Sunnydale AU: first day

Entry tags:

Sunnydale AU: first day

Bella Swan's first day at Sunnydale High has been fairly unremarkable so far. She's gotten some attention as a new kid, but not much - Sunnydale isn't as big as Phoenix, but it isn't tiny, either. People move here often enough. It's also the first day of the school year, and students are clearly more interested in catching up on things that happened over the summer and figuring out their schedules. Bella, having never been a new student before, had been uncertain of how much attention she should expect, and this outcome suits her just fine.

(There also haven't been many people making the connection between her last name and their chief of police. Bella is proud of Charlie and the job he does, but to hear him tell it, she's the only one in Sunnydale who is. And she has to admit to herself, in the interest of truth, that she had been apprehensive about the negative social attention that could net her if Charlie isn't exaggerating.

to-hack: prioritize pride in Charlie over social self-interest.

She knows, even if other people don't, that Charlie has done everything he can to address the massive flaws in the Sunnydale police department ever since his promotion. That's an important thing to be proud of.)

She hasn't been wandering the halls alone and awkward, either. She has been to Sunnydale before on previous visits to Charlie, after all, and he'd made a habit of scheduling things for her to do during the day while he was at work. She'd been less interested in scheduled activities the past couple of summers, but she still sees a few familiar faces in the hallways, and their owners recognize her too. In English class, just before lunch, she runs into Jessica Stanley. She and Jessica hadn't exactly been friends last year, but they'd met through a mutual friend (who has moved away since; Bella reminds herself to reply to Angela's last email soon) and liked each other well enough; Bella had noted that Jessica had an excellent ear for gossip and an equally good knack for acquiring and remembering same.

Jessica invites Bella to join her and her friends for lunch. Bella is glad to accept, pleased both for the chance to turn acquaintance into a new friendship and to avoid the classic high school movie image of gripping her lunch tray and looking awkwardly for a place to sit.

Jessica's friends are friendly and welcoming, and Jessica's ability to gossip is exactly as Bella remembers it to be. Bella has never judged this negatively, and doesn't do it now; gossip is information, and sitting with Jessica ensures that Bella will be the best-informed new student in Sunnydale High by the end of lunch.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

Sherlock has a small corner table to himself, a copy of Hound of the Baskervilles, an expression of absolute serenity, and a skirt.

It's actually quite a nice skirt. Ankle-length, pleated, charcoal grey. Nothing flashy.

He looks up every so often and glances over all the faces he doesn't recognize. Bella is no more or less interesting to him than the three other students in the room who he has never seen before, or the dozen-odd more whose names he does not know.

Bella is looking around the room as she eats her lunch - Jessica is taking the time to talk to others at the table as well, so it's not as if she's being rude.

Her gaze pauses on the boy in the corner. It's the book that catches her attention first; she's been known to read during lunch herself, a habit she's never seen many other students indulge in. Then her eye travels downward, and -

The angle of the table makes it a bit tricky to tell, but she's pretty sure those aren't just shapeless pants he's wearing.

It's rude to stare.

She does it anyway for a moment, before catching herself. Someone else's sartorial choices are not her concern, she reminds herself. He has made it to lunchtime without being sent home to change out of the skirt, so he's not breaking the dress code; it's a transgression of any number of social norms, but a harmless one; he has the right to wear what he likes and not be singled out for it.

So she stops staring. She's curious now, though, and sharing a table with an obvious source of information to satisfy her curiosity, so she asks,

"Jessica, who's that?"

Jessica follows Bella's gaze and makes a face.

"Oh, don't even, he's just doing it for attention. He calls himself Sherlock Holmes. He even does the accent! How sad is that? Nobody even knows his real name."

That is certainly not the kind of information designed to satisfy a person's curiosity.

"No one knows his real name?" Bella repeats skeptically.

The Stark brothers have been in Sunnydale for at least a couple of years, and their parents were well-known. Bella remembers Charlie talking about the brothers moving to town with a mixture of apprehension (he hadn't been police chief long at that point, and his dealings with the Chandlers had been less than fruitful; he didn't want another difficult famous family to deal with) and paternal concern (obviously thinking, as a father himself, about what his own child would go through upon finding herself orphaned, and applying that to the Starks). She remembers writing the journal entry about it, and resolves to track it down in her archive when she gets home.

It seems terribly implausible that Jessica's claim could be literally true.

"No one," Jessica says, gleefully emphatic. It's been a while since she's had the chance to gossip about Tony Stark's brother. He was a hot topic for some time, but eventually Sherlock did something weird today stopped being news. Having someone new to rehash old information for is fun.

