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[big bang theory] if it was so - pg-13
Title: If It Was So
Rating: up to PG-13 for language
Length: 7000 words
Fandom: Big Bang Theory
Prompt: I used the second fifteen prompts in order from the Paradox-o-rama Fiction Friday thing, and all of these are day-after continuations of the first fifteen prompts that I used for Through the Looking Glass.
A/N: Um. I do not even know. Seriously. But there were fifteen picture prompts left that I didn't get to use for the Paradox-o-rama thing, so here they are. Unbeta'd; would love any feedback, as always!
i. the day after the roller coasters
Penny stepped closer to the campfire and spread her hands. There was a chill in the air that not even the flames and forcibly borrowed sweatshirt could banish now that the sun was sinking down to the horizon. "I can't believe neither of you knows how to put up a tent."
"We know how," Leah protested. She squinted at the tent peg she was trying to drive into the hard-packed dirt and waved the mallet she was holding. "We're just not up to scratch on the practical application of that knowledge, that's all."
"And we're not the ones who can't tell the difference between a campground and a hotel online," Shelly grumbled from where she was doing something with the central pole and ... where the hell did she get a level?
Penny gave one last longing look at the car bumping slowly down the track back toward the main highway. Hannah had taken one look at the clearing and whispered something that made Raj dive back into the car and lock the doors behind him. Twenty minutes of trying to coax him out had resulted in the couple heading back for town and the slim hope of a motel with an occupancy, while Penny, Leah, and Shelly carried on with the original plan. Well, the original mistake.
"All right, let's do this," Penny said. She rolled up her too-long sleeves and ignored the clean scent of Shelly's detergent that puffed up from the fabric. "Leah, give me the mallet before you hurt yourself. Shelly, drop the level. I'll get the pegs while you guys lay out the ropes."
Shelly did drop the level, but she also looked like someone had just knocked her upside the head. She darted a look at Hannah and hissed, "Penny, don't talk about our personal business—!"
The sky was completely dark before Penny stopped laughing long enough to drive the stakes into the ground.
ii. the day after the parade
All the decorations in the world weren't enough to transform the dingy walls of the youth center, but Cooper had to admit it seemed like he was the only one who noticed. The lobby was crowded with kids trying to elbow their way closer to the chaperons taking tickets. Over their heads, through the doors, he could see that the DJ had already taken up nearly a third of the room. His speakers and other assorted equipment spilled into the area Cooper had measured and marked off for the dance floor earlier that day.
"It's amazing how no one in this entire organization can follow directions," he grumbled as another over-eager teenager jostled them. He turned to shoot a glare at the group behind him. The kids who'd already taken one of his classes shrank back, but the ones he didn't recognize hardly paused for breath, let alone moving back to give them any more room. He tried to nudge Penny toward the edge of the room where the population density was lighter.
"Do you see your mom anywhere?" Penny bounced at his side, trying to rise up on her toes. She cradled her belly with one hand, using the other to steady herself on Cooper's arm. "I told her we could only help out for the first hour or s—oof."
She stumbled forward a few inches, throwing up her hands to keep from crashing into the kids in front of her.
Before Cooper could reach out for her—or for Tyler, the kid who'd almost knocked her over—the boy grabbed Penny's arm and held on so she wouldn't fall.
"Shi— shoot, Mrs C, sorry! Are you okay? I didn't see you! Brady was shoving me, I told him to knock it off and—"
She laughed, and Cooper's stomach unknotted. Only a little, though. Even though Tyler outweighed him by a good twenty pounds of mostly muscle, most of Cooper's body was still tensing to grab the boy by the back of his neck and drag him outside for a lecture on the idiocy of roughhousing in a crowded room, let alone when there was a hugely pregnant woman nearby. Especially when Cooper's hugely pregnant wife was nearby.
He kept all that to himself, though. He'd made a similar mistake not long before Georgia was born, and he swore his neck had never recovered from the week he spent on the couch.
"Just be careful," Penny was telling the boy. "I have enough trouble staying upright on my own these days." She smoothed her shirt down, pulling it tight over her skin, the round bump of her navel an island floating on a sea of swollen flesh.
Tyler caught the movement of her hand and looked down, then flushed a furious red and stammered out a few more apologies before cutting and running back to his friends. He didn't look directly at either of them the whole time.
Penny looked torn between a frown and a smirk. "Was it something I said?"
"Probably something his health teacher said," Cooper answered. "Let's go see if Mom's in the kitchen."
iii. the day after the collision
"Don't you have any boysenberry?" the disembodied voice asked.
"I am seriously not talking to you while you're invisible." Penny rubbed her forehead. "I still can't believe this is happening."
She knew without turning around that Sheldon was visible once again. Each time he did whatever it was he did with the device he wore on a cord around his neck, there was a very faint humming noise and a smell like someone was burning leaves a mile or so down the road.
When he stepped up next to her, she handed over the box of popsicles. The bright green stripes on his shirt were every bit as startling in her kitchen as they had been the day before under the fluorescent lights in the canned soup aisle.
His crimes against fashion, however, weren't anywhere near as startling as the guy who'd popped out of nowhere behind her car five minutes after she left the store. The man had shouted something in a language she didn't recognize, then shot out her rear window as she tried to drive away. The next thing she knew she was getting shoved half into the passenger seat as the car careened out of the lot, seemingly on its own except for the pressure of an invisible hand on her leg, keeping her foot steady on the gas pedal.
"Ooh, you didn't tell me there was still a pumpkin one in here!" Sheldon closed the flap of the box and put it back in the freezer before turning his attention to the waxy paper sleeve. "Boysenberry is the best popsicle flavor, obviously, but pumpkin's a close second. And on a day as hot as today, I think the squash flavor will be more refreshing than the cloying sweetness of the berry. If it even is real boysenberry." He pulled the box out again and peered at the minuscule ingredients list.
Another thing Penny was still having a really hard time believing was that he was some kind of doctor and not an overgrown child who'd escaped from a mental hospital. If it hadn't been for the repeated proof that he had some kind of invisibility device and a freaking assassin after him, that was. All the same, he was rapidly approaching the point when he wore down her very last nerve.
"Look, Sheldon. Okay, it's not like I want you to get... Are you sure you really don't have anywhere else to go?"
It was probably the seventeenth time she'd asked him to explain what the fuck was going on, not always in so many words, but he'd stopped getting pissy about it somewhere around the time she punched him in the throat and threatened to call CNN.
"Until I determine whether the man who shot at your car in the parking lot is after me, the device, or some combination thereof, I don't know who to trust. As a complete stranger who is incapable of understanding the technology or its ramifications, you are by far the safest choice."
Penny let the insult roll right off; it was far from the first time he'd called her stupid in the last twenty hours or so. Anyway, it wasn't like it wasn't true in this case. Frankly, the less she knew about the thing around his neck, the better off she figured she'd be.
He trailed along behind her while she hauled her laptop out onto the deck. When she dropped into a chaise, he gingerly lowered himself to its twin and took delicate bites of his popsicle. His elbows and knees stuck out at awkward angles as he tried to find a way to sit comfortably on the metal and canvas chair that was at least a foot too short for his frame.
The device around his neck clunked against the arm of the chair. He made a noise like a startled kitten before carefully holding it still against his chest.
While she waited for her computer to boot up so they could check the news — she still hadn't replaced the TV Kurt had taken when he moved out — a new question occurred to her. Why the hell hadn't she thought about this before? She tried to keep the panic out of her voice. Surely he would have said something... "You're sure they can't track you when you use that thing?"
Sheldon finished sucking the last bits of his popsicle off the stick, then laid it on the canvas to the left of his knee.
"No," he said. "I'm not."
iv. the day after the shift change
"Please, don't argue with me." Hillary finished unbuttoning her blood-stained blouse and dropped it on the cracked linoleum. She took another out of her bag and shook it out. The fabric was so thin from repeated scrubbings that the light shone through it as though it were made of smoke. "From what the evac squad told Amitabh after you left last night, the line isn't going to hold much longer. You need to get out of here while you still can."
