How time has ticked a heaven round the stars

My first year exposed to the full wonder that is Yuletide, and I am LOVING this rare fandoms thing. So. A few recs from the slushpile:

This Town We're Painting (St. Trinian's/Sherlock BBC crossover). Premise: Kelly Jones takes a job with a "minor employee of Her Majesty's government" who just happens to (a) have a famous detective brother and (b) rule the known world. Hiring people like Kelly is, of course, how he stays on top, and really, what he's after is the entire St. Trinian's old-girl network. You don't have to know either canon well to love this; you just have to appreciate the traveling sisterhood of BAMF women. Oh, and did I mention hot Annabelle/Kelly femslash? That too.

Sparrow (Tale of Genji). A missing scene that takes place during Genji's exile: an accidental encounter between Murasaki and To no Chujo. The tone of the original prose is elusive and very difficult to capture -- the way nature is evoked, the use of poetry, the significance of clothing and objects, the characters who speak through screens both real and metaphorical. This writer has caught it perfectly, and also exposed the raw longing beneath the surfaces of convention. For any lover of the original (and this is one of my favorite stories of all time), this is sublime.

Revels (Lymond Chronicles - Dorothy Dunnett). There's an excellent crop of Lymond stories this year, but this one -- a set of missing scenes from Pawn in Frankincense, exploring how Francis gains Khaireddin's trust -- is the one that affected me the most. Not least because of a sly bit of running quotation from a later part of the series, reminding us that to love is very often, also, to lose. Beautifully done.

De casibus vivorum illustrium (15th Century CE RPF: Niccolò Machiavelli, Cesare Borgia). Fortuna is proverbially fickle, and two of the more notorious moral relativists of the period drink to and wager on her vagaries. A light touch and a deceptively resonant story, set against the backdrop of one of the period's terrible battlegrounds. 

Two Men in a Boat (Our Mutual Friend, Charles Dickens). The Eugene/Mortimer bond, here given all the astringent humor and hidden depths of the original, but with the slash subtext fully and movingly unpacked. Anyone who finds Mortimer as attractive a character as I do will be filled with glee at this; as the writer notes, the canon story takes us much of the way. There's also a beautiful play here with boats and river journeys, which loom so large in the book and series, and which underpin this story in an equally fateful but subtler way.

Harriet and Sergeant (Lord Peter Wimsey - Dorothy L. Sayers).  I note that this fandom scarcely needs a plug -- it's clearly been a popular one both for writers and readers -- but I particularly liked this story for exploring the dangerous waters of the Harriet-Bunter-Peter relationship. Framing the story with the aftermath of Crutchley's execution in Busman's Honeymoon, the narrative is very much about class roles and how they shape intimate relations -- the bond between the old retainer and the new wife being the most complicated of all. I loved Harriet's POV in this, but especially admire how spot-on Peter's voice is.

Hmm. Class subtext much in all of these? Privilege and constraint? That's a topic for another post.