Work Text:
Beth’s dead.
The news had come singing through like a blow to the gut, delivered to the room at large by their stoutly emotionless leader all folded up behind her desk. Rachel Duncan doesn’t love feelings, she doesn’t wear them with ease; truly, it seems like they might even be a source of embarrassment for her, but Cosima could tell that behind the carefully structured way her arms crossed over her chest Rachel’s heart was beating a little heavier.
Beth’s dead.
Cosima still can’t quite believe it herself. It always lingers, the thought of this contract possibly being your last, but it just sort of ticks along beneath your tongue, never really threatening to choke until something like this happens. It’s the kind of shit that scratches like nails against teeth, that grinds up hard against your ribs and fills your lungs with fire. Shit that makes mortality hard to ignore.
And the worst part is, now she’s gotta train up some shiny new recruit because Rachel never trusts anyone else to do it, and not only that – this one’s gonna be hers, she says, like it’s a privilege. You will be a mentor, Cosima. It’s a promotion.
Of course, this has been coming for a while, even without Beth. What it means is: we don’t want you in the field anymore (she’s certainly been hearing the word liability after her name a lot lately), here’s the pushy little trick who’s going to replace you. Train her up; send her off. Admire your work from afar.
Whatever. She’ll stay in the lab; let everyone else risk their necks on contracts. That suits her just fine – as long as it’s not another Sarah Manning. She’s unquestionably not doing that again.
“Oi, Cos, got a live one for you,” Felix says as he swoops through her doorway, coat swinging bat-like behind him. The woman who follows him inside is not remotely what she was expecting. Honestly, she figured she was in for another dark-haired, compact unit like the rest of them, because Rachel seems to love her little army of almost-identicals. Cosima thinks it must make her feel strangely maternal, or something.
This girl, though; she’s—well, golden. Taller than Felix in the heels she’s completely rocking, she looks like some supermodel snake-charmer sent down from the most expensive part of heaven to totally ruin her day.
“This is Delphine,” Felix says in a tired sort of way, the name rushing out of him like a sigh, and he rolls his eyes as Cosima scrambles out from behind her desk to shake the woman’s hand.
“Hey,” she says, and Delphine smiles. “I’m Cosima, though… you… probably know that already.”
“Oui, yes.” Delphine replies, and Cosima feels something short-circuit in her brain. Rachel failed to mention she was French. “Enchantée.”
“En…chantée,” Cosima says, trying not to wince at her pronunciation and failing miserably. She flicks Felix a brief look and he mouths a theatrical don’t you dare at her, then clears his throat.
“If anyone needs me I’ll be upstairs. With Sarah keeping me out all night – cocked up her contract bloody marvellously, I might add – I barely got any sleep. The bags under my eyes are so large I could use them to carry spare change.”
With that, he swoops back out the door the way he came and leaves Cosima alone with her new protégé. Her green-eyed, golden-haired, devastatingly French protégé.
Someone has to playing a joke on her.
Delphine’s still kinda awkwardly smiling, her hand in Cosima’s, and it takes her a second to remember herself, what she’s supposed to be doing. You kill people for a living, get it fucking together, Cos.
“So,” she says, dropping her hand and wishing she didn’t have to, “This is pretty much the whole like, deal, right here.”
She sweeps an arm wide, taking in her desk strewn with papers and notes – there’s chemical formulas scribbled onto the wood itself at this point – and the shelf along the back wall with its poisons chaotically placed (which Rachel calls a “hazard” and she chooses to believe is just a little unorganized). At the far side of the room, something on her countertop is still vaguely smoking from earlier.
“That’s where the magic happens,” she says with a grin. “Oh, and through there’s my um… quarters.” She waves a hand at the open door. “It’s technically like a storage cupboard or whatever but Sarah got so fed up with the hours I keep that she petitioned Rachel to have me shoved down here permanently.”
Sarah had actually said she was bloody sick of listening to you crashin’ in at five-frigging-AM stinkin’ of ammonia or some shit, Cos, but Delphine can be spared the finer details of Sarah’s vocabulary for now.
