AN: Oh, my. Who knows what this is or where it's going and whether it'll ever get there. I blame late-night fic-reading sprees and too much thinking time...
Disclaimer: Nope. Not even a little bit.
There's a loud crackle of static and suddenly Sheldon's hands feel like they're burning. A pulse goes through him; he doesn't even register his fall to the floor. Then the lights go out.
"Penny, is Sheldon at the apartment?"
"How would I know? Isn't he at work?"
"Just go and check, would you?"
A childhood's worth of fainting and blacking out have equipped Sheldon well: when he comes round, he's barely dizzy. He rolls onto his back, getting his bearings. Glares up at the ceiling. So much dust. He'll have to have another word with that miserable excuse cleaner.
Slowly, he sits up. His head feels a little thick. He swallows, closes his eyes, waits for it to pass. It lasts a little too long. Tendrils of panic are crawling their way up his throat but he swallows them down, refuses to rise to it.
One. Two.
His left hand is still clutching the thin strip of metal, though the electric blue orb on one end is no longer glowing. He hisses with pain as he drops it on the carpet - the metal has left a red imprint across his palm, and now he's noticed it, it's throbbing. He cups the damaged hand in the other, and the applied pressure dulls the pain a little.
Three. Four.
What happened, anyway? Sheldon glares reproachfully at the offending piece of metal, now lying abandoned on the floor. Some kind of static charge... The burning sensation on his hand isn't like any static shock he's had before, though, and he's probably had a more varied experience with those than most, being a self-taught expert in the building of death-rays.
Still. Whatever it was is over now, and his hand seems to be recovering. When he opens his fist, the red mark is already faint. It's a remarkably rapid change, and he's going to have to record this on the board.
Five. Six.
His board. Where is it? He'd been standing right in front of it when he fell, and now it's gone. A frown. Perhaps he's somehow rotated away from it; he swings his head to see, but immediately regrets the fast movement, the wave of dizziness almost sending him back to the floor.
Seven. Eight.
He shifts to a kneeling position, slowly, slowly, but the view this gives him of his office hits him with an entirely different wave of discomfort. It's all very, very wrong. The desk - which is not his desk, it's taller and wider - is askew from its proper position by about seventeen degrees. The desk chair is a different colour and model. The board he was looking for is folded against the wall, not upright displaying the formulae he had been adjusting only minutes ago. There's a fan on the desk, and two pencil pots, clearly intended to separate ordinary biros from other stationary items, but with a stray biro in the wrong pot and a small ruler amongst the pens. That is all kinds of wrong even discounting the fact that it simply wasn't there three minutes ago.
Everything is wrong. Sheldon feels suddenly nauseated. He closes his eyes, trying to steady the very-wrong-and-somehow-spinning room, but fails. This time, he remains conscious long enough to hear his head collide with the floor before he's out again.
"He's not there."
"Hmm. Okay. Thanks for checking."
"What did he do, slip his collar again?"
"Must have done. He'll turn up. Like a bad...coin of little monetary value."
"Good save."
"Ahem."
For the second time in what really feels like an unreasonably short period, Sheldon finds himself blinking awake on the carpeted floor. This time, he looks up to see a woman standing over him, well-dressed and probably in her mid-thirties. Her auburn hair is scraped back in a no-nonsense style and a pair of blue-rimmed glasses are perched on her nose. She's peering at him through them in what might be bemusement, anger or concern - he's improved his emotion-recognition skills of late, but the state his head's in now he really can't say for definite.
"Can I help you?" The woman says, and she offers a hand, as if to help him to his feet. Sheldon looks at it disdainfully, and manages to muster enough dignity to get there without her help. Then he's dizzy again, and stumbles slightly towards the desk, which - for all it is wrong - is a good height for perching on when your legs betray you completely.
The woman's unanswered question hangs in the air, and she's still looking at him expectantly.
