She pulls the supplies from the pouch at her waist, as well as one of the little rune-stone lighters floating around the Gallows these days. Elfroot isn't exactly marijuana, but you roll it more or less the same way. (It works in her rifted-in vape, too, but tonight she's gone analog.) She takes a minute to deal with the rolling, not because she can't do it while talking but because it's a decent excuse to gather her thoughts.
Once it's lit and she passes it to him, she says, "So I know Herian is working with you these days." Which is certainly a place to begin.
Stephen’s so straight-laced on the surface that this might have seemed such a surprise the first time he gladly blazed up with her; but he also underwent psychedelic training with a bunch of monks in the mountains where ayahuasca wouldn’t have been out-of-place for opening their third eyes to other planes. Life comes at you fast.
“Mmyeah,” he says. He’d wondered when this would come up again. It was likely always going to happen at some point; sending Gwenaëlle to impart that initial bad news to Cosima was only delaying the inevitable, and Herian’s been settling into the day-to-day at the infirmary ever since.
“She was very eager to make herself of assistance.”
"Yeah, that part's not only the Tranquility. She always wanted to be put to work." They might eventually get to some of Cosima's thoughts on what the Circle system did to Herian, but she's still sober right now and it feels like a rough place to begin.
She shifts so she's fully sitting on the edge of his desk, not leaning anymore. "So when we talked about the Blip and how it's weirdly sort of like being here twice as a Rifter, I talked a little bit of my ex-fiancee. Did anyone fill you in that it was Herian I was talking about, since she's been back?" An honest question, as far as it goes. It's easy to imagine he'd gotten that from Gwenaëlle, purposely or otherwise; it's just as easy to imagine that no one had thought to spell it out.
“They did, yeah.” The unspoken Gwenaëlle sits there between them, his usual hotline for any Riftwatch gossip or social context he’s missing. “And Herian herself was very open about it besides. She didn’t want to cause you any extra distress.”
But how Herian feels isn’t precisely the most pertinent topic at hand, considering she doesn’t feel much of anything anymore. So Stephen looks at Cosima instead, and weighs what he can see of the expression on— his friend. Yes. They are, in fact, friends, and so he tells himself he’s allowed to ask this, and she came here specifically to talk about this.
"Fuck if I know," has a shaky edge that's more a laugh that otherwise. "I don't ... OK so like. Layer one in this bizarre onion: I'm so fucking angry someone did this to her against her will. Like, taking all I can do to not grab Rowntree and force a vote where I demand we immediately burn down the Chantry. Like, metaphorically, I should specify given that we're in Kirkwall. But still." She flexes her hands, absent and a bit restless.
"Layer two, somewhat in confidence because I don't know how widely this is known: years ago, Herian told me she was thinking about Tranquility on purpose. The fucking Circle made her so afraid of herself that she..." Cosima breaks off over what's clearly an unpleasant memory, taking a breath to center herself. "Anyway. I talked her off the ledge. This was back when we were together, my first time here. And now it feels like some monkey's paw shit on top of how much I would have hated this anyway."
She tilts her head back for a moment, as if the ceiling might have an answer (or just not to directly meet Stephen's gaze for a minute, as much as she trusts him to be saying this at all).
"Layer three. Talking with her now ... it really brings home to me that there's a lot of places where we just don't understand each other that don't really have anything to do with the Tranquility. I mean, maybe that makes it clearer in some ways, but it's nothing that wasn't there before in a different form. And that sucks, you know? Like, in a way I don't know what to fucking do with right now because there are a million more important things going on, but it's still tough to swallow. Because it's right up against layer four, which is that I'm always going to care about her. Like, even if we restore her connection to her emotions, I don't think we should get back together, it's a bad idea for a lot of reasons. But even if it's as friends, what happens to her, her well-being. It matters to me so much."
Another shaky laugh as she looks back his way. "Sorry, I kind of meant to ease into some of that, it's just ... I haven't really talked to anyone about it at all and now you're the lucky winner."
