Title: Perihelion
Author: Elliott Silver.
Summary: Jack is her gravity.
Author's note: Not having (yet) seen season 2, this piece is set after the first season's finale. Many thanks to everyone who has commented on my work so far. You are wonderful.
/*/*/*/
"We've got to live, no matter how many skies have fallen."
~ D.H. Lawrence
/*/*/*/
It's been almost two weeks since her birthday party and a little less since the extravaganza that was Christmas in the Fisher household. Now, at the breaking of the old year into the new, Phryne Fisher finds herself looking up at the sky from the small patch of her back garden.
She is alone. Dot is out with Hugh to see the midnight fireworks, Jane is on a school excursion. Bert and Cec are at the corner pub counting pints, and even Mr. Butler has gone to see an aunt in Adelaide.
Phryne too could be out, so easily, at any number of glittering champagne-soaked parties where the music matches her pulse and the men make it race faster. She had invitations to four, but the green Chanel dress is hanging unworn in her closet, the Boucheron emerald and diamond parure a low dull glow in its velvet box. It's as green as the world when the Nile floods at summer solstice, when life begins anew, but she's in a darker mood than that. She prefers this, this darkness and absence of light, to that finery.
She cannot bring herself to feel color on her skin just now.
She hadn't realized how much she had invested in her sister's death until now, until it's over and the reburial – the closure of it all – has left her a tangle of bleeding grief. She has done all she promised herself she would do. Now she is supposed to feel better, now she is supposed to move on, but the truth is – she doesn't know how.
Phryne stares up at the stars and the stars stare back unabashedly.
In the darkness, the Milky Way hangs low in the east. Orion tilts across the sky, stars strung across the northern horizon. His tri-star belt is the base of the Saucepan, his sword the handle. She thinks it's rather appropriate he's upside down to her, here in this part of the world.
All her skies have fallen, and even the stars are like her life, turned inside out and upside down.
/*/*/*/
He comes to her in darkness, stepping out of it as much as he carries it with him.
"Jack."
Detective Inspector Jack Robinson stands before her with his hands in his pockets, perfectly balanced as if the world wasn't constantly shifting under his feet. She envies him that, knowing how much it has cost him, how long it has taken him to learn so perfectly, to make balance – and what is that, really, but finding peace with oneself? – appear so flawless.
She knows it's not easy for him, but he's spent enough time (like her) making it look good. And he does – make it look good. She's felt the burn of attraction for him since she first met him, and yet – unusual for her – she's done nothing about it.
Now she does. She moves on the bench and he sits beside her.
Together they share space without speaking. Jack's good at this but Phryne is learning. Together they watch the sky.
In the darkness Jack can see the pallor of her face as it tilts upward, the sharp paleness of her skin as it pulls taut across her cheekbones.
It's been two weeks since midsummer's eve crept past in the southern hemisphere, that bright flare of summer solstice when the light of the longest day stretches over them.
It's been two weeks since they re-arrested Murdoch Foyle, since Phryne almost died, since he held her hand in Dr. Macmillan's hospital as they forced poison from her body.
It's been two weeks since they dug into the crumbling riverbed and recovered the tiny scattered fragments of her sister's small bones.
She's waited a lifetime for this, but of all people he knows time doesn't heal all wounds – in fact, sometimes it makes them worse. Sometimes it only pushes people apart rather than keeping them together, and that's not what he wants for her, for Phryne.
He can feel the brokenness in her and it hurts like eating glass.
He takes her hand anyway.
/*/*/*/
Her sister's death was a blackness that penetrated her soul.
She would have been sucked into that darkness – even the final darkness – but for Jack, who saved her even from herself.
"The sky seems so close tonight," she says, when she can no longer do without the sound of his voice.
She gestures up towards a blackness so vast it makes her feel small. She's always hated the night, hated that things could disappear and be taken from her in it. Truly, she's never been thankful for darkness until now. Without dark, without coming here, she would never have seen him, this man who shares darkness with her, who guides her out of it like explorers of old, navigating endless seas only by those cold and distant specks.
"It is," Jack answers simply. "We're at perihelion, when the earth is closest to the sun."
She looks over at him. His face is in shadows, but he turns to her the way he always does, that infuriatingly intimate way he looks at her across rooms and makes her hate the space between them.
"I didn't know you knew so much about the sky," she tells him.
His hand holds hers, and she feels his calluses on her palms, the bridges of his knuckles under the tips of her fingers.
"You'd be surprised by what I know," he answers.
She always is.
/*/*/*/
"Can I get you a drink?" she asks.
"I'll have whatever you are," he answers.
Phryne hands him her own glass and Jack takes it from her gently. He's so good at that, she thinks, taking fragile things and keeping them from breaking.
The liquid is crisp and tingles on his tongue. It tastes like the sparkle she used to have.
"The first monks who discovered champagne said it was like tasting stars," he tells her.
In the swelter of Melbourne the stars circle the sky at summer solstice. Jack knows this shorter distance from the sun causes the Earth to move faster in its orbit, to shiver in place. He and Phryne have been spinning around each other too and now they are sick and dizzy with it.
Phryne turns to meet his level gaze.
/*/*/*/
Clouds scud across the sky, bringing a deeper darkness with them.
Soon the stars will be obliterated, invisible behind this dense wall of sky. That's alright, now. She doesn't need to see them to know they're there.
The rain comes without warning, as it usually does, great gales of heavy water hurling themselves from the Melbourne sky.
