Title: Days of Jade, Nights of Onyx

Author: Elliott Silver

Timeline: Set in series 2 after "Blood at the Wheel" and to the first half of "Juana the Mad" …

Summary: "It's getting late/And while I wait/My poor heart aches on/Why keep the brakes on?"

Feedback: Oh, yes please. Multi-parter: yay or nay?

Note: This is for Idolatrous, who reminded me to write.

/ - / - / - /

They have dinner, because they always do.

They adjourn to the parlor for drinks, because they always have.

They talk – nothing special – and play cards (they'd given up on checkers since the death of Gertrude Haynes). She's watched the play of Jack Robinson's hands as he shuffles the deck, the twist and flex of the tendons beneath his skin.

He makes it look easy, but now it's her turn. She deals two hands and picks one up.

She doesn't like what she's been dealt.

And she doesn't mean the paper kings and queens between her fingers.

It's been different since the car crash, since he thought she died. Something's different, off-kilter. It's like the world turned sideways when she wasn't looking, and she doesn't know how to put it right.

"I just want to see her," he'd said to Collins, who related it to Dot, who'd then told her. Phryne hadn't seen the detective stand there at the wrecked car, hand held to his mouth as he pulled his hat from his head, trying so desperately not to shake, not to break. No, she had only seen the shocked expression on his face as he pulled the white cloth over the dead woman's face – and that wasn't an unusual reaction really.

She hadn't paid attention then to utter paleness of his face, the sweat on his skin, that anguished look in his eyes.

So she was flippant and uncaring, unseeing when all the signs were right in front of her.

"I found it unbearable," he'd said later and she'd though he was being melodramatic.

Now she knows (hadn't she before?) that Jack Robinson is a man of his word.

"I don't want you to go," he'd told her, "I need you to go."

But he was quicker, he walked away first, through those gorgeous heavy wood doors with glass windows that stained the floor red as if with blood. He left her standing there alone.

She fumes.

She sulks.

She mopes.

Then she grieves.

The loss was, as he told her, unbearable. A cold devastation rocks her soul and she falters.

The world as she knows it no longer makes sense, and she is lost.

Jack, her sense of direction, is gone.

Only now does Phryne understand his reaction, when he was called to a scene of death he believed to be her own. The loss of his friendship, the essential presence of his figure in her life, is a death of its own.

What hurts most is the thought, and then the knowledge, that she might be replaceable – to him – that he might be able to cut her from his life the way she could never do for him.

Irked and spurned, she tries to forget him. It doesn't work. There are other men, of course, but none fill the spaces of her heart the way Jack Robinson does without even trying.

None of them can fill her dreams, or satisfy the demands of her body.

Their lithe beauty can't satiate her need for the tidy fit of his suit jacket over his shoulders when she peers over him, the weight of his hand on the small of her back as he guides her through doors, through dangers, the way the hairs at the back of his neck curl outward instead of under when they grow long.

She knows how to take care of herself. She doesn't need anyone – least of all, a lover – to do what she can finish herself. But now she sees a face – only one, of course – when she closes her eyes, and her touch when it breaks, is hollow and unsatisfying.

Jack Robinson has never asked her to change – he wouldn't, God love him – so she will.

She can't – won't – live in this half life of pretending. She's always prided herself on being a woman who needs nothing, but now she realizes how vain and foolish that pride is. If that admittance is a sacrifice, she will make a thousand more.

So she's bathed (in bergamot) and dressed (in lilac), dabbing perfume behind her ears (stephanotis), because that's how it goes. She's made plans (her diaphragm) and changed (into green), because that's how it works too.

"I should go," he says, because he always does.

He moves towards the door to gather his coat and hat.

"Jack," she says, because she never has.

He turns towards her, letting all the shadows of the world fall across his face.

She goes to him before he can object, pressing her hands against his chest for balance. Her fingers smooth the lines of his lapels, the grey wool of his ever-present suit.

The world wavers around them, indistinct and unimportant. A car passes on the road outside, a telephone rings in another house. Somewhere, someone is shouting (but not for them).

They are so close she can smell the warm scent of soap on his skin, the pomade swirled in his chestnut hair, the whisper of whisky as he breathes.

Sometimes, she learns, the first move isn't about bluffing, but about playing the cards you have.

She breathes, and that's all it takes, all that has ever mattered.

His hands come around her chin, cradling her jaw and tipping her face upward so he can see her and only then does he kiss her. He slides a warm hand over her spine, bringing them even closer. She can feel each pad of his fingers as his hips roll against hers, his rise filling her hollows, the wedge of his belt catching on the seam of her dress.

By the look on his face, when they finally come apart, she knows she's done it then, knows that she's broken not only his resistance but her own fear.

Because, isn't this, this man and what she feels for him, what scares her more than anything else? Because, isn't this, this undiminished need for him (she won't call it what it really is), what terrifies her most?

"This is happening," she says simply, bravely.

"Yes," he confirms, honestly, miraculously, and with that, their words make it real.

She holds onto him as if she needs balance, and maybe she does. Her eyes are dark with desire, of an ending she's always known and a journey she does not.

It begins here, now.

She shivers (though she isn't cold) and slides a hand down his arm, afraid to break touch with him. In the darkness he twines his fingers through hers as they climb the stairs in the sleeping house to her bedroom.

