bigbangbigbang fic: I am Sleeping on a Timebomb (2/3)
Title: I am Sleeping on a Timebomb
Rating: R
Word Count: 27,247
Disclaimer: BBT is not mine. No, not even this twisted, twisted version of it.
Warnings: Triggery for emotional and physical abuse as well as several mentions of a miscarriage. Also - very strong language and alcohol addiction.
Summary: AU - Circus performers in a world recovering from a devastating war in the 1980s. Penny joins the circus and meets Sheldon, Raj, Leonard, and Howard, who all have their own reasons for being there. But you can only run so far from your past, and eventually you have to start moving forward.
Pairings: Slight Leonard/Penny, Raj/Sheldon, Howard/OCs, eventually Sheldon/Penny, Raj/Howard, Leonard/Leslie (slight implications of possible future Sheldon/Penny/Wil)
Art/Mix: Here, courtesy of the brilliant fujiidom.
Part One / Part Two / Part Three
-IV-
even their sins you carried as your own
Galveston, Texas - January 20, 1986
The sirens near the ocean go off. Planes, then, coming from ships somewhere off the coast. People immediately start making their way to the bunkers. They’ve got about ten minutes to make it somewhere safe before the planes should be overhead. George, Mary, Missy and Sheldon are in George’s car.
(Gasoline is restricted for the wartime effort, but down south most people have converted their vehicles to run off natural gas.)
George is drunk.
“Let me drive,” Mary says, glancing back at the two young kids in the backseat. Missy is poking her brother, but Sheldon is staring out the window wide-eyed. They’re five years old.
“I’m fine,” George says, looking at her instead of the road.
“George, you’re drunk! Stop the car and let me drive! Or just stop the car, I’m sure there’s a shelter close-”
“I’m fine,” he repeats.
(Alcohol is rationed, but they know how to make moonshine in Texas.)
“George-” she says-
(It’s not safe to drive when the sirens go off. People panic. People forget things like signals and breaks.)
“Mommy-” Sheldon says.
Mary glances back at her two children just as a car cuts through the intersection and slams into the side of their car.
The car flips.
Missy screams.
George is saying something-repeating something-as the world spins
spins
spins
Stops.
Sheldon opens his eyes with a cry, his leg pinned between two parts of the crushed shell of the car.
The rest of the vehicle is silent. Outside, he can hear the sound of bombs falling. It’s night, and without the lights of the car he can barely see-a small blessing.
They find him five hours later, when the bombs have stopped, when they crawl out of the shelters, when they see the jagged metal bending in on itself.
“Mommy,” he says, crying, the lady with the soft voice trying to comfort him.
Mary doesn’t come.
./.
Leonard sits with Penny afterwards. Part of her-part of her wants to gather her clothes and slip off into the night, back to her truck. The other part mostly wants to close her eyes and go to sleep (outside or not).
Leonard wants to talk.
His arm still wrapped around her bare waist, he twists his head a little to look at her better. “Why did you join the circus?” he asks.
The way he asks it, as if he can’t understand why she’d be here, as if she’s somehow above all this, rankles a bit, but she just lifts up one shoulder and lets it fall back down in a half-hearted shrug. “What else was I going to do?”
He’s frowning, that little crease between his eyes. “Anything,” he says, as if it’s obvious, as if she’s stupid. “There are plenty of normal jobs out there-”
“Normal?”
“I wouldn’t have pegged you for joining the circus, is all,” Leonard says, his voice softer, backtracking. She’s silent a long moment.
“You did,” she says.
“I…I had to get away,” he says. “I didn’t have anywhere else to go.”
This time, she’s the one to frown, forgoing exhaustion to prop herself up one arm and look at him closely. “You’ve got first aid training. You’ve got a West Coast accent, and you’re clearly intelligent-you could’ve become a doctor or something. You had plenty of options.”
(The insinuation, of course, that she hadn’t.)
“I had to get away,” he repeats, his voice tight, his words hurried from throat to mouth. “I had nowhere else to go.”
“So you’re running away,” she says, sounding almost disappointed. This time he shrugs.
“I couldn’t stay,” he says, as if it’s an answer.
(It’s not, of course, but she’s hardly one to talk.)
./.
Howard’s been running for years.
His father-that dearly departed fucker-brought him into mechanics when he was little. Pops used to repair whatever needed repairing, be it vehicle or refrigerator or generator.
(Pops never could handle computers, but lucky for them there wasn’t much call for them in the middle of the backwards Midwest, where they had cornfields and cows and ignored the craters the bombs left so few years ago. Howard isn’t bitter, no, he doesn’t want out of this fucking country, out of this fucking life, no he doesn’t care at all.)
Of course, Pops needed the jobs, what with the way he tended to drink their rent and groceries.
Howard didn’t become a mechanic because his dad wanted him to learn on the job, he became a mechanic because his dad couldn’t finish the job. But that’s an old story, and one everyone’s heard before.
He’s good at his job. Better since Dad dropped dead from a heart attack four years and twenty states ago. It’s why Darren snatched him up to work in the circus full-time, with a retainer and all.
And the circus keeps moving. No settling down. He’s used to moving, his entire childhood (can’t pay the bill, ducking into the car in the middle of the night and hitting the gas) was on the move, and now he doesn’t know how to sit, how to settle, and what’s the point of learning, anyway?
(Howard can handle computers.
He can take them apart and put them back together, he can build them up from scratch, the pieces smooth in his hands, and he never had no training, no, this is instinct, this is knowing what fits where, seeing how things connect, seeing how they piece together, and he has it, he can make them sing, he can-
He doesn’t get much call for them, out here.)
Howard can repair whatever needs repairing.
And that’s more than enough, in his book.
./.
Penny retreats into the boys’ truck. It’s easier than dealing with Mira, than having a confrontation with Alicia (brunette tramp), and certainly better than dealing with Darren, sleazeball extraordinaire.
The truck is unexpectedly empty when she walks in, and she pauses, one foot balanced inside, one hovering in midair outside. She’d prefer to stay here, and yet…
A soft brush of fabric on fabric catches her attention, and she looks up to see Raj pop his head up from his cot. He smiles when he sees her, and she smiles back, definite affection flooding through her as he runs a hand through his mussed hair and nods for her to come in.
She does, although she’s admittedly a little hesitant. He clambers down from the upper bunk and gestures to the back area, miming a drink, and she laughs a little and shakes her head no. He shrugs, still grinning, and she’s surprised at how comfortable she is with him.
After a moment, he tilts his head to the side and grabs his pad and pencil and then gestures to her, and it takes a moment for her to realize that he wants to sketch her.
It’s surprisingly touching, and she grins and shrugs and plays bashful, but she’s wanted to be an actress since she was little, and this, this is her in her element, so she smiles demurely over her shoulder as he sketches line and shadow and tries to capture the sadness behind her smile, and the hope behind her eyes.
./.
Sheldon joined the circus a little less than a year after Raj.
That’s a lie, of course. Sheldon didn’t join the circus. Sheldon (breathless, bruised, terrified) hid from his “uncle” (his foster parent), and Darren told him he could stay only if he could be useful, and Sheldon (who had been told and told and told that he was only good for shooting) picked up a gun and showed what he could do.
Sheldon was twenty-one, but not in any way that counted. He wouldn’t look people in the eyes, and he flinched when people moved too quickly around him, and he had nightmares every night.
Darren liked fucking with him, so everyone else stayed away, because it simply wasn’t worth the pain. And oh, Darren was marketing him, and changing his outfits and his names and even his style, but he was ensuring that Sheldon wasn’t going to walk off and join a different circus (”I know your uncle, I’ll find him and tell him where you are, I’ll help him take you back, and then where will you be, hmm? Think he’ll let you live after you left him? Think he’ll take you back when you’re crying and bloody?”).
He called it an investment, as if that made it okay. Sheldon was an investment, and he was just securing that investment.
Raj started sitting with him at dinner (silent always silent). Raj had grown observant from his years of self-imposed silence. He could see the way Sheldon shunned touch and appreciated routine, the way he watched the stars and poured over books when he thought no one was looking. Raj knew about the notebook tucked underneath Sheldon’s pillow, filled with symbols and equations, notes and thoughts about the world around them.
Raj sketched Sheldon one afternoon. He sketched him as Sheldon looked on horseback; gun in hand, body tense and fluid all at once.
“So you don’t forget who you are,” he said, his voice hoarse with disuse as he handed it over to him, careful to avoid his fingers touching Sheldon’s skin.
Sheldon swallowed thickly, eyes sliding along the lines and shadow that described man and rider.
Raj had smiled crookedly and walked away.
./.
Sheldon pauses inside the truck. Raj and Penny are sitting cross-legged on the floor, the bench in front of them layered with Raj’s sketches. Sheldon can tell that Raj still isn’t comfortable enough to speak to Penny, but the fact that he’s showing her his sketches is…surprising.
There’s something about the shape of her smile, the sound of her laugh that relaxes something deep inside of him. He stays where he is and watches them, so he catches it when Raj says, “Yes,” when he nods, the word more breath than sound, but still a word, caught by air and floated over to Penny’s ears. Her eyes widen, but she says nothing else.
Sheldon knows about Raj’s past-his family, his fears, his inability to speak, to disagree, to decide. He also knows that Raj is still afraid, that he still can barely open himself up to others. Raj knew Leonard for months before he spoke to him, and that was with Leonard around all the time, sharing their quarters, with Leonard defending the both of them at every turn, standing up for them when they were both afraid to stand up for themselves. To have him speak to Penny after less than a month-
Raj doesn’t bite back the word as if shocked at himself, but neither does he say more, and Penny smiles as if it hurts, a little, as if she knows a little something about fear.
What she does do-
What she does do is take Raj’s hand in hers and squeeze it, once, before letting go.
She turns her attention full-heartedly to the sketches before her, and Raj, after one heartbeat of tension, lets it melt away into the floor of the truck. He points and smiles and gestures, his eyes endlessly expressive, and she speaks for the both of them, content to wait.
There was a look in Penny’s eyes Sheldon hadn’t been expecting-something vulnerable and fierce at the same time, a need to be protective without being pitying. Sheldon, throat unaccountably tight, pulls his arms in around himself and walks away.
-V-
anger of angels who won’t return
Howard has very few memories of his mother. He knows his parents often fought. He knows she had a habit of yelling across the house to everyone.
He knows she’d hold him, wrapped up tight in her arms, and read to him, the rocking chair slowly tilting back and forth, the blanket over his legs keeping out the night chill.
These are all vague, half-memories, though.
He was four when his father took him away to visit his grandparents. His mother and his father’s parents hated each other, so she’d stayed home.
Home, in Pasadena.
Home, when California burned.
./.
Leonard takes Penny’s hand and she pulls free. She isn’t in a good mood-practice had been utter shit, and Howard had slept with Bernadette, one of her kinkers, and now wasn’t talking to her, the bastard, so Penny had spent a good hour afterward talking to Bernadette and listening to her rail about him.
To make matters worse, Leonard seems to have decided that they’re together, now. Together.
Penny doesn’t do together. In fact, she avoids most facets of togetherness, including all those pesky things like friendship that have been preying on her lately. She doesn’t want to listen to Bernadette sob for an hour. She doesn’t want to have to keep an eye on Howard when he’s drinking, because he doesn’t know his limit and one of these days he’s going to get his ass handed to him because he can’t fucking shut his mouth with the townies.