Sheldon regards her with what he hopes is a disparaging superiority. "What has happened to my office?" He asks, waspish. "I don't know how you managed to get in here and rearrange everything, but I'd appreciate it if we could put it back now. And by 'we', I mean 'you'."
The woman looks at him with raised eyebrows. "Your office?"
"Correct. If you would care to look at the label on the door-"
He gestures with one hand, and notices that the door is standing open, unsurprisingly since this stranger must have just entered. Even from here, though, he can see something's wrong with the door label: his own name and string of qualifications fill up almost the entire metal plaque, and though he can't read it from here he can at least tell that this inscription is nowhere near long enough.
His legs seem to propel him forward unbidden, and only when his face is a few inches away from the door does it occur to him to stop and read.
Dr Ella Finch, the label proclaims, PhD.
Sheldon can't stop the gasp from tearing itself from his throat.
"But, I..."
Dr Finch - because surely that must be the identity of the red-haired interloper - rests a steadying hand on his shoulder, which for some reason is trembling slightly, but he shrugs her off almost violently. "Sir, are you lost? Can I help you somehow?"
But Sheldon has already tumbled out into the corridor, long limbs barely under control. Not his office, he thinks as the door closes behind him, accompanied by the exclamation of "Weirdo!", which is almost soothingly familiar. He must just have been in the wrong room. This isn't even his corridor, actually - the decor is all wrong. And yet...something tells him this is the right place. The distance between the walls, their height, the amount and distribution pattern of the doors. It's all too uncannily similar for this to be another building altogether.
He regains good enough balance to get him to an expanse of wall between two doors on the other side of the corridor. He leans against it and suddenly it's all he can do not to sob like a child. He takes a deep breath and holds it 'til the feeling goes away. The world is full of wrong, wrong, wrongness, but his mother's words still ring clearly in his mind: 'you can't always have it just right. So you just count to ten and make the best of it, Shelly-bean.'
Sappy and far too simplistic a worldview for any self-respecting cereal orderer-by-bran-content, but oddly comforting right at this moment. Sheldon closes his eyes and lets nostalgia smooth away his worries, until he can almost believe that the events he's just lived through were nothing but a fevered dream. He opens his eyes again, and tries to take everything at face value, instead of comparing its wrongness to how it should appear. Just a corridor. There's something sticking into his back, and he realises it's a drawing pin, holding up a notice, because he's leaning on some kind of wall display. He slowly moves away from it so he can see it better.
There are the usual announcements and reports, a few small advertisements. Then there's the latest faculty photograph: the product of that tedious annual occasion which Sheldon hates, where the whole physics department is made to line up, alphabetically by surname, and smile mindlessly at a camera, for what usually ends up being some minutes on end as the photographer fiddles and fusses.
Studying the picture, his quick eye picks out Leonard immediately, centre of the third row. He can't see himself, which strikes him as odd, but perhaps this picture had been taken while he was off on that research trip last month, or even during one of the short intervals he spends in Amy's lab instead of his own department.
He lets his eye wander to the bottom of the picture, where his colleagues are listed. Hofstadter, L. And then, a few names on, Koothrappali, R.
Above the picture itself is printed the date of the photograph, and it's this that causes Sheldon's whole world to crash once again. He stays standing this time, eyes transfixed on the black-and-white print.
April 26th, it says. Nothing wrong with that, in itself. Harmless. It's the last four digits of the date that have Sheldon reeling, or rather, the last two.
Because according to the paper, this photograph - with Leonard and Raj smiling out of that sea of physicist faces - was taken on April 26th, 2022.
And somebody has stolen nine years from Sheldon Cooper.
"...and try not to worry too much, Doctor Hofstadter; a high percentage of missing persons turn up again within forty-eight hours of their disappearance. There's a good chance that will happen with your friend."
"Thank you for your help."
If you don't review, it's almost certain that nothing bad will happen to you! But why take the risk, you know? ;)
