Work Text:
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1934
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Mac is standing behind a cadaver, shuffling her notes as a new class of students jostles its way around the table. She’s used to crops of first year students about to see their first dead body: the nervous ones, the cocky ones, the joking ones who are really only trying to mask their apprehension. In the midst of this group is a tall, gangly girl, awkwardly skirting around her classmates to get close to the table, glaring daggers at a cluster of laughing young men who try to block her out of their way. Mac almost intervenes, but then doesn’t; it’s evident this girl can take care of herself.
She quiets the class, introduces herself, and begins to teach. She quickly gains the students’ attention, and fortunately no one is looking pale or queasy in this group. The tall girl has edged up closer and closer off to Mac’s right, and Mac keeps looking back at the rapt expression on the girl’s face. Alert, unusual eyes, cheekbones standing out a bit on her too thin face, lips parted as though she’s spending the entire lecture gasping in anticipation. She looks like this is the most exciting thing that she has ever experienced. Quite possibly, Mac knows, it is.
Most of the class files out at the end of the lesson, and the girl moves closer to the cadaver, as though she’s trying to commit everything about it to memory.
“You’ll get plenty more opportunities,” Mac says, smiling. “You don’t have to learn it all the first day.” She teases very gently, but from the girl’s determined, hungry look, Mac suspects she will be one of her favorite sort of students: the ones who clawed their way into their places in the college and refuse to let anything get in the way of their goals.
The girl looks up, startled, as if she’d forgotten Mac was there. “Oh,” she says. “It’s only that…” and she trails off, either uncertain of what she wanted to say or unwilling to say it to a stranger. “I’m sorry, Dr. Macmillan,” she says instead.
“Never apologize,” Mac replies, more forcefully than she expects to. “Miss—?”
“Harvey. Alice Harvey.”
“Welcome to medical school, Miss Harvey.”
**
Mac is entirely unsurprised when Alice Harvey quickly rises to the top of her class, though she appears to be the only person who expected this. Her male colleagues always bristle when the female students are too successful, and Alice doesn’t appear to be popular with the other students, either. Mac has seen this play out with a handful of different students: determined, brilliant young women who quickly build the armor that determined and brilliant young women need to succeed in medicine. Helen Dotrice, Beatrice Mason, Edith Jenkins. Once upon a time, Mac herself.
Alice Harvey is their successor, and a worthy one, but she’s different in a way Mac can’t quite identify, beyond the impression that Alice arrived with her armor fully formed.
On one of her teaching days, Mac walks into the hallway to find Alice waiting for her.
“Dr. Macmillan, would you tell me about your work with the coroner’s office?”
Mac hasn’t given serious thought to what specialty Alice might choose. If pressed, she might have guessed surgery for Alice, but as she reconsiders her student through the lens of pathology, she sees it at once. Alice’s focus and tenacity when it comes to solving puzzles, her need to understand why bodies and diseases work the way they do, her methodical patience and comfort working alone. Alice the pathologist. Yes.
She buys Alice a drink, and they talk about pathology. The following week Mac arranges for Alice to observe an autopsy, and then another, and soon Alice is a fixture in the morgue. Mac catches herself watching her student, those bright eyes and sharp features that shine with delight in her work. It’s hard to look away.
One day she can’t avoid introducing Alice to Phryne and Jack, who are poking around their latest murder victim. She can tell Alice finds Phryne alarming—but that’s hardly surprising. Still, Alice has a new glint in her eyes when the puzzle is not simply to understand the disease or to understand why someone died unexpectedly in their sleep, but to factor in blood toxicology or bruise patterns to solve a crime.
The next week Phryne gets Mac drunk and teases her about her “odd, bright, beautiful girl.” When Mac protests that Alice is her student and she absolutely doesn’t think of her that way, she has a hard time believing her own argument.
Despite her growing attraction to Alice, Mac is perfectly serious that she would never pursue a student. Besides, the girl is all of twenty-one, and has in no way indicated an attraction to Mac or to women in general. The whole thing is out of the question. All her life Mac has been falling for women she’ll never have: women who see her as a friend if they see her at all, women who would find the very idea of loving her abhorrent, women who love men. She has a great deal of practice with compartmentalizing her feelings and getting on with things, and this, she tells herself, is no different.
It feels different, though. Alice is so beautiful that Mac can’t look away, so clever that that Mac wants to spend all of her time working with her, so serious that Mac wants to find the thing that would make her laugh, and so fiercely determined that Mac wants more than anything for her to succeed. She can help Alice succeed. That’s her job, and it’s the only thing Alice needs, or wants, from her.