Mostly, though, she doesn’t want Leonard looking at her with hope, looking at her with need, as if she can be everything he wants. She can’t even be what she wants.
(Television and telephones are the only things that lasted, they say. Television more than telephones, because people can walk down the street to talk to someone, but how else are they going to get their soap fix?
Penny watched the television when she was young. One of the few free things in the Midwest, it was one of those little perks of being disproportionately one of the most advanced and backward countries in the world.
Penny wanted to be an actress.
But she’s not an actress. She didn’t go to college. She didn’t finish her last year of high school, not after her brother got arrested for smuggling drugs. She dropped out and joined the fucking circus.)
She doesn’t even know who she is anymore.
Worse, she doesn’t know who she wants to be.
So when he grabs her hand and tries to pull her in close, she pulls back. “No,” she says. “No, Leonard, I told you. It was just that night.”
“But don’t you-” he says, and she can hear it all falling out, don’t you love me? don’t you care?
“There was never going to be anything more,” she says.
He’s silent for a minute, and then he nods.
(He’d known he couldn’t keep her.
He tries to bring himself to really care.)
./.
Leonard went to a private school, but then most West Coast schools were private. The entire atmosphere was built for driving forward scientific advances aimed to improve American life on a national scale, despite the fact that innovation was limited to this one local sphere.
The arts, too, were important-somehow, the country had been split into different societies that relied completely on one another and yet stretched thin and far apart for all that. Television came out of the West Coast-television, and scientific progress, and everything except anything tangible and real.
Food, clothing, necessities, those came from out East. All the plants, all the luxuries, even, they were all developed farther out. And maybe the rest of the country was a little more rundown, but they tended to like it that way-they had their small communities, they had their lives exactly as they wanted them. There’s not really any pressure on anyone out East. You make the life you want to make.
The West Coast is another story. You can’t be average in the West Coast. There’s not enough space, there’s not enough time, there’s not enough people. You have to be extraordinary.
Leonard was brilliant, he really was. But he had Beverly for a mother. Beverly, who expected more than he could ever deliver.
His life (all their lives) was scheduled and planned out beyond preliminaries. His life was a routine. His life felt like a race that he was always losing.
Leslie and Leonard would often work together or compete against each other in class. She brought out the best in him.
Beverly, though, Beverly brought out the worst.
./.
Penny is crying.
She hates crying. Her face gets blotchy and her nose runny and her fingertips itchy, and usually she’s pissed as well as upset, and it means that she’s lost any and all of her control, which is something she truly hates.
Leonard made her cry.
(This is not true. Penny knows only she is responsible for her own actions. No one can make her cry except herself.)
Leonard said some things that seemed unnecessarily harsh, and Penny lost control and started to cry.
(Better. Still painful to admit.)
Penny is crying when she half-stumbles into Sheldon, who puts his hands on her arms and steadies her before either of them realize what he’s doing. He takes his hands off immediately, and he goes a shade or two pale, and Penny wants to throw herself into his arms and cry onto his chest, a desire she hasn’t been struck by since she was twelve and her dog died and her brother came and held her as she cried.
Penny doesn’t throw herself into Sheldon’s arms, though. He doesn’t like to be touched, she remembers that, and remembers more how fiercely the boys enforce Sheldon’s unspoken rules, as if determined to keep them up even when Sheldon cannot bring himself to argue on his own behalf. She realizes that she can feel that same surge of protectiveness blossoming underneath her skin, and so, despite her tears, despite the urge, she pulls back and steadies herself.
He doesn’t move, although it’s clear by his eyes that he doesn’t know what to do or say, that he is not used to being accosted by sobbing women, and she struggles to swallow down everything, to pull her emotions back inside of herself.
“Kurt got me pregnant,” she says (blurts out), and then she can’t stop herself. “He got me pregnant in high school, and then he left me, and my parents would have disowned me if they could. I had a miscarriage and I lost my little girl, and everyone wanted to pretend that nothing had happened, that I was never pregnant, that they hadn’t all left me when I needed them the most.”
She hasn’t told anyone this. She slept with kind Leonard (Leonard who made her cry) and she hadn’t even considered telling him, and now she’s pouring out these secrets to a man she barely knows, a man who’s unable to tell her he doesn’t like to be touched.
What is she doing?
“To…to deny the existence of something,” he says, and his voice is low and rough and his eyes trail along the dirt between them, “Is useless. Changes made cannot simply be ignored because the alternative is preferable.”
Penny nods, wiping her face on her sleeve.
“They think I should be able to forgive them, that-that I should consider myself lucky-lucky-that they want to pretend it didn’t happen, that-”
He reaches out and takes her hand in his, and she is struck silent at the feel of his smooth skin against her callused hand.
“You don’t-” she starts (you don’t have to, I don’t want to make you, please-), and he shakes his head.
“It’s all right,” he says, and she nods blindly, shudders in a breath, and looks down at their linked hands. It means more than she was expecting. More than anything, right now.
“Okay,” she says.
(Maybe, just maybe, it will be.)
./.
Leonard checks himself into a psych facility when he’s nineteen years old.
Beverly doesn’t really believe in psychology. She tends to dismiss it offhand, usually with some sort of condescending statement, so she’s not happy when she finds out.
Leonard’s not doing it because it’ll piss Beverly off, though. He’s doing it because he can’t sleep, can’t eat, can’t control the anxiety that sweeps through him. Nineteen’s too young for an ulcer, the doctor had chided him, and what could he say?
So he checks himself in. He goes to the classes, he talks to the therapists. He truly wants to get better, wants to be able to feel in control of himself, if only for a moment.
Beverly calls him almost every day. The therapists encourage it, telling him he needs to talk to her, to explain to her, to have an honest discussion.
Leslie visits only once. She sits with him outside. He wants to take her hand, to talk to her, but he doesn’t know how to start. He’s terrified she’ll shut him out. He’s terrified that he deserves to be shut out.
He knows what people expect of him.
He knows what Beverly expects of him, that she’s not “people”-that he’s not enough, not smart enough or bright enough or clever enough for her.
He isn’t getting better. In fact, trapped within the walls of the facility, he feels claustrophobic, and the anxiety builds and circles and overwhelms him.
He doesn’t plan beforehand. He’s lived by schedules and calendars and rule books long enough. One day he simply packs his bags and checks himself out. He isn’t a danger to anyone, and he checked himself in, so the doctor shakes his hand and tells him he needs to open himself up more, that he only needs to fill his own expectations, that he doesn’t need to be anything he doesn’t want to be.
Leonard shakes his hand, smiles, and agrees, knowing everything the man is saying is utter bullshit. He hitchhikes out East.
He doesn’t call anyone. He doesn’t tell anyone.
He gets a job in a stable, in a zoo, in a vet’s office as a receptionist. He tries to keep himself around animals, and when he does he feels steadier, calmer, safer.
He never plans to join the circus, but Darren all but steals him away when Leonard helps out when the Vet is out on a case.
He finds himself with Raj and Sheldon, and maybe it’s because they don’t expect anything kind from anyone that he finds it so important that he helps in any way he can.
./.
Howard stumbles and lands heavily against the outside of the truck. Leonard’s eyes darken a little at the way Sheldon recoils at the sound. Raj just looks exhausted.
“I’ll get him,” Leonard says. He doesn’t want Raj to have to handle it, again, and it’s not exactly a situation Sheldon would be comfortable (or effective) handling.
Howard sways and then starts cussing Leonard out when he tries to grab him.
Leonard’s never been patient with Howard, and this is no exception. He tries to reason with him for a minute, but eventually gives up and grabs him by the back of his neck. Howard swings out an arm, enraged, but Leonard’s had some experience with uncooperative animals.
“Pathetic,” he mutters as Howard pauses, hand against the truck, and wretches, but despite himself he knows that even if it wasn’t for Raj and Sheldon, he’d still be here, and he’d still be hating it.
./.
Penny isn’t always sure what to think about Wil. He’s always coming or going, and when he’s around he does his level best to pick fights with Sheldon.
But that’s kind of the thing-the fights Sheldon has with Wil are the only fights Sheldon ever has. He deals with Kripke by backing up and Darren by giving up, but as soon as Wil pops his head around Sheldon is coolly dismissive and outright offensive, and Wil seems to enjoy every second of it.
(“So, Sheldon, you gonna try to not fall off your horse tonight?”
“Wil, I was considering adding a tribute to William Tell to my act-perhaps you’d be interested in participating?”)
Wil finds random times to bump into her, too-always random, always accidental. She goes into town with some of her girls, and he’s in a bar, buying her a drink and being amusingly over-flirtatious. They chat about random things, and she ends up telling him more about herself than she was ever planning. It should make her uncomfortable, because the boys clearly don’t like him, but…
But.
She doesn’t think he doesn’t care. Oh, he’s an ass, and he’s selfish, and he’s mean sometimes, and he’s always edged with sarcasm. Still, she thinks.
Still.
./.
Raj had been a quiet child. His parents had kept him sequestered in the family home, and he’d been taught by private tutors. He had almost no contact with the outside world, but it’d never bothered him unduly. He had stories to escape in, if he wished, and he enjoyed sketching what he thought the world outside might be like.
At fourteen, his parents decided it was time for him to attend an expensive private school.
Raj had been utterly terrified. The amount of people, the noise, the sheer busy-ness of the world around him was shocking.
His teachers and counselors began to call his parents. He won’t speak, they said. Raj’s father had been irritated, his mother furious. They took him to doctors and therapists. They spoke of his duties to his family, to his future wife, to his future children.
He had obligations, they reminded him.
He had to do right by his family, he owed it to them, he couldn’t embarrass them in this manner.
The more they demanded, the more he withdrew within himself.
./.
There are dozens or unspoken rules and traditions that they live by-things Sheldon needs, things that keep them from killing each other, things that they’ve found to work, and have therefore adjusted their lives accordingly.
She’s introduced to one of the few things they all agree is fantastic once it’s clear that she’s not going anywhere. (Howard quotes an episode, and she doesn’t get the reference. All four of the boys stare at her in out-and-out horror.)
Between the four of them, they’ve scraped together recordings of Star Trek: The Last Stand. Leonard has a friend, Stuart, who owns a shop in one of the main cities - they pass near it every two months or so (Darren buys goods in the city for cheap), and they make a pilgrimage there every time.
Stuart’s a nice enough guy who routinely tucks things away to sell them, even some things he could probably sell for more to other people. But then, there’s some background to Leonard and his friendship that no one really knows about, except Leonard had some sway thanks to his mom’s position and got Stuart out of something or other.
The point is, Stuart saves things for them, and eventually all four seasons had been scraped together one way or another. Howard and Sheldon worked together (it was a rare occasion, but Howard was good with computers and Sheldon was good with anything and everything), and somehow they managed to pull the data from old VHS tapes to store it digitally on computers using nothing but five year old supplies and hand-made improvisations.
What this meant, though, was that they had Star Trek: Last Stand at their fingertips.
The four of them immediately set about forcing Penny to watch episodes. (They could quote lines back and forth in a thoroughly intimidating way. Even Raj, although he’s still skittish about talking around her.)
It was a popular show for its time-hell, they still play reruns relentlessly-but Penny’s not sure if it’s the technical aspects or the sheer backbone exhibited by the characters, who refuse to back down in a war they appear to have no chance of winning, that the boys like so much.
