#a lot of miscom in the first half
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sprocketsciencer · 1 year ago
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Let’s go girls!!! Yanited yanited yanited!
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whopooh · 8 years ago
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Miss Fisher and the Close Quarters – March’s prompt
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Look at you being all captured, Jack.
The March prompt proved to be a slightly different challenge than the earlier prompts. The bottle episode prompt, or Close Quarters, means that there is a limited amount of people and a constricted scenario, but other than that, it’s up to the writers imagination. This means we got lovely fics during March, but less easy to categorise. For the soulmate prompt, I could organise the post after how the writers used the idea of a soulmate; for the miscommunication prompt after the amount of angst the miscom created. Here, I will attempt to do it after the scenarios created.
One thing can be said immediately about the trope – it proved to be the fodder for fun romps and sweet stories, not the trampoline for angst (I know @quiltingmom must be very disappointed about that).
I cannot help but start with the clever fic that takes the designation literally, and actually is about a bottle, @longlineoftvdetectives’s “Bottle of Red”. Here we have the constriction of it all being set in the kitchen, and Jack and Mr Butler the only people there (even if Phryne is very present in their dialogue). It’s a lovely short and intimate moment between the two men, after Jack has just left Phryne’s boudoir, and Mr Butler gives Jack some advice from his own life -- all revolving around that red wine bottle he presents Phryne with at the end of “Murder and Mozzarella”.
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Bottle episode for sure.
Then there are fics with a specifically constricted view or scenario.
@loopyhoopyfrood's, ”There Was A Star Danc’d” (not yet finished) is a modern AU, where Jack (a sports star) and Phryne (a dancer) are participating in a dancing program on tv. The scenario is the constricted space of the training, where Phryne pushes Jack’s abilities and forces him to work very hard, while the tension between them is rather strong. In @missingmissfisher’s “A matter of infinite hope”, Phryne and Jack need to hide in a confessional booth -- “It’s a good thing we’re so well acquainted, Inspector, as it looks like we may be here for a little while!” This proves to be a very intimate matter – both in how close they are, and as they first happen to listen to a confession, and then confess pivotal parts of their lives to each other. The space thus proves to be very inspirational.
@phrynesboudoir​/sassasam deals in “Don't Even Have to Get Out of Bed” with some serious bedside detecting, all done from Phryne’s bedroom. Phryne has been put to rest because of a sprained ankle and Jack tries to cheer her up in two ways simultaneously, first by bringing a case to her so she can solve crime with him without leaving the bed, and second by some action of the more physical variety, though the ankle mustn’t be disturbed. This way, we get the chance to hear Miss Fisher say “Well I’m not just going to lie on my back and think of England” as well as this dialogue:
“Show me, by climbing over me,” she breathed. “And stabbing me.”    Jack shook his head. “Truly, your idea of foreplay is bordering on the macabre.”
Also in @whopooh​‘s “The Learning of Detective Skills”, there is bedide detecting going on, although in a different way. The fic is all set at the hospital, in a sickroom, where Jack and Hugh are laid up after having been hurt on the job. An added constriction is that the whole fic is told through Hugh’s point of view, of what he thinks and notices, as he decides to spend his time as a convalescent training his detective skills on his surroundings -- in this case mostly Phryne and Jack: “There was no way two people could sound like this – like they had taken their thoughts and wrapped them up in words that didn’t really mean anything, to hand over to their conversation partner for careful unwrapping – if they were only casual partners.”
In @flashofthefuse​’s “Best Laid Plans” the constriction is, again, double – both in that Phryne and Dot happen to become locked up in a bank vault for a whole night, and in that the perspective is fully Phryne’s -- not only as point of view, but everything is even narrated in her voice. There are plenty of lovely Phryne and Dot moments, and in the morning the third person coming onto the scene of the vault is an annoyed Jack. The push-and-pull between Phryne and Jack is great fun, and also especially interesting to follow from Phryne’s perspective, with her internal asides. It is fun and teasing, all the way to:
“True.” (Not even I believed that pledge to stay out of trouble.) “Wasn’t it nice to actually be able to come to my rescue for once?”    “Are you trying to say thank you, Miss Fisher? Because if so, you’re rather bad at it.”
But the fic is also a bit angsty as Phryne realises there is a lot at stake if she and Dot would be found out --  both for Dot, Hugh, Jack, and herself.
From @flashofthefuse​’s fic, it’s the perfect transition to go into fics where Phryne and Jack – and sometimes someone else – are actually locked up. While the trope doesn’t explicitly say that people need to be locked in, the Miss Fisher universe obviously fits well with that concept – and this gives rise to much fun.
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A 1920s cellfie.
