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[big bang theory] warm gulf wind - pg
I can write other fandoms, I swear.
Title: Warm Gulf Wind
Rating: PG
Length: 5700 words
Fandom: Big Bang Theory futurefic/AU (Penny/Sheldon)
Spoilers: Goes AU mid-3x01 but only in vague unspecified ways that pretty much only exist in my head. :D? :D?
A/N: This fic wouldn't exist at all if it weren't for![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
inkdot, twentyfivepast, and aphelant, who turned me on to amazing Canadian music. The title is from Sarah Harmer's Almost, which I got from one of them (and can't remember which one!). It came up on shuffle the other day and completely ate my brain until I got all this down. You should listen to it as or before you read! Because it was literally on a loop the entire time I was writing and editing! It's now edged up over 100 on the playcount!
You might also recognize a line from everybody's favorite animated 80s girl band. I live for feedback, as always, and this story's a little different than the Penny/Sheldon I usually do, so it would be especially lovely to know what you think of it.
Special Sheldon's-ego-sized thanks tothe_wanlorn for the beta and for always being willing to flail or CAPSLOCK with me. ♥
EDIT 2009-11-23: Now with a prequel/sequel fanmixfic: & what should never be
Penny is thirty-four the year she begins again.
The plane touches down with the scream of wind over the flaps. She can feel the humidity rushing in from outside when the flight crew connects the gangway and opens the door. The aisle is crowded, even in first class, and she stays in her seat until nearly everyone else has gone. The cloudy acrylic window reveals an endless expanse of faded tar and concrete runways, dry scrubby grass growing in wide swathes between them. In the distance, she can see clouds piling up on the horizon over the setting sun. It gives her a chill that doesn't fade.
One of the wheels on her carry-on bag sticks and leaves a skinny black rubber trail as she drags it behind her all the way through the airport. She skirts the crowd at baggage claim and sees a stocky man with close-cropped hair and dark skin holding a sign with her name on it near the car rental counters.
He raises an eyebrow when she tells him she doesn't have any other bags. She wonders what stories he's heard or read about her. He keeps up a steady stream of chatter all the way to the hotel she's been told she'll be staying in. She checks her messages and tries not to be rude, nodding as politely as she can and thanking him when he recites a long list of places she has to see before she leaves. The flight from Los Angeles was long and rough and her skin feels dry and too tight. All she wants is to crawl into bed and sleep until she absolutely has to get up again.
The hotel is beautiful, worlds beyond the last three she's been in. The girl at the counter checks her in with a broad smile, pointedly calling her by the name the production company used when making her reservation. There are two messages waiting for her on the phone when she gets into her room, one from her manager's assistant and one from the director's. A packet of papers and a vase full of overblown roses wait on the table by the doors to her private patio.
She turns off all the lights and opens the curtains, slides the doors open. The breeze off the water smells of salt and fish and something darker that makes her think of blood. She shivers, still feeling the chill from the plane clinging to her skin.
It's fully dark outside, the moon obscured by clouds and the wind sweeping in steadily across miles and miles of water. Music floats on the air from somewhere down the beach, bright horns and choppy drums.
She strips down to her underwear and wraps a sheet from the bed around her shoulders like a cape. A dusting of sand clings to her bare feet when she steps out onto the patio, scratchy and rough against skin that's forgotten how to stand for nine hours straight, in shoes that were too tight and a life that was too small.
The storm is just beginning as she falls asleep, in a bed that's nearly twice the size of the one she's used to. Lightning flashes out over the water, and the rumble of thunder melts into the sound of the waves crashing on the beach.
For the first time in months, she doesn't dream.
---
Once upon a time, she wanted things. Long lists of things she's embarrassed to remember. She wanted glamour and glitter and fashion and fame. Love and fun and sex and money, all of them interchangeable. All of them tangled up together so tightly that she couldn't see the difference between them.
She drank. She danced. She dated. She ignored the dark, empty space that kept growing deep down where no one could see it.
She doesn't want to pinpoint when it started to change. Some days it feels like she woke up one morning and realized that something was missing.
But she knows that's not the way it happened.
---
In the morning, the sky is clear and bright, like it's been scoured clean by the storm.
She orders eggs for breakfast, sits on the low stone wall at the edge of her patio to eat. Her toes dig into the sand, still cold but warming quickly in the sunshine. The beach here belongs to the hotel, is marked for guests only. A few feet away is a sign telling beachgoers to be mindful of nesting sea turtles and hatchlings, and she wonders if it's even the right season to see them.
When she's finished her meal and her eyes start to ache from watching the sun sparkle off the water, she goes back inside and digs through her bag for her dog-eared script. It hasn't been far from her side since the courier delivered it with the signed and notarized copies of her contract.
The thick manila packet on the table has two maps, one of the island and one printed from the internet at her request. There are also a half-dozen new script pages printed on salmon-colored paper, and a note from the director in his assistant's hand. She ignores his unsubtle hints on how they might easily better their association and throws it as far as she can out onto the beach. Two seagulls fight over it, pecking at the paper until they realize it isn't food.
The last items in the packet are a timetable and a call sheet, a few notes on who would be driving her to and from the set each day, and a metal ring with two keys and a plastic tag. She puts everything back except the new pages and sets the envelope aside. There will be plenty of time for that later.
She doesn't have to be anywhere important for another week, thanks to an agent with a reputation to rival the most vicious junkyard dog and the hollows that still linger under her cheekbones. She's under strict orders to rest and relax and eat, but not too much of course, and to ready herself for the role.
Instead, she slips her feet into an old pair of flip-flops that are nearly falling apart. Her hair goes up into messy twin buns high on the back of her head and she slides the patio doors closed behind her until they latch.
There's a family playing on the beach, tossing a frisbee and a beach ball back and forth in some complicated game only they know. She walks past them and smiles behind her sunglasses. They wave, the little girl twirling in the sand and shrieking with glee, and she keeps going.
She walks for miles, running lines in her head to the beat of the waves, and buys a taco from a man with a cart. Sand gets everywhere when she sits down to eat, grinding with the corn tortilla shell against her tongue and teeth. She washes it all down with a cold beer and brushes the sweat from the can on her cheeks and forehead.
The world walks by while she watches.
---
She remembers only one name from the long list the driver had rattled off the night before. It turns out to be a tiny restaurant tucked into the shadow of a gaudy family resort. Neon lights flash in through the windows but inside it is all warm, dark wood and soft music.