Phryne squeals and dances them both upright. She pulls Jack into the darkened kitchen with her and they skid to a sudden stop. Water sluices off them and teeters to the tile floor. The air is humid, thick and heavy as they breathe it in. In the darkness Jack can feel her more than he sees her. They move tentatively, trying to avoid heavy objects like the stove and table. She's more successful than he is; there's a muffled curse in the darkness, but slowly they feel their way forward. Her fingers find his shoulder; his hands settle on her waist. Their bodies press against each other and he can feel the heat of her against him. He can smell the rain on her skin.
Gravity is the only the attraction of physical bodies, a constant pulling towards each other. Without gravity, she would float into space, unbound and untethered. Jack holds her here, in place, where she belongs.
He is her gravity.
His hands tangle in her hair, pushing its dark shadows away from her face. Gently he kisses her, the edge of her hairline, the curve of her brow, the corner of her eye, the line of her jaw. His thumb pushes her chin up and she tilts her face towards his.
In the darkness she says his name and opens her mouth to his.
She tastes like Veuve Clicquot.
She tastes like stars.
/*/*/*/
Once, when Phryne asked him what she should do, Jack answered, "You know what to do."
And she does.
It was only paper she was burning then, but now she's burning all her doubts.
She takes him by the hand and leads him through the unlit rooms and up the stairs. She breathes, and for the first time in a long while, it doesn't hurt to do so. His hand is in hers, and something marvelous and giddy bubbles up within her. She can't keep a smile from turning up the corners of her mouth and changing the way of her face. Her life starts now, and she can't wait.
Gently she closes the bedroom door behind them and goes to the open window. She closes it against the pelting rain, but the water is a restless drumbeat in their ears still.
"No fireworks tonight then," Jack says, looking towards the town center.
Phryne turns back towards him and smiles slow and long in the shadows, taking him in with her eyes in a way that's both joyous and impatient all at once.
"Oh, I wouldn't say that," she replies as she comes at him.
They don't so much collide – they aren't stars, after all – as come together.
Her hands settle first on the silk of his tie, pulling loose the knot the way she's wanted to since the fancy dress party. His eyes are dark on hers as she pulls it free and lets the slip of fabric slide to the floor. Her fingers are quick on the buttons of his shirt, loosing it from his waist and brushing it off his shoulders so she can feel his skin under her palms. She kisses the point of his shoulder and his nails bite through the thick velvet of her blouse as her mouth moves to his neck, where she can feel his pulse under her tongue.
His hands slide to her hips in response, untucking her top and pulling it over her head. For a moment she is blind with it and her world is nothing but scent and texture, the smell of him – soap and sweat – and slick of his skin. She breathes in the hum that comes from the back of his throat as he unlatches her bandeau and she is bare before him.
She feels the tremble in him as they press against each other.
With her astute detecting skills, Phryne concludes that they are still wearing far too many clothes.
She reaches for the buckle of his belt, sliding it loose between her fingers and pushing away the layers of metal and cotton between her and him as he does the same for her.
There is a stumble in the sudden rush of it all, as she steps out of her shoes and he kicks his off, a laugh between them as they wobble on the floor and reach for each other, balancing on each other's lack of balance, falling towards each other as they should.
Somehow they shed clothes and sink to her bed. Now they come together and she learns the length of him. She likes the sparse utility of his body; its very inelegance makes it elegant. His arms and torso are not those of a ballet dancer or dock worker, his legs are not those of a horseman. He's not like her usual beautiful lovers; his skin is marked in different ways. In truth, he's been marked by the same wars that have left their invisible scars on her as well.
He's right (as usual, she admits), Jack knows things, things about herself that even she didn't know until now. Because when she's imagined this before – and she's imagined it many times – it's always been fast and relentless. They might devour each other. But she's never imagined this slow earnestness, the way time unspools around them as his mouth moves across her skin and he makes her see stars.
Here, when she is against him, Phryne is like the sky – she has no edges. Her skin is smooth as glass as if she had never been broken before. Jack slides his hand between her legs, his thumb catching on the bumps of her knee as he traces upward until she gasps against him.
"Jack."
She wraps a long leg around him, drawing him closer until they join and her breath mingles with his voice.
"Phryne."
He draws her name out like an invocation and rests his forehead against her shoulder. She feels his eyelashes brush against her skin as they hold each other.
He moves first, holding himself above her as she watches the flex and play of his arms, the force of breath in his chest. Her hands curl around his biceps, the sole of her foot against his calf, pushing him forward as they slide together and apart. He's slow and tender and rocks into her carefully so that when it comes they are both breathless with it, overwhelmed at the simple realness of it all.
This is what happens, she realizes, when two objects come so close to each other.
This is what happens when two bodies suddenly come to perihelion.
/*/*/*/
Outside the rain sounds cold but inside their bodies are heavy and warm. Beside her Jack moves as their breathing steadies and she presses her hand over his heart.
An orbit is just a fall that keeps missing earth, time and time again, held in place by the irrevocable tethers of gravity, but here, now, she is glad that they have fallen together.
"Stay," Phryne says – and he does.
Somewhere in the distance bells toll midnight and another year begins.
"Happy New Year," Jack wishes her and his voice rumbles over her bare skin.
All too soon the days will shorten and winter will come, but that's alright. Phryne is warm and sleepy and content, all that she can ask to be, and before she drifts into dream, she thinks that a long cold winter tucked into bed with Jack Robinson is just what she needs.
"Yes, it is," she answers him, and then, "It will be."
/*/*/*/