I.
Sherlock had a twin sister. Everybody thought she was dead. Everybody but the dad of Jim Moriarty, who had her cryogenically frozen for twenty years.
Jim Moriarty's dad died, but Jim Moriarty discovered her in the basement and thawed her out. He implanted false memories in her head. "You are a high class stripper now," he taught her. "You will get a job at the strip club at 220 Baker Street."
She was lovely, the most beautiful young woman he had ever seen. She would look awesome pole-dancing, heh heh, he thought evilly.
"Okay whatever," said the girl with skin like cream, hair like jet black hair, blood-red lips and a tinkling voice like sexy bells. She had forgotten that she was super smart, more even than Sherlock and Mycroft combined, but she didn't know those names. She was frozen so long that she forgot, and then those false memories, too.
As she walked from Jim Moriarty's house to 220 Baker Street, every man who saw her either whistled, tripped and fell over, followed her, or all three, sometimes simultaneously. But she didn't notice. She was too busy walking.
"Oh my God who is that lovely creature!" yelled John Watson from the window. He almost fell out because he had never seen such a beautiful graceful girl.
"Probably a princess or a stripper or a street waif on the run from killers," said Sherlock in a bored voice.
"The middle one," said Watson breathing hard. "She just walked into that strip club next door. I'll be right back."
"Not now John do you have to be a pervert when the game is on?"
"Which game?" John said hornily.
"We must solve the mystery of the Hooting Marmalade," reminded Sherlock.
"Let's go get a drink," John mused.
"Oh if we must," deduced Holmes. "Strip club I suppose."
When they came in Eysabelle Perfume Holmes (that was her name, but Jim Moriarty gave her a different name, which was Chyanne Brandy Swan) was on stage stripping the feathery bra off her perfect young body to a song by a really good band. John Watson fainted.
Sherlock didn't even notice.
It was love at first sight.
II.
"It was love at first sight."
A thoroughly bemused Mary Watson raised her eyebrows, and turned her head as if she were trying to identify a sound. After a moment, she glanced from the computer screen to John, then from John to Sherlock, then to her fingernails, then to John again.
"Did I …"
John smiled that bright, anticipating smile of his.
"Did I just read …. Somebody wrote that," she said. "But before somebody wrote that, somebody imagined it. "
"Mm-hmm." John nodded, still with that too-bright smile.
"This happens often?" she said. "This kind of … well, story-thing?"
"With each new blog post," Sherlock said, "they pour down. Like lemmings over a cliff."
"The price of fame," John said. To Mary he added, in a stage whisper, "I get him pregnant in some of them. My virility transcends the limitations of gender."
"Oh, stop gloating," Sherlock said. "It could as easily be you getting knocked up tomorrow."
"And this," Mary said, nodding toward the text on the screen, "is setting you up for an incestuous affair with your presumed-dead-but-cryogenically-frozen twin sister? Goodness. You don't have a twin sister, do you?"
"Certainly not."
"I can't quite believe Moriarty ever had a dad," John said.
"I won't ask about strip clubs," Mary said.
"Thank you," Sherlock and John said in unison.
"Oh." John winced. "That sounded bad."
"But look here," Mary said, with sudden energy. "This isn't right. It's very poorly written, but the writer somehow managed 'cryogenically' and 'implanted false memories'."
"Go on," Sherlock said, with an embryonic smile that gave the impression he was quizzing a slightly promising dunce.
"And, well, some of it is rather funny."
Sherlock coughed. Not the right answer.
"But it's the name, isn't it?" she said. "That utterly nonsensical name. It's got to mean something."
"Bad taste?" Sherlock suggested.
"Potential baby names?" John said.
"Oh, I don't know. Maybe there's an anagram in there somewhere."
"Of course there's an anagram. There are multiple anagrams ... more than I would care to calculate. But meaningful anagrams? I doubt it."
"You've obviously got this sorted," said John. "Quit playing with us and just tell us what it is."
"A moment ago you said that you couldn't quite believe Moriarty had ever had a father. Your disbelief was warranted. Moriarty was conceived via parthenogenesis. He had, in fact, two mothers - Chyanne Brandy Swan, and Eysabelle Perfume Holmes - my aunt."
