Phryne Fisher (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
st_illunsmeared) wrote2017-06-10 12:31 pm
st_illunsmeared) wrote2017-06-10 12:31 pm
[Log] Early Summer Picnic - Jack x Phryne
Jack and Phryne have a picnic, poetry, and passion.
There were many things to be said for the Madonna Inn, but at least at the moment it was proving to be an excellent place to be a forcibly-retired Jack Robinson. Even had the world aligned to allow them to be together back in Melbourne, it would not have been like this. Certainly, there would be nights together, but he imagined that most of their days spent together would have centered around cases, as always.
There most likely would have been, he imagined, a decided lack of semi-impromptu picnics on the lawn. Not enough free time, considerations of both their reputations….
And that would have been a waste. As it turned out, completely unsurprisingly, picnicking with the Honorable Miss Phryne Fisher was an experience somehow both stimulating and relaxing. And no one forgot the blanket. “I wonder if I should ask how involved Miss Williams was in the planning process.”
"As there's no chance of maintaining the illusion that I prepared lunch, you may ask if you like," she replied from where she lounged rather decadently on the blanket. She was considering, quite strongly, the possibility of a drowse, perhaps with Jack's clever fingers in her hair or on her skin, and possibly while he read. He did have such a lovely voice.
“In fact that may be answer enough.” Watching Phryne never got old, even now that he had the option of touching her, but Jack stroked some of her hair back from her face anyway. Wholly unnecessarily, but that was unlikely to matter to either of them.
Rather like a cat, Phryne tilted her head to allow the caress, but the soft sweep of black lashes against porcelain skin suggested (as she intended) encouragement rather than permission. "The non-comestible contents of the basket are my doing, as are the fresh strawberries. Dot thought them rather plain for the meal and blushed quite their color when I explained my intentions."
"Your intentions to... eat the strawberries?" Yes, Jack had some ideas as to the actual purpose of the strawberries, but he found he enjoyed being dense on purpose. Phryne enjoyed being teased, at times, nearly as much as doing the teasing. And Jack was rarely comfortable enough to be entirely open about it.
Phryne's amusement lit up her gaze, more for the fact of teasing than the content of it. Her darling Inspector felt relaxed and comfortable, else he wouldn't. She rolled over to her stomach and propped her chin on her hands (incidentally giving him a rather direct view down the collar of her blouse). "It's true, I may eat them. But they are the perfect size and shape for feeding one another, don't you agree?"
"I've found that a sufficiently motivated lady has been able to feed me any number of items." In fact, from their earliest association, food had been Phryne's favored form of bribery. "Perfect shape or no."
"Mmm, well, whoever she is, she needs to stop. I won't have her taming my dear Inspector to her hand." Of course, Phryne promptly reached for the plate of strawberries, dipped one into granulated sugar, and then lifted it to her own mouth where her lips sealed a perfect kiss around the narrower end of the berry."
"It would take quite a bit for her to catch up with you," Jack murmured, leaning down to accept both the kiss and the strawberry. There was no hypothetical 'her', and both the kiss and the berry were delicious. "You've got plenty of time."
As ever, Jack's kiss sent a delicious shiver through her, the uncanny result of having waited so very long for the second one (the first had been quite unexpected). Phryne curled her fingers into the hair at the back of his neck in an affectionate caress.
"Do I?" The question was unexpectedly soft and serious. "Miss Croft disappeared without warning, and Dottie's would-be beau, Dean Winchester. I heard this morning that Miss Martin appears to be missing as well, and no one has seen young Joan Girardi for months." Leonard had disappeared as well, but she considered it equally likely that he'd set up camp somewhere away from the hotel, and thus didn't worry over it.
"You do. I won't leave you." It would be the other way around, if it was anything at all, if Jack had anything to say about it. There was always the possibility that he wouldn't, given how unceremonious his departures had been from both the ship to England and Gotham City, but all one had to combat that was intent. Will. "If we go, we go together."
She'd lowered her gaze when she asked, and at his answer, she lifted her chin again and offered a fragile smile. "I wish that I could hold you to that promise." Her voice wavered just the tiniest bit, an emotional frailty that she allowed herself around Jack alone.
