Fic rec: A Dozen Different Hours, by onidoko

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Title: A Dozen Different Hours
Author: onidoko
Artist: ptelefolone
Pairing: Holmes/Watson, OC m/m
Length: 64,463 words
Rating: PG-13

Warnings: See fic's About page for comprehensive list. I would highlight: drug use, crumbling boundaries of reality, non-explicit but genuinely creepy and pervasive intimations of child abuse and child sexuality.

Verse: ACD!Sherlock Holmes x Alice in Wonderland. Pop-culture awareness of Carroll will do, but knowing the books adds to the enjoyment (to the same degree as Sherlock, say).

Author's summary: A not-so routine kidnapping provides the great Sherlock Holmes with a case unlike any he’s handled before: a race against a clock which obeys no set rule of Time; a world consisting of other people’s conflicting realities; and a search for a girl whom he’s only encountered between the pages of a storybook …

Reccer's comments: In the event that you have always wanted your Holmesian hurt-comfort UST to take place within the context of a steampunk gothic version of Alice in Wonderland, this is definitely the fic for you. Though it's still worth a read if the idea had not occurred for some reason! In retrospect one wonders if the crossover's been done elsewhere - it's sort of an ultimate throwdown between randomness and its opposite. Victorian secular materialism versus philosophical anti-rationalism.

The thing about writers who aim for the, like, mock fin-de-siècle gothic lolita aesthetic is that they usually don't get past the set decoration. You know? But Wonderland has New Weird bone structure here. It seeps like ink into the crevices of Conan Doyle's London, and Holmes isn't the only one who goes slipstream (in canon Alice herself is a rationalist - one forgets it - alternately swimming with and against the undertow). In tenor and quality the result falls in a region bracketed by The Eight and The Shadow of the Wind (the library scene!). The plot gets away from the author toward the end, as far as I can tell - I have alternate theories for what happened but they are spoilers - but the fact that it holds together as an waking-hour investigation at all is something...... no right it is actually Proper Casefic (tm), not just Holmes' better living through chemistry ahaha. And she piles it right on: RPF, fourth-wall breakage, extensive passages of "Childe Harold" on which hinges Plot, Japanese rock bishounen. (Did I mention the library scene?) There are illustrations. I actually found this story via said illustrations, randomly surfing Devart, and have no idea why it doesn't seem to be better known. My best guess is timing, since it's ACD!verse and was published directly before ppl hared off after Sherlock.

221b_wonderland main story chapter list

Many of my recs will be crossovers, I'm afraid - I have difficulty remembering that Sherlock Holmes does not simply exist across all fictional universes. XD;

Mods, may I have tags for steampunk, fantasy, underage sexuality, and historical RPF? And any others you might see fit.