These guys totally milk the fandom slash

It’s the return of the ficnote!

A week ago, I was at a house party with four other lovely ladies (five women + cat + peach basil ice cream: life is good!) where we spent a significant portion of the evening discussing the joys of fanfiction. And can I just say how wonderful it is to arrive at one’s thirtieth year and be reminded that growing up can be about owning one’s pleasures, not giving them up or shamefully hiding them because you believe others will think you foolish? I love being in the company of people who just enjoy being creative, and taking pleasure in others’ creativity, in such an omnivorous way. The beautiful thing about fan-created fiction and art is that it’s 99.999% amateur. People do it in their leisure time simply because they love it or because they have friends who beg for it.

Reading fan fiction, one of my favorite things is to see how people in such a diversity of situations and background interpret certain characters, pairings, or story lines, and how they engineer those elements to create stories where, more often than not, the main characters’ needs are being met in constructive ways. This spring, at one point, I observed that a certain fic involving Sherlock/John/Sarah was really a story about “a surfeit of needs being met.” While not every fic, obviously, is about successful relationships I actually think it’s fascinating to see how so much of fic is people working out what it takes to make a relationship successful … and the myriad answers to that question they come up with.

Enough nattering on: to the fic rec! This one is another I’ve nicked from Minerva @ Hypomnemata from a post she did on the fan fiction of Inspector Lewis. “Inspector Lewis” fanfic predominantly tackles the pairing of Detective Inspector Robert Lewis with his young second James Hathaway, a former candidate for the priesthood turned police detective. As the back story for Lewis involves a murdered wife and grown children, most fic authors have to negotiate in some way or another Lewis’s successful heterosexual relationship and (usually assumed) straight identity as the backdrop for his growing desire for Hathaway. Hathaway’s character, meanwhile, has a much more fluid sexual identity in the series, but is struggling with religious guilt over same-sex desires. There are also intimations of childhood sexual trauma in Hathaway’s past. Suffice to say, there’s a lot of really interesting stuff to work with — and a lot of potential for that fanfic staple hurt/comfort fic.  Sadly, I don’t think the majority of Lewis fic has plumbed the potential for Lewis’s self-examination as a middle-aged man with a hitherto straight identity who now finds himself in love with another man. Pairing Lewis’s positive (hetero)sexual experience with Hathaway’s more fraught sexual history could have some really interesting results … something that might eventually drive me to write a story arc of my own!

But in the meantime, I bring you a sweet little number that is one of my favorite pieces thus far discovered:

Title: His Awkward Sod
Author: Sarren
Pairing: Robert Lewis/James Hathaway
Author Rating: Explicit
Author Summary: “Lewis and Hathaway pretend to be a couple to catch a killer.”
Length: 1 part, 11,964 words
Available At: AO3.

Have fun, happy Friday, and you might be lucky enough to get another fic rec next week!

I’ve been reading more book-length nonfiction recently, in lieu of online fanfic … so after this installment of “ficnotes” I might let the series lay dormant for a while, until something truly spectacularly gorgeous and mind-blowing comes along. Or until the urge to blog about smut rises again (it often does, quite unpredictably!) … in the meantime, here’s this little beauty which Minerva shared via email a couple of weeks ago, on a morning when I really needed some fluff!

Mycroft Holmes via Fuck Yeah Mycroft Holmes! (Tumblr can be a wonderful thing)

Title: Shock and Awe
Author: random_nexus
Pairing: Mycroft/Lestrade
Author Rating: NC-17
Author Summary: “Oddball style, Manly shmexins, Romance betwen blokes, the usual. Lestrade is falling for Mycroft, but doesn’t think it’s mutual. Hijinx ensue (also the usual).”
Length: 1 part, 1040 words
Available At: LiveJournal.

This is a quiet little fic that takes place in three brief acts: “Before,” “After,” and “Now.” What I like best about it is the author’s focus on the moments of touch, and the details one takes note of in a love — the interior language with which one describes the object of one’s affection. I’m working on a fic myself right now that involves those everyday intimacies shared between people who know they have license to touch — and some of the passages in these three scenes capture that sense of beingness.

I recently discovered that one of my friends and fellow fic readers really ‘ships the (relatively rare) John Watson/G. Lestrade pairing in the Sherlock fandom. So I thought to kick off my return to ficnotes post post-thesis vacation, I’d share two sweet additions to this particular tradition within the overwhelming amount of content out there providing us with all the Sherlock slash we could possibly want.