Stephen’s jolted, for a moment, by that hyper-specific unexpected overlap, which just keeps happening with Cosima for some reason —
But if hers was said in confidence, then his even moreso; he can’t bring himself to explain I think I know how you feel, and how he understands that white-hot anger at the idea of a loved one actually wanting Tranquility. Gwenaëlle was so open about herself, but that particular piece of information had been obtained too closely, too intimately for his comfort. So, instead:
“So that’s at least four onion layers. You’ve got a whole ogre,” Stephen says, his instinctive kneejerk instinct to start off by making light. But his tone soon pivots, turning serious again.
“You still carry people with you. Your words. And that still holds true: of course you’re gonna carry that with you and you’ll still care about what happens to her, even if you’re not romantically involved anymore. And you already said to me, back then, that you’d already been spotting the ways in which your pieces didn’t line up anymore— so, yeah, I could see the Tranquility just, I don’t know, making that even more apparent?”
The ogre joke gets a shaky laugh, so at least she's not offended.
The second part quiets her back down again. After a moment, she breathes out, heavy. "Yeah. Yeah. And it's so ... she's so ready to believe she has to earn my care. That she has to do everything just right. Or, worse, that I don't know myself well enough to set boundaries, so if she doesn't make clear I don't have to interact with her, that I don't have to help, I might miserably trudge through it out of. Obligation, I guess? Not knowing that I can say no? And that's really not the problem, I think zero people in Riftwatch who know the situation would blame me for keeping my space and there's plenty of other people who can offer her support. And that feels like it takes up a lot of the oxygen sometimes. Her offering 17 disclaimers because she doesn't trust that I'm doing what I'm doing freely without all of them."
Stephen never would’ve thought he’d willingly delve into a personal conversation like this, because usually please god don’t tell him about your romantic drama,
but he finds that he cares, for once. About both of them. Perhaps the context matters. It isn’t just tedious social contrivance; there’s gruesome history here, rifters coming and going, an attack, an infected wound he had to clean out with his own two hands. He hesitates a little too long, however, as he listens to Cosima. There’s another unexpected flicker; a sharp twist like he’s caught his breath wrong.
“Yeah. I expect it can be… maddening, someone else making assumptions about your own motivations, not trusting you to know yourself.”
Now it’s his turn for his gaze to drift to the ceiling, glancing away. “And I say that as someone who once did that exact same shit to Christine. Well within her rights to dump me, probably. I had to learn the extremely hard way that if someone says they want to help you, you should probably believe them at face value.”
At least he’s self-aware enough to realise it now, though, literal years later.
“Was Herian like that before the Tranquility? Driven by blind obligations herself.”
She resists the urge to fondly notice that he's now involved with possibly the bluntest person he could find, with regard to believing one's partner. Instead, she answers his question.
"She was, yeah. I mean... it looked different. And our dynamic was different the first time I was here, some, because I was sick. Neither of us wanted me to be, but I think it was easier to mistake me for a certain kind of fragile when it was sometimes hard for me to breathe, you know?"
It hadn't been a simpler dynamic, but it had maybe seemed that way at the time.
"But ever since I've known her, she's mistrusted herself in some ways. I don't know how much is the Circle and how much is temperament, but I think it makes it easy to mistrust others when you think your own motivations and assumptions are in some ways suspect." And that seemed to have been getting worse, even before the Tranquility.
“Hm. Yeah. There’s duty and there’s capital D, underlined Duty, and Herian seems… I mean, I wasn’t sure how much of that to chalk up to the Tranquility, but that seemed to be the case.”
He can’t really picture it. His hands were tied to some broad values — the physician’s oath, a general do-gooder attitude — but he otherwise broke so many rules with impunity that you never really had to worry about his motivations. Mostly, if Stephen Strange wanted to do something, he just went and did it.
He pauses, then: “At least, perhaps it’s easier that you’re discovering this about yourselves now? Instead of when you’re still neck-deep in it, affianced, about to be married.”
The look he gets for the observation about duty is somewhere between fond and rueful. That certainly isn't something new about Herian, it seems.
