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1.
The photos are all but forgotten after the Green Mill case. They end up in a drawer in his desk and it isn’t until months later that he’s digging around for something and he finds them there; a nugget of gold amongst the sediment of his working life.
They’re only photos. He sees her almost daily at this point so her image on paper should be far less affecting than her physical presence.
(Which he is loathe to admit has become rather a problem since her sense of personal space has diminished almost to the point of non-existence.)
And yet.
All it takes is the barest glimpse of her image as he digs through his drawer - the one with her fingers around her eyes in a ridiculous pose that now seems so typical of her - and two things happen.
The first is this: he smiles. It’s completely involuntary and instantaneous; a pavlovian response if ever he’s experienced such a thing. That alone might not be a problem. It’s an amusing photo after all and he likes to think they might consider themselves friends at this point in time so to smile at her photo is harmless. Meaningless even. He can explain it away any number of ways.
But the second thing that happens is this: his stomach ties itself in a knot. And it’s a feeling he recognises precisely because of its rarity. A feeling he has only experienced once as an adult - the day he married Rosie.
And that he can’t dismiss so easily.
So in that brief, innocuous, moment he knows. He won’t give voice to it, won’t even allow it to be a conscious thought. But deep in that purely instinctive part of him, the part that makes him a good detective because it allows him to sense the truth even before he understands the facts - he knows.
It’s inescapable.
She is inescapable.
2.
“I dismiss the charges,” he tells her as authoritatively as he can muster.
“You can’t,” she answers plainly as her eyes break from his.
He would never have imagined, when he first met her, that she would ever allow him to see her vulnerabilities. In fact he would never have imagined that she had any. His first impression of her was not altogether flattering. He had assumed her to be nothing more than a frivolous rich nuisance. But she had surprised him, and constantly continues to do so, with how much more there is behind the haute couture and penchant for partying.
And this guilt of hers runs so deep that he feels out of his depth. He's always tried to avoid thinking about guilt beyond the context of the law and his job as part of upholding it. To think about guilt in a personal way, the kind that people can bear outside the legal context, would mean having to face his own. Rosie. War. The lives he took during it. The life he failed to give her upon his return. These are things best left unexamined in his opinion. They cannot be changed after all.
But she sits before him and declares herself guilty and he finds he cannot bear it, is so desperate to absolve her of it. And when she won’t let him the pain of that settles deep in his stomach. She doesn’t deserve her own sentencing but he knows she’s right; he can’t absolve her of this.
She’s made a prison out of her own grief as her punishment, the kind of self inflicted pain children are so skilled at performing. She holds the keys too tightly but he hopes one day she might loosen her grip enough to let them do their job.
Her grief shouldn’t hurt him but it does. He feels her pain tight in his chest, deep in his stomach, in the tips of his fingers that want so much to reach for her skin and soothe her wounds.
And to feel someone else’s pain as your own…well he knows there’s a word for that.
3.
There’s a moment where he realises that it has become routine to end his nights in her parlour.
He has always considered himself a respectable man and he knows this habit of his, with her reputation being what it is, casts his own somewhat into shadow. He hears the whispers from time to time, the inferences that he has joined the ranks of her revolving door of men, that it’s the reason he allows her to work with the police.
Respectability is the only currency a man has when he doesn’t come from money so he knows he should reconsider this habit of his, return to safer ground. But when she smiles at him, offers a drink, touches him ever so casually, he finds he simply does not want to.
Between the end of his marriage and the unexpected development of this routine, his nights had largely been spent alone. And while he was perfectly capable of tolerating it, these evenings with Miss Fisher are infinitely more pleasurable. The warmth of her laugh, and the light in her eyes and the ease with which she coaxes out his more relaxed nature prove to be far more powerful than his good reasoning.
If you asked anybody who knows him they would tell you: Jack Robinson has always been a man without vices.
Until now.
4.
When the words ‘motor-crash’ and ‘Miss Fisher’ reach his ears, his world narrows to a single visceral urgency that propels his body out of his chair, through the station, into his car and straight to the scene of the crash because what else could he possibly do but go to her - even if it was too late.
And when he sees her, alive and well, her usual glib self, the grief gives way to relief, shortly followed by misplaced anger and an impending sense of the catastrophe that is his feelings for her.
It’s too much and now he knows it; just how irrevocable it is that he loves her.
He tries to drown the revelation in whiskey, lock it away in his office after hours, but she finds him there anyway and he can’t hide from it.
(From her.)
He doesn’t think anything could hurt as badly as those torturous minutes spent thinking she was gone but then she looks at him with more vulnerability than she ever has and begs him to think about how she would feel if he ended their partnership and somehow that’s a torture of an even worse kind because it pulls him in competing directions - self preservation versus her happiness at any cost.
She doesn’t want to lose their partnership.
He doesn’t want to keep living his days in the torture of wanting something he can’t have.
But in the end her happiness does win out, as he should always have known it would. Her joy lights her up and has come to feel like the oxygen in his lungs and he cannot bear to distinguish it. So when she asks him what their safe distance is now he declares them a waltz. She reminds him that a waltz is slow and close, and he promises to stay in step, telling himself that this can be enough.
(And enough it may be, but safe it is not.)
5.
Around them the night is still and so is she; uncharacteristically so, as fear for her father overwhelms her. It’s laced with guilt that she’s responsible and once again he finds himself desperate to absolve her.
He reaches for words of comfort but somehow stumbles into telling her she’s not a telescope and he doesn’t even know what it is he even means by that - but then she’s asking him if that was a compliment and he’s thrust into a moment of opportunity. One that he has been far too afraid to take but knows he must lest he regret it forever.
And so the words romantic overture leave his lips and she is looking at him, stripped bare of flirtation or innuendo.
“Would you like me to improve upon it?” he asks her.
“More than anything,” she replies and those words are his final undoing because it was one thing to love her (he can’t imagine there is a man on this earth who wouldn’t) but it’s something else entirely to entertain the possibility that she might want the same from him.
There are few things in life he considers himself powerless against; Phryne’s sincerity is top of the list. It’s a risk, he knows, to pursue something more than this strange partnership they’ve built but she’s asking him to so he must.
And he loves her.
So he must.