Title: Losing Count
Fandom: Miss Fisher's Murder Mysteries
Rating: G
Length: ~700 words
Author Notes: spoilers for "Blood at the Wheel"
Summary: A Jack Robinson character study.



He still remembered it as if it had only happened yesterday: two inquisitive eyes blinking up at him from underneath a frighteningly stylish haircut, a pair of legs strolling all over his crime scene and, before he knew it, into his entire murder investigation without so much as by-your-leave.

That had been the first time. Miss Phryne Fisher wouldn't take no for an answer, and for all that Jack cursed Collins for being such a doormat when it came to independent women, he found that his own ways of discouraging amateurs from getting involved in criminal investigations hadn't worked as well as they should have, for some reason.

A short time later, when he'd investigated a case on the Ballarat train, that same Miss Fisher, as though the stars had aligned in some mysterious way to ensure they crossed paths on a regular basis. Far from making a nuisance of herself, though, she had proved rather handy, especially with a firearm.

That had been the second time.

After that, it seemed a matter of her becoming embroiled every other time he was trying to solve a case. When he said to her that he felt like he never got a chance to miss her, it was only partly in jest: she had, for better or worse, become - well, not exactly part of the furniture, but certainly something that you just got used to.

He'd lost count of the number of times she'd invited him over to her house for dinner - two partners celebrating their crime-fighting success, at first, though Jack would have been a fool not to suspect her of having other motives for these meetings as well. Phryne went through male acquaintances at a rate of knots and while he didn't exactly judge this, he had no intention of becoming just another one of her conquests.

And so he found himself one day, staring at the wreckage of a racing car after taking a confusing message from Hugh, not wanting to have lost another comrade-in-arms, not wanting to have to process what this meant, having to confront the fact that he had become utterly lost along the way.

He'd enjoyed her company, of course, but there had always been a number on the clock that he could point to and make his excuses, a number of hours that he still needed to put in somewhere, a number of things that had to be done - any number of excuses and distractions and things that were Not Phryne to distract him from thinking about how many hours he did spend in her company, how many nights out of the past seven he had come by her house, for dinner or just for a nightcap, how much he looked forward to seeing her again during the day.

As he walked up the path to the site Hugh had given him - slowly, not wanting to face a truth he had no way of handling - part of him thought that it all mattered little now. Yes, he couldn't deny that somewhere along the line, out of all the hours spent together, the friendship, out of the witty and sometimes outrageous things Phryne came out with (and that he could always match with verbal gymnastics of his own) - somewhere along the line, out of all this, had grown a feeling that was stronger than friendship, something he had acknowledged before himself, in the very still moments, but ultimately something that wasn't going to get him anywhere. And so he'd rationalised it, filed it under "Sleeping Dogs That Should Better Be Left Alone."

It had got him here, to where he was, and this, he decided, was where he would bury it. Put it into the ground with her bones, like he had done before, with others, in the war, and figuratively, during his divorce. It wasn't a question of a number of hours, of the number of times something could have happened, the number of times he might have said something different, or done something different - it was, in a word, too late for all of that, and the human heart wasn't beholden to equations.

He took one last step forward and stared down into the wreckage, facing the unthinkable.

"Can I see her?"