Melbourne - June 24, 1929

"Jack, could you please give us the room for just a few minutes?"

Henry watched the Detective Inspector as Phryne made her request. The other man's eyes had barely left her face since she walked through the door and Henry had seen the wide array of emotions that had played over his face in the few moments since. He rarely missed anything that went on around him and the detective had not been trying to hide his feelings, making it even easier for Henry.

The concern and fear that had played over his face as he stood when it had looked like Phryne might pass out. The momentary relief when she'd shaken her head and seemed to recover herself, which shattered when he'd heard that Phryne had watched Henry die at Verdun. Guilt had been his strongest emotion then, though Henry didn't fully understand why. The hurt and anger as he deduced what she was about to ask him, confirmed as she spoke, her voice full of a level of affection Henry had never heard during the 6 months they had been together. And, finally, the anger receding slowly as they'd locked gazes, leaving only the hurt behind.

For a moment, Henry thought that the policeman would refuse and was slightly surprised when he didn't, but then again, he mussed, she had always been good at getting her way. Instead, he pursed his lips, gave Phryne a jerked nod, and strode from the room. Through the entire exchange, he had not looked at Henry once, his entire concentration on Phryne from the moment when he'd stood as though to catch her should she faint. As Detective Inspector Robinson moved past her, Henry saw Phryne's hand twitch out towards him, as if she intended to grab his hand, but the motion didn't go beyond that and she watched him leave, shutting the door after him.

She continued to stare at the door for a long moment after it had closed. When she turned back to the room, she gave Henry only a small glance before she moved past him and around the desk to sit in the detective's vacated chair. He watched as some of the tension in her shoulders visibly dissipated as she sank into the leather seat. He stayed standing, waiting for her to regain her bearings and address him, which she did shortly, a deep breath the only lead in before she captured his gaze and spoke.

"Explain."

One word. In a tone that Henry had never heard from her before, at least not when addressing himself. That tone held anger, disbelief, guilt, and no small amount of fear. He didn't blame her. He remembered that day in Verdun just as clearly as she obviously did and he could only begin to imagine how his death and disappearance had affected her.

With a deep breath of his own, he resumed the seat across from her. He opened his mouth to speak only to shut it again, not really sure where to begin. It had been forty years since he had last told anyone about himself, or at least about the full extent of himself. And that experience had not gone well. He took another deep breath and reminded himself that Phryne deserved an explanation. And if she was still anything like the young woman she had been thirteen years previously, she wouldn't rest until she had one.

"I'll tell you everything." He paused briefly, expecting her to interrupt, and continued on when she didn't, "But I would ask that you let me finish. It's not very believable and there's a lot of it that I don't understand myself, but I'll tell you what I can."

"Agreed." Her tone was still clipped, but he would take what he could get. He was about to start his story when she spoke again. "And you'd be surprised by what I'm willing to believe at this moment. I saw you die and then watched your body vanish as if you'd never existed. And now you're sitting in front of me, looking as though you haven't aged a day. So I am willing to accept quite a lot right now."

He nodded and gave her a small smile. Every word had been the Phryne that he'd known during the war. Blunt and no nonsense, driven by an odd mixture of pragmatism and infinite hope. It comforted him to know that despite the years between them, she was still the woman he knew. That thought drove him onward.

"It's a long story. One that begins nearly one hundred and fifty years ago." He watched her eyes widen at the implication, but continued on, "I was born in London in September of 1779. When I was thirty-five years old, I took a position as a doctor aboard a slave ship bound for America." Now her eyes narrowed in disgust, whether at the idea of slavery or at what must appear to her to be a blatant lie on his part. He pressed on.

"The ship was owned by my father, who I had only just discovered was participating in the slave trade. It was still twenty years before Britain would abolish the trade of human beings, but I was already adamantly against the practice. When I failed to convince my father, I took the position with every intention of freeing those aboard."

Her expression had become unreadable and he expected that she would stop him at any moment, despite their initial agreement. He paused for a long moment, giving her the opportunity to do just that. Instead, she cocked her head to the side, silently asking him to continue.

"One night, I was checking out a slave who showed signs of sickness. Despite my assurances that the man showed no signs of cholera, the Captain of the vessel was convinced that he was afflicted. He ordered the man thrown overboard, lest the rest of his 'property' be contaminated." His tone was one of disgust as he spoke of the Empress of Africa's commander, but his tone gentled as he continued, "I refused to let him be killed for no reason and when I repeatedly stood in their way, the Captain shot me in the chest."

Phryne's eyes widened in recognition and Henry smiled at her uncanny ability to put two and two together. More than once during their relationship at Verdun, she'd asked him about the scar over his heart. He'd deflected the question many times, but now she finally knew the truth. He nodded in answer to her unasked question and rubbed an unconscious hand across his chest.

"Then they threw me overboard. I assume that they did the same with the other man, but I have no knowledge of what happened to ship or crew or cargo after I was thrown over the side and left for dead. And I did die. I just didn't stay that way."