I’m serious. If you find a gap, people, someone somewhere has thought of it … and if they haven’t I encourage you to go off and fill it yourself!

look, lestrade thinks you should. screencap from ‘study in pink’ (1:1) by telestrkoza

Anyway. Here are this week’s selections.

First up, from the understated and reliably brilliant Miss Lucy Jane, a sweet and sexy one-shot (well, so far) about how Lestrade and Watson finally connect not only as pals but as something more.

Title: Those Boys with the Earthly Eyes
Author: Miss Lucy Jane
Pairing: John Watson/Lestrade
Author Rating: R
Author Summary: “Greg Lestrade kisses with his eyes open.”
Length: 1 part, 1700 words
Available At: MissLucyJane.com.

And as a teaser:

He didn’t know why it seemed like the right thing to do, but it did, and he didn’t know why John closed his eyes and turned his face into the cupped palm instead of laughing and stepping back, which was what Greg expected. He felt the prickle from John’s evening beard and even the brush of his eyelashes as he sighed, and from there it was the simplest thing in the world to slide his hand to the back of John’s skull and step closer, press against that solid body and drop a kiss on John’s hair.

When John tipped up his head his eyes were still closed, so Greg kept his open. Someone had to watch this, remember it.

The second comes from author Elfbert, and is unabashedly a PWP. Who among us hasn’t had the experience of being somewhere for professional development and just wishing we could be at home with our lover/partner/fuck buddy instead?

Title: Congress
Author: Elfbert
Pairing: John Watson/Lestrade
Author Rating: Explicit
Author Summary: “John is stuck at a medical conference. He’s missing Lestrade… (Prompt from the [Sherlock] kinkmeme).”
Length: 1 part, 2,562 words
Available At: AO3.

And as a teaser:

He swallowed the last of his pint, pocketed his phone, his fingers ghosting over the plastic key card in his pocket, just to be sure. The lift seemed to take forever as it took him up through the building, finally depositing him on his floor. He walked along the silent, deserted, corridor finally stopping outside his room, moving to slip the card into the lock.

He jumped as hands slid around his waist and someone pressed against him from behind. There was a familiar scent, and a second later rough stubble scratched against his neck, lips brushing against his ear. “Suggest you get yourself in that room and into bed right now,” Lestrade’s familiar husky voice said.

“What are you…How did you…how did you know my room number?” John couldn’t stop smiling, and tried to turn around, to see his lover.

“Amazing what a warrant card will get you,” Lestrade answered, not allowing John to do anything but walk forward, the door closing behind them with a firm click.

“That’s…” John let out a breath as hands roamed down his stomach and began working to undo his trousers. “That’s…not legal, surely,” he managed.

“No.” Lestrade slid his hand inside John’s trousers…

Can’t believe it’s the first of June tomorrow! Hope y’all are looking forward to a summer full of beach reading, fanfic included.

So here’s the post that Blogger lost, re-created in its entirety thanks to Google Reader (and I thought I was being anal for scraping the RSS feeds of my own blogs…) …

via questionsleftunanswered

So I was surprised a couple of weeks ago, looking over the ficnotes I’d written, to discover that I haven’t highlighted the delightful, delicious “Heart in the Whole” by Verityburns yet.  I linked to it in my massive round-up of favorite fics over at Harpyness but at that point it was still a work-in-progress. Guess I just forgot to highlight it as a finished (and glorious!) thing.

Title: Heart in the Whole
Author: Verityburns
Pairing: John Watson/Sherlock Holmes
Author Rating: NC-17
Author Summary: Events after “The Great Game” leave Sherlock dependent on his best friend and colleague. But John has a secret of his own… Hurt/Comfort / Romance / Little bit of an actual plot!
Length: 20 chapters
Available At: Verityburns’ LiveJournal. You can also access all of her fics and associated fan art through the index page.

UPDATE: The day after I posted this, Verity has released an audio version and “deleted” scene.

It’s not really giving anything away to say that this fic begins with a Sherlock who has suffered some severe injuries following the explosion at the pool (immediately following the cliffhanger ending of “The Great Game” episode in season one). Sherlock and John are not, at the beginning of this fic, a couple, although John is mooning over Sherlock in quite a severe sort of way. Home from the hospital, Sherlock is crabby and physically damaged and, most crucially, temporarily (possibly even permanently) blind due to his injuries.

