Fiction: Same As It Ever Was (Same As It Ever Was)
Title: Same As It Ever Was (Same As It Ever Was)
Pairings: Sheldon/Penny, Raj/OC, OC/OC, ensemble
Warnings: Children, Interdimensional Space and/or Time Travel, Sex
Rating: R
Summary: HERE
Mix/Art: HERE by ishie
A/N: This story has been haunting me for almost a year until I refurbished it to be the ugly, weirdly emotional monster below. I want to thank the people who urged me to keep writing it as it first burst out of my brain and especially ishie for being amazing and talented and having great taste in music, weasleytook for convincing me that this wasn't the worst idea (she's still wrong on that front, but) and galfridian for agreeing to do me fifty more favors than I've ever earned. This will stand as part one of the entire story, even though it'll be split in three. The second half will be up eventually, when I finish editing what I have written and finally get to the proper ending I have planned. Until then, gentle viewers.
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Sheldon wakes with a start and bats away the stray pieces of paper that have stuck to the side of his face. Why had he been sleeping? He doesn’t remember falling asleep and it certainly wasn’t scheduled.
The last he can remember is starting his testing on neutron manipulation, having booked the lasers through to the afternoon. He feels his face for the goggles and looks down to see no gloves on his hands. He’s clearly not in the lab anymore.
What he does notice, then, is that he’s in Dr. Gablehouser’s office.
He bolts up from the chair and rushes to leave the room before being noticed. He looks down as he exits the room discretely and it occurs to him suddenly that he’s wearing a suit. Not one of his classic suits, though. This is dark blue with pinstripes and reminds him of that monstrosity Penny picked out for his Chancellor’s Awards Gala speech. Both the costume and the memory were equally humiliating, if you ask him.
There are more pressing matters, however, and his mind begins that unfamiliar dance of dealing with a problem for which he has no rational solution. He didn’t remember falling asleep, he didn’t remember going to Gablehouser’s office, he didn’t remember changing into these ridiculous clothes, and he couldn’t even place a memory of having purchased them in the first place.
Stumbling around the hallway, he slows close to his office’s threshold. There was someone in there. This same someone looks casually at home in the smallish space; leaning thoughtfully against his desk, white erase marker in hand, correcting a truly pathetic excuse for a Bell test.
It’s the final straw, of sorts, and he crosses his arms with purpose. “Get. Out.” His voice even-keeled but dangerously low. The other man, short and somewhat mousy, bolts upright from the desk and Sheldon watches as the red marker he was holding inadvertently flies across the room.
“Dr. Cooper, what are you doing here?” The man’s off-grey Wayfarers are stitched together at the bridge with what looks like electrical tape. For some reason, this is what sets Sheldon even further on edge. This troll dares to violate his personal space, this morning of all chaotic and confusing mornings, and he can’t even be bothered to buy a new set of glasses when they need mending? Sheldon pulls himself up to his full height and narrows his eyes at the intruder.
“I believe I should be the one asking that question,” he says, coolly.
The man looks truly baffled and moves closer to where Sheldon’s towering over him from the doorway. “I’m sorry?”
“What are you doing here?”
“I-I work here.” He tries to sound confident; Sheldon can sense false bravado better than he can sense most other motivators. Perhaps because he finds it so particularly exhausting and pathetic, he can’t be sure.
The movement towards Sheldon knocks the other man’s rickety glasses a short distance down his nose. His small, unsteady finger instinctively shoots up to push them back against his face. Sheldon gives an almost imperceptible headshake in disbelief before he goes for the jugular.
“Not anymore you don’t.”
“You’re firing me?” He hears in response.
He’s surprised, and happily so, to hear that this person believes he has the authority to do so. If he does, however, it’s news to him. The university had stopped leaving him in charge of people many years ago when they realized he had a hard time keeping someone on the payroll for longer than a day.
To keep things ambiguous, should he be brought in for another one of the sit-downs he received back when his turnover topped out at twenty-three interns in the span of a month, he merely nods. “Well, I know you certainly can’t work here any longer.”
There, that was nice and truthful. For all attorneys knew, he means his office space.
He waits for the other man to fight back, to call him a lunatic or a nutcase, to take a swing at him. He’s encountered every time of layoff reaction known to man. Instead, the man merely slumps his shoulders and gets a rather sad look on his face.
“Can I ask why?” he mumbles.
Sheldon waits a beat, decides on something as non-committal as he can think of. “Because I said so.”
There’s a little huff of breath that could read as the respiratory equivalent of an eye roll. He’s a little begrudgingly proud, for a moment, that it wasn’t a completely lifeless showing on the other man’s part.
“Now, go.”
“Can I at least pack my stuff?”
Sheldon doesn’t know what to say to that. He can’t even process what that sentence could mean in relation to his office, so rather than try to work out what stuff he’s talking about Sheldon frowns. “You can get that later. More importantly, I need you to leave. Immediately.”
Sheldon makes a shooing motion with his right hand as he moves closer into the room and leave space for the man to leave. When he’s finally alone again, he breathes a loud sigh of relief.
This day has been odd, of that he was sure, but a nice exercise in disciplining those of lesser intelligence is always a nice pick-me-up. He walks over to the desk, grabbing the discarded dry erase marker along the way and ambles over to the white board.
He corrects the math with a few short marker strokes before returning the cap to its rightful place and taking a seat behind the desk. His desk.
The chair feels unfamiliar beneath him and it takes a bit of wiggling to get comfortable, but once he’s situated it squarely underneath the desk’s small alcove below, he sets his arms on the cool wood grain. Just as he’s finally feeling things taking a permanent turn for the positive, his gaze shifts to all the personal belongings on the front end of the desk.
Photographs of the mousy, spectacled man from earlier hugging a woman he’s never seen. A Captain Kirk bobble head that while a great likeness of William Shatner, was definitely not his. As if sensing the already problematic developments, his brain seems to urge him to look up at the walls. More than a half a dozen degrees and certifications and awards hang around the small space, none of which have Sheldon’s name on them.
His stomach feels as though it’s dropped out below him. This is a nightmare.
Just as his right hand absently stretches out to touch the small bobble head, his mind snaps at that observation. That’s it, a nightmare. The bobble head agrees. It nods vigorously, Sheldon’s hand having only touched the top briefly before pulling away as if burned makes it bang around on its spring hard enough to echo in the quiet room.
He tries for a few moments to get comfortable with his head laying sideways across the back of his palms in the same position he’d found himself in earlier. He waits aimlessly for five and then ten minutes to fall asleep and grumbles annoyed when rest never comes.
Rather than giving up, he moves back, his spine pushing against the ergonomic chair enough that it gives under his weight and reclines some. It’s not a very natural position, but it’s more comfortable than the desk. Just as Sheldon feels his focused, meditation-like state has pushed him over the edge of slumbering, the chair tilts a little too far and his instincts send his body flying upwards to keep from toppling over.
He mutters something his mother would probably frown at under his breath, knowing that he was so close to sleep a second ago and his meddlesome body had to intercede and ruin it. He wouldn’t have fallen, his legs are long enough that when extended the stick all the way through the cut out below the desk. There’s no way he’ll ever lose equilibrium fully enough to fly backwards, so long as his feet were still on the ground.
And his feet were always on the ground, thank you very much.
Sheldon makes one last ditch effort to fall back asleep on the floor of the office. However, the knowledge that a stranger was walking around here for long enough to have put up knick-knacks, dream or not, he couldn’t relax enough to keep his eyes closed let alone fall asleep.
Unsure of where to go from there, he perches himself at the end of the desk and considers his options. He wonders how long he can stay awake before he’ll just collapse on the desk in exhaustion. But, the trouble with dreams is that they don’t usually follow any kind of logical standard, so there’s no telling how long it’ll take for him to reach a breaking point.
Not to mention he’s only just woken up from what feels like a pretty rejuvenating nap less than twenty minutes earlier. Everything feels hopeless and he’s unconsciously started rocking back and forth, the panic rising slightly inside him.
Then something inside his mind shifts and suddenly it seems so obvious.
He needs go home and sleep in his bed. So he can wake up in his bed and not in Gablehouser’s office and wind up in the repurposed shell that used to be his own. Deep down, he feels a quick pang of regret at having scared off the stranger who this office apparently belongs to now, but he’s already busying himself with finding a ride home. Besides, once he goes back to sleep both this office and the person who works in it will cease to exist.
Shelly, it don’t due to dwell on things you have no control over, his mother used to say. She may have meant it for religious, god-fearing reasons but it holds true regardless.
He feels around his pockets for a cell phone and grabs at his right side when he reaches purchase. What he pulls out does not look like a cell phone, however. It looks like a flattened glasses case or a metal wallet. There is no flip cover or touch screen that he could find. Just a hard shell of plastic that was soft to the touch, encasing a light, three-by-six block of metal.
He pokes it, shakes it around a bit, looks for anything that might trigger it to turn on or pop open.
He feels instantly stupid once he realizes his actions, like some kind of fascinated ape trying to figure out how to solve a Rubik’s cube. Something that would take a child seconds to figure out.
At least this seems to be a dead end and not something he should be able to work out. Either it’s not a phone at all or it’s something his sleeping mind thought up to elude him.
“All I want to do is call Leonard for a ride. Why are you being like this?” he shouts at the phone, his resolve to get it to work quickly fading.
No sooner than he’s let out an exasperated sigh does the small block vibrate, still between his fingertips. He notices the phone - it is definitely a phone - alight with the information that it’s in the process of dialing Leonard.