(Penny knows it’s just a TV show, just like she knows sometimes TV shows actually mean something. She didn’t want to be an actor because she thinks it’d be fun. She’d wanted to do something that would affect people, and now she’s being corny, and fuck it ALL she just thinks that when Sheldon’s watching Picard make the decision-and it’s hard and it hurts-to fire upon the Romulan ship, knowing that Tasha was on it, knowing he had to do it for everyone else, she just thinks that MAYBE it means MORE than television, maybe it means heartache and heartsick and doing things you have to because you have no choice.)
Penny watches the show because she knows what it’s like to not have a choice.
Penny watches the show because she likes seeing people hurt and fail and struggle and pick themselves up after all that and keep on fighting, because sometimes she thinks she needs that reminder.
Penny watches the show because the boys ask her to, and she’s fallen hard and fast for all of them, even though even friendship tends to end in heartbreak, and she swore her heart away for good.
./.
Sheldon has a perfect performance. Penny knows this because she’s gotten into the habit of waiting on the platform above after her act and watching his. Watching his motions from above, so fluid and determined and sure, she can pretend that he’s always steady, that the dichotomy between man and act is not so wide and unbreachable, she can pretend that he is in control and safe from whatever haunts him, whatever hurts him.
After the show, though, Darren backs Sheldon against one of the tent poles, pinning him in place with his hands, his head bent close as he speaks quietly to him. She can’t hear him, but given Darren and given the pale look on Sheldon’s face, she’s sure it’s not anything good.
Leonard isn’t close-one of the animals had been acting up earlier before the show, and he’d mentioned needing to take a look-and Raj, dear lovely Raj, would be next to useless. She sees Howard across the way, but he’s got a bottle in hand and an arm stretched around the waist of a local, and she can tell he’ll not be up for it.
Besides, if she’s capable of taking care of herself, she doesn’t need their help for this.
She walks up to the pair of them, no plan in mind, just knowing Sheldon needs to get away from Darren. She’s not too specific on the whys and wherefores, but as she gets closer she hears “-take you back to your uncle if you don’t stop being a little bitch, is that what you want? Think you’ll have it as good with him as you’ve got it with me? Think you have any idea how lucky you are here? Cuz it can all go away in a moment.”
“Hey!” she calls out when she’s a couple steps away. She keeps her voice light, despite the way her fingers have curled into her palms, the way her pulse is loud in her ears.
Darren turns his head slowly to look at her, keeping his body squarely in Sheldon’s personal space. He looks her up and down dismissively. “What?”
“I was wondering, if you’ve got a second, if you could go over the last part of my routine with me-I was thinking-”
“I’m a little busy,” he says, cutting her off, his voice brisk and clearly irritated.
She hates herself a little for the way Sheldon has pulled his body in on itself, pressed snugly against the pole, eyes wide. She runs a hand through her hair, shaking it back.
“Oh,” she says. “Okay. I was just hoping for some…y’know, private training.”
Now he does look at her, and she can feel the eyes rake along her body and it makes her feel a little nauseous. Steady, she thinks. Steady.
“Well…” he says, letting the word drawl out as he pulls a little away from Sheldon, clear interest on his face. And Sheldon lets his eyes flicker to hers, his own hooded as he scans her face, the pinch of her mouth, the tense muscles in her arms.
His hand hovers in midair before settling lightly on Darren’s arm. “I think-” he says, his voice low, and it’s enough to turn Darren back to him, because Sheldon doesn’t touch people. Penny’s not sure who’s more shocked of the three of them, but Darren waves a hand at her, clearly dismissing her.
“I might have time later,” he says, not looking back, his eyes steady on Sheldon’s face, and she stumbles back a step, unsure and beyond concerned. Sheldon flicks his eyes to hers, his gaze telling her in no uncertain terms to go away, and because she has no other recourse, no other option, she takes another step back and another, and then Raj’s hand is in hers and he’s pulling her away.
“Why-why did he do that?” she asks Raj when they’re out of earshot. “I was trying to help him!”
Raj is still looking at Sheldon, at the way Darren is invading his space, hand clasped securely around Sheldon’s wrist, face too close to Sheldon’s.
“He didn’t ask for help,” he says. And then, because he knows he just sounded curt, he shakes his head. “He’d rather handle it himself than have you hurt because of him.”
“I can handle myself,” she says, sharp.
Raj bites back a bitter sort of laugh. “He never asked you to prove anything.”
-VI-
let me at the truth that will refresh my broken mind
Sheldon had a gift for science and mathematics. He and Missy would bicker back and forth, and she would attempt to destroy everything he did, but Mary kept an eye on them, and she could see the way her boy was, could see how clever he was, how he always wanted answers and explanations and looked for the meaning behind everything.
George didn’t find it funny. George had already lost a son.
(The first year of the war, fire and shrapnel and Sheldon’s grandmother’s house had gone up. Two coffins had gone into the ground-one adult, one child. There hadn’t been much of them left to bury as it was, but they’d made the effort, Mary had seen to that.)
He wanted to show the boy how to throw a punch, how to ride a bike, how to shoot a gun. He didn’t want his son to be some closeted genius freak, and he was never too subtle about his feelings.
Mary never cared.
”God works in mysterious ways,” she’d smile.
Sheldon, to this day, can remember her smile, and the weight of her hand on his shoulder, the pressure of her lips on his forehead.
He doesn’t believe in God, but when his foster parents took him to church every week, he let the words Mary and Mother wash over him.
Jesse, the man who called himself his uncle, was the foster parent that took him in.
(Not the first foster parent, there had been others. Those months in the hospital and the surgeries on his leg, doted on by the nurses as he sat there, silent, psychiatrists dropping by to see him, but there were always so many wounded and fucked up, and there was a war. When they healed his body he bounced from one home to another, some good, some bad, some worse.)
Jesse wanted a man instead of a boy.
Jesse said he’d known George, that George wouldn’t have wanted his son to be some namby-pamby school bitch. Jesse took Sheldon out shooting, and said George would’ve been proud that his son could shoot like that, because Sheldon could. He didn’t like to kill things, and the first time he brought down a bird he’d started crying, and Jesse had shaken him, asking if he was a little bitch to cry like that, and Sheldon had shaken his head, no, no he wasn’t.
He remembers those hours, his leg half-crushed, trapped in that car as the bombs went off. They haunt his nightmares, trail along his skin. He’d wake screaming and Jesse would grab him and haul him out of bed and shove him into the closet, and Sheldon would curl in on himself and try not to cry (not supposed to cry) and think of his sister, hand in his, think of the way she’d cross her arms or tilt her head. He was sure George would’ve been proud of her, that it would’ve been better if she’d been the one to crawl out alive rather than the freak.
So he put away his books, hid equations underneath his mattress. He practiced shooting, he learned to keep a steady stance and a steady hand. Jesse entered him in contests, his voice softly threatening in his ear, telling him to be good, to make George proud, and Sheldon would nod, silent.
(Sometimes, he’d wondered what would make Mary proud, Mary who believed in God and justice and redemption, who’d smiled when he’d tried to cut his own hair, who kissed his scrapes and scolded him when he hurt himself, and made him and Missy hug and make up when they went at it.
“You’re my little genius,” she’d said, once, but it hadn’t sounded like an insult coming from her lips.)
Jesse had backed Sheldon up against one of the trucks when they’d visited the circus. Sheldon could barely hear anything else over the sound of his breath in his ears, his pulse pounding, a shaking hand trying to brush his shaggy hair out of his eyes.
Despite the way he remembers everything, he’s not sure what set this fight off. He just knows he was twenty-one years old, and Jesse said something, and Sheldon had realized that Jesse was never going to let him go. Let him be free. He’d made some comment about some show he was going to get Sheldon to perform at, and he’d been yelling about some mistake Sheldon had supposedly made, and it had clicked, and he hadn’t even been thinking when he’d shoved Jesse away and taken off running, twisting through people, ducking around buildings.
Someone had seen the stark terror on his face and grabbed his arm, shoved him inside the big top and then inside one of the fenced off areas, pushing him back and clapped a hand over his mouth.
Sheldon had had no reason to trust the man in front of him, who hadn’t said a word, but his dark eyes were soft, and the fact that he was Indian, of all things, eased something in Sheldon’s gut, because Jesse was a racist bastard who would’ve freaked in the same situation. Sheldon had nodded and then breathed in and out and tried to stop his hands from shaking as he sank to his knees.
“Thank you,” he’d said.
Raj had brushed a hand through Sheldon’s hair, and Sheldon had shivered. “It’s all right,” he’d whispered.
Darren had found him there, and thrown Raj out and learned Sheldon could shoot and had dragged him along, hid him from Jesse, got him clothes and bunked him in a truck with too many people and too much noise, and Sheldon had let him.
It had been weeks before Raj had begun joining him for dinner.
Longer before he’d spoken to him again.
./.
Penny and Sheldon are walking.
It’s dark outside, and she’s not entirely sure where they’re going, but she trusts that Sheldon knows his way back, given his uncanny memory.
It’s cold outside, but the feel of it is brisk on her skin, a firm reminder that they’re alive, so she tucks her hands in her pockets but doesn’t suggest they turn back.
Howard’s gone off somewhere for the night, and Raj is a bundle of nerves. Leonard’s trying to talk him down, or at the very least distract him, but Sheldon had been too tense and finally stalked off to everyone’s relief.
Penny hadn’t meant to follow, but Sheldon had glanced at her before he slid out the sliding door, and before she’d realized it she was on her feet and mumbling out a scattered excuse.
He hadn’t waited for her, but when she caught up to him he’d slanted a glance down at her and then continued, slowing his long legs a little to accommodate her.
She’s not sure how long they’ve been walking, but she’s distracted enough that she doesn’t notice at first that he’s stopped. He catches her arm with his, and his hand is gentle but his touch is still shocking, and she’s sure her eyes are wide as she looks up at him.
He’s looking up at the sky, and his expression is almost…wistful. She glances up, too, and she’s caught off guard by how well she can see the stars, until she realizes that he’s brought them far enough away from the lights of the circus and nearby town.
“The light of these stars left some of them so long ago that they might be gone, now,” he says, his voice low but still sounding loud in the night air.
The way his face is painted in shadow, the way he’d taken her wrist to stop her, make her think he must mean something more, something deeper and inexplicable and something he feels safe delivering only in riddles too complex for her to understand.
Still, if he had only needed someone smart, or anyone at all, she wouldn’t be here.
She runs his words through her mind again.
“Just because something’s in the past doesn’t mean it doesn’t affect us,” she says, her voice hesitant. She’s not entirely sure why she’s out here, except that she needed to walk and she needed space and she wanted company.
Sheldon rocks back a little on his heels, still looking upwards.
“The Greeks wrote myths about the stars and constellations,” he says.
Penny wants to take his hand in hers, or put her palm against his cheek, but he doesn’t need comforting with touch-probably couldn’t bear it.
She wracks her brain, instead, considering his words, searching for his meaning. Finally she shrugs.
“Whatever they wrote about it,” she says, “A star is still a star. They can’t change that.”
Sheldon breathes out slowly. Painfully.
His hand bumps against hers once. Twice. The third time she slips her fingers through his until they’re intertwined.
The two of them keep looking up at the stars.
