[FIC] Orphan Black: Stranger in the Shell of a Lover
Title: Stranger in the Shell of a Lover
Fandom: Orphan Black
Rating: PG
Word Count: ~3100
Featuring: Delphine Cormier, Cosima Niehaus
SPOILERS: Season 1
Also see: Breakdown of a Host-Parasite Relationship, Cophine Not-Drabble Cycle/Rewind, Repair, Replay
Disclaimer: “Orphan Black” is the property of Bell Media, Temple Street Productions, BBC America, the Space Channel, and associated affiliates. Not mine.
Summary: Sometimes it's necessary to show and tell.
Originally posted to AO3.
passengers missing (we’re looking for you)
When all was dissected and analyzed, then reviewed and assessed again, Delphine had no words for what, exactly, she was doing, what, exactly, she wanted, what, exactly, she felt.
There was no simple way to diagram how her life had so quickly become tangled between differing and opposing obligations and responsibilities. No tables or graphs capable of separating and quantifying the quagmire of emotions, frightening and conflicting and exhilarating, that weighted her every act. No flow chart to track how one decision led to the next, how slipping into one bed tumbled her into another’s, how signing an employment contract brought her here, quietly trying to pledge herself to aid the entity she’d been assigned to entrap.
Delphine had gotten too close to the subject.
The thought almost made her laugh. Of course she was too close to the subject; they were sitting in the same room. Her eyes sought out the object of her musings and found Cosima watching her. Delphine registered the moment Cosima noticed her noticing, how her eyes glinted from observing to guarded, like the way a sheen could fall across the lenses of her glasses, turning the transparent opaque.
The first few times had been unsettling, but the watching, the being caught watching, were a common occurrence these days, one that passed between them without comment.
Delphine leveled her gaze to match Cosima’s and pressed a knuckle to her mouth.
Not today.
Licking her lips, Delphine asked, “What are you thinking when you look at me like that?”
Cosima blinked and leaned back slightly. “Uh.”
Delphine lifted an eyebrow.
“Nothing really.” Cosima looked down at her laptop screen and frowned at it. Delphine let it go, but not without pursing her lips, hidden partially behind her hand. Before long, though, Cosima added, “I was thinking how you’re really quiet.”
Delphine’s forehead scrunched in thought. “I’m really quiet?”
Cosima contemplated the screen for another second before turning back to her. “Yeah. I didn’t notice until--” She stopped and raised her hands as if she were grasping something between them. “Well. So, like, before? Whenever we hung out or talked, you--watched me closely? You were always . . .” Cosima paused, tripping down inner lanes of thought. “Focused and present and engaged.” Her hands chopped through the air on each word, hammering them home. “It was kind of intense, come to think about it."
Cosima eyes found Delphine’s. “But you’re not really like that, are you?”
In Cosima’s voice was a cautious curiosity that kept at bay any chords of fear the question could have struck in Delphine. She felt rather the suggestion of a smile tug at her lips. “What am I like?”
“Quiet.”
Delphine succumbed to a little laugh.
“See?” Cosima insisted, gesturing in her direction with a hand. “Even your laugh is, like, quieter.”
“What does this mean, ‘quiet’?” Delphine inquired further, her voice and eyes carrying the smile she didn’t risk indulging. Her body turned just the slightest bit to more fully face Cosima.
“Y’know . . . quiet.”
Delphine’s lips threatened to split her face. “I don’t know what they teach in America, but I learned you should not define a word by using the word.” She paused for effect. “Especially not just the word.”
That earned her a small derisive sound close to a snort, chased by the trace of a smirk. “Fine, Dr. Smartypants.” Delphine’s eyebrows furrowed at the epithet. “What I mean by ‘quiet’ is that . . . you go off into your thoughts a lot. And you’re kinda reserved? Energy-wise. And before you didn’t and you weren’t.”
Into Cosima’s silence, Delphine nodded slowly. Her gut clenched as she considered the orbit of Cosima’s words. They veered close to subjects they hadn’t dared yet to drag into the open space between them. The mood was never right and the answers--the truths--lurked like buried booby traps waiting to punish any misstep.
Delphine pressed her lips together.
There would never be a right time.
Delphine met and held Cosima’s gaze. “You wonder which is the real me. If either.”
Cosima’s eyes narrowed. Alarm and wariness colored her gaze. Delphine read her expression with a twisting pang in her heart. From here forthrightness appeared such a long journey off and sometimes Delphine wasn’t sure they’d taken even the first step toward it.
“Something like that,” acceded Cosima.