Voice activation. He’s a genius. Honestly.
He waits for the call to connect before he brings the phone to his ear.
“Hello?”
“Leonard, it’s Sheldon. Sheldon Cooper. I need a ride home from the University. I have to go back to sleep so that I can wake up. Come get me.”
There’s the sound of a door closing and Leonard’s voice returns in a hushed whisper. “Sheldon, what are you saying? Are you okay?”
“I’m having a nightmare. From what I’ve gathered of traditional dream myths, one of the surefire ways to awake from a nightmare or dream is to go to bed during said illusion.”
There’s silence for almost a full ten seconds. “Sheldon, are you drunk?”
Sheldon’s head snaps back in derision at the mere suggestion, despite the fact that Leonard can’t see him or his reaction, he shakes his head slightly. “Absolutely not.”
He does breathe into his closed palm, though. Just to be sure that this Leonard doesn’t have information that he’s currently working without.
“Are you feeling okay, then? You sound like you’re - well, you don’t seem to be all there.”
Rolling his eyes, Sheldon huffs and taps his foot silently against the carpeted floor. “Are you coming to get me? Certainly we can enjoy all this riveting small talk when you meet me by my office.”
“No can do, buddy. I’m in Pomona, remember. I wouldn’t get to you before dinner and I need to be out here again in the morning tomorrow, before Dinner Night, so I’m not really looking to make three trips in the span of a day and half.”
“A loyal and dependable friend,” Sheldon says wanly.
Leonard lets out a terse chuckle. “Why can’t you just drive?”
Sheldon begs off with a very clipped, “Goodbye.”
He’s had that conversation somewhere north of fifty times with Leonard. It usually turns into a two strike minimum argument and this day was already enough of a nightmare. He honestly did not have the patience for it at the moment. So, he cut to the chase and spoke, end call, loud and firm.
At least one of them answers his demands. Flipping the phone over in his hands, he ticks down his other options. He checks the calendar on the desk and rules Penny out. She works on Thursdays and there’s no way she’s going to answer his call, no matter how dire the emergency. That leaves Raj or Howard. Given Howard’s preferred mode of transportation involves two wheels and a three-mile-long panic attack, he tells the phone to call Raj.
He sits and lets it ring and ring. Eventually opts to leave a message summing up the gist of his conversation with Leonard, before realizing he’s back at square one.
He waits for a short while, hoping that Raj is in a bathroom somewhere else in the building or discretely ducking out of a meeting to return his call. Once a full ten minutes passes, however, he’s antsy to escape this place that is his and at the same time is not, to wake up and maybe take an extra hour the next time he’s at work to dust his degrees on the wall and maybe re-alphabetize his wall of appendices.
He wonders briefly if this would be worth taking a bus, he laughs at the thought. There’s even a moment where a taxi enters into the equation, but he thinks a nice long walk would do him good. There’s something fairly symbolic about having to get home on foot, ancient and primal almost.
He shrugs off the thought as soon as it pops up as it sounds like the kind of nonsense Penny rambles on when she interrupts his and Leonard’s morning breakfast with half-remembered details of her non-waking experiences mixed in with what her local astrological forecaster has told her.
The mere fact that astrological forecasters were something available locally-Sheldon straightens himself out and begins the familiar path from Caltech’s campus to Los Robles Avenue.
By the time he’s at his apartment, he’s ready to sit down and welcome sleep. He’s never been in the best of shape, but wearing a suit and walking in ninety-degree weather is really not the best way to go about getting fit. In fact, the shoes he hadn’t noticed until the third mile are coming off the second he gets in the front door. Sanitation be damned.
Okay, he’ll probably leave the socks on. But still, this dream version of himself threw a lot of care to the wind.
It’s only once he gets to the complex entrance that he realizes he’s not carrying his messenger bag with him. In fact, he has a set of keys, not a single one of which he recognizes, but still no way into the building. Another Penny-influenced subconscious metaphor? Whatever the source of yet another obstacle on the simple task of getting rest, he’s a few seconds away from taking a rest on the curb of the parking lot.
Before he can properly reprimand himself for the mere thought of laying down on public domain, he notices a tall, frazzled-looking man head towards the entrance he’s been hovering next to. When the other man tilts his cell phone to his shoulder to continue the conversation he’s been having while getting the door unlocked, he doesn’t even look up when Sheldon holds the door behind him and wanders quietly into the lobby.
Sure, what he’s just done is illegal. But he lives here. Plus, it’s always good to know your buildings safety weaknesses. All the more to add to the list of complaints for his monthly check-in with the super.
When he reaches the fourth floor, he realizes his second mistake. With no keys that go to the building, he doubts he’ll have keys that go to his apartment. Why this day seems out to get him, he still doesn’t know.
Just as he’s resigned himself to waiting until Leonard’s home after dinner and occupying himself with a long relaxing stretch out along the first half of the stairwell heading to the fifth floor, his pocket buzzes.
Penny. Penny’s finished early and she can come let him wait in her apartment where there’s a bed and cold water and wireless internet. Although, he’s less concerned about the latter two since he’s looking to fall asleep as soon as possible and he already knows for certain that they have both in his waking reality.
He clears his throat and tells the phone to answer the call. After a few awkward presses of his hand and odd grips around the phone’s sides, it pulls up the call as answered. “Penny!” He all but shouts into the phone’s receiver.
“Sheldon, where the hell are you?” Penny’s voice comes through sounding an odd mixture of worry and annoyance. He’s usually only the recipient of the latter.
“At the apartment, I’m locked out,” he says. He’s a little embarrassed to admit it, but she’s bound to find out sooner or later.
“Apartment?” she asks, voice heading further in the direction of that unfamiliar worried tone.
“Yes, Leonard’s in Pomona, so he couldn’t give me a ride home from work. So I walked.”
“Walked,” she repeats, sounding confused. Did he not just say that?
“Yes, walked. I walked. Are you on your way home?”
“Sheldon did you walk to the apartment in Pasadena?” Penny asks, almost sounding dumbfounded. Why she can’t wrap her head around the most basic information, he will never understand.
“Of course,” he answers easily.
There’s silence on the other line, but he can almost hear Penny’s mind racing with panic. He’s not entirely sure why, but the feeling that maybe he’s taking this all a little less seriously than she is that hits him like a bullet train.
“Sheldon, stay right where you are. I’m on my way.”
He wants to argue that she’s overreacting, although given this ridiculous dream and the even more ridiculous day he’s dreamt, for all he knows she was under-selling it.
Before he can say any of this, however, the elevator to his left bings loudly and a short Asian couple steps out with arm full of groceries each.
If realizing the desk at Caltech was actually someone else’s was hard to process, watching strangers use an elevator that hasn’t worked for almost ten years to carry groceries into what’s supposed to be your apartment, well.
He wonders briefly if he’s having heart attack.
It feels like one and while he’s certainly healthy by most physicians’ standards, he is genetically predisposed-and he’s trying to run over the statistics he’s read about stress-induced heart failure-specifically recovery rates-when he notices Penny’s voice is still echoing into his ear from the phone in his right hand.
“Sheldon-?”
He knows it’s his turn to respond and pushes his brain to articulate anything coherent. “Hnn-mm -yeah?”
“It’s okay, sweetie, I’m only in Echo Park. I was out with Breanna. I’m only fifteen minutes out at the most.”
“There are Korean people in my apartment and the elevator is still open and it’s on my floor and-” Sheldon rambles on. Somewhere, he’s trying to talk himself back through the fact that this is a dream and this is all just his subconscious picking out things that would most intensely disrupt the balance of his mental comfort. Instead he just continues to recount the horrible, not right, backwards events of his morning.
By the time he’s wandered down to the main floor, Penny’s still on the phone interjecting reassurance at all the right places in his heedless ranting, but now she’s telling him to look out for her car.
So he stands, helplessly, staring off into space while Penny mentions something about traffic or repeats that she’s almost there.
What’s scaring him most is this constant feeling of upheaval in his gut, something that maybe his subconscious could conjure for a split second to add some realism to a particularly bizarre nightmare. But to feel it again, this time seemingly nonstop for nearly twenty minutes, it doesn’t feel right. It feels too real and too much like he might have been too quick to consider this a nightmare. Sheldon’s afraid to consider what that would mean is really happening.
He’s startled out of his panic-stricken reverie by a car horn. He hears Penny follow it up with a request for him to get in the car. Penny had a new car. Of course she did. The fact that it was large and new-looking and far out of her price range was just the unreal cherry on top of the cake.
He walks over unsteadily and hesitates before he reaches out for the passenger side door handle, almost afraid that something bad will happen when he touches it. Nothing does, of course, but getting in the SUV is still quite the ordeal. His stomach continues its attempts to escape his body as he looks over at Penny.
She’s got her hair chopped up just above her chin in a haphazard finger wave. Her curls are stacked on her right side and she shakes her head slightly to the front few out of her eyes as she turns to look at where he’s staring back at her, aghast.
Penny seems to decide something and double-parks the car at the edge of the complex’s lot. She kills the engine and even though the keys are still left dangling from ignition whatever music Penny had been playing is cut off. The car plunges into a deafening silence.
She turns to him, her face contorted with a grim concern, and considers her words. “Sheldon, what’s wrong?”
He lets out a muffled bark of laughter. “How much time do you have?”
She glances at the clock and offers him a small, calming smile. “At little under an hour. Fill me in.”
So Sheldon goes on about how confusing his morning has been, tells her about waking up in someone else’s office and having to commandeer his back only to find it’s never belonged to him in the first place and the phone call to Leonard and now the apartment.