They’re quiet as they stay out there, but when they finally turn back they break apart as if they’d planned it all along.
./.
Howard slips out of the bedroom without waking her up. He doesn’t remember her name. He can barely remember anything of the night before, but he woke up naked next to her, so it couldn’t have been all bad.
His head is pounding, but he’s smirking a little as he walks back, jacket flung over his shoulder.
The sun’s up by the time he makes it back to the camp. The circus was mostly broken down the night before, and everything else is being packed away. They’re scheduled to leave in less than a hour, so he walks through the moving people, parading the fact that he’s only now coming back from town. There’s a couple snide remarks thrown around, but he’s enjoying himself until he catches Raj’s eye from across the field.
Raj looks…devastated is far too strong and melodramatic, but something about his face, the look in his eyes, hurts, and Howard stills, hand going to his stomach as if to recover from a blow, air spilling out of his lungs.
It’s the look his mom used to give Pops when he came back late and drunk and smelling of perfume. He can see it with startling clarity, hear raised voices nearby, and these are things he hasn’t thought of for years. He can barely remember his mom, and yet he can hear her, screaming at Pops, hear the crash as glass breaks and spills across the floor.
Howard brushes a hand down his front, feeling it shaking against his shirt, and then he breaks eye contact and walks away.
He doesn’t owe anybody anything.
He doesn’t have to prove himself to anyone.
./.
Raj had seen the books Sheldon couldn’t quite hide in the depths of his trunk, the notebook that he kept underneath his pillow, with the scrawled equations that read like memories to Raj. Except he’d also seen the question marks - the areas where the writing hesitated and then continued, almost reluctantly, into areas Raj had never learned about, had never pressed into.
He didn’t mention it for weeks, but finally, outside in the grass, Raj had pointed out Venus. Sheldon had been quiet for a moment, and then he’d pointed out the soft edges of a constellation. They went back and forth over the course of hours, until finally they were discussing stars and their composition, and Sheldon was discussing the distance between them as if he were discussing shooting.
He could fire a bullet that would take out a star, Raj had thought in a fit of absolute whimsy, the image clear in his eyes-Sheldon, riding the back of the Uchchaihshravas, the snow-white, seven-headed horse of the gods
Days later, he sketched a picture of it-Sheldon, with bow and arrow, flying on horseback in the realm of Svarga, the light of a star dying from his bow strike.
He hadn’t shown Sheldon. Instead, he placed it in a folder he keeps of things he would not want to forget.
./.
Leslie’s dad had worked in the zoo.
(More accurately: Leslie’s dad was a zoologist, on the forefront of his field, responsible for several new ideas circulating academia, author of several important papers, and had worked in conjunction with several behavioral theorists on evolutionary behavioral patterns.)
At ten years old, however, what really stuck was that Leslie’s dad worked in a zoo, and would sometimes, if he wasn’t too busy doing research or off in some foreign country studying animals in their natural habitat (Leslie often stayed with her aunt), he might sometimes let them take a behind-the-scenes tour.
Leonard had found out, at a very young age, that he was quite good with animals. Despite his ridiculous amount of allergies to any number of things, he was not (currently) allergic to any animals. And he really thought that, given his often cowardly tendencies, he should be afraid of them. But animals weren’t like people. People were confusing and demanding and expected anything and everything, and sometimes Leonard would curl up in the middle of his bed, hands tight around his ears as if to shut everything out, because he could never do enough, never be perfect, never be what she wanted.
But animals were different. They wanted food. Some of them needed to be exercised, some of them needed to be brushed, some of them needed affection and some needed lots and lots of space, but there were rules to them, and they could make sense. They didn’t need impossible things, they didn’t need you to be smarter than you were.
They were satisfied with hard work.
And some of them-some of them would let him wrap his arms around their bodies and feel their chests rise and fall. Some of them would let him bury his head in their hair and breathe.
Leslie’s dad had a stable in the zoo-more for recreational and research purposes than as an actual attraction-and Leonard worked in the stable. He’d brush the horses down, clean out the stalls, he’d do whatever needed doing, and it would lessen the ragged beat in his chest, ease the tension in his stomach.
Leslie would come sometimes too, and they’d work side-by-side in silence, letting the work empty their minds, the slow burn of muscles welcomed into their bodies. At fourteen years old she’d pinned him up against a stable door and kissed him, at seventeen they’d tumbled in the hay loft and researched each other thoroughly.
Sometime between the two, when Beverly had announced she and his father were getting divorced, he and Leslie had worked the entire day-backbreaking work that left them barely able to move. The skin on his hands felt raw, and she’d stayed in bed the next day. They never mentioned it afterwards, but he’d felt, going in, it was either that or tearing himself apart if only to understand how to make everything stop hurting.
Sometimes it felt like the only times he was really alive was when he was there.
The year before he checked himself into the psych ward, Beverly told him he really ought not waste his time with such trivialities, and no, that wasn’t a suggestion.
Leslie had asked him why he stopped coming, and he hadn’t known what to say.
He’d insulted her, instead. She’d always taken offensive easily.
./.
When Wil flirts with her, he flirts like it’s all a game, and maybe he’s keeping score. He doesn’t like to be concerned, and he certainly doesn’t like to show his hand, but maybe he asks questions which are too personal, and maybe when he cuts in and scares a guy away, it’s not because he wants in her pants but because the guy was in her personal space.
(She doesn’t need protecting.
Wil would be an idiot to not want in her pants.)
Still, it’s not something she necessarily notices, until Kurt is bugging her relentlessly, and Wil slips between the two of them, picks her up, and starts making out with her.
(It turns out Wil’s a ridiculously good kisser, if anyone was wondering.)
She makes a startled noise of surprise, but when she sees Kurt looking apoplectic she wraps her arms around Wil’s neck and enjoys the ride.
Also, when Kurt grabs Wil’s shoulder and yanks him backwards, and Wil decks him and then Kurt goes for Wil’s back, she takes great pleasure in breaking a bottle over his head.
Kurt falls to the ground with a satisfying thump, and Wil walks her back to camp and then disappears.
./.
Howard comes back, drunk.
This really isn’t a surprise.
Howard comes back drunk, and wants to have a quick fuck with Raj, and that, that is definitely a surprise.
“Didn’t get lucky?” Raj growls as Howard tries to kiss his neck.
“You’re the best,” Howard says against his skin. Raj pulls away.
“No,” he says, “No, I’m not doing this with you anymore.”
Howard stops, and he looks angry.
“Is this still about me drinking?” he asks. “Look, I’ll stop if you want, just-”
“Go find some slut to sleep with,” Raj says, his voice edged, “They’re more your type, aren’t they?”
“That’s not true,” Howard hisses.
Raj turns, drawing away. “I don’t care,” he says.
“Don’t turn away from me!” Howard yells, and he shoves Raj, hard.
Raj stumbles, tripping into a trunk, the pain radiating from his shin as he falls to the ground.
“You don’t walk away from me!” Howard yells.
(And he’s drunk, and he’s stupid, and he’s terrified, and he never meant to hurt him, would never mean to hurt him-)
Howard freezes, looking at Raj-Raj on the ground, wide-eyed and terrified.
“Get out,” Raj says.
Howard gets out.
./.
Leonard finds Raj icing his shin.
Raj isn’t speaking at all, not even to Penny, not even to him.
Not even to Sheldon.
“Are you all right?” Leonard asks, trying to keep his voice soft. Raj’s mouth twists, hating the pity he thinks he hears. He nods, grim.
Raj has always been fine.
./.
Sheldon doesn’t do this.
He’s never done confrontations. He can feel the echo of Jesse’s breath on his face, Jesse’s hand curled in the collar of his shirt, and his hands are trembling and his face pale.
But Raj is his friend.
Raj was his friend when he didn’t remember what that word meant.
Howard is silent, eyes dark, as Sheldon walks up to him. They’re outside, and the cool breeze ruffles through their hair, against their clothes, kicking up leaves and fliers that were dropped by townies.
“Howard,” Sheldon says, and his voice is unsteady but he holds his ground, despite the way Howard takes a swig from the bottle in his hand, despite the way the world seems to tilt underneath his feet. “Howard, you have to apologize to Raj. You have to make it up with him.”
Howard wipes the back of his hand across his mouth, and Sheldon feels his lip curl up at the unsanitary act, but he says nothing. He doesn’t take a step back when Howard moves closer, but it’s a struggle.
“I understand that you’ve got issues,” Howard says. “I get that, and I think I’m generally pretty good with that. But I don’t need you butting into my life.”
“Raj is my friend,” Sheldon says, his voice low, twisting around the word ‘friend.’ Howard is a ball of tense muscles and a bitter sort of smile.
“I guess he’s the only friend you’ve really got,” Howard says. This time Sheldon does take a step back, and Howard’s smirk turns darker. “It must really hurt knowing how much he wants me more than he wants you.”
Sheldon’s hand curls into a fist at his side, and the violence of it shocks him, because this is instinct at work, turning his body into a weapon, preparing him to fight. “You’re hurting him,” he says. “He cares about you, and you’re hurting him.”
Howard’s face is dark against the night sky, and Sheldon can’t make out his expression as he takes another slow swig. “I said it’s not your business,” he says.
Sheldon-Sheldon sees white, Sheldon feels his hands flex, Sheldon moves forward, moves fast, and shoves Howard square in the chest, and as Howard stumbles backwards Sheldon stands above him, fury giving way to fear, muscles aching from the way he’s trying to hold himself together.
“Clean the fuck up,” he says, his voice a hoarse whisper, black creeping in around his vision, and before Howard can say anything more, do anything more, Sheldon stumbles backwards and then turns and runs, his long legs carrying him back to the trucks-
But not back to their truck. His knuckles rap on the door (3 knocks) and Mira wrenches open the door.
“What?” she snaps, and then realizes who it is and softens to simpering, careful to butter up the lead act. He barely looks at her.
“Penny?” he asks, and he can hear his voice crease and bend, and Penny shoves Mira’s hand off of Sheldon’s arm and steps close, and Sheldon grabs her and doesn’t let go.
“Sheldon?” she asks, because he’s holding her, his arms gripping her tightly as if she’s all that’s anchoring her to the world, and he can’t let go.
His face turns against her neck, and she can feel his nose press into her skin, hear him suck in an unsteady breath, his hands snug against her back. Things he can’t say (“I need you”), things he won’t say (“Hold me”), things he does say:
“Please.”
She tightens her hold on him, as if she can hold him together, as if she can hold him in place, and it’s a choked whimper against her skin that makes her close her eyes.
“I’m here,” she promises, her hands moving along his back. He examines and files away the random movements without even thinking about it, the patterns meaningless to her but now inscribed along his nerve endings, in the memory centers of his brain.
(He doesn’t forget anything, ever. Things jostle against each other, memories bumping and connecting at random turns, and he forces himself to separate them ruthlessly, bury some down, destroy the connections they hold with another-he can hold a gun without thinking of Jesse, he can see a car without thinking of the prolonged crash and the hours that followed, he can hold her and not think of those few moments of honest affection he’s ever been given.)
He’s so much taller than she is that he’s practically folding himself in half in order to wrap himself around her, so it makes no sense (no sense at all) that his heartbeat slows, his breath evens, and he feels (finally) safe (real) as she holds him.
(There must be a logical reason, he thinks.
