Okay, a variety of notes are probably necessary here. One, this is LONG. Like, novel length long. As someone pointed out elsewhere, people seem to respond better to short chunks as opposed to great heaping masses of words piling down on them, and since I really didn't bother with chapters anyway, I'll just put it up in little slices. So it won't all get posted right away, but will be eventually, probably within the next week or so. Hey, don't look at me like that, I have a busy work schedule. Rest assured, it is finished.
Two, and this is just as key, the story prominently features two of my characters. Astute readers may remember Joseph Brown from the CSI story also on this site (the one that isn't the dream sequence, and barely feels like a CSI story, natch) . . . for those just coming in, he's second in command of the Time Patrol and that's all you really need to know for the moment. Tristian hasn't appeared in a fan-ficesque story here yet, but he's probably my main character. Brown's best friend, host of the Agents and Voted Most Likely to Do Something Bordering on Irrational To Save Your Life. Any questions on them, feel free to field them my way. If you totally fall in love with them and want to use them, I'd prefer to know about it first.
Chances are as you read this, you may wonder if this is a BBT story guest-starring two of my characters or the other way around. I'll leave that up to people who aren't me to make the final call. This is just how the story went, although, frankly, I like writing mine better and it probably shows.
With that said, I can perhaps promise a bit of humor, some drama, some things that don't make any sense at all and more introspection than you'd expect from a story about aliens in an apartment building. Enjoy, then!
Oh, and obviously Leonard, Sheldon and Penny are not my characters and never will be. But then Chuck Lorre doesn't own my characters, so nyah! I know there's plenty of debate over whether Penny should wind up with Sheldon or Leonard . . . there's merits on both sides but I'm sticking with the paradigm the show seems to have designed for itself. But its not really my focus, as you'll see. In the interests of full disclosure, I've seen all of season one exactly once and a good chunk of season two. While I'm vaguely well versed, those looking to get into arguments about niggling details or whether I have a shelf in the right place in the apartment . . . please go elsewhere. Its best for both of us that way.
And I'm done rambling. Onwards!
If Doctor Sheldon Cooper was certain of one thing in this unified theoretical state we called existence, it was that there were two ways of doing things: his way and the wrong way. The fact that everyone seemed to keep choosing the wrong way and yet the world still kept functioning in its ramshackle blundering way didn't invalidate his hypothesis so much as point to a deeply embedded flaw in their methodology. Sometimes he thought that his entire life was simply one giant experiment designed to show people that one could live a life of quiet efficiency and expedience as long as one had the will. All it took was the desire to plot out every second of every day, as well as the potential consequences and probabilities of those actions, as well as the intersecting probabilities of the actions not taken, as well as any conflicting variables.
It was all very simple. Once in a while he was tempted to write up all the data and place it inside the Superman cookie tin that lay under his bed, with instructions to not read it until the event of his demise. The thought of leaving behind instructions for humanity was appealing to him. But he was compiling more data every day and although he hadn't seen fit to start altering his conclusions, there was just enough statistical leeway that he could let the variables sift for a while.
He doubted he would write it anyway. Why make it easy for everyone? Besides, knowing how people were, they'd find a way to screw up his very explicit directions. In some ways, it was best to simply lead by example.
The milk popped over his cereal reassuringly as he took his usual spot on the couch. He didn't even need to look at his watch to know what time it was. What his friends never seemed to realize was that the world was a puzzle. A three dimensional puzzle with edges sometimes leaked out into the fourth dimension but a puzzle nonetheless. And the only way for one to fit comfortably inside the world was to get all the pieces to lock together properly. Then the picture became clear and it all made sense. Just like here. The proper time, the right cereal, the exact ratio of milk to cereal, the familiar support of the couch and starting the television just enough before Doctor Who began so that the picture was warmed up to give an optimal image for the entire forty-five minutes of the episode. The puzzle, complete. And thus things were right. Down to the atomic level.
"Sheldon!"
The sound of his best friend's voice, followed by the thump of someone hitting the wall with parts of their body that probably weren't meant to strike solid surfaces, suggested that someone didn't exactly share Sheldon's contentment, certainly not to the noble gas levels of inertness that he aspired to.
"Sheldon, what the hell . . ." Leonard came crashing into the hallway, one leg in his pants while trying to simultaneously hop on the other leg and get it through the empty leg. Judging by his trajectory and involuntary center of gravity, he would probably fall down right when he reached the kitchen.
