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[big bang theory] method man - pg
Title: Method Man
Rating: PG
Length: 6400 words
Fandom: Big Bang Theory (Penny, Sheldon, Wil Wheatonnnnnnnnn!)
Recipient:![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
__hibiscus
Warning: Mild swearing; alcohol abuse and potential consent issues; wanton disregard for logic, coherence, reality, sense
A/N: Written embarrassingly late for__hibiscus's generous donation to ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-community.gif)
help_japan ♥
AU from, like, 1996, basically, with the flimsiest of premises. This is 1000000% fictional evil!Wil in case anyone wonders, who in my head is also either Chaos or Fawkes (both? please?). Which means no lovely wife, no lovely kids, no lovely break from acting, no lovely turning down of shitty Richard Gere movies, and no lovely Don't be a dick philosophies. There is probably still some deeply nerdy homebrew action going on, though. The title of the show and some characters comes from The Eye of Argon. Pray you never write anything so infamous. All my thanks toinkdot and allthingsholy for not telling me to stfu ♥♥
Try it on AO3!
Penny smiled at the waitress as she took the menus but waited until the girl was out of earshot again to speak. She'd heard enough horror stories about what people were willing to sell to the gossip sites and tabloids. Read more than her fair share, too. She was skirting dangerously close to providing them with material already, given that she was sharing a cozy drink in the Valley with a costar she couldn't stand. She wasn't about to do anything that could wind up with their pictures splashed across the pages of something that would stare at her every time she ran out of tampons or beer. Or drooled over shirtless Taylor Lautner set pics.
She stirred her iced tea with a spoon, not bothering to hide her grin at the scowl the clanking noise brought out. "Why do we even need to meet this guy? I mean, it's not like... This isn't some big important studio thing. It's not even worth—"
"There are no small parts, only small actors. Joseph Jefferson." Wil Wheaton slurped his drink and made another face. "Or Constantin Stanislavsky, depending on who you ask. Where'd that girl go? This smoothie tastes like rat piss."
The headache that had been threatening for hours kicked it up a notch. She added another packet of sweetener to the already cloying tea just for something to do with her hands that didn't involve punching him in his fat head.
When she couldn't take the silence any longer, Penny summoned her best politely interested look. "Have you worked with anyone like this for any other roles?"
Vivid memories of watching some of his movies with her older sisters had the more annoying parts of her brain dying to ask more pointed questions. The rest of her, however, knew better.
"No."
"Not even on St—"
"No."
She blew out a frustrated breath, more at herself for being upset than at him for being himself. If he didn't want to play nice, it was really no skin off her nose. She had no problem with getting in and out, hitting her marks and going home. None at all. Once they got through this dinner and once the production hold lapsed, she'd be all about keeping as much distance between them as possible. It shouldn't be too hard, after all. With the time-jumps between their characters and physical demands of the filming they'd have to do—not to mention that if they were lucky they wouldn't get a full season order—she might be able to go weeks without seeing him except at the table reads.
So, fine, that was the way it was going to be.
She was two levels higher in Angry Birds by the time he spoke again.
"Hey, did you notice that Buddha at the end of the bar looks like a really pissy Vulcan?"
"I don't care, Wil." She cursed as the ugly boomerang bird bounced harmlessly off a stone wall.
"Come on, seriously, look at that thing."
Penny twisted in her seat to look. "Yeah, okay, he looks a little ticked off."
"A little ticked off? It's like they put Nimoy up there and told him Shatner was directing again!"
Only through sheer force of will was Penny able to keep a heartfelt groan from escaping. His namedropping wouldn't be half so annoying if she gave two craps about any of the names he dropped. Didn't he know anyone under the age of a million?
She checked her cell, praying that someone, anyone, would call and give her an excuse to bolt. "What time did you say this guy was coming? We're going to be done eating before he gets here."
Wil shrugged.
A nasty thread of suspicion wormed its way into her brain. She looked up from the phone to glare at him. "There is somebody actually coming, right? You didn't make me drive all this way just to have dinner with you?"
He threw back his head and laughed, hearty and fake enough to draw the few eyes in the place to their table, then wiped an imaginary tear from his eye before going stonefaced. "Don't flatter yourself. You're not my type."
It might have stung a little bit if he hadn't spent most of the first table read trying to hit on her and just about everyone else who moved within smarming distance. Contrary to his reputation as a benevolent god among nerds, Wil was a total dick: rude to everyone and so full of himself it was a wonder he could breathe. It hadn't taken long for her prepubescent crush on Gordie Lachance to crumble under the weight of his bizarre quote-spouting ego. Less than ten minutes of uncomfortable small talk and six pages of technobabble, in fact.
The completely out of control hiatus beard helped, too. He looked like a Muppet.
Out of the corner of her eye, she thought she saw a quick flash of bright white light. When she turned, she saw the waitress standing near the doors to the kitchen. The girl was petite and blonde, with a face and attitude that seemed a little too sweet to be real. When she saw that Penny was watching her, she walked quickly to the bar and dropped something on its polished surface before continuing on to their table with a full tray perched on her shoulder. Slumping down in her chair, Penny pulled her ponytail over her shoulder to check for split ends and tried to project every ounce of boredom and irritation she was capable of mustering.
Wil waved his now-empty glass in the girl's face when she came to set down their appetizers. With a snide comment on the quality of the smoothie he'd gulped down like someone would take it away before he could finish, he demanded a free replacement.
"If he doesn't show up by the time we're done eating, I'm out of here," Penny announced, interrupting before he could insult the waitress or the restaurant any more.
"Relax, he'll show. The ego is not master in its own house."
His customary smirk faltered when she rolled her eyes and dug into her dumplings. He narrowed his eyes and leaned toward her. "That's Sigmun—"
"Frankly, I don't care," Sheldon insisted. "It isn't my problem what you have to do to solicit funding. Furthermore, I will not sully my impeccable credentials by lowering myself to consulting for ... for some..." He paused to search for the most evocative word possible, one which would sum up all of the derision and disgust he felt at the very prospect. Something suitably condescending. Withering, even. Something with just the right touch of contempt for the person proposing this debacle, although not so much that he wound up weaving serapes—nay, ponchos—for three months. Again.
"Some Hollywood farce," he finally said with a sneer.
Dr Gablehauser tented his fingers and made a face like he'd just been speaking to someone in the applied sciences. "That's too bad. I'd hoped you were committed enough to this department that you would volunteer. Since that appears not to be the case, I'm going to have to give it to someone whose career ambitions leave no ambiguities."
Sheldon stiffened, affronted, before biting out an icy, stilted, "Fine."
After a second of silence, he added, "Whoever you choose will be much better suited to such pedestrian endeavors anyway."
As he turned to leave, Gablehauser said, as if it has just occurred to him, "Of course that means that Dr Winkle jumps to the head of the preferred recipients list for the allocation of any incoming donations...." His voice trailed off into a smug, self-satisfied silence that set Sheldon's teeth to grinding.
"Leslie Winkle?" Sheldon could feel the entire right side of his face jump with suppressed rage. He faced the desk again. "You would put Leslie Winkle's, let's be frank: asinine research ahead of my own ground-breaking projects?"
Gablehauser smiled, wide and sharp-toothed like a Ferengi scanning a cargo hold full of gold-pressed latinum. Only in this case, it was publicity and departmental donors that the man had in his sights, and Sheldon was the unwitting stooge with inadequate shielding against the scans.
He let his shoulders slump. A television script riddled with inaccuracies, fallacies, and outright insults to thinking men and women was hardly worth a few seconds of his attention, let alone however long it would take to educate these buffoons. That kind of interaction with the entertainment industry belonged strictly in the domain of his free time, when he could discuss his complaints and criticisms with like-minded fans at leisure. He had no place taking part in the process beforehand, by choice or by decree. Not when there was more important work to be done. Nobel Prizes didn't win themselves, after all.
On the other hand, could he stand by and let Leslie Winkle take what rightfully belonged to him?