“Cosy,” Delphine says, sticking her head through the doorway, and Cosima tries not to watch the ride of her shirt up her back and the peek of skin it affords. She’s too perfect; like some pale, gleaming sculpture wrought in literature; remembered from mythology; built from honeyed thoughts and manifesting in front of her with effortlessly lupine grace. She resists the urge to slam her palm into her forehead.
Rachel had to have done this on fucking purpose.
“So,” Cosima says, dragging her eyes up Delphine’s spine. “I don’t normally mention this because it’s kinda supposed to be an unspoken thing – but you don’t seem like the usual… breed we get in here.”
“And what is the usual breed?” Delphine asks, leaning against the doorway with her arms crossed over her chest. Cosima snaps her gaze up to her eyes, and she thinks Delphine knows exactly what she was just doing.
“Well, like, we here at DYAD are what you’d call charity cases – criminals lucky enough to ping on its databases and be picked up by Rachel instead of sent to prison, you know? Hustlers, murderers, ludicrously creative pharmacists-slash-drug-dealers with stupid loud-mouth clientele… but you… what the hell did you do to get in here?”
Delphine smiles. “You don’t think I am capable of being a criminal?”
“No, I don’t think you look like the kinda person who’d get caught.”
There is more than a little roguishness in the grin that spreads Delphine’s mouth wide, and Cosima grins back. She’s going to kill Rachel for this. Poison her tea, maybe.
“Maybe I will tell you,” Delphine says, with a laugh at the back of her throat. “When we know each other a little better. For now I think you are a little too cheeky to trust.”
Cosima shrugs and pretends to be offended, mostly to hide the weird giddiness she can feel rising somewhere inside her. “Suit yourself. You wanna see the rest of the warehouse? I can introduce you to the rest of the gang; show you where you’ll be sleeping, the boring stuff.” Unless you wanna jump straight to the part where we’re all bailed up and sweaty somewhere together, because that’s totally cool too.
She leads Delphine upstairs to the living quarters (bypassing Felix passed out on one of the couches near their shared kitchen), and through to the corridor of identical cells where everyone sleeps. Rachel implores her to call them cabins, but these sad, grimy-windowed rooms are far from the kind of thing you’d find on a cruise ship billowing across the salted sea.
“You’ll wanna choose between Sarah’s room and Alison’s,” Cosima says, “And like, on the down-low Alison’s, I dunno, kinda paranoid and a super neat freak? But at least she won’t lock you out when she’s pissed at you like Sarah will. She’d be my recommendation, anyway, because there’s no way you wanna share with Helena.”
“I guess there is not any room for me in your little cupboard,” Delphine says, almost absent-mindedly, like she has no idea that that thought sends Cosima’s heart racing up into her throat with thumping rabbit-quickness. Or maybe she does, Cosima thinks, and swallows hard.
“Sorry, I’m not a big spooner,” she lies.
“A shame,” Delphine replies, and Cosima’s convinced her voice is several octaves too low to be considered wholly innocent.
She leaves Delphine in Alison’s unsettlingly polite hands – there’s a reason she’s their accident-staging expert – and hustles through Sarah’s closed door.
“Oi,” Sarah shouts, “Can you friggin’ knock?”
“What, are you jerking off in here or something? You’ve never required privacy for that before,” Cosima retorts, throwing herself down on the spare bed.
Sarah rolls her eyes, shoulders hunched and brooding over her laptop. This is not unusual Sarah behaviour, but she’s cagier than she was this morning when she got in, and Cosima figures something must be up.
“What’s your problem? You get benched again?”
“That ice-cold bloody corporate bitch,” Sarah says, spitting the words out between her hands, fingers massaging her temples. “Three strike rules are for ruddy baseball, not murder.”
“Maybe you should stop being seen so much, then. We’re assassins; not like, Vikings, or whatever.”
“Leave it out, Cos, please.” She runs an irritated hand through her hair and looks over at Cosima. “What’you after anyway, breaking down my door for no reason – you leave a joint in here when you moved?”
Cosima links her hands behind her head, stretches out on the bed and stares at the concrete ceiling. Everything in shades of grey. Much like her whole existence, she thinks, with only a tiny sting of bitterness.
“Your corporate bitch,” she says eventually, fingers stretching upwards in mocking air quotes. “Is she screwing with me?”
“You’ll have to be more specific.”
