phrynefisher | 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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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."

In the aftermath of the sea

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