Straightening his shoulders as if to prepare for the burden he was taking on, he asked, "Where am I supposed to meet these actors?"
In Gablehauser's outstretched hand, as though he'd been practicing sleight-of-hand in all the hours he wasn't making any useful contributions to science, was a thick manila envelope. Stuck to the front of it was a bright green Post-It with an unfamiliar address.
"I don't know where this is."
"I assumed as much," his boss said with a tight smile. "Dr Hofstadter volunteered to drive you—"
Traitor!
"—after I personally guaranteed that you won't stage a sit-in protest in his front seat like, and I quote, 'a giant baby'."
"Curses," Sheldon muttered under his breath. After clearing his throat, he said, "Fine. I'll go."
"See that you do, Dr Cooper."
"But I won't go happily."
"No one expected that you would."
It was useless to try to devise an escape plan that would get him out of the building and past Leonard's car undetected. Partially because that would be akin to shooting off his nose to spite his face when it came to Gablehauser's threat of withholding funding, but also because Leonard, Howard, and Raj were lying in wait in the hallway. They had him surrounded, a tiny troop of tiny men with the intellects to match. After lodging a formal protest—more because they seemed to expect it than out of any hope for leniency—he let them accompany him to the parking lot with a minimum of fuss.
Howard, of course, argued that his minimum far exceeded everyone else's maximum daily allowance. He and Raj waited until he was belted in the front seat, then all but ran for the scooter that awaited them at the other end of the lot.
Sheldon watched them speed off down the street with no small amount of envy. He'd planned to spend the evening refining the strategy for their next raid to make up for their abysmal showing in the last tournament. But with their betrayal still underway, he didn't feel particularly inclined to working out how to keep them all flush with gold and grain.
Of course, with that thought, he had a sudden flash of inspiration and spent the next twenty minutes mentally racing down the paths they would need to take in order to pull it off. A well-timed freezing spell here, and a melee attack there...
"Would you just get out of the car, Sheldon?" Leonard whined.
Sheldon pulled himself away from the scene of battle to realize that they had pulled to a stop. They were double-parked next to a pale blue pickup truck filled with pool-cleaning equipment. Two unkempt men glared from the front seat and made rude gestures at Leonard's car.
Leonard sighed, probably not for the first time. "Seriously, we can't sit here all night."
"Says who?"
"Me, for one," was Leonard's quick response. "Not to mention Gablehauser. Oh, and, let's not forget: the truck full of guys who are going to kick my ass if you don't get out of my car right now!"
"No." Threats of violence from manual laborers aside, his roommate's exhortations had little of their former power. Not since Sheldon had cracked the code of the so-called non-optional social conventions.
"If you get out of the car, I'll take you for ice cream on the way home!"
"I'm not a child. You don't have to bribe me."
Sheldon tightened his grip on his bag but still didn't make a move to get out. Leonard leaned across his lap to push the door open.
"If you don't go in there right now...." His voice trailed off as he fumbled with the pockets of his jacket, finally coming up with his phone and furrowing his brow in what Sheldon assumed was supposed to be a threatening expression.
"Really, Leonard? You're resorting to blackmail?"
"Get out!"
Sheldon undid his seatbelt and carefully guided it back into position. "You don't have to shout," he chided.
"Apparently I do!"
When it seemed that undoing the seatbelt was as close as Sheldon was going to get to exiting, Leonard pressed a button on the phone and held it to his ear.
"Just remember: you made me do this," he warned. The expression on his face looked as close to stern as it had ever been.
A sudden stab of panic had Sheldon scrambling to exit of the car. He recognized that ringback tone, just as if he were sitting in the front pew and listening live as Mrs Rodriguez mangled it on the church organ.
"My mother? Really?"
"Desperate times," Leonard said with a shrug. "I'll be back to pick you up at ten."
"Nine-thirty. The Dollhouse season finale starts at ten and I don't trust the TiVo."
"Okay, fine, nine-thirty."
"They're going to discover that Echo turned the new Bravo and—"
He didn't get to finish sharing the spoiler, as Leonard sped off down the street before the door was fully latched. The pickup truck rumbled to life and followed along behind.
"Well, someone's clearly not reading my daily schedule updates."
Sheldon sighed and pulled out his own phone to update the distribution list to include Leonard's secondary email address, the one he pretended not to own, for whatever reason. When that was done, he sent a text to Leonard to remind him to pull the door closed at the next light before he fell from the moving vehicle and was crushed by an oncoming garbage truck or a school bus.
It was exhausting, having a roommate who required as much looking after as Leonard did.
Sheldon found the restaurant with little trouble. It was a narrow storefront at the end of an alley that had been converted to a pedestrian walkway. It connected two parallel streets in the middle of the historical district and was filled with the kinds of shops he could only be caught dead in, since there was no other way he would step inside. New Agey shopkeepers beamed happily at him from amid displays of crystals and hand-carved tchotchkes in a bewildering array of pseudo-scientific balderdash. He held his bag close to his hip and walked quickly down the length of the alley, fearing that at any moment he'd be inundated with a cloying spray of patchouli or some other hippie anointment.
Two tall potted palms flanked the entrance of the restaurant, with a hand-lettered menu in the window and a garishly painted sign hanging over the door. The Department of Health grade in the window was a solid A, but Sheldon only trusted that as far as he could throw an easily bribed state official. But the reviews on Yelp had been generally positive, with no reports of any foodborne plagues, hanta outbreaks, or the like. None that he could find, anyway.
When he pushed through the front door, a short woman in what looked like a tie-dyed bedsheet topped with a rayon net bag greeted him. "Hi, welcome to— Sir, are you okay?"
"No, I need to see your health inspection log book," Sheldon told her.
"We... don't have one?" she said, as if she wasn't entirely sure what she was saying was correct.
His every instinct was screaming at him to run, as fast and as far as his admittedly non-athletic legs could carry him. He would even forego a proper warm-up just this once. He could find a bookstore that looked slightly less idiotic than the rest of the businesses on the street and wait there for Leonard to return. Or, better yet, he could call Raj or Howard and demand a rescue operation. After the business with Howard's mother, they both owed him at least three favors payable at a moment's notice.
Before he could move, though, he imagined the sound of Leslie Winkle's demonic laughter as she slammed a lab door in his face. He shook off the urge to flee and forced a smile for the hostess.
"I'm meeting two people. Actors," he choked out. "The reservation should be under Gable—"
The hostess was walking away with his menu in hand before he finished, something that was happening far too often for his liking.
It took Wil all of thirty seconds to size the guy up. In his late twenties, pasty and thin in the way of so many of the nerds who worshipped him, Dr Sheldon Cooper was definitely the kind of geek they needed on set. He wasn't so bad with the technobabble himself, obviously—even LeVar had been jealous of his mastery of it, toward the end. But being able to get a good grasp on the actual real-world applications of what they were acting out was going to be key. Gaining an ally who could disabuse the writers of their more egregious crimes against reality and science-fiction would be even better. Everyone had seen the caustic reviews that came out of the pilot screening at Comic-Con but it hadn't made much of a dent on the scripts still flying out of the writers' room. No way did they need more of that overinvested fanboy mockery bullshit sinking them in the ratings before they even made it out of dry-dock. So to speak.
The introductions were barely over before their new science consultant abruptly jumped to his feet.
"Now, hold on one minute," Cooper cried, his accent sliding into something almost Southern before he got himself under control. "I'm only here to meet with you to see if I'll agree to act as your consultant. I haven't authorized anyone to act on my behalf to execute a contract. And I certainly wouldn't agree to one that requires me to work on set with you on any kind of long-term basis!"
Penny shot Wil a confused look. "Didn't Bobbi say this was a done deal?"
Wil shrugged. He tried to pay as little attention to production details as humanly possible. If it didn't come with a script or a check attached, it really wasn't worth his valuable time. In fact, he'd only agreed to this dinner after being promised the studio would pick up the tab and his mileage. He'd made one too many missteps in the past few years to make any more waves than he had to, especially given that what little he had done was enough to substantially erode the critical praise he'd been amassing since stealing the show from Richard Gere. Luckily, though, he still had plenty of leverage in the front offices, thanks to a lifetime of box office goodwill, so he was still able to look after his healthy bank balances. None of it, though, was going to mean a damn thing by the time this show premiered.
