every chorus was your name, tbbtfic, s/p, 8000 words [for juniperlane]
Title: every chorus was your name
Author: allthingsholy
Rating: PG-13
Notes: So, this is me defaulting on sheldon_penny's Holiday Swap. juniperlane asked for a Raj/Howard vs. Sheldon/Penny Prank War, and instead she's getting this. It's bandfic AU, and it doesn't make a whole lot of sense, but just, you know. Go with it. Thanks to lulabo and montycrowley for beta skills, and to Meg for being the cheerleader to her own damn Christmas present. I hope you like it, lady. (Also, title from Laundry Room by the Avett Brothers.)
(Now with PODFIC, as recorded by juniperlane/betternovembers herself! GO! DOWNLOAD! TELL HER IT IS AWESOME!)
bandfic
every chorus was your name | my love like a voice | make a record of my heart | all the chances we took
cover art by salixlikescake
cover art by fujiidom
----
There's no feeling quite like being on stage, Penny thinks, with the lights in her eyes and the mic in her hand. Her heart pounds and there's music in her ears. Raj keeps his head down and his shoulders sway in time with the melody, fingers strong against his bass. Howard's showy, all flash and flare, but his hands are steady on the drumsticks and his beat is never wrong. Leonard is quiet, his guitar pulled tight against him, his smile stretched lightly on his face. And Sheldon, well-Sheldon is focused and calm, fingers flying fast over the keys, each note a clear, high sound between them all. She sees him watching her onstage, the sway of her shoulders in time with Howard's kick drum, the groove of Raj's bass line in her hips. She catches his eye and watches him for a verse, her voice low and sultry and strong, and he moves his gaze to his hands, but doesn't falter.
She just closes her eyes and sings.
--
They close the show with an acoustic cover of “Bad Romance,” and the crowd is on its feet to cheer them off the stage. Raj heads straight for the fridge backstage, and Howard twirls his drumsticks between his fingers, already craning his neck for any young, eager groupies. They’re somewhere in the middle of the Midwest, the very center of the country Leonard tells her as he opens them two cold beers.
“That’s factually inaccurate,” Sheldon says from behind them, popping the top on his Diet Coke. He wipes his hair off his forehead and almost glares at Penny as his fingers slide against his brow. He’d lost a Halo 3 bet in a tournament on a long drive from Kansas to Denver a month ago, and his hair’s grown out enough now that the ends have started to curl just slightly. Penny itches to run her fingers through it sometimes, to untuck the superhero shirt he always wears beneath the hipster plaid she forces on him and ruffle his feathers top to bottom. She takes a long pull from her Bud Light bottle and settles down on a couch in their dressing room. They’ve got to be outside to hawk merchandise later, but there’s a whole set to wait through and Penny settles in for a quick tussle with Sheldon. It’s enough to keep the performance high running in her veins those precious few extra minutes.
“Alright, Brain Boy,” she starts, “then the exact middle of the country is where, precisely?” She crinkles her eyes at him, jovial and challenging, and sees his fingers flex around the cold can in his hand.
“Well, based on the grid of longitudinal and latitudinal lines crisscrossing North America, I put it just outside Lebanon, Kansas.”
“Fine,” Leonard says, “but Chicago’s still, like, near the center.”
“I knew a girl from Chicago once,” Howard says from the door. He taps his drumsticks against his thigh and wags his eyebrows in Penny’s direction. “Man, she did her city proud.”
Penny cuts him off with a cock of her head and says, “If you even make a ‘she blew like the wind joke’ right now, I’ll punch you in the throat.”
Howard mock-laughs and Raj pipes up from the corner, “I think the words you’re looking for are ‘oh, snap.’”
Penny snorts and Leonard laughs, and it’s not a bad way to spend the few hours they have before they have to finish packing up their gear and hit the road again. Penny’s got a system now, a way to move quickly from one place to the other without leaving anything behind. They’ve been at this awhile.
--
She saw an ad at the Cheesecake Factory, is how this all got started. “Singer wanted; instrumental proficiency a plus; whistlers need not apply.” So she hauled herself across Pasadena and sang “Sunday Kind Of Love” in two strange guys’ living room, and now here she is, two years later, in a beat up bus going 55 all the way across Missouri.
"I liked the blondes in Des Moines," Howard says, "all corn-fed and tall. Like they could just pick me up and use me like a puppet however they wanted to." He gets the glazed-over look in his eyes that means it's time for Penny to tune out the dirtier depths the conversation is surely to fall to, and she turns her attention back to the pad of paper in front of her. She's got lyrics sketched on almost every inch of the open page, snatches of chorus and verse tied together with nothing more than the almost-melody she hears in her head, to the beat of the tires beneath her. Leonard and Raj laugh beside her, and she gives them a quick smile, then moves her eyes back to her notebook, humming to herself as she opens it to a new page.
--
She was wary at first, when she got the gig. They played her a few of their originals, and a cover or two from their setlist. By the third song, she could hear exactly where her voice would fit, just above the riff of Leonard’s guitar and just below the high, tinkling notes of Sheldon’s keyboard.
He made her sign a contract at her first official rehearsal. She’s only allowed to show so much skin (“so as to avoid compromising our musical integrity”), write only so many sappy love songs (“because we are not and never will be back-up performers at your bubble gum factory”), and comp so many door fees to their gigs (“for whatever buffoon you’re sure to be dating that week”). She was pretty sure she didn’t like him thirteen signatures later, but then he sat down to play and she forgot about the contract altogether.
--
They’re all up still at midnight, the lights of the bus muted and low. Penny puts down her notebook and ambles up front, where Sheldon is curled into his usual seat. He’s got heaphones over his ears and doesn’t hear her approach, and he starts just a bit when she sits down beside him. He’s sat in the exact same spot for almost 2000 winding, wandering miles, and she invades his space without a second thought, tucking a foot beneath her and leaning in too close.
“Any luck?” she asks. The paper in front of him is blank but for the bar graph he’s doodled in the corner. She knows the tight feeling that settles into her chest when the right words just won’t come, and she gives him a sympathetic, understanding smile.
Sheldon turns away from her, looking back out the windshield at the stretch of highway beyond. Penny watches the headlights as they cross his face, the way his jaw stands out, the crease of his eyes. They’ve been on the road a month, and she’s just gotten used to the constant feel of motion, the steady hum of an engine beneath her. She likes it, she finds, always moving forward. The band they’re touring with is from Kansas City, four guys and their instruments and a whole lot of talent. They got the gig through some guy Sheldon knows, a friend of a friend or whatever, but Penny’s never been one to look a gift horse in the mouth. So it’s been bar after bar after nightclub after tiny concert hall, but the shows have been crowded, and they’ve gained some fans.
Sheldon keeps reminding them they don’t have much time left. They took off a month ago, piles of cords and equipment and hope shoved in the back of a van, and now here they are, halfway through, and Penny likes to think they’ve got something to show for all the time they’ve spent out on the road. Each show feels tighter, a little more precise, a little more controlled. Every set list is stronger, every final round of applause just a little bit louder. If they are going to be a great band, the real deal, she knows that it’s time to put up or shut up, and she’s never really been one to back down.
--
They pull out of Kansas City on a Wednesday morning, and the tour is officially underway. Penny chatters for an hour about how excited she is, how this is going to be the best thing that ever happened to them. She talks and talks, full of chatter, and Raj and Leonard and Howard all smile and nod. The other guys might not notice, but her voice is too high, too tight, and Sheldon gives her a look, like he’s not fooled by her cheerfulness, like he knows better than to buy this routine. She doesn’t say it’s because she’s nervous. She doesn’t tell him that being back out here feels too much like going back to Nebraska with her tail between her legs.
She just keeps talking, her voice a fine, tense sound. She doesn’t say it’s because she’s scared.
--
“So you were, like, a real pianist?” Penny asks. It’s one of their first rehearsals, and Sheldon’s cross-referencing their cords by length and purpose. He barely spares her a look as he bundles wires around his arms.
“Yes, I suppose you could put it that way.” There’s an air of disdain in his voice, and Penny can’t tell if it’s directed at her or humanity, so she leans her back against the wall and just watches him. According to Leonard, he used to be a real prodigy, a genuine musical sensation. When she’d asked him what had changed, he’d just shrugged his shoulders and shot a quick glance at Sheldon.
“I don’t really know. I mean, I guess he just got tired of it, or something.” He’d leaned in, his voice a conspiratorial whisper, and said, “Really, I think maybe he just couldn’t take the pressure.”
She knows Sheldon well enough now to know that that’s not why he left. He’s less likely to back down from a challenge than she is, and there’s not much she’ll walk away from. She’s seen him put up with a lot of things she knows he doesn’t want to, for the sake of the band.
He’s worked sections with Raj and Howard over and over, even though he had it right the very first time. He’s sat and toiled over lyrics with her, over chords and phrasing, even giving in on the rarest of occassions. He deals with club managers and booking agents, and the occassional overzealous fan.