Mac trades a few shifts so that she’s less frequently in the morgue when Alice volunteers, and she helps to arrange for her to shadow an immunopathologist at the Royal Melbourne Hospital. It’s a wonderful opportunity for Alice, and if it means she’s a little less underfoot, well, that’s probably for the best.
**
Alice is in the morgue, though, the day the boy comes in. Peter. Ten years old, wounds new, old, and older still. Jack had called ahead to warn her; the boy’s stepfather is being held for questioning.
“Have you observed the autopsy of a child before?” Mac asks Alice. “If you don’t feel you can stay, it wouldn’t reflect badly on you at all.”
Alice’s face has gone white, but she has a determined set to her jaw. “I’m all right,” she replies. Mac isn’t sure whether she should believe her; this is the sort of autopsy most students could never get through. But she can tell that Alice is resolute. Mac nods once, and they begin.
They work carefully and quietly. Ordinarily Mac takes the opportunity to teach when she has students observing, but today Alice feels much more like a colleague than a student. She is swift and careful, anticipating Mac’s needs and assisting with surer hands than most fully qualified physicians would have in this circumstance. Cause of death: the severing of the spinal column between C5 and C6, consistent with being pushed down a flight of stairs.
Afterwards, they both deflate. Mac slumps against the wall. Alice grips the counter, and Mac can see that she’s shaking. “All right,” Mac says, shrugging off her lab coat and retrieving the flask she keeps stashed in her desk drawer, “we need some air.” Alice nods, her face still bloodless, and Mac guides her by the elbow to the lift.
It’s well into autumn, and they didn’t think to bring their overcoats. But the bracing wind on the roof is a better cold than the chill of the morgue, and Mac breathes it in. She swallows from the flask and then hands it to Alice who, after a moment’s hesitation, follows suit.
They’re quiet together for a long while, passing the whiskey back and forth.
“Will it be enough?” Alice asks finally. “The evidence from the autopsy. Will it be enough to secure a conviction?”
Mac sighs. “Maybe,” she says. “But the police will try their hardest on this one.”
Alice nods jerkily. “They don’t always, the police.” Mac thinks of Alice’s guardedness and wonders, not for the first time, about her past. The wind howls around them, and just for a moment Mac imagines wrapping Alice up in a warm quilt and holding her there, safe and close. Alice takes a large swallow of the whiskey, which sets her coughing.
Mac retrieves the flask and slips it back into her pocket. She resists the urge to rub her hand across Alice’s back. But then Alice grips her hand, her fingers like ice and her fingernails digging into Mac’s palm. “Does this really help?” she asks, and Mac doesn’t know if she means the pathology, or the liquor, or holding onto another person on a dark, cold night.
“What else can we do?” Mac replies, and she doesn’t let go.
****
1942
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People keep asking Alice if she’s glad to be back in Melbourne. She knows it’s simply a polite thing for her colleagues or her landlady to say. She generally replies that she is, because that’s the polite response. After all, if she’d gotten a place at a Melbourne hospital after graduation, she would never have left in the first place, but such assignments were prestigious and did not go to young women like her. So she’d left, and worked hard and well, though opportunities for advancement were scarce. With the war, though, doors began to open. Suddenly St. Vincent’s was advertising for pathology registrars, and not long after that, Alice found herself on a train back to Melbourne.
Alice has been back for about a month when she rounds a corner in the hospital and nearly runs into Dr. Macmillan. They gape at each other for a moment before Dr. Macmillan’s face breaks into a wide grin.
“Alice Harvey!” she cries, and she grasps Alice’s hands before dropping them quickly. “I had no idea you were back in Melbourne.”
Alice had thought about writing. She’d thought about writing a lot in her first year away, but she’d never been entirely sure what to say. And then the longer she was away, the more she felt it would be strange for Dr. Macmillan to get a letter from her unexpectedly. What if Dr. Macmillan didn’t even remember her? She told herself the clean break was better.
But now Dr. Macmillan is here, and smiling, and happy to see her, and Alice lets herself smile back. Dr. Macmillan is much the same: easy smile, confident stride, jacket and trousers tailored like a man’s, eyes that always seemed to Alice like they were keeping a secret. She’s stopped dyeing her hair, though, and it’s a light brown now, streaked with silver. Alice likes it.
“I’m sorry,” Alice says, suddenly regretting her years of silence. “I suppose I should have written. I haven’t been back long. I—I’m so happy to see you, Dr. Macmillan.” She says it before she can stop herself, but Dr. Macmillan looks delighted.