She comes in after sunset with her hair tucked up under a baseball hat she doesn't remember buying, or packing. She feels underdressed in a sweatshirt that hangs down so far that it covers her hands and her shorts, but the girl at the bar smiles like she doesn't recognize her and gives her a booth at the back of the room near the kitchen. She leafs through her script, through the new pages added in that morning, and listens to the chatter of the kitchen staff behind the swinging door. They speak three different languages, sliding in and out of them at will.
The food is spicy and there is far too much for the plate they give her. She eats with her hands when she remembers to put down the script. The heat spreads through her, helped along by the sweet house wine, and she relaxes by long, slow degrees.
She stays there for hours, throwing in a huge tip more in gratitude for the peace than for the inconvenience of taking up a table that long. She doesn't think anyone minds; the place is never more than a quarter full that night, but she remembers the irritation that would bubble up long before a party, even an easy one, finally got up to leave.
It's raining again when she opens the door and the girl behind the bar calls her back inside. She takes the umbrella that's offered and stuffs the script into the waistband of her shorts, safe and dry under the bulky sweatshirt. It's a tight fit, for once, and she barely even notices the sting of the rain on her bare legs as she walks through the quiet streets to her hotel.
She goes back every night.
---
After the first day, she stays out of the sun, preferring the shade of the covered patio. She keeps her cell phone plugged into the wall in her room but lets all the calls go to voicemail. When she comes back from dinner at night, she dials in and deletes the messages. Her laptop stays at the bottom of her carry-on bag, the hard plastic case a ghostly chill against her fingers as she pulls out fresh clothes.
She knows her part backwards and upside down. It's the most ambitious one she's had in years. It might be the most ambitious one she's ever had.
Instead of sinking into doubt and nerves, she feels buoyed by the challenge. Each new draft brings changes that make her smile with satisfaction. She feels the character growing under her skin, unfurling to fill her out with the weight of someone else's life. All the empty, jagged spaces inside her finish stitching themselves together again.
She dozes in the afternoons and wakes to the soft purple light of dusk.
On the last night of her respite, she leaves the script in her room and takes a battered old spiral notebook with her instead. She flips through the clumsy dialogue and scene descriptions while she eats, laughing softly and trying not to cry at the ridiculous characters and transparent longings of the girl who wrote it so long ago.
She doesn't feel any older than the version of herself who put a pen to this paper. Instead, she feels steadier, like she's finally settling into her stride even with all the turmoil and pain of the last year. She feels like the bruised parts deep within have healed over, that she's tougher now in the places where she needs it most.
Her glass of wine is long since drained when she turns the final page in the notebook and reads what's written inside the back cover. The ink hasn't faded and she traces the precise lettering with fingers that tremble a little. She wants to blame it on the alcohol.
The girl from behind the bar leaves her change on the table and goes to flip the sign on the door. In the kitchen, she can hear pans rattling and the kitchen staff saying good night to each other, each in his or her own language. She gets up slowly, drawing the edges of her sweater closed over her chest. She thanks the girl for the kindnesses of the past week and tucks five large bills under the brandy glass that serves as a tip jar. The girl's eyes go wide and she nods, jerky and awkward like she wants to say something and is only barely holding it in.
The wind has shifted when she steps outside. It's warm and humid and she thinks she can feel the first stirrings of a new season in it. A trickle of sweat runs down the side of her face as she walks back to the hotel with the notebook held close against her heart.
---
The message light is blinking on the room phone when she lets herself in. Her cell phone buzzes insistently and the display on the screen tells her that her voicemail is full. She calls the set coordinator, the costuming assistant, her manager, her agent, her mother, and her friends, in that order. They all sound so relieved to hear from her that she feels guilty for making them worry, but only for a few moments. She needed this time, not just to ease into the character she's about to take on but to let the remains of the past year fade into the distance where they belong.
She takes a bottle of water from the minibar and curls up in the chair on the patio. She holds the notebook in her lap, open again to the inside of the back cover. She can barely read the writing under the dim light of the waning moon but she can feel the strokes where the pen dug into the thin cardboard.
The words don't matter, anyway. They're layered over her skin and bones, a thin white web of scars invisible to everyone but her. They haven't faded at all in the intervening years. Instead, she thinks they've gone deeper, burrowing into the very marrow of her. She feels stronger for having them, like they've fused to her skeleton to make her something like invincible at long last.
She breathes deep. The air, cool from the water again; bracing; scented with salt and fish and something dark that still reminds her of blood, fills her lungs.
She picks up her phone and goes inside, into the bathroom. She turns on the overhead light and studies her face in the mirror. She punches in a number on the phone without needing to look at the buttons. It's a number she's never forgotten, one she's wanted to call a thousand times. She can barely hear the ringing on the other end. Her heart mimics the roar of the waves only a few dozen feet outside the doors, thrums in her ears and throat. She feels the wind shift again.
She's afraid that somehow he'll recognize her number and won't answer.
She's almost more afraid that he will answer, and he does.
She takes another deep breath, feels that thin white web of scars expand, and watches her mouth move to interrupt him.
"Sheldon, it's me."
---
There's a rental car checked out under her name parked somewhere in the lot to the side of the hotel. She hasn't even looked for it yet, preferring to walk wherever her feet wanted to take her. When she disconnects the call, she runs out into her room and finds the map she'd asked the production assistant to print for her before she'd even left California.
Her stuff is everywhere, clothes discarded on whatever patch of floor or piece of furniture was handy when she slipped out of them. It takes her five minutes to find the keyring under a pink hooded sweatshirt and she nearly starts to cry with relief. Her flip-flops are where she kicked them off when she came in and within seconds she's rushing out the door. She makes it only a few steps down the hall before she whirls and goes back. She scoops the notebook off the bed and rips off the back cover.
She can't read the sloppy writing on the plastic rental car tag on the keychain, so she wanders up and down the rows pressing the buttons until she sees the headlights flash. She pulls her hair back and ties it into a loose knot, then rolls the windows down and peels out of the parking lot.