This is what has most surprised Penny. The sheer amount of women who flock to him after shows, who offer to buy him drinks, dinner, try to pull him to the backs of random bars and worm their way beside him. The first few times she’d seen it, Penny had regarded it as a miracle, but now she squints her eyes at him as he coils the wires, at the red and blue and black cords snaking their way up his forearms, and it’s not so hard to believe someone would go for Sheldon. He’s long and lanky under his double-layered t-shirts, and his eyes are a bright, beautiful blue. He’s not really someone she can picture herself with, but maybe if he smiled a little more, or maybe was a little nicer to her. Maybe if he didn’t use big words just to confuse her, and maybe didn’t take her songs too fast just to watch her try to keep up.
“You’re in my way,” Sheldon says, knocking her out of her reverie. His eyes still have that disdainful expression, and a spark of something else, something hidden and held back. So maybe not.
--
Sometimes they call him Silent Sheldon. Not because he never talks-oh god, can he talk-but because he never sings. He never takes a solo, never even takes a harmony, and it’s not that he can’t, she’s pretty sure, he just doesn’t want to. Raj thinks it’s stagefright, but she knows he’s played in front of huge concert halls around the world, and she doesn’t agree.
She catches him sometimes, after rehearsal when everyone else has left, playing the music he must’ve played when he was younger, when he wore tuxes and bowties to concerts instead of faded corduroys and garish sweaters. He flies through the classics, Chopin, Mozart, Beethoven, Tchaikovsky. He doesn’t falter once, but there is something missing in the notes, something flat and resigned. She tucks herself into the stairwell, knees drawn tight to her chest, and listens to him play. She knows he could’ve been-is-a truly amazing pianist, and she wants to ask him why he left, why he walked away and so far hasn’t looked back. She doesn’t ask him anything though, and she doesn’t leave her spot on the stairs until she hears him stand up to leave.
If she asked him why he left, she thinks, she’s not sure he’d have an answer, or at least one she’d understand, but she knows he sounds happier playing the chords he writes himself. She starts to think she maybe called this one too early.
--
She follows Sheldon to a laundromat in Boulder, because all of her jeans smell like a bar. She’s tempted to just say screw it and buy a few new pairs, but she thinks about the rent check waiting for her back home and reconsiders. Sheldon lectures her the whole way there on color separation and the perils of set-in stains, but when she walks in she just picks a washer and gives him a look while she dumps her whole basket inside. Sheldon sighs dramatically behind her as she fiddles with the settings, but finally she shoves her quarters in the slots and then heaves herself onto the next empty machine.
It takes Sheldon five minutes to pick the best washers. Penny watches him lift every lid and turn every dial, and when he finally finds the right ones, a bloc of four farthest from the entrance, she just rolls her eyes and watches him load his whites.
“There’s an ice cream place across the street,” she says, looking out the window at the busy city beyond. She kicks her heels against the washer and watches him and asks, “You want?”
Sheldon shakes his head and doesn’t answer, just points to the sign on the opposite wall.
“’Do Not Leave Clothes Unattended,’” she reads aloud. “Yeah, I saw that and chose not to care.” A pick-up truck drives by loaded with old furniture, and then a convertible with the top rolled down. Penny watches the couple inside as they drive past, his arm along the back of her seat, her face turned to watch him while he watches the road. She hasn’t had sex in six months, so: “Ice cream. You want?”
“The carefree manner in which you break rules is troubling for me, since we have a signed contract which, in effect, binds my fortune to yours.” He pours detergent into the measuring cup, precise and focused, and then adds it to the washers and is done. He turns to face her, the machines humming behind him, and crosses his arms in front of his chest.
They stay that way a few minutes, Sheldon quiet, Penny staring out the window at the passers-by. It’s a companionable silence, and she lets it settle around them, but then all of a sudden she finds herself asking, “Why don’t you ever sing with us?”
Sheldon narrows his eyes, but doesn’t turn them toward her. She can see the muscle in his jaw working, tight from the clench of his teeth. Penny wants to ask again, to press on, but she bites back the words and waits. Sheldon holds his pose for a long minute, and then finally looks at her and seems to deflate. He settles his hips slightly against the washer and drops his gaze to the floor.
“I find singing in public to be a disagreeable experience,” he starts, and his voice is calculated and calm. “Performance has an inherently revelatory nature, and I find it uncomfortable exposing my innermost feelings to strangers in such a manner.”
It’s not what Penny expected him to say. She expected him to say his voice is pitchy, that he slurs his r’s or pops his p’s, that his breath support is faulty. She expected excuses, not the truth.
“You should do it,” she finds herself saying, pushing herself off the washer and stepping toward him. “I know you can sing.” She’s heard him in rehearsals, correcting her and Raj on their harmonies and his voice is always a steady, solid tenor. She knows it’s not lack of talent that keeps him quiet, and she can’t imagine he’d turn down showing off another talent.
He swallows hard and gives her a look, and she knows what he’s thinking before he says it. “Of course, I can sing, I merely choose not to.”
She knows she could push his buttons here, get him to open up by calling him a coward, bet him or question his talent. But it feels wrong, to force his hand like that, so instead she slides next to him and almost brushes her hip against his, and settles her gaze on her shoes.
“It’s freeing,” she says. “There’s nothing else like it. It’s just you and the audience and all these things you have to say, things you get to tell them, and it’s just. Liberating, I guess.” She knows she’s oddly sentimental about it, but it’s the only thing she’s ever wanted to do with herself, and she won’t apologize for passion.
If there’s one complaint she could make about Sheldon’s performances, it’s that they’re a little too rigid, a little too structured. He’s into the music, she’s sure, but it feels restrained, sectioned off, like there’s something he holds back. He doesn’t riff much, instead sticking to the music he’s set out in long sessions with her.
Somehow, they became the de facto songwriters. They just kind of fell into it months ago, Penny scribbling lyrics while Sheldon wrote the piano portions. He’s pretty good with the bass and guitar parts too, but he never gets any better at the drum sections. They became their own unit, a set in an occassional sea of mayhem, and if Penny had to admit it, she’d probably call Sheldon her best friend. She knows him well enough to know that the hesitancy with which he looks at her now is based more on embarrassment than uncertainty, so she meets his eyes and gives him the most genuine look she can manage and says, “Sheldon, I love it.”
He breathes out hard and looks away, and she knows he’s trying to hedge when he says, “There are any number of our songs I’d be willing to try my voice on.”
She shakes her head, says, “No, it should be yours. Something you write. Something that means something to you.” He doesn’t look at her, so she pushes on. “Isn’t there anything you want to say? Isn’t there anything you hold back that you just want to let go of?”
She waits him out, tracing the edges of the washer with the tip of one finger. She doesn’t have to look at him to know his face is screwed up in concentration, in deliberation, and when he straightens up, holding himself higher, more confidently, she knows she’s won.
He steps away without saying anything to her, moves to take a seat at one of the chairs lined up against the windows, and she says to his back, “Take your time with it.”
He stops and looks over his shoulder, framed by the street outside. The city is just beyond him, alive and busy, but she keeps her eyes stuck fast to his. “Don’t force it. Just. Say whatever you want to.”
He turns away and settles stiffly into the plastic chair, and she looks away and waits for her wash to finish.
--
Penny makes a comment one day that she thinks about for a long while after. She’s been with the band about six months, and one day at rehearsal Sheldon’s being even more Sheldon-y than usual, saying, “Well, the train wouldn’t have ‘come off the rails,’ as you put it, if you hadn’t failed to keep up with my tempo in the last section.”
Penny knows there is no bite behind it, that it’s just Sheldon being Sheldon, but she still tightens her fists and counters, “Oh, don’t act like you’re so superior. If you were you’d still be in Berlin, not flunked out and struggling to get noticed like the rest of us.”
Something in Sheldon seems to snap shut instantly. His face closes up, his jaw tight, eyes hard. As well as she’s come to know him, this is new, something she hasn’t seen before. She’s about to interrupt, about to backpedal, when Sheldon’s hands go to the keys and he’s playing the bridge slower, like she’s asked him to.
She sings along, but the power of the section is gone, and her voice is thready and weak. She doesn’t tell him he was right, but she doesn’t say anything when he changes it back either.
--
Things go smoothly until Des Moines, where things never really click, never really lock into place like they should. The crowd doesn’t get into the show, and they leave the stage sweaty and silent, their blood humming in their veins.
“The last section was too rushed,” Penny says, looking over at Howard. “I think the long fill got us off tempo.”
“Hey, don’t blame the hands.” Howard shrugs his shoulders. “I’ve been told they’re made of magic.”
“Just because your mother raves about your foot rubs does not mean you have magic hands,” Raj says, leaning over for a high-five from Leonard before he’s even finished.
