the visitor
Title: The Visitor
Pairing: Nikki/Helen.
Rating: None.
Disclaimer: Characters (and some of the dialogue in this fic) belong to Shed Productions, not me.
Word-count: 545
Concept: Helen POV musing
Spoilers + Notes: Set season 2 ep... 8? The day Helen visits Nikki. Answer to the_pottingshed Challenge #25: New Beginnings.
Feedback: Always welcome, no matter how harsh - just be practical! Commentary preferred on my journal post but either way.
In the short time she's worked in the prison service, the different roles in which she's placed herself, she never thought she'd ever be in this one. The visitor.
She's never known anyone in prison. She's never known anyone who's even been in prison. Her desire to work in the field was driven not by personal experience but by an abstract moral horror at the things she read in Criminology and Social Anthropology textbooks. The facts ran like a litany through her head as she'd walked the corridors every day in this building and the others like them where she'd trained and worked.
Seventy thousand people in prison. One third of petty offenders lose their home while in custody; two-fifths lose contact with their families; two-thirds lose their jobs. Around half of all prisoners have a reading age less than an 11-year old. Two in five prisoners lack basic literacy skills and four in five do not have basic numeracy. 40% of women going to prison have previously attempted suicide. She's one of the lucky ones; she's one of the smart ones; she's not like the rest.
She looks like the rest, sitting there. Helen's heart sinks as she steps into the visitors' room and Nikki, extra pale between her near-black hair and her pink tabard, head bowed, shoulders hunched, looks... she looks like a prison inmate.
Then Nikki looks up, and their eyes meet, and Helen feels her ears grow hot and she almost turns around right there and walks straight back out because she suddenly isn't sure she can do this, isn't sure she can walk across the room and just say "Hiya, Nikki," and sit down and not touch her and not kiss her and not burst into tears.
But if there's one thing she knows how to do in Larkhall it's autopilot through the pain, and before she knows it she's striding past Sylvia Hollamby without a glance, and she's standing looking down at Nikki Wade.
How did this happen? When, in here, in among the arguments, and the politicking, between the bars and the block and the rock and the hard place and the frying pan and the fire, did I find time to fall in love? How did this all begin?
And then she realises that it didn't. It didn't begin when she kissed Nikki in her cell, or when Nikki kissed her. It didn't begin when Nikki pressed her hand to her breast, or when she moved Nikki to Enhanced, or gave her that copy of Sophie's World.
It didn't even begin when she squared off against her almost a year ago, when she called Nikki's bluff and slung her into seg for the first time.
Or maybe it did. Maybe it began all of those times, maybe they were all tiny beginnings, little steps along the way. But as Helen looks down at her, meets her warm brown eyes with their impossibly long, dark eyelashes, she feels something new starting all over again. She suddenly understands what visits mean for the women in here, the symbol of hope, a future, a life beyond the four walls and vaulted ceiling of their cells. And she realises what this visit means to Nikki. We're gonna have to make this work. We're gonna make this work. I promise, Nikki.
"Hiya Nikki."