"Beth has this cousin in New York who looked up his birth certificate? And it says Sherlock Holmes right on there. The old one is gone. There's no record that anyone else ever even existed. But everyone knows Howard Stark had problems, maybe his wife let him name Sherlock or something. But Sherlock definitely cracked after they died, he must have. He was already like that when they moved here. They've probably had to bribe a thousand people to keep him out of the mental hospital, but they can afford to. It used to creep me out, but he doesn't do anything gross. He knocked out David Farber on his second day, but David deserved it and he stopped being such an asshole after that. I think he moved to go live with his grandparents or something because he was so humiliated about getting his ass kicked by the crazy kid."

The callousness about Sherlock's parents is unappealing. Not the kind of thing one looks for in a new friend. (Or at least not the kind of thing Bella looks for.) But, Bella thinks, maybe if she'd grown up in a town where people died left and right, she'd be callous about it too.

And that's hardly her priority at the moment, because Jessica just spelled out a big fat challenge.

If Sherlock Holmes was born with another name, Bella is going to do everything she can to find it. The mystery will drive her crazy until she solves it.

She looks at Sherlock again. This time, it's decidedly speculative.

He happens to glance up again, but his gaze passes over her without stopping. If Sherlock made eye contact with everyone who gave him looks at school, speculative or otherwise, he would waste at least an hour of his time every day.

Bella's next class is Biology, which one else at her table has. Jessica gives her directions to the classroom, but the numbering system is confusing and Bella gets turned around a couple of times before she finds it.

She's not tardy, but it's been long enough that all but one seat has been taken. The empty seat is the one next to Sherlock.

Bella would consider this lucky, but if Sherlock's reputation is what Jessica claims - and there's no reason to think Jessica inaccurate - then it's no surprise at all that no one sits with him unless they absolutely have to.

Bella takes the seat, giving him a tentatively friendly smile.

"Good afternoon," he says politely, looking her over to see if there is anything of interest he missed at lunch.

(Bella used lotions to keep her skin from drying out in the dry heat of Arizona, and has yet to give up that habit even though her skin is adjusting nicely to the more forgiving Sunnydale environment. Her favorite one is a subtle freesia scent, and she used it this morning.)

"Hi," she says. "I'm Bella Swan, I'm new here." She does her best to keep it to casual friendliness. He must get his share of overeager curiosity, and if that annoys him, alienating him right away won't do her any favors. You don't have to befriend people to find out about them, but it doesn't hurt, and if they do indeed have the resources to make your search for information difficult, it's wise to stay on their good side.

And even without that motivation, she genuinely does want to avoid being rude. Rudeness is a quality she has worked not to have.

"Sherlock Holmes. But then, I expect you found that out from Miss Stanley, along with the prevailing opinions on my sanity and," his voice turns very dry, "desperate need for the attention of my peers."

Regardless, he returns her smile.

"It is a pleasure to make your acquaintance."

Jessica was right about the accent. Bella can't really speak to its authenticity - she's hardly an expert on English accents - but it doesn't sound obviously fake, like if he stole it from a bad parody or something along those lines.

"Jessica is a veritable fount of information," she agrees. "But I can judge people for myself."

"I invite you to do exactly that. It would be a welcome change."

"I will," Bella promises.

There are certain of Jessica's conclusions that she suspects are sound, but she prefers to confirm or deny things for herself. It's not useful to accept other people's conclusions without examining their accuracy. People are wrong about things all the time, and Bella does not wish to operate based on inaccurate information.

"It's nice to meet you."

"All right, class, settle down."

James gave them a couple extra minutes, since it's the first day and all, but he has get things started eventually.

"I'm James Mayer and I'll be your biology teacher for the year. Let's start with roll call, shall we?"

As he goes through the list of names, Sherlock gets a brief reproving glance; James did try to pass him on the strength of his grades last year, but there's only so much you can do when the administration notices that a student only managed to make it to half your classes.

". . . Isabella Swan - is that Isabella you go by?"

Bella partially represses a smirk when she hears the similarity between Sherlock's accent and Mr Mayer's. Very practical of him to have used a real life model.

She also notices the look the teacher gives Sherlock, which is interesting. He doesn't give a stern-teacher kind of vibe. But if Sherlock has been using his accent as a guide, he must have had at least one class with Mr Mayer before.

"No, I prefer Bella, please."

—Did she notice?

She did.

Observant of her.

"All right."

James makes a note on his roster.

"I bet every teacher's been making you stand up and embarrass yourself with the story of your life, so I'll skip it." He smiles at her, seeing her relief, and continues through the list.