The map she tucks under her bare thigh, under the notebook cover she has guarded all this time. She wants to pretend that this is all an impulse born of wine and warm, lazy days, that asking for the map was something she never intended to follow through on. That it is another in a long line of half-formed ideas, spurred on by realizing how close she is to him for the first time in years. But she's memorized every inch of the route in the past week, smoothed the paper out over her legs as she ate her eggs in the mornings and watched the beach for hatchlings making their way down into the sea. When she closes her eyes, she can see the thick red printed line snaking across the island and onto the mainland, an bright blazing path that will carry her to where she needs to go.
The directions say that the journey will take her forty-five minutes, maybe slightly faster at this time of night and season when there is no traffic.
She makes it there in less than thirty.
---
His porch light is burning bright when she pulls the car up the driveway, but the rest of the house is dark. She sees a soft, flickering blue glow behind the curtains of one window and wonders what he's watching. If he were on his computer, the light would be steadier. Harsher. It's a distinction she didn't realize that she could make.
She turns off the engine and sits for a moment, hands curled tight around the steering wheel. She can still turn around, go back to the hotel, and leave things where they are. She can go back to her life, and throw herself back into her career, and wonder what-if for the rest of her life, like she's done for the past decade.
The door makes a heavy thunk as she throws it closed, echoing off the neatly painted garage, and the blue glow dies away. She's halfway up the walk when the door flies open and he's framed in the darkness that echoes behind him.
She makes a noise; it could be a word almost but it never approaches anything intelligible, and he steps out onto the porch.
The years have been as kind to him as they have been to her, on the surface at least. He is long and lanky, maybe a few pounds heavier but carrying it well. He no longer looks like a stiff breeze will pick him up and blow him out to sea. His hair is just as long as it was the last time she saw him, the skin around his mouth smudged with a day's growth of beard. His eyes are hooded and dark, shadowed from the light that haloes his head. She is dizzy just from looking at him, feeling like she's stepped through a window in time. She walks up onto the porch and he reaches out and folds her into a hug, as smooth and as easy as if he does it every day.
She buries her face in the hollow of his throat and breathes him in, the long-forgotten mix of soap and detergent that clung to him even when he was sweaty and triumphant from a long Saturday morning of mock battle. She is shaky with adrenaline and a fierce, leaping joy that catches in her throat.
His arms loosen around her and she shifts back just a few inches. Just enough to look up into his face and return his smile.
He slides a hand up her back to her shoulder and then down her arm to take her hand in his.
---
They stay up half the night. Not really talking, not much. Not anything else, either, despite the hard pulse of blood that pools low in her abdomen every time his voice rises or her hands skate along the bare skin of his arm to the rolled-up cuffs of his button-down shirt.
He tells her about Raj and Missy, about his own work, only the barest, broadest sketches of his life. She reciprocates with news of Howard, of Leonard. Of Leonard and Leslie. He barely sneers and she sees the careful way he frames his questions, the tension that cords his long arms. Her heart aches with the hurt he still carries, and with her own, but she is not ready to tell him that.
They sit in an easy silence, a lamp burning low in one corner of the room. She relaxes against him, tucks her legs under her, and tries to match her breathing to his.
She falls asleep on his shoulder and awakens in the morning under a thin blanket. He is curled in the chair next to the couch, his legs awkwardly folded up under his chin. He startles under her touch, face slackened by momentary confusion when he opens his eyes to her, but he rouses easily.
He rubs his eyes with one long-fingered hand, still the surest sign she knows that he is on the verge of falling back to sleep, and she pulls him up out of the chair and pushes him toward the stairs. He leads her up to his room and falls onto the bed heavily. She looks around and feels dizzy again, memory and time tugging at her from every direction. It looks the way she remembers his old room, maybe even with some of the same Silver Age covers framed on the wall.
He's asleep again before she can say goodbye and she rolls one side of the comforter up over him like the cocoon he prefers. His hair is warm and soft against her lips when she presses a kiss into it. As she turns to go, something out of place on his bookcase catches her eye and she goes to take a closer look. Plastic boxes filled with comic books still cover every inch of the lower shelves but on the top are a row of containers stuffed with magazines. She flips through them, glossy supermarket gossip rags filed with thick issues of Vanity Fair and flimsy copies of Starlog special editions. Her name or her face greets her from every one.
She flies down the stairs and outside, fumbling through her pockets for her keys. She drops them twice from shaking hands before she manages to unlock the car door and pull the notebook cover out.
In his kitchen she digs through drawers for a pen, then finds a marker secured to the refrigerator with a springy elasticized string. She scrawls a note across the bottom of the cardboard sheet and takes it upstairs to prop it against his alarm clock.
---
She is bone-tired but giddy when she makes it back to the island. She drives straight to the production offices downtown and waits for the wardrobe department to come find her. The fittings don't take long; even with all the food and wine she's had in the past week, she is still only barely the size they want her to be. In the full-length mirror, as two assistants pin up her hems and another her hair, she sees that the hollows beneath her cheekbones have filled in.
One of her co-stars swans in and back out again. He's half her age and twice the draw she's ever been. He fusses with his already-perfect hair and refuses to wear the waistcoats they've brought for him. He tells everyone within hearing distance that he won't come out of his trailer until it's fixed.
The costume designer rolls her eyes and asks no one in particular who the kid thinks he is. Someone will coax him out later and twist him into shape, so that he's happy to wear the costumes they have in exchange for a few more close-ups than have already been storyboarded.
The production is stripped down to absolute basics, all the customary fat and padding sliced away. She traded her usual asking price for the week of solitude and a bare-bones trailer, and is working for scale for the first time in years. She's in high demand thanks to a series of lucky breaks, but she wanted this part with a ferocity that scared her.
It's a film by a first-time feature director and a writer who is mostly known for her dedication to toiling away on rewrites of other people's substandard scripts. She met them both at a party, and a passing comment by one led to an explanation by the other and a phone call from her to her agent. She traded on her name and its modicum of influence to help them secure a budget, then set up an audition with the casting director under an alias after they offered her the lead with no questions asked.
The casting director pulled her aside when she'd finished reading for several of the parts. He told her she had to fight for the secondary lead and nothing else. He was adamant, his grip just tight enough to redden the skin at her wrist. She agreed, feeling something in the dialogue that sang to her, vibrating through blood and muscle and lifting the hairs on the back of her neck.
What he didn't say, and what she already knew, is that this is the role that's going to make her.
---
The shoot is long and arduous. She spends her days swathed in a succession of ankle-length woolen gowns, her hair rolled low against her neck, sweltering in the heat. They're in a beautiful old house made to look new again. On camera, she sits like a lady, knees together, head tilted down, eyes only occasionally flickering up to meet another's gaze. She holds herself stiffly, a combination of whalebone and horsehair and bruises.