Once upon a time, Penny's laugh had been vibrant enough to fill entire rooms, to coax others into laughing along with her, even when they didn't know why. Now, it was as faded and crumbling as the world outside.
"I wouldn't make it more than a few miles inland. We both know that."
The wall shuddered under Hillary's open palm, the loud smack making them both jump. The coffee mug Penny had left on the sill rattled against the thin pane of glass.
"We don't know that! You've been hiding here for three goddamn years and, God help us all, I let you."
Penny's hands shook, and she had to blink back a sudden rush of angry tears. "I haven't been hiding," she spat. She tried to say more, but the words wouldn't push past the lump in her throat. It took a huge effort to keep her hands from straying to the scars on her neck and face, and the ring felt heavier on her finger than it had ever been.
The mug rattled against the window again with the echoes of artillery fire that drifted in from the north. Hillary sighed; her shoulders drooped, and one strap of her thin, greyed camisole sagged down her arm. She'd lost more weight off a frame that had hardly any left to give. Her skin stretched tight over the bones of her shoulder and ropey muscles that grew more defined by the day, not from toning but from the fat slowly burning away around it. Was the cancer back? Penny wondered, fear shooting like lightning through her. Was that why Hillary was pushing what she'd thought impossible?
"Will you at least think about it?" Hillary asked, her voice soft again. Guilty. Almost defeated. "Jorge says he knows someone who can get you to the traveling lands."
Penny didn't want to think about it. She had given up hope a long time ago, walled up all of the cracks where it might sneak back in.
Hillary's words were splitting her wide open again, and she didn't know if she would survive it this time.
v. the day after the party
They were halfway across the parking lot when Danny twisted out of her grip.
Penny lunged for him. Her fingers just grazed the back of his shirt as he went running full-tilt toward the steps leading up into the park. She would have raced after him, but Jill was squirming against her other hand with surprising strength. Tiny fingernails pinched and scraped the skin around Penny's knuckles as her daughter tried to pry her hand free.
"Daniel Allen O'Flannery, you get back here!" she yelled after him. "Jilly, stop it."
The answering whine was familiar even if some of the words weren't. "But, Mommy, it's the Weather Man! From the party!"
Startled, Penny looked up, and wanted to sink down into the parking lot until the pavement swallowed her whole. At the bottom of the steps, frozen as if in terror of the six-year-old boy barrelling toward him, was the tall man her children had accosted the night before. The man with the blue eyes she imagined that she could feel on her back every time she turned away.
The one who had stolen into her dreams later that night, the first since Kevin's captain stood in her living room, turning his black cap in his hands, the acrid smell of smoke clinging to his skin and hair.
Penny closed her eyes and swallowed a swear word that would have earned her a smack on the bottom from her puritanical daughter.
"Mommy, come on," Jill pleaded. She was pulling so hard against Penny's grip that her whole body pitched forward, like a rocket straining to blast off from the pad. "I want to talk to the Weather Man! He said he knowed why the bees like the apple trees better but Danny made me forget to ask him to 'splain it 'cause he kept talking about cars and then you made me ...."
With a sigh, Penny let herself be dragged forward. "He knows why, Jill," she corrected, "and please stop calling him the Weather Man. His name is Dr Cooper."
Jill stopped pulling for a fraction of a second, her eyes wide and mouth slack and round. "A doctor," she breathed in wonder before turning back into a tiny girl-shaped tugboat sweeping them both across the asphalt.
vi. the day after more than one ending
If she squinted, Main Street looked exactly the same as it did the day she left town. With the windows down, her hair in her face, Penny could pretend for a second that this was Kurt's Chevy and they were heading for guaranteed fame and fortune and streets paved with gold. The shifter would be smooth under her hand as he moaned in the passenger seat about his killer hangover from their raucous going-away party.
But Davis Drug was now a CVS, and the café where she'd worked all through high school had been boarded up for a year. And instead of carrying the football team and boosters to an away game, the town had rolled out the school buses to ferry people from the church to the cemetery and back.
Penny lifted her foot off the accelerator and rolled through the stoplight. As they passed through the intersection, Tommy Peters stopped waving the procession through and tipped his hat to her instead.
"I can't believe Tommy Peters is a freaking deputy," she said aloud. "Seriously, biggest pothead ever."
Sheldon turned in his seat to regard the cop shrinking into the distance behind them. "Maybe he still is."
That's not the point she wanted to tell him, but she didn't know what the point was, exactly. She was dry-eyed and still full from breakfast, and she was driving her mother's truck through a town she thought she'd left behind forever. Her hands were steady, and she took each turn neat and slow, and she could see the back of her aunts' heads in the car ahead.
Penny concentrated on them, on the thick white line of Anna's part, and the tidy bun at the nape of Betsy's neck. She couldn't make herself look any farther forward than that, relying on Sheldon to tell her with slight noises and intakes of breath when it was time to take the turns she would rather not take.
Small pebbles pinged up into the undercarriage of the truck when they pulled into the small gravel parking lot just outside the gates. Ahead she caught a glimpse of the long, black body of the hearse that carried her parents as it disappeared down the service track that led deeper into the grounds. Behind her, in the mirror, the cheery yellow buses rumbled to a stop along the road.
There was a vague memory in her head of someone explaining that the buses couldn't park in the lot; that people would have to pick their way across the grass and stones, church shoes and all. Too much rain or not enough, she wasn't listening, not really. She was tracing the knuckles of her left hand, feeling the long-faded scars from helping her dad rebuild a tractor engine, a thresher, the old well pump.
"When your dad—" she started to say as she put the truck in park. "Were there a lot of people? Like this?"
Sheldon looked out the window again, at the people tramping across the grass with skirts and pant legs held high. "No," he said. "Not this many."
She hadn't cried in days, not since Sheldon took the phone out of her hand and shut himself in his office to make arrangements. But now, as she watched him looking out at the greyness that surrounded them, cold and bleak like it had been ripped out of her brain and left to die, Penny felt tears crowding into her throat, thick and hot.
vii. the day after the accidental date
The giant outer space spider creature was dead in a parking lot, its hairy legs cocked toward the sky and yellow tape strung up all around the corpse.
The blandly hunky country sheriff was threatening the equally blandly hunky visiting scientist with a night in jail when the knocking started. Penny muted the TV on her way to answer the door. It had been another long and annoying shift at the shop, but one she'd weathered admirably, considering...
Well, considering she'd been swallowing laughter like a lunatic all day and walking with a decided bounce in her step, it was hardly surprising she'd made it through the day without braining anyone.
As she looked through the peephole to see her new neighbor, Sheldon, with his hand raised to knock again, she felt another grin lift its way onto her face. This time she didn't do anything to stop it.
"Hi!" she chirped as soon as the door was open enough for her to meet his eyes.
Sheldon started to say something, then apparently thought better of it and smiled instead. It didn't sit quite right on his face, one side of his mouth lifting more than the other, but she thought it probably matched her own idiot expression pretty well.
"I realize that this may be awkward given that we've only known each other for a sum total of seven hours, when you add our impromptu outing yesterday evening to the various times our paths have crossed in the lobby, elevator, stairwells, and parking garage in the past few days...."
"Geez, and here I thought you didn't know I existed," Penny teased. For the first time in a long time, she wanted to cringe as the words slipped out. She'd meant to say something friendly, maybe tell him to take a breath, but what came out instead— she didn't realize until that moment that she had been counting too.
"I- I, that is—" He kind of peered down at her. "You're being sarcastic, aren't you?"
That gave her pause. "You know, I actually don't think I am."
"Damn. Well, we can discuss that later. Right now I am compelled to infringe on our nascent association to ask for sanctuary."
"Huh?"
"My mother wants me to invite you over for dinner. She's making nine-bean chili, and my father—"
Penny threw up her hands to stop him. "Say no more. I've got a dad of my own. Come on in, I'm just watching something terrible on TV. You want a beer?"
