"It's a miracle, really," Cosima shot, glancing over her shoulder, a brow arched at Lennox's ability to focus solely on his phone while walking and yet, still manage to not barrel into things. "If I were any other employee, he'd have fired me by now. Lucky for me, he knows that not even you work as half as hard as I do."

Lennox's head whipped up so quickly and the expression of mock hurt that sprung into action across his face had her laughing instantly, though instead of glancing back, she had slowed her pace to match his stride. "You're so rude," he informed her, as if it were the worst insult in the world, but she merely waved him off and rolled her eyes, bumping into him playfully. "So have you called that little croissant back? She only called HQ four times looking for you. I mean, not that I blame you."

Frustration began to easily etch itself across her face, but she shook her head, attempting to let it ebb away. "I told you, I'm not calling her back. I don't care if she wants to give me my phone. If I can make it to next week's paycheck, I can just buy a new one and save myself the hassle of having to see her again." Perhaps the facade she wore was a lot sturdier than what it hid behind it, but she was forging valiant attempts of not letting it show. She was simply too proud to cave to a situation that could render her powerless, especially at the hands of someone who didn't deserve to wield such power.

"I totally get it, I do, but I could just as easily get it for you, you know."

Again, Cosima shook her head, the tips of her dreads tickling the back of her neck as they swung side to side from their place tied atop her head. "It's really not that important. You live literally thirty two seconds away from me and anyone who needs to get ahold of me can just as easily call you." She could sense his attempt to understand, but knew that even though he knew more of her than any other living soul, he was still struggling with seeing a side of Cosima that had never before had an opportunity to present itself. "I appreciate the offer, really. But it's not about the phone, it's about my pride. And bratty as it may be, I'm not ready to let go of that yet."

Lennox gave a shrug, his lips turning down at the corners in a bit of an agreeable frown. "Fair enough."

"We're going to be late if you don't move those lumberjack legs any faster," she informed him, as if it was somehow pertinent to the conversation they'd just been having, when it was instead an overt attempt at directing the topic away from memories she would have much rather moved on from. "I already told Quin that I was skipping out on post service festivities. Doing wedding receptions is so draining and I'd much rather have a Planet Earth marathon and get high with you." Although she seemed to be topic jumping, Lennox was able to so easily follow her train of thought.

"Of course. My liver needs a time out anyway or it might start revolting." His lips turned up at the corners with a toothy grin, emitting a soft chuckle.


"I don't know Delphine, I feel like this is a terrible idea."

Although she knew he couldn't see her, Delphine's lips pursed at Dominic's words, causing her to heave a sigh at her own reflection in the mirror, pinning her phone to her ear with the assistance of her shoulder. "Look, it's not like I'm springing anything on her. I've been trying to get in touch with her the entire week so I could avoid yet another confrontation, but since she won't return my calls… Well, I'm already going to be there anyway, so what's the harm?"

Even as the words leapt from her lips, diving head first into the air around her, she couldn't believe herself. Cosima was going to be furious, most likely, and that was unavoidable. The truth was, she had put a lot of thought into the events of the day and how they would, most likely, play out. She had, for a brief period of time, considered the idea of not going to her step-sister's wedding, sheerly to save face with Cosima. Their last encounter had ended horribly, or at least as much of it as Delphine could recall had ended horribly. Cosima had been spiteful and deliberate in her actions, and yet, it wasn't enough to make her back off.

There were so many factors, so many things that contributed to the pull that Delphine felt, once again, toward Cosima. It wasn't that she wanted to be forgiven, that she wanted to repent for the horrible thing she had done, the promise she had broken. Instead, something inside of Delphine ached for the wholeness that simply seeing Cosima brought to her entire sense of being. Leaving Seattle all those years ago, it had been like pulling at a loose thread, but in a dual aspect, which was something she had never considered before seeing her the night of her birthday. When she had left, it was as if the end of her thread that tied her to Cosima had been caught under her shoe and the farther Delphine got from her, the less like herself she truly felt. On the opposing hand, she could see the repercussions her actions had on the girl she had been so helplessly head over heels for once upon a time. She could see that she'd snagged on another thread, a thread of Cosima that had never come unhooked. Instead, every movement she made, every step she took, every day she broke her promise, she was taking more and more of someone intangible, someone out of her sights that she had vowed to love so deeply. Their parting had only assured a mutual destruction in different ways, and Delphine was slowly beginning to open her eyes to the fact that her actions were, at best, inexcusable.

