A/N Here goes another update! I've been editing this as opposed to practicing this huge presentation I have for my English class, but this was more enjoyable, and I'm not sure what we're doing for this presentation, so I might need a little extra luck on this one… Anyways, thank you so, so, so much to the two people who reviewed last chapter, I loved seeing some new names there, because that means that new people are reading and enjoying as well and it makes me every sort of happy to know that. So, anyways, first italicized bit is the 'present' and then within the plaintext there's a tiny italicized portion which is Delphine remembering one of her first conversations with Alison (I had to add that in!) so, I hope y'all enjoy this one!

-Nightshade

I do not own Orphan Black (in fact, I'm so tired from returning to school that it took me three attempts to spell "Orphan Black" without messing up, that definitely proves I'm not worthy of owning it.)

Of Microscopes and Bloody Hopes

Chapter Seven

I tinkered about the kitchen, really just trying to pass the time. There wasn't much here that was foreign anymore. It was a bit confusing, I suppose, the entire concept. One expects that when you fall in love, it's new and sparkling and addictive, but once you begin semi-cohabitating with the person (I suppose that's what one could call our relationship at this stage, Cosima and I) the magic disappears. The person becomes a regular part of everyday life, loses that shiny-newness. They become more human, more flawed. You realize that they have habits like leaving the toothpaste cap unscrewed, or forgetting to put the milk back into the fridge. You temper love with the slightest dash of pique. But with Cosima that didn't happen. In fact, the last time she'd left the milk out on the counter, I'd nearly cried with relief at the fact that she was alive and able to do that. Able to irk me in the most endearing fashion. It was something that only Cosima knew how to do. Anyone else's flaws would have become immediately apparent under my scrutiny, eyes focused like a microscope, restless and unsatisfied. I suppose that's what love truly is, vouz voyez, that flipping of one's world over, like a winking, silvery coin flipping head over tail through the air. Where love means pain, and where irritation meant happiness, and where spoiling milk on a dusty, scarred countertop was a relief.

I swept a hand across the kitchen counters, feeling the scars and ripples, the circles where beer bottles and cups have been left, the occasional burn left by a cigarette or some sort of cooking implement perhaps. It was almost like braille, where you could run your hands upon it and learn what went on in the past. Currently I'd taken a break to re-focus my eyes before returning to the glowing screen I'd had set up on Felix's kitchen counter. The entire space was dominated by my recently-acquired supplies, the large scanning electron microscope being the item which commanded the most attention, surrounded by smaller tools and bits of paraphernalia. I turned away to open a program on my laptop, starting a search engine while remembering the great lengths I had to go to get all this equipment. The greatest length? Namely, Alison Hendrix, and confronting the soccer-mom clone a week and a half prior...

"I'm sorry, you plan on doing what?" the prim clone asked me, whirling about with the restrained poise of a ballet dancer. Her eyes were scathing, burning into my own. I hardly saw the resemblance to Cosima at this point. The identical-appearance-thing was a shock at first, but after meeting them multiple times, the differences usurped the similarities. There was a foreignness in Alison's rigidity, her coldness, the manner in which her eyes flitted about the room, scanning, darting, always on the lookout for threats. There was an animal wariness about her. Some sort of feral fear, hidden in the bubble vests and yoga pants and pink.

"I need to find a cure for Cosima." I restated, calmly, feeling very much under threat. Sarah no longer looked at me threateningly, Felix was slowly warming to my presence—or at least becoming indifferent—but Alison still looked at me like an adversary. As soon as I'd brought the topic up, her eyes went steely and cold, reflecting horrific images of medical tests and lab rats in cages, spinning their wheels and hoping for some sort of reprieve. But she'd been spending a little more time here recently, something about troubles with her husband, Donnie was it? De toute façon, if she was going to be around more often, I felt the need to make it clear that I was no threat.

