A/N: Hello, readers! Welcome to my first attempt at Johnlock. I've actually written about 3/4 of this whole story so I may be posting around 5 chapters in total and a chapter every three days or so (at least the ones I've finished writing.) This is also posted on A03 if you're interested; the link's in my profile.
Warning: I don't have a beta or a brit-picker so all mistakes are mine. Feel free to review for your thoughts and suggestions.
John was used to the stares. Being the new kid in high school at least four times every year since he was ten subjected him to loner status mentality. He was naturally a very quiet guy, as opposed to the boisterous personality of both his parents. At least, that was when they were still alive. They moved to London from Northumberland during the summer when his dad was shipped off to God-knows-what country doing God-knows-what. His father had never been the one to talk about his work except that he was a soldier and that he worked for the British Government. He was gone for months at a time and was frequently relocated each year. It was just a few months ago that he was stationed back in England from Japan, and exactly two months ago that they moved to the bustling city of London where his father and mother were both killed in a tragic accident right on the eve of John's 18th birthday. It was a drunk driver, the detective had told him. Lestrade was the detective who handled the case. John was silent when he was brought to the precinct, collected his parents' belongings and walked away.
And so John disappeared. He took a job for the rest of the summer and rented out a flat. He figured he would make ends meet until he knew what he was going to do with his life when a thick creamy white envelope was dropped into the rusty mail slot of his door.
John looked up from the blog entry he was writing at the behest of his therapist which would supposedly "help him with acclimatizing to the death of both his parents". John thought she full of bullshit but kept his less than decent thoughts to himself and decided to give the whole blogging thing a whack. He flicked on the desk lamp and picked up the letter. It was heavy, and looked out of place in the small, dank apartment he was currently occupying. John narrowed his eyes at the letter's blood red wax seal and the cursive writing on the front that addressed its contents to him. There was a masthead on the upper right hand corner of the envelope that looked awfully familiar to teenager.
A few minutes of silence and John let out a breath as rolled his eyes. St. Bart's Prep. Where both his parents had gone to school. His dad had a habit of keeping things hidden until the very last moment. John let a feeling of nostalgia wash through him as his mind sped through memories of his parents showing him photo album after photo album of the time they met and spent together in prep school.
John smiled and ripped open the envelope. Several sheets of neatly typed paper fell out along with an engraved Gold pin. He picked up the letter and read aloud.
"Dear Mr. John Watson, we are pleased to inform you that you have been awarded special entry to the graduating class of 2013 of St. Bart's Preparatory School. It has come to our attention that your parents had recently passed and we have accepted you based on their last wishes and your previous school transcripts…"
John pretty much zoned off after that and quickly read through the rest of the instructions. He dropped the letter on the desk and looked at a half-empty bottle of pain medication on his table. His headaches had been getting worse and worse the past week.
"At least there'll be a nurse there."
It was raining hard and John was without an umbrella, though his thick overcoat and hooded sweatshirt seemed to do the job. He was lugging a large trolley behind him towards a rather ominous-looking black-brick building with numerous windows, all of which were closed off against the strong downpour. There were stares from everywhere and John could feel the prickling of the hair on his nape as he walked towards the shade of the building's overhang.
"Blasted rain." John shook his hair out and adjusted the strap of his backpack. Rusted gold letters were on a plaque above the double wooden door.
Reichenbach Hall.
John rolled his eyes at the German. Welcome home, John.
It's raining again.
John's attention was brought back to reality and he found Molly looking at him expectantly. "Oh, I apologize. What did you say?"
Molly was jumpy sophomore who had been tasked to show him around the campus grounds for the better part of the morning before first period at 8. The campus was spacious and secluded, with its own pool and track field, four main buildings, and three dormitories. St. Bart's Prep was surrounded by red brick walls and two miles of forest all around. Security was pretty high end, with camera surveillance and an impressive security detail. If John didn't know any better, he would've guessed that the place was designed to keep the students in, instead of outsiders out.
Molly smiled and her eyes crinkled at the corners. "I was asking if you were a day student or a dormer."
"Dormer," John looked inside his empty locker and dumped most of his books in. "I'm staying at Reichenbach Hall."
Molly looked interested. "Oh? Do your parents work out of town?"
John took out a calculus book and paused. "They're dead. I'm pretty much an orphan."
Molly turned pink and nearly dropped her books. "Oh… Um… I'm sorry. I didn't know."
"It's no problem." John took a look at the clock. The first warning bell was due in about thirty seconds. "You better going or you'll be late for class. I still have to drop by the headmaster's office before second period."
"Okay." Molly flashed him another smile but he could tell she was embarrassed. "I'll see around, yeah?"