Thump. Leonard hit the floor at the edge of the landing. Oh, right, Sheldon corrected himself. Didn't account for friction, although it is within the margin of error, I suppose. Rookie mistake, though. He decided to keep it to himself.
"Sssh," Sheldon said. Leonard craned his head to look up at him, his glasses askew on his face and an expression somewhere between dazed and amazed. "The expendable supporting character is about to discover the TARDIS is bigger on the inside than out. Don't take that moment away from them."
Leonard's puzzled glare doubled, and then he just shook his head. He forced his free leg into his pants and stumbled back onto his feet, adjusting his glasses in the process. "Why didn't you tell me that I overslept? I mean, you've been up for hours and-"
He stopped, letting his arms drop to his sides. On the couch, Sheldon was mouthing along to ". . . bigger on the inside . . ." and clearly not paying attention to a word he was saying. Leonard stared at him for another second, swatting at his unruly hair to bring some kind of fundamental order to it, the realization finally dawning on him.
"Wait a minute . . . if you're watching Doctor Who then it's-"
"Precisely six-fifteen," Sheldon said, with the kind of assuredness that only came from being on the mailing list of the NIST.
"Hold on . . ." he fixed his shirt, which had someone become twisted around his shoulders in the process of running out of his room. "If it's six-fifteen then why does my clock say nine-thirty?"
"A little experiment," Sheldon replied, not taking his eyes off the television.
Leonard chose his next few words very carefully, secretly wishing that it were possible for a tone of voice to wrap itself around someone's throat. "What do you mean, experiment, Sheldon?"
"Oh. It was very fascinating." Sheldon settled back, turning his attention away from his television show, which told Leonard how seriously he was actually taking this. His face became very animated, although he never spilled a drop of his cereal. "You see, I've noticed over time that humans, who once existed purely on a diurnal cycle, have more and more let their bodies become attuned to external artificial forces. Alarm clocks, calendars, episodes of Friends, we gauge our lives by these instead of letting it be regulated by our own natural internal clocks." He gestured toward Leonard with the spoon, using it to make small squiggles on an invisible board. "My thought was whether that internal clock has atrophied so much that if taken away, we'd be unable to tell time properly and would simply believe whatever these external forces tell us."
"So you changed the clocks."
"Yes." Sheldon smiled gamely. "I even reprogrammed your cell phone to display only Australian time, in case you caught on and happened to use that. I put an alternate power source in your alarm clock in case you unplugged it by accident. I also asked the bank across the street if they'd change their giant digital clock on the odd chance you might look out your window at some point during the day, but the gentleman in security refused to listen, even when I explained to him the necessity of having everyone in a four square mile radius on board for the experiment, or else we ran the risk of it not being blinded properly." Sheldon sniffed. "But apparently the words scientific integrity were not in Hank's vocabulary."
"A lot of words probably weren't," Leonard noted dryly. "So, what are your conclusions?"
"Mixed. On the one hand you did actually get up on time, but instead of listening to your body's natural clock you simply panicked and refused to trust your instincts. If I had been a smilodon, you would be kitty meat right now, sir."
"I'll keep that in mind if we ever enter another Ice Age," Leonard said wearily, trudging over to the kitchen cabinets.
"I'll probably have to repeat the experiment," Sheldon mused, partly to himself. "Although now that you know the nature of the experiment, you're compromised ethically from participating in it further. Maybe Penny would make a suitable subject."
Leonard did his best to stifle a laugh. "Okay, you try that. Although you may discover more than you want to know about the physical nature of time in the third dimension."
Sheldon tilted his head to the side slightly. "How so?"
Leonard gave his friend a look. "When she throws a clock at you." Sheldon merely continued to look at him with his eyes narrowed, the way he did when he was still trying to process a notion he found illogical. In the meantime, Leonard sighed and went looking through the cabinets to find something to eat. Alphabetical cereal, soup organized by the type of disease it would be most effective against and placed according to the likelihood of getting said disease, as well as a series of hermetically sealed bags that were all labeled Do Not Open Except in Case of with a different natural disaster finishing each sentence. I don't really want any of this stuff, Leonard thought.
He came to a decision. What the heck, I'm already wide awake now. Grabbing his bag, he swung it over his shoulder and said, "Listen, Sheldon, I'm going down to the bagel place. You want anything?"