In @star-l8​‘s “Lock Picking”, Phryne is dared by Jack -- or decides to take it as a dare -- that she cannot pick the locks in the police station’s cell. She decides to take him up in it although it’s late in the evening, which ends with her and Jack locked into the cells as she threw away the keys in her bravado. It is fun and sweet, and Hugh Collins becomes the means of liberation, which is rather mortifying for a Jack still groggy from sleep: "What was Hugh doing in his bedroom? And why was he inquiring about Miss Fisher?” Another take on Phryne and Jack in the cells is @ladyroxie​‘s “We Two Alone”. This time they have been intentionally locked up, having been arrested while undercover. The constriction is double in the sense that they are locked up but also separated, put in adjacent cells. Phryne is very tipsy, and Jack tries to take care of her from his own cell, and the fic is a thorough and emotional exploration into his intense feelings for her, Jack being completely disarmed by her innocence in tipsiness: “He'd mostly mastered the trick of withstanding her proximity when it was a shower of sparks, when she was lit up and glossy and fierce. (...) But seeing her like this, when all of those things had been left behind, was an ambush he hadn't seen coming.”
In @olderbynow​‘s “Back In The Ring” the constriction is a very unexpected one – Phryne and Jack are stuck in a tree, with a bull pacing below them. It is such a fun fic where they banter about how they got into this situation, and Phryne is also riling Jack up with stories about her old friends, in response to him not giving anything away about his own feelings or desires. And also about food: 
“He makes the most delicious Sauce Bourguignonne,” she goes on ruthlessly.    Their eyes meet. Her expression is challenging and it’s obvious that she’s angling for a fight. He blinks slowly.    She huffs, clearly frustrated that he’s not rising to her bait.    There’s silence for a blissful minute and then…    “Now, when I went to Sweden in ‘21 I met this artist who was--”
I will not repeat it here, since I kind of overcrowded the comment section with it already, but I find it such a fun possibility that the bull in this fic can stand for Jack’s repressed desires and emotions, trapping the two of them in one place.
An equally humorous fic is @ollyjayonline’s “Two’s company…” Here Phryne and Jack come to be locked up in a small space, but there is also a third person, the insufferable Miss Sumner. She is both the reason the door became locked and proves a specialist in backing Jack into corners. There is such fun tension in this triangle, as she both grates on Jack’s nerves (while he tries to be a gentleman) and flirts with him, and it’s wonderful to get to follow his reactions and inner snark, like “He thought he did well to keep the sarcasm to merely dripping, as opposed to torrential.” Phryne is mostly following the development from the sideline, a.k.a. the door trying to pick the lock:
"You wanna hand up?"    No, what I want is for you to be anywhere in the world but locked in this small room with me, he thought.    "Jack?" another more welcome voice came from behind him, "Don't you think you're being a tad over dramatic?"    Possibly true, he admitted to himself, but hardly fair coming from the woman who had taken all of sixty minutes from their arrival in New York to put herself in the middle of a murder enquiry.    "I'm almost certain Miss Sumner didn't mean to lock us in the room."
Finally, there are full cases or stand-offs based on the bottle ep idea. In @firesign23​’s “Hotel Homicide” Phryne, Jack and Mac take on an incredibly unlikely and odd murder case – so unlikely even, that it proves to be based on a true case. The killed man was thought to have died of natural causes in an hotel room, “Until they opened him up and found his internal organs were practically liquified,” as Phryne interjects. The three friends have only a limited amount of time and are in one place, the hotel room where the murder took place (Phryne even locks them in for good measure) and Hugh helps them via telephone. They need to find clues to give them a new perspective on the murder in order to save a friend of Mac’s from the accusations. Phryne is glorious in her investigations of the room, and there is wonderful banter and discussion between the three of them:
“Unfortunately that meant the local police decided that it was murder, and I half-expect them to accuse Mary of witchcraft to explain it away.”    “Hmm,” hummed Jack. “Which would be unfortunate, as witchcraft wouldn’t even require her presence in the room.”    “Perhaps she cursed his cow while she was at it,” Phryne retorted.
Last out, @allimariexf, “The Inside Man” is a beautiful and intense fic about a bank robbery. Here a lot of people are involved, but all set in the same place, a bank. Both Phryne and Jack happen to be at the bank on errands, unbeknownst to each other, and suddenly find themself in the middle of a robbery. The two need to first realise that the other is there, and then they, without giving away that they already know each other, need to communicate wordlessly about what is going on – a feat they manage admirable. There is the very real risk that someone might get shot, and they both feel pangs of sadness about how the day could have been if they had just happened to walk into each other without any mayhem happening. Just as there is always a hindrance in the episodes, here Jack’s reverie -- “His heart instantly began to beat faster, and his afternoon’s prospects, which had until this moment seemed drab and tedious, were suddenly suffused with possibility” -- is interrupted by reality: “Oi! This here’s a robbery!”
The way Phryne and Jack communicate, their gazes and understanding of each other, are very intense -- one could say this is rather an anti-thesis to last month’s trope, miscommunication. These are two people who understand each other, know each other inside and out, and trust each other:
And as her gaze alighted on the object of the criminal’s attention, Phryne found herself looking directly into Jack Robinson’s impassioned eyes. (…) Jack! Even without his characteristic composure, his steady gaze supplied the ballast she hadn’t known she needed.  (…) In an instant, Phryne processed Jack’s awareness that she recognized him, and read relief in his gaze and steel in his jaw.
And this joint ability they have is the only reason they actually make it out alive from the bank.
That was all for the March prompt (here is the full fic list). So looking forward to see what fics might emerge from the april challenge, body swap.
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