orelsemystery

[orelsemystery]

Read ch. 35 here.

[orelsemystery]

Just so bad, you guys.

Read ch. 34 here.

[orelsemystery]

Read ch. 33 here. It's for all the Holmes/Watson lovers out there <3

Charles pauses and turns back to look at the door. Cheap wood; a flimsy doorknob with a small keyhole. Maybe it’s a storage closet. That’s what Charles had always thought. Maybe inside that storage closet, amongst old files and tubes of lipstick and a dusty broom, is a box or two of books.

With a sense of illicit curiosity, he rattles the doorknob. Still locked. He bites his lip, thinking.

If it had been any other book—but Julian has always expressed disdain for detective fiction, for Holmes in particular. Despite this, he seems to know a lot about the Holmes canon; despite this, he keeps a copy of it in his closet.

Charles sweeps his hand along the top of the doorframe. A key falls to the ground. Heart giving a sudden jump, he bends to picks it up. It’s pretty clean; his fingertips are dusty from the doorframe, but the key itself, though cheap and not new, isn’t grimy. He tells himself to put it back. Instead, blood rushing in his ears, he slides it into the lock and turns it.

The door opens. It’s not a closet. It’s a small room, about the same size as Julian’s office. At first he thinks it is in fact another office: there’s a desk by the back wall. It’s a small desk, though, not quite full-sized, and it looks, Charles thinks, weirdly familiar.

His heart stops. 

[orelsemystery]

Chapter 32 is here.

 Strategy meetings and hushed conversations and secrets, years and years of them, years and years of living on a tightrope, living in crisis—and Jack’s body bleeding all over the floor, and Lu’s bed empty, and all the rest of it pales, all the rest of it turns inside out and—how had it taken Piper so long to see it?—it is hollow. There is nothing there.

[orelsemystery]

Read ch. 31 now. It's not a good day for detective lovers with big imaginations and sensitive hearts.

[orelsemystery]

Read ch. 30 here.

Sometimes you solve a clue with the detective you were obsessed with when he was on TV as a kid and are now working for and it's exciting. Like, really exciting.

[orelsemystery]

No gay angst here. Why would you even think that?

[orelsemystery]

I've been soooo absent on this blog recently! Apologies; it's the end of the semester and I've been very busy. But if you're in Pittsburgh, tonight I'll be giving a talk entitled "Taylor Swift and the Curious Case of Curious Time" for the Carnegie Science Center's 21+ night, which is themed "Swiftie Science" this month. A little bit of a departure from the Or Else content, but don't worry, it is still deeply invested in the intensity of memory, the weight of time, and the pull of longing. Just with more glitter. <3

[orelsemystery]

It's all a fun-and-games mystery until it's not.

Read chapter 28 here.

[orelsemystery]

I am a WHORE for “the love is requited, they’re both just idiots”

[orelsemystery]

sometimes a theme recurs in your work without your permission. and sometimes it reaches a threshold where you're like. well now i think this is saying something about me against my will. don't know what though

[orelsemystery]

I drew some little Sherlock Holmes dancing men for this one. Read ch. 27 here.

[orelsemystery]

A woman sits in the lower righthand corner of the frame, her hands on her lap. She is enveloped in a net, which pools at her feet and which is suspended by two long white threads extending upwards past the top right corner of the photograph. Under the net she appears composed or, maybe, simply posed. She stares just past the camera, her eyes—dark dots in the pale oval of her face—pointing at something that we, the viewers, cannot see. Or pointing at nothing.

The net makes D’Espérance ghostly: it falls over her body not unlike the way draped fabric swoops over the heads and bodies of the spirits who show up in photographs of séances. The grey-white crosshatching of the threads sinks into the grey-white background of her skin and blurs her facial features—her nose invisible, her mouth a smudge of darkness. And it obscures whatever scarf or shadow falls across her neck and torso, so that her head appears to float.

In a 2003 article in Art Journal, Mark Alice Durant describes “the blur of the otherworldly”: the tendency to associate the smudge, the haze, the vague shape with the not-quite-of-this-world—the spookification of the partially visible. Citing Victorian spirit photography, UFO images, and a set of blurry photographs supposedly produced by a man simply staring into the camera lens, Durant writes that “it seems that the visual proofs of paranormal activity must be conveyed in styles analogous to their tenuous accessibility” (14). That is, images meant to function as proof of the supernatural are often frustratingly vague or difficult to make out, which Durant argues is a manifestation of the difficulty of obtaining solid evidence of the paranormal. According to Durant, photography is particularly likely to produce such ambiguous proofs because it seems to hover between reality and representation, the material and the immaterial—“Black cloths and safe lights, apertures and sensitivities, filters and latent images: the glossary of photographic terms is suggestive of an entire world of betweenness” (8)

-Lu Fairchild's dissertation

Read chapter 26 here.

[orelsemystery]

Read chapter 25 here.

[orelsemystery]

hey.

everything is terrible.

in this chapter, a conservative university administration threatens a queer scholar because they consider her work "pornographic." so it's feeling relevant to the state of the U.S. right now, and to some of the potential issues around censorship we may face in the next four years.

let's maybe do a better job sticking together in the face of this than the English department in this fictional university?

sending love and solidarity this week. 💜💜💜

[orelsemystery]

read it here. so sorry to all my medievalist friends.