Off camera, she sprawls in a canvas chair in a tank top and her cotton underskirt, the dull, heavy dresses hanging from a nearby costume rack. She spends as little time as possible in her trailer, preferring the wind in her hair and the sounds of the crew filling her ears.
Her phone is light and warm in her hands between takes, the keys wearing thin from too much use. She sends him pictures and videos of her days; he responds with images of his meals, the plates centered precisely in the frame, and snippets of facts relating to whatever he thinks she might be interested in.
They talk every day while he walks home from work and she breaks for dinner. She sits at the same table in the corner of the craft services tent, his breath steady in her ear. The ease with which he alters his routine to include her makes her want to laugh out loud.
He calls at night, every night, the last thing he does before he wraps himself into his cocoon and drifts away. Long afterward, she lays in her bed, still too wide and empty, and stares out at the water. In the last seconds before she slips under, she can feel him against her, his breath stirring the hair at the nape of her neck.
---
In their final weeks, the entire company transforms into a frenzied nocturnal beast as they race against the dawn to capture the night scenes. She sleeps late into the afternoons, waking with long, languorous stretches.
They're standing on the set one night, a narrow strip of beach littered with bodies and blood and carefully controlled fires, all covered with the stinking dark smoke of fake guns. A production assistant calls cut and another shouts out the countdown until someone remembers to turn on an audio stream. The effects crew shuts down the gas jets and someone switches off the generators. The klieg lights fall dark and everyone, cast and crew, hangers-on and visitors with passes around their necks, they all lift their faces up to the heavens. They all stand together facing the horizon and as the countdown sinks lower, a hush blankets the group.
A tiny bright streak shoots up into the sky for only an instant, far away across the water and moving farther with every second, burning steadily in the dark sky before it winks out. In her head she traces the arc of its trajectory from the graphics splashed across every TV set and newspaper she's seen for months, the terminus marked against a small unassuming patch of red dusty ground millions and millions of miles away. She thinks of Howard, and little green men, and the time he offered to let her drive on another planet. She whispers a prayer to no god in particular and can't hold back a grin that nearly splits her in two.
The beach erupts in cheers and dancing and whirling, hugging, kissing. They're celebrating amid the pieces of two distinct centuries, watching the future race into the sky again and again on dozens of tiny cell phone screens. Someone hooks a laptop up to the playback monitors and everyone crowds around; the craft services people start passing out bottles of champagne. The President's voice echoes across the sand and water, tinny from speakers turned up too far.
She walks away into the darkness and presses her phone to her ear.
---
When her wrap day arrives, she is ready to shed this character like a snakeskin and emerge with new, smooth flesh that belongs only to her. Her final scene is an easy one, at least compared to those she has already done.
She kneels in the sand and presses her hands against a chest that is wet and cold with blood. Her fingers dig for purchase in the rough, salt-stiffened fabric of a coat and she doesn't flinch when a hand comes up to weakly push her away before falling still. She falls back to her heels and stares out across the water, a dark, tarnished gun glinting dully at her side.
They go again, and again. Six takes in all and then she is free. She grins down at the boy lying in the sand, his hair still perfectly tousled, and helps him to stand.
There's a brief hush while the director takes off his headphones, then applause ripples through the assembled crew. She takes a few moments to walk around, doling out hugs and teasing threats in equal measure, before turning to the wardrobe trailer, a costuming assistant trailing at her heels.
They have to stop while someone wheels an equipment trunk across their path. When it is past, she looks up and sees him standing under the bare bulb at the corner of the battered double-wide that houses hair and makeup. The light overhead deepens the shadows around his eyes and he looks around, wary, tense. He wears, for the first time in her memory, a pair of jeans. An animated hero's head peeks out from under his button-down shirt, and his hands are clasped behind his back.
She approaches slowly, holding her skirts up to keep them from dragging across the pitted parking lot. She hears the whisper of his mother's voice, cautioning them to take it easy lest he startle.
He turns slightly and sees her, his features relaxing into something that isn't quite a smile. In her head, she tells his mother where to stick it; she's had enough of this long, slow slide toward each other, and she picks up her skirts and runs.
---
She calls the front desk from her room and has the clerk switch the billing onto her own personal credit card for however much longer she wants to stay. While she's on with the airlines, canceling her flights, he drifts around the room, picking up and folding her things.
She has breakfast sent up: toast and bacon and sausage and waffles for her, drowning in butter and syrup, everything she's not supposed to eat; cereal and milk for him, still in the packaging so he knows no one else has touched it. They sit on the low wall of her patio to eat and watch the sun rise over the water. He balances his bowl in one large hand, doesn't complain about the temperature or the wind or the sand.
He was born here, spent the first quarter of his life and part of the last in a house just a few miles away. She peppers him with questions but his memories all center on his family, his studies, and his house. He is familiar with her version of the island only when it matches with the facts he has picked up along the way, colored only in the palest shades by his own personal experience.
When he's finished eating, he rolls his jeans up to his knees and carefully folds his socks into his shoes. She stands to join him, her toes wiggling in the sand, and tries to think where to take him first.
Before she can decide, a yawn sneaks up on her, cracking her jaw wide open.
He tries to excuse himself, already turning away to leave, and she draws him back into the room and down beside her atop the bed. For the first time, it feels like the right size, only just barely wide enough to fit them both. He tries to protest and she stills him with one hand on his chest, his heartbeat fluttering under her fingers.
---
She is emptying the contents of a moving box when he comes home from work, his footsteps steady and soft on the carpeted stairs. The door stands wide open and she puts down a framed piece of cardboard, two sets of writing trapped under the glass, when she sees him in the hallway, looking in at her while he fiddles with the strap of his bag.
She doesn't smile so much as she beams, delighting in the way his cheeks round when his mouth curves up at the sides.
"Hi!" she chirps, taking a step toward the door. She knows he remembers the way this turned out the first time. It's patterned like a map under their skin, invisible to everyone else.
"Hi," he responds, meeting her eyes this time instead of dipping his gaze down to the floor.
She says it again, knowing he hears the question in her voice, and he comes into their room, halving the distance between them in a single step.
Penny is thirty-four and Sheldon thirty-nine the year they begin again.
