#this is essentially my main timeline but what if there was soulmate nonsense too

[selfshipstorm]

Soulmate AU

John Seed had always seen the soulmate system as a farce. Why would there be someone special meant for someone else, destined to be their perfect other half? He especially grew to despise the words printed on his arm he grew and they became one more thing the couple who'd adopted him used against him. After all, who's first words to their soulmate would be go to hell?

Minerva Black got her soulmate mark when she was thirteen. Four words across her ribcage, just under her left breast. This one's not clean. Her mother just laughed. Well of course that's what it'd say. Elizabeth Black just grinned at her daughter. My little woodsman, you're not at home unless you're covered head to toe in mud. 

Minerva didn't even recognize her mark when it was said, but in her defense, her soulmate didn't realize when she spat his right back. 

It was only after her clothes had dried from her dip in the Henbane, after getting kidnapped and near drowned had finally caught up to her, after the rage at John Seed's audacity had boiled over and she'd gone on a rampage, that she realized what he'd actually said. 

This one's not clean. He'd muttered, handing off his copy of his brother's backwards bible before his grip tightened around her shoulders.  Go to hell. She'd spat back as indignantly as she could muster while exhausted and half drowned, and the look on his face told her she was in for it.  She took a breath as he pushed her under the surface of the Henbane once more. 

Her soulmate had tried to kill her. After everything she'd spent her life imagining, all the scenarios of meeting her soulmate she'd dreamt up. He had tried to kill her. 

[whopooh]

Miss Fisher and the plight of miscommunication – February’s trope challenge

Does this whisky glass imply drinks, or something else, Miss Fisher?

You remember I couldn’t help but write a post about the soulmate trope of January, because it was so much fun and gave food for so much thought. The same really proved to be true for the miscommunication trope, so I decided to write about that one too. I remember that when the trope was announced, @quiltingmom was not the happiest in the fandom, fearing all the angst that would come up with this trope. She even taught me that “smh” means “shaking my head”. So, I decided to do the organisation of this post in a @quiltingmom proof way, by ordering them after their amount of angst, starting with the lightest and going to @ladyroxie. (I’d love some feedback from you about where you draw the line between nicely angsty and too angsty in this line!)

This is actually a very reasonable way to structure the stories. The nice thing with miscommunication -- apart from it fitting Phryne and Jack and their way of behaving rather well -- is that it can take turns in very different directions. The plot itself is usually one of comedy – in that classic sense of the word, which means the ending is happy – since miscommunication really needs to be cleared up for the story to feel completed. But that gives ample opportunity for different roads to be taken -- and very different length of fic -- between the start and the happy ending; I have made a division into humour; humour with an angsty part; angst light; and angst. (Here is the full collection.)

I am delighted that the February fic covered all of these possibilities, and in so many different ways. The wonderful humour part saw @olderbynow’s “Across Frayed Wires,” where Jack gets a message from Hugh over a very bad line. We are given the internal view of a delightfully overthinking Jack that tries very hard to not think about a certain lady detective, but when the message says “alarm” and “Fisher” he cannot help but associate this to Phryne. The message 

made no damn sense at all, but still had Jack’s heart climbing into his throat as his mind helpfully supplied filler words that essentially translated the sentence into “Miss Fisher has done something reckless again and is in danger.” It was the sort of phone call he spent half his days expecting, of course. 

Unfortunately for Jack, when he stumbles into Wardlow he instead disturbs Phryne in the middle of a tryst with a lover, and the mortification of Jack and all his awkwardness and thought-processes are adorable.

More humour and teasing with regard to their sexual relationship is present in @loopyhoopyfrood’s “Mistaken”. This is an original take, set before the timeline of the episodes, and gives us a sweet and fun and mistakenly heated encounter that is completely packed with misunderstandings, and poor Jack gets pushed into doors no less than two times by a very insistent Miss Fisher. A third teasing with the sexual theme is sassasam/@phrynesboudoir's “Miss Communication” that is set after the last episode. Phryne writes from England a rather juicy letter to Jack, that also quotes some of his own not completely innocent phrases from an earlier letter, but puts it in the wrong envelope. The exact look on Aunt P’s face when she reads that scandolous letter we are left to imagine from the line “with eyes almost bulging from their sockets.” Jack, poor duck, on the other hand, receives a letter that talks about embroidery.