But instead of diving in there, she considers his second observation, taking a drag as she does. "...yeah, probably. I mean. Part of me thinks we can't really know the ways we'd both be different if I'd just been here the whole time instead of vanishing. Like, I do think you're right, some of the fault lines were here even before I went. But also she lived the stretch without me. And I came back with new memories, including getting way more serious with my partner from back home, and even knowing that Cosima isn't me, exactly, it's... Someone you're with leaves a mark on you, too, even when you don't consider yourself with them anymore."
A shaky laugh. "I mean, the way you're definitely right is that I think it would have been a disaster if we'd tried to work it out just out of some sense of obligation to our earlier promise. I don't think we were in real danger of that, though." Herian, her general feelings on promises aside, had been the one to leave. If she hadn't, Cosima suspects that Cosima herself would have stepped away instead. Her self-preservation instinct is certainly that strong.
“And after a certain point, it becomes moot,” Stephen points out. “You can bellyache and drive yourself crazy wondering what could have been, but the fact remains that you did vanish and come back, so these are the versions of yourselves that the two of you are dealing with, right now. We play the hand we’re dealt.”
Okay, and sometimes you can go back and change the past, but this isn’t one of those times.
Despite the subject matter, the conversation flows easily: her turn with the elfroot, then his, a back-and-forth like trading pulls off a wine bottle. It gives them space and little breathers and ways to keep their hands busy. Makes him a little more ruminative, and easier for him to roll with the fact that they’re sitting around talking about girls.
Friends. Whoulda thunkit. Once it’s his turn with the elfroot, he looks down contemplatively at its burning tip, the flame.
“You’re still allowed to care about her deeply, as a friend, even if you don’t want to get back together. My ex—” He realises, then, that until a brief moment ago he hadn’t even named Christine with Cosima, despite Cosima being the only person who’s heard about this outside of Gwenaëlle. And he trips over it for a second, peeling back those layers of his own history, before continuing: “Anyway. Christine. She’s one of my few friends, back home. You went through a lot together. You can still care.”
Deductive reasoning had suggested Christine is the person he'd talked with her about before, but it's nice to have it confirmed. She nods with a rueful smile. "I'm glad. It sounds nice, you know. Being friends with an ex. Love that on paper. But if I manage it with Herian, it'll probably be the first time. I mean ... to be clear, not because I'm out here refusing to do it, but. OK do you want a kind of objectively ridiculous counterexample? It does involve weird clone shit."
There's so much of her pre-Thedas life that sounds normal and wholesome when she brings it up, but that's largely because she leaves out the year or so right before she arrived. The people who'd seen the Fade's imitation of her home world, or those with enough longevity to have met Sarah or Helena, could probably fill in some gaps, but it's not something Cosima raises routinely.
Then again, if anyone can handle weird clone shit, it's probably the sorcerer from a world where half the population vanished for five years.
Stephen takes another puff of elfroot and then does a thing he almost never does: he reaches out with his spare hand to lay it over hers, a grandiose gesture.
He keeps his expression straight-faced, so serious that it actually circles back around to shit-eating again, as he says with all somber gravitas: “Cosima Niehaus, with all my heart, never doubt this about me: I am always going to want to hear an objectively ridiculous counterexample involving weird clone shit.”
orphan black spoilers but also: S3 aired 9 years ago, what have you been doing
It make her laugh in spite of herself. "Alright, man, you asked for it," with a bit of a lingering grin, even if it's rueful.
"So. The partner back home I mentioned, Delphine. Let's ... OK, shit, this involved a lot of complicated parts and I gotta sort out which ones you need to understand. So. Almost all of the clones were in the general population, unaware of our origins. The people who designed this experiment, they wanted us to be exposed to a whole range of environmental factors and they wanted that exposure to be indistinguishable from how a non-clone would experience them. Close as they could get at least. But. You've probably spotted the problem with that from an experiment design point of view, right? If you've got individuals in your study all over the world and they don't know they're in your experiment, how do you get data? I assume in countries with less robust privacy laws, they were just out here harvesting stuff from routine medical appointments, but hard to do that in the U.S., Canada, the U.K., France, etc. without drawing unwanted attention."
