Chapter Text
Sherlock Holmes, believe it or not, was once a teenager, and was just as arrogant then as he is now. He hated secondary school almost as much as he hated stupidity, bad tobacco or poor standard violinists, but nonetheless was forced to attend. Sherlock Holmes was my roommate at boarding school.
My first memory of him was when he walked into our dorm, his duffel bag over his shoulder. He placed it by his bed, then pulled out and lit a cigarette. I watched in surprise as he took long drags from it casually, the smoke floating in whisps into the air, and I wrinkled my nose at the scent.
Sherlock looked much like he did now, but with teenage imperfections on his face. The same dark, curled hair, those cheekbones you could cut open an envelope with. Even sitting with his legs crossed I could tell he was tall, much taller than myself. His elbows were propped up on his knees and held the cigarette between long fingers while watching the smoke with a pleasured expression.
After six drags of his cigarette, he noticed me sitting on the bed parallel to his. I was half a year into my A-Levels, and while my time in Lower Sixth was somewhat lonely, I was glad to have my own room for the half-term leading to where we are now. Sherlock was the same age as me, judging by the colour of his tie - red - in our grey and black school uniform. In most schools, members of the Sixth Former could wear their own clothes, but in my school - a private boarding school in the centre of London - we were required to wear the uniform. I felt out of depth usually: my parents weren’t rich or royalty, but in the army, so they were travelling. I felt even more out of place around Sherlock.
Sherlock Holmes regarded me with an air of arrogance mixed with obscure curiosity as if I was a bluebottle fly that wasn’t bothering him but could be. My mind of an awkward teenager didn’t know how to react, so I settled with a strained “hey.”
“Hello,” Sherlock replied after his seventh drag, the smoke escaping from his mouth like a smoke machine on stage. From his first word, his accent was very British and rather upper-class.
“Hi,” I said, offering a nervous smile. “I’m John Watson.”
“Yes, I saw your name on my information sheet. From first impressions, you’re anxious with low self-esteem. You’re a virgin, haven’t got drunk before, never smoked, never dated. You seem like an ideal roommate,” Sherlock said, the words sliding out in rapid succession, well-pronounced, and I couldn’t help but be irritated at the man I had just met. I opened my mouth to speak, but Sherlock Holmes wasn’t bloody finished. “You have an older sibling who you used to be close with but since then has slipped away from you, because you don’t talk to their friends and you’re really not that charismatic. Or maybe not so much to people you don’t know. As humans adapt to things, you adapt to people over time. I’m assuming you have a sister, as you don’t seem like a brother has beaten the living daylights out of you. ”
I couldn’t help but bite back a scowl, but equally, he was right in every respect. It was infuriating, but frankly incredible. Maybe in time, I'd grow to find it solely incredible.
“You’re right,” I said in wonder, staring at him, dumbfounded.
“I know,” Sherlock replied, before holding out his cigarette between long fingers. “Would you like to change one of those variables?” he asked.
“No, no thanks,” I replied, pushing Sherlock’s hand away apprehensively, who shrugged.
“Suit yourself.”
“Are you even allowed to smoke in here?” I asked after a moment, and Sherlock simply shrugged.
“You won’t tell, will you?” he asked, his question more of a statement. “No. You wouldn’t.”
…
After that interaction, I didn’t see much of Sherlock Holmes for a while, but it gave me a lot of time to think about him. His bed was always well made, but he was always out of the dorm before I woke and back while I was asleep. He woke up after I did, and I could tell he wasn’t a morning person, with his unintelligible groans and his cigarette every morning. Luckily, he’d taken to smoking out of the window.
Peculiarly, I hadn’t shared any lessons with Sherlock. I’d seen him around, in corridors, looking mysterious and ominous in the expansive corridors. He never seemed to be lost, despite him just joining the school. Or maybe I was wrong and he’d been there a while, and I hadn’t noticed him. Who knows?
The next time I saw him was in the library: he was hidden behind a pile of books, in fact, three piles of books. I took notice of some of the titles: he was reading biology books and then scribbling rapidly down in a leather-bound notebook, his handwriting quick and scraggly, but legible, with long curled strokes. He looked up as I approached, his eyes slightly red around the irises.
“Oh!” he exclaimed. “What was it, Joseph? Jonah--?”
“John Watson,” I corrected, and Sherlock clapped his hands excitedly, pulling up a chair next to him and motioning for me to sit down.
“Alright, Watson. You’re taking biology, correct?” he asked, raising a quizzical eyebrow.
“Yes, I am.”
“Now, help me with this,” Sherlock said, motioning to his paper with his annoyingly neat but characteristic handwriting. I scanned his notes, which were about the theory of the impact of bruising after death: hypothetically, Sherlock was saying that if bruising could still happen to a corpse after death, it would be influential in a homicide case. He then gave multiple examples, which I didn’t read into, but glanced up at him, as Sherlock was awaiting my answer.
“Looks like it would work,” I said optimistically, knowing I should stay on good terms with a man who could tell my whole romantic life from a glance.
“Are you up for testing it?” Sherlock asked, raising an eyebrow mischievously. I hadn’t been acquainted with him for long, but I could tell he was scheming.
I hesitated before answering: “How?”
Sherlock grinned. “I have a few ideas.”
…
I hadn’t broken any rules since I’d joined my school; I didn’t want to picture the look of disappointment on my parents' faces if they knew I was sneaking out after curfew to conduct science experiments on the corpses of frogs in the biology room.