He looked around the apartment as he came in, at the piles of clothes on the armchair and couch, the socks and magazines strewn all over the coffee table, the pile of recyclables teetering next to the kitchen island. Penny tried not to let his scrutiny bother her.
After a few seconds, Sheldon shook himself and repeated, "...a beer. Yes, I think I will." He nodded, looking satisfied.
"How long is your family in town?" Penny asked as she grabbed the bottles and popped the tops. "Oh, they don't live with you, do they? It's just that I've never seen them here before. Not that I've been spying on you or anything! I mean, you just moved in! How would I know what's up with you? Or your family?"
She thrust a bottle in his hand and took a long drink from her own, mostly to stop the embarrassing flow of words before she told him she'd checked out his medicine cabinet the night before, or that his grandma had patted her arm and complimented her hips. Or that one of his uncles had offered to take her on a turkey shoot when she and Sheldon came to visit, as though no one had given him the memo that she was actually a total stranger kidnapped from the hallway.
Sheldon shuddered. "Good lord, no. My brother got married last week, and they stayed to help me move into the building. Most of them are heading back to Houston tomorrow."
"That's nice," she said, then realized how that sounded and stuttered a correction. "No! I mean, it's nice that they helped you move! I mean, yeah, it'll be nice for you, probably, to have your apartment to yourself—"
"I wouldn't say that, exactly."
Penny had been on the receiving end of her fair share of smoldering looks, and as Sheldon raised the beer bottle to his lips.... Yep. That was definitely one of them.
viii. the day after the blockbuster
"What does that even mean?" Penny muttered at her textbook. She could barely balance a checkbook, let alone wade through all of this. What the hell had possessed her to sign up for a finance class in the first place?
At her elbow, her cell phone started buzzing, a blurry picture of Sheldon's sleeping face lighting up in the display.
Oh, right, that was who had talked her into it.
"Sheldon, so help me God, if you're calling to bitch at me for letting Gilda touch your popcorn yesterday, I am going to strangle you."
He sucked in a scandalized breath. "She touched my popcorn?!"
Penny winced. "What? No! That's not why you're calling?"
"No, I was calling to tell you that Leonard hasn't come home yet, so I assume Gilda's plan worked and they are still engaged in acrobatic feats of—"
The book slammed shut with a crack. All this studying in the middle of the day was going to ruin her eyesight, anyway. Or something. "You're home alone?"
"That is the implication one should take away from 'Leonard hasn't come home yet'."
She did a quick breath check and dug through her purse for a mint. "Unlock the door," she commanded. "I'll be there in thirty seconds."
Through the phone Penny heard the telltale squeak of his bedroom door, then the echo of his footsteps through the living room. She tossed aside a stack of unopened mail, coming up with her spare keys and the still-sealed toothbrush she'd been meaning to leave in his bathroom for weeks.
"You just left an hour ago! I thought you had an exam to study for?"
Penny yanked her door open to find Sheldon watching her from the other side of the hall. She pressed random buttons on her phone to disconnect the call and threw it over her shoulder, not caring where it landed. "Screw the exam."
"You can't really afford to neglect your education any longer, but I was hoping you'd say that," Sheldon said into the phone he still had pressed to his ear. "Remind me to encourage Gilda to wear miniskirts more often."
ix. the day after the game
Sheldon engaged the brakes on his chair, snapped the cloth napkin open and settled it on his lap. He'd only just started to inspect the silverware when the waitress bounded over with his soda.
"Two days in a row? If I didn't know better, I'd say this was my lucky day."
He looked up in time to catch her wink, but her smile faded a little when he didn't otherwise react. It gave him an odd sinking feeling to see her bright expression dim so he forced an answering smile.
Equilibrium apparently restored, she waved the laminated menu. "Wanna take a look today or should I just put your usual order in?"
"The usual. And this fork has spots."
She reached for the utensil he held out, and he was suddenly reminded that her right arm was encased in a cast all the way up to her elbow. He waited until she came back with a clean roll of silverware to ask, "What happened? I'm sorry. I should have asked yesterday."
"Oh, it's nothing, just a stupid accident. I was coming down the escalator at the mall and my sandal got stuck in the step thingy. The doctor said it was just a sprain, so I'm totally okay to keep working!"
None of Sheldon's degrees or titles were in medicine, but he'd certainly had enough experience with them in the past few years to know that sprains didn't usually require full casts. But the waitress' lips tightened the longer he looked, so he busied himself with the salt and pepper and sweetener packets, making sure they were lined up correctly with the edges of the table.
"I'll just have the usual," Sheldon repeated, hoping she would take the hint and leave. He was embarrassed by how much he wanted to pry, to make sure the injury wasn't severe, that she wasn't just trying to keep a job that was beneath even her.
"Sure thing, sweetie," she said. Her usual sunny demeanor returned, the smile audible in her voice. "I actually put it in as soon as I saw you come in. One barbecue bacon burger coming right up."
He wasn't sure when her chatter had become more comfort than annoyance, but there was no denying that the food wasn't what drew him back to this restaurant day after day. It was disconcerting, this interest he had in her. Not just in her well-being, but in her. He wanted to know why she was at the mall, why she worked her, why she always looked happy to see him... It had been years since he'd had any interest in anything outside of himself. Why now?
Why her?
x. the day after the sunscreen
"I still smell coconut," Lee complained.
He leaned in toward Penny and took a loud sniff of her hair. The cab driver lifted the last of their luggage out of the trunk and rolled his eyes.
"You're imagining things, Lee." Katie pushed on the bridge of her oversize sunglasses and went back to rummaging through her purse. "Jesus Christ, if I left my keys in that hotel room, I'm going to kill someone."
After a week of enforced cohabitation with her two best, and bitchiest, friends, Penny wasn't touching that with a ten-foot pole. The last time she'd tried to call Katie on her drama queen tendencies, she wound up sleeping on the patio when Katie locked her out of the room.
Instead, she settled for the lesser — and far more satisfying — evil of picking at Lee.
"If you smell coconut it's probably because you're still drunk on daiquiris. All I smell is exhaust." She leaned in and gave him a significant look, then stage-whispered, "And B.O."
The driver slammed the trunk lid, making them all jump. He got into his cab without another word.
Looking at the bags still piled up between the vehicles, Lee raised an eyebrow and crossed his arms. "I sincerely hope y'all don't think I'm picking those up."
Katie gave up trying to crawl in her purse long enough to repeat, "Y'all?", before shrieking with laughter.
"For the last time, there is nothing wrong with the way I talk!"
Penny ignored them both and started hauling their bags off the road and up onto the sidewalk. Lee and Katie followed, still arguing, but only after she finished moving the last bag. She sat on the biggest suitcase and flapped the front of her tank top, trying to get a tiny breeze going in the sticky, sweltering heat. Or at least to keep enough air moving so she wouldn't smell quite so much like roadkill by the time they got home.
Next time, she swore as she prayed for a skycap who would probably never show, next time she was picking where they went for spring break.
xi. the day after the last straw
Penny drove west out of Colorado, with some notion of seeing the ocean, but doubled-back before too long and went south instead. She slept in her car for a few hours at a time, whenever she found a parking lot that seemed busy enough. She couldn't believe she had been so stupid as to use her own name that night. She'd remembered about the credit cards, how they could be tracked, and threw them out the window a few miles from home. Her cell phone followed, three hours in the opposite direction. In St Joseph she had used her sister's driver's license for the credit check and traded down her car for one that smelled like oil all the time, even when the engine was cold.
Now she went south, and then east, then north and west, huge looping circles around the desert while she tried to figure out what to do next. Even if there was someone she could go to for help, every single name and number she'd never bothered to memorize is trapped in a hunk of plastic somewhere in Iowa.
There were a few minutes, when the moon was high overhead and animals called to each other in the darkness, when Penny almost turned the car to head home.