When he finishes calling roll, he says,

"Okay, everyone, look at the person next you and get their email, because they're your lab partner for the year. No fussing, you can survive one period without being attached at the hip to someone else. If you have a real problem with it, see me after class."

Sherlock has no objections!

He fishes a pen out of his pocket and writes the following on a scrap of paper:

f54d7f00f6092fedb4e42f23458f2722@gmail.com

His handwriting is exquisitely precise. Well, with an email address like that, it had better be.

"I use my school-issued one for schoolwork," Bella tells him as she accepts the scrap of paper. "I don't know what it is here yet, but I'll give it to you when I do." Charlie has drilled the idea of being careful with her personal contact information into her head since she was little. Being stingy with her personal email is a resultant habit that she sees no reason to break. There may not be much point in it with someone who will probably end up at her house more than once during the year to work on a project, but it offers no drawback that makes the effort of breaking the habit worthwhile.

She makes a mental note to stop by the computer lab to find out the Sunnydale High address format and make sure the account is set up and working.

She glances at the paper Sherlock handed her in case he does the same thing, and her eyebrows rise a little.

"You really don't like being spammed, do you?"

"Indeed I do not," he agrees.

Bella pulls a binder from her backpack and carefully tucks the paper into the inside front pocket. That is not an address she's going to be able to call back to memory if she loses it before she can enter it into a contacts list.

There's still a flurry of information exchange going one, which Mr Mayer seems inclined to indulge, so she asks,

"Have you taken a class with him before?" Most teachers, in her experience, teach more than one class.

"Yes. This one. I decided I had learned everything I needed to from it halfway through the year, but the administration disagreed."

Amusement flashes across Bella's face.

"That explains the look he gave you."

"It rather does."

"But you don't seem to mind."

Everything Mr Mayer has done since has confirmed her immediate impression of him as not being stern. Firm, but friendly. She can't know everything there is to know about how he interacts with students after five minutes in his classroom, but he's done nothing else to indicate that he's the type of teacher to let a student know in front of everyone (no matter how discreetly; she is the only one who seems to have noticed) that that student has disappointed him.

It could be nothing. It could be irrelevant: maybe Mr Mayer disapproves of the skirt. But the connection to Sherlock, in whom she already has reason to be interested, is giving it extra weight.

He shrugs. "It's a fair judgement, don't you think?"

"I do, based on what I know so far," Bella says. "Since you're here instead of having dropped out and gotten your GED instead, I assume you want a diploma, which you won't get until they decide you've learned enough. If they decide you haven't, which you just said they did, then you've effectively wasted all the time he's spent teaching you, and people don't like having their time wasted. If it were simply that the material was too difficult for you, then that wouldn't be your fault and there would be no reason to give you that look. There could be other things going on, too, but I don't know either of you well enough yet and I'd rather not speculate too much."

She tends to avoid taking people she's known less than an hour through her mental process like that. It's paradoxically unhelpful in a getting-to-know-you type of conversation; people get distracted by responses that are far more thorough (and often more blunt) than they expected.

But she wants to see what Sherlock Holmes does with it.

Sherlock Holmes smiles.

"You're very thorough."

"I prefer to be clear with myself on exactly what I think and why I think it," Bella says, "and I can't do that without knowing what information I have and where I got it from. Saying it out loud helps fix it in my memory."

She doesn't mention the notebooks. She's learned to be careful about those.

"I tend to do it in my head. Faster that way. But then, our priorities are slightly different."

That they are, if he's really going full out with the Holmes act, and she has more reason to believe he is than to believe he isn't. She nods.

"It's usually myself I'm making deductions about. I know myself better than most people do, but not as well as I could."

Which isn't to say that she doesn't go around solving mysteries. Her motive isn't staving off boredom, though - it's a relentless need to know. She always needs to know.

"Introspection is a hobby of mine. Not a prominent feature of the original, but then, I've taken some liberties."

And he assumes it's fairly obvious—to her—that he would need a high level of self-awareness to make himself into Sherlock Holmes.

The notion of creating a whole new identity for oneself, even with the basics already handed over by someone else, is certainly destined to be the topic of an entry or five in Bella's notebooks.

She smiles, pleased to be so readily understood. She's used to people not understanding, or not wanting to understand. Introspection isn't for everyone.

She hadn't thought about whether she'd like him.

Sherlock and the new girl are getting on. James approves. With Cal and Tony both graduated, Sherlock could certainly use an ally on school grounds, whether he thinks so or not.

In the meantime, though, James has a class to teach. Or at least a class to pretend to teach, given that they won't retain anything they're told on the first day anyway.

Sherlock and Bella will have to bond on their own time.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

Sunnydale AU: first day

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject