Work Text:
Phryne couldn’t believe it had worked. Vic Freeman must have had more pull than she thought, to snow the head nurse so thoroughly. As they raced each other, cackling, across the airfield, she exulted in the freedom of flyer’s jodhpurs instead of the tidy nurse’s uniform that she had been cramming herself into for months now.
“Now, if anyone asks if you’re old enough to fly,” Vic had said, “you’re 18 in your boots, Sir, and then let me do the rest of the talking.” She had been more than willing. When war had broken out, it had killed several heirs-in-waiting in succession quite quickly, and her father couldn’t have leapt at the chance faster if he had been a leopard. Father and Mother had spent all of 1915 trying to install her as a husband-hunting daughter of an earl and Phryne had spent it trying to escape. She finally thought she had done it, but some officious blowhard had noticed her damnably memorable name in the applicant pool, and remembered that he owed her father a significant gambling debt. As a “thank you” for which she would never forgive him, he had shuttled her off to the safest, plushest hospital in possibly the most boring part of England that had ever existed. She had signed up to drive ambulances and rescue handsome men in uniform. Instead, she was scrubbing bedpans and counting needles under the eye of a battleaxe who made Aunt Prudence seem like a paragon of French liberality. And then, Vic had arrived at her hospital.
As he fiddled with the lock on the gate at the hangar, she stood back to watch his dark hair ruffle in the early morning breeze. He had suffered a broken collarbone in an early training mission for the AFC, and the combination of his mother’s money and his own talent had resulted in his being sent to England as test-pilot in medical recovery, the happy confluence of their meeting, and an almost immediate coming to an understanding. “Look here,” he had said. “I’m not going to say we would get married, but we could enjoy each other’s company if you were interested, and I carry enough French letters that you wouldn’t have to worry.” Phryne had considered it. Considered his broad shoulders, the flash of his smile when he talked his way around Matron as if it were easy, the way his face softened with affection when he talked about his baby brother back home. “I’ll teach you to fly a plane too, if you want to be more than a nursemaid,” he had added. Phryne had agreed. Which had led to this morning’s horizontal activities, and a subsequent covert op to ensure that Phryne Fisher was going up in a plane today.
“Come on, Phryne,” he gestured, and she scrambled after him into the hangar. Inside, the dim morning light was still barely filtering through, but when her eyes had had time to adjust, she caught her breath.
“Amazing,” she breathed. “Are these all war planes? Were you going to fly these in German New Guinea?”
“Not hardly.” He scoffed at her, but she saw his chest puff up just the same. “Most of these are nothing more than gliders. We were going to be up in a B.E.2, but that was kitted out for observation.” He moved through the hangar, dodging propellers, ropes, and canvas until he came to a two-seater. “Now this one, though,” he said, dragging loose the cover, “this bird is special, an R.E.8, for observation, and they can mount a machine gun and kit for bombing too. They’re testing them in France right now, but they’ve modified this one to train a few pilots as well.” He kicked the chocks under the wheels loose and gestured for her to help him. “Let’s wheel her out so we can do our own inspection.” Carefully, quietly, they moved the plane out into the open air and Vic walked her through pre-flight checks, fueling, on and on until she could feel herself prickling with impatience to get up in the air. Vic, though, took his time. She appreciated that quality in him as a lover, but as a flying teacher, she was finding it intolerable, and said as much. He put his hands on his hips and gave her a level look.
“It’s a plane, Phryne,” he said. She resisted the urge to roll her eyes, but he continued. “This isn’t a bicycle that you can hop aboard and probably not crash. This doll has almost as much personality as you do,” he grinned. “You need to respect her, since I know you don’t have a healthy fear of anything.” That pulled her up a bit short, and she nodded.
“I’ll always be a proponent of respect for women,” she quipped feebly.