Title: Warm Gulf Wind
Rating: PG
Length: 5700 words
Fandom: Big Bang Theory futurefic/AU (Penny/Sheldon)
Spoilers: Goes AU mid-3x01 but only in vague unspecified ways that pretty much only exist in my head. :D? :D?
A/N: This fic wouldn't exist at all if it weren't for
inkdot, twentyfivepast, and aphelant, who turned me on to amazing Canadian music. The title is from Sarah Harmer's Almost, which I got from one of them (and can't remember which one!). It came up on shuffle the other day and completely ate my brain until I got all this down. You should listen to it as or before you read! Because it was literally on a loop the entire time I was writing and editing! It's now edged up over 100 on the playcount!You might also recognize a line from everybody's favorite animated 80s girl band. I live for feedback, as always, and this story's a little different than the Penny/Sheldon I usually do, so it would be especially lovely to know what you think of it.
Special Sheldon's-ego-sized thanks to
the_wanlorn for the beta and for always being willing to flail or CAPSLOCK with me. ♥EDIT 2009-11-23: Now with a prequel/sequel fanmixfic: & what should never be
Penny is thirty-four the year she begins again.
The plane touches down with the scream of wind over the flaps. She can feel the humidity rushing in from outside when the flight crew connects the gangway and opens the door. The aisle is crowded, even in first class, and she stays in her seat until nearly everyone else has gone. The cloudy acrylic window reveals an endless expanse of faded tar and concrete runways, dry scrubby grass growing in wide swathes between them. In the distance, she can see clouds piling up on the horizon over the setting sun. It gives her a chill that doesn't fade.
One of the wheels on her carry-on bag sticks and leaves a skinny black rubber trail as she drags it behind her all the way through the airport. She skirts the crowd at baggage claim and sees a stocky man with close-cropped hair and dark skin holding a sign with her name on it near the car rental counters.
He raises an eyebrow when she tells him she doesn't have any other bags. She wonders what stories he's heard or read about her. He keeps up a steady stream of chatter all the way to the hotel she's been told she'll be staying in. She checks her messages and tries not to be rude, nodding as politely as she can and thanking him when he recites a long list of places she has to see before she leaves. The flight from Los Angeles was long and rough and her skin feels dry and too tight. All she wants is to crawl into bed and sleep until she absolutely has to get up again.
The hotel is beautiful, worlds beyond the last three she's been in. The girl at the counter checks her in with a broad smile, pointedly calling her by the name the production company used when making her reservation. There are two messages waiting for her on the phone when she gets into her room, one from her manager's assistant and one from the director's. A packet of papers and a vase full of overblown roses wait on the table by the doors to her private patio.
She turns off all the lights and opens the curtains, slides the doors open. The breeze off the water smells of salt and fish and something darker that makes her think of blood. She shivers, still feeling the chill from the plane clinging to her skin.
It's fully dark outside, the moon obscured by clouds and the wind sweeping in steadily across miles and miles of water. Music floats on the air from somewhere down the beach, bright horns and choppy drums.
She strips down to her underwear and wraps a sheet from the bed around her shoulders like a cape. A dusting of sand clings to her bare feet when she steps out onto the patio, scratchy and rough against skin that's forgotten how to stand for nine hours straight, in shoes that were too tight and a life that was too small.
The storm is just beginning as she falls asleep, in a bed that's nearly twice the size of the one she's used to. Lightning flashes out over the water, and the rumble of thunder melts into the sound of the waves crashing on the beach.
For the first time in months, she doesn't dream.
---
Once upon a time, she wanted things. Long lists of things she's embarrassed to remember. She wanted glamour and glitter and fashion and fame. Love and fun and sex and money, all of them interchangeable. All of them tangled up together so tightly that she couldn't see the difference between them.
She drank. She danced. She dated. She ignored the dark, empty space that kept growing deep down where no one could see it.
She doesn't want to pinpoint when it started to change. Some days it feels like she woke up one morning and realized that something was missing.
But she knows that's not the way it happened.
---
In the morning, the sky is clear and bright, like it's been scoured clean by the storm.
She orders eggs for breakfast, sits on the low stone wall at the edge of her patio to eat. Her toes dig into the sand, still cold but warming quickly in the sunshine. The beach here belongs to the hotel, is marked for guests only. A few feet away is a sign telling beachgoers to be mindful of nesting sea turtles and hatchlings, and she wonders if it's even the right season to see them.
When she's finished her meal and her eyes start to ache from watching the sun sparkle off the water, she goes back inside and digs through her bag for her dog-eared script. It hasn't been far from her side since the courier delivered it with the signed and notarized copies of her contract.
The thick manila packet on the table has two maps, one of the island and one printed from the internet at her request. There are also a half-dozen new script pages printed on salmon-colored paper, and a note from the director in his assistant's hand. She ignores his unsubtle hints on how they might easily better their association and throws it as far as she can out onto the beach. Two seagulls fight over it, pecking at the paper until they realize it isn't food.
The last items in the packet are a timetable and a call sheet, a few notes on who would be driving her to and from the set each day, and a metal ring with two keys and a plastic tag. She puts everything back except the new pages and sets the envelope aside. There will be plenty of time for that later.
She doesn't have to be anywhere important for another week, thanks to an agent with a reputation to rival the most vicious junkyard dog and the hollows that still linger under her cheekbones. She's under strict orders to rest and relax and eat, but not too much of course, and to ready herself for the role.
Instead, she slips her feet into an old pair of flip-flops that are nearly falling apart. Her hair goes up into messy twin buns high on the back of her head and she slides the patio doors closed behind her until they latch.
There's a family playing on the beach, tossing a frisbee and a beach ball back and forth in some complicated game only they know. She walks past them and smiles behind her sunglasses. They wave, the little girl twirling in the sand and shrieking with glee, and she keeps going.
She walks for miles, running lines in her head to the beat of the waves, and buys a taco from a man with a cart. Sand gets everywhere when she sits down to eat, grinding with the corn tortilla shell against her tongue and teeth. She washes it all down with a cold beer and brushes the sweat from the can on her cheeks and forehead.
The world walks by while she watches.
---
She remembers only one name from the long list the driver had rattled off the night before. It turns out to be a tiny restaurant tucked into the shadow of a gaudy family resort. Neon lights flash in through the windows but inside it is all warm, dark wood and soft music.
