Piper Chapman, she understands her.
There are plenty of people from shittier lives with worse histories, but Chapman's story is familiar to her.
At least Chapman isn’t hooked on drugs. Just a drug mule, Nicky thinks, and imagine if she’d been so lucky.
But the family thing, the family that doesn’t quite understand you(at least Chapman’s loves her, Nicky thinks), that she gets.
It’s the whole ‘from a different world’ thing.
It’s doesn't really make a whole lot of sense, but it makes Nicky kind of feel bad for the girl. She’s so naïve, and so self-centered that Nicky finds her sort of refreshing.
She’s in the middle of some ridiculous love triangle for the first bit of her prison sentence too, and it’s a bit like watching a trainwreck that you could probably stop if you really tried, but Nicky doesn’t.
She might be able to stop it, but it’s not like she can make Vause disappear, and so long as she’s here, Chapman is careening towards her.
She’s right, too, and then Vause is gone, and Piper’s fiancé is done, and yeah, that Nicky understands.
~~
But back to now.
Red’s recovering pretty well. She’s definitely never going to adjust to feeling powerless—no one handles powerlessness well unless they’ve never felt power, Nicky thinks.
Power is what gets you places, it’s what saves you from the worst of this place, from the worst of yourself.
Nicky wants enough to get through the day, but besides that, she's got other things on her mind.
She wants a lot of other things though, like drugs and to fall down into the darkest hole she can imagine. And then, other times, she simply wants her freedom(wants the love she’s always wanted, that she never gets).
But that, she knows, is life.
~~
She fucks Piper in the chapel, because they’re both lonely and needy and horny.
“You’re a good friend, did you know that?” Piper says afterwards, breathing heavily and wiping her brow.
Sex is sex, Nicky knows, and this is nothing different.
Nicky smiles. “I’m the best kind of friend,” she says, and it’s probably not true, but when it comes to this, maybe she is.
There are sexual benefits to this kind of friendship, and she finds comfort in them, and says as much.
Piper looks at her, smiles slightly, and agrees.
It doesn’t take a genius to know that this’ll happen again, and so it does, right then.
This can’t possibly go wrong, Nicky thinks, and she should know better than to hope that, she should.
But apparently not.
~~
Luschek is still an asshole, and still doesn’t really care about anything, and so when he catches them having sex instead of fixing some broken lamp, he just watches like the pervert that he is, and then suggests they get back to work.
He’s disgusting, but he’s predictable, and predictable is safer than the alternatives, so she’ll take it.
She’s a little disgusting too, anyway, so she can’t really judge all that much.
~~
The time slips away slowly, from second to second, minute to minute, and she never forgets exactly what her countdown is.
She’s not even sure she cares one way or the other sometimes, so maybe that’s part of her punishment.
But when she looks back upon past days, it’s a sea of meaninglessness.
Today, things are slow. This very moment, she feels an eternity passing.
But tomorrow, she’ll feel the next eternity, and so on and so forth.
This is slowly killing her, but so would being outside.
She wonders, sometimes, if there’s any point in hoping for tomorrow.
~~
She slips back into a routine, because the monotony is somehow comforting. On Tuesdays and Thursdays she screws Piper.
On a Sunday, Morello comes back to her, broken and defeated.
“I can’t do that again,” Nicky tells her. “You and I can’t do that anymore.” You told me that first, she thinks.
“I miss you,” Morello says, and Nicky’s heart clenches hard in her chest.
“I miss you too,” Nicky says, and she wishes she didn’t.
There’s hope in Morello's eyes, and there’s nothing worse than hope.
Hope might as well mean death, if you ask her.
But hope, she knows, springs eternal.
~~
“Four more months,” Piper tells her, and Nicky hmms at that.
“See, just do your time,” Nicky says, “And it’ll pass right by.”
Piper snorts. “Slowly, like a snail running a marathon.”
“I have over a year left,” Nicky tells her. “At least your snail’s almost at the finish line.”
Piper frowns, and then reaches out and pats her hand, like she’s trying to be comforting.
Nicky smiles, because it almost is. It’s nice that she tries, at least.
Most people don’t even bother doing that.
~~
Nicky has a problem.
Nicky will push away everyone, and then be angry at them for not being there when she needs them.
This is her curse.
Nicky sleeps with Morello, though it’s prison, let’s be real here, there’s no sleeping involved.
Nicky’s long since forgotten what it feels like it take your time, to do something other than rush for the finish line.
That’s her punishment.
~~
Piper can be hard and punishing, but more often she’s soft—all soft skin and gentle touches.