Delphine discerned the hesitation threaded between the words. Gently, softly, she prompted, “But not exactly like that?”
Cosima eyed her with the same consideration she afforded slides beneath a microscope. Then she shook her head and scoffed, a disgusted sound that clawed out of her throat. It wasn’t derision directed at Delphine, not entirely. No one could be harder on Cosima than Cosima.
Delphine waited, until the silence grew thick and viscous, necessitating an interruption less they both suffocate on the anticipation of the unsaid and the unknown. She waited until Cosima was compelled to speak, her voice even in tone and diction, but roughened with husky textures. “I keep thinking you’re the woman who lit up like a light bulb and watched me like a hawk whenever she saw me, or who sometimes laughed a little too loud at something I said, or who kept trying to sell me on how great Neolutionism is. But then I see you sitting there quiet and oblivious, just--off in your own head, thinking about who knows what, and it hits me, like, ‘Wow, I have no idea who this woman is.’”
The weary cynicism of her delivery contradicted the intensity of her gaze drilling into Delphine, focused with the concentration of a laser beam, digging, digging, burrowing with each word. What Cosima saw Delphine couldn’t have said, only that she did not look away, did not break the eye contact that near vibrated in the space between them with the song of a struck tuning fork.
Delphine kept her silence until her molars ached. Flexing her jaw loose, she swallowed to moisten her throat. “No idea?”
Cosima didn’t respond. Her mouth twisted into various dashes and lines, curves and considerations, close-lipped and sealed. After a time, Delphine bowed her head and smiled, hiding the lackluster and disparaging expression.
“Perhaps that makes two of us, then,” Delphine declared, lifting her head, features smoothing. Cosima’s eyes narrowed in wary inquiry. Delphine shrugged. “You’re a mystery to me, too.” Cosima’s eyes went slitted; such words could only sound trite to her. Delphine rolled her lips, drawing them inward. “And when I’m with you . . .” Delphine’s head swiveled minutely from side-to-side. “Sometimes I don’t know who I am either.” Cosima’s scrutiny continued unrelenting as Delphine lowered her eyes, pushed her hair back, and raised her gaze again. “But I want to find out. If I can.” She chewed on her bottom lip. “It can be a lot to think about.”
Cosima’s eyes darted between one of Delphine’s to the other, looking, searching, the line of her jaw drawn as tight as a rebuke. Then she turned away, with the barest shake of her head, and exhaled in a soundless sigh.
“You’re telling me,” she rasped. With the last word falling from her lips, Cosima snuck a glance at Delphine out of the corner of her eye. Beneath the furtive inspection, Delphine didn’t register a smile hazarding its way upon her lips but she saw it reflected in the hesitant, reluctant curling of Cosima’s.
“Now you’re going to say that we should do all this soul searching together,” Cosima said drily.
“No,” Delphine said carefully, reining in her smile, “because you just did. But it’s a very good idea.”
Cosima gaped at her. “You--you’re an asshole.”
Delphine nodded. “I may be.” She relinquished the hold on her smile, on the fondness that curled tight behind it once it was set free, on the warmth she’d tamped down into the timid confines of her fluttering heart that now spread throughout her limbs at the sight of Cosima shaking her head and breaking into a knowing, amused smirk--granting permission, giving consent. “We’ll find out.”
there’s a reason not to want this (but I forgot)
"Why did they send you to monitor me?"
"What do you mean?" Delphine countered.
Cosima turned away from her desk and spread her hands. "Like with Beth, it was a double-blind. She didn't know she was being monitored and her monitor didn't know she was a clone. He reported on her without even knowing why. But you obviously knew what I was--what I am. You were--studying me before we even met."
Delphine nodded slowly. "Yes."
"So why you? Why when you knew so much? When you were a--a participant in the experiment."
Delphine shook her head. "I don't know."
Cosima gave her a look but Delphine cut her off, "No, really. I don't know. Much of the project is classified and there are many levels of security clearance. I was told everything on a 'need to know' basis. But," Delphine continued in a more measured tone, "if you're asking me to speculate, I believe that they suspected, or were near certain, that you had become self-aware. When you moved to Minnesota, a new monitor needed to be assigned to you. They likely saw it as an opportunity to confirm their suspicions and so sent someone who had knowledge of the experiment."
"When I moved," Cosima repeated to herself. "Do you know who my previous monitor was?"
Delphine shook her head. "No."
Cosima raised an eyebrow.
"The identities of monitors are classified," Delphine explained. "None of the reports I glimpsed had names."
"Reports." Cosima braced herself with a deep breath. “Wow.”