Many nights, both sober and intoxicated alike, she had found herself, often in the company of another, staring at the ceiling, a sense of guilt and sadness gnawing away at her heart. Sticky skin meant little to nothing more than a way to pass the time and yet, she still found herself missing the one time, the only time, it ever meant something. In the late hours of the night, depths of her ached for her to find a sense of courage, to do anything at all to reach out, to try and find what she had once let go of. Selfishly, she told herself that she would never be needed, that Cosima was living a life that had to be better than one that would include herself in it. All of those sleepless nights, all of those heartachingly long hours of darkness seemed self-centered and unwarranted in the face of Cosima's pain, in the way it glistened in her eyes, though Delphine was sure if she knew it had, she would have only been furious with herself. If there was anything she knew for certain, it was that Cosima refused to allow herself the luxury of weakness before others. She had to be in control of a situation, had to have the upper hand and know that she dictated how things happened. Delphine couldn't really blame her, especially coming from the roots they had. She had only made that more clear by her spiteful feat behind closed doors. The thing of it was, finding that phone the next morning was a shout in Delphine's ears, one telling her not to let it go, not to allow Cosima the ability of brushing her off.

"If it's the last time I see her… Then I'm okay with that. But… I don't know, Dom. I just… She isn't as stone cold as she's trying to be. I know that. I know her. I just wish I knew myself half as much." Her words were soft, her tone dropping a bit. There was that guilt, slowly surfacing, grappling hold of her words and sailing out of her mouth alongside them, weighing them down as they traversed the sound waves.

"Just…" he hesitated, a resigned sigh puffing out from between his lips. "Be careful. I just don't want you doing anything you'll regret."

"Merci, dad," she joked back, laughter erupting from both ends.

Oh, if only she could actually listen.


A shrill squeal cut through the air of the auditorium as Lenny's foot hiked up and he began hopping around, shaking his leg out.

"What did I tell you? You can't roll one of those tables by yourself. You know, I am smarter than I look. And I look really smart." Cosima's grin shifted the apples of her cheeks, causing her glasses to lift and slide slightly down her nose, only accidentally emphasizing her point.

"Well then get your smart ass over here and help an idiot," he responded gruffly, as if he was trying to seem a lot more brassed than he actually was.

With a roll of her eyes and a slightly playful shake of her hips, she meandered over to where he was, standing on the opposite side of the table, reaching up to help him roll it through to the opposite side of the room. As they fixed the legs and righted it, she had started to shake out the cloth to cover it with when Lennox's expression caught her attention. He had seized up a bit, his eyes going wide as he looked somewhere over Cosima's shoulder. Her arms dropped and an eyebrow raised in curiosity. "Hello, earth to beard man, can you hear me, beard man?" He blinked a few times and seemingly snapped back into reality, looking back at her before glancing again across the room before nodding his head toward the doorway. A sense of dread poured into her, coursing through her veins from head to toe, doubling back to pool in her stomach. She didn't have to ask, didn't have to even question why he had that horrified look on his face. As she slowly began to turn, every organ she had felt as if it plummeted to the very soles of her feet. At the same time, a tidal wave of hot anger seemed to swell, leveling somewhere in her chest. Before she could process it, her feet were carrying her toward Delphine, a smoldering fire burning in her eyes and a sense of purpose in her step.

"What are you doing here, Delphine?"

Although Cosima the freight train screeched to a halt mere inches in front of her, Delphine did not waver and instead, produced Cosima's phone, her words timid and quiet. "I brought you this."

Cosima glanced down at the phone, but made no move to grab it. Instead, she was putting every inch of her focus on trying not to let the way Delphine looked in that dress do things to her head that could steer her off the course of her pride-driven vendetta. "No, I mean what are you doing here?" Her words were sharp, her tone hard and hollow. Before Delphine could answer, though, Cosima waved her hands in frustration, shaking her head as she turned and started to stomp off, heading for a set of double doors several yards away. "I don't even care." As she passed through them, though, she heard them swing open and closed again and found her blood nearing boiling point as she whirled around to see Delphine standing there, phone still clutched tightly in her hand. Cosima's jaw tightened, bulging as she gave a hearty attempt at reigning in the seething anger that was beginning to bubble up in her chest. "Just leave me alone!"

Delphine's face fell, despite her attempts to keep it from being obvious, and she swallowed down the lump in her throat. "I just want you to have what's yours."

This was, very apparently, the wrong thing to say. Cosima was immediately thankful for the privacy of the mostly empty kitchen. Her small hands balled up into fists, her nails digging into her palms. "For once," she barked, her tone razor sharp, her eyes nearly burning a hole right through Delphine.

Her head tipped forward out of shame, causing a few blonde curls to topple over, covering her face. She stepped forward and placed the phone on the stainless steel countertop, inches in front of Cosima, and wordlessly turned to leave, but she had already lit a fuse that she could not extinguish in time.

