"For England, Home, and Beauty" by cimorene (NC-17)

[periwinkle27.livejournal.com]

Fandom: SHERLOCK HOLMES
Pairing: Holmes/Watson
Length: 5,700 words
Author on LJ: cimness
Author Website: cimorine.net

Why this must be read:
This tale is woven around and into Doyle's tale "The Bruce-Partington Plans." In that story Holmes asks Watson to help him break into a house to locate evidence. In this story, told from Watson's POV, we see his reaction to the request as well as his deep feelings for Holmes.

Flush with success, too filled with adrenaline to sleep, the two men repair to Baker Street. There Holmes invites Watson into his room for a brandy and tells him of some further action he has planned. Given that they are in Holmes's bedroom, wearing their dressing gowns and drinking brandy, you can guess what that action might be.

I thought the peek into Watson's mind was very well done. He is portrayed as a more complex and feeling man than usual, and I was really drawn to him and his emotional struggles.

Perhaps the great degree of my affection for Holmes is not laid explicitly before the reader in any of my published chronicles of him, as it is a personal matter, but I think it safe to say that it cannot be overstated. It has, on occasion, given me much pain, though those occasions were mercifully short-lived and far between.

I should not say it was difficult loving a man, or even discovering that I loved one, for I loved Holmes too dearly and had done so too long for it to seem like anything but the most natural thing in the world. It may have troubled me sometimes as something far different from what I had been brought up to and what British society dictated, but I fear the force of Holmes's genius is such as to remake the world immediately around him. Whether by his subtle design, or by some unconscious ability, people fell in with him, and fell before him--which is just what I did, beginning at the first of our acquaintance.

So I was drawn to him; so I was drawn along with him, to the country, to the basement of a bank, to Switzerland; so I was drawn at least some way into his mood, so that I could not be at ease when he was not, and so that I could not long be censorious in the face of his determined vivacity.

For England, Home and Beauty