Sheldon gave him a long stare, as if unsure if the question were serious or not. When neither of them said anything for a good minute, he finally realized that Leonard was really waiting for an answer and said, "I don't possibly see what your efforts can add to what I already have."
"All right, fine." Leonard sighed and headed for the door. "I'll back in a bit, if you change your mind, call me."
". . . after all," Sheldon continued, "I had plenty of time to prepare for breakfast, as my body knew exactly what time it was, having set my internal clock to equal Greenwich Mean Time, that way I simply have to do the calculations in my . . . hey." He leaned forward a bit, his eyes widening in shock and his voice climbing an octave or two up the scale. "Hey! The television is out!"
Leonard rolled his eyes. "We can look at it when I get back, Sheldon. I'm hungry now."
"But Leonard . . ." Sheldon spun around in his spot, a twitchy plea taking root in his eyes, ". . . how am I supposed to know the Doctor resolves the temporal paradox?"
"Probably the same way he did the last time you saw the episode. The Variability Principle doesn't really apply to pre-recorded television shows. Maybe the cable's just out." Leonard opened the door, knowing he wouldn't be able to escape without at least one more second of begging. "We'll look when I get back."
"But Leonard-"
"Good-bye, Sheldon," Leonard shot back, dashing through the door and closing it behind him as quickly as he could.
* * * * *
Leonard was tempted to put something in front of the door as he left the apartment in case Sheldon tried to follow him. Muffled as it was, he could still hear his friend calling for him through the wood, his cries growing more insistent, like the desperate mating call of a flightless bird. God, it was only a TV show. It wasn't like it was Battlestar Galactica or anything. Sheldon would be okay after a little while, it wouldn't be anything like that time when the power went out during the Star Trek marathon and he had tried to rig up his own power supply. If Raj's Geiger counter watch hadn't tipped them off, things might have turned out quite differently.
Chances are he would pace around the apartment for a while, quietly reciting the dialogue that he was sure he was missing while continually checking the television and all the wires. Eventually he'd start fiddling with it and if it wasn't back on by then he'd immerse himself in some other project while occasionally giving the television a tight-lipped, flared nostril glare. He'd be a pain to be around the rest of the day but at least it wouldn't require the people from OSHA to show up again.
Which was why he was going to waste enough time in the bagel place as humanly possible. Leonard stifled a yawn, shifting his bag on his shoulder again. If he didn't fall asleep there. He glanced across the hall, to the apartment across the way. Perhaps he should knock on Penny's door and see if she wanted anything. She'd probably think that was nice of him, especially this early in the-
He was five steps across the hall, his hand already poised to knock on the door, when it hit him. It's six thirty in the morning. He had forgotten for a second, the digital dial on his clock still flashing in his head like an LCD forest fire, the residual panic of thinking he'd overslept still swirling around in his brain. Dammit, Sheldon, why you can't be more like a normal crazy person and talk to stuffed animals or receive signals from the mothership? Penny wouldn't be up this early, a fact she had reminded him about more than once. Unless the building is on fire, I don't want to hear from you until at least nine AM. And even then, carry me out and tell me about it later. Nope, something told him her ability to appreciate thoughtfulness was directly proportional to the integer on the clock dial. Oh well.
Alone it was then. But. This could still work out. He could pick up an extra bagel and time his return for when Penny came out of her apartment. That way he would seem extra thoughtful for considering her without even asking. And by then Sheldon would have either fixed the television or gone off somewhere else to sulk.
Yes. It was all fitting together nicely. Leonard felt his mood lift a little, the rough start of his morning worn away by the day's new possibilities. Good. It was about time something started going-
The clatter started high above him, almost directly through the ceiling. It was a loose rumbling, rocks being mumbled in a flash forward of plate tectonics, a cascade of snarled dynamite punctuated by sharp knocks and what sounded like the occasional yell, eventually devolving into a steady rolling tapping, a constant rain of bowling balls that seemed to be growing louder with each passing second.
Leonard cocked his head to the side, eyes narrowed. That sounds like someone falling down a flight of-
The man came into view a moment, the angle of his deflection causing all his arms and legs to go askew, all resistance gone as he careened heavily into the wall, hands feebly grasping at the railing and lost before he even started the fight.
Leonard leapt back sharply, nearly losing his balance as the man came to a messy, limp halt at his feet, hitting his head with a bang on the floor and landing face down, one arm thrown out as if fighting for an extra inch. He was dressed in what appeared to be a black uniform, although it had no identifying markings.