He busied himself with his glazed edamame salad while Penny shifted into character and started working on the nerd. Her reel and the material they had to work with didn't do her any justice, either: she was good. Maybe better than he was, even. All trace of his prickly, bitchy costar was gone in an instant, replaced with the seductive and intriguing Thea that had emerged during rehearsals. Within minutes Cooper was seated and calm again, though he didn't exactly look happy about it.
"So have you read the scripts yet?" Penny asked. She punctuated the question with a sultry smile and a lingering touch of her hand to Cooper's.
"No," he said shortly, pulling his hand away and folding both in his lap.
Wil snorted. It looked like she was going to have about as much luck barking up that tree as he'd had with her.
But Penny clearly hadn't given up. She leaned toward Cooper and turned up the wattage on her smile. Only someone who was watching carefully would be able to see the look of dread that flashed across her face when she asked, "Did anyone tell you which show we're hoping you'll help us with?"
The help us was a good touch, Wil had to admit. Despite what he'd told Penny, he had worked with some of these so-called expert consultant types in the past. They always thought they knew more than any actor could comprehend, even though acting was at least 75% barely informed bullshit and more than capable of carrying the audience past any inaccuracies. If the audience was even aware they existed to begin with, which they usually weren't.
Looking just a tad sheepish, Cooper admitted that he didn't know the name of their show. Didn't know any of the details, in fact. Just that his boss had strong-armed him into coming to the meeting with some kind of money thing held over his head as incentive.
Wil could relate. He took pity on the guy, who it seemed was about to find himself trapped in the same nightmare they were.
"It's called Argonite."
"Argonite?!" If Cooper's head weren't already spinning from getting hit with the double barrels of Penny-as-Thea, it was now. He looked back and forth between them, a skeptical look creeping onto his face. "You're the leads on Argonite."
It wasn't so much a question as it was a statement of disbelief, but he and Penny nodded in unison anyway.
"But the pilot had Alicia—"
"Yeah, well, not anymore," Penny said with a scowl.
"And wasn't Eddie Norton the—"
"Hack," Wil coughed into a fist.
The waitress returned to deposit their entrees. She looked like she wanted to linger so Wil sent her scurrying with a brush-off gesture.
Penny held up a hand suddenly. "Wait, you know who was in the pilot?"
Cooper nodded and Wil felt a cold sweat erupt under his armpits. His heart started to race. If he knew about the pilot, then....
"I saw it. We were in Ballroom 20 for the—"
But whatever he'd been there to see was lost in the simultaneous rush of questions from both Penny and Wil.
"Oh, Jesus. Did they really laugh the whole time?"
"Was it the cut where Thea has to smother—"
"What did you think of the blood oath—"
"The uniforms. How did people react to the unif—"
"Who gives a shit about the uniforms? What about Captain Grig—"
Cooper didn't answer either of them, though. He didn't even look at them. Instead he upended his bag and dumped the contents on the table, nearly dropping a thick manila envelope in a shallow bowl of soy sauce. He ripped the envelope open and pulled out a stack of papers held together with brads. When he flipped it open, Wil saw the familiar show info and confidentiality warnings printed on the front.
After a skimming quickly through a few pages, Cooper finally looked up at them. Horror and a slowly dawning panic were written in every line of his face, the kind of instantly recognizable expression Wil had been trying to perfect for decades.
"I can't— This is, I can't be associated with...." He waved his hands, as if the gesture was enough to encompass the entirety of how fucked they all were. "There has to be a way to fix it. This would be my ruin!"
Penny huffed out a laugh and crossed her arms. "Join the club, buddy."
Two hours and several rounds later, they were no closer to a solution than when they'd started: with Penny's suggestion that she could try her hand at faking the plague. A plan that had fallen apart entirely once Wil pointed out that she had no idea what the symptoms were and Sheldon lectured on the inconveniences of a CDC investigation.
The only good news was that the show's production hold was a clear sign that the network was at least as skittish about the show's prospects as the three of them were. But that hold would end as soon as Sheldon agreed to come on board, or so the vaguely threatening letter included with the scripts would indicate.
After he'd uncovered that tidbit, Penny insisted he switch from water to something a little stronger.
"I'll have a Diet Coke, then."
"He means a cuba libre," she told the waitress. "And keep 'em coming."
To Sheldon, she said, "It's Portuguese for Diet Coke."
"Oh. Are you Portuguese?" he asked their waitress.
She gave Penny a strange look before nodding and chirping, "Uh, yep. Sure am. Portuguese through and through."
"To solidarity!" Penny interrupted, raising her glass in an impromptu toast as the girl walked off.
Wil gave a sloppy, over-exaggerated spit-take. "You know what that means?"
Penny scowled. "I read the SAG newsletters."
Sheldon left them to their squabbling and turned his thoughts back to their predicament. All other things being equal, he still couldn't dismiss Gablehauser's threat. If he refused the consulting opportunity, no matter how valid his reasons, there would be no hope for getting his funding renewed. He could kiss every chance of acclaim and recognition goodbye. He was doomed no matter what he did.
As he nursed his frustration with the large, oddly flat Diet Coke that tasted somewhat antiseptic, Wil chimed in with another suggestion.
"If we do it consistently—not just every once in a while but on every take—they're bound to release us from contract. Nobody wants to work with someone that unprofessional."
Penny made a disgusted face and pointed her margarita glass at him for emphasis. "You'd be surprised."
Wil didn't look happy about the correction. He leaned in closer to Penny, his mouth twisting into a sneer. "They've already replaced one bad actress, sweetheart. They'd do it again."
"Well, I'm not going to make myself look like an idiot," Penny snapped.
"Too late," Sheldon murmured as he flipped the final script closed. He didn't know why he'd bothered; every single page was as full of idiotic dialogue and nonsensical action as the horrendous pilot episode he'd seen at Comic-Con. Oh, the online reviews had been scathing, all right, and rightfully so; some of them had even been his. Wooden acting, a laughable premise, leaden dialogue so painful it was an insult to language itself... If there was even a whiff of intentional satire or tongue-in-cheek irony, the show would probably be a hit, finding a ready audience with fans eager to poke fun at their favorite tropes. But nothing was going to right this sinking ship, not even replacing the original leads with these two. Not if the scripts arrayed before him on the table were what they were working with. Not even Shatner could wring anything memorable from this dreck.
When his words finally registered, Penny's head whipped around so fast the end of her ponytail smacked Wil on the cheek. He sputtered, indignant, but his complaints fell on deaf ears.
"Did you just call me an idiot?"
Sheldon recognized the look on her face. If he'd seen it once, he'd seen it a hundred times. Mostly on Destination: Discovery but it had been a familiar sight on hunting trips with his dad, too. It was not the kind of look a prey animal normally survived and there was no doubt that she was the predator in this particular situation, his own superior intellect notwithstanding. She had the tanned, toned limbs so common to Southern California, but unlike many of the other women in her industry she didn't look like a stiff breeze would injure her. She looked like she could hurt him.
"I did nothing of the kind!" he protested.
"A stiff apology is a second insult, man," Wil offered before draining his beer.
"It sure sounded like you did," Penny insisted, even more belligerently than before.
"GK Chesterton said that, about the apology," Wil added.
He needn't have bothered. Neither Sheldon nor Penny were paying the slightest bit of attention, and Sheldon had known the quote's provenance already anyway. He would have said so but he'd only realized it as Wil's words filtered through his brain.
"I didn't call you an idiot," he tried to explain, instead, "just that you're going to look like one."
"He's right."
"Shut up, Wil."
"Hey, come on, you're not the only one who's going to look like an asshole here, Penny." Wil leaned back to signal their waitress for another round with his empty beer bottle, nearly toppling his chair in the process.