“Well, maybe if the guitar player hadn’t forgotten to change keys into the bridge, I wouldn’t have been distracted!” Howard counters, and then Leonard’s up in arms and then Raj follows suit and it quickly devolves into all of them yelling at each other. Penny looks at Sheldon, sitting quietly looking at something on his phone. He offers no assistance, so she lets out her best wolf-whistle and silences all of them.
“We cannot fight like this! We have four more weeks of shows, and we cannot fall apart right now!” She holds her hands up; she is not above begging them to brush this aside for now. Each show up to tonight had been better, tighter, and it felt like all the miles and hotel beds had been worth something. She will not let them unravel now if she has to hold this band together with her bare hands.
She gives Sheldon a look, a pleading, desperate look, and he clears his throat and stands, the usual authority in his voice. “Leonard, the key change is imperative for the flow of the song, but Howard, that last fill did seem to dither on.”
Howard opens up his mouth to speak, but Sheldon continues on unabashedly. “No, it dithered.” He goes on to pick on each of them, to call them out where they were wrong, and by the end of it, they’re all mad at Sheldon, but not at each other. Penny knows he doesn’t mind it that way, that it’s the role he’s had to play more often than not, and when he’s finished she gives him a small, grateful smile.
He doesn’t acknowledge her with anything more than a tilt of his head, but things are back on track by the very next show.
--
She’s had a melody stuck in her head since Detroit, a strange rush of chords and phrases. If she had to describe it, she’d call it hopeful. She catches herself humming it over and over again, tapping her fingers against her thigh and the table and the armrest on her seat. She plucks the strings of her guitar but can’t quite make it sound the way it should.
Sheldon starts to huff every time she starts to hum, and after awhile she moves from annoyed to amused. Every once in awhile, she whistles a few bars just to rile him up and he narrows his eyes and frowns at her. It’s a Monday night and they don’t have a show, so she’s locked Sheldon in her hotel room to hammer out the finer points of a few new songs she wants to try.
They haven’t talked about Detroit. She still remembers the way he looked when they finally pulled apart, his lips swollen and eyes bright. She’d opened her mouth to say something-though even now she’s still not sure what-and he’d stepped back, swallowed hard, and pulled down the ends of his shirt where she’d rucked it higher with warm, eager hands. Something closed shut, glossed over, and he gave a slight nod and walked away.
She doesn’t say anything about that though, as they sit on the bed with their knees almost pressed together. His keyboard’s set up in front of him, and she’s got sheets of paper spread out all over the covers, and the disorganization is clearly making him stircrazy. They’ve gotten through two songs already, bright, even melodies that she knows will entertain, and Sheldon hasn’t yet brought up his song. She wants to ask, but his silence on the subject makes her wary, and she knows he spooks easily. They finish their last song and she waits a long moment, giving him an opening, and when he doesn’t take it, she stands up to take a break. Sheldon stops her with a look.
“That’s it?” he asks. “You’re not going to further subject me to that half-melody you’ve been humming for two weeks?”
Penny clenches her jaw and looks past him out the window, at flat fields for miles and miles. Of course he’d call her out, when she couldn’t do the same to him, but she’s never backed down when challenged.
“I can’t get it out of my head,” she says. He leans back and settles in deeper, not ignoring her, just-assessing. Evaluating. She’s come to know there are few things he’s ever done without proper mental preparation. She pulls her gaze from the window and meets his eyes. “Haven’t you ever had something you just couldn’t get out of your head?”
She sees his hands tighten above the keys, and his eyes graze her face for just a moment. He takes a deep breath, looks past her, over her shoulder and out at the blue sky above, and then his hands start to move again.
He’s playing her song. The barest bones of her melody, the simplest notes and phrasing. She comes back to sit beside him and adjusts his tune every now and again, a halfstep up here, a halfstep down there. It’s something they’ve done a thousand times before, worked the pieces of their songs out slowly until they were right and ready, but her heart flutters just a bit as she listens to him playing the tune she’s had in her head for weeks. It’s tinny and weak, the volume on the keyboard turned most of the way down, but it’s hers, and it’s almost beautiful. There’s still something missing, she thinks, as she scrunches her nose at him.
“Almost,” she says, tightening her jaw and shaking her head. “It just needs….” She trails off, narrowing her eyes as she watches his hands. He adds chords above, harmonies below, tweaking and trying and adding frills and phrases. He plays different variations, different tempos and keys, but still they can’t quite get it right. They work until the sun goes down, until the boys come back to get them, and when she catches Sheldon humming the notes at dinner, she doesn’t say a thing.
--
Penny meets a woman in Des Moines, Hannah, who’s on the verge of packing up her things and moving out to L.A., heading across the country with just a smile and an iron will. Penny laughs and shakes her head, but her face is just a little bit sad. This is the closest she’s been to Nebraska in years, and her chest buzzes when she thinks about going home, facing her family and her past. She doesn’t think on it long, but she does buy Hannah another drink.
Howard swears he hooks up with a girl in Denver who looks exactly like Heidi Klum, but Raj swears Howard passed out in their room by midnight with the blankets tucked up under his chin. Penny’s known them long enough to know which one to believe.
They meet lots of people as they zig and zag from state to state, old fans of the other band’s, new fans of theirs. They’re somewhere in Indiana when Greg sends her the link. A fan in Chicago took photos of his show, and snapped some of Penny and the guys onstage too. They all crowd around Leonard’s laptop and surf through the files, 10 bright, vivid shots of the five of them performing.
It’s the last photo that strikes Penny most. She’s singing, mic tight in her hand, pointing at Leonard and smiling bright and wide. But there in the corner is Sheldon at his keyboard, head tilted back and eyes closed. She can almost see him swaying in his seat, totally lost in the music.
She’s never seen him so serene, so innocent, so joyous. She remembers that moment, chrystalized in her mind. He’d played the bridge of “Famous Last Words” just a bit differently, more raucous, not quite as sharp. He never usually riffs much or ad-libs, but she remembers noticing the change and being surprised.
She wishes she’d thought to turn and look at him, wishes she could’ve seen him in this moment, with his face so bright and his heart so close to the surface. She’s pretty sure he doesn’t look like that when he plays Chopin, and understands a little better why he walked away from the conservatories and the concert halls. She might’ve thought it weakness once, or a flaw of character, but she knows now that it was desire, and determination, and courage. Walking away from what had been handed to him, choosing to work at something instead. She’s never thought him brave before, but she’s learned better now.
--
Every once in awhile, she catches him working on his song. She knows he’s pushed as much by the challenge to himself as the challenge she made him, but when he catches her staring, at the offer of help she knows is written on her face, he turns away and doesn’t bring it up.
--
She’s been in the band for two years now, and she feels an odd affection for all of the guys, even if each one has his own strange quirk.
Leonard is so earnest it’s almost painful, and it had taken awhile to shake the hopeful, hangdog looks he used to give her, but he’s kind, and giving, and always willing to stay the extra hour to get a song just right. Howard is demeaning and insulting and presumptuous, but she also knows his deep-down caramel center, and takes his comments with a roll of her eyes and a tolerant smile.
Raj had hardly spoken to her at all her first month in the band beyond what was absolutely necessary. Leonard told her he was shy, nervous around beautiful girls, and she decided she’d just get used to it, but then he took the harmony during one of their ballads and Penny was so struck by his clear, gentle voice that she stopped in the middle of the song and simply gaped at him. Three days later she’d punched him hard in the shoulder and told him to snap the hell out of it, and with a little more physical encouragement, he slowly opened up.
Sheldon was the only one who really pushed back. It took weeks, months, even most of that first year, but she came to realize, and understand. She worms her way in, with stubborn will and sheer determination, and refuses to back down. He treats her better than the others because she makes him, because she deems herself an equal and makes him believe it too.
She will not say that Sheldon is her favorite, but that doesn’t mean she doesn’t think it. So when she catches him lost in his mind, bobbing his head ever so slightly to the beat she knows only he can hear, she wants to go to him, to sit and encourage and listen. She wonders at the song that he is writing, what he has to say, and what he’s willing to tell them.
She knows he’s not taking it lightly. That he’s toiling over every word, every chord, just like she does. It feels like they both still have something to prove.
--
She kisses him in Detroit. She doesn’t plan it, but he mucks up the bridge of “Foolhardy Heart” and his hands are too heavy on the keys for the rest of the night. When she squeezes in next to him at the bar, he’s sliding a five to the bartender and bringing a glass of something brown and strong to his lips. It isn’t often that he drinks, but when he does, he hits back hard. So she watches him drink his first glass too quickly and decides to head it off early.
“No one even noticed,” she says, as he motions for a refill. “It was fine, no one even knew.”
“I beg to differ,” he says, eyes on his drink. “I knew. You knew. That hardly constitutes no one.”
He is impossible when he is like this, all stubborn pride and carefully cultivated ego. She motions to the bartender for two of whatever he’s drinking and while they’re waiting she asks him, “What’s the song about, Sheldon?” Her voice is needling, coy, and she gives him a broad, showy smile.
