Sarah doesn't look at Cosima like a sister.
In a way, it takes her weeks - weeks - after she returns from Frankfurt, to see it. It takes that long to see that the way Sarah regards Cosima, the way she ducks her head to her whiskey glass and her cheeks colour so slightly, the way she sways between her feet when Delphine is around. It takes that long to see that her glances, her way of steadying Cosima with her hand on her hip, the way she unconsciously admires the low cut of Cosima's overly gauzy tank tops, are not sisterly.
In another way, it took only seconds of being in the room with them both for the skin on the back of her neck to rise. It took only Sarah's quick look, as Cosima flung herself joyfully into Delphine's arms, for some repressed animal instinct of hers to come burning to life and identify Sarah as a competitor, a threat to her and hers.
Inevitably, reality cuts through. It takes a month, but it happens like this: she drops Cosima off to help Sarah understand her research about the differing health issues integrated into the Castor clones. Sarah is staying at Mrs S' house with Kira, and Delphine helps Cosima's slender form up the snow covered path, teasing and jostling as they go. She's gentle against Cosima's stark hips, but Cos is grinning, enthused at the prospect of science and from half a cone of weed with her breakfast. They slide past Sarah, still in the doorway with her hands around her Earl Grey, and she deposits Cosima onto the couch as a loose bundle of free falling, happy limbs.
Delphine tucks Cosima onto the couch, and they kiss, and then her phone is buzzing as she's standing, and she's always been inclined to wander when she speaks on the phone, so she's in the kitchen when she turns and sees Sarah slide onto the couch by Cosima and lightly raise her face with two fingers under her left jawbone.
Delphine stops listening to her phone call.
Cosima lifts her face to Sarah's, and their eyes meet, and Cosima's hand is on Sarah's arm now and their gaze doesn't break. Sarah leans in a little, saying something soft that Delphine doesn't catch, and Cosima twitches her head to the side and then tucks it closely below Sarah's jaw instead.
Sarah's shoulders drop with the longest exhale she's seen her give. Sarah Manning breathes from her chest, doesn't let anything get deep inside her. She exhales, and slides her arm around Cosima.
"Delphine? Hey, Delphine? I think you're dropping out, can you hear me?"
She flinches. "Qui. Yes, I'm sorry, I can hear you now. Please tell me again about the trial results?"
She knows now why she'd felt that sudden, brutal shot of adrenaline.
She goes to work. She spends the day in a preoccupied daze and if the Dyad continued to hire her for anything more than theoretical access to one of the clones, she'd fear for her job security.
How long had she missed this? How long had this been going on? Was there, in fact, anything happening? Perhaps she'd misread their interaction. Perhaps she was panicking, pointlessly, over nothing more than a close and affectionate bond. They hadn't kissed, after all, no matter what she thought she'd begun to see.
She hopes for this. Wants it. But she turns over their interaction in her head - Sarah's hands, tender on Cosima's face, the way Cosima had turned her head into the touch - and knows, deep in the pit of her stomach.
Sarah has touched Cosima. Has in all likelihood fucked her, put her hands and her mouth where Delphine has done all too infrequently. Sarah has seen the way tension builds up in Cosima's stomach, caused the crease that forms between her eyebrows when she's close, heard the way Cosima laughs in bed. It guts her.
Delphine had taken her to bed only last night, gone down on Cosima for ages before being flipped and pressed improbably hard into the mattress. Cosima had been exhausted afterwards, slept unmoving on her side right through the night, but she'd never once paused in her actions or her enthusiasm. Delphine hadn't thought to doubt that Cosima wanted her, loved her still. She'd said it, during, and slurred it again as her eyes closed, glasses pressing awkwardly into her cheek.
Delphine stays at her desk and works uselessly, mechanically. She files and tests and answers emails, rereads research on speculative stem cell technology. She even finds it in her to smile briefly, when Cosima texts her bad puns around lunchtime. But she doesn't reply, and she stays at her desk and works. She works well past when she'd agreed to pick Cosima up.
She doesn't reply to the texts that gradually, then increasingly, collect on her phone. Once six passes, she stops reading them, doesn't answer, either, the repeated calls.