"We're all going to look like assholes." The swearword sounded ridiculous coming from Sheldon's mouth. He snickered and chased the straw in his Diet Coke around the glass with his tongue, wondering why such a problematic accessory was necessary in the first place. Finally, in frustration, he pulled it out and dropped it on the remains of his lemon chicken.
He felt strange, like the carbonation in his soda was slowly bubbling its way through his bloodstream and aggregating in his brain. Ridiculous and impossible, he knew, but that didn't negate the feeling.
"Assholes," he repeated, the Ss getting a little tangled on their way out.
On the other side of the table, Sheldon's snickering had dissolved into the occasional hiccup. Wil was rambling on about something that had happened a million years ago backstage at the Emmys or the Grammys or whatever.
Penny drained the rest of her margarita as the waitress came back with yet another round. They'd been there for hours, nursing drink after drink and throwing out one ridiculous suggestion after another, but the poor girl had been just as attentive and friendly the whole time. Unless she'd been spitting in their drinks at the bar all night.
She eyed the candy-colored slush in her glass suspiciously for a moment before shrugging. Hey, alcohol killed germs, right?
"What are we going to do?" she asked, feeling a sudden rush of tequila-fueled tears prickling at the back of her throat. She drowned them with another healthy swig.
"We could get hit by a truck," Wil rumbled. He'd been sinking farther and farther down in his seat as the night wore on, as though the beer had started to melt his bones.
"Too painful," Sheldon countered. He closed his mouth and rode out a painful-looking hiccup that jerked his whole body.
Penny ventured, only half-joking, "Set the studio on fire?"
Wil shook his head. "Too expensive."
They lapsed into silence again, each staring into the depths of their respective drinks. Something buzzed amid the pile of papers and books that Sheldon had dumped on the table. He rooted through his things until he unearthed his phone. He made a face at the display then turned it off and hid it under the pile once again.
Looking around the restaurant, Penny saw that the few other tables had finally cleared out, except for a group of young women sitting in the far corner and staring. After a few seconds of what looked like furious discussion, one stood and started walking toward their table. She clutched a napkin and pen in her hands and looked absolutely terrified.
Penny nudged Wil, who looked around blearily.
"Be nice," she hissed.
"Oh, I'm always nice," he slurred before turning a beaming grin on the girl. He even managed to sit up straight, as if he had suddenly found the spine he'd misplaced earlier that night. He was charming without being creepy, friendly without flirting, signed the napkin with a theatrical flourish and asked if the girl and her friends were enjoying their night out.
After a few more seconds of blushing and stammering, the girl pulled out her phone and asked Sheldon to take their picture. Penny scooted her chair out of the way to make room for the girl to kneel next to Wil, who put an arm around her shoulders without trying to cop a feel and grinned like a fool at the flash.
Honestly, it was like watching a pod person move around inside his skin.
"What the hell?" Penny asked as the girl fled back to her table to collapse in her chair with a high-pitched squeal.
Wil shrugged. "Hey, they pay the bills. And you never know who they'll tell if you're an asshole."
Sheldon nodded, his face serious until the effect was ruined with another hiccup. "Fangirls are terrifying."
"Yeah? Try fanboys sometime," Penny scoffed.
With a noise that could almost have been a purr, Wil sunk down in his chair again and stroked his beard.
"Seriously?"
He raised an eyebrow. "You have no idea."
Sheldon's head was propped up on his fist as he listed dangerously to one side, his elbow slipping farther across the table with the movement of his jaw. The tablecloth bunched against his elbow in rippling folds like those in the gravitational field he'd modeled just that week. But the two actors were too busy arguing to hear his interjections, so he kept the observation to himself. With a start, he remembered that he should be paying attention. They were working on something important. Something he couldn't quite remember what it was.
"Conventions can be very liberating places," Wil was saying.
"Well, yeah," Penny agreed, "but—"
"I grew up doing this, remember. There isn't much I haven't..." his voice trailed off as he sat bolt upright. "Eureka!"
The exclamation startled another painful hiccup from Sheldon.
Penny groaned and shifted in her seat. "No, please, rub it in some more that I didn't get that part."
Wil made a frustrated noise and sat forward, looking far more alert than he had in hours.
"Didn't your agent explain why we got called back for the second pilot?"
Penny's shrug sent the room spinning. Sheldon grabbed onto his glass as if it could somehow steady him.
"Well, didn't your lawyer explain about the non-standard clauses?"
"I don't know; I just signed what they put in front of me. Hey! The last job I had was playing House's dead hooker daughter. I jumped all over this."
Wil sighed hard enough to start the table bobbing, as if they'd set sail in the middle of dinner and Sheldon was just now noticing. He drained the rest of his Diet Coke and tried to find where the waitress was docked to ask for another. Before he found her, though, he realized Wil was still talking and concentrated as hard as he could on the words.
"So then Eddie and Alicia got themselves into a little bit of trouble at Comic-Con. Not, like, accidentally wandered into the exhibit hall trouble. Think Rob-Lowe-at-the-Democratic-convention trouble."
Sheldon had no idea what that meant. It seemed like the words were familiar but strung together in an independent clause, he couldn't parse their meaning. From the look on Penny's face, it seemed she couldn't either.
"Jesus, how old are you two? They got caught in flagrante delicto. Knocking boots. Making the two-backed beast?"
Penny started to laugh but Sheldon was still lost. He shrugged at Wil, who made a disgusted noise.
"For the love of... Alicia was sleeping with the director and Eddie's married to one of the executive producers; that's how he landed the part. But they got caught having sex in a green room in San Diego by some con volunteers. The studio managed to hush it up before it hit TMZ but, next thing you know: pfft! Eddie and Alicia go bye-bye."
"How did I miss that?" Penny gasped between fits of laughter. "It couldn't have happened to a nicer Alicia!" Just saying the woman's name was enough to set her off again. She slumped forward in her chair and covered her face with her hands.
Sheldon's head was spinning. "But how does that help?"
He turned from Penny's shaking shoulders to Wil, who had somehow loomed up out of his seat and was within inches of Sheldon's face.
"Just go with it," Wil said, his breath warm and slightly sour. Sheldon would have recoiled from the yeasty smell but there was nowhere for him to go.
Then, when Wil's mouth met his own, there was nowhere he wanted to go. Surely it was symptom of whatever illness was overtaking him, some foodborne parasite the California Department of Health had allowed to flourish due to their substandard inspection routines. Or, one of these depraved Hollywood types had slipped something into his odd-tasting drink, in order to make him pliable to their perverted will. He'd be lucky not to be sold to a cult by morning!
But all of those fears fled when Wil's mouth nudged his open and pure sensation flooded in to replace all coherent thought.
"I don't understand how this is going to get any of us out of our contracts," Sheldon said when Wil pulled away enough to allow his brain to kick back into gear and the words to slip out. His voice sounded as if it had dropped several octaves and he hurriedly cleared his throat.
"Shut up," Wil growled, and dove back in. This time, his hands were spread against the back of Sheldon's head, fingertips brushing against his scalp, sending shivers racing down his spine.
"Morality clause," Penny said when they broke apart for air again. Dimly, Sheldon realized she'd stood and crossed over to his side of the table. He thought he saw lightning flashing through the windows, or fireworks going off. Or possibly it was the last dying firings of random neurons from oxygen deprivation.
With a quick twist of her hips she pushed herself in between them. With both hands on the arms of Sheldon's chair, she slowly stepped forward until she was straddling his lap, right there in the middle of the restaurant. Wil stepped up behind her and pushed her ponytail aside to stroke the nape of her neck. His smirk deepened when he saw Sheldon's gaze follow the path of his fingers.
Penny curled her fingers against Sheldon's side, plucking at the dual layer of fabric that lay between their skin. She wriggled closer, adjusting her knees in the narrow spaces between his hips and the chair.
"If we do anything to make ourselves or the show look bad," she whispered against his lips, "we're out on our asses. Now, let's make it look good for all these nice ladies with cameras."
