Whiffling's Recs

Fic | BBC Sherlock | "and stand there at the edge of my affection" by coloredink (General Audiences)

gin-shots:

April 2011. “‘You’ve written love letters,’ Sherlock asserted.” 

I really had a hard time figuring out what to say about this one, because I love love love it, but I have to read it from a specific… canonical stance. This is a post S1 fic, and it depends on a detail of Sherlock’s characterization that wasn’t exactly jossed by S2, but the way it is presented here was undermined by S2, and it in general seems to turn up fannishly less frequently in S2’s wake. But it also happens to be a detail that I enjoy and appreciate about Sherlock in any canon: that it isn’t that Sherlock is all thought and no feeling so much that he connects the two in ways that are strange to John; in ways that John is, occasionally, either unwilling or unable to understand. The way that coloredink works with that here is lovely: this fic is very, very sweet, but it has teeth at the edges, and, as is usual in ink’s fic, they point in unexpected directions.

A very good review of one of my favorite fics.