She comes in after sunset with her hair tucked up under a baseball hat she doesn't remember buying, or packing. She feels underdressed in a sweatshirt that hangs down so far that it covers her hands and her shorts, but the girl at the bar smiles like she doesn't recognize her and gives her a booth at the back of the room near the kitchen. She leafs through her script, through the new pages added in that morning, and listens to the chatter of the kitchen staff behind the swinging door. They speak three different languages, sliding in and out of them at will.
The food is spicy and there is far too much for the plate they give her. She eats with her hands when she remembers to put down the script. The heat spreads through her, helped along by the sweet house wine, and she relaxes by long, slow degrees.
She stays there for hours, throwing in a huge tip more in gratitude for the peace than for the inconvenience of taking up a table that long. She doesn't think anyone minds; the place is never more than a quarter full that night, but she remembers the irritation that would bubble up long before a party, even an easy one, finally got up to leave.
It's raining again when she opens the door and the girl behind the bar calls her back inside. She takes the umbrella that's offered and stuffs the script into the waistband of her shorts, safe and dry under the bulky sweatshirt. It's a tight fit, for once, and she barely even notices the sting of the rain on her bare legs as she walks through the quiet streets to her hotel.
She goes back every night.
---
After the first day, she stays out of the sun, preferring the shade of the covered patio. She keeps her cell phone plugged into the wall in her room but lets all the calls go to voicemail. When she comes back from dinner at night, she dials in and deletes the messages. Her laptop stays at the bottom of her carry-on bag, the hard plastic case a ghostly chill against her fingers as she pulls out fresh clothes.
She knows her part backwards and upside down. It's the most ambitious one she's had in years. It might be the most ambitious one she's ever had.
Instead of sinking into doubt and nerves, she feels buoyed by the challenge. Each new draft brings changes that make her smile with satisfaction. She feels the character growing under her skin, unfurling to fill her out with the weight of someone else's life. All the empty, jagged spaces inside her finish stitching themselves together again.
She dozes in the afternoons and wakes to the soft purple light of dusk.
On the last night of her respite, she leaves the script in her room and takes a battered old spiral notebook with her instead. She flips through the clumsy dialogue and scene descriptions while she eats, laughing softly and trying not to cry at the ridiculous characters and transparent longings of the girl who wrote it so long ago.
She doesn't feel any older than the version of herself who put a pen to this paper. Instead, she feels steadier, like she's finally settling into her stride even with all the turmoil and pain of the last year. She feels like the bruised parts deep within have healed over, that she's tougher now in the places where she needs it most.
Her glass of wine is long since drained when she turns the final page in the notebook and reads what's written inside the back cover. The ink hasn't faded and she traces the precise lettering with fingers that tremble a little. She wants to blame it on the alcohol.
The girl from behind the bar leaves her change on the table and goes to flip the sign on the door. In the kitchen, she can hear pans rattling and the kitchen staff saying good night to each other, each in his or her own language. She gets up slowly, drawing the edges of her sweater closed over her chest. She thanks the girl for the kindnesses of the past week and tucks five large bills under the brandy glass that serves as a tip jar. The girl's eyes go wide and she nods, jerky and awkward like she wants to say something and is only barely holding it in.
The wind has shifted when she steps outside. It's warm and humid and she thinks she can feel the first stirrings of a new season in it. A trickle of sweat runs down the side of her face as she walks back to the hotel with the notebook held close against her heart.
---
The message light is blinking on the room phone when she lets herself in. Her cell phone buzzes insistently and the display on the screen tells her that her voicemail is full. She calls the set coordinator, the costuming assistant, her manager, her agent, her mother, and her friends, in that order. They all sound so relieved to hear from her that she feels guilty for making them worry, but only for a few moments. She needed this time, not just to ease into the character she's about to take on but to let the remains of the past year fade into the distance where they belong.
She takes a bottle of water from the minibar and curls up in the chair on the patio. She holds the notebook in her lap, open again to the inside of the back cover. She can barely read the writing under the dim light of the waning moon but she can feel the strokes where the pen dug into the thin cardboard.
The words don't matter, anyway. They're layered over her skin and bones, a thin white web of scars invisible to everyone but her. They haven't faded at all in the intervening years. Instead, she thinks they've gone deeper, burrowing into the very marrow of her. She feels stronger for having them, like they've fused to her skeleton to make her something like invincible at long last.
She breathes deep. The air, cool from the water again; bracing; scented with salt and fish and something dark that still reminds her of blood, fills her lungs.
She picks up her phone and goes inside, into the bathroom. She turns on the overhead light and studies her face in the mirror. She punches in a number on the phone without needing to look at the buttons. It's a number she's never forgotten, one she's wanted to call a thousand times. She can barely hear the ringing on the other end. Her heart mimics the roar of the waves only a few dozen feet outside the doors, thrums in her ears and throat. She feels the wind shift again.
She's afraid that somehow he'll recognize her number and won't answer.
She's almost more afraid that he will answer, and he does.
She takes another deep breath, feels that thin white web of scars expand, and watches her mouth move to interrupt him.
"Sheldon, it's me."
---
There's a rental car checked out under her name parked somewhere in the lot to the side of the hotel. She hasn't even looked for it yet, preferring to walk wherever her feet wanted to take her. When she disconnects the call, she runs out into her room and finds the map she'd asked the production assistant to print for her before she'd even left California.
Her stuff is everywhere, clothes discarded on whatever patch of floor or piece of furniture was handy when she slipped out of them. It takes her five minutes to find the keyring under a pink hooded sweatshirt and she nearly starts to cry with relief. Her flip-flops are where she kicked them off when she came in and within seconds she's rushing out the door. She makes it only a few steps down the hall before she whirls and goes back. She scoops the notebook off the bed and rips off the back cover.
She can't read the sloppy writing on the plastic rental car tag on the keychain, so she wanders up and down the rows pressing the buttons until she sees the headlights flash. She pulls her hair back and ties it into a loose knot, then rolls the windows down and peels out of the parking lot.
The map she tucks under her bare thigh, under the notebook cover she has guarded all this time. She wants to pretend that this is all an impulse born of wine and warm, lazy days, that asking for the map was something she never intended to follow through on. That it is another in a long line of half-formed ideas, spurred on by realizing how close she is to him for the first time in years. But she's memorized every inch of the route in the past week, smoothed the paper out over her legs as she ate her eggs in the mornings and watched the beach for hatchlings making their way down into the sea. When she closes her eyes, she can see the thick red printed line snaking across the island and onto the mainland, an bright blazing path that will carry her to where she needs to go.
