Saving Sherlock Holmes (5/43)
Oct. 4th, 2012 09:20 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
earlgreytea68Title - Saving Sherlock Holmes (5/43)
Author -![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
earlgreytea68
Rating - General (eventually as high as Adult, which will be adjusted on a chapter-by-chapter basis)
Characters - John, Sherlock, Lestrade
Spoilers - Through "The Reichenbach Fall"
Disclaimer - I don't own them and I don't make money off of them, but I don't like to dwell on that, so let's move on.
Summary - Sherlock Holmes, schoolboy. Yeah, that basically sums it up.
Author's Notes - Thank yous! Toflawedamythystandsensiblecatfor the Britpick; to the readers who read as this was being written, includingchicklet73; and toarctacuda, who uncomplainingly betas massive amounts of fic.
Chapter 1 - Chapter 2 - Chapter 3 - Chapter 4
Part II
Chapter Five
September 1992
John Watson had wanted Eton to be the sort of place where he could just…blend in. Fly under the radar a bit. Not be noticed. He hadn’t thought it would be, but he had wanted it to be that way. He had told himself that when he had been packing up to go, trying to ignore the views of his mother, who thought he was reaching far beyond his station and should know his place. A Watson at Eton? she had said to him. They’ll know you’re an imposter immediately. He wasn’t an imposter, of course. He had gained entrance fair and square, but the curious looks he kept getting as he wandered, looking for his house, definitely made him feel like an imposter. And like he was doing a poor job of blending in.
“You look lost,” another student finally said to him. “Do you need some help finding a house?”
John wished he hadn’t looked so obviously lost. He wished he’d looked merely like he’d been out for a stroll. Enjoying himself. With his luggage dragging along behind him. Oh, bloody hell, he obviously looked lost.
“I…yes,” he said, deciding it was stupid to deny it. “I’m looking for Holland House.”
“Oh, that’s easy. It’s just there.” The student pointed at a building nestled just beyond the building they were standing in front of, and John felt like an idiot for not having realized that.
“Cheers,” he said to the student, trying a self-assured smile of I don’t feel like an idiot or anything like that.
“Don’t mention it. I’m Mike Stamford.” He stuck a hand out.
John was slightly relieved. This, he thought, was almost like making a friend. He took the offered hand and shook it. “John Watson.”
“What year are you?” Mike asked it curiously.
“Last year,” John answered.
Mike tilted his head, looking more curious, but only said, “So am I, so I suppose I’ll see you around.” He headed off, clearly with an engagement to go somewhere, meet people he already knew, settle into his last year in a familiar place.
John suddenly wondered if he’d gone absolutely mad for insisting upon this.
He dragged his luggage over to the building Mike had indicated, which was a grand, imposing two-story building with ivy creeping distinguishedly over its walls, and John looked at the rows of symmetrical windows and thought of the council estate flat he’d come from in comparison. He still felt absolutely mad for doing this, but he stared at this new home of his and thought to himself, You’re at Eton. And he didn’t feel any more confident, but he felt more determined not to let anyone know that about him.
The door to the bedroom he’d been told was his was standing open, and there was someone in it. In fact, there was more than someone in it. There were a lot of somethings in it, too. The room was a towering mess of…John didn’t know what. It was almost too much to catalogue. Unsteady piles of books and newspapers and magazines. Petri dishes and flasks littered over every flat surface. What looked very much like a human skull.
“Did you want something?” demanded the someone in the room, without looking up, and John tore his gaze off of the human skull and looked back to the person in the room. A classmate, John assumed, leaning over a microscope set up on the desk by the window, making adjustments to its focus.
“I… There must be some mistake. Sorry,” said John, feeling like an idiot for the hundredth time that day.
“No mistake.” He scribbled something on a piece of paper. “This is your room.”
John had just been confirming that for himself. Unless there was some mix-up with the school administration, this was definitely the room number he’d written down. He looked back at the room’s occupant, who was now sitting back in the desk chair and regarding him with frank interest. He was dressed in most of the Eton uniform, only tie-less, which made John feel distinctly underdressed. Then again, everything about him made John feel distinctly underdressed, as if maybe John’s entire person needed to be rethought, ironed out. There was something dramatic and otherworldly about this person in his room. He had cheekbones so dramatically high that they should have given him an odd, alien look but instead managed to merely be arrestingly intriguing. His mouth was such a dramatic bow shape that it seemed as if it couldn’t possibly be real, and yet it managed not to be foolish looking but paradoxically aristocratic. His eyes were some pale color John couldn’t pin down from the distance he was at, but whatever they were, they were sharp, and his hair was a tumble of dark, unruly curls. Everything about him seemed overdramatic and unnecessary and memorable and commanding. John felt, in comparison, absolutely laughable. He wondered if these were the sorts of creatures that existed at Eton, and if he was going to be tossed out for not being Byronesque enough.
The unknown intruder in his bedroom steepled together ridiculously long, elegant fingers and tapped them briefly against his unlikely mouth and then said, abruptly, “Some sort of delicious blackmail. I can’t wait to find out what it is.”
John blinked, his hand tightening slightly around his luggage. “Sorry?”
“You’re new here. In your last year. New in your last year? That never happens. And from a council estate and a state school, no less. Even if you were the cleverest human being to ever have been born there would need to be something else at work for you to be here.”
John, frowning, started to tell him that this was all none of his business.
“Don’t tell me,” the boy cut him off. “I want to figure it out for myself.”
John grew more irritated. “I wasn’t going to tell you anything.”
“Ah, so there’s something to tell,” concluded the boy, triumphantly.
John inhaled in frustration. “It isn’t any of your business. How did you know all that stuff, anyway?”
The boy made a dismissive noise. “Hardly a difficult deduction, any of that. I’m Sherlock Holmes.”
He had a posh, ridiculous name, John thought, annoyed, to go with his posh, ridiculous looks and his posh, ridiculous voice. John dragged his luggage through the detritus on the floor.