She listens patiently, nodding here and there to let him know she’s following. When he’s finished, despite feeling a weight lifting from his chest at no longer being the only person with this knowledge, the look on Penny’s face wasn’t exactly comforting.
She starts and stops talking a few times, apparently unable to come up with a coherent response. Nibbling on her bottom lip, she reaches over and places the back of her hand against his forehead. He nearly jumps out of his skin at the unexpected touch, but since the car’s interior isn’t that large a space, he can’t do more than wiggle around in his seat as she presses her hand tighter against his head.
“Have you been feeling well? I mean, I know you’ve got a lot of-there’s obviously a lot you’ve gone through today, but did you feel sick at all? Maybe you’re coming down with something?”
He wants to shake her and explain that he feels fine, wide awake unfortunately, but fine. How he’s feeling is not the problem. The fact that he’s woken up in some kind of nightmarish alternate universe is the problem.
Only: that’s it. Sheldon blinks and turns the thought over. He was a man of science, sure, but he was also a man of science fiction. Interdimensional travel was not an entirely unsubstantiated hypothesis. He’s read Vallée’s work just like everyone else. Sure, he did it while laughing at the inanity of it all and more than a few eye rolls at the mention of UFOs and several other extraterrestrial-centric phenomena, but still. Anything that gave an explanation to the situation at hand was feeling welcomed in Sheldon’s mind. Until he got a chance to go back to bed and hopefully escape this reality altogether, coming up with alternative reasoning made him feel safer and more confident that it was a temporary hiccup in an otherwise successful career.
He’s seen enough movies to know how ruffling the feathers of an alternate universe goes, so instead of continuing his panic, he decides to try and blend in.
“Yes, I don’t feel that great. I haven’t eaten anything in hours and I’m a little light-headed, I don’t know why I came by here,” he replies, calm. “Nostalgia, perhaps? Who knows?”
Penny gives him an unsure frown at his change in demeanor. Quickly, as if on a whim, she puts the back of her hand to his head forehead once again. “Just double checking,” she clarifies.
He’s off, lost in another thought, however and doesn’t register her shaking off the oddness of the situation and turning the car back on. He's entirely focused on her left hand. She’s wearing a wedding band.
He can still feel the spot above his right eyebrow where it brushed against a second ago, suddenly everything feels officially off the rails and out of control.
There is no way the Penny he knew would up and get engaged. Not only is she not dating anyone, but she’s never seemed like the settling down type. The moment her relationship with Leonard had veered towards the serious, she bolted. He can’t imagine any suitor managing to convince her to wed in anything short of a year or more.
So, that was it. This was an alternate reality, masquerading as a nightmare, centered around personal details about his friends that he has no interest in being concerned over. He’s starting to feel like the pounding in his head is his brain’s attempt to make a run for it. He can’t really blame it for trying, at the moment.
“Your ring-” he sputters, not having thought over the new information for long enough to consider that if he’s trying to blend in that asking about something this version of him surely knows about is probably not the best way to go about it.
Penny pulls up to a stoplight and glances down at where he’s staring, dumbstruck. “What?”
Sheldon can’t come up with anything better than a strongly bewildered stare.
“Oh, right. I always take it off when I go to yoga.” Penny grins at him.
She pulls at a chain around her neck and wiggles a second, smaller band with a tasteful three stone diamond setting. An engagement ring.
He doesn’t know where to begin, his curiosity and horror equally piqued. “You’re married.”
He says it as a statement, but they both hear it as a question. She looks over, eyes narrowed once again before turning her attention back to the road as the light changes to green. “Uh, yeah, buddy. And last I checked: so were you.”
Penny smirks out the windshield of the car and Sheldon is about to make a long impassioned speech about just how ridiculous even joking about that is-when he rolls his eyes and his gaze shifts briefly to his lap. There, where his hands are resting on his knees, a plain silver wedding band wrapped around his ring finger, staring back up at him like the harbinger of the coming apocalypse that it was.
“I’m married,” Sheldon says more to himself than as a response to Penny’s sarcasm.
“We’re married, idiot,” she says. With a huff, she pulls onto the 110 and they continue along the expressway in silence.
Sheldon can’t stop worrying the wedding band around his finger. Every mile they zoom along the road, the more physically uneasy he gets. It fits far too snugly beneath his knuckle and he’s started genuinely considering what he could’ve possibly done to deserve this kind of hell.
When they take the exit to Santa Monica, he watches as the streets stretch past the windows and slowly gives way to houses with lawns and some with gates and a few playgrounds here and there. He can’t imagine why Penny’s taken him all the way out here of all places, he can’t remember ever passing through this section of the city let alone having a reason to drive out here.
He’s ready to voice his confusion when she angles the car sharply on a side street and pulls up into a driveway. There’s a garage further down the stretch of gravel but Penny leaves the car alongside the edge of the house they’re in front of.
She hops out and clicks the lock button on her keys. Sheldon’s still sitting in the front seat, staring around, trying to take in his surroundings and prepare himself for whatever obstacle is bound to rear its head next.
Penny notices he’s still inside only before she’s about to enter the house. She looks back and motions wordlessly with a curt nod for Sheldon to follow her inside. He tries the door, realizes she locked it a second ago, and has to wait for her to press unlock before he can exit.
Her earlier concern has apparently morphed into casual annoyance at his trepidation. Perhaps if he doubles back on his lie that he’s merely feeling hungry and a bit unwell to tell her that he’s without a large chunk of his memory in what’s either the most vivid nightmare he’s ever experienced or an alternate reality that seems constructed based on his worst fears. Maybe then she’ll stop rolling her eyes as he hesitates to walk through the front door.
Penny’s got a key, it seems, because the door opens without a problem.
The next thing he knows, he’s standing in a living room that’s doing things to his subconscious that he would’ve deemed impossible an hour ago. Hell, he would’ve found them downright ridiculous a few seconds ago.
Instead, he’s looking around at what feels like a memory but this isn’t like the others that he’s missing. There’s a wall-to-wall bookcase with several layers that appear moveable with the use of tracks, complete with a ladder, massive fireplace set up across from the center of the room where the seating is located, and an enormous sectional that takes up the length of two different walls. These are all things he’s seen in his mind as things he’d buy if given a much larger income and more flexible construction permits than those of his apartment complex’s lease allows.
This is his dream apartment. Or dream house, rather, considering its size.
Although he’s always loved the couch he and Leonard picked up in Encino back when they first started living together, something about the large openness of the sectional spoke to somewhere deep inside of Sheldon. All that space, even if there were five people sitting on it, no one would have to be closer than an arms-length to one another.
There’s a spot against the opposite wall that’s effectively the crux of the entire sectional that calls out to him and before he can stop himself, he’s crossed the small area between himself and the cushion. With a deep, contented sigh he sits down and things feel instantly ten times better than they were only a minute ago. This was clearly His Spot.
Give him a new reality, a waking dream, come hell and high water; Sheldon Cooper knows his seat on a sofa when he sees it.
Penny’s ducked into another room with a smirk on her face but as Sheldon’s still soaking up the redemption that is this mysterious sofa. When she returns it's with a small plate of cookies.
“Did you just make these?” Sheldon says, without much thought, as he’s still caught up in angling himself so as to best feel comfortable in his new position.
She gives him a look and answers, “No. These are from yesterday night, remember? I figure they’ll hold you over until dinner. Maybe make you feel less sick and loopy.”
Right, he was this person who makes cookies when Penny visits his huge house and he couldn’t let her suspicions rise again. “Right, right. Yesterday.”
“So, you feel better?”
“I do. Much,” Sheldon says honestly. Between nibbling on the cookie and relaxing in his new spot, he’s almost forgotten the dramatics of the day.
Until Penny grins and finishes her thought. “Then you can get the kids?”
“The kids?” Sheldon parrots back, his third cookie frozen before it could reach his gaping mouth.
“Our children. Can you go get them if I make dinner? If you don’t feel good, I don’t really want you making dinner and getting us all sick. You can just take my car since you must’ve left yours at Caltech.”
For a moment, it sounds to Sheldon like Penny’s started speaking in another language. The troubling thing being that he knows most other languages and he doesn’t recognize any of the words in a single one of the sentences she just said to him.
“Sheldon?” Penny asks, looking slightly impatient over at him.
His brain seems to catch up, then. Kids. He has children. They have children. Penny and he aren’t married to separate people but to each other. Or, he can assume they are since they apparently have children together.
He knows that if he ever had children with someone that he’d want to do it in wedlock, if only to escape the monster that would become his mother, otherwise. But he’s never wanted more than an heir to his fortune of trophies and awards and perhaps someone to pass on the genes that carry his IQ and winning personality in them. For him to have actually gone through with it, though, to have not one but at least two (based on Penny’s use of the plural noun) children seems laughable.
“Yes, yes,” he answers, absently. He bites the cookie, numbly, trying to feign normalcy. “When should I go?”
She puts her hands on her hips and tilts her head forward just the slightest bit and in that moment he’s sure she’s a mother, whether it’s of his children or not, that look is Mothering 101.
He scrambles up from the couch and looks around for keys. To a car. Which he has just agreed to drive. Suddenly there seems to be more than one flaw in his plan.
As if sensing his hesitation, Penny snatches the keys from a bowl next to the wall she’s standing against where the living room expands into another room he’s not yet seen. She tosses them up in the air in his direction and by some grace of dignity, one that’s ignored his pleas all day until that moment, he catches them, and that seems to restore some of her patience with him.