"Oh my God, are you okay . . ." Leonard immediately bent down to check him. He must have slipped and fallen down the steps, or maybe passed out. Without thinking, he turned the man over, then cursing himself for doing it. You idiot, he could have broken bones, don't-
The man was conscious, although barely. He was young, maybe not much older than Leonard, with a shock of close-cropped brown hair and smooth features. His complexion was pale, approaching ashen. Leonard could see several blue-purple bruises already forming on his face, like diatoms spreading. One hand was covering his chest, the fingers idly twitching. His breathing was shallow, and with a hiss he inhaled sharply, his face registering a stab of pain.
"Listen, ah, okay, listen, just don't move . . ." Leonard was doing his best not to panic but panic was slowly winning. "Just stay right there and I'll . . ."
The man's lips parted slightly, and his eyelids fluttered open, darting around in lazy arcs until finally settling on Leonard. A grin crossed his face, drawn back on weak strings and at odds with the situation.
"Yeah," the man said, with a quiet laugh. "I've done enough moving for today."
"Right, right," Leonard said quickly. "I'll go get help and . . ." Maybe Sheldon had an emergency first-aid kit, hell, the man probably had a surgeon's kit hidden somewhere in the apartment, in case he ever had to do an appendectomy on himself. Like he'd trust anyone else. "Does . . . does anything hurt I can . . . I can maybe get some ice . . ."
"Just this." The man moved his hand away from where it was covering his chest, revealing a neatly drilled hole about two inches wide close to his heart. Blood was slowly oozing from it in regular pulses, an escape hatch too easily taken.
Leonard staggered back a step, the world falling into an array of broken equations that refused to balance.
The man must have seen Leonard's face, because he laughed thickly in a wet burbling noise that sounded out of place coming from his body. "Yeah," he said, coughing a little as his back arched against the floor. One finger weakly traced the edges of the hole. "I should probably get that looked at, huh?"
Then with a deflated sigh, the man's eyes rolled back into his head and he quite efficiently passed out.
* * * * *
This was turning out to be a waste of his time. The fault wasn't in the television itself, as he had taken it apart and put it back together again, in the process making some improvements to the picture quality. Calls to the cable company hadn't gone through, making him suspect they had starting picking up on what phone number was his. Resplicing the wires was a viable option but if he was going to do that he might as well rewire the entire apartment the way he had always wanted to, with superconductors. Leonard had tried to talk him out of it several times, but he wasn't here and perhaps it was an idea whose time had come.
The fact that Leonard wasn't here rankled him more than he wanted to admit. Didn't he know that some matters were very important to him? How could his friend leave him in this obvious time of need? Sheldon had backed him in so many ridiculous attempts to throw himself at Penny that he needed to start using scientific notation, so the least Leonard could do was offer moral support.
Well. The next time Leonard needed help trying to integrate a Levy flight formulation, he'd show him a thing or two about chaos theory. He wasn't just some garage where you pulled your car in when you wanted to perform fractional quantum mechanics on it.
A rapid knocking on the door tore him reluctantly out of his thoughts. Odd. None of the other neighbors were up this early, certainly not Penny. Besides, this knocking was not unlike an atrial flutter, while Penny's tended to be approximate a more typical ventricular tachycardia. She wouldn't be up this early anyway, for some reason she tended to not maintain a regular seven-and-three-quarters hours of slumber, preferring to do what she called "sleeping in". That merely led to a slippery circadian rhythm. He had made up charts to prove it to her but she had merely yawned, thus further proving his point.
The knocking continued without pause. It couldn't be Leonard, as gratifying as that might be to have him recognize that his desire for breakfast did not supersede Sheldon's needs. After all, he did have a key to the place.
Shrugging, Sheldon went back to sketching out the schematics of the new apartment wiring in his notebook. He wondered if there was room for that wireless transmitter he had been mulling over. There was a fantastic nature show that came out from New Zealand and it would spectacular to not have to watch it on his laptop anymore. If he drilled a hole in the ceiling right about . . .
The door suddenly popped open and Leonard practically fell in, stumbling backwards for several steps. "Why didn't you answer the door?" he nearly shouted, his voice reaching toward registers that Sheldon hadn't heard since that errant pitch at the university's Planck Day softball picnic. From his angle Sheldon could see that Leonard was strangely hunched over, like he had indeed been hit again. Perhaps another overture to Penny had gone poorly. Well, he should have known how she'd be this early.
