A/N Well, I've been working on this idea for quite a while, and it's been killing me to have not posted it for so long! I was initially planning on this idea being a short one-shot, but by the time the 'one-shot' hit 30,000+ words, I decided to break it into chapters. The OB hiatus is killing me, and this is the only way to escape back into the incredible world of TMas and CloneClub! I can't say I have too much to say about this one, except that, as I've done in the past, I'll put any French translations at the end of the chapter for Delphine's lines. Oh, and beware, there will be science ahead! My dad being a scientist and me being a science nerd, it was inevitable that it found it's way in here. It is Science Girlfriends after all!

I went for a bit of a different structure for this one as well, the italicized, shorter portions in the beginning occurs in the 'present' with the rest of the plaintext occurring as a flashback in Delphine's mind. This first chapter's got a little poem I wrote, my inspiration for the title, but after that is the 'present'-portion, and then the flashback. Hopefully the style's not too hard to follow! And as always, feel free to leave reviews! I absolutely love them! It was the positive reaction to my other OB fic which encouraged me to write this one!

-Nightshade

I don't own Orphan Black, that extreme honor belongs to Graeme Manson and John Fawcett. But damn, I wish I did!

Of Microscopes and Bloody Hopes

Chapter One

Come my darling, take pause and sit,

Let me spin you gold-silk tales.

Of microscopes and bloody hopes,

Curvetting wintry gales.

My thoughts they tread,'pon weary feet,

Loving words stitched in red hue.

Of night to morn, my toil's adorn

Each bless'd hour spent with you...

Musty carpets. Darkened corners. Graffiti upon the walls, written in twisted Möbius strips of scrolling colors, painted with fire and breath and the gleam of a giant, unseeing eye. The solitary window that brands its 'RIMBAUD' shadow in the gaps amongst the daylight, the sun moving in tandem. Each of these, so foreign at first, had become the hallmark characteristics of home to me. It was so, that if I went a day or two without hearing the anxious jangle of the screwdriver in the door like a white-eyed mount champing at its bridle, or the wail of a dissident horn beneath the leaden palm of an agitated city driver, I might feel out of place. Comme une, like a… a piece of a puzzle that did not fit. I stood by the large window, staring at the inky sky against the lit buildings, a curious juxtaposition. I suppose my life with her was the same. Au début, I was in foreign land, no idea what I should be doing, or how I should be acting. I was lost whenever I was near her. But now, I was at home wherever she was. Maintenant, je suis seulement perdu quand Cosima n'est pas avec moi. I chuckled humorlessly, the dry sound barely permeating the woolen-soft barrier of quiet about me. C'est ironique, oui?

A few days had passed since her admission. "I'm sick, Delphine." It was all she had to say. When I came to America, all the way from France, I considered that to be the 'Brave New World'. But not now. Now, in a shoebox-sized loft in Toronto that smelled of disorder with an ironic hint of dish detergent, with my friend or experiment or perhaps even girlfriend, against my side sleeping, with subtle breathing and a halcyon expression, now I was in the real 'Brave New World'. The even more jarring experience had been meeting her clones earlier, and not because the second Sarah snapped herself out of her distraught ranting about Kira she was lunging at me ferociously, screeching something about 'bollocks' which I couldn't quite understand. If Cosima hadn't held her back I have no clue what would have happened. Alison, the other clone, with bangs, stood there watching silently, but her eyes kept darting over to the spot where Felix kept his knives, her fingers twitching around an imaginary blade, which unsettled me as well. Mais, ce n'est pas mon point, my point was, that my aggressive welcoming wasn't the most unsettling part. It was the fact that I looked at the two newcomers and saw Cosima. There was a rough, street-smart, punk Cosima, and a perky, pink tracksuit-wearing Cosima. I suppose it shouldn't be as shocking, I had seen photos before, in Cosima's file she hid. But it was still quite surreal. Alison, the one wearing pink, seemed just as shocked by my appearance as I was with theirs. It was, une soirée intéressante, to say the least. Anyway, it had been a few days later upon that same couch, with Cosima fast asleep, that I began my research. I had waited for her to go to sleep, because I had hoped to look through the files Leekie had given me on her, to see if there were any indications as to what was making her ill. I wasn't quite sure how well she'd take it. The reminder of my past allegiance, that is. The glow of my laptop's screen cast eerie shadows upon the slumbering woman, making her eyes seem darker and her skin paler, comme un fantôme. It made Cosima look even sicker than she was. I kept digging. The files I were given were blank, mockingly so, except now their vagueness threw slurs at me and my poor judgement.

"There is absolutely nothing here." I muttered, closing them down and growling internally. They were so empty that it made me look stupid for ever having gone along with the whole project. From this new angle, with the rose-coloured glasses removed, all my files and assignments were so unclear that I should have been able to see that this new experiment wasn't exactly legal, or ethical. Stupide, stupide… focus! I opened a medical journal I vaguely remembered reading years ago, something about spontaneous tissue death in the lungs. Any form of information would be useful to me as of now.