Jack kissed that smile, light and gentle, and wondered again how he'd thought that Miss Fisher in a relationship would be as confident and devil may care as she was in other things. It was easy to forget, watching her vibrancy and wit, that this was pain she had walled off, and was only now allowing to bleed out. "Have you ever known me, Phryne, to make a promise and not keep it?"
"Not you, my dear Inspector. You have far too much integrity." Phryne sighed and took his hand to lace their fingers together. She didn't need to tell him that 'not you' was more than an emphatic linguistic contrivance. He knew precisely who had made promises they didn't keep, and precisely who hadn't promised but had left her anyway.
"We have time, love." Phryne wasn't used to steady, dull, normal. The real test would be when she was used to it, whether it made her restless or comforted her. Which would also take time. "And I have never known you to be a woman who accepted any less than her due." As she had learned to insist on, before him.
It comforted her to speak of this as though they had some control, but anyone who had been exposed to the pure evil that was Murdoch Foyle knew control to be an illusion more often than not.
Still, she had no intention to spoil a lovely afternoon with depressing thoughts, if she could get away from them, so she smiled more gamely, eyebrows lifting in playful admonishment. "I have neither taken nor given my due yet today, darling, and it simply wouldn't do to make a liar of you. How shall we rectify the situation?"
Jack gave her roughly five seconds of innocent I-have-no-idea-what-you-mean blankness before taking a strawberry of his own, dipping it in sugar, and offered it as she had earlier.
Phryne answered with a soft, pleased laugh before accepting his offering. She kissed both mouth and fingers, and then returned to his mouth again to lick the sugar from his lips. "An excellent beginning! Now I think...yes."
She shifted on the blanket to prop herself in the bend of Jack's hip (not at all subtly encouraging him to move to suit her) where she could be caressed, drew the plate of strawberries and her unattended champagne near, and then handed him a book of poetry that "incidentally" she'd opened to a particular stanza she quite appreciated and was, for the moment, content to let do her speaking for her.
Jack paused briefly while he took in the stanza Phryne had clearly meant to highlight: This is love: to fly toward a secret sky, to cause a hundred veils to fall each moment. First to let go of life. Finally, to take a step without feet. It seemed... accurate enough. Go into the unknown, fall and keep falling, and hope you don't hit the ground. And presence of the word 'love' alone was telling enough about his dear Miss Fisher's feelings.
Rather than let the pause go on uncomfortably long, putting one or the other of them on the spot, Jack cleared his throat and started to read, starting with that stanza.
When he'd finished reading it aloud, Phryne placed her hand gently over the text and sought his gaze. "I do love you, Jack. So very dearly." And although her stomach fluttered with a touch of panic, nothing of substance had changed. It was simply time he heard it from her.
"I love you, too." Jack met her eyes, unflinching. He'd said it before, at least in his endearments, a way to tell her without saying it outright and spooking a woman who had good cause to be spooked by the word 'love'. So an answer like I know, while accurate, would also have dismissed how difficult the admission was for her.
Phryne smiled very gently to hear him put it into the words he'd held close for many months. "I don't mind hearing it from you," she said, just a touch of surprise in her voice at the realization. "I know you don't mean to restrain me by it."
"I would never. Your freedom is integral to you." Even if she'd been willing to give it up, in full or in part, her freedom was too much of what he loved about her for Jack to be willing to accept it.
Because words were clumsy and gratitude between lovers equally so, Phryne slid her hand behind his head and drew him into a kiss, sweet and slow, and undeniably unchaste. She certainly couldn't care less who saw, and she imagined that, at least in this moment, Jack probably couldn't either.
He couldn't and didn't, and Jack kissed her back quite readily. It was true that this sort of display was best kept private, but when there were no politics of any kind to think of, it mattered far less. At most, they would scandalize one or two people who would either adjust or avoid them.
Phryne smiled into the kiss and only pulled back to murmur, "Do you think we'll ever get used to that, simply kissing because we wish to, after all of this time?" It wasn't a real question, not precisely, but she did feel a remarkable sense of wonder whenever he yielded to the urge to kiss her (when they weren't in bed; that, after all, was expected).
“I rather hope not.” It seemed to Jack that that would be the beginning of the end, the first step towards perfunctory cheek-kisses on the way to some other place. Colder than he ever wanted to be able to maintain with Phryne.
