phrynefisher | In the aftermath of the sea

Entry tags:

!ic: scene,
porthos

In the aftermath of the sea

The smell of smoke and fire was freshly cleaned from her hair, the faint scattering of gunshot residue over her wrist where her sleeve and glove had left a gap of unprotected skin scrubbed away. A good, hot shower had been just the thing in the wake of playing pirate. Her invitation to Porthos to join her (whether in her shower or in her bedroom entirely had been left open to his interpretation once she had abandoned the pretense of caring whether there was a fire built within the grate in her room or not) perhaps more so.

There was little motivation to leave the sea of sheets in the aftermath. Even less to do more than stretch languorously, back arching a moment off the bed as she was reminded of every inch of herself before she relaxed back down. Her head turned in order to allow her to look at the man beside her, a smile pulling easy at her lips as she shamelessly ogled him.

Appreciated, that was the word. As one would with any other work of art.

Where she had not forgotten the heavy, unspoken thing that had hung in his eyes onboard the Thetis, Phryne was content enough to allow the lingering heat on her skin and the taste of sweat and laughter on her tongue to leave the door open for anything he might wish to say. "Better?" she asked, a playfulness bright in the low sound of her voice, brows arched with the understanding that neither of them could say they hadn't just enjoyed themselves.

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"That's one word for it," Porthos allowed with a smile, reaching out to brush some of her hair from her lovely face. The heaviness that lay on his heart was not gone, but it was certainly pushed aside, for now. There was no better exertion, save that of a righteous battle, and it had been the one and then the next, and in the best order, Porthos felt, to leave him at his most relaxed.

"Is there someone waiting for you, in - Australia?" he asked, a hand pillowed under his head as he watched her. His other hand settled on her shoulder, thumb rubbing her skin just to feel it. It wasn't an actual attempt at evasion, but rather a genuine question, brought on by the certain knowledge that Phryne was one of a kind, and the sort deserving the sort of proper devotion Porthos could only ever temporarily offer. "It doesn't seem right there shouldn't be."

As much as she valued her composure and the perfect application of her favorite red lipstick, there was something beautifully freeing in feeling absolutely wrecked. There were no demands on her time, none she knew of that might tear him immediately away when she was of a mood to linger with him awhile. Perhaps order in a bottle of something to supplement the small stash of rum they had brought back from their adventures at sea, perhaps a few things to nibble on beside the line of his collarbone or the shell of his ear. Beside, in addition to, before, any of them suited her then.

The flicker of amusement that the thought of how strange it really was to be lying beside a man who came from a time before Australia had been more than a half-mythical place discovered by the Dutch was one dismissed with the brush of his fingertips against her cheek. The gentleness of his touch had been a surprise the first night they'd met, doubly so when accompanied by the rasp of callous to his fingers and palms, and one that left her then wanting only to lean into the small touches he offered.

"My life is my own," she told him by way of answer, soaking up the warmth of his hand against her bare skin without an ounce of guilt. "I have no desire to be someone's wife," she spoke not with distaste but with an even certainty she wanted him to understand, as she had never been anything but direct and honest with any lover on that point, "Nor someone's mother."

Her answer might have shocked some, Porthos figured, but they would have to be hypocrites to judge it, if they were in the same position as he currently was. As it was, he had met other women like her, although apart from Flea, he'd never known them quite this intimately. Tt seemed odd, comparing Phryne to Flea; they were as different as night and day, on the surface. But underneath, there was the same indomitable spirit of freedom, Porthos suspected.

So Phryne's answer hardly shocked him, but amused him, instead, that this would be what her mind had jumped to. Probably, in her time, those things were still expected of women, and she was much an exception in her Australia as she would have been in Porthos's France.

He leaned in to kiss her shoulder, because it was there, a perfect curve of pale skin, and entirely too tempting. "Not what I asked, but it's good to know."