“Careful,” said Sherlock Holmes, sharply, as he tipped over a taxidermied squirrel.
“What are you doing in my room?” John demanded, finally making it all the way to the bed, which was covered with papers on which were scribbled equations for something.
“It’s my laboratory,” answered Sherlock Holmes.
John looked at him in disbelief.
“Well, it’s not like you were using it,” Sherlock pointed out, with a superior sniff. “And I needed the space.”
“Don’t you have a bedroom?”
“Of course. I’m just next door.”
“Brilliant,” said John. “Then we’ll just move all this stuff next door.”
“We can’t possibly.”
“I don’t see any reason why not.”
“My room can’t look like this. I’d get in trouble, and I get in rather too much trouble here already. You will never get in trouble for this. You have some sort of delicious blackmail that we can use to our advantage.”
“We?” echoed John. “Our?”
Sherlock Holmes nodded once. “Of course. Now that we share this room.”
“No,” said John. “We don’t share this room. This is my room.”
“It’s your bedroom and my laboratory. Hence, we share the room.”
“It isn’t your laboratory,” John insisted. “It’s my bedroom. Full stop.”
“It’s both.”
“How is it both?”
“It has laboratory equipment, and it has a bed.”
“A bed that is covered in… Is that chewing gum?”
Sherlock stood up for the first time. He was taller than John, which irritated John a bit more, more of the posh, elegant lines that Sherlock Holmes seemed to be entirely composed of. He gracefully stepped past John and began gathering up all the stuff on the bed. “It’s for an experiment. I’ll, you know, tidy a bit. Of course.”
Sherlock actually sounded a bit embarrassed, and John felt like this was a small victory. “Yes,” he agreed, putting his luggage on the bed. “Tidy it. And nothing on the bed, the bed is mine.”
Sherlock nodded, dropping the stuff that had been on the bed into one of the other piles in the room, and John suddenly realized that he’d apparently agreed to allow the rest of the room that wasn’t his bed to be Sherlock’s laboratory. How had that happened?
John sighed and watched as Sherlock ineffectively did something John supposed Sherlock considered to be “tidying up,” which in reality appeared to be moving things from one pile to another.
“What sort of experiment do you need a rubber chicken for?” John asked.
“Oh, no,” Sherlock answered, with a fleeting smile. “That was just a prank.” He straightened and stood back and looked satisfied, as if this were quite tidied up enough.
John disagreed and was about to say so when Sherlock spoke again.
“You should come with me.”
“Come with you where?” asked John, because he wasn’t sure what mad thing this bloke might suggest.
“They’ve scheduled you to go on the tour of Eton but that would be with the new boys.”
“I am new.”
“No, no, I mean the junior boys, the thirteen-year-olds. You don’t want to take your first tour of Eton with the housemaster and the new boys, you’ll learn nothing.”
John actually thought Sherlock had a good point there.
“So I’ll give you a tour of Eton and, anyway, I want your advice on something.”
“My advice?” asked John quizzically.
“Yes, as a scientist.” Sherlock was heading out of the room as he said this.
John said, “Hang on. What makes you think I know anything about science?”
Sherlock stuck his head back into the room and grinned at him. “You’re letting me keep a laboratory in your bedroom. Now hurry up.” He looked as if he were close to dancing with glee. “This could be dangerous.”
***
John couldn’t make up his mind whether Sherlock’s tour of Eton was extremely helpful or astonishingly useless. It mainly consisted of Sherlock walking very fast and John keeping up while Sherlock pointed to distant buildings and said things like, “That’s the building with all the boring divs about things that don’t matter,” and “Avoid that building. I’m fairly sure everyone in it is dying slowly of mercury poisoning, but no one will listen to me.”
John made a mental note of where the mercury building was and followed Sherlock across a field, toward a clump of trees silhouetted by the long September twilight. “Are you my year?” he asked, because this would be kind of nice if he could just follow Sherlock around for a bit until he got his own bearings.
“No, sixth,” Sherlock answered, never pausing in his stride. “But we may have some divs together. I take the divs of the year ahead of me.”
“Why do you do that?” asked John.
“Because they think it challenges me. Because they are idiots.” His voice dripped with disdain.
“Oh,” John realized, drawing this conclusion: “Because you’re much cleverer than everyone else here. Of course.”
Sherlock stopped walking and drew up to his full height and frowned at him. “I shouldn’t even be in school,” he proclaimed.
John couldn’t help being amused. “Why are you then?”
Sherlock’s frown turned darker, and he swept away, back on his path to the trees.
John smiled and followed. “Where are we going?” he asked.
“To the river, where it is secluded and quiet and we won’t be disturbed.”
“What are we doing at the river?”
Sherlock stopped walking again and peered down at him. “Are you frightened?”
The question surprised John. He looked around the empty field warily. “Should I be?”
“You’ve just met me. I’ve just told you that I’m taking you someplace secluded. And you should know that I know innumerable ways to kill a person. I’ve been revising intensely.”
John cocked an eyebrow at him. “No offense, mate, but I grew up on a council estate, and you’re the poshest thing I’ve ever seen, so I think probably I could take you.”
Sherlock narrowed his eyes a bit, but he didn’t seem displeased, more… Actually, John had no idea how to read the expression on his face. After a moment, Sherlock started walking again and John followed again.
“What makes you think I don’t know how to carry myself in a scuffle?” Sherlock asked, as they walked.
“Do you?” asked John, instead of answering.
“One does learn survival skills, John,” replied Sherlock. “Even at Eton.” They were at the river now, and Sherlock commenced to enthusiastically scrambling about in the mud at the bank for something.
John winced as Sherlock knelt to get a better angle, thinking of the state of the expensive Eton trousers Sherlock was wearing. Everything about the school cost an obscene amount of money, but clearly Sherlock had never thought about anything like that in his life. He was currently crawling through muck in a uniform the cost of which John couldn’t even have contemplated mere months earlier.