It occurred to her, then, as it had only a few times since they'd embarked on this new adventure that for as confident as he seemed with her, her darling Jack worried. Of course he did, when a woman he'd loved and who seemed to have loved him and been able to turn and walk away.
She caressed his jaw and said quietly but decisively, "It won't happen." Not what he feared. And if the surprise of it faded, the delight never would.
“Not for quite a long time, I trust.” That sort of certainty could only come with time, but Jack wasn’t looking for cracks and fault lines, or trying to pull back in advance of finding them. It was something.
Never. But she knew he couldn't be forced to believe it. Instead, she trailed her fingers down his chest and then lifted her gaze from where they rested to meet his gaze. "I'm better when I'm with you, and you make me want to be better still." It wasn't the non-sequitur it probably seemed; just another set of thoughts she'd had that she hadn't known how to share with him until now.
“And you’ve challenged me to grow.” To leave his internal shelter and rejoin the world, without ever really forcing him entirely out of comfortable territory. Miss Fisher had simply annoyed, cajoled, or charmed him into taking one step forward, then another, and he’d never stepped back again.
Phryne basked in the unexpected glow of that for a moment. She did like knowing he believed she'd affected him for the better. Of course she'd thought so, but it needn't follow that he had as well. "Not so much to grow, darling, as to live." She leaned close and placed a kiss to his pulse. "I needed you to live."
“They’re much the same thing, really.” There was a difference, in that dead things didn’t grow because they couldn’t.
"Perhaps." She stroked the skin in the V of his shirt collar, thoughtfully. "But I didn't need you to become more than you were. Just to be it. You'd all but forgotten how, I think."
“I believe you’re right.” He’d actually thought that the War had killed those parts of him, so it had been no surprise to him when he’d walked around half-dead for years. And then Miss Fisher had blazed into his life, upending parts of it, swirling around the rest, not taking blandness for anything like an answer at any time.
"Of course I am." She favored him with a sunny smile, kissed him soundly and then flopped somehow gracefully back to the blanket. "I've been studying you for years, darling mine, and I am a detective."
“Quite true.” Jack leaned slightly to trace his fingers along her side. If he’d been an artist, this might well have been a good time to start sketching, but he was no such thing.
There were many things to be said for the Madonna Inn, but at least at the moment it was proving to be an excellent place to be a forcibly-retired Jack Robinson. Even had the world aligned to allow them to be together back in Melbourne, it would not have been like this. Certainly, there would be nights together, but he imagined that most of their days spent together would have centered around cases, as always.
There most likely would have been, he imagined, a decided lack of semi-impromptu picnics on the lawn. Not enough free time, considerations of both their reputations….
And that would have been a waste. As it turned out, completely unsurprisingly, picnicking with the Honorable Miss Phryne Fisher was an experience somehow both stimulating and relaxing. And no one forgot the blanket. “I wonder if I should ask how involved Miss Williams was in the planning process.”
"As there's no chance of maintaining the illusion that I prepared lunch, you may ask if you like," she replied from where she lounged rather decadently on the blanket. She was considering, quite strongly, the possibility of a drowse, perhaps with Jack's clever fingers in her hair or on her skin, and possibly while he read. He did have such a lovely voice.
“In fact that may be answer enough.” Watching Phryne never got old, even now that he had the option of touching her, but Jack stroked some of her hair back from her face anyway. Wholly unnecessarily, but that was unlikely to matter to either of them.
Rather like a cat, Phryne tilted her head to allow the caress, but the soft sweep of black lashes against porcelain skin suggested (as she intended) encouragement rather than permission. "The non-comestible contents of the basket are my doing, as are the fresh strawberries. Dot thought them rather plain for the meal and blushed quite their color when I explained my intentions."
"Your intentions to... eat the strawberries?" Yes, Jack had some ideas as to the actual purpose of the strawberries, but he found he enjoyed being dense on purpose. Phryne enjoyed being teased, at times, nearly as much as doing the teasing. And Jack was rarely comfortable enough to be entirely open about it.