"Of course. Just tuck your tail between your legs and run like you always do," Cosima snapped, the hostility radiating off of her in waves.

At this, Delphine lifted her head, her eyes, her soft and gentle eyes, searching the face of a complete stranger. She had never known this part of Cosima, a part that had only appeared in response to her presence. This was something she recognized herself responsible for and it only made her want to fix it, to some how repair this giant rift she had created between them. It was more than obvious, though, that that was the very last thing on Cosima's agenda. She was finally reaching a terrifying realization, and that was that she could not mend something that Cosima had no desire to mend. She couldn't undo a past that had ruined the one person that had helped her understand what love truly was, and that ached in every last inch of her bones. "What do you want me to say, Cosima?"

Cosima's cheeks had flushed a deep red and she seemed to fumble a bit at Delphine's question. "I… I shouldn't have to… to tell you." Even as the words came from her mouth, Cosima wasn't even sure what it was she wanted to say.

"I'm sorry."

Cosima's gaze nearly cut right through her, even as she tried to hold conviction in her words.

"You don't get to be sorry. You made an active choice to not come back. So don't act like you regretted it… Because if you did, if you truly felt sorry, I'd have known it a lot sooner... because you would have cared enough to keep your fucking word." Her words shook with the quaking of her voice and the trembling of her chest as she attempted to even her breathing. She was not going to cry, not in front of this woman, not in front of someone so undeserving. "You made your choice, Delphine and now I'm making mine." Her anger had taken over and was the driving force behind her words, causing her small frame to shake, trembling where she stood, her feet glued to the ground beneath her. Before she could continue, people began to bustle in and out, carrying utensils and the like, paying no attention to the quarreling duo.

Delphine was at a loss, beginning to rack her brain at light speed for any possible antidote to the poison that had toxically constructed a wall, a divide that cut so cleanly between them. Cosima's words sliced her open, like she was sure they were meant to. It should have curbed her reaction, but her mouth was opening and words were tripping out, stumbling over each other before she could think to stop them. "Why don't you just admit what this is really about?" she posed, her brow knitting together as she folded her arms over her chest. Cosima's back straightened and a stiffness coursed throughout her being, causing Delphine's teeth to grind. "Why don't you just admit that the reason you're so angry with me is because I made you realize that you had no one else. I left you and never came back. You've convinced yourself that it's because you weren't worth it." A gloss began to form over Delphine's beautiful hazel eyes, but her words were firm and deliberate and she could see exactly what she knew she would: Cosima was about ten shades of red and purple, her balled up fists vibrating at her sides.

"Fuck you, Delphine," she managed through clenched teeth, starting to turn around. However, Delphine saw what Cosima could not; behind her, two men in suits identical to hers were carrying the wedding cake (which Delphine was disgusted to know cost almost three thousand dollars) through the kitchen and to the dining room.

"Cosima, wait!" she rushed, reaching out for her wrist. The moment the other woman felt the contact, though, it only caused her to jerk away, beginning to trip over her own feet and the way they crossed awkwardly as she was pulled back. She lost her footing and instead of jerking away, her hand clamped hard onto Delphine's arm in hopes that it would offer some soft of an anchor, but instead, she could feel their weight shift as she managed to pull her down with her. In an instant, they were on the ground and Jay and Quin stood on either side of them, empty handed, with their mouths hanging wide open.

There, in the center of the platform, sat both Cosima and Delphine, completely covered in destroyed cake and icing.

Forty five minutes later and the clink clink clink slam of the steel barred door made Cosima's stomach sink. Icing had found its way into odd places and the heat that had crept up her neck had been burning for a good half an hour.

"Destruction of property, really?" she asked out loud to no one in particular, though Delphine, who was tucked away in the corner, sighed softly.

"Some brother-in-law he's going to be," Delphine muttered darkly, still trying to salvage any inch of her ruined dress that she could.

Cosima's wild eyes were suddenly wide and she turned on Delphine, that same brewing anger beginning to bubble up once more. "It was your sister's reception?! Your sister's fiancé had us arrested?! Could this day get any fucking worse?"

Then, like a swell of nausea, something dumped out of Delphine's mouth, a sickness to Cosima's ears. Perhaps it had been resonating in Delphine's chest since that very first moment in the kitchen, but it was a painful pest, chewing away at her insides, and had been as she watched this woman who was so strange and yet so familiar harbor an unrelenting anger that she would most likely never part from. Maybe it was from the little gestures and expressions, the ones that were still so engrained into her memory. Maybe, though, it was just that the flame she'd thought burned out a long, long time ago was still flickering, just barely, fighting for a chance to burn again.

"I still love you."