of snogs, snacks and other stories

A fic of holding hands in hansom cabs. Handsomely.

Two men get into a hansom cab.  Not the beginning of a joke, but of an intimate encounter. The two men have gotten into many cabs, many carriages, many spots of trouble and resolution and many more squirmishes. The consulting detective and his trigger-happy, jolly right hand. Partners.  The right hand and the left hand: one lights a cigarette, the other holds the fire. Two hands on two bodies acting as one. The matchbox passes, now, and the hands touch.  Their hands have touched many times: quick and familiar and careful and attention-seeking, gentle on occasion, always friendly. It is no different now.  Is it? Observe the point of connection, where skin meets skin and the sudden spark stems not from the match. The flicker of their eyes, the quick jolt neither pretends to notice, the prickling sensation such an unassuming touch can leave behind.  Has something changed?  It must have been our imagination; a trick of the light.  There is smoke between them. 

I had a big fanfic in a previous fandom where one of the big reveals was the involvement of a kind of infamous villain, whose presence was built up to and foreshadowed through the whole fic until his reveal without ever mentioning his name, so that the name drop would be a gut punch. It worked especially well because of who the villain was and his presence in that fandom space specifically (it's very complicated) and if it was an original story this reveal wouldn't work at all the way it was written in the fic. Because if you don't have a predisposition to think about that character and his relationship to the hero in a very specific way, then just seeing their name won't do much to you; the reveal and the recontextualisation it pushes upon you hinges on your previous knowledge of the source material.

I think it's an interesting tool fanfic authors are given. One of my favorite fanfic of all time is partially a re-imagining of its source material's canon, and something it does is introduce antagonists much earlier in the story or deepen npcs' stories. It then works to evoke a tragic irony that again wouldn't work if you didn't know the source material, and it's something the author obviously has a lot of fun with.