Sherlock snagged his shirt on a protruding branch, muttered something that sounded like “Bugger,” and continued crawling around the trunk of one of the trees, perilously close to tumbling off the bank.
“Be careful, would you?” said John, who didn’t fancy having to go into the river to save Sherlock and was hoping Sherlock knew how to swim.
“I’m fine,” Sherlock assured him, and then leaned far over the bank to grab something that he pulled up with a look of triumph in his eyes. “Aha!”
It was a fairly sizeable plank of wood, the length of Sherlock’s arm, and he dragged it over to where John was still standing.
John ignored the plank, looking at the state of Sherlock’s uniform. “My God, you’re a mess.”
Sherlock glanced down at it negligently. “All in a day’s work, John. Look!”
“What work?” said John, and turned his attention to the plank. The light was beginning to dwindle, and John couldn’t see what he was supposed to be concerned about. “What is this?”
“It’s mold, John.” Sherlock beamed with pleasure, pointing at three distinct growths of mold on the plank.
“Yes. Well. Dark, wet, warm: perfect conditions for the growth of mold.”
“Except that I grew this mold.”
“How did you grow it? The plank grew it, and the mold itself. You didn’t grow it.”
Sherlock looked annoyed. “I started it on its way. Just a little nudge. Placed the mold on the plank and took it here to see if it would grow.”
“When did you do this?” John asked, thinking that the Michaelmas term had just started. It suddenly occurred to him. “Do you not go home between terms?”
“Of course I go home between terms. I planted this last half.”
“You left an experiment before you went home for the summer?”
“Of course.”
“How did you get my room such a mess if you’ve just got back yourself?” John asked.
“What are you talking about? I was keeping the room neat for you!”
Sherlock looked as if he meant that sincerely, so John dropped it and looked back to the mold. “Excellent. Well done, you. You’ve grown mold.”
“It’s aspergillus,” said Sherlock, proudly.
“You’ve grown poisonous mold,” John amended, and took a step away from the plank.
“I knew you would know what that was.” Sherlock looked delighted. “Don’t worry, this won’t kill you. But I was curious about how easy it would be to grow. If, for instance, one wanted to kill someone, could one theoretically grow aspergillus mold and use that as the murder weapon? Might be a neat way to do it, wouldn’t you think?”
John considered. “Yes, actually. Not foolproof. I mean, not as straightforward as, say, arsenic.”
“But less traceable,” Sherlock pointed out. “There are pros and cons to all murder weapons.”
“You’d have to have an awful lot of it to kill an adult. Adults can withstand a large amount of aflatoxin. And even then there’d be no guarantee…” John trailed off, abruptly realizing exactly what he was discussing, and looked from the mold to Sherlock. “Is there someone you want to kill?” he asked, quizzically, because this all seemed very strange.
Sherlock looked startled by the question. “No. Well, I mean, of course, there are people who annoy me, but no, I am not actively trying to kill anyone.”
“Then…” John gestured to the aspergillus mold.
Sherlock glanced at it. “What?”
“Why are you growing poisonous mold?”
Sherlock looked at John as if he were the stupidest person Sherlock had ever encountered. “I already told you. It’s an experiment. Come along.” Sherlock tucked the plank under his arm and headed back in the direction they’d come.
John made a face. “Now you’ve got aspergillus mold all over your shirt.”
“You want to be a doctor,” said Sherlock.
John blinked in surprise and hurried to catch up to him. “How did you know that?”
“Simple enough deduction. You know a great deal about what a mold will do to the human immune system. Goes beyond mild interest in human health. Plus, you have caretaker tendencies. You’ve agreed to let me keep a laboratory in your bedroom because you don’t want me to get in trouble, and yet you’ve just met me, and you keep fretting about my clothing and whether or not I’m going to fall into the river. Yes. Definite caretaker tendencies. Definitely a doctor. And that makes sense. That’s why you’re here, suddenly, now, in your last year of school. Why start a new school in your last year? Because you want to be a doctor, and Eton will get you into a better university and from there a better medical college. But you’ve always wanted to be a doctor, no one learns about the effect of mold on a human immune system as part of a summer’s lark. And yet you haven’t started Eton until now. You’re clever, but you wouldn’t even have tried for Eton before, so something changed this summer. Or early this year. Money, quite a great deal of it. You are not fastidious—that much is obvious from what you’re wearing—so at least half of the worry over the state of my clothing is over your knowledge of how expensive the uniform here is. You’ve enough money to be here, not on a scholarship, but you’re not used to that amount of money. But a sudden influx of money wouldn’t be enough on its own to get a council estate boy into Eton in his last year, no, that money has an Eton connection I just haven’t figured out yet, but I’ll get there.”
“That was…brilliant,” John said.
Sherlock stopped walking abruptly and stared down at him. “Really?”
John tilted his head at that reaction. Surely Sherlock was aware that had been brilliant, that was surely why he’d done it in the first place, to show off. “Yes, really.”
“That’s not what people normally say.”
“What do people normally say?”
“Piss off.”
This startled laughter out of John, and Sherlock gave him a quick, tentative smile that was half-pleased and half-surprised, and then turned and started walking again.
John, following him, thought that it was no wonder Sherlock had had to learn survival skills at Eton, but decided not to bring that up. He said, instead, “What time is it?” wondering if they’d missed supper.
“Yes, sorry about that,” said Sherlock, clearly answering the question John hadn’t voiced. “This is why it would be more convenient if I were permitted to bring Mrs. Hudson here with me. She would fetch us food.”
“Who’s Mrs. Hudson?” asked John. They had reached Holland House and were now dodging a number of students in the hallways, all of whom gave Sherlock strange looks and a wide berth.
“Mrs. Hudson is my…difficult to explain,” Sherlock said.
Some sort of domestic help, John concluded. Sherlock had domestic help. Not that that was surprising. Everyone at this place probably did.
