Fic: Homo Faber

[saki101]

Title: Homo Faber
Author: Saki101
Fandom(s): Frankenstein and Sherlock
Characters/Pairings: Sherlock Holmes/John Watson, Mrs Hudson, Mike Stamford, Victor, OCs
Rating: PG-13
Word Count: ~13.1K total
Disclaimer: Frankenstein is in the public domain; Sherlock is not mine and no money is being made.
Summary: What if Dr Frankenstein had had Dr Watson to keep him right? A story in which Sherlock's mother's maiden name is Frankenstein and Dr Watson has been invalided home towards the end of the Napoleonic Wars...
Notes: A stand-alone AU fusion fix-it fic written for the Springlock Exchange for swimmingbirdrunningrock's great prompt: John's the detective, Sherlock's the doctor. AU, fic or ficlet? Go wild. This connected to a thought I had had upon seeing Frankenstein with Mr Cumberbatch in the role of the scientist: every genius needs a John Watson.

Excerpt: “We are all egoists,” he said. “Every child likes to hear the story of his beginnings, the tale of his parents’ courtship, the events surrounding his birth, the parts of his story he cannot know himself.”

On AO3

Comments

[igenlode]

Dr Hooper is Molly in disguise -- yes?

And Harry is the brother...

The little references to coming up to the 'castle' from the village actually made me think of "Dracula" ;-)

Does Victor still have middle-aged hair ("with a hint of grey") after his 'rebirth', and is that why he's so keen on curls?

Has Sherlock been digging up the churchyard as well as getting fresh samples from Bart's? I like John's suggestion that perhaps Victor has inherited the consciousness of a hand or a leg rather than a brain, which would account for his unformed intelligence :-p

It's neatly à propos to have Victor quote Milton to his creator! The business about the coffee I don't understand; is that a reference to some part of the book I've forgotten? Or a conversation that is assumed to have taken place off-screen?

Presumably Dr Holmes isn't actually going to create an Irene Adler as such for Victor's bride, but the wording certainly has extra resonance in this context :-)

[saki101]

Oh, thank you for all these lovely, detailed questions! :-D

Dr Hooper is indeed Molly in disguise. It was fun to see the same approach taken in The Abominable Bride a couple years later, but then the times pushed women towards that solution.

And Harry is the brother, deceased by the time the story opens, but still John's confidant.

Victor does still have the hair with a hint of grey, but his yearning after the shiny curls is due to his childlike adoration of his 'parent' and wanting to be like him.

Sherlock has been disturbing the peace of the local churchyard, but once the hospital is functioning at his castle/manor, he has much fresher spare parts for the final bits he needed, fresher even than the ones from Bart's, although Michael was certainly bringing him high quality bits and pieces.

I never had a proper conversation about why Victor had to start over, but clearly his rebirth wasn't the simple re-awakening of consciousness that Sherlock had expected. John refers to soldiers who had to relearn basic skills because of the damage caused by their wounds and trauma. Victor's parts were all coming back from the dead and had to integrate themselves into something new, so I posited that they would need a similar period of rehabilitation and the leg and the hand as well as the brain would all contribute to this new entity. There I was playing a bit with the Sherlock assertion that the brain was all that mattered and everything else was just transport. Victor isn't the professor of philosophy who was killed by the horse anymore. He's a new personality, albeit he has the intellectual capacity of the professor, but not the memories. Of course, I was also using the condition of the Creature from Frankenstein who needed to learn everything afresh.

About the coffee...I decided to replace the wild pursuit across the Arctic ice with a happier, but not completely satisfied, Victor leaving home to see the world and travelling in less inhospitable climes. The Romantic Orientalism of Mary Shelley's era influenced my decision to have his wanderings include the Middle East as well as the world-wide wandering that Sherlock (and the original Holmes) were supposed to have done when they were supposedly dead. So, the spiced coffee that Victor brought back for Sherlock is just a hint as to where he's been. Also, the tiled room in which they were smoking and drinking coffee was modelled on what's left of one in The Wallace Collection. (This article has a picture of another one; I couldn't find one of the room at The Wallace Collection, which I really like.) I was trying to conjure a much less hostile disagreement between Victor and Sherlock over whether Sherlock would create a 'mate' for Victor, than the Creature and Frankenstein had. (Yes, I was engaged in all sorts of wish-fulfillment when I wrote this, but I reasoned that Victor was capable of disagreeing less wildly because he was so much less alone and less traumatised than the Creature had been.)

You're right, Holmes doesn't necessarily have to create an Irene Adler for Victor, although one modelled on the original Irene Adler would be a noble person. There will always be the issue of such an arranged 'marriage', not unheard of for the time, but still. The most Sherlock could do would be to bring alive a mate that shared that unique heritage with Victor, but whether she would conform to his hopes for a sweetheart is a whole other story! Either way, it would work to refer to her as 'The Woman' and I just couldn't resist it. ;-)

Well, I have rambling on!! Thank you again for your thoughtful comments.

[igenlode]

Ouch -- I'd missed the implication of Sherlock using 'spare parts' from the work at the hospital :-(
And I suppose that was his motivation for setting the whole thing up in the first place?

I was subconsciously picturing the tiled Arab Hall in Leighton House from your description: https://lookup.london/leighton-house-arab-hall/
It sounds as if I was somewhat along the right lines, at least...



(I never seem to get notifications for replies to my comments on this community, which means I don't see them unless I happen to check back; I think it's because they get posted as replies to the original post rather than specifically to my comment...)

[saki101]

That Stamford's proposal would also benefit Sherlock's work, was definitely an incentive for Sherlock to sponsor the project. But, as with the original Sherlock Holmes, he is a person inclined to help the powerless when they are in need, even without recompense. So, the proposal suited both the pragmatic and altruistic sides of his personality.

The thing is, Sherlock was wrong about what he thought he would achieve. I have him thinking he would be bringing people, at least the people whose head/brain he used, back to life. (I don't think that's what the original Frankenstein thought would happen though, although I don't think we're given enough information about what he thought would be a successful result beyond animation. He certainly wasn't prepared for the Creature to be as helpless and undeveloped as an small child though, so maybe he did think he'd get an adult consciousness and skill set since he was using adult body parts.)

Oh, I love that you were thinking of the Arab Hall at Leighton House! One of my favourite places ever! (I even set a story there years ago, but not a Sherlock one.) The room at The Wallace Collection is much smaller, and not nearly so captivating, but my understanding is that it's all that's left of a larger room, much of which got remodelled at a later date. I am happy to picture the characters in the Arab Hall though.

[igenlode]

No, I don't think the originl Frankenstein was motivated by a desire to bring back the consciousness of the person whose brain he'd used; he is not interested in resurrecting the dead, but in trying to create life from scratch.