“If you hurry, you can catch the end of his game,” she says to him as he moves to the front door.
“His game?” He has a son, Sheldon notes with a pang of something like pride before his mind reminds him that, no, he does not. This person he’s pretending to be might but since they’re not the same person, claiming anyone as his own progeny is both wrong and slightly worrisome.
“Yeah,” she says as though it should be obvious. “He’s playing soccer at Clover til six. Or did that somehow manage to let that slip your mind despite him going on and on about it this entire week?”
Sheldon is lost for words, which is rapidly becoming a bad habit, and gives a feeble nod before he heads to the door.
Once he figures out how to start the car and fools with the preset navigation points on the built-in GPS in the car, he slowly inches back out of the driveway.
Before he’s all the way out, he turns back around and sends a long glance at their house. He was so shook up earlier he hadn’t really taken in his surroundings all that well. Now, however, his breath catches some and he has to blink to remember that he has places to be and a child to retrieve.
It’s truly spectacular, this house, he considers as he pulls out into the street and watches the dark wood of the fence around their front yard fade in the rearview. It must’ve cost somewhere in the six digits and it suddenly occurs to him that there’s almost no way either he or Penny could afford it on their salaries.
But he didn’t actually know his salary. Or whether Penny was making more money than she used to, working at the Cheesecake Factory. In fact, he didn’t know if she still worked there at all. It seems silly to think that she’d drive all the way from Santa Monica for a minimum wage waitressing job. Surely she’s transferred to the local branch if she’s still with the company.
He drives slowly along the rest of 21st street until he has to turn right on Montana. The traffic looks to be picking up given the time of day and the busy street. It’s been almost three years since the last time he drove a car and even then it was under emergency circumstances.
Pushing down his fear of the road, he continues on his short journey across town. He keeps telling himself that he wouldn’t own a car if he didn’t know how to drive, so some portion of this should come naturally. Of course, he’s never really had anything of substance come naturally to him for most of his life, unless you count science or mathematics or memorizing IMDb filmographies.
Still, he gets there in one piece and breaths a loud sigh of relief when he pulls into the crowded parking lot near the airport.
When he wanders up to the field where there are fathers, mothers, and family gathered watching the tail end of the youth soccer game, he remembers exactly why he’s always lacked the motivation to follow sports.
They’re boring.
But you’d never know based on this crowd, people screaming and cheering on the players. Sheldon tucks his hands in his pockets and tries to feign interest.
Another man ambles over, his hair thinning and his cheeks extremely bright and full. He gives Sheldon an appraising look. “Ernie Daniels,” he says by way of greeting, extending his hand out in a way that would make declining it entirely impolite no matter how greatly Sheldon wishes he could.
“Dr. Sheldon Cooper,” he answers simply.
“Haven’t seen you ‘round these parts before, you a first timer?” Sheldon doesn’t know if he should lie and say he wasn’t or go along with the man’s assessment. He honestly didn’t know if this was his first time here. It’s the first time he could remember being here, but given the day he’s had that’s hardly saying much.
“Yes.”
Ernie beams and gives a conspiratorial smirk. “I can always spot the newbies. Which one’s yours?”
Sheldon freezes, his mind halting as it occurs to him that he has no idea at all. He nods oblong towards the field and hopes Ernie will drop the subject and leave him be as well.
Instead, Ernie reaches for his back pocket and pulls out a wallet. Flipping through a few plastic covered mini-photos, he extends his arm and shows Sheldon a picture of a short, very excited looking boy in a soccer jersey. “Kyle’s mine, number twenty-two. He’s a trooper. He’s the best on the team when he puts his mind to it, just has to get out of his shell. They’re not all all-stars, you know?”
Sheldon nods, politely and smiles out at the field. He picks Kyle out of the chaos and watches him nervously patrol what he assumes is a defensive position given where the ball’s in play and where he’s standing. Or he’s just very bad at this game.
There are a few players zooming around with no such reservations, scoring points or diving to block shots. He can tell that Kyle probably considers himself quite the player, but objectively, there’s almost no way he’s the best player on either team. But Sheldon keeps that information to himself with a smile.
He absently pats around his pocket and finds a wallet of his own. Cursing himself for not having thought to look for this earlier, given the fact that he could use all the information about this alternate Sheldon he can get, to better fit in.
He flips through and finds no pictures, shrugs over at where Ernie’s peering over hoping to see one. “They must’ve slipped out by accident!” he says wanly. He’s not even technically lying; for all he knows they have.
The whole lack of memory slash alternate universe thing is really doing wonders on his ability to fabricate truths.
Ernie turns his attention back to the game and Sheldon takes the opportunity go rifle through his wallet for a few seconds while he can. There’s not much, but the information he does gather is enough to stop his heart a few times. But that feeling of his throat seizing up and the metaphorical rug being pulled out from under him is old hat now and he manages to keep his face trained to a calm stoicism during his exploration.
First, there’s his driver’s license. It puts the current date at after 2028 but before 2032, based on when it was issued and due to be renewed. Which is just absurd because he’s not had time to adjust to the idea of living in a decade that ends in twenties, let alone one that’s already near the mid-thirties and he can’t be forty-six years-old. He just simply cannot.
The mere suggestion of any such notion in his brain is met with not just disbelief but outright rejection. It’s one thing to hear that he’s married to Penny with children. Both being highly unlikely aside, they were still feasible in that there are ridiculous scenarios that could end with one or both somehow happening. But to have lost twenty years of memories. Twenty years off of his life, no. Absolutely not.
He didn't even know what to make of the fact that he and Penny appeared to be happily married with children for whatever amount of time they’ve been together. That he had little to no excuse for besides perhaps dumb luck, although he didn’t exactly put much faith into that either.
Regardless, neither of those situations demanded he wrap his head around two decades being missing from his memory. He certainly doesn’t feel forty-six. He thinks it over and wonders if being married to Penny has demanded a more regular exercise regimen. After all, hadn’t he just heard her say she was coming from yoga? Something she would probably do fairly frequently, for her to speak of it in that way.
He can’t think on it for much longer as Ernie’s begun pointing out what plays the kids on field are attempting and contemplating how old you feel is hard to do with only partial attention.
Sheldon then realizes that given the average age of the boys in the league being something like eleven that would most definitely put him in his late thirties at least. Unless in this universe he met Penny earlier than twenty-eight and got married and had children immediately. The thought of that was somewhat disturbing, however, because given that Penny was six years his junior that would put her right out of high school and while there’s certainly some merit to the longevity of youthful romances, he could hardly imagine himself dating the version of Penny he knew who was twenty-six, let alone starting out when she was six or seven years younger than that.
Once he’s wrapped his thoughts around the fact that his age was probably mid-forties at least, no matter how depressing and wrong that sounded, he refocuses on the game. One of those children was supposedly his.
He looks around and tries to picture himself being the father of any of them, tuning out Ernie’s play-by-plays to let his imagination run wild. Unless they’re adopted, he can rule out several of the minority players, there are a few red heads that couldn’t be his given his recessive genes, and of course he knows who Kyle belongs to. That leaves a pool of about ten spread across the two teams.
He sees a gangly, pale boy standing off to the side with a pair of wire rimmed glasses and looking like he’s having even less fun being here than Sheldon is. In fact, if you’d forced him to play, Sheldon’s almost entirely sure that he’d be doing exactly the same thing.
Well, that, or he’d be like one of the other scrawny kids that keeps trying to block the ball and trips over his feet every other time in the process. He hopes for both their sakes that it’s the former of the two.
He watches as the taller boy narrowly avoids interaction with the ball, a small but agile blonde boy from the opposing team maneuvering up and around him before reaching the other end of the field and going in for the seventh goal since Sheldon’s started watching.
Another one of the gangly boy’s teammates breezes past with a aggressive request for him to pay better attention and Sheldon feels for him, in that moment. There’s a difference between paying attention and wanting to participate in organized sports.
“I tell you, some of these kids are just not cut out for soccer,” Ernie comments off-hand.
Sheldon bites his tongue to keep from sharing his own thoughts, as he’s still not positive whether the boy in question is even his son. It’s also rather amusing that the person whose son has been standing stock still “defending” the same location for most of the game is likely not to be included the other man’s grouping.
“Tell me about it,” he says back, with perhaps more bite than necessary. But from the look on Ernie’s face, any other implications soar right over his head.
Before they can talk any longer about it, the game is called to an end. Both Sheldon and Ernie watch as each team lines up respectively to give good game high fives to each opposing team member and coach.
His eyes search for the boy from before. He finally picks him out, in the process of giving a lackluster palm to the last few people in line before disappearing to the other side of the field and rummaging through his rucksack for, unsurprisingly, his cell phone.
Sheldon’s still standing next to Ernie, waiting to decide if he should go around the field and double-check if that’s his son. The other man’s beaming with hands firmly set on his wide hips, watching Kyle have a short conversation with one of the other players.
Sheldon is about to say something to Ernie about the procedure for finding your son and bringing them home, to figure out a way to single his out and get home without making a fool of himself, but he’s caught off guard when a soccer ball comes flying at him.
It hits his shoulder with a loud thwack and Sheldon turns to where the culprit--the short blonde who had run circles around the tall, awkward boy from earlier and pretty much every other player on either side for that matter-is standing.
He’s a few short feet away from Sheldon, his face the perfect mixture of amused and regretful. In that second, Sheldon knows. He just knows, deep down. He’s seen that face before.