“Good. Now let’s get you in the cockpit so I can show you how to persuade her into the air.” He gestured, and she clambered aboard with Vic following pleasantly closely behind. He showed her how to buckle herself in, where her controls were located, and explained once again just what she ought to be doing in an emergency when one occurred. His arms were around her, his hands guiding hers with gentle authority. If she hadn’t been absolutely wild to learn how to get the plane off the ground, and Vic utterly stern on teaching her properly, the whole session would probably have devolved into an athletic attempt at sex on an airplane. Even then, he did have to repeat himself a few times. “I’ll let you wing-walk if you can prove to me you’re taking this seriously,” he said, noticing her lean into his arms. He patted her hair with one hand and repositioned her upright with the other. “But for now, let’s stick to getting this bird aloft, and you can take some pictures with my box brownie once we’re up.” She nodded mutely, heart in her throat. They were doing this. He was actually going to take her flying. With hands that were beginning to tremble, she clicked her belt closed and gently seized her controls. Vic was buzzing around at the base of the plane, kicking tires or whatever it was that you were supposed to do to a plane to make sure it didn’t fall out of the air. She took a deep breath, and an acrid smell assaulted her nostrils.
“I’m sitting on a fuel tank, and I smell fuel. Is that supposed to be happening?” She was trying to cover her nervousness, but Vic only gave her a devilish look that made her knickers flutter.
“Buckle your helmet, Nursemaid, I’m going to start us up.” He dragged down hard on the propeller, and dashed to the wing to hoist himself in. There was a phenomenal buzzing noise as the engine caught and began to work. She felt the nudge in her hands of the control stick, as if the plane was done waiting on the humans and was going up into the sky, commanded or no. Then Vic gave a whoop and a holler and they were taxiing along the long strip of the runway, the nose of the plane beginning to tip them upward, seeking the air. “Not a moment too soon,” he laughed. Phryne risked a look back, to see two men exiting the spotters’ tower, pointing at the plane. “We’ll just have to have that argument later.”
“What argument is that?” she shouted over the noise of the plane.
“The one where I was only supposed to go up to test the aircraft if Matron had cleared me,” he called back. “But the best way to learn is by teaching, right? So, I’ll teach you and brush up my own skills in the process.” There was a shift in the horizon, and her stomach dropped as he banked the wings of the plane to make a turn to the north. So, this was flying. This was… wonderful. She was weightless, she was translucent. She was as agile as an angel, springing from cloud to cloud and dragging her fingers through bands of light as they streamed past her.
The wind stung her cheeks, and the growling of the engine was so loud, it was pressing into her ears like a pair of giant hands. She risked a look down at the ground, at the dirty stripe of England she had just planted her feet on moments ago. It was miniscule, and she fought a flash of vertigo. Vic tugged on the end of her scarf and she craned her head to see him. He was grinning like a madman. “So, Nursemaid, are you ready to take charge?”
“I remember what to do,” she shouted back. She settled her hands on the controls carefully, mindful that Vic had done the hard part already. Slowly, gingerly, she tested the plane’s responses. Vic hadn’t been exaggerating when he had said the controls were heavy. She felt it shift, wings tipping side to side as she adjusted the controls. It didn’t seem like Vic was countermanding her, so she gave some stronger pushes, turning the little plane in a lazy, level circle. The wind grew chillier, and her nose begin to drip. “Can we go faster?” She called, and was answered by a stronger roar from the engine, and the circle began to bank slightly.
“Now hold it steady and even, Nursemaid,” came Vic’s voice above the noise. “The wind is being tricky and we don’t want you in a spiral on your first time out.” But his words seemed to be falling out and away from the plane as the left wing began to dip. She stiffened her grip, the juddering of the machine numbing her hands. Vic said something else, but the wings were tilting still further, and suddenly they were in the spiral, the horizon hurtling sideways and the ground presenting itself like a wall. The plane roared downward, swirling, and every organ in her body seemed to dislodge at once. A thought crystalized in her head.
Do not panic. Fly.
She pulled back on the throttle – gravity was being assertive enough already. Her hand skimmed over the controls, searching, and Vic’s voice came back, like a cantor in church. “Ailerons, opposite rudder, elevator, recover!” There was no panic in his voice, but a commanding courage.
“Fear not!”, said the angel. Phryne swallowed her heart back down and dragged on the aileron lever, then shoved hard on the rudder to push the plane back out of the terrifying encroach on the hard, bitter earth. Elevator was next. But no matter how she tried, the nose of the plane would not lift. Phryne’s eyes began to flicker, panic crouching at the back of her throat. The gray-brown-green of England’s ominous shores was careering fatally toward her. But in that aching, stretching second, Vic again cut across the rush of the wind.