She shifts, tucking one of her legs up and letting the other swing free. "Enter the concept of monitors. You get people involved in the experiment to insert themselves into clones' lives to get close to them. Friend, roommate, romantic partner, whatever makes sense. And once you're close enough a clone will let her guard down with you, clandestine measurements. I don't know who all of mine were but I found out at least one of my exes was." So, you know. That's fine and normal. And this is all still setup.
The mood see-saws a little; there’s the ghost of amusement in the air still between them, but Stephen’s expression tightens at the corners of his eyes, concerned about what he’s hearing. They’ve broached the unethical nature of these cloning experiments before, but this is a whole other level —
“Jesus christ,” he says. “Someone was dating you to measure you? To gather data?”
"Oh yeah. Fucks you right up. Especially because, once we clones were adults, romantic partner seemed to be an especially popular choice for monitors. You know, access to where you live, reasons to stay over at night without raising suspicions. And also a huge fucking betrayal. Sometimes the people running the experiment tricked the monitors into what they were doing: One of my sisters' husbands thought he was participating in some sort of long-term sociology experiment." She doesn't say bless, but it's in her tone. Donnie loved Alison but was also a man who'd look for "gullible" written on the ceiling.
"But sometimes people were working for the company, and then they'd get close to a clone actively knowing why. That happened to my sister Beth. And it's how I met Delphine. She was posing as an immunology student at my university. Trying to get close to me on purpose, it turns out. Ironically, not romantically as far as I know. She thought she was straight when we met." Funny old world. "But she was really hot, I've got to emphasize that to you. French accent, great hair, brilliant brain. So we hooked up, and then I figured out she was working for the Dyad Institute and it immediately got complicated."
This is, like, one-third of the way through the point she was trying to make, sorry Stephen. It's a little bit that she's getting stoned, but mostly that this entire story is unhinged and it's hard to tease out just the part she wants.
He tilts slightly back in his chair as he listens, more nonchalant than most people get to see from him, but he’s still riveted to the tale even as the chairlegs lift off the floor, relaxed.
“French accent, great hair, brilliant brain,” Stephen repeats with a laugh: “Sounds like we’ve similar taste in women. Whouldathunkit.”
The chairlegs drop back down and hit the stone floor of the office. He’s still listening. Locked in, as they say.
"Yeah, look, when I say nice work if you can get it about being a kept man," is a tease, but also it's not like he's wrong about Gwenaëlle being Cosmia's type on paper.
"So. I dumped her, but then we got back together and we were trying to work the problem of my illness together at Dyad, the company she was working for. Mixed successes there, fully. But the whole reason I brought up Delphine and this long-ass story is that at one point, she got promoted in Dyad to a point where she could really do a lot of good for all of us clones as a whole. But she broke it off with me, because she said she felt like she couldn't love us all equally the way I asked her to if she was also with me and that the greater good was more important." Cosima's not a shrinking flower normally, but the flow of conversation is distinctly easier now. Even if the topic isn't, quite.
"I mean, given all the setup, it could have actively been worse."
Maybe less comforting than it might be, and especially so given what she's about to say.
"So I met someone and it was ... nice, you know? Nothing Earth-shaking, just like normal first few dates stuff. But I wasn't exactly going to lead with by the way, I'm the result of an illegal human cloning experiment and my sisters and I are in the middle of fighting a biomedical corporation for our bodily autonomy and I also have a potentially fatal health condition. I felt like that was a little bit too much for even, like, date three." She sighs. "But, uh. Delphine took an interest. Had the two of us surveilled, did a whole background check on this woman — Shay — and told me that she had a military background she hadn't mentioned, strongly suggesting that she was a spy working with an organization who'd ... not important, but Delphine thought I was in danger."
There's really no way to finish the story while covering anyone in glory, but they've come this far. Still, Cosima's regret is clear. "So, uh. Delphine showed up and interrogated Shay in her home, and apparently at one point threatened to kill her and make it look like a suicide. I later learned. And after all that, Shay was just a normal woman who'd decided her military service wasn't third-date material either because, shockingly, she found it turned a lot of women off before they got to know her. So, uh. That all. Could have gone much better."