In the end, she stood by the hood of the car and tossed a nickel she found wedged in the back of the ashtray. They would be looking for her by then, turning her apartment upside-down, harassing her family, her neighbors, coworkers. She needed to disappear, for good. For real. No more driving aimlessly around hoping for salvation. She needed to go to ground.
She needed to be someone new.
The coin told her to go east, so she turned to the west instead. East was rainy and wet, Ivy Leagues and pinstriped suits. East was cold cities and ruthless business. But West? West was golden sunshine and dreams coming true.
Penny couldn't go home. She thought of how the gun had kicked in her hands, the familiar burn of muscle as she struggled to hold it steady. How the hole that blossomed in his chest was not a neat little circle, not at all, not like in the movies. How he didn't drop to the floor but came after her instead, his hands hard and crushing, like always, and the floor was slick with his blood and hers. How she fell to her knees in it before his body finally, finally, went down on one knee, then face-first to the floor.
It took an hour over the dry sink in the basement to scrape it all off her hands. The clothes smelled terrible when she burned them, and she gagged, over and over again, crying through it all and furious with herself for it.
The coin told her to go east, so she went west. She went west to the ocean, and then the coin told her to go south, then east, and the coin said to turn left, and left again, and right, and the gas light came on as she passed a not-too-shabby brick building with a for-rent sign in front.
Two mismatched men stepped out of the front doors, arguing with each other about aliens and dim sum and whose turn it was to do something she didn't catch as they passed.
It was Katie who got into the car in Omaha, who cried without stopping as she drove hours and hours out of her way. It was Katie who disappeared on the road somewhere near Denver, and Katie whose name and face she would have to forget.
It was Penny who stepped onto the sidewalk in Pasadena.
xii. the day after the trial run
Sheldon paused the DVD. "Would you like me to draw a warm bath for you?"
"What the hell?"
"It's what my mom used to do whenever Missy got dumped."
Leonard glared. "That's not helping, Sheldon!"
"Oh." He took a moment to consider why. "I thought after the two hours you spent last night cataloguing all of Stephanie's flaws with Louie-slash-Louise that it was once again acceptable to reference your breakup directly. I apologize."
The apartment was so quiet he could hear the hum of the DVD player all the way across the room. It seemed Leonard wasn't even breathing.
"You can borrow Mr Quackers, if you think that would help."
"Oh, my God," Leonard whispered as he rubbed his temples.
xiii. the day after the one ending
If life were a movie, the Army would swoop in as Penny struggled bravely to keep breathing, her skin chalk-pale and damp. The coughs would wrack her body, but delicately, as if she were too frail to even muss her hair, let alone spit up blood and mucus. They would bundle her out to waiting trucks; Sheldon, too, if he were still breathing, and Leslie and Raj, too, if their chemistry had sequel potential.
If life had a script, there would be a miracle cure. Leonard would burst through the door, hale and whole and all but vibrating with purpose. He would hold a vial, or a syringe, or even a single pill pinched between two fingers, ready for the hero shot, the close-up, the kiss with the heroine for whom he'd risked life and limb.
If life came from a studio, if life went the way someone decided it should, instead of whatever direction it took by chance—
If life was all written, with a beginning, a middle, and an end determined by an individual or a committee or marketing data, Penny would be flying down a country road with the wind in her hair, the radio cranked up, Leonard's hand on her thigh. The sun would shine and the trees would dance, the birds would sing in the trees, and if life were a movie, Penny would be making out with Leonard before the credits started to roll.
If life were a movie, this wouldn't be the end.
Not yet.
xiv. the day after the team
"Are you sure we shouldn't help?" Raj asked again. "There seem to be more coming in."
All six of their heads swiveled toward the entrance doors, where a veritable wave of black-suited, over-muscled goons kept flooding into the restaurant. The hostess and the floor manager shrieked again and dove behind the salad bar. A mountain of plates crashed down around them, followed by one of the original goons. He moaned once and went silent, his whole body limp.
"I think she's doing fine on her own," Sheldon said. He went on eating while everyone else at the table flinched and cringed and, though Howard would deny it later, whimpered.
"Any of you ever work with Walker over at the agency?" Leslie asked. "Looks a little bit like Combat Barbie there? Last I saw her was at a Weinerlicious."
"With the pigtails?" Kripke squinted across the dining room to where Penny was whipping off her yellow vest and using it to bring down another two bruisers. "You see a wesemblence?"
"Maybe it's just the uniform."
Leonard pushed up his glasses and cleared his throat. "I'm with Raj, maybe someone should help her. I mean, eight against one isn't great odds, even for Penny."
He looked at Sheldon, who sighed.
"Fine," he huffed and put down his burger. "And which one of you will be the one to tell her why we thought she couldn't take care of herself?"
No one would meet his eyes.
"I'll expect a forfeit from each of you," he warned as he stood.
xv. the day after the audition
On the drive home from the audition, Sheldon sat with his face tilted toward his open window. At a stoplight a car pulled up beside them, front and back seats overflowing with high school kids. One of them looked over and saw Sheldon's wide, milky eyes, and elbowed another. They made faces, shouted and laughed and pointed when he didn't react.
He never kept his eyes closed when he could help it. Refused to wear dark glasses. Considered an eyepatch for a day or two, but couldn't decide whether it should be on his right or his left.
Penny often wondered if there was any reason beyond sheer pigheadedness. Was he able to see impressions of light or color where he once saw everything? Or did his brain give him faint shadows to fill in what it knew must still be out there? Was it pitch-black inside his head, the blindness robbing him of all he'd ever seen?
But theirs wasn't a relationship that would let her ask these questions. Sheldon only let her in so far, and not one inch beyond.
When she woke the next morning, he was already up and gone. Since his position at the university dissolved amid the allegations and lawsuits, he had been acting as Stuart's assistant, on and off. Usually off. Even Stuart didn't have the patience to put up with the black moods that blew up when Sheldon's frustration met his new limitations head-on. Combined with the headaches that knocked him out of commission for almost a full week every month, it was no wonder Raj was his only option.
She checked the cupboards and fridge and opted to skip breakfast. Penny hadn't had much of an appetite lately, but she was getting better at stretching their meager groceries from one week to the next. Her shifts at the restaurant were still bringing in a lot of money — more, even, once she got over her distaste for flirting with everyone that was seated in her section. Before, it had seemed so tacky to pretend like that, but the closer they skated to losing the apartment, the friendlier she got.
Maybe we should talk about going—, he'd started to say.
Penny didn't want to admit it—never, ever wanted to admit it— but it was rapidly becoming the only choice they had left. She knew that if it hadn't been for her, if she hadn't been there to hold him back, Sheldon would already be gone, blindness be damned. The calls still came, she knew, even though he never mentioned them. And every once in a while she would turn on the laptop and find his screen-reader still open, with the browser history full of news stories about things with names she'd never be able to pronounce, like autunite and uranophane.
When he came home that night, his cane tip-tip-tapping through the living room while she watched from the kitchen, Penny studied him for the first time in what felt like ages. The lines around his mouth and eyes were getting deeper, and the creases in his forehead never fully smoothed out anymore. He still walked hunched over a little, like he was just starting to bend to talk to someone. His shoulders rounded forward, one lower than the other as he kept the tip of his cane dancing just above the floor.
"A picture would last longer," Sheldon said.
He pulled off his ugly windbreaker and carefully laid it over the back of his dusty desk chair. Penny stayed where she was, waited for him to settle onto the stool in front of her, then guided his hands to the plate of toast and mug of coffee she had ready for him. He smiled, faint but warm.
With a shock Penny noticed just how thin he was. His shirts hung from his shoulders, barely skimming the edges of his chest and stomach. His wristbones stood out sharply, the veins in his hands and forearms more noticeable than ever.
Her breathing must have changed, because he swallowed and tilted his head toward her.
"Sheldon," she said, her voice cracking a little, "I think we should talk about going."