He closes his eyes and stops caring.)
Part One / Part Two / Part Three
./.
Rating: R
Word Count: 27,247
Disclaimer: BBT is not mine. No, not even this twisted, twisted version of it.
Warnings: Triggery for emotional and physical abuse as well as several mentions of a miscarriage. Also - very strong language and alcohol addiction.
Summary: AU - Circus performers in a world recovering from a devastating war in the 1980s. Penny joins the circus and meets Sheldon, Raj, Leonard, and Howard, who all have their own reasons for being there. But you can only run so far from your past, and eventually you have to start moving forward.
Pairings: Slight Leonard/Penny, Raj/Sheldon, Howard/OCs, eventually Sheldon/Penny, Raj/Howard, Leonard/Leslie (slight implications of possible future Sheldon/Penny/Wil)
Art/Mix: Here, courtesy of the brilliant fujiidom.
Part One / Part Two / Part Three
-IV-
even their sins you carried as your own
Galveston, Texas - January 20, 1986
The sirens near the ocean go off. Planes, then, coming from ships somewhere off the coast. People immediately start making their way to the bunkers. They’ve got about ten minutes to make it somewhere safe before the planes should be overhead. George, Mary, Missy and Sheldon are in George’s car.
(Gasoline is restricted for the wartime effort, but down south most people have converted their vehicles to run off natural gas.)
George is drunk.
“Let me drive,” Mary says, glancing back at the two young kids in the backseat. Missy is poking her brother, but Sheldon is staring out the window wide-eyed. They’re five years old.
“I’m fine,” George says, looking at her instead of the road.
“George, you’re drunk! Stop the car and let me drive! Or just stop the car, I’m sure there’s a shelter close-”
“I’m fine,” he repeats.
(Alcohol is rationed, but they know how to make moonshine in Texas.)
“George-” she says-
(It’s not safe to drive when the sirens go off. People panic. People forget things like signals and breaks.)
“Mommy-” Sheldon says.
Mary glances back at her two children just as a car cuts through the intersection and slams into the side of their car.
The car flips.
Missy screams.
George is saying something-repeating something-as the world spins
spins
spins
Stops.
Sheldon opens his eyes with a cry, his leg pinned between two parts of the crushed shell of the car.
The rest of the vehicle is silent. Outside, he can hear the sound of bombs falling. It’s night, and without the lights of the car he can barely see-a small blessing.
They find him five hours later, when the bombs have stopped, when they crawl out of the shelters, when they see the jagged metal bending in on itself.
“Mommy,” he says, crying, the lady with the soft voice trying to comfort him.
Mary doesn’t come.
./.
Leonard sits with Penny afterwards. Part of her-part of her wants to gather her clothes and slip off into the night, back to her truck. The other part mostly wants to close her eyes and go to sleep (outside or not).
Leonard wants to talk.
His arm still wrapped around her bare waist, he twists his head a little to look at her better. “Why did you join the circus?” he asks.
The way he asks it, as if he can’t understand why she’d be here, as if she’s somehow above all this, rankles a bit, but she just lifts up one shoulder and lets it fall back down in a half-hearted shrug. “What else was I going to do?”
He’s frowning, that little crease between his eyes. “Anything,” he says, as if it’s obvious, as if she’s stupid. “There are plenty of normal jobs out there-”
“Normal?”
“I wouldn’t have pegged you for joining the circus, is all,” Leonard says, his voice softer, backtracking. She’s silent a long moment.
“You did,” she says.
“I…I had to get away,” he says. “I didn’t have anywhere else to go.”
This time, she’s the one to frown, forgoing exhaustion to prop herself up one arm and look at him closely. “You’ve got first aid training. You’ve got a West Coast accent, and you’re clearly intelligent-you could’ve become a doctor or something. You had plenty of options.”
(The insinuation, of course, that she hadn’t.)
“I had to get away,” he repeats, his voice tight, his words hurried from throat to mouth. “I had nowhere else to go.”
“So you’re running away,” she says, sounding almost disappointed. This time he shrugs.
“I couldn’t stay,” he says, as if it’s an answer.
(It’s not, of course, but she’s hardly one to talk.)
./.
Howard’s been running for years.
His father-that dearly departed fucker-brought him into mechanics when he was little. Pops used to repair whatever needed repairing, be it vehicle or refrigerator or generator.
(Pops never could handle computers, but lucky for them there wasn’t much call for them in the middle of the backwards Midwest, where they had cornfields and cows and ignored the craters the bombs left so few years ago. Howard isn’t bitter, no, he doesn’t want out of this fucking country, out of this fucking life, no he doesn’t care at all.)
Of course, Pops needed the jobs, what with the way he tended to drink their rent and groceries.
Howard didn’t become a mechanic because his dad wanted him to learn on the job, he became a mechanic because his dad couldn’t finish the job. But that’s an old story, and one everyone’s heard before.
He’s good at his job. Better since Dad dropped dead from a heart attack four years and twenty states ago. It’s why Darren snatched him up to work in the circus full-time, with a retainer and all.
And the circus keeps moving. No settling down. He’s used to moving, his entire childhood (can’t pay the bill, ducking into the car in the middle of the night and hitting the gas) was on the move, and now he doesn’t know how to sit, how to settle, and what’s the point of learning, anyway?
(Howard can handle computers.
He can take them apart and put them back together, he can build them up from scratch, the pieces smooth in his hands, and he never had no training, no, this is instinct, this is knowing what fits where, seeing how things connect, seeing how they piece together, and he has it, he can make them sing, he can-
He doesn’t get much call for them, out here.)
Howard can repair whatever needs repairing.
And that’s more than enough, in his book.
./.
Penny retreats into the boys’ truck. It’s easier than dealing with Mira, than having a confrontation with Alicia (brunette tramp), and certainly better than dealing with Darren, sleazeball extraordinaire.
The truck is unexpectedly empty when she walks in, and she pauses, one foot balanced inside, one hovering in midair outside. She’d prefer to stay here, and yet…
A soft brush of fabric on fabric catches her attention, and she looks up to see Raj pop his head up from his cot. He smiles when he sees her, and she smiles back, definite affection flooding through her as he runs a hand through his mussed hair and nods for her to come in.
She does, although she’s admittedly a little hesitant. He clambers down from the upper bunk and gestures to the back area, miming a drink, and she laughs a little and shakes her head no. He shrugs, still grinning, and she’s surprised at how comfortable she is with him.
After a moment, he tilts his head to the side and grabs his pad and pencil and then gestures to her, and it takes a moment for her to realize that he wants to sketch her.
It’s surprisingly touching, and she grins and shrugs and plays bashful, but she’s wanted to be an actress since she was little, and this, this is her in her element, so she smiles demurely over her shoulder as he sketches line and shadow and tries to capture the sadness behind her smile, and the hope behind her eyes.
./.
Sheldon joined the circus a little less than a year after Raj.
That’s a lie, of course. Sheldon didn’t join the circus. Sheldon (breathless, bruised, terrified) hid from his “uncle” (his foster parent), and Darren told him he could stay only if he could be useful, and Sheldon (who had been told and told and told that he was only good for shooting) picked up a gun and showed what he could do.
Sheldon was twenty-one, but not in any way that counted. He wouldn’t look people in the eyes, and he flinched when people moved too quickly around him, and he had nightmares every night.
Darren liked fucking with him, so everyone else stayed away, because it simply wasn’t worth the pain. And oh, Darren was marketing him, and changing his outfits and his names and even his style, but he was ensuring that Sheldon wasn’t going to walk off and join a different circus (”I know your uncle, I’ll find him and tell him where you are, I’ll help him take you back, and then where will you be, hmm? Think he’ll let you live after you left him? Think he’ll take you back when you’re crying and bloody?”).
He called it an investment, as if that made it okay. Sheldon was an investment, and he was just securing that investment.
Raj started sitting with him at dinner (silent always silent). Raj had grown observant from his years of self-imposed silence. He could see the way Sheldon shunned touch and appreciated routine, the way he watched the stars and poured over books when he thought no one was looking. Raj knew about the notebook tucked underneath Sheldon’s pillow, filled with symbols and equations, notes and thoughts about the world around them.
Raj sketched Sheldon one afternoon. He sketched him as Sheldon looked on horseback; gun in hand, body tense and fluid all at once.
“So you don’t forget who you are,” he said, his voice hoarse with disuse as he handed it over to him, careful to avoid his fingers touching Sheldon’s skin.
Sheldon swallowed thickly, eyes sliding along the lines and shadow that described man and rider.
Raj had smiled crookedly and walked away.
./.
Sheldon pauses inside the truck. Raj and Penny are sitting cross-legged on the floor, the bench in front of them layered with Raj’s sketches. Sheldon can tell that Raj still isn’t comfortable enough to speak to Penny, but the fact that he’s showing her his sketches is…surprising.
There’s something about the shape of her smile, the sound of her laugh that relaxes something deep inside of him. He stays where he is and watches them, so he catches it when Raj says, “Yes,” when he nods, the word more breath than sound, but still a word, caught by air and floated over to Penny’s ears. Her eyes widen, but she says nothing else.
Sheldon knows about Raj’s past-his family, his fears, his inability to speak, to disagree, to decide. He also knows that Raj is still afraid, that he still can barely open himself up to others. Raj knew Leonard for months before he spoke to him, and that was with Leonard around all the time, sharing their quarters, with Leonard defending the both of them at every turn, standing up for them when they were both afraid to stand up for themselves. To have him speak to Penny after less than a month-
Raj doesn’t bite back the word as if shocked at himself, but neither does he say more, and Penny smiles as if it hurts, a little, as if she knows a little something about fear.
What she does do-
What she does do is take Raj’s hand in hers and squeeze it, once, before letting go.
She turns her attention full-heartedly to the sketches before her, and Raj, after one heartbeat of tension, lets it melt away into the floor of the truck. He points and smiles and gestures, his eyes endlessly expressive, and she speaks for the both of them, content to wait.
There was a look in Penny’s eyes Sheldon hadn’t been expecting-something vulnerable and fierce at the same time, a need to be protective without being pitying. Sheldon, throat unaccountably tight, pulls his arms in around himself and walks away.
-V-
anger of angels who won’t return
Howard has very few memories of his mother. He knows his parents often fought. He knows she had a habit of yelling across the house to everyone.
He knows she’d hold him, wrapped up tight in her arms, and read to him, the rocking chair slowly tilting back and forth, the blanket over his legs keeping out the night chill.
These are all vague, half-memories, though.
He was four when his father took him away to visit his grandparents. His mother and his father’s parents hated each other, so she’d stayed home.
Home, in Pasadena.
Home, when California burned.
./.
Leonard takes Penny’s hand and she pulls free. She isn’t in a good mood-practice had been utter shit, and Howard had slept with Bernadette, one of her kinkers, and now wasn’t talking to her, the bastard, so Penny had spent a good hour afterward talking to Bernadette and listening to her rail about him.
To make matters worse, Leonard seems to have decided that they’re together, now. Together.
Penny doesn’t do together. In fact, she avoids most facets of togetherness, including all those pesky things like friendship that have been preying on her lately. She doesn’t want to listen to Bernadette sob for an hour. She doesn’t want to have to keep an eye on Howard when he’s drinking, because he doesn’t know his limit and one of these days he’s going to get his ass handed to him because he can’t fucking shut his mouth with the townies.