“Alex came to see me again,” Piper tells her, and Nicky nods her head.
“And how’d that go?”
Piper shrugs, like she doesn’t care. She does, of course.
Nicky knows that face, knows the way that it feels.
But unlike her, Piper gets loved back, that’s just the way this fucked up merry-go-round goes—some people get off, taking the hand of their loved ones, and others don’t.
Some people stay on the merry-go-round, completely forgotten by their parents, because it’s the nanny’s day off, and it’s too hard to remember that they even exist.
But that’s an issue for another day.
“My ex-fiance is dating my ex-best friend,” Piper muses aloud. “And Alex is free, and I’m sitting in here, rotting away.”
“You have to get over that,” Nicky tells her. “You can’t live with that kind of bitterness.” She’s getting out in a few months too, and the self-pitying thing isn’t going to play so well with people with much longer sentences.
“Sure I can,” Piper says. “Everyone else does.”
“In here, maybe,” Nicky says. “But those ones never leave, not really. They might step out of those prison gates, sure, but they’ll never leave here, and likely they’ll be back soon. That, or they end up buried in the ground, because they can’t let go of their shit.”
Piper sits quietly, and Nicky just sighs. “Eat your breakfast. It’s too early for this.”
~~
Piper takes her time when she eats Nicky out, which is a bit of a problem, because their time is limited, and sometimes she just barely gets to come(which in itself is kind of fun, she supposes).
There’s something nice and comforting about slow, Nicky thinks, though it scares her a little too.
It gives her time to really feel things, and not in an overwhelming rush the way it usually is.
It’s not frantic, it’s heavy.
It’s a nice change of pace, at least.
~~
Three months till Piper leaves, and Nicky thinks she’ll probably miss her a little.
She won’t think about her too much, because that’s just depressing, and the last thing Nicky needs in this hellhole is to be more depressed.
She looks down at her arms, and sees her scars, and reminds herself to stay strong, be better, live.
It’s too easy to forget, as she knows very well.
Remember, she thinks, remember.
Sometimes, it’s really easy to remember, like when Piper kisses her after they have sex, and it’s soft and chaste, or when they serve good food in the cafeteria, which happens almost never.
You have to take the good moments when you can.
~~
“I hate it here,” Piper says, and Nicky laughs, because she only has two and a half more months, that’s chump change.
“You’re telling me,” Nicky says, and it’s so damn funny, because she’s almost starting to feel Piper’s excitement.
She thinks she might be excited for Piper, which is surprisingly unselfish of her.
~~
Two months to go, and Nicky feels something, so she does what she normally does in these situations and screws at least three different people.
It doesn’t make her feel better, but this thing with her and Piper doesn’t actually mean anything, so the only rules she’s breaking are the prison’s, and when has she ever cared about those?
There’s something bubbling under the surface, and she feels it growing day-by-day, and it’s dangerous.
She doesn’t put a word to it, because she knows what happens when you do that.
But she feels it anyway, despite herself.
This only serves to make her angry.
~~
Sex without feelings is the best kind, she’s decided, because that’s how she rolls, that’s what keeps her safe.
She looks at Morello sometimes, and on occasion they screw, and she wonders what she feels.
She wonders what love feels like when it’s reciprocated, what it feels like to know without a shadow of a doubt that someone loves you too.
She’s not likely to ever find out, she thinks.
That’s simply her lot in the world.
~~
Let’s put a name to it, Nicky thinks.
Let’s talk about the way that Piper frowns when she’s reading something she’s really invested in, or how she still makes a face when she eats the really weird cafeteria food that Nicky’s still not sure is fit for consumption.
We could talk about the way that Piper feels in her arms too, but that’s sex, and Nicky’s comfortable with that.
More importantly, there’s the way that she feels in Piper’s—when Piper reaches out and caresses her face or kisses her neck, and did no one explain to her how friends with benefits arrangements are supposed to work?
Let’s call it love, Nicky thinks, to put a name to it, so that she can hate it.
So that she can fight it.
~~
Fifty days until Piper leaves, but that’s none of Nicky’s business. Nicky's got about a year left, and she's not sure what to do with that herself.
“The sex makes me feel better,” Piper admits one day. “Like I’m still a person who can make choices for herself, because everything else—“
“Is decided for you?” Nicky finishes, and Piper nods. Nicky knows the feeling.
There’s so little you can control, and so you cling to what you can.
“Thank you,” Piper says softly, reaching out and grabbing her hand.
Nicky has an intense desire to pull her hand back, but she doesn’t. Instead she looks around, to make sure no one is watching, because physical contact between inmates is not acceptable, and the last thing Piper needs is something bad on her record.