Rating: PG
Length: 6400 words
Fandom: Big Bang Theory (Penny, Sheldon, Wil Wheatonnnnnnnnn!)
Recipient:
__hibiscusWarning: Mild swearing; alcohol abuse and potential consent issues; wanton disregard for logic, coherence, reality, sense
A/N: Written embarrassingly late for
__hibiscus's generous donation to help_japan ♥AU from, like, 1996, basically, with the flimsiest of premises. This is 1000000% fictional evil!Wil in case anyone wonders, who in my head is also either Chaos or Fawkes (both? please?). Which means no lovely wife, no lovely kids, no lovely break from acting, no lovely turning down of shitty Richard Gere movies, and no lovely Don't be a dick philosophies. There is probably still some deeply nerdy homebrew action going on, though. The title of the show and some characters comes from The Eye of Argon. Pray you never write anything so infamous. All my thanks to
inkdot and allthingsholy for not telling me to stfu ♥♥Try it on AO3!
Penny smiled at the waitress as she took the menus but waited until the girl was out of earshot again to speak. She'd heard enough horror stories about what people were willing to sell to the gossip sites and tabloids. Read more than her fair share, too. She was skirting dangerously close to providing them with material already, given that she was sharing a cozy drink in the Valley with a costar she couldn't stand. She wasn't about to do anything that could wind up with their pictures splashed across the pages of something that would stare at her every time she ran out of tampons or beer. Or drooled over shirtless Taylor Lautner set pics.
She stirred her iced tea with a spoon, not bothering to hide her grin at the scowl the clanking noise brought out. "Why do we even need to meet this guy? I mean, it's not like... This isn't some big important studio thing. It's not even worth—"
"There are no small parts, only small actors. Joseph Jefferson." Wil Wheaton slurped his drink and made another face. "Or Constantin Stanislavsky, depending on who you ask. Where'd that girl go? This smoothie tastes like rat piss."
The headache that had been threatening for hours kicked it up a notch. She added another packet of sweetener to the already cloying tea just for something to do with her hands that didn't involve punching him in his fat head.
When she couldn't take the silence any longer, Penny summoned her best politely interested look. "Have you worked with anyone like this for any other roles?"
Vivid memories of watching some of his movies with her older sisters had the more annoying parts of her brain dying to ask more pointed questions. The rest of her, however, knew better.
"No."
"Not even on St—"
"No."
She blew out a frustrated breath, more at herself for being upset than at him for being himself. If he didn't want to play nice, it was really no skin off her nose. She had no problem with getting in and out, hitting her marks and going home. None at all. Once they got through this dinner and once the production hold lapsed, she'd be all about keeping as much distance between them as possible. It shouldn't be too hard, after all. With the time-jumps between their characters and physical demands of the filming they'd have to do—not to mention that if they were lucky they wouldn't get a full season order—she might be able to go weeks without seeing him except at the table reads.
So, fine, that was the way it was going to be.
She was two levels higher in Angry Birds by the time he spoke again.
"Hey, did you notice that Buddha at the end of the bar looks like a really pissy Vulcan?"
"I don't care, Wil." She cursed as the ugly boomerang bird bounced harmlessly off a stone wall.
"Come on, seriously, look at that thing."
Penny twisted in her seat to look. "Yeah, okay, he looks a little ticked off."
"A little ticked off? It's like they put Nimoy up there and told him Shatner was directing again!"
Only through sheer force of will was Penny able to keep a heartfelt groan from escaping. His namedropping wouldn't be half so annoying if she gave two craps about any of the names he dropped. Didn't he know anyone under the age of a million?
She checked her cell, praying that someone, anyone, would call and give her an excuse to bolt. "What time did you say this guy was coming? We're going to be done eating before he gets here."
Wil shrugged.
A nasty thread of suspicion wormed its way into her brain. She looked up from the phone to glare at him. "There is somebody actually coming, right? You didn't make me drive all this way just to have dinner with you?"
He threw back his head and laughed, hearty and fake enough to draw the few eyes in the place to their table, then wiped an imaginary tear from his eye before going stonefaced. "Don't flatter yourself. You're not my type."
It might have stung a little bit if he hadn't spent most of the first table read trying to hit on her and just about everyone else who moved within smarming distance. Contrary to his reputation as a benevolent god among nerds, Wil was a total dick: rude to everyone and so full of himself it was a wonder he could breathe. It hadn't taken long for her prepubescent crush on Gordie Lachance to crumble under the weight of his bizarre quote-spouting ego. Less than ten minutes of uncomfortable small talk and six pages of technobabble, in fact.
The completely out of control hiatus beard helped, too. He looked like a Muppet.
Out of the corner of her eye, she thought she saw a quick flash of bright white light. When she turned, she saw the waitress standing near the doors to the kitchen. The girl was petite and blonde, with a face and attitude that seemed a little too sweet to be real. When she saw that Penny was watching her, she walked quickly to the bar and dropped something on its polished surface before continuing on to their table with a full tray perched on her shoulder. Slumping down in her chair, Penny pulled her ponytail over her shoulder to check for split ends and tried to project every ounce of boredom and irritation she was capable of mustering.
Wil waved his now-empty glass in the girl's face when she came to set down their appetizers. With a snide comment on the quality of the smoothie he'd gulped down like someone would take it away before he could finish, he demanded a free replacement.
"If he doesn't show up by the time we're done eating, I'm out of here," Penny announced, interrupting before he could insult the waitress or the restaurant any more.
"Relax, he'll show. The ego is not master in its own house."
His customary smirk faltered when she rolled her eyes and dug into her dumplings. He narrowed his eyes and leaned toward her. "That's Sigmun—"
"Frankly, I don't care," Sheldon insisted. "It isn't my problem what you have to do to solicit funding. Furthermore, I will not sully my impeccable credentials by lowering myself to consulting for ... for some..." He paused to search for the most evocative word possible, one which would sum up all of the derision and disgust he felt at the very prospect. Something suitably condescending. Withering, even. Something with just the right touch of contempt for the person proposing this debacle, although not so much that he wound up weaving serapes—nay, ponchos—for three months. Again.
"Some Hollywood farce," he finally said with a sneer.
Dr Gablehauser tented his fingers and made a face like he'd just been speaking to someone in the applied sciences. "That's too bad. I'd hoped you were committed enough to this department that you would volunteer. Since that appears not to be the case, I'm going to have to give it to someone whose career ambitions leave no ambiguities."
Sheldon stiffened, affronted, before biting out an icy, stilted, "Fine."
After a second of silence, he added, "Whoever you choose will be much better suited to such pedestrian endeavors anyway."
As he turned to leave, Gablehauser said, as if it has just occurred to him, "Of course that means that Dr Winkle jumps to the head of the preferred recipients list for the allocation of any incoming donations...." His voice trailed off into a smug, self-satisfied silence that set Sheldon's teeth to grinding.
"Leslie Winkle?" Sheldon could feel the entire right side of his face jump with suppressed rage. He faced the desk again. "You would put Leslie Winkle's, let's be frank: asinine research ahead of my own ground-breaking projects?"
Gablehauser smiled, wide and sharp-toothed like a Ferengi scanning a cargo hold full of gold-pressed latinum. Only in this case, it was publicity and departmental donors that the man had in his sights, and Sheldon was the unwitting stooge with inadequate shielding against the scans.
He let his shoulders slump. A television script riddled with inaccuracies, fallacies, and outright insults to thinking men and women was hardly worth a few seconds of his attention, let alone however long it would take to educate these buffoons. That kind of interaction with the entertainment industry belonged strictly in the domain of his free time, when he could discuss his complaints and criticisms with like-minded fans at leisure. He had no place taking part in the process beforehand, by choice or by decree. Not when there was more important work to be done. Nobel Prizes didn't win themselves, after all.
On the other hand, could he stand by and let Leslie Winkle take what rightfully belonged to him?
Straightening his shoulders as if to prepare for the burden he was taking on, he asked, "Where am I supposed to meet these actors?"
