L'appel du Vide // Johnlock AU

Chapter 1

// John's POV //

"John Hamish Watson, a pleasure." A man with narrow green eyes looked me up and down, a thin smile on his face as he fixed his dark red tie. He wore a simple suit, and I could see a gun in a holster under his blazer where his breast pocket would be. I wondered what kind of school my older sister had sent me to, where it was necessary for a teacher to carry a gun. 

All I knew about this school is that it's called 'Quincey School for the Special' and that the person who founded the program was a Frenchman that worked for Her Majesty's Secret Service.  

"Erm, yes. The pleasure is mine." I said this with caution, not exactly trusting the man who smiled coyly down at me. We were in a small, cozy room, kind of like an office. There was a dark wooden desk in the corner, and comfortable chairs lined two of the walls. The school was secluded from the rest of civilization, with lots of trees surrounding us. 

My bags were taken from me, and a few moments ago a dog had run up to me, jumping at me and smelling my gun, a wondrous 9mm 17 glock. They let me keep it fortunately, and I tucked it into the waistband of my pants, letting the handle stick out by my hip, ready to be grabbed.

All of this fell from my thoughts when I saw the man in front of me, he inflicted discomfort and fear in me. 

"If you would follow me this way, please." He spoke with some sort of conversational cheerful tone, with some vibrato on the words he spoke.  Two heavily armed people opened the two doors in front of us, saluting to the bone chilling man as they stood rigid. He led me down the hallway, which was as blank as a cloud. The floor was plain black carpet, a reflection of the ceiling. The walls are a dark gray, and with all this darkness I began to feel like I was in a prison, no windows, the only light shining from the fluorescent lights in the ceiling.  

"Nothing to fret about, Mr. Watson." The man claimed with a lighthearted voice, and I felt even more cautious as he tried to talk with fake reassurance. I had just turned seventeen, but the way he was treating me made me feel like I was still a toddler.

There were doors every few yards only on the right, and all the lights were off in every room from what I could see. I could see a room ahead, and lots of people that looked my age in there, the soft hum of talking and shouts being heard all the way from where we were. But we turned shortly, the man in front of me unlocking a door and flipping on the lights. I followed behind him, skirting the door as it began to close by itself due to its heaviness.

He sat down in a black leather seat, and motioned to a similar chair across from his own. Folding his hands, he leaned onto a large desk, organized papers and files sitting all around us. He had nothing else on his desk, except for a glass of water. 

He had no sentimental things in the room, just filing cabinets lining up the wall behind me. Behind him he had a glass cabinet inside the wall, full of guns and a pristine uniform. To my left was the large door with a thick tinted window in the middle, and to the right was a plain white board with what looked like complicated schematics and math equations. 

He reached into a drawer that was on his side of the desk, and pulled out a thick file. He began scanning through it lazily, before placing it wide open in front of me, a smirk pulling on his lips. I stayed quiet, refusing to look at the folder out of pure fear and confusion. We both sat in silence, and I coughed awkwardly after a few seconds of him smiling and watching me, making me uneasy. 

"My name is Mycroft, Mycroft Holmes. I am your counselor and one of your core teachers here at Quincey. Do you know why you're here, John?" He asked, and I shook my head, not daring to talk or reveal more than I should. 

"Quincey is a school for the troubled children, the special ones, the ones that just don't seem to fit in. You fit in every single one of these categories, John. You may think you did well in blending in, but ever since you began primary school you had caught our interest. You are very alluding, you hide your flaws well. A gift many here would kill for."