Not now, Nicky thinks.
“No problem, happy to oblige,” Nicky says, and she makes a crude sexual gesture, and Piper laughs, and all is well.
As well as it can be, anyway, because there are always limitations. Now that’s something Nicky never forgets.
~~
The days tick away then, and for the first time Nicky thinks she almost wishes time would slow back down again.
Or, at least, that it would feel that way, because she knows that time is made of discrete units, she’s just fucking upset, okay?
She’s hard on herself now too, especially now.
She’s still ignoring the way she feels, because there’s no point in doing anything else.
~~
“I’ll miss you,” Piper says softly, handing her whatever crap she wants Nicky to keep out of the stuff she's managed to accumulate.
It’s nothing special, just a book Nicky had said she’d wanted to read.
Nicky hadn’t really been serious about it, but Piper had taken it that way, and now she has a book she’s not sure she’ll ever read.
Well, Nicky thinks, she’s got plenty of time to change her mind.
“I’ll miss you too, blondie,” Nicky says with a slight smile. “Don’t come back here, okay?” She doubts that Piper will, but it needs to be said, just in case.
Piper will go back to her perfect life, and get herself a perfect new boyfriend or girlfriend, and then fiancé, and by the time Nicky gets out, who knows where she'll be? It's nine and a half months, it's an eternity.
“Thank you, Nicky,” Piper says, hugging her briefly when no one's watching. “Be safe, okay?”
Nicky shrugs, like yeah, sure, but then Piper looks her in the eyes and says it again. “Be safe, okay,” and it’s more of a demand this time.
“Yeah, sure,” Nicky promises.
“Good,” Piper says, and she goes back to divvying up the rest of her things.
~~
I love you, Nicky almost wants to say, but that’s ridiculous.
She doesn’t love her.
This is what prison does, it warps your perception, and it screws you the fuck up.
But anyway—Nicky hugs Piper one last time, and whispers the words in her ear, and then pulls away and slips away into the crowd, not bothering to turn back or to look at Piper’s face again, and then Piper’s gone.
And she’s safe.
It’s probably not a fair thing to do, but it’s the best for both of them. Nicky gets to say what she needs to say, and Piper doesn’t have to struggle to reply.
It’s better this way.
~~
She screws the feelings away then, almost recklessly, because love, love?
Love is bullshit.
She’s so reckless she almost gets caught, but thank god for church podiums.
She’s fully happy about all that she’s doing, but then she gets the request, and Piper wants to see her.
When she sees her again, she takes the hug, because Piper’s already going in for it, and it’s over quickly. Too quickly, but shut up.
“Missing this place already?” Nicky asks, plopping down at the table.
Piper sighs, and then breathes in deeply, like she has some sort of speech to make.
Oh no, please no.
Nicky does not have the time or the emotional strength to deal with this right now.
“If you’re going to give me the ‘I just got out of prison and I can’t waste my time with an inmate now because I have to get my life together’ spiel, then save your breath,” Nicky says, smiling slightly to take the sting out of it.
Piper hesitates, and narrows her eyes, studying her carefully. “I wasn’t going to say that.”
“Oh,” Nicky says. “Well.”
“You kind of sprang it on me at the last moment,” Piper says, and her hands are fidgeting on the table, like she wants to touch her, but she knows as well as the rest of them that she cannot reach them forward and touch Nicky.
It’s funny, Nicky thinks.
They can touch even less now than they could before.
“That was the point,” Nicky says. “I was saving you the trouble.”
“I didn’t ask to be saved the trouble,” Piper snaps out, and there’s a part of Nicky that enjoys getting Piper riled up.
It’s easy, too.
“Sorry,” Nicky says, and she knows that she doesn’t sound sorry.
“I feel—“ Piper hesitates. “I feel something for you, and I—“
“It’s okay, Chapman,” Nicky says. “Don’t worry about it. You don’t have to explain yourself to me. You’ve got a life to live, and I still have plenty of time to do. Even if I didn’t, there’s no room for you and me in the outside world. I get that.”
“I don’t—“ Piper objects, and Nicky shakes her head.
“Get with the program, Piper,” Nicky says softly. “Leave here, and go meet someone nice, and get your life back together. You’re not going to want me nine months from now, even if you think you want me now.”
“I don’t know what I want,” Piper says. “But I’d like to figure that out for myself, thank you very much,” she bites out, and Nicky raises an eyebrow.
“Well,” Nicky says. “You have plenty of time.”
~~
Nicky almost relapses, and she only manages not to by the grace of her friends and their kindness.