“Geez, Dad, you’re supposed to catch it.” Ernie looks back and forth between the two with barely concealed shock. “Or at least duck!”
part one / part two / part three
Pairings: Sheldon/Penny, Raj/OC, OC/OC, ensemble
Warnings: Children, Interdimensional Space and/or Time Travel, Sex
Rating: R
Summary: HERE
Mix/Art: HERE by ishie
A/N: This story has been haunting me for almost a year until I refurbished it to be the ugly, weirdly emotional monster below. I want to thank the people who urged me to keep writing it as it first burst out of my brain and especially ishie for being amazing and talented and having great taste in music, weasleytook for convincing me that this wasn't the worst idea (she's still wrong on that front, but) and galfridian for agreeing to do me fifty more favors than I've ever earned. This will stand as part one of the entire story, even though it'll be split in three. The second half will be up eventually, when I finish editing what I have written and finally get to the proper ending I have planned. Until then, gentle viewers.
###
Sheldon wakes with a start and bats away the stray pieces of paper that have stuck to the side of his face. Why had he been sleeping? He doesn’t remember falling asleep and it certainly wasn’t scheduled.
The last he can remember is starting his testing on neutron manipulation, having booked the lasers through to the afternoon. He feels his face for the goggles and looks down to see no gloves on his hands. He’s clearly not in the lab anymore.
What he does notice, then, is that he’s in Dr. Gablehouser’s office.
He bolts up from the chair and rushes to leave the room before being noticed. He looks down as he exits the room discretely and it occurs to him suddenly that he’s wearing a suit. Not one of his classic suits, though. This is dark blue with pinstripes and reminds him of that monstrosity Penny picked out for his Chancellor’s Awards Gala speech. Both the costume and the memory were equally humiliating, if you ask him.
There are more pressing matters, however, and his mind begins that unfamiliar dance of dealing with a problem for which he has no rational solution. He didn’t remember falling asleep, he didn’t remember going to Gablehouser’s office, he didn’t remember changing into these ridiculous clothes, and he couldn’t even place a memory of having purchased them in the first place.
Stumbling around the hallway, he slows close to his office’s threshold. There was someone in there. This same someone looks casually at home in the smallish space; leaning thoughtfully against his desk, white erase marker in hand, correcting a truly pathetic excuse for a Bell test.
It’s the final straw, of sorts, and he crosses his arms with purpose. “Get. Out.” His voice even-keeled but dangerously low. The other man, short and somewhat mousy, bolts upright from the desk and Sheldon watches as the red marker he was holding inadvertently flies across the room.
“Dr. Cooper, what are you doing here?” The man’s off-grey Wayfarers are stitched together at the bridge with what looks like electrical tape. For some reason, this is what sets Sheldon even further on edge. This troll dares to violate his personal space, this morning of all chaotic and confusing mornings, and he can’t even be bothered to buy a new set of glasses when they need mending? Sheldon pulls himself up to his full height and narrows his eyes at the intruder.
“I believe I should be the one asking that question,” he says, coolly.
The man looks truly baffled and moves closer to where Sheldon’s towering over him from the doorway. “I’m sorry?”
“What are you doing here?”
“I-I work here.” He tries to sound confident; Sheldon can sense false bravado better than he can sense most other motivators. Perhaps because he finds it so particularly exhausting and pathetic, he can’t be sure.
The movement towards Sheldon knocks the other man’s rickety glasses a short distance down his nose. His small, unsteady finger instinctively shoots up to push them back against his face. Sheldon gives an almost imperceptible headshake in disbelief before he goes for the jugular.
“Not anymore you don’t.”
“You’re firing me?” He hears in response.
He’s surprised, and happily so, to hear that this person believes he has the authority to do so. If he does, however, it’s news to him. The university had stopped leaving him in charge of people many years ago when they realized he had a hard time keeping someone on the payroll for longer than a day.
To keep things ambiguous, should he be brought in for another one of the sit-downs he received back when his turnover topped out at twenty-three interns in the span of a month, he merely nods. “Well, I know you certainly can’t work here any longer.”
There, that was nice and truthful. For all attorneys knew, he means his office space.
He waits for the other man to fight back, to call him a lunatic or a nutcase, to take a swing at him. He’s encountered every time of layoff reaction known to man. Instead, the man merely slumps his shoulders and gets a rather sad look on his face.
“Can I ask why?” he mumbles.
Sheldon waits a beat, decides on something as non-committal as he can think of. “Because I said so.”
There’s a little huff of breath that could read as the respiratory equivalent of an eye roll. He’s a little begrudgingly proud, for a moment, that it wasn’t a completely lifeless showing on the other man’s part.
“Now, go.”
“Can I at least pack my stuff?”
Sheldon doesn’t know what to say to that. He can’t even process what that sentence could mean in relation to his office, so rather than try to work out what stuff he’s talking about Sheldon frowns. “You can get that later. More importantly, I need you to leave. Immediately.”
Sheldon makes a shooing motion with his right hand as he moves closer into the room and leave space for the man to leave. When he’s finally alone again, he breathes a loud sigh of relief.
This day has been odd, of that he was sure, but a nice exercise in disciplining those of lesser intelligence is always a nice pick-me-up. He walks over to the desk, grabbing the discarded dry erase marker along the way and ambles over to the white board.
He corrects the math with a few short marker strokes before returning the cap to its rightful place and taking a seat behind the desk. His desk.
The chair feels unfamiliar beneath him and it takes a bit of wiggling to get comfortable, but once he’s situated it squarely underneath the desk’s small alcove below, he sets his arms on the cool wood grain. Just as he’s finally feeling things taking a permanent turn for the positive, his gaze shifts to all the personal belongings on the front end of the desk.
Photographs of the mousy, spectacled man from earlier hugging a woman he’s never seen. A Captain Kirk bobble head that while a great likeness of William Shatner, was definitely not his. As if sensing the already problematic developments, his brain seems to urge him to look up at the walls. More than a half a dozen degrees and certifications and awards hang around the small space, none of which have Sheldon’s name on them.
His stomach feels as though it’s dropped out below him. This is a nightmare.
Just as his right hand absently stretches out to touch the small bobble head, his mind snaps at that observation. That’s it, a nightmare. The bobble head agrees. It nods vigorously, Sheldon’s hand having only touched the top briefly before pulling away as if burned makes it bang around on its spring hard enough to echo in the quiet room.
He tries for a few moments to get comfortable with his head laying sideways across the back of his palms in the same position he’d found himself in earlier. He waits aimlessly for five and then ten minutes to fall asleep and grumbles annoyed when rest never comes.
Rather than giving up, he moves back, his spine pushing against the ergonomic chair enough that it gives under his weight and reclines some. It’s not a very natural position, but it’s more comfortable than the desk. Just as Sheldon feels his focused, meditation-like state has pushed him over the edge of slumbering, the chair tilts a little too far and his instincts send his body flying upwards to keep from toppling over.
He mutters something his mother would probably frown at under his breath, knowing that he was so close to sleep a second ago and his meddlesome body had to intercede and ruin it. He wouldn’t have fallen, his legs are long enough that when extended the stick all the way through the cut out below the desk. There’s no way he’ll ever lose equilibrium fully enough to fly backwards, so long as his feet were still on the ground.
And his feet were always on the ground, thank you very much.
Sheldon makes one last ditch effort to fall back asleep on the floor of the office. However, the knowledge that a stranger was walking around here for long enough to have put up knick-knacks, dream or not, he couldn’t relax enough to keep his eyes closed let alone fall asleep.
Unsure of where to go from there, he perches himself at the end of the desk and considers his options. He wonders how long he can stay awake before he’ll just collapse on the desk in exhaustion. But, the trouble with dreams is that they don’t usually follow any kind of logical standard, so there’s no telling how long it’ll take for him to reach a breaking point.
Not to mention he’s only just woken up from what feels like a pretty rejuvenating nap less than twenty minutes earlier. Everything feels hopeless and he’s unconsciously started rocking back and forth, the panic rising slightly inside him.
Then something inside his mind shifts and suddenly it seems so obvious.
He needs go home and sleep in his bed. So he can wake up in his bed and not in Gablehouser’s office and wind up in the repurposed shell that used to be his own. Deep down, he feels a quick pang of regret at having scared off the stranger who this office apparently belongs to now, but he’s already busying himself with finding a ride home. Besides, once he goes back to sleep both this office and the person who works in it will cease to exist.
Shelly, it don’t due to dwell on things you have no control over, his mother used to say. She may have meant it for religious, god-fearing reasons but it holds true regardless.
He feels around his pockets for a cell phone and grabs at his right side when he reaches purchase. What he pulls out does not look like a cell phone, however. It looks like a flattened glasses case or a metal wallet. There is no flip cover or touch screen that he could find. Just a hard shell of plastic that was soft to the touch, encasing a light, three-by-six block of metal.
He pokes it, shakes it around a bit, looks for anything that might trigger it to turn on or pop open.
He feels instantly stupid once he realizes his actions, like some kind of fascinated ape trying to figure out how to solve a Rubik’s cube. Something that would take a child seconds to figure out.
At least this seems to be a dead end and not something he should be able to work out. Either it’s not a phone at all or it’s something his sleeping mind thought up to elude him.
“All I want to do is call Leonard for a ride. Why are you being like this?” he shouts at the phone, his resolve to get it to work quickly fading.
No sooner than he’s let out an exasperated sigh does the small block vibrate, still between his fingertips. He notices the phone - it is definitely a phone - alight with the information that it’s in the process of dialing Leonard.
Voice activation. He’s a genius. Honestly.