The directions say that the journey will take her forty-five minutes, maybe slightly faster at this time of night and season when there is no traffic.
She makes it there in less than thirty.
---
His porch light is burning bright when she pulls the car up the driveway, but the rest of the house is dark. She sees a soft, flickering blue glow behind the curtains of one window and wonders what he's watching. If he were on his computer, the light would be steadier. Harsher. It's a distinction she didn't realize that she could make.
She turns off the engine and sits for a moment, hands curled tight around the steering wheel. She can still turn around, go back to the hotel, and leave things where they are. She can go back to her life, and throw herself back into her career, and wonder what-if for the rest of her life, like she's done for the past decade.
The door makes a heavy thunk as she throws it closed, echoing off the neatly painted garage, and the blue glow dies away. She's halfway up the walk when the door flies open and he's framed in the darkness that echoes behind him.
She makes a noise; it could be a word almost but it never approaches anything intelligible, and he steps out onto the porch.
The years have been as kind to him as they have been to her, on the surface at least. He is long and lanky, maybe a few pounds heavier but carrying it well. He no longer looks like a stiff breeze will pick him up and blow him out to sea. His hair is just as long as it was the last time she saw him, the skin around his mouth smudged with a day's growth of beard. His eyes are hooded and dark, shadowed from the light that haloes his head. She is dizzy just from looking at him, feeling like she's stepped through a window in time. She walks up onto the porch and he reaches out and folds her into a hug, as smooth and as easy as if he does it every day.
She buries her face in the hollow of his throat and breathes him in, the long-forgotten mix of soap and detergent that clung to him even when he was sweaty and triumphant from a long Saturday morning of mock battle. She is shaky with adrenaline and a fierce, leaping joy that catches in her throat.
His arms loosen around her and she shifts back just a few inches. Just enough to look up into his face and return his smile.
He slides a hand up her back to her shoulder and then down her arm to take her hand in his.
---
They stay up half the night. Not really talking, not much. Not anything else, either, despite the hard pulse of blood that pools low in her abdomen every time his voice rises or her hands skate along the bare skin of his arm to the rolled-up cuffs of his button-down shirt.
He tells her about Raj and Missy, about his own work, only the barest, broadest sketches of his life. She reciprocates with news of Howard, of Leonard. Of Leonard and Leslie. He barely sneers and she sees the careful way he frames his questions, the tension that cords his long arms. Her heart aches with the hurt he still carries, and with her own, but she is not ready to tell him that.
They sit in an easy silence, a lamp burning low in one corner of the room. She relaxes against him, tucks her legs under her, and tries to match her breathing to his.
She falls asleep on his shoulder and awakens in the morning under a thin blanket. He is curled in the chair next to the couch, his legs awkwardly folded up under his chin. He startles under her touch, face slackened by momentary confusion when he opens his eyes to her, but he rouses easily.
He rubs his eyes with one long-fingered hand, still the surest sign she knows that he is on the verge of falling back to sleep, and she pulls him up out of the chair and pushes him toward the stairs. He leads her up to his room and falls onto the bed heavily. She looks around and feels dizzy again, memory and time tugging at her from every direction. It looks the way she remembers his old room, maybe even with some of the same Silver Age covers framed on the wall.
He's asleep again before she can say goodbye and she rolls one side of the comforter up over him like the cocoon he prefers. His hair is warm and soft against her lips when she presses a kiss into it. As she turns to go, something out of place on his bookcase catches her eye and she goes to take a closer look. Plastic boxes filled with comic books still cover every inch of the lower shelves but on the top are a row of containers stuffed with magazines. She flips through them, glossy supermarket gossip rags filed with thick issues of Vanity Fair and flimsy copies of Starlog special editions. Her name or her face greets her from every one.
She flies down the stairs and outside, fumbling through her pockets for her keys. She drops them twice from shaking hands before she manages to unlock the car door and pull the notebook cover out.
In his kitchen she digs through drawers for a pen, then finds a marker secured to the refrigerator with a springy elasticized string. She scrawls a note across the bottom of the cardboard sheet and takes it upstairs to prop it against his alarm clock.
---
She is bone-tired but giddy when she makes it back to the island. She drives straight to the production offices downtown and waits for the wardrobe department to come find her. The fittings don't take long; even with all the food and wine she's had in the past week, she is still only barely the size they want her to be. In the full-length mirror, as two assistants pin up her hems and another her hair, she sees that the hollows beneath her cheekbones have filled in.
One of her co-stars swans in and back out again. He's half her age and twice the draw she's ever been. He fusses with his already-perfect hair and refuses to wear the waistcoats they've brought for him. He tells everyone within hearing distance that he won't come out of his trailer until it's fixed.
The costume designer rolls her eyes and asks no one in particular who the kid thinks he is. Someone will coax him out later and twist him into shape, so that he's happy to wear the costumes they have in exchange for a few more close-ups than have already been storyboarded.
The production is stripped down to absolute basics, all the customary fat and padding sliced away. She traded her usual asking price for the week of solitude and a bare-bones trailer, and is working for scale for the first time in years. She's in high demand thanks to a series of lucky breaks, but she wanted this part with a ferocity that scared her.
It's a film by a first-time feature director and a writer who is mostly known for her dedication to toiling away on rewrites of other people's substandard scripts. She met them both at a party, and a passing comment by one led to an explanation by the other and a phone call from her to her agent. She traded on her name and its modicum of influence to help them secure a budget, then set up an audition with the casting director under an alias after they offered her the lead with no questions asked.
The casting director pulled her aside when she'd finished reading for several of the parts. He told her she had to fight for the secondary lead and nothing else. He was adamant, his grip just tight enough to redden the skin at her wrist. She agreed, feeling something in the dialogue that sang to her, vibrating through blood and muscle and lifting the hairs on the back of her neck.
What he didn't say, and what she already knew, is that this is the role that's going to make her.
---
The shoot is long and arduous. She spends her days swathed in a succession of ankle-length woolen gowns, her hair rolled low against her neck, sweltering in the heat. They're in a beautiful old house made to look new again. On camera, she sits like a lady, knees together, head tilted down, eyes only occasionally flickering up to meet another's gaze. She holds herself stiffly, a combination of whalebone and horsehair and bruises.