Rating: up to PG-13 for language
Length: 7000 words
Fandom: Big Bang Theory
Prompt: I used the second fifteen prompts in order from the Paradox-o-rama Fiction Friday thing, and all of these are day-after continuations of the first fifteen prompts that I used for Through the Looking Glass.
A/N: Um. I do not even know. Seriously. But there were fifteen picture prompts left that I didn't get to use for the Paradox-o-rama thing, so here they are. Unbeta'd; would love any feedback, as always!
"I know what you're thinking about,"
said Tweedledum; "but it isn't so, nohow."
"Contrariwise," continued Tweedledee,
"if it was so, it might be; and if it were so,
it would be; but as it isn't, it ain't.
That's logic."
i. the day after the roller coasters
Penny stepped closer to the campfire and spread her hands. There was a chill in the air that not even the flames and forcibly borrowed sweatshirt could banish now that the sun was sinking down to the horizon. "I can't believe neither of you knows how to put up a tent."
"We know how," Leah protested. She squinted at the tent peg she was trying to drive into the hard-packed dirt and waved the mallet she was holding. "We're just not up to scratch on the practical application of that knowledge, that's all."
"And we're not the ones who can't tell the difference between a campground and a hotel online," Shelly grumbled from where she was doing something with the central pole and ... where the hell did she get a level?
Penny gave one last longing look at the car bumping slowly down the track back toward the main highway. Hannah had taken one look at the clearing and whispered something that made Raj dive back into the car and lock the doors behind him. Twenty minutes of trying to coax him out had resulted in the couple heading back for town and the slim hope of a motel with an occupancy, while Penny, Leah, and Shelly carried on with the original plan. Well, the original mistake.
"All right, let's do this," Penny said. She rolled up her too-long sleeves and ignored the clean scent of Shelly's detergent that puffed up from the fabric. "Leah, give me the mallet before you hurt yourself. Shelly, drop the level. I'll get the pegs while you guys lay out the ropes."
Shelly did drop the level, but she also looked like someone had just knocked her upside the head. She darted a look at Hannah and hissed, "Penny, don't talk about our personal business—!"
The sky was completely dark before Penny stopped laughing long enough to drive the stakes into the ground.
ii. the day after the parade
All the decorations in the world weren't enough to transform the dingy walls of the youth center, but Cooper had to admit it seemed like he was the only one who noticed. The lobby was crowded with kids trying to elbow their way closer to the chaperons taking tickets. Over their heads, through the doors, he could see that the DJ had already taken up nearly a third of the room. His speakers and other assorted equipment spilled into the area Cooper had measured and marked off for the dance floor earlier that day.
"It's amazing how no one in this entire organization can follow directions," he grumbled as another over-eager teenager jostled them. He turned to shoot a glare at the group behind him. The kids who'd already taken one of his classes shrank back, but the ones he didn't recognize hardly paused for breath, let alone moving back to give them any more room. He tried to nudge Penny toward the edge of the room where the population density was lighter.
"Do you see your mom anywhere?" Penny bounced at his side, trying to rise up on her toes. She cradled her belly with one hand, using the other to steady herself on Cooper's arm. "I told her we could only help out for the first hour or s—oof."
She stumbled forward a few inches, throwing up her hands to keep from crashing into the kids in front of her.
Before Cooper could reach out for her—or for Tyler, the kid who'd almost knocked her over—the boy grabbed Penny's arm and held on so she wouldn't fall.
"Shi— shoot, Mrs C, sorry! Are you okay? I didn't see you! Brady was shoving me, I told him to knock it off and—"
She laughed, and Cooper's stomach unknotted. Only a little, though. Even though Tyler outweighed him by a good twenty pounds of mostly muscle, most of Cooper's body was still tensing to grab the boy by the back of his neck and drag him outside for a lecture on the idiocy of roughhousing in a crowded room, let alone when there was a hugely pregnant woman nearby. Especially when Cooper's hugely pregnant wife was nearby.
He kept all that to himself, though. He'd made a similar mistake not long before Georgia was born, and he swore his neck had never recovered from the week he spent on the couch.
"Just be careful," Penny was telling the boy. "I have enough trouble staying upright on my own these days." She smoothed her shirt down, pulling it tight over her skin, the round bump of her navel an island floating on a sea of swollen flesh.
Tyler caught the movement of her hand and looked down, then flushed a furious red and stammered out a few more apologies before cutting and running back to his friends. He didn't look directly at either of them the whole time.
Penny looked torn between a frown and a smirk. "Was it something I said?"
"Probably something his health teacher said," Cooper answered. "Let's go see if Mom's in the kitchen."
iii. the day after the collision
"Don't you have any boysenberry?" the disembodied voice asked.
"I am seriously not talking to you while you're invisible." Penny rubbed her forehead. "I still can't believe this is happening."
She knew without turning around that Sheldon was visible once again. Each time he did whatever it was he did with the device he wore on a cord around his neck, there was a very faint humming noise and a smell like someone was burning leaves a mile or so down the road.
When he stepped up next to her, she handed over the box of popsicles. The bright green stripes on his shirt were every bit as startling in her kitchen as they had been the day before under the fluorescent lights in the canned soup aisle.
His crimes against fashion, however, weren't anywhere near as startling as the guy who'd popped out of nowhere behind her car five minutes after she left the store. The man had shouted something in a language she didn't recognize, then shot out her rear window as she tried to drive away. The next thing she knew she was getting shoved half into the passenger seat as the car careened out of the lot, seemingly on its own except for the pressure of an invisible hand on her leg, keeping her foot steady on the gas pedal.
"Ooh, you didn't tell me there was still a pumpkin one in here!" Sheldon closed the flap of the box and put it back in the freezer before turning his attention to the waxy paper sleeve. "Boysenberry is the best popsicle flavor, obviously, but pumpkin's a close second. And on a day as hot as today, I think the squash flavor will be more refreshing than the cloying sweetness of the berry. If it even is real boysenberry." He pulled the box out again and peered at the minuscule ingredients list.
Another thing Penny was still having a really hard time believing was that he was some kind of doctor and not an overgrown child who'd escaped from a mental hospital. If it hadn't been for the repeated proof that he had some kind of invisibility device and a freaking assassin after him, that was. All the same, he was rapidly approaching the point when he wore down her very last nerve.
"Look, Sheldon. Okay, it's not like I want you to get... Are you sure you really don't have anywhere else to go?"
It was probably the seventeenth time she'd asked him to explain what the fuck was going on, not always in so many words, but he'd stopped getting pissy about it somewhere around the time she punched him in the throat and threatened to call CNN.
"Until I determine whether the man who shot at your car in the parking lot is after me, the device, or some combination thereof, I don't know who to trust. As a complete stranger who is incapable of understanding the technology or its ramifications, you are by far the safest choice."
Penny let the insult roll right off; it was far from the first time he'd called her stupid in the last twenty hours or so. Anyway, it wasn't like it wasn't true in this case. Frankly, the less she knew about the thing around his neck, the better off she figured she'd be.
He trailed along behind her while she hauled her laptop out onto the deck. When she dropped into a chaise, he gingerly lowered himself to its twin and took delicate bites of his popsicle. His elbows and knees stuck out at awkward angles as he tried to find a way to sit comfortably on the metal and canvas chair that was at least a foot too short for his frame.
The device around his neck clunked against the arm of the chair. He made a noise like a startled kitten before carefully holding it still against his chest.
While she waited for her computer to boot up so they could check the news — she still hadn't replaced the TV Kurt had taken when he moved out — a new question occurred to her. Why the hell hadn't she thought about this before? She tried to keep the panic out of her voice. Surely he would have said something... "You're sure they can't track you when you use that thing?"
Sheldon finished sucking the last bits of his popsicle off the stick, then laid it on the canvas to the left of his knee.
"No," he said. "I'm not."
iv. the day after the shift change
"Please, don't argue with me." Hillary finished unbuttoning her blood-stained blouse and dropped it on the cracked linoleum. She took another out of her bag and shook it out. The fabric was so thin from repeated scrubbings that the light shone through it as though it were made of smoke. "From what the evac squad told Amitabh after you left last night, the line isn't going to hold much longer. You need to get out of here while you still can."