"And you plan on doing that how? Last I heard you got yourself a one way ticket out of—" she stopped, eyebrows crinkling up and mouth puckering like she suddenly had a bad taste in her mouth. I had remembered someone, Sarah or Cosima, having told me that Alison didn't let them use the 'C-word' so it made sense that she wouldn't want to make much reference to the institute and scientists that had essentially created her.

"The DYAD Institute?" I supplied for her, watching her scowl deepen ever-so-slightly before she curtly nodded her head. Her question was a valid one, how a discredited scientist, especially one with a history of having participated in an illegal and unethical human cloning experiment, would go about finding lab space.

"Yes, that. As far as I'm aware this 'cure' if you even find one, isn't something you can just cook up in your average household kitchen, am I correct?..." kitchen… an idea popped into my head, adding atop the initial one. something so crazy, and so unlikely to even work, that I nearly smacked my head against the coffee table in front of me out of sheer astonishment. But it just might be our only hope.

"Sarah mentioned you having some substantial amount of money?" I asked tentatively, watching as, predictably, the uptight soccer-mom went rigid and shut down. I swore that her eye was twitching out of sheer frustration and shock. I had no money though, at least not enough to get us anywhere. I'd come over from Paris recently, I'd set up what little savings I had after the move in a bank account provided by the Institute. They'd even purchased an apartment for me near the lab, close enough to the university in Minnesota so the ruse of "PhD student" seemed plausible. Little had I realized that all that DYAD had done for me back then, only made it harder for me to sever all ties. I'd had to withdraw what little money I could take without it being noticed, cut up the bank card, and simply disappear.

"You can't be serious!" she fumed, tossing her hands up in the air, voice taking on a shrill tone not unlike the screeching of metal-against-metal made when one drives their car into another. I held my hands up, a supplicating gesture, hoping that she wouldn't wake Cosima. The poor dreadlocked woman had been exhausted recently, the illness obviously taking its toll on her stamina. The fit she'd had last night had been one of the worst she'd ever had to endure. She had been coughing and hacking for almost half an hour, a painful, agonizing half an hour of redness and stilted breaths that limped like injured deer. Once the night faded into a milky dawn, she was sweaty and tired, and had once thrown up from the pure physical exertion. Understandably, it took a while for the both of us to relax long enough to fall asleep.

"Please Alison, listen to me. I need equipment to keep researching, expensive equipment, yes, but vital. This cure, it might not only help Cosima. You all are genetic identicals, yes? What would happen if you or Sarah were to fall ill? What if it's something Kira inherited? This affects you all, and if I can save her, it might help you all." I begged, hoping she didn't hear my voice crack upon the 'if'. It was a fairly big if, but I couldn't let it be an 'if'. Cosima will recover, I don't care if I die of exhaustion, slumped over a petri dish culturing cells, I will find the cure. Alison was taken aback by the implication, and let her rabbit-quick mind, with the same paranoia and omnipresent fear of a prey animal, run wild with the possibility of falling ill. Perhaps it was cruel of me to even suggest it, but frankly I had no time for niceties and for sugar-coating things. It was a very real possibility, and I expressed that. The woman in front of me rocked a little on her feet, thinking, her arms crossed over her body defensively. She huffed irritably before answering.

"Fine. How much do you need?"

A sizeable sum of the "Emergency Defense Fund" and a night spent scanning eBay and laboratory supply websites later (which surprisingly had a lot of the equipment I needed) I had set up a fairly functional lab space in Felix's kitchen. It was a good thing that I'd been able to get most of what I needed, because without it I'd be nowhere. When I'd asked the slim man if I could take his blender apart to see if I could perhaps use the parts to build some sort of centrifuge, his eyes went wider than dinner plates. I took that answer as a non. I jotted down notes on my laptop, taking down results. Felix entered unceremoniously, the door banging hollowly, scattering my thoughts.