There's no hesitation, no holding back, not now. They, neither of them, needs to ask what the other wants, whether they are sure. They are, and there's just this, this wonder of it, the making real of what has for so long been only a dream.

In the darkness he removes his tie, his waistcoat, his shoes. She scrubs off her dress, her stockings, her garters. They remove everything until there's nothing left, not even a pin in her hair.

They come together before the mirror. He turns her towards it, pulling her in front of him so their bodies are flush with one another.

He watches her reflect in its silvery surface.

In the mirror his eyes pin hers, holding them together as he takes her – the many reflections of her – in.

Her dark hair haloes around her pale face, her body a series of angles and curves that fit only here, with him, his arm around her waist, his hand splayed on the bone of her hip like a flower in bloom.

Her jade eyes are bright in the onyx darkness.

For a moment they stand without moving, breathing in the simple refraction of their selves.

For once, now, they see each other the way they always should have been, together.

Then Jack moves in the husky darkness and the picture changes.

He maps the contours of her skin, the cartography of flesh made memory. His hands drift from belly to throat, his fingers lingering where her pulses races under the pads of his thumbs. They swirl over her shoulders, down the lines of her arms to the twist of her wrists, trailing their way back over her elbows, her collarbones, the cove of her chest where she breathes.

Behind she feels the rub of him against her.

His hand dips to the crease of her thigh, the dark triangle where her leg slides into something different altogether. His fingers trace the warm fissure of her body, and a bud of frenzy builds inside her. A shiver runs from core to shoulders.

"This is happening," he says, and his voice rumbles over her.

"Yes," she breathes.

She never imagined that he would be so forward, so blunt in his loving of her, but then she's learning there's so many things about Jack Robinson that she couldn't possibly have guessed, beginning with just how much he's wanted her, how much he loves her, this way his eyes hold her as she falls, the dark delight of it all as she crashes in his arms.

She twirls in his hold, then, turning her back on their images. Before her now he is real, not a reflection. Her fingers knot in the hair of his chest, and he growls as she pulls less than playfully, as she explores the tense contours of his torso, lavishing him with her mouth and fingertips wherever she can reach him. The growth of his stubble rubs at her jaw, roughness where she hadn't expected any.

He feels her smile against his skin as she kisses the round of his shoulder, the soft (not innocent) flutter of her eyelashes as her fingers slip lower and take him into her palm.

He swallows hard as she kisses him where his pulse beats.

Phryne wonders how that looks in the mirror, but she doesn't need to see it to know how beautiful it is. She imagines the tilt of his head turned back for her, the curl of her body around his, the sinuous twisting of two bodies slowly merging and becoming one.

She brings him to the edge of her bed, sinking into the dark sheets and pulling his body over hers.

For the first time she feels the weight of him, the sparse heft of his body pushing the breath from her, and she marvels at the joy of it.

After this night they will be linked by their own desire; their bodies will forever carry marks of the other, invisible but no less indelible.

She reaches for him, guiding him between them so he slides between the cradle of her hips, welcomed into the folds of her body.

Time sluices over them, unchained, the buckles of the world come undone. She comes first, in a great sob, and he follows. Finally they let go and at last come together.

Boneless and spent they slide against each other. They are slippery to touch, their skins slick with sweat, and his kiss when she meets it with her mouth is achingly tender. Breath fans their wet faces, cool and intimate. She kisses him and tastes salt, closing her eyes only to the resonance of their hearts.

/ - / - / - /

He wakes in a rush, as if he might miss something, head thrust from the pillow as if he's already late. He takes in the light at the window, the sun in the mirror, the moss-green expanse of rumpled sheets thrown carelessly over her bare skin.

Jack Robinson looks alarmed, relieved, and amazed all at once. She knows how he feels.

"It did happen," he says. "I wasn't dreaming."

Phryne shifts under the sheets.

"Perhaps it could happen again?" she teases, and she brings her mouth to his before he can answer. The kiss is warm and slow as the slide of his hands on her skin.

Downstairs the telephone rings, and all too soon there's a tentative knock at the door.

"Miss?"

Her mouth bridges the curl of his shoulder as his fingers sink low and she gasps.

"Hugh's just rung," Dot calls through the door. "There's been a murder at the docks. Will you come right away?"

Jack's mouth stops tracing the line of her ear, teasing the lobe with his tongue, and Phryne falls back in frustration.

"This isn't happening," they vent in tandem.

They look at each other and that's all it takes. She dissolves in giggles and the room is filled with the full richness of his laugh. They are giddy with the newness of this, this first bond, this promise, this hope.

"Yes, Dot dear," she finally calls back, when they manage some semblance of seriousness. "Tell Hugh we'll be there directly."

Outside the door there is a startle and stumble of footsteps, a pause at the plural of the answer. But downstairs the kettle's whistling and the car's being brought around, and water rushes in a bath being filled.

Inside the floor is strewn with their clothes, the bed heady with the scent of their sex, but somehow the world is back on kilter. The partnership, a new one with different boundaries, has been restored.

The game is on.

"Murder at the docks," Jack repeats.

Phryne Fisher grins.

"I'll see you there."

/ - / - / - /