“French accent; amazing rack. Legs for like, a full half-mile. And I’m supposed to have a professional relationship with her for as long as either of us lasts in this shithole. She has to be fucking with me.”
“I… oh. The new chick. Kinda looks like a new-born horse, little wobbly.”
Cosima nods, running her fingertips over her eyebrows, stretching the skin out over the bone until it distorts her vision. That’s the one.
“And she’s French?”
She nods again. “Like, fresh-off-the-baguette French.”
“Shite. Definitely screwing with you.”
“I thought as much.”
Sarah smirks. “You know, you could send Rachel absolutely mental and just shag her right now.”
Cosima sighs; she’s been entertaining the thought of Delphine’s legs curling over her shoulders for the better part of half an hour now, but she knows as soon as Rachel catches even an inkling of debauchery she’s out, benched like Sarah for the foreseeable future. It’d drive her nuts.
Not that the thought of banging your new apprentice is gonna keep you sane either, she reminds herself.
“Holy shit, you’re actually thinking about it, aren’t you? You need’a get outta here once in a while, geek-force, you’re going stir crazy.”
“She’s probably not even gay, Sarah, there’s no point anyway,” Cosima says, getting up and heading for the door. Even five minutes with Sarah lately is grating on every single fibre of her being. Maybe she really does need to leave the warehouse more often.
Sarah snorts. “Plenty of people have been ‘not even gay’ til they met you, Cos.”
Delphine becomes a constant hum in her senses over the next week, dawn til dusk. While she works, Delphine likes to sit at her desk and trace the pen lines etched into the wood, dark-nailed fingertips passing across long-discarded formulas. She pokes through drawers without prompting, assimilating herself into Cosima’s contained little world with barely a ripple. Soon it feels like she’s been there forever.
She’s also a quick study – cataloguing the array of poisons into her memory within a few days, then acing the impromptu pop-quiz Cosima throws at her one evening from her perch on the counter.
However, when she takes an unmarked bottle from the shelf with a curious look, the only one she hasn’t been able to identify, Cosima has to almost dive clean across the room to remove it from her grasp before she smells it – why do people do that, anyway? It’s literally poison – and Delphine jumps back like she’s been electrocuted.
“Sorry,” Cosima apologises. “But if you’d smelled that you’d have been comatose for a week.”
Delphine frowns. “Then why would you not label it as such?”
Shrugging, Cosima places the bottle back on the shelf. “I’m not used to having someone else in here. I know what everything is, you know? I’m not expecting snoopy French rebels poking around trying to kill themselves.”
She punctuates her sentence with a pinch to Delphine’s ribs, and Delphine’s face lights up with a brilliant smile. She shakes her golden head, eyes warm. “Rebels do not snoop, surely? Anarchists, secessionists – they are not exactly… quiet types. Generally speaking.”
Cosima blinks. “Ok, linguistics major, I didn’t realize we were discussing semantics.”
Delphine smiles again. She is starlight; entire galaxies distilled down into human form with that smile. “We were not. I just wanted to tease you for a change, cheeky.”
It’s official. Cosima is totally, one hundred percent, bottom-of-the-ocean sunk.
Naturally, Rachel insists that Cosima’s last contract be Delphine’s first. It’s so she knows the drill, knows the escape routes, obviously – it’s purely coincidence that it also means she can get well and truly get settled underneath Cosima’s skin.
As if the unrelenting press of her in the lab isn’t enough; the perfume that curls under her nose in tendrils, the brush of Delphine’s arm over her head to reach something on a high shelf, or watching her lean against the counter to talk to Felix at breakfast. It’s all utterly maddening, and now she’s gotta spend the whole night at her side, and not to mention keep a clear enough head to off some poor nightclub owner who got on the wrong side of someone with very deep pockets and a revenge fetish.
She’s loading up her kit when Delphine walks in, and a brief, absurd thought skitters through her head when she sees her: dressed to kill. She almost laughs.
“Hey, ready to go?” she says instead, and tries to think of anything but the way those leather pants are making her want to forget all about the stupid job and attend to something else that’s suddenly way more important.
“Yes, Felix is waiting downstairs.”
“Great.”
“Listen, Cosima,” Delphine says, and Cosima stops in her tracks. She’s still getting used to the way her name sounds in that lilting accent. “I wanted to thank you for helping me to climb the ropes, this week.”