John shut his locker. He hated it when people breached the topic about his parents. It wasn't because he was sad or anything of the sort. He just hated it when he would answer and they would get embarrassed for asking in the first place. John watched Molly walk away and a flitting thought passed through his subconscious.
I wonder how Harry is doing…
He felt someone's eyes on him and he looked around. He spotted the red blazer of the school turning a corner and a mop of ebony curls. His footsteps were silent against the cold marble floor. John blinked and turned the other way, heading for the head office.
Odd.
"Have you settled in Mr. Watson?"
John stopped looking at the many crystal ornaments that lined the shelves of the headmaster's office and cleared his throat. "Yes I have, Headmaster."
The headmaster smiled, his eyes twinkling. "That's good to hear. Did you know that the room you're staying in was once your father's?"
John was silent. He felt nothing about the room. A room was just a room. It was stupid to attach sentiment to an inanimate thing.
The headmaster took his silence for a no and continued, "Well anyway, it was. I hope you'll have a good year here at St. Bart's Prep. I know it's quite sudden, since you're graduating next fall as well, but it's what your parents would have wanted."
"I understand, Headmaster," John replied monotonously before adding, "Thank you for this opportunity."
The headmaster seemed to perk up at that and smiled once more. "Well, that's all. Please don't hesitate to approach me or any of your professors if you have any trouble. I doubt you will. You're dismissed. A classmate from your next class will be waiting outside."
John nodded and walked as fast as he could out of the gloomy looking office. The Headmaster's smile was not warm or inviting, in fact it was chilling to the bone. Something John hadn't felt since… John stopped in front of his dorm and let his thoughts continue, well, since he saw his parent's bodies in the morgue, their faces almost unrecognizable because of the impact of the car into a solid rock wall. A shudder ran through John just thinking about it.
"Cold?"
John looked to his left and saw a lanky boy leaning against the wall holding a Rubik's cube. "What?"
"You shuddered. There's no draft so I wondered if you were feeling cold. If so, then you should go to the nurse."
John was silent for a minute as the boy continued to stare at him. "Oh. Um. No. Not cold. Just an unpleasant memory."
The boy's face was devoid of an emotion. "I see."
John cleared his throat and began to turn away.
"I'm supposed to take you to your next class."
John coughed again. "Oh right. Yeah. Sorry."
The boy pushed himself of the wall and began rapidly turning the sides of the multicolored cube. "You don't seem like your sick yet you keep clearing your throat."
John resisted an urge to roll his eyes. Yeah, well that's called being embarrassed. "I'm fine. Really."
The boy did not reply and started walking down the hall. John caught up to the boy's side. "I'm John Watson."
"I know." The boy glanced at him and held out his hand for a shake. "Sherlock Holmes."
John shook his hand. "Nice to meet you Sherlock."
"…likewise." Sherlock stopped in front of a wooden door. "You're staying at Reichenbach Hall, are you not?"
John looked at him. "Yes. How did you know?"
Sherlock stared back. "Your shoes are muddy. It was raining this morning but you aren't wet yet your shoes are dirty. Reichenbach Hall is the only place here where you need to go through soil to get to and from the main building. You probably waited for the rain to stop before heading over here. Plus your trousers are a bit ripped, probably from the rose bushes by the path, since the tears look a bit new, judging by your pink skin."
John scratched the area where a small slip of his thigh was showing. He thought nobody would notice so he didn't go back to change. "Oh, wow. Okay. Yeah. Reichenbach Hall."
Sherlock pushed the door open and went inside without a look back.
Brilliant.
A woman with curly black hair in a bun stood in front of the class. "Good morning everyone."
The students scrambled for their seats and intoned, "Good morning, professor."
John walked over and handed her a small pink slip which she didn't even so much as glance at before spearing it through a small metal rod on her desk.
"We have a new student with us today. He'll be joining your class for the rest of the year and will be graduating with you." The woman nodded over to where John was standing. "Mr. Watson, why don't you introduce yourself?"
John took his hands out of his pockets and looked out at the bored expressions of his classmates faces. "Um, hi. I'm John Watson… I just moved here from Northumberland a couple of months ago."
The professor looked at him expectantly. "Any hobbies? Interests?"
John shrugged, "Not anything interesting."
She sighed. "Another silent one, eh? Well, I'm Professor Donovan, and welcome to Advanced Physics. You can take a seat in the back, next to the window."
John shifted his bag to his other arm and nodded. The seat Professor Donovan instructed him to stay in was next to a short shelf lined with hardbound textbooks and small-scale projects from previous years. The room itself was spacious, twenty-five single desks, all occupied by attentive-looking teenagers. Well, except one.