Phryne's amusement lit up her gaze, more for the fact of teasing than the content of it. Her darling Inspector felt relaxed and comfortable, else he wouldn't. She rolled over to her stomach and propped her chin on her hands (incidentally giving him a rather direct view down the collar of her blouse). "It's true, I may eat them. But they are the perfect size and shape for feeding one another, don't you agree?"
"I've found that a sufficiently motivated lady has been able to feed me any number of items." In fact, from their earliest association, food had been Phryne's favored form of bribery. "Perfect shape or no."
"Mmm, well, whoever she is, she needs to stop. I won't have her taming my dear Inspector to her hand." Of course, Phryne promptly reached for the plate of strawberries, dipped one into granulated sugar, and then lifted it to her own mouth where her lips sealed a perfect kiss around the narrower end of the berry."
"It would take quite a bit for her to catch up with you," Jack murmured, leaning down to accept both the kiss and the strawberry. There was no hypothetical 'her', and both the kiss and the berry were delicious. "You've got plenty of time."
As ever, Jack's kiss sent a delicious shiver through her, the uncanny result of having waited so very long for the second one (the first had been quite unexpected). Phryne curled her fingers into the hair at the back of his neck in an affectionate caress.
"Do I?" The question was unexpectedly soft and serious. "Miss Croft disappeared without warning, and Dottie's would-be beau, Dean Winchester. I heard this morning that Miss Martin appears to be missing as well, and no one has seen young Joan Girardi for months." Leonard had disappeared as well, but she considered it equally likely that he'd set up camp somewhere away from the hotel, and thus didn't worry over it.
"You do. I won't leave you." It would be the other way around, if it was anything at all, if Jack had anything to say about it. There was always the possibility that he wouldn't, given how unceremonious his departures had been from both the ship to England and Gotham City, but all one had to combat that was intent. Will. "If we go, we go together."
She'd lowered her gaze when she asked, and at his answer, she lifted her chin again and offered a fragile smile. "I wish that I could hold you to that promise." Her voice wavered just the tiniest bit, an emotional frailty that she allowed herself around Jack alone.
Jack kissed that smile, light and gentle, and wondered again how he'd thought that Miss Fisher in a relationship would be as confident and devil may care as she was in other things. It was easy to forget, watching her vibrancy and wit, that this was pain she had walled off, and was only now allowing to bleed out. "Have you ever known me, Phryne, to make a promise and not keep it?"
"Not you, my dear Inspector. You have far too much integrity." Phryne sighed and took his hand to lace their fingers together. She didn't need to tell him that 'not you' was more than an emphatic linguistic contrivance. He knew precisely who had made promises they didn't keep, and precisely who hadn't promised but had left her anyway.
"We have time, love." Phryne wasn't used to steady, dull, normal. The real test would be when she was used to it, whether it made her restless or comforted her. Which would also take time. "And I have never known you to be a woman who accepted any less than her due." As she had learned to insist on, before him.
It comforted her to speak of this as though they had some control, but anyone who had been exposed to the pure evil that was Murdoch Foyle knew control to be an illusion more often than not.
Still, she had no intention to spoil a lovely afternoon with depressing thoughts, if she could get away from them, so she smiled more gamely, eyebrows lifting in playful admonishment. "I have neither taken nor given my due yet today, darling, and it simply wouldn't do to make a liar of you. How shall we rectify the situation?"
Jack gave her roughly five seconds of innocent I-have-no-idea-what-you-mean blankness before taking a strawberry of his own, dipping it in sugar, and offered it as she had earlier.
Phryne answered with a soft, pleased laugh before accepting his offering. She kissed both mouth and fingers, and then returned to his mouth again to lick the sugar from his lips. "An excellent beginning! Now I think...yes."
She shifted on the blanket to prop herself in the bend of Jack's hip (not at all subtly encouraging him to move to suit her) where she could be caressed, drew the plate of strawberries and her unattended champagne near, and then handed him a book of poetry that "incidentally" she'd opened to a particular stanza she quite appreciated and was, for the moment, content to let do her speaking for her.
Jack paused briefly while he took in the stanza Phryne had clearly meant to highlight: This is love: to fly toward a secret sky, to cause a hundred veils to fall each moment. First to let go of life. Finally, to take a step without feet. It seemed... accurate enough. Go into the unknown, fall and keep falling, and hope you don't hit the ground. And presence of the word 'love' alone was telling enough about his dear Miss Fisher's feelings.