So "could be worse" presumably encompasses Shay was actually a spy for real and/or Delphine did kill her, among other things.
The dating apps were already daunting to begin with — Stephen had been teetering on the edge of just a bit too old for them, measuring their convenience versus his aversion — but considering Cosima’s experiences, he had envisioned something more calamitous. Shay turning out to be yet another spy, more trust issues to field, more betrayals. Cosima can see his brow crinkling as he measures those pros/cons. He waggles his hand.
“Could’ve gone better, could’ve been worse,” he says, echoing her thoughts. “On the one hand, all of your experiences mean some paranoia is fairly justifiable and warranted. On the other: okay, yeah, way to have your ex absolutely kill your shot at a future love life.”
"Poor Shay. Got the hell out of Dodge which is, like, the most understandable reaction. Delphine and I had a big fight about it, and then I thought she was dead. Delphine. And it was just ... it was extremely fucked." A beat, and then: "She isn't, though. At home. She did get shot, but it turns out not fatally, and then she got kidnapped, so. We eventually made it up before I came back to Thedas again. Or like, Cosima prime did, I guess, but I remember all of it, so." Just rifter things.
She takes a drag and then seems to come up for air a bit. "...wow, I'm sorry, this has got to be way more than you bargained for when you let me bribe you with drugs earlier." She finds she doesn't mind that she's told him, exactly, but she feels like she's now been talking for an extremely long time, all told.
“In fairness, I always ask for the long story,” Stephen points out, amiably. “My own life has been so batshit weird that I welcome anecdotes that are anywhere near the same. Solidarity, etc.”
He’s ruminative after a moment — everything sliding into that comfortable loose where he’s not quite so anal about his privacy, less neurotic about cracking open the box and swapping these stories, dipping into each others’ personal lives. Cosima’s one of the few he doesn’t mind doing this with, it turns out. Not something he would’ve predicted when he first arrived here, but so it goes.
“It’s not exactly weird clone shit,” he offers, “but if it makes you feel any better, I have a story about meeting an alternate universe version of my ex?”
"I guess you did ask," she allows. But the offer of a return story gets her attention. "Oh man, what was that like? I feel like everyone imagines clones are like meeting alternate universe versions of yourself, but it really isn't, it's like ... twins, but there's a ton more of you and you didn't even have the same parents. Like, Alison," who he could have "met" in the Fade, in theory, giving this a particular slant, "and I have the same DNA but we aren't the same person in any way. Alternates are something else again."
She's the farthest thing from a physicist, but you don't spend as long as she has in an actual other world without getting curious about the possibility of a multiverse, at least not with Cosima's background.
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portalling) wrote2022-04-02 01:17 pm
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Once it's lit and she passes it to him, she says, "So I know Herian is working with you these days." Which is certainly a place to begin.
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“Mmyeah,” he says. He’d wondered when this would come up again. It was likely always going to happen at some point; sending Gwenaëlle to impart that initial bad news to Cosima was only delaying the inevitable, and Herian’s been settling into the day-to-day at the infirmary ever since.
“She was very eager to make herself of assistance.”
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She shifts so she's fully sitting on the edge of his desk, not leaning anymore. "So when we talked about the Blip and how it's weirdly sort of like being here twice as a Rifter, I talked a little bit of my ex-fiancee. Did anyone fill you in that it was Herian I was talking about, since she's been back?" An honest question, as far as it goes. It's easy to imagine he'd gotten that from Gwenaëlle, purposely or otherwise; it's just as easy to imagine that no one had thought to spell it out.
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But how Herian feels isn’t precisely the most pertinent topic at hand, considering she doesn’t feel much of anything anymore. So Stephen looks at Cosima instead, and weighs what he can see of the expression on— his friend. Yes. They are, in fact, friends, and so he tells himself he’s allowed to ask this, and she came here specifically to talk about this.
“How are you feeling about it?”