The person who brought him here, Sherlock Holmes, was looking particularly bored out of his mind. The Rubik's cube was nowhere in sight and a small wiry model of a molecule was on top of his desk. He was rapidly changing its shape every 5 seconds and paying absolutely no attention to Professor Donovan.
The professor turned around and put a hand on her hip. "Holmes, not again. Won't you put that thing away?"
Sherlock paused his work. "Why?"
Professor Donovan's lips were pursed. "Because, even if you have made this class very aware just how knowledgeable you are about everything, you are disturbing your classmates."
Sherlock feigned innocence and looked around. "I don't see anyone being disrupted, professor."
Professor Donovan looked ready to throw something at the bushy-haired teenager. "If you don't keep that thing I will confiscate it… just like the previous fourteen models you have brought to this class."
John held back a snigger as a semi-pout started to appear on Sherlock's face. What a strange fellow.
The pout disappeared as Sherlock, who was seated one seat to his left, raised an eyebrow at him. John stared back and kept a straight face, as if to say, 'What?'. John blinked. Sherlock put the model away and clasped both his hands on top of the table.
"Happy, professor?"
Professor Donovan narrowed her eyes. "Quite. Now stay like that until I finish the lesson."
John shook his head and smiled as Professor Donovan continued droning on about the day's lesson. The rain had started to let up but the clouds stayed, bathing the grounds in a fluorescent light from the midday sun. John's mind had started to drift off and his hand started sketching lazily in the drawing pad he had opened on his desk.
John was about seven years old. It was one of his haziest memories of his parents, or rather, his earliest memory ever. John knew it was odd that he didn't remember anything before that time, but the more he tried to recall, the worse his headaches would become. It had been raining all morning but turned into a light drizzle by early afternoon. His mum wouldn't let him out of the house, being the sickly child that he was. Since he was the never one to throw tantrums, John had silent acquiesced and stayed in his room.
"Broom broom." Little John said quietly, running the toy car over the wooden floor. His mummy would scold him again for putting scratches on the recently polished floor.
Suddenly there was a loud bang and the sound of wood splintering. John could hear his mom shouting over the loud noise. John looked out the small window by his bed and saw big shadows passing by, accompanied by sound of something cutting through the air.
Little John looked up from his car and out the door. "Mummy?"
The living room was empty. The house was silent. The big shadows were gone. John was suddenly picked up and his red toy car dropped to the floor, making a loud clattering sound. It was all very fast. A flash of black cloth. Then everything was dark.
"Mr. Watson! Mr. Watson!"
John's head dropped from his hand and his right hand stopped sketching. He felt out of it, and his face was covered with a sheen of sweat. He looked up.
Professor Donovan made a sound of exasperation. "I've been calling your name for the past minute."
A pink blush stained John's cheeks. "Sorry, Ma'am."
"As I was saying, if you were listening at all to the lesson, what was one of Heisenberg's major contributions to the field of physics?"
"Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle, wherein the exact location of the atom can never be completely determined, only the quantum level where it resides," John recited without skipping a beat.
John refrained from rolling his eyes. Moving around so much and having little to no friends at all tended to give him a lot of time for advanced reading. More often than not John had to move schools in the middle of the year and it just didn't do that he had no idea where his class was in the syllabus, so he preferred to study everything when he could. Being smarter or well read than everybody else also tended to keep other students away from him.
Professor Donovan was a bit taken a back. She was sure that John didn't listen to a single word she's been saying for the past hour. "…that's correct…" Professor Donovan's face grew worried at his pallor. "Mr. Watson, is everything alright?"
John nodded, "…yes, Ma'am."
Professor Donovan gave him a look over. "You seem a bit pale. Try to get some rest later. I don't want you nodding off in my class again. Having Mr. Holmes here is bad enough."
John nodded and the professor turned back to the chalkboard to finish the lesson. As John began to zone her out once more, he looked down at his drawing pad. It was the sketch of a seal of sorts. Three interlocking circles with a small bird in the middle, speared by a single arrow.
There was something eerily familiar about the symbol that John couldn't place.
Sherlock watched as his new classmate rapidly began sketching with a pencil over a blank sheet of drawing paper. His wasn't even looking down while he drew, and his eyes were clouded over, as if remembering something he had forgotten. His right hand began to tremble as he drew and little beads of sweat started appearing above his brow.
Sherlock felt an urge to snap John out of his stupor but Professor Donovan beat him to it. He watched John become flustered for one second before replying with a monotonous voice.
"…Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle, wherein the exact location of the atom can never be completely determined, only the quantum level where it resides…"
Sherlock smirked at John's answer. Seems like he wasn't like the rest of his schoolmates who were entirely too boring and predictable. Sherlock spied a look at his classmates drawing.
His eyes widened in confusion. Why would he sketch that?