“Oh, please call me Mac!” she exclaims. “I’m not your teacher anymore.” A strange expression passes over Dr. Macmillan’s—Mac’s—face for a moment, and then the smile is back, and she’s peppering Alice with questions about her new job and where she had been before, and before Alice knows it she has agreed to meet for dinner.
She returns to work feeling a little upside down, and…pleased. Someone was happy to see her. Dr. Macmillan was happy to see her. “Mac,” she says aloud, experimentally, to the empty lab.
During medical school, Dr. Macmillan had been—everything, really. Alice would have done well regardless; she’s confident of that. But it had helped more than she could ever express to have someone in her corner, a mentor and maybe even occasionally a friend.
The rumors had swirled around Dr. Macmillan, of course. The students, taking in the shocking red hair and even more shocking masculine clothes, called her deviant and worse. “It’s illegal, you know,” they whispered in the stairwells.
She was the first woman Alice had ever known who liked women instead of men. Alice had certainly understood why someone might avoid men; all the men she had ever known had been condescending and dismissive or violent and abusive. Alice’s stomach turned at society’s general expectation that she would marry one of them and give him the right to put his hands on her whenever and however he wished. No, she had decided quite young, she would never marry.
But not only to avoid men but to care romantically for women—Alice had found the idea intriguing, if still vaguely terrifying. At school, the girls bragged of the secrets they told each other and told their young men. When friends became too close, Alice learned, and they began to feel entitled to ask questions about your past, to touch you unexpectedly. Romantic entanglements—presumably those with women, as well as those with men—had an even greater expectation of intimacy.
How, too, would one even go about entering into such a thing? Liking someone, recognizing that the affection was returned, not making a potentially criminal mistake—it seemed to Alice like a tremendous risk to take. Yet she could also imagine the rewards of caring for someone, being cared for in return.
And increasingly, that abstract someone had a name and a face. As her medical training progressed, Alice was more and more drawn to Dr. Macmillan, not simply as a mentor or a friend. She began to comfort herself in lonely moments by thinking of Dr. Macmillan’s laugh, her indignation, her pride—and her eyes, her long fingers, the quirk of her lips into a wry smile. She carried these memories with her during the years away, and she’s been surprised by how little they have faded. Very occasionally Alice let herself remember that night on the roof, cold fingers and burning whiskey and all the things she wished she knew how to say.
**
They meet for dinner, and Alice finds it unexpectedly easy to call her former teacher Mac and to talk as peers. They speak of work, but not only of work, and the following week they have dinner again, and the week after that Mac calls her in to consult on a case.
Mac’s life is frenetic; she’s constantly running between projects and causes and quasi-volunteer jobs. It makes Alice, with her life carefully arranged between long days at work and quiet evenings at home, a little panicked just to think of it. She wonders how Mac has time for her, but somehow she does, and with increasing frequency.
The first time Mac invites Alice to her flat for dinner, Alice isn’t quite sure what to expect; she has very rarely been a guest in someone’s home. But it’s surprisingly comfortable, Mac cursing good-naturedly as she burns things, Alice watching and hiding her smile behind her wine glass.
“Next time I’ll make a better show of the cooking,” Mac says as Alice leaves, and Alice can tell she means it. There is a next time, and a time after that, and Mac’s cooking never gets any better, but Alice doesn’t care. Alice knows Mac isn’t just being polite; for some reason, Mac wants to spend these evenings with her. The realization makes Alice feel a little unsure. She is enjoying herself, but the closer they become, the more Alice has no idea what she is meant to do.
Alice finds it especially difficult to navigate spending time in the rest of Mac’s busy life. Work consultations, lectures, even the occasional dinner out are familiar territory for Alice. But she agrees to attend a charity fundraiser for the Women’s Hospital, and it is altogether too much. Mac is trying to convince wealthy donors to part with their money, and Alice fails miserably to make small talk with strangers. The crowds are overwhelming, and when a drunk man leers too close to her, she flees at once.
The next day Mac turns up at Alice’s lab to apologize. “I shouldn’t have thrown you to the wolves like that,” she says, and looks sincerely chagrined.
“No, I’m sorry,” Alice protests. “I just don’t fit in at events like that. You shouldn’t feel obligated to invite me.”
Mac opens her mouth and then closes it again, and Alice doesn’t know how to read the expression on her face. “I didn’t invite you out of obligation,” Mac says quietly.