Who or what she might have been had the War not intervened, she could no longer say. Without it she would not have been able to escape the closeness of the walls at home, the hopelessness of a life with few options. Without it she would not have had half the nightmares she did, twists of memory and imagination painted in blood and fear and death. Without it she would have never seen the streets of Paris while destitute, but without it she would have never been allowed to escape it and take the reins of her own life once more with the windfall of her inheritance setting her free.

She wondered at times who she might have been in a world untouched by war, but where it had drawn the outline of who she had made herself to be, it had no place in the luxury of those rumpled sheets and the warmth of his lips pressing against her skin. "No," she agreed, her lips pulling into a brief smile, "I suppose it was not."

Whether she would have been made wife of some man out of the inability to live a life outside the control and support of one, that did not matter. Not then. "No husband. No permanent lover." It was more in line with what he had asked, she supposed, and where she shifted among the sheets to press him onto his back, it was to lay herself half over him and set her chin upon the arm she barred across his chest. It allowed her to trace a nonsense design against his skin with one finger as she asked, "And you? Where do you belong if not with your fellow Musketeers?"

Porthos happily welcomed her on top of him, a hand finding her waist, the other tracing fingertips over her shoulder. Her question was phrased in just the right way to bring recent, troubling events to mind, but he did his best not to let his brow darken at the thought of them. Nothing about being in bed with Phryne warranted a dark brow.

"Nowhere," he answered, and he managed to find it in his heart, at this stage, to see it as a good thing. "I'm exactly where I belong." He didn't know how many men could say this, and so it was bound to be a good thing.

It took little effort at all to find a raised line of a scar on the warm, smooth skin of his chest, the tip of one finger slipping along it as her gaze dropped momentarily from his face in lazy inspection. His was a body unused to inaction, the proof of it was clear enough in the many scars her fingers had tripped over in their time together, each one a marker of a story of the life he lived. As it Her eyes returned to watch his expression, although every action, every look, remained unrushed in that state of blissful relaxation.

There had been no question of her enjoying anything of what had come before, the catch and burn of adrenaline too addictive for her not to have thoroughly enjoyed every minute of it. Still, the idle pleasure of the moment was a thing of beauty all on its own, and worthy of appreciation.

As was the warmth that bled from his skin to hers and the husky timbre of his voice when he spoke.

She dipped her head and pressed a kiss against his skin in acknowledgement of his statement. "How long as it been," she started, curiosity licking through her. "Since we saw each other last?" He had not said so, but Phryne tallied the threads of her evidence and had concluded (however correct or incorrect she might have been) that more time had passed for him than it had for her.

Between the time spent here and the time in Paris, it took Porthos a few moments to tally it all up in his mind. "Four months, give or take a week or two?" he offered. Of course, her question begged one of his own, although the necessity for it, in this place, was still something that boggled the mind. The thumb of his hand on her waist stroked over silky skin in a repetitive motion, and he asked, in return, "How long has it been for you?"

Navigating the world of the Nexus was unlike any Phryne had come across in any of her previous adventures. There was no foreign currency to learn the denominations, tour guides to attempt to maneuver around, no phrase books to pick up (or ignore for the sake of attempting to learn the language with the help of some other person's tongue). With its changing, shifting doors and the collection of people from across time and space, it was a world that defied all reasonable explanation.

As it was a world where time was anything but consistent.

"A few weeks, perhaps, no more." How strange it was to consider that she had lived only a fraction of the time he had. "I take it that you returned home?"

"Yes," Porthos confirmed, feeling more settled for the weight and shape of her on top of him, even when thinking of what he had left behind. He was silent for a little while, and then added, "I met my father," maybe because she was not from his world, because she was so far removed that telling her meant less than it would, telling the others who had not yet lived it.

"He was not what I hoped."

To say the least.

The idle tracing of her fingertips against her skin faltered only briefly when he came to the heart of the matter. To, she guessed, what might have been the cause of the tension that had borne iron in his shoulders and a tightness to his expression on that pirate ship she had not seen before. The months missing between them surely held the source, and where she was not then so calculating as to have invited him back to her room for an interrogation, she saw no reason why they could not, in the warm aftermath of it all, speak.