At some point, she realizes she's been sitting motionless, head in her hands, for longer than she can remember. Her back aches when she finally straightens, dragging her hands, wincing, through her hair. She needs painkillers, or a drink, and one is absolutely not going to be enough.
And she looks up, and Sarah is there. Still in a way that Cosima could never manage, watching her.
Delphine drops her hands, straightens her back, but doesn't stand. She'll fight, but not with fists. Not like Sarah does.
"How long?" she asks coldly, " How long have you been fucking her?"
Cosima is all movement, but Sarah is taut. She stares, then ducks her head, and there's something so Cosima in it that Delphine aches. Goddamnit, they're clones for christ's sake, how can they be identical and so unalike? Sarah shifts her weight, her leather jacket brushing the door frame, and shrugs a little.
"It ain't like that between us," is her answer, and Delphine could scream at the lie.
"No?" she's glacial, the words a twisting knot in her throat. " You haven't fucked her?"
Sarah exhales hard through her nose, raking her hand through her hair now. "No. Not since you've been back," she says.
That wasn't what she'd expected to hear. It makes her pause, and perhaps it assuages some of the hurt born from thinking Cosima would fuck her and then go to Sarah for the same. Some. But did it matter?
"Besides," Sarah says, begrudgingly, "it ain't like that." She's looking down, seeming to grope for words, looking for a concept that's as hard to say as to feel. "It ain't about the sex. I mean, it is, but like - not just that."
She looks up, catches Delphine's gaze. Her eyes are shining. Maybe she believes her, or maybe it's just masochism, but Delphine hears herself asking, "Well then what is it like?"
For the first time, Sarah leaves the doorway. Her ever present boots make a soft tread, but her proximity seems sudden when she slips her fingers lightly along the edge of Delphine's desk. Her gaze is detached, almost impersonal, as she looks over the lab, computer screens still on and microscopes still loaded with samples, the fridges laden.
"I wanted her to live," she says abruptly. "That's all, to begin with. I want her to live, and she's," she makes a frustrated gesture, "all stuck in her head, Cos, and I - we - we need her."
I need her, Delphine understands. But I need her too screams inside her.
Sarah's closer now, and how is it that she's both taller and skinnier than Cosima? It makes no biological sense. Genotype and phenotype, environmental influences, supplies her brain, but Sarah's saying, "It wasn't her idea, if that helps." She stops, considering, and snorts, "Not my idea, exactly, either, but she - she didn't start anything."
Delphine stares at her, then her hands. It would be easy to blame Sarah. She's making it easy, even, and it helps a little to think that Cosima wasn't the first to look at her clone and think what if. It helps to think Cosima didn't wait for her to leave the country only to fall into bed with Sarah Manning, Rachel's unmonitored tramp. And perhaps it would help if she could look at Sarah and see someone who took advantage of Cosima, someone who wrangled caring for an invalid into getting into her bed. But that isn't what this feels like.
Before, she'd tried not to let her imagination get involved, but her renegade brain had still spat up writhing images of the two of them together, limbs entwined and skin flushed, Cosima's moans underlined by Sarah's low cursing. Now, the picture she draws is more innocent, somehow chaste, of an ill Cosima and despairing Sarah.
She exhales, impatient. It doesn't sound as though Sarah had arrived, seen an opportunity, and started something in a lustful haze. It sounds as though Cosima was dying, and Sarah was desperate, and used every tool in her arsenal. But Sarah doesn't fight with her words. Logic, and science, and coolly thought out rationales, that's all Delphine's territory.
Delphine wants Cosima to live, too.
She stares again at Sarah, in her boots and leather jacket and her tight jeans. The eyeliner that has recently reappeared under Cosima's tutelage. The tousled hair, the flannel. She can see the appeal, even forgetting that her face is Cosima's.
Sarah's studying her too now, still closer, and Delphine can feel her gaze like the sun. Perhaps that's what drew Cosima to her, too.
Sarah extends her hand, but doesn't touch her. "She wants you to come home, Delphine. Really," and she pauses, "You need to talk to Cosima."