“Try again, I’ve got it,” he called. And when she pushed at the forward elevator this time, the nose began to lift and suddenly, the wings were no longer cartwheeling, the horizon was rising back into view, and the trees that had been expanding in size like a leafy bomb cloud were drifting back into place beneath them. “Well done, Nursemaid, we’ll make a flyer of you yet.” Phryne jolted with shock. She had very nearly killed them, and he was congratulating her? She twisted around in her seat to glare through the goggles at him.
“Isn’t trial by combat rather medieval?” She would call him an absolute bastard after they landed.
“It’s a test plane,” he yelled back, still somehow sounding nonchalant. “We’re testing it. And we discovered the nose is very heavy during a spin, which can unnerve a greenhorn. I’d call that quite successful.” Phryne wished very hard for something heavy to throw at him. Arrogant man! “The camera is under the seat if you want a picture,” he added. Still smarting from the blow to her pride and the bite of fear in her heart, she rummaged around without taking her eyes from the instruments until she found the little cardboard-and-leather cube. Carefully, she clicked one picture, then two, then returned it under the seat before resettling her hands on the controls.
“Alright Vic, let’s try this again,” she called. “This time, I’ll keep her steady.”
---
Some time later, after the flight, the landing, the argument with the flight tower, and the subsequent venting of some invective at each other, which had turned out to be heated in rather a different direction, they found themselves lying in the grass behind one of the hangars. The sun rested lightly on the airstrip, and the sound of mechanics and flyers and military brass arguing with each other babbled inconsequentially beneath the roar of the planes coming and going. Vic was resting against his pack, smug and satiated in equal measure. His eyes roamed over his kingdom, and she knew he was thinking of his unit – of rejoining them in their heroic derring-do.
“If… if things don’t go quite right, will you look in on my brother?” He put his hands behind his head, and she basked in the sharp angles of his profile against the light. “He’s a good kid, he just…” Vic paused, then sighed. “I don’t know if he’ll have that easy of a time without me there. Mum is…something else.”
“Of course,” she said. “I’ll come fly with you when this is all over.” She insinuated her hand into his. “Better days still to come, and all that.”
“Better days to come,” he agreed. “Now, let’s take a picture, so the kiddo will know who I’ve deputized as his guardian angel.” The quiet click of the camera captured them both, his face careless and glad, hers with a trace of hero-worship that she would never have admitted to, should the question have come up. But it never did. He took her up in the plane again, and again, and again, despite Matron and the brass objecting. Vic mailed the picture to his brother, and was shipped out like a parcel himself, not long before she was, both of them headed for different ports in France.
When she found herself near Ypres, she looked for the planes overhead, wondering if Vic was in one of them, watching over her like a brash, overconfident angel with noisy, canvas wings. Time passed. And when the news came about Cambrai, she dashed tears away in secret, sure that whatever had happened, Vic would have made the most of every moment – would have wanted her to do the same. That same evening, she had presented herself to the highest-ranking flyer they had in hospital, and spun a silver-tongued story for him about growing up orphaned in the circus, with a big brother who taught her wing-walking. “Flight Lieutenant Compton, I want to do this. For my brother.”
Nurse Phryne had been snapped up by Intelligence Services shortly after. True, they realized right off that she had lied. But what a lie! And she did have a gift for languages, a level head in danger, few Continental family connections that could be leveraged, and an abundance of street smarts. What hadn’t been a lie was that the woman could, indeed, fly a plane. She and Compton would be, and were, quite the competent team.
---
“I smell fuel. I’m on top of a fuel tank covered in canvas and balsa wood, and I smell fuel.” Phryne couldn’t stop her smile, even as she walked to the back of the plane, gesturing for the mechanic to hold off on hauling down on the propeller. She looked up at her complaining trainee as she adjusted her gloves.
“Put your helmet on, Inspector. I’m taking you up. Just think of it as a motorbike with a few extra features.”
“A motorbike doesn’t have an argument with gravity every time you turn it on.”
“It’s not an argument, it’s a spirited exchange of ideas,” she replied, hauling herself up to sit behind him. “I should think you’d be used to those by now.” Jack buckled his helmet and she missed his reply, but she gathered it was something about how he preferred exchanges of ideas that didn’t result in explosions. She nodded to the mechanic and there was a putter, then a roar as the airplane asserted itself and Jack’s words were washed away in the rush of wind. She settled herself more snugly into the seat of the little Moth, and thought of Vic, brash and young and courageous, and Vic, quiet and scarred and still brave. “Hold on tight, Jack,” she cheered, “and get ready for a taste of the sky.”