The night had a way of teasing secrets out of them all, after all.

Memories of the man she knew bearing that same title were never without their bitterness, leaving her voice low and only a touch flippant (could either of them bear it being entirely serious) when she replied, "They so rarely are." It was neither the time nor place for mention of her own father, but rather one she devoted easily to encouraging him to speak. "Had you known of him before?"

Her first words - and her tone - seemed to hint that her father had not been of the apparently rare breed of ascendant one could be proud of. Porthos didn't ask, but took up stroking his fingers across her back. "I only knew my mother," he replied, with a shake of his head. That was an easy answer to give, compared to anything to do with his father. The grief was much older. "She died when I was a child. Then I grew up in the Court of Miracles."

He watched her face to see if the name would register with her. He had no idea whether the Court might survive to her days, never mind whether an Australian lady would have heard of it.

Now, it had been years since she had laid her hand on any work of Victor Hugo's and the memory of the two books that called on the Court of Miracles in their telling were not equally fresh in her mind. Still, there was the memory immediate of its descriptions in the Hunchback of Notre Dame and the tellings of gypsies and beggars. The words had been stark and gritty, where the few mentions of it in her time in Paris had always sought to put that slice of Parisian history into a more romantic light. Paris and her artists, her poets, and her outcasts. A world that sought in the wake of a war to tie itself to a more colorful past than one that came in shades of mustard and screaming shells.

She made no effort to disguise the surprise in her expression, although it was milder than it perhaps would have had she been more intimately acquainted with it as a present reality. "I'd almost believed the Court to be a myth," she told him, digesting the information with more thought to what it would have been like to grow up in such a world than any judgment someone of his age might've attached.

"I'm sorry, Porthos. It could not have been easy losing her so young."

"At least I got to know her," Porthos replied honestly. Better to have known and lost her, than never have known her at all. It was true of his father as well, after a fashion. He would rather know, even if that meant knowing that he was not worth knowing. "What about your parents?"

She made a soft sound of agreement. She couldn't, after all, argue with such a sentiment when it was true enough. Those who passed into one's life rarely seemed to remain within it, but in having known them it changed a person irrevocably. The war had impressed upon her as little else had that where one could expect loss, one could live their life to its limits because life was so short.

Where the matter of fathers was one less than comfortable, Phryne was too aware of how central it sat in the grand scheme of conversations and social circles in her life to not be able to speak something of it. Again, the night and its encouragement of the sharing of small intimacies. "Both alive and well. Tucked away in the family estate in Somerset, actually," they had not spoken of her (low) inherited title and she made only oblique reference to the wealth her family had inherited with the war. "A world away from Richmond and a childhood spent stealing peaches for my supper."

Porthos's lips twitched into a small smile at that picture; he saw absolutely nothing wrong with stealing peaches for one's supper, far from it. Especially as a child. "So you're the only one in Australia?"

The name fell slightly more easily from his lips now than it had at first, this strange land on the other side of the world Phryne claimed she came from.

"No," she replied, although the words were less hesitant than they were in considering the state of her family by blood and their scattered present. "Aunt Prudence and Cousin Arthur do live not too far away, although Aunt Prudence usually drops in to be certain I'm aware of her disapproval of one thing or another." It might have sounded too biting if there hadn't been an undercurrent of humor about it, the quirk of her smile implying that she was all too amused over her aunt's disapproval and her own lack of remedying such seeming slips of 'proper' behavior.

"You know," Phryne began, as a thought occurred to her. "You could come and see Australia for yourself," the thought seemed to catch fire as she looked up at him and weighed what his world had just taught him against the benefits the hotel could offer beyond piracy. "Come for a visit and see something of my world."

"If the hotel lets me," Porthos confirmed with a nod, fingertips idly moving across the small of her back. He was smiling a little, the thought clearly not an unpleasant one. It sounded like an adventure, and Porthos could hardly turn down an adventure. "I'd love to."

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In the aftermath of the sea

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