"Oi! What the hell are you doing? How am I supposed to bloody cook?" he asked, tossing his hands up in the air out of exasperation. The tired, morning-stained, frayed part of me desperately wanted to quip back with some incisive comment about how Cosima's health is more important than any hypothetical cooking he could possibly do.

"I've never seen you cook." I retorted, returning to my workspace and looking for the materials I needed. Felix scoffed, a gesture that had become fairly familiar to me during the time that I'd stayed here. Before I simply interpreted his, what do they say, sassiness? Anyways, I interpreted it as animosity, when in reality, I gathered that it was kind of how he just interacted with people. I took it as a good sign. He stayed quiet for a second, mulling over my retort, before replying in a slightly softer tone.

"What are you even bloody doing, anyway?" he asked, as I grabbed the sample container and placed it under the microscope's lens, focusing it until the picture on screen was visible. I pushed my goggles out of the way, setting down the syringe I was holding in one gloved hand and looking the Brit in the eyes.

"Well, what we've determined so far is that the cause of her illness is at the genetic level, an anomaly there. Due to Kira's healing time, and the presence of the synthetic sequence in their genome, I think it's safe to say that the scientists who worked on the project manipulated their DNA, inserted something quelque chose qui est appelé, something called a transgene." I paused, watching him nod his head. Either he actually understood what I was talking about, or he was an excellent actor. I took a slight pause to get my own thoughts in order, while I fidgeted with the sticky, powdery gloves on my hands. I always hated the way they felt. My words, the things I wanted to say felt all tangled and knotted up. I'd spent so long with these theories in my head, that it almost seemed foreign to speak of them.

"Anyway, when a scientist inserts a transgene into something's genetic makeup, there's a certain… margin for error, that one must contend with. The added gene may go to a spot on the chromosome where it accidentally deletes or overrides a healthy gene, instead of going somewhere else where it would cause no harm, which may be the case with the other clones as they haven't shown symptoms. If that happened in the case of Cosima and this 'German' she once mentioned, it could have caused the anomaly, or made them more susceptible to a virus or something, any number of issues." I finished. Somewhere in the back of my mind I could hear Cosima's breathing, low and even, music to my ears. But I knew that wasn't the case, she wasn't here tonight. Alison was having some sort of important meeting at her house, and despite my protests, Cosima insisted she was well enough to attend. Of course, I was worried about having her so far away, what if she had another attack? What if it was worse than before? What if Sarah and Alison don't know that helping Cosima lean over and rubbing her back is the easiest way to ride out the coughing fits? Milliers des questions ran through my mind, worrying myself distraught like an anxiety-stricken parent, but there was an upside. With her not here, I was able to fully focus on the work at hand, without any possible distractions. C'est un double-edged sword.

"Okay Madame Curie, what I hear you saying is that her DNA's all sixes and sevens, and that's because the scientists at this mysterious institute buggered something up, but what about this elusive cure you've been chasing like it's a bloody white rabbit?" I refrained from correcting him that Marie Curie was a chemist and physicist, not an immunologist, but that didn't mean that it wasn't the first thought in my mind. I opened my palms in a supplicating gesture, motioning for him to 'hold his horses'.

"The cure… that's une peu plus inconnu, a little less concrete. My hope is that, by shutting off or overriding this faulty gene, her cells will stop degenerating, and she'll recover. Initially I was leaning towards some sort of lung transplant, since Sarah and Alison have the same genetic makeup and would be ideal donors, but if any other clones have this faulty gene, we'd be back where we started." Plus, something I didn't mention, was that I felt like I had no place sitting Sarah and Alison down to essentially beg them to each give up a lobe of one of their lungs. We all just reached the point where they're no longer scowling at me distastefully, nowhere near the level of intimacy and trust needed for me to solicit their organs.