"Huh?" Cosima murmured, straining to sit up and squinting from poor eyesight. I had taken her glasses off once she fell asleep. I didn't want the frames to bend. She yawned delicately, comme une chatte. She paused briefly, crinkling her brow as she teetered indecisively on whether she should return to sleeping or wake. The rounds of her eyes were a harsh purple against her skin, making her eyes look sunken-in and gaunt. Sickly, even. Cosima shifted, rubbing her eye with the heel of her hand, looking adorably puzzled as to where her glasses had gone. Despite the fact that the golden-green was misty and drugged with sleep, something in how she looked at me reminded me of that afternoon when we'd had sex for the first time. Or more specifically, the time after, lying in her bed while she tangled our fingers into each other's. Both times they had that shimmer of happiness in my presence, a shimmer I felt I didn't deserve. It was quintessentially her, Cosima's eyes with their shimmer and cat's-eye thin lining of black liner. It made me want to kiss her again. Instead, I reached over the laptop, careful not to disturb the keyboard and lose my spot, and plucked her glasses off the table's stained, scratched surface. Absentmindedly, drawing the moment out perhaps, I trailed my fingers across the bubble-like print of where a glass had once sat without a coaster. Taking her glasses in both hands, holding them delicately with two fingers by the edges, I slipped them into place behind her ears, taking the time to stroke my hand against the curve of her jaw. It settled there. The kiss upon her nose was practically required in the moment. It was like Cinderella's suitor replacing sa soulier du verre.

"Bonsoir ma chérie, sens-tu bien?" I asked softly, our faces so close that it was probably unnecessary to speak. One could simply think of what they wanted to say, and the other would be able to read it in their eyes. I could hear each of her breaths perfectly, light and natural. For a few seconds I focused upon them to calm myself down. She straightened up, and I had to forcibly tell myself not to hold her back. She was ill, oui, but she wouldn't take kindly to me coddling her. Besides, with tentative positivity, she hasn't had an attack in the past few days.

"I don't know much of what you just asked. It was a question, right?" she asked cheekily, smiling while readjusting her glasses with her index finger and her thumb. I chuckled, yes I do suppose I have the tendency to slip into French without really thinking it. But her little puzzled-face she made when she tried to understand it was irresistible.

"Oui, I asked if you were feeling well." I smiled sweetly in return, watching her mentally catalogue the phrase, looking for a place somewhere in that brilliantly talented mind of hers, and remembering it there. The effort was terribly endearing.

"Well then oui, je sens bien." She quipped back in an awkward, jumbly Americanised French accent, returning my tentative smile with her own brilliant grin. It was the type that made her eyes sparkle and her face light up, like the ruby head of a match just as it lights. I could feel the warmth from where I sat.

"Very good." I replied, both of us trading giggles of amusement. Personally, I found whenever she tried to speak French beyond cute. She had me hooked by that first 'Enchantée' in the hallway outside the university elevators. I relaxed into the couch, sliding the laptop shut and watching the glowing slit of the screen get thinner and thinner, a blinking eye, before finally closing its lids and falling into sleep. Dusk, a soft, purple carpet of nighttime, rushed in to replace the dim blue light. The graffiti upon the walls looked like monsters, all curved claws and vacant eyes and tableau poses, peering from the shadows. My surroundings were transformed, yet Cosima was still there unchanged, present in the golden-green gleam of her eyes and the sweet, low sound of her breath. It was strangely peaceful, a haven from the thump-thump of the city outside, a heart that beat life and light, lungs that breathed smoke and sound.

"Oi! Would someone open the bloody door?" a high-pitched voice called, clear yet throaty like a violin or the trill of a bugle. Cosima untied herself from the human knot of us, before padding over to the large door, pulling the screwdriver, and yanking the deceivingly-large metal door out of the way. Felix, Sarah's foster sibling if I was correct, stood in the doorway, skinny yet posed like a pipe-cleaner figurine. He tossed the loose tail of his scarf over his shoulder before treading forward, reclaiming his space.

"Oi, Oi Cosima," he greeted, wary of her, yet familiar, before turning his gaze to where I sat on the couch. I was overcome with a feeling that I didn't quite fit where I was. Felix, Sarah, even Alison and Cosima to a lesser extent, were familiar, they blended in to the shadow and the color of the city, all the smooth erratic lines and vibrancies. I, on the other hand, was all rigid and black and white and bone; I was gaunt where they blended in. I stuck out, comment est-ce qu'on dit, comme un sore thumb?

"Et tu Benedict Arnold?" he 'greeted' me, if that counted as a real greeting. The 'et tu' part of it sounded a bit peculiar, since the slim man's heavy British accent, when applied to French, was like shoving a square peg in a circular hole, it didn't fit quite right. The entire greeting was laced with obvious derision, masking less-than-obvious distrust. He didn't seem like the person to be outwardly cruel, but he was probably acting spiteful out of his protective nature. That definitely sounded better than him simply hating me. It made sense, if I could come face-to-face with the version of me that lied to Cosima, the version of me that let Dr. Leekie seduce me with his dreams of grandeur and innovation, I would shun her too.