In Gablehauser's outstretched hand, as though he'd been practicing sleight-of-hand in all the hours he wasn't making any useful contributions to science, was a thick manila envelope. Stuck to the front of it was a bright green Post-It with an unfamiliar address.
"I don't know where this is."
"I assumed as much," his boss said with a tight smile. "Dr Hofstadter volunteered to drive you—"
Traitor!
"—after I personally guaranteed that you won't stage a sit-in protest in his front seat like, and I quote, 'a giant baby'."
"Curses," Sheldon muttered under his breath. After clearing his throat, he said, "Fine. I'll go."
"See that you do, Dr Cooper."
"But I won't go happily."
"No one expected that you would."
It was useless to try to devise an escape plan that would get him out of the building and past Leonard's car undetected. Partially because that would be akin to shooting off his nose to spite his face when it came to Gablehauser's threat of withholding funding, but also because Leonard, Howard, and Raj were lying in wait in the hallway. They had him surrounded, a tiny troop of tiny men with the intellects to match. After lodging a formal protest—more because they seemed to expect it than out of any hope for leniency—he let them accompany him to the parking lot with a minimum of fuss.
Howard, of course, argued that his minimum far exceeded everyone else's maximum daily allowance. He and Raj waited until he was belted in the front seat, then all but ran for the scooter that awaited them at the other end of the lot.
Sheldon watched them speed off down the street with no small amount of envy. He'd planned to spend the evening refining the strategy for their next raid to make up for their abysmal showing in the last tournament. But with their betrayal still underway, he didn't feel particularly inclined to working out how to keep them all flush with gold and grain.
Of course, with that thought, he had a sudden flash of inspiration and spent the next twenty minutes mentally racing down the paths they would need to take in order to pull it off. A well-timed freezing spell here, and a melee attack there...
"Would you just get out of the car, Sheldon?" Leonard whined.
Sheldon pulled himself away from the scene of battle to realize that they had pulled to a stop. They were double-parked next to a pale blue pickup truck filled with pool-cleaning equipment. Two unkempt men glared from the front seat and made rude gestures at Leonard's car.
Leonard sighed, probably not for the first time. "Seriously, we can't sit here all night."
"Says who?"
"Me, for one," was Leonard's quick response. "Not to mention Gablehauser. Oh, and, let's not forget: the truck full of guys who are going to kick my ass if you don't get out of my car right now!"
"No." Threats of violence from manual laborers aside, his roommate's exhortations had little of their former power. Not since Sheldon had cracked the code of the so-called non-optional social conventions.
"If you get out of the car, I'll take you for ice cream on the way home!"
"I'm not a child. You don't have to bribe me."
Sheldon tightened his grip on his bag but still didn't make a move to get out. Leonard leaned across his lap to push the door open.
"If you don't go in there right now...." His voice trailed off as he fumbled with the pockets of his jacket, finally coming up with his phone and furrowing his brow in what Sheldon assumed was supposed to be a threatening expression.
"Really, Leonard? You're resorting to blackmail?"
"Get out!"
Sheldon undid his seatbelt and carefully guided it back into position. "You don't have to shout," he chided.
"Apparently I do!"
When it seemed that undoing the seatbelt was as close as Sheldon was going to get to exiting, Leonard pressed a button on the phone and held it to his ear.
"Just remember: you made me do this," he warned. The expression on his face looked as close to stern as it had ever been.
A sudden stab of panic had Sheldon scrambling to exit of the car. He recognized that ringback tone, just as if he were sitting in the front pew and listening live as Mrs Rodriguez mangled it on the church organ.
"My mother? Really?"
"Desperate times," Leonard said with a shrug. "I'll be back to pick you up at ten."
"Nine-thirty. The Dollhouse season finale starts at ten and I don't trust the TiVo."
"Okay, fine, nine-thirty."
"They're going to discover that Echo turned the new Bravo and—"
He didn't get to finish sharing the spoiler, as Leonard sped off down the street before the door was fully latched. The pickup truck rumbled to life and followed along behind.
"Well, someone's clearly not reading my daily schedule updates."
Sheldon sighed and pulled out his own phone to update the distribution list to include Leonard's secondary email address, the one he pretended not to own, for whatever reason. When that was done, he sent a text to Leonard to remind him to pull the door closed at the next light before he fell from the moving vehicle and was crushed by an oncoming garbage truck or a school bus.
It was exhausting, having a roommate who required as much looking after as Leonard did.
Sheldon found the restaurant with little trouble. It was a narrow storefront at the end of an alley that had been converted to a pedestrian walkway. It connected two parallel streets in the middle of the historical district and was filled with the kinds of shops he could only be caught dead in, since there was no other way he would step inside. New Agey shopkeepers beamed happily at him from amid displays of crystals and hand-carved tchotchkes in a bewildering array of pseudo-scientific balderdash. He held his bag close to his hip and walked quickly down the length of the alley, fearing that at any moment he'd be inundated with a cloying spray of patchouli or some other hippie anointment.
Two tall potted palms flanked the entrance of the restaurant, with a hand-lettered menu in the window and a garishly painted sign hanging over the door. The Department of Health grade in the window was a solid A, but Sheldon only trusted that as far as he could throw an easily bribed state official. But the reviews on Yelp had been generally positive, with no reports of any foodborne plagues, hanta outbreaks, or the like. None that he could find, anyway.
When he pushed through the front door, a short woman in what looked like a tie-dyed bedsheet topped with a rayon net bag greeted him. "Hi, welcome to— Sir, are you okay?"
"No, I need to see your health inspection log book," Sheldon told her.
"We... don't have one?" she said, as if she wasn't entirely sure what she was saying was correct.
His every instinct was screaming at him to run, as fast and as far as his admittedly non-athletic legs could carry him. He would even forego a proper warm-up just this once. He could find a bookstore that looked slightly less idiotic than the rest of the businesses on the street and wait there for Leonard to return. Or, better yet, he could call Raj or Howard and demand a rescue operation. After the business with Howard's mother, they both owed him at least three favors payable at a moment's notice.
Before he could move, though, he imagined the sound of Leslie Winkle's demonic laughter as she slammed a lab door in his face. He shook off the urge to flee and forced a smile for the hostess.
"I'm meeting two people. Actors," he choked out. "The reservation should be under Gable—"
The hostess was walking away with his menu in hand before he finished, something that was happening far too often for his liking.
It took Wil all of thirty seconds to size the guy up. In his late twenties, pasty and thin in the way of so many of the nerds who worshipped him, Dr Sheldon Cooper was definitely the kind of geek they needed on set. He wasn't so bad with the technobabble himself, obviously—even LeVar had been jealous of his mastery of it, toward the end. But being able to get a good grasp on the actual real-world applications of what they were acting out was going to be key. Gaining an ally who could disabuse the writers of their more egregious crimes against reality and science-fiction would be even better. Everyone had seen the caustic reviews that came out of the pilot screening at Comic-Con but it hadn't made much of a dent on the scripts still flying out of the writers' room. No way did they need more of that overinvested fanboy mockery bullshit sinking them in the ratings before they even made it out of dry-dock. So to speak.
The introductions were barely over before their new science consultant abruptly jumped to his feet.
"Now, hold on one minute," Cooper cried, his accent sliding into something almost Southern before he got himself under control. "I'm only here to meet with you to see if I'll agree to act as your consultant. I haven't authorized anyone to act on my behalf to execute a contract. And I certainly wouldn't agree to one that requires me to work on set with you on any kind of long-term basis!"
Penny shot Wil a confused look. "Didn't Bobbi say this was a done deal?"
Wil shrugged. He tried to pay as little attention to production details as humanly possible. If it didn't come with a script or a check attached, it really wasn't worth his valuable time. In fact, he'd only agreed to this dinner after being promised the studio would pick up the tab and his mileage. He'd made one too many missteps in the past few years to make any more waves than he had to, especially given that what little he had done was enough to substantially erode the critical praise he'd been amassing since stealing the show from Richard Gere. Luckily, though, he still had plenty of leverage in the front offices, thanks to a lifetime of box office goodwill, so he was still able to look after his healthy bank balances. None of it, though, was going to mean a damn thing by the time this show premiered.