Sherlock stopped in front of John’s door and confidently opened it with a key.
John’s eyes widened. “Wait. You have a key to my room?”
“Of course I do. How else would I get in and out?” Sherlock was already in the room, messily clearing space on the desk and setting his plank of poisonous mold down. He paused and looked back at John. “Does that bother you?”
“I…” said John, because Sherlock did have a point about getting to the laboratory part of John’s bedroom. John still didn’t understand how he’d been talked into having a laboratory part of his bedroom in the first place, but he found himself saying, “No going in and out in the middle of the night.”
Sherlock considered. “Much.”
“What?”
“No going in and out in the middle of the night much.”
“Sherlock, I’ll be trying to sleep.”
“But one never knows when scientific inspiration might strike, John.”
“No going in and out in the middle of the night, Sherlock.”
Sherlock shrugged a bit and made a noncommittal noise and turned back to his plank, and John thought he could already tell that Sherlock had just decided that he could go in and out in the middle of the night as much as he wished.
“Also,” said John, moving into the room toward the luggage on his bed and deciding he ought to unpack, “I’m not sleeping with poisonous mold in my room. You can keep that in your bedroom, ta very much.”
Sherlock waved his hand about, concentrating on peering at some of the mold through his microscope.
John walked over to the dresser and opened the drawer and sighed. “Sherlock.”
“Oh. Yes. I needed space for my socks.”
“You don’t have enough space for your socks in your own dresser?” John asked.
“No,” said Sherlock, absently, as if that answered the question fully.
John sighed again and started to push the socks aside to make room for his own.
“Careful,” said Sherlock. “They’re in an index. If you leave your socks for me, I’ll work them into the index for you.”
“I don’t need my socks to be in an index.”
“Sock indices are important, John.”
“No, they’re not. And I’m not sharing socks with you.”
“Be that way,” said Sherlock, and John looked at him and told himself it was thoroughly irrational to feel like he was the selfish one for not wanting to share his socks.
“You must be Sherlock Holmes,” said a voice behind John, and John turned, and Sherlock looked up from his microscope.
A man in a suit was leaning against John’s doorjamb, arms crossed, looking at Sherlock with a wry expression on his face. He wasn’t terribly old, John thought, late twenties, maybe thirty, with brown hair and brown eyes and a faintly indulgent air to him.
“Who are you?” Sherlock demanded.
“Your new tutor,” the man responded, sounding amused.
“What? But what happened to Ackerley?”
“This is awkward,” said the man, “but apparently the headmaster failed to consult you before making staffing decisions.” The man’s face was serious with mock concern.
Sherlock did not look the least bit amused.
The man finally turned to John, his face losing the drollness, shifting into pleasant sincerity. “You must be John Watson. Welcome to Eton. I’m Mr. Lestrade, and I’m afraid I’m not your tutor, but I am your biology master.”
He extended a hand, and John shook it carefully, wanting to make a good impression, which he wasn’t sure he did considering his room presently contained poisonous mold and a filthy Sherlock Holmes.
“Now,” said Lestrade. “You’ve both missed supper. The house master wasn’t pleased, but I assured him you must both have an excellent reason for being absent.”
“Sherlock was giving me a tour,” John said, truthfully. “He didn’t want me to be humiliated by having to go with the junior boys.”
“How kind of him,” said Lestrade, taking in the state of Sherlock’s clothing. “And this tour was archeological in nature, was it?”
Sherlock scowled.
Lestrade, to John’s surprise, chuckled. “Go and eat,” he said. “And be on time for your schools tomorrow so that I don’t already get a reputation for being too lenient.”
“I am never on time for anything,” Sherlock announced, superiorly.
“So I’ve heard,” remarked Lestrade. “I am very much looking forward to our many detentions together.” Lestrade winked before he pushed himself off of the jamb and walked away.
Sherlock let out an angry breath. “Well, he’s insufferable and unacceptable.”
“He seemed nice,” John said, mildly. “I’d let you sit here and sulk about him, except that your tour of Eton left out the important detail of where I can find the food he was talking about.”
“Fine,” Sherlock relented. “We’ll go eat.” Sherlock stood.
“But first you move the poisonous mold to your room,” said John.
Sherlock huffed with impatience. But he did carry the plank to his bedroom.
Next Chapter
Author -
earlgreytea68Rating - General (eventually as high as Adult, which will be adjusted on a chapter-by-chapter basis)
Characters - John, Sherlock, Lestrade
Spoilers - Through "The Reichenbach Fall"
Disclaimer - I don't own them and I don't make money off of them, but I don't like to dwell on that, so let's move on.
Summary - Sherlock Holmes, schoolboy. Yeah, that basically sums it up.
Author's Notes - Thank yous! To
flawedamythystandsensiblecatfor the Britpick; to the readers who read as this was being written, includingchicklet73; and toarctacuda, who uncomplainingly betas massive amounts of fic. Chapter 1 - Chapter 2 - Chapter 3 - Chapter 4
Part II
Chapter Five
September 1992
John Watson had wanted Eton to be the sort of place where he could just…blend in. Fly under the radar a bit. Not be noticed. He hadn’t thought it would be, but he had wanted it to be that way. He had told himself that when he had been packing up to go, trying to ignore the views of his mother, who thought he was reaching far beyond his station and should know his place. A Watson at Eton? she had said to him. They’ll know you’re an imposter immediately. He wasn’t an imposter, of course. He had gained entrance fair and square, but the curious looks he kept getting as he wandered, looking for his house, definitely made him feel like an imposter. And like he was doing a poor job of blending in.
“You look lost,” another student finally said to him. “Do you need some help finding a house?”
John wished he hadn’t looked so obviously lost. He wished he’d looked merely like he’d been out for a stroll. Enjoying himself. With his luggage dragging along behind him. Oh, bloody hell, he obviously looked lost.