Mostly, though, she doesn’t want Leonard looking at her with hope, looking at her with need, as if she can be everything he wants. She can’t even be what she wants.
(Television and telephones are the only things that lasted, they say. Television more than telephones, because people can walk down the street to talk to someone, but how else are they going to get their soap fix?
Penny watched the television when she was young. One of the few free things in the Midwest, it was one of those little perks of being disproportionately one of the most advanced and backward countries in the world.
Penny wanted to be an actress.
But she’s not an actress. She didn’t go to college. She didn’t finish her last year of high school, not after her brother got arrested for smuggling drugs. She dropped out and joined the fucking circus.)
She doesn’t even know who she is anymore.
Worse, she doesn’t know who she wants to be.
So when he grabs her hand and tries to pull her in close, she pulls back. “No,” she says. “No, Leonard, I told you. It was just that night.”
“But don’t you-” he says, and she can hear it all falling out, don’t you love me? don’t you care?
“There was never going to be anything more,” she says.
He’s silent for a minute, and then he nods.
(He’d known he couldn’t keep her.
He tries to bring himself to really care.)
./.
Leonard went to a private school, but then most West Coast schools were private. The entire atmosphere was built for driving forward scientific advances aimed to improve American life on a national scale, despite the fact that innovation was limited to this one local sphere.
The arts, too, were important-somehow, the country had been split into different societies that relied completely on one another and yet stretched thin and far apart for all that. Television came out of the West Coast-television, and scientific progress, and everything except anything tangible and real.
Food, clothing, necessities, those came from out East. All the plants, all the luxuries, even, they were all developed farther out. And maybe the rest of the country was a little more rundown, but they tended to like it that way-they had their small communities, they had their lives exactly as they wanted them. There’s not really any pressure on anyone out East. You make the life you want to make.
The West Coast is another story. You can’t be average in the West Coast. There’s not enough space, there’s not enough time, there’s not enough people. You have to be extraordinary.
Leonard was brilliant, he really was. But he had Beverly for a mother. Beverly, who expected more than he could ever deliver.
His life (all their lives) was scheduled and planned out beyond preliminaries. His life was a routine. His life felt like a race that he was always losing.
Leslie and Leonard would often work together or compete against each other in class. She brought out the best in him.
Beverly, though, Beverly brought out the worst.
./.
Penny is crying.
She hates crying. Her face gets blotchy and her nose runny and her fingertips itchy, and usually she’s pissed as well as upset, and it means that she’s lost any and all of her control, which is something she truly hates.
Leonard made her cry.
(This is not true. Penny knows only she is responsible for her own actions. No one can make her cry except herself.)
Leonard said some things that seemed unnecessarily harsh, and Penny lost control and started to cry.
(Better. Still painful to admit.)
Penny is crying when she half-stumbles into Sheldon, who puts his hands on her arms and steadies her before either of them realize what he’s doing. He takes his hands off immediately, and he goes a shade or two pale, and Penny wants to throw herself into his arms and cry onto his chest, a desire she hasn’t been struck by since she was twelve and her dog died and her brother came and held her as she cried.
Penny doesn’t throw herself into Sheldon’s arms, though. He doesn’t like to be touched, she remembers that, and remembers more how fiercely the boys enforce Sheldon’s unspoken rules, as if determined to keep them up even when Sheldon cannot bring himself to argue on his own behalf. She realizes that she can feel that same surge of protectiveness blossoming underneath her skin, and so, despite her tears, despite the urge, she pulls back and steadies herself.
He doesn’t move, although it’s clear by his eyes that he doesn’t know what to do or say, that he is not used to being accosted by sobbing women, and she struggles to swallow down everything, to pull her emotions back inside of herself.
“Kurt got me pregnant,” she says (blurts out), and then she can’t stop herself. “He got me pregnant in high school, and then he left me, and my parents would have disowned me if they could. I had a miscarriage and I lost my little girl, and everyone wanted to pretend that nothing had happened, that I was never pregnant, that they hadn’t all left me when I needed them the most.”
She hasn’t told anyone this. She slept with kind Leonard (Leonard who made her cry) and she hadn’t even considered telling him, and now she’s pouring out these secrets to a man she barely knows, a man who’s unable to tell her he doesn’t like to be touched.
What is she doing?
“To…to deny the existence of something,” he says, and his voice is low and rough and his eyes trail along the dirt between them, “Is useless. Changes made cannot simply be ignored because the alternative is preferable.”
Penny nods, wiping her face on her sleeve.
“They think I should be able to forgive them, that-that I should consider myself lucky-lucky-that they want to pretend it didn’t happen, that-”
He reaches out and takes her hand in his, and she is struck silent at the feel of his smooth skin against her callused hand.
“You don’t-” she starts (you don’t have to, I don’t want to make you, please-), and he shakes his head.
“It’s all right,” he says, and she nods blindly, shudders in a breath, and looks down at their linked hands. It means more than she was expecting. More than anything, right now.
“Okay,” she says.
(Maybe, just maybe, it will be.)
./.
Leonard checks himself into a psych facility when he’s nineteen years old.
Beverly doesn’t really believe in psychology. She tends to dismiss it offhand, usually with some sort of condescending statement, so she’s not happy when she finds out.
Leonard’s not doing it because it’ll piss Beverly off, though. He’s doing it because he can’t sleep, can’t eat, can’t control the anxiety that sweeps through him. Nineteen’s too young for an ulcer, the doctor had chided him, and what could he say?
So he checks himself in. He goes to the classes, he talks to the therapists. He truly wants to get better, wants to be able to feel in control of himself, if only for a moment.
Beverly calls him almost every day. The therapists encourage it, telling him he needs to talk to her, to explain to her, to have an honest discussion.
Leslie visits only once. She sits with him outside. He wants to take her hand, to talk to her, but he doesn’t know how to start. He’s terrified she’ll shut him out. He’s terrified that he deserves to be shut out.
He knows what people expect of him.
He knows what Beverly expects of him, that she’s not “people”-that he’s not enough, not smart enough or bright enough or clever enough for her.
He isn’t getting better. In fact, trapped within the walls of the facility, he feels claustrophobic, and the anxiety builds and circles and overwhelms him.
He doesn’t plan beforehand. He’s lived by schedules and calendars and rule books long enough. One day he simply packs his bags and checks himself out. He isn’t a danger to anyone, and he checked himself in, so the doctor shakes his hand and tells him he needs to open himself up more, that he only needs to fill his own expectations, that he doesn’t need to be anything he doesn’t want to be.
Leonard shakes his hand, smiles, and agrees, knowing everything the man is saying is utter bullshit. He hitchhikes out East.
He doesn’t call anyone. He doesn’t tell anyone.
He gets a job in a stable, in a zoo, in a vet’s office as a receptionist. He tries to keep himself around animals, and when he does he feels steadier, calmer, safer.
He never plans to join the circus, but Darren all but steals him away when Leonard helps out when the Vet is out on a case.
He finds himself with Raj and Sheldon, and maybe it’s because they don’t expect anything kind from anyone that he finds it so important that he helps in any way he can.
./.
Howard stumbles and lands heavily against the outside of the truck. Leonard’s eyes darken a little at the way Sheldon recoils at the sound. Raj just looks exhausted.
“I’ll get him,” Leonard says. He doesn’t want Raj to have to handle it, again, and it’s not exactly a situation Sheldon would be comfortable (or effective) handling.
Howard sways and then starts cussing Leonard out when he tries to grab him.
Leonard’s never been patient with Howard, and this is no exception. He tries to reason with him for a minute, but eventually gives up and grabs him by the back of his neck. Howard swings out an arm, enraged, but Leonard’s had some experience with uncooperative animals.
“Pathetic,” he mutters as Howard pauses, hand against the truck, and wretches, but despite himself he knows that even if it wasn’t for Raj and Sheldon, he’d still be here, and he’d still be hating it.
./.
Penny isn’t always sure what to think about Wil. He’s always coming or going, and when he’s around he does his level best to pick fights with Sheldon.
But that’s kind of the thing-the fights Sheldon has with Wil are the only fights Sheldon ever has. He deals with Kripke by backing up and Darren by giving up, but as soon as Wil pops his head around Sheldon is coolly dismissive and outright offensive, and Wil seems to enjoy every second of it.
(“So, Sheldon, you gonna try to not fall off your horse tonight?”
“Wil, I was considering adding a tribute to William Tell to my act-perhaps you’d be interested in participating?”)
Wil finds random times to bump into her, too-always random, always accidental. She goes into town with some of her girls, and he’s in a bar, buying her a drink and being amusingly over-flirtatious. They chat about random things, and she ends up telling him more about herself than she was ever planning. It should make her uncomfortable, because the boys clearly don’t like him, but…
But.
She doesn’t think he doesn’t care. Oh, he’s an ass, and he’s selfish, and he’s mean sometimes, and he’s always edged with sarcasm. Still, she thinks.
Still.
./.
Raj had been a quiet child. His parents had kept him sequestered in the family home, and he’d been taught by private tutors. He had almost no contact with the outside world, but it’d never bothered him unduly. He had stories to escape in, if he wished, and he enjoyed sketching what he thought the world outside might be like.
At fourteen, his parents decided it was time for him to attend an expensive private school.
Raj had been utterly terrified. The amount of people, the noise, the sheer busy-ness of the world around him was shocking.
His teachers and counselors began to call his parents. He won’t speak, they said. Raj’s father had been irritated, his mother furious. They took him to doctors and therapists. They spoke of his duties to his family, to his future wife, to his future children.
He had obligations, they reminded him.
He had to do right by his family, he owed it to them, he couldn’t embarrass them in this manner.
The more they demanded, the more he withdrew within himself.
./.
There are dozens or unspoken rules and traditions that they live by-things Sheldon needs, things that keep them from killing each other, things that they’ve found to work, and have therefore adjusted their lives accordingly.
She’s introduced to one of the few things they all agree is fantastic once it’s clear that she’s not going anywhere. (Howard quotes an episode, and she doesn’t get the reference. All four of the boys stare at her in out-and-out horror.)
Between the four of them, they’ve scraped together recordings of Star Trek: The Last Stand. Leonard has a friend, Stuart, who owns a shop in one of the main cities - they pass near it every two months or so (Darren buys goods in the city for cheap), and they make a pilgrimage there every time.
Stuart’s a nice enough guy who routinely tucks things away to sell them, even some things he could probably sell for more to other people. But then, there’s some background to Leonard and his friendship that no one really knows about, except Leonard had some sway thanks to his mom’s position and got Stuart out of something or other.
The point is, Stuart saves things for them, and eventually all four seasons had been scraped together one way or another. Howard and Sheldon worked together (it was a rare occasion, but Howard was good with computers and Sheldon was good with anything and everything), and somehow they managed to pull the data from old VHS tapes to store it digitally on computers using nothing but five year old supplies and hand-made improvisations.
What this meant, though, was that they had Star Trek: Last Stand at their fingertips.
The four of them immediately set about forcing Penny to watch episodes. (They could quote lines back and forth in a thoroughly intimidating way. Even Raj, although he’s still skittish about talking around her.)
It was a popular show for its time-hell, they still play reruns relentlessly-but Penny’s not sure if it’s the technical aspects or the sheer backbone exhibited by the characters, who refuse to back down in a war they appear to have no chance of winning, that the boys like so much.