He doesn’t answer for a long while, just grabs his drink when it’s laid before him and lets Penny pull him along as she winds a path away from the bar.
She guides him to the loading dock, her back against the giant folding door as she heaves herself up onto an equiptment case. He leans a hip against the wall and swirls his drink and doesn’t speak.
“Sullen looks good on you,” she says, taking a sip. Scotch, and strong, and it burns when it hits the back of her throat. She doesn’t flinch as she takes another drink and continues, “It goes well with the whole hipster look you’ve got going on.”
“Need I remind you, you’re the one who picked out this outfit?” he asks, cocking an eyebrow at her. It’s true, of course; she dragged all the guys out to Pasadena Mall and picked out new shirts and jeans and button-downs to match their eyes. They all bitched and moaned about “losing their artistic identities,” but in the end they came to a compromise. Raj still wears his sweater vests over the patterns and plaids she picked out, and Howard still rocks the turtlenecks she made him buy more often than the ones he wore before, but Penny has to admit, it works for them.
Sheldon’s wearing a blue plaid shirt that matches his eyes perfectly, and she can see the top of Superman’s head poking out just above the first button. She’d heard him pacing the hall last night, the thud of his footsteps lulling her to sleep, just the ghost of a melody humming from his lips as he beat a weary path into the carpet and toiled on the song he just can’t seem to finish. His eyes are puffy from too little sleep, and he rubs a tired hand against the back of his neck. That might be what makes her tug on his wrist and pull him toward her, or maybe it’s the buzz of the scotch just starting to work its way into her fingers. Either way, she pulls him close and kisses him just as she hears the headliners take the stage and the Motor City start to roar. He stays stock still for just a moment, but then the bass line kicks in and he closes his hand around her hip and leans into her.
They don’t really talk about it after the show, and things aren’t weird exactly, but something shifts.
Sheldon doesn’t wear that shirt again.
--
Greg knocks on her door after the show in Chicago, after the boys have all gone to their room. When she cracks it open, he’s got a smile on his face and invites himself inside. He tells her there’s a producer he knows, someone legit, someone bigger than either of them have ever dealt with before. He’s coming to their last show in Kansas City, wants to hear both of them play, and take it from there. Penny buries her face in her pillow and screams herself silly. She knows they are so close to being ready, so close to being right, and she lets the excitement creep into the safest, most cautious parts of her body. She hugs Greg, brief but grateful, and then charges down the hallway to the boys’ room and knocks on their door at one in the morning.
Sheldon answers with a scowl and a reprimand, but by the time she finishes telling them the news, even he is smiling.
--
They stay two days in St. Louis, a whole lazy weekend stretched between them. They all hit the city, downtown, the park, the zoo. Sheldon is his usual resistant self, but she tugs him along, her small hand in his larger one, into the Penguin House and off to Big Cat Country. It’s a beautiful fall day and they eat ice cream and hot dogs and take the kiddie train all the way around the park.
By the time they eat dinner and head back to the hotel, Raj and Leonard and Howard bid her quiet goodnights and head for their room. She showers and changes and tries to settle down, but there is something restless in her bones, something accustomed now to wander. She takes the elevator back to the hotel bar, orders a drink and drums her fingers against the wood as she waits, a nervous, expectant feelings in her stomach.
“We have a show tomorrow and spending half the night in a smoke-filled bar is far from a prudent decision.” She doesn’t even turn to look at Sheldon as he sits down beside her, just smiles into her drink and waits.
“Only three shows left,” she says. It’s his line, Sheldon always the constant reminder that their time is running out. She turns and gives him a small, sad smile, and he raises a hand to signal the bartender. He orders a scotch and soda, and when it’s placed in front of him he plays with the glass in his hands before he even takes a drink.
She watches the lines of his hands, the warm, waiting crease of his brow. She wants to comb her hands through his hair, grown out long just over his ears now, and curling against his forehead. There’s real affection in her voice when she leans over, just nudging his shoulder with hers, and asks, “What’s the song about, Sheldon?”
He doesn’t answer for a moment, just takes a sip of his drink and then settles his eyes on the mirror above the bar. When he starts to speak, his voice is low, familiar, intimate as he tells her things she’s never heard him talk about before. He tells her about his family, growing up in Texas, his studies in New York and England. He tells her about the conservatory in Berlin, about his decision to leave, about always fighting against someone to be better, fighting against himself to be the best, and how it just didn’t make him happy anymore. He doesn’t say it in those words, though. He says things like, “It was irrational to continue to pursue a career path that no longer stimulated or satisfied me,” and “I felt my talents and attention could be better utilized elsewhere,” but she knows what he means anyway. She’s gotten good at reading between the lines with him, and they sit there most of the night, their voices low and hushed.
--
They’re quiet most of the way from St. Louis to Kansas City. The highway’s straight and narrow, and they make quick time, passing restaurants and rest stops all along the road. The van is quiet, still. No one says much of anything, and there’s a tightly wound, waiting feeling pressed up against the windows.
She knows it’s because they’re preparing themselves for the way their world could change. She knows it’s because this thing is drawing to a close and they may not get another chance like it.
Penny sits beside Sheldon, watches him tense and untense his hands, and finally she wraps her fingers around his and squeezes tight. He stills for just a moment and then turns to her, and she gives him a look and a sure, certain smile. He uncoils his shoulders and leans back in his chair, head held just a little bit higher.
She knows they’re ready.
--
She steps out on stage for their last show, the last time they’ll be out here together, and from the very first note, it is perfect. Howard has never been so on, and Leonard’s fingers have never hit their marks so surely. Raj rocks out like she’s never seen him do before, and Sheldon is a bright shining force on the edge of the stage, his hands so strong and sound, she has to make herself turn away.The mic is hot in her hand, and her melodies are smooth, and Raj’s harmonies are perfect. The crowd is alive in front of her, wild and warm and pressing in on her forever, and by the time the notes of their last song are fading into the cheers and whistles of the crowd, there are almost tears in her eyes.
She knows then that there is no turning back. That there’s nothing that will ever make her feel this way, and as she looks around at all the guys, she knows they feel the same. No matter what Greg’s producer friend has to say, they will work at this until it falls into place, because they’ve come too far to quit now. They all have dumb smiles on their faces as they flee stage left, and she’s about to pull Howard and Raj into sloppy, wild hugs when a hand closes around her wrist. Sheldon spins her around, his chest heaving, eyes shining, and then fits his palm against her cheek. The crowd is still cheering them from beyond the heavy curtain, and she almost misses Sheldon’s words when he speaks them.
“I’m playing it. Right now,” he says, shouting to be heard over the crowd. “It seems like an optimal moment, and I’d be remiss to let it escape me.”
Penny grabs his free hand with hers and squeezes it tightly. She doesn’t say “this is it,” but they both know it anyway. Sheldon leans forward and kisses her, quickly and almost chastely, but his hand is warm against her cheek and his fingers linger in hers when he finally turns to take the stage.
He keeps his eyes on hers as he walks back to his piano, pulling a mic over and adjusting the stand. He’s a lone man in front of the crowd, and he sits down a little unsurely. She sees him take a deep breath, close his eyes for just a moment, and then he’s playing.
His hands almost shake against the keys, but the notes are still clear. His voice is timid, unsure, but still deeper than she thought it would be, and she hangs on every word. I’d carry you around in my pocket, he sings, with the bright shiny nickels and dimes. It’s a little cheesy, like a love song should be, and she closes her eyes and tilts her head closer to him, a warm smile spread on her face.
She looks down and sees Leonard’s fingers moving in time with the rhythm of Sheldon’s song. She knows he’s working out the cello part to accompany it, the same way she can hear the harmony she’ll sing just over Sheldon’s voice. It’s a beautiful song on its own, but she knows there is room enough for the rest of them, that they can polish this thing until it shines.
And then: she hears the notes before he plays them. There, just between the bridge and his last chorus, is her melody, tucked into his like it’s what was always meant to go there. It’s been transposed, shifted just slightly, but it’s hers all the same. It sounds full, rich, meaningful as it wraps itself around his notes, and when he finishes the song, his eyes are glued to hers where she stands just offstage.
The crowd cheers again, and Penny, Raj, and Howard are quick to join in from behind the curtain, their whoops and hollers louder than anyone else’s. Sheldon stands, ducks his head awkwardly, and then flees to the rest of them.
They pull him into a hug, a wild mass of arms and elbows; she lays her head on Leonard’s shoulder, runs a hand through Raj’s hair. Penny knows it’s the beginning of the rest of their lives, that this is the best thing they will ever do with themselves and she can finally see it stretched out in front of them, on and on forever. She squeezes them all tighter and lets the tears finally come. She feels Sheldon settle his hand at the small of her back, and his mouth just barely brushes against her temple. She squeezes her eyes shut, joyous, and when they finally pull away, they’re all laughing.