He busied himself with his glazed edamame salad while Penny shifted into character and started working on the nerd. Her reel and the material they had to work with didn't do her any justice, either: she was good. Maybe better than he was, even. All trace of his prickly, bitchy costar was gone in an instant, replaced with the seductive and intriguing Thea that had emerged during rehearsals. Within minutes Cooper was seated and calm again, though he didn't exactly look happy about it.
"So have you read the scripts yet?" Penny asked. She punctuated the question with a sultry smile and a lingering touch of her hand to Cooper's.
"No," he said shortly, pulling his hand away and folding both in his lap.
Wil snorted. It looked like she was going to have about as much luck barking up that tree as he'd had with her.
But Penny clearly hadn't given up. She leaned toward Cooper and turned up the wattage on her smile. Only someone who was watching carefully would be able to see the look of dread that flashed across her face when she asked, "Did anyone tell you which show we're hoping you'll help us with?"
The help us was a good touch, Wil had to admit. Despite what he'd told Penny, he had worked with some of these so-called expert consultant types in the past. They always thought they knew more than any actor could comprehend, even though acting was at least 75% barely informed bullshit and more than capable of carrying the audience past any inaccuracies. If the audience was even aware they existed to begin with, which they usually weren't.
Looking just a tad sheepish, Cooper admitted that he didn't know the name of their show. Didn't know any of the details, in fact. Just that his boss had strong-armed him into coming to the meeting with some kind of money thing held over his head as incentive.
Wil could relate. He took pity on the guy, who it seemed was about to find himself trapped in the same nightmare they were.
"It's called Argonite."
"Argonite?!" If Cooper's head weren't already spinning from getting hit with the double barrels of Penny-as-Thea, it was now. He looked back and forth between them, a skeptical look creeping onto his face. "You're the leads on Argonite."
It wasn't so much a question as it was a statement of disbelief, but he and Penny nodded in unison anyway.
"But the pilot had Alicia—"
"Yeah, well, not anymore," Penny said with a scowl.
"And wasn't Eddie Norton the—"
"Hack," Wil coughed into a fist.
The waitress returned to deposit their entrees. She looked like she wanted to linger so Wil sent her scurrying with a brush-off gesture.
Penny held up a hand suddenly. "Wait, you know who was in the pilot?"
Cooper nodded and Wil felt a cold sweat erupt under his armpits. His heart started to race. If he knew about the pilot, then....
"I saw it. We were in Ballroom 20 for the—"
But whatever he'd been there to see was lost in the simultaneous rush of questions from both Penny and Wil.
"Oh, Jesus. Did they really laugh the whole time?"
"Was it the cut where Thea has to smother—"
"What did you think of the blood oath—"
"The uniforms. How did people react to the unif—"
"Who gives a shit about the uniforms? What about Captain Grig—"
Cooper didn't answer either of them, though. He didn't even look at them. Instead he upended his bag and dumped the contents on the table, nearly dropping a thick manila envelope in a shallow bowl of soy sauce. He ripped the envelope open and pulled out a stack of papers held together with brads. When he flipped it open, Wil saw the familiar show info and confidentiality warnings printed on the front.
After a skimming quickly through a few pages, Cooper finally looked up at them. Horror and a slowly dawning panic were written in every line of his face, the kind of instantly recognizable expression Wil had been trying to perfect for decades.
"I can't— This is, I can't be associated with...." He waved his hands, as if the gesture was enough to encompass the entirety of how fucked they all were. "There has to be a way to fix it. This would be my ruin!"
Penny huffed out a laugh and crossed her arms. "Join the club, buddy."
Two hours and several rounds later, they were no closer to a solution than when they'd started: with Penny's suggestion that she could try her hand at faking the plague. A plan that had fallen apart entirely once Wil pointed out that she had no idea what the symptoms were and Sheldon lectured on the inconveniences of a CDC investigation.
The only good news was that the show's production hold was a clear sign that the network was at least as skittish about the show's prospects as the three of them were. But that hold would end as soon as Sheldon agreed to come on board, or so the vaguely threatening letter included with the scripts would indicate.
After he'd uncovered that tidbit, Penny insisted he switch from water to something a little stronger.
"I'll have a Diet Coke, then."
"He means a cuba libre," she told the waitress. "And keep 'em coming."
To Sheldon, she said, "It's Portuguese for Diet Coke."
"Oh. Are you Portuguese?" he asked their waitress.
She gave Penny a strange look before nodding and chirping, "Uh, yep. Sure am. Portuguese through and through."
"To solidarity!" Penny interrupted, raising her glass in an impromptu toast as the girl walked off.
Wil gave a sloppy, over-exaggerated spit-take. "You know what that means?"
Penny scowled. "I read the SAG newsletters."
Sheldon left them to their squabbling and turned his thoughts back to their predicament. All other things being equal, he still couldn't dismiss Gablehauser's threat. If he refused the consulting opportunity, no matter how valid his reasons, there would be no hope for getting his funding renewed. He could kiss every chance of acclaim and recognition goodbye. He was doomed no matter what he did.
As he nursed his frustration with the large, oddly flat Diet Coke that tasted somewhat antiseptic, Wil chimed in with another suggestion.
"If we do it consistently—not just every once in a while but on every take—they're bound to release us from contract. Nobody wants to work with someone that unprofessional."
Penny made a disgusted face and pointed her margarita glass at him for emphasis. "You'd be surprised."
Wil didn't look happy about the correction. He leaned in closer to Penny, his mouth twisting into a sneer. "They've already replaced one bad actress, sweetheart. They'd do it again."
"Well, I'm not going to make myself look like an idiot," Penny snapped.
"Too late," Sheldon murmured as he flipped the final script closed. He didn't know why he'd bothered; every single page was as full of idiotic dialogue and nonsensical action as the horrendous pilot episode he'd seen at Comic-Con. Oh, the online reviews had been scathing, all right, and rightfully so; some of them had even been his. Wooden acting, a laughable premise, leaden dialogue so painful it was an insult to language itself... If there was even a whiff of intentional satire or tongue-in-cheek irony, the show would probably be a hit, finding a ready audience with fans eager to poke fun at their favorite tropes. But nothing was going to right this sinking ship, not even replacing the original leads with these two. Not if the scripts arrayed before him on the table were what they were working with. Not even Shatner could wring anything memorable from this dreck.
When his words finally registered, Penny's head whipped around so fast the end of her ponytail smacked Wil on the cheek. He sputtered, indignant, but his complaints fell on deaf ears.
"Did you just call me an idiot?"
Sheldon recognized the look on her face. If he'd seen it once, he'd seen it a hundred times. Mostly on Destination: Discovery but it had been a familiar sight on hunting trips with his dad, too. It was not the kind of look a prey animal normally survived and there was no doubt that she was the predator in this particular situation, his own superior intellect notwithstanding. She had the tanned, toned limbs so common to Southern California, but unlike many of the other women in her industry she didn't look like a stiff breeze would injure her. She looked like she could hurt him.
"I did nothing of the kind!" he protested.
"A stiff apology is a second insult, man," Wil offered before draining his beer.
"It sure sounded like you did," Penny insisted, even more belligerently than before.
"GK Chesterton said that, about the apology," Wil added.
He needn't have bothered. Neither Sheldon nor Penny were paying the slightest bit of attention, and Sheldon had known the quote's provenance already anyway. He would have said so but he'd only realized it as Wil's words filtered through his brain.
"I didn't call you an idiot," he tried to explain, instead, "just that you're going to look like one."
"He's right."
"Shut up, Wil."
"Hey, come on, you're not the only one who's going to look like an asshole here, Penny." Wil leaned back to signal their waitress for another round with his empty beer bottle, nearly toppling his chair in the process.