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"Layer two, somewhat in confidence because I don't know how widely this is known: years ago, Herian told me she was thinking about Tranquility on purpose. The fucking Circle made her so afraid of herself that she..." Cosima breaks off over what's clearly an unpleasant memory, taking a breath to center herself. "Anyway. I talked her off the ledge. This was back when we were together, my first time here. And now it feels like some monkey's paw shit on top of how much I would have hated this anyway."
She tilts her head back for a moment, as if the ceiling might have an answer (or just not to directly meet Stephen's gaze for a minute, as much as she trusts him to be saying this at all).
"Layer three. Talking with her now ... it really brings home to me that there's a lot of places where we just don't understand each other that don't really have anything to do with the Tranquility. I mean, maybe that makes it clearer in some ways, but it's nothing that wasn't there before in a different form. And that sucks, you know? Like, in a way I don't know what to fucking do with right now because there are a million more important things going on, but it's still tough to swallow. Because it's right up against layer four, which is that I'm always going to care about her. Like, even if we restore her connection to her emotions, I don't think we should get back together, it's a bad idea for a lot of reasons. But even if it's as friends, what happens to her, her well-being. It matters to me so much."
Another shaky laugh as she looks back his way. "Sorry, I kind of meant to ease into some of that, it's just ... I haven't really talked to anyone about it at all and now you're the lucky winner."
no subject
But if hers was said in confidence, then his even moreso; he can’t bring himself to explain I think I know how you feel, and how he understands that white-hot anger at the idea of a loved one actually wanting Tranquility. Gwenaëlle was so open about herself, but that particular piece of information had been obtained too closely, too intimately for his comfort. So, instead:
“So that’s at least four onion layers. You’ve got a whole ogre,” Stephen says, his instinctive kneejerk instinct to start off by making light. But his tone soon pivots, turning serious again.
“You still carry people with you. Your words. And that still holds true: of course you’re gonna carry that with you and you’ll still care about what happens to her, even if you’re not romantically involved anymore. And you already said to me, back then, that you’d already been spotting the ways in which your pieces didn’t line up anymore— so, yeah, I could see the Tranquility just, I don’t know, making that even more apparent?”
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The second part quiets her back down again. After a moment, she breathes out, heavy. "Yeah. Yeah. And it's so ... she's so ready to believe she has to earn my care. That she has to do everything just right. Or, worse, that I don't know myself well enough to set boundaries, so if she doesn't make clear I don't have to interact with her, that I don't have to help, I might miserably trudge through it out of. Obligation, I guess? Not knowing that I can say no? And that's really not the problem, I think zero people in Riftwatch who know the situation would blame me for keeping my space and there's plenty of other people who can offer her support. And that feels like it takes up a lot of the oxygen sometimes. Her offering 17 disclaimers because she doesn't trust that I'm doing what I'm doing freely without all of them."
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but he finds that he cares, for once. About both of them. Perhaps the context matters. It isn’t just tedious social contrivance; there’s gruesome history here, rifters coming and going, an attack, an infected wound he had to clean out with his own two hands. He hesitates a little too long, however, as he listens to Cosima. There’s another unexpected flicker; a sharp twist like he’s caught his breath wrong.
“Yeah. I expect it can be… maddening, someone else making assumptions about your own motivations, not trusting you to know yourself.”
Now it’s his turn for his gaze to drift to the ceiling, glancing away. “And I say that as someone who once did that exact same shit to Christine. Well within her rights to dump me, probably. I had to learn the extremely hard way that if someone says they want to help you, you should probably believe them at face value.”
At least he’s self-aware enough to realise it now, though, literal years later.
“Was Herian like that before the Tranquility? Driven by blind obligations herself.”
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"She was, yeah. I mean... it looked different. And our dynamic was different the first time I was here, some, because I was sick. Neither of us wanted me to be, but I think it was easier to mistake me for a certain kind of fragile when it was sometimes hard for me to breathe, you know?"
It hadn't been a simpler dynamic, but it had maybe seemed that way at the time.
"But ever since I've known her, she's mistrusted herself in some ways. I don't know how much is the Circle and how much is temperament, but I think it makes it easy to mistrust others when you think your own motivations and assumptions are in some ways suspect." And that seemed to have been getting worse, even before the Tranquility.