----
Author: allthingsholy
Rating: PG-13
Notes: So, this is me defaulting on sheldon_penny's Holiday Swap. juniperlane asked for a Raj/Howard vs. Sheldon/Penny Prank War, and instead she's getting this. It's bandfic AU, and it doesn't make a whole lot of sense, but just, you know. Go with it. Thanks to lulabo and montycrowley for beta skills, and to Meg for being the cheerleader to her own damn Christmas present. I hope you like it, lady. (Also, title from Laundry Room by the Avett Brothers.)
(Now with PODFIC, as recorded by juniperlane/betternovembers herself! GO! DOWNLOAD! TELL HER IT IS AWESOME!)
bandfic
every chorus was your name | my love like a voice | make a record of my heart | all the chances we took
cover art by salixlikescake
cover art by fujiidom
----
There's no feeling quite like being on stage, Penny thinks, with the lights in her eyes and the mic in her hand. Her heart pounds and there's music in her ears. Raj keeps his head down and his shoulders sway in time with the melody, fingers strong against his bass. Howard's showy, all flash and flare, but his hands are steady on the drumsticks and his beat is never wrong. Leonard is quiet, his guitar pulled tight against him, his smile stretched lightly on his face. And Sheldon, well-Sheldon is focused and calm, fingers flying fast over the keys, each note a clear, high sound between them all. She sees him watching her onstage, the sway of her shoulders in time with Howard's kick drum, the groove of Raj's bass line in her hips. She catches his eye and watches him for a verse, her voice low and sultry and strong, and he moves his gaze to his hands, but doesn't falter.
She just closes her eyes and sings.
--
They close the show with an acoustic cover of “Bad Romance,” and the crowd is on its feet to cheer them off the stage. Raj heads straight for the fridge backstage, and Howard twirls his drumsticks between his fingers, already craning his neck for any young, eager groupies. They’re somewhere in the middle of the Midwest, the very center of the country Leonard tells her as he opens them two cold beers.
“That’s factually inaccurate,” Sheldon says from behind them, popping the top on his Diet Coke. He wipes his hair off his forehead and almost glares at Penny as his fingers slide against his brow. He’d lost a Halo 3 bet in a tournament on a long drive from Kansas to Denver a month ago, and his hair’s grown out enough now that the ends have started to curl just slightly. Penny itches to run her fingers through it sometimes, to untuck the superhero shirt he always wears beneath the hipster plaid she forces on him and ruffle his feathers top to bottom. She takes a long pull from her Bud Light bottle and settles down on a couch in their dressing room. They’ve got to be outside to hawk merchandise later, but there’s a whole set to wait through and Penny settles in for a quick tussle with Sheldon. It’s enough to keep the performance high running in her veins those precious few extra minutes.
“Alright, Brain Boy,” she starts, “then the exact middle of the country is where, precisely?” She crinkles her eyes at him, jovial and challenging, and sees his fingers flex around the cold can in his hand.
“Well, based on the grid of longitudinal and latitudinal lines crisscrossing North America, I put it just outside Lebanon, Kansas.”
“Fine,” Leonard says, “but Chicago’s still, like, near the center.”
“I knew a girl from Chicago once,” Howard says from the door. He taps his drumsticks against his thigh and wags his eyebrows in Penny’s direction. “Man, she did her city proud.”
Penny cuts him off with a cock of her head and says, “If you even make a ‘she blew like the wind joke’ right now, I’ll punch you in the throat.”
Howard mock-laughs and Raj pipes up from the corner, “I think the words you’re looking for are ‘oh, snap.’”
Penny snorts and Leonard laughs, and it’s not a bad way to spend the few hours they have before they have to finish packing up their gear and hit the road again. Penny’s got a system now, a way to move quickly from one place to the other without leaving anything behind. They’ve been at this awhile.
--
She saw an ad at the Cheesecake Factory, is how this all got started. “Singer wanted; instrumental proficiency a plus; whistlers need not apply.” So she hauled herself across Pasadena and sang “Sunday Kind Of Love” in two strange guys’ living room, and now here she is, two years later, in a beat up bus going 55 all the way across Missouri.
"I liked the blondes in Des Moines," Howard says, "all corn-fed and tall. Like they could just pick me up and use me like a puppet however they wanted to." He gets the glazed-over look in his eyes that means it's time for Penny to tune out the dirtier depths the conversation is surely to fall to, and she turns her attention back to the pad of paper in front of her. She's got lyrics sketched on almost every inch of the open page, snatches of chorus and verse tied together with nothing more than the almost-melody she hears in her head, to the beat of the tires beneath her. Leonard and Raj laugh beside her, and she gives them a quick smile, then moves her eyes back to her notebook, humming to herself as she opens it to a new page.
--
She was wary at first, when she got the gig. They played her a few of their originals, and a cover or two from their setlist. By the third song, she could hear exactly where her voice would fit, just above the riff of Leonard’s guitar and just below the high, tinkling notes of Sheldon’s keyboard.
He made her sign a contract at her first official rehearsal. She’s only allowed to show so much skin (“so as to avoid compromising our musical integrity”), write only so many sappy love songs (“because we are not and never will be back-up performers at your bubble gum factory”), and comp so many door fees to their gigs (“for whatever buffoon you’re sure to be dating that week”). She was pretty sure she didn’t like him thirteen signatures later, but then he sat down to play and she forgot about the contract altogether.
--
They’re all up still at midnight, the lights of the bus muted and low. Penny puts down her notebook and ambles up front, where Sheldon is curled into his usual seat. He’s got heaphones over his ears and doesn’t hear her approach, and he starts just a bit when she sits down beside him. He’s sat in the exact same spot for almost 2000 winding, wandering miles, and she invades his space without a second thought, tucking a foot beneath her and leaning in too close.
“Any luck?” she asks. The paper in front of him is blank but for the bar graph he’s doodled in the corner. She knows the tight feeling that settles into her chest when the right words just won’t come, and she gives him a sympathetic, understanding smile.
Sheldon turns away from her, looking back out the windshield at the stretch of highway beyond. Penny watches the headlights as they cross his face, the way his jaw stands out, the crease of his eyes. They’ve been on the road a month, and she’s just gotten used to the constant feel of motion, the steady hum of an engine beneath her. She likes it, she finds, always moving forward. The band they’re touring with is from Kansas City, four guys and their instruments and a whole lot of talent. They got the gig through some guy Sheldon knows, a friend of a friend or whatever, but Penny’s never been one to look a gift horse in the mouth. So it’s been bar after bar after nightclub after tiny concert hall, but the shows have been crowded, and they’ve gained some fans.
Sheldon keeps reminding them they don’t have much time left. They took off a month ago, piles of cords and equipment and hope shoved in the back of a van, and now here they are, halfway through, and Penny likes to think they’ve got something to show for all the time they’ve spent out on the road. Each show feels tighter, a little more precise, a little more controlled. Every set list is stronger, every final round of applause just a little bit louder. If they are going to be a great band, the real deal, she knows that it’s time to put up or shut up, and she’s never really been one to back down.
--
They pull out of Kansas City on a Wednesday morning, and the tour is officially underway. Penny chatters for an hour about how excited she is, how this is going to be the best thing that ever happened to them. She talks and talks, full of chatter, and Raj and Leonard and Howard all smile and nod. The other guys might not notice, but her voice is too high, too tight, and Sheldon gives her a look, like he’s not fooled by her cheerfulness, like he knows better than to buy this routine. She doesn’t say it’s because she’s nervous. She doesn’t tell him that being back out here feels too much like going back to Nebraska with her tail between her legs.
She just keeps talking, her voice a fine, tense sound. She doesn’t say it’s because she’s scared.
--
“So you were, like, a real pianist?” Penny asks. It’s one of their first rehearsals, and Sheldon’s cross-referencing their cords by length and purpose. He barely spares her a look as he bundles wires around his arms.
“Yes, I suppose you could put it that way.” There’s an air of disdain in his voice, and Penny can’t tell if it’s directed at her or humanity, so she leans her back against the wall and just watches him. According to Leonard, he used to be a real prodigy, a genuine musical sensation. When she’d asked him what had changed, he’d just shrugged his shoulders and shot a quick glance at Sheldon.
“I don’t really know. I mean, I guess he just got tired of it, or something.” He’d leaned in, his voice a conspiratorial whisper, and said, “Really, I think maybe he just couldn’t take the pressure.”
She knows Sheldon well enough now to know that that’s not why he left. He’s less likely to back down from a challenge than she is, and there’s not much she’ll walk away from. She’s seen him put up with a lot of things she knows he doesn’t want to, for the sake of the band.
He’s worked sections with Raj and Howard over and over, even though he had it right the very first time. He’s sat and toiled over lyrics with her, over chords and phrasing, even giving in on the rarest of occassions. He deals with club managers and booking agents, and the occassional overzealous fan.
