221B Recs

Title: No Bangs Without Foreign Office Approval
Author: Reckonedrightly
Pairing: fem!John Watson/fem!Sherlock Holmes
Length: 217,621
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: None
Verse: Sherlock BBC
Author's summary: It’s 1942, and while London’s nights are no longer interrupted by air raid sirens, the war still rages and not all of it is fought openly. From its headquarters in Baker Street, the Special Operations Executive plans to set Europe ablaze with its networks of spies and saboteurs in Nazi-occupied territory. Joan Watson knows what it is to keep a secret, but she isn’t expecting to be recruited into the clandestine world of SOE. Nor is she prepared to meet Sherlock Holmes, a former private detective who has by her own admission ruined her own life at least three times over—and who has a murder to solve in Occupied France.

Reccer's comments: I’m a sucker for historical AUs admittedly, and I’m pleased to add this one to the rec list here. I am quickly running out of time to slide in this last rec and cannot do it adequate justice. ReckonedRightly’s prose is lush and gorgeous without being heavy-handed. Both the historical context and the training program Joan and Sherlock undergo are well integrated with the plot, and Joan and Sherlock as English-trained saboteurs for the French Resistance is so fitting to their characters that this feels more canon than AU.

This spoiler-free excerpt from Sherlock's point of view stuck with me when I read it:

Now? Now, blessedly, there was no point thinking about how she felt about it, or thinking about anything which had happened three years ago. Not now, when she finally felt that she was making headway in the case.

It was like lifting her head after a winter so long she had forgotten the taste of sunlight. It felt much too clean and all-pervading to be anything so unpleasant as emotion; closer to photosynthesis than happiness, she thought, and all the better for it.