"Why didn't you open the door?" Sheldon inquired. "Or have you regressed to a primordial state where such concepts have now become foreign to you? It's really quite simple." He stood up, rapidly moving around the couch. "Here, I'll show you. You take the doorknob and . . ."
Sheldon froze in mid-step, seeing the reason that Leonard's posture was so funny.
"Don't just stand there!" Leonard shouted. "Help me with him." He had his hands under some man's armpits and was dragging him into the room.
Sheldon stood there for a second, the muscles working without any sound coming out. "Dare I even ask what this is all about?"
"I don't know, he fell down the stairs outside. Help me get him to the couch." Leonard grunted as he struggled to bring the man in a few more feet. His burden was definitely unconscious, little more than dead weight and not able to assist Leonard at all in overcoming the friction coefficient of their floor.
"Since when are we an infirmary?" Sheldon asked archly, but he came over and grabbed the man's legs so that he wasn't scuffing their hardwood floor up with his boots. "I thought we had this discussion after the Chirpers incident."
"You try to walk past an injured baby bird!" Leonard protested. "And I've already apologized several times for him making a nest in your Helm's Deep diorama."
Sheldon glared at Leonard across the prone man, his eyes narrowing ever so slightly. "There is no apology for what he did to Gandalf. Even the Valar in their might wouldn't have been able to repair the damage." The two of them fell silent as the maneuvered the man between the couch and the coffee table.
"Still," Leonard said, biting his lip to keep a laugh down, "you could at least call him Gandalf the-"
Sheldon's stare hardened into something razor edged. Leonard looked down, muffling the snicker just in time again. But the glance reminded him of their impromptu cargo and his face went serious again as he put more of his meager strength on lifting him up onto the couch. The whole time the man didn't react, even when Leonard almost bumped his head against the table. It was hard to tell if he was even breathing.
Meanwhile, Sheldon was studying him more closely, his eyes focusing with all the intensity of a spy satellite. "What did you say happened to him?" he asked, his voice taking on that resolute cadence it had when he was sifting through theories in his head.
"I told you, he fell down the stairs." Leonard started to guide the man's head toward the cushion, praying that he could keep Sheldon distracted long enough so that he didn't notice that their guest would be laying on his spot. That was not an argument he wanted to have right now. He twisted, one knee on the couch, trying to get the man up without pulling a muscle or having the man land on top of him.
That didn't seem to satisfy Sheldon. "Why is he dressed like someone out to do reconnaissance behind enemy lines?"
"I don't know." Leonard backed up onto the arm of the couch, almost flipping over the top of it in his efforts to get everything situated. Only the dead weight he was holding kept him anchored. Sheldon, for his part, merely stood there as if rooted, his intent stare not wavering a degree. "Maybe he's in the military. Maybe he was going to a party."
"He looks like he was coming from a paintball game," Sheldon noted. "And judging by the paint all over his chest, his team possesses the same relentlessly efficiency as ours at-"
Leonard, engrossed in folding the man forward and then extricating himself without toppling onto the couch himself, didn't see Sheldon's eyes go wide, all the tumblers in his brain falling into the place at the exact same moment.
He did notice, however, when the man's legs suddenly dropped and his body slid away from Leonard. Not ready for the shift, Leonard slipped, only avoiding falling on the man's face by turning to the side and falling right off the couch, clipping his shoulder on the table on the way down.
"Ow, Sheldon, warn me next time you're going to-" Wincing, he got up onto his elbows, only to see Sheldon halfway across the room, pointing at the man with a stiffened, shaking finger, his other hand clenching and unclenching rapidly.
"Leonard." Sheldon spoke with the rigid calm of someone who had just realized that the universe had reached critical mass and the wrong word could send it over the tipping point. "That's blood."
Leonard wasn't quite sure how to approach this. A dozen scenarios went through his mind, all of which ended either in Sheldon fleeing from the room screaming or the injured man being flung out an open window. In the end, he decided that blunt honesty was the best approach. "Well .. . . yes. Yes, it is."