This is what has most surprised Penny. The sheer amount of women who flock to him after shows, who offer to buy him drinks, dinner, try to pull him to the backs of random bars and worm their way beside him. The first few times she’d seen it, Penny had regarded it as a miracle, but now she squints her eyes at him as he coils the wires, at the red and blue and black cords snaking their way up his forearms, and it’s not so hard to believe someone would go for Sheldon. He’s long and lanky under his double-layered t-shirts, and his eyes are a bright, beautiful blue. He’s not really someone she can picture herself with, but maybe if he smiled a little more, or maybe was a little nicer to her. Maybe if he didn’t use big words just to confuse her, and maybe didn’t take her songs too fast just to watch her try to keep up.
“You’re in my way,” Sheldon says, knocking her out of her reverie. His eyes still have that disdainful expression, and a spark of something else, something hidden and held back. So maybe not.
--
Sometimes they call him Silent Sheldon. Not because he never talks-oh god, can he talk-but because he never sings. He never takes a solo, never even takes a harmony, and it’s not that he can’t, she’s pretty sure, he just doesn’t want to. Raj thinks it’s stagefright, but she knows he’s played in front of huge concert halls around the world, and she doesn’t agree.
She catches him sometimes, after rehearsal when everyone else has left, playing the music he must’ve played when he was younger, when he wore tuxes and bowties to concerts instead of faded corduroys and garish sweaters. He flies through the classics, Chopin, Mozart, Beethoven, Tchaikovsky. He doesn’t falter once, but there is something missing in the notes, something flat and resigned. She tucks herself into the stairwell, knees drawn tight to her chest, and listens to him play. She knows he could’ve been-is-a truly amazing pianist, and she wants to ask him why he left, why he walked away and so far hasn’t looked back. She doesn’t ask him anything though, and she doesn’t leave her spot on the stairs until she hears him stand up to leave.
If she asked him why he left, she thinks, she’s not sure he’d have an answer, or at least one she’d understand, but she knows he sounds happier playing the chords he writes himself. She starts to think she maybe called this one too early.
--
She follows Sheldon to a laundromat in Boulder, because all of her jeans smell like a bar. She’s tempted to just say screw it and buy a few new pairs, but she thinks about the rent check waiting for her back home and reconsiders. Sheldon lectures her the whole way there on color separation and the perils of set-in stains, but when she walks in she just picks a washer and gives him a look while she dumps her whole basket inside. Sheldon sighs dramatically behind her as she fiddles with the settings, but finally she shoves her quarters in the slots and then heaves herself onto the next empty machine.
It takes Sheldon five minutes to pick the best washers. Penny watches him lift every lid and turn every dial, and when he finally finds the right ones, a bloc of four farthest from the entrance, she just rolls her eyes and watches him load his whites.
“There’s an ice cream place across the street,” she says, looking out the window at the busy city beyond. She kicks her heels against the washer and watches him and asks, “You want?”
Sheldon shakes his head and doesn’t answer, just points to the sign on the opposite wall.
“’Do Not Leave Clothes Unattended,’” she reads aloud. “Yeah, I saw that and chose not to care.” A pick-up truck drives by loaded with old furniture, and then a convertible with the top rolled down. Penny watches the couple inside as they drive past, his arm along the back of her seat, her face turned to watch him while he watches the road. She hasn’t had sex in six months, so: “Ice cream. You want?”
“The carefree manner in which you break rules is troubling for me, since we have a signed contract which, in effect, binds my fortune to yours.” He pours detergent into the measuring cup, precise and focused, and then adds it to the washers and is done. He turns to face her, the machines humming behind him, and crosses his arms in front of his chest.
They stay that way a few minutes, Sheldon quiet, Penny staring out the window at the passers-by. It’s a companionable silence, and she lets it settle around them, but then all of a sudden she finds herself asking, “Why don’t you ever sing with us?”
Sheldon narrows his eyes, but doesn’t turn them toward her. She can see the muscle in his jaw working, tight from the clench of his teeth. Penny wants to ask again, to press on, but she bites back the words and waits. Sheldon holds his pose for a long minute, and then finally looks at her and seems to deflate. He settles his hips slightly against the washer and drops his gaze to the floor.
“I find singing in public to be a disagreeable experience,” he starts, and his voice is calculated and calm. “Performance has an inherently revelatory nature, and I find it uncomfortable exposing my innermost feelings to strangers in such a manner.”
It’s not what Penny expected him to say. She expected him to say his voice is pitchy, that he slurs his r’s or pops his p’s, that his breath support is faulty. She expected excuses, not the truth.
“You should do it,” she finds herself saying, pushing herself off the washer and stepping toward him. “I know you can sing.” She’s heard him in rehearsals, correcting her and Raj on their harmonies and his voice is always a steady, solid tenor. She knows it’s not lack of talent that keeps him quiet, and she can’t imagine he’d turn down showing off another talent.
He swallows hard and gives her a look, and she knows what he’s thinking before he says it. “Of course, I can sing, I merely choose not to.”
She knows she could push his buttons here, get him to open up by calling him a coward, bet him or question his talent. But it feels wrong, to force his hand like that, so instead she slides next to him and almost brushes her hip against his, and settles her gaze on her shoes.
“It’s freeing,” she says. “There’s nothing else like it. It’s just you and the audience and all these things you have to say, things you get to tell them, and it’s just. Liberating, I guess.” She knows she’s oddly sentimental about it, but it’s the only thing she’s ever wanted to do with herself, and she won’t apologize for passion.
If there’s one complaint she could make about Sheldon’s performances, it’s that they’re a little too rigid, a little too structured. He’s into the music, she’s sure, but it feels restrained, sectioned off, like there’s something he holds back. He doesn’t riff much, instead sticking to the music he’s set out in long sessions with her.
Somehow, they became the de facto songwriters. They just kind of fell into it months ago, Penny scribbling lyrics while Sheldon wrote the piano portions. He’s pretty good with the bass and guitar parts too, but he never gets any better at the drum sections. They became their own unit, a set in an occassional sea of mayhem, and if Penny had to admit it, she’d probably call Sheldon her best friend. She knows him well enough to know that the hesitancy with which he looks at her now is based more on embarrassment than uncertainty, so she meets his eyes and gives him the most genuine look she can manage and says, “Sheldon, I love it.”
He breathes out hard and looks away, and she knows he’s trying to hedge when he says, “There are any number of our songs I’d be willing to try my voice on.”
She shakes her head, says, “No, it should be yours. Something you write. Something that means something to you.” He doesn’t look at her, so she pushes on. “Isn’t there anything you want to say? Isn’t there anything you hold back that you just want to let go of?”
She waits him out, tracing the edges of the washer with the tip of one finger. She doesn’t have to look at him to know his face is screwed up in concentration, in deliberation, and when he straightens up, holding himself higher, more confidently, she knows she’s won.
He steps away without saying anything to her, moves to take a seat at one of the chairs lined up against the windows, and she says to his back, “Take your time with it.”
He stops and looks over his shoulder, framed by the street outside. The city is just beyond him, alive and busy, but she keeps her eyes stuck fast to his. “Don’t force it. Just. Say whatever you want to.”
He turns away and settles stiffly into the plastic chair, and she looks away and waits for her wash to finish.
--
Penny makes a comment one day that she thinks about for a long while after. She’s been with the band about six months, and one day at rehearsal Sheldon’s being even more Sheldon-y than usual, saying, “Well, the train wouldn’t have ‘come off the rails,’ as you put it, if you hadn’t failed to keep up with my tempo in the last section.”
Penny knows there is no bite behind it, that it’s just Sheldon being Sheldon, but she still tightens her fists and counters, “Oh, don’t act like you’re so superior. If you were you’d still be in Berlin, not flunked out and struggling to get noticed like the rest of us.”
Something in Sheldon seems to snap shut instantly. His face closes up, his jaw tight, eyes hard. As well as she’s come to know him, this is new, something she hasn’t seen before. She’s about to interrupt, about to backpedal, when Sheldon’s hands go to the keys and he’s playing the bridge slower, like she’s asked him to.
She sings along, but the power of the section is gone, and her voice is thready and weak. She doesn’t tell him he was right, but she doesn’t say anything when he changes it back either.
--
Things go smoothly until Des Moines, where things never really click, never really lock into place like they should. The crowd doesn’t get into the show, and they leave the stage sweaty and silent, their blood humming in their veins.
“The last section was too rushed,” Penny says, looking over at Howard. “I think the long fill got us off tempo.”
“Hey, don’t blame the hands.” Howard shrugs his shoulders. “I’ve been told they’re made of magic.”
“Just because your mother raves about your foot rubs does not mean you have magic hands,” Raj says, leaning over for a high-five from Leonard before he’s even finished.