It takes her a second. “Oh! Oh, for showing you around and stuff. It was no problem. My pleasure, even.”
Delphine smiles with a crinkle in her nose, and for a second this is a normal workplace, and they’re normal coworkers who aren’t on their way to end a life. They’re people who don’t live with blood on their hands as well as under their skin. They know nothing of the fear that eats a greedy hole somewhere deep inside.
Yes, Delphine smiles and it’s the universe, it’s flowers in bloom, and there is something blooming in her chest, too, that feels uncannily like attachment.
And unfortunately, it also definitely feels like breaking the damn rules.
Felix drops them off in front of some neon wasteland called Neolution with the usual two-hour warning and a knowing kiss blown in Cosima’s direction, then he drives off to wait in the shadows. It’s cold out, and her breath clouds like smoke in front of her face, wrapping around with chilling teeth.
“About Felix,” Delphine says as they near the entrance, “I’m sure I heard him say something about being a pacifist, how is it he can work for you?”
Cosima shrugs. “He and Sarah were a package deal. Getaway driving was the least violent option available.”
Inside, the club is a smoky hell-pit, vibrating with bass and bodies straight out of science-fiction. Delphine sticks close as they thread their way through, and Cosima can feel her hand brushing the knot of her elbow. It’s funny how easy it is to forget – they’ve been trained for this, groomed into the machines Rachel has so wonderfully designed, but get out into the thick of it, the heartbeat of it, and things can start to warp out of shape in seconds.
Cosima turns and leans up into Delphine’s ear, disregarding the totally unnecessary press of pelvis into leather hip and says, “Leekie’s got a booth somewhere near the back, so just… offer to buy him a drink, slip the stuff in – we stick around to make sure he drinks it, then we’re out.”
Delphine twists to find Cosima’s ear, lips brushing against her skin. She feels her smile. “Simple.”
Then she’s gone.
Cosima sets herself up with a glass of wine and a good view of Leekie’s table, trying desperately to ignore the low rumble of something in her stomach that feels a lot like jealousy. Delphine is good at this – flirtation, that total devotion of attention to her subject to make them feel special – and suddenly it seems a whole lot less crazy that she’s ended up here. Those flower-smiles, those galaxies – it dawns on her that they can be directed anywhere, and the rumble flares into something closer to a roar.
Momentarily, she watches Delphine stand and point vaguely in her direction, then excuse herself from Leekie’s table.
Cosima puts herself in plain sight, and the smile Delphine gives her when she sees her shouldn’t make her feel as flustered as it does, given that one of the same was just directed at the white-haired skeleton man now watching them curiously from his darkened corner.
But she has little time to process it, because Delphine loops an arm around her back and presses in, snagging Cosima’s wine glass and taking a sip before depositing it on a table.
“Come,” she says, unnervingly warm and close. “I said I was going to dance with you as an excuse to leave.”
Of course, when she says dance it is some approximation of it, but Cosima’s usual flowing response to the beat is overtaken by Delphine’s need to crowd in and swivel her hips, all frazzled golden curls and smiles sticking to her cheeks. Everything feels too hot, her nerves in tremors, and it’s hard to concentrate on anything but the feeling of Delphine’s body against her, long and taut. There’s a bright, glittering burn in her eyes, too, something Cosima swears is inviting and shrewd. Like she knows, like she can tell the loose coil of arms around her neck are itching to reach for bare skin, that her mouth wants to latch deftly onto the heart-sprite beating under the veins in her neck. It’s strange, because everything about Delphine screams super straight, right down to the way she was hanging off Leekie not three minutes ago, but everything she’s doing now feels decidedly not straight. Like really, really the opposite of straight.
One of his bodyguards seems to think so too. Cosima watches him approach from over Delphine’s shoulder, and tries not to panic. They’ve already lingered too long, she knows, they should have gotten out as soon as Delphine left Leekie’s table. If this guard reaches them, they may very well be screwed.
Delphine, unaware of what’s happening behind her, is still grinding a steady rhythm against the front of her dress, hands smooth over her hips. And she’s close, so close; brilliant colour-creature of purple and pink fluorescent lights, her breath puffing hot against Cosima’s cheek. It would be so easy to tilt up and squarely meet her lips – just to deter the guard for five minutes, she tries to tell herself. Just so they can find a way out of here.
