until you cry: now you must try my greed

Sherlock Holmes. Holmes/Watson rentboy!fic, explicit, 6576 words. He felt like a man possessed, enchanted by the spell of Holmes' long white exposed collarbones. To find his friend, his flatmate, the theme of so many of his thoughts in such a place, looking as he did - beautiful and strange and inhuman -

( take this longing from my tongue )

Free to a good home; comment and credit.

01-18 Sherlock Holmes 2009
19-22 Granada tv series
23-25 Sidney Paget illustrations


( give me the most abstruse cryptogram, or the most intricate analysis )

Female School of Art', 1874. An elegant young man with time on his hands poses for a roomful of young women in a straight reversal of the usual roles. From "Punch, or the London Charivari", May 30, 1874.

For those who - like me - are diving into oldschool Sherlock Holmes fandom, here's a very strong rec: janeturenne's longfic One Week. I'm not sure if I should cite the amazingly brainbendingly hot crossdressing sequence, or the unbearably aesthetic scene in which Watson seduces Holmes during a public performance of the New World Symphony, or for its amazingly good voice and idiom and atmosphere, so I'm going to do all three. Seriously, read this one. Starts humorously, and then turns to the more straightforwardly erotic, winding up in lovely passionate drama.

eta: I've got 4,000 words of my Holmes rentboy smut completed. Some few thousand left to go.

The Concert

No, I will go alone.
I will come back when it's over.
Yes, of course I love you.
No, it will not be long.
Why may you not come with me?—
You are too much my lover.
You would put yourself
Between me and song.

If I go alone,
Quiet and suavely clothed,
My body will die in its chair,
And over my head a flame,
A mind that is twice my own,
Will mark with icy mirth
The wise advance and retreat
Of armies without a country,
Storming a nameless gate,
Hurling terrible javelins down
From the shouting walls of a singing town

Where no women wait!
Armies clean of love and hate,
Marching lines of pitiless sound
Climbing hills to the sun and hurling
Golden spears to the ground!
Up the lines a silver runner
Bearing a banner whereon is scored
The milk and steel of a bloodless wound
Healed at length by the sword!

You and I have nothing to do with music.
We may not make of music a filigree frame,
Within which you and I,
Tenderly glad we came,
Sit smiling, hand in hand.

Come now, be content.
I will come back to you, I swear I will;
And you will know me still.
I shall be only a little taller
Than when I went.

Edna St. Vincent Millay

Our heroine, having read a great deal of misogynistic philosophy of late, becomes depressed and reflects that God must have forsaken her, having created such an imperfect being as woman.

So occupied with these painful thoughts, my head bowed in shame, my eyes filled with tears, leaning on the pommel of my chair's armrest, I suddenly saw a ray of light fall on my lap, as though it were the sun. I shuddered then, as if wakened from sleep, for I was sitting in a shadow where the sun could not have shone at that hour. And as I lifted my head to see where this light was coming from, I saw three crowned ladies standing before me, and the splendor of their bright faces shone on me and throughout the entire room. Now no one would as whether I was surprised, for my doors were shut and they had still entered ....

Then she who was the first of the three smiled and began to speak, "Dear daughter, do not be afraid, for we have not come here to harm or trouble you but to console you, for we have taken pity on your distress, and we have come to bring you out of the ignorance which so blinds your own intellect that you shun what you know for a certainty and believe what you do not know or see or recognize except by virtue of many strange opinions. You resemble the fool in the prank who was dressed in women's clothes while he slept; because those who were making fun of him repeatedly told him he was a woman, he believed their false testimony more readily than the certainty of his own identity. Fair daughter, have you lost all sense? Have you forgotten that when fine gold is tested in the furnace, it does not change or vary in strength but becomes purer the more it is hammered and handled in different ways?"

I've got to ask: who's got the info on his name? Google/various sociological database searches tell me that Sherlock means either "fair-haired" or "short-haired," and that it's a common surname. So what possessed Conan Doyle to give it to his protagonist as a prenomen? Did he ever discuss the name, or what it meant to him?

It's one of those things I'd never noticed, and then I started reading fic and the lovely strangeness of it really leaped out at me. I find it inexplicably - and intensely - sexy.

quoted in one of my course readings from George Eliot's Scenes From Clerical Life, and entirely too h/c-alicious to not share:

It is a wonderful moment, the first time we stand by one who has fainted, and witness the fresh birth of consciousness spreading itself over the blank features, like the rising sunlight on the alpine summits that lay ghastly and dead under the leaden twilight. A slight shudder, and the frost-bound eyes recover their liquid light; for an instant they show the inward semi-consciousness of an infant's; then, with a little start, they open wider and begin to look; the present is visible, but only as a strange writing, and the interpreter Memory is not yet there.

elspethdixon provides Victorian eye surgery trivia that brings drug use in the Holmes movie into clearer focus (see what I did thar? ha ha.)