A final predominantly humourous fic is @ollyjayonline’s “Nine times out of ten”. It is a delightful story of Phryne deciding to play match-maker and implicating Jack in that, while on the boat back home to Australia. It is rather emma-esque in the way her plan goes rather wrong, the girl Jack was meant to pay attention to suddenly interested in him and not in the original beau she was aiming to make jealous. Suddenly they find themselves in a situation where Jack has to play the role of not wanting Phryne, and Phryne the role of trying to get him – all while they secretly have an established relationship, that is still a bit shaken by the roles they play. It’s a wonderful way of contrasting their true relationship with the fake one and with what the people around them are believing about them. Above all there is a delicious tension – her decision forcing Jack to play a part, and then she herself not being sure when he is playing and when he’s sincere. Phryne faces emotional turmoil and realisations, while the humourous aspect is still the main one.

From this, the step is not far to @flashofthefuse’s “Mistaken relations”, that I decided to label as the first humour with an angsty part. The fic introduces an embarrassing moment when Phryne thinks Jack has asked her to come over, and while she has decided to surprise him with hardly any clothes on, he comes home with another woman. Awkwardness ensues and Phryne is thrown off-kilter a little bit, feeling unsure and a little bit jealous, but at the same time knowing she has no right to be jealous. And incredibly sweetly, what really annoys her is that “he was laughing, Mac. Before he opened the door, I could hear him laughing.” Phryne and Jack are so acutely aware of not pressuring the other that they completely fail in communicating what they want. Jack’s sister – because that’s the mysterious woman – asks him:

“So, you’re not worried about her?” “Because of this? No. I worry about her getting herself arrested, or possibly shot, but this kind of thing? No.

Of course, the readers just want to tackle Jack at this point, but he perseveres, and it’s probably lucky he has a clever sister. She has the same no-nonsense take on things as her brother, at least: “I hope I get another chance to meet her while I’m here, preferably fully clothed.”

In @firesign23’s “As stimulating as black coffee”, Jack has followed Phryne to England just for them to realise that they aren’t working, sexually: 

It’s fine,” he said. “You just surprised me.”  “I’m aiming higher than fine, Jack.”  The man actually pouted. “Well, I certainly wasn’t achieving it.” 

They have a wonderfully ridiculous argument and part ways, which is a very fun turn of the reunion in England -- of course that’s not the end of it though. 

@promisesarepiecrust “Maybe more?” is a lovely short take on the question of Phryne and marriage, as she wakes to a note left by Jack that seems to say “marry me?” Phryne is rattled: “When she’d first read it, she couldn’t help the words that left her mouth: first a curse, followed by “Oh, Jack, no— why would you do that?!”” As the trope is what it is, maybe he didn’t exactly – and it plays out in a lovely way.

Phryne is Very Angry.

The final humourous fic is @jeneenp/collingwoodgirl’s “Licence to Thrill” and its theme of overhearing. Without him noticing, Phryne overhears Jack talking with colleagues, and is appalled as she realises he is talking rather demeaningly about her. Everything she ever thought about him crashes down completely, the betrayal is enormous, and she walks into his office and hits him hard in the face. Jack’s reaction is wonderful – without taking his eyes off her, he asks the other policemen to leave them alone:                                        

For nearly a full minute, there was nothing but silence. All three men appeared to have been turned to stone by the furious goddess that stood before them. It was only when Jack reached up and, unbelievingly, dabbed at his cheek that she was reminded he was still flesh and blood. “Collins—” Jack growled, his eyes never leaving hers. When Hugh didn’t move, Jack barked again. “Both of you! Out. Now.”