Bad idea, but screw it, she thinks, and surges forward.
Delphine’s mouth is hot and wet, and her hands immediately fly up to cup Cosima’s face, her tongue licking a blazing path between her lips in wanton strokes. This wasn’t a bad idea, it was a terrible idea. Pretty thoroughly terrible, with the way Delphine is pressing over her, forcing an arch into her back, making her cling onto her shoulders to keep from falling. She’s not coming back from this.
However, the man behind them stops in his tracks, and with a look from Leekie, he retreats. It’s something, at least.
Delphine, fierce against her and still none the wiser, pulls Cosima up hard over the jut of her hip. Cosima sinks into it, pitching forward with that familiar burning pressure twisting inside. Delphine keeps kissing all with tongue and teeth and swollen lip, and when little groaning noises of pleasure start issuing from her mouth Cosima’s sure she’s going to completely lose it.
She pulls back, regretful and breathing hard, and finds Delphine’s ear. “One of Leekie’s guys was on his way to get you. He’s gone for now but… we should bounce.”
Delphine nods, then kisses the rest of the breath out of her lungs. “We should look like we are going somewhere more private,” she says against her mouth.
“There’s a back door,” Cosima replies, trying to remember the floorplan with Delphine’s hands still sliding all over the place, her lips dragging lightly over her cheek. The throb between her legs is demanding a whole lot more attention than an escape route, and for a moment she thinks about the merits of actually hauling Delphine somewhere more private and eliciting another bout of those delicious little moans from between her teeth. The job, she reminds herself.
She pulls Delphine’s phone out of her front pocket and fires off a text to Felix in the sliver of space between their bodies, then replaces it with a sinfully slow slide of fingers, feeling the hot plane of Delphine’s hip against her knuckles. Her gaze flicks up, and Delphine is looking at her with pupils the size of the moon, black and endless.
Cosima takes her hand, and without further ado drags her towards the door she thinks she remembers, and doesn’t spare a second to look back.
They don’t mention it on the ride back to base. She can feel Delphine’s glances, feel the air between them heavy with something, but they stay silent. Felix makes a point of grabbing her hips on the way inside, thrusting into her with a theatrical oh, Delphine, just quiet enough so Delphine can’t hear, and she rolls her eyes.
They don’t mention it upstairs, either. Cosima makes a cup of tea and considers waiting for Delphine to come back out of her room, but chickens out when she hears the door open, hurrying back downstairs to the lab again. Delphine’s not going to want to talk about it anyway, she thinks – it’s adrenaline. It happens all the time, and it’s her first job. She probably wants to forget all about it. Move on. Totally fine.
She goes to sleep with an ache deep in her belly, frustration and guilt wound up nice and tight, and almost has a heart attack when she hears the door creak open at 4am.
“Cosima?”
She sits up. “Delphine?”
She can just make out the tangle of hair and long limbs in the murky dark, and reaches for her glasses. Her heart thumps loudly in her chest. She doesn’t want to believe that Delphine’s here for the reason she’d like her to be here, but her heart wants to thump like she is all the same.
“I’m sorry for waking you,” Delphine says, apologetic. “I couldn’t sleep. I think I have woken everyone, actually; Alison thought I was trying to burgle her.”
Cosima snorts. “Of course she did.”
“You are sure she is an assassin, oui?”
“Positive.” She remembers too well the freak-out that commenced the moment Alison got back to the warehouse after her first contract. There was a lot of drinking that night.
“Come sit down,” she says, realizing Delphine’s still hovering in the doorway.
She flicks on her lamp, squinting in the sudden glow of light, and moves her legs so Delphine can settle on the edge of the bed. Delphine picks at a loose thread on one of her blankets, a hand tousling through her hair as she tries to figure out what to say.
“I just wanted to… I wanted to make sure everything was okay,” she says. “With us. I feel like possibly you were uncomfortable with the way I kissed you earlier.”
Cosima swallows, but doesn’t have time to say anything before Delphine is talking again.