[orelsemystery]

Read ch. 22 here. It was a favorite to write--Charles and Piper finally getting to talk about their queer feelings and what it's like to be the Watson to a Holmes. An excerpt:

Charles clears his throat again. His throat feels too tight to speak. He opens his mouth and what comes out is entirely beyond his control. “I kissed Julian.”

For a second Piper doesn’t speak. Then: “What?”

“I kissed him,” Charles says in a rush. “We kissed each other. More than once.”

Piper blinks. Their eyebrows have shot way up. “When?”

“Recently. Uh. the first time was about a week ago.”

“Holy shit.”

“Yeah. Uh.”

“Oh my god. How long have you been working for him?”

Charles smiles shakily. “Since a few days before you showed up at his office.”

Piper’s eyes widen. “Seriously? I thought you’d known each other for a lot longer than that.”

“Well.” It’s Charles’ turn to look down at his lap. “I sort of have. He…he was in this TV show. Young Sherlock. When I was a kid. I was pretty much obsessed with it.”

Piper shakes their head. “Shit. Uh…does he know about that?”

“No.”

A pause. “Wow.”

“Yeah. He seems to not like people talking about it. So I never mentioned it. But like…I had his poster on my wall.”

“Fuck,” Piper breathes.

“Yes. So. I—the kissing.” Charles’ face is very hot. “I can’t tell if it’s—if it’s because—”

“Because you loved the TV version of him as a kid.”

“Right!” Charles hesitates, then adds in a rush: “Plus it’s the first time I’ve ever kissed a man. Maybe the first time I’ve ever wanted to? I don’t know. I don’t know! But. Now I’m thinking, like—could that be enough—the childhood detective stuff, is that enough to—to make me think that I—actually want to kiss him? But maybe I don’t? And it’ll just…wear off eventually?”

Piper stands up, rubbing their face distractedly as they pace to the window. “Holy shit.” They stare out at the brick wall opposite and say, “You’re in a fic. You’re in a Sherlock Holmes fic.”

Charles laughs a little. “I know.”

Piper whirls back around to face him. “This is absurd.”

“I know. I’ve read Lu’s stuff.”

“On Archive of Our Own?”

“Yeah.”

“Holy shit.” Piper sinks back down into the armchair.

“It’s just…” Charles hesitates. “What you were saying. About the way you make people into sort of mythical characters. How do you know…how do you know what’s real?”

“Oh.” Piper pauses, thinking. “I guess…I guess I don’t really care. I don’t really believe in ‘authenticity’ anyway.”

Charles lets this sink in. “But what if—if you get to know that person, say, and they’re not the way you imagined. Isn’t it, like…crushingly disappointing?”

Piper lets out a startled burst of a laugh. “Pretty much.” They shrug. “It’s worth it.”

“Yeah?”

They nod. “Although…I mean…it does hurt. Not even just the disappointment. Before that. The…wanting. If that makes sense.”

“Yeah. Yeah, it does.” Charles is quiet for a moment. “Do you think I could do that? Sort of—subconsciously manufacture an attraction to men because of some made-up idea of a detective I was obsessed with as a kid?”

Piper doesn’t answer right away. Eventually, they say, slowly, “I think most people would say no. That’s not how we like to think about queerness, or being bi—like, I’m supposed to tell you that you can be bi for a long time without realizing it, but now you are realizing it and you’ve always been bi and…and that could totally be true! Totally. But the possibility that you might sort of…temporarily feel this attraction that’s a kind of overflow of that intense fannish devotion to the Julian you remember as a kid…” They shrug. “It actually sounds possible to me.”

Charles’ stomach plummets. “Oh.”

“But,” Piper adds, “but that doesn’t mean—that doesn’t mean it’s, like, fake? Or dumb, or…like, if you feel attracted to him, that’s not—that’s real, even if it’s not…even if it’s because of some complicated thing happening in your head. Even if you’re not sure why you’re attracted to him, or how serious it is, it’s still real. I mean, if you like kissing him, you like kissing him.” Piper tilts their head. “Do you like kissing him?”

Charles nods.

“It seems to me that the question is, will this last. And also, maybe…how would it affect him if it didn’t?”

“Yeah,” Charles whispers. “Yes. What if I’m really fucking this up—what if I, I get to know him, the real him, and stop thinking of him as this mostly made-up persona, and I just…stop wanting him like that? And he feels like I’ve been lying, like I’ve been stringing him along—like I don’t really like him, just that made-up persona?”

Piper blows out a breath. “Yeah. I don’t know. I’m sorry, I…I’m either a really good person to ask or a really bad person to ask, I’m not sure which. I wish I could just be like, you’ve just realized you’re bi, congratulations! But…desire is so so complicated.”

“Right.” Charles swallows. He feels small. He looks down, trying not to show Piper the miserable expression he knows has just stolen across his face.

“Here’s a thing, though,” Piper says suddenly. “What do you want it to be?”

“What do you mean?”

“If you got to choose. Whether your attraction to Julian was some sort of fluke that will go away, or if you really do want him in a more serious and long-term kind of way?”

“I want to really want him,” Charles says immediately, and then his mouth falls open. He feels dumbstruck. “I…I didn’t know that.”

“It’s probably a good thing to know.”

Piper smiles at him. Their eyes meet, finally, and stay on each other.