A/N; I had been thinking about this story for some time, and Sheldon's departure at the end of season 7 offered a nice jumping-off point. It's a bit different from my other stories; more adventure, less romance. It will still feature the canon couples doing the things that couples do, but in a different context. Although this prologue is angsty and the story is kind of AU, I still plan on peppering it with humor and keeping everyone IC as much as possible. Updates will probably be less frequent than in the past, but we'll see how it goes. I own nothing of TBBT or the Cthulhu Mythos (a rather unsubtle hint about where this is going).
Dr. Leonard Hofstadter looked around at his companions as they huddled to the rear of the military transport plane that was taking them back to the mainland. The group had been through a lot in the past weeks, and it showed in the fatigue and recently remembered horror on their faces. His fiancée, Penny, clung tightly to his right arm, her face dirty, her long blonde hair tangled and disheveled. Leonard still thought she looked beautiful, in spite of it all. Howard Wolowitz and his petite blonde firecracker of a wife, Bernadette Rostenkowski-Wolowitz sat beside them on the left, holding each other and whispering together; a private conversation between two lovers who were only recently pulled from the brink of despair. Leonard politely tuned them out. Poor Raj, Rajesh Koothrapali, astrophysicist, sat opposite them, typically alone, his eyes downcast. Emily, the woman he had been seeing recently, had opted not to join them on this venture. Beside him, but with a small space between them sat Amy Farrah Fowler, her eyes still red from the tears she had shed for her loss. Where their seventh companion Dr. Sheldon Cooper was, Leonard was not quite sure.
The chain of events that had brought them to this juncture replayed themselves in Leonard's mind. It all started after Sheldon, Leonard's roommate and friend, had left Pasadena by train at the start of the summer when his neat, predictable world had come crashing down around him. Recent changes to the status quo, in part precipitated by Leonard and Penny's engagement and culminating in a fire at Stuart's comic book store (usually a sanctuary to which Sheldon could retreat in search of comfort in the face of chaos) had sent Sheldon on a pilgrimage to quell his inner turmoil. Although when he first left Sheldon had been calling Amy every day to keep her and his friends updated, communication had, in the last week or so, fallen off to a trickle of text messages giving his whereabouts but little more. So it came as a surprise to Leonard when he was awoken in the middle of the night by the incessant buzzing of his cell phone.