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He can’t really picture it. His hands were tied to some broad values — the physician’s oath, a general do-gooder attitude — but he otherwise broke so many rules with impunity that you never really had to worry about his motivations. Mostly, if Stephen Strange wanted to do something, he just went and did it.
He pauses, then: “At least, perhaps it’s easier that you’re discovering this about yourselves now? Instead of when you’re still neck-deep in it, affianced, about to be married.”
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But instead of diving in there, she considers his second observation, taking a drag as she does. "...yeah, probably. I mean. Part of me thinks we can't really know the ways we'd both be different if I'd just been here the whole time instead of vanishing. Like, I do think you're right, some of the fault lines were here even before I went. But also she lived the stretch without me. And I came back with new memories, including getting way more serious with my partner from back home, and even knowing that Cosima isn't me, exactly, it's... Someone you're with leaves a mark on you, too, even when you don't consider yourself with them anymore."
A shaky laugh. "I mean, the way you're definitely right is that I think it would have been a disaster if we'd tried to work it out just out of some sense of obligation to our earlier promise. I don't think we were in real danger of that, though." Herian, her general feelings on promises aside, had been the one to leave. If she hadn't, Cosima suspects that Cosima herself would have stepped away instead. Her self-preservation instinct is certainly that strong.
no subject
Okay, and sometimes you can go back and change the past, but this isn’t one of those times.
Despite the subject matter, the conversation flows easily: her turn with the elfroot, then his, a back-and-forth like trading pulls off a wine bottle. It gives them space and little breathers and ways to keep their hands busy. Makes him a little more ruminative, and easier for him to roll with the fact that they’re sitting around talking about girls.
Friends. Whoulda thunkit. Once it’s his turn with the elfroot, he looks down contemplatively at its burning tip, the flame.
“You’re still allowed to care about her deeply, as a friend, even if you don’t want to get back together. My ex—” He realises, then, that until a brief moment ago he hadn’t even named Christine with Cosima, despite Cosima being the only person who’s heard about this outside of Gwenaëlle. And he trips over it for a second, peeling back those layers of his own history, before continuing: “Anyway. Christine. She’s one of my few friends, back home. You went through a lot together. You can still care.”
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There's so much of her pre-Thedas life that sounds normal and wholesome when she brings it up, but that's largely because she leaves out the year or so right before she arrived. The people who'd seen the Fade's imitation of her home world, or those with enough longevity to have met Sarah or Helena, could probably fill in some gaps, but it's not something Cosima raises routinely.
Then again, if anyone can handle weird clone shit, it's probably the sorcerer from a world where half the population vanished for five years.
no subject
He keeps his expression straight-faced, so serious that it actually circles back around to shit-eating again, as he says with all somber gravitas: “Cosima Niehaus, with all my heart, never doubt this about me: I am always going to want to hear an objectively ridiculous counterexample involving weird clone shit.”
orphan black spoilers but also: S3 aired 9 years ago, what have you been doing
"So. The partner back home I mentioned, Delphine. Let's ... OK, shit, this involved a lot of complicated parts and I gotta sort out which ones you need to understand. So. Almost all of the clones were in the general population, unaware of our origins. The people who designed this experiment, they wanted us to be exposed to a whole range of environmental factors and they wanted that exposure to be indistinguishable from how a non-clone would experience them. Close as they could get at least. But. You've probably spotted the problem with that from an experiment design point of view, right? If you've got individuals in your study all over the world and they don't know they're in your experiment, how do you get data? I assume in countries with less robust privacy laws, they were just out here harvesting stuff from routine medical appointments, but hard to do that in the U.S., Canada, the U.K., France, etc. without drawing unwanted attention."
She shifts, tucking one of her legs up and letting the other swing free. "Enter the concept of monitors. You get people involved in the experiment to insert themselves into clones' lives to get close to them. Friend, roommate, romantic partner, whatever makes sense. And once you're close enough a clone will let her guard down with you, clandestine measurements. I don't know who all of mine were but I found out at least one of my exes was." So, you know. That's fine and normal. And this is all still setup.