“Well, maybe if the guitar player hadn’t forgotten to change keys into the bridge, I wouldn’t have been distracted!” Howard counters, and then Leonard’s up in arms and then Raj follows suit and it quickly devolves into all of them yelling at each other. Penny looks at Sheldon, sitting quietly looking at something on his phone. He offers no assistance, so she lets out her best wolf-whistle and silences all of them.
“We cannot fight like this! We have four more weeks of shows, and we cannot fall apart right now!” She holds her hands up; she is not above begging them to brush this aside for now. Each show up to tonight had been better, tighter, and it felt like all the miles and hotel beds had been worth something. She will not let them unravel now if she has to hold this band together with her bare hands.
She gives Sheldon a look, a pleading, desperate look, and he clears his throat and stands, the usual authority in his voice. “Leonard, the key change is imperative for the flow of the song, but Howard, that last fill did seem to dither on.”
Howard opens up his mouth to speak, but Sheldon continues on unabashedly. “No, it dithered.” He goes on to pick on each of them, to call them out where they were wrong, and by the end of it, they’re all mad at Sheldon, but not at each other. Penny knows he doesn’t mind it that way, that it’s the role he’s had to play more often than not, and when he’s finished she gives him a small, grateful smile.
He doesn’t acknowledge her with anything more than a tilt of his head, but things are back on track by the very next show.
--
She’s had a melody stuck in her head since Detroit, a strange rush of chords and phrases. If she had to describe it, she’d call it hopeful. She catches herself humming it over and over again, tapping her fingers against her thigh and the table and the armrest on her seat. She plucks the strings of her guitar but can’t quite make it sound the way it should.
Sheldon starts to huff every time she starts to hum, and after awhile she moves from annoyed to amused. Every once in awhile, she whistles a few bars just to rile him up and he narrows his eyes and frowns at her. It’s a Monday night and they don’t have a show, so she’s locked Sheldon in her hotel room to hammer out the finer points of a few new songs she wants to try.
They haven’t talked about Detroit. She still remembers the way he looked when they finally pulled apart, his lips swollen and eyes bright. She’d opened her mouth to say something-though even now she’s still not sure what-and he’d stepped back, swallowed hard, and pulled down the ends of his shirt where she’d rucked it higher with warm, eager hands. Something closed shut, glossed over, and he gave a slight nod and walked away.
She doesn’t say anything about that though, as they sit on the bed with their knees almost pressed together. His keyboard’s set up in front of him, and she’s got sheets of paper spread out all over the covers, and the disorganization is clearly making him stircrazy. They’ve gotten through two songs already, bright, even melodies that she knows will entertain, and Sheldon hasn’t yet brought up his song. She wants to ask, but his silence on the subject makes her wary, and she knows he spooks easily. They finish their last song and she waits a long moment, giving him an opening, and when he doesn’t take it, she stands up to take a break. Sheldon stops her with a look.
“That’s it?” he asks. “You’re not going to further subject me to that half-melody you’ve been humming for two weeks?”
Penny clenches her jaw and looks past him out the window, at flat fields for miles and miles. Of course he’d call her out, when she couldn’t do the same to him, but she’s never backed down when challenged.
“I can’t get it out of my head,” she says. He leans back and settles in deeper, not ignoring her, just-assessing. Evaluating. She’s come to know there are few things he’s ever done without proper mental preparation. She pulls her gaze from the window and meets his eyes. “Haven’t you ever had something you just couldn’t get out of your head?”
She sees his hands tighten above the keys, and his eyes graze her face for just a moment. He takes a deep breath, looks past her, over her shoulder and out at the blue sky above, and then his hands start to move again.
He’s playing her song. The barest bones of her melody, the simplest notes and phrasing. She comes back to sit beside him and adjusts his tune every now and again, a halfstep up here, a halfstep down there. It’s something they’ve done a thousand times before, worked the pieces of their songs out slowly until they were right and ready, but her heart flutters just a bit as she listens to him playing the tune she’s had in her head for weeks. It’s tinny and weak, the volume on the keyboard turned most of the way down, but it’s hers, and it’s almost beautiful. There’s still something missing, she thinks, as she scrunches her nose at him.
“Almost,” she says, tightening her jaw and shaking her head. “It just needs….” She trails off, narrowing her eyes as she watches his hands. He adds chords above, harmonies below, tweaking and trying and adding frills and phrases. He plays different variations, different tempos and keys, but still they can’t quite get it right. They work until the sun goes down, until the boys come back to get them, and when she catches Sheldon humming the notes at dinner, she doesn’t say a thing.
--
Penny meets a woman in Des Moines, Hannah, who’s on the verge of packing up her things and moving out to L.A., heading across the country with just a smile and an iron will. Penny laughs and shakes her head, but her face is just a little bit sad. This is the closest she’s been to Nebraska in years, and her chest buzzes when she thinks about going home, facing her family and her past. She doesn’t think on it long, but she does buy Hannah another drink.
Howard swears he hooks up with a girl in Denver who looks exactly like Heidi Klum, but Raj swears Howard passed out in their room by midnight with the blankets tucked up under his chin. Penny’s known them long enough to know which one to believe.
They meet lots of people as they zig and zag from state to state, old fans of the other band’s, new fans of theirs. They’re somewhere in Indiana when Greg sends her the link. A fan in Chicago took photos of his show, and snapped some of Penny and the guys onstage too. They all crowd around Leonard’s laptop and surf through the files, 10 bright, vivid shots of the five of them performing.
It’s the last photo that strikes Penny most. She’s singing, mic tight in her hand, pointing at Leonard and smiling bright and wide. But there in the corner is Sheldon at his keyboard, head tilted back and eyes closed. She can almost see him swaying in his seat, totally lost in the music.
She’s never seen him so serene, so innocent, so joyous. She remembers that moment, chrystalized in her mind. He’d played the bridge of “Famous Last Words” just a bit differently, more raucous, not quite as sharp. He never usually riffs much or ad-libs, but she remembers noticing the change and being surprised.
She wishes she’d thought to turn and look at him, wishes she could’ve seen him in this moment, with his face so bright and his heart so close to the surface. She’s pretty sure he doesn’t look like that when he plays Chopin, and understands a little better why he walked away from the conservatories and the concert halls. She might’ve thought it weakness once, or a flaw of character, but she knows now that it was desire, and determination, and courage. Walking away from what had been handed to him, choosing to work at something instead. She’s never thought him brave before, but she’s learned better now.
--
Every once in awhile, she catches him working on his song. She knows he’s pushed as much by the challenge to himself as the challenge she made him, but when he catches her staring, at the offer of help she knows is written on her face, he turns away and doesn’t bring it up.
--
She’s been in the band for two years now, and she feels an odd affection for all of the guys, even if each one has his own strange quirk.
Leonard is so earnest it’s almost painful, and it had taken awhile to shake the hopeful, hangdog looks he used to give her, but he’s kind, and giving, and always willing to stay the extra hour to get a song just right. Howard is demeaning and insulting and presumptuous, but she also knows his deep-down caramel center, and takes his comments with a roll of her eyes and a tolerant smile.
Raj had hardly spoken to her at all her first month in the band beyond what was absolutely necessary. Leonard told her he was shy, nervous around beautiful girls, and she decided she’d just get used to it, but then he took the harmony during one of their ballads and Penny was so struck by his clear, gentle voice that she stopped in the middle of the song and simply gaped at him. Three days later she’d punched him hard in the shoulder and told him to snap the hell out of it, and with a little more physical encouragement, he slowly opened up.
Sheldon was the only one who really pushed back. It took weeks, months, even most of that first year, but she came to realize, and understand. She worms her way in, with stubborn will and sheer determination, and refuses to back down. He treats her better than the others because she makes him, because she deems herself an equal and makes him believe it too.
She will not say that Sheldon is her favorite, but that doesn’t mean she doesn’t think it. So when she catches him lost in his mind, bobbing his head ever so slightly to the beat she knows only he can hear, she wants to go to him, to sit and encourage and listen. She wonders at the song that he is writing, what he has to say, and what he’s willing to tell them.
She knows he’s not taking it lightly. That he’s toiling over every word, every chord, just like she does. It feels like they both still have something to prove.
--
She kisses him in Detroit. She doesn’t plan it, but he mucks up the bridge of “Foolhardy Heart” and his hands are too heavy on the keys for the rest of the night. When she squeezes in next to him at the bar, he’s sliding a five to the bartender and bringing a glass of something brown and strong to his lips. It isn’t often that he drinks, but when he does, he hits back hard. So she watches him drink his first glass too quickly and decides to head it off early.
“No one even noticed,” she says, as he motions for a refill. “It was fine, no one even knew.”
“I beg to differ,” he says, eyes on his drink. “I knew. You knew. That hardly constitutes no one.”
He is impossible when he is like this, all stubborn pride and carefully cultivated ego. She motions to the bartender for two of whatever he’s drinking and while they’re waiting she asks him, “What’s the song about, Sheldon?” Her voice is needling, coy, and she gives him a broad, showy smile.