Phryne sat forward in the opposite chair, recognizing that he was now getting to the information she really longed for.

"Something happened that night. I was transformed. My life is just like yours. Except for one small difference: it never ends." Her expression said that she considered that to be more than a small difference, so he tried to explain what he meant. "I still feel love, pleasure, pain. I've lived a full life. Been madly in love, had my heart broken, fought in numerous wars, and seen more than my fair share of death. In my long life, I've experienced many ends, but only that one beginning."

He gave her a tight smile, knowing that she was bound to give him plenty of grief following his next admission.

"Since that night, more than a century ago, every time I die, I always return in water." He took a deep breath and, finding himself suddenly shy despite their history, looked down at his hands as he continued, "And I'm always naked. Lends itself to some slightly awkward situations."

A burst of laughter drew his attention back to the woman across from him. She had covered her mouth quickly with her hand, but he could see her shoulders shaking as she silently laughed at him. He shook his head at her, glad that after 150 years, he was no longer prone to blushing. And he could see the humor in it as well, though he wouldn't give her the satisfaction of letting her know that.

Glaring in her direction, he waited until she had stopped laughing. "Now you know as much about my condition as I do. All I know for certain is that the pain is real. It's just the dying part that's not."

He paused, not sure how best to proceed. Deciding to ignore earlier details of his life for the time being, he skipped straight to that moment in Verdun. "After I died at Verdun." Her quick intake of breath didn't deter him. She had asked him to explain and so he would. "I awakened, for lack of a better word, in the Meuse River several miles north of the trenches, behind German lines. I was taken prisoner while attempting to steal clothing from a supply train and spent the next 16 months in a prisoner of war camp, before escaping with 6 others. By the time I made it back to England four months after that, the war was nearly over and I had been declared dead at the front. I worked in a London hospital under a false name until 1919 and then went to New York. I moved to Sydney three months ago."

He paused briefly, studying her features. Relief, curiosity, and awe were the predominant emotions, but he could see that not all of her anger had completely dissipated. For the first time in their association, Henry found himself uncertain what she was thinking. She seemed to be trying to collect her thoughts, which he understood perfectly. Even after more than a hundred years of living it, he still had trouble taking in his reality sometimes. As he waited for her to speak, he realized that he had left out something very important in his story.

"I'm sorry, Phryne." She looked up from where she'd been studying the desk in front of her and looked him in the eye as he continued. "I can't imagine what you went through after my body vanished in that trench and I would never have chosen for you to find out in that way. I know-"

"Would you have told me?" She cut him off, her words more curious than condemning, her tone even as she continued to stare him down.

"I don't know. Honestly, it's not something that I thought about one way or the other. It seems strange, I'm sure, but on the front, surround by death, I never really thought about the possibility of my own." He took a deep breath unsure how much he should share with her, but she deserved full answers. "I'm not sure that I would have. I've told people before - people that were important to me, who I believed I was important to - and it has not gone well." He paused as images of Nora, his wife, and the asylum she'd sent him to flashed through his mind, but shook them off quickly and continued, "So, maybe."

He shrugged, not sure what else there was to say. She nodded thoughtfully and they sat in silence for a long moment before she spoke.

"I thought that I was going insane. Thought the front had finally gotten to me." Her voice was low, he was barely able to make out the words. "I didn't tell anyone, I didn't dare. When they declared you dead, I just told myself over and over again that I had imagined it. And eventually I convinced myself."

Henry nodded, "I'm can not express how sorry I am for the hurt that must have caused you." He paused until she was looking at him again, "You were…" He gulped, not really sure that he should be admitting this to her. "You were the first person in that hell that I felt understood me. That understood the drive to heal, the need to save at least a few even as the many died around us. And you were the first person in 60 years that I could imagine trying to live a normal life with. I don't know…"

He trailed off, not sure what else he could say. He wanted her to understand, to know that she had meant so much to him. In six months, in the middle of a horrific war, she had become his best friend.

The clenched feeling in his stomach dissipated as she smiled at him. A real, full smile. The first she'd given him since she walked into the office ten minutes earlier.

"I thought about it too. Thought about whether, after the war, we could be something real." She paused before adding, "Back then."

He understood what she was trying to tell him with that addition. He smiled, glad that he could read her expression, could understand everything she wasn't saying in that moment. That she had considered it once, in the past, but that they wouldn't just be picking right back up where they had been. He wasn't surprised. The thirteen years between them would have been enough to give him pause as well, even if he hadn't seen how she and Detective Inspector Robinson interacted earlier.

He nodded at her, acknowledging everything she hadn't said. They sat in silence for long moments, before she seemed to shake herself back to the present.

"What do you know about our murders?"