"I wasn’t shown much,” Delphine said softly. “I’m more familiar with your bloodwork than the details of your life. Keeping monitors relatively ignorant is standard practice, I believe. As far as I can tell, they try very hard to integrate monitors seamlessly into your lives, and for that to feel natural . . . ." Delphine waved one hand listlessly, a bare flick of the wrist. “It’s better to know less.”
"Okay,” Cosima drawled, “explain it to me: I move, taking no one with me, and that opens up a monitor position that needs to be filled. So they send a scientist?”
"I don’t believe it had to be a scientist," clarified Delphine, "but that it was convenient to send one. You were moving to pursue a doctorate in a scientific field and they wanted . . . They wanted to send someone who would appeal to you. Who would be someone you would want to befriend. Someone like a fellow scientist.” Delphine’s eyebrows rose and fell in a self-deprecating arch. “Sending . . . me . . . had an added advantage: I didn’t have to be briefed on the particulars of the project. If you were self-aware, I would know what to look for.”
“Is that why you went through my shit?”
The words and the force behind them took both women by surprise. Delphine’s breath curled out in a gust as if they’d jabbed her in the gut. Cosima watched her, stiff, expression on the crumbling side of neutral.
Delphine looked away and passed a hand over her brow. A tremble marked the progress of her fingertips until she interlaced her fingers and dropped her joined hands into her lap. When she looked back at Cosima, sadness pinched the corners of her lips. “You said you knew all along, but did you really suspect me from the beginning?”
Cosima frowned, weighed the question, and settled on a shrug.
“Even though it was you who repeatedly approached me?” Delphine pressed.
Cosima held up a hand. “Look, let’s just drop it, okay?”
“But what if I really had been a foreign exchange student who was,” Delphine sent her hair swaying with a shake of her head, “studying microbiology? And was new and alone in America? And had broken up with my boyfriend in France? And--and had yet to make any friends?”
Cosima waited until she was finished to let out a snort-laugh. “But you weren’t.”
“I could have been.”
“But you weren’t,” Cosima repeated, in a voice small and soft and devoid of any laughter.
They stared at each other.
“But,” Delphine began softly.
“Don’t,” Cosima cut her off. The effort cost her. The effort of convincing herself everything was alright when her life was spiraling deeper and deeper into bewildering and terrifying, of navigating conversation with Delphine where it was once so easy and thoughtless, of trying to forgive--Delphine, herself--when forgiveness, and where it might lead, could pose a danger to them all.
Cosima pressed the heels of her palms against her forehead. “You weren’t, Delphine. You weren’t just some regular grad student. You weren’t lost. You didn’t just break up with a boyfriend. You weren’t someone who just wanted to be my friend.” She let her arms fall and shook her head. “You weren’t, even when I second guessed myself at every other word between 'bonjour' and 'ciao.' Then second guessed all that second guessing. Then backpedaled and tried to tell myself, ‘Maybe she is who she appears to be.'” She took a breath that shuddered--not rattled in warning of a coughing onslaught, but from the tears that threatened to gather in her eyes--and finished, in a near whisper, “But you weren’t. No matter how much I wanted you to be.”
Delphine’s expression reflected Cosima’s emotions in motion picture, a shifting play of longing, sadness, and--Cosima almost looked away--empathy. She saw, too--and hated that she saw it, that she recognized it at a glance, resented even that Delphine was this type of person and that this layer was not part of the construct of lies--that Delphine wanted to touch her. Yet Cosima could feel the length of the room stretched between them like an ocean.
Long-distance never works.
Delphine broke eye contact to look down at her hands, bouncing them in her lap. “I thought about it--I think about it. Sometimes. How things could be if I had been all of those things and not--not who I am. But you know what’s silly?” Delphine peeked at Cosima through her lashes. “I have trouble finding the start. I can’t think of what leads me here. What could have brought me across an ocean to meet you, if not you. Causality, you know?” Delphine paused as her mouth attempted a smile that fled as soon as it touched her lips. “Do you ever have trouble turning off the scientist part of yourself?”
She didn’t wait for a reply. Her gaze shifted, just to the left of Cosima, into empty space. “But say I could skip the how--just, um, ‘get to the story,’ as my mother would say.” The corners of Delphine’s mouth deepened and dimpled. "I imagine that we would meet, maybe just like we did, only this time everything would be--what it seemed.” Delphine nodded to herself. “And you--friendly and charming and,” Delphine hesitated before adding, “beautiful--would win me over.”
Cosima sucked in her lips.