And Phryne “found it largely reminiscent of a hostage negotiation. It was immensely satisfying.” What follows is a delicious conversation where he tries to understand her fury, she slowly realises that they had actually been talking about something completely different from what she’d gathered, and an equally delicious making up.

In the category angst light I place three fics. @suigeneris221b‘s “Someone is waiting” gives us Jack finding out through the newspaper’s gossip column that Phryne has married in London. He decides to immediately repress all his feelings until he can go home and have a breakdown in peace. It’s both humorous and angsty, and Mac’s telegrams to Phryne asking what the heck she is doing are great. As the trope is miscommunication, we probably shouldn’t take the newspaper’s story at face value, and we get truly wonderful interactions between the triad of Phryne, Jack and Mac while trying to make it all right again. Something similar can be said about @whopooh’s “I’d know you anywhere,” where the slightly angsty misunderstanding instead stems from Jack being feverish after a knife wound, mistaking people for each other. Again, Mac is a solid rock for her BFF Phryne. In @missingmissfisher’s “A thousand times over”, the misunderstanding evolves from Phryne having received a faulty message, which makes her walk in on Jack having dinner with and comforting Rosie, and this then leads to several disastrous attempts at contact between the two. Finally, in a lovely turn, Jack manages to communicate through the flower language, but it wouldn’t have worked out without the translation help from her solid friend Mac, educated in the natural sciences.

Finally, the end of the spectre: the angst proper of miscommunication, which obviously can be rather heavy. In @rositalg’s “Old Habits Die Hard Holding On” Phryne and Jack have just about started a relationship, and in a clever twist the fic in one single scene explores three things: Jack’s fear of Phryne wanting other men, the fear belonging to the threat of a serial killer in a case, and Phryne’s fear that goes back to her backstory with René. There is a flinch in the fic that is really devastating. Two fics deal with mistaken news of death: comeaftermejackrobinson’s “The tell-tale heart” explores a possible parallel to “Blood at the Wheel” – if it was instead Phryne who at that moment in time would receive a message that Jack had died, and also discovering that he had put her down as ‘next of kin’: “He had listed her as his next of kin and had never said a word about it. She could have killed him for putting her through this, really, had he not been already dead”. @omgimsarahtoo’s “In the Next Breath” explores the Phryne receiving mistaken news of Jack’s death when they are already in an established relationship -- the feeling of loss is acute:

Her head swam, and when she dropped her hand from her eyes, she could see Dot’s concerned face, black spots swimming through her field of vision. Ha, dots on Dot. The thought made her huff out a laugh, and she clapped a hand over her mouth, horrified.

Only minutes after the news, Jack comes home to a devastated household, and acutely heightened from the thought of the loss are Phryne's emotions and the feeling of making love to him.

The last fic is the most angsty one, @ladyroxie’s “Between the Shadow and the Soul”. In this multi-chapter case fic, Jack disappears on his way to England without a trace, and as Phryne doesn’t even know he decided to follow her, it takes time before anyone starts to miss him -- a nightmare in itself. Jack has been badly injured by a person who steals his identity to travel, and when Phryne finally realises he’s gone missing, she investigates, takes help from an old friend in England, and goes to Egypt to try and find him. It is very suspenseful and the question is if she’ll manage to find him, and in time. Jack’s injuries here were so brutal that @221aubrina in “The Library” – which here can serve as a sweet appendix to the trope – wrote a wonderful meta story about the librarians that take care of all the ‘Jacks’ that have been out in circulation among the fanfic writers and have been damaged. After @ladyroxie’s fic, the librarians check the injuries and note:

“Yeah... he'll need a good deal of extra time and care in The Restoration Lab." Norton shook his head. "Huh. Pretty bad then, eh?" Harris nodded to his colleague. "We might have to bring a couple of the other copies out before this edition's fit to be checked out again, if it ever is." "Think he might have to go to the Special Collections Wing?" Norton queried.

Thus we can, even in this journey towards more and more angst, end on a humorous note.

This was the February trope, and I look very much forward to reading stories of March’s trope, “Bottle episode”.