Her voice was stern and it took him a moment to switch gears back to the deaths that had troubled Melbourne for five months. He hoped that this change up meant that she did truly believe him. But whether she did or not, there was a more pressing concern and he was glad to finally be talking to someone who might actually listen to his evidence about the murders.

"I know what was published in the papers. I know what I've read in the coroner's reports. And I know that each of these murders directly mirrors the Whitechapel murders of 1888. The murders attributed to an unidentified killer known as Jack the Ripper." He held her gaze as he spoke, his tone even and confident. "And I know that because-"

"You were there." Her voice was a mixture of surprise and incredulity. And when he nodded in confirmation, she huffed out a short laugh and shook her head. "Of course you were."

"They're almost identical." His tone was still serious despite her seeing the humor of the situation. "The prostitutes, their ages, and the exact manner of death in each case. Starting not with Helen Baines as the papers have reported, but with Margaret Ward, who - exactly like Emma Smith in 1888 - was raped by multiple adult males and one teenager and died a day later of a rupture peritoneum."

She gaped at him, trying to assimilate this new information, but he wasn't done.

"And there were eleven total deaths over three years in Whitechapel. There's no definitive evidence that all of them were committed by the same individual, but if it's the same person or a devoted copycat there could be as many as seven more deaths in the near future."

This time, she didn't pause for a moment, taking in the information in a heartbeat.

"You need to tell Jack." She stood and walked around the desk to perch on the corner in front of him. "Not just about the similarities between the cases. Everything. You know things about those cases that no one who wasn't there could possibly know and Jack will realize that. You won't be able to hide this secret from him, not while helping solve the case."

He stared at her in disbelief. Hadn't he told her that telling people had never gone particularly well in the past? How could she expect him to just tell the detective who seemed so convinced that he was the killer? She seemed to read his thoughts.

"I understand that this isn't the ideal, telling him after he brought you in on suspicion of murder, but we need your knowledge if we're going to catch this guy before he kills again. And Jack has no reason to listen to you, any more than any other detective has in the last few weeks, without telling him the whole truth."

"You and he are obviously close. Surely, you vouching for me-" He stopped speaking as she shook her head.

"Jack isn't some stupid cop. He may only have seen us interact for a few, very bizarre, moments, but he will have recognized that we're former lovers. He'll assume that I'm letting that relationship cloud my judgement. There's just too much evidence against you at this point. Circumstantial though it may all be." She sighed heavily before continuing. "I trust Jack completely. And trust is a lot harder for me these days than it was thirteen years ago." Henry could tell that there was something she wasn't telling him with that statement, something that had happened, maybe someone, that had caused the shift, but she continued on without more detail.

"If there was any other way, Henry… I don't know if he'll believe you, but you have to try, for the sake of this case."

He groaned and dropped his head to his chest. Phryne Fisher had always been good at getting what she wanted by whatever means she deemed reasonable. It didn't seem that that had changed at all. And she was right. If he didn't try everything in his power to be a part of the investigation and another woman died…

He'd blame himself. Forever.

He looked back up at her and he could tell from the renewed glint in her eyes that she was well aware that she had won.

As he opened his mouth to tell her not to gloat, the door behind him crashed open, slamming hard against the wall and rebounding back toward the face of an irate Jack Robinson.

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AN: Totally took the vast majority of Henry's explanation about his condition from the Pilot episode of 'Forever'. I don't own it. Those words were written by Matt Miller. I just reordered them slightly. And for anyone who watches 'Forever', I like to imagine that Henry was less careful - not about his secret, but with people - before he met Abigail.

AN2: I'm not sure how other people go about writing big complex stories, but I wanted to tell you all about a great FREE tool that I found for it. It's called Trello and it's been awesome for writing this fic and others. It's a project management tool by design. It's super easy and intuitive to use and easy to change things around. So, for example, for this story I built several lists (Plot Outline, Chapters, Death Details, Jack the Ripper facts, etc.) and within the lists I make cards with details. So in my Chapters list, I have a card for each chapter where I keep basic plot, possible ideas, etc. And the great thing is that it's a breeze to change stuff on any of the cards and change the order of cards. You can add color labels to things and attached finished docs (so I keep a cloud copy of each of my finished chapters attached to the correct card). Also, if you like having your work beta'd, you can invite other people to boards or cards and they can leave comments, etc.

I don't work for Trello or anything like that I just have had trouble in the past keeping details on things like this in an easy to manage fashion. Especially times when I'm writing one chapter and have an epiphany for the next or further down the line. In the past I would keep jumbled notes in a word doc or multiple ones and that would make it hard to handle, but this has been great. So, for example, as I was writing the this chapter, I came up with my perfect ending. So I added a new card to my Chapter list, title it Epilogue, and wrote my idea down. It took all of ten seconds to get it set up.

Once I finish this story, I'm happy to invite anyone who wants to take a look at the board so they can see for themselves how I did it. Or if people really want to see earlier than that, I can create a dummy board with everything up to this point that has been published (no spoilers) so far and you can go from there.