What ensues is a saga that’s a scant one third mystery (tracking down Moriarty) and unabashedly two parts romance. John and Sherlock negotiate the new terms of their friendship, and the gradual recognition that they want something more intimately physical than either of them expected. This fic earns bonus points for the way it handles Sherlock’s exploration of sensual and sexual touch with John, in this particular rendering something that he is not entirely sure he wants (or if so, on what terms).

by berlynn_whol

M and H, who have far more by way of Holmes fan credibility than I do, maintain that Sherlock really only works as a character when depicted (in modern terms) somewhere long the homosexual-asexual axis. And even I know that, whether we’re talking Arthur Conan Doyle canon or the most recent Sherlock television series, the relationship at the center of the Holmes universe is Sherlock Holmes and John Watson. So whether we’re talking about homosocial friendship, homoerotic male friendship, homoromatic asexual sensuality, or whatever-the-hell we want to call it … it’s Holmes/Watson all the way.

Within the Sherlock Holmes fiction-writing fandom there’s quite a bit of imaginative speculation over how a John/Sherlock relationship might look if Sherlock were asexual and John were, well, anything from straight but prioritizing his friendship with Sherlock to bi to fluid to gay (rarely asexual himself).  Today I’m bringing you one such imagining: a story in which Sherlock might be sexually uninterested in John, but sensually starving for his attention.

Title: Sensual Ace
Author: cagedwriter61
Pairing: John Watson/Sherlock Holmes
Author Rating: PG-13
Author Summary: “In which John finds out the real reason Sherlock does cocaine and agrees to become a substitute.”
Length: 1 part, 2,403 words
Available At: LiveJournal.

Whether you find “asexy” Sherlock believable, or prefer to imagine that the physical contact in this story will eventually lead to more directly sexual things, I personally think this is a contribution to the body of fan-created literature that is one part heart-breaking, one part heart-warming, with a wee bit of humor thrown in for good measure.

So it was brought to my attention on the thread of last week’s ficnote that people are actually taking my recommendations seriously. Well, goodness people! I’m flattered. Though it also makes the act of selecting and highlighting my favorite bits of fic a little nerve-wracking!

I feel a little like Gregory Lestrade (“Study in Pink,” Sherlock 2010) in this screen cap.

Not that I’m going to let this stop me!

So for this week’s ficnote, we have a three-part fic brought to my attention by Minerva, my goddess of “Mystrade” (or Mycroft/Lestrade) fanfiction. Which really is, as a body of fic, full of the adorable.

Title: Impact
Author: Elfbert
Pairing: Mycroft Holmes/Gregory Lestrade
Author Rating: NC-17
Author Summary: “Impact: The action of one object coming forcibly into contact with another.”
Length: 3 parts
Available At: LiveJournal and AO3.

This week’s fic is set prior to Lestrade’s interactions with Sherlock, which allows for Lestrade and Mycroft to meet on their own terms. Terms which involve Lestrade on a motorcycle being run over by Mycroft’s inattentive driver. And then taken back to Mycroft’s townhouse in order to clean up. Which is when Mycroft notices that D.I. Lestrade has nipple piercings.

Everything else is really just details. Although it’s worth mentioning a couple of things I think this fic does really sweetly and skillfully. One is that Elfbert doesn’t ignore the class difference between the two men, and gives them space within the fic to negotiate the inequality in financial resources without those inequalities automatically meaning that Mycroft is the one calling the shots. One of the ways she levels the playing field for the two characters is, actually, the other key bit of character development: Lestrade is Mycroft’s first date.

As in, ever.

Holmes stared at his ‘phone. It wasn’t often he didn’t know what to do. Usually he wasn’t even aware of any ‘wrong’ options – he was confident in himself, his decisions, his knowledge. But now … now he wished that dating (and exactly when it had turned into ‘dating’, rather than a formal business arrangement in his mind, he wasn’t quite sure) was simply a matter of asking your secretary to phone their secretary and put everything into place.

Not that Detective Sergeant Gregory Lestrade had a secretary, which was the first stumbling block.

Which allows, natch, for Greg to be the assertive, initiating partner … at least at first.

As always, have fun! That’s what fic is for. And if any of you all have fic you think I’d enjoy (self authored or otherwise), please do leave links in comments. I’m always looking for new stories and authors to add to my list of bookmarks.

via the culture concept circle

After last week’s brief vacation in Potterland, we’re returning to the equally delightful world of Sherlock (BBC) fanfiction. This week’s fic is a full twenty-five chapters long and deals with the complicated emotional currents eddying around the three main characters: Sherlock, John, and Mary Morstan. Sherlock is in love with John, but isn’t exactly sure what that means to him (or whether he’s capable of pursuing a romantic and/or sexual relationship). John is in love with Sherlock but doesn’t know how to deal with the fact this runs counter to his identity as a straight man (or also if a sexual relationship is what Sherlock wants). Mary marries John, but her motives for doing so are mixed at best and poisonously manipulative at worst.