(Penny knows it’s just a TV show, just like she knows sometimes TV shows actually mean something. She didn’t want to be an actor because she thinks it’d be fun. She’d wanted to do something that would affect people, and now she’s being corny, and fuck it ALL she just thinks that when Sheldon’s watching Picard make the decision-and it’s hard and it hurts-to fire upon the Romulan ship, knowing that Tasha was on it, knowing he had to do it for everyone else, she just thinks that MAYBE it means MORE than television, maybe it means heartache and heartsick and doing things you have to because you have no choice.)
Penny watches the show because she knows what it’s like to not have a choice.
Penny watches the show because she likes seeing people hurt and fail and struggle and pick themselves up after all that and keep on fighting, because sometimes she thinks she needs that reminder.
Penny watches the show because the boys ask her to, and she’s fallen hard and fast for all of them, even though even friendship tends to end in heartbreak, and she swore her heart away for good.
./.
Sheldon has a perfect performance. Penny knows this because she’s gotten into the habit of waiting on the platform above after her act and watching his. Watching his motions from above, so fluid and determined and sure, she can pretend that he’s always steady, that the dichotomy between man and act is not so wide and unbreachable, she can pretend that he is in control and safe from whatever haunts him, whatever hurts him.
After the show, though, Darren backs Sheldon against one of the tent poles, pinning him in place with his hands, his head bent close as he speaks quietly to him. She can’t hear him, but given Darren and given the pale look on Sheldon’s face, she’s sure it’s not anything good.
Leonard isn’t close-one of the animals had been acting up earlier before the show, and he’d mentioned needing to take a look-and Raj, dear lovely Raj, would be next to useless. She sees Howard across the way, but he’s got a bottle in hand and an arm stretched around the waist of a local, and she can tell he’ll not be up for it.
Besides, if she’s capable of taking care of herself, she doesn’t need their help for this.
She walks up to the pair of them, no plan in mind, just knowing Sheldon needs to get away from Darren. She’s not too specific on the whys and wherefores, but as she gets closer she hears “-take you back to your uncle if you don’t stop being a little bitch, is that what you want? Think you’ll have it as good with him as you’ve got it with me? Think you have any idea how lucky you are here? Cuz it can all go away in a moment.”
“Hey!” she calls out when she’s a couple steps away. She keeps her voice light, despite the way her fingers have curled into her palms, the way her pulse is loud in her ears.
Darren turns his head slowly to look at her, keeping his body squarely in Sheldon’s personal space. He looks her up and down dismissively. “What?”
“I was wondering, if you’ve got a second, if you could go over the last part of my routine with me-I was thinking-”
“I’m a little busy,” he says, cutting her off, his voice brisk and clearly irritated.
She hates herself a little for the way Sheldon has pulled his body in on itself, pressed snugly against the pole, eyes wide. She runs a hand through her hair, shaking it back.
“Oh,” she says. “Okay. I was just hoping for some…y’know, private training.”
Now he does look at her, and she can feel the eyes rake along her body and it makes her feel a little nauseous. Steady, she thinks. Steady.
“Well…” he says, letting the word drawl out as he pulls a little away from Sheldon, clear interest on his face. And Sheldon lets his eyes flicker to hers, his own hooded as he scans her face, the pinch of her mouth, the tense muscles in her arms.
His hand hovers in midair before settling lightly on Darren’s arm. “I think-” he says, his voice low, and it’s enough to turn Darren back to him, because Sheldon doesn’t touch people. Penny’s not sure who’s more shocked of the three of them, but Darren waves a hand at her, clearly dismissing her.
“I might have time later,” he says, not looking back, his eyes steady on Sheldon’s face, and she stumbles back a step, unsure and beyond concerned. Sheldon flicks his eyes to hers, his gaze telling her in no uncertain terms to go away, and because she has no other recourse, no other option, she takes another step back and another, and then Raj’s hand is in hers and he’s pulling her away.
“Why-why did he do that?” she asks Raj when they’re out of earshot. “I was trying to help him!”
Raj is still looking at Sheldon, at the way Darren is invading his space, hand clasped securely around Sheldon’s wrist, face too close to Sheldon’s.
“He didn’t ask for help,” he says. And then, because he knows he just sounded curt, he shakes his head. “He’d rather handle it himself than have you hurt because of him.”
“I can handle myself,” she says, sharp.
Raj bites back a bitter sort of laugh. “He never asked you to prove anything.”
-VI-
let me at the truth that will refresh my broken mind
Sheldon had a gift for science and mathematics. He and Missy would bicker back and forth, and she would attempt to destroy everything he did, but Mary kept an eye on them, and she could see the way her boy was, could see how clever he was, how he always wanted answers and explanations and looked for the meaning behind everything.
George didn’t find it funny. George had already lost a son.
(The first year of the war, fire and shrapnel and Sheldon’s grandmother’s house had gone up. Two coffins had gone into the ground-one adult, one child. There hadn’t been much of them left to bury as it was, but they’d made the effort, Mary had seen to that.)
He wanted to show the boy how to throw a punch, how to ride a bike, how to shoot a gun. He didn’t want his son to be some closeted genius freak, and he was never too subtle about his feelings.
Mary never cared.
”God works in mysterious ways,” she’d smile.
Sheldon, to this day, can remember her smile, and the weight of her hand on his shoulder, the pressure of her lips on his forehead.
He doesn’t believe in God, but when his foster parents took him to church every week, he let the words Mary and Mother wash over him.
Jesse, the man who called himself his uncle, was the foster parent that took him in.
(Not the first foster parent, there had been others. Those months in the hospital and the surgeries on his leg, doted on by the nurses as he sat there, silent, psychiatrists dropping by to see him, but there were always so many wounded and fucked up, and there was a war. When they healed his body he bounced from one home to another, some good, some bad, some worse.)
Jesse wanted a man instead of a boy.
Jesse said he’d known George, that George wouldn’t have wanted his son to be some namby-pamby school bitch. Jesse took Sheldon out shooting, and said George would’ve been proud that his son could shoot like that, because Sheldon could. He didn’t like to kill things, and the first time he brought down a bird he’d started crying, and Jesse had shaken him, asking if he was a little bitch to cry like that, and Sheldon had shaken his head, no, no he wasn’t.
He remembers those hours, his leg half-crushed, trapped in that car as the bombs went off. They haunt his nightmares, trail along his skin. He’d wake screaming and Jesse would grab him and haul him out of bed and shove him into the closet, and Sheldon would curl in on himself and try not to cry (not supposed to cry) and think of his sister, hand in his, think of the way she’d cross her arms or tilt her head. He was sure George would’ve been proud of her, that it would’ve been better if she’d been the one to crawl out alive rather than the freak.
So he put away his books, hid equations underneath his mattress. He practiced shooting, he learned to keep a steady stance and a steady hand. Jesse entered him in contests, his voice softly threatening in his ear, telling him to be good, to make George proud, and Sheldon would nod, silent.
(Sometimes, he’d wondered what would make Mary proud, Mary who believed in God and justice and redemption, who’d smiled when he’d tried to cut his own hair, who kissed his scrapes and scolded him when he hurt himself, and made him and Missy hug and make up when they went at it.
“You’re my little genius,” she’d said, once, but it hadn’t sounded like an insult coming from her lips.)
Jesse had backed Sheldon up against one of the trucks when they’d visited the circus. Sheldon could barely hear anything else over the sound of his breath in his ears, his pulse pounding, a shaking hand trying to brush his shaggy hair out of his eyes.
Despite the way he remembers everything, he’s not sure what set this fight off. He just knows he was twenty-one years old, and Jesse said something, and Sheldon had realized that Jesse was never going to let him go. Let him be free. He’d made some comment about some show he was going to get Sheldon to perform at, and he’d been yelling about some mistake Sheldon had supposedly made, and it had clicked, and he hadn’t even been thinking when he’d shoved Jesse away and taken off running, twisting through people, ducking around buildings.
Someone had seen the stark terror on his face and grabbed his arm, shoved him inside the big top and then inside one of the fenced off areas, pushing him back and clapped a hand over his mouth.
Sheldon had had no reason to trust the man in front of him, who hadn’t said a word, but his dark eyes were soft, and the fact that he was Indian, of all things, eased something in Sheldon’s gut, because Jesse was a racist bastard who would’ve freaked in the same situation. Sheldon had nodded and then breathed in and out and tried to stop his hands from shaking as he sank to his knees.
“Thank you,” he’d said.
Raj had brushed a hand through Sheldon’s hair, and Sheldon had shivered. “It’s all right,” he’d whispered.
Darren had found him there, and thrown Raj out and learned Sheldon could shoot and had dragged him along, hid him from Jesse, got him clothes and bunked him in a truck with too many people and too much noise, and Sheldon had let him.
It had been weeks before Raj had begun joining him for dinner.
Longer before he’d spoken to him again.
./.
Penny and Sheldon are walking.
It’s dark outside, and she’s not entirely sure where they’re going, but she trusts that Sheldon knows his way back, given his uncanny memory.
It’s cold outside, but the feel of it is brisk on her skin, a firm reminder that they’re alive, so she tucks her hands in her pockets but doesn’t suggest they turn back.
Howard’s gone off somewhere for the night, and Raj is a bundle of nerves. Leonard’s trying to talk him down, or at the very least distract him, but Sheldon had been too tense and finally stalked off to everyone’s relief.
Penny hadn’t meant to follow, but Sheldon had glanced at her before he slid out the sliding door, and before she’d realized it she was on her feet and mumbling out a scattered excuse.
He hadn’t waited for her, but when she caught up to him he’d slanted a glance down at her and then continued, slowing his long legs a little to accommodate her.
She’s not sure how long they’ve been walking, but she’s distracted enough that she doesn’t notice at first that he’s stopped. He catches her arm with his, and his hand is gentle but his touch is still shocking, and she’s sure her eyes are wide as she looks up at him.
He’s looking up at the sky, and his expression is almost…wistful. She glances up, too, and she’s caught off guard by how well she can see the stars, until she realizes that he’s brought them far enough away from the lights of the circus and nearby town.
“The light of these stars left some of them so long ago that they might be gone, now,” he says, his voice low but still sounding loud in the night air.
The way his face is painted in shadow, the way he’d taken her wrist to stop her, make her think he must mean something more, something deeper and inexplicable and something he feels safe delivering only in riddles too complex for her to understand.
Still, if he had only needed someone smart, or anyone at all, she wouldn’t be here.
She runs his words through her mind again.
“Just because something’s in the past doesn’t mean it doesn’t affect us,” she says, her voice hesitant. She’s not entirely sure why she’s out here, except that she needed to walk and she needed space and she wanted company.
Sheldon rocks back a little on his heels, still looking upwards.
“The Greeks wrote myths about the stars and constellations,” he says.
Penny wants to take his hand in hers, or put her palm against his cheek, but he doesn’t need comforting with touch-probably couldn’t bear it.
She wracks her brain, instead, considering his words, searching for his meaning. Finally she shrugs.
“Whatever they wrote about it,” she says, “A star is still a star. They can’t change that.”
Sheldon breathes out slowly. Painfully.
His hand bumps against hers once. Twice. The third time she slips her fingers through his until they’re intertwined.
The two of them keep looking up at the stars.
They’re quiet as they stay out there, but when they finally turn back they break apart as if they’d planned it all along.