"Do you know . . ." Sheldon swallowed, his Adam's apple swelling. He lost his voice for a moment and when the words returned his voice was heard as if pushed through an extremely narrow space. "Do you know how hard it is to get that stain out of the couch?" Before Leonard could say anything else, Sheldon dashed forward, hands fluttering upward like he was swatting imaginary bees, circling around the living room in the style of a mad comet. "Even if you use non-abrasive cleaners, the fabric is still going to fade that much faster than the rest of the couch and for years people are going to notice and ask, 'Why is that part two point three percent lighter than the rest of it' and you're going to have no choice but to explain about the day someone was bleeding all over it."
"Sheldon . . ."
He zipped past Leonard, locked into his maze, committed to the path of escape no matter if the walls were in the way or not. "From then on we're going to be known as the people who had someone bleed to death in their apartment. We'll be in the crime statistics, reported in the journals, people will do standard deviations based on us! We'll be the mean, the new definition of the norm."
"Sheldon-"
Back in front of the couch, he seemed locked in a staring contest with the pores of his palms. "It won't come out . . ." he said in a stage whisper, giving Leonard a maddened look. He blanched, his breathing going erratic. "I have to sit down-"
And he started to, in his usual spot, right where the man's head was.
"Sheldon!"
The snap of Leonard's voice was somehow enough to stop Sheldon, who froze into perfect stillness, his knees partially bent, a slice of matter caught between states.
Leonard took off his glasses and wiped at his brow. "Just . . . just relax for a second, okay."
Some semblance of calm passed back into Sheldon's otherwise serious face. "You should call an ambulance," he said, almost robotically.
The hint of a gameplan spurred Leonard into action. He cast one more look at the unconscious man, but his eyes kept drifting toward the wound residing in his chest. At least he appeared to have stopped bleeding, although that suggested two possible outcomes, only one of which was positive. Leonard was doing his best not to think about that, insisting to himself that was the man was still breathing.
"I tried," he explained, veering toward the kitchen counter. Automatically, Sheldon followed him, the desire to be away from the man overriding the oasis his spot normally represented. "My phone isn't working, something must be-"
Even before he had finished the statement Sheldon had his own phone out, being the type of person who would spend all night figuring out ways to more efficiently dial nine-one-one. "No signal," he muttered, eyes narrowing. He shifted a few inches. "Maybe I'm not standing in an optimal . . ." Getting the same result, he darted over a few more inches. "Hm. The satellite must be off its orbit and attained a new geosynchronous position." He looked up at Leonard. "We're going to have to go on the roof."
"Sheldon, we are not going on the-"
"No, you're right," his friend replied, fingers tapping the buttons and creating a sudden atonal symphony. "Start your car, we'll have to ride around the city in a grid pattern to discover the new coordinates." He thought about this. "Except the city isn't a perfect grid. How are your tires on backyards?"
"We're not leaving," Leonard said tiredly, making his way to the kitchen counter and wishing for perhaps the first time ever that they kept alcohol inside the apartment. "Not unless it's to drive him to the hospital."
The mention of the man seemed to snap Sheldon out of his theoretical problem and drag it screaming back into reality. His gaze tracked back over to the couch, as if pulled, and when they locked onto the man's prone form he nearly jumped, scooting over to join Leonard at the counter, moving sideways while somehow keeping his body facing the couch. He rubbed his hands together, close to his chest, and leaned near Leonard.
Sheldon whispered, "He didn't just fall down the stairs, you know. Not unless he was trying to use his body to smother a burning javelin first."
Leonard put both hands on the counter, swallowed heavily. "Thanks. I was trying not to think about that."
"About the hole in his chest?" Sheldon appeared shocked. "How can you not? It's impossible to miss. It would be like those Chinese astronomers not seeing supernova one eighty-five. Sure you might avoid spotting it, since it only takes up the entire sky." His voice rose up a bit on the last part, and when the sentence was over he held himself up stiffly, his body quivering slightly.
"I know, I know," Leonard said, putting his elbows on the counter and running a shaking hand through his hair. "We're going to have to take him to the emergency room." He pressed his palms against his forehead. "But we don't even know who he is."
"Well, it sounds like you had a chance to ask him before he lost consciousness completely." Sheldon slapped the counter lightly. "Gosh, Leonard, do you have no regard for social conventions? You should have at least introduced yourself."
"It's just going to be hard to explain."
"Tell them he's from the fifth floor apartment. For all we know, he could be. Much like us, the doctors probably haven't met them either." He peered at the man like a bird going out of style. "Just . . . can we move him? Please?"