“I did not mean to, uh, get so carried away. I’ve… I mean, I’ve… never…”
“No, no, it’s cool. I know how it goes. Adrenaline and whatever. It makes us do some stupid stuff.”
Delphine nods, but Cosima feels like she can see a flicker of disappointment on her face, and her heart thumps again, wild in her chest. Too tired to be diplomatic and still not really awake, she clears her throat.
“But like, um, full disclosure... it made me uncomfortable but probably like, in the complete opposite way of what you’re thinking.”
Delphine’s eyes go wide in the yellow light, and Cosima’s sure she’s screwed up telling her that. But then her mouth is filled with the delicate slide of Delphine’s tongue, Delphine’s hands at the base of her neck, Delphine’s body craning persistently forward, and maybe it wasn’t a mistake at all.
She kisses like no time has passed since they were pressed together in that sticky, sweaty club. She kisses like the world is going dark, like they’re all that’s left, and it’s all Cosima can do to keep up. She drags Delphine into her lap, runs her hands up the knots of her spine as Delphine’s legs splay wide and her thighs squeeze around her hips. She did have the vague intention of taking things slow, but clearly Delphine has other plans, her tongue tattooing intricate details upon the inside of her mouth, humming moans against her lips.
It’s stupid, so stupid to kiss her, to wind a hand up her shirt and find a hardened nipple, roll it under her thumb until Delphine is bucking into her with sharp catches of breath. Stupid. Stupid and hot.
She pulls back from Delphine’s mouth, lips wet and sticking, and looks up into her darkened eyes.
“So, I just wanna make sure, this isn’t like, some weird new form of training practice Rachel’s got you doing, right?”
“Rachel?” Delphine asks, her hips stilling. “What does Rachel have to do with this?”
Cosima shakes her head, regretting the question as Delphine shifts back on her lap. “Nothing. Nothing.”
Delphine stares at her for a moment, eyes searching. Then, raising an eyebrow, she finds one of Cosima’s hands and guides it slowly between her legs. Even with the shorts that have ridden high on Delphine’s waist Cosima can feel dampness soaking through, and she sucks in a breath.
Delphine leans into her, mouth whispering on the hard line of her cheek. “This is not practice,” she says, almost vicious. Her tongue darts out and traces the bone, then she inches her mouth toward Cosima’s ear. Her teeth skim gingerly against the ridges of flesh, making Cosima’s mouth drop open, making her think of perilous jaws and bloodstains on the earth. She doesn’t understand how she lost control so quickly.
Delphine clears her throat and rocks once against Cosima’s hand before she speaks again. “Did you think I was going to leave you and go report to Rachel with results, or something?”
Possessed by the need to have the upper hand again, Cosima abruptly presses hard into Delphine with two fingers and she moans, her hips pitching forward like Cosima’s hand is a sudden gravitational pull. Cosima roughs the wet cotton over her, momentarily dipping inside, and feels a shudder against her fingertips.
“If you did, would I get an A-plus?” she asks.
She thinks Delphine wants to roll her eyes, but when Cosima slows her fingers to a sinful drag she groans instead, banking up against Cosima’s body and shoving her wrist back into her stomach with force. This is what Cosima has missed, the insistence of someone against her, begging for the touch of her hands, the grind of hip against hip, the grin of her mouth over skin. Her life – their lives – don’t really allow for it; always faced with too many questions and answering with too many lies. Girls who drip with the blood of monsters do not find love in brightly lit rooms, they are left to skulk in the shadows and take what scraps they can find. A lick of dusty affection; hands knitted against harsh concrete.
So this: Delphine, serpentine; Delphine, wrapped desperate around her, feels like sunlight baking into her coldest reaches, her gloomiest depths. It feels like the first breath of warmth after winter. She wants to shift them, lay Delphine out on the bed and find all her stretches and bends, the architecture she makes under the stroke of tongue and the lightest catch of teeth. She wants to take hours to map that ranging human-galaxy that spans the length of her body, that is glittering beneath her skin.
But Delphine is writhing, hips pumping, those sounds issuing from her mouth again – breathy, pitched, travelling straight down to the aching throb between her thighs. Her mouth goes dry when Delphine rocks back slightly, one hand closing around Cosima’s wrist and the other moving the soaking layers of shorts-fabric aside, and suddenly she’s got three fingers buried to the knuckle inside her. Delphine clenches around them with her mouth wide and damp, still clasping Cosima’s wrist. Her hips are frantic now, grinding hard against the press of thumb against clit, and her head tips back, spine arching forward so her chest is flush against Cosima’s.