He waits for the call to connect before he brings the phone to his ear.
“Hello?”
“Leonard, it’s Sheldon. Sheldon Cooper. I need a ride home from the University. I have to go back to sleep so that I can wake up. Come get me.”
There’s the sound of a door closing and Leonard’s voice returns in a hushed whisper. “Sheldon, what are you saying? Are you okay?”
“I’m having a nightmare. From what I’ve gathered of traditional dream myths, one of the surefire ways to awake from a nightmare or dream is to go to bed during said illusion.”
There’s silence for almost a full ten seconds. “Sheldon, are you drunk?”
Sheldon’s head snaps back in derision at the mere suggestion, despite the fact that Leonard can’t see him or his reaction, he shakes his head slightly. “Absolutely not.”
He does breathe into his closed palm, though. Just to be sure that this Leonard doesn’t have information that he’s currently working without.
“Are you feeling okay, then? You sound like you’re - well, you don’t seem to be all there.”
Rolling his eyes, Sheldon huffs and taps his foot silently against the carpeted floor. “Are you coming to get me? Certainly we can enjoy all this riveting small talk when you meet me by my office.”
“No can do, buddy. I’m in Pomona, remember. I wouldn’t get to you before dinner and I need to be out here again in the morning tomorrow, before Dinner Night, so I’m not really looking to make three trips in the span of a day and half.”
“A loyal and dependable friend,” Sheldon says wanly.
Leonard lets out a terse chuckle. “Why can’t you just drive?”
Sheldon begs off with a very clipped, “Goodbye.”
He’s had that conversation somewhere north of fifty times with Leonard. It usually turns into a two strike minimum argument and this day was already enough of a nightmare. He honestly did not have the patience for it at the moment. So, he cut to the chase and spoke, end call, loud and firm.
At least one of them answers his demands. Flipping the phone over in his hands, he ticks down his other options. He checks the calendar on the desk and rules Penny out. She works on Thursdays and there’s no way she’s going to answer his call, no matter how dire the emergency. That leaves Raj or Howard. Given Howard’s preferred mode of transportation involves two wheels and a three-mile-long panic attack, he tells the phone to call Raj.
He sits and lets it ring and ring. Eventually opts to leave a message summing up the gist of his conversation with Leonard, before realizing he’s back at square one.
He waits for a short while, hoping that Raj is in a bathroom somewhere else in the building or discretely ducking out of a meeting to return his call. Once a full ten minutes passes, however, he’s antsy to escape this place that is his and at the same time is not, to wake up and maybe take an extra hour the next time he’s at work to dust his degrees on the wall and maybe re-alphabetize his wall of appendices.
He wonders briefly if this would be worth taking a bus, he laughs at the thought. There’s even a moment where a taxi enters into the equation, but he thinks a nice long walk would do him good. There’s something fairly symbolic about having to get home on foot, ancient and primal almost.
He shrugs off the thought as soon as it pops up as it sounds like the kind of nonsense Penny rambles on when she interrupts his and Leonard’s morning breakfast with half-remembered details of her non-waking experiences mixed in with what her local astrological forecaster has told her.
The mere fact that astrological forecasters were something available locally-Sheldon straightens himself out and begins the familiar path from Caltech’s campus to Los Robles Avenue.
By the time he’s at his apartment, he’s ready to sit down and welcome sleep. He’s never been in the best of shape, but wearing a suit and walking in ninety-degree weather is really not the best way to go about getting fit. In fact, the shoes he hadn’t noticed until the third mile are coming off the second he gets in the front door. Sanitation be damned.
Okay, he’ll probably leave the socks on. But still, this dream version of himself threw a lot of care to the wind.
It’s only once he gets to the complex entrance that he realizes he’s not carrying his messenger bag with him. In fact, he has a set of keys, not a single one of which he recognizes, but still no way into the building. Another Penny-influenced subconscious metaphor? Whatever the source of yet another obstacle on the simple task of getting rest, he’s a few seconds away from taking a rest on the curb of the parking lot.
Before he can properly reprimand himself for the mere thought of laying down on public domain, he notices a tall, frazzled-looking man head towards the entrance he’s been hovering next to. When the other man tilts his cell phone to his shoulder to continue the conversation he’s been having while getting the door unlocked, he doesn’t even look up when Sheldon holds the door behind him and wanders quietly into the lobby.
Sure, what he’s just done is illegal. But he lives here. Plus, it’s always good to know your buildings safety weaknesses. All the more to add to the list of complaints for his monthly check-in with the super.
When he reaches the fourth floor, he realizes his second mistake. With no keys that go to the building, he doubts he’ll have keys that go to his apartment. Why this day seems out to get him, he still doesn’t know.
Just as he’s resigned himself to waiting until Leonard’s home after dinner and occupying himself with a long relaxing stretch out along the first half of the stairwell heading to the fifth floor, his pocket buzzes.
Penny. Penny’s finished early and she can come let him wait in her apartment where there’s a bed and cold water and wireless internet. Although, he’s less concerned about the latter two since he’s looking to fall asleep as soon as possible and he already knows for certain that they have both in his waking reality.
He clears his throat and tells the phone to answer the call. After a few awkward presses of his hand and odd grips around the phone’s sides, it pulls up the call as answered. “Penny!” He all but shouts into the phone’s receiver.
“Sheldon, where the hell are you?” Penny’s voice comes through sounding an odd mixture of worry and annoyance. He’s usually only the recipient of the latter.
“At the apartment, I’m locked out,” he says. He’s a little embarrassed to admit it, but she’s bound to find out sooner or later.
“Apartment?” she asks, voice heading further in the direction of that unfamiliar worried tone.
“Yes, Leonard’s in Pomona, so he couldn’t give me a ride home from work. So I walked.”
“Walked,” she repeats, sounding confused. Did he not just say that?
“Yes, walked. I walked. Are you on your way home?”
“Sheldon did you walk to the apartment in Pasadena?” Penny asks, almost sounding dumbfounded. Why she can’t wrap her head around the most basic information, he will never understand.
“Of course,” he answers easily.
There’s silence on the other line, but he can almost hear Penny’s mind racing with panic. He’s not entirely sure why, but the feeling that maybe he’s taking this all a little less seriously than she is that hits him like a bullet train.
“Sheldon, stay right where you are. I’m on my way.”
He wants to argue that she’s overreacting, although given this ridiculous dream and the even more ridiculous day he’s dreamt, for all he knows she was under-selling it.
Before he can say any of this, however, the elevator to his left bings loudly and a short Asian couple steps out with arm full of groceries each.
If realizing the desk at Caltech was actually someone else’s was hard to process, watching strangers use an elevator that hasn’t worked for almost ten years to carry groceries into what’s supposed to be your apartment, well.
He wonders briefly if he’s having heart attack.
It feels like one and while he’s certainly healthy by most physicians’ standards, he is genetically predisposed-and he’s trying to run over the statistics he’s read about stress-induced heart failure-specifically recovery rates-when he notices Penny’s voice is still echoing into his ear from the phone in his right hand.
“Sheldon-?”
He knows it’s his turn to respond and pushes his brain to articulate anything coherent. “Hnn-mm -yeah?”
“It’s okay, sweetie, I’m only in Echo Park. I was out with Breanna. I’m only fifteen minutes out at the most.”
“There are Korean people in my apartment and the elevator is still open and it’s on my floor and-” Sheldon rambles on. Somewhere, he’s trying to talk himself back through the fact that this is a dream and this is all just his subconscious picking out things that would most intensely disrupt the balance of his mental comfort. Instead he just continues to recount the horrible, not right, backwards events of his morning.
By the time he’s wandered down to the main floor, Penny’s still on the phone interjecting reassurance at all the right places in his heedless ranting, but now she’s telling him to look out for her car.
So he stands, helplessly, staring off into space while Penny mentions something about traffic or repeats that she’s almost there.
What’s scaring him most is this constant feeling of upheaval in his gut, something that maybe his subconscious could conjure for a split second to add some realism to a particularly bizarre nightmare. But to feel it again, this time seemingly nonstop for nearly twenty minutes, it doesn’t feel right. It feels too real and too much like he might have been too quick to consider this a nightmare. Sheldon’s afraid to consider what that would mean is really happening.
He’s startled out of his panic-stricken reverie by a car horn. He hears Penny follow it up with a request for him to get in the car. Penny had a new car. Of course she did. The fact that it was large and new-looking and far out of her price range was just the unreal cherry on top of the cake.
He walks over unsteadily and hesitates before he reaches out for the passenger side door handle, almost afraid that something bad will happen when he touches it. Nothing does, of course, but getting in the SUV is still quite the ordeal. His stomach continues its attempts to escape his body as he looks over at Penny.
She’s got her hair chopped up just above her chin in a haphazard finger wave. Her curls are stacked on her right side and she shakes her head slightly to the front few out of her eyes as she turns to look at where he’s staring back at her, aghast.
Penny seems to decide something and double-parks the car at the edge of the complex’s lot. She kills the engine and even though the keys are still left dangling from ignition whatever music Penny had been playing is cut off. The car plunges into a deafening silence.
She turns to him, her face contorted with a grim concern, and considers her words. “Sheldon, what’s wrong?”
He lets out a muffled bark of laughter. “How much time do you have?”
She glances at the clock and offers him a small, calming smile. “At little under an hour. Fill me in.”
So Sheldon goes on about how confusing his morning has been, tells her about waking up in someone else’s office and having to commandeer his back only to find it’s never belonged to him in the first place and the phone call to Leonard and now the apartment.