He doesn’t answer for a long while, just grabs his drink when it’s laid before him and lets Penny pull him along as she winds a path away from the bar.
She guides him to the loading dock, her back against the giant folding door as she heaves herself up onto an equiptment case. He leans a hip against the wall and swirls his drink and doesn’t speak.
“Sullen looks good on you,” she says, taking a sip. Scotch, and strong, and it burns when it hits the back of her throat. She doesn’t flinch as she takes another drink and continues, “It goes well with the whole hipster look you’ve got going on.”
“Need I remind you, you’re the one who picked out this outfit?” he asks, cocking an eyebrow at her. It’s true, of course; she dragged all the guys out to Pasadena Mall and picked out new shirts and jeans and button-downs to match their eyes. They all bitched and moaned about “losing their artistic identities,” but in the end they came to a compromise. Raj still wears his sweater vests over the patterns and plaids she picked out, and Howard still rocks the turtlenecks she made him buy more often than the ones he wore before, but Penny has to admit, it works for them.
Sheldon’s wearing a blue plaid shirt that matches his eyes perfectly, and she can see the top of Superman’s head poking out just above the first button. She’d heard him pacing the hall last night, the thud of his footsteps lulling her to sleep, just the ghost of a melody humming from his lips as he beat a weary path into the carpet and toiled on the song he just can’t seem to finish. His eyes are puffy from too little sleep, and he rubs a tired hand against the back of his neck. That might be what makes her tug on his wrist and pull him toward her, or maybe it’s the buzz of the scotch just starting to work its way into her fingers. Either way, she pulls him close and kisses him just as she hears the headliners take the stage and the Motor City start to roar. He stays stock still for just a moment, but then the bass line kicks in and he closes his hand around her hip and leans into her.
They don’t really talk about it after the show, and things aren’t weird exactly, but something shifts.
Sheldon doesn’t wear that shirt again.
--
Greg knocks on her door after the show in Chicago, after the boys have all gone to their room. When she cracks it open, he’s got a smile on his face and invites himself inside. He tells her there’s a producer he knows, someone legit, someone bigger than either of them have ever dealt with before. He’s coming to their last show in Kansas City, wants to hear both of them play, and take it from there. Penny buries her face in her pillow and screams herself silly. She knows they are so close to being ready, so close to being right, and she lets the excitement creep into the safest, most cautious parts of her body. She hugs Greg, brief but grateful, and then charges down the hallway to the boys’ room and knocks on their door at one in the morning.
Sheldon answers with a scowl and a reprimand, but by the time she finishes telling them the news, even he is smiling.
--
They stay two days in St. Louis, a whole lazy weekend stretched between them. They all hit the city, downtown, the park, the zoo. Sheldon is his usual resistant self, but she tugs him along, her small hand in his larger one, into the Penguin House and off to Big Cat Country. It’s a beautiful fall day and they eat ice cream and hot dogs and take the kiddie train all the way around the park.
By the time they eat dinner and head back to the hotel, Raj and Leonard and Howard bid her quiet goodnights and head for their room. She showers and changes and tries to settle down, but there is something restless in her bones, something accustomed now to wander. She takes the elevator back to the hotel bar, orders a drink and drums her fingers against the wood as she waits, a nervous, expectant feelings in her stomach.
“We have a show tomorrow and spending half the night in a smoke-filled bar is far from a prudent decision.” She doesn’t even turn to look at Sheldon as he sits down beside her, just smiles into her drink and waits.
“Only three shows left,” she says. It’s his line, Sheldon always the constant reminder that their time is running out. She turns and gives him a small, sad smile, and he raises a hand to signal the bartender. He orders a scotch and soda, and when it’s placed in front of him he plays with the glass in his hands before he even takes a drink.
She watches the lines of his hands, the warm, waiting crease of his brow. She wants to comb her hands through his hair, grown out long just over his ears now, and curling against his forehead. There’s real affection in her voice when she leans over, just nudging his shoulder with hers, and asks, “What’s the song about, Sheldon?”
He doesn’t answer for a moment, just takes a sip of his drink and then settles his eyes on the mirror above the bar. When he starts to speak, his voice is low, familiar, intimate as he tells her things she’s never heard him talk about before. He tells her about his family, growing up in Texas, his studies in New York and England. He tells her about the conservatory in Berlin, about his decision to leave, about always fighting against someone to be better, fighting against himself to be the best, and how it just didn’t make him happy anymore. He doesn’t say it in those words, though. He says things like, “It was irrational to continue to pursue a career path that no longer stimulated or satisfied me,” and “I felt my talents and attention could be better utilized elsewhere,” but she knows what he means anyway. She’s gotten good at reading between the lines with him, and they sit there most of the night, their voices low and hushed.
--
They’re quiet most of the way from St. Louis to Kansas City. The highway’s straight and narrow, and they make quick time, passing restaurants and rest stops all along the road. The van is quiet, still. No one says much of anything, and there’s a tightly wound, waiting feeling pressed up against the windows.
She knows it’s because they’re preparing themselves for the way their world could change. She knows it’s because this thing is drawing to a close and they may not get another chance like it.
Penny sits beside Sheldon, watches him tense and untense his hands, and finally she wraps her fingers around his and squeezes tight. He stills for just a moment and then turns to her, and she gives him a look and a sure, certain smile. He uncoils his shoulders and leans back in his chair, head held just a little bit higher.
She knows they’re ready.
--
She steps out on stage for their last show, the last time they’ll be out here together, and from the very first note, it is perfect. Howard has never been so on, and Leonard’s fingers have never hit their marks so surely. Raj rocks out like she’s never seen him do before, and Sheldon is a bright shining force on the edge of the stage, his hands so strong and sound, she has to make herself turn away.The mic is hot in her hand, and her melodies are smooth, and Raj’s harmonies are perfect. The crowd is alive in front of her, wild and warm and pressing in on her forever, and by the time the notes of their last song are fading into the cheers and whistles of the crowd, there are almost tears in her eyes.
She knows then that there is no turning back. That there’s nothing that will ever make her feel this way, and as she looks around at all the guys, she knows they feel the same. No matter what Greg’s producer friend has to say, they will work at this until it falls into place, because they’ve come too far to quit now. They all have dumb smiles on their faces as they flee stage left, and she’s about to pull Howard and Raj into sloppy, wild hugs when a hand closes around her wrist. Sheldon spins her around, his chest heaving, eyes shining, and then fits his palm against her cheek. The crowd is still cheering them from beyond the heavy curtain, and she almost misses Sheldon’s words when he speaks them.
“I’m playing it. Right now,” he says, shouting to be heard over the crowd. “It seems like an optimal moment, and I’d be remiss to let it escape me.”
Penny grabs his free hand with hers and squeezes it tightly. She doesn’t say “this is it,” but they both know it anyway. Sheldon leans forward and kisses her, quickly and almost chastely, but his hand is warm against her cheek and his fingers linger in hers when he finally turns to take the stage.
He keeps his eyes on hers as he walks back to his piano, pulling a mic over and adjusting the stand. He’s a lone man in front of the crowd, and he sits down a little unsurely. She sees him take a deep breath, close his eyes for just a moment, and then he’s playing.
His hands almost shake against the keys, but the notes are still clear. His voice is timid, unsure, but still deeper than she thought it would be, and she hangs on every word. I’d carry you around in my pocket, he sings, with the bright shiny nickels and dimes. It’s a little cheesy, like a love song should be, and she closes her eyes and tilts her head closer to him, a warm smile spread on her face.
She looks down and sees Leonard’s fingers moving in time with the rhythm of Sheldon’s song. She knows he’s working out the cello part to accompany it, the same way she can hear the harmony she’ll sing just over Sheldon’s voice. It’s a beautiful song on its own, but she knows there is room enough for the rest of them, that they can polish this thing until it shines.
And then: she hears the notes before he plays them. There, just between the bridge and his last chorus, is her melody, tucked into his like it’s what was always meant to go there. It’s been transposed, shifted just slightly, but it’s hers all the same. It sounds full, rich, meaningful as it wraps itself around his notes, and when he finishes the song, his eyes are glued to hers where she stands just offstage.
The crowd cheers again, and Penny, Raj, and Howard are quick to join in from behind the curtain, their whoops and hollers louder than anyone else’s. Sheldon stands, ducks his head awkwardly, and then flees to the rest of them.
They pull him into a hug, a wild mass of arms and elbows; she lays her head on Leonard’s shoulder, runs a hand through Raj’s hair. Penny knows it’s the beginning of the rest of their lives, that this is the best thing they will ever do with themselves and she can finally see it stretched out in front of them, on and on forever. She squeezes them all tighter and lets the tears finally come. She feels Sheldon settle his hand at the small of her back, and his mouth just barely brushes against her temple. She squeezes her eyes shut, joyous, and when they finally pull away, they’re all laughing.
----