Somehow, she wrests a hand down between them, and when she begins to paint Cosima with slick fingers her mind goes fractal, kaleidoscoping into bursts of colour and light. There is nothing better than this, she thinks, this symmetry of bodies and rouging of skin at some ungodly hour of the morning. Primal, archaic twists of sinew and bone and breath.
The angles are all wrong, too many elbows and wrists and stringy muscles of forearms in the way, but the beautiful imperfection of it sends her teeth scraping hard over Delphine’s collarbone; ears filled with Delphine’s heady, searing moans against her temple as she thrusts her fingers deep.
She feels Delphine finally reach some magnificent peak, her mouth pressing earnestly into Cosima’s skin, then she goes slack against her, pulsing around the gentle curl of her fingers.
She manages to pick herself up, smoothing the hair out of her face and grinning like a stunning, sated lunatic.
Cosima looks at her for a moment, then tilts her head. “So I’ve gotta get an A for that at least, right?”
Delphine snorts, lifting herself out of Cosima’s lap. Then she pushes Cosima back with her free hand, rising up over her body as she settles into the pillows. Her eyes are wide with something akin to curiosity as she watches Cosima under her, hand sliding beneath her underwear to find slippery skin. She studies the reaction: Cosima’s jerk of hips and her open mouth, and Cosima feels almost like some strange experiment, wondered over and revered.
It doesn’t take long for her to come undone, with Delphine’s long fingers stroking potent rhythms in mimicry of Cosima’s own, and when she comes back to herself she pulls Delphine down next to her, lets her nestle in against the curve of her chest as she catches her breath.
Screw Rachel, she thinks, drawing symbols across the plane of Delphine’s shoulders with a fingernail, the lingering scent of her shampoo tickling her nose. Delphine’s hand palms her stomach, lazy and warm. Screw Rachel and every one of her stupid rules. This is worth it.
In the morning she sneaks upstairs as quietly as she can, putting into practice the training she’s almost never bothered to use, and when she reaches the empty kitchen she thinks she’s in the clear.
Until Felix steps out from behind the door, grabbing her shirt and almost scaring the life out of her.
“Felix, what the fuck?”
“Alison’s rather concerned that Delphine’s gone missing,” he says, knowing perfectly well that Delphine’s not missing at all.
Cosima tries her hardest to feign innocence. “Delphine? She’s uh, already down in the lab.”
“Yeah, I bet she is. Rachel’l have your head, Cosima.”
“Screw Rachel.”
Felix’s eyebrows climb so high they almost disappear into his hair.
She sighs. “I know. I know. Look it won’t… happen again.”
She immediately recalls the breathy, laughing way Delphine came down from her orgasm not ten minutes ago, still urging herself into Cosima’s mouth with her hands tangled in her dreads. Nice try, Niehaus. “Or like, I’ll try not to let it happen again. Can you just… cover? For me?”
Felix rolls his eyes. “You’re in luck, I was feeling particularly benevolent and I told Alison she got up early at your request. So technically I suppose I wasn’t even lying.”
She shoves him.
“Hey, how about we show a little bloody respect? And let’s get this—” he waves vaguely at her hastily put-together outfit, “whole situation back downstairs, shall we? I’ll find a way to get some of Delphine’s clothes down to you in a minute.”
“Thank you, Felix, you’re a lifesaver.” Cosima makes to kiss him on the cheek, but he takes a sudden step back in response.
“Oh no. Nuh-uh, I know what you’ve been doing with that face, I don’t want it anywhere near me until I know you’ve showered.”
Cosima fixes him with a withering look. “God, you’re so gay.”
“Pots and bloody kettles, Cosima,” he retorts, manhandling her back towards the doorway. “Hurry it up.”
She blows him a kiss from the steps before heading down them, damn near sprinting back to the lab and Delphine still sprawled in her sheets. She smiles, lips curling mischievous in the corners. Felix has inadvertently given her a fantastic idea.
“Shower?”