She listens patiently, nodding here and there to let him know she’s following. When he’s finished, despite feeling a weight lifting from his chest at no longer being the only person with this knowledge, the look on Penny’s face wasn’t exactly comforting.
She starts and stops talking a few times, apparently unable to come up with a coherent response. Nibbling on her bottom lip, she reaches over and places the back of her hand against his forehead. He nearly jumps out of his skin at the unexpected touch, but since the car’s interior isn’t that large a space, he can’t do more than wiggle around in his seat as she presses her hand tighter against his head.
“Have you been feeling well? I mean, I know you’ve got a lot of-there’s obviously a lot you’ve gone through today, but did you feel sick at all? Maybe you’re coming down with something?”
He wants to shake her and explain that he feels fine, wide awake unfortunately, but fine. How he’s feeling is not the problem. The fact that he’s woken up in some kind of nightmarish alternate universe is the problem.
Only: that’s it. Sheldon blinks and turns the thought over. He was a man of science, sure, but he was also a man of science fiction. Interdimensional travel was not an entirely unsubstantiated hypothesis. He’s read Vallée’s work just like everyone else. Sure, he did it while laughing at the inanity of it all and more than a few eye rolls at the mention of UFOs and several other extraterrestrial-centric phenomena, but still. Anything that gave an explanation to the situation at hand was feeling welcomed in Sheldon’s mind. Until he got a chance to go back to bed and hopefully escape this reality altogether, coming up with alternative reasoning made him feel safer and more confident that it was a temporary hiccup in an otherwise successful career.
He’s seen enough movies to know how ruffling the feathers of an alternate universe goes, so instead of continuing his panic, he decides to try and blend in.
“Yes, I don’t feel that great. I haven’t eaten anything in hours and I’m a little light-headed, I don’t know why I came by here,” he replies, calm. “Nostalgia, perhaps? Who knows?”
Penny gives him an unsure frown at his change in demeanor. Quickly, as if on a whim, she puts the back of her hand to his head forehead once again. “Just double checking,” she clarifies.
He’s off, lost in another thought, however and doesn’t register her shaking off the oddness of the situation and turning the car back on. He's entirely focused on her left hand. She’s wearing a wedding band.
He can still feel the spot above his right eyebrow where it brushed against a second ago, suddenly everything feels officially off the rails and out of control.
There is no way the Penny he knew would up and get engaged. Not only is she not dating anyone, but she’s never seemed like the settling down type. The moment her relationship with Leonard had veered towards the serious, she bolted. He can’t imagine any suitor managing to convince her to wed in anything short of a year or more.
So, that was it. This was an alternate reality, masquerading as a nightmare, centered around personal details about his friends that he has no interest in being concerned over. He’s starting to feel like the pounding in his head is his brain’s attempt to make a run for it. He can’t really blame it for trying, at the moment.
“Your ring-” he sputters, not having thought over the new information for long enough to consider that if he’s trying to blend in that asking about something this version of him surely knows about is probably not the best way to go about it.
Penny pulls up to a stoplight and glances down at where he’s staring, dumbstruck. “What?”
Sheldon can’t come up with anything better than a strongly bewildered stare.
“Oh, right. I always take it off when I go to yoga.” Penny grins at him.
She pulls at a chain around her neck and wiggles a second, smaller band with a tasteful three stone diamond setting. An engagement ring.
He doesn’t know where to begin, his curiosity and horror equally piqued. “You’re married.”
He says it as a statement, but they both hear it as a question. She looks over, eyes narrowed once again before turning her attention back to the road as the light changes to green. “Uh, yeah, buddy. And last I checked: so were you.”
Penny smirks out the windshield of the car and Sheldon is about to make a long impassioned speech about just how ridiculous even joking about that is-when he rolls his eyes and his gaze shifts briefly to his lap. There, where his hands are resting on his knees, a plain silver wedding band wrapped around his ring finger, staring back up at him like the harbinger of the coming apocalypse that it was.
“I’m married,” Sheldon says more to himself than as a response to Penny’s sarcasm.
“We’re married, idiot,” she says. With a huff, she pulls onto the 110 and they continue along the expressway in silence.
Sheldon can’t stop worrying the wedding band around his finger. Every mile they zoom along the road, the more physically uneasy he gets. It fits far too snugly beneath his knuckle and he’s started genuinely considering what he could’ve possibly done to deserve this kind of hell.
When they take the exit to Santa Monica, he watches as the streets stretch past the windows and slowly gives way to houses with lawns and some with gates and a few playgrounds here and there. He can’t imagine why Penny’s taken him all the way out here of all places, he can’t remember ever passing through this section of the city let alone having a reason to drive out here.
He’s ready to voice his confusion when she angles the car sharply on a side street and pulls up into a driveway. There’s a garage further down the stretch of gravel but Penny leaves the car alongside the edge of the house they’re in front of.
She hops out and clicks the lock button on her keys. Sheldon’s still sitting in the front seat, staring around, trying to take in his surroundings and prepare himself for whatever obstacle is bound to rear its head next.
Penny notices he’s still inside only before she’s about to enter the house. She looks back and motions wordlessly with a curt nod for Sheldon to follow her inside. He tries the door, realizes she locked it a second ago, and has to wait for her to press unlock before he can exit.
Her earlier concern has apparently morphed into casual annoyance at his trepidation. Perhaps if he doubles back on his lie that he’s merely feeling hungry and a bit unwell to tell her that he’s without a large chunk of his memory in what’s either the most vivid nightmare he’s ever experienced or an alternate reality that seems constructed based on his worst fears. Maybe then she’ll stop rolling her eyes as he hesitates to walk through the front door.
Penny’s got a key, it seems, because the door opens without a problem.
The next thing he knows, he’s standing in a living room that’s doing things to his subconscious that he would’ve deemed impossible an hour ago. Hell, he would’ve found them downright ridiculous a few seconds ago.
Instead, he’s looking around at what feels like a memory but this isn’t like the others that he’s missing. There’s a wall-to-wall bookcase with several layers that appear moveable with the use of tracks, complete with a ladder, massive fireplace set up across from the center of the room where the seating is located, and an enormous sectional that takes up the length of two different walls. These are all things he’s seen in his mind as things he’d buy if given a much larger income and more flexible construction permits than those of his apartment complex’s lease allows.
This is his dream apartment. Or dream house, rather, considering its size.
Although he’s always loved the couch he and Leonard picked up in Encino back when they first started living together, something about the large openness of the sectional spoke to somewhere deep inside of Sheldon. All that space, even if there were five people sitting on it, no one would have to be closer than an arms-length to one another.
There’s a spot against the opposite wall that’s effectively the crux of the entire sectional that calls out to him and before he can stop himself, he’s crossed the small area between himself and the cushion. With a deep, contented sigh he sits down and things feel instantly ten times better than they were only a minute ago. This was clearly His Spot.
Give him a new reality, a waking dream, come hell and high water; Sheldon Cooper knows his seat on a sofa when he sees it.
Penny’s ducked into another room with a smirk on her face but as Sheldon’s still soaking up the redemption that is this mysterious sofa. When she returns it's with a small plate of cookies.
“Did you just make these?” Sheldon says, without much thought, as he’s still caught up in angling himself so as to best feel comfortable in his new position.
She gives him a look and answers, “No. These are from yesterday night, remember? I figure they’ll hold you over until dinner. Maybe make you feel less sick and loopy.”
Right, he was this person who makes cookies when Penny visits his huge house and he couldn’t let her suspicions rise again. “Right, right. Yesterday.”
“So, you feel better?”
“I do. Much,” Sheldon says honestly. Between nibbling on the cookie and relaxing in his new spot, he’s almost forgotten the dramatics of the day.
Until Penny grins and finishes her thought. “Then you can get the kids?”
“The kids?” Sheldon parrots back, his third cookie frozen before it could reach his gaping mouth.
“Our children. Can you go get them if I make dinner? If you don’t feel good, I don’t really want you making dinner and getting us all sick. You can just take my car since you must’ve left yours at Caltech.”
For a moment, it sounds to Sheldon like Penny’s started speaking in another language. The troubling thing being that he knows most other languages and he doesn’t recognize any of the words in a single one of the sentences she just said to him.
“Sheldon?” Penny asks, looking slightly impatient over at him.
His brain seems to catch up, then. Kids. He has children. They have children. Penny and he aren’t married to separate people but to each other. Or, he can assume they are since they apparently have children together.
He knows that if he ever had children with someone that he’d want to do it in wedlock, if only to escape the monster that would become his mother, otherwise. But he’s never wanted more than an heir to his fortune of trophies and awards and perhaps someone to pass on the genes that carry his IQ and winning personality in them. For him to have actually gone through with it, though, to have not one but at least two (based on Penny’s use of the plural noun) children seems laughable.
“Yes, yes,” he answers, absently. He bites the cookie, numbly, trying to feign normalcy. “When should I go?”
She puts her hands on her hips and tilts her head forward just the slightest bit and in that moment he’s sure she’s a mother, whether it’s of his children or not, that look is Mothering 101.
He scrambles up from the couch and looks around for keys. To a car. Which he has just agreed to drive. Suddenly there seems to be more than one flaw in his plan.
As if sensing his hesitation, Penny snatches the keys from a bowl next to the wall she’s standing against where the living room expands into another room he’s not yet seen. She tosses them up in the air in his direction and by some grace of dignity, one that’s ignored his pleas all day until that moment, he catches them, and that seems to restore some of her patience with him.
“If you hurry, you can catch the end of his game,” she says to him as he moves to the front door.