“I…yes,” he said, deciding it was stupid to deny it. “I’m looking for Holland House.”
“Oh, that’s easy. It’s just there.” The student pointed at a building nestled just beyond the building they were standing in front of, and John felt like an idiot for not having realized that.
“Cheers,” he said to the student, trying a self-assured smile of I don’t feel like an idiot or anything like that.
“Don’t mention it. I’m Mike Stamford.” He stuck a hand out.
John was slightly relieved. This, he thought, was almost like making a friend. He took the offered hand and shook it. “John Watson.”
“What year are you?” Mike asked it curiously.
“Last year,” John answered.
Mike tilted his head, looking more curious, but only said, “So am I, so I suppose I’ll see you around.” He headed off, clearly with an engagement to go somewhere, meet people he already knew, settle into his last year in a familiar place.
John suddenly wondered if he’d gone absolutely mad for insisting upon this.
He dragged his luggage over to the building Mike had indicated, which was a grand, imposing two-story building with ivy creeping distinguishedly over its walls, and John looked at the rows of symmetrical windows and thought of the council estate flat he’d come from in comparison. He still felt absolutely mad for doing this, but he stared at this new home of his and thought to himself, You’re at Eton. And he didn’t feel any more confident, but he felt more determined not to let anyone know that about him.
The door to the bedroom he’d been told was his was standing open, and there was someone in it. In fact, there was more than someone in it. There were a lot of somethings in it, too. The room was a towering mess of…John didn’t know what. It was almost too much to catalogue. Unsteady piles of books and newspapers and magazines. Petri dishes and flasks littered over every flat surface. What looked very much like a human skull.
“Did you want something?” demanded the someone in the room, without looking up, and John tore his gaze off of the human skull and looked back to the person in the room. A classmate, John assumed, leaning over a microscope set up on the desk by the window, making adjustments to its focus.
“I… There must be some mistake. Sorry,” said John, feeling like an idiot for the hundredth time that day.
“No mistake.” He scribbled something on a piece of paper. “This is your room.”
John had just been confirming that for himself. Unless there was some mix-up with the school administration, this was definitely the room number he’d written down. He looked back at the room’s occupant, who was now sitting back in the desk chair and regarding him with frank interest. He was dressed in most of the Eton uniform, only tie-less, which made John feel distinctly underdressed. Then again, everything about him made John feel distinctly underdressed, as if maybe John’s entire person needed to be rethought, ironed out. There was something dramatic and otherworldly about this person in his room. He had cheekbones so dramatically high that they should have given him an odd, alien look but instead managed to merely be arrestingly intriguing. His mouth was such a dramatic bow shape that it seemed as if it couldn’t possibly be real, and yet it managed not to be foolish looking but paradoxically aristocratic. His eyes were some pale color John couldn’t pin down from the distance he was at, but whatever they were, they were sharp, and his hair was a tumble of dark, unruly curls. Everything about him seemed overdramatic and unnecessary and memorable and commanding. John felt, in comparison, absolutely laughable. He wondered if these were the sorts of creatures that existed at Eton, and if he was going to be tossed out for not being Byronesque enough.
The unknown intruder in his bedroom steepled together ridiculously long, elegant fingers and tapped them briefly against his unlikely mouth and then said, abruptly, “Some sort of delicious blackmail. I can’t wait to find out what it is.”
John blinked, his hand tightening slightly around his luggage. “Sorry?”
“You’re new here. In your last year. New in your last year? That never happens. And from a council estate and a state school, no less. Even if you were the cleverest human being to ever have been born there would need to be something else at work for you to be here.”
John, frowning, started to tell him that this was all none of his business.
“Don’t tell me,” the boy cut him off. “I want to figure it out for myself.”
John grew more irritated. “I wasn’t going to tell you anything.”
“Ah, so there’s something to tell,” concluded the boy, triumphantly.
John inhaled in frustration. “It isn’t any of your business. How did you know all that stuff, anyway?”
The boy made a dismissive noise. “Hardly a difficult deduction, any of that. I’m Sherlock Holmes.”
He had a posh, ridiculous name, John thought, annoyed, to go with his posh, ridiculous looks and his posh, ridiculous voice. John dragged his luggage through the detritus on the floor.
“Careful,” said Sherlock Holmes, sharply, as he tipped over a taxidermied squirrel.
“What are you doing in my room?” John demanded, finally making it all the way to the bed, which was covered with papers on which were scribbled equations for something.
“It’s my laboratory,” answered Sherlock Holmes.
John looked at him in disbelief.
“Well, it’s not like you were using it,” Sherlock pointed out, with a superior sniff. “And I needed the space.”
“Don’t you have a bedroom?”
“Of course. I’m just next door.”
“Brilliant,” said John. “Then we’ll just move all this stuff next door.”
“We can’t possibly.”
“I don’t see any reason why not.”
“My room can’t look like this. I’d get in trouble, and I get in rather too much trouble here already. You will never get in trouble for this. You have some sort of delicious blackmail that we can use to our advantage.”
“We?” echoed John. “Our?”
Sherlock Holmes nodded once. “Of course. Now that we share this room.”
“No,” said John. “We don’t share this room. This is my room.”
“It’s your bedroom and my laboratory. Hence, we share the room.”
“It isn’t your laboratory,” John insisted. “It’s my bedroom. Full stop.”
“It’s both.”
“How is it both?”
“It has laboratory equipment, and it has a bed.”
“A bed that is covered in… Is that chewing gum?”
Sherlock stood up for the first time. He was taller than John, which irritated John a bit more, more of the posh, elegant lines that Sherlock Holmes seemed to be entirely composed of. He gracefully stepped past John and began gathering up all the stuff on the bed. “It’s for an experiment. I’ll, you know, tidy a bit. Of course.”
Sherlock actually sounded a bit embarrassed, and John felt like this was a small victory. “Yes,” he agreed, putting his luggage on the bed. “Tidy it. And nothing on the bed, the bed is mine.”