III.
"Moriarty was conceived via parthenogenesis. He had, in fact, two mothers - Chyanne Brandy Swan, and Eysabelle Perfume Holmes - my aunt."
Jim finished typing the paragraph and threw himself back in his chair, snickering gleefully. Damn, it was fun being dead! No criminal network to manage, no shady dealings, nothing but surfing the web and writing fan fiction. He did it because it was fun. It was fun because Sherlock read it. Sherlock read it because it irritated him, and Sherlock loooooved to be irritated. If he didn't, he'd still be dead, too, instead of out in the nasty, noisy, pea-brained world.
"Somebody's happy today," said the day nurse, coming in with Jim's medication.
"Genius burns, nurse. Genius burns."
"Then it won't be damped by a few pills and a sip of water. Come on now, be a good boy and take your candy."
"Anything for you," Jim said, "my beautiful Chyanne Brandy Swan."
"Get on with you!" the nurse chuckled. "I never should have told you my old stripper name. It's Nurse Eysabelle Perfume Holmes to you!"
The End
VI. (or is it IV? I can never remember)
But it wasn't the end.
It would never be the end.
Not so long as Molly Hooper had breath in her body and a body that could breathe life into the dead.
And a slap that could break a man's neck.
No, really.
It could.
She was simply holding back.
"You worked Vice for years!" she shouted. "You must have known every stripper in the greater metropolitan area."
"I knew as many of 'em as I could," Lestrade slurred through what was left of his mouth. "They called me 'Lestraddle' because I used to get me leg over."
"Well, maybe if you're a good boy," said Molly through clenched teeth, "I'll Lestraddle you instead of cutting it off and feeding it to the koi!"
"You have to feed it to the koi … they're too coy to feed themselves."
Oh dear God. She was going to kill him. She really was.
"Chyanne!" Smack. "Brandy!" Smack. "Swan!" Smack.
"You think brain damage is going to make me suddenly remember?"
"You think brain damage is going to make me suddenly remember?" he murmured, deep from within his daydream.
"Say something, boss?" Donovan asked.
"Hmmm? Oh. No. Nothing," replied Lestrade.
V.
No. Nothing.
Nothing multiplied by nothing divided by nothing left exactly and precisely nothing. Which was exactly and precisely the amount of action Greg Lestrade was going to get tonight unless he could give Molly Hooper the information she wanted before she beat him quite literally senseless.
It was a strange relationship, but for the most part, it worked for him.
"Why do you even want to know?" he gurgled through a mouthful of blood and drool.
"I'm sorry, I didn't quite catch that. You'd better write it down."
She handed him a pad and pencil. Which he was able to use, since she hadn't actually tied him to a chair or cuffed him or anything of the sort. Their relationship was built on trust.
"Why do you even want to know?" he wrote.
Molly read the line. She snorted through her nose. She paced from one end of the dungeon to the other. She flung the pad and pencil at Lestrade.
"Because," she said, in tight, controlled syllables, "if Sherlock has a twin sister, and if this twin sister is a stripper, and if Sherlock falls in love with said twin sister stripper and has an incestuous relationship with her, I must do everything I can to be the creamy vanilla center of that particular dark and crunchy sex-cookie, you idiot!"
Lestrade spat out the mouthful of blood and drool and grinned (or tried to … the resultant facial expression doesn't actually have a name in the English language).
"Only if I can watch," he said.
IV? VI? Oh my aching head!
If only I could watch, thought Jim Moriarty, the look on Sherlock's face when he finds out my mother is actually his cryogenically frozen twin sister and his aunt! For, of course, Eysabelle Perfume Homes and Chyanne Brandy Swan were one and the same - a middle-aged, motherly nurse by day, a mind-bogglingly lovely (and scandalously young … barely legal, even) high-class stripper by night.
Thirty years ago, advanced science had split one woman into two. But the experiment succeeded at a cost - the life-threatening condition in the one that required immediate cryogenic action, and the bizarre gender-change in the other (which produced the man Moriarty knew simply as "Dad").