Title: The Progress of Sherlock Holmes
Author: ivyblossom
Pairings: Sherlock Holmes/John Watson, John Watson/Mary Morstan
Author Rating: Explicit
Author Summary: “Sherlock is head over heels for John, but you wouldn’t know it by looking at him. First-person present-tense series of short scenes from Sherlock’s point of view, borrowing heavily from Arthur Conan Doyle’s stories.”
Length: 25 Chapters (61,999 words)
Available At: Archive Of Our Own in chaptered or series versions.

What I adored about this fic, aside from the loving attention to Sherlock’s inner voice (his attention to detail, his precise notation of observation and emotion), was that ivyblossom took three incredibly damaged characters, put them in a situation in which they manage to cause themselves and one another even further damage, and then wrote at least two of them out of that situation into a better place. With some really loving and lovingly detailed Sherlock/John slash along the way.

It’s Tuesday, which means fic day!

by karli_meaghan

Harry Potter/Draco Malfoy slash is actually where I was (re)introduced to the world of fan-created fiction, when Hanna shared the saga of Underwater Light with me (now no longer available online, though you can read about it over at Fanlore.org). It was Underwater Light that convinced me that fan fiction was a genre worth paying attention to, not only as a “guilty pleasure” but as a literary endeavor that could actually sometimes be more skillful than the original creation to which it owed inspiration.

Tissue of Silver isn’t Underwater Light though its characterization of both Harry and Draco owe a lot to UL author Maya. However, it’s easily the most entertaining Harry/Draco fic I’ve read in a while. The downside is its lack of explicit sex (c’mon, you know that’s a huge reason we’re reading this stuff); the upside is the care with which author Fearless Diva constructs her post-series world, and the characters within it who have been given a depth that, really, Rowling never managed (I’m serious).

Title: Tissue of Silver
Author: Fearless Diva
Pairing: Harry Potter/Draco Malfoy
Author Rating: R “for coarse language, brief drug use, some sexual content, and consideration of issues of sexual consent.”
Author Summary: “A love story concerning possessed furniture, black silk pyjamas, courtroom drama, premonitions of doom, assassination attempts, Death Eater yoga, absinthe, bare feet and a sensible werewolf.”
Length: 576K (one long chapter)
Available At: Fearless Diva’s Harry Potter Fiction page (along with short pieces set in the same universe … “Famous for Their Discord” and “Voluptas” come highly recommended) and also recorded by FayJay (for the win!) at AudioFic.

I’m not going to say a whole lot more about this, so as not to spoiler things. The basic set-up is this: in a post-series, post-war world Draco Malfoy (who served as a spy for the anti-Death Eater side) is testifying at a series of Death Eater trials. He is also flamingly gay and very Peter Wimsey in his affected non-chalance. When threats are made against his life, (ostensibly)straight tabloid sensation Harry Potter (“Super Auror”) is assigned to keep him safe. Shenanigans ensue.

There are also letters to and from Draco to his godfather Severus Snape which are hilarious, and have I mentioned Remus and Sirius make cameo appearances as Harry’s godfather and godfather-in-law?

And obviously the Chair of Evil. Go forth and read.

from the blind banker, capped by killcolor

I owe my friend Minerva @ Hypomnemata a big thank you for posting a link to this particular fic.

Title: Transport
Author: ThisPrettyWren
Pairing: Sherlock/John (Sherlock BBC)
Alerts: Bondage, Sensory Deprivation
Rating: NC-17
Length: circa. 10,500 words
Available At: ThisPrettyWren’s the unattended kettle and the epilogue can be found here.

Where to begin with this particular fic. The first thing you need to understand is that this is definitely a kink fic in which Sherlock’s chosen form of sexual outlet is bondage and sensory deprivation followed by anonymous sexual/sensual touch. At a sex club where John Watson occasionally provides his services as the doctor on call.

What I think this piece (amazingly enough the author’s first pass at writing explicit slash) does brilliantly is convey the way that, for Sherlock Holmes, lack of sensory input serves to increase his capacity for relating and communicating with others (read: John) in an intimate way. In a way that make shim feel cared for, connected and grounded. By engaging in activities that many of us would see at first glance as distancing, as dis-engagement, as a refusal to accept human-to-human intimacy with a known other being … Sherlock is actually able to experience intimacy on a profound level.  

Also: don’t miss the epilogue, wherein the author explores the way that this intimacy between John and Sherlock serves to help Sherlock function in the world outside of sex — how it helps him feel known in a way that keeps him present and focused where he might just fall to pieces otherwise.

Go enjoy!