"Till We Have Cases" updates: Chapter 25's online!
Up now at AO3...
Chapter 25 of Till We Have Cases, “Of The God's Data-Gathering and A Visit To Town”
In this chapter: The healer-Prince starts having misgivings about his sister's visit to the House of the Two Hundred Twenty-One Bees; while the Consulting God gets to grips with a strange new facet of the Work, and lays down the law.
...The God watched the door close behind Iaon, his mind snapping back almost instantly to the issue of the Prince’s family. “…The sister,” he hissed softly, and all around him the shadows gathered at the edges of the Chamber darkened, twitching and shivering with his annoyance. I should have looked more closely into her business from the start. In any case, I dare not let the woman anywhere near Iaon, or my House, without far better data.
…Yet it was problematic, troublesome, the reading of hearts, no matter how necessary it might be. It meant immersion in sentiment, emotion, the messy side of mortal life. Only with Iaon (before the God promised to stop it) was sliding into a mortal’s heart ever anything like easy or pleasant. The God far preferred the clean cool business of deduction, always a matter of rationality, control, precision, and most of all, observation from a safe distance outside. Yet—much though he hated to admit it—there were places where even deduction, even as he practiced it, could not take him. Sometimes laying open the tablets of the heart was the only way: sometimes you had to be sure. And this was such a time.
So best get on with it.
Warnings for intimations of mortality, family angst, deductions and suppositions, sibling issues, missing persons, mixed motivations, and cats.
Till We Have Cases is a BBC Sherlock AU fic set in the post-Trojan War Bronze Age of ancient Greek myth… featuring a dangerous young god with a gift for deduction who’s sent to put a stop to the lifesaving ways of a warrior-prince with healing hands. But all of a sudden the Prince has moved into the Consulting God’s flat on Mount Olympus and they’ve started solving crimes together. And what follows after that is… somewhat unexpected.
Warnings for mythology running amuck, folklore sticking its nose into the tent, and True Love being tried in the fires of adversity. (So what else is new?)
Notifications about updates, as well as maps, side notes, and other reference material can be found at The Lotus Room.