Sherlock and I were walking through the corridors, which were enclosed in darkness. He’d somehow gathered the staff timetable for hallway watch (which was actually real in the late eighties) and he was abusing it to its full potential. I don’t know how he managed to get it, and I thought this over to myself while we walked to the biology rooms, jumping at every shadow. I could feel his gaze linger on me as I did so, annoying and patronising. Once, we turned a corner and scared a bird outside; I almost jumped out of my skin. I heard a snicker come from Sherlock’s lips and could feel a blush form on my face. Luckily, he couldn’t see it in the darkness.
Once we reached the entrance to the biology room, Sherlock knelt on his knee to the level of the door, pulled a hairpin and a pointed-looking object out of his pocket, and pushed it gently into the lock.
Is he picking a lock right now? I thought to myself, just as the door clicked, and Sherlock pressed down on the handle and let himself into the science lab.
“Wow,” I said, somewhat awestruck, as he closed the door behind us. Sherlock Holmes simply smiled somewhat smugly at my amazement, before turning to the science prep room and picking that lock as well. “Do you do this often?” I asked as he worked before the door clicked open again.
“Only when I’m bored. It’s usually chemistry,” Sherlock replied. “Did you not think about why I got back into our dorm so late? No, no, I suppose you didn’t.”
One moment Sherlock and I were having a conversation, and the next he placed a dead frog on the table in front of me. I had done required practicals on animals before, but I could not get over the stench, every time. Sherlock, however, seemed unbothered, naturally, as he began hitting it with a ruler. A plastic one, if it makes anyone feel better.
He was beating the remains of this poor frog (for science) for a good five minutes, before placing the ruler down, thank the Lord, and turning to me. “Set a timer, Watson,” he said, somewhat out of breath, and I nodded obligingly, before watching as Sherlock walked over to the sinks and washed his hands in one of them.
“You didn’t wear safety goggles,” I pointed out in a lazy attempt at humour.
“You entered the science lab without teacher supervision,” Sherlock replied, walking back over and taking the pen and notebook out of my hands and scribbling down notes, observing the frog eagerly.
“I suppose I did.” I leaned against the table next to him, the room still in darkness, but I don’t think Sherlock really minded, as he wrote and observed with the amount of interest and precision I would’ve thought it was full daylight.
“Are you bored a lot?” I asked, simply making conversation.
“Say it as a statement,” Sherlock requested, and I tried not to seem confused.
“You’re bored a lot,” I said, as if the words were unfamiliar on my tongue. But then it clicked. The answer to my question earlier. “Oh.”
But Sherlock looked up at me and smiled. It looked oddly formidable as he stood over the dead frog, and I found myself laughing.
“What?” Sherlock asked his expression a humorous one.
“This is like a nightly activity,” I said, nodding.
“Yes, yes, and we should leave before the teachers find us. I’ve got all I need.” Sherlock closed his notebook, picked up the tray with the frog on, and quickly put it back in the lab tech’s room. He then silently motioned for me to follow him as he opened the door silently and we disappeared through the corridors.
When we got back to our dorm, I felt oddly satisfied. Sherlock sat down cross-legged on
his bed and opened his notebook in front of him, reading over his results.
“Oh, Watson, that was very successful,” he remarked as he rested his head on his hands.
“Was it?” I remarked, leaning back against the wall as I sat on my bed.
“Definitely.” Sherlock continued reading, his eyes flicking over his answers inspectingly.
We sat in a comfortable silence for a couple of minutes. There was too much adrenaline for me to sleep, so I was just lying there as Sherlock read through his findings. But eventually, I worked up the courage to break the calm quiteless over the room.
“So,” I began, keeping my voice straight. “Where did you… Come from?”
Bemused, Sherlock glanced at me from over the top of his hands. “I grew up in the countryside near Birmingham, but something tells me this is not what you’re asking.”
I nodded my agreement. “Yeah, no, I mean more like… You kind of just appeared. It’s halfway through the year, and you just joined. I mean, I was enjoying having this room to myself…”
“Of course. Well, the truth is,” Sherlock began, before pausing for a measured moment to weigh up whether to tell me or not: “I got expelled. Back in Third Year. And so my brother and my parents pulled some strings to get me back in here, because, God forbid, I attend a much more interesting school.”
I listened, questions circling in my mind like sharks. “What did you do?”
To my surprise, Sherlock laughed. “I accused another student of murder,” he said simply.
“Just like that?”
“How else? Anyway, I had lots of evidence for the case, anyway,” Sherlock said. “Means, motive, opportunity, along with the whole story of how it happened. I wouldn’t let it go. And so they suspended me. On my suspension, I was still hooked on this case and I found the perpetrator and confronted him, but the school intervened. Despite that, I’m back,” he concluded, before lighting a cigarette and opening the window.
“Wow,” I replied, somewhat awestruck. “And nobody took your murder case seriously?”
“My brother did. But he was disappointed that I tried to take care of it myself. What a twat.” Sherlock gritted his teeth: I could tell that he disliked his brother to some extent. There seemed to be some tension there.
“Ah,” I replied instead of sharing my analysis.
“Mhm.” Sherlock, who ten minutes before this interaction was whipping a frog, was now smoking a cigarette. I thought over what he’d just told me, his story adding depth to his personality somewhat. He intrigued me.