#lufairchild

[orelsemystery]

Holmes seduces Watson. But it's the 1880s and Watson is cautious, so he has a rule: one man, one orgasm. No ongoing liaisons. No romantic attachments.

Holmes follows the letter of the law and buries its spirit so deep even the world's greatest consulting detective would be hard pressed to find it again.

Rating: Explicit

Tags: Edging, Period-Typical Homophobia, Relationship Negotiations, brief canon-typical mention of drug use, Exhibitionism, Voyeurism, Victorian pornography, oral stimulation, Masturbation, Erotic Dreams, Anal Plug, Other Additional Tags to Be Added

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Did you know that the missing grad student from Or Else, Lu, writes fanfiction? You can read it on Ao3! This is her ongoing WIP inspired by greywash's BBC Sherlock fic "build your wings"--i.e., it's about really elaborate and lengthy edging. It's just been updated for the first time in over two years...which is a long time to wait given that Holmes had just put an anal plug inside Watson. WHAT WILL HAPPEN NEXT?

...and read Or Else as it updates weekly on www.orelsemystery.com!

[orelsemystery]

Watson is catching up on the latest medical journals that afternoon—nothing like descriptions of open wounds and various infectious diseases to quell what has become near-constant arousal—when Holmes asks him if he enjoys pain.

For a moment, Watson is puzzled, thinking of shrapnel and blood, hacking coughs and fever aches. Then he understands.

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another chapter is up!

[orelsemystery]

a sneak preview: an excerpt of this fic will be in tomorrow's update of or else!

ACD Holmes, E, 2.4k

I must confess that I have not been entirely honest in my accounts of that great man, Sherlock Holmes, whose genius I have nonetheless endeavored with genuine alacrity to lay before the public. Readers in some far-distant and miraculous future will perhaps pardon me for my omissions and prevarications where they have occurred, understanding that in these dark ages at the latter end of the nineteenth century, certain acts and circumstances must be concealed if one is to avoid great peril to one’s reputation, well-being, and, indeed, one’s liberty. All of which is merely to say that when Mr. Holmes had finished examining the infamous murder room at Lauriston Gardens—the very first crime scene where I had the privilege of watching him work, as faithful readers will no doubt remember—and we had gone to Audley Court to hear the constable’s account of the crime, Holmes did not attend a Norman-Neruda concert, as I claim in A Study in Scarlet. He came back to Baker Street with me, and he kissed me for the first time.

[orelsemystery]

a new fic by Lu is up! it'll appear in this week's chapter update of Or Else. so this is a little preview for you (:

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If you know anything at all about Sherlock Holmes, it is that he eschews all emotion.

Watson has made sure of that. Readers of his tales have a clear image of a man more like a machine: cold, calculating, brilliant, blank. He has assigned me the occasional romantic quirk; one might suppose that when I play the violin, for instance, some buried thread of feeling glints like precious metal in a smooth chunk of slate. I have room in my heart for music, then, for beauty—but not for other people.

It makes my job easier, he explains to his readers. Emotional distance helps me see things clearly.

What he should say, would say, if he were telling the truth, is that propagating the illusion of emotional distance makes it easier for both of us to live our lives free of scrutiny. I am not in fact a heartless automaton. I simply reserve my deep feeling, my great passion, for an object the world does not allow. I am in love with John Watson—to the point of possessiveness, irrationality, self-abnegation—and were his readers to perceive that, and to deduce as well that he loves me in return, we would face scandal and trial and the end of both our lives as free Englishmen.

Watson is very clever for painting me in this light, then. He is cleverer, in fact, than the Sherlock Holmes of fiction ever acknowledges. Yet he did not come up with this image of the heartless Holmes from whole cloth. There is a grain of truth in it. Before I knew him—or rather, before I admitted I loved him—I was that unyielding rock face, that mechanical man. And Watson was the one who opened me up and took me apart to reveal to both of us the raw currents of need and desire flowing deep within my veins.

read the rest on ao3

[orelsemystery]

This is the character whose dissertation I wrote for my own dissertation! She writes about Victorian Spiritualism and Villette and Sherlock Holmes and Hannibal and Captain America and BBC Sherlock fic. And her dissertation is organized by sex act (anal fingering, subbing in BDSM, edging). It's about using texts that engage (explicitly or implicitly) with these sexual forms to search for a robust queer sexual politics that's better at nuance and at including marginalized people than a lot of mainstream feminism and internet purity politics. Lu also writes fic! You can read some of it here: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lufairchild/works. I'm going to post more periodically as I post the novel chapters, along with bits of Lu's dissertation.

She goes missing early in Or Else and subsequently occupies a classic mystery novel role: the missing woman everyone else projects their own issues onto. I'm usually annoyed by this trope, so I wanted to poke and prod at it and twist it around a bit to see what it might become if the missing woman also had a strong voice in some ways--hence writing her dissertation and fic as well. I'll be interested to see what folks think about how it turned out!