“His game?” He has a son, Sheldon notes with a pang of something like pride before his mind reminds him that, no, he does not. This person he’s pretending to be might but since they’re not the same person, claiming anyone as his own progeny is both wrong and slightly worrisome.
“Yeah,” she says as though it should be obvious. “He’s playing soccer at Clover til six. Or did that somehow manage to let that slip your mind despite him going on and on about it this entire week?”
Sheldon is lost for words, which is rapidly becoming a bad habit, and gives a feeble nod before he heads to the door.
Once he figures out how to start the car and fools with the preset navigation points on the built-in GPS in the car, he slowly inches back out of the driveway.
Before he’s all the way out, he turns back around and sends a long glance at their house. He was so shook up earlier he hadn’t really taken in his surroundings all that well. Now, however, his breath catches some and he has to blink to remember that he has places to be and a child to retrieve.
It’s truly spectacular, this house, he considers as he pulls out into the street and watches the dark wood of the fence around their front yard fade in the rearview. It must’ve cost somewhere in the six digits and it suddenly occurs to him that there’s almost no way either he or Penny could afford it on their salaries.
But he didn’t actually know his salary. Or whether Penny was making more money than she used to, working at the Cheesecake Factory. In fact, he didn’t know if she still worked there at all. It seems silly to think that she’d drive all the way from Santa Monica for a minimum wage waitressing job. Surely she’s transferred to the local branch if she’s still with the company.
He drives slowly along the rest of 21st street until he has to turn right on Montana. The traffic looks to be picking up given the time of day and the busy street. It’s been almost three years since the last time he drove a car and even then it was under emergency circumstances.
Pushing down his fear of the road, he continues on his short journey across town. He keeps telling himself that he wouldn’t own a car if he didn’t know how to drive, so some portion of this should come naturally. Of course, he’s never really had anything of substance come naturally to him for most of his life, unless you count science or mathematics or memorizing IMDb filmographies.
Still, he gets there in one piece and breaths a loud sigh of relief when he pulls into the crowded parking lot near the airport.
When he wanders up to the field where there are fathers, mothers, and family gathered watching the tail end of the youth soccer game, he remembers exactly why he’s always lacked the motivation to follow sports.
They’re boring.
But you’d never know based on this crowd, people screaming and cheering on the players. Sheldon tucks his hands in his pockets and tries to feign interest.
Another man ambles over, his hair thinning and his cheeks extremely bright and full. He gives Sheldon an appraising look. “Ernie Daniels,” he says by way of greeting, extending his hand out in a way that would make declining it entirely impolite no matter how greatly Sheldon wishes he could.
“Dr. Sheldon Cooper,” he answers simply.
“Haven’t seen you ‘round these parts before, you a first timer?” Sheldon doesn’t know if he should lie and say he wasn’t or go along with the man’s assessment. He honestly didn’t know if this was his first time here. It’s the first time he could remember being here, but given the day he’s had that’s hardly saying much.
“Yes.”
Ernie beams and gives a conspiratorial smirk. “I can always spot the newbies. Which one’s yours?”
Sheldon freezes, his mind halting as it occurs to him that he has no idea at all. He nods oblong towards the field and hopes Ernie will drop the subject and leave him be as well.
Instead, Ernie reaches for his back pocket and pulls out a wallet. Flipping through a few plastic covered mini-photos, he extends his arm and shows Sheldon a picture of a short, very excited looking boy in a soccer jersey. “Kyle’s mine, number twenty-two. He’s a trooper. He’s the best on the team when he puts his mind to it, just has to get out of his shell. They’re not all all-stars, you know?”
Sheldon nods, politely and smiles out at the field. He picks Kyle out of the chaos and watches him nervously patrol what he assumes is a defensive position given where the ball’s in play and where he’s standing. Or he’s just very bad at this game.
There are a few players zooming around with no such reservations, scoring points or diving to block shots. He can tell that Kyle probably considers himself quite the player, but objectively, there’s almost no way he’s the best player on either team. But Sheldon keeps that information to himself with a smile.
He absently pats around his pocket and finds a wallet of his own. Cursing himself for not having thought to look for this earlier, given the fact that he could use all the information about this alternate Sheldon he can get, to better fit in.
He flips through and finds no pictures, shrugs over at where Ernie’s peering over hoping to see one. “They must’ve slipped out by accident!” he says wanly. He’s not even technically lying; for all he knows they have.
The whole lack of memory slash alternate universe thing is really doing wonders on his ability to fabricate truths.
Ernie turns his attention back to the game and Sheldon takes the opportunity go rifle through his wallet for a few seconds while he can. There’s not much, but the information he does gather is enough to stop his heart a few times. But that feeling of his throat seizing up and the metaphorical rug being pulled out from under him is old hat now and he manages to keep his face trained to a calm stoicism during his exploration.
First, there’s his driver’s license. It puts the current date at after 2028 but before 2032, based on when it was issued and due to be renewed. Which is just absurd because he’s not had time to adjust to the idea of living in a decade that ends in twenties, let alone one that’s already near the mid-thirties and he can’t be forty-six years-old. He just simply cannot.
The mere suggestion of any such notion in his brain is met with not just disbelief but outright rejection. It’s one thing to hear that he’s married to Penny with children. Both being highly unlikely aside, they were still feasible in that there are ridiculous scenarios that could end with one or both somehow happening. But to have lost twenty years of memories. Twenty years off of his life, no. Absolutely not.
He didn't even know what to make of the fact that he and Penny appeared to be happily married with children for whatever amount of time they’ve been together. That he had little to no excuse for besides perhaps dumb luck, although he didn’t exactly put much faith into that either.
Regardless, neither of those situations demanded he wrap his head around two decades being missing from his memory. He certainly doesn’t feel forty-six. He thinks it over and wonders if being married to Penny has demanded a more regular exercise regimen. After all, hadn’t he just heard her say she was coming from yoga? Something she would probably do fairly frequently, for her to speak of it in that way.
He can’t think on it for much longer as Ernie’s begun pointing out what plays the kids on field are attempting and contemplating how old you feel is hard to do with only partial attention.
Sheldon then realizes that given the average age of the boys in the league being something like eleven that would most definitely put him in his late thirties at least. Unless in this universe he met Penny earlier than twenty-eight and got married and had children immediately. The thought of that was somewhat disturbing, however, because given that Penny was six years his junior that would put her right out of high school and while there’s certainly some merit to the longevity of youthful romances, he could hardly imagine himself dating the version of Penny he knew who was twenty-six, let alone starting out when she was six or seven years younger than that.
Once he’s wrapped his thoughts around the fact that his age was probably mid-forties at least, no matter how depressing and wrong that sounded, he refocuses on the game. One of those children was supposedly his.
He looks around and tries to picture himself being the father of any of them, tuning out Ernie’s play-by-plays to let his imagination run wild. Unless they’re adopted, he can rule out several of the minority players, there are a few red heads that couldn’t be his given his recessive genes, and of course he knows who Kyle belongs to. That leaves a pool of about ten spread across the two teams.
He sees a gangly, pale boy standing off to the side with a pair of wire rimmed glasses and looking like he’s having even less fun being here than Sheldon is. In fact, if you’d forced him to play, Sheldon’s almost entirely sure that he’d be doing exactly the same thing.
Well, that, or he’d be like one of the other scrawny kids that keeps trying to block the ball and trips over his feet every other time in the process. He hopes for both their sakes that it’s the former of the two.
He watches as the taller boy narrowly avoids interaction with the ball, a small but agile blonde boy from the opposing team maneuvering up and around him before reaching the other end of the field and going in for the seventh goal since Sheldon’s started watching.
Another one of the gangly boy’s teammates breezes past with a aggressive request for him to pay better attention and Sheldon feels for him, in that moment. There’s a difference between paying attention and wanting to participate in organized sports.
“I tell you, some of these kids are just not cut out for soccer,” Ernie comments off-hand.
Sheldon bites his tongue to keep from sharing his own thoughts, as he’s still not positive whether the boy in question is even his son. It’s also rather amusing that the person whose son has been standing stock still “defending” the same location for most of the game is likely not to be included the other man’s grouping.
“Tell me about it,” he says back, with perhaps more bite than necessary. But from the look on Ernie’s face, any other implications soar right over his head.
Before they can talk any longer about it, the game is called to an end. Both Sheldon and Ernie watch as each team lines up respectively to give good game high fives to each opposing team member and coach.
His eyes search for the boy from before. He finally picks him out, in the process of giving a lackluster palm to the last few people in line before disappearing to the other side of the field and rummaging through his rucksack for, unsurprisingly, his cell phone.
Sheldon’s still standing next to Ernie, waiting to decide if he should go around the field and double-check if that’s his son. The other man’s beaming with hands firmly set on his wide hips, watching Kyle have a short conversation with one of the other players.
Sheldon is about to say something to Ernie about the procedure for finding your son and bringing them home, to figure out a way to single his out and get home without making a fool of himself, but he’s caught off guard when a soccer ball comes flying at him.
It hits his shoulder with a loud thwack and Sheldon turns to where the culprit--the short blonde who had run circles around the tall, awkward boy from earlier and pretty much every other player on either side for that matter-is standing.
He’s a few short feet away from Sheldon, his face the perfect mixture of amused and regretful. In that second, Sheldon knows. He just knows, deep down. He’s seen that face before.
“Geez, Dad, you’re supposed to catch it.” Ernie looks back and forth between the two with barely concealed shock. “Or at least duck!”
part one / part two / part three