"Delphine." I awkwardly greeted, standing up and extending my shaky hand. Perhaps he wouldn't notice that my palms were nervously sweating. In all the craziness that occurred recently, what with Kira's disappearance, and Alison signing Leekie's contract, Helena's death, and finally, my appearance, I wasn't sure if we had ever been properly introduced. I also hoped that presenting my actual name would discourage any more name calling. I wasn't even sure what Benedict Arnold meant… Felix stared me down suspiciously, looking me up and down with a scathing pout and furrowed eyebrow. In an effort to hide my nerves, I lowered ma vue to stare at the abstract swirls of colour on his shirt.

"Felix." He replied curtly, shaking my proffered hand tentatively, frankly looking quite baffled by my gesture overall. Using the fact that our hands were joined, he tugged me forward a little so our faces were close together.

"Listen up, if you ever do anything that harms Kira, or Sarah, or even Cosima or Alison I swear I will kick your blonde, truffle-eating arse all the way to Brixton. And that's before I let Sarah at you too. Clear?" he threatened, lowly and evenly. I feared that he'd follow through. Unconsciously, I nodded my head a bit, my eyes feeling too wide and shocked to fit on my face. Cosima heard this though, and I felt her gentle hand materialize between my shoulder blades, rubbing my back a little as she stepped forward, straightening her head and narrowing her dark-lined eyes.

"Felix please." She asked, her voice soft and reassuring to my ears, but edged with warning for his. He stepped back, striding evenly over to the small 'kitchen' area of the apartment. In reality, it was just a rough jutting-out of countertop, surrounded by a few dusty, worn cabinets that could have been picked up off the side of the road. They were all a slightly different shade of brown, and had different handles for each drawer. The wall of cubby-hole like cabinets had no doors, and looked more like it belonged in a workshop than a kitchen, acting as an apartment building for bags of bread, and cups, and a number of other assorted things. One of the drawers had been painted over with some weird phallic demon-thing. Mon dieu.

"Fine. Anyone up for mimosas?" he offered, voice laced with something I thought was sarcasm, clinking around back there. He was looking for something in the cupboard with the demon. Multiple colored bottles of alcohol were produced. Now that he wasn't threatening me, I could really focus on how he actually sounded. The peculiar way in which the letter 'a' sounded like a breathy 'err' and how his sentences rose and fell in a predictable lilt, like ocean tides and waves.

"No thank you, I'm going to keep working." I declined politely, pulling the laptop back on to my lap, determined once again to find her cure. A paper of Cosima's caught my eyes on the table. The ribbons of jagged lines upon paper, her genetic sequence. More clinking behind me. Felix shuffled about.

"All right, oh, and lights stay on! You two are staying here, but I refuse to put up with any sort of lesbian-sex-party-nonsense! I already have to contend with Sarah and Paul shagging in my bed…" he muttered, his voice taut like a guitar string and irritated. It took all I possibly had in me not to keep the redness from covering my entire face at the mention of 'lesbian-sex-party-nonsense'. I was more than a little embarrassed by him mentioning our sex life, or whatever little constituted as our sex life, out loud. Cosima just looked amused at the idea of Sarah having slept with Paul in Felix's bed. A small part of her looked to be considering the idea. I gave her a faux-stern smirk. Jamais, never Cosima. No way. Back to the task at hand, I reached over and grabbed the printout of that portion of her genome. If I remembered correctly, these were the papers that her and that fawning colleague of hers, Scott, were looking at the day I came to visit her. I looked at it, eyes honing in on one spot where brackets had been scribbled in to denote a certain section. Scribbled beneath in red pen:

'Anomalous for cytochrome c'

"Hey, what're you doing?" Cosima asked, stretching upwards and craning her neck, trying to look at the sheet. Her eyes were the colour of a bruise, I wanted her to get some rest. I also knew she wouldn't listen to me if I told her so.

'Making good on my promise to you.' I mused silently, opening up a new file on my laptop. A spider crawled across the table where the paper had once been, disturbed by my moving it. Its amber-brown bead of a body was propped up by eight little legs, thin like thread or hair, constantly moving. They were so tenuous, so insignificant, that it looked to be hovering above the ground, like the slightest disturbance would shatter the illusion and cause it to collapse in on itself. Like if it stopped moving at its breakneck, frantic pace, it would die. It was just too delicate to exist for too long.

"Finding your cure."

A/N Comments? Questions? Remarks? Review please!

Translations:

Comme une… Like a

Maintenant, je suis seulement perdu quand Cosima n'est pas avec moi… Now, I'm only lost when Cosima isn't with me

C'est ironique, oui?... It's ironic, yes?

Mais ce n'est pas mon point… But that isn't my point

Une soirée intéressante… An interesting evening

Comme un fantôme… Like a ghost

Comme une chatte…Like a cat

Sa soulier du verre… Her glass slipper

Bonsoir ma chérie, sens-tu bien?... Good evening my darling, do you feel okay?

Je sens bien… I feel okay

Comment est-ce qu'on dit, comme un…How do you say, like a…

Ma vue… my view/vision/eyesight

Mon dieu… My god

Jamais… Never