OOC intro: I just discovered that, at least in the US, Prime Video has Orphan Black available to watch, and I had forgotten just what a chameleon Tatiana Maslany is. I've previously only seen the first season and maybe a couple episodes of the second, but it got part of my head playing around with what it might be like from the perspective of one of the male lovers of the Clone Club, without actually using the characters from the show. One challenge: how I get the premise across from a POV that doesn't know what's going on.

This literally represents the first draft of the prompt, so feel free to absolutely eviscerate it, even though it's likely to get the same number of actual responses as any of my previous prompts, which is to say zero.

I grabbed my carry-on from the trunk and finished paying the Uber driver before heading up the stairs to the flat at a near-charge. Key in the door, click, wheel the bag to the side before closing the door and heading toward the bedroom. "Claire?" No answer. "Claire?"

I can hear her moving inside the walk-in closet, hangars sliding, and there's an oversized duffel on the bed. "Claire? How'd it go?" She had an administrative hearing today, suspended last month ago after a security clearance had lapsed when somebody elsewhere in the chain of command hadn't cleared paperwork in time.

She looked over at me. "Mark? I thought you weren't getting home until tomorrow."

"Had to come see you. How'd it go?"

"I panicked. I.... kind of threw up on them." she answered.

"Are you OK?" I asked.

She nodded, eyes a little wet. "At least, I will be," she replied.

I stepped in closer to her. Something was different, that I couldn't quite put my finger on. "What did you do to your hair?"

"Uh.... nothing. I got it cut."

"It's longer," I pointed out as I let a finger twirl out through one end.

"It's just wet," she answered.

"Something's different," I insisted.

She flexed her ankle to close the inch or two gap in our heights and proceeded to kiss me to within an inch of my life, with a kind of vigor I hadn't been able to remember for months.....