After "Dad" "died" - which is to say, after "Dad" had sexual reassignment surgery, changed her name to Chyanne Brandy Swan, and became a stripper - Moriarty discovered the frozen girl (his other mother) in the basement. It took him twenty years and every ounce of genius he possessed to sort through the confusing web of intrigue and scandal. His genealogy was, in short, a mess.
But not, he thought gleefully, nearly the mess that Sherlock's was.
How was it that Sherlock's aunt was also his twin sister? Oh, this was rich … this was the jewel of the maniac maze of webbery.
She wasn't.
VII.
She wasn't.
Going to admit, that is, to her husband or her husband's best friend, that she found herself enjoying the fan fictions immensely. Perhaps it was because the men seemed so annoyed, and yet so flattered, by them. Men were strange creatures when it came to people paying attention to them. They would endure almost any indignity for applause. They had to have it. Otherwise, they felt they quite simply ceased to exist.
Mary had never worried over such things. In her previous line of work, notoriety was a bug rather than a feature. She hadn't blogged her kills. She had no starring role in fan fiction, and no fandom of her own.
She was barely a character in the stories written about Sherlock and John. Nobody in that world liked her much. She was an impediment to the massive romance between John and Sherlock. The evil bitch who dared to shoot Sherlock. The liar, the villain, the interloper.
The ones who dared call her the worst insult of all - Mary Sue - well, she had resources. She knew how to find them. She knew how to stop them. She'd retired from the profession, but she still enjoyed assassination as a hobbyist.
Only one thing bothered her. I mean, really bothered her.
Who was the author of "Pole-Dancing for Love"?
And how had they found out about Chyanne Brandy Swan?
VIII.
Chyanne Brandy Swan tingled all over, from the tips of her hair follicles to the dead skin cells on the soles of her recently thawed-out feet. A man lay on the floor in a faint because of her beauty. So what, she thought, that happened all day today.
But next to him with piercing eyes and the handsomest sexy face ever in her life that she had seen, smirking in a way that was making her really mad and in love at the same time, was a mocking tall man with a look that said he knew what she looked like naked and he liked what he saw because she was naked and he liked it.
The song ended and she forgot to curtsey, even with about a thousand men throwing all their money at her.
She tossed her head and her ebony black black hair cascaded around her shoulders like a dark misty fog of midnight on a hot summer day in hell.
The man still looked at her infuriatingly with that knowing look.
The janitor swept up all the money on the stage and put it in Chyanne Brandy Swan's bank account. It was like a million British dollars. But she didn't care.
The man still stared at her smirkingly.
Suddenly she remembered how smart she was. She swaggered off the stage and stared up at the tall man with a look of proud definance that said she meant business.
"What?" she expostulated.
"I deduce that you are the only woman in the whole world who will make me madly, passionately, tenderly, violently, and teasingly in love with you," he snarled in a know-it-all voice that shook with barely repressed longing.
"You can't," she whistled shrilly. "I'm dangerous. It will kill you or something."
"I don't care. I would rather die kissing you than live forever."
"You are a pervert!" she bleated playfully.
Suddenly she died.
Sherlock gargled "NOOOOOOOOOOOOOO! Mary Watson why did you kill the only woman I ever loved before?"
The evil bitch responded. "Heh heh heh!"
"I will kill you now and John and I will raise your baby and be a family," Sherlock pontificated
"Before you do that let me first tell you why," gritted the evil, ugly female.
"Okay," Sherlock ejaculated.
"Because I am your sister, Eysabelle Perfume Holmes! She was just a decoy!"
Mary now Eysabelle tore off her ugly blonde wig and spilled out the rippling tresses of raven's wing raven that were her birthright.
"You are the most beautiful creature I ever beheld," mused Sherlock huskily. "I love you."
"And I love you," barked Eysabelle Perfume Holmes, blushing provocatively. "At last! O, bliss! Bliss! My own!"
With a rapture of joy known mostly to angels and practically almost never to humans, except for a couple every now and then, they fell into each other's arms, never to be parted again.
Postscript
Sherlock Holmes and the Case of the Meaningful Anagram
It was obvious, really.
What was it like to be everybody else, to be so slow, so endlessly stupid?
"Eysabelle Perfume Holmes" was an anagram of "A Supremely Feeble Holmes".
And really, what else did one need to say about the whole sordid affair?