Once upon a time, Penny's laugh had been vibrant enough to fill entire rooms, to coax others into laughing along with her, even when they didn't know why. Now, it was as faded and crumbling as the world outside.
"I wouldn't make it more than a few miles inland. We both know that."
The wall shuddered under Hillary's open palm, the loud smack making them both jump. The coffee mug Penny had left on the sill rattled against the thin pane of glass.
"We don't know that! You've been hiding here for three goddamn years and, God help us all, I let you."
Penny's hands shook, and she had to blink back a sudden rush of angry tears. "I haven't been hiding," she spat. She tried to say more, but the words wouldn't push past the lump in her throat. It took a huge effort to keep her hands from straying to the scars on her neck and face, and the ring felt heavier on her finger than it had ever been.
The mug rattled against the window again with the echoes of artillery fire that drifted in from the north. Hillary sighed; her shoulders drooped, and one strap of her thin, greyed camisole sagged down her arm. She'd lost more weight off a frame that had hardly any left to give. Her skin stretched tight over the bones of her shoulder and ropey muscles that grew more defined by the day, not from toning but from the fat slowly burning away around it. Was the cancer back? Penny wondered, fear shooting like lightning through her. Was that why Hillary was pushing what she'd thought impossible?
"Will you at least think about it?" Hillary asked, her voice soft again. Guilty. Almost defeated. "Jorge says he knows someone who can get you to the traveling lands."
Penny didn't want to think about it. She had given up hope a long time ago, walled up all of the cracks where it might sneak back in.
Hillary's words were splitting her wide open again, and she didn't know if she would survive it this time.
v. the day after the party
They were halfway across the parking lot when Danny twisted out of her grip.
Penny lunged for him. Her fingers just grazed the back of his shirt as he went running full-tilt toward the steps leading up into the park. She would have raced after him, but Jill was squirming against her other hand with surprising strength. Tiny fingernails pinched and scraped the skin around Penny's knuckles as her daughter tried to pry her hand free.
"Daniel Allen O'Flannery, you get back here!" she yelled after him. "Jilly, stop it."
The answering whine was familiar even if some of the words weren't. "But, Mommy, it's the Weather Man! From the party!"
Startled, Penny looked up, and wanted to sink down into the parking lot until the pavement swallowed her whole. At the bottom of the steps, frozen as if in terror of the six-year-old boy barrelling toward him, was the tall man her children had accosted the night before. The man with the blue eyes she imagined that she could feel on her back every time she turned away.
The one who had stolen into her dreams later that night, the first since Kevin's captain stood in her living room, turning his black cap in his hands, the acrid smell of smoke clinging to his skin and hair.
Penny closed her eyes and swallowed a swear word that would have earned her a smack on the bottom from her puritanical daughter.
"Mommy, come on," Jill pleaded. She was pulling so hard against Penny's grip that her whole body pitched forward, like a rocket straining to blast off from the pad. "I want to talk to the Weather Man! He said he knowed why the bees like the apple trees better but Danny made me forget to ask him to 'splain it 'cause he kept talking about cars and then you made me ...."
With a sigh, Penny let herself be dragged forward. "He knows why, Jill," she corrected, "and please stop calling him the Weather Man. His name is Dr Cooper."
Jill stopped pulling for a fraction of a second, her eyes wide and mouth slack and round. "A doctor," she breathed in wonder before turning back into a tiny girl-shaped tugboat sweeping them both across the asphalt.
vi. the day after more than one ending
If she squinted, Main Street looked exactly the same as it did the day she left town. With the windows down, her hair in her face, Penny could pretend for a second that this was Kurt's Chevy and they were heading for guaranteed fame and fortune and streets paved with gold. The shifter would be smooth under her hand as he moaned in the passenger seat about his killer hangover from their raucous going-away party.
But Davis Drug was now a CVS, and the café where she'd worked all through high school had been boarded up for a year. And instead of carrying the football team and boosters to an away game, the town had rolled out the school buses to ferry people from the church to the cemetery and back.
Penny lifted her foot off the accelerator and rolled through the stoplight. As they passed through the intersection, Tommy Peters stopped waving the procession through and tipped his hat to her instead.
"I can't believe Tommy Peters is a freaking deputy," she said aloud. "Seriously, biggest pothead ever."
Sheldon turned in his seat to regard the cop shrinking into the distance behind them. "Maybe he still is."
That's not the point she wanted to tell him, but she didn't know what the point was, exactly. She was dry-eyed and still full from breakfast, and she was driving her mother's truck through a town she thought she'd left behind forever. Her hands were steady, and she took each turn neat and slow, and she could see the back of her aunts' heads in the car ahead.
Penny concentrated on them, on the thick white line of Anna's part, and the tidy bun at the nape of Betsy's neck. She couldn't make herself look any farther forward than that, relying on Sheldon to tell her with slight noises and intakes of breath when it was time to take the turns she would rather not take.
Small pebbles pinged up into the undercarriage of the truck when they pulled into the small gravel parking lot just outside the gates. Ahead she caught a glimpse of the long, black body of the hearse that carried her parents as it disappeared down the service track that led deeper into the grounds. Behind her, in the mirror, the cheery yellow buses rumbled to a stop along the road.
There was a vague memory in her head of someone explaining that the buses couldn't park in the lot; that people would have to pick their way across the grass and stones, church shoes and all. Too much rain or not enough, she wasn't listening, not really. She was tracing the knuckles of her left hand, feeling the long-faded scars from helping her dad rebuild a tractor engine, a thresher, the old well pump.
"When your dad—" she started to say as she put the truck in park. "Were there a lot of people? Like this?"
Sheldon looked out the window again, at the people tramping across the grass with skirts and pant legs held high. "No," he said. "Not this many."
She hadn't cried in days, not since Sheldon took the phone out of her hand and shut himself in his office to make arrangements. But now, as she watched him looking out at the greyness that surrounded them, cold and bleak like it had been ripped out of her brain and left to die, Penny felt tears crowding into her throat, thick and hot.
vii. the day after the accidental date
The giant outer space spider creature was dead in a parking lot, its hairy legs cocked toward the sky and yellow tape strung up all around the corpse.
The blandly hunky country sheriff was threatening the equally blandly hunky visiting scientist with a night in jail when the knocking started. Penny muted the TV on her way to answer the door. It had been another long and annoying shift at the shop, but one she'd weathered admirably, considering...
Well, considering she'd been swallowing laughter like a lunatic all day and walking with a decided bounce in her step, it was hardly surprising she'd made it through the day without braining anyone.
As she looked through the peephole to see her new neighbor, Sheldon, with his hand raised to knock again, she felt another grin lift its way onto her face. This time she didn't do anything to stop it.
"Hi!" she chirped as soon as the door was open enough for her to meet his eyes.
Sheldon started to say something, then apparently thought better of it and smiled instead. It didn't sit quite right on his face, one side of his mouth lifting more than the other, but she thought it probably matched her own idiot expression pretty well.
"I realize that this may be awkward given that we've only known each other for a sum total of seven hours, when you add our impromptu outing yesterday evening to the various times our paths have crossed in the lobby, elevator, stairwells, and parking garage in the past few days...."
"Geez, and here I thought you didn't know I existed," Penny teased. For the first time in a long time, she wanted to cringe as the words slipped out. She'd meant to say something friendly, maybe tell him to take a breath, but what came out instead— she didn't realize until that moment that she had been counting too.
"I- I, that is—" He kind of peered down at her. "You're being sarcastic, aren't you?"
That gave her pause. "You know, I actually don't think I am."
"Damn. Well, we can discuss that later. Right now I am compelled to infringe on our nascent association to ask for sanctuary."
"Huh?"
