Galvanizing

Title: Not Yet Dead
Fandoms: BBC Sherlock & ACD Sherlock Holmes.
Length: 106K±2K words, depending on whether you ask BBEdit or Google Docs (and AO3 will probably have yet another number).
Rating: BBC-series-comparable violence; body count's probably higher, though on a technicality. The MPAA would rate it R for the cussing.
Summary: Sherlock Holmes has long been fascinated with (and haunted by) the tragic story of his namesake cousin. When his nightmares about it grow unbearable and he starts seeing hypnotherapist Jim Moriarty, however, Sherlock begins to wonder whether he himself is his cousin's reincarnation. Have Sherlock and the modern John Watson known each other before this life? Can Sherlock solve a nineteenth-century murder and prove the historic Dr. Watson innocent, and also solve the current string of oddly-posed unidentified corpses?
Warnings: Likely geography abuse; probable misrepresentation of the British Library's ability to catalog their archives; hypnosis doesn't really work that way; references to unrequited love, but decided lack of pr0n. Otherwise, I'm a "chooses not to warn" person, though on AO3 I did tick "Major Character Death". (Which is pretty useless, since a lot of the major characters are dead before the story even starts, so you don't know whether I mean them or others...)
Thanks to: thesmallhobbit for beta, Brit-picking, and extreme patience; belovedmuerto for reminders to get off my butt and write.

(If you're following the fic on AO3, you've seen all this; this is just a backup copy.)

( Chapter 1 )
( Chapter 2 )
( Chapter 3 )
( Chapter 4 )
( Chapter 5 )

My recent 60-word fics posted to the LJ community LJ community sherlock60 for "The Empty House", "The Engineer's Thumb", "The Final Problem", and "The Five Orange Pips".

( fun with short ACD fic )

You know you've been reading too much Sherlock Holmes when you describe your kid's messy diaper as a "three-wipe problem".

"A Scandal in Bohemia" inspired me to do some noodling in Google Book Search to check on the pronunciation of "Irene". While “ee-rain-eh” may well have been the correct British pronunciation of the name, Adler was born in New Jersey; this 1851 poem published in Philadelphia (i.e. just across the river from NJ) suggests that “eye-reen” would have been an American pronunciation at least that early.

So my personal Holmes canon is that ACD (or Watson, if you prefer) may have been thinking three syllables, and Adler herself might use that pronunciation now, but her parents called her Irene as in "Goodnight, Irene".

(Assuming, of course, that "Irene Adler" is her birth name and not a stage name; I think the letter she writes Holmes [and, for that matter, her general personality] suggests that it's indeed her birth name, but if Irene is a name she took on in England or Europe, then the three-syllable version would likely be correct.)