"We're all going to look like assholes." The swearword sounded ridiculous coming from Sheldon's mouth. He snickered and chased the straw in his Diet Coke around the glass with his tongue, wondering why such a problematic accessory was necessary in the first place. Finally, in frustration, he pulled it out and dropped it on the remains of his lemon chicken.
He felt strange, like the carbonation in his soda was slowly bubbling its way through his bloodstream and aggregating in his brain. Ridiculous and impossible, he knew, but that didn't negate the feeling.
"Assholes," he repeated, the Ss getting a little tangled on their way out.
On the other side of the table, Sheldon's snickering had dissolved into the occasional hiccup. Wil was rambling on about something that had happened a million years ago backstage at the Emmys or the Grammys or whatever.
Penny drained the rest of her margarita as the waitress came back with yet another round. They'd been there for hours, nursing drink after drink and throwing out one ridiculous suggestion after another, but the poor girl had been just as attentive and friendly the whole time. Unless she'd been spitting in their drinks at the bar all night.
She eyed the candy-colored slush in her glass suspiciously for a moment before shrugging. Hey, alcohol killed germs, right?
"What are we going to do?" she asked, feeling a sudden rush of tequila-fueled tears prickling at the back of her throat. She drowned them with another healthy swig.
"We could get hit by a truck," Wil rumbled. He'd been sinking farther and farther down in his seat as the night wore on, as though the beer had started to melt his bones.
"Too painful," Sheldon countered. He closed his mouth and rode out a painful-looking hiccup that jerked his whole body.
Penny ventured, only half-joking, "Set the studio on fire?"
Wil shook his head. "Too expensive."
They lapsed into silence again, each staring into the depths of their respective drinks. Something buzzed amid the pile of papers and books that Sheldon had dumped on the table. He rooted through his things until he unearthed his phone. He made a face at the display then turned it off and hid it under the pile once again.
Looking around the restaurant, Penny saw that the few other tables had finally cleared out, except for a group of young women sitting in the far corner and staring. After a few seconds of what looked like furious discussion, one stood and started walking toward their table. She clutched a napkin and pen in her hands and looked absolutely terrified.
Penny nudged Wil, who looked around blearily.
"Be nice," she hissed.
"Oh, I'm always nice," he slurred before turning a beaming grin on the girl. He even managed to sit up straight, as if he had suddenly found the spine he'd misplaced earlier that night. He was charming without being creepy, friendly without flirting, signed the napkin with a theatrical flourish and asked if the girl and her friends were enjoying their night out.
After a few more seconds of blushing and stammering, the girl pulled out her phone and asked Sheldon to take their picture. Penny scooted her chair out of the way to make room for the girl to kneel next to Wil, who put an arm around her shoulders without trying to cop a feel and grinned like a fool at the flash.
Honestly, it was like watching a pod person move around inside his skin.
"What the hell?" Penny asked as the girl fled back to her table to collapse in her chair with a high-pitched squeal.
Wil shrugged. "Hey, they pay the bills. And you never know who they'll tell if you're an asshole."
Sheldon nodded, his face serious until the effect was ruined with another hiccup. "Fangirls are terrifying."
"Yeah? Try fanboys sometime," Penny scoffed.
With a noise that could almost have been a purr, Wil sunk down in his chair again and stroked his beard.
"Seriously?"
He raised an eyebrow. "You have no idea."
Sheldon's head was propped up on his fist as he listed dangerously to one side, his elbow slipping farther across the table with the movement of his jaw. The tablecloth bunched against his elbow in rippling folds like those in the gravitational field he'd modeled just that week. But the two actors were too busy arguing to hear his interjections, so he kept the observation to himself. With a start, he remembered that he should be paying attention. They were working on something important. Something he couldn't quite remember what it was.
"Conventions can be very liberating places," Wil was saying.
"Well, yeah," Penny agreed, "but—"
"I grew up doing this, remember. There isn't much I haven't..." his voice trailed off as he sat bolt upright. "Eureka!"
The exclamation startled another painful hiccup from Sheldon.
Penny groaned and shifted in her seat. "No, please, rub it in some more that I didn't get that part."
Wil made a frustrated noise and sat forward, looking far more alert than he had in hours.
"Didn't your agent explain why we got called back for the second pilot?"
Penny's shrug sent the room spinning. Sheldon grabbed onto his glass as if it could somehow steady him.
"Well, didn't your lawyer explain about the non-standard clauses?"
"I don't know; I just signed what they put in front of me. Hey! The last job I had was playing House's dead hooker daughter. I jumped all over this."
Wil sighed hard enough to start the table bobbing, as if they'd set sail in the middle of dinner and Sheldon was just now noticing. He drained the rest of his Diet Coke and tried to find where the waitress was docked to ask for another. Before he found her, though, he realized Wil was still talking and concentrated as hard as he could on the words.
"So then Eddie and Alicia got themselves into a little bit of trouble at Comic-Con. Not, like, accidentally wandered into the exhibit hall trouble. Think Rob-Lowe-at-the-Democratic-convention trouble."
Sheldon had no idea what that meant. It seemed like the words were familiar but strung together in an independent clause, he couldn't parse their meaning. From the look on Penny's face, it seemed she couldn't either.
"Jesus, how old are you two? They got caught in flagrante delicto. Knocking boots. Making the two-backed beast?"
Penny started to laugh but Sheldon was still lost. He shrugged at Wil, who made a disgusted noise.
"For the love of... Alicia was sleeping with the director and Eddie's married to one of the executive producers; that's how he landed the part. But they got caught having sex in a green room in San Diego by some con volunteers. The studio managed to hush it up before it hit TMZ but, next thing you know: pfft! Eddie and Alicia go bye-bye."
"How did I miss that?" Penny gasped between fits of laughter. "It couldn't have happened to a nicer Alicia!" Just saying the woman's name was enough to set her off again. She slumped forward in her chair and covered her face with her hands.
Sheldon's head was spinning. "But how does that help?"
He turned from Penny's shaking shoulders to Wil, who had somehow loomed up out of his seat and was within inches of Sheldon's face.
"Just go with it," Wil said, his breath warm and slightly sour. Sheldon would have recoiled from the yeasty smell but there was nowhere for him to go.
Then, when Wil's mouth met his own, there was nowhere he wanted to go. Surely it was symptom of whatever illness was overtaking him, some foodborne parasite the California Department of Health had allowed to flourish due to their substandard inspection routines. Or, one of these depraved Hollywood types had slipped something into his odd-tasting drink, in order to make him pliable to their perverted will. He'd be lucky not to be sold to a cult by morning!
But all of those fears fled when Wil's mouth nudged his open and pure sensation flooded in to replace all coherent thought.
"I don't understand how this is going to get any of us out of our contracts," Sheldon said when Wil pulled away enough to allow his brain to kick back into gear and the words to slip out. His voice sounded as if it had dropped several octaves and he hurriedly cleared his throat.
"Shut up," Wil growled, and dove back in. This time, his hands were spread against the back of Sheldon's head, fingertips brushing against his scalp, sending shivers racing down his spine.
"Morality clause," Penny said when they broke apart for air again. Dimly, Sheldon realized she'd stood and crossed over to his side of the table. He thought he saw lightning flashing through the windows, or fireworks going off. Or possibly it was the last dying firings of random neurons from oxygen deprivation.
With a quick twist of her hips she pushed herself in between them. With both hands on the arms of Sheldon's chair, she slowly stepped forward until she was straddling his lap, right there in the middle of the restaurant. Wil stepped up behind her and pushed her ponytail aside to stroke the nape of her neck. His smirk deepened when he saw Sheldon's gaze follow the path of his fingers.
Penny curled her fingers against Sheldon's side, plucking at the dual layer of fabric that lay between their skin. She wriggled closer, adjusting her knees in the narrow spaces between his hips and the chair.
"If we do anything to make ourselves or the show look bad," she whispered against his lips, "we're out on our asses. Now, let's make it look good for all these nice ladies with cameras."