Sherlock nodded, dropping the stuff that had been on the bed into one of the other piles in the room, and John suddenly realized that he’d apparently agreed to allow the rest of the room that wasn’t his bed to be Sherlock’s laboratory. How had that happened?
John sighed and watched as Sherlock ineffectively did something John supposed Sherlock considered to be “tidying up,” which in reality appeared to be moving things from one pile to another.
“What sort of experiment do you need a rubber chicken for?” John asked.
“Oh, no,” Sherlock answered, with a fleeting smile. “That was just a prank.” He straightened and stood back and looked satisfied, as if this were quite tidied up enough.
John disagreed and was about to say so when Sherlock spoke again.
“You should come with me.”
“Come with you where?” asked John, because he wasn’t sure what mad thing this bloke might suggest.
“They’ve scheduled you to go on the tour of Eton but that would be with the new boys.”
“I am new.”
“No, no, I mean the junior boys, the thirteen-year-olds. You don’t want to take your first tour of Eton with the housemaster and the new boys, you’ll learn nothing.”
John actually thought Sherlock had a good point there.
“So I’ll give you a tour of Eton and, anyway, I want your advice on something.”
“My advice?” asked John quizzically.
“Yes, as a scientist.” Sherlock was heading out of the room as he said this.
John said, “Hang on. What makes you think I know anything about science?”
Sherlock stuck his head back into the room and grinned at him. “You’re letting me keep a laboratory in your bedroom. Now hurry up.” He looked as if he were close to dancing with glee. “This could be dangerous.”
***
John couldn’t make up his mind whether Sherlock’s tour of Eton was extremely helpful or astonishingly useless. It mainly consisted of Sherlock walking very fast and John keeping up while Sherlock pointed to distant buildings and said things like, “That’s the building with all the boring divs about things that don’t matter,” and “Avoid that building. I’m fairly sure everyone in it is dying slowly of mercury poisoning, but no one will listen to me.”
John made a mental note of where the mercury building was and followed Sherlock across a field, toward a clump of trees silhouetted by the long September twilight. “Are you my year?” he asked, because this would be kind of nice if he could just follow Sherlock around for a bit until he got his own bearings.
“No, sixth,” Sherlock answered, never pausing in his stride. “But we may have some divs together. I take the divs of the year ahead of me.”
“Why do you do that?” asked John.
“Because they think it challenges me. Because they are idiots.” His voice dripped with disdain.
“Oh,” John realized, drawing this conclusion: “Because you’re much cleverer than everyone else here. Of course.”
Sherlock stopped walking and drew up to his full height and frowned at him. “I shouldn’t even be in school,” he proclaimed.
John couldn’t help being amused. “Why are you then?”
Sherlock’s frown turned darker, and he swept away, back on his path to the trees.
John smiled and followed. “Where are we going?” he asked.
“To the river, where it is secluded and quiet and we won’t be disturbed.”
“What are we doing at the river?”
Sherlock stopped walking again and peered down at him. “Are you frightened?”
The question surprised John. He looked around the empty field warily. “Should I be?”
“You’ve just met me. I’ve just told you that I’m taking you someplace secluded. And you should know that I know innumerable ways to kill a person. I’ve been revising intensely.”
John cocked an eyebrow at him. “No offense, mate, but I grew up on a council estate, and you’re the poshest thing I’ve ever seen, so I think probably I could take you.”
Sherlock narrowed his eyes a bit, but he didn’t seem displeased, more… Actually, John had no idea how to read the expression on his face. After a moment, Sherlock started walking again and John followed again.
“What makes you think I don’t know how to carry myself in a scuffle?” Sherlock asked, as they walked.
“Do you?” asked John, instead of answering.
“One does learn survival skills, John,” replied Sherlock. “Even at Eton.” They were at the river now, and Sherlock commenced to enthusiastically scrambling about in the mud at the bank for something.
John winced as Sherlock knelt to get a better angle, thinking of the state of the expensive Eton trousers Sherlock was wearing. Everything about the school cost an obscene amount of money, but clearly Sherlock had never thought about anything like that in his life. He was currently crawling through muck in a uniform the cost of which John couldn’t even have contemplated mere months earlier.
Sherlock snagged his shirt on a protruding branch, muttered something that sounded like “Bugger,” and continued crawling around the trunk of one of the trees, perilously close to tumbling off the bank.
“Be careful, would you?” said John, who didn’t fancy having to go into the river to save Sherlock and was hoping Sherlock knew how to swim.
“I’m fine,” Sherlock assured him, and then leaned far over the bank to grab something that he pulled up with a look of triumph in his eyes. “Aha!”
It was a fairly sizeable plank of wood, the length of Sherlock’s arm, and he dragged it over to where John was still standing.
John ignored the plank, looking at the state of Sherlock’s uniform. “My God, you’re a mess.”
Sherlock glanced down at it negligently. “All in a day’s work, John. Look!”
“What work?” said John, and turned his attention to the plank. The light was beginning to dwindle, and John couldn’t see what he was supposed to be concerned about. “What is this?”
“It’s mold, John.” Sherlock beamed with pleasure, pointing at three distinct growths of mold on the plank.
“Yes. Well. Dark, wet, warm: perfect conditions for the growth of mold.”
“Except that I grew this mold.”
“How did you grow it? The plank grew it, and the mold itself. You didn’t grow it.”
Sherlock looked annoyed. “I started it on its way. Just a little nudge. Placed the mold on the plank and took it here to see if it would grow.”
“When did you do this?” John asked, thinking that the Michaelmas term had just started. It suddenly occurred to him. “Do you not go home between terms?”
“Of course I go home between terms. I planted this last half.”
“You left an experiment before you went home for the summer?”
“Of course.”
“How did you get my room such a mess if you’ve just got back yourself?” John asked.
“What are you talking about? I was keeping the room neat for you!”