"There's research into stem cells, but we don't have the equipment here to do such treatments, and they're experimental at best. So I'm going to try to use gene therapy. It basically involves taking a virus, replacing it's genetic material with the gene you want to introduce into their genetic material. It basically takes advantage of the normal cycle of viruses, by having the virus invade the cell and then insert the genetic material—in this case the gene you've selected, in DNA or RNA—into the cell's genetic material, and as the cell divides it divides with this new gene as a part of the genome…" I continued, explaining the process until I saw Felix's glassy eyes staring off into space. Of course. I supposed that to the layperson it wouldn't make much sense either. A part of me was glad he just didn't ask as to where I got these lab-grade samples of vector viruses from, as that was a long, and mostly illegal story… Felix huffed impatiently, turning around to the giant arrangement of cabinet-cubby-holes and setting up a teakettle. The door slammed open once again. All at once, the group of clones entered the loft, Sarah looking weary and a little shocked, supporting a bloodshot and drunken Alison, with the rear being brought up by a stiff and weak Cosima.

"Qu'est-ce qui se passe? What happened?" Sarah was mumbling nonstop like a radio station someone had put on low volume and all but ignored. Alison gave an ill-sounding whimper as the punk clone awkwardly laid her on the couch. All in all, the group held a tense energy. The hairs on the back of my neck stood up. I saw a flash of red, just the slightest smudge of it on the hem of Sarah's white shirt. I wondered if it was Cosima's.

"I knew it all along, I kneeww it Sarah, Bloody Mary and Judas Priest I knew ittt…" Alison slurred from her pose on the couch. I peeled off the pair of gloves I was wearing, hating the chalky powder left in between my fingers. My hands itched and crawled but I stayed stationary. The dreadlocked clone did the same. Everything around us moved slowly, as if the air and the passing time were thick as agar jelly. We were all specimens trapped within.

"Donnie's her monitor…" Sarah furtively replied, shifting on her feet uncomfortably. No one made eye contact with anyone else. A siren wailed outside, signalling distant chaos. The teakettle on the stove whistled. Felix made no move to quiet it. I felt like there was some undercurrent of meaning I was missing, some past event that I hadn't been around for to experience which makes all this clear and sensible. Without it, I was a microscope with a broken lens, seeing everything beneath me in the vaguest, blurriest form possible.

"Who's blood is that?" I asked, moving over to where Cosima was. The petite woman seemed to be in shock, she was deathly quiet. Lips were pursed and wrinkled tersely as if they were sewn shut. At this point in her illness, it was obvious that she was sick, especially in comparison to the other clones. Even though Alison was pale and loopy-looking, from a glance one could tell that Cosima was clammy, and had a sickly pallor. Her cheekbones were flat, tense planes upon her thinning face, she gave off a weak energy. But she was still standing, fighting, ropy and thin with bruises hidden deep beneath her skin, instead of purple and blue, a blooming red in her chest.

"I hit Donnie with a car!" Alison screeched, voice filled with some sick sense of excitement. "He was running and yelling at me and I ran him over and it was good…" she trailed off in a broken string of hiccupping giggles. Felix and I both went stone-still. The pink, yoga-pant wearing clone sounded like some crazed murderess. I quietly feared for my own health. The teakettle screamed, building up tension and calling for attention. Sarah cleared her throat and stumbled forward a few steps. Ma chérie was cold in my arms.

"She didn't run him over. She found some paper or file or something on DYAD Institute letterhead folded into one of his shirts. She confronted him, he yelled, and ran off, presumably to inform Leekie, or his handler, or whatever bollocks this stupid thing entails. We dragged her out of the house—after she'd somehow gotten ahold of a bottle of wine—and sat her in the backseat of our car. We were just about to drive away when he ran in front of us, screaming bloody murder about us needing to stop. There was no way we could have avoided him." Cosima was shivering at Sarah's recounting of events, I rubbed her arms like it would make some sort of difference. Like physical warmth could thaw this icy-clawed grip of shock. Alison let out a loud snore, passed out already.