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“Jesus christ,” he says. “Someone was dating you to measure you? To gather data?”
Talk about future trust issues.
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"But sometimes people were working for the company, and then they'd get close to a clone actively knowing why. That happened to my sister Beth. And it's how I met Delphine. She was posing as an immunology student at my university. Trying to get close to me on purpose, it turns out. Ironically, not romantically as far as I know. She thought she was straight when we met." Funny old world. "But she was really hot, I've got to emphasize that to you. French accent, great hair, brilliant brain. So we hooked up, and then I figured out she was working for the Dyad Institute and it immediately got complicated."
This is, like, one-third of the way through the point she was trying to make, sorry Stephen. It's a little bit that she's getting stoned, but mostly that this entire story is unhinged and it's hard to tease out just the part she wants.
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“French accent, great hair, brilliant brain,” Stephen repeats with a laugh: “Sounds like we’ve similar taste in women. Whouldathunkit.”
The chairlegs drop back down and hit the stone floor of the office. He’s still listening. Locked in, as they say.
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"So. I dumped her, but then we got back together and we were trying to work the problem of my illness together at Dyad, the company she was working for. Mixed successes there, fully. But the whole reason I brought up Delphine and this long-ass story is that at one point, she got promoted in Dyad to a point where she could really do a lot of good for all of us clones as a whole. But she broke it off with me, because she said she felt like she couldn't love us all equally the way I asked her to if she was also with me and that the greater good was more important." Cosima's not a shrinking flower normally, but the flow of conversation is distinctly easier now. Even if the topic isn't, quite.
"So I tried to go on the dating apps."
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“—I’m girding myself for whatever horrifying turn this is about to take,” Stephen says.
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Maybe less comforting than it might be, and especially so given what she's about to say.
"So I met someone and it was ... nice, you know? Nothing Earth-shaking, just like normal first few dates stuff. But I wasn't exactly going to lead with by the way, I'm the result of an illegal human cloning experiment and my sisters and I are in the middle of fighting a biomedical corporation for our bodily autonomy and I also have a potentially fatal health condition. I felt like that was a little bit too much for even, like, date three." She sighs. "But, uh. Delphine took an interest. Had the two of us surveilled, did a whole background check on this woman — Shay — and told me that she had a military background she hadn't mentioned, strongly suggesting that she was a spy working with an organization who'd ... not important, but Delphine thought I was in danger."
There's really no way to finish the story while covering anyone in glory, but they've come this far. Still, Cosima's regret is clear. "So, uh. Delphine showed up and interrogated Shay in her home, and apparently at one point threatened to kill her and make it look like a suicide. I later learned. And after all that, Shay was just a normal woman who'd decided her military service wasn't third-date material either because, shockingly, she found it turned a lot of women off before they got to know her. So, uh. That all. Could have gone much better."
So "could be worse" presumably encompasses Shay was actually a spy for real and/or Delphine did kill her, among other things.
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“Could’ve gone better, could’ve been worse,” he says, echoing her thoughts. “On the one hand, all of your experiences mean some paranoia is fairly justifiable and warranted. On the other: okay, yeah, way to have your ex absolutely kill your shot at a future love life.”
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She takes a drag and then seems to come up for air a bit. "...wow, I'm sorry, this has got to be way more than you bargained for when you let me bribe you with drugs earlier." She finds she doesn't mind that she's told him, exactly, but she feels like she's now been talking for an extremely long time, all told.
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He’s ruminative after a moment — everything sliding into that comfortable loose where he’s not quite so anal about his privacy, less neurotic about cracking open the box and swapping these stories, dipping into each others’ personal lives. Cosima’s one of the few he doesn’t mind doing this with, it turns out. Not something he would’ve predicted when he first arrived here, but so it goes.
“It’s not exactly weird clone shit,” he offers, “but if it makes you feel any better, I have a story about meeting an alternate universe version of my ex?”
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She's the farthest thing from a physicist, but you don't spend as long as she has in an actual other world without getting curious about the possibility of a multiverse, at least not with Cosima's background.
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🎀