Sherlock looked as if he meant that sincerely, so John dropped it and looked back to the mold. “Excellent. Well done, you. You’ve grown mold.”
“It’s aspergillus,” said Sherlock, proudly.
“You’ve grown poisonous mold,” John amended, and took a step away from the plank.
“I knew you would know what that was.” Sherlock looked delighted. “Don’t worry, this won’t kill you. But I was curious about how easy it would be to grow. If, for instance, one wanted to kill someone, could one theoretically grow aspergillus mold and use that as the murder weapon? Might be a neat way to do it, wouldn’t you think?”
John considered. “Yes, actually. Not foolproof. I mean, not as straightforward as, say, arsenic.”
“But less traceable,” Sherlock pointed out. “There are pros and cons to all murder weapons.”
“You’d have to have an awful lot of it to kill an adult. Adults can withstand a large amount of aflatoxin. And even then there’d be no guarantee…” John trailed off, abruptly realizing exactly what he was discussing, and looked from the mold to Sherlock. “Is there someone you want to kill?” he asked, quizzically, because this all seemed very strange.
Sherlock looked startled by the question. “No. Well, I mean, of course, there are people who annoy me, but no, I am not actively trying to kill anyone.”
“Then…” John gestured to the aspergillus mold.
Sherlock glanced at it. “What?”
“Why are you growing poisonous mold?”
Sherlock looked at John as if he were the stupidest person Sherlock had ever encountered. “I already told you. It’s an experiment. Come along.” Sherlock tucked the plank under his arm and headed back in the direction they’d come.
John made a face. “Now you’ve got aspergillus mold all over your shirt.”
“You want to be a doctor,” said Sherlock.
John blinked in surprise and hurried to catch up to him. “How did you know that?”
“Simple enough deduction. You know a great deal about what a mold will do to the human immune system. Goes beyond mild interest in human health. Plus, you have caretaker tendencies. You’ve agreed to let me keep a laboratory in your bedroom because you don’t want me to get in trouble, and yet you’ve just met me, and you keep fretting about my clothing and whether or not I’m going to fall into the river. Yes. Definite caretaker tendencies. Definitely a doctor. And that makes sense. That’s why you’re here, suddenly, now, in your last year of school. Why start a new school in your last year? Because you want to be a doctor, and Eton will get you into a better university and from there a better medical college. But you’ve always wanted to be a doctor, no one learns about the effect of mold on a human immune system as part of a summer’s lark. And yet you haven’t started Eton until now. You’re clever, but you wouldn’t even have tried for Eton before, so something changed this summer. Or early this year. Money, quite a great deal of it. You are not fastidious—that much is obvious from what you’re wearing—so at least half of the worry over the state of my clothing is over your knowledge of how expensive the uniform here is. You’ve enough money to be here, not on a scholarship, but you’re not used to that amount of money. But a sudden influx of money wouldn’t be enough on its own to get a council estate boy into Eton in his last year, no, that money has an Eton connection I just haven’t figured out yet, but I’ll get there.”
“That was…brilliant,” John said.
Sherlock stopped walking abruptly and stared down at him. “Really?”
John tilted his head at that reaction. Surely Sherlock was aware that had been brilliant, that was surely why he’d done it in the first place, to show off. “Yes, really.”
“That’s not what people normally say.”
“What do people normally say?”
“Piss off.”
This startled laughter out of John, and Sherlock gave him a quick, tentative smile that was half-pleased and half-surprised, and then turned and started walking again.
John, following him, thought that it was no wonder Sherlock had had to learn survival skills at Eton, but decided not to bring that up. He said, instead, “What time is it?” wondering if they’d missed supper.
“Yes, sorry about that,” said Sherlock, clearly answering the question John hadn’t voiced. “This is why it would be more convenient if I were permitted to bring Mrs. Hudson here with me. She would fetch us food.”
“Who’s Mrs. Hudson?” asked John. They had reached Holland House and were now dodging a number of students in the hallways, all of whom gave Sherlock strange looks and a wide berth.
“Mrs. Hudson is my…difficult to explain,” Sherlock said.
Some sort of domestic help, John concluded. Sherlock had domestic help. Not that that was surprising. Everyone at this place probably did.
Sherlock stopped in front of John’s door and confidently opened it with a key.
John’s eyes widened. “Wait. You have a key to my room?”
“Of course I do. How else would I get in and out?” Sherlock was already in the room, messily clearing space on the desk and setting his plank of poisonous mold down. He paused and looked back at John. “Does that bother you?”
“I…” said John, because Sherlock did have a point about getting to the laboratory part of John’s bedroom. John still didn’t understand how he’d been talked into having a laboratory part of his bedroom in the first place, but he found himself saying, “No going in and out in the middle of the night.”
Sherlock considered. “Much.”
“What?”
“No going in and out in the middle of the night much.”
“Sherlock, I’ll be trying to sleep.”
“But one never knows when scientific inspiration might strike, John.”
“No going in and out in the middle of the night, Sherlock.”
Sherlock shrugged a bit and made a noncommittal noise and turned back to his plank, and John thought he could already tell that Sherlock had just decided that he could go in and out in the middle of the night as much as he wished.
“Also,” said John, moving into the room toward the luggage on his bed and deciding he ought to unpack, “I’m not sleeping with poisonous mold in my room. You can keep that in your bedroom, ta very much.”
Sherlock waved his hand about, concentrating on peering at some of the mold through his microscope.
John walked over to the dresser and opened the drawer and sighed. “Sherlock.”
“Oh. Yes. I needed space for my socks.”
“You don’t have enough space for your socks in your own dresser?” John asked.
“No,” said Sherlock, absently, as if that answered the question fully.
John sighed again and started to push the socks aside to make room for his own.
“Careful,” said Sherlock. “They’re in an index. If you leave your socks for me, I’ll work them into the index for you.”
“I don’t need my socks to be in an index.”