“But there would still be all of this,” Delphine said quietly as her eyes swept across their laptops and the myriad flat surfaces obscured by manila folders, printouts and thick reference tomes. “For you. I would not know about any of it and maybe I would never know about any of it. Would you hide it from me? To protect me? Or out of--shame is not the right word, but maybe?” Her focus snapped back onto Cosima. “Could we have . . . this?” She gestured at everything in the room, all the space between them that they had filled with the secrets of Cosima’s being, her biology, her makeup. “When that you tells me you are sick--or maybe that you doesn't tell me, but that me finds out, sees you coughing into a tissue or hears you in the bathroom--would I be able to help you? Or would I be--” Delphine’s lips moved, struggling, and Cosima could practically see her brain trying to choose words, “helpless? And ignorant?
“Would that be better?”
Delphine licked her lips. “When I think like that, I wonder, if I could do it all again, if maybe I would make all the same choices if it would mean ending up here. With you. Even exactly like this.”
Cosima pressed her lips together to keep them from quivering. “What if I can’t forgive you?”
“I’m not asking you to forgive me,” Delphine answered in equally soft tones. “All I ask is that you let me help you.”
The snort took longer to work its way out of Cosima this time.
Delphine’s expression faltered, the light in her eyes banked to a dim glimmer, lips slacking between uncertainty and dashed hope. “What?”
Cosima turned to the window and shook her head, muttering, “Causality.”
“Pardon?”
“Nothing,” Cosima said, louder and more clearly, searching out Delphine with her eyes once again. Taking in the sight of her, attentive and expectant, Cosima knew that if she could see the inevitable--that letting Delphine help her would lead to trusting Delphine, as she’d always wanted to, perhaps even more than she’d ever allowed herself, which would mean forgiving Delphine along the way--that Delphine could plot the same trajectory. That Delphine did. That Delphine had.
Because Delphine got it. Delphine got Cosima.
Cosima didn’t know whether to despise or admire or thank the Neolutionists for choosing so aptly in this gorgeous, doe-eyed, intelligent scientist, but even as the conflict crossed her mind, she knew that it didn’t matter, that in this she wasn’t fighting the Neolutionists, or even Delphine, but herself, with her desire to capitulate, with her fear of forgiving and of trusting, with the sinking suspicion that she already was.
Cosima could have laughed at herself. Without preamble, she said, “Yeah.” When Delphine’s eyebrows drew together, she added, “To your question.”
“My question?” Delphine repeated. She looked so damn cute wearing confusion. Was it safe to admit that?
Cosima smirked. “Yeah, I’m not sure it’s even possible to turn off the scientist part of my brain.”
Delphine managed to look taken aback for only a second. A small smile tugged shyly at her lips. “Yes. It can be problematic.”
“Not in the right company,” Cosima pointed out offhandedly.
Delphine’s smile found the confidence to widen. “Right. I feel lucky to . . . be in good company?”
“Ditto,” Cosima agreed, feeling the smirk pull at her mouth. “Obvs.”
Delphine burst into laughter, startling Cosima with how light and clear it sounded. “‘’Obvs’! There is that word again! What is this ‘obvs’?”
Stunned, Cosima stared at Delphine. Then she was laughing and Delphine was laughing and no harmony like their intertwining voices and no sensation like the bubbling levity of their shared mirth and no revelation like this innocuous misunderstanding had sounded or felt so good in weeks.
-Fin-
Notes: This is a piece that sat in my drafts folder for a long time, that I started shortly after I finished "The (Biological) Facts." But I got blocked writing this and, in the meanwhile, ended up starting and pursuing what would become the Cophine Not-Drabble Cycle. But these particular conversations directly followed "Breakdown of a Host-Parasite Relationship" and thus bridged my thinking between what I had estabilshed in "Breakdown" and what was happening in the Not-Drabbles.
I considered incorporating these two conversations into the Not-Drabbles themselves, but the writing style was slightly different than what I was doing in the Not-Drabbles. (Which in itself was kind of strange since I've never really thought of my writing as varying very much.) Nevertheless, they felt like a prelude to the Not-Drabbles, especially in the sense that these "break the ice" and establish the teasing, bantering style of Cosima and Delphine's dialogue in the NDs--and my working theory of Delphine's monitor-ship.
So I present them separately but with the intention that they should be read before reading the Not-Drabbles . . . even though the Not-Drabbles were like halfway done by the time I finished this. Just go with it.
All chapter titles are taken from Vienna Teng's "Recessional." I pretty much think that song is the captures the quintessence of where S1 left Cosima and Delphine. XD