She pulls back from the edge, and settles down.
She needs to make better use of her time, she thinks, in more ways than one.
~~
Nicky has a broken heart, and she’s not happy about it. There was a reason she’d tried to stop herself from feeling this way.
There’s a reason why she’d tried to head it off before it became an issue.
Didn’t she say that?
She’s been through this before. She’s a pro at getting over people who don’t love her.
That’s how this works.
This is the story of her fucking life—she loves, and they don’t.
The rest is, as they say, history.
~~
She eats, she fucks, she sleeps.
She reads a little too, though not the book sitting on her desk.
Not the one from Piper.
No, no, no.
~~
She reads manuals, sometimes, and actually puts a little effort into learning that electrical crap when she’s working.
Might as well learn some valuable skills, right?
She’s got the time, after all.
~~
Piper doesn’t visit her again, but she does send her a letter apologizing for coming.
It doesn’t say much more than that, just calls their time together important, and says that she has feelings for her, and that she wants good things for her.
She hopes that when she gets out that she can find a way to be happy.
Happy, Nicky snorts.
She doesn’t get to be happy.
~~
The time passes, and suddenly she only has six months left.
It’s still prison, and it fucking sucks, but she's almost out. She's been here for four and a half years, and she can finally almost taste freedom.
She wonders what Piper’s up to even though that’s ridiculous, and she shouldn’t waste her time.
Get over it, she tells herself.
Get over it.
She pulls out a piece of paper and writes a letter to her mother, and even sends it on through.
Maybe it’s time, she thinks, to start trying to move on for real.
~~
Now here is a truth she’s not much proud of, but her mother is an asshole and Nicky doesn’t contact her because she wants her love, she contacts her because she wants to have a chance at actually living her life when she gets out.
She’ll need a place to stay, and some money to get by. And she knows her mother, you know. Her mother won’t just give her a chance.
Nicky will have to lay the seeds for her, she’ll have to pry and prod until her mother thinks it’s her own idea to invite Nicky to come stay with her.
A month before her release date, that’s exactly what her mother does(well, except her mom is setting her up in an apartment, which means Nicky'll be lucky to ever get a visit out of her). She even offers to have someone pick her up, and what did she say?
Like she said, she knows her mother.
~~
She steps out of the walls, and she feels different immediately. She cries too, but no one can prove that, okay?
She knows she’s not a different person, but maybe she is.
Time didn’t exactly stand still, and her clothes don’t fit her—though the ones her mother send in four different sizes definitely do.
There are conditions her mother imposes upon her release, and most of them don’t really bother her.
Go to school or get a job, preferably both. That she’d do anyway, obviously. Don’t do drugs (Nicky is actually kind of grateful for that one).
The rest of the rules are barely significant, and again, Nicky doesn’t mind.
This is just a stopping ground, a place to get her bearings while she tries to transition her way back to the real world.
Her mother sends her flowers, which is actually almost nice of her, and she hires a sober companion, which is funny.
Her mother doesn’t come to visit her(just sends her regards, and the flowers, and the sober companion), but Nicky wasn’t expecting that anyway. It still hurts a little though, and she hates herself for it.
~~
A week and a half into her new freedom, Nicky gets a phone call, and she stares at her phone in surprise.
She’s still adjusting, so it’s not like she knows anyone who would be calling her. Her mom’s number is programmed in, so it’s not her.
“Hello?” Nicky answers.
“Hey,” she hears, and she recognizes the voice immediately. “It’s Piper Chapman.”
“Well, hello there,” Nicky says. “And what have I done to deserve the honor of you calling?”
Piper laughs, and Nicky closes her eyes, enjoying the sound of it. “I heard you got out last week,” Piper says. “I looked you up, and I called three other people with your name before I got you,” Piper explains. “How are you?”
She could lie, or she could deflect with a few simple words, but instead she goes for the truth. “I don’t know. Why are you really calling?”
Piper is silent for a moment, and Nicky wonders if she’s rethinking her plan to call.
“Would you like to have coffee?” Piper asks, and Nicky bites her lip in surprise, drawing a little blood.
“Oh. Are you sure?”
“Yes,” Piper says. “Absolutely.”
“Okay,” Nicky hears herself say, and she feels very far away from herself.
~~
People like Nicky don’t get loved, they scrape the bottom of the barrel searching it, but all they ever find is pain.
Nicky, it seems, is luckier than most.
Nicky struggles to get her life together, and she makes mistakes, but she finds a way to be happy.
She finds a way to be loved. Because yeah, Piper loves her too.
And one day, someday, she even manages to believe it.