"I got out, took a look at him, he was laying on the ground, groaning and hollering angrily something awful. Then we drove off. 'Figured whatever one of Leekie's little pawns he had called would find him." She sighed, voice rough and garbled like a phone with a bad connection. Like driving into a dead zone. Like being cut off. Her eyes were the color of two leads, greyed and heavy, swinging tenuously from two plumb lines, pitching and swaying and looking for solid ground. Cosima shivered.

"Well then, Dreads and our own Madame Curie can take my bed, I'll take a chair, and Sarah can share the couch with Ms Mariticide-in-the-making, yeah?" he quipped, looking to his sister for confirmation who just shoved Alison over roughly and stretched out on the couch, eyes slamming shut like doors. I almost felt guilty for sleeping in Felix's bed, when the man had already been a fairly gracious host, but I could see why he said so. Because she was ill, Cosima needed all the rest she could get, and because she was in shock, she needed someone familiar with her. Felix knew that, though I suspected that if I brought it up he'd quip some dry comment about not having changed the sheets since our last 'romp' together, making it impossible for him to sleep there. I nodded graciously, walking Cosima over to the bedroom-area and closing it off from the rest of the loft by letting loose the heavy, velveteen curtains. Button-by-button I undid Cosima's red coat, shedding the extra layer and laying it neatly over the back of a chair. She blinked owlishly, looking even smaller without the bright colored outerwear. Pulling her into my arms, I set my chin on top of her forehead and held her close.

"What is wrong ma chérie?" I prompted, fumbling for the zipper on the back of her blouse while still keeping her close. She was exhausted, and somewhere around here there was some form of pyjama to change her in to. She shivered and shook, trembling all over. When she tried to talk her lips quivered. Her voice wavered. Everything about her erratically screamed instability.

"I was sitting there and the car hit him, right on the front, it hit him and I screamed I think, I think I screamed and he made a thud and the car made a thud and there was blood on the windshield and on Sarah and Alison was laughing and I couldn't look away from it all, it hit him, he fell right over with screaming breaks and thud and Delphine…" she rambled brokenly, her voice cracking and her sentences breaking and everything about her current state of mind fragmenting like fine china when slammed against a wall. I rocked her against my chest, cradling the broken genius. It had been a long day for all of us, and for Cosima it meant that the last few events in said day hit her pretty hard. I let her cry and sob and cough against my chest. My skin grew sticky with tears and slick with blood and damp with heavy breaths and breaking words but I didn't move. I soothed her, I tugged her shirt over her head, pants over her ankles, slipping a loose tank on her instead. She shivered once more, but she refused the longer shirt I offered. Instead she quelled the shaking by tangling herself in me, arms wrapped like cocoons as I cradled her among the maroon sheets. I waited until the shivers quelled, until the tears dried, until the coughing subsided. Waited until she was asleep and safe, and then and only then, did I let my eyes slide shut, dreaming about nucleotides, A, T, G, C, A, T, G, C, A, T, G, C, A, T, G, C, over and over, in muted shades of grey and green, all the while as a teakettle screamed, forgotten.

A/N So yeah, I don't quite like Donnie, so I fancied getting him out of the way for a little while at least! Plus after the golf-club incident, I could so see Alison being abnormally okay with having hit her husband with a car… Cosima's reaction however, unlike Alison, who's a little scary at some points, and Sarah, who's not a murderer or anything, but she buries that sort of 'softer' side of her in order to do what she has to do, I think Cosima's a little less used to all the death and such surrounding the cloning. She's spent a lot of her time in a laboratory setting and such, and hasn't really been in the thick of things, plus at this point she's physically exhausted from the illness, and a little emotionally-whacked, so I figured she'd take it a little harder… so that's my rationale for that! Anyways, thank you for reading, as always feel free to leave a review!

Translations:

Vous voyez… You see

De toute façon… Anyway

Quelque chose qui est appelé… Something called a

Milliers… Thousands

C'est un… It's a

Une peu plus inconnu… A little more unknown

Qu'est-ce qui se passe?...What happened?