Despite her experience with the fundraiser, a couple of weeks later Alice apprehensively agrees to go with Mac to a small party at Miss Fisher’s house. Mac keeps an eye on her, introducing her to everyone while at the same time shielding her from the worst of Miss Fisher’s exuberance. Alice begins to relax and manages to talk easily enough with Mac’s friends.
And then Miss Fisher is at her shoulder, grinning. She tips her head toward Mac, winks at Alice, and whispers, “You know, she’s so very glad you came back.” Alice’s stomach does a flip, and she looks across the room at Mac, who is laughing, dancing, dazzling.
**
Alice is meeting Mac after work one day when she hears someone shouting. A man’s voice, coming from inside the morgue. He is ranting about women’s incompetence, and women working where they don’t belong, and women who don’t know how to be women. Alice’s blood runs cold, and she can’t make herself move from her spot in the hallway. For a long moment she’s the child hiding in the space between the wardrobe and the wall, trying to block out angry voices and breaking glass. But then she’s back in the hallway, and someone is shouting at Mac, and she rushes into the room.
She doesn’t recognize him, the shouting man. He’s wearing a lab coat, and he’s a young man, about Alice’s own age, and she wonders why he isn’t at war. She can’t process what he’s shouting, only that he’s looming into Mac’s space, his finger stabbing the air in front of her face, and Alice sees herself reaching for his elbow, hears herself shouting back, “Stop!”
He turns on her in an instant, hand raised, and she fumbles behind her because there is an instrument tray, and if she has a scalpel she can—.
“Alice!” Mac cries out, and in the moment before the back of the man’s hand collides with Alice’s jaw he freezes and goes white.
The scalpel is in her hand, and she’s shaking. The man has dropped his hand and is backing out the door; he still looks furious, but he’s mumbling something that might be an apology. Mac has moved to Alice’s side, a little cautiously, and she closes her hand around Alice’s, pulling the scalpel free and putting it aside.
The room feels too bright and too sharp, and she sways into Mac, who opens her arms and draws Alice in. “It’s okay,” Mac whispers into her hair. “He’s just an arrogant, insecure little bastard. He’s not worth it.” Her voice is a little strained, and Alice turns her face into the curve of Mac’s neck, takes a handful of her lab coat, and doesn’t let go.
She feels a little fuzzy-headed as Mac guides them out to her car. They’d originally planned to have dinner out, but Mac drives back to her flat and Alice is grateful. Inside, she sinks onto the sofa, and a moment later Mac joins her and puts a glass of whiskey in her hand.
“Drink this,” she says, and Alice does, eyes and throat burning. Mac puts the empty glass on the coffee table and threads her fingers through Alice’s.
“I’m sorry,” Alice says after a few minutes. “I shouldn’t have—I overreacted.”
“You don’t need to apologize.” Mac’s thumb moves back and forth over her knuckle, and Alice focuses on that. “Do you want to talk about it?” Mac asks gently. “About why you reacted like that?”
She doesn’t want to talk about it. There’s too much, and she’s never said any of it aloud, not to anyone. But she owes Mac some explanation. She takes a shaky breath and concentrates on the feel of Mac’s hand; it’s warm, the skin a little dry. “I know it isn’t rational, but I thought he—.” She swallows hard. “I don’t want to lose you,” she says, and it’s no more than a whisper.
“Oh, sweetie,” Mac breathes. With her free hand she cups Alice’s cheek, splaying her fingers from cheekbone to neck. “I’m right here.”
Mac’s eyes are a little watery, and she licks her lips, and she’s looking at Alice like she’s special. Like she’s beautiful. Like no one has ever looked at her before. And Alice can’t breathe because it’s too much, and what if she’s wrong about this?
She isn’t wrong, though. Something falls into place, like the last piece of evidence that helps her solve a puzzle, and Mac must see it, too, because she smiles. And Alice is the one who moves, a little unsteadily. She’s never kissed anyone before, but she’s kissing Mac, and it’s strange and awkward and perfect, lips and tongues and teeth and hands.
Her fingers tangle in Mac’s hair, and Mac’s hands clutch at her waist, and all she wants is more, and closer. Mac’s lips move along her jaw now, and her throat, and Alice gasps. She feels Mac’s smile against her skin; then Mac raises her head, and Alice takes in her mussed hair and flushed face.
“I’ve wanted to do that for such a long time,” Mac says, and her face shows so much that Alice never realized she’d been holding back: affection, desire, joy.
Alice falls into her arms and holds on. “Yes,” she says, and Mac’s pulse beats beneath her lips. “Yes.”