“Sock indices are important, John.”
“No, they’re not. And I’m not sharing socks with you.”
“Be that way,” said Sherlock, and John looked at him and told himself it was thoroughly irrational to feel like he was the selfish one for not wanting to share his socks.
“You must be Sherlock Holmes,” said a voice behind John, and John turned, and Sherlock looked up from his microscope.
A man in a suit was leaning against John’s doorjamb, arms crossed, looking at Sherlock with a wry expression on his face. He wasn’t terribly old, John thought, late twenties, maybe thirty, with brown hair and brown eyes and a faintly indulgent air to him.
“Who are you?” Sherlock demanded.
“Your new tutor,” the man responded, sounding amused.
“What? But what happened to Ackerley?”
“This is awkward,” said the man, “but apparently the headmaster failed to consult you before making staffing decisions.” The man’s face was serious with mock concern.
Sherlock did not look the least bit amused.
The man finally turned to John, his face losing the drollness, shifting into pleasant sincerity. “You must be John Watson. Welcome to Eton. I’m Mr. Lestrade, and I’m afraid I’m not your tutor, but I am your biology master.”
He extended a hand, and John shook it carefully, wanting to make a good impression, which he wasn’t sure he did considering his room presently contained poisonous mold and a filthy Sherlock Holmes.
“Now,” said Lestrade. “You’ve both missed supper. The house master wasn’t pleased, but I assured him you must both have an excellent reason for being absent.”
“Sherlock was giving me a tour,” John said, truthfully. “He didn’t want me to be humiliated by having to go with the junior boys.”
“How kind of him,” said Lestrade, taking in the state of Sherlock’s clothing. “And this tour was archeological in nature, was it?”
Sherlock scowled.
Lestrade, to John’s surprise, chuckled. “Go and eat,” he said. “And be on time for your schools tomorrow so that I don’t already get a reputation for being too lenient.”
“I am never on time for anything,” Sherlock announced, superiorly.
“So I’ve heard,” remarked Lestrade. “I am very much looking forward to our many detentions together.” Lestrade winked before he pushed himself off of the jamb and walked away.
Sherlock let out an angry breath. “Well, he’s insufferable and unacceptable.”
“He seemed nice,” John said, mildly. “I’d let you sit here and sulk about him, except that your tour of Eton left out the important detail of where I can find the food he was talking about.”
“Fine,” Sherlock relented. “We’ll go eat.” Sherlock stood.
“But first you move the poisonous mold to your room,” said John.
Sherlock huffed with impatience. But he did carry the plank to his bedroom.
Next Chapter
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
no subject
Date: 2012-10-05 01:53 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-10-05 03:48 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-10-05 01:57 am (UTC)And I may have let out a bit of a squeak when I realize we were going to meet John.
no subject
Date: 2012-10-05 03:48 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-10-05 02:15 am (UTC)Mind, I did want to cuff Sherlock around the head a few times for what he is doing to poor John. :D
Ooo will Sebastien make an appearance? I bet John is going to punch him if he does dare to show his face!
no subject
Date: 2012-10-05 03:49 am (UTC)And poor John. What's a Watson who's not being bothered by a Holmes?
no subject
Date: 2012-10-05 02:31 am (UTC)Lestrade as a tutor/schoolmaster? That's different, but could be fun!
Just one thing: medicine is an undergraduate-entry degree in the UK, so John doesn't need to do a first degree before applying to do medicine. He would just apply to his preferred universities that have degrees in medicine - if you want to stick with canon for that one, he'd apply to Queen Mary for Barts and the London School of Medicine and Dentistry: http://www.smd.qmul.ac.uk/
no subject
Date: 2012-10-05 03:49 am (UTC)I'm glad you're enjoying this!
no subject
Date: 2012-10-05 02:44 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-10-05 03:56 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-10-05 02:56 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-10-05 03:57 am (UTC)You're right, I bet John gives into the force of Sherlock and his sock index fairly soon.
Great icon!
no subject
Date: 2012-10-05 05:31 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-10-08 03:28 am (UTC)The circumstances of John being at Eton are completely unrealistic, but I needed to get him there somehow, I felt, in order for this fic to work, so I made something up. And, if I did it right, hopefully the inevitability of The Two Of Them Together comes through. :-)
no subject
Date: 2012-10-05 01:26 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-10-08 03:28 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-10-05 02:44 pm (UTC)“Yes, sorry about that,” said Sherlock, clearly answering the question John hadn’t voiced. “This is why it would be more convenient if I were permitted to bring Mrs. Hudson here with me. She would fetch us food.”
What a wonderfully entitled rich kid thing to say. He's not even meaning it to be anything other than a genuine wouldn't life be better if Mrs Hudson were here (a true enough statement) but it's so full of so many assumptions that he wouldn't even realize he's making.
The bit at the end with moving the mold seems really important. John might be easy going and likely to cave to most of Sherlock's craziness, but he's not a door mat. There are lines and he will make you not cross them.
no subject
Date: 2012-10-08 03:29 am (UTC)Sherlock *is* an entitled rich kid. I mean, I love him dearly, I do, but he is terribly entitled, and I wanted that to come across from John's POV.
And yes, I wanted to show that John might be a bit more taken with Sherlock than he realizes at this point, but he still has LIMITS, and he will fight for the ones that really matter to him.
no subject
Date: 2012-10-05 04:13 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-10-08 03:35 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-10-05 05:05 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-10-08 03:36 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-10-05 07:06 pm (UTC)*chortle*
You've absolutely captured their 'voices' here - the men they will become. Especially that long speech of Sherlock's and all his deductions.
And already John's settling into starting to accept him!
no subject
Date: 2012-10-08 03:36 am (UTC)And everything about Sherlock is a bit posh and ridiculous. ;-)
no subject
Date: 2012-10-07 12:30 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-10-08 04:06 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-10-07 03:40 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-10-09 03:20 am (UTC)