The Refugees
Three kids, lost and alone in a big world. They're aliens, of course, from a planet beyond the solar system whose name doesn't matter. That world's been destroyed; collateral damage in a war that spanned the cosmos. The kids are shuffled off with half a million others to different worlds, far from the fighting. Earth is one of them.
Now, Earth's a funny planet. The vast majority of the population don't believe in aliens. There's a minority who does, and the reason that a lot of this minority believes is because they are aliens. There are Martians, and Plutonians -who aren't, strictly speaking, natives of Pluto, they're just colonists- and probably a thousand more species representing most of the Milky Way Galaxy. Some are refugees, like these kids. Some are criminals. The funny thing about Earth not officially recognizing the existence of extraterrestrials is that it makes it a great place to hide.
These three kids. Their real parents are dead, having been drafted to fight a war that wasn't their own. So they're adopted by two humans who are, as they say, in the know. The kids get new names, nothing like their real names -which are unpronounceable by humans and most other species for that matter-. Mycroft, Sherlock, and Eurus Holmes. Holmes belongs to all of them, even their human parents. More importantly, they're disguised.
Disguise doesn't mean dressing up. It means cloning a human body and transferring their consciousness into it. Every memory and thought and shred of personality. They're safe this way. Safe from dissection and experimentation, which too many have been subjected to.
"How many?" asks the oldest child. In this strange place, he's the bravest. But not really brave so much as it's logical that he ought to ask, being the oldest and most capable he assumes responsibility-
Sentiment is (was) discouraged on their homeworld. Emotions are meant to be ignored. Caring is not an advantage.
Too many, comes the answer. The child-who-is-now-Mycroft Holmes frowns automatically. Before, he wasn't capable of frowning and the mild emotion would have translated to a tentacle flick.
Interesting, he thinks.
Eurus retained her psychic powers during the transfer. It happens sometimes, the alien explains to Mummy and Father while Mycroft watches. She just has to be careful to hide them from humans who aren't in the know.
"Only at home," Mummy tells Eurus. "Never at the park, or school, or anywhere else. Can you do that, sweetie?"
Eurus just observes Mummy with large, unblinking eyes. She doesn't respond to sentiment. She never displays it, unlike either of her brothers.
Eurus has a knife pressed to her wrist. This hand, so unlike her tentacles, is absolutely fascinating and she wants to see how it works. Mycroft snatches the blade away from her, moving faster than she's ever seen- adrenaline spiking, emotionally-influenced "fight or flight" reaction...emotions likely caused by threat of harm to kin, but it didn't matter that the threat came from that kin…
More experimentation is required.
Mycroft realizes, a step behind Eurus, what she's thinking. She's gathering evidence to test her hypotheses. He pushes down the despair rising in him. Caring is not an advantage, he reminds himself. "Do you feel pain?" he asks.
"Which one's pain?" Eurus asks. She has too many strange emotions inside her that weren't there before the transfer. Humans talk about pain, happiness, sadness and whatever else but they never explain the difference.
Sherlock has a friend whose name is Victor Trevor. He won't tell them his old name, too proud of his new, better name. Victor Trevor.
The best part is that he's an alien too. His kind- who hail from a planet on the other side of the galaxy- are shapeshifters. Unlike the Holmeses, the consciousness transfer doesn't work on his species, so he gets to stay, physically, an alien.
The day is typical. Victor's a strangely-colored eagle, a smallish Quiplo'uzken, and finally a normal Earth dog, chasing Sherlock across the yard. Gleeful shrieks carry to the house.
"They're explorers today," Mycroft says absently, looking up from his book. Childish nonsense.
"I do hope no one sees little Victor shifting form," Mummy says. Her brow is creased. "But he and Sherlock have so much fun."
Fun isn't a good reason to be risking an entire population, Mycroft doesn't point out.
Eurus chooses this moment to emerge from...wherever she spends her days. The truth is that she spends hours on hours in her room with the door locked, exercising her psychic ability. Their closest neighbors are a quarter of a mile away, and she can now hear every word they think. Bend their wills. She's not making zombie legions...yet...but sometimes, old Madam Lunsborough finds herself holding something she doesn't remember picking up. A teacup, a shovel, a steak knife. Her grandchildren wander about in dazes from time to time. A quarter mile away, Eurus Holmes stares out her second-story window.
A marked improvement over last week. More data is needed.
It's during one of these trials that Sherlock and Victor catch Eurus' attention. They claim to be friends in both speech and thought, Eurus observes. Define friendship. Her mind skitters ahead, designing experiments and trials for the unsuspecting pair. What is friendship? What is its purpose? What are its effects on emotions? On psychic abilities?
Eurus isn't the only one who retained psychic ability in the transfer. She's only the strongest. She's only the least distracted by the human phenomena of emotions and the phenomenon called pain.
The tests are ready. Eurus leans out her bedroom window. Sherlock and Victor are pirates again. An extinct breed of seafaring Earth pirates this time, not the real ones who roam so much of the Milky Way. Victor is be a dog again, a rust-colored hound of some kind.
"Sherlock," Eurus calls. Just to be sure, she draws his attention to her, like tugging a thread. He pauses, one foot still lifted over the flowerbed.
"I want to play too," Eurus says.
Victor is at the bottom of a well. Eurus repeats the song she composed when Sherlock demands, for the fifth time, where Victor is. Eurus calculates that Sherlock can pull the information from her mind. Emotional duress increases physical and psychic facilities significantly.
Test result: failure. Eurus has overestimated Sherlock's ability. Victor Trevor drowns in the well. Conclusion: more duress is required.
While Eurus is making the necessary calculations, Sherlock screams. A psychic burst, fueled by emotion and untempered by experience, engulfs the area. Eurus knows enough about mental shielding to protect her mind. Sherlock doesn't.
A crime was committed by an alien and against an alien, and so it is the aliens who take Eurus away. Sherlock, they can do nothing for. Mycroft is not sad. Caring was never an advantage. It is not care, but tradition and the duty charged to him by Mummy, that drive Mycroft to look after Sherlock. And he does need so much looking after in this broken state.
Sherlock's memories are fractured. He does not remember their old home. He does not remember Eurus. Victor is now Redbeard the hound to Sherlock- and Mycroft does not tell him that Redbeard was Victor, the nickname a loose translation from his old language.
Sherlock's psychic powers aren't completely gone. He makes deductions quicker and better than any human could and picks up on everything. Not once does he show signs of remembering the truth of the universe and the truth of his own past. He swaggers through life, experiments with Earth drugs, gets into fantastic trouble with Earth law enforcement (never alien authorities) and becomes Earth's first consulting detective.
Meanwhile, Mycroft waits. The death penalty is unheard of among their kind, and so Eurus is still alive. Still developing her psychic powers. One day even Sherrinford won't be able to hold her. Other aliens emerge into daylight, seemingly drawn by Sherlock's blatant display of otherworldly talent. The boldest of them, the one Mycroft considers most dangerous, calls himself Jim Moriarty.
One way or another, everything is coming to a head.
So...story behind this fic: I binge-watched the fourth season of Sherlock a little while after it came out on netflix. Then I had this idea, and the more I thought about it, the more it made sense.
Eurus Holmes is an alien. That explains all of her fantastic abilities in this decidedly-unfantastic setting. (and I mean fantastic as in the fantasy genre, not splendid.) I mean, really? Predicting terrorist plots years in advance based on twitter? Are the writers trying to break our suspension of disbelief?
So I wrote most of this, got unmotivated, and let it sit in my google drive for months until I decided to finally finish it instead of writing my OTHER fanfictions. You're welcome :)