"My mother wants me to invite you over for dinner. She's making nine-bean chili, and my father—"
Penny threw up her hands to stop him. "Say no more. I've got a dad of my own. Come on in, I'm just watching something terrible on TV. You want a beer?"
He looked around the apartment as he came in, at the piles of clothes on the armchair and couch, the socks and magazines strewn all over the coffee table, the pile of recyclables teetering next to the kitchen island. Penny tried not to let his scrutiny bother her.
After a few seconds, Sheldon shook himself and repeated, "...a beer. Yes, I think I will." He nodded, looking satisfied.
"How long is your family in town?" Penny asked as she grabbed the bottles and popped the tops. "Oh, they don't live with you, do they? It's just that I've never seen them here before. Not that I've been spying on you or anything! I mean, you just moved in! How would I know what's up with you? Or your family?"
She thrust a bottle in his hand and took a long drink from her own, mostly to stop the embarrassing flow of words before she told him she'd checked out his medicine cabinet the night before, or that his grandma had patted her arm and complimented her hips. Or that one of his uncles had offered to take her on a turkey shoot when she and Sheldon came to visit, as though no one had given him the memo that she was actually a total stranger kidnapped from the hallway.
Sheldon shuddered. "Good lord, no. My brother got married last week, and they stayed to help me move into the building. Most of them are heading back to Houston tomorrow."
"That's nice," she said, then realized how that sounded and stuttered a correction. "No! I mean, it's nice that they helped you move! I mean, yeah, it'll be nice for you, probably, to have your apartment to yourself—"
"I wouldn't say that, exactly."
Penny had been on the receiving end of her fair share of smoldering looks, and as Sheldon raised the beer bottle to his lips.... Yep. That was definitely one of them.
viii. the day after the blockbuster
"What does that even mean?" Penny muttered at her textbook. She could barely balance a checkbook, let alone wade through all of this. What the hell had possessed her to sign up for a finance class in the first place?
At her elbow, her cell phone started buzzing, a blurry picture of Sheldon's sleeping face lighting up in the display.
Oh, right, that was who had talked her into it.
"Sheldon, so help me God, if you're calling to bitch at me for letting Gilda touch your popcorn yesterday, I am going to strangle you."
He sucked in a scandalized breath. "She touched my popcorn?!"
Penny winced. "What? No! That's not why you're calling?"
"No, I was calling to tell you that Leonard hasn't come home yet, so I assume Gilda's plan worked and they are still engaged in acrobatic feats of—"
The book slammed shut with a crack. All this studying in the middle of the day was going to ruin her eyesight, anyway. Or something. "You're home alone?"
"That is the implication one should take away from 'Leonard hasn't come home yet'."
She did a quick breath check and dug through her purse for a mint. "Unlock the door," she commanded. "I'll be there in thirty seconds."
Through the phone Penny heard the telltale squeak of his bedroom door, then the echo of his footsteps through the living room. She tossed aside a stack of unopened mail, coming up with her spare keys and the still-sealed toothbrush she'd been meaning to leave in his bathroom for weeks.
"You just left an hour ago! I thought you had an exam to study for?"
Penny yanked her door open to find Sheldon watching her from the other side of the hall. She pressed random buttons on her phone to disconnect the call and threw it over her shoulder, not caring where it landed. "Screw the exam."
"You can't really afford to neglect your education any longer, but I was hoping you'd say that," Sheldon said into the phone he still had pressed to his ear. "Remind me to encourage Gilda to wear miniskirts more often."
ix. the day after the game
Sheldon engaged the brakes on his chair, snapped the cloth napkin open and settled it on his lap. He'd only just started to inspect the silverware when the waitress bounded over with his soda.
"Two days in a row? If I didn't know better, I'd say this was my lucky day."
He looked up in time to catch her wink, but her smile faded a little when he didn't otherwise react. It gave him an odd sinking feeling to see her bright expression dim so he forced an answering smile.
Equilibrium apparently restored, she waved the laminated menu. "Wanna take a look today or should I just put your usual order in?"
"The usual. And this fork has spots."
She reached for the utensil he held out, and he was suddenly reminded that her right arm was encased in a cast all the way up to her elbow. He waited until she came back with a clean roll of silverware to ask, "What happened? I'm sorry. I should have asked yesterday."
"Oh, it's nothing, just a stupid accident. I was coming down the escalator at the mall and my sandal got stuck in the step thingy. The doctor said it was just a sprain, so I'm totally okay to keep working!"
None of Sheldon's degrees or titles were in medicine, but he'd certainly had enough experience with them in the past few years to know that sprains didn't usually require full casts. But the waitress' lips tightened the longer he looked, so he busied himself with the salt and pepper and sweetener packets, making sure they were lined up correctly with the edges of the table.
"I'll just have the usual," Sheldon repeated, hoping she would take the hint and leave. He was embarrassed by how much he wanted to pry, to make sure the injury wasn't severe, that she wasn't just trying to keep a job that was beneath even her.
"Sure thing, sweetie," she said. Her usual sunny demeanor returned, the smile audible in her voice. "I actually put it in as soon as I saw you come in. One barbecue bacon burger coming right up."
He wasn't sure when her chatter had become more comfort than annoyance, but there was no denying that the food wasn't what drew him back to this restaurant day after day. It was disconcerting, this interest he had in her. Not just in her well-being, but in her. He wanted to know why she was at the mall, why she worked her, why she always looked happy to see him... It had been years since he'd had any interest in anything outside of himself. Why now?
Why her?
x. the day after the sunscreen
"I still smell coconut," Lee complained.
He leaned in toward Penny and took a loud sniff of her hair. The cab driver lifted the last of their luggage out of the trunk and rolled his eyes.
"You're imagining things, Lee." Katie pushed on the bridge of her oversize sunglasses and went back to rummaging through her purse. "Jesus Christ, if I left my keys in that hotel room, I'm going to kill someone."
After a week of enforced cohabitation with her two best, and bitchiest, friends, Penny wasn't touching that with a ten-foot pole. The last time she'd tried to call Katie on her drama queen tendencies, she wound up sleeping on the patio when Katie locked her out of the room.
Instead, she settled for the lesser — and far more satisfying — evil of picking at Lee.
"If you smell coconut it's probably because you're still drunk on daiquiris. All I smell is exhaust." She leaned in and gave him a significant look, then stage-whispered, "And B.O."
The driver slammed the trunk lid, making them all jump. He got into his cab without another word.
Looking at the bags still piled up between the vehicles, Lee raised an eyebrow and crossed his arms. "I sincerely hope y'all don't think I'm picking those up."
Katie gave up trying to crawl in her purse long enough to repeat, "Y'all?", before shrieking with laughter.
"For the last time, there is nothing wrong with the way I talk!"
Penny ignored them both and started hauling their bags off the road and up onto the sidewalk. Lee and Katie followed, still arguing, but only after she finished moving the last bag. She sat on the biggest suitcase and flapped the front of her tank top, trying to get a tiny breeze going in the sticky, sweltering heat. Or at least to keep enough air moving so she wouldn't smell quite so much like roadkill by the time they got home.
Next time, she swore as she prayed for a skycap who would probably never show, next time she was picking where they went for spring break.
xi. the day after the last straw
Penny drove west out of Colorado, with some notion of seeing the ocean, but doubled-back before too long and went south instead. She slept in her car for a few hours at a time, whenever she found a parking lot that seemed busy enough. She couldn't believe she had been so stupid as to use her own name that night. She'd remembered about the credit cards, how they could be tracked, and threw them out the window a few miles from home. Her cell phone followed, three hours in the opposite direction. In St Joseph she had used her sister's driver's license for the credit check and traded down her car for one that smelled like oil all the time, even when the engine was cold.
Now she went south, and then east, then north and west, huge looping circles around the desert while she tried to figure out what to do next. Even if there was someone she could go to for help, every single name and number she'd never bothered to memorize is trapped in a hunk of plastic somewhere in Iowa.
There were a few minutes, when the moon was high overhead and animals called to each other in the darkness, when Penny almost turned the car to head home.