./.
Howard slips out of the bedroom without waking her up. He doesn’t remember her name. He can barely remember anything of the night before, but he woke up naked next to her, so it couldn’t have been all bad.
His head is pounding, but he’s smirking a little as he walks back, jacket flung over his shoulder.
The sun’s up by the time he makes it back to the camp. The circus was mostly broken down the night before, and everything else is being packed away. They’re scheduled to leave in less than a hour, so he walks through the moving people, parading the fact that he’s only now coming back from town. There’s a couple snide remarks thrown around, but he’s enjoying himself until he catches Raj’s eye from across the field.
Raj looks…devastated is far too strong and melodramatic, but something about his face, the look in his eyes, hurts, and Howard stills, hand going to his stomach as if to recover from a blow, air spilling out of his lungs.
It’s the look his mom used to give Pops when he came back late and drunk and smelling of perfume. He can see it with startling clarity, hear raised voices nearby, and these are things he hasn’t thought of for years. He can barely remember his mom, and yet he can hear her, screaming at Pops, hear the crash as glass breaks and spills across the floor.
Howard brushes a hand down his front, feeling it shaking against his shirt, and then he breaks eye contact and walks away.
He doesn’t owe anybody anything.
He doesn’t have to prove himself to anyone.
./.
Raj had seen the books Sheldon couldn’t quite hide in the depths of his trunk, the notebook that he kept underneath his pillow, with the scrawled equations that read like memories to Raj. Except he’d also seen the question marks - the areas where the writing hesitated and then continued, almost reluctantly, into areas Raj had never learned about, had never pressed into.
He didn’t mention it for weeks, but finally, outside in the grass, Raj had pointed out Venus. Sheldon had been quiet for a moment, and then he’d pointed out the soft edges of a constellation. They went back and forth over the course of hours, until finally they were discussing stars and their composition, and Sheldon was discussing the distance between them as if he were discussing shooting.
He could fire a bullet that would take out a star, Raj had thought in a fit of absolute whimsy, the image clear in his eyes-Sheldon, riding the back of the Uchchaihshravas, the snow-white, seven-headed horse of the gods
Days later, he sketched a picture of it-Sheldon, with bow and arrow, flying on horseback in the realm of Svarga, the light of a star dying from his bow strike.
He hadn’t shown Sheldon. Instead, he placed it in a folder he keeps of things he would not want to forget.
./.
Leslie’s dad had worked in the zoo.
(More accurately: Leslie’s dad was a zoologist, on the forefront of his field, responsible for several new ideas circulating academia, author of several important papers, and had worked in conjunction with several behavioral theorists on evolutionary behavioral patterns.)
At ten years old, however, what really stuck was that Leslie’s dad worked in a zoo, and would sometimes, if he wasn’t too busy doing research or off in some foreign country studying animals in their natural habitat (Leslie often stayed with her aunt), he might sometimes let them take a behind-the-scenes tour.
Leonard had found out, at a very young age, that he was quite good with animals. Despite his ridiculous amount of allergies to any number of things, he was not (currently) allergic to any animals. And he really thought that, given his often cowardly tendencies, he should be afraid of them. But animals weren’t like people. People were confusing and demanding and expected anything and everything, and sometimes Leonard would curl up in the middle of his bed, hands tight around his ears as if to shut everything out, because he could never do enough, never be perfect, never be what she wanted.
But animals were different. They wanted food. Some of them needed to be exercised, some of them needed to be brushed, some of them needed affection and some needed lots and lots of space, but there were rules to them, and they could make sense. They didn’t need impossible things, they didn’t need you to be smarter than you were.
They were satisfied with hard work.
And some of them-some of them would let him wrap his arms around their bodies and feel their chests rise and fall. Some of them would let him bury his head in their hair and breathe.
Leslie’s dad had a stable in the zoo-more for recreational and research purposes than as an actual attraction-and Leonard worked in the stable. He’d brush the horses down, clean out the stalls, he’d do whatever needed doing, and it would lessen the ragged beat in his chest, ease the tension in his stomach.
Leslie would come sometimes too, and they’d work side-by-side in silence, letting the work empty their minds, the slow burn of muscles welcomed into their bodies. At fourteen years old she’d pinned him up against a stable door and kissed him, at seventeen they’d tumbled in the hay loft and researched each other thoroughly.
Sometime between the two, when Beverly had announced she and his father were getting divorced, he and Leslie had worked the entire day-backbreaking work that left them barely able to move. The skin on his hands felt raw, and she’d stayed in bed the next day. They never mentioned it afterwards, but he’d felt, going in, it was either that or tearing himself apart if only to understand how to make everything stop hurting.
Sometimes it felt like the only times he was really alive was when he was there.
The year before he checked himself into the psych ward, Beverly told him he really ought not waste his time with such trivialities, and no, that wasn’t a suggestion.
Leslie had asked him why he stopped coming, and he hadn’t known what to say.
He’d insulted her, instead. She’d always taken offensive easily.
./.
When Wil flirts with her, he flirts like it’s all a game, and maybe he’s keeping score. He doesn’t like to be concerned, and he certainly doesn’t like to show his hand, but maybe he asks questions which are too personal, and maybe when he cuts in and scares a guy away, it’s not because he wants in her pants but because the guy was in her personal space.
(She doesn’t need protecting.
Wil would be an idiot to not want in her pants.)
Still, it’s not something she necessarily notices, until Kurt is bugging her relentlessly, and Wil slips between the two of them, picks her up, and starts making out with her.
(It turns out Wil’s a ridiculously good kisser, if anyone was wondering.)
She makes a startled noise of surprise, but when she sees Kurt looking apoplectic she wraps her arms around Wil’s neck and enjoys the ride.
Also, when Kurt grabs Wil’s shoulder and yanks him backwards, and Wil decks him and then Kurt goes for Wil’s back, she takes great pleasure in breaking a bottle over his head.
Kurt falls to the ground with a satisfying thump, and Wil walks her back to camp and then disappears.
./.
Howard comes back, drunk.
This really isn’t a surprise.
Howard comes back drunk, and wants to have a quick fuck with Raj, and that, that is definitely a surprise.
“Didn’t get lucky?” Raj growls as Howard tries to kiss his neck.
“You’re the best,” Howard says against his skin. Raj pulls away.
“No,” he says, “No, I’m not doing this with you anymore.”
Howard stops, and he looks angry.
“Is this still about me drinking?” he asks. “Look, I’ll stop if you want, just-”
“Go find some slut to sleep with,” Raj says, his voice edged, “They’re more your type, aren’t they?”
“That’s not true,” Howard hisses.
Raj turns, drawing away. “I don’t care,” he says.
“Don’t turn away from me!” Howard yells, and he shoves Raj, hard.
Raj stumbles, tripping into a trunk, the pain radiating from his shin as he falls to the ground.
“You don’t walk away from me!” Howard yells.
(And he’s drunk, and he’s stupid, and he’s terrified, and he never meant to hurt him, would never mean to hurt him-)
Howard freezes, looking at Raj-Raj on the ground, wide-eyed and terrified.
“Get out,” Raj says.
Howard gets out.
./.
Leonard finds Raj icing his shin.
Raj isn’t speaking at all, not even to Penny, not even to him.
Not even to Sheldon.
“Are you all right?” Leonard asks, trying to keep his voice soft. Raj’s mouth twists, hating the pity he thinks he hears. He nods, grim.
Raj has always been fine.
./.
Sheldon doesn’t do this.
He’s never done confrontations. He can feel the echo of Jesse’s breath on his face, Jesse’s hand curled in the collar of his shirt, and his hands are trembling and his face pale.
But Raj is his friend.
Raj was his friend when he didn’t remember what that word meant.
Howard is silent, eyes dark, as Sheldon walks up to him. They’re outside, and the cool breeze ruffles through their hair, against their clothes, kicking up leaves and fliers that were dropped by townies.
“Howard,” Sheldon says, and his voice is unsteady but he holds his ground, despite the way Howard takes a swig from the bottle in his hand, despite the way the world seems to tilt underneath his feet. “Howard, you have to apologize to Raj. You have to make it up with him.”
Howard wipes the back of his hand across his mouth, and Sheldon feels his lip curl up at the unsanitary act, but he says nothing. He doesn’t take a step back when Howard moves closer, but it’s a struggle.
“I understand that you’ve got issues,” Howard says. “I get that, and I think I’m generally pretty good with that. But I don’t need you butting into my life.”
“Raj is my friend,” Sheldon says, his voice low, twisting around the word ‘friend.’ Howard is a ball of tense muscles and a bitter sort of smile.
“I guess he’s the only friend you’ve really got,” Howard says. This time Sheldon does take a step back, and Howard’s smirk turns darker. “It must really hurt knowing how much he wants me more than he wants you.”
Sheldon’s hand curls into a fist at his side, and the violence of it shocks him, because this is instinct at work, turning his body into a weapon, preparing him to fight. “You’re hurting him,” he says. “He cares about you, and you’re hurting him.”
Howard’s face is dark against the night sky, and Sheldon can’t make out his expression as he takes another slow swig. “I said it’s not your business,” he says.
Sheldon-Sheldon sees white, Sheldon feels his hands flex, Sheldon moves forward, moves fast, and shoves Howard square in the chest, and as Howard stumbles backwards Sheldon stands above him, fury giving way to fear, muscles aching from the way he’s trying to hold himself together.
“Clean the fuck up,” he says, his voice a hoarse whisper, black creeping in around his vision, and before Howard can say anything more, do anything more, Sheldon stumbles backwards and then turns and runs, his long legs carrying him back to the trucks-
But not back to their truck. His knuckles rap on the door (3 knocks) and Mira wrenches open the door.
“What?” she snaps, and then realizes who it is and softens to simpering, careful to butter up the lead act. He barely looks at her.
“Penny?” he asks, and he can hear his voice crease and bend, and Penny shoves Mira’s hand off of Sheldon’s arm and steps close, and Sheldon grabs her and doesn’t let go.
“Sheldon?” she asks, because he’s holding her, his arms gripping her tightly as if she’s all that’s anchoring her to the world, and he can’t let go.
His face turns against her neck, and she can feel his nose press into her skin, hear him suck in an unsteady breath, his hands snug against her back. Things he can’t say (“I need you”), things he won’t say (“Hold me”), things he does say:
“Please.”
She tightens her hold on him, as if she can hold him together, as if she can hold him in place, and it’s a choked whimper against her skin that makes her close her eyes.
“I’m here,” she promises, her hands moving along his back. He examines and files away the random movements without even thinking about it, the patterns meaningless to her but now inscribed along his nerve endings, in the memory centers of his brain.
(He doesn’t forget anything, ever. Things jostle against each other, memories bumping and connecting at random turns, and he forces himself to separate them ruthlessly, bury some down, destroy the connections they hold with another-he can hold a gun without thinking of Jesse, he can see a car without thinking of the prolonged crash and the hours that followed, he can hold her and not think of those few moments of honest affection he’s ever been given.)
He’s so much taller than she is that he’s practically folding himself in half in order to wrap himself around her, so it makes no sense (no sense at all) that his heartbeat slows, his breath evens, and he feels (finally) safe (real) as she holds him.
(There must be a logical reason, he thinks.
He closes his eyes and stops caring.)
Part One / Part Two / Part Three
./.