Work Text:
Jack knew as soon as he woke that something was wrong. There shouldn’t have been the light from the early morning sun on his face, not when he’d meant to wake before sunrise. He was out of bed in an instant, glancing at the useless alarm clock that read a time hours before. In the time it took to throw his clothes on, he was out the door, and if he was more disheveled than he preferred, it couldn’t be helped. Phryne was leaving.
He arrived at the airfield just in time to see her airplane lift into the air. Cursing his clock and his luck, Jack got out of the car and stood next to it, hands deep in the pockets of his overcoat, watching the woman who had changed his life—if mostly for the better—leaving. As the plane circled the field to head towards England, he knew at least that she saw him standing below, for a single gloved hand waved a scarf cheerily before letting it slip from her hand. Then she was gone.
Jack stayed in place until the plane was lost in the clouds, and then walked to where the scarf was draped across the low grasses of the airfield and picked it up. It was a fine silk, soft against his hand. It was disheartening to think that the best person in his life had left so easily, like another of her mad sudden schemes. But of course the preservation of her parent’s marriage was more important than him. It was only natural. No wonder, either, given his awful bungled attempt to let her understand what she meant to him. Even the memory of it made him cringe. Not one of his finest moments, by far. He had gone over it in his head so many times, how he would tell her what she meant to him, and that’s what came out? It didn’t bear thinking about.
He rubbed the fine silk between his fingers before folding it and placing it in his breast pocket. Jack walked back to the car. There was no use in lingering; she was gone, and there was work to be done, as always.
Back at the station he remained distracted and moody, altogether too immersed in his own head to be good for anything. As much as Jack detested those behaviors in himself, he couldn’t help it. She made him feel young and foolish. Perhaps her own frivolity was infectious. To think that when she had first appeared on his crime scene she had been an unwanted snoop and a nuisance was strange—though she remained always a snoop and often a nuisance, her company had grown welcome. Jack sat up suddenly, shaking his head, trying to clear his mind and focus, but it was no use. He needed a solid case, not the remnant formal paper-shuffling left over from finished investigations.
Jack had kept her mug shots, locked in a drawer of his desk. He pulled them out now, smiling foolishly at her picture. Jack wondered if it was possible for his life to return to the bland state it had been before her arrival. It certainly didn’t seem like it could. A lot had changed due to Miss Phryne Fisher; his expectations of life, his hopes, even his own character had been altered by that singular woman. He had been happy before—well, content, at least, most of the time—with what he had. But now she had inspired him. Solving murders would be so dull without her. Everything would be—though it struck him the bizarrity of that statement. He had been a detective too long now if a murder was dull business.
A gruff voice in the other room startled him out of his melancholy preoccupation with her absence; he heard a gruff voice speaking. “We have a letter here for the inspector.” Jack walked into the other room to see Burt and Cec standing at the counter. “Letter for you, sir.”
A letter delivered by hand from these men could only be from her. Jack took it from them, trying to remain a semblance of calm and decorum, though he seized it perhaps too quickly for that. “Thank you,” he said, making it obvious in his tone that they were dismissed.
As soon as they stepped out the door Jack hastily looked for a letter opener, opening drawers and slamming them shut before giving up and ripping the envelope open in his haste to see what Phryne had said.
It was a short note, not even signed, just scrawled hastily on piece of letterhead. Come after me, Jack Robinson. And then, when he turned it over looking for something more, written on the back: It’s a romantic overture.
He smiled.
Come after me, Jack Robinson. Had she made up her mind then? Would he be enough?
Could he really go after her? He had his job, surely he couldn’t give it up to transverse the globe for a woman whose relationship to him he wasn’t sure of, a woman who was given rather alarmingly to flings and flirtations. He knew he wasn’t that, at least—surely, he wasn’t. She wouldn’t invite a fling all the way across the world, and she knew by now he wouldn’t bear being toyed with.
He had to go. He must, work be damned. He had been a reliable man his entire life, but Jack couldn’t live in that routine again without her beside him, thwarting and frustrating and helping all at once. It wasn’t possible for him to consider remaining here without her, too tedious to imagine. Their one episode of estrangement had been too arduous, too painful to bear repeating, even if it had been self-inflicted, back when he’d imagined he could still extricate himself from her, fool that he’d been. He couldn’t bear that again.
That was that, then. He would speak to the commissioner. If he had to resign, so be it. Jack Robinson was going to England, and damn the consequences on his career.
Jack grabbed his hat, seating it on his head, put on his coat, and was at the ticket office as immediately as physics allowed.
“When does the next ship leave for England?”
“Tomorrow morning, 7:00, sir,” said the attendant.
Until seven was not a great deal of time to put his affairs in order, but it would have to do. “Thank you. One ticket please.”
“Very well, sir, there you are.”
When the boat set off at seven, Jack stood at the bow, eagerly watching the horizon. He had nowhere to look but forward.