Rather than let the pause go on uncomfortably long, putting one or the other of them on the spot, Jack cleared his throat and started to read, starting with that stanza.
When he'd finished reading it aloud, Phryne placed her hand gently over the text and sought his gaze. "I do love you, Jack. So very dearly." And although her stomach fluttered with a touch of panic, nothing of substance had changed. It was simply time he heard it from her.
"I love you, too." Jack met her eyes, unflinching. He'd said it before, at least in his endearments, a way to tell her without saying it outright and spooking a woman who had good cause to be spooked by the word 'love'. So an answer like I know, while accurate, would also have dismissed how difficult the admission was for her.
Phryne smiled very gently to hear him put it into the words he'd held close for many months. "I don't mind hearing it from you," she said, just a touch of surprise in her voice at the realization. "I know you don't mean to restrain me by it."
"I would never. Your freedom is integral to you." Even if she'd been willing to give it up, in full or in part, her freedom was too much of what he loved about her for Jack to be willing to accept it.
Because words were clumsy and gratitude between lovers equally so, Phryne slid her hand behind his head and drew him into a kiss, sweet and slow, and undeniably unchaste. She certainly couldn't care less who saw, and she imagined that, at least in this moment, Jack probably couldn't either.
He couldn't and didn't, and Jack kissed her back quite readily. It was true that this sort of display was best kept private, but when there were no politics of any kind to think of, it mattered far less. At most, they would scandalize one or two people who would either adjust or avoid them.
Phryne smiled into the kiss and only pulled back to murmur, "Do you think we'll ever get used to that, simply kissing because we wish to, after all of this time?" It wasn't a real question, not precisely, but she did feel a remarkable sense of wonder whenever he yielded to the urge to kiss her (when they weren't in bed; that, after all, was expected).
“I rather hope not.” It seemed to Jack that that would be the beginning of the end, the first step towards perfunctory cheek-kisses on the way to some other place. Colder than he ever wanted to be able to maintain with Phryne.
It occurred to her, then, as it had only a few times since they'd embarked on this new adventure that for as confident as he seemed with her, her darling Jack worried. Of course he did, when a woman he'd loved and who seemed to have loved him and been able to turn and walk away.
She caressed his jaw and said quietly but decisively, "It won't happen." Not what he feared. And if the surprise of it faded, the delight never would.
“Not for quite a long time, I trust.” That sort of certainty could only come with time, but Jack wasn’t looking for cracks and fault lines, or trying to pull back in advance of finding them. It was something.
Never. But she knew he couldn't be forced to believe it. Instead, she trailed her fingers down his chest and then lifted her gaze from where they rested to meet his gaze. "I'm better when I'm with you, and you make me want to be better still." It wasn't the non-sequitur it probably seemed; just another set of thoughts she'd had that she hadn't known how to share with him until now.
“And you’ve challenged me to grow.” To leave his internal shelter and rejoin the world, without ever really forcing him entirely out of comfortable territory. Miss Fisher had simply annoyed, cajoled, or charmed him into taking one step forward, then another, and he’d never stepped back again.
Phryne basked in the unexpected glow of that for a moment. She did like knowing he believed she'd affected him for the better. Of course she'd thought so, but it needn't follow that he had as well. "Not so much to grow, darling, as to live." She leaned close and placed a kiss to his pulse. "I needed you to live."
“They’re much the same thing, really.” There was a difference, in that dead things didn’t grow because they couldn’t.
"Perhaps." She stroked the skin in the V of his shirt collar, thoughtfully. "But I didn't need you to become more than you were. Just to be it. You'd all but forgotten how, I think."
“I believe you’re right.” He’d actually thought that the War had killed those parts of him, so it had been no surprise to him when he’d walked around half-dead for years. And then Miss Fisher had blazed into his life, upending parts of it, swirling around the rest, not taking blandness for anything like an answer at any time.
"Of course I am." She favored him with a sunny smile, kissed him soundly and then flopped somehow gracefully back to the blanket. "I've been studying you for years, darling mine, and I am a detective."
“Quite true.” Jack leaned slightly to trace his fingers along her side. If he’d been an artist, this might well have been a good time to start sketching, but he was no such thing.