Title: Duty, Honour, and Loyalty

Author: Sara

Pairing: Holmes/Watson

Rating: R (mature themes, no explicit sex)

Warnings: Death of a major supporting character (not Holmes or Watson)

Summary/challenge: Where duty and honor conflict with love. Written to answer the challenge: "A well-meaning meddler decides to do something about the latent attraction between Holmes and Watson and decides to play matchmaker."

Betas: Lyra was an enormous help--from helping me kill off Mrs. Watson to making sure that motivations were clear throughout. I cannot thank her enough! xs helped with eliminating Americanisms and anachronisms. jm, as always, gave me confidence and helped with refining things. Any errors and problems that remain are probably the result of my stubbornly refusing to listen to them.

Part of the Cliche Fuh-Q-Fest at  http://www.kardasi.com/Cliched/index.htm

Feedback to: sara_merry99 @ yahoo.com

Disclaimer: Sherlock Holmes, John Watson, and Mary Watson were not created by me. They are in the public domain, so in that sense they belong to me, as they do to the rest of the world. But I am in no way claiming to have created them.

Note on Chronology: Assembling a Sherlockian chronology is a challenging endeavour. There are a multitude of chronologies by various researchers and there is a considerable amount of disagreement between them. For the purposes of this story, I have not followed any particular chronology exclusively, but have chosen between a few different ones as suited my needs for the story. The dating of "The Adventure of the Dying Detective",  "The Stock-Broker's Clerk" and "The Hound of the Baskervilles" (which is not mentioned in this story) I take from Mr. Frankland's "Some Chronological Crankiness" (http://members.aol.com/mfrankland/chronology.htm). The dating of "The Boscombe Valley Mystery" I take from Baring-Gould's Annotated Sherlock Holmes. "The Red-Headed League" is dated according to Brad Keefauver's Birlstone Railway Timetable (http://www.sherlockpeoria.net/Who_is_Sherlock/ChronologyCorner.html). As Watson was very clear with the dates on "The Final Problem" and "The Adventure of the Empty House", there is no substantial disagreement on those.

Additional note: Some dialogue in the last section of the story is taken from "The Adventure of the Empty House" by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. I am not endeavouring to pass Doyle's writing off as my own, merely to honour him by integrating my own efforts into his.