Leonard straightened his arms, put all his weight forward and exhaled. "Yeah. We'd better. Maybe we can check his pockets for ID, get a name out of him at-"
"It's Joseph." Leonard was about to tell Sheldon to stop making up facts to suit whatever odd theories he had inside his head when he realized something very simple.
That hadn't been Sheldon's voice.
Gradually he let his gaze slide back over to the couch. To the man on the couch. To the man on the couch who now had his eyes open.
And was staring right at them.
"Joseph Brown," he said, quite distinctly.
"It appears we don't have to carry him to your car anymore," Sheldon remarked.
* * * * *
The man looked away from them and turned his face toward the ceiling. He appeared to be taking very deep breaths, as if trying to relearn respiration.
"Well," he said, "that was fun." He swung his legs off the couch and onto the floor. "Now if you boys will excuse me . . ."
"Whoa, whoa, wait." It was Leonard who spoke, as the two of them went around the counter on either side to cross back into the living room, moving more or less at the same speed. "You just fell down a flight of stairs. You're not going anywhere."
"I did," Brown said, starting to get up but halting when the two men surrounded him, Sheldon near the arm of the couch, Leonard on the other side. "And I'm very grateful to your guys for not leaving me out in the hallway. So if it's okay with you I'll just go and see myself out-"
"I don't think so." Leonard folded his arms over his chest. "A minute ago you were completely unconscious." Sheldon was staring at Brown strangely, as if trying to add conflicting variables in his head. At his side one hand was moving, the fingers twitching in sketched equations. "You can't just get up and walk around, that's not possible."
"That's the amazing thing about science," Brown replied cheerfully. He stood up and even though his expression didn't change, a certain menace crept into his posture. "It makes the impossible come within reach." His eyes narrowed and Leonard found himself backing up a step. "Now, I think it's time I left."
"Your wound is gone," Sheldon suddenly blurted out.
All attention shifted to Sheldon, who reacted in much the same way as a reed holds up in a stiff breeze. Which was, poorly. Wringing his hands together with geometric precision, he said haltingly, "When we brought you in here, there was a puncture wound on your chest." Nobody else spoke and Sheldon tilted his head upwards a little bit, his eyes bulging at the edges. "That . . . that wound is now gone."
Immediately Leonard checked and discovered that his friend was right. The skin over the area was completely smooth, without any seam or mark to indicate what had once been there.
Brown only put his hands in his pockets and chuckled, a brief, disbelieving sound. "I think you just imagined it," he said calmly. "Guy falls down the stairs, you panic a little, start to see things. It happens. Especially when you're not used to it."
Somehow Leonard stood his ground, even as he felt his knees start to go. "Then why is there blood still on your shirt?"
"With a splatter area consistent with a blow that struck you with a rapid velocity from a level angle," Sheldon countered. At Leonard's odd look, he added, "Junior Forensics was on the Learning Channel last night."
"It . . ." Brown looked from one man to the other, then back to the first one again. He scratched idly at his chest, as if trying to put some feeling back into the area. "It . . . okay, listen," he said rapidly, sitting down in a sharp motion. He plopped himself down in the corner of the couch, not seeing Sheldon's nostrils flare slightly. "I might as well level with you." He folded his hands together, placed them between his knees. "My name isn't just Joseph Brown. It's Commander Joseph Brown and I'm here on behalf of the Time Patrol, a quasi-temporal paramilitary organization. I'm chasing aliens."
"Really?" both men said at the exact same moment, scuttling in closer. Brown jerked back a bit, surprised and caught off guard.
"You're not supposed to take that seriously," Brown muttered. Then, blinking, he let himself take in the rest of the apartment, the various dry-boards with arcane physics equations, the rows of books and superhero paraphernalia, the constant quiet cooing of a multitude of electronics. "Oh no," he added, in a very small voice.
"Is it a secret mission?" Leonard asked, keeping his voice down and glancing around the apartment as if hidden eyes might already be watching them. "For the good of planet and to save humanity? Don't worry, we won't tell anyone." But in his head he was thinking, Oh wow, wait until Raj and Howard hear about this! Especially after they rubbed our faces in meeting George Smoot at the Modern Physicists Today convention. We've got them beat now.