In the end, she stood by the hood of the car and tossed a nickel she found wedged in the back of the ashtray. They would be looking for her by then, turning her apartment upside-down, harassing her family, her neighbors, coworkers. She needed to disappear, for good. For real. No more driving aimlessly around hoping for salvation. She needed to go to ground.
She needed to be someone new.
The coin told her to go east, so she turned to the west instead. East was rainy and wet, Ivy Leagues and pinstriped suits. East was cold cities and ruthless business. But West? West was golden sunshine and dreams coming true.
Penny couldn't go home. She thought of how the gun had kicked in her hands, the familiar burn of muscle as she struggled to hold it steady. How the hole that blossomed in his chest was not a neat little circle, not at all, not like in the movies. How he didn't drop to the floor but came after her instead, his hands hard and crushing, like always, and the floor was slick with his blood and hers. How she fell to her knees in it before his body finally, finally, went down on one knee, then face-first to the floor.
It took an hour over the dry sink in the basement to scrape it all off her hands. The clothes smelled terrible when she burned them, and she gagged, over and over again, crying through it all and furious with herself for it.
The coin told her to go east, so she went west. She went west to the ocean, and then the coin told her to go south, then east, and the coin said to turn left, and left again, and right, and the gas light came on as she passed a not-too-shabby brick building with a for-rent sign in front.
Two mismatched men stepped out of the front doors, arguing with each other about aliens and dim sum and whose turn it was to do something she didn't catch as they passed.
It was Katie who got into the car in Omaha, who cried without stopping as she drove hours and hours out of her way. It was Katie who disappeared on the road somewhere near Denver, and Katie whose name and face she would have to forget.
It was Penny who stepped onto the sidewalk in Pasadena.
xii. the day after the trial run
Sheldon paused the DVD. "Would you like me to draw a warm bath for you?"
"What the hell?"
"It's what my mom used to do whenever Missy got dumped."
Leonard glared. "That's not helping, Sheldon!"
"Oh." He took a moment to consider why. "I thought after the two hours you spent last night cataloguing all of Stephanie's flaws with Louie-slash-Louise that it was once again acceptable to reference your breakup directly. I apologize."
The apartment was so quiet he could hear the hum of the DVD player all the way across the room. It seemed Leonard wasn't even breathing.
"You can borrow Mr Quackers, if you think that would help."
"Oh, my God," Leonard whispered as he rubbed his temples.
xiii. the day after the one ending
If life were a movie, the Army would swoop in as Penny struggled bravely to keep breathing, her skin chalk-pale and damp. The coughs would wrack her body, but delicately, as if she were too frail to even muss her hair, let alone spit up blood and mucus. They would bundle her out to waiting trucks; Sheldon, too, if he were still breathing, and Leslie and Raj, too, if their chemistry had sequel potential.
If life had a script, there would be a miracle cure. Leonard would burst through the door, hale and whole and all but vibrating with purpose. He would hold a vial, or a syringe, or even a single pill pinched between two fingers, ready for the hero shot, the close-up, the kiss with the heroine for whom he'd risked life and limb.
If life came from a studio, if life went the way someone decided it should, instead of whatever direction it took by chance—
If life was all written, with a beginning, a middle, and an end determined by an individual or a committee or marketing data, Penny would be flying down a country road with the wind in her hair, the radio cranked up, Leonard's hand on her thigh. The sun would shine and the trees would dance, the birds would sing in the trees, and if life were a movie, Penny would be making out with Leonard before the credits started to roll.
If life were a movie, this wouldn't be the end.
Not yet.
xiv. the day after the team
"Are you sure we shouldn't help?" Raj asked again. "There seem to be more coming in."
All six of their heads swiveled toward the entrance doors, where a veritable wave of black-suited, over-muscled goons kept flooding into the restaurant. The hostess and the floor manager shrieked again and dove behind the salad bar. A mountain of plates crashed down around them, followed by one of the original goons. He moaned once and went silent, his whole body limp.
"I think she's doing fine on her own," Sheldon said. He went on eating while everyone else at the table flinched and cringed and, though Howard would deny it later, whimpered.
"Any of you ever work with Walker over at the agency?" Leslie asked. "Looks a little bit like Combat Barbie there? Last I saw her was at a Weinerlicious."
"With the pigtails?" Kripke squinted across the dining room to where Penny was whipping off her yellow vest and using it to bring down another two bruisers. "You see a wesemblence?"
"Maybe it's just the uniform."
Leonard pushed up his glasses and cleared his throat. "I'm with Raj, maybe someone should help her. I mean, eight against one isn't great odds, even for Penny."
He looked at Sheldon, who sighed.
"Fine," he huffed and put down his burger. "And which one of you will be the one to tell her why we thought she couldn't take care of herself?"
No one would meet his eyes.
"I'll expect a forfeit from each of you," he warned as he stood.
xv. the day after the audition
On the drive home from the audition, Sheldon sat with his face tilted toward his open window. At a stoplight a car pulled up beside them, front and back seats overflowing with high school kids. One of them looked over and saw Sheldon's wide, milky eyes, and elbowed another. They made faces, shouted and laughed and pointed when he didn't react.
He never kept his eyes closed when he could help it. Refused to wear dark glasses. Considered an eyepatch for a day or two, but couldn't decide whether it should be on his right or his left.
Penny often wondered if there was any reason beyond sheer pigheadedness. Was he able to see impressions of light or color where he once saw everything? Or did his brain give him faint shadows to fill in what it knew must still be out there? Was it pitch-black inside his head, the blindness robbing him of all he'd ever seen?
But theirs wasn't a relationship that would let her ask these questions. Sheldon only let her in so far, and not one inch beyond.
When she woke the next morning, he was already up and gone. Since his position at the university dissolved amid the allegations and lawsuits, he had been acting as Stuart's assistant, on and off. Usually off. Even Stuart didn't have the patience to put up with the black moods that blew up when Sheldon's frustration met his new limitations head-on. Combined with the headaches that knocked him out of commission for almost a full week every month, it was no wonder Raj was his only option.
She checked the cupboards and fridge and opted to skip breakfast. Penny hadn't had much of an appetite lately, but she was getting better at stretching their meager groceries from one week to the next. Her shifts at the restaurant were still bringing in a lot of money — more, even, once she got over her distaste for flirting with everyone that was seated in her section. Before, it had seemed so tacky to pretend like that, but the closer they skated to losing the apartment, the friendlier she got.
Maybe we should talk about going—, he'd started to say.
Penny didn't want to admit it—never, ever wanted to admit it— but it was rapidly becoming the only choice they had left. She knew that if it hadn't been for her, if she hadn't been there to hold him back, Sheldon would already be gone, blindness be damned. The calls still came, she knew, even though he never mentioned them. And every once in a while she would turn on the laptop and find his screen-reader still open, with the browser history full of news stories about things with names she'd never be able to pronounce, like autunite and uranophane.
When he came home that night, his cane tip-tip-tapping through the living room while she watched from the kitchen, Penny studied him for the first time in what felt like ages. The lines around his mouth and eyes were getting deeper, and the creases in his forehead never fully smoothed out anymore. He still walked hunched over a little, like he was just starting to bend to talk to someone. His shoulders rounded forward, one lower than the other as he kept the tip of his cane dancing just above the floor.
"A picture would last longer," Sheldon said.
He pulled off his ugly windbreaker and carefully laid it over the back of his dusty desk chair. Penny stayed where she was, waited for him to settle onto the stool in front of her, then guided his hands to the plate of toast and mug of coffee she had ready for him. He smiled, faint but warm.
With a shock Penny noticed just how thin he was. His shirts hung from his shoulders, barely skimming the edges of his chest and stomach. His wristbones stood out sharply, the veins in his hands and forearms more noticeable than ever.
Her breathing must have changed, because he swallowed and tilted his head toward her.
"Sheldon," she said, her voice cracking a little, "I think we should talk about going."