Off camera, she sprawls in a canvas chair in a tank top and her cotton underskirt, the dull, heavy dresses hanging from a nearby costume rack. She spends as little time as possible in her trailer, preferring the wind in her hair and the sounds of the crew filling her ears.
Her phone is light and warm in her hands between takes, the keys wearing thin from too much use. She sends him pictures and videos of her days; he responds with images of his meals, the plates centered precisely in the frame, and snippets of facts relating to whatever he thinks she might be interested in.
They talk every day while he walks home from work and she breaks for dinner. She sits at the same table in the corner of the craft services tent, his breath steady in her ear. The ease with which he alters his routine to include her makes her want to laugh out loud.
He calls at night, every night, the last thing he does before he wraps himself into his cocoon and drifts away. Long afterward, she lays in her bed, still too wide and empty, and stares out at the water. In the last seconds before she slips under, she can feel him against her, his breath stirring the hair at the nape of her neck.
---
In their final weeks, the entire company transforms into a frenzied nocturnal beast as they race against the dawn to capture the night scenes. She sleeps late into the afternoons, waking with long, languorous stretches.
They're standing on the set one night, a narrow strip of beach littered with bodies and blood and carefully controlled fires, all covered with the stinking dark smoke of fake guns. A production assistant calls cut and another shouts out the countdown until someone remembers to turn on an audio stream. The effects crew shuts down the gas jets and someone switches off the generators. The klieg lights fall dark and everyone, cast and crew, hangers-on and visitors with passes around their necks, they all lift their faces up to the heavens. They all stand together facing the horizon and as the countdown sinks lower, a hush blankets the group.
A tiny bright streak shoots up into the sky for only an instant, far away across the water and moving farther with every second, burning steadily in the dark sky before it winks out. In her head she traces the arc of its trajectory from the graphics splashed across every TV set and newspaper she's seen for months, the terminus marked against a small unassuming patch of red dusty ground millions and millions of miles away. She thinks of Howard, and little green men, and the time he offered to let her drive on another planet. She whispers a prayer to no god in particular and can't hold back a grin that nearly splits her in two.
The beach erupts in cheers and dancing and whirling, hugging, kissing. They're celebrating amid the pieces of two distinct centuries, watching the future race into the sky again and again on dozens of tiny cell phone screens. Someone hooks a laptop up to the playback monitors and everyone crowds around; the craft services people start passing out bottles of champagne. The President's voice echoes across the sand and water, tinny from speakers turned up too far.
She walks away into the darkness and presses her phone to her ear.
---
When her wrap day arrives, she is ready to shed this character like a snakeskin and emerge with new, smooth flesh that belongs only to her. Her final scene is an easy one, at least compared to those she has already done.
She kneels in the sand and presses her hands against a chest that is wet and cold with blood. Her fingers dig for purchase in the rough, salt-stiffened fabric of a coat and she doesn't flinch when a hand comes up to weakly push her away before falling still. She falls back to her heels and stares out across the water, a dark, tarnished gun glinting dully at her side.
They go again, and again. Six takes in all and then she is free. She grins down at the boy lying in the sand, his hair still perfectly tousled, and helps him to stand.
There's a brief hush while the director takes off his headphones, then applause ripples through the assembled crew. She takes a few moments to walk around, doling out hugs and teasing threats in equal measure, before turning to the wardrobe trailer, a costuming assistant trailing at her heels.
They have to stop while someone wheels an equipment trunk across their path. When it is past, she looks up and sees him standing under the bare bulb at the corner of the battered double-wide that houses hair and makeup. The light overhead deepens the shadows around his eyes and he looks around, wary, tense. He wears, for the first time in her memory, a pair of jeans. An animated hero's head peeks out from under his button-down shirt, and his hands are clasped behind his back.
She approaches slowly, holding her skirts up to keep them from dragging across the pitted parking lot. She hears the whisper of his mother's voice, cautioning them to take it easy lest he startle.
He turns slightly and sees her, his features relaxing into something that isn't quite a smile. In her head, she tells his mother where to stick it; she's had enough of this long, slow slide toward each other, and she picks up her skirts and runs.
---
She calls the front desk from her room and has the clerk switch the billing onto her own personal credit card for however much longer she wants to stay. While she's on with the airlines, canceling her flights, he drifts around the room, picking up and folding her things.
She has breakfast sent up: toast and bacon and sausage and waffles for her, drowning in butter and syrup, everything she's not supposed to eat; cereal and milk for him, still in the packaging so he knows no one else has touched it. They sit on the low wall of her patio to eat and watch the sun rise over the water. He balances his bowl in one large hand, doesn't complain about the temperature or the wind or the sand.
He was born here, spent the first quarter of his life and part of the last in a house just a few miles away. She peppers him with questions but his memories all center on his family, his studies, and his house. He is familiar with her version of the island only when it matches with the facts he has picked up along the way, colored only in the palest shades by his own personal experience.
When he's finished eating, he rolls his jeans up to his knees and carefully folds his socks into his shoes. She stands to join him, her toes wiggling in the sand, and tries to think where to take him first.
Before she can decide, a yawn sneaks up on her, cracking her jaw wide open.
He tries to excuse himself, already turning away to leave, and she draws him back into the room and down beside her atop the bed. For the first time, it feels like the right size, only just barely wide enough to fit them both. He tries to protest and she stills him with one hand on his chest, his heartbeat fluttering under her fingers.
---
She is emptying the contents of a moving box when he comes home from work, his footsteps steady and soft on the carpeted stairs. The door stands wide open and she puts down a framed piece of cardboard, two sets of writing trapped under the glass, when she sees him in the hallway, looking in at her while he fiddles with the strap of his bag.
She doesn't smile so much as she beams, delighting in the way his cheeks round when his mouth curves up at the sides.
"Hi!" she chirps, taking a step toward the door. She knows he remembers the way this turned out the first time. It's patterned like a map under their skin, invisible to everyone else.
"Hi," he responds, meeting her eyes this time instead of dipping his gaze down to the floor.
She says it again, knowing he hears the question in her voice, and he comes into their room, halving the distance between them in a single step.
Penny is thirty-four and Sheldon thirty-nine the year they begin again.
Started: 23 September 2009
Finished: 25 September 2009
Finished: 25 September 2009