"It's not a secret, no, it's not a mission at all," Brown said, looking rapidly back and forth between the two of them. "It . . . I mean, gosh, I feel light headed. Was I just talking?" He shook his head, rolling his eyes back slightly. "I must have hit my head falling down the stairs. I probably have a concussion and boy can I say the darndest things then. I hope I didn't tell you anything that might give you a mistaken impression of me." He glanced over at Leonard, who was still staring at him in the same semi-fawning manner as before. Smiling uneasily, he pivoted on the couch and turned to Sheldon. That man seemed more of a realist, surely he'd think that this was all nonsense.
Instead, Sheldon bent down and said conspiratorially, "I understand if you don't want to cause any temporal paradoxes. It's difficult, playing with the fifth dimension."
Brown could only stare as Sheldon slid off the arm of the couch, hands clasped behind his back and pacing in front of him, rattling off facts with rapid efficiency. "You've probably received intense training on our customs and culture so that you can blend in without causing any suspicion. You look perfectly human, but if you need to you can heal quickly so as not to leave any messy corpses in the wrong time period. And you no doubt travel in a kind of time ship that can disguised as something modern so that nobody tries to take it." He was musing these without really listening to himself.
"Listen, those are nice theories and you all seem like swell people but I have to-"
Suddenly Sheldon snapped to attention, his eyes going wide as he clapped one hand over his mouth and pointed directly at Brown. "Oh my Lord," he said, his voice partially muffled. "Leonard." His voice came out as a little squeak.
"What is it?" his friend asked.
"The facts, Leonard. The facts." Sheldon removed his hand from his mouth and ticked them off one by one on his fingers, not taking his eyes off Brown. "He looks just like us. He travels in time. And he healed, or should I say more properly . . . regenerated." He looked left and right, then put one hand up alongside his mouth and whispered to Leonard, "I think he's a Time Lord."
"What?" both Leonard and Brown said at the same time, for different reasons.
"Quick," Sheldon darted forward. "Check to see if he has two hearts!"
"Don't," Brown said, pointing at Leonard, then twisting to make sure Sheldon kept the proper distance. "Don't even think about it."
Sheldon bent down so that his head was nearly level with the arm of the couch. Resting both hands on it, he said, "Sir, you don't know how often I've dreamed about this, to meet one of you and be whisked off on adventures in time and space. To engage in a debate involving the finest scientific gibberish anyone can come up with. The places you could tell us about, the questions you could answer, it boggles the imagination." He pressed his hands together, tapping them lightly. "Although before we go into any of that, I do have one request."
"No," Brown sighed, "I'm not going to tell you the secret of time travel-"
"Oh, I'm working on that already," Sheldon said offhandedly. "You're probably working off my design, honestly. No, could you . . ." he waved his hand a little, frowning. ". . . could you just slide over a little."
"Sheldon, don't start . . ."
"Leonard, my breakthrough could result from my being perfectly at ease in the comfort of my spot. If he ruins the contours of it, then he might cause himself never to exist and cause a paradox that could rupture the fabric of space and time as we-"
"Okay, people, listen!" Brown stood up suddenly, sending both men skittering a few inches back. He ran both hands through his hair, doing his best not to grit his teeth. "This has been a delightful exercise in connecting the dots poorly." While he was speaking, Sheldon practically dove for his spot on the couch, ignoring Leonard's sharp glare. "But before we go too far off-track here, I need to make it clear, absolutely crystal clear, that I am not a time traveller, I am not from another planet and I am definitely not chasing after aliens. All right?"
He looked from Leonard to Sheldon and back again, his eyebrows raised hopefully.
The two men exchanged glances behind him. Leonard put his chin in his hand and shrugged, saying, "Yeah, we can stick to that cover story."
"Absolutely," Sheldon agreed, nodding.
"No, I'm serious here," Brown insisted. "Kidding around is one thing but I don't want anyone getting ideas that there are aliens anywhere near-"
A light knock on the door sent everyone's attention whipping in that direction. A second later it opened and an unfamiliar young man poked his head in, his gaze immediately settling on Brown.
"Joe," he said, pushing the door open further to reveal he was dressed casually in jeans and a polo shirt. A strange flashlight-like object was clipped to his belt. "I thought I had the Nirtorian hive cornered but it looks like they escaped into the wiring. We're probably going to have to seal the building off."
Leonard and Sheldon gasped.
Meanwhile, Brown just sat down on the couch and put his head into his hands. "Thanks, Tristian," he said with a sigh, sounding defeated. "I'm glad you're on it."